Reflections of a stormy petrel

I just watched the first two minutes of a BBC show, and then turned it off because I knew exactly how it would end. The show was Garrow's Law, and it opened with a mob murdering someone during an election. Since Garrow is a heroic lawyer, we know that he will uncover the facts behind the mobbing; and what convinced me to give it up was the way the camera panned in through the mob to point to one bystander - the obvious candidate to be the crucial and heroic witness who leads Garrow to the truth. And the witness was black; the only black there. Once I had seen that, I knew the whole story.

Then I found myself thinking. And I realized that, just as I had seen this kind of death-dealing obviousness and preachiness in products of the modern media industry, I don't think I had ever seen it in fanfics. I have seen terrible fanfics; I have seen fanfics - most of them, I would say - that featured viewpoints I disliked, even disliked violently; but I don't think I can remember a single fanfic that proceeded by this kind of box-ticking predictability - murderous white mob? - check; innocent black whose decency and truthfulness will solve the issue? - check. I have seen fics whose authors I would have been glad to shake till they rattled; fics whose wrong-headedness, whose political or religious parti pris, made me sick; but if I have read anything that was so obviously predictable and foredoomed to move along the same lines and make the same points, it was because of the writer's lack of skill. It certainly was not because of any determination to take the story through certain predetermined points. In fact, fics whose implicit politics infuriated me were nonetheless a lot less offensive to me than this BBC production, although I would actually support a good deal of its views of history and values. It was the sheer dreary obviousness, the box-ticking predictability of it all, that offended me to the point of stopping the program within two minutes of the start.

What I am trying to say is that the ruinous effect of Political Correctness on writing - especially writing for Hollywood and TV - is not an expression of the zeitgeist or of anything that individuals, misguided or not, might want to say off their own bat. I have seen fics whose values I wanted to shred like confetti, but nobody who writes fics throws in, say, a good black character, just because there is a box somewhere that says "good black character", "corrupt white establishment" and the many other similar cliches are obliged points through which the story should go. In other words, the really poisonous, story-killing variety of PC is not a feature of individual writers' imagination. When left to themselves, even the most radical writers don't write that way.

It is a function of the corporate mind; of the corporate timidity, the corporate need to be seen to be on the right side in anything that pressure groups are sensitive about, the need not to draw certain negative terms to oneself. Writers who are writing for themselves, to please themselves and their readers, don't write like that. They may be perverse, stupid, prejudiced, or sick; but they don't tick boxes.

The most frequent mistake in writing Alternate Universe fics, one that I see again and again, is to start with one changed element or even setting, and then to bring in more and more arbitrarily. The proper use of AU, it seems to me, is to see what would change if one element or the setting were changed; and to make it work properly, everything else should as far as possible stay the same. I think this would make the story resonate more with anyone who is familiar with the original. But to start, as I have recently seen one fanfic author do, with one of the teachers taking a youth potion in order to join Harry as a student, and then, for no connected reason, to make Ron of all people be identified as a genuine Seer, is to introduce a completely irrelevant new story element and to break the inner logic of the story. The idea of a rejuvenated teacher is a perfectly good one (given the premise that magic can do pretty much anything) and can lead to interesting and amusing situations, and, on a larger perspective, actually alter the balance of forces and redirect the whole conflict. But it must be dealt with on its own merits, not be suddenly capped with something else altogether. (To be frank, the author had already been managing it rather clumsily, showing that, having had this interesting idea, s/he did not know what to do with it. That suggests that the sudden introduction of another idea was a symptom of despair, which does not make it any better.) Every time I see this sort of thing, I get an itch to pick up the same idea and rewrite it. And frankly, I for one do not need any more plot bunnies chewing at my ankles.