Is Saving the World the Only Story? Part 3

Hello all!

I hope you have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Years! I hope you’ve all had a sane year, mine’s been a rollercoaster and it ain’t stopping for a while. (I have to housesit for my mom for New Years so that she can go off partying with her friends, grumble-grumble.)

I’ve got a number of good news, I’m all over the place. Got approved on SubscribeStar! Have to make an announcement detailing all that and the potential calendar plans. Ain’t that American? Planning a whole new year before the old one is done. My BOOK—is almost done, but done enough to where I can advertise it and hopefully have it out by January. Put that in another announcement.

I have to say first, here and later, Thank You. Thank you, all you people who’ve followed me along so far, all 9 to 27 of you on average. Used to be 30 of you, but let’s get that to 40+! If you haven’t got me on Facebook, you can start pestering me on SubscribeStar (more on that later).

Just, you being here is flying me forward. More to follow!

…

SO the me who was posting this series some 2 months ago was a FOOL!!!! An IGNORAMUS. Clearly didn’t know what he’s doing. Present-day (ho ho ho) me has a better grasp on things but is still a scatterbrained fool. Incomplete thoughts are saved for another day for me. To recap everything, past-day me was grasping for topics to talk about, and the previous posts in this series were me trying to get at our popular entertainment, as I see it.

It seems to me that there are two broad plots, two overall story styles, the ‘save the world’ plot and the ‘main character becomes a better person’ plot. The two can overlap but also don’t. Now, in my view there were other forms than these, in older previous centuries. For example, ‘coming of age’ is still around, though it seems much less so these days. Another was ‘understanding your place’ type of plot, where the MAIN CHARACTER is usually unhappy with their life, tries to break out of it, and after a misadventure realizes what they got was pretty good. They become grateful for what they have.

-Save the world.

-MAIN CHARACTER becomes a better person.

-Coming of age.

-Understanding your place.

[Note that coming-of-age is reserved for kids and teens, while ‘becoming a better person’ is usually about maladjusted adults.]

I’m not a folklorist by training or trade. I am a storyteller who has focused mainly on the (Western) European and Japanese fairy tales, plus the tropes (*shudder*) of American Saturday morning cartoons, action movies, Westerns, etc. I am a child of the Entertainment Age. I’m not an archeologist, but I do understand the Greek/Egypt/Norse myths. I may have no formal training*, but having grown up on these things, I understand that there is Wisdom in stories. So, I tell from experience that of the four above-mentioned plots, the two most common in Ye Olden Days were ‘coming of age’ and ‘understanding your place’, with a close third being I call ‘adventure sagas’.

[*And I listen to those who do have formal training and post their stuff on YouTube ™.]

‘Saving the world’ and ‘BECOMING A BETTER PERSON’ were quite rare by comparison. Not impossible, but they were not the norm in pre-modern times. The first was because ‘saving the world’ was effectively out of mortal hands; that was for the gods, demi-gods and heroes. Plus, how big ‘a world’ are you talking? The second was because—what does it mean, ‘become a better person’? Self-improvement is a mostly modern concept—correction! In esoteric schools (books of magic) who have been around for centuries, a kind of self-improvement was sought. But the public view of ‘self-improvement’ is a modern conception that I think has not existed beforehand*. For Ye Olde Days, ‘becoming a better person’ was just following your appropriate social role or behavior, and usually you gave up a kind of vice that weighed you down.

[*Note that I’m also drawing on Lewis and Chesterton and co., so I’m stretching ‘modern day’ to the 1870s up to now, 2023 and onwards.]

Saving the world? Well, if God, the gods, demi-gods, heroes, and what-not don’t exist or left the planet, I suppose it is up to mortals and superheroes to save the world! …What’s the world you’re saving? I mentioned before that I call myself a cosmologist, because I start from the top and work downwards. What’s the world? How is it arranged? How do cause-and-effect work? Are there spiritual and material realities*? On and on.

[*If you ever get into Japanese anime, even the some dozen classic genre-defining ones, they will go into detail, ad nauseum, on how the heck their secret ninja techniques or magical arts work. Anime viewers know what I’m talking about. It’s almost like their version of science!... And then the power of friendship saves the day anyway.]

So, uh…If your world was created by Satan, is it worth saving? How about 4 versions of him, all competing with each other? Or, maybe, Satan isn’t around, but malicious forces had a hand in birthing the world. Or, the world always was and ever will be, and does not need saving at all. In that case, don’t worry about saving the world—save yourself. Perhaps, the world cannot be destroyed, but it can be thrown into perpetual, cosmic Un-balance, which makes life a misery. Is the world fragile? Can it exist without humans? On and on. (And, don’t forget that the purpose of a mythology is partly to explain how the world works, among other things.)

