494 – Bad Metaphors in Fiction
The Mythcreant Podcast
Navigating Fictional Oppression
This chapter examines the depiction of oppression in literature, critiquing the use of metaphors and analogies that can obscure or misrepresent real-world issues of marginalization. It highlights various storytelling techniques, including allegories, and their effectiveness in addressing complex social topics while addressing the potential pitfalls when poorly executed. Through a discussion of specific literary examples, the chapter calls for more nuanced and sensitive representations of power dynamics within speculative narratives.
What if one thing was representative of another thing? Bet I just blew your mind. No? You already know about metaphors? That’s probably good because otherwise this episode wouldn’t make any sense. Today, we’re talking about fictional metaphors, specifically the kind that don’t work because those are always the most fun. We talk about parallels for race, pandemics, weapons of mass destruction, and also British crime dramas, for some reason. If you think about it, this podcast is basically a metaphor about listening to three people discuss things. Whoa.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Ace. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You are listening to the Mythcreant Podcast, with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle and Bunny.
[Intro Music]Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreant Podcast. I’m Bunny, and with me today is…
Chris: Chris
Bunny: …and…
Oren: Oren.
Bunny: And I wanna run a little thought experiment that I think will be illuminating for our audience who maybe haven’t thought hard enough about certain issues. So I want you to imagine a world that hates podcasters. Podcasters are just too sexy, we’re too smart, and we’re too brave and too successful.
Chris: Are you saying we don’t live in this world already?
Bunny: It’s true. Podcasters do have it pretty rough.
Oren: I referenced a meme earlier about how having a podcast means you’re unemployed. Everyone hates us ’cause of how cool we are.
Bunny: Exactly. You have to understand how downtrodden podcasters are in this world. Just everything is about how podcasters are the worst, and we’re crimes against God. Religious zealots and bigots and pundits wanna take us down. There are zoning laws that restrict where podcasters can live because everyone hates podcasters. And there are anti-podcaster hate groups that hate crime podcasters too, because they’re jealous of podcasters.
Oren: Of how cool podcasters are. They could never record half an hour of dialogue a week. That’s just, they couldn’t do it.
Bunny: Exactly. Resentful.
Chris: All the people who oppress us secretly wanna be us. That’s definitely how it works.
Bunny: It’s all about jealousy, and you can see thinking about this world that it’s sad and bad, it would be a bad world. And so I hope we all have learned that oppression is bad and a very serious issue for us podcasters.
Oren: I guess I feel like I did learn something. I learned that oppression is bad, maybe.
Bunny: Yes, we’ve learned something significant about bigotry and the way it works.
Chris: Definitely very accurate things about bigotry and the way it works.
Bunny: Bigots just be jealous, really. Thankfully, we do not live in this world and can therefore go about our podcasting ways, even having learned something important. So keeping this in mind, how potentially oppressed we could be in an alternate world, us podcasters… today we’re gonna talk about bad metaphors and analogies in fiction.
Oren: [sarcastic] I don’t know why! That was a perfect metaphor. This is not an appropriate topic, Bunny.
Bunny: I’m introducing the topic by doing it well so that we can talk about doing it poorly.
Oren: Ooh, that’s clever. That’s good.
Bunny: It’s very smart. People who are in the Discord will understand where this is coming from because I’ve recently been griping about a book called The Sleepless, which inspired this and made me start thinking about the ways, especially oppression, but many other issues are depicted through these metaphors and analogies and fiction that use essentially a parallel for some issue to discuss that issue in a speculative way. And I feel like I’ve seen more negative examples than positive ones of this. But then again, there’s kind of a question of what counts, because one could argue that just about any conflict that you can base a story around could be potentially read as an analogy for something, but there are some that are more obvious than others, shall we say.
Chris: I will say it is hard to depict any kind of fictional oppression that does not map directly or at least to some category of real-world oppression. Anything that you can come up with if, again, if it’s actually a good oppression analogy and not something that nobody would ever oppress, you can usually map it on to some category of marginalized people in the real world.
