Heroes That Don't Kill

 I’m sorry I haven’t updated the book diary in a while, but I was reading To Sleep in a Sea of Stars and that book is long so everything else was on hold. But I should get to it soon.

Also, there is definitely going to be a Note on Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and colonialism, even if there’s another blogger who already did a better post on it.

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On Heroes Who Do Not Kill

It is very common, especially in superhero fiction, for the narrative to spell out that the hero absolutely does not kill people. This makes it fairly easy to make the character a more sympathetic vigilante in many cases--he or she is not someone going around killing criminals or enemies or whatever. I think this is fine.

However.

There is a difficulty with writing this kind of character, especially when doing it for the screen, and that it’s really freaking difficult to show compelling action scenes this way. I mean, it isn’t, but then you get really loose definitions of “mortal injury.” Look, I love Daredevil, but the man repeatedly beats crooks in the head with a metal bar and this is considered non lethal because he isn’t using blades or bullets. That’s not… look, getting hit in the head a lot is a very bad thing.

The guy doesn’t have it as hard as Batman, although that might be in large part because there are just so many incarnations of Batman. But in the Arkham games him not killing is a large part of his character arc--Joker is first fascinated by him because he saves him when he’s falling off of a building instead of letting him die. And yet his own combat moves in-game are very brutal, leaving broken bones in mooks and supervillains. Him detonating small explosions under bad guys is apparently no big deal. Also he can chuck Batarangs at bad guys, which I remind you are essentially bat-shaped shurikens. Again, it’s not taken too seriously because he’s not using guns, knives, or swords.

The final game Arkham Knight makes it so much worse. One of the finishing moves involves slamming a mook’s head into a fuse box. The Batmobile can simultaneously run over and tase enemies. Also it shoots rubber bullets into peoples heads with a gun that looks like heavy artillery. Yeah, those guys are probably dead.

[Side note: Zack Snyder got a lot of flack over his Batman killing people (which he should), but no one at all seems to give this same amount of criticism to Tim Burton’s Batman, which is weird because that was one of the reasons I could never get into those movies.]

I realize of course that some of this can be chalked up to gameplay--the player isn’t necessarily told to run over criminals, but it feels like a very obvious outcome. And it still doesn’t explain Batman shoving people’s heads into fuse boxes and watching them get electrocuted, and acting like this is a perfectly non lethal way of dealing with enemies. I’m not saying “Oh no, people will think this is an okay thing to do!” because I have much higher faith in the audience, I just think it’s stupid. Yeah, it looks cool, but it goes against what you’re trying to say with the character.

What’s worse is when a story tells us that killing people is bad, and the hero lectures people about it, but then in actual action scenes the hero doesn’t care. BBC’s Robin Hood (beware sentences where this comes up) begins with the titular character firmly not killing people, but when he thinks Marian died in the first season finale he starts killing. He doesn’t kill in season two, I think, but in season three he still talks to other characters about how killing is wrong while the show inconsistently has him killing enemies because… I don’t know, not doing that was becoming difficult.

Also the writing in season three was abysmal.

Arrow inherited this problem. In the first season, Ollie doesn’t really care about whether or not he kills people, though he usually doesn’t--there’s a line in the pilot that most of the mooks he shoots with arrows survive, albeit with disabling injuries. In season two he decides to stop killing in honor of his friend Tommy (who died thinking he was a murderer). And he sticks to it! Until the next season, where he kills the main villain, and after that he kills and doesn’t depending on… nothing really.

There’s a scene in season five where his whole schtick is trying to convince Dinah not to kill the mobster who killed her partner, and then has a massive fight scene with the gang which involves him blowing up a helicopter???

There are ways to do cool action scenes without being this stupid! Agents of SHIELD, which DOESN’T have a no kill rule anyway, has the agents using these weapons called Icers, which are guns that shoot knockout rounds that stun enemies rather than pierce them with bullets. They’re introduced fairly early on and are used throughout the show’s run. Bam! Quick solution to the problem! You can have gun fights and not have enemies get killed.

