#fictional works tackling irl topics has been a thing for as long as fictional works have existed

[unofficialadamtaurus]

Personally i hate the whole like.. question about adam u got like.. U KNOW.. that one. The “white saviour” one. Because rwby’s faunus stuff is NOT comparable to IRL issues. Coming from a native person. It’s not a good place to speak on.

Especially if you’re white. Anything you say about it will look fucked because you’re trying to use the comparison. The white fang stuff? It is Fictional. When you say it’s like a real thing it feels like the actual non-fiction stuff gets dulled down in reality.

They hit some points, personally, with the faunus stuff. I understand how it is, but the story is still really messy around there by default. But it’s not IRL issues.

Adam is a faunus, yes, he has power in the white fang, yes. That’s base thing. But you cannot compare it to IRL issues because that’s fucked within itself. IT’S STICKY.

I see people use it as a joke, I have never seen someone call him that legitimately. This whole thing just hurts my brain. He is not comparable.

I hope this is understandable enough. I don’t like getting into RWDE stuff and I don’t like debating the faunus allegory, because it’s a mess in certain spots.

Like. Obviously. Look at me.

I think people just need to stop comparing it to IRL issues because it’s harmful. It’s a completely different area. What.

-⭐️

I have seen the white savior take in the wild, but it was months ago and I blocked the person who said it immediately so there's zero chance I can dig it up. This is not a case of rwde posters making up a bad take to clown on it, much as I wish it were.

I'm going to disagree with most of what you said in your ask, but the tl;dr of my position is this: tackle serious topics, expect serious critique.

I don't want to discount your experience as a native person since I am whiter than milk. However, I think the stance that nobody can analyze a work of fiction through the lens of real events is a bad one that flattens the landscape of discussion regardless of the race or ethnicity of the author/critic.

Speaking as a white person who grew up in the United States and is critiquing the work of other white people who grew up in the United States, I think it's fair for me to point out where I personally believe RWBY's portrayal lacks nuance so long as I do not seek to drown out POC voices in the process.

My biggest point of contention with your ask is the idea that because RWBY is fictional, it cannot be compared to reality. To be honest, that stance is somewhat mind-boggling to me. When you say RWBY's racism isn't comparable to racism in reality...why not? Purely because it's fictional? I need a more compelling reason to understand why you're stating this like it's inarguable. Furthermore...what else are we supposed to compare it to? Nothing? Should we treat any instances of fictional works presenting experiences also found in reality as untouchable? Or should all fictional works only be compared to other fictional works? I personally believe the answers to these questions should all be a firm no.

Reality is, whether I like it or not, where we live. It informs our experiences and particularly the art we create. This includes web cartoons founded on the Rule of Cool that decide to add racism to their world building.

To explain my side in more depth, commentary on how RWBY portrays racism is inherently comparing it to reality because that is the single source of truth we have for how racism presents itself outside of fiction. (Outside of comparisons to other fictional media.)

Have I personally experienced racism? Of course not. Can I usually recognize when someone or something is racist? I sure fucking hope so. In this case, I can look at RWBY's portrayal and explain why I believe that, compared to what I have seen of racism in the real world and based on other opinions from fans and critics of color, it falls flat.

Basically, I don't critique RWBY as though it is trying to do a 1:1 retelling of racism in reality. I critique it as though it is a show written by white American men that tried to translate aspects of real-world racism into a cartoon and did not do so in a way I find satisfactory. Tackle serious topics, expect serious critique.

With all that out of the way, I do agree with the idea that discussing serious real-world topics like racism through the lens of fictional media can be problematic. We all saw that disgusting Ironwood = Putin post and I personally cringed my way through some Marvel fans trying to reconcile the events of January 6 with their favorite spandex-clad superheroes. That shit is bad; it displays, on some level, an inability to engage with reality on its own terms.

That is, however, not what we're doing here. In the simplest possible terms: RWBY translated racism to a fictional medium. Critics critiqued that translation. This is very, very normal. I don't know how else to say that your discomfort with this behavior in rwde indicates a discomfort with how a significant body of academic work engages with fictional media.

