Alternate History vs. Secret History

 I am a bit off because of world news, and that’s kind of overwhelming my mind right now but I don’t have much meaningful to contribute (well, less than usual) so that’s not going to be the subject of today’s Note.

Things at work are weird right now, and I’m in a weird headspace, so I spent a lot of Friday taking different notes as to what I should make an essay about. And I try not to repeat myself too often. So the ideas of complaining about Star Wars and Heroes of Olympus are out, I think–I bang on about those too often.

So we’re going to talk about A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians because why not?

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Alternate History vs. Secret History

Despite how much I’m going to criticize A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians I want to reiterate that I *did* like that book and I plan to read the sequel whenever I get the chance to.

When I did my Book Diary post on the novel though, one of the things I criticized was that despite it being an Alternate History in which magic is A Thing, and openly so, for whatever reason the history more or less follows the same path as it does in real life. The path of the French Revolution and the struggles against slavery in European colonies is basically the same, following the same stumbling blocks. Magic hasn’t actually changed the timeline at all. That there are magic users among the populace doesn’t seem to make a difference. And I said that this would work better as a Secret History story, rather than an Alternate History one.

So. Let’s define our terms then.

When I say “Alternate History” I generally mean that the story takes place in a timeline on Earth where there is some diversion from our timeline because of one factor or another. There are plenty of Alternate History stories that don’t contain any real fantastical elements at all (and in fact that’s what most people generally think of when they think of Alternate History, I think), like Clash of Eagles which is “What if the Roman Empire lasted a thousand years longer and also tried conquering North America?” or The Man in High Castle in which the Axis Powers won World War II. “What if the Nazis/Confederates won?” is a popular take in these types of stories, though I think those are the most boring ideas to come up with and are overused. I came up with a list of better ideas one time on Tumblr.

A lot of the Alternate History I end up reading tends to be more fantasy and science-fiction. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is Regency Era England but in which Britain has a history of magic. Temeraire is the Napoleonic Wars but with dragons. Baltimore starts in a World War I similar to ours but quickly goes off the rails because vampires cause a plague in the world and the war dissolves as vampires and monsters start rampaging across Europe. The Bartimaeus Trilogy is somewhat modern England if the world had magicians in the style of Prospero running all the great empires of history.

Now Secret History is a bit different. I may have made that term up, I’m not sure. It’s where we assume that history runs the way it did in real life, except behind the scenes there’s something else going on. Assassin’s Creed is a Secret History, in which history follows (mostly) the path it did in real life, but with the blood feud between Assassins and Templars spanning throughout all the big world events. Traitor to the Crown is the American Revolution, but there are witches trying to influence happenings of the war. A lot of urban fantasy tends to have Secret History going on in the background, of course– Percy Jackson and the Olympians assumes that Greek myth shenanigans have been going on throughout the past, Dresden Files and Harry Potter heavily imply that wizards had something to do with World War II, and so on and so forth.

In short: the major events seem to have gone the same as they do in real life, but there’s a secret world that’s been making it happen that way.

To be fair to Declaration of Rights of Magicians, it’s the first book in the series, and perhaps in the sequels we’ll see more divergence as the series goes on. The first Temeraire book doesn’t actually have that many divergences from real life history either, but as the series goes on we see how the world is very different with dragons–for starters, a lot of the problems of colonialism haven’t taken root, because the would-be colonized ALSO have dragons and can work with them better than European powers, which mostly see them as powerful animal weapons despite their human-level intelligence. So there is time for this series to change things, of course!

But right now it doesn’t seem like that’s where it’s going. Like Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, there is a big event in the past that makes the timeline significantly different–in this case, it’s the Vampire Wars centuries before the events of the story–but in this case the world just seems to be the same? Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, once the magic started, felt like a fundamentally different world. Declaration of Rights seemed like the magic was pushing the historical figures to act exactly like they would in real life. Instead of changing history the magic enforced it.

And so I wonder: why did you choose Alternate History at all? If the events aren’t actually changed, why not just make it a Secret History story? There are a couple of Plot points that would have to be reworked to make it function, but considering that they all contribute to making the Plot of the novel match real world history, I don’t know that it was really necessary. 

If you tell an Alternate History story, and the history in the story isn’t actually alternate… well, why are you telling an Alternate History story?

