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Seer of Blood (Wyatt) and Witch of Void (fractal)


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spookydichotomy
@spookydichotomy

the lord of the rings, the foundation of the fantasy genre. what would it even look like without that one element? more robert e howard, jack vance kinda stuff? there's a pratchett quote about tolkien in fantasy as mount fuji in japanese art- everything after him reckons with him in some way.

a song of ice and fire is the world's most popular unfinished novel series, and the proverbial shadow cast on the cave wall. george r r martin's reaction to tolkien has generally seemed rather petty- see his frequently quoted line about "what is aragorn's tax policy", which has a funny if not entirely fair rejoinder in that none of martin's kings have a stated tax policy either, but was really more a thing about how aragorn was a good man but it wasn't certain he would be a "good king" based on martin's nebulous definition of "good king", so as much as I want to I can't really make fun of him for that. for that. the tax policy line.

tolkien was a scholar of the period of time his setting emulates, and was a junior officer in world war one. he knows his shit. apparently he put down writing lotr for a year or so because he couldn't work out how to have two characters meet up within a feasible travel time based on where they were in the text. his military matters make a scrupulous sense, with matters of morale and logistics and command handled- theoden's ride to the pelennor fields was a heroic march, but it was a plausible one. places have farms! how people get food is considered, even sauron's orcs. this seems like a low bar, but.

martin's setting revolves around a cycle of multi-year winters that would, without a wildly different ecology with vastly lower nutritional requirements, prevent most forms of life from living inside a temperate zone, and nobody really cares. most of the action takes place on a continent he's claimed is the size of brazil that's basically blown-up england except everyone speaks one language, which is a lower degree of linguistic complexity than world of warcraft. incomprehensibly vast armies are raised basically out of nowhere, and apparently a fan reckoning has clocked an infantry force of tens of thousands of troops moving across the map faster than the mechanized nazi blitzkrieg.

there is a disproportionate amount of sexual violence- yes, even for a medieval pastiche's context. guys just do the most heinous shit you've ever heard of and again, nobody cares. you'd think one of them would get knifed in their sleep by an abused servant- how's that for a twist!- but they can just kinda do whatever without consequences, because there's a catholic church analogue that seems fairly toothless and has cathedrals and stuff despite nobody believing in it. girls have kids because that's The Way Things Were even when it wasn't because people have kinda known for tens of thousands of years that things are a lot safer for both mother and child when she's an adult. the infant mortality rate is really good, actually, when they aren't being murdered for shock value- much better than the maternal mortality rate, which seems disproportionately high as a way to cut down on characters. wow, someone else whose mom died in childbirth? how novel! I cannot even get started on the orientalism.

one of these is derided as childish and fanciful, and the other as grounded and material and Serious. for adults. tolkien's actual text is, beyond the evil spirits and giant eagles, very reasonable, but he presented it as an escapist fantasy, and it got enshrined in the public consciousness as that. martin's story is pop history schlock with irreconcilable scale and logistics problems, but martin postures that it's realistic, and that's all that really counts, innit? what does the text matter, when the author boasts that he's being more realistic and true to "real life" than everyone else? it's all branding


eatthepen
@eatthepen

In general, when 'realism' gets appealed to in reference to any genre media, it's a displacement of responsibility, a smokescreen thrown up to cover the agency of a creator who understands on some emotional level that the story they want to tell is lazy, trite or rote and is placing their comfort in their own mediocrity above any interest in doing good or rewarding creative work.

Yes, I fuckin' hate GRRM. Also I ban my first-year game design students from using the word 'realistic' to describe games.

That's not to say that importing material restrictions on fictional action from real-world history is a bad thing - if you know about horse-riding and you know that medieval horse-riding travellers could only travel up to a certain average speed per day, it can be cool to use that as a limiting factor on the speed of information propagation in your sprawling fantasy world. Restrictions breed creativity. My favourite fantasy author, Janny Wurts, sells this really well (I'll admit that you do have to read a lot of scenes where a character complains of saddle sores). You can do that for one or two or a few aspects of a setting. Doing it for every aspect of a setting is impossible and would bog down your prose -so- badly.

Even earnest realism is always selective. Maybe you have realistic horses and unrealistic musical instruments (Wurts again). Maybe you arduously replicate a late-feudal farming economy but the nobles all have pet dragons that they ride to visit one another. Any time you see someone claiming 'realism' as if it legitimises an exploitative or discriminatory creative, always push back, especially when it's used, Martin-style, as a marketing strategy.


teioh
@teioh

Lots of good thoughts in the previous two posts but also worth noting that what gets to count as realistic is intensely political. In particular, what often counts as "realistic" is conflict, oppression, violence, and brutality, whether it is political, gendered, racial, etc.

But rarely do people look at a piece of media and say, as an example, "wow, that depiction of community kindness and solidarity is so realistic." Why not? People talk about making a more "gritty" or "realistic" portrayal of xyz genre or trope or story archetype, and almost always it means more conflict, more oppression, more violence, and more brutality. Do we live in a world where such things exist? Of course we do. But must our lives be solely defined by it? No, of course not. But does it benefit the ruling classes to depict "reality" as fundamentally, irrevocably, irrefutably, inevitably harsh, brutish, violent, and oppressive, that such brutality is simply an inescapable "fact" or "reality" rather than conditions enacted on others via human agency, that somehow cruelty is the defining human trait rather than the fact that we humans cannot help but see ourselves in everything, including inanimate objects, and develop empathy for them?

Oh yes, it definitely does benefit them for us to accept their violence and cruelty as a "reality" we cannot escape.


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in reply to @spookydichotomy's post:

feels like sometimes "realism" in fiction just means "bad stuff that sometimes happens in the real world that i don't like to think about also happens in this story but the proverbial camera fixates on it"

This realism-by-vibes thing is such a bummer, especially the CSI effect and more generally police procedurals, both of which do significant real-world harm by inducing credulous jurors to convict innocent people based on junk science peddled by lying prosecutors.

There is only one shining example of realism in the world of crime TV: My Cousin Vinny. Procedurally it's almost entirely accurate except for a compressed timeline.

the irony of which is that the job of investigators and cops got initially harder as a response to the existence of csi & law and order meant that people wanted "hard proof" and "scientifically backed evidence" so they just moved to include bunk science like "hair matching" and shit

Sci-fi suffers from much of the same, the general vibe being that oh we've moved on from the spandex suits and colored laserbeams, that silly stuff. We're doing hard science fiction now, our ships follow newtonian physics and use kinetic weapons and missiles, our protagonists wear body armor and use assault rifles, it's more realistic which makes it more good.

Wait what do you mean "they did that in the 90s too and better, fuck Halo go watch Space Above and Beyond"

in reply to @eatthepen's post:

in reply to @teioh's post:

What I'd give to see a disaster/apocalypse story that shows people acting realistically, which is doing everything they can to keep each other alive. Disasters bring out the best in humanity in the real world!