It's so strange to understand that this was all just a teenagers' fanfic

[temnix]

I would like to like Dungeons&Dragons style fantasy, I really do. I used to like it. I think, though, I respected it back then. Somehow it did not jar my sensibility or taste. Some "high fantasy," especially the more recent simulacrums from corporate monsters, like the shit churned out by Wizards of the Coasts, Blizzard etc. over the last 20 years and more, always revolted me. The story of Warcraft 3 was vomitous in a way Warcraft 2's still doesn't feel. But even the wizards with staves and pointy hats and warriors in chain mail bikinis, and druids who are so wise and herbalist and Wiccan from classic years have stopped commanding my respect. I wish I could simply say that I outgrew them, and, of course, it's true that I didn't know back then what I know now, so I wasn't bothered, but I know I still want that which made fantasy fantasy - imagination. I see schlock for schlock now, however. I can't help but notice megaholes in plots, I can't do anything with stories where the antihero who has been sliding towards the dark side all his life gets redeemed at the last moment because someone shows him his mother's locket or something like that. None of the geography or economics of the Forgotten Realms, to take up just any setting, make sense... Are there economics? Social structures? Classes?

Have a look at this picture from the FR Wiki online, lifted from some very old sourcebook, by the look of it:

The caption reads: "A Turmishan warrior displaying her ornate armor." This is from an article on the land of Turmish. I consulted it hoping to find out something about that country, but instead I encountered a scattering of adolescent flash points. The country isn't even described in any detail in the wiki, and I doubt the sourcebooks were any better. The map is just a medley of dungeon sites, the locations have names like Morningstar Hollows and the Lake of Drifting Stars. Two landmarks not so far away from each with "star" in their names. For crying out loud, who wrote this crap? The governing body is called an Academy of Stars... And the warriors on the picture, here is what the article says about them: "Turmish was famous for its mercenaries and warriors, who were known to be honorable, impartial, articulate, and battle-skilled.[7][11] Intelligent and charismatic, Turmishan warriors were often conspicuous and stood out in a crowd.[Turmishan warriors were known to wear beautiful, ornate, and intricately crafted armor.26]" Obviously the numbers are references to valuable confirmations in which you should hasten to revel, but anyone with half an atom of logic would ask: "articulate," warriors? What, how? The only way to be articulate is through education, and warriors can't have any and don't want any, they spend that time learning to fight. "Intelligent" and "charismatic" go the same way; how intelligent and charismatic were medieval knights, those rude motherfuckers who bathed a couple of times a year? And intricate armor - how much would that cost? Just impossible all around.

But it doesn't matter, because all this stuff about fancy armors and articulate warriors ever was was an excuse for some cosplay. Get together, dress like that, each invent a suit of armor, divide into teams of orcs and elves, fight a battle. That's all this kind of fantasy ever was - a fanfic.

Of course, the illustration is appropriately crappy, so it grounds the text very nicely. But it's like that with everything. Okay, so the Forgotten Realms always did suck, and Elminster was a rip-off of Gandalf, yada-yada, but even more inspired settings like Krynn... I wonder to what extent I could go along with it now. There is nothing there that jars my memory, but I can't do anything with that fantasy either. At the same time, I don't find anything at all problematic with real writers of fantasy: de Camp, Howard, Leiber, Dunsany, Tolkien (at the time of "The Hobbit," anyway), Vance, Eddison... Their worlds were different from this commonplace reality outside the window mandated for all of us, they were strange worlds, but sensible in their own way - and for grown-ups. But the stuff upon which these forums float, for example, this standard fantasy fare is just collapsing in my eyes like an avalanche, it's rolling off the cliff and disappearing in the abyss where I don't care ever to see it. It's the same with much of science fiction. Some cut corners and a little naivety aside, I don't have any problems with "Babylon 5," I don't have to believe "Lexx," but "Farscape," as original as its visuals were, the series often had complete pap for plots. And I don't want to acknowledge that it was crap, I want to participate in the story without indulgences. The made-up parts don't bother me, I'm crazy enough for anything, it's the parts that connect to reality that I find offensive. 

