A. Lee Martinez's Blog, page 41

Proto-Protagonist

What makes a protagonist?

At its most basic, the protagonist is the lead character of out story.  They don’t need to have any innate qualities to be designated the protagonist, which might or might not be different than being labeled the story’s hero.  Protagonists have a lot more wiggle room than heroes.  If the story focuses on one character above all others, that character is the protagonist, usually by default.  A lot of critically acclaimed stories go the protagonist route.  Name a popular TV drama and odds are pretty good that it features an amoral, questionable protagonist who is defined by his ruthlessness and negative qualities.  It works, and I’m not going to put that down.

But I have to admit I prefer heroes to protagonists.  Heroes can’t just be the character at the center of the story.  They need to be more than that.  They have to be heroic obviously.

It’s perhaps a bit old fashioned, but it matters a lot to me that I admire and even aspire toward heroism.  This is why, as I’ve pointed out too many times already, I don’t care for Man of Steel.  It moves Superman from hero to protagonist.  He’s not a bad guy in the story, but there’s not a lot to admire about him.  He goes from an aspirational character to a relatable one, and that is a clear choice by the creators of that film.  Just not one I can get behind.

I write heroes, but I do my best to avoid cookie cutter definitions of heroism.  Some of my heroes, like Mack Megaton (indestructible superstrong buttkicker) and Emperor Mollusk (absolute mastermind), are standard issue in their heroic qualities.  Mack and Emperor are Men of Action!, even if neither is strictly speaking a man.  They march into the scene and win the day by being stronger, smarter, and just better than their opposition.

Other heroes, like Nessy (practical housekeeper) or Diana (a roll with the weirdness kind of lady), are more unusual in their heroism.  They aren’t among the most powerful characters in their universe, nor the most clever.  They are the right people in the right situation at the right time to make all the difference in the world, but it can be easy to underestimate them.

The problem seems to be that we have very specific definitions of what a sophisticated protagonist MUST be.  It’s not hard to figure out what these new rules are.  One only need compare the classic Superman to the Man of Steel version.

Sophisticated protagonists must be conflicted.

Sophisticated protagonists must act out of self-interest.

Sophisticated protagonists must sacrifice something in order to achieve their victory.

In most cases, it’s not hard to do any of those things, and, as a general rule, they do enable us to tell more compelling stories.  But it isn’t a mold that every protagonist should be shoved into, and there’s something disappointing to me about the absence of heroic characters who are not only admirable, but become MORE admirable as their story progresses.  Protagonists who walk through fire and manage to become better for it.  Heroes who embody triumph.  Superman used to be that guy, but of late, he’s become just another guy who saves the day only after Metropolis is in ruins, who kills reluctantly because he can’t think of a better way.  But, hey, it’s reluctantly, so it’s not like he’s a bad guy, right?

I’m not calling for an end to the morally dubious, flawed protagonist.  I think such characters have expanded our horizons and allowed us to tell interesting stories.  Such characters are nothing new, and have existed for as long as people have been telling stories.  But there should be room for many types of protagonists, many types of heroes.  A world where Superman must be Batman is a poorer one for it.

(I won’t get into the many misconceptions about what makes Batman “interesting” because that’s a topic unto itself.)

I’d like more diversity in my protagonists in any case.  I’m not only talking about race, gender, etc. (though that’s a great place to start).  I’d love to see more sensible protagonists who succeed because they think things through.  I don’t care much for Breaking Bad, but I do like that its protagonist is defined by his intelligence more than his muscle.  Though I do wish intelligent protagonists weren’t often portrayed as morally or socially deficient.  Then again, my most intelligent hero is (technically) an evil genius, so it’s not as if I haven’t fallen a bit into that trap myself.

It’s not always easy to write heroes in this day and age, and it will probably get worse as time goes on and a generation that grew up watching a lot of grey heroes fighting grey villains begins writing its own stories.  Just like comic book superheroes have never quite recovered from the generational influences of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns.  It is the nature of culture to favor one set of storytelling tropes over another, and it’s also the nature of culture to eventually seek out new tropes that satisfy neglected needs.  I sometimes wish the cycle would hurry itself up, but all things in their own time.

In the meantime, I’ll contribute what I can to popular culture.  It isn’t going to change the world, but I’ll be here when the world is ready to change on its own.

(Oh, and because people have told me I should do more plugging, I thought I should mention that Mack Megaton is from The Automatic Detective, Emperor Mollusk is from Emperor Mollusk vs the Sinister Brain, Nessy is from Too Many Curses, and Diana is from Chasing the Moon.  Each of them are really great stories, featuring very different protagonists.  Also, all of them have weird slime or tentacle monsters in them, which is something I didn’t do on purpose but seems to pop up a lot in my stories.)

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Suck It Up

Doing something is usually more important than doing something well.  You have to be ready to fail, and you have to be willing to do so a lot before you’re ever really going to be good at anything.  It’s kind of an obvious truth, but it’s one worth repeating now and then.  Failure is important and, to quote Jake from Adventure Time:

“Dude, suckin’ at something is the first step to being sort of good at something.”

But even when you’re good at something, you’re going to stink at it occasionally.  I’ve written ten novels at this point, a dozen or so short stories, a heck of a lot of blog essays, and just a ton of words.  And not all those words have been great.  Most of them, sure, but not all of them.

