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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32404 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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I'm surprised you liked the priest so much, since the Shu-Dereth church was such an obvious stand-in for the Roman Catholic Church, and the priest's whole arc is basically about discovering that his church is evil and the fantasy pope is a fraud.

For what it's worth, as a Mormon I didn't see this as anything against Catholicism. Sanderson has quite a few characters that lose their faiths (or otherwise grapple with them), all believing in very different sorts of religions. "Character loses faith in dominant church" is simply the story (out of those) which will be told most often because more characters will be members of the dominant church than any other. There's also something very Catholic about standard fantasy due to its origins in Tolkien's work. Like, the default assumption for fantasy is that it's set in a sort of medieval Europe.

In his latest book, the Stormlight Archive, there are another two characters who grapple with and eventually lose(?) their faith. One believes in a sort of Eastern made-up religion which worships stones, and another must convince the dominant church (called "Vorinism") that their god has literally died.

In Mistborn another character grapples with a sort of "church of churches" which believes in all faiths and strives to remember all of their teachings. He eventually decides that the church is literally false, but that its teachings are both useful and beautiful. If Elantris were his only story of a character losing their faith, I'd perhaps agree with you, but given all the other stories about that that he's written I think it's pretty clearly not supposed to be any sort of point against Catholics.

I don't think Brandon Sanderson or Stephenie Meyer hate Catholics, and I doubt either of them intentionally decided to write Evil Fantasy Catholics into their stories. But it's impossible not to see the allusions. They almost certainly did it unconsciously, the same way anyone else deeply immersed in a particular culture will unintentionally write through that lens.

I'd argue Evil Fantasy Catholic's, because there's a hierarchy, are easier to write into a fantasy story than Evil Fantasy Protestant's.

I haven't read Elantris, but I've read Mistborn, and what makes the religion particularly Catholic? I read big institutional religions as just that, big institutional religions, and I don't know that that would have to necessarily be Roman Catholicism, even if that's the best example. If I remember correctly, Mormonism itself is institution-focused enough to fit in some ways, which would be an obvious influence as well.

And whatever the case may be, in Mistborn, I read the worship as being for political reasons at the head (even if not in the rank and file), which is probably not true of any major group of Christians.

Mistborn didn't feature such an obvious "Catholic" church. It was a lot more explicit in Elantris, which even had monastic orders and a fantasy pope.

To be fair, Dalinar’s arc is much, much better developed than the others. Part of that is experience, part of that is having several times as many words to play with.

I personally found Sazed’s approach to be the weakest despite how much I like where he ends up.

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