Thread by @Delafina777

So I recently reread the Belgariad, because I read it when I was in middle school and remembered it being kinda YA-ish and was wondering what 1980s high fantasy YA looked like in comparison to today's. Holy shit, these books are a specific kind of awful.

Like, the idea that different races have different inherent personality characteristics--and intelligence levels--is pretty much a FETISH. But if you've read the series you know this. I'm here to talk about two specific things.

1) The idea that this stuff is problematic for adults, but not for children. When I was like, wow, has anyone done a reread of these? I came across a number of blog entries by parents, being like, yeah, there's some problematic stuff but they're fine for kids.

Like, PEOPLE, GET A FUCKING GRIP. Stories are part of what teach us our ethics, our sense of what makes a hero, and how to relate to other people. They don't have any overt sex, which would be not ok for kids, but the racism IS?!

The idea that it's problematic because *adults will recognize it and be offended* rather than that it will *shape children's worldviews to be racist and sexist* is so fucking backward it's unbelievable.

There are reasons to read overtly racist or sexist works. Sometimes there's stuff to learn. Sometimes just to understand what was considered "normal" and acceptable in a particular period.

But it is adults, not children, who should be reading them, because adults presumably have the critical thinking skills to parse out what's worth learning from and what's pointless malice.

2) While reading the Practically Every Page With The Racism, I was struck by the almost *affectionate* presentation of most of it. The world of the Belgariad is divided, basically, into White People Land and Evil Asia.

The Belgariad's White People Land is populated by four different peoples who are all descended from Fantasy Vikings, as well as High Medieval Chivalry Knight People, Fantasy Romans, and Drug Addict Snake People.

Oh, and Fantasy Early America, which is populated by descendants of the four Fantasy Viking-descended cultures, the Noble Knight People, and the Fantasy Romans. (Not the Snake People, everyone hates them.)

Then there's Fantasy Evil Asia, but I'm not going to get into that right now because the problems are obvious. I want to go back to the way the different cultures in the Belgariad's West interact.

So everyone has extremely rigid personality characteristics based on which culture they're from, and they talk about how that's because they're from that culture, and they affectionately roll their eyes at each other about it.

So it's presented as this sort of neighborly friendly competition, like the Swiss probably roll their eyes and mutter "Danes!" while having a beer together.

And what struck me is it made me think of those exposes where a POC journalist goes to a white nationalist convention and the white nationalists are, like, seemingly friendly, and all, "hey, we can all get along if we keep to our own kind, no hard feelings, yeah?"

And, like, you could come away from reading about that self-presentation and think they're eccentric but harmless, instead of what they actually are, which is straight-up genocidal.

And if you were a sheltered white kid in the 80s reading about this stuff and being taught in school that racism was largely solved by the civil rights movement, you'd get the idea that a white sense of superiority is basically like rooting for the home sports team.

And, like, you don't see them on lists of best fantasy series anymore, but these books were NYT bestsellers in their day, and a metric fuckton of baby geeks read them and loved them and still reference them in their RPG games today.

So, there's this idea that the alt-right came into RPG communities and other geek circles from outside, like they were infiltrators. And as I keep saying, maybe some of them did, but the attitudes of "why are we still talking about racism?" "oversensitivity!" were there already.

The media that geeks loved growing up is MARINATED in this stuff. (Yes, there has also always been the counterstream, especially in comic books, of progressive values, but let's not pretend that it's the only story.)

(It's a pretty telling reminder of how privileged I am, and especially how privileged I grew up, that I remembered them as sort of clueless grandpa racism, instead of what they are, which is actually obsessively racist. It's on like EVERY PAGE.)

Oh, and here's the reason I care, besides the fact that these books are still getting recommended as Good For Kids:

Eddings is a good writer. A better one, in terms of straight-up readability, than a lot of the other epic fantasy writers of the time.

He writes good banter. For the most part, he keeps the pace moving along pretty briskly. The interactions between his heroes are, for the most part, warm and believable. His writing goes down smoothly.

And that's why people ate these books up when they came out. We're not talking John Ringo crap here. They're an easy, page-turner read.

Anyway, my Xbox green-screened and my new one doesn't come until Friday and I am basically TV-less, so I might pour myself a glass of wine and live-read the Belgariad tonight. Not promising, because I might also just take a bubble bath and read The Tethered Mage (A+) instead.

But anyway, just reflecting on the idea that so many parents consider sex or violence to be something their kids have to be protected from in the fiction they read, but not racism. (Or sexism--these books are also sexist as fuck.)