circular_time | Strawman "Your Fave is Problematic" Syndrome (Reply)

I’ve run into this problem for years.

It originally came up for me in some of the later Trek iterations and, especially, in Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, which weakened and undermined a lot of characters because flawed characters are ~~more interesting~~ easier to dramatize than nice guys. (See: Faramir wanting to take the Ring, Frodo’s “go home, Sam,” or even Denethor, reduced to a madman instead of a pragmatist who saw no rational hope of victory.) Lately, I've been noticing the problem in the nuWho I've watched. It turns up in Big Finish as well, to a lesser extent.

Here’s the pattern I’m seeing...

A character is a hero, with genuinely endearing or admirable traits, which is why fans love him/her (can be her, but it’s usually a him).
Later showrunners/directors/etc introduce new fatal flaws to the character in order to tear them down a peg.
Fandom delights in posting “your fave is problematic posts” tearing into the hero for the introduced flaws.
Fandom retroactively imposes the “problematic fave” characterization onto the older material, until the earlier version of him is erased/eclipsed, in a sort of 1984-rewrite: he always was this way.

(I’m genuinely able to stay away from #3; #4 is why I sometimes have to take a break from fandom, leaving my queue on autopilot.)

I understand the need to introduce flaws to one-dimensional heroic characters, although I wish I could find that incredibly important essay about why this decade’s systemic cynical derision towards all “nice guy” characters is problematic. But the flaws are often more exaggerated, cartoonish, and Pantomime-like than what was there before, undermining the “realism” argument that many people use to justify making established heroes more flawed.

This has bothered me for a while, but I couldn’t articulate why. I finally realized what was bothering me: It’s a fiction-writer’s version of a logical fallacy. I wrote the above list before looking up a textbook definition, and boy howdy do they match:

STRAWMAN FALLACY
Description: Substituting a person’s actual position or argument with a distorted, exaggerated, or misrepresented version of the position of the argument.
Logical Form:
Person 1 makes claim Y.
Person 2 restates person 1’s claim (in a distorted way).
Person 2 attacks the distorted version of the claim.
Therefore, claim Y is false.
— source: Bo Bennett’s Logical Fallacious website.

Do you see what I’m getting at?

So, here's how I would define Strawman Problematic Fave Syndrome:

Classic canon has character Y.
A later showrunner/director/author rewrites character Y with problematic flaws.
The later showrunner/director/writer can then deconstruct rewritten character Y.
Fandom concludes that character Y is problematic, because of #2, and uses that to critique original character Y.

The thing is, this is lazy writing. “I can’t portray character Y, because it’s hard to portray ‘nice guys,’ so I’ll throw new appalling flaws at him which are easier to dramatize and give the audience and side characters something to criticize. After all, conflict creates drama." Yes, but real-world conflict is often based on easy-to-overlook underlying causes. A clever dramatist can shine a spotlight on those things, helping audiences see them more clearly.

What’s so maddening is that yes, character Y is always problematic. Any beloved hero who’s been around for thirty to fifty years originated in an era with problematic hero-tropes, sexism, White Savior Syndrome, and a whole cartload of unexamined assumptions (and by and large, those things aren't absent from modern media either). Why not bring him forward as he used to be, but not let him get away with his old shit, because now we see it for what it is. Alas, that’s usually not what happens. The old flaws were subtle, insidiously so, such that we often overlooked them. Modern flaws for rebooted characters are often caricature-like, exaggerated traits applied with all the subtlety of eighties make-up.

I feel like this is related to the huge upswing in superhero movies in the past decade or so. Superheroes don’t just have skills and proficiencies, traits and talents; they have superpowers. I feel like this has bled over into other ‘verses, so that lead protagonists (and antagonists) often have super gadgets, super-sized flaws or virtues, and even superhero-like titles and epithets.

Again, while I originally became annoyed by this pattern in some of my other fandoms, what’s brought this to a head for me is Doctor Who. I think the problem has its roots in the EU (Not all EU, just some EU). I feel like Big Finish is better at taking this old, established character, deconstructing him, and lovingly helping us see him better, warts and all — without painting bright purple warts on him.

Nor is Big Finish entirely free of Straw Man Problematic Fave Syndrome. I don’t appreciate the Master audio as much as a lot of people do, because it imposed a fairly serious “the Doctor is really a bad person, and here’s why” rewrite on the Doctor’s character. I knew... I knew!... I’d start seeing it retroactively imposed on the character I love. AND I HATE THAT.

No. There’s plenty of stuff the classic Doctors did for us to poke at. We don’t need to write a story about how Two kicked puppies to make him more interesting. Let’s just look at him with a more critical eye.

Give One well-deserved critique for his incredibly problematic behavior early on (although the show did a great job of addressing that and showing it as character development.)
I haven’t seen Two in so long that I can’t remember his flaws apart from his childishness; he had some of the same petulance that Davison brought to the character.
Give Three a hard time for his supreme self-confidence and self-assurance that he’s right (for which in some ways his death was an atonement) and for his occasional childishness and sexist treatment of companions as assistants.
Give Four a hard time for his grandiose airs and his tendency to bully his companions, and for often ignoring the petty feelings of mere mortals— he cared about things on the large scale, but the little people often get left out of his reckoning.
Give Five a hard time for flying off the handle, for failing to take criticism from Adric and Tegan in a mature way, for his occasional Hamlet-like moments of indecision.
Give Six a nuanced kick in the butt for arrogance and insensitivity, and make him less of a caricature. (BF did this beautifully, largely via Evelyn Smythe, who shows how to do it— not with great sweeping drama but with an occasional dry comment tinged with affection).
And I don’t know what the hell to do with Seven, because the Cartmel Plan was the first Strawman Problematic Fave rewrite that bugged me— although I couldn’t put my finger on why at the time— and Big Finish has institutionalized Problematic Seven to such an extent that I’ve lost sight of the Doctor whose whimsical arrival caused me to fall in love with Doctor Who all over again.

I will leave others to ponder how much my words do or don’t apply to nuWho. Of course, nuWho can’t be a critique of the flaws of the old Doctors; that would send the show backwards instead of forwards. Besides, that’s what Big Finish is for.

I really only get pissed at nuWho when it starts doing 1984-revisions of the earlier Doctors. (Just leave ‘em alone. Don’t go back and revise. Don’t bother trying to rewrite everything into a coherent and consistent canon— it’s not and never was.) But my superficial first impression is that a lot of exaggerated flaws (and virtues!) have been added to the newer Doctors for the sake of drama, traits which seem to be painted with all the subtlety of classic Who incidental music. Whereas I think BF tries to keep the Doctor’s flaws less absolute and more subtle, intermittent, and realistic, even flaws which have developed in the audios because their Doctors are not static and calcified but grow, evolve, and react to new situations.

And then sometimes BF makes the Doctor start getting into an OOC, penis-waving pissing match with a companion’s ex over who has the more pimped-out vehicle, and I tear my hair. ;)

TL;DR: I think all long-lived fandoms are prone to introducing the fictional equivalent of logical fallacies— character distortions— over time, especially when trying to make more “flawed,” realistic characters. I think we need to watch for that. And I think all writers, producers, etc need to beware of Straw Man Problematic Fave Syndrome when they are looking for new angles on old characters.