Crime Stories And Criminal Protagonist

domisotto 2020-10-29 02:40:30 UTC #22

Oh, yeah, I know, but even then, the Rich Boy always had possessive or unpleasant streak. An arranged marriage or a crappy boss, or wanting to bed her in revenge for some weird misunderstanding or whatnot.

HGohwell 2020-10-29 02:42:47 UTC #23

I must have got lucky on a lot of mine (or have mentally blocked the bad ones). Most I remember are reasonable to standard romance jerk levels. Not that standard romance jerk levels are great (I never did understand why women in romance movies pick these guys but whatever) but they were no worse than normal.

cherrystark 2020-10-29 02:43:08 UTC #24

I've never understood the appeal of those stories. Sure, lots of money could be nice but there is something precious about having a space that's yours and you're safe in. I've read some of these stories and she's basically a prisoner in a gilded cage and if she tries for freedom, she's met with violence.

HGohwell 2020-10-29 02:44:19 UTC #25

Haha also my mum, who is very much into these "trashy romance novels" is of the opinion any rich guy is a criminal anyway. "No one has that much money without doing something shady" she says.

cherrystark 2020-10-29 02:49:34 UTC #26

She probably has a point. It also bugs me when the MC finds out about the criminal activity, they're cool with it. Aside from the story justifying the violence, in one werewolf story I read, the guy brutaly kills someone in front of her and the MC is like "yeah, strength. I support you, hubby" and she was supposed to be all sweet and innoncent.

HGohwell 2020-10-29 02:53:33 UTC #27

Oh yeah this. Not just romances but in general. Like, you've just found out about a loud of criminal/violent activity. Please freak out just a little. Even just a little. And then they try to justify it with "well they've had a messed up childhood" or "they have a messed up personality" and that's why the except it so easily, when we've seen nothing about that before. Like, I'm cool with someone accepting crime easily, if it's foreshadowed and set up that they're like totally amoral or apathetic before hand. I nearly liked the Netflix Death Note movie for this. Mia (was it Mia they called her?) being really into the killing and the driving force was a pretty cool idea if not amazingly executed.

domisotto 2020-10-29 03:11:31 UTC #28

an atavism after millennia of drilled-in passivity and unworthiness in the women. It doesn’t disappear just because more options for self-realization and taking charge become available.

But, it also parallels an unlikely hero who pretty much nearly dies, but in the end wins.

Lol, don’t ask me, I like writing triumphant womanhood and matriarchy.

amortelito 2020-10-29 04:59:21 UTC #29

I'm not familiar with any Mafia comics/movies/books.
About romanticizing criminals I'm thorn. I love a lot of villains and I think it's okay to make them sympathetic as long as they don't justify their crimes.

On the other hand, I can't stand drug cartel movies or series. I can't wait for the drug lord to fucking die in a painful way. I feel no sympathy whatsoever for them and I don't care for their "human" side. I understand this is fiction but seeing how cartels affect my country I really can't fully enjoy this characters in fiction. They are scum and they deserve nothing.

Sorry for the rant, If anyone likes drug cartel series I don't judge you.

Samuraiflame 2020-10-29 05:32:51 UTC #30

I find it interesting that certain countries/cultures are a lot more sensitive about their organized crime represented in fiction than others. Lately I've seen some frustration by Italians about the Godfather and other Mafia-inspired media because they have had family or history of being personally affected, which is totally valid. I would say the Chinese Triad is also always portrayed negatively, but that's just from all the Chinese movies I've seen growing up.

On the other hand, the Yakuza video game series and other Yakuza themed manga, anime, movies and etc. are super popular in Japan. (Heck, there's that game interview that someone did a while ago where they had actual yakuza members play the games lol) But in reality, I would say the average Japanese person is still aware of the atrocities and dangers of the actual yakuza, and the public opinion of them is that they're still Bad. It just seems that they have their own 'caricature' in media that people accept as just another character archetype, rather than a romanticized version of actual criminals.

