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vcmwThis is one of those sort of a response posts... I was enjoying reading ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
alecaustin 's post about failure modes in panels, and it occurred to me that there are things I'd love to hear people discuss, and usually don't. Which is not exactly apropos of discussion of success/failure, which means it goes here instead of there.
1) Monsters and Magicians. I read so many stories in which the use of magic is presupposed as something that saps the humanity of the user. Either it abstracts them from day-to-day emotional cares, or it literally burns out their empathy, or it requires of them a degree of control that can make them seem inhuman, or it's built on sacrifice of self-or-others, etc. On the other hand, inhuman monsters who can work magic are often portrayed as more human in their thinking/emotions than inhuman monsters who can't. A dragon mage is more apt, in a story, to be thoughtful and relationship oriented than a non-magic using dragon. And the same for most non-humanoid creatures. Usually, if they can work magic, sorcery, etc., they're portrayed as thinking. I guess you see it most often in dragons, but also in wyverns, griffons, farm animals in comic fantasy, companion animals in all sorts of fantasy.
So I think there's something worth exploring there in how magic is used to explore human-ness or its absence. Is magic a stand-in for intellect, here, with sorcerers as people who've retreated to (often literal) ivory towers, or neglected the cats and the babies while they stir spells? Or is it a metaphor for something like spirit, with arguments about who or what has a soul? I'm fairly sure I've seen it used both ways.
2) World-building, historicity, and injustice. I Do Not Get why so many secondary world fantasies built on historical culture models just leave in all the sexism and homophobia because "that was true to the source material" while adding on mythic structures, fantastical creatures, and political/economic situations that were not true to the source material. It's silly and unconsidered. If I have to read one more young adult novel where a girl struggles with a sexist, sex-and-gender repressing patriarchy because she has Special Skills unrecognized by the girl-hating priests/priestesses/soldiers/random power-figures of her culture, I'll scream. Especially because all this girl-hating is usually just because That's How It's Done. If you've thought up eighteen reasons why clockwork cloud dragons feud with the Rainbow Mist people for possession of the Sacred Mating Fields, you better have put just as much thought in to why women can't inherit property in your imaginary world. Also, though this verges in to whole other questions of economics and economic world-building, if you're going to have highly centralized nation states in a world without slavery or economic exploitation on the level of serfdom/feudalism/early industrialism, please to be explaining where the magic income came from! France, England, and Spain without colonies were puny little countries full of internecine strife, and they did not have bustling megaports and advanced trade goods. Nor did they have strong central kings. They had a whole lot of palatinates and dukedoms and territories and things which were semi-autonomous most of the time to the point of often speaking different languages. (This is why I think of all regency romance novels as a funky kind of secondary world fantasy with bad world building. Where in heck did all those Regency Dukes get all of their money if none of them was involved in Jamaican slave trading or brutal warfare with Thuggees or taking gunships into China to force them to buy opium?) This isn't limited to sexist stuff though that's the axis of it I notice most. Pick your axis really. If no one is engaging in brutal colonial oppression, and yet your country has high level trade goods which could only be created in multiple disparate economies, where are your international traders? Your average country in fantasy has less diversity than a mid-sized Mediterranean trading port of the middle ages.
