This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
We haven't hit our weekly quota of gender posts yet, so, let's have another one. (This one's not about trans people, don't worry.)
This will be an unorganized series of bullet points because I'm responding to an unorganized bullet point video.
The Sentence I Only See Men Write: How writers flatten a female character
In the not too distant past, I was engaged in a conversation in which a familiar complaint was lodged: "Why aren't there more complex™ female characters in fiction?" (Are any real humans "complex" in the way in which that term is applied to fictional characters? I consider this to be a wide open question.) "Why are male literary characters allowed to be anything and everything, while female characters are consistently shunted into a small group of familiar and repetitive archetypes?" To which my immediate response was: "Well, the people who are most deeply invested in this issue and are clamoring the loudest for complex™ female characters are also the ones who most strictly police how female characters are allowed to act, and they complain the loudest when characters don't meet their stringent standards". Fortunately, the youtube algorithm furnished me with evidence to support my hypothesis (that being the linked video above).
Her first point about the "perky tits" thing is, y'know, perfectly valid and reasonable, point granted. That is a silly thing to write. My quibbles started with her second point about the "competence tax":
"Why anybody wanted a competent FMC to begin with". As though we, collectively, sit down with a book carefully chosen for its "competent" FMC and then ensure that the character meets every requirement on our checklist before continuing. This is an NPC's way of approaching art.
Anyway, isn't she just giving away the game here? To be a complex character (i.e. not a "flat" character, the exact phenomenon she claims to be opposing) is to have weaknesses and face adversity. But she immediately claims that a female character whose weaknesses are too prominent will be seen as "wounded", and readers will start to "worry" for her. She complains when she gets what she claims to want. Do you see the issue here?
Do woke feminists truly want female characters to be complex (meaning, multifaceted and sensitive, nuanced and reflective, yes, but also at times damaged, depraved, unloved and ostracized, perhaps even for perfectly valid reasons)? Could feminist literary critics really stomach say, for example, a female Shinji Ikari? Someone who has duties they are expected to fulfill, but who has no identifiable virtues in the classical sense, consistently fails to meet every challenge that is posed to them, and has to be literally, physically dragged into action by other people during the critical final battle (shortly prior to causing the extinction of all humanity due to what is essentially a childish emotional outburst)? I have an inkling that a hypothetical Female!Shinji would fall flat and fail to resonate, particularly for a female audience (regardless of political persuasion), although to be honest I'm not entirely sure why. Meanwhile Male!Shinji, despite not being anyone you could classify as a "role model", is still felt to express something important and universal.
To the extent that we have difficulty imagining a female Hamlet, or Leopold Bloom, or Humbert Humbert, I think it's due to a combination of men and women feeling that 1) such characters would be unrealistic, or would at least represent the extreme ends of the bell curve of possible female behavior, and would thus be seen as novelties, and 2) the Women Are Wonderful halo effect kicking in and causing people to want such characters to be shielded from unnecessary harm and risk. Perhaps these attitudes are immutable, perhaps they are not. But my point is that these attitudes are just as strong among the woke as they are among "traditionalists", if not more so, and this is part of what explains their preference for repetitive generic girlboss characters.
The video continues with some further Do's and Don't's:
I mean. I talk like that. And I'm a dude. Is that a bad thing? Should I not be doing that? (Yes, I know that you just clarified that it was ok, but you also called it insufferable, and you felt that it was important enough to include as its own point in the video, sooo...)
None of them are "bad desires", buuuuut only certain types of desires can actually "drive the plot", apparently.
At some point, the relentless girlbossification of all characters just starts to look like the demonization of perfectly normal and healthy psychological traits (many of which are more common in women, but all of which can also be found in men as well).
