#sexism in fantasy

[tedkaczynskiofficial]

People describing the roles women had/have and trying to justify this are greatly missing the point.

You are still describing [occupation]. If they were a man or an unmarried woman, you'd call them [occupation].

Women have also always been involved with the work y'all are describing as the men's role.

Y'all are extra fucking ridiculous for trying to justify the use of this language for modern women today.

There is no reason to play devil's advocate for demeaning sexist language that only describes women in relation to their male relatives and denies them the title their work should grant them. There are cases where this sort of language is fine to use in writing, the same way that sometimes it makes sense for a slur to be included in a piece of writing. That doesn't make this good language or offer justification for it.

[silverity]

i think it's James Baldwin's criticism of the American film industry's fixation on Westerns that i'm thinking of, that the romanticism of the "Wild West" was a white male colonial fantasy. a lawless land, where a man can rule through brute strength and violence, his whiteness makes him superior to those deemed "savage", and he can have any woman he pleases as long as he can force her to submit.

i've always felt those type of "grimdark" medieval fantasies with so much sexual violence against women function the exact same way. it's a Western for male incel nerds. and it's not surprising that the most famous example of this, game of thrones, is so pornographic as porn is another male fantasy.

[how-bout-i-tell-you-anyway]

ok, i'm just going to say it. there's a reason that some of us like reading monster/alien romance just as much as maybe even more than regular romance.

and no, it's not about the supernatural dicks (at least not for me).

in short, it's about respect. obviously, the monster/alien comes from a place somewhere other than human society on planet Earth. because of that, he is completely ignorant of the sexist bias inherent in our society. (and by inherent i mean literally trained into us since birth and embedded in every aspect of our society)

sometimes the monster's views are more misogynistic — but in those stories the heroine manages to change his views by earning his respect as they navigate their inter-special differences (aka, he learns and fixes himself).

usually, the monsters believe strongly in equality between the sexes, and they are often shocked and horrified if/when they learn of how human men treat their partners. [and yes, i know some of them are over-the-top protective to the point of being controlling, but even then it's because they view the heroines as someone to continuously be protected, cherished, and respected.]

TLDR: it's an escape into a romantic fantasy where the love interest is GUARANTEED to be a good partner because he literally could never think to harm, insult, or disrespect the heroine

[quietsophie]

My manager is the worst. He makes me feel so dumb and weak. I can tell he resents women. Every time we're alone I think about him pinning me with his weight and forcing himself into my unprotected pussy. I want to feel him speed up and breathe heavier when I beg him not to cum inside me. I want to cry and whine and 0rgasm uncontrollably as he shoots a hot load straight into my fertile womb.

[divorcedwife]

one thing i really liked in pillars of eternity worldbuilding is how pallegina, due to her fantasy condition, is in her society socially a woman but legally genderless, and thus allowed to join a knight order that doesn't allow women. and that point of view isnt universal, just how her society works. i vastly prefer this sort of writing to just, oh no there's no sexism in our world, it's just coincidence that 95% of knights are men and 95% of rulers are men and

[the-kingshound]

Putting the current angst aside for a second, I find it telling how the two major critiques to the game are that the characters are too nice to MC and that the ROs are too feminine (because they are nice. Because men aren't nice and don't say "dear" or "darling")

... I don't know

[alicentsaegon]

Modern fantasy writers are like

"I want to tackle themes such as misogyny or clssism or racism or homophobia in my work!🤗🤗🤗 No there's none of that present in my book, this society that mimics 1300s central Europe suffers from none of these issues because thats not progressive and if we have DRAGONS and MAGIC why do we need this ahaha am I right? 😅🙂‍↕️Except for this individual conflict in this novel the characters have to overcome but that's an isolated case. Oh look there's a Queen!"

[jackalpants]

Come back to me when you draw orc women with bigger tusks than orc men

Orc guys with big soft cow eyes, dainty little tusks, tall and strong and slim in the hips, and their absolute unit monstrous wife, apple of their eyes, capable of bench-pressing a city bus and deeply unpretty to human culture

Basically this

But orcs

[wetcatspellcaster]

I'm not going to tag this bc I can practically visualise the hornets nest I'm kicking, but I am starting to get annoyed by people who are complaining about inconsistencies in dragon age lore, when the inconsistences mostly seem to be happening in places where the old lore was severely problematic and written at the height of game of thrones grimdark fantasy market trends.

[she-her-cuntboy]

The thing is, right, I'm not confused... but if someone "convinced" me I was confused, well, I kinda have to fuck them, don't I?

*twirling hair*

[alpaca-clouds]

The Witcher books always confuse me

And not for the reason you might think.

I can always be on the "I knew this, before it was cool" train for The Witcher. Based on the fact that I just read every fantasy book that our local libraries had. And one of the book series, that was in the library, was The Witcher, as they got translated into German in the early 2000s.

It meant a lot to me at the time because of Ciri. Ciri was the first ever non-anime character, I encountered in media, who was LGBTQ*. Because, you know, representation matters.

But, at the time, there was still so much about the books that I did not get.

Again, I read them from the library, not owning them. And also knew them under the German title "Der Hexer". So, when I was a young adult and my then boyfriend started hyping this new fantasy game, I originally did not even realize from the title that it was a game based on those books I read as a teenager. Imagine my surprise, when I played that first game back then and realized: "Oh, I know those characters!"

I read the books again in 2012 and was still fairly impressed with them. But over the years - reading the books again and again - I got confused about these books. How where these books written in the early 1990s by a white man?!

