why anti-woobification bugs me
Oct. 9th, 2012 02:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineI used to be very strongly against woobification, but at this point, the anti-woobification brigade bothers me far more. And nothing bothers me quite so much as their mantra of, “what happened to him [it’s virtually always a him] as a child was terrible, but that’s not a defense for what he is as an adult.”
Heading off the let’s-interrogate-why-woobies-are-usually-men tangent: I think popular media tends to focus overwhelmingly on male pain and this is what’s presented to us, for another, fandom tends to home in on it anyway, and for a third, I think it gets judged the way it does because of skeevy masculinity and anti-femininity issues.
Some of the time, sure, it’s an answer to creepy victim-blaming bullshit. And I don’t mean victim-blaming to refer to things like “Korra was going to light Tarrlok on fire” (though I’ve actually heard people say that is victim-blaming), but more like, “Padmé shouldn’t have provoked Anakin into choking her.” But a lot of what I see now is, “people love a character without issuing disclaimers.” You know, we can be fannish about villainous or quasi-villainous characters without constantly reminding our unseen audience that yes, we know they’re bad guys?
Beyond that, though, there’s another layer of … I’m not sure what the word is. Problematic has basically lost all meaning at this point. Let’s say that it bothers me, even though we’re talking about cartoons and space operas and novels and whatnot, because for me there’s a lot of RL background going on.
See, “but now he’s a grown man!” is a simplistic, reductive, often careless response to an incredibly complicated issue. I see it used, constantly, as a basic premise, an assumption that everyone can agree with - or, in many cases, an assumption that everyone should agree with. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve heard someone say something to the effect of, “well, as long as [character fanbase] acknowledges that [character] should have gotten over it already, I’ll tolerate their affection for different made-up people than the made-up people I like.” And the fanbase says, yes, yes, we understand, woobifying is terrible boo hiss, can we go back to feeling sorry for him now?
You know what? Without qualifiers, that premise is vastly inadequate to my experience of the real world - and what with art reflecting and influencing real life, I can’t leave that at home when I go into fandom. It’s not that childhood trauma always excuses, or even explains, people’s adult selves - I’m not saying that. I’m saying that sometimes it does, and more often, it (merely!) diminishes an individual’s capacity to choose and judge, and now and then, the person is no less responsible than they’d be if they had an idyllic childhood, all varying from person to person and situation to situation.
But some fans talk as if we live in some alternate reality where childhood doesn’t lead into adulthood, where the psychologically resilient are more worthy than those who aren’t. It’s as if all victims of all childhood traumas are created equal and some are strong enough to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and some are weaklings to be despised.
And it’s … okay. My family has a long history of abuse of virtually all kinds, which has been extremely damaging for the last five generations. I’m lucky enough that its effect on me has been mostly indirect; instead, a succession of near-death experiences in childhood (and other things that I don’t care to go into at the moment) left me pretty much a nervous wreck by thirteen. It’s taken the last thirteen years, a full half of my life, with lots of professional help, an intensely close friendship, and a deeply supportive family, to even begin to put myself together. I am not in a position to judge people who don’t manage to overcome their traumas. I’ve worked to get past mine as far as I have, but I’ve also been immensely fortunate.
Moreover, my grandparents and my mother and stepfather and my aunt and her husband and I are all licensed for therapeutic foster care. Because of the vagaries of the system, we - particularly my parents and I - have ended up as a sort of last stop for severely abused children before they’re permanently institutionalized. I’ve had literally dozens of foster-siblings (and whatever my grandparents’ foster-children are to me) at varying levels of functionality: that is, from considerably more functional than I am to considerably less.
A lot of them never got “over” the effects of their abuse. Not because of some inherent weakness, but because they were that damaged by their abuse and then again by the foster-care system. Plenty of my foster-siblings were yanked back into their abusive homes, then back to us, then back to them again, on and on, or jerked between different homes because of some bureaucratic shuffle.
Nearly all of these ones had problems with attachment, long-term judgment, and empathy; many had far, far more. Those who’d never had any kind of ally outside their homes tended to be very badly-off. My grandparents had a foster-son who had been so severely abused that he could scarcely function at all; he couldn’t be justly held responsible for anything.
Most of the time, it’s not quite that extreme, but in every case I know of, trauma impairs people’s faculties in some way, and often for life. And a lot of time, my foster-siblings who seemed to be making the most progress ended up much worse-off when they became adults, particularly the men. The thing is, while we always had to fight for services, it was a fight we had some chance of winning when we were advocating for children (i.e., minors). But once they became adults, virtually everything dried up - and if they’d never been able to get help in the first place? Good luck.
It’s like fandom says. Adults should be over it already. Men, especially, shouldn’t need help (weakness! unmanly!), but women too. I have a foster-sister right now who’s only eleven; it’s taken three years to get the help she has now, and of course we worry about what’s going to happen in seven years. We’ve made the arrangements that we can, but sometimes it’s like there’s a clock ticking down. Two of my foster-sisters almost immediately fell between the cracks when they turned eighteen, and I don’t know what happened to them.
It’s not always some wholly tragic - what’s the phrase? - oh right, sob story. Sometimes people are lucky enough to be naturally resilient. Sometimes they get the help they need. Sometimes they’re able to move on, at least enough to more or less function in the world and be more or less answerable for their actions. Certainly, people who win their psychological battles deserve credit for their own victories; I’m not arguing that this is all passively determined, just that a lot of the dialogue around “tragic pasts” underestimates the extent of their influence.
Our experiences, particularly our experiences as children and our traumatic experiences - and particularly-particularly traumatic experiences as children - can and often do have enormous effects on our psyches. The kind of things that are easily dismissed as “another rough childhood” can damage people. It can damage people enough that they’re never able to get better, it can damage them enough that their personal agency is diminished (in any degree from the slight to the very considerable), it can be one or the other or both or neither or something else altogether.
