Note: The Concurrent Enrollment English class I'm teaching is writing a personal essay about their literary journey. We're using Fahrenheit 451 as our text, but writing our own stories as we go along. Personal narratives are kind of my jam, so I decided that I would draft my own example essays/approaches to the topic. Fortunately for me, I won't be graded on what I write. Instead, I can simply let the story take me where it will. Here's what I wrote.
Naked trees. Kniving winds. The too-early setting of an October sun. A strange street. A dripping nose. In my cold-chapped hands, I held a flyer for Jim Ferrin, a guy in our ward who was using the youth to help canvas Orem neighborhoods with his candidacy. I did not much care about him--aside from being politically ignorant, I was twelve years old and completely uninterested in doing this bit of service. Besides, I wasn’t friends with any of his kids. Add to that the injury of having had to give up a perfectly good book-reading evening, and my pre-teen angst about the job becomes clearer. I walked to the next house, numb fingers fumbling with the slender elastic, wrapping the half-sheet of paper (hunting-orange in my memory, though who now knows what it really was) around the screendoor’s black handle. As the leaves gossiped past me, I shrugged deeper into my thick leather coat. “I don’t want this,” I said to myself. “I want to be at home, with Lessa, F’lar, and Jaxom.” Lessa, F’lar, and Jaxom, of course, aren’t real. They’re characters from the Dragonriders of Pern series by Anne McCaffery. Set on a faraway planet, the book series revolves around the men and women who have become selected to ride massive, fire-breathing dragons, all in defense of their planet from a mindless mycorrhizal threat. The world is a rare feat in secondary-world creation, second only to Tolkien’s Middle Earth in the complexity, interaction of disparate parts, and world-building. (The late Anne McCaffery didn’t build her own unique languages for her world--something that will likely always put Tolkien at the top of the list for most detailed secondary-world creation in literature.) To a twelve year old whose primary experiences were imaginative, having such a wonderfully wrought world--even if it was fictional--was where I wished to spend as much time as I possibly could. What I didn’t understand then but can see more clearly now is that Lessa, F’lar, and Jaxom--and Robinton, Menoly, and the rest of the entrancing cast--came into my life as permanent residents, people who became real to me through the viral act of writing and reading. They felt almost tangible, with problems that were large-yet-solvable, a type of bravery that I could only aspire to, and beneficiaries of a world in which dragons weren’t terrible beasts to slay but instead gentle companions, loyal and true. I grew up in the late eighties and early nineties: Ronald Reagan’s deregulation of what constituted advertisements to children meant that my Saturday mornings were twenty-three minute long commercials with a plot, interrupted by seven minutes of actual commercials. I knew very well how a child could pine for something. After all, watching an entire episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles--during which time there were a half dozen reminders that I could actually play with the Technodrome or get that Donatello action figure to round out my collection--was an injection of desire coming straight into my eyeballs. There was a yearning for the toys on the TV (to say nothing of the jealousy I felt toward the child actors who got to play with the toys during the commercial) that can be difficult to fully understand. I would ache for what I saw on TV, almost as if I could physically feel it. That’s what I felt that blustery October day as I hawked flyers for Jim-Ferrin-in-our-ward. But it wasn’t an ache for the action figures and playsets. It was a desire to return to a written world, a place where these fictitious people lived. I wanted to return to Pern, not suffer through the bad weather of Utah in late-autumn. I couldn’t say that this was the first time that I felt such a pining for the fictitious, but it’s certainly one of the strongest. The pull of characters--a concern for them that was akin to caring about my real life friends and their problems--was so intense that I almost cried. (Being freezing cold and miserable probably only added to that emotional response.) This, of course, is a different sort of experience than when I finally “got” what Shakespeare was saying in Hamlet or could “see” Milton’s brilliance. This was a more tangible, more from-the-gut experience. I found myself wanting to be in a place that I had never seen with people I had never met more than I wanted almost anything else in that moment. I did, unsurprisingly, get to go home when my service was complete. I don’t remember if Brother Ferrin ended up winning that election a couple of weeks later; I do remember, however, that Pern has--ever since that time--been a part of me, a place that I happily return to. And though I don’t ache to return there anymore (at least, not to the same degree), I know the keenness of such yearning. I now look forward to the next time an author’s words can so fully enrapture me--I look forward to being teleported again. My trail toward fantasy literature is, in hindsight, a rather obvious one. There's probably a lot of Mormonic undercurrents that pushed me toward it (multiple other worlds, beings with extraordinary abilities, clear distinctions of right and wrong) that I won't dive into here. Maternal influence certainly had something to do with it, as my mom had (and still has) a deep affection for the fantastical. Superheroism and preternatural stories pepper my younger days' reading; little surprise, then, that fantasy fiction has been a mainstay in my life. Except for the tail-end of my high school career. I was taking a science fiction class from Greg Park (a fantasy writer as well as teacher and all around good guy) and, though it was clear that fantasy could do a lot of what was being discussed in the class, I kind of developed the sort of snobbery about literature that's the inevitable result of learning just enough to be dangerous. I didn't necessarily dislike fantasy, but I preferred science fiction. Then my future sister-in-law, Becky, came over (she was dating my brother at the time) with a door-stop tome under her arm. I believe it was Stone of Tears (but I could be wrong). I asked her about it, and she said that it was a really cool fantasy series by a guy named Terry Goodkind. I asked her if there was a lot of magic in it, or maybe just a light touch. For some reason, I didn't want to read it if there was too much of the fantastical in the fantasy novel (an irony that was completely lost on me at the time and will, perhaps, become clear to you as you finish reading). I remember hoping that she would answer that it didn't have too much; instead, she said that there was quite a bit. She recommended it anyway. Stone of Tears was the second book in the series, so I didn't borrow that one. I picked up my own copy of Wizard's First Rule later--probably at MediaPlay--and started reading. Despite its unassuming first sentence ("It was an odd-looking vine"), I was rapidly pulled into the world of Richard the Seeker and his true love, Kahlan Amnell. Despite some extreme content (tame, perhaps, if you're a reader of George R.R. Martin or Joe Abercrombie, but pretty intense for a seventeen-year-old), I really enjoyed the book. I read the entire series (as far as it had been published, at least) before leaving on my mission in 2002. Goodkind inspired me to pursue fantasy in a way that I hadn't before. In many ways, he's foundational to my own writing interest (though not, necessarily, style). I purchased