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Here's an interesting essay on the presence--or lack of presence-of non-white folks in D&D throughout history. It's a funny thing to be a black kid into fantasy. Most of this stuff is ripped from Tolkien, and as much as I love LOTR, there is, indeed, something disquieting about the total whiteness of the movies. I don't blame that on Jackson or Tolkien. If someone was doing a fantasy epic based on Xhosa creation myths, I wouldn't expect to see any white people.
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You posted about he aging of cartoons a while back which inspired me to rewatch the D&D cartoons, which age very well, by the way. I'm not sure if our acrobat friend would reinforce the premise of the article you cite, or refute it (consider Bobby as a counter point to the obvious critique).
You would see plenty of white people if they were making a movie out of it.
On that note, did you ever read 300? Then watch the movie? I think most claims of whitening the source material are blown a little out of proportion but damn, they turned a group of olive-to-dark skinned guys with dreds into King Arthur's court and for spice made the Persian king into a giant black glitter queen. The political hackwork in the script (the Spartans were free and deomcratic? really?) was nothing by comparison
Very interesting. As a matter of fact, I just saw Role Models this weekend and didn't notice any black people in Laire. I'm gonna have to go back and look into that. They even hit up the Asian community with the king. Maybe I just can't remember. But they did throw in Ronnie at the end, only for him to be "killed" and died nobly.
Love your blog and read it every day!
I played D&D but the color of my character's skin never really entered into the equation. There was no visual representation of him - just numbers on a piece of paper. And since I had a thief/assassin I always thought more about cloaks and weapons than
I will say that Blizzard has done a better job with characters, though they are far from perfect. You can choose the hue of your characters and Humans can be made brown (for lack of a more concise term) - orcs can be made light or dark green, etc. It does seem, though, that every human NPC is white. I can't recall seeing any in the game that wasn't so. However, I would never play a human - the Alliance are terribad. Undead > everyone else.
I will also say that the Warcraft lore is far from clear when talking about bad guys vs. good guys. A simple expectation might be that the humans and elves are good guys and that the undead and orcs are bad. Light = good and dark = bad. However, in warcraft that's not necessarily the case. And I would argue that the humans are probably more evil than anyone else. The main hero is certainly Thrall, a dark skinned orc. The most peaceful leader is Cairne - the brown tauren (bull/human hybrid for those not in the know). And certainly the main villain (or anti-hero depending on your perspective) is Arthas, a human ex-paladin.
Maybe I'm over-analyzing it. Clearly D&D made no attempts at inclusion but new games are making progess. WoW clearly aims for ambiguity when assessing who is right and wrong and who represents good and evil (at least when dealing with playable races).
One thing we can all agree on though is that blood elves suck.
I was (and still am, although not as maniacally) into SF and fantasy and as young black girl, I admit at times I was troubled by the whiteness of the fantasy world. On the one hand, I just plowed ahead - it was what I liked, and so I went with it. But as I got older, I started to feel bad about it and sometimes even angered by it. I took a break from SF for a bit, but in the intervening years I have noticed a change; a touch more diversity. And, as I've gotten older, I also really don't give a damn what other people think quite so much.
Sorry, I do not have time to read the entire linked article, and I know the author was going to talk about this. But I do have to say, the Drow are/were, hands down, the coolest race in the entire AD&D universe. And Drizzt Do'Urden was the best character in the entire "Forgotten Realms" series of books.
Not a D&D guy, but a huge fan of LotR; the racial subtexts in those books goes far beyond lily whiteness. Consider the descriptions of the Southrons, together with their description as the only race of men to join up with Sauron, for example.
What is your opinion of the controversy over Star Wars when the first film came out in 1977? Lucas was criticized for having an all-white cast (though the lead villain was, of course, voiced by a then-uncredited black actor). Lucas put Billy Dee Williams in the second film but never formally apologized for his casting of the first; he claimed it was basically a coincidence, and made note of the Japanese influence on the story, which in its early drafts was supposed to have Japanese actors.
Roger Ebert has commented that ever since Billy Dee's appearance in "Empire," there has come a tradition of casting African Americans in science fiction movies. You have to admit, that has its downside. Maybe it's a blessing in disguise that fantasy movies like LOTR (which are only rarely good) aren't known for having black actors in them. Sci-fi and fantasy may appeal to the geeks, but they're not the stepping stone for ambitious thespians.
The fantasy genre is pretty much built on European myth and legend. LOTR is a direct attempt to write the original English mythology Tolkien thought was lost after the various waves of conquerors.
It's pretty hard to write people of color into that milieu without them feeling like the token black guy. Which is probably why most authors don't even try.
New games may be getting better in general, but that article reminded me of how creeped out I was when the original Fable rewards you for making your character a good guy by turning him paler and blonder, while evil characters grow progressively swarthier. Coupled with the whole "be anyone you want to be, as long as he's a dude" thing, it just seemed shockingly regressive. Especially for a game where I spent the entire time running up my homosexual encounter meter.
I'm surprised to be the first to bring up Ursula LeGuin, who with full intent gave the civilized folks in her Earthsea books coppery-brown to black skins; the barbarian invaders are blond.
Of course, when they made an Earthsea movie for the Sci-Fi Channel, Ged was payed by some Santa Monica beach boy (with Danny Glover as Magic Negro). LeGuin had several kinds of fit, which are probably preserved on her website.
Somewhat-related question: Is someone like Octavia Butler known broadly in the sci-fi community? (Sci-fi and fantasy aren't necessarily the same thing, but there's some overlap, right?) Having only read Kindred, I didn’t know until hearing an interview with her (I think I heard it the same year she died) that after writing that book she went into the science fiction realm? She talked about taking heat from the Black community for not being a “race woman”. Just curious to know how she was received. Was/is she considered mainstream?
Most of the D&D games are based in fantasy settings ripped off of medieval Europe. Of course everyone's white, the games take place in whitey whiteland.
But vanilla D&D is boring anyway. There are too many moral absolutes in most settings. There's too much determinism. The generic D&D world is tired and old. What surprises me is that people still play in Forgotten Realms or one of the myriad other Tolkien-based worlds.
But D&D is just one out of a bunch, and in my opinion one of the worst tabletop gaming systems out there. Shadowrun, for instance, has a much more interesting take on social issues.
As a GM, I threw away my PHB a long time ago, and I like to design my settings in-house. One of my more recent campaigns, for instance, was set in a plutocratic colonial empire, in which non-humans were second class citizens. The underclass was filled by anime-style cat people, who were kept as domestic servants and laborers. They could have children with humans, but of course, miscegenation was illegal. (Some beat the odds and were successful entrepreneurs. Hats off to racial progress.) On the other hand, democracy existed---but only in the more progressive goblin cities. The wars fought between humans and goblins had more to do with Machiavellian aims than with one or the other's moral superiority.
Why you would ever kill an orc on sight, I have no idea.
I was going to mention the Ursula K. LeGuin thing too, but roac beat me to it. I will mention that Steven Erikson, in his Malazan Book of the Fallen series, goes out of his way to introduce ethnic and racial variety into his casts. Indeed, I'd say the most awesome characters in the book are invariably dark and swarthy, and of the "fey" races, the coolest two are the black-skinned Tiste Andii and the gray-skinned Tiste Edur. The white-skinned Tiste Liosan are a bunch of self-righteous motherfuckers.
Erikson's books are, hands-down, the fantasy novels to beat for any aspiring writer. And I actually think they set the bar high for any genre in the terms of what's possible, philosophically and narrative-wise, in a book. Aside from Cormac McCarthy, Eriskon is the only writer to make me cry.
Of course, SF/Fantasy is also a good place to look for good, old-fashioned racial paternalism, too. Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian Tales, anyone? It'll be interesting to see if that movie ever actually gets made, given that angle. Of course, the slated director is the putz who gave us Sky Captain, so we know it's going to suck.
I am going to answer this for you even though it's way more information than you will have ever wanted. Though I do think this is tangentially related to the article. I'll explain.
In World of Warcraft the the factions were originally made up of four races each. The Horde had the Undead, Trolls, Orcs, and Tauren. The Alliance had Humans, Night Elves, Gnomes, and Dwarves. And even though I said earlier that there are no clear good or bad races, there are a number of people who see the Alliance as good and Horde as bad despite the lore. This is probably based on preconceived ideas - many which originate from LOTR and D&D - humans and elves are good and orcs and trolls are bad.
Humans and Night Elves were often considered the "best looking" or coolest races. What you would see on different realms, then, was often a great faction imbalance where many kids wanted to be the good looking and heroic alliance fighting the evil and ugly horde. Maybe this doesn't seem like a big deal, but some realms had 3:1 faction imbalance and when players can kill people of the opposite faction on site it created a lot of problems.
What happened then is that the alliance got the reputation for being a bunch of younger and immature kids who were not very good at the game but wanted to be heroes or look at night elf boobies all day. (Seriously, ask someone who plays the game about night elf females dancing on mailboxes.) The Horde then got the reputation of being older players who wanted to escape the alliance kiddies.
Well, Blizzard - the makers of WoW - wanted to rectify the faction imbalance. And even though they never admitted it publicly, it was understood that the prettier races of the alliance were causing the imbalance. The Horde, therefore, needed a pretty race that the kids would want to play. Thus, Blood Elves were introduced to the game in a later expansion and we saw a lot of kids make blood elf characters on the Horde side because they were awesome or whatever. Horde players to this day still have a general distaste for Blood Elves because it caused an infusion of hyperactive adhd kiddies who all wanted to name their hunter Legolas.
Now why did I write all of this when you clearly didn't ask? Well, because I think it reinforces TNC's earlier point. In WoW, we saw players gravitating towards races they thought looked better and believed to be heroes even though the lore showed that both sides were good and bad. To even it out they had to introduce a good looking race to get people to join the Horde.
And, if you want to take it a step further, they had to introduce a "white" race to get people playing the Horde alongside with Taurens (brown), Orcs (green), Trolls (blue-ish green), and Undead (corpse/skeletons). That's just the way the cookie crumbles, though.
I play an undead warlock. So I get my joy from setting humans and night elves on fire.
Keith:
I think people tend to play DnD because the mechanics work particularly well and are relatively balanced. Having a big user-base goes a long way towards this, lots of demand for supplemental books and budget for R&D.
I know I play it in spite of the setting. I'd really prefer steampunk, modern, or sci fi. I mean when I GM I can deconstruct and critique the default setting some but often feels that I'm working against the system when I do it. I like the Eberron setting a better, they mix up the "typically evil" stuff a bit, although with pulp inspiration I wouldn't be surprised if it was problematic in other ways.
