“And even if we die striving to find the peace we lost / at least we know we tried, didn’t stand by with fingers crossed”
There’s a sentiment I’ve seen a lot from both creators and enjoyers of their work this past year: this idea that it feels so pointless or aloof or even insensitive to talk about their work, to promote their work or that of their creative colleagues, or to express how much we enjoy a piece of media.
I understand. I’ve felt it too. How am I supposed to post about my work like nothing’s wrong? Like a besieged people aren’t struggling for their life against a madman with delusions of empire (bonus round: that doesn’t narrow it down), like one of the most reprehensible humans who ever lived and his regime of craven lickspittles haven’t contorted a 250-year work-in-progress of democracy into an ersatz fascist state whose terror squads are at war with its own people as I write this?
How am I to simply tune out the frequency as humanity’s constant enemy – tribalist, fascist, bigoted tyrantism, endeavoring to make a world where the powerful take what they will and the rest of us suffer what we must – is again making its play for the soul of humanity?
I have some cool stuff planned for you this year on the Looking Glass. And this isn’t cool. And generally, I try to avoid articles that date themselves unless I can put some sort of timeless spin on it. And specifically, I try to avoid getting extremely political on here. But at the same time, there are some things I need to say.
Because if you’ve noticed, I have been posting about my creative work, about the work of my friends and colleagues in the creative world, and about the media I enjoy. My bluesky timeline is a whiplash of writing stuff, fandom stuff, bizarre shitposts and dead-serious antifascist political stuff.
This is not a paradox. This is me trying to spin the plates of joy and gravity at the same time.
I don’t want to look back on this and say that I became so swallowed by fixating on the unfolding darkness that I too became colourless. And I don’t want to look back on this and say that I simply carried on as though the train hadn’t come off the rails, unbothered by the wolves at the gate.
And to reconcile that, I remind myself that stories, art and media aren’t just stories, art and media. They are the colours of our lives. If we as living things are the universe experiencing itself, then art and stories are our species finding different ways to experience, probe, question, affirm itself.
The media we love is a purchase of sanity when faced with the insane. Something to help set us back to baseline. But more than that, art and music and narratives are a means of finding a common language to interpret and translate our complicated heavy thoughts into something more digestible. Every hero, every villain, every lyric and thematic talisman means something about the people and the society that produced it. And hell, we have a lot of complicated heavy thoughts to parse through of late, don’t we?
Sometimes it’s because a piece of media comes out at just the right time to meet its moment. But more often, I find, it’s a case of finding something in ourselves reflected in what’s been created. We are seen. That character from that one series that you secretly (or not so secretly?) think of as your blorbo hits you in that deeper way because they reflect aspects of our humanity that needed to be spoken, needed to be acknowledged, and they did it in a way that hits far deeper than simply talking about it.
And the media we love brings us joy. Simple joy. And that’s important, because they want us miserable. They prey on the miserable, because that’s how they peel off people to their side: from the smaller grifters who run daily videos making bad-faith accusations about how everything in various media is ‘woke’ in a negative context, to the heads of state who tell you how horrible your life is and how it’s all because of the outgroups they want you to hate, they want you miserable. They want you as hateful as they are. And every time you buy back some spiritual sanity by simply Enjoying A Thing, you are disobeying their prime directive.
“And remember this: the imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this: the day will come when all of these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this: Try.”
And hey, you know what? Authoritarian regimes tell stories too. It’s just about all they do besides violence. But they tell foul stories, the kind meant to harm instead of heal. It’s why they saturate the airwaves with propagandists telling lies that we didn’t see what we know we saw, be it one of the world’s most dangerous oligarchs whipping out a Nazi salute on the world stage or the latest summary execution on American streets by a regime thug; it’s why their billionaire supporters buy out major news stations and morph them into additional propaganda arms. It’s why they flood the zone with shit. To gaslight and weaken enough of the body politic beyond even the ability to agree that there is a baseline reality within which we dwell.
