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.
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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.
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