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I can’t take stories about oppressed wizards seriously unless they’re being oppressed by other, more powerful wizards. Oppression flows from power, not towards it. A lot of series want to examine oppression but they also want to have their oppressed people have special abilities because it’s fantastic and cool and provides a catharsis when the oppressed decides to switch on their powers and be badass. Stories have to jump through incredible hoops of narrative contrivance to explain why in this instance the very powerful people are being oppressed (see Attack on Titan for recent example. The explanation of why the Titan shifters are an oppressed minority would take pages to go into.) Popular media like X-Men skirt this line by having the oppressed people able to take over if they wanted to, but they choose not to because Xavier is such a good guy. But in that case he normally keeps his group safe. There are many opportunities to tell stories about oppression in fantasy but doing it through the conceit of oppressed wizards just does not seem like the best idea. And when these wizards win in the end the message is “the wrong people were the masters, we’ll be better masters, plus we’ve got magic powers.” In real life, oppressed people do not have the power to annihilate their tormentors with flames from the aether plane. If they did, real life would look very different. When oppressed wizards can do that, they stop working as a parallel and any hope of a positive message is lost. It’s more likely that the story will end up validating people who want to believe that oppression happens for a legitimate reason Ironically Jemisin seemed to realize this when she wrote her first trilogy, and had her gods oppressed by other, more powerful gods. Then she forgot it for the one that won all the Hugo’s. Ccs fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Apr 3, 2021 |
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Apr 3, 2021 18:31
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Peel posted:A little off-topic, but if you're annoyed by the Fifth Season's (or similar's) take on 'what if a population of humans with dangerous superpowers' you might want to check out the SF anime From The New World, which takes the exact opposite tack. The psychics are in charge, and the full working out of how this works, and the kind of people they are and society they've made is unsettling but compelling. I think of it every time this discussion happens. From the New World is one of my all time favorite series. One of the few anime I’ve watched twice. Also The Song of Shadows sets an incredible mood in the opening scenes : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Lxke2YUjBcM
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Apr 4, 2021 16:20
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But the argument is that such a society is only possible by rooting out the people with bad ideology and getting rid of them. They might be bad people but they're still suffering, so she's saying a society with suffering is preferable to abandoning that society. Which I suppose I agree with, you've got to crush Nazis. Not all of them will be receptive to therapy. The Omelas story had an interesting hook. What if the suffering of one person could ensure a utopia? That's a crazy idea and doesn't have much connection to reality, but its an interesting philosophical question. The Ones Who Stay and Fight posits that if you just gank the people who might be bad, job done. Okay. I mean, that's how a lot of societies already function, except they don't have such progressive ideologies they're trying to protect. If in the former society a consensus hadn't been achieved about what would constitute a utopia, it suggests that in the development of the Um-Helat society, these social workers probably killed a lot of people who would not be executed by a majority of the citizenry. Not sure if the story was meant to cast doubt on democracy.
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Apr 5, 2021 22:02
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I was gonna say that the story came off to me like the fever dream of a right wing nationalist believing he’s gonna get hunted by social justice warriors. Honestly I really don’t like this story. The point it’s trying to make is bad and it’s so unsubtle, beating the reader over the head with sentences like “ But this is no awkward dystopia, where all are forced to conform.” (Really? I don’t believe you.) and “ This is Um-Helat, after all, and not that barbaric America. This is not Omelas, a tick of a city, fat and happy with its head buried in a tortured child.” (Okay we get it.) The story can function because it’s defending current progressive values but values change and I would rather not have them enforced by thought police rebranded as social workers.
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Apr 6, 2021 04:17
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Harold Fjord posted:I think some of these criticisms of the wizard and x-men stuff overlook some simple human aspects. You can have all the power in the world but you can't make people like you and want to genuinely be your friend. A small minority of people with great power could be controlled and manipulated by society over generations based on that simple idea alone. Is there a historical example you can point to there? Differences are punished unless they are exploitable in some way, in which case they are rewarded. A supernatural power simply doesn’t align with the reasons anyone is actually oppressed, any more than athletes are oppressed for being really good at sports. Though I suppose you could make some point about how college athletes are exploited, but overall if someone has a power that is useful in some way they would likely have an entrenched position of privilege.
