We Need a Little Socrates in Our Lives

I had an idea for writing a Note about Elementary and Sherlock Holmes but thing I’ve read post essays of basically what I was planning to say at least ten times over. But then I thought about this, in part because I’ve been playing too much Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey and I’ve given up looking at my Facebook News Feed because it tends to be a garbage fire.

As always, when I’m complaining about people and politics on social media, I’m talking about stupid politics; I don’t mean informing people about issues or organizing events. That’s all fine and good.

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We All Need a Little Socrates

Socrates was, by all accounts, one of the most annoying people in history. Believing that ‘The unexamined life was not worth living,’ he decided he would help people examine their lives and beliefs by going around asking people questions about seemingly the most basic ideas. You know that little kid who is constantly asking ‘Why?’ to all your questions? Socrates was a bit like that. Because nothing was meant to be taken as a given--he hoped that the people he talked to would realize that there are many assumptions we live with that aren’t necessarily bad, but we haven’t thought about why they’re good. We just accept them.

And that’s kind of annoying to deal with. Because let’s say you’re someone that supports literacy for all. That sounds like basically a good thing, and I don’t think Socrates would disagree with that. But if you brought it up in front of him he would start asking a bunch of questions to make sure that you both understood why it was a good thing. 

[Although to be fair, exactly how much Socrates wanted to challenge society’s conventions is a bit unclear, considering how much of what we know about him is from his student Plato, who may have been shoving words in his teacher’s mouth. We know that some students of Socrates disagreed with how Plato portrayed Socrates--Diogenes the Cynic, for instance, basically worked on the assumption that according the Socrates, you should reject society and he went around naked, eating in places it wasn’t considered acceptable, and masturbated in public. I’d like to think Socrates’s beliefs were somewhere in the middle.]

So Socrates was an irritating twit sometimes. But I think we kind of need that sort of willingness to question everything. We’re not really people who do that anymore.

You would think that the rising number of atheists in the world would mean that people are questioning authority more and more, and commonly-held beliefs are being peeled away. But that’s only sort of true. Yes, more people are disdaining religious authority and those commonly-held beliefs… but what’s replacing them isn’t more solid. I’m not criticizing atheism itself, but what I end to call Internet Atheism.

You would be amazed how many how many times I’ve seen arguments for atheism that aren’t built on facts but on things copied and pasted from the Internet. Every time Easter rolls around, there is for instance a wave of people claiming that Easter is actually the celebration of a pagan goddess Eostre because the English word ‘Easter’ is derived from her name. Never mind that the word ‘Easter’ is the English word, and other cultures use words that are completely unrelated. I’ve also recently seen the claim that Easter is actually derived from Ishtar, because somehow the English word is derived from a Mesopotamian deity.

Like I said, this isn’t a condemnation of atheists or atheism. After all, the website History for Atheists has a great takedown of the whole thing right here. It’s a criticism of stupidity dressed as intellectual atheism; taking something at face value that doesn’t make much sense once you stop and think about it because it fits with your established beliefs is exactly the sort of thing atheism should be rebelling against. 

This is part of why I absolutely despise those screenshots of Twitter posts to make ‘GOTCHA!’ political points. Most of them can be taken apart if you interrogate it for more than a minute. It is not an argument for or against something; it is not argument at all. It is an attempt to beg for applause. It is built on an assumption that remains unproven.

I’m not saying that you have to sit and contemplate every belief you have every second of every day. But if you’re going to try to build or share an argument putting forth that it is the correct belief, you will need to do more than accept your thoughts on it as given, and you shouldn’t copy and paste something off the Internet as an argument if it isn’t even actually an argument. 

And if we see someone arguing something based on an assumption then we should challenge those assumptions, whether or not we agree with the conclusion that the argument endorses. I am not saying you cannot believe in anything; by all means, you should believe in something. But you should also believe in that something because you’ve decided, by questioning the subject and deciding that it makes sense.

Be a bit like Socrates, because the unexamined life is not worth living. Just, maybe, not as annoying as he was.

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James Lovegrove's Pantheon Series

I was sick this past week. I’m feeling much better now, but it was a bit of a rough week, which is a shame because I was hoping for it to be a really fun week.

