Just who has the black and white world view here? Or: rexamining fannish vocabulary

[selenak]

The other day, when looking for someone, anyone, writing anything about Regina and Snow that's not driving me crazy, I came across about the comment that "Regina has been remarkable patient with Snow", complete with somewhat later a comment about "The Charmings' black-and-white morality". Now, other than immediately thinking "you have that backwards, Ma'am, on both counts" (and massively so), it reminded me of something that I've observed in fannish circles since ye olde Highlander days, and the more time passes, the more fandoms I travel through, the less true when one looks at the actual canon it appears to me. To wit, two basic assumptions:

1) Heroes (male or female) have a black-and-white morality, are unwilling to compromise, and have a narrow, inflexible world view. By contrast, villains (and morally ambiguous characters) have a far more sophisticated point of view and are able to appreciate the shades of grey in life. This goes hand in hand with heroes being naive and child-like whereas villains are mature and smart.

2) Being able to see the moral shades of grey as opposed to having a black and white world view equals unconditionally supporting the fannish favourite, no matter what good reasons there might be to object to actions of said favourites, act against the favourite or, gasp, dislike or hate the fannish favourite.


Going back to my earliest online fandom, back in the day, and I bet that's still the case, show hero Duncan's reactions in the Horsemen episodes was unfavourably contrasted to Joe's. Duncan, a great many fans argued, was showing his narrow, black and white world view via his shock at the revelation that their friend Methos turned out to have a past as a mass murdering warlord, whereas Joe was able to see the shades of grey (different times). By which they meant Joe's instinctive reaction to Cassandra's revelations about Methos' past was "that crazy bitch must be lying" (classic rape culture, though the phrase hadn't been coined back in ye early 90s), and then, when it turned out she hadn't been lying at all "these were different times and Methos is totes different now" (well, yes, but a) doesn't mean Cassandra is obliged to forgive him, and b), that's not what you said when it wasn't your buddy but Kirin/Kage, an Immortal whom you only knew via the chronicles, Joe. Back then, you declared Duncan crazy and naive for giving Kirin/Kage the benefit of the doubt and allowing for the possibility that even an evil warlord might change and become a good person.) In conclusion, what Joe was showing in the Horsemen eps wasn't greater appreciation of shades of grey, it was buddy loyalty. Which is a very human trait, and it means he's a good friend to have, but it's really not the same thing as greater unterstanding of moral dilemmas. Meanwhile, Duncan starts by NOT declaring Cassandra a crazy lying bitch but hearing her out, then hearing Methos out, and spends the rest of both episodes despite his shock clinging to the hope Methos has changed, at least enough not to aid and abet mass killing anymore, looking for clues that this is so, and making a massive leap of faith based on that. While trying to keep both Cassandra and Methos alive. Yep, that's truly a man of black and white morality unable to see outside of his own narrow pov.

There is an earlier episode in the same season, Valkyrie, which also comes to mind here. Duncan's old friend Ingrid, due to guilt of having had the chance to kill Hitler and having been unable to go through with it, is currently assassinating wannabe dictators, demagogues and up and rising scum left, right and center, which often involves killing several or even alot of bystanders as well. Whenever I see this episode quoted as an example of Duncan having a black-and-white world view and Methos evidencing his superior understanding of the shades of grey in morality, I'm similarly boggled. What Methos evidences is his pragmatism. (Not the same thing.) He has an opinion from the get go, which is that Duncan should just kill Ingrid, never mind understanding her reasons. He doesn't budge from this opinion for the rest of the episode. It's Duncan who changes his opinion on what he should to several times depending on his state of information, who because he understands where Ingrid is coming from but also can't do nothing once he knows doing nothing means letting her kill both people for what they might or might not do, and people who happen to be in their vicinity tries just about everything to find another solution, including various attempts to talk to Ingrid and one, via cooperating with a mortal policeman, to get her arrested which would mean her imprisonment but not death. It's this mortal policeman (one of HL's great minor characters) who has the episodes most famous lines about seeing things in black and white as a child and now finding there were only shades of grey. He, too, understands Ingrid's reasons. But you know what he doesn't do? Letting her continue to do her thing and look away because of that.

