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meganbmooreTwo fandom (one not always only fandom) terms that I think get misunderstood a lot are Man Pain and Nice Guys. More accurately, I think that, when people object to the terms, what they’re actually reacting to is what they perceive to be complaints about nice guys and manpain, which are actually separate things.
Disclaimer: I am a lazy bum who does not always differentiate myself.
Nice guys (lower case) are, well…nice. They might be badass, and they might be angst, but they’re nice. They support their friends, don’t put up with their friends/girl(or boy)friends/family being insulted or mocked, don’t think they’re owed sex/relationships and don’t tend to put their significant others on pedestals, or measure them against a previous significant other, or a crush who rejected them. They may or may not be the most moral person around, but they don’t act like they’re the moral voice, and usually own up to their prejudices are mistakes. On screen, they’ll get paired with pretty much anyone, but get sidelined in favor of Nice Guys and Bad Boys. If they aren’t the Platonic Best Friend, they probably get written out before long (often in a story arc designed to make them look less nice and make the Bad Boy or Nice Guy look good).
Nice Guys (upper case) are held up as being nice and normal, upstanding guys girls should want to date, and guys should place their POV in. They’re typically upheld a the moral voice of the canon, even when they’re being total losers, judgmental, or practicing double standards. They do these frequently. Their previous significant others and the crushes who rejected them are frequently, in their eyes, seen as “owing” them something, and as being at least somewhat answerable to them. Unless their girl(or boy)friends/family are all be sainted by the canon, their response to the mocking/insulting of the loved one will be to ignore it, “jokingly” join in, or make “now-now” noises but not really object unless it’s someone the canon wants us to hate. Their significant others, current, past, or imagined, are frequently put on pedestals and others are held up and found lacking, chosen for similarities, or someone they try to mold into a similar person, and they are frequently reminded of this under the guise of the Nice Guy denying it even as he does it, or being supportive or helpful. They frequently get paired with flighty and/or self-centered and/or “bitchy” girls so that the audience will agree with them when they joke with their friends about all her personality flaws. These scenes will be portrayed as funny/cute/justified. Otherwise, they will be paired with a Flawed/Dark Heroine so that they can explain to her and the audience all the things about her that need “fixing” and be the sympathetic guy stuck with the problematic woman. They never go away. Never.
Wallace Fennell, Daniel “Oz” Osbourne and Stefan Salvatore are nice guys.
Duncan Kane, Xander Harris and Matt Donovan are Nice Guys.
(Veronica Mars, Buffy, and The Vampire Diaries respectively for both.)
Manpain (lower case, one word) is a gendered term referring to the legitimate pain-physical, emotional or psychological-caused by a character’s experiences. There is also woman pain, but it gets called manpain because (1) canons and fandoms give (typically heterosexual and of the culturally dominant ethnicity) male experience and pain priority and exposure over other pain, and (2) many parts of fandom love men angsting/getting beaten/tortured, and it’s an easy way to express evil glee when the object of a crush is chained to the dungeon wall after being tortured as the villain gloats about how his hoodlums are hunting down the dude’s wife/kid/mentor/puppy.Fandom has kinks. Manpain is often temporary, and lasting manpain is often dealt with and, though still present, a character suffering manpain will typically do hir best to move on with hir life and not burden others with it, or pretend nothing is wrong while figuratively wearing it on hir sleeve. Other characters will frequently call a protagonist on emotional manpain if it goes on long enough, often as a signal to the poor viewer/reader they the canon will be moving on now. Sometimes (often) manpain be allowed to run rampant until it becomes Man Pain, threatening to devour every scene the character is ever in.
Man Pain (upper case, two words) often starts as legitimate pain that becomes an all-encompassing force that often becomes a-if not the-central drive and defining characteristic of a character. Man Pain is used to justify any behavior, which often includes the poor treatment of loved/fond-of-because-your-heart-is-now-stone-and-you-will-never-love-again ones, rudeness, emotional cruelty/coldness, and unrealistic expectations. Bad Boys frequently get a hefty dose of Man Pain (usually a meanie and/or dead ex-girlfriend or mother) to make them more sympathetic so that we‘ll be more forgiving of that one time they tried to rape the heroine, the other time they tried to murder her best friend, or how they led the school in making the heroine‘s life horrible for a year, and Nice Guys often get it to gloss over their own behavior. Man Pain is also often given more attention and presumed justification in canon than manpain.
