[Story Rant] Persecution Fantasy?

[jordangreywolf]

Is there a TVTrope that corresponds to an overblown persecution fetish? Like, "Everybody is out to get me for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON OH WOE IS ME?" Because I think there might just be something worth categorizing in a few anime I've seen.

It feels a little like some of my worst early attempts at writing fiction when I was in grade school and junior high: Joe Nobody is picked on by everybody for absolutely no reason. Why, he's not even Rudoph with a red nose for them to make fun of. But of course, he shall RISE ABOVE all that, and show them. Maybe even get revenge.

I think in part it was because I was a kid who moved around a lot and thus any established friendships got shattered and I had to keep starting over. But I can't blame it all on just THAT, because once I stayed in one place, I kept doing really stupid stuff that people would remember. In any case, I read an awful lot of young adult fiction and kid stories in which the poor, poor protagonist was senselessly picked on by wicked stepparents, aunts, and uncles, classmates, and maybe even random strangers. Maybe there was some reason to it, however superficial, but that seemed to be lost on me.

Mostly I just seemed to come away with the idea that heroes are persecuted. Being picked on is a sign of virtue and that the universe is eventually going to get around to balancing the scales. So I think maybe, just maybe, I had a bit of a self-fulfilling thing going on -- I EXPECTED (maybe on some twisted level even WANTED) to be the noble loner, the pitiable, virtuous protagonist who, any minute now, should find a magical wardrobe leading to a fantasy land, or fall into the cockpit of a giant robot vehicle powered by teen angst, etc.

So, having tried to drag myself out of that sort of cycle, I think I might be especially sensitive when I get even a whiff of that sort of twisted fantasy playing out in fiction.

Deadman Wonderland
Deadman Wonderland is a grand example of this from the get-go. Perfectly innocent protagonist is framed for mass murder of his classmates, put through a laughably melodramatic "kangaroo court," complete with wicked lawyers making un-disguised smug grins, and then thrown into a weird prison-slash-game-show-nightmare with shades of the Running Man, complete with exploding collars (but then it quickly abandons that concept to springboard off in very different directions, like a puppy distracted by a squirrel).

The Saga of Tanya the Evil
I might be stretching my premise, but I sensed a little of this in The Saga of Tanya the Evil. That is, the protagonist is clearly given a "reason to suffer" ("How dare you FIRE someone for being incompetent at his job, when he has starving kids to feed? And when he subsequently KILLS you, then surely you need to be punished further in the afterlife!") but then, the deity of this universe is pretty darned demented, too. There are times when it's pretty clear that the audience is intended to sympathize -- at least a little bit -- with the protagonist's bloodthirsty take on things.

But a large part of why I feel that way, is because of the setup of the conflict that "Tanya" is thrust into. Imagine World War I or II (exactly which, it's a bit squishy), with a stand-in for Germany, and all the Allied nations are out to crush it. And I mean EEEEEEVERYBODY ... except that Pseudo-Germany hasn't attacked or invaded anybody. There are no Nazis, and yet all of Pseudo-Germany's enemies are complete zealots about the need to CRUSH Pseudo-Germany, even to the point of self-sacrifice. This prompts me to wonder ... WHY?!? What is motivating all the nations of the world to throw themselves into the meat-grinder of magical trench warfare against this one nation, if it's purely playing the defensive and driving off invaders?

Rise of the Shield Hero
And we get to what set off this train of thought: Rise of the Shield Hero. It's hard to avoid spoilers here, but right from the get-go, there's something off about this almost-bog-standard "Isekai" ("To Another World") anime. Even though the protagonist ends up visiting a fantasy world through a magical BOOK, it's somehow yet another JRPG fantasy -- because apparently writers these days are too far removed from any other sort of fantasy setting to even conceive of a fantasy world where you DON'T have "hit points" and "experience points" and "level-grinding" and other such tropes of MMOs and the like.

But more importantly, although there are four great Cardinal Heroes, right from the start, there's this disappointment that, aww, you're the SHIELD Hero. The SHIELD Hero is for LOSERS. It's, like, lame, man. Can't tell you WHY, but it just is.

And since that just isn't enough, we're going to throw in CONSPIRACY and BETRAYAL from the outset. (And, good grief, the fact that this is going to happen is practically there in FLASHING NEON LIGHTS. The foreshadowing is anything but subtle.)

Never mind the complete lack of motive. Never mind the complete lack of opportunity for anyone involved to have organized said conspiracy. Never mind the complete brazenness and stupidity of the whole plan, based purely on one accusation. It's just going to happen, because we need our protagonist to get royally PILED ON, so we can go, "Yeah, TAKE THAT!" when he hands out some much-needed butt-whooping to anyone who crosses him from that point on.

