Pop Culture Glut and Gluttony
Urphänomen
Over the past probably about a decade now, there have been numerous reactionary movements in pop culture, and from my view, almost all of them seem to be even bigger disasters than what they’re reacting against. I can somewhat sympathize with even the GamerGate stooges despite some of their politics and antics when I saw just how bad of a game Depression Quest was, but the answer wasn’t just to complain about things, not make things, and swatting self-identified feminist critics. I didn’t even really bother to keep up with Sad Puppies or what have you though that just looked like the same thing repeating itself. Now it looks like Substack is trying to become home to a movement that’s trying to sort of react against mainstream pop culture but self-consciously do things differently this time which is called Iron Age.
I got conscripted into Warrior Wednesday without asking for it despite the fact I’ve not written any fantasy at all on this platform yet, only a small amount of sci-fi, and when I get some free time I plan on writing more things that are mostly sci-fi rather than fantasy. Well, at least this movement doesn’t look horribly embarrassing thus far, though I dread if it would take a turn for the worse, which I think is likely to happen since even if these people clearly seem much more mature and self-aware and weren’t even the same doxxing teenagers involved in the other ones to begin with.
This is something that seems like a strength could also be a weakness: more people than just hardline reactionaries are annoyed at the mainstream and want to take action now. Now there are also right-libertarian types, normal Republican voters who aren’t extremists, centrists, and even some really old-school leftists who hate all the social justice stuff and don’t believe in this kind of radical identitarian politics as something positive. But I commented I don’t think you can hold together a movement just based on people having a common enemy and I thought that was doomed. This is even despite the fact I asked to be in the sci-fi day and the more pulp-ish fantasy one and I could probably qualify for horror too once I actually write some, though my priorities right now have been on school, even if I should make sure to take some breaks and let my brain grow and make some more GABA just like you take breaks from exercising your body.
The last couple of days I have been sick, tired, and fatigued for most of 48 hours, making myself get up to take care of myself and take care of as much school and work as I could but not much longer. Luckily it’s not so persistent as it used to be since I’ve identified and learned to manage the causes and I expect it to not happen more or less at all in the future. I really think that’s largely a brain thing, not psychological but my brain is actually too tired, like when you get some kind of headache and feel tired from studying but worse, because I know I can make myself not tired, I can go take some Panax ginseng and drink a bunch of caffeine and wake myself up, but I felt too much hazard in doing that for that period of time even though I’ve done it before. I felt like there was something critical I didn’t understand and that getting up and going on with my day like nothing happened would prevent me possibly from ever understanding it. Then a certain sentiment started to recur to me that I thought I had successfully argued against, the idea that pop culture is somehow bad and we should only be into “high” culture.
Didn’t I already prove that was false? Yet I am fatigued, I have lost whatever my arguments against it were for the time being even though I remember there were some, and this seemed important to continue working on. So slowly I would enter deeper into the odd state where my body is essentially asleep, almost paralyzed even though I could break it by volition if I wanted, but my mind is awake, and can sort of dream despite the fact I am conscious and know what’s going on. There is nothing like that state, I’ve heard it called the hypnagogic state and called my binaural beats album Hypnogogy largely as a play on that and because, to be honest, the ultra-slow, ultra-fast, and mixed tracks are quite good at inducing and playing into that state and sort of taught me more about the structure of it (hence hypno gogy = like learning by hypnosis.)
After enough time in that state, I remembered my arguments and fully agreed with them again and the new information I needed dawned on me. The problem with pop culture isn’t that it’s bad per se, it’s that way too much is being produced compared to in the past. We don’t need like zero new pop culture to be produced or anything, but people take for granted the levels we had in the past and I think that’s not sustainable, I think we collectively need to change our focus which is what I have been doing and I plan on doing that instead of using essays to engage in what I jokingly called “laboraphobia” in one of the comments about the Iron Age people and how people not really wanting to work on their creative projects as much as they say they do is nothing new. I joked of course it was new and made up the word “laboraphobia” to describe just how new of a phenomenon this must sardonically be that was never described before.
