Why the "Its just fiction" argument sucks.
May 26, 2024 7:59:38 GMT -6
Post by saintofm on May 26, 2024 7:59:38 GMT -6
Sometimes when discussing the topic of a fictional work in any media sooner or later someone will say something along the lines of its just fake, its just fiction, its just make believe. One end its asked by people demanding to know why this or that is important. On the other end, its ironically used as a defense of this or that point or genre, content found within and so on (especially when controversy is involved, say what some gamers tried to do with video games when the usual suspects have it in its sight in it again).
While on any meaningful level, I only had to deal with this twice, one in a forgivably lighthearted situation and the other less so. The former was at a family friend's house with my Mom, and Scifi had Raptor Island on and me and the male member of the family we were visiting kept complaining about the soldiers (special forces Navy seal types) can't hit a Utah Raptor when its standing still, except for the guy with the grenade launcher. In this case it was asking why we cared so much: Its make believe. In this case, we cared because this was suppose to be a PG-13 esk story, not a kids cartoon from the 80's, and they wanted us to believe an elite team of special forces members can't hit the broad side of a barn. Our suspension of disbelief was shot up.
The other one was on this site with my Boobplate debate (the main thread in this section, but you can find the post that derailed the whole topic in the Serious section on the website) that was far more mind numbing. I won't go into detail of that, but the poster was trying defend overly sexy army in general with "its just make believe." If you can defend it, be my guess, I am willing to hear you out (on a different thread, not this one), but the poster's attempt to negate any perceived hate or controversy of that style of armor in fiction neutered their argument as it made it sound like because its fiction it doesn't matter.
And I think that's the thing that annoys me and others: The implication it doesn't matter, that just because its fiction, its make believe it doesn't have the same importance of other, more tangible things in our lives. Maybe the quality of this or that Godzilla movie is not as important than say being able to pay the bills, but unless I am in a field that needs Algebra level math, History, the ability to due a push up in Gym class, Biology, and what ever other class you had to take in high school and college because they said you needed those credits, guess what folks: Neither do they. I am not saying they are not important, History was my favorite and best subjects in school, and I use order of operations when building a playlist for Warhammer, but I am neither working as a historian or in finance.
Yet fiction is important. Before I ask what your thoughts on this is, your experiences, I would ask for your own counter arguments as I list 5 of my own.
1. Fiction, especially writing is where we get to use the fancy words. Unless we are trying to sound smart in an essay, most of us won't use alot of word in our given language. The Montra of Keep It Simple is a default for most of us (yes, my hand is raised too) so many may not hear those ten-dollar words more times than not In an effort to show not tell, fiction be it a book, audio book, or the like, will use them. Saddening becomes sorrowful. Dislike becomes animosity and more. It makes you learn new words or word usages, and thus makes you smarter (or at least some tools to make you sound smart around others, whichever comes first).
2. It can be a Barometry for what people thought about different things. What people thought, expected, held sacrosanct, and so on. Kyle Kallgren, another youtuber, once did a video on why you needed to see Birth of a Nation (the super racist silent picture) and it wasn't for the usual reasons (and gives several alternatives that did it first or better, including a video of a kitten during the early days of film). He said it should be viewed as the ideology, the fears the film promoted, the racist attitudes depicted: All were what the average person would have believed at the time.
For better and for worse we can get a glimpse of what people thought was ok (and eerily enough not ok). A look at Dominic Nobles video on which adaptations of The Three Musketeers stayed the truest to the source material is another strong contender as at least one film made some changes to work with the Hays Code, specifically the part about the Clergy (the big bad in this story is usually a corrupt Cardinal, and that wouldn't have flown back before the G rating was a thing).
3. Can give you a bit of padding for a difficult subject. Avitar the Last Air Bender covered had topics like genocide, imperialism, propaganda, pacifism, discrimination, terrorism, brainwashing, ableism, abusive households, and abuse of power and did in a why a child could understand. Gargoyles like wise handles discrimination based on appearance and genocide, but also covered topics such as poaching, gun violence, not believing everything on TV, science without ethics, the importance of reading, honoring your heritage, forgiveness, greed, and adjusting to a new county (much less time period for the Manhattan Clan). Batman the Animated series covered domestic abuse, the problems women go through in the entertainment industries, tried to break down a dissociative disorder with Two-Face on a level a child could understand, steroid use (the werewolf episode), and more. The Outsiders covered topics and themes such as gang violence, crippling poverty, classism, and what has to be two of the better depictions of Autism long before most people knew what that was. Pick a difficult topic be it discrimination, violence, abuse, corrupt leaders, and so on, fiction can allow you to live through it and either put words to your situation or allow you to visualize what others have gone through without needing all the dangers involved with it.
