Horizon Zero Dawn & Flawed Cultures

 Alright I’m going to be real with you the last couple of days this week have been a bit rough, especially since I woke up late (well, relatively so) on Friday and didn’t get time to do all the pre-breakfast stuff I usually do on weekdays, and then the minivan’s CD player hates all of humanity.

Anyway I’ve been thinking I was going to get the “Siege of Paris” expansion for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, but it turns out that it doesn’t really further the story, so now I’m on the fence and not sure what to do (but the season pass is on sale!). In the meantime I’ve been replaying this.

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Horizon Zero Dawn and Flawed Cultures

Maybe I’ve already written about this but my other idea was “Putting modern sensibilities in historical fiction” and I’ve definitely done something like that. I think. Maybe.

It’s been rough.

Something I like about Horizon Zero Dawn is that there are different cultures depicted in the story, and none of them are depicted as the “Good” one. You’ll notice that many times in fantasy or science-fiction, when there are different cultures, there are certain cultures that are meant to be the “Good” one, or a “Bad” one, or make one culture or another appear as better or worse than the others. Sometimes these attempts fall flat. During the rewatch of the BBC Merlin my sister and I pointed out that the Old Religion absolutely sucks and there’s no reason that any of this was sustainable, not least of which because they’re constantly using magic to mind control people and whining that their stick-mobiles are sacred relics.

I think what makes a lot of these fall flat is because the problems that a society is given by the writer, well, they’re things that are so out of the normal frame of reference that it feels artificial. In The Witcher III, for instance, Novigrad is burning mages and nonhumans in the street and everyone’s just fine with it. And to be clear, I’m not saying that public genocide doesn’t happen and get excused by the public--the Chinese government clearly demonstrates that right the fudge now--but it was a bit out of left field for its intended audience when it came out, and I think it feels less like a realistic thing to happen in the worldbuilding and more like an attempt to make the setting edgier.

Horizon… doesn’t feel that cheap.

Alright so our story starts with Aloy growing up as an outcast of the Nora tribe, a matriarchal theocracy of warrior-hunter people who distrust technology. There are exceptions, but for the most part they’re a very dogmatic society. And the player character, Aloy, questions them and their beliefs and dogma all the time, because having been raised as an outcast, she really doesn’t feel much attachment to the culture.

I think this is a brilliant way for an audience to get this perspective. If your viewpoint character was raised as a normal part of the society, it’s hard to make his or her critique of it feel remotely genuine, and not like the writer is imposing outside views on the character. Maddie Smith in Runemarks is similar in this regard, with the outcast protagonist--and the sequel Runelight shows the flipside, with Maggie who is raised as a normal part of the restrictive society and so never has a reason to really question it.

Also I think there’s a point in here somewhere about showing that a matriarchal society isn’t necessarily better and more tolerant than a patriarchal one, too.

And yet even though we are clearly not meant to sympathize with these aspects of the culture, we’re not supposed to hate these people either. Well, not all of them. Resh can go suck a brick. Aloy thoroughly rejects the idea of thinking of herself as Nora--she goes so far as to suggest being called “Aloy Despite the Nora,” instead of “Aloy of the Nora.” When they bow down to her as their savior at the end of the game, she’s disgusted. But she doesn’t hate them, just the way the society made them, and even then they’re not all bad. Rost and Teersa are fairly strict in following dogma, and yet aren’t bad people. Rost is willing to leave Aloy to avoid her breaking tribal law about talking to outcasts once she has a way out of her shunned status, and yet he’s the most heroic member of the tribe in the game. 

Teersa, one of the High Matriarchs, is fairly loyal to her religion. There’s a bit of dialogue I like in which Aloy presents some information that seemingly contradicts her religious teaching. Instead of declaring Aloy a liar, or deciding that her religion’s a hollow lie (which is how I think lesser writers tend to handle this kind of thing), she’s shaken, but she ultimately decides that there is something going on beyond her understanding.

