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Fiction matters.
Jun. 24th, 2010 12:01 amAnother post on the Avatar: The Last Airbender movie that sums up many of the arguments quite nicely.
Here is the excerpt that gets reposted the most:
Stop thinking. Stop feeling. Put down your books, put down your pens, forget your stories. Close your eyes and plug your ears. Forget what your story sounds like. You have no myths. You have no history. Stop breathing with your heart and living in your head. Your dreams are worthless, because they are not real. They are not tangible. You can't sell them. They are worthless. Go outside and consume, consume, consume. But never question. Never speak. Never dare to feel that you've been malnourished or mistreated. Never, ever admit that you have been poisoned. Be satisfied; you are well fed.
Here's the thing (to expand on one specific part): fiction matters.
Fiction matters when women are raped, murdered, abandoned, mutilated or beaten to further men's narratives.
Fiction matters when trans people only exist as jokes to make other characters (typically heterosexual men) uncomfortable.
Fiction matters when bisexual people do not exist, and homosexuals are either asexual or sex fiends.
Fiction matters when black men and latin men are always gangsters, or the soon-to-be-dead sidekick.
Fiction matters when Asian women are only hot martial artists or victims of abuse.
Fiction matters when a movie about Japanese culture and history features a Chinese cast, when a white man is cast as Alexandre Dumas, when narratives consistently write mothers out of their children's stories, but continue to feature fathers, when all Christians are evil cultists or mindless sheep, all atheists are obsessively practical near-robots, and all muslims are terrorists. It matters when non-white European/American culture and history is shown primarily through the POV of a white European/American man who saves the culture, or becomes its representative. It matters when men disable women's cars "for their own good" and black men talk about how they're eager to die so the white man can be a hero, or are revealed as the evil mastermind after being portrayed as the sympathetic character the whole time. It matters when a wheelchair user can have no sex life, or career, or stable relationship. It matters when treatable mental illness or a mental disorder makes you a killer.
I could go on. You could add just as much.
But fiction matters. Some of us turn to fiction to think. Some of us turn to fiction to not think. Some of us only criticize things we don't like, and some of us criticize everything. Some of us criticize one aspect, and some of us criticize another aspect of the same thing. Some of us won't wath things that annoy us on certain levels, and some of us will stick with it and either deal with or fanwank the part that bothers us.
Liking something you know has problems doesn't mean you agree with it, and not seeing the same problems another sees doesn't mean you're racist/sexist/ableist/etc., or that they're wrong.
But no matter how you approach a text or how you interact with it or what your reasons are for presenting the text fiction matters. We consume it to get something from it. Fiction is a part of our culture. It reflects what a culture finds acceptable, and what thoughts and themes that culture supports. When something persists in fiction, it persists in the culture that the fiction exists in. Does the average white man assume that every black man on the street is going to mug him? No. But should the black man accidentally bump into the white man, our culture and our fiction tells us that the white man should be more suspicious that the black man just stole his wallet than he would be if a white man bumped into him.
Fiction does not exist in a vacuum. It never has and it never will. When you approach a piece of fiction, you are approaching a product created by perceptions of social norms, whether the product agrees with them, sees itself as flaunting them, or challenges them, and consuming it based on your interactions with those norms. It matters.
ETA: lj version