New CBB

Another conworlding trope that makes me want to burn the world is when a species is played up as being simply better than us morally. Elves are by far the worst offenders, but sci-fi is riddled with them as well.

It's bad enough if their superiority is based on something we can all agree with, e.g nonviolence or universal cooperation, but all too often they become mouthpieces for the authors' personal views. It becomes pretty unforgivable if these views don't even make sense for the setting of the story (for example, atheists in a high fantasy setting).

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Wa mnew yiHegolech.

I quite agree, although if they are "better" than us morally, there should at least be a plausible reason for it.

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___________________ I am the Great Rabbit. Fear me, O Crabs!

I generally don't like this, period. Putting your own views into the world, fine. But they better make damn good sense and not make the other side look like caricatures. Of course, even I'm not above that, and I myself have to constantly make sure I don't unconsciously make certain ideas or what not look better than other, but thankfully I don't think I have anything too blatant in my conworld.

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I now have a blog. Witness the horror.

I think I think, therefore I think I am.
- Ambrose Bierce

Whoever was editing Wikibooks seems to have overlooked this; go to http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Conworld and click on the link titled Exemplary Conworlds.

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My Kankonian-English dictionary: 37,000 entries and counting

31,416: The number of the conlanging beast!

Judging from what that link directs to, I'd say it's more of a poor choice of words with the use of 'exemplary' on the main page.

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КЕРВЕНСКИЙ

That's actually not that far-fetched. For quite a long time, pretty much all of China had a foot fetish -- a *small* foot fetish. Causality with the practice of footbinding is uncertain. Apparently you'll still hear comments on the size of a woman's feet in some rural areas.



What's wrong with alliances of convenience? They happen all the time in the real world, and they're an excellent source of dramatic conflict.



You can make elves and dwarves your own and quite interesting. You can also use other races and be just as interesting. Or you can do as a few recent fantasy novels and make the world essentially all-human, with other races rare and magical or nonexistent entirely.

A couple examples:

- Through much of George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, we pretty much only see humans. There's talk of other races, but you don't see giants (great massive yeti-like creatures) for quite some time, and you have to wait even longer to see the children of the forest (magical cat-people, basically). But he manages to tell compelling stories of clashes between very different human cultures, anyway. The other races are mainly relevant to only a couple of stories. (And yes, I realize you see an Other in the prologue of the first book -- but you don't learn a whole lot about them for a while.)

- Similarly, Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicles, has two races, human and Fae. But you don't meet a Fae until the second book, and much of the time Kvoth is busy interacting with various other human cultures (some of which may be more believable than others). When you do talk to Fae, their motivations are alien and amoral, making them into a very interesting race to juxtapose with humans.

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George Corley
Producer and Moderating Host, Conlangery Podcast

speaking about races, I really hate the monorace polity trope... just because ye yanks are segregationist racists, and racially segregated ones at that, doesn't mean the entire world is like that... there's plenty of non-monoracial cultures in the history of the world, and a HUGE amount of reasons why, given greater diversity of intelligent things, monoracial polities wouldn't be any more common than on earth, perhaps less so.

I also hate how people call species 'races'. fantasy is so racists.
race
race
raceracerace
go speed racer go!

Modicone: Wanna talk about race? Go here.
(And by "talk" I mean "discuss cultural implications and realities", not "throw insults.")

I think attitude, more than content, is what turns me off a conworld.
On the intellectual side, I like to see people thinking things through to their (sometimes unexpected) logical conclusions, and making lots of neat connections between elements in the setting. So what bugs me isn't elves, it's when you didn't think about elves, you just inserted them from something you're familiar with. Or you didn't try and integrate all the different elements of your world, you just threw in every weird/cool/shiny thing you could think in a haphazard manner. The worst case of that I can think of is Wicked (the book).

On the emotional side, I dislike conworlds that seem to have been created just to be cool or bizarre or disturbing. Concultures are like characters. I can identify with people who are very different from me, if they seem real and they have a certain human warmth. But if they don't care about each other, have no everyday concerns, never make mistakes, never seek comfort, and never get cranky when they're hungry, I'm bored. Similarly, I'm not that interested in concultures where everyone seems perfect, solemn, and dedicated to weird rites or epic causes.

And it hardly needs to be pointed out that even today, vast swathes of the western world have a breast fetish in one form or another.

