[ SECRET POST #5148 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5148 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 34 secrets from Secret Submission Post #737.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

An honest question from someone with little experience of these kinds of conversations -- does coding in fiction need to be intentional?

[thewakokid]

I would say so, generally. No absolutes but I pretty much hold that the intent counts for a lot. I think the prevailing opinion is different on this, but I worry the reason for this is that a lot of people seem interested in being able to attack people for their perceptions of their wrong doing, rather than any harm from those wrongdoings.

Like, a writer who creates an evil character and gives them a Russian accent might be falling into the trope of the stereotypical cold-war era villain.

But it's equally possible he's never watched a 60's James bond film in his life and is just writing about a guy he knows in real life who he hates and who has a Russian accent. In general, You have to know, or at least believe you know the intention before you can make the case that something is coded. And Intention, outside of the authors own statement, is pretty hard to know.

Now, if Orson Scott Card wrote a mincing lisping villain who is excessively interested in the hero being shirtless, I could entertain your read on the character as being a depraved homosexual stereotype... but it strikes me that in most cases there's a lot more of the readers perceptions at play when "Coding" is brought up.

[(Anonymous)]

Not at all. There are lots of fiction shorthands we're all familiar with. Two solid of examples of which are:

- stereotypical gay characteristics of villains
- women however strong will usually still need to be saved by the main guy

It's so ingrained, so familiar to us that we undoubtedly replicate those patterns over and over again. Stories may even seem unbalanced to us without them, because we're so used to stories and characters being a particular 'shape'.

[(Anonymous)]

SA Thought of some better examples.

So Scar from the Lion King and slipping on banana peels.

Way back when, banana peels were introduced as visual shorthand for slipping on horseshit in the street. I can't remember whether it was a censorship issue, studios not wanting literal shit in their films, or just an amusing idea someone dreamed up that was cleaner and therefore more convenient.

Well anyway, back then everyone knew exactly what it was alluding to, and that presumably played a part of any audience merriment. Now we know of that gag, but don't have any context for it in real life.

So same with Scar. He is very very camp, not physically astute and literally limp wristed. He is a homophobic charicture of a gay man. But those are common elements of Hollywood villains, and his characteris obviously constructed to be that kind of atypical villain. I love Scar, he is a fun character and neither kid or adult me never once for a second equated him with being gay in any way. And yet, deep in the annals of film, someone somewhere obviously set about deliberately using gay stereotypes as villains. And now we have Scar.

[(Anonymous)]

I absolutely don't think that it does

Of course it's a matter of interpretation, and there's not ever any hard and fast objective line one way or the other. But it does feel like, in a lot of cases, people practically demand that a writer has to hold up a flashing sign that says I AM TALKING ABOUT X before they will acknowledge it, and will refuse to exercise their own judgment and scrutiny even in situations where it's very obvious. People want to deny that things are problematic and extend the benefit of the doubt even when it's patently absurd to do so.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, it does. Coding is specifically the deliberate use of tropes or stereotypes to imply that a character is part of a specific group without actually stating it, and is traditionally used to get around publishing restrictions or outright censorship.

It's certainly fair to say that a character reads like a stand-in for X group, and to discuss why, for example, certain stereotypical behaviors are used to show a character as poor, a criminal, Not From Here, etc. But if it's not deliberate, it's not coding. It's interpretation.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think so.

I think a about Stephen King's IT in this case. That was the perfect example of a person writing what they saw, without actually understanding what they were seeing. He has more than one queer-coded character because he saw kids who acted a certain way and just mimed it. It was other LGBTQIA+ people who recognized those traits for what they could mean. And that was so powerful that it literally changed the canon. (Stephen King was happy to roll with Richie's character being explicitly gay.)

I think that's the perfect example of coding being unintentional but having dramatic effect. Writers write what they see. They aren't always going to understand what they're seeing and copying.