Jack7
First Post
ESSAYS ON GAME DESIGN
Essay Eight: What is Modern Fantasy Anyway?
“It will have blood, they say; Blood will have Blood.”
“If blood be ink then every man might write an epoch with his veins.”
“Thy blood and virtue
Contend for empire in thee…”
“The Soul is in the Blood.”
What is modern fantasy?
A couple of threads, this one, and this one (and more I cannot now remember or locate), plus some reading I have been doing on my own lately have put me in the mood to consider that question. I’m not just speaking about fantasy gaming, though of course that is a sort of sub-branch of the entire subject matter, and is a question for consideration all on its own. And I’m sure that I, and others, have repeatedly beaten that poor enquiry into a stupor in one way or another. Or at least stabbed at it til it is stained beyond all recognition.
But what I’m talking about is the chthonic Grandfather of fantasy gaming, and indeed most modern fantasy films, and books, and so forth. I speak of the fathers, and the ancient forefathers of the modern “genre,” and so I ask, where is Ouranis in this matter? (Sorry, couldn’t resist the pun.) Where is that Titan, the old father of the old fantasy and the early myth, that looms in the background, but to our modern eyes is strangely invisible, though his skeleton is made of the very stuff that shelters our hidden dreams? And what was he really like in older age, and what has he become in our day (rather anemically of late, I suspect) in comparison to the monstrous prodigy he once was?
Now I’ll give my opinion of the matter, and then others can discuss their particular take on the issue. And mine will be measured, though I’m sure, through a scope too narrow for some, and too wide for a few.
Yet to me fantasy is myth. First and foremost. Not all myth, but a peculiar form of those things that once were. Now, of course, not all myth is fantasy, by any means, but the best fantasy is mythical, if not in whole, then at least in assumed antecedents. The point at which fantasy, or the best fantasy, sort of thinly diverges from the mythic Ocean of Tiamat, strikes out to start a new family of fortune, to branch away onto and into clearer and less salted waters - that begins within, and through, the channel of man. That is to say, fantasy is that type and class of myth that is not so much concerned with Cosmic issues, as it is, in the main, concerned with individual issues, or with the fate of particular individuals where such beings occasionally intersect the Cosmic axis. So to me Myth is the Ocean upon which the Soul of Man sets sail into the Milky Way, if you will, of gods and things divine, and Fantasy is the River, (like the Amazon or the headwaters of the Nile as they basically used to be), untamed and unexplored, that churning, clashing frontier waterway upon which the Soul of a Man embarks - inviting ordinary mortals as well as individual non-mortals to take to her waters and canoe and swim and fight upstream through obstacle and terror, through turmoil and disaster, to find either paradise, or damnation, or as is oft the real and more truthful case, a little of both.
But in any case fantasy is not really the record of the gods or creation, or even of God and Creation, it is the record of man and of creatures both like man, and unlike man, exploring that creation in their own individual and personal way. For man can be many things, but he cannot be a god, and God can be many things, but unless he compress himself down into the flesh of man he cannot sail the small and otherwise unnavigatable waters that are the channels of individual lives. For God is too huge, too ponderous to otherwise sail anything but that monstrous ocean of the Cosmos. And even that is but a poor pool in which for him to bathe.
In myth there is Ambrosia, and Soma, in fantasy though, there will be Blood. The blood of mortal men. And at times the blood of giants, and elves, and of dragon, and monster. But as the old saying goes, there will be blood. Not the immortal ichor of gods, but the bright crimson of clay mixed with personal fate, and individual fatality.
That being said I personally think that fantasy is far more than just the struggle of the individual, on a stage writ large (by measure of our human perspective), or even writ peculiar and small, as if enscribed in glyphs on fairy wings. There must be something else than mere “personal stake” in the events of the flow of the tale. Everyone and every player must have their personal stake in any affair, of course, that is only natural. But there must be other qualities present upon which to feast as well, unlooked for, surprising, and disturbing things to spice the broth, to thicken the soup, to flavor the meat of the matter. Or every tale of fantasy would devolve into the mere tail of the singular beast involved. In other words if fantasy were only about personal adventures then there would be no universal, transferable fantasy, no point to the yarn but the thread itself, and that thread would be of use only to the one who first wove it.
