fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2629 ]

[ SECRET POST #2629 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2629 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 071 secrets from Secret Submission Post #376.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 3 - too big ], [ 1 2 - repeat ], [ 1 - posted twice ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'm saying, in a world where people can fart out snowflakes and have talking snowmen running around, you have tossed realism out the window and waved goodbye. And you don't get to pull real world science for why a fictional queen has to be pale skinned until you explain the real world science for how Olaf worked.

Bring me a living, singing, stone troll and you can go "Science says she had to be white, duh." Otherwise admit that it's dumb as a sack of hammers to say Olaf was more historically and scientifically accurate than a darker skinned fantasy queen in a cold climate.

You know, I find it a little bit annoying that people insist that any vague nod to "accuracy" and "realism" is irrelevant and unnecessary in a fantasy setting.

I find it more than a bit annoying that the 'accuracy' and 'realism' tends to generally be kinda sexist or racist or otherwise obnoxious. I mean, where are the people pissed off that we never see the characters have to take a dump?

How about the fact in the Hobbit they spent all this time elaborately laying out Bag End and mention indoor plumbing, but in none of the designs or references is a bathroom included? But shit, you want to give a character a tan and suddenly everyone's howling about "accuracy."

I'm not talking about giving people tans. Arandelle's people can have as many tans as they like! How many Scandinavian royal families are POC though? I just feel it's slightly more accurate that that Elsa is white because she's the queen of a psuedo-Scandinavian country.

I always took that snappy line about Bag End's plumbing as an indicator than maybe the toilet is in the bathroom - that is something that happens a lot. I do however think that the maps I've seen of PJ's Bag End don't make it the luxury home the books imply.

Keep in mind, I keep using words like "vaguely" and "slightly" in relation to this accuracy issue because I know that the bits of realism come in, well, bits. Also, do you really want detailed accounts and scenes of characters taking dumps? Some realism is just boring, while some is interesting world-building.

"How many Scandinavian royal families are POC though?"

How many have ice powers?

It's magic, she could have been queen of a psuedo-Scandinavian country and been black because hey, it's a fantasy world and that's normal in that world. And if enough movies did that, maybe it would stop seeming so unrealistic.

One thing I really liked about the movie, there was no questioning her on her gender. No one went "A Queen? Ruling? Without a big strong MAN to make all the tough decisions for her and kill spiders and lift heavy objects? Insanity!" She was treated as a ruler with ice powers and family issues, not someone who had to prove herself as a woman in a man's world. And it was wonderful. There are times and places to include those realities, to fight the Gastons of the world, but it was refreshing to have a story where Gaston does not exist, even if his kind are accurate and realistic. Because it is a fantasy, and everyone deserves that.

BTW, the ice powers are the totally fantasy aspect. That's the part that actually does require your disbelief being suspended. The part that boggles me is that you cannot suspend your disbelief at Elsa being white.

Fantasy still has to have some grounding in reality for people to be able to suspend their disbelief; otherwise, it gets too weird. This grounding is most easily achieved by developing climate, weather, and landscape in recognizable ways.

Fantasy landscapes could, theoretically, be developed in any way. You could put a blazing hot desert right next to a plain of endless winter. You could have rivers flow up mountains instead of down them. You could have perfectly smooth coastlines. You could have earthquakes occur where there are no fault lines.

The reason they aren't developed that way is because people wouldn't buy them, despite the fact that it's fantasy. Even in books where the world is utterly alien, there are still nods to realistic climates and land formations (and for that matter, there are generally nods to technology or political situations that we can recognize and grasp onto when the aspects that are "different" really start taking off).

The bottom line is that fantasy (and even sci-fi) is not about making things completely up out of whole cloth; it's about couching fantastical (or speculative) elements in a real-seeming world. You've heard of "uncanny valley," I assume? When one reads a book that strays too far from what's real, one experiences something very similar to that.

Now, does that mean that fantasy novels can't question or obliterate gender and racial norms? No, absolutely not. What it does mean, however, is that race should probably be developed realistically, i.e. people at the poles have lighter skin and people toward the equator have darker skin. I don't think there's any racism involved in a country with a Scandinavian base having primarily white characters. I do think there would be racism involved, however, if a country with a Sub-Saharan African base had primarily white characters.

Which is why Inuit and Alaskian First Nations are practically albino and European settlers in Australia are so dark skinned they're blue-black, I assume? Earth has always been one huge gradient and you can tell exactly where someone lives by sampling their melanin.

And you never see stuff like floating islands.

Or people living right next to lava without bursting into flame.

Alice in Wonderland is an obscure hipster book that no one has ever heard of, since it doesn't exactly follow physics. It was certainly never made into any movies that show a wonderland that doesn't follow physics.

You people are kinda dumb, aren't you? And sheesh, if you're trying to tell yourself that keeping Frozen exactly the same but doing a pallet swap on two characters (four if you count the king and queen) would be utterly out of the realm of belief and make the movie unrealistic? You have issues. Serious, serious issues.

Which is why Inuit and Alaskian First Nations are practically albino and European settlers in Australia are so dark skinned they're blue-black, I assume?

How long, precisely, do you think it takes for a set of genes to change to the extent that they would have to for these things to be true? We're talking tens of thousands of years. Neither the Inuit nor European settlers in Australia have been in their respective locations long enough for either group's skin tone to change overly much (this is particularly true of the Europeans. There is no way that amount of change could occur in a population in only a few hundred years, absent intermarriage).

This does bring up a point, however, that I think would have better served you: people migrate.

