wheelchairs

whatever, man

The funniest thing about D&D wheelchair discourse is that they have existed since the 6th century BCE, and would be present for most settings that D&D journeys are based on. Mostly for old, high ranking and rich people, but not a mystery.

Alright you might not see them much in fieldwork, exploring tombs and evil castles, but then you didn't get many bookish alchemists or ritual priests delving like that either.

But that's not what is interesting to me. What's interesting is the part of the discourse that says "why wouldn't they heal any disabling injury?"

I am always fascinating by healing magic, and the way it works in various settings. (In my arguably most successful work, the villain is the world's only magical healer.)

Oh, biological manipulation magic, growing wings or an extra arm or raising an army of clones from a drop of blood, whatever that's no different from any other power fantasy.

But specifically healing is always about "returning to a state of wholeness." Drink a potion and your wounds all heal, that missing toe comes back, your concussion stops ringing - but that's it. You don't age back to 25, or get your virginity back, or forget the horrors of war, or grow some extra muscles you didn't have before but would be useful.

For "healing" to work as simply as it does in most magical settings, requires there to be an ideal self it can always refer to.

And so the wheelchair-ists implicitly claim that the self without the ability to walk, is the real self they heal to. Not to heap scorn on them, as everyone has pointed out, Professor X lives in a universe with seven thousand different types of healing and robotics, but uses a wheelchair iconicly.

(Fic idea, person who uses a healing potion and heals to a different gender. A whole society dealing with this.)

That last fic idea is actually a thing that happens to a side character in Stormlight Archives.

The world premise is that healing restores you, roughly, to your self-conception. So for instance there's a character with a prominent scar, and healing doesn't remove the scar because it's a huge part of his identity. And then at some point he goes through a character arc that leads him to stop thinking of that scar as an important part of his identity, and when the character growth concludes then the scar goes away.

But there's a side character who is a trans man, and when he eventually gets access to a form of healing, it changes his body to match. (If you read the books and didn't notice this—it did happen, but you have to be paying a lot of attention to catch it. It's a side-side character and you need to compare two passages that are in separate books to catch it.)

oh but as an aside: in terms of giving classes stuff to do outside their central domain of expertise, you don't really need to look for esoteric stuff for fighters, they've got, like, "being scary", "being beefy", "being good at smashing or moving things", "being athletic", and that's fine? Like if those aren't coming out as useful in a dungeon crawl, or if spellcasters are matching them just on the basis of some handwavey "magic can do anything!" explanation, maybe that's the problem and not that fighters need broader domains of built-in competence. those seem like things that should be useful and character-defining outside of fights, don't they?

Being scary, eh? So tell me... Which attribute does the Intimidate skill use?

And, magic-users aren't matching those things with some handwavey "magic can do anything!" explanation; they're matching them because Fly is a 3rd-level spell!

But we're retreading almost 20-year-old discourses, Angel Summoner vs. BMX Bandit, and how no one has a concept of a "high-level Fighter", where things are inherently deemed "too anime" if the non-magical character can keep up at all with any of the things that the rulebook literally says that spellcasters can do at 10th, let alone 20th level.

I don't really blame you for not reading the longer threads on this because they were extremely long, but we were talking about system design or "how could you do this hypothetically" more than the current state of things on the ground.

And again not to retread the whole round of discourse, but there's nothing intrinsic about Angel Summoner vs. BMX Bandit that makes it implausible to give the latter the advantage in most practical situations -- that's a corner that they painted themselves into with the specific way they designed spellcasting. The first step to extricating yourself is "probably don't design it that way!"

Meant to respond to the original post, so this is as good a time as any to re-weigh-in.

You're right of course that there are some specific problems in (D&D/3.x/whichever system you point at) that are evadeable. "Bards are better at intimidate than Fighters" is avoidable if you want to, and also kind of dumb. But there are two harder to avoid points.

One is that most of these games have other martial archetypes that aren't "the fighter". If you have a role for "being big and beefy and scary", surely the Barbarian is better at that than the fighter. And "being athletic" goes either to the Barbarian or the Rogue, depending on which form of athleticism we're talking about. And sure, you could write around that but this isn't about the system, this is about archetypes.

There's a specific problem with having the Fighter over and above just having "martial types", because it's deliberately bland and all the interesting conceptual space goes to other classes. Which is why I think at one point I suggested that "Fighter" is bad but "Knight" or "Hero" (or "Paladin") are better: they have clear theming.

(Honestly, "Wizard" is bad for the same reason. Your theme is "you do all the magic"? Warlock and Storm Mage and Druid are much better magic classes than "Wizard".)

