[ SECRET POST #5446 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5446 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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10. [SPOILERS for Wheel of Time]



















Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #779.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I sort of agree, sort of disagree

I think the thing about these conversations is it seems like people can't help but collapse the fantastical elements of a setting into their real-world implications. When it comes to the idea of an evil race, for example - in the real world, the idea of an intrinsically evil race is both harmful and wrong, because human beings are a single race and the idea that certain peoples are evil is a tool for racism and oppression. But there is no reason that a fantasy or SF world couldn't just have an intrinsically evil race. Things can work differently in invented fictional world. You still should probably be really careful writing things that way because of the real-world connotations, or avoid it altogether. But a lot of the way that people talk about these issues just seems to ignore the fantastical and SFnal elements of the setting, as though depicting a fantasy race in a magical setting as intrinsically evil is really just the same as it would be if you did it in a real-world context. Fundamentally evil races in fantastic and SF fiction are not just straightforward equivalents of real world oppressed groups.

It reminds me a lot of the X-Men problem. The X-men comics often want to treat mutants as a metaphor for various real-world oppressed groups (for instance, black people or gay people). And that's fine as far as it goes - you can tell some really good stories using that framework. But you also can't lean on that framework too much, or take it too literally, or think too much about the implications of it. If you do, the analogy breaks down really quickly, for exactly the same reason: the X-men aren't just a real-world oppressed group. They also have a bunch of comic book stuff going on that absolutely doesn't have a parallel in real-world experiences or logic. Mutants have unrealistic, massively destructive superpowers and that's not a feature of the way that our world works. So the further you go in treating fictional superpowered mutants as a straightforward stand-in for oppressed groups, the more problems and dissonance you run into and the more you have to ignore the genre elements of the setting to make the analogy work.

Or I guess that's how I feel about it at least.

[(Anonymous)]

da That's a really good take on it imo. Thanks.

[(Anonymous)]

"Fundamentally evil races in fantastic and SF fiction are not just straightforward equivalents of real world oppressed groups."

In a vacuum, yeah. Considering nothing else, yeah. When the "fundamentally good" heroes who combat them are pretty much always straightforward equivalents of real world groups, things get dicey even if your evil race is the most unproblematic thing ever. There is not, in theory, anything wrong with having your evil race have dark skin, for example. Then you add, like 99% of the time, fundamentally "good" heroes and civilizations who are clearly straightforward equivalents of white Western Europe... lol

I'm just saying it's not the evil race that's necessarily the issue, but that having an evil race or the possibility that an evil race can exist, establishes in-world that other races can be and are inherently good. And that's a minefield nobody treads well

[(Anonymous)]

DA

I'm just saying it's not the evil race that's necessarily the issue, but that having an evil race or the possibility that an evil race can exist, establishes in-world that other races can be and are inherently good. And that's a minefield nobody treads well

yeah, this, Inherently always evil races stretch credulity in exactly the same way inherently always good ones do: it's just hard to believe if you look into it too much. If anything it leads to a world that seems to have even more evil in it than the real one: like in LOTR-world we know there are humans and hobbits and dwarves and elves who have done evil things - but we never see an orc do anything good. It's weird. It doesn't jibe with an intuitive understanding of sapient beings. (Tolkien dithered about this a LOT in his journals and letters, ultimately he realized it didn't work either and was always trying to write himself out of the logical hole he wrote himself into)

[(Anonymous)]

It doesn't jibe with an intuitive understanding of sapient beings.

I agree that it does jar against our intuitions. I don't think that's a reason that it can't be done. Science fiction and fantasy are full of things that jar against our intuitions, and don't follow the rules of the world as we're familiar with. An always-evil or always-good species is not, I don't think, more intuitively difficult to comprehend than a race of artificial intelligences, or a gestalt species, or the idea of experiencing all events through time simultaneously or chronologically, or whatever else.

And not only is that common in genre fiction, I think it's a really important and distinctive part of science fiction and fantasy as genres. That's the whole "cognitive estrangement" thing people talk about, basically. It's a feature of this kind of genre fiction, not a bug. It's one of the distinctive things that can make SF&F at its best really interesting and different from other kinds of fiction.

And I'm definitely not saying that this is actually a justification for every use of the trope. I think in most if not all cases it is really badly used. But I also think there is a level of complexity and nuance in thinking about SF&F elements in stories that people sort of skip over. Not just related to this topic, I think it's a really common thing.

[(Anonymous)]

"An always-evil or always-good species is not, I don't think, more intuitively difficult to comprehend than a race of artificial intelligences"

It is, though. Well - half right, half wrong.

