I Don't Like Vikings That Much

 I considered not doing a Saturday Note this week because I’m having a busy weekend, but it looks like instead it’ll just be late and more rushed than usual.

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I Don’t Like Vikings That Much

Alright I alluded to this in my Book Diary post on Odinn’s Child, and probably this could have been picked up in any of the comments I’ve made about Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla (which I have yet to review, and for that I apologize), but: I have trouble with Viking protagonists in historical fiction. And it’s probably a bit weird that I only just formulated this in my head, all things considered--one would think I would have realized this much earlier. But no, I’m not a huge fan of Vikings as protagonists, or in general.

It is a bit odd considering that I really like Norse mythology. It’s great! I eat that stuff for breakfast! I can hand out tons of Norse mythology book recommendations on the fly. It’s one of my favorite sets of mythology. But I don’t like the people who actually worshipped the Norse gods because, quite frankly, they sucked.

And a lot of people don’t want to deal with that.

I’ve said this multiple times, but the main problem that I had with Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla is that the game doesn’t really want to reckon with the notion that going around raiding, pillaging, and burning people’s houses while colonizing their lands makes you the villain. The Norse heroes that are leading these raids are presented not just as heroic among their fellow Norsemen/women, but to their Saxon allies as well. Odinn’s Child doesn’t do that much better in this regard, though it does lampshade that the willingness among pagan Scandinavians to fight everyone gets them in trouble more than they really need to.

Many of these examples come with unhealthy doses of “we’re hardy, real men, who are always honest and straightforward, unlike those hypocritical Christians who say they’re all about love but hate us!” And again, complaining about the Christians disliking you while you’re actively pillaging, conquering, and enslaving their lands and people is so stupid that it hurts me to read this as if it’s supposed to be sympathetic.

One of the oddest things in AC: Valhalla though is that this pillaging only takes place among Europeans? There is (spoiler) a section that takes place in Vinland, or North America as we call it now, and the Norse there have met the Native Americans and promptly… ignore them? The player character, and one other Norseman, meets and talks to them. The other guy, Olaf, is considered a weirdo and criminal for bothering to talk to the Native Americans there, and trying to establish trade. But other than that, there’s nothing. No hostility, no violence, no trade, absolutely nothing. And the anachronistic Norse colony here is set up by one of the villains, whose clan opens the game by trying to sell the protagonist into slavery. The villain has set up a work camp to excavate a First Civilization site, and he hasn’t tried to interact with the people who actually live there? Either to ask for a guide, or to enslave, or anything?

And I’m not saying he should have done that, but it’s very out-of-character.

I think there are possible ways in which one could write sympathetic and interesting Viking characters. There’s the lovely cast of Olaf’s crew in Sea of Trolls, who are memorable and sympathetic, but when they first show up it’s to raid Jack’s village, and they take him and his sister captive. And they bond, eventually, especially on a quest to Jotunheim to face off against an even bigger evil. But upon the journey’s end, they’re like, “We’ll drop you off and then maybe next time we’re raiding we’ll swing by and visit!” Jack is horrified that they’re going back to raiding, and their response is, “Yeah, we’re Vikings. That’s what we do.” And it’s again emphasized that yeah, they’re not good people.

Ranger’s Apprentice post-Battle of Skandia and the spin-off Brotherband Chronicles dodges this altogether by making it so that the Skandians (the in-universe Nordic peoples) no longer raid as part of a treaty, and instead hire themselves out as bodyguards and naval patrol.

There’s also the Skelligans in The Witcher 3, who take raiding and inter-clan feuds very seriously, and as Cerys points out, both of these have prevented their kingdom from actually developing into something other than a bunch of bullies that bother the major kingdoms of the Continent on the international stage. If she becomes queen, she reforms the kingdom into being actually productive and drops all that raiding crap. And mind you, this is already a setting that’s full of gray morality, and so none of the Skelligan behavior is portrayed as being particularly noble, in the same way that barely anyone on the Continent is.