What I'm trying to find here, speaking out loud in a void, is a sort of fulcrum, a kind of foundation point that's eluding me, where style and content can come together without requiring the audience to be very young or primitive. I don't want to think that all imagination is a youthful mistake. Even the good writers I mentioned, even they... weren't they deluding themselves with their bold and intricate fabrications? Even they, weren't they victims of a temporary blindness, lasting while one is relatively young and healthy and strong and in touch with one's time and ways - and feeling immortal? After that ends, if one has become a professional in time, it's possible to dream away, professionally, until one's final days. But is that all there is? A short fest of delusion and then a redoubt to keep reality at bay?

[Lightbringer]

As an author, all I can say is to go write what you want to read. You're not alone, whatever your tastes. The other folks who agree with your sentiments will beat a path to your door (or Amazon author page) to buy them.

[InThePineways]

I think about this a lot. There's a downward spiral that eventually happens in all genres of art. It's not just a matter of taste or preference, or any of the usual excuses people give. It's a decrease in artistry, resulting in cruder iterations of what came before. There are common factors every time this pattern occurs. Factors like losing the foundation the genre is based on; in the case of fantasy, an increasing separation from the classical hero myths of ancient and medieval Europe. Or a gradual retreat of talented people from the genre; Gary Gygax's resignation from TSR. And of course, the imposition of opportunistic leaches; Beamdog and their terrible cash-grabbing "enhanced" editions. Eventually, the genre's creative output becomes unrecognizably warped from the original, genre-defining work, and one wonders what he ever saw in it.

Edited November 22, 2021 by InThePineways

[temnix]

@InThePineways Well said, only the disconnection is not just from the source stories but from the culture and mindset that made them, or something like them, believable and relevant. Until only a few decades ago the majority of people, in all parts of the world, were brought up in societies that believed in the supernatural. They had common creeds, whether Christian, Muslim, Hinduist or any other. I'm actually from a country with several generations of atheists, the Soviet Union, that is, and that gives me something of a detached perspective, but it's still true that until recently ideas like the existence of magic, mysterious worlds adjacent to the one humans inhabit and so nature spirits and shapeshifters, life after death and therefore ghosts, and so on were in the realm of possibility, even if social life in the spotlight was already industrialized and bureaucratized. But now those subjects have evaporated from the thoughts of nearly everyone. Zealots aside (and they are not a healthy counterexample), who doesn't think nowadays that consciousness is in the brain and that when the brain dies, it's all over? Who doesn't think that science falls flat on its face every now and then but is, all the same, the only real kind of knowledge? Who doesn't accept the evolutionary story of the past, devoid of events other than the big meteorite that killed the dinosaurs? And human history is about this corrupt king waging war on that one, no better; guns, microbes and steel. That's a far cry from giving Britons an origin in the ancient Troy or the idea of a manifest destiny. All of those fanciful imaginings have been laughed out of court, and even the words are gone off tongues. I think the word "werewolf" is more or less undecipherable by an average brain today - the idea behind it is too strange. Is it a dog? Is it a man in a shaggy suit? Hollywood and pop culture still reuse the tropes, but look at ghost movies there are so many of: they are completely about jump scares and ugly, distorted visuals now. I don't know a single one that honestly takes up a hypothesis that there is some continuity of consciousness after the death of the body, a parallel continuum to the events the eye can see. Such a model would instantly appear too outrageous even to the makers. It's the same with everything else that used to have a dangerous edge as a representative of a vast, unknown world outside.

And there is no influx of fresh notions for the cauldron of the imagination. Science fiction may get a boost when the social order changes and priorities become realigned, but I don't see poetry and fantasy coming back as essential social forces. That would require a return to a preindustrial or a turn towards a non-industrial society. Castaneda writes at one point that the interests and methods of modern shamans are different from those of their ancient predecessors because they have no social function. You will never a shaman as a village healer or a court magician, he notes. Well, what is the point, then? Without relevance, how can fantasy be interesting or vital?

