Politics in Stories
A common complaint from certain people in recent years is that we should keep politics out of media - out of stories. Personally, I take issue with this for a couple of reasons and I thought it might be interesting to go into exactly why this refrain irks me.
The first of these reasons is simply that it is practically impossible to entirely remove politics from any even remotely complex story. Stories reflect the values of the time periods they were created as well as the beliefs and values of the ones who write them. These things are innately political.
George Orwell’s books, like 1984, deal with the dangers of totalitarianism and how the populace is manipulated and controlled by those systems. A Song of Ice and Fire is, in many ways, the Wars of the Roses with zombies and dragons. The very nature of their content renders them political. But this isn’t something exclusive to stories with plots that explicitly deal with politics either.
The Lord of the Rings across its various adaptations does not have an overly political narrative at a glance. In fact, I have seen it come up fairly often as a suggestion for a good story that isn’t political. However, the central plot of both the books and the movies is about the corrupting influence of greed and power. These stories also introduce us to the conflict between the human kingdoms of Gondor and Rohan and explore the isolationism of the elves. There is a repeated moral that people must stand together against a greater evil instead of letting pettier grievances interfere and lead them to ruin. These are all inherently political plot points and themes. I don’t want to speak too much about the books compared to the movies because I’m much less familiar with them. However, I am fairly sure the basics of the story are consistent across the different versions of the story and I think most of the people citing The Lord of the Rings in these debates are talking about the movies anyway.
When the villain of the story is suspiciously similar to Hitler or Stalin, when a subclass of a society is oppressed and must rise up against their oppressors or power dynamics between classes are explored, you are engaging with a political story. Any time you read a book that deals with matters of greed, power, unity, division, war, good or evil (whatever those look like to the author), you are engaging with a story that is political by nature. Star Wars, The Hunger Games, A Handmaid’s Tale, Harry Potter, Animal House, V for Vendetta, Cyberpunk, X-Men, The Iliad - I could go on and on. All of these stories involve politics or have political messages at their core, even if we consume them purely for entertainment.
Think back to the books read to you when you were a small child. How many of those stories had messages about sharing, respect, tolerance or other such basic moral lessons? Even such simple morality is political by nature because it reflects the values of the society that the children hearing the stories are a part of. Perhaps not every piece of fiction will have a political message buried within it. However, you cannot separate politics from storytelling as a practice. They are fundamentally linked. Stories have always been used to share messages and explore ideas. They always will be.
It does raise the question then, if politics and stories could never really be separated, then what exactly is the problem? Well, a lot of the time, people aren’t really complaining about the presence of politics at all. Rather, what they are complaining about is the inclusion of content that runs contrary to their own political beliefs.
Of course, people are entitled to believe whatever they want and nobody is required to enjoy the stories they read, watch or play. But society is constantly growing and evolving and, as a result, more and more representation of previously unrepresented groups is going to happen in our fiction. More and more exploration and espousement of political, philosophical, religious and moral views that are either new or once considered “radical” is going to happen. When you decide to pick up a book, play a game or watch a movie, you are choosing to take the risk that it might contain content you would prefer not to engage with. The world isn’t going to turn back the clock to accommodate your sensibilities. If you want to take to social media to rant about that, then that is and always will be your right. But in the end, it’s just as pointless as trying to isolate politics from fiction is.
