#like i don't get this modern urge to give power and agency to women in mythology by either

[themoonking]

see someone spreading misinformation about ancient greece online, gently correct them, they say "well discerning whats canon and whats fanon in greek mythology is really difficult". i am killed instantly.

[qqueenofhades]

Hey Hilary! I haven't seen "confederate" or "the man in the high castle", I only know their basic premises, but how are they different? I don't understand why are people so upset about one but not the other (this is probably me just missing something), can you explain your point of view?

Confederate isn’t out yet, it was only announced recently as the next project of the Game of Thrones co-creators (Benioff and Weiss). People are giving this all kinds of side-eye because a) Game of Thrones is overwhelmingly white, and b) has a huge, HUGE problem with violence against its female characters, especially rape. So when you have a couple of white guys who are known for their shock value style, and who have seemed obsessed with rape as a plot device, proposing to make a show about modern slavery, when black people are well aware that violent racism has never gone away and when neo-Nazism and the Confederacy are still proudly identified with, has… way too much possibility to just be gross as hell. I understand they have hired some black writers, which is better than not hiring black writers, but… why do we NEED a show about this? Why do we need more misery porn, more depictions of African Americans as slaves, more images and mainstream space for this ideology, when the president of the country is a self-confessed white supremacist? What are we getting out of this, fictionally or in reality? It’s not the right of fiction to take a historical premise and redo it that I object to – I love alt-history as a genre. But this is not particularly new. “What if the South had won the Civil War” has been done to death, and represents more than a little wish fulfillment. And as noted, Benioff and Weiss’ previous work makes everyone rightfully wary that this is going to be “shock, rape, and violence.” And we… have that every day in reality against black people. We don’t need more.

If you want a show about the Civil War turning out differently, Amazon is developing a series (with actual black showrunners) about a post-Reparations America where black people have received several Southern states for their own country. This puts the power and agency back in their hands, does not present the degrading and mistreatment of black people as entertainment (when again, we get that enough in reality) is an interesting and not-overdone premise, and allows us to imagine an opposite reality that is actually different from our own and promises a critical reflection on the way things are. Maybe Confederate can do that, but.. yeah, my hopes are not high, and it’s not something we need or which tells us anything different. At worst, it’s grimdark torture porn masquerading as “bold” and socially engaged media.

Meanwhile, The Man in the High Castle is based on a novel from 1962 and which, in my view, actually takes its premise both seriously and which never pretends the Nazis winning WWII was a good thing. Its contrast with our universe becomes (no spoilers) a major plot point. All the main Nazis are white American men. The people who suffer for it (and who make up the resistance) are women, Jews, people of color, Japanese-Americans, and others. The show is dark and violent, but it never substitutes gore or shock for story, and actually does what a well-constructed alt-history should do, especially one with such troubling resonance for our present moment. It makes us look really hard at who we are and how we got here.

Believe me, I heard about its ill-advised marketing campaign by putting up swastikas, and that made me cringe. I also cringe at the unsurprising tendency in fandom to woobify John Smith and Joe Blake (the main American-white-man Nazis, who at the moment are both unrepentant Nazis) and make pretty edits for them and ship them with Juliana Crane (the main female heroine). I… can’t do it. They’re complex characters (though I think Joe is just a lame asshole, frankly) and I recognize what they bring to the story, especially Smith, but he’s a villain. I recognize that problems exist around and outside the show, but as a narrative itself, I haven’t seen it glorifying Nazis or acting as if this is something to be aspired to at all, and which urges critique of their reappearance in our own present moment. As I said, it’s based on a book from the 60s, and it is actually reflecting our current events in a way that makes us THINK about these events, our complicity in them, and the way in which white America has become happily Nazified in TMHC’s world – because let’s be real, that is exactly what would happen. And again, its contrast with our world is something that is acknowledged, comes up, and is dealt with. If they take a U-turn in season 3 and change these premises, then yeah, I’m going to call them out for it.

The point isn’t to say that twisting a historical premise is inherently “wrong,” or that fiction has no right to explore controversial topics, or to posit alternate outcomes. But the way in which these stories do it, the message they are sending, the ideology around its creation, and the way in which those themes are handled in resonance to the present, all has to be done carefully and critically. Every piece of historical fiction, especially around charged events like these, is produced for a modern audence. You can’t ignore that in the name of some supposed “purity of historical experience.” It doesn’t exist. You have to reckon the world into which you are putting this creation, and why.

So yes. Fiction has every right to imagine “what if the South won the Civil War” or “what if the Nazis won World War II” or anything else. But that places an added responsibility on it to do it very carefully, with relation to our existing popular media and political discourse, and one which I have absolutely no reason to think Benioff and Weiss can pull off.