That was in response to you. I was talking about something else in my post, though - growing out of the books and movies that used to fascinate and inspire. Other people have had a worse time at that, I'm sure. I've never been a fan of R. Salvatore, so I've never had to contemplate seppuku upon discovering what trash the Drizzt books are. I don't think I actually did grow out of what I still respect, however. Not out of the original Dragonlance books, not of the first Moonshaes trilogy by Douglas Niles for the Forgotten Realms. Not out of the wonderful Aladdin animated series for TV, a jewel of the 90s. Not out of the better parts of Xena, Hercules, Conan with Schwarzenegger (I prefer the second movie), and I keep "Red Sonja" on my hard drive. They are still powerful, as are the comics from the 70s issues of Heavy Metal. And Magic: The Gathering for many years held the flag high. But they really don't make them that way anymore. The external world does not correspond to these essentially simple stories and visions. It surges around them violently and wants to tear one away. As I look at so many wonderful MtG cards, I feel myself lapsing into a sort of reverie that is perfectly natural and would be congenial to, say, Thoreau and other Transcendentalist writers in the United States or their Romantic counterparts in Europe. I want to stay in that frame, in that mood and in that measure of time. I don't want to change, or become smarter, or soak up worldly experience outside. I'm not interested in splaying my being in synch with the undulations of this (im)material civilization and reality that I find out of those little windows or my own window. The coronavirus may kill me, but it will never excite me. Yet, unlike the Transcendentalists and Romantics, I realize that there can be no development to the stories. Two hundred years ago it would be different. When those writers and painters walked in the wild, or semi-wild (strange enough for the inhuman character to be felt but not so rough as to kill them), the artists and other, congenial spirits still had a future ahead, a possible future, in that environment. It was still possible, debatable, for the world not to trundle on in the direction it then did. They could, at that time, still develop and enjoy divergent notions. And maybe in nature and in open sensitive spirits there would be enough response and echo to maintain a place and a time where the poet and the painter's sentiments would be relevant and verdant. There could be a separate community through time.

But that's not where we are now. It is impossible to continue traditions or countercultures once started today. Take Wicca. Its origin story was always laughable, but it was true, serious and cool in its intent and statement - a different mode of relating to the natural world and intuition. That went on until, oh, the 90s. But what does it mean to be a Wiccan now? Or a goth? I keep seeing young people in black, but what does that stand for? They have their faces buried in smartphones the same as the squares. I'm not even talking about commercialization and commodification, though, I'm saying that there is no future in dreams. To a dream sent there is no dream answering. Even if a global revolution singes this world order off the planet, something even more technical and rational and proletarian will, no doubt, take over. It is not logically necessary that this should be so, but I can't avoid this conclusion, knowing what I do about human nature.

Edited November 28, 2021 by temnix

[Grammarsalad]

You might like Eberron

[temnix]

I'd rather read de las Casas' "Shortest Account of the Destruction of the Indies." It's going to have a lot of detail, it's from life, and I might improve my Spanish. And the reason I went to it is because I'm playing "Colonization."

[InThePineways]

On 6/20/2021 at 7:18 PM, temnix said:

I would like to like Dungeons&Dragons style fantasy, I really do. I used to like it. I think, though, I respected it back then. Somehow it did not jar my sensibility or taste. Some "high fantasy," especially ...

 

On 11/27/2021 at 5:51 PM, temnix said:

@InThePineways Well said, only the disconnection is not just from the source stories but from the culture and mindset that made them, or something like them, believable and relevant. Until only a few decades ago the majority of people, in all parts of the world, were brought up in ...

Very interesting, insightful posts. I have nothing to add, except I think you're right, first, that as one ages he begins to see absurdity in things that previously had so much meaning, and second, that stories begin to lose meaning as the culture that created them drifts further away from the conditions in which those stories were created. If you think about how fast the modern world changes, it's inevitable that the stories we relate to will also change with each passing decade. Unfortunately, at the current juncture, there seem to be very few people who understand the world well enough to create culture that seems relevant.

I might catch some flack for this, but I think the game Disco Elysium does a great job of broaching relevant themes in a way that's sensible and mature (for a videogame). It's also tons of fun. It gets a bad rap for being too different from standard RPGs, but if you haven't played it yet it's definitely worth a go.