more of his books after I came home, eventually getting Gayle interested in them as well. I read up through the Chainfire trilogy, as well as the novella, Debt of Bones. I even listened to the connected-but-not-about-Richard spinoff novel The Law of Nines. Eventually, much like with Brian Jacques, I stopped reading the same story again and again but with a different cover. Honestly, part of the break with my appreciation for Goodkind happened in Naked Empire. (This is a major spoiler, so if you're going to read/reading his stuff you may want to skip this…and probably the rest, since I'm not really a fan anymore.) In that novel, Richard is poisoned and the only way to be saved is to drink three draughts of an antidote--one of which is destroyed by the bad guy of the story. When Nicholas the Slide (great name, by the way) pours out one of the vials, I thought something along of the lines of, Holy crap! How's Richard getting out of this one? And though there is a pretty clever piece of writing when they figure out who's been spying on them the whole time, I was immensely let down that Richard survives because his magical gift inspires him to describe how to make the concoction that would save his life. Yup. The whole thing was solved "because magic". The Chainfire Trilogy was really enjoyable, and I felt that the end of Confessor was enough of an ending to leave that world behind. But it wasn't just my disappointment in Naked Empire that made me start resisting some of Goodkind's writings: It was his objectivism. One of Goodkind's strengths is his ability to weave throughout his novels rigorous philosophical conversations without them feeling out of place…at least, he used to be able to do that. But his adoration of Ayn Rand (pretty far from my favorite philosopher, if I'm being honest) becomes larger and larger as the books progress, eventually setting up a massive strawman argument that undergirds the entire motivation of the "bad guy" nation, the Imperial Order. The great crime of the Imperial Order is the familiar distortion between communism and totalitarianism, and since I knew my Mormon history well enough to see more than a passing parallel between it and the similarly named "United Order", I felt more and more uncomfortable with what was being denigrated and what was being asserted in the libertarian thrust of the rest of the novels. I still appreciate his willingness to tackle issues that are important to him, and I love the idea that the characters are really motivated by their commitment to their principles…I just don't really jive with what he has to say anymore. The pages long (not joking) rants that some characters have as they evangelize their rugged individualism is not really a highlight of the series, if you ask me. So my own politics breaks with Goodkinds; big deal! Separate the artist from the art and all that…well, sure, but the politics is the art, in this case, so that doesn't work. And more than that, I eventually started seeing Goodkind as having hoodwinked me. As I mentioned earlier, my forays into fantasy were frequent as a kid, but I stopped reading it as much when I went into high school. With Goodkind being my reintroduction to the genre, he acted as a kind of touchstone for me, the source of what quality fantasy looked like. If it was derivative of him--or out of sync with his style--I didn't really care for it. In other words, he became the entirety of my palate. The problem with that is there are other fantasy novels out there, and most of them are different from the Sword of Truth series. So I was kind of faulting a phonebook for lack of a plot--accusing other books of not being what I thought was fantasy because I was reading "real" fantasy. And, strange enough to say this, Goodkind doesn't think that he writes fantasy. First of all, I don't write fantasy. I write stories that have important human themes. They have elements of romance, history, adventure, mystery and philosophy. Most fantasy is one-dimensional. It's either about magic or a world-building. I don't do either. (Interview) This is factually wrong on almost every single count--so much so that it's probably not worth even indulging with a response. He does, however go on to say this about his work: What I have done with my work has irrevocably changed the face of fantasy. In so doing I've raised the standards. I have not only injected thought into a tired empty genre, but, more importantly, I've transcended it showing what more it can be--and by so doing spread my readership to completely new groups who don't like and won't read typical fantasy. Agents and editors are screaming for more books like mine. (I couldn't find the original interview--which makes this suspect--but here's where I found it.) Wow.
So, while Goodkind rails constantly against this kind of cherry-picking of his quotes (claiming that they're out of context, though in reality they sound just as bad in it as out of it), I think it's fair to say that the man doesn't think of himself as a fantasy writer. He refuses to be pigeon-holed (and says calling him one an example of bigotry, which means that he really doesn't know people use that word), despite the fact that he writes fantasy novels. I don't know what he's trying to get at, really, with his rejection of the genre that's made him a millionaire. He writes about wizards, dragons, magic, dark entities, preternatural events…a whole host of things that fits inside of the very broad definitions of fantasy writing. No, there are no elves, nor dwarves, in his books. But if elves and dwarves are the requirement for fantasy, most fantasy these days isn't. It shows a shallowness of reading within the genre (in another interview, he asserts the only other author worth reading is Ayn Rand) that he's insistent on his point of view, at least to me. Do you see the irony I mentioned earlier? So here's where it kind of comes down to: I recognize that there were some really great things in his books, especially in the early ones. There's a lot of excellent development of secondary characters, as well as a hint toward a complex magic system that had a lot of interesting variation. However, I should have realized that the author has little appreciation for other people and that I ought not to add to his overinflated ego, even at the price of one more book. If you don't believe me, let me remind you the name of his first book, Wizard's First Rule. That rule, as described in the book? "People are stupid." I'm not going to say that he's a hack (at least, not completely; he definitely "borrowed" heavily from the only other voice in fantasy that I think he read, which was Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series); he has moments of tension and good prose and some solid ideas. But he also has Superman with a sword and treats him about as well as someone who thinks Superman needs a sword would. There was potential in his world, I think…but it got lost somewhere along the way. I will also say that, at least as far as my own reading will go, it won't include Goodkind again. And that's sad. I did enjoy a good many moments in that series. I wish that it hadn't become tainted in my mind, that his attitude towards his readers wasn't divisive ("true fans get me" is a type of mantra that comes up again and again in his interviews) and that he embraced what he was. Ah, well. Fortunately, there is a lot of great fantasy out there. Perhaps one day I'll be a part of it. Back in January, I wrote about the immersion park Evermore. It's a great place that I've been to three times now, most recently this past weekend. Gayle and I celebrated our 15th anniversary by heading over to the park, dressed as our Tudor-era vampires. As was usual for introverted me, I smiled and listened to what others had to say, and spoke very little.
