In the media I’ve come across that depict violence, there can sometimes be a tendency to immerse the reader in a glorification of violence that might, frankly, displace the media from reality, or, worse, romanticize the very violence that it depicts. It is common in adult fantasy novels to engage with rape, for example, in a relatively shallow way – on Reddit one user was critiquing the novels of Game of Thrones for depicting rape of other women, but never really engaging with it among main characters. Spoiler alert, this is not necessarily true for the TV adaptation, but it’s an interesting concept. There is certainly a point in which media crosses a boundary between thoughtful insight into violence and indulgent depictions of it. Physical violence is a far more commonly used in the latter, for example, where action movies engage a very primal satisfaction with violence that everyone feels to some degree, and turns it up to ridiculous levels – and in all honesty, the extent to which that is damaging is debatable, because it is certainly not the fault of mass media or major depictions of violence of any kind that any significant amount of people hurt each other. People tend to seriously harm other people for an accumulated variety of reasons: social, fiscal, emotional, cultural, etc. Point here is that it’s an example of the way media can glorify violence of a certain kind.
Now, what really brought this subject up was the manga Goblin Slayer. Most people familiar with manga or anime have seen the intro scene of the first episode, or the first chapter, in which goblins violently rape and murder a band of adventurers. I have seen plenty of rationalizations of the scene, and from a stand-alone perspective that ignores the rest of the show, it holds up – such a shocking scene has the potential to set the stage for a complex, “realistic” fantasy world that echoes the violence of inter-human pillaging. However, the manga at least quickly devolves into a very self-serving harem fantasy that repeatedly shows rape of well-endowed, perfectly figured women again and again (and near-rape of main characters that, of course, are saved at the last second and express little to no concern for themselves after the fact) for the sake of titillating its audience, which is a shame because there is a lot of potential in that beginning scene. There are, in fact, hardly any women portrayed that aren’t catering to some sort of audience (one of the girls is even specifically advertised as being 15, one of many insights into the rather disturbing sexualization of children and teens in the medium).
That’s the main issue here – is when people writing escapism get lost in the portrayal of violence in their fantasies (because that’s how they get people to keep reading, or because the author has a rape-fetish) and lose sight of looking through reality from an insightful lens. Sex does sell after all, so it’s no wonder people make media like this, and probably very few people want to read artistic or literary things all of the time. At the end of the day though, much of this media is forgettable, and, as Saidiya Hartman was once criticized for, threatens to potentially promote violence by portraying it in detail. As I said before however, I am not entirely convinced media is a major contributor to violence, because the threat of censorship leveraging this argument is far more dangerous. However, if violence is portrayed casually, and the effects it has on its victims and executors disregarded, it certainly loses its value within any work.
The Scenic Climax 