Writing About Songwriting

[CN: Audio link with smutty lyrics—not explicitly NSFW content, but if your boss or kids is listening close, there's enough innuendo that they might clutch their pearls.]

So while I've been recovering from cancer, it's been hard to kind of focus my writing energy and attention on deadlines and blog posts about dialogue, dramatic pacing, or grammar, but I've not been without my creative outlets. There's been plenty of writing in more free flow forms, including helping Rhapsody write some of her smutty and funny songs.  Like this gem we collaborated about a certain generously-mustached plumber:

https://soundcloud.com/user-184032870/mari-oh

I know it's not the usual fare I serve here at Writing About Writing, but I thought I would share because I like to make ALL my writing accessible from one place (here), as well as show folks following my career in real time that even though "finish your shit" is some spectacular advice, sometimes its rejuvenating (and fun—remember FUN?) to take a break and work on another project for a little while. 

Lyrics: 

I’m down with the free mushrooms 
The flower power’s kinda hot
Your fisting skills are legendary 
I’ve been giving this some thought

She’s always in another 

castle’s dungeon and therefore…
Your overalls would look better
In a pile on my floor 

Bro face facts, it’s more open than you think
It’s been forty years she’s got a kidnapping kink.
I wanna take that mustache for a ride
Have you check my plumbing deep inside

Oh Mario
Power down into meeee

You could wear just cappy 
or that furry raccoon suit
Invite your friends, I’m into it
—Toadette is kinda cute

I want to hear that power up noise
As you lay pipe into me
Let’s empty out those fire balls
Give in to ecstasy 

I wanna one up with you all day
And if you wanna two up, ask Luigi to play

You can smash my box for your prize
Just say “it’s a-me” when you come inside

Oh Mario
Power down into meeee

Rail me while on your hot star power
Douse me in your golden coin shower
There’s a hidden level inside this hole
As I slide down every inch of your flag pole

Oh Mario
Power down into meeee

Oh Mario
Power down into meeee
Oh Mario-o oh! OH!!!
Power down into meeee

9 Things Dungeons and Dragons Taught Me About How to Write (Part 2)

Return to part 1

This is a continuation of a previous post (and it's been a while), so I'm going to dive straight in without introduction. Head back to see the first part to the intro and the first five.  

5- The characters must be allowed to affect the plot.

The worst games I've ever run? They were either those dungeon crawls that are basically dynamic board games focused on rules and dice results, or they were stories I had in my head with predetermined endings. We once tried to beat Ravenloft five times in a row. By the end, even the sadistic dungeon master who loved killing players was like, "Come on guys. We have to do this" and our final solution involved Dwarven engineers razing the castle during the day with Greek fire shot from engineered trebuchets and ganging up on the survivors as they fled the castle. Honestly it was magical, but we were so fucking sick of that module that it tasted like cold ash.

Or it went the other way, and I was just telling a story with my players and their characters being window dressing. I just kind of put them inside the plot, but their actions didn't really change the directional flow of the story. "Let's storm the castle." "No, I think that's a bad idea." "WE MUST DO IT NOW!!!" Honestly, I pissed my best friend off so hard that he wouldn't let me run the games for a couple of years. ("No, I was thinking I could do a Star Wars game Chris. You just relax. Have a coke.")

The best games? I barely mapped the plot at all.  The players did everything and I just kind of had the world react to their choices. Shit, half the time the stuff they came up with when they were talking about what might be going on was ten times better than what I had planned, and I just went with it. ("Why YES, there is evidence to believe that the Sith are on the brink of a civil war. Should it be the rule of two or the rule of one?" *writes down a note "Civil war. Good idea!!!" and underlines*)

If they got into a bar brawl, the constabulary would want a word with them (maybe a favor for looking the other way that leads to an adventure) and the guys that lost would be out for payback (oh look, another adventure). If they killed a bunch of goblins, the goblin kingdom would put fully-armed pickets on their borders (more adventures). Where they would do one thing and then see the results of it in the plans and reactions of their antagonists. The big bad Troll-demigod wasn't just sending more and more capable minions to kill them, and everything wasn't wrapped up after a single conflict was resolved (with combat or not). The best games reacted to the players––were driven by them. Their decisions had consequences and they could head bad shit off at the pass if they tried....or completely fuck things up worse.

If you're writing a story that is just a railroaded plot which would unfold the same for literally any main character (or several main characters), your story is probably pretty boring. If you could trade out half the characters for the cast of Gilmore Girls or The Muppets, and nothing would fundamentally change, then what is the point? The characters have to be able to move and shape the plot. Remember how if you switched Othello and Hamlet each play would be five minutes?


6- Why are they even doing this?

The most common thing players want to do isn't getting into bar brawls down at the local tavern.

Actually it's nothing.

Players want to do nothing. Oh they'll get bored and eventually go make trouble, and they'll probably chase down a plot if you give them a reason like riches or a dead brother who needs avenging, but their natural state is to wonder why they would do all this wacky shit that should by all rights get them killed.

There's a famous story in my gaming circle about The Tree™. The Dungeon Master described a huge, nasty gnarled tree that towered over this dilapidated forest and looked like it was the source of evil itself.

"We avoid that tree," the party said.

The DM paused. "But it's clearly a huge anomaly in this forest. Obviously something's going on."

"Yeah," the players agreed. "Something bad. Evil tree in an evil forest. We don't want a thing to do with it."

Well, the DM had written the whole adventure around their presumed curiosity and so they walked around the tree only to run into it again.

"We go the other way," the party said.

"No matter which way you go, eventually the tree ends up in front of you."

"We spend hours walking away."

"The tree ends up showing up on the horizon no matter which way you go."

"This is fucking stupid!" one player screamed. "If I wanted to play Zork where I have to do one thing, I would just go play fucking Zork." (Bear in mind that this was a long time ago and not quite such an anachronistic reference at the time.)

"It's magic, okay!" the Dungeon Master said. "The tree is, like, calling you to it."

"Then fuck it," the party said. "We sit down and have lunch. And use our engineering skills to build a trebuchet that will fire a flaming ball of pitch from here so that we can burn down The Tree™ from half a mile away."

"I assist his engineering check."

"I use my bardic power to enhance that engineering roll."

Details get hazy after this point as there was some kind of out-of-character altercation that ended at least one friendship for a couple of months after someone's popsicle-stick Star Destroyer got shattered.

The greatest question you have to ask yourself about a character is "why would they do that." And you have to ask it of every single character every single time their goals shift. If your reader can't relate to what the stakes are, your reader doesn't care if they get their goal or not, and then you've lost them. If Jack Burton didn't want his truck back, there would have only been a moderate amount of trouble in Little China.


7- It's actually the not-that-great characters that are the most interesting.

My entire social circle got their hands on D&D second edition at right about the same time, and started drooling over the attribute bonuses that included god-like stats going all the way up to 25.  We wanted our wizards buff enough to have hit and damage bonuses and our fighters with impossibly high dexterities and our thieves preternaturally clever. ("Of course Lift Nimblefingers can speak Elvish. He speaks eight languages, you know.")

For a while there, it was weirder to see a third- or fourth-level character who hadn't somehow gotten their most important stat up above 20––18 is supposed to be the pinnacle of human limitation. The multi-class everything wasn't unheard of and the world was crawling with Fighter/Mage/Thieves and Cleric/Mage/Fighter/Psionicists. One guy swore to me that the 8 nestled in with nothing but 17's and 18's (on a number generated by rolling three six-sided dice and adding the result) or that basically one average roll proved that the other five were a totally legit one-in-a-billion chance.

The thing was, these characters SUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKED. They were boring as fuck. They either got killed by overwhelming force or they sashayed through everything they saw without breaking a sweat. They had no weaknesses. They were too awesome.

It's fun to have your crack shot, ace pilot, chosen-one mystic martial artist character, kick ass all over town, but there's a reason Luke is kind of fucking boring until he starts failinating the countryside in Empire Strikes Back. There's a reason Han and Leia are both ten times more interesting from the minute they walk on screen. And even better characters have more flaws.

The best characters you can probably think of usually have flaw lists as long as their merits lists. And that goes for the ones you write too. There's a reason the character I remember the best from that period of time with the god-like badasses was a fighter with a 13 strength and shitty stats all the way down because the DM made me role in front of him. Erik Goblinsbane is still in a folder around here somewhere because he succeeded by being scrappy, wily, careful, and really interesting.