What was interesting to me was the way that the time there is spent. The premise of the park is simple: Walk around beautifully designed "sets" (for lack of a better word) and talk to strangers. There aren't any rides, and though there are a few activities (axe throwing or a straw-bale mazes), that isn't the point of the park. That's what makes it fun, of course; you're going in to experience something completely different than what other theme- or amusement parks offer. At the same time, it means that every time is slightly different. Depending on what you choose to do (and whom you choose to talk to), you'll be able to learn more about the world and about the current events. In the case of Lore--the Halloween-themed aspect of Evermore--there were a couple of murders that recently happened. (Behind the scenes snooping let me know that the "victims" were actually either fired or quit--I can't remember which--and so the head writers of the park had to figure out how to explain why these characters weren't around anymore.) Near the end of our evening, we stopped by a small fire pit and listened to two of the characters chat about the deceased, reminiscing about the funny things that they'd done. Strangely enough, during our trip to the park during the summer, our youngest son had interacted with Ben, one of those who was murdered. The interaction had been positive, so my wife shared with the mourning fiancé about what Ben had done and how our son was affected--she offered words of condolement and reassurance. Part of me was really impressed. What are the odds that the bereft almost-widow would start to reminisce right around us, who happened to have had specific memories of her Ben? And then part of me thought, Wait a second. She's not really mourning. Ben isn't actually dead…he's just not employed here anymore. They weren't really going to get married! This is madness! But that's just it, isn't it? The unified fiction of the experience can wind its way deeply enough into the participants that, if they're willing, they can fabricate a realistic-though-false reality--which is a weird phrase, now that I see it on paper. Though they're acting--essentially improv acting, too--the characters interact with willing "world walkers" in such a way that a person may feel compelled to offer honest condolences. I'm not an actor. I've never done anything (aside from coaching my Shakespeare team competitors) that really pertains to theater. Sure, I've been a passive audience member in countless stage plays, and seen probably thousands of movies by this point in my life, but I don't find myself so heavily invested in these stories that I've wanted to interact with them. In fact, part of my difficulty with Evermore is that I'm always thinking "This is fake, this is fake, this is all just pretend". And that's why it's so fun to go with my wife: She's willing to buy into the fiction of the character she's dressed up in. She doesn't do this just in Evermore, either--it's her behavior at FanX and any time we're at the Renaissance Faire. She speaks with her fake British accent and maintains a specific story in her mind for what she's doing. For me, I'm putting on different clothes; for her, she's putting on a different person. There's a lot to be said about that sort of thinking, that sort of entertainment. I'm really hopeful that the Evermore experiment, as it were, is successful. Having these alternative means of understanding others, of enjoying the power of human imagination, are valuable. And though the experience isn't perfect, it was still a worthwhile time for us in the world of Evermore. 1
All things taken together, I could listen to Neil Gaiman read a laundry list and walk away feeling as though I've done the right thing. His Hampshire accent and mellow expression is uniformly charming, so that even when he's describing something strange or uncomfortable, I'm lulled into the belief that whatever it is, it's not so bad. He isn't the most poetic of writers, though he isn't without his moments of brilliance, but what makes him so interesting to me is the effortlessness with which he writes. It's not actual effortlessness; he talks about this quite a bit, as a matter of fact--about how hard it is to write, to create art (pronounced as "awt" in his endearing way). He does have a tendency to fall up in his life, which he sketches with this book, The View from the Cheap Seats, though it isn't because of lack of talent or desire to work hard. In that sense, he's been immensely lucky, though I'm more and more becoming convinced that lucky is only useful if you're prepared beforehand to receive it. And Gaiman has been lucky--he's the first to tell you that. In fact, The View from the Cheap Seats is a collection of his essays (most of them in the form of introductions to different books by other authors) that operates also as a dim outline of how his career has worked thus far. I am a Gaiman fan in principle, in part because of his personality. I've read some of his books (Fortunately, the Milk was a favorite, though I liked Fragile Things well enough, too), but it's not usually his fiction that draws me to him; it's his thinking about fiction, about stories that affects me so much. That makes The View from the Cheap Seats a perfect book for someone like me. It focuses less on his own strange worlds and more on how he's been influenced by others' art (awt) throughout his life, including different bands (They Might Be Giants' album Flood gets a mention) and paintings and concerts he's been to. The entirety of his experience is sponged into his mind, ready to be squeezed out onto the page. I really admire that. 2 The View from the Cheap Seats isn't really a book I would recommend someone read. Instead, I'd insist that they listen to it. Though I don't know if I'd put Gaiman and Austen on the same level, it was said by one of Austen's surviving brothers-in-law that Pride and Prejudice never sounded as real and correct as it did coming out of her mouth when she read it aloud. I could perhaps assert something similar about Gaiman's book. His way of asserting something and then, in a quintessentially British manner, retract or modify or qualify what he's said works--I think--much better in the ear than on the page. Of course, how would I know? I haven't read the book, I've only ever listened to it. And my favorite of his essays, "Make Good Art" is a commencement speech that I have watched a handful of times, so that makes it doubly true in this case. In one instance, however, I really did read his essay before I listened to it--the introduction to Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451--and, of the two, I liked the spoken one more. The rest of the recommendation is inference. 3 The idea--diminishing, it seems, in our increasingly connected and decreasingly empathetic world--that a person can live off of her words has long been one that appeals to me. I care a great deal about how other writers write (aside from the "letter-by-letter, word-by-word, page-by-page" approach that has the frustrating quality of being technically accurate and practically useful while feeling utterly worthless), so I listened to this book in order to see how Gaiman writes. Does he wake up in the morning at the same time as the day before, a cuppa by him, as he scribbles in a notebook? If so, what kind of notebook--a spiral bound or one of those expensive ones that look so attractive on the bookstore shelf and then do an excellent job ferociously collecting dust when brought home--does he use? What type of pen? If a pen, does it bother him if he loses his pen part way through the book? Can it change widths and ink types and colors, or does he simply have a Costco-produced bevy of pens that are identical and utterly replaceable? Or none of the above, because he uses the word processor, and does he think that there's a danger, as Mark Edmundson notes, in having his writing on the screen or printed out, already looking like a book instead of like a rough draft that needs to be trimmed and tweaked, twisted and wrought differently than when it first spurted out in the frantic heat of creation? Sadly, none of these questions are answered, though I somewhat doubt