Oren: And even if you’re not doing that on purpose, there are only so many ways that people get oppressed. So there’s gonna be language shared to a certain extent. And if you’re not, I would question whether or not your story is actually about systemic oppression.
Bunny: Certainly there are many stories that are trying to be about that and many parallels for real-world oppression, that’s trying not to simply tell a story about that oppression, but tell a story through the oppression of a different group to illustrate something. And I feel like that’s the main reason people do this. Okay, we can talk a bit about why storytellers do these. I think that one, to shed new light on it or look at it from a new perspective, that’s like a high concept one. Another one is just that a story wants to talk about racism without showing brutality towards black people, which is completely understandable.
Chris: Done well, it can just reduce the sensitivity of the material. So it hits less hard and gives people a little bit of objective distance on contentious issues. And that can be useful. And we can talk about all the downsides, but when done well, it does do that.
Bunny: I think another one is like the reduction to absurdity, which I think is reductio ad absurdum, which is showing how ridiculous a certain form of bigotry or oppression or some sort of social structure is when presented in a different context. Wasn’t there that Star Trek episode where people are oppressed based on… what color what side of their face is?
Oren: That one is definitely trying to make a point about real racial oppression with varying degrees of success. I think it was certainly valuable at the time. Nowadays, I think we can probably do better, but I appreciate it for what it was.
Chris: I do think for some real world issues, not necessarily talking about oppression here, using an analogy can add novelty. So for instance, when people use zombies as a parallel for a pandemic. That’s not usually an issue of oppression, but maybe readers don’t really wanna read all of the details about how pandemics work. But if you’re like, “it’s zombies,” then they do wanna read it.
Oren: Zombies are a lot more fun to deal with than actual pandemics, just like straight up. They’re much more entertaining.
Bunny: What if you could chop up the virus? What if you could shoot the virus? I think people also sometimes just include things because they seem deep and relevant and have Insight with a capital I. Even if they are none of those things, ’cause I do honestly feel like sometimes storytellers just put them in because that is a deep thing that people have made comments about.
Oren: It’s hard to guess at a storyteller’s motivation, but I have certainly read or watched stories where some weird parallel will come up and it doesn’t really seem to fit with the rest of the world. And I’m just left wondering, why was that in there? And it gives the impression that maybe the author or the writer or whatever just wanted some recognition for having deep thoughts, but maybe they had another reason and they just didn’t accurately portray it very well.
Chris: Maybe it used to be part of their big vision and then they made revisions and it’s left over, or… there’s so many things that can happen.
Oren: And this isn’t always about bigotry either. We’re talking about bad metaphors or bad analogies or what have you. You can also have one of my favorites. I read a book recently called Priest of Bone. It’s clearly Peaky Blinders, but reimagined in, I guess a Renaissance, maybe late medieval fantasy setting. And there are certain parts of it that just don’t work super well and the degree to which they don’t work will matter more depending on how much you’ve studied this period. Some of them are pretty obscure, like it really bothered me that this society had mass conscription. Because that’s not a thing that this type of society would have. But I don’t think most people are familiar with the details of the history of mass conscription and how it was invented in the French Revolution. I don’t think that’s common.
Bunny: No, I don’t think that’s common.
Oren: But what more people might notice is that it kept the part from Peaky Blinders where the fantasy gang hates the government and distrusts them and feels like they can’t trust the government for whatever reason. And in the show, that’s because the gang is made up of Roma and Irish travelers. Who are both marginalized groups, so they have a really obvious reason why they don’t trust the government. In this story, that’s not the case. Everyone seems to be part of the same race and ethnic group. Now, it could be class solidarity, but it doesn’t seem like it. None of them really seem to have that much sympathy for poor people who aren’t their friends. So it’s just this weird like, yeah, that was in the show, so now it’s in the book too.
Bunny: Ah, weird.
Chris: I do think that with analogies, probably one of the biggest cons is that it’s just really easy to create a situation that doesn’t map over well.
Bunny: The moment you have an analogy, you are saying something that seems like it should have a parallel, like whatever you include, because it’s an analogy, it seems you are saying something about the thing it’s an analogy to. And if you, the storyteller, forget that, things can get really weird really quickly.
