Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "art"

A friend asked me to find pictures of goats ("they're a menace!") for a small project of his. It has inspired me, too. I kind of want to put something in the story.

I love goats.

full size



Drawn by a good friend of mine whom you can find here on twitter. Please bother him with a bunch of art commissions, he could use things to do.

I haven't had a giveaway for a while, and with a bit of plotting about I managed to put all three into one at the same time. For the rest of the week, The Straggler's Mask, Scourge of the Silver Wings, and Last Gasp to Bygone Stars are all available on Amazon for precisely zero dollars! You may not care for the genre or the content but you've nothing to lose!



(A battle against skeletal horror centipede not guaranteed to take place in any of these.)

When was the last time you enjoyed a book, or movie or video game or anything, that was truly groundbreaking and influential? Not just good and entertaining - there's been plenty of those - but something that left its mark to the history of arts and made certain none could ignore the footprint it left behind?



I don't recall us having had too many lately.

Maybe it's just me: maybe there's a bunch that I have not noticed because I don't follow the right circles. Or maybe these things can only be seen decades after the fact. Or maybe we no longer get any because we've capped our art, and can now only recycle the same old stuff.

But I've come to believe that it's far more sinister than this. I submit that the reason to the slump is that the modern day simply does not allow for innovation anymore.



We've come to live in this incredibly lame cyberpunk reality, where we're ruled by a few big megacorporations that keep on swallowing one another to become even greater and more bloated - and they're doing the best they can to make as much money as possible with as little risk as possible. And what art can you have without a bit of risk?

Marvel Cinematics Universe is pretty much the single most monetarily successful movie franchise ever, and sure, plenty of the movies in it are pretty entertaining and well-directed and -acted... but they're also about as far from groundbreaking as you can get, barely even staying in your head for much longer after you've seen them, let alone leaving real a mark in film history and culture. In the realm of comics, superheroes rule and continue to rule even though nothing has changed in their worlds for decades. Nothing in the realm of anime has approached the popularity of One Piece, and even that - for all the money it has made - has barely left a mark when compared to its predecessor Dragon Ball. The western cartoons have been running in circles for decades. Dungeons & Dragons has a death-grip on roleplaying games. Among video games we've just got Fortnite, Minecraft, Battlefields and what have you, the same old franchise zombies: The Last Of Us II recently racked in pretty much every reward there was - even making up some new ones just for itself - despite the enormous worker abuse and the fact that pretty much no player actually liked it.

And then books - the reason we're all here in the first place. "Groundbreaking" is a word that comes up a lot in advertisement, and then the book sells like a thousand copies and is forgotten by the next year by all but the most devoted fans. As detailed wrote in the previous post, the art of literature is particularly dead: even in the mainstream it barely sells, let alone being any good.

Then if you do come up with something genuinely new in any of these mediums, you'll be pretty much doomed into obscurity, no matter how good your work actually is: you'll impress a small group of people, but you lack the money and influence of these megacorporations, and your gem will be buried deep beneath the bland inoffensive porridge they promote.



I still think Undertale deserved to change everything about video games. It was the first and only time I've seen a game take full advantage of its medium - outside of brief gimmicks - blurring the line between the player and player character, and even more than that, offering genuinely impactful choices and immense depth of variations that follow from them. But of course such things could never be implemented in the AAA industry, obsessed with special-effect-laden interactive movies as it is. Maybe if it had come out a decade earlier it might have done something. Alas.

And it's the exact same story in every medium. Nothing has been allowed to change for ages. No risks have been taken, let alone paying off. There was a time when the media giants of today - Star Wars, Dragon Ball, superhero comics, Disney Animated Canon, video games as a whole - were precisely the sort of risks, ones that just happened to pay off enormously, all the more beautiful for it. We need more of those. We've forgotten where we came from.

I hope this won't last for long. I hope the people will grow tired of it all eventually and that the status quo will be broken. And I wish to be there to see it when it happens... and to take advantage of the new golden age once it does. Sword and Sorcery will rise again.



Would be nice if I knew what to do to be noticed, though. I feel like a drowning man unable to break the surface: I know what I must do but I cannot for the life of me tell which way to swim or how to swim at all.

Imagine questing for an ancient spell of awesome power, overcoming many dangerous trials and perils, one of your friends even sacrificing his life to break the seal. Then at last you get to whip out this planet-buster against the Dark Lord. And you find that it has all the power of a wet fart.



This is the predicament that the players of the 1988 Final Fantasy II found themselves in. The fabled Ultima spell, sealed away in the ancient days for its world-shattering potential, turned out to be effectively useless. Even the Emperor's mooks could pretty safely survive even a higher-level blast. The whole plotline was dropped just about as you learned the spell, and you never once need to actually cast it. Poor Minwu died for naught.

Allegedly we have one of the programmers to thank for this: he figured that such an old and outdated spell simply could not stand relevant in the face of newer and more refined techniques. That magic would naturally have advanced leaps and bounds in the many ages since Ultima had ruled the earth, and that even a simple fire spell, taken for granted by young wizards of today, could match or even overshadow it. Imagine Greek Fire, a deadly secret weapon of antiquity, pitted against modern bomber plane with a cargo hold full of napalm. You can't really argue with that.

