The shape of the solution
Nov. 10th, 2013 03:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI am utterly stuck on this 'writing' thing. Some of it for the same reasons I'm stuck at everything else, but some of it...
The problem is bad guys. Antagonists. What are Our Heroes opposing?
And how do they deal with them?
I've been reading a bunch of urban fantasy in a row. They're all fantasy PI stories, where someone with magic deals with the interface of a magical world with a mundane one. And they're all stories that solve things with violence.
I'm particularly upset with the tendency to label something 'insane' and then treat that with a good being killed. I've sincerely had it with that trope. Long since. They never bother defining 'insane', and they never have any treatment options.
But that's just a subset of the general problem. In order to solve problems with violence, they take away society. They take away police, leaving the PI to work alone. They take away prisons, leaving the PI nowhere to send their opponents, nowhere that would hold them. And they take away the possibility of rehabilitation.
Sometimes they retain redemption. It's just usually a redemptive sacrifice. So, you can prove one crime is not the whole of you, but usually by jumping in the way of a bullet.
PI stories set up the police on one side and criminals on the other, and have the PI walk some kind of line between them. Maybe it's about police corruption, or the restrictions of red tape, or how the police just can't see some communities. There's something the PI can do that the institutions of law enforcement cannot. When it's urban fantasy, that's usually because the police don't know one whole community exists. Then that community has its own laws. They just happen to be set up so people get killed a lot.
The series I've been reading most recently has one law that's supposed to be unbreakable, the one where thou shalt not kill, and still it manages to set things so actually the PI knows better and just this once killing is the thing to do. And then they can duck the legal consequences. Because they are Good People, so it don't count.
See, that's where the whole paradigm breaks down: the shape of this thing seems to rely on some people being Good People. They do bad things, but it don't count, because they are Good. Frankly, this scares me. The book worlds don't have lawyers or trials worth the name, they just have Good People who Know Best. Only they're acting exactly the same as the Bad People, the ones who hide behind the laws and try and enforce them even against the Good People. The only way we know they're different is we're riding the point of view of the Good People, so we know all about their intent.
... there's no room in this for saying intent is worth bugger all. What if there are no Good People, only good acts? Entire genres break down.
And then there's the Bad People. The ones set up so they're a problem that can be solved by violence.
The main thing necessary for such people is that their crimes are all things they do and keep doing. If the person stops, well, the world gets better.
I've been reading a lot of news headlines lately, and it don't seem to me the world works that way much. I mean, look at poverty. You can't really solve poverty or the knock on effects thereof by removing people. That's a problem that needs solved by the building of things and the doing of things, not the stopping of them. Stopping things is the source of a ton of problems, like the government stopping welfare benefits or stopping care plans or stopping treatment being available. Not doing things seems to lead to much daily misery, like not looking after people. And that's all daily regular stuff. Really big problems. You can't solve them by taking any particular people out of the equation.
So it seems to me that these solve it with violence stories rely on setting up Bad People of a sort that aren't terribly significant in the world. And then taking away all the social checks and balances and institutions and preparations and treatments and responses, just to leave the only solution as violence. And then making this out to be the triumph of good.
It's not like the problem of leaders too eager for unwinnable wars is exactly obsolete, but it's not a thing that can be solved by taking out one or two people. Don't reckon it ever was. Kings, Queens, and governments, the interactions of power and people and law, they don't work the way the fantasy books set up. Why are we still reading and writing about monarchies, and not the complex interactions of democracies and media and inherited power? I know one set of reasons, because every family breakdown feels like the end of the world, and with monarchy it gets amplified until it really is. But there are a great many stories that don't seem to be using that. Nor do they seem to really be selling the dangers of monarchy or aristocracy, since there's always a good ruler to contrast against the bad.
And why is it usually bad Queens? Don't tell me because mythology, I know there are thousands of years of myths about the illegitimacy of feminine power, I'm asking why we're still using them to prop up the patriarchy now? It's right up there with the use of 'insane', with the way a bad queen is almost always a mad queen, because rationality got claimed by the masculine and cast so much out of its borders. Mad bad Queens and the men they corrupt: fantasy genre staples. Even urban fantasy. Even ones set here and now, with women as the 'I' of the book. They don't exist within a network of powerful women, they just sit there surrounded by men. What world is that?
So I look at the stories I've been reading, and watching, and listening to, and I look at the blank page, and I just... can't believe in it. I can set up a world with problems I recognise and people I believe in, and then I can't find solutions that fit into the page or have a shape I know how to deal with. Or I can set up Good People vs Bad People, Fight! ... and they're hollow little puppet people playing out a poisonous lie.
There's stories I know how to write, nice tidy ones with a triumph at the end of them, and there's problems I've actually encountered, which I have to hope have solutions but they're not ones I can see from here.
I'd say I need better fiction, but I'm getting stuck on how to make better real lives, so...
So I guess yeah, I'm stuck on all the things for all the same reasons. Because there's all these problems, and they seem to be big problems like capitalism and kyriarchy and poverty and the way all this technological progress seems able to solve all the problems except access and distribution and how to get enough carers. And I can't see how to throw a metaphor on that and beat it by the end of the episode. Or make much progress on any of it in real life.
