Children's Fantasy

I grew up in a time when children's fantasy was a very small part of the genre.  Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising Sequence (Published 1973), and The Chronicles of Prydain (Published 1964) were pretty much it.  Cooper's series combined elements of the children's pulp of an earlier generation, The Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew and mixed it with cultural references from an even older generation's fantasy, The Chronicles of Narnia and LOTR.  Both series were excellent, and moderately popular in their day, evidenced by the fact that Disney made a film of The Black Cauldron.  These were the books that opened my mind to fantasy.  But the step from those children's books to adult fantasy was a steep one: go for the Once and Future King, or risk drowning in LOTR.  But the field has changed a lot since then.

There were many authors who revitalized the genre but the real break through came with J.K. Rowling's epic, Harry Potter.  I was a young man when these books came out, and I resisted for over a year before succumbing to Pottermania.  My feeling at the time was simply, these are children's books, I read adult fantasy.  And true to form, when I began to read the series, I was immediately critical of the simplicity of the prose.  It didn't take long for me to reform my views on the matter.  But even now, my attitude toward children's fantasy is slightly deprecatory.  I haven't read Percy Jackson and the Olympians and have absolutely no desire to do so.  Nor have I seen the movie, or read the books of The Last Airbender.  I do have in my collection, The Golden Compass, and though I've seen and enjoyed the film, I have yet to start the series.

So why the antipathy?  Well, for one thing, my first real adult fantasy book, after reading the book report worthy LOTR and Narnias listed above, was Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks.  I loved the original cover, pictured here.  Swords of Light derives half of its name from that pivotal moment in my life.  It was difficult, and over eight hundred pages.  But it was by reading adult fiction that I learned to write and speak as well I have.  I never needed to study the GRE, GMAT, or LSAT vocabulary modules, 800 page novels are not models in brevity.  They require a significant range of word choice.  Descriptive passages need more than words like dark and dirty.  For example:

The elf walked down the dark hallway, ready to fight.

The elf crept down the dank passageway, arrow nocked and half-drawn.

or

The elf lithely skulked down the corridor, cedar bow drawn and tipped with venom, arms tense, eyes sweeping the crumbling path before him.

Sometimes the best way to learn is to dive into the deep end, not continue skimming the surface.  I'm not a teenage girl, and so I have limited utility for vampires, but I do make an effort to be au currant, and so I read the first book of The Twilight Saga, Twilight.  Unlike Harry Potter, I was not convinced.  This was an atrociously written book, incredibly boring and a bit like eating uncooked tofu, tasteless and devoid of substance.  You want Vampires?  Read Ann Rice.  I didn't mind the Christian messaging in the book, both Tolkien and Lewis were hard-core Christians.  Christ imagery abounds in both.  I minded the poor quality writing and the utter boredom.

My other critique of children's fantasy, particulary in its more modern vintage is its tendency to protect and pull punches.  Though the evil vampire is eventually pulled limb from limb in Twilight, there is no description, no gore.  The young woman never has sex with her man.  That's fine, but at least let her have dirty fantasies.  Christianity is rife with rules about sex and sexuality, if you're going to use it, you should be torturing the reader with temptation, not regurgitating apollinian fantasies about love. 

Fantasy is about real life.  By creating realms that can't possibly exist, we transcend believability and are able  to examine relationships that might otherwise be obscured by traitorous thoughts like "oh, that's not realistic!"  That possibility is dimmed when the lewd and the tragic are ignored.  Harry Potter's saving grace is that the teenagers are teenagers, death is death, and loss is inescapable.  These were how the original fairy tales educated.  Think "ashes, ashes we all fall down," that hoary old children's chant that describes Europe's time during the Black Death.  Think Jack and The Beanstalk.  Jack kills a giant after stealing his wealth.  Not pretty, not nice, and above all, completely unsanitized.  Think Rumpelstiltskin, a beautiful girl about to be raped by a lord, she tricks a gnome, who ultimately pays for her deception with his life.