When the gods in repose sup on Nectar and Honey-dew, that is myth. Gods in repose strike us with interest, but rarely with fascination. It is their power and immortality we desire to see at work, not the gods themselves. To the gods the gods are of themselves, but to us they are merely types. But when men discover they starve in the dangerous and alien shadowland of fey and terrifying beings far older and more grim than themselves, and so must eat the flesh of the monster (to what unanticipated effect they cannot guess) they have butchered to survive through the winter, or when a man discovers that his enemy turned erstwhile ally has fed him the flesh of his first born changeling child in revenge against some forgotten slight, then that is fantasy (or sometimes Shakespeare).
When the gods hold war counsel and decide who they will patronize in war, that is myth, when mortal men battle seemingly impossible odds against foes and forces bent upon their ultimate doom and destruction, that is fantasy. Why? Because in fantasy, the best of fantasy anyway, the victims of life’s unruly riddles are not types in repose or masks that strut upon an unreal, unreasoned, and unrisked stage, they are us, caught in the same snares and webs we run throughout our lives, and so the weird and uncanny world does leap from thin air and through imagined plight into our own lungs, so that we breathe it in and it mixes in us deep.
But still there are other aspects of fantasy still more nebulous yet than that, not exactly myth, where individual souls meet feral world and beasts of the twisted nature. I could list dozens of such traits, such substances and natures of what I mean, but they all seem to me to coalesce into a sort of singular paradigm: they are not reality as we know and understand it, and yet they become our reality as we imagine it to be within us.
And here is the Crux of the matter, the point where all roads converge, and the examples of the past speak best but where much contemporary fantasy falls far short of being real fantasy (except in the most informal and inaccurate market sense) at all, and becomes, for lack of a better term, a B-grade comic book adaptation of a not very good made for television Sci-Fi (or is that Sy-Fy?) script of what fantasy might have been had Ed Wood or Uwe Boll given birth to it instead of Homer and Beowulf and Tolkien and Tieck and the Brothers Grimm (and they were grim, were they not).
A lot of modern fantasy is filled with Twinkle Swords and Potion Pots and men named the mighty Purple Prince of the High Feyworld Shanglethrop, but there ain’t a drop of human blood (or even imagined ichor) in any of it. Oh, there are spells, but few charms, monsters, but no menace, shadows, but no substance, allusions, but no achievement. Modern fantasy has all of the forms, a nauseum of forms, a plastic and artificial sea of forms, but lacks the living flesh, it lacks the catching breath, it lacks the very thing that most excites the human soul…
Where is the Blood? Where is the grael that you dip dead warriors into so that they rise again like breathless ghosts, their wounds still dripping bile and gore, so that the creep of their slick and liquid tread freezes the fear in a man into a solid, weighty, stifling thing as he watches unbidden doom approach? Where is the inescapable omen that flits about in uneasy dreams like a carrion crow to light upon the mind and call ancient black-eyed ravening wolves to fall upon you in the night? Where is the fire that cooks the Burning Man come to visit hearth and home with flaming bones and the moans of neighbors butchered alive?
There is no blood anymore. No danger, no crafty, grievous fairy folk to pour out strong the wine of dread, no twisted cords or chords of long betokened fate, no clash of arms as war imperils like a spear of unbent iron, no lay of dread, no poetry of form, no verse in which heroes ride to battle knowing that the cause is lost, yet true. Instead, there are pre-programmed versions of a computer animated Ogre dressed in padded, armored, tonnage made supposedly fearsome by the whine of soft machines and pastel glowing ion streams. Are fantasies are all of calculations bare, and vaporware. Where hell once walked (and men could too) in moors and meres to tear men apart, now fantasy envisions pixilated beasts who bleed binary bits of shadowed gore. Our fantasies are all virtual now, for few men risk real threat anymore, and so the grave has become our Land of Nevermore, and has made all our fantasies mere caricatures of terror’s past. We have tamed and booked our horrors, and so made a library of propriety where once stood a cairn of the slain. Having forgotten fear, and the fear of mortal blood, our modern fantasies are stale as death. And stink of contrivance, and gaping ennui.