I would be able to do much with the answers anyway. He likely would say what he once heard the (a week ago) late Gene Wolfe observe, which is that you never really learn to write a novel, just the novel you're writing. And would I be better off as a writer if I knew that Gaiman (like I!) prefers EnerGel Liquid Gel Ink from a Needle Tip 0.7mm ball made by Pentel? Probably not. That doesn't change the fact that my questions about his process are yet unanswered and that I am, not-so-secretly, disappointed that I'm not likely to know. 4 I hoped that I could be given a hint about what he means about "good awt", because he writes fantasy and horror and speculative fiction (which he prefers over the term science fiction because it feels broader and more inviting and more accurate), the genre which I love and have dedicated almost my entire writing energies to doing, and I can't escape the feelings of disdain from people whom I respect who feel as though my contributions to literature are, at absolute best, tolerable. My own sentiments about the worth of fantasy as a genre, or speculative fiction's worth, are cloudy. And, yes, I understand that The Iliad and The Odyssey, if retold honestly and correctly, would be genre fiction. Nevertheless, I feel that my own writing, because it's genre fiction, can never be literature. To address that feeling, I thought that Gaiman might help me know what "good" writing is, what "good" art is, how I can feel as though I'm contributing when I feel quite certain I am not. But that didn't happen. At least, not directly. I think I could infer that he feels as though good art is that which makes the maker of it happy and touches someone else. That's not a bad definition, so far as it goes, but it doesn't really answer the question, does it? Taste is one thing; judgment of whether or not what one creates is worthy of exploration, preservation, or enjoyment is another thing all together. Because I teach literature, I put the responsibility of understanding this question upon myself. Can I justify teaching one thing when it will preclude every other possible thing I could teach? Is that worth the time, effort, and frustration that is a part of the process of learning? Especially when taste may be one thing, but it is an important thing. Quality can be judged differently, perhaps, when one is looking at skill and structure, at "objective" markers on a piece. But I don't like Dickens, despite acknowledging both his skill and structures. I don't want to teach Dickens, even though he makes good art. If finding an answer to a question is the indicator of good art, then The View from the Cheap Seats isn't good art. But if finding a way to ask a question is the indicator, The View from the Cheap Seats is very good. Maybe you should give it a look. In Utah Valley, we have a new amusement park that's unlike what I've seen in other places. Instead of being a collection of rides, the attraction at Evermore Park is that they've created a fantastical world that the guests participate in. By that I mean the cast of characters are all fully realized characters, complete with backstories, purposes, desires, motivations, and even areas where they need help. The reason you go to Evermore is to talk to these people and, as a result, explore the park.
It was a fantastic experience. My wife and I went there with my students as part of my Fantasy Literature Winterim. She and I had dressed up (I in much of my steampunk Spider-Man, she in a southern belle dress that she made for her school's Civil War unit) and wandered around the park. I am not an extrovert; despite being a teacher and feeling very little worry or nervousness being in front of people, I don't like talking to other people in normal situations. (Unless time is of the essence, I would rather walk around a store for twenty minutes trying to find an item than to just ask an employee, for example.) So this park is not a natural thing for me. Nevertheless, being with my wife (who is much more extroverted than I) whose costume caught every employees' eye, helped a lot. At first, we weren't sure how, exactly, to go about doing what would prove to be an exciting thing. Then we bumped into a dragon trainer who looked distressed. We chatted with her as she explained her problems, and, at the end of the conversation, we asked if we could help her with anything. She said that she needed a vial of salt to get to her father, as they would be helpful in their draconic research. We asked where we'd get that from, and she said that we may be able to buy it with some gold. Well, we didn't have any gold, but by talking to some other cast members, we learned a phrase of endearment that dwarves love to hear. With that information, we retraced our steps to a snug warren where a small band of dwarvish bards were singing contemporary pop tunes. My wife said the phrase to them and received a golden coin. With that in hand, we found "The Executioner", a swarthy fellow sitting in the corner of the tavern. After discussing our needs, he asked to see our coin, which I slid across the tabletop. He looked at it and, as he did, dropped something into his mug. He said something about how nice it is to think and have a drink, scooting the empty mug toward me. I gently pulled the vial of salts out from the stein and thanked him. Some hour or so passed before we found the dragon trainer. When we did, we managed to get him his salt, which he was so grateful for that he gave me a tarot card with "The Mechanic" on it--an indication that we had completed our quest. Here's the thing that was so enjoyable about it: I've done countless fetch quests in my years as a video gamer, but I've never actually felt invested in the process. Maybe it's because the world felt like it was catering to me specifically, so where's the rush? In the case of Evermore, however, the process of listening, asking questions, and navigating the world as we learned its lore was not only enjoyable, but exciting. We spent almost five hours in the world of Evermore, despite the cold, including a quarter hour on an ice-rink, still costumed. Gayle particularly loved it, calling it her "happy place". If you're a Utahn (or you plan on visiting the state for any reason), I'd recommend that you try to go to Evermore: It's unlike any other amusement park I've ever seen. The entertainment is as good as you want to make it, an interactive and exciting place that rewards your participation, rather than passive observation. It was…magical. ==== Hey, friends. I have been releasing essays on my website for a couple of years now at a pretty steady rate. I'm happy to do so, as it benefits me as a writer and (I hope) you as a reader. I also think that, as a writer, it's okay if I believe that my work has some value monetarily as well as emotionally. To that end, I've created a Ko-Fi account, which is basically a way to give an online tip to a creator whose work you appreciate. The idea is, you can buy them a cup of coffee. (That's what the name of the website sounds like, if you're curious.) I'm not charging for any of the content on my website; instead, if you'd like to toss me a cup-le (see what I did there?) of bucks to show your gratitude, that would be cool. I'd totally appreciate that appreciation. If you don't? No problem. We can still be friends. As always, thanks for reading! As an aspiring fantasy author (or would it be an aspiring writer? I'm not sure which it may be), I have made it my imaginative business to concoct new worlds, then turn around and write about them. I've made worlds where people can manipulate the world--but only by shortening their total potential life span. I invented one where poetry was literal magic, changing the way things worked through rhythm and rhyme. One of my worlds has gigantic golems fighting in trenches with their female soldiers while another has the conceit of every person has a color that allows them to do enhanced behaviors when they absorb the light of a particular color. In each of them, there is more going on behind the scenes, with histories, deities, politics, and subplots. These additional pieces never really see the light of day: They are, after all, part of the world building process.