---

But the Angel Summoner/BMX Bandit problem isn't as system-bound as you're making it. Like, the original video doesn't mention a system at all, right? The point is that those concepts are hilariously out of scale with each other. Sure can write a system where the Angel Summoner has an area smite for Level-d6 and the BMX Bandit has a drive-by attack for Level-d6, and their numbers are functionally equivalent. The problem is that that's really dumb. If you want your game to have an Angel Summoner, who summons angels in a meaningful way, then maybe you can have Ghost Rider but you can't have BMX Bandit.

Of course this isn't a problem if you want to keep the power level low. You don't need to have Angel Summoner in your game at all, and if your wizards top out at "summon housecats and throw hand grenades" then totally mundane characters can keep up thematically just fine. But the fantasy genre has a long tradition of wizards who can tell armies to go fuck themselves, and D&D-likes have generally at least attempted to interact with that archetype. At that point, being a guy in that army is not playable.

And relatedly, the thoroughly mundane character has an intrinsic disadvantage in the "make up bullshit during freeform roleplay" segments. Now I take your point that maybe the audience could be more enthusiastic about the power of athleticism, but there are real limits to what that can do if you expect it to be at all tethered to realism.

Now I don't mean any of this to say you can't have martial characters. It's just that the martial characters can't just be "a dude with a sword who swings his sword real good". And there are lots of options here!

Any or all of these ideas can be imported to a D&D-like, but it's hard to support the fighter specifically.

Reminded again of the terrible website Mythcreants, and I think the main pattern, the biggest repeating problem I’ve seen with them, is how they, like, imagine a pretty broad Category of Thing, imagine it being in some way bigoted, and then instruct the audience to never do that Broad Category of Thing, and instead do the opposite - stay on the safe side, and saying anything inadvertently if anyone were to read into what they’re saying.

If you’ve got a character with a disability, you could imagine it potentially feeling demeaning or tiring or patronising if the disabled character is really vocally down on the disability and it’s a significant issue for them and it ruins their life. So the solution, you are instructed, is that your disabled character must not consider it that big of a deal. There’s a stereotype of having evil villains having certain minor distinctive disabilities like eyepatches and hook-hands and scars. And like, you can imagine that having some negative cultural effect. So the solution, you are instructed, is that villains are not allowed disabilities. Unless they are sympathetic about it. There was a bit about ‘Villain Redemption Arcs’ - one point in the numbered list of things not to do was the villain being too villainous. Villains get redeemed, but they were too evil in the past, so they don’t *deserve* to be redeemed. The solution, they instruct, is to just not redeem villains that are ‘irredeemable’, or to make your villains less evil.

It’s all just very… uncreative. Surface-level.

Like, it’s stuff that you could probably do to be *aware* of, but that *awareness* of it should lead you to do something *interesting* about it, and Mythcreants just seems so fundamentally afraid of doing things that are *interesting* over anxiously avoiding things that could be considered problematic. Just nervously hiding from it.

Like, good fiction, I find, grabs and idea, and just *goes into it*. It’s following it wherever it leads. Really *exploring* whatever the thing has to offer. Like it’d be so much better if you’re just… aware of the stereotype, or aware of how evil the villain is, and you just… explore that. You go somewhere with it. You do something interesting about it.

But the writing advice is always more ‘Covering your Ass’ and ‘Checking the boxes’ than, like, being interesting. It’s less about Good writing as it is about Inoffensive writing.

Like, in this article ‘ Five Anachronisms That Fantasy Needs ‘, it lists 5 things from history and instructs you to just Not Use them in your story, because it “Will Detract from your reader’s enjoyment” and “Risk normalising said views.” in the case of disagreeable social views.

And like, every single one of those 5 examples are things that could be really really interesting things to play with. Like you could really *explore* that, it could make for something really interesting and memorable. It’s the sort of thing that makes me want to start writing, y’know. You can do some crazy stuff with that.

But the instruction is just “Don’t”. In creative disciplines you never just “Don’t”! 

@necarion and I were talking earlier today about Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive.  He has a society that has extremely rigid gender roles—like to the extent that men and women eat totally different styles of cuisine.  (Eating sweet food as man, or spicy food as a woman, is taboo.)  Men fight and lead but can’t read or write, and women read and write but can’t fight or lead.

But he’s also pretty explicit that this culture has zero issue with gay relationships.  And that honestly makes no sense in-world, right?  Both in the sense that societies with rigid gender roles tend to be, well, rigid about them, and in the sense that “wait, you’re married to a man?  Then who does your reading for you?” is a perfectly reasonable question in that world, in a way that “wait which one of you does the laundry” isn’t in ours.

On the other hand, this is the sort of society where transness seems very plausible.  In fact, even in canon it has an explicitly codified third gender, a sort of priesthood whose members don’t count as male or female.  (So if e.g. you’re a man who wants to learn to read, you have to become a priest.  But that role has its own set of restrictions.)   

