Save the whales? Maybe. Save magic? Definitely.
I am in the middle of a war. The war is not a war on terrorism. It is not a war on drugs. It is instead a war on something much, much more important in how my life plays out. I’m fighting a losing war against people who are trying to destroy the best part of the fantasy genre in literature and movies – namely, magic.
I recently had the opportunity to put forth a plug for a favorite series of mine on a friend’s blog, but that wasn’t really the sort of place to discuss the greatness of my favorite series by George R.R. Martin. (MMD, what follows is not a comparison to your favorite fantasy series, because, frankly, I haven’t seen the movies or read the books and can’t accurately evaluate them. I’m discussing the problems with the types of fantasy stories I used to read when I was younger).
There is something that sets apart stories of the ‘fantasy trash’ variety (which you can find on the shelves of any diehard 14-year old ‘DragonLance’ lover) from the truly great attempts at developing the fantasy genre. That special quality is the degree to which fantastical elements are seamlessly blended with realistic elements in the correct proportions. Take, for instance, the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy of books. By and large, when you read the works, it is clear that most of the world seems to be quite mundanely explainable. We need no magic wands and special potions to deal with an army of Orcs standing outside the gates of a mighty citadel. Rather, we need to have a larger group of heroes and warriors standing prepared to defend their territory from the ravaging hordes outside. We don’t need to have magical flying carpets to whisk us from one end of the world to another. When the Fellowship of the Ring was to make the trip to Mount Doom, they had to walk the length of Middle-Earth, braving dangers along the way. Even in ‘The Hobbit,’ a dragon wasn’t some mystical enchanted being, but rather was simply an intelligent (and very large) reptilian beast with a penchant for collecting treasure.
What magic there was in the story (and I’m separating magic from a complicated divinity-tale) was more reserved for truly special moments in the story. It was only in stark contrast to the completely mundane explanations for how the world functioned that magic took on a mystical, awe-inspiring quality. Magic is supposed to be powerful, frightening, and (most importantly) unusual.
Imagine a superhero story like Spiderman or Superman. Why are the heroes of these stories as great as they are? Simply put, it is because they are so incredibly different from those around them. If, in Spiderman, Peter Parker were merely one of thousands of people who could shoot webs from their hands and climb up walls, we would find it interesting, but the character of ‘Spiderman’ would have lost something special. Similarly, the latest three ‘Star Wars’ movies suffer from a flaw. The original three were masterpieces of special effects, precisely because the special effects were not going on constantly. A sword fight between Jedi is mundanely explainable. Droids on a moisture farm are understood in a prosaic fashion. The truly special effects highlighted what was supposed to be important in the movie, and did so adeptly because of their absence from the rest of the story. The three new movies are a nonstop special effects marathon, which ironically completely removed the ‘specialness’ from the special effects. When I see a melee between thousands of battle-droids and a race of fish-people, I should be wowed. If I’m thinking, “more of the same,” then something important has been lost.
The same principle applies with magic. The more magic you incorporate into a story, the less and less meaningful the magic becomes, and the more and more ordinary the exercise of it seems.
That reason is why I enjoy George R.R. Martin’s series so much. In many ways, I consider it to be vastly superior even to Tolkien’s beloved Trilogy. Martin’s world is set in a medieval sort of landscape and is fraught with power struggles for the throne of an empire when the king is laid low by treachery. There are large battles, tender love stories, families who are ripped apart, and the everpresent spectre of winter (and its accompanying famine). Magic is an unknown, and scary, outside force with which our ambiguous heroes must contend. The empire can summon tens of thousands of mounted men, but how do they deal with a single sorceress from beyond the sea who can summon an insubstantial shadow to slip into their commander’s tent at night and slide a very real dagger through his chest while he sleeps? The empire can man the large Northern wall with men and war-machines, but how do they deal with an enemy that gets back up and continues to attack even after they have died?
