No, it doesn’t indicate a problem with the critique. If I tell you that super mario is not a particularly feminist piece of work I don’t think you’d disagree, but I imagine you’d probably not agree that we shouldn’t play it.
Criticism isn’t about saying that something is unworthy of our time: quite the contrary, its about looking at worthy pieces of work and seeing where they fail and they succeed.
Yes, the best friend dying to motivate our hero is a classic motivation, and not one that is inherently bad. However, because so many heroes in literature and film are men, and so many of the friends that die are women, it begins to be problematic. Pointing out tropes and their abundance in culture isn’t to say that an individual instance is necessarily bad, but to say that it might be worth thinking of new ways to approach the problem. For example, being sexually assaulted in one’s past might be an excellent motivation for a female character, except it occurs in fiction a hell of a lot, so it has become tiresome.
For more on this I might point to the good (if a little feminist 101) tropes vs women in video games videos.
No, it doesn’t indicate a problem with the critique. If I tell you that super mario is not a particularly feminist piece of work I don’t think you’d disagree, but I imagine you’d probably not agree that we shouldn’t play it.
Criticism isn’t about saying that something is unworthy of our time: quite the contrary, its about looking at worthy pieces of work and seeing where they fail and they succeed.
When you say something fails, one of two things is the case: either the thing you’re talking about is deficient in some way and should or could be improved; or you’re making an irrelevant statement. Otherwise you shouldn’t have used the language of “fail” and “succeed”.
Also, people are not just saying that HPMoR isn’t particularly feminist. That I would take as meaning that it’s simply orthogonal to feminism. But they are saying it in a way that suggests they think it is a flaw. I don’t think anybody will deny this.
Now, if I understand you correctly, what you’re saying is that people are wrong to utter this as a complaint, but that it’s legitimate to point out that HPMoR instantiates certain patterns. Even if you are explicit that you’re not saying it shouldn’t conform to these pattern, I think it’s not relevant. And the reason is this:
However, because so many heroes in literature and film are men, and so many of the friends that die are women, it begins to be problematic.
I’m not saying that it can never be problematic. There is this problematic pattern. What I’m saying is that this pattern-matching leads you astray in the case of HPMoR because its conforming to this pattern is an accident brought about by completely feminism-irrelevant meta-issues (namely the relation between certain unobjectionable story premises and the original from which it is derived). Instantiations of tropes that come about in this accidental way don’t count; in the same way that someone who doesn’t speak Chinese by chance producing a sequence of sounds with the right pitch contour that by a Chinese speaker would be perceived as a word doesn’t count as that person having spoken a word of Chinese.
Quite a number of things feminists find problematic in fiction are so not because of anything intrinsic in them (surely stories don’t really have any intrinsic meaning, really; they always only mean something to people who have interpreted them somehow), but because in the context of broader culture those things have Unfortunate Implications. Now, simply avoiding doing anything that has Unfortunate Implications severely restricts what can be said about women, which in turn has Unfortunate Implications of its own. So, short of just fixing all of society so the context isn’t so troublesome any more, there are always going to be hard choices, and reasonable people are going to disagree about whether the right choice has been made. The present critique is pointing out, correctly, that Hermione’s fate has Unfortunate Implications. Perhaps there was a better way to tell the story, but one can point out the UIs without knowing such a better way, and even if one doubts that it really exists; drawing attention to UIs may improve understanding and contribute to other projects even if there is no fixable deficiency in the present target.
If a text can have Unfortunate Implications even if there was no alternative way to tell the story and the story is legitimate, then I don’t understand this concept of Unfortunate Implications and I think it oughtn’t to be called “Unfortunate Implications”. Because there is no implication of anything.
These things seem to me to work like implicatures. “The author could have told the story in a different way. But she didn’t, she told the story in a way conforming to this or that culturally prevalent pattern. Interesting.”. But if the author couldn’t have told it in any other way anyway and the conformity with the pattern is a purely accidental property and the cultural prevalence of the pattern has nothing to do with anything in how it came about, then this isn’t interesting.
If a text can have Unfortunate Implications even if there was no alternative way to tell the story and the story is legitimate, then I don’t understand this concept of Unfortunate Implications and I think it oughtn’t to be called “Unfortunate Implications”. Because there is no implication of anything.
The point is that once an author is made aware of a trope which can be off putting to some readers, they can
attempt to avoid it in future. Obviously the author doesn’t have to, and sometimes this particular trope might be necessary, but I don’t think its bad to go “hey, this doesn’t work for me for x y and z reasons”.
From a story telling point of view, ignoring feminism for a minute, I personally find characters dying “randomly” unsatisfying. Joss Whedon does this occasionally, killing off characters essentially at random, rather than letting said character have a heroic moment then dying. I appreciate that this is deeply realistic, but the story lover in me rebels. This is, of course, a different issue from the one I’m approaching, but I wonder if it isn’t adding to some people’s reaction.