Oren: Like in the Voyager episode Jetrel, they wanted to do a big atomic bomb parallel. So they bring in this guy and it’s like, “you invented the space atomic bomb, and it killed a bunch of people. Think about what you did!” And it’s like, all right, okay, sure. But Voyager could do that with one torpedo. This isn’t a new technology. We live in space. Like this stuff is pretty common at this point, so, hmm. Hmm!
Bunny: Me just bringing Oppenheimer onto my show to scold him for a while.
Oren: Yeah, I have some issues with that episode beyond that portrayal. But if you are paying attention to the way that the sci-fi premise works, you will immediately notice that. It’s not like you couldn’t do a sci-fi weapon of mass destruction storyline, you just need to think about it a little harder.
Chris: We were talking about oppression analogies, and there’s just so many ways that oppression analogies in particular can go very wrong. Persecution flips, we’ve talked about that, where you make the powerful people oppressed. I was just reading the Vampire Royals series, clearly supposed to be a reveal, but there, again, are vampires and the royals, but we’re clearly going to reveal that they were the ones who were mistreated all along.
Oren: Oh no!
Chris: And humans need sensitivity training. The idea is that vampires have, you know, intervene when a new vampire is made to keep them from killing anybody, but they still have an impulse to attack and feed on humans, and they’re obviously invincible and way more powerful than humans.
Bunny: I was gonna say, they have superpowers.
Oren: They also conquered the humans and made them all live in poverty, so… heck ’em.
Bunny: The kings are the real oppressed people.
Chris: I’m pretty sure we’re gonna find out… I did decide to discontinue this book ’cause I could see where it was going, but I’m pretty sure we’ll come up with some explanation for why it was totally okay for the vampires to take over the humans and take all their stuff.
Oren: They had to do it!
Chris: They had to do it!
Bunny: The humans were too mean! What were we supposed to do, if not seize control and rule with an iron fist?
Oren: Often bad analogies happen when you want something to be an analogy for more than one thing at the same time and those things are not compatible. So in the novel Winter Tide, which I really like, disclaimer, the Deep Ones are clearly a parallel for the interned Japanese in World War II, and in fact, they are interned in some of the same camps as the Japanese. I mean, they meet and form family bonds, which I thought was pretty neat. Those are my favorite parts of the story. But the Deep Ones are also a giant undersea empire from the ancient times, and it doesn’t work. They can’t be both of those things at the same time, ’cause it creates all kinds of questions like why didn’t the giant Deep One undersea empire use any of its extensive resources to try to free the Deep Ones who were taken prisoner? And the answer is… there isn’t one, ’cause if they had, they would have succeeded. So that’s just an example of why you want to think about what kind of parallel you’re looking for, and make sure that the thing that you’re doing it with is not being placed under too much stress.
Chris: The other thing to look out with any oppression analogy besides, okay, what is supposed to be the marginalized group is way too powerful to be oppressed. There’s also, I guess they call it gray-washing, where you take an inherent black and white situation and try to make it gray, and it has problematic implications. Basically, these are story scenarios in which we make the marginalized people to blame for being marginalized to some extent. So Bright is notorious for this, having orcs that are dressed up to embody stereotypes about black people. But they also had the backstory where they used to like, serve some dark lord or something, as in that was used as a justification and it’s like. Now we’re actually coming up with real things this marginalized group did to make the situation feel less one-sided, but oppression is one-sided in real life. That’s how it works. Doing anything like that, making marginalized people dangerous, to any degree, anything like that.
Oren: You have to think about, what is it a parallel for? Because you can have oppression scenarios that are not super one-sided. They can be more complicated. They can have a complicated history if you are prepared to deal with that and make sure you’re actually exploring it. But these orcs are just the most clear parallel for black people that the show could make them to a cartoonish degree and then being like, oh yeah, and it was because they were bad guys and attacked humans. Okay, that’s where it breaks down because you already made it clear who they were a parallel for, and spoilers that’s not part of racism against Black people in the United States, in case anyone was unclear about that.
