Disneyan Shallowness or the Trivialisation of the Bastard Hero

[flyingskull]

There's a thing that's been annoying me for a long time... Well, alright, there's lot of things that annoy me, I'm easily irritated, but now I want to talk about one particular attitude towards a particular type of character (in all media) that annoys me to the point of rage.



Unnecessarily Reforming the 'Decent' Bastard

If Henry Fielding were a contemporary author and he'd written Jonathan Wild last year, tons of readers would love and adore Jonathan and proclaim him a Good Hero, because the novel proclaims it every other page, you see, and if the author tells you persistently a character is a Hero Noble and Brave, then he must surely be. (There's another can of worms with female characters which I'll explore in another post, this is way too long as it is) A few, more critically inclined readers would get that he's a criminal with no redeeming features whatsoever, but they would be screamed at by legions of fen who'd consistently quote Wild's noble words about virtue as gospel and testament to his pure heart.

Yet, as we all know, Jonathan Wild is a political satire about 'Great Men' who gain power by cheating, stealing, murdering and conniving. The 'Great Man' is a hypocrite and all his words are lies. "Judge people by what they do," Fielding says, "not by what they say."

In other words, many contemporary readers, probably beaten down by the Politically Correctedness of our times, need authorial statements to know whom to admire and whom to despise in a story and when the above are lacking the only parameter they follow is the 'virtuousness' of their lines of dialogue. A Hero must say Noble and Kind words to everyone and, if sometimes he gets righteously angry as well he may, he'll express his contempt for his enemy or rival with scathing words of Noble Outrage (like 'you loser' or 'you coward').

Literature forbid we have a hero who's also a rude bastard, how can readers (yes, yes, a lot of them NOT all of them) resolve the confusion about the character?

Well, it's easy. Thanks to the Disney School of Good Feelings and Feeling Good, readers (NOT all of them, and this is the last time I specify it. Take it as said every time) either decide the Bastard is not a Hero, after all, or they decide that he isn't really saying all those rude and insulting snarky things. Jane Austen had a wonderful career based on readers' blindness to conflicting information, after all. Shallowness as an analysis tool prescribes that there is NO subtext, nothing is ever implied and actions are not important at all. What does it matter if character A saves the world, if he's rude about it? What does it matter if character B has deep and strong feelings for character C, if he never says it?

I'm not very clear, am I? Alright, on with the examples.

Diana Wynne Jones' Christopher Chant, the Chrestomanci, is an arrogant, selfish, vain, sarcastic bastard. He's also a sort of permanent saviour of worlds who has a deep respect for justice and all societal Good Things and a deep respect, affection and love for his wife, children and friends. Does he express his feelings with loving words? Not on your life, because he's also a deeply private person - a consequence of his isolated childhood and subsequent betrayal by his mentor - one who'd die before exposing his 'weaker' feelings to rejection and ridicule; one who hides behind sarcasm and rudeness because he really thinks most people are fools who won't understand anything but assurance and brusqueness.

That is a fully realised three dimensional character, obviously, but do some readers see him as worthy of being the Hero of a Series? They are shocked by his rudeness, to them it doesn't compute. Here's an example:

... Cat's secret dread was that one day he would be there, making polite conversation, and actually see one of Gabriel's lives as it went away. If he did, he knew he would scream.

The dread of this happening so haunted Cat that he could scarcely speak to Gabriel for watching and waiting for a life to leave. Gabriel de Witt told Chrestomanci that Cat was a strange, reserved boy. To which Chrestomanci answered "Really?" in his most sarcastic way.

"How can Christopher be so mean to Cat?" some say. "How can Christopher be so mean to Gabriel?" some other, more astute readers say. "It makes Christopher not so enjoyable as a protagonist and hero," both the factions say and run off to write fanfics in which he's the personified Milk of Human Kindness and Never But Never Says an Unkind Thing to Anyone (he also says 'I love you' a hell of a lot). We can't have kindness through deeds and unsaid respect for others now, can we?

