On Time Skips

 Hello! I am having a weird week. I’m less stressed about life in general and more stressed about Christmas shopping in particular, because without going out to places I have been shopping online and some things take a while to arrive! A couple of things have not arrived! And they should have! It’s not great!

I am a little behind on reading. I meant to watch Two Towers some time soon but my LotR schedule will take a backseat while I watch Christamas movies, I think. And some other things as well.

Also I watched a few episodes of Primal! That was cool.

---

On Time Skips

I had this thought in the bathroom Friday morning. Which sounds weird, but I have a lot of thoughts in bathrooms, and the fact that I came up with an idea before Friday evening is, sometimes, very impressive. To me at least.

But time skips! That very useful thing to have between books in a series, or seasons of a show, or films in a film series, that let you pick up a little bit later and find out what the characters are doing. They’re great. I mean, sometimes. Sometimes they’re great. Sometimes they’re annoying as fudge. I know that there are people who absolutely hate them if they’re more than a week, but I don’t quite understand why.

See, contrary to any writing lessons you may have picked up from watching Once Upon a Time, we don’t actually need to know what happened in every minute of your main characters’ lives. Time skips between installments gives you the freedom to skip stuff that isn’t interesting, because most people’s lives aren’t nonstop action, or even particularly good stories. So say one installment of the story shows the beginning of a war, you don’t actually need to tell about every engagement or movement or whatever that happens in the conflict. You can skip to a key moment in the war.

The problem is when the time skip is used to cover basically everything interesting that might have happened. So if one installment starts the war, and the next one ends it years later? The audience is going to feel a bit jipped in that they don’t get to see what the war was actually like. I think the worst example of a time skip I can think of is the five year time skip between the first two seasons of Young Justice.

See, the first season of Young Justice ends with the Justice League realizing that while they were mind controlled by the villains, they have sixteen hours that are still unaccounted for, and they don’t actually know what the villains’ plan is. The second season picks up five years later, where members of the Team are no longer teenagers, there’s a new Team, a bunch of new Leaguers, and several of the character dynamics have changed. So this leads to having to awkwardly show the audience what the heck happened to everyone in the five years since, AND who the new characters are and what their backstories are, while ALSO trying to tell you the story of the alien infiltration and invasion of Earth. Like yes, I get that they wanted to introduce a bunch of new elements to the story without having to go and introduce it episode by episode, and considering everything they didn’t do that badly, but it’s still really annoying that so much happened and we have to play catchup instead of just letting the story happen.

Why are Miss Martian and Beast Boy siblings now? Why did she and Connor break up? How many of his teammates did Nightwing date? How did Tim become the new Robin? Wait, there was an in-between Robin who died? How did Jaime get alien technology attached to his spine? How does Wonder Woman have a protege with the same powers? Why is Aqualad evil? When did Artemis and Kid Flash retire? Why is Ocean Master out of the Light? Why not just tell us these stories, instead of skipping past them and then dropkicking us into an alien invasion story that also happens to have enough discussions about the rest of it so that we know what happened?

I think the makers of the show did figure this out. When the show got revived, and a third season got produced, there’s another timeskip, but it’s only two years, and a lot of the changes that happened feel more organic and easier to follow. New characters are introduced out of nowhere with little explanation, but they’re not main characters so it feels less egregious.

I remember that there was a bit of the Tumblr fandom for Legend of Korra that was shocked that between the first two seasons there was a six month time skip. And this baffled me because of Young Justice but also because that’s actually a good thing. Look, we don’t need to see Korra going around to everyone and restoring bending with her Avatar powers, we need to move to a new story and see where the characters go afterward. Again, and we don’t need every detail! We need to move to the part of the story where things happen again!

Sometimes there should be a time skip. If you pick up right where you left off, but feel like a lot of time has passed, or that a lot happened that doesn’t seem probably in such a short time frame? Probably should have had a time skip. If there wasn’t Luke and Rey’s Plot in The Last Jedi (because the previous movie ends on a cliffhanger there), I would say that movie needed a time skip, because the First Order gets over being exploded remarkably well. NO I WILL NOT GET OVER THAT! A time skip would explain how they can pull a dreadnought out of their butt to bomb the Resistance base from orbit right after they suffered a crippling loss and had to hastily evacuate their own planet.

