Mieville says neat stuff.

[judd_sonofbert]

From a goodreads interview here.

"In the broader sense, I absolutely do think that the implicit politics of our narratives, whether we are consciously "meaning" them or not, matter, and that therefore we should be as thoughtful about them as possible. That doesn't mean we'll always succeed in political perspicacity-which doesn't mean the same

Comments

[seannittner]

As someone who finds it an over simplification to call a single character evil (and gets really annoyed when they are portrayed as nothing but evil), it's even harder for me to portray a race as such.

It was really cool in my Warcraft game that all the players understood the orc weren't fighting them because they were savage or evil. They had been locked up for years, broke out and were trying to tear through the alliance army so they could break out the other orcs who were still in internment camps. This meant that sympathizing with the orcs was very prevalent in the game, even though the protagonists were at war with them.

What drives me nuts however is when I try to present complicated peoples who are opposing the protagonists and they are dismissed as just "evil". In the fiction, I suppose it is fine for the characters to see their enemies as evil, but I really hate it when the players take that outlook.