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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Purgatory: Imperialism and Racism in Fantasy Novels?
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Ariston
Insane Unicorn
# 10894
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Justinian:
quote:
Originally posted by Kelly Alves:
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Originally posted by Zach82:
That right there is pretty ominous- why can't there be a crass elf or an urbane dwarf? Why not a gentle orc?
My first D&D character was a pacifist half-orc. Pissed everyone off.
D&D is a game about exploring, adventuring, and killing things and taking their stuff. Playing a pacifist anything in D&D is refusing to engage with the game in the same way refusing to build houses in Monopoly would be - but D&D is also cooperative, so you're letting the whole team down.
It's also about role-playing, storytelling, and breaking with conventions. Why wouldn't a pacifist character want to go on adventures and save the world? They might not want to grab the sword and butcher other creatures themselves, but that's true of many people; not everyone with a sense of adventure also condones violence.
You also forget that, in D&D, the real enemy is not the orcs, undead, or other characters, but the DM, the rules, and whatever plans your DM had for you. If they're not pulling out their hair and calling you awful names by the end of the night, you're not doing it right. I knew a few people in college who deliberately played broken characters, and, what they couldn't break through the rules, the destroyed in role playing. Everyone but their DM loved it.
As for SF being a deliberate attempt to espouse political values, I'd hate to beleive that C.J. Cherryh or any of the distopian authors popular in recent years are in favor of the bleak and broken systems they write about. Sure, there are the Ayn Rands of the world who did nothing else, but, let's be honest, they sucked. Well, okay. I'd like to think Terry Pratchet is probably in favor of Discworld's regimes, but . . .
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“Therefore, let it be explained that nowhere are the proprieties quite so strictly enforced as in men’s colleges that invite young women guests, especially over-night visitors in the fraternity houses.” Emily Post, 1937.
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Doc Tor
Deepest Red
# 9748
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Ariston:
As for SF being a deliberate attempt to espouse political values, I'd hate to beleive that C.J. Cherryh or any of the distopian authors popular in recent years are in favor of the bleak and broken systems they write about. Sure, there are the Ayn Rands of the world who did nothing else, but, let's be honest, they sucked. Well, okay. I'd like to think Terry Pratchet is probably in favor of Discworld's regimes, but . . .
To be honest, I believe that when you set out to write didactic fiction, you have a much greater tendency to suck than anything else - which is why I have such a downer on "Christian fiction". The same applies to deliberately espousing your own politics in fiction in order to teach others.
As a creator of the finest Marxist-Christian SF™ ( ![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif) ), I have to check myself constantly that my real thoughts don't creep onto the page. Yes, I'm making shit up, just like every other author.
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Mudfrog
Shipmate
# 8116
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Posted
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Originally posted by Jade Constable:
Harry Potter is surely pretty commendable from the imperialism and racism perspective.
Unless you're a house elf.
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"The point of having an open mind, like having an open mouth, is to close it on something solid."
G.K. Chesterton
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Doc Tor
Deepest Red
# 9748
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Demas:
quote:
Originally posted by HCH:
I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned the Earthsea trilogy of novels by LeGuin.
Ged - the hero of Wizard of Earthsea - has red/brown skin; but the book I had as a child had a white guy on the cover.
And that Jesus bloke doesn't look very Jewish either...
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Cottontail
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# 12234
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by HCH:
I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned the Earthsea trilogy of novels by LeGuin. (She has written more about that world since then.) In the first book, we find an archipelago world without an overall government. By the end of the third book, Earthsea has a king for the first time in many years.
Although LeGuin is often regarded as a feminist author, most of the characters are male and the magic in the stories is mostly in the hands of males. The school on Roke is all male.
I see you haven't read the 4th Earthsea book, Tehanu. It completely turns the whole 'magic is for men' thing on its head. Fantastic book - I recommend it.
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Mockingale
Shipmate
# 16599
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Fr Weber:
Well, Tairy Goodkind is particularly graceless and awful. The books are stuffed full of gratuitous torture scenes, and the black-hat characters are EEEE-VILLL with no motivations that make any sense.
Yeah, the torture porn aspects made me feel icky to say the least. And you're right, I do wish the villains were a little less one-dimensional. Did you also notice that the heroes were only not villains because they weren't *pure* evil?
quote:
And my God, have you ever read an interview with the man? He must have been picked on continuously all the way through high school, because wish-fulfillment and overcompensation pour off everything he says like...I dunno, like an overworked fantasy metaphor.
I haven't read an interview with Goodkind, but judging by his writings I imagined him to be like many guys I knew in high school who were picked on as nerds and latch onto Ayn Rand as a fantasy that one day they'll be recognized as the creative producer ubermenschen that they are and all the people who torment them will be sorry when the nerds Go Galt. It looks like I was not far off.
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Kelly Alves
Bunny with an axe
# 2522
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Ariston:
It's also about role-playing, storytelling, and breaking with conventions. Why wouldn't a pacifist character want to go on adventures and save the world? They might not want to grab the sword and butcher other creatures themselves, but that's true of many people; not everyone with a sense of adventure also condones violence.
Thank you.
Part of the point for me was challenging this Tolkieninan sense of race-based morality--exactly what we are discussing, in other words-- which started bugging me when I re-read the books for the fourth time or so in my teens. And I realize I am overstating my game mates response-- they were "pissed off" for maybe ten minutes, in a jovial sort of way, and then everyone figured out a way to work together. Because that was the priority. And they were very creative.
I made a new character pretty quickly because-- well I wanted to be kick-ass, but I still trotted my half orc out once in a while for old time's sake-- and because I figured out an effective way to play him.
[ 27. October 2012, 04:48: Message edited by: Kelly Alves ]
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I cannot expect people to believe “
Jesus loves me, this I know” of they don’t believe “Kelly loves me, this I know.”
Kelly Alves, somewhere around 2003.
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Palimpsest
Shipmate
# 16772
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Posted
Norman Spinrad wrote a book called "The Iron Dream" The meta story is a parallel world where an unemployed artist named Adolf Hitler emigrated to the United States and became a pulp fiction writer. His masterpiece which is the rest of the book is called Lord of the Swastika's. You'll never read Conan the same way again.
Ursula LeGuin wrote a number of additional books in the Earthsea world in which the question of why women weren't allowed to be wiards was addressed. She's also complained about the tendency of the film makers to give all the characters white skins.
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:
To be honest, I believe that when you set out to write didactic fiction, you have a much greater tendency to suck than anything else - which is why I have such a downer on "Christian fiction". The same applies to deliberately espousing your own politics in fiction in order to teach others.
