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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34549 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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One thing the Stormlight Archive does, which I quite like, is create fantasy races. By this I mean that the existing human races in the series don't correspond to our Earth ethnicities but rather take some racial features from some races and others from others. The kingdom most directly coded as "war-hungry imperialist americans" are fairly dark-skinned and have epicanthal folds, while the kingdom most coded as Chinese is more similar to white people. Maybe some other fantasy series do this too, but I'm not aware of any. I think it is one of many steps which can be taken to partially mitigate these sorts of objections to the work.

while the kingdom most coded as Chinese is more similar to white people

Which kingdom are you thinking of? My guess is Shinovar but I'm not sure

That's what I was thinking yeah.

World building is part of it - like the world of the stormlight archives is based on a rock pool he saw at the beach iirc, so the parshendi have crustacean features (although I always got more insect vibes from them) and the humans are transplants from another universe or something, so they settled like refugees and developed different cultures. Wait does this make Sanderson a hbd guy?

I always find those attempts very annoying. Not just due to the fact that it intentionally distorts basic intuitive assumptions that a fantasy desperately relies on to create a believable world. But that it's an obvious admission of the reality of those intuitive assumptions. It's only pretending they're not there because they obviously are there.

It's the equivalent of taking a Rubik's cube, recognizing that it does look satisfying when there is obvious order to the colors, jumbling it up until it's an incoherent mess and then presenting it saying 'There. Isn't this satisfying?' No. It's not. It's a jumbled incoherent mess and the only reason you jumbled it up is because you recognize order and the inherent reality congruent intuition everyone has about these things. But for reasons that are purely derived from modern political norms authors predictably and performatively distort them without acknowledging that without the intuition and order they would have nothing to write about in the first place.

But for reasons that are purely derived from modern political norms authors predictably and performatively distort them without acknowledging that without the intuition and order they would have nothing to write about in the first place.

I think this is true of plenty of other, more important things besides race. Things like gender differences, age differences, and sheer institutional inertia are often ignored to give heroes slightly better stories, even though ignoring them often defeats the purpose entirely if you think about it for too long.

Evil institutions are threatening because they're enormous and oppressive, so if the hero and a few sidekicks can take them apart in an afternoon, they shouldn't have been threatening to begin with. Female soldiers are incredibly exceptional because the average woman is so much weaker than the average man, so if your armies are full of women, this should no longer be a big deal because clearly in your fantasy world there are no strength differences. Age is similar--we give elves a lot of respect as people who have lived 100s or 1000s of years, but if an elf who has been 25 for 10,000 years is still a poor swordsman, elves should no longer earn such respect. If anything they should be denigrated for wasting so much time.

I'm trying to gesture here towards the general rule of "make exceptional thing normal, but continue to rely on our intuition of it as exceptional."

In other words, I agree that what you're describing can be an issue, but only when the narrative actually relies on it to any extent. Many other stories already rely on this sort of thing to much greater extents.

When it's done like this, I don't think it's anything all that bad, just a defense mechanism.

Wheel of Time did that, to an extent. The psuedo-Asian Borderlanders did have vaguely Asian appearances, but the Japanese and American Indian inspired Aiel are all blonde and redheaded white people and the Sea Folk are black.

Yeah, I read that series a long time ago but somehow didn't pick up on that. That's probably where Sanderson got that idea from.

The Wheel of Time (books) also does this. A lot of readers like to try and pattern match the various nations to various real-world nationalities, but it's pretty clear that Robert Jordan intentionally designed a lot of them to not match any we know in particular.

For sure, I think in WoT it's more cultural though. They're still supposed to be Earth ethnicities, just in a vastly different context.

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