So it’s frustrating when the narrative or the characters tell us “Killing is bad!” and then… don’t do that, or do it in a way that makes it clear that the writers don’t actually know what that entails. Some properties avoid it altogether to not have this problem--I don’t recall anyone in any of the Marvel movies ever talk about not killing enemies, for instance. But I don’t think it’s too difficult to do well! It’s just that a lot of times it isn’t. Because of really stupid writing or action choreography.

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Characters Have to Have Good Wants

 Hello! I’ve been feeling pretty good this week, physically, though this week at work has both dragged on and gone by very fast. Don’t know how that works. I started reading To Sleep in a Sea of Stars (‘twas a birthday present) which is fun. Reminds me a bit of what you’d get if you crossed Inheritance Cycle with The Expanse.

I need to work on the review of The Witcher III as well...and a review of The Muppets, I think.

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Characters Have to Have Good Wants

This sounds like a “duh” but characters have to want something, and we have to care about it. I said this a lot in my Hounded sporking, but the biggest problem (or rather, the root of the biggest problem) with Kevin Hearne’s Hounded is that the protagonist of the novel, Atticus O’Sullivan, doesn’t want anything. He doesn’t want wealth, he doesn’t want to protect anyone, he doesn’t want to save anyone, he doesn’t want power, or world peace, or stability, or anything. One could make the argument that he just wants to be left alone in peace, but he doesn’t do anything in pursuit of that other than go about his business as if nothing’s wrong. It’s not until the villains kidnap his dog that he actually goes to confront the antagonist, which is in the last fifth or so of the novel. Otherwise, he does his darndest to ignore everything.

This book was written by an English teacher.

I’m also playing Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla right now, which I will note is a good game, but its story is somewhat lacking, especially in regards to past games. For starters, the main character’s motivation is essentially that he wants to help his brother conquer England. Which isn’t in and of itself a bad sort of motivation for an audience to attach to a villainous protagonist (conquest), but the game tries to paint this goal as a lot more wholesome than it really is.  It doesn’t act like there might be something slightly villainous about trying to violently conquer a country where there are already people living there. So it’s hard to care about his motivation, since among Eivor, the characters around him, and the narrative itself, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla doesn’t seem to know what it’s talking about.

I want to be clear, a character’s want doesn’t have to be complex. It doesn’t have to be simple. It doesn’t have to be good. It certainly doesn’t have to be something we identify with (although those are also good). But it has to be consistent, and we have to be made to care about it, even if it’s something that we personally don’t want. The key is to make the motivation important to the character, and make sure that it makes sense within the context of the story, so the audience can care.

Stephen King’s The Dark Tower is about Roland Deschain trying to find the titular Dark Tower. What exactly he’ll find when he gets there isn’t clear. Yes, there’s this whole thing about how the Tower is what’s holding up reality, and there are forces trying to destroy it, but that’s not clear from the beginning of the story. All we’re told is that Roland wants it. Now maybe it doesn’t make sense in realistic novel fashion, but The Dark Tower is attempting to be an epic fantasy story with Western trappings (and also there’s a lot of science fiction and vampires and an immortal sorcerer IT’S JUST WEIRD OKAY?!). And so it’s a classic knightly quest--heck, the inspiration for the book was Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. In light of that, an impossible quest to the edge of reality makes perfect sense. And by the end, the characters care so much about it that you care about it too, if you’ve stuck around to the end.

Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag has its lead Edward Kenway want, essentially, to get rich quick. And he’s a dick about it. But the narrative and his fellow characters call him out on this all the time, and we’re shown pretty early on that he’s got a wife back home that he’s hoping to get back to, and that he wants to make a better life for his family--which he only thinks he can do with these get-rich-quick schemes. So even if we don’t sympathize with his goal, we understand his motivations. We care because he cares, and because we’re hoping that he works out that maybe his friends are right and that there’s more to life than riches. And thankfully he does.

You can make us care about quite a lot of things for epic stories, even if they don’t seem very big! A couple of years back, someone released a video game about a widower traveling to a mountain with his son to pay respects to his deceased wife. That game was God of War. For a story that complex, it didn’t need a complex motivation, or even a big one, other than that the heroes want to do A Thing, and there are forces getting in the way because Reasons. We care about the motivation because we like the characters and want to see them succeed, and we hope to see the two of them bond over the course of the journey.

