Fiction Writers Should Write (and Read!) History

Posted by natechen on November 23, 2018

For among mortal powers, only imagination can bring back the dead.

-Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn

People, real people, are very complex. At the same time, if you can get to know them well enough you can get in their head and anticipate what they’ll do. An interesting aspect of history is how much of it is trying to do just that. The more you study history the more you come to realize that the facts on record are only a part of the historian’s responsibility. Getting in the heads of historical figures and trying to make sense of what was happening there and extrapolate it to the broader context of history is a big part of what drives the understanding of history forward, giving new routes of inquiry to pursue and new context to existing facts.

It’s also part of what makes history so dangerous – surmises of what historical figures thought cannot be confirmed, only supported or doubted based on available evidence. The best historians run down sources, carefully weigh them against each other and come to well reason conclusions. Two excellent examples of this are Evan Thomas’ Sea of Thunder and Tom Carhart’s Lost Triumph.

Lost Triumph is an excellent example of both sides of this kind of historical work. Carhart begins with a thesis concerning Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s plans for winning the Battle of Gettysburg. While not exactly a new thesis it is one that is disputed – in particular by others with differing opinions on the usefulness of the units in question or the lay of the terrain. Carhart then goes back to Lee’s early career, including his time as Commandant of West Point and the kinds of curriculum he encouraged, and traces forward the kinds of strategy he taught and later employed, then ends with conclusions, based on what we do know happened at Gettysburg, as to what Lee’s strategy was.

While the evidence Carhart presents is strong and well documented the shortcomings of the book are pretty noteworthy, too. Lee wrote very little about the Civil War after the fact (and what little he did say is all brought up in the course of the book) and none of it supports or disproves Carhart’s thesis. Further, many of Carhart’s suppositions are either unsupported by anything said or written by those present, contradict some of Lee’s other behaviors or don’t match the prevailing understanding of units and tactics of the day. It’s a sound work of historical supposition as it stands but it also can’t be proven one way or the other.

Sea of Thunder is a bit more reserved. As a study in leadership it’s a very careful book, examining the commanders in question mostly through what they’d written and what others had written or said about them. In particular, the book’s handling of the question of why Vice Admiral Takeo Kurita turned away from Leyte Gulf is exemplary. Thomas examines every possible explanation – he was tired, he was scared, he didn’t want to doom his ships and men uselessly, he felt there wasn’t enough information to press on, he believed saving the fleet was more important than his objectives – and weighs them in order from what seems least likely to what seems most likely. He cites the evidence that supports each supposition. But he never definitively says why Kurita left the battle. Kurita took that secret to the grave, and Thomas respected that fact.

Why is this important to fiction writers? The answer is simple. The methods historical scholars use to understand historical figures are the same methods you should use to understand your fictional characters. Well researched, thought out and written historical studies dig deep into the psychology, decision making and circumstances of the people they examine and the approaches they take can really help you dig into the minds of your own characters. Of course, you are making up the many factors that contribute to your character’s decisions and that can make things more difficult.

Too many authors warp circumstance or a character’s thoughts to fit their desires for a story’s plot, making for awkward and unsatisfying stories. Carefully analyzing your characters in the same way historical authors analyze historical figures can help you avoid these unsatisfying moments and write your characters more realistically and vividly. It may require you think over your stories and characters more. A lot more. But in the end the better outcomes will be worth it.

The heart of great fiction is verisimilitude. The more realistic your characters are in their emotions and decisions, the greater their sense of realism, and the more you can ground even the most fantastic story in your reader’s minds. Avail yourself of the fantastic resource that is well written history, and maybe even try your hand at writing some yourself. You can only grow from the effort.

The Dragon Prince’s Good Intentions Misfired

Posted by natechen on November 16, 2018

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 November 9, 2018

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 November 2, 2018

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

Posted by natechen on October 26, 2018

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:

The first episode contains a not very explicit but not very ambiguous rape.
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:

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.
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

Posted by natechen on October 19, 2018

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 October 12, 2018

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:

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 October 5, 2018

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

Unexamined Metanarratives, or The Problem with Privilege

Posted by natechen on March 9, 2018

I’ve talked about the concept of metanarratives at length before in the general context of postmodernism and specifically when applied to superheroes and Star Wars. Today I want to highlight what I believe the positive impact of deconstructing metanarratives are through a metanarrative commonly employed in modern fiction. While postmodernism deconstructs metanarratives because it believes they are a power play – an attempt to control the thinking of others by forcing their minds into preconceived patterns – I believe most metanarratives arise out of a person’s general philosophy and, while fiction can reinforce these philosophical preconceptions, it can also be used as a way to measure these preconceptions and see what about them makes sense and what doesn’t.