Which brings me my next point. Acknowledging moral dilemmas, trying to understand where the other side is coming from, to compromise instead of pushing for a "my way or nothing at all" solution, that's not something I've seen the majority of villains do in genre tv (and cinema) during the last twenty years or so. Au contraire. It's what I keep seeing the heroes do. Take the earlier quoted Once Upon A Time examples. If anyone has a narrow black and white world view from which she only very recently is starting to move away, it's Regina. Regina actually trying to understand someone else's pov instead of always insisting she's the wronged party (even if the wrongers in question are, say, two children she kidnapped, sent in lethal danger and who strangely don't want to live with her afterwards) is breathtakingly new (and good to see). It also puts her ahead of such other fannish favourite villains as Loki (MCU edition) or Morgana (BBCs Merlin edition), who kept the "everything bad that ever happened to me is always someone else's fault and never my own, my point of view is the only one worth having, everything bad I did was something the other people had coming, and/or was someone else's fault as well, and/or who are these insects anyway and why should I care?" attitude till the very end, in Morgana's case, or till the most recent point in canon, in Loki's. But it took Regina a really long time to get there, and we still don't know whether it will keep, or whether she'll be able to show empathy for anyone she's not either related to or used to be friends with.

Meanwhile, also in Once Upon A Time, you had Snow understanding where Regina was coming from when Regina was making her first attempt on Snow's life (via the Huntsman), rescueing Regina's life (for the first, not the last time) when already an outlaw whom Regina had put a price on, expressing fervent belief in Regina's redeemability and longing for her company that stopped only when presented with the dead bodies of an entire village Regina had ordered slaughtered, saving Regina from execution (again) after her own victory and giving her the chance to live another life (again), only to have that thrown back in her face. You have Snow, the two times she has wronged Regina (once as a child, with that fatal breach of confidence which however was the result of manipulation by an adult), once as an adult, this time very intentionally and with deliberation (that spoilery thing at the end of The Miller's Daughter), doing that bemusing thing: accepting responsiblity (both times), and, following her own conviction that deeds count more than words, act on it. (Both in self punishing ways - taking the apple from Regina after being told the truth about Daniel's disappearance, offering Regina her heart in atonement for manipulating Regina into matricide - and in more constructive ways ( saving Regina's life (again) when after Owen and Tamara have abducted her and are torturing her via being the one to take the emotion sharing gizmo to find her, then (again) by voting to go back for her instead of letting her sacrifice herself). OuaT canon offers a lot of examples of Snow not only trying to understand Regina but actually showing she does understand Regina rather well. (Some of my favourites include telling Emma about the Cora-Daniel-Regina stuff and her own part in it, her awareness that given the choice to fight her army or chase after Snow, Regina would choose going after Snow every time, which is how Snow is able to defeat Regina, and her "Regina doesn't trust her mother - never has" to David; indeed her entire manipulating Regina into putting that heart back into Cora is only possible because Snow gets Regina and the entire Regina/Cora relationship .) Yup, truly a narrow-minded person unable to see anyone else's point of view, that Snow White.

There is another example that comes to mind, though more complicated, because the comics versions are written so contradictory, depending on the writers and the editor du jour and the retconned continuity du jour, and the film versions, too, have by now their somewhat internally contradictory canon, with more to come, but still: Erik "Magneto" Lehnsherr and Charles Xavier often are also quoted as examples of the sophisticated villain/morally ambiguous character able to see the shades of grey and the rigid good two shoes who can't see how much more complicated life really is than his narrow point of view. Leaving aside Xavier's own capacity for morally shady stuff in either canon and acknowledging Magneto really has the world's best backstory reason for believing everyone is out to get him and anyone close to him: I still think that estimation is having it backwards, too. Magneto in most incarnations I've seen him in has as rigid and black and white a pov as you're likely to get. He's right, everyone else who disagrees with him is wrong. Mutants are superior, non-mutants are envious little wannabe genocide committers or at best necessary historical debris. Certainly not people with an identical right to live. Compromise? Is the first step to annihilation. This isn't "seeing the shades of grey", this is a sterling black and white.

I'm not saying that all the hero characters I've named can't also be (or act) naive, or occasionally inflexible and unwilling to budge from their pov. With the longer lived ones, like Duncan, it also depends on which point of their lives you catch them. But by and large, their "narrowness" or lack of maturity seems to express itself in not being able to to look away or walk away when someone, no matter how sympathetic a someone, is actively damaging other people. And again, I point to that policeman in the Highlander episode Valkyrie. Who, as he told Duncan, is well aware that it's entirely possible the demagogic politician they've just saved from getting assassinated by Ingrid will become someone who inflicts great damage. And then he, too, would be responsible for the man's continued existence. But he still couldn't not act. The fact that there was no "good" solution, that there were shades of grey, all this didn't mean to him that he shouldn't have done anything at all or should have looked away.

