prismatic-bell:

reddishadow:

exac:

“this character did a problematic thing-” its a story helen, commonly including things like conflict and drama

The thing an astonishing amount of people keep ignoring is framing. It’s not enough that a character Did A Bad, how does the piece of media present that action?

There’s a world of difference between:
a) this character Did A Bad and That’s Bad
b) this character Did A Bad and the creators don’t seem to be aware of this so it’s Just A Thing That Happens
c) this character Did A Bad and That’s Great, people who think Doing A Bad is Bad are Wrong.

Like, both Atlas Shrugged and Bioshock are about a guy who’s sick of people and their “rules” and “caring about people other than yourself”, and decides to build his own paradise hidden away from the world where he doesn’t have to kowtow to any of that tedious ~morality~ other people seem to have for some reason. In this kind of reductive mindset, both must be equally hashtag problematic.

In Atlas Shrugged, the book is so keen to trip over itself in glorifying the mindset behind the story that it literally stops dead for sixty solid pages of the author giving up what little pretence of actual narrative the story has to just pasting The Objectivist Manifesto into the mouth of one of the book’s many, many empty mouthpieces. The guy is so right, he’s a genius and could revolutionise the world if only those pesky normies with their ~ethics~ would just get the fuck out of his way and let him do whatever he wants.

In Bioshock, the guy’s glorious monument to self-interest falls apart into a hellish dystopia only a few years after being constructed because, shocker (heh), gathering an entire city’s worth of amoral “rational free thinkers" would result in everybody turning on each other and their unchecked scientific experiments turning everyone into barely-human monsters. Because safety laws and the bounds of ethics are for squares!

One of these is an unabashed advertising tool for the ideology behind it, one of these is a satire of that same ideology by presenting a realistic prediction of how the original set-up of an objectivist “paradise” hidden from the world would actually play out anywhere on Earth that isn’t inside Ayn Rand’s head.

Framing, my lovelies. It’s very important, far more important, in fact, than the immensely shallow surface-level reading of “in media A character B did thing C and thing C is bad therefore everyone who so much as thinks about liking media A is literally worse than Satan”.

Then again, actually engaging with media on any level beyond the immediate surface isn’t conducive to holier-than-thou Hot Takes so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@lordhellebore