Thread by @xasymptote

I keep thinking about those tweets that went around a few weeks ago. The ones stating incredulity that fans of stories where plucky rebels beat oppressive regimes - Star Wars, Harry Potter, Hunger Games etc - could fail to support real life rebels like BLM.

I have a thread.

There's been a weirdly polarized debate that's been playing out in fandom spaces for years now about the effect fiction has on reality.

To some extent I think the really polarized stances are both strawmen, but they're the ones that keep coming up in my feed.

One of the really polarized stances is that fiction doesn't affect reality at all, and the other is that there's an extremely strict one-to-one correspondence between the two - that if you read or write about bad things you must be bad in real life, and so on.

I have *a lot* of thoughts about this, because I've been doing social-justice-oriented book reviews for a decade, and as a cognitive scientist I've also looked into some of the actual psychological research on the effects fiction has on people.

So, like, of course fiction affects us, and of *course* we absorb values from the books we read - but the way that happens is very nuanced, very subtle, very individual.

It's often not a book's overt events that affect us most, but the smaller things a book takes for granted-

-because those are the things that we often take for granted in real life, and that are powerful because we fail to question them.

Things like whose perspective is valued, who is portrayed as having an inner life and being worthy of empathy, what biases are upheld.

Bringing this back to how people could see media about anti-fascist rebels but then fail to rebel -

It's because these media, by and large, are not actually meant as instruction manuals for rebelling in real life.

They're archetypal tales of good versus evil.

They position rebels as "good" and fascists as "evil" because, well, c'mon, if you don't think fascism is evil you shouldn't be following me.

But "how to rebel against fascism" is not their point.

In real life trying to dismantle fascism does not generally involve casting beams of magic light from your phoenix feather wand, or firing a shot into the one tiny weakness of a ridiculously giant doomsday weapon, or winning at a contrived survival game. It involves other things.

Stories that portray anti-fascist resistance in these symbolic, mythic terms are not interested in how real-life resistance works.

They are interested in other things - the characters' journeys, the relationships, the feeling of prevailing against horrible odds.

And, to be clear - this isn't a *criticism* of such stories, except in the sense that every comment on the underlying themes of a story is criticism.

"Be a political instruction manual" is not the only valid goal for a work of fiction to have.

If nothing else, a well-crafted mythic story of good vs evil at least tells us that its worthwhile to defend the things we believe in, and that seemingly insurmountable, awful things can still be overcome.

But it's not necessarily going to tell us how to do that when we are regular people who lack magic, lasers, etc - or even how to recognize the most pervasive injustices that occur in our actual, mundane, situated lives.

Unfortunately the same story that tells us something really important about overcoming evil in the abstract can also unthinkingly hold up some of the prejudices that help specific evils thrive.

They can be important, inspiring stories about resistance in the abstract and yet also be stories where women and POC are sidelined, where disabled people are disposable, where queer relationships don't exist.

Or where the author is a terf - choose your own adventure.

And again - I want to stress that the individual response to fiction is really complicated. Reading a sexist story doesn't make you a sexist.

But if you were already sexist, or struggling with internalized sexism, then it doesn't exactly help, either.

Same for all the other -isms.

Some of us don't see the -isms because the world is so immersed in them already.

Some of us take a militant stance that the -isms are how it should be.

Some of us, through critique or transformative fanwork, practice dismantling them.

So this is how people can be a fan of anti-fascist tales and still end up supporting fascism.

Because exposing the underpinnings of real-life fascism is not these books' function.

Particularly when real-life fascism is based partly on prejudices that the tales take for granted.

(And, I want to briefly note, the reverse also applies. You can root for, feel sympathy for, or want to redeem the fascist villains in a fictional story, without sympathizing with fascism IRL. Because "here's how fascism works" is *not the point of these stories.*)

As writers we have a responsibility to think about how our storytelling can improve the state of the world. But it does not follow that there's one single kind of story that a "good" writer is obliged to tell, For The Cause. In fact, that kind of storytelling usually fails.

& also - I was going to mention this upthread, but forgot - even a story with a great message can be twisted in unexpected ways.

Think of The Matrix - an archetypal good vs evil tale and also a trans allegory, written by trans women - and the "red pill" metaphor.

The really vital message of The Matrix is that sometimes the world you thought you lived in, and the things you were taught to believe about yourself and others, is a lie.

And that message resonates really hard for both sides of the political spectrum, unfortunately.

Stories can be like that sometimes. They can mean seemingly opposite things to different people, depending on where those people are coming from and what they already believe. & their most vital, healing messages can have relatively little to do with real world politics, as such.

& if we want to write stories that do help dismantle fascism, we need to think about not just literal portrayals of battles against fascism, but about every other narrative floating in the world around us, & the fact that real life is complicated & messy & human -

& that one story, no matter how perfectly crafted, can't do all this for all people, or even most.

We're all in this fight but even the best of us are all just putting out our tiny sparks into the collective narratives of the world, & hoping for the best.

Uhh. And it looks like this is blowing up, but this doesn't feel like a good time for self promotion, does it.

I'm in Canada, so here's Black Lives Matter Toronto.

blacklivesmatter.ca