Best summary I heard “In Riverdale Anything Can Happen.”
I think there’s something to that. Archie in concept is tethered to certain ideas and characters who are archetypical. This in some ways is limiting, but as the characters are about very human situations, it is a human tether. Archie’s situations are human ones – love, school, life, death, food (especially in the case of Jughead).
But because Archie has this tether, you can then go hog wild with it in a way. It always has a ground, so go nuts. Team Archie up with the Punisher, have him fight Predator, explore alternate timelines, create the Legion of Archie. Whatever works – Archie and company are still themselves.
In turn the series own limited focus – wholesome teams in their rather nice town – provides a limitation. In some ways the best thing to do is go a bit nuts – and you can, as you have themes to work with and return to.
Finally the human-humorous grounding gives you fertile ground to experiment. The message of Riverdale is “Everyone belongs,” as we’ve seen with the groundbreaking Kevin Keller. Everyone is a pretty wide berth to experiment with.
Glad to meet the new Archie, same as the old Archie, a difference we can all be glad is the same.
– Steven Savage
Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach. He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at http://www.stevensavage.com/.
I’ve talked about tropes as something that can kill a world because they’re unreal – yet at times tropes aren’t a problem. Let’s explore. (more…)
(Originally published at Ganriki, I thought the crew here would enjoy it!)
And while we’re at it, is light a particle or a wave? That one, we already have (sort of) an answer for: it depends on how it’s constrained. The same, I think, applies to anime too: it’s a genre and a medium, depending on which way the pie is being sliced, and who’s doing the slicing, and who’s doing the serving of the slices.
To me, the main distinction is in which eyes are doing the beholding. If you’re a fan, it’s easier to think of anime as a medium, because odds are you’ve spent enough time up close and personal with it to see how it manifests in too many different ways to be a genre. If you’re a non-fan, looking in from the outside, many aspects of it tend to blur together to present to an outsider the trappings of a genre.
Some of this, I suspect, comes from the way anime — more these days than before — is contrived to serve a certain self-selecting audience that expects to see certain things. Hence the endless parade of harem and moé shows — not that those things are automatically bad, more that what we get is designed more to fit a certain set of preconceptions than it is to tell a story or even be all that entertaining. (I’m glad the worst of those two trends appears to be over, but I’m not confident it’s being replaced with anything markedly better.) A non-fan looks at such things and sees a whole slew of traits that s/he can bundle together into a genre — making it all the easier to identify it on sight and, most likely, consign it to perdition.
Fans on the inside, though, see genres within anime, but they don’t automatically regard anime as a whole as a “genre”. They know that it’s a container, though, one which can enclose any number of different sorts of experiences. Nobody with enough experience thinks the works of Satoshi Kon, Clannad, the various Gundams, or the various Monogataris are coming from remotely the same places. Odds are no two of those things even have the same fanbases within anime fandom — but again, to an outsider, it’s all one big undifferentiated lump of Weird Japan. Labeling it as a genre makes it easier to not have to think about the possibility that it might in fact be not all that undifferentiated.
Understand something: I’m not blaming anyone for taking that approach. Most anyone outside of any highly trafficked fandom is going to feel baffled. But few people that I’ve run into think of Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, and Sherlock in the same “genre” of British Stuff I Couldn’t Be Bothered With. I suspect that’s because the main mode of delivery for those things didn’t necessarily start with its national origin, but with a concept. Anime is set apart first and foremost by the fact that it comes from Japan. If the West put one big label on it to begin with as a way to allow “us” to wrap “our” heads around it, is it really such a surprise that so many of those not deep in the thick of it are able to put it all in a box and sit on the lid?
I suspect the same goes for all those who can’t get into Hong Kong action pictures, or Bollywood musicals. And, while we’re at it, what about all those abroad who might well have the same shelve-it-and-shove-it approach to Hollywood tentpole productions (which might well all be a “genre”, given how formulaic they are), or the Marvel/DC axis of comic books? If people can call anime a “genre”, it’s not because of anything anime alone has done; it’s because of the way many of the mass-market entertainments created by any culture tend to breed in a good deal of uniformity that only falls away once you come closer.
What I’m saying here, then, is that the whole question of whether anime is a genre or a medium doesn’t just depend on who you ask. The very fact that such a question exists is a symptom of how any of us looks at another culture’s cultural products, and maybe even our own as well. (Many Japanese novelists, for instance, give anime and especially manga the same lump-it-together-and-forget-it treatment as Western non-fans.) We have a hard time not looking at such things without needing a label or a box of some kind, in big part because such things are consumption instructions. If we know something is comic-book-ish, we have some idea of how to process the material. If we know something is anime-ish, likewise.