Tolkein introduced us to no ambiguity in his fantasy regarding good and evil. The races of men, dwarves, and elves were good. Orcs and goblins were evil. If you couldn’t tell just from how they looked (ugly things are always evil, apparently), he color-coded it to resolve any lingering doubts. Gandolf (after his death and resurrection) is dressed in white. Sauron is ensconced as a gigantic flaming eye atop a hideous blackened tower in a dismal location. There are no questions in a reader’s mind about who they should root for.
Martin takes the more mature route in his literature. There are numerous great Houses in the Empire which all desire to seize the throne, and all believe (and have legitimate arguments as to why) they are the rightful heirs to the throne. You quickly find that you change what sides you root for on a chapter-by-chapter basis. Sure, House Stark is noble and your obvious protagonist family, but their claim to the throne is tenuous at best. House Targaryen was deposed and exiled due to the brutality and violence of a long line of Targaryen kings, but the current heir to that line is a woman determined to end the bloodshed and usher in an era of blessing and peace with progressive social reform. House Lannister may be double-faced and sneaky, but the bad actions of the Queen (assassinations and the like) are understandable in that she is attempting to protect her young and vulnerable children (who are too young to take the throne) from being killed while the kingdom rages around them. The brother of the old King, who likely has the most convincing bloodline argument to the throne, is a man who is determined to take the throne because it is his by right, but who would obviously be an ineffectual king who metes out cold and iron-handed justice without compassion or pity. To explain what I mean by that statement, he elevated a commoner to nobility when the commoner smuggled food into a besieged keep where the brother was holding out against a larger force, saving his life and the lives of all his men. The brother then proceeded to order the man’s fingers removed as the proper punishment for breaking the law by smuggling.
I could go on. No character is so spotlessly clean-handed that you love them for their nobility, and no character is so darkly evil that they are too far removed from what you can relate to.
By placing his books in a complicated (and I mean complicated) morality tale, keeping you guessing about who is right, what ‘right’ means in this context, and how it might all end up, instead of over-emphasizing non-stop magical occurrences, Martin keeps magic as what it should be:
Magical.
I recently had the opportunity to put forth a plug for a favorite series of mine on a friend’s blog, but that wasn’t really the sort of place to discuss the greatness of my favorite series by George R.R. Martin. (MMD, what follows is not a comparison to your favorite fantasy series, because, frankly, I haven’t seen the movies or read the books and can’t accurately evaluate them. I’m discussing the problems with the types of fantasy stories I used to read when I was younger).
There is something that sets apart stories of the ‘fantasy trash’ variety (which you can find on the shelves of any diehard 14-year old ‘DragonLance’ lover) from the truly great attempts at developing the fantasy genre. That special quality is the degree to which fantastical elements are seamlessly blended with realistic elements in the correct proportions. Take, for instance, the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy of books. By and large, when you read the works, it is clear that most of the world seems to be quite mundanely explainable. We need no magic wands and special potions to deal with an army of Orcs standing outside the gates of a mighty citadel. Rather, we need to have a larger group of heroes and warriors standing prepared to defend their territory from the ravaging hordes outside. We don’t need to have magical flying carpets to whisk us from one end of the world to another. When the Fellowship of the Ring was to make the trip to Mount Doom, they had to walk the length of Middle-Earth, braving dangers along the way. Even in ‘The Hobbit,’ a dragon wasn’t some mystical enchanted being, but rather was simply an intelligent (and very large) reptilian beast with a penchant for collecting treasure.
What magic there was in the story (and I’m separating magic from a complicated divinity-tale) was more reserved for truly special moments in the story. It was only in stark contrast to the completely mundane explanations for how the world functioned that magic took on a mystical, awe-inspiring quality. Magic is supposed to be powerful, frightening, and (most importantly) unusual.