Can't speak to comics much (I read Archie comics), but I do recall Octavia Butler's earlier series always had white women on the covers, even though internal clues made it clear the heroines were black. In later novels they did use black cover models--changing times, changing artist stature?
In fantasy it doesn't bother me too much if, as you say, they're picturing an early anglic culture. And a lot of attempts to have diverse races come across rather hamhanded and token. I think more is put on futuristic sci fi--if it's 500 years in the future, we don't expect everyone to be white. Or if they are all one race, there should be a logic to the planet's colonization, for example, e.g. Brazilian separatists.
Speaking of sci fi, Wonkette argues that Lando has been tapped for AG, and they have a convincing photo.
TNC, I'll do you one better: I am the only black comic book & gaming store owner that I, and many other people (so I've been repeatedly told), am aware of (atleast for the moment, the current economic climate is forcing me into an unfortunate direction).
From what I've seen, and this is without having read the article or doing any legitimate research, one of the major issues contributing to our lack of representation in Fantasy, and to a lesser extent Sci Fi, is the dependence upon videogames for entertainment. And not so much particular kinds of videogames (my friends growing up were all madden, all shooting, nothing else), but more so videogames as a replacement for any kind of imaginative exercise.
My grandmother was an english teacher and taught me how to read by making me read the article for every sunday newspaper toy add I brought to her. When I was a kid my aunt would come from California every summer, and bring with her Final Fantasy I, Talisman and her DnD books, and her latest sketches and water color paintings of Gandalf and Frodo. This is just unheard of in our community these days, and it is a sad thing.
James F. Elliot: Seconded! Great to hear from another Erikson lover. I constantly evangelize that series. I've had at least one success but given the size of the books it's hard work.
One other thing of note for Erikson is that probably one of the most pleasant places to be and cultural capitals is called Darujistan.
The Drow have always bothered me. As badass as they are, they seem so damn socially regressive. Plus, anyone with half a brain knows that subterranean creatures are much more likely to be albino than dark. The Drow should totally have been badass albinos.
Does anyone besides me remember "Metamorphosis Alpha"?
Heh, I too play an undead warlock. We will destroy them all and then eat their corpses!
From my earliest days of D&D, I always thought it was strange that all members of the monster races had the same alignment. It made no sense to me. How could all the dragons of a particular color have the exact same outlook on the world? It made no sense at all. So when I started DMing I would throw curveballs at the players by changing alignments of monsters occasionally on them.
They have added cultures to the games in the past from different backgrounds. They made a very concerted effort to add Asian influences and characters to the games through various resource books. I don't recall as much effort regarding other cultures though.
I am amused at how Warcraft has flipped the script. Last night my undead warlock was flying around on a red dragon in order to save the world. And the humans are indeed dirtbags. I was shocked at how petty they are when I started exploring their starter area when the game was new.
There's a very interesting sociological elements to Blizzard's creation of the Horde races that may or may not have been intentional. The cultural elements used to signify them come from tribal/minority cultures (African, Caribbean, and Aboriginal American) and you have to wonder if that subconsciously affected players' choices. The addition of the blood elves adds a weird sort of mix to the group. Somehow they seem to be popular despite the fact that the more immature players think they're all "gay." In fact, they're extremely popular in my LBGT-friendly guild (along with the Feral druids for the bear crowd).
Patagonia, there are definitely non-white human NPCs in WoW. Off the top of my head, I think some of the priests in Stormwind are black (or at least brown).
Also I think it's worth noting that Night Elves, one of the Alliance races, are dark skinned -- purple or blue usually. Not only that, but their features, particularly in the males, seem closer to African than European in inspiration. The male Night Elves even do the moonwalk if you type /dance in the game. Michael Jackson is at least sort of not white, right?
Anyway, I couldn't get very far in the linked article. It just kept making assertions that didn't seem all that plausible and then acting like they'd been proven when they hadn't. Also, in the part where the author lists how many non-white adventures he found in the various source books, he claims to have found 2 in the entire canon: a black male and a black female. But his definition of non-white seems pretty narrow -- what about Mialee, the example elf wizard found throughout the 3rd edition source books? Here's an official illustration: Mialee. She's not a human, but the argument was about adventurers period, and she looks to me like she could easily be Asian or Latino.
@Greg Sanders: Hell yes! I tell everyone to read them. I'm going to cry like a little schoolboy who just got his Transformers lunch box stolen when I close book ten. I'm also incredibly pissed that the Ian C. Esslemont Malazan books aren't available in the U.S. Erikson is a truly gifted storyteller, but I don't think his books would be half as good without his twenty years as an archaeologist/anthropologist behind them.
The racial undertones of Tolkien have often been noted -- Southrons and Easterlings were dark-skinned and pretty much evil. The only things that can be said in his defense are he was a product of his time, he was careful to note that these people were unfortunates who fell under Sauron's sway, and in the only scene in the books which focuses on men fighting men (Faramir and the men of Gondor ambush a Southron patrol), Tolkien points out how uncomfortable and sad it makes Sam.
Well we know that when subterranean creatures are formed through evolution, they're likely to be blind albinos, but I don't think the same can be said of subterranean creatures that were created by a malevolent spider goddess.
James F. Elliot: Quite agree with sorrow once it ends, although really the books are so crowded with detail that I think there's no way I couldn't find more on repeated re-reading.
I'm lucky that I have a friend in Montreal (the one I've convinced to read the series) that gets me the ones not available in the U.S.
Huge sci-fi fan, ate it for breakfast, lunch and dinner growing up as a kid in Kenya. I guess I wasn't really attuned to the lack of black characters in sci-fi until I hit my teens. I remember reading "Babel 17" by Samuel R Delany as a teen and being absolutely psyched when I came across one of the characters speaking swahili, later found out the author was African American.
It's funny, I go back and read some of the books I loved and I can't stand them. The Lensman series by E.E Doc Smith now reads like something a Nazi eugenist would have dreamed of (sorry, not trying to invoke the Godwin law, thats just the way it reads). There seems to be a thread of racial hierarchy running through most S.F books from that time. There are notable exceptions, but even with the exceptions (and great writers) blacks and characters of color are woefully missing. I remember being pleasantly shocked by Arthur C Clarke's inclusion of race in one of the Rama books.
I'm also a fan of Tolkien and also keep in mind that the books are a reflection of the times they were written. The bad guys/trolls in "The Hobbit" have clearly lower class/Irish accents. But yeah, in the Silmarillion and the LOTR the most depraved characters are of darker skin. And I do fault Peter Jackson a bit, especially when he states that in the siege scene in the 2nd movie he was going for the effect of the Boer's being surrounded/attacked by the Zulu (it's in the interviews on the extended collection, he saw the scene in an old movie). It doesn't take a lot of imagination to figure out who the boers and Zulus correspond to.
Also, in the extended interviews, the Fijian actor who potrayed the leader of the Urukhai was talked about in what I considered very condescending terms.
I mean, Peter Jackson is an amazing director, but there are parts of the LOTR trilogy where I was rooting for the good guys while being uncomfortably aware that the bad guys looked much more like me. It's enough to give one schizophrenia.
I have begun seeing more black characters in sci-fi books written by non African American authors. In some cases the depictions are great (Ancient Shores by Jack McDevitt and Wheelers by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen) others are just horrendous (Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, where the sole character of color who is close to being of any importance is a nigerian doctor whose name you never learn and of course dies mid-way through the book). Of course they are books by AA authors, i.e Octavia Butler's amazing books and those get it right, but by and large, the future seems very white.
It's like somewhere between our modern era and the future something happened to wipe out most blacks. It's not like the writers go out of their way to eliminate blacks, its like they are much more comfortable imagining a world where we do not exist in any meaningful measure.
Movies/TV series are somewhat less problematic. For all its faults, I loved the original Star Trek due to the presence of Uhura (and lets not forget, the first interracial kiss on American TV), Star Trek TNG seemed to me a step backwards in diversity. Movies, loved 'Serenity', 'The Matrix', 'Deep Impact' (I mean, cmon, Morgan Freeman as the president kicked ass!), 'Event Horizon' etc.
I still have an ongoing love affair with sci-fi, though I do find myself reading it with a more critical eye.
Consider the descriptions of the Southrons, together with their description as the only race of men to join up with Sauron, for example.
True, and Tolkien is answerable for it. Though I think the real ghetto children of the book are the dwarves. No, actually, they are the Appalachians, now that I think of it.
Anyway, Tolkien also wrote these words:
In the movie, Faramir has a speech using most of that language, to the same effect. To me, that's Tolkien's first-hand experience of WWI coming into play.
Personally, one of my most cherished characters is a female half-orc who I imagine as very dark, very large, and very strong. As a model, I use Queen Latifah and Venus/Serena Williams.
Yeah, a gender-and-race-bender. Oddly, it's not as much of a stretch as I thought.
roac,
Thanks for the info.
I loved 'Left Hand of Darkness' but never read the Earthsea series, now they are next on my list. I did some googling and found Ursula LeGuin's angry but measured missive about the tv series. I think it is really disturbing that they decided to cast (once again) the good guys as white when in the book they are black/brown. Even more disturbing are the responses to her calling her a 'knee jerk liberal' and 'pc police' when clearly in the books she cast the good guys as brown/black and the invaders as white. It seems that race is just one of the elements in the story they totally F'ed up but when did asking that movies adhere to the spirit of the story and true to the writers vision (especially the race reversal, something I'm sure LeGuin did very consciously considering these books were written in the 1980s) make one a knee jerk liberal?
This kind of reminds me of Angelina Jolie playing Pearl's wife in "A mighty Heart". That also bothered me. Pearl'w wife was bi-racial and Jolie had to have her skin darkened to play her. What, there were no talented bi-racial actors to play her (Halle Berry and Thandie Newton come to mind).
I love to hug someone I killed then cannibalize their corpse. I like to show the alliance how much I appreciate the meal.
Humans are the worst. There's all sorts of religious zealotry and absolutely assuredness about the righteousness of their cause. You don't get the sense that they're at all reflective but rather war-mongering racists who take to arms at the first sign of an affront. Gee, I wonder why anyone would think humans are like that...
The good thing about those attributes is that are definitely not perjorative. Taurens are clearly modeled after Native Americans and they are the race that I would say most alliance respect (lore wise). Trolls are carribean but it's done more for flavor than anything else.
One does often hear the term "gay" as a description of blood elves. There was once a thread on the general WoW forums inquiring "where are all the male blood elves?" - hinting that the men were so feminine you couldn't distinguish between the men and women. However, they were definitely added to get more people playing Horde and it does seem to have succeeded. My realm is ridiculously imbalanced but I actually like it that way.
True there are a few here and there. Not many. But I think Blizzard does a lot more to be inclusive than those NPCs here and there.