The problem is bad guys. Antagonists. What are Our Heroes opposing?
And how do they deal with them?
I've been reading a bunch of urban fantasy in a row. They're all fantasy PI stories, where someone with magic deals with the interface of a magical world with a mundane one. And they're all stories that solve things with violence.
I'm particularly upset with the tendency to label something 'insane' and then treat that with a good being killed. I've sincerely had it with that trope. Long since. They never bother defining 'insane', and they never have any treatment options.
But that's just a subset of the general problem. In order to solve problems with violence, they take away society. They take away police, leaving the PI to work alone. They take away prisons, leaving the PI nowhere to send their opponents, nowhere that would hold them. And they take away the possibility of rehabilitation.
Sometimes they retain redemption. It's just usually a redemptive sacrifice. So, you can prove one crime is not the whole of you, but usually by jumping in the way of a bullet.
PI stories set up the police on one side and criminals on the other, and have the PI walk some kind of line between them. Maybe it's about police corruption, or the restrictions of red tape, or how the police just can't see some communities. There's something the PI can do that the institutions of law enforcement cannot. When it's urban fantasy, that's usually because the police don't know one whole community exists. Then that community has its own laws. They just happen to be set up so people get killed a lot.
The series I've been reading most recently has one law that's supposed to be unbreakable, the one where thou shalt not kill, and still it manages to set things so actually the PI knows better and just this once killing is the thing to do. And then they can duck the legal consequences. Because they are Good People, so it don't count.
See, that's where the whole paradigm breaks down: the shape of this thing seems to rely on some people being Good People. They do bad things, but it don't count, because they are Good. Frankly, this scares me. The book worlds don't have lawyers or trials worth the name, they just have Good People who Know Best. Only they're acting exactly the same as the Bad People, the ones who hide behind the laws and try and enforce them even against the Good People. The only way we know they're different is we're riding the point of view of the Good People, so we know all about their intent.
... there's no room in this for saying intent is worth bugger all. What if there are no Good People, only good acts? Entire genres break down.
And then there's the Bad People. The ones set up so they're a problem that can be solved by violence.
The main thing necessary for such people is that their crimes are all things they do and keep doing. If the person stops, well, the world gets better.
I've been reading a lot of news headlines lately, and it don't seem to me the world works that way much. I mean, look at poverty. You can't really solve poverty or the knock on effects thereof by removing people. That's a problem that needs solved by the building of things and the doing of things, not the stopping of them. Stopping things is the source of a ton of problems, like the government stopping welfare benefits or stopping care plans or stopping treatment being available. Not doing things seems to lead to much daily misery, like not looking after people. And that's all daily regular stuff. Really big problems. You can't solve them by taking any particular people out of the equation.
So it seems to me that these solve it with violence stories rely on setting up Bad People of a sort that aren't terribly significant in the world. And then taking away all the social checks and balances and institutions and preparations and treatments and responses, just to leave the only solution as violence. And then making this out to be the triumph of good.
It's not like the problem of leaders too eager for unwinnable wars is exactly obsolete, but it's not a thing that can be solved by taking out one or two people. Don't reckon it ever was. Kings, Queens, and governments, the interactions of power and people and law, they don't work the way the fantasy books set up. Why are we still reading and writing about monarchies, and not the complex interactions of democracies and media and inherited power? I know one set of reasons, because every family breakdown feels like the end of the world, and with monarchy it gets amplified until it really is. But there are a great many stories that don't seem to be using that. Nor do they seem to really be selling the dangers of monarchy or aristocracy, since there's always a good ruler to contrast against the bad.
And why is it usually bad Queens? Don't tell me because mythology, I know there are thousands of years of myths about the illegitimacy of feminine power, I'm asking why we're still using them to prop up the patriarchy now? It's right up there with the use of 'insane', with the way a bad queen is almost always a mad queen, because rationality got claimed by the masculine and cast so much out of its borders. Mad bad Queens and the men they corrupt: fantasy genre staples. Even urban fantasy. Even ones set here and now, with women as the 'I' of the book. They don't exist within a network of powerful women, they just sit there surrounded by men. What world is that?
So I look at the stories I've been reading, and watching, and listening to, and I look at the blank page, and I just... can't believe in it. I can set up a world with problems I recognise and people I believe in, and then I can't find solutions that fit into the page or have a shape I know how to deal with. Or I can set up Good People vs Bad People, Fight! ... and they're hollow little puppet people playing out a poisonous lie.
There's stories I know how to write, nice tidy ones with a triumph at the end of them, and there's problems I've actually encountered, which I have to hope have solutions but they're not ones I can see from here.
I'd say I need better fiction, but I'm getting stuck on how to make better real lives, so...
So I guess yeah, I'm stuck on all the things for all the same reasons. Because there's all these problems, and they seem to be big problems like capitalism and kyriarchy and poverty and the way all this technological progress seems able to solve all the problems except access and distribution and how to get enough carers. And I can't see how to throw a metaphor on that and beat it by the end of the episode. Or make much progress on any of it in real life.