Or how about this: a woman is stuck in a science lab and is trying to get out. Bam--that’s Portal. Again, the motivation is simple, but the execution is where it shines. And of course, we want Chell to succeed because from first-person perspective, we’re her. We want to get out of this massive lab where there’s an evil AI trying to murder us.

[I was going to use John Wick as an example, but I feel as if using only the examples of widowers with dead wives maybe set a bad precedent.]

Some other motivations from stories off the top of my head that are brilliantly executed:

-To save her brother and home (The Wee Free Men)

-To be out from under his father’s thumb (a large chunk of Outstretched Shadow)

-To clear his name (The Lightning Thief)

-To regain godhood (Trials of Apollo)

-To make it through a school year (Year of the Griffin)

-To become a knight (The Seeing Stone)

-To not get caught for criminal activities (Going Postal)

-To not die (Jurassic Park)

-To be put in charge of her family (Darksiders III)

-To find the truth of her birth (Horizon Zero Dawn)

You can probably tell that I’m looking at my shelves as I type this.

Some of these are big, some of them are small. Some of them are selfish, some of them are epic quests. A good motivation for a character can be anything. You don’t have to have something high-minded or noble for the story and character to work. But it has to be something, and it has to be something that we can be made to care about. 

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Religious Fanaticism is Not (By Itself) a Good Motivation

 CT scan came back! Apparently I’m clean. Which means… we still don’t know what’s wrong with my guts, I guess, but it’s not something fatal in there, so yay for that. Also! I finished The Tower of Nero, the last in the Trials of Apollo series.

I had this idea for a while, and I didn’t think I had time last week to develop it fully. But I was reading this post and I thought some more about it. So here we are!

[I realized while writing this that it sounds as if I am more worked up about this than I really am. I’m sorry.]

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Religious Fanaticism (By Itself) Is Not a Motivation

We do know this, right? I mean, it isn’t, by itself, a motivation. And yet in fiction all the time, we’re given a butt ton of antagonists that are religious zealots, and their motivation is nothing more than “this guy is a religious nut.” And that’s not really good character writing, is it? It’s exactly the same as saying, “This is a crazy person! I don’t need to invent a coherent motivation for his actions! He just does what he does for the story to work because he’s crazy!”

This is lazy writing.

I will admit that I am biased--I am a religious person, so I am a little tired of seeing organized religion demonized by popular media. That being said, I am not writing this to tell you that writers cannot write characters who are religious fanatics. I am saying that if that is all you can give as a motivation for an antagonist, then go back to the drawing board and try again. I am very, very tired of people acting like it’s clever, subversive writing to writing foaming-at-the-mouth religious fanatics.

This was in part inspired by my playing The Witcher III: Wild Hunt and the recurring presence of the Church of the Eternal Fire in the city of Novigrad. Aside from two of them in one of the storylines (admittedly, one of the best storylines in the game), the Church of Eternal Fire exists to be angry douchebags that happily kill mages and nonhumans for funzies. 

I will admit that having not read/played the majority of the Witcher series, there might be an explanation that I’m missing. But we’re not given much reason as to why these people believe what they do. Most of them explicitly seem to be in it for their own personal gain. Furthermore, they’re centered in a city that is run by criminal syndicates, all of which are led by people who think they’re an insane cult. And yet people are happy to go watch the Eternal Fire burninate mages and nonhumans in the public squares on a regular basis.

“Well that’s just like the witch hunts in real life!” No! No it’s not! Because (setting aside that historical inquisitions didn't work that way, no matter what pop culture told you) we don’t see people selling each other out for gain or to settle rivalries as much as the cult doing whatever it wants for its own gain. And this isn’t a once-a-month thing, this is apparently every few days, at least. It’s more comparable to the Holocaust, except the Holocaust very purposefully wasn’t done in public spaces. 

The point I’m getting at is that the Church of Eternal Fire is a relatively new religious organization which commands the faith of the general public, letting them regularly kill people for little-explained-reasons other than ‘humans are bastards.’ Okay, fine! Humans are bastards! But that doesn’t mean they do things for no reason! Where is the propaganda about why mages are so bad other than because Eternal Fire said so? Propaganda can be a popular tool, but it has to be built on something, and as far as I can tell the seething hatred against mages isn’t built on anything other than… we need that in the story we’re trying to tell here. And it’s not a bad story, I just felt like this one aspect of it doesn’t hold up very well to scrutiny--it’s just another way to dial up the grimdark factor.