Eh, I would still say Night Elves are more white than anything. Even though they are blue and purple they are a very light blue and a very light purple. And while the males might do the Michael Jackson dance, the female dance is modeled after Alizee and so that probably offsets any gain due to moonwalking.
Not to belabor the point. Ursula K Le Guin's article in the slate
http://www.slate.com/id/2111107
The relevant passage.
They then sent me several versions of the script—and told me that shooting had already begun. I had been cut out of the process. And just as quickly, race, which had been a crucial element, had been cut out of my stories. In the miniseries, Danny Glover is the only man of color among the main characters (although there are a few others among the spear-carriers). A far cry from the Earthsea I envisioned. When I looked over the script, I realized the producers had no understanding of what the books are about and no interest in finding out. All they intended was to use the name Earthsea, and some of the scenes from the books, in a generic McMagic movie with a meaningless plot based on sex and violence.
Most of the characters in my fantasy and far-future science fiction books are not white. They're mixed; they're rainbow. In my first big science fiction novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, the only person from Earth is a black man, and everybody else in the book is Inuit (or Tibetan) brown. In the two fantasy novels the miniseries is "based on," everybody is brown or copper-red or black, except the Kargish people in the East and their descendants in the Archipelago, who are white, with fair or dark hair. The central character Tenar, a Karg, is a white brunette. Ged, an Archipelagan, is red-brown. His friend, Vetch, is black. In the miniseries, Tenar is played by Smallville's Kristin Kreuk, the only person in the miniseries who looks at all Asian. Ged and Vetch are white.
My color scheme was conscious and deliberate from the start. I didn't see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. I didn't see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had "violet eyes"). It didn't even make sense. Whites are a minority on Earth now—why wouldn't they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?
Peter Jackson does not deserve the benefit of the doubt on this one. Take a gander at some of his earlier movies. The beginning of Dead Alive, for example: there's no ambiguity, and it's not subtle; he depicts black folks as stupid savages. They look and act a lot like the hordes of Uruk-hai in the first LOTR movie.
I really don't think Jackon's a fire-breathing racist or anything - it's more likely unexamined, internalized stereotypes coming out in his film-making. Racism is pretty mainstream in New Zealand, with the Maori being still being widely regarded as savage and stupid. Growing up there, I'm sure it's hard to avoid internalizing those sorts of nasty archetypes. Interesting thing about being an artist, though, is that Jackson throws this stuff on the screen for all to see. Still, I'd really like to see Jackson get called out more about it, because it's not acceptable.
I forgot to mention: My beloved female, dark-skinned, half-orc was quite specifically NOT the product of rape. Nor was her half-angel half-brother.
Also, re: races in WoW, for those who haven't already seen it: election 2008 poll of WoW players. The partisan breakdown by race was astonishing to me, anyway.
Yeah the females don't seem very black, but then again the male Night Elves are the only race that can get a Mr. T haircut. And you can get a pretty purple skin tone.
(I mostly play orcs though, as a side note.)
"Not a D&D guy, but a huge fan of LotR; the racial subtexts in those books goes far beyond lily whiteness. Consider the descriptions of the Southrons, together with their description as the only race of men to join up with Sauron, for example."
"The racial undertones of Tolkien have often been noted -- Southrons and Easterlings were dark-skinned and pretty much evil. The only things that can be said in his defense are he was a product of his time, ....'
Well, yes he was, which is why the skin color of his races matters so much less that the obvious equation of Mordor and Germany and the Orcs and the Germans. LOTR follows British anti-Prussian/German propaganda pretty closely, hopefully inadvertently, and it was so glaring that he inserted a German-looking race on the Good Guys side to kill that parallel. In his day the fashionable meme was of a Celtic high civilization that had gone down under a tide of Saxon barbarism. Some of that obviously crept in too.
Jeepers, Ebert, did you not notice Lt. Uhura?
Also, has nobody but me read Day of the Drones? It's the post-apocalypse, and the only civilization left is African, and they blame whitey for the apocalypse, so lightskinned guys roast themselves in the sun to try and get darker, etc., and suffer from discrimination, and then one day a scientist finds a tribe of white people who pattern their society on that of the bee. And the protagonist is a smart, foxy, dark-skinned young woman. This book was written in the early 70s, and somebody really really needs to make a movie out of it. It is all kinds of fabulous.
Follow-up on race in DnD's Eberron setting. The wiki entry verifies most of what I remembered, namely that they have their own civilization a la Warcraft and Drow are similarly not evil worshiping.
That said, I haven't played Eberron that much, so I'm not saying it doesn't have problematic aspects, but definitely seems like an improvement.
No Eberron for DnD 4th edition for at least a year I think though. Although one notable change versus some of the things mentioned in the article is that races no longer have stat penalties. They've still got varying stat bonuses, but they don't have inherent weaknesses. So doesn't get beyond racial essentialism, but a step up I'd say.
@ Professor Kum'n'go -
No need to even go back to Jackson's older work. I was extremely uncomfortable watching King Kong, which had the most appalling representation of "natives" in any movie since, oh, the original Kong. Truly frightening.
I suspect that many of the humans in fantasy are "white" not because the source material is anglo-saxon per se, but because the creators of it are mostly white, and therefore turn to the lore that is closest at hand. Kung Fu movies are fantasy, too; fantasy created mostly by asians, with asian characters.
It's been my observation that the sci-fi/ fanasy world is skewed whiter and maler than the surrounding population. I have a theory about that... but I think the content is probably skewed because the creators and consumers are skewed.
Well, yes he was, which is why the skin color of his races matters so much less that the obvious equation of Mordor and Germany and the Orcs and the Germans. LOTR follows British anti-Prussian/German propaganda pretty closely, hopefully inadvertently, and it was so glaring that he inserted a German-looking race on the Good Guys side to kill that parallel.
It is my mission and self-imposed duty to address the issue of Tolkien's racial attitudes whenever they arise. This is never satisfactory because the subject is too complicated for a readable blog post. I mean, Tolkien was both a philosophical anarchist AND a serious believer in the divine right of kings.
So it is much easier just to say that the quote above is as wrong as it can possibly be. Tolkien's chief scholarly interest was in the lost prehistory of the Germanic peoples, of which the
English are one branch and the "Germans" another. Many passages from his published Letters make very clear that he (1) admired the Germans as a people while (2) utterly despising the Nazis and their racial ideology.
(It was the French he didn't like.)
Have you read Oscar Wao, TNC?
Yeah Tolkein got super pissed anytime it was suggested that LoTR was a WWII allegory.
Re: The racial undertones of Tolkien have often been noted -- Southrons and Easterlings were dark-skinned and pretty much evil
Um, the Haradrim aren't meant to look like Africans, they're meant to look like South Asians or Arabs (hence the elephants). I'm South Asian and it doesn't bother me, so I'm not sure why it bothers Mr. Coates.
@ Hector -
I always thought of the Haradrim as North African, a la the Carthaginians, who were famous for using elephants in war.
@ Miles -
While the Drow might be protected by their evil spider goddess, I seem to remember their skin color being the result of a curse by the Elven gods for their betrayal, which seems remarkably like the old mark of Cain/curse of Ham story used to justify slavery. My Drowish history may be wrong, though - been quite a while.
Yeah, I thought Lolth had something to do with that but you may be right. The point stand though!
Erikson's "Malazan Book of the Fallen" is in my opinion the best fantasy I've ever come across hands down. George RR Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" comes in second.
"Malazan" is great from a huge number of reasons one of which is the great diversity (racial, ethnic, etc.). It even has blue humans (Napans). And power and badassedness is not just reserved for a few euro-looking characters. That was always a problem for me as a kid. A small one, but still. Same thing with comics.
"Ice and Fire" seems to be way more traditional in terms of racial demographic, but my memory may be fuzzy given the huge gaps of time that pass between the release of the next book.
Also, in fantasy isn't race sometimes a synonym (sp) for species? Does it matter?
Lastly, any sci-fi/fantasy geek looking for a great book needs to read the Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.
AMT: Another Erikson lover? Awesome. I'll check out Rothfuss based on your good taste.
@James F. Elliott:
I get the Esselmont Malazan from Amazon UK. The currency exchange hurts but its worth it. I'm finishing up the second one now. Also, having Malazan as the saga to beat is scary. I've toyed with the idea of writing and Erkison makes me wonder if I could even come close.
Great article, TNC, as in a great representation of how sociologically impoverished our discourse in humanities has become in academia.
I have a story. In college, I once created a campaign myself. I based it off of Eastern history and set it in a world that obviously resembled earth. I began the world in Hangzhou, capital of the Nan Sung dynasty. I even wrote my own Eastern mythology for it. Thirty pages long. Well, the 'Three Dreams' didn't go over so well with my players.
I just fired off an email to them with this article in the link:
Now, all this nonsense has teleported me back to Fall of Senior Year, when I unveiled my masterpiece: the Three Dreams. The Three Dreams was an attempt to create a mythological text for a bunch of . Something to work off of. Something to have fun with. But immediately I was disappointed.
K: This world is racist. Druids suck.
B: Yin is sexist. Are these brothers & sisters *really* fornicating w/ each other?
T: Uh, yeah, I'll get to reading it . . . soon . . .
Three years of and it was too much to ask to get you to, you know, read a text. The sexist line for Yin really threw me, because I had switched Yin and Yang around. In Eastern philosophy, Yin is the female and the dark: but I had made the female the light. But still: sexist. Good god, people! The was the first time I thought about scrapping the campaign and walking away (but this would become a recurring experience).
So anyway, I wanted you all to get a dose of yourselves, a bunch of faerie fancy pants feminist post-colonialists.
So ridiculous.
For a good primer on SF (or speculative fiction) by people of color, check out "Dark Matter", edited in 2000 by Sheree R. Thomas.
In addition to masters like Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany, you can check out stories by Nalo Hopkinson (her characters are often of Caribbean origin), Tananarive Due, Ismael Reed...
Also, SF writers Sherri Tepper and Connie Willis, who I believe are White, often feature characters from a wide variety of ethnic/racial backgrounds.
Americans tend to put their extreme sensitivity onto everything and everyone. Hence the genuine rage a lot of Americans feel when they see a German Halloween costume catalog or something.
It's unforgivable, unforgivable I tell you, that Tolkien dared to make people from outside of fantasy Europe non-white & anything less than angels! He should have pretended everyone was white, or at least put an african-middle earthican in there somewhere.
Dismount that high horse sirrah, or I shall smite thee!
It's not a defense of sci-fi and fantasys tendency, especially in the early days, to make the good guys very pale and the villain swarthy, but goddamnit, when there is a geographical reason for it, and when the Southrons get a really mild treatment for guys in thrall to evil incarnate, give the man the benefit of the doubt.
