Cram School

"Six such straigh As

Cut 'em in the bathroom

So this is it then?

You're here to win, friend

[...]

Ring-ring, call 'em up

Tell 'em 'bout the new trends"

 

Sleigh Bells  - Rill Rill

____________________________________________ 

"Animals can be driven crazy by placing too many in too small a pen. Homo sapiens is the only animal that voluntarily does this to himself."

Robert A. Heinlein - From the Notebooks of Lazarus Long

____________________________________________

"ACADEME, n. An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.

ACADEMY, n. [from ACADEME] A modern school where football is taught."

 

Ambrose Bierce - The Devil's Dictionary 

____________________________________________ 

"The fool room's out of order," he said. "It won't respond."

"Or---"

"Or what?"

"Or it can't respond," said Lydia, "because the children have thought about Africa and lions and killing so many days that the room's in a rut."

 

Ray Bradbury - The Veldt (1950)

____________________________________________ 

 

 

The recent riots in France over... what is it this week? Education, right. They put me in mind of a standard complaint about complaining, specifically the repeatedly trotted out observation that everyone seems to have an opinion

DENHAM'S DENTIFRICE!

about what's wrong with the school system. Well, yeah? Because we've all been through it? And it's an artificial, one-size-fits-all environment that ends up fitting nobody? I'm not sure why you'd expect a blank Yelp page on that one.

 

On a completely unrelated topic, once upon a time there were some mice. Mice in paradise. Para-mice. (You might've watched the spin-off when you were younger.) Plenty of food, no predators, a nice, cozy, weatherproofed wonderland. Forever and ever. Which lasted about a year before they started acting psychotic. Six hundred days before they altogether stopped even breeding then gradually died off, having never even remotely used up the food or shelter handed to them. J.B. Calhoun's behavioral sink experiments have been fashionably sneered at over the past sixty years. They were, after all, not properly controlled and the conclusions drawn were shamelessly verbalized in human terms. So unprofessional. So unseemly.

 

Okay, naughty-naughty Doc Bumpass*, let's assume we've given him the requisite wrist-slap... but have you actually tried reading some of his observations? Because much like the DENHAM'S DENTIFRICE! great dystopian novels which the opening decades of the 21st century have only proven more prophetic, not only does the general slant of the behavioral sink model paint an unflattering caricature of our current society, but so do quite a few of its uncomfortably rodential details. It is difficult to read of females demanding safe spaces and turning hyperaggressive, including toward their own young, without picturing an insecure she-mouse manically screeching from her nest box. It is downright impossible to hear of outcast males huddling together, randomly abusing each other with no hope of escape, without seeing the online cults built around macho figureheads. Or even more on-the-nose, to read of Calhoun's "beautiful ones" or mice whose sole activity beyond addressing their physical needs was reduced to obsessively grooming themselves, without seeing the fitness craze of the previous generation or rampant plastic surgery and "looksmaxxing" as its logical progression.

 

Which is not to say such results have been viewed correctly upon entering public consciousness. Thanks in no small part to the author's own abuse of Biblical allegory, you shouldn't be surprised at hearing right-wingers gleefully drawing a "careful what you wish for" moral from the story interpreted as proof that society must inflict hardship and privation, that the poor should never be helped, that the vast bulk of the populace should be constantly threatened with homelessness and starvation as "natural" conditions. Or, to take another often mistaken slant, though I myself would gladly take it as an argument against overpopulation, re-iterations of such environments seem to indicate that it's not sheer crowd size so much as social pressures which foment destructive behaviour and ultimate collapse. Perception of one's peers matters more than their physical existence for this purpose.

