Author Archives: natechen

The Dragon Prince’s Good Intentions Misfired

Posted by natechen on

Obligatory spoiler warning for The Dragon Prince. In case you haven’t watched it yet.

I like Netflix’s The Dragon Prince. However, like so many shows aimed at young people, the show has a heart, a moral message it’s trying to convey. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. And I even mostly agree with the points Dragon Prince is trying to get across. However, the trick to telling a moral story is making sure the story you tell conveys the message you intend. Good intentions don’t mean much if they don’t get through to your audience. And unfortunately, The Dragon Prince falls down on this count not once, but twice. These aren’t central to the story or its primary moral message, but they do stand out in contrast to an otherwise well done narrative and wholesome morals, so it bears mentioning.

Let me address a bit of an elephant in the room first. Both of these points revolve around characters who are disabled. In our world disabilities are hindrances that can be overcome with some work and understanding from the people around you. That’s good, and I am glad whenever I see people succeeding in spite of their disabilities. But unfortunately disabilities are just that – a lack of certain abilities. Those shortcomings are real, and need to be made up for. To pretend they don’t is to insult all those in the world who suffer from them and the work they must put in to overcome them.

I am aware that The Dragon Prince exists in a world of magic and the supernatural, and these factors could somehow make up for these physical disabilities. However, not only would that undercut the point of putting these characters in as an example of how disabilities do not prevent full and satisfying lives, the fact is one of these characters is clearly not compensating via magic and the other is using magic that explicitly does not compensate for her disability.

Now I’m not making the point that you can’t put disabled characters in your stories, even in swashbuckling adventure stories. But you can’t simply write those characters like their disabilities don’t exist some or all of the time. And I’m afraid that’s what The Dragon Prince does.

Let’s start with Amaya.

Amaya is the maternal aunt of Callum and Ezran, princes of a human kingdom on the border between humans and the magical races of Xadia. She spends most of her time at a fortress guarding a pass between the kingdom and Xadia. Amaya is also deaf.

Now immediately one might think that Amaya is never written like she’s not deaf. After all, she communicates in sign language and has an interpreter who has to pass on most of what she says, right?

Yes, she conforms to the most basic stereotypes of a deaf person in a world of hearing people. However, it’s the way that she relates to her job that is the sticking point here. Amaya is presented as a formidable fighter, and I suppose in some contexts that’s entirely possible for deaf people. But here’s a secret – hearing is the only human sense that allows us to assess a situation in all directions at once and through obstacles. For a soldier who expects to be in a melee on the battlefield going without hearing is almost worse than going without sight.

In fact, there’s one fight where Amaya is facing an enemy in front of her and a door bursts open behind her and she reacts to the sound. That’s a horrible breach in the established rules of the story, but Amaya can’t be presented as a formidable warrior without it – meaning the writers made a mistake somewhere along the line.

Worse than that is just how useless a battlefield leader who can’t hear is. In medieval times, which The Dragon Prince is clearly modeled on, almost all battlefield communication revolved around loud noises, beginning with yelling and moving up the line rapidly to horns and drums. Without her hearing Amaya cannot hear spoken updates from her troops or pick up on long distance signals via trumpet or drum. And sign language doesn’t seem to be universally understood in Xadia so there’s always the risk she’ll get stuck with soldiers who can’t understand her. Yes, she can read lips and understand reports from anyone that way, assuming they aren’t coming from someone in a full, face covering helmet. Yes, she has an aide who interprets for her and who can hear signals from other parts of the army that aren’t in line of sight. But the fact is, that still leaves her effectiveness dependent of the safety and health of a single soldier, or perhaps a small group of them, that can understand her.

Amaya commands the most important defensive structure in the kingdom. It makes no sense to have the entire chain of command there entirely dependent on a small handful of soldiers who can understand her, and who have to relay any signals from a distance to her. There are a lot of work arounds you could implement for this. Signal flags, for example. But they are all fragile (what if the fortress is attacked at night?) and this is the most important point in the kingdom. You don’t leave weak points in its defense.

I have a lot of thoughts on how the character of Amaya could have been tweaked to leave the essentials in place – deaf woman, aunt to the two children, fearsome fighter – without these problems in play. But that’s not the point I’m getting at. The point is, disabled people sometimes have to face the fact that, while they could do a thing they want to do, they may not fit that role as well as someone who does not have their particular disability. Or the work arounds necessary for them to fill that role will leave them inherently less suited to it than someone else. The Dragon Prince presents all possible considerations that would rightfully present obstacles to Amaya being a general as magically being ignored by the world around her, and that’s a very stupid expectation to offer.

However, while Amaya might set a disabled viewer up for a disappointment that pales in comparison to Ava.

Ava is a wolf who lost a leg to a bear trap. Ava was rescued by a young girl named Ellis who was told by her parents they couldn’t afford keep the animal and if returned to the wild the wolves would shun Ava because she couldn’t keep up with them. Ellis ran away with Ava and climbed the nearby mountain, braving many strange and frightening things to stumble across a “miracle healer” who returned Ava’s leg to normal. Only it turns out the miracle healer did no such thing.

In truth the “healer” was an illusionist who made it appear that Ava had a healthy leg, so people would be more “accepting”. Ava always had only three legs, she just needed the people around her to be comfortable with her in order to get by, so the illusionist obliged her.

This is colossally stupid. It doesn’t make any sense for Ellis’ parents to keep a healthy wolf but not a sickly one – if they couldn’t afford one they certainly couldn’t afford the other. It’s stupid, and worse, destructive, to create the illusion that when a child’s parents say “no” to something because the family cannot afford it it’s actually because the parents are uncomfortable with it. Children negotiate with this premise all the time (I know I did) but it only leads to tension in the family as parents get frustrated with their children’s pestering and the child builds distrust of parents. Not a good message.

Further, Ava carries two people on her back at times, as well as scrambling up rocks and ledges, as if she had two functioning front legs. Let me stress, the illusion created for Ava only looked and felt real – it wasn’t actually there. In which case, Ava acting like a normal wolf is stupid.

But the worst part of this is, it gives disabled children the impression that all they have to do to fit in is act like they aren’t disabled. No matter how much stress and pain this might cause them. Bottle it up. Pretend it’s not there.

Congratulations, Dragon Prince. You’ve contradicted your own point.

Again, disabled people are not less than healthy people, any more than someone with the flu is less than a healthy person. But their disabilities do have fundamental impacts on how they interact with the world. If you’re going to write fiction that includes these people you must. Must. Must. Be true to life in how these shortcomings will impact them, or you’re doing more harm than good. The Dragon Prince tried, but I’m not sure it managed. This time. Hopefully the writers can recover and do better in the future.

The Tragedy of Kanye West

Posted by natechen on

Wait! Wait! Come back! This is about writing, I promise!

We’re going to talk about writing in the context of Kanye West.

Come back! Please!

Okay, joking aside, I do want to talk about writing and it’s going to be that rarest of posts ’round these parts, the topical post. Those who pay some scant attention to politics may be aware that the popular rapper Kanye West has taken to the political arena in the last few months, an interesting and unusual direction for him. My purpose is not to break down the content of his political commentary, which primarily consisted of encouraging free thought and questioning of accepted beliefs (fairly benign messages), but rather the error he made in his approach.

Kanye’s biggest mistake proved to be his failure to analyze his audience. This resulted in his message getting lost in signal noise and ultimately jumbled with the statements of people around him, whether he agreed with them or not.

Mandatory disclaimer time. I don’t know much about Kanye West – not a fan of rap in general, don’t watch reality TV, not really in to celebrities. Before his entry in to the political arena, which does interest me, I only knew that he cut Taylor Swift off at the Grammys that one time. People who have followed West’s career for a while agree that diving head first in to a new realm of discussion with strong opinions already in place is not unusual behavior for the man, so I’m going to assume Kanye approached making commentary on politics the way he’s approached every other piece of commentary he’s made in his life.

Most musicians start building hype through a press release and reaching out to one or two trusted media venues, then follow up any further press interest they get as they continue to try and network to better and better platforms. They rely on the press as their primary audience, building hype and enthusiasm via straight forward discussion of their newest work and the artistic process and their excitement at the outcomes. This is a pattern Kanye lives in quite well, from what I’ve seen he’s a charismatic man and speaks with great force and passion, and he rolls with punches splendidly, even turning hostile questioning to his own advantage.