Especially compared to the truly blatant and undeniable racism in so much contemporaneous fiction, Tolkien isn't answerable for anything and frankly was probably setting a good example.
An interesting article, and his points about racial essentialism and especially the lack of non-white humans are well taken. One thing he consistently fails to take into account, however, is D&D's nature as an actual game. While at the high end D&D can be sophisticated interactive storytelling, it still has to have certain game mechanics and rules built in to make it playable. Sometimes things like stat bonuses or different levels of hit dice are just attempts to translate physical realities into numbers.
And while the author seems to scoff at the notion, Gygax's protectionist attitudes towards the human race were undoubtedly necessary. Based on my own middle school and high school D&D playing experiences, almost no one would have played a human if there weren't a whole bunch of cool classes that more or less required. Part of the point of a game like D&D is to immerse yourself as much as possible in the fantasy ... when you're allowed to pick what (fantastic) race you want to be, why choose the race you already are?
At risk of going seriously off-topic, I have to ask the folks that have finished the Malazan books - does it become clearer to the reader who is who and what is going on as the series progresses? I've just finished Deadhouse Gates, and found myself terribly confused about who people where, where they came from, what they where doing, why they were doing it, etc. I would chalk this up to my own deficiencies, but I did not have this problem at all when reading the Wheel of TIme and other similarly complex books. Do things get better in this regard as the series progresses?
p.s. I second the recommendation of The Name of The Wind. It's not as racially progressive as the Malazan books, but is so fantastic a story that it really doesn't matter.
The further you got from the vanilla settings in D&D -- especially 2nd ed, which had a broader diversity of settings -- the more people of color you got. Were there even any white people in Dark Sun? Planescape had a lot of non-whites, though they were admittedly just as likely to be blue or orange as brown.
I just finished Toll the Hounds recently (Malazan, Book 8) and I have to say that it was kind of confusing at times, but still entertaining. I never made it through the Wheel of Time, but even though they're undoubtedly the best, the Malazan books can be hard to follow if you're not paying attention or even if you are. He starts with a core of characters and spread them across the world and then introduced new characters and new plotlines that sometimes seem unrelated. They always tied together. You just have to wait. It's probably easier to deal with if you can read them all back to back so you remember who everybody is. I think that's the biggest problem, the sheer volume of characters. Memories of Ice is awesome.
Another great sci/fi novel to deal with race/prejudice was written by Richard Morgan. It was called Black Man in the UK and Thirteen here in the states. Its probably in paperback by now. I love this book.
"LOTR is a direct attempt to write the original English mythology Tolkien thought was lost after the various waves of conquerors."
Yeah and Tolkien's work as an academic was very good on Old English literature and the Norse stories. He more of less single-handedly rehabilitated Beowulf from Classicist attacks.
It's interesting to think what shape fantasy would have taken without Tolkien. What he pointed out about Anglo-Saxon literature is that the reason it was dismissed was because we come to it with Classical expectations. So Anglo-Saxon epic isn't linear, it's cyclical. There are numerous fore-shadowings and flash-forwards in Beowulf. Indeed at the very opening the poet says he'll recite the story of the burning of Heorot - so you know there's not necessarily a happy ending.
They're obsessed with decline. There's lots of sun-sets in Old English but also a sense that the world isn't as good as it once was and it's getting worse, a feeling that every age is less heroic than the one that preceded it. At the end of Beowulf there isn't a cheer that he defeated the dragon or a celebration of his heroic life. The final image is of his body on a monumental pyre (something since banned by Christianity) surrounded by his people, the women singing dirges. And it's made clear that without Beowulf all of the surrounding Kingdoms will invade and his people will be enslaved and his lands taken.
They also don't have a single protagonist as the simple hero. While Beowulf is the main character what's emphasised is his loyalty to his Lord and the Hall. When, in the second book, Beowulf dies in the fight against the dragon it's not because he isn't as strong as he used to be but because his thanes (with the exception of Wulfram) abandoned him.
In all of Anglo-Saxon literature the heroic virtues are primarily to do with doing what you said you would do. They're obsessed with promises made in the 'mead-hall' which is why the heroes aren't, perhaps, as interesting as, say, Achilles, Ulysses or Satan.
I think all of thsoe things exist in Lord of the Rings - far more than Classical ideas of heroism and the epic - but without Tolkien I think fantasy would have a very different feel to it. All of that would be removed, you wouldn't have the cylcical narrative, the sense of decline, the 'fellowship'. It would produce a totally different story and a radically different aesthetic. And I think it would be interesting to see that sort of thing, people as steeped in a different set of myths as Tolkien was in Anglo-Saxon and Norse mythology to produce a fantasy.
For example what would an Indian fantasy novel look like? I mean a writer whose cultural reference is the Ramayana or the Mahabarata could write something very different to what we expect and something very interesting.
Shaun
Zeke: It stays about the same. And it isn't just you, I'm a fan but I lose track as well. I sort of treat them as history books. I track the characters I'm interested and accept that I'm not going to necessarily be able to perfectly follow everything else. As AMT says they do tie together which helps and it's less of a problem when read in quicker succession.
But yeah, if you want to be able to track everything you need to use the lists, take notes, or be smarter than me as I'm sure not capable of it. :P
I would say the plot lines get easier as time goes by. There can be some large tangents, particularly in prologues, but at this point I think I have a pretty good idea of where most of the plot lines are headed, if not any solid predictions of what happens when they they all get together.
My current favorite is Midnight Tides, my only caveat is that uh, some of the females were not the best written characters I've encountered. Fortunately there were also a good number of better written women both in that book and in others, so it isn't a huge deal.
For what its worth I would recommend Tad Williams' Otherland series for an interesting take on race in the future. I loved it, but I know some who hated it, so take this as a qualified recommendation.
Not only are the main heroes African, one is a Kalahari Bushman, and the "villains" are not your usual array of maniacal rich white men, but a realistic projection of who the rich people will be in 100 years. Americans and Europeans to be sure, but also Arabs, Chinese and an African or two.
The most evil character is Maori, so they don't come off great, but there you go.
Speaking of Lando. Remember the first Burton Batman? Billy Deee Williams played Harvey Dent pre-scarring. When they turned Dent into Two-face they tapped Tommy Lee Jones. Maybe they didn't think Williams had the chops or the name recognition, or maybe they were scared of the bad press from turning the only black character into villain. Anyway, considering what that might have done for his career, I always thought it was a shame Williams couldn't continue the part.
Interesting Article.
A whole comment thread on SF and D&D and no one mentioned Robert Jordan. (May he rest in Peace).
Sometimes a story is just a story.
I've seen a couple of mentions of Chip Delany here.
(Random factoid: he appears to be a Dalton school alum; somebody tell Matt Yglesias.)
I heard an interview with Delany some time ago in which he said that he didn't like LOTR very much. "The world of lord of the rings is a world in which racism is true; elves are good and orcs are bad, because they are elves and orcs...." (quote reconstructed from memory, of course). As I recall, he chose his words carefully so that his point was not just about skin color, but about the moral content of a character being determined by their tribe.
Greg:
I'm not a big fan of D&D's leveling system. I prefer other systems because they're nonlinear and more realistically reflect a character's progress.
So far World of Darkness is my favorite system, and I tend to branch off from it. I like the World of Darkness philosophy better anyway---in the phrase "role-playing game," D&D tends to emphasize the "game", whereas WoD tends to emphasize the "role-playing". Balance isn't really an issue for me, because combat is not the most important part of a campaign---and if there is an egregious power differential between players, then I have zero problems with tweaking the rules to improve the experience.
But I have a very idiosyncratic gaming group, and we tend to have to explain our strange ways even to veteran gamers.
Thought some of you might enjoy this:
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2003/04/22fellowship.html
It sort of ribs a lot of the points we've been making, but it's funny regardless.
That said, I haven't played Eberron that much, so I'm not saying it doesn't have problematic aspects, but definitely seems like an improvement.
The Drow in Eberron are basically the cannibal Africans from 20's pulp adventure (Alain Quatermain, Tarzan) so I'm not sure what an improvement on race that setting is.
I don't play D&D with any black people, but I don't think I could run drow pc's or npc's if I did. Too much white self-consciousness about racism, on my part, to even consider trying to role-play the racism drow (are supposed to) experience.
But then a guy in my group right now is a white man married to a Kenyan woman, and we play at his house, and I guess I have no problem setting up scenarios of in-game racism, or even running drow as villains. So, I don't know.
Side thought - I listen to the Wizards D&D podcast, and even though it's basically an hour-long commercial the 8-part Penny Arcade/PVP Online 4th edition session, where they simply recorded Scott Kurtz and Gabe and Tycho playing 4th edition with Chris Perkins as GM, was totally awesome. I've often tried to think who they could get for "Celebrity D&D, pt. 2". Wouldn't it be awesome to get together a party of Will Wheaton, Vin Diesel, Stephen Colbert, and Ta-Nehisi Coates and just turn the microphones on?
Another shout out to LeGuin - the Lathe of Heaven adressed race issues head on. And the PBS made-for-TV movie version made a huge impression on me when I saw it in the early 80s - that was the first time I'd ever seen an interracial sexual relationship treated as something completely normal in mainstream media (as compared to say Tom and Helen on "The Jefferson" whom I always felt we were supposed to congratulate on their oh-so fantastic liberal sensibilities, and of course you never really believed Helen had any sexual interest in Tom).
I first got into D&D when I moved from Catholic school to the gifted program in public school in 4th grade; our regular group consisted of three white guys (including me and two Jews), two Japanese-Americans, and a black guy who was a grade higher (but we had the same teacher because of some combined classes).
It's true, a lot of the D&D stuff is chock-full of white people. There's no getting around that. TNC's original post says, "non-white" people, though, and there is some room for Asians. Remember the Monk character class? Also the Oriental Adventures milieu, which came out when I was in junior high.
What was interesting was that the black guy was a Jehovah's Witness, so as long as we were over at his house we couldn't play D&D, but we could play things like Star Frontiers or Boot Hill. I lost contact with him in high school, and sadly learned that he died in a car accident in college.
AMT said:
Also, in fantasy isn't race sometimes a synonym (sp) for species? Does it matter?
For the most part that how I understand it too. However this view does become rather complicated by the existence of half-orcs, half-elves and the like. Since these races can breed, it seems rather likely that they do not constitute separate species. I suppose it could be a horse+donkey=mule situation where it is a genetic dead end, but it seems to me that most depictions choose not to go this route. For instance: http://www.wowwiki.com/Half-elf Of course all this comes with a caveat that this is fantasy we are talking about so scientific terms like species might not have meaning.
