White Knights, Easy Moral High Ground & Hollow Heroes

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.

Portraying Prejudice Well - Avoiding the Perils and Pitfalls

When you produce media with marginalised characters at some point the thorny issue of prejudice and bigotry is going to raise its ugly head. Sadly, prejudice is an unyielding fact of existence for most marginalised people, it’s something that cannot be ignored or brushed over and a marginalised character who manages to live a charmed life avoiding all prejudice is not necessarily going to be a great reflection or portrayal of actual marginalised people and their experiences

Are these characters going to move through some kind of fictionalised utopia where prejudice doesn’t exist? It’s certainly tempting and a perfectly valid choice – especially for more fantastic settings. After all, if your quasi-medieval setting is going to have a completely original map, 10 year winters, dragons, super-cold-zombie-makers and a completely fictional polytheistic religion where half of the aspects of deity are female, then why shouldn’t it also have gender parity, for example? This isn’t our society, this isn’t our world – there’s absolutely no reason why our prejudices and bigotries need to be exported. If reality can change enough to allow elves and wizards, it can certainly change enough for people not to hate each other because of their race.

In fact, in some ways it’s offensive to assume these prejudices should be exported to a fantasy setting – especially if you’ve made no real effort in the new setting to explain it. If you’re willing to change so much to make this fantastic, alien world then not only refusing to remove bigotry but then not even trying to add to your world building why this bigotry still exists actually implies that said bigotry is inherent, expected and even natural. If you’re world is misogynist just because our world is (and was if we’re using historical settings) then you’re implying misogyny is inevitable – that we don’t need a reason why a society would become misogynist that misogyny is an inherent ground state of being for

Again this doesn’t mean your fantasy setting shouldn’t contain prejudices – but work in the sources, reasons and development of that prejudice; make your portrayal of prejudice fit the world rather than assuming that misogyny/racism/homophobia/ableism et al simply must always be present.

We have also seen that attempt at a prejudice-less utopia fall flat, especially when it is set in a world that is very close to our own, as most Urban Fantasy is. Teen Wolf, for example, often claims to be set in a world without homophobia – yet we still have homophobic jokes (and the whole concept of coming out and the closet) that can only exist in a world where homophobic prejudice exists; Scott could not have made the Coach back off from kicking him out from a school event by dancing with Danny if they did not live in a world where gay teens are banned from prom for being gay. This lack of follow through is not just lazy, but also implies that the whole concept of a “utopia” is less to present a world where gay characters don’t face bigotry, but more to create a world where gay characters don’t have to be developed or have storylines that may centre on them.

The Hugo Awards, Vox Day and Apologetics for Bigotry

This year the Hugo nominations had many wonderful and talented authors on the slate, including a few who have included marginalised people in their work or are marginalised themselves.

And it also included a novelette by Vox Day.

For those who don’t know, Vox Day is a bigot. It’s not really worth parsing down what kind of bigot he is, because the answer is “yes”. If someone is not straight, cis, white and male, Vox Day will spew his venom on them. He thinks gay people are a “birth defect.” He thinks Black people are inherently less intelligent (and called N. K. Jemisin not fully civilised for “historical reasons”) and, of course, that he thinks there’s no such thing as marital rape. This isn’t an exhaustive list, not even close, but there’s a limit to how nauseous we’re willing to get to write this post and googling Vox Day is going to give us heartburn. Honestly, there are no words to accurately sum up what a terrible human being this man is.

A lot of people have spoken about this and, to a degree, we felt there was no need to add to the discussion - but then the reaction itself, the commentary we’ve seen, including in several social-justice spaces have added to our already churning stomachs. So let’s tackle this.

First of all, why is Vox Day getting this nomination a problem? Ultimately, not everyone can be nominated for a Hugo. It takes a level of support - I know there have been a lot of allegations of vote rigging, internet campaigns et al on behalf of Vox Day and others - but none of these would have worked if there weren’t a sufficient number of people who decided to champion Vox Day. In fact, gaming the system would require active champions of Vox Day and his hateful campaigns because the merely indifferent would not help him get a nomination.

Him being nominated at all sends the message that there is a not-insignificant number of people in the SFF “community” who support the hatred he espouses - and many more who are indifferent or do not consider it important.

That is a toxic message - and a message we have seen reinforced by some of the commentary - even supposedly supportive commentary - on the issue. The amount of dismissal or insulting priorities we’ve seen really add to the message that there are a whole lot of those indifferent people.