8- Build that fucking world....but introduce it slowly

Two things I learned never to do in D&D. One is not bother to build the world. "Okay so what's beyond the mountains? What do you mean no one's ever been there? We've got three-thousand-year-old elves in the forest next door and we're clearly living on an ancient Dwarven ruin, and in all that time, no one's ever thought to pop over and check?" "Wait, so who's the lord of this Castle? Sir Billy? Wasn't Sir Billy the lord of the last castle?"

The other thing was sitting through endless history lessons by a Dungeon Master who clearly thought our Melatonin supplements needed some back-up. For three hours he told us about every little detail of the wars he had written into his notebook and we didn't get to game because by the time he was done all the energy had been hyper vortexed out of the room and we were like, "Oh....look at the time. 6:30pm. Getting really late. Better head out. Got work tomorrow at noon."

It doesn't matter if you're dotting the shoreline with named fishing villages on your entirely-too-detailed map of Ratacia (the Easternmost continent of Fatlanas on a standard map) or working out the socio-economics of your what-if world that you snootily call "futurism" so you don't get painted with the same genre brush as those sci-fi pleb writers. Your world needs your attention. And the richer you make it the more lush details can come through, but you need to dribble them out. Put them in the mouth of a character, a detail dropped here or there. (As long as it's natural. Nothing worse than that weird exposition dialogue. "I love you, Andrea, even though you once tried to poison my father because my twin brother Daniel convinced you that he was me, impregnated you, and told you that your child would be a threat to my mother who is secretly the heir to Valacia..." or the dreaded system explaining line "As you know....")  Just drizzle out enough exposition to get you to the next scene. Let your readers delight in putting the details together like a jigsaw puzzle instead of crapping out some brick of exposition dump on them in the first chapter that screams "Hi, this is my first novel" more than if you'd written it on the front page in crayon, or describing a person because they see themselves in a mirror.

There's a reason people laugh at this line.

9- The best antagonists are never just orcs.

They might be orcs, but they're never JUST orcs. But usually, they're not even orcs at all.

The best antagonists have a few things in common.

They are often a lot like the protagonists––maybe even a LOT like the protagonists. If you're familiar with the concept of a foil, you already understand this, but if not, let me just say that the best antagonists remind the protagonists disturbingly of themselves. Maybe they have the same skill set (like being able to use The Force) but are using it nefariously. Or maybe they are just as clever but are trying to stay a step ahead of the characters. Or maybe they want the same thing but are going about it in ways the protagonist wouldn't. They make the protagonist uncomfortable because they force them to confront something about themselves.

They often exist (after some fashion) because of something the protagonist did. Might have been a mistake or maybe something they would do again in the same circumstances, but on that day they created a problem for themselves.

They often want something that is at least somewhat understandable.  Orcs are just evil (unless you're trying to play a "what IS evil" type game*). Orcs just want to pillage the village, steal the sillage and cause spillage. They are irredeemably bad. What they want goes against everything you stand for or believe in, so you either fight them or people die. Saron and Vader are great bad guys, but they're not great bad guys because they made you think about the nature of the human condition. They're not great bad guys because they express complicated motivations that you can really get behind. they are great bad guys because they personify the human desire for domination––something that we all recognize is bad, yet all can relate to a little as well. They have run with their most base impulse. They're great because they are memorable paragons of evil, but they don't just want to fuck shit up randomly; they want to rule the world/galaxy.

*As a GM, I pull this shit on the regular.

With orcs––just orcs––there's no indecision. There's no nuance. There's no complexity. It's kill or be killed. Great for a fight or two or just to raise the stakes of the emotional struggle, but it gets boring if you're not mixing it up or that's all there is. The best antagonists have a goal that is relatable, possibly even understandable. And the best antagonists? They're the ones you find yourself arguing online that they might have been right.

I'm so right, they have to kill me off and have a mercenary take my place for the final reel.
Image credit:  Hollywood Pictures Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Films

The best villain I ever made for D&D––one that still gets talked about today by the players of the game––was literally a dark mirror version of the paladin who had been created as a balance for a divine intervention. He was just as cocksure and manipulative as the character that he was "created" from (except evil), and he was just as convinced of his own infallibility. And ironically, he wanted pretty much the same thing the other characters in the game. He just thought the best way to get it was to kill everything in his path, and to corrupt the souls of the other members of the party to being unwilling to stand against him, and get rid of the paladin.

When I wrote this, it was originally titled as "15 things D&D taught me......" So if I come up with another five there may be a part three (and some title editing). 

BioShock Infinite: Your Argument is Invalid (Part 4 Subtext in Art)

Two quick reminders:

1- This is part 4 of a multipart article, and I’m jumping right in without much of recap.

You can go back to Part 3 

Or go all the way back to Part 1

2- While I’m not decoding the end or discussing the plot directly, there will be spoilers. (I’m also going to be doing some minor spoilers for Alien in this post.)

We’ve shown that Bioshock Infinite has a theme that is important to the human condition and that the internal elements of the game help reinforce this theme. We’ve shown that the technical execution of the game is superb.

What about subtext? Does Bioshock Infinite have any of that?

Subtext is one of those things in art that is a little hard to explain, but it is easier to describe.

Imagine you’re watching an old married couple:

"Wanna get something new on your pizza?"

"I know what I like."

"Oh I just thought maybe you might like to try something different for a change."

"You're welcome to get your own."

"I don't want my own....pizza. I'm just tired of the same old thing and never trying anything new."

Now, you know for sure this conversation isn't REALLY about pizza. That's subtext. Deeper meaning. Something beyond what the superficial appears to be. A layer beyond. In music without lyrics, this can be as nebulous as feelings evoked by the minor falls and major lifts and resolving Nimrodian chords or as deliberate as "This is a song about war. It's called Mars, the bringer of War."

Let me give you an example in film: Alien. Alien is a movie about a mining crew that finds an egg and the alien runs around the ship kicking the crap out of them until Ripley, the protagonist, blows it out the airlock and then fires thrusters...in its face.

Sup art world!

And how many times has this plot unfolded exactly in the same way in a million forgettable movies? Horror. SciFi. Scifi Horror. We’ve seen it done over and over and over again. Why is alien one of the most praised horror films of all time?

Because Alien is steeped with subtext about something else—specifically about rape. (Okay so here is the content/trigger warning for the next couple of paragraphs of discussing Alien's subtext, so if you want to meet after the picture of the bunnies below, I’ll see you there.)
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Last chance to skip ahead.....

This deepened subtext of Alien not only taps into deeper primal fears, but flips the script gender wise to do so, creating intense anxiety around birth scenes, using crew members to procreate, and causes a shudder when we think about it choking Kane and threatening to kill him if it is removed “before it’s finished.” But even beyond that, it gets into even deeper social commentary when you realize that the ship's name is “Mother” and the thing with that parental name was what forced them into the position to be violated. (OOOOooh what’ll really bake your noodle is if you realize that the gender switching of alien violations means that "Mother" can actually be read as a social commentary on FATHERS and how they put their daughters into danger.) And you thought that alien mouth shooting out was just kind of cool. Its phallic...dripping...mouth. Okay, I think that point's been made!

That is subtext. On the surface it’s a movie about an alien with a second shooty mouth. Under that, it’s about much more.

"Is it safe to come out now?"

Now there is a lot of subtext within B.I. that I could analyze, but again my goal here isn’t to write a master's thesis article about everything going on and put all my readers to sleep. Cages, birds, corsets, free will, religious imagery, and even the writers’ attempts at social commentary (which we will get to next time) all play into a deeper subtext that challenges the ostensible action on the screen. Once you get past the convoluted plot about multiple dimensions and the “what really happened” analysis, B.I. has so much more roiling beneath its surface. But in order to continue proving that video games
have the capacity to be real art, we need really only examine a single successful (albeit ubiquitous) symbol that is pervasive throughout the game.

So let’s talk about water.

You step into Columbia (having come from a lighthouse in the middle of an ocean) and you are literally inside a fountain. The water spills across the floor in a shallow pool, it flows down the
stairs in defiance of every reasonable safety precaution. There isn’t even a handrail! (I hate to think whose job it is to clean up the blood spatters and twisted bodies of everyone who slipped on this
breathtaking display.) Water covers the floor in not one, but two chapels with spectacular stained glass, and then you go down the stairs along a single walkway of waist-high water with candles floating in it. (Just consider for half a second the pragmatism of the upkeep of something like that.) Throughout the story, despite the fact that you are in a city floating miles above the earth, water is all around you—beaches, traitorous falls, near drownings, and of course the brutal end of several characters.

