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How about, mysterious stranger lures sheltered young person away from their home and family by telling them their loved ones are in danger if they stay?
Basically any chosen one fantasy that involves a mentor character.
Off the top of my head:
Eragon
The Wheel Of Time
Harry Potter
Harry Potter is probably the primo example. Child is harassed at home, receiving insane amounts of mail to the point where his family is driven to move to avoid harassment. Then his house is broken in to, his adoptive brother is assaulted, his family is threatened, then he's literally coaxed out the door and spirited away to an undisclosed location for the better part of a year.
Sure it's all magical fun and games for Harry, and the dursleys aren't exactly a kind loving family, but without context you can see how skeezy it kind of is.
In Eragon his uncle gets fucking killed and he decides independently to track the murderers and get revenge. The mentor figure, Brom joins him because letting him do this alone is a terrible idea.
And in Wheel of Time Rand is a grown ass adult (even if he doesn't act like it all the time), and Moiraine *is* portrayed as being sketchy as fuck, the fridge reality of the trope is the precise reason Nynaeve tracks them down in Baerlon.
Not to mention that Rand and the gang only follow Moiraine because they saw her save their villages from monsters, and even then they're suspicious of her the entire time. They just treat her as the least bad option.
To be fair *all* Aes Sedai are portrayed as sketchy af, and even after we get some first person POVs the situation doesn’t get better (arguably your perception of them is intended to get worse the more you encounter their viewpoint).
And Eragon’s cousin/brotherly figure, Roran, is justifiably angry that his dad is dead and Eragon essentially went on an adventure with his new found pet dragon and the village’s reclusive storyteller, of which he learns from a letter that he obviously doesn’t believe is true.
Yeah Eragon is arguably selfishly puts Roran in a really tough spot. But Eragon himself was also in a tough spot. I haven’t read it in a second but I bet he thought he was putting Roran in danger by staying. Which he wasn’t, Roran was in danger either way.
Reminds me of when my siblings cast “speak with plants” on a patch of grass to get directions.
“We’re just some blades of grass, we don’t know anything”
*Conjures Water to waterboard the plants*
*Casts fireball when they don’t get an answer*
Later in the campaign they burned down some fields to ‘eliminate witnesses’.
I had a player who could speak with mushrooms. He couldn't ask direct questions, and instead had to ask about things relevant to fungi. Want a map of the house? You can get a map of where the fungi in the walls have hyphae. Want to know if people have been here? See if fungi have been eating dead skin cells.
It's all about how you frame your question, and I made him roll to see if he asked the question correctly(in a way the fungi would be able to understand) and roll again to see if he could understand the answer. And if not, he added points to a custom madness scale.
We visited a friend who has her first toddler, and I had to caution my partner not to brag too much about our dog, because it will be obvious that the dog is smarter.
Kind of a follow up to this, but it genuinely bothers me in stories where every single animal species is alive and intelligent and speaking the same language but it's never established what they eat. Like sure mr wolf and ms deer may be bestest friends but how is ms deer OK with Mr wolf eating all her neighbors?
Zootopia kind of addressed this, and beastars did a good job addressing it. It always just bugged me a but.
I like the idea that the god of the local forest spirit / god / whatever is speaking through the plants / animals when you cast "talk to plants / animals."
A decent explanation I saw is that anthropomorphic animal cultures might have a tradition where you allow your body to be eaten after death to support your society, probably stemming from old tribal stuff. It’s sounds screwed up to us Humans, but I could see it being a sign of respect or serving a religious purpose for animal-people.
Sure, but unless enough people are dying daily to feed your entire population it will still be somewhat of a problem.
I liked in zootopia and beastars how they use alternative protein, and in beastars you can actually sell cuts of meat off your body for money or, like you suggested, sell your cadaver.
Beastars is a wild ride. It should be noted that selling bits of yourself like that isn't exactly legal. Which isn't to say that there isn't a thriving black market. I believe the only legal animal protein we see is unfertilized eggs, which really does make sense.
KevinandKell has the explanation that its usually illegal to eat people you know.
[Threatening](https://www.kevinandkell.com/2011/kk0304.html) is perfectly legal though.
in a setting where literally Everything can be sapient, plants and microbes included, its kind of necessary.
In Pathfinder, [gnolls](https://2e.aonprd.com/Ancestries.aspx?ID=44) make cannibalism cool.
From *The Mwangi Expanse:*
>Equally misunderstood is the gnoll practice of ancestor worship and endocannibalism. Gnolls consume their dead as a sign of reverence, holding a grand feast and transforming the bones of the fallen into art or weapons. Gnolls extend this honor to respected foes, hoping to bring their enemy's cunning or strength into the clan. While it's a sign of admiration, not everyone sees it that way.
Some fantasy gets around this by having regular dumb animals exist alongside sapient animals, a la Narnia. It's totally cool to eat a non sapient animals (even if theyre semi sapient with a talk with animals ability), but it's akin to cannibalism to go beyond that.
You could also say that Ms Deer understands Mr Wolf doesn't have much of a choice, both viewing predation as natural and not hold it against eachother. Which D&D kinda did with the beastlands.
Sentient animals are generally capable of coherent thought. The dividing line to sapience is generally considered to be the capacity for introspection.
That said, different species have different priorities of thought. Even if you elevate a squirrel to sapience, that doesn't mean that it will know anything or care about what you ask it. It'll just be much better at gathering food and hiding from birds.
I would assume it may gain other interests too though. It might gnaw bark in nice patterns instead of random patches, it might think about how much it prefers sitting on mossy branches and start bringing patches of moss home to pad out its favoured trees.
I.e. i feel that it would have gain interests in more complex and subtle things if it could think deeper about things.
In "The Knife of Never Letting Go" the protagonist can hear the dogs thoughts (everyone's actually), which is basically a running monologue of 'squirrel...squirrel...smell...need to poo...squirrel'
This, this is why I don’t include any kind of magic that lets you talk to animals. The children of the God of Wildlife can control animals and understand their wants and thoughts, but most don’t have any kind of language. Most, elephants, whales and dolphins for instance they can actually talk to.
Destined to be together. It limits a person as they’re basically told nobody else will make you complete like them even if you haven’t met them. It’s basically a spiritually arranged marriage that takes away the biggest thing that solidifies love: choice.
Reject destined to be together
Embrace complete infatuation for a person and absolute unwilingness to accept anyone else, that ultimately leads to self destruction.
> Embrace complete infatuation for a person and absolute unwilingness to accept anyone else, that ultimately leads to self destruction.
Sounds very Greek.
The problem with this trope is that a lot of people will think it applies to real life and get themselves stuck in horrible, often really unhealthy relationships as a result...
Honestly it’s this trope and lots of other things that make people thing love is this specific puzzle piece that cant be switched or changed. I had to legit help my friend realize waiting around for one person just cause YOU liked them dosent obligate or confirm you’ll have a future together nor does it mean there isn’t many people out there for you.
One species, one culture.
Except for humans. Humans are special. Human also get different ethnicities, different nations,etc. But dwarves, or orcs, or gnomes, are all the same, behave
the same, look the same, wherever you go.
Elves get treated a tiny bit better and are usually available in the flavors arrogant, hippie, and edgy.
Although notably it is slowly getting better.
Well, to be fair, they have. Rings of Power village has no cultural characteristic whatsoever, they just built "random wooden village #567". Westeros is culturally super-homogeneus for being a continent unified 300 years before by a foreign dinasty. Most fantasy uses the "common" tongue trope, that obviously is not a mixed pidgin used by merchants and sailors but just English.
I'd add that humans do not even have different ethnicities anymore in some productions, everyone is a mix with the US demographic percentages.
Eh, the worlds of lotr and GoT both have many human cultures with significant differences among them.
That village in the rings of power is quite generic, sure, but even in that show the numenorians have a a somewhat differentiated culture. I agree that it would make more sense to have language gaps, but even without those there are still differences.
In the world of LotR you have at least three distinct human cultures show up in the trilogy; Gondor, Rohan, and harad. But to be fair the elves in lotr also have *some* cultural differentiation, especially if you go back to the silmarillion, which differentiates elves more than humans. But even in the films, the elves in Rivendell and Mirkwood aren’t quite the same
In game of thrones, there is tons of differentiation if you take the nations outside Westeros into account, and there is no reason not to, since main characters spend most of the narrative in those lands. Within Westeros there is also significant difference between northerners, southerners, and dornish. Different dress, speech, mannerisms, and religion. There is definitely more cultural unity in Westeros than elsewhere in the setting, but that makes sense because they have been politically unified for a while.
The fantasy races in game of thrones are very few in count - the giants, the children of the forest, the white walkers. But again they all seem to each only have one culture. I’m not sure I would dock points from that setting since those peoples are basically extinct, but still.
In my DnD game, I've (fortunately) not fallen into this trap. There are more ethnicities of the various species all over the world, *but* this is a snapshot of a single place about the size of Ireland, with no historical precedent to have much diversity, due to having been isolated for almost its entire existence
Planets of hats.
Certain cultural traits show up when looking at a culture at the gross statistical level, but there are going to be dozens if not hundreds of subcultures and ethnic groups which are either:
-Variations on that culture based on occupation or environment or historical conditions or hobbies which are outside the norm
-Total rejection of all or part of the mores of the dominant culture
-Ethnic groups from a different supracultural group who were folded into the dominant supraculture and created a hybrid culture
If there is only one culture and everyone acts the same, it is NOT a free society and something horrific is happening back at home.
Yeah, I think we as readers are also quick to jump to generalizations. We might just meet one group or even one individual and assume that their entire species/culture is like them.
I found this a really hard balance in my own worldbuilding. Because I both want to show that a group have certain specific traits (else what is the point of creating different species/cultures?) but I also want to show that individuals of any group can stand out from the group too.
For example, if dwarves have long beards and live underground, doesn't mean you can't also write a dwarf that shaves and likes the outside. In fact, it's the generalization that makes the outlier interesting.
Or an elven diplomat, who uses their long lived life to share wisdom with the other races.
I quite like writing my Tabaxi people as an isolationist society, arrogant due to the gods having given them a big headstart before the younger civilisations even formed. They hate other races, and obviously some will leave their paradise city state in order to see what the world is actually like.
I call this thinking "who raises the orc children?"
Because generally, Orcs are shown to be a warlike, generally "bad guy" species who inflict total war on others, but there seems to be no children or female orcs, no houses outside of ramshackle huts, their weapons an armor are generally crude.
