Abetting the Setting

"My theories are borrowed from somewhere else
And I've never had too many to talk about
'Cause you were real quick and you were quick to point out, well
That was borrowed too"

 

Ugly Casanova - Diggin' Holes

 

 

From my first swipes at Europa Universalis 4 I wasn't crazy about the far larger density of scripted events compared to #3. Granted this is partly a matter of taste, being a bigger fan of strategy than of historical re-enactment, but such events can quickly overshadow whatever theme you had intended for your campaign. Aragon, for instance, gets several major freebie options for peaceful annexation during its early game (Naples, Navarre, Castile) whose overwhelming benefit dictated my early strategy of maxing diplomacy (national focus, +2 advisor) but going on a charm offensive instead of the naval/trade offensive I had originally envisioned. I will say though, I may wrinkle my nose at the implementation but at least Paradox maintains solid justification throughout, avoiding veering from the game's historical grounding, consistently feeding greater immersion and not tossing random shit at the wall to see if it sticks.

 

Which is not to say sticking to central theme completely avoids weirdness. Take Old World:

It's a Boss Baby prequel, just roll with it.

History, after all, is verifiably weird in many places, child monarchs being the least of it. On the other hand, Old World's enfilade of early monotheisms has repeatedly tempted writers to place more emphasis on the supernatural than feels natural to a naturalistic setting. It's a given that your citizens would believe nonsense, quite another to make it a verifiable in-game force. The blessed/cursed attributes (altering your ruler's random positive/negative event chance) always struck me as out of place, and the newer natural disaster expansion plays around with prophetic dreams and such. Still they cultivate a light touch, thankfully, where more amateurish developers tend to smack you in the face with such digressions.

 

Vagrus is a fantasy RPG set in a Romanesque evil empire with half-elves, half-dragons, half-ants and several other halves, all shooting fireballs and swashing their bronze buckle(r)s. Yet when I traveled to the obligatory Thousand and One Nights expansion, I was greeted with this.

Yes, everyone's fighting over oil wells. As in petroleum. Crude, that is. Black gold. Texas tea. Mullah lubricant. Whatever happened to olives and sesame? Instead of the simplistic and anachronistic Arabs=Oil, why not dip into middle-eastern references more appropriate to the old-timey setting like the spice trade or the silk road, which would've meshed so much better with Vagrus' core caravan-management motif, or hell, why not Arabs' obsession with horses? Or a Persian-themed demon-slaying fire cult aping Zoroastrianism? Or a militarily brilliant lame upstart princeling denied noble title for lack of lineage but expanding a namesake empire off said spice/silk trade. Or dive even deeper to show locals pouring libations to their dead relatives in Ereshkigal's domain? Or if you want to go the Egyptian route, a lizard cult evoking Sobek, since you've already got lizard mounts and nonsensical dinos as random encounters? Why the fuck with the derricks out of nowhere?

 

Sure, Vagrus already featured occasional modern elements like your dwarf companion's pistol, but that at least was presented as a rarity and even then just a primitive flintlock that takes an extra round to reload and is painfully inaccurate, as early firearms were. (At least it doesn't blow up in his face as they were wont to do. Don't ask me where he's getting the powder.) Even if you wanted black viscous petro-oleum in your game, you could've stuck to ancient surface extraction and the odd shallow well; crude, unrefined fuel and tar seeing limited local use, not a full-blown mechanized industry over which wars are fought.

 

It's worth comparing how Tolkien for example got away with his own anachronisms, like the bomb at Helm's Deep and the pterosaur mounts. For one, they're very limited in scope. For another, they're contextualized as departures from the norm showing the unnaturalness of both Saruman's futurism and Sauron's brutish, prehistoric primitivism. Yes, yes, you're allowed to roll your eyes a bit at the Shire's cozy Edwardian provincialism (not to mention the books' larger monarchist/medievalist slant) but that secure grounding allows small departures from such norms to spice without glutting. Coherence matters. (Just please don't look for it on this blog.)

 

You might raise an eyebrow, for instance, at Cyberpunk 2077 throwing Buddhist monks into its dingy futuristic mix... but dinginess makes a fine fit for those sworn to poverty, so there you have the same angle of building on an existing theme. The first quest you encounter concerns two brothers targeted by a street gang for forcible mechanical implantation.

You can later revisit the dilemma: though the artificiality of the modern world is opposed to their sought purity, they don't see it as an absolute impediment, merely a lengthening of the path.

Thus it becomes just another angle on Night City's culture of excess, bringing everything back to the central theme. It contrasts nicely with punk rage as well:

As another series of seemingly chance encounters has a monk feeding you meditations on your elemental constituents... via a neural interface. And that's all. A quest consisting of sitting peacefully in various damp, airy, sunlit meadow cutscenes... and don't spoil the ending for me 'cause I don't think I've finished it yet. But once again, though seemingly random, this element feeds back into the game's central theme of raging against the machine - both in rage and machine. And honestly, you could probably substitute Franciscans for the same effect, were you able to turn to facets you actually need for your narrative and downplay or throw out whatever superficialities or heavy-handed moralizing fundamentalists would want included. It's not as if William Gibson didn't do the same with voodoo themes forty years ago.
 

However, many of the worst cases of such digression are not meant to integrate with the rest of the story at all, but are thrown in to browbeat the audience with a supposedly all-important moral lesson. It's harder to find anything made in the 2010s which doesn't fall in that trap, but as just one example within the medium of games, try Dead State which among other ill-advised soapboxing gave us the NPC companion Karen, who turns out to be in the early stages of pregnancy and demands an abortion. Because it's her body, her choice, full stop, and only an anti-abortionist filthy-male-pig-reactionary-loser-fundamentalist-etc. would deny her this absolute right.

Great?

Now don't ask me what the hell this has to do with blasting zombies' heads off.

 

Of course, there could have been endless ways to work the issue into the plot of your survival shelter, as a pregnancy would raise any number of practical and ethical concerns relevant to the situation.

Do you have adequate medical facilities?

Can your makeshift tribe provide the material resources to ensure an infant's care? Have you looted any baby formula and diapers?

Can you other scavengers afford to support her while she's bloated to uselessness or has a parasite attached to her nipples? And is it fair to ask that of you?

Would someone else be willing to raise the child after birth, lessening her burden?

Are you in a secure location where you can start a long-term community?

For that matter, as you have zero information about the world at large, might you assume humanity has been wiped out and you desperately need every scrap of genetic diversity you can get to rebuild the species? 

Never mind all that because our real priorities are having her take umbrage at the very notion of possibly maybe questioning her choice, browbeating you for not supporting her enough and breaking up with her boyfriend and self-inducing an abortion with a random pill overdose (meant to make her look heroic) because woman right, man wrong, nothing else matters. That they named this bitch "Karen" just a few years before that became a meme is just icing on the cake.

 

Maybe your story can accommodate an inexplicable dinosaur or oil rig or some superstitious blather, maybe it cannot. Cases differ. I suppose the real question to ask yourself is: are you being a Karen about it?

 

 

____________________________________________

 

 

P.S.: Don't forget to lube your mullah!

Dumb Animals

"I was caught in Fangorn and spent many weary days as a prisoner of the Giant Treebeard."

- Gandalf, in an early draft of LotR from The History of Middle-Earth

__________________________________________________

 

Amish guy smacks Berlin in the face with a bedpost, news at 11.

While I welcomed its predecessor Moon as hard science fiction at a time when the superhero movie craze was just amplifying, watching (and increasinly skipping through) Mute I found myself constantly wondering why this was made into a SciFi story at all, aside from the hero regaining his voice by technological means, which foregone conclusion hardly justifies two hours of padding. Where Moon solidly anchored its plot to its scientific precepts, Mute looks like Duncan Jones decided to make a cyberpunk flick, just because, and backfilled generic details as an afterthought. So, obviously it needs some robots for the techno angle, plus lotsa pimps 'n hoes for the gritty film noir angle, and the rest is extended shots of the hero or antivillain brooding. So much brooding.

