Villains Should Have Limits

 Welp I felt better with medication, but I’m feeling like crap again, and I don’t have an appointment with my regular doctor until October 9, so I’ve got to find some way to hang in there?

Still reading Lord of Chaos, the sixth Wheel of Time book. Expect a Book Diary entry soon.

Also I started watching I, Frankenstein on Hulu. And, uh…. It’s something, alright.

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Villains Should Have Limits

Alright I know I’ve talked about this somewhere, but I absolutely hate it when villains pull trump cards out of their armpits. When heroes do this, it’s usually called out as horrible Deus ex Machina, or Mary Sue Powers, or something like that. But when villains do it, it’s more often (though not always) excused as a twist or another way to stack up the odds against our heroes.

The worst example I can think of (though not the one that inspired this Note) might be the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy and the First Order.  The First Order keeps suffering what should be crippling losses, but instead they keep trotting out new superweapons and stomping over the rest of the galaxy with no problems whatsoever. Their planetary superweapon gets destroyed? Well they’re mostly in their fleet and have taken over the galaxy right now. Somehow. Their dreadnought gets destroyed? That’s not a big deal, they’ve got a whole fleet and a flagship that makes other ships! Mommy ship gets wrecked? Also not a big deal apparently. Then Palpatine pulls an entire fleet of planet-killers right the fudge out of the ocean, on a planet that’s explicitly difficult to get to.

What.

They just keep getting more improbably huge and expensive superweapons for the next climactic struggle, with no explanation as to how they got the money, materials, or know-how to build it. They just do because we need the villains to have something big to fight against, like the Empire. Never mind that the Empire had expenses and struggled after major defeats.

What actually did inspire this essay was a bit in the final season of the Netflix Daredevil in the penultimate episode. Some spoilers, obviously. Near the end of the season, it looks like the Good Guys are going to nail Fisk in the courts, and Fisk only finds out about the deposition as it’s starting. He sends goons to stop our heroes in traffic and kill the witness. But Matt gets the guy to the courthouse safely, if a bit late, and he testifies, and everything’s going well… only to find out that SOMEHOW, Fisk has gotten someone inside the room with the jury, and had the guy memorize the names and addresses of loved ones of all the jurors, in order to prove that he could have them killed at any time. So Fisk gets out of indictment. How did he know who was in the jury? How did he get their families’ information so fast? How did he manage to kidnap the guy and make him memorize all that information? And that last bit explicitly took a while--he tells the jurors that Fisk wouldn’t let him leave until he memorized it all. Remember, Fisk found out about the deposition that day. Already the show had stretched its credulity with how much reach Fisk had, but this was pretty ridiculous. There’s no explanation given as to how he pulls this off, he just does because we need to squeeze one more episode into the season, and a climactic battle is more exciting than a court case.

I’m not suggesting that writers need to have spreadsheets listing all of the antagonist’s abilities, resources, and capabilities. I mean, it’d be kind of cool if they did, but that’s a lot of extra work. But just as you can’t have your heroes pull allies, weapons, and superpowers out from nowhere, don’t think that villains can get a free pass for it. It’s less egregious in settings when a villain’s exact abilities and resources are mysterious, but even then there has to at least be some measure of foreshadowing, and have it fit within the narrative. Having Sauron’s armies utilize giant tunneling worms in Battle of the Five Armies was a copout, because if he’d had those the entire time it wouldn’t make sense why he wouldn’t have used them in any other point in the series, especially since we never see what the heroes would do to counter them.

It’s good to give heroes a challenge. It’s great! And I’m not suggesting that fantasy and science fiction has to be realistic. But there should be some limits to what villains can and can’t do. If the heroes keep blowing up their stuff, the villains should actually be bothered by this. No one is so untouchable that they won’t notice a bunch of their top-of-the-line ships being destroyed! Those cost a lot of money and time and manpower!

There’s a fantastic scene in Order of the Stick after Tarquin keeps throwing men from his army at the heroes, and they keep overcoming the forces. Tarquin wants to continue wasting resources, and his allies want to give up. Because it’s not worth it! He has to call in favors in order to get his mage friends to help, and even they give up because they’re using up too much and not getting anything out of it!

Or that episode of Young Justice where Vandal Savage actually has to call in friggin’ Darkseid for help in saving the world from alien invasion, because he actually doesn’t have any resources left--he’s used up all the armies and superweapons tying up the Justice League. The Light is powerful, but not all powerful! They’ve got limits to what they can use! They can’t do everything!

