Why Do People Even Care About Unfortunate Implications?

If I write something that idolizes killing newborn children as the most important activity anyone can engage in, that's subjective and I cannot be criticized on the grounds that my work is about glorifying baby-killing because that's completely subjective and is totally about other people imposing their standards on me. Which they shouldn't because I'm free, man, to murder babies all day long!

That's obviously an extreme example, but it illustrates something important: you haven't thought this through.

You really haven't thought this through, because otherwise you'd realize that's not remotely what I was talking about.

Works come from people and societies and are consumed by people and societies. The interaction between the creating person and society and the consuming person and society is very important to how well a work interacts with its audience.

Since you are in desperate need of education on this, take a moment to contemplate this post. And perhaps this one as well. Or this one. They illustrate what happens, at the nuts-and-bolts level of a work, when an author's worldview collides with a readership of a different one. Odds are good, if you approach them honestly, you'll probably find yourself agreeing with a lot of what's said about the characters. (Surprise, you're absorbing and reading criticism on social and personal grounds and agreeing with it!)

Now, that's hardly a criticism of the works as a whole, which are more than worthy of criticism as whole in this sense. Left Behind is an awful set of books on many levels. However the most insidious is that for people who read them and like them, there is a monster at the end of the books...and that monster is the person who read and liked them. This is because books are not an effort to scare people into Heaven, but an am-enjoying-the-suffering-of-others premillenial dispensationalist fanfic about all the really bad shit that's going to happen to everyone who never believed in their particular brand and why people who believe in their particular brand are better people; indeed, why only people who believe in that particular brand should be considered or treated as people.

If you do not think it valid to criticize a work for being something like that, then you need a much better explanation than that the critic is attempting to force conformity to their beliefs.

edited 29th Aug '13 8:58:11 AM by Night

Uh, no. You can be criticized for it. You're just not obligated to accept that criticism. And yes, despite your sarcasm, you are free to murder babies all day long. You'll go to prison or be executed for it, as well you should, but you can do it.

This is the kind of whiny hyperbolic horseshit that turns people away in the first place. You know what? You're right that I don't disagree with most critcisms of Unfortunate Implications. What I do disagree with and refuse to let go unchallenged is the completely unquestioned objective moralism that goes along with said criticisms.

It's not about whether I think the criticism is valid, it's about whether the authors themselves are obligated to think the criticism is valid. And they aren't. You aren't obligated to stop criticizing them either.

edited 29th Aug '13 9:17:09 AM by Robotnik

I think I would care less about writers and unfortunate implications if editors did their damn jobs. However they do not, much of the times, and other people getting their hands on a work can actually make it worse.

Playing devil's advocate here: if writers were better at their jobs, editors wouldn't have to do anything.

edited 29th Aug '13 9:32:03 AM by Robotnik

That would mean that writers would have to care about unfortunate implications, which you say they should not.

I didn't say they "shouldn't". I said they don't have to.

edited 29th Aug '13 9:44:08 AM by Robotnik

Wrong-o. It's not the editor's job to decide what the writer is saying, or how what they say can be interpreted. The editor's job is only to point out to the writer how to say what they're saying in the clearest, most effective way.

edited 29th Aug '13 9:43:29 AM by Madrugada

So when I'm reading someone's work, I should not speak up when I find it morally repulsive, and know that it is not satire, but sincere?

I will never look at anyone's work ever again, that's for sure.

edited 29th Aug '13 9:45:41 AM by ohsointocats

You can speak up. The author just doesn't have to listen to you. You have a right to criticize, they have a right to ignore it.

And I'm saying that if editors, agents, and publishers did their damn jobs, something that offensive would never get through to be published.

See Madrugada's post above. They're editors, not censors.

You can certainly say "Hey, I find this bit morally repugnant." if you're beta-reading.

But if you're editing, your job is to say "This sentence is awkwardly phrased." or "This bit is confusing, who's talking here?" or "This chunk is really choppy to read. All the short little sentences and sentence fragments disrupt the flow." or "Hey, if you leave this in, you create a plothole later, <here>."

An editor's job is to suggest improvements to the way the story is told. Not to change the story that is being told.

An agent's job is to find a publisher who's willing to buy the book his client wrote and make the best possible deal for the writer.

And a publisher's job is to sell books and make money for the publishing company (s)he works for. Period. End of sentence. End of paragraph.

edited 29th Aug '13 10:10:31 AM by Madrugada

So it's never anybody's job to wonder why, say, they're helping along so many books where the only reason there is a female character is for her to get raped? Hmm.

If you don't agree with the points you are attempting to make, why are you arguing them?

The problem is they are obligated to accept such criticisms, and you need to grasp that, because you're proposing that authors exist in a state of complete sociopathic vacuum unconnected to the cost of bread.

They do not. They have to get paid and they have feelings.

And more importantly, Unfortunate Implications are, a noticeable amount of the time, not the result of the story being told but the author doing the telling. The author's presence being detectable in a story is one of the greatest sins they can commit, in much the same way that one of the greatest sins of acting is to drop character in a live performance. This is a technical issue, and one you've missed.

