Give the people what the people want (Part 1)

Aka an examination of the escalation of violence in modern media exemplified by Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead

Warning: extensive discussion of violence, including torture, sexual abuse and gore

A good friend of mine has written her Bachelor’s thesis on “Violence in Game of Thrones” and thus inspired me to write my own short analysis of violence in modern media. Since this is just a blog post and not a paper, I can’t hope to be anywhere near as extensive and academic as she was in her thesis. I’ll try to keep this comprehensible and still feature most if not all of my thoughts on the matter. Have fun!

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People tend to enjoy watching violence from a safe distance. This seems to be a fact that has been true for many centuries. Public executions from ages past were made into a spectacle for cheering crowds and nowadays the TV and movie screens are awash with it. The reasons for this are varied. Medieval crowds as well as modern movie audiences both relish in the feeling of seeing people punished that seemingly deserved it (note how a number of horror movie characters are assholes just so seeing them die will be rewarding). There’s also a distinct feeling of ‘thankfully it’s them and not me’. Violence when it happens to other people in a safe distance instills a sense of relief that one is safe at home (or in the crowd), which also is rewarding. And maybe watching violence speaks to sadistic and aggressive tendencies in each of us that we are too civilized to let bleed into our everyday life.

I’m not exempt from this, far from it. I enjoy Tarantino’s movies, which are famously violent and bloody. Seeing the brutal R-rated Logan was more fun than any Logan appearance before had been (the fact that Logan was allowed to be brutal is often cited as one of the reasons for the movie’s success). And we all know that Deadpool would’ve sucked so bad had it not been filled with hilarious and gruesome fight scenes. Hannibal is teeming with gore and extreme – if creative – violence in such a way that you’d have to edit out whole episodes if you’d attempt to censor it (which you shouldn’t, of course, Hannibal is a brilliant show and every scene is a work of art). Daredevil’s fight scenes feel so real, because they are violent.

But what I want to talk about is not the presence of violence in movies or TV shows in general, but the escalation of it. I’m also not here to talk about torture porn in horror movies, because A) I never watch those movies and thus can’t really talk about them and B) it’s a completely different topic.

The escalation of violence is best observed in shows like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones that both got famous for their excessive depiction of violence. I’m sure a lot of people have written essays or articles about it already, this is just me adding my two cents. TWD und GoT differ from similar shows in terms of their rating, which allows them to show violence to a degree that other shows cannot. Another thing they have in common is that due to fact that they got popular in part because of their violent nature (at least this is often emphasized in articles), violence is expected by the audience. Additionally both shows have not shied away from (permanently) killing beloved main characters and have both been praised for it. The producers and screenwriters therefore strive to meet the audience-expectations. The problem is that people by now have become largely desensitized to violence (that’s another post I’d like to write: “how the shocking became mainstream”) and it’s very difficult to truly shock a modern day audience. So if you have a reputation of being a shocking show, what are you to do?

The answer, in both cases, apparently is to up the ante. An audience that was shocked at the sudden death of what they assumed to be the main character at the end of season 1 in GoT, will be used to main characters dying by season 3. To make such a death shocking it needs to be much more dramatic than the relatively tame execution of Ned Stark. The so-called Red Wedding is undoubtly shocking. Even for book readers already familiar with what to come. The camera at this point doesn’t pan away from the violence anymore but shows the murders that are happening in detail. Those that suffer are innocent and do not deserve to die in such a gruesome way. They are betrayed by people that swore their allegiance and killed by their hosts (a feat which in the GoT verse is an egregious blasphemy). A pregnant woman is stabbed multiple times in the stomach and her pain as well as the pain of her husband and his mother are shown extensively. The scene’s purpose – apart from its main purpose of being this season’s shocking show-defining scene – is to properly hammer home the fact that no one is safe, nowhere is safe and you shouldn’t trust anyone.