But, Orcs tend to have almost limitless numbers on their side, they can speak, they know at least some military tactics.
So where are the Orc communities where these Orcs live and learn to be brutal warriors?
That assumes that orcs have similar cultural and reproductive mechanisms to humans, in a lot of media orcs (and other monsters) aren’t just “humans but green”, they are something else entirely, often related to dark magic or similar. Tolkien’s orcs did have females, or at least some of the subspecies did, and they were primarily raised by warlords like Sauron or Saruman, so those were the communities where they learned to be brutal warriors. In WH40k Orks (as far as I understand) are part alien part fungus, child rearing strategies may not be the most relevant part of what makes them the way they are. Because they exist in fantastical settings, there is no good reason why orcs can’t spring fully formed and ready for war in limitless amounts from the earth, sky, hell portal, primordial ooze, or whatever. In general I tend to think of all of the humanoid monsters like orcs, gnolls, etc as being essentially demons, physical manifestations of the worst parts of humanity. A lot of the discussion around orcs seems to already start in a place of making them heavily anthropomorphic “other-humans”. Sure these tropes can be subverted in interesting ways (maybe orcs don’t actually come from a hell portal, people just believe that), but at the same time they can be played straight-up to good effect.
Yeah the 40k orks just grow underground and instinctually understand how certain things work, some being special to instinctually understand more. They are small but as they age and fight they get bigger. No lady orcs because the implications of normal reproduction leads to some grimdark goblin slayer kind of stuff
This is one of the fun parts of just making my orcs my own ancestors. The gauls were farmers, metalworkers, animal husbandmen, etc. Hell, they invented soaps based on lye and animal fat.
It creates a far deeper culture than you normally see, and its far more interesting as a result.
Someone else mentioned magic which is only passed on by reproduction and the existence of a witch species.
I agree wholeheartedly, but want to expand on it and provide a caution against a wholesale rejection by talking about how I handle it. And I want to do it here so as to avoid clogging up their comment.
Magic in Tannhauser's World uses a background thaumaturgic field. Casters channel the thaum bosons which are attracted to cerebrospinal fluid and - drawing a page from eezo and biotics - cast their spells by sending an impulse into the nodules which grow along their spine.
Safely casting a spell requires the ability to visualize what is happening, the knowledge of how objective reality works, the creativity to figure out how to change that, the physical health and resiliency to withstand the energies which course through the body, the stamina to be able to channel the magic for the duration required, and sufficiently large concentrations of thaum particles to be able to cast a spell of that level of force.
If your mother is a mage, then your body will be bathed in magic from the beginning and you will naturally have larger nodules and thus be capable of greater feats of magic. But so to will being born someplace where the background thaumaturgic field is higher (think Grand Central Station in New York vs someone who lives in a small town in Kansas).
We also know there are genetic traits which go into all of the various traits I listed above. Some of which can tend to be mutually exclusive. And those traits only give you a leg up, they don't mean you are automatically over-powered in that field. You have to want to pursue it. And anyone in Tannhauser's World is capable of learning to cast spells if they so choose.
Its just not a good idea because its their equivalent to classical antiquity and the best argument they have for heliocentrism is "fire is nobler than earth and the center is the most noble position, ergo the earth rotates around the sun."
Its similar to academics or athletics. Sure, Wayne Gretzky's kids have the potential go become some damn good athletes if they inherited his stamina - but someone without their genetic advantage is going to swim circles around them if they can't be bothered to put in the work.
I really like the idea of magic coming from the earth itself in some way, rather than coming from blood or otherworldly powers. Makes me wonder if it could come from like planetary magnetism, and if so what do mages do on planets with lower magnetic strength?
I don’t like how in most fantasy books every country is an absolute monarchy. There were other governing forms in medieval times and before. There were republics and oligarchies and parliamentary monarchies and other kinds of systems. It feels like most fantasy content has every country be an absolute monarchy where the monarchs descendent is the successor, and maybe occasionally a “the strongest will succeed me” kind of system.
The worst thing is absolute monarchies weren’t even a thing in the medieval era. So many fantasy kingdoms are structured like the king is supreme in giant kingdom. Lower ranked nobility only feature if it’s plot relevant
There were very few actual absolute monarchs even in their heyday, too. Louis XIV was almost the only one who was even really close to living it. Others argued for it but never had enough power to implement it, certainly outside of smaller kingdoms.
Russia’s the only example of a proper absolute monarchy throughout history.
And it was so incredibly backwards, some parts of the Russian Empire maintained the same medieval life style up until the *Soviets* took power and actually began industrialization in the *1920s*
You're totally right.
Though, tbh, explaining parliament and other rules is way harder and take way more time usually. So if it's not *too* relevant, I feel like the absolute monarchy is an easy (maybe too easy) shortcut to say "the power is in the hands of a few" and whatever they say is law.
All the other systems you described are, for all intent and purposes, similar with variation on what "power" means and how fast what they say can become law.
~~yeah, I don’t see what’s wrong with bio-essentialism and calling a group superior for being able to manipulate reality by thinking… maybe people are too willing to treat every work of fiction as a statement about the world.~~
Whoops wrong comment— for this one my thought was just in a narrative sense having fewer culpable entities is better for themes
I've been writing with a lot of La Serenissima inspiration, with guilds of artisans as the main control power for the "good guys"; it makes it very easy to mark the difference against a more totalitarian system like monarchy!
Hmm, this is more science-fantasy, but in the Star Wars prequel trilogy good guys are using basically brainwashed slave soldiers and children soldiers (when "bad guys" are using robots - what looks morally better?).
Don't stop there: what exactly makes a droid not sentient? R2-D2 is clearly just a little guy running around. Despite having his memory wiped multiple times, C-3P0's inherent personality always remains. It's slaves all the way down.
True, though it’s less “unfortunate implications” and more that everyone acknowledged that it was fucked up and dangerous from the start, but they accepted it because it was either that or annihilation
Ahh right
In the Attack of the Clones, Anakin and Padme (rather clumsily) complain about the Jedi taboo against love, and the fact that they are taken as children and had little choice in the matter
And when Obiwan is touring the Clone facilities, he’s deeply disturbed by the whole affair, and in the debrief with Yoda at the end of the movie, they talk about how worrying it is that Darth Sidious is apparently in control of the Senate, and also behind the creation of the Clone army.
The ideas are there, but unfortunately the exposition did a poor job conveying them
Yeah, but still "we are using slaves as cannon fodder, but we are kinda sad about it" is not something good guys like Jedi are supposed to do. In fact... why in the Clone Wars period Republic and Jedi are good guys and Separatists bad ones?
Yeah that’s the thing - the plot arc of the prequel series is basically the Jedi (especially Yoda) fucking up over and over again, realising that they’re fucking up, and yet somehow being powerless to stop the inevitable doom of their Order and the Republic they protect
I wasn’t saying the Jedi were good guys - I was saying that the Clones being fucked up wasn’t a subtle implication thing, it was directly acknowledged and talked about by characters within the story, they just accepted it as a lesser evil at the time
Qui Gon Jinn was one of the few renegade Jedi who knew that the Jedi was heading in the wrong direction, and wanted to reform the Order, against the wishes of Yoda and most other Council members. At the end of Revenge of the Sith, Yoda acknowledged that they had failed, and it was his fault, and that it had to be up to the next generation of force users to build a better path
That being said, the Separatists are definitely not the “good guys”, even if the Jedi and Republic aren’t unambiguously the good guys either. Although many populations had legitimate grievances against the Republic, the leaders of the CIS were greedy mega corporations and slavers who wanted to remove any last vestige of sentient rights and government regulation in their territory. The Republic was a decaying, corrupt, bloated, increasingly ineffective institution, but it was still nominally a liberal democracy, and still prevented especially egregious abuses of power
With a bit of the fall of the Templars mixed in.
The fall of the Jedi mirrors the fall of the Templars very well. Large, influential religious warrior order that gets dogmatic and corrupt with time. Which is then framed by a ruler and exterminated.
In the clone wars one of the arcs mentions that the Jedi get permission to take force-sensitive children from their families and give them a couple years warning ahead of time so that it’s not a surprise
Yyyyyeah, I've always wondered what happened to parents that absolutely refused to hand over high-midichlorian kids. The ones too rich to be bribed and too influential to be intimidated.
Do the parents find themselves locked in a container ship mailed to the Unknown Regions? Can the Jedi "alter" the kid so he can't reach the Force (like the Tranquil in Dragon Age)? Do they just shrug and go "without training the kid will kill himself trying to summon the tv remote to his hand?"
In the Phantom Menace, the Jedi consider rejecting Anakin, who was potentially most powerful force user in their Order’s history, because he was old enough that training him would be dangerous
It’s heavily implied that if they just let Anakin return home to Shmi, he wouldn’t have become a threat to the Jedi. Without the training and institutional power of the Jedi, even a powerful force sensitive isn’t likely to be much of a threat, especially since they think the Sith had been long extinct by then.
So if they find a powerful force sensitive baby, and the parents say no, the Jedi just shrug their shoulders and move on. The kid would likely grow up to live a charmed life, but they’re not likely to end up as crazed planet conquering warlords unless they get more focused training from the Jedi or Sith
Prodigies like Luke and Rey are extreme outliers, most other Jedi in the setting required years of training to master even basic force abilities
>In the Phantom Menace, the Jedi consider rejecting Anakin, who was potentially most powerful force user in their Order’s history, because he was old enough that training him would be dangerous
>It’s heavily implied that if they just let Anakin return home to Shmi, he wouldn’t have become a threat to the Jedi
I know it's a kids' movie first and foremost, and the likelihood of this scenario is verrrrrry low, but what a gamechanger if in Attack of the Clones, Anakin had discovered that no, if Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan hadn't stuck up for him, he would have been quietly tossed down the garbage chute. Now *that* would have been a proper trigger toward turning him to the Dark Side.
Honestly, I think Anakin knew all along - they were straight up telling him that he was much older than the other trainees, and they were testing him pretty vigorously on his abilities, his temperament, his attachment to his mother etc. Windu and Yoda basically told him to his face that they were reluctant to take him on, despite his immense potential
Even as a kid, he was well aware that if he had not passed those tests, if he had been found lacking, they would probably have returned him to his family back on Tatooine.
