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

Yeah, see, the thing about whatever Ancient Conspiracy you have in pretty much any work of (urban) fantasy and real world atrocities is that there's a very simple rule of thumb:

Your supernatural beings and their Ancient Conspiracy can be involved in all manner of real world events, even including atrocities, either directly in the same way real life people were (e.g. An evil wizard who happens to be an SS officer or a werewolf who happens to be drafted to go to Vietnam) or using it as cover for their own actions (e.g. a nest of vampires who use the deathtoll of the Cultural Revolution to mask their lethal feeding habits, a cult of Cthulhu worshippers using Lynchings as a cover for their sacrifices), but under no circumstances should you ever, ever have your Ancient Conspiracy be directly responsible for any real world atrocity the aftermath of which still directly affects people today. (e.g. The complete destruction of Carthage or any of the various sackings of Rome are fine, but slavery in the American South and even Pogroms in Medieval Russia are not).

Yeah I try and tread carefully about that;

The villainous Umbral Horde faction is involved in a lot of history - with Dark Father Antonius, a "Dark Priest", sent over to the Californian region by the Spanish government as part of a settlement - he moves to California to get a home for him and his religion, and he never returns to Spain proper.

Antonius for all his villainy is stated to have treated the Native Americans by far better than the Europeans did, valuing them as allies and trying to preserve them and their lives. The Umbrals in general are kind of Equal-Opportunity Evil - they're bad guys, sure, but they're firmly anti-racism and have been for a long time. "All are valued servants of the Dark - for shadow is cast upon all equally."

In terms of more recent history, I was thinking of having Trump try and make backroom deals with the Umbral Horde despite them worshiping deities literally called "The Dark Gods" - all in order to try and obtain any dirt on Hillary that the leader of the UH had.

Despite an agreement to support them if he came to office, Trump immediately goes to prepare to attack Antonius' Baja California settlement established after the war events that occurred...because Antonius executed the son of a donor for serious crimes, and because Antonius' "Cathedral City of Erdengard" is a generous home to a lot of Mexicans.

The sad thing is, I can actually see Trump doing all of that latter bit.

Edited by NickTheSwing on Nov 9th 2018 at 10:59:19 AM

I dunno, speaking as a Southerner, I get a smile with the idea that the "noble heroic plantation honor with all his chivalric honor" was actually an incestuous undead monster all along.

But my family worshiped Gone with the Wind.

I only found out later when I visited my Great Aunt (who was 92 in the 86 and lived over a hundred) who owned a fucking plantation. I was too young to realize what it was until after her death when my aunt aunt explained it.

I was like, "Oh shit."

I'm not saying she was a vampire from a proud lineage of them. But I'm saying it wasn't impossible.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 10th 2018 at 12:35:02 PM

@Nick: You're using a current event for a story. Is still distasteful. I'm sure a Hispanic would be glad to hear that Spanish Evil Wizards are their saviors

Also, the Evil Wizard being nicer than colonizers is funny to me because in the story that I wrote, the Evil Sorcerer was also a Evil Colonialist.

I mean, it wasn't too hard. A man who absolutely shit in ancient traditions and murders entire towns and tribes to steal their magical artifacts?

Edited by KazuyaProta on Nov 10th 2018 at 6:35:26 AM

Because this isn't the Worldbuilding forum, I'm going to hold off on extensively pointing out just how many elements of that beyond the use of current events make me uncomfortable, but good grief there are quite a few.

"of which still directly affects people today. (e.g. The complete destruction of Carthage or any of the various sackings of Rome are fine, but slavery in the American South and even Pogroms in Medieval Russia are not)."

Of course affect is weird because we are srtill influence by stuff in hundred of year in the past, and if one want to be reaaaaally pedantic, black people are are afect by decision made post civil war when white people try to mantain slavery in all but name.

It remind me of Vive military est when the second war power discover gastplam(is like mana but grimdark) a magical power that can be harvest from living body, the nazis and imperial japan did the only rational and fuck up thing they could and start remaking their atrocity with the express purpose of harvesting as much as posible, which they start to turn the war....

until the alies catch up with them and force a statemale.

very intersting used of the trope and even then the author wasnt please with the idea of "nothing changr UNTIL THIS VERY POINT" but that is on part of the genre.

@ Antonius being an "Evil Spanish Wizard". He's an Italian. Well, Roman to be precise.

He has more or less spent the last few thousand years fighting various Kings, Queens and Princes of Europe, and manipulating the ones he doesn't outright slay. It wouldn't be a stretch to say Antonius is older than Methuselah.

I am absolutely resolved that I'm not going to back down on using present day events.

