Marginalised Characters: Banished to the Plot Box

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One phrase you will see repeated a lot on Fangs for the Fantasy is “the plot box”.

The Plot Box is a mysterious, unknown place where characters (usually minorities) are banished to when the writers decide they no longer know what to do with (or want to deal with) them. These characters disappear, often with little explanation, and are absent from the screen/page until the writers decide to use them again and they just reappear as if nothing happened.

We talk a lot about the Plot Box on Fangs because this is a storytelling tool that is very commonly used, can appear in many different ways and very often serves as another means by which marginalised characters are erased or tokenised.

The most common form of Plot Box Banishment is the simple disappearance. Usually with no explanation - a character will just not be present for several episodes. I’d like to think that they’re having wonderful wild times with the Doctor and he just got the timing wrong - but Doctor Who isn’t that diverse either.

The Originals has one gay character and he spends the majority of his time in the plot box.  Josh is besties with Davina. When he lost his boyfriend Aidan, Josh went away to lick his wounds and everybody including Davina who supposedly cares so much about him promptly forgot that he exists. Josh is allowed out of the plot box only when Davina is in some kind of danger or her fee fees are hurt. He has no real story of his own and the epitome of the GBFF, there to provide service and comfort for his straight “friend” (so often our shows seem to confuse “servitude” with “friendship”)

ABC made a big deal about adding Mulan to the cast of Once Upon a Time. And a while Once Upon A Time was teasing the idea that Mulan would confess her love to Aurora giving the series its first (and only) LGBT character. When Aurora announces her pregnancy, Mulan congratulates her and never reveals her feelings. Mulan then deals with her disappointment by joining the Merry Men and disappearing into the Plot Box - when the Merry Men return, Mulan is conspicuous by her absence. Though I say conspicuous, absolutely no-one noticed: her being lost in the Plot Box was not worthy of comment. Just when,. as an audience we were thinking of starting a missing person’s report Mulan shows up to help Merida to deal with a problem, before promptly leaping back into the Plot Box again.  

Morgan on The Walking Dead is perhaps my personal favorite example of this particular form of banishment. We first meet Morgan and his son Duane in season one, when Rick stumbles upon them after waking up in the hospital alone.  Morgan explains to Rick how society fell apart and gives him rudimentary instructions of how to survive in a zombie apocalypse.

Manpain!

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In walks the manly, testosterone swelling, mighty male protagonist. Able to take down entire legions of enemies, possibly with only his chest hair (or, as is more often now, the glaring reflection from his waxed pectorals). His firm jaw and clenched teeth (naturally adorned with a light dusting of stubble – and yes, he doesn’t have time to shave but can still keep those pectorals gleaming) show a man with a grim purpose, surely nothing could crack his granite visage?

But he stops, looks down at the savaged remains of his wife/child/side-kick/pet marmot and that stony façade cracks. A single Mantear trickles down his rugged cheek and the music swells dramatically as everyone falls silent as the great hero is brought down by his greatest foe; Manpain.

 

Manpain is not a new phenomenon, but it seems to be growing more common. The manly-male heroes of yore who would never dream of shedding a tear or reacting with more than an angry eye squint in the face of the worst provocation are rapidly becoming extinct. Now, you cannot possibly be a hero without the ability to force out that Mantear and stare in agonised grief at the camera or possibly raising despairing fists to an uncaring sky. Even the most emotionless, removed and untouchable of heroes has to suggest some deep, painful currents running beneath his stoic façade.

There’s certainly some benefit to this – too often men are taught that the only acceptable emotions to express are lust or rage (or, more horrendously, lust and rage) and anything else is deemed a sign of weakness to be mocked and reviled. Allowing men to have a richer emotional palette, to present even the roughest, toughest, hardiest of manly-men to be able to express grief and sorrow and pain, to need help and support, to hurt and need healing are certainly useful things to add to our societal consciousness and media culture

Alas, as in so many things, the execution comes with its own set of problems.

At its most benign, Manpain replaces any real characterisation - and often results in some truly hilarious melodrama. A really good example of this is Will, from Lee Carroll and Carol Goodman’s Black Swan Rising Series. Will is so overcome with the thought of losing Garret he reacts by falling to his knees on the sandy beach, ripping his shirt open and instantly composing the most horrendously bad poetry I have read in a long time. It’s absolutely epic in its overly dramatic Manpain that it becomes hard to choose between rolling one's eyes and laughing out loud.

But not all are so benign (or hilarious). The most obvious we often see is, of course, Fridging. Fridging is a horrendously overused trope whereby a side-character (usually female and usually a love interest) is killed off for the sake of the main character’s story or character development. That (usually female) character is reduced to nothing more than a plot point in the main character’s story which is inherently dehumanising to her while centring his importance

In our quest for Manpain, we’ve filled a whole lot of fridges. Supernatural, perhaps the supreme master of Manpain, has filled an entire frozen food aisle full of fridges so Dean can hone his so-tortured look (Jensen Ackles must be worried his face is going to freeze like that one of these days).

