Creative license vs Cognitive dissonance

[Philistine]

I have a tendency to get mad at games for defeating my expectations: whether it's black samurai, no alignments in D&D, or a voice that doesn't fit my character. I also get mad at shows that don't represent characters or events the way I've seen or read them before. I've been asking myself how reasonable are my expectations, how much should creatives be consistent with previous iterations of material?

How much creative license can you tolerate before calling bullshit?

 

[largh]

Perhaps you should take games less seriously...worry is a waste of time and worrying about things you cannot influence makes no sense, you know

I think any artist has a complete freedom to select the direction for their art. Let it be a black samurai, white drow or a blue cow. Sometimes I may find it silly but if it doesn't interest me, then I will not waste my time with the game. Simple.

 

[Redglyph]

I think that in both videos and games, a part of it is necessary adaptation. For example, you can't easily use narrative in a video, so you have to replace it with other events than the original book to convey similar feelings. Another part is indeed artistic freedom, and your only options are accepting it or passing on the offer. Sometimes it's good (the TV series adaptation of The Man in a High Castle), and sometimes it's not so good (AC Shadows). There's usually a good deal of subjectivity.

When developers design a game, game rules, etc, they try to make it good for a good share of potential players, but they can't afford to please everyone. For example, adding other voices in CP2077 would have cost a lot, and I've never heard anyone else complain about V's voice, so you just happen to be in the small percentile of the population they dropped. If you're very demanding on many features, chances are it'll happen often - being also more fussy than average, I would know. For that, you'll have to reconsider your priorities (form vs content) or keep being disappointed.

 

[Couchpotato]

I understand the poster. If your going to race swap, gender swap, and so on the developer or any other medium better have a good explanation then just the word diversity.

Lately though I just laugh, roll my eyes, and move on as it's not worth getting mad.

 

[Philistine]

Perhaps you should take games less seriously...worry is a waste of time and worrying about things you cannot influence makes no sense, you know

I think any artist has a complete freedom to select the direction for their art. Let it be a black samurai, white drow or a blue cow. Sometimes I may find it silly but if it doesn't interest me, then I will not waste my time with the game. Simple.

I wish I could take games less seriously! Gaming is my primary hobby, taking up most of my free time and has been almost my whole life. This past year in particular I have been focusing on games I've been anticipating for years Starfield, Cyberpunk, BG3 most of all. That kind of anticipation comes with expectation based off earlier games. Then there is the time factor - I usually put in 200-300 hours into big RPGs like these. So it's very hard for me not to be heavily invested in them before I even start. AC Shadows was the latest disappointment, DA: Dreadwolf could be the next.

Back to my original post though, which games have made artistic choices that YOU were upset about? I assume that @largh has never been disappointed this way.

 

[Pladio]

I feel like if you can believe in demons, it doesn't make sense for there to be an issue with female black demons. I am sure that if you look at old fantasy rulesets from the 1970s, there wouldn't have been black elves, but now there are. How is that a problem ?

Games, books, rulesets, stories, they all evolve with the times. In the 50s you would never have seen anything homosexual in mainstream media, now most games have those options in romance. Obviously it'll upset some people.

I am sure there have been things that upset me. The only thing I can remember is a game, which had obvious stereotypes of different 'real-life' groups. i.e. the greedy Jewish money-lender. It doesn't bother me as much if it's an in-game characterisation, especially if it's obviously just a few edge-cases.

Overall, I rarely get frustrated by games doing things different than I expect them to be, but sometimes it can detract from the experience somewhat. For example, in King Arthur: a Knight's Tale, the main character had a very 'arrogant' voice/temper but was basically a shieldbro. So my expectation was a murder-hobo and it was the opposite, but it had nothing to do with prior knowledge... So maybe doesn't fit your question

 

[largh]

No, I suppose I have never been disappointed by the creative freedom developers have taken but plenty of other things such as the story, immersion, writing, NPC, mechanics and loot to name some. I don't really care about ethnicity especially in AC games as they are complete fiction. Besides, how do you know it will be a disappointment? We have seen only a few trailers.

 

[Redglyph]

When I'm disappointed by a game, it's usually because of technical limitations or issues, rarely because of artistic decisions. Sometimes, the writing is not great, or some issue makes me cringe, but not enough to be mad or disappointed. For example, DOS:2 has this typical Larian humour, and the AoE were exaggerated, but I still loved the game.

