Unsurprisingly, many writers in the Mythcreants community want to write stories that promote social justice. But just because we have good intentions doesn’t mean we’re doing no harm. Social justice issues are often sensitive, and many writers don’t know how to approach them. Unfortunately, this often results in a story that’s problematic instead of constructive, which is the last thing we want!
Building on our previous list of social justice blunders, let’s look at the five issues we frequently see when editing manuscripts with social justice messages.
1. Representation Is Missing
In stories, representation separates those who simply say they support social justice from those who truly stand up for it. A storyteller who speaks in favor of social justice but does not include diverse characters looks like a hypocrite. More than that, a story about marginalization that unfolds without the actual people who are marginalized looks exploitative, appropriative, or condescending.
Take the 2000 X-Men movie. In it, characters Rogue and Iceman visit Iceman’s parents. There, Iceman comes out to his parents about being a mutant. His mother responds by asking if he’s tried not being a mutant. This scene is obviously based on the experiences of queer people. There’s just one problem: There are no queer characters in the movie!*
Regardless of whether the filmmakers thought they were supporting queer people by doing this, they only showed cowardice in exploiting a real world issue. If they were truly advocating for equal rights, they’d be willing to create controversy by supporting queer people in unambiguous ways. Instead, they appropriated the trauma of marginalized people to make their privileged protagonists look sympathetic.
Unfortunately, not much has changed in the 23 years since. The show Star Trek: Strange New Worlds has a storyline about the oppression of Illyrians. While they preach about bigotry in the episode Ad Astra per Aspera, it’s hard to ignore that the show is a step backward for equality. Star Trek: Discovery is led by a Black woman and features gay, trans, and nonbinary characters. Strange New Worlds is helmed by yet another white man, has far fewer queer characters, features a prominent ableist storyline, and kills off its only disabled character in season one.
For fiction writers, depicting people who are different from us can be intimidating. Yes, we might get it wrong. But because marginalized people love representation, they’re also pretty forgiving. Simply being aware that you should do research, stay away from topics that are sensitive, and hire consultants when you can afford it is half the battle. At the end of the day, it’s no more difficult than the other storytelling skills you have to master to write a good story.
If you can’t gather the courage and muster the effort to represent others in your story, what are you doing adding social justice messages? Social justice isn’t about saying the right thing; it’s about elevating marginalized people and their experiences. In stories, that means including marginalized characters.
2. The Bar Is Too Low
Social justice is a moving target. That’s mostly a good thing, because the biggest cause of changing standards is forward progress! However, this means that a good social justice message is one that’s needed today, not one that was needed a hundred years ago. To demonstrate, imagine you encountered a story with one of these messages:
- Women are just as intelligent as men.
- Black people should be allowed in white bathrooms.
- Not all Jews are wealthy bankers.
Those don’t look like progressive messages, just the opposite. By opening arguments that are already settled, these messages normalize extreme bigotry. They suggest that ideas such as “women as less intelligent” are plausible enough to be worth debunking in the first place.
While those examples are extreme, unfortunately this is a common issue. That’s partly because we love to emulate our favorite stories, even stories that are very old. Consider the hit show Stranger Things, which frequently borrows from influential ’80s movies. It got in hot water by regurgitating the sexist tropes of yesteryear, such as having two female characters get in a jealous turf war.
Other times, storytellers have this issue because they aren’t in tune with the social justice issue they are covering. Take The Orville. In the bizarre episode About a Girl, the crew works to protect a girl from an alien species that has eliminated women from society. To do so, the protagonists argue in court that women are just as worthwhile as men. No, I’m not making that up.
Besides taking feminism back a couple hundred years, this episode is also anti-queer. Gender and biological sex are consistently conflated, and the only queer characters on the show come from this misogynist alien species. This society also eliminates its few women by surgically altering their bodies and reassigning their gender without consent. In today’s context, it looks like propaganda designed to demonize gender-affirming medical care.
