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alias_sqbrA lot of western fantasy has worldbuilding involving a balance between two fundamental forces: usually Light and Dark but sometimes Order and Chaos. This often very explicitly draws on Chinese ideas about Yin and Yang, where in theory both are necessary and neither is all good or all bad.
Examples: Star Wars, Delta Rune(*), The Cinderella Principle
But in all the cases I can think of the cultural Christian influence causes one to be the Good Force and one to be the Evil Force. The Good may have it's flaws and the Bad it's useful/necessary aspects, but to a large extent, that's how it plays out. I don't think I've ever seen Western Fantasy make the two anything approaching genuinely morally neutral. Even stuff like The Legend of Korra, which is set in quasi-Asia, doesn't always escape.
Note: I would like to apologise in advance to anyone with a better understanding of yin and yang than me I am sure I am getting some of this wrong!
But afaict, that'a not how Yin and Yang are seen in China. I mean I'm working from a very limited understanding here, mostly based on cheesy fantasy, but afaict while Yang (masculine/light/active) is often overall seen as better than Yin (feminine/dark/passive) the idea of keeping them in balance is much more baked in and natural, especially since so many morally neutral things have yin or yang associations. For example, since yang is associated with heat and dryness, too much yang causes overheating/dry skin/constipation etc, and someone might eat yin foods like crab and beans to fix it(**).
I've seen this sort of mostly-morally-neutral approach in Western Fantasy when there's more than two forces, eg when there's elemental forces like Wind/Air/Fire/Water etc. People can conceptualise those as all good but limited in their own way. Maybe one leans kinda bad and another leans kinda good, but you can see them as roughly equivalent.
But when there's only two, the culturally baked in Good vs Evil dichotomies take over. There may be a Twist where it turns out the Good one is actually Bad (and the Bad one is either also Bad, or secretly Good), but that's not the same thing. Like, I can't imagine people in the Star Wars universe going "Oh, you're constipated? You have too much Light Side, eat some beans to up your Dark Side and keep in balance".
And I mean there's nothing wrong with having a (supposedly) Good force and Bad force in principle. It just gets jarring when the worldbuilding claims they're both important and need balance, but then fails to be consistent with that. To give a similar example, it's like the way Harry Potter worldbuilding claims all the houses are good but Slytherin is clearly written as the Evil House, and a few kinda-good Slytherins and bad non-Slytherins doesn't make that not true.
Also I'm just curious to know if anyone has actually written Western Fantasy not set in (quasi-)Asia(***) with a genuine balance between two dichotomous forces where neither is the obvious Good One.
(*) Or, as was pointed out in the comments, the story Delta Rune is pretending to be but probably isn't.
(**)This was the least awful seeming source I could find, there sure is a lot of exotifying woo about yin and yang on the internet...
(***)Since there are a few Western authors who've gone to the effort to try to write Ancient China etc accurately. I am not qualified to say if they overall succeeded but based on my vague memories some of them at least did better on morally neutral yin-yang-esque dichotomies than Korra with it's "Order and Chaos are both important but also Order is a beneficent God and Chaos is the Devil".
Examples: Star Wars, Delta Rune(*), The Cinderella Principle
But in all the cases I can think of the cultural Christian influence causes one to be the Good Force and one to be the Evil Force. The Good may have it's flaws and the Bad it's useful/necessary aspects, but to a large extent, that's how it plays out. I don't think I've ever seen Western Fantasy make the two anything approaching genuinely morally neutral. Even stuff like The Legend of Korra, which is set in quasi-Asia, doesn't always escape.
Note: I would like to apologise in advance to anyone with a better understanding of yin and yang than me I am sure I am getting some of this wrong!
But afaict, that'a not how Yin and Yang are seen in China. I mean I'm working from a very limited understanding here, mostly based on cheesy fantasy, but afaict while Yang (masculine/light/active) is often overall seen as better than Yin (feminine/dark/passive) the idea of keeping them in balance is much more baked in and natural, especially since so many morally neutral things have yin or yang associations. For example, since yang is associated with heat and dryness, too much yang causes overheating/dry skin/constipation etc, and someone might eat yin foods like crab and beans to fix it(**).
