Crime and Punishment in a Just World
I was keeping myself amused by reading reviews of the latest Doctor Who and was struck by one criticism in particular: someone was accusing Who's headwriter to have taken last season's message and thrown it away and replaced it by the opposite message.
It wasn't an unfounded criticism, but I was completely dumbfounded by it nevertheless.
I looked at it and realized that what rubbed me wrong about this was not the interpretation itself, but the assumption that Doctor Who has a message.
It suddenly struck me as the greatest fallacy I've ever seen in any fandom - because I have seen it in any fandom I ever looked at.
Let's take HP, for example: Hermione punishes the clasmate who ran off to tell the authorities about their illegal activities and nothing bad happens to Hermione, yet the classmate is scarred for life. I look at this and imagine the author going "and that's why you don't go and tell the teacher, kids." (Not literally, of course, just figuratively.)
I mean, if it doesn't have bad consequences for the fictional characters, doesn't that mean that the characters are in the right?
Am I wrong to assume that the moral, the message of a story lies in the way characters are rewarded/punished by their actions?
Feuding families drive their children into suicide, therefore feuds are wrong? Jealousy will lead you to kill your wife for things she hasn't actually done? Greed and ambition will might give you the throne, but you'll lose your honour, you happiness, your dignity, your wife, your sanity, your life?
Isn't that what Shakespeare is telling me? Aren't those his messages? And what about the Brothers Grimm and their long-suffering orphans and cindermaids? Doesn't that tell me how a good heart and enduring humiliation and pain will lead to a better life? What about Dickens? What about Tolstoy? Aren't they telling me something? Don't they have a message?
Are we not trained to look for the moral of a story everywhere we look? Is not the way punishment is doled out ultimately the author trying to tell us about how a just and fair world according to him would work? Is fiction, especially children's fiction, not about representing ideals?
Yet, isn't that a fallacy? Just because Hermione is rewarded for scarring Marietta and Marietta is punished for being a snitch does that mean that Hermione represents the postive ideal?
Or is that just a healthy dose of realism? Crappy people do crappy things to good people all the time and get away. A just world is an illusion, so why should Rowling represent a positive ideal about a non-existent reality rather than the cold hard truth that life sucks and that heroes can be sucky people, too?
To be fair, HP isn't exactly the cutting edge of fictional realism and neither is Doctor Who and Tolstoy was very proud of the messages in his stories and according to Shakespeare there was no more woe than the story of Juliet and her Romeo, but I congratulate the person who finds a message in Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides or Welsh's Esctasy short stories.
But there are a lot of fandoms between Shakespeare's Tragedies and Irvine Welsh. I never hesitated passing a harsh judgement on Hermione's hex and other attempts of hers to harm other human beings, but reading that criticism of Doctor Who has me reconsidering my attitude here.
If you boil down a complex and possibly tragic ending down to the author sending the message that "father knows best" then even something so openly declared to be children's entertainment as Doctor Who can be over-simplified.
And maybe I am even doing injustice to Shakespeare. He ripped the plot of Romeo and Juliet from Arthur Brooke (who had stolen it from someone else, who in turn had stolen it... never mind.) who pretty loudly declared that the story was about two misbehaving brats who got their punishment for not obeying their parents. And who is to say that Shakespeare's intended message doesn't differ from Brooke's?
I have nothing but my gut feeling (and a gazillion scholars agreeing with me) that Shakespeare's emphasis on the family's brutality has a point that contradicts Brooke's interpretation. I can't prove that Marietta's punishment has Rowling's approval except that the impression that if HP is supposed to be represent a morally grey world it woefully falls short of the mark.
Maybe things like Draco crying were steps into a grey morality, but seeing the lack of authorial pity towards Draco in general it's baby steps at best, not full-fledged evidence that heroes and villains in HP are morally and ethically interchangeable.
So what about Doctor Who?