There was an NPR bit about a musical about political resistance in Egypt? And for whatever reason I thought it’d be cool if someone did a story set in modern Egypt with Egyptian gods and the political situation in Egypt? I just thought it’d be cool. I don’t know enough on Egypt to even consider it though.

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James Lovegrove’s Pantheon Series

Have you seen these books? They’re from a series of military science-fiction books all connected to mythology, with titles Age of _____. They confused the heck out of me when I first stumbled upon them, because I assumed that they were all in the same continuity, which they’re not. Age of Zeus is not the sequel to Age of Ra and Age of Odin is a different story entirely from both of those. Reading the backs of the books I had trouble figuring out how the world got from being taken over by the Egyptian gods to being taken over by the Olympians to being defended by the Aesir.

Eventually sitting in the Barnes and Noble I decided to pick one of them up. First I read was Age of Odin, in which a disillusioned British soldier gets killed and then picked for Valhalla as Ragnarok steadily approaches. It was… alright, I suppose? There were bits that felt kind of stupid. For starters, when the protagonist meets Freya he’s immediately attracted to her, and despite not really seeming particularly special she ends up falling for him. For Reasons? There’s also this subplot about there being a traitor, and the protagonist thinks it’s this one guy and it’s clearly not? Human characters seem to hew close to national stereotypes. Also the villain is Sarah Palin? I mean it’s Loki disguised as the US President that is an obvious stand-in for Sarah Palin, which is an amusing joke, but a bit silly for an actual Plot that we’re meant to take seriously.

Still, even if I thought the book was okay at best, what stuck out to me was the ending. For all its mediocre-ness, the ending was kind of an explosion of Awesome, in which Heimdall headshots Loki with a sniper rifle. And that is one of the best images of Norse mythology I have ever had the pleasure of reading in my life.

So I decided to pick up Age of Ra afterward. The Plot of this one was that the Egyptian pantheon had taken over the world, defeating and destroying all other pantheons, and afterward the major gods divvied up the continents between themselves. But because Set doesn’t get along with any of the other gods, the world’s constantly embroiled in a world war between the continents controlled by Osiris, Isis, Horus, Anubis and Horus’s sons against Set and his wife Nephtys’s lands. The protagonist finds himself joining a group that’s dedicated to overthrowing the rule of the gods, but the leader of that group, a masked man who calls himself the Lightbringer, has his own agenda that he’s not sharing.

Again, not a brilliant novel, but it did have its high points. While the twist about which god was behind everything at the end was pretty obvious (Set, the villainous god of deception, was responsible the entire time?? WHAT?!?), I don’t think I’ve run against that many stories about Egyptian mythology, and not ones that deal with their family dynamics. There are regular interludes that don't feature the human characters at all--just Ra desperately going from one god to another, trying to convince them not to try to kill each other. And I liked that characterization, especially because at the end he fails and just says “Screw it!” and he retires as king.

But like I said the story of the human characters is still kind of dumb. Aside from the twist that the Lightbringer is actually the puppet of one of the gods (this is not a twist if you know what Lightbringer is in Latin, guys), it also has the whole ‘Here is a beautiful, unattainable woman who for Reasons falls in love with the protagonist’ thing that Lovegrove likes. So it wasn’t until about four years later that I picked up another one of these books, and that was Age of Zeus.

It wasn’t that good. In part because it’s basically the same as Age of Ra: the Greek gods have taken over the world. The twist here is (spoilers) that the Greek gods aren’t actually gods, they’re genetically-enhanced humans with superpowers because this one guy was a dick and made himself Zeus. Which made me feel slightly better about the Plot, considering it’s about killing the Olympians, and I have weird feelings about god-killing plots. And of course, our protagonist is a woman this time around.

Parts of it felt like the author was trying too hard to sound adult and extreme. The other two books in the series had this too, but Age of Zeus had too many and it just felt gross. It wasn’t particularly fun to read that the guy who was chosen to become Hades was a necrophiliac before he got his god powers. That’ just… gross. Especially considering it adds next to nothing to the story other than making him a creep, which we already knew.

