#sff blogging

[anghraine]

I just caught up on the shenanigans around the Hugos numbers and ... something is very wrong.

[anghraine]

I may put together a longer post about this later, but something I feel very strongly:

Fantasy as a genre does not need to morally justify its existence.

I see "fantasy can do and say really important, profound things, but most of the time it's just escapist trash" going around pretty regularly. But it is no more incumbent on fantasy to say Important Profound Things than on any other genre. It's no worse for it to be escapist than for anything else to be—that's part of what fiction is!

It's not to say that fantasy or any other genre, or particular trends in any genre, are above criticism, but that fantasy-specific condemnations tend to trade in wild double standards.

[anghraine]

Regularly scheduled announcement: my post about SF/F short story outlets that are open for submissions, with payments etc, is extremely out of date.

I added an edit to that effect a few years ago, but that isn't the version that makes the rounds. Everyone in the notes who says writers should just use the Submission Grinder is 100% correct.

[anghraine]

Hi! Seing your recent post about the Belgariad made me want to read it again, then I saw the crazy story unearthed about David and Leigh Eddings… it’s interesting to me that they apparently were very intent on writing a marketable book, and that you still find most of the relationships in the story unhealthy. I’d be interested to hear more about your opinion or some examples! Thanks :)

Yeah, David and Leigh Eddings's prospensity to write idealized and peculiarly wise children combines horribly with the knowledge of what they were like IRL. He was dead before I found out, but yikes.

And yes, their books (esp The Belgariad) were definitely written to be formulaic in a fun way, but I think quite a lot of misogyny and racism seeps through. And for me, the misogyny is really felt with the way female characters get slotted into pretty narrowly defined female roles (even Polgara IMO suffers from this at times), the emphasis on the ~female mystique, and sometimes straight up awful things like how Merel is treated by the narrative vs Barak.

I do see some improvement in The Elenium, despite its own problems (the Styrics are intriguing but also, wtf). Characters like Sephrenia and Ehlana feel like more distinct personalities to me and less market-tested tropes. But The Belgariad has always been more popular, I think, so I guess the market-tested approach panned out in the end.

[anghraine]

I've been thinking about the common "Humans are Mario" framework in fantasy.

It's pretty common for settings with multiple humanoid and fully sapient species to have each species (and/or its culture) represent a particular aspect of RL humanity or combination of RL qualities. But the in-story humans don't represent much of anything in particular, or are just sort of average and normal amidst all these other, more specialized, peoples, like the Mario option in MarioKart.

There's a related variant where humans are not all middle of the road but rather are, like actual humans, all over the place in terms of cultures and attitudes where other species tend to be more restricted or defined. This strain of fictional humanity is often characterized by things like versatility, diversity, adaptability, and ambition, which are cool in theory, but basically allow them to be anything. They still average out to kind of Mario-ish because they aren't as clearly defined/restricted as other humanoid species in their settings, but this comes from the huge variety across the species without distinctive trends compared to the others.

In short, they're actual humans transplanted into the fantastic or otherwise speculative setting.

Personally, I tend to gravitate towards human characters and cultures. At the same time, I find both forms of the Mario humans rather boring, especially in games. I prefer fantastic humans to be as culturally distinct as any other sapient humanoids.

This is one of the reasons I'm really fond of GW2 humans, who have some very distinct traits, especially in the core game. In general, they are devoutly religious, and they tend to have an affinity for the elegant and glamorous when they can manage it, and the attractively functional when they can't. Their politics are involved and typically involve numerous factions and lots of internal dissent. They're proud and nostalgic, often holding on to old loyalties and old grudges, and grimly resilient in the face of overwhelming threats.

I've always thought that they're rather like traditional Elves with human appearance and lifespan, actually. But they still sometimes fall into the Mario trap—where PCs of the other playable species tend to lean into their cultures, the human PC is not particularly nostalgic, not invested in ancestral grudges, not super devout, but just sort of human-shaped and blandly reasonable. My theory is that the game's creators assumed a human PC who was messy in the way that humans are messy in GW2 (grim, religious, resentful) would be off-putting for players, and so the human PC just became kind of boringly inoffensive.

Swerving away from my game, though, I think we do see a lot of this trope of in-story humans as the most average or least distinctive sapient fantasy (or sometimes sci-fi) species, in settings with multiple sapient species representing aspects of RL humanity. And I can see why people are ambivalent about making the species who look like real human beings more defined than just "people" or "average." But I do wish in-story humans were more often as lovingly developed and defined as other species tend to be in these settings.

And in games in particular, I also wish human characters could lean more into the characteristics of the setting's humans and less into that inoffensive Mario role.

[anghraine]

For all the many many many many problems with the Eddings books (which I inhaled as a teenager), they were vivid enough that it's a real struggle not to name my blessèd yet sketchy D&D snake lady Salmissra.

[anghraine]

bookspls1815 replied to this post:

wait does this mean you're a Blue Sword person!?!?!?  that book is literally part of my soul

Wellllll

[anghraine]

I got three different pro authors named Sarah confused, but finally managed to figure out which Sarah goes with which book series, and it turns out the Sarah who I actually wanted to read is not the one who was a total asshole on Twitter. Small joys!

[anghraine]

Oh, a WOT episode (“The Flame of Tar Valon”) is one of the finalists for the Hugos! Awesome :D

[anghraine]

For those who are interested in that sort of thing and have an opening chapter you’re pleased with, I just saw that Uncharted Magazine has a SF/F opening chapter contest going right now.

There’s more info here.

[anghraine]

Hey all, I need some recs, and while I have some ideas, I thought I’d ask around. My mother’s trying to figure out Christmas presents, and one of the things we’re looking for are fantasy novels written relatively recently.

More specifically, we’re looking for fantasy that a) takes place in a compelling secondary world, b) takes a more or less serious approach to its material without grimness (not comedy, not dark fantasy, not subversive), and c) involves a reasonably prominent magic system (it doesn’t need to be a hard system, but magic should be a significant part of the story).

It doesn’t have to be evidently influenced by Tolkien/Jordan/Eddings/etc, but it’s not a problem if it is.

[anghraine]

So that damn sf/f post took off AGAIN, and I figured I should just resign myself to it. Hopefully, the fact that only a tiny proportion of people seem to realize that it’s years out of date is not actually hurting anyone, just inconvenient once people realize many of the links are broken / mags and anthologies are closed / pay rates have been changed / etc.

I was just going FINE. WHATEVER to myself ... and then the porn bots found it.

>_<

[anghraine]

greywatch replied to this post:

Oooh who? 👀

Katharine Kerr!

[anghraine]

A fantasy writer I’ve been meaning to read since high school, but have residual good feelings about for some reason, just got retweeted onto my Twitter feed via a pro-vaccination meme. So I glanced at her profile and it turns out that she has Good Opinions in general. I think I will read her, after all.

[anghraine]

Shout-out to every person who has mentioned the Submission Grinder in the notes of my absurdly outdated SF/F post. It’s great and a much better resource than my post.

[anghraine]

Shout-out to all the people who have pointed out that my sf/f publications post from 2015 is extremely outdated.

(This is not sarcastic—it’s making the rounds again because most people never check the original date/current status of the links. So I do appreciate the people who at least try to slow its progress.)