As a boy I enjoyed a lot of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, both Howard's originals and the Marvel comic books. One thing that consistently bothered me about his Hyborian age setting, though, was that it used recent historical real-world geographical and ethnic proper names for his prehistoric "age undreamed of."
Conan was a Cimmerian. The Cimmerians were real, historical people best known today for attacking ancient Middle Eastern countries like Urartu in the eighth century BC. Conan's adventures take him to places like Khitai, "Afgulistan," Iranistan, Hyrcania, Kambuja, and many others that are basically real-world earth names changed slightly or not at all. The Vilayet Sea especially bugs me, as that is a Persian word (derived from Arabic) simply meaning "province." Then you have Shem, the land of the fantasy Semites. The list goes on.
The intended effect of using real-world, often modern, names for a pseudo-prehistoric fantasy world is to conjure a whole setting through mental associations with a single name. Howard's ideas for countries seem as if they arose from his flipping through the pages of an atlas or a one-volume encylopedia. Evocative names drawn from the real world allowed Howard to rely on the mental associations of his readers to fill in the gaps left by what is unsaid with generalized folk beliefs about the people and lands associated with those names. Mostly, those associations are stereotypes.
The unintended side-effect for me has always been that these undisguised references pop the fantasy bubble. I simply can't suspend disbelief in a prehistoric "Hyrcania" when I know quite well that this is a specific place by the Caspian sea, a land named for wolves in ancient times--but not prehistoric times. There may be readers who think it's cool that he looked up some old names, but to me their deployment looks juvenile and worsens the fiction.
Let's call the deployment of references to real, historical things in purely fantastical settings Real-World Transplants. You can type RWTs for short.
RWTs in fiction do work for the author and the audience. In role-playing games, they allow gamers to agree on unspoken assumptions about fictional places by relying on stereotypes and "common knowledge." This, in my view, is the main reason for the reliance on European bases for fantasy settings. Players in the Anglophone world share more knowledge (correct or not) about Europe and shared assumptions about fantasies set in imaginary versions Europe than about other countries.
Yet there is a limit to what RWTs can do. They create flavor and atmosphere but they also set a limit to believability. Real-world references in a fantasy setting undermine the fantastic and imaginary character of the setting. If the intent is to create an alternate version of our world, that may be expected. If it's just fantasy, or if the fantasy does not accord with known history, then you're mixing flavors by introducing RWTs. Some people don't mind those flavors. Others dislike the mixture. I tend toward the latter.
RWTs are frequently used to invoke what I call generic exotic. I wrote a bit before about what makes fantasy generic. It's a topic that one could write whole books about. There is, though, a generic exotic, constituted of the cultural names, terms, and references shared by players that give fantasy the flavor of "foreign." They are Real-World Transplants that instantly convey to gamers some characteristics of this particular fantasy object.
This is a tough problem made tougher by contemporary cultural politics. I also wrote before about what I called the "eurofantasy." The idea is that the unspoken default of fantasy has been an imaginary Europe based on selective features. These features represent only a tiny sliver of European history and culture, but they are the shared references mostly for Anglophone players. I discussed ways of getting around the eurofantasy, and I concluded that basically it's probably too hard. (I also found that southern and eastern Europeans hated the term when I introduced it into an online discussion forum. They said that what I meant by eurofantasy did not include their countries' histories--but that was my point. It's a bundle of stereotypes.)
One shortcut to generate the generic exotic is to use RWTs. If you call your fantasy desert land to the south and east something like "Al-Hazeeq," every player will immediately conjure up an Arabian fantasy. If you call it "Chian-Ma," the players imagine a fantastic East Asia. If you have an island country called "Tokumaga" in which samurai and ninja wage war, everybody knows that this is a fantasy Japan. Set aside the problem that most of the fantasy references shared by players will be stereotypes, sometimes of an insensitive variety. You could even throw caution to the wind and use real-world names as R.E. Howard did. Say you create a high-mountain country called Tibet, or change it slightly to Thibett, full of serene monks and snow-monsters called yeti. For some gamers, this is no problem. Point of reference is established. But at this point, your RWT is breaking the fantasy bubble for me. It's not an echo of the real world. It's just a piece of the real world air-dropped into fantasy and it is incongruous with its otherwise fantastic surroundings.
