The Discourse of Fantasy

[Elemental_Elf]

What about C. S. Lewis?

He was friends with Tolkien. Lewis created a fairly detailed fantasy world full of themes, story concepts and ideas that are similar to Tolkien's.

So why is Tolkien the bedrock of Fantasy and not Lewis? Why are we playing with Elves and Orcs instead of Lions, Mice and Fawns? 

[LoA]

What about C. S. Lewis?

He was friends with Tolkien. Lewis created a fairly detailed fantasy world full of themes, story concepts and ideas that are similar to Tolkien's.

So why is Tolkien the bedrock of Fantasy and not Lewis? Why are we playing with Elves and Orcs instead of Lions, Mice and Fawns? 

I was mentioning this in a thread I just posted. Part of it, I think, is that elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings, etc, are all basically humans. They all have two arms, two hands, two legs, two feet, and so on. It's easy in a statistical way to make a human, and then tweak it enough to the point where it's an elf, or a dwarf. Give elves favored classes in wizard, give dwarves shorter running distance, halflings and gnomes have -2 strength because there smaller than everyone else. But once again there all bipedal sapiens.

A lion on the other hand is another beast entirely (pun half intended). It has four legs, is way more stronger than a human, and can easily kill a man within a minute. So what can you do statistically to even out the balance? Make it so they can't use weapons? give them huge penalties for wearing armor? Make it more difficult for them to put on armor?

So that's partly the reason we all play as elves and dwarves. Because it's easier to balance a human and a dwarf stat wise, than say a human and a dwarf elephant. The fact is, the d20 system was never designed in mind for anyone that wanted to play as anything but a bipedal with hands.

[Steerpike]

So why is Tolkien the bedrock of Fantasy and not Lewis? Why are we playing with Elves and Orcs instead of Lions, Mice and Fawns?

A few things:

1) The Narnia books are much more child-oriented.  The Lord of the Rings books, being very long, bloody, and often pretty creepy and dark are somewhat more adult than the Narnia series; though Narnia still has a bit of blood and battle, and it has its creepy moments (The Silver Chair takes the cake in my book), the characters are still basically children most of the time and the books are individually relatively short.

2) Tied to this, Narnia's allegorical message is incredibly heavy-handed, where as Tolkien's texts are determinedly anti-allegorical.  Sure things can be read into Tolkien's texts (lots of things), but in Lewis' they're spelled out for those passingly familiar with Christianity.  It doesn't help that Lewis' particular brand of Christianity is often deeply unpleasant, misgoynistic and bullying.  While I think someone reading Tolkien's texts wouldn't necessarily be fully aware of the values those texts are expressing or reinforcing - the values they may or may not be responding to - it's almost impossible to read Lewis' texts and not recognize the overtly Christian allegory.

3) Tolkien's secondary world-building ("subcreation") is richer.  In effect we "buy" Tolkien's world more than we do Lewis'.  It feels more like a real place because of all the background information which exists for its own sake rather than as part of a moral lesson.

[Lmns Crn]

What about C. S. Lewis?

He was friends with Tolkien. Lewis created a fairly detailed fantasy world full of themes, story concepts and ideas that are similar to Tolkien's.

So why is Tolkien the bedrock of Fantasy and not Lewis? Why are we playing with Elves and Orcs instead of Lions, Mice and Fawns?  

That's an interesting question.

I could offer conjecture that Lewis had relatively lower traction because his books are targeted at a younger audience, and were less appealing to adult readers.

Or that while both authors were influenced by religion (and Tolkien's mythos includes pretty clear analogues of god, angels, demons, and so on), Lewis's work is more naked religious allegory and the religious elements are more central to the story. (Perhaps this created a sense that Tolkien was more involved in creating a new thing, while Lewis was more involved in restating an already-familiar story.)

Or that, in drawing from themes of Norse and Celtic mythology, Tolkien was drawing from "strong stock" while Lewis drew from "weaker stock" by way of talking animals and so forth. Maybe one set of symbols is more culturally relevant somehow (in which case, it'd be interesting to consider the reasons why), or maybe this is just another way of saying "Lewis wrote for kids, so adults were less moved".