There’s also the question of just why the gods were able to beat back people at all. They had godlike powers, to be sure, but they can be killed with weapons, it’s just very difficult. And yet they apparently destroyed cities and ravaged armies. And yet you’re telling me that no one in the entire world fought against them and they never caused a dent in them? With our bullets and bombs and missiles? Really? And I get that Lovegrove is British, but am I meant to believe that the UK is the first country to really stand up to this threat?

It basically had many of the problems the other two had, but they were magnified. And I decided that even if I liked one of the books and the ending of another, I didn’t really have much reason to keep on reading these. Maybe the rest of the books clean up the issues that the author had with the first three, or maybe he does something interesting with the mythology like he does in Age of Ra. But given that I’ve read three of these books, and only genuinely liked one of them, and only liked the ending of another, I can’t really say that I have much motivation to pick up more.

And that’s a shame because I love mythology! There’s something interesting to be done with military science-fiction and mythology being mixed together; or perhaps just mythology and science fiction mashed up. But it could be done better than this, and more often than not I’m not satisfied with how the books turned out.

You can probably skip these.

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Villains Are Serious Business

I ate too much on Wednesday, and it’s entirely possible that I’m eating less for the next few days because of it.

I’m going to whale on Riordan for a bit more. But to be fair, I don’t think this is a problem he usually has.

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Villains Should Probably Be Serious Business

Re-reading Heroes of Olympus I’m struck again by how seriously none of this is taken? I mean there’s a lot going on in the Plot that is taken very seriously, but there's also a lot that’s just… not that serious at all. I’ve talked a bit about how the gods are pushed from being eternal archetypes to being punchlines, and that’s not great. But in Mark of Athena, the villains are also jokes, and that’s also pretty egregious.

I’ve never watched the animated series Adventure Time, but I remember reading somewhere on TV Tropes that there was a note passed around the team making the series which read ‘The Lich King Is Not Funny.’ Which was odd considering how wacky of a series that is. There are candy people and bacon pancakes and jokes about animators and it’s not really the type of show that, at first glance (which is what I’ve had), you’d think had a serious villain. And that’s a great idea to implement: that even though the work isn’t serious most of the time, there’s something there that’s just not funny and that’s the villain.

To be fair Rick Riordan’s not too bad about this outside of Mark of Athena, because while there are some joke villains, most of the antagonists are played seriously. Mark of Athena just had the problem that the main villains for the book, the giants Otis and Ephiliates, are just… joke characters. They’re these two doofuses that are acting like caricatures of theater kids. Their plan is to destroy Rome, but with weird monsters and explosions and crazy outfits. They’re meant to be the anti-Dionysus, throwing revelries so insane that they make Dionysus’s look tame by comparison, but their schtick in-book doesn’t seem like parties as much as a plan from Dr. Draken on steroids. Then there’s Arachne, who is mostly played as a legitimate threat, but then she’s undone because Annabeth pretends that she’s going to be her art agent. And I get that it feeds into Arachne’s whole hubris thing, and it is definitely in line with the myths for someone to be tricked by something like that, but along with the giant twins being jokes (and really, the Mark of Athena quest being really disappointing) I’m not inclined to give it much credit.

Heroes of Olympus is sort of nominally a comedy, but it’s also meant to be a story that we take seriously: a Greek myth set in modern day. And when all the other major villains, like Kronos, Luke, Octavian, Gaea, and Porphyrion are treated like major threats that can actually kill our heroes if they’re not careful, then these two clowns prancing about arguing about whether or not to do ballet during their attempt to destroy Rome is just… it’s a bit lame, ya know?

I get that there are ways to do villains who are funny, but it’s a careful trick. GLaDOS from Portal comes to mind; she’s hilarious, but I think that it works for two reasons: first because the tone of the series is built entirely on dark humor from the get-go, and secondly because she’s not revealed as the villain right away. And even though GLaDOS is pretty silly  and hilarious, by the second game she’s also given a bit of a tragic dimension that fleshes out her character more.

