Contemplations on a parent’s discomfort with buying violent toys, exploring how perceptions of play and consequences have changed across generations.
Violence in the absence of consequences is a hard concept to convey to a child. I guess that is why I find it hard to buy toy guns or soldiers for my kid. The fact that I feel so uneasy to do something I did myself at his age got me thinking about violent toys or more, what were the expectations of how we were supposed to play with them.
Obviously, the first thing that comes to mind is you have two sides. On one side, there are the “good” guys. They are righteous in their wielding of death. The heroes who, through great sacrifice, make the world safer by eliminating the other side: the “bad” guys. With that black and white viewpoint, it makes it simple to assume that it could be healthy for a kid to act out a battle of two opposing sides, if one is justified by a noble cause.
But of course, reality isn’t that simple. The good guys aren’t always good, and even some are driven by revenge to such a degree that their being blinded by it is a trope. And then you have the bad guys which could just as well be misunderstood or misguided people who have fallen for the lies of an eccentric tyrant. All the foot soldiers being merely fodder for the good guys doesn’t seem to fit either.
With all of this, I began to think back on how my brother, and I played with our action figures. Being the generation of millennials that were young enough to remember the Gulf War being such a one-sided wipe-out, the big conflict that stood out to us was the Vietnam War. We idolized the fighters of the bush, holding their M-16s and stepping through rice paddies. Sure, there were other wars, and movies that glorified them like The Great War or World War II, but with the Vietnam conflict, the films were over-the-top with violence and gore, but at the same time hinged on the revisionist belief that America would’ve won had it not been for the reluctance of our population to really go full tilt.
This is a disgusting over-simplification of it, but we were about 7 and 10, so were quite limited in our ability to understand geopolitical conflicts.
With all of that in the forefront of our media, we would take up sticks and creep through our own backyard woods as guerrillas fighting an invisible army. I don’t remember if there were any racial undertones to our playing, but there had to be for us to always assume the “bad guys” were the ones fighting off a foreign invader in their own country. Freedom was the antithesis of communism we were always taught and our action figures too fought off the evils of a faceless enemy.
That anonymity is something that struck me when thinking back on all of this. We never used our Cobra action figures to fight the G.I. Joes. They were united in a common cause against enemies without faces or names. They were everywhere until they were dead or we or them retreated. Our missions were organized. The units were made up of Joes that had been drafted. Yes, just like in the Vietnam War.
This is probably a good place to segue bit to explain that our G.I. Joes were definitely soldiers, but first they were people (or dolls if that makes it easier). They had cardboard box homes, worked at cardboard box jobs, ate play dough food, and did their best to live normal lives when not on active duty. Each had a bank account with money, bills, hopes and dreams. In the vast town where they all lived, they would greet each other and have get-togethers. It was a nice life until your number got called up and you were transferred to the military base.
The consequences of the violence we pretended to inflict on that invisible enemy came in the form of loss of limbs, mental breakdowns, and also just the stresses of leaving your restaurant behind because you were needed at the front. The fight was to preserve life in that cardboard town. To preserve the principles that made up a functioning society.
When one got called up, their friends would join them for a farewell party and when they were gone, those same friends would worry. We played war, but because of our idolization of the Vietnam conflict, it was impossible to leave out the social aspects of what being drafted and fighting in a foreign place meant to those making the sacrifice.
Looking back, one of the biggest reasons we built those playsets for our toys was because we were quite poor in those days. We had action figures, some vehicles, and a good amount of imagination. Had we had the big sets, the real massive ones, we might have played differently. But the biggest reason we did it, well, because it was damn fun. Building a little house with separate rooms, furniture, working water with makeshift juice box plumbing was the highlight of our day. Every piece of cardboard that came into our house got cut-up, taped, and colored until it was another feature of the town. Our whole basement was a sprawling metropolitan complete with roads, post office, a “Diet Pepsi” factory, a cozy bookstore, several restaurants and all of it was teeming with life.
We played war, but because of our idolization of the Vietnam conflict, it was impossible to leave out the social aspects of what being drafted and fighting in a foreign place meant to those making the sacrifice.
In the solemn occasion of a G.I. Joe too far broken to continue on, their friends would gather in the small backyard of our house and there would be a ceremony before he was buried six inches in the ground. The consequences to the violence made us appreciate what we could yet understand. It made us aware that things we saw in movies and TV were far more complicated than just good vs evil. That fun we had primed us to question war.
As seriously as we took G.I. Joes, my brother ensured we took playing WAR just as serious. That was a big thing. We didn’t play “army” or “soldier”. What we played was WAR. There were holes in the ground with punji sticks and other traps that we had to create or avoid. It was serious business to us. In that pre-9/11 world, five kids could walk through the sewage creeks of the neighborhood decked out in camo gear that we procured cheap from the army surplus store carrying either sticks or toy guns with electrical tape around the bright orange barrels.
It was always about the reality of conflict. We rarely reveled in what was supposed to be the fun of the whole thing. Which is why we didn’t play G.I. Joes much with other kids. We had our own world in which the battle was waged not just in the jungle, but at home.
Something adults always forget, and I feel like I’ve forgotten until writing this, is that toys are more than the packaging or advertising says they are. Kids can make anything out of anything. They are not bound to play house or war. They can make up any game that is fun to them and they need the space and encouragement to do so.