Bunny: Black people do not serve a dark lord.
Oren: Generally not.
Chris: Another one that I tell clients who are doing this that I see is if you are doing any kind of oppression analogy, don’t erase the people who are actually being oppressed in real life. This is the thing with X-Men where we use “have you tried not being a mutant” and there’s no characters in there that are obviously queer to viewers, but we’re using that as an analogy for oppression against queer people. So if you’re gonna do anything like that, if you have a racial oppression analogy in there and almost all of your characters are white, that doesn’t look good. It really doesn’t.
Oren: You could make arguments about how at a certain time we couldn’t have those characters on TV or in popular books, so all we had were parallels. And sure, maybe that was true at some point, but if you’re writing a book today, it is not true anymore, especially if you are of a privileged background yourself.
Bunny: I think we’ve been gesturing at this, but another problem that I’ve seen in a couple places that really bugs me is just going to the most obvious place. With your parallel. Okay. I haven’t finished this book yet, but the reason I’m having trouble getting into it is this is a book called When Women Were Dragons, which is about, there was a mass dragoning where a bunch of women in the 1950s turned into dragons and I was like, that’s a really cool premise. But then they’re using the dragons as an analogy for sex ed, where talking about the dragons is like this awkward thing. And then it’s treated like quote/unquote “women’s issues.” They’re dragons. They turned into dragons.
Chris: Ah, the story is running on analogy logic, as I like to call it.
Bunny: It’s exactly that.
Chris: It’s when the actual details of the story stop making any sense because now we’re going by “what if the analogy is the reality,” not what’s actually in the story, and it causes a lot of dissonance. The big story I remember this from is in World War Z, which again has zombies as a parallel for a pandemic, but like the writer really wanted false positives for, because that’s the thing that happens in pandemics where people think they have it and they don’t, and that like messes up the data, but you don’t usually have false positives for zombies. So he adds these people called quislings who’ve decided that they’re loyal to the zombies and they pretend to be zombies and bite people. So then we have false positives, and it just makes no sense, it’s like nobody would do that. That would not be a thing.
Bunny: Quislings?
Oren: So the term quisling, if anyone’s not familiar with it, refers to a guy named Quisling who was the leader of the civil administration that the Nazis set up to be like, “hey, Norway, you’re being run by other Nordish people, don’t look at us.” And so they picked this guy. He was obviously a traitor. And so his name is now synonymous with people who betray their own country or whatever to serve the enemy. And in this particular case, I’ve seen people talk about the quislings in the light of Covid and compare them to people who went around spreading Covid, either, usually just by ignoring safety precautions and occasionally on purpose in some truly bizarre situations, but it doesn’t really fit. Because again, these people aren’t spreading the zombie virus, they are just pretending to be zombies. You can do the thing where people spread the virus by ignoring safety precautions or maybe even on purpose in a zombie apocalypse, ’cause there’s a zombie virus, and that’s not what the quislings are.
Chris: There’s no equivalent to false positives in a zombie setting. So we just made up something that didn’t make any sense so that we could continue our analogy. That’s analogy logic, which is another problem I see. And I don’t know if some people, if they read the story and the analogy is the only thing in their head, and they’re not thinking about the situation literally at all. Maybe that’s, for some people that would be fine, but it drives me up the wall.
Bunny: First and foremost, it’s a story and it has its own eternal logic. And even in an analogy, like you’re making a parallel to something, but you’re also doing the parallel. The parallel in itself has to make sense. It can’t just be the other thing, because it’s a parallel.
Chris: That is the reason you’re choosing the parallel is for the layer that it adds to the original issue. And so if they’re dissonant… I’m sure there was some symbolism there with the women turning into dragons and being a dragon being a woman’s issue.
Bunny: It’s definitely doing that, but I was like, well, this just felt like the most obvious way to take it. We have this really interesting event that’s called the mass dragoning and what we have to say about it… it’s kind of taboo and awkward to talk about. It’s like talking about periods. I don’t know. It’s turning into a dragon.
