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I've been thinking about culture war in media lately.
For those who don't know, I'm a game programmer, working to kinda move into the game-director role. Obviously at some point I am going to have games with humans in them [citation needed], and since they're humans I need to decide what they look like both in terms of dangly bits and skin color, which is of course now highly politicized, joining the ranks of literally everything else in existence.
But I'm not looking for an excuse to put characters in of one skin color or another. I want a universe that feels reasoanbly alive, with characters who are interesting and not just inserted for politics reasons. So a big part of this ends up being "how do I choose interesting characters that don't feel like a political statement, or at least, if they do feel like a political statement, it's a political statement I don't mind making, or a political statement I'm intentionally making as part of the game, and also, boy it would be nice to come up with a way to insert characters of literally any type without that also being a political statement, and I guess as a side note this involves talking about explicitly political media and what makes it work well or badly".
This has, in fact, been done well.
Let's talk about that.
One good technique is to put in characters that are politically sensitive and then just never call attention to it. Uhura was black, and everyone watching Original Star Trek knew it, because she was, you know, on screen, consistently reflecting fewer photons than Captain Kirk, as black people do. Kirk didn't seem to know it, though; Kirk just kind of ignored it. In fact, I'm not sure this ever came up during all of Star Trek. Uhura was black because Uhura was black, and the show carefully avoided ever making a thing out of it.
Another good example here is Miles Morales in Spider-Verse, who is also black, and again, I'm not sure the movie ever really mentions this. The movie is explicitly not about Miles Morales' skin color. Another example: a lot of characters from Borderlands 2, such as Ellie, who is a fat woman which is essentially never relevant to the plot, and Sir Hammerlock, who is gay.
Sir Hammerlock being gay is an interesting case, so let's talk about it more! With most characters, either you find out their skin color the instant you see them, or it turns into a serious Face Reveal thing (imagine the controversy if the Halo TV series had revealed that Master Chief was black!) But media in general tends not to show much about character's sexualities, and the game industry even less so. Even mentioning romantic choices feels like something that can't be done subtly - all characters could be seamlessly replaced by asexual beings that reproduce via mitosis unless your work is about the fact that sex happens.
(Tangent: Can we, like, do something about that? Have some main characters who start out married, and end married, and the story is never about their difficulties in marriage? Seriously, how many happily married main-character couples exist anywhere in fiction? Note to self, do this sometimes. End tangent.)
(Tangent addendum: I just played Guacamelee 2 and it does this. That's one! Anyway, moving on.)
But in the case of Hammerlock, he sends you on a quest to check out what happened to an old friend of his, and if you happen to dig into the quest details, which most people don't, you find out it's an old boyfriend, and honestly I really like how this is handled. Hammerlock is just a guy who likes guys, and he's worried about his old fling, and this is never turned into a Explicitly Political Thing, and that's cool. 10/10, very human.
Let's talk about another technique! Another technique is to, instead of making the plot not about something, make the plot extremely about something. I did a search for "movies about black people" and one site recommends Malcolm X and another hit provided by Google is a list of "11 movies that confront American racism". You can guess where that is going! Uhura could have been white, Ellie could have been a thin guy, Sir Hammerlock could have been asexual, that wouldn't really have changed any of those pieces of media, but you can't turn Malcolm X into an Asian without some pretty serious plot adjustment!
There's nothing wrong with this solution either. I am generally not interested in this kind of media, but if that's the movie someone wants to make, hey, have at it, all up to them. But because I'm thinking about this for the sake of my own games, I'm discarding this because, as mentioned, I'm just not all that interested.
But while we're on the subject . . .
. . . I can't help but wonder if this is counterproductive.
A painful thing about human beliefs is that we are very very very bad at changing our mind. And having arguments shoved in our face really doesn't help. Walk up to someone who hates skub and shout pro-skub catchphrases at them, if you like; this will not make them more positive about skub, they'll probably just become more certain that skub is bad because all skub-lovers are fuckin' jerks, man. But show them movies that just happen to include skub, in a way where it sorta just . . . doesn't matter? Maybe they'll stop caring so much about the horrors of skub. Desensitization is a hell of a drug.
