For those of you who have ventured down the rabbit hole that is TVTropes, I’m sure you can appreciate the sort of conceptual shorthand they provide whilst simultaneously ruining and improving your life. Today we’re going to talk about values dissonance. To explain in briefly to the uninitiated, values dissonance is where the values of you the consumer of media clash with those of the characters, author, etc. This is often due to a difference in time period, culture, etc. For instance, the average modern reader probably isn’t going to be completely on board with the values of characters from a Regency Period novel. The inverse is values resonance. Where values dissonance highlights the differences that divide us, values resonance can reveal surprising common ground.

As an author and a pseudo-philologist, the subject of values dissonance fascinates me. Perhaps I just use my novels as a means of sublimation, but it’s the excuse I give for my interest in taking in the ideas and viewpoints of other people. I love taking it in, internalizing it, trying to become a person I’m not. If I’m doing it right, it means that I can make characters that are further removed from myself.

Therein lies a tricky point. Because stories and characters come out of the author, they bear the mark of their source. The most transparent have nearly one-to-one correspondence, but the truly talented storyteller can create degrees of separation. This is certainly what I strive to do, but I couldn’t say how well I succeed. It becomes a problem when you want to create a character largely removed from yourself. The thing is that a lot of people think what’s on the page (or screen) is a direct reflection of the source. This is not always the case, though. Oftentimes, the attempt to create the Other only results in strawmen, but sometimes the Other can be crafted so convincingly that it’s hard to imagine they’re removed from the source. This can lead to misblaming in the case of deliberate values dissonance.

The cowardly solution is to lay it on thick with the disclaimers or to abandon a convincing, fleshed-out character for a safe strawman that only the thickest would confuse for self-representation. Alternatively, you can have your little author avatar thoroughly dismantle the offending character or see that karmic retribution is swiftly and duly meted out. If you’ve got a little more steel in your nerves, you can opt for things to play out more naturalistically. The focus of values dissonance may not ever get refuted in any meaningful way if it doesn’t serve the interests of the story. You may catch some flak for it, but your work will probably have more integrity.

Let’s take an example from my own work. As you know, I don’t like to dwell on my own views, political, religious or what have you. It’s not that I lack any conviction or am ashamed of my beliefs, but I don’t like to create unnecessary conflict or distract from my work, which should be the focus. I can tell you now that no one character is a carbon copy of myself. In fact, because I’ve been working with most of my characters for so long, many of them retain artifacts from earlier stages of my development. They may represent former aspects of my beliefs but not me as I am now. Anyway, on to the specific example, let’s look at Chapter 1 of Tico3. The drunken racial and political diatribe by Lydia and Sean with the bartender Khoi was actually a lot of fun for me to write because I was going out of both my comfort zone and myself. Things like race and politics are touchy subjects, maybe not so much in some countries out there, but here in the US, get ready for a scrap if you get into it in mixed company. (Even in an audience with largely the same views, it can get unpleasantly heated.) Cutting loose like I did was really cathartic. Lydia is mostly an equal opportunity misanthrope, but despite (or perhaps because of) her own Chinese ancestry, she’s rather strongly anti-Chinese, but as a general gadfly, she’ll latch on to any angle of abuse if she can. Sean, on the other hand, doesn’t have much actual antipathy for anyone, but he’s a bit of a troll and hates political correctness (which is still very much in force in the Union era). They don’t think as I think or speak as I speak and are likely to rub a lot of people the wrong way, but that’s all part of the reason I love them so much.

In conclusion, values dissonance may make you uncomfortable, but can be interesting. If you’re the sort of person who likes to venture beyond your own boundaries, it can actually be a way of broadening your horizons. Maybe you’ll use it to hone your ability to launch a counterattack and maybe you’ll use it to build a little empathy. Or you could just shut yourself off. It’d be a bit of a waste, but life is too short to raise your blood pressure too much.

Other Links to this Post

1. The Palidor Media Blog » Dat’s Waycist! — Fri 04 Dec 2015 @ GMT+0000 18:33:16