The principles of fiction, in reaction to the present times, by yours truly: 1. Fiction should satisfy an audience. If it does that and the audience is not also motivated to do actual harm, then the fiction is done.
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2a. To the extent that Tumblr kid culture is right about anything, it’s that the one primary rhetorical function of fiction as a political force is to normalize things. This is hard to predict and usually only occurs successfully as part of a propaganda effort.
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2b. On the whole, most fiction is highly unsuccessful at normalizing any of its values. To go back to my raw data driven model of the world, let me list off the core values as I understand them of the top movies in recent history
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Avengers: Endgame: to the extent there is an ideology here, you could say a certain technocratic ideal is promoted through heroizing Stark, but above all if the film has a “message” it’s “you can’t sacrifice massive numbers of people for your agenda” and, well, not normalized.
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Star Wars: The Force Awakens suggests that violent resistance to fascism, including dissent within the ranks of those who are ordered to enforce it, is morally just. This is not happening.
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Avengers: Infinity War has the same message as Endgame. Again, people are perfectly happy thinking like Thanos. (Could Thanos have been taken as a hero, like we saw with Fight Club? I’ll get into that later.)
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Jurassic World has messages in favor of animal rights and not militarizing things, and generally about corporate exploitation being bad. None of those things are politically ascendant.
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The Lion King is, again, about deposing an unjust ruler who ascended through deceit and evil. This is not happening
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The Avengers doesn’t have a coherent message I can point to, but people certainly didn’t take Nick Fury’s decision to not sacrifice New York in the hope of saving the rest of the nation to heart.
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Frozen II argues that we must interrogate whether we’ve benefited from colonialism. Some folks say it doesn’t go hard enough on that; fair, but people aren’t doing that at all.
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Avengers: Age of Ultron suggests it would be a mistake to trust techbros to write an algorithm to control our lives. On the contrary, we have decided we want to absolutely do that.
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Black Panther suggests that Black people deserve sovereignty and independent legal rights, should have a choice about whether to cooperate with law enforcement, and should resolve disputes within the Black community without needing white people’s help.
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These are all things that are happening to one degree or another, but definitely in no way because of the movie.
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Finally, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part II suggests that if an existential threat arises to everyone but especially minorities, people should resist bureaucrats who try to interfere with addressing that threat, using violence where those bureaucrats are collaborating
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This, too, is not a thing that is happening. Media is not successfully didactic. Most of the films we talk about that supposedly got an idea into culture and led to it being adopted are cult films in any case, and they are nearly all subject to interpretation/selective reading
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Like, it’s text in Fight Club that Project Mayhem is *bad*. The book *may* endorse the “men’s movement” to the extent that it suggests men have some specific problems to work through with each other, although Marla’s story indicates it’s societal or generational.
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But Tyler is NOT the hero, the hero is the guy who shoots Tyler. It’s not a reinterpretation, it’s the surface reading. As soon as Narrator realizes he’s Tyler he sets out to stop what he’s put in motion.
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Similarly, you don’t need me or the Wachowski sisters to tell you that a person who sits down to watch THE MATRIX and comes away from it thinking that the r*d pill represents liberating men from evil female control is bringing his own baggage to the table
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I mean, you don’t need to bring up that it’s a trans metaphor or anything! Just apply “it’s just a movie bro” basic logic and note that the villains are all dudes, all the women shown are with the rebels except for the one fake program lady, and it’s clearly just not about that
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Anyway, I'm not saying media can't have an influence over people behave, but I'm saying that simply looking at a work and saying "wow, this is saying x" doesn't mean people will take x from it and act on it, whether that's the intended meaning or not
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Ok, so 2b. The way stories are most effective at normalizing things are through portraying things as relatable. I'll grant some concessions in the following bits.
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Stories normalized the military throughout the 00s and up until the beginning of the current decade. I'm not sure how effective this normalization currently is, and sometimes suspect Millenials and Gen X are overly sensitive to it, but it's definitely real
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I would contend that fiction in our society normalizes Christianity in various ways that mostly result from treating it as completely ordinary and normal, even when one isn't really Christian
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brb have to talk to family will get back to this.
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OK, can continue for a bit Fiction normalizes heterosexuality. I don't see any evidence it's successfully normalized non-heterosexuality or being trans, although I think it can ok now BRB for real
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OK, so 3. I said fiction relates to audiences. It primarily does this by evoking emotions in them, and those emotions are going to broadly trend toward the positive *after the audience has processed them*. The actual emotions felt by the audience at the time may differ
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Parenthetical,will address in a bit:audiences may be small, or they may be quite large! There is some media that will always have only niche appeal, but we cannot fully judge what the broad appeal of a media is from things like sales/box office, bc marketing & culture play a rule
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*role Fiction must be understood in any case on at least four levels of abstraction before it reaches audience impact: I. The in-story emotional tenor of an event (a character’s father dies tragically)
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II. The audience’s judgment of that emotional tenor (they disagree with the character’s actions, as he is Kylo Rea and he is stabbing Han Solo, with whom they have positive associations, but conversely, they relate to Rey and Finn’s dismay in-universe and judge it appropriate)
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III. The audience’s actual emotional feelings as a result of the event (in this specific example, ranging from being angry at the creators for killing Han Solo, to hating the character of Kylo Ren for killing Han Solo, to *relating to* the character of Kylo Ren for same)
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IV. The audience’s emotional impact from witnessing (or if it were a game, participating in) the event: objectively in the case of the canonical death of Han Solo, largely muted, possibly from the out of universe expectation that Harrison Ford would ask to be killed off
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