Because they know, on some level, that they are the ultimate enemy of all humanity, in times past and now. They know that there are far more of us than them. They know without their virulent stories drowning us in lies, far more people would see with clear eyes their ruthless, sadistic, cruel deeds for what they are.
But their stories are weak, because these machine men have no joy for imagination, no zeal for creativity. It’s why they’re always at war with the arts, a place of free expression, of the kind of authentic human joy that refuses to be caged.
Our stories are stronger. And we are stronger. And we cannot allow the foul stories of machine men, with machine hearts and machine minds, to drown out our voices, our stories, and the grand story that is reality itself, sitting above us all, unimpeachable but constantly under siege.
But here’s the thing. Their stories may be weak, but they are many. And when you’re surrounded by a world screaming for you to give in, when even people you thought you knew are on board and making every excuse in the book for every horrible thing that’s happening, it can be hard to hold on to ourselves. The things we know are real and the things we know are right. The gaslighting is working when there’s a small flicker at the back of our minds that asks, ‘are we the one who’s crazy?’
And our stories and art can help with that. Really. As creators, we can pour our frustrations or our anxieties or our affirmations onto the page, or screen, or whatever medium is ours. As fans we find community and solidarity, even a sense of genuine normality, by engaging with like-minded enjoyers. On both sides of the creative paradigm, these aren’t just fun cool things; they’re battlements around our minds and our hearts, reminding us who we are and the things that we know are worth fighting for.
Stories, music, art also give us a shared language to interpret and understand what we’re going through and bearing witness to. Tales of empires falling, songs of protest and revolution, cautionary tales about what we ought not to ever become; just as one example, you can try to understand the psychology of propaganda and indoctrination in a hundred peer-reviewed journal articles (this is also a good idea), but you can also play the Mass Effect trilogy and it hits you suddenly that Reaper indoctrination, as described in-game, is a stunningly perfect metaphor for how propaganda works, how it changes the mind on a neurological level, and why once a mind is captured by it, it’s so incredibly hard to pull them back. Actually, playing back through that trilogy and making this realization helped me, I think, because the one-degree-removed metaphor for real-world indoctrination made me remember that I’m not going insane in a world that increasingly demands we join the mad parade and act like it is normal and natural.
And, yes, I do believe that all these things are a powerful tether to anchor us. They are ports in a storm when the enemy wants us to feel like we’re just barely holding on in a hurricane.
Because there will come a day when they will not be, those who made their play to make our time a dark one. We need to be able to look back and say that we brought colour to the dark, one way or another.
“And when the fire falls from on high / we can be the pretty heroes if we try / tonight…we’re gonna take a stand, we won’t comply”
The work, the courage and the sacrifice of those on the front lines of our time cannot easily be accounted for in words. I know I haven’t said much about it, because when it comes to real action against the fascism of our time, these are true heroes, and the telling will always fall short of doing justice to my admiration for these people. The intent of this piece isn’t really about the on-the-grounds action, be it on the streets of American cities, the trenches of Ukraine or elsewhere, but I would be remiss while we’re here to not speak up about them.
The ones who are organizing, rallying, doing what they can to confront our constant enemy have proven themselves the best of humanity. The ones who have fallen, fell so that we might have a better place to call our own on the other side of tomorrow.
And what might that world look like? Because every society is its own creation story. Both its people, and the art it produces, the tales it tells about itself. As everyday heroes do what they can to lay the bricks of a better day, that society needs to be a place of joy, and hope, and colour and life, and art and stories are a fundamental element of that.
For those of us who cannot by our circumstances be a Zelenskyy, perhaps some of us can be a Chaplin. Artists who knew they existed in troubled times, who understood that the ears of the many offered them a mandate not just to entertain, but to stand in solidarity through their art.
Even when we think we are without hope, without witness, without reward, we let our favourite melodies carry us and let our favourite stories absorb us. And we create, in spite of the horrors, to spite the horrors, and to meet our moment. We refuse to go hollow. For those who come after, we dance in the firestorm. Because after the embers, there will be rain.
“It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.”
“What are we holding onto, Sam?”
“That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it’s worth fighting for.”