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

Here's my thing. Charles, I do get where you're coming from. You grew up in the South, so you got to deal with the ever-present cultural message:

"The men and women of the Confederacy did nothing wrong."

And you want to confront and reject that message. Which is a good thing to do, because that message is garbage and we should never have permitted it to propagate during the Reconstruction and after.

Germany didn't become what it is today by going, "The Nazis were fine people and I don't know what y'all are so upset about."

But by literally dehumanizing the plantation owners, I fear you're not actually confronting that message so much as adding to it. The message:

"There were evil inhuman creatures infesting the Confederacy and doing terrible things."

is not mutually exclusive with that first message up above. It shifts the blame from the Confederates to the vampires. In essence, by asserting that vampires are at fault for the crimes of the Confederacy, you are in fact absolving Confederate men and women of any wrongdoing.

I know that's not your intent, but you need to consider whether the message you're writing truly counteracts the cultural narrative or merely adds to it. It would be very easy for someone reading about vampire plantation owners to take away the idea that Confederates were good, honest people tragically misblamed for the actions of wicked forces beyond their comprehension or control.

When Superman fought the KKK, he didn't fight alien wizards dressed in Klan hoods. He fought the KKK.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Nov 11th 2018 at 5:30:26 AM

That assumes Robert E. Lee the vampire is not Robert E. Lee. The vampires of any hypothetical confederacy are still the same racist PO Ses that they were in life. It just means an allegory that exposes them as the blood drinking parasites they were.

But YMMV.

Thanks for discussing it with me.

Meanwhile, White Wolf has apologized for the Chechnya chapter.

https://www.facebook.com/whitewolfpublishing/

The issue is doubly complicated because I spoke with the writer and he lives in Georgia, trying to bring attention to the horror going on with his neighbors. He wrote it in 1st person from two perspectives:

1. A homicidal vampire psychopath who admired the evil going on 2. A humane vampire who saw the nastiness for what it was.

Then his editor turned both to 3rd person and the text became....well, what it was.

At the risk of derailling isn't the problem with the Alt-Right that there's plenty of people who find Hydra, Cobra, and literal cartoon supervillains to be Evil Is Cool?

Roger Ebert had a serious issue with the portrayal of the Klan in movies like The Chamber and Mississippi Burning because he didn't believe the problem was the Klan being portrayed positively.

The people attracted to the Klan were attracted to them because they were psychotic outlaws who murdered blacks.

It also says how much of a environment I grew up in that I'm familiar with the "David Duke Controversy" which is NOT the David Duke controversy you guys are familiar with. Basically, the DDC is whether or not David Duke by being the clean cut well-spoken "white pride" guy was missing the point of the Klan in that they should be about hate.

It's what led to the breakup of the group under his control because he wasn't extreme enough and irritated the, well, degenerate methheads.

• weeps for humanity*

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 11th 2018 at 4:59:39 AM

The problem is that too many people don't recognize their own bigotry as bigotry because they grew up thinking that bigotry is only stuff as extreme as the KKK and Nazis. Something that isn't helped by portraying them as literally inhuman supernatural monsters.

That is...very much not my reaction to the issue.

In the place I grew up, people don't identify as racists but they very much are of the mind that there's an existential threat to the white race. Which isn't "bigotry" but "realism."

And the difference between it and more extreme racism is negligible.

They don't see themselves as bigots but it's not because they condemn the Nazis or KKK, it's because they don't see themselves as bad people.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 11th 2018 at 5:20:42 AM

Wait? White Worf apologized? That's pretty good!.

Edited by KazuyaProta on Nov 11th 2018 at 8:20:57 AM

I'm worried about them sacking people for it. I just want them to get a sensitivity editor as this was misguided attempts to bring awareness not actual bigotry.

Yeah, Rob and Tobias covered it better than I could but the issue with that strategy is that it inevitably wraps around and has the same ill effect as downplaying an evil group.

When dealing with historical villains it’s probably a good idea to hold off on any downplaying or exaggerating. Show them as they were, which for a group like the confederacy is more than evil enough.

