RE: https://mementomori.social/@juergen_hubert/117319175637424972
i have always wondered this myself.
i also wondered why many so-called JRPGs like several Final Fantasy games feature European-style knights & royalty rather than Japanese-style samurai & shōgun/daimyo (or any other culture for that matter).
my favorite franchise, The Legend of Zelda, which was conceived by Japanese people in Japan, feature blonde-haired blue-eyed protagonists that resemble Swedish classmates i had in college. i see the same in Japanese cartoons. colonialism...
this trend may be reversing but i haven't paid much attention lately. i got fatigued of mainstream storytelling around middle school.
however if ai slop continues to be generated blindly, we'll just see more of it. i'd rather not, but to each their own i guess.
Quoting
I find it _interesting_ that most modern portrayals of fairy tales involve kings, knights, princesses and so forth - the privileged aristocratic classes on top of the social pyramid. Even if the protagonist of such a tale is poor, they are still secretly from privileged parents, and their story tends to be about reclaiming their "rightful" (i.e. privileged) place in society.
Meanwhile, the _vast_ majority of German folk tales I have read feature peasant protagonists. Nobles _might_ appear, but they are the villains as often as they are a force for "good".
Reframing fairy tales to focus on protagonists of privileged birth and relegating low-born characters to sidekicks and background characters was a _choice_. It's so pervasive nowadays that most modern-day storytellers don't even realize that they are making this choice, since they have accepted this as "normal". But it is a choice nonetheless.
And if we are telling stories of our own, we need to ask ourselves what choices we are making when developing our protagonists.
#privilege #storytelling #AmWriting #ClassStruggle
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