[I also think it’s worth noting that incompetence is a running theme in the series; GLaDOS can’t kill Chell because she’s just really bad at it, Wheatley can’t run the facility because he’s a moron, GLaDOS killed her former handlers because, well, they made an evil AI just ‘cause… it all amounts to people who are smart at one thing being hopelessly stupid when it comes to practical matters.]

I don’t know if Terry Pratchett ever has a villain who is just a joke villain. I mean, there are jokes made about the villains, certainly, but off the top of my head I can’t think of an antagonist in Discworld that’s a joke. They’re all serious villains. That doesn’t mean that the books aren’t funny at all, but that there’s something serious. It gives real stakes to the story and characters.

There are exceptions, like I said, but I think it’s more effective when they’re not. And that’s not even to say that they don’t get funny moments or the like. But a villain comes across strongest when he or she isn’t a joke,or  isn’t even funny. It spells out a mood for the audience about what to expect for the audience. If you’re making a silly comedy where none of it means anything more than a joke, then… yeah, go ahead and make your joke villains. But if you’re using comedy in a serious story, or if you’re using a parody to make a point, then don’t make your villains jokes. Make them actual villains.

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-EAHC

What I've Been Reading 8

So I used to do this thing where I talked about the books I’ve been reading, and pair them with a piece of music, because for whatever reason when I was reading Baltimore I kept getting the theme from The Order 1886 stuck in my head. I don’t think I’m going to do the whole ‘pairing with music’ thing here, but I will talk about the books I’ve been reading.

It’s been a while since I made one of these, so there are a lot of books that I’ll be listing. And to be clear, these aren’t all the books I’ve read since I last wrote one of these, but they are all the ones I want to talk about.

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Kingdom Come by Mark Weid and Alex Ross

When it comes to influential comics, I think this one gets the short end of the stick. Which is a shame, because there’s a lot here that gets picked up by other comics.

The story of Kingdom Come is basically asking the question of whether or not superheroes really help the world or not. After a decade or so of the Justice League, a new generation of heroes pops up that’s not so concerned about things like saving people, or sparing their enemies, or collateral damage. Eventually Superman retires because he’s sick of the whole thing.

And so we see the world through the point of view of a Christian pastor named Norman McCay. Plagued by visions of the apocalypse, he’s picked up by the Spectre (who, reminder, is an angel of retribution) who decides that he will witness the events leading up to the final battle. He watches helplessly as Superman comes out of retirement and reforms the Justice League to deal with the growing unruly metahuman threat.

It’s a comic that raises some interesting questions about superheroes. They’re probably not new for today’s readers, but it still handles them better than most other media I’ve seen.

Should superheroes kill? Why or why not? And if superheroes turned bad, how far should we be willing to go to stop them? Could we even stop them? And if superheroes are just reflections of us, what do different generations’ superheroes say about those people? And it didn’t feel heavy-handed in its messages, like a ton of other critically-acclaimed comics are.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was a very good comic, and certainly one of the ones that should be more talked about. The story’s good, the art is fantastic, and it was an all-around good experience.

Time Quintet by Madeleine L’Engle

Hey, you know A Wrinkle in Time? Did you know it was the first in a five book series? And also did you know that the books are heavily influenced by L’Engle’s Episcopal Christianity? I vaguely knew ahead of time that it was a series, but I only recently learned that it was a Christian work after poking around about the Disney movie (which I also saw, and it was just kind of okay?).

I really liked it. It certainly felt like a children’s book written several decades ago, but it was still good. And in many ways, the books felt like science fiction. Because it dealt with ideas like dystopia and conformity and what it meant to be an individual and how people interact with each other, tying into strange scientific concept like travelling across vast amounts of space or microscopic biology or time travel.

And they’re very Christian, something that’s kind of downplayed. The main characters are guided by a Cherubim (yes I know that’s plural but… it’s explained in-book) in the second book. Mrs. Who recites a couple of Bible quotes. And the nature of the enemies of creation, the Echthroi, are analogous to fallen angels.

It’s not really hard science, true, but they’re children’s novels. They’re strange, but they’re interesting and very influential. So while right now I’ve only read the first three books, I look forward to seeing how the last two shake out.

