The Wandering Inn and Intellectually Dishonest Worlds

NOTE: Mild Spoilers for The Wandering Inn

I’ve been reading The Wandering Inn for the past year or so. It’s a web serial. One of the longest ones out there, dwarfing even Worm by roughly 10x. I generally like it. The world and characters it presents are interesting. That being said, there is one element I dislike. The lack of intellectual honesty.

The world the serial is set in is a classic LitRPG one. Think high fantasy but with an explicit DnD style levelling system that the inhabitants are aware of and that shapes much of the politics and structure of the world. It follows many characters, but the main protagonist is probably Erin. She’s a human girl who is Isakied into the world and instead of doing what most Isakai protagonists do and becoming a warrior or adventurer, she starts and runs an inn. Over the course of chapters, she makes friends, gradually improves her inn and solves problems both big and small. Eventually, despite being a somewhat ditzy inkeeper, her actions ripple out and make a lasting mark on first her region then her continent and then the world. While there is some darkness, probably more as the series goes on and transitions from a light-hearted slice-of-life to fantasy, the overall message is overwhelmingly a positive one. Erin consistently ignores self-interest and chooses to be kind and accepting and forgiving and brave. She often comes into conflict with the “good guys” and challenges bigoted customs. A few examples of this.

• The continent she finds herself fought a near-extinction war a decade or so ago. It was against the Antinium, a recently appeared hive-mind like race with no concept of peace, empathy or morality. She befriends a bunch of Antinium, tries to get the city to trust them and this eventually blossoms into creating a “good” Antinium sub-faction.
• In this world Goblins are violent, murderous, rapey and universally despised. Cities frequently cull them. They’re seen as animals to be killed, not people. Yet, they can think and they can level (in this world levelling is seen as the key thing that distinguishes animals from people). Erin has some nasty encounters with goblins. but nontheless befriends some of them. She insists on treating goblins as people. Over time it turns out that many goblins were just misunderstood, their race has the potential for peace and prosperity, and things basically work out for her. Rags, a small female goblin she saves in an early chapter, becomes a legendary leader of her people. A few others become heralds of a new age.

One one hand I understand that not every story is meant to be a rigorous intellectual dual where you tear your own beliefs to shreds in an effort to step closer to the truth, no matter how much it burns. Some stories are just written to entertain. Some stories intentionally explore how an ideology or world view is right, illuminating parts of it and letting people imagine a different way of doing things. e.g: Ayn Rand stuff. I think that’s all fine and it’s a necessary social function of stories, to create a shared world and frame of reference in the collective unconscious. Still, something does feel off to me. If you think your values are correct, and then you construct a world where most of civilization disagrees with you but just happens to be wrong every time they do while your self insert character is right.

When I dig into my intuition here, I don’t even think what I find disappointing is that the “tolerance and forgivness” approach works out in the env. What I find disappointing is that refusal to acknowledge or explore the tradeoff. It’s like a Law and Order episodes where the detectives are given a choice between torturing a terrorist to defuse a bomb or letting hundreds of people die, after much hand wringing decide that torture is bad (cue applause lights and them being portrayed as great people) and then via deus ex machina the bomb is somehow defused anyway. It’s sidestepping the moral difficulty.

If I could snap my fingers and have GPT-7 generate an alternate story arc, I guess it might go something like this.

• The settled races of the world are cruel towards goblins. They hate them and hunt them. Still, it’s true that when goblins grow in number chieftains then lords and then kings arise. It’s true that they almost always leave hundreds of thousands of dead in their wake. It’s also true that most, but not all, goblins are predisposed to be evil, cruel and hateful and you can’t really integrate them. Reservations could work, but would require constant policing, border wars every once in a while etc… Does Erin still do the right thing? Does she still fight for goblins to be seen as people, knowing that while some deserve that most never will?
• The Antinum cross the sea fleeing from god knows what and engage in a brutal war. A decade or so later, the hive near the wandering inn is also experimenting with individuality and creating conscious workers/drones. Their experiments succeed but the new works, while conscious, have alien morals. They care about spreading their hives genes, more than anything. They care about art and have morals, but their morals are Blue and Orange. They also still post an existential threat to the world, with their newfound ability to level and their rapid breeding. What does Erin do? Does she cross her fingers and hope that the hive finds a way to live with the other races. Or does she sell them out, knowing that if she waits it’ll be too late if they become an unstopable swarm and destroy everything and every one she loves.