Yesterday, friend of the blog Daddy Warpig wrote a post on his Facebook that used the continued occurrence of male/female interchangeability in pop culture to critique modern character writing more generally (Warpig’s post is below the fold.)
“I’m more and more convinced, every year, that most writers have no idea how to tell a story, [nor how to] write real, sane human beings.”
Many don’t.
They’re never taught what to do to feel or act masculine or feminine (and are taught there’s no such thing). Worse, they’re taught that thinking of people as masculine or feminine is a thoughtcrime, and that they should strive to NOT be masculine or feminine. Little children are taught that they should disregard all the things that would bring them joy, that they should embrace and strive to accomplish things that will bring them misery.
Moreover, comfort distances themselves from natural human emotions, ideology lies to them about what humans really are, and living a degenerate lifestyle means they’re unaccustomed to joy or feeling that their “heart is full”. Much genuine, passionate human experience requires innocence (or its adult sibling, virtue).
Taken together, they (by which I mean most) act in affected ways, they believe false things about even their own emotions, desires, and drives, and they’ve never lived so close to the bone (because of pain, deprivation, or desperation) that they know what it’s like to be on the razor’s edge of disaster every day, with only God (or chance, if you don’t believe in God) standing between them and utter material and emotional ruin. There is a constant, desperate struggle there, and success or failure is largely out of one’s hands.
Living without struggle means people are amused, ironic, detached, and bored. All of these emotions reflect the distance from a passionate, energetic, DRIVEN life. (We underestimate how much of today’s social media cruelty is driven by boredom.) They mean one does not understand or appreciate another’s suffering, and have no empathy for their pains. They make one cruel and unfeeling.
Pray not that your children never know suffering, pray instead that their lives are not too easy, that through their suffering they can learn what pain means, and learn to empathize with others’ pains.
Here’s a test: do you treasure entertainment just for being entertaining? If you’ve endured suffering, you do, because you KNOW the value of having your burdens lifted, for even a short time. Even momentary respite gives us strength to endure the unendurable. If you have nothing but contempt for “escapist fiction”, you’ve never hurt enough for long enough to need it.
Distance from the human experience means they don’t understand what it means to be human so they can’t write human characters. They and their characters act in affected ways, have affected drives and desires, and experience affected emotions. It’s affectations all the way down.
I find very little to disagree with here. This goes beyond self-parodies that come from writing fiction based only on other fiction. Modern childhood and modern life are heavily bound up in rules and regulations, including restrictions on what one may talk about. Children are helicoptered over so much that the state of Utah had to pass a law that lets kids play without adult supervision. As much as I enjoy a good video game, these also add to the rule-governed aspects of modern life since they must follow their programming (it’s also safer, since kids won’t get banged up playing Nintendo.) And to top things off, we spend far too much time on social media, a virtual space that cuts us off from each other.
It’s worse than Warpig mentions — the reason there’s so much “affectation” in both reality and fiction is because we have to engage in it to survive: repeat the correct slogans, follow the clock, stay on the hamster wheel. Deviation from this will be questioned in more ways than one. It starts in childhood — get in all the right programs and extracurriculars so they can get into a good college, which will get them a good job that they could use to pay off all the debt they accrued, if they got the job at all.
And the debt can’t be discharged in bankruptcy.
It is sometimes said that we indulge in too much escapism, trapping ourselves in virtual worlds when we should experience real life. This is only partially correct; we need a healthy experience of real life and our escapes. Be cognizant of your life, but don’t surrender to every sling and arrow. Fantasy makes that just a bit easier.
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My novel Shining Tomorrow does its best to portray its characters in a properly human way. Back the Indiegogo campaign so I can bring this alternate history superhero tale to audio.
