#sexism in fantasy

[ae-neon]

If Cass kill the male in the village where his mother is murdered, he should have kill the female too to end their misery.

Because Illyrian social system revilved around the Male. Male is their provider and we dont see women in illyria having career. So who will put bread in the leftover female and kid? Who will ensure their safety. Like it or not, not matter how bad illyria treat women, they protect their own family. Cause it is a humiliation for the Male to not protect their own female (from rape, taken as sex slave like Cassia mother happen to be, wild animal, extreme weather, cold but its fine to them to clipped the female wing).

Now the women lose it all. Their home, their breadwinner, their protector from further violent and damage.

Really, Cassian? With the poverty in Illyria, can other camp take this female in? The camp themselves is struggling to live and now they have more to feed. Imagine the newborn and children watching their home blew up, their daddy killed because a grown ass male cant conduct a proper investigation on his mother (even though he is part of the government and have DAEMATI High Lord) and now this male cant regulate his own emotion

Hello anon

TW for serious topics surrounding war, death and slavery

You're so right. In similar real world circumstances many women are known to kill their children and then kill themselves rather than face what usually comes next. Often it's rape, slavery and death especially for their sons.

SJM is kind of insane for structuring most of Illyria in stationary camps? That's just not how societies work. Long term settlements are permanent and built to last. I think Illyrians are supposed to be somewhere between Spartans and Mongolian but SJM puts no effort into any of her worldbuilding so who knows.

In any case, Spartans had permanent structures. They lived in a city state with a stable and established government which regularly intervened on every aspect of their lives from birth to education and marriage. Every young man had to serve in the army and train from childhood and slavery sustained most of their economy.

Mongols were nomadic, they moved around and didn't tend towards fixed towns or cities. they lived in clans, most everyday things were handled by the community. Their government was largely decentralised despite having a Khan. Child soldiers were illegal and raiding and herding sustained most of their economy.

These two cultures cannot be ambiguously blurred just because they are both warrior cultures. And the one thing they did have in common sjm denies the Illyrians: women were important; they were legally and culturally respected.

Sjm's Illyria cannot exist. It has nothing. It means nothing. It is just savagery for the sake of trauma porn and fetishisation of poc men.

[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.

[ae-neon]

I really agree with this

I think it will be argued that in the newer style Persephone gets this feminist glow-up

But does she?

In so many of these newer tellings her power is either directly related to her husband or when it isn't - she's very powerful but still learning and largely ignorant on her own powers

Persephone was a goddess in her own right despite her youth. She grew up being a goddess, she wasn't ignorant about her world in the way so many of her counterparts are. She might not have been as powerful as him but she wasn't a lost lamb

It's not just Demeter who is broken down to raise Hades up, it's Persephone too

To stay on brand.

Feyre has to learn to read and use her powers from Rhys. She has to learn to see and understand herself from him. She is traumatized until he heals her.

Instead of her meeting him as his equal, she (while powerful, of course) must be raised to equal by him

My problem with Hades and Persephone retelling

(aka this will not end well for me)

So sometime ago I made a post about things I hate in "modern literature" basically me ranting about booktok shit, and I mentioned my pure hatred for the "hades/Persephone retellings" genre and I tried to explain it in the reblogs but I didn't phrased myself very well there so I want to do it again?

So here I go swinging another baseball bat to the wasps nest.

The Homeric hymn of demeter is this very known tale of why we have the seasons, the plot basically goes as: Hades god of the underworld kidnaps Persephone goddess of flowers, demeter her mother goddess of crops gets desperate don't do her job while trying to find her the world suffers yada yada something something in the end Persephone has to spent half of the year with her mother (spring and summer) and the other half with her husband in the underworld (autumn/winter)

Right

Now let's go to the " doesn't matter my opinion people will be mad at me "part

The full myth as is presented in the Homeric hymn of demeter has Persephone pretty clearly being kidnapped and held against her will

The myth was very clear about Persephone's not willingness to the marriage as she 1- screamed for help 2- was described as miserable when visited by Hermes 3- asked for her mother 4-lightened up once hearing about her 5- is described as being tricked by hades to eat the pomegranates who kept her tied to the underworld

In the context of when the myth was created the reasoning was pretty clear to be about the horrifying yet inevitability of wedding, and the separation between mother and daughter.

Arranged or forced marriages are a fictional thing to a lot of people nowadays, it's a thing of time pieces or something from religions that you don't understand and find oppressive but it was (and still is in some places ) a reality

The arranged marriage has its perks in some context as it takes away the burden of having to choose your partner and if your culture is build on this you would not see this as a oppressive practice just how things are the sky is blue and someday your father will choose your husband.But there's also the fear, your future husband could be half decent person there was a chance or an horrible monster very possible sometimes you truly couldn't know.

Kinda like death itself there was This uncertainty, the fear yet anxiety and maybe longing of it without knowing what would come next.

So in context this tale probably resonated a lot with girls and women at the time as a reminder that after the marriage they can still see their mothers time to time, it wasn't death itself just separation, even if their wedding was bleak as a dark winter, spring will come.

And I love this tale really

Then we have the new context, like I said the fear and longing of arranged marriage is not a reality to many people in modern western secular world, But suffocating mothers are.

There is discussion on whether or not Persephone went on her own will but it is a pointless discussion the result is still the same she has half of the year up here half down there.

But the retellings do a weird thing, some of them reframe it to make demeter the villain.

Demeter goes from grieving mother to an angry wench who it's just terrified of an empty nest and suffocates Persephone she is mother goethel locking Rapunzel in a tower,She is the opressor.

And hades is the stand in badboy he is rhysand, darkling, Damon Salvatore and draco Malfoy In leather pants and all the other guys in black clothes but not in a cringe emo edgylord way in a dangerous way with a jawline to cut diamonds and abs for days, rich and powerful a dominating alpha ready to sweep the damsel ad bring her to freedom.

Do you ever heard that anarbor song 18, if not listen it's exactly the hades guy on those retellings

And the thing is I have no true problem with this concept it's not my cup of tea(I prefer the golden retriever rather than the black cat) and I do think the amount of coercion and straight up sexual assault on those are quite not good, but it might be someone's else's cup.

The problem is calling this a feminist retelling as by making Persephone a willing bride it empowers her.

It truly doesn't.

The original was already empowering a grieving mother doing anything on her power to save her lost daughter is fucking punk.

Yet the rebellious vein of the modern author the desire to be that girl the one who had the guts to actually runaway from home after fighting with your mom for not letting you paint your hair, mixed with the desire to be coddled by a dark prince charming, aman who will desire you so much he won't be able to control himself, a beautiful rich man who will worship you, have amazing sex with you, will be enough of a feminist to respect your choices yet enough of a patriarchal alpha male to spoil rotten with all things money can buy, provide for you as you are his queen, this desire takes one of the most simple yet understandable tale of true feminine power and bastardize it to another opposite Attraction tale.

And this is why I hate hades and Persephone retellings.

[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

[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

[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.

[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.

[filibusterfrog]

Would you say you learn more heavily towards fantasy in your art? If so, what about fantasy does that?

i actually rly dislike most fantasy media so im making the kind of content i think id enjoy. makes the world slightly nicer to just make nice things

[rhaenin-time]

This is your reminder that ambiguity in a (competently written) story functions to force the reader or viewer to engage on a thematic level, rather than a literal plot level. In other words, you don't "answer" ambiguity with conspiracy-grade theories born and "proven" through easter egg hunts and counting breadcrumbs. The thematic answer, the message of the ambiguous part of the story, should fit regardless of whichever of the likely possible "answers" is the "true answer." Because in cases of ambiguity, the thematic answer is the "true answer."

Do with that what you will.

[mistninja]

I dont like DNFing books but they are BIG and they are in the same limbo space as Asoiaf so it doesn't seem worth it.... has anyone here read them and if so would you say it gets better soon?

[just-a-little-radish]