@BESW and 36241 stayed up for a long time, because of the 200 point cap.

@BESW yea, real problems people face involving extinct animals and locomotion.

Mmm. Again, we've talked about how my take on the importance of why folks are worldbuilding is out of synch with the wb.se community's.

The Stack network is built on the assumption that most querents are not asking questions out of idle speculation. The further a particular Stack's topic deviates from that, the harder it is to work within the Stack site mechanics.

@BESW out of sync with the community’s what?

"take on the importance of why folks are worldbuilding"

Ok, I see it now.

I just set a small bonus for worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/51746/…

Besides the low views, a significant number of “answers” are commentary on the premise and don’t have anyhing to do with what was asked. So I’ve flagged those too; you might see that in yiur review queues. I added comments explaining, if it’s not obvious when doing the review: they miss the point, give feedback for the question, or simply discuss something that’s not what was asked. So it looks like a dew answers but only 1 addresses the question!

@Mithrandir24601 well, the accepted answer misspells “Oryginal”!

@JDługosz I see your problem. If there's no decent answer by the time I get back this evening, I might make an attempt at answering it. As for the raptor question, at least the new answer is actually a proper answer, but it still doesn't say anything that hasn't already been said. Is there a reason there's no 'duplicate answer' flag?

huh, I wonder how many times parents want to make a sexual joke, but can't because their kids are around

for some reason, I never realized how hard that must be until now

@James I feel your pain on that moon question. If it gets closed, I'll definitely vote to reopen (I'd like to get some other reopen votes, though).

@HDE226868 Which one are you talking about?

oh yeah...I forgot about that one

huh, apparently they're making another Star Trek show

and Gene named his son Rod. Such a terrible thing to do.

@DaaaahWhoosh Rod Roddenberry?

@dot_Sp0T yep, so it appears to be

Rhododendron

oh, wait. I guess his name is actually Eugene. Still a bad choice, but I guess if he chooses 'Rod' over it then that's his problem

Eugene Rod Berry?

more or less

oh, wait, Gene's name is probably also Eugene

man, I don't like it when fathers give their sons their own name. It's so confusing

So you'll name your child SooooonWhooooosh?

lol I will now

I wonder how many kids there are who have been named 'Son' or 'Daughter'

Most children in the northern countries

is that so?

which northern countries? And does it get confusing?

Maybe not exactly what you meant, but here: Icelandic Names

oh right, that's not what I meant but it's interesting

I didn't think anyone still did it that way

kinda wish my name was Robertson

or... Bobson

I'd pick Bobson

I'd be called Petersson

:D

The issue with that system is that it is not gender neutral

and you know anything that is not genderneutral is very bad

it's not like the other system is any better, I don't use my mom's maiden name

my idea is that when two people get married, they pick a new last name, and give that last name to their kid(s)

that way, you can give a name to your union, to your new family, rather than continuing some patriarchal system that doesn't really do anything any more

and it's a sustainable solution, because the name doesn't have to get any longer (as it does with hyphenations)

What about that whole genealogy thing or whatsitcalled

we have computers now, it's easier to keep records.

Should someone unpin @Mithrandir's comment about Literature given it has now hit 100% commitment?

yes

although no

probably leave it there some more days to make people visit the newborn page?

is it a mod-pin or a room-owner-pin?

we can have someone pin an update

@HDE226868 we might need your help

but mostly I just want to see how long it takes you to get here

@dot_Sp0T I thought it was a private Beta first for committers only and then an open Beta like WB used to be.

we definitely should link to the beta site once it's created

"This proposal has reached 100% commitment. We are preparing for its launch and expect to create it soon."

oh, wait, is the beta actually private?

aww, I forgot about that part

I want to see what it looks like

I'll send you some screenshots.

It goes un-private quite quick though.

private beta isn't really private

anyone can access

So why is it called private?

"When a Stack Exchange site goes from Commitment Phase to Beta Phase, for the first week, only those users who Committed to the proposed site will have access"

Gandalf the liar

@dot_Sp0T I just read that and got really confused for about a minute...

