Selective Empathy: A Trope I Always Hated
Let me talk about a trope I have always kind of hated, and that at times really ruined a lot of media for me. Most notably it is the reason why I soured so much on Avatar - The Last Airbender, even though I still have so much nostalgia on this show.
I saw a post recently on how the series handled the entire story of Aang not wanting to kill Ozai, and how all the other Avatars refused to provide him a non-lethal option to resolve the conflict. And if you follow my blog, you know I actually am very much for stories that resolve the story without violence. But I still hate this in Avatar. And I am going to tell you why.
Who Cares About the Nameless?
The reason why I hated the entire "I cannot kill Ozai" plot is, that Aang kills during the series - and it never is brought up as a problem to this point. Largely, of course, because him killing so far is a thing that anyone who thinks along can see, but never is acknowledged within the text.
A lot of it happens in Book 1. There is specifically two situations. One being during the Coal Mining plot. Our protagonists throw two Fire Nation Guards - both wearing armor - into the water. One of them screams "I cannot swim", which the series is playing largely for humor. Because, haha, how funny, an adult who cannot swim and works on an artificial island. Hilarious. (Let's just ignore how the ability to swim is massively charged in terms of racism and classism and what not.) But aside from the joke being tasteless: this is two men in armor. I would argue that most people who can swim will not be able to perform this feat while wearing armor.
And then there is the finale of The Siege of the North, where Aang fuses with the spirit and just... sinks the entire Fire Nation fleet. Which, let's face it, will have killed most of them. Because again, they wear armor, this is largely the open ocean, and also this is cold water in an icy region. While the water will not be subzero, the air most certainly is. And either way, the cold will lead to hypothermia. Even with fire benders. Those who do not die through drowning will likely suffer a death through freezing.
But this... is something that is not acknowledged. And part of this is that it is a kids show. And kids shows rarely acknowledge it when people die of violence. Especially if protagonists kill.
So, when it comes time to kill Ozai - who other than those soldiers in the armada has a name and is an actual character - it is suddenly a viable plot concern that indeed, Air Nomads are pacifist and do not kill. Which makes killing Ozai, the fascist leader of the Fire Nation, somehow more morally complicated than killing literally hundreds of likely drafted people, who did not really have a choice about being there.
But let's be honest. This is obviously not an Avatar-originating problem. It is a trope quite common in media. It is a trope. And the core of this trope is that the nameless goons within any piece of media generally are not treated as people, but just obstacles to overcome. Within the context of any fictional world soldiers, goons, and minions are just things and can be killed without their death ever being treated as something that stains the protagonist's hands. After all, those are not people. They do not have names, or history, or families. Because within the space of the story they indeed don't. But...
Well, this is a problem. Because it is related to a specific way in which we frame history.
You have likely at least once heard of "Great Men History". And Great Men History is generally how we all are being taught about history.
The term and theory goes back to Thomas Carlyle. But while his entire idea was racist, patriarchal bullshit... if we are honest, it is not as if he invented the concept. People have framed history always around the acts of a few great men, whose names were remembered - and not around the workers and soldiers they commanded.
There is a German Poem by Bertold Brecht, which always stayed with me on this. I am gonna share a bit of it with you. The name of the poem is: "Fragen eines Lesenden Arbeiters" (Questions of a Reading Worker) if you want to look it up.
Der junge Alexander eroberte Indien.
Er allein ?
Cäsar schlug die Gallier.
Hatte er nicht wenigstens einen Koch bei sich?
Philipp von Spanien weinte, als seine Flotte
Untergegangen war. Weinte sonst niemand?
Friedrich der Zweite siegte im Siebenjährigen Krieg. Wer
Siegte außer ihm?
To translate it into English:
Young Alexander conquered India.
Him alone?
Caesar won over the Gauls.
Didn't he even bring a cook along with him?
Philipp of Spain cried, when his fleet
sank. Was he the only one to cry?
Friedrich the Second won the Seven Year War. Who
Won beside him?
The poem basically tackles on how we frame history as the decisions, wins, losses, and acts of a few select people - most of them men, many of them white men.
And a bunch of people - like Thomas Carlyle - basically looked at this, clapped, and said: "Yes, of course, without those great men we would totally be cave dwelling savages. These wars would not have been won without these great men. Those things would not have been built without these great men." Even though a bunch of those great men never once held a sword, and never moved a single stone in the constructions.
Everyone else gets forgotten. Everyone else is not worth mentioning. Maybe there is some words being lost over soldiers when it goes into how the military was trained or behaving. But the function of soldiers is of course to be a non-person. To be part of "the army". To not be thought about as people.
But then there is a bunch of associated workers, who fully get ignored. The cooks, the carpenters, the masons, the black smiths, the animal handlers, the tailors... all those people usually just disappear completely from the stories. Sure, a bunch of armies did not have a lot of either - but many had. But they get forgotten.
And in regards to the death toll, there is of course also the good old quote: The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic. A quote that does not, in fact, originate with Stalin, but a French satirical magazine from the early 20th century. But there is a truth to this.
And this has been talked about before. How there is the death of empathy, the more people are affected. Because our brains just cannot deal with all the suffering associated with a hundred deaths. One death makes sense. We can do that. We can understand that. But a hundred? A thousand?
Those two aspects interact. Our inability to not be endlessly empathic, and how we frame narratives around bad things happening.