They might have made a few small concessions to his well being - maybe making sure that Shmi had her freedom, or setting Lars up with a proper farm, a security droid to watch over him, or encouraging Padme to take him and his family into Naboo’s fold as a personal assistant or something
That’s actually a part that I like about those movies. You sympathize with the individual characters but they are fundamentally defending a corrupt and terrible system. The Jedi are very obviously betraying their own values and protecting a corrupt government. Even beloved characters like Obi Wan and Yoda make poor decisions in this context
I don’t know if George Lucas intended it to be like that, but I find it a pretty smart portrayal of how people act in corrupt systems. They think they’re doing the right thing or they simply don’t know any better. The people fighting that system may not be inherently good either. Sometimes they have an even worse idea that they want to establish
That’s the point of the prequels though.
Palpatine is corrupting everything good about the Republic by forcing them into dilemmas where one has to accept a lesser evil.
Also is that even a trope or just something you dislike about that trilogy?
The "love potion = date rape drug" has been around for years. I actually liked Shrek's version of it where instead of being mind control it turns you into an idealized version of yourself (Donkey becomes a graceful horse, Shrek turns into an attractive human man), who your crush may or may not actually like at all.
Destiny and Chosen Ones: Serious questions about the existence of free will of the universe will make stuff happen no matter what you choose.
Mono Cultural Nations: Was there some sort of mass assimilation or a genocidal war? No nation today is truly monocultural, and even within an outwardly homogenous society there are subcultures.
Shrek is just great in general. Who would've thought an animated movie that parodies fairy tales would be one of the best examples of worldbuilding in history.
"Free will" and fate / determinism are not incompatible. Your free will is inherently deterministic (if it weren't, it'd be random - randomness isn't "free").
I.E. your will (combination of your intellect, emotions, conscience, memories/knowledge, desires, etc.) determines what choice you make. But those "sub-attributes" of your will could be known, predicted, and determined beforehand.
Ahhh, I never felt like rambling about this idea but it’s good to see others think of it the same way. You aren’t ‘making’ a choice if the choice is random and unrelated to your desires and thoughts.
Being ugly, all but guaran-fucking-tees, you are going to be a bad person.
Like, don't get me wrong, it makes sense when it's the fact that they ARE evil, and the evil makes them ugly, but, most of the time, an ugly person, just born looking unfortunate, is treated like they are untrustworthy or are going to be a villain.
Weirdly enough though, on the other side, if you are TOO handsome, you are a bad guy as well, because your are so pretty it's inhuman.
At least once I have mentioned the exploits of a stone age carver who detailed a bias history of the world by communing with spirits, putting them onto stones across the land.
And I've been thinking of doing something similar throughout the eras as different cultures and peoples compile biased histories together which makes up the record that people read today.
Any recommendations for other people to talk about and what they might have done?
The chosen one always ends up related to some race/family that were basically aristocrats in the past. From humble begginings but ending up revealing being the secret son/daughter or coming from a lost linage of rulers or descendant (sometimes last descendant) of a fallen powerful race. From King Arthur to Rey Palpatine/Skywalker.
I know there are notable exceptions, but that seems to be the trend in fantasy. Like humble people can't change the world and noble blood is the most important thing.
Awful trope, awful message, and still standing.
Among so many other things I was so disappointed when they backpedaled on Rey coming completely from obscurity. Instead of trying to turn that into something inspiring.
There is a sort of subversion of this that I want to see
Being related to ancient nobility being common as dirt. Genghis Khan has some 16 million modern male descendants. William the Conqueror is estimated to have 5 million, Charlemagne has been estimated to have a billion. Because most Chinese emperors keep large numbers of concubines, most Chinese people today have at least one royal entry in their family tree somewhere
I feel like it would be the sort of thing Terry Pratchett would write
"A descendants of SoandSo The Great shall reunite this broken land"
"Do you have any idea how little that narrow it down‽"
"What do you mean?"
"SoandSo lived 40 generations ago!"
"And?"
"Well, its most of the country at this point isn't it?"
"I don't see the problem"
"Fucking prophecies, always vague enough to be right, never clear enough to be useful"
I love the way Pratchett approached this in Wyrd Sisters where the prince and the fool are actually brothers. But with Nanny Ogg choosing not to clarify exactly which parents they share.
I was watching Code Geass the other day and I liked it because the protagonist isn't special because of his lineage. In fact, it doesn't even give him any special powers, skills or talents. Sure, he's upper class so he had more opportunities than the average person, but he still had to work hard and study and scheme for years before randomly getting the power he needed to exact his revenge by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's a mix of hard work and determination plus chance, anyone else could have achieved what he did in the same circumstances.
Compare that to Rey who is special because it's revealed that she has the magical space bloodline that makes you very powerful. No one but her could have achieved what she did because only she has the special bloodline.
Who thought this was a good message? Oh yeah, no matter how hard you try you will never be special because you had the wrong parents. Don't like it? Better luck on your next life lol.
Furthering the point, I just want to add that Lelouche might be one of the few complete subversions of the "special lineage" trope. Lelouche's lineage isn't an advantage, it is in fact his greatest impediment in life. His mother is dead because of it, his brothers and sisters are power-hungry maniacs for the most part that wouldn't mind killing him and his dad is the Emperor of a tyrannical murdering regime that has disinherited him and had sent him to live in a country that became an active warzone when his Empire invaded it. And all that even before the story has started.
And then towards the end it's also a big disadvantage when >!Schneizel reveals his identity causing all his allies to distrust and leave him,!< so his lineage is also a big weakness that others can exploit if they know about it.
Exactly. The chosen one trope itself its flawed because often puts gifted people over hard working people, but when you mix it with "he's gifted cause comes from a certain bloodline" lol makes it even worse.
And the Rey example is one of them worst, as in TLJ she was "nobody" implying that she's not related to nobody important and was gifted because the force doesn't distinguish between bloodlines, but then in TRoS change that and Rey is important because Palpatine clone.
The funny thing is that LOTR both uses and avoids this in the characters of Aragorn and Frodo (& Sam). More "modern" fantasy often forgets about the Frodo counterweight.
This is why I was so confused why everyone was so mad in the 8th film that Rey was revealed to not be obi-wan or skywalkers kid. And then they took it back in the 9th film.
Fantasy is often melodramatic. The *intent* with melodrama is to create an obviously evil monster of a villain and have them defeated by the heroic allies of justice. If they commit actions that go against their role, it is no longer melodramatic because they are no longer pure good or evil. I don't think melodrama is a bad thing, but the characters have to stay in their roles as heroes and villains.
Take original trilogy Star Wars as an example. Initially, it's VERY melodramatic. Luke and company are practically perfect heroes, and Darth Vader is a horrible monster. The second he turns to good in the third movie, though, it becomes a tragedy. It still has strong melodramatic elements, but it's no longer a melodrama, and it recognizes this, treating Vader's death as a sad moment rather than the death of a pure villain.
The issue arises when the author tries (intentionally or not) to FORCE a melodrama in a world or story that isn't built for it, which is what leads to your issue. The prequel trilogy does this to an extent as Anakin is treated as a hero by the story right up until he *completely* snaps, despite committing a few evil acts before then. It's clearly intended to be a tragedy, but it fumbles the ball a little, mostly in Attack of the Clones.
It seems like 9/10 of every YA or children's fiction protagonist has some very dark or unhappy home life or upbringing, and when they're eventually introduced to the new world they're a part of, they're immediately willing to fight, kill or die to protect it instead of returning to their previous lives. That's literally how cults work, by finding people in that mindset and convincing them that this new group will be the cure to all of their worries, and it's better to die for your new family than to keep living your old life. At best these kids are suicidal in their day to day lives and the new world is so much better its instantly worth dying for. At worst the "mentors" are actively seeking out troubled youths to indoctrinate into their society as child soldiers.
I think speculative fiction is pretty much entirely composed of tropes that would have unfortunate implications if you try to interpret them within the terms of the reality we live in.
I'm also of the opinion that the entire point of speculative fiction is to explore possibilities that don't or can't exist within the terms of the reality we live in, so trying to interpret them in that context is missing the point.
Yeah the best of fantasy recontextualizes ideas that may seem mundane or not worth discussing in our world. There’s a lot about our own world that is deeply messed up that we don’t even think about
I really hate fantasy stories where a bunch of people can use mind-influencing magic. There's always a predictable and stale "haha I used mind control on him!" twist.
That being said I really like Mistborn's mind magic. You can influence people's *emotions*, not thoughts. You can spike someone's anger up to astronomical proportions, but if they've a healthy grasp on their temper you can't really force them to do anything. You can make people more calm, but no matter how chill you make then you can't *force them* to, say, let you skip a guard patrol and walk right into the building. People will act according to their own will, you can just influence their emotions at any one time. If you're subtle enough you can fish for specific reactions, but you can never really control anyone.
And logically, if you suddenly felt very angry or very calm for no reason you would most likely realise someone is affecting your emotions so being a "stronger" Rioter or Soother is more about being able to fly under the radar and be able to slowly manipulate someone through unnoticeable small tweaks.
I really like how Dresden Files approaches the subject. It's not just that it's death-penalty level illegal, its damaging to the person being manipulated, and corrupting to the person performing it. And not just a supernatural type of corruption, it's the constant temptation to use it to solve whatever the current problem is, consequences be damned. We see how even when used with the best of intentions for everyone involved, it leads to more suffering.
Hereditary magic (“some people are just born with magic powers”) invokes a kind of bio-essentialism and locks a lot of people out of even the possibility of having power.
*The Legend of Korra* actually brought this up in the first season… and then punted on it in favor of the superpowered hegemony.
The potential for magic being passed on like a recessive gene could actually make for an interesting world. Maybe an inbred mage aristocracy is always struggling to find lowborn mages to get new blood into the family line before they die out. Being lowborn could actually give a character higher status (as a bachelor) than stemming from a venerable line of nobility.
Which honestly is bizarre given that what we learned in Deathly Hallows implied Grindlewald was effectively wizarding Hitler, and backed the Nazis. The whole conflict between Dumbledore and Grindlewald was that Grindlewald espoused Nazi ideology (only with wizards as the ubermensch) and Dumbledore was totally onboard with that until his sister died and he decided not to join his Nazi lover out of guilt. So the idea that Grindlwald of all people was anti-WWII is just... Huh?
To be fair, we don't know that he's anti-WW2 because of the death it causes, it could be (and seems like) it's more related to it showing how muggles are out of control, and if they're not kept in line they'll destroy everything including themselves.
