Redefining "Good"

Image description: Glinda the Good Witch from the classic film, The Wizard of Oz. Do I discuss the film at all today? Nope. But when discussing the concept of what "good" means, I couldn't resist going with the obvious representative image.

I start today’s post with what seems like a simple question: what does it mean for something to be “good”? That might sound incredibly obvious at best and incredibly stupid at worst, but it’s a topic I believe bears examining from time to time. When you hear the word “good,” what do you think of? If you’re someone who often thinks about the world, you might think of “good societies,” “good people,” or what’s “good” for the environment. Someone familiar with biblical concepts might think of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. A geek like me may think of “good” from the standpoint of “good media,” like a television show you love, a movie that kept you guessing, or a particularly thought-provoking book. All this to say, the concept of “good” is not always as uniform as it may seem.

If you look the word up in a dictionary, the definition you get will be something along the lines of “approved of" or “morally correct” and those definitions illustrate my point rather well, largely because what one person or group might think is “correct” and what they “approve of” may be very different from another. Generally, I’m sure there are things that most people would agree on as being “good” versus “bad,” but even then, there can be grey areas. Here on the blog, I frequently use the word “good”, usually under the umbrella of “good” representation; even my blog description talks about analyzing “the good, the bad, and the ugly” in media when it comes to asexual and/or aromantic representation. I do my best to describe what I think that means in each situation – for instance, in some cases, it might mean “avoiding the usual tropes” or it might involve an analysis of how much I personally believe a character’s non-sexual or non-romantic identity will help similar people feel less alone. But even I could stand to reexamine the concept a bit, because sometimes “good” is not enough.

In general, this post is going to be looser in form than many of my posts usually are; the concept of “good” has been in my mind a lot lately and I decided maybe it was time to coalesce all the thoughts I was having about this topic into one. In order to do that, I want to look at a few things that people often consider as “good things” and view them a bit more critically. I’ve decided to analyze the concepts of fun, pleasure, and happiness with the hope of demonstrating that maybe these things are too often cited as a reason or motivation for things, and why focusing on these things solely excludes a lot of important emotions and experiences, as well as types of people.

All videos in this post are not mine

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Redefining “Fun”

Many people might consider something valuable if it’s fun – as in, if they derive enjoyment from it. But everyone’s definition of fun is undoubtably different, and this is where the notion becomes a bit of a slippery slope. Looking at and redefining this concept is not necessarily something that factors into representation or aspec issues, but I believe its implications are broader and affect media in general; even beyond just media, I think the endless unyielding pursuit to make things fun, while beneficial in some cases, is extremely harmful in others because it colors people’s attitudes when relating to each other. So, although “fun” as a subsidiary of “good” doesn’t have a direct correlation to “good” representation or related issues, I think it nevertheless has a lot of implications and deserves to be analyzed.

To illustrate this, I point to the reality TV series Survivor, one of my guilty pleasures. Survivor divides contestants into “tribes” and sends them to an exotic location to build and maintain a shelter, compete in challenges, and eventually determine who they want to “vote off” from their tribe, thus eliminating that player from the game. It’s not exactly where I go for hard-hitting television, and as a reality show, it should indeed be enjoyable, which it is quite often. For instance, the recent “Winners at War” season, in which all the contestants were previous winners, was a great season full of absolute masters of the game. In this season, they also added tokens that players could use to buy rewards and advantages, something I didn’t notice much because I was too busy focusing on the rest of the enjoyable elements. So why is it noteworthy? Due in large part to the host and executive producer of Survivor, Jeff Probst, talking about these tokens with a former contestant and television writer, who asked Probst a question that often haunts me: “But is it fun?”

As stated above, a reality show should be enjoyable, so it is a valid question to ask if something in the show is fun. But there is a reason why I chose “fun” as the first branch of “good”, because oftentimes the concept of “fun” is so loose and undefinable that it becomes almost meaningless. If you’re wondering how Survivor took this critique about fun to heart for the next two seasons, they came up with the following concept – players could find an immunity idol (which, if played correctly, makes them safe from elimination) that could only be unlocked by saying a silly phrase included with the idol. These phrases included things like “I believe butterflies are just dead relatives saying hi,” “I’m as confused as a goat on Astro-turf,” and “It’s the classic tale of the bunny having dinner in the mailbox,” among others. Yes, those really are the actual phrases the contestants had to work into conversation in front of everyone (TV audience included) to get their idols. And while I know there were many viewers who had no problem with this – all in the name of fun – I found it pointless at best and full of secondhand embarrassment at worst.