The problem is that, in the early stages of this process Kanye has probably grown used to working with the music press. Musicians and music press have a mutually beneficial interest in making sure the public at large is enthusiastic about a musician’s upcoming work. This can take many forms but the press is rarely interested in dampening down what the artist is trying to say – the art is at the center of that kind of press after all.

Political press is a much, much different beast. Political press is always spinning, and rarely with any concern for how what was originally said was intended. It’s instructive how much of what President Trump has said to the public has come through venues he has complete control over – Twitter, the Press Secretary, rallies – and how much what he has said in those venues has still been spun all over the place on both sides. Very noncommittal statements on the subject of, say, North Korea have been spun as everything from threats of war to declarations of a new age of peace.

While Donald Trump is not as charismatic as Kanye, he has a station on popular culture that is older and more pervasive and he has shrewdly used that to trumpet his messages directly to the public as often as possible, bypassing the spin machine as much as possible. He knew the media was an audience hostile to him and, while he couldn’t remove their power he could dilute it by asking people who they would rather believe – the press or Trump. That’s not a great strategy for cultural cohesion but it is an excellent strategy for getting your message through clearly.

Kanye was used to being a straight shooter with people who had no need to spin. He didn’t know this new audience as well as Trump and so he thought he could simply get up and talk about how enthused he was to see long time rap icon Donald Trump as president and how proud and excited that made him feel about his country. He made some statements on Twitter, a few public appearances, and finally an interview on TMZ. But by that point the spin was in full effect.

Kanye was a traitor who was becoming a Republican! Kanye was a full MAGA guy and that was great! Kanye wanted all black people to vote Trump! Kanye didn’t know anything about being black! From celebrated writers like Ta Naeisi Coats at the Atlantic to staff contributors at The Gateway Pundit, everyone had a spin and no one really cared what the crafted message of Kanye West was. They just needed his name to boost their own messages.

After months of this it’s not surprising that Kanye doing a personal favor for a friend on the opposite side of the political aisle would be misconstrued as endorsement for a political movement he had no interest in. The “Blexit” movement, about black people stepping away from the Democratic party in favor of the Republicans, is naturally a poor fit for a man who wants to question everything and wants others to do the same. It’s not surprising Kanye would throw up his hands and walk away from politics after being pushed into yet another box by the political press.

But at this point he really should have expected it. The sad fact is, people who will listen to art and get hyped for its message frequently don’t want to listen to political messages or question them to see if they’re really what they claim to be. Most political press outlets have a vested interest in catering to that desire by spinning the news, or at least their opinion pieces on the news. And almost any reporting on someone like Kanye is bound to be 99% opinion. It’s a very different environment from an industry press like Kanye would be used to.

For all his personal charisma, powerful personality and worthwhile message, Kanye approached his foray into politics as a musician with something to say, rather than as a politician with an agenda to push. That mistake in technique, that failure to understand his audience, let him loose control of his messaging and become a political figurehead for anyone who wanted him for a short period of time. Now he’s turned back to creative work, where his skills will doubtless show much more return. And, if he’s shrewd, he can still put his message forward if he wants.

It’s very tempting to think that just because you’ve become good communicating in one medium or to one audience that you can communicate in any medium or to any audience. This is naïve. That audience is not this audience, it’s not yours until you understand it well enough to make it yours. Each medium, each audience, must be carefully examined, all preconceived notions questioned, all trusted approaches doubted, until they are thoroughly understood. Do it and hopefully you won’t come up short in the final reckoning. Take that to heart and maybe a little of Kanye’s message will have gotten through in the end.

Politics and Publishing

Posted by natechen on

We live in a world where politics seems to have invaded everything. It’s not healthy to have contentious debates about the direction we want our society to take dominate everything from sports and entertainment to religion and philosophy. There needs to be venues where people can come together and appreciate the common human experience without refighting the political battles of the day. At the same time, the places best suited to providing these neutral forums also has the greatest potential to impact the political arena.

Entertainment and religion can powerfully shape the way we view the world, especially with undiscerning audiences, and that makes them a big target for people who want to gain political power beginning in arenas outside the political. Most people’s political beliefs are shaped by their sense of what’s moral or beneficial after all. And, particularly in the case of religion or philosophy, one almost expects political beliefs to be influenced by other parts of life.

Thus entertainment has most commonly been regarded as the appropriate apolitical arena. Sports teams gave people a cause to rally around and a forum for camaraderie which had nothing to do with the intricacies of public policy, novels and movies created a shared mythos where politics could play a part but were often kept as distant metaphors or subtle themes by the best writers. Unfortunately, beginning sometime in the 1950s, ideology began to gain traction in entertainment as well. For the purposes of this forum, the influence of politics on publishing is what interests us most.

Some political publishing was inevitable, but most of it focused on news and commentary, not entertainment. And, until recently, there was still a wide offering of apolitical entertainment if you desired it. But that offering has grown slimmer and less accessible for some time, until we’ve reached a point where it’s almost nonexistent in some mediums or genres.

Enter Comicsgate.

Like most mediums, American comics had enjoyed a low political presence for a long time. But the thumbscrews were building through the early 2000s and apolitical content got pushed out. Soon any contributors who disagreed with the prevailing political ideology in comics was under pressure to keep quiet or conform. By about 2015 artists and writers were starting to loose work just because of their views. Come 2017 Comicsgate, a strange backlash against political purity testing and storytelling in the comics industry, had arisen and was enraging the old guard with their irreverence towards the people running the mainstream and their willingness to throw down shibboleths.

Comicsgate spends most of their time condemning political maneuvering in the industry and tsking over subpar product that has resulted from what they view as an overemphasis on political correctness and an underemphasis on good storytelling and art. The mainstream accuses them of bigotry and envy.

The conflict between old guard and rebels came to a head in May of 2018 when one of the figureheads of Comicsgate, one Richard C. Meyer, wrapped up an Indegogo campaign to create his own independent comic and announced that it would be published through a company called Antarctic Press. Upset, comic book veteran Mark Waid announced his disappointment on his public social media platforms and contacted Antarctic Press directly. What followed were a couple of harrowing days for the owners of Antarctic Press as they state they were contacted repeatedly, not just via the Antarctic offices but at their day jobs, by people angry at their collaboration with Meyer. Eventually Antarctic canceled their contract with Meyer and forced him to find his own methods of printing and distributing the book.

Now Meyer is suing Waid for tortuous interference with his contract.

Full disclosure. I’ve praised the work of Mark Waid on this blog in several places, including here, here and here. I think he can be a great writer, capable of writing great stories that bring people together with the power of the shared human experience. I also rather like Richard Meyer’s work as a comic book critic and I backed one of his Indegogo projects (although not the one that was through Antarctic Press). I also find Waid’s behavior in this case thuggish and egotistical. So what now?

There was an interesting article by another independent comic creator, Jon del Arroz, who addressed this exact question on his own blog. You can read it here. He makes several great points in this. Both sides are appealing to their fans to raise money for their legal defense funds. The money spent in this way isn’t really helping anyone but the lawyers, and it’s certainly not helping the comic industry, which is struggling. (And before you bring up the Marvel Cinematic Universe it’s important to point out that the Marvel film studio and comic line are administratively and – more importantly – financially independent.) And Comicsgate has spent a lot of time talking about this lawsuit like it’s a great victory, which it clearly isn’t.

At the same time, Arroz make’s one major mistake in his analysis of this situation.

See, he seems to think that this lawsuit has somehow made Comicsgate political, and ruined its ability to say it’s a movement about apolitical entertainment. I disagree.

First, Comicsgate does have a majority of what Americans would consider moderate to far right wing figures in it, including Meyer himself, as well as figures like Ethan Van Sciver, Doug Ernst and Doug TenNapel. However, it has a lot of moderate left wingers as well, like Nasser Rabadi and Donal DeLay. But all these people are committed to apolitical storytelling. That lets them put their differences aside and help each other with the craft of comics while still enjoying their policy disagreements.

At the same time, getting a comic published is a business. Business is not entertainment, it is very political and it has to be. If Waid is, in fact, guilty of interfering in business in an illegal fashion then it is not only appropriate but, from the business perspective, necessary to respond in a legal fashion. Any good business lawyer will tell you that every time you pass on your business rights your ability to stand up for them in the future is diminished. Further, if Comicsgate or some part thereof does intend to transform from a loose collection of critics to a new part of their industry they have to make it clear to the old guard that they cannot be harassed out of the business. Meyer seems to understand this, as he made clearish in his long but rambling explanation of why he sued Waid in the first place (at the time of this writing the video where Meyer explains his reasoning is no longer available, perhaps because he has removed it at the advice of his legal team). For Meyer’s business ambitions to play out, he has to take part in the legal/political side of business or basically admit he’s been run out of the industry.