The problem I’ve most often come across is that a lot of egotistical people think they’re great at stuff they aren’t all that good at, and they have no shortage of confidence because they’ll never understand how bad they are at something.  This is why the vast majority of self-published books are pretty sub-par.  It’s not because being self-published makes one a bad writer.  It’s that a lot of bad writers turn to self-publishing to feed their egos.

Seriously, I have nothing against self-publishing, and it’s a perfectly viable option for a lot of people.  But if you’re self-publishing your book because it’s “too brilliant” for the literary establishment, I am here to break the bad news that it isn’t.  The publishing industries has nothing against brilliance.  It doesn’t necessarily care if a book is literary gold, but if they happen upon a brilliant book they think they can sell, they’ll publish it.  Convincing them that the book will sell is the hard part.  Not the brilliance.

Meanwhile, a lot of interesting people with something cool to say and neat stories to write are so busy second guessing themselves that they’ll never even finish their story, much less ever get it published.

I struggle with this myself still, and I’m a professional writer.  I get paid to write and have been getting paid to write for almost a decade at this point.  You can walk into most bookstores and find my books on the shelves.  (And if you don’t find them, do me a favor and request one, won’t you?  That’d be keen.)  I’ve had my ups and downs, and it’s not always sunshine and rainbows, but I have managed to make a living doing this, which is more than many people manage.

Still, it’s difficult sometimes to not get stuck in your own head and to talk yourself out of even trying.  While it’s different for every book I write, there are some books where I was halfway through and thought, “What the hell am I doing?  No one is going to want to read this.”  It’s funny because I don’t doubt that I can write a decent story, but whether or not it’s a decent story people are going to get excited about, that’s always up in the air as far as I’m concerned.

But I write anyway.  I’m fortunate that I’ve achieved some small level of success, and it’s easier to talk myself into going at those low points.  It can be a struggle now and then, and there are days, weeks, when I’d much rather sit around playing video games than write another damned word.  And I like writing stories.  I think I’m even good at it.

So if you’ve been thinking about writing and keep talking yourself out of it, I say go for it.  Jump right in.  Don’t worry too much about plot or theme or narrative arcs.  Just write.  Write knowing it will stink but that if you stick with something and are genuinely trying to be good at it, you will get better.  You might never be great, but greatness is overrated.  (Trust me on this.  I’m pretty great.)

This advice applies to more than writing though.  It applies to a lot of things.  Draw awkward stickmen fighting dinosaurs.  Sculpt lopsided clay pots.  Go to the gym and lift little baby weights.  Cook something badly.  Play board games you don’t understand and lose them over and over again.  Get stuck in awkward conversations with people you barely know.  And just otherwise do something you aren’t very good at, knowing you’re going to fail at it and probably aren’t even going to care enough to get better at in the end.  Because if you try enough things, something is bound to click.  You might not be great, but you can be good.

And being good is highly underrated.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Obscurity Power

While DC struggles to bring ANYBODY BUT BATMAN to movie screens, Marvel has just released the first trailer for Guardians of the Galaxy, a sci fi superhero film about (obviously) superheroes in space.  A lot of fans, myself included, are flummoxed that DC vast stable of characters are trapped in some vague limbo while Marvel’s next planned blockbuster features a talking raccoon and a tree monster as two of its lead characters.  It seems absurd on the surface, and, indeed, I never thought I’d see Rocket Raccoon in a movie.  Much less a mainstream big budget blockbuster.

But then I realized that Rocket’s obscurity is exactly why he’s the perfect character for Marvel to get behind, and that the beauty of Marvel’s current string of superhero films is that they have all focused on characters most people have only a passing familiarity with.  Before these films, most people had barely any opinion on Iron Man, Thor, or Captain America.  But everyone has an opinion on Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman.  Everyone knows Aquaman is dumb.

Or do they?

A lot of these opinions are cultural institutions, bandied about with thoughtless abandon.  To use the word Meme in its proper context for once, these are thoughts that exist on an almost reflexive level.  People who haven’t read a Superman comic in their life, who haven’t watched a single episode of any cartoon featuring The Man of Steel, and who know almost nothing about the character’s history, but are still convinced that Superman is “too much of a boyscout” or a “boring, invincible hero”.  Everyone in the universe can tell you how stupid Aquaman is, but when you point out that he has more powers than Captain America or Batman, that he is stronger and faster and a highly skilled hand-to-hand combatant, they will still retort that “He talks to fish, and that’s dumb” as their final opinion.

The advantage Rocket Raccoon, Star Lord, Groot, Drax, and Gamora have over these much more well-known characters is that, outside of a small, hardcore comic book fan base, nobody knows much about them.  Society has yet to really define them, and that means that the creators can go into a film adaptation with a lot of flexibility.  This has been one of the keys to the Marvel movies’ string of successes.  These adaptations were free of a lot of the baggage from both the creator and the audience.

DC’s characters don’t have that advantage.  I’m not offering it as an excuse that they’re so reluctant to even try a Wonder Woman movie.  Though I also can’t blame them for being hesitant after Green Lantern, a movie I actually enjoyed quite a bit but seems to be on most people’s dislike list.

Marvel, on the other hand, is full of properties that nobody knows about.  I think what’s helped them most, ironically, is that most of their bigger properties (Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four) are stuck at other studios.  So Marvel must turn to its less popular characters for its own productions.  If Marvel had those rights, I don’t think we would ever have gotten an Iron Man film.  And without Iron Man, the entire chain of events leading to the Marvel Cinematic Universe would never have happened.  Instead, we would probably be stuck with a Spider-Man reboot and another Wolverine film (with some X-Men dropping by to say hell0).  Oh, wait.  We kind of already have those, don’t we?