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The Hero Wannabe

 You know, overall I think I had a good week. Things are okay. 

There was a time I considered making a Note about Dramatic Irony and applying that to Wheel of Time, but I think I’ve expounded on that in the series, though I don’t think in those terms. We will be talking about Wheel of Time though, just not that aspect of it.

I did kind of want this to be ‘Gawyn Trakand SUX’ but I’ve found that there has been a lot of digital ink spilled on the topic in the fandom so I’ll try to not make it so repetitive.

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The Hero Wannabe

You know, something I think about ever since reading The Faithful and the Fallen is the idea of the guy who thinks he’s the ultimate hero, but isn’t. It’s a fairly common occurrence in real life, if you know where to look (mostly the Internet). You know, those people who shout very loudly about how he or she is right and taking down THE SYSTEM when really this person’s just making things worse? Yeah that guy.

And since I’ve also recently finished The Wheel of Time, I’ve been thinking about those characters, and you know what? Gawyn Trakand SUX.

[rubs forehead] I said I was going to try not to do that okay, so:

Faithful and the Fallen has a character named Nathair who thinks he’s the Hero. And Wheel of Time has Gawyn who also acts like he’s the Hero. Neither of them are, and it’s played for drama in both cases. 

Nathair thinks he’s the Chosen One, in part because he’s told so by his advisor who he thinks is an archangel-type being and he seems to be fulfilling all the criteria. He leads a crusade to conquer the continent and get all the magic artifacts. It’s about halfway through the series that he finds out that he’s not the Chosen One, he’s the in-universe equivalent of the AntiChrist, a pawn of the Devil meant to try to bring about the end of the world. This causes, as you can imagine, quite a bit of a breakdown, but he continues to side with the villains. He tells people it’s because he thinks they might be right, but in his POV chapters it’s obvious that it’s mostly because he feels he’s come too far and doesn’t want to let go of everything he’s earned. He gets the chance to redeem himself several times and he just doesn’t, remaining a villain until the end.

He gets a pretty awesome fight scene before he dies too.

And then there’s Gawyn Trakand. He’s the prince of Andor, meant to grow up to be his sister Elayne’s chief guardian and warrior when she becomes queen (only women can take the throne of Andor). He and his brother Galad go to train with the Warders of the Aes Sedai (the wizard people) while his sister and love interest, Egwene, are training in magic. He becomes increasingly frustrated when Elayne and Egwene are sent on secret missions for months at a time that he doesn’t hear anything about, and so when the head of the Aes Sedai is overthrown he sides with the rebels, kills his sword fighting instructor, and works for the new leader Elaida (an arrogant and selfish woman who he has never actually liked or trusted, I should mention).

At some point after his mother, the Queen of Andor, disappears, Gawyn hears a rumor that Rand, the Dragon Reborn, is the one who killed his mother. And so because he decides that Rand killed his mom, and also is probably behind his sister and love interest’s disappearance, he swears he’s going to kill him. When Egwene and Elayne both assure him that Rand didn’t do it, Gawyn still insists that he did and has to be talked down from his death oath.

It’s some time after this that Egwene declares her love for him. I don’t get it. He basically spends the rest of the story doubting her decisions, doing what she tells him not to, and assuming he knows best. Gawyn also has a pretty cool sword fight before he dies.

Basically, Gawyn sees himself as the Hero, fighting against the forces keeping his family apart and him from his love. Like many protagonists, he’s pretty headstrong and impulsive, but he tends to also be skilled and strong enough to pull it off.

And thinking about why one of these works for me and the other doesn’t, the obvious answer is that Nathair is a villain. You are not supposed to agree with all that he does in the story. In fact, it’s supposed to be obvious, more as the story goes on, that he’s not doing the right thing and you become repulsed by the person he’s become. 

The problem with Gawyn is that the story tries to act as if he’s not kind of a monster. What are meant to be tragic flaws are more just really stupid and nonsensical decisions. He kills his fencing instructor, who he was shown to be friendly with, and apparently shows little to no regret about it. He sides with a horrible person he doesn’t even like because he thinks Siuan is keeping too many secrets about his sister and would-be girlfriend. He fully intends to kill Rand for something he thinks maybe he did, despite people he trusts who know Rand better than he does telling him that he didn’t do it. And when he does get together with Egwene, and she’s in a position of authority, he undermines it by not doing what she says just about every time she asks.

