Poetic Interlude I

Look to it brothers and sisters;

Look to the fire that illuminates the ending of the darkness.

As it climbs and ascends the edge of our awareness at the edge of our worlds and minds,

always remember that while its warming fingers

may caress our cheeks:

those same delicate touches

can so easily become blades

that cut and rend the very souls.

Know of it mothers and fathers;

this thing is both benign and deadly, to friend to foe and to strangers.

For as it has no pity, so too does it lack malice, knowable or unconscious.

Something that simply is cannot be bound by judgement nor value that it does not possess.

So walk with and follow me my sons and my daughters;

Follow this only guide we all have to keep at bay the shadows of the minds and the lands.

Until we light our own fires within, we have no choice but to trust.

Trust that which remains unaware unmoved uncaring by our existence our living our very being.

To blindly rely upon a power not our own is to feel, but not to know.

To think we grasp, but not to truly understand nor comprehend.

It will be a perilous journey though blackness to find illumination.

Until all that remains is what is what was what may yet come to pass.

Hero or Anti-Hero: Therein Lies the Rub

    In terms of relatable story characters, nothing really seems to beat the Anti-Hero. If you need someone to swoop down from on high and save everything or everyone that needs them, even if it means that they must be put in difficult positions and tax their moral stances to the utmost, these are often not the people you want to turn to. In fact, you had best hope you don’t stand in their way for any reason, because if they’re put in a corner, they’re not going to dig deep to find some hitherto unknown well of courage and strength just waiting to come into being. They will look for solutions. They will gradually (or rapidly depending on the specific character) stop caring as to why you are standing in their way. They will take you into account. And then one way or another, you will be dealt with.

            Now, I don’t have a lot of sarcastic clip art or demotivational posters or even any links to any dictionary definitions. Mostly because this is going to be third person anecdotal about stories that are not widely available for free on the internet, but also because this is something of a personal subject for myself. So without further ado, let’s get right to it.

            Whether people admit it or not, their imaginations demand two things of them. A purposeful story. A story with a pattern and a reason behind many if not all of the things that happen within its framework. And secondly, their imagination demands an increasingly complex framework for the underlying simple stories that they tell and hear in turn. Don’t believe me? Think of one of your favorite stories. Take your time, I’m in no hurry. For me one of my absolute favorite stories is Catch-22; the quintessential parody of war novels that still manages to make points that you almost think to yourself seem entirely incidental to the entire overall arc, disjointed as the narrative structure may be.

            It is ultimately the story of a single bombardier who becomes increasingly disillusioned with the war effort and who ultimately deserts when the opportunity presents itself to him. A very simple premise at its core. But it introduces characters both major and minor that make it the world the story inhabits increasingly and mind-bendingly complex. So complex in fact, that the title became a synonym for an unwinnable situation where no positive outcome is possible.

            But in any case, when the framework demands complexity and depth one of the only reasonable places to look for it is in the main protagonist. One of the reasons that Greek mythology continues to fascinate even today, and why even Norse and Egyptian stories continue to circulate in the popular consciousness despite having virtually no recognition as major religions anymore is certainly not because of its historical significance. If that were all that was to it, so many other religions would have survived as well, if only to keep a clear and accurate timeline in mind when looking at the evolutions of human belief systems.

            So many of the more fascinating stories that get taken into the hive mind of pop culture and endlessly permutated and examined and rehashed over and over are not the more traditional heroes, such as Perseus who slew the Gorgon or Theseus who ended the life of the minotaur in order to end the suffering inflicted upon Athens by Crete. (And even they had their more questionable moments...) No, it is their more questionable companions such as Heracles, Achilles and even Odysseus. An extremely strong man who only performs some of his most memorable and famous actions to avoid being sent to the Hellenistic version of Hell, a man who chose eternal glory over family life and dragged his defeated opponent Hector’s corpse around the walls of the city behind a chariot before leaving his body to be eaten by carrion purely to spite Hector’s family and a man who slaughters all of the suitors who had attempted to woo his wife after he had been presumed dead for over a decade as well as any handmaidens who had been ‘weak’ enough to fall for their charms.