 

Which brings us back to the classroom. So as not to attempt sipping the ocean through a straw, let's limit tonight's point to a single facet of education: the basic, now quite universal class environment of many same-age students at their desks and a teacher lording it up front. A head-count of thirty could easily have counted as an entire clan in the stone age, covering everything from toothless infants to equally toothless old farts. Though villages in recorded history grew somewhat larger, even a growing youth's closest peers would only roughly be the same age. Most of your day-to-day life would be spent learning the monkey way, not memorization but observation and imitation of elders of various ages, being gradually included in their activities. A little tot might curiously watch his father sharpen tools, a slightly older kid might carry said tools back and forth, then later learn when they need sharpening, then a year later give some tools a tentative once-over, then a couple years after that be in charge of keeping them sharp. And all the while he'd be hearing comments about whetstones from mom and grandpa, and answer his younger brother's questions about the topic to the best of his knowledge.

 

No natural human milieu consists of a uniform swarm of the same age.**

 

Now, let's acknowledge that just as the complexity of a world beyond subsistence farming explains to some degree an extension of childhood as learning period, it also creates a need for formal education. We ain't just grindin' rusty old spades no mo'. Anyone who thinks homeschooling could ever again suffice on a large scale after WW1 deliberately ignores that a modern upbringing far outstrips the competence of ape instinct to instruct one's offspring.

Don't eat the red berries? Fully within a monkey's informational landscape.

Plow the field, plant it in spring, weed it in summer, harvest it in fall? Parental instruction can still encompass that.

Say your ps and qs, maintain your automobile's oil level and tire pressure, pad your retirement fund, don't (get caught) steal(ing)? Uhh, now you're demanding a bit of a stretch, getting shaky, quite a few parents flounder as we can see the haphazard results all around us.

Teaching your children to navigate the conceptual tangles of a multimillennial, multicultural artistic, scientific and philosophical canon, or post-industrial interpersonal and economic concerns? Far, far beyond the capacity of most Homo "sapiens" to even grasp, much less articulate to the understanding of a young dependent.

So before you question the capability of modern schooling to inform, acknowledge purely private instruction simply will not fill that role in the vast majority of cases. Most homeschoolers are religious backbirths reciting psalms to their kids and calling it trigonometry.

 

But communal life, especially within institutions imposing uniformity (often via literal uniforms) also imposes a competitive and conformative stress easily eclipsing any actual education that might occur, a topic again embarrassingly recognizable in Calhoun's famous article's concluding emphasis on "role fulfillment":

"the continuing high survival of many individuals to sexual and behavioural maturity culminates in the presence of many young adults capable of involvement in appropriate species-specific activities. However, there are few opportunities for fulfilling these potentialities. In seeking such fulfilment they compete for social role occupancy with the older established members of the community. This competition is so severe that it simultaneously leads to the nearly total breakdown of all normal behaviour by both the contestors and the established adults" 

There is no room for a twelve-year-old to be The Twelve-Year-Old per simian instinct as part of an extended family unit while lost in a sea of twelve-year-olds.

 

News stories have cropped up over recent years of first Australia, then Europe increasingly censoring internet access (focusing primarily on teenagers) based on poorly-defined mental health risks. But when it comes to social media sites in particular, the obsessive cliquish fad worship, the unending threat of public shaming, the weaponization of insecurity, it's hard to tell whether governments or media companies are the pot or kettle in that particular color palette. For all its capture of modern attention, Facebook does not have the power to imprison youths for full work-weeks over a period of sixteen years in glorified Mouse Utopias and set them against each other. The moral majority does that via schools.

 

Is it news to anyone that the bulk of time spent in school, from ABCs to college campuses (themselves increasingly forced to teach remedial ABCs) is not spent on academic work? Repeated stories of college-age sub-literates amply demonstrate the system is not investing that time in conveying knowledge. But all of it, every fucking second, be it recess or gym class or study hall or lunch or assemblies or recitals or after-school clubs or practicing filling in standardized test bubble sheets, is spent in the public eye, in the herd, in big rooms with many other bodies performing ritualized behavior, obeying authority and dodging public censure, being seen and judged and made minutely aware of one's social, not intellectual but social ranking according to the moral majority's consensus. That's the point. Just as Communist nations brought religious authority to heel not for an ideological opposition to irrational cultism but because they envied churches' competition to state cultism, no rational observer can ignore the screaming hypocrisy of censoring internet sites for biting older social institutions' act.

