Politics in Media - The Good, the Bad, and the Preachy

Depression is terrible (my wife suffers it) but incels turn depression to hatred.

Which makes then unsympathetic.

They can't be loved and they're right. Because they ARE awful people who scare women and want them to be slaves.

No Sympathy if your requirement from women is to be your Sex Slave.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Oct 19th 2018 at 8:04:34 AM

I know, they have my sympathy for what they suffer but lose by turing into hatred in part by thinking it cannot be fixed it.

In general there is some stuff incel said that you kinda kind see as truth if squint a little bit: dating for example have some bias, one of it is that people just sort know how to date and talk and at times superficial charm can actually be helpfull.

They just take this as sign is not worth trying and it goes downhill for that.

The incel movement was notably founded by a bisexual woman.

https://www.elle.com/culture/news/a34512/woman-who-started-incel-movement/

She started it to help people get together to discuss their experiences and work to self-improve.

It became a black hole of hate.

While I like the idea of self improved, in many way I don think there is some thing to call out of dating in general.

I mean I used to have some proto ideas the incel have, including the idea that I coudnt just have someone because I didnt know how to talk to them, now I have a girlfriend and I want to marry her it sacred to know how close I was to falling into this.

I also liked this article where a guy finds out that "ironic" bigotry doesn't actually exist.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/19/incels-why-jack-peterson-left-elliot-rodger

A great moment of mine was the realization women weren't aliens. To be fair, I was fourteen.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Oct 20th 2018 at 4:37:44 AM

.... Well. You certainly learn something new every day.

Generally, shows that try to tackle politics and current events don't do it very well. They either buy into misconceptions, water things down to avoid alienating too many viewers, etc. To say nothing of the specific issues some shows may face — Roseanne was doomed to fail because its showrunner was a bigot.

Bottom line: you probably shouldn't be getting your views on incels from a show like SVU.

Edited by M84 on Oct 21st 2018 at 3:24:55 AM

Weirdly, I felt the Newsroom on HBO went downhill immediately because it was interesting because it commentated on current events (and past news). The show's commentary on the then-current Tea Party remains topical and fascinating. So was their coverage of the Casey Anthony material and exploitation of the media circus around the tragedy.

Whenever they left "real" news, it went completely bizarre and overthetop.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Oct 20th 2018 at 4:39:38 AM

So. Opinions in Always Chaotic Evil species? The ones that you can kill without feeling bad.

I personally prefer going for the Hive Mind or the Horde of Alien Locusts as the enemies that our heroes can kill and torture without feeling bad. Or some types of demons (I usually write demons are being morally neutral per se, the products of a bad culture rather than bad for birth. But I can't avoid the temptation to write the classic Born-evil demons that exist only to cause pain)

Edited by KazuyaProta on Oct 20th 2018 at 11:08:45 AM

Not exactly politics in media, unless you are talking about blatantly racist propaganda during wartime.

Kind of both honestly. I wonder what are the effects of Always Chaotic Evil in media.

Deshumanization is a fascinating topic. One of the saddest cases of deshumanizating propaganda for me was the Anti Japanese propaganda of the WW 2 era.

Because is a textbook case of Right for the Wrong Reasons. The Japanese in WW 2 were basically the most evil nation alongside the Germany, but American propaganda focused on...racism.

And thus, USA betrayed it's own citizens with the Internment Camps for Japanese Americans.

Sad. Because USA really didn't have to use racism to make Imperial Japan and Tojo look bad.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Oct 20th 2018 at 11:27:03 AM

You know, I think a lot of people here int his thread want to talk more of a philosophies of tropes kinda of way, how tropes afect public and the public affect tropes rather than focus on pure political terms.

I think I will make a new thread tomorrow.

We had a thread like that but it got derailed and locked.

I think the politics behind the trope of Always Chaotic Evil is very easy to talk about. It's the general idea of whether or not there's politics necessarily to the idea or not at all. Racial essential-ism is a concept which came up a lot at our table even if we didn't know what it was as a concept to begin with.

One of the early D&D modules was Keep on the Borderlands which had you enter the Caverns of Chaos and had the option to kill orc children, kobold children, and bugbear children. This sparked literally decades of debate as the question was whether they were monsters innately inclined to evil or just a people who were "evil" in culture (and if they were, why was that?)

It didn't help that D&D orcs were people which were known to fit a lot of stereotypes about black tribal peoples and Tolkien had been accused of that himself. It's one of the reasons why the "demon blood" retcon was made about orcs in the Warcraft universe, so the orc race could be redeemed.