Imagine a superhero story like Spiderman or Superman. Why are the heroes of these stories as great as they are? Simply put, it is because they are so incredibly different from those around them. If, in Spiderman, Peter Parker were merely one of thousands of people who could shoot webs from their hands and climb up walls, we would find it interesting, but the character of ‘Spiderman’ would have lost something special. Similarly, the latest three ‘Star Wars’ movies suffer from a flaw. The original three were masterpieces of special effects, precisely because the special effects were not going on constantly. A sword fight between Jedi is mundanely explainable. Droids on a moisture farm are understood in a prosaic fashion. The truly special effects highlighted what was supposed to be important in the movie, and did so adeptly because of their absence from the rest of the story. The three new movies are a nonstop special effects marathon, which ironically completely removed the ‘specialness’ from the special effects. When I see a melee between thousands of battle-droids and a race of fish-people, I should be wowed. If I’m thinking, “more of the same,” then something important has been lost.
The same principle applies with magic. The more magic you incorporate into a story, the less and less meaningful the magic becomes, and the more and more ordinary the exercise of it seems.
That reason is why I enjoy George R.R. Martin’s series so much. In many ways, I consider it to be vastly superior even to Tolkien’s beloved Trilogy. Martin’s world is set in a medieval sort of landscape and is fraught with power struggles for the throne of an empire when the king is laid low by treachery. There are large battles, tender love stories, families who are ripped apart, and the everpresent spectre of winter (and its accompanying famine). Magic is an unknown, and scary, outside force with which our ambiguous heroes must contend. The empire can summon tens of thousands of mounted men, but how do they deal with a single sorceress from beyond the sea who can summon an insubstantial shadow to slip into their commander’s tent at night and slide a very real dagger through his chest while he sleeps? The empire can man the large Northern wall with men and war-machines, but how do they deal with an enemy that gets back up and continues to attack even after they have died?
Tolkein introduced us to no ambiguity in his fantasy regarding good and evil. The races of men, dwarves, and elves were good. Orcs and goblins were evil. If you couldn’t tell just from how they looked (ugly things are always evil, apparently), he color-coded it to resolve any lingering doubts. Gandolf (after his death and resurrection) is dressed in white. Sauron is ensconced as a gigantic flaming eye atop a hideous blackened tower in a dismal location. There are no questions in a reader’s mind about who they should root for.
Martin takes the more mature route in his literature. There are numerous great Houses in the Empire which all desire to seize the throne, and all believe (and have legitimate arguments as to why) they are the rightful heirs to the throne. You quickly find that you change what sides you root for on a chapter-by-chapter basis. Sure, House Stark is noble and your obvious protagonist family, but their claim to the throne is tenuous at best. House Targaryen was deposed and exiled due to the brutality and violence of a long line of Targaryen kings, but the current heir to that line is a woman determined to end the bloodshed and usher in an era of blessing and peace with progressive social reform. House Lannister may be double-faced and sneaky, but the bad actions of the Queen (assassinations and the like) are understandable in that she is attempting to protect her young and vulnerable children (who are too young to take the throne) from being killed while the kingdom rages around them. The brother of the old King, who likely has the most convincing bloodline argument to the throne, is a man who is determined to take the throne because it is his by right, but who would obviously be an ineffectual king who metes out cold and iron-handed justice without compassion or pity. To explain what I mean by that statement, he elevated a commoner to nobility when the commoner smuggled food into a besieged keep where the brother was holding out against a larger force, saving his life and the lives of all his men. The brother then proceeded to order the man’s fingers removed as the proper punishment for breaking the law by smuggling.
I could go on. No character is so spotlessly clean-handed that you love them for their nobility, and no character is so darkly evil that they are too far removed from what you can relate to.
By placing his books in a complicated (and I mean complicated) morality tale, keeping you guessing about who is right, what ‘right’ means in this context, and how it might all end up, instead of over-emphasizing non-stop magical occurrences, Martin keeps magic as what it should be:
Magical.
posted by The Academian | 9:23 PM
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