I’m starting to take issue with the popular line “I have no problem with characters doing bad things, as long as they’re explicitly condemned in-universe.”
Is it so awful to have to make that judgment for yourself? To be shown a morally gray or even totally black situation that isn’t presented like a sermon? You are allowed to come to your own conclusions about a character. An author’s failure to condemn problematic characters doesn’t mean they condone them. It means they’re asking you to make up your own damn mind.
Also, I feel like it’s much closer to real life to see casually bigoted characters going ignored than to have them ham-fistedly called out for it at every turn. Because sometimes people who are racist are good people in other ways. Sometimes people who are explicitly anti-racist are terrible people in other ways. Because people are whole people, and I’m sick of the idea that authors have to explicitly condemn or condone them. My job as a writer is to depict people. Not to judge them. To let the audience do that for their damn selves.
Real people aren’t fed to us on black or white platters. Why should fictional ones be?
I feel like these conversations would benefit tremendously from less prescriptive language. Like, imagine if instead of “I have no problem with characters doing bad things as long as they’re explicitly condemned”, that person went with “when a character is a bigot and faces no consequences in universe, that ruins the story for me”. That’s something that’s true for a lot of people, and something that it’s totally reasonable to complain about. It belongs in the same category as “relentless cynicism ruins a story for me” or “that weird thing where you have three male characters and three female characters and they’re very conspicuously Paired-Off Love Interests ruins a story for me” or “economics that seem implausible ruin a story for me”. People are allowed to have their dealbreakers!
But it’s a mistake to go from “this thing isn’t pleasant for me and I avoid it” to “it’s bigoted/ignorant/wrong/evil to write that thing”. There are hella competing needs in the world of fiction. There are people who need independent characters who scorn romance and people who need healthy supportive romantic relationships and people who need unhealthy manipulative disasters of romantic relationships. There are people who need honest narratives about bigotry that faces no consequences, there are people who need stories set in a world that feels a little more just. Sometimes the same person needs conflicting things at different times!
You cannot write a story that won’t make someone go “oh, ugh” and you shouldn’t feel obliged to try. And so we need space for peoples’ “oh ugh” to be valid and legitimate and yet not a veto.
all of the “cringe/cancel culture is bad” and “cringe/cancel culture is good, actually” takes on here miss a very important truth - it’s bad to cringe at or cancel things i like, and good to cringe at or cancel things i dislike
And if you look up the stages of gentrification, it usually goes like “artists and teachers and etc move into this neighborhood because its what they can afford” and THEN “developers notice these people and try to capitalize on them.”
in college a teacher explained that criticizing gentrification wasn’t about shaming or blaming the white people that were most likely living in the only apartments they could afford - it was about asking why their living there was inherently valuable. it’s not really about who - it’s about why. why white lives are literally valued more. why is the presence of white people a gentrifying force? what is it about whiteness that elicits immediate value?
sorry bro but according to my calculations you now have to kiss me on the lips. bro it’s in the math right here i checked it with a calculator and everything