These circumstances are why the Marvel Cinematic Heroes continue to fly high, and why they continue to take obscure characters and turn them into popular mainstream hits.  Nobody was clamoring for a Guardians of the Galaxy movie, but now that it’s coming, it looks promising.  Marvel has succeeded in doing in film what comics have taken for granted.  They’ve created an interwoven universe where all things are possible, and they’ve done so from the ground up.  No easy feat, but one that happened as much due to circumstances as anything else.

DC has found some success in superheroes in other media too, but its most notable ongoing success is the Green Arrow TV show.  (Yes, I know it’s just Arrow, but I refuse to leave off the Green.)  Like Iron Man, like Thor, like the Guardians of the Galaxy, Oliver Queen is somebody most people haven’t heard of, and thus, he’s free to enter the public arena free of pre-judgment.

So it’s not an accident that The Guardians are getting their own film, and understanding this, it’s even a sensible expansion of the Marvel brand.  There are dozens upon dozens of space-themed superheroes and villains in the Marvel comic book universe (and a lot of my favorite characters in Marvel Comics are of the “Cosmic” variety), and because no one would’ve ever thought to license those rights, it gives Marvel a hell of a lot of potential for more movies.

In a way, the Marvel movies remind me of the golden age of Batman: the Animated Series, Superman: TAS, and Justice League Unlimited.  The creators were allowed to jump headfirst into the company’s toybox and create some of the most impressive, genre-defining stories of the era.  Most of my favorite superhero stories are found, not in the original comics, but in those animated tales.  Of course, success leads to complacency, and Warner Brothers Animation has fallen to producing half-hearted adaptations of previously successful stories.  That’s a real shame, but it does seem the way it was fated to go.

So it is too that I imagine the Marvel movies will eventually suffer the same fate as executives, marketing folks, and just plain unimaginative creators step into pool for their very own slice of the pie.  It already happened to their animated work, where the Disney XD initial version of The Avengers lost a hell of a lot of its charm when it was “fixed” to become more like the movies.  But for now, it’s almost a golden age for Marvel superhero films.  Even when they’re not that great, they’re still doing what so few dare to do.  I think a wise tree alien once said it best:

I am Groot.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Endings, Happy or Otherwise

Why do we dislike happy endings?  More importantly, why do we equate them with shallowness or fluff?  It’s an important question.

For the record, I like happy endings.  I don’t always need them.  Nor do I think they are always dramatically appropriate.  Some stories are bound to have sad or ambiguous endings, and that’s just fine with me.  I don’t always need the hero to find love, the bad guy to get his comeuppance, and everybody getting a free puppy by the end.  But I do like it when it works and when it is justified within the story itself.

Happy endings will always be seen as “safer” and “less bold” (as a recent review for Divine Misfortune I stumbled across put it) by a lot of people.  There’s not much a writer can do to get around that.  It’s largely a matter of preference, and that’s often the way it works.  We all have our pet peeves, our hot buttons, our preferred likes.  Nothing wrong with that.  I happen to prefer stories where, even if the good guys don’t win, there’s some element of hope for tomorrow.  It’s a preference.  I get that.

But too often, it seems as if we reflexively find happy endings to be a less interesting, less dramatic choice.  There’s some logic to that.  A happy ending can often seem like a copout.  Life is messy and complicated, and an unapologetic happy ending tends to ring untrue to us.  It probably stems from the fairy tales we are told as children.  “And they lived happily ever after . . . ” is probably the biggest lie in fiction.  But it’s not a lie because the characters end up happy.  It’s a lie because it implies that their lives are over and nothing else interesting ever happens to them again.

Maybe that’s why we dislike them as well.  We all know life goes on, that it is full of ups and downs, and that happiness is a fragile state of being.  We all learn that there is no promise of happiness tomorrow and that things are far more likely to go wrong than right in the long run.  And if you don’t know that, congratulations, you are either living a charmed life or completely oblivious.  Either way, you might be considered one of the lucky ones.

I think happy endings get a bad rap because of that word ENDINGS.  It implies that since the story is over, there is nothing more on the horizon for the characters.  They all get together for the after party, shake hands, and disappear into the ether.  It’s hard not to see that when so many characters seem like they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves once the story ends.  Fairy tale characters are most prone to this.  Prince Charming is designed to fight dragons, kiss the princess, be a dreamboat, and little else.  Cinderella is made to be downtrodden and then whisked away to the palace.  The villains are made to be villains.  The extras exist only to play their part and gracefully depart the stage.  Once the story is over, these characters have no reason to keep going.

Perhaps this is why so many writers and readers of late have taken to expanding on these characters.  It’s an interesting idea, to question what happens to Snow White after the wicked queen is dead or why the evil sorceress bothered to curse anyone in the first place.  It rarely ends up appealing to me.  Maybe because I find these characters don’t have enough going on to really justify it in the end.  I know a lot of writers earn plenty of praise and commercial success by tapping into this zeitgeist, and good for them.  Sometimes, they’re interesting (ala the critically acclaimed Fables comic title).  And sometimes, they seem like so much bad fanfiction (ala Once Upon a Time . . .).  But either way, they tend not to be able to hold my interest.

(Also, notice I said BAD fanfiction.  I have nothing against fanfiction, and while the majority of it isn’t very good, that’s no different than most fiction.)