The Norse Mythology Blog | norsemyth.org: Interview with Michael Moorcock, Part One | Articles & Interviews on Myth & Religion
I remember that Michael Moorcock said in an interview that in the past no one would have told their child to write novels, or to form a rock band. Since writing fiction and making music have become very profitable I think they have become glutted and that’s basically the start and end of what we’re seeing now. We don’t need movements to try to reclaim cultural activities to a level they never were at, especially since movements don’t address the underlying causes even if we think that in an idealistic world people should be able to increase the level of production as, ironically, a form of progress despite the moderately reactionary nature of these movements.
In the name of idealistic progress, I will say that I think the solution to the problem if you do think people should be producing more of this kind of creative work is to go back and read more of the old stuff. I actually got kicked out of my local gaming store’s Discord chat once for saying that over and over and people thinking I was just whining, but what I said then was essentially a less-conscious version of what I’m saying now. Why should I read your book when I still haven’t read Dune, Earthsea, and Elric saga? Then those people, one of whom was literally studying postcolonialism at university, said that those were very orientalist and I should feel bad if I read them, and many of the tabletop roleplaying dungeon masters and players, who were basically failed novelists, were telling me to read things that they wrote instead, or read things were they were seemingly getting paid to promote the author. At that time it was very obvious to me that the reason I was being told not to read classics was that people wanted me to read their books instead, though I was nowhere near putting that into a broader framework of understanding, that was enough to make me double down on wanting to read classics.
Today, after spending a lot of time asleep and a lot of time in hypnagogia, I did realize there is indeed a larger pattern, which is simply that a lot of pop culture is being produced at an unsustainable rate, and it would be possible to sustain a higher rate if people engaged with more “high” culture and classics. Ironically, a lot of really old-school leftists I have known over the years would consider postcolonialist authors of terrible fiction books no one wants to read to be the real colonialists because I have heard before from some leftists that they consider the essential element of capitalism to be expansionism. The drive to make more and more books, music, etc. even if it’s completely awful and to get rid of the old, aside from any individual artists’ and groups’ interests in increasing their personal profits, is definitely an example of rampant, cancerous expansionism whether or not you think that’s what capitalism is, and I don’t think I would assume that’s what capitalism is though I don’t have proof it’s not either.
Representing African mythology or whatever in a very unappealing light to just try to generate this metastatic writing that’s killing our culture is certainly, from one view, a kind of very unfavorable colonialism, and people wanting to read the One-Thousand and One Nights or whatever and play a D&D game with genies, thieves, and magic flying cloaks is equally not. Sure, there are a thousand and one cringey ways that game could be run, but you should already know if you’re with someone who’s a bigot and thinks Shahrazad is a belly dancer and wants to give everyone cringey accents or not, no one needs someone majoring in “postcolonialism” to show them Shams-al-ma’arif and try to correct your Arabian or Persian game (also, in actual Middle Eastern countries no one would be using Shams-al-ma’arif to run their D&D game, it is considered an extremely cursed book that’s the basis of most of their horror movies and even the people who don’t think it’s inherently evil so much as just prone to misuse aren’t going to treat it so flippantly as pretending to summon the djinn of the days of the week in their game. So much for self-described postcolonialists being so knowledgable. Of course postcolonialists are the real colonialists like anti-racists are the real racists.)
(Mostly unrelated source of the image: Biotechnology from the Blue Flower - Anna Dumitriu)
This is why the subtitle to this post is Urphänomen, a German word meaning original phenomena, which causes English to somewhat irritate me since it doesn’t have a direct translation of that ur- prefix. For example, another word that’s more common in some technical contexts is Urtyp plural Urtypen, but this is alternatively translated as either prototype or archetype depending on the context when the word itself very much encompasses both in those technical contexts. For example, in Goethe’s science, you would have the Urpflanze which was the original plant, and the original plant is sort of the prototype for other plants and also the archetypal plant, and Goethe went out of his way to describe the original plant, as well as the original light, and all the other Urphänomen that mattered the most to him personally, and also wrote poetry about it. Another key point about the Urpflanze and the Urlicht in particular is that the Urlicht was what Goethe basically saw as yellow sunlight, which you see in Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre, and the Urpflanze is considered by Goethe to be a blue flower, since Goethe saw leaves as somehow being derived from flowers (probably not historically accurate at all unless we start including other types of plant reproductive structures as being “flowers” since angiosperms evolved comparatively recently, yes, flowers are plant genitals just like the meme suggests) and Goethe saw blue as basically being sort of the color that arises after you have the yellow light, like how there’s the blue sky and the yellow Sun. The third color is process magenta and is clearly illustrated in the original book as being process magenta, though the labelling of it as Purpur or purple caused a lot of people to seem to assume it was supposed to be some sort of darker and more bluish color.
