Stereotypes

[SeverinR]

Stereotypes in the created world should be like stereotypes in the real world,
the stereotype is generally correct looking at the masses. But break it down into individuals and it can be as different as each person.
My stories have some good half orcs, still have tension with elves, but they are not stereotypical. The big picture, stereotypes are overall correct.
Elves can be honorable intelligent people or idiot drunken slobs just looking for the next coin, the nicest person ever, or the most evil. Like humans, Elves have free will. Actually all humanoids have free will in my works, but Orcs and mixed breeds are limited by mental capability and attitudes in society.

Elves like the arts and beauty, they are long lived, so they find more time to enjoy the beauty in things.
Orcs are short lived, and focus on aggression, fighting, and living fast, don't notice the beautiful tapestry they rip off the wall in a fight.

 

[James Chandler]

But, as mentioned in the thread...would we not all be bored with a thinking, feeling gooey blob?

I was thinking of Sargent Schlock, too!

 

[Viktor Greenblood]

A noob enters

OK, first post, and I might as well get straight into the business of things.

Hi, I've been registered here for a while but this is the first time I've entered into a discussion, so here is my view on the topic. Generally, stereotypes are bad, in my view, because they oversimplify and restrict things, a stereotype seems to me to be a simplified and usually overused image of something. So, the opening poster mentioned 'viking cultures' in some of the fantasy books they had read, the stereotype of the vikings is as savage warriors from a harsh landscape who come and raid the civilised world. Sometimes they're vicious enemies and sometimes they're 'honourable warriors' (whatever that means in the context), but that aspect of their culture is the stereotype, the big, bearded, savage, looting and pillaging, heavy drinking barbarians who spend their downtime in mead halls eating meat, drinking mead, beating each other up and laughing boisterously. The stereotype doesn't have room for the vikings who were the best shipwrites, explorers and metalworkers in Europe, or who settled in new lands from Moscow to Canada.

Stereotyped cultures can be based on the real world, but they're always a gross simplification of the culture they're stereotyping, which makes the culture both less interesting, because it seems boring and two dimensional, and less plausible, because a culture will both have people with all kinds of different dispositions and will need those people to do different jobs (unless those jobs are all done by slaves or foreigners, and that's a difficult system to maintain).

So I don't think there's a problem in including analogues to real world cultures in a story, the real world is more detailed than an imagined one could ever hope to be, and I don't think there's any shame in taking elements from it to add colour or realism. I think there is a problem if those analogues are only crude, simplified versions of what those cultures really were, because then something which is supposed to add colour and realism looks monochrome and implausible.

This last point applies to entirely invented cultures just as much as to ones which are taken from history, the problem isn't having elves, it's having lots of elves who are all exactly the same.

On the idea of characters and cultures that aren't human at all, I'd say that they're tricky because of striking a balance between making them comprehensible and making them different. Making them comprehensible is easy enough if you have them thinking or acting in human-like ways, but then their inhumanity rings false, and I at least find it quite hard to work out how an inhuman creature would think, being human myself and everything.

 

[CicadaGrrl]

I think people stick to stereotypes because fantasy should, at least, involve some foreign things. When we change everything, we worry our readers won't be able to keep up.