Edited by NickTheSwing on Nov 10th 2018 at 6:04:23 AM

If that is the case I lease make him clear he does for pragmatic reason and at lease show the natives some mesuring of WHY they are treating with him, making a two way choice, not just a way to prop the chararter.

I take a very strong stance that history is fully mineable for entertainment.

And also that plantation owners were in real life vampires.

I have a couple of ideas for it:

The first one is a vampire annoyed with the south because now all is slaves he could feed will be lost with the war.

Another one I have is one mad vampire who decide for some really twisted reason to embrace two vampires: one white men and one black women and pit against each other but placing a geas so they cant harm each other directly, meaning they always using pawns and agent to disrupt the other.

Such a couple of ideas.

One of the interesting subplots in STRAIGHT OUTTA FANGTON is the protagonist's creator, Thoth, is a ruthless controlling Old One. He's every bit the kind of monster the others are, out for power and control. However, he does have one soft spot where he just drops his usual callousness.

He being a former slave from Haiti, flat out gives any help to liberate the people captured for being sold as food to other vampires.

As for the two way street thing, it is brought up that Antonius was desperately in need of a place in which to stay, and the Natives basically set up an agreement - Antonius helps protect and defend them and their interests, and he gets certain places to set up shop.

@ Charles Phipps: You may be interested in James Cotton Woodley, a character I have planned then. Firm Republican donor, Family Values Man...former Plantation owner, abhorrent racist, "best friend" of several high up Confederacy men...and also a vampire who uses two of the downright evilest magic types in the setting; Exaction (which when done a certain way enslaves souls to empower yourself and use Soul Power spells) and Doppelagio Magic (a really, really gross-ass magic type that basically amounts to "kill your opponent by infecting them with your blood, which turns into hostile new duplicate internal organs".) His whole thing is the dissonance between his Faux Affably Evil appearance, and the things he does with his magic types.

This is a 23 minute long video about the Shrek movies by Youtube channel host Big Joel. It discusses the way the films approach being a social outcast and the role power plays in society.

As Big Joel sees it, the first two films are critiques of power structures and rejections of the idea of needing validation from society. Shrek stays an ogre and in the second movie him trying to be someone he isn't is taken advantage of by the villains. He also points out how King Harold himself is a victim of society's norms as he has to hide the fact that he is a frog and goes as far as locking his daughter in a tower and almost drugging her into marrying someone she neither knows nor loves.

Where the third and fourth movies went wrong, Big Joel feels, is that they decided to normalise power and have the status quo be a thing that no one is to fight against. He references the scene in Shrek The Third were Arty tells the villains the only thing stopping them from fulfilling their dreams is themselves and not society's prejudices and refers to Shrek as an agent of the status quo by putting Arthur as king of Far Far Away.

It's certainly an interesting view of the Shrek movies. I myself don't agree with this idea that a status quo itself is inherently bad. Your thoughts?

I think there's a certain level of trying to necessarily ascribe the meaning you're looking for to a text, good or bad. In the case of Shrek, the meaning of "accepting yourself" and "it's okay to be different/not conventionally attractive" is text. However, the simple fact is Shrek doesn't want to be a king and is perfectly content being a working class ogre.

He's not a man who wants class or to be a part of the upper class or government.

Which is explicit in 3 and 4.

He rejects wealth, fame, and power like a big green hobbit.

Okay I’m gonna unpack this a bit, I’m going to do it because you’ve bought your personal experience into this and because I think you’re adult enough for me to be able to use you as a kind of case study without taking offence.

You kinda want her to have been a magic vampire, why? Because it puts additional distance between you (her descendant) and her crimes, it marks out a big difference between her as someone who would favour such things and you as someone who opposes them. Even just the amusing fictional concept put that’s distance there.

It basicly marks out that you never would had never could do such things because you’re not a supernatural horror.

That distance is dangerous.

Now you’re self-reflective enough to just be having some fun here, but for people who aren’t self-reflective they need that closeness to the crimes of their ansestors, because that closeness, that worry that “there but for the grace of god go I” is how we check ourselves, it’s how we avoid sliding down the slippery slope.

That process of othering the people who commit such crimes is dangerous for society because it allows people to falsely reassure themselves that they’d never commit such crimes, some will hold that assurance even as they commit their own horrific acts and it will be part of how they justify to themselves that what they’re doing is okay.

Very well, to unpack this.

I made the joke about her being a vampire because it is a metaphor for the fact that I grew up in an environment that desperately struggled with ways of justifying Neo-Confederacy ideals. I never knew my Great Aunt to say a racist thing and she was a sweet, kind, and beautiful old woman. However, the environment I grew up in was apologist to the extreme.

