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?
I’ll get this one out fast because I’m not really following Daredevil: Born Again nor have I seen the first Netflix series it allegedly came from. So I’m going by third party information and knowledge of other adaptations, but it’s the latest argument in stupid. Apparently Karen Page, a woman with an average woman build, took down a bunch of ICE agent stand-ins rather easily. When people who actually know who Karen Page is and her sorted history in the comics (the source material whether media snobs like it or not) complained that was silly, the response is “wait, you can believe a blind man can beat up a bunch of dudes but not a woman?”. This is why the social media hashtag #ContextIsForTheWeak is itself weak. Let’s look at this blind man.
If the Netflix/MCU version of Matt Murdock is anything like the comics or the adaptations I have seen (the two most prominent being The Trial Of The Incredible Hulk and the Fox Kids Spider-Man, which was a great version of ol’ hornhead) saves an old man from being hit by a truck as a kid. A canister of radioactive ooze hits him in the face as the canister breaks open, robbing him of his sight and causing a rat and four baby turtles to mutate into future ninja. His father is killed for not fixing a fight out of wanting his son’s respect more than his eyesight. Obeying his dad’s final wish, Matt studies and becomes a successful lawyer.
However, that’s not where his tale ends.
Lost in the perspective is that Matt isn’t truly blind. The gunk also gave him enhanced senses, becoming something he calls “radar sense”. In the comics he can even read ink impression on a newspaper as if it were in braille. He also trains his body to as much of a human and personal peek as his mind, learns how to fight using his radar sense to make up for a lack of eyesight (minus the superpowers, real world blind people do the same thing, having their other senses replace the lost one), and creates weapons that he can utilize without his opponents being any wiser about his disability. These are things Karen Page cannot say about herself. She never trained in combat, has no superpowers, and while a good lawyer nothing states that she’s a good fighter. Now if you want fighters who are blind and fueled by estrogen, I have a couple for you.
That’s Jinx, introduced in G.I. Joe: The Movie. If you didn’t watch or the video’s down, Jinx gets easily taken down by Beachhead, her drill instructor, until she fights her way, trained by a blind ninja master. Wearing a blindfold she easily whips the seasoned soldier. The Joes have a history of eccentric and female soldiers. We believe Jinx can beat Beachhead here and a monster woman from Cobra-La later on in the final battle, both literally with her eyes closed, because we know she’s been trained in martial arts by a blind master by exposition. It’s in her history, not something she learned in a day of barely training tops. She’s learned how to harness her other senses so much that she actually has a weakness fighting with her eyes open. No superpowers required. Blinding Jinx was the dumbest thing Pythona could do. It was handing Jinx the victory.
However, let’s do one with “superpowers”, though it’s not what her world calls them. Toph from Avatar: The Last Airbender was blind from birth. She is also an earthbender, one who can channel the element of earth and later invents metalbending because it comes from the earth. We see this is not atypical, just abnormal, since we have a waterbender who learns to control the flow of blood like it’s water and a firebender who can convert that heat into lightning. You can assume airbending would have an extra form as well if not for the events of the series. And it’s women who we first see use these advanced forms, though lightning firebending is shown to not be as new as metalbending while bloodbending has been around so long it’s considered a forbidden art by waterbenders. No complaints from the fans on those, either. Toph also learned to use her connection to the earth to compensate for her blindness, reading vibrations in the ground to find her opponents and sensing where someone is standing, which she has used in an earthbender version of professional wrestling, so she has combat skills at an early age. When Aang choses her as his earthbending instructor it makes total sense.
We don’t believe Karen Page can fight better than Daredevil not because she’s a “chick” but because she’s a chick with no history of fight training, not even a self defense class, or superpowers, unlike Daredevil, Jinx, or Toph.
Let’s look at another bit of recent stupidity: not believing a trans woman or someone in a wheelchair could exist in a “Dungeons & Dragons” style world. Why can’t you accept a woman would be trans or that someone in a wheelchair? Because magic exists that has healed far worse. This is a more extreme example, but….
While this clip from The Brilliant Healer’s New Life In The Shadows (which I wouldn’t mind checking out someday) shows that the talent is exhaustive and not known to all healers, we still see a woman’s entire lower arm and hand restored as if it were never removed. (The women in that show are also badasses who aren’t girlboss feminists.) We see stories where character have their gender swapped by accident by magic, no surgical scars required (never understood how those were an option in the often maligned Dragon Age: The Veilguard) and even if they’re injured where magic can’t heal they can still have some kind of magical prosthetic. Go sci-fi enough and you can have an exoframe that helps you walk or a full prosthetic body like in the Ghost In The Shell franchise. That’s on top of all the monster strikes, poisons, space viruses, and sword wounds a player can have healed rather quickly in video games by grabbing a box spinning in mid-air.