Metanarratives are rarely – possibly never – without some foundation in reality. The mostly happy homes of Home Improvement or The Cosby Show do exist, for example, but the constraints of their fictional setting prevent them from being explored in depth, so a number of clichés and tropes built up around these fictional families until The Simpsons came along to deconstruct them. While The Simpsons is no longer particularly relevant to sitcom formulas; for years it was ascendant and its deconstruction of the prevailing metanarrative did open up new avenues of storytelling to explore. That didn’t invalidate the old metanarratives, even if many people acted like it did.

There are a lot of metanarratives in modern fiction that could use this treatment, like the “trade in your birth family for one you build yourself” metanarrative (conveniently ignoring that if you can’t make your birth family work the odds you can build a function one are pretty small) or the “sell guns to both sides and reap huge rewards” metanarrative (a good way to get shot and, as near as I can tell, never something that’s happened historically). And perhaps this will become a recurring spot as other post ideas have, there’s certainly fodder for it. But for now, I want to look at Privilege.

The concept of “Privilege” I want to talk about is not what we normally think of as a privilege. It’s not permission to use the computers at the school you attend – unlike a member of the general public who does not have that privilege – or the privilege of using motor vehicles on government owned roads – which is basically what your driver’s license grants you. In much of modern fiction there is the notion of unearned benefits conferred to you by circumstance, particularly circumstances that favor one group over another. And that notion is encapsulated in the term “privilege”.

Let’s start our deconstruction of this notion by mentioning that the ideas behind Privilege are not new. When circumstances convey benefits no one earned there have been a host of terms for it. “Luck” is one, suggesting that sometimes the world just seems to like you more than others. “Blessing” is another, conveying the way people or, among the religious and/or superstitious, supernatural forces will give something of value to another as an expression of affection or to cement some kind of personal bond. “Bias” is a third, denoting the preference of one group over another.

And here we come to the first major construct of Privilege that must be taken apart and examined. The very use of the term marries blessing and bias. Not all blessings imply a bias. For example, my sisters and I were blessed with a homeschooling education. My parents blessed me with a social study curriculum that emphasized understanding philosophy and ideas in ways that profoundly shaped the way I think and who I am today. But they didn’t choose to bless my sisters with the same curriculum. In many ways their social studies were easier or more engaging, but they did not develop the same perspectives. And, looking back on it from a distance of some years, I can see that the curriculum I studied did not suit their personalities and interests as it suited mine. Yes, my parents exercised their good judgement in making these choices, but good judgement is not the same as bias. Nor do I feel the different educational blessings my parents shared with their children were inferior or superior to each other. They were simply chosen to best fit those receiving them. The Privilege metanarrative leaves no room for this kind of nuance.

But perhaps you are thinking to yourself, “This is a bad example. The Privilege metanarrative applies to groups, rather than individuals. Of course an education as highly tailored to individuals as homeschooling would rule Privilege out.”

If you were thinking that, then you’re correct. The second construct the Privilege metanarrative brings to the table is group based evaluation. In the Privilege metanarrative my parents’ decisions must be understood through group identity. Thus, the choice to give me an education full of philosophy must have been a result of my male privilege, as the job of men is to run the world and make sure all the other people are unprivileged (the term for this is oppressed in the view of the typical postmodernist). The fact that my parents might have looked at each of their three children’s interests and temperament individually is not relevant to the metanarrative any more than Chicago style political dramas are relevant to a Home Improvement style sitcom metanarrative.

Which is to say, they can be made to blend but one aspect will bend to the other – either the corrupt politicians must be shown as fools by the sitcom crew or the sitcom cast will become unwitting tools of the corrupt politicians, either my parents must have been driven by unconscious bias towards the favored male gender or their decisions being what they are is just a result of my being in some way stereotypical. There’s nothing wrong with this blending on the surface, by the way, but culturally predominate metanarratives tend to win out in the blending and right now the Privilege metanarrative saturates our culture. The tendency to let it win out will be strong, but a good writer must still carefully evaluate whether that metanarrative blend is what’s best for your story.