Okay, now, what’s the threat? Let’s make it cosmic/high fantasy scale, so that we don’t get bogged down in local particulars. Is the cosmos suffering from a Galactic Hernia*? Is, Nature, dying? Not from malicious forces, but because death/decay/entropy is finally taking its course, and the old world dies to make way for the new. Sucks for mortals then. Hell, it may just be that the Cosmos/Nature is going through convulsions, like a cosmic geyser erupting right on cue. Still sucks for mortals then. Maybe, even, it is the awakening of a great Cosmic Beast, who on the regular sleeps for eons, wakes up, trashes the joint, and then goes back to bed. Just like a ill-trained dog.

[* “Living with a Hernia” by Weird Al Yankovic.]

Or perhaps it is the Forces of Evil this time, directed by the Heart of Evil, to systematically destroy the ordered cosmos piece by piece. Aha! Though grievously harmful, all you have to do is stab the Heart of Evil…in the heart. Boom! Done. Legions of Evil die with their Heart, or are scattered into uselessness. But what’s this? Is the Heart of Evil indestructible? Uh. Uh-oh. Can you shove it in a prison? Clog it up with…evil cholesterol—you get the idea! It’s not going away, it is an independently-moving force, and thus if it can’t be killed it must be banished or paralyzed. Pretty dang common story trope! Even happens in history, like when Christian Romans feared the return of Emperor Nero in the 4th century, or the Japanese fearing the return of the ghosts of their most famous warlords from the Sengoku Jedai. The ghosts/zombies of wicked Legends, come back to haunt the present day…

Or perhaps it is the wickedness of humans that is the cause of destruction? That seems to be the all-too-common narrative of the day, at least in the political sphere. (Enough about that.) But in fiction? It is strange to me, because, say, in present-day fictional work, humans are held with scorn, but…the collective body of humans is NOT blamed. Rather, it is still individuals in these fictions, who push some forbidden boundary or are suicidaly greedy that begin the countdown to midnight. Just, you know, kill them like they are a Heart of Evil. Pure and simple. See, it is multiple types of suicide to, well, have your moral message be ‘you humans should commit suicide!’

How will you make money from your entertainment then if your audience follows that moral of the story? Sure, you’ll get a lump sum of revenue, but don’t bother making a sequel to ‘Humans Commit Suicide: The Morality Play’.

Unfortunately, I do have an example of this being the case—not of real-life humans committing suicide, but the moral of the story being ‘commit suicide for a good cause.’ That shame belongs to Gen:Lock (2019), a sci-fi animated series made and produced by RoosterTeeth ™*. It had everything going right—political thriller, giant robots, high-tech, brain-uploading, potential for moral-ethical-philosophy junk, fun and memorable characters voiced by big-name stars. Ran for 2 seasons (2019/2021) and the second season ended with one of the main characters dying pointlessly and another character, the youngest member of the protagonists’ team, committing suicide to ‘ascend to a higher plane of existence’. Yup, that was the message by the end of season 2. Commit suicide for a higher cause. No, not dying in battle—the ‘turn off your brain functions and organs’ kind of death.

[*Yes, their name is a pun on ‘C*ck-Bite’; originally it was a ‘dudes in their basement’ company that rode the success of the early Internet entertainment, before Netflix, and over the past decade has been plummeting downwards because of—it is a whole mess, and the original creators of the company are heart-sad at what it has become. You can find the history if you wish, but it is an unhappy tale all the way through. It was a very strong cautionary tale for me.]

And, then, there’s Cosmic Indifference threat. A Cosmic Power, indifferent and uncaring of humanity, blows up the earth because humans are no more important than an anthill in the grand scheme of things. You can thank our horse-faced boy, HP Lovecraft, for popularizing this threat. The Cosmos is full of incomprehensible alien-gods and monsters, and humans are a very tiny hermit crab in an open ocean. …Why don’t we have Lovecraft-inspired environmentalist movements? Both don’t care too much for humanity. Though, I think one deliberately hates humans and the other has no capacity to care about humans. (Misanthropy—hatred of humans—is a topic for another post.)

To recap:

-Cosmic Geyser Eruption

-Heart of Evil

-Human Wickedness

-Cthulhu Sneezed

What does each of these four broad threats tell about the story? As far as I’ve seen, these are the highest scaled threats in fiction. (A sub-category of them all has ‘even the gods are threatened’, like Norse Ragnarok scenario.) What does the ‘moral of the threat of the story’ say? All of them take some time to unpack, so I’ll give what summary I can that is accurate enough.

Personally, though, let me speak first as a craftsman, as a fiction writer. Going to these threats is too quick and too cheap. On the one hand, yes, they are the highest dangers that we humans can conceive in our minds. On the other, they are too big to comprehend. Cthulhu is not scary because he’s too big to comprehend. ‘Oh no, he blasts your mortal sanity into teensy-little bits!’ Most people just see Cthulhu as a giant squid monster*. They are too stupid to be scared. No, Cthulhu is scary only for atheists and rationalists, because they try and control him by putting Cthulhu into a mental category. They fail spectacularly and go insane—or end up worshipping him.

