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.