Rick’s epic Manpain on The Walking Dead all relates back to the death of his wife Lori, a character largely lacking in much in the way of development except to be a millstone around Rick’s neck. The whole point of her existence was Rick’s development and Rick’s angst

Even when the women are allowed to live, a large number of these character’s Manpain can be traced back to a female “cause” (not all, certainly, the whole “I have a destiny I don’t want because being special is soooo hard” raises fairly regularly as well – as we see with Alex on Dominion and the massively melodramatic tortured past is a mainstay in paranormal romance series like Black Dagger Brotherhood and the Dark Hunter Series) – as we see on the Leftovers and Justin with his Guilty Remnant wife or Helix’s Alan Farragut stomping and moping around about Julia. These women are not dead, but one of the main roles they serve is as a source of angst and pain - at least in the first season.

Walking Dead Season 4: sneak peak

Walking Dead season 4 Sneak peak - just a little longer to wait

The Death of Marginalised Characters

We talk a lot about how marginalised characters are depicted in our shows and books. How they live their lives, what stereotypes they conform to and, most often of all, how many times they’re completely erased. But one of the most prevalent problems that dogs all marginalised people is not how their characters live - but how they die.

Who dies?

Firstly, they die a lot. Death is something that hits marginalsied characters disproportionately - and that’s especially true in genres where character death is common or expected, like dystopias. We see this time and again on the shows we watch, on Supernatural there’s an enormous number of fridged women, a string of dead POC and half of the very few GBLT people the show has included have died. Warehouse 13 has killed off a Black woman Lena and killed (and resurrected) a gay man, Jinks. Falling Skies, especially in the first season, had an astonishing number of dead POC and do we even have to mention how many POC have died on The Walking Dead? The Vampire Diaries has a host of Black witches who serve the vampires - before dying, and so many random Black people have been devoured that it has become a running joke. I don’t believe American Horror Story ever had POC except to kill them - and while it was a show with a huge death count, the POC didn’t last more than an episode or 2. The violence and death on American Horror Story also disproportionately targets gay people and women.

These are just a few examples - but in most shows where there are character deaths - especially a number of character deaths - it is the marginalised people who are disproportionately on the slab.

Who Survives?

So you minority character has kicked the bucket and joined the choir invisible; the survivors pick up the pieces and start to move on to their next adventure and... what do you know, all the living people are straight, white folks! How shocking is that!?

This is the next problematic element we see so often. Too often in shows with a high death count, it is not just the minorities who disproportionately fill the graveyards, but they start with smaller numbers in the first place.

See, this is where tokenism can be a problem. When you have a nearly entirely majority cast, even one or two deaths among your minority characters can halve their numbers - or wipe out your minorities entirely and, as the death toll mounts, so too does the diversity plummet. When I first started watching the first season of The Walking Dead I was impressed by the number of POC - who then started dying, splitting off from the group and otherwise disappearing until we end up with an increasingly White cast. In the Falling Skies we see the same issue - we started with several POC who were whittled down through the season, even new POC joining the cast killed off until we ended with a far far far Whiter cast.

In extreme cases this can make the enemies seem very targeted in their killing. Increasingly surrounded by dominant characters, the marginalised are still unerringly picked off. And there’s no greater example than shows that simply don’t have more than one or two tokens at all and even they die - wiping out everyone or nearly everyone of their marginalisation - as we saw on Warehouse 13 and Haven.

When faced with this problem, too many shows will introduce a new token. This doesn’t fix the problematic death so much as it underscores it - T-Dog’s death wasn’t made more worthy by Oscar’s introduction, it just emphasised how little T-Dog mattered, how much he was reduced to being just a token inclusion. After the decimation of POC in the first season of Falling Skies, we had a brief introduction of Jamil and Diego before they were both shuffled off.

Fangs for the Fantasy Episode 105

This week we discuss Being Human (US), Vampire Diaries  and the upcoming spin off, the Originals. We also look at Walking Dead and Michonne’s angry eyes

Our book of the week is Moonshifted by Cassie Alexander

Our Next books of the week are:

18th February - 25th February: King Makers by Griffiths  
28th February - 4th March: Brilliant Devices by Shelley Adina  
4th March - 11th March: Frost Burned by Patricia Briggs
11th March - 18th March: Summoning the Night by Jenn Bennet
18th March - 25th March: Clockwork Princess by Cassandra Clare  
25th March - 1st April: The Struggle by L.J. Smith  
1st April - 8th April: Etiquette and Espionage by Gail Carriger

Fangs for the Fantasy Episode 99

Welcome back after the New Year! Hope it was a good one for everyone.

This week we have the return of Lost Girl and all of its many issues. We also look at the Walking Dead computer game. We also discuss Fringe.

Our book of the week is the extremely awesome Touch of the Demon by Diana Rowland that we love in all its glory

Our next few books of the week are:

7/1/-14/1/2013: The Awakening by LJ Smith

14/1-21/1/2013: Grave Memory by Kalayna Price

21/1-28/1: Ever After by Kim Harrison

28/1-4/2: Magnificent Devices by Shelly Adina