thread: 2005-07-05 : Setting and Source Material
On 2005-07-12, Sydney Freedberg wrote:
Coolness.I suspect that the "rule" of Tolkein's world that is really upsetting to most of us could be boiled down as "people have free will, but moral predispositions are inherited"—which has some truth in it (e.g. child abuse tends to run in families) but in Middle-Earth ends up with entire races (Orcs, Southrons) being burdened with so much inherited evil that they are effectively irredeemable. It's not quite simple racism (that'd be "moral qualities are inherited," without qualifiers) but it's painfully close.
And the temptation to go through every fictional setting everywhere and reverse-engineer what an adequate set of "seed crystals" and "rules" would be is powerful, but I think would draw us horrifically off-topic. So I'll stop.