Heck, Lord of the Rings runs on the idea that Sauron can’t do everything--they’ve got to keep him busy and distracted while a small group goes into Mordor and chucks the Ring into the fire from whence it came. I feel as if some writers now would have Sauron throw giant monsters never even hinted at before in front of Frodo and Sam--after Shelob there’d be a giant cat thing, and then a great big lizard, and then a dragon, with no explanation whatsoever.

Again, you don’t have to explain everything the villain does; I don’t need his superweapon receipts, or a scene showing him doing everything. But he can’t just pull answers out of thin air.

It’s lazy.

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The Trouble with Celtic Mythology

 I’m okay? Ish. Stomach still bothers me, but I’m on medication for the week. Hope I stay this good in the next couple of weeks until the doctor’s appointments, at least.

Also hey, I reread both Fellowship of the Ring and The Graveyard Book this week! Next is Lord of Chaos, which in my head will always be ‘That one Wheel of Time with the 60 page prologue.’

Anyway this was sort of inspired by a Tumblr post.

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The Trouble With Celtic Mythology in Fantasy Fiction

The problem with Celtic mythology is… well, there’s more than one problem, if we’re being honest here.

Let’s start with this: “the Celts” describes a very large group of ancient peoples, not just those of the British Isles, which is probably what you think of when you hear the word ‘Celtic.’ Britain, Ireland, Spain, France, Switzerland, and Germany all had Celtic people in them at one point. The Galatians mentioned in the Bible? They probably weren’t Celtic by the time Paul was writing to them, but the name comes from a group of Celtic people. And they didn’t all believe the exact same things, or speak the exact same language. They were related, sure, and we can probably draw some conclusions because of that. But just because they’re related, doesn’t mean they’re the same. Orthodox Judaism is related to Islam and also Mormonism, but those three are all very different religions from each other. Likewise, the Celts in Switzerland didn’t believe the same as the Celts in Galatia, or the ones in Wales.

The two big chunks of literature we have on Celtic mythology are from Welsh and Ireland. We have bits and pieces from elsewhere, and we can extrapolate some, but not too much. Like, we know that the Scots are descended from the Gaels that settled in what would become Scotland, and theoretically they had similar beliefs. But we don’t know all the differences either. We know some; for instance, the Scottish had things like wulvers, and more water horses, in their myths, as well as the Seelie and Unseelie Courts. And there were already Picts living in Scotland; we’re still not sure what they believed, and how those beliefs affected the Gaels.

The second big problem we have with Celtic myth is that an awful lot of the Celtic peoples didn’t write down their religion, at least not in ways that have survived up into the modern age. I am sure that some scholar or another could give you reasons why much of their religion wasn’t written down--maybe it was lack of writing, maybe it was the belief that some things shouldn’t be written down, maybe it was because the priestly druid class liked to preserve their mysteries--but I don’t know that it matters for the purposes of this essay. Generally, they didn’t, and because of that we lost much of their stories and mythologies. We don’t have that much to work with! We do have some written stories from the pre-Christian Celtic era, but while we get some ideas of beliefs and deities, sometimes we just get stories and legendary cycles mixed with lives of saints and historical events.

The Romans recorded quite a lot about Celtic culture and beliefs, but historians question how accurate their records are. Did druids actually perform human sacrifice on the scale the Romans reported? Or was that trait embellished, or invented wholescale to make the Celts seem more “barbaric” and in need of Roman “civilization”? Not helping our understanding of Celtic religion is that the Romans just assumed that everyone, especially the Celts and the Germanic peoples, worshipped the same gods under different names, and assigned Roman deity names to other people’s religious figures because they decided they were close enough. Sometimes the names of Celtic deities, or at least Latinized versions of those names, got written down, but individual traits usually didn’t.

We have some actual stories, and those are from Christian writers, recording legends and folklore. Some of those have obvious religious figures, like Irish gods and the Welsh ruler of the underworld. But in many cases we don’t know much about the origins of the stories. There’s a tendency in certain circles to just assume all the stories are just downgraded, Christianized versions of old mythological stories, and that all the characters were actually gods. And then the traits that happen to pop up in those stories get assigned as deity patronages. That’s not necessarily fair, because for all we know, these could just be folktales. It’d be like claiming that people used to worship Tam Lin, or Cinderella, or Paul Bunyan. We just don’t know.

[The Tumblr post that kind of inspired this Note was specifically about taking Welsh stories out of context like this.]