I usually have happy endings in my stories, but I’ve always thought it was obvious too that life would continue for these characters.  They aren’t on a permanent upswing with nothing but sunshine and rainbows in their future.  There will be further trials and tribulations.  There always are.  I’d like to think I imbue my characters with enough life and personality that they don’t seem to stop existing on the last page.  But I can’t blame some folks for feeling as if it isn’t as sophisticated as an author who might spell that out.

Another part of it though is that we’re so accustomed to being fed (and sometimes, force fed) characters that it can seem wrong to leave them behind.  Everybody seems to want to know the origin of their favorite characters, and they usually want to know how that character meets their end.  Comic book superheroes, for instance, love rebooting characters every now and then so that they can retell the origin of when Batman first met Superman or create a new version of Spider-Man’s origin.  They also love telling possible final stories for the characters, where Superman finally dies or Wonder Woman’s final battle against evil.  It’s only when the character is dead and buried that we safely feel like labeling their story over.

Perhaps my favorite example of Tragedy and Death trumping Comedy and Life is found in Up.  The movie begins with a touching montage of the lives of a couple, from childhood to the death of one of them.  It is, indeed, a beautiful piece of storytelling, and it ends on a sad (but inevitable) note.  The rest of the story is about Carl dealing with his grief and loneliness.  It’s about his obsession with the past and regrets he carries.  And, then, near the end, the true theme of the story shows itself.  Life is grand.  It’s full of joy and pain.  It isn’t what you want it to be, and it rarely will be.  The tragedy of Carl’s character at this point isn’t that he misses his wife.  It’s that he’s letting that pain keep him from living onward.  That moment in the film, when his wife reaches out from beyond with a message scrawled in a book that makes him realize this, is so very powerful to me that I still tear up a bit just writing about it.  But for most people, it seems it will never be as powerful as the opening montage, which is there deliberately to play upon our perceptions and to lure us into Carl’s point of view so that when the revelation comes later, we’ll be just as surprised and emotionally invigorated as Carl.

Up is a movie that’s all about life’s ups and downs, and that’s it’s most powerful message.  Yet when we talk about its sophisticated elements, we don’t often talk about the joyful ones, the hopeful ones.  The ending, as Carl, Russell, and Dug sit on the curb, counting cars, having a genuine good moment that each of them so desperately have been missing from their lives, doesn’t say there will be no more pain in the future.  It’s the end of this story, and it’s a happy one.  But it’s not THE END.

Happily ever after doesn’t exist.  But happy endings do because most stories have to end at some point.  If the writer happens to choose to leave when things are looking rosy, it isn’t always a copout.  Sometimes, it’s exactly the right place to leave.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Devastation of the Indines (a board game review)

While my professional career has been a little rocky lately, Action Force, my recent tabletop game purchases have been exceptional.  I own a lot of games.  Over 150 last time I checked.  Some might think that’s too many, and they would probably be right.  Then along comes this recent string of games that are all undeniably awesome, and I think it’s not nearly enough.

As a tabletopper, I love playing a good board and / or card game.  In fact, if I had one weakness in this hobby it’s that I rarely play a game well enough to master it.  There’s no exception with the game I’m reviewing today, but that’s mostly because it is filled to the brim with such possibilities.

By the way, is tabbletopper a thing?  It should be if it isn’t.

Devastation of the Indines by Level 99 Games (www.lvl99games.com) is, hands down, one of the most rewarding, intriguing, and downright enjoyable games I’ve played in ages.  Part of the BattleCon series of games (stands for Battle Connection) the game can be best summarized as a card-driven battle game that simulates a classic 2D fighting arcade game.  At its simplest, Devastation is a one-on-one fight between fantastic characters.  What makes the game shine though is that it isn’t trying for a literal interpretation of the genre.  It understands that a card game can’t simulate the battle of reflexes and combo mashing that can be found in arcade fighters.  It wisely opts to take advantage of the card game format to do things an arcade fighter couldn’t do.  By building off the framework with new and interesting ideas, the game really manages to be the best of both worlds.

Teaching the game is relatively simple.  It’s as simple as choosing a fighter, reading their reference card, and jumping right in.  Sure, you’re likely to spend a couple of turns fighting ineffectively, but within a few turns, everything will start to click.  Understand how to play this game isn’t that hard.  Playing it well is another matter entirely.

Every fighter has their own rule unique to them.  Eligor the paladin expects to get hit, but, if played correctly, hits back harder.  Marmalee the sorceress collects concentration counters that allow her to trigger powerful effects, but those counters can be lost when she’s hit by her opponent.  Pendros the druid drops environmental tokens on the board, and he’s all about making sure he and his opponent end up in the right position to take advantage of them.  The framework for all the fighters is the same, but the special rules mean that no two play exactly alike.

And that’s merely three of the novice level fighters.  There are 30 fighters in all, ranging from simple characters like these to incredibly complex characters like Tanis the ghostly puppeteer who jumps from puppet token to puppet token in unpredictable ways and Iaxus the dimensional guardian who plays special plane cards that alter the rules of the match for both players.

In addition, the game features four boss characters who are specifically designed to fight groups, allowing for a rich multiplayer experience.  Any fighter can also be upgraded to boss mode, allowing for an odd number of players to enjoy a match.  There are arenas that can also add a level of complexity and risk.