But essentially, it boils down to this: if your protagonist is a Viking, you have to own up to the fact that he or she is someone who is part of a culture that pillages and colonizes other peoples as part of their career. Vikings are, for whatever reason, a group of white colonizers who are somehow still romanticized in fiction, and very often without any lampshading that these are, by their job description, very bad people. And when fiction tries to feature Viking characters as protagonists and doesn’t do that, especially while still keeping the pillaging and such, is dishonest and stupid and I just hate it all around.

So I wish writers would stop doing it.

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Elementary, Sherlock Holmes, & Righteous Fury

 My guts feel weird as I’m writing this but in the past year that’s become fairly normal, sadly enough.

I deliberately did not talk about the Shadow Carja in last week’s Note about the tribes in Horizon Zero Dawn because I didn’t think I had much to say about them. But the more I thought about it Saturday afternoon and Sunday, the more I thought of things I could say; however, I also had this idea that has floated in and out of my head since rewatching the pilot episode of Elementary. Once it came back at the beginning of the week I wrote it down as this week’s subject so that I wouldn't forget it again.

Also, while I will compare the CBS Elementary to BBC’s Sherlock in the approach to the character, this is not meant to be an essay saying that one is superior to the other, or to put down Sherlock. I may get the two titles mixed up; I apologize if I do that.

And spoilers for the pilot episode of Elementary.

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Elementary, Sherlock Holmes, & Righteous Fury

Towards the end of the pilot episode of Elementary, Sherlock Holmes figures out how the perpetrator, the victim’s husband, did the crime: he was not the killer (who was found to have killed himself earlier in the episode), but the killer’s therapist, who was secretly seeing him. The man prescribed steroids to his patient and secretly pushed his violent urges and obsessions, despite telling him he was giving him medication to calm him down. So when the patient was put in a situation where he was in close proximity to his (the therapist’s) wife, he killed her in a rage, and immediately went home in a confused stupor disgusted with himself over what he’d done, eventually killing himself.

And when Sherlock puts this together and confronts the man, he is furious.

In grad school I took a film class, and the professor referred to something he called the ‘Save the Cat’ moment. It’s the bit of a film in which the hero shows he’s a good person.

This is that moment.

Sherlock Holmes, as presented in the early episodes of Elementary, is a douchebag. He frequently disregards the comfort of people around him, dismissing people’s concerns because they bother him or he’s trying to make a point or something. And he gets called out on it. A lot. Mostly by Joan. A large part of his character development over the course of the series is him actually picking up on this and doing his best to be a better person by respecting people other than himself. By the end of the series, Sherlock is still abrasive and has little regard for social niceties, but he’s more openly respectful of other people and willing to accept other people’s points of view.

But right here, right in the pilot, is this moment that sticks with me. Because Sherlock Holmes presents himself as a selfish ex-junkie doing his best to keep himself busy with being a detective to pass the time, because he knows he’s better at it than everyone else. And when confronting this man he’s enraged. Not because the man has outwitted Holmes by making it difficult to find proof of his crime (although I’m sure it doesn’t help), not because of anything that this man had done to Holmes personally.

He’s enraged because this doctor took a man who came to him for help was wound up and used like a weapon. That he abused a man’s trust by drugging him and setting him on another person.

Sherlock Holmes is angry because he’s feeling righteous indignation on the way this man has treated a vulnerable human being.

As far as I can recall, BBC’s Sherlock Holmes does not do this. I will admit that I haven’t seen the third and fourth seasons since they’ve aired. He does get stunned by some of Moriarty’s more horrific actions. And he gets quite angry when someone he cares about is in danger, or gets hurt, or is threatened in some way. To be fair, this is entirely consistent with his characterization and development in that show. In Sherlock, Sherlock Holmes says in the first episode that he’s a sociopath, and it’s clear throughout its run that he has trouble relating to other people at all. So him feeling the kind of rage at the injustice some criminals exhibit wouldn’t really be in character for him.

We don’t see it with the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes either. He does show concern for other people, and he does go out of his way to help others out of danger. But the Sherlock of Guy Ritchie’s films is a bit busy. He’s dealing with cases relating to the fate of the country, or of all of Europe.

