On Character Chemistry

For reasons that are not clear to me, I randomly got annoyed again at that episode of Extra Credits titled something like “Why are there so few sci-fi games?” because there are oodles and oodles of science-fiction games, especially in the mainstream (Halo, Mass Effect, Wolfenstein, Metroid, Metal Gear Solid, Gears of War, Dead Space, Fallout, Assassin’s Creed, and Portal to name a few) but the Extra Credits writers kind of brush those away with “Well, they’re not real sci-fi so they don’t count.” And that’s… really silly. 

Anyhow let’s talk about writing romance in your stories.

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On Character Chemistry

Something that I think can be obvious for people who have tried writing romantic arcs in fiction but maybe no one else seems to get: writing romance is hard, man.

I recently read the first couple of books in the Newbury and Hobbes series, which is a group of books set in an alternate steampunk Victorian London. Our two title characters are Maurice Newbury and Veronica Hobbes; the former is an agent of the Queen of England who investigates special cases and the latter is his assistant. There’s also a copious amount of shiptease between them, which is kind of a shame because they don’t actually have any chemistry.

It’s hard to define what is or isn’t chemistry. But to put simply, it’s a bit like this: how believable it is that these two people are genuinely attracted to each other. Stereotypically, a lot of action movies don’t really care about this: you have two leads of opposite genders, and at the end they get together because that’s how these things go. But I’d like to think it’s been dialed back a bit in recent years, with more movie makers being aware that they’ve got to sell the idea that these two characters want to make out and more critics being critical of when they can’t buy it.

And I think if we’re being fair, not all works of fiction really need that much chemistry between the two leads. Yeah, it’s preferable if you’re going to have a romantic arc that it’s clear these two characters like each other, but there’s a lot of fiction in which romance isn’t the point, so I kind of get that for many writers it takes the bench while the main part of the story takes center stage.

Let’s take Terry Pratchett for instance. Sir Terry Pratchett was not a romance author; he did satirical fantasy novels (and also a lot of other stuff, but we’re focusing on Discworld right now). There are romantic relationships in his books, but they’re not the main focus of most of them, and many of them aren’t particularly that deep or well-developed. Thief of Time ends with the implication that Lobsang and Susan get together despite that relationship kind of not really being that strong. Three of the Tiffany Aching books tease a relationship between Tiffany and Roland only to drop it abruptly in I Shall Wear Midnight to be replaced by Preston.

And this doesn’t mean Pratchett’s a bad author, because he’s not. I’d dare say that he’s probably the cleverest writer of the English language in the last few decades. But he’s not really that good at writing romance, which is good because he never wanted to be. My point is this: don’t feel too bad if you don’t nail this, especially if that’s not your intent or purpose.

What makes this different than Newbury and Hobbes though, is that the entire steampunk series is built around and named after these two characters, and their relationship. So the little bits of ship tease strike me as very odd, because if it weren’t for these hamfisted moments I’d never really get the idea that these two chuckleheads like each other as anything other than close colleagues. There are moments when people talking to Hobbes say things like “Oh Sir Newbury? He’s handsome, isn’t he?” and she blushes and is all like, “It’s not like that.” And when Hobbes gets captured and the villain rubs it in Newbury’s face, he goes ballistic and is all like “UNHAND HER YOU FIEND!” and when he saves her she’s barely conscious and he’s holding her close and is all like “I can’t bare to lose you!” 

And I just… don’t get it? What do you guys like about each other? They don’t have common interests outside of their jobs: Newbury’s super into the occult and he’s an opium addict, neither of which Hobbes has been seen to be supportive of. Hobbes’s own personal life subplot is more concerned about her sister in an asylum. They don’t really hang out that much in their off time. So why? Why do these two supposedly falling in love?

[shrugs] I dunno. But they are, I guess. And so at the end of the second book, when Newbury finds out something and he’s like, “GASP! Maybe she doesn’t love me!” (and some other stuff) I don’t really care. 