You see where I'm going with this.  Fantasy is vital to children's development.  It teaches them ethics, right and wrong, about caring, duty honor, and love.  But sapped of life's tragic realities, it's just a desensitizing Hallmark card.

The Dwarves by Markus Heitz

Let me start this post with a disclaimer:

Anyone who can finish a novel, and get it published has my utmost respect.  And more, they are in at least this one way far superior to me: they've the will to see it through.

Criticisms of this book might also be inappropriate for this reason:  The Dwarves is one of those few fantasy novels that bridged the language gap.  Every single other fantasy book I've ever read, and I've read many, were in English.  Translating from German is hard, and my philosophy professors always assured me, particularly the Germans, that a great deal is lost in even the best translation.  One of my central criticisms of this book is that the prose is simple to the point of being for a much younger audience, twelve to thirteen.  I suggest that this is the publisher's fault.  German is an exceedingly colorful language, and each word is dense with meaning.  This was not a book to go Hemmingway on.  But Americans are thought by editors at large to be fairly simplistic in their reading level, and so perhaps there is a sensible reason for this fault.  Compare the prose of The Dwarves to the prose of Erikson's from The Malazan Book of the Fallen and you'll see what I mean.

Overall, I enjoyed this book.  There's enough going for it, that I'd consider reading the sequel.  As usual, I'd seen this title in the bookstore and admired its fine cover.  Not only that, but I was intrigued.  Dwarves are usually in the model of Gimli from LOTR, amusing sidekicks, or Flint from the Dragonlance Saga.  The implication, and truth of the title, is that this might be one of the first such fantasy novels where the hero is a dwarf.  The book had an interesting, relatively swift moving plot, some gruesome details, and an exciting conclusion.

Very well, let's get to the five.

1.  Character:  This is perhaps my primary complaint about the story.  The characters are very naive.  Naivety is only bearable when it proves a point, is a statement about the character, not the writer.  Rand Al'Thor starts out the Wheel of Time very naive.  But Jordan does this intentionally, to show that he's an eighteen year old boy from a farming village.  Every single character, except maybe one, the Maga Andokai are naive to the point of iritation.  And they say the lamest things to one another!  The main character Tungdil is the worst for this, but even the main vilain, the Nudin the Knowledge-Lusty (For real! Really, a better translation wasn't available?  Maybe Google translate did their translation) was exceptionally naive.  He ravages his own homeland, convinced that he's acting on the greater good.  This would be an interesting character development except that it's not really talked about much, save for one of the the story's modes: the play within the play.  And he has a good excuse, he's inhabited by a demon spirit.  Madness is intriguing, ethical decision making is intriguing, devil possession is passing the buck.  In this case, passing it to the sequel I imagine.

The other reason The Dwarves fell flat, is that the Dwarves themselves were remarkably bland.  There is an interesting mythology presented, five clans of dwarves, separated by their God, Vraccas. (*I was dismayed by the name Vraccas, in one of my own unfinished works of 2002, I'd chosen this exact name to be an evil god.)  The dwarven mythos is essential to the story, and is one of the most enjoyable elements.  But even so, detail regarding the lives of regular dwarves was incredibly sparse.  Worse, Heitz had an excellent vehicle for doing so, and since the main character is a foundling, every sentence between two dwarves would have added color.  It's like a six year old's coloring book, full of poorly colored shapes, many pages left entirely blank.  Worser:  There's millions of helpful dwarven cliches in other fantasy novels that could provide further description without dragging down the plot.  This is why cliche's are useful, they speak volumes.

