# Stereotypes, something we should avoid?



## Endymion (May 21, 2012)

While sitting on my chair I started thinking about elves. When I open a fantasy book elves are alway portrayed (almost always) as beautiful, wise... Well, perfect. And I thought, that maybe some creatures are supposed to be like that. Untouched. Like they were originally. For examples trolls. When you read troll somewhere, doesn't the picture of a big, ugly, fat creature pop into your head? Or the trolling sign? Wouldn't it be odd and hard to understand if the next sentence about the troll would be "Her blonde hair was like the rays of sunshine"? Or that orcs were peaceful politicians that invented democracy?

I do realize that if we would copy everything and wouldn't even try to be original then there wouldn't be any good books. Stereotypes are bad, but what if you donÂ´t overuse them? Is it a bad thing anyways?


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## Hans (May 21, 2012)

Endymion said:


> When I open a fantasy book elves are alway portrayed (almost always) as beautiful, wise... Well, perfect.


Elves are often some wish fulfillment for authors - and readers. It does not have to be that way. In Mythology elves can be mean and nasty critters.



> And I thought, that maybe some creatures are supposed to be like that.


If the author wants them to be, yes.



> Untouched.


Virgin?



> Like they were originally.


Elves were originally exactly what? Different sources tell very different things.



> For examples trolls. When you read troll somewhere, doesn't the picture of a big, ugly, fat creature pop into your head? Or the trolling sign? Wouldn't it be odd and hard to understand if the next sentence about the troll would be "Her blonde hair was like the rays of sunshine"?


Maybe it's just me, but I know enough about norse mythology to know that this is entirely possible.



> Or that orcs were peaceful politicians that invented democracy?


For arcs we have a own thread somewhere. These are defined by Tolkien and so lack (yet) the diversity that a hundreds or thousands year old mythology would give.



> Stereotypes are bad,


Are they?



> but what if you donÂ´t overuse them? Is it a bad thing anyways?


IMHO stereotypes are a tool you can use. As you said, when you write "troll" the reader has a certain image. Of course you can use this image and then they "troll with the following differences:".
Most fantasy worlds are "like earth until stated otherwise". Earth, the reality, is the biggest stereotype you have. And everyone always uses it. There is nothing wrong with that.


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## Queshire (May 21, 2012)

The biggest thing is differentiating between tropes and stereotypes. To that end, I direct you to this website; Home Page - Television Tropes & Idioms Certainly, there's nothing wrong with using tropes, but you got to own it, tie that sucker down and make it your bitch. Elves Are Better, but how exactly are they better? In my world, they've mastered life magic which is basically magical genetic engineering, they are better because they make themselves better in a way remeniscent of plastic surgery.


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## Feo Takahari (May 21, 2012)

I'm new here, so I'm curious--is this going to turn into a debate about the inherent racism of portraying a race of tall blonde people as the embodiments of perfection? I've been on sites where it would and sites where it wouldn't. (Personally, I don't think it's racist in and of itself, but I think it traces back to racist origins, and the repeated use of it with no comparable glorification of different body types can do as much cultural damage as actual racism.)

(As for beautiful trolls, I recall a mention that Robert Asprin has a story in which the males of the species are trolls, and the females are trollops.)


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## Ireth (May 21, 2012)

Feo Takahari said:


> I'm new here, so I'm curious--is this going to turn into a debate about the inherent racism of portraying a race of tall blonde people as the embodiments of perfection?



Not all elves are blond -- in fact most of Tolkien's elves (which are largely responsible for today's popular view of the race) were black-haired. The blond ones were only about 1/3 of the population. Also there were elves with red or silver hair, though those colors were extremely rare and exclusive to specific bloodlines.


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## Dark Huntress (May 21, 2012)

Feo Takahari said:


> I'm new here, so I'm curious--is this going to turn into a debate about the inherent racism of portraying a race of tall blonde people as the embodiments of perfection? I've been on sites where it would and sites where it wouldn't. (Personally, I don't think it's racist in and of itself, but I think it traces back to racist origins, and the repeated use of it with no comparable glorification of different body types can do as much cultural damage as actual racism.)



I may differ from most but I think that if racism pops into your mind when you read that sentence or description of the characters, then it racist. This is one case where I think the author is responsible for what he KNOWS the reader will interpret.  If he means it to be racist than there's no problem but if he doesn't well the reader may still see it as racism.