I'm not sure that's the right way to make the point. There are a lot of books that would be much better if they weren't didactic. But at the same time, a short list of the best novels ever written would probably be dominated by novels with explicit moral or religious or political commitments (Emma, Bleak House, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, The Devils, The Karamazov Brothers - even In Search of Lost Time).
If we go to SF Le Guin's The Dispossessed is nothing if not a screed against capitalism and in favour of anarchism (with a side order of digs against younger anarchists). But it's a classic of sf. I suppose the reason it works is that Le Guin is using the medium to think things through, rather than merely to present her conclusions.(*)
What's wrong with a lot of didactic fiction isn't that you see too much of the author's real thoughts; it's that there weren't enough of the author's real thoughts to see.
(*) From our quarrel with the world we make rhetoric; from our quarrel with ourselves we make poetry - Yeats.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Justinian:
D&D is a game about exploring, adventuring, and killing things and taking their stuff. Playing a pacifist anything in D&D is refusing to engage with the game in the same way refusing to build houses in Monopoly would be - but D&D is also cooperative, so you're letting the whole team down.
It's true that the D&D rule set is largely geared towards exploring and killing things and taking their stuff. But still it is an RPG and Monopoly isn't and that means that you don't have to solve all problems by fireballing them.(*) D&D had rules for trying to negotiate your way out of fights from the beginning. Old school D&D fights were basically attrition - you got little character reward for them and they used up resources. So you tried to avoid them if you could.
(*) In old school D&D, once you're past a certain level the fighters and thieves might as well be pacifists.
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Ariston:
Well, okay. I'd like to think Terry Pratchet is probably in favor of Discworld's regimes, but . . .
I'm pretty sure Pratchett isn't actually in favour of one man one vote in the Ankh-Morpork sense.
(On the other hand, I would guess he is in favour of the anarchic cunning displayed by trickster figures, and The Patrician is basically a trickster figure who happens to be running a city.)
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
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Enoch
Shipmate
# 14322
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
I agree in the main, though--and I'm afraid it's because he wanted an exotic setting and grabbed for one reminiscent of an Ottoman Empire that never was. Complete with hair, skin, etc. Which was perhaps a bit lazy of him, and should have been handled better.
It's worth considering that our archetypes are laid down in our psyche very early in life. When Lewis was a child, the Ottoman empire was still alive, sick, sinister and dangerous.
Something I found surprising, is that there's a point in one of the Star Wars films where an army comes to support the heroes, from a nation/species that are obviously a rap stereotype of black Americans. Although they are on the 'right' side, they are portrayed as exuberant, edgy and a bit simple. I don't know which film it was as I saw it some years ago, and have never been that excited about Star Wars. It felt like California's tribute to 'the brothers', but it left a nasty taste in my mouth. It stuck in my memory.
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Barnabas62
Shipmate
# 9110
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
(*) From our quarrel with the world we make rhetoric; from our quarrel with ourselves we make poetry - Yeats.
That's spot on.
Dafyd, after you observation re "Left Hand" I checked and found that Ursula Le Guin had indeed had a bit of a quarrel with herself and in the end agreed with the critics about pronouns. Reading that quarrel with herself was illuminating. Thanks for the heads up.
I think she was a bit hard on herself. The book was written in 1969, lots of stuff re feminism was still being worked out. It's interesting that she doesn't want to edit the original, partly because the book has been continuously in print, partly because she'd prefer it to remain as an honest reflection of where she was at at the time.
The pronoun thing didn't spoil the book for me at all, still doesn't. From the text itself I got the point very early on that our normal pronouns were inadequate, whichever choice was made. Same thing applied to "Winter's King", the short story you mentioned, where Le Guin combined the use of the female pronoun with male titles (King, Lord) to "preserve the ambiguity" as she said herself. That also worked for me. I think Le Guin feels that her menwomen came across as more male than female, and that was a flaw. Possibly that's generally true, it just never worked that way for me. I think I just "got" her intentions, was captivated by the outworking in a truly memorable story.
So far as this thread is concerned, Le Guin stands out for me as an honest pioneer, in the world of fantasy writing, prepared to explore the nasty 'isms in strange new worlds. Quite right about "The Dispossessed" too. She has enriched the genre with her graceful fantasies.
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Who is it that you seek? How then shall we live? How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
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Doc Tor
Deepest Red
# 9748
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:
To be honest, I believe that when you set out to write didactic fiction, you have a much greater tendency to suck than anything else - which is why I have such a downer on "Christian fiction". The same applies to deliberately espousing your own politics in fiction in order to teach others.
I'm not sure that's the right way to make the point. There are a lot of books that would be much better if they weren't didactic. But at the same time, a short list of the best novels ever written would probably be dominated by novels with explicit moral or religious or political commitments (Emma, Bleak House, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, The Devils, The Karamazov Brothers - even In Search of Lost Time).
But this is the difference: it's not the author's opinions we read, it's the characters' opinions.
The moment when the author's voice is heard is the moment when they should have stopped writing a novel and started writing an essay. Or a sermon. I should, reasonably, be able to write a perfectly coherent defence of laissez-faire capitalism, racism, national socialism, imperialism, or whatever ism you care, if a particular character believes it. (And yes, I have more-or-less successfully done this in print.)
There is also no particular reason why that character is then painted as a one-dimensional strawman, deliberate set up for the hero to knock down. Bad fiction, no biscuit.
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Paul.
Shipmate
# 37
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by ken:
The aliens are just humans with makeup on.
Isn't this precisely the problem though? If you try to write genuine alien aliens you have to come up with some ways of making them different below skin level. Which means you'll end up highlighting general characteristics of them as a species. In other words you'll be stereotyping.
And inevitably a lot of people will read them as just characters in a story - which is what you want but then they'll look at them as essentially humans in makeup and read stereotyping as coded racism.
I guess in order to avoid this trap you need to show both the broad-strokes differences that make them alien AND show diversity within them[1] and some commonality with other beings[2]. It's not an intractable problem but it's not easy and it doesn't surprise me that those who succeed are being called geniuses.
It's also why, whilst we should be careful about what attitudes we're swallowing when we read, we should sometimes give the author the benefit of the doubt.
[1]Unless of course you want lack of diversity to be part of their alienness.
[2]Ditto.
Posts: 3689 | From: UK | Registered: Jun 2004
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Enoch
Shipmate
# 14322
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Posted
English has no pronoun for a living person who is neither male nor female because such people are not part of our normal experience.
Until about 1986, people would have used 'he' that way, and not really noticed it. It was normal to use 'he' as the default word for a person who had not yet been identified and could turn out to be either a man or a woman. Our ears have only become sensitised to this in the last 25 years.
Just try calling a person 'it'.
