This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
That was sad. On the one hand he has a great attitude (in some ways) towards representation, believing that characters need to be real characters etc. and not perfect cookie-cutter superheroes.
On the other, despite what he said I knew that none of the characters were in real danger. Even knowing that Wildbow has killed viewpoint characters in the past, Pale has just gone a bit too far for that. The main characters (14 year old girls) are always talking to each other like you'd expect characters in a modern therapy textbook to talk, including frequent discussion of boundaries by name. Maybe to him this seems like good communication, but to me they seem like aliens born from Milquetoast Modern Progressivism vats rather than from mothers, who will continue gargling the detritus of their own afterbirth for the rest of their lives in order to train themselves to never have any opinions not exactly 100% conforming to the party line.
I have many other objections, but what it boils down to is that Wildbow is a fantastic author, but chooses to make his story a vehicle for progressive ideology without meaningfully challenging even its smallest detail.
Some examples:
They live in a universe where all gods exist and are quite powerful and genuine faith is a strong protection, but there are no Christians to be found anywhere. I get that this can be a tough issue (you are essentially "fictionalizing" God by lumping him in with greek gods etc) but you'd expect at least one Christian character given all the much more fringe types of people being represented.
The universe in general seems perfectly fine with sexual progressivism where I would expect it to be extremely strict. For instance, the universe is quite traditional in interpreting a sword as "masculine" and a chalice as "feminine" and will partially define your role in the universe according to which of these you choose, and the corresponding gender, but then has no issue with anything else you'd expect. A universe so rooted in tradition would have little patience for female breadwinners, let alone something like transgenderism.
There are no caricatures of any kind--for instance, no native american shaman practitioners--even though I'd expect that sort of archetype to have a lot of power in this universe.
Going back to point #1, no paladins or priests even though they should be quite powerful.
No extremely traditional / homophobic / transphobic / etc. Others, except for perhaps some misogyny, though I'd expect the other categories to be much more rooted in tradition
Lots of hand-wringing about pedophiles going after 16 year olds, but also celebration of a 14 year old's sexual awakening, as well as countless references to extreme sex acts around a character who is mentally ~10 years old.
No in-universe attention, no matter what, given to the possibility that someone could use Practice to change their mind rather than their behavior, even though things like "spirit surgery" are major plot points so it's clearly possible. Zed sacrifices a lot to be a man rather than a woman rather than just snipping that desire in the bud. Given the book's internal logic I don't think that doing so would be a good idea, but I do think the possibility should at least be mentioned even if rejected immediately.
If I'd kept a list while reading through the book I'm sure I'd have dozens to hundreds of better examples, but for now this will have to suffice.
I see that a lot in modern fantasy/urban fantasy genre, every faith or religious tradition is true except Christianity. Makes it a bit awkward if you're including any Jewish/Muslim characters, since the idea of the One God is shared in all those traditions, but they get treated more for exoticism points than rigorous theology (Jewish kabbalah for the equivalent of magic-using and so forth).
So everyone from animists to Zoroastrianists can have functional, working divine rituals and miracles but Christianity is only a made-up story. Depending on the particular writer, this can be done reasonably well (if stretching credulity - I'm thinking of a series in which demons and Hell are very real, but the Devil is absent and nobody has any clue if God is real, not real, or what is going on there) to the laugh-out-loud (Bryan
Singer'sFuller's, I mixed up my gay Hollywood Bryans, version of "American Gods" and the Easter episode, where we must take Eostre/Ostara as the real, original goddess and the Christians just stole that. Moreover, there are multiple versions of Jesus, but only One Original Version of all the other gods - so it's not "believers create the gods in their own image, so we can have various versions of any god, the god is not pre-existent" except for Christianity).Why I say that's laugh-out-loud is because it's not the real story, but it's a commonly accepted new myth of our times. Ah, well!
EDIT: I think it's because the writers all accept that the gods don't really exist, so it's easy to use them in their works and treat them as though they do exist, in the terms of their various myths and cultures. Christianity isn't that simple, though, because for Western writers it was recently, and still is in areas, the dominant religion and treated as real. So treating the Christian God as real in your fiction is equivalent to saying "I believe this is real". Which is a problem, if you're non-Christian or an atheist.
To take the Chesterton quote from "Heretics":
I could write about Thor or Sekhmet or Nuwa and treat them seriously within-universe, because I don't believe in them. It would be like inventing my own pantheon and writing about them. But if I write about the Blessed Trinity or Jesus, I'm writing about a living belief. If I share that belief, I'm going to treat God differently than the gods. If I don't share that belief, then writing in tune with how Christians generally express beliefs will leave me open to "but do you believe/support this? don't you realise that it's all homophobic [tick off bingo card of bad things]?" If I don't write in tune (Jesus is the hippy peacenik commie revolutionary who is against The Man but doesn't claim to be any more divine than the rest of us who all have God within us) then I'm still doing something that is going to be perceived as a challenge to orthodoxy and will be treated by some as "yeah, stick it to those bigots!" or celebrated by some as "now this is the kind of Christianity I can accept/I believe in" or criticised by some as "this is all hogwash". This is likely to get me dragged into arguments I'm not intending to have (unless I'm Philip Pullman, writing my Why Yes I Am An Atheist, Take That C.S. Lewis! anti-Narnia novels).
