Stories have conflict and should have conflict to be about something; being vs being, being vs nature, being vs self; I understand this.

But does it always have to be war?

In thinking about this, I’ve also found that much of the conflict gets interpreted in terms of power; who wants power and is trying to get it vs who has power and is trying to keep it. And this can include power/control over the self.

But conflict doesn’t have to equal war.

So why does so much of fantasy involve War? Is it that Tolkien did a war and so everyone else does too? Or is it that D&D was an outshoot of table top war gaming, and thus when came D&D as a war game with dragons and what not, stories mimicking it also naturally dealt with war and aggressive conflict? Is it all of those? Is it more?

– The Looking Glass Wars

– The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (conflict and a kind of extended cold war)

– Guardian of the Dead (war of the supernatural)

– Mercedes Lackey; Valdemare = War, Joust = War, Bardic Voices = War, various collaborations (there’s a lot of war)

– Star Wars

– The Lord of Derkholm (war, though it’s a mocking satire of fantasy tropes)

– Codex Alera (oh definitely war)

– Dresden Files (also war, though mostly couched as mysterious paramormal conflict)

So again, why is so much of the conflict being(s) vs being(s)? With being vs self and being vs nature as sub-stories. Heck, often it seems like being vs nature is about a war against nature or a war FOR nature, but it’s still war.

Can only short stories, novellas and children’s stories not involve the grand power struggle between two or more great sides for a higher goal?

Though I suppose that’s not actually my direct question. My direct question is about war as war; bombs, explosions, machinery, tactics, logistics, weaponry, injury & recovery… Or cold war where the intrigue is all about preventing war.

Why is war so important to fantasy? What am I missing? Is this a reflection of how Eurocentric it often is, unconsciously mimicking the struggle for resources in European history? Or the struggle to have the MOST resources and privilege to dole it all out in European history? Is this why so many fantasy novels have a history prologue of who fought whom when and how leading to the current state of conflict?

Is fantasy nothing but fantastical history of imagined lands? Maybe with a few heroic legends from some scattered warriors thrown in?

If my offhand memory where better, I’d be able to contrast and see if the fantasy that gets called innovative is fantasy that better hides the war filling inside.

I don’t like war. I get bored reading about charges and positioning and machinery and weaponry. I don’t care about a character’s genius in combat unless it tells me more about the character themself. I mentioned The Dresden Files above, but I do care about the characters there. I care what the war does to them, how they cope, how they manage, their losses, their small victories, their damages, their healing.

I’ve a close friend who gets bored with battles in movies. And said friend has been soundly teased in the past. But I think I understand better. In movies, I watch the acting in the battle scenes; how desperate does the character seem, how tired, how afraid; that engages me. Most written battles focus on mechanics and I flip the page, bored.

So in reframing and decolonizing my mind, I ponder war and fantasy and the possible pitfalls; such as needing an easily recognized enemy and using all sorts of hard stereotypes and subtext stereotypes to get the point across while thinking they’re merely shorthand and not perpetuating a dangerous, damaging mode of thinking. And pitfalls such as how repetitive and mono-story tales on war can get.

I know I must be misremembering/forgotten fantasy stories that do not have a war at their heart. It’s not all usurpers and rebel alliances, the true lost heir fighting for the crown, guerrilla or intrigue tactics against a suborned civil or cultural institution – is it?

Is all that’s missing in one, spandex?

You have shape-shifters, wizards & magic workers, mythical creatures from legends, horrific tales etc; various secret or sometimes public organizations revolving around these magical, different beings, heroes vs villains, with big stakes and often a final show-down.

Urban Fantasy currently is drifting sharply into the stream of Paranormal Romance/Erotica (with a sprinkling of Mangaesque Harem tropes). But the last only brings it back around to sequential art storytelling.

UF/PR has your;

Remy’s – Bad boys with dark pasts and explosive (in all senses of the word) powers.