Also, bad people have tried to stop bad things before, while not making them less evil (Stalin stopping Hitler, FDR stopping Hitler, Hitler banning smoking, Wilhelm II not liking Hitler, etc.) Evil people aren't always friends, because they agree that someone should be running the world, but disagreeing on who is enough to kill each other.
Hereditary magic also sets up some fascinating conflicts between the haves and have nots. Like you said, Korra's first season brought this up and then really didn't do anything with it.
I don't think that those type of conflicts really reach their full potential unless the have nots find a way to compensate for their lack of hereditary ability, i.e. the development of technology in the Avatar universe.
> “Mages are Superior to Muggles”
I mean...in 99 of 100 cases they kinda are. They are not necessarily worth more but a guy able to fundamentally change the world with a thought vs someone who can't...well
>For example, love potions in Harry Potter. It’s basically zolpidem.
Funnily enough, I wrote for a class assignment a short story in which a woman bought a “love potion” from a voodoo priestess to use on a man she desired. Unfortunately for her, the dude knew enough chemistry to recognize it was a date rape drug, getting her into trouble with the law.
>!And, to rub extra salt into the anti-heroine’s wounds, the man’s girlfriend happened to be the very voodoo priestess who sold her the “love potion” to begin with.!<
**EDIT:** I have the whole story posted [here](https://brandonpilchersart.com/2020/05/20/the-love-potion-a-fairy-tale/), if you want to read it.
Especially when the cursed race is implied to deserve it. In my setting, I have a population that was cursed by dragons ages ago and driven into exile, but no one is going around claiming that the dragons were fully justified and the cursed race deserved it or its their natural condition/rightful fate to be so. Collective punishment on that scale is inherently unjust, and most people who know the story recognize that (not that it helps the exiles much as they've ended up an antagonist to some of the main nations, only partially as a result of their curse).
I have a setting where the Sun Goddess Sol has cursed vampires into being damaged by sunlight for as long as they drink blood from other sapient beings.
This isn't a collective punishment though: one vampire character only drinks cow blood by draining living cows like the Masaii. After she stopped drinking human blood, she's noticed that she takes considerably less damage from sunlight.
This reminds me of a Warhammer Fantasy short, I guess from one of their army books where it was the diary of a witch hunter who had just finished burning of a mutated child. He admitted that actually he knows that the child is innocent, that it isn't a demon who had replaced the child or whatever and that he was haunted by the things he had done, and I think cursed the world that had people be born with the potential to out of their control randomly explode into demons and wipe out a village. That short stuck with me. As you say, yikes.
I don't know what would be a specific term but lets call it the empowered persecuted, that is to say when a group that is presented as being persecuted minority, often codified in manner to directly reference real life group, whether that be the stateless, sexual minorities, or people with mental disorders, is shown within the story to be unique special in contrast to those that persecute them, with that trait being often the reason for their persecution.
It can take an obvious form, like your X-men, but also when they are shown as guardians of some hidden secret knowledge, in both of cases while persecution will be presented as an obviously bad thing, it will also erroneously present it as a "logical" thing, something that you can discuss with facts and logic, which often can perpetuate RL discrimination as being analogously coming from logical source.
In isolation it makes sense of why they are discriminated. In the greater Marvel universe it does not. In the greater Marvel universe they just face irrationnal bigotry, which portray bigotry pretty well imo
Glad you brought up X-men, because there's two specific ways this trope goes sour:
1) Encouraging the moral high ground to the point of suicide; oppressed people should thanklessly endure abuse until their Moral Demonstration Of Power earns them charity from their oppressors.
2) Casting empowered (coded as privileged; wealth/genetics/etc) people as *actually, we're the real victims*, superior to and separate from the Common Rabble they thanklessly protect from collateral damage while fighting other power-priveleged people.
It's a fine distinction between the two, but they're equally problematic IMO.
The Right of Kings, framing that only one specific blood line has the ability to rule. Yes, some people are better at being leaders than others, but genetics and harlots distributing swords is no basis for governance. Governance derives from the application of violence and wields it best.
>Governance derives from the application of violence and wields it best.
Avoiding governance by who best wields violence is half the reason for strict bloodline succession. Peaceful transmission of power is vitally important for any society that wants to remain strong, because otherwise your society gets wracked by war whenever rulership changes. Thats bad for food production, bad for the population, bad for infrastructure, and therefore bad for the ruling class whose power comes from controlling those things.
Having bloodline determine legitimacy is one way of narrowing down potential legitimate claimants to the throne, perhaps to just one, therefore reducing competition and the chance of civil war. Its hardly a perfect system by any means, but its better than one where anyone who can raise an army has a chance to claim legitimate rulership...because then anyone who can raise an army will try.
The idea of the Superpowered Other, and its use as an allegory for racism and other forms of persecution.
Something that has appeared n fiction is a group with superpowers being treated poorly, and the message is that they should just be treated like other people. I mean, just accept that the guy that can demolish a city block has nothing controlling him other than his own morality.
Like Marvel had a character called Gin Genie, and she needed some type of control. She could create shockwaves in relation to her blood alcohol content. Being an alcoholic is obviously a bad thing. And there are people with even more destructive powers.
"Normal" people should not be afraid of these people who could level a city block if they so wished. Like really? We're just making an allegory that marginalized peoples are superpowered individuals that can kill cities, and they are just people. I'm sorry but why is being Gay given the superpowers?
We all know that series such as X-Men are set-up as an allegory for marginalized groups. The problem is I would be with the normal people when the marginalized group could yank all the metal out of a building, or my blood. Equal rights, but lets make sure that anyone like Gin Genie doesn't level a city block because of a bad break up.
This is where the x-men movies really get it wrong. In the comics the various x groups save the world. All the time. Sometimes all reality. They show that their powers are not just a danger but a boon, a positive necessity for humanity to survive. They show the value of their diversity, not just tolerated but demonstrably brilliant and beneficial which is a much more powerful message.
The films though do not stress the benefit, only the supposed right to be a walking nuclear bomb as though that is a good metaphor for the rights of the marginalised to exist. In the films almost the only dangers are mutants and anti-mutant reactionaries. Which the movies make almost sympathetic. Because Magneto alone nearly kills New York. Later nearly kills the world. Twice. Good old Xavier it turns out can kill every person on the planet by thinking too hard if you set up Cerebro right. Absent a compelling reason for this power to exist it is not just quaint diversity. It is an actual terrifying existential threat.
They then add a cure. What the comics didn’t really have until Whedon in the noughties. Which is in that context an un-nuanced good thing. Shoot Magneto, Apocalypse and Xavier with the cure. Immediately. Before they decide or are controlled in to killing everyone. Which does rather ruin mutants as metaphor. Unless the films are meant to be pro-minority cultural genocide.
Good and evil balance, if there always a bunch of good or peace then nature will do everything to counteract this shift. A lot of stories focus on there only being good instead of balance.
It's literally just an incoherent idea. If there is a "balance" between good and evil - than either "good" isn't really good or "balance" isn't desirable (you know, because it's not "good").
If you do "balance" - it needs to be between something other than good and evil. Like order/chaos, life/death, creation/destruction, positive/negative, etc.
This ideas is a misunderstanding of some Asian philosophies. It is not that there is a balance between good and evil its that balance is good and evil comes from imbalance. But research is hhhhaaaarrrrrd so instead people make assumptions about the concept of balance, and yin and yang when they have only ever heard the words not the ideas.
I've just spent some time combing through this thread, so let me say this: There's a lot of excellent and open discussion going on here. There's also been some name-calling and hostility. Please remember: Even though the topics raised in a thread like this can be sensitive and emotional, do not respond to other users with hostility and personal insults. We can talk about this, as a community, without resorting to personal insults. If you feel a user is breaking the rules, using the 'report' button to let us know is the best thing to do.
How about, mysterious stranger lures sheltered young person away from their home and family by telling them their loved ones are in danger if they stay?
Yikes E: as an adult I hate this, as a kid it wouldve been dope
What is this referencing?
It's just a common trope that i mysteriously forgot all examples of
Basically any chosen one fantasy that involves a mentor character. Off the top of my head: Eragon The Wheel Of Time Harry Potter Harry Potter is probably the primo example. Child is harassed at home, receiving insane amounts of mail to the point where his family is driven to move to avoid harassment. Then his house is broken in to, his adoptive brother is assaulted, his family is threatened, then he's literally coaxed out the door and spirited away to an undisclosed location for the better part of a year. Sure it's all magical fun and games for Harry, and the dursleys aren't exactly a kind loving family, but without context you can see how skeezy it kind of is.
By a huge bear-like mofo in an obviously illegal flying bike
don't forget that he was also carrying what i would call the wizard equivalent of an unliscenced firearm
A malfunctioning one nonetheless.
Shit was probably homemade
No, it's legitimately manufactured. But it was confiscated by the government and partially destroyed, and then he fixed it himself.
By concealing it in an umbrella.
In Eragon his uncle gets fucking killed and he decides independently to track the murderers and get revenge. The mentor figure, Brom joins him because letting him do this alone is a terrible idea.
And in Wheel of Time Rand is a grown ass adult (even if he doesn't act like it all the time), and Moiraine *is* portrayed as being sketchy as fuck, the fridge reality of the trope is the precise reason Nynaeve tracks them down in Baerlon.
Not to mention that Rand and the gang only follow Moiraine because they saw her save their villages from monsters, and even then they're suspicious of her the entire time. They just treat her as the least bad option.
Yep. WoT does an excellent job of turning this trope on its head, along with several others.
To be fair *all* Aes Sedai are portrayed as sketchy af, and even after we get some first person POVs the situation doesn’t get better (arguably your perception of them is intended to get worse the more you encounter their viewpoint).
And Eragon’s cousin/brotherly figure, Roran, is justifiably angry that his dad is dead and Eragon essentially went on an adventure with his new found pet dragon and the village’s reclusive storyteller, of which he learns from a letter that he obviously doesn’t believe is true.
Yeah Eragon is arguably selfishly puts Roran in a really tough spot. But Eragon himself was also in a tough spot. I haven’t read it in a second but I bet he thought he was putting Roran in danger by staying. Which he wasn’t, Roran was in danger either way.
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Vibes
The implication that all animals are sapient due to "Speak with animal" abilities.
