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.
Is there any such character they do like?
The one who comes to mind is Fury Road Max Rockatansky. (Which, yes, ha ha irony given the title of the movie, but even so.)
How can a character who was the protagonist of three movies be a character who keeps with the directive to never be a protagonist and never have the camera follow his viewpoint? If familiarity breeds contempt, why do they not feel contempt for him? Aren’t his ambitions important in the context of the movie? (I don’t remember, I saw it with a bunch of other people doing something else and wasn’t paying attention)
Also what shibboleths does Tuxedo Mask violate? Is it that he’s heterosexual? I can’t think of anything else.
* I’m pretty sure the woke types who salivate over Fury Road have mostly never seen another Mad Max movie and don’t care to do so. (It’s also true that Mad Max basically doesn’t have ambitions that carry over from one narrative to the next.) In the thinkpieces etc. that I’ve seen, his MM:FR incarnation is usually described as “tough manly resourceful dude who shows up out of nowhere and decides to assist Furiosa and her posse-of-damsels simply because it’s the right thing to do.”
* “What shibboleths does Tuxedo Mask violate?” …le sigh, there’s a well with no bottom.
The whole thing is anime, so that’s a big strike against it right there. The Senshi are wearing slightly-fetishized-or-at-least-slightly-fetishizable short-skirted outfits, so that’s another big strike. Usagi doesn’t act even a little bit like a Strong Female Character, so we’re already deep in shit, everything about the show is toxic (except maybe through a hazy nostalgic veil of “I once watched this show about magical girl warriors and remember no details”). And Tuxedo Mask gets hit with the horns effect as much as any other part of it.
But of course it’s worse than that. In his first appearances, Tuxedo Mask, who is portrayed as “good at combat” and “confident,” swoops in and saves Sailor Moon, who at that point is portrayed as “incompetent” and “scared.” This is a gross violation of every rule of Acceptable Woke Action Writing. It is (more or less) understood that, in real life, women are often going to be less physically-action-capable and that this matters – hence all the arguments about women being perpetually in fear of their physical safety, etc. – but in Fun Fiction you’re not allowed to portray this, because the desirable fantasy is the Badass Woman.
Even more importantly, Usagi and Mamoru slowly build up to their actual fantasy/destiny of togetherness, which is: Ye Olde Heteronormative Prince-and-Princess Fairy Tale with gender roles out the wazoo. Endymion/Tuxedo Mask/Mamoru looks and talks and even acts like your classic romance Prince, strong and dashing and protective…and in the context of that relationship, Usagi looks and talks and acts like a Princess, blushing and emotional and happy to be protected. I’ll be honest, my memory of Sailor Moon is super sketchy and so I can’t point to details, but at the very least the signifiers are there: the prince outfit, the long white dress, the couple pose, the “destined to love each other” motif, the metaphysically gendered nature of it all. And the woke coalition hates, hates, hates the Prince-and-Princess Fairy Tale.