The Innate Superiority of Man: Common Problems in HiE's · 4:09pm Sep 4th, 2016
Greetings, my good ladies and gentlemen. I hope the weekend finds you well rested and in good spirits.
I am curious: how many among you are fans of old adventure stories? Not older modern adventure stories, I mean really old ones. Think nineteenth century. The likes of Journey to the Centre of the Earth, The Jungle Book, The Lost world and Tarzan? I understand that this may seem an odd way to start an essay about ponies, but bear with me.
These are all genuinely excellent stories, but they and their contemporaries do have issues, when viewed with modern eyes. Many of them are more than a bit racist.
Before we proceed further, please understand: this is not a discussion about racism, and if anyone attempts to turn it into one I shall be most displeased. Don't do it.
That said, there is a common trope in some of those old adventure stories that was quite the hit back in the day, but looks really bad by today's standards.
It is called Mighty Whitey. From Tv Tropes:
A common trope in 18th and 19th century adventure fiction, when Europeans were visiting and documenting vast swathes of the world for the first time, Mighty Whitey is usually a displaced white European, of noble descent, who ends up living with native tribespeople and not only learns their ways but also becomes their greatest warrior/leader/representative. Extra points if he woos The Chief's Daughter along the way; an unfortunately common variation that perpetuates into present-day media is that she will continue to love our hero even if he is directly responsible for the death of her husband, brother or even father.
Sometimes the foreign societies are shown to be realistic, three-dimensional and actually rather pleasant places to live. Indeed, sometimes the native peoples are shown to be better in some way than European society and the white man begins to despise his old home. All this is a setup for the white man to adapt to the Native's ways, thereby making him superior both to the natives and the Europeans back home. In modern-day fiction, sometimes the Mighty Whitey is there to lead or inspire the Hollywood Natives or bring some aspect of modern technology or knowledge to their aid, something they presumably could not do before he showed up. One particular version has it so that the sympathetic Author Avatar whitey is not only now the Great White Hope for the non-white Noble Savages, but is very often defending them from other evil whites.
Now, the premise here is pretty simple: white Europeans (or Americans in some works), particularly those of noble descent, are just better. Said just betterness will become apparent when they are in the darkest wilds, mingling with the primitive natives.
For reasons that should be abundantly obvious, this sort of thing has fallen out of rogue in the modern era. Aside from being horribly, blatantly racist, concepts like the innate superiority of noble blood are about as scientifically accurate as Lamarckian Inheritance and about as fashionable as eighties hair.
Indeed, in modern adaptions of old classics this can cause problems. Modern versions of Tarzan, for example, tend to play up the raised by apes angle; the superiority of his noble blood shining through, which was a big factor in the original story (Tarzan wasn't a better jungle man because he was taught and raised by apes, but because he was a European of noble descent and therefore Just Better), tends to be quietly ignored.
By all rights, Mighty Whitey should be stone cold dead; a rather embarrassing trope of an earlier time.
But he is still hanging in there, even in modern times. Avatar, for example, is a classic Mighty Whitey type story. We are still dealing with primitive natives, they are still saved by a (coincidentally) white guy who joins them and proves their greatest hero. Here, though, the key issue is not one of race, but species. It is his humanity that makes him superior.
Avatar is a touch more complex than that, of course, but there is one place where Mighty Whitey is running around unfettered and raw, with all the sightly nauseous original assumptions well and truly intact.
Equestria.
I speak, of course, about HiE badfics. I'm sure you have all read the sort: our human protagonist finds himself in Equestria. Usually he will appear in the Everfree, where he will rapidly discover a hitherto undocumented talent for timberwolf wrestling, or else he will blow away a similar monster with his Mighty Gun.
Generally, he will save some helpless natives ponies whilst he is about it. Occasionally, the ponies will be inexplicably hostile to him, yet he will (for a time at least) avoid and outwit them through his superior woodsmanship.
Even beyond those well worn clichés, HiE protagonists will generally come armed with modern day tech and knowledge with which to blow pony minds. He (almost all of these are male) will have hands, with which to dazzle ponies.
He will ultimately take responsibility for protecting the weak and helpless ponies, untutored as they are in the ways of the world with their silly girliness, and thus become their greatest hero. He will share with them his superior knowledge of science and technology, and all will be in awe of him.
