I nearly refused to go see this movie with my family for my Dad’s birthday because, and I quote myself, “I don’t want to see the Magical White Boy go save the Hapless Ethnics from his own culture.” Because the Magical White Boy (or its corollary, the Magical White Schoolteacher) is a well-known trope of storytellers who feel guilty about their hegemonic dominance but don’t quite understand it nor want to ever actually let go of it. The Magical White Boy is the story of the hero (white and male, from an overwhelmingly white and male background) who encounters a foreign/alien/ethnic culture about to be abused by his own dominant white culture, goes native, and then leads the hapless primitives in a popular uprising against his own culture. It implies, rather disgustingly, that the Hapless Ethnics can only win when they have the Magical White Boy on their side. But it’s a win-win for all the white kids watching the movie: their aspiration-figure is (a) white like them, (b) on the side of right, and (c) still comfortably white like them. It’s cowardly and facile storytelling, and I’m already bored just describing it in this paragraph.

But Avatar isn’t about a Magical White Boy saving the Hapless Ethnics.

(Massive spoilers ensue.)

Sure, the humans in the story are all white and male (I was counting; you know how many non-white soldiers there were, even in the background? Two. Out of a hundred or so.). Sure, the blue aliens created with motion capture are all, under the CGI layer, portrayed by brown and black actors. Sure, the main character, white and male and totally lacking in characterization, does indeed encounter the Na’vi, join them, and fight the big, bad humans. Hell, Avatar thinks it’s a Magical White Boy film, but it’s… well, it’s not.

In Which I Construct My Own Backstory

Consider the following:

• Every animal on Pandora has four eyes, six limbs, and breathes through aspirators in their chest. Except the Na’vi, who have two eyes, four limbs, and noses.
• As Jake Sully says in one of his video journals, the Na’vi don’t want anything the humans have. They are completely self-sufficient and content with what they have.
• The planet features strange stone constructions with no feasible natural cause.
• The entire biosphere of the planet is connected in a data network of staggering proportions.
• Within that data network exists an entity with its own will. The Na’vi call it Eywa; I call it an AI. Sort of a green SkyNet.
• All the animals on Pandora have paired interface-tendrils of the sides of their heads. The Na’vi have one.

There’s no evolutionary reason, even if you’re working under the Gaia Hypothesis, for the entire planet to be networked. Organisms aren’t going to just link up, especially cross-species, to exchange data. Certainly not the entire fucking planet. That’s just too damned convenient for the end-users of this massive network. And who are the end users? The Na’vi, who happen to have some pretty profound morphological disparities with the rest of the planet.

Putting all that together, I come to one conclusion: Pandora is an constructed ecology created by the ancestors of the Na’vi, who modified themselves to be able to interface and control all the incredible biological technology that Pandora comprises. Perhaps the current Na’vi do not remember this; maybe their ancestors created the planet for their children as a sort of paradise. Nevertheless, the Na’vi live on a planet that is perfectly tailored to their needs. Sure, they carry bows and arrows, but they aren’t at a technological disadvantage when compared to the humans — as evidenced by the conclusion of the movie.

Oppression Requires Oppressors and the Oppressed

This puts the Na’vi at a profoundly different footing when compared to the humans. Sure, the humans call them savages. Of course, the Na’vi call the humans savages, too. The humans call them ignorant, and the Na’vi return the favor. Any claim of cultural superiority is pretty specious to begin with, but note that every allegation leveled at the Na’vi is reflected right back.

Also note that the humans, at the start of the movie, are not oppressing anybody. They came to the planet, they started mining their unobtainium (which would have been a great name if it was dropped once, in which case it would have been a funny nickname for an unnamed commodity, but was used twice, so it was confirmed as the actual, unfortunate, name). They set up schools to attempt cross-cultural communication and attempted some sort of trade, which the Na’vi refused. But at the start of the movie, there is no mention of the humans displacing the Na’vi or taking anything by force. So despite the big piles of military equipment, the humans are not starting off the movie as oppressors.