Oren: It feels like it would be a little more interesting than that. I haven’t read this book, but a movie that I can think of that actually did the same thing really well is Turning Red, which got a lot of hate because people figured out what the analogy was and were like, “ooh, no menstruation, ew.” And so that one is clearly, among other things, a metaphor can be about more than one thing, it is clearly a metaphor for menstruation and puberty in general, but it makes more sense. It makes more internal sense. It’s not just, “hey, you’re becoming a panda. Here is your panda pad.” You know, it’s not that literal, although they do mention actual menstrual products in the movie, which also made people mad. So as far as I’m concerned, A+ move.
Chris: Yeah, A+. And in Turning Red, everything that happened in the story still made sense and there were just clearly parallels to the analogy of growing up and going through puberty, but we never had things that didn’t make sense literally because we prioritized the literal interpretation first, and then had the analogy as a second layer.
Bunny: It needs to make internal sense.
Chris: Another issue that can happen with analogies is a lack of clarity about what it is that you are covering and what point you’re trying to make. That can allow things like misinterpretation or appropriation of your message, particularly if the people that are involved are erased from it. So the poster child for this one is The Matrix, because The Matrix was intended as a trans analogy, and one of the reasons it doesn’t come out that way is because the studio basically, there was supposed to be a person who was essentially genderfluid that was taken out by the studio, and The Matrix has some very powerful symbolism in it, but it was not clear that it was a trans analogy, which meant that it could be appropriated by misogynist groups.
Bunny: I, yeah, I never would’ve guessed that.
Oren: And it’s also like the symbolism in general is something that is very broad in its appeal, which helped The Matrix as a film, but it also means anyone can interpret it however they want, ’cause it involved things like realizing you’re not who you thought you were or realizing that society has been lying to you and things like that. And those things happen and they are real, but they also are things that everyone kind of imagines happening to them often in ways that are fake. And so that’s how you get the guys who are like, “ah, what this means is that society has been lying to me about women. And the truth is that women are evil. And the truth about myself is that I am a double alpha man who will go my own way, but also sleep with lots of women.” And so you can see how that analogy, by being general, also made itself very easy to co-opt.
Chris: Whereas just as a counter to that, like the movie Space Sweepers. It’s not a perfect movie, but it does have some very interesting messaging in there. And one of the things about it is that it’s very clear who it stands for and against, because there’s a specific character in there that is like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos put together.
Bunny: Oh yes. Good friend, Elon Bezos.
Chris: Elon Bezos, the villain of Space Sweepers. That makes it really hard to misinterpret or misappropriate, ’cause we can see there’s a specific person who is a stand-in, and when the people are erased, if we’re trying to represent them, that’s when it becomes the most unclear.
Oren: Space Sweepers also managed to have a message that was both clear and widely popular. So it can be done.
Bunny: It can be done. I think another issue, and this is me circling around to The Sleepless because I want to rant about that.
Chris: Yeah. I think we’re ready for the Sleepless rant.
Bunny: Are you ready for me to unleash this? Every issue we’ve been discussing, just about every one, applies to this depression metaphor and The Sleepless, which is trying to be a metaphor about everything, every kind of oppression, using language that’s explicitly used against specific marginalized groups. It’s very deliberate about this, despite being in an otherwise egalitarian near future setting, which made it like extra weird because this is supposed to be a world we recognize, but then it’s like the author just took a bunch of bigoted rhetoric and copy-pasted, find-and-replaced any mention of groups with the word Sleepless. So you get the exact rhetoric of like “crimes against God” and “unnatural” and “chasers.”
Oren: “Coming out.”
Bunny: “Coming out.” Yep. Coming out is what it’s called when you reveal that you’re Sleepless to someone else. Chasers are people who fetishize the Sleepless, which is a really weird thing to fetishize. Gets so abstract like, “oh, I’m turned on by the fact that you don’t sleep.” It’s like being attracted to insomniacs. There’s also like, okay, all of this, you have to accept that this sleeplessness is like this thing worthy of being oppressed. But at the same time as we have all of these religious zealots calling for zoning laws and trying to keep Sleepless people in the closet or whatever. At the same time, we’re also meant to believe that everyone wants to be Sleepless. There’s a huge semi underground pharmaceutical industry.