This really does not preclude them from suggesting that certain elements of the story are being mishandled, particularly in ways that are likely to alienate readers.

In fact that would actually be a rather important aspect of it. An editor should always ask what story the writer is attempting to tell, so they can hear it in the writer's own words what they are trying to convey, and point out where things have gone wrong or are the writer's biases are injuring the story's appeal to a broad audience. (Tying in again to the Left Behind thing, which as a series was desperately in need of this.)

edited 29th Aug '13 11:04:43 AM by Night

Okay, now you're arguing from a financial and pragmatic perspective, rather than a moral one. And I can get behind that, but whatever you think of their fire-and-brimstone views, I'm not sure the authors of the Left Behind series have ever been particularly strapped for cash. I'm sure they're not as popular as they could be if they dropped the hellfire schtick, but one post ago you were going on about "monsters", and now you're heading down the "be nice or you won't make enough money" route, and while sound, I have doubts about whether that principle applies here.

If it's a question of money, they have enough, AFAIK. If it's a question of you finding their views morally reprehensible, we've already discussed that.

edited 29th Aug '13 11:13:48 AM by Robotnik

There's also a technical side to it, as I alluded to in my first post in this thread and the edited version above. (Expanded version available below.

You still haven't explained why morally-based criticism should not be accepted as valid, however, you've simply rejected it out of hand. Complaining about how people are forcing their belief systems and values on the author and they don't have to take that isn't an answer because it's easily abused. Try seeing how long a "only if it's funny" rule lasts in relation to forum moderation for a practical example.

edited 29th Aug '13 11:14:45 AM by Night

The primary responsibility for the content of a book is on the author's shoulders. They're the one who wrote it. They're the one who decided how to handle it. They're the one who made the choices of what story they were going to tell and how they were going to handle it. If they chose a story that you think shouldn't be told, don't support them — don't buy it, don't recommend it, recommend against it. If they told it badly, don't reward them: don't buy it, don't support it, recommend against it.

The publisher carries some of the blame: they chose to make it available. But they would only do that if they expected to make money off of it. So let them no that they aren't going to get your money.

But don't blame the editor or the agent.

Question for the posters here. How, in your own words (i.e. no quoting the trope page or using a quoteblock/bunch of arrows and saying "this"), would you actually define "Unfortunate Implications"?

edited 29th Aug '13 11:11:47 AM by KillerClowns

I agree. I don't believe that they're good writers. Few critics worth their salt seem to.

But a few posts ago, you seemed to be coming at this from a moral perspective, and as I said, I don't agree they have any kind of corresponding obligation to concede the superiority of your morals, even if I do agree that they are in fact superior.

I don't know. To be honest, I'm not sure the wiki itself knows what it wants to do with that trope. The general consensus seems to be that it is not individual works that are the problem so much as viewpoints that dominate the industry that no one is questioning. Okay. And yet, Unfortunate Implications is a trope constantly applied only to individual works, and not to broad trends, viewpoints, or industries themselves.

It's generally obvious enough for me to notice when a work is pandering or just plain shallow. But I don't care to get angry about it, and am put off by people who are.

edited 29th Aug '13 11:25:31 AM by Robotnik

You're basically arguing that social corrective mechanisms are completely invalid applied to literature. (But perfectly valid applied to other things.)

Intentional or unintentional things illustrative of the author's bias and prejudice or could be easily construed as such, that are not in themselves...textual(?) to the story. (I'm not sure I have a good word for what I'm trying to convey here. Basically, the work is not about them. That's a different kind of bad; my contempt for message fiction is a whole other beastie.)

edited 29th Aug '13 11:35:13 AM by Night

It does seem strange that we have completely absolved everybody of any social responsibility in any fictional work whatsoever.

Nobody's absolved everybody. I clearly stated that the contents of a book are the responsibility of the author. You appear to want to absolve the author of the consequences of the choices (s)he made in the story they told, and put the responsibility on someone else.

Huh, I did not know editors did solely grammar-y things. Interviews from authors always seemed to imply they tried to cut off the worse bits of the plot sometimes.

That's not really on topic though, but...yay for learning new things?

Depending on how you define easily abused, I might say, "Tough shit", but then again, maybe not. It would help if you could give me a clearer example.

Well, as I reject the concept of objective morality completely, I think that's only natural. If that's not good enough for you, too bad. We're approaching the issue with irreconcilable viewpoints and there's no point in continuing the discussion.

edited 29th Aug '13 12:14:59 PM by Robotnik

Let's say a writer writes a book about black people in the US being sold back into slavery and this portrayed as a good thing. The editor, agent, and publisher have no responsibility or reason to reject this work. In fact, they take it and decide to sell it. It sells millions of copies and much of the audience either sees nothing wrong with this premise or endorse it. Is this okay?

edited 29th Aug '13 12:16:20 PM by ohsointocats