Visually at least its cold, inhuman urban wasteland aesthetic fits the bill (and is rather skillfully conveyed, e.g. that two second time-skip at the library) but even in that department you have to giggle at the occasional gratuitous interposition of <something techy> into the scenery to remind us we're at least nominally watching SF. The plot itself (a plucky squire pure of heart and doughty of bicep, racing to the aid of his lady love) offers nothing you couldn't get out of ten thousand children's fables no matter how many broken noses and transvestite hookers you toss in to jack the rating out of PG territory. Even a potentially solid ending is undermined by sap and a lack of attention to how exactly our hero will contend with the scores of mobsters he's just set after his blood. Tone shifts hardly help either, undecided from scene to scene whether it wants to be Blade Runner or Pulp Fiction, and stock politically correct characterization just nails that coffin shut. Every man is a cackling sexual predator except the one-good-man protagonist, women are innocent victims and goodness intrinsically tied to cuteness. And of course the primitivist angle goes hand-in-hand with the feminist one for bonus purity points. If you want more depth than that, you won't find it watching Skarsgard sit dramatically at various tables.

I'm reminded Tolkien said there was only one part of LotR which flowed leisurely, which he wrote basically in one go once he had its basic idea, and that was the Rohan / ents / Isengard conflict. Of course that's largely because the ent angle runs on a stock nature vs. tech juxtaposition (and yes, it was stock even in the early 20th century, and had been for a century prior) and he lifted the hubristic comeuppance angle from Macbeth (twice: no man of woman born / 'til Birnam wood remove to Dunsinane) because he disliked Shakespeare's handling* of those plot twists. His original idea was pure fairytale fluff, in which giants fee-fi-fo-fum and carry off victims to their lairs; not much to it. Fairytales were invented by simple minds which simply imagined bigger versions of themselves, giants as giant humans, because that's as far as a dirt-farming illiterate's imagination could stretch. Tolkien did not abandon that source material ("ent" shares its linguistic root with "ettin") but tweaked it into a more naturalistic extension of the world beyond ourselves.

Nota bene, Treebeard did not shift completely from being a mean giant who imprisons good guys to a member of Aragorn's army. He (and his kin by extension) is still prickly, standoffish, dangerous independent will alien to the world of men (as magical creatures are by default outside monotheistic folklore) not evil but best left alone. And though Eowyn in turn was given the right-of-way in her big speech about being denied her chance at glory just because she's a woman, she never descended into a trite feminist "strong woman" stereotype slapping boys around to show 'em who's boss. In fact she was at one point meant to die on the Pelennor Fields, her mad quest for glory being a mode of self-destruction driven by hopeless infatuation and family tragedies, yet another victim of the defeatism Saruman/Sauron's machinations instilled in their enemies. The point being not least that anyone who actually wants to go to war must be at least partly cracked.

 

And he achieved that added nuance by moving past set pieces or stock heroics and even by critiquing The Immortal Bard Himself! But that took a lifetime of study and reconsidering many drafts, not just pumping out the lucrative Hobbit sequel his publisher had demanded.

Publish or perish. It's often remarked that Dickens' books are padded due to being paid by the chapter. But of course plenty of 19th-century writers also padded their works for the very same reason. They just lacked Dickens' flair and so have dropped from memory. How many movies have you seen which featured one or two decent scenes but obviously should never have been more than a 15-30min short - dragged out to two hours to pay the mortgages of armies of third camera grip understudy foley wranglers and buy a fifth private jet for a studio executive? How much less wasteful would it be to simply pay all such potential creators a universal income simply to exist, and let them create at their own pace, rather than actively push an economy based on the mass production of waste?

"Is the rabble also necessary for life?"

 

__________________________________________________

 

 

* I'm of mixed opinion. I find Tolkien replacing "no man (of woman born)" with a woman instead of caesarian birth a more fitting resolution, but I do still prefer Shakes' original non-supernatural solution to the removal of the wood. (Don't get me wrong, I love the ents, but still...)

Void the Void

"We transmit on all frequencies
Talk show panic gossip queens
Racing into ruin
Racing on to our demise"

 

Aesthetic Perfection - Into the Void

 

 

Before complaining about Darkest Dungeon 2, let me sidetrack to say the validity of any fad is inverse to the extent to which it is, in fact... a fad. An idiotically and endlessly regurgitated meme. A refuge for the unimaginative and simpleminded. An idiot-friendly set piece. Vapid filler. Dross.

 

Anything can be dragged down to that level if enough of the braindead majority pile onto the bandwagon.

So first off, everyone give Lovecraft a rest. He's getting as played-out as Tolkien elves by last decade. Likewise, as everyone willfully misinterpreted elves as mere spindly prettyboys while ignoring the poignancy of cursed pride, doomed creation or waning nobility, "lovecraftian" has been debased to "tentacled fish monsters" increasingly ignoring the persistent theme of human insufficiency, immeasurably vast antiquity or creeping decadence which elevated his stories past the usual creep show. When The Secret World did it, the reserves had not yet been tapped dry. This ain't then. Come now, horror's not my preferred genre, but there must be other sources of inspiration you can channel. (Just don't fall back on red horny devils or googly-eyed oni.) (Or vampires.) (Or ffs, anything but zombies!)

On a related note, stop spouting "the void" for a bogeyman catch-all. Even as a teenager back in '97 I had no trouble calling bullshit on Event Horizon's standard trappings of a burning hell being called a "dimension of pure chaos" ... which would in fact mean a whole lotta nothing at all. Certainly not a force obsessed with attacking humans. Yes, yes, the certainty of nonexistence is the core under-riding anxiety of any sapient, but you're hardly plumbing those philosophical depths by constantly spouting "the void" as highfalutin' smokescreen for generic goblins. I'm sure you all want a slice of Games Workshop's pie, but a setting designed to peddle fifty-dollar toy soldiers to fanatical collectors is just too obviously a make-work pile of warped pretextium crystals with no depth worth tapping. There's nothing there to copy. The setting really is... a void. You won't steal away Warhammer's fans unless you can slap the Warhammer logo onto your product. Even Blizzard didn't manage it.

Also, as appealing as "the void" sounds to any writer desperate to leave all options open for future sequels / expansions cramming anything and everything trendy into that kitchen sink, you do know you're not the only ones who can spot that cop-out from coherence and a proper worldbuilding framework, right? If it's everything, it's nothing. I'm not sitting here in front of my screen awed at infinite possibilities when I hear your voice actors intone "kay-oss" or "the aether" or "Tha-Voyd" * with all the gravitas of fifth graders reciting a book report on a book they didn't read. I'm thinking "yeah, mmkay, so there's maybe a 5% chance whatever rando' shit these rando' scheisters pull out of their asses next might not bore me to tears." The suspense is not killing me.

______________________________________________________________

* Or worst of all by this point "multiverse"

F**klore

"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)

_________________________________________

 

"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

_________________________________________

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 psychological 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.

999 words

"Whattodowheretogohowtodowithoutyou?

You're-my-pole-star!"

Caravan Palace - Jolie Coquine

 

Watching the first half of the latest Dune movie, I was reminded of one difficulty in adapting the book. A disproportionate slice of its events are interpreted through omniscient narration of various characters' internal monologue, especially Paul's. Think of scenes like the vision after his and Jessica's escape. It's not so much the event itself as an intelligent, highly educated young man's awareness of its implications that lends it its gravitas, that ego-effacing triskelion of convoluted cross-purposes and pitfalls, of being turned into a channel for the flow of history against one's will, of standing on the brink of apotheosis and at the same time a potential end to all that has been. I won't deny young Timmy Shammy's a durn fine thesspeen and did what he could with it, but the scene simply does not work in film. Instead of momentous, it feels dragging. Certainly you're not left with the spine-tingling impression of having just witnessed the story's cusp, and in turn that lack saps subsequent chapters of much of the change in tone beyond "ah crap, dad's dead" or a change of palace/sietch scenery. Yet trying to convey visually the verbal description of Paul's inner realizations would not only eat up screen time but turn the scene into a truly Lynchian acid trip. (And that's what the water of life scene is for.)

But other alterations can be excused far less readily. Take for instance excising Princess Irulan's epigraphs and replacing them with Chani's cheekbones for the sake of shilling the pop tart. Irulan's narration helps not only foreshadow coming chapters but contextualize the story's conflict in historical terms, not merely as the aimless lurching and clashing of hordes of brainwashed simpletons but as the informed machinations of superior intellects within a sophisticated social milieu. And in this case, they could easily have been overlaid on establishing shots as voiceovers.

In other adaptations (sticking with good ones) even omissions minor in length lose their justification for the original passage's illustrative scope.