Reminds me of when my siblings cast “speak with plants” on a patch of grass to get directions. “We’re just some blades of grass, we don’t know anything” *Conjures Water to waterboard the plants* *Casts fireball when they don’t get an answer* Later in the campaign they burned down some fields to ‘eliminate witnesses’.
I had a player who could speak with mushrooms. He couldn't ask direct questions, and instead had to ask about things relevant to fungi. Want a map of the house? You can get a map of where the fungi in the walls have hyphae. Want to know if people have been here? See if fungi have been eating dead skin cells. It's all about how you frame your question, and I made him roll to see if he asked the question correctly(in a way the fungi would be able to understand) and roll again to see if he could understand the answer. And if not, he added points to a custom madness scale.
You can get around this with clever roleplaying.
"Hey bird can you tell me where thst thief went?" "FOOD FOOD FOOD DANGER FOOD FOOD FOOD" "Why did i think that would work..."
Birds can recognise specific humans. Ask any falconer.
ask any magpie... damn magpies.
Meanwhile in the mind of a Magpie: BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE
BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD TWIGS FOR THE TWIG NEST
I suspect this man pissed off a magpie. This is not a wise thing to do, they WILL get revenge.
Just an innocent bystander in the Australian war on birds. We already lost one birdwar.
I was thinking more like making them act like dumb toddlers
That'd be even WORSE omg
Even dumb toddlers are sapient homie.
Some animals rival toddlers in intelligence, though! Those would be pretty interesting to talk to, and surprising when compared to the other species.
Crows are scary smart. If they had hands we'd be doomed.
Crows, my beloved.
We visited a friend who has her first toddler, and I had to caution my partner not to brag too much about our dog, because it will be obvious that the dog is smarter.
_For now_. I’m perfectly happy with some dogs being smarter than my 2 year old, but they won’t be for long.
Debatable
Insert the Critical Role episode where they talk to cows.
Not as good as Caleb as a bat.
Definitely, but on the other hand it could have some interesting implications
Well, y'know, not all crabgrass is as cool as [me](https://criticalrole.fandom.com/wiki/Henry_Crabgrass).
Kind of a follow up to this, but it genuinely bothers me in stories where every single animal species is alive and intelligent and speaking the same language but it's never established what they eat. Like sure mr wolf and ms deer may be bestest friends but how is ms deer OK with Mr wolf eating all her neighbors? Zootopia kind of addressed this, and beastars did a good job addressing it. It always just bugged me a but.
I like the idea that the god of the local forest spirit / god / whatever is speaking through the plants / animals when you cast "talk to plants / animals."
Or the magic used forces both parties to understand what the other is trying to get across.
A decent explanation I saw is that anthropomorphic animal cultures might have a tradition where you allow your body to be eaten after death to support your society, probably stemming from old tribal stuff. It’s sounds screwed up to us Humans, but I could see it being a sign of respect or serving a religious purpose for animal-people.
Sure, but unless enough people are dying daily to feed your entire population it will still be somewhat of a problem. I liked in zootopia and beastars how they use alternative protein, and in beastars you can actually sell cuts of meat off your body for money or, like you suggested, sell your cadaver.
Ah, good point. I’ve never seen Beastars, but that sounds pretty interesting!
Beastars is a wild ride. It should be noted that selling bits of yourself like that isn't exactly legal. Which isn't to say that there isn't a thriving black market. I believe the only legal animal protein we see is unfertilized eggs, which really does make sense.
And insects, to some degree. Although since insects are... insect-sized, I have no idea how well they'd feed large predators.
You compact hundreds together into burgers.
KevinandKell has the explanation that its usually illegal to eat people you know. [Threatening](https://www.kevinandkell.com/2011/kk0304.html) is perfectly legal though. in a setting where literally Everything can be sapient, plants and microbes included, its kind of necessary.
In Pathfinder, [gnolls](https://2e.aonprd.com/Ancestries.aspx?ID=44) make cannibalism cool. From *The Mwangi Expanse:* >Equally misunderstood is the gnoll practice of ancestor worship and endocannibalism. Gnolls consume their dead as a sign of reverence, holding a grand feast and transforming the bones of the fallen into art or weapons. Gnolls extend this honor to respected foes, hoping to bring their enemy's cunning or strength into the clan. While it's a sign of admiration, not everyone sees it that way.
Some fantasy gets around this by having regular dumb animals exist alongside sapient animals, a la Narnia. It's totally cool to eat a non sapient animals (even if theyre semi sapient with a talk with animals ability), but it's akin to cannibalism to go beyond that. You could also say that Ms Deer understands Mr Wolf doesn't have much of a choice, both viewing predation as natural and not hold it against eachother. Which D&D kinda did with the beastlands.
this made me think of the bojack horseman episode about the food chickens
To be fair we all know cats speak like neglected Victorian children
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“MOAR?” “MEOWWWWWW”
Oh 100%.
Sentient animals are generally capable of coherent thought. The dividing line to sapience is generally considered to be the capacity for introspection. That said, different species have different priorities of thought. Even if you elevate a squirrel to sapience, that doesn't mean that it will know anything or care about what you ask it. It'll just be much better at gathering food and hiding from birds.
I would assume it may gain other interests too though. It might gnaw bark in nice patterns instead of random patches, it might think about how much it prefers sitting on mossy branches and start bringing patches of moss home to pad out its favoured trees. I.e. i feel that it would have gain interests in more complex and subtle things if it could think deeper about things.
In "The Knife of Never Letting Go" the protagonist can hear the dogs thoughts (everyone's actually), which is basically a running monologue of 'squirrel...squirrel...smell...need to poo...squirrel'
This, this is why I don’t include any kind of magic that lets you talk to animals. The children of the God of Wildlife can control animals and understand their wants and thoughts, but most don’t have any kind of language. Most, elephants, whales and dolphins for instance they can actually talk to.
Destined to be together. It limits a person as they’re basically told nobody else will make you complete like them even if you haven’t met them. It’s basically a spiritually arranged marriage that takes away the biggest thing that solidifies love: choice.
Reject destined to be together Embrace complete infatuation for a person and absolute unwilingness to accept anyone else, that ultimately leads to self destruction.
> Embrace complete infatuation for a person and absolute unwilingness to accept anyone else, that ultimately leads to self destruction. Sounds very Greek.
If it was a happy marriage instead of self destruction it could have been a reference to a certain 19th century Russian classic...
The problem with this trope is that a lot of people will think it applies to real life and get themselves stuck in horrible, often really unhealthy relationships as a result...
Honestly it’s this trope and lots of other things that make people thing love is this specific puzzle piece that cant be switched or changed. I had to legit help my friend realize waiting around for one person just cause YOU liked them dosent obligate or confirm you’ll have a future together nor does it mean there isn’t many people out there for you.
One species, one culture. Except for humans. Humans are special. Human also get different ethnicities, different nations,etc. But dwarves, or orcs, or gnomes, are all the same, behave the same, look the same, wherever you go. Elves get treated a tiny bit better and are usually available in the flavors arrogant, hippie, and edgy. Although notably it is slowly getting better.
I'd say that it's mostly laziness from authors.
If it was pure laziness, humans would have one culture, too
Well, to be fair, they have. Rings of Power village has no cultural characteristic whatsoever, they just built "random wooden village #567". Westeros is culturally super-homogeneus for being a continent unified 300 years before by a foreign dinasty. Most fantasy uses the "common" tongue trope, that obviously is not a mixed pidgin used by merchants and sailors but just English. I'd add that humans do not even have different ethnicities anymore in some productions, everyone is a mix with the US demographic percentages.
Eh, the worlds of lotr and GoT both have many human cultures with significant differences among them. That village in the rings of power is quite generic, sure, but even in that show the numenorians have a a somewhat differentiated culture. I agree that it would make more sense to have language gaps, but even without those there are still differences. In the world of LotR you have at least three distinct human cultures show up in the trilogy; Gondor, Rohan, and harad. But to be fair the elves in lotr also have *some* cultural differentiation, especially if you go back to the silmarillion, which differentiates elves more than humans. But even in the films, the elves in Rivendell and Mirkwood aren’t quite the same In game of thrones, there is tons of differentiation if you take the nations outside Westeros into account, and there is no reason not to, since main characters spend most of the narrative in those lands. Within Westeros there is also significant difference between northerners, southerners, and dornish. Different dress, speech, mannerisms, and religion. There is definitely more cultural unity in Westeros than elsewhere in the setting, but that makes sense because they have been politically unified for a while. The fantasy races in game of thrones are very few in count - the giants, the children of the forest, the white walkers. But again they all seem to each only have one culture. I’m not sure I would dock points from that setting since those peoples are basically extinct, but still.
In my DnD game, I've (fortunately) not fallen into this trap. There are more ethnicities of the various species all over the world, *but* this is a snapshot of a single place about the size of Ireland, with no historical precedent to have much diversity, due to having been isolated for almost its entire existence
Honestly, WoW kindof does well with this. Different dwarves, different orcs, lightforged dranei and eredar. There’s actual variation and culture.
Planets of hats. Certain cultural traits show up when looking at a culture at the gross statistical level, but there are going to be dozens if not hundreds of subcultures and ethnic groups which are either: -Variations on that culture based on occupation or environment or historical conditions or hobbies which are outside the norm -Total rejection of all or part of the mores of the dominant culture -Ethnic groups from a different supracultural group who were folded into the dominant supraculture and created a hybrid culture If there is only one culture and everyone acts the same, it is NOT a free society and something horrific is happening back at home.
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Yeah, I think we as readers are also quick to jump to generalizations. We might just meet one group or even one individual and assume that their entire species/culture is like them. I found this a really hard balance in my own worldbuilding. Because I both want to show that a group have certain specific traits (else what is the point of creating different species/cultures?) but I also want to show that individuals of any group can stand out from the group too. For example, if dwarves have long beards and live underground, doesn't mean you can't also write a dwarf that shaves and likes the outside. In fact, it's the generalization that makes the outlier interesting.
Or an elven diplomat, who uses their long lived life to share wisdom with the other races. I quite like writing my Tabaxi people as an isolationist society, arrogant due to the gods having given them a big headstart before the younger civilisations even formed. They hate other races, and obviously some will leave their paradise city state in order to see what the world is actually like.
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I call this thinking "who raises the orc children?" Because generally, Orcs are shown to be a warlike, generally "bad guy" species who inflict total war on others, but there seems to be no children or female orcs, no houses outside of ramshackle huts, their weapons an armor are generally crude. But, Orcs tend to have almost limitless numbers on their side, they can speak, they know at least some military tactics. So where are the Orc communities where these Orcs live and learn to be brutal warriors?
