Woke up in a foul mood

[beccaelizabeth]

I've been thinking that a lot of stories lately are about telling ourselves we're the plucky rebels. We're the tiny little humans fighting the forces of hell and heaven both, and never mind that the fighting mostly consists of saying I Don't Wanna And You Can't Make Me and then maybe trying to shoot everything, which isn't terribly angelic in the first place. Or we're the tiny band of heroes trying to fight off the aliens, the terrible no good very bad aliens with the biology that means we're never going to get along, and oh dear, oops, we did it again, they're all dead. But hey, humans are alive, so clearly we're still the heroes! Even though exterminating whole races is, you know, evil. They're always moving on to the next bunch of intractably evil aliens without really stopping to think about that part. Always the evil enemy is the huge great scary force over there trying to kill us, and our tiny little group is by definition heroic, even with all the killing.

The thing is, just by being born where most people sitting at their computers reading this were born, just by living in these huge capitalist giants of countries, we are not the rebels. We're the bloody Empire. And I do not think our stories really deal with that, except by telling us its secretly okay because secretly we're the tiny persecuted ones anyway.

I mean, we live in conditions of such abundance, but it's by leeching off so much of the world. Even those of us who are pretty damn poor by local standards are still poor vampires. It even gets harder to be careful about it, because no spare resources to make sure everything is Fair trade, for whatever that's worth. So we're vampires stuck taking whatever we can get. That isn't a story I seen yet. We're the vampires with the feeling we're not monsters any more, because the supermarket shelves are full of this convenient blood, and hey, nobody is screaming. Not where we can hear them.

We've been studying Maus at college, Hitler and the holocaust and stuff, and it keeps coming up, we study this stuff in schools, we say never again, but it's like it blinds us. We'll never let Hitler happen in our back yard again? Okay, maybe. But his was not the last genocide. It wasn't the first. It wasn't just his neither. But it sits there in the teaching of history as its own unique thing. Like, as long as we're not Hitler, we're doing okay. And okay, not being Hitler is a pretty good goal as far as it goes, but there are just a few more kinds of evil in the world than that. Guarding against just that one kind and getting smug about it is not sufficient. And it's worse than that, because most of the world, reading about Germany, is reading about Them. It's the story of how That Lot did evil. How Those Other Guys were evil. So people gets real vigilant about Those Other Guys Over There. And they're ready, willing, and able to stomp the hell out of them just as soon as they start that evil stuff.

We need more stories about becoming the monsters. We need more stories about waking up to realise it's a monster world. It's not sufficient to guard the borders or reject the other out there. We need stories about looking in the mirror and dealing.

Except I don't even know what they would look like. It's not like I voted for what my country does. It's not like I can stop being a vampire. Is it? I'm just trying to get by, here, same like everyone. I can't step out into the sun and have the world be a better place, it don't work that way. And with being such a tiny vampire in the grand scheme of thing, it wouldn't matter that much anyway, right? So hell, may as well just sit here and watch my happy stories.

So I don't like me very much. Or see much I can do about it.



I don't know what the kind of hero I'm looking for would look like, but they do not look at aliens or even demons and see monsters instead of people. They do not go around eliminating those others. They don't turn every other person into part of their weapon. They don't witch hunt the one person that's secretly an outsider pulling all the strings, especially in situations where everyone is just trying to get their needs met. And they don't blame the alien-demon-others for their own violence or call it necessary or be in stories where There Should Have Been Another Way because, damn it, there always already was.

I don't know how to do those stories. Or, indeed, live them.

Comments

[predatrix.livejournal.com]

Always seemed to me one of the better things about NuWho and the less worse parts of OldWho is that the Doctor doesn't necessarily want to kill aliens, and has a sense of wonder about diversity. It's just a shame that there are too many aliens killed in it anyway. One of the odder parts of ClassicTrek is that Spock admires diversity yet goes all rigid!Vulcan!traditionalist every five minutes.

I admire SF where the alien/the other is seen as a person, differences or not, because why should genetics/physical humanity be the most important thing; people aren't necessarily the most sensible judges (as various parts of NuWho point out).

Ruth (was at SF group the other week)

[beccaelizabeth]

The Doctor has a sense of wonder about diversity, yes, he thinks the werewolf is beautiful, right up until he destroys it. The NuWho Doctor has done genocide on screen in front of us, and oh dear, the nasty aliens made him do it. It's creepy. He says he doesn't want to, and the story acts like that makes it not his fault, even when he's just pushed the button. Setting up stories so he has to blow everyone up is rather a problem. And it's Doctor Who, classic and new, that rewrites all of history so an Outsider-Alien Did It, so you look for the solution to problems by finding the one that only looks human. Witch hunt. It keeps being the worst bits telling itself its the best bits.

The bit at Demons Run was actually cooler than usual on that front, because the Doctor got a bunch of aliens together to go fight humans. It just... kind of didn't work.