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edenfallingDecember 7: working-class heroes (for heliopausa) [Tumblr crosspost]
I'm going to talk about this in terms of fantasy only, because otherwise we'd be here all day.
In general, I think we should have more working class heroes. The complications caused by the constraints of working class life can lead to really interesting plots, character arcs, and world-building, and it's good to remind readers that everybody's lives are meaningful, regardless of income or occupation. But I can see why they're scarce.
One main reason working class heroes are scarce is because adventures tend to be, on some level, wish-fulfillment for the reader. The idea is to imagine doing huge and important things, and if you're going that route, why not also imagine being a person in a position of power and respect, someone who doesn't have to struggle in a boring job to make ends meet?
Another thing about writing standard fantasy action/adventure plots is that you need characters who have enough agency to make a difference on a wide scale. So you need a person who is in a position of some social, political, or military power... and shockingly, people in such positions don't tend to count as working class. You can have characters who start as working class and rise to prominence, but a character who somehow saves the country while still working as, say, a janitor, shop clerk, hired farm hand or what have you, is going to take some more thoughtful plot work, and a lot of writers (and readers) don't want to bother.
On the other hand, while it's not terribly realistic for a shop clerk to lead a war against the evil magician's invading army, it's not always that much more realistic for a king or queen to do the same thing, particularly once you've hit a certain level of social organization and stratification. Past a certain point, people in charge tend to sit in offices and get reports from underlings who are the ones actually going out and doing exciting legwork. Yet stories about heroic royalty are all over the place. I think that's a legacy from fairy-tales, and also the sort of archetype-driven storytelling that assigns rank to characters in relation to their innate worthiness. Which is fine if you're writing a symbolic sort of fantasy, but if you're going for the 'realistic world that just happens to include magic' style of fantasy, it becomes untenable.
One can argue that knights/soldiers/mercenaries/guards/itinerant adventurers count as working class in their own way, of course, and depending on the setup of any given fantasy world, that will hold more or less water. But I think that doesn't quite count, because a lot of 'adventurers' seem to come from relatively privileged backgrounds, and the rest have adventure-ready tools and skills by virtue of their jobs, which is not the case for our hypothetical shop clerk, who probably has no training and certainly doesn't get handed a sword as part of her normal workday equipment. And swords are expensive. You're going to have to put a lot more thought into justifying why a shop clerk has one (or how she compensates if she doesn't) than if you're writing about a person with more ready money and/or a more martial career.
I could probably keep going for twice again as long, but then this would get even less organized than it is now, so I'll stop here.
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December Talking Meme: All Days
heliopausa) [Tumblr crosspost]I'm going to talk about this in terms of fantasy only, because otherwise we'd be here all day.
In general, I think we should have more working class heroes. The complications caused by the constraints of working class life can lead to really interesting plots, character arcs, and world-building, and it's good to remind readers that everybody's lives are meaningful, regardless of income or occupation. But I can see why they're scarce.
One main reason working class heroes are scarce is because adventures tend to be, on some level, wish-fulfillment for the reader. The idea is to imagine doing huge and important things, and if you're going that route, why not also imagine being a person in a position of power and respect, someone who doesn't have to struggle in a boring job to make ends meet?
Another thing about writing standard fantasy action/adventure plots is that you need characters who have enough agency to make a difference on a wide scale. So you need a person who is in a position of some social, political, or military power... and shockingly, people in such positions don't tend to count as working class. You can have characters who start as working class and rise to prominence, but a character who somehow saves the country while still working as, say, a janitor, shop clerk, hired farm hand or what have you, is going to take some more thoughtful plot work, and a lot of writers (and readers) don't want to bother.
On the other hand, while it's not terribly realistic for a shop clerk to lead a war against the evil magician's invading army, it's not always that much more realistic for a king or queen to do the same thing, particularly once you've hit a certain level of social organization and stratification. Past a certain point, people in charge tend to sit in offices and get reports from underlings who are the ones actually going out and doing exciting legwork. Yet stories about heroic royalty are all over the place. I think that's a legacy from fairy-tales, and also the sort of archetype-driven storytelling that assigns rank to characters in relation to their innate worthiness. Which is fine if you're writing a symbolic sort of fantasy, but if you're going for the 'realistic world that just happens to include magic' style of fantasy, it becomes untenable.
One can argue that knights/soldiers/mercenaries/guards/itinerant adventurers count as working class in their own way, of course, and depending on the setup of any given fantasy world, that will hold more or less water. But I think that doesn't quite count, because a lot of 'adventurers' seem to come from relatively privileged backgrounds, and the rest have adventure-ready tools and skills by virtue of their jobs, which is not the case for our hypothetical shop clerk, who probably has no training and certainly doesn't get handed a sword as part of her normal workday equipment. And swords are expensive. You're going to have to put a lot more thought into justifying why a shop clerk has one (or how she compensates if she doesn't) than if you're writing about a person with more ready money and/or a more martial career.
I could probably keep going for twice again as long, but then this would get even less organized than it is now, so I'll stop here.
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December Talking Meme: All Days
(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-09 03:51 am (UTC)I think that in comparison to everyone else in the trilogy, the hobbits are definitely in a lower social class -- the Shire is a very prosaic and everyday sort of country, with neither royalty nor knights -- but within their own culture, Pippin and Merry are landed nobility (they end up as Thain and Master of Buckland, respectively) and Frodo is their rich cousin, though he doesn't have a title himself. I guess he'd be gentry, if we're using British social equivalents. And even Sam ends up as de facto gentry, though he starts as solidly working class as it's possible to get.