At the risk of seeming prone to nepotism, Porno Kitsch is quickly becoming one of my favorite people to talk to on Twitter (the best of you better amp up your game a little). Specifically, their insight on fantasy tropes is providing some excellent discussions, such as when we chatted about the use of racial analogues in fantasy as evidenced in their review of Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings.
Today, we’re going to talk about fantasy races and we are briefly going to touch upon race in fantasy. Mind, I’m more concerned with the former than the latter, but there is a nigh-inexhaustible source of insight on the latter subject in the form of N.K. Jemisin. An avid fan of her discussions, I highly recommend checking her out.
So, anyway, I hear that J.R.R. Tolkien once severely regretted not making the races more ambiguous and complex in The Lord of the Rings. Probably wise of him, since his portrayal of elves, orcs, men and dwarves is generally held up as fodder for criticism of racial portrayals in fantasy. It’s true that a lot of readers are demanding our fantasy races to be a little more involved these days. We dislike orcs that are out and out evil, we dislike elves that are perfect and benevolent.
The reason for this, of course, comes back to the heart of a story: conflict and how to invest our readers in it.
Clearly-painted races remove us from this. If the orcs are evil and the elves are good, then…there isn’t really a conflict, is there? We don’t know why the orcs are doing what they’re doing or why the elves feel compelled to stop them. And without motive, we don’t really have a keen insight into the conflict and we’re less invested in it.
Beyond that, it’s just not realistic to portray a fantasy race that wants to kill everyone just for the sake of killing them. There has to be a logic (not necessarily logic, as it doesn’t have to make sense to us) that drives the motive. Do the orcs need the elves’ land? Do the orcs want to avenge themselves? Do the orcs view the elves as a threat to their way of life?
With the right logic, you certainly can have races with a clear moral distinction, but I tend to dislike them, as they tend to make the answers to them a little too obvious and thus they’re not as explorable as a people with a little more complexity.
Really, though, this is kind of just regurgitating things that are largely known. Where the real meat of the discussion comes from is the idea of using clear racial analogues in fantasy.
It’s become a bit more common lately: a race in a fantasy world that’s a bit too close to a race we already know in our daily lives, following their culture, using their traditions, portraying their world. There may be different names, but we often end up with something resembling…
In the eras following the Great Warring States, we find that Bliro, a proud Blapanese man from Blapan and heir to the ancient Blirobito Blynasty is experiencing troubles with the distant land of Blina and the Blinese.
The above is something of a rather gross exaggeration, but it’s also a pretty good indicator of why I dislike this sort of fantasy race-crafting.
I’ve heard arguments that the use of cultural analogues is a more genuine way of stating something in a book than inventing an entirely new one. After all, presumably all books say something about society, whether we intend for them to or not. And, indeed, having the cultures more relatable through clear analogues might be a better way of exploring them.
But the difficulty is, you often see these analogues used in conjunction with the former issue: a lack of moral ambiguity. And that’s kind of the issue: when the cultural analogue isn’t explored fully and just portrayed as they are seen through the eyes of another race (frequently, their enemy), it can come off as grievously offensive.
I’m definitely not accusing anyone of putting a distinct racist agenda in their work. But it’s something that I feel is worth discussing and it’s something I don’t agree with.
But, as I’ve said, I’ve heard of authors who use it to great effect and authors who use it whose work is greatly praised. I certainly liked The Way of Kings, anyway. Maybe I’m just entirely full of shit.
What do you think?
Totally worth discussing! Just AFTER I write my SFSignal column :-).
In sum: you’re not full of shit, unless you just ate 3000 calories in the last 24 hours.
I think the distinction of races and the question of race is a useful distinction both for discussion and for worldbuilding. Jemisin gives us a lot to ponder, and there have been a number of other good discussions (which I cannot find right this second). I have actually struggled with these questions since I was a full-time DM playing D&D. For races, I nixed the whole idea and went with species, thus getting out of a racializing discourse and making them physiological types with a wide range of motivations and cultural systems.
As I slog my way through the first draft of my own novel I have been trying to figure out how racial notions (within and between species) affect the conflict, and the biggest question is: how much of it is about the story and how much of it is me being a git anthropologist?
I think all authors struggle with that in some regard.
Gah! Why do you have to start these things when I’m 5 chapters from finishing my edits!