Goethe’s Farbenlehre is still used today in various kinds of optics applications such as printing and screens, and Goethe’s morphology is still used today despite the fact plants don’t all originate from flowers and the fact there’s a system for finding type species in the Linnean taxonomy that conflicts with how Goethe did it, though Goethe was a critic of the Linnean taxonomy itself and I think I would have to concur even though Goethe didn’t seem to have ever formulated a real alternative. The Linnean taxonomy is obviously kind of just trash in my opinion even though there are a lot of people who view themselves as very poetic and write and say, since Linnaeus was known to have studied himself, Linnaeus’s body is the type specimen for Homo sapiens. What’s Goethe’s taxonomy then, a threat to that idea? And from the guy who literally coined the term Übermensch by translating Homo superior to German in Faust before anyone ever thought to translate it into English no less? I fully expect there to be very odd political reasons people aren’t eager to overturn the Linnean taxonomy despite it clearly not functioning and despite the fact it causes people to argue about all the beetles that are named after Hitler and don’t even have a little moustache.
Should beetles be named after Adolf Hitler? | Science | AAAS
Should beetles be named after Hitler? Maybe if they have a little Hitler moustache, but in that case I’d just name them after Charlie Chaplin and avoid the whole mess. In the meantime, have the emperor monkey, who actually does have a Kaiser Wilhelm moustache, and isn’t named after literally Hitler. Every species I don’t like is named after literally Hitler. Just kidding.
So, back to stories. I see people as basically making stories based on other stories and going back to the Urphänomen is much more useful for making new stories than trying to make something that’s like other things. People who are trying to make stories out of elements that are found in a lot of stories, such as “fantasy stories often have elves with bows, knights, and dragons, and sci-fi stories often have spaceships, robots, and aliens” are basically working with set theory while what I put forth is basically type theory, and in-between that you also have category theory which could be applicable for defining genres without saying “it has to have elves to be a fantasy story” but doesn’t have so much bearing on how stories are generated or even very much on whether stories are good or not.
The Power Of Myth - by DONN's WYKKYD AMBITIONS (substack.com)
When you look at Star Wars, that might be the first story, or at least the first modern and more commercial story, that was semi-self-consciously generated based on the idea of Urtypen. George Lucas read a lot of Joseph Campbell books which were explicitly based on Jung, and Jung based his archetypes on Goethe’s archetypes. However, I think in English the word archetypes has become sort of diluted because it’s often used as a euphemism for stereotypes due to stereotypes having a negative connotation, and I do think that affected Star Wars as well, though I’m not saying that made Star Wars worse or anything, just different than what I would have made if it were left to me, which maybe could be viewed as sort of a beneficial mutation in a way, a mistake in copying that lead to an improvement.
Stereotypes as an idea originally literally referred to moveable type and not to kinds of things, but in a technical sense stereotypes generally referred to something more like categories, like an example I got from a dictionary: “the cowboy is a stereotype of the American West.” There’s nothing particularly negative about having a stereotype of a cowboy no matter what some people might want to say about Westerns or at least particular Westerns (what I’ve heard postcolonialists say about Karl May could warrant its own article,) but that’s not really what the so-called Romantic scientists meant by Urtypen so that’s why I’ve generally left the word Urtypen untranslated as many technical terms often are rather than referring to archetypes like the Jungian precedent. I think that has taken on too much specific cultural coloring while also losing a lot of the original meaning and the original meaning is very central to my point even if I don’t think the sort of shifted meaning is something entirely bad. It’s just a different kind of thing which I think can be used along the original but which is not equivalent.
