Social Critique in Fiction

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Fill Baptismal: Dec 15, 2008

Something that I increasingly dislike is that sci-fi or fantasy fiction that wants to make some kind of social statement will use mutants/vampires/cyborgs as a stand-ins for real life minorities despite them being categorically different from and dangerous to regular people in a way that people with different skin tones obviously are not.

The A and B plots of every X-men movie are some combination of "we need to stop this bigoted human who thinks mutants are dangerous" and "we need to stop this psychotic mutant from committing genocide on humans or taking over the world". If you take the fictional world at all seriously on it's own terms, then holy poo poo, of course the people who want to somehow regulate the unpredictable Demi-gods are in the right.

It's always treated as some kind of damming revelation that SHIELD or whatever other agency wants to have the means to somehow combat superheros or whatever, but if I was a taxpayer in a world where poo poo like that was real, I would probably be pretty ok with that!

The Black Mirror episode with the soldiers was I think the only one recently that did this kind of thing and got it right the mutants are just normal people, and the soldier's implants and bigotry prevent them from seeing that. I would like it a lot more if speculative fictions that wanted to address themes like this either fully thought through their metaphors like that, or just directly addressed the issue using actual people of different (could be still be fictional) ethnicities.

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Fill Baptismal: Dec 15, 2008

Sanguinia posted:

There are tons of mutants out there with virtually no powers, and they get the exact same treatment as the ones that are actually threatening. THAT'S the racism metaphor. You don't need to, as the first X-Men movie has Jean Grey point out to Senator Kelly "license people to live," to deal with dangerous mutants. People want to do it because they're afraid and hateful of the IDEA of mutants, much like they're hateful and afraid of the ideas created by bigoted stereotypes. "Oh, I'm a racist just because I crossed the street when I saw that mutant coming? He might have had a [dangerous power here]!"

This is where the metaphor breaks down though. Black people, gay people, etc. don't actually have some kind superhuman powers that could potentially threaten you. But in the fictional worlds that do this kind of thing, they often give the minority group stand-in abilities that do in fact make them objectively more dangerous or at least different. Accepting the metaphor requires you to make some pretty weird moral leaps. Sure, it's usually helped by the narrative dice being loaded by the anti-mutants being written as obviously odious/evil/etc. But the overall metaphor still doesn't hold that much water when you think about it.

"I don't want to enter into a business deal with a black guy, because he's black." = baseless bigotry.

"I don't want to enter into a business deal with the guy who can read minds because I'll always be at a disadvantage in negotiations, because he may read my mind" = a substantially more grounded and reasonable concern, even if the dude with the mind reading ability is a stand up guy who would never do that.

Like, I know these are comic books, etc. but imo the mark of good fiction with crazy things like superpowers is people still reacting relatively believably to extraordinary circumstances, and for the allegory to be morally coherent it kind of has to fail this test in a lot of ways.

Killer robot posted:

Into the Clairmont era that really shaped what the X-Men became, it moved toward more and more explicit minority coding. Partly since that gave some easy plot hooks, partly since as it went on a lot of people found that to resonate, and on a more cynical side partly because that got the writing attention not as comic books but as literature. But it also led to the problem you mention, compounded by how often mutant-fueled world-ending threats happen as the big plot events. On top of that, there was the running, open editorial conceit for a long time (not sure if it's still there) that barring anything else happening mutants absolutely were going to replace, not coexist with, mainline humans. So it led to super awkward plots where if you actually followed the allegory past a surface level it was a story where the blacks/jews/gays/whatever really are by word of god gonna take over the world and eliminate everyone else, but the good ones will do it slower and with less bloodshed.

In practice, X-Men comics plots with anti-mutant antagonists usually end up really going the extra mile to make it unambiguous that they're motivated by pure bigotry and hatred to a level that would make Red Skull blush, just because it would give such mixed signals if they didn't.

Yeah, this is exactly the issue. The metaphor works on a surface level because of the narrative dice loading, but it gets really awkward once you think about it on any level past that.

Like, they do the narrative slanting and make the senator character referenced in the other post I quoted loathsome so the audience know who to root for, but in a world where there was a non-trivial risk of everyone born with a certain gene becoming walking WMDs, believing that it was a good idea to keep some kind of list of people with said gene would probably be a pretty mainstream belief. Might by seen as the more progressive option relative to other options.

I think this kind of setting can make for great stories about fear, balancing public safety with individual rights, etc. But it doesn't really work for a clean cut parable about bigotry when you think about it.

Fill Baptismal fucked around with this message at 04:36 on Nov 4, 2021

# ¿ Nov 4, 2021 04:28

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Social Critique in Fiction