Edited May 22, 2022 by InThePineways

[temnix]

@InThePinewaysDisco Elysium's system requirements were too high for me. And it was very original, judging by everything, but in a sort of "postmodern" way, to use that as a shortcut. Then again, one must take leaps of faith. Previous generations didn't have to vault over these cracks of emptiness, though, in the hope of reaching the other side where the genius in the author has made stones bloom. And I don't think there is a new culture coming, because mechanization ins't human to begin with. At a wobbly interface line between folklore and industrial society there were at first attempts at original horror, reconceiving traditional images (shapeshifters, angels, demons, wizards, all of them), urban fantasy was born, but that was only a period. What looked like a balance between the rational and the irrational across the 20th century, the fertile ground for all of science fiction, to begin with, was just a temporary state when one watercolor is being washed away by another, and for a while they are swirling in a mix.

That's how it was with dystopias, you know? In the 20th century all of the best ones were written (did "When the Sleeper Wakes" still catch the 19th? Anyway...) But it always seemed like these terrible futures would remain futures. It seemed like the thunderclouds would remain on the horizon. All the foresighted writers warning 30-50-100 years in advance about environmental disasters, dehumanization, state control, overpopulation, genetic manipulation, they seemed to be sitting snugly in a safe niche. And in a way, they were, because back then it was possible to make a decent living from fiction. It was like dystopias were a permanent genre and you could produce them forever. Make a career out of warnings. And some people like Ballard or Ellison pretty much did, but only because they happened to live in the postwar years - not too early, not too late, just right. Those things seemed like a normal accessory of development, warnings. And every warning was only a snapshot from the generational position of the writer. Some caught the clouds farther away, but did not believe they would really come, some were brought up with them closer, which already seemed normal, though old men knew so much ground had been lost. But the storm front was not a nightmare, it was moving in all along, all that acclaimed fiction had no effect whatsoever, and some time in the early 2000s it finally quite arrived. In my opinion, no new culture will be forthcoming if technology continues its roll into the foreground, and the minority of people in the world who have different ideas about progress have no clout. Ursula Le Guin wrote not long before her death that in the near future the art of remembering will become very important. The people who remember how things were done right will be crucial in resisting these times with their obsessive technologies, she wrote.

That's part of what I've tried to do with my mods. They are very traditional, in a way. I wanted to remind people of what it means to have choices, to have occupations in a game other than accumulate points or make power builds. And once you have that, it turns out the elves and dwarves are okay, the alignments are okay. If you let yourself breathe, they don't need to be reformed. And the traditional gender roles are okay too, if kindness and fairness are brought to them.

Edited May 23, 2022 by temnix

[InThePineways]

@temnix I'll have to try your mods. They sound like just what I'm looking for.

Dystopian sci-fi is pointless when real life outperforms it. The Western world is steadily losing ground, and bad decision follows bad decision at every turn. What causes the corruption of an organization? Or a civilization? Perhaps the corruption of the individuals who compose it? At the risk of sounding sensationalist, I feel we're at the beginning of a new dark age with a new religious tyranny of sorts. The quote by Ursula Le Guin seems prophetic. Civilizations have a limited life span, and even if they carry on in name (Greece, Egypt), it's obvious when the end has come. You and I were born too late to explore the world, too early to explore the stars, but just in time to watch the fall of Western civilization, the greatest so far in history.

[temnix]

@InThePinewaysActually, we are even too late for the decline of the West, by a hundred years or so.  And for deep reasons, I've started to like the idea of the original sin. I've always been a good Adamite and hippie, but there really seems to be some core of greed, vanity and desire for dominion over others in most people that circumstances of life don't explain. I've seen this in myself, too, but only when I suffer. When I have the things essential to me, I'm not like that. They, on the other hand, want to lord it over each other even in good times. But I'm not giving up on exploring the world! There are other dimensions, less known than what the maps show.

[Isewein]

The beauty - and danger - of the idea of original sin is that it in some sense divests us of responsibility for our misdeeds and misfortunes. Just as the narrative of inevitable cyclical civilisational decline does, which in a sense is just as teleological as that of progress it decries. To me it is a sobering reminder of the errors of defeatism to see the brave people of Ukraine willing to put their lives on the line for what in a very real sense is Western civilisation.