So when you have a story, I think a story itself functions as sort of Urphänom, as opposed to all the layers of analysis which are like your set theory and your categories and whatever other kind of logical or rational analysis you could apply. People remember stories very easily and that’s because stories speak more directly to experience. People call politicians they don’t like the Evil Empire, or Voldemort, or Thanos, or Umbridge. People can speak and understand very easily comparing things to other things compared to breaking things down and analyzing them. Old cultures would hand down knowledge including practical knowledge in terms of stories as well as poetry (which brings in sort of a more grammatical and aesthetic level of structure to go with the conceptual one) and even today that’s a lot of how mnemonics and memorization works even though it isn’t generally considered to be something objective, though that could warrant its own discussion since I think the sign is not arbitrary.
This is sort of the same metaphor as what I said in my article on liberalism as a political ideology, but what I see going on now really looks like basically memetic cancer from a certain point of view. People have a lot of energy to put into creative projects but they don’t have very much structure, so it’s like a cell reproducing madly with broken DNA and destroying its host. The best thing to do I think is to cut that off, though I’m not one of those people who’s going to argue that literally everything released recently is trash, especially more indie kinds of media which I think are really unaffected. Just because the cancer very much appears metastatic doesn’t mean you need to chop off your legs. I think we need to cut back and go back to older media because those are the Urphänomen for our Urphänomen. It might be useful to write about the influences of famous works on other famous works, but I don’t want to get too caught up in that, yet I think we need an Urphänomen of Urphänomen of Urphänomen so I’m going to do some of that.
Playing D&D with randos is really dissatisfactory to me because in their cancerous need to try to make new things just to make new things, they have no understanding of what makes other works interesting. When I come at this with this kind of logic, it seems to be completely ununderstood because I have been inundated with these kinds of ideas of Urtypen and metamorphosis and evolution and they, decidedly, have not. Their kind of answer is the kind of thing I refer to as brittle, or rigor mortis: we need elves because it’s fantasy! But we don’t need elves because that’s too White. We should have the orisha from African religion, because that’s Black fantasy! That’s like voodoo and Santería but more real and from the perspective of people who approve of it!
So that’s how we get Children of Blood and Bone (in addition to the people who decided to use Shams-al-ma’arif in their D&D games while rejecting the One Thousand and One Nights, even though Shams-al-ma’arif is feared in its parent culture and One Thousand and One Nights is basically seen as pretty standard fairy tales, even though Aladdin and Sinbad are not so popular despite being authentic as far as anyone can tell due to thieves and djinni summoners being, well, edgier than most of the content) and yes I’m going to pick on this book despite it being by a Black author and all the people who would call me colonialist for being White. Why? Because we already have a White version of that kind of story and it isn’t Harry Potter, it’s The Craft. In Harry Potter, magic is basically presented as a mind thing even though you won’t find something as technical as “psionics” anywhere on its pages. Hagrid comes up to Harry and goes like “does anything happen ta ya?”
When you consider that there are a tremendous amount of similarities between various parts of Harry Potter and Roald Dahl, it becomes pretty clear that this is based on Matilda, the book about the telekinetic girl whose parents died: Harry Potter’s parents also died, though in Harry Potter it was because they were trying to protect him, and then he has the evil stepparents and the favored stepbrother, who is literally portrayed as a fat gluttonous pig and also ends up with a pig tail, trying to stop him from going to school. Of course, Hagrid himself is essentially a character from another Roald Dahl book, the BFG, as Hagrid is a half-giant (rather than a full giant) who arrives to take Harry on an adventure and has sometimes comically, sometimes more horrifyingly little understanding of human culture and social norms due to living in isolation, though Hagrid does things like adopt illegal dragon eggs rather than “only” borrowing books for 60 years before returning them. The Hogwarts Express and the letter are a lot like the golden ticket that leads to Willy Wonka’s candy factory in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and in that light, the prevalence of magical candy is rather obvious, and the comparison of Ron’s flying car is with the glass elevator from Charlie and the Glass Elevator as well as some of the Willy Wonka movies which sort of just throw it all together. The Hogwarts school being for Witchcraft and Wizardry in that order is as much of a reference to Roald Dahl’s The Witches as it is to some idea of putting ladies first.
