“War pr0n” is a style of fiction that can be studied similar to the way we can study the “Mary Sue” phenomenon. This document is an attempt to analyze and define war pr0n, explain what makes something war pr0n, versus what makes it not war pr0n, and how one might come up with a war pr0n score to compare one story to the next.
Like the concept of a “Mary Sue”, that a piece of fiction involves some aspects of war pr0n doesn't mean it isn't an enjoyable piece of fiction. The goal here is to introduce some concepts for critiquing fiction. If you don't like a particular piece of fiction and it has something to do with the Mary Sue in the story, then knowing how to identify a Mary Sue, and what makes a character a Mary Sue, can help you point to what did not work for you in the story. Likewise, if you run into some fiction that takes license with the use of force, and that bothers you, this can help you identify what's qualifies as war pr0n and why.
War pr0n is any fiction that injects the reader into an unrealistic depiction of war, violence, or use of force, allowing the reader to fulfill some wish fulfillment fantasy about force. Often, the wish being fulfilled is the desire to reduce the complexities of real life into something that can be easily solved through the use of force. The world of war pr0n is divided into good guys and bad guys, and the good guys hand out justice to the bad guys, in the form of well-deserved violence, without any of the moral after effects that comes from committing an act of violence in real life.
Some of the key attributes of war pr0n include "othering", "paper targets", several forms of "distancing", a particular form of “meat puppets”, and something I call the “High Road Bypass on the Road to Hell”.
The first indicator of war pr0n is how easily it allows "othering". Othering is comparing ourselves to some other group of people, while maintaining ourselves as fundamentally different to that group, better than that group. Morality then becomes a matter of what group you belong to rather than your individual actions. The reality of morality is quite complex. "Othering" is a way to simplify the complexity into "us" versus "them", where "us" represents the good guys and "them" are the bad guys. "Othering" provides an important bonus in that it removes the requirement of the "good" guys to have to be introspective and examine the morality of their actions. Instead, they are good by definition, therefore their actions must be good.
"Othering" is something we are born into. Being able to see someone else as your equal and put yourself in their shoes is something we develop only as we mature. Seeing people who are different than yourself, who have different opinions than yourself, who don't agree with you politically, as your moral equal creates a much more complex world to live in. You have to hear both sides of a disagreement. You have to learn history. You have to learn diplomacy. You have to give the job of law enforcement and war making over to some third party. You have to come to some sort of agreement for what will be lawful behavior and what will not. You have to develop some form of due process so the government does its job properly.
It's all a very realistic view of what's needed for people to operate in the world. But it's all very, very complicated. By creating a story where the protagonist is allowed to "other" the antagonist, where the protagonist gets to wear a white hat and the antagonist wears a black hat, war pr0n allows the reader to slip into an oversimplified fantasy.
To tell whether a work of fiction is engaged in othering, ask yourself if the protagonist is quite similar to you the reader (bipedal, warm blooded, humanoid, with family, friends, a job, etc), while the antagonist is quite dissimilar to you the reader (snakelike, spiderlike, cold blooded, psychopath, psychotic, insane, no family, no friends, whose only job appears to be world domination or whatever would require slaying the protagonist in a fit of cold-blooded maniacal laughter).
One possible outcome of extreme othering is "Paper Targets". Paper Targets occur in fiction when the antagonist is "othered" to the point that the antagonist is surrounded by an army of nameless, heartless, emotionless henchmen, whom the protagonist can kill with substantially less emotional backlash than if they were fully fleshed out characters.
Describing the events in a real war might involve paper target characters, simply because the number of deaths in a battle might be so massive as to be impossible to represent on an individual basis.
To tell whether a work of fiction is employing paper targets to create war pr0n, look for a set of black hat henchmen that the protagonist kills with little thought. If black hats are being represented as paper targets, but every white hat death is a painful, emotional, heart-string tugging, die-in-someone's arms scene, then you're looking at possible war pr0n.
"Distancing" separates the protagonist from the violence occurring in the story. This can happen a couple of different ways, through narration, through the protagonist's actions, or through the protagonist's intention. Whatever the mode used, the purpose of distancing is to allow the protagonist the benefit that violence brings, without any of it's messy consequences, moral repercussions, and so on.
