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Comments
Much like what happened with music, the right approach is to make it convenient and less expensive to buy the stuff legally.
Hell if I know what the right approach is. I don't think there has to be a definitive right approach in order to call something wrong that doesn't work and likely makes the problem worse. The problem is, there's no such thing as uncrackable DRM. You can make it take longer before your product gets pirated, but if you make it less convenient for the people who buy it legally in the process, then once it does get pirated you end up in a situation where the pirates are getting a better experience than the people who pay for it. So I guess the right approach is one that accepts piracy will happen but tries to create incentives to buy the product in other ways.
Of course, the bit about "there's no such thing as uncrackable DRM" doesn't necessarily apply when we're talking about magic or whatever.
Edit: Also what CU said. A lot of people who pirate things are doing so because they don't want to pay, but the fact that "go to ThePirateBay, click the download link, wait" is about as easy as it gets is also very relevant. If you can make it that easily to get legally, people are more likely to do it, especially if it's also fairly cheap. This is why Steam is so successful, for instance. (Of course, Steam does include a DRM layer, but a comparatively non-intrusive one.)
Steam's success is also due to coming with a number of other features, such as screencap sharing, cloud saves, and social networking.
All of that still falls under the umbrella of making the user experience nicer than it is when pirating.
So...back on topic.
Am I the only one who hates it when separate species like "elves", "humans" and "dwarves" are assigned only one culture that never changes, even if it logically should have changed given geographical and temporal differences? Like, let's say:
It's just really lazy and makes no logical sense.
^ You're not the only one who's annoyed at that lack of
realismverisimilitude/believability.That said, that's partly the fault of fantasy fiction of the "things are, just, like this" sort. The kind where good and evil are not fluid concepts up for debate but core parts of one's being.
To be honest, elves can be quite varied. It's the dwarves who are pretty much all the same. I can't think of any notable example save D&D itself, where there are any notable differences between dwarves (albeit that may be just me not being well-read). Elves, meanwhile, get at least the Vanilla and Dark forms, and occasionally Wood, High, Sea, so on.
Elves generally fall into one of several subtypes while Dwarves are rarely anything other than "Dwarvish". It's annoying regardless though.
Let's also keep in mind how some races are just always evil regardless of anything, sans maybe one or two token exceptions.
Well, in folklore a dwarf stays underground because if they're touched by sunlight they will turn to stone.
Like I said, that's become a lot less common these days, what with stuff like the S.S and the apartheid policy being viewed with contempt outside of fringe white supremacy groups.
They were pretty much always held in contempt. Traditionally, most fantasy readership has been left wing politically, ever since the explosion in popularity of The Lord of the Rings (and I mean the initial explosion, when it was still just a book). Not to say that right wingers would be accepting of those things, but the political leanings of the traditional fantasy audience would probably make them more immediately critical of that kind of thing. Or perhaps not, given how severe some narrative shortcomings became in fantasy.
I also forget how popular that series was as a book series before it became the movies and things. Like how on Friends Ross referenced reading LotR and Rachel referenced the Hobbit on two separate occasions, both times before the movies came out.
Well you could look at rock at metal music to chart the popularity of fantasy across the years.
I dunno, I'm not sure if a book that contains an example of an Always Evil (Lawful, but still) race (the Orcs) should be used as an example of fantasy readership disapproving of Always Chaotic Evil races.
To be fair, aren't the orcs manufactured, thus making them more like robots than a true race?
^^^Metal doesn't really reflect mainstream culture though it does tend to have a more lasting influence than a lot of mainstream stuff.
I think cinematic technology has helped fantasy take off. Back when I was a kid you had Buffy and Xena and if you could sneak the violence past your parents stuff like Hawk The Slayer. But now with Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones being able to deliver their scope without camp (something metal music videos have yet to master) then it's reached a wider audience.
That's an...imperfect analogy. It's stated that Melkor "corrupted" the Five Races to make them, but the actual method is left vague.
Mhm, I think right-wing writers tend to prefer sci-fi, for some reason. But then, SF's also got quite a number of left-wingers, so I dunno. Fantasy pretty much by definition looks like the sort of thing right-wingers would like, you know, black-and-white morality, idealisation of the past, so on.
I guess that depends on the type of sci-fi, really. Most cyberpunk is left-wing, sci-fi was a big thing in the Soviet Union etc. Generally it's a mixed bag, though.
