Christmas Special 2024: Goblins, Elves, and Fantastical Prejudice - The Politics of Fantasy - The Emancipated Citizen

Episode Transcript
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(00:13):
Hello, hello and welcome everyone to the Emancipated Citizen Podcast.
My name is Zac Alrayyis.
With me as always is Benjamin Snow.
Welcome to our 2024 special holiday episode.
This year we're talking about race and racialization within fantasy narratives.

(00:34):
We're going to be talking a lot about humanoid races in series like The Lord of the Ringsand Harry Potter.
I would like to start a little bit by trying to dive into the world, talk about the livedexperience of the characters, the character building a little bit, transition a little bit

(00:57):
to the real world roots and impacts of such narratives within, say, racial worldviews orolder mythologies or things like that.
With us, have Clarissa Janin, who
is a student of popular fiction and an author who came across my attention after I read anarticle about avoiding racism in fantasy literature.

(01:30):
And I thought that a lot of the things covered there from the portrayal of
races like dwarves in the Lord of the Rings or goblins in Harry Potter was very insightfuland especially in combination with the mention of even older narratives.

(01:58):
think also one of the things that really drew my attention was your mentioning the Beowulfstory and the kind of one-dimensional storytelling and sort of
similar idea of dehumanizing kind of humanoid races.
So Clarissa Jenin, welcome to the Emancipated Citizen podcast.

(02:19):
We're honored to have you.
Would you like to say something about yourself that I didn't that I maybe left out?
Yeah, I just want to say thank you for having me.
I'm really excited to be here.
And I wanted to say before we got started, especially since this is a podcast, you know,an audio format.
I did want to address that while I will be discussing the relationship between fantasyraces and real world racism, that I am not a person of color and I come from a lot of

(02:50):
privilege.
So I wanted to firstly urge everyone listening to go listen to authors and academics ofcolor because they've been doing this work for a long time.
That being said, I am here because I think it is important for white authors and readersto also acknowledge these issues.
I see a lot of other women with a noticeable lack of melanin on book talk and other bookcommunities online, either ignoring these issues outright or asking why we need to bring

(03:20):
politics into books.
So I just want to say that books are political.
Access to literacy is political.
We've seen a nearly 200 % surge in book bans in the last school year in the US.
which includes both school and public libraries.

(03:41):
And in its recent analysis, Penn found that books about LGBTQ people and books thataddress race and racism and feature characters of color were among the most frequently
challenged titles.
So this is dangerous for us all and to ignore it would be to deny reality and the effectsof institutional racism.

(04:03):
and how close it still is to us, even if we might rather pretend it's not there.
A lot of harmful tropes have been baked into the fantasy genre as far back as Beowulf,right?
So it's so deeply that many of us simply don't notice they're there.
I just saw a video last night from Rinstar, who's a creator I enjoy, who was talking aboutthis as well and the relationship between fantasy races and real life racism.

(04:31):
and the video ended with how important it is to hear from other perspectives because weall have our own biases and perspectives that we see things with, then we might not
realize how harmful something can be until someone else points it out.
So that's what I'm hoping here to do is just have a discussion around all that.
But all that being said, I'm honored to be here and excited to dig in.

(04:54):
So those attitudes are kind of baked in our culture and in our narratives for a very longtime.
And a lot of the core elements of what we consider fantasy and mythology are built onhierarchical, blood-based kind of allocations of worth or hierarchies.

(05:19):
Even if it's not racial per se.
often going to have advantages and disadvantages and structures of nobility and monarchywhich are based in a time before ours, which exemplify things that we now consider outside

(05:45):
of the human ideal, the divine choosing of monarchs and
things like that are, like, in their core kind of go against our democratic understandingof the world that we want.
So is there a separation, I guess, that should be drawn of, or you imagine yourselfdrawing between which of those tropes are kind of, we can use which of those tropes are

(06:19):
absolutely taboo at this point?
I mean...
Is it clear what I'm kind of getting at?
Because at a certain point you can also talk about how problematic it is to have princesand princesses and monarchies, least in a way that glorifies those institutions.

(06:44):
Right.
think in a lot of the research I was doing, a lot of what it came down to was justrecognizing
in the media we consume when we come across this idea that certain people or sentientbeings are just inherently better or worse or more dangerous or more beautiful than

(07:10):
others, that that is just an innate part of them that we can know from the offset withouttalking to them or getting to know them, that we can just look at someone and know
whether or not they're a good person or a bad person or harmful, right?
Because we see that, as far back as Bale were as far back as Beowulf, these ideas of anatural other in these pre-fantasy texts where if you read John Henry Runsby thesis on

(07:50):
Otherworldly Others and Racial Representation and Fantasy Literature.
He talks about texts like Beowulf and other European romances from that era and how theyoften spoke about a lone hero of the nation fighting off invaders and how these heroes are
made either retroactively or intentionally by the author into national patriots of epicproportions.

(08:16):
where the villains will act as stand-ins for foreign nations in those texts, that is thepurpose that they serve in the narrative, and they will often be depicted as inhuman or
supernatural to a certain extent.
They are meant to be monstrous inhuman corruptions of what correct humanity should aspireto be.

(08:40):
Right?
So that's, we see that very deeply ingrained.
Yeah.
And that
You know, that was very influential to a lot of the modern fantasy genre.
A lot of those ideas carried over because a lot of those ideas are, as you say, veryembedded into just humanity in general.

(09:00):
It is very easy for us to think in terms of us versus them, who's part of the in-group,who's part of the out-group, you know, the narrative other and stuff.
So that is something that has been part of literature.
You know, for many, many years.
Right.
So, you know, we can't talk about race and fantasy without talking about the monsterraces.

(09:27):
You know, you have your trolls, your ogres and the orcs.
Right.
The orcs are commonly portrayed as being ugly, violent, evil and uncivilized.
Like that's just an inherent part of who and what they are.
And therefore.
They are generally acceptable to kill on site, therefore.

(09:50):
And this is something that we should question when we're consuming fantasy media, right?
If the fantasy is of a world where it is acceptable to kill based on race, we need toquestion why is it that we're fantasizing about genocide, right?
What about this is appealing to us?

(10:11):
Why do we want to fantasize about that?
And I think some of that comes not so much from a conscious, I want to hate people place,but from just an easy place of, it's nice to be able to easily recognize an enemy.
So I'm not constantly living in fear, wondering who could hurt me.

(10:34):
But at the same time that you can't know just by looking at someone.
Unfortunately, we do live in a world where
you need to actually talk to people before you can know what their character is and whatkind of a person they are.
We can't just look at someone and know whether they're good or bad.

(10:59):
Right?
And we see even in modern fantasy, this still carries over in the Harry Potter books,right?
The non-human races, like the giants, the centaurs, the goblins, and the half-elves.
You know, they generally get kind of a mixed reception, even for many of the supposedlygood and heroic characters in the series, right?

(11:21):
Even Harry and his closest allies will treat them in ways that are less than equal to theother wizards.
Yeah, and the other humans.
Yeah, like we know they're not human, but they treat them as if they aren't fully people alot of the times.
And even though these races
are all capable of performing magic, right?

(11:44):
Like even the Muggles in the series, they can't perform magic and yet these magicperforming creatures who can talk and speak and hold jobs, they're not treated the same.
And only the human wizards are permitted to enroll at the Wizarding School of Hogwarts.
And they all have varying degrees of...