But it would actually make sense, and be interesting, if you were allowed to switch to the other gender role, as long as you did it completely.  Even if you were AMAB you can be a woman, but you must wear dresses and hide your left hand in public and eschew leadership roles and stop eating spicy food.  And then you might imagine this society totally allowing two AMABs to marry, but only if one of them is inhabiting the male gender role and the other is inhabiting the female gender role.  (And maybe this society feels totally uncomplicated about agreeing that one is a man and the other is a woman.  She reads and eats strawberries, right?)

And that’s way more interesting in a lot of ways than “oh yeah, don’t worry, all my characters are fine with gay people, so if you’re gay you can feel included.”  But Sanderson is super big on explicit by-the-book inclusivity, in a way that I think sometimes gets really awkward.  And I suspect this is partly from a good-faith belief in the sort of thing you’re talking about.  And it’s partly because, well, he’s a relatively conservative Mormon, and if he wrote a book where his protagonists weren’t comfortable with homosexuality, people might attribute those beliefs to him.  He doesn’t have cover to experiment in that way.

i feel like a society where nobody who is in charge of shit reads has bigger problems

Oh definitely. You’re not supposed to think this is a good setup!

(Although important men do consume books.  They just have to do it as audiobooks, by having a woman read aloud to them.  Which is part of why the “wait, so who does your reading for you?” is such an important question.  In military units it’s very important that one of the men have a wife or a sister so that she can read dispatches and keep the books for the unit.)

But that’s part of my point.  No one is going to read this setup and think “Ah, prolific male author Brandon Sanderson thinks men shouldn’t be allowed to read or write.”  So he can explore that fucked up and frankly kind of stupid system without anyone thinking, or feeling, that he’s advocating for it.

But if he said “also they’re not cool with gay people” then it would be a whole Thing.

this (with the transness inclusion) is actually pretty similar to my headcanon for Qunari from Dragon Age, who are introduced as having such incredibly rigid gender roles that the first Qunari NPC will more readily believe you are a weird looking man than a woman fighter, and then later said to be more accepting of a trans male human character than humans were. you just don’t know what qunari have under their armour bc by this point gender *is* ‘do you want to be a soldier or a teacher?’

anyway i’ve not read this series but having all book learning mediated through women seems like a setup for even more illicit exercise of soft power by powerful mens wives and mothers than real history

it’s so incredibly charming that someone thinks no one is going to read this setup and think “ah, Brandon Sanderson thinks men shouldn’t be allowed to read and write” or “women shouldn’t be allowed to be political leaders” while posting this literally on Tumbr, the website where at least half of the posters are 100% going to announce that this is indeed their reading, and then compete with each other over who can most loudly denounce Brandon Sanderson for sexism.

I think those things are very different! I could very easily see someone accusing Sanderson of thinking women shouldn't be allowed to be leaders. (That would be a dumb criticism given the totality of his work, but I wouldn't be surprised if some people were making it. I'm sure they are!)

But no one (plus or minus epsilon) is going to accuse him of thinking men shouldn't be allowed to read and write, for two reasons. One is that he is in fact a male writer, so like come the fuck on. And the other, probably more important one, is that it doesn't touch on any big culture war topics; there isn’t a body of conservative Mormons who think that men shouldn’t be allowed to read, or anything, so there’s no source for that allegation and no one is going to engage in it.

Now maybe you could get someone to argue that, because people are silly sometimes.  But it’s a rounding error; he’s not going to worry about getting in trouble over that, or about alienating his readership.  Whereas “Sanderson is homophobic” is a fundamentally plausible charge that a bunch of his readers would get very mad about.

Reminded again of the terrible website Mythcreants, and I think the main pattern, the biggest repeating problem I’ve seen with them, is how they, like, imagine a pretty broad Category of Thing, imagine it being in some way bigoted, and then instruct the audience to never do that Broad Category of Thing, and instead do the opposite - stay on the safe side, and saying anything inadvertently if anyone were to read into what they’re saying.

If you’ve got a character with a disability, you could imagine it potentially feeling demeaning or tiring or patronising if the disabled character is really vocally down on the disability and it’s a significant issue for them and it ruins their life. So the solution, you are instructed, is that your disabled character must not consider it that big of a deal. There’s a stereotype of having evil villains having certain minor distinctive disabilities like eyepatches and hook-hands and scars. And like, you can imagine that having some negative cultural effect. So the solution, you are instructed, is that villains are not allowed disabilities. Unless they are sympathetic about it. There was a bit about ‘Villain Redemption Arcs’ - one point in the numbered list of things not to do was the villain being too villainous. Villains get redeemed, but they were too evil in the past, so they don’t *deserve* to be redeemed. The solution, they instruct, is to just not redeem villains that are ‘irredeemable’, or to make your villains less evil.

