eepy-dragon

ice blast to the face

yuki
adult dragon
very tired

asexual disaster mess


Scampir
@Scampir
folly
@folly asked:

what's a trope in fantasy settings that you don't like?

I think it's the uncritical gygaxian race stuff and the fantasy races of dwarf, elf, halfling, troll, ogre, orc, goblin etc. Some people on cohost have tried to rehabilitate it but so far there are lines that have not been backed down from and I am therefore not convinced. It's just this way that race works out that really conflicts with what I have read about race over the course of my education. So many people see it as a necessary component to an enjoyable medieval fantasy work and like I love a fantastic version of a person but I am so sour on the prospect of receiving various ethno-national communities as a natural formation of peoples and not like, the product of a political project. Or to have a kind of population level physical trait assume that people want to exploit that. Here are three things that adopting that trope doesn't account for:

  1. People don't agree with every ideal in their culture
  2. People may agree with values emphasized within their culture but actively act against them
  3. There is more variation within populations than between them.

And like, if an author wants to include these fantasy beings as a race or species I am not going to engage unless they actually recognize what that means outside of providing something fantastic or resonant to the internal experience of the character. It is wrong to sanitize the gygaxian/tolkien model of fantasy race and treat it like it's distinct from our world's racism.


smuonsneutrino
@smuonsneutrino

go watch a bunch of DS9 to see this done reasonably well (if sometimes clumsily because 90s)


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in reply to @Scampir's post:

I'm curious: is this because this version of fantastic peoples is like, the "uncanny valley" of the situation? 'Cuz I agree on all points, but I'm also thinking about how I use elfishness in my cloakkink work as a cipher for cultural alienation. It's a different kind of use from what I'm doing with Terra Philia, where I'm explicitly trying to recognize that the different fantasy communities are the collision of subspecies and culture, and individuals are often defined by how they break from those patterns. Seems like there's this long, thorny middle ground where elves and the like are too common/detailed to be treated solely as metaphor, but not individuated/entangled with their surrounding politics enough to avoid racist pitfalls.

I think that your project is already digging into something different. Like as soon as you ask “what are queer elves like?” and how are elves alienated within their own society you are handling it critically.

got in an argument on here over this a month or so ago where i was critical of the same thing you are and wound up blocked over it. truly wild that this is up for debate at all on cohost of all places

in reply to @smuonsneutrino's post:

I think a snag with this is that DS9 has this politic throughout where everyone has a homeworld and beyond that they have to build claims to planets through settler colonies. Adopting that would be stepping beyond the gygaxian/tolkien "gods made everyone" element.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding-- what are the core elements of the gygaxian model you're attacking? My view of how fantasy races "ought to" work is way more informed by star trek than any actual fantasy (of which I've read/watched surprisingly little), so I might be missing something here.

Ah sorry if it came out like I was attacking I probably didn’t give this comment enough attention. Maybe we should discuss this in in dms on discord or something I actually want to like, discuss where you’re coming from here more in-depth so I can explain where I am more eloquently.

I have to suppress my urge to retcon my entire D&D world to change all the "humans but slightly unusual" species to some other creature almost every week.

Also, I find it kind of interesting that whenever I explain how I don't run fantasy species as monocultures because that's incredibly lazy and bad, I am met with the impression that I'm automatically thus running some kind of sloppy Marvelized High Fantasy popcorn game.

I just thought about where these fantasy species came from in prehistory around the same time humans were evolving from apes. All the other species did roughly the same thing. So why would humans be the only ones that get to have 100 unique worldwide cultures and thousands of subcultures?

Did the other species not migrate, ever? How'd they get stuck in that one spot?