How do you know if your message is too old? If you are highlighting a problem of injustice, it should be either unknown or not widely agreed to exist. If it’s unknown, it’s constructive to raise awareness. For instance, the way the US treats its prisoners or farmworkers has been swept under the rug for a long time. Whereas if the problem is not widely agreed upon, that means the issue is controversial. Bias in policing and trans rights fall in that category.
If your problem is widely known and agreed to be a problem, covering it probably does more harm than good. That’s because it lowers our standards by normalizing injustice. Featuring unjust societies also makes it more difficult to give marginalized characters positions of influence so they can impact the plot and feature prominently in the story. It reduces representation.
Of course, that doesn’t mean we should never revisit old issues. If you are writing a historical novel about women suffragists, naturally you’ll be covering how women gained the right to vote. In that case, you can take it for granted that your audience supports voting rights for women and focus on a social justice issue in need of more coverage. Did you know white suffragists embraced racist rhetoric in support of voting rights? That’s definitely ripe for a message about hypocrisy, intersectionality, and unity.
3. Oppression Is Exaggerated
As storytellers, it’s our job to bring compelling threats into the story. However, in some cases, this can end up working against us. In our effort to make protagonists sympathetic, create problems, or simply communicate clearly to our audience, we can exaggerate issues too much. This can feel forced and break believability at the best of times, but it’s especially damaging when covering oppression.
Similar to a message from 50 years ago, exaggerated depictions of oppression normalize extreme behavior. Not only that, but they give the audience the wrong idea about what oppression looks like and what effect it has.
If every story about oppression features lynch mobs, everyday racist rhetoric begins to look innocent in comparison. But everyday racism is harmful largely because it happens every day. The cumulative harm of low-level aggression is difficult to convey in a story; you have to live it to fully understand.
Making our depictions extreme indicates a lack of sensitivity to the issue. Take the novel City of Brass, which features a djinn city with a half-djinn underclass called the shafit. The oppression against the shafit is so extreme that it is outright illegal to give them medical care of any kind, something I have never heard of in the real world.
Despite this huge problem in the city, the oppression of the shafit isn’t the central focus of the book. The main character doesn’t seem to care about their suffering at all. While this seems discordant, both this lack of caring and the extreme oppression are signs that the storyteller is not educated on these issues or particularly passionate about them. The result is another depiction of oppression that’s exploitative.
Extreme oppression also displays insecurity on the storyteller’s part. In many cases, the storyteller is afraid that if they don’t depict extreme bigotry, the audience won’t get it. But it’s our job to make them get it, and if we don’t think we’re up to the task, we shouldn’t be covering these issues.
A skilled storyteller makes less mean more. Instead of making the depiction extreme, we can illustrate the harmful effect of things that are closer to home. For instance, imagine your character has to be at an interview in five minutes, but they have to go to the bathroom. They don’t feel safe using the bathroom that’s close by, so they race up and down three flights of stairs just to pee. Then they arrive at their interview several minutes late and sweating. Over time, they start going out less and less because finding a bathroom is such a hassle.
Choose the lightest amount of oppression you can get away with and use your story to show how it matters. If it hinders the protagonist, it will have an impact. If we all use severe depictions instead, it feeds the myth that bigotry is somehow over. It excuses people engaging in bigoted behavior because audiences come to think anything less than genocide must be okay.
4. Bigotry Isn’t Clearly Condemned
In the corner across from extreme depictions are ones that rely on the audience to know more than they do. Since we know what we’re trying to do, it’s easy to underestimate how explicit we need to be. But audiences that have little lived experience or education about these issues may not recognize bigotry when they see it. This is especially likely when we’re covering the right issues.
Because these are cases where storytellers fail to communicate their intent, it’s difficult to find firm examples from popular works. Distinguishing these instances from plain old bigotry requires a creator interview with just the right details. One well-known example is the show Mad Men. The writers meant to portray the destructiveness of misogynist white men like Don Draper in the show. But they also gave their historical setting an incredibly glamorous look. As a result, many viewers admired Don Draper instead of hating him.