Predictably, as we’ve seen with previous bigots on parade, there has been a vocal demand to focus on the quality of the work an author produces. We’ve heard the same for Orson Scott Card, Frank Herbert - in fact, just about any vile person out there. We’re supposed to ignore the author, consider the author’s actions irrelevant and take their work in a vacuum.

Jim C Hines, who is usually much better on these issues, has written a post on the subject that included a section on “separating the authors from their work” and these lines:

“Some authors are assholes. That doesn’t mean they don’t have fans who genuinely like their stuff.”

and he has tweeted:

Call me naïve, but I want the Hugos to be about the best authors, artists, & editors in our field. That’s what I’ll be reading for. (3/5)
— Jim C. Hines (@jimchines) April 20, 2014

I’m not interested in letting anyone turn the Hugos into their personal political statement. I’m interested in celebrating awesomeness (5/5)
— Jim C. Hines (@jimchines) April 20, 2014

John Scalzi has also written two blog posts where he, among other things, wants Vox Day’s work to be judged on the writing, not the bigotry of the author.

“Instead, take a look at the work, read the work, and if you like the work, place it appropriately on your ballot. Because why shouldn’t you? Regardless of how a work got on the ballot (or more accurately in this case, how you think it got onto the ballot), it’s there now. Read the books and stories. If you like them, great. If you don’t, there’s plenty of other excellent work on the ballot for your consideration.”

Portraying Bigotry

 
One of the thorniest issues when it comes to analysing media from a social justice perspective is the concept of portraying prejudice and bigotry. After all, bigotry exists, bigoted people exist, at some point we’ll expect some bigoted characters showing up.

And that’s not a bad thing - in fact, erasing prejudice and pretending it doesn’t exist is far from ideal. To not show prejudice in times and places where prejudiced would be common or rife can be a denial that that prejudice exists, especially if you are showing everyone in that area and era as gloriously accepting of all minorities. In many ways it’s a form of erasure to do this or a rewriting of the world - both present and historic. The problem is portraying prejudice in a way that doesn’t perpetuate it - and too often writers use this argument of “realistic portrayal” as an excuse to produce some severely bigoted work.

So how to portray bigotry without producing a book or show that should come with its own trigger warning or will make the minority in question want to eat your liver?

Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, is that prejudiced portrayal really necessary? Sometimes the presence of bigotry is not only unnecessary, but it’s down right confusing, especially in speculative fiction. In an alternate world with an entirely different religion, culture even different species, is there a reason why women are dealing with misogyny? So much else had changed, why not this? Or, in the distant future, between the stars with more curiously-humanoid-aliens than you could shake a phaser at, do we still need racism? This can reach the point of almost parody - I’ve seen avatars of Greek gods - ancient Greek gods - losing their shit over men kissing. The Greeks!

It’s bemusing that, in these worlds where everything can be so different from our own, prejudice is considered inviolate. When all else in history can be changed, when the truly fantastic can be introduced, when we have magic, vampires, aliens and plot holes you can drive a bus through, it seems ridiculous to decide that bigotry is just something that must remain. And I think every social justice media critic in the world is tired of someone explaining the absolute necessity of “historical accuracy” in a series that has freaking dragons.

But even aside from fantasy worlds where you’ve decided to, bewilderingly, include real world bigotry; there is plenty of bigotry shown in works that are closer to our world and we have to ask “why is this necessary?” Does this prejudice actually add anything to the story or development or anything at all? One of the things that annoyed us so much about season 1 of American Horror Story is the amount of bigotry that was presented was completely gratuitous - it did nothing for the story to have the realtor use gay slurs to describe the previous occupants of the house, or even half of the many other problematic incidents on the show. Throwing in bigotry for the sheer hell of it, to an extent where it seems almost out of place sometimes, doesn’t help anyone.

Ok, you’ve looked at the bigotry and it is an absolute essential part of setting the world, the characters and the story. It would be wrong to exclude it - so how to include it without supporting it? Simple - by making it unsupportable.

Don’t make it funny, or casual, or accepted by the whole cast (as was the problem with American Horror Story season 1 in many ways), don’t present it as a quirk or minor issue. Don’t let it go unchallenged. That challenge is what stops a portrayal of prejudice into something that supports prejudice. Obviously that challenge can come in the form of a loud lecture or denouncement - but, contrary to what the objectors say, you don’t have to shoehorn a clumsy PSA into the middle of your story. That's a straw man, there are innumerable ways you can challenge the prejudice you've presented