So what do we have left? We have two cultures in juxtaposition. Neither is technologically superior. Neither is culturally superior, whatever that might mean. Neither is oppressing the other. What we have, even if we don’t know it at the start of the movie, is two cultures meeting as equals. Neither of them believes the other culture is their equal, but that’s what we have. The corollaries that you might make between this movie and the real-world collisions of white and black, white and red, crusader and arab, colonist and aborigine… none of them actually hold water. The essential ingredient for a criticism of oppression or hegemony is a disparity between the sides portrayed, and that is profoundly missing once you look at the specifics of the situation.

Even if you don’t accept my little constructed-planet backstory, the specifics don’t change. The humans and the Na’vi are equals in terms of technology and military power — the Na’vi’s tech is just alien and biological, and their military power is unmobilized at the start of the movie. Whether or not the Na’vi are actually an elder race, they’re still entering the game on equal footing with the humans; they can’t cry oppression.

Escalation of Assholery and Jake Sully

These two equal cultures face off. One completely spurns the other, which you’ve got to admit is not very nice. Of course, the other one goes and blows up the other’s home, which isn’t exactly neighborly, either. So what we have is a sort of escalation of assholery. In the midst of it we have Jake Sully.

There’s a lot of bluster about Jake being a “traitor to his race,” but it’s hardly a favor that Jake switches sides and joins the Na’vi. It’s no commentary on real-world race relations or real-world history; most importantly, it means that Jake Sully isn’t a Magical White Boy out to save the noble savages. Jake’s just a guy who chooses between two cultures, one of which offers to gives him his legs back at the cost of being an asshole and the other which gives him a new body, a hot girlfriend, and a respected place in society for the cost of… pretty much nothing at all. What a heroic decision!

To clarify: there are and were profound instances of oppression between races in our history and current events. I am not commenting on those by any means, and that’s because Avatar isn’t commenting on them. It might be trying, but it misses the mark by a wide margin. In fact, you might say that the most telling criticism of Avatar is how poorly it portrays cross-racial and cross-cultural oppression by empowering the “primitives.” Because, by giving them their arboreal internet, green SkyNet, and happy animal friends, the movie erases the disparity of power that would have made the humans real oppressors. It thereby might be construed to imply that the Iroquois, the Gabi Gabi, the Hawaiians, the Seljuks, and every other loser of cross-cultural war lost, not because of massive disparities in military and economic power, but because they didn’t try hard enough. Which, in addition to being offensive, is just stupid.

Instead, I prefer to remember Avatar as the movie about the two cultures meeting, one of them acting like assholes, and the other culture righteously beating the shit out of them with pet dragons, Earthmother SkyNet, and arrows the size of fucking spears.

Which makes me ponder: what if you design a game with two ratings for each stat: the number that determines your effectiveness as we’re used to, and the rating that determines some sort of incentive-reward when you use it (similar to octaNe). The idea being, you are displaying both what you’re good at and what you want to see in play, avoiding the two-contradictory-messages thing.

So say, for instance, we rate stat effectiveness with a number 1-6 and stat incentive with die size: d4s for stuff you actively don’t want to deal with, d6s for neutral stuff, d8s for “that’s sort of cool,” and d10s for “this is what I want my corner of the game to be about.” So I have Willpower 5d4, which is a clear indicator that I would really like to avoid things like mind control, and Kill People With Swords 4d10, which shows that I’m all about killing people with swords. I also have Eloquent 2d8 — flagging that I want to see social interaction and maybe even politics despite the fact that I’m shit at it.

Say you roll a couple different stats for any check, and evens are successes and odds are failures. After everybody has rolled, you not only count up successes, but the GM can also count up big dice to see how he’s doing. To put teeth into this, for every d10 rolled, the GM gets an Adversity Point to add to his budget; for every d4 rolled, he loses Adversity. (And every two d8s give him one point, or something — details are sketchy; this is just an illustration!) Play should very quickly move towards highlighting what the players want to jam on. The system also still preserves the ability to resolve the occasional conflict in an arena that a player finds disinteresting.

So does anybody remember Star Trek: Nemesis? I mean, I’m sorry for bringing it up and making you think about it, but if you will recall, that Star Trek movie featured a giant, scary, pointy-ended Romulan ship dedicated to the destruction of the Federation and cast the comparatively underpowered Enterprise as the only line of defense opposing it. Sound familiar? Yeah.