I'd say that makes this character, and others like him, a mature character, able to see the shades of grey in morality, able to see other view points. And a hero. As opposed to a great many villains, with their emotionally childlike nature that tends to see things entirely in black and white, for-me-or-against-me, and their utter inability to acknowledge any shades of grey.

Comments

[sholio]

I just want to say a huge 'WORD" to this. :)

Actually, the original reason why I started following your journal is because I got into Highlander back in 2010 or 2011, and was thoroughly baffled and offput by the widespread Duncan/Cassandra hate (which, yes, is still there), and someone pointed me to your journal and fic as a nice antidote to that. And then I found out you had cool, interesting opinions on a lot of other shows and were fun to follow. But yeah, it was Highlander originally.

And I think you articulate the issue really well here. It's very frustrating to me that fandom so often takes really interesting moral situations in canon and reduces them to this bizarrely one-sided view. I see fandom labeling heroes intolerant, naive, or foollishly black and white thinkers for simply having any moral standards at all, let alone having good reasons to dislike people who may have a habit of lying to them, stealing from them, and/or trying to kill them (who may be absolutely fantastic characters in their own right, but you know, when someone's canon characterization revolves around being awful to everyone else, it doesn't make the other characters on the show intolerant for disliking or distrusting them!). And a lot of times it involves papering over the very aspects of complex, fascinating characters like Methos or Rumpelstiltskin or Regina that make them really interesting in order to force the whole character dynamic of the show to fit a concept of uptight, intolerant good guys and unfairly persecuted bad guys.

I also think you really nailed something important here, which is that it's often the antagonists who are the ones who are locked into a limited worldview they can't break out of, and the "intolerant" heroes whose ethos involves giving repeated second chances even when they've been burned for it before.

I loved Highlander for being a show that could have been little more than its ridiculous premise and shoestring budget, but instead set up some really fascinating, thorny, morally complicated episode. And then fandom baffled me with its urge to reduce any situation, no matter how nuanced, to "Duncan is wrong, naive, and hopelessly lost among the moral complexities of the 20th century" no matter what had actually happened.

[selenak]

I see fandom labeling heroes intolerant, naive, or foollishly black and white thinkers for simply having any moral standards at all, let alone having good reasons to dislike people who may have a habit of lying to them, stealing from them, and/or trying to kill them (who may be absolutely fantastic characters in their own right, but you know, when someone's canon characterization revolves around being awful to everyone else, it doesn't make the other characters on the show intolerant for disliking or distrusting them!).

Yes. "Tolerant" all too often is defined as "supportive of that character I like", not as, well, "tolerant". As can be seen whenever a villain isn't popular and the hero spares him/her. Then it's not "how dare X condemm villain Y, that just shows his/her narrow black and white world view!", it's "here goes X, instead of ridding us of this awful bore, he/she is such a goody two shoes that they can't even kill Y". I have yet to hear someone argue for, say, Christine's (of Chivalry fame) redemption, or that Methos was "judgmental" for killing her. No, it's Duncan who is stupid and naive for not killing her at the first chance he gets and totally at fault for her victims in between.

And a lot of times it involves papering over the very aspects of complex, fascinating characters like Methos or Rumpelstiltskin or Regina that make them really interesting in order to force the whole character dynamic of the show to fit a concept of uptight, intolerant good guys and unfairly persecuted bad guys.

Yes, the fanon versions are so much less interesting than the complex characters the show gives us precisely because of that enforced concept. I mean, I love them. A lot. I'd love to read fanfiction about them. But it's so hard to find some that a) resembles the characters instead of woobified versions of same, and b) doesn't bash the respective counterpoints and heroes.

which is that it's often the antagonists who are the ones who are locked into a limited worldview they can't break out of, and the "intolerant" heroes whose ethos involves giving repeated second chances even when they've been burned for it before.

That's become more and more my impression in the last decade. But have you ever seen a popular antagonist described thus? No. No matter how true it is. Because people seem to have got it in their heads that only the heroes can be intolerant and narrow minded. (Well, evil priest antagonists aside, but these aren't popular.) (She says, waiting for someone to come up with a popular evil priest antagonist.) (Who isn't Justin Crowe from Carnivale, because Justin Crowe wasn't an evil priest in the first season that made his popularity.)