2)  Let's talk about Cliche:  Heitz had two options here.  Use the old dwarven cliches laid down by Tolkien, and many since, or bust a nut and create something new.  Either would have worked well for me.  However, by using a familiar race, beloved of fantasy readers everywhere, Heitz had already consigned himself to a certain amount of necessary cliche.  Let's see here:  Dwarves are short: check.  Dwarves prefer underground mountainous lairs: check.  Dwarves hate magic: check.  Dwarves are long lived: check.  Dwarves prefer axes: check.  Dwarves are smiths: check.  Dwarves love gold: check.  Heitz had a subtle spin on the dwarven love of gold, he made it genetic.  By which I mean, Dwarves have the love of gold and gems intrinsically.  Men love gold too, but its generally admitted that we love it for the things, including sex and status, that it can get for us.  Dwarves just like how it looks, sort of like human women.  Heitz also used the dwarven cliche of using names that involve all of the above.  I enjoy this particular cliche quite a bit, so no problems here.  In fact, these standard fantasy cliche's held true for all of the races.  Let's coin a term, "LOTR Race Cliche" shall mean that Dwarves are short and bulbous, Elves are tall and fair, humans are enh, orcs are evil.

The Coming of Age cliche was also used to some degree, though somewhat inexplicalbly.  Tungdil is 60 years old when the story starts.  This is really only about a third of a dwarf's life.  But I'm at a third through my life, and I don't act like a twenty year old, so what's this guy's excuse?  Tungdil isn't immature, he's just completely innocent.  Naive, as stated above.  And it bugged the hell out of me.  At 60 years old, you've learned a lot about life, particularly when you've spent the entire time living among humans.  That's at least two generations of medieval humans he would have lived through.  Still there are some good reasons, he's never met a female of his race.  God knows, women give you gray hairs.  And he's never met a male of his race, so when he meets the story's comic relief, the warrior twins Boindil and Boendil, acting a bit childlike would be understandable.  This leads to a third cliche: Self-Actualization.

Coming of Age cliche's often become self-actualization cliches.  In the Eye of the World, Rand al'Thor becomes a man.  But through the remainder of the series, he continues to grow and change, leaving behind the Coming of Age cliche of the first book.  Tungdil has a problem: he knows nothing about his race, other than what he's read in books.  Fortunately for him, everything he ever learned in his books about dwarves was completely accurate.  This bothered me, again I felt like this book was aimed at thirteen year olds.  That would be fine, but good fantasy is aimed at a much broader audience, thirteen year olds included.  I don't need you to tell me that books are good, thank you very much. 

3.  Scope:  The scope of the novel was perfect.  The realm is called Girdlegard (again, an awful translation choice--literally, the land is wearing a girdle that guards it from evil.)  Still Girdlegard is small, with delineated borders, and the reader is not in any way made curious about what lies beyond those borders.  A common fantasy trope is to name off lands far distant without providing a purpose for these lands.  Such a trope is merely to show that that the story takes place in a larger land, not in space.  Personally, I prefer bounded lands because, well frankly, its easy to make up funny names and toss in a sentence about far away lands.  It's a bad writers trick (I know, I use it)  Heitz doesn't indulge.  That said, there are just too many lands for a fairly simple story.  Were six human kingdoms really necessary?  No.  Only two are relevant.  In contrast, the five dwarven realms are completely relevant, and tantalizingly explained.  I mentioned in my last post how difficult it is to indicate scope without falling into such tropes, but Heitz sidesteps the issue very nicely.

4.  Magic:  The story starts out with there being six main Magi, male and female.  And they save the realm from another cliche, The Perished Land. Not unlike Jordan's Blight.  Nothing grows in the Perished Land, and anyone who dies in it is forced to walk the land as a revenant, enslaved to the will of some gaseous form of evil that is only hinted at.  Magic isn't really explained, and Heitz falls back on more cliches, spell books, runes, jars of ingredients, eye of newt, you know the deal.  One thing for sure about magic.  You can eat other Magi's magical power.  Guess how.  It's an important plot point, but Heitz doesn't bother to explain it.  And maybe he's right--Dwarves hate magic.  And if nothing else, The Dwarves, is about Dwarves.  One fairly interesting and enjoyable part of the story is that, much of the book is taken up with quests searching for magical artifacts.  This is something fairly rare in fantasy of the past twenty years which is primarily character driven.  I don't want to spoil the novel, but it becomes clear in the first fifty pages, that the big bad can't be killed with the usual assortment of weaponry.  Magical weapons are cool, and anyone who ever played a fantasy board game, videogame or the beknighted Dungeons and Dragons knows it.