Scott Summers – Devoted Good Guys All About Protecting Hearth & Home

Batman – Ok I can only think of Harry Dresden right now, picking up ‘family’ left & right while convinced he’s a loner but I’m sure I can think of others given time. But there are definitely a bunch of ‘Bruce Waynes’, rich guys who aren’t all they seem on the surface, marked by their pasts.

Heroes for Hire – Practically is a UF Detective Saga, including the thief on the side of ultimate good & the ex-cop.

Dazzler – Singer who fights crime cause crime and trouble finds her

WW – Goddess among us, defending against ancient threats trying to regain their former power.

No wonder so many women who read comics and have been looking at at the execs in charge, are pointing across the street to where UF/PR is booming while screaming ‘Hello! Wake up your senses!’

And Dresden did actually make it to comic book form (do not talk to me about LKH. Just dont’).

Ahh, I think that click is my brain reconciling itself.

And Now For Some Mild Silliness:

I haven’t watched General Hospital in YEARS. But right now, considering that Port Charles once sported a vampire and has sported an alien visitor, I seriously think they only use the Mafia because they can’t have The League Of Evil Doers.

I have called Superhero Tales – Soap Operas With Super Powers.

I had just written my post on fantasy fiction, and was still mulling my thoughts over in my mind when I read this amazing response to a fresh wave of passive-aggressive racism in the fannish blosphere. Here is the essay in question; The Pomogranate Lamp by Ephemere (and if you don’t know how badly I will thump you for behaving badly in a post I like – imagine yourself a grape and I a steamroller).

And with the essay I had a brain-storm of a privileged child of colour, whose parents benefit from the oppressive colonizers by being ‘good natives’ – seeing how his father is treated as a more favoured pet, vs a worthless worker, but not as an equal. Noticing roving eyes on his mother or sisters or her brothers and cousins.

If I must write about war and uprisings for a thing to be fantasy – why not Wars of Independence? Why not Revolutions?

And yet another part of me screams that I still don’t want the colonizers and imperialists to have a place of prominence in what I write. And I hesitate to make their skin not ‘pale’ – because that opens the doors to all sorts of intra-poc complications – like people who want to know if the Japanese count as PoC when they were Colonizers and Imperialists once upon a time. And these people ignore who has incluence and presence over Japanese decisions and trade now in the present.

And yet… the mocking ‘Well, they’ll soon discover they can’t rule themselves half as well as we could rule them‘ – is something I KNOW; Something I believe others could relate to and would enjoy seeing a character (group of characters, a nation) overcome.

~ – – * – – ~

4

Complaining about having to create a whole new culture in order to avoid appropriation and misrepresentation has hit me as somewhat akin to whining. After all the alternative is to take from left, right and center as if the whole world and everything in it were mundane, with nothing sacred or having specific or particular importance or nuances I might not understand; as if I had the authority to use other people’s lives and philosophies and histories as ‘dressing’.

So, if I don’t want to do what does (currently) get done. Then I have to change. And that change is likely to be to remove my fictional world from specific historic implications in my world that cannot be put aside or run away from and create, as best as I can, a world that at least implies it is intentionally set apart; a world with different historical moments and circumstances, thus leading to different sociologies and cultures and affected cultures.

ETA: Not that I want this (fictional) world to claim that it lives in a vacuum (as many like to when challenged on their isms) but to set it up to have its own social, ethical, ethnic, class and gender complications.

But what about the reader interpretation? I guess I have to accept that just as the writers who offend me have no control once the story is out of their hands, on what I bring to the table – I have no control over whether or not some clueless, ignorant individual reads a story and decides everyone’s white with exotic dressing and the dynamics are the perfect assimilating natives.

Or at least that’s my solution for now.

That thing is – I don’t like the fantasy genre and probably never really have, but never realized it.

Do note, this is not the same as not liking fantasy fiction; fiction involving magic and myth and wonder. This is about the genre, what it is, the stylizations, the focus; The reason why I’ve rolled my eyes so many times when I heard ‘Tolkien is the Father of Fantasy Fiction’.

Except now I think that’s very, very true. I think he set a template that people have followed and followed and perhaps not given much thought at all about what it is they are saying and doing.