Is there really anything so wrong with your wish including "another person's name"? Is that something that a modern liberated woman is always going to feel a bit icky about? If there is any residual "structural misogyny" that remains in the culture of first world western countries in 2026, it lies in our hyper-individualism. Who can you go to today who will not tell you "be your own person, don't care what other people think, define yourself, your own opinion matters most"? Who will tell you the opposite? "Actually, maybe what other people think does matter. Maybe their opinion of you is more important than your own opinion of yourself. Maybe you need other people, in a very deep sense, and that's ok. It's just as legitimate as any other way of being". No one, that's who. (People who are adept at social games will of course tell you that what other people think matters, but usually only in a cynical and utilitarian way, rather than in a deeper personal sense.) Material dependence is actually relatively normalized, at least on the economic left. "Who do you think built all those roads?", "do you know how many government programs you actually use?", and so forth. But emotional or spiritual dependence? Unthinkable. Attitudes that are only fit for weaklings and children.
This is why the Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalytic tradition has the capacity to serve as such a powerful corrective to the excesses of both woke moralism and rightist traditionalism/hyper-individualism; it represents a sort of "middle voice" that has been culturally suppressed. Lacan stresses from the beginning that desire as such is always the desire of the Other ("what does the Other desire from me?"), thus there is no such thing as desire outside of a relational context. A desire that is completely purified of the Other's name is a fantasy. But I digress.
Let me reiterate, the mere fact that a character exists to fall in love is not flatness. It could be written in a flat and uninspired way, particularly if the author is a flat and uninspired person themselves. But those properties are not intrinsic to it qua life project or psychological trait.
Perhaps there are real humans who "exist to fall in love", or perhaps there are not. I pass no judgement on the empirical question. But to the extent that there are such real humans (or, to the extent that we can imagine them, and weave together the threads of such a character as they might emerge from the infinite sea of possible stories), their mode of existence is just as pregnant with possibilities, just as liable to contain secret worlds, just as much an inexhaustible well of pathos, as any other legitimate mode of existence that you might care to name. To assume otherwise would be to import the aesthetic and value judgements of "common sense" and adopt them wholesale; but it is precisely the task of art and the artist to interrogate these judgements and put them into question.
What makes someone an artist (as opposed to a dancing monkey) is their capacity to look at what has hitherto been considered ordinary, common, uninteresting, lowly, drab -- or, in the limit case, ugly, horrific, and evil -- and see the beauty in it that went previously unnoticed, teaching people to look at it anew. To the extent that these principles have hitherto not been applied to "genre fiction" or "commercial fiction", this is a skill issue.
I'm becoming concerned that our culture is losing basic media literacy. It used to be common knowledge that good characters need to have flaws, not just be perfect all the time. So Achilles had his heel as a literal weakness, but he was also full of moral flaws. If he had just been a good soldier who followed orders without pride, the story of the Iliad would have been boring.
Flawless main characters are such an obvious problem that the original "Mary Sue" short story was just making fun of all the crappy fan fiction where people used characters like that. Usually as self-inserts. It's mind-boggling to me that we've reached a point where professional literary critics not only defend that sort of thing, but they actually criticize anyone who dares write in some flaws for their female characters!
It was bad enough when Star Wars did it. But I thought, "fine, whatever, they're not looking for deep literary characters there, they just want someone to look cool on a green screen and sell toys." But now it seems there's a disturbing number of media following this trend.
All I could think reading this:
Was "does anyone think House is incompetent?". Does it take away from the fun of the show because he has flaws?
I've been rewatching that show recently and "best X in the business but pays for it" is a perfect description of him. The tortured male genius isn't new. I don't stop thinking House is competent because House has a limp or a drug addiction or is, frankly, a cunt. If anything these weaknesses are what make him tolerable as a character. You can't both be an all-knowing genius and get away with being a cunt unless you have an excuse.
It's an interesting thought experiment: What would happen if somebody made a television show or movie with an equivalent female character. An extremely capable professional but a very difficult person with a drug addiction and a limp. I don't think people would go for it, even feminists. Because women are supposed to be Wonderful.