[Lmns Crn]

Jeez, Steerpike, posted 1:13 apart. :yumm:

[Elemental_Elf]

Does that naked religiosity necessarily matter in a time when people were overwhelmingly Christian? It's an issue today but back then? Not nearly as much.

I think the kid-centric viewpoint has more to do with Narnia not becoming per-eminent than most other arguments  (and all the issues that go with that (simpler story telling, less world building, less grit, etc.), all of which appeal to teen-age boys and adults).

Having said that, I still find it odd that Fantasy parrots  so closely to Middle-Earth. Why weren't Minotaurs a common PC race, or Mice? Is a Narnia-style Minotaur that much more powerful in-game than an Orc? Dragonlance pulled it off with ease. And what of Fawns? They are just people with goat legs. Why are they not common? Considering pixie-sized races have not gained wide acceptance, I suppose there is something inherent to the size of anthropomorphic mice that prevents them from becoming popular (no DM likes dealing with oddly sized characters who can do weird things(from a human's perspective, like racing up into the BBEG's pants and stealing the MacGuffin key from his pocket)).

[Lmns Crn]

Does that naked religiosity necessarily matter in a time when people were overwhelmingly Christian? It's an issue today but back then? Not nearly as much.

I don't know, which is why I'm just spitballing ideas. (I also don't know that it's true that people decades ago were more likely to be Christian, as opposed to nonbelievers being more strongly pressured by society to be silent about their dissent, but that's a whole 'nother conversation, and not a particularly relevant one probably.)

Honestly I think the specific religious content is less of a factor than is Narnia's really close correspondence to stories of moral instruction that most of the population is already highly familiar with. Tolkien dealt with moral themes in the process of his story-- there's a lot of capital-G-Good vs. capital-E-Evil, themes of temptation and redemption, downfall caused by giving into selfish and base desire, etc.-- but it's not Bible Stories with Wizard Jesus in the same transparent, moralizing way that Lewis wrote Bible Stories with Lion Jesus.

(ed: Here, just picking a non-religious example of a moral fable we've all known since we were kids, to try to make the point that the religious aspect isn't the relevant aspect.)
I mean, I could probably do a straight rewrite of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and come up with a really interesting and compelling setting to put it in, and people would still say "man, this is just The Boy Who Cried Wolf with time-traveling space merfolk, I already know that story, and I don't need that moral preached to me again."

Part of my bias is that, as a young kid, I devoured Tolkien's work and loved it, and I devoured Lewis's work and loved it. And now that I am an adult, I still love Tolkien, but I can't read Lewis anymore. To my eye, it did not age well at all. (It was like that time in college when my friends decided to go track down episodes of the Transformers cartoon we watched as kids, and we realized it was really, really bad, and we had just been too young to know when we were originally fans.) One author still has things to say to me that I want to hear; the other does not. Not to draw inappropriate conclusions or anything, but that experience is at least consistent with broader trends about which opus seems to have more cultural clout these decades later-- maybe something about Tolkien's work just ages better, and that's the crucial ingredient of his ideas' popularity?

Considering pixie-sized races have not gained wide acceptance, I suppose there is something inherent to the size of anthropomorphic mice that prevents them from becoming popular (no DM likes dealing with oddly sized characters who can do weird things(from a human's perspective, like racing up into the BBEG's pants and stealing the MacGuffin key from his pocket)).

There's probably a lot of truth in this, definitely.

But any time we ask "why is [thing] not more common?" we risk wading into a morass. Sometimes we have answers that seem fairly clear ("why aren't just-as-wide-as-your-nose moustaches more common?") and sometimes matters of taste are less clear ("why aren't bellbottoms more common?") There's a common cognitive trap about externalizing one's own preferences: "I like [thing]" becomes "[thing] deserves to be more common", and that can lead to pretty confusing perspectives.

Animal-character settings have gained a lot of traction, and I don't think they'll ever be as big as the Tolkien-inspired stuff, but there's still Mouse Guard, and Shard, and the Redwall and Watership Down hacks for FATE or whatever that I am totally certain someone has made and posted on the internet somewhere.

Minotaurs have been pigeonholed as monsters to be hunted and slaughtered for millennia. You can thank that asshole, Theseus. That's a hell of a lot of cultural momentum to talk about overcoming, when you ask an apparently simple question like "why not minotaurs as a PC race?"