We've just had too many years of stereotyping in this county to believe otherwise. That is indeed very sad.


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## Jabrosky (May 21, 2012)

Endymion said:


> Stereotypes are bad


The reason "stereotype" has such negative connotations is because certain stereotypes have been used to justify the oppression or dehumanization of real groups of people. However, in this thread we are talking about fictional races. Stereotypes about elves, orcs, or whatever don't hurt real groups of people, so even if they are trite, they cannot be fairly compared in real-world damage to stereotypes about, say, African people.

As for "beautiful" elves having blond hair, blue eyes, and pale skin...elves originate from Northern European mythology, so of course they would resemble idealized Northern Europeans. If elves came from African mythology instead, they would resemble idealized Africans instead. I find stereotypical fantasy elves incredibly annoying and have never found them attractive (pointy ears is a turnoff for me), but I don't fault them for having "Nordic" physical features (which I have myself BTW).


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## Queshire (May 21, 2012)

I think an argument could be made that saying that stereotypes dealing with fictional races being no big deal could result in the readers mentally extending that to stereotypes as a whole being no big deal, which can be bad.


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## gavintonks (May 21, 2012)

do not fall into the trap of hollywood movies are it,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,if you research and go to original stories you find very different concepts and descriptions


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## Feo Takahari (May 21, 2012)

^^^ Fun fact: back when elves were bad, they were brown-skinned. You can still see this in a few works, like Holly Lisle's _Tithe_ or Eloise McGraw's _The Moorchild_.

That said, I don't think we can clearly prove this sort of stuff racist. It's easier to show it as intellectually simple. I want to be surprised by fiction, and orcs with no twist other than "savage and warlike" aren't surprising.


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## Queshire (May 21, 2012)

again, I don't think it's a bad to use the tropes and such associated with a fantasy race, you can have orcs that are savage and warlike, that's what makes them orcs, but that shouldn't be the only thing about them, if you have JUST the classic attributes of a race, they end up being flat, it's best to try and round them out some more.


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## Steerpike (May 22, 2012)

Blizzard orcs have evolved a bit. Blizzard basically took their original Warcraft universe almost directly from Warhammer, up to the point of even incorporating the art style. It was more or less just a clone of the Warhammer world, with Starcraft somewhat of a clone of Warhammer 40K. Since then, they've taken the stories in different directions.


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## Devor (May 22, 2012)

Steerpike said:


> Blizzard orcs have evolved a bit. Blizzard basically took their original Warcraft universe almost directly from Warhammer, up to the point of even incorporating the art style.



In their defense, when they made the first game they were actually pitching it to Warhammer.


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## Steerpike (May 22, 2012)

Devor said:


> In their defense, when they made the first game they were actually pitching it to Warhammer.



Yes. From what I understand, they were actually negotiating for a license from Games Workshop to create Warhammer video games. The license fell through (luckily, from my point of view; maybe not as luckily if you are Games Workshop, though they seem to do well).


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## gavintonks (May 26, 2012)

I am posting this in a few threads as I have become to notice that many people consider a "travelogue through their imagination" is a story. It is not the imagination is purely the substitute for characters within a well crafted and entertaining story. This is not creating a game it is writing and entertaining and gripping story that may or may not exist somewhere but it it the story that must be real first.,


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## Hans (May 26, 2012)

gavintonks said:


> I am posting this in a few threads as I have become to notice that many people consider a "travelogue through their imagination" is a story.


A story can have the style of a travel report. And not each and every story needs to strictly obey the dogmas taught in modern "Creative Writing" classes.
Maybe fantasy readers are more used to get the adventure story type. But does really every fantasy story have to be an adventure story?


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## Feo Takahari (May 26, 2012)

Gulliver's Travels is basically a travelogue, isn't it?


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## gavintonks (May 27, 2012)

No Guliver lands up in the land of miniature people where he battles prejudice, and then to the land of giants, other than his sea trip and waking up on the island he is engaging with misunderstandings


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## gavintonks (May 27, 2012)

good point Hans


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## Queshire (May 27, 2012)

While I have never read Gulliver's travels myself, I remember hearing that the little guys and the giants were only one part of the story, he travels to several other legendary lands, even Japan, which, at the time it was written, killed just about any non-Japanese that landed there so was considered pretty legendary as well.