(12:07):
Status in Wizarding Society, right?
Like the Giants certainly aren't welcome amongst common Wizarding Society, right?
We don't see them really in the series because According to the books they all alliedthemselves with Voldemort, right?
They are a monolith who all decided to ally themselves one way and of course we know inreal life no people group is a monolith and

(12:36):
things get very dicey when we begin to categorize any group as all thinking or believingthe same things.
And the centaurs all live in the forest, right?
They are also physically outcast from the rest of society.
We can see they've been othered from the other wizards and they consider Ferenz who is thecentaur who he helps Harry at one point.

(13:04):
And he takes on a teaching job at Hogwarts for a bit.
And the other centaurs consider him a traitor for his pro-human leanings, which I have toimagine could be influenced by the years of discrimination that they've faced from
wizards.
They see him getting all buddy-buddy with them and go, hey, what are you doing?

(13:26):
They are not nice to us.
see, you know, I'll get into them more later, but the goblins who are trusted to run thebank, but they're not permitted to carry wands.
And the house elves, of course, are quite literally a race of slaves, right?
So we see a lot of varying degrees of how these different inhuman races are treated as nothuman.

(13:54):
Is there any conception?
just seeing those narratives that those subhuman races are granted rights and perhaps evenin a way that's, you know, is like the kinds of rights that slave owners might ascribe to

(14:21):
their slaves in different times in history, right?
where there's some consideration that is given to them, maybe not the full humanconsideration, but...
or...
I mean, as far as the Harry Potter narrative goes, or some other narratives that you canthink of?

(14:47):
Like asking how they...
I don't really understand the question.
I mean...
It seems to me that house elves, for example, have even less rights than slaves did inmany human societies, right?

(15:07):
It doesn't seem like there's any kind of right to safety or dignity in the very least forthose kinds of, for those races.
Yeah, right, because slavery throughout history has
varying degrees right of how they were treated.

(15:29):
Like, you know, you have shadow slavery, which was a whole thing versus other forms ofslavery varying up to the more indentured servitude kind of degree.
There's a pretty wide scale there as far as treatment goes.
Right.
So we don't I don't know that we see the house elves treated at the Harry Potter books.

(15:52):
They get dark, but they don't get as dark as
shadow slavery.
You know, we don't see little baby house elves being stripped away from their parents andsold off, right?
We don't see that and stuff, but we still see.
Yeah.
Are we sure we just don't see it because it doesn't happen around the main character?

(16:12):
Yeah, it very well.
Yeah, could be happening in the background.
It's just not something that's shown to the child audience, right?
I don't recall how much the books.
I don't know if they get into how self-reproduction at all, but yeah, we would have toimagine is that going on in the background, right?
If we're accepting this narrative of, yes, we just have this race of elves who are treatedas slaves, how they don't really seem to have any society of their own, their entire world

(16:46):
revolves around serving.
So yeah, is that happening in the background?
Yeah.
And like, do they like give
Do they actually get permission to go have a significant other to even have babies?
And the black family stuffing the heads of their house elves when they were no longer ableto work.

(17:08):
I would argue that is trying to think of examples of human, not human slavery that bad.
I don't know that I've ever heard of that happening.
Right.
It might have at some point, but yeah, that like stuffing them like that definitely makesthem more like animals, right?
Than humans, because typically we taxidermy animals like they're a prize that we'veconquered somehow.

(17:35):
Right.
And yeah, it's it's the black family that does that.
Right.
Like Sirius Black is meant to be a hero, but he treats creature his family house self verypoorly throughout the series.
Yeah.
Dumbledore explains that part a bit.
He was kind to other house elves, specifically his family who was still in love with hisfamily who had been kind of abusive towards him, so you know.

(18:01):
Yeah, right.
Like, can dislike someone without abusing them, right?
Like, there is...
Just because we don't like someone doesn't mean we have to treat them as I mean, it's kindof a lose-lose situation for this kind of character, because...
Because you know, you have your masters, you have to be in line with what they want andyou know, if you're blindly loyal to them or abusing their son and then the son becomes

(18:27):
your master, then you're going to have this history of maybe not treating him so wellthrough no fault of your own because you're not granted any agency as an independent kind
of person.
So I think, yeah, I mean within this, this part of being enslaved.

(18:52):
the person with power.
Exactly.
Yeah, Sirius is the person with power in that dynamic, right?
It's on him how he treats And also just on the small tangent of House Elf reproduction, Iwould like to just observe that House Elves don't wear any clothes, and if they're given
any clothes, they become free, right?

(19:14):
And we don't see that they have any genitals.
So it's hard for me to imagine that they even reproduce sexually.
I mean, that's a different kind of point.
What I wanted to get into, and I don't know if either of you recall that part of it,because it was kind of brief.

(19:36):
But I believe I do recall in, I believe, the fourth or the fifth book.
Hermione was involved in this in an organization for the Society for the Promotion ofElvish Welfare or SPU.
Yeah, and she's treated as kind of a fool by everyone else for advocating for this, right?

(19:59):
Like everyone else kind of looks at her just like, what are you doing?
You are you clearly don't understand, you know, they just
they just want to be slaves, right?
And she's very much painted as this kind of over the top social justice activist for beingupset at the notion of slavery, right?

(20:22):
It's a very interesting portrayal.
Yeah.
And I don't know what to make of it.
was it book five where she started knitting hats for them and started trying tonon-consensually free them?
So yeah, Toby ended up cleaning the
Gryffindor common room all on his own, had a stack of hats taller than he was.
Yeah.

(20:44):
What is J.K.
Rowling even trying to say there?
I'm not sure what she's trying to say, yes, when doing such things, you should properlylike, you know, talk to the people you're trying to help.
That might be a good idea.
Yeah.
But what was interesting to me, because when I read the books as a kid, right, I

(21:06):
just sort of accepted the author's word as gospel, right?
Just accepted, this race of creature likes to be enslaved like this, and she should bemore considerate towards them and stuff.
But now that I'm older, you know, I'm able to recognize why did Rowling write this in thefirst place?

(21:27):
Like, why is this race just so happy to be enslaved?
Like, that's a weird thing to include.
And as I was like thinking about it, I was wondering, you know, rolling, she came up withthis race, but she didn't need to when like this race of creature that just likes to be

(21:53):
enslaved when brownies were right there if she wanted to use them right there, a type ofhousehold spirit or goblin from Scottish folklore.
and Hogwarts is in Scotland, right?
And they're said to come out at night while the owners of the house are asleep andperform, you know, different chores or tasks and stuff.

(22:15):
And traditionally the owners of the house had to leave offerings for them, usually somekind of food or something.
And the Brownies were typically described as being easily offended and they would leavetheir homes forever if they felt that they had been insulted or taken advantage of.
Right?
So you could still get this idea of these live in maids who tidy the house and tidy thegrounds of Hogwarts without such a weird slave dynamic, right?

(22:44):
Because the Brownies and folklore are characteristically mischievous.
And if they're angered, they're said to turn malicious.
And so it's considered very important to treat them well and you work for them as much asthey work for you.
It's a much more symbiotic relationship than what we have.
with the house elves, right?

(23:04):
Where they just, they just want to be slaves and they are so upset about, we see withWinky the house elf, when she is dismissed, her primary concern is how poorly her poor old
master must be doing without her, right?