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Apr 6, 2021 16:10
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biracial bear for uncut posted:We literally live in a world where extermination pogroms have been carried out against indigenous peoples throughout the centuries because superstitious white people believed the heathens were gaining mystical powers through deals with Satan (as evidenced by their darker skin or their big noses or some other superficial characteristic!) or the whole blood libel in exchange for longer life/riches/etc. that Christianity has applied to pretty much every non-christian religion in history. That's the old "but what about the witch trials" argument. None of those people had actual magic. If they did, they’d have used it to avoid being executed. The actual reason for the persecuting those people involved general hatred of that group or for a political land grab. Meanwhile, it’s fairly common for religious figures, Christian and otherwise, to claim they have supernatural powers. Sometimes they have to be careful how they flavor these powers so as not to violate doctrine, but they always find ways. If magic actually existed, religions would either embrace it or be formed around it rather than reject it as evil. But on that point I do think it's possible to make oppressed wizards sort of work if you frame it as one group of wizards being opposed because of nationalism or another marginalized trait. But if in a society certain people are born with useful magical powers, it's really hard for me to believe that those people would be oppressed. Ccs fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Apr 6, 2021 |
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Apr 6, 2021 16:44
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biracial bear for uncut posted:Someone asked for historical examples and I gave that the exact response it deserved. The "magic" excuse in the real world is a justification for engaging in racism, etc. The witch trials happened with magic as a proxy for hatred of independent women and complex local politics. If magic was actually involved the would-be oppressors would be annihilated. I was looking for a historical example in which "A small minority of people with great power could be controlled and manipulated by society over generations based on that simple idea alone." Unless you're asserting that "indigenous peoples throughout the centuries" had more power than their colonizers or that the colonizers ever assumed that the indigenous people had more power than them, lol. Accusing them of devil worship was just a convenient excuse to get rid of them faster. The whole oppressed wizard trope just completely misunderstands how oppression works. Oppression flows from power, not towards it. The people writing stories about oppressed wizards usually even realize this, because most of the stories are about wizards overthrowing said oppression and getting back on top. But its baffling that the wizards were powerful enough to overthrow an entrenched and structural system of oppression and not powerful enough to prevent it from happening to them in the first place. This is only relevant to one of Jemisin's series, cause her first solved the issue by having gods oppressed by other gods. They are forced to serve humans at times, but the humans are only playing a part in a larger system of oppression upheld by a greater power. If the Guardians in Fifth Season has been stronger then I could have bought it. In fact the whole discussion has kind of veered off from its relevance to Jemisin's work to just be about a trope I don't like but other people seem to think works for reasons that baffle me. Ccs fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Apr 6, 2021 |
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Apr 6, 2021 20:59
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Jaxyon posted:Sorry I'm too busy looking for historical examples of 300,000 year old night elves. Ha ha. I mean has there been any small group with outsized economic or military power in the real world that has been manipulated by society? I can't think of any. People like to imagine certain ethnic groups throughout history have been both rich and oppressed, but usually it's just because there was an even richer group oppressing them. The only arguments I've seen to actually support this point point to revolutions where an aristocratic or royal family was all killed or sent to the gulags. A number of France’s elite lost their heads in 1789, but just a few decades later they were back, ruling through their wealth and power like nothing happened. Wizards with intrinsic power would have clawed their way back to power in a generation or so.