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## Caliburn (May 28, 2012)

I think about this a lot, and basically have the same opinion as Queshire (love TV Tropes). 
I've become attached to many tropes, and I like them a lot, but I often feel trapped by them and find it difficult to think outside of them. One particular example would be the D&D magic system (or whatever system they borrowed it from). In fact pretty much anything D&D-oriented--my brain tends to just default to those tropes and in order to think outside of them I have to consciously deconstruct them and then rearrange the pieces or add in other things. When doing this, I always run into the same dilemma: how do I decide what to use/throw away/rearrange? It can be really hard! 
I guess some people might be able to just spontaneously come up with original stuff out of thin air. I do that sometimes, but usually by accident when I'm doing something else. Its not something I can just do, so failing those rare moments, tropes are my bread 'n' butter. 
There's nothing inherently wrong with elves and trolls etc. In fact, one could say that the common fantasy tropes we have today are basically our collective mythology, just like people had back in the ye olden days. In magic, repitition has symbolic power, so the repetitive depiction of elves and trolls and the like seems to solidify their existence in our collective psyche--forming a symbolic visual language that resonates with people. It feels good to tap into that language, but I'm always preoccupied with trying to find ways to do things differently--to communicate in new ways. It can be a very meticulous and methodical task, but then again so is all craft. Whenever I watch a skateboarding video I am amazed by how graceful and "in-the-zone" the pro skateboarders are, but it just looks that way because its all edited together smoothly and you don't see all the outtakes and the time they spent learning the tricks etc.


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## gavintonks (May 28, 2012)

The copy I have does not have parts 3 and 4 and in general discussion it is the first 2 parts mostly referred too. Thanks to wikki the story is unfolded.

l Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships, better known simply as Gulliver's Travels (1726, amended 1735), is a novel by Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift (also known as Dean Swift[1]) that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of the "travellers' tales" literary sub-genre. It is Swift's best known full-length work, and a classic of English literature.

The book became popular as soon as it was published (John Gay wrote in a 1726 letter to Swift that "It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery"[2]); since then, it has never been out of print.
Contents

    1 Plot summary
        1.1 Part I: A Voyage to Lilliput
        1.2 Part II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag
        1.3 Part III: A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan
        1.4 Part IV: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms
    2 Composition and history
        2.1 Faulkner's 1735 edition
        2.2 Lindalino
    3 Major themes
    4 Historical Oddity
    5 Cultural influences
    6 In other works
        6.1 Sequels and imitations
        6.2 Allusions
    7 Adaptations
        7.1 Music
        7.2 Film, television and radio
    8 See also
    9 References
    10 External links
        10.1 Online Text

Plot summary
Part I: A Voyage to Lilliput
Mural depicting Gulliver surrounded by citizens of Lilliput.

4 May 1699 — 13 April 1702

The book begins with a short preamble in which Lemuel Gulliver, in the style of books of the time, gives a brief outline of his life and history before his voyages. He enjoys travelling, although it is that love of travel that is his downfall.

During his first voyage, Gulliver is washed ashore after a shipwreck and finds himself a prisoner of a race of tiny people, less than 6 inches tall, who are inhabitants of the island country of Lilliput. After giving assurances of his good behaviour, he is given a residence in Lilliput and becomes a favourite of the court. From there, the book follows Gulliver's observations on the Court of Lilliput. He is also given the permission to roam around the city on a condition he not harm their subjects. Gulliver assists the Lilliputians to subdue their neighbours, the Blefuscudians, by stealing their fleet. However, he refuses to reduce the island nation of Blefuscu to a province of Lilliput, displeasing the King and the court. Gulliver is charged with treason and sentenced to be blinded. With the assistance of a kind friend, Gulliver escapes to Blefuscu, where he spots and retrieves an abandoned boat and sails out to be rescued by a passing ship which safely takes him back home.