There’s just something, apparently, about the little guy standing up to the giant threat from beyond. And I’ll be the first to admit, this makes for a great story. Unfortunately, in recent years, it’s made for the great story, especially in Hollywood. Our hero is always inexperienced, overpowered, and outclassed, and yet somehow he comes out on top — and by somehow, I of course mean “by banding together his friends to outmaneuver and outmatch the overpowering threat.” Every. Single. Time. Every. Single. Story.

The US and the Underdog

The United States of America has the underdog story written into its DNA. We like to tell ourselves that we won our independence by fighting off the terrible and overwhelming outside threat of the British army. Of course, there are two problems with this: firstly, it didn’t actually happen that way, and secondly, that was a long time ago, and the US today is nothing like the thirteen colonies in our collective imagination. Now, I’m going to unpack that right now, but I get hella pedantic, so you might want to just skip to the next header. In any case, to unpack:

First off, the British were not the enemy from outside — they were us; we were them. The thirteen colonies were British colonies, peopled by British colonists, and while there were certainly valid and compelling arguments to secede, we have, on this side of two hundred years, turned the British into an Other, when in fact the shared culture between the colonies and the British Isles accounted for far more than their differences. The American Revolutionary War was a family blow-up where two brothers (or more accurately, a father and son) have a violent argument and then don’t talk to each other for twenty years… and we started it by breaking laws and refusing legal (though unethical) searches. We weren’t the victims of an unprovoked attack from outside our borders; we decided to draw a new border down the middle of the British Empire.

Secondly, the popular account of the Revolutionary War tends to forget our allies, the French, the Spanish, and the Dutch (also known as all of Western Europe at the time)… and the world war they started in Europe that siphoned off British troops and supplies from the American front. We only won here because the British were fighting a much bigger war over there. Or to put a finer point on it, we only won because we were less important than the French, Spanish, and Dutch all trying to invade London at the same time. And then, through a number of historical factors that I won’t go into here, after the wars were over, the newly-minted United States of America dropped their erstwhile allies like a hot potato. We didn’t outmaneuver and outwit the big, bad redcoats… we outmaneuvered and outwitted the poor redcoats that got abandoned in the colonies while their friends fought in the real war.

Now, up till now, all that criticism really does is challenge the historical pertinence of the American myth. Which is to say, the artistically responsible thing to do in such a situation is to keep making movies and whatnot about this myth, but do so with a little subtlety, a dash of irony, and perhaps a touch of humility. The American Revolution is a glorious, fantastic piece of history, but it’s way more interesting when it’s nuanced with all those little facts and details that make it something other than a straight-up black-and-white conflict.

However, there’s another problem with fetishizing our little national myth. In 1776, we were thirteen backwater colonies having a spat with Dad. In 2009, we are the last standing superpower, the leader of the free world, the engine of the global economy, and so on and so forth. We aren’t the little guy any more. We just aren’t. We are a nation that possesses frightening amounts of power — which is not to say power that we “shouldn’t” have, but power that we must be very, very careful about using. At this level of power, it’s very easy to make more problems than you solve — and the easiest way to do that is by swinging around our last-standing-superpower weight as if we were the scrappy little underdog out to take down the way-more-powerful Othered badguys. In the light of that reality, telling ourselves that we (and Captain Kirk) are the underdogs is not just wrong, it’s irresponsible.

Trek on the Small Screen

So do you remember Star Trek? Like, the television show? Back when it was Kirk, Spock, and McCoy on a barely-decorated soundstage, there was us, the Federation, and there were the Klingons. These two states had big conflicts over their mutually-opposed points of view. (Romulans, on the other hand, were usually over there and only occasionally got on screen.) But the vast majority of the universe was populated by third parties: unaligned worlds who both the Federation and the Klingons wanted to sway to their side. Sound familiar? That’s because the historical context of original Trek was deep in the midst of the Cold War, where NATO and the Warsaw Pact saw the globe as a chessboard of potential allies in the inevitable war on the horizon. Importantly, though, there’s only one episode where the Federation and the Klingons are actually at war, and it’s over by the end of the episode.

