I’m joking with the meme, but it’s an interesting how plot armor unintentionally places value on people’s lives in fiction.
It’s telling that censorship laws decide who it is and isn’t acceptable to kill. Just thinking about violence against sentient robots and how that’s normalized in things like Samurai Jack.
Like we know the robot has thoughts and feelings, like they’ll try to run to save themselves or plead for mercy, but a character can still heroic after essentially killing a non-human who’s acting like how we understand humans.
I feel like there’s something dangerous in how easily we can depict appropriate targets of violence. Not just robots, but anybody deemed as less than human are allowed to be more put at risk.
Unnamed people are killed in superhero fights all the time. But unless they are of a class of characters like protagonists, they are collateral damage at best.
I think Plot Armor as a trope needs more class consciousness and awareness around how deciding who gets to be protected is often an unconscious political belief.
What about you though? Any tropes in media you’d like to see explored more or written with a leftist understanding?
It’s telling that censorship laws decide who it is and isn’t acceptable to kill. Just thinking about violence against sentient robots and how that’s normalized in things like Samurai Jack.
Like we know the robot has thoughts and feelings, like they’ll try to run to save themselves or plead for mercy, but a character can still heroic after essentially killing a non-human who’s acting like how we understand humans.
I feel like I should point out that he does kill humans in season 5, and the show more or less says that not only is he still cool and heroic for doing it, he’s actually even more awesome now that it can be shown with blood and everything.
Yeah that’s wild from a creative perspective. The morals didn’t change, the censorship level did because it was on adult swim.
And even then there was still this level of acceptable violence when you’re not considered human enough.
They were considered evil enough to kill even if they were born human and made evil against the will.
Yeah that’s wild from a creative perspective. The morals didn’t change, the censorship level did because it was on adult swim.
I mean, I think that was completely the correct decision, artistically. Samurai Jack was openly influenced by chanbara movies and samurai anime and manga, and particularly by Lone Wolf and Cub. The samurai characters in those stories are cool and heroic precisely because they kill people in stylish and gruesome ways. Shying away from that or rejecting it would have been hypocritical weak. I also think “cinematic violence is incredibly cool and our hero is incredibly cool for killing people in cool ways” is FAR less problematic than “it’s cool to kill robots because they’re not ‘real’ people, even when we show them as fully sentient, but killing humans is a big no no.”
Basing a fantasy culture off of a real-life culture. Or even worse, basing a fantasy race off of a real-life culture - that’s just dehumanization. It’s very common, it’s very problematic, and it’s a remnant of racist 20th century fantasy. The Forgotten Realms has to be destroyed, sorry. Genshin Impact as well.
If you’re going to be using a real-life culture, you need to seriously know your stuff and have respect for the culture you’re writing about (this is why Liyue is good and Sumeru is racist trash, for instance). I’d say to most people that if you want to use someone else’s culture cause it’s cool, consider worldbuilding something unique instead and save us all a headache.
Tolkien’s thing exploring the extremes of humanity as different races was cool. Except there was way too much overlap with real world races that invalidates it for me.
The former is what humans have been doing in mythology since the beginning of civilization. The latter is modern mythology, basically nationalism and fascism in the worst case. There is a reason that neo-Nazis use the term “orc” for people they consider inferior
How did Tolkien explore the extremes of humanity through different races? Lord of the Rings may give thst impression somewhat and the Jackson films quite a bit but on other works elves have quite a variety of cultures and different types of dudes including one of the biggest assholes of the legendararium, Feanor. The dwarves still seem a bit like a monoculture but Tolkien didn’t write a tonne on them and they keep a lot of their culture secret to non dwarves. Children of Hurin has examples of characters form all of those races who act against what would become the stereotype (it didn’t exist yet, it came from people who were inspired by Tolkien). This may just be me being a giant Tolkien geek and from reading everything the guy ever put to paper at least twice.
Yes you are right, there is a lot of internal diversity within elves and dwarves. That is a saving grace, and not just that, it should serve as direction for modern fantasy writers too who might otherwise overlook the scope of Tolkien’s project as the first fantasy work, and write monoliths and stereotypes instead.
How did Tolkien explore the extremes of humanity through different races?
I am trying to recall exactly where I read Tolkien explaining this. Maybe the Silmarillion or one of his letters, or I might be remembering someone else’s explanation. Basically the observation that in mythology, subsequently reflected in Tolkien, supernatural races are in fact human but to an extreme in some respect.
Like the elves represent the daring and heroic of humanity, once young, powerful, and immortal in a new world, then weary of it once past the point of glory. The dwarves are humanity’s drive to build and conquer nature, to an obsessive degree. Orcs are humans twisted by industrialization and warfare. Hobbits are humans stubborn yet content in their traditions, maybe fearful of change as well.
You see the same across mythologies, which I believe Tolkien was aware of. In Indian mythology, the gods and gandharvas are humans with extreme power, virtue, knowledge, and compassion. The asuras are the same, but without compassion. Rakshasas are asuras without the virtue and knowledge. Pretas are hungry and all-consuming. The apsaras are sexual and playful. And so on. They are all humanoid, even the ones which aren’t, paradoxically, like the nagas, kinnaras, and kimpurushas.
All put together, at least in the Indian conception, they are all characters in a divine drama, meant to celebrate or teach the human condition to the human audience.
What’s really problematic is when they just have race wars in there, as a thing, and it’s not examined at all. For all the things BG3 does well, it treats the goblins as completely disposable even within the narrative itself. There’s deep gnome characters who live on the surface in Baldur’s Gate, but every single goblin is a football hooligan that eats people and can’t read. All they’re good for is being slaughtered by the PC or slaughtering all the Tieflings at the grove.
What’s really problematic is when they just have race wars in there
yeah, like making a completely new culture that’s unrecognizable from it’s inspirations is fucking hard, i’m sympathetic to taking liberties and making a country ‘magic italians’ or something. but your fantasy cultures should never be doing a fucking race war unless its industrialized, colonial and the story is all about examining that.
medieval and ancient people didn’t do race war, they didn’t have the ideological bases to even imagine it
Medieval group atrocities were usually religion-based. The Protestant movement motivated a lot of bloodshed, and medieval Christians were real big on Jewish pogroms for damn near anything that might happen. Plague? Famine? Bandit raid? Blame the Jews, have a pogrom. Hell, they did it for recreation sometimes.
To that end I’m kinda using that approach in my own stuff (spoilers for autistic infodumping about my writing that I’m procrastinating on)
spoiler
In the setting I’m writing, a theocratic nation led a genocide of the orcs and goblins after ancient elven magitek industrialization allowed religious political power to fester into religiously-grounded protofascism, and the theocratic leaders were upset with how the nomadic tribes of orcs were interfering with their land grab and also selling their mercenary services to other nations, and of course settled insular goblin communities had worked hard to carve a niche for themselves and monopolize certain specialized trades that industrial barons were keen to take control of so they had to go. Heretics, all of them, offensive to the sight of the human-coded pantheon. After war and famine and magical disasters ravaged a lot of the other populations as well, the remaining orcs and goblins, absolutely mad with lust for revenge, were instrumental in the big multiracial peasant revolution that killed all the nobles and priests that were left and started managing the multiple simultaneous apocalyptic crises unleashed upon the continent.
Also two of the crew of the airship I’m setting it on are from Not-France and speak Not-French and Not-France is the center of remaining Not-Europe culture because they were relatively unscathed by the never-ending lightning storms and time ruptures and roving self-perpetuating undead hordes so they still got their universities and theaters and salons and whatnot, so yeah just slapping some aesthetics on there to get the job done is fine in small doses but it’s no fucking excuse for not examining everything and making sure it all fits together and feels true and isn’t some fucked up bullshit that inadvertently says some heinous shit
There are two classes of tropes for me: the ones which serve as actual building blocks of worldbuilding and storytelling, and the ones which are cultural biases.
The former are just the usual patterns retold throughout history, like the hero’s journey. They can seem boring, but it’s because they are generic and need to be localized to the fictional world or a culture’s mythology. Arguably, the way we identify these involves bias, eg. the hero’s journey is mostly based on Indo-European mythology. But I hope my point can still be made.
The latter category are the tropes informed by biases. Or to put it another way, when you can create any possible world or write whatever story, why is it just medieval Anglo shit over and over? Ever notice how most fantasy maps are left-justified? Even hard worldbuilders who do all that meteorological calculation shit can’t perceive a linguistic reality beyond the European sprachbund.
It’s like learning the etymology of a word. Sometimes you find out the way we use words today is very weird, and we shouldn’t assume it applies across all time and traditions (“man” used to be gender neutral, for example). Except some core words eg. “to be,” “to go,” “to come” are relatively very stable.
Omg I thought I was the one going crazy telling people of the implicit racism in LotR or other fantasy works!
I mean “horde” comes from the Turkish word “ordu” meaning army and was used to describe the ottoman ordu/horde. Is it then a coincidence that the orcish horde are often depicted wielding scimitars and the elves straightswords?
Why is mordor placed in the exact position as anatolia on the map? Rectangular in shape with near insurmountable geological features as its borders???
edit: I just took a look at the map for the first time in years and omg, minas morgul (once a gondor city) is so clearly gallipoli/troy coded, the black gates guarding the “main entrance” (who fell to mordor because of a plague in gondor) for Istanbul, the misty mountains the alps and the shire being obviously england doesn’t even need to be mentioned
The geography is specifically based on earth’s, because it’s meant to be set in the distant past of our irl earth when there was still magic.
The sword thing really gets me but I am usually quiet and self-conscious that it sounds like whining.
I really like swords, all swords! But growing up, I was taught that straight swords are the good and elegant ones, while all other designs are for evil henchmen who die immediately. The exception being the katana because weebs caught onto it as a glorified exoticized object.
In general, it confused me how knight, samurai, and ninjas become categories in themselves, but no other historical warrior figure gets to have the same.
Unnamed people are killed in superhero fights all the time. But unless they are of a class of characters like protagonists, they are collateral damage at best.
I think Plot Armor as a trope needs more class consciousness and awareness around how deciding who gets to be protected is often an unconscious political belief.
They attempted this in The Boys but it ended up being a liberal CIA jerk off
I hate seeing things like, “the royal court: words are sharper than daggers here and you must be more alert than on any battlefield.” I like political intrigue, so I get it. But I’m 90% certain most aristocracy was people with seven toes on each foot from decades of inbreeding going to court to decide which son was going to marry their 13 year old first cousin.
I’d like to see it subverted from a left wing perspective.