This is exactly what M84 was talking about. People thinking “Oh, I’m not a bigot because I don’t act the way bigots on TV act. There’s just an existential threat to the white race.”

Edited by archonspeaks on Nov 11th 2018 at 5:25:04 AM

Honestly, I think it's best not to involve supernatural evil with the Confederacy at all.

But if one really wants to do it...instead of making plantation owners vampires, why not have plantation owners working with vampires? Like, in exchange for vampires' help gathering slaves and keeping them in line, the plantation owners let the vampires feed on the slaves?

Edited by M84 on Nov 11th 2018 at 9:27:39 PM

That's what most works do to my knowledge. Thought the appeal of the Vampire Slave Owner is good too, just acknowledge that he's working with a human created system and is cool

My understanding is that Charles’ point is that the people he’s talking about don’t even get as far as recognising that the KKK are bigoted.

You talking about getting people to recognise that you don’t have to be KKK levels of racist to be racist, he’s talking about getting people to recognise that the KKK are racist.

They don't deserve that level of respect. That they aren't sullied by the evil of black magic but are "pure" human.

But as stated, I think we come at it from different ways.

I think the basic problem is that the entire mentality of challenging their racism is based on a flawed assumption in the first place. People kept arguing, "They are going to not think themselves as racist because they're not KKK or Nazis."

The flawed assumption is they concern themselves with being bigots at all. They don't. Therefore, it's a pointless exercise because it doesn't weigh on their minds.

Indeed, it's the source of so much online problem and communication issues because it's like worrying about the Aether to them. They don't comprehend why people think bigotry is an issue to worry on. Not that it is dead but that it was ever a big deal in the first place.

Slavery was just an anarchonism, not a true evil.

It's Blue-and-Orange Morality as far as they're concerned that people are obsessed over it.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 11th 2018 at 6:54:19 AM

Respect? Hardly. I just don't think it's a good idea to add fantastic elements to a real life atrocity. At least, not in a way that makes slave owners literal inhuman monsters. At least handle it the way Ghostapo is handled. Add supernatural evil if you want, but keep them human.

If you want to make the slave owner = vampire metaphor, do it the way Magic: The Gathering did with conquistadors. They didn't make the real life historical conquistadors into vampires, but they did have a faction of vampire conquistadors in one storyline.

Edited by M84 on Nov 11th 2018 at 11:04:55 PM

Fair enough.

In Beckett's Jyhad Diary, they had a bunch of Methuselahs living in plantations and slaving the owners but they claimed that this was because the brutality and cruelty of the slave owners attracted the undead.

But no, I didn't have all Confederates be vampires in my book. I did have a few controlling families (and some vampires on the side of slaves).

And the thing is... If you want to highlight the Planters' inhumanity through a character who is a vampire, that's not really a problem.

You can have a vampire Planter who is obviously evil... And then highlight that the human Planters aren't in any way better than the vampire and that the vampire is hiding their true nature and keeping a steady food supply by using human monstrousness as camouflage to blend in... Or something like that.

But to have the Planters all be vampires (or controlled by vampire, or using a system originally devised by vampires) is to make race-based chattel slavery and the real life atrocities at its core a consequence of vampire society and the way that it revolves around the vampires' need to secure some way of accessing a sufficient number of humans to feed on, rather than the consequence of plain old racism and way that southern society in general at the time revolved on how both rich and poor folks supported that system, the rich because they were profiting from it and the poor because it gave them someone to feel superior to.

The Planters weren't villains set apart from normal society, they were the upper crust of a society that was, itself, villainous and retains traces of that villainy to this day.

Edited by Robrecht on Nov 11th 2018 at 4:40:57 PM

It's the same problem I have with the Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil trope, basically. By dehumanizing a terrible crime, you make it impossible for human beings to have ever committed it. This, in turns, leads to the logical dissonance of "Sure, I'm drugging a woman's drink to sleep with her without her consent, BUT AT LEAST I'M NOT A RAPIST."