Also…why would you want to play as a trans character or an active knight in a wheelchair? Unless you think it would make for an interesting character, wouldn’t you just play as the gender you want? Some people even play the gender they aren’t just for fun, not out of wanting to be that gender. (Or in some video games they’d rather see the opposite gender’s butt for hours at a time.) I was in a wheelchair for about a month after my surgery, and that was after I stopped being bedridden. I wanted to learn to walk again, and rather slowly I did, going from wheelchair to walker to a cane, and now I need none of those. This is good and unless it would be an interesting character I wouldn’t play someone who was crippled. Odds are a player who is permanently in a wheelchair in real life would rather play a character who can walk rather than having a flying wheelchair or something. The point of playing a game be it RPG or video is to be a cooler, more interesting version of yourself, free of body dysmorphia or handicap. I understand people obsessed with themselves who can’t believe in a higher power have trouble understanding that, but some of us want to be better than we are now. Dudes want bigger muscles. Women want to be more attractive or able to wield a sword against goblins. It’s not just the rules of the land, and as previously discussed consistency with magic systems are important to believing the world is a possibly existing place. It’s just making gameplay fun. I couldn’t fight a dragon and I have working limbs and my chosen gender.
Speaking of consistency, let’s finally get to the racial makeup of the fantasy world. This is where the culture war has done the worst damage, and of anything I’ve written where I’ll get the most pushback. Note that I don’t care what someone’s race is when it comes to modern day United States, or even the real world. We’re talking about the fictional worlds of fantasy. And yet, fantasy needs some kind of rule to be believable. Can you have, for example, black people in a fantasy world? Sure…but like everything else in worldbuilding you have to do it the right way.
I’m not biological expert. While I was prepping this article another article from Live Science came my way. The article itself states that according to a recent study redheads are on the rise, male pattern baldness is on the downturn, and humans are developing a level of immunity to HIV and leprosy. As it is people with leprosy are in better shape than they were in the days of the Bible or even European folklore. All of our variants as the human race are based on where we, or more accurately our ancestors, came from. Skin color, eye and nose shape, and various other features came from the geographic locations our ancestors came from. That same study suggested our skin might be lightening up, which I can only assume comes from how we’ve learned to control our environment with everything from sunglasses to suntan lotion to air conditioners. We can live in any ecosystem we want theoretically. (That’s depending on local politics, but this is political enough as it is. I’m not even going there.)
Your typical high fantasy world has stricter rules than your typical sword and sorcery world. In the latter nobody really cares about skin color because people travel all the time. Some genomes are closer than others, though not on the level of something like Paw Patrol where the jungle is a short drive from the ski lodge, though they still have to fly to not-England. (Preschool shows don’t care. They just want to do the cool thing for the kiddies.) Conan meeting up with a darker skinned man is not unbelievable because he probably came there from some far off land, and the choice in skin color was just to reflect that, not some false sense of representation. When James Earl Jones played the villain in the first Conan movie, the response was “hey, it’s that guy with the cool voice turning into a snake man during an…orgy what?”. That last part could just be me.
In your Tolkien inspired high fantasy things are different. You can have a traveler from a foreign land. Mystic Knights Of Tir Na Nog had that so Saban could keep his MTV reality show style racial balance. However, the folklore that inspired it, and in turn most fantasy works, has such things about as rare as a dude who can rebuild a human arm like a living 3D printer. If we’re a product of our environment and the environment is based on European geography as well as European folklore, the humans are going to be caucasian because that’s what people in the real thing would look like, just as the various Last Airbender characters each match the color of their geography based on the cultures whose martial arts styles were used to represent the various element bending. Not a European in the entire Avatar world, and nobody complains because it makes perfect sense to that world. Also there’s no Europe.
