Oppression Stories and Privileged Entitlement
As you might have noticed, I am currently engaging a fair bit with the Dragon Age fandom. And it really makes me hyper aware of one specific kind of issue with media consumption: the entitlement of people who are generally not affected by a certain kind of oppression, but feel entitled to consume narratives about it.
I will use one example that I know tumblr will more likely agree with first.
Whenever we are talking "medieval" (most often actually not medieval, but whatever) fantasy or historical fiction, there will often be a discussion of the topic of violence again women in those forms of fiction. Often a lot of women will note in stories like Game of Thrones and other stories, how violence against women, especially sexual violence, will often be turned into a spectacle to titulate an assumed male audience. And whenever this discussion gets bigger, maybe because a new game comes out or something that features this kind of violence or does not, you can bet there is gonna be men who start to scream that: "But this kind of violence is realistic! It is historically accurate! If women do not like history, they should not consume historical media!" Or, if the piece of media freshly released, does in fact not feature this kind of violence, those same men will scream: "This has gone woke! They remove historical accuracy for brownie points!" Basically: there are a lot of men who feel entitled to consume media that features the oppression of women. They feel entitled to stories about female suffering.
And something I notice in terms of the Dragon Age fandom, is that there we do kinda see the same shit, just on another level of oppression. In this form racial.
If you are not familiar with that fandom: there it is a very big topic that the elves are enslaved by one of the Empires in the world, and it was early on pretty much established that it was a form of chattel slavery. And while the elves generally are - like so often - more drawn in the context of First Nation people, or rather the "Noble Savage" stereotype, in the regards of how they are oppressed within the world at large, it is quite clear that the parallels are drawn in the narrative towards anti-Black racism.
The issue in the games however is: those games, beginning to end, are mostly written by white people. From the lead writers, not a single one was non-white. Some of the writers for single characters were, sure, but none of the main writers.
And it kinda shows in how this topic is handled. While we do not see Tevinter at first, we do see racism against elves in the other places. And there is a sort of voyeuristic nature to how that racism is depicted. Even if you play as an elf, the way it is depicted is always from the mainstream human society. The games always normalize the human perspective.
When it comes to slavery, the way slavery is depicted is very much to have some easy minor bad guys to fill up some space and give you some easy side-quest villains. Most people will be able to agree that slavers are bad guys, so basically they serve the same purpose as Nazis in Indiana Jones movies. Even in a "morally grey" setting, most people agree on their badness. (Though, obviously, you as Hawke can somehow still decide to sell Fenris back into slavery. Because we are serious dark fantasy, or some bull.)
Now, in the last game of the series - Veilguard - we finally see Tevinter, but we do not see the slavery there. I only just learned that part of the reason was not necessarily executive meddling, but the fact that lead writer Trick Weekes said that they as a white person had not business writing this topic.
Ideally, obviously, though would have been resolved by hiring some non-write writers with education and expertise on writing this kind of story, it is quite easy to imagine that due to issues with company leadership and such why this did not happen. (Everything that deals with big budgets suddenly will become penny pinchers, once someone suggests hiring a sensitivity consultants, rather than having them quickly glance over a finished projects as freelancers.)
I absolutely agree that it does feel weird that now we go to Tevinter and do see nothing of that slavery we heard so much about. But I absolutely understand why Weekes themselves would not like to touch that topic. I would even agree that they, as a white person, are just not the right person to write this.
And within the discussion on the topic I notice the same thing as with the "historical violence against women" topic: people, who are not affected by the topic really, feel entitled to see this kind of oppression in the stories they consume.
While there are absolutely stories by white people that handled the topic properly, most do not. Most of the time that slavery is handled in fictional (or even "historical retelling") stories, it tends to serve at least one of the following goals:
a) tell the audience, that even if they are white, they are not one of the "really bad white people".
b) allow them a voyeuristic view on the misery porn of it all.
c) allows them to engage in the power fantasy of getting revenge on their oppressors.
This holds true, even if the topic is engaged through some metaphor. For example by having it be fantasy races.
Ironically a lot of those topics could probably be circumvented if rather than chattel slavery a fiction engaged with other forms of slavery (dept slavery, and war captive slavery) that have less of the racial aspect in them. But in our western context it is obviously that if we hear "slavery" we will think of chattel slavery.
To end off this post: the vast majority of people on tumblr are white, so many of them will feel attacked on this topic, just as the guys who get told that no, their historic fantasy story does in fact not need several explicit rape scenes feel attacked.
And obviously this is a topic that you can apply to pretty much any other story on oppressed groups. Non-Queer people often primarily engage with queer stories through the lense of queer suffering and are often angry over stories of queer joy. Ablebodied people primarily engaged with disabled stories through the lens of disabled suffering, and also get very angry over people of disabled joy.
Heck, it is also the same when we are talking about how sex work gets represented in media (usually through the lens of the sad, suffering woman who has been forced into sex work and wants to get out, and possibly gets saved when a rich white guy falls in love with her and saves her from her horrid fate).
Again, in some specific cases I can understand that at times it feels wrong when we have media that tells us constantly about one form of oppression going on and now showing it. But most of the time the people wanting to see it, are people who are not affected by this form of oppression or comparable forms. They feel entitlement to consuming stories about this oppression.
And I am sorry, but you are not. You are not entitled to consume those stories. And you really should reflect about why you feel entitled to it.