(23:26):
That she doesn't even seem super upset about.
herself, she's just sad for her master.
Right?
Her whole world revolves around him.
mean, I mean, I think I think that since this kind of race of enslaved humanoids wasintroduced to the narrative, there have been quite a number of opportunities, right, to to

(23:56):
tell the story in a different way in a way that's like
not so strange and seemingly glorifying slavery, right?
Because in the second one, of course, you have the story of Dalby being freed and, youknow, at that point, okay, maybe you can develop kind of a narrative where there is a sort

(24:22):
of struggle for freedom and, you know, some kind of curse or...
you know, evil magic or enslaving, whatever.
I don't think anything is said about the origins of how elves became slaves or anythinglike that.
I mean, there was plenty of opportunity and especially, you know, reading, I think, was itthe fourth or the fifth book where with Hermione and her spew organization, how like, I

(24:54):
think I just as any like
normal person pretty much was kind of rooting for this kind of effort, but in a way it waskind of portrayed as being very silly and very like I think, yeah, like I said, Winky the
house elf being upset about not being in that position anymore.

(25:21):
I mean, even there you can go into a whole Stockholm syndrome kind of
dynamic with it.
But no, it's more told about in a way that is glorifying the institution and in some waysis actually reminiscent of what I hear from formerly slave-owning families in Saudi Arabia

(25:47):
because so the country where I come from
slavery was only officially abolished in 1964.
So the institution of chattel slavery was very present within living memory.
So I don't know, there were parallels that I could draw there that were very strange anduncomfortable.

(26:14):
And I mean, I don't know if you've ever talked to any former slaves, Zach, but
The way no house cells except for Dobie seem to any agency of their own and seem to be sodedicated to their masters.
I almost think they must have been created to be like that because what living species hasno agency of their own?

(26:39):
The only thing I can think of is like ants, bees, wasps, that family.
And the whole reason they do that is because they have more genetics in common with theirsiblings than with their parents or their offspring.
And right, like are they are they meant to be ants?
Like very inhuman kind of thing.
Like they're more akin to bugs then, right?

(27:01):
no, no.
I'm saying that ants are the way they are because they exist in siblings that helps theirgenes more than reproducing themselves.
The house of it's like it's like they're
biological automatons created by magic just to do with the household choice.
Yeah, right.
they, the other house selves treat Dobby as very weird for wanting to get paid for hiswork.

(27:27):
Like they think, they think he's so strange for that.
Or you can explain this by, by some, I mean, I mean, magic is your hail Mary foreverything here now.
I mean, you can explain this with the
maybe you had some other race that was magically put into slavery and cursed.
mean, you know that there are, know, imperious curse, And you have, like, there aremagical ways to bend people's wills.

(27:59):
So, mean, that's one possible narrative point that you can put there.
Another possible one, like, also in combination with that is just
the real world phenomenon of Stockholm syndrome and the development of dependency ofslaves to the people who enslave them because you have a lot of real world examples of

(28:26):
people being born in slavery and being used to a certain life and then when they'rereleased, like, what am I supposed to do?
How am I supposed to get food?
I mean, it's, you know.
And I think it would have been perhaps more believable if when Winky was free, we saw herhaving some of those concerns, right?

(28:50):
About like, what am I going to do?
How am I going to take care of myself and be okay and make sure that I am going to be allright?
Like what's going to become of me?
Like any thoughts towards herself, but all of them are still towards her master.
right, her former master and she becomes an alcoholic over it.

(29:11):
Like she is so distressed and quite literally depressed in the text.
And her only concern is her former master, right?
She has no concerns for herself and her own wellbeing.
Yeah, it's, it's definitely, prob probably the most problematic and the weirdest kind of,a fantastical race that I can think of within this context.

(29:38):
the more problematic archetypes, the obedient natural slave kind of.
Yeah, there is one point I almost wonder if J.K.
Rowling was trying to make and did very badly.
Because sometimes, not necessarily, but most often, white people in the capital try tohelp.

(30:06):
Others, I think the best example is probably in the Mexican Revolution.
You had all these, you had the people starting the revolution in Mexico City and saying,okay, these relationships with a lot of the indigenous tribes, well, they had a feudal
relationship with the Aztecs and then the feudal, more or less, the titles wereeffectively transferred to some Spaniards.

(30:33):
They said, okay, we're going to dissolve that.
the base units in society are the individual in the family and the immediate family.
But the indigenous tribes didn't necessarily like that deal.
wanted to continue, a lot of them wanted to continue to have their tribes.
Maybe she was trying to make a point like that about Hermione annoying a lot of thehouseholds, but not the best way to make that point.

(30:59):
I mean, if you want to make a point about or if you want to make a critique about
top-down emancipation and the possible pitfalls of something like that.
can imagine a context where that might be appropriate, but certainly if you're entirelyneglecting to critique the very institutions of oppression that people need to be

(31:23):
emancipated from in the first place, if you're completely ignoring that, then it becomesless credible that this is like the...
goal that you're kind of going towards and advocating for a more people or subject-drivenemancipation or bottom-up kind of movement.

(31:47):
don't think that's something that makes sense, to be honest.
yeah, mean, slavery probably...
the worst part of it, we got it right out of the way.
Let's talk a little bit about orcs, goblins and races that are either evil or have somecharacter defects that determine them to say a life of immorality.

(32:24):
What does that imply?
I'll compound this question with also asking you about maybe alternative narratives forcharacters who might belong to races that are traditionally considered evil or bad or

(32:44):
greedy or whatever and have a sort of very human arc of redemption or kind of effect wherethe...
where the fog is kind of lifted from the way that we're viewing this character to makethem more relatable.

(33:05):
Can you talk about all of that first?
The races themselves and the problematic nature of how they're described and maybealternative narratives that get closer to them as characters and potentially avoid this
problem in...

(33:27):
Yeah, so we know that because of the way that this idea of innate hatred has been bakedinto the stories we tell right as far back as Beowulf as we were talking about, we can
find that a lot of these ideas that we might consider to be outdated are still

(33:50):
very alive and well in our collective consciousness, right?
Like Harry Potter is pretty recent text, right?
And I found this definition of what is called hate laundering from the award-winningwriter, game designer and cultural consultant, James Mendez-Hodes, where he says how first

(34:13):
colonizers will come up with this theory of humans and not
quite humans in order to justify narratives and policies of violence and dreads towardsnatives.
And then authors like Tolkien, which I'll get into in a bit, reifies these narratives inThe Lord of the Rings, granting via Middle Earth a sheen of fantasy and respectability by

(34:37):
swapping out ideas of Oriental or Mongol for orc or goblin.
And then these tropes
then cascade to a new generation of fantasists whose joy is to embody their settings.
And while they may not consciously understand or acknowledge from which deep-seated biasestheir embodiment springs, nevertheless, we begin to dehumanize intelligent beings.

(35:05):
And so we know that Tolkien described in an interview in 1964,
how he took inspiration from Jewish people for his dwarves and that he constructed theirlanguage to be Semitic.
And now in the initial stage of Tolkien's legendarium, dwarves are mostly evil, right?

(35:27):
They align themselves with the evil valor named Melkor and the orcs back in the Book ofLost Tales.
And the dwarves are also explicitly characterized as greedy and whiny.
In the Hobbit, right, their primary motive is to return to the Lonely Mountain to gettheir gold back, even though Thorin explains that they don't really need it.

(35:49):
And the main crisis comes when Thorin is unwilling to give Lake Town's inhabitants anycompensation for their help in defeating the dragon Smaug, even after their town was
destroyed by him.
And the text states that most of the dwarves seem to agree with him.
Right.
So we can see
this very real world anti-Semitic stereotypes present in the story.

