![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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".
no subject
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.
no subject
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 :)
no subject
Date: 2018-11-28 08:38 am (UTC)