Accepting violence in the media

I’ve never been a big video games fan (Mario aside). So I don’t have much experience in the “realistic violence” games where people gun down enemies and beat up prostitutes. Thus, the “violence in video games leads to bad trends in behavior” argument hasn’t really had an effect on me.

Then I discovered how disturbing people’s reaction to media can truly be.

During one of my late-night browsing sessions on tvtropes.org — I recommend the site, but you’ll get sucked in — I ran across a reference to William Hamleigh, the villain of Ken Follett’s book “The Pillars of the Earth” — which I also recommend. And it led me to a pretty disturbing page on DeviantArt, a site where artists can upload their creative works for others to view.

The picture itself isn’t anything unusual — he’s just sitting on a horse (and as an art history minor, I can tell you that there areLOTS of paintings and sculptures where people are sitting on a horse). But, as directed on the tvtropes page, I read the comments under the page and was seriously freaked out.

As anyone who’s read the novel can tell you, Hamleigh is a bad, bad guy. Our first look at him shows him almost running down peasants, then trying to refuse to pay them for their work. Then he storms the stronghold where several other main characters are residing and rapes the main female protagonist. Throughout the book, he goes on to rape his wife and a peasant’s daughter, tries to destroy a cathedral town, and is involved in the death of Thomas Beckett. In short, this is not a guy you want to invite to a dinner party.

But it appears he has a fan base. The comments I found said things such as “He’s a sex machine” and “He was all ‘Violence’ and I was like . . . (drooling smiley).”

The one that shocked me most said, “The entire novel, all I could think was, ‘Aliena, why? What have you done? He’s a blonde with a badassitude. Why aren’t you worshipping the ground he treads?!’”

Mind you, Aliena is one of the girls he brutally rapes. I couldn’t find the ages of the posters, but they’re female, and from across the globe — Italy, Costa Rica and more, in addition to the U.S.

Part of me hopes they’re young — too young to realize that those comments are disturbing. And part of me hopes that they’re adults, that kids wouldn’t talk this way about a rapist, fictional or not.

I shouldn’t need to tell college students how prevalent rape is in our society. We all know. It’s unfortunately become so common that it’s dangerous to walk home by ourselves at night. Girls especially are often warned to be on guard against attackers.

I’m stunned that these girls are reacting to the character in such an enthusiastic way. Yes, sometimes people exaggerate and create personas on the Internet – after all, it’s anonymous. But that doesn’t change my shock. This isn’t a movie or TV show — they can’t even be attracted to the character because they like the actor or the way he looks.

They’re just deciding that he’s “hot,” and that makes him okay. In fact, that makes him pretty cool. Oh, he hurts women constantly and horribly throughout the book? How cool!

It’s really frightening that people can react that way. Yes, he’s just a fictional character in a fictional story. Yes, it’s the Internet.

But if they react that way about a person who brutalizes people just because he can, how do they react to real-life rapists and abusers? If the person fits their definition of “hot,” do they get a free pass, despite the fact that he hurt someone else?

Maybe — hopefully — that thinking doesn’t translate to real life for them, that they think it’s just fiction and anInternet persona. If that’s the case, then I wish they would think before they act, or “e-act” about what they’re supporting and what it says about them.

If it isn’t the case . . .

Maybe it really is true that the violence — fictional and not — that permeates our society is desensitizing us to the horrors. I still prefer to give the benefit of the doubt to videogamers and others, though some game aspects are pretty bad . . . and make me wonder who came up with them. I’d like to think that the comments are out of the norm, that most people wouldn’t think that way.

Obviously, I’ll never know for sure.