Maybe it's not a fallacy to believe that it has a message, but maybe the assigned message was just wrong. Maybe it's not about "father knows best", maybe it's just "life sucks, but goes on."
It wasn't an unfounded criticism, but I was completely dumbfounded by it nevertheless.
I looked at it and realized that what rubbed me wrong about this was not the interpretation itself, but the assumption that Doctor Who has a message.
It suddenly struck me as the greatest fallacy I've ever seen in any fandom - because I have seen it in any fandom I ever looked at.
Let's take HP, for example: Hermione punishes the clasmate who ran off to tell the authorities about their illegal activities and nothing bad happens to Hermione, yet the classmate is scarred for life. I look at this and imagine the author going "and that's why you don't go and tell the teacher, kids." (Not literally, of course, just figuratively.)
I mean, if it doesn't have bad consequences for the fictional characters, doesn't that mean that the characters are in the right?
Am I wrong to assume that the moral, the message of a story lies in the way characters are rewarded/punished by their actions?
Feuding families drive their children into suicide, therefore feuds are wrong? Jealousy will lead you to kill your wife for things she hasn't actually done? Greed and ambition will might give you the throne, but you'll lose your honour, you happiness, your dignity, your wife, your sanity, your life?
Isn't that what Shakespeare is telling me? Aren't those his messages? And what about the Brothers Grimm and their long-suffering orphans and cindermaids? Doesn't that tell me how a good heart and enduring humiliation and pain will lead to a better life? What about Dickens? What about Tolstoy? Aren't they telling me something? Don't they have a message?
Are we not trained to look for the moral of a story everywhere we look? Is not the way punishment is doled out ultimately the author trying to tell us about how a just and fair world according to him would work? Is fiction, especially children's fiction, not about representing ideals?
Yet, isn't that a fallacy? Just because Hermione is rewarded for scarring Marietta and Marietta is punished for being a snitch does that mean that Hermione represents the postive ideal?
Or is that just a healthy dose of realism? Crappy people do crappy things to good people all the time and get away. A just world is an illusion, so why should Rowling represent a positive ideal about a non-existent reality rather than the cold hard truth that life sucks and that heroes can be sucky people, too?
To be fair, HP isn't exactly the cutting edge of fictional realism and neither is Doctor Who and Tolstoy was very proud of the messages in his stories and according to Shakespeare there was no more woe than the story of Juliet and her Romeo, but I congratulate the person who finds a message in Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides or Welsh's Esctasy short stories.
But there are a lot of fandoms between Shakespeare's Tragedies and Irvine Welsh. I never hesitated passing a harsh judgement on Hermione's hex and other attempts of hers to harm other human beings, but reading that criticism of Doctor Who has me reconsidering my attitude here.
If you boil down a complex and possibly tragic ending down to the author sending the message that "father knows best" then even something so openly declared to be children's entertainment as Doctor Who can be over-simplified.
And maybe I am even doing injustice to Shakespeare. He ripped the plot of Romeo and Juliet from Arthur Brooke (who had stolen it from someone else, who in turn had stolen it... never mind.) who pretty loudly declared that the story was about two misbehaving brats who got their punishment for not obeying their parents. And who is to say that Shakespeare's intended message doesn't differ from Brooke's?
I have nothing but my gut feeling (and a gazillion scholars agreeing with me) that Shakespeare's emphasis on the family's brutality has a point that contradicts Brooke's interpretation. I can't prove that Marietta's punishment has Rowling's approval except that the impression that if HP is supposed to be represent a morally grey world it woefully falls short of the mark.
Maybe things like Draco crying were steps into a grey morality, but seeing the lack of authorial pity towards Draco in general it's baby steps at best, not full-fledged evidence that heroes and villains in HP are morally and ethically interchangeable.
So what about Doctor Who?
Maybe it's not a fallacy to believe that it has a message, but maybe the assigned message was just wrong. Maybe it's not about "father knows best", maybe it's just "life sucks, but goes on."