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Apr 6, 2021 21:43
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If you don't want to have the discussion that's fine. I just think that the trope of oppressed wizards is lazy and in the worst cases creates a metaphor that is so broken that it ends up validating people who want to believe that oppression happens for a legitimate reason. If authors want to write stories about oppressed magical characters it's best to have them be oppressed for other marginalized traits, or because of nationalism (this is Attack on Titan's one get-out-of-jail free card for using the oppressed wizards trope. It adds nationalism into the mix to provide a better justification. Still, as the internet can attest, many believe its metaphor to be hamfisted.) I felt Fifth Season was well written but too miserable for my tastes. I also am not a fan of second person narration and had to struggle through. Same reason I didn't get far in Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower. Harrow the Ninth is the first book written in second person I actually enjoyed (there's a book where the wizards are running things, at least on a lot of planets. Because of course they are.) There's so much cultural inertia behind the oppressed wizards trope and often used in attempts to encourage social justice. But I feel that's causes people to give it a pass while it weakens the story. killer crane posted:They're not great examples, because the colonizers could just spend more power from outside the colony the overpower uprising within (see history), but they work as microcosm. Yeah I mean I assume the people who would be organizing a revolt were cognizant of the fact that the colonizers could outspend them. If we transpose this to fantasy literature it's similar to how in the Inheritance trilogy some gods have to serve humans, not because the humans are more powerful than them but because there are more powerful gods out there than can crush the currently servile gods. Ccs fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Apr 6, 2021 |
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Apr 6, 2021 22:27
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Adjusting the power of the orogenes so that their powers can't be used in such targeted ways to kill humans might have helped my suspension of disbelief. Like if they could only stop earthquakes, not start them. It's just awkward in a book about how oppression is wrong to introduce a group of people who can easily kill with their minds. Oppression shouldn't be based on feelings on self-preservation! Other races are not a threat to white people, queer people are not a threat to straight people. People who can flash freeze others and cause an earthquake are a pretty big threat! Stop trying to change the context of the oppression! It doesn't work as a metaphor anymore!
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Apr 6, 2021 22:54
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Harold Fjord posted:Historically, minorities and especially black people have been portrayed a possessing superior physical strength, but lacking intelligence and control. The usage of "natural athlete" as a microagression from Matt Walsh's Nazi in Community springs to my mind here. Playing on that to wizardry seems reasonable to me. There are different kinds of power, and numbers is a kind minorities are at relevant disadvantage In by definition. But that's why using the metaphor is dangerous. Racism and sexism, etc are the result of irrational fears based on misconceptions, usually employed to strengthen the current ruling class. Wizard powers, at least as depicted in The Fifth Season, are a legitimate threat. This changes the context of the oppression that these storytellers seem to want to explore. Even if the reaction to this danger is overly harsh, the ordinary humans are still acting out of self-preservation. This is almost never the case in real-life oppression. For varying definitions of self-preservation, of course. Captains of industry might complain that their profit margins aren't as high and thus they aren't as comfortable if they're not able to exploit certain oppressed groups.
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Apr 6, 2021 23:41
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I just don’t think the existence of Guardians is relevant to how making the oppressed group a legitimate threat distorts the central metaphor.
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Apr 7, 2021 00:05
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Jaxyon posted:You don't think the literal hand of oppression is relevant? I’ll echo my post above: Racism and sexism, etc are the result of irrational fears based on misconceptions, usually employed to strengthen the current ruling class. Wizard powers, at least as depicted in The Fifth Season, are a legitimate threat. This changes the context of the oppression that these storytellers seem to want to explore. Even if the reaction to this danger is overly harsh, the ordinary humans are still acting out of self-preservation. This is almost never the case in real-life oppression. The Guardians, as agents of the humans desire for self preservation, don’t change the problem of the metaphor.
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Apr 7, 2021 00:19
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But you’ve fallen for the bad metaphor. Whites are acting on a perceived threat that doesn’t actually exist. Humans in the Fifth Season are acting on the legitimate threat that people who can cause earthquakes with their minds exist. This is why giving magic powers to a group and then having them be oppressed due to these magic powers doesn’t work. It changes the context of the metaphor, because there is actually a legitimate reason. It’s not that the Guardians weren’t powered up enough, it’s that the metaphor falls apart. With enough work, you can set up a story where all the world’s governments have rallied together and made the giant robots or elite death squads that would be necessary to oppress wizards. But then you get into the social and political problems. Namely that it introduce new contexts that justify hatred against wizards and can’t get around the fact that they’re justifying hatred. This can work if the goal is to create a multisided conflict where each side has a legitimate grievance, but it absolutely falls apart when modeling real-world bigotry and oppression, as so many stories of downtrodden wizards are trying to do.