All this being true… I’m not enamored of the idea of this suit being funded by the fans of an industry – on either side – much less the amount of haymaking and fundraising that’s gone on around it. (For this reason I’m not linking to the fundraising pages for either side of the suit.) It only fuels the kind of division that entertainment was originally supposed to help us bridge.

Long time readers of this blog know I like to examine the publishing industry from time to time and try and draw lessons for myself and other aspiring writers from it. Unfortunately, there’s not much I can glean from this other than the obvious: Straighten up and prepare for a long slog. Even if you have a good product others want, it seems that might not be enough. There’s a lot of opportunities out there for us, but in changing times the old guard might not give way easily.

We Have Forgotten Our Symbolic Language

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There was a time when fairy tales and myths were ways of talking about the world which were rife with mystery and symbolism. These stories served as ways to present human realities in sharp, simple and easy to remember ways. While lacking in nuance by today’s standards this symbolic language is part of what made these traditional stories easy to pass down. The people who told them were typically not literate and, even if they could read or write, generally wouldn’t have the resources to make something durable enough to stand the test of time. The average home was a very flimsy place back in the day, and something as flimsy as paper was unlikely to survive the seasons, much less the years.

So stories larger than life, stories of brave knights and princesses, dark forests and lurking predators, monsters and ghosts were spun to stand out from the day to day humdrum of life. But most all people knew that the protagonists were stand-ins for the higher callings in their lives, the dark places represented hard times or unfamiliar circumstances and the ghouls and dragons the worse parts of human nature that had to be confronted and overcome, whether from sources without or from within their own heart. This symbolic language was beautiful, effective and most of all memorable.

We’ve forgotten how it is used.

Part of this is because of the immediacy of our culture. Twitter hot takes and reddit memes have overtaken the discussion to the point where the first aspect of anything that catches the attention is what is commented on. You would think memes could fill the role of introductory symbology for our culture but so much of meme culture is rooted in irony and sarcasm that it tends to undermine the nature of symbolism – commentors are too busy trying to put their own spin on the meme to consider the original intention of whatever they’re riffing on. Symbology requires a level of shared perception between author and audience which meme culture actively avoids. Which brings us to the second issue, namely the very postmodern culture we live in.

Postmodernists are hung up on power games and oppressing people; they’re always looking for it. Almost all literary criticism in our era is rooted in postmodernism, so the people who used to keep and teach our cultural symbolism, the elders and wise women, now spend all their time dissecting it to see how it’s bad. An ogre who robs and kills travelers is no longer a symbol of human greed, it’s a racist caricature of Jews, or black people, or whatever.

This is something that’s been nagging at me for a while, but I always chalked it up to postmodernism. But the decay of meaningful symbology was really thrown in stark contrast for me by the reaction to a little work of Japanese fiction called Goblin Slayer. For those wondering, the story focuses on a man who kills goblins. Who would have guessed?

There have been two camps of people who have reacted to Goblin Slayer: people who think the show is morally reprehensible or at least posing as it for shock value and people who think it’s just a dark, gritty action fantasy tale not afraid to face harsh realities.

The primary two reasons given when people say Goblin Slayer is horrible are:

  1. The first episode contains a not very explicit but not very ambiguous rape.
  2. The attitude of the title character, particularly in his extermination of child goblins, endorses genocide.

The usual responses to these objections  given by those who just think Goblin Slayer is a dark adventure are:

  1. Rape is an evil thing that happens, and using it to establish the evil of your villains is just as valid as using murder or torture, both things goblins also do in the first episode.
  2. Goblins are presented more as a lethal pest that happens to have arms, legs and a head like a human, rather than as sentient beings. The Goblin Slayer is an exterminator who deals with the pests, not a genocidal maniac.

Both of these reactions completely miss the point.

They are not serious criticisms of the story, for two reasons. The first is that they are based on a woefully incomplete understanding of Goblin Slayer. These are not criticisms, these are hot takes, sarcastic, ironic statements made to grab attention on Twitter, not engage with the work as it stands. One episode of a thirteen episode run is not much to base an opinion on but it is plenty to grandstand on like an ignoramus. For starters, if these self-styled critics were interested in offering an informed opinion without waiting for the rest of the series to broadcast, Goblin Slayer has plenty of source material that they could have drawn on and the source books are “light novels”, the Japanese equivalent to novellas, that can be read in a few hours each. But this wasn’t about criticism or analysis, this was about finding something to be outraged about. But outrage is the devil’s cocaine, it feels good but blinds all senses, leaving the outraged to be swept along by the crowd with no real sense of what’s happening. It’s the exact opposite of the attitude a critic needs.

Worse, this easy outrage at any little thing you can call rape or racism dulls the senses. Like the cocaine addict, the outrage addict wears down their receptiveness to these issues and wearies their mind, until real outrages pass right by them without comment. But that’s not what we’re driving at today, so we’ll leave it at that. The real point is this:

Goblins are not stand ins for real world races, nor are their crimes perpetrated on the audience. In Goblin Slayer the goblins are symbolic of human evils. The narrative goes out of its way to make this point. We are told in the first chapter of the source material that a saying goes that every time a new group of adventurers is formed so is a band of goblins. A folk tale is mentioned that a goblin is formed every time someone makes a mistake. Elsewhere the Goblin Slayer himself mentions that his sister told him when you resent someone you become a goblin. The Slayer’s cunning and ruthless way of fighting is twice compared to the behavior of goblins, a fact he himself acknowledges in a speech early in the first book where he compares his own obsessive destruction to that of a goblin’s. “He who fight’s monsters should take care lest he become one” is an overused trope but fortunately not one that really applies to Goblin Slayer.

You see, Goblin Slayer is a story in the vein of the old fairytales (a very gruesome and violent group of fiction itself, I might add). The Slayer himself is an embodiment of the battle between good and evil in human hearts. He comes from a very, very dark place. It’s what drives him to exterminate the evils of goblins so thoroughly. As the only villains of the tale, goblins in Goblin Slayer fill many roles but all of them are as representations of human vice. Gluttony and greed in the form of their rapacious theft and cannibalism, lust in their abductions and rapes, cruelty and wrath in their rampant violence.

We know that the victims of evil are, sadly, the most likely to perpetuate that evil. Bullied children are more likely to become bullies as they grow, victims of domestic violence more likely to abuse, sexual assault victims more likely to rape. This truth is dark, but doesn’t leave one without hope. If acknowledged, one can be on guard. Like the reforming alcoholic who avoids any drinking situation, these victims can grab hold of their situation if only they know what to be on watch for.

While many adventurers move on past goblins and view them simply as pests, the Goblin Slayer has suffered horribly from them and so he is more on guard against them than any other. He does not allow even a scrap of potential for them to reclaim their power in his life, so he exterminates them even down to the children. He is dark and troubled, teetering on the edge of monstrousness himself at times, but in time he is blessed with people who can see how damaged he is and who will not reject him outright, and what began as a perpetual battle against the darkness the goblins cast him into begins to relent, and the support of people who care gives him the chance to begin building a life that is more than just battling his own demons.

No, Goblin Slayer is not great literature. But it is a sincere story about looking the human capacity for evil in the face and accepting that it has to be fought in all its incarnations, great and small. The way it goes about this will doubtless be off-putting to some. It’s not exactly pleasant to watch. But the point is, it is a story told in a language that was commonplace in our culture not fifty years ago but that we have somehow forgotten how to use in the time since. That’s clear from the incredibly off-base reaction to it. That’s quite sad, a whole portion of our cultural heritage lost in just a few generations. It may take far longer to recover from the loss.

Marvel Netflix Doesn’t Understand Heroism

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For some reason people love Marvel’s Netflix offerings. I don’t understand why. About 40% of these offerings is people trying to convince the hero of the story not to be the hero of the story. What happened to the days when being a superhero was all about people with extraordinary gifts who tried to use them to help others when they had the chance? Why does it always have to be a boring slog of self-reflection and self-recrimination? Why can’t Iron Fist just put the suit on, punch some Triads and make New York more safe? For cryin’ out loud, stop making your superheroes boring, self-centered naval gazers. This is not what we signed up to see.

OK, maybe some did but not me.