I suppose that a good couple rules of thumb would be these: 

-Is the time skip being used to hop over all the good storytelling opportunities? If not, it’s fine. If it is, then maybe don’t do that. Your audience could feel like they missed something or they could wish that they were getting robbed of a much more interesting story featuring characters they care about.

-Are you picking up the next installment right afterward? If so, then think about what’s going on in the story, and if it makes more sense for there to have been some breathing room between installments. The audience is smart enough to understand that stuff happened in between in that time.

Like many storytelling elements, they serve a purpose. So think about why you’re applying or not applying it. Tell the most interesting story possible, and use a time skip to avoid the unimportant bits of the narrative (between installments, of course), or don’t use them to make sure you cover the important parts that the audience won’t want to miss.

---

Why the Masquerade?

 You know, about a year ago when I was stuck I could always do a movie review or a Note about books I’ve been reading. But now that I have the Book Diary and Movie Munchies, I don’t know that there would be much point to those nowadays.

I also considered a Note about what books I would adapt into television or movies if I were a famous and powerful Hollywood person, but that would quickly devolve into “These books are good, go read them!” and again, we have my Book Diary for that.

Today is the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe! Reminder that the patron saint of the Americas made herself known to an indigenous person in his own language.

---

Why the Masquerade?

TV Tropes has a thing they call “the Masquerade.” It’s when, in fiction, especially urban fantasy, there is a secret world of magic, or aliens, or vampires, or robots or whatever, and they don’t tell the normal people about it. After all, if the Muggles know about the Secret World, then--

Well, what, exactly? Why can’t the Muggles know about the Secret World? And in fantasy worlds, constructed worlds, the mages don’t have much reason to hide their powers. So why would they decide to do it in our world?

The very obvious answer is because it’s easier on the writer. If we lived in a world with magic, and monsters, and robots all out in the open, the world would look very different from the way it does now. But that requires crafting a brand new history of the world, but one that still has enough landmarks that it’s recognizable to the reader. If Rome had immortal wizards, chances are the landscape of the world would be very different, and trying to make a modern world with that premise in the background would make it very difficult to believably shape it into anything we would find familiar.

You could skip that, but it would feel cheap somehow. Lindsay Ellis’s video on the Netflix movie Bright talks about this--it’s a world in which orcs, elves, fairies, centaurs, and dwarves live alongside humans, but it’s still our world, our culture, and history, fashion, and technology have apparently been exactly the same as our world, with only some minor things, and the fact that somewhere in the past there was a Dark Lord that orcs sided with that tried to take over the world using magic.

But it certainly is possible. People have been doing alternate histories for ages. The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud is a good fantasy example of this. The Hellboy comics also have the BPRD as a public agency, but how much the public knows about, like, monsters and demons is unclear until we get to the apocalypse storyline, where it’s hard not to notice the giant monsters overrunning the United States.

There is the very common notion that it isn’t safe for everyone to know about the Masquerade. And the Muggles aren’t the ones who have safety in question. As is pointed out in Dresden Files, while yes, individually a monster or mage could take on any human, or even a group of humans, there are quite a lot of us. As is pointed out, when humans get their stuff together, we can wreck most supernaturals with our guns and explosives. We do see monsters being dropped by conventional weapons. The reason the supernatural world keeps us in the dark is for their own safety.

Also it’s easier for monsters to eat us if we don’t know they exist.

[Harry Potter has the International Statute of Secrecy, but in that setting it is very unclear who would come out on top in a Wizard vs Muggle conflict, as we very rarely see the two sides get adequate preparation for the fights. There was a popular claim that bullets would beat wands every time, but this is unconfirmed, and we do see that actual wizards usually weren’t hurt much by the witch trials of Europe.]

There is also the idea that it’s safe for us. In some settings, influenced one way or another by Lovecraft, knowing the full extent of the supernatural is actually really bad and it hurts us. There are settings in which there are worlds upon worlds that humanity at large just isn’t ready to deal with, and the widespread panic of knowing about there being monsters everywhere isn’t worth risking by our heroes.

Maybe the Masquerade is enforced because of Rules. Maybe the gods don’t want people to know about them because it removes the need for faith if there’s proof of gods everywhere. Maybe it’s kept in mystery why the rules are there, but the authorities have it there and assure us there’s a good reason.

Here’s the thing though: a lot of urban fantasy doesn’t have any explanation whatsoever.

