Not Everything is an Exact Allegory

I wasn’t even sure if we’d have a Saturday Note this week. I spent most of it out of town on vacation, so I don’t have a list of notes of things I wanted to talk about, or an outline or something like that. I do have some dragon sketch practice, though.

Presently reading an Avatar book, about Yangchen. I have a lot of laundry to do today, so I'm not sure if I’ll be able to do a lot this weekend.

Now I feel like I've written about this kind of thing before? I can’t find it, though, at least not in the Saturday Notes, so we’re going to go with it anyway.

Not Everything is an Exact Allegory

I recently watched Wake Up, Dead Man, the new Benoit Blanc murder mystery on Netflix, and it was good! Watch for that review on the movie blog in the next month sometime. But also… okay, so there’s one character played by Andrew Scott that is a formerly-revered science-fiction author that has been sucked into very reactionary views and accidentally built a very weird, prepper audience against his will, after becoming a part of Monsignor Wicks’s inner circle. I saw a couple of people on Tumblr decide that this was OBVIOUSLY meant to be a parody of J.K. Rowling, duh, but that… didn’t feel right to me?

Like, TV Tropes, for reference, draws a comparison to Orson Scott Card, who fits that character a lot closer, with a couple of adjustments–notably, Card is Mormon, rather than Catholic as the characters in the movie are.

The entire thing made me think of another thing I saw with a movie last year–in James Gunn’s Superman. The movie has an entire subplot about one fictional country, a US ally, planning to invade another country to kill civilians, and the government doing nothing about it, while Superman worked to stop the slaughter, causing an international incident. Because people have the subtlety of a brick to the face, many audiences assumed this was a deliberate statement on Israel and the conflict over Gaza–despite the movie’s script being written well before that was front headline news for everyone.

[And also the fictional country in question in the movie looking, and the leader talking, a lot more like Russia than any other country.]

I think there is this tendency to read into stories what we want to see, whether or not it was intended by writers. And because people have become so issue-focused, they want to project those issues onto every theme they find that can be remotely related. I’m glad you care about the slaughter of Gazans, but that doesn’t mean that every story about one country or ethnic group being a dick to another is a direct allegory.

And part of the problem with this is that because people read these stories, with fictional characters or groups, as direct allegories for real world issues and problems, they’ll think if those things don’t conform to their sympathies it’s because the author hates this or that group. There’s a whole thing in the Dragon Age fandom about the treatment of Dalish elves, a group whose depiction draws from several real-world oppressed groups. Their beliefs about the gods are ultimately misguided and wrong, and many of them throughout the series can be dicks–which leads to some fans acting like these are statements by the writers about real-world groups like the Romani or Native Americans. Which they were never meant to be! They’re elves! Fictional beings!

Mind you, if you’re going to go out of your way to draw so many parallels, you should probably expect that some in the audience will take it that way…

Back to Superman and Wake Up, Dead Man, though, it feels as if audience members expect things to be allegories, and I need to pull out my Tolkien again, because we all need to learn about “Applicability” again. The famous Tolkien quote reads:

"I cordially dislike allegory, and have done ever since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other resides in the purposed domination of the author."

Like, okay, you do realize that this issue is not limited to one person? Or one group? A beloved popular author or artist breaking off from the original audience and becoming an accidental champion of a certain political group is not a one-time thing. A country committing genocide for BS reasons and the US not getting involved is also, sadly, not a one-time thing. When a writer puts something on the page to talk about an issue, they’re not necessarily speaking about a single instance.

That’s how stories become timeless. Or try to, anyway. When George Lucas was writing the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, about the fall of the Old Republic, there were parallels to modern things, yes, but he was also writing about Rome and the rise of Caesar, or France and Napoleon, and so on and so forth–because representative governments devolving into tyranny is a pattern that happens over and over again.

Likewise, when James Gunn writes about Superman stepping in when no one else will, well, he’s doing the same kind of thing: even when nations decide it’s too politically risky to protect human life, we should stand up and do it anyway, because that’s the right thing to do.

And again, while I think it’s admirable that we care about certain issues as much as we do, it’s also limiting in analysis of fiction. Not every piece of fiction with relevant themes is meant to be one-to-one to a specific issue, and it doesn’t have to be. It wasn’t meant to be an allegory. It was meant to be applicable to those issues. That doesn’t mean that certain criticisms can’t be used on a work, but it does mean that you can’t limit how you view this movie. It doesn’t have to be about one, specific thing that you’re thinking about right now, because it’s in the news. —