3) Genre fiction that sells well is not the enemy. I swear. The next person that bashes on Harry Potter at a convention like it leaves a bad bad taste in their mouth deserves to have their mouth stuffed with gummy worms or something. So she made more money than the average convention in its entirety. So what. They were perfectly entertaining school/comedy/action stories. And really, they did a better job of engaging with real world issues like indentured servitude and so forth than the average kids books manage. Let it go. I'd love instead to hear a serious discussion about what separates well-selling but not critically loved fantasy from critically loved but not well-selling fantasy, starting from an assumption that both are clearly doing well at something, and then trying to sort out what those somethings are. My conviction would be that the critical stuff is world-building first, plot and/or character second, character and/or plot third, and the well-selling stuff is character first, plot second, world-building a distant third, but that's my assumption based on my preferences. I think that there's another axis where the question is fantastic element as blatant metaphor vs. fantastic element in conversation with fantastic/literary convention. Blatant metaphor sells better because it's more accessible - you don't already need to be part of the conversation to interpret it. If what your story is doing best is commenting on other narrative in a new and intriguing way, that's going to be wicked interesting to someone steeped in the narrative - and almost completely opaque to someone reading in the genre for the first time. There are exceptions, which is why fairy tale works often do well - most people know enough about the bare bones of fairy tale logic that a meta-conversation about them makes sense to a novice reader. A meta-conversation about the average ethical practices of space opera, not so much.
4) Based on my own preferences, I'd like to hear a conversation that takes the fantasy/sf published as romance, comics, etc. just as seriously as the stuff published as fantasy/sf and literary fiction. There are in fact plenty of mass market paperback fantasies on the rack at my Rite Aid, Hannafords, etc. etc., thanks very much. They just happen to be by authors like Marjorie Liu, Nora Roberts, Lynsay Sands, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Gena Showalter, Nalini Singh, etc., rather than by Philip K. Dick and David Eddings. The fact that they didn't come out under the Bantam Spectra, DAW, Ace, Tor, or whatever imprint doesn't make them not fantasy to me as a reader, and I don't actually see that much difference in the romance focus between say, an average Marjorie Liu book or an average Anne McCaffrey book. Also, the diversity level as far as queer characters and non-white characters is rather higher in the average romance-fantasy or romance-sf that I pick up than it is in the average fantasy I pick up. This may be (in fact, probably is) more a reflection of me as reader than the field as a whole, but it's still my observation.
These are the thoughts that have pretty much burbled behind my brain while I sat listening to panels at the couple of conventions I've been too. And y'know, it's possible that with some of these (especially #4) I'm just the wrong audience for the conversation that's happening. But still - me and my discontents, let me show you them.
alecaustin 's post about failure modes in panels, and it occurred to me that there are things I'd love to hear people discuss, and usually don't. Which is not exactly apropos of discussion of success/failure, which means it goes here instead of there.1) Monsters and Magicians. I read so many stories in which the use of magic is presupposed as something that saps the humanity of the user. Either it abstracts them from day-to-day emotional cares, or it literally burns out their empathy, or it requires of them a degree of control that can make them seem inhuman, or it's built on sacrifice of self-or-others, etc. On the other hand, inhuman monsters who can work magic are often portrayed as more human in their thinking/emotions than inhuman monsters who can't. A dragon mage is more apt, in a story, to be thoughtful and relationship oriented than a non-magic using dragon. And the same for most non-humanoid creatures. Usually, if they can work magic, sorcery, etc., they're portrayed as thinking. I guess you see it most often in dragons, but also in wyverns, griffons, farm animals in comic fantasy, companion animals in all sorts of fantasy.
So I think there's something worth exploring there in how magic is used to explore human-ness or its absence. Is magic a stand-in for intellect, here, with sorcerers as people who've retreated to (often literal) ivory towers, or neglected the cats and the babies while they stir spells? Or is it a metaphor for something like spirit, with arguments about who or what has a soul? I'm fairly sure I've seen it used both ways.