            I don’t know about anyone else, but that doesn’t sound like the actions of a very heroic person. And yet still Heracles’s 12 labors are one of the most memorable stories of ancient Greek heroism. Achilles is still considered such a sufficiently awesome figure that he had metaphorical and physical weak spots named after his heel. And Odysseus’s actions to, during and coming home from the Trojan War are quite literally the stuff of epics. So what is it about characters like this that attracts and inflames the imagination even when the characters themselves are not particularly heroic?

            It is precisely the fact that they are not strictly heroic that makes them so relatable, so interesting. Ultimately, despite their flaws and (sometimes numerous) failings, they continue onward. They do things that we’d consider questionable for dubious reasons, but they are still fundamentally good people at their heart. They mean well. Mostly.

            Even their ideas of divinity weren’t beyond this treatment. The ancient gods were skirt chasing, petty, easily angered juveniles who could take offense if you so much as sneezed on their boots while licking the soles. But they could be kind too. Aphrodite’s bring Pygmalion’s statue to life comes immediately to mind. As well as Zeus’s bringing Dionysus to Olympus after accidentally killing his mother and Hera’s willing adoption of Heracles. Not perfect by any means, just like real people. And because of that constant striving for but equally constant falling short of perfection, they were also far more relatable. Far more understandable.

            Complexity which surrounds simplicity. Light and Darkness intertwined to create not one or the other but a shade of grey. Unreality the skitters the edge of knowledge. Fantastic creatures and actions that are driven by comparatively mundane and straightforward thought processes. All of these serve to make the Anti-Hero in many ways far more fascinating than the traditional protagonist of many a tale. But that is a story for another time…

Dualism in Lycanthropy: A Synopsis

When people imagine supernatural creatures, they don’t often imagine there could be two sides to them. Not using the original material anyway. We don’t see people talking about how Dracula might’ve had one of his brides rebel against him in order to protect humans or hear speculation about how the creature might’ve been harassing his creator and killing his family in order to prevent him from continuing to play god and thus save humanity from being overrun by the inexplicably reanimated dead. But that’s not so in the origin of the word Lycanthrope aka The origin of most well known mythological creation/exploratory stories aka Greek “Hellanic Yes” Mythology.

In Greek Mythology, there is one original story for where werewolves came from. That is the story of king Lycanos, the cruel king who verbally talked of disbelieving in the same gods who had managed to lay waste to cities and turn a once beautiful priestess into something so horrendously ugly that she turns to stone anyone who looks directly on her and burns her image into any surface that reflects it back. Zeus came down in mortal form and attempted to have him recant his doubt of the gods. Lycanos, reasonable and logically thinking chap that he is, decides he’s going to test the divine power of his guest by killing one of his sons and feeding his flesh to the guest during the feast. Because cannibalizing your children  is usually the best way to prove a possible god in mortal form is in fact a crazy man who’s off his meds. Mostly.

Zeus, instantly remembering that distasteful dining experience from the dive bar a few weeks back, instantly recognizes the smell of cooked kid and so cursed Lycanos to become a wolf in order to reflect his true ‘inner bestial nature.’ A cruelly fitting end to a fittingly cruel man. And it seems reasonable to assume that is the only instance of manmade monsters, or monsters in man form. But that isn’t quite true, for in my mind there is still another possible source of werewolves in Greek mythology: one who most anyone even passingly familiar with the genre of ‘for the love of everything holy, don’t ever spy on naked female dieties’ could recognize. I am of course, talking about the story of Daphne the nymph preferring to get turned into a tree rather than be yet another one hour stand of the original sensitive musician god Apollo.

No wait, that’s the recognition of another bad habit a lot of the male half of the pantheon seem to get into, though I can’t for the life of me think of a name for it. No, the story I’m thinking of is the story of Actaeon and Artemis. The hunter, searching through the woods with his hounds, stumbles upon a sacred bathing site of the goddess of the hunt. And so manages to see her in all her godly glory. Apparently it wasn’t that much of a godly glory to see since she had to personally intervene instead of simply waiting for her godly aura to vaporize him ala Zeus in what is colloquially known as: “No wonder the wine god constantly needs to get hammered in order to forget where he came from.” Turned into a stag, his hounds chased and eventually tore him apart, seemingly of their own will. But there are ancient beliefs that believe that if one followed the teaching of Hecate, the ancient Titaness of witchcraft and crossroads, there was a way to use the pelt of the wolf to transform into its form. 