The Survivor example proves that what one person finds fun, another person finds stupid, but it’s admittedly a harmless example. However, what happens when this concept of “fun at all costs” spills into other facets of life? A place where this can be seen in what I feel is a more harmful capacity is at the theme park Walt Disney World, specifically ECPOT, my favorite part of the resort. EPCOT as I knew it was a sprawling and beautiful place, one half of which was about various countries of the world and their cultures, and the other half of which was dedicated to the potential technologies of the future. I was lucky enough to visit EPCOT many times growing up, especially during the park’s “Millennium Celebration” in 2000. As a child, I got to talk to cultural representatives from around the world in the Millennium Village, experienced the brilliantly creative parade “Tapestry of Nations” (video at the end of this section), and fell in love with the gorgeous nighttime show “Illuminations: Reflections of Earth.” All through my adolescence and into my adulthood, I adored EPCOT for its mixture of creativity, history, education, and futuristic optimism, and I always had fun there.

Fast-forward to present day, and to the past several years of EPCOT’s history, in which Disney has decided to essentially obliterate EPCOT’s educational nature in the name of making it more “fun.” As such, I’ve been forced to watch as everything that made EPCOT creative, thought-provoking, and entertaining is bulldozed (literally) to make way for things that are as surface level as possible. In short, they are making it “fun” only by literally destroying everything that made the park meaningful or enjoyable for so long. While this may again seem like a lightweight example, I believe the attitude behind EPCOT’s destruction points to a larger problem with society, in that making things fun and accessible has come to be synonymous with making them vapid, which is insulting and dangerous.

Image description: EPCOT's masterpiece nighttime show "Illuminations: Reflections of Earth," a heavily aesthetic visual show using fireworks, pyrotechnics, water effects, lasers, and music to express its theme of world unity. It ran from late 1999 to September 2019, when it was scrapped for a more accessible Disney-themed show.

The relentless quest to make something fun is actually, I believe, somewhat misguided, due not only to the fact that fun means different things to different people, but also because that very phenomenon means that fun can often be very accessible; as such, it does not need to be manufactured at the expense of everything else. I often wonder why people throw out beauty, creativity, or thought in the name of fun when #1: fun can easily exist alongside those things (as it already used to in EPCOT) and #2: it’s not necessary to go to great efforts to create fun. This is something that retired Disney innovator Joe Rohde brought up in an Instagram post, discussing how people often ask “why can’t it just be fun?” and how that’s often a shorthand way of dismissing intellectual or aesthetic value. I believe his answer is something all people and all media could stand to learn from.

“Fun is cheap,” Rohde says in his post. “I can have fun in an inflatable pool in my backyard. I can have fun playing basketball by the garage. I can have fun watching videos of snarky cats. This fun costs very little. An inflatable pool costs $50 or less and can be used many times; a trip to a major entertainment venue like a Broadway play or theme park can cost many hundreds of dollars per visit, all in. So, are these places just plain fun? Are they hundreds or thousands of times more fun than shooting Silly String at each other on the porch? Probably not. Therefore, fun cannot possibly be the motivating factor… people must be paying this kind of money and making this kind of effort for a reward that is of higher value, more rare, and of greater impact than fun.”

Although Rohde is of course focusing on theme parks specifically, I think this concept could be applied to nearly anything. He goes on to say that some of the things that are “of higher value, more rare, and of greater impact than fun” are not only pleasing, but essential for the human mind, and I agree with him. We shouldn’t have our brains turned on all the time, and there is nothing wrong with having things that are mindlessly enjoyable, like the things Rohde mentions as “cheap fun,” nor should we assume that things that are fun automatically lack any kind of value. But I also think we do ourselves a disservice when we assume that fun is automatically better than anything else. At the beginning of this section, I mentioned that the question “is it fun?” haunts me, because it usually comes right before the destruction of something I love. The notion of “why can’t it just be fun?” often feels like a deathblow, meaning that anything I find emotional, beautiful, or worthwhile is about to become a sanitized, easy-to-swallow shell of itself.

The EPCOT example is not the only example of this. In fact, I could give you many examples – spanning music, television, movies, video games, etc. – in which “but it’s fun” or “it’s feel-good” or “it’s funny” have been used to justify decisions that I believe ultimately hurt media and its viewers in the long-run. In the end, I think the entire thing can be summed up with the final lines of Rohde’s post, in which he describes theme parks as a form of communication, a sentiment which I believe should be true with a lot of media that people tend to want to be “fun” and fun alone. If we look at these things as relationships as Rohde says, we should take his words to heart: “People like worthy, meaningful, invested relationships, not cheap ones.”

Redefining Pleasure

Contrary to what it probably seems like after that last section, I don’t hate fun. In fact, I love having fun, I love laughing, and I love being silly – and I always hope that I can be seen as a person who does those things. In fact, I believe that fun is life-affirming and even lifesaving. If we cannot laugh or smile or enjoy ourselves, life becomes a flavorless, tedious chore. This is something I learned while writing a fanfiction series with a dear friend of mine, a series that we wanted to make happy, warm, and inviting. Many of our favorite comments on that series were from people telling us that they use the stories to escape their day-to-day lives and their problems. There is nothing more wonderful to hear as a creator than to know your work has been healing to people, and it proves that media of all kinds touches people, whether silly or serious. Therefore, the lesson is not to toss out fun or to look down on things that are primarily concerned with being nice or accessible; the real lesson comes in how to balance both extremes.