The Nora are the main culture we really get to know, because that’s what Aloy grew up around and the story starts there. But we see the other cultures, and while there are plenty of good people in all of them, none of them are perfect either, and Aloy frequently calls out their BS. The Carja are recently reforming after being a brutal, caste-based warrior society that frequently enslaved and sacrificed people from other tribes. Their king is pretty progressive, but he can’t throw out all the old rules at once, and so plenty of sexism, classism, and xenophobia still remain among members of the culture. Also there are war criminals hiding out there. The Oseram that Aloy meets are fine, although they don’t understand a lot of social cues and have a habit of using their building skillz to make giant war machines. And it’s implied that the Oseram living the Claim, their homeland, have pretty strict ideas about gender roles. And the Banuk are nuts, even outside the whole ‘the shaman is weaving Machine cables through his skin’ thing, because they hold this crazy idea that if a hunter can’t survive out in the winter wilds for a few nights, then they’re just not cut out for living, y’know?

None of the societies are perfect, by a long shot. And they’re imperfect in ways that feel very human and not at all tacked-on or over-the-top. They’re things that a lot of people have to deal with today: cultures with strict gender roles, or people romanticizing a very troubled history, or perpetuating harmful mindsets in the name of ‘survival of the fittest.’ It’s all shown to us through the filter of a science fiction story, but I think it speaks to real life in a way that most speculative fiction doesn’t.

And I think that’s pretty cool.

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Good & Evil in Storytelling

 I tend to avoid making my Saturday Notes about current events because I don’t like talking about topics that are too controversial, but I was seriously considering for a while talking about vaccination and the rhetoric surrounding the anti-vaccination crowd and how utterly stupid so much of it is. There are people out there who are utterly convinced that the COVID vaccine has about a 50/50 chance of killing you and it infuriates me that this nonsense exists out there on the net.

Mostly by people I know on Tumblr, so don’t go after any of my Facebook friends.

I also considered, because I finished reading Odinn’s Child by Tim Severin, talking about why a  lot of stories about Norsemen, especially in their conflict with Christian Saxons and such, don’t really work for me, but that’s probably going to come out in discussion posts about Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.

Anyhow, instead we’re going to talk about morality? I guess?

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Good & Evil in Storytelling

There’s this attitude I’ve seen expressed about Star Wars (admittedly mostly in articles and think pieces and not really in fandom circles) that basically says this: we’re all tired of the way things are, and we’d enjoy these stories a lot more if they weren’t about Jedi anymore. Why? Because we’re all tired of the moral rigidity of Jedi, and the whole notion of there  being a Good/Evil dichotomy that defines the setting.

First off: this is stupid. Almost no one in the fandom is tired of Jedi, and there’s one reason for that is because they’re the guys with the laser swords. I know that some people in Lucasfilm have a hard time grasping that nearly everyone’s Star Wars fantasy is swinging a lightsaber around, but that’s what almost everyone thinks about when they think about Star Wars. It’s great that there are a diversity of opinions in the fandom and that Star Wars is a big enough universe that you can tell almost any kind of story in it. But let’s not pretend that this “we’re tired of stories about Jedi” feeling is universal among the audience. ‘Cause it ain’t.

Second: Why does that Good/Evil dichotomy bother anyone?

And it makes me think of that one statement made by the producers of the upcoming Wheel of Time series was not going to be a straightforward Good vs. Evil story, it was going to be a story about complicated motivations and people. And that is also dumb as grits because the whole point of the story is that the Dragon Reborn is the one destined by the Creator to fight the final battle against the Dark One, Shai’tan. Who is not a metaphor or anything, he’s actually Satan, or at least this version of the world’s incarnation of him, or something (Wheel of Time is a weird setting), the cause of all evil in the world. Why the fudge would would the adaptation not be about a straightforward battle of Good and Evil?

I think that because the villain behind everything is so straightforwardly evil right from his name that the story can’t have any moral complexity in it at all--Limyaael makes this criticism of Wheel of Time and I think she misses the mark here. Because yes, the Dark One is pure Evil Incarnate, but his servants, who take up much more page time, are complex characters with their own motivations and conflicts. There are in fact Darkfriends who we see questioning or even abandon the Dark One, and each of the Forsaken has a personal reason for choosing to side with Evil against the Dragon. Likewise, the heroes aren’t all perfect people by virtue of fighting the Dark One, they often do stupid or morally ambiguous things in the pursuit of trying to defeat the bad guys.

Also this is a big budget adaptation of a massive fantasy series that practically defined the genre for a while and it’s coming out in November and so I’m wondering why we don’t have a trailer? Someone answer me that!?