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Ad astra per mīrābilia ballisticōrum Sovieticōrum!

All I have to say is:

Do not make your conworld an incoherent mess of "Shit I Think Is Cool" unless you really know to make it work.

Otherwise you end up with Full Auto.

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Dracusam Yg tol svrola zen gym mau
bitch-PL 1SG GEN swag DEST know NEG

¡Meteoro vaya!

Those were the days!
¡el que no vio Meteoro NO tuvo INFANCIA!!

You aren't scrapping that idea, are you?

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___________________ I am the Great Rabbit. Fear me, O Crabs!

Thanks for pointing this out.

This is generally something people don't really know about history - and one that I've grown to appreciate more and more as I continue my study in history (history major here). Many historical states were quite multiracial. Rome, for instance, was very mixed, and many Roman Emperors came from North Africa, the Middle East, non-Italian Europe, and so on; in other words, contrary to common perception of Romans as pure white dudes, some Roman Emperors might as well have looked like Bin Laden's cousin or something. Many medieval Islamic states were also highly diversified; medieval Spain, for instance, was a huge mess of what we would call "white", "black", "jewish", and "middle eastern" folk; many of the Turkish sultans were of mixed ancestry - if I remember correctly Suleiman was half-Greek or half-Slavic or something (might be his successor). And on and on.

Point is, I think this problem in fantasy is something that is rooted in common perceptions of history - that people have kept to themselves historically.


Actually, this goes to another point, and one I feel very strongly about when it comes to history. Historically, many cultures themselves were mixed, the result of centuries upon centuries of influence and counter-influence from one group to another. Early medieval Islamic culture, for instance, while obviously founded on pre-Islamic Arabian culture, was heavily influenced by Sassanid Persia, which itself was influenced by Achaemenid Persia, classical Greece, and India. Historical religious sectarianism and secret societies of southern China, for instance, drew influences from local Chinese traditions, Buddhism, and even Persian religions such as Manichaeism - I did a research paper on this, and was surprised at the plausibility of a Persian Manichaean influence on things such as Chinese triads or religious rebellions as late as the 20th century. A modern-day example might be Jazz: influences draw from classical European music, traditional African and Amerindian musical traditions, ragtime, and even Asian music. This was how ideas and inventions spread so quickly: Paper, Gunpowder, for instance, spread along the Silk Road from China to the Islamic World to Europe.

My point is that this is often not reflected in stereotypical fantasy where every culture has kept to themselves for 1038032424 years until the magical hero comes along and forces everyone to work along, or something like that. Those immortal elves always keep to themselves in their magical trees, the dwarves are always inside their mountains doing dwarven stuff, and so on - nobody exchanges culture, ideas, inventions, religions, anything. And not only that, nobody even mixes. Even if two groups come into contact, they always sort of keep to themselves and don't change at all - elves are still their same elfy selves or whatever.

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I now have a blog. Witness the horror.

I think I think, therefore I think I am.
- Ambrose Bierce

Trial by Stone - Haaaaaakskeeeeeeeeekaaaaχχχχχχχχχχ!

Beware the dreaded Crab-jutsu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIklYwwd4wE

I think the two largest contributing factors to mono-racial consocieties are laziness and the idea that long distance travel was rare in 'the old days' (which, I suppose, amounts to a lack of research and perhaps is covered under 'laziness').

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I speak English and a touch of Gàidhlig.
I am creating a conworld, which I refer to as the Carrion Series, that will contain three languages, Iriex, Dvoen and Maxna.

And it took you less than a year to figure this out!

*claps*

Bravo, bravo!

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♀♥Ø

That was great. The best part was the reed popping up out of the water.

But I'm trembling if you know crab-jitsu...If you move sideways like that...Oh, man. But I'll fight back with my rabbit-fu!
(no video). I learned first hand from my rabbits.

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___________________ I am the Great Rabbit. Fear me, O Crabs!

No video necessary.

http://www.toplessrobot.com/Jaxxon.jpg

See, you didn't know that I knew.

But here's the video anyway.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ty3dmkuDZs

Ah! You know. I can't believe it. I'll kill the infidel who told you! It must have been Lady Macbeth...She's probably mad at me since I sold here for meat.

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___________________ I am the Great Rabbit. Fear me, O Crabs!