Chris: As there would. Realistically, yes, people would want to not have to sleep.
Bunny: Because objectively sleeplessness in this world, which is like a capitalist quasi dystopia, sleeplessness would be a massive asset. And so they’re talking about how oppressed they are, and then they’re also being like, also, I’m really fit and healthy and I have all these skills and I learned jiu-jitsu and I work multiple jobs because I don’t need to sleep, and so I’m filthy rich. And it’s like. These people should be running the country. Why are you making them parallels for homosexuality? Oh my God, there’s just so much to talk about. There’s so much that doesn’t make sense.
Chris: My favorite from what you mentioned on the Discord was that even the environmentalists want to oppress them.
Bunny: And the thing about the environmentalists is like, okay, that’s one that I could see more than the others because whatever, you have your lights turned on more or something.
Chris: By that measure, Americans should be very impressed by the environmentalists because we use way more energy per capita than most other countries.
Oren: Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there would be some environmentalists pointing out that the more people that become Sleepless, the more resources we’re using. But the jump from there to “and now the environmentalists want to regulate us out of existence” is like, they haven’t come from me or my computer yet, so I’m okay. When they start hunting Bitcoin miners in the streets, then maybe I’ll reconsider.
Bunny: Now we need that story as long as it’s not an oppression analogue. Here’s the thing, is that sleeplessness could have made a really good discussion of labor, but not because Sleepless people are oppressed, because they are a risk to non-Sleepless people, and a market that would prioritize workers who don’t need to sleep. That would be a labor issue. People would be, what do unions have to say about this? That could be really interesting, but it’s not that Sleepless people would be the ones on the short end of the stick. They are poised to have so many advantages here and the book kind of limp-wristedly is like “corporations exploit us.” You don’t have to work multiple jobs. You could just play video games for eight hours while everyone else is sleeping. Yeah, corporations do exploit, and maybe you could say more about that if you wanted to with the sleeplessness thing, but like in conjunction with everything else, the Sleepless are very well positioned in this scenario.
Chris: I can imagine an interesting story where everybody suddenly doesn’t need sleep. And then there is a battle over whether employers get to claim that time, right? For the same level of pay. And a kind of movement to try to make that into free time for people and not more work time. I can imagine that struggle, but when you only have a small portion of the population not needing sleep, it’s hard to imagine that being a big issue.
Bunny: It’s like a quarter of the world population. I think they specify that. That’s what frustrates me about this book is that you could have some really interesting emotional and even philosophical points to think about when it comes to this idea of what would it mean for a society to be sleepless? Would you give up sleep if you could, that sort of thing. But it’s just this lazy oppression analogy that uses the exact same language as like gay rights. I didn’t even talk about the villains. The villains are a hate group of Sleepless people who are like, Sleepless supremacists. And then the main villain is like a Sleepless CEO, which is like, yeah, the Sleepless people would be CEOs.
Oren: But have they come out yet, is the question? Has the Sleepless CEO come out?
Bunny: As the Sleepless supremacists say explicitly, they are out and proud.
Oren: Oh. Big oof.
Bunny: I’m not kidding!
Chris: It’s just painful to create a scenario where a group can be both supremacist and oppressed at the same time. That is not how that works. That is so painful. Oh my goodness.
Bunny: But is also like yo-yos between whether the supremacist group is like, people consider it a real threat and like we are told that someone who is a member of this group did a suicide bombing on a research facility that was trying to figure out how to prevent sleeplessness or something. Like they have actual acts of terror, but then people are like, oh, they’re just a bunch of harmless kooks. Make up your mind!
Oren: We are pretty much at the end of our time, and I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.
Chris: Indeed. If you would like to prevent us from being sleepless, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to take a minute to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. And then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]Chris: This has been the Mythcreant Podcast. Opening/closing theme: The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton.
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