Unlike some, I never saw much problem with leaving Tom Bombadil out of The Lord of the Rings, he mostly serving to work up the fairytale atmosphere without plot tie-ins. I did lament removing the entire greater Old Forest / Barrow Downs sequence, which presaged both the ents and wraiths of later chapters and showed the wide reach of evil in Middle-Earth, and let the hobbits earn their plot-critical shortswords. Worse yet: leaving out the dunedain. Aragorn is not only the son of Arathorn, not merely royal brat #594 riding into town on his high-horse and demanding a throne jus' 'cuz, but the latest leader of a millennium-running guerilla resistance movement. Gathered support from his northern kinsmen cemented the good guys' historical, geographic and political continuity. Replacing them with a random visit from a lone Elrond not only came across as... a bit goofy... but partly restricted the scope from Tolkien's more mature worldbuilding approach toward a standard power fantasy adventure wherein designated heroes save the world.

Or take as another example Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, set in a world experiencing at least partial ecosystem collapse - hence the title, artificial pets having become a luxury item as more species die off. Blade Runner pretty much ignored that angle, but I've always been irked by the loss of a very minor scene in which a tiny spider futilely struggles to bite through human skin. The various juxtapositions of human/android/animal interactions set up a creeping existential dread backed by "as above, so below" comparisons* largely absent from the more character-centered movie... albeit partly compensated by Rutger Hauer's inspired rewrite of his final speech.

 

While we're on PKD and creepy-crawlies, Linklater's otherwise excellent adaptation of A Scanner Darkly left out the recounting of a sexy chick who'd rallied three male junkies to her apartment to rescue her from a bug invasion. Though eager to get in her good graces (and pants) they protest the singular bug in question is harmless. Her reply "If I had known it was harmless I would have killed it myself" becomes a lynchpin of the novel's attempt to humanize addicts in comparison to nominally healthy, mockingbird-slaying human psychology. Given the exchange's brevity and its reflection on the rest of the story (hint: where else does the word "harmless" show up?) was it not more plot-relevant than the sex scene?

Sometimes changes truly are warranted by the medium. The Road was brilliant in both book and movie form, but the book winds up with a passage which never fails to bring a tear to my eye:

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

I don't care how many screenwriting/directorial awards you've won, I give you little chance of doing that paragraph justice on screen. It was replaced, however, in poignant fashion, with the screen fading to black and fading in aural ambiance evoking a different brand of irreparable loss of the mundane. A well-conceived and well-executed compromise.

But more often than not, such changes are simply concessions to the movie-going public's presumed mental feebleness compared to the page-flipping public. Innumerable books' nuance or emotive punch has been sapped by a Hollywood happy sappy ending. Even when the ending itself is not ruined, its setup still can be. The classic adaptation of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine from 1960 omits a short episode after escaping the Morlocks. The traveler stops so far into the future that the Earth has become tidally locked with the Sun. No trace of civilization lingers, not even ruins. Along an endless, freezing beach naught survives but smears of planktonic scum and oversized, scavenging crabs. No sound greets him but the wind, and the chill of eternity encroaches ever closer. Faced with the futility and finality of existence, the time traveler hops back to his own time, to save the degenerate, yet cozily familiar and reassuring, Eloi. In the movie version, omission of the final shore leaves the impression of a hero rushing to the year 802,701 to lead a glorious rebellion of the meek against the predatory. But in the book this doubles as a retreat from ultimate reality. Is continuing the good fight a quixotic limitation of human intellect then? The vapid gesticulations of a short-lived and short-sighted ape incapable of grasping the fullness of its own place in infinity? Or a humble admission of same limitation and resolution to work within one's means? And why is this added layer presumed off-limits to the payer of a ten-dollar movie ticket yet not a ten-dollar novel?

_________________________________________________

 

* I still maintain PKD hit that theme more solidly in his best story, Second Variety.

Aptly Pingouinous

"Don't talk like that to me" said Sam sternly. "If it ain't fair for Ellie and Fro to sit up after supper it ain't fair for them to be born sooner, and it ain't fair that I'm your dad and you're not mine. So no more of that, take your turn and what's due in your time, or I'll tell the King."

- The History of Middle-Earth

That's part of an alternate ending to the Lord of the Rings, with Master Samwise narrating in his own folksy manner to his rodential litter of offspring seventeen years after the ring's destruction. It caught my eye due to Sam extrapolating righteous bed-times from first principles. Unlike SciFi building its justifications from the bottom up, Fantasy's proceed dictatorially from the top down, from the whims of universal custodians. Fantasy fairness is not a matter to be weighed or justified but fitted to ordained precepts of ill-defined specialness, authority and primacy, just like the monarchic right to rule or the license to create. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note the assumption that under predicted parameters (e.g. seniority or anointment) similar pieces will fall into expected relationships. There is a time for everything, and trying to fight the flow gets you washed away faster than Canute's toenail clippings.

Given we don't live in a religious fiction world and events do not require divine license, it was for no good reason that my brain recently dredged up Anatole France's Penguin Island of all things... and for the bad reason that I want to sound interesting on teh internets, I am now bestowing mine brain fart onto thee, fair reader. The book came out when Tolkien was in his mid-teens, and without postulating any direct link between the authors, I have to note in both their writing the intrusion of a sort of anthropological causality upon what had been previous centuries' religious fabulism. The debates over evolution had finally settled into grudging acceptance. Verne and Wells had settled scientific fiction into a more or less modern form. Everyone could increasingly see WW1 looming on the horizon, not by any explicit decree but the implicit consequence of population pressures, expansionist mentalities, antiquated (and exploitable) political alliances and economic surplus stockpiled as military hardware. Though centuries slow in perfusing human irrationality, you can see the fiction of the time adjusting to the notion that the state of the world is neither "Just So" nor part of some master plan but an outgrowth of physical laws and changing conditions.

Think of Penguin Island as an early mockumentary. The titular island's inhabitants, accidentally given souls and reason, end up recapitulating various episodes of mythology and a millennium of French history. Hilarity ensues... if you can ever get the jokes. Let's face it, the book's dependence on historical references and ripped-from-the-headlines-of-1906 courtroom drama make it a hard sell these days. Even reading it decades ago, with both The Three Musketeers and high school history classes fresh in mind, I could not match up most of its allusions to their inspirations.

However, I found much of the story did not require me to "get" the precise context, which is where Tolkien comes back into this page. Since I first read his books in junior high I've kept hearing strained comparisons between his Middle-Earth and our Midgard: was Sauron supposed to be Hitler, was Isengard BMW, that sort of thing. Tolkien's response was no, he was presenting archetypes, which by their very nature apply to many individual examples. Dictators, fortress towns, barbaric swarms and wars over pigheaded pride all feature endlessly throughout history. With France's "penguins" you're better off applying that lesson of applicability, glossing over the precise place and time being lampooned and viewing his vignettes as satire of human behavior writ large, of the conniving of political power via facetious smiles and influence peddling, of sainthood built on successful scams and the worship of bandits, and justice preordained by social acceptability.

 

One thing I liked initially about Penguin Island and still like now skimming through it decades later is how France built up his imaginary nation's culture upon its own fables of the past, with otherwise petty figures and events snowballing into massive institutions over the centuries, flying in the face of heroic epics. Such observations presaged the yet uninvented game theory: events determined not by the pretense of morality but as the result of existing positions of power, not by personified fate but by natural weakness. It's not really the old chestnut about the thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters, as the process is not truly random but a grim sort of social undertow. The villain and the victim collude against heroism. Pygmalion lusts after his own Galatea. A confidence artist, if successful, somehow cannot help but be canonized by future generations as moral paragon.

 

Who ratified our bed-times anyway? Maybe you won't get all the obscure century-old French in-jokes, but if you've ever been intrigued by mythopoiesis and the pettiness of grandstanding, do try to thumb through Penguin Island.

Fantasy Evolved

Continuing where I left off, to better account for evolution in fantasy worlds, the most important step is to switch from top-down to bottom-up thinking. Sounds easy until you remember you're thinking of art, lit or marketing majors (or worse, video game designers) none of which are big on logic or have learned any science since tenth grade, and all of which probably have a massive god complex when it comes to finessing their babies into the exact perfect artistic (and profitable) vision that came to them last St. Andrews' day in a dream while on the toilet at a luxury expositional expo. This in fact makes fantasy storytelling particularly recalcitrant, playing god in a setting with actual gods, as "so the prophecy foretold!" melds perfectly with "this half-assed backstory sounded hella dramatic in my plot outline." It's not like the internet isn't peppered with such rants already, but if you're wondering why anyone would even bother with such speculation, I'll get to that at the end.

 

Remember: fantasy is a top-down system where the rules are handed down by magical beings, while SF is a bottom-up construction upon consistent (if imaginary) physical laws. SF is evolution; F creationism.

