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But Why
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If I can summarize what I think you’re getting at; you’re asking why people make knights and the monarchy their protagonists, when they are the historical and moral equivalent to today’s billionaires, and yet people don’t vilify them the way they do today’s billionaires.
The thing is… people still do venerate billionaires, in real life and in their fiction. Just look at modern superhero settings, with characters like batman or iron man. Or even just look at the way Star Wars itself came to treat the Skywalker family. The chosen one narrative is directly emergent from the right of kings narrative of stories like that of King Arthur, but it is a core part of basically all popular fiction today, fantasy or scifi. It’s a topic that many critics dig into as a fascination for our society as a whole, but the very reason it’s problematic is the reason it’s attractive to people. They want to feel a little bit like the chosen one. Whether that’s through having magical powers or through being really rich and in charge or being the best at shooting aliens in your space ship.
No one’s saying you have to like fiction that implicitly or explicitly depicts a “right of kings” society, or like monarchies depicted and roleplayed in fiction, but I think you’d be best served at this point by just acknowledging that you have a personal and deep-seated dislike of it in this particular genre, instead of trying to argue that actually depicting a semifantastical monarchy and RPing a princess are the uniquely worst version of this kind of fantasy.
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@De-Villefort said in But Why:
@icanbeyourmuse said in But Why:
Trying that doesn’t work for on me, man. I am Native.
If someone built a game where everyone played the people who funded and benefitted from the trail of tears, would you be okay with people saying they wanted to play those rich land barons because they thought it was fun to throw parties and dance with all the pretty daughters of industry?
Injustice is injustice.
I don’t have to be Native to know what those land thieves did to the natives was wrong and that their life style shouldn’t be lauded as a good time.Why would I hold it against them? Are they saying they are doing it because they are ‘out to get me’? Are they doing it intentionally to be a jerk? Are they planning to play out abusing the people that are under them? Or are they doing it because they want to have fun with the rose colored view of nobility? The answer, as someone who prefers the fantasy genre, has been mostly ‘no’ to all but the last question. There is always exceptions. You’re viewing it as they are only intending bad intent. Everyone has, repeatedly, told you that fantasy as a royal or noble is divorced from the RL variant and everyone has acknowledged that nobility in history was not as rose colored as what we all play in the fantasy setting.
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@DrQuinn YOU’RE RIGHT, BUT MY GOD.
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@Tez oh shit i was going to say something but then i remembered we’re not in that section of the board, lol
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@DrQuinn I had a feeling the dude was a troll when he made his initial argument and using an image still from anime.
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@mietze I am now curious to what you were going to say since I’ve not really seen anything you say as something that should be in the less controlled section.
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tbh this is all @Tez’s fault for splitting this into game gab instead of rough and rowdy LIKE WE DESERVED
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@icanbeyourmuse i was going to tell @tez that of course she would say that since she’s an indoor-plumbing rejecting class warfare winning princess pinching feudal fangirl.
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@Tez
Rich people do nice things for a few poor people some times makes them keeping everyone poor the rest of the time okay?Like, you get an annual Christmas bonus if you work really, really hard all year long at your job where you are under paid the rest of the year but because you have just enough money with that bonus to not lose your house that makes your CEO taking home 8000% the wages of the hourly workers at your company for his job of showing up twice a week for meetings perfectly okay, right?
Setting up a game where you play nobles and royals is like setting up a game where everyone plays CEOs and you have to optimize the productivity of your company while also putting on the appearance of not being a monster by doing charity events.
Games where you play the elites instead of the people standing up to the elites, are the glorification of everything wrong with the world.
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@Roz GET respectfully wined and dined before you are treated to a delightful romantic encounter.
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I am done with this. Instead, I will spend my time being amused by @mietze 's ‘unsaid’ comment to Tez.
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@icanbeyourmuse said in But Why:
Or are they doing it because they want to have fun with the rose colored view of nobility?
I’m not saying that you should be mad at them for playing the elites, but it’s pretty degusting.