This came up in the discussion for the sporkings of The Iron Druid Chronicles, where one of my astute readers pointed out that there isn’t an explanation for why the supernaturals keep everything secret from the Muggles. There’s none! One could give the theory that they’re afraid of people being hostile, but our main character becomes immune to death in the second chapter, so I don’t think that’s it. And I think that this is one of those tropes that gets used all the time that people take it as part of the genre, and many times authors don’t question why.

Angelopolis was an even worse example. There’s apparently a secret world of angels that secretly runs the world, and the “good guys” (I put that in parentheses because they’re foul and have concentration camps but ANYWAY) have extensive documentation about this and Biblical history, and no one says anything. There’s also Supernatural, which by season five had entire towns being wiped off the map in the Apocalypse, and yet apparently no one in the government even realizes what’s going on? Even though they had an FBI agent on the Winchesters two years before who got mysteriously murdered?

Why do the characters not go public? In some cases, how could they not? I’m not saying don’t have the Masquerade in the story--by all means, do. I’m trying it myself in my writing. But give an explanation for it. There has to be a reason that the characters are adhering to it. You can’t just tell me that it’s because that’s what everyone else is doing. That’s not good fantasy writing. Write reasons for characters to act the way they do, for the rules to work the way that they do. That’s basic writing.

---

Writing Powerful Protagonists (and Antagonists!)

 Sleep, sleep, what is sleep?

I came across this post recently, which has me… concerned about Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, because it makes it seem as if you’re essentially playing as a whitewashed version of the villains from Secret of the Kells.

Also I want to write about Wheel of Time, but I feel that I’d be more insightful once I actually finish the series. 

So let’s talk about something else instead.

---

Writing Powerful Protagonists (and Antagonists!)

[I may have written about this kind of thing before. If so, I’m sorry. But I’m on a tight deadline and didn’t sleep very well.]

I remember back when I was in middle school or so, all of the fantasy writing advice was about how you shouldn’t make your protagonists very powerful, to avoid making them Mary Sues. I don’t know if many of the fantasy authors I read today ever heard that advice, but I suspect they either haven’t or decided to ignore it. 

There is a noticeable trend in fantasy, especially urban fantasy, to write characters who are powerful. They are wizards, demigods, heroes of unmatched skill. And you know what? That’s okay. That’s fine. Having a powerful protagonist isn’t a bad thing. The trouble is when the story doesn’t serve to challenge that protagonist.

Let us take, for instance, Superman. I have heard it said very often that Superman is a very boring character because he is unkillable. And in a badly written story, this is true--the tension is gone because we know that Superman will not die. This was, in fact, the problem I had with the animated film Superman vs. the Elites--while the ideological conflict was interesting, the final battle was meant to be a tense duel where we were supposed to be concerned about Superman’s wellbeing in a fight where no one was wielding any of Superman’s weaknesses. I kept yelling ‘He’s SUPERMAN!’ at the screen the last twenty minutes of this film.

But a good Superman story pits him against powerful opponents. Now, a powerful opponent doesn’t necessary mean someone who has strength to match Superman, although it sometimes does. Lex Luthor can work as a perfect foil to Superman not because he can counter Supes blow for blow, but because he can arrange situations in which Superman’s powers will not save the day instantly. The comic Superman for All Seasons comes to mind. And even then, the issue isn’t “Will Superman die?” but “Will Superman be able to save everyone?”

Still, it is a very difficult balance to walk, and I don’t know if all authors can manage it. Dresden Files, for instance, does a pretty decent job, but by populating the world with characters who are just as powerful, if not more so, than the protagonist. He also spends a large chunk of several novels trying to figure out exactly who the antagonist is, as he’s an investigator by trade, so he can’t exactly just blast the bad guy when he first appears anyway. And when he does, they turn out to be powerful wizards or magical beings as well, so he has to use his wits. Yes, Harry Dresden is a powerful wizard, but he’s hardly the only one, and power doesn’t equal everything in the world Butcher has created. Battle Ground culminates with a battle against a Titan, in which Harry doesn’t have a hope of beating by himself.

Compare this to, say, Hounded, the first book in The Iron Druid Chronicles, in which when the main character finally fights the antagonist which has been apparently trying to kill him for centuries, he easily outfights and kills him. Also the main character becomes immune to death in the second chapter of the book. That is… precisely how not to write a powerful protagonist. 