Any of this sounding familiar? We have all seen stories like this on Fimfiction. And not just on Fimfiction. The tropes are all in place; this is Mighty Whitey in his purest state, and it stems from authors assumptions that their characters, as humans, are simply better than the pony characters in MLP.
It feels natural, therefore, for such authors to elevate their self insert above canon characters, just as it made sense to the old adventure novelists to write their characters as better than the natives, at the natives own specialities, even when it was highly unlikely that they would be in reality.
Moving away from the mighty woodsman seen in fics like Misunderstandings, even the 'Ordinary College Student' will tower over the citizens of Ponyville, literally looking down upon them in his manliness. Even fics like Pessimism and Sarcasm start with the assumption that the protagonist is just better than the ponies, and is at liberty to sneer and look down on them as he pleases whilst maintaining the sympathy of the audience.
Much of this is born out of naked wish fulfilment, as it was with the adventures of yesteryear. People want to be the big hero, or at least a big deal. Nor is this thinking limited to standard HiE's; it is rife in Displaced fics, where the total superiority of the human cosplayer is taken completely for granted, and is part of the power fantasy those fics exist to facilitate.
The real acid test here is the one character that cannot claim to any characteristics but his humanity. Anon. To quote Palm Palette in one of my old reviews, who put this very eloquently:
Hmm, with all the Anon-bashing going on here, I'm a bit surprised that you didn't mention his/her most insidious trait. Being a vessel for self-immersion isn't the only role that he serves. In his blandness, he also represents a generic human—a humble ambassador for all of humanity, if you will. With that in mind, consider the following:
• Anon is immediately the first person Twilight turns to for help when she and her friends can't cheer Spike up.
• Spike instantly opens up to Anon after shutting out his friends/family.
• This quote: <"Hey Anon." Spike had always liked the human. He was.. different, for lack of a better word. His input on the world was refreshing at times.> Bear in mind that every trait Anon has, the ponies, by implication, lack.
• Anon is an endless fountain of wisdom who always knows exactly the right thing to say.
• Anon is somehow more unique than Spike.
• Anon completely solves all of Spike's problems in like five minutes.Are you feeling that smug aura of superiority yet? Aren't you glad to be part of a race where a generic human easily outperforms colorful equines in every possible way?
Think about it. Anon does not get what he wants because of his character. If a story wanted to emphasize characterization, don't you think it'd be more specific than the ultimate generic blank slate? Anon gets what he wants because of his sole defining trait: he's human. Humans are superior. Anon is a power trip, and a rather shameless one at that.
All of this leads to some of the key problems some people have with HiE's: the assumption of innate human superiority must come with an equal assumption of inferiority on the part of the canon characters. In many HiE's (including crossovers), the ponies are regarded disdainfully by both the narrative and the (human) characters.
We have tropes like ponies attacking humans on sight as monsters, and thus allowing an author to both indulge his or her persecution complex whilst establishing the moral superiority of his or her protagonist. It should be noted that such thinking is based just as much on wish fulfilment and assumed superiority as the more traditional power fantasies.
We have fics where, in the fashion of Eustice Scrub, the protagonists status as a member of a more technologically advanced civilisation grants superiority to the protagonist, leading to things like the author avatar smugly correcting and belittling Twilight or the princesses.
Of course, we have the previously mentioned blatant power fantasies, in which the ponies are turned into cheerleaders at best, damsels at worst. Recall fics like Commander Thorn in Equestria, where literally everything about the all powerful clones is shown to be completely superior, in every way, as the poor ponies are subjected to endless indignities.
Never mind the wish fulfilment, that, ultimately, is the real problem: in too many HiE's, the canon characters are just treated badly. By the narrative, by the author and by our resident human, who is just better than them.
Well, my good ladies and gentlemen, I defer to you. What are your thoughts on this? What tropes have you identified in bad HiE's that seem common? Have you yourself seen similar trends? I await your responses with interest.
"Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before." The opening from Star Trek sums up nicely what my hopes were for HiE / HaS fics, Exploring a strange new world, interesting and entertaining interactions with In Character new lifeforms and many new civilizations.