As a general rule, I’d say if you’re going to show a race be they ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (although I agree there’s no such thing, just shades of grey), you have to show conflict within that race. There has to be those that oppose the Dark Lord’s ideology (even if it’s with an even worse world outlook).
You also need to show motivation, which is a trickier thing when it’s applied to an entire people. It’s usually politics or religion (The example I’m thinking of here is the policy of isolationism in the US in the 1920s and 1930s).
Also remember that cultures bleed over time. There’s always gonna be a Johnny Orc that falls in love with Susie Elf and whilst procreation might not always be possible for reasons of biology, you may end up with nation states with a migrant element.
Gah! No time to carry on, gotta work…
For a work that contains a cliché “evil” race (Sranc, basically orcs with elvish faces) with a very good reason for being mindlessly destructive, see R.Scott Bakkers “The Prince of Nothing” series. It also contains quite a few other tropes which get twisted and turned in rather original ways.
Thanks for the link – that’s high praise!
Just to, well, agree with everyone: there’s a tendency to equate race with motivation. And, in the post-Eddings, anthropocentric era, that works with nationality as well. All Drasnians are cunning. All Starks are cold and noble. Etc. Etc. It is an easy shortcut, as it paints good and bad (and other character traits) with a broad brush. Which is fine if you want to mow down the Murgos in vast numbers without making your ranger seem like a serial killer…
But anything with broad brushstrokes, especially when one of the brushes is the Brush o’ Evil, is going to run afoul of real world analogues. (See: Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings). Whether this is intentional or not isn’t the issue, but when you have the Blapenese from Blapan, some reader (probably an assy blogger) is going to connect the dots on their own.
AND it all connects with the bullshit, recurring fantasy premise of predestination. If you are born to be a high king, you’ll be the high king. If you’re born as a Murgo, you’ll be a soldier in the army of evil. One’s “nature” is inescapable and is established at the moment of birth. (Or before then, when one’s Prophecy or God or whatever first did a doo-doo ten thousand years ago).
(Steps off of soapbox)
Preach it! Predestination is just one trope that I would love to see ashbinned. It comes up to much in epic fantasy, and sometimes in sword-and-sorcery (and perhaps in some of the pararomance stuff too?). Grinds my gears, it does.
There is no need to reiterate the problems that many writers and readers have with found with standard fantasy tropes such as races. They exist, we know about them, and most people agree it would be better fixed. My first comments are restricted to the “fantasy” side of the racial debate. The second question, is arguably, more complex and deserves its own reply.
So what are the “fixes?”
My Elves Are Different (to toss a coin to the plagiarism fairy, please click here.
A lot of fantasy authors still craft the races we saw laid down by J. R. R. Tolkien. Minor variations, name changes, but still a lot of elves, dwarves, and orcs. That’s their business I suppose, but it is like driving your story cart, race-wise, down a heavily rutted road. You’re risking eating the dust of a lot of other writers and the reader knowing from just a glance, exactly where the road will go. You risk then both unflattering comparisons and boredom on the part of the reader as this is a trip they’ve made many times before.
Some writers, being clever folk with a mean streak a mile wide, have recognized this potential pitfall and thought ahead. They set up their creaking ox-carts trundling down what looks like a safe, well trod road and then as they go around the bend, the road plunges off a cliff. They then cackle from the margins “Ha, you thought you were going to x but really ended up in land y!” Their orcs will be complex, city-building, nurturing their young types and their elves are different (though you can bet good gold against base lead, they’ll *still* have pointy ears).
This subverting of tropes while useful, rarely produces much surprise these days as it has become the calling card of a number of popular authors.
This technique can be expanded obviously, to apply even where non-human races don’t exist, working with a variety of human racial types that have been culled from the historical real world. Walk down that path far enough however, and you’re really more of a writer of alternate historical fiction. And you’re now in even more perilous territory. See the next post.
Back to the orcs et al.. Another approach is go a more original route. Chop off the wheels of the cart, install runners, harness a pair of magical goats, and plunge over the cliff from the very start. Break virgin territory. Go your own way and think up some original inhabitants with their own alien cultures that are a fit for your story/your world.
No Elves! Ah, memories.