Metanarratives that operate without question quickly run out of control. Humans tend to push ideas as far as they can, usually running right of the edge of a cliff in the process. The history of the Privilege metanarrative is an interesting expression of this. The basic pieces of the modern take on the metanarrative were put in place during the Civil Rights era, when Privilege was rampant in culture and law. Recognizing it was a very important step in human progress and resulted in good things for the nation as a whole and many ethnic minorities in particular. This fact is a big part of why the idea of Privilege is so widespread in culture today. However, the idea of Privilege has far outgrown its starting context.

We frequently hear of “white privilege” in culture today. In summation this is the idea that generations of cultural expansion, tight knit families, careful investments, inheritance, emphasis on education and ethnic loyalty have catapulted white people to the forefront of the world and given them a stranglehold on the wealth and power of the modern world. In turn we see the Privilege metanarrative used to justify any number of actions to disrupt this supposed deathgrip. This has been true in pulp and pop entertainment for a while and has crept into daily discourse as well.

Again, this metanarrative is not new. The clearest example in history is how, for over a thousand years, the inherited wealth, excellent education, ethnic loyalty and powerful family ties of Jews was used as an excuse to persecute them.

This is the final aspect of the Privilege metanarrative that must be deconstructed. Like all flawed, human concepts, metanarratives can drive great evil as easily as great good. The current Privilege metanarrative casts Privilege as an evil and those that oppose it as a force for good, a direct extension in its origins in the Civil Rights movement. While this can be true, and again has been true in recent memory, it is not always the case – again, in recent memory. By the same token, Privilege is viewed almost as a universal, underpinning every situation, when sometimes a blessing is without bias, or luck is just luck. There’s no reason to say my education was a privilege over that of my sisters, as we all turned out equally well and, some might say, they are doing somewhat better than I am.

I’ve been very hard on postmodernism in the past and I stand by my belief that its approach to metanarratives is silly and leads only to confusion. But I hope I’ve shown today that the process of deconstructing a metanarrative and looking at its component parts and how it’s played out across history can give us a deeper understanding of a metanarrative, what its strengths and weaknesses are, and how it might be used in innovative ways. At the least it lets us put aside popular metanarratives for a metanarrative with less cachet at the moment but better suited to your needs.

Metanarratives are just one of many tools in the writers arsenal. Use them wisely and you get good stories. Sometimes that means breaking them down and seeing what each part has done, is doing, and could do.

Now. The throughline of this blog has been nonfiction for far too long. Come back next week and we’ll kick off a new dose of fiction with a spicy double posting followed by an exciting (hopefully) new sci-fi tale from yours truly!

Star Trek: The Long Road Home

Posted by natechen on February 16, 2018

In January of 1995 the fourth installment of Gene Rodenberry’s Star Trek franchise started out on what could have been the franchise’s greatest installment. The idea was ripe with promise but, by the end of its run, Star Trek: Voyager would prove great ideas don’t always translate to great shows. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Voyager for what it was. But it could have been more and some of us will always wonder at what could have been.

Voyager started by throwing a lot of the playbook out the window. The starship Voyager wasn’t just a ship on a mission of exploration, it was a ship lost in space. A series of events left it on the opposite end of the galaxy from Earth, with an eighty year trip home in front of it. Captain Janeway would have none of the prestige of the Federation’s name to back her or the threat of Starfleet reprisals to deter danger. No one in that sector of space knew what a human was, much less whether their government was worthy of respect. Gone also was any attempt at relevance to the current political situation – it didn’t even exist in slight nods like we saw in DS9 with the Maquis or the Cardassian occupation. The idea was to bring back the hard driving captain, a la Kirk, and the danger of the unknown and surprising.

With DS9 on route to the Dominion War and a bruising, exploration free future Voyager was something the franchise badly needed. It sought to keep Rodenberry’s dream alive while presenting us with new and exciting vistas and cultures for the franchise to explore. It succeeded only in part.