The theme of ‘nowhere is safe’ is so prevalent in TWD that it has been ridiculed. Seemingly every season the little band of survivors finds a new place to stay only to have that temporary safety taken away from them again, be it by zombies or ruthless antagonists. It is a zombie apocalypse after all, so the constant danger isn’t unbelievable. What makes it ridiculous is the repetition of very similar story arcs. Search for new haven – brief happiness in the new haven – violent destruction – repeat. To keep things interesting and not lose viewers to boredom the producers need to include some form of variety or – as they apparently prefer – escalation. Their first camp is destroyed by a brutal zombie attack that costs a part of the group their lives. In contrast to GoT, TWD already started out with an in depth depiction of violence. The audience is from episode one onwards privy to close-ups of rotting corpses, zombies eating people alive and other types of violence. This, of course, makes it even harder for the producers to keep their content shocking for the viewer. The second season, which is spent mostly on a farm in relative safety, is consequently regarded as the most boring one by many fans (even though it features the death of a child, and further people being eaten alive). Season 3 again manages to intensify the violence by adding torture, mutilation and similar to the repertoire.

But naturally the audience gets used to that, too. If you believe that the shock value is the only thing keeping your show going, you have to dig deeper. The keyword here is ‘believe’. Both GoT and TWD have other things going for them (interesting characters for example) and as a person somewhere else has pointed out in a fitting analysis, bad things happening is only interesting if it constitutes a deviation from the norm (https://i-am-of-the-stars.tumblr.com/post/155633738523/ifitwerentforthatmeddlingkid-bethanyactually). Screen-writers often don’t seem to share this opinion. In addition to that most TV shows that don’t rely on case-of-the-week episodes typically tend to feature some form of escalation (that very often unfortunately has the show spiraling widely out of control and quality). So, I get where TWD’s and GoT’s screen-writers are coming from.

(Another justification for the violence is the simple fact that a lot of the violent things happening in the shows are happening in the source material, a comic and book series respectively, too. The important difference hereby is in how the violence is portrayed – also keep in mind that seeing a violent act on screen is different from reading about it in a book. Additionally both shows did diverge from the source material more or less drastically and added even more violent scenes.) 

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This post has gotten so long that I decided to split it in two. So, this is only part one. If you're interested in more keep on the look-out for the second part.

Humans are the Real Monsters

At first I just wanted to talk about how as the seasons progress on the Walking Dead the zombies become less and less a threat and the real danger are the surviving humans. Then it occured to me that this is actually a theme found all over popculture. All popculture is, of course, produced by humans (as far as we know... *cue X-Files music*). This is an interesting observation to make as it suggests that no small part of humanity actually has views bordering on misanthropy and can identify with those views in media.

Back to the topic: this theme is so prevalent that it has an extensive TV Tropes page. For the sake of a comprehensive discussion I will only choose a few examples of media I personally have dealt with, but go on and check out their list and description, it's worthwhile. As described on the page this theme comes in different varieties. For my analysis I divide the chosen examples in two categories:

a) A human protagonist in conflict with the alien or supernatural realizes either that they have been in the wrong or that there is something worse than what they thought they were fighting against.
b) A non-human character provides an outsider's perspective on the actions of humans and makes the audience question what they took for granted.

Let's start with a) because this has been my starting point for this post, too. In Walking Dead a ragtag bunch of human survivors fight against a horde of zombies that threaten to overpower them from time to time. At least in the earlier seasons. Now the most conflict stems from their interactions with other survivors. Zombies are usually only an annoyance and only really dangerous when utilized by other humans. They have however come into contact with vicious cannibals that treat others like meat and now a group of cruel sadists whose actions promise to be more gruesome than anything we've seen before (I haven't seen season 6 yet, so I don't know for sure). Because they are corpses, the zombies rot. It costs them their already dubious strength, speed and endurance. Nowadays the zombies splatter apart if they trip and fall (which they frequently do). But any human that's still alive has either had the fortune of being protected or is a more or less deranged survivor accostumed to violence. If you heard a rustling in the bushes in earlier seasons you wished for a human, now you wish for a zombie.