“But hey, aren’t 90% of history’s violent conflicts started over religion?” Says who? This is one of those statistics that gets repeated all the time, and yet no one bothers to cite a source. Which is odd, considering this is a statistic often quoted by people who are meant to believe in hard facts and not take things on faith. People believe that statistic because it fits a preconceived notion, not because there are facts behind it.

But sort of stepping back to what I meant to be the topic of this essay: I suppose a large part of my problem with religious fanatic villains in fiction is so often there’s the implication that if these antagonists just didn’t have religion, then they wouldn’t be antagonists. And I’m not going to stand here and tell you that there aren’t cases of religion of enabling or encouraging dangerous fanatical behavior--that would be a lie. But this happens quite often outside of explicit religious contexts as well. 

For a fairly disturbing example I can think of that isn’t American-flavored politically-charged there is that time a mob lynched, quartered, and beheaded a referee after a soccer game in Brazil, putting his head on a spike on the field in 2013. To be fair (I guess??) and give full disclosure, the referee had stabbed a player. 

I would personally argue that over-hyping a celebrity, politician, or sports event with that kind of fervor is a kind of religion, albeit one that doesn’t want to admit itself as such. Michael Crichton made a similar argument about UFO enthusiasm. Then again Michael Crichton also claims to have had an astral projected hugging session with his deceased father, so maybe that wasn’t the best famous person example for me to use.

The point is: fanaticism isn’t limited to religion. And when I think of terrifying fanatical mobs, religious people aren’t the ones that worry me.

One thing I really liked about the original Assassin’s Creed, and later Legend of Korra, is that while the villains were fanatics (though not of the religious sort), it’s explicitly said that their intentions aren’t bad, they’re just going about it in all the wrong ways. The Templars in Assassin’s Creed all want good things: the poor people off of the streets and taken care of, an end to prejudice and intolerance, the end of the Crusades. But they go about this by trying to burn books, force people to do what they want, and react violently when their plans meet the slightest resistance. Likewise, the villains of Legend of Korra (except for may Unalaq who makes no sense) have good motivations: equality, the unification of mortal and spiritual worlds, the end of the tyranny, and the strengthening of the Earth Kingdom. As Toph points out, they’re just out of balance, trying to accomplish those goals by force and violence. 

I think you rarely see this kind of introspective character writing with religious fanatics. They’re just stupid mooks for the heroes to kill without feeling bad. For instance, the Whitecloaks in Wheel of Time. There’s a scene in Wheel of Time when the wolves that Perrin talks to describe the Whitecloaks as smelling as if they were rabid. And the heroes don’t ever have much problem mowing them down. Given everything that happens, it’s hard to blame them, and the series already has a bajillion Plot threads running so I don’t think it’s too egregious, but these are human beings that are trying to fight evil?

And that’s a bit weird, that the Whitecloaks in that series are just religious fanatics, and the narrative doesn’t really get into their motivations other than that. Because while yes, they see Darkfriends in just about everyone who disagrees with them, the fact is...there are an awful lot of Darkfriends running around in disguise, infiltrating every aspect and level of society. Obviously, they go way too far, but part of the reason for that is that they’re absolutely right to be terrified of the Satanic cult they’re fighting against. They themselves have been infiltrated by the Satanic cult they’re fighting against! I can’t exactly blame them for being paranoid douchebags when that paranoia is seemingly justified.

The books don’t really do that in any vaguely sympathetic way. Which is what I’m asking for here--like I said, I’m not against people using religious zealots as an antagonist, but I’m really tired of it just being treated as a form of madness that no one ever bothers to understand. Why are people pushed into fanatical feelings about religion? Probably the same reasons they are pushed into fanatical feelings about politics or sports or 

If you decide to write an antagonist that’s a religious zealot in a heavily character-driven piece of fiction, then actually write a character. Even if you don’t give the reader all of the details, I shouldn’t look at any character and feel that they’re just filling a role because you felt you needed an antagonist and picked a stock character because you’re too lazy to write actual characters or create a developed backstory for the world they live in. I understand not every story is going to have the time or depth to get into all of that. But half the fantasy epics I read/watch definitely do, but they don’t because it’s a lot easier to just say “these people are insane, that’s all there is to them.”