Wheel of Time, which I’m reading now (so again, I could be completely butt-backwards--I haven’t finished the series yet), has some issues in this regard, and I have mixed feelings about how it handles it. Yes, Rand is powerful, and yes his main antagonists are the powerful Forsaken, who are around his level in magic. And many of them take disguises and make elaborate plots to lure Rand into a trap to kill him. AND Rand is also trying to navigate politics because everyone wants something from the Dragon Reborn, and this hinders his job significantly. Also he’s slowly going insane. And the other characters aren’t anywhere near as powerful, and have more of a challenging time defeating opponents. Yet when Rand actually gets to battling a Forsaken, it seems as if that in direct confrontation he curbstomps them one by one. 

And like I said, it takes a while to get there; very often he gets saved by one of his friends too, so it isn’t exactly like Rand shows up and hits the Win Button. But it is a bit frustrating to me, at least, that so many of the Forsaken just get one-shot’d with Balefire or stabbed. Then again, like I said, I am far from finished with the series, and I know that this series has a habit of bringing back characters that we think are dead.

One of the troubles I have with Trials of Apollo by Rick Riordan is that the new villains aren’t really that powerful, in comparison to past villains of previous serieses. They’re deified Roman emperors, with a powerful corporation. So they should be something like mythological Lex Luthors, but in essence they’re… not. Partially because they’re in a book series aimed at kids, I imagine, but aside from Nero, they tend to be very straightforward about their plans, challenging heroes straight on and stamping their company’s name on everything. When our heroes have conquered gods and primordial personifications, it’s a little bit of a downgrade to move to three guys who essentially have some superstrength, a lot of flunkies, and keep attacking the heroes who can summon lightning or floods or earthquakes or zombies head on, it’s a bit difficult to take seriously. Yet the narrative does.

Although again, I haven’t finished this series, and I want to reiterate that I’m way above this series’s target audience by this point in my life.

There is a balance you have to make. The easiest way to make this balance is to make a believable powerful protagonist work is to give him or her equally powerful antagonists. But if you don’t do that, you can make it work through adding enough complexity and making the villains smart enough that the heroes can’t just blast them on page ten. The key to making powerful protagonists is, quite simply, by writing competent antagonists.

[I suppose that also writing an interesting and well-developed protagonist is also key in this, but I’m tired and this has gone on long enough so far.]

---

Fantasy Tactics, Part Two

 Eating too much this week was probably not good for my guts. But I’m out from work until Monday! And that’s pretty great.

You know, I highly considered not doing more of these, but then I recalled that I named the last one ‘Part I’ so I suppose I should probably do a ‘Part II’ at some point, huh?

---

Fantasy Tactics, Part II

Moving on--

FANTASY MOUNTS!

In fantasy stories you sometimes see people riding creatures that aren’t horses. And that’s fine! But in war time you have to consider that a lot of animals, no matter how cool it would look to ride, probably wouldn’t make good mounts. Horses are very good at running long distances faster than humans can, and are big enough to carry people and objects. And obviously, we’ve been breeding horses to specialize in those traits.

But there are animals that I don’t think are very good for riding, and I don’t know that anyone would try. Wolves for instance, come up as mounts for orcs in The Hobbit (and we see it in The Lord of the Rings movies), and those are explicitly a special kind of evil wolf that Tolkien refers to as wargs, so I give it a pass. But we see wolves as mounts in some other fantasy stories, or big cats or something (Aslan gets a pass in LWW too because, well, he’s Lion!Jesus). I don’t think that predators make very good mounts. Maybe for patrols and parades (which would happen a lot in most fantasy settings). But warfare? Long distance riding? No--most predators are not built to run long distances for long amounts of time. They ambush prey. Some can run for longer than others, and yeah, they’d be vicious to attack people with. But calvary charges? Heck no. They’re not built for that. Obviously, I suppose it’s possible for people to breed animals with these traits, but I’d like to be told that rather than just ‘these people ride giant predators.’

Other animals I feel like don’t get enough thought put into it. We see dwarves riding goats in Inheritance Cycle and The Hobbit films, but not much is done with that? And like, yeah, maybe on a flat plain they’re not as good as horses, but in mountainous terrain? Goats are perfect mounts. They can climb rocks much better than any bipeds.

There’s also a scene in The Battle of the Five Armies in which we see a dwarf riding a giant boar? That’s… actually a really good idea. Obviously boars as they live in our world aren’t great for riding, but assume you could train and breed them for that, do you have any idea how hard it is to kill a giant boar? It’s a massive, sturdy animal great for attacking and hard to kill. It’s not great for speed, but it’s not a bad creature for riding in the thick of a melee.

