Writing in Universal Grammar
Stories Outside the Text
Contrary to some rumors that I’ve heard, J. K. Rowling was actually not ever a homeless lady who was raped on a back alley. She was a poor lady in state housing who was in an abusive relationship which included sexual assault. In other words J. K. Rowling basically always had as posh of a mentality as a book about a British boarding school would suggest, even if she’s generally considered fairly left-ish politically despite her propensity to tick off standard leftdroids as well as standard rightdroids.
I’ve heard J. K. Rowling always had the book planned out. I’ve seen evidence that indeed, even the part about the fact where wizards used to poop in their pants and then use magic to clean it up was always in there, it just got brought up again for Pottermore after everyone forgot about it. The original article I read said that it was in there shouldn’t be surprising since Harry Potter always had elements of Roald Dahl, which made me think that Harry Potter actually had rather a lot of elements of Roald Dahl, including entire plot lines and versions of the same characters, which is not a problem in my opinion at all because we’re all just standing on the shoulders of giants really. The plot and worldbuilding to Harry Potter seem to have always been planned out, but what wasn’t planned seems to be both how much of a commercial success it was, and all the things besides the books.
Some people would equate there being anything besides the books itself with commercialism but I think that’s really a sort of Babylonian mentality and ironically the actual commercial viewpoint. If you just have someone printing books that’s easier for a corporation to regulate. If there are all sorts of media there are a lot of contracts to write, there’s the issue of fair use, there’s the issue of fan art, and it’s sort of just the Wild West. So aside from the Babylonians and smarmy English teachers and professors, corporations probably also want there to be nothing outside of the text to use Derrida’s phrase out of context.
Long before there was Harry Potter, there was Elric of Melnibone, which I don’t intend as a character equivalent, that’s primarily Ged from Earthsea if there is one, Elric is way too edgelord-y and also loses at the end. Elric of Melnibone was also not a huge commercial success at all, and Michael Moorcock himself said back when he was growing up no one would have encouraged their children to be a writer or start a band. However, what Michael Moorcock did was make a character who was more or less explicitly a sort of countercultural rock and roll mascot, and make it in a gazillion different forms. In addition to writing the Elric books, he also basically owned the band Hawkwind even though I don’t think he started them because he just learned they really liked his stuff, he also worked with Blue Öyster Cult to write some Elric songs, and there’s all the Elric cover art which is more or less official with the books, there are the Elric comics. The inside of Hawkwind albums relating to Elric have cool art too. Behold, here’s an old vinyl album (not my album or photo,) Warrior on the Edge of Time, where the inside opens up and folds out and it’s a shield that says CHAOS with the chaos star.
So back when creating all this content was not remotely profitable people kept making things in different media and didn’t think much of it. The idea that every is basically the text just seems like some kind of English teacher idea that megacorporations also like because it makes everything easy to regulate, especially people themselves since you can pigeonhole people as “a writer” if you make them only write books. However, the story itself is clearly something in the universal grammar of stories, and things like Star Wars with Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader are just a part of the i-language that don’t really change meaning whether you have a movie about them, a book, a show, or all the toys and other merchandise. The story can change when different people are allowed to work on it, sometimes for the worse and those versions should probably be more or less discounted as changing the story away from the real version rather than making a different real version, but it’s not like there’s some Platonic notion of Star Wars that only works when it’s the original trilogy films or some Platonic notion of Harry Potter that only works when it’s the books or some Platonic version of Elric that’s also the books. That’s basically the whole thing of ideasthesia, you can’t even perceive the world without using your mind first so that’s ultimately the real version of the story. Maybe the movies are better but movies are not equal to a story, movies are just one version of the e-language like maybe a poem is better in the original language than translated on some subjective level or a song is better by the original band. But the others aren’t somehow just fake when the idea is clearly the same.
I still tend to kind of hate writing because it’s a box that you’re put into, but the goal seems to be just to have contempt for the idea of the purity of writing, not to try to avoid writing entirely. Hate is basically contempt plus fear, and that’s always a misaimed emotion since fear is supposed to be like awe and not directly at lowly things, which is what makes hate basically intrinsically evil since the idea of hate itself always involves a definitionally-misplaced attitude and emotion. There are lots of different things that can count as writing after all.
If J. K. Rowling was ironically poor because she was too posh, on the one hand that shouldn’t be surprising since the whole point of luxury I think is also basically intrinsically evil, the point is to burn money on things that definitely aren’t worth that much which creates negative value, and though some people can afford that more than others everyone would be worse off following it than not following it by definition so there’s always a poverty to luxury. That’s just a sign that if you stop taking these kind of English teacher mentalities like “only the book is the real version” which I’m pretty sure is straight from Gilgamesh and, for all the Protestants who would more or less agree, there are cooler Protestants like Quakers who very flagrantly disagreed, you will have a better time, and also make more money, even if sadly corporate garbage is going to get involved in what I would think in most contexts is actually the purer mentality.