Tolkien who drew on the claiming of the land in European mythologies and legends as inspiration for creating his own saga of the legendary unbelievable and amazing for Great Britain – specifically England. And of course there’s the affects on him of WW1 & WW2 and industrialization and the rush towards technology and seeming race away from even basic respect and acknowledgement of the beauty and bounty of nature.

But there’s a lot of war in the claiming of the land even without Tolkien’s war experiences; there’s a lot of friction and conflict, opposing factions, fighting and bloodshed. There’s all that driving the old out, whether it be indigenous peoples or dangerous creatures or obstinate plantlife.

So we have, first comes love Tolkien. And I know that then came D& D, which, while it drew inspiration from Tolkein’s works, originally stemmed from medieval war games (a thing I hope to find out more about at some point if I can just find some that mention the female contributors and maybe even some written by women). So we have medieval war games with the possibilities of amazing beasts and beings and we have Tolkien’s embellished tropes of ‘the claiming of the land‘ – of course many fantasy tales spinning down from two such sources will busy themselves with battle scenes and battle plots, about the overthrow of evil and reclaiming the homeland/saving the land, etc…

The thing is, I don’t like reading about war. I don’t like reading about tactics. I loathe being told geographic attributes not because they mean something to the characters or represent the beauty of the world, but are important so that as a reader I’ll supposedly appreciate the tactical genius of the author as per writes up characters on a charge, or holding ground or fending off against all odds.

The only sword I ever gave a true damn about was Excalibur. The only scabbard that interested me was also Arthur’s. The only armor that caught my eye were Lancelot’s, Gawaine’s and Galahad’s. Those bits of weaponry signified the characters and were sometimes characters in their own right.

When I picked up the fantasy genre, I was trying to find more mature books that were like the fiction I’d read when I was younger. I wanted the possibilities of mystical xenoanthropology and xenosociology. Children’s books have dragons and magic, talking trees, animal societies, fairies, supernatural guiding or parental figures; children’s books have aspects of delight, they play up the possibility of worlds unseen and unknown bursting with more wonders than the imagination. It was probably only natural for me (and perhaps for many others), having enjoyed those works to go seek out more works involving the same. And the place to find those things, the most logical lead was, is, fantasy fiction.

If it came with battles and clashing steel and long discussions about holding the high-ground and companies and other groupings – well, I would deal. And I did. I skipped pages and it became such a habit that I’ve skipped pages unconsciously for years and never really thought much about it.

And if it came with no thought as to who got to be the privileged heroes and who were the misguided sidekicks or evil villains – then I would deal. And I did. I did for a very long time.

And then came Racefail 09. And I’ve been grieving and I’ve been hurt. And I’ve been waiting to get better – but I didn’t. Every-time I picked up a fantasy book recently it wasn’t just dissatisfaction, it was disgust and horror and more hurt. And then I had that realization yesterday; the fantasy genre has let me down twice. It associated all the wonder of the books I read as a child with war and conquest and revolutions. It associated all the growing up and maturing and gaining knowledge tales with a Euro-centric focus on the cruelties of the feudal system and wouldn’t it be amazing to reinvent that era without such harshness. It took a playland of imagination and boxed it into a very specific thing – one fantasy. One story.

And of course with Racefail 09, I discovered that the institutions that bring such tales; the editors and many writers and of course various publishing houses and their PR employees were, some maliciously, some uncaringly and obliviously, boxing it in a second time as a very specific thing.

Aside: And I need to make a note here so I don’t forget about Urban Fantasy and readers of fantasy worlds possibly reclaiming fantasy from the warscapes, along side with resurging Gothic Romance and trying to apply a Sexual Revolution. Though what about the G v E warscapes in UF itself?

So, I love the possibilities of flights of fancy in fiction and yet I loathe the fantasy genre – for hurting me, for crushing my spirit, for ripping a sense of my self from me, for desecrating my childhood, for telling me I was wrong to ever think I belonged – that I could dream; that I could tell a story. It seems I really should have given more thought when I started using the term non white futurism and fantasy; I should have considered what did I mean by futurism, what did I mean by fantasy?