TRAINED SOLDIERS VS. HARDCORE WARRIORS!

There’s a bit in one of the Codex Alera books (a series in which the culture is based off of ancient Rome) in which Tavi our protagonist, must join the army as an officer, and when he’s told that he needs to learn how to fight, he protests that he knows how to fight. Except his friend points out that while he can fight in a duel, he can’t fight as a soldier, which is different--fencing is not the same as being in formation and relying on the men around you. He can beat anyone in a fight against single opponents, but doesn’t know how to be in a testudo formation.

Likewise, we see this come up several times in Ranger’s Apprentice, where the protagonists have to train a large group of people to fight against a better threat. Battle of Skandia is about Skandia (a Scandanavia stand in) being invaded by the Temujai (a Mongol stand in), and the heroes teach the serfs to be archers. Not marksmen, of course, because they don’t have the time. But to be able to shoot volleys. The tenth book in the series has them in Nihon-Ja (a stand-in for Japan) and helping the emperor in fighting off a samurai rebellion, and they train their men, a group of woodcutters, how to fight in a testudo formation, because against men who are used to individual combat with swords and spears, an impenetrable shield wall is a bit difficult.

It’s not a matter of making sure each individual person in the unit is a skilled warrior, it’s about making sure they can all fight as a unit.

In fantasy stories, there is often an emphasis on elite units being made up of hardcore warriors that can take anyone in a one-on-one fight. But in many cases, the military units that won battles weren’t badasses, they were disciplined. Shield walls, volleys, formations--these get jobs done just as well. We do see formations in fantasy and historical films, but they’re often broken up as soon as the fight gets going. And I understand that it’s more dramatic and cool to watch badass warriors taking out hordes of enemies like that, but let’s establish that formations are useful and have reasons for existing.

There’s a series I started (and can’t find the next book for!) where the antagonist invents shield walls, and this utterly baffles everyone else because theirs is a hardcore warrior culture, and no one knows what to do against it. Naturally, it starts to curbstomp everyone else it comes up against.

NAVAL BATTLES!

You know, not a lot of fantasy stories do much with naval battles. Like sure, they’re there. And I think there are scenes in fantasy stories (Dragonlance comes to mind) in which it’s clear to everyone that if a dragon shows up while you’re in a ship, you’re screwed. But in a world in which there are wizards, well, what are they doing during naval battles? Or voyages in general? It’s possible that having someone throwing around a lot of magic during a voyage in a small contained space that’s made of wood is a recipe for disaster, but I don’t usually get an explanation for this.

[I imagine that in these fantasy worlds, sailors might have superstitions that it’s bad luck to carry a mage on board a ship.]

What can mages do during naval battles? Quite a lot, I imagine. Lighting enemy ships on fire, calling lightning and waves, making and throwing projectiles, putting up barriers to protect the ship. And if the other ship has a mage too, then you get a very complicated situation in which two ships are firing at each other and two mages trying to outdo each other and overcome magical defenses and counter magical attacks. 

Heck, even outside of battles, wizards would be handy on ships. Using air manipulation to fill sails and get them going in the right direction, keeping the seas calm, summoning fresh fish up from the ocean to keep the crew fed, keeping the ship clean with magic… there’s a lot to be done here.

AIR SHIPS!

Not enough fantasy stories have airships. Those are awesome! Why not use those more? And I think that obviously you’ll have airship vs airship battles, but the one thing I’m thinking about is that an airship is also, if applied correctly, completely deadly against ground troops. Because here you have a flying armor vehicle that may have ranged weapons that could easily float over a battlefield and bombard enemy forces with cannon fire or heavy objects or whatnot. 

And of course, airships fighting each other (which we would have gotten a lot of if the 2011 Three Musketeers had ever gotten a sequel). These would obviously be much slower than the dogfights between airplanes or starships, and these ships would have more mobility than normal ships because they’re moving in three dimensions rather than just across the surface of the sea (although the idea of ships that sail across clouds sounds very cool too).

There are reasons, I imagine, why an airship would not be practical. But I very rarely see them brought up. In worlds where wizards can do basically anything, it seems very possible that someone would have thought at some point to make a flying ship. And yet they’re not that common in mainstream fantasy, and you hardly ever see them pulled out in warfare.