(36:13):
Tolkien did amend his work later in The Lord of the Rings, which notably was writtenpost-Holocaust, whereas The Hobbit was written before the Holocaust, so we can suspect how
real world events may have influenced how he thought about things and he may have goneback and written things a bit more critically.

(36:38):
He tries to kind of amend his portrayal of the dwarves with the character Gimli, right,who is portrayed as steadfast and courageous throughout the text.
And the appendix is at the end of the Lord of the Rings state of the dwarves that the onlypower over them that the rings wielded was to inflame their hearts with the greed of gold

(36:58):
and precious things, which suggests that greed and vengeful, vengefulness.
were actually caused by the rings rather than being innate racial traits.
And though Tolkien in the Lord of the Rings was still kind of using Gimli as a bit of atokenized dwarf to represent the entire race, we can still see an attempt to at least

(37:21):
potentially mitigate the harm that he had contributed to.
Right.
And we see with his orcs and
trolls and goblins, his monster races that he includes that they are inherently evil,violent, uncivilized, and therefore othered by the rest of Middle Earth.

(37:42):
And the aftermath of both world wars that Tolkien lived through, right, he fought in WorldWar One, which was a huge inspiration for what he wrote.
But these wars led to an increased
us versus them mentality and a renewed spirit of intolerance towards the other in fantasysuch as Tolkien's which we can see represented in his monster races.

(38:08):
The orcs result from racial degeneration in the text.
They are descended from elves who as stated in the similarian no simil- silmarillion sorry
They came into the hands of Melkor and by slow arts of cruelty were corrupted and enslavedand thus did Melkor breed the hideous race of the orcs in envy and mockery of the elves of

(38:36):
whom they were afterwards the bitterest foes.
Right.
So we see this idea of just innate biological enemies and one who is innately better andinnately worse than the other.
And the orcs
will often draw on negative portrayals of different Asian, African, Polynesian or NativeAmerican peoples.

(39:00):
The land of Mordor where they dwell lies on the eastern side of Middle Earth, on the edgeof civilization.
They are distant enough to not be part of the main in-group, but they're close enough tostill pose a threat to it.
And we see this idea of the orcish horde threatening civilization, how that parallelstraditional narratives.

(39:21):
about Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan who are model, we're modeling the orcs after thisidea of Asian barbarians who are going to sweep over civilized society, right?
That's the fear that's kind of lingering over middle earth.
I think there's some important historical context to that though.

(39:44):
Genghis Khan completely wiped out many, many cities and he wouldn't
It's not that he'd destroy the city.
It's that they would go in, kill every man, woman, child, and dog, go away, come back aweek later, and kill the people trying to bury the dead.
And it's not like it was Asian and European violence and freaking them out.

(40:07):
That was step nomads against everyone.
The Chinese, they are...
have a lot more historical trauma from that.
Well, I think their treatment of the Uyghurs is...
largely a result of that historical trauma, even though once you have breech-loadingrifles, steppe nomads aren't so scary.

(40:30):
When you have warplanes and tanks, they're no longer a threat, but boy, they havedisplaced so many Inner Mongolians and moved so many Han Chinese people.
Inner Mongolians are like 5 % of the population in their own homelands.
It's the step nomads being terrifying for many, many reasons.

(40:56):
And a lot of people are now reading the orcs as an allegory for Russians, to the pointthat Ukrainians and Poles and people in support of them are just calling Russians orcs.
the way the Army of Mordor worked, it is a lot like the Russian army.
And we're talking about people who Tolkien probably would have lumped in with theRussians.

(41:19):
And really the people who dislike Russia the most are the people who used to be in theempire.
Just one bit of historical, important historical context with that.
And the only people who really lasted against the Mongols were people who had eithermosquitoes who killed them because, not a whole lot of malaria on the steppes.

(41:41):
Or people had a nice big body of water between them and the mainland.
I wish I mean Japan and Java.
I think the way that it has to do with the way that we understand history and how historyis always kind of a matter of perspective, no matter how much we try to tell stories in a
manner that's like dispassionate and objective.

(42:02):
I think a really good example of that is probably what you mentioned first with GenghisKhan and the history surrounding that.
And that's also
kind of developing into this trope of the all-destroying monkoloid or this kind of type ofperson that is inherently violent and that's inherently violent and horrible and that kind

(42:33):
of thing.
And I think, yeah, mean, especially towards the end of the 19th century and the...
earlier half of the 20th century.
It wasn't just the Nazis that understood the world in a very racialized way.
mean, even their enemies, even the British, the Americans, a lot of them.

(42:57):
Like it was like in many circles even considered scientific fact that you have differentraces of human beings with different characters and
characteristics and dominance and submission and good and evil and that kind of thing.

(43:19):
Maybe not in such stark emotional terms as good and evil, but I think also an example,even though Tolkien himself developed his view on race and as Clarissa was pointing out
before, how
how the conception of the dwarf and this anti-Semitic trope developed, or he tried todevelop it in a way that was less offensive.

(43:52):
He and a lot of people around him, even in their opposition of the Nazis...
I mean, I came across a story of German publishers during the Nazi rule of...
During the Nazi rule in Germany, trying to get from Tolkien proof that he does not haveJewish ancestry so that his work can be published.

(44:21):
part of the way that he responds is that he refers...
He says very good things about Jews, yeah?
It's like the Jews, they are very gifted and...
noble race of people and I would be proud to have a drop of their blood in my veins orthings things along those lines, which I'm sure they were made with the best of

(44:49):
intentions, but also kind of reflects that people at that time just saw race in a way thatis that is kind of alien to the way that some people see it now and the way that
we understand the nature of ethnicity and race today.

(45:11):
And I think a lot of that was just like the hymns making the dwarves to be...
Sorry for the interruption, but just to finish the talk, today if you were to refer to theJews as a gifted and noble race of people, that's still kind of problematic in its own
way, Right, because with...

(45:33):
even positive stereotypes, like really any stereotypes anytime you were making a monolithout of a group of people, like that is that's not how people work, right?
People are much more complex than that, right?
And a lot of Tolkien's portrayals were likely unconscious, right?
Like the dwarves might have been conscious, especially just from a linguisticsperspective, because he was primarily a linguist, right?

(46:00):
But even despite that,
You know, he, you know, still was brought up in an era where that was just how everyonewas taught to think and live like probably didn't even like consciously make all of these
connections that we're making today as we're going back and analyzing stuff.
But we see, yeah, with positive stereotypes too in Tolkien's work with the elves, right?

(46:29):
They are portrayed as
superhuman practically being a noble race known for being innately beautiful and pure andintellectual.
And this depiction parallels a lot of myths of the Aryan master race, which I don't knowthat Tolkien subscribed to intentionally, right?

(46:52):
Like he was trying to be very praiseworthy of Jewish people in writing to the Germans.
But we know that these ideas
are still baked into society.
We still inherently carry these ideas of what is innately more beautiful traits or moregood and pure.
That's a part of our culture and a part of the culture that Tolkien was in.

(47:15):
And so we see that the elves are commonly portrayed as having notably fair skin andstraight hair.
And in much of Tolkien's work,
the elves are revered and almost worshipped by other races like the hobbits.
And while the orcs are meant to be corrupted elves, the elves themselves are divinelycreated in Tolkien's writing, being the elder children of Illuvatar, associates elven

(47:48):
nobility with their ancient origins, which is
Much like the hypothetical nature of the Aryans as the Ervel, which stems from the Naziracial theory that all Indo-European peoples were related to the Germans via a Nordic
Indo-Germanic primordial people of the Nordic race.

