trust the microwaves

an omnipotent creator being almost certainly doesn't exist but if it does, it's a supervillain

gods shouldn't exist but we keep creating them to use as weapons. and no one knows how to defuse one

gods don't exist which is a relief bc otherwise we'd be forced to hunt them down for execution

creator god exists and we owe it nothing (DEEPLY unqualified)

god/s abandoned us and it hurt at the time but in hindsight we escaped a highly toxic relationship

boy is a devil

"If someone breaks in dude, you beat the ever-loving shit out of them real hard dude, you beat the shit out of them, Chancho, you hear me?"

"You just beat the shit out of anyone who breaks in!"

translation notes:

"What if a small group of religious extremists, persecuted in their own country, moved to an inhospitable uninhabited island and had to rebuild society there?" - But the Americas and Australia weren't inhospitable and were full of Native nations, why are you perpetuating the idea of Terra Nullius and manifest destiny? - Yes, that's because this isn't a metaphor for the British invading other countries, it's a metaphor for finding out how much of a person's religious practise is rooted in worldly concerns, vs how much they will really stymie themselves for the sake of God.

"What if 1/100 children born was a werewolf?" - But queer people are no danger to straight people, and disabled people don't have predictable patterns to their illnesses, and most people who have uncontrollable rages really CAN control them and are just lying, and no minority group has superpowers... - Yes, but that's all immaterial, because I wanted to talk about a load of other metaphors about the passage of time and responsibility and the relationship between humans and wildlife.

I think it particularly comes up the moment an author includes any sort of marginalisation/oppression for their fictional/fantasy world. I've lost count of the times now where I've seen people read a book on, say, the terrible oppression of the Gwyllion, and immediately gone "Oh, so the Gwyllion are a metaphor for the real world X people, either deliberately or accidentally through the author's inherent racism. This is therefore super problematic because the Gwyllion are also described as Y, which means the author is also saying that about X people."

There will always be real world parallels when discussing oppression. Always. But that's because oppression is oppression - precise details may vary, but it follows the same pathways the world over, and that will naturally be copied into fiction as well. This does not mean the author is intentionally telling the exact allegory that you've projected onto it. If that's how you read everything, then yeah, everything becomes super problematic, but also, why are you reading any fiction that isn't solely about real world historical events? It's clearly not for you

And, you know, obviously there are works that are racist/misogynistic/etc, including deliberately so. But I really don't like the way people have started going "I have spotted a PROBLEMATIC ALLEGORY here, I'm ever so smart" and acting like they're the cleverest little critic that ever lived. You have to meet a work on its own terms. Lovecraft was a big ole racist, sure. Someone who has written a book about the oppression of magic users in their fantasy world, however, is rarely writing a story about how queerness lurks in family lines and must be controlled; they are way more commonly writing a story about a world with magic that they then wanted to take seriously, and while there might well be elements of queerness there, those magic users are not a 1:1 replacement.

Sometimes these lines are blurry! But we're going way too far to one end of that spectrum

The post that got me thinking about this yesterday was someone talking about how they'd love to write a vampire story exploring vampirism as a disability (dependence on a substance to manage the condition, blindness/weakness in daytime, can't enter buildings without accommodation, etc). But, they said, they can't, because they don't want to be making the point that disabled people are parasites, and vampires are generally considered parasitic.

And like. What an incredible shame. That we'll lose that, because they're already afraid of the "I have spotted a PROBLEMATIC ALLEGORY" crowd. That would be a great story for exploring disability themes, OR just a great new take on vampires, and either of those things would be so good to read. But there would be so many people who would jump in with "So you think disabled people are draining the life force of the ableds around them?", never stopping to actually think "Vampires are not a 1:1 stand in for real world disability because they are fictional and do not exist."

That being said… fiction does not exist in a vacuum. Oppression exists in real life, so when it comes up in fiction it’s normal to compare it to real world oppression. Not only that fantasy race / queer / disability allegory is actually everywhere. I mean the biggest box office hit ever was Avatar. A movie about the United States stealing Native American land and the natives being saved by a white man. It involved no native people on its writing team (only some to consult which doesn’t mean much as far as I’m concerned) and was absolutely a white savior story.

It’s also a little insulting to marginalized people to say that if they want to see better representation of how they experience the world they should only read historical fiction. Do we not deserve to see ourselves reflected in at least some fantasy fiction?

I understand that authors dont always intend for something to be a one to one allegory, Tolkien was a very nice man who hated allegory. However even his nameless horde was made up of dark skinned people bent on destroying civilization. I doubt he intended it to be read that way, in fact I think that black and brown people were the furthest thing from his mind when he wrote that story. I think he was probably just pulling on traditional imagery of dark vs light. Which… shouldn’t be used literally otherwise you get things like a main cast of fair skinned heros saving the world from the scourge of dark skinned monsters and .. uh “men of the south” whatever that means.

What I’m trying to say is that oppression exists in the real world. When you write about fantasy oppression you will carry over themes of real life oppression into it. Racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, this is the water we swim in. It. Is. Everywhere. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t write that vampire story with vampirism as disability, you should and it should center the experiences of disabled people. Some people do think of disabled people as parasites, how do your vampires prove those people wrong? Sure have werewolves as an exploration of the passage of time and our responsibility to nature. If 1 in 100 people are werewolves then it IS a story about a minority group, how does being a minority affect those themes?