Original subtitles

LECTURER: What we end up with is a restriction of the kinds

of stories that we tell as a society, the kinds of stories

that we value, the kinds of stories

that readers get to read.

And there's a whole slew of people out there

who would love to read stories about people

just like themselves overcoming adversity.

Let's talk about a really common archetype that we

see in American literature--

the rugged individualist protagonist.

This is the lone character, usually male--

always male, actually.

The lone character who doesn't need help, who solves problems

with his fists or his gun.

We see this character everywhere in American literature,

and we love this character.

This is John McClane from "Die Hard."

This is John Wayne in pretty much everything he did.

This is all the old westerns, and so on.

And these are great stories.

We tend to enjoy them because they're

the story of a person overcoming adversity

just by being super tough and super interesting and super

powerful and amazing.

And you know, this is not a bad archetype in and of itself.

The problem is that rugged individualism so permeates

our media and so permeates the stories

that we have been told over the years

that it's almost started to become the only way that one

can safely or lucratively tell a story.

To the point that stories of people overcoming adversity

in different ways--

with willpower versus with a gun or their fists,

with endurance rather than just shooting something--

these kinds of stories are less told

and are actually considered less valuable or important

in our society.

And what this ultimately ends up sort of turning into is,

you know, because the rugged individualist tends

to be a very masculine-centered archetype,

what it means is that the stories of women, when women

are overcoming adversity, either tend to frame them in a very

masculine way or tend to ignore the ways in which women

actually do overcome adversity.

Because those aren't-- you know, she's not punching something,

so it's not important.

And so what we end up with is a restriction

of the kinds of stories that we tell

as a society, the kinds of stories

that we value, the kinds of stories

that readers get to read.

And there's a whole slew of people out there

who would love to read stories about people

just like themselves overcoming adversity.

Wouldn't a wheelchair user like to read

a story in which they overcome adversity,

but it's not just about them getting up from the wheelchair

or suddenly developing a miraculous cure.

It's about them also shooting something.

You know, or overcoming problems with their fists.

We don't usually see those kinds of people

treated as rugged individualists, either.

Rugged individualists are always able-bodied,

middle-aged cishet men.

So it's a little bit restricting.

And what it means is that you are

trapped by this constriction.

You don't have as many stories.

You don't have as good stories out there available to read.

A protagonist that's antithetical

to the rugged individualist is going to be probably not

a cishet white guy.

Probably not able-bodied.

Can be cishet white guy, but not the kind of person

who can shoot anything, whose solutions to problems

are not physical.

Or maybe cerebral or emotional.

Could be characters whose ways of solving problems

involve gathering a large group of people around themselves

who are all individually able to solve pieces of that problem.

And then all together as a team, they're

able to get things done.

So there's a number of different ways that you can do this.

Let's look, for example, at the latest "Mad Max"

movie, "Mad Max--

Fury Road."

The story of "Mad Max--

Fury Road" centers around Max, who

is the title character of a series of films so far.

But a lot of the people who saw "Fury Road"

didn't see any of those previous films,

so they don't know who the heck Max is.

He's just some guy that the movie is named after.

And we're introduced to him over the course

of the film as a survivor.

Almost feral.

He barely speaks.

When he does speak, it's in a lot of grunts.

He's great at punching and hitting things and shooting

things, but that's kind of all we really know about him.

But he's actually not the protagonist of the film.

And this is one of the kind of baits and switches

that "Fury Road" throws at us that's

one of the things that makes this such a great film.

The actual protagonist of the film

is Furiosa, who is a woman character

living in a society that is highly patriarchal to the point

that they enslave women as literal chattel.

And she has decided, as one of the few women

in the society who is not treated just as literal food

or breeding stock--

she has decided that she's going to help other women reach

a place where they, too, can live a freer and more complex

life.

And you know, a lot of people who

saw this film were unhappy with the amount of focus that

was given to Furiosa.

But when you really break it down,

Mad Max is not anywhere near as interesting

a character as Furiosa.

Max doesn't have any background that we

know of unless you saw the previous films.

He's obviously traumatized, but we don't know why.

