Guess I should follow up on the orc thing because that got all popular and shit.
Lots of fantasy genres tell stories on a national or larger scale, involve war and battle, and like having heroes show off their skills. Structurally, I think this lends itself to ‘armies filled with evil monsters that the heroes can mow down and not feel too guilty about.’ (There’s usually some guilt in modern stories, as a figleaf, but usually not as much as the killing of thousands of sentient beings would imply.)
It’s both true that A) This doesn’t have to be the case, and B) if you want to read/write epic fantasy but also cordon yourself off from the Horde of Savage Monsters trope for moral reasons, you are objectively going to limit your options.
While I’m not much into gaming, I get the impression that’s how indie games with weird interfaces and fourth-wall-breaking plots that intentionally screw with the player’s head went from a revelation to a cliche within a few years. Similarly I hear a lot about fantasy in which “nothing happens, but at least it’s brown and queer people it’s not happening to” (which is not something I’d like to read or write, but I hear it wins awards). People are trying to create vegan, all-organic, cruelty-free fantasy and realizing that it limits their options relative to people who are fine with pizza and Coke. Both groups of revolutionaries eventually run into the boundaries inherent to their artistic decisions.
There’s nothing wrong with living a certain lifestyle for moral reasons. There is something wrong with trying to make everyone else live like you.
Especially because I think the critics are getting the motivations of Savage Monster fantasy wrong. It’s part of the whole widening circles of concern thing! We went from stories about slaughtering the next tribe over to the next town to the next country (imagine making a WWII movie where the American soldiers treated the Axis soldiers like Gimli and Legolas treated the orcs!) to slaughtering a different species that doesn’t even exist.
The attraction is being in awe of the courage and excellence of the heroes, not cheering on the slaughter per se. The critics seem to think the motivation for writing and reading these stories is the Savage Monsters themselves, rooting against them instead of for the heroes, and filling in your minority human group of choice because you’re just a hateful bastard like that.
And more than the “Oh-ho, I think YOU’RE the racist here!” responses, I think that’s where the disconnect is. They think it can’t be that people just want to hear a good story instead of turning everything into a deconstructive literary seminar. The general idea that “everything is Culture War, there are Good and Evil sides, and if you disagree with either of those you’re on Team Evil” is far more insulting and revolting to me than arguing about which monster stands in for which group of people.
(I may be the Weird One here in that I’m pretty much willing to roll with whatever a story tells me about who’s good and who’s bad, because I don’t think sussing it out is really a good use of my time. When I told a creative writing class that I couldn’t remember any villains in media that I rooted for more than the heroes, they sure looked at me funny.)
There was a post on SSCreddit’s culture war thread (either the old or new one, I forget) that would be mocked for its simplicity if it ever saw the light of day that went like “Sometimes people just want to read a book or play a game that’s about killing the fuck out of bad guys and no social shaming is going to stop that.” And basically, yeah.
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