There are no more palaces in Xanadu, no skaldic and scalding lines about the grisly death and wrack and ruin of cities burned, no ancient, deep, and untouched things (except in name only, and usually named as if by grade school contest), no weird apparitions uncanny to chill the unquiet blood, as a matter of fact (and that is the shame, for much of modern fantasy reads like a cold and sterile text-book in spell work and pseudo-science sprinkled over with the uneaten and discarded crumbs of “fantasy terms”) there is little or no Wyrd at all. Even the vocabulary is dead, like a glistening word-hoard buried under tons of unplumbed ice, and untimely forgotten just when any heat or effort of any kind would thaw it from its silent tomb.
There is no fell, there is no fury, there is no fate, there is no blood, it is as if the old ways are all trampled over with heroes of haystraw and monsters of papier-mâché. Much sound and fury, signifying only crudely animated acts, and the clashing clatter of chance.
But I wax melancholy I suspect, when I should wax to the tip of the spear. I see little of real fantasy (pun intended) nowadays, anymore than I see much of great myth. Or much of great anything at all in reference to all those fields and disciplines we variously call the Realms of Art (with the possible and noted exception of film). It is as if the best Oracles of all the Muses are overturned in sleep, and their ancient fonts of inspiration all dried up and broken, and the streams by which they slake their thirst are choked with all things most ill-conceived and unnatural. All things that is, but magic and hope.
Where is the Kingdom that once lay conjured up by Merlin? Where is the Undiscovered Country of Lord Dunsany? Where is the Worm Ouroboros? And how long til the dawn, that they rise again?
Modern fantasy (not all by any means, but much, too much, and far more than needs) – it seems more like a contradiction in terms than some great endeavor built upon megaliths pregnant with purpose, cunning and able in design. It is as if not even dwarves, but dwarves among dwarves, labor long, but without much effect, to construct palaces of modern fantasy only to discover in the end that they cannot even build large enough to house a child, or charm a fool. Are glowing swords and cartoonish heroes the best that modern fantasy can forge from centuries of previous and ancient effort, or does this age admit an underlying truth – her fantasy is but a forgery of things she does not, and has not sought, to understand?
Essay Eight: What is Modern Fantasy Anyway?
“It will have blood, they say; Blood will have Blood.”
“If blood be ink then every man might write an epoch with his veins.”
“Thy blood and virtue
Contend for empire in thee…”
“The Soul is in the Blood.”
What is modern fantasy?
A couple of threads, this one, and this one (and more I cannot now remember or locate), plus some reading I have been doing on my own lately have put me in the mood to consider that question. I’m not just speaking about fantasy gaming, though of course that is a sort of sub-branch of the entire subject matter, and is a question for consideration all on its own. And I’m sure that I, and others, have repeatedly beaten that poor enquiry into a stupor in one way or another. Or at least stabbed at it til it is stained beyond all recognition.
But what I’m talking about is the chthonic Grandfather of fantasy gaming, and indeed most modern fantasy films, and books, and so forth. I speak of the fathers, and the ancient forefathers of the modern “genre,” and so I ask, where is Ouranis in this matter? (Sorry, couldn’t resist the pun.) Where is that Titan, the old father of the old fantasy and the early myth, that looms in the background, but to our modern eyes is strangely invisible, though his skeleton is made of the very stuff that shelters our hidden dreams? And what was he really like in older age, and what has he become in our day (rather anemically of late, I suspect) in comparison to the monstrous prodigy he once was?
Now I’ll give my opinion of the matter, and then others can discuss their particular take on the issue. And mine will be measured, though I’m sure, through a scope too narrow for some, and too wide for a few.