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Apr 7, 2021 02:16
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Hmm I should probably rephrase that, it might not condone hatred but it does provide a reason for it beyond “I imagined a bunch of nonsense about x group” that constitutes racism and sexism. Since in this case the deadly magical powers actually do exist. On the previous topic, I will say that recent discussions about NFTs have made me wish for social workers with pikes who go around stabbing anyone who has ever heard of the concept. Jemisin may be on to something. Ccs fucked around with this message at 04:52 on Apr 7, 2021 |
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Apr 7, 2021 02:27
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Uranium Phoenix posted:Going back to (1), though, the panic about orogenes as metaphors for the oppressed ignores the thought experiment Jemisin is proposing with them. We can all agree that oppressed people are not revenge driven sociopaths; as you note, queer people aren't a threat to straight people, and the fears that racists and other vermin cultivate is irrational. But what Jemisin is proposing is: What if the fears were founded? What if the oppressed people really could ice entire towns or shake apart cities? Wouldn't oppressing them be justified? And of course, the obvious message in the books is: No. It wouldn't be right to enslave and oppress minorities even if they were mighty earth-wizards. But IS that a message anyone should agree with? I'll give an example of how this metaphor stops working for me. If I'm walking down the road and I see a guy with a different skin color coming towards me and I cross the street to get away from him that's a lovely thing to do. It's predicated on racist fantasies of danger. If I'm walking down the road and I see a man with metal claws coming out of his hands, I am well within my rights to cross the street to get away from Mr. Stabby. It's like the orogenes all are born with AK-47s inextricably attached to them. Now we all believe oppression against minorities is wrong but most people think controlling and regulating dangerous weapons is A-Ok. In a sense the book's message plays into right wing fears that if you try to regulate dangerous weaponry its the same as oppressing a minority group. I do not think for one instant that Jemisin intended that reading. Oppressed wizards is a trope with a lot of cultural inertia behind it and she got swept up in the trope. As did Stan Lee, Hajime Isayama, etc.
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Apr 7, 2021 14:38
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Uranium Phoenix posted:But your fear of Essun Scissor-Hands there would not be founded, because the idea in the books is that the destruction the orogenes are unleashing descends from the pain that is inflicted on them. You've stretched the metaphor to its breaking point and its still not working. Magic powers are a better compared to weapons than any sort of marginalized trait. And no one should be comfortable around people carrying weapons. Sure, they probably won't use the weapons unless provoked. It's still a weapon. It justifies the fear, which doesn't map to real world marginalization or oppression.
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Apr 7, 2021 16:37
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Jaxyon posted:
We get that's what it's trying to be. Storytellers often want to push back against oppression and marginalization, so they decide to use a parallel. But when the source of the oppression is switched from "a different race" to "a deadly power that can be used as a weapon" it changes the context of the metaphor so drastically that it no longer functions. It introduces implications that the story trips over. There's a number of issues with changing the metaphor to oppressed wizards which I've covered in disparate posts in this thread but I'll bring them together here: 1.) It's difficult to oppress wizards. Authors make an effort to give the evil humans some kind of countermeasure to negate the advantage of magic, and they’re almost always woefully inadequate. 2.) Oppression flows from power, not to it. A supernatural power simply doesn’t align with the reasons anyone is actually oppressed. 3.) It makes the wizards into an actual threat to the people around them by the nature of their deadly powers. It absolutely falls apart when modeling real-world bigotry and oppression. There's solutions to this problem. Wizards can be oppressed by other wizards (see The Inheritance trilogy). Or the wizards can be oppressed for another marginalized trait that maps better to reasons for real world oppression. Or the wizards were all in one country that was invaded by another, making the reason for their oppression nationalism as opposed to because they have superpowers.
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Apr 7, 2021 18:10
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Jaxyon posted:I've never had the probelem with X-men being a civil rights or gay rights metaphor despite the existence of omega level mutants. If you do, cool. This book and x-men is probably not for you. I mean the thing is the metaphor not working is only an aspect of the story. A pretty major aspect, all things considered, but not enough for me to discount The Fifth Season. Personally the reasons I didn't enjoy it so much had more to do with the second person narration than the oppressed wizard trope, but choice of point of view is a matter of taste and not something I can spend time arguing about haha. It's the same reason I still enjoy Attack on Titan despite feeling that it fails its attempt at the same trope. The overall theme of AoT is "war brutalizes us all but especially our children." I agree with that and I think it does a good job of conveying that theme, but like with The Fifth Season it tries to use the oppressed wizard trope and causes its other themes to become confused. There's more than one theme in The Fifth Season too, so the trope not working only invalidates some of them.
