Why Metatextual Criticism of Fiction is Important, by @WhisperingFlow2
Whisper is a close friend of the blog, and was kind enough to dissect layers of meaning beneath the hit masterpiece Morbius in a way that I neither was anticipating or expecting. Disabilities and how they’re discussed both within the queer community and out is something we’ve been wanting to tackle for a while, and I was delighted when they submitted this piece. Enjoy, and be sure to follow them on Twitter and support them at the links below.
Spoilers for Morbius and Vampire in The Garden.
If you’re one of the people who have watched Morbius, you may be aware that the phrase, “It’s morbin’ time’ ‘ isn’t even in the movie. If you haven’t watched it, you’re likely contemplating why people are even making text memes about it.
Personally, I care less about the memes. I’m more interested in how Morbius is a disabled character. Yes, Michael Morbius is a disabled superhero. And I’m confused as to why that aspect was so neglected despite being inherent to how he viewed the world.
If you haven’t seen the movie, here’s a brief explanation of Morbius’s backstory. Spoilers ahead, if you are averse to them, now would be the time to stop reading and go watch the movie.
Michael Morbius grew up as a disabled child, with a condition that made him physically weak. He required constant blood transfusions for a condition that was rare and under-studied. His main support devices were a pair of crutches, and he continues to use these up until he finds a “cure.”
In scenes from the movie during his childhood, we see him mocked by a group of kids passing below his -likely- third story room. Later, the same kids would savagely beat Milo after he lashed out against them for stealing Michael’s note.
Michael saves Lucien (nicknamed Milo) by using a ballpoint pen spring to fix Lucien’s transfusion machine. Michael’s doctor notices, and comments on his gifts being important and needed. And he is given the opportunity to go to a school for gifted children. Michael eventually gets his university degree to become a doctor at the age of nineteen. We then see him being awarded a nobel prize by the King of Sweden; which he declines as his synthetic blood was a byproduct of a “failed” experiment as he puts it.
Dr. Morbius succeeds in creating what is presumably an RNA virus to fix his damaged DNA using vampire bat DNA. While the movie’s explanation of how it fixes his DNA is flimsy, it still works. But as you likely know from the trailer, it turns him into a bloodthirsty vampiric monster.
Granted, Morbius is no longer actively dying, and his legs work until he needs to feed on human blood. Blood is his main weakness, and it doesn’t really end up factoring into the plot; but we’ll get to that.
Surprisingly, the movie doesn’t have him comment or acknowledge this change. We never see Michael doing things that he couldn’t do prior to curing himself. They could’ve even added a scene where he sees another person using crutches, and feels guilt over not having helped them. This would’ve added greatly to his characterization. All we get instead is a few action shots of him doing wild leaps and acrobatics.
It’s almost as if Dr. Morbius ceases to be a doctor afterwards, and simply becomes a superhero who has doctoring knowledge. And interestingly we don’t see him once consider whether he should keep being a doctor. The movie almost exclusively focuses on his conflict with Lucien.
The movie builds his backstory on his disability, and then the main conflict is with his best friend who is also a vampire, and is also previously disabled after having been cured in the same way as Morbius. Lucien, having stolen the cure and used it on himself, has become an actual monster in body and personality. And he’s hellbent on convincing Michael that he’s also just as much of a monster.
While there is something to be said about the angle of being an “outcast” for being different. I don’t really think this is all that relatable to me. For me, my disability isn’t just about being an outcast. Being disabled for me is about being treated less than in society, it’s a kind of coldness. The kind that Douglas Adams once described:
“If it was an emotion, it was a totally emotionless one. It was hatred, implacable hatred. It was cold, not like ice is cold, but like a wall is cold. It was impersonal, not like a randomly flung fist in a crowd is impersonal, but like a computer-issued parking summons is impersonal. And it was deadly, again, not like a bullet or a knife is deadly, but like a brick wall across an expressway is deadly.”