We aren’t necessarily supposed to agree with him–but we are supposed to see him as sympathetic. Which he’s not–he’s just some douchebag who, by virtue of his skill and strength and convictions, thinks he’s the Hero. And Nathair is like that too, but the narrative pulls the rug out from under him and shows him that he’s not. Gawyn doesn’t get a moment like that, at least not one that feels satisfying.

I think the idea of a character who thinks he’s (or she!) is the hero is a really neat one, especially since we have so many people around us today who seem to act like they’re the protagonists in their own stories rather than trying to be decent human beings. And we’re having a lot of discussions these days about what does or doesn’t make a heroic character in fiction, especially in regards to expectations from the past. I like the idea of an entitled character thinking he’s the Hero, and then he’s just NOT. But it’s annoying when the text doesn’t realize that the fake hero is actually just a terrible person.

You don’t need to give a moral judgment on each of your characters, to directly tell the audience if you approve or disapprove of his or her actions. We’re talking about writing fiction, not a morality pamphlet. But you do have to at least acknowledge gaping character flaws and realize when the character comes across as not at all sympathetic but an entitled douchebag. It makes a great villain, but it doesn’t make a great love interest, especially if he doesn’t reform or redeem himself before the story’s end.

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Who is High Fantasy FOR, Anyway?

 I am strongly considering bringing noise-canceling earmuffs to work because I hate the sound of chewing and everyone in the office eats the crunchiest food imaginable.

Also my laptop was acting up so I’m writing this on my parents’ computer. Yay. Forgive me any typos as I get used to a different keyboard. I really wish my computer would just TELL me it needed to do an update rather than just letting itself run 10 times slower on basic tasks…

I had this thought for a while though so let’s talk about it!

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Who is High Fantasy For, Anyway?

So a few months back I kept getting video ads on Facebook for a crowdfunding from a Christian channel trying to make an animated adaptation of a book series called Wingfeather Saga so that they could make an animated fantasy show for children with Christian themes. Which, you know, whatever, fine. But something that caught my attention is that the guy asking for your money in the ad pointed out that A) he hated a lot of the children’s television his kids watched because it was mostly aimed at toddlers, and B) most high fantasy these days is made with the assumption that it’s for adults, citing Game of Thrones and The Witcher. And not just like, “This is more mature in tone and has themes that only adults will fully understand,” but “It had nudity, graphic violence, and swearing.”

I have been thinking about this. Because it’s kind of right? At least, in regards to live-action. There is still animated high fantasy being made for families, like The Dragon Prince (WHERE IS THAT NEXT SEASON THOUGH), but most of the live-action high fantasy is squarely aimed at an adult audience. And it’s not as if The Lord of the Rings films, or the Hobbit trilogy, were really made for children either, but they weren’t made in a way that families couldn’t watch them either.

I don’t want to say it’s the fault of Game of Thrones, but it’s definitely the turning point for the genre.

A quick side note too: when I say “High fantasy is now being made for mature audiences,” I want to be clear that I’m talking about film and television. Dark fantasy has been a trend for a while now. The Witcher and A Song of Ice and Fire books have been out for decades, and if you’ve ever walked through a fantasy aisle in a bookstore, even if you see a bunch of old books, they’re very often not for children. And there have been dark fantasy games for ages as well. This trend is not out of nowhere, it’s just now mainstream.

But what an odd thing to become so mainstream?

I strongly suspect that a lot of people saw Lord of the Rings as kids, and when they grew older, they saw Game of Thrones as filling that high fantasy itch, but also as something that appealed to their desire to see adult television shows with more graphic material. In a sense, an audience who said to themselves “Well I’m a grown up now, I want to watch a more grown up version of that.” That’s not to say that Game of Thrones IS a more grown up version of Lord of the Rings but it certainly got billed as that quite often. I definitely saw more than one outlet say something along the lines of “Well Tyrion’s a dwarf, but he’s NOTHING like Gimli, he visits prostitutes!”

