The evil that men, not aliens, do
Nov. 7th, 2010 05:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gryphonseggI've been distracted from posting lately-- distracted by several things, among them reading Sherlock Holmes fanfic published in hard copy by pro writers. You know what seems to be really popular in this specialized sub-sub-sub-genre? Crossovers with other characters and real historical figures from the time of the original Holmes stories. And you know what the most popular crossover appears to be? Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper. Thinking back, I realize that lots of writers who use Victorian settings or themes like to put their own spin on the Ripper murders. And that can go into uncomfortable territory because the Ripper murders were real murders that actually happened, and happened to women at the very bottom of their country's socioeconomic scale, at that.
Rehashing them for entertainment feels morally dubious to me . . . but then, we (reading and writing and story-telling humans) are always rehashing horrible historical events for morally dubious purposes. What, aside from the fact that I read so many of them in a fairly short time span, makes rehashes of these particular murders feel so off to me? Asking myself this, I realized that some of these stories bother me much more than others, and I compared and contrasted them to find the common thread. It was easy to find once I started looking for it. The ones that strike me as not much different from, say, a story set during a real historical war are the ones that feature the great detective discovering the identity of the very human Ripper (with or without the assistance of Oscar Wilde, airship-flying Thomas Edison, and the immortal Merlin). Some writers come out in support of one of the RL theories about which Victorian era celebrity committed the murders. Others use a human fictional character. The stories that make me feel guilty for enjoying them, though, put the blame on a non-human entity. It was an alien vivisectionist! A Lovecraftian horror! A demon using a human(ish) body as a tool just like the knife! Not one of us, no, anything but one of us! It bothers me in the same way as other books I've read, where alien conspiracies caused war and patriarchy and slavery, or otherworldly manifestations of evil controlled the Nazis. This kind of twist bothers me because, at some point, the book is finished and it's time to go out and deal with the real world, where human beings like the ones we interact with all the time really did horrible things, and not because Cthulu made them do it.
Rehashing them for entertainment feels morally dubious to me . . . but then, we (reading and writing and story-telling humans) are always rehashing horrible historical events for morally dubious purposes. What, aside from the fact that I read so many of them in a fairly short time span, makes rehashes of these particular murders feel so off to me? Asking myself this, I realized that some of these stories bother me much more than others, and I compared and contrasted them to find the common thread. It was easy to find once I started looking for it. The ones that strike me as not much different from, say, a story set during a real historical war are the ones that feature the great detective discovering the identity of the very human Ripper (with or without the assistance of Oscar Wilde, airship-flying Thomas Edison, and the immortal Merlin). Some writers come out in support of one of the RL theories about which Victorian era celebrity committed the murders. Others use a human fictional character. The stories that make me feel guilty for enjoying them, though, put the blame on a non-human entity. It was an alien vivisectionist! A Lovecraftian horror! A demon using a human(ish) body as a tool just like the knife! Not one of us, no, anything but one of us! It bothers me in the same way as other books I've read, where alien conspiracies caused war and patriarchy and slavery, or otherworldly manifestations of evil controlled the Nazis. This kind of twist bothers me because, at some point, the book is finished and it's time to go out and deal with the real world, where human beings like the ones we interact with all the time really did horrible things, and not because Cthulu made them do it.
