Sink or Swim Mentors

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

This is a trope that I really HATE. Technically, it's not just in speculative fiction, but it is so very prominent there, especially with any kind of magical mentor.

I remember a passage in a Discworld novel talking about how, actually, it was very inspiring when Granny Weatherwax left you to deal with a situation on your own. It meant she believed in you, that you could handle it yourself. She trusted you to deal with things.

What this means in practice, though, is a mentor who is making a bet that she has accurately gauged your ability to deal with a lethal situation, and the stakes for that wager are your life.

(A related trope that really drives me up the wall is Lethal Training. If the training, by design, can kill you, it's not really training, it's "throwing an untrained student into a deadly situation for no good reason.")

[SlackerinDeNile]

It depends on the context for me, if it's used to display the brutality of an organisation, way of thinking or society it can be effective.
Also in real-life training for certain army regiments or international agents tends to get very lethal so if the character is a new recruit for something like that then it makes sense for it to be very dangerous and\or exotic.

There's also faux-sink or swim scenarios, in which the student doesn't know that they're being put through a simulation or scripted event, which I don't mind either as long as they're being applied by a mentor who knows what they're doing and the student is clearly intelligent enough to be put in that situation.

[Naldiin]

This trope also irritates me, but for different reasons. I'm in a fairly competitive graduate program and it's sort of a real-world near-equivalent to the sort of 'sink-or-swim' training-from-hell, just without the lethal consequences. You have to put in a ton of time and effort to even be here, so there's a big sunk cost if you fail. And failure is very possible, either by failing to complete (25%ish of people, maybe?) or by completing and failing to get a job (another 25%?) in a rough job market. Unlike in the movies, failure doesn't get you killed...but it does mean irrevocably wasting about a decade of your life and a ton of money. Often, the mentors (your advisors) don't really care much about their students, or don't have the social skills to really help even when they do care - it's compounded by often unclear or 'fuzzy' expectations.

The thing I see among my colleagues that I never see in fiction is the emotional and mental toll that kind of environment brings. A lot of my colleagues grapple with stress disorders and depression, or self-medicate (usually with alcohol and pot, which leads to other negative outcomes). And that's a group of people who are all, pretty much without exception, super-passionate and self-motivated about what they're doing.

That's not just anecdote, either - the rate of depression and mental illness is *very* elevated in graduate programs. One Berkeley study (link: http://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2015/ ... c-berkeley ) put the for depression in graduate students at around 45%, while another (link: http://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i32/Grap ... ealth.html ) suggests the figure is around 32%. For reference, the rate of depression in the US Military (!) is around 16% for deployed personnel on a lifetime basis (source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4100466/ ). Some of these studies actually suggest that the 'sink or swim' training in something like graduate school is actually worse for your mental health than actual combat - I make no claims on this, as I have not served.

In fiction, the 'training from hell' might make the hero self-doubt briefly before an uplifting montage. But we never see it break someone emotionally. We don't see people become self-destructive, or emotionally toxic. We don't see the depression, the mental illness or the substance abuse. Or else we get the Fremen, where living on a hard world has hardened them into super-soldiers but with exactly zero of the massive traumatic problems we would expect from a society that basically consists entirely of grown-up child soldiers. We're just never shown the broken men that kind of system produces.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

That...is a really good point I had never even considered. =o

[Naldiin]

That...is a really good point I had never even considered. =o

One thing I will add: there's a folk belief I've run into that this sort of mental illness - post-traumatic stress disorder, and the associated depression and other problems - is somehow an exclusively modern phenomenon, or that it is only confined to certain cultures or peoples. I sometimes hear that PTSD "first appeared" in the context of the First World War, for instance, or that some super 'badass' people (Knights, Zulu, the Fremen, Vikings, Samurai, whatever) wouldn't have suffered from it.

It's not true. Shell-Shock or PTSD didn't 'start' in WW1, it merely was first noticed in quantity there and was the first time that the phenomenon got a proper name. But you can see clear symptoms of PTSD, for instance, in the writings and literature from the Crimean War, or from the American Civil War. All over, all over the American Civil War.

Moving further back in time, into the pre-modern period ( = Ancient/Medieval) you can still find evidence, but you have to look harder, because those societies tended to stigmatize or normalize PTSD symptoms, and the historical sources for those periods are generally uninterested in talking about them. Every so often though - sometimes in a religious or superstitious context - you'll get references to extreme examples of PTSD symptoms (the less extreme examples almost certainly existed, but escaped notice by the sources). Famously, a Greek soldier at Marathon, Herodotus reports, was struck blind by the sight of the battle - he took no wound, but could no longer see ('hysterical blindness' or conversion disorder).

The Romans fought continuously - it's estimated that the average Roman male probably spent 7 to 10 years in the army actively deployed - and were as 'warrior' a warrior culture as you might imagine. But they had laws for soldiers who might injure themselves to avoid combat, and we hear reports of men who went mad with despair or terror in combat or sieges. I would suggest that Roman society, especially in the Republic, which was very much a society set up by soldiers (as all Roman adult males of property served), had a lot of cultural practices and institutions which might serve to soften the impact of trauma, or else to normalize that trauma.

It has also been suggested that different cultures will 'work out' that trauma in different ways, so the cultural context may change the symptoms of trauma. But the trauma is still trauma. So far as I can tell, there is no 'badass' culture which is immune to the terror of battle, or the trauma of watching a buddy injured or killed. What you are more likely to find are societies that aggressively discard the broken people (usually men) that war produces, stigmatizing them (as cowards, for instance).