At the end of the day, crime dramas are popular and the majority of people who aren't personally affected by them are intrigued by the underworld. There's nothing you can really do about the people who it might hit uncomfortably close to home for (or those that can't separate fiction from reality...), so I would say just write your criminals like how you would write any other anti-hero or morally grey character. Organizations as a whole can still be Evil and Bad, but the people working under them aren't necessarily always 100% black or white. (And I would say that applies to more than just criminal organizations coughs)

Llyrel 2020-10-29 07:05:37 UTC #31

And this is exactly how I myself feel about the mafia genre as a whole

As I said before, I won't scream at people who like the genre or anything like that. But yep, portraying mobsters as the heroes (note: "heroes" as in "good guys, role models, people to admire", not as in "protagonists") is something that irks me to no end.

Which isn't to say that people shouldn't write about mobsters being involved in a love story at all: as awful as they are, these guys are human too and they do have relationships in real life (with some of them being quite famous, too), so it'd make no sense for me to say that nope, you should never ever write about a mobster falling in love. Also, as long as proper research is done and the work of fiction shows the dark side of the mafia, I'm more than okay with it. I probably still won't read it, because generally speaking heist stories are not a genre I have an interested in, but you do you.

I also agree that one way to make people to "root" for the criminal would be to make their opponent a much worse person... however, I find that kind of thing often leads to the whole "the clan only kills people of other clans, no innocents involved ever" which kind of defeats the idea of showing the true dark side of the mafia. As I said in the other thread, mafia has absolutely no qualms killing innocents, and writing a story where "yeah, they're bad, but they only kill people who are worse than them" does fit into what I'd call "romanticizing" the issue.
Same goes for portraying mobsters as the Robin Hood of the story: in my country especially, that kind of attitude is not fiction. It's reality. The mafia presents itself as the only thing that can "save" you from a government that just won't care. They pretend to help you, they give you "jobs", money to live... and then, if you don't do exactly what they say, they kill you and your entire family. Making you believe that they're the good guys and that they're some kind of rebels going against the rules to help people is exactly one of the most used tactics of the mafia over here to recruit people. So, once again, not exactly the kind of stuff I'd like to read about, unless it's being handled with the necessary care (read: the true consequences of the Robin Hood attitude are being shown and they're not just left at the "yeah, they're rebels, but good rebels" stage).

As I said, however, these are just my views as someone who lives in a city/country plagued by the mafia. The thing that irks me about it is that, unlike with most horror movies where the murderer/monster/evil guy is CLEARLY evil and you're rarely going to see them being depicted by its author as "omg, so sexy!!!1!", unlike war movies where the war IS usually depicted as something that kills people, no matter on which side they are, heck, unlike with Death Note which truly makes you question what the line between good and evil is... with the mafia genre, the kind of attitude I see the most on the Internet is "GUNS, SEXY SUITS AND ROMANTIC ADVENTURES, OMG MAFIA IS SO COOL!!!" which... really rubs me the wrong way.

I don't know how many of you are from the US, but to put things in context, it'd be similar to having someone creating a whole romance genre about... school shooters. Y'know, stories about how these "poor kids" are just "misunderstood", how they're "actually good guys" who got tired of a "society who constantly bullies them", so they decide to create an alliance to "get rid of all them popular kids" as a "revenge". It does happen in real life, am I right? A lot of school shooters are outcasts who could never fit into society. However, now imagine the school shooter in this kind of stories being constantly depicted as a romantic hero who "just wants to make the world a better place" because "society failed him". The kids who get shot, instead, are always depicted as the "bad guys" who "deserved it" and nobody will cry for them. And then, imagine having an entire fandom of people who are not from your country and who never witnessed the horror of a school shooting going around screaming stuff like "omg, school shooters are SO SEXY, I wish there was one in my school!", "yes, plz, gimme a sexy school shooter from the US!" and "shooters are so heroic, omg!!!! -swoon-"
If this example sounded utterly disturbing to you, then I guess you can understand how I (and many other Italians) feel about the mafia genre.

amortelito 2020-10-29 07:40:51 UTC #32

I absolutely agree! You read my mind about the way they portray criminals as some cool sexy outlaws.

