\n\nGuess I should follow up on the orc thing because that got all popular and shit.
\nLots of fantasy genres tell stories on a national or larger scale, involve war and battle, and like having heroes show off their skills. Structurally, I think this lends itself to \u2018armies filled with evil monsters that the heroes can mow down and not feel too guilty about.\u2019 (There\u2019s usually some guilt in modern stories, as a figleaf, but usually not as much as the killing of thousands of sentient beings would imply.)
\nIt\u2019s both true that A) This doesn\u2019t have to be the case, and B) if you want to read/write epic fantasy but also cordon yourself off from the Horde of Savage Monsters trope for moral reasons, you are objectively going to limit your options.
\nWhile I\u2019m not much into gaming, I get the impression that\u2019s how indie games with weird interfaces and fourth-wall-breaking plots that intentionally screw with the player\u2019s head went from a revelation to a cliche within a few years. Similarly I hear a lot about fantasy in which \u201cnothing happens, but at least it\u2019s brown and queer people it\u2019s not happening to\u201d (which is not something I\u2019d like to read or write, but I hear it wins awards). People are trying to create vegan, all-organic, cruelty-free fantasy and realizing that it limits their options relative to people who are fine with pizza and Coke. Both groups of revolutionaries eventually run into the boundaries inherent to their artistic decisions.
\nThere\u2019s nothing wrong with living a certain lifestyle for moral reasons. There is something wrong with trying to make everyone else live like you.
\nEspecially because I think the critics are getting the motivations of Savage Monster fantasy wrong. It\u2019s part of the whole widening circles of concern thing! We went from stories about slaughtering the next tribe over to the next town to the next country (imagine making a WWII movie where the American soldiers treated the Axis soldiers like Gimli and Legolas treated the orcs!) to slaughtering a different species that doesn\u2019t even exist.
\nThe attraction is being in awe of the courage and excellence of the heroes, not cheering on the slaughter per se. The critics seem to think the motivation for writing and reading these stories is the Savage Monsters themselves, rooting against them instead of for the heroes, and filling in your minority human group of choice because you\u2019re just a hateful bastard like that.
\nAnd more than the \u201cOh-ho, I think YOU\u2019RE the racist here!\u201d responses, I think that\u2019s where the disconnect is. They think it can\u2019t be that people just want to hear a good story instead of turning everything into a deconstructive literary seminar. The general idea that \u201ceverything is Culture War, there are Good and Evil sides, and if you disagree with either of those you\u2019re on Team Evil\u201d is far more insulting and revolting to me than arguing about which monster stands in for which group of people.
\n(I may be the Weird One here in that I\u2019m pretty much willing to roll with whatever a story tells me about who\u2019s good and who\u2019s bad, because I don\u2019t think sussing it out is really a good use of my time. When I told a creative writing class that I couldn\u2019t remember any villains in media that I rooted for more than the heroes, they sure looked at me funny.)
\nThere was a post on SSCreddit\u2019s culture war thread (either the old or new one, I forget) that would be mocked for its simplicity if it ever saw the light of day that went like \u201cSometimes people just want to read a book or play a game that\u2019s about killing the fuck out of bad guys and no social shaming is going to stop that.\u201d And basically, yeah.
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>imagine making a WWII movie where the American soldiers treated the Axis soldiers like Gimli and Legolas treated the orcs
This was very much the point, Quentin \u201cI Make Violent Movies About How Movies Use Violence\u201d Tarantino completely reverses the moral valence of classic WWII movie tropes \u2013 it\u2019s the Germans who have distinct regional accents and share stories of the homes and families they\u2019re serving to protect while the Americans/Jews are indistinguishable grunting brutes \u2013 to show that our loyalties don\u2019t really lie (never really lied?) with those moral qualities, but with \u201cour team\u201d, the bare ingroup, and that the weird ultimate impact of the defeat of the Nazis in American culture is providing us with a concept of a valueless, indistinguishable mass of humans that can be killed en masse without compunction
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