Trauma, abuse, psychological damage: they’re complex, they’re massive, they’re imperfectly understood, and they vary wildly between individuals. And when we talk about “woobies,” these are the things we’re talking about. The characters are not real, but the kinds of things they experience are. And some dismissive, facile sentence treating the fallout from childhood trauma as if it were Trix Cereal is not remotely sufficient to address them.
no subject
on 2012-10-10 12:42 am (UTC)Anti-woobiefication often reads like victim-blaming to me, usually with a side order of the creepy gender issues you mentioned. There's also a "fannish anti-woobiefication brigade" that creeps me out as well: the ones who want to fan/stan for male villains/quasi-villains/antiheroes but who can't stand seeing them as having any emotional vulnerabilities or needs or, really, background explanations for their behaviors and concomitant ways of having a more positive outcome if other people in their childhoods or even later life had not dropped the ball (at best--- sometimes the ball got used to hit the character in the head, so to speak). Or even if said fans get the abuse issues, they often go for the most screwed-up-possible result with them--- the psychopathic or sociopathic result, the result that we least understand how to address in psych as a field right now. And I... well, I am not stanning for these characters for the same reasons as those folks are, let's just leave it at that. Oh, and Force forbid you see said character as actually wanting to be, oh, someone's Dragon, especially someone female's Dragon, and not The Big Man In Charge. (Anakin Skywalker fandom, I am looking at you, though you're not the only guilty one by a long shot.)
Also, my hat is completely off to you and your family for what you are doing for your foster siblings. What you are doing takes my breath away with its excellence.
no subject
on 2012-10-11 07:09 pm (UTC)And yes, at some point it starts to feel that fandom can't help victim-blaming regardless of where their sympathies go! Oh, and this:
the ones who want to fan/stan for male villains/quasi-villains/antiheroes but who can't stand seeing them as having any emotional vulnerabilities or needs or, really, background explanations for their behaviors and concomitant ways of having a more positive outcome if other people in their childhoods or even later life had not dropped the ball (at best--- sometimes the ball got used to hit the character in the head, so to speak)
So much yes! I was not thinking specifically of those when I wrote this, but it happens ALL THE TIME with the dudebro Vader stans, and I actually ended up having a really interesting conversation with someone on tumblr about exactly the same thing happening with (less dudebro, but still skeevy) Amon fans. It's not your fandom, but if you're interested, the conversation was here, here, and here. (Damn tumblr, lol.)
Oh, thanks! My family's done it since 1970, wellll before I was born, so it's ... just how things have always been? And my grandparents, particularly, have - I think what they do is a mixed bag. But I really admire my mother and my aunt's work. (I mostly babysit and explain life lessons by way of Star Wars.) I was worried about talking over people, a bit - I mean, there are plenty in fandom who've been in foster care, say, and certainly people who've been abused and can speak for themselves. But I think this is an important angle, too; it definitely affects the way you look at things, when you've lived and worked with 40+ people whose abuse entirely or largely does excuse them, and the trite dismissals really grate.
no subject
on 2012-10-24 02:22 am (UTC)Oooh, I'm glad my co-rant about "inexplicable-villain-stanning" makes sense! I have fortunately not had close encounters with dudebro Vader stans, but my own current fandom other than SW is Final Fantasy VII, and Sephiroth gets the same treatment as Vader and Amon--- even people who want to poke around in his head nearly always choose the IMO least-healthy version of him, and it's usually in ways that adhere strictly to certain "ideals" of masculinity. In fact, I'm sort of sardonically amused because your not-my-fandom (A:LOK) and my not-your-fandom (FFVII) have almost the exact same issues with regard to the "villain": I read the first conversation you linked, and all the issues about Amon's godhood and untouchability versus him being a flawed human with a background that makes the creation of that persona for himself make sense... oh, dear Force, hi, Sephiroth, what are you doing over there? Because it's a very similar dynamic, with the self-creation of a "flawless" persona for purposes that make a lot of sense given the character's actual canon backstory but the fannish explorations of same often leave me cold. (All of which is reinforcing my decision to be very very careful about where I get my Star Wars fannish fixes, because I can do without the dudebro Vader-stanning. I am not interested in characters I don't find sympathetic, plzkthx. Not to mention that Star Wars got interesting to me again as an adult in large part because of all the social and interpersonal issues, and fail on the part of the Assigned Good Guys, in the PT. Oh Obi-wan, you didn't just drop that ball, you used Anakin's head for target practice with it.)
You are more than welcome! As I said, that is a truly excellent thing to do! (And, hey, Star Wars hits so many archetypes and so many more subtle human issues all at once, and it's culturally accessible--- fantastic vehicle for talking about Stuff!)
And you definitely don't sound like you're talking over people to me, certainly not people who've experienced foster care and/or abusive family backgrounds. (And IMO if you're talking over people who have no experience at all with that and feel free to be dismissive of its effects on people's development... that is not necessarily a bad thing, if only because people blithely asserting that someone should just "get over" the wide variety of issues that come out of those experiences can be hurtful to, you know, people who've had them?) (That's a major rant of mine, actually.) And it's definitely good to get a perspective from someone who's in a position to see those issues over and over again, how certain related issues keep coming up for people who've had abusive childhoods--- both for fannish reasons of, hey, these are some things we should think about with this character, and then for reasons of, there are people in fandom who have gone through or are going through abusive situations, and hearing, "Yeah, that hurts people," and by extension, "You being hurt by what you're going through is not abnormal much less weak"... almost can't be a bad thing.