Orcs, Droids and Clones

[4thofeleven]

Continuing my infrequent rants about things I’m sick of seeing in stories…

Inhuman enemies. Now, I don’t mean just non-human enemies; they’re cool. I mean the sort of enemies that are carefully designed so there can be no possible moral issues about Our Heroes killing them en masse. Maybe they’re robots. Maybe they’re zombies. Maybe they’ve got a hive mind. Maybe they’re just instinctively aggressive. Either way, they’re there to a, pose a threat and b, then get killed.

Now, if the genre is, say, a zombie story, that’s fine – you don’t want the audience distracted from the protagonist by speculating about the culture of the zombies or what their greater goals are. They’re there, there’s lots of them, they’re going to eat your face. The problem is when they start wandering into other genres, where slightly more nuanced antagonists would probably serve the story better.

I’ve always felt they’re kind of a cheat, for starters. The author has a story where the hero kills lots of baddies, doesn’t want to deal with the possible moral issues, and so makes them into orcs. Or demons. Or zombies. Or zerglings. Or clones. And the problem is this tends not to actually improve the story much. If you introduce these sorts of enemies, well, your villains are now a lot less interesting; you can’t do a ‘hero and villain have to ally against a greater threat’ story. You can’t do a ‘misguided yet sympathetic villain’ story. You can’t do stories about negotiations or peace treaties or defectors or intrigue. And you haven’t really gained anything – if your Orcs or whatever are invading or pillaging or otherwise causing harm to the heroes, it doesn’t really matter if there’s peaceful Orc nations on the other side of the world or if they’re all born evil; the ones the heroes are facing are a threat, and there really aren’t many moral issues in killing them.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has a race of aliens called the Jem’hadar. They’re genetically engineered soldiers, created to be unquestionably loyal to their masters, the Dominion. They’re instinctively violent killers, created purely for warfare – and as a result, they’re not that interesting. There are really no stories you can tell about Jem’hadar that you can’t tell with a regular militaristic alien like a Klingon – and there’s plenty of Klingon stories you can’t tell with Jem’hadar. And once you’ve said that the Dominion army consists entirely of Jem’hadar, you can’t tell stories about the sort of people that would fight for the Dominion anymore, or how they reconcile their job as brutal enforcers of an evil empire with their civilian lives. Nope, they’re specially created monsters with no lives or goals outside of making our hero’s lives difficult.

Or take the Star Wars prequels and their reliance on droids as enemies. The Separatist armies aren’t made up of idealistic if misguided revolutionaries. Nah, judging by the movies, the entire separatist cause consists of a dozen businessmen and a Trade Federation brand Build Your Own Army kit. Now you might say, ‘Well, you can’t have the Jedi hacking their way through people just because they’re on the wrong side’ – well, sure, there’s a lot less moral issues in having robots as the enemies, but, you know, the moral issues should be the point – or, at least be an option, not rendered completely impossible to even consider.

Now, alright, maybe I’m being a little unfair. If you’ve got a story where the baddies are just there to serve as nameless extras, it doesn’t really matter who they are or if they do anything outside of combat. Still, it strikes me that the setting as a whole suffers a little. I mean, I know from a narrative point of view neither Stormtrooper #8 nor Battledroid #00823 is going to suddenly decided to cast his lot in with the heroes and turn against his superiors – no, they’re going fire ineffectually at the heroes and then get shot or cut in half. But I don’t think the *characters* should know that’s all their enemies exist for… That’s why I get into arguments with anyone who claims the Stormtroopers in the OT are clones.*

Of course, that leads into the second big problem with Inhuman Enemies – The Inhuman Enemy who Isn’t. This is where we get told by the author that the enemies aren’t real people and it’s perfectly alright to kill them, maim them, torture them, or set them on fire – despite the fact that other than the author’s assurances, there’s nothing to distinguish them from regular people. I see this one a lot in vampire stories, where the author insists that vampires aren’t alive, so it’s OK to kill them, even though they’re behaving and talking exactly the same as anyone else. Or you get robots that are clearly self-aware and have their own personalities, except we’re apparently meant to still think they’re somehow not entirely on the same level as meatbags humans. The Star Wars EU has a particularly bad case of this, where R2-D2 is clearly considered a ‘person’, while generic astromech units are considered only tools. There’s a particularly annoying bit in one of the X-Wing novels, where Wedge casually memory wipes his astromech because he doesn’t like its personality, yet somehow he’s still meant to remain a sympathetic protagonist…

And then there’s the Clonetroopers**. Are they meant to be read as people, or not? Because if they’re people, then the Jedi are leading a slave army into battle. Now that sounds wrong, and probably isn’t how we’re meant to interpret things – but clones aren’t robots or zombies, they’re the same as regular people… hell, that’s the point! But Yoda and Mace Windu’s big concern is “The Chancellor has accumulated too much power” and not “The entire Republic and the Jedi Order is complicit in a massive violation of human rights.”, so I guess we are meant to consider the Clonetroopers closer to battle droids than to people…

And that’s why I dislike the Inhuman Enemy concept – if you do it right, you’re still not adding anything to your story. And if you screw it up, and don’t think it through or set it up properly, then you end up with a really weird scenario, where the reader is forced to accept that certain characters are inherently less than human, in spite of their being no real evidence within the story to support that.

There’s evil people, you know – and there’s plenty of regular people who still fought for evil regimes and committed atrocities. Write about them, and stop trying to create morally pure warfare, where one side is irredeemably evil unsullied by the hint of good…

 

* Well, that, and that it doesn’t make sense to refer to a conflict as “The Clone Wars” if most of your military still consists of clones – be like referring to WW2 as “The Infantry War”…

** Seriously, I don’t bring up the SW prequels every time I talk about flaws in stories because I hate them or enjoy ragging on them – it’s just most people on my friends list is familiar with them, so they make good examples. It’s easier to talk about these things when everyone knows the same stories being talked about – Shaka, when the walls fell.

Comments

[sunnyskywalker]

I still maintain that R&J was really a play about a cycle of violence turning a stupid teenage crush into a bloodbath. If all had gone normally, Romeo would have been over Juliet in a week, just like he got over Rosalind. But nooo, they had to get sucked into the drama of the feud... Ahem. Anyway, I don't take R&J as the model for great love, that's for sure.

Actually, I think Lucas was aiming for the popular perception of R&J as a great forbidden love with A/P, but ended up a lot closer to my interpretation of "crush turns deadly due to various circumstances, many totally preventable."

Palpatine sweet-talking everyone would have been awesome. I'd even have settled for Palpatine sweet-talking everyone into accepting the clone army as "totally volunteers, really!"

[imadra-blue.livejournal.com]

Ha! Yes, I agree that Lucas tried to do the popular perception of R&J, but then gave us something so close to real life. He also wanted to show the negative side of too love. The love that Luke had saves Anakin, but the love Padme had condemns Anakin. Lucas actually elevates pure love born of family or even friendship above romantic love. It's one of the things I love about SW, because in our society, I wind up arguing to I'm blue in the face that there's other sorts of love than romantic, and everyone ignores me, because they think getting married and "falling in love" is the only happiness a person can have.

Man, I sorely miss all those opportunities for Palpatine to spin things his way. I still love the only scene where he really does that, at the opera house. That was the only real seduction in canon, and I wish we had been able to see him seduce the populace, too.