I think that if the networks tried to make a gender-swapped version of House, it would be difficult to resist the temptation to (1) soften her difficult personality and make her more sympathetic; and (2) take away the drug addiction since it's a red flag of poor character. In short, it would be difficult not to make her something of a Mary Sue.
The more subtle example is Wilson, who is a pretty nice guy (at least on the surface) and considered almost saintly because he works in paediatric oncology, one of the toughest jobs there is. And he is a pretty decent guy - except in his personal life. Multiple marriages and divorces, mostly caused by his inability not to cheat. His most solid and long-lasting relationship is his friendship with House, and there are explorations during the series of how maybe this is kinda messed-up co-dependent that is not so good for either of them.
Well yeah, because he's a giant slut [denotation only]. Which is the entire reason he even can function in oncology; if I recall correctly, that's stated more or less explicitly even outside of the traditionally sexual (there's one episode that's explicitly trying to get him to put out a different organ to fix a friend and long-term patient).
Interestingly, I think that's also what allows him to get along long-term with House. Both of them are in it for the love of the game (and receive the love through the game of driving back physical reality [House, stereotypical male trait] and driving back emotional reality [Wilson, stereotypical female trait]). I feel as if the larger conflicts in that series arise specifically when the foundation of that relationship breaks down, or at least that's the impression I get from the clips.
Weakly held opinion: perhaps the reason that neither men nor women can tolerate depictions of women with female character flaws is because it exposes a strategic liability that hurts them more than men would be if acknowledged? Maybe the framing should not be "Women are Wonderful" as it should be "the consequences of Women Not Being Wonderful are way more destructive than they are for men, thus, the trade-off human instinct makes for men always being flawed punching bags is that they're the only ones who may be Great in the end"?
Maybe that's the root of why female characters doing that (re: "Mary Sue") feels so uniquely uncanny vs. the male version of this, which is... well, Superman?
If that is the case, the issue with Modern Day Media is fundamentally a reflection of Modern Writers growing up in a Modernity that [for various reasons] is no longer able to naturally instruct Modern Humanity about why that compromise was made.
Then, the vanity of modern generations decried can be properly seen as rational- for when that compromise is no longer base reality, other concerns, like claiming that 'oh, you just want that because it's your instinct, and so we'll put all our effort solely into
owning the Consshitting on the Lesser Human Beings'... well, that makes sense too, as does the inevitable rejection of their works when they go bankrupt (for human instinct is ultimately what makes stories resonate).[And then, due to the fact women use 'is already aware of that knowledge and bold enough to capitalize on it' as a differentiator between men, women cannot instinctively self-moderate on what they choose as a filter. So, by the time they figure out they need to be screaming that from the rooftops to get men to finally approach them... it's too late.]
...oh, wait, maybe that's why progressives feel no dissonance when calling themselves liberals, isolate 'Ref 1', because that's what liberals are famous for doing, and they interpreted the reason why we did that purely as hatred for the old ways (and... not going to pretend it's not some of the time) rather than the pride and joy that comes from doing a new thing.
An observation one could perhaps make of any successful marriage. (Maybe marriages that don't have those flaws are not stable solely because they don't come with their own continually/tacitly acknowledged costs simply because otherwise there's no strongly defined right and wrong with respect to the other partner?)
I think the co-dependence for both of them is that House has someone he can't drive away (Wilson always comes back, always sticks around) and he can feel superior in that he's the one trying to loosen up Saint Jimmy out of his staid, conformist lifestyle (and not that he needs someone, he doesn't need anyone, not him!) and Wilson can feel superior in that "well at least if I am pathetic with my failed marriages, I'm not as pathetic as House who is still pining over his ex-wife".
It's a great friendship, but it's not necessarily good for them. Both of them enable one another's worse impulses because they are so terrified (in different ways) of being alone, they can't drive away the one person who will tolerate them and stick with them even after seeing their ugly side.
I didn't watch much of the show and don't know what the ending was, but I think they do sort of do a Butch and Sundance ride off into the sunset ending?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link