5.  Theme:  It's hard to get a handle on the overall theme of The Dwarves.  It might be too basic.  If the prose were more detailed, or better translated, I could make a better stab.  The Perished Land isn't particularly dark or frightening, and the revenants can talk, and in some cases, even be completely normal.  So darkness as a theme is out.  I guess if I had to peg it, I'd say, unity.  There's a weird scene in the end, after the big bad is beat, where a minor character makes a speech about unity between the races.  Given the happy-go-lucky nature of the characters, this theme seems to be the most prevalent.  I can't complain, go Unity.  Go Peace.  But...again, I'm not thirteen.

If the cover weren't so groovy, I'd tell you to borrow a copy.  Want mine? 

Videogame: DragonAge: Origins

So, I'm going to expand this blog to include fantasy video games because I found a crunkin' awesome one.  This game will knock your socks off.

I was waitng for the next big fantasy game to come along.  I'm sort of retro in my video gaming.  This is because of a general technological lag in equipment, and the fact that I'm fully employed, in grad school, and engaged to a Ph.D. student.  This does not leave much time for video game playing.

So you know where I'm coming from, some of my favorite fantasy and fantasy related video games include Heroes of Might and Magic III, the entire Final Fantasy franchise from Final Fantasy II on up., to Final Fantasy 12. I also like strategy fantasy games like Age of Empires and Age of Mythology.  And of course, the entire Baldur's Gate series. 

So on to DragonAge: Origins.  When I finished classes this summer, I wanted some innocuous fun during my time off.  I checked list after list for the best RPGs.  I wanted something current, but I wanted to stay away from online video games.  Why?  Without diverging too much: time for videogames, is time for me, and me alone.  I am NOT looking for any interraction with the broader populace. I have an active social life, I don't need friends online.  This is not to disparage people who do--merely expressing a preference.  I was exceedingly disappointed when Square released Final Fantasy 11 as only an online game.  That's right--you can't actually even play it without going on line.  I was very much afraid that DragonAge would be a game like that.  The game does in fact have that capability, but it has an undeniable throughline that is completely playable without the internet.  What a relief.

I'd also heard that there were some difficulties with the PC version of the game.  Employees of both GameStop and BestBuy who raved about the game, both suggested I buy the console version, and stay away from the PC.  Had I an XBox or PS3, I may have done so.  But I got a new computer just a year ago.  I purposely spent twenty bucks extra for a nice video card, and fifty for extra ram, but my machine is by no means a performance whore.  I wouldn't even know how to make a gaming machine.  As it is, you'll be glad to know the game plays absolutely fine.  The Wiki for DragonAge has reported on some general programming bugs, but they have not made the game in anyway unplayable, unlike my attempt at playing the more recent Heroes of Might and Magic, which required seven different patches to play.

So onto the FFF

Note:  I haven't finished the game, I was too excited to wait.  And I rarely get to finish videogames, which require a skill and tenacity that simple reading does not.

