How do I break out of those weird tropes but still write something with gnomes and shit? What does it look like when wizards control the means of production?

  • skeletorsass [she/her]
    ·
    4 years ago

    In my book I’m working on, I’m approaching it like a work of history from below, so I’m exclusively writing from the perspective of normal, oppressed people. There are no rich people learning lessons or anyone with a secret royal birth; just a poor family trying to get by.

    This is a valuable tip. A lot of fantasy will fail this unintentionally and become pro-feudalism, even written by an author who is not a reactionary.

    • jack [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      4 years ago

      I can think of a good example of exactly this in an otherwise politically excellent and quite anticapitalist books I read this year, Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett. Light, early book spoilers below (they are really not significant spoilers):

      spoiler

      There are two primary perspective characters. One is a poor former slave just trying to get by. She rules. The other is a dude who's (somewhat) secretly the son of the wealthiest woman in the world, who is pulling all kinds of strings, and he's supposed to be the heir to her fortune and corporation, but he refuses. He's a good character, but I just had to wonder: why, in our tiny selection of protagonists, must one of them be so outrageously priviliged? It's a distraction from the point of the story.

      Good book though, and I recommend it. That author's other work is good anti-imperialist fiction, but similarly, it's from the perspective of the imperialists, including some people of outrageously important birth.

    • shitstorm [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Exactly. I do enjoy stories that follow lords and princes, but I hate hate hate the current trend of showing "good lords" by making the peasants dumb. The new lord shows up and uses his fancy knowledge to increase production 100%, yes this wealthy noble definitely knows more about land production than the people living on it.

      I like noble characters since they're the ones who have armies in medieval-like fantasy, but the story should not go out of its way to justify feudalism. If your character is a lord and wants to be a good person, they should either have cognitive dissonance or want to reject the notion of lordship.