Sorry, that opening paragraph should have had a rant warning. But I really don’t understand what the primary appeal of these shows is supposed to be. Let’s roll back a bit. Let’s look at these shows, very, very briefly. Daredevil is about a blind lawyer who can fight like ten men and his personal vendetta with the head of organized crime in New York. Luke Cage is about a wrongly convicted felon trying to keep his head down while doing right by the people of Harlem. Jessica Jones is about a woman and her abuse – of alcohol, friends and lovers, and their abuse of her in turn. Iron Fist is about the world’s greatest martial artist feeling guilty.

All four have protagonists that seem to act for selfish reasons, prioritizing how they feel or what they’re mad at over simple, meaningful steps to help others. Of these four, Luke Cage had the most likeable protagonist who, even though he was kind of milk toast, still managed to be funny, charming and powerful as needed. Sadly, even Luke succumbed to the self-recriminations as he tried to make a living and eventually went off the deep end because apparently getting a little money made him go nuts. Iron Fist was getting close to pulling out of the rut, pairing its most interesting, relatable and best written character, Ward Meechum, with lead Danny Rand on a globetrotting adventure as a set up for its next season. Alas, after a season of playing pattycake with murderers and thugs then giving up his powers to his girlfriend for reasons the story tells us about but never shows, Iron Fist‘s audience ran out of patience and dropped it and the show has been canceled. Not without cause, mind you, although I did find it a little disappointing. I liked Ward.

Look, there is a place for deep dives into the psyche of a character, for unpacking what makes people tick and what the price of hard decisions might be. But that’s not the appeal of hero stories. Hero stories generally break down into two categories – aspirational and relatable. Aspirational heroes are people we’d like to be like. They are the Superman or Batman of hero tales, people whose qualities we know no one can ever really have but we’d still like to strive for. Relatable heroes are the Spiderman of heroic stories, people with all the trials we have but who are more on the road to the aspirational goal than we are, just a few steps ahead. Both categories make us feel a little better about what we do to make the world a better place. And they usually make us feel better about the world, too.

After all, if there are so many people putting stock in these heroes, maybe if we all take a step in towards those ideals the world will be a brighter place. These Netflix “heroes” don’t make the world a better place. They just exhaust themselves trying to fulfill their selfish emotional needs.

Many people rate the Marvel Netflix shows far above the, admittedly somewhat cheesy, DC CW shows like Arrow or The Flash. But let’s be real. The Arrow and the Flash go out, do good things for other people, and pull those around them towards doing the same. The extent to which the do it is silly, of course, and others have comment on it plenty. But the point is that they are superheroes. Everything they do has an impact that would be silly to expect in the real world. That doesn’t stop Flash from being an aspirational hero or Arrow from being a relatable one. As heroic shows they’re doing far, far better than the grimy, self-satisfied heroes Marvel Netflix offers.

I tried. I really did. Iron Fist wasn’t a great place to start. But for better or worse, it’s also where I’m ending. I’m done with Marvel Netflix. I just don’t know what people saw in it. Whatever it was, it wasn’t the kind of heroism I was looking for.

Writing Men: All Might

Posted by natechen on

Welcome to the latest round of nerdy author musings. If you’re new to this aspect of my writing, it’s customary for me to make at least a few posts a year rambling about what I think of writing and musing on what I’ve studied about the art in the last year or two. This helps me get my thoughts on how to write well in order, in preparation for upcoming projects, and hopefully holds your interest for at least a minute or two.

It’s been a loooooong time since I’ve done a breakdown of a well written male character, including a breakdown of all the ways writing a man is done well in fiction. If you want a refresher of all I’m talking about you can get it by following these handy links:

 

Introduction 

Goals 

Codes of Conduct 

Waffle Brain

Breaking Stuff

Giving Up

Aloneliness

Mentoring

Mentoring Pt. 2

Semper Fi

 

Also, if you want to see the three previous male characters I’ve analyzed you can find them here:

 

Daniel Ocean

Dipper Pines

Charlie Brown

 

Today I want to talk about All Might, the Superman analog from Kohei Hirokoshi’s My Hero Academia. All Might is an interesting case study, not only because he has a deeper character history than any other male character we’ve analyzed, but because he’s a male character from a completely different culture, yet he still carries many of the significant hallmarks of male thought and action that we’ve identified so far. This lends credence to the theory that these are, indeed, universals to the human experience, and thus things that we must wrap our heads around in order to write well realized male characters. With that in mind, let’s get down to it!

Goals 

All Might has one simple goal that serves as the foundation for his life. Namely, to become “The Symbol of Peace.” The function of this symbol is to set the minds of normal people at ease, in day to day life, knowing there is a powerful barrier between themselves and danger, and in crisis, knowing that when they see him then they know things will be okay. In short, All Might wants people who face danger to think of him and be at ease, in the hopes it will make the difficulties of life a little easier. It’s a simple yet noble goal for a simple but noble man.

Axioms

In pursuit of his goal All Might lives by a few simple maxims. One is Always Smile, a thought passed down to him by his mentor as a way to put people in danger at ease. It’s one of the few useful pieces of advice he has for his own pupil, Deku.

While never explicitly stated, All Might lives by the principle of humility as well. This is evident in many ways, from the extreme deference he shows to practically everyone he meets to the ease with which he works with other public servants like the police and civil authorities, in spite of the fact that he is far more powerful and popular than they are. It’s even evident in the way he introduces himself. All Might’s catch phrase, “I am here!” uses a very diminutive form of the pronoun “I”. Without getting too far into the weeds, All Might uses the most simplistic form of the personal pronoun, even though many people with his fame and status would typically use more self-aggrandizing forms of speech. Even the Japanese title of the manga uses a more assertive form of the personal pronoun. And it’s not like All Might isn’t flashy. Most likely he uses this form of “I” as a way to show that, in spite of how dangerous he could be, as a hero he is at the service of the general public.

The third axiom of All Might is in the name of his quirk (or superpower), “One for All.” Part of what I jokingly refer to as the Musketeer’s Paradox (All Might’s archenemy wields a power known as “All for One”) this quirk is the foundation of All Might’s identity. Not his superhero identity, but who he is. Because at some point in the past the man named Toshinori Yagi disappeared entirely in the superhero persona of All Might. Everything he had was devoted to the cause, to the point that we never learn much of anything about him that doesn’t tie back to the superhero part of his life.

Compartmentalization 

This is a harder aspect to track in All Might’s life. Given his total devotion to his job, one might expect that he’d given up on all aspects of his life that didn’t tie back to his one purpose as the Symbol of Peace, and in many respects I’d say that analysis is correct. The catch is, before the start of the story of My Hero Academia, All Might suffers a grievous, near fatal wound that leaves him a shattered husk of who he was, only able to tap into his true potential for a few hours a day.

Unwilling to have his work as Symbol of Peace undone by showing the world that he can no longer serve as a pillar of society, All Might is forced to hide his weakness from the world at large. While MHA generally eschews the notion of “secret identities” so common in superhero stories in the west, this is a very close analog to it, as All Might leads a double life as a towering, musclebound titan in public and an emaciated, coughing skeletal figure in private.

Eventually All Might’s weakness is exposed to the public and this aspect of his character is gone. We might see it again in the future but, for the moment, All Might’s monomania in pursuit of the Symbol of Peace has prevented his forming too many mental compartments.

Competition

All Might and competition are interesting because… well, he doesn’t really have any. Yes, Endeavor is there and yes, Endeavor does want to beat All Might and take the spot of top hero. But the fact is, All Might is the best. No one else even comes close. That might cost All Might a few points except for the fact that this reality transforms All Might into something else – he becomes the gold standard.

Every hero or aspiring hero in the world – or at least Japan – measures themselves against All Might. Are they strong enough? Showing enough good will? Taking enough care in how they fight? Investigate? Patrol? Even the villains set their agenda by All Might. His impact on the world around him is staggering.

And it’s not like All Might isn’t measuring himself against anything. In many ways the standards of a mentor who has passed on can be even more daunting, as you can never really know how you’ll measure up to it…

Sacrifice 

It’s tempting to say All Might gave up a lot to get where he was. Giving in to that temptation would be wrong.

Real talk. Toshinori Yagi never wanted to be anything but All Might. He forged all his friendships through his efforts to be the Symbol of Peace, he took to his powers like a fish to water, he never really pulled his head out of the game long enough to get distracted by anything else. All Might never cared very much for the things he gave up to reach the top of his game so it’s hard to call passing over them a sacrifice.