But those instructions are not absolute. They don’t come down from the mountain on stone tablets, as it were; they come from the whole history of viewership for those things. They don’t have to be taken on face value, and most of the history of anime advocacy between fans and from fans to non-fans revolves around this. It’s not just a cartoon, we say to the wholly uninitiated. And to the initiated who already has some territory staked out, we tell them it’s not just a love story or a fight show. We would scarcely need to do this kind of advocacy if the existing labels — harem comedy, shōnen action show, shōjō romance — didn’t already carry such weight.
What’s more, neither mode — genre and medium — exists entirely apart from the other, certainly not as long as either viewpoint exists at all. Some anime embody anime-as-a-genre far more specifically than others, and ask to be looked at in that light; some embody it far more as a medium than others, and so that approach works best for the items in question. The genre tells us what kind of story to expect, and how it will be fulfilled. This medium is a way to look at something that empowers it in certain ways, that gives it a certain automatic suspension of disbelief that some stories need to embody as effortlessly as they can.
Knowing that we have these reactions puts us one step closer towards being able to approach these things entirely on their own terms, without needing to figure out first what part of the shelf to put them on. In the end, we don’t need a label of “genre” or even “medium” to justify anything; it’s the labels that need us to justify themselves. Would that we can see so.
(Originally posted at Muse Hack, I thought you Sanctumites would enjoy it as well)
I met Lillian Csernica at Con-Volution. She’s a professional author who’s written short stories and even warmed my worldbuilding heart with a guide to making magic systems. Of course I’m going to interview here, she’s one of us. (more…)
(Way With Worlds runs at MuseHack, Seventh Sanctum, and Ongoing Worlds)
Every worldbuilder, author, artist has had that moment. That moment where originality seems to be a fleeting illusion.
Perhaps they feel that they can’t seem to do anything original. Every idea they have seems done (and perhaps done better). The fear of being accused of derivation. The sense everything they do seems to be alike.
Perhaps they feel there just isn’t anything left. Everything has been done, there’s nothing left to do.
So let’s address that issue that many a worldbuilder faces – how do we deal with the need to be original? Fortunately there’s an easy answer.
Screw originality, who needs to worry about it?
Pointless Quest, Pointless Question
The need for originality that seems to trouble many a creative person, reminds me a lot of writer’s block. Writer’s block, in my mind, really is something that only has power over us as we name it – and having named it we’ve given it power and made our fear of it a trap. Originality is a case of where we have this vague idea of something and, feeling we must find it, fear its lack.
It’s all fear with little substance.
Let’s ask what originality is, anyway.
Something never seen before? Impossible because there will have to be some similarity in your ideas or your world to something or no one will ever have an idea of what’s going on.
Something new? New may be a matter of perspective. I’m sure with enough work anyone can find a similarity between two ideas. I once jokingly said the anime “Attack On Titan” and the surrealist Cartoon “Adventure Time” are the same – a shapeshifter and a combat expert in a post-apocalyptic future helped out by a slightly off-kilter scientist. So what really is “new” or “different”?
In fact, sometimes the unoriginality is original in another way. I’m reminded of an episode of the show Remember WENN called “Between a Rock and a Soft Place,” where the crew of a small radio station did a show called “Same Dane, Private Eye.” However this hardboiled thriller was really a retelling of Hamlet, with the prince as a two-fisted detective. Original or not? Original in combination of unoriginal ideas? Your guess is as good as mine.
Something where there’s nothing else like it on the market? Depends on your idea of the market – and many a market don’t seem to care about originality.
So I’ going to suggest “originality” is not a solid thing, it’s a somewhat relative, situational term. Useful, indeed, but something that’s better as a whole because it’s parts don’t exactly some up. A map not a destination.
The thing is when we treat originality as a solid thing, then we seek something that isn’t solid. When we don’t find it (and worse, when we’re in a funk, it can be harder), we become depressed or angry. But we’re angry something we can never truly be said to have, because the term isn’t solid.
So stop worrying and get back to worldbuilding.
The real question of your setting is “Does It Work.”
Integration Over Consternation
So really the question a good worldbuilder should be asking is how do their ideas hold together. Does the setting make sense, is the history believable, does the magic work, is the technology properly explained. Does the world functioning a way that people “get it” – and thus they can buy into it.
See, good worldbuilding means creating a setting that makes sense and functions, that people can grasp intuitively. It doesn’t have to be “original.” In fact it may be rather unoriginal. You could even be exploring common ideas so originality isn’t on the agenda.
But if it works and comes to life, people can connect with it.
Part of the fear of unoriginality (but only part) is that one is resorting to tropes and common ideas. Dead concepts, long ago mummified and propped up in many a story, wayposts saying “here’s your big ‘ol standard plot.” We’re afraid, in short of a world that’s just “here we go again.”
