I should note before we begin that this conversation won’t be restricted to fantasy itself. The same nonsense gets spouted with the two genres I’m more familiar with, science fiction and superheroes. Fantasy just seems to be the better genre to go over the ridiculous arguments that will be presented. Also, I have to apologize to my regular readers as the culture war versus geek and pop culture discussion is going to once again disrupt our happy little home, like an Old West town caught in a border war between two ranches. It’s the way the world works, and it’s helping ruin storytelling in the 21st century, and we’re only 26 years in. Still, if you follow storytelling discussion between culture warriors you know this line:
“You can believe in (insert fantastic element here) but you can’t believe in (out of place marginalized group) being there?”
This isn’t Sam Rami not believing a chemistry whiz with engineering skills building a silly string launcher due to an instinctual need to make webbing. This is a typically European inspired fantasy world with people from other nations (because heaven forbid we tell THOSE people’s own culture and fantasy stories where Europeans would be the out of place ones), a woman beating up dudes a superhero would have trouble with, or a guy in a wheelchair fighting dragons. This is what they say we can’t fathom.
They’re right, we can’t.
The reason isn’t (insert bigotism name here), it’s because of something surface level stereotype driven activists who have never spent real time among the groups they claim to champion but want to look good and push some form of easy extremism in a vain attempt to look like the “good white people” never understand: fantasy has rules. Magic DOES have to be explained. The proverbial and sometime literal devil is in the details. There’s a reason these stereotypes, which actually hurt or insult the very groups they claim to champion, don’t work. A stereotype in storytelling is a starting point. The character has to be built from that stereotype, not embody it in some lame attempt to be an avatar for every member of a certain group regardless of individual views within that group that you only learn when you actually care about other people and not a pat on the back from your peers declaring you on the “right side of history” like some oracle with all the vision-reading skills of Anakin Skywalker. (Hey dummy, the Force is warning you the more you stay on this path the greater odds your wife is going to become one with it.) Okay, that’s out of my system…for now. Let’s take some examples, shall we?
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