Just like with the concept of “fun,” there is nothing wrong with taking pleasure in something. In fact, there are a lot of things that we should take pleasure in doing, and sometimes it’s even possible to find ways to make unpleasant tasks more pleasant quite easily. But I think problems arise when we assume that everything can or should be pleasant. In my estimation, both pleasure and fun as concepts are like cotton candy – cotton candy is a lovely treat occasionally, but eating it all the time would not only be a terrible idea, it would also effectively ruin the purpose of cotton candy as a special every-now-and-then thing. Therefore, when it comes to pleasure, I believe we should challenge our thinking about the types of experiences we take pleasure in, how we do so, and when it is appropriate. And above all, we should ask ourselves what pleasure really means.

The term pleasure, for some people, has a predominately sexual notion, although when I speak of the concept, I am of course not thinking about it in those terms. Rather, when I think of the concept in a day-to-day sense, specifically how it’s overused, I usually think about the concept of instant gratification – or the desire to have your wants fulfilled as quickly and easily as possible. Without getting too deep into any type of psychological stuff regarding the topic (because frankly, I’m wildly unqualified to do so), I bring this up because I feel instant gratification and the notion of having wants fulfilled quickly is another thing that's ruining a great deal of culture and life in general.

For example, something I discuss frequently is how some fandom concepts can become extremely excluding to certain types of aspec people. As much as I love a well-told romance and enjoy “shipping” certain characters, for instance, I think sometimes people crave the instant gratification of two characters getting together, especially when it comes to works that are explicitly sexual. For some aspec people – or even just non-aspec people who are uncomfortable with writing graphic scenes – this impatience some fans tend to have can lead to aspec work being brushed off and devalued, as I’ve unfortunately seen happen many times. In certain cases, some fans would much rather have the immediate satisfaction of smut than the long-term payoff of a slower burn romance or relationship development, and I believe that can lead to enormous problems.

This becomes even more of a struggle if you’re trying to write a character as on the asexual or aromantic spectrums through slow build-up and establishment of character. For instance, if you’re trying to craft a character who is demisexual and/or demiromantic, their relationships are going to take a while to establish, and the writer should be spending time developing emotional bonds between the characters and those closest to them. However, in a world where people want the satisfaction of a pairing getting together right now, it feels like writers don’t always have that necessary space to create their aspec characters. In fact, I think this exact phenomenon may have a hand in many poorly executed romances we see in media. If creators are impatient or they know the people consuming their media are impatient, this may lead them to cobble together certain pairings that make no real sense, or which haven’t really done the work to be believable. Sure, sometimes chemistry between characters is enough to go on, but not always, and I feel that many times this type of haste tramples the chance aspec people have to see themselves in certain characters.

As I said previously, I think our society allows – and even encourages – us to be impatient and pursue instant gratification, even in simple, everyday life things. We live in a very fast society and as such, we all value our time and want things quickly, from quick entertainment to quick fixes to being quickly given the things we want and need. It’s hard to fault people when this is what our culture encourages them to think. However, as Joe Rohde said, real meaning is often found in deep relationships, not cheap ones, and I think this mentality should apply to a lot of things. There’s nothing wrong with seeking pleasure, quick or otherwise, from something that’s fun and accessible. But just like you can’t live your life only eating cotton candy, I don’t believe anyone can live by only consuming things that are surface-level pleasurable or quickly gratifying. Just like cotton candy, those things are good for a quick sugary lift, but to toss out all other sustenance is ill-advised. And yet, I feel that’s exactly what we do to many things in life. Pleasure is good, but I think it’s more important to strike a balance between short-term pleasure and longer-term gain, which should hopefully lead to more pleasure in the long run.

Redefining (or Reexamining) Happiness

I began this post by asking what “good” means, and I ask a similar question now, one that all people likely ask themselves – what does “happy” mean? This question can get very deep and philosophical, and I’m not interested in diving too deep into its psychology. But I do think “happy” is an interesting synonym for “good,” because I don’t know if those two things are always necessarily as synonymous as we often believe. I’m reminded of the concept for Ursula K. Le Guin’s story, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. In the story, Omelas is a beautiful society where everyone is safe, fulfilled, and happy. However, the city harbors a dark secret, one that every citizen is told when they come of age – the only reason Omelas is happy is because one child dwells in misery. When the citizens learn of this, many of them, although horrified, eventually reason that this is a necessary trade-off and go back to their lives; but some – as the title suggests – leave the city for good.