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Apr 7, 2021 18:27
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Sarern posted:All they have to do is read the books, OP. Oh no. Dragon Age is the dumbest use of the trope. It relies on video game mechanics where you can accept a fire blast and a sword strike do equal damage, and the oppressors in that world put all the mages together in Circles, which is the exact opposite of what you would do if you didn’t want them to take over. Concentrating marginalized people is something you do when they have no power. With mages, you’re just putting them in a place where they can more easily work together and come up with plans for world domination or whatever else strikes their fancy. Sigh. Videogames!! shakes fist
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Apr 7, 2021 19:18
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Kchama posted:People have already spoken on this, but this is absolutely completely wrong. First of the matter was that slaves WERE oppressed because they were seen as dangerous. The slave owners did it out of self-preservation. But also slaves were kept as a form of self-preservation because they benefited the slave owner with their labor. In certain societies people were turned into slaves because it was decided it was required for the good of society, aka self-preservation. In a lot of these cases, the enslaved could (and indeed at times did) fight against it and sometimes even won. Imagined self-preservation. You're confusing the fantasies that inflamed the racist beliefs for the actual events in the stories where superpowered people are human weapons. Key word is "seen". Racism might cause people to "see" other people as dangerous, but those beliefs are without merit. In these fantasy stories where mutants can wipe out a town with their mind, there is merit. As I said in the example before, it's the difference between crossing the street to get away from someone of a different race, predicated on racist fantasies of danger, and crossing the street to get away from a man with claws coming out of his knuckles. Fantasy stories that give an oppressed group superpowers take the above examples and say "these are the same." The metaphor collapses in on itself from the implications. Like I'm pretty sure the reason slavery lasted as long as it did was because of the economic advantages to the slaveholders, the idea that the slaves were a threat was an after the fact and convenient rationale for continuing a terrible system. I could be wrong though. But this trope's way of messing up stories whose themes are supposed to be positive is very damaging. Attack on Titan has the exact same setup of an oppressed group with destructive magical powers that are taken advantage of by the rulers. The theme of the series is ostensibly "War brutalizes us all but especially our children." However by bungling the oppression metaphor by using the oppressed wizards trope it's been hailed as "The Alt-Right's Favorite Manga". And the alt-right assholes aren't just willfully misreading the series (though they are doing plenty of that.) They're also tapping into the contradictions in the incoherent metaphor and running with it. Ccs fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Apr 7, 2021 |
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Apr 7, 2021 21:01
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I think you’re misunderstanding my point in a small but important way. It’s not about the fact that slave riots or colonized groups can fight back and sometimes win when they band together. It’s that the trope introduces an inherent power dynamic that breaks the metaphor. If you're using wizards as your stand-in for Oppressed Group X, then making each member of the group inherently more powerful than an ordinary human, it means there is now a justification for the ordinary humans to fear the wizards. The story may not condone the oppression that springs from this fear, but by introducing the inherent power differential between two people who in our reality would be on equal footing (absent oppressive power structures) it changes the context of the metaphor. I think it changes the context of the metaphor so much that it breaks and becomes incoherent as a model for real world oppression.
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Apr 7, 2021 23:36
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Harold Fjord posted:The man with claws coming out of his knuckles is merely an armed man, must like any other man in our society may or may not be armed at any time without you realizing. You may think the fear more rational, but that isn't obviously true. Yeah but people in our society aren’t intrinsically armed. This goes back to points I’ve made before about how it changes the context of the metaphor. Just try to think about this a bit more. About how giving a group terrifying monster powers and then oppressing them because of those powers just doesn’t square with the origin of real world oppression in any sense.
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Apr 8, 2021 00:16
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Jaxyon posted:And let me take a bold stance here, maybe we shouldn't horrifically oppress people even if they do have powers that make you scared? This is why I keep saying that the stories don’t condone oppression, they just introduce an actual cause for the oppression by giving one group of people deadly magic. I’m using this as an aggregate example of every franchise that makes use of this trope, whether it be The Broken Earth, X Men, Dragon Age or Attack on Titan. I think it’s an incoherent metaphor.