The notion that the stories about the Jedi are too dogmatic also kind of frustrates me because A) that’s a Plot Point and B) we do see Luke, the paragon of everything good in the Jedi Order by Return of the Jedi, get tempted to do evil several times over. And he sometimes does really dumb things in trying to help his friends. We see this again and again in Star Wars: heroes who are tempted to the Dark Side because they have good intentions.

Ezra’s flirtation with the Dark Side in Star Wars: Rebels is built out of the desire to protect his friends. He hates the Sith and their Empire so he’s willing to do pretty sketch things to stop them, but that hatred is born out of the desire to protect the people he cares about. And it makes the motivation feel very real. Sadly this subplot isn’t wrapped up in a way that’s too satisfactory, because the show was busy with Thrawn’s plot, but I get it, ‘cause, you know, Thrawn is a cool villain.

Obi-Wan does say, after all, “Only the Sith see in absolutes.” Which is a line I’m still trying to work out the meaning of, truth be told, but it clearly indicates that even in Star Wars things aren’t so straightforward. I suspect that a large chunk of hatred of Jedi from some segments of the fandom is born more out of an intense dislike of organized religion in general and monastic orders in particular more than anything else--especially evident on the insistence I see somewhere that “Well, obviously Jedi have casual sex, why wouldn’t they?”

I’ll admit that I also can’t much complain about the villains in Star Wars being obviously evil because… they’re fascists and corrupt corporations. There are things we can critique about execution, sure, but it’s not like I’m gonna be sold on the “But what if the fascists and corrupt corporations actually weren’t all evil?” idea that’s implied by the complaint that Star Wars needs to have more complex morality.

[There is an episode in The Clone Wars that implies that the Separatists aren’t all evil and some are quite noble, and I’m okay with that. But it’s also undermined by the rest of the series in which the Separatists are run by a Satanic space wizard and cabal of corporations, and all their agents and officers in the field are war criminals and mad scientists.]

And I know that I’ve said this before, but I think there are excellent stories you can do with Lawful Good protagonists, and still subvert audience expectations. One of the delightful things about Kipo & the Age of Wonderbeasts is that the title character is almost unfailingly optimistic and believes the best in everyone she meets, despite living in a dystopia defined by prejudice. And everyone around her thinks she’s crazy to be like this, and yet she makes it work, because she’s able to rebuild the world by virtue of seeing the good there that no one else can manage to see.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with having a straightforward Good vs. Evil story. There’s nothing wrong with having there be something that is actually, definitively Evil in the story for the Good heroes to overcome. Now yes, this can be dull and boring if you do it badly, and if you don’t do anything original with the story. But in and of itself it isn’t bad. And I’m frustrated by seeing opinions that basically try to brush it aside as limited storytelling when it really isn’t. At all.

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Narnia is Not Tame

 I have watched Trollhunters: Rise of the Titans and I had thoughts about that ending; I was going to revolve this Note around that. But on the off chance that one of the three people who reads these Saturday Notes, y’know, cares, I didn’t want to spoil a movie that was just out. For the record though if you don’t watch the Netflix series, Trollhunters is actually pretty darn good? If you’re into kids’ action series.

Friday was a rough day at work too, so I kind of want to crawl into a hole and hide for the rest of my days. But hopefully my dad and I will get to see The Green Knight this weekend, and hopefully we’ll enjoy it.

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Narnia is Not Tame

I reread The Voyage of the Dawn Treader this week, and that book is weird. But we’ll talk about that in the Book Diary post. Another thought I had while reading though was that very often I see The Chronicles of Narnia talked about as if it’s a cutesy story about a saccharine group of kids having a safe romp through Candyland where nothing bad ever happens. This is perpetuated by blockheads like Lev Grossman--in his book The Magicians (or as I sometimes think of it, “Fantasy Sucks and You Suck for Liking It”), the sequence in his Narnia analogue, Fillory, is filled with the protagonists being astonished at actual bad things happening.

This attitude towards the books reminds me of a complaint I made a few years ago, in which I pointed out that so many times people making their own takes on fairy tales make the claim, or their reviews make the claim that it’s “Like a fairy tale, BUT DARKER!!!” Someone with a passing knowledge of fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood or the Three Little Pigs knows that there are versions of the story where good characters get devoured by an angry wolf.

Cue my friend’s admonishment: “But dude, fairy tales ARE dark.”