The evil part is easy. They go around instinctively killing and looting and pillaging and enjoying generally being awful to everyone else. Cut and dried, everyone agrees what blatant evil is. And one good deed, even if gigantically Good, doesn't wipe out a history of causing tragedy and death. Easy peasy.

Now always-good... always-good is a minefield like I said. Because good doesn't work like evil does. Good is way more subjective, depending on the reader's perspective and opinions. Imagine the protest that would result if someone made a race, called it Good, and they were anti-choice because they believe life begins at conception. Based on a certain set of beliefs that is subjectively good, and based on another it's evil. It's not nearly as cut and dry. Plus, while one act of good cannot redeem someone's life of evil, one evil deed of enough magnitude can wipe out a legacy of altruism and make that character or race permanently non-Good. So it's a much harder line to walk, and a much harder thing to intuiitively comprehend

However, if we're establishing that alignment can be tied to biological race, then a Good race should be possible. But what would that race be like? No one would agree. So then we're back to looking at the Evil race, and if one side of it can be subjective then the other should be and must be, too, as opposed to an objective fact. This has nothing to do with bringing it into the real world or not, but having internal consistency with its own system. Either both Evil and Good labels are subjective or they're not

[(Anonymous)]

I agree that it is problematic and requires careful handling because of the real-world connotations! But I think talking about it requires moving between and dealing with both the real-world connotations, and the purely fictional parts where the fantasy or science fiction or comic book world is fundamentally different from our own and obeys a different logic.

[(Anonymous)]

DA

For example:

1a) Do not throw scrap metal at a living weapon.

1b) Do not be the person standing next to the moron throwing scrap metal at a living weapon.

2) The Universe doesn't care if you're having fun.

3) F x S = K. Freedom multiplied by Security equals the constant K.

4) Don't waste calories. ( In Transformers terms, life is too short for bad Energon, high grade, etc. )

And last but not least, old age is not for sissies.

--- Kup.

[(Anonymous)]

SA

Number three requires some explanation. In order to have some Freedom, you must give up some Security, and vice versa.

[(Anonymous)]

"those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety"

[(Anonymous)]

I feel silly, where is this a quote from? was it from IDW? It does sound familiar.

It's a parody...

[(Anonymous)]

The previous post is a parody of Larry Niven's 'Rules to Live By'.

The original list started off with "Never throw shit at an armed man."

Hope this helps.

Re: It's a parody...

[(Anonymous)]

oh! Thanks!

[(Anonymous)]

SA

Here is the relevant link!

https://larryniven.net/stories/nivens_laws_2002.shtml

Have fun reading it!

[meadowphoenix]

I think the thing about these conversations is it seems like people can't help but collapse the fantastical elements of a setting into their real-world implications.
You can and many people do have a philosophical disagreement with this type of convention that may be informed by, but is not necessarily alluding to or collapsing into, real world-implications. You are never going to be able to magic your way out of the issue of inherent traits without exculpating that race, because autonomy is required for evil and an absolute inherent nature of any trait makes true evil impossible. Once you give a race the free will necessary for "evil" you have to do some explaining about the inherent aspects, and yes, because humans don't really have a good handle on our messier selves, the fantasies humans write rarely can nail this down well. This is a common philosophical problem in thinking about beings; it can hardly be surprising people don't like reading about attempts to thread that needle in literature.

You may have some luck if you apply inherent alignment in all races consistently, or explain why it isn't consistent, which fantasies very rarely want to do because that would involve a philosophical discussion on how you get societies that in some way work cooperatively successfully enough for battles but are irredeemable as opposed to mindless.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think I necessarily disagree with most of this. I definitely agree that it would be very difficult to do the concept of an always-evil race successfully. You would have to do a lot of worldbuilding work and a lot of philosophical thinking about the nature of evil. Most writers probably couldn't pull it off (certainly, a writer as deeply Catholic as Tolkien never would have been able to - it's definitely not a concept he should ever have considered, and I assume that's why he dithered and reconsidered on it).

That said, I don't think it's impossible. But in particular, I think it's a bad habit to just shortcut to "It doesn't work that way in real life so it's impossible" - to just assume that the salient facts are necessarily going to be the same as they are in our world, even in a fictional world that doesn't work the same as ours.

[meadowphoenix]

Yeah, I can definitely agree that the conversation should be able to move past "this is how it operates outside the novel." It's just that I've had many a discussion on the nature of evil in fantasy, and it gets past that discussion and onto the philosophical discussion pretty fast and, tbf, even then in order to have some type of nuanced discussion, there requires that everyone understand what the story meant by certain moral terms or actions or characters etc, which....leads to what a person outside the story would mean. I just don't think you can remove relation to the natural experience when the concepts of the story were made in outside the story in this world with this world's terms and examples.