You cannot just point to the characters and say “These two are falling in love.” Writers need to do more than that. There needs to be a reason to think that these two people are bonding, that they like spending time together and enjoy talking to each other about things other than work. This is one of the reasons, I think, back when Twilight was big, that “Team Jacob” got so much traction with the fandom: Bella and Jacob actually seem to like hanging out together! Whereas with Edward they just kind of moped and talked about how much they were in love, and that’s a lot of telling instead of showing.

...I know too much about Twilight.

This is the distinction, I think: If the point of your story isn’t the relationship, or if it isn’t a huge focus of the story, then fine! It’s preferable that your characters have chemistry and good buildup to their relationship. But it’s not absolutely essential, because that’s not what the story is about. But if you’re banking your story on two characters’ relationship with each other, and go so far as to name the series after them because of it, weeeeeeell… you kind of need that chemistry.

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Enlightenment Era Fiction

I’m mostly been let down by big comic book events, but I recently read the New 52’s Forever Evil and I really liked it. There’s something about watching Lex Luthor getting some character development and working with villains to stop invading villains from another universe that shouldn’t be that fun and well done, but somehow is. So props to Geoff Johns for that.

We’re going to talk about Enlightenment Era fiction. That is, fiction set in the Enlightenment Era, rather than fiction written in the Enlightenment Era.

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Enlightenment Era Fiction

For whatever reason I’ve been reading a lot of books set during the Enlightenment? I didn’t mean to fall into this sort of niche book category, it just sort of happened? And I’ve noticed that there are some things I liked about it as a period people write about, and some things I didn’t like as much.

Let’s start with asking ourselves: what is the Enlightenment? Wikipedia defines it as a huge chunk of the 18th century, though it notes in the same article that there are people who define its beginning with Descartes’s work, and for the sake of argument that’s what I’m going to be going with. It’s a bit fuzzy when the Renaissance led into it, because historical periods are actually kind of fuzzy in general. But the Enlightenment, so-named by the people who lived in it (which should tip you off about what the scholars of the time thought of themselves), was an age that tried to define itself by reason. More of the population of Europe than ever could read, as there was now a way to print more books rather than writing them by hand. People who could read got together in public and shared their ideas, leading to more people being educated and opinionated. No longer were the scholarly conversations dominated by religious figures; instead we see the beginnings of modern sciences like chemistry and astronomy. The absolute power of kings is crumbling as people no longer saw monarchs as divinely appointed and in their place we saw the ideas of a social contract between the governors and the governed. 

Despite all these assertions that the world was becoming more reasonable though, it wasn’t without its obvious downsides. World wars start becoming a thing, like the Thirty Years War, the War of Spanish Succession and the Seven Years War. Colonialism was in its heyday, and around now is when you start to see the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade going full throttle with no signs of stopping. London burned that one time. And then you have that little occasion in which the people of Paris decided to start executing people who didn’t show enough loyalty to the state.

Then there was also a bunch of weird shiz going on. This is when we start seeing the rise of secret societies; some of which were basically social clubs and others which were… not. Some, like the Freemasons, last until today. Others, like the Illuminati, did not. Alchemy was heaving its last breaths as a field of study (Newton himself really loved alchemy), and interest in the occult began to fill in that void of the obscure knowledge. 

Warfare began to change immensely. With the advent of more reliable firearms, more armies switched to gunpowder weapons as the default ranged equipment rather than bows or crossbows. But guns hadn’t become so reliable that they’d replaced the sword, and so swords were still used in combat, both on the battlefield and in disputes of personal honor.

It was a time like any other, really. Despite its pretensions of being so much more civilized than the “Dark Ages” (a term coined in the Enlightenment), there was just as much violence, superstition and unreason as any other time in history.