Whether or not they qualify as species though, the existence of the "half-" races brings up another wrinkle. Most worlds, in my experience, depict half-'s as rare and portray "pure bloods" as the norm. However most usually depict at the least humans and elves as living peacefully together. This by necessity sets up a world where interracial relationship are possible but are discouraged, either actively or by default as the result of living in what amounts to self-segregating communities. (Elves live in forests and humans live in cities for instance, which brings us back to essentialism.)
However having said all that there is something to be said for having the races in fantasy be fundamentally different. If for example the elves live in the cities with the humans and behave in the same way that humans do, doesn't that just make them basically humans with pointy ears? Of course that's kind of the point. But it does seem a little boring.
The "Mary Poppins" books along with the "Half Magic" and "Narnia" stories and "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy and "The Hobbit" were and are my favorite fantasy escapes. Not into the genre so much now, but it helped me then. These were books that
I took out from an upper west side Manhattan library in the late 1950's-early '60's. Along with the "color' fairy tale volumns (grey, violet etc.) these stories took me there, to places that were so different from my own and yet I knew where I was.
By the late 1960's, I was cutting school to read Austin and Thakeray, which I found as fantastical, as entertaining and as useful.
I've heard the Delany critique of LOTR, and to me, it misses the point of the stories of the elves, or it was an incomplete understadning.
In the Silmarillion, elves are good and bad, and orcs are defiled and wounded. They are the same race. The issue he was addressing with the orcs (and Uruk-hai, later) was the outcomes of systemic trauma and defilement by a malefic actor on a group designed for good. This theme was echoed in Numenoran history, and in the descriptions of the SOuthrons. Its not the race that is evil, it is the evil actors who defile good things.
I never particularly liked mainstream D&D precisely because it encouraged you to kill lots of people and take their stuff. (I'm more of a WFRP person.)
But I did enjoy al-Qadim, so I'm not sure what the problem there is supposed to be. IIRC, that setting explicitly abolished the racial animosity thing between elves, dwarves etc., in analogy to medieval Islam's relative tolerance.
"Latino" is a race? "African-AMERICAN" is a race? Very strange.
LOTR and D&D for that matter are definitely products of their time of creation and reflect (as fantasy is great at doing) the values of the creators. What I would LOVE to see fantasy get beyong is the "Light/Dark" color theory. We've picked up tropes from LOTR and other fantasy such as a "Dark Lord" figure without stopping to question it. I'm not saying the way to address it is to make the bad guys white (altho that would be fun) but rather have some new tropes that are not based on equating color with good and evil.
Rachel Manija Brown and her friends pulled together a list of female and non-white sci-fi and fantasy authors a while back. It's a good resource for those here who are looking for something new and cool to read.
Total O.T and betraying even more that yes, I am a geek, I liked Howard Shore's music for LOTR but I think a good second would have been some of Ralph Vaughn Williams music for some of the more contemplative scenes (i.e something from "Fantasia on Greensleeves").
British author interested in British mythology, British composer interested in integrating British folk music = match made in heaven.
World of Warcraft actually takes the racism inherent in D&D a step further.
Orcs have an African motif. The Orcish homeland has giraffes and lions and looks like an African Savannah. It's actually a pretty cool place, but the fact that African cultural phenotypes are attributed to a non-human "race" is racist, inherently.
The Tauren similarly have a Native American motif.
The Trolls are carribbean/latino
Elves are asian.
Dwarves are scottish/irish. Since in English history, the scot/irish were the celtic peoples who were colonized by the Germanic Anglo/Saxons, this is again, racist.
At least it's a benign racism. It's not as bad as say, Warhammer. But implicitly, through design choices, I would say that the game world is fairly racist.
It is clear that Orcs are not human; they are purely evil and have no souls to redeem. Tolkien made them so because he needed the cannon fodder.
This involved him in a very serious theological dilemma, and as a person who took theology seriously, he spent the rest of his life oscillating between two explanations: That Orcs were mere automata (see Bk VI ch 4, immediately after the destruction of the Ring), and that Orcs originally had souls which Morgoth somehow destroyed. Neither of which is the least bit satisfactory.
However, Tolkien was at least very clear that there are no Orcs in the actual world, only human beings capable of good or evil, and hence of redemption. At its core, this is what the story is about: Frodo's decision to treat Gollum as capable of being redeemed, in the face of all the evidence, is what makes the destruction of the Ring possible.
I didn't know that about World of Warcraft..I find that both depressing and a bit distressing. There's just NO need to make fantasy "races" so analagous to this world.
@ Stephen -
Good point about half-elves and such. Though I always assumed that the reason humans and elves would not form that many long term relationships is because of their completely different life spans (with elves living hundreds of years). Think the Aragorn/Arwen relationship in LOTR, where Arwen still looks young when Aragorn is old and decrepit. Maybe you would still have a lot of short term flings or whatnot, but they've never really gotten into the mechanics of elf reproduction, so maybe it requires a bit more of a conscious decision to procreate.
Interestingly, Dark Sun did have sterile half-dwarves called Mules.
Argh, I would read this entry right when I'm supposed to be doing some work! (And I would have caught it yesterday were I not totally under the weather then.)
Friend of mine who's British and black once spoke very movingly about how the EarthSea books were revelations for him in 1970s Britain. I can only imagine.
Also, apparently nobody's mentioned David Anthony Durham yet but I might have missed it -- I need to read it, having enjoyed some of his other books, but he's started a new fantasy series, Acacia, and while I can't find the old blog entry now, when he first started talking about it a couple of years back, he spoke about wanting to elaborate on the Tolkien epic fantasy model in a number of ways, including but not limited to race. I have a book backlog to hell and back but I did want to give this one a read here soon.
The more I think about this the more I think the subject is obsessing over leaves when the problem is the forest. I am speaking only of Fantasy and related role playing games, not SF so much.
We are discussing the role of race and racism in worlds that were created to approximate a society reflective of the European Middle Ages or earlier complete with hereditary hierarchies, racism, misogyny, feudal economics with slavery in all but name, divine right of kings, imperialism, religious bigotry and wars, entrenched elites supported by magic or gods or some other such supernatural power and not through actual achievement or merit. There is not a single liberal enlightenment egalitarian, meritocratic, democratic value to be found. Pretty much everyone behaves as their blood dictates. Heroes become heroes because they fulfill some destiny/inheritance or some such, it is rarely earned through actions in and of themselves and peasants are pretty much cannon fodder. Luke Skywalker was a hero because of who his parents were, not because anything he did initially.
In worlds/books/games/ etc that rely on such stark contrasts between good and evil and nostalgia for such rigid societies, how can we be surprised there is racism or other forms of intolerance.
And while I have enjoyed the analysis of LOTR and other works/games, most people who enjoy them do not read them with such subtly or care. Most have no idea how religious Tolkien was or what he wrestled with or has even read the Silmarilion. What they see or read are rigid worlds where you can always tell who is evil or how beings will behave based upon the color of their skin, their ethnicity, or their species.
"I didn't know that about World of Warcraft..I find that both depressing and a bit distressing. There's just NO need to make fantasy "races" so analagous to this world."
Maybe they're going a step too far and I think the thing that matters Tolkien is he didn't just cut and paste a number of cultural referants but really got the culture he was writing about, indeed he changed perspectives on it hugely through his academic work. But it's difficult to imagine something removed from a human culture in some way.
Incidentally I don't think it deals with race at all but the best novel that is, I suppose, fantasy that I've ever read is Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell which really very good.
Baiskeli said:
I liked Howard Shore's music for LOTR but I think a good second would have been some of Ralph Vaughn Williams music for some of the more contemplative scenes (i.e something from "Fantasia on Greensleeves").
Missed this in previous trips through the thread. I thought the same thing when the movies came out! Shore blew it by setting the Shire, which is quintessentially English, to music that was Celtic.
The Shire-theme that plays in my head is "Searching for Lambs" (Midi) But that's personal and random, of course.
I think the light/dark mythology goes back to sun gods and fear of dangerous creatures that prowl in the night, so unless you're writing the mythology of a nocturnal species, it's hard to get away from. Light and dark colors are analogized to illumination and lack of illumination (it's hard to even say that without using a word that has "dark" in it), and there you go. It didn't start with LotR by any means - look at Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, for example (an example both non-Western and pre-Christian).
Some people find it easier to transfer this system to different varieties of humans than others do, based on the humans available to their experience.
As far as fantasy race essentialism, I think it's necessary to keep fantasy races (whether or not they are species in the technical sense - in some settings they are, e.g. Brust's Dragaera series) from becoming nothing more than funny-looking humans. In some cases individuals are shown deviating from/overcoming the stereotypes of their race (e.g. the elven mechanic in Bull's Finder), but if the stereotypes aren't going to be at least statistically true, then why introduce the other "race" at all?
In our world, there's no other intelligent species as different from ours as a wolf is from a fox. But that's exactly one of the constraints of our world that F/SF is often interested in breaking. To impose homogeneity on all intelligent beings simply because we only have firsthand experience with one species of intelligent being would be a grave lack of imagination, IMO.
The same logic applies to science fictional aliens (and everything the linked post says about orcs could also be applied to kzinti and Klingons, among others, to say nothing of the notorious flap about Jar Jar and Watto in the Star Wars prequels).
Further to the discussion of race in Tolkien, something that struck me (a white guy) long before the obvious race problems in LOTR is the fact that Tolkein equates height with nobility. Which I guess makes some sense in a world ruled by hand-held edged weapons, but even at 5'9", I still felt excluded and inclined to empathize with the dwarves.
@baiskeli:
"And I do fault Peter Jackson a bit, especially when he states that in the siege scene in the 2nd movie he was going for the effect of the Boer's being surrounded/attacked by the Zulu (it's in the interviews on the extended collection, he saw the scene in an old movie)."
The movie Jackson is referring to is called Zulu, starring Michael Caine. It is the true story of 150 Welsh infantrymen and a few Boer militia at the outpost of Roarke's Drift that were surrounded and attacked for several days by 5,000 Zulu warriors. The Welshmen were able to fight off the Zulus. It resulted in more Victorian Crosses (the UK's highest honor for soldiers) being awarded than any other engagement in their history. It's an amazing military story (and a great "war" movie, too boot), akin to Thermopylae only with a happier ending, and that's probably what Jackson was going for.
@AMT:
"I've toyed with the idea of writing and Erkison makes me wonder if I could even come close."
I totally understand where you're coming from, as I'm in the same boat. What Erikson has done, however, is make me a far better writer, even if a pale imitation. My stories have to be more complex and interesting just to compete for my own attention.