In the wake of that show, everyone and their mother wanted in on that sweet success, and so we saw a bunch of fantasy, science fiction, and historical fiction that desperately wanted to try their hand at doing dark fantasy. And it’s not always entirely fair to compare these shows, as many of them were based off of properties that existed long before George R.R. Martin’s books were written. But they also wouldn’t have been greenlit without that show, and it’d be silly to not recognize that it had an influence on them in one way or another.

But it’s gotten more than a little silly. Did you ever watch The Shannara Chronicles? It was trying to bill itself as an MTV Game of Thrones type of series. And so there are several “Court Intrigue” subplots added to the story, along with a couple of (fairly tame) sex scenes. The episodes I did watch, I did because I wanted to see Manu Bennet kick butt, and I gave up on the second season pretty early on when I learned he died in it. But it felt really silly because the show was trying to act like it was very mature about these topics of violence and sex, but the protagonists still vaguely referred to “feelings” instead of falling in and out of love, and many of these subplots went absolutely nowhere.

And what I’ve seen of the Wheel of Time show isn’t all that encouraging in this regard either. They have sex scenes, which is weird to me. It’s not that characters in the book series don’t have sex, they do, but it’s pretty much fade-to-black, and none of it happens this early in the story, because the leads are sheltered kids from a small town where everyone knows each other. The first time Rand sleeps with a love interest in the books, his first thought the next morning is that he HAS to marry this girl or else he’s shamed her. The development of these relationships is a large part of these characters’ arcs. And I get that if the show didn’t have any of that in its early seasons and then added them later on, it would feel VERY weird, like you’re watching a completely different show. And also that they aged up the characters. But I also suspect that the showrunners essentially decided that the show needed sex scenes to stay relevant in the market of high fantasy television shows.

As for violence–well there’s plenty of that in the books too. But the show also pushes that in some ways to match with stereotypical screen depictions. Like I said, the characters in the books start out as kids (older teenagers), but in the show, Perrin has been married, but his wife got frigded before the story started so he can have some angst. Like, yeah, we need to be taken seriously, obviously we need to have violence committed against a woman for a man’s character development; that’s how you do good fantasy, right?

[Hilariously/sadly, Screen Rant didn’t realize that this wasn’t something from the books.]

We don’t need this, is what I’m getting at. I’m not suggesting that we need to ban sex and violence from all of high fantasy, okay. But I am saying that we shouldn’t have to have those in our fantasy stories on screen in order to make it for adults. Or teenagers! If the story genuinely calls for those things, then fine! But very often it doesn’t, and it reads as if the writers or directors or what have you really wanted to make sure they had your attention, so that the reviewers will write “It’s like Lord of the Rings, but DARKER!!!” We shouldn’t have an entire genre that seems to be made just to be accessible to adults, very often in the shallowest way possible. High fantasy stories should be going across the board, for all kinds of audiences to tell all kinds of stories.

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Authoritarianism in Fiction

 Like, yes, pulling Maus from the curriculum of a school and the stated reasoning behind it was really, really stupid, but they didn’t actually ban it. They just pulled it from the curriculum. And now the media’s acting like no one in the county is allowed to read it, which is not what’s happening? I’m not saying don’t go after this, just go after what actually happened.

Anyway, Waitangi Day is coming up! Tomorrow, in fact! It’s a very important day. 

I thought about this idea from watching The Mandalorian these past couple of weeks.

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Authoritarianism in Fiction

Towards the end of the first season of The Mandalorian, there’s a scene in which an Imperial character known only as “The Client” claims he doesn’t understand why anyone opposes the Empire. Because after all, everywhere the Empire goes, quality of life improves, crime goes down, stability is reached, and everything is just better. Now to be clear, I don’t think you’re necessarily supposed to believe this guy. And that’s a good thing too, because he’s dead wrong.

We see throughout the Star Wars canon that the Empire didn’t actually make anything more stable. It ended the Clone Wars, sure, and some of the material like the games make it seem as if life on the Core Worlds got pretty cushy. But elsewhere? Crime syndicates are thriving, the Empire straight-up enslaves entire populations like Kashykk, and strip-mining entire planets for resources to fuel their war machines, like on Lothal.

