"this story has dragons"

[sigmaleph]

I am frustrated by this argument, in particular in the form of "so you can have dragons, but [women/queer people/etc] being treated with respect is too much?" (there's other frustrating arguments based on the fact stories include dragons, but I won't address them all here).

It frustrates me because it's, like, a twist away from a legitimate argument, which is:

Fantasy author: I had no choice but to write people being misogynistic in my book, because people were misogynistic in the middle ages. It was for the sake of realism.

Fantasy reader: OK, but you also put dragons in your book. Dragons aren't real.

The problem being that the argument is a retort. It does not make sense without the context of someone claiming they were just forced to do something out of realism, which most fantasy authors don't claim.

The argument above, in non-retort form, implies that once you have conceded on making up a new world, you should make it one with no misogyny (or queermisia, etc). Which I can't make sense of; surely you can, if you want, write that, but why should you have to? I don't think writing characters with horrible opinions means you share them; indeed it's one common way of criticising said awful opinions. Brienne of Tarth and Cersei Lannister are fascinating characters that would make absolutely no sense if their world wasn't a horrifying patriarchy, and I want to read stories like theirs*.

Sometimes I write things (rarely I finish things, but often I have some idea of what the world is like, at least). I have one story right now where a main character's backstory is profoundly shaped by being an amab person who has sex with men in a society that really hates that; I also have one where a main character is a trans woman and has never experienced any social disapproval for it whatsoever. Neither has dragons, but the first one has wizards and the second has superheroes. I like the freedom I get of making up a world, and deciding what their attitudes to various things is, but I would find it creatively stifling if I was only ever supposed to write the second kind of world and not the first.

*There's plenty of arguments about sexism in GRRM's writing to be made, let's be clear. It's just that his setting being patriarchal is not a good one.

Comments

[yvannairie]

Huh. TIL people don't use it as a retort. I guess I shouldn't be surprised considering how much more controlling over what kind of fiction people produce the discourse has gotten.

[feotakahari]

There’s a big argument over it on https://earlgraytay.tumblr.com right now.

[sigmaleph]

this is, as it happens, not a coincidence

[yvannairie]

Well now I regret having gone to read that with my own two eyes.

Fuck, I guess nobody actually copes differently and nobody ever needs space and nothing is ever too-real and there's no nuance!