(48:09):
Right.
And I don't know that this is something that Tolkien was intentionally trying to do.
Right.
But we see these ideas just embedded in the collective consciousness and coming out in thefiction that was produced at that time.
Yeah, I mean, I mean you can certainly draw lot of parallels in terms of like, yeah, Imean you have the Orphan Christ, the primordial pure race of strong and white and blonde

(48:38):
people and then you have like sub-branches that through whatever accidents of history kindof degenerate racially into...
Yeah, something that can be kind of considered equivalent to the orcs.
So, I mean, you can certainly draw lot of parallels there and I think if nothing else,it's an interesting kind of mirror to the way that society viewed race at the time.

(49:13):
But we see it, like, it doesn't stick to that time, right?
Like, we say, race at the time, but we see it popping up in even, like, current.
literature, right?
We talk about JK Rowling and Harry Potter, you know, with her goblins.
They also fall into a lot of anti-Semitic stereotypes, even though it was written wayafter Lord of the Rings and the Holocaust and all that.

(49:38):
We see those ideas still permeating in the collective consciousness and stuff.
We, know, the goblins run the Wizarding Bank of Gringotts.
And even though they demonstrate great magical ability, they're considered unequal to thewizards.
Right.
And we see this idea in her text of the goblins lining up with the myth of Jewish controlof the Federal Reserve and that they dominate the world economy.

(50:05):
Both ideas of which stem from centuries of Jewish discrimination throughout Europe inwhich one of the only careers permitted to Jews was banking, which
notably is also the only career I think we see goblins doing in Harry Potter, right?
And the goblins on screen depictions are also just uncannily similar to a lot of theantisemitic propaganda from the early 20th century with their long nose and beady eyes.

(50:33):
But unlike Tolkien and his antisemitism, Rowling and her franchise didn't adjust theirantisemitic representation when it, because people have been pointing this out.
since the books came out, right?
This has been a topic of conversation for a long time, but instead of recognizing thepotential harm in what she wrote, the franchise doubled down and in the 2023 video game,

(51:02):
Hogwarts Legacy, the plot revolves around crushing a rebellion led by the oppressedgoblins and features a goblin rebellion.
meant to take place in the year 1612.
Meanwhile, in Germany, 1612 in the real world, not the Harry Potter books, there was apogrom, know, an organized massacre of Jews in Frankfurt.

(51:28):
And the game includes an artifact from the Goblin Rebellion of 1612, which looks just likeJewish shofars, which are ancient musical horns typically made out of a ram's horn.
You can pull up the picture and look at them side by side.
It's just a shofar.
Right?
And they're typically used for Jewish religious purposes.

(51:51):
And the text in the game says that this artifact was used by the goblins to generallyannoy wizards.
Right?
So we see this disdain for the goblin culture.
some...
Yeah.
When I read that section of your article, it was kind of difficult.

(52:16):
It was shocking at first glance, but it was also a little bit difficult to wrap my headaround how something this overt can be a result of unconscious bias.
mean, things like, okay, mean, the whole- I have to think that- Goblins and all of that.
And as we've mentioned before, and as we will-

(52:38):
get back to when it comes to Christian and Nordic mythology and and the monster trope andand you know things that have been in our collective consciousness for so long that Like
like there are ways that you can understand the goblin races in general in in in more thatlight but you know when yeah when when you have this shofar when you have when you have

(53:03):
you know the date 1612 and
and a rebellion of the goblins.
This almost makes me wonder if you know how in more recent years on the internet, I guessrecent is a relative term, but I guess with the mass of the internet, a lot of people

(53:26):
engage in like rage bait content and that kind of thing.
it's like,
somebody accuses a YouTuber of being racist and then they see it as an opportunity to getmore attention and so they start saying more more racist things and people start watching
them more.

(53:47):
Do you think that might be what's happening a little bit?
I don't know that that would have happened with the game and stuff primarily because Idon't think that that's the sort of, you video games and children's...
video games that's typically not their go-to marketing method, I would think.
They really were not trying to bring attention to that.

(54:11):
And it seemed to me more as just something that was slipped in.
think we're talking about the collective consciousness and stuff.
But I think by the time you get to straight up just depicting shofars in the specific yearof 1612, that's no longer collective consciousness.
at that point, right?
Like that is a very intentional sort of thing that they've had to deal with.

(54:36):
And I know some fans have come to Rowling's defense since folkloric goblins are also knownto be greedy, trustworthy and villainous in a lot of their original folklore.
But they didn't engage in coin minting and money lending, you know, the way Rowling'sgoblins do.
And

(54:57):
You know, some people might argue that the negative connotations between rolling's goblinsand Jewish people are just happenstance.
But I think it is also worth noting what anti-Semitic stereotypes might have inspiredEuropean folklore of a long-nosed race depicted as greedy and untrustworthy.

(55:21):
Right?
Like you ask someone to describe what is a goblin and they will
and you line that up with a lot of anti-Semitic stereotypes and you see a lot ofsimilarities there.
And so we have to think about where these stereotypes and this folklore came from.
But the specific parallels in the game, I think, show the dangers that fantasy still facestoday of permitting these bigoted stereotypes in fantasy races.

(55:53):
But I don't know that the game was trying to
do that from an angle of, we're going to rage bait the game, right?
Like, that seems like an odd tactic for a children's video game to take.
Yeah.
And we've actually covered another episode in our last episode, rolling in trans people,also Richard Dawkins.

(56:19):
seems, it would seem strange for them to be trying to appeal to the far right, but themore like
these parallels, I had no idea about.
Previously, all I'd heard about so far was Christian theocrats blowing them.
And it always seems like people aren't Jewish, but are pretending to be Jewish.
Yeah.
And some way always seem to be the worst people short of Nazis.

(56:45):
But I don't know what to do with it.
they seem to be springing up a lot.
A few months ago, there were
All of a sudden my Twitter feed was half people saying that Stalin was a Jew because hisoriginal name was Jew Gavili.
That is not Georgian for Jewish person by the way.
The Georgian word for Jew is more Semitic sounding.

(57:07):
So yeah, I don't know what to make of this.
I did not expect if you told me this would be happening 10 years ago, I have said you wereinsane.
Right?
Like it was wild to me to see this happening in like literally just a couple of years ago.
Right.
And I think, yeah, I definitely like growing up, you know, lived in this world, this ideathat like, things used to be so bad, but they're better.

(57:33):
Now things are changing.
But I think I had a teacher when I was a kid tell me that, your generation is going to bethe first one to grow up without racism.
And now I'm older and I'm like, no, no, we're not.
I don't know why you thought that.
I was taught in school that the Holocaust didn't happen.
Yeah.

(57:55):
Wow.
Yeah.
I mean, no, we're not beyond that.
And as far as anti-Semitism goes, my snow is not my real last name.
My last name is a Czech last name.
And there's, according to at least one of my cousins, a significant part of her family isJewish.

(58:20):
I think anti-Semitism going forward as far as the violent kinds, I'm probably okay.
It looks like it's mostly going to be Islam-based anti-Semitism.
I don't think many violent Muslims care that I have a non-practicing Jewishgreat-grandparent, but the Nazis, they might have discriminated against me for that.

(58:46):
They probably wouldn't have sent me to Auschwitz, but not for
that reason at least, but they might have discriminated against me.
know, we don't know.
We can see.
Yeah, we can see like maybe things aren't to the level that they were, you know, in themid 20th century.
But I think sometimes we give the current day a bit more credit than it necessarilydeserves in terms of how far we've come and how progressive we all are.

(59:18):
Yeah, and something that we've talked about extensively on our podcast is specificallybigotry coming out of cultural refocus outside the West.
yeah, there are a lot of people in the West who care about social justice and deliberatelyignore a lot of what we're trying to cover because it just doesn't fit their narratives

(59:39):
too.
Like violence against ex-Muslims, there's shocking number of leftist people who refuse torecognize it too, which, you know.
It can be a kind of a problematic topic because I I understand how certain things that Imight say to some people might be only taken at face value because of my origins and maybe

(01:00:06):
if the same things were said by somebody else they would be received differently, Imean...
I mean, on the tangent, I can totally kind of see how, why somebody in the US might saythat black people being racist is not a real thing.

(01:00:29):
I mean, I can totally...
go there.
But when we're talking about the experience of Kurds or Jews or tribal groups within theMiddle East or within East Asia, suffering from very similar structures that aren't

(01:00:52):
oriented around whiteness per se, then it's almost inverse of
version of Orientalism where we're the only ones who can be racist kind of thing.
But yeah, I mean, it's a complicated...

(01:01:14):
definitely varies a lot based on where you are and what the history of the area is andwhat the stereotypes of that...
Because even the concept of race differs based on where you are in the world.
Different parts of the world have different
categories and determiners for what constitutes different races and how many differentraces are there and stuff, right?

(01:01:39):
It's a very subjective thing.
Absolutely.
And races as understood in the West didn't exist as a concept before 1500 or so.
And I guess another thing we should probably cover about Tolkien, just in the context hewas writing in the late Victorian period.

(01:02:00):
Apparently, Victorian authors would specifically talk about their Anglo-Saxon ancestors aspeople who wiped out the indigenous Britons in England.
And it's like they wanted that to be true, and it isn't.
The Hebrew Bible does the exact same indigenous British people.
They're indigenous British Britons.

(01:02:22):
Romano-Britons.
know, Roman Empire is there for a very long time.
It becomes hard to describe them.
They still existed.
The anglo-saxon Y chromosomes are the overwhelming majority Y chromosomes, but themitochondrial DNA of Britons is very common.

(01:02:42):
Even in fairly early anglo-saxon kings, a lot of them had indigenous British mother orgrandmother.
And I'm sure this plays a role in why a lot of the literature at the time was the way itwas, but I'm
Do you think it's worth including into why a lot of fantasy is the way it is with theirconception of race?

(01:03:08):
I think you touched on it before about this idea of fantasizing about genocide and how,yeah, mean, probably there were past times and settings where maybe to a different extent
than it is now, it was kind of respectable or cool to brag about.

(01:03:30):
things like genocide, even in cases where we know it didn't happen.
You just kind of, yeah, so there was this tribe this idea of, how powerful we are.
And we killed everyone and that kind of thing.
Yeah.
Because that's how we show we're the best, by killing everyone else, of course.

(01:03:50):
Clearly, there are no other markers for what a good civilization looks like.
I mean, you mentioned...
Yeah, and in the case of...
case of Britain gets even weirder because they wanted the Anglo-Saxons to have wiped outthe indigenous Britons and then they really praised the Normans too who then certainly

(01:04:13):
didn't wipe them out of the Anglo-Saxons but you know it very heavily dominated them forquite a while before they merged in well the main language of English towns until the
Black Death was French.
So Ben, you were talking earlier about the conception of race and how it hasn't alwaysexisted, at least in the way that we understand it now, and maybe at some point, like

(01:04:36):
within the Middle Ages, this started to develop.
But we do know that before that, even before what we consider race in the modern or 19th,20th century sense, there were...
Concepts that predated that and kind of acted as a precursor for that.

(01:05:01):
So you can talk about like you were talking about before the Anglo-Saxons and theirfantasized genocide against the Britons or the Israelized fantasizing genocide against the
Canaanites and

(01:05:24):
And even within folklore, within Nordic and pre-Christian folklore, of course you havethis monster trope which is as old as storytelling itself, probably, and you have
fantastical races of elves and goblins and things like that, which likely predated ourmodern conception of race, right?

(01:05:55):
So if this is like kind of the bedrock or the core of this genre of fantasy basically,right?
And the oldest and most simple stories within this genre describe monsters andone-dimensional simple narratives of evil beings and characters and so on.

(01:06:20):
I don't know, I mean...
Can we build something that is completely divorced from those origins based on that kindof basis?
I mean, would say, you know, there's a saying, you know, that comes up a lot in writingand literature when people are trying to come up with new original ideas and they get

(01:06:49):
themselves stressed out over trying to come up with something new and original.
and having to remember this saying of there is nothing new under the sun.
Every story that will be told has already been told, and we're just telling it in slightlydifferent ways.
And I don't know that there's inherently wrong with drawing inspiration from mythology,just because something is old doesn't make it bad.

(01:07:16):
Just as much harm as we can find in these tropes.
There is a lot of good and truth that we can find in old stories as well that we can drawfrom.
Right?
I don't know that it's age necessarily makes it good or bad.
And I know that there's anything inherently wrong with imagining new sentient species topopulate our fantasy worlds.

(01:07:43):
I think we just need to make sure that we don't misuse this tool for harm.
Right?
Because it is fun and interesting to think like, what if we lived in a world where therewere other sentient species besides humans?
What might they look like?
What might they be like?
What could they do?
And I think that's just a part of like human creativity.

(01:08:04):
And the problem comes when we then try to subscribe morality to those different speciesand ones that are inherently better or worse and therefore.
we get to treat them inherently better or worse.
And I think what's important is that we engage critically both in what source material wechoose to use and how we choose to apply it, right?

(01:08:32):
Because we can apply a trope in a new setting that can quickly provide new and potentiallyharmful layers that weren't there originally, but in a new context, it has added meaning.
that can be either good or bad, right?
Like the folkloric dwarves loved gold, so do Tolkien's dwarves.

(01:08:53):
But by him also basing his dwarvish language off of Semitic languages and portraying themas greedy for their love of gold, this new context plays into real life anti-Semitic
beliefs, right?
You know, we talk about how Rowling's goblins, you know, they were known to be

(01:09:14):
greedy and then adding the banking on top of that, know, adds new problematic stuff thatwasn't there in the original.
course, but, but I guess what I'm getting at more is, kind of a large part of it is, thatmaybe some races or some conceptions and some fantasies are based on a

(01:09:39):
kind of concretization of the abstract concept of evil.
mean, if you think of Satan himself, you can kind of see him as a sort of characterizationof the abstract concept of evil in a lot of literature.
And it's...

(01:10:01):
I mean, I guess it's also been done for, you know...
reinterpretation of Satan himself.
And I guess, yeah, if you can reinterpret Satan to be a sympathizable good guy kind ofthing, you can reinterpret any kind of constructed race or fantastical being that exists

(01:10:31):
within our collective imagination, right?
Would you like to go into
The...
So, forgive me for failing to remember the author's name, but there was this work calledGrendel that you referred to that talks about the story of Beowulf from this perspective

(01:10:55):
of Grendel and...
Yeah, I mean, mother was also part of the story and he, know, clearly...
A story that shows different sides and nuance and humanity.
Is that something you'd like to touch upon and tell us about?
Because I thought that was an interesting thing to mention before.