Please stop making trash like 'Anon get all the mares' and 'Human vs Pony / X War' because honestly whats the point of scouring the vast extent of space, in search of new worlds, new life and new civilizations, if it's only to offer me those I was seeking to escape?
Speaking of Anon, Read This, because it was insightful and an interesting discussion resulted.
And while I generally agree with you, (the phenomenon obviously exists!) while this is structurally similar to "mighty whitey" tropes, as far as I can tell, the origins of this writing behavior are considerably different. At least to a certain degree, we're actually dealing with two shades of the same misanthropy here: "Ponies are inherently superior." and "Ponies are inherently inferior." The first stems primarily from dissatisfaction with other people. The second is a circlejerk reaction to the first without actually rejecting it.
I have to take issue with this post, especially the part about Common problems in HiEs. Examples of stories on this site with the human being innately superior in intelligence, combat abilities or problem-solving do exist, and still get written, but exactly how common are they in 2016? How many stories like this actually make it to the top of the popular stories section, or are even locatable without a dedicated effort? A lot of the bad HiE writing dropped off after Equestria Girls was introduced, because new writers who want to write wish-fulfillment stories about their badass self insert found it easier to write them falling in love with the mane 6 as high school humans anyway.
Most of the HiE stories I've seen come out in the last year or two are either a subversion/deconstruction of this genre, or a story of a scared human barely surviving with the aid of ponies. Heck, those Anon stories that are ripe for contempt? Most of them have the human in question come off like Daffy Duck, with the ponies as Bugs Bunny in a classic WB cartoon. Sure, the human gets to make some sarcastic quips, but he's usually the one who ends up with suffering consequences and being an object of ridicule/pity.
Mighty Whitey is a classic trope. You know what's another one? Dead Unicorn, where the original version (Mighty Whitey HiEs, or just Displaced fics of any kind) was a brief flash of popularity and has disappeared, but subversions and satires of the original are so popular and humorous with so many, that they keep getting written, mostly for an audience who never experienced the original trope. I know of several long running, popular stories that exist in large part to mock this dead horse, and they are still going strong.
4191739
Thanks for the link, I shall pursue it forthwith.
I agree with your statements, and shall write an essay on the other side of the coin in due course.
4191754
The common problems in the title refers to this essays key purpose: starting a discussion on exactly that. You are correct that these are not as common as they were, although I would argue that the guys who would have been writing these are now writing Displaced fics instead, which is hardly an improvement!
4191785
Displaced stories are actually Anon stories in costume, come to think about it. See my and horizon's comments on the abovelinked post. The anonymity defense they offer is pretty much identical in structure.
4191790
Just finished reading that Anon thread. Very enlightening, particularly horizon's post. I may now have to follow ScarletWeather...
Good point on Displaced, as well.
4191785 To be fair, I agree with the content of your blogpost entirely, beyond the current frequency or visibility of HiE fics (yes including Displaced fics, which also seem to be pretty rare these days unless one diligently looks for one.)
My own problem is more with posts like these. Fimfiction is a diverse site with many authors ranging from high and even middle school, to many more authors in their 30s and 40s. I've read some posts by other authors that indicate a lot of these Displaced and HiE fics are written by high school students, many of whom have just started writing fanfiction because they were inspired to write about their OC falling in love with a member of the mane 6, etc.
Now, I don't really read those stories, or follow those authors. Most of the people I follow at least come off as older, more educated, and much more experienced writers. They may write stories, insightful blog posts, or both, but they tend to have both great writing skills, and an interesting or funny take on the show or life in general. (Present company definitely included.) In turn, these people I follow usually have scores or even hundreds of followers, and if they write stories they are widely praised.
What disturbs me is when the intelligent people I admire post something that to me reads "hey guys, I went digging and found a bunch of dumb teenagers with 3 followers each writing about getting super powers and having the mane 6 as a harem! The authors probably have deep-seated insecurities and zero skills or experience in writing before! HAHAHAHA!" This seems to happen on a recurring basis. I can't really argue with the assessment in question, but it definitely feels like the author of the post is punching down. Personally, I don't have the skills or creativity to write fiction myself, but I really hope teenage authors who look up to more experienced writers on the site and follow them aren't seeing themselves reflected in these posts.