Pterry's Vimes. Yes, I'm the Queen of Obvious and am a descendant of Monsieur de Lapalisse. Deal with it. Vimes is another Bastard. He's not the arrogant, vain bastard, but the raging, violent, sarcastic (all Bastards are sarcastic, after all, it's a mark of Intelligence), selfish - yes, selfish. He really is. Selflessness isn't a healthy thing. - Bastard with a capital B. You won't catch Vimes saying "I love you, fluffybunny" to Sybil because A) Pterry's too good a writer to mire himself in sentimental nonsense and B) even if Vimes says mushy things in private, which I can't believe, he'd never express his feelings in public. Because, say it with me, Bastards are intensely private persons, If they weren't, they wouldn't be Bastard Heroes, their Bastardiness - UGH, sorry, filthy neologism there - is in their words and attitude, NOT in their actions and feelings. And Vimes is SO near to being a villain, in a sense. He always has to reign himself in, to deny himself expression of his rage. It's not by chance that his greatest victory - in Night Watch, of course - is not killing Carcer. Vimes' societal values are solid and good, his societal mores (politeness, conformity) non-existent.

And yes, I've read fanfics in which Vimes was an abusive husband or lover and others in which he was soooooooo politically correct in Disneyan lovey-dovey that I don't know which nauseated me more.

And Murakami's Yuki Eiri (see icon). Because, if fen of good writers can be shockingly blind and/or stupid, they can't hold a candle to the sheer blindness and/or stupidity of a multitude of manga and anime fen. Give them a hell of a fascinating character who happens to be a Bastard of the broody, cold, violent, insulting and sarcastic persuasion whose past trauma (I'll post all about Murakami's Gravitation ASAP) assures that he'll never be able to express his feelings because - boring innit? - he's a VERY private person. Yet his societal values are solid... I'm repeating myself amn't I? And URGH! how he's treated by fen! Abusive, sadistic lover or mushy idiot because he has to be redeemed and reformed into a Disneyan image of goody-goodiness, if he is to be good.

Let's not even dwell on poor Draco Malfoy, what's been done to him makes me weep for humanity.

In conclusion, I suspect lots of fen are repulsed by intelligence, because if there's one thing that distinguishes the Bastard Hero from the Bastard Villain is exactly intelligence as in the OED definition:

The action or fact of mentally apprehending something; understanding, knowledge, cognizance, comprehension (of something)

Intelligence makes people appreciate and espouse the basic societal values of justice, respect of others' life and rights, it doesn't necessarily make people appreciate and espouse the societal mores of politeness and conformity. Intelligence is threatening because it tends to put in discussion established mores. Intelligence allied to passion is lethal for conformity, the desire to be what I call the 'invisible burgeois'. Intelligence plus passion plus impatience does a marvellous Bastard Hero make, my favourite kind of hero, by the way, but I suppose I've shouted that from the rooftops already. A certain kind of fan - they come not single soldiers but in BATTALIONS! - is shocked and put out by the Bastard Hero and they all frantically re-write him into a one-dimensional bland nothingness that negates the richness of the character and, incidentally, all the work the author put into creating him. But who cares about complexity when we can have Disneyan shallowness and everything in black-and-white simple stupidity?

Long live all Bastard Heroes and long may they continue insulting friend and enemy alike! They have my support, at least.

PS: I wanted to add Dunnett's Lymond, but I fear mistful sarcasm, so I've refrained. :-D

Comments

[flyingskull.livejournal.com]

People used to read, the ones that could, of course. They weren't distracted by TV or cinema or radio or comic books. Reading was an intellectual pleasure and exercise.

Still cretins abound and my namesake based her whole career on people's willful blindness to what they didn't want to see. I think nowadays it's gotten worse and worse with Hollywood (and TV but they're the same) dictating the norm of dumbing down things to insipidity and also offering products which tax the intellect less and less. Confront the magnificence of silent films with the easy one-layer products of today. Right, there are excellent films around, they're just very few.

HP fandom (not all of it, of course, but wast swathes of it) wants to find things that are actually NOT. Like continuity, worldbuilding and coherent characterisation. But do they see that the Nominal Hero is a piece of shit? Nope, because the Author tells them he's a Noble Hero and he scoffs, I tell you SCOFFS! at death. That's what I was trying to say, if they do it with Pterry... I mean flattening out Vimes, for example into a fluffy-bunny-lovey-dovey, they are going to be thrilled to have a Hero that won't force them to blink away entire conversations.

Yes, thank you luv, I know the Magnificent Bastard trope and it's true that he can be either a Hero or a Villain, Lymond is a perfect example of the Magnificent Bastard Hero... almost.