It’s all just very… uncreative. Surface-level.

Like, it’s stuff that you could probably do to be *aware* of, but that *awareness* of it should lead you to do something *interesting* about it, and Mythcreants just seems so fundamentally afraid of doing things that are *interesting* over anxiously avoiding things that could be considered problematic. Just nervously hiding from it.

Like, good fiction, I find, grabs and idea, and just *goes into it*. It’s following it wherever it leads. Really *exploring* whatever the thing has to offer. Like it’d be so much better if you’re just… aware of the stereotype, or aware of how evil the villain is, and you just… explore that. You go somewhere with it. You do something interesting about it.

But the writing advice is always more ‘Covering your Ass’ and ‘Checking the boxes’ than, like, being interesting. It’s less about Good writing as it is about Inoffensive writing.

Like, in this article ‘ Five Anachronisms That Fantasy Needs ‘, it lists 5 things from history and instructs you to just Not Use them in your story, because it “Will Detract from your reader’s enjoyment” and “Risk normalising said views.” in the case of disagreeable social views.

And like, every single one of those 5 examples are things that could be really really interesting things to play with. Like you could really *explore* that, it could make for something really interesting and memorable. It’s the sort of thing that makes me want to start writing, y’know. You can do some crazy stuff with that.

But the instruction is just “Don’t”. In creative disciplines you never just “Don’t”! 

@necarion and I were talking earlier today about Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive.  He has a society that has extremely rigid gender roles—like to the extent that men and women eat totally different styles of cuisine.  (Eating sweet food as man, or spicy food as a woman, is taboo.)  Men fight and lead but can’t read or write, and women read and write but can’t fight or lead.

But he’s also pretty explicit that this culture has zero issue with gay relationships.  And that honestly makes no sense in-world, right?  Both in the sense that societies with rigid gender roles tend to be, well, rigid about them, and in the sense that “wait, you’re married to a man?  Then who does your reading for you?” is a perfectly reasonable question in that world, in a way that “wait which one of you does the laundry” isn’t in ours.

On the other hand, this is the sort of society where transness seems very plausible.  In fact, even in canon it has an explicitly codified third gender, a sort of priesthood whose members don’t count as male or female.  (So if e.g. you’re a man who wants to learn to read, you have to become a priest.  But that role has its own set of restrictions.)   

But it would actually make sense, and be interesting, if you were allowed to switch to the other gender role, as long as you did it completely.  Even if you were AMAB you can be a woman, but you must wear dresses and hide your left hand in public and eschew leadership roles and stop eating spicy food.  And then you might imagine this society totally allowing two AMABs to marry, but only if one of them is inhabiting the male gender role and the other is inhabiting the female gender role.  (And maybe this society feels totally uncomplicated about agreeing that one is a man and the other is a woman.  She reads and eats strawberries, right?)

And that’s way more interesting in a lot of ways than “oh yeah, don’t worry, all my characters are fine with gay people, so if you’re gay you can feel included.”  But Sanderson is super big on explicit by-the-book inclusivity, in a way that I think sometimes gets really awkward.  And I suspect this is partly from a good-faith belief in the sort of thing you’re talking about.  And it’s partly because, well, he’s a relatively conservative Mormon, and if he wrote a book where his protagonists weren’t comfortable with homosexuality, people might attribute those beliefs to him.  He doesn’t have cover to experiment in that way.

seems worth mentioning that as far as I remember the only place in canon where the Vorin (men-can’t-read culture) attitude to homosexuality even comes up it’s to be contrasted with the Azir attitude to homosexuality, which do more or less exactly the thing you describe. amab people can socially reassign themselves to the social role of woman to be allowed relationships with other amab people (while otherwise the Azir being much less strict on gender roles, by comparison)

there’s an argument you could make that these attitudes to homosexuality seem mismatched to the respective cultures and Sanderson let the Vorin be the less homophobic ones just cause most of the main characters are Vorin. but, well, maybe he was just making up cultures. worth saying that whether the vorin are homophobic or not has mattered very little so far, there’s like one minor gay character on-page so far.

Yeah, that’s a big part of my issue, that those attitudes to homosexuality are mismatched.  Like with this exchange:

And like, which one of those characters sounds like he’s from a culture with incredibly strict religious taboos about gender roles?

But yeah, I think the Vorin get to be non-homophobic because they’re the protagonists and we want them to be sympathetic.  Whereas “other cultures” can be more weird and less sympathetic because they’re over there.  And yeah, it hasn’t been relevant and that’s the point.  