The very first episode of Elementary, on the other hand, makes a point to tell the viewer: this is a man who cares very deeply about the injustices of the world, even if he’s a bit of a tosser most of the time. Right away he’s shown to be someone Good--albeit Chaotic Good and not Lawful Good, because Sherlock’s happy to break into someone’s apartment to find evidence if he thinks it’ll help. He can say what he wants about being a consulting detective, but a huge part of what he does, and why he does it, is because Sherlock recognizes that there are problems in the world that he is equipped to solve. There are people who need help, and he can help them.

I haven’t read enough of the original stories to tell you how accurate this take on the character is. Random Tumblr posts and conversations I’ve had lead me to believe that it’s closer to Arthur Conan Doyle’s characterization than a lot of other takes. But in any case, it’s become a rather rare thing to see protagonists who are doing the right thing because it’s the right thing. More often it’s revenge or self-interest that accidentally turns into saving the world or something like that. And to be clear, these aren’t bad motivations; adding personal stakes to a story is good. It makes the character’s journey personal.

And maybe I’m misreading this interaction entirely; it does involve drugs, and part of Sherlock’s whole schtick in Elementary is that he’s a recovering addict. And maybe that’s why he reacts so strongly here and I need to watch the episode again. But it’s still him getting angry on the behalf of another person, a man abused but an authority figure he trusted and that’s just… that’s Good stuff.

More like that, please.

I should just rewatch all of Elementary.

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Horizon Zero Dawn & Flawed Cultures

 Alright I’m going to be real with you the last couple of days this week have been a bit rough, especially since I woke up late (well, relatively so) on Friday and didn’t get time to do all the pre-breakfast stuff I usually do on weekdays, and then the minivan’s CD player hates all of humanity.

Anyway I’ve been thinking I was going to get the “Siege of Paris” expansion for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, but it turns out that it doesn’t really further the story, so now I’m on the fence and not sure what to do (but the season pass is on sale!). In the meantime I’ve been replaying this.

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Horizon Zero Dawn and Flawed Cultures

Maybe I’ve already written about this but my other idea was “Putting modern sensibilities in historical fiction” and I’ve definitely done something like that. I think. Maybe.

It’s been rough.

Something I like about Horizon Zero Dawn is that there are different cultures depicted in the story, and none of them are depicted as the “Good” one. You’ll notice that many times in fantasy or science-fiction, when there are different cultures, there are certain cultures that are meant to be the “Good” one, or a “Bad” one, or make one culture or another appear as better or worse than the others. Sometimes these attempts fall flat. During the rewatch of the BBC Merlin my sister and I pointed out that the Old Religion absolutely sucks and there’s no reason that any of this was sustainable, not least of which because they’re constantly using magic to mind control people and whining that their stick-mobiles are sacred relics.

I think what makes a lot of these fall flat is because the problems that a society is given by the writer, well, they’re things that are so out of the normal frame of reference that it feels artificial. In The Witcher III, for instance, Novigrad is burning mages and nonhumans in the street and everyone’s just fine with it. And to be clear, I’m not saying that public genocide doesn’t happen and get excused by the public--the Chinese government clearly demonstrates that right the fudge now--but it was a bit out of left field for its intended audience when it came out, and I think it feels less like a realistic thing to happen in the worldbuilding and more like an attempt to make the setting edgier.

Horizon… doesn’t feel that cheap.

Alright so our story starts with Aloy growing up as an outcast of the Nora tribe, a matriarchal theocracy of warrior-hunter people who distrust technology. There are exceptions, but for the most part they’re a very dogmatic society. And the player character, Aloy, questions them and their beliefs and dogma all the time, because having been raised as an outcast, she really doesn’t feel much attachment to the culture.

I think this is a brilliant way for an audience to get this perspective. If your viewpoint character was raised as a normal part of the society, it’s hard to make his or her critique of it feel remotely genuine, and not like the writer is imposing outside views on the character. Maddie Smith in Runemarks is similar in this regard, with the outcast protagonist--and the sequel Runelight shows the flipside, with Maggie who is raised as a normal part of the restrictive society and so never has a reason to really question it.

Also I think there’s a point in here somewhere about showing that a matriarchal society isn’t necessarily better and more tolerant than a patriarchal one, too.

