Survivor Appendix E (5e) Authors- Ursula K. LeGWINS!

[Lanefan]

What do you say to all the protesters, 100 years from now, who are tearing down statues of Martin Luther King Jr. because he was a meat-eater?

What do you say to the people, 100 years from now, who are burning and banning the works of Le Guin, Jemisin, Alexander, Martin, Sanderson, Jordan, Kay, Tolkien, and Moorcock because they dared to depict meat-eating in their books or were meat-eaters themselves?

What do you say to those same people, 100 years from now, who look down on the people of our time and everything we wrought because we were largely meat-eaters?

Keep in mind, the modern vegetarian movement predates us by over 100 years, so no one alive today can say that they didn't know any better.

If I'm still around 100 years from now and capable of saying anything to anyone I'd be saying "they've kept me alive for over 150 years so pass me another beefburger, dammit!"

 

[Prakriti]

I wouldn't have much to say to these folks, but only because they're hyperbolic fever dream creations that have little to no bearing on the discussion we're actually having.

Alright. Then imagine someone came into this thread every day and announced that they were downvoting your favorite authors because they were vile meat-eaters. How would you view that person, and are you aware that other people might be viewing you that way right now?

 

[Gradine]

Alright. Then imagine someone came into this thread every day and announced that they were downvoting your favorite authors because they were vile meat-eaters. How would you view that person, and are you aware that other people might be viewing you that way right now?

I probably wouldn't think much in the way about them at all, to be honest. Hell, one of my favorite authors is regularly getting downvoted because she has initials in her name. I don't come to Survivor threads expecting sensible voting patterns, and neither should anyone else.

 

[CleverNickName]

What do you say to all the protesters, 100 years from now, who are tearing down statues of Martin Luther King Jr. because he was a meat-eater?

What do you say to the people, 100 years from now, who are burning and banning the works of Le Guin, Jemisin, Alexander, Martin, Sanderson, Jordan, Kay, Tolkien, and Moorcock because they dared to depict meat-eating in their books or were meat-eaters themselves?

What do you say to those same people, 100 years from now, who look down on the people of our time and everything we wrought because we were largely meat-eaters?

Keep in mind, the modern vegetarian movement predates us by over 100 years, so no one alive today can say that they didn't know any better.

In a hundred years? Before I said anything, the first thing I would do is learn. I would find out why people are so angry over people eating meat that they are tearing down statues and burning books. I would want to know what had changed in our culture, what drove that change, and what policies and events drove the entire culture to such a dramatic shift in attitude. Was a terrible food-borne plague traced to meat? Was a long and bitter war fought over the cattle industry? Was it the long, slow, and hard work of the vegetable lobby? Was there a new breakthrough in nutrition science? A resurgence in religious beliefs that forbade the consumption of meat?

Their actions might very well be justified, or not, but they would certainly be worth knowing and understanding, long before I started commenting about it.

Compare the past to the present, but always remember to also compare the present to the past.

 

[Sacrosanct]

My wife is a research historian, and she would like to remind us that this is not an "either-or" situation. When learning about the past, we must consider context of historical attitudes and actions to get a clear idea of intent and social expectation. But we must also relate them to their context today, and frame them with the ethos and social expectations that we are living in. It's vital that we do both. We must measure past events by their past context, and measure them by their current context. Failure to do either is a failure to learn, and a missed opportunity for progress.

She is glad that you mentioned Thomas Jefferson, because that is a good case-in-point. Yes, he was a slave owner. But slavery was not "acceptable" back then. In fact, it was considered morally abhorrent in most of the Christian world at the time. The abolitionist movement started in the 1600s when the Roman Catholic Church condemned it, continued to 1732 when James Oglethorpe publicly argued against slavery in his proposal to found the Georgia colony, and gained strength in 1777 the brand-new State of Virginia abolished slavery. Slavery was a major point of contention among the nation's Founding Fathers even before the Declaration of Independence was signed, but it seems that those facts are never part of the discussion today. We are too quick to just tell ourselves "well it was okay back then, but times were different" and not measure that difference (and especially the similarities) between Then and Now.

Slavery was not "okay", not even back then, unless you were profiting from it. It just so happened that slavery profiteers controlled most of the land and wealth (and therefore, most of the political power) in America for more than a century. That is a very important thing to remember, especially in the modern era. The complete picture is so much more applicable in both time frames.

So when you find yourself saying "well that author might have been a complete jerk, but everyone was a jerk back then so it's okay," stop and ask yourself...who said it was okay? Was truly everyone a jerk back then? and if so, was everyone truly okay with it? What changed, and why, and how?

She also recommends we read more history books and fewer works of fiction, but she gives that advice to everyone.

Well, Jefferson was an extreme example I used for a bit of hyperbole. Let's look at my other example, one that happens much more often. The damsel in distress. By today's standards, people call that sexist because women are typically portrayed in positions of less powerful than men, or even needing to have a man rescue them. Seems pretty obviously sexist now, right? But as recent as a few decades ago, that was the typical fantasy trope. Someone who wrote fantasy might not necessarily be a sexist because they wrote a story of a damsel in distress. More likely, they wrote what was familiar to them. And I think it's unfair to condemn or otherwise disparage someone by today's standard for something that very well could have just been ignorance and/or lack of the progress we have now. Civil rights, equal rights, etc isn't a light switch, where it goes from bad to all good in one step. It's been an ongoing process of incremental improvement. someone who is more progressive by the standards of their day, even if they are less progressive by the standards of today, doesn't deserve to be disparaged.