However...

I would be curious to see more settings (and to me, fantasy mostly means game settings) bucking that trend, or at the very least doing a better job of worldbuilding than slapping random species onto a random landscape like pizza toppings. Besides, I already promised a post on fantasy evolution earlier this year when complaining about Lord of the Rings Online idiotically drafting dwarf women into front line combat in the name of female superiority and in defiance of Tolkien's well-reasoned dwarven hyperprotectiveness toward their minimally fertile 1/3 female population. Given I already touched on dimorphism (that's what she said) back in 2017, I'll shelve sexual selection for some future date and widen the scope to general morphology/behavior.

 

Let's start with some basics:

Evolution, fundamentally, can be expressed tautologically: what lasts, lasts. (The devil's in the details.) Also, since the cell/body/colony does not get copied over via reproduction, it's genomes, genes or whatever gets reproduced generation by generation out-lasting each other by expressing more favorable proteins/cells/bodies/behaviors. Not a huge issue in works of fiction, until writers forget their creations would need to reproduce in order to continue existing as species or societies - see the dwarf example above. It also means that anything which interferes with reproduction is severely, severely, SEVERELY maladaptive, something to think about when you're designing all those noble, monkish space-elves who do nothing but write poetry and practice their katas all millennium long, but somehow manage to coexist with pod-people and sapient fungi. It doesn't take a war to get over-run and starved out by the numerically superior.

 

Also, something doesn't need DNA to evolve. If your robots or nature spirits make copies of themselves and each has minute differences in their programming/soul/WhateverMakesItTick then those which reproduce more successfully will compose more of the next generations, and so on until they replace the original stock. Saberhagen's Berserkers would long have replaced themselves with a version that doesn't expend resources and endanger itself by hunting down all life in the universe.

 

Aside from that, the general pattern is:

1) shit happens - random mutations in germ line (remember, if it's not passed down, it doesn't count)

2) shit gets cleaned up - natural selection (less adaptive traits reproduce less successfully and so do their bearers) (this is the part creationists like to ignore when scoffing at the idea of random chance producing complexity.)

Remember that even if a body part is not directly harmful or beneficial, it still imposes an energy (nutritional) cost on the organism growing and maintaining it. So please stop sticking all those redundant crests, spikes, limbs and feathers onto your fantasy races! Art majors, THIS MEANS YOU! ... "Dire" badger my dire ass. Remember that mutations pile on very gradually into recognizable features so if you want something to suddenly sprout wings in a single generation, you'll have to resort to an explicit "it's magic" dodge. (The mariner's gills in Waterworld were a real groaner.) Remember also that selection works in the present. Plants don't randomly start producing gigantic colorful flowers just in case bees might appear in ten million years. Exception: exaptation, where a feature you already have acquires a second use, like insulating feathers also aiding flight.

Selection is anything but random. The environment directly impacts which related organisms reproduce more successfully, and therefore how the overall population will look in a hundred or thousand generations. Which is actually good news for writers, because you get to start with a map! And you love maps, don't you, you Tolkien wannabe ha- aherhm, where was I... maps. You probably have a vague map in mind already. You know you want your heroic band of adventurers to cross some snowy mountains and some rivers, exactly one swamp and definitely an erupting volcano or seven along the way. You're already picturing both the boundless creaking taiga and the chokingly dense multicolored vines overwrapping the rainforest. Cool. Plate tectonics and erosion lie beyond my current scope, except to note it's one aspect Tolkien tended to be weak on, slapping mountain ranges perpendicular to each other and rivers flowing every which direction.

Figure out your landscape first, then start deciding where your heroes will encounter various creatures based on a few general rules of adaptation, starting with temperature gradients. (I won't bother citing them one by one, but I should note Wikipedia features a nice list of biological rules)

- Cold environments favor warm-blooded creatures large enough to conserve heat. (Ice-snakes are weird.) Corollary: compact bodies conserve heat better, so cool it with the stilt-legged, bat-eared icewalkers. Even moose and reindeer are stockier than their tropical cousins.

- Reptiles are good at conserving water and require fewer nutrients, outcompeting mammals in hot deserts. Which is to say, there are other animals than camels in deserts. Look them up.

- "Amphibious" does not mean perfectly adapted to both environments. Keep in mind frog locomotion mainly gets them back in the water as fast as possible. Aquatics would have support and locomotion issues on land (see seals). Please, no prancing mermaids. Also, long flowing hair is NOT hydrodynamic.

- Cave dwellers might see better in dark but more likely favor other senses (see the famous blind cave _____) Goblins probably would not have amazing vision, and even if they're just nocturnal would likely be colorblind to increase light sensitivity (see bats.)

- Islands have a weird effect on body size, with large species getting smaller due to limited resources, and more often small species getting larger due to lack of predators. This would be an excellent way to work that cosmetic re-skin game designers love so much in a logical fashion... and one I never see used.

- Parasites tend to fit their host, both in size and intersecting life cycle. In fact, they closely co-evolve with their hosts over generations, to the point of strictly specializing (especially internal ones) in a few closely related species. Your heroes have nothing to fear from dragon tapeworms. This was one major plot hole in the original Alien movie, addressed in pathetically hamfisted fashion with Prometheus.

- Magnifiy that by orders of magnitude for anything which evolved in complete isolation (e.g. on different planets) and especially do not EVER talk about miraculously compatible alien genetics. DNA is not just a linear code, but produces and depends on a myriad scaffolds, chaperones, cofactors, regulators, markers and processes like tagging or splicing, not to mention the million convoluted signal cascades required for DNA to react to its extracellular environment, all of these developed in tandem between the existing template and iterative selective pressure over literally billions of generations. The odds of something which has never encountered either the same template or the same pressures spontaneously producing hybrid offspring are, statistically, nil! Nil squared! Nil to the tenth! Just... don't! If you want half-alien babies, you'd end up needing to genetically engineer some hopelessly wasteful monstrosity operating on two separate metabolisms at once (and they'd probably be sterile and poisoned by BOTH parents' native environments) to the point any intelligent species would give it up and opt for robots. Golems. Whatever. Sorry, didn't mean to get S all up in your F.

That brings us to the issue of divergent and convergent evolution.

Divergence usually results from separation. Half your elves go over the sea, dark hair randomly predominates in one population, light in the other. One side's taller, one side has longer pianist fingers. Cool, whatever. It can also result from specialization (as Larry Niven so memorably tried to portray in Ringworld) and this is where your handy-dandy map comes in. Do you have populations of elves living in plains/mountains/forests for tens of thousands of years before developing civilization? Give the plainsrunners long loping legs to cover long distances, and the tree-climbers shorter legs with prehensile toes, and the mountain-climbers partially hardened, hooflike foot soles and oversized lung capacity. Chesty elves. Hell, why not? We've tried every other kind.

Convergence generally results from different species adapting to the same necessity, and for fictional purposes largely concerns morphology. Limb shape is a famous example, as each medium strongly favors one or two modes of locomotion, so that even across hundreds of millions of years and distantly related clades, runners, swimmers and soarers will gradually develop legs, fins and wings independently of each other. What does this mean for fantasies set in alien landscapes? Well, if you create an environment of shattered floating islands over a bottomless void, everything from bugs to buffalo would need some way to cross those gaps, be it by flying, gliding, steering the islands, or clinging parasitically to flyers, shooting spores to the wind or ballistic seeds. If you set your adventure among the vertical trunk and branches of a world tree, then climbing adaptations (prehensile tails, low centers of gravity, gripping pads and claws) would predominate as would ways of taking advantage of the world-tree's sap, a world of squirrels, geckos, aphids and orchids.

Above all, remember everything must somehow acquire the energy and chemicals it needs to carry out its metabolic processes. Case-in-point: Herbert's sandworms. Leaving aside the question of whether their burrowing friction would glass the sand around them, no way in hell would they ever filter enough food from desert sand at their size to fuel such an energy-intensive method of travel, in direct contrast to their likely inspiration, baleen whales, which make use of buoyancy and currents. Even if it were possible, they'd get out-competed for food by smaller, more efficient burrowers. If you want a big impressive beast in your story (like dragons) first ask yourself: what does it eat? And does something else eat that better? Moby Dick ate giant squid... did Smaug eat giant flying squid at altitudes other flyers can't reach? This also goes for armies, with the classic question of how exactly the utterly barren Land o' Murder's provisioning all those tens to hundreds of thousands of indigenous orcs. How many Mordors' worth of farmland would it take to supply one Mordor's worth of orcs and trolls?