[daydadahlias]

Hi! I have an unusual request for you. I’m an aspiring writer and I’m always looking for ways to help develop my writing. I was listening to the new 5sos interviews and I find it really inspiring to hear the guys talk about their new music! So that got me thinking, why not ask similar questions to my favourite writer? So, question for you, what inspires you the most, as a writer? Are there were any works of fiction and/or writers that have inspired you and that you could recommend to me? 1/2

Oh, my dear, you shouldn't have allowed me this opportunity to ramble but also thank you sm for allowing me this opportunity to ramble. (also I know you're asking this as someone who has read my fanfiction only but I'm also going to apply this to how I view my ~original work~ because that'll probably give you a better answer).

1) I completely agree about how wonderful 5sos' interviews have been lately! They're all so insightful as artists and as they grow older and navigate the industry, they learn better and more profound ways to articulate themselves. I know they're a bit on the chaotic side sometimes (because they never really got a chance to grow out of that more youthful phase if you think about it and sometimes that sort of childish joy pops out) but when they actually answer a question, they always exude such genuine passion and love for what they do and I admire them so much for it. Ashton especially majorly inspires me as an artist.

2) What inspires me most? I think that's a really tough question and I’m not going to answer it well but I can try! I'm a pretty passionate person in life (as is probably apparent) and just about everything I make is crafted with a lot of care and excitement. And, a lot of the times, has some type of message I’m trying to at least subconsciously get across to an audience. And that largely just comes from the world surrounding me. I'm really obsessed with the way people view the world and I feel like every time I write a story, I'm just trying to capture even, like, a tiny sliver of the human experience. I want to be able to write a story that feels real for a reader. So I think that what inspires me the most is just people and how people feel. If you want a more tangible answer than that I cannot give you one lol! I wish I had more concrete things to describe but I've been writing novels for about eight years so it's hard to really pinpoint one specific, tangible thing that keeps me going. In terms of fanfic, I’m inspired a lot by… this sounds fucking horrible lmfao but, lack of understanding from people. Or simply ignorance/lack of exposure to a topic. I write a lot of stories with the intention of teaching something. Usually, in my fanfic, it twists back to consent but sometimes I have other things I’m trying to make a reader think about too. I talk a lot about mortality in my original work. Guilt is a pretty frequent theme I tackle in original novels. And a lot of my short stories boil down to defining different versions of love.

3) So you didn't specify if you wanted other fanfic writer inspirations or irl writer inspirations so I'm going to give you a mix of both. Strap in, she’s long.

In the 5sos fandom specifically, there are two writers I hold pretty damn highly. And I’m not going to tag either of them properly because I already gush about them too much and I don’t want them to think I’m obsessed. I’ve probably said a bunch that Anna (@/ashtcnirwin & elivigar) is my favorite writer in this fandom but it isn’t any less true now than it was when I joined this fandom two years ago. Anna has some of the most gorgeous prose I’ve ever read. I love the way she provides very sensory details in a story and I always feel really emersed when I read her work. Her stories move in a very fluid trajectory and I think read in the same way a prose poem might. They’re very lyrical to me which is what I enjoy about them so much. Anna's fics all feel, to me, very dense in a very good way. They sort of swallow you up. So she inspires me to lean into my more poetic side when writing fiction. Also, she just makes me want to write for fun because she hypes me up too much. And the other writer I really admire here is Molly (@/burstingsunrise & galacticsugar). When I was doing theatre in high school (and writing scripts), I was told that every scene should flow to a specific beat. If you say your line off rhythm, the entire audience will know because it will sound off. And it’s hard, usually, in literature to point out that type of bah-bah-beat style, y’know? But I think that Molly specifically is a great writer to read to understand how scenes have beats. She has this fantastic more modern style that I love. I feel very often that my prose gets carried away in flowery language and while Molly does have a lot of beautiful prose in her stories (looking @ Stained Hearts rn), she balances it out so fucking well with contemporary dialogue and these absolutely buck-wild similes that plant you right in the real world and current times. So she inspires me a lot to try and be more playful with my writing and try to incorporate more realism into my work. Like, for instance, my fic Take Notes wouldn’t have been possible for me if I hadn’t read Molly’s fics (specifically this one) first.

