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War handwavium is any fiction that injects the reader into an unrealistic depiction of war, violence, or use of force. War Handwavium tends to reduce the complexities of real life into something that can be easily solved through the use of force, thereby justifying the use of force. The world of war handwavium 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 handwavium include “othering”, “cardboard targets”, and several forms of “distancing”. A separate indicator of war handwavium is that it shows violence as a replacement for (or improvement upon) social structures. One category of War Handwavium was created specifically for how the realities of torture are repeatedly misrepresented in fiction.
Othering:
The first indicator of war handwavium 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 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 behaviour 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 protaganist is allowed to “other” the antagonist, where the protagonist gets to wear a white hat and the antagonist wears a black hat, war handwavium 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 unsimilar 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).
Cardboard targets:
One possible outcome of extreme othering is “cardboard targets”. Cardboard 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, who exist for the protagonist (or protagonist’s team of white hats) to kill with substantially less emotional backlash than if they were fully fleshed out characters representing human beings. See also “distancing”.
To tell whether a work of fiction is employing cardboard characters, look for a set of demonstrably evil characters who will die specific deaths at the hands of the protagonist, but to do so, the protagonist first must go through several magazines of cannon fodder to get there. If the bad guys have cannon fodder where huge swaths of black hats die nameless at the hands of white hats, but the white hats have no cannon fodder, and every white hat death is a painful, emotional heartstring tugging, die-in-someone’s arms scene, then you’ve got cardboard targets.
It is important to note that as with all other conditions of war handwavium, it only qualifies as war handwavium if it is one sided. If both sides have cannon fodder, nameless characters who die without much notice, then it probably doesn’t qualify as cardboard targets of war handwavium.
Distancing:
“Distancing” separates the protagonist from the violence occuring 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.
Distancing Narration:
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, the narative voice might pull back, show less detail, focus on the regret of the protagonist, or reduce the desription 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 cardboard 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 narative.
To determine whether a work of fiction is using distancing narration, note whether the level of narration is different when the white hats commit violence, versus when the black hats commit violence. If narration is equally sparse for both sides, then it probably doesn’t count as a point towards war handwavium qualifications.
Distancing actions:
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 conscience 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, procurred a ranged attack weapon of some kind and simply shot the antagonist in the big finale.
By setting up a Rube Goldberg machine 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 criminals. Armies generally don’t sneak in during the night, set up some massive 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.
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 handwavium because neither side causes direct fatalities. If the antagonists are causing direct fatalities, and the protagonists use Rube Goldberg machines, then you’ve probably got a story that is closer to qualifying as war handwavium.
The key is whether or not the protagonists and antagonists have the same relationship to the effects of their actions, or whether the antagonists cause direct violent harm, while the protagonists generally distance themselves from causing direct violent harm.
Distancing intentions:
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. The antagonist sets this character on fire, attempting to kill him. The protagonist responds by dousing her flaming teammember with wather. Some of the water splashes on the antagonist, and the antagonist melts before everyone’s eyes. Ding dong, the witch is dead.
While Dorothy committed the action that killed the wicked witch of the West, she didn’t intend to kill 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 handwavium scorecard is whether or not the other characters are intending to commit violent acts, and do commit them, while the protagonist kils the antagonist through some unintentional action, or the side effect thereof.
That doesn’t mean that the “Wizard of Oz” is war handwavium. 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 handwavium for adults.
Violence as an alternative to Social structures:
Some aspects of War handwavium simply represent violence as an improvement upon existing social structures. Simple examples of this is when a story shows how “due process” gets in the way and prevents the “good guys” from getting the “bad guys”. If only we could circumvent due process, then we could get the bad guy, and then “justice” would be served.
That isn’t Justice, however. And it is a blatant misrepresentation of violence. Without due process, the State is wide open to committing all manner of abuses. It was these kinds of abuses which were listed by the founding fathers as cause for America’s Declaration of Independence. The refusal to follow the rule of law being primary. The refusal to allow Trial By Jury being another. Rendering the military as above civil power being yet another.
This knowledge was then reflected in the Bill of Rights a few years later, which listed a number of limitations on the State to prevent an abuse of power. These social structures were put in place so that our government would not become that which we had fought against. They include limitations on the government that forbids it from restricting religion and free speech, forbids the government from restricting people’s ability to peacably assemble, forbids the government from restricting the poeple’s right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
It requires that the government have probable cause before searching people’s property. It requires a trial by jury. It forbids the government from using cruel and unusual punishments.
These are the sorts of social structures that allow individuals to form a nation and govern themselves, while making sure those in government do not abuse their power.