What makes the period appealing to many writers is that it’s this sort of border in history; it’s not the Middle Ages or Renaissance, but it’s definitely not the Modern Age. It’s a time when people are so convinced that they know everything, but there’s so much that’s yet to be discovered. And it’s close enough to modern sensibilities that you don’t alienate your audience by presenting close-to-modern views in your characters.

I’d sort of gotten an interest in the period from Assassin’s Creed. I still hold that the American Saga, set in the 1700’s, contains the best writing the series has ever had. I also played a lot of Unity this year, set in the French Revolution, and I liked the idea of it much more than the actual execution--you can see my review of it on this blog.

But what was supposed to start this kick in books was Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver. The first book in the Baroque Cycle, one of the copies in the library had a big fancy alchemical symbol for Mercury on the cover, and despite it being around nine hundred pages I thought it seemed like it could be a cool introduction into the period. Well-researched history! Characters from different backgrounds! Globe-trotting adventures! What more could you ask for?

Except… I got three hundred pages into this book, and I was really, really bored. I liked the history, but it mostly involved a guy hanging out with scientists of the era, and their personal lives. I didn’t care. I was waiting for the real adventure to get started. I didn’t even get to a part where there was more than one viewpoint character. So I put that book down.

I also picked up Ex-Libris, a book by Ross King (not Stephen King, like I had thought when I picked up the book), and I was slightly disappointed with the book, but I did finish it, and overall I enjoyed it, unlike with Quicksilver. It being significantly shorter probably had something to do with it. The book chronicles a bookseller being tasked with finding a rare alchemical text that was supposedly dictated by Hermes Trismegistus. It felt a bit like an Umberto Eco novel, though there wasn’t as much travel as I would have liked.

The book that ended up actually sparking more of my interest in the period was A Star Shall Fall by Marie Brennan. It’s the third volume in the Onyx Court, a book series that chronicles a faerie court based in London at different points of history. This one was incredibly interesting to me because unlike other books of the time period I’d read, this one went all out in its fantasy elements, mixing alchemy and science, as the way the main conflict was to be solved involved both. That was a cool idea, and I wish I could find more fiction with this setting that played with alchemical ideas.

[I did just put Newton’s Cannon on hold at the library; maybe that’ll feed this craving I have.]

But I’m still kind of bothered that there’s a lot of this fiction that tends to glorify the Enlightenment. Less so among those that cover the colonial side of the equation, but there’s a lot in the European side. So much of Ex-Libris is praising the age, and characters making statements like “The world’s gotten so much better since Galileo proved that the world revolved around the Sun!” Which… he didn’t, actually, he just helped support the theory and also demanded it be taught as incontrovertible truth without being able to prove it. But regardless, that’s a vast oversimplication of how events rolled out. At least Ex-Libris beat into your head the results of the English Civil War, but other than that the problems of the era are generally treated as “Those darn Catholics wanted to crush all our SCIENCE!” without getting much into, say, Cromwell trying to genocide the Irish, or wars of succession, or wars over colonial territories.

And I suppose because a lot of the books are from the point of view of English people living in Europe, that makes sense as a point of view, but it is still a bit jarring to see stories where people in England are raving about how life is so great now that they’ve got SCIENCE! and when colonialism and slavery are still part of the reasons these big wealthy empires exist in Europe at all. I’m not saying that in every one of these stories, someone needs to run in and say “What about the slaves?!” but there should, I think, be an acknowledgement that no matter how great this period appears to be to some of the people in it, that system’s built, like so many others, on the suffering and exploitation of others. Only this time period sometimes gets away with it because it labelled itself as enlightened.

It’s a great period to set a story, but I don’t just want to see more fiction set in it, I also want to see fiction that deals with the problems of the Age of Enlightenment in an honest way, that doesn’t try to cover up the flaws with the propaganda of the time. I want more complicated fiction that plays with the time’s weirdness. And I want it to be more interesting than Quicksilver, which bored me to tears.