---

Powder Mage is Brilliant, Go Read It

 This week has been stressful because of the amount of work I had to do in the office, but other than that it hasn’t been that bad (for me). Still, I tend to have “Oh no, what if I have covid?” panics at least once a day. So that’s fun.

NaNoWriMo’s still kicking my butt, thanks for asking.

Anyway, let’s talk about Powder Mage mothercluckers.

---

Powder Mage is Brilliant, Go Read It

The fantasy genre has a bit of a weird relationship with gunpowder.

People tend to equate the fantasy genre with the middle ages, and with a pre-gunpowder world. And that’s not an unfair assumption to make in many cases. Mainstream fantasy tends to shun firearms. It’s not true of all fantasy, obviously--the dwarves have it in Warcraft, there’s more niche stuff like the Soldier Son Trilogy, and the Fable sequels have it--but overall, it’s not very common. When it does appear, like in The Two Towers, or Kung Fu Panda 2, it’s a foreign concept to most characters in the setting. And that’s fine! I’m not bashing those stories.

It gets a bit weird when you have things like urban fantasy though, where guns are almost nowhere to be seen for… Reasons. I recently reread Rick Riordan’s The Burning Maze, which is the third book in his Trials of Apollo series, and there are some comments about how guns don’t work around demigods or something (but no other combustive technology, like car engines have the same problem), which is never even hinted at, and somewhat contradicts what we see in the previous twelve books. Methinks Rick has been talking to Cassandra Clare again; she also has a similar rule in Mortal Instruments on why Shadowhunters don’t use guns, but again doesn’t make sense because it doesn’t affect any other forms of combustion or projectile technology.

In any case, a lot of fantasy doesn’t want to deal with guns. Because that takes out the sword fights, I think. And this misses that there was a long time when guns weren’t really that reliable and hadn’t quite replaced the sword. That a fantasy setting not unlike the Enlightenment of our world would be a really interesting place to tell stories.

Brian McClellan apparently agreed.

Hence: The Powder Mage Trilogy. A trilogy of rather thick novels set in a fantasy world that is currently going through something like our Age of Revolutions. The story begins with the country of Adro’s Field Marshal, Tamas, leading a coup to overthrow the monarchy and the chaos that follows from that. What makes this setting interesting is its magic system.

See, for a while there were two kinds of magic users in the world (well three if we’re counting bone-eyes, and a couple other things, but we’re not getting into that now): Knacked and Privileged. Knacked basically have one superpower, or a Knack, and that’s it. Not needing to sleep, or perfect memory, or detecting mages, or healing, or whatever. Usually not very powerful.

Privileged, as you can imagine, are much more powerful. They have more traditional magic, based on the elements, though they have to wear special gloves in order to control that power they can throw around. They can also see in the Else, which is like the Third Eye for detecting magic and seeing other mages and such. They tend to get gathered up into Royal Cabals that nations maintain for guarding the royal families and leading military expeditions.

But recently in this setting, in the past hundred years or so, after the widespread use of flintlock firearms in the military, another kind of mage has evolved into being, one that Privileged can’t see in the Else, although they can see them right back: Powder Mages, who have magic connected to gunpowder. They can snort it to go into a powder trance and become more powerful, and are all amazing marksmen. But they also have complete control of combustion, and can use up and redirect gunpowder without pulling triggers, reloading, or even using a gun. At one point Tamas makes a barrage by throwing a bunch of musket balls into the air and firing them off (though it’s not very accurate, it deals with a large group well enough). It’s pointed out several times that pointing guns at Powder Mages is really dumb, because they’re just prevent the powder from igniting. And Vlora makes a cask of gunpowder explode by will.

It’s an interesting idea, because this kind of mage, that deals specifically with gunpowder, obviously hasn’t existed forever. It’s fairly new (though not THAT new by the time the story starts). And it made me think about what McClellan is doing with this idea.

The Powder Mage Trilogy is about change. A lot of fantasy stories are. Changes to the characters, changes to the world, change to society, changes to warfare, and changes to religion. Those are all very common things. But this trilogy shows how the world is adapting and evolving by displaying how the magic itself is evolving. And no one really gets how or why. We see that Powder Mages are a new type of magic that evolved and nobody really knew how to deal with it at first. And we see magic evolving more, with things like Privileged who don’t need to use gloves, or Powder Mages pushing past the normal limits of their abilities. And it doesn’t feel like McClellan’s breaking the rules, because it’s not so common or overdone that he’s throwing the rules out the window. But he does it in a way, mostly with characters who aren’t the main ones, to show that the world is changing, and no one really knows how or where it’s going.

