Many of you know that I am a fantasy and science fiction fan. I am also an anime fan, a manga fan, and a fan of cosplay, though I do not really get to participate in cosplay. I have had wry comments from a couple of friends that I ended up being an Orthodox priest because of the vestments, the incense, and the icons. However, that is absolutely not true.
Because I read so much fantasy, I have noticed an interesting quirk. Fantasy is full of heroes (male and female) doing heroic things. If it is a series, they do those heroic things over and over, book after book. But, this presents a problem. You see, these heroes have this tendency to be wounded over and over. In any of the various fantasy books I have read, the hero even gets wounded more than once. This presents a problem because most deep wounds take both time and physical therapy to accomplish a reasonable recovery. Even then, some wounds tend to leave some physical impairment.
This creates a problem because if recovery time is built into the book (or series), then some serious time is going to pass before the hero returns to the battle, or the author has to picture a crippled hero trying to take down an opponent who now has a strong advantage over the hero. Most authors solve this by either having healing magics, healing potions, or by having the hero have a constitution that allows for incredibly faster healing than a normal person. For instance, the hero may be a shapeshifter or a non-human being with exceptionally fast healing.
In passing, I should mention that this also extends to sexual relationships. Have you noticed that couples never seem to get pregnant unless they want to? This, again, is always attributed to either magic or herbal concoctions that the ancients have always known about.
However, here is where the quirk comes in. There are various fantasy stories in which the heroes are a hidden subset within society. This can create the situation in which the heroes have available to them healing power and potions which are not available to the rest of the existing society. And that creates what is often an unacknowledged ethical problem. Why do not the healers in the heroes party share their healing knowledge and/or gifts with the existing society?
There are some authors who do deal with the issue. One solution is to argue that the existing society would persecute or misuse those who have those gifts. This is found in series in which those with those gifts would be classified as witches, etc., and condemned to death or penal servitude. Another solution is that there are not enough healers and they would be overwhelmed–or studied to death by the government–should they go public.
But, the reality is that there is an ethical issue in those series in which the heroes are a hidden subset of society and have healing powers or potions which would be of help to that society, and will not find a way to share that. It means that they are willing to leave the vast majority of that society to suffer injuries and diseases that could otherwise be easily healed. It is no surprise that in the majority of those series the only solution they find is to claim that if they reveal their solutions they would be persecuted to death. It is the only way in which the author can justify the ethical lapse of not helping society.
This does not mean that I will stop reading fantasy series. It simply means that I need to ignore the lapse and simply go with the flow.
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