Yeah, AC Shadows isn't even released; let's give them some slack. I usually like the themes and enjoy the gameplay, but I never let too much expectation build up with those games.

 

[JDR13]

I don't care about race or color unless it goes against the description of the creator/author. For example, I can understand why people had an issue with black elves in Amazon's Rings of Power series because those elves are literally described as "fair-skinned" by Tolkien in the books. I don't think we should change things in an iconic book/show just for the sake of inclusion.

 

[Stingray]

I don't care about race or color unless it goes against the description of the creator/author. For example, I can understand why people had an issue with black elves in Amazon's Rings of Power series because those elves are literally described as "fair-skinned" by Tolkien in the books. I don't think we should change things in an iconic book/show just for the sake of inclusion.

The English word "elf", and the words from other languages that it was derived from, have always been associated with whiteness - long before Tolkien even lived.

See the Etymology section on this page for some details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elf

 

[Pladio]

The English word "elf", and the words from other languages that it was derived from, have always been associated with whiteness - long before Tolkien even lived.

See the Etymology section on this page for some details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elf

Except you've only read one portion of the Etymology section:

The Old English forms are cognates – linguistic siblings stemming from a common origin – with medieval Germanic terms such as Old Norse alfr ('elf'; plural alfar), Old High German alp ('evil spirit'; pl. alpî, elpî; feminine elbe), Burgundian *alfs ('elf'), and Middle Low German alf ('evil spirit').[35][36] These words must come from Proto-Germanic, the ancestor-language of the attested Germanic languages; the Proto-Germanic forms are reconstructed as *ɑlβi-z and *ɑlβɑ-z.[35][37]


The article also clearly talks about elves in a variety of ways including as demons or even Satan:

Identifying elves with the demons of Judaeo-Christian-Mediterranean tradition.[9] For example:

• In English-language material: in the Royal Prayer Book from c. 900, elf appears as a gloss for "Satan".[10] In the late-fourteenth-century Wife of Bath's Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer equates male elves with incubi (demons which rape sleeping women).[11] In the early modern Scottish witchcraft trials, witnesses' descriptions of encounters with elves were often interpreted by prosecutors as encounters with the Devil.[12]

This is no longer the case, elves have evolved to be beings of light and grace. Back to my point that things change.

Side note: "Alps" are in Battle Brothers as beings of nightmares.

 

[Redglyph]

That's interesting, but what does it have to do with Tolkien's lore? His book, his rules.

I think to remember there were different groups of elves with different shades of skin, but maybe not as dark as the one we saw in the series. I wasn't bothered by it, but I understand one could find it a little too far.

 

[largh]

I think the notion here was about elves within an IP. It is true that elves in the Lord of the Rings have been described as fair-skinned, often blond haired. Even if I had seen the TV series, I would have probably just found dark-skinned elves amusing symbols of the times we live in rather than provoking. The same goes for the Witcher. I do not remember how elves were described in the books exactly, but I am pretty sure that a white male author from Poland always imagined them like Tolkien with the getto-twist in that IP.

It tells a lot about the current "woke" culture: you'll need to twist the IPs and stories such that including multi-culture everywhere seems completely natural to them. This also applies to cases where clear racism prevails, such as the racist elves in the Tolkien's world, instead of making something original fitting for the multi-culturism. Despite that, I find all this woke and anti-woke stuff an entertaining show to follow. It just demonstrates how we people are always thinking "us and them" even if some of us like to think ourselves liberal and inclusive. Maybe it just shows that we are pack animals desperately looking for something to belong to.

 

[Redglyph]

Again, I enjoyed the series, but maybe it's an example of what not to do in a book 'adaptation'. The elves were not the only issue: the whole show is supposed to take place in a part of the IP Amazon doesn't have the rights to, and they've been working around the problem as they could, but it's obviously not to everyone's satisfaction. Youtube fans out there raised eyebrows - maybe several times - and hoped the next season would be more aligned with the books. Some were more vocal on Youtube, but I'm not sure if they were actual fans or just feeding on the phenomenon to get more audience.

If it was made by people who loved the IP and couldn't afford to do otherwise, it'd be sort of OK, but it's Amazon, so I can't imagine they did it for anything else than greed.

