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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 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.
no subject
Date: 2018-11-22 01:40 pm (UTC)(also obvs science fiction rather than fantasy, but)
no subject
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.