The first two or three seasons of Voyager present us with a section of the galaxy that looks an awful lot like home. There are analogs to the Klingon in the Kazon and the Ferengi in the Talaxians – and that’s just in the first episode. We even see analogs to the ancient Iconians later on in the series. If the hope was to take us to a new and fresh section of the galaxy it sure started off feeling a bit old and stale. But there were new cultures and cool new ships and new planets and new problems and Voyager tackled them all with vim and gusto in spite of its rocky start. That part was fine.

What was less fine was the attempt to shoe horn in some nonsensical interpersonal squabbling in the form of the Maquis. You see, Voyager was not the only ship stranded in the Delta Quadrant. The Caretaker, a very powerful alien who brought them to the Quadrant, had pulled in many different ships and one of them belonged to the terrorist group Voyager had been chasing. The idea was to combine these two groups and let personal conflict erupt. This was a bad idea for a couple of reasons. First, the Maquis were all Federation colonists or former Starfleet officers estranged from their government by a peace deal with the Cardassians. They had very few philosophical or moral differences from Starfleet – the conflict arose almost entirely from differences to political circumstances that, once both groups were a galaxy away from home, no longer existed. As a result there were only a few avenues for good story conflicts to explore without venturing into the realm of the truly ridiculous. Once they were all mined out the idea was dropped and Voyager functioned as a Starfleet ship for the rest of the series. The idea of two crews with shared goals but fundamental differences in morals or methods that made working together hard would be explored again, but much better, in the episodes “Equinix I & II”.

But the biggest misstep in Voyager was the Caretaker itself. Not it’s inclusion, but discarding it so quickly. The Star Trek universe has a number of mostly forgotten civilizations that travelled huge swaths of its galaxy long before humanity took to the stars. The Preservers and Iconians both controlled large chunks of the galaxy, according to the lore. But no take on the franchise has ever explored them in depth. It would have been nice to see the Caretaker tied to one of these civilizations – or perhaps even a new one – that Voyager could have encountered on a recurring basis as it made its way home. The Voyager crew as travelling interstellar archeologists would have been fun. As it was, Voyager only encountered one other Caretaker in a fairly forgettable episode. While Enterprise would play with the idea of a powerful civilization scattering artifacts throughout a section of space in its third season even the Sphere Builders wouldn’t receive that much in the way of development. It was a missed opportunity that could have really made Voyager distinct, possibly even a standout in the latter half of the franchise’s life. Alas, it was not to be. The Caretaker served as a MacGuffin to get the crew away from the Federation and was promptly killed off and ceased to be of much relevance.

Voyager did expand on the lore by adding three new antagonistic species that were interesting and fun. The Hirojen are basically the Predators for the Star Trek universe and seeing how Janeway dealt with them was pretty interesting. The Malon introduced interstellar junk haulers to the clean and tidy Rodenberry future and added a very unique spin to a number of situations that could have been very generic. And Species 8472, also known as the Undine in later spinoffs, added a new juggernaut race to the galaxy for humanity to worry about.

The showrunners also decided to bring back two big NextGen antagonists in a totally new way. The Borg returned in a big way, acting as a recurring obstacle from season 4 onwards. Everyone knew this was coming, Picard met the Borg in the Delta Quadrant after all, but the necessity of dealing with the Borg on a semi-regular basis and the fact that the series couldn’t ever let Voyager get caught stole some force from the menace of the implacable Borg. Add in the fact that the writers applied the (aptly named) Worf Effect to them in order to build up Species 8472 and the fact that we tend not to fear things we understand (rightly or not) and the Borg overall lost some of their sense of danger as the show went on.

Q also made a return, this time dealing with the internal politics of his race and the problems that come with phenomenal cosmic power. While the change to the way the Borg were portrayed probably had to come if they were to continue being an antagonist in Star Trek, the shift in Q was not necessary, needed or even very good. Once he was no longer the face of the impersonal weight of the universe bearing down on humanity he ceased to be a useful antagonist and just became a cosmic powered nuisance. It was an interesting line of thought but ultimately the story itself went nowhere.

In short, it seems as if the showrunners behind Voyager weren’t quite sure where they wanted to go. The show has no strong theme, and thus no quintessential venue. It feels much like actual exploration, in fact. We saw many things, and they were interesting. But they didn’t always connect.