The real sacrifice comes when All Might has to face the reality that he can’t keep being All Might. You see, the secret of One for All is that it is a superpower that can be passed from one person to another. Six people wielded it before All Might. When his injuries leave him with an ever shrinking window of time with which to perform his duties as Symbol of Peace it become apparent he must find an eighth person to pass his power on to.

The catch to this is, once One for All is in the hands of another All Might’s own power will begin to wane and eventually vanish.

It would be understandable for someone to spend their whole life straining to reach the peak to cling to it for as long as possible. After all, All Might earned his place there. He did far more than anyone else in the superhero business to uphold law and order, the public adored him as a hero and trusted him more than any other. But in the end All Might knew that the existence of a Symbol of Peace was more important than him being the Symbol of Peace. So he passed his power on to Deku. At least he would have a little while longer to stand in the gap as the final embers of One for All kept him strong for a little while.

Except he quickly faced the same quandary again. A few months after passing his power to Deku, All Might would face his archrival one last time, as part of a rescue operation gone badly wrong. Again, after all he’d done with the full force of his power, one could forgive All Might for holding back, clinging to the few scraps of time he had left to stand as the Top Hero and fill the role of Symbol of Peace he’d so painstakingly crafted for himself. Deku was nowhere near ready to take over, after all, and he’d do so much better with a mentor who still had the power to keep up with him as he learned the ropes.

But All Might had lived too long as the Symbol of Peace to let it lapse. All for One was too dangerous to leave at large, and besides he had casually threatened the peace of the citizenry. If left alone he would do far more damage to peace than an undertrained Deku.

So for the second time, All Might took what little time he had left in his dream job and sacrificed it so the peace of others could be upheld. Anyone would have understood if he hadn’t. Dream jobs don’t show up every day. But he chose to retire sooner than he wanted so that others could have a future. That kind of tradeoff is at the heart of heroic sacrifice.

Solitude 

All Might is a naturally gregarious and jovial person so he’s not typically alone. Furthermore, many of the reasons a story might show him alone don’t apply to him – he’s not the protagonist of this story and we don’t often see him working through the kinds of problems well served by solitude. But none the less we do get glimpses of him alone from time to time, usually when contemplating what to do about the League of Villains and the Catch 22 that leads them. Usually All Might’s solitude is an indication of what’s important to him – he withdraws when facing something that effects him on an emotional level so as to preserve the integrity of the Symbol of Peace. It won’t do for the public to see him upset, after all.

Loyalty 

While it might seem surprising to say about a boy scout superhero like All Might, the truth is he doesn’t have many real friends. But the handful he does have – Gran Torino and Detective Tsukakichi for example – command a great deal of respect and loyalty from All Might and offer the same in return. All Might’s own mentor, Nana Shimura, also commands great loyalty from All Might. Even after death All Might honors her memory in his philosophy of heroism and determination to somehow save her grandson Shiragaki from the clutches of evil. It’s not a theme of his story but it is there, never the less.

Mentoring 

The whole point of All Might in this story is to serve as a mentor, both for Deku and his friends. His career as the Symbol of Peace was legendary but ultimately it had to end. In many ways All Might’s superpower, One for All, is the literal embodiment of what he must do: Take the power of the Symbol of Peace he created and pass it down to others. However, while Deku is the literal embodiment of that process practically every aspiring superhero in the business looks up to All Might as a source of inspiration.

We see that most strongly in Deku’s frenemy Bakugo, another young man who has looked up to All Might all his life and wants to be an equal to his childhood hero. Where Deku admires All Might’s ability to save all the people who fall within his reach Bakugo admires the way All Might never loses to evil. This dichotomy is reflected in their personalities and the way they act under pressure. Neither one fully understands All Might, each grasping at only part of what made him the Symbol of Peace. If All Might can somehow knock these two into shape he can take the first step to solving the Musketeer’s Paradox.

The fatal flaw in All Might was always the fact that any villain that could defeat him would shatter his Symbol of Peace – a goal that All for One would eventually achieve, if in a roundabout way. One for All is still only one man, after all. And All for One’s horrifically exploitative personality may have tainted his power’s potential but his ability to unite people behind him gave him a depth and breadth of options that All Might’s solo career never afforded him.

But as a mentor All Might has a second chance. He can unite an entire generation of heroes all for the one goal of being the Symbol of Peace for a new age. And, in turn, with that one Symbol reflected in all who take up the banner against evil, the promise of Peace will not fall just because one man does. It turns out that, in retiring, All Might may just have found a way to make a better Symbol of Peace than he ever could have as a working hero.

All Might is a pretty simple character. And that’s fitting, as he is aimed at a younger audience first and foremost, and he’s very comfortable in his genre prescribed role. But he’s written with such zest and passion that one can’t help but be charmed. What’s more, he’s a fantastic example of how uniquely male themes can hold up a character’s story line without coming off as a stereotype or failing to resonate with a wide audience. An achievement worth studying for sure.

Schrodinger’s Book: Afterwords

Posted by natechen on

I’m often asked whether I outline my stories or not and, when I say I do, I’m often asked if I find it restrictive. I’ve never understood this question as an outline is just a general picture of how your story is paced and what needs to be in it. It’s not like there isn’t room for improvisation and improvement as you go along. Case in point: Schrodinger’s Book was outlined with an epilogue. You may have gathered that those plans have been scrapped.

The truth is, after writing the last chapter anything I tried to write for the epilogue felt deeply anticlimactic. It’s important not to overstay your welcome so I’ve just cut that part of the story. My characters have finished their arcs and Aubrey’s last words turned out to be much more satisfying that I expected them to be – at least to me. So I’m not going to beleaguer you with anything further, at least not for this visit to Schrodinger’s world.

If you’ve been reading this story since chapter one, you probably know that this story intimidated me, in part because I wasn’t sure how I would keep my enthusiasm for the project up as I poked at issues that concerned me in a setting I’ve never been terribly fond of. It turns out that the characters are what would motivate me. With the exception of Priss, the poor girl who was just around to be a foil for the two protagonists, I knew where I wanted each of the core five to end up and each chapter I wrote brought me a little closer to those important milestones.

I wanted to see Sean accept a moment of temporary pain just to live up to the principles he’d espoused. I wanted to see Lang grapple with the idea of being in command and what the consequences of neglecting that were. I wanted Aubrey to find the confines of her world and see past them to the potential of the future. And while I didn’t want Dex to die, he was too much of a boundary pusher not to wind up there in the end, especially in a world where UNIGOV ruled supreme. Getting to those goals pushed me to keep writing, pushed me to make every step there as interesting as possible so those moments of payoff would be worth it. I hope you’ve found them just as fun as I have.

Which brings me to the biggest thing I’d like to say. And that is:

Thank you. 

If you’ve been reading this blog for years, thank you for sticking with me. I know I can be a bit of a boring pedant sometimes and you really deserve more thanks than I find the time for just for sticking with me. If you’re new and you just joined in the last year or so, thank you for giving me a chance. I hope you’ll stick around now that the story that dragged you in is over. Regardless, after doing this for five or six years, I know how important an audience is, and how hard it is to keep. You folks are a treasure.

So what now?

Well, for starters, there will be no fiction for a while. Two months at least, possible not until the start of the new year. We’ll see.

This is in part because to give me time to pull my head out of the last story and prep it for the next and in part because I only really have enough time to write one post a week right now and I want to dabble in some nonfiction essays on the topic of writing covering subjects that have caught my attention. I know, I know, nothing more boring than a writer writing about writing, right? But I think it’s interesting and I hope you will to so I pray you’ll indulge me.

During this time I’ll be doing two other things behind the scenes as well. One is prepping a new project. This project isn’t directly connected to Schrodinger’s Book in any way, but I hope my readers new and old will find it just as interesting. The other is researching and prepping the manuscript for Schrodinger’s Book for translation into an e-book format. So if you’ve ever wanted to foist this story off onto unsuspecting friends and relatives you will soon have a chance to do so! More details on both of these projects will come in the future.

For now, I hope you will indulge one last request of mine, for now. I’d like to do a reader Q&A as one of my essay posts. I know I’ve not been the most audience participation focused blogger in my tenure but I am grateful for your readership and I’d like to answer any questions you may have so I’m testing the waters by asking for any questions you have about Schrodinger’s Book, the story, the writing process, the characters and world building, you name it. Go ahead and leave them in the comments for this post and if I get enough for a decent post in a by the 11th of October I’ll answer them in a post on the 18th. If I don’t I’ll be sure to leave answers to any questions I do get down in the comments. Once more, thanks for reading!