So if you’ve ever wondered to yourself, “Why are Celtic mythology’s influences less often seen in fantasy fiction than Greek and Nordic?” you might have yourself an answer here. You see why this is difficult to adapt into a coherent mythology? Most fiction that deals directly and heavily with a Celtic mythology sticks tightly to Irish myths, where we have a better idea of who the gods were. But even then you’ll get weird distortions based on fringe New Age ideas. Flidais, for instance, appears in the Kevin Hearne novel Hounded, as the Irish goddess of hunting, like a sort of Celtic Artemis (but without the chastity so she can sleep with the hero, of course). It’s unclear if Flidais was ever actually a goddess, but she’s more associated with cattle than wild animals in her stories. And even weirder is Hearne’s characterization of Aenghus Mac Og, who he makes into a vengeful, angry jerkwad who wants to take over the world.

I think Vikingdom made more sense than that book.

It’s also frustrating because many writers assume that all Celtic cultures are the same. Hearne refers to the Irish gods as the Celtic gods, which isn’t quite true (and weird in a series where all myths are true). And there are plenty of adaptations of King Arthur stories that add Gaelic mythological elements and gods. Which isn’t bad, the idea of a crossover myth! I’d love to see Arthur and his war band duke it out with Fomorians! But it’s got to at least be acknowledged that there’s something a bit strange about a Welsh heroic figure hanging out with Irish gods.

You’ll notice that a lot of the really good fantasy fiction that does take on Celtic mythology isn’t as straightforward in the way it interacts with the texts. We don’t know all the facts on the myths, and that’s okay! We’ll just… sort of use the things we do know to tell a story, and admit that we’re making it up, rather than try to present a story as a sort of continuation of Celtic myth.

For instance, Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander is quite clearly based off of the Welsh stories, and rips many of the names and items and words right out of the Mabinogion. But that’s kind of it. They’re not adaptations of Welsh mythology, and use those ideas to make an original story. Yes, Gwydion is The Man, and Taliesin is an amazing bard, but Arawn Death Lord is now a Dark Lord-style villain, rather than the ruler of the underworld who really had no interest in taking over the world. There are very clearly godlike figures in the text, but the novels don’t really get into the details of how that all works because it’s not important to the protagonist and his story.

Or Song of the Sea, which certainly uses figures from Irish mythology, but again tries to tell an original story rather than be some sort of exposition on the myths. Mac Lir, Macha, and the Daoine Sidhe, are all Irish mythological figures, and yet the movie doesn’t really get into too much detail about whether these fairies are gods or what. It tells an original story about selkies and puts them into Irish myth as its own thing. The whole, “Let’s just make them all fairies” is a popular way of dealing with Irish myth in general.

And I’m not saying that fiction has to do this, if it wants to engage with Celtic myth; in fiction, I don’t know if I’d think that there are so many hard bound rules as such. But I think it’s… unwise, unless you’re deliberately telling a story meant to reflect New Age beliefs, to try to use that take on Celtic myth--that we can reconstruct the myths based off what we have, and we definitely know what those myths are, rather than the truth that we just don’t know, and we’re better off acknowledging that and letting ourselves tell original stories with these elements. Yeah, we have elements, but not enough to act like it’s a fully-developed theology in the same way that we have a more solid idea of how Greek myth worked (and even then, Greek mythology isn’t as cut-and-dry as Edith Hamilton would have you think).

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Angelopolis vs Hounded

 I started my reread of The Fellowship of the Ring this week, and though it’s going slowly I’m having fun with it, especially with how passive-aggressive Bilbo is in his will.

I have been feeling pretty crappy in my guts this past week or so, and I’m seeing a doctor today, so hopefully we’ll clear up exactly what is going on down there. In the meantime, have a Saturday Note.

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Which is Worse: Angelopolis or Hounded?

I feel as if this has come up a bit since my Hounded sporking concluded. One of the things I said repeatedly was that while I think Hounded is a bad novel, it’s not as bad as Angelopolis. Some people seemed to argue with that, and I want to start this Saturday Note setting the record straight: 

Angelopolis is the worse novel of the two. That is, I think, an objective fact. We could split hairs on the details, but overall I think it’s clear that Angelopolis is terrible. Hounded may be an annoying and unfunny male power fantasy wish fulfillment novel, but Angelopolis is downright incoherent at times. The novel ends with evil angels killing everything out of nowhere and a third of the world getting wrecked by nuclear meltdown. And one of the villains eats a penis (that’s not a metaphor or anything).

But is it possible that even if Angelopolis is the objectively worse novel, that it’s maybe… more bearable? Maybe it’s worse to analyze, but actually more fun to read than Hounded? In a “So Bad, It’s Hilarious” sort of way?

