How do the dominant cultural narratives in art and mass media affect our politics?

There's something of a "Middle Earth" issue to it as well. Basically, the fact that most fantasy settings are Fantasy Europe and the rest of the world might as well not exist.

Forgotten Realms had a bunch of other settings grafted onto it but at the end of the day, at least, it had black people, Arabs, Aztecs, China, and Japan. Mind you, Ed Greenwood was a bit annoyed because they grafted the Middle East on it when the Middle East already existed.

7th Sea also has all of the lands of the world but Lighter and Softer with the Aztecs giving up human sacrifice and everyone having Eternal Sexual Freedom plus gender equality save Italians (who are the designed Politically Incorrect Villain).

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Aug 9th 2018 at 5:32:40 AM

That reminds me of when people complained that Kingdom Come had only white people - while conveniently ignoring the Cumans. Apparently Turkic people don't count?

My main issue with how representation in video games is often treated on the internet is that very often people fall into the tokenism trap.

It's less "why isn't the setting more diverse", which is a good question to ask, but "why doesn't your setting have x". It's still a good question, but it depends on the setting you're looking at - nobody would accept a game set in, say, North Africa, that has no actual North African people in it.

Not to mention that "white Europeans are all the same" is kinda iffy as well. :/

Doing representation right is hard - but I'd rather have people put actual effort in than simply tick off checkboxes.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Aug 9th 2018 at 2:34:54 PM

Presumably this controversy was caused by the same group of people who caused a minor controversy over one of The Iron Bull's mercs being transgender. A portion of Bioware's fandom overlaps on the fandom with the Toxic Bigotry portion of the general video game fandom.

I still remember how upset people were on this very forum about the absence of options to deliberately insult and misgender Krem upon finding out about him. People were ranting angrily about Bioware "forcing their SJW agenda down our throats" and shit.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 9th 2018 at 6:48:11 AM

If anything, I feel too many people, even progresive ones still treat the "west" as sort of white land even when they dont want to, or a sort of homogenous block, It eel annoying most of the time.

"Why the hell would you have to "explain" why diversity exists?"

Because in general, diversity just dosent burst ou of thin air.

Also, I find weird people are fine with "Is fantasy, nobody gives a damn!" when in general is consider a poor excuse to be lazy.

"he fact that most fantasy settings are Fantasy Europe and the rest of the world might as well not exist. "

That dosent fix the issue because more often that not, the bulk of the plot is still in europe analogue, also they suffer of what I call compartmentalization, the idea that every country exist with define border and never move beyond it.

I really don't understand why they thought Bio Ware would want their hero to be roleplayed as a transphobe, seeing as Gaider is openly gay and they almost certainly have LGBT+ on the staff.

Because bigots gonna bigot.

Edit:

Movie Bob did a parody of the typical Alt-Right media reviews. The reception so far is that it's a bad parody because not only does it fall squarely into Poe's Law territory but that he is far more articulate about the subject and gives better (albeit ridiculous) arguments than they do.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Aug 9th 2018 at 6:06:46 AM

You know an easy way to annoy the living shit out of me these days is these idiots whom will immediately jump in an conversation or debate to saying that the SJWS are just cramming shit down our throats and SJW this and SJW that.

Even some people on this forums (not saying names, don't want drama importation) put waaaay to much stock in the bullshit idea that the SJW boogeymen control the media. It's incredibly tiresome.

It's kind of darkly hilarious yet sad at the same time that people whom constantly rant about SJ Ws don't have the self-awareness to realize that they are acting the exact same way that the supposed SJ Ws are via trying to stifle conversations, shut people out, censor anything and anyone they don't like. Create safe spaces and echo chambers for their shitty views. Try to justify their assholeness with freedom of speech while not understanding that freedom of speech means someone else can call them out for their bullshit.

It's depressing. I nearly fell into the alt-right once and I realized how crazy as shit they are once I noticed they were acting the same exact way that the people they claim to be fighting against were.

Edited by Wispy on Aug 9th 2018 at 6:23:05 AM

Generally there is no reason not to have diversity in your story. If your work is set in a world wholly unconnected to the real world or its history there is little reason to portray systemic bigotry.

If your work does have roots in the real world...you should still have diversity. But you should also show that real life minorities faced problems in those days. And of course you should do the proper research.

Because, for instance, it's not the presence of the dragon that means there's no reason to have widespread Homophobia. It's the lack of a Roman Empire and of Christianity, specifically the transition Ancient Judaism -> Ancient Jewish Christianity -> Ancient Roman Christianity -> Medieval Roman Christianity and Islam.

Like, it's not a fun subject and this isn't the thread to discuss the modern echos thereof, but in comparison to the rest of the ancient world, Ancient Judaism was homophobic (and sex negative in general) as fuuuuuck.

And when the disciples of one ancient carpenter-turned-preacher carried their modified version of Ancient Judaism into the rest of the empire that subjugated their people, among the many things they carried with them was that homophobic attitude.

And so when the leaders of said empire, which was so full of toxic masculinity that only the fact that the term hadn't been coined yet kept them from calling themselves the Bro-man empire, took a shine to that religion, they imported that homophobia right along with them. It was an easy sell, they'd already had the opinion that all that gay stuff was fine if you were, like a grown man doing that stuff to a boy, but being a grown man on the receiving end of a cock? Man that was embarrassing.

It's not like homophobia was completely foreign to all the territories that those leaders had subjugated and continued to conquer and impose their new religion on... The ancient Germanic tribes, the Gauls, the Slavs, the Aryans and all those guys and gals? There were sure people among them who weren't fans of the same sex sexing going on, but culturally their position was mostly that as long as one's spouse wasn't against it, whatever people decided to put their peepees in or did with their vagoos in the privacy of their own home was their own business and more power to them.

