cephiedvariable:

*cracks open the cellar door and crawls out of the shadows*

Hi, I want to talk about a very delicate, complex and startlingly revolutionary topic today. 

Is it ethically permissible to like villains and write fic about them crying pretty and getting fucked? Hmmm. Hard to say. Doing so might make you a problematic person. Wow, this really is the great moral question of our times, isn’t it?

(It’s not, actually.)

So yeah, of course it’s ethically permissible to like villains, and the fact that there is discourse in both fandom and mainstream media crit reminding us constantly that: “Something You Might Have Missed In The Newest Disney Franchise Movie: The Bad Guys Are Bad And The Good Guys Are Good, A Startlingly Revolutionary And Feminist Narrative!” is deeply discouraging to me as a writer, as a consumer of media, as a human being with the ability to observe, absorb and synthesize information.

It seems like there is far more focus right now on looking directly at what characters say and do as a method to extract substance from a text without asking what it means that they say and do those things, and what the author is trying to accomplish or make you think by making the characters say and do those things.

That is to say, people are looking at what the text “”“says”“”, not what is says.

This is probably a natural result of what I’m gonna flippantly refer to as the “YA-ification” of mainstream media, that is: the rise of dominant nerd culture and “identity” being exploited by capitalism in concert with massive campaigns of media conglomeration creating a situation in which popular media is becoming increasingly homogenized and “safe”.

But I don’t really want to talk about that directly. I want to talk about why I think specifically Villain Discourse™ is a prime symptom of this and why I think it’s a good example to show the problem with viewing pop culture through this kind of lens.

So, like, when “Media Consumption = Identity” hits fandom, it gains another dimension, which is the link of media consumption to personal morality. We’ve seen a profane marriage between these two laterally related concepts over the last few yeas that has broken down into smaller and smaller battlefields until it’s no longer just about what shows you watch, it’s about what characters you like in the shows. Good pure fans like “Hero Character”, bad impure fans like “Villain Character”.

Captain America is “good”. He’s a “cinnamon roll”, a “non-toxic male”, a “golden retriever”, a “soft pure hero”, a “feminist friendly hero”. Loki is bad and greasy and a Villain and Silly Fangirls Need To Understand He’s Bad. Every time a male hero doesn’t, idk, explicitly call his female co-star misogynistic slurs, fandom and nerd media fall over themselves to act like it’s the most Important Story Ever Told and it’s an incredibly pressing issue to make sure everyone understands that the people who oppose the hero are Not Good, because the fans out there drawing fanart of the bad guy must not have gotten the message!

My problem here is that this kind of criticism is explicitly buying into the moral and political framework of a story, rather than viewing the story through your *own* moral framework and synthesizing it in a meaningful way. It limits analysis to playing by the rules that these $300 million blockbusters want you to play by.

For example, the idea that Captain America as presented in the MCU (or any character in big, colourful PG rated popcorn flick for that matter) is a new, revolutionary, un-problematic kind of hero is how we saw so many people unblinkingly and uncritically swallow ‘The Winter Soldier’ as some politically rebellious masterstroke of leftist defiance when it was actually a very careful, very safe, very neoliberal script that took tepid aim at something everyone agrees is bad (the Patriot Act) without offering any substantial commentary or praxis and while *still* stroking off American exceptionalism and perpetuating the inherently reactionary message of superhero vigilantism. 

That’s my take at least. So why should I accept that people who like Steve Rogers are “better” and “more moral” than people who like [hot villain of the week], when I think that the entire thematic foundation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is suspect and against my personal politics?

I’m not saying ‘The Winter Soldier’ is bad and you’re bad for liking it, I’m saying that I think the conversation we had about it as a culture was exactly the conversation Disney wanted us to have about it. The idea that these are “important” statements, that these black & white, a-thematic stories told in broad strokes across multi-million dollar canvasses are meaningful moral constructs is what Disney and similar companies want you to think. Literally NO ONE needs to be *told* who the Good Guys are and who the Bad Guys are in a PG rated mainstream franchise. 

You can, and should, glean real life context and messages from even simplistic narratives, but that kind of analysis needs to be applied outside the Good Guy/Bad Guy paradigm of the text itself. Yeah, sure, there’s something to be said about Kylo Ren’s arc in light of how young men are being radicalized by extremist movements targeting their loneliness and emotional instability, but that interpretation existing doesnt mean that people who like him better than the heroes are stupid. They aren’t being tricked or duped, they aren’t morally suspect and they aren’t committing an act of irresponsible text misinterpretation on the level of, say, not realizing that Humbert Humbert is a monster. 

Not all fiction is a morality tale, and not all fiction SHOULD be a morality tale and not all people should be obligated to react to morality tales the way the morality tale wants to be reacted to 100% of the time. Treating

morality tales  as these earth-shattering, profound commentaries that must be obeyed absolutely and drawing lines regarding personal integrity based on whether people like Good Space Wizards or Evil Space Wizards is creating a critical atmosphere in which the “good” being presented to us isn’t being questioned at all.

And that, imo, is way, waaaay more alarming than people on the internet writing ship fics about Kylo Ren’s big wibbly lips.