For my Winterim this year, I'm asking the students to build their own worlds. I've given them a list of a dozen or so aspects of their secondary worlds (as Tolkien would call them), with things as variegated as gender roles to languages. One of the parts we're studying this upcoming week is the concept of cosmology. In preparing for the lesson, I've been reading snippets of Tolkien's work in The Silmarillion, as well as Edith Hamilton's Mythology. I also have a book about Azaroth, the setting of World of Warcraft, which details an interesting take on how their fictional universe was created. What strikes me in the study of this would have to be the stunning variety of details and the similarity of the broad strokes. All of them, in one sense or another, says that there was nothing until there was something. For Tolkien, he has Eru--also known as Ilúvatar--singing other beings into existence, who then join his symphony of creation. In the case of Azaroth, there is only the Light and the Void. As the two intertwined, the universe began to take its primordial shape. That's a similar approach to the Greeks, whose universe existed before the gods--the broadness of Chaos eventually pulled them into existence--rather than gods who shaped the universe. The Norse took a slightly different bent by having a universe that eventually created the gods, only to have the gods turn around and, after slaughtering part of the universe, created the world and all we know. Most of the cosmic forms of creation myths and stories that I've seen follow this sort of path. Even our scientific explanation has the concept of a time before Time, of emptiness before there was space, and a confluence (in the case of the Big Bang, a contraction) of what was there until the outward force of explosion caused things to become. Whether by celestial fiat (Eru saying, "Eä," or Be--or the Abrahamic God declaring "Let there be light") or through cosmic genesis, we have a sense of Creation being a sense of matter somehow coalescing and growing, organizing and destroying. If such a thing is "universal" (pun always intended), I believe that many of my students may cook up similar stories. I look forward to finding out. This year, I'm teaching a Winterim about fantasy literature. It's been enjoyable thus far (admittedly, only two days in may be too soon to tell), and I like that I can talk about something I'm really interested in without feeling like I'm digressing.
Our first conversation was about a handful of titles that I picked, asking if what I presented was fantasy or not. One of the titles wasn't a book, but the movie Dr. Strange. After all, it's all about magic and astral planes and basically, well, fantasy ideas. (The movie doesn't have Fin Fang Foom, which is basically a massive dragon that Strange has to battle in the comics; that makes Dr. Strange a fantasy character in the most traditional of all definitions, in my mind.) While most kids were on board with this, one student said something along the lines of superhero conventions being somewhat independent of fantasy--or science fiction, for that matter. That's given me something to chew on. What is it that causes a genre to be created? Is the popular appeal of superheroes in our mainstream culture sufficient to reclassify the type of fiction that they inhabit? I know a lot of people feel like it's a label, so who cares, but every word, every sound that we make is a type of label. There's nothing intrinsically book about a book; it's only called that because we all agreed--somewhere along the linguistic road--to call it a book. It's just a label, yet it's immensely useful in differentiating one item from another. In the case of fantasy versus superhero fiction, I feel like it might be time to allow "Superhero" its own generic label. Part of my thinking is that, more even than in the original days of the Superman radio program, superhero saturation nowadays is multi-platformed and consistently invoked. Back in '08, Barack Obama invoked the Batman/Robin paradigm (incorrectly, the pedant in me would point out, as Robin gets mad at Batman all of the time). I kind of feel that, if a convention of fiction is used easily in a presidential campaign, it indicates a level of acceptance of the power and importance of the fiction, even if it does draw from an art form best known for muscly men wearing tights. If superheroes do deserve to have their own genre, what does it entail? Certainly the idea of humans (or human-like beings) empowered beyond what is known to normal physics and being proactive in helping the improvement of the world would be a part of it. Costumes are a convention of the genre, but not a requisite--same goes for secret identities. I think it would be important to distinguish the superhero genre from the subgenre of its source material--just because something is a comic first doesn't necessarily mean that it would be in the genre (I'm thinking of Bone first and foremost, though there are many others). The specifics of the genre might require fine-tuning, and--as is the case in all things--it wouldn't necessarily fit in every version. But the idea that there's a new genre--not subgenre, mind you--of "the superhero" is an interesting one to me. I have a love/hate relationship toward Brandon Sanderson's work. I'm not a huge fan of his prose--I find it rather uninspiring, which I know is his entire point: He's said that he purposefully goes for prosaic descriptions. Still, after reading something like Patrick Rothfuss' or Alan Moore's writings, where part of the power is the wordsmithing, I feel like that this deliberate choice is a genuine weakness of his style*. I know that this isn't his intent--and I say that mostly because I feel like, having listened to hundreds of hours of his podcast, lectures, and even personally sitting down and chatting with him for a couple of hours over lunch a few years back--but the effect for me is almost one of…I don't know, dumbing down his writing to make it more accessible. That sounds like a good thing, of course: What writer doesn't want to write accessibly? But there are a lot of deep thoughts and moments of dilemma and distress in his books--as there are in other works of fiction. Comparing a paragraph of, say Victor Hugo to Sanderson's work is almost laughable: Both are authors with incredible stories, pacing, interconnection, and thought. One, however, inspires in the very way he writes, while the other keeps it simple and plain.