Additionally, the original Enterprise is only the underdog when it confronts the universe itself. That is, incomprehensibly powerful avatars of the unknowable infinite — guys who style themselves like Greek Gods and perform what is effectively magic. These guys are never representatives of nation-states, and they never come back (they would eventually be wrapped up into one character, Q, in TNG). When the Enterprise faced off with other nation-states, though, they were equals at worst, and usually had the technological advantage. Nobody ever had a bigger, badder ship than the Enterprise. And again, at the time, nobody had bigger, badder ships than the American Armed Forces, either. The US wasn’t the underdog, so neither was the Enterprise.

Zip forward 18 real years and 76 fictional years to The Next Generation. Again, it is science fiction written for its own time. The once-vicious rivalry with the Klingons has cooled to nothing; instead, the Federation deals with two fascist states, the Romulans and the Cardassians, and an international cartel, the Ferengi Alliance. However, all three of these are rarely anything more than an annoyance. There is nothing in the universe that matches the Enterprise, which traipses from world to world, sometimes appreciating the varied cultures they find and sometimes judging those cultures with their massive technological advantage. They are burdened by the Prime Directive (which Kirk found to be little more than an annoyance) and the ethical considerations of their actions, especially considering the imbalance of power they enjoy.

Sidenote: one could argue that the Borg are TNG’s big bad guys, much like the Klingons were original Trek’s big bads. You’d be right — at least, insofar as Kirk didn’t fight Klingons as much as we like to think he did, and there was only one borg episode in each season of TNG, except the first season, in which there were none. The Borg are an anomaly — a hackneyed, caricatured, and silly anomaly, but an anomaly nonetheless.

Also consider Deep Space Nine, the first Trek franchise started after the fall of the USSR. DS9 takes TNG’s re-envisioning of Trek one step further. Now the Federation is the only real superpower in the universe, and is thrust into the position of shepherding fledgling democracies such as the Bajorans from the rapacious hunger of teetering fascist states like the Cardassians. While Sisko and DS9 itself is often outmatched by big, menacing ships, the Federation is not, and what keeps the station alive is Sisko’s ever-present ability to get on the phone and have the bulk of the Federation come beat Gul Dukat into paste. In this milleu, much of DS9 considers to what extent the Federation should involve itself in other states’ internal affairs, given that its very presence changes the political landscape (”The problem is Earth!”). The show examines and challenges issues of sovereignty, terrorism, and religion. It was Trek for the 90s.

…that is, until the Dominion muscled in and stripped any semblance of relevance from the show, turning into a highly entertaining by thematically dead pot-boiler.

Now, I didn’t watch Voyager or Enterprise. Whether they follow the other series’ trend of producing speculative fiction that matters to their audience or go the way of the movies, I have no idea.

Trek on the Big Screen

We might also briefly consider the Trek movies, which have an incredibly wide spread of artistic success. The first was straight-up speculative fiction, and redid what the original series did very well: awe in the face of a vast and incredible universe. And it tanked. As a result, Roddenberry was pulled from the sequels.

Wrath of Khan smashed into theaters with high-action swashbuckling in space, bringing back a well-remembered antagonist from the series, conveniently missing any of the thematic trappings he previously possessed. And what happens? A crippled Enterprise faces off against another Federation ship, itself not crippled, commanded by an ubermensch. That’s right: they’re the underdogs. Harnessing the underdog myth, Khan was tons of fun, thematically dead, and a box-office success. In Search for Spock, Kirk and the crew have to, well, search for Spock, but the Federation itself tries to stop them. Voila, the protagonists are underdogs again! Then, it’s a skeleton crew on the Enterprise against a Klingon bird of prey. Double-win! (Star Trek III is the only successful and critically-aclaimed odd-numbered movie.) Then comes four, where the crew start off as fugitives from the Federation, then time-travel back to the 80s. They are fish-out-of-water, which is sort of the comedic brother of action-adventure’s underdog, and the movie is also a success.

Such strings of success can’t last forever, of course, but that wouldn’t stop the makers of Trek movies to abandon the underdog theme. In The Final Frontier, of course, the crew of the Enterprise goes up against God, or at least, an unreasonable facsimile thereof. In The Undiscovered Country, Kirk and Spock are thrown into a Klingon jail, and later attacked by an unbeatable cloak-and-shoot Klingon warbird. You have the Borg in First Contact, the Son’a in Insurrection, an ineffectively-scary-Picard-clone-boy in Nemesis.