Lucky for you we are in something of a golden age of deconstructing all this baggage within genre fiction, or so it currently seems to me. It has never been a better time to be an iconoclast.

[LordVreeg]

On the iPad, and traveling, so not Cutting and pasting....
But this is another place lc and I are in accord.  I loved both growing up and into my twenties, but I find Lewis transparent and obvious, whereas Tolkien's depth, after literally many dozen re reads, is still useful.

I have mentioned the hobbits as the reader's lens a few times, and I am going to point it out again.  The fellowship has been copied again and again, but the interactions remain fresh, as does the incredibly granular yet palpable and logical growth of all the hobbits.   I think this is one secret to the connection readers get.

I think a few times we've mentioned the depth of Tolkien' s works, but I also want to point out the way Tolkien lightly touches things, as opposed to knocking readers over the head with it....

[HippopotamusDundee]

Considering pixie-sized races have not gained wide acceptance, I suppose there is something inherent to the size of anthropomorphic mice that prevents them from becoming popular (no DM likes dealing with oddly sized characters who can do weird things(from a human's perspective, like racing up into the BBEG's pants and stealing the MacGuffin key from his pocket)).

There's probably a lot of truth in this, definitely.

Animal-character settings have gained a lot of traction, and I don't think they'll ever be as big as the Tolkien-inspired stuff, but there's still Mouse Guard, and Shard, and the Redwall and Watership Down hacks for FATE or whatever that I am totally certain someone has made and posted on the internet somewhere.

Speaking of animal-character settings let's not forget Bunnies and Burrows, the Watership Down RPG, which came out in 1976 and presented all at once the first published instance of non-humanoid PCs, the first detailed 'martial arts' system, and the first attempt at some kind of skill system.

[LordVreeg]

I played that when it came out...that was modeling Watership Down, an amazing book I still keep next to the bed at the Maine house, is pertinent to the literary part of the convo....

[Steerpike]

Does that naked religiosity necessarily matter in a time when people were overwhelmingly Christian? It's an issue today but back then? Not nearly as much.

It's not just the message - which, apart from being Christian, is very conservatively Christian and groan-inducingly moralistic - it's that the message is so obvious, the texts to didactic.  This in itself is unappealing.

So, yeah, exactly what Luminous Crayon said...

[Magnus Pym]

I come extremely late in the conversation but I thought I would post my thoughts.

For instance, why are elves, dwarves, and orcs so pervasive?

Well. I've never really been one for the standard thing we see everywhere. As you can see in my works (Plaguelands and Primeval, whom links lie in my signature), I usually focus a lot on humans. In real life, the human being is so fascinating, and so diverse -linguistically, physically, culturally, psychologically, by gender, by affections- that I see no use in burdening my works with additional races which will also be equally diverse, or nearly so.
I also seem to get a calling to do something different. Perhaps it is a point on which I fail, but having read others works on here, I can say with confidence that both my imaginary worlds seem to dissociate themselves from those of the very creative minds we find in this community as well as the mainstream fantasy worlds out there.

Why are most settings placed within a medieval time-frame?

There's something interesting from the technological level of the medieval times. It is crude, yet not exactly primitive; and it is not instantaneous on a large scale, yet quicker than the means employed in more primitive times. And here I speak of technologies in general, not any particular domain such as weapons, or transport, or tools.

My Plaguelands world is certainly medieval-inspired, but not my Primeval. So I don't feel any particular calling to the medieval time-frame.

A suggestion I would make here is that perhaps, the writer, knowing many questions -mostly concerning technicalities of the time- will arise, decides to use such a time-frame so as to learn. It's curiosity. Curiosity is what first brought me to D&D, ages ago.

---

Man just follows the ambitious anyways. Sheeps aren't only found in fantasy world-creation, but in all domains.

[Elemental_Elf]

Does that naked religiosity necessarily matter in a time when people were overwhelmingly Christian? It's an issue today but back then? Not nearly as much.

I don't know, which is why I'm just spitballing ideas. (I also don't know that it's true that people decades ago were more likely to be Christian, as opposed to nonbelievers being more strongly pressured by society to be silent about their dissent, but that's a whole 'nother conversation, and not a particularly relevant one probably.)