Hm…

It was suggested to me (here) that the difference is the tone. Angelopolis is a conspiracy thriller drama, whereas Hounded is a comedy-flavored action urban fantasy. When drama doesn’t work, it can be incredibly amusing. You laugh at the melodrama, at the ridiculousness of the situations that characters are taking seriously, at the absurd plot twists. Comedy is something different entirely; when a comedy isn’t funny, it’s not fun to watch or read. Seeing someone throw a bunch of jokes that aren’t funny at you, it’s just grating.

Which is part of the thing with Hounded: it’s supposed to be funny, and to do that it keeps throwing joke after joke at you when it doesn’t fit. In the final battle, there’s a bit where a bird poops on the main villain’s face, and Atticus’s dog quotes South Park at us. It’s so annoying because it’s so obviously meant to be funny, but instead it reads as the author being juvenile and stupid.

Atticus gives the EMT a wedgie twice and we’re supposed to find this the height of humor.

Angelopolis doesn’t have quite the same problem. There’s not a lot of humor; the little that there is also falls flat. But it’s blocked out by all of the drama and infodumps. The drama that happens is random and weird; so it tends to fall flat. The thing that makes it worse, in my eyes, is that the angelologists are essentially Nazis, complete with their own Nephilim concentration camps, and the similarities are not really brought up and the motives are only kind of questioned a couple of times by our “heroes.”

That was probably the sticking point with me. Other than Eno eating a penis, the thing that sticks out for making Angelopolis an atrocity of a novel that never should have gotten published is how genocidal the protagonists are. Hounded has a lot of problems, it’s clearly a white power fantasy, and there are some racially and ethnically-insensitive bits, but none of the main characters are okay with ethnic cleansing, which sadly cannot be said about Angelopolis.

There are some similarities between the two novels though. Both are fond of using Informed Attributes, or Telling rather than Showing, though in different ways. Hounded tells us time and time again, out of his own mouth and from other characters, that Atticus is a paranoid, cautious, and clever man, when he is really nothing of the sort. Upon finding out that the villain he’s been dodging for thousands of years knows where he lives, he reacts by… calmly going about his business, and not bothering to change his schedule at all. When he finds out that the bad guys are watching his house, he avoids his house, and then goes to all the public places he’s known to frequent.

Angelopolis does something similar in that the book keeps telling us that Verline is an incredible angel hunter, the best agent the angelologists have. At the end of the novel they pick him as their leader, the one who will lead them against the apocalypse that’s apparently happening (but never explained), citing his leadership skills and his strategic mind. Except he’s never shown any of those talents throughout the novel. He frequently goes off to do his own thing without telling his teammates, gets captured or detained, and has to be bailed out. He loses every fight he gets in, and doesn’t understand basic strategy or how to pursue objectives. His main skill seems to be that he knows how to hotwire vehicles. Verlaine never knows what he’s doing, and the other characters act like he’s a super spy.

I mean, it’s arguably worse in Hounded, because Atticus is such an awful character, and it’s written from his point of view. So half the novel is him talking about how great he is, and getting everything he wants, and all the other characters bending over backwards to either give him what he wants or not get in his way. And that is perhaps what makes Hounded so much more obviously irritating as a book--it’s written from the point of view of a guy who thinks he’s brilliant and funny and clever and he’s obviously not. He’s the sort of guy you want to slap upside the head.

Angelopolis isn’t annoying in that regard. But I don’t think Angelopolis is that funny either, as a failed drama. Mostly because it’s just so confusing. Even before you get to the ending, you have characters doing...things that don’t make much sense. There comes a point where one of the villains says, “Tell me what’s going on!” and the protagonist is as confused as the reader, because by all rights she should know too, and the book never explains why she doesn’t. The most coherent parts of the novel are the infodumps, which are all stupid and self-contradictory if you can get past the boredom of reading them.

I got mad reading it, but only at the end, and only because I was confused. Hounded made me mad because… well, it’s like talking to an obnoxious dudebro teenager who thinks he’s all that. But if you actually analyze Angelopolis it’s more infuriating; if you don’t, it’s just really, really boring, and for me that’s worse. I’d rather be feeling something than just sitting there bored, which is what Angelopolis made me feel. 

On a surface level, it’s boring. On a deeper level, it’s infuriating.

Hounded’s just annoying all the way through, no matter how you slice it.

Take your pick as to which is worse.

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Literary Fiction and Misery

 Hallo, wonderful people, it’s been a slightly rough week. My guts and I got into a disagreement. But I got out of work early on Friday, and no work on Monday! That’s pretty fantastic! We’re probably going to spend Monday emptying the garage, which is less fantastic, but it’s a thing that has to be done.