– Nate

Schrodinger’s Book Chapter Twenty Seven: The Unwritten Book

Posted by natechen on

Previous Chapter

Aubrey was sitting on the steps, a thin silvery blanket from Priss’s pack around her shoulders, when Lang poked his head through the door up top and said, “Come on, people. I’ve got our route mapped out and it’s time to go.”

Priss  immediately started packing things up, winding up cables and securing her AI. Sean did his best to help with only one hand to work with while Aubrey folded up the blanket, still absently brushing at tears. Lang watched the process for a moment before asking, “What happened?”

“It’s a long story,” Priss said. “I’ll give the long version in my report, but the short version is that we learned some very disturbing things about how UNIGOV has been running things for the past few centuries.”

“Ah.” Lang nodded once and said, “I’ll read the report, then. Let’s get moving.”

“What are you carrying?” Aubrey asked, looking meaningfully at the large bundle, wrapped in a blanket much like the one she’d just folded up, that he had slung over one shoulder.

“Something I picked up for Admiral Harrington when we get back to the fleet. Got a present for you, Priss.” He picked up her exoskeleton from the stack of gear he’d set by the door and dropped it on the landing at the top of the stairs, keying it to unfold so she could step in when she got up the stairs.

“I don’t suppose you’ve got a couple of spares, do you?” Sean asked. “These stairs just keep going.”

“Sorry, we’ve got Dex’s but I don’t know the first thing about recalibrating one of these for a new user. There’s lots of crap to work out. Has something to do with the balance gyros or something.” Once Priss was in her exo he handed her the bundle with the spare exo and the weapons in it then shifted his own bundle from one shoulder to the other. “Let’s move.”

The bowels of the Vault seemed quite empty and most of the stairs and halls they took were pretty dusty. In the ten minute trek from where they met up to the ship hanger they didn’t see anyone else. That didn’t change once they were actually in the hanger. In fact, it took them a solid ten minute just to find the power for the hanger and get it switched on, at which point they could actually take a look at what they had to work with.

“Wow.” Like most of the rooms they’d visited in the Vault this one was huge and had ledges and a catwalk running around the perimeter. Leaning against the railing, Lang could see the room was easily two acres in size and contained at least ten Departure era ground to orbit craft lined up on either side of the wide rail that would shoot it towards orbit via maglev propulsion. “This place should be in a museum.”

“This place could be a museum,” Priss corrected.

“Don’t insult the ships that are going to get us off this god forsaken planet. This era of technology should be something the AI can parse. Help me tap in and get these things ready to launch.”

——–

It took several hours of running back and forth, helping the spacers load this and find replacements for that, before they even got to the stage of firing up one of the hanger’s tugs and moving one of the launch craft over to the launching station. By that point Aubrey could feel her body starting to drag. It had been nearly eight hours since any of them had eaten and a solid twenty since she’d slept. Lang and Priss were a little more alert – drug induced sleep was still sleep after all. But Lang was hellbent on getting them back into orbit without wasting any more time and he was pretty sure he could launch with just another hour’s worth of work.

So he dragged Priss into the cockpit to run diagnostics while leaving Sean and Aubrey to load the gear. As they went their separate ways Sean asked, “You got anything left to eat, Lang?”

“Should be some protein bars in the rucksack,” Priss answered. “Help yourself. I plan on getting a real steak once we’re on the Tranquility.”

So they munched on compressed protein as they dragged the spacer’s rolling crates up into the ship’s modest cargo hold and strapped them down, then tossed the bags into a bin in the back of the passenger compartment. The exoskeletons were a little harder to secure so they finally settled for collapsing all three of them and strapping them to a single chair. There were six in the cockpit so it wasn’t like they were hurting for space. The problems came when they went to retrieve the odd bundle Lang had brought with him earlier. When they picked it up it started moving.

One minute and fourteen seconds later Aubrey burst into the cockpit. “Lang! Why the fuck do you have Mond tied up in a bag?”

“He’s answerable for the death of a prisoner under his care.” He didn’t even bother looking up from his diagnostics. Neither did Priss, which suggested she’d been in on it. “We’ll make him stand before a tribunal. It’s pretty standard stuff, really.”

“You shot his arms and legs off.”

“We’ll clone him new ones.” Lang stopped, one hand hovering over a button – an actual button not a holodisplay or touch control – and seemed to think for a minute. “I think. He may just get prosthetics until after the tribunal. If he’s executed cloning would be a waste of time and resources.”

“Yeah, well, you could have left him some arms. At least the elbows up.” Sean was settling Mond in to one of the passenger seats. Aubrey felt a twinge of shame at not helping him carry Mond into the ship. They’d opened the bundle he was in and found him half conscious and delirious, probably because his medical systems had drained him badly in the process of countering Lang’s quadruple amputation via plasma assault. She’d been so upset she just charged off to give Lang a piece of her mind, rather than helping a man clearly in distress.

“He’s a feisty one,” Lang said, sounding legitimately impressed. “I didn’t want him clobbering me with one of his stumps so when I moved up from his legs I took a little more.”

“Well it’s going to make strapping him in to a chair a pain in the ass.” Sean set about trying to do just that while Aubrey fished around for some water and food to try and revive Mond. The medical system was a brilliant piece of technology but it needed a well fed body to do its work.

“Sit him in your lap if you have to,” Lang said. “We only need another twenty minutes or so to get into orbit.”

Mond coughed on a mouth full of water before taking a few greedy bites of the offered protein stick and swallowing hard. “I told you,” he said around the last mouthful of food, “these launch facilities have hanger doors. They aren’t open. If you try and launch us without authorization from me or a similarly ranked UNIGOV party member you’ll just kill us all.”

“I figured as much. Your office had a door, after all, you obviously haven’t forgotten what those are for and from what Sean and Aubrey told us about their jobs, you get bureaucracy too. So I thought ahead.” Lang held up his AI. “With the right tools and an adequate sample,” he held up his mission log in his other hand, “you can fake a voice pretty easily, at least well enough to fool the human ear. And I’m betting you don’t bother with voice print IDs, right?”

He fiddled for a moment and the AI announced, “I am Stephen Mond and I am authorizing the launch doors be opened.”

Mond’s eyes grew large and bulged outwards. “You gave that whole speech about tribunals for a voice sample?”

“Nope. Hence your sitting in that seat with no arms and legs.” Lang tossed the AI down on the console and gave Mond a spine shivering glare. “You’re very much going to face justice so I wouldn’t get too attached to breathing, Director Mond. Now shut up and let me do my job.”

Instead Mond turned his attention from Lang to Sean, then Aubrey. “I cannot believe that two upstanding sapiens, dedicated to civil living and mutual support, such as yourselves, would choose to assist these deranged and destructive individuals over your own government. What could possibly come over you?”

Aubrey exchanged a glance with Sean. There were so many ways to answer that. They’d gotten to know three of Mond’s so called martians. They were hardly what he made of them. Then there was Sarah and the terrifying glimpse Aubrey’d had of what UNIGOV had done to her. And there was Dex.

Before she could try and put any of that to words, Mond went on. “You will never be at ease among them, you know. You’re not built to be suspicious. They will constantly look at you and judge you before knowing you. They will assume your state of mind based on whatever they’ve gone through and choke out everything you are based on their own views of the world. You cannot possibly live in that environment.”

“He does have a point.” Lang turned in his chair after handing his AI off to Priss, who held a headset mike up to it and got to work, presumably contacting whoever would open the launch doors for them. “Copernican society is radically different from what you know. You might fit in with the Rodenberrys, if you work at it, but I can’t guarantee this is something you’ll ever get used to. It might be riskier for you to stay but if you want to… this is your last chance to get off. I won’t get in your way.”

For all her life Aubrey had thought assuming people’s state of mind was a crime against them. A way of trying to make them conform to you, rather than finding who they were and meeting them halfway. The almost telepathic way the spacers had communicated without speaking had been one of the things about them that unnerved her the most. But in that instant, as she glanced at Sean and looked into his eyes, she saw that this, too, was something she’d been wrong about. In an instant she could tell that the last few days had fundamentally changed him in much the same way they’d transformed her and in that knowledge was a feeling of safety and acceptance that she’d never found in her schools, UNIGOV training or mental health counseling. They both smiled and slipped in to chairs, strapping in.

“You know what I think, Lang?” She asked.

