By Ben Soltau
The status quo in media is almost always immovable. This observation, which I have made countless times, recently re-occurred to me as I was reading through the popular Japanese shounen manga series Black Clover.
In the story, the Clover Kingdom is separated into distinct castes: the peasants, the commoners, the nobles, and the royalty. Each class is characterised by varying levels of magical ability with the royals as the strongest.
The entire series is structured to critique this system and the oppression that it causes, with the peasant protagonists acting as a vanguard to reform the kingdom’s deeply held prejudices.
However, when reading I couldn’t help but notice that, while individual characters in positions of power, such as the royal families, were beginning to change their own personal understandings of peasants and commoners, the political structures of the aristocracy remained largely unchanged from beginning to end.
The foolish and tyrannical king remained on the throne, the royals and nobility kept their opulent lifestyles and estates, and not once did anyone even remotely consider the idea of dissolving the aristocracy.
Look again towards something like superhero movies, where superpowered heroes take to the skies to either solve supernatural world-ending catastrophes, or to prevent a group of petty criminals from robbing an ATM.
Powerful beings that completely ignore the permanent good they could do through restructuring the society which fosters the very criminals they love to beat up.
I can’t help but think that there is some kind of underlying loyalty to the “way things are” that writers almost instinctively adhere to, even when the moral perspective of the story contradicts itself.
There are of course plenty of exceptions to the rule, take for example the anime One Piece, where the protagonist pirates fight relentlessly against the oppressive World Government headed by an elite caste of comedically evil, slave-owning nobles called the Celestial Dragons.
Although the military force of the World Government, the Marines, contains several well-meaning characters who wish to reform the system due to their involvement within said system, while following orders to pursue pirates — the enemies of the state — they find it essentially impossible to do what is really needed for radical change.
Many dystopian stories and historical fiction tackle themes of rebellion against the established order, such as in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy and Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.
For stories that do adhere to this worship of the status quo, it is always the villains that seek to change the system with the heroes, while potentially sympathetic to the villains’ cause, always opposing them in the guise of pursuing an ideal the “correct way”.
The sympathetic villains, on the other hand, get written around into pretzels to make them morally opposable, even if it contradicts the very characterisation the story had previously painstakingly constructed for them.
A famous example from Marvel is the primary conflict of the 2018 film Black Panther. Erik Killmonger was introduced with the goals of wanting to end oppression, systemic racism, and the centuries of suffering inflicted upon African-descended people worldwide, through the mass liberation of global minority groups.
His goal is revealed to be the arming of oppressed people worldwide to initiate a global race war that would spark violent revolution against the forces oppressing marginalised people across the planet.
At the end of the movie, after King T’Challa stops Killmonger’s plans he reveals Wakanda to the world, sharing Wakandan technology and wealth in an effort to achieve the ideal world that Killmonger imagined. This would have been a good concept if he didn’t begin this program with the grand opening of a single outreach program in Oakland, California.
The movie itself portrays revolutionary black liberation as almost inherently evil and tosses aside even the remote idea of greater violence as a solution to the already inherent violent nature of colonialism.
This isn’t to say that an apocalyptic global race war would have been necessarily preferable to T’Challa’s method, but the film fails to portray a middle ground and reinforces the inept bureaucracy of real-life social change.
Whether writers have direct orders not to rock the boat, or instinctively shy away from potentially paradigm changing ideals in their work, it’s undeniable that this trend is prevalent in all sorts of fiction across every medium.
All I believe is that if the house elves in Harry Potter deserve freedom in one book, and then all of a sudden hate the very concept in the next book, that just isn’t morally consistent writing, and it ruins the integrity of the most important aspect of a text: what it’s trying to say.
Featured image: The Avengers assemble in The Avengers. Photo: YouTube
