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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5377470" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, if we axiomaticly accept that beauty is 'in the eye of the beholder', then it must come from somewhere and those are as good of explanations as any.   I'm not saying that the concept of beauty is uninteresting if we make beauty subjective.  That's an interesting thought as well, and the more interesting because at least at a surface level it appears to be true.  But, I am saying that I find the concept of objective beauty to also interesting, and the more interesting because at least on a surface level it doesn't appear to be true.  To me, exploring what isn't tells me often as much about what is as exploring the thing directly.  Indeed, I consider this one of the great virtues of speculative fiction generally.   We can firm up our notions of the real by contrasting it with the unreal.  And we may discover every once in an while some counterintuitive suprises - like non-Euclidian geometry, general relativity, and Hisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.Ok, fine.  If that's what you dislike, all the more reason to play with this particular toy.  What if we imagine a world where the objective standards of beauty show humans to be rather ugly things?  What sort of other standards of beauty might we have?  What would their basis be?  What is an alien standard of beauty, and what within it might we find in contrast and in common with a humans love of (for example) the curve of a well turned ankle? I'm not at all saying that that racism, sexism, and other-isms can't be explored with a subjective standard of beauty.  I'm suggesting that there are perhaps other things, which, to be honest I'd find less well explored and less trite than your typical critical theory inspired deconstruction.  One of the reasons fantasy generally seems so trite to me, is that people seem little inclined to take much risk with it.  (That's about the only thing in this thread I agree with ProfessorCirno on.) Not just the D&D universe, but every universe.  That's one of those surprising bits of counter-intuition that turns out to be true.   My feeling is most people give relatively little thought to what those axioms ought to be when they slap the label 'fantasy' on the setting.   Science fiction writers tend to be somewhat better in this regard which is why I find that genera to have a little more breadth to it.</blockquote>

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