On Character Chemistry

For reasons that are not clear to me, I randomly got annoyed again at that episode of Extra Credits titled something like “Why are there so few sci-fi games?” because there are oodles and oodles of science-fiction games, especially in the mainstream (Halo, Mass Effect, Wolfenstein, Metroid, Metal Gear Solid, Gears of War, Dead Space, Fallout, Assassin’s Creed, and Portal to name a few) but the Extra Credits writers kind of brush those away with “Well, they’re not real sci-fi so they don’t count.” And that’s… really silly. 

Anyhow let’s talk about writing romance in your stories.

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On Character Chemistry

Something that I think can be obvious for people who have tried writing romantic arcs in fiction but maybe no one else seems to get: writing romance is hard, man.

I recently read the first couple of books in the Newbury and Hobbes series, which is a group of books set in an alternate steampunk Victorian London. Our two title characters are Maurice Newbury and Veronica Hobbes; the former is an agent of the Queen of England who investigates special cases and the latter is his assistant. There’s also a copious amount of shiptease between them, which is kind of a shame because they don’t actually have any chemistry.

It’s hard to define what is or isn’t chemistry. But to put simply, it’s a bit like this: how believable it is that these two people are genuinely attracted to each other. Stereotypically, a lot of action movies don’t really care about this: you have two leads of opposite genders, and at the end they get together because that’s how these things go. But I’d like to think it’s been dialed back a bit in recent years, with more movie makers being aware that they’ve got to sell the idea that these two characters want to make out and more critics being critical of when they can’t buy it.

And I think if we’re being fair, not all works of fiction really need that much chemistry between the two leads. Yeah, it’s preferable if you’re going to have a romantic arc that it’s clear these two characters like each other, but there’s a lot of fiction in which romance isn’t the point, so I kind of get that for many writers it takes the bench while the main part of the story takes center stage.

Let’s take Terry Pratchett for instance. Sir Terry Pratchett was not a romance author; he did satirical fantasy novels (and also a lot of other stuff, but we’re focusing on Discworld right now). There are romantic relationships in his books, but they’re not the main focus of most of them, and many of them aren’t particularly that deep or well-developed. Thief of Time ends with the implication that Lobsang and Susan get together despite that relationship kind of not really being that strong. Three of the Tiffany Aching books tease a relationship between Tiffany and Roland only to drop it abruptly in I Shall Wear Midnight to be replaced by Preston.

And this doesn’t mean Pratchett’s a bad author, because he’s not. I’d dare say that he’s probably the cleverest writer of the English language in the last few decades. But he’s not really that good at writing romance, which is good because he never wanted to be. My point is this: don’t feel too bad if you don’t nail this, especially if that’s not your intent or purpose.

What makes this different than Newbury and Hobbes though, is that the entire steampunk series is built around and named after these two characters, and their relationship. So the little bits of ship tease strike me as very odd, because if it weren’t for these hamfisted moments I’d never really get the idea that these two chuckleheads like each other as anything other than close colleagues. There are moments when people talking to Hobbes say things like “Oh Sir Newbury? He’s handsome, isn’t he?” and she blushes and is all like, “It’s not like that.” And when Hobbes gets captured and the villain rubs it in Newbury’s face, he goes ballistic and is all like “UNHAND HER YOU FIEND!” and when he saves her she’s barely conscious and he’s holding her close and is all like “I can’t bare to lose you!” 

And I just… don’t get it? What do you guys like about each other? They don’t have common interests outside of their jobs: Newbury’s super into the occult and he’s an opium addict, neither of which Hobbes has been seen to be supportive of. Hobbes’s own personal life subplot is more concerned about her sister in an asylum. They don’t really hang out that much in their off time. So why? Why do these two supposedly falling in love?

[shrugs] I dunno. But they are, I guess. And so at the end of the second book, when Newbury finds out something and he’s like, “GASP! Maybe she doesn’t love me!” (and some other stuff) I don’t really care. 

You cannot just point to the characters and say “These two are falling in love.” Writers need to do more than that. There needs to be a reason to think that these two people are bonding, that they like spending time together and enjoy talking to each other about things other than work. This is one of the reasons, I think, back when Twilight was big, that “Team Jacob” got so much traction with the fandom: Bella and Jacob actually seem to like hanging out together! Whereas with Edward they just kind of moped and talked about how much they were in love, and that’s a lot of telling instead of showing.

...I know too much about Twilight.

This is the distinction, I think: If the point of your story isn’t the relationship, or if it isn’t a huge focus of the story, then fine! It’s preferable that your characters have chemistry and good buildup to their relationship. But it’s not absolutely essential, because that’s not what the story is about. But if you’re banking your story on two characters’ relationship with each other, and go so far as to name the series after them because of it, weeeeeeell… you kind of need that chemistry.

