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

By that metric, every single conflict the United States has fought in since the Wright Brothers took flight is an evil war of imperialism. The American bombing campaign against North Korea - which everyone outside of China and North Korea itself agrees to have started the war - is no less savage or "evil" than that launched against German cities, Japanese cities, North Vietnamese cities, Yugoslavian cities, and Iraqi cities.

How dare Amerikkka use its air power to assist allied countries being invaded by bombing and taking the consequences of war to the invader's own nation.

Edited by FluffyMcChicken on Aug 19th 2022 at 11:29:36 AM

There is, I think, room for a nuanced debate to be had in what can justify a war and the actions one takes in it, but let’s try to keep things civil.

I'm not engaging in war crimes apologia here, mate. What was done to North Korea by American bombings was nothing short of an atrocity. Leveling 75% of Pyongyang is an atrocity. Covering up rape is an atrocity. Propping up a dictatorship that killed hundreds of thousands of people and tried covering it up for decades is an atrocity. I don't say this to defend North Korea, but for god's sake, what the American government did was genuinely reprehensible.

Also VERY suspicious to try defending the bombings committed against Vietnam and Iraq (or hell, if Japan is being mentioned, are we gonna defend the atom bombs?).

This isn't even agreed upon in academia. Bruce Cumings is one of the foremost experts on the Korean War and he railed against that narrative. I'd suggest reading his work on the subject.

Edited by Diana1969 on Aug 20th 2022 at 5:01:09 AM

I think this is getting a bit off-topic.

In any case, what mainstream media depictions of the Korean War are there outside of MASH and how do they address the conflict?

While his research on the misdeeds and atrocities committed by the anti-communist forces is admirable and a valuable addition to the historical record of the Korean War, Bruce Cumings should not be considered a definite authority on the Korean War despite his personal insistence that everyone does so. He's been criticized as being too charitable to the Communist forces from a spectrum as wide as Korean Redditors, other American academics, and a former Korea correspondent.

And as a Korean War buff since the freedom and well-being of my Taiwanese relatives were indirectly saved by the UN intervention in Korea, I indeed have read through Cumings' book and feel qualified to comment about it. It's thankfully brief compared to doorstoppers like Halberstam's or John Toland's, but Cumings could have done himself a favor by lengthening the book so that it reads more like a history of the Korean War, instead of just a history of anti-communist atrocities in it.

As a Korean War, I'll point out that Wikipedia has an exhaustive list of international films set in the Korean War.

In the US, there actually used to be a number of high-profile Korean War films being produced and released up to the beginning of the US involvement in Vietnam in the mid 1960s. The most high-profile include The Bridges at Toko-ri, Pork Chop Hill, Retreat, Hell!, Hold Back the Night, and Fix Bayonets! from the very moment the Korean War began in 1950; Samuel Fuller's The Steel Helmet is the very first Korean War film, and it was released even before the Chinese intervention in November 1950.

What eventually killed Korean War films in Hollywood was how (1) the Vietnam War and its uniquely frustrating nature that captivated Hollywood filmmakers, and (2) Hollywood's growing engagement with China that meant that the Chinese military must never be portrayed as adversaries.

However, this year might see a turning point with the upcoming movie Devotion about US Navy pilots providing air support to Marines besieged by Chinese forces at the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir, which China has already made its most expensive film duology of. Brief glimpses of Chinese troops can be seen in the trailers:

Edited by FluffyMcChicken on Aug 19th 2022 at 12:46:45 PM

I don't know if media from outside the US count as 'mainstream' but in South Korean modern movies and television, it is definitely not a 'good war.'
In works that are similar in tone to the US WWII films, it is more 'these brave heroes struggled to protect our country' than glorifying the war itself. (e.g. 71: Into the Fire, Operation Chromite.) In most other works, they focus on the tragedy of people from the same nation killing each other; this is symbolized in the movie Taegukgi where two brothers end up on opposite sides of the war. Another point discussed in films is the pointlessnesses of the war itself, as the war isn't 'over' yet, while both sides have roughly the same territory as when the war started. (e.g. The Front Line, which is about soldiers in a standoff over a hill)
In such films, thus, the rank-and-file North Korean soldiers are depicted more positively than the higher-ups who order them to kill and die for the Kim dynasty, as many of them are conscripts who did not have much choice.
I think these portrayals differ from most US war films about WWII or the Korean War because we were on the side that got invaded, and thus many civilians suffered, so it is not a good war at all. Also, the North Koreans are a less different enemy to the South Koreans than most of the enemies the US faced, as the two Koreas were originally the same country, which is why most movies don't depict them as one-dimensional cartoon villains. As unknowing said, most works of fiction treat enemy soldiers from similar ethnic groups as actual humans, instead of alien zombies.

When they do appear, Chinese forces are depicted in South Korean films as faceless hordes of foreign invaders while the North Koreans tend to be at least humanized.

Relevant bit starts at 1:40.

Or as in the TV series Legends of the Patriots, it's ok to shoot a Chinese soldier in the ass while he's mooning your lines.