Another likely example is the depiction of anti-ADHD sentiment in Ms. Marvel. The main character, Kamala Khan, is a Muslim Pakistani American that has to deal with racism and religious intolerance. She’s also strongly coded as having ADHD. Given that the head writer shares this neurotype, this is probably not an accident. However, this means that not only is the depiction of ADHD not explicit, but the worst ableism also isn’t condemned.
In the first episode, Kamala deals with a school counselor who belittles her for doodling in class. This is an adaptive behavior people with ADHD often use to pay attention. He also scolds Kamala when her attention wanders instead of giving her a fidget toy to help her focus.
On the plus side, this aggression is realistic and would benefit from better awareness. Because the main character is on the receiving end of bigotry, the viewers are primed to see the counselor’s behavior as a problem. However, specifically because this issue has low awareness, most viewers probably won’t recognize that the school counselor is ableist. The show needed to communicate this, and it doesn’t.
If you have a depiction with any kind of toxic social dynamics that are subtle, you can clarify what’s happening by:
- Giving it a name, such as ableism, racism, abuse, etc.
- Making a credible character, such as a protagonist or mentor, speak out against it.
- Showing the protagonist learn to stand up and push back against it.
Then be careful about how cool you make bigoted antagonists appear. While villains usually benefit from being cool, people will admire these villains, and that’s not what you want.
5. Forgiveness Is Prioritized
These days, many storytellers avoid black-and-white moral scenarios. Completely evil villains can come off as fake, and many storytellers are looking for more constructive, feel-good solutions than simply slaughtering the enemy. Instead, many villains end up seeing the error of their ways, are forgiven for their crimes, and end up joining Team Good.
However, oppression is inherently a black-and-white issue. The oppressors have the most power, and they are using that power to harm the vulnerable. In contrast, marginalized people do not have the power to hurt their oppressors in significant ways. When a marginalized group manages to land a few blows, they can expect retaliation at a larger and more violent level. Any hatred or anger marginalized people feel toward oppressors is not only harmless but largely justified.
In a context like this, forgiveness is easily twisted into another tool of oppression. Forgiveness is supposed to represent how we feel about those who have harmed us. It’s meant to be freely given once we feel it has been earned. However, privileged people not only equate forgiveness with getting a pardon for crimes committed, but they often feel entitled to it. In short, oppressors pressure people to forgive them as a means of avoiding accountability. With accountability removed, oppressors are free to continue harming others.
When storytellers try to mix forgiveness with oppression, it can go terribly wrong. Take the show Star Wars: Rebels. In it, protagonist Zeb is the survivor of a genocide committed by the Empire. An early villain of the show, Agent Kallus, participated in this genocide. He even uses the signature weapon of Zeb’s people: a trophy from the genocide. However, Kallus continually fails to catch the heroes, quickly losing his aura of menace. Since he was no longer an effective antagonist, the writers naturally looked for something else to do with his character.
Unfortunately, they decided to use the old “stuck in an elevator” relationship arc to redeem him. This meant stranding Zeb and Kallus on a planet together, so Zeb can learn to get along with the guy who participated in the genocide of his people! To the writers’ credit, they did decide to retcon Kallus’s role in the genocide before the episode, so he was no longer a direct participant. Even so, Kallus was part of the empire that did it, and he still had his trophy weapon. Putting Zeb and Kallus in a situation where they had to band together to survive was gross.
This doesn’t mean forgiveness can never appear in stories about social justice. However, it must be done carefully to avoid pitfalls. Generally, an inappropriate emphasis on forgiveness comes in one of three forms:
- A marginalized character forgives someone they would not realistically forgive because the harm done was too great. This treatment downplays or erases the harm that was done.
- A marginalized character is pressured into forgiving someone that harmed them. This pressure might come from other protagonists to try to convince them to forgive, or, as in the case of Rebels, it could come from a plot that requires them to forgive to save the day.
- The anger of marginalized characters for crimes done to them is demonized or vilified. The story emphasizes how violent and dangerous oppressed people are because they are angry.