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Enlightenment Era Fiction

I’m mostly been let down by big comic book events, but I recently read the New 52’s Forever Evil and I really liked it. There’s something about watching Lex Luthor getting some character development and working with villains to stop invading villains from another universe that shouldn’t be that fun and well done, but somehow is. So props to Geoff Johns for that.

We’re going to talk about Enlightenment Era fiction. That is, fiction set in the Enlightenment Era, rather than fiction written in the Enlightenment Era.

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Enlightenment Era Fiction

For whatever reason I’ve been reading a lot of books set during the Enlightenment? I didn’t mean to fall into this sort of niche book category, it just sort of happened? And I’ve noticed that there are some things I liked about it as a period people write about, and some things I didn’t like as much.

Let’s start with asking ourselves: what is the Enlightenment? Wikipedia defines it as a huge chunk of the 18th century, though it notes in the same article that there are people who define its beginning with Descartes’s work, and for the sake of argument that’s what I’m going to be going with. It’s a bit fuzzy when the Renaissance led into it, because historical periods are actually kind of fuzzy in general. But the Enlightenment, so-named by the people who lived in it (which should tip you off about what the scholars of the time thought of themselves), was an age that tried to define itself by reason. More of the population of Europe than ever could read, as there was now a way to print more books rather than writing them by hand. People who could read got together in public and shared their ideas, leading to more people being educated and opinionated. No longer were the scholarly conversations dominated by religious figures; instead we see the beginnings of modern sciences like chemistry and astronomy. The absolute power of kings is crumbling as people no longer saw monarchs as divinely appointed and in their place we saw the ideas of a social contract between the governors and the governed. 

Despite all these assertions that the world was becoming more reasonable though, it wasn’t without its obvious downsides. World wars start becoming a thing, like the Thirty Years War, the War of Spanish Succession and the Seven Years War. Colonialism was in its heyday, and around now is when you start to see the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade going full throttle with no signs of stopping. London burned that one time. And then you have that little occasion in which the people of Paris decided to start executing people who didn’t show enough loyalty to the state.

Then there was also a bunch of weird shiz going on. This is when we start seeing the rise of secret societies; some of which were basically social clubs and others which were… not. Some, like the Freemasons, last until today. Others, like the Illuminati, did not. Alchemy was heaving its last breaths as a field of study (Newton himself really loved alchemy), and interest in the occult began to fill in that void of the obscure knowledge. 

Warfare began to change immensely. With the advent of more reliable firearms, more armies switched to gunpowder weapons as the default ranged equipment rather than bows or crossbows. But guns hadn’t become so reliable that they’d replaced the sword, and so swords were still used in combat, both on the battlefield and in disputes of personal honor.

It was a time like any other, really. Despite its pretensions of being so much more civilized than the “Dark Ages” (a term coined in the Enlightenment), there was just as much violence, superstition and unreason as any other time in history.

What makes the period appealing to many writers is that it’s this sort of border in history; it’s not the Middle Ages or Renaissance, but it’s definitely not the Modern Age. It’s a time when people are so convinced that they know everything, but there’s so much that’s yet to be discovered. And it’s close enough to modern sensibilities that you don’t alienate your audience by presenting close-to-modern views in your characters.

I’d sort of gotten an interest in the period from Assassin’s Creed. I still hold that the American Saga, set in the 1700’s, contains the best writing the series has ever had. I also played a lot of Unity this year, set in the French Revolution, and I liked the idea of it much more than the actual execution--you can see my review of it on this blog.

But what was supposed to start this kick in books was Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver. The first book in the Baroque Cycle, one of the copies in the library had a big fancy alchemical symbol for Mercury on the cover, and despite it being around nine hundred pages I thought it seemed like it could be a cool introduction into the period. Well-researched history! Characters from different backgrounds! Globe-trotting adventures! What more could you ask for?

Except… I got three hundred pages into this book, and I was really, really bored. I liked the history, but it mostly involved a guy hanging out with scientists of the era, and their personal lives. I didn’t care. I was waiting for the real adventure to get started. I didn’t even get to a part where there was more than one viewpoint character. So I put that book down.

I also picked up Ex-Libris, a book by Ross King (not Stephen King, like I had thought when I picked up the book), and I was slightly disappointed with the book, but I did finish it, and overall I enjoyed it, unlike with Quicksilver. It being significantly shorter probably had something to do with it. The book chronicles a bookseller being tasked with finding a rare alchemical text that was supposedly dictated by Hermes Trismegistus. It felt a bit like an Umberto Eco novel, though there wasn’t as much travel as I would have liked.