Edited by FluffyMcChicken on Aug 19th 2022 at 1:02:57 AM

That's interesting. M Ost countries would portray civil wars or such with more nuance compared to the foreign attackers. Or is it incorrect?

There aren't many depictions of The Korean War in the US I can think of, IIRC it's even been nicknamed "The Forgotten War".

That's actually sort of what I was getting at, it's not talked about often. The way I've heard it described is that it lacks the desperate heroic struggle of WWII, but also lacks the turmoil of Vietnam.

I'd imagine it's correct to say that most nations would tend to treat a civil war with more nuance than one against a foreign invader. Again, going back the American Civil War, it was common to treat it as a morally grey conflict.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Aug 19th 2022 at 1:11:50 AM

It's also one of the shortest conflicts the US has fought, at least in the extremely active stage between 1950-1953 with both sides launching massive offensives and fighting in large setpiece battles. The Korean War was fought and "done" in government policy and public perception in only three years, compared with the whole decade spent in Vietnam and two decades spent in Afghanistan and Iraq. There simply wasn't enough time for the Korean War to leave a massive footprint in American cultural memory as Vietnam and the GWOT did.

Plus, the Korean War is not as artistically striking as Vietnam, as American soldiers were largely dressed and equipped with World War II gear and fought in a rugged mountain landscape not dissimilar from European settings in WW 2 films. Nor were the North Koreans and Chinese (who fought by and large conventionally in large formations) as charismatic and uniquely challenging as the Viet Cong with their guerilla tactics and culturally significant but exaggerated spike traps.

, Within the actual war between June 25, 1950 (when the North Koreans invaded) and July 17, 1953 (the date of the armistice), only the first year saw the kind of battles that feature in movies. The latter two years were a WWI-esque stalemate in the mountains, with the front lines barely moving. The movie The Front Line chose to pick the last days of the war as its setting, in part to show how pointless the war was in the first place.

I was referring to his dense, two-volume book on the origins of the war, but okay.

If the Korean War had lasted longer, it would have seen the same kind of depictions as in Vietnam. Even MASH, despite being set in Korea, was used as an allegory for Vietnam.

Interestingly, the MASH series' runtime lasted much longer than The Korean War did.

Edited by Protagonist506 on Aug 19th 2022 at 1:48:13 AM

I feel I don't need to specify because I presume everyone here would be arguing in good faith and wouldn't assume the worst.

Edited by Rynnec on Aug 19th 2022 at 7:01:44 AM

That's an irony a lot of people have noted.

As far as MASH's depiction of the conflict goes, it's...complicated. The war itself is depicted as hell and there's attention given to the traumas of the conflict (not just PTSD but also the struggles of being away from home and seeing the bodies piling up...this *is* about doctors in the Korean War, after all). It reflects the Vietnam era malaise towards American militarism and takes a lot of potshots at people like Douglas MacArthur (one early episode dealt with an unexploded bomb that needs to be defused, but when it goes off, it's a propaganda bomb...an *American* propaganda bomb full of leaflets attributed to MacArthur).

But beyond that, there's a lot of issues. Beyond a minor recurring character played by Pat Morita, most of the Korean characters are heavily stereotypical. They're mostly depicted as peasants who barely speak English. There's also an issue with the 4077 itself being heavily white, when the Korean War was noticeably the first desegregated war for the American armed forces...and while I've seen the justification being that the real life 4077 was supposedly mostly white already, there's two issues with that. For one, the 4077 in the series is barely anything like the real life one anyways, so, y'know, no need to pretend there's accuracy...I mean c'mon, the shit Hawkeye gets up to would not happen in real life without serious repercussions. But for another, there *WAS* already an African-American character in the first couple of episodes, who was randomly written out...though, I think part of that might have been because they literally named the character a racial slur ("Spearchucker" Jones, and god am I reminded that old antiquated slurs are WEIRD).

I read this article on "sweet weird" and have a question.

Can someone explain to me how the idea that the world has to make sense is "heteronormative"?

I'll have to give the article a more thorough reading in a moment, but my guess from the excerpts you posted would be that the article writer for the Mary Sue (as well as Charlie Jane Anders herself) is focusing on the fact that a lot of the story conventions we take for granted are heteronormative. And that's not just in the sense that they say "you should be sexually attracted to the opposite gender," though that's part of it.

The thing is that heteronormativity encompasses a LOT of things, but in a very specific way. The nuclear family is heteronormative. Having one breadwinner and one housekeeper is heteronormative. Heteronormativity is a specific state that's culturally held up over others - a masculine man marrying a feminine woman, settling down in a house she keeps, having 2.5 children, the American Dream. Cultural heteronormativity says that that is what everyone should want.

