Ryan Hughes said:
Lupine said:
Really? Are we going to discuss art here or are we focusing on reality? If art, then we need to stay in art. If reality, then we don't need to start talking in generalizations and then trying to tie it not all that successfully to the individual. Fredrick Douglass was a great man and honestly the world needs more great men and the ideals that forge them. However the average man is not great, instead he is average.
We crack open history books and get caught up in the big names but almost never once has any of us considered really the people around them. All the smaller parts that make the larger stand out. By in large, people are self-interested. Most people are worried about what is good for them, what is bad for them, how things affect them. Even people that are sometimes thought of as selfless they tend to have an interest in the outcome of the events around them. What I'm getting at here, and I realized it has taken me a bit...is that revenge is a selfish and self-gratifying thing. It is as easily a part of average people's lives as anything else born of self-interest and while it isn't something to be glorified, it also doesn't really need demonizing. Works of art speak to people, and are born of the human condition, as such I don't feel like we really need to apologize for art being representative of parts of the human condition that we'd rather not be reminded of.
Revenge is selfish, sure. However, it is actually far from self-gratifying. This is one of the many points Tolkien and others were making literally for centuries: that revenge is in-and-of itself destructive to the vengeful as much as it is to the object of that revenge. Take Dumas'
Count of Monte Cristo, after singly the most elaborate vengeance in literary history, Edmund Dantes realizes that his obsession has in fact robbed him of everything he once held dear and everything he once believed in, even to the point where he attempted to murder innocent people and indirectly caused the death of an infant. It is Dantes' redemption at the end that makes the novel worthwhile.
I'm glad we agree that Douglass was a great man, but in reality he was not
that exceptional. Few of the slave rebellions of the era had much in the way of an aspect of vengeance -as far as we can tell- and after their freedom, acts of revenge against former slave owners were virtually non-existent. While common, everyday former slaves sought nothing but freedom in droves, despite southern fears -mostly from former slave owners and handlers- that there would be mass acts of vengeance.
Our interpretations of history are shaped by literature and art. In this sense, the "Wild West" is a fiction becoming history. The medieval era as it is commonly thought of is largely a construct of Enlightenment and Victorian fictions set in that time, rather than being based in any fact. I don't think I'm wrong to draw some parallels here between art and reality.
As for the article itself, I'll add that Tolkien was a veteran of WWI, and as a result had no delusions of the grandeur of military force or acts of vengeance. Those things are literally a luxury of societies that have never experienced total war. After seeing atrocities that we can hardly even imagine, there is no way he would have the same thoughtless approach to storytelling that the writers of
Shadow do.
I'd say it depends on your view. There is an old I believe Chinese proverb that says "He who seeks vengeance should dig two graves, one for his enemy and one for himself." Now to our sensibilities this seems like a warning against revenge, except within context the saying actually means that vengeance should be important enough for you to lay down your life for. So, while revenge is self-destructive, that in and of itself doesn't stop it from being self-gratifying. I realize that there might be a bit of cultural dissonance in that example but at the same time I can think of enough anti-heroes that embody this very attitude. Sometimes we play it for tragedy, but seemingly more often these days we play it straight, sometimes to the logical conclusion and sometimes to the illogical audience coddle.
We'll have to agree to disagree here. Not about the historical facts obviously, but about human nature undertone. I'd point out that Southern United States slavery was for all intents and purposes a bit of a cultural genocide going in and then a psychological smear campaign for most of its existence. People hand fed a inferiority complex for centuries to quell rebellion, probably aren't the group you have to worry about starting rebellions. When slavery ended, I would personally have been less worried about revenge and more worried about people actually knowing how to take care of themselves. Most slaves weren't educated. While some of them had marketable skills, not all of them knew how to go about marketing those self-same skills out in the world. More than that, a good amount of these people obviously had nothing in common but the color of their skin. Now compare and contrast this with the history of rebellion as a whole. Peaceful rebellion as a whole is pretty out matched by bloody over throws of established order. I'm not trying to be insulting, but I'm pointing out the differences between groups of oppressed peoples and how these differences add up to different outcomes. Violence isn't always the human answer, but we didn't become one of the most successful predators on the planet by shying away from it either.
This I partially agree with. However I think it to actually be more of a combination of "Winners write the history books" no matter how inaccurately and that with the advent of radio, television, and movies that art has become more readily available than historical texts. Think of it this way, History likes a good story, because history is written by people and people like good stories. It would be why the film adaption of the graphic novel of 300 is probably going to draw a bigger crowd than a documentary about the actual Battle of Thermopylae, which obviously even then has been recounted in history due to being better by and large than the story of normal people doing normal things.
Also the pop culture vision of things doesn't actually make it influence history, but rather a cultural perspective of history which is pretty different in my opinion. A good example are horns on viking helmets. So while I see your point, I still think the two things are different enough that it is sort of a crap shoot mingling them or in the case of cultural perspective history vs history, using them interchangeably, isn't really a good idea. Especially when you aren't using pop culture attitudes about historical periods but rather historic figures, that while perhaps exaggerated were still very real people.
Someone posted this quote before and I feel like here I should post it again.
?I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history ? true or feigned? with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.?
See the issue I have here is with the use of delusions of grandeur. While I can say I've never played SoM, I for one can't pretend that the need for vengeance beyond all else is some sort of luxury. The world just doesn't work that way by and large. Situations aren't always logical and neither are people. Yes people can delude themselves, and yes warhawks sometimes exist because of disconnect between the realities and sufferings of war and a total illogical mentality of warrior aggrandizement, but that isn't the only reason that people fight wars. In fact the warrior aggrandizement has always been a lure for people that don't know any better and an excuse because at the heart of the matter we as human beings have a hard time admitting two things:
That we want to live (sometimes live better) and we don't care if that sometimes means that others have to die.
And that sometimes survival isn't enough and if our despair is deep enough then we just don't want to go on living.
I feel like these two are something that we dance around a lot during the course of the human condition. Mostly it is a call back to selfishness and how people are selfish, but let me add a bit of a societal twist here and add that at the same time we don't want to be seen as selfish or at the very lest not thought of as inordinately so. The thing is though that selfishness is a part of the human condition, it works as a survival instinct. Also someone being so in a work of fiction isn't necessarily approval of their selfishness, sometimes it just is in terms of the person's psychology. This is literally the is a work of art racist if it has a racist character argument all over again. Having a character, even the protagonist do something within context of the story is not necessarily approval of that thing.
And finally, this isn't a Tolkien story. It is set in Middle Earth sure, but not a Tolkien story and considering that someone actually posted a spoiler about how the game may subtly be building up to be a completely different story, I feel like this might just be getting harsh fan criticism because fans criticize things that they don't feel match up with their established view of something.