This brings us to behavior.

Try orcs. They live in close, overpopulated, hypersocial bands but act like Tasmanian devils or other infamously solitary, hyperaggressive beasts. They're basically locusts in a perpetual state of swarming, except swarming behavior is better interpreted as a terminal investment strategy, where an organism responds to drought, overpopulation, other scarcity or morbidity by investing its energy reserves in a massive reproductive / dispersal gamble. Inherently untenable, and functional only as such. Orc-like fantasy/SF races would work better if the author more carefully described a population boom/bust cycle and paid closer attention to the triggers which turn mundane pests into plagues. Note this carries far more plot-driving potential than the basic description of orc-types as "mean and many." To some degree, the idea that they coalesce as armies and pose major threats only under Bolg or Sauron-like leadership approaches this, but how much better would it get by tying it all together with physical and hormonal changes?

In a greater sense, while the r/K distinction is less distinct than once thought, it still pays to think of your fantasy races in terms of their life histories relative to each other. Long-lived, slow-growing, slow-breeding elves which take a thousand years to repopulate would need stable environments, something Tolkien rather elegantly incorporated into those secretive, defensible elvish enclaves like Rivendell. Just randomly scattering around unexplored woods in vulnerable bands would open them up to disaster. Note, great apes are classic K-strategists, and humanoids would not spread easily through that standard-issue dramatic fantasy landscape constantly erupting with volcanoes and getting wiped out by manageddons and genocided by evil wizards at random intervals. You need to give your humanoids some breathing room for them to form believable societies.

Conversely, rapidly reproducing, short-lived, expansive species replenish their populations better after disaster but gradually fall prey to more careful, resilient competitors during stable periods. Klingons would probably live to thirty and have fifteen children each to offset their idiotic hyperaggressiveness.

 

Keep in mind environment shapes both biology and culture. Creatures adapted to constant Under-dark or the deep ocean, even if they can see, would probably not wax poetic about light/dark dichotomies like those of us subjected to circadian cycles; nor would they winter their discontent when they've never seen the passing of the seasons. Burrowing creatures would not have a "high" king like we arboreal descendants.

If you've had the patience to read this far, you might be growing a tad exasperated at my making a mountain out of a molehill. After all, it's freakin' fantasy, dude! It's like, magic! Unsure how something works? It's magic! A wizard did it!

Therein lies the problem. Magic is magical by contrast to the mundane. Make it mundane and kill its appeal. Don't gratuitously fabricate unicorn-fart-powered lightbulbs where "a candle" would fit your narrative purpose just as well. Just as you should do your homework for the fields of basic mechanics or sanitation so you don't need to resort to wheelbarrows or outhouses powered by pixie-dust, get some basic nature documentary understanding of biological principles so you don't need to magically explain why your rainforest's full of polar bears.

 

One common surprise expressed by younger audiences when finally getting around to reading Tolkien, the precursor of D&D or WoW, is just how little magic actually plays into his plot twists. The stories which created high fantasy are in fact low fantasy. Yeah, and that's why Middle-Earth is still the champ. Its author did his homework, and didn't resort to gratuitous, amateurish overstatement where a mere understanding of the world would fit more naturally. When Gandalf casts a "light" cantrip or Samwise tells a rope to un-knot itself, it actually comes across as magical!

I leave you with one last question to be addressed in the future: how would magic itself affect evolution?

Fantasy Unevolved

"Whether I contemplate men with benevolence or with an evil eye, I always find them concerned with a single task, all of them and every one of them in particular: to do what is good for the preservation of the human race. Not from any feeling of love for the race, but merely because nothing in them is older, stronger, more inexorable and unconquerable than this instinct - because this instinct constitutes the essence of our species, our herd."

 

Nietzsche - The Gay Science #1 "The teachers of the purpose of existence", 1887

 

 

I may not be a writer but I am terrible, so I've been taking Terrible Writing Advice. While for the most part I find JP's sarcastic jabs both incisive and insightful (translation: hating the things I hate makes you a genius) his segment on villains did raise an eyebrow for decrying the will to power as insuffucient motivation for a megalomaniac. Sure, "I wants it 'cuz I wants it" does lack a certain narrative oomph, but here unfortunately narrative conflicts with verisimilitude. As I've laid out the issue several times here before, even with stone-age technology a tribe of naked apes so efficiently concentrates usable resources that evolutionary pressure will increasingly favor not just ability in acquisition but partitioning the take, by hook or crook. We lionize taking the lion's share because that tendency gave our ancestors a higher chance of passing down their genetic material, and we have inherited their predispositions. Powermongering and the race for social status have obviously suffered from runaway selection within our species (indeed may well be more responsible for our increased intellect than tool usage) and being baked so hopelessly into our instincts will fuel any amount of insanity. Asking why someone might want a bigger house than the neighbours' (or by extension, ALL OF THE HOUSES) is as obvious and meaningless as trying to define complex motivations behind the desire for sex or sucrose: a beginner's lesson in evolutionary psychology, which from the point of view of the individual just *is*!

If you must fill in some Dark Lord backstory, focus not on why the villain wants power, but on why the villain's powermongering strategy has shifted from cooperation to domination. Tolkien, for instance, did this quite naturally with his famous Quisling deciding he was better off biding his time and growing stronger under Sauron's newly stretching wing than supporting the ostensibly toothless White Council. Same goes for Sauron himself making a personal power-play at the end of the second age, with his greatest potential opposers' mutual defeat / retreat beyond the boundaries of the world made round leaving him poised to seize control, and his own physical change rendering his previous covert strategy untenable. His motivation never once changed. His circumstances did, and his story accordingly.

While you might say Sauron's not human and did not evolve, fantasy authors invariably base their races on the human lowest common denominator, motivations tracking human ones with little divergence and even less creativity. Which is odd given that fantasy paradoxically is in some ways better positioned than Science Fiction to include evolutionary change. Not only do Fantasy creatures inhabit more natural worlds with fully connected ecosystems (rather than SF's spaceships or run-down cities) and conflict-prone environments which could easily apply adaptive pressure, but Fantasy's kalpa-length timeframes frequently dwarf SciFi stories' more condensed action, allowing for gradual change. Evolution (a hot topic in the late 19th, early 20th post-Darwin media landscape) or the passing of geologic ages featured in many of the stories which jumpstarted SciFi's popularity (think The Time Machine) and also helped Tolkien drag fairytales into modern relevance by providing a LostWorld-ish sense of depth to LotR's history. Ghan-Buri-Ghan the primitive knuckledragger, many passages of troglodytic goblins once again recalling cavemen, the Nazgul's winged mounts* immediately suggesting pterosaurs, and Saur-on himself as master of a world before the world of men (to my teenage self that always read "he's a dinosaur" and canon be damned) consider just how much more believable, more solid as a world, these little touches rendered Middle-Earth.

 

I consume little fantasy in general (Song of Ice and Fire, Dark Materials, Kingkiller Chronicle) but such settings and tropes are inescapable in computer games and much of the frustration fueling this post and its upcoming sequel comes from hopelessly generic landscapes like Faerun, Dyrwood or Ferelden with their rule of placing every single monster in every single zone for the sake of monetizing assets to the fullest possible extent. Still, I'd blame this lack of imagination more on the genre than on the medium, and my last example comes from a webcomic.

 

I've mentioned Selkie here before in the context of webcomics' treatment of fatherhood. It's a science fantasy story about a human adopting a child from a species of (suspiciously humanoid) aquatic predators with claws, webbed digits, razor-sharp teeth and poison spit. Lot of potential there, predictably squandered in an effort to keep the Sarnothi relatable and familiar to the audience in the worst tradition of Star Trek wrinkly forehead aliens. They could, for instance, not have been given hair to increase their drag while swimming, but you're just scratching the surface there. A recent comic addressed the heroine on a playground as "Sarnothi of the climber bars" and I couldn't help but groan at the wasted potential. A swimming species would likely not develop a very strong grip for climbing. Otters don't do chin-ups. Sharp slashing claws and webs don't mix - see drag again. Nor do flippers generally maintain spring-toed musculature, but I guess it was more important to show the young heroine bouncing around in gym class with the human children. Nor are poisonous species, for that matter, particularly prone to develop massive overpowering musculature (picture viperacondas or mantispiders) but a species of spindly ambush predators using one-hit poison tactics wouldn't have yielded an imposing enough strongman in the figure of Mr. Scar-Kill-Him-Die. For that matter, how did their hunting style develop and how does it compare to human/wolf prey-harrying tactics... and given the impact such organization has on social dynamics, how would their society differ?