Let me point that out explicitly. In a game about a floating city—where it would be easier in every way to just leave water out of the game—the game designers took great pains to explain and put it in.
Dismissing its significance is absurd. A case can be made for water as a symbol for life or death or
even both simultaneously. Three major characters die in water. Being “reborn” within the waters of baptism is not only a major part of the plot, but is essential for Booker to enter Columbia (but not without saying he “nearly died”). And of course, there’s the unambiguous end in which both life and birth come from the single act of Booker’s willing but forced asphyxia at the hands of his own daughter(s). However, an even more interesting subtextual meaning for water is as an allegory for choice—the game’s principal philosophical conundrum, and we can track this by paying attention to how deep the water is during any given moment.

When Booker arrives in Columbia, he is confronted with a thin layer of water over everything—and there is only one way he can possibly go to enter the city. In fact, he must be baptized within these waters “for that is the only way to enter the city.” Later it is during his plunge into deep water that he almost is free
 of Songbird the first time, but he wakes up, on land and his first words are of Anna.

It is no coincidence that the water kills the songbird at an almost comically shallow depth (for a construct of such ferocity). The one part of Booker’s life that he can’t seem to overcome to regain his agency and free will (“Songbird always stops you…”). But the deeper the water goes, the more choice he seems to have. Underneath the water’s surface, his agency is restored him.

Comstock is basically drowned in a few centimeters of water within a birdbath as a tender waterfall flows near him from some
infinitely recycled source. Indeed, his fate was sealed the minute you walked in the room.

And of course it is Booker being plunged into the waters of baptism, but held beneath them (a final moment foreshadowed during his arrival to Columbia), that is the only way to end the vicious cycle of becoming Comstock and building Columbia over and over again. He must let himself be held under the surface to find the only choice he can still make. Like Songbird, he is killed at an almost comically shallow depth (barely over his knees) and in doing so his agency is restored to him.

Even small details within the game mechanics themselves help to reinforce this relationship: the control you can exert over enemies via water with the Undertow Vigor borders on ridiculous.
This is also why in the scene that takes place in the deepest water in the game—a brief foray into the setting of Rapture (an underwater city) – Bioshock’s earlier incarnation – a moment of
truly infinite choice is opened up as Booker DeWitt casually uses a "bathysphere"—the use of which by Andrew Ryan is a major plot point of the original game and a genetically coded device.  (Now go back and look at the little sisters and Elizabeth again.)  In the deepest of water, the full scope of “infinite” within the Bioshock universe becomes clear as it is implied with almost diabolical subtlety that Rapture may be an echo of Columbia. Deepest water—infinite choices. [2019 NOTE: less "diabolically subtle" since the release of the Rapture DLC, but certainly at the time of the original article.]

Consider in this context the imagery with which the game opens. Literally leaving the ocean of choices behind by heading towards a lighthouse—a beacon that is ostensibly land jutting out from the water but also represents the end of Booker's choices and the beginning of Booker’s predetermined path. And in the end, you wind up back at the same lighthouse, walking across water (but unable to enter it) as you go from one lighthouse to another, the illusion of choice revealed not to matter, and the destination right back where you started.

Subtext?  Yeah, it’s got some of that

(Next time, I’ll enrage white middle class geeks everywhere as I talk about some of the ways Bioshock Infinite spectacularly failed in its quest to be politically and socially poignant and what that means to its claims of artistry. )

On to Part Five...

Worldcon (Wrap Up, Review, Ruminations)

Prologue

Day 4

It was an amazing four days even for this stone-cold introvert. The panels were informative and interesting even if I hadn't been attending many with the intent of mining them for future blog posts.

My philosophy about these events hasn't changed. If they don't sound like your cup of tea, you aren't missing out on the writing opportunity of a lifetime or anything to skip them and stay home and work on your novel. I don't think I emerged a better writer or that a convention (or camp or literary event or whatever) is a necessary thing for a writer to attain success, or provides networking they can't find through more-their-cup-of-tea means. Most of the useful information is online and accessible to an even mildly determined researcher.

Worldcon is an all-volunteer convention with no paid staff so in this case, the organizers aren't making money, but even so the convention center, the local hotels and restaurants, and a whole lot of vendors made money. It's worth it for a writer to remember what direction the money flows in these events, that they are not a vital part of being a writer, and really only attend such things if they WANT to attend such things. I was staying with a friend of a friend (and coming in on the light rail every morning), brought my own food, and got the ticket as a gift and I still walked out with a much lighter wallet.

There's still a palpable Sad/Rabid puppies vibe. The white guys who are annoyed at all this "diversity stuff" don't outnumber EVERYONE else, but they are the largest single demographic and they sure do take up a lot of space and suck up a lot of oxygen wherever they go. A few of them wound up on panels and a lot of them dived into the Q&A sections with "more of a comment really." You could really feel that schism and their resentment at losing hegemonic control of the narrative. But everyone else was also pretty cheerfully ignoring their bullshit, so that was kind of awesome in a way.

I also noticed something else when I was there and I'm going to try to blog about it and even bring in some paid help to get it as right as I can. I definitely have the topics I'm interested in and gravitated towards those panels, and so I spent about 14 hours doing panels of some flavor or another of representation, appropriation, social awareness, or inclusivity. Over and over and over again in these panels, sincere white writers (as in not the ones outside in the red hats) would ask how to get their characters right, how to thread the needle between representation and appropriation, and how they could do right by other voices.

Last thought, and it's just a tiny bit catty: every time I asked a sincere question, I ended up getting a clever joke as an answer instead of an answer. Not a clever joke and THEN an answer, but a flip quip and then the panel moved on. And it wasn't just me––my questions aren't just extraordinarily esoteric or weird. It was about half the questions I saw asked during the entire convention. Yet every panel and panelist and even folks in the audience say they are annoyed by the ubiquitous plague of audience members who don't ask questions but instead offer up their own insights or anecdotes.  I can't imagine those two things aren't related, to be honest. Panelists trying to make a clever joke instead of actually answering a question create an ecosystem in which a sincere person with a question who is maybe feeling a little unsure of themselves isn't going to bother if they're essentially going to be blown off. Guess which overconfident hands are left raised high and proud?

Still the whole thing was breathtaking and I had a wonderful time, shunting off every day to a new line-up of interesting panels. I only wish during a few hours I could have had a time turner to catch two or three panels that all looked just as good. It's a shame there's basically no chance I'll be able to go to Dublin or New Zealand for 2019 or 2020 respectively and very little chance of getting to one in the US unless I am making considerably more than I am now.

Worldcon Report (Day 4)

Prologue (Back to the Beginning)

Day 3

A couple of Sunday's panels had a LOT of overlap with previous ones— in some cases right down to the multiple panelists who shared some of the same anecdotes as they tackled the same questions. I definitely aim for particular topics, and they’re issues I hope more folks can access, but a lot of times I picked between two panels, and I wish this had been a little more telegraphed.

I started by skipping a panel. The "Late Bloomers" panel sounded interesting, but even though I'm no spring chicken, I think I was going mostly to get some fodder for a blog post. However the room was ungodly crowded, seats were all gone when I showed up, and I was getting some strange looks. (I’m guessing the median age was around 65-ish, compounded by the fact that I look a fair bit younger than I am.) I don't think any one person meant anything, and they probably would have strenuously objected to the thought that they'd made me uncomfortable, but when 100 or so people give you the "Why are YOU here?" look, you can decide pretty quickly that the lack of seats is a dealbreaker.

The Shape of Horror

This panel spent much of its time just trying to define where the borders were between horror and other genres. We talked about the idea of horror in broad philosophical terms like the Greek idea that if you know what you're terrified of, it's "terror," but if you don't know what you're terrified of, it's "horror."

There was some time spent discussing the borderlands of dystopia, thriller, and dark fantasy and why each fails to be horror in some way. The exuberance and upbeat endings of most were what the panelists came up with.

Largely they came to a consensus that was not very concrete. Horror has downbeat endings, but mostly it leaves the reader with a sense of unease that stays there. It involves some level of unresolved tension––a lack of catharsis.