And the film does not center around his healing

or overcoming trauma.

Furiosa is equally traumatized.

We see that she's missing an arm, among other things.

And that couldn't have been fun.

We see that she's in a society where

particularly beautiful women are literally taken and forced

into just an absolutely horrible life.

She's a beautiful woman.

So something has happened to set her free from this,

but it was also possibly traumatic, as well.

But we don't see any of that.

And we don't need to know any of that.

What we do know is that she has seen a problem in her society,

and she has decided to do something about it.

And just that gives her a character

arc that is much more engaging than Max's simple,

I've got to survive.

Max, at the beginning of the film, is, I've got to survive.

In the middle of the film, he's, I've got to survive.

At the end of the film he's, I've got to survive.

Sorry.

That was meant to be flat.

That's not a character arc.

He's literally the same person at the beginning

and the same person at the end.

Furiosa, on the other hand, starts off

as this person who appears to not really

care about her fellow women.

Turns out that she does.

Turns out that she's even able to care about Max.

And then once she realizes that she cannot take these women

away and create a better life, she's got to fix the society

that she's in, she goes back and becomes effectively

a revolutionary.

That's a hell of a character arc.

One of the problems that I have with rugged individualism

is that it's not even so much a character

archetype as propaganda.

You know, a big part of the basis of this idea

kind of comes from Herbert Hoover's insistence

that people should pull themselves up

by their bootstraps and not seek handouts or not

seek any kind of government aid in order to do well.

The problem with this is that as Hoover

was telling some groups of people

that they were going to need to work really hard

and pull themselves up by their bootstraps,

he was basically shoveling government aid

at other groups of people.

He was giving farm subsidies.

He was giving-- you know, kind of putting together

the GI Bill.

He was deporting massive numbers of Mexican-Americans,

many of whom had been born in this country.

He deported millions just because he

decided that he didn't like that group of people.

Say you know, for people to pull themselves up

by their bootstraps, they need to, at the very minimum,

not be messed with and not be persecuted and not

have their homes taken from them and all of their property

taken from them and so on.

They need to just be able to survive

without anybody bothering them.

And Hoover was busy bothering huge numbers of people.

And then meanwhile, he's saying that these other groups

of people who he's busy helping are somehow better people.

And this is the genesis of the rugged individualist archetype.

So I mean, you've got characters who appear again and again

in fiction who are supposedly, you

know, these stand-alone, rugged, independent people who

don't need help from anyone.

And it's bullshit.

They've asked for help from other people.

They've gotten help all along the way to get that far.

And in a lot of cases, the ways that films and books

will make a person seem more rugged or more individualistic

is to focus very narrowly on the part of their lives

where they have to fight somebody

and we don't see anything else of their lives.

We don't see the communities that they grew up

in where they learned how to read and learn maybe

how to shoot.

We don't see the family farm that they sold to get the guns.

Or the family farm that was wealthy enough

to be worth something.

We don't see any of the other things that

are part of every normal human being's background.

We don't see the interrelation.

We don't see the socialness.

We are a social species.

We are people who don't do anything by ourselves.

And the idea that you can just pull yourself up

by your bootstraps is propaganda.

So it's important that in a lot of cases, as creators,

as writers, that you are aware of the difference between how

people really are and what people are framed as,

what people told to be, what people are framed to be.

Very few of the archetypes that our society

holds up as ideals actually work as regular people.

So if you want to tell a story about that,

then you're going to have to maybe interrogate

that rugged individualist a little bit.

Or interrogate those other archetypes

and make sure that you're not just replicating

Hoover's particular bugaboo.

A lot of writers will ask the question of why

is it important for me to--

or why are you emphasizing so much

that I should veer away from these common, tried and true,

popular, lucrative ways of storytelling

kinds of characters, and so on.

Because I want to make money.

I mean, you know, I totally understand that as a writer.

Or I want to be popular.

There's any number of reasons why

you might want to pursue some of this more

common, well-traveled stuff.

I mean, there's no reason why you shouldn't.