The book that ended up actually sparking more of my interest in the period was A Star Shall Fall by Marie Brennan. It’s the third volume in the Onyx Court, a book series that chronicles a faerie court based in London at different points of history. This one was incredibly interesting to me because unlike other books of the time period I’d read, this one went all out in its fantasy elements, mixing alchemy and science, as the way the main conflict was to be solved involved both. That was a cool idea, and I wish I could find more fiction with this setting that played with alchemical ideas.

[I did just put Newton’s Cannon on hold at the library; maybe that’ll feed this craving I have.]

But I’m still kind of bothered that there’s a lot of this fiction that tends to glorify the Enlightenment. Less so among those that cover the colonial side of the equation, but there’s a lot in the European side. So much of Ex-Libris is praising the age, and characters making statements like “The world’s gotten so much better since Galileo proved that the world revolved around the Sun!” Which… he didn’t, actually, he just helped support the theory and also demanded it be taught as incontrovertible truth without being able to prove it. But regardless, that’s a vast oversimplication of how events rolled out. At least Ex-Libris beat into your head the results of the English Civil War, but other than that the problems of the era are generally treated as “Those darn Catholics wanted to crush all our SCIENCE!” without getting much into, say, Cromwell trying to genocide the Irish, or wars of succession, or wars over colonial territories.

And I suppose because a lot of the books are from the point of view of English people living in Europe, that makes sense as a point of view, but it is still a bit jarring to see stories where people in England are raving about how life is so great now that they’ve got SCIENCE! and when colonialism and slavery are still part of the reasons these big wealthy empires exist in Europe at all. I’m not saying that in every one of these stories, someone needs to run in and say “What about the slaves?!” but there should, I think, be an acknowledgement that no matter how great this period appears to be to some of the people in it, that system’s built, like so many others, on the suffering and exploitation of others. Only this time period sometimes gets away with it because it labelled itself as enlightened.

It’s a great period to set a story, but I don’t just want to see more fiction set in it, I also want to see fiction that deals with the problems of the Age of Enlightenment in an honest way, that doesn’t try to cover up the flaws with the propaganda of the time. I want more complicated fiction that plays with the time’s weirdness. And I want it to be more interesting than Quicksilver, which bored me to tears.

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Disney and Spin-Offs

I’m still furious about the Ragnarok question at Trivia on Thursday night, not the least because the text of the question was copied and pasted from the Wikipedia article. So I had an idea for a Note about God of War and its take on Norse mythology, but I think right now I should stay away from Norse mythology if I want to keep anything like a semblance of calm and rationality.

I had an idea for a full essay about Camp Jupiter/New Rome from Heroes of Olympus being absolutely insane, but that might make it to ImpishIdea first.

At least I saved a hummingbird yesterday? That was cool.

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Disney’s Doing Too Many Spin-Offs

Loki gets a series! Vision and Wanda get a series! Ghost Rider gets a series! Obi-Wan might get a series! And so on and so forth. People are already speculating how these movies are going to tie into the future films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the upcoming Star Wars films, and guys, I’m just tired of this.

I already wrote an essay about how I’m tired of several franchises, particularly those owned by Disney, are deciding that instead of stopping and explaining what the eff’s going on instead relegate it to a spin-off series or comic. For instance, Lucasfilm recently released the trailer for the second (and final) season of their animated series Star Wars: Resistance, and how it chronicles in-detail about how the First Order managed to take over the galaxy despite, you know, them being a fringe movement and their home base being destroyed and there being no rational reason that they’re as powerful as the movies keeping insisting they are.

And they shouldn’t have to do this! I shouldn’t have to watch a television series aimed at children in order to feel as if I have a grasp of how things work! I shouldn’t be questioning where the bad guys get their manpower and resources from and have to do homework to figure it out. The Original Trilogy had the advantage of making the bad guys the government, so it makes sense that they’ve got deep pockets; but by making the First Order explicitly remnants of a government that no one likes and keeps employing evil backstabbing bastards, one has to wonder how it stays afloat at all, much less keeps recruiting soldiers and building top-of-the-line technology.

But moving past my Star Wars issues, with Disney releasing its upcoming streaming service, they’ve decided they’re going to do more of this, meaning that they’ve decided that they’d import one of the worst parts of comic books into screen mediums. People are speculating how Loki will tie into the next Thor movie, and I just! Don’t! Care! Can you imagine watching a Thor movie, and then Loki pops up out of nowhere, and whenever you ask about it, all the fanboys are just like, “Oh no it makes perfect sense, you just have to watch his series on Disney+!” No! Bump that! 

Continuity is fine, and I love serialized stories. Boy do I. I’m reading like fifty different series right now. But this has to stop. If I see a movie, or watch a series, I shouldn’t have to do homework for it! I shouldn’t have to watch ten more hours of a series I have to pay monthly to legally view in order to make sense of the fact that a formerly dead character is now faffing about in the movie I’m watching.