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What Would Ancient Greek Fantasy Look Like?

 This has been a pretty good week. There was a dragon cake. I have a medical thing on Monday, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll figure out what’s wrong in my guts. I’m a bit apprehensive about that.

But it’s WAITANGI DAY, GUYZ!!

I thought about doing a thing about writing religious extremism, but I didn’t have time to develop that as much as I’d like for this week. 

I’m reading Obsidian Trilogy again, which is good! But it’s fairly within the lines of what people think of as “standard fantasy” and I had this thought in the last two hours of work on Friday. I *think* I’ve expressed something of the like before, but I don’t know that I’ve done a Note about it. So here we go!

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What Would Ancient Greek Fantasy Look Like?

There’s a common sentiment in the fantasy blogosphere about how cool it would be to see fantasy based on things that aren’t medieval Europe. And most of the time the suggestions are the Islamic Golden Age, or feudal Japan, or medieval China, or pre-colonialism Africa, or pre-Columbian Mesoamerica or something. And those are fine! But what about ancient Greece? Yeah, medieval fantasy grabs a lot of monsters from it, and prophecies and sometimes names and plot points. But it’s not really ever based on ancient Greece is it? And I had some thoughts about what a fantasy world based on ancient Greece would look like.

For starters:

ONE: City-States

One of the defining characteristics of the famous periods of ancient Greece were the dominance of city-states. That means that there aren’t really countries as we think of them, there were cities that controlled certain territories. The first times that Greece thought of itself as a country were when an invading force came in from somewhere else.

Now some fantasy books have city-states, but mostly it feels as if they just don’t know how to develop a country outside of its main city so it becomes one by default. They also don’t really get into how utterly weird these city-states are...in regards to each other. Because they share a language and a similar religion, but they don’t all have the same social structure, political framework, or religious traditions. Athens is the one we think of when it comes to ancient Greece, mainly because they had all the writers that survived. So we think of ancient Greece as democratic and philosophical and that’s… not how it all was.

[Also Athens was a democracy if you were a male citizen, and that’s it.]

So Sparta didn’t have a democracy, it had a monarchy with two kings, and also this whole thing with ephors, who could overrule kings on certain decisions. Also women could own property and participate in public life, including sports. Whereas in Athens, women couldn’t leave the house with the escort of a male relative or spouse. 

Different places also had different religious traditions. We think of Greek mythology like a canon, but it wasn’t. You read a mythology book now and it’ll tell you that the Greeks believed that Zeus was raised in Crete as a child, but there’s a tradition that he was actually born in Arcadia. And then there’s a claim that someone found Zeus’s tomb on Crete. Who the dominant gods would have been depended on where you were. Athena’s popular in Athens, obviously, but somewhere like Arcadia liked Pan, whereas in Delphi they clearly favored Apollo.

A fantasy world based on ancient Greece would reflect these differences. Maybe they wouldn’t have real-life parallels exactly like the real historical city-states, but a character from one city would be utterly baffled by the traditions and politics of a different city. Each city would be a different adventure because they’re all so very different from each other despite being superficially of the same culture.

TWO: Religion and Morality

Look, Greek religion is weird. Your high school classes and your Internet friends who like correcting people about it have probably a very simplified view of it. There were gods and spirits for just about everything--those nymphs and satyrs and wind spirits? Those are all very minor gods. Every river, every forest, every city, had a god. Sometimes a minor one, but there was one there. Which means that while the city might have official festivals dedicated to Apollo, there would be smaller local cults to gods that people the next city over have probably never heard of. 

I have a lot of questions about whether what we think of Greek myths were actually literally what the ancient Greeks believed. Like, how much of it was actual religion, how much of it were folk stories, and how much was dramatization? Remember, organized religion the way we think of it didn’t exist yet, not there--so it’s not like there’s a canon.