[*Too often, he’s shown as an angry-looking squid monster, when the more accurate depiction is Cthulhu having a blank face—his ‘face’ is unrecognizable so you can’t tell what he’s thinking.]

Speaking for fiction-writing, going to these threat levels is cheap and quick. It is sensationalism in most cases, scapegoating in others. You do not get, say, ‘good drama’ from these unless you build up to them. (Hold on, I’ll get to Human Wickedness in time.) Nor can you spell out the stakes. That’s easy to do but has less impact. You cannot even show—you know, the show vs. tell methods? Not even showing is sufficient to work. For the creeping dread to really set in, your audience must put the stakes together, in their own mind. Show and tell evidence of how bad things get, sure, but the final step is…the audience participating in the horror. It is they who have to put the picture together. You can’t have your apocalypse be Cthulhu, he’s not relatable. …Not relatable to healthy people, I mean. Nor do you need your apocalypse to be solely about humans. Sure, they, erm, ‘humanize’ the stakes, and for many audience members that may well be the only way for them to understand.

Okay, okay, I’ll get to the summaries. So, for Cosmic Geyser Eruption and Cthulhu Sneezed, humans don’t have to be valued. There is not that much difference between the two, because the former is just—there, and the latter is effectively a force of nature with an alien mind guiding it. There is almost a zen apathy to these stories, an acceptance that human life is brief. Beautiful, fragile, but a small blip in the timescale. In these kinds of stories, there doesn’t have to be fatalism or nihilism. It is acceptance of powerlessness, an acceptance that there never was control. There is a pleasant delight at existence.

I find these stories as jarring as bleach, but about as helpful as bleach, too. They are great meditation pieces. Are the things you really, really want that important? Are you really pursuing things that make you happy? What have you done with your life? …In my estimation, these kinds of Stories—Cosmic Geyser Eruption and Cthulhu Sneezed—are for people who are too easily pleased. They are happy with little, and don’t need much to be happy. It is not that these people, who would enjoy these stories, it is not that they have a deathwish. They are just, passive. Not lazy, just not ‘intense’. They may be very thoughtful. They have an understanding that yes, the ‘world’ is vast and huge, and full of strange things that are not human and full of strange things that aren’t human that also think!

These stories aren’t necessarily for nihilists or existentialists—those two kinds of people would be the go-getters of the apocalypse. In fact I dare to say that if a C.G.E. happened or a Cthulhu Sneeze was approaching, they’d fall into different camps. There would be those who gave up, and those who would participate in the oncoming destruction as a last-ditch, willful effort for autonomy. They are filthy traitors and will be treated as such.

Then there will be the true nihilists and existentialists. The first will try and be an Übermensch, an Artist who will try and create faster than the destruction. They will try and be Creation outrunning Destruction. The second will try and be similar but different—they will try and be Action outpacing Entropy. What better time to be an existentialist, to make your own meaning in the void? What better time for they to say to the oncoming nothing, ‘Let there be light’?

Now, my fellow fantasy nerds know full damn well what happens when you oppose Cthulhu—act fast to reseal his prison, or lose, miserably. The fate if you don’t is too awful to comprehend. Don’t **** around with Cthulhu or his cousins or other Lovecraftian critters. They are apathetic at first, sure, but they can still be p*ssed off, and they get mean when you get them mad. Or, at the least, respond with due violence if their efforts meet an obstacle. They may not think like humans, but they can be more violent than humans.

But what of our nihilists and existentialists in non-Cthulhu situations? I can only imagine poor King Lear from Shakespeare, gone mad in the rain. The play, King Lear, is about Lear and his kingdom and so on, but a running theme is the chaos and indifference of nature. Lear is betrayed by his family and thrown out onto the stormy moor, where he is expected to die. In a famous scene, King Lear is quite insane and still believes himself to be a king, so much so that he tries to command the very thunderstorm to do his bidding! He, now a man with nothing, is a sad, insane old man trying to command, to impose control, on the storm raging from the sky. I suspect it will be the same for the nihilists and existentialists when their time comes to do something against nothing.

And as for the Heart of Evil and Human Wickedness…Oh, Gawd! Oh Laudy. I can’t summarize them to do them justice. Their stakes are different and more complex, yes. See, compared to Heart of Evil and Human Wickedness, the Cosmic Geyser Eruption and Cthulhu Sneezing are—the latter two are like day jobs by comparison. You build a levee to stop a flood, you try and take similar precautions with a Cosmic Geyser (maybe). Dark, morbid cults that worship things with too many tentacles? Meh, make a government agency to discover and counteract them. Make your Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense*. Make your Delta Green** special operations teams to raid cultist lairs and interrupt clandestine meetings with UFOs. It’s just a day job, that snuffs out the small cases, and prevents the small problems from getting bigger. If they do get too big, we will all be too dead to notice…

[*Hellboy ™ series by Mike Mignola]

[**Delta Green RPG, 1992 and 2011, itself based on the Call of Cthulhu RPG (1981)]

More to follow!