War handwavium may misrepresent these restrictions against abuse of power and instead portray them as incapacitating the government and preventing the government from doing its job. War handwavium will show how due process lets the “bad guy” get away, but it won’t show how due process prevents government abuse, prevents innocent people from being convicted. War handwavium will show how a bad guy gets off on a technicality from an improperly obtained search warrant, but it won’t show how an entire nation was formed due to the abuses of State using searches as a way to harrass the innocent. War handwavium will show how torture produces useful intelligence, but it won’t show how a State that is allowed Cruel and Unusual punishments can abuse that power to instill Fear in its people and enforce its Tyranny.
War handwavium may attempt to grossly simplify the complexities of Social Structures and represent them as nothing more than ineffective, meddlesome, problems that prevent the protagonist from achieving his goals. Justice no longer becomes a matter of due process, trial by jury, and reasonable punishments. Instead, War handwavium may simplify the issues to the point that Justice grows out of the barrel of a gun, that war is better than diplomacy, that vigilanteism is better than due process, and that cruel and unusual punishments, torture even, is morally demanded.
For every scene that shows violence as superior to any social structure, add ten points to the war handwavium score. Social structures include due process, trial by jury, probable cause to search, prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, a subservience of military authority under civil authority, and so on. Basically, any restriction of power placed on the government is a social structure. These restrictions are put in place to prevent abuse of power and to prevent innocent people from being punished by the government. And fiction that shows all the problems of these restrictions without any of the issues that come from circumventing these restrictions wins points as war handwavium.
+10 points on the war handwavium score if protaganist tortures antagonist and gets useful information.
+10 points on the war handwavium score if protagonist tortures only guilty people without following due process.
+10 points on the war handwavium score if protagonist circumvents due process and only convicts guilty people.
-10 points on the war handwavium score if protagonist circumvents a social structure and tortures, convicts, or punishes an innnocent person.
Bureaucracy:
As a subcategory of showing violence to be superior to social structures, the state is sometimes represented as a bureaucratic nightmare against which the protagonist must overcome to defeat the bad guys. Note that the bad guys isn’t the bureaucracy or the state, but that the bureaucracy and state act as impediments to the protagonist achieving his goals.
Some times the state is a bureaucratic nightmare, and sometimes it does get in the way of people getting what they want. If the bureaucracy is shown as a legitimate enemy of the protagonist or legitimately set against the protagonist or legitimately inept in helping teh protagonist, then it is not war handwavium. An example of this would be to show George Bush’s complete lack of response for an entire week after Hurrican Katrina. If the protagonist is a victim of the hurricane trapped in New Orleans, then the government can be legitimately shown to be causing part of the problem.
However, if the government is shown to be consistently and unrealistically inept, even when they want to help the protagonist, then it is probably war handwavium trying to show the state as irrelevant and a violent protagonist as a solution to the problem.
+1 for each act of the state which demonstrates ineptness that doesn’t harm anyone.
+2 for each act of the state which demonstrates ineptness that harms someone physically (deprives them of food, endangers their lives, etc)
+3 for each act of the state which demonstrates ineptness that kills one of the whitehats or a civilian.
-1 for each act fo teh state which demonstrates aptitude but doesn’t directly help anyone or save anyone’s life.
-2 for each act of the state which demonstrates aptitude and provides a white hat or civilians with physical help (food, clothing, shelter).
-3 for each act of state which demonstrates aptitude and saves the life of a white hat or civlian.
Torture:
First of all, some facts about torture from a pragmatic point of view.
Torture does not produce useful information, except in fictional, hypothetical, “ticking bomb” scenarios. Torture produces mountains of false positives. Think about it. You’re being tortured. The guy torturing you wants you to give him some really good information about terrorists. Except you’re not a terrorist. Real people keep getting mistakenly picked up, black bagged, and shipped out to some torture center. Only to be dumped after months of physical abuse. So, there you are, innocent, and this guy thinks you’re guilty. If he’s torturing you to find out if you’re guilty, then we may as well go back to the “Witch test”: If they drown, they’re innocent. If they float they’re guilty. But we’ve come a long way since that. Now we only torture people we *know* are guilty. (For some definition of *know* that doesn’t involve due process, a chance to defend yourself, a chance for legal representation, and so on.)
And there you are, being tortured. And you’re not involved in anything related to terrorism. But you want the pain to stop. You want the simulated drownings to stop. You want some food before you pass out from malnutrition. You’d like to sleep but you’re stuffed into a box that’s too small to stand up or lie down in.
What would you do?