This can be done by dipping your ladle into some less overused mythic sources, pulling out creatures and fantasy races from other cultures and continents. Or best of all, inventing from whole cloth, your own. A blend sometimes of the above works well. More obscure mixed with the entirely strange.
So no elves, not even with rounder ears or more facial hair or an aversion to bathing. A number of authors have made this a speciality but in general, I think there remains more territory unclaimed in this direction where new authors might break ground. Or wind, in the case of Sam Sykes.
E.
The other day, the problems of race were raised by some reviewers of B. Sanderson’s The Way of Kings while chatting on Twitter. Clearly some readers/reviewers, were troubled by what they found there – even if it was unintentional on the part of the author.
Mr. Sanderson is without a doubt, a genial and pleasant man. No one was suggesting he harbors racist views and yet. And yet. There the question hung unasked, a bit like what happens with Sam and a bad smell occur in a closed room.
Were these problems just an example of uncritical construction of what is outwardly a very complex secondary world, or did they speak to a deeper problem? Not just with Sanderson but with the whole genre?
It is worrisome the number of brown skinned, desert dwelling, vaguely Persian/Arabic/Muslim villains that we see frequently depicted in fantasy novels. Black hearted, black skinned, black-be-towered always seems to be the defining characteristics of nefarious evil doers. That and a nice cape.
Now obviously, not all of this comes from racial stereotyping. I’ve yet to meet a person of colour -I find that term odd but I’m not sure what the best alternative is for such a sweeping statement that takes in so very many ethnicities but absent among them pale tans, pinks, or nordic colouring- who was actually “black” but that hue is of course the shade of night, of death (at least in the West), and has a long precedent with signaling threat or danger for our species who depends on our sight. Nothing wrong with this, I think, so long as writers are mindful that it is easy to be lazy, tar with too broad a brush, and thus draw uncomfortable connections with race when all we’re trying to do is make our baddie well, bad and dramatically dressed.
In general, I think steering clear of this stereotype altogether is best – unless you’re writing a panto. Personally I’m not a fan of boo-hiss villainy and like the more subtle shadings of real world evil which comes in all the colours of the rainbow.
There is also the commonality that many secondary worlds are closely modeled on our own historical earth. This is a way of establishing a sense of milieu and an understandable landscape that readers can quickly come to grips with, without having to spend pages and pages of description and exposition getting everyone up to speed. As most -this I’m very happy to say, appears to be changing- fantasy has traditionally focused on a vague pre-industrial European West, one enemy which we see being used over and over again is the vague pre-industrial Middle East.
But should we forever play out the sad tale of the Crusades, the wars between Greece and Persia, and those between Christendom and the Turks? Are writers using a shortcut that is both stale and at the same time, fraught with suggestions of an implacable Us vs. Them laid out along the axis of West vs. East? I think the answer is a tentative yes on both counts.
So if you’re going to do this, outside the pages of a strictly historical novel, you must take great care. I haven’t read The Way of Kings -only the hundred or so chapters offered up by the publisher and others for free- and I am unlikely to based on these, so I’m not going to say how problematic this is in Sanderson’s case. But others have and it seems enough of an issue as to have made some would be readers uncomfortable if such reports are true.
Not casting blame, but I think this is an interesting example. Here’s a very well known and widely selling author, so his influence is no little thing. Subtle racism as expressed through the unintentional vilification of real world cultures, can still leave a mark. It is harder to defend against as well, compared to the more loony, out in the open stuff. It is a seed that can get implanted in the minds of younger or impressionable readers, and so, as an author, some degree of social responsibility may exist.
But then this is true for the hyper violence and frequent misogyny often found in fantasy as well – though they tend to get less press and fewer people devoting blog space to discussing the problem.
I have a setting of one of my many unwritten novels – dating back a good fifteen to twenty years ago to its original inception. Set in a secondary worldscape which has resemblances to our own and all of the above; and where the main enemy is gathering on the northern tip of the hot, desert filled southern landmass. I have to say I had more in mind the struggle between Rome and Carthage being a classicist at heart. There is no sign for example of monotheism of any sort, on my imagined globe and yet. And yet. Now, years after 9/11 and in the midst of our current problems with East and West establishing a more harmonious long-term relationship, I wonder if I wouldn’t make some changes along these lines were I ever to return to it.
Food for thought.
E.
So much food for thought. Great comment.
Sigh.