 

The decline in quality of education has done nothing to lessen the obsession with keeping youths in "educational" institutions, using any excuse to continue cramming them into those gigantic hives wallpapered with slogans. Far from it, the buildings have grown larger and the schooling lengthier and more dilute. The crowding is the point, because as those rodent Utopias demonstrated, the crowd itself, the unending impingement of public perception upon the individual, the cliques and popularity contests and sartorial fads and slogan chanting, that hell of others, will in and of itself instill dysfunction which can be weaponized as psychological lever by the rich controlling public discourse. Anxiety, aimless aggression, loss of personal agency, these are resources to be reaped by those who have always seen in that footage of mice huddling listlessly in a corner of their heaven turned hell not a warning of societal collapse but a promise of an unresisting underclass to be freely abused.

 

Stories like Bradbury's The Veldt are classic among SF's warnings of futuristic dysfunction, fear of a Santa Claus machine displacing parental authority, feeding the id until it overtakes the individual, fear of strange psychoses nursed in secret corners. Other tales prophesying conformity almost always portray it as imposed from above, by some government morality police, instead of the far cozier reality of naked ape mob rule, the "family" wall-screens Bradbury himself also posited in Fahrenheit 451. The psychosis is rather inherent in human evolutionary history, in dependence on family and tribe. It's not secret, but all too public. It's the superego, it's validation and belonging, it's a bigger entourage, more family, more friends, a bigger tribe, safety in numbers. It's every church and sports stadium and mosh-pit. Remember Jonestown needed no content algorithm or "share" button, merely the group policing itself. You don't need a hashtag to form a lynch mob, but it helps.

 

The insanity now cited as a result of social media is only the logical expansion of the playground jungle, of exploiting students' propensity to obsess over their peers' consensus instead of trying their best according to objective measures, of substituting social pressure for reality, a habit which will, observably, carry over into the adult life of a work force incapable of personal choice. Dependence, yes, but not on technology. On approval. Do remember Calhoun had already coined the term "behavioral sink" before he reached Universe 25, from earlier observations on rats which, accustomed to each others' presence, would voluntarily crowd together and scramble to all feed from the same food trough, despite multiple such food sources being made available.

No overlord.

No complicated futuristic gadgets. 

No training required.

Just sociability.

 

 

_______________________________

 

 

 

* Yes, I had to work his middle name in there. Seriously. Bumpass. Just imagine going through school as Bumpass. Not even bumpas. No. Two esses. Fully bumped. There are even places with that name! Why was I never informed of this? There's even a Bumpass, Virginia! Please tell me it's predominantly Catholic!

** Not that I'm a fan of such naturalistic arguments. You just don't get to ignore the mismatch to instinct. I would rather have actively selected for Homo superior, but obviously schools simply have not done that because they're not meant to.

 

edit:

I forgot to mention one particular memory which kept resurfacing while writing this, from when I was a fresh immigrant at the start of junior high. There was another little girl in class, and I do mean "little" as in the shortest of all of us, a tiny little sprig. Bit nerdy too, probably the most linguistically adept. At recess, having no place in their already formed play groups and not knowing the games they were playing, I quickly acquired the habit of just bringing a book out to read sitting against the school wall. So one day I'm startled by a manic screech from the playground "heeeee's pickiiiinnng hiiiss NOOOOOOSE!" and see her pointing wildly at me. That I had both hands on my book didn't seem to make much difference. While far from an extreme example, the moment's conciseness stuck with me as the sort of spontaneous sociopathy which invariably grows out of the need to divert the mob's aggression to targets of opportunity.

"Developed a cult following" developed a cult following.

Wildermyth

"Something in the woods is very strange

Birds have started singing songs of change"

 

Umm, not to nitpick, but your logo reads "saggyboobildermyth" and unless I see a helluva lot more battering ram action, that is falsely advertising a whole different fantasy subgenre!