Instead of using these patterns, separate the redemption of oppressors from forgiveness by those they harmed. An oppressor who feels remorse should work on their own to make up for their crimes without expecting anything from those they harmed. If they do that, then afterward someone might forgive them – if the harm was mild enough. If it’s not mild, the harmed party can choose not to forgive the former oppressor but to accept their help anyway.
All of these errors have something in common. They stem from the writer’s decision to address bigotry by adding it to their story. Even when we add bigoted characters just to smack them around, we are still letting them define our worlds and characters. We are repeating and reinforcing the same unfair social structures. Before you make that choice, consider your other option: leaving it all behind. Show everyone the world you want to live in.
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How would one represent social justice in the view of larger world setting with multiple races and species?
For example, in Star Wars the multiple alien races are grossly underepresented in the larger story. Should newer instalments feature more Bothans, Trandoshans and other species as main characters? (I personally think it should, not to serve any effort of social justice, but simply because I think the stories will be more interesting if this is done well.)
Couldn’t say I was aware that such races existed. Regardless, that would be interesting to see more of those races in the Star Wars universe. Perhaps one of them might become a jedi?
What’s the prominent ableist storyline in SNW?
That would be Pike’s story, where the drama is built around the idea that his life will be over once he suffers an accident and becomes disabled. This plot point doesn’t make any sense given Federation medical tech, and it also fits into the greater ableist trope that becoming disabled is as bad or worse than dying.
I can’t believe I forgot about that, omg. I watch SNW as episodes come out weekly, and it’s been a while since that’s come up. I wonder if they’re trying to gloss over it.
Yeah it hasn’t come up much in season two, thankfully.
I’m pretty sure that first point is part of why a lot of fans headcanoned Hermione as Black as well as Muggle-born. (Though in hindsight, making Hermione Black would only make the house-elf subplot even more uncomfortable.)
Also, regarding the last point about forgiveness, would Eddie Valiant and Roger Rabbit fall into that category? I haven’t seen the movie in a while, so I’m not sure.
Black Hermione has a different context in Britain than she perhaps would in the USA.
I don’t think Roger Rabbit maps to this scenario, since there was no Toon Army that was responsible for killing Valiant’s brother. Roger had no involvement in any way; Valiant’s prejudice toward all toons is shown as misplaced. The situation would be different if, say, the henchmen weasels committed the murder and the movie involved a situation where Eddie could only solve the mystery by befriending & forgiving one of the weasels (maybe who is trying to defect and snitch on his boss?) to get information. “Cool story, still murder”, as the saying goes.
Point 5 reminds me of how I once tried to talk with ChatGPT about why resentful individuals might resonate with a fictional god. The idea was to look at resentment from a more neutral angle (i.e. it can manifest both positively and negatively, rather than the purely negative idea propagated by culture), but it insisted, unprompted, on “correcting” me, by telling me why resentment was inappropriate and that a fictional god should value forgiveness instead. This led to an exchange that concluded with it bothsidesing leniency towards white supremacists in the Southern US during Reconstruction, suggesting it could be argued to have helped Black people in the South move past oppression.
It was a stark reminder that chatbots are inherently biased towards the views of privileged groups. Forgiveness is something that inherently benefits those who have the most to lose from facing accountability for their actions, who invariably tend to be those who benefit from a paradigm that naturally breeds resentment in its victims.
When forgiveness is a virtue, then those who turn down the opportunity to hold their oppressors accountable are lauded as ideal; those who refuse to dismiss their valid feelings, and instead take action based on those feelings, are demonized by comparison. Thus, the marginalized are pressured by society to demonstrate their moral superiority by allowing their oppressors to get away with their unjust actions.
Technically, Chatbots aren’t on anyone’s side. They have no opinions or thoughts of their own. All they do is collect information related to the question and summarize it.
It’s just that the privileged have a lot more opportunities to write than the marginalized, so the former “Information” available naturally comes in larger quantity.
