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?
i’m pretty much done with any story about restoring the “correct” monarchy. be a bunch of communes with a defense pact or something like damn
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.
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.
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.
Before I knew what The Absolute was, the goblin woman in the cage had my sympathy and I sincerely wanted to find out what she was talking about and set her free because leaving her in there to be inevitably killed just seemed pointlessly cruel.
I’m not saying The Absolute had to be some wholesome goblin leftist revolutionary front that would overthrow the rich assholes of Waterdeep or something, but the single note “these are ugly bad people that do bad things” messaging was really, really lazy.
Pathfinder goblins have a lot more nuance even while still being generally unruly and seen in an ungenerous light.
Wild that BG3 literally removed alignments and still made 99.9% of golbins evil
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
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.
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’d like to see it subverted from a left wing perspective.
Basically a fantasy wine cave with fantasy wine liberals congratulating themselves for performative smartness.
I don’t ever need to read another story where the protagonist is seemingly of humble origins but is secretly a VERY SPECIAL person, perhaps even the one FORETOLD BY PROPHECY
If it wasn’t a compelling basis for a story, it wouldn’t be used so much. But after the first thousand stories like that it’s enough already
Just stay the hell away from time travel. It can be neat and thought provoking when done with enough thought put into it as a central conceit, but more often it’s just a narrative ass-pull that causes more problems than it solves.
The exception that proves this rule, when its done in a comedy. The series Red Dwarf has a few episodes where time travel or time running backwards or a time portal are used and its funny. I think the movie James vs Himself has got some funny parts too.
One of the most ruinously widespread propaganda messages is “changing society somewhat is hard and the people that try may have a point but go too far therefore trust in the status quo warriors to set things as good as they can be.”
It’s in capeshit of course, but it’s also pretty much everywhere else, including P R E S T I G E T V trash, showing anyone that isn’t a cynical murderfucker as a fool, or worse.
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.
It is called Middle Earth
