So, here’s a rapidly-metastisizing cultural/memetic problem:
There are lots and lots and lots of people who have been made to feel, for one reason or another, that the Noble Well-Presented Culturally-Approved Hero Figures are somehow not for them. That they don’t get to see themselves and their stories in the princes and princesses, in the knights and dashing roguish rebels, etc. They’re too ugly, too flawed, too Wrong somehow.
Thus they do what fringey outcasts have always done, and instead identify with monsters and villains. Great. It’s a classic.
…except that there are so many different fringes nowadays, and we exist in a milieu that does not encourage them to be friendly to one another, or even to be mutually comprehensible. Their norms are different, and often incompatible. They have wildly divergent values and wildly divergent myths. There’s a lot of hostility all around.
The conceptual territory of “beloved monster” is getting pretty damn crowded. And “your version of the Monster is Bad-Wrong” necessarily misses the whole point of monster-dom in a very painful way, but…it’s becoming increasingly unavoidable.
I have no idea what you’re talking about here, but I feel like I would be very interested if I did. Unless you consider something like Hatred to be a major representative of a large subculture of outcasts, then I can’t think of any widely “beloved monsters” that inherently contradict each other. Most “beloved monsters” I can think of seem like they’d get along at a monster mash.
This isn’t about a clash of characters. It’s about a clash of readers.
(On
the object level, it also largely devolves to boring culture war shit.
Which is why I didn’t get more explicit in the original post.)
**********
Who
believes, deep down, that he doesn’t get to identify with the classic
hero? Who actively wants to identify with the beloved monster?
Well, let’s make a list –
1. Sexual minorities (who are often regarded as threatening bestial freaks)
2. Certain racial minorities (who are often regarded as threatening bestial freaks)
3. People who feel strong ideological pressure to align themselves with outcasts and outsiders
4. Non-minority men who are seen as threatening and bestial and freakish (especially in a sexual or romantic context)
5. Edgelordy non-minority men who want to be seen as threatening and bestial and freakish, because that’s the kind of power and dignity that’s available to them
6. People who feel strong ideological pressure to align themselves with transgression and rebelliousness
(obviously this is a very incomplete list, and obviously there’s a lot of overlap between categories, but good enough for now)
Back when I was growing up, in the ‘90s – in the heyday of White Wolf games and Anne Rice novels and hardcore Phandom – all these people were basically friends with each other,
in a macro-level culture-mapping sense. They were all Outside, and
aligned against the Inside, which was the domain of smug well-adjusted
normies. White Wolf could market its products as being “for people from
the Outside” and it basically just worked.
Now, uh, most
members of groups 1-3 belong to one political-cultural camp, and most
members of groups 4-6 belong to a different political-cultural camp, and
those camps detest each other with great passion.
But they’re still all identifying with the same monsters. They all still think that Beauty and the Beast is a fairy tale for them, about the glories and struggles of their lives.
You can see this, very visibly, in a lot of grassroots-level social-justice-friendly literature. In the way that Monsterhearts
comes right out and says “yeah, being a creature of darkness is
basically a metaphor for being a member of an Oppressed Group.” In the
way that the core tumblr userbase will squee over any kind of cute
“monsters secretly being pure and wonderful” content, more reliably than
it will squee over literally anything else. In the whole “gay
Babadook” discourse.
The edgelordy side of it is less
visible, because the edgelords don’t have anything like the same sense
of community and there’s not nearly as much in the way of ground-level
artistic output. But if you go look at the art that they do produce
(on 4chan etc.), it’s not hard to see. And of course their
identification has a pretty solid foundation in a lot of the most
important source texts – Beast and Phantom and Dracula etc. get much of
their mileage out of being threateningly sexual figures, in a way that the SJW monster-fans have to work pretty hard to elide in order to make the mythology serve their purposes.
This
is going to explode horribly. People are defensive of their symbolism,
and especially don’t like sharing their symbols with their hated
outgroups. At some point, there’s going to be a nasty public fight in
which someone says “you don’t get to be Beast, you’re too much of a
disgusting weirdo to be Beast, Beast is our figure.” Which will
ruin the terrain for at least some people, maybe for everyone. Which
will be terrible, because it’s really useful to have a powerful dignified romantic figure with whom you can identify even when you’re a disgusting weirdo.