Because it matters.

The fantasy genre as comes to mind, for me at least, is narrow. And after thinking, all my life, that a fantasy genre writer is absolutely what I wanted to be – for it all to become narrower still; to be squeezed out; to realize who I am when I’m not writing wasn’t, couldn’t, reconcile with who I am when I am writing – not if I wrote fantasy genre – no wonder I’ve been in such a confused daze and whirlwind of shock.

Note: I’m honest here in this space wondering if there are other writers who feel blocked from writing because of what happened and inviting them to comment – I won’t be tolerating stupidity or ignorant well meaningness.

My pain and hurt and upset is not here for your voueristic pleasure, for your learning moment, for your Eureka. It’s here because I can’t filter this blog to only non-whites (far less non-whites who have not bought into the dirty sticking plaster of absolute whitewashing that current parlance calls colourblindness).

So…

If fantasy is set up for non European environs to be ‘exotic’. If Tolkien, when held up as The Father Of… leads to certain expectations as afterall he came from the school of thought of the mysterious orient and the civilizing presence of colonialism as much as early eco-conservatism. Then the ‘birth’ of fantasy, if it is Athena to Tolkien’s Zeus, sprung from his head heavily steeped in a privileged perspective. And those who built upon it, looking to the past to add a twist, looked to the past of other cultures through the eyes of romantically racist outsiders.

And that lens is what creates, perhaps, a ghetto out of non-European environs. Because it doesn’t matter how well a bit of writing is, it will always be comprehended through the attitudes and experiences of the reader. And if their attitudes are filled with stereotypes and twisted ideologies on what’s ‘real and authentic’ – there’s no room for anything else.

And I know personally right now, I’m not at all enthused at the idea of breaking them of such attitudes; of surprising them or having a twist or turn they didn’t expect because they were basing what comes next on those stereotypes. I don’t want my writing to be all about Learning Moments For Them. Not just because it places me in the role of teacher (exhausted teacher at that). But because that’s not why I write, that’s not what I want to put across in my writing. My focus, why I write, the stories and themes I want to go over have nothing to do with educating the majority on their privilege. I don’t want to speak to them, or write for them. And I can feel the resentment stirring in my stomach even now, stealing breath in a tight squeeze of frustrated tension.

Seems like writing about the block is definitely working, as painful as it is to work through.

Every fantasy series I have loved; many of whom don’t swerve away from the reinvented medieval European past; I have never looked at them as teaching me more about Europe; the food, the people, the politics, the weaponry, the weather etc… And it’s rare there’s a fantasy that uses herbs in a way that makes me rush to an encyclopedia in a bit of herb lore geekry.

Those fantasy stories (high fantasy they called themselves) that took me away from myself tended to focus on a Dark Lord who needs to be vanquished, and the artifact that must not fall into the wrong hands, to the ism-filled darkskinned mercenaries and orcs and urakai monsters and the gracious civilized uber pale skinned elves. And here I must nod to Dianne Wynne Jones’ The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: The Essential Guide to Fantasy Travel, at the very least for confirming all those tropes I’d seen (and come to think boring) even if she didn’t notice the ism, particularly racism, filled others. But no where in any of that, did I ever think that this is the way Europe is, was or should have been. And I could think that because there was so much around me reflecting Euro-centrism and western-centrism; a fantasy story with European reflections could remain just a fantasy story. A narrow focused fantasy story.

But as me, as a non-white/PoC writer, I ponder representation, how infrequent it is, and how isolated the representations that do exist are – so that I do need to worry about ghettos and stereotypes and adding to the narrowly framed pile of examples that currently exist, and the resentment that comes with that; the burden I do not want to bear.

Aka the tokenized exceptionalism or exceptional tokenism within fantasy that leave me cold. Cold and angry.

My cup runneth over.

My tolerance has worn out.

And if I was already wondering about why the stories only focused on one thing in the first place….