Other clear influences on Harry Potter include Lord of the Rings, which is fairly self-explanatory in terms of trying to fight the Dark Lord and having the invisibility cloak and the Deathly Hallows, and A Wizard of Earthsea, a book about a boy wizard who goes to school and learns to cast spells by learning the true names of things. It is interesting in that light that there are essentially two major “mutations” in terms of making things align with some common intuitions that people have had repeatedly in other contexts.
The first, in terms of Lord of the Rings, is that the Deathly Hallows that are used to help fight Voldemort belong to Death and not to Dark Lord Voldemort. Lots of people have tried to make versions of Lord of the Rings where getting ahold of the ring is seen as sort of a good and necessary thing, when Tolkien meant it as basically evil and saw the fact that Sauron created the Ring as being basically a diminishment of his power, and he even saw that Morgoth/Melkor (basically just fictional Satan/Lucifer) as infusing the entire world with his essence to corrupt the Music of the Ainur and make it into his “ring” as diminishing Morgoth as well, because Tolkien read lots of fairy tales where there would be magic artifacts and myths such as the Nibelungenlied where he saw creating an artifact would take power out of its creator on one level even if it was made to make accomplishing some goal easier. This is a closer parallel to the horcruxes in Harry Potter than the Deathly Hallows, though the horcruxes are more of something that made an incredibly evil human into a lich and maybe possessed, not something that made an angel fall.
And the horcruxes I think are sort of one of the most original things in Harry Potter for all I’ve been talking about how it’s related to other works, because in most cases where you have undead like liches or vampires or zombies they keep themselves alive by feeding on life essence like a parasite, but Voldemort distinctly does not have to feed, he split his soul so he’s more similar to the idea of a ghost that can’t leave the mortal plane of existence. He actually does exist as an incorporeal spirit at first when he’s on the back of Professor Quirinius Quirrell’s head hidden under the turban. Voldemort can be seen as almost sort of just traumatizing himself by engaging in evil acts to stay alive, and that also seems like way more of an accurate view of death than “the dead feed!”
Dracula etc. can be seen as sort of a representation of narcissism in my view, but many people have difficulty distinguishing between predator and parasite conceptually, and that leads very easily to the idea of just seeing that humans are heterotrophs, most humans eat meat and even ones who don’t tend to end up killing other things regardless, and having the sort of mutation of the “good vampire” who learns to balance their existence against others, as well as say the “good liches” who are given soul energy by the gods in the Dungeons and Dragons Forgotten Realms settings and similar. As soon as you change it from feeding to sort of ossifying and breaking you get something that’s much obviously more evil, and you don’t have people identifying with Voldemort like you do with Dracula. And you can see this is really sort of an original depiction in fiction despite clearly coming from other things. Originality is not about trying to make something completely ex novo, that generally ends up being both completely unoriginal and just bad. Make what you like, the idea is what matters, though the idea of intentionality leads to a sort of paradox that I think of as the invisibility of art that could have its own essay. Basically, when you’re thinking of what something represents and what it’s about, like Harry Potter, you’re not thinking so much of it as literature, so usually the best work in any kind of medium or genre gets almost taken for granted, while the worst has people going like “ooooh that’s so artsy!” I think that is also one factor leading to the sort of cancerous glut we have now.
Another interesting “mutation,” this time in regard of A Wizard of Earthsea, is that in A Wizard of Earthsea you have this idea of magic as being based on language and speaking the true names of things. Harry Potter certainly has its spoken spells but it’s implied this is very much not the original source when you have Hagrid talking to Harry about being secretly Matilda as well as a male version of a witch due to finding his metaphorical golden ticket and everything else Roald Dahl. It’s generally considered that the spells are basically just focusing something mental for the wizards, and that some wizards can do magic at-will in certain forms and degrees without having to speak them. Two of the relatively more common kinds are apparating, which is taken from the idea of apparitions and seems to really deliberately have some kind of spiritualist psychic connotation, and the animagus, which is just someone turning into an animal but that’s also not described as a spell but as a skill some specific wizards learn. There’s also the infamous guy from the Harry Potter movie memes just sitting around basically using telekinesis on his cup and stuff who is supposedly the most powerful wizard and just doing wandless magic like nothing while also reading A Brief History of Time and implicitly joked about being the wizard the series should have really been about.
