Complaining: Reactionary Fantasy

I was directed to here via ATT and the Removing Complaining thread.

Reactionary Fantasy's a mess - I just removed two examples that were just "it's BIGOTRY and FAKE PROGRESSIVENESS", and the main paragraph is one giant whine. The Removing Complaining thread stated a very similar trope (Supposedly Rebellious Series) was cut for being filled with complaining.

Opened. We have our work cut out for us if a similar trope was cut.

I can definitely see how this trope would attract Flame Bait, for one.

Not only that, most of the examples look like misuse.

I tried to improve the Maleficent entry, but am not sure it has a right to be there at all. Maleficent is not hobbled or sent back to the kitchen in the way Jeannie is.

One might say it is not a perfect feminist movie, but I am not so sure it actually meets the criteria for reactionary fantasy.

I see lots of misuse, a few generic examples, lots of rambling, projecting ideas, and other problems. Most importantly, there's really no clear thread through the examples. They're in all directions, and the only thing I can gather is that it's about some works not being completely progressive or whatever. Very few if any seem to care about the trope description.

Mostly seems like complaining. Not sure if anything's worth saving.

I think it would be a legitimate trope if used correctly (work deliberately demonstrates traditional or "regressive" values as a creator reaction to societal change). It may be hard to determine that when it's not very blatant or when no Word of God is available regarding creator intent. Right now, this trope looks like it's mostly being used as a replacement for one that was already removed.

The problems start right in the description. It almost immediately leaps to Example As Thesis, and with some extremely dubious examples! No one is going to deny that I Dream of Jeannie was typical male wish-fulfillment fantasy. (Literally.) But to leap from that to a claim that it was a deliberate backlash against feminism is a stretch that I suspect very few would accept. Bewitched even less so, since the relationship in that was extremely typical for the era.

On the other hand, this is definitely a real thing. I haven't even gotten to the examples yet, but I know of several where I can cite Word of God.

So...I'm not sure. We might be able to fix this with a cleanup and a rewrite of the description. But I'm not completely opposed to cutting and letting someone go to TLP if they think they can do better. Sometimes a fresh start is the best way.

I'd suggest making it a Trivia page that needs Word of God support.

Cut and/or sending to TLP is my vote. This is too much of a mess as it stands to fix otherwise

I don't think that only accepting deliberate examples will lead anywhere.

People who uphold the status quo almost never do so deliberately or even consciously. They just keep doing what they always did. They do not view the messages they put in their works as political (even though they very much are), because that's just how things "are" or "have always been" or "used to be in the good old times".

The trope needs a stricter definition. Things that have to be there for an example to count.

If we require "Superficially empowered /supernaturally powerful woman who is portrayed as sex object for the male protagonist" then the Maleficent example doesn't qualify, because while the three good fairies are portrayed as stupid, they are not portrayed as sex objects.

Or we require "(Supernatural) woman could do whatever she wants, chooses to stay in the kitchen" - also wouldn't apply, Maleficent gets her wings back and only gives up rulership of the moors, which is implied to be a meaningless position, anyway.

Both of those would apply to Jeannie and to a number of other works.

I don't think specific requirements would work. Those change with the times, since what was progressive in the 60's can likely be regressive now.

That's one thing that the trope fails at is taking time into consideration as well. I mean, it compares I Dream of Jeannie with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess. Which is also out of context.

Then there's things like the Star Trek: The Original Series example, which as far as I can recall wasn't really marketed to be particularly progressive as much as it actually was relatively progressive for its time (basically what they could get away with).

I think there's something to a trope based on the Mod Squad example- a work that uses the veneer of some hip new movement to attract viewers but is actually critical of that thing (Do We Have This One). But that's not completely clear from the trope description, and many of the examples are not straightforward examples of this.

The title (but not the trope description) implies another, potentially also legit if maybe YMMV definition: Fantasy or science fiction where Medieval European Fantasy includes the values of middle ages with regards to class, status of women etc. This could still open the door to complaining, but could be improved by specifying that this must involve constructed worlds/societies where social structures that are more old-fashioned/less equal than the author's own time are portrayed positively, making it more of the strict inverse of Feminist Fantasy. Currently, many examples aren't from Fantasty/magical storylines, and don't fit this at all.

I agree that this sounds like two separate tropes.

The problem with "author's own time" is that, as recent events have rather spectacularly demonstrated, even in the same time in nominally unified cultures there are massive differences in social norms and attitudes. Then there are other cultures, i.e. the anime problem: if an anime goes about promoting the Yamato Nadeshiko as the ultimate feminine ideal, does that make it 'reactionary'? Yamato Nadeshiko is a pretty old-fashioned concept, but at the same time lots of people might argue that most if not all of its traits are still positive in modern society. That applies to lots of other cultures as well, although there are much fewer examples of those on the site, and even if we have such a relatively specific example for a creator as 'modern American author' that's still an extremely broad range of societies that might apply.