Also I’m reading the second Witcher book of stories? And while I sort of appreciate it and really like parts of it, I don’t know if I want to do this entire series? Just a thought.

Anyway this is a thought I had last week while reading Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway and the Stuckey-Frenches (that sounds like a terrible band).

[If you want the full effect of this essay, you’ve got say “literary fiction” in your head with a tone quite similar to the one Jim Sterling uses when saying “Triple-A game industry.” Just a tip.]

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Literary Fiction and Misery

Part of the problem I’ve always had with “literary fiction” is how miserable it often is.

Alright I know we’ve done this before but let’s give out a definition of “literary fiction” that isn’t just “It’s the stuff you read in high school English class.”

“Literary fiction” is, in the words of those who really like it, character-driven fiction featuring realistic people and scenarios. That’s… not a great definition, because so much of all fiction is character-driven nowadays--just imagine a fantasy or science-fiction novel without a clear character arc published now, and all the criticism that would come from it--and a lot of crime, historical, and mystery fiction rolls on “realistic scenarios.” In the back of Writing Fiction, the appendix tries to argue that the difference is that “literary fiction is about people, genre fiction is about stereotypes,” but that’s clearly so crock full of poop that you can smell it through the walls. It’s especially stupid because the past few decades we’ve seen more and more genre fiction deconstructing and reconstructing the genre, playing with the archetypes and stereotypes, subverting and deflecting our expectations. So that definition doesn’t work.

Let’s try again.

“Literary fiction” examines everyday life. It is a genre (SHUT UP JANE AND THE STUCKEY-FRENCHES YES IT IS) that aspires to tell “realistic” stories about everyday people. We can split hairs all day long, but that’s the definition I’m going with, because that covers a wide enough range of the stories in the genre that I think it fits. Genre is difficult to strictly define anyway. Your “literary fiction” types will try to occasionally claim that other genres are actually “literary fiction” by virtue of “I like this, and so it can’t be genre because it’s good and I’m not like the plebs!”

[I may have some unresolved issues with my undiegrad English department. So sue me.]

This is why you have things like the subset of the fantasy genre called “magical realism,” which your English teacher would argue isn’t actually fantasy because “It’s not really about magic, it’s about people!” Or that article I found in graduate school that argued that because No Country for Old Men had things like themes and messages and complex characters, it couldn’t really be a crime novel, it was “literary fiction” disguised as a crime novel to trick the uneducated plebs into reading it or some such nonsense like that.

A large part of the gatekeeping around what does or doesn’t count as “literary fiction” is built around the idea that real, GOOD Literature must not be escapist! Escapism is for entertainment. And therefore, so are happy endings. So much of “literary fiction” is meant to display not just ordinary people in ordinary situations, but ones who never actually win. 

In general I do not seek out “literary fiction,” but it’s not in and of itself bad. I don’t hate the genre (yes I’m calling it a genre my sophomore writing professor can deal with it); I think it’s got some good examples. And there is a lot of value of telling the stories of everyday people and the struggles they go through in everyday life. Representation matters, after all. Being able to articulate the struggles people go through is an important and powerful thing. And you can show that many times, life doesn’t have a clear-cut happy ending, and that’s just part of life sometimes. You’re not a loser because you’re not a hero defeating the Dark Lord or restoring the Galactic Republic; you’re just trying to get through life, like the rest of us. That’s okay. 

But I object to the notion that this is the only kind of story that matters. And more than that, I object to the notion that is sort of pushed on you from high school onward that for literary fiction to exist, it must not be happy. Because while I liked some of them, almost all of the stories in this book by different authors were about people… being miserable. About them failing at their lives, their jobs, their relationships, their struggles. And these were the examples of short stories to be like, “Hey, write like this!”

It made me think that there was this problem with glorifying misery in literary fiction. That seeing a bunch of people being emotionally and psychologically beaten down was supposed to somehow be better than actually trying to make things better. It’s like when someone is a dick to you, and when you call him or her or them out on it, the response is “Well life’s not fair!” Fine, but you’re still a dick! I don’t think it’s bad to draw attention to the struggles of everyday people, and show the misery that happens to people sometimes; but if that’s all you want to show, all you think is worth showing people about everyday life, then there’s a problem!

It feels less like a celebration or appreciation of the struggles of ordinary people, and more of a relishing in their suffering. At the very least, it’s an attitude that feels like a denial that there’s anything good about the real world. And I’m not remotely okay with that? Don’t we have enough problems to deal with? Don’t we have enough misery in the real world without some snobbish literature elite telling us that it’s all that really matters in storytelling?

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