Speak of the Devil

[zenolalia]

I made a comment last night talking about how spurious claims of purity policing led to me getting shut down when discussions racism in media, specifically as regards to popular cop comedy Brooklyn 99. That all happened about 6 months ago.

And, as if summoned from the depths of hell by the mere mention of it, lo and be fucking hold, it's happening again as of this evening.

I don't understand why this is considered such a contentious subject. Brooklyn 99 is a fantastic show, and I love it. It's got superlative writing, exceptional acting, and a real sense of conscience about race dynamics.

But it's also a show where cops are sometimes the villains, but always the heroes. And that comes with baggage in a society that already considers the heroism of cops to be so ubiquitous and inherent that even when cops murder children in cold blood, most of them receive paid leave, and get hired by neighboring police precincts.

It's not that B99 doesn't try to talk about the nastiness of police and race. It's that it's a sitcom where police are the heroes. The genre restraints prevent a serious discussion from happening, save in the occasional Very Special Episode. And, often enough, that ommitment to acknowledging the complexity of race and policing is back-seated in favour of a good joke at the expect of an arrested person, of a defence lawyer, of internal affairs.

It's a good show.

It's also a flawed show.

I don't think that's really in question here... And yet, so many people insist that by pointing out and discussing these flaws, I am a monster calling for the end of QPOC on primetime TV.

Comments

[cimorene]

I can't say anything useful about these particular conversations, but I think those reactions are inevitable whenever you criticize something you like, because some people can't comprehend criticizing things that they like and take even the lightest critical gaze as a declaration of eternal enmity, sort of you're either FOR us or AGAINST us, but applied to literally everything from political parties and social justice movements to fannish interests to food preferences.

[palominocorn]

Yeah, I think that's at least a big part of it. Purity culture has been creeping further and further into the US/maybe other Western too way of being for the last twenty years (at least), so even people who lean left and weren't raised in a Christian cult of virginity have internalized it to some degree. There's far less "yeah, it has problems, but I love it" than there was even when I was in college earlier this decade.

I'm also wondering (and this is me going out really far on a limb) if maybe trauma has something to do with it? I suspect that most of the people doing this (not just about B99, but also SU, and, uh, IDK what the others are but I know I've seen similar discussions around them) are mostly abuse survivors (likely also heavily queer and neurodivergent as well). I know that abuse survivors can very easily fall into this sort of dichotomizing thinking, that either something is pure good or pure evil.

And it makes sense to develop such a thing, because most abusers swing between lovey-dovey one moment and then horrible the next, and reminding yourself "no, the abuse makes the whole relationship bad" is a way of surviving, of getting and keeping yourself away. But once you're OUT and reasonably safe, it's a really awful thing to keep carrying around with you. And it's hard to acknowledge that this survival mechanism is hurting you now, and harder still to get rid of it.

Which doesn't excuse the harassment, of course. There's no excuse for that. These people need to find ways of coping with their trauma that don't hurt others.