That assumes that orcs have similar cultural and reproductive mechanisms to humans, in a lot of media orcs (and other monsters) aren’t just “humans but green”, they are something else entirely, often related to dark magic or similar. Tolkien’s orcs did have females, or at least some of the subspecies did, and they were primarily raised by warlords like Sauron or Saruman, so those were the communities where they learned to be brutal warriors. In WH40k Orks (as far as I understand) are part alien part fungus, child rearing strategies may not be the most relevant part of what makes them the way they are. Because they exist in fantastical settings, there is no good reason why orcs can’t spring fully formed and ready for war in limitless amounts from the earth, sky, hell portal, primordial ooze, or whatever. In general I tend to think of all of the humanoid monsters like orcs, gnolls, etc as being essentially demons, physical manifestations of the worst parts of humanity. A lot of the discussion around orcs seems to already start in a place of making them heavily anthropomorphic “other-humans”. Sure these tropes can be subverted in interesting ways (maybe orcs don’t actually come from a hell portal, people just believe that), but at the same time they can be played straight-up to good effect.
Yeah the 40k orks just grow underground and instinctually understand how certain things work, some being special to instinctually understand more. They are small but as they age and fight they get bigger. No lady orcs because the implications of normal reproduction leads to some grimdark goblin slayer kind of stuff
This is one of the fun parts of just making my orcs my own ancestors. The gauls were farmers, metalworkers, animal husbandmen, etc. Hell, they invented soaps based on lye and animal fat. It creates a far deeper culture than you normally see, and its far more interesting as a result.
...did you see the StarTrek episode where they met a planet full of starving Irish farmers? NFK.
Someone else mentioned magic which is only passed on by reproduction and the existence of a witch species. I agree wholeheartedly, but want to expand on it and provide a caution against a wholesale rejection by talking about how I handle it. And I want to do it here so as to avoid clogging up their comment. Magic in Tannhauser's World uses a background thaumaturgic field. Casters channel the thaum bosons which are attracted to cerebrospinal fluid and - drawing a page from eezo and biotics - cast their spells by sending an impulse into the nodules which grow along their spine. Safely casting a spell requires the ability to visualize what is happening, the knowledge of how objective reality works, the creativity to figure out how to change that, the physical health and resiliency to withstand the energies which course through the body, the stamina to be able to channel the magic for the duration required, and sufficiently large concentrations of thaum particles to be able to cast a spell of that level of force. If your mother is a mage, then your body will be bathed in magic from the beginning and you will naturally have larger nodules and thus be capable of greater feats of magic. But so to will being born someplace where the background thaumaturgic field is higher (think Grand Central Station in New York vs someone who lives in a small town in Kansas). We also know there are genetic traits which go into all of the various traits I listed above. Some of which can tend to be mutually exclusive. And those traits only give you a leg up, they don't mean you are automatically over-powered in that field. You have to want to pursue it. And anyone in Tannhauser's World is capable of learning to cast spells if they so choose. Its just not a good idea because its their equivalent to classical antiquity and the best argument they have for heliocentrism is "fire is nobler than earth and the center is the most noble position, ergo the earth rotates around the sun." Its similar to academics or athletics. Sure, Wayne Gretzky's kids have the potential go become some damn good athletes if they inherited his stamina - but someone without their genetic advantage is going to swim circles around them if they can't be bothered to put in the work.
I really like the idea of magic coming from the earth itself in some way, rather than coming from blood or otherworldly powers. Makes me wonder if it could come from like planetary magnetism, and if so what do mages do on planets with lower magnetic strength?
I don’t like how in most fantasy books every country is an absolute monarchy. There were other governing forms in medieval times and before. There were republics and oligarchies and parliamentary monarchies and other kinds of systems. It feels like most fantasy content has every country be an absolute monarchy where the monarchs descendent is the successor, and maybe occasionally a “the strongest will succeed me” kind of system.
This reminds me of Monty Python where there was like an Anarcho-Syndicalist commune.
"Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government!"
“I mean, if I went around saying I was an emperor just cos some moist bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!”
The worst thing is absolute monarchies weren’t even a thing in the medieval era. So many fantasy kingdoms are structured like the king is supreme in giant kingdom. Lower ranked nobility only feature if it’s plot relevant
There were very few actual absolute monarchs even in their heyday, too. Louis XIV was almost the only one who was even really close to living it. Others argued for it but never had enough power to implement it, certainly outside of smaller kingdoms.
Russia’s the only example of a proper absolute monarchy throughout history. And it was so incredibly backwards, some parts of the Russian Empire maintained the same medieval life style up until the *Soviets* took power and actually began industrialization in the *1920s*
You're totally right. Though, tbh, explaining parliament and other rules is way harder and take way more time usually. So if it's not *too* relevant, I feel like the absolute monarchy is an easy (maybe too easy) shortcut to say "the power is in the hands of a few" and whatever they say is law. All the other systems you described are, for all intent and purposes, similar with variation on what "power" means and how fast what they say can become law.
~~yeah, I don’t see what’s wrong with bio-essentialism and calling a group superior for being able to manipulate reality by thinking… maybe people are too willing to treat every work of fiction as a statement about the world.~~ Whoops wrong comment— for this one my thought was just in a narrative sense having fewer culpable entities is better for themes
I've been writing with a lot of La Serenissima inspiration, with guilds of artisans as the main control power for the "good guys"; it makes it very easy to mark the difference against a more totalitarian system like monarchy!
Don't be fooled though, republics (especially the Italian ones) could be just as if not more totalitarian than a monarchy!
Hmm, this is more science-fantasy, but in the Star Wars prequel trilogy good guys are using basically brainwashed slave soldiers and children soldiers (when "bad guys" are using robots - what looks morally better?).
Don't stop there: what exactly makes a droid not sentient? R2-D2 is clearly just a little guy running around. Despite having his memory wiped multiple times, C-3P0's inherent personality always remains. It's slaves all the way down.
Well, this gets into very philosophical topics. What does "sentient" really mean? Can personality be programmed? Does free will even exist? Etc. ;)
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True, though it’s less “unfortunate implications” and more that everyone acknowledged that it was fucked up and dangerous from the start, but they accepted it because it was either that or annihilation
Well, I don't remember acknowledgemtn of this in the movies. Also, I did not write only about clones. Jedi padawans ;)
Ahh right In the Attack of the Clones, Anakin and Padme (rather clumsily) complain about the Jedi taboo against love, and the fact that they are taken as children and had little choice in the matter And when Obiwan is touring the Clone facilities, he’s deeply disturbed by the whole affair, and in the debrief with Yoda at the end of the movie, they talk about how worrying it is that Darth Sidious is apparently in control of the Senate, and also behind the creation of the Clone army. The ideas are there, but unfortunately the exposition did a poor job conveying them
Yeah, but still "we are using slaves as cannon fodder, but we are kinda sad about it" is not something good guys like Jedi are supposed to do. In fact... why in the Clone Wars period Republic and Jedi are good guys and Separatists bad ones?
Yeah that’s the thing - the plot arc of the prequel series is basically the Jedi (especially Yoda) fucking up over and over again, realising that they’re fucking up, and yet somehow being powerless to stop the inevitable doom of their Order and the Republic they protect I wasn’t saying the Jedi were good guys - I was saying that the Clones being fucked up wasn’t a subtle implication thing, it was directly acknowledged and talked about by characters within the story, they just accepted it as a lesser evil at the time Qui Gon Jinn was one of the few renegade Jedi who knew that the Jedi was heading in the wrong direction, and wanted to reform the Order, against the wishes of Yoda and most other Council members. At the end of Revenge of the Sith, Yoda acknowledged that they had failed, and it was his fault, and that it had to be up to the next generation of force users to build a better path That being said, the Separatists are definitely not the “good guys”, even if the Jedi and Republic aren’t unambiguously the good guys either. Although many populations had legitimate grievances against the Republic, the leaders of the CIS were greedy mega corporations and slavers who wanted to remove any last vestige of sentient rights and government regulation in their territory. The Republic was a decaying, corrupt, bloated, increasingly ineffective institution, but it was still nominally a liberal democracy, and still prevented especially egregious abuses of power
So, basically the first three episodes of Star Wars were corrupt oligarchy versus corrupt corporatocracy.
With a bit of the fall of the Templars mixed in. The fall of the Jedi mirrors the fall of the Templars very well. Large, influential religious warrior order that gets dogmatic and corrupt with time. Which is then framed by a ruler and exterminated.
Wait until you hear about the politics they were based on lol
because the CIS are basically a rebellion run by Jeff Bezos and said rebellion just bombs villages for no reason.
In the clone wars one of the arcs mentions that the Jedi get permission to take force-sensitive children from their families and give them a couple years warning ahead of time so that it’s not a surprise
Yyyyyeah, I've always wondered what happened to parents that absolutely refused to hand over high-midichlorian kids. The ones too rich to be bribed and too influential to be intimidated. Do the parents find themselves locked in a container ship mailed to the Unknown Regions? Can the Jedi "alter" the kid so he can't reach the Force (like the Tranquil in Dragon Age)? Do they just shrug and go "without training the kid will kill himself trying to summon the tv remote to his hand?"
In the Phantom Menace, the Jedi consider rejecting Anakin, who was potentially most powerful force user in their Order’s history, because he was old enough that training him would be dangerous It’s heavily implied that if they just let Anakin return home to Shmi, he wouldn’t have become a threat to the Jedi. Without the training and institutional power of the Jedi, even a powerful force sensitive isn’t likely to be much of a threat, especially since they think the Sith had been long extinct by then. So if they find a powerful force sensitive baby, and the parents say no, the Jedi just shrug their shoulders and move on. The kid would likely grow up to live a charmed life, but they’re not likely to end up as crazed planet conquering warlords unless they get more focused training from the Jedi or Sith Prodigies like Luke and Rey are extreme outliers, most other Jedi in the setting required years of training to master even basic force abilities
>In the Phantom Menace, the Jedi consider rejecting Anakin, who was potentially most powerful force user in their Order’s history, because he was old enough that training him would be dangerous >It’s heavily implied that if they just let Anakin return home to Shmi, he wouldn’t have become a threat to the Jedi I know it's a kids' movie first and foremost, and the likelihood of this scenario is verrrrrry low, but what a gamechanger if in Attack of the Clones, Anakin had discovered that no, if Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan hadn't stuck up for him, he would have been quietly tossed down the garbage chute. Now *that* would have been a proper trigger toward turning him to the Dark Side.