4. Allows you to grow as a person. My Dad's favorite book was a Louise L'Amor western called Flint which was about a cowboy coming home so he could die of cancer comfortably with those that loved him. My dad, who had a very scary form of sarcoma cancer, said he learned something new about himself every time he read it. This is something fiction can allow. We can experience things, and sometimes those experiences can hit home harder than others.
Other times, it gets you a glimpse of something maybe you are not a part of. To paraphrase an old youtube video I found years ago, Crispin Freeman was in a panel and he was discussing the merits of fiction one of them you experience them by proxy through the characters in the story and be in a safe space while doing so. I've never been a soldier, but how many war films have put me though the horrors of war, and made me feel alive after words? Or that feeling I got when the Nuke went off in Modern Warfare 1. While that moment was long since spoiled for me as it was one of the biggest moments of gaming, it still left me going "Wow" simply from the shock and aww of a character fighting his way through a city, just rescuing a helicopter pilot that was crashed landed, and now is slowly dying of radiation poisoning. Or the Fire and Furry cinematic in Star Craft II: Wings of Liberty, trying to find hope when everything seems lost just before the final fight. I know I wanted to kill a dragon that attacked my homestead simply because it killed my character's kid's pet in Skyrim a few times. Or the relief when Bilbo outwits Golem in the cave in The Hobbit.
Sometimes it might even push you to be more. How many people wanted to be Paleontologists after Jurassic Park or Archeologist after Indiana Jones?
5. It can bring the past to life. Histories, and even scriptures are nice, but sometimes you need to see what someone could have been. Even if there are lots of liberties taken, its a snapshot in a world that is far from you or me as Mars is. A Knights Tale draws more from modern sports culture than it does medieval, but by using that iconography the film allowed us to get into the spirt and relate to the characters better. Alpaha gave us a glimpse what that first moment when wolf became the animal dubbed Man's Best Friend might have looked like. Number the Stars allowed me to see what it might have been like to be a kid growing up in Occupied Denmark in WW2. And the Death of Stalin just how insane it was to be in Stalin run Soviet Union.
What are your thoughts, experiences, and more with this loathsome phrase?
While on any meaningful level, I only had to deal with this twice, one in a forgivably lighthearted situation and the other less so. The former was at a family friend's house with my Mom, and Scifi had Raptor Island on and me and the male member of the family we were visiting kept complaining about the soldiers (special forces Navy seal types) can't hit a Utah Raptor when its standing still, except for the guy with the grenade launcher. In this case it was asking why we cared so much: Its make believe. In this case, we cared because this was suppose to be a PG-13 esk story, not a kids cartoon from the 80's, and they wanted us to believe an elite team of special forces members can't hit the broad side of a barn. Our suspension of disbelief was shot up.
The other one was on this site with my Boobplate debate (the main thread in this section, but you can find the post that derailed the whole topic in the Serious section on the website) that was far more mind numbing. I won't go into detail of that, but the poster was trying defend overly sexy army in general with "its just make believe." If you can defend it, be my guess, I am willing to hear you out (on a different thread, not this one), but the poster's attempt to negate any perceived hate or controversy of that style of armor in fiction neutered their argument as it made it sound like because its fiction it doesn't matter.
And I think that's the thing that annoys me and others: The implication it doesn't matter, that just because its fiction, its make believe it doesn't have the same importance of other, more tangible things in our lives. Maybe the quality of this or that Godzilla movie is not as important than say being able to pay the bills, but unless I am in a field that needs Algebra level math, History, the ability to due a push up in Gym class, Biology, and what ever other class you had to take in high school and college because they said you needed those credits, guess what folks: Neither do they. I am not saying they are not important, History was my favorite and best subjects in school, and I use order of operations when building a playlist for Warhammer, but I am neither working as a historian or in finance.
Yet fiction is important. Before I ask what your thoughts on this is, your experiences, I would ask for your own counter arguments as I list 5 of my own.