But when your world comes to life, when the ideas tie together, then it’s not a world of tropes – it’s a good, solid setting. You may see things that have been seen before, but it’s alive, and engaging, and interesting. It’s also yours, your unique vision, spinning away like an orrery.
Tropes are uninteresting and laughable when dead. But when alive . .. then they’re just common ideas working.
Imagine a bog-standard fantasy tale with your usual ripoff D&D party – the fighter, the wizard, the thief, and the cleric. Sounds boring and stupid. But imagine in brought to life, with magic versus religion, a warrior’s code ruling a person’s life, a shadowy criminals past haunting them . . . and then you have a story that could be interesting. Because it’s alive, even if the individual parts seem like tropes and stereotypes.
Well, seem like tropes and stereotypes until you realize how lively they are. Maybe tropes are what happen when you rip archetypes and common concepts out of their settings and just have their ghosts haunting your works.
Stop Worrying
So stop worrying and go build your damn world. Make it work, live and breathe. Make it function. Make sure it makes sense.
You’ll make a better setting, have more fun, worry less, and get more done. Let Originality be something that’s a laudable goal, perhaps even a good measuring stick, but one you measure by the liveliness of you setting, and one that you on’t let dominate you.
Besides, maybe when you focus on making that world well, originality will take care of itself, because we all know when our minds really get going that’s when the real surprises start . . .
Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach. He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at http://www.stevensavage.com/.
Bit of an early update here!
First, the new generator. After the Writing Prompt Generator I needed to do something fun and simple. So inspired by cheesy monster flicks, I created the Creature Feature Generator. You can just get monster names, or get ones that are intermittently punched up to be “movieseque.” So are you ready for . . .
- Atomic Tyranosaurus Part 7: The Final Battle
- Daughter Of Two-headed Beast
- Insectobot Reloaded
- Monster Orca : The Next Generation
- Octocuda Versus Atomic Beast Part 5
- Octorantula
- Snakeshark Part 8
- Snakestorm
- The Rise Of Toxic Dragon : The Legend Ends
- Viperasaurus
Of course I’m all ready to see Octocuda Versus Atomic Beast Part 5. Part 4 really ended on a cliffhanger!
If you have any suggestions for additional creatures to add to the database or cheese extras in titles, like “Reloaded,” let me know.
Otherwise mostly been doing some site tweaks for search engines. I’ve wanted to optimize them for awhile and figured I’d just get it over with.
So how’s everyone else doing?
Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach. He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at http://www.stevensavage.com/.
(Way With Worlds runs at MuseHack, Seventh Sanctum, and Ongoing Worlds)
My friend Serdar, in writing Flight of the Vajra (which I edited, I admit, but I enjoyed the hell out of it) is fond of noting the plot happened when he realized his setting didn’t hold together. The novel is basically about things not working, or as I like to put it ,having more questions than answers is bad, but more answers than questions is worse.
What Serdar says sounds both wise and flies in the face of a lot of the attitudes heavy Worldbuilders may take. We want things to make sense. We want it to hold together. We want it to work.
But sometimes the tale is what happens when it doesn’t work. Maybe it’s a disaster. Maybe it’s a transition. Things are always in transition anyway.
So before you look at your latest world, at your latest change, and decry how you can’t see how the kingdom survives, or the galaxy prospers, or whatever remember that you may have just found the story you were looking for. The world breaking is the story.
The problem however is that you don’t know if you’ve done bad worldbuilding or that you’ve created a good but unsustainable setting. Maybe the setting falling apart is because your exquisite sense of detail has led to an inevitable conclusion – or maybe you just did a crappy job.
So it’s time for some questions.
Question 1: Why Does It Break?
First of all you have to ask just why your setting seems destined to fall apart. I mean if things are going to break down you have to know why?
- If it is because things just don’t seem to make sense, then the fault is probably yours.
- If the falling apart occurs because of elements in the setting, it may just be an unexpected feature. If you see a race war between elves and dragons as inevitable despite a fragile peace that was hard-won you don’t have a problem – you have a game, a story, or a RPG session
Question 2: How Did We Get Here?
You look at your setting and realize it’s going to go down in flames. Is this a story to tell or is this a mistake on your part? Part of the question is asking why this is all happening.
- * Are there reasons for the setting to get to the point f degrading that make sense in the context of the world? Can you explain why the Star Empire would survive the first hundred years but not the next two? In short, can you see your setting existing, but eventually falling apart.
- * If you can’t explain how your setting would get to the point where it would then fall apart you have a problem. Essentially the setting has shoddy infrastructure anyway and falling over is your mistake, not a feature. It should never have been big enough to fall apart.