As for irl writers I really admire!!

The biggest one is Tim O’Brien. I think that it’s pretty (painfully) obvious if you’ve read Tim’s work and mine that I have adapted my style a lot in his image. I love his style of writing and I also love his viewpoint on writing. I would recommend any of his short stories/novels (my favorite being The Things They Carried). He talks in most of his work (specifically TTTC which is centered around the theme) about something called a “heart truth” which explains that a story doesn’t have to be non-fiction to be true. He relies on human emotion to tell his stories and implies that you should write what you feel rather than what necessarily happened to you. And that’s what makes the story true: the heart’s feeling about it. It kind of falls into that unreliable narrator niche and I’m just in love with it. I would highly, highly recommend him.

I’m very into Ray Bradbury as a writer. I enjoy his short stories and I love his book called Zen in the Art of Writing which is all about his own inspirations regarding his work. I appreciate him talking about how he truly doesn’t know anything about his characters when writing; he just lets them have it and follows their lead. And sometimes they don’t do what he wants but that’s the story he has to go with now. And he talks a lot about what his subconscious leads him to do in stories rather than what he actively chooses to do. Which is something that I as a writer often feel! That’s why it’s pointless for me to outline. I genuinely never know what’s coming next in a story. I never know how a piece is going to end until I am writing that ending.

This is a more niche part of my writing inspirations but there’s this poem called “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman that I love and I think articulates the way I view (or, I guess, viewed) smut while writing it. So I think that’s pretty nice to check out. It’s a beautiful non-explicit poem that discusses the implications of intimacy within sexual moments.

Bo Burnham isn’t necessarily a “writer” but I am a massive fan of his and I think a lot of my love for writing does stem from him. As both a performer and a writer, I love the way he crafts shows and I have such respect for his art. I would so so highly recommend his Netflix special “Make Happy.”

This is gonna not make sense lol but Ryan Ross from Panic! at the Disco is also a pretty major inspiration for the way I write poetry and the way I wrote stories a few years back. I would recommend just reading the lyrics to the album Pretty. Odd like they’re a poem collection. I just think they’re so fucking lovely (specifically “Behind the Sea”).

If you’re into fantasy novels, VE Schwab was a major influence for me back when I wrote original fantasy. Her series A Darker Shade of Magic made me go ballistic. Her worldbuilding and character dynamics are almost unparalleled.

Also, plays!! Oh my god, dude, read plays as often as you can. I think plays are so fucking important to read because they’re the bare bones of a story, you know? They’re down to just the dialogue. And so I think if you want to write a good, natural story, you should read plays for those core details. Some of my favorite scripts include “The Normal Heart” by Larry Kramer (shocker there), “Dead Man’s Cellphone” by Sarah Ruhl (and honestly any Sarah Ruhl plays, she is fucking wild), “The Nerd” by Larry Shue, “Almost Maine” by John Cariani, “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean” by Ed Graczyk, and my most recent favorite is “A Raisin in the Sun” by Lorraine Hansberry.

Thank you so much for asking. I hope this gives you anything at all to work with lol <3

[paenling]

no ones saying you cant enjoy daniil? people like him as a character but mostly Because he’s an asshole and he’s interesting. the racism and themes of colonization in patho are so blatant

nobody said “by order of Law you are forbidden from enjoying daniil dankovsky in any capacity”, but they did say “if you like daniil dankovsky you are abnormal, problematic, and you should be ashamed of yourself”, so i’d call that an implicit discouragement at the least. not very kind.

regardless, he is a very interesting asshole and we love to make fun of him! but i do not plan to stop seeing his character in an empathetic light when appropriate to do so. we’re all terribly human.

