Media Analysis

[writerkit]

I watched this video and now I have Thoughts.

Because she had me until the end. Things are capsules of their time, that's important to look at, and "this media has Issues" really needs to be decoupled from "it is morally wrong to like this piece of media." She coins the term "virtue mirroring" for the belief that the media you watch reflects your internal morality and notes that this belief isn't a good thing and can actually get in the way of robust critical analysis because people wind up in a position of refusing to criticize because they connect their morality 

At the end, though, she says something I disagree with: that media which shows problematic behavior must show the characters getting punished for it in some way. She gives the example of someone she knows complaining about You, which I haven't watched, because the last season didn't trust the audience to figure out who the villain was and instead hammered it home very forcefully, and that her response to that complaint is "Well a lot of people didn't get who the villain was so this was necessary." This is, incidentally, the same complaint I have about the last season of Deep Space Nine, in which the writers went way over-the-top on Dukat and Winn because people in the audience had gotten a bit too absorbed in Dukat as being cool and trying to downplay his evil and they were trying to Seriously Drive Home that Dukat is evil.

It is not our responsibility as writers to cater to the lowest common denominator of the audience.

Now, I get that she's apparently had a lot of guys who watched How I Met Your Mother tell her they've taken the date-rapist character as an example to follow, but I also think she's overplaying the extent to which HIMYM caused that versus happened to be the fixation for men who would otherwise have read The Game or something. The kind of man who gets naked without invitation in a woman's apartment in order to get her to sleep with him was going to do something regardless.

It's not about whether you can write a complex or interesting story in which the morally reprehensible characters get punished for their moral reprehensibility. Categorically, you can. But there are specific types of complex and interesting story, stories that are worth being told, that are not like that. Where the characters don't get punished, where the terrible characters go free, where you are expected to do some of the work. More to the point, the insistence that the characters who do bad things must be punished for that undermines the rest of her point: that we need to be able to read media critically. Spoon-feeding isn't going to help with that.

And there will always be some portion of your audience who doesn't get it no matter how hard you drive the matter home. There are people who seriously think Lolita is romanticizing Humbert. You will never have a piece of media that doesn't have some substantial portion of its audience miss the point. Saying that media needs to make sure the bad characters are punished? That's still a kind of virtue mirroring. Sure, the rest of the video is letting you off from punishing yourself for liking the Problematic media, but it's still saying media needs to live up to a certain type of virtue or it's automatically contributing to what's wrong with society.

It's still encouraging exactly what the rest of the video purports to be arguing against.

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

If your audience can't tell who the heroes and villains are without you hammering on it, then you have done a shitty job of writing. That doesn't mean you can't have some moral ambiguity, but if that is what you want, then let it be vague and don't try to force change after the fact. Your heroes and villains should dress, talk, and act differently. Because good and evil aren't things that happen only once. They're part of a person's nature and, especially, part of their choices all the time. And those ambiguous characters should be struggling over which way to jump of different issues.

I suspect that the hammering is a clumsy attempt to fix a very real problem in modern media, which is that many stories are such a mishmash that it's impossible to tell at a glance who you should be rooting for. I solve this by reading or watching other things, because if I can't tell at a glance who is worth backing, I really don't care.

We don't need a return of the Comics Code, which yes, mandated that all bad guys always had to be caught and punished. 0_o

Re: Thoughts

[squirrelitude]

One of the major themes I've seen in modern media is the "morally gray character", so you don't end up with a clear distinction of hero and villain.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

It's fine to have a morally gray character as a foil between two sides, or as a counterpoint against one side. That's a great solution to avoid black/white oversimplification. But when most or all the characters are like that, it quickly devolves to "Why should I even care who wins when they all suck?"

Re: Thoughts

[writerkit]

That's a matter of personal preference, though, not some kind of moral obligation to society to make sure your writing is sending Correct Messages. I stopped reading A Song of Ice and Fire for more or less this reason, but I don't think it's causing harm to Society by existing.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

It's less about political correctness and more about clarity in writing. Matters of plot and characterization are part of the skills of constructing an effective story. If I walk past the TV with a fight scene, and I cannot distinguish the sides because the characters all look and act the same, that's poor storytelling. Characters and scenes should have a distinct purpose; if the characters are indistinct then it undermines their justification for all being in the story -- unless they belong to a homogenous group treated en masse, like an army.

The parameters of storytelling are not rules ... they're more like guidelines. But they do explain how to tell a story that makes sense and entertains the audience. You can break any of them. It's just that the more you break, the harder it gets to maintain narrative cohesion. You have to know exactly what you are doing -- and have control over your own work, which is increasingly hard today. Some of the mishmash is caused by too many fingers in the pie.