It is less of a problem in other languages like French, German, Welsh etc because they have grammatical gender which does not automatically coincide with biological fact.
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Enoch
Shipmate
# 14322
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Late Paul:
quote:
Originally posted by ken:
The aliens are just humans with makeup on.
Isn't this precisely the problem though? If you try to write genuine alien aliens you have to come up with some ways of making them different below skin level. Which means you'll end up highlighting general characteristics of them as a species. In other words you'll be stereotyping. ...
Likewise, since the death of the last Neanderthal, none of us has ever encountered a sentient being who was different under skin level. So it's a bit difficult for any member of our species really to come to terms with what such a being might be like.
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Jane R
Shipmate
# 331
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Posted
quote:
Harry Potter is surely pretty commendable from the imperialism and racism perspective.
![[Eek!]](eek.gif) Harry Potter is Little England until you get to the Quidditch World Cup in Book 4.
Don't get me wrong, I like the books, but I don't think J K Rowling should get points for portraying a post-imperialist Britain when the first book in the series was written in the 1990s and the basic idea is that wizard society is hidden within the modern world. And all three of the main characters are white British.
I don't see much from Le Guin in them - the major influences I see are Jill Murphy's 'Worst Witch' series and Diana Wynne Jones' books ('Witch Week' is set in a boarding school, but quite a few have the theme of magic intruding into everyday life). Rowling might have been influenced by the boarding school story genre and Agatha Christie as well (the 'whodunit' aspects of her plots are always very convoluted).
Not like the School of Wizardry on Roke at all.
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Jane R
Shipmate
# 331
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Posted
Oh, and Enoch: quote:
It is less of a problem in other languages like French, German, Welsh etc because they have grammatical gender which does not automatically coincide with biological fact.
Say that to a group of French feminists and watch them turn purple.
Actually there is debate on this, but a lot of them would contend that the problem is greater in a language with grammatical gender. You can't even forget about your sex when choosing an adjective to describe yourself, because it must agree with your gender.
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Zach82
Shipmate
# 3208
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Posted
In German, it is thus,
male student: Student
female student: Studentin
male students: Studenten
female students: Studentinen
male and female students: Studenten
Spot the inherent sexism.
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Don't give up yet, no, don't ever quit/ There's always a chance of a critical hit. Ghost Mice
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Dafyd
Shipmate
# 5549
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:
But this is the difference: it's not the author's opinions we read, it's the characters' opinions.
Le Guin does step in and moralise at us in The Dispossessed. Whereas in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress all the right-libertarian political opinions are expressed by characters. I don't think that makes The Moon is a Harsh Mistress any less didactic. The Dispossessed is a better book. I don't think it's just that I'm more biased in favour of left-anarchism than right-anarchism. I think it's that Le Guin is more interested in exploring the way in which her society fails.
When Neal Stephenson brings his story screeching to a halt to offload a lecture about cryptanalysis or information technology or banking or the best way to eat breakfast cereal it's equally entertaining whether he's doing it through his character's consciousness, free indirect style, or through the narrator.
On the whole, if an author can't write something in their own voice they're generally not going to do it better in a character's voice. The idea that one procedure is inherently better than the other seems to me an anti-nineteenth century prejudice. Generally speaking it is even worse to have a character who is clearly the author's spokesperson than for the author to be their spokesperson themselves. And as you say, if a character is set up as a strawman for characters the author favours to knock down that is bad all round. (At least, strawmen are bad if the author is writing in a realistic genre, for a value of realism that includes Tolkien and most sf.)
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we remain, thanks to original sin, much in love with talking about, rather than with, one another. Rowan Williams
Posts: 10567 | From: Edinburgh | Registered: Feb 2004
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Doc Tor
Deepest Red
# 9748
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Posted
I'm not particularly convinced - in that, yes, there are times when an author can get away with it (Stephenson and Le Guin being two of the few), but generally the insertion of Author Avatars and Mary Sues end badly. I'd much rather read the characters' opinions rather than the authors, especially when I'm reading say, Larry Niven or Orson Scott Card. Or Lovecraft, for that matter.
Separating the two can be difficult, but let's try subtlety first.
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Eliab
Shipmate
# 9153
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Robert Armin:
Currently I'm rereading one of my favourite books, Prince Caspian, when a statement by Trufflehunter struck me: "[Narnia] isn't a country for humans, but it's a country that needs a man to rule it," (or words to that effect; my apologies, but I don't have the text in front of me). It seems to me that that is the sort of comment that could have been made by a Victorian Brit about India, or many other places: "It's not a white man's country (lots of us die over there) but it needs to be ruled by a white man".
If that statement has any extra-Narnian application intended at all, I'd bet a considerable sum that it is meant to imply a fairly typical Christian 'stewardship' view. Globally, the human species is dominant in that it has a fair degree of control over (and power to preserve or destroy parts of) the natural world, and this power was intended by God, but is to be exercised responsibly, because we do not own that which we control, we only manage it on behalf of the creator and master of everything, This is not man's planet, but man was created to run (bits of) it. And, more immediately, the same would apply to any part of creation in our personal sphere of influence, such as a parent's control over children – it is to be exercised responsibly and conditionally.
That would accord much more closely with the expressed views of Lewis in his other works than supposing any sort of pro-imperialist view.
quote:
However, what about a modern American? Mercedes Lackey, in her Valdemar novels, creates an entire race of intelligent lizards who live in harmony with humans. However, these lizards do all the cooking, cleaning, mending and making of clothes without ever getting a major part to play in a story - but this is fine because they LOVE all that sort of stuff. From my point of view, again, this sounds uncomfortably like the rationalisation slave owners used: "They're perfectly happy doing all the menial work; it's what they're suited for".
I've not read much Mercedes Lackey, and what I did read, I read a long time ago, but the one thing I do remember is an extremely strong and positive portrayal of homosexual characters in one of her trilogies. I would have thought her something of a liberal on that evidence, It would surprise me if she were an apologist for slavery.
quote:
Originally posted by Barnabas62:
George R R Martin (Game of Thrones) has plenty of very strong women characters
I think so, although one of my (male) friends and my wife both found his work deeply sexist, because of the nasty things that happen to his female characters. I don't see it myself – horrible events seem pretty evenly distributed between the genders.
quote:
Originally posted by Badger Lady:
On the Narnia books, I remember even as a (darked haired; half- Asian) child finding the Horse and His Boy quite disturbing. Almost all the 'good' characters were white and blond. All the baddies were dark haired, dark skinned and (even to my superficial reading) based on Arabs/Muslims.