I am a defender of fiction and I think tv/comics/movies are not to blame for crimes. At the same time it's infuriating to see so many deaths and pain caused by mafia/cartels and then see a fuckin poster promoting the movie of a famous drug lord as if he was some kind of rockstar.

In social media I have seen people posting how drug cartels "care for small communities" because they sent them food and medicines...well they wouldn't need charity if the cartels hadn't stole their lands to grow drugs. So maybe this glamorized version of the bad people is contributing to the way people see them and that's scary.

Llyrel 2020-10-29 07:47:10 UTC #33

Exactly this! I also think the great majority of those who write this sort of genre do not have any malicious intentions and I definitely don't think fiction is to blame for crimes.

...But yep, as I mentioned in the other thread seeing this glamorized version of the mafia/drug cartels everywhere with little to no research about these issues to counterbalance the misinformation definitely doesn't help getting rid of harmful stereotypes

SilentHamster102 2020-10-29 08:12:47 UTC #34

I actually very like mafia movies and so on, but if they're at least trying to be realistic and making the research how are things work in those organizations. I'm not too good with a glamourized view on organized crime, because it's not how things going IRL, and overall I'm not so fond of a glamourized view on everything in every genre. And at the same time, I'm a not a moralist and completely fine with villain protagonist and won't make any drama of it.

I used to read some books about operations of an organized crime, and it's really interesting, there could be good movies or fictional novels about it while keeping it's realistic (and they're existing of course).

The last one was a publicist book about organized crime in St.Petersburg in the 1990-s and that's really sad that Russian culture is too weak to produce something decent in this genre. Just fictionalize those events and exaggerate them a bit and there would be a really nice book or a movie. But it's other thing already, not related to the topic.

domisotto 2020-10-29 13:02:42 UTC #35

The attraction of a Criminal as the protagonist is the high stakes existence in the real world settings.

Very few professions deal with matters of life and death, and have their lives on the line on a daily basis—and all of them are heavily regulated, and incomprehensible to a non-insider, I.e. doctors, police, spies, PI, soldier.

A lot of audience does not want to read fantasy and sci-fi, the genre we may want to write, because it takes efforts to get into each setting. It is particularly true for SciFi that is more variable than fantasy and even harder to get into in the Internet format.

The same problem is inherent to historic fiction and anything involving political plots that are not rudimentary.

You have a niche that masquerades as realistic fiction, like action movies a-la Mission Impossible or John Whick, but is lite fantasy.

Another advantage of contemporary setting is that women have freedom of movement and action. The only other genre that allows it is SciFi, and, as noted before, SciFi is one of the hardest genres to shift.

In terms of ethnic hatred, as an ethnic Russian who can enumerate exactly 2 non hostile portrayals of Russians in a gigantic body of media available to the English-speaking world, Victor Nikiforov in Yuri on Ice and Ilya Kuryakin in Man from Uncle, I believe that haters gonna hate.

The unfortunate consequence is that with the fixation on genetically appropriate fiction, I pulled a lousy card, lol, because neither the Russians are big consumers of English on-line fiction, nor is a Russian MC is a winning bid for hearts and minds of literally anyone else.

But such is life—finding the readers means finding what people want to read, and as far as romance is concerned, criminal contemporary romance is something that is both fun to write, and stands a better chance than more realistic romance or general fiction.

My first contemporary romance was about a male librarian struggling with binge eating disorder and a burned out athlete in a fairly realistic setting in Canada. Zero reads.

My fantasy didn’t go well either, matriarchal, Xianxia or Classic DnD...

My Demisex SciFi might as well not have existed.

But mafia romance did better than anything to date... no, not to the tune of millions of reads that the more succesfull writers could get, but people just read it, and for me it was the first ever win as an internet writer, and I will always love the genre because of it.

NickRowler 2020-10-29 13:09:02 UTC #36

I don’t like mafia movies. I had to watch The Godfather and Goodfellas for a film class. And I have also seen Scarface. These are considered critically acclaimed films. And while I liked the cinematography, I had similar issues with the stories. They are just boring. I don’t care about action, I don’t find gun violence exciting. I am not really a fan of the antiheroes in these types of films. I know these films tend to be popular with men, maybe because of their “men acting edgy and obnoxious “ vibe. And with something like Scarface, it just feels like glamourizing a psychopath.