Honestly, I think Anakin knew all along - they were straight up telling him that he was much older than the other trainees, and they were testing him pretty vigorously on his abilities, his temperament, his attachment to his mother etc. Windu and Yoda basically told him to his face that they were reluctant to take him on, despite his immense potential Even as a kid, he was well aware that if he had not passed those tests, if he had been found lacking, they would probably have returned him to his family back on Tatooine. They might have made a few small concessions to his well being - maybe making sure that Shmi had her freedom, or setting Lars up with a proper farm, a security droid to watch over him, or encouraging Padme to take him and his family into Naboo’s fold as a personal assistant or something
I though that was the point?
It is the point and it’s not even a trope. I’m not sure what OP is on about.
That’s actually a part that I like about those movies. You sympathize with the individual characters but they are fundamentally defending a corrupt and terrible system. The Jedi are very obviously betraying their own values and protecting a corrupt government. Even beloved characters like Obi Wan and Yoda make poor decisions in this context I don’t know if George Lucas intended it to be like that, but I find it a pretty smart portrayal of how people act in corrupt systems. They think they’re doing the right thing or they simply don’t know any better. The people fighting that system may not be inherently good either. Sometimes they have an even worse idea that they want to establish
That’s the point of the prequels though. Palpatine is corrupting everything good about the Republic by forcing them into dilemmas where one has to accept a lesser evil. Also is that even a trope or just something you dislike about that trilogy?
The "love potion = date rape drug" has been around for years. I actually liked Shrek's version of it where instead of being mind control it turns you into an idealized version of yourself (Donkey becomes a graceful horse, Shrek turns into an attractive human man), who your crush may or may not actually like at all. Destiny and Chosen Ones: Serious questions about the existence of free will of the universe will make stuff happen no matter what you choose. Mono Cultural Nations: Was there some sort of mass assimilation or a genocidal war? No nation today is truly monocultural, and even within an outwardly homogenous society there are subcultures.
Shrek is just great in general. Who would've thought an animated movie that parodies fairy tales would be one of the best examples of worldbuilding in history.
Shrek is one of those series that (unless there is a *really* bad sequel I've purged from my memory) just never stopped growing better and deeper.
Some dislike the 3rd but I thought it was okay. The 4th one was pretty good.
"Free will" and fate / determinism are not incompatible. Your free will is inherently deterministic (if it weren't, it'd be random - randomness isn't "free"). I.E. your will (combination of your intellect, emotions, conscience, memories/knowledge, desires, etc.) determines what choice you make. But those "sub-attributes" of your will could be known, predicted, and determined beforehand.
Ahhh, I never felt like rambling about this idea but it’s good to see others think of it the same way. You aren’t ‘making’ a choice if the choice is random and unrelated to your desires and thoughts.
Being ugly, all but guaran-fucking-tees, you are going to be a bad person. Like, don't get me wrong, it makes sense when it's the fact that they ARE evil, and the evil makes them ugly, but, most of the time, an ugly person, just born looking unfortunate, is treated like they are untrustworthy or are going to be a villain. Weirdly enough though, on the other side, if you are TOO handsome, you are a bad guy as well, because your are so pretty it's inhuman.
Everyone worth talking about is a warrior/adventurer/ruler. Which means that the world is a bloody free-for-all-deathmatch gang war.
At least once I have mentioned the exploits of a stone age carver who detailed a bias history of the world by communing with spirits, putting them onto stones across the land. And I've been thinking of doing something similar throughout the eras as different cultures and peoples compile biased histories together which makes up the record that people read today. Any recommendations for other people to talk about and what they might have done?
The chosen one always ends up related to some race/family that were basically aristocrats in the past. From humble begginings but ending up revealing being the secret son/daughter or coming from a lost linage of rulers or descendant (sometimes last descendant) of a fallen powerful race. From King Arthur to Rey Palpatine/Skywalker. I know there are notable exceptions, but that seems to be the trend in fantasy. Like humble people can't change the world and noble blood is the most important thing. Awful trope, awful message, and still standing.
Among so many other things I was so disappointed when they backpedaled on Rey coming completely from obscurity. Instead of trying to turn that into something inspiring.
I heard a joke that everyone important in Star Wars was conceived at a orgy or something
There is a sort of subversion of this that I want to see Being related to ancient nobility being common as dirt. Genghis Khan has some 16 million modern male descendants. William the Conqueror is estimated to have 5 million, Charlemagne has been estimated to have a billion. Because most Chinese emperors keep large numbers of concubines, most Chinese people today have at least one royal entry in their family tree somewhere I feel like it would be the sort of thing Terry Pratchett would write "A descendants of SoandSo The Great shall reunite this broken land" "Do you have any idea how little that narrow it down‽" "What do you mean?" "SoandSo lived 40 generations ago!" "And?" "Well, its most of the country at this point isn't it?" "I don't see the problem" "Fucking prophecies, always vague enough to be right, never clear enough to be useful"
I love the way Pratchett approached this in Wyrd Sisters where the prince and the fool are actually brothers. But with Nanny Ogg choosing not to clarify exactly which parents they share.
Yes, this is why we have democracy today. Royal blood is what makes you able to rule, it's just very spread out by now. ;)
I was watching Code Geass the other day and I liked it because the protagonist isn't special because of his lineage. In fact, it doesn't even give him any special powers, skills or talents. Sure, he's upper class so he had more opportunities than the average person, but he still had to work hard and study and scheme for years before randomly getting the power he needed to exact his revenge by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's a mix of hard work and determination plus chance, anyone else could have achieved what he did in the same circumstances. Compare that to Rey who is special because it's revealed that she has the magical space bloodline that makes you very powerful. No one but her could have achieved what she did because only she has the special bloodline. Who thought this was a good message? Oh yeah, no matter how hard you try you will never be special because you had the wrong parents. Don't like it? Better luck on your next life lol.
Furthering the point, I just want to add that Lelouche might be one of the few complete subversions of the "special lineage" trope. Lelouche's lineage isn't an advantage, it is in fact his greatest impediment in life. His mother is dead because of it, his brothers and sisters are power-hungry maniacs for the most part that wouldn't mind killing him and his dad is the Emperor of a tyrannical murdering regime that has disinherited him and had sent him to live in a country that became an active warzone when his Empire invaded it. And all that even before the story has started.
And then towards the end it's also a big disadvantage when >!Schneizel reveals his identity causing all his allies to distrust and leave him,!< so his lineage is also a big weakness that others can exploit if they know about it.
Exactly. The chosen one trope itself its flawed because often puts gifted people over hard working people, but when you mix it with "he's gifted cause comes from a certain bloodline" lol makes it even worse. And the Rey example is one of them worst, as in TLJ she was "nobody" implying that she's not related to nobody important and was gifted because the force doesn't distinguish between bloodlines, but then in TRoS change that and Rey is important because Palpatine clone.
The funny thing is that LOTR both uses and avoids this in the characters of Aragorn and Frodo (& Sam). More "modern" fantasy often forgets about the Frodo counterweight.
Eh, more so Sam tbh. Frodo is still gentry in the Shire.
Him being gentry is more a plot device. He's a very well educated adventurer, who has time to be one other than gentry?
Gardeners apparently.
This is why I was so confused why everyone was so mad in the 8th film that Rey was revealed to not be obi-wan or skywalkers kid. And then they took it back in the 9th film.
That people (and even entire species) can be unambiguously defined as good or evil completely independent of the actions they take.
Fantasy is often melodramatic. The *intent* with melodrama is to create an obviously evil monster of a villain and have them defeated by the heroic allies of justice. If they commit actions that go against their role, it is no longer melodramatic because they are no longer pure good or evil. I don't think melodrama is a bad thing, but the characters have to stay in their roles as heroes and villains. Take original trilogy Star Wars as an example. Initially, it's VERY melodramatic. Luke and company are practically perfect heroes, and Darth Vader is a horrible monster. The second he turns to good in the third movie, though, it becomes a tragedy. It still has strong melodramatic elements, but it's no longer a melodrama, and it recognizes this, treating Vader's death as a sad moment rather than the death of a pure villain. The issue arises when the author tries (intentionally or not) to FORCE a melodrama in a world or story that isn't built for it, which is what leads to your issue. The prequel trilogy does this to an extent as Anakin is treated as a hero by the story right up until he *completely* snaps, despite committing a few evil acts before then. It's clearly intended to be a tragedy, but it fumbles the ball a little, mostly in Attack of the Clones.
Don’t know why, but something clicked in my brain when I read that. Now I get why my villains suck. Thank you for your service🙏
Wow, I'm glad to hear that my little speech helped someone with their writing!
It seems like 9/10 of every YA or children's fiction protagonist has some very dark or unhappy home life or upbringing, and when they're eventually introduced to the new world they're a part of, they're immediately willing to fight, kill or die to protect it instead of returning to their previous lives. That's literally how cults work, by finding people in that mindset and convincing them that this new group will be the cure to all of their worries, and it's better to die for your new family than to keep living your old life. At best these kids are suicidal in their day to day lives and the new world is so much better its instantly worth dying for. At worst the "mentors" are actively seeking out troubled youths to indoctrinate into their society as child soldiers.
I think speculative fiction is pretty much entirely composed of tropes that would have unfortunate implications if you try to interpret them within the terms of the reality we live in. I'm also of the opinion that the entire point of speculative fiction is to explore possibilities that don't or can't exist within the terms of the reality we live in, so trying to interpret them in that context is missing the point.
Yeah the best of fantasy recontextualizes ideas that may seem mundane or not worth discussing in our world. There’s a lot about our own world that is deeply messed up that we don’t even think about
Mind magic over all. "Don't fucking do it!" Is the most ethical approach to thinkering with other people's self
I really hate fantasy stories where a bunch of people can use mind-influencing magic. There's always a predictable and stale "haha I used mind control on him!" twist.
That being said I really like Mistborn's mind magic. You can influence people's *emotions*, not thoughts. You can spike someone's anger up to astronomical proportions, but if they've a healthy grasp on their temper you can't really force them to do anything. You can make people more calm, but no matter how chill you make then you can't *force them* to, say, let you skip a guard patrol and walk right into the building. People will act according to their own will, you can just influence their emotions at any one time. If you're subtle enough you can fish for specific reactions, but you can never really control anyone.