It's also why Chris Meltzer became enormously pissed off at Blizzard because the orc race was redeemed in Warcraft III only to be continuously used a villains ever since by the stockholders who assumed the Horde was the "villain" race. Indeed, as a WOW fan, it gets annoying when Alliance players assume you want to play a bad guy when you play Horde.

On the other hand, I'm also of the mind sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. When you create a bunch of enemy mooks, you might not actually be making a statement about anything other than you need enemy mooks. A very good argument was made to me that you can't actually be racist against fictional monsters because they are fictional. Whenever you use them as a metaphor for a real life racial groups, that's on the user or the creator.

I actually love Fantastic Racism as a concept because it allows you to talk about these sorts of things but I also feel it's no substitute for the real thing. One of the moments I had fun was when they got into the subject in Straight Outta Fangton with prejudice against vampires. Peter Stone, the protagonist, is a black vampire.

His statement being, "No, there's some pretty big fucking differences between racism and anti-vampirism. Believe me, I should know."

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Oct 21st 2018 at 1:49:55 AM

If you're going down that route, then we'd essentially be rehashing the old thread all over again, talking about any trope and justifying it by saying "it's political". And that's likely going to just lead to more derails into trying to justify why something one happens to enjoy is so deep and meaningful while something you don't like is just garbage. And all of those discussions are things better suited to the threads pertaining to said works.

If we're going to do this thread, let's limit it to stuff that has a clear political statement or commentary about politics.

Edited by M84 on Oct 21st 2018 at 6:25:53 PM

I think talking about politics and ideas about politics in media qualifies.

But, sure, if you don't want to do it—fine.

Consider it dropped.

I think moving away from Always Chaotic Evil as a trope would be for the best. It feels to me like...well, not propaganda, per ce. It's not like The Lord of the Rings is trying to convince you that real-world orcs are bad and we should murder them. But it kind of is?

Like propaganda for propaganda, I guess. The point isn't "Vampires are a 1:1 metaphor for Muslims" or something. But rather, getting people to accept the premise that a race of people can be universally inhuman monsters powered by pure evil and thus should be exterminated. Convincing people not that X group is such a group, but merely that such a premise is sound of logic.

Once you've accepted the basic idea that an entire race of inhuman evil creatures can exist and we absolutely have a moral imperative to wipe them out to the last child, that's when the haggling over precisely which groups of humans those are can begin.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Oct 23rd 2018 at 10:16:13 AM

This was brought up in the previous locked thread where it was more on topic. And yes, it is a troublesome trope. That is why most media do not play it straight these days.

Cases where it was blatantly political just hammer home the problems. Cases such as Frank Miller’s Holy Terror.

"We had a thread like that but it got derailed and locked."

the thread was about politics in media, not how media influence tropes and vice versa, that is why it got derail to such a extent: the thread kinda move and got flanderized into that.

It might be a good idea to have a thread for general meta-discussion of tropes and politics, though I think a thread like that might be a little too broad for on-topic.

Maybe for the trope thread? I think it would work better there.

The thread was about media narratives and how they affect real life politics.

The problem with that thread, one which may affect this one too, was that by its very nature it involved fictional works. And tropers being tropers, it's very easy for us to be sidetracked when it comes to talking about our favorite fiction.

Edited by M84 on Oct 23rd 2018 at 9:28:15 PM

The problem is more that while taking about politics is good is a little bit limited, we sidetrack into taking more of how the used of trope and how that get afect by the public or viceversa.

That it pretty much.

We kept getting sidetracked into things like whether the Sith Code was better than the Jedi Code or other ridiculous things, which had nothing to do with real life politics.

Anyway, that's why I want to try and keep this thread as on-topic as possible. So going back to the original topic:

I've often found that the more intentionally political a writer makes their work, the worse it is. Probably because they think the message is more important than the actual quality of the writing and that it stands by itself. Hence why Marvel's Civil War crossover events were such flops for me. Or the aforementioned Holy Terror.

A bit of sidetrekking isn't bad because they allow the discussion of a topic more fully.

As long as it's at least somewhat related, I don't see that as a problem.

But that's just me.

I think Civil War was actually quite entertaining and certainly better than a lot of what Marvel was producing at the time. It wasn't great but it was entertaining even when (and because of) the ridiculousness. Holy Terror, however, was just racist evil trash.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Oct 23rd 2018 at 7:00:08 AM