There are plenty of bad things that happen in the Narnia novels. Sometimes they happen to good people! There is plenty of violence as well! To be sure, these are children’s books, and so most of the worst of it isn’t on-page, but there are plenty of horrible things that happen. Do we forget that Voyage of the Dawn Treader sees our heroes nearly trapped in slavery? That Prince Caspian tells us that Miraz had all his political enemies assassinated, executed, or set up to die? That Peter beheads a Telmarine lord coming at him in the same book? That the monsters that try to summon the White Witch are killed as well? That there are giants eating a talking animal in The Silver Chair (and the heroes had unwittingly already bitten into it, much to their revulsion)? That Jadis killed her entire universe in The Magician’s Nephew? And then in LWW she goes and kills Jesus?!

[Again, not a metaphor for Jesus, actual Jesus. Not an allegory. Stop saying that.]

And the heroic characters are far from perfect people! Edmund is the obvious one, but there are plenty of others. In Voyage of the Dawn Treader the characters grapple with their baser instincts quite a lot. Caspian’s reaction upon finding a pool that turns things into gold is to try to claim it for the crown and make himself the wealthiest man in history. He also tries to abandon his country to go to Aslan’s Country, which every other character calls him out on. In The Horse and His Boy, Aravis has to be point-blank told by Aslan that disregarding someone’s pain isn’t okay even if that someone is lower class than you--something that Shasta is pretty shocked she hasn’t already worked out.

There is plenty of material in front of us to show that this isn’t a fun ride all the way through. There is a lot of struggle, a lot of violence, and a lot of battle. Because we don’t get graphic descriptions of the violence in front of us I think many people think that it isn’t there, but that’s just silly. Somehow, people get the notion that because they are Christian books written for children, they obviously must be dumbed down.

We know that children’s stories, especially old-fashioned children’s stories, are not usually that dumbed down, right? There’s a lovely quote that I think is from a Terry Pratchett book (and I can’t remember which one, for the life of me) about how adults try to make stories appropriate for children by removing the violence and blood, but that it turns out children don’t really mind that violence, as long as it happens to the correct parties. Or a statement by Neil Gaiman talking about Coraline, in that children read it as an adventure and love it, whereas adults find it all terrifying and think that their kids will have nightmares about it all.

The idea that Chronicles of Narnia is a saccharine and cutesy story is one of those ideas that has less to do with text and more to do with assumptions made by those who have either forgotten the source material, or never bothered to get acquainted with it in the first place. If you like graphic descriptions of on-page violence in stories and are disappointed by the lack of it in these novels, that’s a different criticism altogether.

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Why is The Flash afraid of parenthood?

 It’s late on Friday and I haven’t written this yet, but I had this idea of talking about media perceptions of the media, inspired by watching State of Play last weekend. I decided instead to hash out my feelings on The Flash, because that’s something I haven’t written much about. At least I don’t think so.

But! I was thinking of seeing a movie this weekend. Snake Eyes? Raya and the Last Dragon? Who knows.

Also I finished The Goblin Emperor and that’s fantastic.

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Why is The Flash afraid of parenthood?

No worries, I’m not going to go into heavy season finale spoilers. I think. But I don’t know if anyone who reads these (all three of you, tops) even care that much, but I’m not going to say what happens in the finale. 

So with the wrap-up of season seven, there are now two seasons of The Flash in which Barry and Iris meet their speedster offspring from the future, and this season had this whole thing about accidentally creating the personifications of fundamental forces of the universe (it’s weird), and acting like Barry and Iris are their parents because they created them? And how through that they learn to be parents?

Kay, so let me back up a bit. In season five (or rather the end of season four), we’re introduced to Nora, Barry and Iris’s child from the future. She’s a major character all season. And yet we don’t really see Barry and Iris having a conversation about having kids, or trying to have kids, until about a year and half later in season seven. And there’s that storyline with the fundamental forces of the universe which paints them as parents of a group of four adult people. And then the last few episodes of the season has Nora and Bart appear from the future, and--

...does The Flash not want to actually deal with children? Or families raising young children?