This book of the Travels is a topical political satire (see below).
Part II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag
Gulliver Exhibited to the Brobdingnag Farmer by Richard Redgrave

20 June 1702 — 3 June 1706

When the sailing ship Adventure is steered off course by storms and forced to go in to land for want of fresh water, Gulliver is abandoned by his companions and found by a farmer who is 72 feet (22 m) tall (the scale of Lilliput is approximately 1:12; of Brobdingnag 12:1, judging from Gulliver estimating a man's step being 10 yards (9.1 m)). He brings Gulliver home and his daughter cares for Gulliver. The farmer treats him as a curiosity and exhibits him for money. The word gets out and the Queen of Brobdingnag wants to see the show. She loves Gulliver and he is then bought by her and kept as a favourite at court.

Since Gulliver is too small to use their huge chairs, beds, knives and forks, the queen commissions a small house to be built for Gulliver so that he can be carried around in it. This is referred to as his "travelling box." In between small adventures such as fighting giant wasps and being carried to the roof by a monkey, he discusses the state of Europe with the King. The King is not happy with Gulliver's accounts of Europe, especially upon learning of the use of guns and cannons. On a trip to the seaside, his travelling box is seized by a giant eagle which drops Gulliver and his box right into the sea where he is picked up by some sailors, who return him to England.

This book compares the truly moral man to the representative man, the latter of whom is clearly shown to be the lesser of the two; Swift, being in Anglican holy orders, was likely to make such comparisons.
Part III: A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan
Gulliver discovers Laputa, the flying island (illustration by J.J. Grandville.)


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## gavintonks (May 28, 2012)

5 August 1706 — 16 April 1710

After Gulliver's ship is attacked by pirates, he is marooned close to a desolate rocky island, near India. Fortunately he is rescued by the flying island of Laputa, a kingdom devoted to the arts of music and mathematics but unable to use them for practical ends. ("La puta" is Spanish for "the whore;" Swift was attacking reason and the deism movement in this book, the last one he wrote for the Travels.)

Laputa's method of throwing rocks at rebellious surface cities also seems the first time that aerial bombardment was conceived as a method of warfare. While there, he tours the country as the guest of a low-ranking courtier and sees the ruin brought about by blind pursuit of science without practical results, in a satire on bureaucracy and the Royal Society and its experiments. At The Grand Academy of Lagado great resources and manpower are employed on researching completely preposterous and unnecessary schemes such as extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, softening marble for use in pillows, learning how to mix paint by smell, and uncovering political conspiracies by examining the excrement of suspicious persons (see muckraking).

Gulliver is then taken to Balnibarbi to await a trader who can take him on to Japan. While waiting for passage, Gulliver takes a short side-trip to the island of Glubbdubdrib, where he visits a magician's dwelling and discusses history with the ghosts of historical figures, the most obvious restatement of the "ancients versus moderns" theme in the book. In Luggnagg he encounters the struldbrugs, unfortunates who are immortal, but not forever young, but rather forever old, complete with the infirmities of old age and considered legally dead at the age of eighty. After reaching Japan, Gulliver asks the Emperor "to excuse my performing the ceremony imposed upon my countrymen of trampling upon the crucifix", which the Emperor grants. Gulliver returns home, determined to stay there for the rest of his days.
Part IV: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms
Gulliver in discussion with Houyhnhnms (1856 lllustration by J.J. Grandville.)

7 September 1710 – 2 July 1715

Despite his earlier intention of remaining at home, Gulliver returns to the sea as the captain of a merchantman as he is bored with his employment as a surgeon. On this voyage he is forced to find new additions to his crew who he believes to have turned the rest of the crew against him. His crew then mutiny, and after keeping him contained for some time resolve to leave him on the first piece of land they come across and continue as pirates. He is abandoned in a landing boat and comes first upon a race of (apparently) hideous deformed and savage humanoid creatures to which he conceives a violent antipathy. Shortly thereafter he meets a horse and comes to understand that they call themselves Houyhnhnms (which in their language means "the perfection of nature"), and that they are the rulers, while the deformed creatures called Yahoos are human beings in their base form.

Gulliver becomes a member of the horse's household, and comes to both admire and emulate the Houyhnhnms and their lifestyle, rejecting his fellow humans as merely Yahoos endowed with some semblance of reason which they only use to exacerbate and add to the vices Nature gave them. However, an Assembly of the Houyhnhnms rules that Gulliver, a Yahoo with some semblance of reason, is a danger to their civilization, and expels him.