The counterpoint to that is that everything that isn't that specific milieu is queer. And I'm not saying that as in, is it gay to live with your roommates; the point is that it's not heteronormative. The definition is extremely tight and specific, which makes anything outside of it "wrong." So when you have characters like Eda (from the Owl House image the article uses), who's an older woman living on her own with two adopted kids - she doesn't have a husband, which means she doesn't fit into the strict definition of heteronormative. (The fact that she has an on-again off-again thing with an enby witch is also relevant here, but not the part that makes it queer.) Characters who don't reinforce the end goal of finding an opposite-sex person to have children with are, by (loose but workable) definition, queer, whether they're actually sexual minorities or not.

The point I'm trying to make and the reading I'm getting is that, so many of our narratives tie finding your fated one and getting married to "happily ever after." The world and the story make sense when that happens - look at how disappointed people tend to be with the ending of Princess Mononoke, when San and Ashitaka don't clearly end up settling down. In that context, having the world not "make sense," and having found families and friendships that are more important than romantic partners, is radical, and queer in the way that it stands up to the whole "you must have Babies Ever After" thing. But more and more, that's not what people are looking for nowadays, and that's largely because they now have the freedom to look for what they actually want instead of what society tells them they have to want.

Actually, stated rather well here.

Edited by RedSavant on Aug 23rd 2022 at 3:53:55 AM

Doubleposting to add that I do think there's something to be critical about with the rise of Soft Vibes Only in queer content spaces, and "sweetweird" as a concept name kind of twigs that worry for me. But that's a different topic.

Edit: Oh whoops, that's also covered in the article, haha.

Edited by RedSavant on Aug 23rd 2022 at 3:57:55 AM

I have noticed a few...odd backlashes in recent years about made-up subgenres.

And by made-up, I mean stuff like "squeecore", which is sci-fi and fantasy written for big moments, has a lot of snark and has plotting that resembles YA novels a lot. The reason I say this is made up is because it's not a new thing. A lot of it describes things like Stargate or Dark Matter pretty well. But it's hurled at people like John Scalzi and occasionally Charles Stross as an accusation.

The only coherent reason I've seen given for why it's supposedly bad is that it's not timeless but like...deliberately trying to be timeless can easily result in something incredibly dated and some of the stuff held up as good examples of sci-fi and fantasy are...questionable. (Some of the "anti-squeecore" crowd really seem to like Xanth and like...uh, no, John Scalzi's stuff is much better than Xanth)

And by that you mean an attempt in subverting Were Still Relevant Dammit?

Timeless is like...I've seen people holding up the Barsoom series as timeless. Or a lot of H.G. Wells' stuff. But they're actually extremely of their time, we've just lost the context in mainstream pop culture and don't register much of what they were reacting to or referencing.

No one deliberately writes to be timeless because everyone is impacted by the trends around them.

Here's the secret piece that completes the puzzle. Want to know what the single uniting element of squeecore is? It almost all tries for diversity in various ways.

Edited by Zendervai on Aug 23rd 2022 at 8:20:33 AM

I came away from the article with not a great grasp of what they were describing squeecore as (aside from a generic sneer word), since like... Scalzi generally writes or wrote competent milsci fiction, the last book of Stross's I read was an incredibly dense book about speculation on currency exchanges in a society with sub- and lightspeed traveling, and as much as Muir wears her Tumblr and Homestuck influences on her sleeve at points in the Locked Tomb trilogy, it never felt like her intention was to be twee.

Personally, I find the attempts to carve all of these subgenres out of the vast body of media to be inherently exclusionary. It's understandable that people want to have something "of their own" in a world that feels divisive and exclusionary, but characters and stories are universal. For example, "Protagonist seeks love" and "protagonist seeks acceptance" can happen no matter what style, genre, or setting you're writing for.

Calling all non-heteronormative media "queer" seems deliberately intended to bait people more than unify them. "Go away, straight person, this isn't for you." I can totally get feeling excluded and wanting to have something of your own, but I'll bet I can find the same core elements in most of these stories, regardless of whether it's "man hooks up with woman", "woman hooks up with woman", "man discovers satisfaction in his own identity", "woman fights the disapproval of society", "child seeks independence", or anything else.

Now, we've seen in a lot of recent big-budget releases how "heteronormative society" gets its knickers in a twist over anything that doesn't pander specifically to them. Observe how Disney and Marvel are accused of "going woke" or "going feminist" for making shows like Captain Marvel and She-Hulk: Attorney At Law. Given all of that hatred, I can very much understand wanting to keep one's own little corner of media free from it.

"Squeecore", though, sounds like someone is deliberately attempting to trigger people with narmy, feel-good content. I enjoy happy endings like anyone else, but it can be taken a bit too far and go into "hugbox" territory where everything is nice and nobody has conflicts. It feels like a way to bury oneself away from reality rather than engage in momentary escapism.

Edited by Fighteer on Aug 23rd 2022 at 8:51:14 AM

"Squeecore" was not coined by the people who actually write the stories that are called such. It was an insult coined by the Rite Gud podcast. They outright called it "gentrified SF".

So yeah, if someone is calling a story "squeecore", they are probably not using it as a compliment.

Edited by M84 on Aug 23rd 2022 at 9:02:57 PM