I've seen this sort of mostly-morally-neutral approach in Western Fantasy when there's more than two forces, eg when there's elemental forces like Wind/Air/Fire/Water etc. People can conceptualise those as all good but limited in their own way. Maybe one leans kinda bad and another leans kinda good, but you can see them as roughly equivalent.
But when there's only two, the culturally baked in Good vs Evil dichotomies take over. There may be a Twist where it turns out the Good one is actually Bad (and the Bad one is either also Bad, or secretly Good), but that's not the same thing. Like, I can't imagine people in the Star Wars universe going "Oh, you're constipated? You have too much Light Side, eat some beans to up your Dark Side and keep in balance".
And I mean there's nothing wrong with having a (supposedly) Good force and Bad force in principle. It just gets jarring when the worldbuilding claims they're both important and need balance, but then fails to be consistent with that. To give a similar example, it's like the way Harry Potter worldbuilding claims all the houses are good but Slytherin is clearly written as the Evil House, and a few kinda-good Slytherins and bad non-Slytherins doesn't make that not true.
Also I'm just curious to know if anyone has actually written Western Fantasy not set in (quasi-)Asia(***) with a genuine balance between two dichotomous forces where neither is the obvious Good One.
(*) Or, as was pointed out in the comments, the story Delta Rune is pretending to be but probably isn't.
(**)This was the least awful seeming source I could find, there sure is a lot of exotifying woo about yin and yang on the internet...
(***)Since there are a few Western authors who've gone to the effort to try to write Ancient China etc accurately. I am not qualified to say if they overall succeeded but based on my vague memories some of them at least did better on morally neutral yin-yang-esque dichotomies than Korra with it's "Order and Chaos are both important but also Order is a beneficent God and Chaos is the Devil".
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Date: 2018-11-22 05:49 am (UTC)Note that I don't think it's likely to end up as an example of the kind of thing you are looking for here, I just think the "balance between light and dark" thing is supposed to be kind of vacuous, and I would put money on Toby Fox being familiar with this sort of critique of other stories that have used that line and invoking it intentionally.
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Date: 2018-11-22 06:03 am (UTC)Oh, good point! edits post
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Date: 2018-11-22 08:09 am (UTC)*** SPOILERS FOR THE FFXIV 5.0 EXPANSION TEASER TRAILER FOLLOW ***
Having said that though one of the underlying themes of FFXIV is the balance between light and dark. The player character is considered to be the warrior of light & the champion of Hydaelyn the world crystal, and is fighting against the Ascians who are agents of darkness & the dark god. We've won a bunch of recent battles & it's heavily implied that we might be tipping the balance of the world a little too far toward the light. They give examples through the main story quest of other worlds who have fallen completely to darkness (the Void from which demons come) & fallen completely to the light (just barren scorching light where nothing lives) & it's pretty clear that both of these options are Really Bad. The 5.0 trailer dropped this week & it heavily implies that you're going to tip the balance too far in the direction of the Light & in order to avert calamity the player character is going to have to do a hard turn & become the Warrior of Darkness. (And/or time travel & rewrite history, but it's a teaser trailer so it's all very vague.) ETA: it's all very tense & I cannot BELIEVE I am going to have to wait until June/July for the expansion. HOW DARE THEY drop the teaser trailer so early.
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Date: 2018-11-22 08:18 am (UTC)Your story sounds interesting! So does the FFXIV plot.
Final Fantasy and other Japanese fantasy with elements from traditional Western Fantasy are an interesting mix of tropes. That sure sounds like an excess of Yang to me :)
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Date: 2018-11-22 08:32 am (UTC)Of course his BFF (and eventual love interest) is trapped in a horse shapeshift for the entirety of the first main story arc so I also worry about people thinking my story is ridiculous.
I think overall FFXIV has treated it pretty well! It started off in the first/reborn game with the opinion that the ascians (and thereby that darkness) were unambiguously evil but over the last couple of expansions I think they've had a lot of growth (including by the player character) into the realisation that balance is actually pretty important. So it might certainly have started off that Dark = Evil but that's definitely not the place they're in now.