The entire spectrum of differences between Atlantean aquatic / predatory specialization and human plainsrunning prey-harrying is wasted because:

1) The author's desperate to drive home a politically correct message of coexistence and unity, willfully ignoring necessary divergence

2) The author just wanted to make them cool, but never considered they don't need to out-human humans to retain their coolness as fanged, poisonous sala-Man-ders

If you'd like to see a better take on the same divergence, you could try War with the Newts by Karel Capek (you remember, the guy who repurposed the word "robot" to its current usage?) War with the Newts' fairly relentless dark humor largely stems from humans' incapacity to recognize the other species' capabilities and danger, simply because it does not manifest in cozily familiar human facial expressions and social interactions. Moreover, the greatest danger stems precisely from our similarities in newts' ability to absorb human ideologies... while repurposing these in pursuit of their own instinctive drives and biological prerogatives.

So how might our current fantascifi worlds better integrate the truism that aliens are alien? Well, I've rambled enough for one night, so I'll cut off the observational half of my musings here and devote the next post to the speculative half.

___________________________________________________

 

* Weirdly, Tolkien denied consciously tailoring the flying beasts as pterosaurs, and true enough in early drafts featured in The History of Middle-Earth, they're initially just nondescriptly vulture-like.

From the Foundered Lang

"learn a few scraps of Horace and Virgil and Homer for the confusion of cads" **

H.G. Wells - The World Set Free

 

While the fantasy writers he inspired will as a rule just slap together something with old-timey medieval "feels" and call it a day, J.R.R. Tolkien himself rooted his works firmly in careful study, to the occasional point of recherché posturing. Alright man, we get it, you love Beowulf, but alliteration still sounds buffoonish in Normanized modern English.

Anyway, as random thoughts will oft pop into your head of their own accord, I woke up this morning to that rhyme about seven stars and seven stones and one white tree. When I first read The Silmarillion in my teens I glossed over the explanation of the stars symbolizing the dipper; for a SciFi fan, stars just made a generic cool symbol at face value, and seven's just a ubiquitous numerological gimmick. And, though I'd heard the term septentrional years or even decades ago, I never connected it with Tolkien using the seven stars as shorthand for the Numenoreans as northmen. Together with anchoring his reflections on Atlantis through the langobardi* (a.k.a. Lombards) in the earliest version of the Numenore myth, it's another reminder of just how much of Tolkien's early writing was an attempt to reconnect with his pre-Imperial heritage in a society dominated by the church, the entrenched Norman aristocracy and classical philology.

___________________________________________

* Thereafter mixed in with Saxons stylistically to create the Rohirrim, and linguistically repurposed for the Longbeards.

** Irony, in case you didn't look up the full quote, which I've cited here before vis-a-vis English delusions.

Elemental, My Dear Conventional

"the construction of elaborate and consistent mythology (and two languages) rather occupies the mind, and the Silmarils are in my heart. So that goodness knows what will happen. Mr. Baggins began as a comic tale among conventional Grimm's fairy-tale dwarves, and got drawn into the edge of it - so that even Sauron the terrible peeped over the edge. And what more can hobbits do? They can be comic, but their comedy is suburban unless it is set among things more elemental."

J.R.R. Tolkien, 1937 letter to Stanley Unwin on the topic of a Hobbit sequel, as cited in The History of Middle-Earth

 

 

I just realized why I've never particularly liked superheroes: they're hobbits!

Wait, let's back up a bit.

I recently commented elsewhere that a dungeoneering webcomic overlaps with adventuring in general, be it high fantasy, urban fantasy, SciFi, anything outside our plains-ape dating dramedy lowest common denominator, but looking back I conspicuously omitted horror or superheroes. And I still would.

 

While superheroes owe their (now almost forgotten) distinction from old-timey demigods and other magical heroes to their 20th-century superscience origins, they remain a representation of the daring prince or plucky small-town lad who finds magic <ITEM> and defeats <MONSTER> to reinstate the status quo. They so unequivocally dominate pop culture precisely for reassuring the brain-dead majority in their inertia that they deserve to be protected by their betters or that mundane desires somehow go hand-in-hand with transmundane ability.

Adventuring though (and especially Science Fiction in its better moments when it's not caveman science fiction) has inherited another take on heroics from industrial era exploration stories. Here the gentleman adventurer, the independent scientist of peerless intellect, has discerned a wondrous <NOVELTY> which he will risk life and limb to unveil. The status quo was never truly in peril... but it is insufficient.

Hobbits' comically exaggerated parochialism lends itself to neither avenue. Both Bilbo and Frodo's company are called to adventure by outside forces and their charm comes from their status as unlikely heroes. They mostly act the part of everyman viewpoints among larger than life forces, suburban comic relief dotting a more elemental drama several ages in the making.

Superheroes tend to stop at the suburban part, and not particularly comic at that.

Even X-Men's supposed message of embracing change, couched in the larger theme of "acceptance" boils down to "we just want to be beer-swilling, sitcom-watching deadheads like the rest of you" and the less said about mad scientist villains and treating any scientific achievement as world-shattering malice, the better.

It's an old observation that anyone with at least half a brain tends to identify with the villains in superhero stories, the thinkers who analyze, plan and invent, not the dumb jocks who win out every time by punching the problem, or in newer versions by squinting real hard and defeating those threatening outsiders by sheer force of will.

I suppose I always liked Middle-Earth partly because it allowed me to honestly root for the nominal good guys despite its luddite undertone and conventional saving of the conventional day. Bilbo's "Tookishness" leads him over the misty mountains cold and long before bearing a ring Frodo studied elvish, unlike any of the woolly-toed schlubs around them. They transcend their hobbitude. The proudful Noldor, for whom paradise itself was not good enough, recall the gentleman scholars of past ages, diminished and weary of their exile as they may be after having struck outward into the primitive Great Lands. Probably most importantly, Frodo's climactic battle with himself shows simpleminded force of will (important as it was) as ultimately insufficient. Wheels within wheels, plans within plans, intellects far beyond that of the plucky small-Shire lad, outmaneuvered the villains into LotR's Pyrrhic victory.

How often do superheroes win via strategic positioning?

Beardier than Thou

"Such men as he be never at heart's ease

Whiles they behold a greater than themselves

And therefore are they very dangerous"

 

Caesar describing Cassius, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Act1Scene2

 

 

"Memento mori. You are parasites, and a parasite which kills its host is a doomed parasite."

Thus I admonished The Lord of the Rings Online eight years ago, that in light of its rapidly diminishing gameplay value and overwhelming reliance on its Tolkien license, shitting on Tolkien's corpse was a bad, bad idea. Stay tuned, we'll come back to that by the end.

For a while, LotRO benefited from Standing Stone Games' split into a separate studio. The new adventures centering on Northern Mirkwood, the Iron Hills and Misty Mountains more closely approached the "Middle Earth Online" the game should originally have been instead of "Rehash the LotR Plot Online" it was turned into in its middle years. The "legendary" item system (a whole gear farm in each weapon) was retooled into something less aggravating last year, along with a few other quality of life changes and more attention to detail like interweaving quests instead of polishing off one location at a time forever. There are even some new monster models, after a long drought. But, after over a decade of catering only to the stupidest possible clientele, it was too little too late.

 

Standing Stone got desperate enough last month to give free access to all but the last major expansion, Gundabad, which no company does except in extremis. So I've sunk some cost into Gundabad, jumped back in and have been struggling to catch up on the past couple years' content. Initially, several others from the guild I'd joined two years ago also popped their heads up, until it almost seemed we'd get enough for an instance run. Two weeks later they were gone again. Partly, this can hardly be helped, as LotRO features a tremendous amount of repetitive "kill ten rats" content to wade through before reaching the even more repetitive end-game of farming a single instance for gear upgrades - a problem compounded by timesinks like nearly instantaneous respawns forcing you to kill everything twice in each location. Running the game on what would appear to be the same servers from fifteen years ago doesn't help, as more than a dozen players in any location immediately weigh the network lag down into rubberband land. And, of course, it's hard selling slightly blocky mid-2000s 3D graphics on a more modern market of downright fuckable photorealism, no matter how inspired your visual artists may be. Before I get to my complaints, let me admit LotRo's old knack for achingly scenic landscapes remains solid.

The Wells of Langflood: beauty, branches, bears and boggarts

Even some of the Gundabad zones seemingly created (just as Moria) with a mind toward low decorative workload (noone questions cave walls textured uniformly mottled gray) make inspired use of repeating motifs.