If racists are vampires, then the bar for racism becomes "literally being a vampire". And that, in turn, means nobody is racist because nobody is literally a vampire. Is Donald Trump literally a vampire? Does he skulk the streets of DC at night looking for young women to murder and drink their blood? No? Then that proves he's not racist!

I've long disagreed with that premise that the problem with rapists, slavers, and horrible people is that people think THOSE people do it and not them. Then again, I live in very tight rural communities where the kind of horrible crimes underneath the venue of pleasant suburbia and small town life.

Bullshit.

The idea of the Mayberry or Broadchurch style community where no one "respectable" would do it and it has to be an outsider is a creation of television. No one actually believes that who lives in these kind of communities because, no surprise, we know about the abuse, murder, drug abuse, and so on that is always in these sorts of places.

I feel like there's a real cultural difference at play here that there's this kind of "we can't believe someone like X would do it."

The problem is that usually these kind of assholes are able to blame the victim but that's a very different problem.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 11th 2018 at 10:14:59 AM

Or, more commonly, "Does Trump hold long n-word filled diatribes about the inferiority of PoCs while engaging in comic book villainesque plans to eradicate them all? No? Then that proves he's not a racist!"

Because, stepping away from vampires for a moment, waaaaay too many works make their villains who represent real world ills so unrealistically, simplistically over-the-top evil that it obfuscates that less extreme versions of that behaviour are still horribly bad.

'Cause, let's be real here, slaves in the South, by and large, were treated relatively well or at least no worse that poor whites, just like the modern revisionists claim. After all, slaves were there to work and slaves who were constantly recovering from vicious whippings or violent serial rapes or who were completely exhausted, so they were generally clothed, fed well, given leisure time to recover and even given a modicum of self determination.

And that does not matter. At all. Because in the end they were still slaves. They were still forced to work. Whatever self determination they enjoyed, they enjoyed only on the sufferance of their masters, who could take that freedom away with them on a whim. While atrocities were not as endemic as fiction occasionally portrays them as, they were still very much a constant and ever present possibility, along with the reality that when, not if, but when they did happen, the slaves had no recourse but to take it or face even worse.

Slavery wasn't a vile crime against humanity because it was a brutal Mordor-esque hellscape of rape and torture, but because it was, arguably much worse, a constant, generations long grinding down of the spirit of an entire class of fellow human beings based on their skin colour through a system that used the constant, soul crushing threat of atrocity.

And that's the insidious thing... You can use willpower and physical strength to endure the whipping some fictionalised overseer gives you for your insolence and then heroically attempt to overcome them and break your chains and rise to freedom and, even if you fail, that makes a very good story.

You can't (or at least not nearly as easily) heroically resist being denied an education or a sense of self worth. Nor can you heroically overcome the knowledge that even if you did manage to resist and break your chains, if you could even conceive of the notion, the entire system would fall upon you and beat you down until you submitted or died. Including your own people, who'd do it simply because they know that if they don't, the same will happen to them. But that doesn't make a very good story, so that's a historical reality we gloss over a lot.

Edited by Robrecht on Nov 11th 2018 at 7:33:45 PM

Dude, no they weren't. They were treated like subhuman chattel with beatings, torture, rapes, and murder. The South has done an excellent job hiding what was done to keep slaves in line (and erase the massive amount of sabotage and fighting against slavery which was done).

The thing is, my essential argument is that people who think cartoons are the problem fail to note the cartoon is the appeal.

Donald Trump was elected not because he dialed back on the message (ala David Duke) but he doubled down on it.

But that's just me.

In Nevada they elected a (dead) rapist pimp. The Tea Party took power because it was the party of extremists. I think a lot of people assume everyone has standards of shame that means they hide their evils when it's the ones who wear it as a badge of honor that get the most support.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 11th 2018 at 10:51:20 AM

It's not about hiding their evils. It's about their evils still not being extreme enough to qualify for the Cartoon Villainy standard for -isms.

When you set the standards for heinousness too high, you wind up with logic trains like, "Oh, yeah, Trump talked about randomly molesting women, but there's nothing wrong with that. It's Locker Room Talk. Every guy talks like that. It is completely and absolutely normal for men to behave in this fashion!"