It took the rich a long time to normalize the propaganda that they are the good guys and we should look up to them. It’s done a lot of harm in the world and this type of genera is furthering that ideal.
If you want to play it, feel free! I just don’t understand why you would want to emulate the scum of humanity.
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So to you the appeal is in playing the downtrodden masses fighting against the powers that be. The people who have mundane lives and no access to the fantastical excesses of their oppressors - maybe things like magic, fantastical technology, or plumbing…?
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@De-Villefort said in But Why:
@Rinel
Star Wars is mostly a good example. The Jedi are for all their many flaws, people who act selflessly for the good of society as a whole.You mean the people whose dedication to celibacy and total emotional detachment led one of their strongest to murderize them because no one would help him save the one he loved?
Super-hero based stories are of course focused on basically good people.
Have you followed super hero stories since the 1980s? Or, like, every non-MCU or DC super hero content in the past four or five years?
Firefly is a good, well known story with basically good protagonists.
Wash. It had one. His name was Wash. A leaf on the wind.
My problem with the fantasy genera is that the stories who have terrible people for heroes is the standard not the exception.
This is a very narrow view of fantasy, that I can only assume is recency bias. Grimdark fantasy has certainly become extremely popular with the success of A Song of Ice and Fire, but it is a relatively newer approach. Honestly, the rise of anti-heroes in comics like Wolverine, the Punisher, Lobo, comes even before that.
Until the rise of grimdark in the 1990s, most fantasy followed the same basic tropes, and probably 75% of them were Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey.
Pug from The Riftwar by Raymond Feist
Belgarian from David and Leigh Eddings
Various simple folk in Shannara by Terry Brooks
The Heralds from Valdemar by Mercedes Lackey
Literal engineers and smiths from Recluce by LE Modesitt
All but one major POV char of the Wheel of Time by Robert JordanWith the exception of Belgarion as a “hidden heir” these were tradespeople, thieves, warriors, etc, and almost all of them fundamentally good people, even the thieves.
Now tell me how many upright noble truly good redeeming people were on Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, and Firefly.
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Wash. It had one. His name was Wash. A leaf on the wind.
I would agree on Wash actually being a ‘good guy’. Maybe not purely since he did go along with what the others decided but I would classify him as a legit good guy. Inara too, I think would fall into a good protagonist. Simon might be the other I would almost say is a good guy. Although, he does go pretty damned far in the stuff he is willing to do. Outside Wash and Inara and maybe Simon, I don’t think I would really call any of the crew of Serenity (or any other parts of Firefly) full of good protagonists.
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@De-Villefort said in But Why:
In fantasy stories the Knight born into privilege and the Princess born into power are seen as the good guys while they ride their majestic white steed past the peasants dying in the streets.
People are complex, and no one is a good guy or a bad guy. They’re just good or bad for specific people in specific contexts. If you insist your fiction be only about good guys, then you are going to be spending a lot of time watching archived Saturday morning cartoons from the eighties.
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@icanbeyourmuse said in But Why:
Wash. It had one. His name was Wash. A leaf on the wind.
I would agree on Wash actually being a ‘good guy’. Maybe not purely since he did go along with what the others decided but I would classify him as a legit good guy. Inara too, I think would fall into a good protagonist. Simon might be the other I would almost say is a good guy. Although, he does go pretty damned far in the stuff he is willing to do. Outside Wash and Inara and maybe Simon, I don’t think I would really call any of the crew of Serenity (or any other parts of Firefly) full of good protagonists.
This is Kaylee erasure, and it will not stand.
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@Jennkryst Haha. She has a good personality and disposition but I’m not sure she would be a ‘good guy’ type. I mean, the introduction of her was of her banging in an engine room because it gets her going. She also doesn’t object to what they do, most of the time.
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@icanbeyourmuse said in But Why:
She also doesn’t object to what they do, most of the time.
Wash and Inara don’t raise a fuss about their heists either. Certainly all the characters have some degree of moral grayness, being on an outlaw ship and all, but they all have good in them.