This is one of the most frustrating things about comics and their crossover events. Not just the decades of continuity that keep springing up to become relevant and kicking you in the face with how much you don’t know, but how with every major crossover, of which there are now multiple times a year, the events leak over into several different other comic stories, and those comic stories sort of converge, so in order to understand the conclusion you need to have read all of those as well. Which is on purpose, in an attempt to boost sales for a bunch of other comic titles, but it’s really really annoying. 

It’s an obvious ploy to make even more money, and for whatever reason we’re all just fawning over it instead of being annoyed that our enjoyment of comic book movies is being held hostage behind paywalls. Because it’s baffling now but there are people who only watch Disney movies for entertainment. I’ve seen people brag about how they only go to the theaters for Marvel films now, as if it’s something to be proud of, owing brand loyalty to an entertainment franchise.

Disney, please stop. Everyone else stop too. Just make entertainment that stands on its own again, I’m begging you.

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Science Fiction and Religion

I just reread Sword of Summer and I had a lot of thoughts, but most of those have been hammered out in other essays I’ve done so we’ll skip over that. I also reread Einstein’s Dreams, which carries the subtitle “A Novel” on the cover despite not even being a hundred fifty pages. It’s… okay, but it’s just a bunch of short, three or four page chapters that are like, “What if time worked like this instead of like in our world?” Each idea could easily be its own science fiction novel. I don’t know why I had to read it for my philosophy class in undergrad.

But I also read A Canticle for Leibowitz for the first time! And it’s fantastic!

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Science Fiction and Religion

Mainstream Science fiction doesn’t really have that great a relationship with religion, I think. To be fair, there aren’t a lot of mainstream genres that do; as pointed out here, fantasy novels tend to make religions into generic Scientology Inquisitions. Mainstream science fiction tends to sort of ignore religion in general; like, please tell me, other than the Jedi and Sith, what religions exist in the Star Wars universe? What does religion look like in the Star Trek universe? What is the religious scene of Fahrenheit 451? What does Tony Stark think about faith? And yes, I do know that some of these questions have answers, I know for a fact religion is discussed somewhere in Star Trek or in the Expanded Universe, but it’s not something that a casual fan is likely to know about.

And I also don’t think that a lot of science fiction really has anything other than a very shallow understanding of religion. The Scythe trilogy portrays a world where most ways of dying have been “cured” and the only way people permanently die is by these appointed officials called Scythes “gleaning” people. It’s explained that because people don’t worry about death, most religions have disbanded. Except death still exists, it’s just less common and run by certain officials. I don’t think all the Christian denominations would just pack their bags because of that and be replaced by the one religion that still exists in the books, which are Tone Cults who worship sound. Furthermore, there’s no way that the Scythes themselves wouldn’t be deified by someone.

Gene Roddenberry was also famously atheist, and had he been allowed to would have made Star Trek a future that did away with religion; that’s not really how things shook out, considering how many different people worked on the series and studio mandates and such, but I can’t imagine how that would even work? People will always believe things based on faith; that’s human nature. 

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a bit different. The main setting of the story is a monastery in a post-apocalyptic future. A huge theme of the novel is the repetition of history; and like in history, in a chaotic and unstable world, monasteries are some of the few places that are preserving knowledge of the past world. Except instead of classical texts on philosophy and literature, it’s scientific texts and technological manuals. And it’s amusing, but also sad, because the monastery doesn’t quite understand all of the knowledge it’s been keeping, but they get it more than anyone else, who are all baffled at the idea of a bunch of monks doing science experiments in their basements instead of becoming rich and famous off of their knowledge. 

There is post-apocalyptic fiction with religions represented, but more often than not they seem to be doomsday cults that want to kill our protagonists and eat them or something. Which isn’t completely out there, but I don’t think it’s the most likely answer. Like, of course in a cruel post-apocalyptic world there would be religious communities that would set themselves up and become sanctuaries of a sort. 

Firefly also does remarkably well with depicting religion in its character of Shepherd Book. And of course it makes sense; the series is working with the elements of an old time Western, and the small town preacher is part of that cast you see in plenty of Westerns. Book isn’t some anomaly either; we don’t see a lot of the Christian church in this far future, but it clearly exists and is pretty active, as just about everyone recognizes Book as a preacher when they see him.

[There’s also a lot more to Book than meets the eye, as is hinted at throughout the series but never fully expanded upon because the series got cancelled.]

There should be questions about religion and its applications in weird science fiction situations! Like, how does Christianity or Islam interact with the discovery of alien life? How does alien life feel about religion? Are there alien missionaries? What are their religions like? 