(01:11:16):
that was in my research into this subject.
was one of the books that I came across was it's just called Grendel.
Grendel by John Gardner retells Beowulf from Grendel's perspective.
Right.
So the
point of the book is to humanize the otherwise inhuman beast and by doing so it's able tohighlight the national discriminatory side of the original story and kind of turn it

(01:11:51):
around and show that more and how it was present in the original text.
Yeah, I haven't read Grendel but it came up as an example of authors who have noticed
this in literature and have tried to then turn these tropes on their heads and dosomething about it, right?

(01:12:12):
I also came across, you know, everyone talks about Ursula K.
Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy.
You know, I need to read it.
Everyone's been recommending it to me, but I know that it's one of the first works ofWestern fantasy where a deconstruction of race and racism is a crucial part of the story

(01:12:33):
and the world.
Right.
And then there's other ways of doing that.
Right.
You have a couple of texts by black authors, I believe.
Charles R.
Saunders, Imaro is a swords and sorcery story that features a black hero in anon-exploitative tribal Africa inspired fantasy world.

(01:12:55):
And Samuel R.
Delaney's return to Nevereon.
don't know how to say it totally.
So forgive me.
But his Return to Nevereon series is closer to a deconstruction of the swords and sorcerysubgenre from a more multi-ethnic angle.

(01:13:16):
So those are different avenues that these authors have taken to try and address orreinterpret these potentially harmful tropes into ways that allows us to engage with them
more critically and make something good out of them.
A lot of...

(01:13:36):
Yeah, there are, as you probably know, as you definitely have seen, there's a lot of talkon the internet from different people about making our trusted and known narratives into

(01:13:58):
something that's woke and...
you know, taking out all of the magic and the, you know, the things that we're used to andare comfortable with.
I mean, you hear a lot of people complaining about that kind of thing.
And I thought an interesting kind of consideration to have about that is that, is there,like, is it possible to be just too detached from the origins of the...

(01:14:29):
many times the very biased origins of those narratives to a point where yeah you're eitherout of that genre or the writing is no longer as compelling.
one concrete example that I can think of this is yeah okay so this racial essentialismthat we see in Tolkien's work it has to go and we can find

(01:14:58):
different ways of interpreting racial relations and ethnic relations and things like thatwithin that world.
Okay, so what about for example the concept of monarchy?
Is it okay at all to have medieval-like or fantasy narratives that maybe romanticizesomething like being a princess?

(01:15:27):
when that's, you know, the princess is obviously like a position within a hierarchy that'salways been very problematic socially.
And so how do we imagine this kind of I mean, even beyond race when it comes to thingslike class consciousness and that kind of thing.

(01:15:49):
Right.
And, you know, there certainly are plenty of fantasy texts that do
Address the issues of monarchy and stuff and stories of I edited a book series recentlywhere in the middle of the series a lot like an empire was Dissolved and turned into more

(01:16:10):
of a republic or something and became more Democratic like that was part of the story Idon't know that every single fantasy story has to be focused on that like you can have
more character driven stuff
And the monarchy is just a part of the setting, right?
I think the issue with the fantasy races is this idea that it's okay to treat people likethat versus when it's the setting.

(01:16:40):
And it certainly would be good in your story, I think, to have those elements there toengage with that critically.
But also that's a very large scale.
type of storytelling versus a smaller scale, more just personally character driven story,right?

(01:17:02):
So I think each text is going to have its own purpose as to what its focus is going to be.
Because if you try and tell too many stories at once, the narrative is just going to getbogged down and overwhelmed.
So sometimes you do have to be more specific, but it certainly is something to consider aswe're writing.
fantasy, right?

(01:17:22):
Like this idea of monarchy and princes and princesses and do we have that there because wewant to set our story in a specific time period and so this needs to be there in order to
establish the setting and if it is there to establish a setting, right, what are we doingwith that and how necessary is this setting for the story that we want to tell?

(01:17:50):
Right, I think there's a lot of factors at play.
Yeah, I mean, I think also one curious kind of phenomenon that happens when producers orthe production of those things want to be more conscious of that kind of thing.

(01:18:14):
Often the point is completely, from my perspective, it seems like
You know, this whole point of looking at hierarchy and race critically is completely mixedand you have some producer just going, yeah, okay, so make some of the elves black or make

(01:18:35):
the queen of England black, whatever.
And problem solved.
Now we have representation.
Now everything's good, right?
Right.
Yeah.
And of course it's always good to have diverse cast because we live in a
diverse world and I'm immediately going to be suspicious of any fantasy narratives thatattempts to present an in-universe reason why a race can't be diverse in that world,

(01:19:01):
right?
We live in a diverse world, so diversity should be our default.
But that being said, you know, if your fantasy races do fall into problematic tropes, likehaving villainous monster races or elves that are inherently superior,
giving those elves a variety of skin colors isn't going to fix the issue of assuming thata person's morality or ability or inherent worth can be determined by their race.

(01:19:29):
Like you can't just put that on top of it and address the reason why it was problematic,right?
The reason why the elves and elf superiority is an issue isn't just because they are oftendepicted as pale and having straight hair.
Like it's not just that.
There's
all the other stuff with it of their inherent divinity and purity and goodness and howmuch the other races worship them, right?

(01:19:58):
And giving them different skin colors isn't going to address that.
Yeah.
Did you read the, did either of you read the Aragon series or the, in here series?
Aragon was the first book in it.
I've read the first one many years ago.
I don't remember much of it.
Well, in that book, the elves were stronger and longer living because they made a pactwith a magical pact with dragons before humans did.

(01:20:28):
So they got their extra powers from a symbiotic pact with dragons to patch up a war.
you think that's better than...
And know, humans entered the pact later and got on the same trajectory.
Do you think that's better than...
Tolkien's elves being better because they're divinely formed?

(01:20:49):
Yeah, I would imagine so.
Like, because you have, you know, just having longer lifespan, right, doesn't mean thatyou're inherently better or worse.
Like different animal species, right?
Because really when we say race, we're talking about different species here, right?
And different species have different lifespans, whatever.
And if there's a magical reason behind it, cool.
I think what's important in that what you're describing is the humans also later had theability to do that as well.

(01:21:14):
right, that they also could choose to enter this pact.
And I think that definitely helps it be less of an inherent like racial thing, but thiswas a covenant, a pact that they consciously like chose to do, right?
And that other people could also join in with.
I think that definitely helps.

(01:21:35):
And the series ends with dwarves and urgos who I guess you could compare to orcs, so ifthey had horns.
Joining as well in the Urkels, and, you know, like Orcs.
enemies are always violent.
Then he goes into the reasons behind why there's so warlike.

(01:21:56):
The female Urkels would not marry a male who had not killed at least three enemies.
Yeah, what's interesting in recent fantasy years is how some creators have attempted toportray
these monster races like orcs at more sympathetically and heroically typically by swappingout their depictions as savage dumb brutes in favor of a martial race aesthetic similar to

(01:22:27):
what a lot of dwarves will also get.
They'll be depicted as a martial race.
And there is a good intention behind this, but this also just exchanges negativestereotypes.
for positive ones and continues to depict these races as being innately predisposed toviolence.