The point, and thanks again for forcing me to rethink things and be clearer, is that to me the difference between the Bastard Hero and the Magnificent Bastard Hero is that the first is human and vulnerable and the second slighty inhuman and not vulnerable at all. I love me a Magnificent Bastard Character, but, no matter his alignment, he can't be the Hero, just one of the heroes because when one takes that kind of characterisation too far, one loses the layers and subtext that makes the character sympathetic enough and reduce the Magnificent Bastard to a sort of thinking machine with NO respect for other people's right in a society. Being manipulative is not the same thing as being rude, in fact, it's the opposite.

Vetinari is a Magnificent Bastard - actually TEH Magnificent Bastard to end all Magnificent Bastards in the annals of Literature - and that's why Vimes - the bastard with no magnificence about it - is the Hero. For reasons of Humanity and Three-Dimensionality, donchaknow?

As I said, Lymond is the only borderline case of the Magnificent Bastard being also the Bastard Hero, I mean Dunnett brought the thing so far in the first book of the series that a slow reader would actually assume he was the villain for three-quarters of the story. Or even longer, depending on slowness and stupidity. It oculd only work once, of course and she didn't try it again, but he's borderline alright.

My problem with exceedingly Machiavellian characters is that they either have far too much power for the story to contain and fall over into godhood or that they are boring because no suspense is possible around them.

[baeraad.livejournal.com]

People used to read, the ones that could, of course. They weren't distracted by TV or cinema or radio or comic books. Reading was an intellectual pleasure and exercise.

Ah, 'tis true, 'tis true... proper books have a lot more space to insert hints and subtexts than more visual media, which needs to get the job done a lot quicker. Not to say you can't be elegant with television - a single line of dialogue can speak volumes, if you do it right - but I can't fault your observation that most of the time, uhm... no. ^_^;

The point, and thanks again for forcing me to rethink things and be clearer, is that to me the difference between the Bastard Hero and the Magnificent Bastard Hero is that the first is human and vulnerable and the second slighty inhuman and not vulnerable at all.

Very true. We like the Bastard Hero because he's so human, but we like the Magnificent Bastard because he's so superhuman. =]

Of course, the lines blur. Moist von Lipvig is a Magnificent Bastard of sorts, but he's still vulnerable. I think perhaps it's because he's not Magnificent all the time - he can fail, or be beaten. So the audience starts rooting for Moist to get in gear and live up to his potential to be a Magnificent Bastard, to smash the people who arguably deserve smashing and to do it with style. =]

In fact, I would go even further and say that the MB is easy to show as vulnerable, because he relies on seeing the potential in a situation that other people can't see - and sometimes, a situation just has no potential, and the MB is helpless. Of course, a bad author will give the impression that his favoured character cannot fail no matter what, but there's no helping bad authors. =]

You are right, though, a MB can't be a hero. He can do good, but he can't be good - for that, you need some basic decency, and the MB's appeal is that he has no decency. He can have regard for decency, he can respect it in other people, but he has none of his own.

Oh, on a personal note - in the last few days, I have learned the virtue of being a bastard. I've had a loooooooooong flaming row with someone who just got booted off my flist with extreme prejudice, and it's left me thinking that people who talk a lot about goodness and community and harmony are hiding a lot of very unpleasant traits behind those pretty words. If I don't believe in anything bigger than myself, then at least I don't believe in anything big enough to victimise people over! If I'm a selfish son of a bitch, at least I don't try to control people in the name of "love"!

To hell with all of that shit! BASTARD POWER! =]

[flyingskull.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, Moist, IMO, is not a Magnificent Bastard because he can't be it all the time. OTOH, I think Moist aspires to Magnificent Bastardhood, but will never get there because he's far too human and easily distracted by unappealing girls in severe clothes and a cigarette habit... That, and a lot of other things. He can only be manipulative with people he doesn't like.

In fact, I would go even further and say that the MB is easy to show as vulnerable, because he relies on seeing the potential in a situation that other people can't see - and sometimes, a situation just has no potential, and the MB is helpless

Hmm... I'd say yes, an MB would be helpless in such situation, but not vulnerable all the same. Helpless and vulnerable are different things. Only what you feel for other people can make you vulnerable. It's a chink in your inner armour. External circumstances can make you helpless, but that simply means that all you try is ultimately useless to resolve the situation. See?