@Zeke: Yes. Deadhouse is only the second book in the series, and while the narrative takes a long while to start pulling together (Bonehunters), it becomes much clearer who is who, and Erikson gets better at sketching out his characters and making sure you know which plots and sub-plots are distinct. DeadhouseGardens, and Memories of Ice, the next book for you, is really good. Don't give up! Wait until you're introduced to the characters of Karsa Orlong and Trull Sengar in House of Chains and all your patience will be rewarded.
I agree with Greg that Midnight Tides is probably the best book in the series so far, but for my money, Toll the Hounds shows off a real genius for storytelling.
something that struck me (a white guy) long before the obvious race problems in LOTR is the fact that Tolkien equates height with nobility.
Well, yes, he does. But he makes the real heroes three feet tall . . .
All this is metaphor. Tolkien believed in hereditary aristocracy while at the same time believing that all souls are exactly equal before God. The tension between these beliefs is one of the things that make his work inexhaustibly interesting.
"So it is much easier just to say that the quote above is as wrong as it can possibly be. Tolkien's chief scholarly interest was in the lost prehistory of the Germanic peoples, of which the English are one branch and the "Germans" another. Many passages from his published Letters make very clear that he (1) admired the Germans as a people while (2) utterly despising the Nazis and their racial ideology."
You seem to think that what a scholar says on the conscious level determines what the noveleuiist crerates on another level. Tolkien was a product of his culture and his times, and his scholarly interests don't change that. In any case an interest the fact that the English and the germnas are both Germanic hardly means that Tolkien are anyone else in that period would see the Germanic peoples ars anything other than barabarians. there's a reason that the term "Saxon' is a slutr in English and the more PC ternm is Anglo-Saxon.
It's pretty obvious that the Elves resemble and are probably on some level based on the Tuath De Danaan and the Tylwyth Teg. Celtic. There is no figure or "race" in any Germanic muthology that corresponds to them. In any case Tolkien said he was fascinated with Finnish and made Quenya vaguely sound like an imitation of Finnish. So much for Germanicity.
Passages from letters stating an admiration of the German people hardly preclude casting them as helpless minions of an evil master. As for his protestations concerning WWII, qui s'excuse, s'accuse............
I think the light/dark mythology goes back to sun gods and fear of dangerous creatures that prowl in the night, so unless you're writing the mythology of a nocturnal species, it's hard to get away from.
To me it sounds like we need an African folklorist (or a folklorist from some other dark-skinned people, like Australian aborigines) to tell us whether this whole lightness = good, darkness = evil thing carries over into other cultures where the people aren't pale-skinned.
World of Warcraft actually takes the racism inherent in D&D a step further.
Orcs have an African motif. The Orcish homeland has giraffes and lions and looks like an African Savannah. It's actually a pretty cool place, but the fact that African cultural phenotypes are attributed to a non-human "race" is racist, inherently.
The Tauren similarly have a Native American motif.
The Trolls are carribbean/latino
Elves are asian.
Dwarves are scottish/irish. Since in English history, the scot/irish were the celtic peoples who were colonized by the Germanic Anglo/Saxons, this is again, racist.
At least it's a benign racism. It's not as bad as say, Warhammer. But implicitly, through design choices, I would say that the game world is fairly racist.
How exactly does using real world cultural markers in a fantasy setting automatically count as racism? That pretty much goes against the entire point of the post ... that minority cultures aren't represented in gaming.
A few random points:
(1) Gygax and company's casual racism aside---these were dudes from Milwaukee and Chicago who grew up in the Forties and Fifties, so we should cut their Seventies selves some slack for more than their wide collars, big ties and joints---drow appearance is obviously that of a photographic negative. It's not perfect because a photographic negative would have dark teeth but that's the origin of their appearance. Speaking as someone who liked to stare at his photography buff dad's negatives because of the weird effect, this was obvious to me from the day I picked up the Fiend Folio in, oh, 1982....
(2) The author of the talk strikes me as making some really weak arguments. He's cherry-picking through old stuff from a long time ago, for one, and simply doesn't appear to be all that well-read. While I won't say that D&D and RPGs in general are models of racial tolerance (should they be?) they've gotten better over the years... much like society in general. For example, I'm not sure what his problem with al Qadim was but I'd say it was the first real attempt by a major company at a not stereotypical non-Western fantasy RPG. It *is* fantasy and thus drawing on 1001 Nights a lot more than serious scholarship (duh it's a game!) but al Qadim broke a lot of ground I think. Just flipping through the 4E PHB, I wouldn't disagree that many of the characters are rather European of appearance (much more "fantasy" than in the past, though) but there are dark skinned, negroid, Asian, or simply unclassifiable people, and of course lots of pictures of nonhumans that resemble no RL race at all. See, e.g., pp. 44, 46, or 50. The half orc doesn't appear in the game yet, but is slated for release later.
In retrospect I'm not sure I should be surprised, as it reminds me greatly of the kind of half-assed "sensitivity training" they forced on us in the college dorm back when I was an undergrad. The best sensitivity training I got then was working in a large kitchen mostly staffed by black people and ably run by two middle aged black women who made sure a few thousand people got fed three squares a day, every day, for eight months out of the year.
Documenting the statements in my earlier post, from Tolkien’s published Letters. From no. 45, to Michael Tolkien, 9 June 1941:
From no. 81, to Christopher Tolkien, 23-25 September 1944:
Probably I should point out that the failure to capitalize "Jews" in the last quotes was an error of transcription.
Further to Jim at 1:16: There is plenty of evidence to show that believe in creatures called Elves/Alfar was integral to the shared Germanic mythology. Presumably this is a tiny fraction of the material that was available before medieval Christianizers systematically obliterated it. What we have, however, suggests that the Elves were roughly similar in their characteristics to their Celtic equivalents.
Tolkien was haunted by the knowledge of what had been lost. His literary enterprise was in large part an attempt at reconstruction.
The evidence is collected here (link does not imply endorsement of all the author's conclusions).
To me it sounds like we need an African folklorist (or a folklorist from some other dark-skinned people, like Australian aborigines) to tell us whether this whole lightness = good, darkness = evil thing carries over into other cultures where the people aren't pale-skinned.
That would be a tough one to nail down. While western Europeans have a long tradition of the enemy being dark skinned (basically stretching back to the rise of Islam), it would be harder to find a dark-skinned people with a long term history of contact with light-skinned people whose culture wasn't completely gutted by war, disease, religion or slavery.
Personally, I'm inclined to believe the good=light thing comes from sunlight, which is universally a good thing, whereas most people over the pre-1800 history of the world probably never met someone with a different skin.
While I would find more info from African and Aboriginal folklorists interesting, it's ultimately irrelevant if those traditions equated dark with evil. My point is that we as a world culture should strive to throw out some tired old tropes, chief among them "Dark=evil". We live in a fully, artifically illuminated world, not the world of our ancestors, so it would serve out collective pysche more to have a more relevant way of analogizing the anxieties we face.
Medieval European attitudes to dark skin were ambivalent. Devils could be black, but so were Christian Ethiopians. North African saints like St Maurice could be depicted as black-skinned:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Saint_Maurice_Magdeburg.jpg
And of course one of the magi was depicted as a black man.
'Genetic' racism really only starts to develop from the fifteenth century in Europe. It's part of the suspicion of forced converts to Christianity in Spain and their descendants.
All right--if we are dropping knowledge, look to the work of Frank Snowden, who wrote an important book called "Before Color Prejudice"
If dwarves being scottish is racist, does the word mean much anymore?
Are you referring to the semi-Scottish accent adopted by the Welsh actor playing the dwarf in the movie?
We're talking about the book here. The dwarves in the book are Jewish.
Rather than elaborate in this post, I will wait to see if anybody is still paying attention.
I'm paying attention, roac, but that's because I'm a Tolkien freak and already knew that bit. How's your dad Carc BTW?
Carc is dead, but he was well known to you once. R.I.P.
It is a hundred years and three and fifty since I came out of the egg, but I do not forget what my father told me.
roac: Excellent point about Frodo's attempt to redeem Gollum mirroring the redeemability of all people. But what does it mean that he ultimately fails to redeem himself? It is only through the suggested intervention of an external force that his betrayal turns to good.
Right on about the dwarves being Jewish, there's no doubt about that. Their language even sounds (to the admittedly untrained ear!) rather Hebrew-ish. "Barak Khazad! Khazad ai-menu!" By the way, the coolest battle cry ever.
To all of those who have mentioned LeGuin and her treatment of race: Right on, right on. When I put her work next to the work of Doris Lessing's, an author who has gotten far more recognition, I see no comparison. LeGuin is simply phenomenal.
There are no black Africans in LOTR - not negatively depicted, not positively depicted. They simply aren't there. And the same is true for East Asians. Tolkien was writing from a deeply medieval European point of view - and he was so immersed in it that it's hard to find any exceptions. Blacks and East Asians were mostly unknown to medieval Europeans, and so they do not appear in Middle Earth. The bad guys - the Orcs and Sauron - are clearly Saracens/Mongols. The threat from the East, the bowed gait of the Orcs (very reminiscent of Gengis Khan's riders), the scimitars, even the language - "ash nazg durbatuluk..." - sounds Turkish/Mongolian. Gondor is Rome, Numenor is ancient Greece (and again the fragments of Numenorean are very hellenic sounding). None of this is even very carefully disguised. Tolkien simply could not have written his book in a politically correct way, it would have undermined the entire point for him of trying to recreate a medieval epos.
roac,
That poster was referring to the dwarves in World of Warcraft, who have Scottish accents.
Excellent point about Frodo's attempt to redeem Gollum mirroring the redeemability of all people. But what does it mean that he ultimately fails to redeem himself? It is only through the suggested intervention of an external force that his betrayal turns to good.
In terms of the story, because Tolkien posited that the temptation to use the Ring was not resistible by anyone. Theologically, because all created beings are tainted by Original Sin and can only be redeemed by the intervention of Grace.
It is a nice touch that Gollum, the utterly corrupted, is the instrument chosen by Eru/God to intervene with. Medieval theologians liked this.
A lesser writer would have had Gollum repent and prove Frodo right. In the actual story, of course, Gollum's almost-repentance is frustrated by the clumsiness of Sam, so that Frodo never knows that he was right.
I read a lot of sci-fi and I used to read a lot of fantasy. The fantasy stuff was overwhelmingly about white men and had made a lot of the assumptions discussed in the article. Robin McKinley's books were the first I remember reading that had female heros. Old sci-fi has the same problems but by the '60s or '70s you start seeing more diversity: e.g. the work of Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, and Ursula K. LeGuin. Now I think there's a lot of good sci-fi that does a better job dealing with race and gender. Mr. Coates, has your son (or you) read _The Ear, the Eye and the Arm_ by Nancy Farmer?
There are no black Africans in LOTR - not negatively depicted, not positively depicted. They simply aren't there.