And they’re not even good at it! If the Empire had backed Thrawn’s TIE Fighter program they’d have a better fleet to go fight the Rebellion, but instead they placed all their money in a giant superweapon, and put most of their big brass on it, and then when it sploded they had to figure out how to build back their resources. And then they just built another one. Also their officers are constantly trying to one-up and backstab each other for status, Inquisitors can hijack ships and operations whenever they want, and Vader keeps executing officers when he’s annoyed. This is not a well-run government or military! It’s falling apart on every level!

And from what I understand, that’s kind of how real-life authoritarian governments go. There’s this misconception that authoritarian governments like fascism are at least good at making things run smoothly. “The trains run on time,” goes the expression. But they don’t! They’re really bad at holding things together. Nazi Germany thought it’d be great for productivity if there was this ‘survival of the fittest’ mindset going on, and so you had plenty of redundant departments and projects competing instead of working together, and they’d sabotage each other to try to get ahead.

Also they were genociding large chunks of the population, which isn’t a good thing for development, despite what genociders would tell you!

So one of my frustrations with the Sequel Trilogy of Star Wars is that the fascist regime, the First Order, is apparently a subversion in this regard. Because yes, it’s evil, but it apparently works. The First Order has seemingly unlimited resources, ships, and manpower and can power through what would be major setbacks to the Empire. The Death Star gets destroyed, and the Empire is reeling. When Starkiller Base (which is an actual planet and their home base) gets destroyed, the First Order proceeds to steamroll the Resistance, take over the galaxy’s major hyperspace lanes, and pull an even bigger ship out of their armpit, a ship big enough to make its own baby ships. This is the most efficient authoritarian regime in fictional history, because no matter what happens they always have more ships, men, technology, and firepower.

[I did not start writing this Note thinking I was going to trash the Sequel Trilogy.]

Authoritarian regimes are not this efficient. That doesn’t mean they’re not plenty dangerous, but they’re not the kind of entities that can regularly take beatings like that and walk back from it without a scratch.

And something that didn’t sit well with me in The Witcher III: Wild Hunt is the idea of Nilfgaard. Nilfgaard is an authoritarian superpower; it’s steamrolling its way across the Continent and conquering everyone in its path. You can’t talk badly about the emperor or you’ll be in deep trouble. The army regularly commits war crimes. The emperor constantly reneges on promises he made. And yet they’re the alternative to Radovid’s reign, which is racist, genocidal, and would lead to a new wave of constant oppression should he win. And I get that yes, The Witcher is a world in which everyone sucks, but Nilfgaard is sometimes presented as being the good ones by virtue of not being the other, and very often their malevolence is downplayed, because yeah, they’re harsh, but at least they’re fair and efficient. And I’m not really down with that! They’re an authoritarian empire on a war of conquest with no point other than nationalistic pride! That’s not okay!

Compare this to another video game series, like Assassin’s Creed. The Templars are authoritarian–that’s their schtick, that most people cannot be trusted to control their own destinies, so the Templars should run the world for the greater good. And not all of them are bad people! Some of them genuinely want to do a lot of good, and go out of their way to try to make people’s lives better. But for the most part they’re douchebags! Because an organization based on the notion of taking power attracts plenty of people who want it for its own sake. As Ezio points out, they’re all very happy to talk about the greater good, but the second there comes a chance to give up power they tend to immediately get defensive and refuse. And because they’re so after power, they’re often screwed by their own ambitions. It’s pointed out several times that if they weren’t such douchebags out for themselves, they actually could have instituted the changes they wanted and fixed things like inequality and slavery.

And that strikes me as more realistic. Like yes, in theory an authoritarian government could work as a powerful entity that can address the problems of society, but in practice it never will because it’s handing power to a group of corruptible human beings that are going to try to put themselves into that system for the power they can gain and end up sabotaging the whole thing to get ahead themselves. I like this idea with the Empire in Star Wars and the Templars in Assassin’s Creed because it’s a really good illustration of how a corrupt regime works (I say, as someone who isn’t a historian or political science scholar, so take that how you will).

They don’t make the trains run on time. They do their darndest to convince you that they do, but they’re really not good at making a solid country. And given that we’re seeing a bewildering amount of support of authoritarian regimes in the world today, I don’t much like it when fiction depicts it as “Well, it’s harsh, but it gets the job done.” No! No it doesn’t! It just wants you to think that.

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