After Next Generation and Deep Space Nine it may have been inevitable that the cast on Voyager wasn’t quite as strong as we were used to. They were all fine actors and had many good scripts to work with but nothing we ever saw from them equals the incredible talents of a Spiner or Stewart or the longform character development of Nog or Odo. Never the less, Kate Mulgrew as Janeway, Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine and Robert Picardo – probably the best actor in the series – as the EMH did get to show a broad range of acting talent that was greatly appreciated.

It helped that these three characters were the most interesting on the ship as well. Star Trek has a history of putting characters who struggle with humanity in the show to help push certain kinds of stories along. Seven serves that role from her appearance at the end of season four until the show’s conclusion. It’s interesting to see Star Trek, a franchise normally very vested in multiculturalism and leaving things as they are, push so hard into the realm of cultural deprogramming and reindoctrination. And make no mistake – that’s what Voyager’s treatment of Seven amounts to. In the process the show makes a sound argument for why such actions might sometimes be necessary, high minded ideals not withstanding.

The Emergency Medical Hologram, a holographic emergency stopgap that the crew activates when their living doctor is killed, is another interesting take on the “what is humanity?” shtick scifi in general and Star Trek specifically loves so much. He struggles with the very narrow scope his original programming gave him and getting the crew to think of him as a person, rather than a convenient tool. Unlike many of the characters chasing humanity in the franchise’s history, the Doctor does not have a flat, emotionless disposition. Rather, he’s abrasive and overconfident, saddled with his creator’s personality – not something particularly conductive to his job. He also struggles early on with being confined to specific parts of the ship, another kind of handicap the show has never explored before.

Last but not least comes the captain herself. I’ve always found it interesting that, even among fans who don’t consider Deep Space Nine the best incarnation of the franchise, Benjamin Sisko is considered the most human Star Trek captain. This is not at all intuitive. Both Kirk and Picard are larger than life figures, to be sure, and little time is spent with their flaws. Sure, Sisko had a hobby in his baseball obsession and a son, then later a steady girlfriend and a wife. And those were very appealing parts of his character. He also made morally questionable choices. But he tended to get away with his lapses of character without consequence, or even much in the way of guilt, which hardly qualifies as believably human in my book. Then there’s the whole religious icon thing and the Sisko as the everyman captain starts to fall apart. Especially as there’s two other contenders for the title.

Captain Archer of the NX-01 Enterprise was a much more humble man, with prejudices and moral failings. He has a hobby and deals with a fair amount of romance, although never a long term relationship. But, as you may guess given the subject of this post, I don’t give the title to him.

You see, as a captain Kathryn Janeway is a bit of a trainwreck.

Other than Kirk, no captain shows quite the same level of disdain for Starfleet regulations as Janeway. For the good captain, survival frequently came first. She wasn’t afraid to meddle in local affairs or skirt the Prime Directive to get the crew closer to home. She was also remarkably vengeful for a 24th century starship commander, occasionally persecuting vendettas against certain aliens – or even Starfleet commanders – to a degree that worried her crew. She came from a scientific background, rather than a pure command career, and her priorities were often towards the immediate care and safety of her crew rather than long term principles. But most of all, Janeway’s moral decisions are in constant doubt. While most captains made one or two difficult calls they tended to get left behind very quickly.

Janeway’s most questionable moral decision was the one that permanently stranded her crew in the Delta Quadrant to begin with. She could have gone home, you see, but that would have required leaving the Caretaker’s technology in the hands of very brutal and amoral people. Staying in the Delta Quadrant was the only way to ensure the Caretaker’s array was destroyed without any part of it falling into the wrong hands. The very harsh consequences of that decision dog her every step of the seven year journey home. That kind of heavy weight is something truly human, and it makes Janeway interesting and complex – even if I wouldn’t exactly want her to command my starship.

Like the other two shows of its era, Voyager ran for seven seasons and produced its fair share of good episodes. It also had some of the weakest episodes of the franchise, particularly in the first season or two. But even so, the good outweighed the bad. Episodes to watch include “Message in a Bottle”, “Future’s End” Parts 1 and 2, “Relativity”, “Tinker, Tenor, Doctor, Spy”, “The Year of Hell”, “Living Witness” and “Deadlock”.