Too many “withs” and not enough “whens.” The story of my fife?
E.
My personal bugbear: Tolkien did not invent elves, nor dwarves. Fantasy did not start with that man whose magnus opus I dearly love. If you draw on folklore, you’re somehow stuck in Tolkien’s shadow.
Of course, if you try and subvert tropes, then people will point, laugh and say “My elves are different” which is a catchphrase so overused, it’s become a trope itself. Of course, if you call your elves, melves then it’s different and new… apparently. In my view that’s just as bad.
Of course, it really doesn’t matter whether your character is an elf or a melf or even a Taniwha so long as they are interesting. If you’re not subverting the tropes, then there’s a strong likelihood the character will be predictable and a bit flat. But again it depends on the story. if you use your elf/melf/taniwha against an army of assassin ninja robots to maybe contrast the traditional against the contemporary, it could still be pretty good.
The traditional races are building blocks that the author is free to choose or ignore as suits their story. As Sam says there’s the potential of dragging racial baggage with them, but those are the risks the author needs to realise if he wants to take them on.
My Tikbalangs are different
“…a proud Blapanese man from Blapan and heir to the ancient Blirobito Blynasty is experiencing troubles with the distant land of Blina and the Blinese.”
I totally LOLed.
I like that John Stevens brought up species. A lot of races that appear in fantasy, or at least those ones that possess some kind of cultural organization or “civilization” (exhibiting some kind of self/social control, you might say, versus those straight-up monsters that just eat you and shit) do look and feel like the “races” we have in real life insofar as they’re just variations on a theme infested with various stereotypes, hatreds, kitsch, quirks, and fetishes. It’s so easy to (even accidentally) build races in fantasy that are auto-offensive, because when the defining points of “type” are just these little bits of ephemera, you just end up creating stereotypes. The ephemera should be reserved for individuals.
And that’s why, conversely, I prefer and thoroughly appreciate when races are genuinely different species: the gray caps in Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris, or the Striders in China Miéville’s Bas-Lag, have motivations that are genuinely baffling because they inhabit a sort of world utterly different from the baseline humans that basically always dominate any fantasy. They think differently, they partake of other dimensions, they’re made of vegetable matter. It’s like creating a fantasy world populated by cats and dogs rather a fantasy world populated by Africans, Caucasians, and so forth.
And the particular reason this is better is because cats and dogs – or better, dogs and seals – are legitimately different kinds of lifeforms, and if they created societies would of necessity have different values (“Water!” “No, no, land!” “Go to hell let’s fight.”) whereas the variations among different sorts of human “races” and “cultures” usually amount to the difference between wearing knee-highs or argyles. Both are dumb, just wear normal socks bro.
Although that last might be utterly wrong if I thoroughly historicized the differences between human races…
Oh, I also like Steven Erikson’s “races” in the Malazan Book of the Falen, where the differences are, like, extra ribs and joints or just being permanently undead. That’s so awesome.
There is lots of research to show that even the most open minded of us exhibit racists tendencies on a subconscious level. We are programmed to do so by our culture as nurtured by media.
Its hardly surprising that those tendencies show in books. Either from the writer or the from reader’s interpretation of the words.
Particularly when a writer has an easy route to get his audience to quickly identify and categorize the races he is creating, its easy to see why he might unconsciously or even deliberately choose traits that his audience understands.
These kinds of discussions are the solution to working out those long held, deeply ingrained biases. Calling into the light those things that have no rational basis forces them to disintegrate in the face of our rational conscious minds.
Hey, MY elves are different. Oh wait, I haven’t any. Well, my Dwarves! Very not Dwarvish. Except for one character who is a dwarf; oh, he’s the only dwarf. Gnomes are not a species per se, but a sort of fusion of daemon and elemental.
I think we need to mess with a lot of these ideas and biases by producing fiction (and criticism!) that takes them apart.
In contrast to Mr. Sanderson, I just finished KJ Parker’s THE HAMMER, which has a shockingly mature interaction between the “civilised folk” and the “Savages”. Parker includes one of those rare moments where the Savages have a completely alien view of the world, which isn’t portrayed as better or worse – just different. And the protagonist, in a fit of progressive liberal sensibility, acknowledges it. Prompting an in-context discussion of what “savage” even means, and systems of belief, etc. etc.