I would prefer to let this go but the fact is that at the Pelennor Fields Mordor deployed "out of
Far Harad black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues."
Alas.
@Keith:
Fair enough. I do enjoy role playing and like point buy systems not so much for realism as flexibility. But at my heart I'm a gamer. I don't need the game to be combat by any means, but I like a solid challenge. If collective story-telling is more your speed, rule tweaking is definitely less of an issue. Happily as you say there's lots of systems out there to support the range of interest.
Vanya,
I think Gondor is meant to represent Byzantium, but I could be wrong. Tolkien's treatment of Denethor seems to parallel the medieval Catholic interpretation of the fall of Byzantium.
Charles,
If they do represent Carthaginians, then they certainly aren't meant to be black. The Carthaginians were fairly recent migrants from Lebanon (=Phoenicia) and probably looked pretty similar to Lebanese today. They were also, for what it's worth, a pretty nasty bunch, who used to roast infants alive as a burnt offering to their god Molech, so it's hard to feel much sympathy for them.
"Shadowrun, for instance, has a much more interesting take on social issues."
"I didn't know that about World of Warcraft..I find that both depressing and a bit distressing. There's just NO need to make fantasy 'races' so analagous to this world."
That reminds me of when I first read a Shadowrun rulebook (1st edition, I think). From what I remember, it took place after a lot of elves, orcs, etc, were born to regular folks expecting regular kids. Some white babies were elves, some white babies were orcs, some black babies were elves, some black babies were orcs, and so on. The authors made it clear that any race-race combination was possible instead of making these metahuman races analogous to ethnicities IRL (like, sure all dwarves are short, but that applies to Chinese dwarves and Ethiopian dwarves and dwarves from everywhere else instead of mimicking the stereotype of Chinese people all being short).
Hector,
Byzantium is plausible as a model for Gondor - but of course Byzantium really was a continuation of the Roman Empire. Probably a better analogy than my original is that Arnor was Rome and Gondor was Byzantium, the North - south split parallelling the East-West split in Rome. And Gondor as Byzantium makes the Orcs as Turks/Mongol parallel even more explicit. So you can call it racism, but Tolkien is basically just retelling Gibbons in a slightly more fanciful way.
"I would prefer to let this go but the fact is that at the Pelennor Fields Mordor deployed 'out of
Far Harad black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues.' "
A good point, but it's worth mentioning that a distinction was drawn between near Harad and Far Harad, with only the inhabitants of Far Harad being black. It always seemed pretty clear to me that Harad was the Muslim Caliphate, and therefore consisted of a "Swarthy" majority and a "black" minority (this also explains the Elephants reasonably well)
OH NOES liberal guilt meshes with RPGs and modern mythology!!!1
As a non-western minority in west africa I also notice that there are no whites, asians, or middle eastern people represented in African mythology. There should be white heroes in African mythology as well, just as there should be black people in white cultural myths, otherwise it is racism IMO.
All you people are racist for not noticing this and have "RPG privilege" and "myth privilege."
Meh to your "race and D&D" article, Mr. Coates. Meh.
I could write a few pages about stuff I take issue with about the article, not the least of which is that the author makes no attempt to dicuss the role of *cultural* determinism in D&D, but the essay does have a point: there is a breathtaking amount of racial determinism in D&D, no question about it.
But, this is conterbalanced by complete and utter equality within the "human" race; there is absolutely no barrier to making your character black, asian, etc... and the game is as colorblind as the players and the DM want it to be. The author tries to ward off this argument by saying that all the human characters are essentially white, but he's reasoning is supported by two extremely flimsy arguments.
One, he points out that the game is based heavily on European mythology and culture. Well, of course it is (see Ta-Hehisi's comments of Xhosa creation myths). The people who wrote the game were a bunch of white guys who grew up with European mythology and fantasy. What would you expect them to make. The characters, and the realms, are by *default* white european. But there is nothing that says they have to be! This is a game about imagination (role-playing) and thus imagination is its only limit. You are able, in fact encoraged, to go out and make your own campaign settings, even your own rules (right there in the first pages of the 2nd edition). If the group wants to make an Asian or African themed campaign setting there is nothing to stop them. The idea that, as expressed above in some posts, say Asians aren't offered anything from D&D because "all they got was a monk" is silly and insulting. Must ethnic minorities necessarily want to play character's themed from their own culture? And, if they do want to, what is to stop them from doing so? A fighter is a fighter in any culture, whether you call him a samurai or a knight. A ninja can be approximated by combining aspects of fighter and thief. Martial arts is the only thing the system doesn't really cover, thus the need for the monk. The writer points out that some of the suplimentary stuff (Oriental Adventures, for example) is stereotypical. Fair enough, but just exactly how close is a game maker, or a fantasy author required to stick to his source material? Are players to be barred from role-playing different cultures, races, or genders? D&D doesn't place any limits on what players can do in that respect. Or, in other words, your paladin may have to be human, but he can be every bit as black as you want him to be.
The author's second flimsy peice of evidence is the lack of minorities depicted in the manual art. "See," he says, "it may not say so, but you can't really have a minority character - just look at the pictures." Once again, not entirely suprising given the backgrounds of the game creaters, but wholey immaterial. While there are few depiction of minorities, there is still nothing to stop you from role-playing them or using them in your campaign. Or, look at it this way: If I were to judge the game soley based on the fantasy artwork involved, I would also assuredly conlude the game was masively sexist: there is no end of preposterously chain-mail bikini clad, nearly nude attractive women. Not suprising given the male, teenage audience. But, in the actual game there is no sexism inherent whatsoever. Much like ethnicites within the "human" group, females of all races are given perfect equality with men. They have the same stats, the same character classes, and the same abilities. Any major female character , whether PC or NPC, heroine or villian will naturally rise to the same level of power and importance as a male character. (In all my years of playing, I have never encountered the typical "save the princess" style gender conventions so common in say, traditional fantasy and RPG video games.) The same is true for your black paladin, or your asian ranger. The author insists that you must stick to the base material, and can't deviate from the artwork. But that is a mindboggling position given he is discussing a game which is all about using your imagination to create.
***
Could the core manuals benefit from some more deversity? You bet. But what I am trying to say is that the massive racial and cultural determinism built into the system (dwarves will always be short, orcs will always be evil, etc...) is offset by the complete and utterly perfect equality granted to characters of different (human) ethnic background and gender.
I forgot to note that chain-mail bikinis are no-where to be found on the equipment list.
Aside: I'd be interested to know whether Mr. Coates (or his son for that matter) felt the same way as the author did (that is, that non-white charactes were out of place) when they first started playing, or did they (as one might expect) simply imagine their fighter/mage/whatever as being black like them, and make no further note of it? Is the main reason "being black the black kid into fantasy is a funny thing" because none of the characters look like you, or because none of the other kids playing down at the comic shop look like you?
The idea that, as expressed above in some posts, say Asians aren't offered anything from D&D because "all they got was a monk" is silly and insulting.
That's not what I meant about the monk. It was just the only (or only major) part of 1st edition AD&D that was directly inspired by Asian mythology instead of European myths (at least until some later supplements like Oriental Adventures).
Much like ethnicites within the "human" group, females of all races are given perfect equality with men.
I'm pretty sure in 1st edition AD&D the upper strength limits for male and female characters were different.
Beyond that, though, you're right that campaigns could be set in any ethnic setting.
Only played 2nd edition; there definately wasn't a strength limitataion there. Lost the monk (atleast in the core rules) though.
Mad props to Hector for spotting the resemblance between Gondor and Byzantium. Tolkien was aware of it:
I think Zeke is clearly correct in pointing out that the "structural" equivalent of Mordor is the Caliphate (and the later Ottoman Empire). This was never a popular suggestion even before 9/11, and these days I hesitate even to mention it for fear of encouraging the Mark Steyn types.
The logic however is inescapable: The story is supposed to be taking place in the northwest part of Europe at some prehistoric time. In historical times the Christian nations occupying this territory were under persistent pressure from non-Christian nations located to the east and south. The imagined situation naturally resembles the historic one, and the adversaries have darker skin in both cases. But it does NOT follow that Tolkien did then, or would now, see Arabs, Persians, et al. as any worse by nature than white Europeans. Everything he wrote in his letters shows otherwise.
An aside in re: Tolkien - When they were first casting the movies, I thought that Morgan Freeman would have made a great Gandalf. Still do.
In Re: D&D/AD&D - playing it as-is is the mark of a new gamer and few people play the game as-is anymore. WOTC/TSR Recognised this maybe a bit too late, but still pushed the game out of the 1950s (where, more or less, the mindset of 1e/2e was born). Progress of any kind is slow.
The real failing of D&D is not the fact that it fixates on race, but that it fails to take into account culture and sub-culture. It distresses me immensely when people lump 'white europeans' and 'african americans' together as monolithic groups. They are not and likely never will be. I understand that as a civilization we need handles to grip large groups - but frankly in our individual games we should be more subtle.
When creating a setting, I have my players select their character's culture of origin, their species is usually human - and if I have non-humans, I create individual cultures within those species for characters to choose.
Interesting counterpoint to all of that ... Order of the Stick, a webcomic by Rich Burlew. It's extremely funny and bases quite a bit of its humor on D&D. The heroes' leader, Roy, is dark-skinned.
Interesting thing about Star Trek: I recently watched parts of the two pilots, and while there were no African-Americans in the first one (there was one Asian officer in the transporter room), there was an African-American bridge officer in the second, although he didn't have any dialog in the part that I watched. Also worth noting is that the spin-off series, Deep Space Nine, not only featured an African-American lead (the excellent Avery Brooks), but also directly addressed the issue of race in episodes such as "Far Beyond the Stars" and "Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang", largely at Brooks' urging.
Besides Tolkien, RPGs incorporate the pulp sword and sorcery of Robert Howard and his ilk. Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream (which predates D&D) originates in an alternative world where a certain failed Austrian artist emigrates to America and becomes a pulp writer. Most of the book consists of his novel Lord of the Swastika, a dead-on parody of Howard that points up the racism inherent to his work.
I am coming too late to this comments thread, but this was generally a fascinating discussion to read.
I was surprised that no one mentioned the Racial Preferences Table in the AD&D Players Handbook. That was the first time I had ever seen the word "antipathy."
The Deities and Demigods book had extensive lists of non-Western pantheons.
More broadly, a look through the original Monster Manual pretty quickly shows that while Western myth and fantasy literature form the basis of the world the authors were describing, they were pretty shameless about writing up everything they could find from any culture that had a mythology with monsters/creatures that could be useful to them. The Ki-Rin is the best example of this that I can think of, but I know there are others. While there might not be enough monsters represented from any given non-Western culture to run a story set entirely in that culture without importing/modifying some other more generic critters, my general impression was that the authors wanted to recruit as many extant cultural mythologies as possible to their milieu. It probably made for less work for them, as well.