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Disney and Spin-Offs

I’m still furious about the Ragnarok question at Trivia on Thursday night, not the least because the text of the question was copied and pasted from the Wikipedia article. So I had an idea for a Note about God of War and its take on Norse mythology, but I think right now I should stay away from Norse mythology if I want to keep anything like a semblance of calm and rationality.

I had an idea for a full essay about Camp Jupiter/New Rome from Heroes of Olympus being absolutely insane, but that might make it to ImpishIdea first.

At least I saved a hummingbird yesterday? That was cool.

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Disney’s Doing Too Many Spin-Offs

Loki gets a series! Vision and Wanda get a series! Ghost Rider gets a series! Obi-Wan might get a series! And so on and so forth. People are already speculating how these movies are going to tie into the future films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the upcoming Star Wars films, and guys, I’m just tired of this.

I already wrote an essay about how I’m tired of several franchises, particularly those owned by Disney, are deciding that instead of stopping and explaining what the eff’s going on instead relegate it to a spin-off series or comic. For instance, Lucasfilm recently released the trailer for the second (and final) season of their animated series Star Wars: Resistance, and how it chronicles in-detail about how the First Order managed to take over the galaxy despite, you know, them being a fringe movement and their home base being destroyed and there being no rational reason that they’re as powerful as the movies keeping insisting they are.

And they shouldn’t have to do this! I shouldn’t have to watch a television series aimed at children in order to feel as if I have a grasp of how things work! I shouldn’t be questioning where the bad guys get their manpower and resources from and have to do homework to figure it out. The Original Trilogy had the advantage of making the bad guys the government, so it makes sense that they’ve got deep pockets; but by making the First Order explicitly remnants of a government that no one likes and keeps employing evil backstabbing bastards, one has to wonder how it stays afloat at all, much less keeps recruiting soldiers and building top-of-the-line technology.

But moving past my Star Wars issues, with Disney releasing its upcoming streaming service, they’ve decided they’re going to do more of this, meaning that they’ve decided that they’d import one of the worst parts of comic books into screen mediums. People are speculating how Loki will tie into the next Thor movie, and I just! Don’t! Care! Can you imagine watching a Thor movie, and then Loki pops up out of nowhere, and whenever you ask about it, all the fanboys are just like, “Oh no it makes perfect sense, you just have to watch his series on Disney+!” No! Bump that! 

Continuity is fine, and I love serialized stories. Boy do I. I’m reading like fifty different series right now. But this has to stop. If I see a movie, or watch a series, I shouldn’t have to do homework for it! I shouldn’t have to watch ten more hours of a series I have to pay monthly to legally view in order to make sense of the fact that a formerly dead character is now faffing about in the movie I’m watching.

This is one of the most frustrating things about comics and their crossover events. Not just the decades of continuity that keep springing up to become relevant and kicking you in the face with how much you don’t know, but how with every major crossover, of which there are now multiple times a year, the events leak over into several different other comic stories, and those comic stories sort of converge, so in order to understand the conclusion you need to have read all of those as well. Which is on purpose, in an attempt to boost sales for a bunch of other comic titles, but it’s really really annoying. 

It’s an obvious ploy to make even more money, and for whatever reason we’re all just fawning over it instead of being annoyed that our enjoyment of comic book movies is being held hostage behind paywalls. Because it’s baffling now but there are people who only watch Disney movies for entertainment. I’ve seen people brag about how they only go to the theaters for Marvel films now, as if it’s something to be proud of, owing brand loyalty to an entertainment franchise.

Disney, please stop. Everyone else stop too. Just make entertainment that stands on its own again, I’m begging you.

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Science Fiction and Religion

I just reread Sword of Summer and I had a lot of thoughts, but most of those have been hammered out in other essays I’ve done so we’ll skip over that. I also reread Einstein’s Dreams, which carries the subtitle “A Novel” on the cover despite not even being a hundred fifty pages. It’s… okay, but it’s just a bunch of short, three or four page chapters that are like, “What if time worked like this instead of like in our world?” Each idea could easily be its own science fiction novel. I don’t know why I had to read it for my philosophy class in undergrad.