It’s difficult to describe just how much this game shines, especially with repeated plays.  This is deliberate.  While Devastation of the Indines can be played casually, it works best when played often.  There’s so much in this box that it can be a little overwhelming, and when I first bought the game, I jumped from fighter to fighter with gleeful abandon.  It was great fun, but only after I decided to stick with a fighter did I start noticing how deep this game is.  If you play multiple matches in a row with the same fighters against the same opponent, the game play grows more complex.  It reminds me of when I used to play 2D fighters.  The game wasn’t only about the fighters, but the metagame of learning your opponent’s style (and them learning yours).  The best 2D fighters were a constant back-and-forth as players adapt strategies, overcome those strategies, and find new, unexpected ways to win.  Because this is a tabeltop game, the reflexes and complex memorization of a traditional fighting game have been replaced by a battle of wits.

I could talk about this game all day, but it has risen to the top of my Must Play List, and while it has a hefty price tag, the amount of content is staggering.  There’s also its smaller, more affordable, completely compatible predecessor War of the Indines.  Both are highly recommended, Action Force.  And if you can’t trust the world’s fourth or fifth most famous tabletop game enthusiast, who can you trust?

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Game Plan

I’ve been writing for well over twenty years now.  I’ve been a professional novelologist for a little over eight years now.

I still have no clue what people want.

Not one.

I have an inkling.  I know that, generally, people like things they already know they like.  Once someone discovers something they enjoy, they’re likely to stick with it for a long, long time.  We get annoyed at Hollywood for producing sequel after sequel, but we go see them.  We get bored with ongoing book series, but we stick with them.  We become wholly dedicated to our favorite TV shows, books, movies, bands, and so on.

Until we stop being dedicated and move onto something else.

I know (or at least, I’m pretty sure) that the key to gaining a loyal audience, more than anything else, is timing.  Star Wars came along at the right time and a media empire was born.  Like a first love, it holds a special place in a lot of people’s hearts, and it continues to thrive.  It’s not only because of that original audience either.  It’s because Star Wars spreads like a cultural virus, from old host to fresh hosts.  It continues to remain relevant because, somehow, it continues to become the first love of new generations.

Harry Potter became a phenomenon because a young generation was ready for something, and, if it wasn’t Harry Potter, it would’ve been something else.  That’s not meant as a slight to Harry Potter‘s popularity.  Any more than it’s a slight to my lovely wife to acknowledge that timing was critical to our relationship.  I love my wife, but if our timing had been off, we could easily have gone different ways, and we would never have known what we were missing.

But is timing all that matters?  Is life all about being in the right place at the right time?

It’s not that I doubt the importance of other elements.  The original Star Wars is a groundbreaking film and worthy of every bit of praise it receives.  The Harry Potter series (while not my cup of tea) is solid, entertaining, and has plenty worthwhile about it.  But timing is why they’re noticed.

Maybe it’s because I’ve had a bit of a career slump of late, and I feel like I should be doing better than I am at this point.  Of course, it’s just as likely that I was on an early, unexpected career high, and this isn’t a slump, but the way it should be.  It’s weird to complain about being dissatisfied getting paid to write stories for a living when so many people would love to do it for free, but it’s human.  I want to be more popular than I am.  I want to sell more books.

And I’m just not sure how to do that.

A lot of that, much as I hate saying it, is out of my hands.  I don’t control the timing of the universe, and I can’t tell the future.  As humans, we tend to view hindsight as foresight.  Sure, Star Wars and Harry Potter are now multi-million dollar cultural moneymaking machines, but at the time, nobody really knew that.  And there are plenty of predicted NEXT BIG THINGS that fizzled away and faded into obscurity.

I’m fortunate enough that I’ve seen other writers go through this, so it isn’t quite surprising.  I’ve known more than one writer who, while chugging along with their career, hit that career bump where things just seemed overwhelming and frustrating.  That’s not much different than any career, where it’s all too easy to feel like you should be further along than you are and you end up wondering if this is all there is to it?

I’ve never expected to be a household name or to be a giant of science fiction and fantasy, but I know I don’t want to be stuck where I am either.  I’ve come to realize recently that my ambitions are larger than that.  I don’t think I’ll ever be spoken of in hushed tones among the greats of literature.  I doubt my books will even be remembered a few decades from now.  But still, I want to climb higher.

I used to think writing good stories (and a lot of luck) might be enough, but it isn’t.  There has to be a game plan at some point.  I don’t have one of those yet.

STEP ONE: WRITE

STEP TWO: ?????

STEP THREE: PROFIT

You could call it a work in progress, Action Force.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

 

The Robocop Factor

So there’s a new Robocop movie coming out this weekend.  Well, not new.  A reboot, a remake, a re-imagining, whatever you want to call it.  I know next to nothing about it, but this is the internet, where ignorance doesn’t prevent one from commenting on things.

I couldn’t be less interested in it.

The original Robocop is one of my favorite films for a lot of reasons.  It came out in 1987, when I was 14 years old, and at the time, a good violent science fiction film was something of an original.  It featured a cyborg hero, who isn’t technically a robot, but close enough.  And it’s a subtle nod to distopian science fiction, corporate culture, and the nature of identity.  There’s also a giant killbot.  To say that Robocop is a product of its time is correct, but it has also achieved a certain level of timelessness because it has a larger scope than a lot of other 80′s flicks.  Is it weird to say that I would call the film surprisingly intelligent?

Not if you know me at all.

Robocop is a very violent film.  It’s bloody, gory, and takes place in a bleak future (though I think it’s technically an alternate past at this point).  Even by current standards, the film remains surprisingly brutal.  People get shot, stabbed, blown up, and, most memorably, a guy gets doused with toxic waste and literally splatters into  goo when hit by a car.  It’d be easy to hear all this and dismiss the film as an exercise in 80′s excess, and, indeed, I’m sure there are people who still do that.

