[ 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

[(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).