“What?” A smile tugged at the corners of his lips.

“I think there’s only one book where you can’t know what it says until you look. And that’s the future.” She sat back in her seat and smiled. “Take us up.”

Priss glanced up from her headset. “Doors are opening.”

A ferocious, gleeful grin split Lang’s face then he spun to his board and said, “Securing all hatches. Let’s go to space.”

A few button presses later the invisible hand of acceleration slammed them back into their chairs as the shot down out of the hanger, into the dark tunnels beyond and towards the distant light of the sun.

~fin~

Schrodinger’s Book Chapter Twenty Six: The Meaning of Responsibility

Posted by natechen on

Previous Chapter

There was a sort of unwritten agreement among Spacer worlds that computer operating systems all needed to have a few things in common. Similar icons for various core functions of the operating system, similar finger commands for important holodisplay interactions, that kind of thing. Naturally, Earth hadn’t gotten the memo. So, while he’d managed to log in to the computer console in Mond’s office – and to his unsurprise there was no password protection on the computer – he still wasn’t entirely sure he was on the way to getting the information he wanted. Wasn’t even sure he was working through the right set of programs. What he’d originally taken as a kind of security camera app turned out to be the creepy visual hijacking program UNIGOV used to look through its citizen’s eyes. As far as he could tell, no one was looking at any kind of ground to orbit craft at the moment so it wasn’t being very helpful.

He was trying to figure out how to close the program when the door slid up and Mond stepped through. They both froze for a moment, staring at each other through the holodisplay, as the door slammed closed behind Mond. Lang recovered first, scooped up his carbine and blasted the door controls behind Mond.

To his credit Mond didn’t jump or scamper out of the way. He did flinch, although under the circumstances that was totally understandable. After pulling himself together he asked, “What can I do for you Corporal Langley?”

“Nothing right this moment,” Lang said, putting his carbine back down and going back to the holodisplay. “Although I wouldn’t try calling for help. It’s just going to get someone hurt.”

“And you’ve avoided that so carefully up until now,” Mond replied, his tone suggesting he believed the opposite.

“More so than you,” Lang shot back. “Amateurs should know better than to play with loaded weapons.”

“Civilized people wouldn’t have brought them in the first place,” Mond fired back. “This is a pointless conversation. I don’t even understand how you’re here.”

“I wanted the rest of our gear back.” Lang patted his carbine. “I know you wouldn’t want to use it but better safe than sorry.”

Mond scowled. “Not what I meant. I have a fair idea how you got out of the storage room but how did you get here?”

“Oh, that was easy. All our weapons have trackers built into them. It’s part of how we make sure they don’t wind up in the wrong hands. And, for all your technical expertise, I’m willing to bet it never even occurred to you to look for that kind of thing. You’ve never cultivated the suspicion. Getting through the halls to here was surprisingly easy since no one ever stopped to question me. Kind of surprised you just took them and stuck them in your office, though.” He patted the computer console. “Peeking into your computer records was the logical next step once I was here. I was hoping to get a few questions answered before I left. Not having much luck with the computer so let’s move up the food chain, shall we?”

“Is that some kind of declaration of intent?” Mond asked. “You want me to tell you something?”

“I do. But first I want you to sit down there and put your hands on the desk.” Lang pointed to the chair in question.

After a moment’s hesitation Mond pulled the chair out and sat, folding his hands one over the other on the desk as requested. “What do you want to know? I may not be able to answer all your questions, mind you.”

“There’s only three, so it’ll go quickly.” Lang kicked back and put his feet up on the desk, cradling his carbine over his chest, taking a moment to admire the utter waste of window glass in the wall behind Mond. There was nothing to see out there but metal walls and acres of bookshelves. They could have at least put in some natural lighting. “First question. What did you do with the other spacers who’s drop pods you recovered?”

Mond shrugged. “I can’t say for sure, since your pod is the only one that landed in my jurisdiction. But from what I’ve heard they were recovered, in much the way you were, questioned and given much the same offer you were.”

“To settle on Earth?”

“Correct.” Mond steepled his fingers, going distant for a moment. “I have no idea whether any of them took the offer or not. If they did they would have their skills assessed, medical systems installed, accounts opened and an appropriate place of work found for them.”

Lang’s eyes narrowed. “And if they didn’t?”

“Then a medical system would be installed and they would be put in Shutdown.”

The capitol letter in Shutdown was clearly audible. “And what does Shutdown mean?”

“By switching off the medical system in a preplanned fashion the human body enters a comatose state and can be placed in something closely resembling suspended animation. That state of being can be maintained indefinitely if the proper life support is put in place.” Mond offered a shrug. “It’s not perfect. The person still ages, for example. And the mind can develop severe neural problems if it’s not properly engaged, so we plug their nervous systems into a sort of fugue state simulator that allows them to be conscious in a simulated reality of their own creation.”

“Got all the kinks worked out of that system, don’t you?” Lang sat back up in his chair, staring hard at Mond. “What do you use it for when there are no spacers around?”

“Building a stable sapiens population required we remove a large number of martians from it over the years. Shutdown proved a reliable and humane way to do it.”

Lang suppressed a shudder. The whole thing sounded incredibly nightmarish. Time to move on. “Does this facility still have any of the original launch craft in it? Or did you actually follow through on something and dismantle them?”

“I assure you, following through is a talent of mine,” Mond said stiffly, showing offense for the first time this go around. “But no, we didn’t disassemble them. Space had no interest to UNIGOV but it’s easier to keep the technology contained, and not raising imperialist tendencies in the general population, if the space ships are one large, difficult to misplace item rather than twenty thousand small pieces. I presume you want one of them?”

“You presume well.”

Mond considered it for a long moment, then nodded. “I suppose it can’t be as bad as leaving you here, on planet, and doing whatever it is you might do if left to your own devices. Since we’ve proven incapable of containing you, I suppose we’ll have to settle for getting rid of you. You can map a route to their location using that system.”

It took a few minutes of fiddling to pull up the program Mond was pointing to and get the map up on the display, another minute for his AI to copy the map over, and it was all ready to go. Lang got to his feet and dropped his AI into its pocket, then pulled out his mission log. As he sorted his gear Mond also got to his feet.

“You had a third question?” Mond asked.

Before answering Lang pushed the recording button on the log recorder. “I did.” He walked around the desk to face Mond directly. “Stephen Mond. You’re being detained on one count of war crime, namely the killing of a prisoner under your care. Is there anything you’d like to declare before you are taken into custody? Any statement made will be admissible as evidence.”

Mond actually jerked back a step as if he’d been struck. “I beg your pardon? You do not have the authority to take me anywhere.”

“You should have known this was coming, Mond. You said it yourself. I’m responsible for Dex. Since I can’t get him back into orbit, I have to make sure the man who killed him faces justice. Now.” He held out the log for Mond to speak into. “Do you have anything to declare?”

“I will not-”

“Please confirm your name for the record.”

Mond glared at him before starting over. “I, Stephen Mond, will not leave this planet willingly. And, while you might be able to get from here to the ship hanger if you move alone, you will not be able to do it with me.” Mond looked away slyly. “And you will need to open the launch doors if you want to actually take off. I assure you they will not be open if you take me with you. We do have some security procedures here and a martian leading the Vaultkeeper around at gunpoint will certainly trigger them.”

Lang switched the log recorder off and grinned. “I know. Fortunately, I won’t be leading you around at gunpoint. I thought of a far, far more satisfying way of doing it. You have complete faith in that medical nanotech you use, right? Never mind, that’s more than three questions.”

He proceeded to blow Mond’s left leg off at the knee.

As the screaming died down Lang scowled and said, “Okay, in perfect fairness it’s a lot less satisfying than I expected. Still, you look like you’re doing fine.”

Mond looked up from his new position on the floor, hands wrapped around his leg. “You,” he ground out between gritted teeth. “Are a monster.”

“Of course. That’s what you expected of me, wasn’t it?” Lang checked the stump of the limb and, as he expected, it was already starting to show evidence of skin regrowth. “I wouldn’t want to disappoint your precious narratives. Besides, pain is temporary. Death is permanent. Something to think about. I’ll be answerable for pain. You’ll be answerable for death.”

“I was not responsible for that.”

“No. You see, responsibility is owning your shit. Whether you think it was an accident.” He placed the barrel of his carbine on Mond’s other knee. “Or unavoidable.”

Pulling the trigger a second time gave him no satisfaction at all.