regarding “the racism and themes of colonization in patho”, we’ve gotta have a sit-down for this one because it’s long and difficult. tl;dr here.

i’ve written myself all back and forth and in every direction trying to properly pin down the way i feel about this in a way that is both logically coherent and emotionally honest, but it’s not really working. i debated even responding at all, but i do feel like there are some things worth saying so i’m just going to write a bunch of words, pick a god, and pray it makes some modicum of sense.

the short version: pathologic 2 is a flawed masterwork which i love deeply, but its attempts to be esoteric and challenging have in some ways backfired when it comes to topical discussions such as those surrounding race, which the first game didn’t give its due diligence, and the second game attempted with incomplete success despite its best efforts.

the issue is that when you have a game that is so niche and has these “elevated themes” and draws from all this kind of academic highbrow source material -- the fandom is small, but the fandom consists of people who want to analyze, pathologize, and dissect things as much as possible. so let’s do that.

first: what exactly is racist or colonialist in pathologic? i’m legitimately asking. people at home: by what mechanism does pathologic-the-game inflict racist harm on real people? the fact that the Kin are aesthetically and linguistically inspired by the real-world Buryat people (& adjacent groups) is a potential red flag, but as far as i can tell there’s never any value judgement made about either the fictionalized Kin or the real-world Buryat. the fictional culture is esoteric to the player -- intended to be that way, in fact -- but that’s not an inherently bad thing. it’s a closed practice and they’re minding their business.

does it run the risk of being insensitive with sufficiently aggressive readings? absolutely, but i don’t think that’s racist by itself. they’re just portrayed as a society of human beings (and some magical ones, if you like) that has flaws and incongruences just as the Town does. it’s not idealizing or infantilizing these people, but by no means does it go out of its way to villainize them either. there is no malice in this depiction of the Kin. 

is it the fact that characters within both pathologic 1 & 2 are racist? that the player can choose to say racist things when inhabiting those characters? no, because pathologic-the-game doesn’t endorse those things. they’re throwaway characterization lines for assholes. acknowledging that racism exists does not make a media racist. see more here.

however, i find it’s very important to take a moment and divorce the racial discussions in a game like pathologic 2 from the very specific experiences of irl western (particularly american) racism. it’s understandable for such a large chunk of the english-speaking audience to read it that way; it makes sense, but that doesn’t mean it’s correct. although it acknowledges the relevant history to some extent, on account of being set in 1915, pathologic 2 is not intended to be a commentary about race, and especially not current events, and especially especially not current events in america. it’s therefore unfair, in my opinion, to attempt to diagnose it with any concrete ideology or apply its messages to an american racial paradigm.

it definitely still deals with race, but it always, to me, seemed to come back around the exploitation of race as an ultimately arbitrary division of human beings, and the story always strove to be about human beings far more than it was ever about race. does it approach this topic perfectly? no, but it’s clearly making an effort. should we be aware of where it fails to do right by the topic? yes, definitely, but we should also be charitable in our interpretations of what the writers were actually aiming for, rather than reactionarily deeming them unacceptable and leaving it at that. do we really think the writers for pathologic 2 sat down and said “we’re going to go out of our way to be horrible racists today”? i don’t.

IPL’s writing team is a talented lot, and dybowski as lead writer has the kinds of big ideas that elevate a game to a work of art, particularly because he’s not afraid to get personal. on that front, some discussion is inescapable as pathologic 2 deals in a lot of racial and cultural strife, because it’s clearly something near to the his heart, but as i understand it was never really meant to be a narrative “about” race, at least not exclusively so, and especially not in the same sense as the issue is understood by the average American gamer. society isn't a monolith and the contexts are gonna change massively between different cultures who have had, historically, much different relationships with these concepts.