And that’s… pretty heavy. I mean the series starts with imagery very reminiscent of the French Revolution--the king and his family are overthrown, the nobles are guillotined, their property is seized (but it turns out that the royal bank account is empty anyway), and Adro now has to fight off foreign powers that are trying to take advantage of the chaos and prevent them for starting a republic. Obviously, other book series deal with social upheaval and societal change--A Song of Ice and Fire is the famous one, but it’s in so many stories like Wheel of Time and The Dragon Lords and The Obsidian Trilogy.

But it’s not always tied to magic like that. In Wheel of Time and The Obsidian Trilogy, it’s more that old forgotten forms of magic are being rediscovered (NOTE: I say this without having yet finished Wheel of Time). With this, it isn’t one aspect of the world that’s changing--it’s everything. And the characters can’t hold on to anything too tightly because that might be pulled out from under them too. They’re not trying to make things the way they were, because they can’t go back to that way--it doesn’t exist anymore.

Everything is changing. Nothing’s the same anymore. And that’s not a risk a lot of fantasy stories take. It’s not one most fantasy stories need to take, I think. But it’s something I didn’t expect. And I think it’s worth looking into the series for.

---

Fantasy Tactics, Part One

 Existential dread, something about being scared for the world, yadda yadda. This wasn’t too bad of a week, but I just keep seeing headlines about how we’re all dying and that’s not great for my state of mind! It makes me want to not go to work! But I need to be paid! So you see the problem I’m in!

Anyway I was thinking of doing a more Limyaael-style Saturday Note this time around.

---

Tactics in Fantasy

Alright I know that movies aren’t great depictions of battle tactics. I know. Okay. It’s fine. Movies are for entertainment. I’m not one of those people who sits and cries foul every time there’s the tiniest inaccuracy in a movie, unless it hits my buttons, or I’m really annoyed or something.

But I would like to see people do some more stuff with tactics and warfare in fantasy. To be clear, books tend to be better at this than movies, but there are also things that I don’t see that often in books either, that I’d like to see more of.

SPEARS!

Look, you know that the ancient Greeks didn’t really like swords that much? They had them, obviously, but that wasn’t the weapon of choice for warriors--the spear was. The sword was what you used when you were too close to use the spear. The iconic weapon of the king of the gods, Zeus, was a spear. Mind you, that spear was also a lightning bolt. But it was a polearm that he hurled at people!

And I’m not saying that fantasy must follow the rules of ancient Greek hoplites or Greek culture at all (although I would really like more Greek-flavored fantasy), but think about spears! Think about the advantages that a spear has that a sword doesn’t. No, it doesn’t have the same connotation in modern culture as swords, but it’s a weapon with more range than swords, and it’s a lot better to use in a shield wall. 

In fantasy there are a lot of opponents that you’re probably better off fighting with a spear. Giants, for starters--a long lance or spear is going to be a lot safer than walking up to him with a sword. Dragons as well. And spears are probably the first weapon you’ll be using if you’re on horseback, rather than a sword. And if you’re riding an animal larger than a horse--well, a spear is going to be helpful.

MAGIC!

While playing The Witcher 3 during the Battle of Kaer Morhen there’s this thing--when Geralt’s in trouble, the plan is to shoot up a flare and get Triss to rain down fire on your position. Basically, use magic as heavy artillery to bombard a location. And that’s… really cool.

I feel as if despite the fact that magic and wizards are common in fantasy, they’re not used that tactically? Generally, it’s about a lone wizard going into a fray and throwing lightning or fire or something, and maybe coming up against another wizard and doing a wizard duel. And that’s okay I guess. You get some great scenes like that--Dresden Files has quite a few.

Inheritance Cycle has a thing about mages always seeking each other out in battle, because they’re all so ridiculously overpowered that they’re trying to cancel each other out with telepathy. Which is kind of a cool idea, but they make for not as interesting magic battle scenes, because it mostly amounts to two wizards glaring at each other until one of them breaks (or some normal guy walks up and smacks them with a hammer).

But what about tactical magic? Wizards have a tendency to be a lot more frail than hardened warriors in battle, so it makes sense that they wouldn’t be in the thick of it, using magic for other purposes (and NO, not just as healers, although that’s not a bad use). These are the big guns! Use them to bombard enemies with fire, or shards of ice, or something! Have them call up mist to block opponents’ visions, or erect barriers from the ground to divide the battlefield.

