The Lost Girl issue

Some of you may know of a show, one of many, about a supernaturally powerful woman and her coterie of beautiful hanger's on and her bitchy evil frenemies...

Well, that wasn't very specific, was it?

I'm talking specificially about Lost Girl, which has among its various claims to fame that its 'All Canadian' and that it is entirely non-judgemental about sexuality. Well... given that the 'heroine' is a succubus, that only makes some sense.  Not that it really is non-judgemental. I mean: you have hot straight sex and hot lesbian sex, usually on camera, but no real sign of hot gay sex, on or off camera. Not that I'm complaining... or even watching anymore... I just like pointing out how people like to bullshit themselves.

That's all a distraction, however: a reason to watch the show. (Yay for Boobies!)

The issue I take with the show isn't the mythology, which in the main is reasonably well researched for a tv show, and not appallingly adapted for 'drama'. Its not the sex, or the lack of sex or the overwhelming presence of the sex. Its not even trying to sell me another forty year old actress as a hot naked sex-pot by using soft focus lenses, or a woman as a powerhouse because, Magic.

No.

The issue, the umbrage, I have with the show, and many other recent bits of pop culture flotsam shoved at us these days is the moral landscape.

So in Lost Girl, all the supernatural gribblies of the world are all 'Fae', to include our nominally demonic heroine, the Lost Girl herself.  Fair enough.

Like ALL fae, or fairies, or shidhe, they are devided into light and dark camps, good and evil, seelie and unseelie.  Because, well, that's sorta what fae do, right? Also, mythology loves to simplify the world in to clear camps of light and dark, good and evil.  Its sort of a major, and important theme of mythology.

All well and good. Lost Girl meets the Light Fae, who are the group of fae who refuse to kill humans to feed (apparently, all Fae need to feed on humans in the Lost Girl world. Fair enough...), while the Dark Fae are the fairies who basically think of humans as cattle.  Moreever: The dark fae have to real issues with all sorts of evil behavior towards their own, kept in check mostly by fear and personal power of the various players.

Anyway: The two sides formed after a powerful fae (the blood king, I think they call him. Its the midget barkeep (SPOILER! Hah!), cast a spell forcing immutable laws on fae society. Prior to that they were just savage tribes slaughtering each other to feed even more powerful monsters.  The Dark Fae are generally portrayed as more powerful and more organized and motivated... they are kept in check by the laws that prevent them from just declaring war outright... in fact a number of sub plots involve dark fae manipulations of events to bring about war between the two sides. THe light side isn't all peaches and cream, which also doesn't offend me. I mean: They trick and enslave a human doctor into being their personal science-bitch and resident hottie-lesbian (and really: Can you blame them?), they have some pretty strict rules and seriously heavy duty punishments for infractions. On the other hand, they are trying to avoid a war and remain powerful enough to survive it if it comes, and their enemies like eating people and torture as a hobby.

So when our Lost Girl shows up on the scene, meets the various parties and players what does she do?

She sides with the light fae, right? I mean they've got a resident lesbian for her to make out with, in her obligatory love triangle involving the werewolf (like that shocks you people...), right? And she is really happy to learn how to not accidentally eat people when she has sex, which is a very light-fae attitude, right?

Silly readers, of course not. She refuses to join a side and tries to play the middle, despite the fact that almost every bad guy winds up being a dark fae.

That offends me.

Oh, if it was just this one show I'd shrug and go 'hee... tits' or something. No. It seems all these 'awesome' shows, books, and movies... all these 'riot-grrl-power' pop culture dramas always find a way for the heroine to look somehow noble for rejecting the putative good guys.

Look: There is no real third way. Life may have all sorts of shades of grey and interesting colors blurring the lines between good and evil, between light and dark, but that doesn't mean they represent some purer, more noble path that choosing good over evil.

You don't require an objective good for that to be true, either.

Ironically: They rob themselves of a chance for narrative richness, as questions of moral complexity, of moments of true drama, are stripped when the heroine's rejection of good is viewed as morally right. She never has to compromise her beliefs because she is 'right'.

What appalls me is the frequency which this meme, this narrative pattern surfaces. I didn't have to see that recent 'witch coming of age' film to know what the heroine chose at the end, its become cliche. Now: I may have been wrong about the girl-witch finding herself the first and most powerful 'evah' grey caster... in that particular case, but consider that in the trailer, and really in the film itself, no one ever tells her to 'go light'. THe dark witches want her to go dark, and are willing to manipulate her into being dark, but the light casters, and ordinary people, just want her to be 'true to herself'.

Ultimately it winds up being the same sort of thing.  Good is only really good if you aren't all judgmental and preachy about it.

That is utter rot. Nonsense.

Let me repeat Burke's famous quote for you

"All that is necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men do nothing."

Ultimately, essentially this is what we are being told that Good should do. Nothing. Good shouldn't judge, it shouldn't preach, it shouldn't uphold certain values. Good becomes a passive thing, a mere rejection of evil behaviors.  The Lost Girl can't side with the Light Fae because they do things that are, to her, morally objectionable, and she can't side with the Dark Fae because they are actually Evil, with a capital E. By choosing NO SIDE, by being all passive and You-Go-Girl pro-human, she is presenting the idea of a passive Good that is superior to the organized, restrictive Rules based small-G good of the Light Fae.

Likewise, we can only support the Girl-Witch in Beautiful Creatures good to the Light because no one ever tells her the Light is the only legitimate choice, and we fully endorse her rejecting the Dark Casters because, well, they keep telling her to 'Go Dark' all the time.

What a fucked up morality they try to present!

It is utterly divorced from reality, and simply saying it is fantasy isn't good enough. Fantasy works because it is grounded in a real world we can understand. You take a real, believable world and add magic to it. You make conscious choices about what 'real rules' don't apply.

We are born savages, barbarians... sociopaths, really. Every human being is a little monster who only cares for himself, from birth.  It takes years to teach the helpless little monsters to be reasonable, altruistic, civilized human beings.  It takes rules. It takes judgments and punishments.  It takes making black and white, good and evil, real things in a world made up of colors and greys. And even after thousands of years of practice we still sometimes get it wrong.

Worse: Civilization is a precious, fragile thing.  We assume stability, we assume progress is a part of the natural order, that the only thing we can change is the rate of progress.

Nonsense.

Civilizations die, they collapse and it takes lifetimes to start over again, and many, many cultures have never found their way out of savagery. Civilization is not assumed, it is built slowly and carefully on rules, on trust.. and yes, on Judgment.

Telling people to reject Good, because it is only less evil than Evil is corrosive, destructive and damning. Telling people that its only Good if its optional, if its non-judgmental is corrosive, destructive and damning.

We have a real shortage of responsibility in our modern society, and this sort of perverse moralizing is only making things worse.

But what do I care? I get to see two naked chicks making out on my television.

Caio.