Honestly I think the specific religious content is less of a factor than is Narnia's really close correspondence to stories of moral instruction that most of the population is already highly familiar with. Tolkien dealt with moral themes in the process of his story-- there's a lot of capital-G-Good vs. capital-E-Evil, themes of temptation and redemption, downfall caused by giving into selfish and base desire, etc.-- but it's not Bible Stories with Wizard Jesus in the same transparent, moralizing way that Lewis wrote Bible Stories with Lion Jesus.

(ed: Here, just picking a non-religious example of a moral fable we've all known since we were kids, to try to make the point that the religious aspect isn't the relevant aspect.)
I mean, I could probably do a straight rewrite of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and come up with a really interesting and compelling setting to put it in, and people would still say "man, this is just The Boy Who Cried Wolf with time-traveling space merfolk, I already know that story, and I don't need that moral preached to me again."

So, as a society, hitting upon the themes/stories/parables from the bible is viewed as weak writing but authors doing the same except with Tolkien, get a pass? What makes derivative works of Tolkien more acceptable, at least culturally, than derivative works of the Bible?  

Part of my bias is that, as a young kid, I devoured Tolkien's work and loved it, and I devoured Lewis's work and loved it. And now that I am an adult, I still love Tolkien, but I can't read Lewis anymore. To my eye, it did not age well at all. (It was like that time in college when my friends decided to go track down episodes of the Transformers cartoon we watched as kids, and we realized it was really, really bad, and we had just been too young to know when we were originally fans.) One author still has things to say to me that I want to hear; the other does not. Not to draw inappropriate conclusions or anything, but that experience is at least consistent with broader trends about which opus seems to have more cultural clout these decades later-- maybe something about Tolkien's work just ages better, and that's the crucial ingredient of his ideas' popularity?

I'm a bit younger than you (grew up in the 90's) but I recently had a similar experience with Beast Wars (the CGI version of Transformers where they turned into animals rather than vehicles). I remember being a kid and LOVING Beast Wars! I had a whole bunch of the toys growing up, including the expensive Megatron/T-Rex and Optimus Primal/Gorilla (side note, Optimus was renamed Primal for the show). However, upon viewing it recently (late 20's), I find the show boring, poorly paced and very child-oriented. However, Dexter's Lab recently popped up on Netflix and I still find that show to be quite enjoyable because it has a fair bit of depth in the writing that has aged quite well.

This conversation draws me to a book I recently read - The Companions - which is the latest Drizzt book. It was a really fun read, well crafted and well executed. However, it was definitely written at the teenager reading level. I wonder if, in 40 years, people will look back on those 30+ books as being passe or or will they be remembered fondly as hallmarks of D&D-style fantasy. Will R. A. Salvatore's works be viewed as kindly as Tolkien's or disparagingly as Lewis'. There is much to admire about the Drizzt books but, at its heart, it is a story of a man who rejects his birth society and adopts the culture of another, foreign one. Will that theme eventually feel as trite as Lewis' religiousness?

Considering pixie-sized races have not gained wide acceptance, I suppose there is something inherent to the size of anthropomorphic mice that prevents them from becoming popular (no DM likes dealing with oddly sized characters who can do weird things(from a human's perspective, like racing up into the BBEG's pants and stealing the MacGuffin key from his pocket)).

There's probably a lot of truth in this, definitely.

Animal-character settings have gained a lot of traction, and I don't think they'll ever be as big as the Tolkien-inspired stuff, but there's still Mouse Guard, and Shard, and the Redwall and Watership Down hacks for FATE or whatever that I am totally certain someone has made and posted on the internet somewhere.

Minotaurs have been pigeonholed as monsters to be hunted and slaughtered for millennia. You can thank that asshole, Theseus. That's a hell of a lot of cultural momentum to talk about overcoming, when you ask an apparently simple question like "why not minotaurs as a PC race?"

The legends of the Minotaur was of one such creature. Fantasy authors have long striven to make them a true species. So, in a way, that represents a lot of growth for the creature.