There’s one minor gay character, whose role is to exist for the scene I just quoted so that Sanderson can assure the readers that, yes, the Vorin have a bunch of strange and alien gender and religious taboos, but other than that they think just like you, liberal educated reader in 2020s America.  He doesn’t want to let his cultures deviate too much from modern sensibilities even when they really should.  

Reminded again of the terrible website Mythcreants, and I think the main pattern, the biggest repeating problem I’ve seen with them, is how they, like, imagine a pretty broad Category of Thing, imagine it being in some way bigoted, and then instruct the audience to never do that Broad Category of Thing, and instead do the opposite - stay on the safe side, and saying anything inadvertently if anyone were to read into what they’re saying.

If you’ve got a character with a disability, you could imagine it potentially feeling demeaning or tiring or patronising if the disabled character is really vocally down on the disability and it’s a significant issue for them and it ruins their life. So the solution, you are instructed, is that your disabled character must not consider it that big of a deal. There’s a stereotype of having evil villains having certain minor distinctive disabilities like eyepatches and hook-hands and scars. And like, you can imagine that having some negative cultural effect. So the solution, you are instructed, is that villains are not allowed disabilities. Unless they are sympathetic about it. There was a bit about ‘Villain Redemption Arcs’ - one point in the numbered list of things not to do was the villain being too villainous. Villains get redeemed, but they were too evil in the past, so they don’t *deserve* to be redeemed. The solution, they instruct, is to just not redeem villains that are ‘irredeemable’, or to make your villains less evil.

It’s all just very… uncreative. Surface-level.

Like, it’s stuff that you could probably do to be *aware* of, but that *awareness* of it should lead you to do something *interesting* about it, and Mythcreants just seems so fundamentally afraid of doing things that are *interesting* over anxiously avoiding things that could be considered problematic. Just nervously hiding from it.

Like, good fiction, I find, grabs and idea, and just *goes into it*. It’s following it wherever it leads. Really *exploring* whatever the thing has to offer. Like it’d be so much better if you’re just… aware of the stereotype, or aware of how evil the villain is, and you just… explore that. You go somewhere with it. You do something interesting about it.

But the writing advice is always more ‘Covering your Ass’ and ‘Checking the boxes’ than, like, being interesting. It’s less about Good writing as it is about Inoffensive writing.

Like, in this article ‘ Five Anachronisms That Fantasy Needs ‘, it lists 5 things from history and instructs you to just Not Use them in your story, because it “Will Detract from your reader’s enjoyment” and “Risk normalising said views.” in the case of disagreeable social views.

And like, every single one of those 5 examples are things that could be really really interesting things to play with. Like you could really *explore* that, it could make for something really interesting and memorable. It’s the sort of thing that makes me want to start writing, y’know. You can do some crazy stuff with that.

But the instruction is just “Don’t”. In creative disciplines you never just “Don’t”! 

@necarion and I were talking earlier today about Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive.  He has a society that has extremely rigid gender roles—like to the extent that men and women eat totally different styles of cuisine.  (Eating sweet food as man, or spicy food as a woman, is taboo.)  Men fight and lead but can’t read or write, and women read and write but can’t fight or lead.

But he’s also pretty explicit that this culture has zero issue with gay relationships.  And that honestly makes no sense in-world, right?  Both in the sense that societies with rigid gender roles tend to be, well, rigid about them, and in the sense that “wait, you’re married to a man?  Then who does your reading for you?” is a perfectly reasonable question in that world, in a way that “wait which one of you does the laundry” isn’t in ours.

On the other hand, this is the sort of society where transness seems very plausible.  In fact, even in canon it has an explicitly codified third gender, a sort of priesthood whose members don’t count as male or female.  (So if e.g. you’re a man who wants to learn to read, you have to become a priest.  But that role has its own set of restrictions.)   

But it would actually make sense, and be interesting, if you were allowed to switch to the other gender role, as long as you did it completely.  Even if you were AMAB you can be a woman, but you must wear dresses and hide your left hand in public and eschew leadership roles and stop eating spicy food.  And then you might imagine this society totally allowing two AMABs to marry, but only if one of them is inhabiting the male gender role and the other is inhabiting the female gender role.  (And maybe this society feels totally uncomplicated about agreeing that one is a man and the other is a woman.  She reads and eats strawberries, right?)

And that’s way more interesting in a lot of ways than “oh yeah, don’t worry, all my characters are fine with gay people, so if you’re gay you can feel included.”  But Sanderson is super big on explicit by-the-book inclusivity, in a way that I think sometimes gets really awkward.  And I suspect this is partly from a good-faith belief in the sort of thing you’re talking about.  And it’s partly because, well, he’s a relatively conservative Mormon, and if he wrote a book where his protagonists weren’t comfortable with homosexuality, people might attribute those beliefs to him.  He doesn’t have cover to experiment in that way.

i feel like a society where nobody who is in charge of shit reads has bigger problems

Oh definitely. You’re not supposed to think this is a good setup!

