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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38489 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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It's a weird thing noticed in a lot of newer fiction. Villains, even of the no redeeming qualities and reveling in their villainy variety, are not allowed to violate certain modern social taboos. To depict the bad thing, even as a negative example, is usually not allowed or contemplated (sometimes out of a "don't cause emotional harm to audience who can be affected by this" desire).

I don’t think that’s difficult to understand. Putting it out there and arguing against it (implicitly by associating with villainy) shows that the perspective can be contested. Better to remove the logical syntax from the zeitgeist so that it can’t even be thought.

Of course, I don’t think it’s particularly effective in this case…

Precisely. If you try to associate an idea with villainy, you run the risk that the audience keeps the idea and rejects the attempted association. If you punish people heavily for discussing the idea at all, you can hope that the children never think of it for themselves and the adults don't pass it on.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/VillainHasAPoint

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawmanHasAPoint

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/InformedWrongness

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RootingForTheEmpire

If you punish people heavily for discussing the idea at all, you can hope that the children never think of it for themselves and the adults don't pass it on.

This has a lot of the same energy as the stereotype (rooted in truth? Everyone says it is, but I have my doubts) about sheltered Catholic schoolgirls discovering sex in the outside world and becoming absolute freaks, presumably due in large part due to their lack of exposure to it in their upbringing. If you can count on having absolute totalitarian control over a child's life, the sheltered approach can work, but you have to be just about perfect, and the lack of preparation makes a single miscue potentially disastrous. In the context of these disapproved ideas, one would need close to totalitarian control over things people say to each other in public discourse which certainly seems to be the goal, though the odds of it actually succeeding seems rather low at this point.

Yes, it has to be near-hegemonic to work. It can, though, I think. All the stories I’ve heard indicate that people really were much more sexually sheltered in the 30s, or even the 60s, compared to now. It wasn’t until the Sexual Revolution spread through society in the late 60s that knowing a lot about sex became the default rather than the exception.

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