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Apr 8, 2021 00:47
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Jaxyon posted:So am I reading this be that oppression is justified when people are scared enough of the people they are oppressing? No it’s saying that unlike racism, which is predicated on fiction, these stories introduce deadly magical powers and give them to a particular group. It provides an actual reason for the fear. The oppression that results from the fear is not condoned. Let’s just do a thought experiment where every mutant is as strong as Jean Grey’s Phoenix. People would be entirely justified in being afraid of anybody with that kind of power. Because she actually has the ability to incinerate the world. Compared with a reality in which people only believe that this group of red haired people can end the world with a thought. One is based on fictitious and harmful imaginings, likely pushed by the current ruling class. The other is a legitimate fear. Ccs fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Apr 8, 2021 |
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Apr 8, 2021 01:00
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Harold Fjord posted:I don't even know what to say. I’m using that as an example. In a lot of these fantasy stories, like Dragon Age, all of the members of the particular oppressed wizard group are around the same power level, which involves having a ton of destructive capability. A group of people who all have this same destructive ability naturally causes people to fear them. The fear motivates the oppression that happens. The oppression is not condoned by the story, but it twists how oppression actually works. As opposed to real world oppression where a powerless group is enslaved and then the oppressors start to get nervous because these people have a legitimate grievance because they were oppressed. Or they were oppressed in the first place due to completely fictitious ideas about how dangerous the group was. It’s a simple substitution. Fictitious idea to actual threat, and the corresponding baseless fear to legitimate fear. And that makes for an awful metaphor for real life marginalized oppressed groups. Ccs fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Apr 8, 2021 |
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Apr 8, 2021 01:33
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The thugging out is a paranoid fantasy. The text of the book shows us orogenes having deadly magical powers that can kill people. It’s a question of whether the fear is legitimate or not. I keep repeating that it does not condone oppression. It just breaks the metaphor because now there’s legitimate fear. Do you believe regulating guns is a good idea? Because that’s what these magic powers basically are and it provides a much more 1 to 1 metaphor that doesn’t break as easily. Ccs fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Apr 8, 2021 |
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Apr 8, 2021 01:38
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Jaxyon posted:Fear is always legitimate to the oppressor. It's how they justify the oppression. It has nothing at all to do with any reality and magma wizards don't change that. Why are you changing the definition of legitimate? I mean inherently legitimate, not "this guy has a twisted worldview, but because it's HIS worldview he thinks its legitimate. After all, villains are always the heroes of their own story." The whole message of racial/sexual tolerance is to affirm the fundamental, underlying humanity of every individual, and to recognize that race/sexuality is merely one descriptor of a human being. Written succinctly, the message is, "We are equal." And these stories go, Well actually one of these groups has deadly magic powers. They're basically born with a gun strapped to them. Uh, good luck dealing the that power disparity!
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Apr 8, 2021 02:08
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Jaxyon posted:What part of magical powers makes oppression be legitimate? What the... I keep repeating "it does not condone oppression. It just breaks the metaphor because now there’s legitimate fear. " Fear of the deadly magical powers. That exist in these fantasy universes. Black people are not a threat to white people. Queer people are not a threat to straight people. Immigrants and refugees, no matter their skin tone or religion, are no threat to countries they immigrate to. Wizards who could choose to cause a massacre with a thought are a threat. The sad thing is its a trope in so many franchises I like! Attack on Titan has some great characters and fight choreography and takes its protagonist on a really interesting journey from typical shonen action hero to crazy maniac. But it makes the mistake of having the oppressed group (who are coded as Jewish, wear arm-bands to show they're part of the oppressed group, and live in ghettos where they're indoctrinated with false history about past crimes) be able to transform into giant man-eating monsters with exaggerated facial features. If it was all false history and this group was oppressed because they were a convenient scapegoat for their rulers due to some obvious physical difference, and then their rulers injected them with a serum that would have turned any human into a monster, it would have solved this problem. But Attack on Titan wants to be about the oppression and reaction of a specific ethnic group. And thus this monster power is limited to them. It's not about the masters inventing a fiction to oppress people who can then be used (which maps better to real world racism), its about the masters having a fairly legitimate fear of these people who can transform into monsters, and then instituting unjust oppression and finding a way to further exploit them. It should be obvious why I don't think Jewish coded characters should be able to transform into violent monsters? X Men also runs into this problem all the time when they try to extend the metaphor. Xavier's team can be read as positive, peace loving people who are unjustly maligned. But then you've got the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants running about proclaiming their superiority and killing humans! But we don't want to imply that if the oppressed wanted to they could easily do a genocide and rule the world, right? Especially not if we've coded our mutants as real life oppressed groups! In fact the current discourse in comics is about how the metaphor is kind of incoherent and the series needs to focus more on intersectional issues instead of always coming back to the oppressed mutants well. Ccs fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Apr 8, 2021 |
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Apr 8, 2021 02:31
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Harold Fjord posted:how are you measuring 'legitimacy' of fear? The capacity the magical individual has for violence compared to an ordinary human.
