What's up with Mormons and dogshit best-selling books?
The books can be annoyingly lib at times, but the eye color caste thing is very clearly represented as a bullshit system you shouldn't agree with.
Yeah, I never actually got around to finishing reading it, but from what I read even when the POV characters were people who intrinsically believed in the system it seemed like the actual narrative was pretty overtly saying "this is dumb and bad, actually," and showing the ruling class as depraved psychopaths.
Yeah, the only "white" people in the setting are from the nation/culture described as exotic and foreign, or are literally interdimensional aliens.
Mistborn is pretty great though. I really like how
spoiler
Elend's liberal democracy falls apart because he divides the voting block by Nobles | Rich Skaa | Skaa and then :surprised-pika: the rich skaa all side with the Nobles and fuck him over so they can go back to exploiting the Skaa (who put him in power)
Dude spent his whole life reading nothing but theory written by other Nobles and his best guess fell apart almost instantly because he didn't understand that the Skaa struggle was a class struggle as much as it was a race one. Then in Era 2, they all fetishize his Great Man status and implement the flawed system and re-create all the issues he had,
Though, there is the whole thing with Kelsier being a 'bad guy' because he hated the nobles sooo much, when some of them are nice actually!
Nah dog, fuck em'.
Now normally I’m not one for biology based caste systems BUUUUT this one puts me as a king or philosopher so maybe I’ll have to change my mind on that
"oh, now I understand why everyone's always telling me 'go off, king' on twitter!"
For a site that routinely mocks the "the curtains are just blue!" crowd, Hexbear sure is bad at understanding that authors can write about systems in a way that makes it clear they're a bad thing.
Also this is at least the third potshot at Sando in two weeks, so I see we're doing the usual ":reddit-logo: likes something so we need to be contrarian and declare a relatively harmless YA fantasy author fascist" kick again.
I remember the first round of 'Sando bad' discourse going when Wired published that wild article about him.
Hey, someone has to keep the posting factory open
Also, tje people who recomended me this saga are SO FUCKING REDDIT
I had the same thoughts. I heard the sequel is better but I haven't bothered to read it.
His only work I've read are the WoT entries and while I understand he was finishing another person's series didn't seem to really get most of the characters, like Mat Cauthon became bland as fuck.
For a site that routinely mocks the “the curtains are just blue!” crowd, Hexbear sure is bad at understanding that authors can write about systems in a way that makes it clear they’re a bad thing.
Don't be ridiculous, by the way, have you heard of that awful pro-Nazi movie Come And See?
Also why are sanitation workers and street sweepers always “untouchables” in every setting? Y’all those are important jobs you need those people
mirroring real life i guess
sanitation is usually seen as a very low status job, even though if they all stopped working most of us will be riddled with disease within a few yearsI think "sanitation worker" and "postal worker" are the only non-cop jobs that have been unionized in every city and town I've ever lived in.
True. Hey, how long has it been since your city last experienced a garbage strike? Because I think everyone in Toronto remembers the 2009 one vividly enough that they think twice before taking sanitation workers for granted. Shit was nasty.
i think the last actual strike was maybe in 2005?
they did threaten one last year though, but i think the local council capitulated
the council is local government to be clear
Underpayment your important workers is a efficient social technology. It means you can have more of them and improve your society.
It is perverse but profitable
This hierarchy implies there's more sanitation workers than peasants/proles. This society literally needs to be less shit.
As far as I get it, in actual caste systems untouchables as the lowest cast weren't like the most common cast.
Because people can't do anything but copy Indian caste system roles, just with a different set of people in each caste.
Because nobody wants to do that kind of work, so it gets shoved off on those least able to resist
Also in some cultures metal workers were considered untouchable for some reason? Maybe they had to deal with harmful chemicals or something...
Because that's how it's been in some real caste systems
Good soap was hard to make for a long time so if you had a dirty job you were probably dirty most of the time. Which means rich people were unlikely to invite you to nice things. Which then means you get underpaid and it becomes a vicious cycle.
as others have mentioned, it is framed as a really bad system
is funny reading them as a blue eyed ne'er do well though nglMe when I see virulent racism: "Airsick lowlanders..."