Another show in which human protagonists fight against non-human enemies is Supernatural. Usually the perpetrators are mystic beings of varying degrees of evil. That humans, however, also have the potential to cause absolute horror is also evident. This is taken up by Lucifer himself who uses it to partly justify his hatred of humanity. But even the main characters experience this. I can think of two episodes that have no supernatural element in them at all and are simply examples of humans being senselessly cruel. One of them features a quote by Dean: "Demons I get, people are crazy!" He says this, because while demons are awful, they are somewhat justified in that seeing as they are demons, humans however have no excuses, no apparent destructive nature to hide behind.

An intersting case to look at is District 9.  In this movie an alien ship got stranded on earth. The surviving extraterrestrials are subsequently locked up in a horrible ghetto and treated on all accounts as subhuman. The human protagonist works for a company intimately linked with the organization of the ghetto. In the course of the filiming he gets infected and slowly but surely turns alien himself. His change of perspective is thus forced, because he experiences the same oppression and terror that the aliens have been forced to endure for a while now. The effect is nevertheless the same and in no way diminished. While we might at first see the aliens as scary it becomes obvious over the course of the movie that the humans are effectively the villains.

Now we turn to b) and the first thing that comes to my mind is X-Men as a metaphor for struggle against oppression in general. The mutants are notably not human. They have potentially disatrous abilites and quite a few of them look more or less drastically different (Kurt Wagner aka Nightcrawler only an example). It is clear from the beginning who we should symapathize with. X-Men asks us to switch perspectives and has us clearly identifying humans as the villains. Even the movies that present Magneto as the primary antagonist feature humans being just as horrible if not more so, since Magneto generally is given a more or less convincing justification.  

The Doctor in Doctor Who usually loves humans. He travels with them and spends a lot of time and effort saving them or their planets. He has a great deal of positive things to say about them, too. Sometimes, however, humans screw up as they do. Not everyone is a fundamentally good person and sometimes humans do everything they can to prove the Doctor's enthusiastic belief in the human race wrong. His sympathy for all living creatures is not always shared by the humans. He gets angry then and calls them out on their hipocrisy or cruelty.  "I should have told them to run, as fast as they can, run and hide, because the monsters are coming: the human race!", he says after humans blast a spaceship in retreat into oblivion. They prove themselves to be no better than the alien invaders.

Tying in with my Science Fiction university course this theme is especially popular in the genre of Science Fiction or Dystopia as those are often used to reflect on worrying developments in modern society.

Female Villain Archive 1: Anna

On my main blog I've once talked about female villains and how there are so very few of them (not counting the cliché fairytale evil witches or the high school mean girl). So this series of posts is dedicated to the vilainesses who are boss. Enjoy!

Starting out with Anna (Morena Baccarin) from the short-lived TV series V - The Visitors.

http://v.wikia.com/wiki/The_Visitors

She is the queen of a malevolent reptilian alien species that has come to earth to devour the humans. Joy! Of course this is not what she leads with. She promises cures and advancements and continually stresses "we are of peace". With a soft voice she convinces the world to trust her. She's ruthless when confronted with obstacles and dissent from her own people. Those who betray her suffer a gruesome death. When the show was cancelled after its second season she had all but reached her goal.

What I like about her is that she is the uncontested and efficient leader. She knows how to interact with the human world and has a meticulous plan. The Visitors are somewhat organized like a bee hive and as their queen she alone has control over the 'hive's' future and existence. And while she is mostly cold and calculating, she is not without emotion. 

2) Snowpiercer

Who doesn’t love a bleak dystopia? The last of humanity riding around a frozen planet in a highly classist train society, hell, why not? It’s always time to join a revolution. What begins as a straight-forward struggle to reach those in power and take over, peppered with fantastic fight sequences and saddening sacrifices, abruptly takes a turn to the nihilistic when the true backgrounds are uncovered. Man, I did not see that coming and it made everything that happened until then appear in a whole new light. The ending keeps with the new nihilistic tone and thus is perfect.

How to write a good love story

Disclaimer: this - and that should go without saying - is only my very personal preference others might give you vastly different answers.