We Will Survive
This panel was very similar to the "Stop Killing Us" panel from yesterday, but was specifically about how sci-fi and dystopian fiction (also utopias) regularly have no people of color. They pointed out how very often the slate being wiped clean leads to SUPERPATRARICAL societies (The Walking Dead was brought up several times) and how, in general, the authors of these sorts of stories need to interrogate their narratives about which humans have value.

The Coming Plague

My last panel was much more technical than anything I'd done the rest of the weekend. It was about how we're basically overdue for something really, really bad. Spanish flu killed 50 million, and we're packed in closer, move around more, have more vectors, and enough people refusing to vaccinate that herd immunity is breaking down in a lot of places.

The panel spent a good chunk of time on how climate change would affect communicability. (Generally it would go up. Mosquitos are pretty much the most dangerous animal in existence and the further north they go, the more it's going to suck to be humans.)  And there were some pretty sobering (by which I mean terrifying) statistics about how the rise of sea level would create some prime real estate for some of the worst kinds of infectious bugs.

One thing that struck me was how simple the first "tier" of disease prevention was. Sanitation, clean water, and accurate information was really the first line of defense and we still don't have that in a lot of parts of the world. (In one question they were each given ten billion dollars and what would they do with it and the idea of vaccines or cures didn't really come up. Ten billion dollars would save a lot of people in the developed world but the place where it would save the most would be working on plumbing and water to the places most likely to be devastated.

And that was it. I had to get back to Oakland to start watching a client's cats, so I didn't get to stick around and watch the Hugos or go to all the awesome post-Hugos parties. It was a blast and a half and other than being so tired that I'm kicking myself for trying to keep up with a daily posting instead of giving myself a day or two off, I was thrilled to have the opportunity of a lifetime.

Reflections and ruminations

(Welp, I totally lied. Our poll is going up tomorrow––along with the "final thoughts" version of this running series about Worldcon––and I may even have some juicy gossip type drama about why it didn't go up tonight when we get there. Stay tuned!)

Worldcon Report (Day 3)

Back to the beginning

Day 1

Day 2

Saturday was a little less busy than Friday, and it got a lot less busy after I screwed up my schedule a bit. There was a panel on "epic stories" that I chose to skip. It sounds neat, but I don’t have any grand designs to write an "epic" anytime soon. There is one creeping around in my head for the "someday" pile, but if I'm being super honest, as great as the panels are, they can only broad brushstroke a subject in 50 minutes, and I kind of trust my craft instincts to that degree. Plus this epic I am thinking of is very I-thought-this-was-awesome-when-I-was-in-high-school-and-brimming-with-unchecked-privilege-and-too-many-80s-movies, and would need a lot lot lot lot of work to even be back on the drawing board.)

Anyway, I there were some chairs and outlets waaaaaay down the hall, so I took the time to get a little writing done. And it had actually been so long since I'd had a good writing session that I got distracted and carried away and ended up missing the NEXT panel too (on Space Operas).  Fortunately after that I was back on track.

Mental Health and Craft: Creating with Depression and Anxiety 

This was a great panel with a lot of wonderful ideas and insights that will definitely show up in future blog posts. But just right off the cuff I can tell you that you're not alone. It was standing room only and packed to the gills. You are not alone.

Alien Minds: What is Possible and What Can We Do with Them?

This was a really cool panel, but possibly an example of why you want your panelists to have slightly differing views instead of opposing ones. The panelists even rejected the central conceit of the panel's description (that our brain, as an evolved organ, evolved to be able to deceive and detect deception in groups of primates.

There was a surprising amount of philosophy in a panel about alien brains. We spent a huge amount of time trying to define consciousness and coming to the conclusion that we can detect it more easily than we can define it.

However once we got to the "Would be be able to talk to them?" the panel kind of went to war. One panelist made a series of assumptions about collectivism and mathematics that presumed the fundamentals of communications with what would probably be technological beings. The other panelists had a real problem with these underlying assumptions. They pointed out that communication is difficult with other HUMANS and that we might only really be able to realize that their method of communication (involving something like releasing pheromones or waving their phygellus) was perhaps not an involuntary act, to say nothing of how they communicated.

I think there's something to the idea that the lone panelist was a white guy. Like I didn't get the feeling he was a racist or sexist or anything but just that white dudes tend to find communication direct and easier and it is other folks who learn all kinds of code-switching, subtleties, nuances, and double meanings.

Two of the panelists really disagreed on basically every issue and though they were still joking when our time was up, the jokes had taken on an edge and were starting to feel uncomfortable. I think if it had been a 90 minute panel, we'd have had to watch them fight.

Stop Killing Us

This 10/10 panel was probably the highlight of my day. It was all about how there are identifiable patterns of marginalized groups whose sole representation in modern media frequently get killed.

I've written about fridging before (even its plasticity as a term that goes beyond just women), and how across media it time and again creates a "triage of human worth" but there were more dynamics drawn into this panel that are worth further exploration, so clearly I may need to cook up another article.

In particular one charming and outspoken member of the panel brought in a lot about disability intersections and pointed out how insidious and ubiquitous the trope of the disabled person who WANTS to die can be and how disabled folks are completely erased rather than AUGMENTED in most utopian fiction.

There's a lot to dig into, and I can only poke at it here, but one thing I had begun to notice at this point was an intense anxiety among the white writers who genuinely cared about getting representation right that they didn't know how to do avoid all the pitfalls between appropriation, representation, and bad representation. So I'm definitely going to be trying to write a bit on that in the coming weeks.

Geek Identity, Policing, and Gatekeeping

This panel started with a good foundation and the introductions talked a lot about folks who experienced gatekeeping in the geek world along their marginalized identities (race, sexuality, gender), but like a lot of panels (actually a LOT of them, I noticed) it quickly delved into questions of representation within geek MEDIA and drifted away from it's actual description. The questions kind of kept trying to pull the panelists back to the issue of how to fight gatekeeping and what damage rather than good the elitism did to a fandom, even just for its own sake (to say nothing of being clearly expressed along lines of bigotry), but the panelists wanted to go where they wanted to go, so we talked about representation again.

And as I've said over and over again, that is clearly something that needs more written about it.

Author vs. Fan Ownership

I picked the panels by topic, but it was cool to end up finding out that John Scalzi was the moderator.  Also, I don't think I've ever heard the word "liminal"used so often during the entire rest of my life combined.

This panel touched on ethics and legality of fanfiction and it was spectacular. We talked about how writers have created room for fan fiction in recent years and how the fan fiction has existed in some form basically forever. Even most published work is some sort of fan fiction, perhaps with the serial numbers filed off.

The fanfic authors themselves often have deep philosophical debates about where their responsibility to characters starts and ends and what sorts of things are acceptable to do with the IP they are using for their story.

The thing I noticed, which I have mentioned before, is that the point kept coming up that there was some purity in fanfic. Folks who write fanfic do so knowing they won't ever get paid. And it is actually the idea of OWNING a story (in a capitalistic way) that is the more unusual idea for pretty much all of our history as a storytelling species. And of course the feedback is almost immediate and deep and often more engaging than solicited reviews. In a way fanfic is a more pure expression of art and artistry for its own sake and and who we are as humans.

More coming tomorrow.

Worldcon Report (Day 2)

I'm going to Worldcon!

Day 1

So this post is actually about Day 2 (Friday), which was filled to the brim with panels and bereft of even time to grab a sandwich, but I crammed them in anyway because I didn't want to miss a minute and just tanked up on breakfast and brought power bars to get me through.

I also just went and went and went and went and got home and fell over. Unless I start making WAY more money from writing, this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, and I didn't want to miss a thing, so apologies for being a day behind.


Representation in Geek Media- 

This was a great panel for "examples." The panelists really wanted to tell us the shows and books that they really liked.

The point that came up again and again and again was how vitaly, critically, desperately important it is for people to see folks like themselves in media. It just....changes so much about their relationship to that media. They become fans. They imagine their possibilities.

A couple of the points they made they circled back to a couple of times. Ultimately diversity injects new life into fandom and struggling against it hurts fandoms. For purely selfish reasons, creators don't want to listen to the very vocal minority of people objecting to diversity.

The second point is that came through was that people would prefer no representation to bad representation and simply seeing people like them (but not bad representation) to no representation. It was subtle, but they drew clear distinctions between problematic representation (like queer baiting or Apu) and the kind of representation that would ENDANGER them via the cultural perception of created after a constant stream of shitty stereotypes.