Even worse, it revisionist.

The narrative I grew up on establishes innumerable facts of the heroism of Confederate soldiers, their commitment to peace, their chivalry, their suffering at the hands of the North's barbarism, the Both-Sidism, and I could on all day about the utter bullshit for hours. People who passionately genuinely believed they were fighting for self-determination in addition to slavery (and were SHOCKED on a level of cognititive dissonance that white supremacy and slavery were in the constitution when I pointed it out).

You ask why I say the Confederacy should be joked about being vampires? I say that because it tears into the myth in a direct and visceral way. Because saying they were men isn't enough. That plays into, "They were just normal people caught in a bad situation." They weren't, the Confederacy was not normal, it was an aberration hated across the globe as a bunch of monsters in its time.

The romanticism of the Southern aristocrat or "Noble Rebel" need to be mocked, torn down, and their image cultivated by Gone with the Wind, North and South, and John Carter of Mars destroyed. Making them literal monsters helps reconcile the fact they are not heroes. They were villains. Maybe it does make some artificial distance but that artificial distance helped ease me into realizing just how monumentally wrong the narrative I grew up with was.

One of the characters that helped me do that?

Sheriff from Chicago by Night in Vampire: The Masquerade. A.K.A The Vampire Confederate soldier and racist evil hick.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 11th 2018 at 8:59:25 AM

I guess it does come down to the narrative one is trying to dispel, for myself and others in this thread we’re seeing the narrative of “Sure it was horrible, but it can’t happen here”, which is dispelled by showing that the people behind such crimes were real humans and not some kind of supernatural monsters, reminding people that it can happen here and we must be on guard.

But for you and where/when you grew up it’s a different narrative, the narrative is one of “it didn’t happen, what are you talking about?”, th crimes aren’t blamed on others, they’re not being acknowledged as crimes at all.

For you it’s about getting people to realise that the confederacy was bad, for us it’s about trying to get people to realise that the ideas that lead to the confederacy could appear again.

Amusingly enough that makes myself and other rather privileged, we have the privillage of being able to safely assume that everyone thinks that slavery and the confederacy were bad things, that’s a privillage you didn’t have growing up.

So where’s the divide coming from? Is it a generational thing, is it just that you’re fighting the battles you were raised fighting? Or is it a geographic thing, that’s acceptance that the confederacy was bad hasn’t yet reached where you live?

It’s problematic, because both battles are important, both have to be fought, but media doesn't observe the same generational and geographic boundaries that cultural ideas do, we can’t have one set of media for people who need to be told that slavery is bad and one set for people who need to be told that slavery could happen again.

I honestly don’t have a solution.

Edited by Silasw on Nov 11th 2018 at 5:39:17 PM

Some of it is simply different interpretations. Having real life evils be supernatural monsters on one hand makes them seem a bit fantastical and "unreal". On the other hand, it is actually a very severe Take That! to the whatever evil you're talking about.

I believe it's a combination of generational, regional, and cultural (propaganda). "Heritage not hate" is a common refrain around here, which is bullshit about why the Confederate stars and bars, statues of Robert E. Lee, and Civil War memorials all dedicated conspicuously to the Confederacy are everywhere.

I've been called a traitor to my people (literally, "MY PEOPLE" as if I owed my traitorous ancestors respect for their crimes) because I talk about how killing Klansman and ex-Confederates would be awesome addition to video games. The very fact killing Klansman is considered a BAD thing tells you just how bullshit the above statement is.

In a real sense, there's been an incredible effort to sweep under the rug the excesses of Confederate brutality and these myths are repeated every day. Stone Mountain has a memorial to three traitors and white supremacists on the side of its face, polluting the country but you'll see thousands of people talk about how it's EVIL to demolish the thing. That's relatively tame compared to the fact there's actual statues to Bedford Forrest around here.

If I were to drive around town, I can inform you, I will see approximately 30 Confederate flags prominently displayed in the immediate 1 mile area of my house. Thankfully, the KKK is now acknowledged as the Appalachian equivalent of the Aryan Nation in that it is known by everyone as a bunch of meth dealing degenerates but that doesn't mean it doesn't have thousands of members in the states.

The KKK's just the criminal arm of a culture that has an endless number of Civil War societies (my mother once introduced me to one of her friends in the Daughters of the Confederacy) and groups which exist to churn out a steady stream of "Why Robert E. Lee was the greatest man who ever lived" (actually spoken as a common statement with complete sincerity) and "Why the South has never recovered from the Civil War" (due to the BRUTALITY of the North).

