I need to do a review of RRR for the movie review blog, but I don’t even know how to begin talking about the film. Because it’s nuts. In a delightful way, but absolutely nuts.
Still working on Horizon Forbidden West and it’s going great. Not sure how to approach the topic of upgrades and picking new equipment up–my instinct is to do that, but also I don’t want to keep using money and resources on things that might get replaced.
And I hate robot kangaroos. Why do they need bombs?!
Also! Public Service Announcement: there’s a GoFundMe for a friend whose daughter has cancer, and I’d appreciate if you took a look and passed it along if you can.
On the Afterlife in Fantasy
Sometimes I think about how different fantasy stories talk about the afterlife.
[Quick disclaimer: I’m not going to talk about The Good Place in this essay because that show is kind of doing its own thing and it’s fantastic. Talking about that would take an essay all on its own.]
One of the things that stuck with me about Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief is when they get to the Underworld, they see that there’s a massive, quick-moving line labeled ‘EZ Death’, and we’re told that they’re the souls of people who get to the afterlife and don’t want to face the Judges of the Underworld, and so skip the process entirely and go straight to the Asphodel Fields, the place where the dead are usually sent if they’re not good enough for Elysium or bad enough for the Fields of Punishment.
“Imagine standing in a field in Kansas. Forever,” is how Grover describes it.
And it’s messing with the Underworld–the Asphodel Fields have to be expanded, which is causing Hades no shortage of headaches. It’s generally presented as bad by the protagonists as well, because a bunch of people are so scared of Judgement that they’re willing to skip even the chance of going to Heaven, essentially.
It also throws me back to Pirates of the Caribbean, in which Davy Jones recruits crew members based on that idea: that there are sailors lost at sea who would otherwise die, but if they are scared of Judgement then they can delay it by joining the crew of the Flying Dutchman. Again, this is presented as a bad thing, to be so scared of death that you’re willing to do whatever to avoid the mere possibility of damnation.
It seems to be a continuation of a common idea in fantasy: that death is going to happen to everyone; the people who can’t deal with that are, at best, suckers who don’t have a grip, and at worst, outright villains. It made rereading Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica frustrating, despite it being a love letter to fantasy and science-fiction throughout the ages, because it desperately does not want any of the main characters to die, and artificially extends their lives through magical shenanigans, even when they’re real life fantasy authors whose work lean towards them being against that sort of thing.
It also makes me a bit worried that more and more, I see fantasy writers painting the afterlife as kind of sucky.
Going back to Riordan, there’s a weird bit in one of the Trials of Apollo books, after one of the more prominent characters gets killed, in which Apollo tells us that actually, Elysium isn’t so great as it’s all cracked up to be. Turns out that being alive is apparently better than being in ancient Greek Heaven. Which basically means that all of the heroic characters who have died in Riordan’s books are getting a crap deal. There is a way out of Elysium, in reincarnation, but the memory is wiped, and as this isn’t Hinduism or Buddhism, it’s not moving towards Nirvana or Enlightenment, it’s just… going through a cycle.
Then you have stories like Supernatural (this is admittedly a ten-year-old example) which, in an attempt to be a bit edgy but also stay within their low budget, has Heaven as getting to live in your own happy memories, but unless you make an effort to move around Heaven, you’re stuck in them. Which is pleasant, but it’s stasis.
[There’s an odd example in Cronus Chronicles in which the afterlife sucks, but it’s a Plot point–one of the motivations of the characters is to make sure that the dead get better treatment in the Underworld.]
This strikes me as this really weird obsession with the physical world, that the world we live in now is the best that can exist–which, in both Riordan’s books and Supernatural, is clearly false because those worlds suck to live in, especially if you are aware of the supernatural world around you. Maybe it’s because I’m religious, but this is a sucky way to look at the world. And more to the point, as I said before, death is something that everyone has to face. In many of these types of stories, it’s something that has already been faced by several characters. So now the writers are telling us, “Yeah, those good, honorable characters that you cared about? Their afterlives suck too. They didn’t even earn a good afterlife.” It’s not like an atheistic setting in which there is no afterlife, it’s worse, because there is one and it’s apparently bunk.
And that’s one way to beat down your audience and make it hard to care about what happens.
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