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Date: 2018-11-28 08:24 am (UTC)If you ever want to run something by me as a transmasculine person (if not an actual trans man) I'm open! Can't help with the being a horse thing though :)
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Date: 2018-11-28 08:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-11-22 12:56 pm (UTC)I've heard Discworld described as having Auditors and Elves set up as the poles of excess order and excess chaos, but it's hardly central and imo they're really just manifestations of the same old sin, per Granny Weatherwax: treating people like things.
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Date: 2018-11-22 03:45 pm (UTC)Oops, I did too! I knew I'd get something wrong but was hoping it wouldn't be quite so basic /o\
Hmm, yeah, Discworld doesn't do the exact sort of thing I was thinking of but there is absolutely a general underlying pattern of anything being bad if taken too far or given too much power.
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Date: 2018-11-22 01:05 pm (UTC)In Happy Potter: I thought fanfic did a much better job than canon in writing the Slytherin as Good and Necessary. I never actually wrote in Happy Potter myself because I was quite satisfied with how other fanfic authors did it.
In Babylon 5: As far as I remember in his interviews JMS said that he intended to make the Shadows and the Vorlons morally more-or-less equivalent. I'm not sure it came out that way but I tried to read it that way in my fics.
In Tolkien: The Elves and Dwarves were created by different gods, have different values and gifts, kind of hate each other and both can legitimately claim to be Firstborn. We get primarily the Elvish perspective in the Silmarillion and through Elrond, but Gimli seems to see things differently. The different perspectives are never resolved, and drove a lot of my ficcing (although I never wrote that much about Dwarves directly, more about Feanorians).
In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine we're told the Prophets are Good and the Pah-wraiths are bad, but I'm not sure that's borne out by how they behave. And we're told Kai Winn is a villain but I'm not sure she is. So I had to write Winn-centric Pah-wraith apologetic fic.
Of all my fandoms, Battlestar Galactica is maybe the closest to what you are describing in canon, although it still took some fanfic to get it really there. The humans enslaved the Cylons, the Cylons blew up the humans' planets, so both sides start with some serious wrongdoing. They believe in different gods, and canon sometimes implies that one set is real, sometimes the other, but never resolves the question of which is real or which is good. I think the show was trying to draw on Hindu imagery around the cycle of suffering (one phrase that keeps coming up is "all this has happened before and all this will happen again") and it uses the Gayatri Mantra in its opening credits.
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Date: 2018-11-22 01:40 pm (UTC)(also obvs science fiction rather than fantasy, but)
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Date: 2018-12-17 01:26 pm (UTC)Yeah, fanfic did a much better job with Hogwarts houses than canon.
Hmm, I never thought of factions like the elves and dwarves, but that does have the same broader...thing (I say eloquently).
The Vorlons and Shadows are, to me, an example of an interesting but failed attempt at equal and opposite forces. We slowly got more of a sense of the issues with the Vorlons, but the shadows never really did anything good, unless I'm forgetting something. But the idea of it was really good.
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Date: 2018-11-22 04:02 pm (UTC)Two series come to mind*.
The first is L. E. Modesitt, Jr's Saga of Recluse, which starts out seeming pretty clearly good vs evil, with the twist that the viewpoint Order Mages are strongly associated with Black, whilst the opposing Chaos Wizards are strongly associated with White.
Later books lean heavily into the idea that lack of balance is A Very Bad Thing™.
The other series is Louise Cooper's Time Master trilogy, which is told from the point of view of (originally) a young lad running afoul of the oppressive rulers of his world who grows up to fight them and help return some balance to it.
The twist here is the the oppressive rulers are The Lords of Order, and the rising powers are ultimately the Lords of Chaos. (This was a radical and new idea when first published in 1986.) Again, the narrative talks about the importance of balance, though from what I remember in this case it's more about power moving as a pendulum from one side to the other and back, rather than finding a middle ground. I seem to recall that Chaos was more amenable to the idea of maintaining a balance, whilst Order was completely uncompromising towards the idea of not trying to destroy Chaos and rule the world.
(*) Note: I have not read the entire series in either case, and it's been probably 20 years since I read any of them, so there may be issues I missed at the time or have forgotten since.