Claim your innocence. No doubt. But after three or four months (you’re not exactly sure because you’ve lost track of time, maybe it’s only been four very long days, who knows) you are fairly certain that this may never end. You’re also fairly certain that anyone who may care about you may not know where you are and may be unable to do anything to help you. Your captors don’t believe your protestations of innocence. And they’re convinced if they just torture some more, you’ll finally confess. Then the day comes where they pull you out of your cell, bind you, and strap you down into the waterboard, and the fear finally becomes too much. You can’t take it anymore. You confess. And for a brief moment, you are spared the waterboard, only because they’re too busy to take notes and simulate drowning you at the same time.
You make something up. The interregator doesn’t like it, so he tortures you some more. You change your story until he stops. At which point, you’ve learned what it is your captor wants to hear. Your captor then writes this down and this “intelligence” enters the system on top of a huge mound of similar documentation.
Torture produces a mountain of useless data, indistinguishable from the useful because both useful and useless are acquired the same way. Some may be convinced that torture has some value, if for nothing else than finding the proverbial “needle in a haystack”, but the problem is that the needle is made out of hay, and there is no way to distinguish one from the other. There is no way to know if what you’re looking at is needle or just more chaff.
If your captors knew the truth and had sufficient information to tell one from the other, they wouldn’t need to torture you, now, would they?
Follow up on every lead? There was this guy, people called him Curve Ball. He gave some westerners some leads about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. He claimed he worked at a plant in Iraq making WMD’s. A military invasion and quagmire later, we discover that he was lying to get asylum away from Iraq. If people are lying to get asylum, what do you think they’ll be willing to say to stop the simulated drownings?
Torture is a hay-producing process.
If you’re being tortured and tell your captor something that can be confirmed to be not true, what do you think is going to happen during your next “session”? He’ll be mad at you for lying. And he’ll take your lying as proof of guilt, and torture you even more. And eventually, you’ll learn to confess to stuff that is hard to figure out and is hard to disprove. You’ll learn to make hay that can’t be distinguished from a needle.
Of course, the great fallback of the defenders of torture is that only the guilty are subject to this sort of thing. To proport this requires an unbelievable force of will to ignore basic realities. The news, for instance, regularly reports on some innocent person who was whisked away and tortured for several months before being silently dumped when their innocence is finally so powerful that it can’t be denied. If you need a list of names to prove this, then you are more likely looking for a loophole, looking for some flaw to disprove the facts, and you’re not worth the effort.
Now, take the completely innocent person and shift it to some low-level flunky. A driver, a messege carrier, or a brother of a low-level flunky. Put them into the situation of being tortured, and what do you think they’ll do?
Same thing the innocent person did. Say whatever he has to say to stop the torture. Add more hay to the pile.
From a purely pragmatic point of view, torture is a process that encourages whoever is being tortured, whether they are innocent or guilty, whether they know anything or not, to produce confessions that can’t be proven or disproven, because those are the kinds of confessions that stop the torture. Torture produces a mountain of stuff that is impossible to distinguish as hay or needle.
Torture does not produce useful information. Torture does not work.
Now, that’s the pragmatic fact of torture. So, how does this affect fiction that may or may not be war pr0n?
+10 points on the war pr0n score if protaganist tortures antagonist and gets useful information.
Remember, torture does not work. Torture encourages the production of hard to distinguish information. If torture works in a story, the author is engaging in war pr0n.
+10 points on the war pr0n score if antagonist tortures only guilty people without following due process. +8 points if protagonist tortues innocent people, but the damage is “distanced” from the audience (see distancing section for various methods to distance violence from the audience)
Remember, if the witch drowns, she was innocent. If she floats, she’s guilty. If you think we’ve risen above the capability for that level of thinking, you haven’t been watching the news. If the protagonist engages in torture on people without following due process to determine their guilt, but the protagonist always manages to only torture guilty people, then that’s an unrealistic representation of the world. Witchhunts that kill innocent poeple are precisely why we have due process. Due process is the only safeguard against the state torturing confessions out of its victims. If the author contrives a story such that the protagonist never uses due process and never punishes an innocent person, then the author is engaging in war pr0n, playing on the reader’s desire for a simplistic view of “justice” that is indistinguishable from “vengeance”.
Miscellaneous topics:
We must do Evil to achieve Good.
or
You Can’t Handle the Truth!
Sun-Tzu said “All warfare is based on deception”. Which means that the military is going to have to conceal its position, feign attacks, keep it’s plans secret, and so on.
This does not mean that all secrecy is a required part of war. In fact, when an individual in the military commits a war crime, secrecy is the last thing you want. (unless you’re the one who committed the crime.)