Show them movies that claim to involve this, but have the movie constantly shouting pro-skub catchphrases?
Well, now we're back where we were before. Or even worse, frankly, because now they'll be expecting any movies with skub in them to be a thinly-veiled propaganda piece. So not only have we failed to convince them with subtlety and care, we've fucked up future attempts to do so. Good fuckin' job, man, way to go.
Skub is an allegory, but you've figured that out by now, so let's move on.
Specifically, let's talk about allegories.
There's an episode in Original Star Trek where the crew finds some guy in space. The guy's face is white on the right side and black on the left side. Wild, right? Aliens! Shortly thereafter, they find another guy whose face is white on the left side and black on the right side. These two people hate each other because they think the other person's face is wrong and their respective countries have destroyed their entire planet in the ensuing war. Also one of them was used as slaves by the other. What is this story really about? Who can say! It is a mystery! We shall never okay it's obviously about racism. Like. Transparently so.
(In one of the weirder and less socially-acceptable examples of nominative determinism I've seen, the script for this episode was written by a stereotypically white guy named Gene L. Coon.)
Star Trek never fucking blinks. At no point does Captain Kirk turn to the TV and say "by the way, black lives matter", or any less anachronistic catchphrase. This is doubly impressive because Uhuru is still in this episode obviously and she doesn't even mention it. There is a single mention that Earth was perhaps not entirely copacetic in the past - by Chekov, not even by Uhuru, and in response to a question that does not feel shoehorned in whatsoever - and then that's it! It just moves on.
This being Star Trek, Kirk of course has to draw a lesson at the end. And he does . . . but fascinatingly, it's a lesson about hate, not about racism. Racism does not exist for Kirk. He is not even considering the issue.
And Kirk's utter refusal to even consider racism frankly drives the point in both harder and more subtly.
It's a brilliant episode. I love this episode. It's a perfect example of how Star Trek writing, while hamfisted at the best of times, was elegant and refined in exactly the right ways. With so little effort they could have turned this into a cultural war! And they didn't!
I want more things like that. I want episodes that don't hammer in the point with a sledgehammer. I want allegories, not blatant propaganda; sure, it's still propaganda, I don't think anyone would claim that Star Trek wasn't. But it's careful propaganda. It's subtle propaganda. It's propaganda that doesn't come across like paid advertising, with the characters mugging at the camera while carefully holding soda cans so the label is visible, and the label says "vote for me in the next election, but not the other guy, he's a fascist, which is proven by this movie about comedic squirrels wearing silly hats".
And here is the point where I run out of clever inspiration.
I'm trying to figure out how I would make either characters that are never called attention to, or characters that are an allegory . . . for trans people.
And it's goddamn impossible.
The problem with trans people (if you are getting linked here in anger because I said there's "a problem with trans people", finish the damn sentence first, christ) is that the entire classic concept of being "trans" is linked, kind of intrinsically, to being invisible.
Not to the person themselves being invisible. But to the trans-ness being invisible. The platonic ideal of a trans man is someone who everyone looks at and says "yes, that is a man, I have no doubt in my mind", and then never thinks twice about. The "trans" part, ideally, vanishes. And this makes it really easy to put a trans man in a game or a movie: you just put a man in.
But that doesn't help. Uhura does not work if she looks exactly like a white guy. The point of Uhura is that she is obviously black and nobody cares. But you can't have someone who's "obviously successfully trans" - it's contradictory! You have to drop a Sir-Hammerlock-esque hint somewhere, and, one, it's really hard to do so when any mention of a trans person's birth gender is "deadnaming", while, two, Hammerlock is totally cool with casually mentioning that he used to pork a dude with a dong, but trans people themselves generally do not want to talk about their birth gender. It's similar to the whole reveal-a-character's-sexuality problem except massively boosted. Put a character in who keeps talking about all the people they're boning and they come across as oversexed and somewhat disturbing; put a character in who keeps talking about how trans they are and you get Hainly Abrams.
So, then what? An allegory? But what allegory can you possibly use?
How do you make a respectful allegory about something that you're trying to show is conceptually acceptable but whose ideal form is intentionally invisible?
Honestly? I don't know.