Like, these books - again - have not only openly LGBTQ* characters, with one of the main characters being openly bisexual, but they also just tackle a plenthora of feminist and anti-colonialist issues within the text. And I am just sitting there: How did this got written in the 1990s, before the age of the internet? How did it get published at the time? What kinda man is Andrzej Sapkowski, that he was actually interested in writing this?

You know... I do not hate the games. They are very fun games. While I only played that first game twice, I did put hours upon hours in Witcher 2 and 3. But also... I absolutely get Sapkowski's frustration with those games. Because the games literally just do not get the books. The point with Geralt as a protagonist is, that for the most part he is just some dude. He is not some superhero type. Heck, he acquires a disability midway through the books and struggles with a ton of stuff after that. But the games ignore this as much as they ignore Triss' scars (and her self-consciousness about them). Just as they ignore a good chunk of the colonization angle of the books.

And... Really... The books are probably my favorite high fantasy book series. And quite frankly, given that a ton of folks got into the fandom through the games, the fandom is obviously full of folks, who have not really gotten access to this full picture and are very ignorant about the themes of the book series. And while I am very on the "hey, adaptions can do their own thing" train... At times I just look at the games with their sexy times side quest and think to myself: "Hmm, they kinda didn't get it, did they?"

To me it is really ironic, though. That this Polish book series from the fucking 90s manages to align with my progressive values a lot more than most books being released these days.

[separatist-apologist]

Calling the IC nepo-babies is the most hilarious thing I've ever heard because what do you have?

The High Lord, who is the product of a lesser fae woman and the magically chosen High Lord that doesn't get a say in if he's chosen by the gods to rule or not, who is also discriminated against by his own court (and the people outside it) for not being full High Fae

A bastard-born general who never knew his father and whose mother was murdered for being sexually assaulted, and was raised in a war camp for the first decade of his life

A shadowsinger who was likely also the product of sexual assault at the hands of his powerful father, who then punished Azriel for his OWN discretion by locking him in total darkness for 11 years and allowed his two older sons to torture the Azriel so severely he still carries the scars

An ancient god that spent 1000 years trapped in a prison

A woman whose only value to her family was her reproductive organs and when she no longer served that function, had a note nailed to her body before she was dumped over a foreign border where, lets be real, they expected her to be killed

And a badly neglected human girl who literally died at the altar of freeing a land that she'd been terrified of her entire life.

But like. Hell yeah. Go off, overthrow those nepo-baby rulers which DEFINITELY isn't it's own illiterate take of the reading.

[clearancecreedwatersurvival]

I don’t know or care if it runs counter to jirt’s canon, red haired proto-Eowyn should have ended the movie as a warrior queen instead of her cousin taking the throne, he was Barely in it.

[destructive-delight]

ah. sexism exists.

[progressofthepilgrim]

How many times are we gonna see casual hatred for and dehumanization of women like this expressed by men with a cross emoji in their name or "Christ is King" in their bio, before we acknowledge that religious men have a very real problem and the ones who are not radicalized by misogyny are doing nothing to stop it?

[wolf-tail]

The fact that I loved the movie Pixels so much as a kid, and the fact that it ever got produced at all, is that wishfulfilling, self gratifying, power fantasy bullshit can be enjoyed by other people than you, you just have to find the right audience.

Pixels sucks in the way that most movies in that vein suck, It's an Adam Sandler movie after all, but there are things to like about it. There's a sort of charm to the fact that it feels so clearly like it was written by twelve year old boys.

"My best friend is the president and we use our video game powers to save the world, hot girls like us, and the asshole who cheated at donkey kong and bullies me acknowledges that im better" could actually be a fairly solid movie, if the characters were more funny and charismatic, and the hot babe love interests are treated more like complete characters than prizes to be won that trip over themselves at the sight of the first complete loser they see.

The movie also somehow manages to have the most boomer ass take on video games and still be thoroughly pro video game. It essentially has the vibe that all video games made after 1990 are kiddy trash, the only real gamers are the people who poured a thousand quarters into an arcade cabinet in the years before the Soviet Union collapsed. This is worse than boomer bullshit, it's Gen X bullshit.

There's a good movie hidden somewhere underneath all the sexist and unfunny Adam Sandler stank of Pixels. The movie is pure nostalgia bait to a very specific audience, so perhaps better writers would zero in on that feeling of childhood whimsy, and the benefits of maintaining it into adulthood.

You all know me as a person who is generally pro self indugent power fantasy, but I also know that power fantasy can be bad in more ways than just being pure self gratification. Mary Sue media that is made to appeal to pretty much men and men alone, or whatever malformed caricature of the average man imagined by a depraved filmmaker that assumes all men must just be mindless, masculinity obsessed sex pests with dicks for brains like he is (looking at you Michael Bay), tends to reek of misogyny, the kinds that imagine that women don't have inner lives that don't revolve entirely around men and reproduction. This is what people talk about when they talk about the male gaze in media.

This is the kind of media like isekai anime where half naked teenage girls have the camera angle focused on their chests every three seconds and only exist to be the harem for the most boring man to ever exist.

This doesn't mean that all power fantasy made by and for primarily men is just going to be like that by default, this kind of media is just a symptom of societal misogyny in general, and typically made by men who have done little to no work in unlearning it. If a man has done the work to check his own sexism, the power fantasies that he dreams of and writes into movies, books, games and shows probably aren't going to be sexist.

To make a long story short, Pixels could've been good If the people who made it weren't sexist old crustbags with no comedy skill.