Underdog Thoughts
This isn’t something I’ve given a whole lot of deep thought to or planned out very well, but I want to share some random thoughts I had pertaining to underdog stories. Namely, what I perceive to be a problem with them.
First off, I want to make this clear: I am not knocking the concept of an underdog story. I enjoy them as much as the next person. The idea of a disadvantaged protagonist slowly overcoming seemingly impossible odds is a safe and enjoyable idea that carries a lot of inherent appeal. They are easy to do well, many of them are extremely good, and you shouldn’t feel bad for enjoying them.
At the same time, however, I feel that underdog stories (or at least their underlying attributes) are way too common. In something like sports movies, this is understandable, but consider just how far this concept tends to reach. A military movie is usually going to focus on a single underfunded and undersupported party of soldiers on a special mission that involves facing a much more powerful adversary. A fantasy or science fiction story is typically going to paint the protagonists as “rebels” standing against an organized opposition with near-total control. Even in superhero movies, where the hero is often built off society’s views of heroism and righteousness, that hero is typically going to be put in a position where the bulk of visible society does not support them - maybe because they are construed as a villain, or maybe because the bulk of society consists of some evil regime. Whatever the case, we go to extreme lengths to make sure our protagonists are always underdogs.
While it would certainly be nice to see more non-underdog stories for the sake of variety, I feel the actual ramification of this pattern is something much darker. I would say that, we, as a society, are slowly losing sight of the fact that underdogs can be badguys.
While I tend to be very critical of its writing, Skyrim’s civil war plotline is actually a very good illustration of this idea. Ulfric is a rebel leader - he’s an underdog leading a group of followers against an established empire. The game opens with said Empire trying to execute the two of you. You’re supposed to root for him, at least at first.
However, it’s left rather ambiguous whether or not Ulfric is really in the right. He’s planning to instigate a major conflict with a powerful adversary (the Thalmor) that the empire has a peace treaty with. The Thalmor are counting on him to sow instability and weaken both Skyrim and the Empire. He’s also kind of racist, even by real-world standards - like, this is a character who literally wants to make sure every major decision in his province is made by white people.
Most people I’ve seen who really analyze the conflict in Skyrim tend to side with the Empire rather than the Rebels. However, their reasoning has an interesting theme to it. They point out that the Empire is weak and already lost many of its provinces, and Skyrim is one of its strongest remaining parts. They say the Thalmor are the larger threat, and the Empire will need Skyrim’s support to defend against them. Rather than citing the extreme death toll and conflict Ulfric is inviting, their arguments for siding with the Empire are typically geared toward painting the Empire as the underdog. I don’t think we even consciously think about this, but we have a lot of trouble really defending someone as being the goodguys unless they are the ones fighting against a larger force.
This mindset actually extends beyond fiction. Think about entertainment: a lot of people - particularly with artistic inclinations - rebel against popular media. They see it as this large force overshadowing and drawing attention away from their superior, underappreciated tastes (Pop? I only listen to classical). We accept this as a valid thing people can do - we don’t view the above comic as rude or uneducated the same way we would if, say, it was attacking something less popular, like indie graphic novels.
What is the reason for this? In both cases, you have people consuming a type of media they enjoy. In both cases, said branch of media is going to have positive qualities that appeal to people and negative qualities that drive people away. Why are we so quick to attack the larger one and defend the smaller? While there are definitely reasons one could cite for supporting one thing and attacking another, I feel as though this fundamentally comes down to us wanting to root for the underdog. If comics were a part of pop culture rather than a niche market, I think we’d be attacking them as hollow and problematic. I mean, hell, at one point we actually did.
Where am I taking this? Like I said up above, we are getting stuck in this idea that underdogs are inherently good. Our culture is so ingrained in its idolization of underdog stories that it skews how we view the world around us. We have trouble admitting that, for the most part, the people we oppose are the underdogs.
Consider the way we talk about crime. It’s no secret that we dehumanize criminals - we don’t see them as people who violated societal standards out of desperation or sickness, we just see them as criminals. However, we dehumanize them in a very specific way: we make them bigger.
We don’t think of someone as dealing drugs because they have to pay their bills - we describe them as part of the drug epidemic in the US. By putting them behind bars, we have weakened this unstoppable force that makes our country unsafe. A robber? We’ve helped secure ourselves against the anarchy that would overtake us if such harsh punishments were not dealt out. We make crime into something bigger than us; we paint law enforcement as the underdog, acting as hard as they can to keep a huge problem at bay.
I am not saying law enforcement is bad, but I would not describe them as being an underdog. Statistically, criminals are a minority - the vast, vast majority of people want law to be upheld. Like mentioned above, criminals are often acting out of desperation or sickness - they are living human beings who feel like they have no choice but to break the law, or who lack empathy or cognition in some way that keeps them from caring. They are a small minority of people desperately who need help. Yet, our first inclination is to portray them as a large force we can feel good for defeating.
When opposition is smaller or equal to us, we feel pity or for them. We want to examine the problems and come to an understanding. When they are larger or more powerful, however, we feel justified in attacking them as viciously as possible. We want this hypothetical evil force to suffer for looming over us. If we can construe ourselves as the smaller group - as the underdog - then we feel like the goodguy no matter what we do.
There is a lot of well-known harmful rhetoric based around this idea. Like, post-9/11 Islamophobia in the US took the fact that there were Muslim terrorists and pushed it into this idea that any Muslim could be a terrorist, inflating a relatively small group (terrorists) into a huge, looming threat (people who could be terrorists). Similarly, when AIDS was first coming to public attention in the US, you had groups pushing this message “homosexuals are everywhere, and any one of them could have AIDS”. Rather than drawing attention to the comparatively small group of people who were actually affected, it was cleverly inflated into this huge, threatening group that people could feel fear and hostility toward.
You could interpret this as ordinary fearmongering, but in some ways I think it’s better explained as pivoting on this sense of underdog fertilization that is ingrained in us from an early age. It’s not supposed to warrant a fear response so much as justify hatred. It’s rhetoric designed to make us the small and disadvantaged heroes up against a seemingly unstoppable threat.
I guess what I am really trying to do in all of this is draw attention to this potentially harmful idea of underdog idolization, and make an appeal for people to do three things:
First, don’t inflate the size of your opposition. If you’re taking a stand against a group smaller and less powerful than you, be honest and own up to it. Don’t embellish your opponents’ power when describing them to others to gain support, and don’t lie to yourself about what you are facing.
Second, don’t construe it as a bad thing to stand against a smaller opponent. Lots of bad things are small - in fact, I’d say most of them are. Such wrongdoings need to be responded to as though they are small and varied incursions against us, not unified, large-scale epidemics that should elicit our hostility. Don’t be afraid to stand against the little opponents - the small things that make you say “that’s not right” - since overall they’re the ones that cause the most harm.
And third, don’t let someone use their relative size to defend their position. Any sufficiently manipulative person is going to be aware that we value underdog stories, and understand that making themselves look small and underpowered will add to their appeal. If you catch someone taking this angle, be very careful to make sure their position is something you actually want to support. Maybe it will be, and they are what you’d consider a legitimate underdog protagonist, or maybe they are trying to manipulate you into acting against your own values.
As usual: just be aware, be critical, and be extremely wary of anyone that attacks you for displaying those two traits.
