PSA: Your Default Narrative Settings Are Not Apolitical

[xenologer]

PSA: Your Default Narrative Settings Are Not Apolitical

Which leads me back to the issue of prejudice: specifically, to the claim that including such characters in SFF stories, by dint of contradicting the model of straight, white, male homogeneity laid down by Tolkien and taken as gospel ever since, is an inherently political – and therefore suspect – act. To which I say: what on Earth makes you think that the classic SWM default is apolitical? If it can reasonably argued that a character’s gender, race and sexual orientation have political implications, then why should that verdict only apply to characters who differ from both yourself and your expectations? Isn’t the assertion that straight white men are narratively neutral itself a political statement, one which seeks to marginalise as exceptional or abnormal the experiences of every other possible type of person on the planet despite the fact that straight white men are themselves a global minority? And even if a particular character was deliberately written to make a political point, why should that threaten you? Why should it matter that people with different beliefs and backgrounds are using fiction to write inspirational wish-fulfillment characters for themselves, but from whose struggle and empowerment you feel personally estranged? That’s not bad writing, and as we’ve established by now, it’s certainly not bad history – and particularly not when you remember (as so many people seem to forget) that fictional cultures are under no obligation whatsoever to conform to historical mores. It just means that someone has managed to write a successful story that doesn’t consider you to be its primary audience – and if the prospect of not being wholly, overwhelmingly catered to is something you find disturbing, threatening, wrong? Then yeah: I’m going to call you a bigot, and I probably won’t be wrong.

I want to enter into a committed long-term relationship with this article.

This is one reason I have a hard time finding fantasy settings that I really click with. Too many writers, worldbuilders, and roleplayers either A: don't want "politics" (read: minorities) in their pretendy funtime games, or B: really think that the only people who've ever led narratively interesting lives were straight white cisgender people, and that for the sake of realism they can have wizards and fairies but cannot have more than a couple token POC in their setting.

I console myself by reminding myself that if that's the level of thought they put into their writing and worldbuilding, they're probably pretty mediocre at both. Odds are I'm not missing much.

It's also worth adding that Tolkien didn't want to create the enormously racially-screwy and gender-backward narrative that he did with Lord of the Rings. When it was pointed out to him (by which I mean, sometime around when the Nazis wrote to him and said, "Dude we love you!"), he went, "Oh no, look what I did," and decided to use his future writings to undermine that a great deal and do better. Sadly, he died before he got to finish that, but the Silmarillion helps and he evidently had more improvement plans in his notes.

So I am kinda both saying I want worldbuilders to be less like Tolkien in how they worldbuild, and more like Tolkien in how they respond to criticism about their worldbuilding. Not all stories have to be about magical straight white people. Frankly, there are only so many stories to be told in identically-"medieval" whitewashed patriarchal fantasy settings.

Comments

[ariseishirou.livejournal.com]

If it makes you feel any better, I've been hearing a great deal of "I'm so sick of white medieval fantasy Europe" in geekdom these days, even from the white cis hetero male crowd. And authors who put characters of colour front and center in their writing, like N.K. Jemisin, are extremely popular. It's possible, I think, that GRRM represents the last great gasp of that ilk, and, if YA fantasy is any indication, the future will be much more representative of anyone other than the usual suspects.

[afro-dyte.livejournal.com]

If it makes you feel better, I wrote a fantasy romance about an Afro-Latina pirate who falls in love with a Latina sorceress.

[motherwell.livejournal.com]

I think a major part of the problem is that most fantasy fiction is based on European myths and legends. And when Tolkien revitalized that whole genre, he did it by bringing a compilation of European (mostly English) myths, legends and folktales back to life -- for a mostly white Eurocentric audience who are now the primary audience for all of the fantasy Tolkien inspired. And that led to a self-reinforcing exclusionist tendency: white folktales appeal to a mostly white audience, and neither the folktales nor the audience have that much room for nonwhite characters. (And besides, it doesn't always make perfect sense to bring nonwhite characters into white folktale worlds when: a) nonwhite characters didn't enter into the original folktales, and b) the nonwhites have very different folktale worlds of their own.)

And brings me to my pet peeve about a fundamental contradiction I see in the entire fantasy genre: by freeing themselves from the constraints of fact, history and rationality, fantasy authors seem to think they've expanded their range of possible stories. But in reality, when you cut yourself off from the challenges of realism, you end up locked into a very narrow range of story ideas that have already been accepted into most people's consciousness, because they resonate with the readers' preconceptions, beliefs, and expectations. The fantasy stories that "work" are the ones that people have already heard, in one form or another, and that allude to some lesson or message they'e already found relevant to them. Try going outside that range, and you'll only get a story that makes people scratch their heads, and doesn't leave any kind of lasting impression.

I'm probably fatally biased here, but I find SF far more challenging, and far more diverse in its range of stories, precisely because it has rules that both challenge and offer new avenues of thought. From a storytelling point of view, it's easier to introduce warp-drive in to a SF story than it is to introduce new spells into a fantsty story: the SF reader expects new ideas and new twists, while the fantasy reader expects the established rules of magic, vampires, knights or whatever to be respected. (Note how vampire stories are judged: the ones that adhere to the old rules generally do better in the long term than those that go for whiz-bang modernizations. That (I think) is the main reason why "True Blood" and "Twilight" will have more lasting popularity than "Blade." Vampire stories have certain particular themes and messages, and new innovations tend to obscure and diminish them.)

[motherwell.livejournal.com]

When it was pointed out to him (by which I mean, sometime around when the Nazis wrote to him and said, "Dude we love you!"), he went, "Oh no, look what I did," and decided to use his future writings to undermine that a great deal and do better...

I'd really appreciate a cite for that. I thought Tolkien didn't even start writing LotR until after WW-II, so I'm not sure which Nazis would have written him fan mail then.