But having watched the film recently, I see it as having aged very well.  While it is violent, there is an intelligence at work as well as some surprising story choices.  There’s a sinister corporation at work here, but the corporation isn’t entirely evil.  There’s no doubt that profit is their motivation, but they also are not completely heartless.  The world can be brutal, but there are indications that, despite it all, life goes on.  Robocop himself is clunky, slow, and very robotic.

Some of those choices were quickly forgotten in the sequels, where the more generic storytelling assumptions popped up.  In Robocop 2 and most media beyond that, the corporation (OCP) goes from ambivalently evil to outright malicious.  The dystopian elements get cranked up, and the science fiction elements, relatively minor in the film, get more prevalent.  At one point, Robocop gets  a freakin’ jetpack, which always felt a bit strange for a character defined by his clumsiness.  In the process, Robocop and his stories became more generic, losing a lot of the film’s original charm in preference of things we’d already seen a hundred times before, done better in other stories.

Knowing nothing about the new film, I can only assume these sort of changes will remain in place.  This is to be expected.  The longer something lasts, the more generic it tends to become.  This is especially true of any shared property or idea because it will inevitably fall into the hands of someone who either wants to make it more commercial or, even stranger, thinks that they’re improving the idea by making it more generic.

Here, I might be tempted to point out that, after years of trying, someone managed to finally jam Superman into the generic Tragic Mopey Sacrificial Dark Hero category he wasn’t designed to be, but we’ve all heard enough of my rants about that, haven’t we?  All I’ll say is that Man of Steel, the new Trek films, and even the new Star Wars films all managed to rob each of their original creations of much of their originality and charm in favor of an updated (i.e. generic mold) version.  That this so often succeeds shows that the majority of people want something they’ve enjoyed before.

That’s the truth.  I’ve wrestled with this dilemma for years, and though I wish it weren’t so true, I believe most people prefer things safe and predictable.  That’s a harsh belief, and I hope I’m wrong.  But, year after year, I see it pop up.  Every remake removes the unique elements, replacing it with the most generic equivalent. 

Psycho is terrifying because it’s about a seemingly normal guy who kills people.  You don’t know why.  You’re never supposed to know why.  Then along comes Bates Motel to tell you why he went crazy, and it’s the most generic reason you can imagine.

Every Alien film is about how the unknown could very well be filled with terrifying monsters that will devour you as you watch in helpless terror.  Prometheus decides that the whole reason for that is a generic ancient aliens plot that doesn’t add anything to that terror.

And now the new Robocop takes a clunky, clumsy cyborg who is chiefly known for his slowness and ability to shoot bad guys in the face and turns him into a generic, agile, super warrior.  Yes, the original Robocop is a strange creation.  He’s imposing, but also, slow and, under the right circumstances, easy to get the drop on.  But he’s Robocop.  That’s part of what makes him unique, compared to so many other science fiction heroes.

Not having seen anything of the new film except the occasional TV commercial, the character seems swift and deadly.  It isn’t a terrible change, but it is a generic one.  Just like choosing to make Superman feel conflicted about using his powers is generic.  Just like filling the Star Wars universe with hundreds of flipping, slashing jedi knights makes it feel more generic.  Just like having Khan go from a genetic superwarrior to a superpowered, supergenius, immortal blood-producing Mary Stu feels more generic.  In each case, I have little doubt that the people in charge of such decisions thought they were improving upon the original, even while stripping them of their unique qualities.

And, yet…

I can’t say they’re wrong for doing so.  I’ve seen enough people commenting on how a generic Superman is exactly the Superman they were waiting for.  There are no doubt those who hate the original Robocop who will find this new, more agile version more acceptable.  The audience is far more likely to reject something for being different than being more of the same.  No judgment on that.  Just a truth I have a hard time denying anymore.

There are exceptions.  Man of Steel has plenty of detractors for straying so far from the version of the character a lot of fans love.  It didn’t keep it from being financially successful, but it did put Warner Brothers in a weird position of having a successful film with an uncertain future.  Occasionally, a story comes along that dares to be different and succeeds because of it, but it’s always a gamble.  Then again, playing it safe is a gamble, too.  There are no guarantees when creating a story, and you can’t always predict how the audience will react.

All I know is that a Robocop who can leap through the air like a ninja isn’t something I’m interested in because the ponderous tower of strength with the monotone voice is such a great character, and if we lose that in favor of a more generic version, that’s a real shame.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

The Good, The Bad, The Meh

Is it possible to respect an artist’s talent without respecting their art?  It certainly isn’t a question that gets asked very often, and if there’s one thing this blog is dedicated to (other than Dinobots and secret coded messages to the Illuminati), it’s weird questions.  That, and blatant self-promotion.

Hey, I write books.  You should buy some of them.

Also, the golden falcon snatches the angry pineapple at midnight.  But never mind that right now.

It occurred to me how it’s not a paradox at all to respect an artist’s ability without caring all that much for their work.  I am not a big Hayao Miyazaki fan, for example.  I love Spirited Away, sort of enjoyed My Friend, Tortoro.  The rest of his work leaves me mostly indifferent, aside from Howl’s Moving Castle, a film that I actively dislike.