Morality also didn’t exist the way we think of it. It was there, obviously, but in terms of religion? The gods were good because they stood for order and civilization, whereas the monsters were things of the wild that tried to tear down that order. The notion of Good versus Evil, where the good guys are good because of their own virtues, that’s not as much a thing. Greek heroes and gods were often terrible in the stories to the people around them, but because of their rank in the pecking order and because they were civilized they got a free pass. Zeus is pretty bad as a husband and father by modern standards, but he was a model of fatherhood and kingship in ancient Greece: a man who had total control of his family, arbitrated disputes, could punish them if they misbehaved, and had the power to ward off any threats. That sounds like an abusive father to us, but in a strictly patriarchal society with strict social roles? Eh. 

And religious practices would be a lot weirder than what we think of. There are lots of really big festivals, involving parades, ceremonies, and sometimes mass sacrifices of animals that got blood everywhere. Oracles could turn away people if they weren’t of the right social status, or if the sacred animals didn’t feel like approving of them. People read flocks of birds for signs of the future.

Ancient Greek fantasy would incorporate some of this. I sincerely doubt that an honest interpretation would include the whole “rage at the gods” thing that is oh so common in fiction now. And if it did, it wouldn’t be that widespread--Socrates was killed for not respecting the gods enough, remember? Gods, even foreign gods, were to be respected--though those foreign gods might not be worshipped or maybe they’re assumed to be different forms of the Greek ones--the Greeks taught that the Egyptian gods were just the Olympians in disguise.

THREE: Warfare

Knights on horseback with swords? Nope! The hoplite! The chariot! The main weapon of war was the spear, and the main formation was the phalanx. If the phalanx broke, then you did too, and you fled until you could reform your position or you got away from the battle. And if you could figure out how to apply these advantages, like at Marathon or Thermopylae you’ve got a really formidable strategy on your side. If not… well….

Your sword? That’s your backup weapon if your spear fails or gets lost. The notion of guys dueling with swords wasn’t a Thing yet. When Hector and Achilles fought, they did so with spears. Heck, Zeus’s weapon is a spear. Mind you, that spear is a lightning bolt, but it’s a spear that he throws at his enemies. And not all spears are made for throwing. Quite a few weren’t, because that was your main weapon. And it’s a handy way to make sure enemies don’t get too close--and if they do, you’re hiding behind a massive shield that’s decorated with whatever you want on it (if you’re from a city-state that decorates shields).

Obviously weapons wouldn’t have been made of steel--bronze was the metal of choice for weapons. Which also meant you didn’t have a lot of large blades. A longsword made of bronze would be remarkably heavy, which is why most of the swords you see from ancient Greece are shorter. 

Armor would have had a lot of leather. It was still very protective! But nowhere near all-covering plate armor or chainmail that you see in plenty of fantasy stories.

And hopping back to city-states, whether or not you were a soldier depending on where you lived. Some city-states demanded that all able-bodied men give military service if they were citizens, and if they were slaves they were made to by the men who owned them. And some, like the Spartans, looked down on certain kinds of weapons, like bows.

There were mercenaries, which Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey plays with, though the reality wasn’t that there were a bunch of wandering badasses riding through the countryside and taking part in battles that were little more than Hollywood-style mass brawls.

I’m not saying that the modern wandering hero archetype can’t exist in a story in a fantasy world modeled after ancient Greece, but it would have to keep in mind that they’re not going to just be knights errant in a Mediterranean setting. There might be horseback riding, there might be a sword, but probably most of the battles wouldn’t look anything like what you’d see in Lord of the Rings and there would be much more emphasis on spears than swords.

FOUR: Miscellaneous Crap!

Some other things that I alluded to, or don’t know how to develop into more paragraphs:

-Extreme xenophobia! Everyone who isn’t Greek is a barbarian!

-So much slavery! Mind you, not usually based on race but still owning other people!

-Homosexuality, but often only socially acceptable in cerain ways! Including grown men grooming young boys!

-Olive oil! Feta! Pita bread!

-Sexism!

-Painted statues!

-Nudity in art! Nudity in sports!

-Dragons! Or rather, drakons!

-Here’s a list of monsters from Greek mythology!

-Beards! Curly hair!

-Plagues as signs of the gods’ displeasure!

-The god of the dead not being evil!

And other fun things!

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