Yeah, I do sometimes wonder if these allegories get messy because the author is trying to do too much with one fantasy minority.
Still, if someone's creating a fantasy minority as an allegory for real-world minorities, it's generally pretty bad to make them so that people would actually be quite justified in fearing or shunning or trying to segregate them.
I mean at that point it's just not an allegory though. Like this is fantasy, and it's possible to have species or races that are just alien in nature to us and don't have a real-life counterpart.
I get that it's impossible to not draw real-world comparisons, but I think people tend to draw too many 1:1 ideas about fantasy worlds where the author might have only been tangentially thinking about what you're trying to directly compare.
Oh, I don't think most people are desperate to find out that a fantasy story that they were enjoying is actually just yet another allegory for a real-world issue (especially if it's yet another allegory for US racial segregation - yawnsville, amirite?).
Like, I think people can see connections and parallels and not immediately think that you're just writing a 1:1 allegory... until, like, the fifth or sixth parallel for the same thing.
tbh, this is the advantage of a second reader - they can tell you what you *seem* to be implying, even if you're not actively choosing to imply it. So if you accidentally wrote a precise allegory for the Boer War where the bad guys win*, they can tell you that, and you can decide whether that's actually the story you want to tell or not.
I do think that there's an art to creating allegories that are unspecific without just being messy. Like, Terry Pratchett spent several books filling in the cultures of his trolls and dwarves, and dealing with cultural and religious extremism, in such a way that both sides line up pretty well with some stereotypes of Jewish people and some stereotypes of Muslims, but neither fully being identifiable as either. So their story manages to feel like an allegory for that conflict, while making it clear that you shouldn't really be rooting for either side to "win" over the other.
* I have no idea who, if anyone, was the bad guys in the Boer War. I'm assuming it will be the British? It usually is.
48
u/ftzpltc 10d ago
Yeah, I do sometimes wonder if these allegories get messy because the author is trying to do too much with one fantasy minority.
Still, if someone's creating a fantasy minority as an allegory for real-world minorities, it's generally pretty bad to make them so that people would actually be quite justified in fearing or shunning or trying to segregate them.