Digression: DADT and Batwoman (Part II)

The DC Women Kicking Ass blog is hitting it out of the park talking about the Batwoman character's roots in DADT. Here's a panel from Greg Rucka's seminal run on Detective Comics, and the blog post has a statement from Rucka as to what was going on in his mind as he wrote it:



I've been talking about heroes and fiction a lot lately, and there are a lot of ways that can be relevant to a culture, but perhaps the single greatest role a fictional hero can play is to illustrate the emotional truths behind ideas that can be too easily intellectualized, allowing injustices to be rationalized away. It's not the only role they can play, certainly, but it's one Rucka hit out of the park with this story: crafting a believable gay character who could be both related to and idolized, one who overcomes tragedy and still finds it in herself to help others.

Now, the argument will always be that it can be just as easily written the other way, and on a technical level, your correct. All sorts of hateful garbage gets published. Bit there's a spark when the writing hits something true. It's a matter of craft. Injustices against any groups are born out of caricature, and lack of empathy, and portrayals that re-enforce those views usually betray the lack of empathy with a hollowness of characterization. You can have conservative writers and characters -- science fiction, particularly, is rife with them -- but even those conservatives, the ones who write well, are slow to abandon empathy. Empathy is a tool in any artists' hands, and transcends political beliefs. With it, you can use a political issue as a starting point to create art. Without it, you're simply creating propaganda.