(Although important men do consume books.  They just have to do it as audiobooks, by having a woman read aloud to them.  Which is part of why the “wait, so who does your reading for you?” is such an important question.  In military units it’s very important that one of the men have a wife or a sister so that she can read dispatches and keep the books for the unit.)

But that’s part of my point.  No one is going to read this setup and think “Ah, prolific male author Brandon Sanderson thinks men shouldn’t be allowed to read or write.”  So he can explore that fucked up and frankly kind of stupid system without anyone thinking, or feeling, that he’s advocating for it.

But if he said “also they’re not cool with gay people” then it would be a whole Thing.

this (with the transness inclusion) is actually pretty similar to my headcanon for Qunari from Dragon Age, who are introduced as having such incredibly rigid gender roles that the first Qunari NPC will more readily believe you are a weird looking man than a woman fighter, and then later said to be more accepting of a trans male human character than humans were. you just don’t know what qunari have under their armour bc by this point gender *is* ‘do you want to be a soldier or a teacher?’

anyway i’ve not read this series but having all book learning mediated through women seems like a setup for even more illicit exercise of soft power by powerful mens wives and mothers than real history

Yeah, that last thing is explicitly brought up, although not as explored as thoroughly as it could be. (One character has an epigram about "we forbade women to use the sword and we gave women the book, and sometimes I wonder if we really got the better end of that deal.)

The most explicit version of this is "undertext". Basically, most books have a set of footnotes that are never to be read or even mentioned out loud. Which means that women, who can read, will read them, but men, who have to listen to books read by women, will never even know they exist. And it's pretty explicitly a mechanism by which women, who are locked out of most formal exercises of power, can steer the actions and knowledge of the men in their lives.

Minor spoiler: there’s a bit where one particular man, who winds up as a religious renegade, decides to learn to read.  And his girlfriend winds up having to explain this setup to him, and gets pretty embarrassed in a “wait is this manipulative?  It sounds manipulative when I say it out loud” sort of way.  But of course they had good reason to be manipulative, as you point out.  

Reminded again of the terrible website Mythcreants, and I think the main pattern, the biggest repeating problem I’ve seen with them, is how they, like, imagine a pretty broad Category of Thing, imagine it being in some way bigoted, and then instruct the audience to never do that Broad Category of Thing, and instead do the opposite - stay on the safe side, and saying anything inadvertently if anyone were to read into what they’re saying.

If you’ve got a character with a disability, you could imagine it potentially feeling demeaning or tiring or patronising if the disabled character is really vocally down on the disability and it’s a significant issue for them and it ruins their life. So the solution, you are instructed, is that your disabled character must not consider it that big of a deal. There’s a stereotype of having evil villains having certain minor distinctive disabilities like eyepatches and hook-hands and scars. And like, you can imagine that having some negative cultural effect. So the solution, you are instructed, is that villains are not allowed disabilities. Unless they are sympathetic about it. There was a bit about ‘Villain Redemption Arcs’ - one point in the numbered list of things not to do was the villain being too villainous. Villains get redeemed, but they were too evil in the past, so they don’t *deserve* to be redeemed. The solution, they instruct, is to just not redeem villains that are ‘irredeemable’, or to make your villains less evil.

It’s all just very… uncreative. Surface-level.

Like, it’s stuff that you could probably do to be *aware* of, but that *awareness* of it should lead you to do something *interesting* about it, and Mythcreants just seems so fundamentally afraid of doing things that are *interesting* over anxiously avoiding things that could be considered problematic. Just nervously hiding from it.

Like, good fiction, I find, grabs and idea, and just *goes into it*. It’s following it wherever it leads. Really *exploring* whatever the thing has to offer. Like it’d be so much better if you’re just… aware of the stereotype, or aware of how evil the villain is, and you just… explore that. You go somewhere with it. You do something interesting about it.

But the writing advice is always more ‘Covering your Ass’ and ‘Checking the boxes’ than, like, being interesting. It’s less about Good writing as it is about Inoffensive writing.

Like, in this article ‘ Five Anachronisms That Fantasy Needs ‘, it lists 5 things from history and instructs you to just Not Use them in your story, because it “Will Detract from your reader’s enjoyment” and “Risk normalising said views.” in the case of disagreeable social views.

And like, every single one of those 5 examples are things that could be really really interesting things to play with. Like you could really *explore* that, it could make for something really interesting and memorable. It’s the sort of thing that makes me want to start writing, y’know. You can do some crazy stuff with that.

But the instruction is just “Don’t”. In creative disciplines you never just “Don’t”! 