The hopeful takeaway is that getting representation right wasn't seen as an impossible needle to thread by anyone. Asking for some people's sensitivity reads (and either paying for, otherwise compensating for, or at minimum gushingly acknowledging their labor), usually brings up the level of representation to the point that it will work well.


Pronouns Matter––Gender Courtesy for Fans

I got a bit of a wonderful surprise when it turned out that Ann Leckie (of the Ancillary Trilogy) was the moderator for this panel. I don't fan out too hard––I think that's a side effect of seeing writing as hard work instead of ineffable––but that was pretty cool.

We hit a lot of nuance in this panel and one thing that kept becoming clear is that there wasn't always a single answer. When and where and WHY to use someone's pronouns (or possibly not) were all very personal. Outing someone, even just by asking their pronouns, could conceivably put them in a pickle. Learning to read a room is important. English is an aggressively gendered language, and that is baked into the linguistics, often even more than other power dynamics.

But everyone agreed on a couple of things. 1) If you misgender someone (assuming it is unintentional and not malicious) just apologize, fix it, and move on. The out of control, obsequious, gushing centers the person who did the misgendering as the party that feels "so bad." 2) Moving towards gender neutral language (folks instead of guys, for example) is probably nothing that's going to change the world by 2020, but it's a step in the right direction and greatly appreciated.


Geek's Guide to Literary Theory

This was a fun lecture (it wasn't a panel), but it was little bit like having a 1 hour review of my entire 12 week Literary Theory course in college. I've discussed literary theory here when it comes up (though it should never really be something consciously in one's mind while writing), but we didn't really get into the GEEK part. More just a one hour review of various schools of thought. Fun, but likely because it was not new info for me, and I'm a total nerd.

I also think deconstruction is quite a bit more involved than linguistic pedantry. [Time (n) flies(v) like an arrow (A.P.). Time(v) flies(n) like an arrow (A.P.) Time-flies (compound n) like (v) an arrow (object).] But maybe that was second hour stuff.


New Ancestral Myths

I actually left this panel after only 25 minutes or so.

It was standing room only and I hadn't had lunch, and frankly I might have been more charitable if I were sitting and fed. The beginning was really interesting––the super diverse panel pointed out the way "religion" is given to Judeo/Christian traditions and everything else is called "mythology" whether it is a living religious practice or not, and there was also a really neat point about how the "ancient mythologies" well known in the English speaking world (Greek and Roman) traced a path through what was often considered to be whiteness. And the religious beliefs (even dead religions) of people of color are almost never as well known.

Unfortunately the moderator was having some trouble keeping the panel reigned in on the topic and as we drifted further afield I found the thread of motif more and more confusing and eventually just left.


Tapping our Mythic Past

The interesting thing I saw here was what was agreed and disagreed on. The panelists disagreed furiously about bringing myth into fiction (but were incredibly civil about it). One called appropriation the "third rail" of writing and made the point that writing backgrounds they weren't from and who talked about their backgrounds meant doing one's due diligence through research and sensitivity readings, never being a stranger, avoiding stereotypes, and always treating your characters as authentic and genuine people. Another panelist was very uncomfortable with that idea, even really eschewing doing much writing about their own cultural myths. Everyone on the panel related the experience of  being called out regarding their own culture. The demographics of who came down in which camp are probably not what you might have expected either.

There was also a problem with one panelist who seemed like maybe they were a bit anxious and had some trouble with repeating themselves. Of course they also did a lot of jumping in on the questions. So we had a lot of redundancy.

However, the thing they agreed on was also interesting––that trying to find the "decoder ring" of myth ultimately undoes the myth, and the central idea they walked away with was this idea of personalizing mythic past. That is you tell a story that portrays people and tells a story, and you maybe show how that myth influences them, but you don't appropriate the myth itself as true or not. That contradictions are essential. That there is truth without facts. (Much like fiction itself, I noted.) That being okay with not knowing is an important part of indigenous myth and antithetical to colonialists and Judeo/Christian myths where everything needs to be codified, classified, turned into binaries and some truthy truth rooted out. Myth had a power that danced outside of their ability to touch it even if it wasn't "true" in the desperately objective sense of the word.

"Mythology is," one panelist said to the delight of the entire panel, "the human mind trying desperately to understand itself.


Stress Management for Creatives

Got some great ideas from this panel that will definitely show up in an upcoming post.


Afrofutureism: From Octavia to T'Challa

This was an incredible lecture with an A/V presentation and I will cover some of the points in time, but 1) it is too much to go into in a post like this and needs its own space and 2) I heard that Steve Barns might be putting up an online version and I wouldn't want to steal his thunder at all because he put a shit-ton of effort into an incredible presentation.


Imposter Syndrome: You DO Deserve To Be Here

This is another panel that will definitely transform into a future post. Good advice. Good insight, but too much to write it all out in an encapsulation.

On to day 3

Worldcon Report (Day 2––but not day 2)

Unfortunately today was my busiest day––longest day and with the smallest number of breaks (only one hour out of 9) and I'm falling asleep trying to write today's shenanigans up.

So I'm going to get some sleep, and tomorrow I will get up today's write up and probably be a day behind.

Worldcon 76 Report- Prologue

Our regularly scheduled programming around here (such as it is) is going to take a few days off while I bring you reports from Worldcon 76.

I'm going to Worldcon this year!

For those who don't know, Worldcon is a convention for writers. And while it has some overlap with costuming, and a lot of other general nerdery going on, it is specifically for writers. Topics of events run from how to self publish to including diverse voices in one's writing.

I never really expected to be going to Worldcon. Maybe in some halfway pipe dream future where I've got way more income going on than I do today. I like gaming conventions even though they're usually a bit more peopling than I am able to handle. I've heard stories about Worldcon that made me envious of the panels and stuff, but it is really outside my budget. It moves around the world and even when it's in the USA the travel expenses, ticket price for the con itself, and hotel booking for multiple days pushes it up to easily over a thousand dollars. That's big bucks for a little fifth rate blogger like me. And while Worldcon definitely sounded cool, I probably wasn't going to drop a thousand bucks on ANY vacation until I'd been to Disney World.

Then the perfect storm happened. The perfect storm....of awesome.

Worldcon is in San Jose this year which is only about an hour drive south from where I live. Cap is going there to do some work making the world a better place, and has a friend with crash space for the both of us. And she bought me the ticket for an early birthday present. I'm one of those people who sees what's possible and carefully manages my expectations. Cap is one of those people who says "Let's go get what you want––we'll find a way!"

And she did.

Thus, instead of our regular fare, I'm going to try to write a report every night. I'll do this like I'm a serious writer/blogger type, and pack a notebook and pencil and everything. I'll take notes and shit to write up in the evenings about the events I attended and what they were like. I'm not sure exactly how much time I'll have at the end of each evening, but I'll get as much up as I can and if there are lingering thoughts I'll put them in some subsequent write ups.

Sound good?  Okay, I need to pack. See you at Worldcon.

Day 1

The Return of a "Dark" History (A Literary Review of Thor: Ragnarok)

Thor Ragnarok may be the coolest, slickest, funniest indictment of white supremacy that you're likely to see for a long, long time. 

Meta disclaimer: 

I so seldom catch movies on opening night, and even more rarely have the time to go home and write them up. Usually any review like this is weeks or even months behind the curve. I mean, no shit, I have a half written article about The Force Awakens here. I started it in good faith the night the movie opened and....well....shit came up.
Anyway.

The point is, I don't often catch the pop culture curve. I'm usually the one showing up six months late, wheezing, and saying "Have I missed anything?" And my ideas aren't exactly super ground breaking, I just try to throw in a sex joke or something. So this is me in rare form trying to type faster than the hype can get stale. I'm already seeing the first articles hitting that are making the points I wanted to make a week ago, so I lift my glass to their authors. and hope I can add something meaningful, or at least some eighties pop culture references or something.

And also spoilers, folks. Couldn't go where I go without LOTS of spoilers.

Though statistically liberal arts majors are likely to end up being "the boss" because of their broad base of reading and writing skills and ability to communicate*, the only actionable skills a Lit major has right after graduation chiefly involve literary analysis. Since my Creative Writing emphasis was lit heavy, I possessed two skills. (The other one was writing about writing.)