Sure, H&HB is mostly set in a fantasy empire with an Arabian flavour, but it is simply not true that all or most of the Calormenes are evil, in contrast to the white humans being good. One of the protagonists is a Calormene (and she ends up marrying into a white royal line without anyone thinking that in the least odd) and everything we are told of her family, friends, servants and allies suggest that they are just ordinary folks. The final judgment on the principal villain (with which the reader is expected to concur) is pronounced by posterity in the form of Calormene schoolchildren. The Calormenes aren't 'other'. They are us. Dark-skinned humans in the Narnia books are just people, sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, with all the faults and virtues that that implies, just as they are in real life. The only relevance skin colour ever has in the whole book is to give a clue that Shasta is not Arsheesh's natural son (a fact which had not even been apparent to Shasta).
And, of course, Calormene religion has damn all to do with Islam. It's polytheistic, uses graven images, and practices human sacrifice. I can't think of a single incidental detail which could conceivably be intended to identify it with the faith of Muslims.
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Richard Dawkins
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Justinian
Shipmate
# 5357
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Ariston:
It's also about role-playing, storytelling, and breaking with conventions. Why wouldn't a pacifist character want to go on adventures and save the world? They might not want to grab the sword and butcher other creatures themselves, but that's true of many people; not everyone with a sense of adventure also condones violence.
No. And there are plenty of RPGs out there that aren't literally hacked tabletop wargames. Also there's a world of difference between not wanting to grab a sword and butcher other characters and being an out and out pacifist going against the rest of your team mates.
quote:
You also forget that, in D&D, the real enemy is not the orcs, undead, or other characters, but the DM, the rules, and whatever plans your DM had for you. If they're not pulling out their hair and calling you awful names by the end of the night, you're not doing it right. I knew a few people in college who deliberately played broken characters, and, what they couldn't break through the rules, the destroyed in role playing. Everyone but their DM loved it.
Um... no. As a DM I enjoy it when I need to improvise as fast as the players do because someone's worked through the fence and drive cross country. On the other hand I don't play 3.X where you really could shatter the game. And when I play, the DM is one of the people there to have fun - and the one who puts the most time and effort in to it. The DM has at least as much right to have fun as anyone else at the table.
@Dafyd, that's wave 2 D&D you're talking about, not wave 1 I think. The endgame for D&D was meant to start at level 9-10 where the fighter got an army, the wizard got a tower, and you settled down to politics rather than classic adventuring. Also there's a huge difference between trying to avoid fights and being a pacifist; the way the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Group would handle a dragon would be wait until it was asleep then gang-shank it. And the standard party involved at least nine characters, with a wall in front and one behind wearing as heavy armour as possible.
[/derail]
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My real name consists of just four letters, but in billions of combinations.
Eudaimonaic Laughter - my blog.
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Pomona
Shipmate
# 17175
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jane R:
quote:
Harry Potter is surely pretty commendable from the imperialism and racism perspective.
Harry Potter is Little England until you get to the Quidditch World Cup in Book 4.
Don't get me wrong, I like the books, but I don't think J K Rowling should get points for portraying a post-imperialist Britain when the first book in the series was written in the 1990s and the basic idea is that wizard society is hidden within the modern world. And all three of the main characters are white British.
I don't see much from Le Guin in them - the major influences I see are Jill Murphy's 'Worst Witch' series and Diana Wynne Jones' books ('Witch Week' is set in a boarding school, but quite a few have the theme of magic intruding into everyday life). Rowling might have been influenced by the boarding school story genre and Agatha Christie as well (the 'whodunit' aspects of her plots are always very convoluted).
Not like the School of Wizardry on Roke at all.
It has many more non-white characters than most mainstream children's/YA fantasy and is anti-racism/anti-speciesist (if that's the right word to use about non-human creatures in the books).
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Consider the work of God: Who is able to straighten what he has bent? [Ecclesiastes 7:13]
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Pomona
Shipmate
# 17175
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Mudfrog:
quote:
Originally posted by Jade Constable:
Harry Potter is surely pretty commendable from the imperialism and racism perspective.
Unless you're a house elf.
Mistreatment of house elves is criticised by 'good' characters though, even if Harry participates in it.
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Consider the work of God: Who is able to straighten what he has bent? [Ecclesiastes 7:13]
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Zach82
Shipmate
# 3208
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Jade Constable:
Mistreatment of house elves is criticised by 'good' characters though, even if Harry participates in it.
While the narrative clearly sees mistreatment of slaves as wrong, it doesn't seem to me that it considers the place of house elves in wizarding society itself as morally problematic. Slavery is all well and good, so long as the slaves like it and you're nice to them.
Indeed, it seems to me that Hermione's opposition to it is treated with outright contempt.
[ 27. October 2012, 21:48: Message edited by: Zach82 ]
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Don't give up yet, no, don't ever quit/ There's always a chance of a critical hit. Ghost Mice
Posts: 9148 | From: Boston, MA | Registered: Aug 2002
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Kelly Alves
Bunny with an axe
# 2522
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Justinian:
Also there's a world of difference between not wanting to grab a sword and butcher other characters and being an out and out pacifist going against the rest of your team mates.
i think it is entirely up to the team (including the DM)if the person is "going against" it. My team made excellent use of my mage holding spells, and a variety of other things that helped them gather information and enter places where they might otherwise be turned away. I had a lot of stealth, diplomacy, stuff like that.
And, as I understand it, (as my DM told me)later additions of D&D s included ways for people to enhance their team score by problem solving and negotiating. So, Gary Gygax obviously didn't think the game was all about killing.
And I'm going to say, I have never participated in a game where it wasn't pretty clear that things like creative problem solving, heading off conflict before it began, and generally being a kick-ass role player wasn't valued at least as much by the participants as hack-and slash, if not more, The people who really pissed everyone off, in a not jovial way, were those who went berserker-crashing into situations that compromised the team's ability to adequately defend themselves.
I do agree about the DM having fun, though. Why do it if it's not fun?
... and I don't think this is as tangential as it seems-- the D&D world is pretty much based on Tolkien. The dynamic-- on the most basic level-- is good against evil, and that is largely determined by the race a character is. Solving the problem is (largely) defined by purging the fantasy world of these intrinsically evil beings.
So I create a chaotic- good half orc character-- because they couldn't let me make a good orc character of any kind-- and I make him a pacifist because (hello!) there were actually suggestions in the player's manual as to how to do just that. (It wasn't encouraged, but it wasn't illegal either.)I'm challenging (as much as I could) the idea that evil is race-based, and I'm challenging --well, not really, because I got the idea from the players manual!-- the idea that killing was the only way to solve problems.
Look at the heat the mere suggestion generates. Why is it so challenging to suggest that things can be approached a different way?
And is this the kind of conversation fledgling sci-fi writers have with editors and producers?