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Apr 8, 2021 03:21
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Anyway I think I’ve harped enough on one trope that affects a number of series, but only one of Jemisin’s, that I think creates some unfortunate thematic confusion. I’m gonna pick up Jemisin’s How Long ‘til Black Future Month so I have more to discuss in the thread.
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Apr 8, 2021 04:19
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I don't want to keep having this argument but "a real fear to me" is not the same as "a fear born out of the capacity the magical individual has for violence compared to an ordinary human that is supported by the text of the story, not just by the paranoid imaginings of some of the characters in the story." Cyclops has dangerous eyebeams. That's an indisputable fact in the text of X-Men. The space lasers that certain congresspeople imagine that Jews have is a paranoid imagining and not a fact. And before you go "but is Cyclops having eyebeams a reason to oppress him?" No, it's not. The fact that he has dangerous eye beams does not condone oppression. But it gives the fear a real foundation. Thus breaking the metaphor between Cyclops and a member of an actually marginalized group. Like, when a series like Attack on Titan has its main character use the magic power inherent to his ethnic group to kill a majority of living humans despite the best attempts of many of his friends in the same ethnic group to stop him, it creates some problematic implications that the series trips over before falling down a flight of stairs. Ccs fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Apr 8, 2021 |
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Apr 8, 2021 18:07
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Harold Fjord posted:Please expand on "problematic implications." The story positions the power as exclusive to a certain ethnic group. It basically says "the space laser is real and its now genociding everyone." I think it should be obvious why that has problematic implications? killer crane said it perfectly, "what happens to the metaphor of oppression when you give the oppressors something to actually fear about the oppressed? It breaks the metaphor because it muddles bigoted oppression and control for actual social safety."
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Apr 8, 2021 19:18
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Jaxyon posted:Lets examine all the different wrong things going on in this part of your post alone: These are all issues that come from making a story where a certain group are given deadly magical powers. People are born with guns built in in these stories. This whole list is just evidence of the incoherency that results from trying to equate people with deadly magical powers to a marginalized group. Jaxyon posted:4) The oppressor always thinks the oppressed is legitimately dangerous Also I'm not sure you get how this is important in context. It's like you're saying there no moral difference between someone taking an action because something is true and because they imagine it to be true. Ccs fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Apr 8, 2021 |
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Apr 8, 2021 19:33
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Jaxyon posted:Torturing children is a bad thing to do, if you do it because you think they're dangerous, or because they are actually dangerous. You're specifically picking the most absurd answer by going for the torture option, which is considered immoral in all circumstances. Try it with something that would be moral given whether something is true or not and try again.
