"It's the way we have the world. Without the telling, we don't have anything at all. The moment goes by like the water of a river. We'd tumble and spin and be helpless if we tried to live in the moment.We'd be like a baby. A baby can do it but we'd drown. Our minds need to tell, need the telling. To hold. The past has passed, and there's nothing in the future to catch hold of. The future is nothing yet. How could anybody live there? So what we have is the words that tell what happened and what happens. What was and is."
Ursula K. LeGuin - The Telling
(slight spoiler for this below)
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"An author's way of getting to Mars (say) is part of his story of his Mars; and of his universe, as far as that particular tale goes. It's part of the picture, even if it's only in a marginal position; and it may seriously affect all that's inside.
[...]
If you're spaceship-minded and scientifictitious, or even if you let your characters be so, it's likely enough that you'll find such things of that order in your new world, or only see sights that interest such folk."
J.R.R. Tolkien - The Notion Club Papers
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By Grabthar's hammer, I am sick of supernatural invocations!
Mentioning Kingdom Come: Deliverance piqued myself to pick it back up and, having polished off side-quests years ago, finally get into its main quest. Which is how I discovered that unlike standard Elder Scrolls-ish fare, the main quest actually unlocks a fair handful of new side-quests as you advance, especially DLC material. Hey, not that I'm not complaining about finding more content for one of the most immersive games I've played in my thirty years of such... but I do think it weird to stumble across three NPCs at once blathering about dream visions:
Ran into a rando' soothsayer in the Rattay marketplace and told her she's full of shit without bothering to listen to her babbling, then the "relic" peddler in Sasau told me he dreamt about me as his apprentice and that asshole's definitely full of perpetual shit... but come on, Johanka too? She's supposed to be one of the sane ones! (Well, adjusted to a 1400s definition of sanity at any rate.)
I mean, I trust her quest will get resolved as traumatic stress. Czechia, whatever the country's faults, is supposedly one of the least afflicted by our species' superstitious idiocy (with over half the population openly non-religious) and Warhorse's so far refreshingly treated religion as historical trends explained by human psychology, mass manipulation or abuse of psychotropics. Maybe I'd feel less apprehensive if so many other works of otherwise secular fiction just in my lifetime hadn't poisoned the well by supernatural twists. Look at TV series alone:
Dark raised my hackles worse than most, as up until the end its heavy religious symbolism had been written as to go both ways, easily interpretable purely as the leads' self-definition or self-importance. The series as a whole (ignoring the tediously drawn out teenage romance abused for filler sex scenes) was to that point good science fiction rooted in a physically and not metaphysically active phlebotinum combined with sapient machinations, with no need for the multiverse to give a flyin' fuck about your life's meaning.
Before that it would've been, oh, say, Lost. Not that it was worth watching after the first season anyway, but the finale still turned my stomach. Even after the show started spewing "dharma" left and right, it could have remained a tale of reason domesticating some unknown cosmic force, as it has always done with fire, the wheel, motive forces or nuclear fission. There was absolutely zero excuse for purgatorying shit up, invalidating all the characters' action as toys of invisible supernatural actors via the trite old "it was aalll a dreeaaam" dodge.
In fact, it reminds me that Twin Peaks, fifteen years earlier, could also have taken its seeming supernatural elements in either direction, but no writers leaving themselves that option can ever seem to avoid the cheap cop-out of blaming all their plot holes and inconsistencies on supernatural boogeymen or divine plans.
Hell, I won't pretend Dallas was worth watching, but at least it was cheap, laughable human drama... up until the finale shoehorned a devil in for no particular reason.
More recently, a somewhat underrated two-season affair called Zone Blanche reiterated the Twin Peaks routine. But for all that its characters' progress, allegiances and motivations remained interesting, any attempt at ambivalence vis-a-vis the supernatural fell flat even sooner. It's been done so many times by now that if you notice writers leaving even the slightest opening for supernatural explanations, you know with a certainty they'll come true.
The less said about Battlestar Galactica, the better.
The Telling is rightly seen as one of LeGuin's lesser works, partly for a redundant suite of quaint native storyteller characters, partly for digressing into the protagonist's life on Earth to little effect, but not least for how hard it strains at differentiating good superstition from bad superstition, upholding that American yuppie orientalism to which we've grown oh so tiresomely accustomed.
Illustrating the erasure of native cultures across Asia by 20th-century Communist regimes would've remained poignant enough if she'd stuck to valid critiques against historical revisionism, censorship and outright book-burning, physical and cultural genocide or the sheer violence of the rapid, enforced shift into industrialization, but unfortunately the author also felt some desperate need to justify the continued practice of primitive superstition. And of course she couldn't. There is no benefit brought by loose storytelling about herbs and physiology that cannot be improved by organized medical exploration and standards of care. Whatever pychological benefit we draw from contact with the natural world (and we do) does not extend to dependence on the whims of one's home garden plot and the weather for sustenance or a lifetime of backbreaking manual labor leaving no time for personal growth. However enlightening a single culture's mythology may be, it cannot compare to the skeptic's freedom to explore any and all cultures' mythologies side by side, with no fear of divine wrath or falling off one's dharma by erring from various eightfold, quarterfold or howevermanyfold paths.
And LeGuin damn well knew it. The primitivism she wanted to uphold had nothing intrinsic to offer. So she did what writers always do at that point, what we pay them to do: make shit up. During yoga class, the protagonist sees someone walk on air, and later more or less confirms it. There. Value. Worth! It doesn't matter if the yokels cannot match modern accomplishments in physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, anthropology, because they've got MAGIC POWERS! They and only they. And of course said powers cannot be measured, communicated or demonstrated. They must be glimpsed out of the corner of one's eye in poorly lit gymnasia by unprofessional anthropologists who've "gone native" much like divine commandments are always whispered to a single prophet atop mountain peaks and deep within caves filled with hallucinogenic fumes or behind various curtains.
But take our word for it: it's real. Somewhere in a darkened cave a holy retard walks on air at this very moment!
Why?
Why do you need to hear that?
I spent much of my childhood reading Christian myths and a two-volume set of ancient Greek myths, and fables from the Orient about dragons sleeping beneath dry wells or palaces with unending entrance pavilions, and A Thousand and One Nights and forest witches luring princes aided by helpful birds... but I never needed to believe Perseus was real to enjoy his adventures. And I never needed Sarah Connor to combat terminators by releasing djinni from bottles. Why do you?
Let's stop pretending that writers are cleverly mixing fantasy with reality or science by cramming magic into non-magical plot and settings. What they're really doing is clinging to stultifying superstition to appeal to the subhuman degenerate apes comprising 99% of this species, incapable of distinguishing between internally consistent, rational sequences of events and wish-making. Of course every-yet-anotheredundantrite deus ex machina (emphasis on the deus) need not be clever; it must needs be exactly what it is: predictably reassuring to the mindless majority dependent on some insane belief that supernatural forces are looking out for them.
Every seraph or fomori popping up to solve a murder case reassures the imbecile hordes that even though no trace of the supernatural has ever shown up in the real world, it must be waiting juuust around the corner, just like in them thar teevee show!
And the world's IQ slips another point.
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