Things Which Need To Go Part 2

I split this post into two, because it was getting horribly long. This is part two, which, incidentally, features less ‘how to treat your female leads’ and more ‘stop doing that, it’s annoying’ topics.

4. Torture as a way of gaining information

At first glance, this might look like a ‘SJW’ complaint. Nevertheless, it’s a topic which irks me a lot. Again, this is not about the villain using torture to break someone or just because he’s a sadist. The villain can go on doing this kind of stuff, it’s pretty much part of his job description. It’s about heroes using torture to gain information successfully.

There’s a reason why torture is no longer used as regular means of questioning people. Torture is highly unreliable for several reasons such as people who simply are too strong to be successfully tortured (because they have been trained or have a very high pain tolerance) and people who don’t have the information and lie to end the pain. It has been known for a long time that torture is unreliable as a means of gaining information (and heroes shouldn’t resort to use it for breaking a person’s will or wallow in the pain of others).

Usually, torture is used in stories when information needs to be gathered quickly, too quickly to rely on other means (as espionage or hacking, for instance). And this is where the first problem comes in. If you torture a person who is experienced and can endure a lot of pain, you might run out of time before you get what you need. And if you torture a person who doesn’t know the information you need, they will give you false information just to make it stop. Both cases will not be helpful and shouldn’t be shown as being helpful.

Recently, however, torture as a means for the hero to gain that crucial information has become a very regular topic. It’s been shown on TV, in movies, or in other forms of media. This is highly unrealistic, but a lot of the audience don’t know that and will, therefore, think that this is actually a good way to do things. That’s why people these days think waterboarding actually does something useful. Here we actually also breach the next topic a little, but more below.

Why is this bad? Because it suggests that torture is useful (why else would the hero use it?) and that it’s okay for good people to hurt bad people (or those they see as bad people) to gain information. That not only goes completely against reality, it also makes people think things like ‘why doesn’t the police just beat bad guys up until they confess?’ The answer to that: because that’s not how you find the real culprit.

What can you do instead? Show the heroes tricking the villain (as Black Widow does with Loki in The Avengers, for instance, using his arrogance against him). Show the torture fail. Show how it darkens the hero’s character to use it, how it horrifies him or those around him.

5. Making the world gritty, because it’s fashionable

There are worlds which are, by default, gritty and dark. But there also are worlds which the author has wanted to make dark and gritty for no apparent reason. In most cases, if you look at popular stories of that time, you’ll find it was a fashionable thing to do.

Locke Lamorra lives in a dark and gritty world, because that is part of the story. He and his colleagues are thieves and cons, because that is how they survive in this world. The world is filled with dangers of various kinds. Survival there is hard and that is reflected in the morals of the characters and the kind of stories they appear in.

The ‘Noir’ genre of the thriller was created right after the two World Wars. The world was getting better, but almost everyone had a vivid memory of those dark years. It reflected in the worlds created, in the dubitable characters, in the betrayals, killings, and dangers. It’s a world of criminals, shady people, and anti-heroes.

The world of Game of Thrones is dark and gritty, too, for a reason. It’s a world torn apart by wars and other dangers, by noble houses feuding and those caught in the middle suffering.

Superman, on the other hand, is a bad choice for dark and gritty storytelling. He’s a beacon of hope, always has been. Batman can be made dark and gritty (and Gotham always was more gritty than Metropolis), but not Superman. Yet, the DCEU tried it and produced a flop. They looked at Nolan’s Batman trilogy and thought Superman would work just like that, ignoring the fundamental differences.

If you are trying to write a gritty story, ask yourself why it is gritty. If you have sufficient reason in the fate of your main characters and the world around them, then feel free to go ahead. But never assume a story can only be good because it’s gritty. Light and fluffy can also be a lot of fun. Even darker themes don’t necessarily have to be gritty at the same time.

6. Stereotyping the ‘exotic’ characters

The default for stories these days seems to be the Straight White Male. He’s the action hero who gets the girl in the end. He’s the hero who gets away with torture, especially in gritty worlds. He’s the one who is motivated by the death of his daughter. The second most likely lead is the Straight White Female who, if we’re honest, isn’t doing that much better. Her jobs are often romantic stories where she first falls for the wrong guy, but in the end always for the Straight White Male.

‘Exotic’ characters - meaning ‘everyone who is not SWM or SWF’ - are often just used to spice things up a bit, to pretend you have representation in your story. They are often stereotyped, like the strong black man or the cocky black woman, the Asian scientist, the South American gangster. They are just window-dressing, so the author can point at them and say ‘see, I have a diverse cast.’

Those not straight often fare even worse. ‘Bury your gays’ has been a trope for far too long. Gay characters are often either laughing stock or villains and are killed off before the story ends.

Our society, even in places like Northern Europe, where I live, doesn’t only contain white people, though. Mankind comes in a variety of colour schemes and humans come in a variety of sexual orientations and identities. So, yes, this is a bit of a SJW complaint here. But it’s still a complaint which has merit. Representation matters, no matter whether representation of different ethnicities or different sexual orientations and identities (transgender is still a hairy topic for a lot of people who say ‘you are what your genes say you are, everything else is a mental illness’).

Stereotypes are easy to write, but they also force you on a certain path. They are like a rail: once you’ve started on it, you can’t just turn when you want. You have to follow it. And you limit yourself a lot more than you might imagine at first, since stories with the SWM are doing well. There are a lot of stories which are better told with a person of colour at the helm or with a person who is gay or lesbian. With a person who is beside the norm and proud of it. Real life should be reflected to a certain degree and media representation can change things in real life, too.

Besides - it’s getting old that the hero always is a Straight White Male. Especially as that often leads to the same actors (cough … Tom Cruise … cough) being cast. Especially as that often leads to the ‘Great White Saviour’ trope, when you push a white person into a story with a completely different cultural background. This is one of the worst things you can do. The saviour from outside, who single-handedly saves the poor natives from the oppression they’ve suffered for so long shouldn’t still be around today. Such a story is much stronger with a lead who belongs to those who are oppressed. The one who stands up and says ‘no longer’ and used all the experience their people have with the oppressor to overthrow them. It’s much more realistic, for one thing.

How to change that? It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? Make your heroes male or female or gender-fluid or whatever else you can imagine. Make them straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, asexual - whatever might serve your story or will at least not damage it. Include different ethnicities, but do your research well. Always do your research well. Include disabled people, if you have faith in your ability to write them. You might be surprised at how many different stories you can tell that way.

Break stereotypes and create real, breathing characters. I’ve already written a whole post about that, though, which I won’t rehash here again.

Those are a few things which grind my gears, a few things I’d like not to see used in stories for a long while, until they have become a little less ‘same old’ again.