So much of speculative fiction these days - both sci-fi and fantasy - is overrun with the 'cult of the badass' (phrase lifted from youtube's MrBTongue, link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek2O6bVAIQQ&t= ), that goes beyond lionizing courage and valor (virtues that remain important in our unstable world) to glorify callous violence and honestly sociopathic behavior. And while sometimes we're shown the cost in the dead, we're almost never shown the cost to the living. We never see the broken men and broken women whose lives are up-ended by trauma.

Fiction didn't used to be that way. The Odyssey is a story about a man who spent 10 years returning home from Troy, but who brought the war home with him in his heart. The Real Ultimate Badass of the Trojan War, Ajax, goes mad with violence and eventually turns his sword on himself - his violence consumes him. The other Real Ultimate Badass, Achilles, weeps openly at the loss of his best friend, gives violent vent to his frustrations, and eventually finds himself only able to properly grieve in the company of an enemy (Priam).

Or consider, for a more modern example, Frodo or Faramir from the Lord of the Rings. Frodo saves the world - but "I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me." Faramir (along with Eowyn), the moment his part in the war is ended, declares his intent never to war again, and instead to plant a garden and grow things. His regret at the violence he has to engage in is explicit in the text too, when he wonders about the sad tales that brought his slain enemies to his lands.

There's far too little of that in much of our modern speculative fiction.

[Madner Kami]

Lindybeige made a good video about the subject. In essence, PTSD is as old as humans facing things that overwhelm their psyche.

[LittleRaven]

What this means in practice, though, is a mentor who is making a bet that she has accurately gauged your ability to deal with a lethal situation, and the stakes for that wager are your life.

To be fair though, isn't the purpose of this trope to establish that the mentor is NOT a nice guy?

I mean, I'm thinking of the Dresden Files, where both Molly and Harry ended up with Sink or Swim Mentors...and both of them were/are horrible creatures. Harry's mentor scarred him so badly that when it came time for him to mentor Molly, he deliberately decided to go the very opposite route, basically softballing her every step of the way. (then he died, and it all went to hell)

I'm sure there are some examples where the mentor in question is cool/hot/awesome enough that people are willing to overlook the fact that they are obviously a sociopath, but in general, this is a negative trope, at least when it's played with lethal stakes, and as Naldiin's posts make clear, often even when it isn't.

edit - I really enjoyed both the videos posted in this thread. Thanks for sharing.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

What this means in practice, though, is a mentor who is making a bet that she has accurately gauged your ability to deal with a lethal situation, and the stakes for that wager are your life.

To be fair though, isn't the purpose of this trope to establish that the mentor is NOT a nice guy?

I mean, I'm thinking of the Dresden Files, where both Molly and Harry ended up with Sink or Swim Mentors...and both of them were/are horrible creatures. Harry's mentor scarred him so badly that when it came time for him to mentor Molly, he deliberately decided to go the very opposite route, basically softballing her every step of the way. (then he died, and it all went to hell)

I'm sure there are some examples where the mentor in question is cool/hot/awesome enough that people are willing to overlook the fact that they are obviously a sociopath, but in general, this is a negative trope, at least when it's played with lethal stakes, and as Naldiin's posts make clear, often even when it isn't.

edit - I really enjoyed both the videos posted in this thread. Thanks for sharing.

In my experience...no. It's usually backed up by their Omniscient Morality License and it's a big staple with mystic martial arts stuff and anime. In all the cases where I've seen it used, I can't think of a single example of the character being called out for it or answering for it in some poetic justice fashion. It's always just "tough lough" bullshit.

The example that really got me was...Granny Weatherwax. Firm but fair, tough old bird but ALWAYS morally in the right, the exemplar of grudging justice and shit like that. Terry Pratchett's darling. The heroine of Discworld.

For people who don't mind Discworld spoilers (re Sheperd's Crown)
Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead has never been a more appropriate song.

[LittleRaven]

Oh, well fair enough then. Yeah, that would definitely be annoying if it's supposed to be a positive thing.

[Independent George]

For what it's worth, I don't count any Discworld after Unseen Academicals as canon (I got as far as about 1/3 through Raising Steam, and gave up on Shepherd's Crown after about 50 pages). I suspect (but don't know for certain) that as Pratchett's Alzheimer's worsened, his 'dictation' involved a lot of ghostwriting from a worse writer. In my head, I Shall Wear Midnight was the last Discworld novel.

Up until then, Granny and Vimes were both good but deeply flawed individuals; Granny (and Nanny in a more subtle way) would generally do the right thing in a terrible way. Vimes went full Mary Sue as of Snuff (yes, I'm aware of the other thread, and this is one example of why I think it's still a useful term). All subtlety in characterization and dialogue disappeared after UA (which I thought was bad, but for different reasons) - it's such a night and day difference that I just don't believe it's the same writer. Good grief, that habius corpus joke in Snuff what I'd expect a twelve year old fanfic writer to come up with.

It's most obvious in Granny and Vimes (since they're the main protagonists of their respective series), but all the characters are written much more differently - Death starts making moral judgements on his clients, Vetinari gets vocally angry... It makes me sad because Pratchett's declining health was the most likely cause behind the declining quality, but that drift in the writing was sudden and unmistakable.