Moments of Permanence - Because I need to think about things that are differently stressful, sometimes...

From: eisen Date: May 9th, 2009 12:27 pm (UTC) (Link)

I have nothing, really, to add to this post. sami said all I was thinking anyway and I agree with all of it. So I'm going to respond to this comment because there's something odd I noticed in your link there.

It's totally weird nobody on that entry there mentioned the Drasnians from Eddings' Belgariad/Malloreon series, because they fit the bill of pseudo-Jews so well that, like all the other cultures in the Belgariad, they're stereotypical of it. :/

It is so unexpected to think of Eddings as doing anything unique with the fantasy genre in his worldbuilding that I might have to go lie down for a while at the shock of it.

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From: anatsuno Date: May 9th, 2009 11:55 pm (UTC) (Link)

wow. you are so right. And now I get all of a sudden what I found so likeable and yet vaguely nauseating in the Drasnians: they're my people, except they're my people defaced by prejudice / stereotype.

God. How did I never see this before?

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From: sami Date: May 10th, 2009 12:03 am (UTC) (Link)

I'm disconcerted by this - I never would have twigged Drasnians as faux-Jewish.

Possibly because of the whole Alorn thing, I just... in my head, all of the Alorns are tagged as variant northern Europeans, because they're all descended from the Alorns, who are kind of Vikingish in my head.

I suppose it doesn't help that I haven't read Eddings in about ten years.

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From: anatsuno Date: May 10th, 2009 12:10 am (UTC) (Link)

Hmm. Less than ten years for me, but I haven't reread in a while. I had forgotten the Alorn roots - I'll have to think about this more, but yeah, once pointed out, I can't not see the merchant / spy emphasis-on-the-nose angle, either.

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From: sami Date: May 10th, 2009 12:18 am (UTC) (Link)

The nose thing was only Silk, though, wasn't it? I don't recall other Drasnians with nose issues. But... many years. And I'm only just now really thinking about it.

On the one hand, the spying thing - that doesn't code Jewish to me, because on the one hand, Drasnians outside Drasnia generally are spies, but on the other hand, they don't tend to pass as anything but Drasnians, and, as they have their own well-marked homeland, etc, they don't have a lot of the same historical characteristics I associate with Jews-as-ethnic/national group.

Eddings is fairly strong on ethnic determinism, after all, so having characteristics ascribed to nationalities isn't exactly limited to Drasnians. Tolnedrans are secular and greedy, Arends are stupid, Sendarians are practical, the, um, snaky people are junkies, etc. (Issan? Nyissan? Something like that.)

It's easier than characterisation, I suppose.

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From: sqbr Date: May 10th, 2009 12:29 am (UTC) (Link)

*Thinks "Drasnians? I don't remember who they were"*
*reads discussion below*
OH THEM OF COURSE ACK. I think I vaguely twigged at the time but was Very Young so didn't think about it very hard.

Based on reading the books more than a decade ago so it may be bunk: One thing I liked about the Belgariad is that unlike say Tolkein where you have "normal" humans and then a bunch of kooky other species, you have all these different cultures and they're all human and all kind of weird (and mostly positively portrayed Except of course the Slytherins). Of course the fact they're so neatly defined despite having no particular reason not to get all mooshy at the edges due to intermarriage is kind of..hmm.

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From: embryomystic Date: May 11th, 2009 07:34 am (UTC) (Link)

The Drasnian thing is interesting, and not something I would've thought of by myself, but I think in The Rivan Codex (I skimmed, and didn't leave the library with it, and it still ruined my quasi-rosy memories of the Belgariad and the Malloreon, which I hadn't read since I was in my early teens) David Eddings baldly states (in between bizarre pronouncements like, 'every fantasy story needs a wise old wizard') that the Ulgos correspond to the Jews, and UL is YHWH. I think he lists the real-world analogues of every one of the cultures in that storyworld, actually, which seems kind of tacky, but.

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From: sami Date: May 11th, 2009 07:59 am (UTC) (Link)

I... wow.

So, the Jews are the subterranean religious fanatics everyone finds kind of weird, and whose major character representative is a thoroughly weird religious fanatic everyone finds really irritating until he becomes more like them. Including overcoming a lot of the moral teachings of his people.

That's not problematic at ALL.

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From: embryomystic Date: May 11th, 2009 08:25 am (UTC) (Link)

I know, right? But they're subterranean Jews with superpowers, remember. They can walk through stone. Wait... this is clearing up that whole 'empty tomb' thing in the Gospels. Jesus could walk through solid stone! Cool.

As much as those books came to frustrate me once I started getting critical (and it was gender stuff, mostly, that got to me; men are like this, and women, well, they're like that), it wasn't until skimming The Rivan Codex that I really began to understand how consciously formulaic they were. Why would anyone write a book that explains how uncreative they were in writing their most famous books? Self-effacing, I get, but this is, like, a guide to creating your own shitty fantasy series.

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From: eisen Date: May 11th, 2009 12:04 pm (UTC) (Link)

That is weird and disturbing. I've never been able to finish the Codex, so I always figured the Ulgo were stereotyping the fundamentalist sects of all the Abrahamic religions; it never would've occurred to me he'd have had a specific one of them in mind. As opposed to the Drasnians, who, since it was my impression that each member of the questing party was meant to typify their ethnicity of origin (like in old-style high fantasy - and there's not a cliché from old-style high fantasy Eddings doesn't love), I honestly felt were the more stereotypically Jewish because of how much time the books spent making odd comments about Silk's nose and Drasnians' unerring eye for a good deal - characteristics I rarely found particularly prevalent in the Jews I knew IRL but found repeatedly in the Jewish characters I knew from fiction. And between the two of them OH GOD SO MUCH SKETCHY RACE PROBLEMS HERE, EDDINGS, WTF.

Eddings' honesty about the fact that he has never been very interested in doing anything but hacked-off cliché-ridden fantasy is one of the reasons I liked him when I first found him, actually? It was really refreshing, at the time I picked up Eddings, to have a fantasy author who was so blatantly honest that he wasn't interested in writing anything new, just writing a bunch of old stories with a sense of humor about their origins. But no, sometimes he just goes too far; men are all brave to the point of idiocy and women are always complaining and everyone must get married and every marriage is "yes, dear *sigh*" on the man's part and and and. And then there is the racial stuff which was totally sketchy as hell the whole time and was only barely tolerable because even the main character wasn't all that immune to the rules of the stereotypes. There are all these unchecked and unconsidered assumptions riddling the Eddings books - even on top of the ones Eddings took from his study of fantasy, looked at carefully, and tossed in anyway because he thought they might be funny and/or necessary to the generic plot he wanted to build.

And yet, I still like his books, because on some level they give me what I'm used to with a nice, fluffy coat of silly hijinks on top, even when I can't stop my brain shrieking at the problems underneath. They're like the worst sort of comfort food: it doesn't even taste all that good, but your brain's become convinced it does, and afterwards you're full and blissfully incapable of coherent thought through the food-induced stupor you've put yourself in, but you'll feel queasy for the rest of the week. If I'd discovered Eddings now I'd feel differently, but I've spent too much time being stupidly fond of the things to be able to shake my enjoyment of them even when they hurt me, these days. :/

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From: lady_ganesh Date: May 12th, 2009 11:54 am (UTC) (Link)

At least it was unique in a stereotypical way?

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