4191848
This is a fair point, and it is certainly true of a lot of them. Not all, however. I recently reviewed Your Human and You, a HiE fic with its own set of unique problems. The author of that piece has thousands of followers. Generally, if I'm writing an essay, I will try to avoid singling out too many authors. For reviews, I prefer to avoid low hanging fruit, and go for fics that allow me to discuss problem trends in general.
My favourite review of mine is of a Spike badfic. The fic itself was almost irrelevant; it was almost archetypal as a fic of its ilk, and that was why I selected it: I wanted to discuss Spike badfics in general, through the medium of that review.
This post may seem out of date now, but such fics were ten to the penny. Remember: I have been around this site, and fanfiction in general, for a hell of a lot longer than my joining date would indicate.
But yes: what you are saying is true. Remember though: it's not just young people with no followers who write this sort of thing.
4191866 That's a good point, I suppose it depends on whether you consider "Your Human and You" a member of the category in question or not. I have read that fic, it was one of the subversions I was referring to. A world where humans are slaves, most have the intelligence of dogs, and most members of the Royal Guard are overpowered action heroes, where the protagonist may be slightly better than other humans, but he still must be frequently rescued by his pony protectors, hardly fits into the type of HiE fic we're discussing.
I didn't look at your join date, I assumed from the insightful way you write about this site and the show that you're a veteran. I agree that the fics we're describing, especially Displaced fics, were ten to a penny and highly visible in that brief period in late 2013/early 2014 in which they were invented. But I do feel that they haven't been that way for two years, even though the backlash against them continues to this day.
4191946
One criticism of Your Human and You that I did not bring up (athough JumpingShinyFrogs did) was that the protagonist becomes an ever more special special snowflake cas the fic progresses. At point he does indeed wrestle timberwolves.
A key point about that fic is that it is trying to be several mutually exclusive things at once. In different parts, it is both the fic archetype this essay refers to and its inversion.
Thanks
And yes, I have been around various fandoms in the background for about twenty years.
4191965 I agree he's a special snowflake compared to other humans, but not compared to ponies. Most of the new pony characters in the fic are badass royal guards or battlemages who are generally far more impressive than the protagonist. I'm not saying that is a good or bad thing. But if Tarzan is better than any other European, but he is surrounded by natives that are all better than him, that's not really a "mighty whitey" story anymore, is it?
Hey, if you weren't a writer I respect, I wouldn't have bothered commenting.
4192040
Good point.
Though, if I recall correctly, the Royal Guards who were sent to protect him were remarkably unprofessional and incompetent. I don't think that was the author's intention; they were meant to be sympathetic.
I seem to recall that they let him go into the Everfree to indulge his timberwolf wrestling habit when Fluttershy paid to help get medicine to save Angel. Amongst other things. I am not attempting to refute your point here, I'm simply recalling some related fic issues.
I may be wrong on that point, though; I haven't read it for a while.
4191848
Wait a moment.
derpicdn.net/img/view/2012/6/22/14947__safe_twilight+sparkle_cute_crossover_filly_artist+needed_foal_cookie_adorkable_science.png
As long as we can produce a set of criteria, based purely on text, to differentiate stories that fit the group you just described from all others, I can compute whether they are significantly more or less popular. :)
4192079 You have a good point there, Max's personal bodyguard were a trio of screwups, albeit screwups with fairly unique powers. What I was thinking of is more the rest of the Royal Guard, the ones who get their own chapters. They come off as a bunch of Jack Bauers. The trio are read the riot act for not being as competent as Royal Guards are supposed to be.
4192192 Oliver, I highly doubt there are is any question you couldn't wrest the answer out of from a set of data.
Heck, your main story could, broadly speaking, be considered an extremely well-written Displaced fic.
I suppose if there is a dataset to be examined here, it would be over the last 12 months, the average follower size of authors writing bad HiE/Displaced fics, compared to the average follower size of those either writing/updating stories written as satires of bad HiE/Dispaced fics, or writing blogposts criticizing those fics instead. But there are a lot of undefined variables there.
I suspect the larger issue might be a matter of perspective. A lot of the people who complain the most are serious authors, who may even hope to publish their own original fiction some day. They care a lot about improving the quality of writing on the site. They also eagerly seek feedback and constructive criticism to improve themselves as writers. I'm basically a full-time commenter. To me, what's important is that writers feel appreciated for giving us free content, and we can always ignore anything we don't like.