He is then rescued, against his will, by a Portuguese ship, and is surprised to see that Captain Pedro de Mendez, a Yahoo, is a wise, courteous and generous person. He returns to his home in England, but he is unable to reconcile himself to living among Yahoos and becomes a recluse, remaining in his house, largely avoiding his family and his wife, and spending several hours a day speaking with the horses in his stables.

This book uses coarse metaphors to describe human depravity, and the Houyhnhms are symbolized as not only perfected nature but also the emotional barrenness which Swift maintained that devotion to reason brought.
Composition and history

It is uncertain exactly when Swift started writing Gulliver's Travels, but some sources suggest as early as 1713 when Swift, Gay, Pope, Arbuthnot and others formed the Scriblerus Club, with the aim of satirising then-popular literary genres. Swift, runs the theory, was charged with writing the memoirs of the club's imaginary author, Martinus Scriblerus. It is known from Swift's correspondence that the composition proper began in 1720 with the mirror-themed parts I and II written first, Part IV next in 1723 and Part III written in 1724, but amendments were made even while Swift was writing Drapier's Letters. By August 1725 the book was completed, and as Gulliver's Travels was a transparently anti-Whig satire it is likely that Swift had the manuscript copied so his handwriting could not be used as evidence if a prosecution should arise (as had happened in the case of some of his Irish pamphlets). In March 1726 Swift travelled to London to have his work published; the manuscript was secretly delivered to the publisher Benjamin Motte, who used five printing houses to speed production and avoid piracy.[3] Motte, recognising a bestseller but fearing prosecution, simply cut or altered the worst offending passages (such as the descriptions of the court contests in Lilliput or the rebellion of Lindalino), added some material in defence of Queen Anne to book II, and published it anyway. The first edition was released in two volumes on 26 October 1726, priced 8s. 6d. The book was an instant sensation and sold out its first run in less than a week.

Motte published Gulliver's Travels anonymously and, as was often the way with fashionable works, several follow-ups (Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput), parodies (Two Lilliputian Odes, The first on the Famous Engine With Which Captain Gulliver extinguish'd the Palace Fire...) and "keys" (Gulliver Decipher'd and Lemuel Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Regions of the World Compendiously Methodiz'd, the second by Edmund Curll who had similarly written a "key" to Swift's Tale of a Tub in 1705) were produced over the next few years. These were mostly printed anonymously (or occasionally pseudonymously) and were quickly forgotten. Swift had nothing to do with any of these and specifically disavowed them in Faulkner's edition of 1735. However, Swift's friend Alexander Pope wrote a set of five Verses on Gulliver's Travels which Swift liked so much that he added them to the second edition of the book, though they are not nowadays generally included.
Faulkner's 1735 edition

In 1735 an Irish publisher, George Faulkner, printed a complete set of Swift's works to date, Volume III of which was Gulliver's Travels. As revealed in Faulkner's "Advertisement to the Reader", Faulkner had access to an annotated copy of Motte's work by "a friend of the author" (generally believed to be Swift's friend Charles Ford) which reproduced most of the manuscript free of Motte's amendments, the original manuscript having been destroyed. It is also believed that Swift at least reviewed proofs of Faulkner's edition before printing but this cannot be proven. Generally, this is regarded as the editio princeps of Gulliver's Travels with one small exception, discussed below.

This edition had an added piece by Swift, A letter from Capt. Gulliver to his Cousin Sympson which complained of Motte's alterations to the original text, saying he had so much altered it that "I do hardly know mine own work" and repudiating all of Motte's changes as well as all the keys, libels, parodies, second parts and continuations that had appeared in the intervening years. This letter now forms part of many standard texts.
Lindalino

The short (five paragraph) episode in Part III, telling of the rebellion of the surface city of Lindalino against the flying island of Laputa, was an obvious allegory to the affair of Drapier's Letters of which Swift was proud. Lindalino represented Dublin and the impositions of Laputa represented the British imposition of William Wood's poor-quality copper currency. Faulkner had omitted this passage, either because of political sensitivities raised by being an Irish publisher printing an anti-British satire or possibly because the text he worked from did not include the passage. In 1899 the passage was included in a new edition of the Collected Works. Modern editions derive from the Faulkner edition with the inclusion of this 1899 addendum.

Isaac Asimov notes in The Annotated Gulliver that Lindalino is composed of double lins; hence, Dublin.


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