Since no one is likely to read this, I'll leave it at that.
Jeebus, this guy is an idiot. There's *no* mention of human "races" until the third edition, and then it is *emphatically multicultural.*
Conclusion: Racism!
I read your comment, Mr. Mayhem: I learned a hell of a lot about non-western mythologies via D&D. As one wag put it, "Naga, please!"
@James F. Elliott
The movie Jackson is referring to is called Zulu, starring Michael Caine. It is the true story of 150 Welsh infantrymen and a few Boer militia at the outpost of Roarke's Drift that were surrounded and attacked for several days by 5,000 Zulu warriors. The Welshmen were able to fight off the Zulus. It resulted in more Victorian Crosses (the UK's highest honor for soldiers) being awarded than any other engagement in their history. It's an amazing military story (and a great "war" movie, too boot), akin to Thermopylae only with a happier ending, and that's probably what Jackson was going for.
Thanks for the info. Regarding part of your comment.
akin to Thermopylae only with a happier ending
Happy ending for whom? Definitely not for the Zulus, considering the Boers were invading their lands and that their subsequent subjugation would give birth to apartheid South Africa. The Welsh and Boer might have fought valiantly against a numerically superior force (though their weaponry was far superior) but that doesn't erase the fact that they were colonialists and thieves.
This is the total tone deafness that I'm talking about. When I hear him comparing the Orcs to the Zulus then methinks he has a huge racial blind spot IMHO.
O.K Now my rant begins below, and while it might be tangential to the point of people of color in SF and D&D I will come back to it
Not to invoke Godwin, but would we say the same of Nazi soldiers in WW2 (that they fought gallantly?). Somehow we seem to accord people with white skin a measure of humanity that is denied those with dark sin. My grandfather (Kenyan) was conscripted to fight by the British in WW2, he never talked about it. But I heard from others that Germans would capture blacks subjects fighting on the side of the British and execute them with impunity, with nary a whimper from the Brits. Frantz Fanon's experiences fighting on France's side during WW2 echo this too. So do African Americans who fought for America but when moves where shown in barracks the sitting order was American whites upfront, Nazi prisoners in the middle and blacks all the way in the back.
While I love J.R Tolkien and think he is one of the greatest writers ever, I just cannot deny that the very same elements are at play in his writing. Nobility and gallantry seem to be a function of skin color, and darker skin is an automatic marker of savagery, evil and deprivation.
"Nobility and gallantry seem to be a function of skin color"
While I agree James Elliott's 'happy ending' comment was... questionable (and I speak as a Brit), you need to see the movie. It's shot from the Brits' point of view, so the Zulus aren't individualised, but they are shown as noble and gallant.
Also, the Boers didn't have that much to do with Roarke's Drift - it was an Anglo-Zulu battle primarily.
@Ovid
Will do. Thanks, I might have been mistaking the battle with The Battle of Blood River.
Rorke's Drift was a footnote to the battle of Isandlwana, which was the African equivalent of Custer's Last Stand; the Zulus wiped out a British battalion almost to the last man. War movies are made by the winning side, mostly.
A really good book (though long) about South African history during the 19th century, including the Zulu wars, is "The Washing of the Spears" by Donald R. Morris. I believe it's generally considered to be an evenhanded treatment.
Baiskeli, do you know where your grandfather fought in WWII? My reading suggests that the British East African troops (the King's African Rifles) fought the Italians in the Horn of Africa, the Vichy French in Madagascar, and the Japanese in Burma, but never the Germans. (The Brits, like other colonial powers, didn't want their dark-skinned soldiers to get in the habit of shooting at white guys.) If you know different, I'd like to be educated. Thanks.
Rorke's Drift was a footnote to the battle of Isandlwana, which was the African equivalent of Custer's Last Stand; the Zulus wiped out a British battalion almost to the last man. War movies are made by the winning side, mostly.
One should also note that Zulu was made with the heavy cooperation of the Zulus themselves, who viewed the battle as an honorable fight. By no stretch of the imagination are they portrayed as dishonorable or remotely orc-like in the movie at all (though they certainly die in droves). Instead they are portrayed as intelligent and highly capable foes. I think what Jackson was trying to recreate was the energy and desperation of a triumph against all odds, which Stanley Baker's Zulu indeed does capture very well... and fits Helm's Deep perfectly.
I should also note that the admiration of directors such as Peter Jackson and Ridley Scott for the movie might not necessarily indicate much about their political preferences. Jackson trying to recreate the fight in Zulu says something about his taste in film. The fact that Triumph of the Will was made by Leni Riefenstahl under the Nazis doesn't change the fact that it was highly influential as a film. If we're not careful we're going to start condemning things like the swept wing or turbojets, both of which were largely developed by German scientists during the Nazi era, and that just gets stupid.
But, this is conterbalanced by complete and utter equality within the "human" race; there is absolutely no barrier to making your character black, asian, etc... and the game is as colorblind as the players and the DM want it to be.
Yes, but because nearly all of the art portrays people of european decent, and the mythology is euro-centric, its safe to assume that characters will be white. And it can't be denied that Orcs are grotesque stereotypes of aboriginal peoples
John T wrote:
Yes, but because nearly all of the art portrays people of european decent, and the mythology is euro-centric, its safe to assume that characters will be white.
Really, I wonder about that long running D&D campaign my friend George---with mostly white Midwestern players---ran based on a careful reading of Romance of the Three Kingdoms was, then? Now one example certainly doesn't prove much of anything but what is the #2 selling fantasy RPG, White Wolf's Exalted, which is explicitly based on numerous non-Western sources does say quite a bit.
And it can't be denied that Orcs are grotesque stereotypes of aboriginal peoples
It could be denied, at least by Tolkein, who based the orcs at least a bit on the soldiers he commanded in World War I. But of course that's just going to lead to a whiny leftist riff on the evils of classism so I'm not entirely sure what the point of raising it is.
Look, I'm not denying the racism floating around in the fantasy (or real) world, especially the older stuff, but that's like saying that movies from fifty years ago---with some really important exceptions---are all invalid because of the latent (or blatant) racism many portrayed. Or even movies from ten or twenty years ago for that matter. It just gets more than a bit silly to hold the past to the standards of the present and then dismiss everything that doesn't fit whatever the current morality is. As I believe fits a sentiment our host has expressed in the past: Grow up and get over it.
One should also note that Zulu was made with the heavy cooperation of the Zulus themselves
To the extent -- I had forgotten this, but I just verified it on IMdB -- that Zulu King Ceteswayo was actually played by the reigning Chief of the Zulu Nation, Mangosuthu Buthelezi.
john t
Did you bother to read the rest of the post? D&D is "white" by default, but there is absolutely nothing to keep it that way except a lack of immagination.
Yes, orc and their racial determinism are troubling, but on the otherhand you have human characters with no racial or gender restrictions. How do you measure that?
And this:
"its safe to assume that characters will be white."
does not compute.
Its "its safe to assume that characters will be white" if you aren't playing the game but rather doing some sort of abstract analysis of the genre. However, if you *are* playing the game then *you* choose the characters. You make them whatever you want.
You are telling me that a bunch of black kids gaming will look at the manual and say: "well, I guess I am going to have to play a white guy because I can't find any pictures of black folks in here"? Seriously?
Hey everyone! Chris here -- the guy who wrote the article that everyone is discussing. Wow. This whole thing would be a lot funnier if everyone know the background to my writing it: Nerd Nite. I signed up to give a power-point presentation at a bar in Brooklyn, and I'd been kicking these ideas around with a friend for about a year. So in about two weeks, using just the core-books for research, I whipped this talk out. I wasn't giving the talk at a conference, but to an inebriated audience of non-gaming nerds, hipsters, and geeks in DUMBO. Did I throw in a few lines to get a laugh? Yes, that's why it reads very informally at times. Did I really have time in the 30 minute format to discuss everything I should have? No. Did I ever expect anyone other than my friends who couldn't make the talk to read this? Hell no. Thanks Mr. Coates, for my 15 minutes of fame : )
However, I do believe 90% of what I wrote in this piece, and I do believe that the words and images we use to describe race, especially in a game where players take on the persona of the character, are very important. If the game is so open to players being any color, as the last post suggests, why are 99.4% of the illustrations white. 99.4! Does that mean you must be white? No, of course not, and I never said that. Does that mean you might, as a player of color, feel less included? Yes -- while I've had a lot of white men scoff at this point and dismiss my piece out of hand, I have yet to have heard from a woman or person of color who hasn't at least said "yeah, that always bothered me, too."
Rorke's Drift was a footnote to the battle of Isandlwana, which was the African equivalent of Custer's Last Stand; the Zulus wiped out a British battalion almost to the last man. War movies are made by the winning side, mostly. - roac
Except for the sequel to Zulu, Zulu Dawn, which is about... the battle of Isandlwana. ;-)
I can second the Washing of the Spears recommendation.
Correction: that should be 'prequel' not 'sequel', of course.
@roac
Baiskeli, do you know where your grandfather fought in WWII?
Burma I think. He never talked about it. But other african countries (I want to say the French colonies/provinces) had Africans in different theatres. Let me do some digging and get back to you (the movie "Days of Glory" comes to mind)
(The Brits, like other colonial powers, didn't want their dark-skinned soldiers to get in the habit of shooting at white guys.)
This made me laugh cause its so true. You are right, lets not forget that the Mau Mau rebellion was founded by Kenyans who had served in WW2 and seen that whites bled and dies just like them.
@crimfan
One should also note that Zulu was made with the heavy cooperation of the Zulus themselves, who viewed the battle as an honorable fight. By no stretch of the imagination are they portrayed as dishonorable or remotely orc-like in the movie at all (though they certainly die in droves). Instead they are portrayed as intelligent and highly capable foes. I think what Jackson was trying to recreate was the energy and desperation of a triumph against all odds, which Stanley Baker's Zulu indeed does capture very well... and fits Helm's Deep perfectly.
Thanks, I think this movie is going on my Netflix queue. I'm still not comfortable with the use of skin color in LOTR or a few of the scenes in King Kong but maybe in this aspect I should cut Peter Jackson a break.
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While I agree James Elliott's 'happy ending' comment was... questionable
Oh for fuck's sake. "Happier ending" referred to some of the ostensible defenders surviving, as opposed to Thermopylae where they all died. Sometimes a badass tale of heroism is just a badass tale of heroism. If Jackson had referenced the fricking Autobots' stand at Autobot City in Transformers: The Movie it would be evoking the same goddamn sentiment.