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

This thread is about politics and media. There’s a notable undercurrent in media of pain rays and other taser-type devices being portrayed as evil torture tools, and given the debate around police use of force in this country do you really think there’s no crossover between media and politics there?

I can’t tell if I’m just not explaining this well enough or you’re not arguing in good faith but I feel like I’ve gone over my point here dozens of times now, and I think it’s worth examining why incapacitation via pain is depicted as always evil even compared to potentially more lethal alternatives.

The media that have pain rays also tend to have other means of incapacitating people that don't involve pain.

The pain rays' primary function is pretty clearly torture and not incapacitating people.

A taser may work by inflicting pain, but it's not supposed to be used for torture.

Hence why comparing tasers to Force Lightning or the Cruciatus Curse seems odd.

Another point to consider is that the two examples I've brought up — Star Wars and Harry Potter — either predate taser use being really widespread in the USA (ROTJ) or are a product of a different country's culture (Harry Potter). Thus I don't think either work was trying to send a message about USA police brutality concerning taser misuse.

Edited by M84 on Jan 11th 2020 at 4:01:59 AM

Okay, now I know you’re not arguing in good faith.

There’s a line drawn in media between pain rays and torture and evil. Is it any surprise that you often see suggestions that police should “aim for the legs” rather than use a taser, even though shooting someone in the leg is unbelievably more dangerous? Or that use of a more lethal weapon is depicted as more heroic if it causes less pain?

I’m not talking about these things in the vacuum of one particular work, but as a whole trope, essentially.

Is it possible that these works have informed public opinions on tasers and similar devices? Or the other way around? Obviously there’s a connection, it’s worth examining.

Edited by archonspeaks on Jan 10th 2020 at 12:04:11 PM

It might help to point to other examples where the parallel to police usage of tasers is a bit more obvious. Like I said, Star Wars and Harry Potter's agony beams aren't really connected to that.

I think the more relevant reason is that a lot of cop shows didn't feature tasers for a long while (and still don't) while treating bullet wounds very unrealistically. People think cops should aim for legs or arms because of the prevalence of the Only a Flesh Wound trope in past media.

Edited by M84 on Jan 11th 2020 at 4:06:20 AM

I mean, we have a whole trope for Agony Beam. Pick one off the list.

I also don’t really see how you could possibly say these things are not connected. Star Wars and Harry Potter are both massive cultural phenomenons in the US, and have been stretching back decades. You could absolutely argue that both have informed public opinion on the topic.

Edited by archonspeaks on Jan 10th 2020 at 12:07:31 PM

The thing is, fictional portrayals of Stun Guns if anything downplay the real risks of taser usage.

A person is more inclined to think of the stun guns they saw on tv or in videogames when they see a taser instead of Force Lightning.

The result is that the public that grew up with this media is misinformed about how dangerous a taser actually is. So when people do get killed by tasers, they automatically assume it happened due to malicious intent.

Edited by M84 on Jan 11th 2020 at 4:26:41 AM

Archon, the difference between the Agony Beam and the use of tasers in real life is a very simple one: The taser is the lesser evil to guns right now, even if they can be letal under certain conditions.

In the franchises we have spoken about, there's a valid alternative to reduce a person than using either the Cruciatus Curse or the Force Lightning, the Stupefy spell and the Force Push can give the same results with less pain involved; and, because the alternatives are valid, the formers do not have a purpose of use unless the caster or user wants to inflict needless pain.

In reality, there's no equivalent of the Stupefy spell or Force Push, you only have tasers or guns to deal with a criminal. Here I have to make a mention that using a gun normally means that you have to hit to kill because centre mass is easier to aim for, and even if a bullet hits a non-lethal part of the body the damage caused can potentially leave sequels in the muscles; I also don't have to mention what happens if a person is shoot in the head or in any of the vital arteriae.

Edited by raziel365 on Jan 10th 2020 at 2:36:51 AM

One thing I always liked about lightsabers is while people criticize them as lethal weapons when blasters have a stun setting, the thing about lightsabers is they're actually useful as shields in-universe as well as weapons.

So a lightsaber is more useful than a blaster because it can keep you from being gunned down.

While that is true and the use of lightsabers as a shield is arguably the point of Form III Soresu, a lightsaber is harder to use than a blaster because you need the reflexes to properly protect against blaster fire. If swordmanship is already difficult in real life, using a lightsaber would be on a Dark Souls level.

In general, media tends to heavily downplay how difficult it is to subdue a person nonlethally. The amount of force required to kill someone might barely phase another person. This might actually be the answer to what Archon is talking about.

It's often assumed you can easily KO or stun someone, whereas in practice something like a taser works via pain compliance (IE, torturing the person until they give up). Since a lot of media doesn't quite get this, the idea of an agony beam seems innately cruel compared to giving someone a "tap on the head" or humanely killing them.

Having said that, I'm not entirely sure powers like, say, lightning are necessarily portrayed all that negatively in media in general. There's plenty of superheroes that use lightning or tasers, there's Pikachu, etc. Actually, my favorite weapon in the new Deus Ex games is the Stun Gun. Heck, I think I've even seen agony beams used before by good guys.

The difficulty in subduing someone non-lethally is actually an issue that should be mentioned, it's often hard to understand that holding back is harder than not pulling your punches.

Edited by raziel365 on Jan 10th 2020 at 3:21:46 AM

Fiction in general is weird about what is and is not lethal.