So I don’t like the fantasy genre and now I no longer want to even try and fix it or expand it. Which explains perhaps why I can see that more needs doing than sticking people with different ethnic features into the pre-existing templates (still filled with their problems). And if distributors are liable to stick me in only one part of the store or library anyway – (should publishing happen), then… then what? Chromatic Futurism & Flights Of Fancy is seriously long winded and I don’t think one person can create a genre on their own (no matter what people say about Tolkien or Tolkien and Lewis) – far less if they’re not institutionally, traditionally, of the peoples with the power.

And, note, naming a thing is not creating a thing. Because the difficulty with finding the books and the stories doesn’t mean they’re not already out there, slotted into all sorts of places, hoping for readers. Example I didn’t find The Haunting of Hip Hop under Urban Fantasy or Horror.

Anyway, now I feel like I know a large portion of this block I’ve been dealing with, and why I haven’t wanted to even examine it. I can’t write about something I like, but dislike, grew bored with and feel excluded from trying to transform. I can’t write where how I feel is side-barred as ‘PC Police Whining’ or where people have the gall to say shite like ‘You’re making it unsafe for us who do like things this way to keep on liking and making things stay this way‘ (echoes to other conversations in the blogsphere).

But crap, having a clue doesn’t mean I’m not still trying to find a path.

… But when I think of brown/PoC characters in European style cultures, I end up feeling a collusion to colonization. Perhaps it’s that anime and manga are written in Japanese, Chinese (Mandarin & Cantonese), Korean, Taiwanese etc; but writing in English blurs the line for me from fantasy (where anything is possible) to idealized colonies where the ‘natives’ are properly and appropriately, according to the colonial masters, adapting the habits, mannerisms and most importantly language of those who’ve come to claim their land.

This fragment of thought (one of my own) is the problem I’ve been having when I go to try and write. And I have to admit the thought of possibly writing idealized colonies hurts more now after Racefail 09 than it did in the past. In fact I don’t think I even saw it that way before. I was busy working on accepting the truth, that not writing about white people didn’t mean I had to stick my PoC characters into fantasy ghettos.

After all, in many fantasy books there’s absolutely nothing seen wrong with blonde and blue eyed people, of nomadic cultures in the desert. And even if they don’t have blonde hair or blue eyes, I’ve had an author tell me, the characters weren’t seen, to this author, as PoC. The story used all the tropes, all the Recognition Glee created for whites that denote the Middle East/ West Asia, but the characters to the author weren’t seen as being non-white.

Thus white characters can be anywhere, do anything, have any culture. But PoC characters have to be distinct; Have to be closed in within a specific style where their skin matches the architecture, matches the habits & customs, matches the food. If there’s a dark skinned, soft but many curls haired man in snowy mountains, there must always be an explanation as to why he’s there. He’s always a foriegner. It’s never that his people wandered there years ago and decided they liked snow and yaks.

And now that I’m facing this new hurt; How do I not see South Asians in Victorian style settings as not a colonized nation? How do I not see young dark skinned misses in lacy frilled white dresses, drinking tea on a porch as a different kind of erasure?

Writing fantasy is not impossible. I know this. N. K. Jemisin did it wonderfully in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. But I am stuck. I want to write fantasy versions of my culture, the way whites get to write fantasy versions of theirs. I don’t want to have to create whole new cultures all the time in order to avoid the colonial and imperialistic framing.

I do know that part of my being stuck is that I write in English. I love English. I hug my vocabularly close to my chest. But English is the language of the colonizers. I think, for me, it’s never a question in anime as to whether or not the characters are Japanese. It doesn’t matter if the background looks pseudo European, if there are knights about in horses and plate mail. The characters are speaking Japanese, so they are Japanese to me. And the language puts across a certain cultural sensibility. Nii-san is Japanese. It sets up an entire network of sibling respect, family hierarchy, possible familial obligations etc… The environment is Japanese, no matter what it looks like.

But in English?

If the language I’m writing in, is colonial, what happens when I want to express the culture that is mine, but that IS so impressed upon with, saturated with, other things that are colonial. What sensibility am I sharing when I write in English that can been seen as other than British (perhaps in some cases leading to American)?