*(Turns out you really want someone who can read a hundred pages, find the connections with something else, and distil it all into a memo before lunch)

So of course I'm doomed to literarily analyze everything. Books of course, but I also literarily analyze comics–not comic books, mind you, I'm talking the three panel joke versions–they are surprisingly supple when it comes to poststructural and intentionalist lenses. I analyze bars of soap, children's toys, facial expressions, my lunch...anything really.

And of course movies. Not just deep and confusing Nolan movies. But actually ridiculous giant robot movies too. The more ridiculous the better, to be honest, because it flexes the ol' lit-muscles to have to reach further into the bowels of incoherent vapidity to make a salient point. Plus, let's talk turkey: it's kind of hilarious to be able to do some halfway decent postmodernist and postcolonial theory on Sharknado. (We English majors have peculiar senses of humor. I own this.)

If I'm actually enjoying a piece of media, I'm probably analyzing it, even if that makes you think I'm a buzzkill who can't ever just relax and enjoy something. Thor was no exception. I was sitting in the theater giggling my ass off and remarkably surprised at how a frenetically paced goofy flick with a death scene that was basically "Welp...bye." was holding me rigid.

Here's the funny thing though. If you bring the thoughtful analysis to Thor, you'll notice topical commentary both grotesque and subtle. Unlike some of it's predecessors, and a disappointing number of MCU offerings to be honest, Thor Ragnarok has a lot to say. It might be a joke a minute, but there's a parable about the refugee experience, colonialism, and white supremacy that will liquify you far, far deeper than the Grandmaster's goo stick. And while T: R is not a morality play with characters who play nothing but their analogue, and certainly has characters (like Loki) who are layered and complicated with rich back stories as well as fitting into an extended metaphor, there are some artistic interpretations that fit quite well.

Some of the themes Thor touches on are as subtle as a brick. The Asgardians as refugees are disheveled, displaced, just want to escape death (literalized as a goddess) that is following them–ostensibly for some reason but mostly because they had the temerity to run. The line that they (not a physical place) are Asgard is repeated like a cudgel that can't be avoided. Valkyrie is a grizzled vet, with PTSD no less, who actually has a sense of what they're up against and how powerful it is. And The Immigrant song (the IMMIGRANT song–get it?) blasts not once, but twice through the action sequences.

But some of the metaphors are far more subdued: In the final battle one of the central tensions is whether the refugees will drown in the crossing over water. The resistance is led by someone who is both in character and actor from a typically marginalized group. The stinger scene and how welcome Asgardians will (not) be on Earth, the full force of how impossibly we treat refugees becomes fully apparent.

Other symbols are transparent to the point of invisibility at their core but slathered with so much laughter as frosting that they might escape cursory notice. When The Grandmaster (played brilliantly by Jeff Goldblum) engages in exploitation and human trafficking with a big smile and a manic affect, he reacts angrily, though hilariously, to his actions being referred to as "slavery." Much the same way that capitalistic exploitation of labor is fine so long as we never make those doing it feel bad. At the end, in the first stinger, the same character (a defeated slaver–wink wink nudge nudge–doyougetit?) declares what is essentially a civil war (where he got his ass kicked) to be a tie.

Perhaps the most obvious and also subtle metaphor is Hela herself, who not only marks the MCU's first woman villain, but arguably one of, if not the best. Naturally she too has symbolism both glaring and inescapable and somewhat muted. She walks onto the screen and declares herself returned and in control and can't really understand why no one is happy to see her. In one scene with Thor she indicts Odin as: “Proud to have it, ashamed of how he got it" and literally reveals how a sanitized history has covered up the real one. (No, like LITERALLY it covers it up.) She asks where Thor thinks all the gold came from. And in doing so she reveals that the nine realms were conquered and Asgard is a colonialist and imperialist power. Their prosperity has come at the expense of those they vanquished. She says that she will kill everyone who doesn't share her vision of Asgard's return to glory and power.

The only thing that could have made this more overt would be if she were wearing a red MAGA cap during her monologue.

But the family dynamic of the Asgardian royals is far more subdued as subtext for colonialism and white supremacy. Each presents a facet both of the complexity of colonialist nations (particularly the US) but also of the periods in history. And it brings out the real metaphor of the film–the tension between the distant past, the recent past, and the present. Hela represents a violent, tyrannizing distant past that has made the colonialist power great, and now seeks to destroy any who would challenge her vision. And when most of Asgard rejects her, she draws on that past (literalizing the rise of long dead armies who will execute her vision).  Thor is a young, well-intentioned and good hearted person who has benefitted directly from that violent past without knowing it and now comes face to face with it–and is shocked at its power (a moment literalized by the smashing of his hammer). Odin participated in the crimes, changed his mind, covered up the past, declared everything all better, and held Hela in check. Of course there is also Loki: a character who doesn't care as long as he gets his.

(Edit 11/12/17: Given how many comments have taken full fledged umbrage with this characterization of Loki, I will point out that even if you take out innumerable murders of total innocents in the MCU that he was directly or indirectly responsible for in the name of ruling Earth [colonizing Earth?], and only deal with the current source material, he still usurps his father's throne, trapping him far away and causing his death, falls in with slavers and even seeks to rise within their ranks without a significant moral objection to doing so, and tries to sell his brother out [again] but for being outmaneuvered. While I suspect that his MCU trajectory is headed for a full fledged redemption arc [5/19 Edit: Yep] given that he has not been the full-out antagonist for a couple of movies, and I have to tell you I personally really, really super high-key dig the character, his complicated, and often tragic, backstory of otherness, forced biculturalism, and conflict between occasional pangs of familial loyalty and being basically psychologically colonized bring him depth and layers, but they do not make him NOT fundamentally a character who makes VERY questionable decisions to advance his own power. He has his reasons and that makes him a GREAT character, but it doesn't make him a good guy, if that makes sense.)

The Asgardian royals create a powerful parallel to the political landscape US (and many colonialist powers) today. They got rich and powerful exploiting and subjugating other lands and peoples. The generation that changed its mind, and simultaneously changed the story and held some of the worst of white supremacy in check is dying and a new wave of white supremacy populism is on the rise. There are many who believes in their own exceptionalism without addressing (or even understanding) the atrocities of exploitation and human suffering that got them where they are, and they are suddenly confronted with the past. A past that has returned to claim its birthright for it is the TRUE heir to the throne. This white supremacy wants to remove or destroy anyone that isn't in agreement with it despite the inherent irony that the US (or other colonialist nation) is not really a place, but the very diaspora of people who would be removed. Even the wounded indignancy that it is being resisted is spot on. Those who believed in their history, institutions, and nations as forces of a greater good are shocked both at the truth of their past, at the power that past wields, and how easily those institutions they thought indestructible shatter in its hands. But a system that has been built on white supremacy and a country literally built with slavery and human suffering cannot simply say "Welp...bye," to its terrible history.

And, yes, there is even a huge contingent who frankly don't care what happens to anyone else as long as they get theirs, and they have deep and complicated reasons for doing so and often familial loyalty.

Perhaps my personal favorite persona in this parable is Skurge. More than Loki or Valkyrie his is a redemption arc that fits the extended metaphor, and almost perfectly represents a person with privilege (accurately cast as a white dude) who sees the rise of a power that doesn’t target him directly. He doesn't necessarily like that power (an echo of the "I have a real problem with that" that people in power admit to having about bigotry), but speaking out against it would cost him. (He doesn't exactly slip out the back and go join the resistance at the first opportunity either.) Here's a guy who imagines himself pretty badass and basically just wants to impress girls. He is offered power under the new regime because he is the "right kind of person." He goes with Hela despite lots of furtive glances that indicate his strong objections, but takes no no real action. However he comes to discover that not only is he the bad guy, but he's going to have to actually risk something or a lot of people are going to die. And lest you were beginning to succumb to the subtlety that is Thor, in a nod to both Chekhov and those who Skurge represents, he ends up turning a pair of U.S. M-16s (revealed earlier) on the undead army. Let us hope that the Skurges of our society who “have a real problem with what’s going on” but say nothing realize the cost of their complicity before it is too late.

The lesson here for writers is as heavy a bludgeon as Mjolnir itself–a story can be a fun, exciting, hilarious romp (and even have some non-trivial problems with pacing and fuck up actual mythology like woah) without necessarily being empty of meaning and subtext. Some of the subtler symbolism may not have been explicitly in the mind of the writing team, but given Taika Waititi’s background (a New Zealander with one parent Maori and the other a Russian Jew) it is nearly impossible to imagine the overarching postcolonial themes as unintended.