I loved Highlander for the same reasons. I mean, partly this view of Duncan might be due to the tendency of people to follow the "watch only the Methos episodes" advice, which means, among other things, they miss out of the entirety of Duncan's and Joe's friendship forming against very great odds, because when Duncan meets Joe, he has good reason to believe Joe is a headhunter. And contrary to fanon, where Duncan only ever takes from Joe, the first year or so it's almost always the other way around; it's Joe who keeps approaching Duncan and asking for a favour (mostly in the form of pointing him towards evil Immortal X who was rampaging - Joe took that "never interfere" part of his oath a bit flexibly from the start, and not because he liked Duncan that much but because, understandably, he himself had a problem standing by when knowing a serial killer was in town and knew Duncan's moral code wouldn't allow him to do nothing once he was alerted to that situation). "Watching only the Methos episodes" also means you miss a lot of Duncan's relationships with Fitz and Amanda, both trickster types, whom the humorless fanon version would certainly not be close to, and episodes like Blind Faith, the Kirin/Kage one I mentioned which is in a way the reverse of the Methos situation because there Duncan and the audience know the ruthless killer and exploiter version first and then are asked to wonder whether such a man could really change.

[likeadeuce]

Great post.

I have a friend who just watched the first few eps of OUaT for the first time. She commented that what she finds compelling and sad about Regina is the limitation of her world view -- that she's so determined to ruin Snow's happiness at all costs, it's blinded her to everything else. That, in fact, she's constructed this elaborate curse to punish Snow, but up until Emma arrives, the mindwiped people of Storybrooke just think they're living ordinary lives, so they're not even aware of punishment. Which doesn't seem to speak to moral complexity but to blindness to anything beyond her own need to thwart others.

[selenak]

I know you've only seen a few late s2 eps - was "Welcome to Storybrooke" among them? The flashback section of that is about Regina's first few days post curse casting. She wakes up as the Mayor in "yay, I've won!" mode. Goes out. Everyone bows to her and is in awe. Meets Mary Margaret, who is submissive and shy and what not. And then it's the same the next day, and Regina starts to get frustrated because nobody realises there is anything not normal about this arrangement. The third day, she runs into Mary Margaret in the street, who promptly apologizes despite the fact it was Regina who ran into her. Regina starts to freak out at this point and yells at Mary Margaret "why are YOU apologizing? Why are you not even trying to fight back?" (Mary Margaret is of course utterly bewildered and ?!??? about this, apologizes some more and runs away.) At which point Regina goes to Mr. Gold (who also hasn't got his memory back yet) and says "but this isn't what I wanted, this isn't how I imagined it", and Gold is ?!? as well. In very many ways, Regina is a child emotionally (who is only now finally starting to grow up), and it's not a coincidence that she does connect to children best (from her pov) - child!Snow, Owen in "Welcome to Storybrooke", Henry of course, Gretel in the Hänsel and Gretel ep. (Owen and Gretel then freak out when she tries to keep them.) It's partly because of her mother (and Rumplestilskin did his share - there is an early s2 flashback where we see quite how he became her teacher, and how he ensured she went from basically just wanting magic to defend herself with to starting to harm others), but that doesn't mean Regina isn't responsible for herself and her own actions and has been for years.

[likeadeuce]

Oh, no, I haven't seen that but I'm looking forward to it.

We haven't yet seen the details of how she got Henry, have we?

Also, it's funny that when Tink befriended Regina in the most recent episode, I *assumed* Tink was going to betray HER - yet more sad Regina backstory about why-she-is-the-way-she-is -- which is not exactly what happened.

[selenak]

No, we haven't seen the details (and I'm really curious because it would have to involve contact with the outside world, obviously), but Welcome to Storybrooke shows us how she got the germ of the idea. When Storybrooke magically came into being in Maine, a boy and his father were camping in the forest, hence were inside of Storybrooke. Regina and the boy took to each other, which unfortunately, this being Regina, led her to conclude at once she should just keep the kid. His father, otoh, had other ideas. At the end of the day you have one traumatized boy (the future Greg) standing outside of Storybrooke (which btw how we find out that before Emma comes there, no non-Fairytale originated person would be able to see Storybrooke once they were outside, they'd just see the forest as it was before the curse) and a dead dad inside.

I thought Tink would betray her, too, but the more complicated thing that happened was more interesting. Because Tink actually does the same thing Regina is prone to - blaming someone else for her own decisions. Yes, Regina was cutting in her dismissal, but it was Tinkerbell's decision to steal the pixie dust in order to find a potential new love (and to assume that would be the solution to Regina's problems. Regina hadn't asked her for it, or otherwise tried to manipulate her into it. (Not to mention that the narrative doesn't support Tink's "you were selfish" accusation and idea that because Regina didn't want to fall in love again, someone else was spending a loveless life, either. We've met Robin briefly in an s2 Belle and Rumple flashback episode. His problem then was that his wife Marian was sick - which was why he showed up at Rumple's -, certainly not that he was loveless.)

