![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Okay, frak you, too
Mar. 7th, 2009 02:21 am( tl; dr: BSG is sexist, get over it, me. (No spoilers for tonight.) )
It's a major problem in fiction when you create a world with a different value system from your own. If you want them to be so different, you have to betray your own ideas of what is right and wrong and go, "What would Person X living in World Y think about this Action Z?" The better you are able to separate your own value judgments from that system, the more successful it will be. It's fine to go, "I'll create a world where they think nothing of murdering the second baby in a set of twins!" That's a good challenge to our sense that baby-murdering is wrong, and if you can write it such that the people in your work of fiction can be still entirely sympathetic despite this baby-killing thing, you've written yourself an amazing story. If instead you pull a BSG and write characters such that all the baby-killers end up miserable or dead, you pass judgment on them as the author and your readers/audience will pick up on that. It invalidates the system you set up, and your world breaks a little. (If the point of the story is that people wake up to the fact that this isn't such a great moral thing to do, it's another story. But you can't go "Oh yeah, everybody does this, it's not shocking" and then brutalize the people who do it without invalidating that assumption.)
This is what I mean when I say authorial intent isn't always the final word in a work of fiction. Maybe the author really intended their world of twin-killing people to seem totally normal. But their own moral judgments sabotaged their work. I think it's perfectly fair to call them out on it. This is what workshopping is about, is it not? "Hey, listen, this is totally awesome as a concept, but I don't think you actually believe it. If that's the case, you should reconsider how hard you sell this value in your fictional world." A good author would go, "Hmm, you're right. I need to commit to it more or show that my people are actually ambivalent about it." Because when the author doesn't know how to sculpt a part of his/her world, you can always tell. It's lazy to hand-wave away criticism. And fucking annoying to the audience to go, "Fuck off, you over-sensitive pricks. We're totally sensitive to your minority views. We told you to go climb a tree instead of calling you a bunch of whining pussies, didn't we?
It's a major problem in fiction when you create a world with a different value system from your own. If you want them to be so different, you have to betray your own ideas of what is right and wrong and go, "What would Person X living in World Y think about this Action Z?" The better you are able to separate your own value judgments from that system, the more successful it will be. It's fine to go, "I'll create a world where they think nothing of murdering the second baby in a set of twins!" That's a good challenge to our sense that baby-murdering is wrong, and if you can write it such that the people in your work of fiction can be still entirely sympathetic despite this baby-killing thing, you've written yourself an amazing story. If instead you pull a BSG and write characters such that all the baby-killers end up miserable or dead, you pass judgment on them as the author and your readers/audience will pick up on that. It invalidates the system you set up, and your world breaks a little. (If the point of the story is that people wake up to the fact that this isn't such a great moral thing to do, it's another story. But you can't go "Oh yeah, everybody does this, it's not shocking" and then brutalize the people who do it without invalidating that assumption.)
This is what I mean when I say authorial intent isn't always the final word in a work of fiction. Maybe the author really intended their world of twin-killing people to seem totally normal. But their own moral judgments sabotaged their work. I think it's perfectly fair to call them out on it. This is what workshopping is about, is it not? "Hey, listen, this is totally awesome as a concept, but I don't think you actually believe it. If that's the case, you should reconsider how hard you sell this value in your fictional world." A good author would go, "Hmm, you're right. I need to commit to it more or show that my people are actually ambivalent about it." Because when the author doesn't know how to sculpt a part of his/her world, you can always tell. It's lazy to hand-wave away criticism. And fucking annoying to the audience to go, "Fuck off, you over-sensitive pricks. We're totally sensitive to your minority views. We told you to go climb a tree instead of calling you a bunch of whining pussies, didn't we?
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
