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Written by Paul
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Friday, 02 November 2012 01:04 |
Well, you were promised a Mad King, so you get a Mad King. I had to be careful, when laying this out, not to depict the King as being genuinely mentally ill, or at least not one of the real kinds. I live with a person who has a mental illness, and I suffer from them myself. The last thing I want to do is add to the ongoing demonization of the mentally ill. It is one of the cruelest myths that all crazy people are therefore dangerous, when most of us are dangerous largely to ourselves.
The Mad King is a potent archetype because it has real historical precedent, what with Ivan the Terrible and such, and it also strikes at the very heart of all fears in a monarchy. In a monarchy, if you have a good king, then everything is great; but if you get a bad king, or a flat-out crazy bastard, then you would realize very quickly that you live in an absolutist state, and have very little protection against the power of the crown. One of the reaosns for the reverence for the good kings is the awareness of just how bad a bad king can get. We complain about our leaders, who have strictly limited powers and only stay in office for a short while, with plans and provisions in place should they become unable to perform their duties. They may do things we don't agree with, but at least they are there to do a job. In a monarchy, the guy is king for life, and if he is an idiot, or a paranoid, or just a prick who doesn't care about the country, then you are all in big trouble, and the only way to remove him will involve violence and maybe getting your head whacked off. Not fun.
In this chapter we introduce Queen Alicerin as a viewpoint character, and now I think we have a nice spread: Varian and Ambrel and Raziel and Alicerin. Hero, Antihero, Villain, Heroine. The Queen will have a big part to play in this story, and I was unsure about bringing her in this late, but I think it flows well, and I'm glad to have her around.
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Written by Paul
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Tuesday, 30 October 2012 14:10 |
 Tell me you didn't picture a white guy. See?
Did you know, for example, that Alexandre Dumas - the biggest name in swashbuckling adventure, the creator of the fucking Three Musketeers - was what people of the time called a "quadroon"? In other words, he would not have been able to sit in the front of the bus in Selma, Alabama, is what I'm saying. I often think about what would have happened if he'd made D'Artagnan a similarly mixed-race individual. Hell, he could have based him on his own father. Thomas-Alexandre Dumas was such a ridiculously hardassed soldier that he once routed an Austrian squadron singlehanded, as in, with his sword he beat back an assault by something like 200 men. That is an exploit so bad-ass it makes the shit Porthos pulled look sissy in comparison.
The problem with not writing minorities into your fiction - and I mean any sort of minorities: nonwhites, gays, trans* folks - is that when we don't see these people in the real world at least we know they still exist. In a made-up world, nothing that you don't write in is there by default. If you don't write in any brown people, well, maybe you just forgot, or didn't think you had a place in there for them, but maybe you are thinking there are no such people in the Kingdom of Honkovia. Maybe not having a gay character means you just didn't think to put one in, or maybe you are thinking there are not any.
Whitewashing is bad enough in a real world setting, when we at least know such people are to be found, if out of camera range. But in a made up world, it is ever so much worse, because you are essentially imagining these people out of existence. Think about if your imagined fantasy world is accidentally a place Strom Thurmond would have loved.
I'm not saying every story has to be a tract, with Big Points to make about equality or harmony. What I'm saying is that as white creators, we need to realize that we often do this by accident, by just not thinking about it. I don't believe it is often done in an intentional way, and certainly not in a mean-spirited way. My point is that non-whiteness and non-straightness is too often a thing we just don't see. A blind spot.
This is something I struggle with on my own. In a real world setting I worry about co-opting the voices of real minorities if I write about them and am not one. Then in a fantasy world where I could be much more free to invent, I feel constrained still. In theory, a made-up minority can't be offended, but in reality anything you make up is going to be based somehow on a real thing, and that is going to make writing about it as potentially uncomfortable as depicting any real non-white people. You can't talk about fantasy race or racism without commenting on the real thing, you just can't.
So we leave it out. We don't want to deal with it. I'm guilty as anyone. Racism is not something you want to include in every single story - sometimes it just doesn't fit the tone you want, or it would require more worldbuilding and would pull focus from the story you are trying to tell. But it is telling, and sad, that the best way for fantasy writers to avoid dealing with racism is to make up a world where there is nothing but white people.
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Written by Paul
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Monday, 29 October 2012 00:26 |
All of us have had those moments in life when we have forgotten something so completely that when we are reminded of it, there is that moment of unreality. What are they talking about? I don't remember anything about OH SHIT. So we all know the feeling Varian has here when he is reminded that he has a duel to attend. I'm having a great time describing the city, and I hope no one is bored by it. In the trade, this kind of thing is called "traveling music" and is regarded with some suspicion, as it is thought to be rather self-indulgent. I myself find that the omission of a vivid picture of the surroundings leaves one without much to work with. Details add texture, they give context and richness to a narrative. A sense of place and of the world going on around the characters, with or without them.
Duels are a staple of swashbuckling fiction, and I am often annoyed by how often they are depicted as either extremely formal affairs or as ad hoc brawls. True, there were examples of both, but this is, I think, an account of a fairly typical duel. Death-duels were relatively uncommon, and formality was often no more than nodded to. I am enjoying this subplot here, and those of you who know us can expect that Denora will not be able to avoid the hot, spoiled Duke forever.
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