Speaking of RPGs and creatures, does it strike anyone else as odd that Gnolls have become so iconic, when other anthros have not? It is especially odd given how much of the fluff I have read for Gnolls by third parties really doesn't create a complex Hyena-like culture, and thus could be easily dropped into other predator Anthro Tribes (like Wolf-Men). Catfolk are a very popular species in other games, I remember fondly the Leonin from Mirrodin and the Char from Guild Wars.

Were there any works of fiction from the era before RPGs that had a Rat-Man species? Warhammer has the Skaven, D&D Wererats and Rokugan Nezumi, all of which have common disreputable/dirty/plague/thief themes (well the Nezumi are perceived to have those themes by the Rokugani but are, in truth, an inversion of them). Obviously this all harkens back to "rat" but I'm curious if there actually is a literary root that designers are drawing inspiration from (the way people do with Dwarves via Tolkien).

Lucky for you we are in something of a golden age of deconstructing all this baggage within genre fiction, or so it currently seems to me. It has never been a better time to be an iconoclast.

I don't think you need to be in any particular era to make iconoclasm popular, you just need to be a good writer with a solid idea. Look at Dark Sun, very popular setting in 2E and garnered more than enough support from fans to be revived in 4E, which is something that even very iconic settings failed to pull off (even when they had big anniversaries (i.e. Dragonlance).

I wonder if the resurgence of animal RPGs has to do more with nostalgia (which is hugely popular right now) more than iconoclasm (which, admittedly is also very popular right now).

[Lmns Crn]

That's a meaty post and I'm half-asleep already, so I'm going to hit what I can and get to bed.

So, as a society, hitting upon the themes/stories/parables from the bible is viewed as weak writing but authors doing the same except with Tolkien, get a pass? What makes derivative works of Tolkien more acceptable, at least culturally, than derivative works of the Bible? 

That's not what I'm saying at all. Shakespeare hits upon Biblical references all the time; literature all over the place is full of them. But there's a difference between "hitting upon the themes/stories/parables from the bible" and writing a straight-up Biblical allegory. In my personal opinion, Lewis's main problem is that he's writing with an overt religious agenda that he's not skillful enough to manage gracefully, but this isn't the "C.S. Lewis Sucks Megathread" so I'll try to get back on topic.

There are plenty of shitty Tolkien derivatives on the market too, of course. That's not even related to the point, though, which is about why Tolkien threw a rock into a pond and it made a huge splash and Lewis threw a rock into a pond and it made a tiny splash. I don't think religious allegory is the only reason (or even necessarily the primary one) so I don't really care that much about defending it. This isn't even close to being a conversation about Tolkien knockoffs being culturally sanctioned, it's about considering different possible reasons why they might be common.

Speaking of RPGs and creatures, does it strike anyone else as odd that Gnolls have become so iconic, when other anthros have not? It is especially odd given how much of the fluff I have read for Gnolls by third parties really doesn't create a complex Hyena-like culture, and thus could be easily dropped into other predator Anthro Tribes (like Wolf-Men). Catfolk are a very popular species in other games, I remember fondly the Leonin from Mirrodin and the Char from Guild Wars.

This is really an interesting point. I don't really know a lot about it (I didn't even consciously realize gnolls were supposed to be hyenamen) but I am going to assume that having a catchy name is a big key to success here (and if they were called "hyenamen" instead of "gnolls", we would never talk about them outside of the "hey, remember when the first edition of the Monster Manual was full of ridiculous crap like hyenamen?" context.)

I wonder if this is a simplicity/consistency of design issue (related to Love of Awesome's earlier point about "bipeds with hands") that makes an anthropomorphized animal species easier to deal with or more palatable than straight-up lions and tigers and bears.

Look at Dark Sun, very popular setting in 2E and garnered more than enough support from fans to be revived in 4E, which is something that even very iconic settings failed to pull off (even when they had big anniversaries (i.e. Dragonlance).

And I think it goes without saying that Dark Sun is absolutely the bomb, for sure.

[Lmns Crn]

It's not just the message - which, apart from being Christian, is very conservatively Christian and groan-inducingly moralistic - it's that the message is so obvious, the texts to didactic.  This in itself is unappealing.

So, yeah, exactly what Luminous Crayon said...

Based on what they say about brevity, I am apparently witless as well as soulless. :yumm: