About engaging with some specific mystery genre tropes
Hi! Realized I feel like I need a statement about this as I go further into the AU and deal with some tropes of the mystery genre and how they relate to real life.
I know a lot of stories in the mystery genre lean into copaganda with how it portrays characters with the real life roles in the system of law and order. And one of my primary inspirations of Detective Conan is, yeah, I think it's copaganda heavy (dunno how much compared to other media).
Anyway! My goal with this is to try not to lean into copaganda tropes and subvert the ones I think I can subvert in a healthy way. As well, not to make fun of real life injustices and harm experienced by people who were failed by systems of law and order, which fail people the world over in real life.
I just wanna have a bit of silly fun here, you know? And it's not that fun if a joke I make leaves a bad taste in someones mouth.
I want to do it on the level that Toby does it.
When he depicts prisons, it's cages you can get out of easily and the guard just goes "whoops, guess that didn't stop you!", with pairs of eyes that point out they're pairs of eyes in darkness, cells like hamster cages with giant bottles of water, kings pretending to be animals even when the animals have escaped and there not being a frantic hunt after escaped criminals, because they're just reading at the library.
He depicts traffic cops getting voluntarily run over or bench pressing cars. Remixing the alarms and sirens, and writing custom messages on caution tape. Silly stuff, but also like, showing people those kinda roles messing up and being wrong, while not getting too serious with it? (I guess except the Dess disappearance being connected to Asgore leaving, that's serious, but we don't know that much about it yet...)
That's the kinda way I want to do it.
I just feel like I needed to clarify stuff cuz, yeah, like I said above a lot of mystery stories include copaganda; which glorifies the systems of law and order and people working for them, and the times they depict people taking advantage of it it's "one bad apple", never systemic problems. I'll try to never play into that kinda stuff, and I accidentally make something that sends that message of glorification of justice systems, I'll effort to change it, understand where I went wrong and not repeat it in the future.
On the topic of my stuff, the darkners in this story aren't actual people working within systems of law and order, they're objects seen through a lense colored with a flawed father and former cop, who engages in a lot of fiction (and Asgore in this AU has engaged with mystery fiction as well, since darkners are made from the perspective of the one who made them, and Asgore is the dark fountain maker in Cold Casement).
They might seem at first impression like they play into classic tropes of a role that has propaganda-associations, but I always try to subvert those tropes, twist them, break that first impression and leave the trope behind or showing the harm playing into it can cause, y'know?
But I acknowledge I can do things wrong, like not understanding how something sends a message I did not intend to send, and I'll do what I mentioned above to fix things.
And I also acknowledge, that from what I understand, is that it's also kind of a form of copaganda to depict people in roles in the systems of law and order as just silly and harmless? Like, without acknowledging that people with that kind of power granted to them can and sometimes do abuse it and cause harm. I see stuff aimed at older children being described like this, continuing to perpetuate the image of people in these kinda roles as people who want to do the right thing and fail in harmless ways, when that's the age one should introduce more complex perspectives on those kind of jobs.
So I'll try to not do that, to not be too harmless. That'll be harder, like, I see good comedy stuff get praise for being funny and acknowledge the the harm and make fun of the people causing the harm and also commiserating and showing empathy towards the people affected, at the same time or very close between the different tones? It seems to be hard, but I'll try, even though my bread and butter is mostly just simple wordplay. But just saying that I think that might be harder for me to do well so it might be off the mark sometimes, and in a way that might be a bit worse than just a bad pun making you cringe?
So. Ending statement kinda thing. Hope this didn't get too rambly or I repeated points and things, I can get long-winded... Just felt it was important to say something about this, and I said it in the best way could without spending like, more than four hours on it.
...Oh yeah! You wanna hear the worst case of copaganda in Conan that I think of first when I hear "Detective Conan copaganda"?
It's The Naniwa Serial Murder Case (jp118 / int124-125), at the end where the culprit of this case gets brought to the ambulance and one of the people he wanted to kill wants to punch him, but gets stopped by Toyama (don't remember his first name, it's Kazuha's father) stops him and says "You can't punch him, since he's still my subordinate." And that reason for why there is depicted as if that's a good thing???
(Like, maybe I get "loyalty is a virtue" is more of a thing in Japan and more around the time the episode was made/manga was written (dunno if it's in the manga honestly. don't wanna check currently...) but, oh my god, that is blatant "cops sticking up for other cops that abuse their power"?!?)