@necarion and I were talking earlier today about Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive.  He has a society that has extremely rigid gender roles—like to the extent that men and women eat totally different styles of cuisine.  (Eating sweet food as man, or spicy food as a woman, is taboo.)  Men fight and lead but can’t read or write, and women read and write but can’t fight or lead.

But he’s also pretty explicit that this culture has zero issue with gay relationships.  And that honestly makes no sense in-world, right?  Both in the sense that societies with rigid gender roles tend to be, well, rigid about them, and in the sense that “wait, you’re married to a man?  Then who does your reading for you?” is a perfectly reasonable question in that world, in a way that “wait which one of you does the laundry” isn’t in ours.

On the other hand, this is the sort of society where transness seems very plausible.  In fact, even in canon it has an explicitly codified third gender, a sort of priesthood whose members don’t count as male or female.  (So if e.g. you’re a man who wants to learn to read, you have to become a priest.  But that role has its own set of restrictions.)   

But it would actually make sense, and be interesting, if you were allowed to switch to the other gender role, as long as you did it completely.  Even if you were AMAB you can be a woman, but you must wear dresses and hide your left hand in public and eschew leadership roles and stop eating spicy food.  And then you might imagine this society totally allowing two AMABs to marry, but only if one of them is inhabiting the male gender role and the other is inhabiting the female gender role.  (And maybe this society feels totally uncomplicated about agreeing that one is a man and the other is a woman.  She reads and eats strawberries, right?)

And that’s way more interesting in a lot of ways than “oh yeah, don’t worry, all my characters are fine with gay people, so if you’re gay you can feel included.”  But Sanderson is super big on explicit by-the-book inclusivity, in a way that I think sometimes gets really awkward.  And I suspect this is partly from a good-faith belief in the sort of thing you’re talking about.  And it’s partly because, well, he’s a relatively conservative Mormon, and if he wrote a book where his protagonists weren’t comfortable with homosexuality, people might attribute those beliefs to him.  He doesn’t have cover to experiment in that way.

i feel like a society where nobody who is in charge of shit reads has bigger problems

Oh definitely. You're not supposed to think this is a good setup!

(Although important men do consume books.  They just have to do it as audiobooks, by having a woman read aloud to them.  Which is part of why the “wait, so who does your reading for you?” is such an important question.  In military units it’s very important that one of the men have a wife or a sister so that she can read dispatches and keep the books for the unit.)

But that’s part of my point.  No one is going to read this setup and think “Ah, prolific male author Brandon Sanderson thinks men shouldn’t be allowed to read or write.”  So he can explore that fucked up and frankly kind of stupid system without anyone thinking, or feeling, that he’s advocating for it.

But if he said “also they’re not cool with gay people” then it would be a whole Thing.

Reminded again of the terrible website Mythcreants, and I think the main pattern, the biggest repeating problem I’ve seen with them, is how they, like, imagine a pretty broad Category of Thing, imagine it being in some way bigoted, and then instruct the audience to never do that Broad Category of Thing, and instead do the opposite - stay on the safe side, and saying anything inadvertently if anyone were to read into what they’re saying.

If you’ve got a character with a disability, you could imagine it potentially feeling demeaning or tiring or patronising if the disabled character is really vocally down on the disability and it’s a significant issue for them and it ruins their life. So the solution, you are instructed, is that your disabled character must not consider it that big of a deal. There’s a stereotype of having evil villains having certain minor distinctive disabilities like eyepatches and hook-hands and scars. And like, you can imagine that having some negative cultural effect. So the solution, you are instructed, is that villains are not allowed disabilities. Unless they are sympathetic about it. There was a bit about ‘Villain Redemption Arcs’ - one point in the numbered list of things not to do was the villain being too villainous. Villains get redeemed, but they were too evil in the past, so they don’t *deserve* to be redeemed. The solution, they instruct, is to just not redeem villains that are ‘irredeemable’, or to make your villains less evil.

It’s all just very… uncreative. Surface-level.

Like, it’s stuff that you could probably do to be *aware* of, but that *awareness* of it should lead you to do something *interesting* about it, and Mythcreants just seems so fundamentally afraid of doing things that are *interesting* over anxiously avoiding things that could be considered problematic. Just nervously hiding from it.

Like, good fiction, I find, grabs and idea, and just *goes into it*. It’s following it wherever it leads. Really *exploring* whatever the thing has to offer. Like it’d be so much better if you’re just… aware of the stereotype, or aware of how evil the villain is, and you just… explore that. You go somewhere with it. You do something interesting about it.

But the writing advice is always more ‘Covering your Ass’ and ‘Checking the boxes’ than, like, being interesting. It’s less about Good writing as it is about Inoffensive writing.