Yet to me fantasy is myth. First and foremost. Not all myth, but a peculiar form of those things that once were. Now, of course, not all myth is fantasy, by any means, but the best fantasy is mythical, if not in whole, then at least in assumed antecedents. The point at which fantasy, or the best fantasy, sort of thinly diverges from the mythic Ocean of Tiamat, strikes out to start a new family of fortune, to branch away onto and into clearer and less salted waters - that begins within, and through, the channel of man. That is to say, fantasy is that type and class of myth that is not so much concerned with Cosmic issues, as it is, in the main, concerned with individual issues, or with the fate of particular individuals where such beings occasionally intersect the Cosmic axis. So to me Myth is the Ocean upon which the Soul of Man sets sail into the Milky Way, if you will, of gods and things divine, and Fantasy is the River, (like the Amazon or the headwaters of the Nile as they basically used to be), untamed and unexplored, that churning, clashing frontier waterway upon which the Soul of a Man embarks - inviting ordinary mortals as well as individual non-mortals to take to her waters and canoe and swim and fight upstream through obstacle and terror, through turmoil and disaster, to find either paradise, or damnation, or as is oft the real and more truthful case, a little of both.
But in any case fantasy is not really the record of the gods or creation, or even of God and Creation, it is the record of man and of creatures both like man, and unlike man, exploring that creation in their own individual and personal way. For man can be many things, but he cannot be a god, and God can be many things, but unless he compress himself down into the flesh of man he cannot sail the small and otherwise unnavigatable waters that are the channels of individual lives. For God is too huge, too ponderous to otherwise sail anything but that monstrous ocean of the Cosmos. And even that is but a poor pool in which for him to bathe.
In myth there is Ambrosia, and Soma, in fantasy though, there will be Blood. The blood of mortal men. And at times the blood of giants, and elves, and of dragon, and monster. But as the old saying goes, there will be blood. Not the immortal ichor of gods, but the bright crimson of clay mixed with personal fate, and individual fatality.
That being said I personally think that fantasy is far more than just the struggle of the individual, on a stage writ large (by measure of our human perspective), or even writ peculiar and small, as if enscribed in glyphs on fairy wings. There must be something else than mere “personal stake” in the events of the flow of the tale. Everyone and every player must have their personal stake in any affair, of course, that is only natural. But there must be other qualities present upon which to feast as well, unlooked for, surprising, and disturbing things to spice the broth, to thicken the soup, to flavor the meat of the matter. Or every tale of fantasy would devolve into the mere tail of the singular beast involved. In other words if fantasy were only about personal adventures then there would be no universal, transferable fantasy, no point to the yarn but the thread itself, and that thread would be of use only to the one who first wove it.
When the gods in repose sup on Nectar and Honey-dew, that is myth. Gods in repose strike us with interest, but rarely with fascination. It is their power and immortality we desire to see at work, not the gods themselves. To the gods the gods are of themselves, but to us they are merely types. But when men discover they starve in the dangerous and alien shadowland of fey and terrifying beings far older and more grim than themselves, and so must eat the flesh of the monster (to what unanticipated effect they cannot guess) they have butchered to survive through the winter, or when a man discovers that his enemy turned erstwhile ally has fed him the flesh of his first born changeling child in revenge against some forgotten slight, then that is fantasy (or sometimes Shakespeare).
When the gods hold war counsel and decide who they will patronize in war, that is myth, when mortal men battle seemingly impossible odds against foes and forces bent upon their ultimate doom and destruction, that is fantasy. Why? Because in fantasy, the best of fantasy anyway, the victims of life’s unruly riddles are not types in repose or masks that strut upon an unreal, unreasoned, and unrisked stage, they are us, caught in the same snares and webs we run throughout our lives, and so the weird and uncanny world does leap from thin air and through imagined plight into our own lungs, so that we breathe it in and it mixes in us deep.
But still there are other aspects of fantasy still more nebulous yet than that, not exactly myth, where individual souls meet feral world and beasts of the twisted nature. I could list dozens of such traits, such substances and natures of what I mean, but they all seem to me to coalesce into a sort of singular paradigm: they are not reality as we know and understand it, and yet they become our reality as we imagine it to be within us.
And here is the Crux of the matter, the point where all roads converge, and the examples of the past speak best but where much contemporary fantasy falls far short of being real fantasy (except in the most informal and inaccurate market sense) at all, and becomes, for lack of a better term, a B-grade comic book adaptation of a not very good made for television Sci-Fi (or is that Sy-Fy?) script of what fantasy might have been had Ed Wood or Uwe Boll given birth to it instead of Homer and Beowulf and Tolkien and Tieck and the Brothers Grimm (and they were grim, were they not).