Additionally, I do follow some younger writers who are not overly skilled, often because they write about an interesting plot point or idea even if they have poor prose. Most of them are writing because they have an urge to express themselves, and a desire for the admiration and appreciation for others. Many of them are not looking for negative feedback of any kind, they feel a lot of stress outside this site and are here to in part to feel validated. I know they follow some of the same quality authors and thinkers I do, and I feel like it would suck for them to read biting criticism that they can recognize as pointed at them generally if not specifically, from someone they admire.
4193094
I'm nowhere near that good, alas. Seriously, this is something I don't do often, but I do know that eyeballing can often provide a very skewed perspective, so I know enough to at least try. :)
I'm sure mine is skewed, because while researching for Aporia I concentrated on reading stories to find out what not to do, so I've read a bleeding lot of them. I would only recommend reading a scant few of them, by the way: Stardust, and Project Sunflower. Notice that neither of these are subversions -- they are merely earnestly thought of and written well. Most of the rest isn't just not worth mentioning (well, there's Goof Theorist, who, I think, gets far less recognition than deserved, those are worth mentioning -- actually, 4192079 if you need suggestions on what to review, I think you should look there.) but actually bland to the point of being near identical as they step on the same row of rakes one after another. For a while I even suspected they're all being influenced by the same earlier source.
Then I realized they aren't, or rather, that the earlier source is not a story. :)
That would be kind of difficult, because my data does not include the number of followers. But I do have the number of votes and the read count... And I still need a heuristic to tell them apart programmatically.
The whole point of my statistics project is to find something to read that I will like which I can't find because it has never received enough recognition, just so you know. :)
4193146
Have you tried Not the Hero? Definitely a subversion, and with a great deal of pondering on the effects an HiE would actually have. Actually somewhat similar to Aporia in that it's very meta in nature.
Yeah, that's the undefined variable I meant.
I remember that. I read a whole lot of fimfiction, and not all of what I read is high quality by any means. Some of it I read just because the author has this crazy or interesting idea, and I have to see where the story will go, bad prose be damned. Heck, I've read through a Fall of Equestria story (well, skipped over the large parts of it that were sex scenes), because the author was looking at how the economy could actually try and function in such a society, and I was so intrigued by that idea.
4193607
Yes, it's a lovely story, but beyond simply being a subversion, it's not actually a HiE, if you ask me. :)
4193609 I guess it depends on whether the human needs to be the protagonist or not.
Imagine Aporia if Rika was evil, Mary was a selfish jerk, and the whole thing was narrated by Chrysalis. Still an HiE?
4193660
No, just not a story, it would be over in about three minutes. :)
Being the protagonist actually has no bearing on this -- in Aporia, Mary is the protagonist for the human side while Twilight is the protagonist for the pony side, and there are actually two intertwined, but conceptually separate stories, which require each other to exist. If I were to define HiE as a subgenre, it's about contact. If cross-species/cross-world/cross-fiction reactions are not a significant part of the story, it's not HiE, in my opinion. (Which has no bearing on whether it's a good story or not, but you knew that.) When approached with this point of view, "Not the Hero" is about something else entirely -- the human antagonist isn't reacting to anything, he's just acting out a power fantasy, the ponies aren't reacting to anything, they're just there to be a pedestal for him, and Discord is reacting to that. He doesn't react to the antagonist's human-ness, he knows more than enough about it already, it's his Gary Stu-ness that irks him. Mentally turn that Anon into a pony on entry and nothing truly significant will change.
4193146
I am not familiar with the works of Goof Theorist; I shall have to add those to my read only list. Stardust I know very well: it is an excellent example of good ground work in terms of world building and canon welding paying off for a crossover. I am likewise familiar with Project Sunflower; I shall review both it and Stardust in good time.
My thanks for the suggestions
4193857
Often it's not the HiE story itself which irks me, but its fans in the comments section. UGH. Hordes upon hordes of Mighty Whitey fanboys descend onto the comments sections of stories such as A Midsummer Night's Dream. In the end, I am so turned off I stop following the story.