1)  Character:
So holy neato!  You don't just play one character in DragonAge Origins.  When you start, you get to choose one of six different story lines.  The quests are largely universal, but the dialogue changes for each character.  You can choose from three races, two genders, and the choice of a Magi, creates a wholly different storyline.  I chose the story of a Dwarf Commoner.  So, I can almost guarantee that many of the developers who worked on Baldur's Gate, also worked on DragonAge.  Much of the informational dialogue is written in the same way, and, the controls and view points are very similar.  One neat thing about DragonAge, is that you can zoom in on the character and play it first person, from any perspective.  I don't particularly like the claustophobic nature of first person shooters, so I tend to operate at the three quarter level, but when I want to see a detail of the scenery, it's nice to be able to zoom in.  As in any video game a la Baldur's Gate, or any role playing game, you get to choose the sort of dialogue you want.  You can be a buttface, but you can also play really good characters.  This is bad for me, but good for the teenagers out there who are angry at the world.  I've never wanted to play a player character who was evil.  Even being cruel to imaginary creatures is difficult for me.  As someone who enjoys writing creatively, I can only write nasty characters with the personal knowledge that I fully expect to be writing their comeuppance one day.  (For an example of my creative fiction, tune in to my Eagles Landing blog.)  So you get to choose your own character.  That means that your main character is slightly less enjoyable than the npcs  (non player characters).  NPCs never leave character.  And players are inconsistent, and since you get to choose their story, less fascinating than having a traditional yarn.  Why is that?  Well, I hate making decisions that matter in my own life.  The responsibility of having to make them in my videogames isn't a joy, it's one more burden.  What that says about me, I don't know.

However, the neatest part of DragonAge is that you can play up your NPCs allegiances.  You had a similar capacity in Baldur's Gate, by gaining or losing reputation points.  If you had a bad rep, "good" characters would decline to join your party, or would fight other members of the party.  DragonAge has expanded on this.  You can even sleep with some of your fellow NPCs if you say the right combination of words over the course of the game, and give them the right number of gifts.  All of which leads me to another opinion of video gaming.  Teenagers and gamers will have the endless hours necessary to unravel all of the game's secrets.  Regular Joe's will not.  I will probably not buy another video game in a year or two.  And in that time, I might finish this game.  If I do, I will probably play it again as a different type of character.  No way am I going to get through this game six times.  Maybe six years from now.  But six years from now I'll have kids of my own, and even less time.  So it's nice that the game has increased playabilitiy, but it's also nice to have a plethora of online experts providing guidance on how to complete certain quests, and which gifts will make the NPCs take their clothes off sooner. Some of the characters are really enjoyable, like Morrigan, a witch, or apostate, who is pretty hot, and also pretty contrary.  Other characters like Alistair provide excellent comic relief and great side quests that really help develop the story.

2) Cliche:

So this game bears a lot of resemblance to the world of Tolkien's Middle Earth.  This in no way inhibits the story.  It gives the game a certain visual feel.  You can almost see Peter Jackson's fine visuals in the opening cinematic sequences of the game.  Likewise, the main races are humans, elves and dwarves.  That pretty much ends the cliche.  Ironically, given the religious nature of Tolkien, there was little reference to classical religion in the Lord of the Rings.  DragonAge origins, has an entire religious system that bares striking similarities to Christianity, while also providing excellent critiques of organized religion overall.  God is known as The Maker.  I like simple names in fantasy, multi syllabic names is often a deflection from real content.  They actually use a real group of religious knights, The Knights Templar, to provide a really neat counterpoint to magic.  But I'll get to that.  One Tolkien cliche avoided is that the villanous Darkspawn, though divided into races that look suspiciously like Orcs, Goblins, Giant Spiders, etc. do not come from different lands or tribes, as they did in Middle Earth.  There is a unifed enemy, emerging from the Earth, but also from an alternative demension called The Fade.  These creatures are called demons, and are controlled by an arch demon that is said to resemble a dragon.  This is a wonderful example of how, a popular cliche (The Dungeons and Dragons cliche), is given new life.  Even more fantastic is that as the game progresses, the character can even elect to become a demon, and/or sympathize with demons, who really just want to leave The Fade, and enjoy a more tactile pleasurful existence as a mortal.  One memorable scene occurs with a Pleasure Demon, who has seduced a knight Templar.  You can kill her, and him, since his mind is utterly controlled, or you can let her and him go, on the premise that he knight has let himself be seduced and that he and the demon really are leading a brief but intimately pleasurable life.  Such moral gray tones provide a rich tapestry for the game's story to develop.  Rest assured, the demoness will kill her host, but the knight's fantasy is quite humble, a wife and a loving family-things that are forbidden by the holy vows that a knight makes on entry to the society.