 

Anyway, I've been putting off a Wildermyth summary due to conflicting impressions. Initially annoyed at its tabletop fetish elements, I quickly grew to love its core storytelling principle of taking heroes from humble beginnings as farmers with pitchforks and gradually building them up through chance events, avoiding the by now incredibly tedious Chosen One narratives of the Fantasy genre, fixating not on the foregone conclusion of an end-game power fantasy but various characters' tales of becoming. And really, Wildermyth appeals primarily as an RPG fan's RPG, addressing many such old complaints, my own included in the case of its magic system.

Almost entirely dependent on environment, your casters use various landscape objects to fuel their attacks. While they can be powerful in sheer damage, these more aptly fill in the offensive support elements of rooting or debuffing or shooting around corners, and magical or not, skills often show useful, situational applications. You can bounce a stone discus to an otherwise out of range target, knock an enemy back into range of a guarding warrior who didn't have enough move to reach, use splash or quick-action token damage to burn an enemy's defense, use fire to herd enemies into an archer's ambush. The tactical combat may not look deep at first glance but its elements interact for a great deal of unexpected complexity. Fights are well-varied with some requiring a bull-rush, others a gradual phalanx advance, other times forcing you to retrench.

If you can't tell, my fighter was nearly dead (and enemies will rather ruthlessly take advantage of that) but backing into a room with traps on the floor and an ambush on the doorway pretty much guaranteed the last mob would never get a shot off. 

 

But... Wildermyth retains D&D's reliance on over-randomization. High damage ratios encourage save-scumming, especially as your characters can very easily get killed/maimed in a single round based on an unavoidable roll of the dice. The opening fights of campaigns are quite apt to place you in nearly impossible fights before you've had a chance to level up any skills. Not exactly an increase in meaningful difficulty so much as "rocks fall, everyone dies" frustration. Also, your five-man band will plateau in their tactics sometime around the middle of longer campaigns, and as it's unwise to swap younger, lower-XP heroes in, you'll likely find the last ten or twenty combats quite repetitive. And almost all XP is combat XP. Forcing older heroes to retire may partly address this problem, but once you get a feel for the system you'll likely end up swapping them out even earlier to set up a fivesome for the end-game, which counterintuitively means that latter group will spend even more time together, running the same strat to soak up enough level-ups for the boss fight.

 

That "legacy" system for recruiting your old campaigns' heroes to a new one also sounds better on paper than in execution.

Recruiting old heroes makes them young again, or even revives them. It gets a bit goofy when a young sprat who learned at the old witch's knee one campaign ends up as her suddenly younger self's grizzled old mentor in the next, and it precludes any greater family tree development. Unlike for example the gut-worm quest, this harms internal consistency, not just "realism" and saps that long-term relationship building promised by their character sheets. After only the third campaign of six I found myself trying in vain to ratchet back my "legacy's" clutter of randos. For how ambiguously this plays out, let me tell you the story of Flamena the fuck-up.

When I recruited her in the second campaign she managed to get wounded in her very first fight, then lose a leg in another. At the end I "forgot" her from the legacy, only to have her inexplicably show up again... and again... and always just when I needed another huntress. So I gritted my teeth and made do with her lackluster performance. I laughed out loud when her daughter Flinena joined the band in the fifth campaign only to... you guessed it, get knocked out out in her very first fight and acquire exactly the same face-wound as her idiot mother. Which idiot then, in the climactic boss battle, one round away from near-certain defeat, ended up landing the winning hit on the big boss.

 

Well, y'ol flop-winged bat, what can I say, you were due. All golf-clap for the mighty dragonslayer. Is that a good RPG story? I guess... but too little of it was player input and too much a bug in the legacy system and comically repetitive randomization. I can't recommend all that heartily a game system more entertaining in its screw-ups.