A lot of it depends on plot convenience and plot armor. That's why we have "tap on the head" tropes, the Vulcan nerve pinch, easy clean chokeholds, etc., for the good guys to pass by guards and so on without killing anyone, while Flesh Wounds and the designated hero gunshot area are to increase tension without actually incapacitating the hero.

Then again, like Protagonist said, it's different for everyone. There are those anecdotal stories from WWII or so where soldiers survive gunshots in the double digits, at least for long enough to capture a machine gun nest or so on.

It ultimately boils down to whatever the writer needs for the story to work.

Sometimes it's a Necessary Weasel for heroes to not kill people with their actions despite the fact that they likely would.

It's often pointed out that a lot of the violence Batman inflicts on his opponents could very possibly kill or create very serious injuries, but it's glazed over most of the time because Batman isn't supposed to kill his opponents in most stories.

With Batman it admittedly feels less like a Necessary Weasel and more like a necessary cop-out. But then again, I'm not really a fan of grittier Batmans. Batmen.

I'm specifically reminded of all the shit you can do to people in the Arkham games (shooting them in the head with riot suppression beanbags, curbstomping them with car doors, literally running people over with your bourgeois private tank) and the vital scan is still like "he just got tired and took a nap :)".

I actually chalk it up to Batman being trained enough to be able to incapacitate criminals without killing. That said, I believe it should be noted that he's probably breaking a few bones and doing muscle trauma with some of his stunts. At least The Dark Knight Returns points it out.

Overall, the bottom issue is that the more realistic you make violence, the more horrifying it becomes so the great and flashy feats of strength stop being heroic and start to be bloodthirsty in nature.

I mean Batman isn't the only superhero where that happens, it's a common issue throughout the genre. The Hulk is so destructive and causes so much collateral damage that it'd be very likely that he'd create a lot of casualties. Some stories even tried to "fix this" by saying Bruce Banner is such a genius that he can plan out his movements and attacks in such a way that no casualties happen, which I do find to be a cop-out and a really ridiculous one at that, so much so that simply ignoring the implications would be better.

Edited by Draghinazzo on Jan 10th 2020 at 10:32:34 AM

I'm with Archon on not really getting why something that (non-lethally) inflicts pain is so often seen as more evil than something that kills painlessly.

Part of that probably has to do with the fact that I used to be a boxer in high school and I used to do full contact LAR Ping, which means I have plenty of experience with 'harmless' pain as a natural part of a recreational activity.

So I don't have an automatic association of 'pain = bad'. While I don't universally enjoy pain and I don't like having it much, I also don't fear the knowledge that I might experience pain, because I've experienced it enough without lasting harm to know it goes away.

I will say the fact that it's hard to reliably incapacitate people without killing them is part of my issue with the Technical Pacifist trope, since that trope tends to ignore that very difficulty. A technical pacifist might kill someone accidentally (which is admittedly not necessarily that uncommon) and they might run into a situation where subduing their opponent nonlethally really isn't an option.

To be fair, I will say that a technical pacifist who killed someone accidentally can still reasonably claim to be in cooperation with their code, since they did their "due diligence" if you will and that the death wasn't their fault. I mean, assuming they actually used minimal force and all that jazz.

I am of the camp that inflicting pain to subdue is not villanous in on itself and depends on who is doing the subdueing to see whether it is a good or bad thing. What is unilaterally villanous is inflicting pain for pains sake AKA being sadistic. And I know this is going to sound a bit brutal but I think it's better to break someone's bones than straight up killing him or her, wounds can heal, life cannot be recovered.

Edited by raziel365 on Jan 10th 2020 at 6:37:52 AM

Honestly, rather than fiction stigmatizing the use of tasers, it instead makes them seem a lot more convenient and less lethal than they actually are.

Edited by M84 on Jan 10th 2020 at 10:44:12 PM

"the true Balance of the Force is something close to what Qui-Gonn practiced. Basically, keep the big picture and the future (the Cosmic Force) in mind, but also don't forget that the little pictures and the here and now (Living Force) matter too."

The problem with that is that it dosent feel two diferent part but rather just interpretation that it feel "let be good with the little guy as big sense" and it feel a sort of excuse to said light sight is balance rather than "light is good and good must stomp evil" which is because the jedi for all the asiatic trapping are very much knight templars.

It dosent help that as whole, the jedi are superhero: the sith are bad because they kill stuff and the jedi are good by killing sith.

that it.

Except they are indeed two different aspects of the Force. The Living Force comes from all living things and feeds energy into the Cosmic Force, the aspect of the Force that binds all living things together, according to the Star Wars the Clone Wars episode "Voices".

As for the Jedi being Space Knights Templar (as in the actual knight order and not the Knight Templar trope)...well, yeah.

One History article even pointed out the similarities: KNIGHTS TEMPLAR IN POPULAR CULTURE

I mean, they were the Knights of the Republic.

Edited by M84 on Jan 11th 2020 at 6:22:36 PM

Dude, this may be your personal interpretation or, more likely, something you're paraphrasing from Wookieepedia, but it's not, you know, actual canon.

Not only was 'the Living Force' conceived (out of universe) during the prequel era as a philosophical approach of how to interpret the Force rather than a separate aspect of the Force, but a big part of the 'Living Force' philosophy was that there's no such thing as a separate Light and Dark side of the Force.

I hope you realize that Wookieepedia is not actually the arbiter of what is Star Wars canon, especially not currently, since a bunch of editors on there have been using the confusion surrounding what was still canon after Disney declared the entire EU non-canon as an excuse to slip their personal head canon into articles.