And yet even though we are clearly not meant to sympathize with these aspects of the culture, we’re not supposed to hate these people either. Well, not all of them. Resh can go suck a brick. Aloy thoroughly rejects the idea of thinking of herself as Nora--she goes so far as to suggest being called “Aloy Despite the Nora,” instead of “Aloy of the Nora.” When they bow down to her as their savior at the end of the game, she’s disgusted. But she doesn’t hate them, just the way the society made them, and even then they’re not all bad. Rost and Teersa are fairly strict in following dogma, and yet aren’t bad people. Rost is willing to leave Aloy to avoid her breaking tribal law about talking to outcasts once she has a way out of her shunned status, and yet he’s the most heroic member of the tribe in the game. 

Teersa, one of the High Matriarchs, is fairly loyal to her religion. There’s a bit of dialogue I like in which Aloy presents some information that seemingly contradicts her religious teaching. Instead of declaring Aloy a liar, or deciding that her religion’s a hollow lie (which is how I think lesser writers tend to handle this kind of thing), she’s shaken, but she ultimately decides that there is something going on beyond her understanding.

The Nora are the main culture we really get to know, because that’s what Aloy grew up around and the story starts there. But we see the other cultures, and while there are plenty of good people in all of them, none of them are perfect either, and Aloy frequently calls out their BS. The Carja are recently reforming after being a brutal, caste-based warrior society that frequently enslaved and sacrificed people from other tribes. Their king is pretty progressive, but he can’t throw out all the old rules at once, and so plenty of sexism, classism, and xenophobia still remain among members of the culture. Also there are war criminals hiding out there. The Oseram that Aloy meets are fine, although they don’t understand a lot of social cues and have a habit of using their building skillz to make giant war machines. And it’s implied that the Oseram living the Claim, their homeland, have pretty strict ideas about gender roles. And the Banuk are nuts, even outside the whole ‘the shaman is weaving Machine cables through his skin’ thing, because they hold this crazy idea that if a hunter can’t survive out in the winter wilds for a few nights, then they’re just not cut out for living, y’know?

None of the societies are perfect, by a long shot. And they’re imperfect in ways that feel very human and not at all tacked-on or over-the-top. They’re things that a lot of people have to deal with today: cultures with strict gender roles, or people romanticizing a very troubled history, or perpetuating harmful mindsets in the name of ‘survival of the fittest.’ It’s all shown to us through the filter of a science fiction story, but I think it speaks to real life in a way that most speculative fiction doesn’t.

And I think that’s pretty cool.

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Good & Evil in Storytelling

 I tend to avoid making my Saturday Notes about current events because I don’t like talking about topics that are too controversial, but I was seriously considering for a while talking about vaccination and the rhetoric surrounding the anti-vaccination crowd and how utterly stupid so much of it is. There are people out there who are utterly convinced that the COVID vaccine has about a 50/50 chance of killing you and it infuriates me that this nonsense exists out there on the net.

Mostly by people I know on Tumblr, so don’t go after any of my Facebook friends.

I also considered, because I finished reading Odinn’s Child by Tim Severin, talking about why a  lot of stories about Norsemen, especially in their conflict with Christian Saxons and such, don’t really work for me, but that’s probably going to come out in discussion posts about Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.

Anyhow, instead we’re going to talk about morality? I guess?

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Good & Evil in Storytelling

There’s this attitude I’ve seen expressed about Star Wars (admittedly mostly in articles and think pieces and not really in fandom circles) that basically says this: we’re all tired of the way things are, and we’d enjoy these stories a lot more if they weren’t about Jedi anymore. Why? Because we’re all tired of the moral rigidity of Jedi, and the whole notion of there  being a Good/Evil dichotomy that defines the setting.

First off: this is stupid. Almost no one in the fandom is tired of Jedi, and there’s one reason for that is because they’re the guys with the laser swords. I know that some people in Lucasfilm have a hard time grasping that nearly everyone’s Star Wars fantasy is swinging a lightsaber around, but that’s what almost everyone thinks about when they think about Star Wars. It’s great that there are a diversity of opinions in the fandom and that Star Wars is a big enough universe that you can tell almost any kind of story in it. But let’s not pretend that this “we’re tired of stories about Jedi” feeling is universal among the audience. ‘Cause it ain’t.

Second: Why does that Good/Evil dichotomy bother anyone?