So, I'm writing this post, because a guy friend of mine asked me how to write a love story that would feel organic to me. This got me thinking and I came up with the following:

- If you don't want to go through the trouble of writing a love story, just start out with them already together - works like a charm.
- If you do want to write a love story you have basically two options (of course there are more, but these two are the easiest to realize):

1. "I (the protagonist) know from the beginning that I love that person but don't know what to do with that."
2. "I grow to care about this person more and more and what do you mean I'm in love?"

Both have their merits and I like them equally. You'll have to evaluate which works better with your chosen characters.

- It's always good if the love birds in question start out as good friends.
- If that's not possible (because they just met for example or start off on oposite sides of the conflict), at least make it clear that there's mutual respect and affection.
- Relationships are full of awkwardness and starting them even more so, the great majority of people are not smooth, but painfully emberrassed the more they care about another person (but also don't make it too awkward... as a general rule of thumb if it seems like a bad American romantic comedy you've gone too far).
- Communication is key. Of course depending if you take route 1 or 2 that communication might not always be helpful for the development of their relationship, but I personally always like when people talk about their feelings for each other or negotiate their relationship.
- If you're writing from the protagonist's perspective, make sure to subtly distinguish how they see their love interest (no matter if you chose route 1 or 2) from how they see the other characters. The reader should ideally be able to tell that the characters in question are falling in love much before they kiss.

DON'Ts (aka love tropes I dislike or absolutely dispise):
- Please stay away of the 'love at first sight that's unsupported by anything happening in the story' or what I'd like to call the 'I've seen you once, interacted with you for 10 seconds, don't even know your name, but I'd die for you'- phenomenon, because that's not how human connection works at all.
- Please also stay away from the 'characters treat each other like crap but it's really because they love each other' trope. (Somewhat related: women don't pretend to hate guys they are secretly in love with, please keep that in mind.)
- The jealous ex-partner trope. If you ask me it's nearly never necessary to include a jealous ex-partner in your story (now an ex-partner that is supportive and a good friend that I like).
- Love triangles. I can't tell you how much love triangles suck. In my opinion you can never win when writing a love triangle. 98% of the time it's going to be in some way irritating at best and wholly detracting from the story at worst.
- Reminder! Not every character needs to be paired up with someone and not every story needs a love subplot.
- Reminder the second! Take care that you don't overly focus on the love story (unless of course you are writing a romance that is explicitly centered about these two characters getting together). Try to still devote some time to the character's platonic relationships. Friends and family continue to be important even when your character found their one true love.

DOs (love tropes I like):
- The 'you are so wonderful I'm not worthy so I don't say anything' combined with 'what do you mean? Of course you're worthy and I love you!'.
- Friends and family as (either highly inefficient or very competent) matchmakers (and the characters getting together not 'because' but 'in spite of' their meddling). This is one for more humorous stories.
- 'We just nearly died and the new relevation that life is fleeting leads us to confess our love!'
- Reciprocal healing of broken characters. Sometimes a significant other is just what your character needs to start healing. I just love it when characters that are both to some degree broken help each other heal (doesn't have to be romantic either).
- If you've briefly considered a love triangle, why don't you do a 'healthy polyamory' instead! There are too little healthy polyamories in media.
- The monster and the angel. Aka one character thinks of themselves as a terrible monster and the other as a brilliant angel, but the 'angel' character sees the good in the 'monster' character. (This one is a tricky one, because while I enjoy it a lot, it's very easy to fall into stereotypes when writing, so be careful!)
- Characters being in 'puppy love' aka openly affectionate and loving (and others starting to be fed up with it).

I generally tend to avoid movies, novels and shows that focus too heavily on love stories (and a lot of love stories have minor to major issues in my eyes) so I don't really have any examples of well done love stories to give out. If you can think of anything that had a love story that you enjoyed, please tell me and I can make a list.

I hope this helped at least one person out there. And remember: I'm not an authority on any of this. I'm just a person who consumes a lot of media and has therefore built up a personal preference.