Outside of a Word of God requirement, I just don't see a way to set real guidelines for this that don't immediately invite people into the quagmire of playing amateur sociologist and psychologist, and further arguments over whether they consider a depiction as 'positive', 'negative' or something else. Ultimately you hit a brick wall when somebody says 'well I thought it depicted things in a reactionary way' and nobody can gainsay that. Attempting to infer insidious intentions from creators to subvert or assimilate some new thing they don't like doesn't seem like just seems to invite paranoid conspiracy theories, which I don't really think is relevant here.

This is why, incidentally, I don't really like the idea of a trope about works using 'the veneer of some hip new movement to attract viewers but is actually critical of that thing'. We already have something like that with The Man is Sticking it to the Man', which to me is already a swamp of poisoned wells where you have people arguing that anything produced by a mainstream media organisation cannot truly be 'progressive', 'radical', 'hip' or some other position simply because of who the creator is. If we add in 'is actually critical' without a Word of God requirement, then that proposed trope too sinks into poison wells and conspiracy theories, and by the nature of the concept there would be few if any works where the creator admits trying to stealth criticise something that they're also trying to ride the popularity of.

Another problem with this trope is that it seems to me that ‘reactionary’ is largely a pejorative term by those who use it, mostly in my experience by self-described ‘progressives’, because even the political and ideological vocabulary of the left and right are different, that those people who actually understand what this page is supposed to mean will be largely inclined to complain, while those who might describe themselves as ‘reactionary’ if they actually used that word will miss it completely. If we can even salvage this as a trope, I think it needs a rename, so that people other than activists and political science majors actually understand what it means, and hopefully also curtail complaining.

Of course personally, I’d say this isn’t really a trope. If we're going to play 'death of the author' and leave out a Word of God requirement, it seems to go: creators create a work, a critical mass of the audience (i.e. somebody who wants to add it to the page) judges it as having a certain political stance, regardless of the creator’s intention, and label it ‘reactionary’. That right there is an audience reaction, meaning YMMV at best, and it essentially means ‘people have opinions on what the political stance of a work is’, which is great and all, but isn’t really a trope. That’s something that people can have civil (though more likely uncivil) debates about, but, uh, how is that supposed to mean something?

I agree with . Trying to figure out whether or not something is "reactionary" ain't easy, and this page is mostly PC complaining anyhow.

So what should we do with this trope?

Drop an asteroid on it

edited 25th Nov '16 12:00:24 PM by tryrar

Yeah, I don't think this trope can be salvaged. Most of the examples are terrible.

This trope takes a wrong turn for two reasons: the implicit value judgement that comes with "reactionary" and the lack of restrictions on explicit political content (basically, not limiting or specifying Author Tracts). In principle, the first one could be fixed with a rename (Conservative Fantasy?). The second might be fixable with some kind of specifications about how explicit the politics is, but I think that would be hard to enforce.

I do think, if we're going to allow Feminist Fantasy as a trope, that some kind of page about explicitly non-liberal science fiction is equally valid. Most of the examples from this page couldn't be used, but some of Orson Scott Card 's works come to mind.

I take issue with the larger point that discussions of the political alignment of works are somehow audience reactions or outside of the scope of the wiki. Not all works are political, but plenty do have explicit political content. Politics, along with heroism, love, and death, is one of the main topics for fiction. I would argue that the political nature of The Colbert Report or say, South Park is an essential, easily apparent (for someone with cultural context) aspect of the work.

This wiki is already full of pages that make assertions about political statements and values differences in works, like Fair for Its Day, Values Dissonance, most of the Politics Tropes. I think many of these tropes add value and highlight important aspects of works.

edited 25th Nov '16 8:35:20 PM by naturalironist

Well, (IMHO, of course), the problem with conservative political content in fictional stories as opposed to liberal/progressive/PC/etc. content is that people are way more negative on the former than the latter.

So it seems like there's a consensus for deletion, as no one has come up with any good ways to salvage this. Do people agree?

I think the The Mod Squad example could be folded into Rule-Abiding Rebel.

edited 27th Nov '16 8:34:38 PM by naturalironist

should we do a poll (crowner I think its called) for yays and nays. Just to make sure we are all on the same picture.

I'd say it's beyond salvage, but throw in a crowner just to make sure.

Somewhat related, while I'd say it certainly doesn't need scrapping, Subculture of the Week has a lot of similar complaining when a show portrays a beloved nerdy subculture in a negative light. It seems like a lot of the stuff on that page is complaining that, essentially, TV isn't run by geeks and the stereotype that nerds are strange still exists (the main paragraph is the worst on this).

Crowner here