Keep Asking
Those two questions can essentially tell you if you have a story – if the breakdown makes sense and the setting is reasonable up to the point of the breakdown. With both those traits you have at tale – without, you have mistakes in your setting.
However, maybe that’s not what you want to great in a story or game or comic . . .
But I’m Not Interested In Writing It Falling Apart
Sometimes we discover we’re not writing the tale we wanted or crafting the game we intended. That’s a bit of a tough call. A few pieces of advice I can provide is:
- Change perspectives. Maybe the giant collapse is something you can write from a different perspective then intended. Maybe your perspective is the problem, and once you’re in a character or two’s heads the setting’s problems are things you want to write.
- Back up. Back up a few years before everything goes straight to hell, and tell your story from there – though the coming collapse may annoy you.
- Jump forward. Jump up your timeline and see if the setting eventually evolves to the kind you want to write.
- Re-engineer. The hardest thing to do is re-engineer your setting to remove the relevant apocalypse. That is something that’s a bit challenging and potentially can tempt you to dishonesty. I’d say go for it, but if you can’t truly do it, hen you have to conclude your setting is what it is.
- Quit. Not recommended. Staring over is kind of coping out and you have all that hard work.
Your call on these things. Though I’m not up for quitting – after all if you ram through you may find you want to write the end of the world after all.
It’s Part Of What You Do
Finding your setting is going to fall apart is one of the challenges of worldbuilding. It can shock us and surprise us and derail us.
However it’s also one of the benefits of the craft. Unexpected findings, challenges, settings coming to life are part of the magic of worldbuilding. Though it may alter our lans, at least it’s doing so in a way that truly surprises and inspires and comes to life.
Well, assuming its because the world was well built, but you get the idea . . .
Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach. He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at http://www.stevensavage.com/.
Hey everyone, so what’s been up? A LOT.
Trying to get back to generators (as you can see below the last two weekends were packed). Hoping to get around to dumping some ideas into code so I can get them out of my head (I have notes on three generators now). I need to get my laptop setup with a proper dev setup so I can code at coffee shops. I do my writing outside my apartment and figure why not code the same way? Though fair warning, one or two coming aren’t serious.
Secondly for you career creatives latest job series, “The Dark Side Of ‘Do What You Love’” is complete. It was a chance to explore some more negative approaches to my usual career advice. I thought you folks might like it!
Last week I did Con-Volution. This is a hardcore, old-school SF con with a big focus on skills, writing, socializing, and development. I was on panels on religion and worldbuilding (amazing, has to be done again), general worldbuilding (very diverse), and general careers(with a focus on professional behavior). I’d recommend it to you – give it a check if you can make it, or at least check out their schedule for ideas.
This weekend I did Kraken-Con. Spoke on how to Make Japanese Curry (I’m branching into Geek Cooking and this was successful) and my Fan To Pro panel. Great con and it’s twice a year – only it went from 800 people 6 months ago to about 2K estimated. I’m suspecting it’ll be once a year. This one also had practical panels (seems to be a trend) and was great fun -plus it is so well organized. If you’re in the Bay Area, you need to check it out.
I was also wondering if I should run some Sanctum based events at these conventions – you know, do creative jams, etc. I’m open to any suggestions.
Oh and by the way – this is a great reminder of how I need to pace my congoing ahead of times. Thats basically two weekends of being busy . . .
I do interviews with creative people over at http://www.musehack.com/ and was thinking of reposting them here. Any thoughts on that? Gives people more exposure and lets you meet fellow creatives who might have advice.
Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach. He blogs on careers at http://www.musehack.com/, publishes books on career and culture at http://www.informotron.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at http://www.stevensavage.com/.
(Way With Worlds Runs Weekly at MuseHack and Seventh Sanctum)
So last time I noted how David Brin had gotten me discussing the idea of the Idiot Plot or the Planet Of Morons – the idea the hero(es) are the only things saving the world, which is also corrupt and stupid.
The thing with this plot is it degrades society – and degrades the characters and the world. It makes the heroes stupidly unbelievable, it makes the villains shallow or uninteresting, it makes the world improbable.. It’s in short dumb and inaccurate and psychologically toxic when it’s everywhere.
But I’d like to expand on this in what is hopefully my last Heroes and Villains post on worldbuilding. Yeah, I know, unlikely, but still.
Namely, if you don’t resort to the Idiot Plot and the Planet of Morons (and you won’t, right?), here’s my thoughts on how to make the story or game interesting while preserving world integrity. Because you do want to engage the reader, but you also want to have a good, believable world setting.
First, let’s get to the heart of the matter. (more…)