A Star Shall Fall by Marie Brennan

You know that thing that happens when you accidentally pick up the book in the middle of a series thinking it’s a standalone or the first? Yeah, that happened to me with this one. It wasn’t too much of an issue though, as this series has a unifying cast, but it takes place in different parts of English history. Because, y’know, faeries.

This one is in the throes of the Enlightenment and the explosion of scientific thought. The Fire of London in 1666 was caused by a dragon, an out of control fire elemental. The faeries of London, the Onyx Court, dealt with it by binding it to a comet and waving goodbye as the comet left the atmosphere. Problem: this was Haley’s Comet, and it’s coming back, something they didn’t realize. So now they’re rushing to find a way to kill the dragon, through magic, science or alchemy before it comes back with the comet.

I imagine this book would have been more rewarding if I had read the previous two books (and I’m working on that now!), but I still had fun with it. Other than the premise, there wasn’t a lot to catch up on, especially since all the human characters were new to the series. And quite a few of the human characters were famous scientists of the time--Lord Cavendish has a couple of appearances as the quiet guy at Royal Society meetings. And I liked the exploration of this idea of the borders between alchemy and science, and how they’re not as solid as people think.

And it’s a fun little book. Lots of faeries, lots of science, lots of history. Very good.

The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman

Oh hey, you ever wanted a book series like The Librarians? As in, lots of fun with cool characters and endless possibilities? Cogman’s got you covered.

There is a library, and it’s beyond time and space. Its purpose is to collect rare books. So it connects to a vast multitudes of alternate worlds to let its librarians go and collect volumes unique to those worlds, using the incredible power called the Language. Some worlds are more infested with Chaos, and those worlds are crawling with the Fae and their agents, who see themselves as characters in stories and everyone else as background characters. Some worlds are higher in Order, maintained by the Dragons in their strict bureaucracy and rules.

Irene is a librarian raised by librarians. She’s been assigned to pick up a book in an alternate that’s much like the Victorian Era, but with werewolves, vampires and Fae, all the while training a new apprentice, Kai, who is more than he seems. And then she finds out that a rogue librarian is also interested in the book for reasons that are not quite clear and is all too happy to viciously murder people to get it.

None of the books are long reads, and they’re not the epic fantasy reads that maybe you’re expecting. But they are loads of fun. By introducing the alternates and an organization that uses them, you basically have a license to have the three main characters hop to and from different fantastical historical settings. Steampunk London, or fantastic Carnival Venice, or 20’s Gangster Chicago--yeah, the books can hop through all of them, and they all fit in the story.

And the characters are all likable and interesting people. Irene is not a badass fighter, but she is quick-witted and adept at using the Language, all the while being professional even when she would prefer not to be. And by having a small core of characters who are basically always hanging out, we get attached to them.

I love these books. I want more of them.

The Ables by Jeremy Scott

So this book was written by one of the CinemaSins guys? I assumed that because of that (though I haven’t watched one of those videos in years) it would attempt to be a genre-busting, expectation-defying novel, and it really wasn’t. But it was good, even if the formatting of the book was very strange (spaces between paragraphs and no indentations?).

In short: disabled superhero teens. In long: superheroes have always existed, and Phillip Salinger finds out that he is one-- a powerful telekinetic--living in a town for superheroes. Except he’s blind, making telekinesis a bit harder. But he can still do it. When he’s put in a class with some other disabled superhero kids, they decide to compete in the annual hero competition their school holds, and prove that they’re more than their disabilities. Except there’s something else going on, a villain out there who, of course, thinks powered individuals should rule over others.

It’s a good first novel. It’s not going to blow anyone’s mind; like I said, given it’s from a guy who talks about movie tropes all day for a living, I thought there would be a much more complex plot or something that would make it utterly destroy expectations. And there isn’t--it’s a pretty straightforward story, the only real twist being the one on the synopsis: all our main heroes are disabled kids.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not good. It is. I had fun reading it. And I think that’s what I wanted from a superhero story to begin with.

Project Nemesis by Brendan Reichs

So my sister and I saw Brendan Reichs a lot at YALLFest, so when I saw his book Nemesis at the library in the YA section I thought I’d check it out. And… it’s kind of weird. But good, I guess?