 

That sort of wishy-washiness taints most everything else as well. There's no way to pass down artifacts as clan heirlooms, family relationships have little or no impact, and in fact you're explicitly building a new clan every time. Map locations are utterly forgettable. The cardboard cutout graphics aren't too ugly (hell I didn't complain about them in Shelter and I won't here) but the figurines' limited gamut of poses, animations and components gets, again counterintuitively, more repetitive than if they'd used simpler, more stylized pawns a la Rimworld.

I always loved that face.

But Wildermyth's biggest bugaboo comes in the form of writing. When I asked what can change the nature of a game, actively generating text was one of my stated options. But whatever LLMs are making of that now a few years after the fact, it's clear Wildermyth's approach, of swapping single words into the same sentence, or altering pre-written replies according to character personality flags, didn't get very far. The single word swaps forced very stiff dialogue which could accommodate any [FRUIT] while not being able to comment on its fruitiness, while the characters' personalized replies created non-sequiturs or jarring mood shifts. Repeating the same mini-quest is not made any fresher by one guy talking about apples instead of pears while the other randomly hates/loves them, especially since these are not allowed to impact decisions. Moreover, spotting such changes feels more like spotting the zippers on Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers' suits back when I was ten. Aaaand, channel change. 

 

Sadly, this last complaint cuts to the very heart of Wildermyth's appeal in recreating the old fairytale spirit of adventure. Though less than in Sunless Skies, the florid prose tends to crawl up its own ass as often as not in attempting to imitate old-timey jawin' and simply lacks a coherent concept of the world it's describing. Folklore, writ large, is just too wide a category to have attempted to imitate even in a game with ten times Wildermyth's staff, scrambling in vain to rebuild half a dozen different boogeyman myths from universal principles. It's too inchoate to sound authentic or immersive. Occasionally the ridiculous turns successfully to heart-wrenching melancholy (Shy and the Shadow, When Dreams Were Young, both lovely pieces) but this tends to happen with vignettes written as single contiguous narratives.

 

Even then, it's hit or miss. The writers simply lacked either the practical experience or historical research to adequately portray a pre-information-age social milieu, and if that sounds familiar, it's a complaint I've leveled constantly against more recent authors, whether in comics or in games like Solasta, Sacred Fire or The Necromancer's Tale where characters sound like nothing else but twenty-something, 21st-century yuppies babbling around the game table. Even with the best of intentions and a solid core concept, generations raised incapable of gazing beyond their own navels prove incapable of describing any other society but their own immediate clique. Anachronistic, politically correct, unaware of class interplay except to spout a few interest group slogans by rote, needlessly florid or innocently crass, it's the modern perversion of storytelling into soapboxing and fan service that seems to harm recent cRPGs more than their interactions or aesthetics. 

 

And I would have expected better based on first impressions. The core atmosphere, the mood music, the attention to descriptive sensory details, the heroic trajectories, are solid. The Austin clan seems to have some connections too. I had certainly not expected to see Ursula Vernon's name among the writing credits, unless the name's a complete coincidence. Disappointed that this only seems to reflect one short credited interlude about a turtle, still her more coherent example of such modernized folklore in Digger should not have been ignored. A worse and more pervasive influence likely came from Shae Rossi, who if I'm not mistaken is the feminist cretin largely responsible for ruining LotRO from the pandemic onward. Though (I'll admit it) her ignorant, vandalist approach to folklore works better in Wildermyth's looser, happy-go-lucky interpretation of adventuring than in deliberately shitting on Tolkien for her own gratification.

 

Sad, because though it does not quite reach its ambitions as interactive storytelling, Wildermyth hits its mark quite often. I have begun every time with a sense of wonder and ended with a sense of accomplishment than no bombastic trailer or achievement list can duplicate. Several of my characters have acquired personalities in my mind, the boisterous shock troopers, the reliable one-eagle-eyed sniper and soft-spoken support caster, the versatile mid-range combatant, the grim-faced brick wall. Some events here and there are spot-on calculated to make for a satisfying narrative and strategic payoff.

At least it wasn't a bible in his breast pocket.