The (rather Spartan) cradle of Durin

And, as always, it's somehow even worse to see good work amidst bad, because the storytelling filling the precipices and caverns of Gundabad has taken a sharp nosedive. This was somewhat a problem after Mordor, with professional writers having apparently split the other way from old Turbine. For a while the team broke even, resigning themselves to mediocre drama, unambitious yet also unintrusive, but whichever writers joined preceding the release of Gundabad last year have dragged the new zones so deep into the realm of SJW lunacy as to overshadow any recovery LotRO has made in the past few years.

One sure sign is trying to gratuitously redeem villains and recast them as oppressed minorities. Suddenly we need to focus on good dwarves from the canonically evil Dourhand clan (some of the first enemies you fought back in 2007) because you see it was only their leaders that led them astray. The Nuremberg defense apparently remains perfectly valid in Nogrod. Even orcs, fucking ORCS, are gradually going the way of Warcraft noble savage orcs, deliberately flouting Tolkien's established narrative of them as thoroughly corrupted body, mind and soul by Morgoth (a.k.a. the devil himself) back in the first age. But the most obvious change is relocating Middle-Earth, like every single other product of our propaganda-choked society, to Femtasia, that FEMale chauvINIST utopia where women are always more clever, wiser, morally upright, skillful, braver, stronger, faster and flat-out more bionic than those lowly disgusting males in every possible way.

 

As a side-note, as much of this involves dwarf-women, and one of my old posts on bearded ladies saw a slight increase in hits last year, I may have shared in the guilt of justifying (inadvertently and only by omission of proper context) the notion of sending original recipe Ardan she-dwarves out on adventures. If so, I do regret it, and I'll plan a post at some point in the future about the topic of evolution in fantasy.

Though, as all modern media, LotRO suffered from occasional bouts of virtue signaling (refugee themed plots, a female master of Lake-Town, etc.) they integrated these half-decently into the existing literature. Its current problems appear to have started with Amma.

Back when Erebor was first opened up, one of the quests casually introduced you to the first female dwarf NPC, and Mother Amma was in fact a good character in keeping with Tolkien's own guidelines on the topic. She was protected and hidden away deep within one of her people's most secure fortresses. Which didn't stop her from being portrayed as a respectable matriarch and noted expert in the fine craftsmanship which so obsesses the Naugrim. Cool. I'm down with that.

But of course it's never enough. Not for the fanatics anyway.

The War of Three Peaks and Gundabad proper saw Amma and a host of new females transported to the front lines, increasingly monopolizing the action. Remember Tolkien laid out the central problem quite clearly: dwarves not only breed almost as slowly as elves but only have a 1/3 female population. Much like loonies from Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, this naturally mandates a rabid, unquestionable protectionism as core cultural value, or dwarven demographics would've dwindled to nothing back in the First Age no matter how many Durins they bring back from the dead.

LotRO keeps dwarf females looking masculine (and bearded (you can tell them by their voices)) but while lower cuteness would indicate a higher female involvement in masculine risk-taking, female scarcity would easily over-ride these dames' hirsute valor.

But of course, that's logic, and who needs logic when you've got feminism?

 

For one of the more absurd examples, meet the dwarf lesbians:

One sends you with a gift to her "wife" - an absurd notion both for the reasons above and for this being an infamously traditionalist society. In preindustrial times everyone was a quiverfull by default, with infanticide quietly making up the difference in lean years. While various cultures formalized some form or another of what each other might consider sexual deviance, social justice warriors consisently miss the little detail that true sexual freedom is a virtue and privilege of post-industrial, medically savvy modernity. In a royalist, medieval, 2/3 male dorfopolis you might conceivably (pun intended) see male-male homosexual acts tacitly normalized to ease tensions, but lesbianism would by definition be extramarital, and a childless lesbian marriage would almost certainly be an actively enforced taboo. Dwarf lesbians on the front lines of battle doubly so; two dead wombs for the price of one. Might as well salt yourselves and hop in a pot for the orcs' genocidal ease. But of course, for the SJW who shoehorned this in, a couple of unmarried dwarf lads expressing a fondness for each other in the trenches (iffy but at least arguable) wouldn't go nearly far enough. Had to make a show of strength by vandalizing the source material as much as possible.

Naturally, running a mission with one of the lasses, you find her as idealized as you'd expect, dashing ahead of you to solo everything, explicitly stating she doesn't like fighting and just wants to feel useful and expressing sorrow at having to kill poor innocent bats who've just been trained for evil. Your presence in that mission serves no purpose but to absorb her sanctimony.

 

But the sapphidwarfies are just barely scratching the surface. Back when taking stock of Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire's endlessly reiterated anti-male chauvinism, I noted their main gimmick of juxtaposing good women with bad men in order to drive home (consciously or subliminally) female superiority with every zone, every encounter and every dialogue. Here, three or four years later, we see avid students of that technique at work.

 

There's Hersegg, the young, sparsely-bearded librarian also inexplicably accepted as an experienced explorer and combatant. At least she at one point admits "I was too eager" but a lot more lines have her stuck babysitting an older male scholar Spall, presented as dead weight for being a nerd in a warzone.

There's the dwarf who pissed off his wife by appearing too protective of her. And instead of talking to him about it (you remember communication, that skill supposedly higher in females?) she puts him in the dog-house (gossiping about the problem with Mother Amma instead) until he redeems himself with a present of a show of fireworks.

 

Unjustifiably angry wife = prezzies! Yay equality!

 

Then you've got Elta, who sends you bounty-hunting after beasts with the twist that "I simply name my targets after folks I don't like" and yes of course all three inspirations are male, with the pretexts that they were "lazy to the bone" or "hovered over my shoulder" or had "a very cold personality" - hey, we introduced a female character whose only purpose is killing her male acquaintances in effigy. Cute, right? Adorable. Just like all those times Aragorn's long-lost brother Man-a-born sent you to kill disgusting pigs, slugs and worms named Galadriel, Arwen and Eowyn. Fucking adorable, right?

 

The next one took a slightly longer introduction. First we need to meet a male artisan who's introduced as too greedy and putting on airs for working up his ambition to recover his people's treasured gems and get his name in the history books, and writing convoluted contracts to lock others into servitude. His current servant, one Eskil Bloodthumb, is introduced as a worthless fuck-up -

- and after serving his purpose in feeling dejected and ashamed, instead of learning and growing into his role is immediately replaced with his hypercompetent sister Fastrith, who then starts a romance with one of the Moria dwarves from ten years ago. When debating whether to advance into a dangerous area, he staunchly defends her honor, proclaiming her great ability... and she retorts she might as well come along... otherwise her hapless new beardybeau will dumbly stumble into danger. Answering praise with mockery. Lovely. Definitely not an abusive relationship in the making. And completely different from the guy insulting his wife by (mistakenly) appearing motivated by protectiveness.

Oh, but the brother's not completely forgotten. Fastrith repeatedly quips "Good thing my brother Eskil is not here!" as a catchphrase during a fight. (see below)

Then you've got the two dwarf rogues, Ausma and Muta, who can't seem to go two steps without either being given a heavily scripted mission with more dialogue than half a dozen other characters put together or some other NPC randomly chanting "she is quite clever" or proving themselves superior to males. Note, it's a common trait of Mary Sue characters that the rest of the established cast must suddenly be twisted into helpless idiots or villains to justify Mary Sue's specialness. To the point here, the war hero Nain the Slakeless has to suddenly and inexplicably Rambo into a cave full of orcs by himself, to justify a rescue mission by one of the females, and he ends up shaved as a penalty for his male stupidity. Which stupidity somehow wasn't narratively necessary before females stepped into the picture. For bonus points:

 

Olivorc Twist, everyone. Or maybe Jean Valjorc?

This same mission chain ends with Nain forced to apologize to his orcish informant for mistrusting him and some orcs set up in a cozy little deluxe apartment in a dwarf skyscraper, as a deprived minority getting their due. In a delightfully Freudian slip, we see a glimpse of the dirty little secret behind women's criticism of men. The same quest chain at once tears down and symbolically castrates a respectable male while propping up and idealizing a murderous, ethically incapable replacement, redeeming the most brutal, sadistic, primitive brutes in reach.

No matter how hard you try, you will never be good enough, because what they want isn't "good" but reliably murderous and stupid and easy to manipulate into suicidal aggression. Girls want orc boys.

