Fantasy/sc-fi races observation
Putting all fantasy/sci-fi races on a three dimensional scale with the axes x: short/tall, y: narrow/broad, z: furry/scaly, humans will almost inevitably be relatively high on x and y and towards the center of z compared to the majority of fantasy races and relatively low on x, y, and z compared to sci-fi races.
Thesis: This reflects the differing approaches of fantasy and sci-fi. Fantasy conceives of an entire world on the very edges of perception, reflected in the "smallness" of other races (and thus their difficulty to perceive). Sci-fi conceives of the universe as being much bigger than humanity, by having many races be literally bigger than humans, and alien to our understanding, by having many races take on a reptilian or insectoid appearance.
Thesis: This reflects the differing approaches of fantasy and sci-fi. Fantasy conceives of an entire world on the very edges of perception, reflected in the "smallness" of other races (and thus their difficulty to perceive). Sci-fi conceives of the universe as being much bigger than humanity, by having many races be literally bigger than humans, and alien to our understanding, by having many races take on a reptilian or insectoid appearance.
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Indie games fare somewhat better in this respect, I think.
At the risk of pointing out something obvious (but just to put it out there, not specifically a reply to you), reptiles and other ectothermic (i.e. "cold-blooded") animals tend to do a lot better in warmer places, because their body doesn't spend as much energy regulating internal temperature and keeping them running. So naturally, you don't have lizards running around New England gardens the way you have them running around Florida gardens. This in turn has probably influenced folklore traditions. A lot of stereotypical fantasy literature derives a good amount of material from British, central-western European, and Nordic mythological traditions, with some ancient Roman, ancient Greek, and ancient Middle Eastern influences. Tolkien, specifically, I hear, did draw pretty heavily on Norse mythology, while it's not exactly a surprise that English-language works do draw from the mythos of the British isles. Much of these places are climatically temperate, so the fantasy forests are temperate forests more typically filled with furred things and scaly things are seen more as an anomaly.
hooray for Heavy Object spending like a minute or two with a close-up of an otherwise unimportant lizard on a palm tree (in an artificially reforested part of Australia)
That said, I'd like you to elaborate a bit more.
But at the same time, I admit I am intensely bias towards games. Like I will choose a video game over a book or movie 99% of the time. I will never give up my love for them.
[/I have no idea what I'm saying.]
I don't intend to give an explanation for why these elements exist, just an explanation for the tedture they lend a story.
As for my points or rather lack thereof, I admit I don't fully understand the situation so I rambled.
without actually providing anything in return.
And for all your explanation you missed the fact that I wasn't saying there's a direct causal link.
This like
This fucking nails everything I've hated about my design courses thusfar, most of the stuff we learn kinda feels like this?
whether a conscious decision was involved is indeed irrelevant. i just mentioned it as a possibility, and included the subconscious bit to imply the other possibility. (i assume you don't think tolkien is some kind of platonic shadow uninfluenced by peoples' minds.) I don't think either is very likely, because it is not like my experience of how people think about things.
and don't tell me i'm being too sciencey when you started out with a three dimensional graph, mon.
Neither of which possibility is really relevant to what I'm saying! Which is that the net effect of a foundational decision in a genre is that the use of that decision signifies the genre itself. Which I don't really see *how* you can disagree with, beyond doubting that the decision ever actually happened, ie in this case not agreeing that fantasy races are subdivided by smallness moreso than bigness. Which relies on us having the same defintion of fantasy, too.
but more fundamentally i disagree that the way people think is remotely this simplistic, which is why that's what i led with. i don't know what to give you there but analogies. it's like saying bright colors are for berries, or wolves in a tree means walking in on your parents doing the horizontal fuck, or that if you say "florida" to people they'll walk slower because they think of old people. it's an essentially simplisitic view of cognition that doesn't concord with anything i've ever experienced of the thought processes of myself or others. it is absurd. people do not think like this. they do not recognize size as a signifier in this way. there is nothing for me to construct.
incidentally this view of thinking is why i care about this. i don't care about tolkien or whatever. If there was no conscious nor subconscious motivation for writing fantasy fiction to have smaller creatures in it, how could fantasy fiction have possibly ended up having smaller creatures in it? I am confused. Not that it's what I'm arguing, but there could be plenty of ways. For example, Tolkien was a foundation and did plenty of stuff that later fiction hasn't, thus eliminating any association between the genre and that stuff.
(whether star wars is Really sci fi is admittedly debatable. i do not want to have such a debate, so i threw in a hard sci fi novel)
Also my point wasn't that fantasy doesn't have large creatures, just that
1. It tends to have fewer of them, maybe (remember, dragons weren't always depicted as large)
2. They aren't as minutely divided in terms of *how big* they are.
3. This is especially true in terms of humanoid creatures.
I'm not interested, for example, in the question "Is Mass Effect hard sci fi?" because the component elements of hard sci fi, the component elements of how Mass Effect constructs genre, the origins of each, the motivations of each, and the emotional impact created by each, are far more interesting to me. I vaguely disagree with the sentiment that it is hard sci fi, but that's more because I find the concept of actively categorizing any work as one genre to the exclusion of another is silly.
Look I don't know enough about evolutionary biology to debate you on that front (though the implication that the answer to "why do I want to eat dishwasher packets?" isn't "their texture and bright color indicates that they're a berry" is one I'd probably disagree with on the grounds of why the hell else would it be that way and also it's funny) but I think the assorted elements that comprise the relatively recent invention of genre and the cultural awareness thereof are a bit more clear cut than the links between evolution and modern human behavior.
beyond that. you know you are still making objective statements, right? you're saying the effect is subtler than i understood. that's possible. but a subtle, difficult to measure effect is well, subtle. it's easy to explain away exceptions and so on, so i'm naturally skeptical.
like. let's turn this around. let's say it's me saying something is a signifier, and you disagree. say i say that brown signifies fantasy. my reasoning is that brown is the color of the earth, and sci-fi is in large part about exploring alien and dark space. also a common color for fur. like chewie!
Alternately I could say brown signifies sci-fi. The earth may be underlied by brown but it's generally green and blue, including the sky, one of the most obvious parts of our visual experience. Sci-fi can have worlds with brown sky or brown vistas stretching into the distance, as well as brown lizardy aliens. furthermore, it can indicate a world damaged by industrialization.
You could argue either way. How would you determine which is the truth? Would any number of examples matter? Could any logic not be reflected?
i say the short-tall thing is similar. it is too subtle. it is not a signifier of genre any more than a color or tone.
i don't want to debate evolutionary biology with you any more than you want to debate it with me.
if you think this is more clear cut than an actual science, why on earth did you tell me i'm thinking of it in overly scientific terms?