Even the non-human fantasy and sci-fi races adhere to this rule. Elves are creatures of the forest, dwarves prefer underground living (that doesn’t mean you, Dinklage, it means the non-human folklore creatures your condition is named after!), and so on, and this is reflected in how they look and act. Their culture is also at least in part inspired by ecology. Humans evolved on other planets but only when their ecology matched Earth or whatever part of Earth the planet was inspired by to form the story, what we call a “hat” because somehow an entire planet shares a culture and general ecosystem. If your spaceman is a glob, there needs to be a reason that such a lifeform would evolve and gain sentience. Anthropomorphic foxes, to choose my favorite animal, in a serious sci-fi or fantasy story need a reason to be so. It could be a magician or scientist messing with nature or it could be that’s what evolved as the dominant species for that world’s environment or set aside location, like the Garurians of Robotech II: The Sentinels or the various races of the Sonic The Hedgehog franchise. It’s just good worldbuilding. Having an elf with “asian” eye structure only makes sense if that world has an ecosystem that would evolve that feature and someone traveled from there to the European setting and had sexy time with an elf, or if it the story took place in the “asian” inspired setting. Journey To The West would be odd if Sun Wukong looked more like Chuck Norris. Ricardo Montauban I could believe. Dude could play almost every race believably.
(Speaking of shows I’m curious about…)
This makes what’s going on with Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey all the more bizarre. First off, he wants to make it “historically accurate”, which to him means no gods and no monsters. Instead he’s going to do what he thinks they would have been events in the actual voyage but due to Odysseus not getting out of the house much and it being a year still in only triple digits and a BC in the year, Homer would guess what they are. You know, like sailors in Christopher Columbus’ time swearing they saw sea monsters and mermaids. Except that Homer’s two poems, The Odyssey being a sequel to The Iliad focusing on Odysseus trying to get home and having a series of adventures standing in the way while his wife holds down the fort, are not historical accounts. They’re not even mythology, they’re works of fiction, like Touched By An Angel or Lucifer. Superheroes might be considered modern myth, but that’s only culturally. Superman doesn’t explain a scientific phenomenon we don’t understand, he exists in defiance of the ones we do understand. Remember, this whole nonsense started when three goddesses decided to have a beauty contest and tried to bribe the judge they forced to take part. He took the one that would get him a girlfriend because goddesses are worse than monkey’s paws (sorry, Wukong) when it comes to wishes.
His notion of “historically accurate” is also questionable. Helen of Troy wouldn’t be black (even based on her description in Homer’s poems) and neither would her sister. I haven’t read The Iliad in forever but I don’t even remember a sister, never mind a twin, so why are they played by the same actress? Even if Homer knew about Africa I doubt Africans would work in the story and Australian aborigines would be way out. He also doesn’t want an orchestral score because orchestras didn’t exist back then, which makes less sense than doing half of West Side Story in a language most of your audience doesn’t know and not even including subtitles. Good thing nobody with years of filmmaking experience and well-deserved praise was that stupid.
However, explain to me why you then insist on a rapper as a “modern day poet” playing a Greek poet when rap didn’t exist then and thus also not historically accurate. I think he just likes grounding the fantastic in some “modern” sense of reality, which is why I never fully accepted his Batman movies (though I did enjoy Batman Begins and own the DVD). More cynical critics, following Hollywood’s racial stereotype-ridden trend of believing rap music and cornrows were invented in ancient Africa, are prepared for trap music behind the “poet” like every black lead in a modern Hollywood movie or movie trailer. How is that not racist stereotyping?
Meanwhile the rumor mill, for whatever that’s worth, still insists as of writing time that Elliot Page will be the ghost of Achilles, the near-invulnerable warrior whose mom didn’t want to turn him over and double dip. That’s where laziness gets you, mom. It doesn’t matter what gender you think the former Ellen Page is, there’s no way someone with that build is coming off as one of ancient Greece’s best warriors. I couldn’t pull it off either, unless Achilles had a gut. I don’t think he did. “Historically accurate” my foot…oh, too soon?
The fantastic doesn’t let you get away with everything, and when you’re talking to people who already don’t believe in the fantastic because they’re too mired in modernity and poorly thought out social causes to have an imagination it’s even dumber. There are rules to magic systems and their sci-fi/superhero equivalent because it would be boring and OP otherwise. Superman has limits despite the protests, and he should. Daredevil works when you look into the details (obvious reference is obvious). You can have strong women based on those rules. You can have people from other cultures and ecosystems dropping in if you follow the rules of the world. It’s why worldbuilding exists, but what we have here is world destroying for “the Cause” or just to be lazy sods who couldn’t imagine anything greater than the coffee shop that survived the latest LA wildfires to understand what you’re doing. A good storyteller knows the rules before they can break them so they know HOW to break them without breaking the world, even to add in the groups they claim to represent without seeing them as individual people within that group. It’s lazy and shows you don’t care, and as many of us story analyzers and fans keep pointing out, if you don’t care then why should your audience?
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