showing/building honor and respect, etc

[marbleglove]

I have a quick rant to make about showing honor and respect to either real people or to characters. This was inspired by a Veterans' Day radio bit which pissed me off. It was talking about how "Soldiers, not poets," did whatever. Allowed freedom, and free speech and whatnot. While it's annoying that it blatantly ignored the contributions of poets, that was more or less understandable given that it's Veterans' Day.

What was more distasteful was the fact that the radio apparently thought that the only way to honor veterans was to dishonor everyone else. This is distressingly common in writing, too: some authors think that the only way to show how smart one character is, is to show all the other characters are idiots. This way of looking at the world is also a main reason for domestic abuse: the only way for the one person to feel strong is for the other person to be weak.

The theory is wrong. Honor and respect and power are not a zero sum game. One person having these does not mean another person lacks. The opposite is true, they build upon each other. One of my favorite books is The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth. It's about an assassin trying to get past security and a cop trying to track the assassin. What makes it so good, though, is that both characters are so spectacularly smart, tricky, and clever. If one of them were simply incompetent, then both would lose that quality. A person can be defined by their friends and their enemies. Only a very small person needs very small friends and enemies. A powerful person wants powerful friends and can deal with powerful enemies.

A quote of dubious origin (either Marianne Williamson or Nelson Mandela):

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. Thee's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

Comments

[frogs_of_war]

to show how smart one character is, is to show all the other characters are idiots

Yeah, I hate that too. It's is no great fete to outsmart an idiot. Or pick the good guy over the jerk. Or work harder than someone who is lazy.

[marbleglove.livejournal.com]

Yeah. To my mind, it also implies the opposite: the character isn't smart enough to defeat anyone other than an idiot. Or like sports divisions: Athletes only compete against people in their same weight and class and such like. What the division is says a lot about the abilities involved.

[frogs_of_war]

You're right. The characters are only as smart, strong, diligent, etc. as their rivals. Even if the author tries to make us think that said character is a genius, we can tell what the author really thinks of the character by who they are set across from.

I hate main characters that are idiots. When the character does something spectacularly stupid, I see it as the author not spending enough time on the plot. Otherwise they could find a better way to advance it.

[marbleglove.livejournal.com]

I prefer main characters to be brilliant and awesome but I'm okay with them being idiotic as long as it's acknowledged. What I really hate is when the narrations says "he's brilliant" and then the dialogue demonstrates exactly how far from true that really is.

Robert Heinlein wrote a whole mess of really awesome science fiction books some decades back but I always have to just ignore the female characters as best I can. (Luckily they're not common) He tends to have them be "really brave" because they can cower behind the hero rather than faint dead away, or be "really brilliant" because they can mostly follow the heroes thought process when it's explained.

[mardahin.livejournal.com]

I find it interesting, the comment from the radio regarding poets and soldiers. Especially given that it presupposes that one cannot be both. In WWI, which is the war that lead to Remembrance Day (Veterans' Day in the US), one of the big issues in that war was that pretty much everybody served. You saw army sizes and both voluntary and forced recruitments from all portions of society, not just the sub-sections that tended toward military service (which haven't actually changed much - the poor, looking for jobs (a soldier's pay in WWI for the entry level British grunts was about 4 times what they'd make as a laborer/factory worker), and those from military families w/ a tradition of service, although at this point it's less the abject impoverished and more the lower middle class looking for health insurance/college money in the US).

There are dozens of famous poets/authors who served in WWI, probably the most clearly associated being John McCrae, who wrote the poem "In Flanders' Fields" which is still printed on the Canadian $10 bill. Walt Whitman is another, and the list goes on. People tend to forget that the contemporary conflicts are not the socially all-consuming entities that the World Wars were, and that they draw far less from society on a human level (and thus allow for a much more selective source-pool of recruits). Just because one serves for a few years does not make them a soldier-and-nothing-but-a-soldier. How many of the poets and authors the reporter dismisses are veterans of the Vietnam War, for example?
[/20th Century Global Conflict Specialist Rant]

I agree that there's a disturbing tendency in both fic and RL for people to put others down in order to promote their particular cause/character - look at the trend toward negative campaign advertising in recent years. The problem is, I think, people find it far easier to cut something (or someone) down rather than being confident in the merits of that which they are trying to raise. That, and the fact that there really *is* no quality control on the web, and you get a lot of authors starting out who have no idea what-so-ever of how their work will be interpreted by others (and who have no desire to think about it, beyond the concept that they're entitled to positive FB).

Um, did I make any sense there?

[marbleglove.livejournal.com]

You not only made sense but also made a very good point. Some amazing poetry has come from the trenches, as it were. And the majority of it has been anti-war, or at least nostalgic for home and peace and family.

In addition to cutting down others rather than simply raising the one, there's also the tendency for people to be given a single label which is supposed to sum up all that they are. A soldier, then, is just a soldier and nothing more; a poet is just a poet and nothing else. You make the important point that in truth people are much more complicated than that.

I've noticed that a lot of other-wise good NCIS fanfic will refer to Gibbs as "the marine" or occasionally "the sniper" but I've never seen him referred to as "the craftsman" or whatever the appropriate word is for maker-of-boats, which he also is. Even relatively good authors have trouble with this, though, because people just are complicated and even if you have a novel, it's not really enough space to truly encompass a whole person.