I should finish my T.A. Barron re-read soon, then continue with BPRD and Discworld. Still Dragon Ageing, and trying to find my footing in Thedas. Any tips would be welcome there.
Oh! And Mondaybor Day is Labor Day.
I recently tried reading a fantasy parody novel that I picked up for free on Kindle as a promotion for an independently-published author. It’s called A Court of Bovines and Destiny. It’s about a cow that pulls a sword out of a stone to become the Chosen One. The original title referenced Arthurian legend, rather than the Sarah J. Maas reference that doesn’t really mean anything, as far as I can tell.
It was… bad.
There’s an abundance of obvious swearing from the get-go, Buddy’s characterization is all over the map, and most of the “jokes” throughout are not-even-veiled pop culture references. I kid you not, one of the punchlines is a shout-out to Potter Puppet Pals. The best I can say is that this book was better than Kill the Farm Boy, though that’s not precisely high praise.
When I write essays like this, people think I’m against comedies, or against parodies of fantasy, and that’s not true. I’m against bad comedy. I decided this Saturday Note would be ground rules for parody fantasy. I tried not to be too strict, because I don’t think too many rules are productive for this sort of thing, or writing in general? But there are some things that just don’t work.
ONE: Have a Point
This is one thing that Court of Bovines actually did correctly: there’s a Plot to the novel, and it keeps things moving forward. This is the main failing of Kill the Farm Boy. It has neither Plot nor Point, other than that things happen, only for the authors in the end to declare that this was a “Deconstruction of the Genre as a White Male Power Fantasy”. This is incredibly frustrating because that is not a bad idea for a story, this just wasn’t it (imagine a fantasy where the villain is an entitled “hero” who thinks he’s the protagonist because he fits the stereotypical criteria and goes on to ruin everyone’s lives).
I sort of understand the urge here: instead of an epic quest, we have our comedic characters bumbling around and having misadventures! That’s funny, right? Except soon enough the audience is going to try to figure out why they’re continuing this story. If the characters have no reason to be doing anything at all, you better be telling some darn good jokes, or else barely anyone will kill reading/watching.
Discworld is peak fantasy parody! And every book has a Plot. They’re not all strong Plots, but Pratchett manages to make them feel strong because of the way he tells them.
TWO: Swearing is Not Humor (Neither are Sex or Drugs)
In Court of Bovines, when Buddy the Cow draws the sword from the stone and gets the power of speech, the first thing he says is “What the f***?” This would be amusing, if it weren’t for the fact that he had already been swearing in his inner monologue. Here’s a fun fact: if you want swearing to be funny, you can’t use it all the time, because then it just gets tiring. Even if the audience isn’t tired of it, it isn’t special anymore.
Also, given he’s a cow that just learned how to talk, how would he know that word?
Swearing in parody fantasy works as humor only when it sticks out. If everyone is always foul-mouthed, then it doesn’t work as a joke. It’s just a normal sentence.
Likewise! Sex and drugs (including alcohol). Putting these in a story don’t make them funny. I’m not saying sex or drug jokes can’t work, but if the joke is, “Look, these characters are interested in sex!” or “Haha! He’s drunk!” Well… okay, so what? In some cases, like with Buddy the Cow, it’s just strange, because why is he sexually interested in characters who… aren’t cows? He’ll tell us another character is ridiculously hot, but what that even means to a cow is left blank. I’m not amused, I’m just confused as to what that says.
Building off of that…
THREE: Decide How Ridiculous This is in the Context of the Story
The book cannot decide how ridiculous the concept of a cow hero is. At first everyone is very surprised, but as the story goes on, probably to keep from getting repetitive, plenty of characters are oddly receptive to the idea that there’s a talking cow walking around going on a quest. Barely anyone questions it.
Okay, fine, it takes place in a magical world where plenty of weird stuff happens. So either a talking cow on a quest is insane, or it’s not.
Parody tends to focus on ridiculous situations, sure, but is it insane for the world it’s in? Something like Thursday Next runs on absurdity, except while it’s absurd for the audience, much of the weirder Book World things are normal for the characters, and the humor comes from them taking something ridiculous as seriously as they do, like a Mimefield. Cow Book, on the other hand, tries to bank on how ridiculous its premise is, only for it to not decide if it’s in-universe ridiculous or not. I mean, talking cows, are they weird or not? Considering there’s a country of evil talking ponies, it shouldn’t be, but the book frustratingly can’t make up its mind how the people of the world see these things.
FOUR: Hard Rules Need to be in Place
As usual, I’m not saying that all magic needs very strict rules, though it needs some. We should have some idea of how things work, though, so that the parody doesn’t devolve into a Random Events Plot by virtue of magic just… doing crap that we had no way of knowing it could do before it turned the story upside-down. If you’re doing a subversion at the end, that can work, but bad parody fantasy doesn’t tend to work that way.
Discworld books sometimes spend a lot of time laying down rules, only for the end to show them come into play–or to be subverted by something unexpected. And it works!
The other thing, though, is character consistency. Buddy the Cow will often make an aside in his narration to say, “I don’t understand this human concept, I’m a cow after all.” Only for him to talk and make references that don’t make sense for him to know. To use a tamer example, one character talks about money, and he tells that guy he doesn’t understand it because as a cow, he never had to deal with that. Only a page later, he makes a reference to how service workers are underpaid. Okay, how would he know that if he doesn’t understand money, as he just explained? It took me out of the story. Again when he makes crude jokes or raunchy situations that a cow wouldn’t have any experience with.
FIVE: The Story Should Not be Built on Pop Culture References
[buries heads in hands]
The main villain of the Cow Book is Geoff Gezos. He runs a corporation called Hamazon. The queen of the evil pony nation is named Sarah Jessica Parker, but it’s one word. There’s an annoying rodent named Feelon Muskrat that wants to control all the robot birds and what they say. One of the supporting party members is named Jane Phonda. When sailing across an ocean, the party is attacked by a white supremacist whale named ‘Moby-Prick’.
I guarantee you that reading all that there is funnier than how the actual book delivers it.
It’s not that you cannot use pop culture references and be a good story–Discworld uses them in spades–it’s that the story cannot rely on them to work. If you don’t understand the pop culture references in Discworld, you might miss the joke, but the book will still work, for the most part (unless the subject of the novel IS a pop culture reference, like Moving Pictures, but in that case you kind of have to go with it). If you just throw them in for jokes, or for the actual Plot, I don’t feel like I’m reading a story, I feel like I’m reading your weird disjointed commentary about everything going on in the world. I feel like you should get off the Internet and do something in life.
References are not jokes! References are not a story! Especially since some of them I can see a mile away, once I know what the reference is. Do better.
You guys see why I didn’t finish this book?
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