The act of distancing, is, at it's heart, an act of avoiding responsibility for one's actions. Responsibility is, in its most simple form, being the root cause of some outcome. We are born into a state of deferring responsibility. Children create messes and deny they had a part in it. Or if they want something to happen, they might be forced to defer to their parents and try to convince them to buy the great new toy. When a fight breaks out, their first response is “He started it.”
Being responsible for our actions, to acknowledge our actions, to admit our mistakes rather than blame others, and to take the initiative to get for ourselves the things that we want and accept the consequences, is something we develop only as we mature.
War pr0n distances the protagonist from the responsibility associated with using force, committing violence, or waging war. This can be done by distancing the narration describing the protagonist's acts of violence, by distancing the protagonist from the action that causes the violence to the antagonist, or by distancing the mindset of the protagonist from having the intent to cause physical harm. These are described in more detail below.
While the reader might be shown every gory detail of the antagonist using violence, including the maniacal laugh showing just how much the antagonist enjoys committing violence, when it comes time for the protagonist to commit acts of violence, the narrative voice might pull back, show less detail, focus on the regret of the protagonist, or reduce the description to a simple statement of fact and skip over it as quickly as possible.
Sometimes distancing is as simple as having the protagonist commit the violent act without thinking about it and moving on to the next hurdle to overcome. By not allowing the protagonist time for introspection, the reader is likewise discouraged from thinking about any implications of having just wiped out a lot of human lives.
This can be seen when the protagonist must kill a large number of paper targets to get to the antagonist for the big finale. Whereas, a similar number of deaths caused by the antagonist would be covered in much more detailed, dramatic, and emotional narrative.
To determine whether a work of fiction is using distancing narration, note whether the level of narration is different when the protagonists commit violence, versus when the antagonists commit violence. If narration is equally sparse for both sides, then it probably doesn't count as a point towards war pr0n qualifications.
Another form of distancing comes in the form of distancing the protagonist's actions from the cause of some violent act, while allowing the protagonist the full benefit of whatever violence occurred. In the final showdown, the protagonist doesn't point a gun at the antagonist and pull the trigger, killing them. Instead, the author allows circumstances to combine such that the antagonist is killed by no direct action on the part of the protagonist. The black hats are all dead, but the protagonist didn't have to pull the trigger.
For example, a story might reach the big finale in the antagonist's secret, underground lair, and the protagonist and antagonist are shooting it out. The antagonist might launch some kind of attack at the protagonist, missing the intended target, hitting the support column holding up the ceiling, and an entire mountain of rock collapses on the antagonist. The protagonist escapes the cave in. And they live happily, guilt-free, ever after.
That the antagonist died without the protagonist having to pull the trigger, is an example of distancing the protagonist's actions from the violence. It provides all the benefits as if the protagonist had pulled the trigger, without any of the mess that comes with real violence.
Note that even if the protagonist set herself up to be standing in front of the support column and then goaded the antagonist to shoot, knowing she would dodge out of the way and the ceiling would collapse, it is still distancing. Any protagonist this resourceful could have, at some point, procured a ranged attack weapon of some kind and simply shot the antagonist in the big finale.
By setting up a Lethal Rube Goldberg Machine (LRGM) to bring about the destruction of the antagonist, and designing it so that the antagonist kicks off the device, that is exactly what "distancing the protagonist from the action of committing violence" is all about.
Note that in reality, ranged attack lethal weapons are pretty much the standard, real-life, mode of attack for fighting wars or catching violent criminals. Armies generally don't sneak in during the night, set up some massive Lethal Rube Goldberg Machine, and then at dawn goad the enemy to attack, knowing the machine will then result in the death of all the black hats on the battlefield.
Another possible way of distancing the protagonist from the action that causes violence is through some external consciousness: an empathic universe that steps in and hands out justice, a deus ex machina character of any kind who shows up and does the actual trigger pulling so the protagonist doesn't have to. This is covered in more detail in the later section titled “Meat Puppets”.
To determine whether a work of fiction is distancing the protagonist from the action of violence, look to see whether the antagonist is directly causing violent acts while the protagonist is allowed to avoid pulling the trigger.