It's well worth playing, and serves as positive example in many respects, but also disappointing in how often it gratuitously undercuts its own strongest features. Sometimes you just wanna smack the good ones upside their heads for their fewer mistakes, y'know?

I faff in the face of danger!

Mister Drab-Pants

Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough vs. its Shivaree cover

 

As I wrap up Wildermyth's campaigns, I find myself looking ahead to which RPG I want to queue up next. Owlcat're dragging their feet with that last Rogue Trader DLC. Or... I've been wanting to replay Mask of the Betrayer for nostalgia' sake, but on firing up NWN2 on my more recent computer I find it utterly riddled with graphics glitches and lockups, so that ain't happenin' yet. Or maybe... Witcher 3's been sitting in my collection forever. I was afraid it wouldn't have enough stuff to kill but I hear it's been remonstered now.

 

To sweeten the deal, my ultra-exclusive-dooper-super edition is offering me fancy duds. The schmanciest! I mean, I guess I could do without the... frilly... feathery... leather flake crap around the neck, but aside from that, as fantasy armours go, it's a remarkably down-to-earth design. As fantasy video game armours go, even more so. Hell, it appears a strict requirement of interdimensional travel to get persistently kitted out in one flavor or another of absurdly baroque furry/ferric finery boasting enough frills to make me look like I've been swallowed by a turkey buffed to an eye-searing gloss. MMOs of course have been the worst offenders over the past couple of decades, needing to consistently bait their audience into the cash shop with statelier and statelier status symbols, but it's not like you could escape it in single-player either, likely thanks to the long tradition of fantasy story illustrations being an ergononic nightmare.

"Everybody got their pom-poms? Let's go tickle evil."

Flanges, frills, florettes, reliefs and embroideries, flared spikes and spiked flares, scutes, flutes and zoot-suits, oh my! Even plain cloth gleamed in the light like it was all triple-thick satin dipped in jewel dust. Flippin' hell, it was harder to find armour in Baldur's Gate 3 not dreamt up by a fifteen year old girl on a Red Bull bender. Let's not even get into Japanese games' costume design.

 

Much as I hate to admit it, there is some backing for this in our historic record, as advertising wealth and power has always entailed an inordinate degree of... well "bling" for lack of a better word. While visiting the treasury exhibition in Vienna, I did a double-take on seeing the so-called "sword of St. Mauritius" realizing it was the only piece on display equipped with an actual handle which might conceivably be gripped for more than five seconds, instead of some knobbly, slippery, jewel-encrusted eyesore. And yes, yes, I Get It, they're ceremonial pieces that were never meant to see more use than a bishop's bible.

 

... but then, is my game character strictly ceremonial? Because I was hoping to take him out for a spin. Maybe track some mud on an ogre's carpet. Maybe both pummel and pommel some bad guys. Maybe track down a dryad and check the armor rating on my codpiece, if you catch my driftwood. But whatever my adventures, one type of character I have no interest in roleplaying is the type of ditz worried about glitz over substance. Must everything be disco, my dear dancing queens? Has society gotten so feminized that our escapist fantasies no longer have room for the sort of grim Yojimbo With No Name who in real life owns ten gray shirts? (No that I!... okay, yes, yes I do.)

 

You really want to tempt me with a collector's edition bonus? Offer me rags! Sack-cloth protection over a comfortable plain beige linen shirt, a pile of mismatched furs and leathers, an unadorned verdigried hauberk dented with a thousand blows, scuffed, blatantly re-soled boots as shapeless as the badgers they were probably made from. And just to meet you art fags halfway, if you must embellish, I will admit there's a sort of busy visual design even wolf-men will abide:

thus, the lotus, from humble mud

The overgrown, the tangled and patchwork and decrepitly layered, the clanking, fluttering dregs of a misaligned loom and cross-eyed cobbler, the heavily downcast dross of a long-crumbled forge all stacked atop each other, the strength of entropy repurposed, portable exposed brickwork, let me clad at least myself as urban or verdant decay embodied, a crumbled brutalist temple tridiunal, and I'll forgive you far more of your foppish frippery.