If you had US-American players completely ignorant of geography and history, I suppose you could just lift a historical setting like medieval Hungary, use the real historical names and places, and run it as if it were a fantasy setting. For all your ignorant players will know, it is just fantasy. They never heard of it. So RWTs rely on player knowledge, but the closer they replicate real-world names and terms, the closer you come to undermining the fantasy. How far do you have to go to satisfy a gamer like me, whose day job is studying and teaching about ancient and medieval cultures and history? Sometimes knowing more about a thing ruins it for you. It's a little like the way Marvel comics experts get upset at very particular features in Marvel comics movies that are incongruous with the fantasy they know. Did anybody really like the Hobbit movies if they already loved the book? But RWTs are not quite the same as fan dissatisfaction. I'm not a "fan" of history, insisting that fantasies "get it right." Unlike history, RWTs are not about a particular version of fantasy. It's about any fantasy being undermined by proximity to details already strongly associated with a particular and determined reality. What is particular for you is generic for others.
When I read the fascinating setting book Yoon-Suin, I was impressed by its creativity and eloquence and utility for gamers who want something exotic but not exotic generic. By drawing its RWTs from a quadrant of southern Asia unfamiliar to most Anglophones for its inspiration, it defeats the generic while evoking a land of opium and tea and D&D monsters never met before by your Fighters and Magic-Users. If you want an unusual exotic setting that defies generic tropes and you like to generate a world via results from random tables, this setting is perfect for you, and it's not expensive. At the same time, I stop in my tracks reading Yoon-Suin when I encounter the lands of Sughd (Sogdiana) and Druk-Yul (Bhutan) known by their real-world names. The same goes, to a lesser extent, for monsters like Gyalpo, Mi-Go (yeti, not Lovecraft's space bugs) and other creatures lifted from historical earth. These are, in a way, familiar to me, and they have never been generic. The effect of non-generic RWTs like Sughd, for me, is to break the fantasy in the same way as Howard's Khitai and Hyrcania. It's like making a fantasy world of goblins and dragons and placing an island kingdom in it with a capital called London, in rivalry with another kingdom across a strait called France. The RWTs are too close to the real and violate the boundary of fantasy. In minutes, players would be adopting British and French accents.
I immediately see an argument that some RWTs are necessary to do the work they are supposed to do. They create shared references for a shared fantasy. I'm not against them. The sole point of my discussion is that RWTs may turn from a bridge for fantasy into a gulf across which the suspension disbelief cannot cross.
There is a limit to which one can complain about explicit RWTs. As I repeatedly observe, our fantasies never escape the close limits of our realities. In fantasy role-playing games, we have medusas and gorgons and chimeras, all specific mythological entities turned into generic monsters. But these have been made generic through their repetition recycling in popular culture since before fantasy games began. Because Gyalpo are not common points of reference for everybody's fantasy worlds, perhaps even for any other fantasy world in existence, they are fresh and exotic for some, but fantasy-busting RWTs for a few.
Real-World Transplants are a useful tool to compress lengthy, and often boring, exposition of a fantasy world into a few names and terms that stand in for large quantities of stock stereotype material. They are explanatory short-cuts that give settings a more concrete feeling by loading the fantasy with shared expectations between GM and players. They only work via shared knowledge. But RWTs can also leave participants behind when personal experience interferes with their shared fantasy. Why not change the names, at least? But does changing names render them inexplicable and useless as shared points of reference? If all fantasy settings were required to be completely alien, we'd be left with settings like Tékumel, a lot fewer participants, and some completely unbelievable fantasy worlds in which it is hard to identify with characters. But even "alien" worlds like Talislanta are full of thinly-disguised RWTs. The degree of density and proximity of RWTs to their referents will remain a matter prior familiarity and individual taste.
Your example of dropping goblins in London made me think of Shadowrun. How do you feel about that setting?
ReplyDeleteI live in Seattle and I've enjoyed exploring that game. There are fun aspects to taking a real place I know and turning it on its head.
Shadowrun is a good example of a different way of dealing with RWTs. It's a setting that is a deliberate mash-up of two realities, in which all the PCs understand that this is the case. So it works on its own premise: it is simply our world infused with fantasy. The novelty of it is that nothing can be too incongruous, and the line between the player's "modern" outlook and the PC's "fantasy" outlook is highly permeable.