I would also consider that to be an interesting “mutation” that’s repeatedly happened, and I would consider that similar to one of the debates in linguistics, which is about Noam Chomsky’s idea of e-language and i-language, which is short for external language and internal language. This is a widely-misunderstood idea, I ended up actually e-mailing Noam Chomsky about it and saying oh, e-language is like noumena and i-language is like phenomena, and then Noam Chomsky said no, it has nothing to do with noumena and phenomena, e-language is like representations of knowledge in the world and i-language is essentially mental. If you think things in the outside world are noumena and mental things are phenomena you could make that parallel but Chomsky never seems to have and I don’t think I would either. Notably this idea is not commonly understood in linguistics at all, I even had to ask about it, and most linguists don’t understand it either, because even most linguists, contrary to the conception that Chomsky somehow represents the mainstream, have always found one or another idea to oppose him with. Now it’s Daniel Everett, before then it was other things, but the biggest difference seems to be that Noam Chomsky doesn’t think the purpose of linguistics is to study languages, while most linguists are interested in worshipping their orishas to get spells I mean “mother-tongue nationalism.” Funny how the exact same parallel works out and even if you’ve never heard about this aspect of linguistics until I started using it as an analogy to explain aspects of storytelling, you do now and you can remember it easily because of Harry Potter vs. Children of Blood and Bone uses similar concepts as the basis of different takes on magic. Take that as an example of storytelling-as-Urphänom.
So between Earthsea and Harry Potter you have sort of the Earthsea e-language magic where it’s based on actual true names and physically speaking them and things in the world, and the Harry Potter i-language magic where it’s basically mental and the words you use if you’re like most wizards most of the time and need it in order to concentrate properly and do magic at-will are essentially just sort of a psychological aid to focus. The interesting thing is this idea seems to keep being re-developed, Eragon also said the magic language was just because the original magic beings found focusing their thoughts all the time too unreliable and sometimes dangerous, but the existence of purely mental magic by no means went away and I remember even the protagonist engaging in it eventually just to prove how super special he was basically and also because it’s interesting. The game universe Magic: the Gathering certainly has things like that, and I’m sure there were books like that before then, but it seems to keep happening really independently, almost sort of a convergent evolution because most people almost don’t even reflect on why magic should be tied to any specific set of symbols itself and sort of intuitively want to tie it to essentially this idea of i-language where ultimately the best mages are just using mind powers rather than any kind of external ritual focus.
You even see a bit of that in Lord of the Rings, I remember lots of “magic” things happening that weren’t tied to these incantations or the like and Gandalf basically only had to have his staff to keep him humble as part of his agreement with Eru Ilúvatar who imposed that restriction artificially for being allowed to manifest on Earth and not blind people with his glory as one of the Ainur, not because magic in Lord of the Rings required “arcane focus” or “spell components” like most of the mainstream D&D magic. Elves and other magical beings never had that kind of restriction imposed on them. D&D as well as other games like Pathfinder have certainly tried to incorporate other forms of magic and I think that’s a huge step in the right direction because D&D magic became something really boring as a result of the game’s gradual shift to being a commercial product in my opinion. The original D&D magic was “technology that no one could understand and people had to recite spells because they couldn’t remember all the things without saying it aloud and these mnemonics like gestures or memory aids,” it wasn’t some justification about magic being the unsubtle way to power or the gods need to hear you speak and see you move to grant your wishes or whatever boring thing it became later. Original D&D also had aliens and psionics and all sorts of very explicitly sci-fi kinds of things. Lord of the Rings was also explicitly considered sci-fi by Tolkien himself, though the definitions of the genres have shifted so much and now people think all the things in Lord of the Rings that don’t align with standard fantasy are accidental rather than intentional and have an idea of “the fantasy genre” based on cliches that are not interesting and not even really appealing to most people but occupy some sort of niche of being easy to anticipate while not really needing any kind of explanation because “it’s magic hurr durr, aren’t you enchanted by all the spells and the wizards with their wands and their chanting doing magic stuff?”