AERIAL UNITS!

In a world with dragons, or griffins, or whatever, there are remarkably few aerial units in war? Or preparations for them? To be fair to something like Lord of the Rings, when Fell Beasts show up, no one has ever seen them before so they’ve got no preparations for them other than to shoot arrows. And we see what happens: when a Nazgul shows up on a Fell Beast, he utterly decimates Gondor’s horsemen on open ground.

And The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has a bit in the big battle where we see that the Narnians under Aslan have a bunch of their flying creatures drop boulders on the White Witch’s army. The only counter her army has is to shoot arrows (which can somehow reach that high?); in the sequel we see the Telmarines deploy ballista against griffins, which shouldn’t be as effective as it is (that should take some really quick aiming for such a small and nimble target), but there ya go. We also see the Pevensies use the griffins to airlift them in and out of Miraz’s castle, which is pretty brilliant I think.

Flying units should be Instant Win cards in a lot of fantasy, especially when you have dragons that can breathe fire. Or, if the world has been dealing with dragons and other flying creatures for a while, they should have some way to counter that. Maybe it’s not a perfect way of dealing with it--we still don’t have perfect ways for dealing with tornados or earthquakes here, for instance--but it would be something, especially if it’s expected. You’d think a lot of fantasy armies, knowing they’re going up against dragons, just hope that the dragons stayed home that day.

Do they get their wizards to develop fireproof armor? Are there castles designed with defenses from aerial attack? Spikes all over to stop flying creatures from landing? Ballista designed for downing large flying animals? An aerial corps to fight enemy flying animals? (This last one is the premise of Temeraire by Naomi Novik.)

TERRAIN!

I remember seeing a Tumblr post criticizing a sword fight scene in Game of Thrones (on Sam Swords’s page) that points out that despite being in a rocky environment, the fight itself takes place in the flattest part of the terrain, and so it’s kind of boring because of that. No one uses the rocks or differences in elevation to try to one-up each other. It makes me think--plenty of fights don’t happen on flat ground! You wouldn’t get that from fantasy films and television though, in which most of the fights take place on plains or lightly rolling hills. Maybe in a forest, though those don’t tend to use those very well either.

There’s a lovely bit of monologue in 300 in which Dilios talks about the pass they’re stationed in, and mentions that in that narrow gorge “numbers count for nothing.” Except then they go and fight out in the open and kind of ignore their greatest tactical asset. Mind you, it’s maybe meant to be fantastical, as it’s a story being told to sound awesome, but still--the whole point was to the enemy into a place where they can’t all show up at once.

Where are ambushes in mountain passes? Where are the people hiding in treetops? Where are the fighters climbing up rocks and such to gain a height advantage over opponents? 

And more importantly, where are the armies that adjust the terrain in order to use against enemies? I suppose sometimes you see people digging trenches or pits to make enemies fall in, which is good, but they don’t really go beyond that. Pits with spikes? Treetop canopies to fire from? Building barriers? You don’t see it that often.

EXPLOSIVES!

What’s weird to me in Shadow of War, and I realize it’s a nitpick, is how common explosives seem to be in Mordor? If this is set in the continuity of the movies, or something like it, then that shouldn’t be the case, because we see Saruman invent bombs for military usage, and at the Battle of Helm’s Deep it seems to be a complete gamechanger, the likes of which no one has ever seen before. I suppose explosives existed before that point, given that Gandalf used fireworks, but they’re not common, and no one’s used them for military applications.

If explosives exist in a fantasy universe, whether they be magical or mundane, the fact is that they should become a major part of warfare. Once Europeans started getting a grasp on gunpowder, it wasn’t long before they started making crude firearms. At the very least, we’re talking bombs or rockets.

Combine this with magic? People who can start fire with just a flick of the wrist? Explosives should be all over the place. You should be something like the Powder Mage Trilogy, in which mages make use of gunpowder to wreck armies. In that series, the more traditional Privileged absolutely hate Powder Mages because of the way they can take out enemies much further away and use nontraditional weapons (and some other things, but not relevant to our discussion).

Explosives should change the playing field considerably.

---

I also had some ideas about horses, and volleys, and shield walls, but I’m late on this Note and I’m behind on a bunch of other things already, so for now we’re leaving this here.