There’s this whole subplot in one of the Expanse books that’s a bunch of religious leaders from Earth getting together on a spaceship to discuss the developments that have been happening in the series and how this affects their religions. And it’s great, because none of them are depicted as being evil overlords or anything, though one of them gets a bit carried away when the Plot starts going haywire. But I liked that the authors recognized that everything that’s been happening in the series has massive implications for human beliefs and how religions react to that.

And I guess that’s kind of all I’m asking? I loved A Canticle for Leibowitz, but I know I can’t expect every science fiction story I read to contain monks. But there should be at least some recognition of religion, whether it be in the post apocalypse, or in the far future, in space, or in present day but with an element or two changed. But not as a silly stereotype of religion as written by angry teenage Redditors, but something that can be good or bad, but a part of people’s lives throughout all time.

And it must make sense! I think the atheists who write “In the future, we won’t have religion!” have a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature and how it works. As long as humanity exists there will be faith of some sort or another.

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Making A Spider-Man Movie About Spider-Man

I’ve been reading this book series for children titled Wings of Fire by one of the authors who worked on the Warriors series? You know, the one about the cats that has a reputation for being really intense and having loads of characters? Yeah, so far these books fit the bill. It’s fun!

This essay includes spoilers for Spider-Man: Far From Home.

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Making A Spider-Man Movie About Spider-Man

So I saw Spider-Man: Far From Home recently and I liked it. I put up a pretty good review of Movie Munchies if you’re curious. But one thing I mentioned in the review that kind of bothers me is that there are ways it doesn’t really feel like it’s a Spider-Man movie.

SPOILER ALERT:

The villain of the movie is Mysterio, who is a disgruntled former employee of Tony Stark’s. Tony fired him because he was unstable, but he was the one who created the holographic tech that we see in Captain America: Civil War. He’s after the amazing AI-hidden-in-a-pair-of-sunglasses that Tony passed to Peter after his death and hopes to use that to do whatever he wants and run Stark’s memory the mud.

Here’s the thing: this is the second Spider-Man movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the villain’s motivation is centered on Tony Stark. Which kind of worked with Vulture in Homecoming, as that’s a beginner’s movie, and Tony Stark is actually around as a mentor figure for Peter. But here it’s more egregious. I get that Tony was Peter’s mentor, and that as an important figure in his life he feels like he’s in Tony’s shadow. But when the second movie in a row has a villain who is only after Spider-Man because he’s in the way of him getting revenge on Tony Stark… that’s not great. Because we’re centering the movie named after one hero around another hero altogether.

What makes this frustrating is that the past year has given us not one, but two incredible Spider-Man stories: Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse and the PS4 exclusive Spider-Man, both of which told stories that centered around Spider-Man and didn’t feel as if the protagonist wasn’t the central character of the drama. I get that Far From Home is an installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and has to tie into the rest of it. And given that it’s the movie that comes immediately after Avengers: Endgame, it has a lot to talk about and it can’t exactly not deal with the fallout of that film.

But did we really need the villain to be a disgruntled former Stark employee? And that the entire conflict of the film to be centered around a bit of tech Stark developed? Again, this is the second Spider-Man movie in this cinematic universe, and it’s the second that heavily deals with Peter’s relationship with Tony.

And while I have seen some criticism in this vein, that’s not the majority reaction to this film? I’ve seen a lot of people insist that these last two movies are “Truer to the Text” versions of Spider-Man, that have a deeper understanding of the character and mythos than any live-action incarnation before, which, is, uh… I think a questionable claim at best. I’ve seen Far From Home listed as one of the greatest Spider-Man films of all time, and while it’s good, and it’s fun, I don’t know if I’d call it that either. Because again, it’s not really about Spider-Man. At least, it doesn’t feel like it. It feels more like it’s a continuation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s story arc, rather than being that along with being its own thing.

I’ve talked a little about making sure that the protagonist is in fact the main character of the story, and that a surprising amount of writers can’t seem to get this down, even in the most enjoyable stories. I just didn’t think this would happen to Spider-Man, one of the most iconic heroes in popular culture.

Spider-Man has a supporting cast! And a rogues gallery! And a family! It should not be difficult to create a story about Spider-Man, where the villain is tied specifically to the protagonist in a way that’s overt and matters, and the majority of his character development is not tied to the star of another franchise.

Make a movie about its title character. That’s not too much to ask, is it?

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The Shack Review

Hey guys I read The Shack and now you guys get to hear about it! This is written more in the style of a Goodreads review, I think, because this is how my thoughts are going when I’m trying to put this into words.

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The Shack Review

[This isn’t about the movie. I haven’t seen the movie. It could be brilliant for all I know.]

From the point of view as a Christian, The Shack is heretical. From the point of view of a critic, The Shack is just another bad book.