And normally I wouldn’t ask this, but there’s another couple of the show, Joe and Cecille, who had a baby a couple of seasons ago, and guys, that baby’s gone. I don’t think we’ve seen her on screen in years. Occasionally, it’s mentioned that the baby’s been put to bed, or is being taken care of by some offscreen character. Right now it might be a pandemic thing, but even before the pandemic the baby hasn’t appeared. I’ll admit that I’m not good with names so maybe this means nothing, but I don’t remember this baby’s name at all.

Arrow didn’t have this problem. Yeah, John Diggle’s kid was retconned from a girl to a boy because Flashpoint (if you didn’t watch The Flash that must have been so confusing and annoying), but the kid was mentioned. A lot. And actually had appearances. Diggle’s family role as a father is an important part of his character arc. He was often screwed by the show’s writing, but so was everyone, and that was still a big part of this character.

Joe and Cecille’s kid is… I think Daisy’s kid has more of a presence in The Great Gatsby.

I wonder if the writers of this show don’t want to deal with young children. And that’s something easy enough to screw up, and people complain about dealing with child actors, I guess, so I kind of understand being hesitant to do those kinds of storylines. It’s much easier in a show heavily featuring time travel to just have the kids appear fully grown, and we don’t have that mess of young children growing up and being a nuisance.

And yeah, sometimes people marry after there are already kids and they’ve grown up. It happens. And those stories can be told and have a place! But that’s not what’s going on here. Barry and Iris are going to have children, they just haven’t yet because… I don’t know, we don’t want to do that? They’re a married couple who want to start a family and they are destined to have kids we just haven’t gotten there yet because the show has been edging around the subject for a while.

They sit and talk about being proud of their children and how they turned out, and they haven’t done any of the raising part! There’s some mentorship, sure, but they didn’t raise these kids. It’s a plot point in season five, that Nora never knew her father, but they’re expecting these characters to slip into parent roles when they haven’t even had the kids they’re talking to yet what the fudge.

Maybe they decided with Black Lightning and Superman & Lois (and Arrow covered some of this too) that the whole idea of raising a family with being a superhero is already covered with their CW shows. But there’s a ton they can do with this! With small children speedsters! With being superhero parents! With being a biracial family!

Right now it just seems that they are really, really scared to have the lead characters actually be parents for children. That’s weird. Why even write this into the story if you’re not going to deal with it? It’s something that you can’t ignore, and the show is trying to do just that anyway. A major character has a toddler and that toddler hasn’t appeared on screen in ages! That’s not normal! If you’re going to explicitly write these characters as raising children, then they should be doing that! This needs to be addressed!

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Black Widow Thoughts

 It’s been a week guys and I am in a weird place, mentally, that is not all that great. I’m behind on a lot of things--the Buffy Blog, movie reviews, shows, the sporking… and I don’t know how soon that will be caught up. And it’s Camp NaNoWriMo which, uh, these days doesn’t generally go great for me.

I had a thought about talking about adaptation, but it sounded like something I’d done for a Saturday Note before, and looking through my Google Drive it looks like I have. So instead I’m going to ramble a bit about whether or not I want to see Black Widow.

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Thoughts on Whether or Not to See Black Widow

I know I’ve probably said before that I am a bit worn out on superhero media in general and Marvel in particular. There are projects I’m planning on paying attention to because they stick out in a way that interests me--Loki, because I like that character, and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings because I like kung-fu movies. But at this point I cannot say that something being Marvel is in and of itself enough to attract me to watch something.

In short, I’m having trouble mustering enough emotion to care about Black Widow.

And this is a shame, because Black Widow should have been a movie I would have been really excited about. And I’m probably the 500th person to say this, but I would have been excited for it if it came out in like 2013. This movie should have come out years ago. By a longshot. Scarlett Johansson has been a bankable action movie star, and people were clamoring for more of her in movies, and enough people loved the Marvel Cinematic Universe without question. 

To be clear, enough people love Marvel right now that it still did great, even though the world is the way it is right now. But I can’t get myself to care. And that’s rough. I remember watching Endgame and wondering if I was watching it because  I actually wanted to or because I wanted to be in the same place the rest of pop culture was. I shouldn’t have to feel like I have to watch a movie to be in the same place as everyone else when it comes to pop culture. Any time that someone tells me that I absolutely have to watch this show that everyone else is watching, my first instinct is to tell that person to shove it.