I hope that someday we get a LotR movie where Saruman actually wears a rainbow cloak

it didn't make sense that there was Saruman the White and also Gandalf the White

Pretty much everybody in LotR is white. [ba-dum tish]

aww... but I do recall there was a black Gondor Captain guy

what was his name... I'm worried if I look it up I'll be wrong

@DaaaahWhoosh IIRC, even in the book his cloak looked white unless you looked at it really closely. But I see Saruman as being replaced as head of the order by Gandalf, so Gandalf got a white cloak, but Saruman didn't give his up. They never really explain the significance of the colors, so I don't think many people care that much.

I guess if Middle Earth is analogous to Europe, and there isn't much in the way of slaving to mix things up, and you don't count the countless green people, then it's not far fetched that most people would be white

@AndyD273 it's not so much that I care, more that I want excuses to have a major villain wear a rainbow cloak

That's a fair point

I think I'd have a hard time taking him seriously though...

I imagined it as more a sort of white sharkskin fabric, than a "recently escaped from the set of The Prisoner" look.

@AndyD273 That's a... problematic and easily contested version of European history, but we won't get into it here/now.

I imagined it like a white mistcloak, with an underlayer of that one fabric from the 80s that changes color in different angles

I'm also really annoyed I can't find any arguments for men of Gondor who were black, apparently the person who told me about it made it up themselves and didn't post it anywhere

Looking down the IMDB, Gothmog was played by Lawrence Makoare imdb.com/name/nm0538692

That's about it.

I just recall being told that Gondor has a bunch of little kingdoms from all over, and some of the people there were dark-skinned, and some of those people led troops in the battle of Pelennor fields

Could be that way in the book. I don't remember right off

me neither, I guess when I get home I can check

provided I don't get home at 7:30 like yesterday

btw there is a three-gender question that was closed but now has more information, since they addressed my concerns I feel compelled to try and get the question reopened

I believe Gondor was closest to those areas of Middle-Earth which Tolkien saw fit to fill with savage dark-skinned warriors, who basically only appeared once and never really mattered much.

I thought it was nice that the Southerlings at least weren't inherently evil, like the orcs were

That's kind of a low bar. [wry]

And if we're going to invoke the "a fantasy world can deviate from reality in any way it likes except violate racial demographics" argument, it'd be good to remember that there were black Romans in Roman England who didn't just go away, that the de’ Medici Duke of Florence probably had a black mother, that Marco Polo was using well-traveled trade routes which were centuries old...

...that large parts of Spain got a forcible infusion of Islamic/Persian culture and ethnicity, that whenever a king bought a giraffe or a lion or a leopard it came with a live-in zookeeper who was very well paid and respected...

Middle-Earth's tidy lines in the sand between different political and cultural groups are deeply unrealistic.

I don't really think the lines are as tidy as people think, it's more that they imagine tidy lines because that's what they want to see

like, when I read the book, I was surprised that it seemed like dwarves and elves occasionally passed through the Shire, and that Gondor had people living in a lot of places

Tolkien was telling a mostly straightforward story, so he didn't focus on most of the grey areas, but that doesn't mean they didn't exist

Also, it's worth pointing out that while most people had similar skin colors, they were still completely different races. You had Humans, Dwarves (not human), Elves (not human), Orcs (not human), Goblins (not human), and so on.

There were hundreds of non human people in the movie, and while there was some distrust, they generally got along, at least along political lines.

And as @DaaaahWhoosh pointed out a while back, an Elf granted a dwarf one of the highest honors possible at one point.

if you're talking about hair, I wouldn't consider that one of the highest honors

Arguing about the portrayed skin color is a little silly at that point, at least in universe. Out of universe you can argue it on a "equality in actors getting paid" kind of way, which I'm all for.

