While writing the play [“Straight White Men”] in 2014, Lee ended up interviewing dozens of straight white men and relying on a workshop of diverse college students. She asked them to vent about straight white men — and then asked them how they would like straight white men to behave. “Everyone at the workshop was like: ‘I want a straight white man to sit down and shut up. I want him to take a back seat, to take a supporting role. I don’t want him to be aggressive,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘I want him to listen. I don’t want him taking the head role or the biggest job or to be going after the biggest stuff. I want him in a supporting role to me.’ ”
But when she created a character according to these specifications, she was shocked to find that the workshop participants hated him. “I realized that the reason they hated him was — despite all their commitment to social justice — what they believed in most was not being a loser.”
- NYT
Oh god. Seeing this post cross my dash again, I finally figured out what that focus group actually wanted.
There is a way to resolve the apparent contradiction. You CAN square the circle of “Passive, self-abnegating, and unambitious, but not a loser”– but the key is, it doesn’t work when the character is the protagonist.
Any work that makes Passive Ally Man the protagonist will doubly fail, first because the mere fact of the narrative drawing attention to him is seen as a violation of Ally Man’s vow of passivity (he is only meant to exist via his relationship to his self-appointed betters, not as a person unto himself), and second because the more time we spend with him, the more ordinary he becomes. Familiarity breeds contempt. Never meet your heroes. The less screen time he has, the more mysterious he becomes by default, and that mystery can be parlayed into charisma
The only way for Passive Ally Man to sustain both his Goodness and his Not-a-Loser-ness is to get as little screen time as possible. Then it might have worked. Then instead of an ordinary man with a self and a life, they’d have what they really wanted: a cardboard Fairy Godparent who swoops in at the last second to offer help, and then vanishes.
They didn’t want a character who was somehow simultaneously ambitious and unambitious, they wanted a character who was ambitious, but whose ambitions weren’t framed as important. They didn’t want a passive person, they wanted an active person with a passive role in the story.
They wanted Tuxedo Mask.
But here’s the problem: what makes Tuxedo Mask who he is is the fact that the show is called “Bishojo Senshi Sailor Moon,” and not “Bishonen Senshi Tuxedo Mask”
And therein lies the true horror of Passive Ally Man’s moral standing: whether or not he is a good person relies not on what he does, but on how his actions are framed. The narrator has the power to veto his virtue simply by giving him too much screen time, or worse, letting us see the ‘behind the scenes’ footage of his life, instead of only the Kodak Moments. The medium is the message. The cinematography is the character. Good Allies only exist on Twitter.
Your thesis would predict this demographic likes Tuxedo Mask instead of reviling him. This doesn’t appear to be the case. And I don’t think it’s just because he comes off real badly in the latest version of the anime. I think it’s because nobody can be honest when the other option is Wokeness, even being honest with themselves.
Eh. Actual from-the-text Tuxedo Mask, and the whole Sailor Moon franchise generally, are full of negatively-connotated shibboleths for that tribe; it’s no surprised that they’re despised by the people in question; but this is contingent. The metaphor still holds.