But I also read A Canticle for Leibowitz for the first time! And it’s fantastic!

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Science Fiction and Religion

Mainstream Science fiction doesn’t really have that great a relationship with religion, I think. To be fair, there aren’t a lot of mainstream genres that do; as pointed out here, fantasy novels tend to make religions into generic Scientology Inquisitions. Mainstream science fiction tends to sort of ignore religion in general; like, please tell me, other than the Jedi and Sith, what religions exist in the Star Wars universe? What does religion look like in the Star Trek universe? What is the religious scene of Fahrenheit 451? What does Tony Stark think about faith? And yes, I do know that some of these questions have answers, I know for a fact religion is discussed somewhere in Star Trek or in the Expanded Universe, but it’s not something that a casual fan is likely to know about.

And I also don’t think that a lot of science fiction really has anything other than a very shallow understanding of religion. The Scythe trilogy portrays a world where most ways of dying have been “cured” and the only way people permanently die is by these appointed officials called Scythes “gleaning” people. It’s explained that because people don’t worry about death, most religions have disbanded. Except death still exists, it’s just less common and run by certain officials. I don’t think all the Christian denominations would just pack their bags because of that and be replaced by the one religion that still exists in the books, which are Tone Cults who worship sound. Furthermore, there’s no way that the Scythes themselves wouldn’t be deified by someone.

Gene Roddenberry was also famously atheist, and had he been allowed to would have made Star Trek a future that did away with religion; that’s not really how things shook out, considering how many different people worked on the series and studio mandates and such, but I can’t imagine how that would even work? People will always believe things based on faith; that’s human nature. 

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a bit different. The main setting of the story is a monastery in a post-apocalyptic future. A huge theme of the novel is the repetition of history; and like in history, in a chaotic and unstable world, monasteries are some of the few places that are preserving knowledge of the past world. Except instead of classical texts on philosophy and literature, it’s scientific texts and technological manuals. And it’s amusing, but also sad, because the monastery doesn’t quite understand all of the knowledge it’s been keeping, but they get it more than anyone else, who are all baffled at the idea of a bunch of monks doing science experiments in their basements instead of becoming rich and famous off of their knowledge. 

There is post-apocalyptic fiction with religions represented, but more often than not they seem to be doomsday cults that want to kill our protagonists and eat them or something. Which isn’t completely out there, but I don’t think it’s the most likely answer. Like, of course in a cruel post-apocalyptic world there would be religious communities that would set themselves up and become sanctuaries of a sort. 

Firefly also does remarkably well with depicting religion in its character of Shepherd Book. And of course it makes sense; the series is working with the elements of an old time Western, and the small town preacher is part of that cast you see in plenty of Westerns. Book isn’t some anomaly either; we don’t see a lot of the Christian church in this far future, but it clearly exists and is pretty active, as just about everyone recognizes Book as a preacher when they see him.

[There’s also a lot more to Book than meets the eye, as is hinted at throughout the series but never fully expanded upon because the series got cancelled.]

There should be questions about religion and its applications in weird science fiction situations! Like, how does Christianity or Islam interact with the discovery of alien life? How does alien life feel about religion? Are there alien missionaries? What are their religions like? 

There’s this whole subplot in one of the Expanse books that’s a bunch of religious leaders from Earth getting together on a spaceship to discuss the developments that have been happening in the series and how this affects their religions. And it’s great, because none of them are depicted as being evil overlords or anything, though one of them gets a bit carried away when the Plot starts going haywire. But I liked that the authors recognized that everything that’s been happening in the series has massive implications for human beliefs and how religions react to that.

