December Talking Meme, Day 7: working class heroes

[edenfalling]

December 7: working-class heroes (for heliopausa) [Tumblr crosspost]

I'm going to talk about this in terms of fantasy only, because otherwise we'd be here all day.

In general, I think we should have more working class heroes. The complications caused by the constraints of working class life can lead to really interesting plots, character arcs, and world-building, and it's good to remind readers that everybody's lives are meaningful, regardless of income or occupation. But I can see why they're scarce.

One main reason working class heroes are scarce is because adventures tend to be, on some level, wish-fulfillment for the reader. The idea is to imagine doing huge and important things, and if you're going that route, why not also imagine being a person in a position of power and respect, someone who doesn't have to struggle in a boring job to make ends meet?

Another thing about writing standard fantasy action/adventure plots is that you need characters who have enough agency to make a difference on a wide scale. So you need a person who is in a position of some social, political, or military power... and shockingly, people in such positions don't tend to count as working class. You can have characters who start as working class and rise to prominence, but a character who somehow saves the country while still working as, say, a janitor, shop clerk, hired farm hand or what have you, is going to take some more thoughtful plot work, and a lot of writers (and readers) don't want to bother.

On the other hand, while it's not terribly realistic for a shop clerk to lead a war against the evil magician's invading army, it's not always that much more realistic for a king or queen to do the same thing, particularly once you've hit a certain level of social organization and stratification. Past a certain point, people in charge tend to sit in offices and get reports from underlings who are the ones actually going out and doing exciting legwork. Yet stories about heroic royalty are all over the place. I think that's a legacy from fairy-tales, and also the sort of archetype-driven storytelling that assigns rank to characters in relation to their innate worthiness. Which is fine if you're writing a symbolic sort of fantasy, but if you're going for the 'realistic world that just happens to include magic' style of fantasy, it becomes untenable.

One can argue that knights/soldiers/mercenaries/guards/itinerant adventurers count as working class in their own way, of course, and depending on the setup of any given fantasy world, that will hold more or less water. But I think that doesn't quite count, because a lot of 'adventurers' seem to come from relatively privileged backgrounds, and the rest have adventure-ready tools and skills by virtue of their jobs, which is not the case for our hypothetical shop clerk, who probably has no training and certainly doesn't get handed a sword as part of her normal workday equipment. And swords are expensive. You're going to have to put a lot more thought into justifying why a shop clerk has one (or how she compensates if she doesn't) than if you're writing about a person with more ready money and/or a more martial career.

I could probably keep going for twice again as long, but then this would get even less organized than it is now, so I'll stop here.

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December Talking Meme: All Days

Comments

[heliopausa]

Thank you!
I can see what you mean about fantasy stories needing to be about "characters who have enough agency to make a difference on a wide scale" - at least, for long continuing stories, as opposed to the one-small-action type story, like the little Dutch boy. Even when it is a story about one-small-action, the point I guess, is often about its impact on the big person with agency. (Thinking now partly about my own story, 'Resistance', which has four years of working-class action, all to have impact on the big person with agency.) I'm not sure what to do about it.

"archetype-driven storytelling that assigns rank to characters in relation to their innate worthiness" Yes! I react majorly against this. Though of course wicked kings and queens go back a long way, too; still the end of the story is usually their deposition in favour of the worthy ex-woodcutter. And though you've very reasonably only talked about fantasy here, the same thimble-trick turns up in all sorts of literature. (PWimsey makes me grit my teeth at his constant smug privilege, and his writer just couldn't stop herself from magically making him, prospectively, the Duke and Harriet the Duchess, after all.)

Ouch for readers not wanting to bother! Writing is hard work, so I can understand lazy writers, but it's grim to think one can slog away at a plot and then find that the readers (i.e. those who actually do read it - those who don't pick up a story can hardly be blamed for how they deal with it!) can't be bothered to follow it. Nonetheless... :) I'll gird my loins and pledge to write a hard-plotted working-class fantasy sometime or other in the next year!