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Date: 2018-11-23 02:24 am (UTC)Ooh, interesting, thank you!
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Date: 2018-11-24 01:17 am (UTC)Me: Oh I know lots of exa- Huh. Lol.
(I am going to mention my own Fae Tales verse though because while the Seelie Court is the obvious 'Good One' initially, the story is written from the perspective of the Unseelie, who are very much more the good guys than the Seelie Court over time. It would be like if HP was written from the POV of Slytherin and Draco did actually save the day despite everyone still blindly loving Gryffindor. But that's a clumsy example).
Outside of that, it's actually one of the reasons I did my thesis in like, redemption narratives in Studio Ghibli, or Japanese vs. western feature animation character stereotypes with especial focus on the way villains are treated in Disney vs. how good/evil is treated with Hayao Miyazaki. Like, the predominant religions that evolved through the country and set the foundation of our cultures have a LOT to answer for here, in terms of our protonarratives or fundamental narratives around good and evil.
So to find shows in western culture (or books or other content) that have some how shed the protonarrative of Christian 'good and evil' (even if the people involved were raised atheist, we have still generally been bathed in those stories all around us), and deliberately seek to do something different.
I feel like western stories *claiming* that there needs to be balance but ultimately failing totally (or significantly) in the execution is also some internal conflict or disruption around trying to genuinely shed the narrative but being ultimately unable to, possibly because the person can't actually imagine what a genuine abandonment of this narrative would look like (due to lack of exposure to other stories that don't do this).
And I think also we get indoctrinated with systems like Disney (which at least for the bulk of their existence have been a strong Christian (and bigoted) corpo), so that even if you do get slightly more nuanced stories (like The Secret of NIMH, by another studio, where the two opposing forces are humans vs. rats, and even if the humans are the 'obvious bad guys' they're also us not behaving in any more cruel a manner than usual which is pretty confronting), I don't know how much of a knock on effect they have until you begin to deliberately kind of self reflect on the issue? And a lot of kids don't see those movies, because they're like, by side studios and that's not where the money and power for marketing lies.
Then even with self reflection, I'm not sure how much it can grow without intentional exposure to other narratives. Maybe? Idk.
I feel like I have read or seen things in western fantasy, but honestly sitting here I can't pinpoint anything that doesn't ultimately circle back around to 'no but these are still ultimately the Evil even if you like one of them.'
(Also I like your blog and your thoughts and I apologise for early morning - for me - ramblings but I am having lots of thinky thoughts now <3 )
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Date: 2018-11-24 03:47 pm (UTC)Now I want to read your thesis, even though I'm sure my brain would overheat.
I feel like western stories claiming that there needs to be balance but ultimately failing totally (or significantly) in the execution is also some internal conflict or disruption around trying to genuinely shed the narrative but being ultimately unable to, possibly because the person can't actually imagine what a genuine abandonment of this narrative would look like (due to lack of exposure to other stories that don't do this).
Right!
I like your ramblings <3
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Date: 2018-11-26 09:06 am (UTC)So this series (which is nearly finished) is all about the war between Lysaer (wields light) and Arithon (wields darkness). The prologue frames it in terms of a historical fact that Lysaer/the light was the good one & Arithon/the Master of Shadow was the bad one but that sages have recently gained new insight into the era & then the story begins.
Lysaer & Arithon initially have to work together to rid the world of a great evil but once accomplished (or is it??) SHIT HAPPENS & they spend the rest of the series fighting. (I mean Lysaer spends the rest of the series trying to track down & destroy Arithon & Arithon would just like to be left alone thanks, rip).
I haven't read the last several books (I'm now waiting for her to finish the series before I start over again from the beginning) but they are really, really, really great & I thought it was a great perspective on light and dark. Neither Lysaer nor Arithon (or their respective affiliations) are inherently bad & it's clear that coexistence would be fine (you know except for plot complications). (Lysaer is pretty clearly the one in the wrong but he's not 100% in his right mind when it all happens soooo yeah)
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Date: 2018-11-28 07:27 am (UTC)Interesting, thank you! I am BURNED on unfinished fantasy series but it's good to hear about!
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Date: 2018-11-28 08:41 am (UTC)