Something I think a lot of fantasy roleplaying fans don’t pick up on is that the reason many games’ depictions of orcs and other “monstrous races” get criticised for being racist isn’t just because they’re dark-skinned and evil.
I mean, yes, there’s that, but it’s also that a lot of the tropes that are associated with orcs and such in fantasy RPGs are literally eugenicist rhetoric – and, more specifically, anti-Black eugenicist rhetoric – with the serial numbers lightly sanded off.
Like, you ever notice how common the following elements are?
Being capable of using complex tool and weapons, but relying on raiding and pillaging to obtain them, not because they’re incapable of making them, but because they’re simply too
congenitally
lazy to do so
Having an intrinsic drive to despoil and corrupt the fruits of civilisation, and in particular, taking pleasure in destroying beautiful things specifically because they’re beautiful
Being treated as childishly superstitious for believing in evil spirits, even though such treatment makes no sense from a worldbuilding perspective because they live in a fantasy setting and evil ghosts are objectively real
Reproducing rapidly and reaching sexual maturity quickly, typically at an age when a human would still be a child, with great emphasis placed on the danger of them “outbreeding” civilised peoples if left unchecked
Lusting for the women of other species, resulting in all manner of twisted half-breeds; “heroic” members of their kind are typically drawn from these half-breeds, who must struggle constantly with their base natures
Seriously, a lot of this stuff is copied and pasted directly from 19th Century eugenicist screeds about the intrinsic inferiority of the Black race – they basically just scratched out the n-word and wrote in “orc”.
(And no, you can’t pass it off as folks imitating Tolkien without realising what they were doing. While Tolkien’s orcs undeniably employ racist imagery and stereotypes, there it’s mostly anti-East Asian stuff, not anti-Black stuff. The incorporation of explicitly anti-Black tropes into fantasy fiction’s depiction of orcs is a more recent development, and at least some of the folks doing it absolutely knew what they were up to.)
I really think Jackson is to blame for the recent anti-black bs with orcs, considering how he codes them.
And while Tolkien’s racism regarding orcs is specifically East-Asian directed, I do think there are elements of anti-blackness regarding his orcs as well. While he never came out and said it, there are certainly things I’ve seen and written about that can’t be unseen.
I like to believe that all the dragons in the world were magically cursed and turned into cats. But cats have never forgotten where they come from, hence the attitude.
I nearly didn’t reblog this but the above comment makes more sense than anything I’ve ever heard.
…that’s…that’s actually a story my mom used to tell me when I was little? That a dragon showed up at someone’s cottage so they gave it milk. And the dragon enjoyed the milk, so it kept coming back and got smaller and softer and purry-er until eventually it wasn’t a dragon anymore, it was a cat, and that’s where cats came from and why we keep giving them milk.
She might have gotten the story from Ursula K. Le Guin, or I have confused it with a different dragon story.
That’s also why cats tend to hoard their toys behind the couch!
Actually the story is even older. Written by a woman named Edith Nesbit, first published in 1899, it is called “The Dragon Tamers”. It predates Leguin and other fantasy biggies like Lewis and Tolkien.
Nesbit actually can be credited with being one of the first authors that began to shift myths and legends to more fantasy-like stories (fantasy as a genre how we know it, wasn’t around then because it was just part of literature, especially British literature). In fact, many scholars who study fantasy literature and children’s literature believe that, since her children’s stories were so popular with children in England, the stories and their content prompted Tolkien (the first to coin fantasy as its own genre in his essay “On Fairy Stories”) to take up the stories of dragons and elves and fairies as they’d have been children when she was writing.
Tolkien was born in 1892. He would have been 7 when “The Dragon Tamers” was first published. Edith Nesbit did a LOT for modernizing myths, legends, and lore as a children’s author, maybe more than we will ever know.
PSA to all you fantasy writers because I have just had a truly frustrating twenty minutes talking to someone about this: it’s okay to put mobility aids in your novel and have them just be ordinary.
Like. Super okay.
I don’t give a shit if it’s high fantasy, low fantasy or somewhere between the lovechild of Tolkein meets My Immortal. It’s okay to use mobility devices in your narrative. It’s okay to use the word “wheelchair”. You don’t have to remake the fucking wheel. It’s already been done for you.
And no, it doesn’t detract from the “realism” of your fictional universe in which you get to set the standard for realism. Please don’t try to use that as a reason for not using these things.
There is no reason to lock the disabled people in your narrative into towers because “that’s the way it was”, least of all in your novel about dragons and mermaids and other made up creatures. There is no historical realism here. You are in charge. You get to decide what that means.
Also:
“Depiction of Chinese philosopher Confucius in a wheelchair, dating to ca. 1680. The artist may have been thinking of methods of transport common in his own day.”