But if you think they stopped at dwarves, you've got another thing coming. And more things after that. One of Ausma's missions leads you to the game's first female orc NPC:

 

Loknashra... who is of course far better than the males around her (sexist male orc immediately cowers in fear of her) and badmouths her chief with impunity (the menfolk are doing everything wrong, y'see; and she's only stepping in 'for my people' and not for aggression, to prop up her inevitable moral superiority) earning the explicit admiration of the female dwarf for bonus interspecies sisterhood points.

But wait, there's more!

The hill-folk of Angmar make their return, in the conspicuous form of a plucky and inventive young female:

- whose quest chain leads you to confront and kill her evil father. Because of course.

 

But wait... there's more!

What, you thought they'd stop at humanoids?

 

You run across a warg asking you to rescue her pups from evil sorcerors sticking crystals in them for whatever reason. Of course, the same crystal treatment that drives her "mate" rabidly aggressive turns her into a lucid, noble paragon of virtue. How could it be otherwise?!?

I wasn't deliberately recording these from the start and I haven't even finished the damn expansion but I'm willing to bet it'll be more of the same. I'm stopping examples here for the sake of this already over-lengthy post remaining borderline readable, and for exhaustion at trying to track anti-male proselytism on its own moldy turf. See, that's one thing about fanatics: they never have anything new to say. Just as a Christian will answer everything with either "Jesus" or "Satan" a feminist's interpretation of every scenario is preordained by their holinesses MacKinnon, Steinem and Dworkin:

"Oh, honourable font of gyno-knowledge, might I borrow a moment of your time?"

"Yes, you filthy pig?"

"Half-dog, actually, but never mind. I was wondering what you think of elves."

"Female elves are better than male elves!"

"Oh! Follow-up question, any opinion on dwarves?"

"Female dwarves are better than male dwarves!"

"What a coincidence. Have you given any thought to librarians?"

"Female librarians are better than male librarians!"

"Interesting. While we're on the topic, what about apprentices?"

"Female apprentices are better than male apprentices!"

"How insightful. And what about hill-folk?"

"Female hill-folk are better than male hill-folk!"

"Curiouser and curiouser. What about orcs then?"

"Female orcs are better than male orcs!"

"Fascinating! Ah, but this might stump you: how do you see wargs?"

"Female wargs are better than male wargs!"

"Wasn't expecting that! Dare one inquire as to your opinion of dragons?"

"Female dragons are KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen!!! KillAllMen!!!!!1"

 

But to fully understand their motivation here, you have to remember fundamentalism includes not only monomania but active hostility against outside creativity, especially if it is admired, if it steals admiration away from the hagiography of the one true faith. Sidetrack a bit, for reference, to the iconoclasm of official religions, like christians' destruction of pagan art or conversely muslims' destruction or whitewashing of churches. Recent examples include the Islamic State's attempts to erase all history before themselves. Twenty years before that, younger viewers might not remember the international outrage at the Afghanis' destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha statues in 2001. Even I did not remember, until a recent refresher, that the (tragicomically incompetent, involving... shooting at the statues... with guns) demolition was undertaken for sheer spite, because foreigners has offered to help restore them.

 

This same mindset dominates social justice warriors' revisionist agenda. The harm inflicted against Middle-Earth with every XenArwen and Tauriel and Hollywood-pretty dwarves is not just a bug. It's a feature. Returning to LotRO and its newer writers' competence pay attention to the scintillating banter during one scripted encounter:

Fastrith says, ''If we were to find the stolen stones that made up the mosaic...''
Bróin says, ''...we could restore it!''
Bori says, ''That sounds hard.''
Bori says, ''You are more likely to find the lost Zabad'ibîn, I think.''
Fastrith says, ''Perhaps we will find both! Bróin will help me!''
Bróin says, ''I will!''
Imák says, ''Hmm... do you hear that?''
Imák says, ''There could be more. Do not relax your guard!''
Hobgoblin Prey-catcher says, ''They're in here!''
Imák says, ''There will be more of them. Let's return to the others and prepare!''
Bori says, ''What happened? I heard shouting!''
Imák says, ''Hobgoblins.''
Fastrith says, ''Hobgoblins! How exciting!''
Bróin says, ''How many are there?''
Imák says, ''Does it matter?''
Bróin says, ''Spoken like a Longbeard, Imák!''
Imák says, ''Hmmph.''
Bori says, ''Here they come!''
Bróin says, ''I will fight, if I must!''
Fastrith says, ''Good thing my brother Eskil is not here!''
Hobgoblin Prey-catcher says, ''Take this!''
Fastrith says, ''Good thing my brother Eskil is not here!''
Bróin says, ''Fastrith, are you all right?''

Does any of that sound like Middle-Earth to you? I think the "that sounds hard" coming out of the mouth of a canonically perseverent race is what truly gets me.

*Sigh*

No, Broin, Fastrith is very much not all right. She's a product of hijackers far more interested in giving all new characters B-movie gypsy fortuneteller accents than trying to adapt their dialogue to Tolkien's general style. Other scenes echo even more generic children's cartoon one-liners like "you won't get away with this" or "you underestimate us" or "you've bitten off more than you can chew" and even the dreaded "drat" until you start to realize the fanaticism is a smokescreen. This petty, infantile abuse is as much born of incompetence as it is of brainwashing. Directly mirroring the devaluation of the elves themselves in recent decades, those attempting to adapt good authors must feel a desperate need to vandalize. Faced with superior intellect, creativity, talent, they hunger only to deface, defame, destroy, for how well the other's ability reflects their own inability back at them... and feminism makes as good a pretext as any. A pretext and shield from warranted criticism, because as I noted with regard to both Deadfire and Wasteland 3, "Fanaticism is, among other things, a refuge for the incompetent. [...] unskilled hacks shielding themselves from criticism behind the unbending bulwark of constantly repeated politically correct mantras. My crap promotes people of the correct skin color or sex, so if you call my crap crap then you're a sexist, racist, child-molesting nazi pig."

 

It's not as if LotRO had not demonstrated, in its long years Online, that it is possible to insert new characters, including female ones, into the narrative while respecting Tolkien's original style and framework and even building upon it. Anyone remember Ellen Fremedon?

Aside from the geek cred inherent in her very name, bitter Ellen, in her far shorter appearance than Muta or Amma or Ausma, demonstrated both female leadership and interpersonal conflict stemming directly from the situation in which she and her social rival, Eowyn, find themselves. Conflict against another woman. That happens. Not that you'd know it from feminist iconography pitting the valiant sisterhood always vanquishing those disgusting hairy beasts guilty of all the world's ills - like "lazy to the bone" or "hovered over my shoulder" or had "a very cold personality". Ellen's criticism is both warranted (absent her secret wraith-slaying fate, Eowyn would do far more good as royal representative organizing an eventual exile than as another fresh recruit on the field) and slightly overstated for envy at her rival's higher standing, and your aid leads her to eventually relent enough to cooperate with the warrior princess - a perfectly natural social conflict resolved just as naturally, without the need to degrade either side. In fact, much of the Rohan expansion (though far from brilliantly written (e.g. Thrymm, oy vey)) dealt with the women left behind while the men went to war, the ladies of each fief coordinating defenses, stockpiling for the coming hardships, leading townsfolk to safety, one pining for her husband or father, another cursing him for leaving her, another struggling to fill his shoes or just keeping her mind on more pressing matters, another filling them quite adroitly, or yet another growing into her role independently, quest by quest.

 

I have to wonder, as Standing Stone watch the rejuvenating potential of their gambled freebie content trickle away to nothing, log-in by daily log-in, are they even asking themselves if, among other mistakes, they should've hired better writers? You know, instead of paying some brainwashed imbeciles to spit insults in your customers' faces? More so, to cut the literary branch out from under you with the pretext of the noble cause of spitting insults in your customers' faces? How much salary did you waste on those desperate to use an adaptation in an effort to destroy the original work, when all that's kept you afloat for a decade has been your Tolkien license?

Coincidentally enough, they seem to have posted a Lead Content Designer job about five days ago, just as I got angry enough to start taking notes for this post. Maybe I should apply? Whaddayasay, Fallen Stoners, are ya desperate enough?

'Cause I think you might find yourselves beyond desperation by this point.

Despite my inconsistent commas, action verbing and typos, I do think I've already done better in a page of fan fiction from ten years ago than your current employees in their official contributions. And I didn't need to deliberately shit on Tolkien's corpse to get my amateurish point across.

 

If that's your professional standard, then what the fuck am I <no longer> paying you for?