[ 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)]

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