(I remember reading a forward to a Poul Anderson story in which he talked about being directed by a publisher to "add more sex' to the story. Anderson saw no way to do that without things getting really contrived, so he threw in this ghastly scene involving a human breeding facility out of sheer disgust. The publisher loved it.)
Justinian, I spent 6 years living with a man who lived and breathed gaming. I went to many conventions and enjoyed a variety of DM styles, and I can say with conviction that there are many, many other ways to approach the game-- playing and dm'ing-- than yours. You do you ,and I'll do me.
[ 27. October 2012, 22:12: Message edited by: Kelly Alves ]
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I cannot expect people to believe “
Jesus loves me, this I know” of they don’t believe “Kelly loves me, this I know.”
Kelly Alves, somewhere around 2003.
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Robert Armin
All licens'd fool
# 182
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Posted
Eliab: quote:
I've not read much Mercedes Lackey, and what I did read, I read a long time ago, but the one thing I do remember is an extremely strong and positive portrayal of homosexual characters in one of her trilogies. I would have thought her something of a liberal on that evidence, It would surprise me if she were an apologist for slavery.
While I know nothing about Lackey personally, I too would be surprised if she consciously advocates slavery. However, I am disturbed by an entire race of beings who are have no aspirations above serving others. When I started this thread I was hoping for a discussion of how fantasy seems to let the darker sides of our personalities out, as well as the fun/creative sides. So far the thread hasn't really discussed that side of things, but I've been around long enough to know that the OPer has no control over where things go after they have posted, and I'm fine with that.
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Keeping fit was an obsession with Fr Moity .... He did chin ups in the vestry, calisthenics in the pulpit, and had developed a series of Tai-Chi exercises to correspond with ritual movements of the Mass. The Antipope Robert Rankin
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Barnabas62
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# 9110
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Eliab:
quote:
Originally posted by Barnabas62:
George R R Martin (Game of Thrones) has plenty of very strong women characters
I think so, although one of my (male) friends and my wife both found his work deeply sexist, because of the nasty things that happen to his female characters. I don't see it myself – horrible events seem pretty evenly distributed between the genders.
With you re horrible things. George R R seems to ensure that the distribution of murder, torture and mayhem is subject to a proper PC balance. ![[Biased]](wink.gif)
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Who is it that you seek? How then shall we live? How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?
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Doc Tor
Deepest Red
# 9748
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Kelly Alves:
And is this the kind of conversation fledgling sci-fi writers have with editors and producers?
Inevitably, the answer is both yes and no.
It is easy to add more drama into your script by having a massive punch up/sword fight/exchange of shoulder-mounted rockets. Chandler wrote about any time he got stuck, he'd walk in a man holding a gun. And writers instinctively know this: they've been brought up on all the books and films they've read and seen, where the good guys get to kill the bad ones because it redeems the situation. I've done it myself.
The problem comes in making the left-field solution to the problem genuinely more exciting, more thrilling, more satisfying than putting a gun to the Big Boss's head and pulling the trigger. And if we're in the business of providing vicarious experiences (which we are) then writing the plot and characters in such a way as to make a pacifistic, negotiated or merciful denouement both believable and cathartic is exceptionally hard. I've also done this - but I will concede it's simply easier to have the good guys stab, shoot and bomb their way to victory.
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Forward the New Republic
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Antisocial Alto
Shipmate
# 13810
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Zach82:
While the narrative clearly sees mistreatment of slaves as wrong, it doesn't seem to me that it considers the place of house elves in wizarding society itself as morally problematic. Slavery is all well and good, so long as the slaves like it and you're nice to them.
Indeed, it seems to me that Hermione's opposition to it is treated with outright contempt.
I think Rowling believes that is how real kids would react to a campaign like that- not that that's how they should react. (Also because Hermione is the one running the campaign, and most of the other kids find her annoying; they're not going to sign onto an idea of hers.) Just like Harry getting all mopey in the fifth and sixth books. It is irritating, but fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds are really like that.
Plus, some of the Hogwarts kids (Draco and friends) already believe they're superior to other people of their own species. It's probably not a stretch for them to feel superior to weird little elves.
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Lamb Chopped
Ship's kebab
# 5528
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Posted
I do wonder about the house elves, though. I mean, we automatically find their situation abhorrent (and call it slavery and such), but is it possible that the author is actually intending to play with an even more "out there" scenario--the question of what you would do if you actually, really, goodness to Betsey discovered a species that WANTED that situation and nothing else?
I suspect that if we found a nearby planet of house-elves of the usual sort (not Dobby, then), we'd be horrified. Would probably do our best in fact to convince them that a life of service was NOT what they wanted, that they were mad-brained for thinking so, and generally done everything we could to change their psychology into a form we could tolerate. Which would be just as morally wrong as the reverse.
Maybe that's what Rowling was playing with.
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Er, this is what I've been up to (book).
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down!
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ArachnidinElmet
Shipmate
# 17346
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Zach82:
Fantasy isn't necessarily racist, but sloppy writing lends itself to such sentiments. The fantasy genre relies on certain motifs that make it a lightning rod for racism. Different races in these books not only look different, but actually are different. That right there is pretty ominous- why can't there be a crass elf or an urbane dwarf? Why not a gentle orc?
This is the sort of thing that Terry Pratchett is good at. Yes, dwarfs are often short and live underground and vampires are suave and bitey, but he always subverts the stereotype. It turns out that trolls are portrayed as stupid because they are in too warm an environment. The minute they are cooled down they are superbrainy. Each individual character raises above the expectations of its race/species.
quote:
Also, the main character has to be normal, in the reader's terms, so that one has something to identify with in a fantastic setting. Then this normal is good, and he fights an evil Other that is different and ugly and usually sexually depraved.
I think that's very true in pre 1960s 'classic' stuff.
In alot of recent Dark Fantasy/horror-lite books(vampires & werewolves and things that go bump in the night) loads of the main characters are 'other' themselves, in a number of cases fighting or evading humans.
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'If a pleasant, straight-forward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle manoeuvres' - Kafka
Posts: 1887 | From: the rhubarb triangle | Registered: Sep 2012
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Kelly Alves
Bunny with an axe
# 2522
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Posted
[Mostly to Doc Tor-- man, crosspost slam!]
In the interest of discussing character and plot development, I'm going to discuss D&D again-- because hey, what is it but improv with rules?
I already conceded that I gave up on my pacifist character pretty quickly, because there was no way I could level up, so I want to make it clear that I am not suggesting any violence at all is unnecessary in a story. I just think there is room for one pacifist character. Gives things flavor, as a matter of fact. Creates tension.