Yet I have tremendous respect for Miyazaki as an artist.  Part of this stems from a respect for his contemporaries.  When animators I like say Miyazaki is great, I’m inclined to believe them.  Also, I respect what he does.  In theory, I love that his films don’t fit in neat little boxes, and that he is a filmmaker unafraid to say something.  His leisurely pacing can work beautifully, and his visuals are always interesting.  Yet, at the end of the day, I don’t have the urge to watch his films more than once.  Despite his well-respected body of work, the only film of his that I can rewatch is Spirited Away.

To get past the “East versus West” argument that will spring to many people’s minds, I’ll use another example.  I respect the Coen Brothers immensely as filmmakers, while only liking about a third of the films they create.  But they are unafraid of trying different things, and they don’t play it safe.  In an age when so many filmmakers create the same film over and over again, the Coen Brothers are always experimenting.  And good for them.

It’s an odd position to be in.  Love and hate is easy to understand.  It’s simple to point out things we like or hate consistently, but what about those things that aren’t so easy to pin down?  To paraphrase from a recent Community episode, what of the Nicolas Cage factor, things that are both good and bad and refuse to be categorized?

Community is another great example, by the way.  I love about half of what the show does and dislike the other half.  Often, even in the very same episode.

It might be a dangerous proposition for a writer such as myself to put forth because I have a lot of mixed reactions to my stories, but I’m comfortable with this indecisive state of being.  Some things are good.  Some things are bad.  But a lot of things are both good and bad at the same time.  Or, in this case, admirable and unappealing at once.

I say embrace the complex nature of reality.  Feel free to admire one part of what an artist does without having to devote ourselves to everything else.  Any artist who creates a body of work is bound to create something we don’t like, and that’s okay.  It doesn’t mean we can’t admire them.  It just means that life is messy.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Finding Fiction

As anyone who knows me will tell you, I have something of a mild obsession with Finding Bigfoot, the Animal Planet “reality” show about people stumbling through the woods, NOT finding bigfoot.  It goes along with my mild obsession with Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures, a show about people stumbling through scary places, NOT finding ghosts.  While neither show has actually discovered an iota of worthwhile data in their areas of exploration, and it’s far too easy to poke fun at the shows and how flawed they are in their execution and conclusions, that’s now why I enjoy these shows.

I enjoy them primarily because they demonstrate the value of skepticism.  I’m not talking about the shallow sort of skepticism often displayed on these types of shows.  Too often, skepticism is equated with non-believer when in reality it’s simply an acknowledgement that jumping to conclusions isn’t the best way to really think about the universe.  These sort of reality shows tend to be full of conclusion jumping.  One of my favorites from Finding Bigfoot was when they saw a lone horse running around in the middle of the desert.  Horses don’t run around for no reason (although they actually do now and then).  The horse must’ve been scared by something to make it start running (unproven assumption).  And since horses don’t get scared easily, it must’ve been a bigfoot that scared it.  The pile of assumptions is so fragile that it falls apart under the smallest dissection, but to those who want to believe them, it serves as compelling “evidence.”

But more recently, my favorite justification for encounters with bigfoot and ghosts is the “I felt scared” story.  There are variations on it, but it basically comes down to “I was in the woods.  I felt very scared all of a sudden.  I don’t get scared very often.  Therefore: Bigfoot.”

As a writer, I find these sort of stories to be most amusing because I make a living (hopefully) making people feel things that they have no rational reason to feel.  We need only look at how much humans enjoy fiction to realize how easily our feelings mislead or confuse us.  Fiction, in particular, requires that humans can feel something even when they know what they are experiencing is an entirely manufactured experience.

Storytelling is the art of manufacturing a story.  All the best stories trigger some emotional response.  I have visceral, enraged reactions still to Man of Steel, and I still thrill whenever I hear a song from the Transformers: The Movie.  But why should I?  Neither of these things exist, and I am well aware of that.  Yet I have a huge emotional investment in both.

That’s the power of stories.  They don’t have to be real to make us feel something.  We know that, underneath it all, they are the creations of people meant to manipulate us, and we willingly participate.  We seek such feelings out.  We want to feel them, and often, storytelling is the best way of exploring those feelings and ideas.  It doesn’t matter that they’re fiction.  It doesn’t matter that Superman never existed or that Optimus Prime and Megatron are the spawn of a line of toys.  It only matters if we feel it, and we very much want to feel it.

We’re all different.  I’m not much into horror, and I realized recently that part of that was that I don’t really feel horror fiction.  It doesn’t stir anything within me.  I’m not disgusted by it, nor offended.  I simply don’t experience the emotional pull that makes it worthwhile to those who do.  I can’t say why.  I can only say that I have not been frightened by a scary story in decades.  I know perfectly sensible grown men who have trouble going to sleep after watching a horror flick, and it is that sort of gut reaction that makes them fans of the genre.  My efforts to understand the horror genre is hampered by own muted response.  I can’t really tell you what makes a great horror story because I haven’t ever truly experienced that.  And that stems from my own self, not necessarily from the stories themselves.

On the other hand, I love monster movies.  Not because they’re necessarily scary, but because the mere sight of a strange creature–villainous or heroic, big or small, cheap rubber costume or cutting edge CG–will usually get my attention.  It often isn’t enough by itself, but it can certainly work in a story’s favor.

My favorite movie last year was Pacific Rim, and there’s no doubt the mecha versus kaiju element of it went a long way toward that feeling.  I believe the film is actually stellar in all its other elements as well, but I also admit that any movie where a robot punches a 100 foot tall gorilla is going to get a lot of bonus points from me.  On the other hand, some people feel about kaiju the way I feel about horror.  They might tolerate it, find it mildly enjoyable now and then, but they’ll never experience that emotional punch.  And that’s cool.