So, for those not in the know: Mackenzie, or “Mack” as only his close friends know him but that’s how the narration and every named character refers to him so I don’t know why that detail’s brought up, is a man who grew up as a hardworking, self-sufficient man because he ran away from home and his abusive father at the age of thirteen. He eventually marries Nan, they raise a family, everything’s great UNTIL their daughter Missy (holy fudge will someone not go by a nickname in this book?!?) gets kidnapped by a rando child serial killer on a family camping trip. Ohes noes!

The kid gets killed, the killer isn’t caught, and Mack goes into a period of his life he calls The Great Sadness (the phrase is always capitalized and italicized in the book, despite there being no reason for it). His relationship with God is going down the toilet, because he feels as if it’s his fault or God’s fault that his daughter is dead, and in this emo phase we begin the book. Then, on an icy winter’s day when the mailman doesn’t even get on the road because it’s too dangerous, he receives a letter inviting him to come to “the Shack,” the place where they found his daughter’s bloody dress. And the letter is signed ‘Papa’! And whattaya know, that’s how Mack’s wife Nan refers to God!

So he goes and investigates, and he finds three people in the Shack. And they are God. Rather, one is God the Father, one is God the Son, and the last is God the Holy Spirit, who are incarnated as a stereotype of a middle-aged black woman, Jesus, and a philosophical Asian woman called ‘Sarayu,’ a name that means ‘wind.’ Also God the Father keeps being called Papa despite being a woman, which is a bit strange.

The rest of the book consists of conversations about theology and philosophy between God and Mack. It’s very boring. I kept thinking to myself that it was weird that I didn’t like this, when Platonic dialogues run on the same principle: a dialogue to explain a point. But I think it might because this was also trying to be a story, with fully developed characters and histories. Going into The Republic Plato doesn’t give Socrates a backstory of his past as a veteran to explain his views against war. The Shack though, does have a Plot, but it’s an excuse Plot so that the author, William P. Young, can insert his own thoughts about God into the story.

And maybe that wouldn’t be so bad; excuse plots are not, by nature, terrible things. But if maybe this book had stuck to one topic, like the Problem of Evil (why bad things happen to good people) then maybe we’d get somewhere interesting. And one could argue the entire book is about that, but it also veers into several other discussions about belief and God and love, which needn’t have happened if it was just a straightforward dialogue without the framing device.

Also the theology is pretty terrible. Many Christian reviewers take issue with the idea of God the Father and God the Holy Spirit being portrayed as people at all, and that’s fair; theologically speaking, God the Son is the Person of the Trinity that takes a human shape to interact with us. I’m finnicky on the details, but it’s generally frowned upon, in all three Abrahamic religions, to portray God the Father at all. The only people who got a pass on that were people like Michelangelo, and, well, William P. Young is no Michelangelo. Making God a woman is also frowned upon by traditional Christians, which is fair--God does call Himself a ‘He’ in the Bible, and I think one should use the pronouns another chooses to go by--basic respect, I think, when addressing someone, divine or otherwise. Still, I think these are relatively minor issues compared to the actual content of discussions; getting caught up on Young making God into three roommates is not the big issue with his theology. The novel’s God says that He’s in the shape He is because that’s what Mack needs, not because that’s how God looks. If so, I think the bigger issue isn’t gender but that apparently God thinks some people need a racial stereotype.

No, the points that Christians should take issue here is with the book’s flip-flopping on how it looks at the Bible. At one point God explains to Mack that there was a literal Garden of Eden with literal Adam and Eve, but Jesus and God the Father make the point of saying that the Old Testament just straight-up doesn’t count, for all its rules, because when Jesus died we don’t need to worry about rules anymore! Don’t sweat those Ten Commandments, they don’t matter anymore!

Which is problematic because if we’re using the Bible’s Jesus as a basis here, then Jesus Himself told His followers that they should obey the Commandments and the law of the Old Testament. Jesus’s role was not in changing laws; it was thinking that the law was the end-all, be-all of religious living. Essentially, that if you care more about the letter of the law then of the actual morality behind it, you’re not really living the way God wants you to. I get that nonreligious people might not care much about the distinction, but I should think that even if one’s not religious, the point still stands that Young claims that the God presented in his book is meant to represent the God of the Bible, all the while spouting things directly contradictory to Him. So even if you looked at this as a sort of mythological fanfiction, it’d be pretty shoddy work. It’s like if you said you were making a story based on the characters of the Iliad, but Odysseus is an idiot and Helen was ugly.

There is also this disdain for the idea of religion present in the book? Again, the God of The Shack claims that religion is only a human invention, and that God has nothing to do with any of them. And again, that directly contradicting the source of the inspiration. Jesus tells Mack that he doesn’t go for religion or for hierarchies, but that’s a pretty big stretch considering that Jesus tells Peter that he’s the rock on which he will build His Church, implying an organized religion with a hierarchy with someone at the head, or at the very least, the base. Young tries to get around this by having Jesus claim that his “church” is in fact, the whole of humanity rather than an institution, or those that act how he thinks people should or something? But that doesn’t make much sense; if the church wasn’t meant to be a specific group of people with specific teachings, why would Jesus of the Gospel go around giving teachings on how to live and how to organize and convert people, if they’re not meant to be an institution?