Nemesis is a science fiction thriller in which its main characters get killed on their birthdays every two years. It’s a bit dark like that, especially because no one believes one of them, and the other is convinced that these occurrences are nightmares. But with an asteroid poised to shoot towards Earth, it seems like now more than ever they’ve got to figure out what the heck is going on. And then a bunch of government troops start parking in their small town, indicating that there’s a much larger conspiracy in the background involving the US government.

I didn’t really expect this kind of thriller from the YA section of the library. Yes, YA gets dark, but not usually this dark. It’s the kind of thing I’d expect more in line with The 100 than with anything I usually read. And if I knew what I was getting into from the get-go I don’t know that I would have picked up this book.

Still, it is good, and I didn’t really see any of its twists coming, even though many of them are foreshadowed pretty heavily if you’re paying attention.

Ex-Libris by Ross King

I picked up this book thinking it was by Stephen King, despite not being anything like Stephen King’s other books.

Similar to A Star Shall Fall, this one takes place in the Enlightenment, though a bit earlier. In the year 1660, Isaac Inchbold is a bookseller in London. He’s hired by a mysterious wealthy patron to track down a specific copy of a book, The Labyrinth of the World, that was lost from a collection. What makes it stranger is that the book in question is an occult alchemical text supposedly written down from the dictations of Hermes Trismegistus.

This book was… okay. There’s a bit in the description on the inside over talking about how Inchbold’s adventure spans all over Europe and involves the New World, and it only sort of does. Most of the adventures in continental Europe are part of the flashback story going throughout the book that explains how the volume in question got to England in the first place, and Inchbold isn’t in those at all. And no one goes to the Americas in-narration.

It wasn’t a bad book, but it felt a lot like other books I’ve read that were also historical thrillers involving alchemy or the occult, like those by Umberto Eco. If you’ve read those kinds of stories, you probably won’t be surprised by this one which in the end felt a bit too derivative to really work for me. Maybe if you’re interested in the time period, or English history, you’ll like it more. I didn’t.

The Field Guide to the North American Teenager by Ben Philippe

Norris Kaplan is a black Canadian teenager. And he’s got opinions about Americans, especially American high school. Which wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that now he’s moving to Austin, Texas with his mother so she could teach at the university there. So now he’s in an American high school, and being fully aware of what that’s like from the abundance of American movies and television shows, he is preparing himself to rolling his eyes all semester at a school full of stereotypes.

Except… it turns out people a lot more complicated than he expects. And assuming the worst of people lands him in hot water and caught completely unawares.

It’s… not a masterpiece. If you’ve seen any sort of parody or satire of a teen movie, you’re probably not going to be surprised by this book. But it is funny, and it is fun, and it has some heart.

The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi

I’ve read her Aru Shah books, and while I thought they were okay, they were also firmly not for my age group. So she wrote a book for grown-ups I thought I’d at least check it out, as it’s not that long and I was interested in another historical fantasy book involving secret societies. And Gilded Wolves was fine, I guess.

It is Paris, in the Belle Epoque. The Order of Babel, with its different noble houses, controls the magical artifacts of the world. Severin is from a disgraced house, but he finds a chance to get his nobility back and get his friends/team all that they ever wanted from the Order of Babel by hijacking the Eye of Horus. Problem is, this heist plan starts going sideways basically as soon as it starts, and Severin learns that someone else is after the Eye, and disaster will happen if they get it.

The world is only kind of explained, which I realize is probably intentional: the author doesn’t want the reader to be bogged down but a ton of exposition. Still, I wasn’t sure if this was a full on alternate history or just a secret history story, considering ways in which the police were meant to be involved in the Order of Babel? It was a bit vague.

That being said, character interactions are fantastic. I was reminded of Leverage, in that there are different team members with different specialties and personality quirks that make them lovable. So even if you don’t like the Plot much, like me, I think you’ll probably like the characters and root for them to succeed.

Interesting Times by Sir Terry Pratchett

There were quite a few Discworld books I read in the past few months, but I decided to stick to the one that I thought was the strongest entry.