 

[Stingray]

Except you've only read one portion of the Etymology section:

The Old English forms are cognates – linguistic siblings stemming from a common origin – with medieval Germanic terms such as Old Norse alfr ('elf'; plural alfar), Old High German alp ('evil spirit'; pl. alpî, elpî; feminine elbe), Burgundian *alfs ('elf'), and Middle Low German alf ('evil spirit').[35][36] These words must come from Proto-Germanic, the ancestor-language of the attested Germanic languages; the Proto-Germanic forms are reconstructed as *ɑlβi-z and *ɑlβɑ-z.[35][37]


The article also clearly talks about elves in a variety of ways including as demons or even Satan:

Identifying elves with the demons of Judaeo-Christian-Mediterranean tradition.[9] For example:

• In English-language material: in the Royal Prayer Book from c. 900, elf appears as a gloss for "Satan".[10] In the late-fourteenth-century Wife of Bath's Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer equates male elves with incubi (demons which rape sleeping women).[11] In the early modern Scottish witchcraft trials, witnesses' descriptions of encounters with elves were often interpreted by prosecutors as encounters with the Devil.[12]

This is no longer the case, elves have evolved to be beings of light and grace. Back to my point that things change.

Side note: "Alps" are in Battle Brothers as beings of nightmares.

No, I read the whole thing. Not sure if you did, or maybe you're just being disingenuous. Look at the common origin of the cognates you mentioned, where you conveniently cut off your quote:

These words must come from Proto-Germanic, the ancestor-language of the attested Germanic languages; the Proto-Germanic forms are reconstructed as *ɑlβi-z and *ɑlβɑ-z.[35][37]

Germanic *ɑlβi-z~*ɑlβɑ-z is generally agreed to be a cognate with Latin albus ('(matt) white'), Old Irish ailbhín ('flock'), Ancient Greek ἀλφός (alphós; 'whiteness, white leprosy'), and Albanian elb ('barley'); and the Germanic word for 'swan' reconstructed as *albit- (compare Modern Icelandic álpt) is often thought to be derived from it. These all come from a Proto-Indo-European root *h₂elbʰ-, and seem to be connected by the idea of whiteness. The Germanic word presumably originally meant 'white one', perhaps as a euphemism.[38] Jakob Grimm thought whiteness implied positive moral connotations, and, noting Snorri Sturluson's ljósálfar, suggested that elves were divinities of light.[38] This is not necessarily the case, however. For example, because the cognates suggest matt white rather than shining white, and because in medieval Scandinavian texts whiteness is associated with beauty, Alaric Hall has suggested that elves may have been called 'the white people' because whiteness was associated with (specifically feminine) beauty.[38]

 

[bjon045]

You would have to be a complete numpty to think it is anything other than pandering to a very specific audience that likes to rage about being excluded and ESG policies being forced down by corporate overlords. This pandering approach and/or enforcement of policies often leads to an inferior creative result as various ticks have to be met and the story has to be forced in a certain direction to meet those targets often resulting in lore-breaking content/hamfisted romances/inappropriate LGBTQI relationship/gender disclosure. Some games/movies/tv shows can do both well (like BG3) but many end up poorer for the effort. The general audience geniunely just wants good enjoyable content.

 

[Stingray]

This pandering approach and/or enforcement of policies often leads to inferior creative result as various ticks have to be met and the story has to be forced in a certain direction to meet those targets. Some games/movies/tv shows can do both well (like BG3) but many end up poorer for the effort.

In the US, films aren't even eligible for the Oscars Best Picture award anymore if they don't comply: https://www.oscars.org/awards/representation-and-inclusion-standards

 

[Redglyph]

Aren't Oscars for films? The rules for Emmys' rules seem sounder, though the on-screen representation is only one of the four standards; the other ones seem perfectly feasible (and even commendable, IMO) in a story where the first isn't possible.

Anyway, again, it's not really related to Tolkien's work, though it could explain the decisions made in some films.

 

[Stingray]

This thread isn't about Tolkien, so I'm not sure why you keep bringing that up. I think, if anything, it was triggered by the black samurai?

 

[Redglyph]

This thread isn't about Tolkien, so I'm not sure why you keep bringing that up. I think, if anything, it was triggered by the black samurai?

This thread isn't about the colour of elves, either. It only started because of your reply to JDR13, who mentioned them in the scope of disappointing series, so I'm bringing that up because it's not relevant any more (and feels out of topic). Though, as I also said, it was interesting vs artistic freedom.

EDIT: Anyway, just disregard my comment. No reason not to discuss that.