This isn't a particularly large criticism, especially as it is mostly an explanation of taste: I prefer to have a little more flavor in the prose I read. Some don't. Fortunately, Rothfuss and Moore have their books out for me to read, as does Hugo, so there will always be an alternative for me. However, I won't get Rothfuss-level words with Sanderson-style worlds, which is really too bad. Okay, and, if I'm being really honest, I'm…jealous isn't the right word, as the generosity and willingness to help others along is really strong in Sanderson. But envious, maybe? I think seeing a local author have meteoric success makes me wonder what I'm doing wrong, and that's a question that's been rattling around in my head for so long that my synapses are almost numb at the thought. Also, I've often had an allergy for the popular. If I come across something on my own terms, and I like it, I tend to go all of the way with it. If it's something that everyone seems to be in love with, I often will push back as a matter of principle. This is why I've never watched Dr. Who and, though I like Sherlock, I probably won't finish that series. I treated Harry Potter that way for a long time, taking years to warm up to it. So while my tendencies aren't easily predictable, they do follow a general trend. As far as Sanderson goes, I have a hipster mentality to him a bit: I read Elantris back when it was the only thing he had written and before his enormous success. So maybe I resent people who only like him now that he's done the Wheel of Time series and written double-digit titles, which makes the fandom push me away from his stuff. The thing about all of that is, that's a very trite and superficial reason not to read a person's work. He writes in a genre that I love, he writes well, and he makes exciting and expansive worlds for readers to get lost in. My feelings of minor resentment (though that's too strong a word) probably don't make a lot of sense in that case. So that's the "hate" part--another too-strong word--on Sanderson. As for the love, well, I really like the worlds he creates. Having read most (some? The guy produces so many stories that it's hard to know what I've missed) of his major works, and revisiting the novel that started his career, Elantris, I can see some similar strands running through a lot of his oeuvre. For example, he loves to have really good hearted men doing a lot of clever planning to get what they eventually want. Raoden is that, as is Kelsier in the Mistborn books, and Wax and Wayne in Alloy of Law and its sequels. Lightsong in Warbreaker has that personality, and I see it in Kaladin in the Stormlight Archives. Not only that, but they're all quite witty and bubbly (though Kaladin is a bit more of a brooder), with a strong desire to help others…at least, by the end of the story they are. He also likes smart, forceful women who are also witty and capable of acting around the gender roles that his multitudinous societies embrace--though most of them are fairly patriarchal in most ways. In Elantris, Sarene is the prototypical Sanderson female protagonist: Beautiful, smart, capable, a bit uncouth, and willing to shake things up to make a difference in her world. Vin from the Mistborn series fits a similar role, as does Shallan in the Stormlight Archives. In the case of Elantris, part of what I really enjoyed in my rereading of the book was seeing how well Sanderson sets up the utter chaos of the final fifty pages. People who were thought to have been discarded end up having important roles to fill, while tiny details are brought out in unexpected ways. And though this is a major spoiler for the ending, I feel like the last sentence of the book is absolutely spot on. Early in the book, Hrathen shows up in Arelon in order to save them: In the end, he accomplishes his goal. Admittedly, the death of Hrathen lacks a lot of emotional clout because we were supposed to kind of hate the guy throughout the story, so though he changes his mind and helps Raoden and Sarene, I don't think people really feel like they've lost someone important--not the way Kelsier's death at the end of Mistborn: The Final Empire affects people. It's also nice to read a Sanderson novel and then be done with it. In almost every other thing he's done (I think Warbreaker is the only other standalone novel), there are multiple volumes to go through. That's part of the reason I picked Elantris for my Winterim, as it's a self-contained novel that, though it hints toward a greater world, is finished by the time the ending arrives. By comparison, His Stormlight Archive is only three tomes deep and running over 3,600 pages. For a bit of context, the entire seven book Harry Potter series has about 4,100 pages. And the quantity of words per page definitely tips toward Sanderson, who, if I remember correctly, once said that his worldbuilding alone for the Archive ran over 100,000 words. In terms of worldbuilding, the only one who did it better would have to be Tolkien, and I think there's no way to top that guy unless a writer was also a linguist and tried to emulate Tolkien. In fact, I get the sense that Sanderson is trying to do that, but on his own terms: Rather than having one world deeply interconnected and drawn together through linguistic consistencies, he has created multiple worlds that interconnect through his Cosmere--his word for the shared universe in which all of his major writings transpire. The amount of background work for things like Middle Earth and the Cosmere are acts of immense imagination and I'm always impressed when I think about the amount of sustained attention such approaches would take. I have a fairly complicated world mapped out for the book Theomancy, and it probably is about 10,000 words deep…maybe. And though that isn't my most intricate, it's near the top. All of this is to say that, though this may not have been a strong review of Elantris itself, I do appreciate Brandon Sanderson's work and I look forward to finding time to read more of it. After all, there's plenty to go through. --- * I'm not saying his writing is bad, by the way. I know that Sanderson has done this consciously, and there's almost always a method in his madness. Three years ago, give or take, I saw a book coming out that summer: The Dinosaur Lords by Victor Milán. The blurb was all I needed: "It's like a cross between Jurassic Park and Game of Thrones."
Dinosaurs fighting in a medieval setting somehow? Sign me up. I did a weird thing that particular summer: I wanted the book immediately, so I decided to buy it through the Kindle, but then I realized I wanted the physical copy. I returned the Kindle version (I think…it may still be accessible on my device; I haven't checked) and then, later that day, made it a point to buy the book from the Barnes and Noble in Salt Lake City.