whetstonefires:

whetstonefires:

whetstonefires:

I love redemption storylines but I also distrust the hell out of them. Because roughly 70% of overall and 90% of the ones in fandom aren’t so much about people learning to be good, or kind, or regretful, or even just better, as about identifying someone cruel-but-compelling as being in-clade.

And therefore defending them and their emotional needs against all comers, no matter how just their grudges or valid their needs, no matter if they want blood or just an apology. Because they aren’t yours.

This sort of pity-based vindication narrative is nice when you identify with the person who’s achieved in-clade status, because who doesn’t want to be accepted and defended by a community that knows the worst things about them, and values them anyway?

But it’s horrifying when you don’t, because then it’s just your abuser winning over your community, again, and there’s no reason to believe they’ve learned anything except how to make sad faces and get people to protect them from consequences of their actions.

Which means you’ll never be safe again, and there is no one on your side.

Especially because this process seems to happen mostly to the
benefit of violent white men with persecution complexes, because those
are the villains we’re culturally programmed to see as individuals with
complex psychologies that validate their violent actions.

And if that sort of individual or the sort of world that enables them over and over and over is what has given your nightmares form, then ‘redemption’ stories based around them, especially those fun whumpy self-indulgent ones that center on their persecution and suffering, rather than on the hard, stomach-wrenching process of learning how to confront toxic aspects of yourself and repudiate them, without refusing to take responsibility for what you’ve done as a result, aren’t going to serve you. The best reaction you can be expected to have is neutral disengagement.

Which is why it is really really not okay to pressure people to engage with your villain redemption narrative if they aren’t doing so on their own. Especially via guilt, via any hint that the bad guy is owed their emotional labor just because you empathize with him.

He isn’t, because he doesn’t exist, and is not a person with rights.

And if he existed, so would his victims, and then you would owe them exactly as much sympathy and respect. If not more.

So please stop it with the idea that people who take the villain’s part are inherently more compassionate: if taking a hard line on villainy has real-world implications wrt the retributive model of justice, then centering on the villain has real-world implications wrt systemic empathy gaps. Nobody wins this.

While villain stanning is fine, and it’s not inherently wrong to valorize them and their suffering, people who react badly to narratives that demand they prioritize the justifications of the villain/abuser/killer etc over the impact of their resulting actions are coming from a valid place.

The villains whose vindication meta and fic get the most pushback don’t tend to be the ones who are actually taken through an arc of learning to be better and acting that out in the world. It’s the ones whose suffering is constructed as exculpation.

The ones who believe in their own importance and victimhood so strongly that no one else’s life counts as much as their pain or their wants, and whom a significant chunk of the audience finds a suitable vehicle for their wholly natural and usually appropriate feelings that the world has wronged them and ought to bend around their needs.

Resistance to ‘redemption narratives,’ in my experience, has a lot less to do with moral crusaders hung up on the model of retributive justice than people who receive a majority of such narratives as attempts to coerce them into complicity with their own dehumanization.

People
need different kinds of stories. That’s fine. But the second someone
takes a figure with a pattern of inflicting harm on others for
self-centered reasons and chooses to frame a reluctance to engage with a narrative centered on that character’s feelings as inherently driven by lack of empathy, I lose most of my respect for that person’s ethical judgment.

Compassion
is vital to living ethically, but you have to be able to have it for
people you don’t know and can’t see.

The fact that I get to see Rex
Tillerson make regretful sadface about liars on a podium, now that he’s
washed out of the Trump administration, means it’s easier for my natural
instincts to say ‘tribe…?’ at him than it is for them to say ‘tribe’ about
a hundred kids in Yemen or Syria or Puerto Rico whose deaths Rex
Tillerson facilitated as Secretary of State. Or for that matter a
hundred kids anywhere whose deaths he facilitated as CEO of
Exxon-Mobile.

That does not make sympathizing with Rex Tillerson more morally correct than
sympathizing with the dead children whose existence I can infer only
from statistics. My instincts do not have profound ethical insight. They
don’t understand that the people you know are not the only real people.
They
are easily spoofed.

Following your heart is useful up to a point, but the feelings it’s easy to have do not correlate reliably to the courses of action it is obligatory to pursue.

Even leaving aside all the abusive and exploitative ways our sense of empathy is regularly manipulated by individuals and institutions, it’s universally important to remember that our personal ability to identify with someone does not actually define their inherent worth.

That does mean that even if you hate the villain he’s still a person, but it equally means that even if the villain has the best-developed character in the story, he doesn’t thereby gain the right to abuse minor characters.

The fact that the story tells us why the villain hurts does not make his pain, in-universe, more real or more important than
that of the random extra he set on fire because they were in his way,
or the extra’s grieving family. And you just…don’t get to tell people they’re
defective for valuing the latter over the former.

No.

Protagonist-centered morality is bullshit.

Turning it around to favor the villain rarely makes it less bullshit. Usually it makes it even worse. If you’re going to be just and fair to everyone, do that, and if you’re going to be shamelessly partisan, do that, but don’t spit in my hair and tell me it’s raining.