And another from drafts - on the evil of the First Order

[potboy]

K, let’s examine how evil the First Order are: 

What have we seen them do, on screen, that looks pretty evil?

• They used a superweapon to blow up a massive civilian target
• They tortured an enemy combatant
• They massacred a non-combatant village
• Their army is composed of soldiers who were taken as infants and trained to combat from childhood onward.

Yeah, that does sound pretty bad. But

Who else has done these things?

• The US/allies used a superweapon in WWII to blow up two massive civilian targets
• Guantanamo Bay: *exists*
• During the Vietnam war, US troops operated on a “kill anything that moves” policy, resulting in many massacres of which The Mai Lai massacre is most well known.
• Who else raised children to combat from infancy? The Jedi - who we are supposed to believe are the good guys. (Also in the Real World, what other empire used a child tax to fill its armies and civil service? The Ottoman Empire, also a grey area when it comes to villainy)
  

What moral grounds have we got to say that any of this is justified when we do it - or when the heroes do it - but pure evil when the villains do it? Before we start throwing around the idea that empathizing with the villains automatically makes a person a fascist themself, maybe we should take a look at our own history and remember that all too often our nations have been the villains. 

Would we ourselves want to be judged with the kind of simplistic good v evil duality with which we talk about SW characters? How well do you think we would stand up under that? 

Now obviously, I’m not saying that torture and mass murder are good things. I’m just saying that it’s hypocritical of us to claim that we could never be citizens of a regime like that. We already are.

When our own nations desperately need to learn how to do better, it’s kind of offensive of us, tbh, to keep insisting we could only be the hero, and that we can’t even make art about the villains without sullying our moral purity.

Comments

[acidwitch]

I mean, I find it difficult to say that it's wrong to judge those actions for their immorality as long as you cop to the fact that the actions your country has taken in the past are also evil. Moving forward, and all that.

Man, I don't even object to the fact that people like the Jedi despite the child soldiers thing - lord knows I engage in wish fulfillment about being trained to be a badass while I was still a child - but the active justifications in meta bother me. Especially when they come from people who are so unforgiving about other aspects of Star Wars morality. Even if you assume the apprentices are treated fantastically and raised well in most ways... The Clone Wars kind of erases those good intentions, and so does attachment doctrine, and so does the removal of children from their families unnecessarily.

[potboy]

I quite agree that you can and should judge all those actions as evil actions and I'm against them in real life, and realize that they are fully villainous things to do in fiction. This post was really a reaction against the kind of fandom antis who feel that having any kind of sympathy for the bad guys makes you bad yourself. The moment you started to speculate on the motives of the bad guys in a way that had nuance and regarded them as complex human beings trying to live in their own society, you tended to come in for criticisms that you were a Nazi sympathizer. And that struck me as ridiculous, since the UK (where I'm from) and the US (where a lot of the rest of the fandom are from) have so often been the evil empire ourselves. The more we put evil at a distance and say we could never have done anyhing like that, the more we fail to understand both it and ourselves.

Which still doesn't make it good! I totally agree with that. I'm fully convinced that the FO is a terrible organization even for the most highly ranking people in it, but that's the kind of thing you say when you know you're having a conversation with some shades of grey :)

Also, yeah, I would have loved to train as a Jedi, and I think that young Hux (for example) is a good example of a child who would have benefitted enormously from being taken from his parent at an early age. So not even that is all black and white.

[acidwitch]

OH THIS IS ABOUT ANTIS!! I spent a few years out of fandom and have only been back for a few months and keep forgetting that the whole anti thing has and is happening. I have a hard time recognizing real meta vs social justice wank sometimes because of it. I've managed to insulate myself juuuust enough lmaoooo I'm not excited to have direct contact with them :') it's only a matter of time...

[potboy]

*G* I'm hoping that there will be fewer antis on Dreamwidth than there were on Tumblr. Something about the way it's set up encourages more in-depth conversations, I think. Also it's easier just to not see them on here.

But yeah, this bit of meta was a result of being called a Nazi too many times because I happened to be a fan of fictional villains :) Then I never actually posted it over there because I didn't think the fallout would be worth it.