* We were in Salt Lake because Puck had his annual appointment with his cardiologist, and I convinced Gayle to go to the Gateway. I had to ask an attendant at the store where the book was, as it had come out that day but I didn't see it anywhere. The man brought it out, I bought it, and then sat in the shade of a patio umbrella whilst my children frolicked in the fountain at the foot of the Gateway steps. (The Gateway is an outdoor mall in Salt Lake, which, sadly, is changing its motif--including the Barnes and Noble store there.) It is a very different kind of book. The setting is Paradise, a planet that is similar to ours--indeed, there are hints that the humans on Paradise originated with Earthlings--with a number of important differences. The most important one is that dinosaurs of all stripes (or, rather, feathers) live there. They're mostly Cretaceous dinosaurs, but there are plenty of others that come from different epochs. There are pterosaurs, too, and I think some ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs in the mix. In other words, it's whatever looks cool and fits the story is included. There are additional layers of world building here, with different religions, languages, and customs that all take some time getting used to. Milán has quasi-European names everywhere, as well as a healthy dose of Spanish (called Spañol, which shows how Milán puts familiar flavors but with his own spin on them) throughout. There is politicking and massive battles and interesting characters and magical experiences…it should, really, by all counts, be my favorite series. But it isn't. There's something…rough? I can't quite put my finger on it, honestly, but I have a really hard time getting through these books. Yes, books. If you'll notice, I titled this "The Dinosaur Princess", which is actually the third book in the series. (The Dinosaur Knights is the second one.) This is instructive, I think, in that it shows that there can be cool concepts, excellent execution, and some pretty interesting descriptions and still not be fully immersed in a book. It might be because I'm trying too hard not to feel jealous that Milán came up with the idea before I did. (And did it much better than I would have. The fact that he's friends with George R.R. Martin and was able to use his friend's blurb, mentioned above, didn't hurt his product, either.) It might be that there's a lot of swearing, violence, sex, and nudity--the last one is kind of funny, because the books take place in a tropical setting, so people (who are less prudish in his world) choose to wear very-little-to-nothing-at-all throughout. And this is also interesting to me, because there's a lot more swearing, with more gruesome violence, in It, yet I don't get as bothered by it there? I don't know. I'm certainly desensitized to this stuff on certain levels (probably not a good thing), and so my critiques on that level are unreliable: Sometimes it's enough to turn me off of a book. Sometimes I don't care. Sometimes it's in between. In this case, it's the lattermost option. Here's the thing about the series: It's incomplete. Impressively, Milán wrote three books in just over three years. That is no small feat. In fact, The Dinosaur Princess came out last summer, but at the very tail end--it was September, actually, so I was already back in school. I had sort of built up a "tradition" in that I would buy another Dinosaur book as part of my summer reading experience. But that can't happen anymore: Victor Milán died in February. People die. Authors die. Everyone dies, eventually. And that leaves me in a conflicted position. The Dinosaur Princess ends the third act of the overall drama that Milán was sharing, which means that there is plenty of unresolved stuff in there. And by plenty, I mean plenty. The ending of each book is kind of a "Thanos is coming" feeling, with the subsequent book dealing with that world-threatening problem, only to have repercussions of it grow. The ending of Book 3 is a cliffhanger. And I don't think the series will ever be finished. This happened, most notably, back in 2007, when Robert Jordan died before finishing his Wheel of Time series. Brandon Sanderson was tapped to finish the series, which cemented his career as a fantasy novelist and launched his popularity through the stratosphere. But the reason that happened, in my opinion, is because of a couple of factors that don't apply to Milán's case: One, the Wheel of Time was eleven (!) books deep into the story by the time Jordan passed away. There were people, Sanderson included, who literally grew up during the time the books were being written. That many books, with that deep of a fan base, is an incredible well-spring to give to anyone who would need to finish the series (and, fittingly, Sanderson wrote three books worth of the last book, so the series ended up with a total of fourteen volumes). In short, there was a lot to draw from. In the case of the Dinosaur series, there are three books, published in quick succession. That's it. Two, Robert Jordan is--like him or not--the preeminent fantasy writer of the nineties. Terry Goodkind and maybe Stephen Donaldson to a lesser degree both had a steady and important following. David Eddings, too, had a lot of books. But when it came to being the fantasy writer for an entire generation? Robert Jordan. Milán doesn't have that sort of following--at least, not that I'm aware of. I'm confident there are fans and appreciators of his work. I would say, however, that when someone big in the speculative fiction realm--most recently Octavia Butler--dies, the memorials and mourning I see on writer Twitter is pretty frequent. I didn't get news about Milán until a couple of weeks ago, when I was peeking around to see when Book #4 would come out. While loved and respected, I don't think there's a large enough following/demand for the difficult task of passing the series on to another writer. Three, I don't know that Milán's estate has anything for anyone else to write. In the case of Jordan, his wife, Harriet, had thousands of pages of notes, to say nothing of the immense fanbase that had created databases galore of everything Jordan had added to his world. The final chapter, even, had already been written by Jordan before his passing, as he knew he had limited time. If I were to die, there wouldn't be hardly anything for anyone to do with regard to the worlds I've created. I write a lot of notes on worldbuilding, but I rarely do more than outline a single book at a time. I don't have notes about what would happen next, what the end of a character's life would be like, or anything of substantial use. Robert Jordan knew he was dying and, if I remember correctly, set out a lot of stuff that he wanted to see happen. Milán, from what I can see, died relatively quickly. Did he leave much behind? I genuinely don't know. And that leads to my last consideration: Why am I eagerly wishing for another book when I wasn't head-over-heels in love with the first three? It's a greediness in me, but I think there's a lot to be said about how jealous I am of Milán's idea. I might not enjoy these books because I wish I had written them. I've been trying for years to write a dinosaur story. It's never come together, though I've come close a couple of times. And here's a guy who put three down in as many years. Maybe I'm thinking that if someone else finished the series, I would be like, "Yeah, it's not her idea, so I don't have to be jealous of her." But wouldn't I also kind of wish I were the one who got to finish it? Yeah, probably. I'm a fantasy writer: Imagining fantastical, impossible to happen events is kind of my stock and trade. I mean, I definitely understand that I wouldn't ever be considered as a replacement. I know that. But I would still think those thoughts. As for the book itself, I think it was the best of the three. I read the last one hundred pages in a single sitting, as the logic of the books finally started to click into place. Who knows? Maybe I'll reread it after all? Oh, who am I kidding? I have other books to read, other writers to be jealous of. There's always another book on my "To be read" pile that will influence me and make me dream and imagine and hope that I can do something great with my words, too. I'd better get reading. --- * I don't have memories for every book I buy, but it isn't unusual for me to remember which store I was in or why I picked up a particular copy of a particular book. For me, books are about stories in more than one way. Of the two, I much prefer fantasy over science fiction. In both subgenres (though, in my mind, they'd be better off classified as separate genres, rather than lumped together as "genre fiction") there is a spectrum, from hard to soft, on how consistent, logical, and realistic the fictional world is. I prefer harder for both*, with obvious exceptions (I love the Harry Potter series, which is intrabook hard fantasy and interbook pretty soft; I also love the Dragonriders of Pern series, which is scientifically flexible, what with being able to genetically design teleporting, telepathic creatures).