And again my whole point of making him a pacifist was that he was a half-orc. Really. That was studied.
Yeah, maybe you need a guy with a gun to come in the room, but (let's use crime novel tropes) does he always need to be some swarthy guy with a Guido accent and a pin-striped suit?
[ 27. October 2012, 23:19: Message edited by: Kelly Alves ]
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I cannot expect people to believe “
Jesus loves me, this I know” of they don’t believe “Kelly loves me, this I know.”
Kelly Alves, somewhere around 2003.
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Zach82
Shipmate
# 3208
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Antisocial Alto:
I think Rowling believes that is how real kids would react to a campaign like that- not that that's how they should react. (Also because Hermione is the one running the campaign, and most of the other kids find her annoying; they're not going to sign onto an idea of hers.) Just like Harry getting all mopey in the fifth and sixth books. It is irritating, but fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds are really like that.
Plus, some of the Hogwarts kids (Draco and friends) already believe they're superior to other people of their own species. It's probably not a stretch for them to feel superior to weird little elves.
Maybe. I'm not so sure. The adults around her seem to believe just as the children do- elves like it and so it's OK. The elves hate her for preaching the possibility of freedom to them. Dumbledore wears a pin, but he doesn't make any effort to change the situation in the school's servants' hall, so I suspect he's just humoring Hermione.
It's all portrayed as a spat of youthful, selfish idealism that is ultimately ignorant of the good of the house-elves themselves. Hermione gets over her principles as she becomes an adult, and I don't like that.
[ 27. October 2012, 23:42: Message edited by: Zach82 ]
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Don't give up yet, no, don't ever quit/ There's always a chance of a critical hit. Ghost Mice
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Zach82
Shipmate
# 3208
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Posted
Imma also add another thing that troubled me as I read the Harry Potter Books: its treatment of muggles. Not a single muggle is treated with an ounce of sympathy in all its thousands of pages. Without exception they are petty, vicious, and utterly lacking any creativity. Perhaps this is because Harry has to be miserable, but even Hermione's parents come across as ignorant and small minded, devoted more to the principles of dentistry than the good of their daughter.
Squibs are usually bad people too, and are effectively the underclass of wizarding society. Even a good character like Mrs Weasely talks about her squib relation with unveiled contempt, and seems to think maintaining a relationship with him an absurdity. Harry's squib neighbor, who is at least good, clearly functions alone outside of the society that brought her up. And the narrative doesn't even vaguely imply this is an injustice.
Good characters are clearly against hurting or enslaving muggles, but none of them really seems to understand them as equals. They are portrayed as subhuman anyway, so maybe it's not surprising.
It's not just how the characters act in this case. The narrative itself simply never questions this order of affairs.
[ 27. October 2012, 23:54: Message edited by: Zach82 ]
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Don't give up yet, no, don't ever quit/ There's always a chance of a critical hit. Ghost Mice
Posts: 9148 | From: Boston, MA | Registered: Aug 2002
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Justinian
Shipmate
# 5357
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Kelly Alves:
quote:
Originally posted by Justinian:
Also there's a world of difference between not wanting to grab a sword and butcher other characters and being an out and out pacifist going against the rest of your team mates.
i think it is entirely up to the team (including the DM)if the person is "going against" it. My team made excellent use of my mage holding spells, and a variety of other things that helped them gather information and enter places where they might otherwise be turned away. I had a lot of stealth, diplomacy, stuff like that.
And, as I understand it, (as my DM told me)later additions of D&D s included ways for people to enhance their team score by problem solving and negotiating. So, Gary Gygax obviously didn't think the game was all about killing.
And I'm going to say, I have never participated in a game where it wasn't pretty clear that things like creative problem solving, heading off conflict before it began, and generally being a kick-ass role player wasn't valued at least as much by the participants as hack-and slash, if not more, The people who really pissed everyone off, in a not jovial way, were those who went berserker-crashing into situations that compromised the team's ability to adequately defend themselves.
I do agree about the DM having fun, though. Why do it if it's not fun?
... and I don't think this is as tangential as it seems-- the D&D world is pretty much based on Tolkien. The dynamic-- on the most basic level-- is good against evil, and that is largely determined by the race a character is. Solving the problem is (largely) defined by purging the fantasy world of these intrinsically evil beings.
So I create a chaotic- good half orc character-- because they couldn't let me make a good orc character of any kind-- and I make him a pacifist because (hello!) there were actually suggestions in the player's manual as to how to do just that. (It wasn't encouraged, but it wasn't illegal either.)I'm challenging (as much as I could) the idea that evil is race-based, and I'm challenging --well, not really, because I got the idea from the players manual!-- the idea that killing was the only way to solve problems.
Look at the heat the mere suggestion generates. Why is it so challenging to suggest that things can be approached a different way?
And is this the kind of conversation fledgling sci-fi writers have with editors and producers?
(I remember reading a forward to a Poul Anderson story in which he talked about being directed by a publisher to "add more sex' to the story. Anderson saw no way to do that without things getting really contrived, so he threw in this ghastly scene involving a human breeding facility out of sheer disgust. The publisher loved it.)
Justinian, I spent 6 years living with a man who lived and breathed gaming. I went to many conventions and enjoyed a variety of DM styles, and I can say with conviction that there are many, many other ways to approach the game-- playing and dm'ing-- than yours. You do you ,and I'll do me.
I missed your comment before Dafyd's on this thread, sorry.
Ah. There are at least three distinct types of pacifists PCs and two of them cause me to twitch. You have the one that doesn't there- the the support/trickster character (my favoured archetype tbh) - but you specifically said that the other PCs disliked your character for being a pacifist; this isn't my experience with tricksters. And you've more or less described the 1e thief there - very weak in combat but tricks and skills, but pacifist means more than just poor or even non-combatant.
When I hear pacifist characters, I don't think tricksters, I think of an annoying archetype, and an archetype that's out-and-out griefing. And from your description about it pissing everyone off I assumed you meant the third. The annoying archetype is the healing-only cleric. Supported in some versions, and it has the massive downside of making everything (a) take longer and (b) be less tense. But the worst type are the genuine pacifists. Who will heal the monsters and genuinely behave like a liability. "But I'm just playing my character".
And definitely agreed on the beserker-fighters. Agghhh! Although there's normally a simple answer. Let them die.
As for Gygax and XP rewards, absolutely right. The rule from both Gygax and Arneson was 1XP for 1GP - which meant you gained many times more XP from the loot than from the kills - and in order to prevent you forting up, wandering monsters didn't carry treasure so you just gained the kill XP from them. This was always a controversial if not downright unpopular rule (mostly because Gygax didn't actually explain it anywhere in the DMG) and therefore 2e turned it into an optional rule that was and 3e removed it entirely. 4e didn't add it back but had its own alternatives. (For the record, Gygax gave you the XP when you gained the loot, Arneson when you spent it on something not directly for adventuring).