DeleteMy example of London was this: you have a fantasy setting that is not "the real world" but you use very specific real-world transplants in it without the idea that it's a mash-up of realities. Imagine Middle Earth, but Tolkien put a city called London in the Northwest. Not great for his fantasy.
Take the original GURPS Fantasy world as a "reverse Shadowrun." That setting, called Yrth, is based on the idea that bunches of humans from historical earth were whisked away to a fantasy world where they attempted to continue their cultures. In a magical world, they never developed greater technology. So some RWTs make sense there. They are part of the fantasy bubble, not incongruous with it. (Nevertheless they do the "foreign" countries, based on Shiite and Sunni Middle Eastern countries as well as Japan, badly, to my tastes.)
Interesting post - and I think your conclusion is spot on: it's tricky. A fantasy setting has to balance resonance with novelty, and those things that are resonant for some will be old hat for others.
ReplyDeleteTolkien does it well, but he pulls a particularly clever trick by intimating that his creations are the *originals* of names or concepts that might be familiar from real-world sources. So yes, those *are* the dwarf-names from the Dvertagal - but that's because the Eddic poet is straining for the facts presented in the Red Book. Those thurses under the Misty Mountains? Let me tell you about them. And so on.
I think that's probably the only truly successful way to reconcile resonance with novelty; the names ring true for those who don't know the source, but they offer the novelty of the imagined backstory even to those who do know where the names come from.
Otherwise, I probably prefer genuine obscure terms that I might recognise (I see your chemosit, M John Harrison ...) to slightly changed ones that just make me groan (Lieber's Mingols, for instance).
Tekumel and Glorantha stand apart in the RPG field, though both have their borrowings; I think they succeed by synthesising those - and by being the products of a lifetime's work in both cases. They're very much the exceptions, though.
I suppose the big counter-argument, though, is that you can have a cracking game with vivid characters and splendid derring-do set against the flimsiest and most generic of backdrops. Fantasy fiction based on RPGs is usually terrible, so perhaps RPGs needn't have the qualities one would seek in good fantasy fiction.
Thanks, JC. I like your term resonance as an alternative to transplant. I first started writing about "real-world echoes," which is essentially a kind of resonance, but I wanted to emphasize the out-of-place-ness of them that make them jarring: hence transplants.
DeleteI agree with everything you wrote. About the last comment, that a great game is possible with a flimsy background, that is quite true. If everybody agrees provisionally in the act of play to suspend their usual tastes, whatever they were, any game setting should work well, no?
Here we bump against the idea of "gonzo," which, in my take on it, includes, among other things, wink-wink RWTs for the *players*, not the characters.
Your groan about Mingols is funny, and it also makes the point again that it's a matter of taste as well as background knowledge. I imagine some readers wouldn't get the reference, and some wouldn't care, but you and I both wince. I wish I knew why. Again, I think it has to do with what's already in our brains. The generic starts out as fresh to a newcomer. Mingols, kind of cool! But then you see Moongols and Mungols and Mawnguls across fantasy worlds and after a while you can't take it any more. Or maybe Mingols by itself is just too obvious.
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ReplyDeleteAnglophone folk seem to have no problem with Japanese anime's mashing up European culture, history and tropes. I guess we've not been taught to take offence.
ReplyDelete"But RWTs can also leave participants behind when personal experience interferes with their shared fantasy" - I think this is a shame for those people, but surely a minority issue. Perhaps they can learn to enjoy the setting ironically or as pastiche.
This entry is not about taking offense. It's about how RWTs can pop the fantasy bubble. A part of my discussion concerns how the more familiar something from the real world is to you, the less it makes sense in a fantasy world. There are examples of what I'm talking about in the entry above.
DeleteThe concern with 'offence' in representing cultures is extremely Anglocentric in itself. Funnily enough, other cultures tend to have very different standards of what is deemed offensive! Applying a Eurocentric standard only works for a tiny subset of highly Westernised people; not for normal people actually from those non-European cultures. Edward Said may get offended by reference to harem girls; the average Arab Muslim is more likely to be offended by a teddy bear called Muhammad http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7112929.stm#:~:text=A%20British%20schoolteacher%20has%20been,year%2Dolds%20choose%20the%20name.
ReplyDeleteAs I said in the entry, cultural politics today, like the kind you import into the discussion with this reply, make it a tougher problem to sort out. I'll take your word for it that you know what "normal people" from "other cultures" think about what's offensive.