There’s this weird view of salvation; this idea that everyone is saved, no matter how much evil they’ve done. Christianity is all for the idea that everyone can be redeemed, but this book sort of skips that step by suggesting that nobody needs to be. Mack finds out that his abusive alcoholic father is in Heaven, but there’s no indication that the man had done anything to to turn his life around; so by Young’s story, men who domestically abuse their children and die unrepentant deserve Heaven just as much as children murdered by serial killers. I don’t want to get into a conversation about whether or not we earn Heaven, but we can at least agree that the condition that one be not an evil person to the very end to get past Saint Peter?

And I suppose when writing fiction, there’s nothing to say that one has to remain close to Christian doctrine; there are writers who talk about Christianity who aren’t Christians themselves and I usually don’t really take any issue with it. But this book finds itself passed around Christian circles, as if it is a Christian book, when it is, by its nature, promoting ideas that go against Christianity. It asks that we basically consider the Old Testament non-canon and that we reject the notion of an organized religion. It’s suggesting that everyone goes to Heaven no matter how much evil they’ve done because God is just that sweet of a guy. This being passed off as a Christian book is downright insidious.

I imagine if there’s a nonreligious reader looking at this review, he or she is probably wondering if I’m overreacting. Maybe, but The Shack is also not a very well-written novel. Like I said, there’s not a lot of action in it; the majority of it is conversations between Mack and God about different topics, and those conversations are just Young preaching at the audience what he thinks about God through dialogue. Using dialogues to make a deeper point can work, like in Plato’s works, but those attempt at least to try to think out every possible response to an idea. Young does no such thing, and because the person leading the conversation is God, there’s not much opportunity for an honest dialogue. I suspect that’s another reason having God as a character in the novel isn’t such a good idea.

There’s also the fact that nothing really resolves. There’s not much to the story other than that Mack is in a bad place in his life and his relationship with God. I was reminded of The Traveller’s Gifts, a book read to my 8th grade class, where the main character meets several people through history ending with a talk to an archangel, but in that book from what I remember the main character was having a near-death experience that may or may not have been a hallucination. Mack doesn’t have that; there’s no reason that God talks to Mack other than because he feels emo. Why God doesn’t sit down and chat with everyone angry at God for their lives’ woes isn’t made clear. The whole thing was just to get Mack to forgive God and move past his child’s death. All the action is doing mundane tasks around the house or the yard or such. It’s really boring action. I understand finding the amazing in the mundane, but this is really, really boring.

And his child’s death is just sort of… there. TV Tropes calls it a fridging, and rightly so; it’s a Plot Device to make Mack feel The Great Sadness (it hurts me to type that); at the end of the book, the killer is still at large, but that’s not touched upon because at least Mack’s at peace. Ultimately it doesn’t matter, because Mack’s daughter Missy doesn’t matter, because she’s just the device to get Mack sad enough to be angry at God. Maybe it’s just me, but killing a child, and never resolving the murder, seems to me a really lame thing to do in a story. Yes, bad things happen to good people sometimes, and their families don’t get the closure they want; but in Young’s novel, their feelings straight up don’t matter at all. It’s just… there.

If you want to preach, write a pamphlet. And to be fair, Young has written nonfiction books that are for the purpose of teaching his beliefs. But that should have come first, long before the monstrosity that is The Shack ever reached publication. It’s not a good story, it’s not a good message, and it’s not good theology. It’s not a Christian book, it’s not a good book, and I’m not sure why this ever became a Thing. Don’t give it to your friends to change their lives; give them that’s not a chore to get through.

Now I have to figure out how this dratted book found its way into my house...

Soldier Son Review-Shaped thing

Hooray! I finished the family storyline on Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey! Now I’m trying to finish up the rest and after that I think I’m going to get Legacy of the First Blade so I can see what happens next.

Also it’s been a weird week.

Let’s talk about the Soldier Son trilogy from Robin Hobb.

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The Soldier Son Trilogy Review/Talky Thing

I recently finished reading Robin Hobb’s Soldier Son trilogy. It was strange. I picked them up in the first place because I had read somewhere (I think TV Tropes?) that it was a fantasy novel that depicted a fantasy version of the American West, discussing in it colonialism and the subjugation of indigenous people. There was an American and a Native American analogue! It was cool idea to do with a fantasy novel in an alternate world, and I wanted to see how it was done.

Turns out, it was done in the strangest way possible.