Frankly, it'll be a lot less hassle for me to write about Thor. Nobody is going to get bent out of shape about that, except maybe a few revivalist Norse pagans, and how many of them are sensitivity readers?
Well, if you have a religion that explicitly claims only their God is real, and all other gods are fake or demons, then someone writing an urban fantasy where "gods" are real pretty much has to decide whether or not the Christians (and Muslims and Jews) are right in this universe. I've seen some fiction and RPGs that kind of tried to handwave this, but Christians will inevitably be offended at Jesus being treated as just another source of exorcism points, while pagans will be offended at any implication that their gods aren't real. And the best reaction you can hope for from Muslims is that they don't read it.
I mean, yeah, this is kind of a central premise of fantasy in general. It's simply set in a world that's not accurate to real life. I don't care about that, I just care that the world follow its own internal rules rather than break them in order to make certain groups even more wrong. In a world where people's belief creates gods, you have to justify why the largest group on earth somehow hasn't created a god. In a world where gods are powerful beings that people believe in, you have to justify why (at the very least) no god has filled in for the (for some reason) nonexistent Christian god in order to gain more influence.
EDIT:
I think the big thing is that if you are trying to set something in the modern world, ideally your magic system explains to an extent why the world exists as it currently does. If Jesus is just another source of exorcism points, why is Christianity by far the biggest religion with a strong tradition of exorcism? Why is Christianity so much bigger in general, with such different beliefs? Presumably if gods were real then religions which believe that multiple gods exist are going to outcompete religions that assert that there's only one god; adherents to the latter are going to be getting smitten left and right.
I don't attribute malice to these authors at all, I think they just have stories that they want to write that aren't 100% internally consistent, which is fine. The issue is when they build these worlds which aren't accurate to reality, then use them to make points about things which are accurate to reality. In a world where all gods are real, Christianity would be vastly different than it is in real life. But take your world where all gods are real, then plop Christianity down in the middle of it unaltered, and of course it will look silly because that belief system wouldn't have grown in that world organically.
Iirc, the reasoning was explicitly Doylist. Wildbow mentioned at some point that it seemed likely to turn into giant flaming culture wars and so he decided to just kind of ignore the entire glaring topic.
I figured, and he's done a pretty good job with that aspect of it altogether, but he's still very much fighting against Christian morality without really addressing the source of that morality. As one example, how about marriage? Marriage is literally a vow, generally to love and protect your spouse, but I haven't heard of a single practitioner getting forsworn due to a divorce. So maybe practitioners don't make the same vows? It raises all sorts of questions because you really would expect marriage to be just as if not more significant than a familiar. People should get forsworn for cheating on each other all the time.
As another example, hospitality is a big thing in-story, and to break hospitality is to invite loads of bad karma if not worse. How about responsibility to your family? This should be just as important but the universe seems to care very little for it, not penalizing parents for mistreating their children or children for rebelling against their parents.
So, totally separate from the whole god question, the nature of the universe should be inclined towards very traditional morality but isn't, and my assertion is that this is simply because Wildbow created an internally consistent magic system and then slanted it slightly to be more progressive. There's no way that a magic system that wants people to fit into clearly defined roles would like people being genderfluid or polyamorous.
btw I edited my previous comment just as you added that one, if you want to respond to the edit.
This is actually a low-key important part of the story, though I think there's only 1-2 explicit conversations about it. Practitioner couples write up elaborate contracts, complete with punishment provisions and escape clauses, and then swear to follow the contract. They're taught from a young age to never make a promise to anyone else, especially in the heat of love/affection, and then their marriage traditions bend over backwards to ward off the possibility of foreswearing. And this has a bunch of downstream effects on practitioner culture, when every marriage is calculating and transactional and all human relationships are missing a core element of good faith and comradery.
By what standards? I'd say historically, "child abuse" was common and often understood as being necessary.
This seems really uncommon and difficult. It's quite possible that precedent and karma does factor in here.
I actually liked how this was handled with Zed. It took considerable care and effort to essentially submit a "change of identity form" to the spirits.
Well, Helen's family springs to mind, they must fail any reasonable standard.
I agree with your point on marriage, but the point is that even emphasizing it to that degree seems a bit off to me. The universe itself should enforce marriage as its own Ritual, like a familiar ritual, aside from any explicit promises you make as part of it. Marriage is more than a contract and you shouldn't be able to simply define it differently using a few written words and expect the universe to comply, any more than you can just define a Demesnes to remove the part where you have to face challengers.
As far as Zed, it was handled as well as it could be, given that the universe is sympathetic. My issue is with the universe being sympathetic at all. I get that Wildbow doesn't want to write a story where the laws of reality are transphobic (though I'd argue that's all semi-realistic stories lol) and he's doing a good job given that constraint, but it does still produce inconsistencies.
I don't know that the standard is reasonable by modern sensibilities. Helen was given a dangerous opportunity for incredible power, and the whole schtick of it was that it had to be hidden from the spirits. The Graubard's might be a better example, but even then, they're "fixing" and "improving" their children.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link