The Monsters Are Meant To Be There

[HoratioAtTheBridge]

I am working on developing a new role playing game (I'm blogging at senjitsujidai.wordpress.com if you want to check it out, or you can go to the article I wrote on this subject if you want to see more about how I developed these ideas for the game), and I got to the part about making up monsters. One of the types of monsters I'm making are kaiju, which in this setting are mindless creatures of rage and destruction manifested from humanity's collective unconscious. As I was writing them up, I got to thinking about J.R.R. Tolkien's work of criticism on Beowulf, called "The Monsters and the Critics."

In this essay, Tolkien talked about the literary place of the monsters. To cut a long story short, he argued that the monsters represent death, and the story is about how a person faces the inevitability of death and the destruction of all their works. Very Ozymandias, if you're familiar with the poem.

At the same time, there's been a really big rethink of monsters in fantasy series, including in Tolkien's own work as well as in Beowulf. Wizards, of course, just announced the end of evil races. I think there's a lot of merit to that, and a lot to learn about how we ostracize people by painting them as "monstrous," or use racialized features (as Tolkien as been accused of doing) to indicate evil in the monster. And you can tell great stories about people who have been cast out as monsters - the rethinking of Sycorax and Caliban in last year's run of the Lucifer comic was absolutely brilliant.

I do wonder, though, if the idea of monsters as death, as something we have to continually struggle against, even if it's doomed, is still something which resonates today. Life in the Dark Ages, especially in Germany and England, was incredibly precarious. Death in modern society is much less immediate and threatening, though the coronavirus might be changing that. So maybe the idea of "doom" conveyed by the monsters of Beowulf and Norse mythology just isn't relevant anymore. What do you think? Is the idea of a monster as death personified still worth including in our stories, even if just to role play out how we can face down our own mortality? Can it be separated from its racist past? If so, how do you tell that story?

For myself, I've been trying to find the balance of these evolving views as I'm designing my own monsters. Making death clearly inhuman is one way I try to avoid the problems of the story. And facing down a ravenous dragon creature is still a pretty cool gaming experience. But, should we still have monsters that can't be reasoned with or befriended? Or is that inherently problematic, and promoting violence and hierarchy?

 

[Undrave]

It's an interesting point for sure.

Life in the Dark Ages, especially in Germany and England, was incredibly precarious. Death in modern society is much less immediate and threatening, though the coronavirus might be changing that.

I think this is important. In the dark ages war, roving bandits, wild beasts, unknown illness attribute to curses, were much more common than they are for us today... but I think looking at the type of death we are afraid of today you can design monsters that work.

I'd say you got:

-Natural disasters: plagues, hurricanes, tsunami, earthquakes, wildfires. We still don't control these things and they come out of literally nowhere to threatened us. So you can create dragons, not as sentient and calculating critters that can have debate with adventurers, but creatures with goals and morality that are completely alien. Maybe their very existence bring about catastrophe and they exist as opposition to civilization, like a dragon who's wingbeat spreads illness, or one where their step cause sparks to fly and set fire to everything completely out of their control.

-Criminal organisations, terrorist groups : On the other end of the spectrum you have groups with clear goals and easily knowable motives. Greed or the desire to control. All things considered they're actually a 'rare encounter' in real life, but they are sensationalized. You don't need a whole race of them, but rather organization. People perverted by their own selfish desire that ignore the suffering of others. Rather than 'monster' being a race, it is a creed... something even more dramatic.

-Despot and cultists: Another type of more human enemies are the good people warped by loyalty to dangerous figurehead and endoctrinated with ideology that place them in opposition to others. Again, monsters as a result of corruption rather than a race.

If you work on that, and add the usual wild animals, I think you can have a full bestiary.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I think Death is still a thing that resonates as an enemy, but it also resonates in ways it didn’t used to. See, Terry Pratchett’s Death in Discworld, for instance, or various cartoons and such where Death is a protagonist or friendly figure, or Neil Gaiman’s Death in Sandman.

OTOH, I think perhaps it might be useful to look at how certain monsters can represent a type of human evil, such as vampires (sometimes) representing intimate (not just sexual) assault and abusive partners.

Monsters that represent the destruction of the social order are incredibly visceral enemies for a lot of us, which kaiju can definitely represent, as can enemies that represent the loss of agency, violently tyrannical monsters, etc

 

[Undrave]

enemies that represent the loss of agency

Oh yeah, like mind controlling monsters!

