Celebrim
Legend
I would certainly not suggest that my opinions - political or otherwise - do not influence what I think of as a villain or how my villains behave.
But I'd like to think that the relationship is subtle and indirect. And whether it is or not, I doubt the average player could tease out what question of particular interest to me is represented by a character. The reason for this - and I consider this one of the strengths of speculative fiction - is that the novel setting abstracts out the question on to what a consider a 'higher plane'.
So for example, 'black vs. white racism' is just a particular case of 'racism' which is just a particular case of people hating and mistreating other people because those people are different in some way from them. For me, the most interesting questions and the ones most worth considering are in those cases. We may not all be racist. We may not all hold stereotypical views regarding Europeans or Africans or race relations. But none of us are so inhuman as to be able to claim we treat all other people how they ought to be treated, or that we are universally noble in how we treat our out groups. We all justify our anger and our hatred to people that are different than us and we all perceive those differences as threatening or alienating. So for me, one of the great things about fantasy or science fiction is that we can distance ourselves from or own particular biases and dig at the really core issues. I think of great TV shows like 'Twilight Zone' or original 'Star Trek' when it was at it's best, and how they came at real world social issues from first causes and unusual angles. I think that is a far better and far less provocative approach than trying to come at peoples biases directly where you will naturally provoke defensiveness and move right into their (and your) blind spots.
So for example my current villain Anton Andervay is more or less as close to an atheist as you can get in a world where evidence of the divine is pervasive. But I'm not actually critiquing atheism as you might expect, because from my perspective there is something about this fictional setting that makes being highly critical of the divine entirely reasonable, and namely that in reality I am all the divines and the creator of this little fictional tawdry creation. If this was reality, I would totally consider it reasonable to rebel against me as well. Like most of my villains, I've tried to make Andervay sympathetic on multiple levels because many of the difficult questions of life concern things that don't appear to have easy answers, and were completely rational and reasonable people disagree over the answers.
I would be appalled at myself if I created a strawman villain to serve the purpose of bashing some real world group. I don't consider it good art when I encounter it in literature, and I try to avoid producing things which I criticize as poor literary technique in others. I might accidently do this as a result of my own biases, but it is never my intention. Indeed, I got seriously troubled by Andervay when I realized someone might take him as critique of the irreligious, when in fact I had conceived him as a critique of my own world's cosmology after an exercise in trying to imagine what a world with multiple conflicting and contrasting theological viewpoints would universally consider to be heresy. My solace is that my players are correctly (for my value of correctness) troubled by whether Andervay is right and whether his claim that they are the villains in in the story (and he the hero) is not possibly correct. One story fork I'd always considered possible was the party switching sides, something that the class make up (a cleric and a 'paladin') has generally precluded but which I think would have worked just as well as the more straightforward conflict with Andervay and his minions.
I suppose at some level, even this discussion is heavily influenced by what you call my 'politics'. I've probably thrown out a lot of statements that people with different 'politics' disagree with strongly.
As for my players shaping the approach and story, well, it's been a bit weird. My experience with American born players suggests they strongly gravitate to moral systems which in my campaign world would be labelled 'chaotic'. Most American players I play with (with some exceptions granted) can't even imagine the lawful mindset and are generally scornful of it (and scornful of players that have it). Despite this, and despite the fact that the party gravitates toward CN, they have consistently as players made choices that put them at odds with the world's good NPCs (including Chaotic Good ones), and ironically they have most admired the NPC's in my game and most often allied with the NPC's in my game that are Lawful Evil. The sort of NPCs they like and get along with are the ones that are pragmatic and ruthless and admire ruthlessness in others. They quite frankly prefer to be treated as useful tools rather than as comrades or heroes, because being treated like a friend or a hero puts expectations on them that they don't want to fulfill, whereas being treated as some powerful persons useful tool puts only the expectation on them that they'll ruthlessly pursue a mutually beneficial agenda. I suspect that they really would have gotten along well with Andervay right up until he decided to sacrifice them to achieve 'the greater good'. They don't get along well with other chaotics, because they recognize right away that they can no more trust them than others can trust their PCs. So they end up forging alliances with Lawful Evil types pretty darn consistently. Again, this is made easier by the fact that most of my 'villains' aren't snarling puppy killers with curling mustaches, but complex sympathetic individuals that just happen to be mass murderers and crooks. But considering the PCs themselves are often complex sympathetic individuals that just happen to be mass murderers, I wonder if this isn't to be that unexpected.