As I said, I think it's low hanging fruit to use hindsight and the advantage of years of progress to take down someone else. Also, I'm not saying, and never have said, they shouldn't be immune to any criticism. It's the type of criticism that we should be wary of.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I for one welcome our bovine overlords...

Back to the Survivor thread itself, goodbye to Sanderson. While I like his work quite a bit, I get why he's out of the running at this juncture. I do think his approach to logically thinking through world-building and magic system design to see where it takes you is something to learn from. But stacked against Wolfe, Pratchett, LeGuin, I get it.

I would want to know what had changed in our culture, what drove that change, and what policies and events drove the entire culture to such a dramatic shift in attitude. Their actions might very well be justified, or not, but they would certainly be worth knowing and understanding, long before I started commenting about it.

 

[BookBarbarian]

Back to the Survivor thread itself, goodbye to Sanderson. While I like his work quite a bit, I get why he's out of the running at this juncture. I do think his approach to logically thinking through world-building and magic system design to see where it takes you is something to learn from. But stacked against Wolfe, Pratchett, LeGuin, I get it.

My sentiments exactly. I can see easily why Sanderson is a such a successful author. And I really like his stuff, but the words he uses won't stick with me like the ones used by Wolfe or Pratchett.

 

[CleverNickName]

[MENTION=15700]Sacrosanct[/MENTION]: People don't always refer to the "damsel in distress" trope as sexist, because it's not always the case. (Nor is it all people, either...some folks spend a lot of time studying this sort of thing.) It's not usually a problem to have a female character need rescue in a story. But if the damsel is not only in distress, but also powerless, and mocked, and stripped of her humanity, etc., purely for the sake of contrast with the main character who conveniently has all of the power and humanity and respect...well, you can see how that's a problem.

I agree with you that social change being very slow, and I agree that things can look different when viewed from opposite ends of a timeline. There's a lot of important history between Rapunzel and Princess General Leah, and not all of it is very comfortable for my privileged male brain to learn about. So I agree that some authors wrote in a manner that readers will find offensive today, and I acknowledge they are being criticized for it. And I agree with you: it's unfair.

But it is also necessary. I think that type of criticism keeps us from normalizing or dismissing something that took our society a long time to move away from, and keeps us from slowing down when we still have so far to go. We should strive to understand what happened and why we felt it needed to change, and that's hard to do if we dismiss or ignore the problematic nature of the past. Especially the parts of the past that we love.

That's all I've got. I'm going to put my Serious Social Critique hat aside, and go back to being a silly moogle. I'm not downvoting any of these authors for moral or ethical reasons, and I'm not going to try to change anyone's minds about how to vote. In all honesty: I'm downvoting whoever has the fewest points in the hopes of bringing this contest to as quick of a close as possible. (shrug) That's as good a reason as any.

 

[Gradine]

@Sacrosanct: People don't always refer to the "damsel in distress" trope as sexist, because it's not always the case. (Nor is it all people, either...some folks spend a lot of time studying this sort of thing.) It's not usually a problem to have a female character need rescue in a story. But if the damsel is not only in distress, but also powerless, and mocked, and stripped of her humanity, etc., purely for the sake of contrast with the main character who conveniently has all of the power and humanity and respect...well, you can see how that's a problem.

It's a bit off topic, but I tend to think of the most problematic aspect (even moreso than what you mention) of the "damsel in distress" trope is "woman as prize/trophy"; that is, that the reward for heroism is claim on the romantic (and in some cases overtly sexual) attentions of the woman rescued. This "woman as reward" trope is one of the primary sources of a ton of toxic ideas about expectations in relationships between men and women. It's the reason we have "nice guys", and all of the horrific movements that spawned from them.

And that's me taking off my own Pop Culture Analysis 101 cap as well. In any case, I expect anybody's reasons for upvoting or downvoting in these threads to range from personal to arbitrary. In the other thread I'm downvoting the only movie left on the list I haven't seen yet. In the previous thread I downvoted Lovecraft first, because honestly that guy, but I didn't think the lesser of anyone upvoting him. I just assumed they liked his stories, or the genre of horror they spawned (pun intended). At one point I was downvoting an author because he was a public proponent of Brexit, a policy which has literally zero bearing on me. At some point I'm sure I'll start downvoting Guy Gavriel Kay because his name is kind of annoying to say out loud, or something equally ridiculous and arbitrary, because the people I recognize that I'd downvote are already gone.

These threads have gotten weirdly personal as of late, which is a shame, because this is supposed to be the fun place where we only pretend to get into deeply personal fan wank debates as a way to poke fun at the same. I'd blame the introduction of flesh and blood people (as opposed to more abstract concepts like classes and races) but IIRC it started in the video game thread, so I'm just going to go ahead and blame lowkey for not showing proper respect and ticking off the internet tone filter gnomes.

 

[tglassy]

Carry Fischer’s response to a person who asked her what a parent should say when their little girl asked why she was wearing a skimpy outfit and in chains was to say

“Tell her that an evil alien slug made me wear it and so I killed him.”

Princess Leia was a beast. No “Damsel in distress” there. All she needed was someone to open the door. She took it from there.