Note that in certain genres, children's stories for example, there may be no direct actions that cause death on either side. Peter Pan and his Lost Boys spend a lot of time fighting Captain Hook and his crew. But through the whole story, neither side inflicts direct fatalities. In the end, Peter Pan kicks Hook off the ship, and Hook is then eaten by the crocodile. Although Pan's action of kicking Hook off the ship distances him from directly causing Hook's death, the story doesn't qualify as war pr0n because neither side causes direct fatalities. If the antagonists are causing direct fatalities, and the protagonists use Lethal Rube Goldberg Machines, then you've probably got a story that is closer to qualifying as war pr0n.
It might be that the protagonist directly causes violence to the antagonist, which avoids a point for "distancing the protagonist from the action that causes violence". However, it might be that the protagonist didn't know, or didn't intend, for her action to cause as much violence as it did.
For example, say the protagonist has on her team a highly flammable character, built from non-UL-rated materials. The antagonist sets this character on fire, attempting to kill him. The protagonist responds by dousing her flaming team member with water. Some of the water splashes on the antagonist, and the antagonist melts before everyone's eyes. Ding dong, the witch is dead.
In the “Wizard of Oz”, Dorothy committed the action that killed the wicked witch of the West, but she didn't intend to kill the witch. She wasn't even thinking of hurting the witch. She was trying to douse the burning strawman.
But again, the key to whether the distancing of intentions qualifies as a point on the war pr0n scorecard is whether or not the other characters are intending to commit violent acts, and do commit them, while the protagonist kills the antagonist through some unintentional action, or the side effect thereof.
That doesn't mean that the "Wizard of Oz" is war pr0n. Had the wicked witch intentionally caused the death of several of Dorothy's companions, then perhaps. But as it is, there isn't a lot of actual violence in the story. There are tense moments, scary moments, but not a lot of killing going on. It is, primarily, a story for children more than war pr0n for adults.
Imagine that Alice is embroiled in an online argument about whether or not Wesley Crusher, a character in Star Trek the Next Generation, is a lousy character. Alice likes Wesley's character and defends him unflinchingly. However, she is losing the debate with her circle of people. So Alice calls up Bob, someone she knows loves Wesley Crusher, and tells him to post something to help her argument. Bob logs in and posts how great Wesley is, and chides people for being so mean to Alice, and then after another few posts, he is never heard from again. Bob really wasn't interested in joining the conversation because he was some random person who stumbled into the discussion and had something to contribute or something to say. He was there to say whatever Alice told him to say, because Alice told him to say it.
Meat puppets show up in fiction when the protagonist fails to defeat the antagonist, but then over the horizon, some other character steps in to save the day.
This may or may not be a deus ex machina problem. The common example of deus ex machina is the protagonist fails to stop the villain, but at the last moment, when all seems lost, the cavalry, whom we never heard of to this point, shows up to rescue the white hats and kill or capture the black hats.
The thing is that a deus ex machina is something that isn't introduced in the story, or isn't really part of the main story, but shows up at the end. The story follows the adventures of Dave and Eve, and in the end, a character we never met, Fred, shows up to save the day. That is a deus ex machina.
A “meat puppet” in fiction may have some part in the story who shows up and commits some act of violence so the protagonist does not.
This wins a point as war pr0n if the protagonist that you the reader have been identifying with for the whole story manages in the end to distance herself from the act that would outright kill or cause violence to the antagonist, but some other character shows up to do it anyway.
“Meat Puppets” are an example of using narration to distance the reader from the actions that cause violence. You've identified with the main hero, but some other character does the actual killing. It is narrative distancing because it changes the action to a different character, a more distant Point Of View (POV). It is also action distancing because the POV character doesn't do the act of violence, but gets all the benefits.
Say, for example, that our protagonist, Alice, makes her way into the secret lair of our antagonist, Bob. Alice and Bob face off and prepare for the big, final, scene. Bob engages in quite a bit of monologuing which makes it hard for him to actually kill Alice (sort of like driving a car while on the cell phone, but with energy weapons). And through this monologuing, it becomes clear to everyone that Bob will not be stopped unless someone kills him or captures him.