And Gygax would be rolling over in his grave or just throw up his hands in disgust at the claim D&D was based on Tolkein. He really wasn't a fan and was much keener on Vance and Liebner. The same did not go for his players, however.
And yes, I think D&D has fed into the fantasy market a lot and Lovecraft would be incredibly obscure without Call of Cthulu. And that's even without getting into blatant D&D spin-off series like the Deed of Paksenarrion or anything by Feist. Or Pratchett's affectionate mockery in the early Discworld books.
@Doc Tor, part of the point of Dredd is that he is near-inhuman. And there were reasons (bad ones) why his mask was off in the Stallone movie.
And regarding House Elves, I think part of the point is that Hermione went in guns blazing rather than talking to the House Elves themselves. SPEW was more than slightly paternalistic.
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My real name consists of just four letters, but in billions of combinations.
Eudaimonaic Laughter - my blog.
Posts: 3926 | From: The Sea Coast of Bohemia | Registered: Dec 2003
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Kelly Alves
Bunny with an axe
# 2522
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Justinian:
When I hear pacifist characters, I don't think tricksters, I think of an annoying archetype, and an archetype that's out-and-out griefing. And from your description about it pissing everyone off I assumed you meant the third. The annoying archetype is the healing-only cleric. Supported in some versions, and it has the massive downside of making everything (a) take longer and (b) be less tense. But the worst type are the genuine pacifists. Who will heal the monsters and genuinely behave like a liability. "But I'm just playing my character".
And definitely agreed on the beserker-fighters. Agghhh! Although there's normally a simple answer. Let them die.
As for Gygax and XP rewards, absolutely right. The rule from both Gygax and Arneson was 1XP for 1GP - which meant you gained many times more XP from the loot than from the kills - and in order to prevent you forting up, wandering monsters didn't carry treasure so you just gained the kill XP from them. This was always a controversial if not downright unpopular rule (mostly because Gygax didn't actually explain it anywhere in the DMG) and therefore 2e turned it into an optional rule that was and 3e removed it entirely. 4e didn't add it back but had its own alternatives. (For the record, Gygax gave you the XP when you gained the loot, Arneson when you spent it on something not directly for adventuring).
![[Snigger]](graemlins/snigger.gif)
Ok, thanks for explaining, Maybe that's what the team was worried about, then. (although that character was probably much too prissy to describe himself as a trickster! ) If that's what you thought I mean, then I totally agree. Yeesh.
And apologies, Gary, for the Tolkien thing.
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I cannot expect people to believe “
Jesus loves me, this I know” of they don’t believe “Kelly loves me, this I know.”
Kelly Alves, somewhere around 2003.
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Bullfrog.
Prophetic Amphibian
# 11014
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Posted
Someone posted a while back about Cherryh and whether authors were advocating what existed in their worlds. In her case, I think (her treatment of cell phones, for instance) I would give the author a little more credit for accepting nuance and being creative enough not to generate simple uni-dimensional utopias and/or dystopias. Same with the house elves. I think in some sense it's just an accurate portrayal of how a slave society would respond to an abolitionist. If the whole culture had suddenly shifted merely because of one activist, would it really be that believable? In some ways I think the author nails the point home better by showing how people really do get comfortable in these arrangements, even the slaves themselves.
[ 28. October 2012, 01:53: Message edited by: Bullfrog. ]
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Some say that man is the root of all evil
Others say God's a drunkard for pain
Me, I believe that the Garden of Eden
Was burned to make way for a train. --Josh Ritter, Harrisburg
Posts: 7522 | From: Chicago | Registered: Feb 2006
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Zach82
Shipmate
# 3208
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Posted
Maybe it's there, but I just can't see where Rowling makes the point "it's bad how comfortable everyone is with this house elf thing." Hermione casts off her idealism like so much childish nonsense and it's never heard from again. If the narrative wanted to question the "muggles are subhuman" thing, it seems to me that there would be some sympathetic muggles around. If it is unjust to banish squibs to the margins of wizarding society, then we should see how painful and lonely it is to never develop magical powers. But we see none of those things. The only details we get only confirm the validity of these aspects of wizarding society.
It's fine if Rowling just didn't want to tell those stories, but then, she didn't have to write the world that way either. She made a choice to portray muggles as universally vicious and house-elves as happy slaves. Why?
Or maybe I've been reading too much of the deconstruction of the Chronicles of Narnia.
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Don't give up yet, no, don't ever quit/ There's always a chance of a critical hit. Ghost Mice
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Ender's Shadow
Shipmate
# 2272
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Posted
I entirely agree with Lamb Chopped about the hierarchy portrayed in the Narnia books as being established by Aslan and therefore valid. I must however challenge:
quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
You'll notice, too, that Lewis does not regard just any human being as an appropriate ruler for Narnia. The Telmarines are usurpers, not proper rulers, even though they are human.
Disagree; Caspian is recognised as king by Aslan despite being of Telmarine stock. The whole plot of Prince Caspian is that he has been wrongly put off the throne.
quote:
Originally posted by Badger Lady:
On the Narnia books, I remember even as a (darked haired; half- Asian) child finding the Horse and His Boy quite disturbing. Almost all the 'good' characters were white and blond. All the baddies were dark haired, dark skinned and (even to my superficial reading) based on Arabs/Muslims. I stopped reading the Narnia books after that.
The point about the Horse and His Boy baddies being Arab/Muslim type rulers is well made - but the fact that [spoiler alert] the Boy ends up marrying the girl he's helped escape seems to offer a radical challenge to seeing that as a negative stereotyping; how much more affirming of individuals can you get? Whereas the Calormen empire is an aggressively imperialist one - as the Ottomans were: their last siege of Vienna was in 1683.
Then it was us white guys turn to build empires... ![[Hot and Hormonal]](icon_redface.gif)
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Test everything. Hold on to the good.
Please don't refer to me as 'Ender' - the whole point of Ender's Shadow is that he isn't Ender.
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Eliab
Shipmate
# 9153
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Robert Armin:
While I know nothing about Lackey personally, I too would be surprised if she consciously advocates slavery. However, I am disturbed by an entire race of beings who are have no aspirations above serving others.
If you accept that ML doesn't consciously approve of slavery, and also accept that her stories can be read without the reader thinking that she does, then what's the objection?
Attempting a speculative answer to my own question - perhaps its that the impulse that makes the existence of anintelligent race whose purpose is menial service attractive to the reader is the same impulse that once made slavery an attractive institution.