these themes are “so blatant” in pathologic 2 because clearly, on some level, IPL wanted to start a discussion. I think it’s obvious that they wanted to make the audience uncomfortable with the choices they were faced with and the characters they had to inhabit -- invoke a little ostranenie, as it were, and force an emotional breaking point. in the end the game started a conversation and i think that’s something that was done in earnest, despite its moments of obvious clumsiness. 

regarding colonialism, this is another thing that the game is just Not About. we see the effects and consequences of colonialism demonstrated in the world of pathologic, and it’s something we’re certainly asked to think about from time to time, but the actual plot/narrative of the game is not about overcoming or confronting explicitly colonialist constructs, etc. i personally regard this as a bit of a missed opportunity, but it’s just not what IPL was going for.

instead they have a huge focus, as discussed somewhat in response to this ask, on the broader idea of powerful people trying to create a “utopia” at the mortal cost of those they disempower, which is almost always topical as far as i’m concerned, and also very Russian.

i think there was some interview where it was said that the second game was much more about “a mechanism that transforms human nature” than the costs of utopia, but it’s still a persistent enough theme to be worth talking about both as an abstraction of colonialism as well as in its more-likely intended context through the lens of wealth inequality, environmental destruction & government corruption as universal human issues faced by the marginalized classes. i think both are important and intelligent readings of the text, and both are worth discussion.

both endings of pathologic 2 involve sacrifice in the name of an “ideal world” where it’s impossible to ever be fully satisfied. in the Diurnal Ending, Artemy is tormented over the fate of the Kin and the euthanasia of his dying god and all her miracles, but he needs to have faith that the children he’s protected will grow up better than their parents and create a world where he and his culture will be immortalized in love. in the Nocturnal Ending, he’s horrified because in preserving the miracle-bound legacy of his people as a collective, he’s un-personed himself to the individuals he loves, but he needs to have faith that the uniqueness and magic of the resurrected Earth was precious enough to be worth that sacrifice. neither ending is fair. it’s not fair that he can’t have both, but that’s the idea. because that “utopia” everyone’s been chasing is an idol that distracts from the important work of being a human being and doing your best in a flawed world. 

because pathologic’s themes as a series are so very “Russian turn-of-the-century” and draw a ton of stylistic and topical inspiration from the theatre and literature of that era, i don’t doubt that it’s also inherited some of its inspirational literature’s missteps. however, because the game’s intertextuality is so incredibly dense it’s difficult to construct a super cohesive picture of its actual messaging. a lot of its references and themes will absolutely go over your head if you enter unprepared -- this was true for me, and it ended up taking several passes and a bunch of research to even begin appreciating the breadth of its influences.

(i’d argue this is ultimately a good thing; i would never have gone and picked up Camus or Strugatsky, or even known who Antonin Artaud was at all if i hadn’t gone in with pathologic! my understanding is still woefully incomplete and it’s probably going to take me a lot more effort to get properly fluent in the ideology of the story, but that’s the joy of it, i think. :) i’m very lucky to be able to pursue it in this way.)

anyway yes, pathologic 2 is definitely very flawed in a lot of places, particularly when it tries to tackle race, but i’m happy to see it for better and for worse. the game attempts to discuss several adjacent issues and stumbles as it does so, but insinuating it to be in some way “pro-racist” or “pro-colonialist” or whatever else feels kind of disingenuous to me. they’re clearly trying, however imperfectly, to do something intriguing and meaningful and empathetic with their story.

even all this will probably amount to a very disjointed and incomplete explanation of how pathologic & its messaging makes me feel, but what i want -- as a broader approach, not just for pathologic -- is for people to be willing to interpret things charitably. 

sometimes things are made just to be cruel, and those things should be condemned, but not everything is like that. it’s not only possible but necessary to be able to acknowledge flaws or mistakes and still be kind. persecuting something straight away removes any opportunity to examine it and learn from it, and pathologic happens to be ripe with learning experiences. 

it’s all about being okay with ugliness, working through difficult nuances with grace, and the strength of the human spirit, and it’s a story about love first and foremost, and i guess we sort of need that right now. it gave me some of its love, so i’m giving it some of my patience.