But it’s not just social rejection. It’s social rejection and a pervasive sense that you as a person aren’t worth anything because you can’t do what abled folks can. And I think Disney misses this point with how they constructed Lucien’s backstory especially.
Not only did they fail to capture his weakness and possibly harness it for plot reasons (aside from the question of morality, but that’s easily resolved in him drinking bagged blood), they fail to take into account his history. The main conflict isn’t even related to disability. Even Lucian, aka, “Milo” doesn’t have motivations that are strongly in line with his backstory.
At most, Lucian is evil because he was bullied and had some dark desire for revenge in him. His motives aren’t even questionably moral, they are completely amoral. And this is a disabled villain fighting a disabled hero. They could’ve done so much better.
For example, they could’ve had Lucian create an army of vampires which believed in the superiority of the weak to become powerful and take revenge on their oppressors. They could’ve had Lucian’s belief stem from the idea that those who have suffered have superior morals to those who are privileged.
The plot of Morbius as a whole has very little relevance to his experiences as a formerly disabled person. We never see Morbius become weak as a result of his vampirism aside from the two times he goes without blood in a safe environment.
All they needed was a disabled writer, and the ideas they could’ve come up with would’ve been way better than the plot they made. And yet, Marvel chose not to hire disabled writers, clearly. As the plot erases Morbius’ backstory in order to make him into a “disabled to abled” hero, yet again.
This isn’t the only time Disney has fucked up a disabled character.
Hawkeye had the same treatment, but instead of making him deaf to start with, they made him deaf as the series progressed; which fundamentally misses the point of his superpowers and redacts a large portion of his backstory.
How Morbius is treated and how Hawkeye is treated in the MCU are why metatextual criticism is important in fiction. While we can look at the stories as self contained, the greater public fails to take into account lived experiences of marginalized people. Instead of learning that differences are beautiful and make people unique, Marvel seeks to wash that away in favour of a bland and comforting view of disabilities as “things one can overcome through internal strength.”
The reality is that disabilities are messy. Things are difficult when you live as a disabled person. And erasing those things, and especially erasing a disabled character’s past experiences of hardship allow abled folks to be more comfortable. Because the reality is that disabled people suffer through a lot due to systemic ableism, but we can’t be talking about that in Hollywood now can we? Can’t stir the status quo too much. Nor can we question protestant work ethic and how it treats the disabled as cannon fodder to be put through the grinder of capitalism, until they break under the strain.
This same logic in Hollywood is applied to LGBT couplings in fiction in shows and movies.
For example, in Vampire in The Garden, relationships between vampires and humans are taboo. The world is a post-apocalyptic frozen hellscape where human beings hate art and music, and vampires seek to preserve what remains of these human masterpieces.
The focus is on the relationship between Momo, the human daughter of a high ranking military official, and Fine (fee-nay) the princess and soon-to-be queen of the vampires. During a battle that breaks out, Momo runs from her abusive mother, only to escape into a warzone. Fine sees Momo, and saves her, due to her similarity in appearance to Fine’s previous lover.
Fine then takes her back to her mansion. Momo is understandably skeptical of the vampire princess, as she has been indoctrinated by her culture to hate vampires and see them as violent beings. Ironically, vampires see humans exactly the same way.
After the characters go through more hardships, we are shown a city that is split in half between vampires and humans. And yet, they somewhat cooperate. Even later we finally reach Aria’s (Fine’s former deceased human lover) so called “Eden.” A place where vampires and humans coexist.
Unfortunately this turns out to be a place that has no bearing in reality, and Eden turns out to be more of a nightmare than a paradise.
In the end, Fine dies defending Momo from both the vampires and the humans chasing them. The ending in the far future indicates that Momo succeeded in creating Eden, and is seen as perfectly happy despite having lost Fine.
