Often, writers look
for short cuts. Quick easy tropes, themes, concepts or scenes to helpfully
convey an idea to the audience without necessarily going into too much detail.
This can be an excellent way of quickly getting a point across without being
sidetracked. It can also be lazy, shallow, characterisation and world building
One such habit is
what TV Tropes calls “Kicking
the Dog” itself apparently a Hitchcock reference. Basically having your villain
do something pointlessly cruel to show that we have a genuinely evil person
here. Their evil is pointless, it’s shallow, it achieves nothing other than
cruelty for the sake of cruelty
This simple villain
labelling is now being rebranded from "kicking the dog" to "being a bigot, as media in general at least pretends to be more aware of
marginalised people and prejudice, now starting to use bigotry as the dog
kicking. Your Designated Bad Guy won’t kick a puppy, but they will drop the
N-word or F-word or say something grossly and gaspingly misogynist.
The flip side to this
is when our designated hero - or otherwise designated good guy, gets a special
White Knight moment. Bigotry happens and they get to stand up and nobly declare
that Prejudice Is Wrong, guys, sometimes with a convoluted PSA dumped into the
story to make it clear how very much this character Does Not Approve of these
things.
On the face of it
this sounds like a good and noble intention - after all challenging bigotry is
always good, right? But the point of these scenes are not to challenge bigotry
or declare bigotry as wrong - these scenes use bigotry to build up their main
character as a nice person we should support. The prejudice they’re challenging
is somewhat irrelevant - the character could achieve the same effect by hugging
a kitten or volunteering in a soup kitchen or being nice to their granny. The
actual victim of the prejudice is generally forgotten or irrelevant; any
analysis of the prejudice is incidental to the main point: that the Hero is a
Good Person. It’s like the scene in Game of Thrones when Daenerys is
hailed as “Mhysa” and raised up by a crowd of brown
people: that scene wasn’t about liberation, freeing people, ending slavery - it
was about the greater glory of Daenerys.
It’s not even a half
way decent indication that the writers are even basically aware of the issues
they’re challenging. Some classic examples include Mist using some
random extras using the f-word to insult Adrian and Jay, eventual good guy and
heroine’s love interest, championing him. This is from a show which managed to
be one of the most epicly homophobic shows we’ve seen: and this was certainly
not a show that covered the homophobia Adrian faced even remotely well. Or there’s
the infamous House of Night Series where Zoe has several convoluted
moments where she calls out homophobia, racism and sexism when faced with
blatant, easy take downs to remind us she’s a good person (while doubling down
on ableism, because someone once challenged the author on her repeated use of
ret*rded so she had to include a DEFENCE of that). Yet this series fails on…
just about
every possible
level one can fail on and
most certainly does not develop any of these marginalised characters in
anything resembling a decent fashion.
Or there’s the Anita
Blake Series (and when you’re writing about something wrong in a book
series, there’s ALWAYS the Anita Blake Series), especially in the last
dozen books, where Anita has frequent PSAs against sexism, racism and
homophobia. Dancing was a whole cringeworthy example. But
while Anita speaks against racism, especially if she gets to call out someone
abusing her, she also mentions her white and delightsome skin quite obsessively
whenever we consider her Mexican mother. (Is there a racial equivalent of “no
homo”). She will call out homophobia while, well, this hot
mess applies. And nearly every book some misogynist will have a really unlikely rant
at her about how he totally hates women and need Anita to call him out… while
simultaneously loathing all women.
It’s also noteworthy
that these characters always have a nice straw-bigot to bring down: it’s always
overt and pretty extreme bigotry that is easy and simplistic to shoot down.
Because it’s easy. Because it’s lazy. But it utterly fails to address the daily
toll of bigotry; even perpetuating that same bigotry - like being a bisexual
man and seeing yourself portrayed as an unstable vicious raping murderer, Mist;
or being a woman and having Anita hate you for liking flowers and laying those
nasty emotional “girl traps” rather than being one of the guys like her.
These characters use
the call out to establish themselves as morally superior - while caring little
for the actual causes they’re appropriating. They’re happy to climb on top of
marginalised identity to gain moral high ground, but don’t care very much about
the people they’re stepping on for their little lesson. It is, in essence, a
form of appropriation. The whole battle against prejudice is turned into a
throwaway, often undeveloped line, just to make your character a bit shinier.
It is used, it is exploited, but it is given no real attention or focus.
The damage comes from
devaluing these fights and causes and people, reducing them to a tool while
also presenting both bigotry and the various struggles against bigotry in an
incredibly simplistic and ultimately unhelpful manner. It encourages the idea that
bigotry just means standing nobly in the face of the person screaming the slur
(though it would be nice if more people did that) which, inevitably, will fade
away the minute you confront them with your pithy come back (usually with
fawning praise for you for being SO BRAVE). Bigotry is neither that simple nor
easily banished. I can think of no greater indication of this than how these
examples all have “champions” fighting bigotry yet all treat marginalised
characters so terribly
Again, I have to say
that we’re not saying don’t depict
prejudice: you absolutely should. Prejudice
free worlds can be very problematic; but there is an art to portraying
prejudice well and respectfully. And a tool to tell us how very special your good guy
is, is not respectful or well done.