One of the appealing things about OuaT for me is that for all that magic is important to the show, it's never presented as the simple solution to anyone's problems or a fixit. It can aide or damage, but either way, it needs people's choices and long term actions to make a difference. (For example: Rumpestilskin becoming the Dark One helps him in as much as his son doesn't get drafted to the Oger wars anymore, obviously, the way he uses his new powers also ensures he loses his son anyway.)So Tink thinking she could help Regina by providing her with an instant!new True Love couldn't work, either. Otoh sticking around as a friend and confidant herself could conceivably have made a difference, since anyone else Regina at that point was around was either someone entrapping her (Leopold), someone she resented (Snow), someone who did love her but neither stood up for her or against her (her father) or Rumplestilskin who needed her to become the worst she could be and actively worked towards that end.

[andraste]

*thunderous round of applause*

Yes, this. Just ... all of this.

A while ago, I came across someone declaring that Snow sees Emma as a possession and doesn't really care about her happiness. I can't even imagine what show they're watching. (Never mind that Snow cared about Emma as a friend before she found out about the family connection.)

[selenak]

I can't even, as the kids say these days. And it's a particular shame because I think the Emma and Snow relationship is one of the best things about the show, not least because they really do something with this "daughter who grew up parentless meets parents who are by virtue of plot macguffin younger/as old as herself" and allow for all the complicated emotions on Emma's part; for Snow to understand that and to work with it. I loved that the show let her go after Emma at the start of s1 and gave them that time in FTL together where Emma could get to know Snow as Snow after knowing her as Mary Margaret, and where Snow could do some mentoring without this feeling uncalled for since Emma is an adult. And that scene between Snow and Emma in the previous episode where Snow realises before Emma does what it is Emma hasn't vocalized to herself, and doesn't respond with self defense or insisting on her love or what not but simply by acknowledging that this is how Emma feels, and it won't be magically different by the knowledge that she has parents now, only by Snow being actively and continually there for her (that actions above words things again) - I loved that so much.

[muccamukk]

Best Highlander meta I've read in ages.* Joe was my favourite character, but that's one of the strongest episodes for underlining his personal limitations, how his personal/buddy loyalty can make him unable to assess what's going on (How long it took him to turn on Horton, his extremely complicated relationship in the Duncan/Joe/Watchers triangle).

I wonder if, too, fans took Joe at face value as Exposition Guy (and he plays match maker in fic so often), that if he condemned Cassandra and forgave Methos, then that was that.


*Though honestly I don't spent a lot of time in Highlander fandom because my favourite characters are Joe (partly because of a deep affection for Jim Byrnes), Duncan and Amanda, in that order, and I basically don't care about Methos at all, and like Cassandra a lot.

[selenak]

Thank you. I love Joe, honestly I do, and Jim Byrnes is fabulous, but that doesn't mean he didn't have his blind spots, and his "my buddy, right or wrong" mentality was one of them. It's an appealing trait to have, I can see that... unless, of course, you imagine yourself someone who isn't Joe's buddy but someone in danger from same.

[dorothy1901]

unless, of course, you imagine yourself someone who isn't Joe's buddy but someone in danger from same.

Which is pretty much exactly what happened when Joe convinced MacLeod to go easy on his old sergeant, Andrew Cord, which opened the way for Andrew Cord to kill Charlie DeSalvo.

[selenak]

Exactly!

[muccamukk]

Which in turn lead to one of the more dramatic Duncan/Joe break ups over the years, for which Duncan was called a big meanie, as per usual.

[elynross]

This essay is made of complete awesome, and is so articulate and well-written! And I don't think that's just because what you articulate so well is something I entirely agree with. *g* Well done.

[selenak]

Thank you!

[metanewsmods]

Hi, can we link this at metanews?

(edited comment to be in the right place >_<)

[selenak]

By all means, go ahead!

[amaresu]

Here via metanews

Bit late to the discussion, but I just wanted to say that this is some of the best Highlander meta I've read in years and perfectly articulates why I generally pretend the fandom doesn't exist.

I feel like Duncan actually has a rather sophisticated moral code and it's frustrating to see that glossed over by the vast majority of fandom. This is a guy who's friends are pretty much a Who's Who of Immortal rogues, scoundrels, and thieves. The last thing he has is a black-and-white morality.

Anyways, just wanted to say good Highlander meta.

[selenak]

I don't know whether people of "Duncan sees things in black and white!" think Duncan was forced into each and every one of these friendships, or whether they ignore any HL canon not featuring Methos altogether, but yes. His relationships alone make it clear that this cliché is not true.

Thank you very much for commenting! I'm glad the post spoke to you.