The first book is, I maintain, very good, having only a few missteps. We’re introduced to our protagonist, Nevare Burville, who is the second son of Lord Burville, meaning that he is the Soldier Son (first son inherits, second son goes to army, third to the church) and destined to become a cavalry officer. There was a kerfuffle recently because the king of Gernia recently elevated several soldier sons in the military to lords, because they backed him when the old nobility wouldn’t; Nevare’s father is one of those that got elevated.

Thing is, a lot of Gernia’s territory is built on the plains, which previously belonged to the Plainsfolk. They had magic on their side, but the Gernians worked out that iron can cancel out magic, and started using iron shot in their rifles to take out mages. Now they’re a beaten down people, considered second-class citizens to the white Gernians, who insist that they’re teaching them how to be civilized.

There’s quite a lot of details that stuck out to me as interesting and worthy of potential. Nevare’s father seems like a good father, I suppose, but he’s also plainly sexist and racist from the first chapter, in which child!Nevare gets in trouble for defending a girl his own age that’s mixed race; his father doesn’t chastise him too much, but he’s quick to say that a girl on her own is just too much of a temptation for the boys in the settlement to help themselves, and that Gernians shouldn’t mix with Plainspeople because that makes them unclean somehow. And before sending Nevare off to military school, he lets Nevare go off camping with a Plainsman warrior for like a month to “learn from your enemy” making the man several promises he has no intention of keeping, and deciding to hunt the man down when it doesn’t go well.

Here’s a character who seem sympathetic to the main character, but as nice as he is to his family he’s still strictly upholding a very patriarchal and racist system without question. And of course it comes back to bite him. We can’t claim that Nevare’s father isn’t a racist, sexist douche because he’s nice to his family; the text doesn’t let us. I thought that was an interesting part of the book.

The Plainsman that Nevare spends time with, Dewara, is also quick to point out that all Plainspeople are not the same at all. He’s from a tribe called the Kidona, who generally don’t get along well with the others. It’s the Gernians that lump them all together as one people, and they’ve had to stick together in the face of a military trying to stamp them out. 

This all sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Well, here’s the thing though: most of this series isn’t really about that colonialist struggle between Gernians and Plainspeople. After the first book, that’s all mostly dropped. No, actually it’s mostly involved with another group of indigenous people, the Specks, who live in the forest at the edge of the Gernian Empire, who are using magic to infect the Gernians with plagues to keep them from invading. And then Nevare gets sort of infected with their magic, and their magic is trying to get him to act in their interests but he wants to remain Gernian? And also the magic makes Nevare very fat, because Speck wizards are morbidly obese,and also the aristocracy of their people, who have feeders to bring them food and do basic tasks like shopping and hunting for them? And also the feeders can be a harem too? Also there’s an old Gernian god of death to whom Nevare owes a debt to because Reasons?

Like what the fudge.

And the thing falls apart at the ending, because the story’s resolution was that the Gernians discover some gold and have a gold rush, and the queen of Gernia decides that the Speck sacred trees are also sacred to her, so they’re no longer concerned with expanding outward and everyone can go home now, isn’t that great?

There came a point in the third book where I knew that I wouldn’t be satisfied with the ending. Because the whole story has turned into this conflict within Nevare of having to help the Specks while also wanting to remain Gernian, and there would have to be peace for this to be any sort of conclusion. I thought that if somehow the two sides just sat and talked things out and worked out their differences it’d come across as a bit corny; like, “Hey, don’t worry! We solved colonialism!” as if all it took was a few level-headed conversations. That would be silly. But it’d be better than what we got, which didn’t even involve an actual peace treaty or conversation; just, “Oh, we’re having a gold rush, so we don’t want to expand anymore, it’s cool. We solved colonialism!”

Except it’s not solved at all! Are we really going with the ending where the problems are solved because of human greed? What happens when the gold runs out, as it inevitably will? Are Gernians going to give up a decades-long conflict because they just found one spot rich in gold? And what about the Plainspeople? They’re still second-class citizens who are having their culture systematically stamped out! The first chapter shows them being oppressed. And yet their status is such a non-issue.

The series ends with Nevare getting a happy ending, which, yay, I guess, considering all the terrible stuff he had to put up with over the course of the story. But we’re essentially being told that the horrible crimes being perpetuated on the characters suffering under an imperialist military’s heel are no big deal because at least our white male lead got a happy ending!

I feel bad about coming down this hard on this book too! The first had so much potential, and I was hoping that this would let me launch more into Robin Hobb’s work; it is, after all, past time I tried to oread more speculative fiction by female authors. But overall the story of this trilogy just wasn’t good and it didn’t make much sense. Structurally and thematically it falls to pieces and halfway through the third book it just became a chore to read.

Maybe read the first book. After that, feel free to skip.

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