Like, in this article ‘ Five Anachronisms That Fantasy Needs ‘, it lists 5 things from history and instructs you to just Not Use them in your story, because it “Will Detract from your reader’s enjoyment” and “Risk normalising said views.” in the case of disagreeable social views.

And like, every single one of those 5 examples are things that could be really really interesting things to play with. Like you could really *explore* that, it could make for something really interesting and memorable. It’s the sort of thing that makes me want to start writing, y’know. You can do some crazy stuff with that.

But the instruction is just “Don’t”. In creative disciplines you never just “Don’t”! 

@necarion and I were talking earlier today about Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive.  He has a society that has extremely rigid gender roles—like to the extent that men and women eat totally different styles of cuisine.  (Eating sweet food as man, or spicy food as a woman, is taboo.)  Men fight and lead but can’t read or write, and women read and write but can’t fight or lead.

But he’s also pretty explicit that this culture has zero issue with gay relationships.  And that honestly makes no sense in-world, right?  Both in the sense that societies with rigid gender roles tend to be, well, rigid about them, and in the sense that “wait, you’re married to a man?  Then who does your reading for you?” is a perfectly reasonable question in that world, in a way that “wait which one of you does the laundry” isn’t in ours.

On the other hand, this is the sort of society where transness seems very plausible.  In fact, even in canon it has an explicitly codified third gender, a sort of priesthood whose members don’t count as male or female.  (So if e.g. you’re a man who wants to learn to read, you have to become a priest.  But that role has its own set of restrictions.)   

But it would actually make sense, and be interesting, if you were allowed to switch to the other gender role, as long as you did it completely.  Even if you were AMAB you can be a woman, but you must wear dresses and hide your left hand in public and eschew leadership roles and stop eating spicy food.  And then you might imagine this society totally allowing two AMABs to marry, but only if one of them is inhabiting the male gender role and the other is inhabiting the female gender role.  (And maybe this society feels totally uncomplicated about agreeing that one is a man and the other is a woman.  She reads and eats strawberries, right?)

And that’s way more interesting in a lot of ways than “oh yeah, don’t worry, all my characters are fine with gay people, so if you’re gay you can feel included.”  But Sanderson is super big on explicit by-the-book inclusivity, in a way that I think sometimes gets really awkward.  And I suspect this is partly from a good-faith belief in the sort of thing you’re talking about.  And it’s partly because, well, he’s a relatively conservative Mormon, and if he wrote a book where his protagonists weren’t comfortable with homosexuality, people might attribute those beliefs to him.  He doesn’t have cover to experiment in that way.

Several of my friends (hi @necarion​ and @subsume-restlessness​!) are slightly mad at me that I just told them I won’t be ready to discuss Rhythm of War until Christmas break.

Yeah..so. I *would’ve* been miffed, except my ‘epic reread’ of the first three stalled out at “the early bits of oathbringer are way more difficult to get through than I remember and oh right I have fifty thousand other things to read that seem more important.” Warbreaker is just as fun as I remember though!

Warbreaker is fun! I don't remember the early bits of _Oathbringer_ being hard to get through, but then that's very consistent with them being harder to get through than I remember. :)

Several of my friends (hi @necarion​ and @subsume-restlessness​!) are slightly mad at me that I just told them I won’t be ready to discuss Rhythm of War until Christmas break.

me (after reading the first 85% of a fantasy book): I don’t see why this is so well-regarded. It’s okay, I guess, but 800 pages of nothing substantial happening… me (after reading the last 15%): GIVE ME THE NEXT BOOK RIGHT NOW.

@towardsagentlerworld:

The Way of Kings, by Brandon Sanderson. I had tried reading it a few years ago, but it was too slow so I had dropped it before getting very far. But then I liked Sanderson’s conclusion to Wheel of Time, and I also noticed that The Way of Kings was very highly rated on Goodreads, so I decided to give it another try. Conclusion: should’ve been 20-30% shorter, but enough of a payoff at the end to produce the above reaction. The main problem is that it takes a lot of pages to write enough slice-of-life chapters to add up to epic fantasy. But now it looks like I’m in for… *checks*… 15 more already-released books, and “at least 40” when everything is done. Fortunately, he writes absurdly quickly (I think his first book was published in 2005) so he’s the anti-GRRM in that respect.

Sanderson is absurdly prolific. (The funniest single story is about the time he was having trouble writing a book, so he went ahead and wrote the sequel at the same time to break his writer's block).

Stormlight Archive (the one that Way of Kings starts) is almost certainly his best series, but it's the one that most rewards knowing what's going on in his other series.

It's also probably the slowest start, since it has the most worldbuilding. I don't think the later Stormlight books start that slow, and I don't think the other series start that slow either.

(Hell, they can't---these books are the longest!)