Oh fuck yes. Hypocrites are truly the bottom of the barrel - or even lower down - when it comes to human relationships. Personally I'm extremely wary, biased against, prejudiced against everyone who comes at me with the Disney Imperative in her/his mouth. And, BTW, you're not a selfish son of a bitch. I even doubt you could aspire to bastard. You're a lovely person, a gentlema and a scholar. MIIIIIILES away from 'son of bitch' or 'bastard'. :-D I'm SO glad you kicked the Tartuffe our. They deserve to be kicked out. They respect nothing but their obsession. Phaugh!

[baeraad.livejournal.com]

Ahhh, we seem to be dealing with a difference of definition, then. Not much point in debating it - I'll just say that I include in my definition of the Magnificent Bastard even characters who're really only part-time Magnificent Bastards. =]

Though I must also say that I feel Vetinari has his moments of vulnerability too, though they are few and far between. He doesn't care about any person, it is true, but he does care very much about some things, like the well-being of the city - and so I feel he is vulnerable when it is in danger and he knows that even his considerable ingenuity might not be enough to save it.

Point of interpretation, I guess. It's hard to say anything for sure with a character who plays his cards as close to his chest as Vetinari. :)

Personally I'm extremely wary, biased against, prejudiced against everyone who comes at me with the Disney Imperative in her/his mouth.

(*grins cynically*) You know, that's probably a sensible attitude. I'm starting to think that the people who are the most vocal about how everyone is entitled to their opinion are the people who absolutely cannot stand anyone contradicting their opinion. I guess they figure that everyone is entitled to their views as long as they don't do anything as upsetting as expressing them. And you know how good I am at keeping my mouth shut about what I think, right? ;)

Freaking idiocy. It's not that I particularly enjoy arguments, but they do tend to be the best way to learn of any flaws in your theories - because the person you're arguing with will be very motivated to find said flaws for you. If you never throw your ideas out there and let them face some opposition, how can they evolve?

The fact that the kind of people who cannot stand to be contradicted tend to have very stupid and bigoted ideas suggest that they can't, and that said people like that just fine. >_<

You're a lovely person, a gentlema and a scholar.

And I have the awesome friends to prove it. (*HUGS*) =]

[flyingskull.livejournal.com]

Right. I see your argument and, as usual, it's more a matter of precise definition than underlining concepts. Or maybe a matter of different personal sensibilities. Who cares.

To me the fact that Moist is vulnerable to people while Vetinari is vulnerable (maybe) to abstract things is what makes the difference. Perhaps I should use 'love', but even at 3 am, and not a little pissed, I'm extremely reluctant to use that word in a general sense. Call me allergic, call me sensitised to it.

Shunning with EXTREME prejudice people with Disneyan slobber on their mouth is the only way to survive in the jungle of blandification of all passions that are not Patriotism or Murderous Hate that is our current culture. I've decided I want to SEE respect acted out, before I respect someone. Been burned in naive expectations once too many. I't like the net. I may lauch a comment here and there, but if anyone comes at me with guns blazing, that person's going to get a pice of me mind and it won't be a nice piece either.

Luv, you have awesome friends because you actually DESERVED and EARNED them. HMPH.

HUGZ

[baeraad.livejournal.com]

Just checking quickly - you're not mad at me, are you? ^_^; I'm suddenly worried that my whole rant about "people who can't stand to be contradicted" didn't make it perfectly clear that I was talking about those twerps I was arguing with. Absolutely not you - I'd say you most definitely thrive on the free and spirited exchange of ideas... :)

[flyingskull.livejournal.com]

Am at work will deluge you with words later.

Are you deranged? Am NOT mad. Why mad? Did I sound mad? Was early hours of morning, prolly typed all wrong words. Sorry you think am mad because AM NOT.

HUgz

[baeraad.livejournal.com]

Are you deranged?

Quite possibly. =]

Why mad? Did I sound mad?

Uhm, but you said...

...

... ah, right. "Pissed" in the British sense. Sorry, you spoke the Queen's English and I accidentally listened in American. =]

[flyingskull.livejournal.com]

baeraad, please!

Yea, I was pissed as in 'drunk too much beer'. Happens. :-D Never even once thought you'd interpret as 'pissed OFF' as in 'I'm going to rip your balls off' foaming at the mouth rage. Heehee...

But, all for the best, innit? This'll teach me to post at ungodly hours - best hours, really, can't abide godly hours at all - and uncommonly, for me, out of me mind... On second thoughts, uncommonly for me because of alcohol.

Glad was all a miscommunication thingy.

HUGZ