Tangent: You might notice I skipped Generations in there. If Generations had a coherent plot, I could draw a conclusion from it. However, since it doesn’t, I can’t, so we’re just skipping over it.

In many ways, you could lay the blame for the turning of Trek nostalgia into a never-ending underdog-fest at the feet of the movies. You’d be right, but it wouldn’t be as damning a criticism as you might think. This is because the Trek television formula of thinly-skinned speculative fiction aimed at current events simply doesn’t translate to the big screen. The production cycle for an effects-driven feature film, for one, is simply too long. Certainly there are speculative fiction films that comment on the present day, but they look more like Gattaca than Star Trek. Or to look at it another way, the budget for a effects-driven feature film necessitate a broad audience, and there, well, isn’t a broad audience for speculative fiction. (Perhaps there could be, but that’s a totally different topic.) And, since the television formula for Trek doesn’t work on the big screen, they have to go with something else… and nothing draws in an audience like an underdog story.

And Now…

Which brings us to Star Trek by JJ Abrams, a man who has produced lots of properties, lots of money, and very very little subtext. In Abrams’ hands, I foresee a string of fun, exciting, successful Trek movies that say nothing. We will see the completion of the decades-long process of turning Star Trek from speculative fiction into space opera, systematically picking up everything that Trek ever said, taking it out behind the woodshed, and quietly strangling it until it goes limp. But if it wasn’t Abrams, it would be somebody else. Star Trek isn’t Star Trek when it’s on the big screen, and probably can’t be, even if it wants to.

Star Trek dissolving into a fun and witless commodity does not mean, however, that we can’t have other properties that don’t go the same route, though. There’s hope yet. The first step is putting down the underdog pipe and stepping up to the reality that America and Americans, yes, even you, have some significant power in this world and a responsibility to use that power wisely. The stories that go along with this, the stories that allow us to talk about how to do right by the world, can be just as engaging as underdog stories.

We can tell stories like Schindler’s List, about the path to realizing that you aren’t the underdog, that you have considerable privileges compared to other people, and that means that not only can you make a difference, but you ought to.

We can tell stories like Charlie Wilson’s War, about stumbling onto making a difference and how horrendously complicated it can be.

We can tell stories like The West Wing, where the vast and complicated world intersects with our own, internal and personal lives, and somehow we need to find a path that may not be the right path as judged by history, but is the path that lets us not hate ourselves.

We can tell stories like Castle, where people who aren’t politicians or civil servants step up to do the right thing.

We can tell stories like Forgetting Sarah Marshall, for crissakes, where nobody is a bad guy but everybody has problems to overcome, and if we help each other get our heads out of our asses, we might just make the world a better place.

We don’t need bloodthirsty invaders, corporate overlords, or shadowy conspiracies to produce situations where we can make a difference. We don’t need to be the chosen one or bound by duty or have our family slaughtered by the badguys to be able to make a difference. Just being human and living on Earth gives us opportunities every day to be good people. We should tell stories about that. It can’t be that hard.

So my problem with the “fantasy literary genre” is that it’s not especially, well, literary. While there are certainly exceptions, the vast, vast swaths of “fantasy literature” are more accurately described as fantasy pulps. What’s the difference between literature and pulps?

Literature is created out of a desire for artistic expression, commentary on life, and contributing to humanity’s understanding of itself. It’s part of a giant, centuries-spanning dialogue that informs our identity as a species. Yeah, this is all high-minded, but really, it boils down to this: if the author sat down and wrote something they thought was important and worth others’ time, it’s literature.

The pulps, by contrast, are written purely for your entertainment. The author sat down and tried to figure out what you would like, and then tried her level best to serve you exactly that on a silver platter. There’s no attempt to communicate there, nothing that the author thinks is important. The book or short story or whatever is purely intended to allow you to spend time enjoyably. It’s fluff.