And it makes me think of that one statement made by the producers of the upcoming Wheel of Time series was not going to be a straightforward Good vs. Evil story, it was going to be a story about complicated motivations and people. And that is also dumb as grits because the whole point of the story is that the Dragon Reborn is the one destined by the Creator to fight the final battle against the Dark One, Shai’tan. Who is not a metaphor or anything, he’s actually Satan, or at least this version of the world’s incarnation of him, or something (Wheel of Time is a weird setting), the cause of all evil in the world. Why the fudge would would the adaptation not be about a straightforward battle of Good and Evil?

I think that because the villain behind everything is so straightforwardly evil right from his name that the story can’t have any moral complexity in it at all--Limyaael makes this criticism of Wheel of Time and I think she misses the mark here. Because yes, the Dark One is pure Evil Incarnate, but his servants, who take up much more page time, are complex characters with their own motivations and conflicts. There are in fact Darkfriends who we see questioning or even abandon the Dark One, and each of the Forsaken has a personal reason for choosing to side with Evil against the Dragon. Likewise, the heroes aren’t all perfect people by virtue of fighting the Dark One, they often do stupid or morally ambiguous things in the pursuit of trying to defeat the bad guys.

Also this is a big budget adaptation of a massive fantasy series that practically defined the genre for a while and it’s coming out in November and so I’m wondering why we don’t have a trailer? Someone answer me that!?

The notion that the stories about the Jedi are too dogmatic also kind of frustrates me because A) that’s a Plot Point and B) we do see Luke, the paragon of everything good in the Jedi Order by Return of the Jedi, get tempted to do evil several times over. And he sometimes does really dumb things in trying to help his friends. We see this again and again in Star Wars: heroes who are tempted to the Dark Side because they have good intentions.

Ezra’s flirtation with the Dark Side in Star Wars: Rebels is built out of the desire to protect his friends. He hates the Sith and their Empire so he’s willing to do pretty sketch things to stop them, but that hatred is born out of the desire to protect the people he cares about. And it makes the motivation feel very real. Sadly this subplot isn’t wrapped up in a way that’s too satisfactory, because the show was busy with Thrawn’s plot, but I get it, ‘cause, you know, Thrawn is a cool villain.

Obi-Wan does say, after all, “Only the Sith see in absolutes.” Which is a line I’m still trying to work out the meaning of, truth be told, but it clearly indicates that even in Star Wars things aren’t so straightforward. I suspect that a large chunk of hatred of Jedi from some segments of the fandom is born more out of an intense dislike of organized religion in general and monastic orders in particular more than anything else--especially evident on the insistence I see somewhere that “Well, obviously Jedi have casual sex, why wouldn’t they?”

I’ll admit that I also can’t much complain about the villains in Star Wars being obviously evil because… they’re fascists and corrupt corporations. There are things we can critique about execution, sure, but it’s not like I’m gonna be sold on the “But what if the fascists and corrupt corporations actually weren’t all evil?” idea that’s implied by the complaint that Star Wars needs to have more complex morality.

[There is an episode in The Clone Wars that implies that the Separatists aren’t all evil and some are quite noble, and I’m okay with that. But it’s also undermined by the rest of the series in which the Separatists are run by a Satanic space wizard and cabal of corporations, and all their agents and officers in the field are war criminals and mad scientists.]

And I know that I’ve said this before, but I think there are excellent stories you can do with Lawful Good protagonists, and still subvert audience expectations. One of the delightful things about Kipo & the Age of Wonderbeasts is that the title character is almost unfailingly optimistic and believes the best in everyone she meets, despite living in a dystopia defined by prejudice. And everyone around her thinks she’s crazy to be like this, and yet she makes it work, because she’s able to rebuild the world by virtue of seeing the good there that no one else can manage to see.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having a straightforward Good vs. Evil story. There’s nothing wrong with having there be something that is actually, definitively Evil in the story for the Good heroes to overcome. Now yes, this can be dull and boring if you do it badly, and if you don’t do anything original with the story. But in and of itself it isn’t bad. And I’m frustrated by seeing opinions that basically try to brush it aside as limited storytelling when it really isn’t. At all.

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