3) Scope:

Honestly, I'm still learning about the scope of DragonAge.  The World Map is quite large, but so far, only a few areas are playable.  These areas have provided many hours of gameplay so far.  The game does include a number of brief histories, again, much like Baldur's Gate, called Codexes.  These insert a great deal of depth, history, vision and possibility into the story.  And again, unlike a paperback, a popular videogame can simply use an expansion pack to enhance and enlarge gameplay and story.  But the history of the land is fairly dense, the individual characters have full histories, born in certain cities, living and growing in others.  I'd say the game has impressive scope.  Also, in the Jordanian strain of fantasy--that scope is hinted at straight from the beginning.  This means that as the game grows and expands, the history and story presented will feel more integrated, and less ad hoc, than say, the Seeker series by Terry Goodkind.

4) Magic:

So the system of health and magic is a huge departure from other fantasy games.  Each character has a set number of hitpoints and magic points, that grow, as the character grows his stats, again using a D&D cliche, of Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, and several other factors.  In combat however, as the fighter uses special abilities, or the mage uses spells, it takes away from stamina, or spell points accordingly.  That's standard stuff.  What isn't standard is that, once the battle is over, both health and magic regenerate.  So rather than carrying hoards of potions, you end up carrying maybe a dozen, and than waiting between battles.  This provides some downtime in play, but given the complex operation of the characters, changing armor, equipping weapons, reading codexes, this merely provides another sort of gameplay.  The type of spells used is fairly standard, but there is a greater emphasis in delaying and stunning spells.  Since the characters do not attack in real time, meaning you can't simply hit the x button twenty times in a row to attack twenty times, delaying other characters attacks provides a real advantage on the field of battle.  Likewise, certain spells have cool down periods, ranging from a couple of seconds to a couple of minutes, whereby you'll have to wait before you can recast.  Above I alluded to the history of magic in DragonAge.  In DragonAge, magic is regulated by the Templars.  There appear to be two types of magic, regular, and blood.  Blood magic seems to be far more powerful, hence the appeal to evildoers and other teenagers, but it requires ritual sacrifice, hence the prohibition.  Mages who are regulated, report to an organization called The Circle.  Though the agency has a veneer of self governance, the real power are the Knights Templar, who govern the grounds of the tower and can call the Rite of Annulment if the mages go bad.  And there is a very real possibility of that.  Another really neat part of the system is that, all mages are vulnerable to being controlled by Darkspawn still trapped in The Fade.  One of the main story quests relies on one such character.  And you, as player character, get to decide, do you support the Templars unilaterrally and say that the danger posed by mages should be erradicated before people are harmed, or do you believe that some mages are innocents and that all innocents should be protected?  And that choice affects the entire storyline!  How cool is that?!

5) Theme:

As mentioned above, the overall feel of the game is Tolkienesque.  There is a desperation to the Order of The Grey Wardens, your character is one of them, in that the land has on many occasions been affected by The Blight, and on each occasion it has cost more lives to repell.  The Blight by the way, is the name for the darkspawn invasion.  The Grey Wardens exist to fight The Blight.  The theme reeks of Tolkien and Baldur's Gate--but as stated previously--it doesn't detractgameplay, it only serves to enhance it.  Those tropes help to color what your eyes already see, and fill in the gaps on the places on the map where nothing seems to exist.

 

I love this game, and would recommend it to any serious gamer, any "lite" gamer like myself, and also to casual fantasy lovers, looking for some time away from their eReaders and paperbacks.