This was anything but a random death. It was foreshadowed for a long time, we knew who’d do it and why, it’s an integral part of the main storyline. Part of the story worked exactly because we were expecting this, but the characters were not.
No, it doesn’t indicate a problem with the critique. If I tell you that super mario is not a particularly feminist piece of work I don’t think you’d disagree, but I imagine you’d probably not agree that we shouldn’t play it.
Criticism isn’t about saying that something is unworthy of our time: quite the contrary, its about looking at worthy pieces of work and seeing where they fail and they succeed.
Yes, the best friend dying to motivate our hero is a classic motivation, and not one that is inherently bad. However, because so many heroes in literature and film are men, and so many of the friends that die are women, it begins to be problematic. Pointing out tropes and their abundance in culture isn’t to say that an individual instance is necessarily bad, but to say that it might be worth thinking of new ways to approach the problem. For example, being sexually assaulted in one’s past might be an excellent motivation for a female character, except it occurs in fiction a hell of a lot, so it has become tiresome.
For more on this I might point to the good (if a little feminist 101) tropes vs women in video games videos.
http://www.feministfrequency.com/tag/tropes-vs-women-in-video-games/
When you say something fails, one of two things is the case: either the thing you’re talking about is deficient in some way and should or could be improved; or you’re making an irrelevant statement. Otherwise you shouldn’t have used the language of “fail” and “succeed”.
Also, people are not just saying that HPMoR isn’t particularly feminist. That I would take as meaning that it’s simply orthogonal to feminism. But they are saying it in a way that suggests they think it is a flaw. I don’t think anybody will deny this.
Now, if I understand you correctly, what you’re saying is that people are wrong to utter this as a complaint, but that it’s legitimate to point out that HPMoR instantiates certain patterns. Even if you are explicit that you’re not saying it shouldn’t conform to these pattern, I think it’s not relevant. And the reason is this:
I’m not saying that it can never be problematic. There is this problematic pattern. What I’m saying is that this pattern-matching leads you astray in the case of HPMoR because its conforming to this pattern is an accident brought about by completely feminism-irrelevant meta-issues (namely the relation between certain unobjectionable story premises and the original from which it is derived). Instantiations of tropes that come about in this accidental way don’t count; in the same way that someone who doesn’t speak Chinese by chance producing a sequence of sounds with the right pitch contour that by a Chinese speaker would be perceived as a word doesn’t count as that person having spoken a word of Chinese.
Quite a number of things feminists find problematic in fiction are so not because of anything intrinsic in them (surely stories don’t really have any intrinsic meaning, really; they always only mean something to people who have interpreted them somehow), but because in the context of broader culture those things have Unfortunate Implications. Now, simply avoiding doing anything that has Unfortunate Implications severely restricts what can be said about women, which in turn has Unfortunate Implications of its own. So, short of just fixing all of society so the context isn’t so troublesome any more, there are always going to be hard choices, and reasonable people are going to disagree about whether the right choice has been made. The present critique is pointing out, correctly, that Hermione’s fate has Unfortunate Implications. Perhaps there was a better way to tell the story, but one can point out the UIs without knowing such a better way, and even if one doubts that it really exists; drawing attention to UIs may improve understanding and contribute to other projects even if there is no fixable deficiency in the present target.
If a text can have Unfortunate Implications even if there was no alternative way to tell the story and the story is legitimate, then I don’t understand this concept of Unfortunate Implications and I think it oughtn’t to be called “Unfortunate Implications”. Because there is no implication of anything.
These things seem to me to work like implicatures. “The author could have told the story in a different way. But she didn’t, she told the story in a way conforming to this or that culturally prevalent pattern. Interesting.”. But if the author couldn’t have told it in any other way anyway and the conformity with the pattern is a purely accidental property and the cultural prevalence of the pattern has nothing to do with anything in how it came about, then this isn’t interesting.
You appear to be saying that readers are unfair to authors. Well, yes, they are.
That sounds a lot like Conservation of Expected Evidence to me, by analogy if not quite literally.
The point is that once an author is made aware of a trope which can be off putting to some readers, they can attempt to avoid it in future. Obviously the author doesn’t have to, and sometimes this particular trope might be necessary, but I don’t think its bad to go “hey, this doesn’t work for me for x y and z reasons”.
From a story telling point of view, ignoring feminism for a minute, I personally find characters dying “randomly” unsatisfying. Joss Whedon does this occasionally, killing off characters essentially at random, rather than letting said character have a heroic moment then dying. I appreciate that this is deeply realistic, but the story lover in me rebels. This is, of course, a different issue from the one I’m approaching, but I wonder if it isn’t adding to some people’s reaction.
This was anything but a random death. It was foreshadowed for a long time, we knew who’d do it and why, it’s an integral part of the main storyline. Part of the story worked exactly because we were expecting this, but the characters were not.
Whether this is a reasonable request depends very much on whether the readers in question are themselves reasonable in being putt off by the trope.