In “A Few Good Men”, Col. Jessep ordered a “code red” and an innocent marine died. Jessep then tried to cover this up using the notion that there are men who do dirty deeds to keep the rest of us safe, that those deeds must be kept from the rest of us, and that he was one of those men. The memorable scene from that movie is when Lt. Kaffee is questioning Col. Jessep and Jessep cracks, shouting “You can’t handle the truth!”
We see a darker version of this attitude in “Serenity”. The nameless government operative/assassin is hunting River Tam. At one point, he explains himself to the ship’s captain, Malcolm:
The Operative: It’s not my place to ask. I believe in something greater than myself. A better world. A world without sin.
Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: So me and mine gotta lay down and die… so you can live in your better world?
The Operative: I’m not going to live there. There’s no place for me there… any more than there is for you. Malcolm… I’m a monster.What I do is evil. I have no illusions about it, but it must be done.
This is the “you can’t handle the truth” notion. The operative is saying that he can’t create a perfect world without committing evil. And he expects that whatever evils he commits are justified and will neccessarily have to be kept secret. After all, how can the rest of us accept this perfect world presented to us if we saw the blood that it was soaked in? It’s one of the deepest war handwavium myths I’ve run into.
But it is a myth. If you commit evil, the only thing you can create is evil.
+10 points if the white hats invoke the “you can’t handle the truth” or the “we must do evil to achieve good” argument.
-10 points if the black hats invoke the same argument.
———-
Scoring:
So, the thing is 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 handwavium 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 handwavium. 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 handwavium.
If the antagonist is a ten foot tall tarantuala 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 tarantuala is only killed because the protagonist’s torch accidentally sets fire to its web, then you might have war handwavium.
With all this in mind, the scoring works by adding numbers everytime 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.
Othering scores:
+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 disicpline against a minion for failing to accomplish some mission.)
+5 for every character who has a maniacal laugh.
Cardboard targets score:
+3 for every black hat character with no name killed by a white hat.
+2 for every black hat character with no name beaten by a white hat.
-3 for every white hat character with no name killed by a black hat.
-2 for every white hat character with no name beaten by a black hat.
It’s 3 points to kill and 2 points to beat someone up. beating someone up isn’t nearly as extreme as killing someone from the point of view of the criminal justice system. But in war handwavium, we’re scoring gratuitous violence, violence for entertainment’s sake. So beating someone up is two-thirds the points of killing someone.
distancing of narration score:
(currently covered by cardboard target questions.
Can’t think of an easy way to objectively measure naration.)
Distancing action score:
+3 for every black hat killed by some Rube Goldberg circumstance initiated by chance.
-3 for every white hat killed by some Rube Goldberg circumstance initiated by chance.
+5 for every Rube Goldberg circumstance that kills a black hat which is also unknowingly initiated by a black hat.
-5 for every Rube Goldberg circumstance that kills a white hat which is also unknowingly initiated by a white hat.
Distancing intention score:
+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.
+3 for every action initiated by a black hat that was not intended to kill a white hat, but does.
Violence as alternatives to Social Structures score:
+10 points on the war handwavium score if protaganist tortures antagonist and gets useful information.
+10 points on the war handwavium score if protagonist tortures only guilty people without following due process.
+10 points on the war handwavium score if protagonist circumvents due process and only convicts guilty people.
-10 points on the war handwavium score if protagonist circumvents a social structure and tortures, convicts, or punishes an innnocent person.
+5 points for any mention of “Diplomatic Immunity”.
Bureaucracy score:
+1 for each act of the state which demonstrates ineptness that doesn’t harm anyone.
+2 for each act of the state which demonstrates ineptness that harms someone physically (deprives them of food, endangers their lives, etc)
+3 for each act of the state which demonstrates ineptness that kills one of the whitehats or a civilian.
-1 for each act fo teh state which demonstrates aptitude but doesn’t directly help anyone or save anyone’s life.
-2 for each act of the state which demonstrates aptitude and provides a white hat or civilians with physical help (food, clothing, shelter).
-3 for each act of state which demonstrates aptitude and saves the life of a white hat or civlian.
Torture score:
+10 points on the war handwavium score if protaganist tortures antagonist and gets useful information.
+10 points on the war handwavium score if protagonist tortures only guilty people without following due process. +8 points if protagonist tortues innocent people, but the damage is “distanced” from the audience (see distancing section for various methods to distance violence from the audience)
Miscellaneous:
+10 points if the white hats invoke the “you can’t handle the truth” or the “we must do evil to achieve good” argument.
-10 points if the black hats invoke the same argument.