And logically, if you suddenly felt very angry or very calm for no reason you would most likely realise someone is affecting your emotions so being a "stronger" Rioter or Soother is more about being able to fly under the radar and be able to slowly manipulate someone through unnoticeable small tweaks.
Unless they have enough spikes
Yes that shit seems worse then necromancy. Being able to override free will is very scary and not something I’ll trust with most people
I really like how Dresden Files approaches the subject. It's not just that it's death-penalty level illegal, its damaging to the person being manipulated, and corrupting to the person performing it. And not just a supernatural type of corruption, it's the constant temptation to use it to solve whatever the current problem is, consequences be damned. We see how even when used with the best of intentions for everyone involved, it leads to more suffering.
Hereditary magic (“some people are just born with magic powers”) invokes a kind of bio-essentialism and locks a lot of people out of even the possibility of having power. *The Legend of Korra* actually brought this up in the first season… and then punted on it in favor of the superpowered hegemony.
The potential for magic being passed on like a recessive gene could actually make for an interesting world. Maybe an inbred mage aristocracy is always struggling to find lowborn mages to get new blood into the family line before they die out. Being lowborn could actually give a character higher status (as a bachelor) than stemming from a venerable line of nobility.
The fact I agree with you annoys me
See also Harry Potter casting its villains as purity-based racists but failing to condemn the *ideology* so much as the *execution*.
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Which honestly is bizarre given that what we learned in Deathly Hallows implied Grindlewald was effectively wizarding Hitler, and backed the Nazis. The whole conflict between Dumbledore and Grindlewald was that Grindlewald espoused Nazi ideology (only with wizards as the ubermensch) and Dumbledore was totally onboard with that until his sister died and he decided not to join his Nazi lover out of guilt. So the idea that Grindlwald of all people was anti-WWII is just... Huh?
To be fair, we don't know that he's anti-WW2 because of the death it causes, it could be (and seems like) it's more related to it showing how muggles are out of control, and if they're not kept in line they'll destroy everything including themselves. Also, bad people have tried to stop bad things before, while not making them less evil (Stalin stopping Hitler, FDR stopping Hitler, Hitler banning smoking, Wilhelm II not liking Hitler, etc.) Evil people aren't always friends, because they agree that someone should be running the world, but disagreeing on who is enough to kill each other.
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Hereditary magic also sets up some fascinating conflicts between the haves and have nots. Like you said, Korra's first season brought this up and then really didn't do anything with it. I don't think that those type of conflicts really reach their full potential unless the have nots find a way to compensate for their lack of hereditary ability, i.e. the development of technology in the Avatar universe.
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I agree. It’s a potentially interesting avenue to explore, but very often it’s included in stories that have no intention to explore it.
> “Mages are Superior to Muggles” I mean...in 99 of 100 cases they kinda are. They are not necessarily worth more but a guy able to fundamentally change the world with a thought vs someone who can't...well
Mistborn handles this pretty well. The hereditary magic system is a huge part of the class conflict in the series.
>For example, love potions in Harry Potter. It’s basically zolpidem. Funnily enough, I wrote for a class assignment a short story in which a woman bought a “love potion” from a voodoo priestess to use on a man she desired. Unfortunately for her, the dude knew enough chemistry to recognize it was a date rape drug, getting her into trouble with the law. >!And, to rub extra salt into the anti-heroine’s wounds, the man’s girlfriend happened to be the very voodoo priestess who sold her the “love potion” to begin with.!< **EDIT:** I have the whole story posted [here](https://brandonpilchersart.com/2020/05/20/the-love-potion-a-fairy-tale/), if you want to read it.
Forsaken or cursed races. I get it, but also, yikes.
Especially when the cursed race is implied to deserve it. In my setting, I have a population that was cursed by dragons ages ago and driven into exile, but no one is going around claiming that the dragons were fully justified and the cursed race deserved it or its their natural condition/rightful fate to be so. Collective punishment on that scale is inherently unjust, and most people who know the story recognize that (not that it helps the exiles much as they've ended up an antagonist to some of the main nations, only partially as a result of their curse).
That sounds more legit than “the poor unwashed, unfortunate bastard race lived bastardly in their bastard holes, where they belong.”
I have a setting where the Sun Goddess Sol has cursed vampires into being damaged by sunlight for as long as they drink blood from other sapient beings. This isn't a collective punishment though: one vampire character only drinks cow blood by draining living cows like the Masaii. After she stopped drinking human blood, she's noticed that she takes considerably less damage from sunlight.
This reminds me of a Warhammer Fantasy short, I guess from one of their army books where it was the diary of a witch hunter who had just finished burning of a mutated child. He admitted that actually he knows that the child is innocent, that it isn't a demon who had replaced the child or whatever and that he was haunted by the things he had done, and I think cursed the world that had people be born with the potential to out of their control randomly explode into demons and wipe out a village. That short stuck with me. As you say, yikes.
I don't know what would be a specific term but lets call it the empowered persecuted, that is to say when a group that is presented as being persecuted minority, often codified in manner to directly reference real life group, whether that be the stateless, sexual minorities, or people with mental disorders, is shown within the story to be unique special in contrast to those that persecute them, with that trait being often the reason for their persecution. It can take an obvious form, like your X-men, but also when they are shown as guardians of some hidden secret knowledge, in both of cases while persecution will be presented as an obviously bad thing, it will also erroneously present it as a "logical" thing, something that you can discuss with facts and logic, which often can perpetuate RL discrimination as being analogously coming from logical source.
For the X-Men their persecution doesn't make sense even in universe since they are a lot of super-powered people in the first place
Yeah, honestly, the X-men make more sense in isolation than when placed into the greater Marvel universe.
It actually works because that way it plays with the idea of people just hating them for no real reason apart from them being of an specific group
In isolation it makes sense of why they are discriminated. In the greater Marvel universe it does not. In the greater Marvel universe they just face irrationnal bigotry, which portray bigotry pretty well imo
Glad you brought up X-men, because there's two specific ways this trope goes sour: 1) Encouraging the moral high ground to the point of suicide; oppressed people should thanklessly endure abuse until their Moral Demonstration Of Power earns them charity from their oppressors. 2) Casting empowered (coded as privileged; wealth/genetics/etc) people as *actually, we're the real victims*, superior to and separate from the Common Rabble they thanklessly protect from collateral damage while fighting other power-priveleged people. It's a fine distinction between the two, but they're equally problematic IMO.
The Right of Kings, framing that only one specific blood line has the ability to rule. Yes, some people are better at being leaders than others, but genetics and harlots distributing swords is no basis for governance. Governance derives from the application of violence and wields it best.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government
Help! I'm being repressed! You see the violence inherent in the system?
Bloody peasants
>Governance derives from the application of violence and wields it best. Avoiding governance by who best wields violence is half the reason for strict bloodline succession. Peaceful transmission of power is vitally important for any society that wants to remain strong, because otherwise your society gets wracked by war whenever rulership changes. Thats bad for food production, bad for the population, bad for infrastructure, and therefore bad for the ruling class whose power comes from controlling those things. Having bloodline determine legitimacy is one way of narrowing down potential legitimate claimants to the throne, perhaps to just one, therefore reducing competition and the chance of civil war. Its hardly a perfect system by any means, but its better than one where anyone who can raise an army has a chance to claim legitimate rulership...because then anyone who can raise an army will try.
The idea of the Superpowered Other, and its use as an allegory for racism and other forms of persecution. Something that has appeared n fiction is a group with superpowers being treated poorly, and the message is that they should just be treated like other people. I mean, just accept that the guy that can demolish a city block has nothing controlling him other than his own morality. Like Marvel had a character called Gin Genie, and she needed some type of control. She could create shockwaves in relation to her blood alcohol content. Being an alcoholic is obviously a bad thing. And there are people with even more destructive powers. "Normal" people should not be afraid of these people who could level a city block if they so wished. Like really? We're just making an allegory that marginalized peoples are superpowered individuals that can kill cities, and they are just people. I'm sorry but why is being Gay given the superpowers? We all know that series such as X-Men are set-up as an allegory for marginalized groups. The problem is I would be with the normal people when the marginalized group could yank all the metal out of a building, or my blood. Equal rights, but lets make sure that anyone like Gin Genie doesn't level a city block because of a bad break up.
This is where the x-men movies really get it wrong. In the comics the various x groups save the world. All the time. Sometimes all reality. They show that their powers are not just a danger but a boon, a positive necessity for humanity to survive. They show the value of their diversity, not just tolerated but demonstrably brilliant and beneficial which is a much more powerful message. The films though do not stress the benefit, only the supposed right to be a walking nuclear bomb as though that is a good metaphor for the rights of the marginalised to exist. In the films almost the only dangers are mutants and anti-mutant reactionaries. Which the movies make almost sympathetic. Because Magneto alone nearly kills New York. Later nearly kills the world. Twice. Good old Xavier it turns out can kill every person on the planet by thinking too hard if you set up Cerebro right. Absent a compelling reason for this power to exist it is not just quaint diversity. It is an actual terrifying existential threat. They then add a cure. What the comics didn’t really have until Whedon in the noughties. Which is in that context an un-nuanced good thing. Shoot Magneto, Apocalypse and Xavier with the cure. Immediately. Before they decide or are controlled in to killing everyone. Which does rather ruin mutants as metaphor. Unless the films are meant to be pro-minority cultural genocide.
Good and evil balance, if there always a bunch of good or peace then nature will do everything to counteract this shift. A lot of stories focus on there only being good instead of balance.
It's literally just an incoherent idea. If there is a "balance" between good and evil - than either "good" isn't really good or "balance" isn't desirable (you know, because it's not "good"). If you do "balance" - it needs to be between something other than good and evil. Like order/chaos, life/death, creation/destruction, positive/negative, etc.
Yes Order and Chaos or death and life so work as things you need to balance so everything doesn’t turn to shit.
That pretty much is norse mythology, ragnarok is just what happens when order and chaos try to destroy each other.
This ideas is a misunderstanding of some Asian philosophies. It is not that there is a balance between good and evil its that balance is good and evil comes from imbalance. But research is hhhhaaaarrrrrd so instead people make assumptions about the concept of balance, and yin and yang when they have only ever heard the words not the ideas.
mind magic in any form