@DaaaahWhoosh The elves thought so

at least that was your point at the time

I might have to reread myself

And I wonder how it would have gone down, if say the humans were generally white, the elves were generally asian, and the dwarves were generally african... would that have made more or less of a problem.

the elves should be African, since they were here first

The origin story is completely different though

And they came to middle earth from across the sea

But that detracts from the question

the elves? I thought they woke up in Middle-Earth

I'm just gonna go with since race is a social construct, fantasy species are not diverse if they're mostly shown as minor variations of white culture, regardless of casting (and I'm talking about the novels anyway).

If the races had been separated along visual race lines, would that have been been better or worse?

@DaaaahWhoosh I just know at the end they are on their way back home across the sea...

But there was probably a lot of moving about in the first and second ages

The silmarilian was boring, so I stopped. I may try again some day.

@AndyD273 yeah, I think they started in Middle-Earth, sailed to Valinor, then some of them walked back or something

ooh, Native American elves

that might work

That was my other thought too...

I think trying to salvage old works is less useful than analysing them to understand how we can move forward with new works. LotR has deep-rooted problems with race, class, gender, national exceptionalism, the works.

And they are good archers (giving into a stereotype)

@AndyD273 I don't think there's much textual support for that, at least in Tolkien's work

@BESW It was a product of it's time, and generally did better than it's peers.

ESP if you compare it to H.P. Lovecraft

@BESW I still don't think the original text has as many problems as people attribute to it, but I don't think such an argument is my own, so I don't have enough support for it

Lovecraft died almost 20 years before LotR was published, and was himself on the other extreme end of the spectrum.

And, you know, Last of the Mohicans is fair for its time too but that doesn't make it worth emulating or defending now.

(I really like Last of the Mohicans. But I won't defend it and I certainly won't take it as a model for my own writing.)

There are quite a few strong women characters in LOTR, and if you go by race as actual races and not skin color, there are lots of heros on all sides, and only 1 of the main characters is human.

Well, this is fun, but I gotta go

\o

Except, again, fantasy races are a dodge. Elves, hobbits, and humans are all basically Englishmen with different shaped ears.

Race is a social construct, and appearance is the least part of its definition.

Gender representation is difficult to take seriously when it's all secondary characters who get a little screentime and then leave, or their heroics are relegated to appendices.

Heck, Last of the Mohicans arguably did better at gender representation than LotR.

(At least, the 1826 novel did. The 20th-century movies tended to cut out all the interesting stuff the women did, along with most of their characterisation.)

I tried to make an argument that not representing women isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it didn't end up sounding right

Mmm. Not all works must have equal representation for all peoples, that's true.

yeah, and in the case of warfare there really weren't many women on the front lines for most of history

But it sticks out like a sore thumb when one's sprawling world-encompassing epic with a main cast of nearly a dozen doesn't include any women who stick around for more than a few chapters at a time.

yeah, but putting women in places they wouldn't normally be might devalue their actual roles in human society

if you have a female character in a battle, it implies that the women who raised children and maintained the household weren't as important as the men who went to war

And, eh. I'm not exactly convinced by arguments like that. Nor by the notion that women had any demarcated "actual role" in most of society at any given period, especially toward the bottom of it.

eg, women on a farm weren't "maintaining the household" unless that includes doing pretty much all the work of running a farm. In many parts of Europe the only farming traditionally reserved for men was literal fieldwork.

right, I probably didn't say that correctly

And there's a weird zero-sum game implied by saying that women doing one job devalues women doing another job.

yeah, agreed. It's not necessarily bad, but I guess more of a fine-in-moderation thing

if all your female characters are only doing 'masculine' things, it's a problem

there's still no representation for the gender, just for the sex

I do give Tolkien props for having a woman sneak into battle as a man; that's A Thing Which Happens Quite Regularly.

It might've been nicer if he hadn't treated it like some amazing one-off stunt nobody'd ever heard of before.

It either makes all those seasoned military leaders look super stupid, or the women of Middle-Earth look super disempowered.

hmm, I really do want to continue this conversation, but I really should be going home now

so... thanks for the insight, and good night to you

ttfn

To be fair to Tolkien, not only did said woman sneak into a battle, she actually killed the Witch King... Even ignoring the 'no man...' thing, even the likes of Aragorn or Gandalf ( :) ) would have found that a monumental challenge

Yeah. Again, that sorta makes the Witch-King and every other military commander there look a bit... literal-minded, at best.