DeleteYou seem to support my point that it's a matter of perspective, but you don't address the transfer of real stuff into fantasy settings. I don't mind discussing other things, but I suspect from your two replies that you didn't observe the point about RWTs.
About Edward Said, I never met him but we occupied adjacent professional circles in different generations. He's been dead for 17 years. When I teach PhD students (from various countries) at a university about the history of scholarship, I have to address his role. His book on Orientalism, published in 1978, has plummeted in importance, whereas books that digest it and reassess it (which I'm happy to recommend, if you're interested) take its place. The book Orientalism, which people talk about far more than they read it, has a symbolic life now. It is a signpost for the left and especially a bogeyman for the right. I'm pretty sure that Edward Said would not have cared about our role-playing games at all. He wrote about Palestine and music and Joseph Conrad and US foreign policy, not clerics and elves, and even a half-schooled teenager can do a "Saidian analysis" of the shameless fun of the Hyborian Age. For what it's worth, I don't think that Said was "offended by reference to harem girls," as you suggest. It was how the reference was contextualized. He himself knew quite little about the history of harems, I'm sure, but his concern was representations of by those in power. I don't agree with much of what he wrote, but he wasn't an idiot.
I also don't think the BBC report that you cite from 13 years ago makes your point. It concerns the harassment and jailing of a British teacher in a Christian-Muslim British colonial school in the Sudan, a country then in civil war between a Muslim-led regime and various groups including Christians, over the obviously fake pretext of a teddy bear. I think it probably represents a tiny part of a desperate reaction against British sanctions over Darfur, and to UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown's statement to the UN a few months before that tens of thousands of peacekeepers should be deployed to Sudan to stop the awful slaughter in the western part of that country. If we just read the BBC bit, it may seem that "the average Muslim" got horribly and unreasonably offended over a trifle after a delay of seven months, but the context of war and international politics between the teacher's home country and the host country does matter. I think it's safe to say, therefore, that it doesn't represent the point of view of "the average Arab Muslim."
I'd rather not quibble, though, since the point was RWTs, not which group is more easily offended over what.
My discussion here is not about taking offense. It's about using stereotypical or real-world names that take the place of "lengthy, often boring, exposition" of fantasy settings, and how they can interfere with the suspension of disbelief, depending on your prior familiarity with those things. It's also about how we can't do without them when we play fantasy role-playing games.
Four decades ago I met L. Sprague de Camp at an SF con and we had a very similar discussion. At the time I was a college student and critical of Howard's decision to include such real-world, albeit mostly ancient and/or obscure names. If I recall correctly, Mr. de Camp agreed and pointed out other such borrowings. His opinion seemed to be that Howard was not particularly original at all especially when compared to Tolkein but was quite good at piecing together various elements into a ripping yarn. We agreed that nobody could write a fight scene like Howard.
ReplyDeleteWith the benefit of age and wisdom, I no longer hold the harshness of that criticism. I think that given the time period in which Howard wrote and the audience for his stories, most of his decisions were the right one. For example, the place that we know as Iran was called Persia by the West until 1935 and the name Iran was the Iranian name. I daresay that only a tiny sliver of his audience at that time conciously recognized the names.
In contrast, Tolkein the trained linguist not only invented Elvish and Dwarven languages, but he also succeeded in created new English sounding names. This resulted in both novelty and versimilitude, something which is very, very difficult to achieve for those of who are not Tolkein or M.A.R. Barker. The rest of us have to rely to names which evoke a certain culture, even if that evocation is unconcious for the reader.
This is not to excuse sloppy malapropisms like Mingols, Chyna, or Shem for that matter. With a little bit of effort, an author can create Mongolian, Mandarin, and Aramaic sounding names. For example, Rou na'an Khaganate, Jung-Guo, and Aramaia. Does this run the risk of relying on stereotypes? Absolutely! But the author or GM can choose to avoid stereotypes.
In this way, readers and players are not tossed into an original yet utterly alien world like Tekumel unless it is by choice.
However, there will always be the risk of creeping minstrelsy even if no "transplants" are used by the author. In 1974, Dwarves were not Scottish and yet today many players embrace that sterotype. And apparently in 2020, Orcs and Half-Orcs are stand-ins for Sub-Saharan Afro-Americans and Elves for transgender or non-binary gender folk. But that is a topic for another day. . .!