But I'd like to think that the relationship is subtle and indirect. And whether it is or not, I doubt the average player could tease out what question of particular interest to me is represented by a character. The reason for this - and I consider this one of the strengths of speculative fiction - is that the novel setting abstracts out the question on to what a consider a 'higher plane'.
So for example, 'black vs. white racism' is just a particular case of 'racism' which is just a particular case of people hating and mistreating other people because those people are different in some way from them. For me, the most interesting questions and the ones most worth considering are in those cases. We may not all be racist. We may not all hold stereotypical views regarding Europeans or Africans or race relations. But none of us are so inhuman as to be able to claim we treat all other people how they ought to be treated, or that we are universally noble in how we treat our out groups. We all justify our anger and our hatred to people that are different than us and we all perceive those differences as threatening or alienating. So for me, one of the great things about fantasy or science fiction is that we can distance ourselves from or own particular biases and dig at the really core issues. I think of great TV shows like 'Twilight Zone' or original 'Star Trek' when it was at it's best, and how they came at real world social issues from first causes and unusual angles. I think that is a far better and far less provocative approach than trying to come at peoples biases directly where you will naturally provoke defensiveness and move right into their (and your) blind spots.
So for example my current villain Anton Andervay is more or less as close to an atheist as you can get in a world where evidence of the divine is pervasive. But I'm not actually critiquing atheism as you might expect, because from my perspective there is something about this fictional setting that makes being highly critical of the divine entirely reasonable, and namely that in reality I am all the divines and the creator of this little fictional tawdry creation. If this was reality, I would totally consider it reasonable to rebel against me as well. Like most of my villains, I've tried to make Andervay sympathetic on multiple levels because many of the difficult questions of life concern things that don't appear to have easy answers, and were completely rational and reasonable people disagree over the answers.
I would be appalled at myself if I created a strawman villain to serve the purpose of bashing some real world group. I don't consider it good art when I encounter it in literature, and I try to avoid producing things which I criticize as poor literary technique in others. I might accidently do this as a result of my own biases, but it is never my intention. Indeed, I got seriously troubled by Andervay when I realized someone might take him as critique of the irreligious, when in fact I had conceived him as a critique of my own world's cosmology after an exercise in trying to imagine what a world with multiple conflicting and contrasting theological viewpoints would universally consider to be heresy. My solace is that my players are correctly (for my value of correctness) troubled by whether Andervay is right and whether his claim that they are the villains in in the story (and he the hero) is not possibly correct. One story fork I'd always considered possible was the party switching sides, something that the class make up (a cleric and a 'paladin') has generally precluded but which I think would have worked just as well as the more straightforward conflict with Andervay and his minions.
I suppose at some level, even this discussion is heavily influenced by what you call my 'politics'. I've probably thrown out a lot of statements that people with different 'politics' disagree with strongly.
As for my players shaping the approach and story, well, it's been a bit weird. My experience with American born players suggests they strongly gravitate to moral systems which in my campaign world would be labelled 'chaotic'. Most American players I play with (with some exceptions granted) can't even imagine the lawful mindset and are generally scornful of it (and scornful of players that have it). Despite this, and despite the fact that the party gravitates toward CN, they have consistently as players made choices that put them at odds with the world's good NPCs (including Chaotic Good ones), and ironically they have most admired the NPC's in my game and most often allied with the NPC's in my game that are Lawful Evil. The sort of NPCs they like and get along with are the ones that are pragmatic and ruthless and admire ruthlessness in others. They quite frankly prefer to be treated as useful tools rather than as comrades or heroes, because being treated like a friend or a hero puts expectations on them that they don't want to fulfill, whereas being treated as some powerful persons useful tool puts only the expectation on them that they'll ruthlessly pursue a mutually beneficial agenda. I suspect that they really would have gotten along well with Andervay right up until he decided to sacrifice them to achieve 'the greater good'. They don't get along well with other chaotics, because they recognize right away that they can no more trust them than others can trust their PCs. So they end up forging alliances with Lawful Evil types pretty darn consistently. Again, this is made easier by the fact that most of my 'villains' aren't snarling puppy killers with curling mustaches, but complex sympathetic individuals that just happen to be mass murderers and crooks. But considering the PCs themselves are often complex sympathetic individuals that just happen to be mass murderers, I wonder if this isn't to be that unexpected.
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