The thing is you do have to keep in mind that when you're

writing these stories that cater to one specific type of person,

that are centered on one specific type of person--

and our whole society, yes, is configured to steer everyone

towards those types of people--

but there's still a huge portion of society

that is under-served, that is not

getting the kinds of stories that they want to see.

You know, we've all learned to empathize

with cishet white males because we read books

about them all the time.

We understand their fears.

We understand their backgrounds.

We've seen dozens and dozens of examples

before we ever finish school.

And so, you know, we kind of understand

that group of people, but we don't get the same exposure

and empathy given to other types of people, which

is why it's so easy to find stories

that are effectively just nothing

but collections of stereotypes.

And so it's important that, you know,

you not just tell the best story that you can just

to be the best kind of artist that you can.

But also keep in mind that, you know, if 50% of humanity

is under-served by the literature that exists out

there and you write a book that speaks to that other 50%,

you're still going to make money.

You're still going to be popular.

You're just going to be popular and lucrative

in a different way.

Another thing to keep in mind is that a lot

of these older archetypes, these cliches, these propaganda

types, a lot of these are out of style, out of fashion.

Literature is no different from any other human endeavor.

Stuff comes and goes.

And these days one of the most popular

and sort of cutting edge ways to tell stories

is to tell the stories of other people.

Tell the stories of people that aren't

the rugged individualists.

Center the story on the Furiosa rather than the Max.

Even if you cosmetically give a nod to Max

by naming the film after him, at the end of the day,

it's still a good film if he's there,

but he's basically a sidekick to the more interesting character.

In "The Fifth Season," you are introduced to the story

through the viewpoints of three different characters.

Damaya, a young girl who has just been

determined to be an orogene.

Syenite, a young woman who has grown up in the Fulcrum

and is kind of just now coming into her career

as a professional imperial orogene.

And Essun, a woman who is living in a small village in basically

the hinterland who turns out to be an orogene in hiding

and who is the mother of two children who are also orogenes.

I decided to introduce the story to the reader

through these three POVs because I

was kind of messing with reader expectations in some ways.

Damaya is the character that I thought

readers would be most likely to empathize with,

because we tend to empathize with children.

We, as a species, tend to want to protect children.

You know, when we see them in peril,

we feel discomfort with that.

We want to help them.

We want them better.

And Syenite, as a young woman, is a character

who kind of comes from an age group

that we see a lot of in fiction.

There's a whole series of young women protagonists in Y.A.

novels, for example, and they sort of

dominate that particular sub-genre of fiction.

But there are still certain constraints that as a society

we tend to put on young women characters.

We expect them to be conventionally attractive.

We expect them to have a love interest at some point.

You know, we sometimes are OK with them changing the world

and starting revolutions, but they

have to do it in particular ways or we

get uncomfortable with them as a society

because of our own history.

And in Syenite's case, she is conventionally attractive.

She is a woman of color.

All three of these are women of color.

And in our society, that's not a thing

that we see in the protagonist role very often.

But Syenite is young.

She's obviously sex-positive.

She enjoys having sex.

As part of the story, she is introduced

to another orogene, Alabaster, with whom

she's supposed to travel and with whom she's also

supposed to produce a child.

She is required to do that by the people who run the Fulcrum.

And I knew that the reader expectation

would be that they would kind of form a couple,

or that Alabaster would effectively

be her love interest.

Well, Alabaster is twice her age and completely not interested

in her, and she's not interested in him.

And I wanted to show that they can still

have a relationship, a friendship, or even more

than that, but without having any kind of attraction

to each other or any of that.

So I explored that a little bit with her story line.

And Essun is in many ways a completely atypical protagonist

character.

She is in her early 40s or so.

She's a mother.

She's heavyset at the beginning of the story,

and then she starves a lot, unfortunately.

She starts off the novel out of shape, and you know,

she's the kind of person who, in a lot

of post-apocalyptic novels, would be immediately dismissed

as not survival material.

And the story wouldn't follow her.

The story would just simply assume that as a woman,

as an older person, as someone who's

out of shape and heavyset, that she's not going to make it.

And then we'd go back to our young, fit white guy.

And I just wanted to play with that.

I wanted to go somewhere else.