But if so, I don't see that as a close enough connection to be objectionable. It would be nice is there was an intelligent race which found fulfillment doing my laundry*. It would be extremely convenient. Just as it would be nice to have a shedload of cash, be incredibly desireable to the opposite sex, and be able to bounce bullets and punch bad guys through walls. It's OK for fantasy to be comfortable with that sort of desire.
Of course those desires, for comfort, adulation, power, whatever can be the impulses behind all sorts of crime, but fantasy does not have to pretend that the desires are bad in themselves. They aren't - they are quite natural and, as desires, morally neutral, starting data for moral choices, not faults. The problem is that they can be harmfully indulged - the point of fantasy is to allow them to be harmlessly imagined.
(*I suspect, through I don't know, that the fantasy in fact being spun is "wouldn't it be great if there were a country where no one had to do any menial work unless they enjoyed it?" rather than "wouldn't it be great if I had my own race of willing slaves?". But either is fine with me, considered purely as fantasy.)
quote:
When I started this thread I was hoping for a discussion of how fantasy seems to let the darker sides of our personalities out, as well as the fun/creative sides.
OK, but what's wrong with that? Horror fantasy can be as much fun as heroic fantasy.
I play the Call of Cthulhu and SLA Industries RPGs. A lot of the enjoyment is setting up and dealing with very dark stories. If I write a scenario involving pornography, blackmail, televised rape, slavery, drug abuse, torture and assassination, and run it straight, as if all those things were an accepted part of the campaign world, it doesn't mean that I approve of any of them in real life. It means that I like dark stories.
[ 28. October 2012, 09:34: Message edited by: Eliab ]
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"Perhaps there is poetic beauty in the abstract ideas of justice or fairness, but I doubt if many lawyers are moved by it"
Richard Dawkins
Posts: 4619 | From: Hampton, Middlesex, UK | Registered: Mar 2005
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Curiosity killed ...
Ship's Mug
# 11770
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Posted
Isn't it that a lot of these fantasy themes are ways of experiencing vicariously ideas you'd / we'd like to explore without harming anyone or anything in the process? An effective way of sublimating those darker desires?
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Mugs - Keep the Ship afloat
Posts: 13794 | From: outiside the outer ring road | Registered: Aug 2006
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Doublethink.
Ship's Foolwise Unperson
# 1984
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Posted
I've never been that keen on the divine right of kings.
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All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome. George Orwell
Posts: 19219 | From: Erehwon | Registered: Aug 2005
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Curiosity killed ...
Ship's Mug
# 11770
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Posted
Well, no, but when people talk of being reborn they were often Cleopatra or Mark Antony in a previous existence, rarely a servant when probability suggests they're far more likely to have been a servant or slave.
I was responding to Eliab's post and some of the ideas he was suggesting.
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Mugs - Keep the Ship afloat
Posts: 13794 | From: outiside the outer ring road | Registered: Aug 2006
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Ricardus
Shipmate
# 8757
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
I do wonder about the house elves, though. I mean, we automatically find their situation abhorrent (and call it slavery and such), but is it possible that the author is actually intending to play with an even more "out there" scenario--the question of what you would do if you actually, really, goodness to Betsey discovered a species that WANTED that situation and nothing else?
I suspect that if we found a nearby planet of house-elves of the usual sort (not Dobby, then), we'd be horrified. Would probably do our best in fact to convince them that a life of service was NOT what they wanted, that they were mad-brained for thinking so, and generally done everything we could to change their psychology into a form we could tolerate. Which would be just as morally wrong as the reverse.
Maybe that's what Rowling was playing with.
That's my understanding.
AIUI servitude is supposed to be built into the elves' DNA - witness the fact that the master's command overrules any other magical law for an elf. So that (spoiler alert) an elf can escape from a cave full of protective spells because it's been commanded to do so, and that command is (for the elf) more powerful than the protective spells.
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Then the dog ran before, and coming as if he had brought the news, shewed his joy by his fawning and wagging his tail. -- Tobit 11:9 (Douai-Rheims)
Posts: 7247 | From: Liverpool, UK | Registered: Nov 2004
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Jengie jon
Semper Reformanda
# 273
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Posted
Please note this. The idea that the Calormenes are based on Muslims, is a clear projection of our bogey ideas onto C.S. Lewis. What he is doing is feeding a heavily fictionalised account of India under the Raj. That is as far as there are real life characters for C.S. Lewis Calormene they are Hindus not Muslims.
You have remember that Boxen (Wikipedia) is partly based on his reading of Beatrix Potter and his brothers Warnie readings about India. This is of course the repudiated writing of the Imperial British about India and suffers horribly from Orientalism (to Wikipedia). It does however seem to me far more likely than when wanting a culture for the Calormene he used this than went to stereotyping Muslims. Although as at least three if not four times removed from India and fictionalised I would not expect much connection with reality.
In other words the jump from dark skinned baddie to Muslim is a sign of our own racism not his. Not saying he isn't racist but his is of a different complexion.
Jengie
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"To violate a persons ability to distinguish fact from fantasy is the epistemological equivalent of rape." Noretta Koertge
Back to my blog
Posts: 20894 | From: city of steel, butterflies and rainbows | Registered: May 2001
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Ender's Shadow
Shipmate
# 2272
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Posted
KA, I'm eternally grateful that you didn't want to be a pacifist in the days when I was a DM; all ![[Overused]](graemlins/notworthy.gif) to the DM who coped with you!
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Test everything. Hold on to the good.
Please don't refer to me as 'Ender' - the whole point of Ender's Shadow is that he isn't Ender.
Posts: 5018 | From: Manchester, England | Registered: Feb 2002
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Robert Armin
All licens'd fool
# 182
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Posted
Picking up Eliab's point (couldn't find a handy quote - sorry) and also Lamb Chopped and Ricardus', where I get uneasy with the servant race idea is precisely because it is so appealing, and so prevalent. The idea that there is a whole group of people who enjoy doing the boring menial stuff is exactly what men used to say (are still saying?) about women, slave owners about slaves, upper classes about lower classes. It is the same careless, unthinking attitude that most people with the money to employ servants show towards them. It's the attitude behind the "pleb" comment that cost the chief whip his job. It stinks.
ETA: And if it gets expressed, unchallenged, in fiction it is more likely to flourish in real life.
[ 28. October 2012, 12:12: Message edited by: Robert Armin ]
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Keeping fit was an obsession with Fr Moity .... He did chin ups in the vestry, calisthenics in the pulpit, and had developed a series of Tai-Chi exercises to correspond with ritual movements of the Mass. The Antipope Robert Rankin
Posts: 8927 | From: In the pack | Registered: May 2001
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