And it works! It works well. At no point did this ride stop being hilarious and fun. A writer shouldn't be afraid to be topical just because they want to reach a wide audience. The idea that one must pick either a good story or political relevance is a false dilemma.

In the end, Thor cannot defeat Hela. Her connection with Asgard is literally her strength. She is too powerful and that power is woven too deeply into Asgard's history. He can only leave her to Ragnorök, and it is only the swing of Surtur's sword that literally destroys Asgard to its foundations that (maybe?) defeats her. We face the same dilemma when surrounded by systems, institutions, laws, and culture all rooted in white supremacy–they cannot simply be unwoven and detangled without shattering those foundations from which they are intractable. And yes, if we do this, it will feel like the end of the world.

The important thing to remember is that it is WE who are Asgard.

Logan: Why Character Matters

**Part 1: No Spoilers**

A year ago, if you'd told somebody that arguably the most popular X-man movie of all time, and (to many) a contender for the best of all Marvel movies, would only actually have two X-men in it–two older X-men way past their prime to boot–you would probably find yourself on the working end of some skepticism.

No Magneto? No multi-mutant fight at the end? No Apocalypse or sentinels chewing through two or three mutants every time they are on scene to prove the stakes are really, really high? Pfffffffft.

And if you said that a number of critics would hail it as the best superhero movie of the decade, perhaps ever, you would likely have to deal with a bit of laughter as well. (The snickering kind–not the good belly laughs you hear before someone asks if they can buy you a mug of the finest ale this side of The Dragon's Thirst Inn in Valacia.) Going up against The Dark Knight or The Avengers, as well as older titles like Raimi's Spiderman 2 or even something a bit genre-bending like The Incredibles is not something genre fans would think could be done casually by two aged-out X-men.

After all, the formula for superhero movies has been ramping steadily upwards to bigger and better fights with more and more superheroes on screen at a time, higher stakes battles, more CGI than you can physiologically process, and often the fate of the very timeline hanging in the balance.

Yet there's something undeniable about these movies as they become bigger and bigger special effects extravaganzas with more and more and more superpowered characters stacked in like cordwood. (And it's not just that I stopped considering them to be on my "Must See" list after X3.) Their interest to their audience doesn't grow exponentially. The epic-fury of their battles don't make the movie "good" or "bad." Even when a story does focus on a small cadre of characters, the external plot instead of characters can make blockbusters eminently forgettable–and writers don't have the benefit of soundtracks, huge stars, or special effects budgets.

The conversations about these movies still end up being about the same thing: the characters. Were they interesting? Were they believable? What did they want? What were the stakes? Did the internal conflict matter in a way that made the story more interesting or did they just ho-hum stop the city from being nuked (again). Though film gross is based on a lot of factors, and some of these movies still do well in today's market, the more critically acclaimed and beloved by fans a/the film, the more its characters are interesting and not necessarily its battles eye-popping.

A lot of writers describe the epicosity of their climactic battle. ("It's this HUGE battle between three massive armies....") There's something in the success of Logan, and films like it, for writers to learn about what makes a character arc genuinely compelling and what stakes will drive the highest levels of tension. After all, while a writer has an effectively infinite "special effects budget" and seamless "CGI" for as long as they want to commit pages and pages to such descriptions, writers run the same risk that any summer blockbuster might of getting so caught up in the tools of telling a story that we forget the story itself.

And as cool as that end battle is, if readers are not invested in the characters, it'll be forgettable–no matter the magnitude or scope, it'll be forgettable.

While I have my doubts that Logan is going to "redefine the whole genre," given the current Marvel plan for a thirty-movie ramp up to a sixty-character crossover two-movie battle royale, with each movie making more than the GDP of some European countries, its runaway success and spectacular critical reception is a cautionary tale to writers who forget that what readers are really interested in is the characters, and a reminder to us all that they're the engines of any story we have.

**Part 2: Contains Spoilers**

Look at how well these characters arcs played out.  Within just a minute we've established Logan's wants and needs, and that they are constantly struggling within him. He wants to get out, go away, take a boat away from everything. He wants to die. And he wants to not love things in his world so that he can let go. But he does love things. He is fettered by his concern for the things in this world. And though at one point it seems clear that, had his body not betrayed him, he would have abandoned Laura at Xavier's grave, in the end he keeps stepping up to the plate again and again for those fetters.

And in the end, they are what set him free. Not just a physical release, but his own redemption as a character.

One of the greatest successes of the character arcs in this movie is how it shows without telling. Take this very early exchange between Charles and Logan:

Charles Xavier: Fuck off, Logan.
Logan: See, you know who I am.
Charles Xavier: I always know who you are, I just sometimes don't recognize you.

So much is said in this exchange. Not just about the devastating tragedy of neurodegenerative diseases and how they take away one's ability to recognize loved ones, but also on a subtextual level to establish a meaningful lens into Logan as a character. He is "unrecognizable," which might be the same thing any fan of classic Wolverine might say at the outset of this film.

This exchange also establishes a bickering relationship that is the source of so much fun (and often well-needed levity) in the film. Logan never says he loves Xavier. But even though he wants Xavier to die (so that he can kill himself), he still spends all his time and energy trying to protect Xavier from those chasing him as well as protect him from the abject horror of remembering that it is Xavier who has killed all the other X-men. Logan even indulges Xavier's quest to find a "utopia" that he (Logan) believes isn't even real. Xavier never says he loves Logan either. But he spends all his time and energy trying to give Logan's life the tiniest spark of redemption and connect him with his daughter. Their actions belie their constant fighting.

Actually the movie is really great in general about not spoon-feeding the audience. They never came out and said that the mutant gene had been suppressed through corn syrup, but there's some evidence there if you pay attention. Trust your readers to be smart enough to get some things, especially about character relationships, without your help. You don't have to give them everything on a silver platter.

One of their best successes is finding the way symbolism fits into the story rather than shoehorning a story into symbolism. X-24 is how Logan sees his younger self–mindless, savage destructive rage. It is his past come back to haunt him....in this case literally. And that rage kills Xavier. Wherever Logan goes, that violence follows him and destroys the innocent bystanders around him (as he did the Munsons).  In the end, Logan does not have the strength to defeat his past alone. He needs the help of his daughter.

The entire movie is a parable for getting old, dying and death (as well as the loneliness that accompanies these), how the past comes back to haunt us all, but at the same time about family, redemption, and the sacrifices of a parent. The guy who found walking excruciating was able to engage in mortal combat to the last once he had a reason.

In the end, there is even a poignant metaphor, as the torch of all this power is passed to a wildly diverse group of children from two white men who have spent the movie protecting it from the hands of another group of white men who wanted to control it and keep it to themselves.

But none of this symbolism came at the expense of telling a fun story about bad guys who wanted to kidnap kids and good guys who would put claws through their brain pans.  They teased the symbolism out of a compelling romp rather than try to wrap a story around a bunch of symbolism. And that makes all the difference in how poignant a narrative can be.

And perhaps more importantly, the external plot was almost insultingly simple: "Mutant-creating bad guys want to get back a mutant they created who escaped." Everything beyond that was developed through character, whether it was Logan's reluctant willingness to indulge Xavier's fantasy of Mutopia or Xavier's want of some creature comforts that ended up placing the Munsons in grave danger. What drove Logan, through all its tragedy, angst, and eventual redemption, was not a railroaded plot about stopping the end of the world but rather the characters.

And he died with his heart in his hand.

Logan wasn't a perfect movie. It had pacing issues in the third reel, especially when Logan kept passing out as the characters advanced through the various plot points. The serum that made him Wolverine-y was kind of an awkward "Ha I'm badass again! Nope, just kidding!" plot point, and the grunting, limping, how-pathetic-am-I? portrayal was at times overdone. The "Chekhov's Gun" of the adamantium bullet being what would kill X-24 was stone-cold-obvious about 90 minutes and change before it happened. The use of Shane was an excellent parable, and a fantastic choice for meta-media, but arguably was also a little heavy-handed. A whole other article could be written about Logan and the "white savior" trope, and it never even gets particularly close to passing the Bechdel test. Overall though, Logan was an intensely character-driven ride about the human condition that blew audiences away and brought the X-men arc that Patrick Stewart and Hugh Jackman began 17 years ago to a bittersweet and nostalgic, but satisfyingly crunchy end.