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Apr 8, 2021 20:08
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Yeah. I mean I have a lot of issues with the oppressed wizards trope. I'm hyper sensitive to it at the moment because Attack on Titan just ended and bungled its themes so badly by using it, but I also tried writing a story at some point using that trope and got rightly called out for it by a developmental editor who gave me a detailed breakdown of every reason why it doesn't work. I changed the story and it was better (i'm publishing the book that came out of that in a week or so.) So it was weird reading The Fifth Season and being like "wait this has the same issue" If you want a list of the reasons: 1- a person will be punished for their difference unless they can exploit their difference in some way, and magic is always exploitable. 2- having valuable skills does not lead to marginalization. Capable individuals are not oppressed for the poor mass’s benefit, and neither would wizards be oppressed for mundane people’s benefit. 3 - The kind of person looking to scapegoat entire groups of people is almost always looking for an easy win, not trying to control people who can easily fight back. 4 - Religious oppression wouldn't cause wizard oppression because in a world with magic, magic would be integrated into religion. 5 - Bigots often claim that whichever group they hate is inherently dangerous. When you make such threats real, you at least partly justify the actions taken to stop them. (this is what we're all currently arguing about.) 6 - Elites rarely remain downtrodden for long. A story that has the wizards in power at the end is just confirming that they were the true elites. 7- Wizards would use their power to gain resources to attain regular human allies so they couldn't be outnumber the wizards and crush them with numerical superiority. 8 - If you're trying to oppress wizards with technology, well, they have access to technology too. 9 - You can make the magic weak, but that reduces the chances of anyone being oppressed for it. It might be a little unusual, but it’s so unimportant that it would quickly fade into the background. Plus why even have it in the story at that point? Aren't you using magic for the big action set pieces? 10 - You can oppress wizards with wizard hunters, but then the hunter is also a wizard in every way that matters. Why aren't the hunters then oppressed? (Broken Earth solved this by having the Guardians be from the evil earth. In essence the story becomes more a of a wizard vs wizard story by the end, with the evil earth as the strongest wizard.) Ccs fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Apr 8, 2021 |
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Apr 8, 2021 20:28
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Jaxyon posted:What levels of oppression are OK if you're really scared of the people you're oppressing? killer crane posted:How do you ensure everyone's safety? You'd have to put some control on those people, and the use of their Ak47 arms. Where's the line between oppression and control at that point?
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Apr 8, 2021 21:42
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Jaxyon posted:Exactly so. What the orogenes are put through in the series is terrible, but the nature of their powers raises questions that have awkward answers. Would you live near an orogene knowing that if their self control was less than perfect they could kill you? Not because of malice but because of a mistake. It would result in, at they very least, policies of control to minimize loss of life, and as killer crane noted, Where's the line between oppression and control at that point? Or, y'know, if it was US-esque it might just result in a lot of dead people every year and everyone would shrug and say they can't do anything because of whatever the fantasy world equivalent of the Second Amendment is. I mean, gun nuts literally believe they're being oppressed by having their guns taken away, and as you've previously argued there's no moral difference between something being true and what someone believes is true.
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Apr 9, 2021 00:34
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Goddamn you really want to twist my words to make it sound like I condone oppression. The issue is the oppressed wizard trope makes deadly magic powers into part of the characters identity. It conflates them and a weapon into one entity. It's a dehumanizing trope that doesn't map to any real models of oppression. Gun control is oppression if the person is also the gun. (Think of the Iron Giant. If he had stayed on earth there would be some controls over how he was able to be deployed.) These ten reasons I posted earlier is also a reason why the trope does a terrible job at modeling real world oppression. None of this lines up with why or how oppression happens. If the book is just trying to tell a story about these super powered people and what happens to them, fine. But I don't think it's just doing that. It wants to comment on the nature of oppression and why it happens. And it fails in these ten ways: quote:1- a person will be punished for their difference unless they can exploit their difference in some way, and magic is always exploitable.
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Apr 9, 2021 01:29
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Jaxyon posted:What you've described with gun control is a (mostly) non-oppressed class that is being regulated for things they have a choice in. But they believe that taking away their guns is oppressing them because it violates an inalienable right they think is enshrined in the constitution. If we're in an Avatar-esque fantasy world and there's the ability to take people's magic powers away, is that okay (control) or not (oppression)? Is the weapon they're born with too much a part of their personhood to be removed? This is part of why the trope fails. It changes the context so much that the metaphor breaks. And thus it doesn't help us understand the nature of real world oppression and why it happens (along with those other 9 reasons.) A lot of other people have explored these problems in series like Attack on Titan: quote:Anti-Semitism, like any form of predjudice, has no logical root. By making Eldians former conquerors and genetic “freaks” of nature, Isayama provides a plausible rationality to something that should have none. It's the oppressed wizards trope providing that plausible rationality that makes number 5 on the list the most pernicious of the 10 ways that the trope fails to model real world oppression. Ccs fucked around with this message at 02:03 on Apr 9, 2021 |
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Apr 9, 2021 01:52
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