 

[HoratioAtTheBridge]

I really like the idea of a dragon whose wingbeats spread illness. That would be an excellent idea for a kaiju type monster.

Interestingly, a lot of my other antagonists are criminals, bandits, mercenaries, and particular clan armies. I think that fits your second type of "monster" quite well. I don't really have much in the way of the second or third type, though. That's something to think about.

On the subject of monsters representing certain kinds of human evil, that's a really interesting thought. If monsters in general are dissolution and death, and other things we fear, there's a lot of value to digging down into the taxonomy to say how different monsters represent different fears, and how they can be used in different stories to explore how we react to those fears.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The Magnus Archives is a great horror podcast that explores the idea of different Fears as Powers, each of which has its own really disturbing avatars and monsters.

 

[Nytmare]

I think this is important. In the dark ages war, roving bandits, wild beasts, unknown illness attribute to curses, were much more common than they are for us today... but I think looking at the type of death we are afraid of today you can design monsters that work.

See Godzilla and the advent of the modern day Kaiju story as an allegory of nuclear war, or pretty much any successful modern horror or monster movie you can pick off the shelf. Just look at the themes from the most popular horror films from the last 5 or so years: xenophobia and home invasion, religion, apocalypse, nationalism, class warfare, racism, loss of freedom or agency, disease.

Heck, look at Black Mirror or the new episodes of the Twilight Zone.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I am working on developing a new role playing game (I'm blogging at senjitsujidai.wordpress.com if you want to check it out, or you can go to the article I wrote on this subject if you want to see more about how I developed these ideas for the game), and I got to the part about making up monsters. One of the types of monsters I'm making are kaiju, which in this setting are mindless creatures of rage and destruction manifested from humanity's collective unconscious. As I was writing them up, I got to thinking about J.R.R. Tolkien's work of criticism on Beowulf, called "The Monsters and the Critics."

In this essay, Tolkien talked about the literary place of the monsters. To cut a long story short, he argued that the monsters represent death, and the story is about how a person faces the inevitability of death and the destruction of all their works. Very Ozymandias, if you're familiar with the poem.

At the same time, there's been a really big rethink of monsters in fantasy series, including in Tolkien's own work as well as in Beowulf. Wizards, of course, just announced the end of evil races. I think there's a lot of merit to that, and a lot to learn about how we ostracize people by painting them as "monstrous," or use racialized features (as Tolkien as been accused of doing) to indicate evil in the monster. And you can tell great stories about people who have been cast out as monsters - the rethinking of Sycorax and Caliban in last year's run of the Lucifer comic was absolutely brilliant.

I do wonder, though, if the idea of monsters as death, as something we have to continually struggle against, even if it's doomed, is still something which resonates today. Life in the Dark Ages, especially in Germany and England, was incredibly precarious. Death in modern society is much less immediate and threatening, though the coronavirus might be changing that. So maybe the idea of "doom" conveyed by the monsters of Beowulf and Norse mythology just isn't relevant anymore. What do you think? Is the idea of a monster as death personified still worth including in our stories, even if just to role play out how we can face down our own mortality? Can it be separated from its racist past? If so, how do you tell that story?

For myself, I've been trying to find the balance of these evolving views as I'm designing my own monsters. Making death clearly inhuman is one way I try to avoid the problems of the story. And facing down a ravenous dragon creature is still a pretty cool gaming experience. But, should we still have monsters that can't be reasoned with or befriended? Or is that inherently problematic, and promoting violence and hierarchy?

I think death and doom are kind of two different things here. Death can be struggled against or avoided, or put off, doom cannot be. Your doom is your doom. Railing against it does no good, and may even do harm (particularly to others, but also in the sense of causing you to suffer instead of accepting it). Doom, i.e. fate, is a concept that resonates far less in modern society, because the idea that we have a predetermined fate is extremely hard to square with the universe we experience, and the things we know, and the general concepts of our society, which is somewhat founded on not accepting things are the way they have to be and events are inevitable (I'd argue that aside from science, both Christian and Islamic beliefs can influence societies towards the idea that things can/should change, though there are contradictory factors, of course). Death on the other hand, is perhaps more relevant than it has been for a while!