SilentHamster102 2020-10-29 13:32:35 UTC #37

One of my favorite movies of all time, Red Heat. Very stereotypical, but cool anyway, like it since childhood.
But anyway, I agree with you.
Those hatred Russophobic stereotypes are so present in western media so I just avoiding to watch/read/anyway everything where is Russian character appears, counting it Russophpbic by default until it is proven otherwise (not by me, of course - critics, reviews, etc)

domisotto 2020-10-29 13:33:15 UTC #38

I didn’t see Godfather, but I read the book as a teen and I liked it. Plus, a few of the Italian productions about mafia vs police.

Before I wrote my romance, I watched Gooddfellows, Scarface and Casino, of which Goodfellows was my least favourite—and it is the most mundane, blue collar one too. But all of those movies sort of have suppressed narrators, probably lifted from the books. There was another one, I can’t remember the title, I just found so boring, I gave up. I think it was sort of Hollywood movie industry meets mafia.

What drew me far more though is Face Off and John Whick, both style wise and with the departure toward adventure and that unrealistic edge but still staying without the contemporary fiction space that people don’t need to make efforts to get into that I enjoy.

So, that’s what appeals to me when I write, and that’s what I pair with a romantic plot. My writing brand is escapism, and I am not going to be coy about it.

domisotto 2020-10-29 13:35:40 UTC #39

I avoided Red Heat

Jenny-Toons 2020-10-30 00:43:21 UTC #40

I don't mind crime media when it's done well. And by that, I mean when it's morally grey and peaks into the mind behind the criminal and still shows us "hey, this person is still kinda sus."

My pet peeve is when the author (not the character) puts in high stakes and refuses to let the consequences happen. They either sweep the crime under the rug with cheap baggage or have an extreme black/white view of crime, ignoring all of the factors that can play into why crime happens.

Don't give high stakes if you're not ready to go down that route. If you make your criminal a gun-carrying mass-murderer, don't try and say they're still a good person because they like dogs. No -- I wanna see their mindset: do they justify these killings? Does their background even suggest this was where they'd end up? Even more, I still want a message of "no one should want this lifestyle, and no one really asks for this -- but it happens"

It's kinda what I try to put into my own work (I've got a few crime comics in the making). I'm always thinking about how they feel about the crime they do, how it affects them mentally, emotionally, physically, etc. They all have their reasons for what they do (some better than others), but I don't shy away from the fact that they're still not all together. Hell, depending on the crimes they've committed, their baggage could never justify what they've done (no matter how much they try to say it does).

HGohwell 2020-10-30 01:00:28 UTC #41

This is a pet peeve of mine in like all genres except the comediest of comedies. And for all I love BSD and for all it handles its Mafia pretty well and gets the right balance of brutal and interesting, it's so bad for this in regards to the story over all. They recently (in manga terms) had a guy lost both hands trying to save his friends and we thought cool that's gonna be interesting to see how he handles this, then oh yeah there's someone who can heal injuries, but wait she's just had a break down because it turns out her power to bring people back from the dead might not be good for the mental health of the people she's bought back so maybe she won't use it and there will be consequences but no, no she's fine, she healed him like 2 chapters later, everyone's find, no lasting trauma or consequences. This is a really bad habit the author has, they set up life or death stakes and then back out at the last second so often.

I think this ties a lot to what I was saying about commitment. Don't set something up if you're not willing to do it properly.

This is really good advice for writing these things, I think (and in general). I think this is one of the reasons Black Lagoon is one of my favourites, because no one is trying to justify themselves. They're pretty much all open about "it's a shitty life and we're shitty people, but it happens don't try and romanticize me" which is a really interesting stance for the characters themselves to take. Of course, it does depend on the type of crime story, but yeah, when you're up on the darker more realistic scale, I think it's important not to shy away from these things. If anything, I'd think it'd be part of the draw (while not perfect, things like Dexter, part of the draw was seeing into the mind of a murderer in detail.)