the boringest post I've ever boringly posted, no lie
Dear everyone:
HA HA HA DISREGARD MY PREVIOUS POST I [INSERT ACTIVITY HERE].
Also, I am the biggest moron on this side of the planet (....well, second-biggest, Sarah Palin is pretty damn dumb).
In other news, recent meta has sharpened my appetite for dealing with the Shadowsverse crew. They are all a bunch of assholes, except for Corentin and Cazgo (one of whom has her own issues involving her demon semi-fiance and the other of whom works very, very hard to seem like a brainless surferdude goofball), and I love them anyway (except for Dereth, who somehow manages to play the "abusive dad," "clueless ex," and "that's CAPTAIN rigid tightass to you" cards all at once--no, don't ask me to explain).
kaigou's recent post (for a value of "recent" that includes "in the past six months") has gotten me thinking about white/black~bright/dark~right-hand/left-hand symbolism, and the way I use it in Shadowsverse.
To drop into TV Tropes parlance, Shadowsverse itself is a trainwreck of three tropes: Dark Is Not Evil, Light Is Not Good, and Good Is Not Nice. There is very specific color symbolism: black magicians and white mgicians, one is "evil," and one is "good." Thanks to the color symbolism, the 'verse may read as a Pointed Look at racism, especially since all the major recurring characters are PoCs. But the truth is, Shadowsverse is, at its core, about religion.
But the major points of the 'verse have always been: A) "people" as a rule are roughly the same on the good/evil scale, B) good and evil get a lot murkier when you're riding the high horse of a cause or religion, and C) people atop the high horses of causes/religions tend to do more harm than good.
It's my angry "Seven years in Christian schooling SD:LKHSG:HGH I HATE CHRISTIANS WILL THEY ALL PLEASE SHUT THE FUCK UP" screed, in book form. Because if there was one thing I saw, over and over and over, repeated ad nauseum by not only students but teachers, professors, chapel speakers, parents, was the complete and total erasure of other faiths, other creeds. The people on the "right-hand" path couldn't fucking get the idea through their heads that the the rest of the world followed a separate path, and they could scream themselves hoarse and never change a thing, nor have any right to.
And at some point, I started formulating a world where the left-hand path was in control and always had been, where the right-hand path was shown to be just as vicious, just as hurtful, just as destructive as the left-hand path at its worst.
But thanks to
kaigou's post, I'm starting to wonder: am I derailing or co-opting racial discussion by using deliberate colour symbolism to make a different point? Or does the implied point that "black/dark/left-hand" and "white/light/right-hand" are ultimately nothing more than labels make it permissible?
HA HA HA DISREGARD MY PREVIOUS POST I [INSERT ACTIVITY HERE].
Also, I am the biggest moron on this side of the planet (....well, second-biggest, Sarah Palin is pretty damn dumb).
In other news, recent meta has sharpened my appetite for dealing with the Shadowsverse crew. They are all a bunch of assholes, except for Corentin and Cazgo (one of whom has her own issues involving her demon semi-fiance and the other of whom works very, very hard to seem like a brainless surferdude goofball), and I love them anyway (except for Dereth, who somehow manages to play the "abusive dad," "clueless ex," and "that's CAPTAIN rigid tightass to you" cards all at once--no, don't ask me to explain).
kaigou's recent post (for a value of "recent" that includes "in the past six months") has gotten me thinking about white/black~bright/dark~right-hand/left-hand symbolism, and the way I use it in Shadowsverse.
To drop into TV Tropes parlance, Shadowsverse itself is a trainwreck of three tropes: Dark Is Not Evil, Light Is Not Good, and Good Is Not Nice. There is very specific color symbolism: black magicians and white mgicians, one is "evil," and one is "good." Thanks to the color symbolism, the 'verse may read as a Pointed Look at racism, especially since all the major recurring characters are PoCs. But the truth is, Shadowsverse is, at its core, about religion.
But the major points of the 'verse have always been: A) "people" as a rule are roughly the same on the good/evil scale, B) good and evil get a lot murkier when you're riding the high horse of a cause or religion, and C) people atop the high horses of causes/religions tend to do more harm than good.
It's my angry "Seven years in Christian schooling SD:LKHSG:HGH I HATE CHRISTIANS WILL THEY ALL PLEASE SHUT THE FUCK UP" screed, in book form. Because if there was one thing I saw, over and over and over, repeated ad nauseum by not only students but teachers, professors, chapel speakers, parents, was the complete and total erasure of other faiths, other creeds. The people on the "right-hand" path couldn't fucking get the idea through their heads that the the rest of the world followed a separate path, and they could scream themselves hoarse and never change a thing, nor have any right to.
And at some point, I started formulating a world where the left-hand path was in control and always had been, where the right-hand path was shown to be just as vicious, just as hurtful, just as destructive as the left-hand path at its worst.
But thanks to
kaigou's post, I'm starting to wonder: am I derailing or co-opting racial discussion by using deliberate colour symbolism to make a different point? Or does the implied point that "black/dark/left-hand" and "white/light/right-hand" are ultimately nothing more than labels make it permissible?