On the other hand, it does give a picture of what the privileged believe the marginalized are like. They genuinely fear that if the marginalized are given a chance to exact justice, they’ll never be satisfied, so they promote forgiveness to survive a lynching that will never come.
I mean, If a CEO of a predatory company drives it to bankruptcy, do you want his children and grandchildren to starve in the streets alongside him?
Of course you don’t! The crimes are CEO’s alone and only he needs to pay. But with forgiveness we are expected to brush away his existent crimes along with his family’s non-existent ones.
To be honest, forgiveness is overrated, anyway. Justice is the way to go.
Yes… that’s my entire point. Chatbots are biased towards privileged views. That happens because materials reflecting those views are the most readily available. No need to “well ackshually” me.
So, to summarize, when portraying oppression, authenticity is key?
No, I wouldn’t say that. It suggests if you are authentic, nothing else can go wrong. Though certainly if you do something wrong, inaccuracy will make it look worse.
There’s also ongoing issues about credentials. For example, I have a character in a book based directly on a real person, and her feelings come straight from that person. So she’s Mexican, daca recipient, and always feels out of place. I don’t connect her out of place feelings with her background because it’s not that way with her inspiration, but as a white American man, I don’t have the credentials to write this character. I’m expecting to be told I relied on racist stereotypes.
Still, I take pride in my published novel having a trans lead in a story that’s got nothing to do with gender identity, and I used the opportunity to portray a society that accepts transgender people. ;)
Number five hits on something I have been thinking about lately, about how Western society tends to prioritize forgiveness over atonement in popular media and culture, which as noted becomes a tool of the oppressor. I think this is a reason people are inherently turned off of the idea of restorative justice as a concept. Instead of prioritizing actual restoration with the consent of the victim or survivors including accountability for elites, so often it just comes across as a weak message about forgiveness. In a discussion recently someone brought up blood payments as a problem with restorative justice when blood payments are a totally different thing with a basis in avoiding cycles of revenge more than justice.
Redemption arcs also often suffer from trying to redeem perpetrators of atrocities. I think the problem is rooted in wanting stronger character stakes, which is also a deeper problem that writers so often want high stakes even for stories like these that are hurt by them. So instead of having a tragic figure who joined the Empire out of a youthful desire to protect their planet and who became a Rebel agent when they realized the harm they were causing, we have a character like Kallus who was actually involved in war crimes and treated his troops as expendable. Lowering the stakes of redemption makes it far easier to make the character feel worthy of redemption.
You would be wrong thinking that the west is the only one who does that. A lot of Turkish media priorities forgiveness to an absurd degree that western media looks pretty harsh by comparison, especially when it’s about relationships involving a man abusing a woman.
Japanese media also is mostly about forgiveness, hence many Shonen have some of the most evil people join team good and don’t get me mentioned on how filial piety and how you have to forgive your abusive older family members because they are older and family.
The west is hardly the first thing that does it and never was it the last, it’s not even a thing tbh, since that concept is dubious at best.
Guess the world in general could learn a lesson in valuing atonement over forgiveness.
One big problem, of course, is that we don’t know what to do with characters that are irredeemable. Do we just kill them off, or keep them around so they can suffer?
The most difficult question of course is, what to do with an irredeemable character that feels remorse nonetheless?
Take, for example, The Deep from The Boys. Rape is a crime beyond redemption, so naturally The Deep coercing Starlight to sex makes him irredeemable. The problem comes from the fact that The Deep doesn’t revel in his crime, like irredeemable villains usually do. He has spent every moment since then suffering and desperately searching for a peace of mind, but never getting it. Instead he goes from one torment to the next, one horror after another.
We can’t blame Starlight for not wanting to forgive the Deep, but is it still fair for an irredeemable person to spend the rest of their days in living hell, even if they feel remorse? I know I’m not supposed to feel pity on The Deep, but the show makes it hard not to have his torments feel excessive.