What’s so bad about the pulps, then? Aren’t they just innocuous entertainment? There are two answers to this. First, yes: that’s exactly what they are, and there is nothing wrong about that — there’s also nothing really laudable about it, either. Secondly, however, there is a very large difference between participating in a dialogue through the written word and consuming a product designed to make you feel good. They are, really, fundamentally, completely different things that share superficial similarities. It’s all just reading, right? Wrong. When you read literature, you are a participant; when you read pulps, you are a consumer. An example is probably in order.

When you read Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose, there’s a passage in which a young monk is dazzled by the sacred architecture of a monastery he is visiting, and he itemizes how the numbers of sides or number of towers and so on betray hidden meanings: One steeple for the monotheistic god, two doors for the two testaments of the bible, three towers for the Holy Trinity, four walls for the four books of the gospel, and so on. The thing is, he goes from one to twelve, and has a special, arcane meaning for each number… which means it doesn’t really matter how many sides the building has; however many sides it does have, it will “mean” something. Eco is showing the reader that meaning is as much a product of the person who interprets a work as it is in the person who created the work. As you read Name of the Rose, Eco is talking to you, telling you that you are creating the story as much as he is. You can agree, you can disagree, whatever, but you’re a participant whichever you do.

When you read George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones, you have a very different reading experience. Within the first page or so, you are assaulted with strange words and concepts, none of which are really explained. It’s been a while since I read it, but one example I remember is when a character “waits three candlewidths” or something similarly arcane. This is thrust at you without context, but if you are the sort of reader Martin expects you to be — adolescent, introspective, considering yourself to be a little smarter than most of your peers, and versed in medieval and fantasy tropes — you will figure out “for yourself” that the culture the character comes from marks time by the melting down of candles. And you can give yourself a little pat on the back for proving to yourself that you really are a smart fellow. Which is exactly what Martin wants you to do, and is what he planned for your reading experience when he wrote that. You’re his puppet. Now, certainly there is always some expectation on the part of the author as to the reading experience of the reader, but Martin is so cynical in his use and abuse of this exchange that I nearly stopped reading Thrones about twenty pages in because I was sick to death of these little nuggets. It was like Martin was patting my head every half-page and telling me how clever I was. I was supposed to be a consumer, and just sit back and enjoy the experience of being so damned clever. Of course, that experience was completely artificial, so how clever was I, really? Not very.

Now, there are more honest fantasy novels out there — Martin is a hoary old warhorse of the fantasy genre, and knows it a bit too well — and in these honest fantasy novels, you have an author who has thought of something that is really cool and wants to share it with you. I just finished reading His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik, and this is a good example of this. In super-short-form, Novik thought it would be really cool to pair Horatio Hornblower tallships with dragons of mythology. So you have the British fighting off Napoleon with ships of the line in the channel and dragon-riding aviators above. All of this is a pretty entertaining read, but at the end of the day, Novik has not communicated anything to me outside of, “Hey, isn’t this really cool?” and I as the reader really have no part in any dialogue. There is no thesis to share, there’s just her opinion on the cool-factor of dragons with Napoleonic manners. No characters grow or change, no decisive action is taken regarding any issue, in short nothing happens thematically.

Now, after all of that, answer #1 to “what’s wrong with pulps?” still holds true. Nothing — it’s mere entertainment, nothing more, and can even be implemented well and with flair. There is such a thing as good pulp (of which His Majesty’s Dragon is a good example), but it is a wholly different thing than literature. The conflation of the two (”Oh, you liked Breakfast of Champions? You know what is also a really good book? Pelican Brief!”) does tend to drive me batty.

However, there is also pulp like Martin’s: manipulative, cynical, mercenary, pulp that makes me just another dumb geek. If that wasn’t enough of an insult on its own, this sort of bad pulp works by coopting the tropes of actual literature that preceded it: The Chronicles of Narnia, I, Robot, The Wizard of Earthsea, Frankenstein, and so on. Books that helped establish the fantasy and science fiction genre by telling stories that were worth reading, not because they killed time in an enjoyable fashion, but because when you read them, you got participate in the dialogue that formed them. Which makes this stuff cheap knock-offs produced in the hopes that you won’t notice the difference.

So my problem with fantasy literature? With a few exceptions, it’s either just fluff, or it’s downright insulting.