Logan's success, measured against a tiny handful of the best movies of the genre ever, carries with it a lot of lessons for writers. Characters are vital...more important even than a big exciting external plot. A couple of well-thought-out characters inexorably drawn towards a climax of high personal stakes in a tight, contained story-within-a-story about how excruciating death without meaning can be, is far, far better storytelling than a railroaded, save-the-universe plot with epic battles and dozens of mutant powers on incredible CGI display.

Watching Disney Movies as a Writer (Revised)

Found on Google Images as "labeled for commercial reuse"
Will remove upon request.

A revised and polished version of an older post.

In honor of the trip I’ll be taking to Disneyland this weekend, I thought I would power-navel-gaze about the value one can get out of watching Disney movies as a writer. Also, this will probably not be a particularly long entry, as C-3PO and Indiana Jones await.

Wait. What? Disney movies? Seriously Chris?

Are you talking about those movies that are notorious for perpetuating racial stereotypes like the crows in Dumbo, the “hot crustacean band” in The Little Mermaid, the natives in Peter Pan, the Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp, pretty much every character in Aladdin, (seriously I could go on), and that's if we sort of pretend The Song of the South didn't really happen. The same Disney where the bad guys are almost always effeminate and darker skinned than the good guys (even when they’re both supposed to be from the Middle East…or are…ya know…lions)? Are you talking about the same Disney that indoctrinates legions of young women that beauty is their prime asset, to be completely submissive in courtship and let the men come to them even if it means waiting around for life to just serve you up by magic that your prince will come, and frankly it’s probably just best if they sleep most of the time anyway, abusive guys have a heart of gold inside if you just Stockholm syndrome their beast into submission, and that even if you kill every last motherfucking Hun in China, your big achievement is still if the barrel chested hot guy likes you. Are you talking about the same Disney that indoctrinates legions of young men that they must solve their conflicts with violence, and to be “manly,” they must be a barrel-chested Adonis and fight for their woman—who must be an object of beauty and pleasure because that’s what matters. Are you talking about the same Disney that indoctrinates legions of young people into the belief that there is “One True Love” out there, who is identifiable on sight, who you should leave everything you know and love to be with, and is so preposterously repetitive with their “love conquers all” narrative that they white wash over things like North American colonialism? The same Disney movies that has a generation of kids thinking Hercules’s real mom was Hera and the Little Mermaid ends in a wedding instead of foamy?

Heteronormative, sexist, racist, Bechdel-failing, status quo supporting Disney? Is that what you're talking about?

And yes, this article was written before Frozen and yes, I realize that a few of these tropes have (finally) been challenged by the more modern films.

Yeah. That would be the movies I'm talking about.

Hold the phone, though. I didn’t say they were good movies. I certainly didn't say they were great didactic movies. I said that they could be valuable to watch as a writer. Let’s say if you’re one of those people who thinks Disney movies are still so totally enchanting that you let your kids watch them over and over and over and over again and you figure that images bombarding them fifty or sixty times a year when they’re five won’t have the same effect as a meaningful conversation or two about gender roles when they’re teen-agers. Or maybe you think that at least your kid isn’t watching Jersey Shore.

Edit: or maybe you just think “Oh my god, this will distract them for 90 minutes while I have a chance to do laundry and have a bowel movement of longer than thirty seconds. Pixar isn't TOO bad. At least it's not Cinderella.”

However, I’ve already received death threats from my fellow barrel-chested white males for threatening to mess up the steady supply of subservient women, and this is usually about where the people who think Disney isn’t so bad start to rise up with pitchforks and torches, and the people who hate Disney for all the reasons above are polishing their Awl Pikes for our next encounter because how dare I derive anything of value from something so patently sexist, racist, and everything-else-ist.

And there I am, standing in the middle of a scene from Braveheart, except the two sides want to kill me instead of each other. So let me just say this:

I think Disney movies suffer from being easily accessible and recognizable pop culture icons that everyone has seen and become an easy way to critique the larger culture. If half of us memorized every line from every James Bond movie, we’d probably pick those movies to talk about misogyny or colonialist racism…and we’d probably have even more to talk about if we did. Anything mainstream media puts out would be just as problematic to essentially put on an auto repeat loop, and we go after Disney because it is such a recognizable icon. For all its faults, Disney tends to at least be conscious of some the social progression of our society. Many of its latest movies have even social progressives saying (well, this last one wasn't SO bad). The problem is many of its classic and iconic movies date back to more problematic times. It is even possible to say that one of the reasons many Disney movies achieve such a popular state is because they twang the cultural chord that many people in our society WANT TO HEAR. The really great exceptions to all this bullshit are usually not the movies every little kid knows by heart. And given the reaction that Disney DOES get from enraged fans about anything that isn’t perfectly sweet and antiseptic for the kiddies, it’s probably a wonder they don’t actually have everyone make up and have hot coco at the end of every movie.

All that said, you might still think I’m insane for suggesting that Disney could be valuable for a writer to examine. Those stories are trite. They are simplistic. They are formulaic. They are almost all the same with only a few cosmetic variations. They are the movie versions of a four chord song.

Yes. Exactly.

Because their greatest weakness is also their greatest strength.

Disney Movies can be very useful to a writer precisely BECAUSE they are formulaic. I know a lot of people look at Disney movies and vow that they will never write something so simplistic, so predictable, and so shockingly laden with tropes and cliches. That's good.

But like many things in life, it's very difficult to break the rules if you don't know what the rules are.  Ever seen someone who talks about how they are breaking the rules of grammar for effect, but it's pretty clear they just don't know how to join two clauses? Yeah it's like that. It's impossible to write against the grain of a Disney movie if you don't know what that grain really is.

Most people have their stories rejected not because they lacked complex literary elements–in fact most people do a PRETTY good job of knowing what level their writing is at and what sorts of magazines to send them to. According to editors I've spoken to and what I've read, most people have their stories rejected because they lack a plot. Nothing really happens. "This is a poignant character sketch of an intense moment, but it is a vignette not a STORY," is shockingly common feedback for new writers.

I witnessed this phenomenon time and time again throughout my writing program and even in some of the graduate work I had a chance to see. Amazing writing with fantastic descriptions, exquisite significant detail, care paid to setting, and simply gorgeous characterization would all fall flat on the page because nothing would HAPPEN. No rising tension--no tension at all. Just someone wallowing in their emotional state for a few pages. Often there was an antiseptic reveal that I know was intended to be a plot twist but wasn't because there was no plot to twist.

Some writers try to pass this off as "character driven." Usually they don't really know what that means, they just think it sounds highbrow and means they're NOT "plot driven." But even if this weren't pretentious bullshit, they have confused "character driven" with "no discernible plot." In a character driven story, the characters aren't reacting; they want something. And it is their desires that are driving the action forth.

There is no driving to speak of in 80-90% of young writers' fiction–plot or character driven. Publishers know it and Creative Writing instructors know it. And instead of working on writing good, compelling stories, most programs are still focusing on elements they've deemed more important to
"literary" writing.

Most writers would actually do well to understand plot, and going back to the basics is a good place to start. Disney movies are masters at the basic plot. You can't overly burden a four-year-old with intense complexity and subtle motivations. You might be able to slip in some adult humor, but the basics of the story have to be basic. Yes, a Disney movie is formulaic, but that formula is something people must know long before they can successfully break it. Disney movies have the story arc down pat–rising tension, complication, climax, denouement. Most of them follow The Hero's Journey (despite its flaws and criticisms) so closely, that it would only take you a few seconds to figure out who the "mentor character" is in a list of ten or fifteen Disney movies. (Go ahead; try it: Hercules, Cars, Lion King, Aladdin, Mulan, Finding Nemo.) Most Disney protagonists burn with what they want and what they need.

Sure it's sophomoric to have them say "I want to win that race more than anything!" within the first five seconds of being on screen, but it beats ten kinds of pants off a story where you're not sure WHAT the hell a character actually wants, which is a big problem with much new fiction.

What Disney demonstrates unswerving skill at over and over is telling a story. And for all their flaws and simplicity, examining them for what they're doing well is a great way to avoid stories without plots.

So if you have problems with plot, you could do worse than to suffer through a few Disney movies. Learn to walk before you fly...to infinity and beyond. (Sorry, I had to.)

Now, I must go to see a mouse about a thing.  But work on your "four chords" in the meantime, and enjoy the Official Video with several more examples: