#this weird enlightenment atheistic streak vs increasing real world fundamentalism

[honourablejester]

See, this loops me back around to the initial problem in the post.

Showing people heroically fighting demons is bad, because it valorises historical religious wars. Which means that we’re saying fantasy fiction cannot interact with religion as real without being automatically morally wrong. And I don’t agree with that.

This is what I mean by a fundamentally atheist view of fantasy fiction. And of real history, for that matter.

In a fantasy world, gods are real. Demons are real. Magic is real. Religious wars are not just fought by humans against other humans, as they are in our world, but against non-human supernatural forces. This is a difference in context.

(Which is, mind you, an atheist statement in and of itself, since I’m assuming that gods and demons aren’t real in our world, so there’s inherent bias in that in and of itself).

We are assuming that portraying crusades against demons is bad because those demons are stand ins for the real historical humans of the real historical crusades. But they aren’t. Not automatically. Humans are the only possible enemies in our world. But in a fantasy world, they aren’t.

Instead of exploring the ramifications of that massive change in worldbuilding, how would real magic interact with human desires, how would real gods and real demons interact with human desires, we’re apparently forever stuck assuming that only echoes from our world matter.

Yes, there is a legacy of using fictional non-human species to stand in for real-world other humans that the writer views as ‘lesser’. But the automatic assumption that it’s the only purpose a fictional non-human species could have means that we’re also stuck with the idea that humans are the only things we can imagine as people. Or as important. People like us are the only things we can imagine mattering. If a thing can think and talk, it’s a human or a representation of a human.

In this crusade, the enemies are portrayed as demonically evil because they’re demons. Not evil humans. Actual literal demons.

In real world religions, the depictions of demons or things roughly analogous to demons varies a lot, but they’re usually a force of nature/supernature that is fundamentally either hostile or indifferent to humans. In Christian mythology, demons are creatures that are literally not of our world that want to harm it. What if that was real. What if we had a story where that was the force we’re interacting with.

What is the point of fantasy (or science fiction) if we’re not allowed to treat these fantastical elements as an actual real thing for the characters and societies and systems of the world to interact with? Why are we bothering to create a world where gods and demons are real if it’s not allowed to change anything?

It’s also so bizarrely puritanical for something so incredibly atheist. Because if a story goes out of its way to come up with an enemy that is fully inhuman so that we’re not pointing our violent fantasies at a human, you’re just going ‘actually you’re lying, you really want to kill humans after all’. It’s just ‘violence is bad and you’re morally bad for wanting a safe portrayal of it’, just dressed up differently. Again, like I said in the original post, I’m getting such a vibe of ‘video games make children violent’ here.

Because that is the only concern here. The use of demons as the enemy. Because, again, as we’ve gone through in this post, the actual crusades in the game were portrayed as morally complicated, dubiously effective, and full of complicated people on all sides. Including the demons. In 40K, too, the Imperium is portrayed as a religious fascist hellscape. And the idea you’re forwarding is that the story considers said fascist hellscape as justified because their opponents are literal demons. And that any story that uses literal demons does so to justify whatever they’re putting up against them.

But that is such a flat interpretation. Oh, I don’t doubt it’s true, intent-wise, from some creators. But you can also use a demonic foe to highlight how inhuman humans look even by comparison. You can use a demonic foe to ask, actually, what is the qualitative difference between these two stripes of evil. You can use a demonic foe to ask is anything justified in the face of such a threat. You can use a demonic foe as essentially a supernatural natural disaster equivalent, an unreasoning onslaught that people have to just survive.

I just hate that what we’re saying here is that no, actually, you can’t do any of that. You can never portray supernatural elements as real. You can never portray religion as a force for good, not even a complicated one. You can never treat fantasy threats as real in their world because actually they’re just real-world biases with a different paint job. You can never engage with the premise of the story. You can never ask questions of relative morality, because as soon as you say the word ‘demon’ the sides are automatically drawn. Which is such a Christian moral response to start with, actually.

This is just such a weird, puritan, simultaneously atheist and extremely Christian ideology underlying the thought a) that nothing supernatural can be treated as real, b) that Christian-named evils automatically trump all others regardless of the actual effects shown, c) that simulated violence is indicative of an inherent desire for real violence, d) that any interaction with the concept of religion indicates an inherent fundamentalism, and e) that there has to be a moral victor in any portrayal of conflict.

To be blunt, I do not agree that portraying a religious force in a fantasy world facing a demonic force must be indicative of a belief that religious wars against humans in our world were justified. Because fantasy is not reality, because humans are not demons, and because I don’t view engaging with the premise of a fantasy world as an inherent sin.

‘A fantasy religion might be morally justified for launching a holy war against an army of alien monstrosities who have ripped a literal hole in the world and are killing everything in a two hundred mile radius, with no signs of stopping there’ and ‘using religion as the real world moral justification for a war of conquest and colonialism against other humans is the origin of one of the darkest periods in human history’ are two statements that I am fully comfortable making and see absolutely no conflict between. Because those are two different circumstances. And I'll add on 'a fantasy crusade might be justified in fighting demons but not justified in how they treat the people caught between them at the same time'.

And if there are people in the audience who can’t see a difference between circumstances, or who are uncomfortable trying to make moral judgements without clear guidance or with potentially misleading guidance, or in a situation where there possibly isn’t a clear moral conclusion to come to (because, for example, this is Warhammer 40k and everyone in this fucking galaxy is some stripe of at least fucked up if not outright evil), that’s frankly a them problem.

kind of concerning how married the fantasy genre is to "crusades as a basically good thing"