And I guess that’s kind of all I’m asking? I loved A Canticle for Leibowitz, but I know I can’t expect every science fiction story I read to contain monks. But there should be at least some recognition of religion, whether it be in the post apocalypse, or in the far future, in space, or in present day but with an element or two changed. But not as a silly stereotype of religion as written by angry teenage Redditors, but something that can be good or bad, but a part of people’s lives throughout all time.

And it must make sense! I think the atheists who write “In the future, we won’t have religion!” have a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and how it works. As long as humanity exists there will be faith of some sort or another.

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Making A Spider-Man Movie About Spider-Man

I’ve been reading this book series for children titled Wings of Fire by one of the authors who worked on the Warriors series? You know, the one about the cats that has a reputation for being really intense and having loads of characters? Yeah, so far these books fit the bill. It’s fun!

This essay includes spoilers for Spider-Man: Far From Home.

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Making A Spider-Man Movie About Spider-Man

So I saw Spider-Man: Far From Home recently and I liked it. I put up a pretty good review of Movie Munchies if you’re curious. But one thing I mentioned in the review that kind of bothers me is that there are ways it doesn’t really feel like it’s a Spider-Man movie.

SPOILER ALERT:

The villain of the movie is Mysterio, who is a disgruntled former employee of Tony Stark’s. Tony fired him because he was unstable, but he was the one who created the holographic tech that we see in Captain America: Civil War. He’s after the amazing AI-hidden-in-a-pair-of-sunglasses that Tony passed to Peter after his death and hopes to use that to do whatever he wants and run Stark’s memory the mud.

Here’s the thing: this is the second Spider-Man movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the villain’s motivation is centered on Tony Stark. Which kind of worked with Vulture in Homecoming, as that’s a beginner’s movie, and Tony Stark is actually around as a mentor figure for Peter. But here it’s more egregious. I get that Tony was Peter’s mentor, and that as an important figure in his life he feels like he’s in Tony’s shadow. But when the second movie in a row has a villain who is only after Spider-Man because he’s in the way of him getting revenge on Tony Stark… that’s not great. Because we’re centering the movie named after one hero around another hero altogether.

What makes this frustrating is that the past year has given us not one, but two incredible Spider-Man stories: Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse and the PS4 exclusive Spider-Man, both of which told stories that centered around Spider-Man and didn’t feel as if the protagonist wasn’t the central character of the drama. I get that Far From Home is an installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and has to tie into the rest of it. And given that it’s the movie that comes immediately after Avengers: Endgame, it has a lot to talk about and it can’t exactly not deal with the fallout of that film.

But did we really need the villain to be a disgruntled former Stark employee? And that the entire conflict of the film to be centered around a bit of tech Stark developed? Again, this is the second Spider-Man movie in this cinematic universe, and it’s the second that heavily deals with Peter’s relationship with Tony.

And while I have seen some criticism in this vein, that’s not the majority reaction to this film? I’ve seen a lot of people insist that these last two movies are “Truer to the Text” versions of Spider-Man, that have a deeper understanding of the character and mythos than any live-action incarnation before, which, is, uh… I think a questionable claim at best. I’ve seen Far From Home listed as one of the greatest Spider-Man films of all time, and while it’s good, and it’s fun, I don’t know if I’d call it that either. Because again, it’s not really about Spider-Man. At least, it doesn’t feel like it. It feels more like it’s a continuation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s story arc, rather than being that along with being its own thing.

I’ve talked a little about making sure that the protagonist is in fact the main character of the story, and that a surprising amount of writers can’t seem to get this down, even in the most enjoyable stories. I just didn’t think this would happen to Spider-Man, one of the most iconic heroes in popular culture.

Spider-Man has a supporting cast! And a rogues gallery! And a family! It should not be difficult to create a story about Spider-Man, where the villain is tied specifically to the protagonist in a way that’s overt and matters, and the majority of his character development is not tied to the star of another franchise.

Make a movie about its title character. That’s not too much to ask, is it?

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