And you never see stuff like floating islands.

Or people living right next to lava without bursting into flame.

Alice in Wonderland is an obscure hipster book that no one has ever heard of, since it doesn't exactly follow physics. It was certainly never made into any movies that show a wonderland that doesn't follow physics.

My point, which I apparently didn't make very clearly, isn't that there is never anything unrealistic along those veins. It's that there's almost always something familiar or "realistic" that serves to ground the reader. The books that have fantastical land formations or climate or weather or physical laws generally also contain two things: a) explanations for those elements, and b) a number of realistic elements that exist alongside them.

'Alice in Wonderland' is an interesting example because it does give a lot of readers that "uncanny valley" feeling. That's part of why so many people for so long have chosen to believe that it was inspired by psychotropics. It's also part of why a lot of the adaptations present Alice as a lot more astonished and unbalanced by Wonderland than she appears to be in the book: she is used as the grounding point.

You people are kinda dumb, aren't you?

You must be really frustrated, huh?

And sheesh, if you're trying to tell yourself that keeping Frozen exactly the same but doing a pallet swap on two characters (four if you count the king and queen) would be utterly out of the realm of belief and make the movie unrealistic?

I don't think that myself. But I can see why some people would find it less realistic, and I can also don't think that its current state is necessarily indicative of racism.

I would also add that there is a type of fantasy that aims to be true to a particular time and place while just...adding some magic. To give just a couple of examples: the nations in 'The Killing Moon' were based off of ancient Egypt and Nubia, and so despite the presence of the unreal, the author still aimed to make the world as much like those places as possible; the nations in 'Kushiel's Dart' are based off of France, Scandinavia, and the British Isles, so again, the author aimed to make the world like those places. In that type of story, straying too far from what's "real" hinders what the author is trying to do. If Disney were going for that type of fantasy (which I think they might have been, given the Saami influence and the presence of trolls [and yes, I know that trolls aren't real, but they are a fixture in Scandinavian folklore]), then that potentially adds a whole other level to the discussion.

I'm not frustrated at all. I'm still laughing my ass off that someone honestly read "Characters in an animated Disney movie had to be white because vitamin D" and went "Yes, this is the platform for which I will build my platform for justifying the face I prefer watching white people. It's foolproof!"

Well, I don't know what to tell you, man, or if you'll even ever come back to this thread, but I was more interested in talking about why geographical and racial realism can matter in fantasy (and, well...why realism can matter at all in fantasy). Like I said, I personally wouldn't have difficulty suspending my disbelief if there were principle characters of other races in 'Frozen.' As you inadvertantly pointed out, the nod to realism on that front, if someone wanted it, could be immigration.

Maybe mimi's platform was "I will justify preferring to watch white people." Mine was "a work of fantasy needs an anchor in reality." But perhaps the mistake was in choosing to present it in this thread.

I'm the one that started this side thread (and man did I miss a busy day) but my point was more along the lines of "You can't advocate for ethnic diversity by stomping all over other ethnicities." Also "It is obvious when companies include minorities because they've been told they have to."

When real companies were feeling the pressure from feminist groups to hire more females, they did. And everyone knew that the only reason those females were hired was because there was now a quota of women needed at the office. No matter how talented that woman was, even if she could easily have gotten the job on her own, no one would ever believe it. People rolled their eyes and dismissed them. It didn't break the glass ceiling, it reinforced it. That sort of ham-handedness rarely works.

Also, it should be noted that 'white' is no more a culture than 'Asian' is. Most Disney movies are set in a basic Western European culture, so I was fascinated with the hints of the Sami and the inclusion of some Scandinavian folklore (like the trolls) and I wish they'd explored that more. That isn't anything that showed up in The Little Mermaid, or Beauty and the Beast, or Sleeping Beauty, or Cinderella. Tangled, with it's generic medieval setting, would have been a better choice for having POCs because it's *not* already exploring a different culture.

Yes, I *do* get knocked out of stories/films when things are unrealistic in that manner. The giant, neon "LOOK AT ME, I'M SO ENLIGHTENED" sign gets in my way. There are better ways of handling race relations than this.

NO ONE WILL WATCH A SERIES ABOUT DARK SKINNED PEOPLE DOING SNOW MAGIC
http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140122221731/avatar/images/2/28/Entrance.png

IT WILL FAIL.

http://images.wikia.com/avatar/images/archive/4/4b/20130120155230!Southern_Water_Tribe_waterbenders.png

HORRIBLY.

http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140119164142/avatar/images/d/da/Pakku_waterbends.png

Because if you don't have a basis in reality that cold = albino no one will be able to suspend their disbelief at the brown people doing whitepeople magic.

Having a basis in reality is fine. Having the 'reality' be 'everyone's white' is... I don't even know what to say.

How many times does someone have to say "I personally would be able to suspend my disbelief" before you get that the person you're talking to would be able to suspend their disbelief?

It's not about giving them a tan. It's about making a character nothing but their skin tone. That's what tossing a POC into a film for no other reason than calming some screamers does.

What I want to see is not a black princess in a white fairy tale, but a black fairy tale. Show us something new. Teach us about a different culture. That's one of the things I loved most about Mulan: it showed us something new and told us a story we'd never heard before. Same with Pocahontas and Hunchback of Notre Dame. Disney has already done this! There's no reason they can't do it again. They did it much worse in Frog Princess, and it comes across as very heavy-handed.

Disney's pretty good, especially with their Princess movies, with having the character skin tone geographically match the location. They're at least consistent about this.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #2629 ]

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