People have such a ridiculous expectation of what racism, sexism, etc. constitutes that basically nothing short of actively carrying out a genocide qualifies anymore. Evil thrives in the public's inability to recognize it.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Nov 11th 2018 at 12:58:19 PM

I think that's an assumption built on a faulty premise.

Basically, that it's not that the cartoons are so evil they dwarf trump, it's that people actually care about cartoonish evil when it's not directed at them. Melania Trump wore a jacket about not caring.

Some people...didn't care.

That seems like an Occam's Razor issue that a lot of people are just concerned about their immediate circle. If it's not their buddy victimized, it's not an issue.

It would explain a lot, frankly, and doesn't require the idea media has created an impossibly high hurdle to cross when so many awful racists on TV are far less egregious than Trump himself.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 12th 2018 at 1:13:00 AM

At the same time, the lines are constantly being blurred between what is a depiction of evil exaggerated for dramatic effect and what is actually a depiction of evil that is merely being shown in a fictional context. For instance, a common criticism of environmentalist movies and t.v. shows from the 90s was how they allegedly oversimplified complex issues by depicting the primary drivers of pollution and climate change as being indifferent or hostile towards the idea of eco-friendly business practices. And yet, look at how common climate change deniers are. One of them is the POTUS.

Rather, I would say the issue is that fiction shows the obvious, in-your-face examples of ugly behavior but not the more subtle ones. Like calling a black or Native American person a “credit to their race”.

I would say the issue isn’t that it doesn’t make for a very good story but rather that it makes for a depressing one. It’s very common for movies about slavery or racism to end with some kind of happy ending. Typically, to make it seem like racism isn’t a big deal anymore and that slavery’s effects on black people still aren’t being felt today.

Edited by windleopard on Nov 12th 2018 at 1:48:56 AM

Yes, it's the big issue of depicting evil. True evil isn't sympathetic or nuanced.

It's often very banal and vile.

It's also DANGEROUS to assume that people who are cartoonish are not dangerous. The dictator of China has been jokingly compared to Winnie the Pooh and Donald Trump is a walking cariacture of a millionaire (and has deliberately cultivated that image). Hitler was mocked repeatedly as too ridiculous to be an actual threat due to his constant ludicrous rants and horribly written book. Indeed, ISIS got dismissed repeatedly because they were a bunch of people talking lunatic interpretations of the Koran like re-instituting slavery....and they re-instituted slavery.

Evil cartoons are real and scary mothersuckers.

Edit:

To get back to what I mean, it's kind of a Outside-Context Problem for a lot of posters here when they talk about how we need to make sure people don't think racism is exclusively a problem of Nazis and Klansman.

But Nazis and Klansman are HERE.

They are behind the crime in Kentucky. Thousands of people die from their involvement in the opioid crisis, their regular murder of people (which barely gets investigated), and the fact plenty of them send members out to the American Border to become patrolmen. They raise money for it. There's cults of Christian Identity Movement that hoard guns and wave the Nazi banner.

I'm like....the Nazis and Klan aren't gone. They're not a minor threat either. They are heavily armed crazy people and there's thousands of them in my state. I mean, great about "It can't happen here" is something you want to dissuade people from but it happened here and happened a long ago and it's never gone away.

A guy called me out on the internet about calling Republicans Nazis and I told him, "No, I mean the actual Nazis in my area."

Hell, just look at this: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/white-supremacist-shooting-in-louisville-kentucky-kroger.html

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Nov 12th 2018 at 2:03:12 AM

I’m not sure this is an accurate read. It’s not that the cartoons dwarf evil, it’s that they obfuscate the nature of evil. The example above about racism is one I’ve actually run into before, someone saying they couldn’t possibly be racist because they merely resented all black people and didn’t act like an old-timey racist on TV.

It’s happened with the Nazis already, they’ve become so banal and cliche that they’ve lost a lot of their impact. This has been a massive and fairly disconcerting change over my lifetime.

Edited by archonspeaks on Nov 12th 2018 at 3:41:30 AM