Now, if this story were war pr0n, one way to distance Alice from actually having to pull the trigger and kill Bob, would be to employ a meat puppet. And the way Alice contacts the meat puppet is through their mutual friend, the author. Alice asks the author for help, and because Alice and the author have a psychic link, you don't see this request in the narrative story. The author gets one of his acquaintances to step in and help Alice in the fight. As it happens, the author also has a psychic link with this character as well, so that communication doesn't make it into the narrative, either.
Suddenly, Bob's evil henchman, Charlie, challenges Bob's monologued vision for the future where Bob apparently rules the world alone. Charlie is upset that no mention of Charlie's piece of the action was made. At all. In fact, if Charlie didn't know any better, he might think that Bob was planning to have him whacked and dumped in a shallow grave as soon as this whole annoying business with Alice is straightened out. Bob, who doesn't really have good people skills, tells Charlie to sit down and shut up, that he'll deal with this after this annoying business with Alice is straightened out. This only confirms Charlie's worst fear. Charlie pulls out his Sidekick Sidearm, and puts a very large hole in Bob's chest. Alice manages to avoid having to kill Bob herself, and she lives guilt free ever after.
In the above example, Charlie is a meat puppet of Alice. Or, more accurately, Alice and Charlie are both sock puppets of the author. But that third order formula might be a bit tough to hold on to. So, let's just stick with Charlie being a meat puppet of Alice.
Because Charlie has some level of consciousness, his actions cannot be directly attributed to Alice. Alice doesn't pull the trigger and so avoids any of the messy moral implications that might cause some readers to lose sympathy for her. And the connection between Alice and Charlie, (the author), is something that is camouflaged from you the reader through the suspension of disbelief you granted the author in good faith when you started reading.
The difference between a Meat Puppet and a Lethal Rube Goldberg Machine is that a Meat Puppet has some form of consciousness that makes it appear to be independent of the protagonist. But as with any Meat Puppet, the puppet is only doing what the puppeteer, the author, told them to do.
Sometimes a meat puppet might show up as some form of god, smiting the enemy of the protagonist. See the ending of “Time Bandits” where the “Supreme Being” shows up as the protagonists are being defeated by “Evil”. This probably doesn't qualify as a point towards being war pr0n, because “Time Bandits” was comedy/fantasy written by some of the Monty Python crew, and the Supreme Being showing up at this time was for comedic effect more than for distancing the protagonists from having to commit violence.
Other times, the meat puppet might be some form of magical consciousness in the universe in which the story takes place. Perhaps an empathic universe. The qualification for being a meat puppet is that whatever agent shows up to do violence so that the protagonist doesn't have to, is that this meat puppet has some agency, some form of consciousness.
Magic, by itself, may not qualify as a meat puppet if it operates directly under the control of the character as if it were a mechanical, unthinking, gun. If the protagonist waves a magic wand, says “Aveda Kevdavra”, and casts a spell intended to kill the antagonist, then that sort of magic isn't a meat puppet. The character pulled the magical trigger herself.
If the protagonist is attacked by the antagonist with a killing spell, and the protagonist happens to hold a wand with some level of consciousness such that the wand decides to reflect the killing spell back to the antagonist, then that bit of animism is a meat puppet. The wand has some level of magical consciousness which acted on it's own will, but at the request of the author, making it a meat puppet brought in to help the protagonist.
And the purpose of a meat puppet in war pr0n is to introduce some form of independent consciousness to distance the protagonist from having to pull the trigger herself.
The saying goes that the Road to Hell is paved with Good Intentions. While this may not be entirely true, it is certainly a more realistic than the view that good intentions are enough for you to avoid any bad outcomes.
A child is less able to hold in his mind all the simultaneous information that might affect what end his actions might lead to. It is just too complicated. Also, a child's inability to fully empathize with others, to put themselves in their opponent's shoes, means they are less able to imagine any opposition. They might understand that opposition exists as a fact, but they may not be able to imagine what it would be like to be in the opposition's shoes.
We are born into this one dimensional view of good intentions. And only as we mature are we able to develop the ability to simultaneously hold many different possibilities of our actions, and see the opposition from their eyes.