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Schrodinger’s Book Chapter Twenty Five: The Revelation of Aubrey Vance

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“So there was a colony on Mars.” Aubrey turned around slowly, taking in the details of the square. If there was anything that made it clear the architecture was designed with a lower gravity or thinner atmosphere in mind she couldn’t tell. But then, she also wasn’t an expert on building design. “That’s another point for Lang.”

“Lang?” Sarah tilted her head. “Is he the current Vaultkeeper?”

Aubrey laughed. “Pretty much the exact opposite. It’s complicated. If this colony is on Mars I’m guessing this isn’t a real time picture?”

“No.” The sadness in Sarah’s voice brought her up short. “This is the way Mars was in the past, over two centuries ago. When it was first settled.”

Probably the biggest point of confusion Aubrey and the martians – the spacers, rather, given that she was talking to a real Martian and was now convinced Lang and Priss were telling the truth when they said they weren’t – had been what happened in the missing two centuries between when the space colonists left Earth and when they came back. And that argument had started with their insistence there was a colony on Mars. The question was, what else were they right about? “Can you tell me about the colonization effort?”

Sarah shrugged. “I wasn’t alive at the time but my grandparents were and from what they told me it started about like you’d expect. A mixture of excitement, curiosity, a desire to go places we hadn’t been and learn things we didn’t know. Of course, most people figured doing those things would improve their lot in life and, to be perfectly honest, a lot of the time that didn’t happen. Some people’s reasons were different and I know my grandparents came to Mars because they were tired of the governments on Earth never seeming to work for their own people. The colony was a kind of international collaboration – in theory – and my grandparents hoped the smaller size of the colony would make managing the endeavor more personal and less political.”

“Did it work?”

“Not in the slightest. Human nature isn’t that mutable, it would seem.” Sarah sighed. “That didn’t keep people from trying.”

Aubrey wanted to know what that meant but she also wanted to let Sarah proceed at her own pace. “Meaning what?”

“For some people, it meant extrasolar colonies. Superluminal drives were deemed safe the year my parents were born and the first colonists departed the year they met.” Sarah waved a hand and Aubrey gasped as the cityscape around them vanished with a flicker of motion, giving way to a dizzying spread of stars and an armada of eighteen enormous objects floating in space. They were little more than long tubes that grew thicker towards the middle and tapered to a dull point at either end, flying under the force of dozens of small engines arranged all along one half of the ship. With a sudden burst of light each ship vanished in turn. “No one ever heard what happened to them. Not that I know of. I hope they did better than we did.”

And that was an opening for the question Lang had been asking her since they first met. “What happened to Borealis? We don’t hear about a Mars colony here on Earth anymore.”

For a moment it seemed like Sarah wasn’t going to answer. Then, with another disconcerting jump, they were standing in a bleak concrete square surrounded by red brick walls. One would think that two such places would be very similar but, in truth, the atmosphere here was totally different from the Borealis square. And there was the towering portrait of a balding Eastern man that stood over the arched entrances and exits. Sarah gestured towards the picture and said, “They wanted to erase Mao.”

“It is an odd decorative choice,” Aubrey admitted. “He looks important.”

“He was.” Sarah sighed. “He changed everything about China in just a few decades, and he never paused a moment to consider the millions that died in the process. He was an egotist and a megalomaniac and the world was better the moment he died. That doesn’t mean we should have forgotten him.”

Aubrey turned around in the square, taking it all in. Dreary brick, dreary concrete, dreary men in dreary clothes glaring at passersby with baleful stares. “I don’t know,” she said. “If this is what he made we might be better off not thinking about it.”

“That was the thought,” Sarah admitted. “And for five years after the Memory of Mao was buried – literally,” another flicker of motion put them at the base of a featureless concrete box surrounded by flowers, black wreathes and a reflecting pool full of small paper lanterns, “we heard about how setting down the past made China a better place. People tried to debate the issue but it was hard, so very hard, when we couldn’t even say his name without provoking outrage. In China you could wind up in prison. Of course, that just made some people more determined to talk about him. But the leaders of the time were dead set on trying it again.”

“Who did they want to erase next?” Aubrey asked, half-remembered names Dex had obsessed about flitting through her mind. “Hitler? Moussini?”

“Mussolini,” Sarah corrected. “And it wasn’t a who. It was a what.”

“Okay. What did they want to erase next?”

Another change of scenery. Another town square. A wooden platform with a dozen or more dark skinned, naked men and women in chains and a man with a hand in the air, waving for the attention of the crowd. For the first time, Aubrey realized the moment was frozen. Nothing moved and the mouths of the crowd were blessedly silent. “They wanted to erase slavery.”

Aubrey turned away from the gruesome image. “Good riddance.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But you don’t know what it cost to forget that.” They skipped through several places quickly, a dignified black man speaking to a crowd, a plainly dressed woman slipping through the night, another man bent over a rack of chemicals, an almost impossibly tall and gangly white man speaking at a graveyard. “Fredrick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver, all great people whose lives and character were shaped by slavery and forgotten when it was. To say nothing of one of the most eloquent leader of the era. The words of Abraham Lincoln inspired every generation from his own to mine. But no one after us knew him. And that was just the effects of slavery in one continent in one era. We can’t look at the greatness in human history without facing human frailty. To expunge one is to expunge the other.”

New scenes spread out one after the other. Dozens upon dozens of easterners, men and women, all dressed in dour black suits and stovepipe hats with oddly square fake beards attached to their chins, some walking on stilts to give added height, all gathered in the red brick square from before, apparently reciting something off the tall signs others were holding up for them. An enormous bronze statue perched on an island in the middle of a harbor, holding a tablet and a torch in its hands, had a banner with the face of Mao draped over its own head. And back in the square on Mars, a visiting ships were covered with graffiti of Lincoln and Mao doing everything from arm wrestling to mounting each other’s heads on pikes. “Protests became almost constant. But it was worst on Mars.”

“That doesn’t make any sense!” Aubrey said. “It wasn’t even your history!”

“Of course it was!” Sarah snapped. “Mars had barely been colonized fifty years. What history did we have but Earth’s? Believe me, you do not understand how important that a connection history is until you’ve grown up in a world where it’s your only connection to the rest of humanity that your parents didn’t build with their own two hands. Without it we would have eaten each other alive out here. Even with it things got too close for comfort more than once.”

“But-”

“We were not going to forget. Even tragedy and evil has its place, even if only in keeping a few wayward souls from destroying themselves. Or so we thought.” The defaced ships vanished and the landing square on Mars vanished, replaced with a much stranger sight. It was less a landscape spread out all around them and more of a single point of view, project for them to see. A table stretched out in front of them, three generations of family gathered around it. Grandparents, parents and children were all crammed around a table that could barely fit the two dozen chairs around it. But there was no happy talk, no bustle of meal time, not even the strained air of a vicious family argument. Instead they were all silent, collapsed on the table, over the backs of chairs, on the floor. “I was ten years old when Shutdown came. The bastards in UNIGOV flipped a switch and turned the nanotech that was supposed to keep us healthy into our own damn prison. This is the last thing I saw. My family slipping away with no idea why. We never woke up again.

“I never grew up. Never had a family of my own.” Sarah whirled around, pointing at her inhumanly precise face. “I don’t even know what I look like now. I’ve been in this fucking coma for nearly a century and a half. I’m older than even that damn Mond and all I’ve ever had to live in is these flat, shitty images of a world that no longer exists. You said you were at the bottom of the Vault? Woman, you do not understand Schrodinger’s Vault. UNIGOV likes to forget it’s crimes rather than learn from them. Whatever it told you about the Vault pales in comparison.”

As perfectly drawn as Sarah’s face was, twisted in anger it was still well and truly terrifying. Aubrey backed away slowly, starting to wonder when Priss would get off her ass and pull her out of the pool. In spite of her efforts to put distance between them Sarah still managed to change the world again, leaving them looking down at rack upon rack of pods – eerily close to coffins to be honest – bolted to the walls of yet another vast underground chamber. “Look at that! Every man, woman and child of Borealis, Mars. Kept in a catatonic state for the past century and a half, all because we wanted to remember who we were. Well that’s what we got. No contact with anyone save fucking Vaultkeepers and the rest of the colony in this damn virtual reality they dumped us in. Are we alive? Are we dead? Someone would have to open up the box to check and no one has ever bothered. Well, you’re one of us now, so I guess you get to wait around with us until we can find out. Welcome to the real Schrodinger’s Vault.”

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