A lot of modern fantasy is filled with Twinkle Swords and Potion Pots and men named the mighty Purple Prince of the High Feyworld Shanglethrop, but there ain’t a drop of human blood (or even imagined ichor) in any of it. Oh, there are spells, but few charms, monsters, but no menace, shadows, but no substance, allusions, but no achievement. Modern fantasy has all of the forms, a nauseum of forms, a plastic and artificial sea of forms, but lacks the living flesh, it lacks the catching breath, it lacks the very thing that most excites the human soul…
Where is the Blood? Where is the grael that you dip dead warriors into so that they rise again like breathless ghosts, their wounds still dripping bile and gore, so that the creep of their slick and liquid tread freezes the fear in a man into a solid, weighty, stifling thing as he watches unbidden doom approach? Where is the inescapable omen that flits about in uneasy dreams like a carrion crow to light upon the mind and call ancient black-eyed ravening wolves to fall upon you in the night? Where is the fire that cooks the Burning Man come to visit hearth and home with flaming bones and the moans of neighbors butchered alive?
There is no blood anymore. No danger, no crafty, grievous fairy folk to pour out strong the wine of dread, no twisted cords or chords of long betokened fate, no clash of arms as war imperils like a spear of unbent iron, no lay of dread, no poetry of form, no verse in which heroes ride to battle knowing that the cause is lost, yet true. Instead, there are pre-programmed versions of a computer animated Ogre dressed in padded, armored, tonnage made supposedly fearsome by the whine of soft machines and pastel glowing ion streams. Are fantasies are all of calculations bare, and vaporware. Where hell once walked (and men could too) in moors and meres to tear men apart, now fantasy envisions pixilated beasts who bleed binary bits of shadowed gore. Our fantasies are all virtual now, for few men risk real threat anymore, and so the grave has become our Land of Nevermore, and has made all our fantasies mere caricatures of terror’s past. We have tamed and booked our horrors, and so made a library of propriety where once stood a cairn of the slain. Having forgotten fear, and the fear of mortal blood, our modern fantasies are stale as death. And stink of contrivance, and gaping ennui.
There are no more palaces in Xanadu, no skaldic and scalding lines about the grisly death and wrack and ruin of cities burned, no ancient, deep, and untouched things (except in name only, and usually named as if by grade school contest), no weird apparitions uncanny to chill the unquiet blood, as a matter of fact (and that is the shame, for much of modern fantasy reads like a cold and sterile text-book in spell work and pseudo-science sprinkled over with the uneaten and discarded crumbs of “fantasy terms”) there is little or no Wyrd at all. Even the vocabulary is dead, like a glistening word-hoard buried under tons of unplumbed ice, and untimely forgotten just when any heat or effort of any kind would thaw it from its silent tomb.
There is no fell, there is no fury, there is no fate, there is no blood, it is as if the old ways are all trampled over with heroes of haystraw and monsters of papier-mâché. Much sound and fury, signifying only crudely animated acts, and the clashing clatter of chance.
But I wax melancholy I suspect, when I should wax to the tip of the spear. I see little of real fantasy (pun intended) nowadays, anymore than I see much of great myth. Or much of great anything at all in reference to all those fields and disciplines we variously call the Realms of Art (with the possible and noted exception of film). It is as if the best Oracles of all the Muses are overturned in sleep, and their ancient fonts of inspiration all dried up and broken, and the streams by which they slake their thirst are choked with all things most ill-conceived and unnatural. All things that is, but magic and hope.
Where is the Kingdom that once lay conjured up by Merlin? Where is the Undiscovered Country of Lord Dunsany? Where is the Worm Ouroboros? And how long til the dawn, that they rise again?
Modern fantasy (not all by any means, but much, too much, and far more than needs) – it seems more like a contradiction in terms than some great endeavor built upon megaliths pregnant with purpose, cunning and able in design. It is as if not even dwarves, but dwarves among dwarves, labor long, but without much effect, to construct palaces of modern fantasy only to discover in the end that they cannot even build large enough to house a child, or charm a fool. Are glowing swords and cartoonish heroes the best that modern fantasy can forge from centuries of previous and ancient effort, or does this age admit an underlying truth – her fantasy is but a forgery of things she does not, and has not sought, to understand?
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