This is why the “I felt fear = ghosts must be real” argument falls flat to my ears.  Every time I’ve seen Pacific Rim, read Walt Simonson’s Classic run on Thor, or think about the many awesome adventures of Tarzan, I felt something very real.  But my thrill at watching a giant robot save the human race from evil aliens wasn’t dulled by the reality that none of it actually happened.  Emotion doesn’t care about reality.  Emotion operates on its own rules.

True, if we get too out of sync with our emotions and reality, we end up with all manner of disorders that make life more difficult.  But even the healthiest of us doesn’t exist in perfect emotional alignment with the world.  We still get enraged unduly by slight traffic snarls and overjoyed by the tiniest kindnesses at the right time.  Some of us (who shall remain nameless) can literally rant for an hour about how terrible Man of Steel was or how incredibly frustrating X-Men: First Class was.  Because stories matter.  Stories effect us.  And once you accept that, you realize that, for better or worse, how easily our emotions are manipulated by the world around us and by ourselves, often unknowingly.

So telling me you felt scared because you were in a dark and scary place doesn’t tell me there’s a ghost around.  Saying you were terrified a shadow you saw in the woods doesn’t make that shadow a bigfoot.  It just tells me you’re human, and for a lot of so-called paranormal mysteries, I see no deeper explanation necessary than that.

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

Asymmetry

We all have preferences, but what I’ve come to realize is how blind we are to those preferences.  We know we prefer certain things, but we often make the mistaken assumption that we prefer them because they’re superior choices, rather than products of our own unique outlooks and expectations.  Life is asymmetrical, and to really appreciate it, understanding the beauty and importance of asymmetry is vital.

It seems to be a human desire to rank and order everything.  And I do mean everything.  In recent years, I’ve grown annoyed with Best Of lists and Top 10 whatevers.  It’s all so arbitrary and diminishing.  How can we honestly compare an animated musical fantasy like Frozen to a live-action blood soaked western like Django.  You can’t.  Other than to try and judge them by their own efforts.  Yet we continue to do so.  We literally have an award called Best Picture which takes all the great (and wildly different) films of the year and crowns one of them The Best.  Even in the years when there are nominees I’m interested in, I still find it absolutely bizarre.

The Academy Awards (and, honestly, all awards in the entertainment industry) are just so much advertising and self-congratulatory nonsense, and yet, the average person can be just as invested as the people in the industry.  As a novelologist, I’d love to win a Nebula or Hugo because it would open doors of recognition and commercial success.  I would even appreciate the award.  But to think of anything I wrote (or anything anyone wrote) as a singular accomplishment among the thousands of fantasy books written in a given year would be impossible for me to take seriously.  I’d be reluctant to dismiss other great books as not as good simply because someone had to get an award and that someone happened to be me.

A misunderstanding of asymmetry is why (among other reasons) a lot of people don’t understand natural selection.  Rather than viewing the ecosystem as a complex web, we tend to think of it as a ladder, and we put ourselves at the top of the ladder.  But natural selection is a massive multiplayer battle where winning isn’t about how smart you are or how many bombs you can build.  Bacteria and invertebrates didn’t end up where they are by accident.  Well, they sort of did, but they continue to thrive because they found a niche and made it work for them.  We should respect that more and not just in nature.

It’s why I always have a hard time dismissing often maligned works like Twilight.   I see a thriving creation that has entered the collective imagination and spoken to a hell of a lot of people.  It’s not anything I’d write or ever want to write, and I might even argue that it’s romance for teens and people with arrested development.  That’s a criticism, but it’s not a dismissal.  There’s a niche there, and it’s been filled with resounding success.

A lot of video games and board games are built on asymmetry.  League of Legends has dozens upon dozens of characters to play, each with their own unique flavor.  RPGs, both online and off, are founded upon the idea of a disparate group of individuals, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, banding together to form a stronger team.  But what is most interesting to me about this is how so many people dislike this notion.  They want the characters to fit onto a ranking list, and by some astounding coincidence, the character types they like are the best ones while the ones they don’t like are either too weak or overpowered.

We all have our preferences, but by assuming those preferences are superior, we run the risk of missing out on things we might otherwise not notice and dismissing the preferences of others unduly.  It doesn’t mean we can’t discuss those preferences critically.  I stand by my assessment that Man of Steel is a pretty rotten interpretation of Superman, but I also acknowledge that for a lot of folks, it’s the interpretation they were waiting for.  And though I am a tabletop game fan, I have never particularly enjoyed Settlers of Cataan or Ticket to Ride, both staples of the gaming hobby for most other people I know.  I know as a write my novels that not everyone is going to like them or even get past their preferences to give the books an honest shot.  But to complain about that would open the discussion to the truth that some people are going to like my books for equally arbitrary reasons.

Asymmetry isn’t pretty, but acknowledging that the world isn’t a nice little compilation of Top 10 lists is eye opening.  It allows us to see the world as the messy, incomprehensible collection of stuff that it is.  It might be frustrating at times, but like an H.P. Lovecraft protagonist, it’s necessary to get to the truths that lay in waiting in the greater universe.  I can practically guarantee you won’t go mad from the revelations that it brings.

(Guarantee void in the lost city of Carcosa and the Plateau of Leng.)

Keelah Se’lai

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee