![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
crosspost: why I don't like the dragon argument [March 2013]
Sometimes, it seems like every discussion about how fantasy (especially high fantasy) tends to be focused on white, straight dudes rehashes the exact same points:
Person A: It’s just being historically accurate!
Person B: …there are dragons.
Person A: Yes, but–
Person B: DRAGONS.
There’s some variation depending on which work comes up in discussion, but the basic rebuttal is “the setting includes something that blatantly diverges from the basic laws of reality; therefore, there’s no reason not to diverge from reality in much smaller matters.” I do understand it, but I … um, don’t agree. And I actually dislike it quite a lot.
The thing is, it’s treated as completely irrefutable by the people who make it and/or do agree with it. Yet I suspect that it’s very unlikely to succeed with the people it’s aimed at (not me), for the same reason it doesn’t work for me.
As I see it, including fanciful elements in a story makes it more important to feel otherwise realistic, not less. The more dragons and wizards and such that a story has, the more it needs to be anchored in reality—less with things on the level of “laws of physics” (though layering on changes there does heighten the sense of unfamiliarity) and more with with the smaller, more significant stuff that resonates with the living experience of real people.
And the thing is, women/poc/lgbt folk are real people. They are not comparable to dragons, bizarre, impossible creatures from the realm of Faerie, they are right here in the real world, and have always been right here. There’s no reason for them not to show up in, say, an alternate version of late medieval England (+ dragons), since they existed in actual medieval England. So when people go “all my main characters are straight white men because ACCURACY,” the main offense is a white-washed, heterocentric, patriarchal view of history, rather than an author’s desire to keep their fantastic setting firmly attached to reality.
HOWEVER.
I do think it’s really suspicious that there are so many premises of the ‘how would people be affected if reality were different in [x] way, but otherwise recognizable’ variety, and it virtually never includes ‘hey! suppose gender equality evolved as the dragon invasion forced every fit adult into combat.’
We can have worlds where everyone’s careers are decided in infancy by the astrological signs at the moment of their birth, or where secret enclaves of mutant humans live among us, unseen by the normal world, or where social psychology can predict the future with pinpoint accuracy, but the associated breaks from reality rarely seem to include gender or racial or other kinds of equality, even where it’d be perfectly likely to exist. It’s not that ‘it’s fantasy, reality need not apply’ but that it’s significant which aspects of reality are commonly broken and which are treated as indestructible.
And “you don’t need historical accuracy because you have dragons” does not really address any of that at all.
Person A: It’s just being historically accurate!
Person B: …there are dragons.
Person A: Yes, but–
Person B: DRAGONS.
There’s some variation depending on which work comes up in discussion, but the basic rebuttal is “the setting includes something that blatantly diverges from the basic laws of reality; therefore, there’s no reason not to diverge from reality in much smaller matters.” I do understand it, but I … um, don’t agree. And I actually dislike it quite a lot.
The thing is, it’s treated as completely irrefutable by the people who make it and/or do agree with it. Yet I suspect that it’s very unlikely to succeed with the people it’s aimed at (not me), for the same reason it doesn’t work for me.
As I see it, including fanciful elements in a story makes it more important to feel otherwise realistic, not less. The more dragons and wizards and such that a story has, the more it needs to be anchored in reality—less with things on the level of “laws of physics” (though layering on changes there does heighten the sense of unfamiliarity) and more with with the smaller, more significant stuff that resonates with the living experience of real people.
And the thing is, women/poc/lgbt folk are real people. They are not comparable to dragons, bizarre, impossible creatures from the realm of Faerie, they are right here in the real world, and have always been right here. There’s no reason for them not to show up in, say, an alternate version of late medieval England (+ dragons), since they existed in actual medieval England. So when people go “all my main characters are straight white men because ACCURACY,” the main offense is a white-washed, heterocentric, patriarchal view of history, rather than an author’s desire to keep their fantastic setting firmly attached to reality.
HOWEVER.
I do think it’s really suspicious that there are so many premises of the ‘how would people be affected if reality were different in [x] way, but otherwise recognizable’ variety, and it virtually never includes ‘hey! suppose gender equality evolved as the dragon invasion forced every fit adult into combat.’
We can have worlds where everyone’s careers are decided in infancy by the astrological signs at the moment of their birth, or where secret enclaves of mutant humans live among us, unseen by the normal world, or where social psychology can predict the future with pinpoint accuracy, but the associated breaks from reality rarely seem to include gender or racial or other kinds of equality, even where it’d be perfectly likely to exist. It’s not that ‘it’s fantasy, reality need not apply’ but that it’s significant which aspects of reality are commonly broken and which are treated as indestructible.
And “you don’t need historical accuracy because you have dragons” does not really address any of that at all.