Which also leads to lots of librarians, people like me, and others just not wanting fantasy to have its own section in libraries and bookstores because really standard fantasy is trash even though Lord of the Rings is not, and this is because really standard fantasy is not very closely based on Lord of the Rings at all no matter what its creators like to claim, and it’s not even all that aesthetically similar for what it’s worth, Lord of the Rings is closer to Star Wars aesthetically than Dragonlance books and other examples of “romantic fantasy,” and even though Star Wars is often and I would say rightly called “space fantasy,” I would say that’s because Star Wars and Lord of the Rings are both very much examples of that often-neglected genre called “science fiction fantasy,” and people who can’t see that with Lord of the Rings basically want to consider it underdeveloped romantic fantasy or something. Though luckily there are a few writers of epic fantasy such as Brandon Sanderson and Christopher Paolini who don’t even seem to have considered that and just write things that are very aesthetically and thematically similar to Lord of the Rings in my opinion.
I will probably do more posts analyzing fiction from my point of view now even though I have no real desire to become some sort of critic and I mostly think I should just write because I feel like I could do this all day if I wanted and I don’t think it’s such a bad thing to do. Emerson might have said that Shakespeare didn’t have a theory of Shakespeare, but Goethe also said in his fictional book Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship that Shakespeare infamously had so little known about him that he might as well not have been a natural human being and basically cast Shakespeare and some of the other characters as part of something legitimately supernatural. I don’t want to spoil it too much, but hint: if you’ve seen The Magicians on Netflix or read it it’s really closely based on parts of it. What did you think Wilhelm Meister was doing with his apprenticeship written by the same guy who wrote “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” anyway? Goethe certainly had a theory of Shakespeare, and a theory of Goethe, and theories of lots of things. In fact, reading Wilhelm Meister’s Journeymanship (I’m going to translate this differently than the usual way because I find Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship vs. Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years pretty odd when they use the same construction in German and Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship isn’t becoming Wilhelm Meister’s Apprentice Years even if that’s strictly more literal) at about the same time I read both The Master and Margarita and Watchmen point out certain similarities, which is that all these books actually have a lot of essays plopped into fiction, and that’s with Watchmen being a literal comic book. Watchmen quotes Germans all the time including Einstein, Nietzsche, and Bertolt Brecht, and The Master and Margarita is literally based on Faust and there’s no reason to think maybe the author didn’t also have familiarity with some of Goethe’s other works, though there are some things about that book I don’t like which is I think the author really is implying he went to Hell for not speaking out against Stalin. Which leads me to the last major point I would like to make, which is ideasthesia.
Some people hear about the idea of synesthesia and they think, oh, that’s when people see letters and they’re colored. Technically that’s not true, technically synesthesia is strictly between different senses. People of more of an essentially behaviorist bent will want to say that everything is sense-objects so it’s all just synesthesia, but it’s generally considered that at least there’s some sort of top-down and gestalt kind of processing in humans and literally everything else since behaviorism has been very thoroughly debunked in general, Chomsky also did a lot of that back in the day before he became in my opinion the not so great thinker he is now. When I was playing D&D with randos still, I explicitly demanded for our games to be “more punk or metal” in reference to not liking all the sort of commercial romantic fantasy minstrel music type stuff where you go to a tavern and people just party while carousing drunkenly and it’s not really anything like Lord of the Rings despite Lord of the Rings also featuring traveler’s inns also known as taverns. If there’s some fundamental idea in common between different media you can use that.
To some extent might the medium be the message? Sure, but I can write about an idea or talk about it or draw about it and possibly come up with other ways to refer to it without too much difficulty. Books get adapted into movies, plays, musicals, comics, and even songs regularly as well as being illustrated, you can write poetry based on prose or prose based on poetry. It seems to agitate some psychologists that there’s no such thing as being a “visual person” or “auditory person” and the same people just sort of have a general intelligence just as much as it agitates linguists who want to worship the orishas that the kiki-bouba effect can be sufficiently explained purely in terms of people perceiving higher-pitched sounds as sharp and pointy and lower-pitched sounds as more rounded and soft and that you don’t have to discuss the shape of the mouth at all even if it’s probably also not coincidental that certain mouth shapes also make those sounds. Professors I had in linguistics classes years ago got mad at me when I said you could possibly explain all of phonology basically a priori when you consider the cognitive demands of processing sounds and now I’ve been vindicated, but I shouldn’t be “being vindicated,” I should be doing this research unimpeded from the corporatist aka fascist modern university and if I end up being wrong sometimes or a lot that shouldn’t stop me from going forward and finding more things as long as the wrongness doesn’t horribly impede anything. But so far I haven’t even been all that wrong about much at all that I’ve gone forth and said anyway which makes it orders of magnitude worse.