“The earliest records of wheeled furniture are an inscription found on a stone slate in China and a child’s bed depicted in a frieze on a Greek vase, both dating between the 6th and 5th century BCE.[2][3][4][5]The first records of wheeled seats being used for transporting disabled people date to three centuries later in China; the Chinese used early wheelbarrows to move people as well as heavy objects. A distinction between the two functions was not made for another several hundred years, around 525 CE, when images of wheeled chairs made specifically to carry people begin to occur in Chinese art.[5]”
“In 1655,Stephan Farffler, a 22 year old paraplegic watchmaker, built the world’s first self-propelling chair on a three-wheel chassis using a system of cranks and cogwheels.[6][3] However, the device had an appearance of a hand bike more than a wheelchair since the design included hand cranks mounted at the front wheel.[2]
The invalid carriage or Bath chair brought the technology into more common use from around 1760.[7]
In 1887, wheelchairs (“rolling chairs”) were introduced to Atlantic City so invalid tourists could rent them to enjoy the Boardwalk. Soon, many healthy tourists also rented the decorated “rolling chairs” and servants to push them as a show of decadence and treatment they could never experience at home.[8]
In 1933 Harry C. Jennings, Sr. and his disabled friend Herbert Everest, both mechanical engineers, invented the first lightweight, steel, folding, portable wheelchair.[9] Everest had previously broken his back in a mining accident. Everest and Jennings saw the business potential of the invention and went on to become the first mass-market manufacturers of wheelchairs. Their “X-brace” design is still in common use, albeit with updated materials and other improvements. The X-brace idea came to Harry from the men’s folding “camp chairs / stools”, rotated 90 degrees, that Harry and Herbert used in the outdoors and at the mines.[citation needed]
“But Joy, how do I describe this contraption in a fantasy setting that wont make it seem out of place?”
“It was a chair on wheels, which Prince FancyPants McElferson propelled forwards using his arms to direct the motion of the chair.”
“It was a chair on wheels, which Prince EvenFancierPants McElferson used to get about, pushed along by one of his companions or one of his many attending servants.”
“But it’s a high realm magical fantas—”
“It was a floating chair, the hum of magical energy keeping it off the ground casting a faint glow against the cobblestones as {CHARACTER} guided it round with expert ease, gliding back and forth.”
“But it’s a stempunk nov—”
“Unlike other wheelchairs he’d seen before, this one appeared to be self propelling, powered by the gasket of steam at the back, and directed by the use of a rudder like toggle in the front.”
Give. Disabled. Characters. In. Fantasy. Novels. Mobility. Aids.
If you can spend 60 pages telling me the history of your world in innate detail down to the formation of how magical rocks were formed, you can god damn write three lines in passing about a wheelchair.
Signed, your editor who doesn’t have time for this ableist fantasy realm shit.
“But they’ve used magic to cure all disabilities – “
Your world is unrealistic and unbelievable, and it also smells like a Nazi euphemism. Sure, you can use magic to treat conditions and to assist your characters. But erasing or excluding these people from your narrative because it’s easier than including them or you think disabled people aren’t perfect enough and should all be cured is gross. This also cheats your readers out of a much richer world experience.
“Your world is unrealistic and unbelievable, and it also smells like a Nazi euphemism.”
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ THIS ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
@ everyone coming at me this morning over how they’ve “fixed” the world by removing people like me from their narrative, this is exactly what you’re perpetuating and it’s making me extremely Uncomfortable to realize just how deeply rooted this kind of thinking is from people who supposedly ought to know better.
Me saying disabilities and mobility aids can and should be included in fantasy and sci-fi narratives should not incite the level of vitriol I woke up to this morning.
If the thought of having disabled people existing in your “perfect world” makes you upset, then you make me upset in this world, and unfortunately we both have to live in this one.
Wow holy shit I’m gonna actually give you guys an actual writing tip, being a published and award winning author and all.
Anyways, a great way to work in TOTALLY UNRELATED little details about your setting or what have you that may or may not be relevant later on is through the use of metaphors, euphemisms, etc. in character dialogue.
“This cold is terrible! I’m wearing more layers than an Aenirian bride!”
Congratulations, you now know something about Aenirian marriage customs. You might not even know what exactly an Aenirian is, but you know that their brides wear lots of layers.
See where I’m going with this?
also even though it seems like common sense little details add so much depth and flavour to a story even and maybe especially when those details aren’t plot relevant
not everything in the real world connects neatly and seamlessly with everything else; there are TONS of loose ends in real life because there’s an entire world that keeps going regardless of one particular person or group’s drama
having proof of a world outside of and utterly unconcerned with the main conflict is such a nice touch and a really quick way to breathe life into dialogue
Can I give completely unsolicited advice to fantasy writers that I wish someone had given me when I was into fantasy writing? The cliche “write what you know” is bad advice if taken literally, it’s how we get books about depressed middle-aged creative writing professors who contemplate having an affair. But generally speaking it can be helpful. Tolkien wrote a medieval fantasy because he was the world’s foremost expert on medieval English literature. His book about Beowulf is still considered academically significant. He gave every race detailed languages because he was also a linguist. He wrote about giant battles because he was traumatized by his time in World War I and wrote during World War II. You don’t have to do any of this because that isn’t you. You are allowed to write a whole fantasy epic without a single battle (or you can make battle scenes modern urban melees because clashes of great armies aren’t a thing anymore.) If, say, you’re really into fashion, feel free to describe in painstaking detail every outfit that elves wear for all possible occasions. I promise you it’s no weirder than describing the dialects of tree people. What I’m saying is, you’re not Tolkien and that’s a very good thing because your voice is needed more. Let your freak flag fly and make the world that comes from you specifically.
“
If, say, you’re really into fashion, feel free to describe in painstaking detail every outfit that elves wear for all possible occasions. I promise you it’s no weirder than describing the dialects of tree people.
“
thank you, also, this gives me a great idea for a fantasy story centred around textiles
willowfoot 