Thank you very much for these thoughts, which I'll continue to mull over. :)

[edenfalling]

Well, you can write a long continuing story without giving your main characters control of vast resources -- you just need to narrow the focus a bit, to maybe one town or city. But yeah, the sad truth is that big changes require power, and that's not something your average farmer or street-cleaner has.

There's a very fine line between giving power and privilege to a character and having readers feel like that stuff has therefore been given to them via identification and whatnot, and giving power and privilege to a character and having readers go, "Ugh, another deus ex machina for the author's pet, much?" And where exactly that line falls is different for every person in every story. *sigh*

I think I may have phrased that badly. I didn't mean that readers are necessarily opposed to complicated stories -- it's just that sometimes people get tired and want to read something simple and escapist that falls into well-worn patterns. So different stories will work for different people at different times. But yeah, there's a reason formulaic quest narratives never really go out of style. *wry*

[transposable_element]

Another limb of this is underworld protagonists-- thieves and pickpockets and prostitutes (usually the classier courtesan type), and people who are on the edge of respectability, like actors and artists. People who (archetypically) live fast and die young. They aren't wealthy or powerful, but have occupations that can be romanticized.

Do you know Tamora Pierce's Provost's Dog series? Working class female protagonist!

[edenfalling]

Ah yes, the glamour of the underworld. That's another ancient and venerable trope -- I think it comes a bit from the Trickster archetype, and also a bit from more wish-fulfillment fantasies, of not having to go along with all the rules and restrictions of a functional society.

I read the first two Tortall quartets, and adored them, but I have not read anything else by Tamora Pierce. I should remedy that one of these days.

(True story: when I was twelve or so, I had an idea for a story that involved a girl who becomes a knight and saved her country, and immediately thought to myself, "No, I can't do that; Tamora Pierce already did that." And then five seconds later I thought, "Wait a minute, how many THOUSANDS of stories are there about a boy who becomes a knight and saves his country, and I thought I couldn't write the same plot about a girl because somebody wrote it ONCE? That is STUPID!" But the point remains that I did have that thought, and it took me those five seconds to notice how illogical it was. Cultural expectations write themselves scarily deep into the brain, you know?)

[transposable_element]

There are many stories that have been done to death, but "girl who becomes a knight and saves her country" is not one of them. :D

Provost's Dog may be my favorite of Pierce's series (I've not read them all). It is set in Tortall, about 200 years before Song of the Lioness. Beka Cooper, the protagonist, is George Cooper's ancestor. She is very, very working class: she comes out of the slums to join the Provost's Guard (in other words, she's a cop). The three books in the series are called Terrier, Bloodhound, and Mastiff, which gives you a sense of her personality.

[justicevoles.livejournal.com]

Which is why Spider-Man was always best hero, because when the mask came off, he still had bills and relationship drama, a jerk boss, worries about Aunt May's health, etc. Real world problems. Makes him a little more relatable for most of us than genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist.

And now I'm probably going to spend twenty minutes debating if hobbits count as working class heroes or not... (Besides Sam, obviously)

[edenfalling]

Yes, sometimes it's nice to read about people whose superpowers or magic or amazing fighting skills or whatever don't have any application to their real-life problems, and who maintain a normal life in addition to their heroic deeds. (Of course, it can also be nice to read about people who don't have those problems, and imagine yourself into that position, but it's not relatable in the same way.)

I think that in comparison to everyone else in the trilogy, the hobbits are definitely in a lower social class -- the Shire is a very prosaic and everyday sort of country, with neither royalty nor knights -- but within their own culture, Pippin and Merry are landed nobility (they end up as Thain and Master of Buckland, respectively) and Frodo is their rich cousin, though he doesn't have a title himself. I guess he'd be gentry, if we're using British social equivalents. And even Sam ends up as de facto gentry, though he starts as solidly working class as it's possible to get.