I thought the fantasy of SLA was neat, but I just don't find the focus on military to be exciting. Give me hobbits going through the murky swamp any day.
Yeah, the later books are essentially a superhero story in a fantasy setting. A group of heros with their own distinct power sets, fighting enemies with essentially mirror power sets.
Nah, this part is fine. The sub antagonists are the rascist nobility and that is pretty good.
There are garbage parts though. The bad guys are untimely the black skinned slaves. Which is not great. He handles it fairly well for the books I have read, but it is still a rough premise to try to save.
Bonus the magic has the effect of making you not sleepy but is hard on your body. He is so mormon he thinks coffee is magic.
So, um, it's a spoiler, and it's kinda weird and complicated, but...
spoiler
They're actually not the bad guys at all, at least not historically--the humans are. But now the two sides are locked in a massive, age-spanning, incredibly destructive war in which both sides are the pawns of larger forces, though the humans are still cast as being on the "good" side of that larger conflict. But there are humans on the "bad" side and parshmen (aka Listeners) on the "good" side, and most of the parshmen (aka Singers--like I said, it's complicated) on the "bad" side are portrayed as good, ordinary people who are just caught up in the war.
There being good slaves and then bad slaves does not generally address the issues I had with thr narrative
What? No, that's not at all what I'm saying. The labels of good and bad don't apply to the people on the ground; they're referring to the larger forces behind the two sides. There are good and bad people on both sides.
spoiler
What I'm saying is, the parshmen/parshendi (regardless of which sides they're on) are not the Voidbringers.
And even though there are "good" and "bad" sides, the whole thing is really a lot more complicated than that; the people who are cast early on as the "bad guys" are portrayed with far more sympathy than you would probably expect, and their humanity is made very clear repeatedly. It's really hard to explain it all in a few sentences like this; I can only tell you that if you read the books, I think you'll find that you've mischaracterized them here.
I am saying there are no good guys on the side of kings that own slaves. The story says there are but you know :john-brown:
I think I left off mid way through waiting for future books. However as far as I hand gotten the story was still pro putting down a slave revolt and that felt bad.
untouchables - sanitation workers
I fukken hate this shit so bad. People say this around me and I always have to cut in - motherfucking janitors, garbage pickup people, street sweepers et al are doing some of the most important jobs in this entire fucking city, show some goddamn respect.
Just realized this is from a fiction book, but my comment stands.
What can I say, it's good slop. I have stopped defending him. It's much better to confront the mans shortcomings directly.
that being said, massive spoilers for the whole series
The real reason for the caste system is incomplete cultural remembrance of a group of superpowered individuals who gain their powers through confronting and getting past psychological trauma with the help of various metaphysical manifestations of the spirit realm called "Spren". Those powers turn their eyes glowing light blue as they manifest.
Read The Open Curtain by Brian Evenson. He was Mormon when he started writing it and he was fired from BYU shortly before it was published. In a way it's a personal narrative documenting his struggles coming to terms with the injustices of an institution that has shaped you, but in another way it is a thoughtful meditation on the relationship between mental illness, violence and religious trauma.
I remember this being a shitpost years ago on fantasy/world-building subreddits. Does this actually have something to do with Brando Sando?
One of his book series involves a society with an eye color based caste system. In the books, it is depicted as objectively wrong and evil. Racists irl sometimes actually believe this on top of their ideas about skin color, because why the fuck wouldn't they pass up a chance to be more racist.
There's one character in his books who's basically "the author's perspective if the author was cool" and he specifically goes on a rant about how it might be the stupidest system of social categorization he's ever seen
Okay good to hear. Everything I've seen of Sando's writing indicates he's a a subreddit given flesh, but he didn't seem this overtly despicable.
No, he actually seems like a super nice, chill guy who works hard to listen to the criticism of his mormon-ass social views.
Oh I don't mean his personality strictly - I just mean the bits of writing that I've either seen online or that friends have shown me over the years aren't for me.
I just checked out my eyes and I can't tell if I'm a middle manager of an officer :( green eyes are weird