The Stubborn Myth of “Learning Styles” - Education Next
In fact, in terms of making your game, or story, etc. “more rock or metal,” there are lots of these old rock and metal songs based on various stories back in the day. You probably haven’t heard of most of them even though a lot of them are pretty good, in addition to not having read or maybe even heard of the books they’re based on. If you needed any Urphänomen to prove to you we’re in a glut of bad stuff when we haven’t even exhausted the supply of good stuff that’s in many cases decades old, enjoy!
Behold! A collection of songs based on books I would rather read than the awful novels of corporatist wannabe-authors or books I’ve read instead! It’s really amazing what’s out there when you actually look, and no wonder people don’t want to read people’s terrible “What if we normalized witchcraft in regions where it’s looked down on? I’m also sure putting real witchcraft in our books will have no consequences at all, not even minor or psychological ones!” books or other really ironically colonialist books.
Elric saga. Also has some albums based on it like Warriors on the Edge of Time!
Lord of Light.
The Door into Summer + various (mostly Philip K. Dick.)
The Lord of the Rings.
The Chrysalids.
Man who Fell to Earth.
The Road.
1984.
Animal Farm.
The King in Yellow and the Dark Tower series.
Not are there too many things I haven’t read for me to want to read bad corporatist cancer books, there are dozens of songs and albums out there, most of which people haven’t heard of even though I had to include some of the classics too, for anyone to ignore it!
If you want a TL;DR: Write what you would read but which doesn’t exist. There is an objective point-of-view and other people will like what you like too. Haters gonna hate. In this day and age haters gonna hate extra hard because they see writing as something profitable now even though Michael Moorcock said it didn’t use to be. This has lead to bad writing as well as bad music, bad comics, bad video games, etc. sort of becoming a cancer in my opinion. So just ignore that and like what you like too so you don’t get cancer from the carcinogens, even if you’re like me and posting very un-trendy stuff even if I think it’s very cool anyway because cool is about edginess but not cutting yourself with that edge to me and always will be, and trends now are kind of anti-edgy.
We are the new new Romantics. Many authors on Substack are saying that there’s a new Romanticism and equating it with anti-tech, and then we have John Carter who won’t write about cyberpunk Romanticism already because it’s probably basically an entire novella-length post even longer than this one. Neo-Luddites are the old new Romantics. Lords of the edge are the new new Romantics. Old new Romantics were excessive like Byron; new new Romantics are more measured even if pure Anglophones don’t understand Novalis. Old new Romantics idolized England and think it cannot be surpassed, but new new Romantics tranlsate Goethe to set free an American identity distinct from the old country. Old new Romantics lay the blame on reason, but new new Romantics only criticize pure reason and know that one cannot perceive reality free from ideas and the mind comes before sense with all the strange implications that entails.
There is a reason we don’t have old new Romantics anymore even if you haven’t put together the new trajectory despite me laying it out. If we went back to that we would have the same problems all over again, it’d be like eternal recurrence, I guess that’s appealing to some people but I’m not trying to be a miserable lich like Voldemort here. You can be a pure reactionary and literally cause all the same problems again by bringing back the exact same conditions which caused them again. Or you can grow, change, and develop and bring about something new even if it’s from something old and sometimes something profoundly old.
You are correct when you say Write what you would read but which doesn’t exist.
I have always felt this is the best advice for writers. Usually expressed as write the books you want to read. The rest seems to be fashion or posing as far as I can tell.
Thank you for the reference.
You managed to pack that rather tightly.
Careful unpacking required.
It is a densely nutritious meal.
Food for thought.