“Blink of an Eye” is a masterpiece of high concept scifi like the franchise hadn’t seen for a while. It features Voyager getting caught in orbit around a planet with a different subjective time than the rest of the universe. A year passes on the planet for every minute that the crew lives in orbit. They watch civilizations rise and fall from above and, in turn, those below look up and wonder what the light in the sky means and what the people there might want with them. The concept was so good that it would get reused again in the first season of The Orville.

On the other hand, “Life Line” tells a very personal story about the Emergency Medical Hologram visiting his creator, legendary hologram engineer Louis Zimmerman. The clash of two such very similar, overinflated personalities is a tour de force, fun and witty but still emotional enough to resonate. It features the return of Reginald Barclay and Deanna Troi, veterans of The Next Generation as well used guest stars. It also features a masterpiece of acting by Robert Picardo, who plays opposite himself in most of the important scenes. Star Trek acting doesn’t get better than this unless Spiner and Stewert are on the screen.

“Timeless” and “Endgame” Parts 1 and 2 both feature the same basic premise. Members of the Voyager crew get back to Earth but try and bend time so that the dead left behind can make it home too. “Timeless” features Garrett Wang’s best performance as Ensign Kim in the series and deals in the kind of classic, high concept scifi that made Star Trek great. “Endgame” is the series finale and, in spite of the similar premise, has several key differences. For starters, this time the gambit works and Voayger gets home. Also, it features Janeway as the viewpoint character rather than Kim, and it goes to great pains to wrap up most of the loose plot threads the show left behind, making it a slightly messier – but still satisfying – tale. In a nice bit of self reference, future Harry has a ship commanded by Geordi LaForge show up to stop his time travel attempt in “Timeless” then, in “Endgame”, another future Harry shows up as Janeway starts her Both stories are worth watching for Trek fans, but “Timeless” will probably suit the general scifi viewer not interested in watching the whole series better.

The Borg always had a limited lifespan, as mentioned before, and I think the showrunners had realized that. As I said two weeks ago, the decline of the Borg really started with “I, Borg” back in NextGen but they still had some legs left in them. “Scorpion” Parts 1 and 2 sent them fully into decline with a bang, introducing a new race that even the Borg couldn’t handle and adding Seven of Nine to Voyager’s crew. This is a pretty light episode in terms of scifi but it’s solid space opera with good production values for TV of its era, and the decision making in the episode is both tense and fun to watch, even if you guess what’s coming before it happens. Seven would become a good window into the new Borg status quo, allowing us to discover all the cracks and weaknesses the Borg always had as she did, and coming to understand how an unstoppable force can actually be a stampeding herd one step ahead of disaster.

“Equinox” Parts 1 and 2 is the epitome of what many people wanted Voyager to be – two crews, each with supposedly shared values, but one turned sour by years of merciless peril. When the Equinox and Voyager meet it seems like a bright spot in a long string of trials – for both crews. But the revelation that the Equinox was under constant attack because the crew had decided to deal in genocide in a desperate bid to get home… that was a horror in itself. The punishing conflict that results is tense and marvelously acted. “Equinox” is Voyager at its best – but unlike many it’s not what I feel the entire show should have been. Still, a very clever scifi plot and a great piece of drama as well.

Voyager went off the air in 2001 with the good ship and its crew home at last. It was the last offering of the franchise’s heyday, a great concept that wasn’t everything anyone wanted from it but still acquitted itself well, packing new ships, races and spacial phenomenon into Star Trek lore with reckless abandon. It probably has the smallest enthusiastic fanbase of any entry in the franchise, at least before Discovery, but ideas introduced in it were staples of the expanded lore during the long, twelve year drought between the end of Enterprise and the beginning of Discovery. The Delta quadrant would be better realized as a location than the Gamma quadrant, and the seeds of technological innovation Voyager brought back with her would spin off into several novels. However, even with all that potential, the decisions made at the beginning of the next installment of the franchise showed how Star Trek was beginning to creak under its own weight…

Nate Chen Publications

Project Sumter and Other Stories

Tag Archives: On Writing

Fiction Writers Should Write (and Read!) History

The Dragon Prince’s Good Intentions Misfired

The Tragedy of Kanye West

Politics and Publishing

We Have Forgotten Our Symbolic Language

Marvel Netflix Doesn’t Understand Heroism

Writing Men: All Might

Schrodinger’s Book: Afterwords

Unexamined Metanarratives, or The Problem with Privilege

Star Trek: The Long Road Home

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: