(Way With Worlds runs at Seventh Sanctum and Muse Hack)
Ironically I was about to wrap up my heroes and villains series when David Brin dropped an asteroid-sized essay in my lap.
He notes rather brilliantly that a huge part of our media is the Idiot Plot, that the story is often about a few people who save the world because everyone else, all of society, are a bunch of idiots if not evil. It’s not just Suspicion of AUthority, he notes its socially corrosive.
Now Brin’s article on its own is well worth reading. I’m not going to recapitulate it here because he did a great job. Also I probably couldn’t do it justice.
But I’m going to address the issue as a matter of worldbuilding, because the Planet of Morons, the Idiot Plot, is a serious problem for worldbuilding. That’s what I cover.
Also this idea doesn’t work for building a world. (more…)
(Originally published at Ganriki, by Serdar Yegulalp. I felt his thoughts would be useful here.)
Of all the questions that inspire diverse and deeply subjective responses from anime fans, one of the most prominent has to be the question most every newcomer to anime asks, and finds the answers at least as confounding as the question itself: Where do I begin with this stuff? The evangelical fan, the fan who wants that many more fellow fans to share his obsession with, waits with bated breath for that moment to arise, and may well spend no small amount of energy trying to invite others in. But does introducing people to anime really make them into fans? Or do fans arise a good deal more spontaneously than we’d like to believe?
It’s a good question to ask. I have myself grappled with it long and hard, and for a long time stuck with the argument that for everyone out there not (yet) into anime, there’s an anime for them of some kind. For the Harry Potter fans, you maybe give them Fullmetal Alchemist or Soul Eater. For the CSI and Law & Order crowd, perhaps Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex or Psycho-Pass. Any number of lists like this already exist, or could be drawn up to connect present and future fandoms with present and future anime titles.
What I don’t think any of this does, though, is create new anime fans, in the sense of people who are into anime as a single, broad, overarching subject of interest. And from everything I’ve seen, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
No magic wand for fan-making
One of the big myths of fandom, any fandom, is that the uninitiated can be made into fans if they are only exposed to the right material. For a long time I wanted to believe that people I knew who were generally uninterested in anime could be made curious about it by exposing them to some of its most creative, maverick, and generally excellent productions. I know better than to think this now, not merely because it’s untrue, but because it presumes things about fandom that aren’t true either.
People not motivated to seek out a given thing may nod and smile if you put a good example of it in front of them, but they generally don’t get primed to seek the rest of the subject out on their own. Case in point: Comic book movies haven’t caused a mainstream surge in interest in comic books, just in comic book movies, and that’s mostly because they represent some modestly novel wrinkle in how summer blockbuster entertainment can be assembled and deployed. The comics themselves are still not part of the picture for most people.
Likewise, if you, a fan, put a given show you love in front of someone else, a non-fan, and they react with polite indifference or nonchalance, it’s not because the other person is an idiot — and it’s also not because you lack for the right pitch to give them, or the right material to expose them to. It’s because the ways we acquire tastes and share them with like-minded others are not so straightforward as all that. It’s better to be an ambassador for the things you love than to be an evangelist for those things, but not always easy to tell the difference between the two behaviors.
From what I’ve seen, people have to really want to be a fan of something, especially when it’s a large and overarching category of things — anime, for instance. You’re better off respecting that for what it is than trying to turn it int something it’s not. And even many people who are fans of a given anime or three are not necessarily anime fans — meaning, their interest in those particular anime is dictated more by their interest in the things themselves, rather than any curiosity for anime as a whole, let alone for Japan itself.
This last insight — that anime fandom doesn’t always translate into curiosity about the culture that created it — was something I had to learn about and get over fairly early on. If someone else liked a given anime or three and that was it, that was fine. If Japan wasn’t a topic of interest for them generally, that was fine too. Demanding a better grade of fan (whatever might be meant by “better”) by insisting that they replicate my path into fandom wasn’t likely to do anything except alienate others.
Besides, the way to have a better kind of fan isn’t about having them duplicate the experiences (and, presumably, the responses to those experiences) that led you, or anyone else, into fandom. If anything, it lies in the opposite path: allowing a fandom to be that much more welcoming of, and interested in, people who have something new to bring to the table. When you open your ears and learn about what it is that brings people to something, it becomes easier to see that you have more in common than you have setting you apart.
Friendship over fandom
What matters most, I think, is not the act of recruitment, but the act of friendship over something found mutually interesting. The now-defunct anime distributor Central Park Media once had the motto “World Peace Through Shared Popular Culture”, a sentiment I think is the right idea. It matters more that you are able to bond as people over something than as fans.
Case in point. Not long ago a friend of mine showed me an episode of Free!, which I had up to that point avoided. I sat with them and watched it mostly to be social. To my surprise, I liked it a lot, and I plan to talk more about it in the future, since I think the popularity (read: notoriety) of the show says a lot about the ways people try to claim ownership of their entertainment. On the other hand, DRAMAtical Murder (which they also showed me) didn’t have anything to offer me, though; it just isn’t my thing. Our friendship was in no way diminished by this revelation.
Putting the friendship first, and valuing that most, changes the way this whole process unfolds. If I’m good friends with a great many people, and they all share a taste for something that I don’t (Firefly, Irish reels, what have you), that’s no guarantee I’ll inherit their tastes on anything but the most superficial level. What’s more, friends tend to respect each others’ interests — if they don’t, they don’t tend to remain friends in the first place — and so the shared interests in any given friendship tend to equalize around the things everyone can enjoy without feeling obliged.
Let me put it this way: No fandom deserves to be represented by people who value being pushy over being receptive, and who value their own expectations over someone else’s actual responses. To that end, the best way to get people into anime probably doesn’t revolve around how to get people to watch your favorite show and love it too. It’s more about embodying how anime fans — or fans, period — can be some of the best friends a person could have.
Not much of an update this time gang, had a crazy two weeks. On top of that I’ve got some speaking engagements coming up – so if you’re in the area check out my schedule. Oddly one is on my Japanese curry – I’m expanding what I speak on to cover my geeky cooking interests – which is one of my other hobbies.
Hey, it’s not all generators and columns for me. Sometimes a man has to eat curry. And if you haven’t had Japanese Curry, you are so missing out.
Do keep an eye out for the next Heroes and Villains column, a post by David Brin sent me in an interesting direction. He summed up a major plot issue that worked quite well with my current themes and got me thinking.
And one thing I do want to recommend people check out is looking for “masterlists” and tool lists on Tumblr. I often find interesting lists of generators, creative tools, and more. Quite helpful and interesting! At some point it’d be nice to get some here.
Any volunteers? 😉
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/.
However, after awhile, it seems that it really becomes boring and trope-ridden. We talk Good and Evil but don’t think about it, signifiers are thrown around randomly, and titles like “heroine” or “villain” seem to stand in for actual moral issues. It’s mummifying good and evil, propping up heir bodies, and treating them as marionettes.
A friend of mine once noted that smoking was always used as a sign of evil in media. That was an example of how sometimes good and evil just becomes a pile of signifiers.
So when we think Heroes and Villains, here’s a bit of a challenge of you.
Stop thinking Good and Evil.
Start Thinking Why And How. (more…)
Hey gang, not too much to report today. I caught one of the apparent legion of new diseases going around and was just kind of bleh for most of the week. Ever have those moments where you’re sick enough to not be as active as normal, but not properly sick so you can’t just lie down and be appropriately miserable? Yeah, that was it. Worked from home mostly, did a short outing to see friends, and walked to stay sane, and slept.
The next few weeks are going to be a tad busy, so I’m not sure what else I’ll be up to Sanctum-wise. But if you’re in the Bay Area, let me know as I will be doing some speaking at a few events . . .
I’m really enjoying connecting with people more via Disqus and The Tumblr. By the way, do check the Tumblr, some people are actually writing from the prompts . . .
I do have some next generators queued up, I just need to decide which is next. One is based around magic, one dragons, and one SF pulp heroes. Let me know if you have any suggestions.
– 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/.
In fact, we know it from worlds and stories all too well. It’s a common part of our heroes – but also in villains who redeem themselves or at least have some integrity
You know the drill:
- The heroic sacrifice of some starship captain or engineer that guides their ship into a deadly run on the enemy – and may not even be saved at the last moment.
- The person who dies for a cause, getting nothing in return.
- The hero or heroine that trows themselves on the grenade-equivalent or detonates the bomb-equivalent by hand to save his or her buddies/country/world (pick at least one).
- The villain, who at the last moment, realizes what a giant moral vacuum they’ve been and dies to correct it.
You can easily name at least a half-dozen other examples. It’s woven throughout literature, through film, through comics, through legend.
However there’s time the sacrifice seems . . . off. It sets your teeth on edge for some reason. It seemed false. It seem contrived. It didn’t work for some reason.
And because it didn’t work, it bugs the hell out of you as a reader or player of the game or whatever. Something is wrong in the world.
In worldbuilding, when self-sacrifice happens, like anything else, it should have a reason. If there’s no reason for it to exist, it’s just going to come off wrong. Yet at times, it seems we shoehorn it in there, or it seems to fit yet . . . it doesn’t.
Here’s some warning signs to look out for that tell you that the brilliant self-sacrifice of your hero, or the touching sacrifice of your reformed (but now exceedingly dead) villain, aren’t.
Tropeagedddon
Sacrifice and self-sacrifice are tropes in literature and settings, and thus done a bit too easy. We throw in something into our plots and panels and game options that “fits” as it fits what we think should fit, but it just doesn’t work in our world.
It’s ay, way too easy to throw in a scene of self-sacrifice, just as sure as it is to put an all-too-familiar action scene in a movie, or a stereotype into a story. Sacrifice is a language people understand – but like selecting the wrong word in a conversation, it doesn’t work if it’s not appropriate.
Look out for putting in acts of self-sacrifice just because “the situation calls for it” or “it fits the story” because it should fit the characters and the world.
Selfish Motives Of The Character
Self-sacrifice is an act of transcending the self for something greater- it’s about giving up literally everything one has for a reason greater than one’s own life. Now those reasons may be questionable or crazy or ephemeral, or just plain stupid (at least to the survivors), but the act of self-sacrifice is literally giving up of self.
It’s not the same as sacrificing the self for something.
However the character motivations may really turn out to be selfish. Consider other motives for self-destructive behavior:
- In order to make someone sorry.
- In order to become famous or remembered.
- In order to escape a problem by appearing to “go out” in a heroic manner.
- To fulfill fantasies of martyrdom.
- As an act of self-hatred, essentially as suicide that doesn’t look like it.
Now these motives may indeed fit whatever character you’re creating who’s about to detonate the McGuffin Orb or whatever. If that fits, then by all means it’s consistent with your setting for them to go out. But it’s not heroic, it’s not noble – and frankly other characters will probably suspect.
Now that could be fascinating (“he saved the world, but he was also an egomaniacal jerk, how do we react”) but be careful of dressing up self-serving sacrifice as something else. It will grate horribly.
Selfish Motives of the Author
Now in no way do I want to cast aspersions on you and your world. But sometimes let’s face it, we do stuff in our stories because we like it, and sometimes that includes how we write characters, and how they die.
We can be motivated to put in an act of self-sacrifice assorted ways:
- To just get rid of an inconvenient character. That’s coping out, and believe me, people will notice.
- Because the character is a Mary Sue/Gary Stu/Author’s pet and we want people to love them/feel sorry for them. Usually it’s transparent enough it annoys people.
- Because we wrote ourselves into a corner or built or world i a way we didn’t expect. Usually a big boom solves some of that, but there’s only so often you can play Crisis On Infinite Earths before you kind of strain your credibility.
When it comes to really good worldbuildng, I think we have to take pride in our crafting a good world, and learn how to make it work. Inserting our own motivations in too far, violating our own continuity, damages our settings. In the case of something as deep as self-sacrifice, it can be outright annoying.
Giving Up The Wrong Sacrifice
So, when your heroes and villains make the ultimate sacrifice, make sure it fits them, that the reasons are good, and that t fits the setting. Sure they may be wrong, stupid, suicidal, but at least portray them properly. It brings a truly visceral feel to the story and avoids cheapening your scenes.
Best of all, when you deliver a tale or a game or a world where these moments of self-sacrifice truly ft, it keeps those involved int he world, the readers and gamers, engaged. It makes the world real and organic and alive – even when characters in it are dying.
That after all is what you’re trying to do.
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 gang, it’s been pretty quiet on the Sanctum end – definitely taking a break from generators, the Writing Prompt Generator took a lot more out of me than I thought. Plus I’m busy with work, and am juggling some other projects. I have some conventions coming up. Also there’s some playing of Team Fortress 2 (Engineer-Pyro-Medic is my thing).
The Tumblr appears to be popular – and people keep signing up! I’ll consider jacking in some more generators and stuff into it.
The next generator or three will be some different things I’m kicking around – and that accumulated while working on the Writing Prompt. More stuff I wanted to do than anything else.
Also was wondering, with so many visitors a day, anyone think a get-together of some kind might be fun?
So about it for me. How are you?
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/.
However, there’s a flipside issue I want to address, that of Incompetent heroes and villains. Though I find the former more common than the latter, it’s still an issue with good worldbuilding.
Ever wonder how the hell this person is going to save the world, or how this moron managed to threaten it? Is their stupidity celebrated as a kind of victory? Does the world builder seem to want you to celebrate it?
Welcome to the world of the Incompetents, the dark side to Omnicompetence
A Familiar Tale
You know the story. The hero who manages to save the day despite being stupid/ignorant/etc. The villain with . . . really nothing going for them except they are somehow a threat. Some characters are even portrayed at being so good at what they do because of their stupidity, which is not a trait you want in doctors, programmers, or scientists let alone your hero and their archnemesis.
Sometimes this is played for laughs, which is fine in a comedy – much as an Omnicompetent character can also be played for laughs. In this case it may well fit your focus.
But other times, I think you know what I mean, the characters successes are so outrageous and unbelievable that you really don’t buy them because they are explained by (and not defeated by) their own incompetence. Just as surely as an Omnicompetent character distorts a world, so does a protagonist and/or antagonist who is so dumb you’re not sure they should be allowed to drive, let alone use the Orbital Death Ray.
These sound a bit like the classic Holy Fools, but I have a better name for them . . .
Unholy Fools
In many cases, I think these characters are distorted versions of the classic Holy Fool, characters that seem weird or dumb or foolish, but there is something greater at work. Somehow they succeed despite or even because of what makes them foolish, and yet you wonder how incompetent they are. They’re paradoxes who may be straightforward.
There’s a beloved tradition of these characters. Sometimes their foolishness is a lack of the B.S. others adsorbed. Others think differently. Yet others mess with people to make a point, appearing foolish. Finally some are ambiguous, and that’s the part of the story, making you wonder.
Captain Tylor of the anime series is a great example of a modern Holy Fool, and his very ambiguity is part of the story. Discworld has several Holy Fools who you later on find are not fools so much as some of their personality traits that seem to be flaws aren’t (not spoiling here).
The Holy Fool, frankly, is a damn hard character to create. If you’re a worldbuilder, you have to understand them inside out when the point is they’re mysterious. If you can do it right more power too you.
However, the Holy Fool sometimes seem to just be the Lucky Dumbasses who are annoying. Let’s call them Unholy Fools.
Thinking Like Children
What we often end up with in these “reverse Omnicompetents,” the Unholy Fools, are often childish characters who succeed for reasons that seem to be dumb luck or their dumbness is somehow a virtue. It’s not that they have a virtue that appears to be dumb (often a classic element of the Holy Fool or Holy semi-Fools), or that they lack a negative complicator, it’s literally they’re just stupid.
This happens in comedies, of course, but can happen in a lot of tales as well. The character who “is just doing their job” or “doesn’t know anything about that, but I know how to punch something” and so on is an Unholy Fool. They succeed supposedly as they’re not smart.
They’re not ambiguous, or differentially smart. There’s not that level of thought put to them.
I think characters like this are popular and easy to fall into as:
- They don’t make the readers or gamers feel inadequate.
- They thumb their nose at supposedly smart/talented people.
- They can be good for a laugh.
Of course after awhile the Unholy Fool here sort of grates on people because they are dumb, their successes aren’t believable, and . . . they don’t have reason to be the way they are. The successful idiot too easily is just another authors pet, verging on Mary Sue/Gary Stu territory. In fact, I’d say the Unholy Fool is more likely to be a Mary Sue than many Omnicompetent characters.
An, of course, a worldbreaker. Because, in the end, they’re just successful idiots for no reason
Did You FalL Into The Trap?
So how do you detect you’ve fallen into this trap?
Well first, as noted these Unholy Fools are worldbreakers. If you can’t explain their success, their like-ability, etc. that should set off your worldbuilding alarms. In your gut you probably know it.
Another sign is finding you didn’t think them out as well as you thought. If a character seems to coast, things seem to be “too” good for them despite their flaws, you may have fallen into this trap as well.
Finally, I think Unholy Fools are characters who in their incarnations, appeal only to a subset of people. If you notice some folks dislike a character and you don’t get why, yet others rally to defend them, that may be an indicator.
The best test simply is “can you explain why your character triumphed the way they did”in a manner that works in the world. Te audience may not know (that’s part of the fun with HolyFools) but you need to.
Comes and Goes
It’s odd writing this as I find when I first wrote Way With Worlds I didn’t see many Unholy Fools. Later I noticed quite a few of them popping up, I suspect as they can also be Mary Sues/Gary Stus and they appeal to anti-intellectualism. My guess is these kinds of characters and their appeal come and go with social tends as well.
So perhaps in another decade or two, this may get a laugh as people wonder “oh, who would write that?” But a few decades later . .. well, who knows?
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/.
Not much to update today – mostly because I’m taking a break from doing the Writing Prompt Generator. That one was pretty trying in retrospect and I definitely need some time off – though ironically I have three generator ideas in my head now. Maybe I need to put a server on my laptop so I can tinker at the coffee shops I write at.
One thing I did to is connect the Writing Prompt Generator to the Tumblr. That means that once a day you get a random prompt on top of the story and character prompts! I admit I’m having fun experimenting with the Tumblr.
OK, enough for me, time to sign off, queue up some Rifftrax, and relax!
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/.
If you write on geeky subjects or want to write on geeky subject, Crossroads Alpha would like you to join our Writer’s Pool.
Crossroads Alpha is an alliance of web sites covering comics, anime, careers, creativity, video games, films, and more. There’s a Writer’s Pool that you can join if you’re interested in writing for any (or all) of the sites involved. Needs, ideas, and suggestions will be posted, and if you find something you’d like, you can contact the site owner and go to work!
You can find out more about the alliance at www.crossroadsalpha.com.
Want to join? Go here and sign up:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/ca-writers
Allied sites are:
- http://www.comicsbulletin.com/
- http://www.ganriki.org/
- http://indiehaven.com/
- http://www.musehack.com/
- http://psychodrivein.com/
- http://www.seventhsanctum.com/
- http://tgtmedia.com/
- http://videogamebreak.net/
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/.