Satori over and out

A collection of things I like

This is a list of things that happen in fictional stories that I enjoy. Tropes, themes and whatnot. I might add to it later:

- robots or androids developing emotions and questioning their existence and identity and thus blurring the border between human and other simply through developing a distinct humanity
- retro futurism. Future worlds that are awash with state-of-the-art technology and space travel, but that look like they might take place in the past.
- earnest villain redemption. When a villain that's only a villain through terrible circumstances gets a good and believable redemption arc and now hang out with the good guys, but they're still struggling because redemption is a journey and they're not sure if they can ever forgive themselves.
- unapologetically evil villains. Now to something completely different: villains who are evil and they know it, you don't know why or maybe you do but it doesn't change a thing. They are ruthless and cruel and thoroughly enjoying themselves. They are comfortable in their evilness and don't need redemption. (okay, I realize I'll need to qualify that. There are quite a lot of villains who are unapologetically evil that I don't like at all, what I mean is that sometimes trying to give every villain a tragic backstory or trying to make them sympathetic is the absolute wrong move.)
- found family. They are lonely and maybe they don't really like people all that much, because they've been abandoned or hurt, but here they are with this other ragtag bunch of people and somehow they grow to love and care for each other. (I feel like 'found family' is a generally a favorite with people my age.)
- co-dependent soulmates (doesn't have to be romantic and sometimes it's even better when it's platonic). They know each other inside out. There's no one that knows the other better. They feel each other's emotions and can see what the other is thinking just by looking at them. They wouldn't survive the other's death. It might not be the healthiest way to live, but it's their reality.
- happy endings.
- subtly unsettling stories that make you question reality and whose implications stay with you and make you think
- kind and good people who stay kind and good despite everything they went through and everything they are still going through. People staying bright and optimistic in a world that does everything in its might to break that down.
- characters with power so great it's incontrollable and slowly tearing them apart
- that thing where a person bleeds way more than is actually possible, because that movie's got an R-rating and they'll be damned if they don't use it
- over-the top martial arts fights just on this side of ridiculous
- background rebellion. You know, not the heroic main characters, but those without names ready to lay down their lives for the cause.
- broken and empty characters that still continue on

No, they're not poor babies!

aka please stop the infantilization of 'evil' characters

You know the type. There's this young bad guy (and they're typically white and somewhat attractive) and in the source material they're terrible people performing terrible actions, but for some reason some part of the fandom insists on making them seem like misunderstood, poor babies that only need love and they'd be perfectly fine (see also TV tropes' Woobiefication). 

I've discussed in some length why Loki isn't a pitiful, lonely sweetheart and others have done the same with Kylo Ren. What prompted this talk, however, is my return to the Gotham fandom (season 2 just started on free TV). The most prominent recipient of the woobie-treatment is Oswald Cobblepott aka the Penguin himself. And while he is pitiful and others do treat him awfully, pretending that he's actually just poor and misunderstood, ignores an integral part of his character (apart from being an all around questionable attitude to have towards one of the most sadistic characters of the show).

At least in season one Oswald deliberately plays into people's perception of him as a pathetic loser. He pretends to be silly and submissive and ultimately harmless in order to make others underestimate him (which works out brilliantly mostly). But don't be fooled by his manipulative act. He's only pretending. There's nothing innocent or salvagable about him. It's all part of his meticulous plan. Remember how he even planned for Jim to be the one to execute him, so that he might survive. The first episode of season two shows us the Oswald he really is. Sure of himself, in power and in control, rejoicing in murdering and intimidating his enemies. People will probably always make fun of him and his reaction to that will always be to cut them up in response.

This is the reason why I mostly stay away from fanfiction where Oswald is paired up with someone, because most of the time he's characterized as a somewhat decent person who's just broken and lonely and that love will somehow set things right. Just reading the descriptions makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, because I feel like those stories ignore all the unnecessarily cruel things he does just for fun and the fact that a lot of his pitiful, self-conscious behavior is simply an act. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that people shouldn't write these kinds of stories. I'm a strong advocate of everyone writing whatever the hell they want. I'm only saying that there's a certain danger in fully ignoring all the horrible stuff characters do in favor of infantilizing them. 

Satori likes Oswald just the way he is portrayed in the show - awful and messed-up