(01:22:47):
So I think that's something to be wary of and careful with when you have an entire racethat is just innately violent.
Any of these innate traits like that can get a bit dicey.
Yeah.
And goodness knows there have been plenty of human cultures that were very violentbecause,

(01:23:08):
If you're a man and you want to get married, no woman will marry you if you have notkilled an enemy.
Yeah.
And that gets down to like, you know, differences between specific human cultures, right?
But we don't assume that all humans are like that, right?
But then when we start assuming that all orcs are inherently violent, right?

(01:23:29):
Rather than, this specific community maybe has these values.
Instead of, it's the specific community.
No, it's their entire race is like that.
Before we wrap this up, I did want to ask about or talk a little bit about the evolutionof fantasy in more recent years.

(01:23:51):
And you did mention the more sympathetic kind of painting of like orcs and those races inspecific way.
that kind of exchanges one problem with another.
wanted to go on a tangent about Bridgerton at that point.

(01:24:17):
I mean, at a previous point I did before the conversation went elsewhere, but since youbrought this point of completely missing the point by exchanging stereotypes with orcs, I
thought that would be an opportune moment to bring it up.
Have you watched Bridgerton, the Netflix series?

(01:24:38):
I have not.
I know of it.
I know some of what happens in it.
Is Bridgerton fantasy?
It's not fantasy.
It's like a period piece kind of.
I think there's a lot that's being said about fiction.
Yeah, around race.
I think...
I mean...
Okay, I...

(01:25:01):
Okay, so the monarchy.
the English monarchy, those hierarchies, colonialism, you know, the idea of like,romanticizing this noble class of people and everybody else is kind of lesser than.

(01:25:26):
It's very present in a lot of historical fiction and a lot of things from...
that are supposed to be in the Middle Ages and that kind of thing.
Right.
Yeah, and a lot of fantasy.
It's very Middle Ages heavy.
From that perspective, I see pretty much...

(01:25:48):
It's not critical at all of the role of the monarchy or imperialism or classism.
Or even, you know, I guess it's not directly addressed, you know, considering where theBritish Empire was at that point, there was certainly a view of superiority over other

(01:26:15):
peoples.
I personally found it like very...
Yeah, kind of glaringly insensitive, of glaringly missing the point to just, you know,take a few black characters and inject them within the British aristocracy and then...

(01:26:41):
Like, we don't have problems anymore.
Like, when it comes to something like this...
because it's not acknowledging where all that wealth comes from and how they're able tohave all of that.
it comes to something like this, I'm like...
I would just put myself on the standpoint of just, it's better if you don't, right?

(01:27:04):
I mean, if you don't have any, like-
it's better if you don't include people of color within a narrative that fantasizesimperialism than to have them in those positions just to kind of cover your ass in a way

(01:27:33):
of...
I don't know, it was just a...
I thought that I was having about that particular series that I thought was very, verystrange.
Anyway, anyway, yeah.
interesting discussion, Because you have a lot of people of color who have been sayinglike, well, we want a chance to be able to see ourselves in these pretty dresses,

(01:28:00):
attending fancy parties.
Like, have where the stories where we get to do that and stuff.
So you have that desire for that there.
But then we also have to engage with it critically and think like, okay, this relationshipbetween being able to show the representation of everyone wearing the pretty dresses
versus where are we getting the pretty dresses from, right?

(01:28:24):
So there's certainly a lot of layers of nuance there.
And it is definitely important that we engage with all media critically.
I don't know that we...
inherently have to throw everything away with the slightest bit of problematically, but wedo need to be talking about it and thinking about it and delving deep into it and

(01:28:45):
considering what about this do we enjoy and what about this is not being shown or told.
Okay.
Right.
So before we wrap this up, we're coming to a close here.
wanted to ask about your perspective regarding more modern
fantasy writings and narratives and in how far they're different from traditional ones.

(01:29:12):
think like I can name some examples that seem different in some respects.
mean, I don't know if you've come across the Netflix series, The Dragon Prince.
Yeah.
I really like this series.
You know, it's I mean, I guess this

(01:29:33):
romanticizing aristocracy and monarchy and that kind of thing is also sort of presentthere in a similar way.
But yeah, you have a lot of diversity.
have many different fantastical races who have their different prejudices against eachother, but at the same time, very, like you don't see that same kind of biological

(01:29:55):
determinism and that kind of thing.
It's kind of a World War I kind of narrative.
of all we inherited, those stereotypes and hatreds and things.
And you know, you have a side that's working towards peace and I think that's beautiful.
mean, you have other narratives like Children of Blood and Bones.

(01:30:23):
I don't know if you've come across that title.
It's about...
Like a magical...
I've heard of it.
I haven't read it yet.
I'm in the process of reading it right now.
I wanted to finish it before this episode, but I didn't manage to.
It's also very interesting.
mean, it's about a magical race of people and conflicts with the monarchy and the rulingclass.

(01:30:50):
They...
those people...
Yeah, at a certain point.
experience, sort of genocide.
I mean, it talks a lot about racial tension.
I've heard only good things about it.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, so far I like it, so I can't say anything negative about it so far.

(01:31:16):
I'll say when I finish the book.
Do you think this is the trend that the genre is taking now?
that you have those titles a lot more aware than something like Harry Potter the Lord ofthe Rings you have things like the Dragon Prince and things like that I guess Avatar the

(01:31:37):
Last Airbender is probably also an example of something that has a more aware portrayal ofthis topic Do you think things are going in And it also offends some people because
it's...
Because it's Asian inspired characters and cultures made by white creators.

(01:32:00):
Okay, yeah.
That's another dimension to it.
Yeah, yeah.
Would you agree that things are kind of going in the right direction there?
You're muted.
Yeah, I I think I certainly hope it is, at least I think we definitely see a lot of medianow that is working towards being more aware and conscious of these things.

(01:32:28):
And I think we do see a real attempt from both creators and audiences.
to have stories that don't include harmful tropes and tell better, more sort of equalizingstories that aren't pitting different races as inherently better or worse than each other,

(01:32:54):
right?
And it is a progress, right?
We have a bunch of good examples, but that doesn't mean that everything, just because it'srecent, means that it's
doesn't have anything problematic with it, right?
It's a journey, I think, that will hopefully continue to improve just as we talk aboutthis more and become more aware of it.

(01:33:17):
think audiences are going to keep demanding better and better as they become more aware.
And then as a result, creators will create material that is better and better.
You know, I think
You know, we have a lot of examples.
I have a bunch of examples that, you know, we don't have time for and stuff of ways thatwe see people improving and doing better in this area.

(01:33:44):
So I am certainly hopeful.
Yes.
Thank you very much.
mean, I immensely appreciate your perspective and I really enjoyed this conversation.
Thank you so much, Clarissa, Janine for coming on the podcast.
It was a wonderful time and it was very insightful.
Can you refer our listeners to some of your work and some of your writings?

(01:34:09):
I know you're engaged in popular fiction and have written some essays about this verytopic and you like to delve into this whole world of fiction writing.
So where can people find you, Clarissa?

(01:34:33):
Yeah, they can find me on my website, ClarissaJeannine.com.
And my article on avoiding races and fantasy racism is currently available to read forfree on Page Turner Magazine's website.
So you can find me there as well.
Wonderful.

(01:34:54):
All right.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, everyone, for listening.
Have a nice day.
Have a good evening.
Stay safe.
Take care of yourself.
Ciao.
Thank you so much.

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Christmas Special 2024: Goblins, Elves, and Fantastical Prejudice - The Politics of Fantasy

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Christmas Special 2024: Goblins, Elves, and Fantastical Prejudice - The Politics of Fantasy