Now, imagine that a wolf/dog/canine of some sort, managed to ingest the flesh of man touched by the gods. There are all sorts of stories of gods accidentally creating miracles and beings with their blood, skin, bone and other…less savory body parts. (Aphrodite being said to be a combination of Kronos’s gelded bits and sea foam springs queasily to mind.) Who’s to say these same dogs, who are named and given identities in the original myth, could not have been transformed by one goddess’s thoughtless curse? Who is to say that these animals would not be trapped in the form of men, condemned by their own nature to be stuck between two conflicting states to repent for murdering the man who had taken them in? After all, the gods weren’t exactly particular when it came to divine retribution. Much like many deities before and after them, their mindset seemed to follow more along the lines of ‘general area effect’ rather than ‘single person effect.’

 

And in any case, doesn’t that make them so much more interesting? The idea of an animalistic man and a pack of humanistic animals? I don’t know, maybe it’s just me.

Choice Background Expansion in the Name of NPC Awareness and Respect

            If we’re talking about choices and consequences this week, let’s talk about choice making video games. Because what better way to prove that I’m a mature person than by taking a potentially serious topic and body slamming it back down into the mat of childhood immaturity and giving it a rug burn of utter…something to do with stereotypical assumptions of videogame player’s inherent immaturity.

Oop, never mind; here’s what I was thinking of.

            But in any case, some of the best videogames I’ve ever played were ones where there was an aspect of choice and player determination that felt like it affected the story behind it. I’ve never really gotten into PC games such as World of Warcraft, Mount & Blade or the Sims because the world is too open. Does that make sense? No, of course not. After all, whoever heard of a thing as too much choice?

            Don’t get me wrong; if you want to play god, those games can definitely let you delude yourself into believing it for a day. Or six. But ultimately, they have so much choice that all the choices you make start to feel the same, that it becomes too much like real life where many infinitesimal choices ultimately end up weighing you down like a thousand pounds of feathers that never seem to matter until they all lump together in a giant congealed…pillow…thing.

            Games like Alpha Protocol, Heavy Rain or inFamous on the other hand try to find a balance between linear and open. In Alpha Protocol’s case, the freedom is expressed in the player’s choice of background and interaction with a fairly linear settings both within the context of the characters and the story that makes it feel like part of a true espionage rpg. 

In Alpha Protocol, you can choose Thorton’s background and make him as awesomely stealthy or cringingly brazen as you want but either way, you are a part of something bigger than yourself in every aspect that while you affect and have a stake in, ultimately cannot end on your own no matter how great you are. It leaves itself wide open while never allowing the player to become paralyzed by indecision of how to piddle around with the tranquilizer gun in order to make unconscious enemy soldiers wake up in compromising positions.

In Heavy Rain, the interaction between their characters, how quick their reflexes are and how much the one who controls them believes they deserve to suffer or be rewarded is like taking a microscopic look into a miniature drama between characters in the sims if the sims could speak English and were significantly more memetic.

And in inFamous (1 and 2) how the player controls Cole McGrath aka “The Electric Man” aka “The Demon of Empire City” aka “The Glitter Explosion that still lost to the Biology Experiment Riding a Unicorn” directly affects what powers they can use to further their own play style, their electricity turning either bright ocean blue or dark bloody red depending on whether they decide they’ll treat the game as a hero fantasy or grand theft auto with electricity catharsis.

All of these games have a world, that while fairly linear and enclosed when viewed objectively, create an atmosphere and background of underlying depth that allows the player to feel as though they’re part of something bigger without overwhelming them with choice and decisions. Just the way life could be…if that weren’t such a terrifying prospect for everyone who’s Not the main character of the world videogame.

Maybe you’d be the main character in a videogame, maybe you’d be an npc. Personally, I love the genre, but that’s not really the kind of world I’d want to live in. After all, as Danial O’Brian, regular editor and writing contributor of cracked.com once said: “You wouldn’t be the 17 year old lesbian cult leader, you’d be the water tower painting peon.”