Nevertheless, I still call myself a science fiction aficionado. And can I really call myself that if I haven't read much of the Grandmasters of Science Fiction? I've read three Heinlein books: Starship Troopers, The Puppet Masters, and The Red Planet. I've read maybe a short story or two by Asimov. I've read a lot of Ray Bradbury's short stories and Fahrenheit 451 a number of times. When it comes to Philip K. Dick, the originator of the story that eventually became Blade Runner, I've read A Scanner Darkly and was not particularly pleased. (I didn't know it was a drug book, and I've never been happy with drug stories: Spielberg's Minority Report didn't work for me because I didn't like the drug stuff.) I haven't read the inspiration for Blade Runner, the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I'd like to, I simply haven't gotten around to it. I can't vouch for the film's fidelity to the source material--especially not Blade Runner 2049. But I can say that there's a cachet about the film that I felt I was missing out on. So I went ahead and rented both films and watched them during my cabin retreat. Now that I'm here and home, I have some thoughts that I'd like to share about them. Blade Runner Harrison Ford is a heart throb and widely considered a good actor. I feel like he's all right. Look, he is Han Solo and he was perfectly cast for it. He is a charming fellow and his voice--especially as a younger man, as he is in this film--is delicious. But I don't feel like he ever inhabits his characters (Solo excepted). That is, he always feels like Harrison Ford to me, rather than the person he's supposed to be playing. You may take exception to that, which is fine, but I'm standing by this. He's a good actor who has good roles, assuming those roles are playing Harrison Ford. This holds true for Blade Runner. It's super '80s in its aesthetic and predictions for what next year will look like (and though the way our world works is quite a bit different from what Dick predicted, there's a pessimism in the world of LA 2019 that fits into ours like hand in glove). The soundtrack was--and I know this is a sacrilege to many--atrocious. The synth sounds (which they mercifully dialed down for the sequel, though they're still there) grind against my teeth like a dentist's drill. The computer sequences were quaint and understandable--even if you imagine a more digital world, if it's 1982, there are real limits to what you can convey on screen. So I'm not dissing the film for this; rather, I'm commenting on the fact that I noticed it. Oh, I should add that I did really like the grimy, gritty, rainy, crowded feeling that the film invokes. It reminded me of Ghost in the Shell on that front--obviously understanding that Blade Runner came before. The acting felt stagey--it was 1982, after all, and the kind of acting I'm used to hadn't really come into vogue--but genuine: Everyone seemed to be enjoying their time and working hard to tell the story. As far as it goes, that worked. I guess my expectation of a person being the role they're portraying is part of that more modern acting sensibility? I can't claim that in terms of a film historian, so take it with a grain of salt. Still, I'm left feeling a little hollow by everyone's performances. Pris' introduction is an example of this: As a Replicant, she's on the lam, so it makes sense that she's out on the rain-slicked streets. It even makes sense that she's looking for some shelter. And, yeah, she's after J.F. Sebastian, so she's planting herself there…but Sebastian's response to her (after she accidentally breaks out his car window) is a mild, "Hey, it's okay, do you want to come up to my place, stranger?" that lands--for me--in a weird place of plot contrivances and I guess this is my line so I will say my line and that will be how I deliver the line. It told the story, but I didn't feel as though I was in the world of Blade Runner. Other things bothered me, like the strange jumps in understanding that Deckard had: How did finding the snake scale relate to the reflection of the woman that he enhanced on the computer? The connections between the pieces felt strained and sometimes unbelievable. Then there's the character behaviors: Why did Roy Batty shove a nail through his hand? Why did he carry a dove as he pranced in his Fruit of the Looms? Why did Gaff leave his origami miniature (one of the few strong characterizations of the cast, I felt) outside of Deckard's apartment--if only to let them go? In short, I was left puzzled by why people behaved the way they did and how one event connected with another. Now, I started off by admitting that I haven't seen Blade Runner yet, so I think it's fair to point out that what a lot of people probably respond to with this film would have to be what it was to them when they first saw it. I think a lot of fans have a soft spot in their heart for Blade Runner because it was a new kind of world with a familiar story (I, personally, am sick of the noir tendency of a hard-drinking detective whose apartment is trash yet he ends up shagging the hot, damsel-in-distress type "dame"), complete with the science fiction twist. There's a lot there, for sure…but I wonder if its charm is more connected to the nostalgia of fans rather than the quality of the film on its own merits.** I recommend it, if only because it's a piece of cinematic and cultural DNA. There are concepts within it--not explored well enough, but pointed to often enough for some additional depth--that are worth considering and exploring (particularly the idea of what makes a memory--one of Dick's big preoccupations--and what makes a being human). Blade Runner 2049 The sequel no one asked for…at least, according to people's tweets that I saw before the film came out. Then people saw it and really liked it and, well, here we are. All right, so I already mentioned the soundtrack. The special effects were, of course, much better. The world of LA 2049 is, if anything, more bleak and rain-slicked than in thirty years before. Gosling's acting, honestly, was a lot better than Ford's 1982 character. Of course, Gosling's character was one of aloofness, so that helps. (Not a dig on Gosling; I don't see him in a lot of movies, so I don't know his range.) But I felt like Gosling was K, that he wasn't simply acting, but being. In other words, a more modern acting methodology was on display. The story felt more coherent, if a step into the bizarre. After all, why would there still be Replicants at all? And, yeah, in terms of the Replicants' desires to be human--made manifest in the ability to have children--that makes sense. I guess the evil capitalist (which is a tautology, but whatever) seeking "the child" MacGuffin works, and the twist of K's understanding and the revelations he goes through were really great. For a character who's defined by his subservience and attention to duty, it was cool to see the ways in which he changed. Some of the movie was belabored, operating under its own pretense of grandiosity (much like that sentence). Here's an example: K goes to Las Vegas in the final act…final half of the second act…whenever he does. And when he shows up, the film's score and cinematography are supposed to make me feel like he's arrived in a portentous, important place. But the only set that we see in the sand-blasted wastes are stories-tall statues of women in sexual positions. And, since it's Las Vegas, these are gauche, tawdry positions. So there's a tacky, superficiality layered over the other signifiers of the scene, giving it a jarring, confusing tone. Also, what's with the bees? I mean, they're just…there. This isn't to say the movie was bad. It was, of the two, the one I preferred. Harrison Ford did his Harrison Fordiest by growling through most of his lines, glowering a lot, and getting drunk. If I were a big fan of the original, had seen the trailers, and then gone into Blade Runner 2049, however, I would have felt disappointed: Harrison Ford's character, Deckard, isn't in the vast majority of the movie. K finds him, they fight (because of course), and K gets a clue for the mystery. Then Deckard becomes a dude in distress and K has to save him. Big revelation, the end. There's nothing wrong with that as a story, but from what I remember seeing in the trailers, that wasn't what was being sold. Having Ford's place in prominence when, in reality, he really did more of a cameo, felt like a cheap marketing ploy. On the whole, I think both films are worth a watch. I'm going to keep thinking about the movies, I'm sure. Perhaps I missed something. Certainly there are undertones and nuances that I failed to see on my first pass. That's how things go, I suppose. --- * Some people look at the Star Trek v. Star Wars debate to crystalize this concept, with the former being a harder science fiction world while the latter is much softer. That's fine as a shorthand, though it breaks down pretty often whenever there's a plot reason to bend the rules. Star Wars tried to push toward a harder science fiction side of the spectrum with the introduction (and rapid abandonment) of midichlorians. Star Trek will make declarations about maximum speeds their vessels can accomplish, but they'll break that set up if needed. Additionally, if you're trying to get a better sense of the idea of what makes for hard fantasy, consider what Brandon Sanderson argues in his "First Law of Magic" essay when talking about how many rules a magic system should have. The more detailed and specific the rules, the harder the magic system. The fewer explanations or the lesser the understanding, the softer it is. ** I'm not a film critic, obviously. I watch comparatively few movies, and those I do tend to be tentpole blockbusters that make all of the money. So I realize that this film might not have been made for people like me. It's hard to say for certain. This is simply my response to what I saw. |
AuthorWould you like to support my writings? Feel free to buy me a coffee (which I don't drink, but I do drink hot chocolate) at my Ko-Fi page. Thanks! Archives
July 2022
Categories
All
|