[ SECRET POST #2534 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2534 ⌋

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

01.


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02.
[Doctor Who]


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03.
[Guild Wars 2]


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04.
[Perry Mason]


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05.
[Sleepy Hollow]


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06.
[My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic; gorefic]


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07.
[Marco Mengoni/Max Pezzali (883)]


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08.
[Hetalia]


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09.
[Once Upon a Time and Uncanny X-Men]


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10.
[Borderlands 2]


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11.
[Elementary]


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12.
[Rise of the Guardians. Art by Rufftoon.]


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13.
[Mabinogi]


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14.
[minecraft/C418]


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15.
[The Big Bang Theory]








Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 038 secrets from Secret Submission Post #362.
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

[sarillia]

I find it so interesting where the "realism" argument begins and ends.

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

Which part, where I forgive the setting for being very white, or forgive it for not having many feature women?

[sarillia]

I'm speaking in general, not just about your particular comment, just like I assume you were speaking about a general trend of complaints and not just fauxkaren's comment.

I just find it interesting to see where people draw the line when it comes to realism. Things that are extremely fantastical are generally okay. Dragons, elves, orcs. Things that seem to go against common sense aren't, even when that "common sense" is based on a flawed understanding of history. Which on some level makes sense to me. Change the setting, don't change human nature. I can go along with that to a point, but there's often much more room for argument in these things than some people are willing to allow.

[(Anonymous)]

da

To be fair, I kind of resent the argument of "because there is magic, why can't we also be (insert social issue)" because fantasy doesn't have to... not be realistic. I mean, fantasy should be in the mindset of, if magic and dragons exist, how does that change the world? How will realistic people act? It's one altered premise. I kind of hate the strawman "social justice" (sorry for scare quotes, not sure how to categorize) argument that because there is magic, how dare people insist that a European-inspired fantasy have all white people. The cherrypicking argument of "look, they don't have rotten teeth and shit in the streets, why aren't they as racially diverse as New York City or women's equality" just seems silly to me. Not that those concepts are bad or inappropriate for fantasy at all, but I'm not sure why it's a decidedly bad thing if a fantasy world has sexism or racism (or is just all white, assuming it's set in a European-inspired world).

tl;dr - having fantasy with racial diversity and strong female characters is awesome. but not having those things doesn't have to be inherently not awesome, and arguing "well, there's magic, so..." is kinda weak.

[sarillia]

I find it weak too but I find the argument it's trying to counter equally silly. Basically I spend a lot of time tilting my head quizzically in these discussions.

For me the only argument necessary for adding in more diversity is "people enjoy it". I remember the first time I read a story about a girl with a crush on another girl. I feel like it meant more to me than it should but it really did mean a lot to me. I'd like to see more people experience that because it's a nice feeling.

I don't think it's automatically bad when a story doesn't have all different kinds of people in it, but to me it's just kind of a "but why not?" thing. There is such an amazing variety of experiences out there and I want to write about people who go through all of them.

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I see what you mean.

One novel I got he the main character doing magic by knowing the language the creator god used when he made the world. However halfway into the story he had to do brain surgery - the sort of operation where a hole is drilled to let off pressure. It was done by magic, but it sounded like the author went and researched brain surgery before he wrote the scene.

[(Anonymous)]

I think what you're talking about here is the difference between "realism" and "verisimilitude." "Realism" is the degree to which a work of fiction accurately reflects reality - dragons and magic, for instance, are unrealistic. They are, however, part of the buy-in for the audience in many works of fantasy fiction. Fantasy often contains many unrealistic elements, but as long as the work maintains its verisimilitude - the degree to which the fantastic setting plays by its own rules and maintains internal consistency, and everything other than the obviously fantastic elements works the way one would expect it to - it doesn't strike the audience as unrealistic, notwithstanding the outlandish elements.

Through his language, description, and the specific mythologies from which he was drawing, Tolkien set out to evoke images of a particular location and era in his audience's minds, and that location and era was not particularly ethnically diverse. Deviating from that implied setting is not part of the audience's buy-in for their suspension of disbelief, in the way that the existence of dragons and magic swords is, so it registers as more out-of-place and "unrealistic" in context. Another story that equally involved dragons and magic swords, but wasn't so deliberately and explicitly tied to a particular time and place as its inspiration in the way that Middle-Earth is, would find it much easier to get an audience to accept a diverse cast.

[sarillia]

I think that's a good way of labeling it. I'll have to remember that. I've always liked the word verisimilitude anyway. :p

I still think the era he was drawing from was more diverse than people think but that is a very complex discussion that I am not nearly as prepared to have as the medievalist friends I am parroting. Tolkien certainly succeeded in evoking the images that people pull up when thinking of this sort of time and place.

[mimi-sardinia.livejournal.com]

You phrase how I feel about Tolkien very eloquently.

I am honestly not against diverse representation, it's just that Tolkien specifically does not evoke it much for me. Worse yet, Tolkien implies that the "Lesser" kinds of Men are darker-skinned than the good guys, which I can see as something that could be taken as racist.

Other fantasy settings I have no problem with how much POC representation is in them Someone mentioned to me in a comment upthread Marvelverse's black Heimdall. Well I may think all the Norse gods as white but I don't mind MCU making Heimdall - or Nick Fury - black.

I don't mind POC diversity in Forgotten Realms either, because Faerûn seems like a fantasy setting where people travel a lot more than Middle Earth. It also has a lot more detail about groups of people who would logically be typed as POCs of some degree (not getting into the debate of whether Hispanic or Mediterranean people are POC or white).