The story raises a lot of fundamental questions about if the suffering of others is ever justified and if our happiness is worth it if others are miserable. Can we truly be happy when we’re aware of suffering? Is it only because we’re aware of suffering that we can be good and happy people? These concepts are intense and deserve far more analysis than I can give them in this post; in general, anything I say about these concepts will result in unfortunate oversimplifications of the story, so I highly suggest doing your own digging if this interests you. However, no matter what lesson you take from it, even on a superficial glance I believe the story can challenge the notion of what happiness means. We all want to live happy lives, I think. But I believe more than anything, we should also be living mindful ones.

Image description: A screenshot from the music video for the song "Spring Day" by Korean supergroup BTS. In this scene, a motel called Omelas can be clearly seen, in reference to the story. The irony of using this image given what I'll be talking about next is not lost on me.

Lately, the concept of happiness is something I’ve thought about a great deal. Due to a lot of hard circumstances over these past months, it’s been difficult for me to describe myself as “happy”, but there is one event in which I did experience what I would consider to be true happiness – when I got to see BTS in concert back in November 2021, as described in my “Redefining Belonging” post. Throughout the concert, I was of course basking in the feeling of a dream realized, knowing I was experiencing joy and excitement, but the moment that really cemented this is something most people would not consider to be a happy one. That moment was one of deep emotional catharsis while I was literally weeping, thinking about all the hardships that had plagued me on the road to get to where I was now. Was I happy in that moment? Not in the way you might expect, and that made it more valuable.

The notion of “happy” is not always productive, since perfect happiness is not attainable at every time, and because (as I’ve said numerous times) it’s not the same for everyone. Thanks to many of the things I’ve discussed in this post – such as the ongoing destruction of EPCOT, something that always brought me happiness – I’ve been forced to view happiness through a rather paradoxical lens. In the case of EPCOT, I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who are deriving fun, satisfaction, or pleasure from the alterations that have been made in the park and they are happy after they spend time there; I, on the other hand, am actively unhappy with these changes, and here in lies the eternal paradox of happiness, the old truism that you can’t please everyone.

This feeling of paradoxical happiness comes back around to BTS, not just in the example of the concert, but due to recent events. The main reason I decided to cover all these topics is thanks in large part to BTS unexpectedly announcing a quasi-hiatus. This announcement and my subsequent tangle of feelings regarding it made a lot of these debates within myself even more pronounced. Because the band’s music is a source of strength and safety for me, the notion of them changing is difficult to swallow, even when many fans believe it will make the boys happy. This is a challenge for me because I love BTS not just as a band, but as people, and I of course want them to be happy, but it’s hard to reconcile that, especially if what makes them happy could make me miserable. I’ve heard it said that the concept of love means caring about the happiness of another person over your own; however, I’ve also heard it said that you shouldn't be so quick to replace your own wants and needs with that of another person. Thus, I may have to figure out how I can be happy for something that is probably going to cause me pain.

This is why the notion of doing or pursuing what makes you happy or wanting to live your life for happiness is not always attainable. This is why doing what’s good for one person or group might be harmful to another. I experience this a great deal in my life, in my fandoms, and in the way I interact with media in general, and BTS’s hiatus shows me that I still have some growing to do. Even though I know it’s never going to be as easy for me to attain happiness as it may be for others, sometimes I still fall into that trap where I believe happiness is easy or permanent, which is never the case. I often discuss these moments of unfairness on the blog or talk about how I try to overcome these inadequacies, but I still have a long way to go. I still have a lot of things to redefine.

Originally, today’s post was going to be all about how futuristic media looks at society and the people in it, and how their optimism for the future is sometimes the stuff of my nightmares. That will be my next post, and I feel like it will be stronger for having this one come before it. While that post will be all about what people hope for in the future, this post is in many ways what people hope for in the present. It’s never wrong to hope for fun, pleasure, fulfilment, or happiness and it’s never a bad thing to invite those things into your life when you can. But I believe that to only look at those things would be to ignore a huge part of life, the same way you’d miss out on a huge part of life if you were only ever sad.

To bring things around to my original point, if these things are what it means to be “good,” then what is good representation? What constitutes “good” for aspec people like me and aspec people who aren’t like me at all? Can we live in a world where the things that are good for me are also good for other people with similar and dissimilar identities? To be honest, I don’t know. I think those questions may be too complicated for just one person to answer and in just one post. But at this time in my life where I feel like so many other people are happy while I am actively unhappy, it’s certainly interesting to think about. In a way, this post is as much about me shifting my own paradigms as it is asking others to shift theirs. As I continue forward on this confusing path, trying to accept the loss of my own happiness at times, I hope above all that I can figure out the balance between the extremes of life and arrive at a place where I feel, if not happy, at least complete.