I sort of feel that way about Black Widow. By all the accounts I’ve read and watched, it’s a good movie. But I am not that excited about seeing a movie about Natasha Romanoff, especially since Marvel killed her off in Endgame. I’m a bit less harsh on her death than a lot of critics, but I still recognize it as not a great choice, especially considering that she’s not really given a funeral scene.

I don’t care. And I feel bad that I don’t care. And I feel bad that I feel bad, and that’s stupid because why the fudge should I feel bad about what I do or don’t watch in theaters?

I did say I’m in a weird place right now at the beginning, didn’t I?

Like I said, I’m behind on a lot of things, and there are a bunch of movies I feel like I should go and watch, so adding another to the list feels like I’m adding more pressure to myself. And I don’t need that.

This is probably a very stupid Saturday Note, but I’ve had a rough week and I didn’t know what else to write about.

I am pretty sure that I will go ahead and watch Gunpowder Milkshake.

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Excalibur in Assassin's Creed: Valhalla

 I’m going to be busy this weekend, and July is Camp NaNoWriMo, so there was some question if there was going to even BE a Saturday Note this week. But it appears that there is! Albeit maybe a short one. We’ll see.

I have a lot of thoughts about Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and I’m going to be writing more and more about it as I can, but right now in a rush this is a thing that came to me.

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Excalibur in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla

Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla takes place during the Viking invasion of England. You play as a Viking. For whatever reason, the game tries to play it as if you’re the good guy in this, and drawing deliberate parallels to the immigrant experience despite, you know, being required by the game to burn and pillage churches in order to build up your settlement. Because why not!

One of the longer side quests you can complete leads you to the “Treasures of Britain,” small caves with puzzles and traps that reward you with a small stone marked with an image of one of the Treasures of Britain. After you collect all the stones, if you go to a certain cave, marked as ‘Myrddin’s Cave’ on the map, you find a massive cavern with a First Civilization site, and some exploring will lead you to find Excalibur in a stone.

[Excalibur in Assassin’s Creed is, of course, a Sword of Eden.]

Put the stones in the right slots, and you can draw Excalibur. “Is this the sword that Britons call Excalibur?” Eivor will say with wonder in his voice. And then you can wield Excalibur, a massive greatsword that can release bursts of light that will stun your enemies.

And that’s… kind of it. It felt really hollow to me.

Excalibur doesn’t mean anything to Eivor. Eivor isn’t English, or Welsh, or any sort of British. It’s not as if we ever see him hear about the stories of King Arthur and show interest in learning more, or acquiring his sword. It’s not that King Arthur gets much mention in the game at all. The sword is there because it takes place in England that the makers thought it would be a fun little bonus. But it doesn’t mean anything.

I remember seeing that in-game, it was revealed that the Assassins left the British Isles at some point in the 5th century. I thought it was going to be a running mystery sidequest that you’d unlock answers to as you investigated the abandoned Assassin Bureaus throughout Britain. That you’d get answers. And this all lined up, roughly with both the fall of the Roman Empire and the time when King Arthur stories were supposed to take place. And according to the novel Assassin’s Creed: Heresy, Arthur was a member of the Templars/Order of the Ancients, the enemies of the Assassins (albeit a very idealistic one). I thought that there would be a reveal that in the wake of the Roman Empire’s collapse and absence from Britain, the Order of Ancients under Arthur would have wiped out the Assassins to the best of their abilities, cementing him in the backstory as an important figure and justifying Excalibur in the game.

Except none of that is there. The Assassins left because they were fighting Roman imperialism but didn’t have good PR, and after the Romans left they had very little reason or motivation to stay. Nobody wanted them around, and they weren’t very popular, so they left.

That’s it.

And so we have Eivor, the man or woman (depending on what the player chooses) who came to this land specifically to conquer and subjugate its people, take one of its most famous legendary treasures for him/herself for the sake of having a cool new weapon, after stumbling onto all of the clues leading up to it. Eivor doesn’t want it, Eivor doesn’t need it, Eivor has only kind of heard of it, but it’s there for player recognition.

To be clear of what happens here: Eivor the colonizer comes in and takes a sacred treasure that holds no personal value to him/her, but because it looked cool takes it up and is now his/her personal artifact.

Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla is full of examples of the writers being completely oblivious to the implications of playing as an invader, saying “Most of our sources were written by their enemies, so mustn’t have been so bad.” The fandom’s mostly pretty clueless about it too, acting like it’s perfectly fine because “Of course it’s from the Vikings’ perspective, obviously they see it differently.” The fact that you’re actively oppressing other people, taking their land and wealth, burning their holy sites--all things that are explicitly shown in-game--is handwaved and barely mentioned by the sympathetic Saxon characters, who are tolerant towards you doing all of this. Very rarely is it even hinted that those are exactly the people collaborating with the colonizing armies.

Excalibur is the example that sticks out to me because I did that part recently, and it baffles me that there’s no story attached to the artifact in-game. It’s just another doodad for players to pick up. It doesn’t mean ANYTHING to our character. It’s just a colonizer who doesn’t care about anyone else’s culture or lifestyle grabbing someone else’s shiny artifact because it looks cool.

I hate that.

American Fantasy

 Camp NaNoWriMo has begun! And I’m probably screwing it up quite terribly. But there we are.

I have started the next Wheel of Time book. So far it’s going okay. The prologue actually felt like it was moving Plot forward, instead of setting up more stuff. This was the last book Robert Jordan wrote before he died, so I think he got the hint that he should get a move on with things.

Started up Horizon Zero Dawn again. I will probably come back to Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla for an expansion or two, but right now I think I should step away and try to replay one of the greats again.

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American Fantasy--Where Is It?

I did lists for Celtic, Greek, and Roman fantasies, and about what I would expect in those. But because the 4th of July is coming up, and also I read this blog post, I was thinking about the fact that while there are plenty of American authors writing fantasy, there isn’t that much fantasy that’s overtly influenced by American history.

This is a bit weird and simultaneously not.

See, even though fantasy can technically be anything because it’s fantasy, there are some expectations about fantasy, and they tend to fall into certain trends. And so that leans towards stories and settings based off of medieval European societies. And even though we have seen plenty of fantasy stories branch out from that to historical periods of Africa or Asia, I still don’t see that many fantasy settings that have much American influence.

There are exceptions--but they’re rare. I know Soldier Son trilogy by Robin Hobb draws on American expansion and colonialism, especially in the west, though the government structure is a monarchy. Children of Blood and Bone is set in a fantasy analogue for historical Nigeria, but the author explicitly admitted that a large part of the setting’s conflict is based on law enforcement killing black Americans. And the republic of Republic City in Legend of Korra ends up becoming something closer to an American republic by electing a president.

[For a kind of ‘barely there at all’ example, Paolini was inspired for his setting by living in the mountains in Montana.]

Still, there are a lot of separate elements but not really one that you look at it and say, “That’s based off of a part of American history!” Soldier Son comes the closest, because it very clearly has American army and Native American parallels, but the laws of inheritance that drive a large chunk of Plot and give the series its title don’t connect to American ideas of class that well.

To be clear, that doesn’t make any of the above-mentioned works bad (though Soldier Son wasn’t very good, in my opinion), but it does mean that we don’t really have any fantasy worlds (that I can think of) that contain really good fantasy counterparts to American history. And that’s a bit weird, considering how many fantasy authors and readers are in the United States. No, we don’t have a medieval past, but we don’t need one.

I want to be clear that there is plenty of urban fantasy set in the United States. But high fantasy is what I’m talking about here, where the entire world in question is fictional, rather than fantasy elements in the “real” world. There are also plenty of science-fiction stories that feature more influences of American history and culture--in part because I think that it’s a genre more obviously known for social commentary, and people talking about American history, because it’s more recent, tend to make some commentary about the country, its values, and its politics.

There’s no reason that governments in high fantasy worlds can’t be republics. They don’t have to be monarchies! Republics existed before the Enlightenment! And you would think, with talk about using fiction to talk about current events being a very popular notion, there are a lot of things you can do in fantasy worlds to talk about racism, class struggle, immigration, colonialism being painted as not-colonialism, and all kinds of other things that affect Americans today.

I want to see fantasy with republics. I want to see fantasy based off colonial America, and the Wild West, and gangster Chicago, and Southern Gothic stories, and weird cryptid stories, and Applachia, and Spanish California, and any and all of Florida. It doesn’t have to be the same as the historical periods with the names switched out or anything, but I think those are great inspirations for settings and no one’s really doing anything with them. And I think using the structure of the US government, or something like it, would be an interesting addition to a fantasy setting.

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