It’s easy to look at this in a purely in-universe perspective. But when viewed in the context of films and shows about queer women; the message is obvious. That to be queer, means that you invite disaster upon yourself, and that nothing will work out for you, and you will end up being happy, or tragically sad after losing your dearest loved one.
Of course there are cultural differences in Japanese and American representation of WLW relationships.
The difference being that the Americanized version takes the relationships seriously, and thus prefers a more grim end. While the Japanese version believes that WLW relationships are merely a daydream, a diversion from the reality of marrying a man and preserving the family bloodline/name. Which is reflected in “Vampire in the Garden” in the ending scene of Momo rocking a baby in her arms (which is likely hers).
Just as in Vampire in The Garden, we have the same trope in Puella Magi Madoka Magica, which might be even worse. I won’t explain everything as it’s been years since I watched it. The plot of Morbius as a whole has very little relevance to his experiences as a formerly disabled person. And, AND, we never see Morbius become weak as a result of his vampirism aside from the two times he goes without blood in a safe environment. The short of it is that Homura becomes an evil goddess and traps Madoka in another world because she’s fallen in love with her. Homura’s Soul Gem is revealed to have been “corrupted” by her love for Madoka.
It’s obvious in the assumption that Homura’s queer love for Madoka has corrupted her Soul Gem. The creator views WLW relationships as evil, obsessive and unhealthy, and as relationships that distort reality in a negative and corrupting way. The ending of the final film adaptation of the anime paints a fairly clear picture. Madoka is trapped in an endless loop, to live out her life in a world of Homura’s own making until she finds a way to escape.
In universe, it can be given any meaning the viewer wishes; and this is a big problem. The meta of the work is overlooked by the general public. This is mainly because marginalized issues aren’t taken seriously by the general public; consequently, marginalized opinions on a piece of media are ignored. Creating a cycle where marginalized folks aren’t allowed to talk meta about fiction without being slammed for it.
And while you can still enjoy the work, on a meta level it doesn’t make the work any less filled with harmful tropes.
Similarly unhappy WLW relationships can be seen in, “Blue is the Warmest Colour,” where two women end up in a passionate relationship only for it to turn very sad and unfulfilling. In “The Walking Dead” Denise is summarily killed in an episode with no resolution for Tara in sight. And in the game “Life is Strange” Chloe is sacrificed after kissing Max, in order to save Arcadia Bay, and it is implied to be the “good ending” to the game.
Just as Morbius fails to capture the disabled experience, and to tell a disabled story. Many WLW stories fail to show happy relationships between two women. And the influence of the writers cannot be ignored. If it is, we lose the ability to have proper representation that marginalized folks so dearly desire. And the public conversation of being marginalized is pushed even further down into the dirt.
As a result of a lack of representation, there are large fandoms for these pieces of media where the endings are changed. Aspects of the original works are fixed to be more friendly to marginalized folks. This is why there are hardcore fandoms where people argue over which characters should be together, and about whether or not a character was canonically trans; cough cough, Danganronpa, cough.
It’s not just a matter of being “seen” in media. That is part of it. But it is also a matter of people wanting to look at a character in a show related to them; to be able to enjoy a fictionalized fantasy without having to see their fictional counterpart being tortured or killed.
There are a lot of minorities who are tired of sad stories, of stories about our real life struggles. We just want to see ourselves as happy. Shows like Heartstopper do this well, they act as fantasies for queer people to escape into. We desperately need more shows like this, and without that metatextual criticism, we can’t argue in favour of shows with positive representation and happy endings.
Metatextual criticism is very very important for marginalized people to be heard. And it is far too easy for people to just say, “Sometimes a story is just a story,” without any ounce of critical thought to what the writer’s intentions were for the piece.
So when you hear someone bring up meta criticism of a work, really listen, and really think about what people are saying about their experiences. About what kind of hole a piece of media leaves behind. About good pieces of media where things are done right. And also consider why media such as Morbius and Madoka Magical Girl are so poorly written.