Anyway. So I had more thoughts about fantasy. I thought square bullet-points would be fetching. And why aren't there triangular ones, in HTML? Did David Dardick threaten a lawsuit?
- So a commenter raised the question, "Why do fantasy stories always use the same few races, when SF expects you to come up with your own aliens?" It's basically a legitimate question, but it's not something I mind, for two reasons.
My more fundamental reason is, I like elves/dwarves/gnomes/fairies/goblins/trolls. And I'd much rather see them done well than watch an author have to establish the races he makes up, along with all the magic and history and silly words masquerading as place names you have to do to create a fantasy. Science fiction doesn't have to establish astrophysics as such, only give brief refreshers on the plot-relevant aspects. Take it from me: it's much easier to say "elves on this world are taller than humans, and have three elemental powers depending on what faction they are"; your audience already has a mental image of elves, and you can modify it. If I say "Phlatkerrectr was a typical sillinaemdrace, except for his height," I've really left you much as I found you, in terms of conveying my world to your mind. It's more work for a writer, and requires either a longer book or less actual plot.
But the other thing is, nobody ever really does create new races for fantasy (it's not really that common in SF, either—easily 80% of the species I can think of are the TV versions of the Japanese, Jews, Native Americans, or, ironically, elves, with the VIN numbers melted off). Just because a particular fantasy work's not calling them elves doesn't mean they aren't. I mean, just to take a random example, the Final Fantasy series: Vieras are elves, Ronso and Bangaa are dwarves, Moogles are either halflings or gnomes, and Guado are trolls. The fact they're bunny-women, cat-dudes and dragon-guys, teddy bears, and, well, trolls, doesn't change anything. - The problem isn't really, I think, so much elves/dwarves/orcs/trolls/minotaurs as it is "Celtic-cum-Native American elves/Scottish dwarves/Mongolian orcs/Cockney or Caribbean trolls/Minotaurs who, to a man, should be played by Michael Dorn". You can do a lot more things with "very deeply in tune with the forests" or "insular, fond of craggy mountains" or "brutal raiders" than just those portrayals.
- Some things changed in the course of working on my current fantasy story. I mentioned doing a language for my elves, a while ago, for instance, but now they don't have one (there's a plot relevant reason)—they just have the ability to be understood by anyone they want. They're named in the human language's ancient form, though, because that's when most of them started showing up in the history books of the current civilization.
I keep going back and forth on whether to have two kinds of trolls (I have two kinds of elves—elves always get the most subraces, it's actually a law), or just go with trolls and ogres. Trolls and ogres are really the same thing, but one is northern European and the other is southern. I was also torn whether to have dragons (which are considered faeries, albeit big ones, in my book), but I've decided to go ahead. Everything's better with dragons (except Star Wars, Paolini, maybe you didn't get the memo). - Actually the reason I have two kinds of elves is...there's a synonym for troll (ogre) and one for dwarf (gnome), and one for goblin (kobold—"orc" is actually a variant of "ogre", leading me to wonder what Tolkien had in that pipe). I can sub in brownies for halflings (turns out I don't need 'em, but I had established the idea in advance). But what, exactly, is the equivalent of elf? "Fairy"? But how are goblins not fairies? "Nymph" won't work, they're all female; and something like "yaksha" would establish it as being a fantasy world where India, inexplicably, exists.
That's intriguing by the way, isn't it—while elf and nymph both actually do have the same cultural baggage (German and Greek respectively), "yaksha" is too tied to a particular culture. It's because the others are used conventionally—between medieval cosmopolitanism and Renaissance classicism, German, French, and Classical mythic creatures are accepted stock figures of the canon. Meanwhile there's no convention for yakshas or yokai. I don't think it's bad, I'm in favor of cultures having a canon however broadly defined, but it fascinates. Similarly you can use vampire or zombie, but you probably can't get away with revenant, let alone upir, aekkwi or cihuateotl. - Another example I've noticed of people's inability to think outside the D&D box is, mages are always unarmored. I mean, sure, if iron interferes with magic, or something, but the only reason arcane spellcasters weren't allowed to wear armor was for game balance. But in a book, it's not like you're gonna have to deal with the guys who play fighters (yo!) complaining about the mage being a game-breaker.
- Speaking of games, I wrote a simple little dungeon-crawl adventure, to kick off a new campaign I'm setting in the world of my book. I used a map I found of the Paris catacombs, and, seriously, these encounters write themselves, just look at the place names. "Sepulchral lamp"? "Mummified heart pillar"? "Cabinet of Osteology"? Stranger than fiction, mes enfants.
- Does anyone else get tired of the fact that paladins in D&D-derived fiction never, ever, with the notable exception of Dragonbait, actually conform in any way to their required alignment? Most of them are actually written as, and this is ironic, chaotic evil. "Finding the right self-righteous rhetoric to dress up whatever self-serving scheme I happen to have cooking" doesn't sound like any good alignment to me, how about you? And paladin powers are explicitly Donatist, they'd already have ceased to be paladins long before they could make any trouble.
Either powers like that are withdrawn the moment the person stops living up to the code, or they inhere in the office, completely independent of the person's behavior. "Oh, but they believe they're right, so they keep their powers." Uh-huh. So the gods are going to keep granting powers to people who shame them? Right. How likely is that, really, considering the typical D&D god? - So seriously, what's with all the Welsh in fantasy? Leaving to one side how people think it uses a lot of consonants (which is funny to me, but my grandmother's Czech—strč prst skrz krk), Welsh, and Irish, sound pretty darn guttural, folks. And I actually know some Irish, I know what I'm talking about.
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