I haven’t seen the boys, but I do think that you can redeem any character that feels remorse. The trick is to show a viable path to redemption. Say if Professor X was a high school bully who straight up murdered a nerd, and avoided consequences because of his powerful wealthy and white family. What does he do now? He helps, even saves, the people he would have bullied.
Maybe Clark Kent raped someone.
Maybe Yoda was a sith apprentice.
It wouldn’t be good enough to say Clark Kent raped someone and now he’s trying to atone for it. To put that in his history, we need to see his journey to understanding why he did it, how he recovered, how he did his penance, etc. It would also explain why he’s superman, because Clark Kent is irredeemable. His victim would suffer even more from seeing Clark Kent as a hero, but by being superman, he can atone publicly without further hurting his victim.
It gets worse. Media depicts characters who are forgiven better than those who atone. It’s a mass media version of chevy chase saying racist things because he was friends with Richard Pryor.
I like the kira/dukat story. Star trek gets so much wrong, but at least they’re trying, but they got it right with those two.
The example used in pt 4 is an interesting choice. Under diagnosis of neurodiversity such as ADHD in women/afab individuals is extremely common and is becoming more recognized as ND voices are expressing themselves. How do you reconcile representing the experiences of someone being misdiagnosed or not diagnosed, whose own oppression is defined by ambiguity and confusion, with making oppression clearly condemned? If you label them in the work, you’ve lost part of showing what makes the experience so degrading and frustrating.
To start, I think it’s just good to keep in mind that there are also plenty of people who are diagnosed early. Considering that characters who are coded as ADHD still outnumber those that explicitly have ADHD by a large margin, I don’t think it would damage representation to label a few more characters explicitly. Explicit labeling is especially valuable when public awareness is low, and despite increasing awareness, it is still low.
It’s also possible to give a character’s neurotype an explicit label without the character knowing that label. The easiest way to do that in a TV show would be via the meta conversation – the showrunner can say the character has ADHD. Then the character can have an arc where they learn about it.
That said, while being explicit is very helpful when calling out bigotry, it’s not essential. While trickier, we can communicate that there is something different about a character before what that difference is called is known. In addition, the counselor’s behavior isn’t inappropriate because Kamala has been diagnosed with ADHD, it’s inappropriate because he is shaming her for the things she is doing to get by and for things she can’t control. That would be a problem regardless of her neurotype, so a character could call him out on that. Kamala herself could push back a little more before the end of the season.
However, without a label, it would take a little more time to explain, and the show doesn’t devote that much time to this counselor.
Thank you very much for replying, Chris. I think you made some excellent points. I had thought the actress had identified her character as having ADHD, but you’re right, having the showrunner or some higher ups at Marvel comment would be ideal. I had assumed that the counselor acting poorly towards her was further commentary on a late-diagnosed person’s experience, but I think I’m giving the show too much credit. Cheers!
There’s a danger in giving labels. Readers often use labels as shorthand and will tune out uncomfortable ideas once you give them permission by providing a convenient label. Sometimes you have to walk them in slowly and then spring the label. Just look at supernatural. Dean is an alcoholic, but Sam got the stereotypical addict story. He was violent, selfish, and irrational. But when you understand Dean is an alcoholic, you learn about the real world disease. They only had to do one thing in the end and give him the label, and they would have done more to address the stigma than anybody else since AA was founded.
I feel like saying the following are lessons people already learned, such as:
-Women are just as intelligent as men.
-Black people should be allowed in white bathrooms.
-Not all Jews are wealthy bankers.
Is giving certain bigoted white people WAY too much credit. There are TONS of people out there in the real world who believe in the opposite of these things. I feel like a lot of people, in particular, could stand to learn the one about Jewish people in particular.
#5 Forgiveness is Prioritized is such a big problem in stories aimed at children and young adults! It is so wrong. I can’t stand it.
I understand.
On the one hand, children’s stories are expected to encourage non-violence, because they’re well, aimed at CHILDREN.
On the other, well, see all the problems listed in point # 5. Downplaying oppressive harm, demonizing legitimate anger on the behalf of the harmed…there’s more, but there are people better equipped than me to elaborate.