...

And I think that's pretty much what it boils down to. Our hero needs to be unfairly betrayed, for no good reason, so that we, the audience, can get riled up and therefore cheer when the protagonist uses any and all means to crush his enemies.

I guess it's not the worst trope. I mean, it's leagues better than the quasi-morality of the age-old "Punch and Judy" puppet show.

But, seriously, it bugs me when the writer can't be bothered to at least ascribe some sort of motive to the persecutors, and some sort of reason for this all happening other than what seems to be, "Sorry, the gods want to hate someone, picked randomly, and it's YOU. But at the same time they're also going to give you lots of crazy powers, which they totally don't expect you to use to crush your adversaries."

I've looked at reviews of these anime, however, and I haven't seen a trace of anyone else seeing a bit of a "persecution complex" in the story line. Is it just me?

Comments

[rowyn]

Yeah, I remember thinking as a kid that I was picked on for no good reason. And then when I got to college and had friends, I realized all of them also felt that way. It was the first time that it struck me that maybe virtually everyone's perception of childhood had been "kids are all mean too me and I don't know why!"

But I'm with Greywolf that it is not a fun trope. It reminds me of the writing advice that goes "you need to be as mean as you can imagine to your protagonist, and now EVEN MEANER, no WORSE THAN THAT, before they can finally be allowed to triumph at the end. Oh yeah, how they triumph when everything is against them doesn't matter much, just say they win two pages before the end, there, perfect."

[jordangreywolf]

I definitely have NOT figured out what the right "dosage" is of success and failure for me to enjoy a show.

Horror seems to frequently be at one end of the spectrum. The hero is presumably an underdog (if the hero seems TOO COMPETENT at the start of the movie, then he's probably a bait-and-switch protagonist, or else the REAL opposition hasn't yet revealed itself), any victories are hard-fought, and thanks to the wide range of outcomes in the genre, there's no guarantee the protagonist has any hope of prevailing.

(I have special contempt, however, for the '80s trope of having a hard-fought victory where the PCs finally find the weakness of the Big Bad, and utterly obliterate him ... yet, right before the credits roll, and "THE END" appears on the screen, suddenly -- BOOGA-BOOGA! -- the bad guy pops out, and it becomes "THE END ... ?" Argh! So cheap.)

On the flip side, there seems to be just so much anime (I'd say "lately," but there have been examples of this for a LONG time) where the protagonist is a cock-sure, smarmy, smirking over-powered sort who simply WILL NEVER fail on any level that matters, because he somehow is playing this game with all the cheat codes turned on. (And these days, that may very well be literal, if it's an Isekai where he gets transported to a JRPG universe.) And there obviously are plenty of people who LOVE this, who don't even WANT there to ever be a chance of a sad outcome that might spoil their fun ... but as for me, sorry, I just can't root for the guy. It feels too cheap.

There's got to be some sort of decent medium, somewhere between those extremes. I think it gets more difficult for long-run stories. If you have an entire series where the hero keeps getting his hopes ground into the dirt (or where, repeatedly, your protagonist DIES, and another hapless would-be hero has to take up the torch), eventually it's going to get tiresome ... and if, suddenly, things turn around in the last episode (or perhaps second-to-last), it feels cheap. Like, "Well, of COURSE you're going to clean house now that the series is wrapping up!" Even if that wasn't a sure thing -- I mean, it COULD have been on a downer note throughout, even at the end, for all I know -- it somehow seems to cheapen it.

Here, I think of Higurashi, AKA "When the Cicadas Cry." At first it's a bewildering cycle of "light-hearted fun" that keeps spiraling into horror, with lots of "What the HECK?!?" moments, until on the meta level I start to feel that there's some sort of pattern here ... and then some of the pieces start fitting into place, and maybe there's some sort of hope for resolution after all ... but then the ending comes along and the tone so totally changes that it feels like this can't even be the same universe. The ending is TOO "perfect," too CHEESY, a total break in tone, where the very "rules" of the universe that have prevailed so far are utterly thrown out the window and suddenly it feels like a kids' show -- which this series, as a whole, most certainly SHOULD NOT BE.

As a result, it feels utterly *wrong*, and I find myself mentally rebelling, expecting some sort of "gotcha" at the end -- that this "happy ending" was just someone's deluded fantasy, and that really things ended horribly after all. It was still a fascinatingly horrible ride to get there, but I still can't understand what the heck happened with that ending. I wish I could edit it!

Maybe the better medium is some kind of mix of triumphs and failures -- y'know, kind of more like real life. Minor accomplishments here and there, that may or may not tie directly to the main challenge, but at least it establishes that not EVERYTHING in this story is pity-porn. ;)