2) World-building, historicity, and injustice. I Do Not Get why so many secondary world fantasies built on historical culture models just leave in all the sexism and homophobia because "that was true to the source material" while adding on mythic structures, fantastical creatures, and political/economic situations that were not true to the source material. It's silly and unconsidered. If I have to read one more young adult novel where a girl struggles with a sexist, sex-and-gender repressing patriarchy because she has Special Skills unrecognized by the girl-hating priests/priestesses/soldiers/random power-figures of her culture, I'll scream. Especially because all this girl-hating is usually just because That's How It's Done. If you've thought up eighteen reasons why clockwork cloud dragons feud with the Rainbow Mist people for possession of the Sacred Mating Fields, you better have put just as much thought in to why women can't inherit property in your imaginary world. Also, though this verges in to whole other questions of economics and economic world-building, if you're going to have highly centralized nation states in a world without slavery or economic exploitation on the level of serfdom/feudalism/early industrialism, please to be explaining where the magic income came from! France, England, and Spain without colonies were puny little countries full of internecine strife, and they did not have bustling megaports and advanced trade goods. Nor did they have strong central kings. They had a whole lot of palatinates and dukedoms and territories and things which were semi-autonomous most of the time to the point of often speaking different languages. (This is why I think of all regency romance novels as a funky kind of secondary world fantasy with bad world building. Where in heck did all those Regency Dukes get all of their money if none of them was involved in Jamaican slave trading or brutal warfare with Thuggees or taking gunships into China to force them to buy opium?) This isn't limited to sexist stuff though that's the axis of it I notice most. Pick your axis really. If no one is engaging in brutal colonial oppression, and yet your country has high level trade goods which could only be created in multiple disparate economies, where are your international traders? Your average country in fantasy has less diversity than a mid-sized Mediterranean trading port of the middle ages.
3) Genre fiction that sells well is not the enemy. I swear. The next person that bashes on Harry Potter at a convention like it leaves a bad bad taste in their mouth deserves to have their mouth stuffed with gummy worms or something. So she made more money than the average convention in its entirety. So what. They were perfectly entertaining school/comedy/action stories. And really, they did a better job of engaging with real world issues like indentured servitude and so forth than the average kids books manage. Let it go. I'd love instead to hear a serious discussion about what separates well-selling but not critically loved fantasy from critically loved but not well-selling fantasy, starting from an assumption that both are clearly doing well at something, and then trying to sort out what those somethings are. My conviction would be that the critical stuff is world-building first, plot and/or character second, character and/or plot third, and the well-selling stuff is character first, plot second, world-building a distant third, but that's my assumption based on my preferences. I think that there's another axis where the question is fantastic element as blatant metaphor vs. fantastic element in conversation with fantastic/literary convention. Blatant metaphor sells better because it's more accessible - you don't already need to be part of the conversation to interpret it. If what your story is doing best is commenting on other narrative in a new and intriguing way, that's going to be wicked interesting to someone steeped in the narrative - and almost completely opaque to someone reading in the genre for the first time. There are exceptions, which is why fairy tale works often do well - most people know enough about the bare bones of fairy tale logic that a meta-conversation about them makes sense to a novice reader. A meta-conversation about the average ethical practices of space opera, not so much.
4) Based on my own preferences, I'd like to hear a conversation that takes the fantasy/sf published as romance, comics, etc. just as seriously as the stuff published as fantasy/sf and literary fiction. There are in fact plenty of mass market paperback fantasies on the rack at my Rite Aid, Hannafords, etc. etc., thanks very much. They just happen to be by authors like Marjorie Liu, Nora Roberts, Lynsay Sands, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Gena Showalter, Nalini Singh, etc., rather than by Philip K. Dick and David Eddings. The fact that they didn't come out under the Bantam Spectra, DAW, Ace, Tor, or whatever imprint doesn't make them not fantasy to me as a reader, and I don't actually see that much difference in the romance focus between say, an average Marjorie Liu book or an average Anne McCaffrey book. Also, the diversity level as far as queer characters and non-white characters is rather higher in the average romance-fantasy or romance-sf that I pick up than it is in the average fantasy I pick up. This may be (in fact, probably is) more a reflection of me as reader than the field as a whole, but it's still my observation.
These are the thoughts that have pretty much burbled behind my brain while I sat listening to panels at the couple of conventions I've been too. And y'know, it's possible that with some of these (especially #4) I'm just the wrong audience for the conversation that's happening. But still - me and my discontents, let me show you them.