I don’t think it’s a NEW problem, either. Hell, as early as C.S. Lewis’s time, he had a MASSIVE problem with pacifism because of the Nazis. As in, he was living in the era of the Nazis and Neville Chamberlain.
Which is not quite the same, but it has the same root. Prioritizing the comfort of the oppressors/invaders over that of the marginalized/people about to be invaded. And utilizing non-violent ideology as a shield to hide behind.
It would certainly make things a lot easier to reconcile if childrens’ shows stopped amping their stakes up to include things like mass genocide, imperialist conquest, and straight up world destruction.
I find the idea of forgiveness at any cost to be deeply Christian. Although, as other people pointed out, it appears in other cultures as well.
For anyone interested in delving deeper into the subject, I recommend reading The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness by Simon Wiesenthal.
This is the synopsis from Wikipedia:
In 1943, at the height of both World War II and the Holocaust, a group of forced labourers from the Lemberg concentration camp are sent to a converted army hospital to clear medical waste. Simon Wiesenthal is summoned from this work detail by a nurse to the bedside of a dying Nazi soldier, Karl Seidl (identified only as Karl S. in earlier editions). The soldier tells him he is seeking “a Jew’s” forgiveness for a crime that has haunted Seidl since it was committed one year prior.[2] Over a number of hours, Seidl tells Wiesenthal his life story, including joining Hitler Youth and his experiences in the SS. He then confesses to having participated in the destruction, by fire and armaments, of a house full of 300 Jews. He states that as the Jews tried to leap out of windows to escape the burning building, he and the other soldiers gunned them down.
After Seidl finishes his story, he asks Wiesenthal to forgive him. Wiesenthal then leaves the room without saying anything. The next day, the nurse informs Wiesenthal that the soldier has died. The nurse tells him that Seidl has left his belongings to him, but Wiesenthal refuses to take them, telling the nurse to have them sent to Seidl’s mother. Wiesenthal ruminates on whether or not he should have forgiven Seidl through the rest of his experiences in the concentration camp system. After the war, he finds Seidl’s mother, who in their conversation unintentionally confirms the details of her son’s story. Seidl’s mother asks him how he knew his son, but Wiesenthal lies and leaves without telling her of her late son’s participation in the Holocaust.[3] He then poses the ethical dilemma of whether or not he should have forgiven Seidl to the reader, after which a variety of responses from a diverse group of individuals is given.
I found it interesting that the people who wrote responses with the conclusion to forgive were either Buddhist (2) or Christian (8). To be fair, some Christian writers wrote not to forgive, and some Jewish writers were uncertain. But overall, the difference was striking, with the majority of Jewish writers being against forgiveness and the majority of Christian writers being for it.
You could argue that this is just the difference between the perspective of those whose people lived through genocide versus those who didn’t, but I don’t think it can be boiled down just to that. One of those advocating for forgiveness was Dith Pran, a survivor of the Cambodian genocide. So there’s a lot to think about here.
You have to separate forgiveness into its two components. Inner forgiveness is a gift you give yourself. It’s how you release resentment. It’s a vital skill.
The performative forgiveness is what we’re talking about in stories, of course. I mention these differences because modern Christianity has a prominent performative quality. It seems that it’s not good enough to be a Christian unless you also shout it to the world. Buddhism doesn’t have that performative quality, although many practitioners do.
Christianity isn’t supposed to be preformative either though. There’s a whole thing in the start of Matthew 6 anout it.
Oh, and regarding the demonization of victims, I remember being very annoyed when watching X-Men: First Class years ago, and seeing how it’s portrayed tgat for Erik, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, killing the actual Nazi who murdered his family is the first step down the dark path that will turn him into Magneto. I was almost shouting at the screen: “Are you kidding me?”
There was an interesting discussion about it years ago on a website that reviews movies (in Hebrew). It was called “Magneto and the Jewish problem”.
https://www.fisheye.co.il/magnetos_jewish_problem/