But the Christian Bro-man Empire? They institutionalised the hatred of that sort of things like that hard (in addition to institutionalising misogyny and strict gender roles, but they'd been doing that since before Christianity came along and gave them an excuse to double down on it) as part of getting all the heathens to convert and that shit stuck around, so one extent or another, in all the successor states of the empire and all the successor states of those successor states all the way to the modern day.

TL;DR: No, writers do not need to justify why there's no major prejudices against the people we're (historically) prejudiced against in their setting, what writers need to justify is where, if it's present, the institutionalised prejudice of their setting comes from if their setting's history isn't the same as ours.

The less your setting has in common with the real world, the less the real world’s baggage should apply.

Regardless, you should always have diversity. The reasons offered to not have it are generally not very convincing and often seem like excuses to write bigoted power fantasies.

Pretty sure Rome had a lot of that shit going on before they adopted Christianity - heck, early Christianity lost a lot of its egalitarian aspects when Paul took over. Women used to be a big part of the Christian movement, but Paul - who was a Roman citizen with pretty Roman views - marginalised them for the same reason he threw out all the dietary laws etc: To make Christianity more appealing to Romans.

Not to mention the blatant machismo when it came to Roman views on homosexuality, i.e. it's only okay if you're on top.

Seriously, the idea that Rome was somehow more enlightened before Christianity came around is silly.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Aug 9th 2018 at 4:49:05 PM

The Roman Empire was a lot of things. Egalitarian was not one of them.

Christianity actually became as prevalent as it was because of its feminist leanings. Unlike Mithraism or the masculine areas of the Roman 12, Christianity allowed women to participate as equal in the rites and was against things like abandoning wives, forced marriage, and female infanticide (infanticide in general actually—which was very common).

Things so common in Rome as to be without comment.

People kind of forget that.

Mind you, it says everything you need to that the historians who love Rome as the expression of ultimate toxic masculinity blame Christianity for the fall of Rome. It's a good reason to side with it in historical arguments.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Aug 9th 2018 at 7:50:19 AM

Are you referring to my post? Because I never said this - I said that early Christianity was originally somewhat more egalitarian, with many prominent believers being women.

Pretty sure it was Rome's highly patriarchal society that drove a lot of them towards Christianity in the first place - then Paul happened.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Aug 9th 2018 at 4:50:57 PM

Which is why I didn't say that. What I said was that once Christianity entered the picture, especially when the Emperors got in on it, the homophobia became institutionalised state policy, rather than just cultural bias.

(And while Early pre-Roman Christianity may have been more egalitarian towards women than both the Ancient Judaism it came from and the Roman Empire it spread to, it was never ever not homophobic as all fuck.)

Edited by Robrecht on Aug 9th 2018 at 7:54:49 AM

Homophobia in Christianity has gone through a lot of phases.

Salvanarola put homosexuals to death (part of the reason why his claim to canonization was denied) but previously, it was a venial sin and subject to a fine equivalent to $50 dollars today. Leonardo da Vinchi had his day in court for it a few times.

Bad?

Yes.

But there were a lot of venial sins like not going to church.

It was the Fundamentalist Revolution of the Renassiance and Protestants who were all about hating on the homosexuals.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Aug 9th 2018 at 7:55:55 AM

I was agreeing with you. The implication that the Roman Empire became more bigoted because of Christianity was also something I also felt was inaccurate. Christianity did not make Rome more bigoted. Rome made Christianity more bigoted.

Edited by M84 on Aug 9th 2018 at 10:55:43 PM

Which is still goddamn homophobic as fuck.

Edited by Robrecht on Aug 9th 2018 at 7:55:44 AM

Yep.

No argument there but I've run into a lot of assholes who claim it's a return to traditional values to do violence to gays.

Fuck those guys.

The combining of Rome with Christianity gave the latter actual political power at the cost of what egalitarianism it had. Patriarchy and homophobia backed by Rome’s laws and blades.

Which is ironic considering their patron was almost a Doomed Moral Victor, one of the most egalitarian people until he wound up on the business end of said laws and blades. And then he came back to life 3 days later with no dmagae to his body or morality.

Make me wonder how The Son of God would've reacted at seeing his flock ally with Rome and the consequences of that union.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Aug 9th 2018 at 8:06:02 AM

There's a reason some theologians consider Paul the "second founder of Christianity" - he threw out a lot of stuff that would have kept Roman gentiles from joining up, laying the foundation for its eventual Romanisation.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Aug 9th 2018 at 5:07:02 PM

Any way, the point is that if you're a writer with a setting that didn't have that Roman Empire - Christianity combo (or the various other historical causes), but still has the specific prejudices that spawned in our world, the burden is on you to explain how your setting ended up with them.

The burden is not on the writer who has a setting where those prejudices don't exist in that form to explain why not.

One of the things that pissed me off about the Game of Thrones series is they ruined the Sparrows. The Sparrows in the books are a class-based religious uprising about how the peasantry has suffered unimaginable abuses at the hands of the nobility so they have turned to the church for salvation. HBO made it about hating homosexuality and sex because....why? Because HBO hates religion? Because they're uncomfortable with reminding audiences the nobility is a bunch of assholes?

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Aug 9th 2018 at 8:14:24 AM

It's been a long time since I went to Sunday School, but that'd be the same Paul the Bible had denying Jesus three times before the cock crowed, right?

Edited by M84 on Aug 9th 2018 at 11:14:45 PM