So I think it's totally valid to have monsters as things be opposed, but I think the issue that keeps coming in is that people often want the monsters to have these complex societies and ideas and ways of doing things, but to still be totally legit to slaughter wholesale and get a gold star for Good-ness for doing so, and that's where things get sketchy as all hell/really complicated. When you have monsters simply as a death metaphor, even if they're intelligent or whatever, things tend to work out. Especially if it's them killing a lot of people vs. their one life.

To me these feel like old questions/ideas, not modern ones, as much as some people see them that way. In earlier D&D and RPGs, it felt to me like you had really three kinds of monster. And I see that actually lines up pretty well with what @Undrave is saying.

He has:

1) Natural disasters
2) Criminal organisations, terrorist groups
3) Despot and cultists

I'd put it a little differently:

1) Natural disaster-type monsters - this isn't just mindless dragons or whatever, but things like Bulettes, Cockatrices or Trolls. Creatures of animal intelligence or not a lot more (or if it is more, they may be unable/unwilling to communicate/negotiate/etc.), who wreck ecologies, eat a bunch of people and generally cause havoc by their very presence. Mindless undead tend to fit in here, though they're more often the minions of 2 or 3. Gibberlings, too.

2) "Bad People" - I.e. people (or sentient beings) who chose to be "bad", and know that they're harming others, but don't care, or don't care very much. This would be everything from some low-end bandits (ones who aren't purely a product of circumstance, but have gone beyond that) to highly-organised but not supernaturally-influenced oppressors and the like.

3) "Supernaturally-influenced Beings" - This would be cultists who are actually in some way in thrall to the being controlling them, beings who are mind-controlled, beings who have supernatural "programming" to do evil (or good) and so aren't really free-willed, fixed-alignment dragons, and so on.

In 2E, my experience was that players did consider the motivations of "monsters" and so on, and weren't necessarily into mindless slaughter or the like. I feel like the idea that we can automatically kill stuff because it's alignment says LE or whatever is in a lot of ways more a 3E idea, part of the whole "back to the old skool" deal 3E had, and I think partly influenced by videogames and so on.

 

[HoratioAtTheBridge]

Interesting point about Doom vs. Death. What do you think of the idea of H.P. Lovecraft's work being about doom? That for all of our struggles, we are still as nothing, and we will be extinguished and forgotten? Perhaps it has more of a modern resonance than I was giving it credit for, given the continuing popularity of Lovecraft's brand of horror. And then Howard's Conan might be a sort of Beowulf answer to that age-old fear of eradication...

I think you are right on about the idea of wanting monsters with intelligible motivations but also being okay to kill. I guess it gets a little uncomfortable indulging in an escapist fantasy when you're confronted with the implications of your actions. But then there's the ongoing debate about when violence is okay, and that has some real life resonances right now that are rather disturbing too...

 

[Ruin Explorer]

What do you think of the idea of H.P. Lovecraft's work being about doom? That for all of our struggles, we are still as nothing, and we will be extinguished and forgotten?

Yes he definitely absolutely thought humanity is doomed and there is NOTHING that anyone can do about it. In fact, he thought pretty much every thinking species in the universe was basically doomed.

Perhaps it has more of a modern resonance than I was giving it credit for, given the continuing popularity of Lovecraft's brand of horror.

I think modern takes on Lovecraft tend to split into sort of two groups, those which are somewhat slavish in their imitation, and which are often keen on the "doom" angle, and those which reclaim/reconstruct Lovecraft, which tend to make the doom something that's more a philosophical inevitability, like the the sun eventually dying, and less something to actually existentially terrified about - perhaps it's even comforting on a certain level - "all things must pass". But certainly it is the very notion of humanity only being a small part of a greater, and perhaps terrifying or unknowable universe that is part of what separates Lovecraft from a lot of other horror (even if more conventional horror does cross paths with it from time to time, c.f. The Mist).

It works well in computer-game with a roguelike structure, where the PC(s) is expected to die, and I think that the popularity of that kind of game design has helped fuel the rise in popularity of Lovecraftian themes and approaches.

Whether it's relevant to society and people more broadly, I'm less certain. I suspect it's still a bit niche because people want to make the world better, they want to avert climate change, and so on, and most heroes are still heroes who resist, who fight against, rather than heroes who are tragically doomed.