When you must resort to violence, use of force, or war, nothing guarantees that the outcome will go according to your plan or your good intentions. In fact, Murphy's law of combat is almost standard operating procedure for military operations. Friendly fire will occur. Your equipment will break down, jam, and run out of fuel. Innocent civilians will get killed. The longer you occupy, the more the populace will turn against you. This is the “hell” that the road of good intentions will lead to in a real war.
In a work of war pr0n, the outcome of any actions by the protagonist always follows her intentions.
Note that this is different than “Bad things never happen to the protagonist”. On the contrary, war pr0n often makes a point to submit the protagonist to a laundry list of very bad things, to show how bad the protagonist is suffering, to get us to sympathize with them, and to show how evil the antagonist is for causing all these bad things to happen.
No, the “High Road Bypass” refers to the outcomes of actions initiated by the protagonist. In war pr0n, bad things never happen as a result of action taken by the protagonist, or any damage is minimized, or kept distant from the reader.
A war might erupt in a major metropolis between an army of white hats and black hats, but the white hats never cause any collateral damage. If a building is blown up, it is a conveniently empty warehouse.
It might be that some civilians do not like the white hats, even possibly hate them, but that is not the same as the protagonist taking some action which has unintended bad outcomes that harms those civilians in some measurable way. Allowing the protagonists to be hated by some outside group, but showing no real reason for this group to hate the white hats, is actually more likely to indicate war pr0n than not.
Equipment failures happen and cause real problems, including getting good people killed. Miscommunication happens and cause friendly fire, which can include people getting killed.
Something to look for in war pr0n is that the actions of the protagonist never leads to some measurably bad, undesired, unintended, outcome.
Also note that there are ways that unintended outcomes can occur but be limited in some way to distance the protagonist from wrong doing. For example, the protagonist skips refueling, then runs out of fuel and has to ditch his aircraft behind enemy lines. Alone. Compare this to the protagonist decides to skip refueling, then runs out of gas, and strands himself and a number of people from his unit behind enemy lines.
Compare how the protagonist having a weapon failure that injures himself is different than a weapon failure that harms someone else.
Compare the person harmed being the protagonist himself, versus the person harmed being some nameless civilians, versus the person harmed is one of the protagonist's sidekicks.
So, how to quantify all this down into some sort of objectively defined score. You've just finished reading some fiction and you want to know if it qualifies as war pr0n or not.
The thing is that the scoring must take into account whether the story is balanced or not. if the protagonist distances her actions from violence, that doesn't automatically mean that it is war pr0n. If the antagonist does the same thing, then it might be a balanced story in a non-violent genre, such as children's stories, rather than being war pr0n.
If the antagonist is a ten foot tall tarantula who sucks the blood out of several of the protagonists friends and family, but the protagonist defeats the creature (and its army of minions) without harming so much as a fly, and the tarantula is only killed because the protagonist's torch accidentally sets fire to its web, then you might have war pr0n.
With all this in mind, the scoring works by adding numbers every time some things happens, but then subtracting numbers every time other things happens. Note that for scoring purposes, "black hat" refers to the antagonist or any character supporting the antagonist, and "white hat" refers to the protagonist or any character supporting the protagonist.
+1 for every black hat that is physically different than any white hat character. (skin color, language, wears black)
+3 for every black hat that is a different species than any white hat character. (snake, spider, troll, etc)
+5 for every black hat violent demonstration of evilness. (character, black hat or white hat, harmed or killed for no effective purpose that changes the plot, and appears to be shown to the reader simply to show how evil the antagonist is. Example, violent use of discipline against a minion for failing to accomplish some mission.)
+5 for every character who has a maniacal laugh.
+1 for every black hat character with no name killed by a white hat.
-1 for every white hat character with no name killed by a black hat.
(currently covered by cardboard target questions. Can't think of an easy way to objectively measure narration.)
+3 for every black hat killed by some Rube Goldberg circumstance initiated by chance. (ex. Black hat hanging for his life by a rope, the rope just happens to break, and black hat falls to his death.)
-3 for every white hat killed by some Lethal Rube Goldberg Machine / circumstance initiated by chance.
+5 for every Lethal Rube Goldberg Machine / circumstance that kills a black hat which is also unknowingly initiated by a black hat. (ex. Black hat attempts to shoot white hat, misses, shoots support column, ceiling crashes down, killing black hat.)