Rincewind has been transported to the Agatean Empire. It’s like China. And the people there decide that he’s the Chosen One, to lead them to a revolution. Of course, that’s not who Rincewind is--he’s a coward. He runs away from every fight he’s ever been near. So he keeps trying to run but they won’t let him. And then his old (and I mean ooooooold) acquaintance Cohen the Barbarian comes along with his Silver Horde rolls into the country, and they’re looking for a nice place to conquer/retire.

I think Pratchett is at his best when he’s most vicious. Night Watch is my favorite Discworld book, and it is unrelenting in its view of revolutions and the way they’re don’t do as much as people think. This is somewhat in the same vein. Because we see this group of people plotting revolution all in the name of The People, while not really caring much about what The People want or even asking their opinions on the subject. Because you can say you’re doing it for the Working Man all you want, but if you’re not handing him the power than you’re just spouting empty words.

I mean it’s also really really funny. There are a bunch of running jokes about language, some of which are great because they’re based on how difficult it is for Westerners to learn Mandarin due to the importance of inflections and tones. And while I don’t think it’s the first time we see Discworld feature Asian-style fantasy, it is the one book in the series I’ve read that features it the most heavily.

The Teutonic Knights by Henryk Sienkiewicz

This book is basically the Polish national epic. Published in a time of oppression by the Soviet Union to bolster the national spirit in the face of tyranny, and put back in print after the Nazis were defeated, this book is THE big book in Poland. And I didn’t like it very much. I wanted to, but I couldn’t.

The idea is that it’s a novel about the events leading up to the Battle of Grunwald, when Poland and Lithuania defeated the Knights Teutonic and firmly established themselves as independent countries. Sienkiewicz focuses on a young knight Zbyszko (I have no idea how to say that) as he fights against the Teutonic Order, who are just about the biggest douchebags ever, kidnapping girls, torturing old men and generally murdering anyone who says anything bad about them. And supposedly the atrocities in the book are based off of things that the Soviet government did in Poland when they took over--Sienkiewicz was writing the book as a way to talk about them without getting censored. Obviously, the idea of the Polish people standing up to an oppressive foreign government resonates strongly with his audience, especially after World War II when the invaders are, once again, German.

But I just hated Zbyszko, you know? He tries to murder Teutonic knights before they’ve done anything, and all the sympathetic characters act as if it’s not a big deal when he is jailed for it and lined up to be executed. They excuse it as him being really young and hot-tempered, as if charging full-tilt at a man with a lance is just a thing boys do sometimes and we should get over it. Also he swears undying love to this girl at the beginning, agreeing to marry her… and she’s twelve. Their relationship isn’t really sexual as much as this chaste romance, but I can’t make any excuses that make it okay. And he’s eighteen? When they actually marry some time has passed, but it’s unclear how much time, and the fact is that she can’t be any older than fourteen. That’s really creepy and gross and makes me uncomfortable, especially when there’s a girl closer to his own age clearly in love with him that everyone else in the book ships him with. Whom he marries at the end because the first girl dies.

This book doesn’t really treat its female characters that well.

Yeah, the knights duking it out is awesome, usually, but the villains are so over-the-top it’s kind of lost on you if you’re not sure where this is coming from. And the heroes, for all their claims at nobility, can be incredibly hot-blooded and immature, so I had trouble liking it. And also the girl is twelve. That’s not remotely okay. I kept thinking if I were to adapt this story how I’d change things, because so many of the problems I had could have easily been fixed with a couple of edits.

It’s pretty long though. I wouldn’t recommend trying it unless you’re studying Polish culture.

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So that’s what I’ve been reading! What about you guys?

Whatever Happened to Pirates of the Caribbean?

This started out, in the planning stages as another of the ‘Stuff I’ve Been Reading’ series, but then it got to Friday and I realized I hadn’t written anything, so I needed something that I could put together quicker.

So instead we’re talking about Pirates of the Caribbean because the soundtrack keeps popping up on my Pandora.

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Whatever Happened to Pirates of the Caribbean?