Yet argue with it I shall!

Yes, cars get faster and safer, life-saving medicine more reliable, and communication devices more sophisticated. Technology improves. Science marches on. Problem is, as me and many others have elsewhere argued, magic is not science. It's pretty much the polar opposite of technology. Magic is art. And with art, I'm sad to say that these past few decades, if anything, we've regressed.



Art is hard work. Blood and sweat and tears. Cunning and problem-solving. Focus and desire. Patience and sacrifice. Whatever your canvas - paper, notepad, piece of code, circle of summoning, artifact of doom - you're pouring your soul onto it for all to see. Your anger and frustration, your depression and self-doubts, it's all fuel in the fires of creation. You rack your brain to figure out how it all comes together, and get real inventive to pull off things no one else ever has. You need to be conservative with what you put in, and lean into your limitations, turn them into advantages.

You wouldn't even have started if you didn't think it would be worth it. You won't ever give up until it's perfect and just right. Every hardship you face, every hurdle, even the tiniest of chores and errands and maintenance, only serves to fuel your determination and conviction and keep you focused on the task. And the harder the road, the more rewarding it is when you reach the end - the greater the end result, and the greater the lessons you've learned of your craft, of life, of yourself.

And technology gets in the way of that. It makes things easier, and this is one place in the world where this should not happen. It's like putting an escalator up a tall mountain road. Sure, the view's still great, but it doesn't feel the same way. You don't feel any ache or pain and your muscles didn't grow at all. It's not an adventure anymore, you could've just gone up there on a whim.

True enough, typing up a whole book is still pretty tough, even on a computer. There's still effort and great lessons and the beautiful sense of accomplishment, none of that has gone anywhere. Even to this day, great fantasies and biographies let us marvel the souls and blood of their authors.

ut how's your handwriting doing? Wouldn't it just look so much grander with your own personal style of calligraphy and fancy medieval illuminations? Can you manage anything better than chicken-scratches now, since our whole society, including the work of art, gives no incentive to do such things anymore? And if you had a story in mind that truly deserved such attention - one you wanted to go the extra mile for - just what kind of an amazing fantasy would it have to be?

It's the same story all over. There's a reason most of us prefer practical effects over CGI, real costumes and camera tricks and big-ass model castles; a reason the first Jaws movie was a classic, the shoddy and uncooperative shark prop turned into a great advantage, when in the modern day that'd have thrown the big computer-monster front and center in every shot and ruined the whole thing. Even the new Puss In Boots movie, beautiful as it is, obvious as it is that its creators cared and put their heart into it and came up with all these new effects and tricks, it still can't hold a candle to AKIRA that came out decades in the past. And the modern plague of noodle-handed bean-mouths, cheap and simple to do, are widely and justly mocked.

And now the AI. Now at last, with the arrival of the great apocalyptic beasts GPT and Midjourney, all effort can be excised. All thought can be put away, all cunning snuffed out, all uniqueness made cheaply available everywhere, all meaning lost. I envision a dark age for all art unlike any we've seen ever before, even in the days of Comics Code.



Where was I? Oh, right, magic.

Yeah, I could see magic work about the same way. Over the generations - centuries, millennia - inventive and pioneering sorcerers would refine the spellcraft, make it easier to handle, cheaper to cast, quicker, more manageable, more potent. They'd learn new techniques, delve in new dimensions, uncover new realms. Write down names of new and more powerful cosmic entities. Promise their souls to stronger gods. Craft more sophisticated artifacts and channelling tools. Brew stronger potions. You get the idea. They might never truly tame the stuff - never get to the realm of the much-maligned Magic Systems - but they'll hone their craft to such efficiency as it is possible.

Before long even children can learn simple spells, and cast fireworks without risking to blow up their heads in the backlash. Perhaps not quite everyone can learn it, now or ever, but still, it'll seep into every aspect of this magical society.

The old ways are forgotten. Who, in this day and age, would ever bother spending all night dancing under the full moon? Who would want to risk an explosive miscast, when we can now avoid such things? Why would you still beseech this god, when it's known its power in our world is almost lost? Are you really crafting your own wand?

But this is magic. The realm of mystery and wonder, of fantasy and terrible, terrible might. Not all that is lost is worthless; not all that is outdated is entirely without power. And the more careful you need to be with it, the more preparations and precautions you need, the more it will teach you in turn. And if you're so absolutely convinced that you have to eschew the new and more reliable methods in favour of the old stuff, if you must risk your life in a way no wizard in ages has had to, if you must have your own meticulously handcrafted wand, if you must spend all night out in the cold, if you must go the hard way, tread a thorny path thought cleared millennia ago... well, then you probably have a damned good reason for it, and I'm not going to argue with that. Instead, I think I'll run the hell away.



All these weak-ass ponce conjurers, when they see an old madman begin dance the old dance, they better hit the deck. Shit is about to get real.