(A major challenge for Tolkien is that Middle-Earth was an intellectual exercise in backgineering a world from a set of languages, then forward engineering a story to fit into it. If you look, most of his characters are either "I am a stereotypical X" or "I break the stereotypical mould for X in Y way," because he started with the broad strokes of whole cultures and couldn't get past that when writing individuals.

It didn't help that most of his story is more like plot point meatloaf from the mythologies he studied, and the seams don't always fit together neatly. Éowyn killed the Witch-King because the subverted prophecy is a common trope, and she was basically written for the purpose of checking off that ticky box.)

Well... As a different-world example, in High Valyrian, the word 'valar' is explicitly 'all men [excluding women]' and 'abrar' is explicitly 'all women [including men]' (from the plural of 'abra', meaning 'a woman') - perhaps the original prophecy was in such a language

@BESW You do have a point

@BESW I appreciate your depth of cultural, religious and literary nuance. I'm glad you come here.

@DaaaahWhoosh It's been a long day.

@DaaaahWhoosh (cca @AndyD273) The Noldor, led by Feanor, left Valinor because they wanted to get the Silmarils back. And guess who took them? Dark Lord #1, Morgoth.

(I've been finishing up The Silmarillion this week.)

@Mithrandir24601 The Radch Trilogy uses language/culture-specific gender signifiers in very cool ways, but takes the time to first establish clearly what they are and how they work.

@Green [bow and a flourish] I hope I don't come across as insufferable.

This stuff all orbits crucial elements of my profession, my hobbies, and my faith.

This evening's wierdness is brought to you by another new user who decided to answer a question twice within 10 minutes, using the same idea for both answers. The first answer was in the 'first post' queue, the second in the 'late answers' queue (the question was just over a year old), so I guess that answers the question about the queues that I had yesterday. @BESW I've been meaning to get that for about half a year now! Soon... I'm planning to get a couple of books over the next week

And for examples of really great stories that frontline awesome women in a "man's world" setting, you can do worse than Lois McMaster Bujold's epic scifi Vorkosigan Saga series (though mostly the first several books; once they get Miles-centric they get repetitive and a little insufferable).

I'll add that to the list - thanks!

Her "Chalion" trilogy is great too. If you only read one, read Paladin of Souls. If you read them all, take 'em in order.

Oh, I'll read them all. It might take a while, but I'll get there eventually

(Chalion has some very cool ideas about faith in a polytheistic fantasy setting.)

Oooh. Excellent

Thanks :)

Vorkosigan is about a planet that was cut off from the rest of the galaxy for several generations and is now attempting to reintegrate, from the point of view of a galactic citizen who marries into a noble family on the planet--and then later from her son's perspective.

Ah, there's only 3 of them (Chalion), so I'll read them all some weekend. Because I'm just like that with trilogies

Chalion is mostly written after Vorkosigan, so the writing's a bit more polished.

Also sounds interesting. I'm just about to get Memories of Ice (Malazan book of the Fallen 3), so I'll probably get one of the ones you've just mentioned at the same time

(this weekend)

If you like audio books, the Radch trilogy has an awesome reader available.

Don't mind audio books, but I much prefer reading a book

She can pronounce Anaander Miaanaai without skipping a beat.

Sounds like that narrator was speaking to the author

Was that a question somewhere on the network recently?

Not sure about the network question, but I read an interview a while back. The author spoke carefully with one reader, but didn't speak at all to the other reader, and kinda prefers the second.

Hmm... Suggests some kind of trust with narrating the book or something

I suspect it had more to do with the publisher doing it on their own without including the author.

@BESW I don't think so.

Or that - I would have thought that the author had some kind of say in that kind of thing, but I've never tried to publish anything (having never written anything, that's hardly a surprise), never mind trying to get an audio book released, so I wouldn't actually know

Here we go.

I prefer Adjoa Andoh's version.