As for fantasy, Tolkien himself was a hardcore conservative. Later authors, if political, did mostly lean to the left (Moorcock, for example). The readership can indeed swing both ways - of the fantasy fans I know, there's an almost equal split of left-wing and right-wing people, maybe with a slight right-wing bias. But fantasy's first surge of popularity was among the hippies - Tolkien was huge in the late 60's and early 70's. Remember all the Led Zeppelin songs that reference LotR?
Actually, he was pretty progressive for his Romance-era English context and the class of academic petty gentry he belonged to. This guy, after all, created a story where the world was saved by pot-smoking salt-of-the-earth types who give other people presents on their own birthday. But mostly I say this because of his staunch resistance against value judgements based on race, which some people find odd, but his interest in genealogy taught him how intensely similar all people are on a fundamental level.
As an example, he refused to allow The Hobbit to be published in Nazi Germany, and is known to have sent scathing replies to fan mail that insinuated that he was a white supremist (fan mail, not hate mail). And this is in a social context from before people of non-white heritage had the same rights as white people in many Western nations (including the USA, Australia and the UK), and who lived in England during Churchill's run (who was a massive supporter of the white England policy).
As for fantasy and sci-fi being on sides of the political spectrum, I guess it kind of depends? Tolkien's knowledge of medieval life in general meant that the setting of Middle-earth, for instance, doesn't fit cleanly into conventional left-right dichotomies, because the Middle Ages didn't. Certainly those authors with less of an understanding of the time period have settings that fall more clearly into one or another camp, but an accurate depiction of the Middle Ages will generally appear quite centrist to a modern perspective. Apart from the whole monarchism thing, y'know.
Sci-fi looks towards the future, so it'll focus the fears and preferences of the author. Look at the amount of cyberpunk that has a group of disempowered people act against established corporate powers. Conversely, you get stuff like Starship Troopers, which is like the neoconservative's guide to military ideals. It's no mistake that Aliens ran with the somewhat feministic, working-class-friendly elements of the first movie and turned its colonial marines into tragic parodies of the Starship Troopers, and that the actual Starship Troopers adaptation is mostly a straight-up parody in its entirety.
The biggest difference, I think, isn't in politics but in thematic focus. Science fiction is about the influence of technology and technical progression on us as human beings. A story set in a medieval fantasy world, but based around the development of a powerful technology, is just as much a science fiction story as any you can think of. Conversely, fantasy tends not to be about outward technology influencing human beings, but human beings influencing the world around them by the strength of their virtue. The spotlight is on the characters moreso than the world, or it should be in an ideal sense.
I wasn't aware of those facts about Tolkien, and had actually bought the stuff about the war in the Middle Earth representing the defense of white Europe.
Thanks!
Have you read that essay by Moorcock? 'Cause it sounds like something that you'd read. I like to joke that it's all about dissing Tolkien because The Lord of the Rings didn't end in hobbits setting up a workers' commune in Shire.
Yeah. It's certainly an interesting essay. I'll give it that.
In general, you know what Alex, I'm kinda surprised to admit that I pretty much share your thoughts on the affair we discussed beforehand. So, I'd go back to that topic, but I don't really see anything to add as of now, so I'll just continue the commie stuff and say that somewhere on TVT I've read that some unused concepts for D&D dwarves included a community (more like commune, heh heh) of them who deposed their king and set up some crazy commie shit. I have no idea why was it scrapped. Their concept arts was, allegedly, some crazy mix of standard dwarfery and Socialist Realism. That would've been awesometastic.
Yeah, I read that.
All in all, it appears to be not so much an individual attack on Tolkien, Lewis, Milne and several other authors as much as a general dismissal of escapism as inherently reactionary. Which is something that I have ambigous views about - while I technically agree, I still hold the opinion that not all fiction necessarily has to be socially charged. One still needs a bit of escapism now and then.
Oh, heh, it's the People's State of Morgengard from Chainmail, a strategy game that was basically the precursor to D&D. I don't know if they were planning to reuse it in D&D, though.
Alex, I am disappoint. I was expecting you to say something about how the Orcs weren't really Always Chaotic Evil and talk about how Tolkien was fiercely anti-racist.
Well, you did the latter. But still!
If the orcs were following Sauron's law, would that really make them "Chaotic Evil"