1. Fiction, especially writing is where we get to use the fancy words. Unless we are trying to sound smart in an essay, most of us won't use alot of word in our given language. The Montra of Keep It Simple is a default for most of us (yes, my hand is raised too) so many may not hear those ten-dollar words more times than not In an effort to show not tell, fiction be it a book, audio book, or the like, will use them. Saddening becomes sorrowful. Dislike becomes animosity and more. It makes you learn new words or word usages, and thus makes you smarter (or at least some tools to make you sound smart around others, whichever comes first).
2. It can be a Barometry for what people thought about different things. What people thought, expected, held sacrosanct, and so on. Kyle Kallgren, another youtuber, once did a video on why you needed to see Birth of a Nation (the super racist silent picture) and it wasn't for the usual reasons (and gives several alternatives that did it first or better, including a video of a kitten during the early days of film). He said it should be viewed as the ideology, the fears the film promoted, the racist attitudes depicted: All were what the average person would have believed at the time.
For better and for worse we can get a glimpse of what people thought was ok (and eerily enough not ok). A look at Dominic Nobles video on which adaptations of The Three Musketeers stayed the truest to the source material is another strong contender as at least one film made some changes to work with the Hays Code, specifically the part about the Clergy (the big bad in this story is usually a corrupt Cardinal, and that wouldn't have flown back before the G rating was a thing).
3. Can give you a bit of padding for a difficult subject. Avitar the Last Air Bender covered had topics like genocide, imperialism, propaganda, pacifism, discrimination, terrorism, brainwashing, ableism, abusive households, and abuse of power and did in a why a child could understand. Gargoyles like wise handles discrimination based on appearance and genocide, but also covered topics such as poaching, gun violence, not believing everything on TV, science without ethics, the importance of reading, honoring your heritage, forgiveness, greed, and adjusting to a new county (much less time period for the Manhattan Clan). Batman the Animated series covered domestic abuse, the problems women go through in the entertainment industries, tried to break down a dissociative disorder with Two-Face on a level a child could understand, steroid use (the werewolf episode), and more. The Outsiders covered topics and themes such as gang violence, crippling poverty, classism, and what has to be two of the better depictions of Autism long before most people knew what that was. Pick a difficult topic be it discrimination, violence, abuse, corrupt leaders, and so on, fiction can allow you to live through it and either put words to your situation or allow you to visualize what others have gone through without needing all the dangers involved with it.
4. Allows you to grow as a person. My Dad's favorite book was a Louise L'Amor western called Flint which was about a cowboy coming home so he could die of cancer comfortably with those that loved him. My dad, who had a very scary form of sarcoma cancer, said he learned something new about himself every time he read it. This is something fiction can allow. We can experience things, and sometimes those experiences can hit home harder than others.
Other times, it gets you a glimpse of something maybe you are not a part of. To paraphrase an old youtube video I found years ago, Crispin Freeman was in a panel and he was discussing the merits of fiction one of them you experience them by proxy through the characters in the story and be in a safe space while doing so. I've never been a soldier, but how many war films have put me though the horrors of war, and made me feel alive after words? Or that feeling I got when the Nuke went off in Modern Warfare 1. While that moment was long since spoiled for me as it was one of the biggest moments of gaming, it still left me going "Wow" simply from the shock and aww of a character fighting his way through a city, just rescuing a helicopter pilot that was crashed landed, and now is slowly dying of radiation poisoning. Or the Fire and Furry cinematic in Star Craft II: Wings of Liberty, trying to find hope when everything seems lost just before the final fight. I know I wanted to kill a dragon that attacked my homestead simply because it killed my character's kid's pet in Skyrim a few times. Or the relief when Bilbo outwits Golem in the cave in The Hobbit.
Sometimes it might even push you to be more. How many people wanted to be Paleontologists after Jurassic Park or Archeologist after Indiana Jones?
5. It can bring the past to life. Histories, and even scriptures are nice, but sometimes you need to see what someone could have been. Even if there are lots of liberties taken, its a snapshot in a world that is far from you or me as Mars is. A Knights Tale draws more from modern sports culture than it does medieval, but by using that iconography the film allowed us to get into the spirt and relate to the characters better. Alpaha gave us a glimpse what that first moment when wolf became the animal dubbed Man's Best Friend might have looked like. Number the Stars allowed me to see what it might have been like to be a kid growing up in Occupied Denmark in WW2. And the Death of Stalin just how insane it was to be in Stalin run Soviet Union.
What are your thoughts, experiences, and more with this loathsome phrase?
You add them to your profile as you do them around the forum.