James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes (Marvel comics) was a teenaged soldier presumed dead in a battle against a Nazi in WW2. He actually lost an arm, was given a cybernetic arm, and was brainwashed into being a mindless assassin working for the people he used to fight who was kept in cryogenic suspension for over half a century and thawed out only when needed to kill people. He also killed his successor and tried to kill his best friend a few times. Free of brainwashing, he angsts a bunch but tries to make amends and move on with his life. He doesn’t go on and on and on about being a tool of evil for decades and actually treats people pretty decently. (You would think hooking up with a ex-soviet spy he trained when she was a teenager and he was still brainwashed would add to his issues, but it actually seems to have helped…) Bucky has manpain.
Bruce “Batman” Wayne had his parents shot in front of him as a kid so he grew up to create a public persona he hated to make sure no one thought he was the unpleasant, frequently hateful, often judgmental, One Man War Against Time. He tries to keep it One Man by pushing everyone except his butler away, making sure his sidekicks/associates never forget that they don’t meet his exacting standards, and is generally an extremely unpleasant person with absurdly exacting standards that can never be met, and he's fond of judging and mansplainin' and Knowing Better Than Everyone Else All The Time. This is because his Man Pain is the driving force of his entire life and most defining characteristic. Batman has MAN PAIN
Sometimes, there is a very fine line between manpain and Man Pain, and manpain is often carried to the point that it becomes Man Pain. Take the Bourne movies, for example. (SPOILER WARNING) Bourne is an amnesiac who everyone wants to kill because he’s actually an assassin who‘s gotten on the wrong side of pretty much every government and faction ever, including his own now that he has amnesia and isn‘t a trustworthy little footsoldier. With amnesia, he’s actually a pretty nice guy, so it’s understandable that he’s distressed about this. The only person in the world who doesn’t want him dead is his girlfriend. At the beginning of the second movie, she gets shot in the head with him in the same car, resulting in the car going over a bridge. And necrokissing. Unsurprisingly, he spends the rest of the movie and the entire third movie in a level of self-hating angst that reaches the point where you wonder if Matt Damon’s face has been replaced with stone to make sure he never smiles. You would think this was Man Pain, but it’s actually still manpain! Just on almost unprecedented levels.
Disclaimer: I am a lazy bum who does not always differentiate myself.
Nice guys (lower case) are, well…nice. They might be badass, and they might be angst, but they’re nice. They support their friends, don’t put up with their friends/girl(or boy)friends/family being insulted or mocked, don’t think they’re owed sex/relationships and don’t tend to put their significant others on pedestals, or measure them against a previous significant other, or a crush who rejected them. They may or may not be the most moral person around, but they don’t act like they’re the moral voice, and usually own up to their prejudices are mistakes. On screen, they’ll get paired with pretty much anyone, but get sidelined in favor of Nice Guys and Bad Boys. If they aren’t the Platonic Best Friend, they probably get written out before long (often in a story arc designed to make them look less nice and make the Bad Boy or Nice Guy look good).
Nice Guys (upper case) are held up as being nice and normal, upstanding guys girls should want to date, and guys should place their POV in. They’re typically upheld a the moral voice of the canon, even when they’re being total losers, judgmental, or practicing double standards. They do these frequently. Their previous significant others and the crushes who rejected them are frequently, in their eyes, seen as “owing” them something, and as being at least somewhat answerable to them. Unless their girl(or boy)friends/family are all be sainted by the canon, their response to the mocking/insulting of the loved one will be to ignore it, “jokingly” join in, or make “now-now” noises but not really object unless it’s someone the canon wants us to hate. Their significant others, current, past, or imagined, are frequently put on pedestals and others are held up and found lacking, chosen for similarities, or someone they try to mold into a similar person, and they are frequently reminded of this under the guise of the Nice Guy denying it even as he does it, or being supportive or helpful. They frequently get paired with flighty and/or self-centered and/or “bitchy” girls so that the audience will agree with them when they joke with their friends about all her personality flaws. These scenes will be portrayed as funny/cute/justified. Otherwise, they will be paired with a Flawed/Dark Heroine so that they can explain to her and the audience all the things about her that need “fixing” and be the sympathetic guy stuck with the problematic woman. They never go away. Never.