It's why I strongly favor destroying as many Confederate memorials [[note: they're not memorials mourning the dead either, they're celebration of Confederate generals.]] as possible because they are a direct propaganda campaign against the soul of Southern whites. The people behind them don't care about the actual history involved and have been trying to warp the narrative since Lee's surrender.

One example is I was raised that General Lee DONATED his land to create Arlington Cemetary to honor soldiers of both sides. Other stories, as persistant as the "Clean Wehrmacht" are:

• Slavery wasn't that bad for slaves. "You don't abuse an expensive piece of property."
• Sexual abuse of slaves did not happen or was consensual.
• Confederates fought with honor, Northerners fought with murderous intent.
• The South planned to liberate their slaves peacefully due to changing economics (holllyyy shit - was this not true)
• The North was racist too!

People raising a stink has helped bring this to attention and surprisingly for all of its many many flaws, things like Django Unchained and Wild Wild West (best you never thought that would be a reference) and treating Confederates like Nazis helped. One of the big blows to the KKK in my region that I did research for was that membership dropped sharply when Superman came out against them in his radio program.

Treating them as cartoon supervillains WORKED.

It's why I encourage using them as stock villains, human orcs, and so on because it demystifies them.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 11th 2018 at 10:20:52 AM

I feel weird that my country, while having a dictatorship that always find apologists, I have zero type of identification or extra-disgust (dunno, a lack of It's Personal with them. I should have one, but I don't somehow) despite being from the target group of said dictatorship.

It really don't help that the Peruvian Internal Conflict was pretty Black-and-Grey Morality but with few to no civilian power. A revolutionary group appears to stop the abuses of the cities and turns out to be a terrorist group intending to become a Hispanic Khmer Rogue. Goverment moves from corrupt to creating death squads and doing a fair amount a unwanted violence against innocents while the president order forced sterilizations against Andean Natives (who were also the biggest target of the terrorists, my dad moved to avoid them).

The most regular choice is Hate Both Sides while admitting that if the Shining Path won it would have being worse. Fortunately Abimael Guzman don't have apologists but Alberto Fujimori does...but I can't deny that the man had humanity.

I want him in jail, but I can't deny his humanity. He tortured his own wife, but I still see him a human capable of having positive traits. Same with Abimael.

I can't deshumanize those men. I really can't see them as literal demons, I can create characters working with them that were even worse, but the men themselves...No. I can't.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Nov 11th 2018 at 5:28:51 AM

Deliberately exaggerating how bad historical villains are for the sake of making people realize they’re bad always leaves an odd taste in my mouth. I mean, sure, not the hugest deal, but you walk a very fine line with it.

Sometimes it work in a sense that you bring the trait into reallity rather than something you can rationalize, that is why the worst of comunist you can compare with a order assimilating machine or the nazis with soul eating demons obsess with battle and killing, because in a way that was true.

I mean sure people were men and all that jazz but men sometimes really want to act like demons, that is why the nazis are so easy to used for folder to villians: evil but stylich uniform? check, and batshit but somewhat coherent ethos? check? super duper murderous intent?, check, being unpleasent as hell? check, evil speeches? check check, check.

Or how the KKK sometimes can be as goofy and dumb as it is evil with their weird titles like imperial wizard or dragon or gran cyclops, if it wasnt for the terror they used they would be seen as D&D that got very wrong.

And as personal matter here, Im from venezuela, I saw very close the rise of chavez and is movement, how he used to atack the oposition and got away with everything he wanted, how he call other pity yankes, sell out, traitor and all other names over 16 YEARS(For people in US, imagine a less buffon and racist trump and then out it for a decade and a half and let him decide who will be next president, if that dosent make them shiver in fear, I dont know what it will), and so far saying they are men dosent said anything but the obvious.

Sometimes you need to really show the extention of their evilness.

This works, in my experience, only up to a point. Specifically it works so long as they're open about their own horribleness, because they don't realize other people consider it horrible.

The moment they do, though, it actually becomes counterproductive, because the horrible people will tone down their public horribleness juuuuuuust enough and give regular people time to forget what they were actually like. At which point the horrible people can point to that image and say "We're not like that. That's a huge exaggeration of our very-reasonable-in-comparison (public) behaviour. It's obviously just meant to insult us."

And it'll let them get away with their horribleness.

It's how we ended up in the current situation where literal Fascism is on the rise and the generations that never encountered actual open fascism, just cartoon villain fascism, no longer actually recognised real fascism.

And yet many of them will ALWAYS get back to be cartoon, Trump is really one step to pull a whokilledrogerrabbit and reveal he was a bad cartoon all alone, the saudis look like the steritypical and orientalism villian for a bad movie and the alt right cant hide their disdain for other and neither they endless desire for indulgence.