It’s hard to believe that Pirates of the Caribbean used to be one of the biggest movie serieses of all time. Seriously--it was the movie that everyone parodied, remembered the lines from, and watched with their friends. It was huge. And now it’s just… not. It continues to baffle me, in the same way that everyone used to love The Matrix and would lovingly compare it to Star Wars and Harry Potter as a pop culture story.

And the obvious answer is that the sequels were bad. Which is true! Even if you liked any of the sequels, as I did, the fact remains that none of them were as good as the original. But the second and third movies try to paint the series into a saga, and it… clearly isn’t one? The Plot kind of wanders around, and then neatly finishes, and then a sequel happens mostly unrelated to the previous saga, and then…

...I don’t want to talk about the fifth movie. It’s just bad.

The first film is fantastic: great acting, great story, great characters, great action--just great all around. It has some of the best sword fights you’ll ever see in a movie, without any of the annoying quick camera cuts that plague modern action movies. The characters are all likable and interesting people. The humor is actually funny and surprising when you see it for the first time. It’s just a darn good movie.

What made the second and third movie not work with audiences is the fact that they’re not very well planned. This isn’t opinion, by the way, it’s documented--the second and third films were in pro-production for longer than Disney wanted, so Disney basically told the makers to either start making the darn movie or they’ll pull funding. And so they announced they’d start filming, even though they didn’t have a finished script. What they did have were storyboards--ideas for set pieces and scenes and how they wanted those scenes to go and what they would look like. Which is why those two films have big dumb scenes that don’t seem to go anywhere or really make sense when you think about them--like the three-way sword fight on the water wheel, or the final battle between the Flying Dutchman and the Black Pearl.

The Plot doesn’t really make sense. The whole thing in Dead Man’s Chest is that they’re looking for the Dead Man’s Chest to threaten Davy Jones with, and possibly kill him. And yet in the next film we’re told that the person who kills Davy Jones has to replace him. Which you would think is something that the characters would need to know in the last movie, in which everyone’s out to get it.

And people didn’t like it! They also didn’t get it--especially At World’s End, which has so many double-crosses and a hard-to-follow plot that the DVD actually comes with an FAQ to answer all the lingering questions that audiences had.  So even though they made money, word-of-mouth wasn’t great and there wasn’t really a rush to make another. It was in the works immediately, of course, but it took a while.

And it didn’t really learn from the mistakes of the past ones? See, part of the problem was that Captain Jack Sparrow proved to be an insanely popular character, and but he’s an antihero. So he works best in a supporting role. But all the sequels saw that people loved him and decided to center the story entirely on him. Of course this leads to convoluted films with no real hero character, and since his development is, at best, slow there’s not much to get invested in his character. He’s not a character that’s dynamic as much as a way to get witty dialogue and cool scenes. Which isn’t bad for comedies, but it isn’t a great way to build a long-running character-driven adventure series: around a character who doesn’t develop much. He’s a comedy character in a story that’s not a comedy, and centering on him doesn’t work.

It also probably didn’t help that the Plots of the different movies had trouble distinguishing themselves. Generally there’s an evil McGuffin of some sort everyone’s after, and the bad guys are an evil captain and a cursed undead crew. The one sort-of exception to this is On Stranger Tides, in which Jack becomes an unwilling part of the villain’s crew, who are mostly not terrible people, and only a handful of crewmembers are undead. But it’s still there, and it’s overstayed its welcome by then.

Which is a shame because the premise of ‘Pirate story with some fantasy elements inspired by old maritime myths and no strict adherence to real world history’ is a fantastic one for a movie series. There’s so much that they can do with these stories; they don’t even need to all be about the same characters. And yet they’re all amounting to the same basic formula of ‘Go get the McGuffin before the undead evil bad guys do.’

This should have been the fantasy series of our time and now it’s… well, it’s not. Nobody talks about it much anymore. It’s sad. I mean it’s especially sad if you’ve watched Dead Men Tell No Tales, which was just painful to sit through. I wish we could turn back the clock on the series, but it’s a bit late. Supposedly plans for a reboot are being kicked around, but I don’t think that’ll ever recapture the magic of the original film, or be half as fun. I could be proven wrong of course, and I would love to be.

But I suspect Pirates of the Caribbean has had its day.

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