-5 for every Rube Goldberg circumstance that kills a white hat which is also unknowingly initiated by a white hat.
+2 for any action initiated by a white hat that was not intended to cause nonlethal violence to a black hat but does.
-2 for any action initiated by a black hat that was not intended to cause nonlethal violence to a white hat but does.
+3 for every action initiated by a white hat that was not intended to kill a black hat, but does. (ex. Dorothy throws water on Strawman, Wicked Witch melts)
-3 for every action initiated by a black hat that was not intended to kill a white hat, but does.
+5 for any meat puppet (anything demonstrating some level of consciousness or even magical awareness) who steps in and performs some violence for some character presented as more sympathetic so the more sympathetic character doesn't have to. (The heroine and her small band are saved when a character outside her team kills the evil overlord. The heroine and her team are presented as more sympathetic to the reader. The outside character is a meat puppet committing violence on the heroine's behalf.)
Note that an minor white hat sidekick killing a minor black hat minion is not a meat puppet. But a minor white hat sidekick killing someone far more central than them, may qualify as a meat puppet.
+1 for every legitimate enemy black hat with a name killed by the protagonist.
-15 for every case of friendly fire or collateral damage inflicted by the protagonist that kills a white hat or civilian.
-8 for every case of friendly fire or collateral damage inflicted by the protagonist that wounds a white hat or civilian.
Note that this high road bypass must take into account how deadly the violence is in the first place. If it is not violent, then collateral damage is not expected. Therefore for every legitimate target killed by the protagonist, add one point. Then every case of unintended consequences, subtract some number of points. The more killing, the more accidents are going to happen.
So, you've calculated your score. Now what? First of all, if any single category is a large positive number, then that area might qualify the story as being war pr0n, even if other sections of the story are negative and counter balance it. If every category totals to be nearly zero, then you're probably fine.
War pr0n may be written for a number of reasons.
It might be that the author has an underdeveloped sense of empathy and is limited to “othering” people. Or maybe the author has an underdeveloped sense of responsibility and unknowingly is distancing his viewpoint character from the effects of their actions. It may be the author has an unrealistic, view of war that lets good intentions override the reality that is the ugliness of war. In these cases, the author isn't intending to write war porn, she is unaware. To fix this, the author needs to engage in some personal development and educate herself.
It might be that the author simply wants to sell a lot of books. And to sell a lot of books, it can help to have a character that appeals to the sympathies of as many buyers as possible. And to have a character remain sympathetic to a wide audience, it helps to distance that character from any morally sticky issues. The author is intentionally putting characters into violent situations to raise the tension of the story, but the author ends up creating unrealistic and misleading descriptions of the violence being committed. In these cases, the author is intending to write war pr0n for monetary gain. To fix this, the author needs to either rewrite the violence added for tension into some non-violent scenes, or, the author needs to rewrite the story so that it more accurately represents the realities of war.
Or, it might be that the author has an infatuation with violence and is writing stories of war pr0n to encourage others to take on this infatuation. It may be that the author has an undeveloped sense of empathy or responsibility, or perhaps the author has an unrealistic viewpoint of war.
Fiction, at its best, is a series of little lies told to reveal a greater truth. The little lies are the characters. They don't exist, but the author tells us they do. The character's actions never happened. The world they live in does not exist. These are all little lies that can be used to tell us some greater truth about ourselves. The character and world may not exist, but the story tells us something honest about being human.
At its worst, however, fiction is a series of lies told to instill a greater lie. The characters and the world are untrue, and the story doesn't tell us some greater truth about being human, it tells us someone's untrue viewpoint of the world, told in an attempt to get readers to take on that world view. This sort of fiction is called propaganda. And war pr0n at its worst is nothing more than propaganda encouraging the use of force to resolve issues.
By presenting us with sympathetic characters in an untrue world where “othering” is shown to be accurate, irresponsible behavior is something the protagonists do, distancing is used to minimize the realities of violence, and the high road bypass shows that good intentions guarantee a good outcome, war pr0n at its worst is a propaganda of violence.
Copyright 2007 Greg London
http://www.GregLondon.com