[ 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

[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.