Sometimes you are what you write

As I wrote earlier this month, you can’t assume that because someone writes strong women, or racial stereotypes doesn’t tell us much about what they believe in real life.
There are, however, exceptions. Stories written with a moral message, or a political or philosophical one, where the author wants to convince us that capitalism is good, or socialism, or Catholicism or patriarchy as the case may be.
I don’t like “Western Union” stories (from the old saying that if you want to send a message in your story, use Western Union instead), but quite aside from personal taste, there are so many ways they can go off the rails.
One is when you make the other side a straw man—a caricature of what the other view is, to the point it has nothing to do with reality. Stories where all atheists are just bitter, disillusioned true believers, or claims that gays are actually trying to oppress straights (the link is to a real-life claim, but it’s no less real for all that) have nothing to do with real atheists or gays.
Closely allied we’ve got the “You know the other position is evil because people who support it are evil!” argument. Much as I enjoyed Grant Morrison’s run on the Animal Man comic book, he had an annoying habit of justifying animal rights by showing anyone who disagreed is horrible: The mad scientist in one issue is a callous creep and two hunters who show up in another story rape the protagonist’s wife. Likewise, there’s a scene in Atlas Shrugged where Ayn Rand takes great pleasure in detailing all the attitudes of characters who die in a train wreck, thereby showing They Had It Coming.
Then there are stories where the hero actually debates the author’s position with someone else—only instead of a debate, it consists of the POV character spouting talking points and the other person reduced to sputtering “But … but…” as if the author’s positions are completely inarguable.
Then we have stories where all members of a group are shown as equally awful. All Christians are patriarchal bigots. All Muslims are patriarchal bigots, plus terrorists. All politicians are stupid, corrupt buffoons. That latter one’s fine for humor, but I’ve seen stories in which it just drives home that only someone who was venal and out for political gain could possibly disagree with the protagonist.
Another problem is when the author assumes that everyone shares his viewpoint. I remember an old Hulk story where we’re clearly supposed to be horrified by the military working on a new super-weapon, simply because it’s a new super-weapon: The author takes it as a given that any military project is automatically evil, and assumes we agree, so no need to make a case.
IIRC someone once said that if you’re writing a story about an issue or a position, the reader shouldn’t have any idea where you personally stand. I personally wouldn’t go that far. It can be done (Asimov’s For a Good Cause and Ted Chiang’s Liking What You See, for instance) but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with taking sides, just not heavy-handedly. Anyone reading Impossible Takes a Little Longer will see I’m pro-choice (my super-hero Nighthawk puts in part of her time protecting abortion clinics from terrorists) but I just take abortion rights as a given and don’t dwell on it. If I write about abortion at all, I definitely don’t want someone walking away thinking “Well, there’s reasonable arguments on both sides” as I think very definitely that my side is right. But if I put pro-lifers into a story, I hope I’ll at least make them realistic ones, not caricatures.