I took a walk in gusty -20C weather last year and lucked out witnessing some unfamiliar behavior from these all too familiar dung factories, Canada geese. Until then I had never seen how their type handle a "to build a fire" situation.

Apparently they still fear predators more than the cold. Instead of taking shelter they were out on the ice, lined up uniformly, aerodynamically, crops against the prevailing wind like a fleet into the current, feet and head protected, letting it flow over them. Compare to a still protected but less orderly arrangement on a calmer day just a few degrees warmer.

I guess there are degrees of hunkering down in comfort even for a walking down comforter.

Kindred Not

I'd planned to summarize my thoughts on Wildermyth for tonight, but decided I'd rather run at least one more campaign (having finished 4/6) before doing so, and a common weakness instead reminded me of one of the internet's many dead webcomics. (So that'll be next week instead.)

 

Kindred Not tells of a motley band escaping not to but from their world's large militaristic superpower. How's that for a change of pace from the past years' news cycle? Similar to my comments on Tangled River, it opts for a drawing style more popular in the mid-20th century. Clean lines with characters realistically proportioned but somewhat stiffly, theatrically posed. (Dick Tracy always jumps to mind.) Except instead of using it to illustrate a subgenre popular in that era, it uses the previous century itself as setting.

 

The author went to some pains to reference appropriate decor in everything from wallpaper and lamps to cookware and haberdashery. Admirably so, and it makes every establishing shot a treat. But if reference images and preserved historic buildings serve well enough visually, when it comes to practical details she quickly runs into younger generations' difficulty in portraying a society still teetering between industrialization and traditional life. Feeding cow's milk to an infant without boiling it first? My grandmother would've twisted yer ears right offen yer head, girl!

 

And that's the more pervasive issue: not just practical details like the milk, but the mundane tone of life in older societies which modern authors fail to grasp on an intuitive level: the casual acceptance of corporal punishment and other physical violence, the more or less strict separation of the sexes in both labor and leisure, the dictatorial work ethic, what has now become the world of yesteryear was not just furnished differently but acted differently in a myriad subtle or striking ways. I'll have to revisit this topic in wider detail elsewhen, but for Kindred Not's purposes, the very flavor of dialogue constantly torpedoes that visual immersion.

 

It's only looking at such newer works of fiction that it becomes apparent how unaware modern audiences appear to have grown of the officiousness dominating interactions as late as ~1990, much less 1930. The insistent "mister" this-and-that or various honorifics, the weight carried by a "miss" versus "missus" or the strict adherence to greeting formulae, polite society was a lot more... well, polite, in the old days. Politely violent, politely sadistic, but polite nonetheless, and if you're writing period fiction you really need to get into that mindset. There's a scene early in Kindred Not's second chapter where the teenage girl brings her new male acquaintance to a safehouse operated by a family friend. As soon as she opens the door, the new guy grabs her from behind by the shoulder to warn her from divulging too much information. Uhhh... no! Ronan would've punched Caden square in the mouth in that moment, no questions asked, I don't care what early 20th-century country you're emulating for your fantasy. And sadly, an inability to enter that mindset drags many new works of fiction down, Kindred Not included.

 

___________________________________

 

 

Addendum:

A good comparison might be drawn to a page from Erfworld featuring, as its parody du jour, "chief healomancer" Pierce. You can practically hear Alan Alda's halting giggle and self-conscious smirk in every line of dialogue, a particularly interesting case because Alda's Pierce was himself a seventies' impression of fifties mores and the transgression thereof, mixed with roaring '20s stage comedy. Yet Rob Balder vaulted seamlessly across those more than a century's worth of generational barriers. It is never unclear where the lines of propriety lie and how deliberately they're being trespassed. The information age spy attempts modern seduction, feigns fifties pudeur, is teased in the tones of the sexual revolution and the punchline lands straight out of Groucho Marx' lips. Now that is a firm grasp of milieu!