Honestly one of my biggest pet peeves in fiction is when monsters are malevolent for no reason. Is it “evil”, or is it just hungry and vicious? If the monster is a dangerous animal with no ultimate evil goal, what are its motivations and why is it hellbent upon menacing the heroes?
I found the last Jurassic World movie unwatchable because the behavior of the predatory dinosaurs was so unrealistic. Why are they hurting themselves and endangering their lives to attack the humans? If it is merely hunger, why are they ignoring freshly dead, easily available meat in favor of chasing humans through dangerous obstacle courses? If it’s the hunting instinct, why is it so much stronger than every other instinct of self-preservation? Are they sick? Are they rabid?
I just. Ugh! Unless an animal is portrayed as intelligent enough to want revenge, is influenced by supernatural powers, or has some useful plot reason for wanting to kill anything and everything it can without care for its own life, I don’t buy it. It’s not scary to me. It’s stupid and frustrating and I sit there waiting for the big reveal that mind control or demons are responsible.
On the other hand, antagonists that are genuinely mindless – like non-sentient robots, alien terraforming programs, or weird diseases – are much scarier to me because of their lack of malice or reason.
An unfortunate side effect of The Internet being what it is, is that there is no line drawn between the personal and political. Any statement is readily interpreted as a political opinion, and any voiced frustration with one’s personal life that in any way intersects with broader political issues is read as “this person believes that they experience systematic oppression for this”.
@wellofloneliness What I am talking about is when something like “Man, it sucks how no one wants to visit my house because I own a pet python” is instantly interpreted as “Oh, you think you’re oppressed because you own a snake!” Or, if you complain about how you are afraid that high rise jeans are going to go out of style and you won’t be able to find them in stores again, it becomes “Oh, you think you’re oppressed because department stores don’t cater to your 90’s mom preferences?”
Innocuous personal griping gets amplified and skewed into ‘oh this is an expression of your secret problematic beliefs’. I saw it recently on a post where a straight girl mentioned sadly that she gets less desired attention from guys after she cut her hair and people jumped on her for all kinds of stuff she wasn’t actually implying at all. There was no reason to think she had anything against sapphic women, or that she thought that men should hit on butches, or anything like that… but it was taken as a Grand Statement rather than the mild personal struggle it was almost certainly meant as.
Oof yeah I’ve seen that before. I think ‘aimless complaining with no real purpose, malice, or political motive’ is a pretty natural human behavior and I’m not sure why people are so reactive to it. Some folks are suggesting this is an American thing, and maybe so. I wonder why that should be.
There’s a related idea that ‘if you complain about it, you must want to do something about it’. If you disliked how someone was rude to you, you must want some kind of retribution, right?
I remember when I made a post about being frustrated at how difficult it is to find well-made manual labor clothes in women’s sizes that are actually meant to be worn for working. People took this to mean that I think that women dressing fashionably in flimsy clothing are like… bad or foolish people, while others were offended that I would complain about an inconvenience rather than Taking Action and learning to sew heavy denim or petitioning companies or whatever.
Edit: Another manifestation of this is "Oh, you don’t like X show? Why – what’s problematic about it?” as if disliking something for trivial, non-ethical/political reasons is unthinkable, which I think leads people to try to force ethical justifications for their not liking things. Which is… honestly really destructive.
Animals that humans hunt – especially those killed by a skilled hunter
– have a much faster death than those that fall victim to nonhuman
predators. Humans generally take much more care to give an instant death than, say, a polar bear does. Death itself isn’t
suffering: it’s the end of suffering, and it’s also a natural part of life.
And though these animals may have a will to live, 30% of Harp seals die of exposure in their first year:
that’s natural selection, and while it’s not pretty, it’s also a force
that drives evolution, and the continued survival of these species. The
DFO quotas are well below 30% of the population: Harp seal populations
are estimated to be around 5.5 Million, and around 70,000 are killed
annually in the Canadian hunt.
You are also misinformed about the age of the animals hunted: hunting of
“baby” harp seals and hooded seals (whitecoats and bluebacks,
respectively) has been illegal in Canada since the 1987. This is information that is freely available from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Canada.
Predators are a part of the ecology that sustains life on this planet, and humans have a long and storied history fulfilling that role in ecosystems. As far as my morals are concerned, I see no contradiction in my stated ethics and my support of the hunt: suffering and death are inevitabilities of existence, and humans go so far as to have veterinarians extensively study how quickly an animal dies when it is killed for meat or other resources, in order to minimise suffering as much as possible. (See: the work of Temple Grandin)
We don’t live in a futuristic utopia where people – especially people in remote, non-agricultural areas – don’t need to kill other animals to survive, and my support of hunting and fishing rights is directly related to my support of indigenous resistance and sovereignty.
Humans doing what they need to do to survive and thrive isn’t “evil:” it’s only “evil” if natural processes like death and predation are viewed as intrinsically immoral, and humans are viewed as something other than biological organisms, neither is true. The idea of ‘cruelty-free’ or ‘moral’ food and fibre from that perspective is also a fallacy: plants have senses, and 20 field mice are killed for every loaf of bread. Agriculture and monoculture cropping have relentlessly destroyed soil life webs and fragmented habitat. Speaking purely from a utilitarian perspective, ending the life of a cow kills one organism, whereas a tilled field of soybeans kills hundreds of thousands, including hundreds of “intelligent” creatures like rodents.
As always, I’ll suggest this article for a moral perspective on hunting:
I don’t often get political… but something has happened
Trump. He and his administration are trying to change the law so that whatever gender you were “born as” is your unchangeable sex/gender.
[1.4 MILLION AMERICANS]
This is from a new New York Times article, regarding the technicalities of what has been said. They go even further to discuss what they accurately call “biggest battlegrounds” for transgender students: the bathrooms and locker rooms.
We can’t be quiet about this. They are trying to erase who we are. To make it so that we just DON’T EXIST. As a transgender male who lives in America, this scares the shit out of me.
As I said, I don’t normally get political on my blog, but you all need to know about this.
“Hi, I’m looking for a book with adventure, but no graphic violence.”
“I’m interested in a thriller that doesn’t have any rape scenes.”
“I want a gay main character but I don’t want it to be a coming-out story. And no anti-gay violence.”
“Oh, no, murder’s fine, but no animal cruelty.”
All separate reader’s advisory questions that I’ve answered, and successfully. I don’t know why any of these people asked for those specific parameters, and I didn’t ask, because it’s not my fucking business. And it’s no one else’s business, either–up to and including the government.
Librarians don’t make you reveal your trauma in order to justify what you read or write. You may be confusing us with, uh… *checks notes* …fandom.
Librarians don’t make you reveal your trauma in order to justify what
you read or write. You may be confusing us with, uh… *checks notes*
…fandom.
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