My best idea here is to do something with aliens; some species of alien with extremely flexible sexual characteristics, who don't mind talking about them but which are never relevant to the plot, just roll it into background worldbuilding. I guess it's ironic that I'm coming up with this idea while also playing around with the concept of an alien species with extreme inflexible sexual dimorphism, but so it goes. But this is inevitably going to result in people yelling "zomg are you saying that trans people are aliens" and so that frankly isn't even going to work.
I cannot come up with a solution here, and this makes me very sympathetic to people who are trying to do it the right way. There isn't a right way. There's never been a right way. There's just a lot of wrong ways.
Feels like a tool missing from my toolkit, to be honest.
I don't really have an ending to this post.
You start out talking about not writing a political statement but then end up talking about how to write political propaganda that, unlike most political propaganda, isn't poorly-written or obnoxious. Those are different goals that involve going down diverging pathways. In particular, if you're going to spend time and effort thinking about this sort of thing, how about spending it thinking about the ideologies that exist within your fictional world? Not as an allegory, not as an insertion of current issues with or without commentary, but as part of the worldbuilding. And then instead of deciding ahead of time whether an ideology or political faction is "right" or "wrong" or "it's complicated" based on how it maps to the civil-rights movement or transgenderism or whatever, evaluate it (and let your audience evaluate it) on its own terms, as an outgrowth of relevant issues in the world you have created.
Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software talks about something similar:
Instead of looking to contemporary political controversies for your inspiration, you can try looking elsewhere. You can look to history, to political conflicts where every side and even the issues they consider important are likely to be one or both of "alien" or "timeless" to modern perspectives. Similarly you can look to old political philosophy. Or to fiction that is at least old enough to not be part of the current political zeitgeist. You can look to science and technology, to the sorts of things that societies could theoretically be doing if they had different values or structures. You can look at all the setting elements you have for other reasons, for game mechanics or because they're cool or because they're part of the genre or because you had to make some sort of map/factions/history, and seriously think through how people in that world would relate to them.
Think about questions like what views are functional, whether functional for society or the individual or for some subgroup. For a recent example imagine if, before the invention of AI art, you wrote a setting where AI art was possible. I think you probably could have predicted the backlash from some artists, on grounds like economic self-interest and their self-conception, and predicted a lot of the specific rhetoric. Or, if it was invented a while ago, there's other questions like what sort of economic role it ends up fitting into long-term. I don't think this would necessarily be the most compelling setting element, it probably wouldn't be central, but I think it would probably be more interesting than inserting either contemporary politics or a metaphor for them. Maybe some reviewer would interpret it as you criticizing real-world automation as stripping meaning from work, but I don't think it would benefit from you approaching the writing as a metaphor, except perhaps by using history as a reference for how these conflicts can play out.
You don't have to do this, not every work (especially videogames) needs to have ideologies and political conflicts invented for its worldbuilding. The Law of Conservation of Detail is a very real concern, though it can enhance even briefly-mentioned details if you've put more thought into them than the audience expects. But if you don't want to do this you probably shouldn't be wasting your time and the audience's attention-span on contemporary politics either. In that case just use the superficial details that seem to match your setting/genre/aesthetic and don't do anything more. It is unlikely anyone will care. Yes there have been cases like Kingdom Come: Deliverance (targeted by Tumblr psuedohistorian medievalpoc and then game journalists for not having "POC" in their piece of medieval europe) but there are too many games coming out for people to create controversies like that about a meaningful fraction. Especially if you're not dumb enough to respond on social media or release a statement/apology.
One reason transgenderism tends to be particularly badly written in fiction, particularly fiction not set in a western country in 2023, is because it entails an ideological framework that is highly specific and restricted to a particular place and time. People will write a medieval fantasy setting and give characters views popularized on the internet less than a decade ago. Even people who don't think they're writing fiction, like Wikipedia editors writing about historical women who disguised themselves as men, will try to fit it into the trans framework (sometimes resulting in the Wikipedia article having male pronouns). Historical eunuchs and the ideological viewpoints regarding them are more genuinely alien than "what if aliens had...4 genders" or "what if aliens were genderfluid shapeshifters", because neither eunuchs nor the viewpoints regarding them were based on contemporary ideas like gender identity to begin with.
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