Wallace Fennell, Daniel “Oz” Osbourne and Stefan Salvatore are nice guys.
Duncan Kane, Xander Harris and Matt Donovan are Nice Guys.
(Veronica Mars, Buffy, and The Vampire Diaries respectively for both.)
Manpain (lower case, one word) is a gendered term referring to the legitimate pain-physical, emotional or psychological-caused by a character’s experiences. There is also woman pain, but it gets called manpain because (1) canons and fandoms give (typically heterosexual and of the culturally dominant ethnicity) male experience and pain priority and exposure over other pain, and (2) many parts of fandom love men angsting/getting beaten/tortured, and it’s an easy way to express evil glee when the object of a crush is chained to the dungeon wall after being tortured as the villain gloats about how his hoodlums are hunting down the dude’s wife/kid/mentor/puppy.
Man Pain (upper case, two words) often starts as legitimate pain that becomes an all-encompassing force that often becomes a-if not the-central drive and defining characteristic of a character. Man Pain is used to justify any behavior, which often includes the poor treatment of loved/fond-of-because-your-heart-is-now-stone-and-you-will-never-love-again ones, rudeness, emotional cruelty/coldness, and unrealistic expectations. Bad Boys frequently get a hefty dose of Man Pain (usually a meanie and/or dead ex-girlfriend or mother) to make them more sympathetic so that we‘ll be more forgiving of that one time they tried to rape the heroine, the other time they tried to murder her best friend, or how they led the school in making the heroine‘s life horrible for a year, and Nice Guys often get it to gloss over their own behavior. Man Pain is also often given more attention and presumed justification in canon than manpain.
James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes (Marvel comics) was a teenaged soldier presumed dead in a battle against a Nazi in WW2. He actually lost an arm, was given a cybernetic arm, and was brainwashed into being a mindless assassin working for the people he used to fight who was kept in cryogenic suspension for over half a century and thawed out only when needed to kill people. He also killed his successor and tried to kill his best friend a few times. Free of brainwashing, he angsts a bunch but tries to make amends and move on with his life. He doesn’t go on and on and on about being a tool of evil for decades and actually treats people pretty decently. (You would think hooking up with a ex-soviet spy he trained when she was a teenager and he was still brainwashed would add to his issues, but it actually seems to have helped…) Bucky has manpain.
Bruce “Batman” Wayne had his parents shot in front of him as a kid so he grew up to create a public persona he hated to make sure no one thought he was the unpleasant, frequently hateful, often judgmental, One Man War Against Time. He tries to keep it One Man by pushing everyone except his butler away, making sure his sidekicks/associates never forget that they don’t meet his exacting standards, and is generally an extremely unpleasant person with absurdly exacting standards that can never be met, and he's fond of judging and mansplainin' and Knowing Better Than Everyone Else All The Time. This is because his Man Pain is the driving force of his entire life and most defining characteristic. Batman has MAN PAIN
Sometimes, there is a very fine line between manpain and Man Pain, and manpain is often carried to the point that it becomes Man Pain. Take the Bourne movies, for example. (SPOILER WARNING) Bourne is an amnesiac who everyone wants to kill because he’s actually an assassin who‘s gotten on the wrong side of pretty much every government and faction ever, including his own now that he has amnesia and isn‘t a trustworthy little footsoldier. With amnesia, he’s actually a pretty nice guy, so it’s understandable that he’s distressed about this. The only person in the world who doesn’t want him dead is his girlfriend. At the beginning of the second movie, she gets shot in the head with him in the same car, resulting in the car going over a bridge. And necrokissing. Unsurprisingly, he spends the rest of the movie and the entire third movie in a level of self-hating angst that reaches the point where you wonder if Matt Damon’s face has been replaced with stone to make sure he never smiles. You would think this was Man Pain, but it’s actually still manpain! Just on almost unprecedented levels.
no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 01:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-25 11:08 pm (UTC)