You know how I have recently been replaying the Batman Arkham games. And these games - like many games - kinda are doing the same. Sure, Batman does not kill. Like many superheroes he has the entire silly little no-kill rule (that originally was just a rule of Superman and had a very specific reason to exist, but then for some reason was spread to a lot of superheroes). And yeah, the game tells you: "Yup, that goon you let hang upside down for like an hour is totally fine, actually." Which... uhm, okay. I doubt. But sure, game.
However, the non-goon villains actually are often treated a lot more gentle within the game. Yeah, some get knocked out, but many just tied up and delivered to the authorities. Because hey, those are people, the goons are just... numbers to give you EXP.
I brought this up in regards to two other games before: Dragon Age, and the Uncharted series. Y'all know that I love those series both. But they both suffer from a very specific video game problem. A problem that most video games suffer from. And this problem is that your main tool of interacting with this game words is violence.
And let's be honest: if you think about it this always is silly.
Let's look at Uncharted (and also the Tomb Raider games, especially the newer ones that are very influenced by the kind of action we see since Resident Evil 4). For the most part these games have a plot that is about people trying to get their hands on shiny things. And yeah, sure, there is some magic involved within those shiny things, usually. But in several of the cases the magic is a surprise. (Let's not talk about how this involves characters who in some cases manage to go 10 years finding magic shit every other year and still go: "Huh, magic is real?" every time. lol) Like for the most part both the heroes and villains originally set out to get their hands on the shiny thing because money.
So... this is about money. And in those games you kill several hundred goons. Largely because of money. Which for the most part never gets acknowledged. In several of the Uncharted games the goons are largely mercenaries. Who have been hired by the bad guy. And who... still keep coming at you after you killed the first hundred. Like, let's be honest here: realistically a good chunk would say "fuck it" and skedaddle or try to change sides. They do not do this, because they are not characters. They are little obstacles for you to overcome. When the bosses die, that is a cut scene. But the goon dying is just a thing that happens ten times over within a minute.
I noted how within Dragon Age this created a ludonarrative dissonance for me several times over. Especially in Dragon Age 2, where over the course of the game you usually will kill around 400 or so nameless characters. Because the game used the endless waves of bad guys as filler to pad out the runtime, given that due to the insane development timeline they just... did not have time for filling the play time with actual content as much as in the other games. But this makes it just very weird, whenever a death is of narrative importance. I noted this one specific example: when Anders loses his cool and almost kills the mage girl, and he beats himself up about it. And... like, up to this point we have killed hundreds of people, some of which - under Anders' worldview - were actually acting because of valid grievances. Why does it matter now?
A Culture of Big Men and Violence
The core issue in this has two aspects to it: one is how we frame everything around the decisions of a few great people, usually white men, who had been born into privilege and because of this privilege got to make those decisions. There are a bunch of cases where it is quite likely where it was not actually the idea of someone who was not the big named guy. Like, yes, in the end the big man might have agreed to it - but it was not their idea alone. And heck, I mean, there is likely a bunch of cases where some big thing gets credited to someone who actually had no idea on it back then, but was the ruler associated with it. And this generally translates to how we tell and frame stories. It is about a few people who make decisions - and not the soldiers and goon who die for it.
At the same time we also have a narrative culture that has become accustomed to frame any story worth telling around violence as the main tool. Sure, we might have a few noteworthy examples of well-known movies, shows, and books that do center around violence... but a lot of it is.
Video games are obviously the most notable example, given that pretty much every AAA video game uses violence as the main mechanic with which the player interacts with the game world. Yes, there obviously are Visual Novels, Dating Sims, and generally other Sim Games that do not primarily feature violence. But most big name games use violence as the main game mechanic.
But even outside of this. Look at the blockbuster movies. Those tend to be framed around "action", and action usually means violence. And the same is true for a lot of TV shows. While TV shows arguably are the medium that is most likely to not feature a plot that is hinged on violence happening - it still is in a lot of cases.
Ironically this is especially true for western animation. As western animation (outside of the animated sitcom format) tends to be fantasy or scifi - and fantasy and scifi tend to be generally measured against their ability to portray cool and interesting action. And once more: action translates to violence.
And don't get me wrong: most of the media I am super focused on is media that fundamentally is framed around violence - and I love those pieces of media. I love my Castlevania, I love my Dragon Age, I love my Baldur's Gate 3, and I love my Digimon. Even though out of those series only BG3 allows you to in some cases circumvent violence, and even here the game largely is framed around violence, because it is a game, and violence is the language spoken by games.
It is also why I keep harping on about stuff like famines in relationship to epic stories, because so many people just ignore that the identity of the soldiers is the same identity as those of the farmers, and that without them there is likely a lesser harvest.
In the end this usually is a topic I am willing to ignore most days. Because I still - obviously - am a sucker for smoothly animated action scenes, and game play loops that feel rewarding. But my ability to just ignore it tends to break in the moment, when someone goes: "But we cannot kill [named villainous leader]! Because killing is bad!" While the same characters at the very least were callous about the lives of goons and soldiers commanded by the villainous leader. Like, no, buddy. You cannot do both. Either you care about not killing, and then you gotta be careful about the goons and soldiers and mercenaries, who had little to no say in opposing you. Or you will punish the leader with as much violence as you put the soldiers through. You cannot pull the "oh, killing is wrong/violence is wrong" card, after having enacted violence against people who were likely drafted or had joined the villain out of financial hardships.
