The RPG Pundit is back, talking mythology and RPGs. Even if you write fiction, he's got good commentary here.
First, there is a game that did a far better job at playable mythology then Dungeons & Dragons: Runequest. It's akin to Pendragon and Paladin in that, like Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer, it's a D100 System with very perishable characters and involved character generation. Mythology is made playable due to putting access to real power behind engagement with setting lore in some fashion or another, often involving the joining of a cult dedicated to a specific mythic figure and celebrating its rites. Want to be a god-king? Got to become The God-King.
Second, it shows a very concrete example of what authors in fantasy and science fiction often complain about: "pagan mythology" is often little more than a combination of Fuck You Dad and really dumb LARPing, sometimes with just enough academic bullshit to rook the rubes. Actual mythology (a) has a very real function and (b) is considerably messier than what mentally ill weirdos with already shakey connections to reality--the common figure pushing this bullshit--think that it really is.
Third, mythology is hard because most people don't consciously comprehend it even if they are affected by it- including academics. The closest they get is its political utility, which is still potent stuff but not the full explanation. They could get it if they had the humility to accept that they can be influenced by it, and thus make the effort to think through what they do.
And until more people get mythology, you'll see this problem persist.
This is an in-character explanation of a meta-level discussion going on at the Wiki and has been for some time. Looks like the changes won out and will slowly be rolled down the entire wiki's content as volunteer time allows. It's actually a sensible classificiation system, and Volgun's presentation of how it came about may even be mostly what actually happened (sans SCP-specific stuff).
I say again: if you're not ready to jump into writing your own original stuff from the ground-up, learning how to write using the SCP Wiki (and its offshoots) as training wheels doesn't hurt. There's been professionals putting in contributions, and they're happy to encourage newbs putting in earnest effort to improve their skills.
Of all the fan channels, Doomcock comes closest to grasping awareness of what the Pop Cult is from the inside (i.e. by being one): it's a replacement religion.
He openly calls the Death Cult's deliberate destruction of the idols of the Pop Cult "destruction of our myths and culture", and this is one such video where that's what he's on about, and he is not wrong.
Doomcock, given the limits of the Pop Cult, sees clearest of all of them so far. He clearly and unambiguously calls the deeds of the Death Cult running popular culture in the West what it is: the deliberate denigration of a culture as an Act of Conquest.
Like it or not, there is only one effective response a Pop Cultist can give to this, and it is this response that makes them vulnerable to escaping the Pop Cult:
That's right: declare the Woke Shit to be HERESY, and thereby repudiate it.
This is what they have to do to avoid the goal of the Death Cult's destruction of the cult's idols: to demoralize them enough to make joining the Death Cult the only way to make the pain of despair bearable.
I put it to you that those in the Pop Cult can be reached. If they can reach where Doomcock is, then they can be brought the rest of the way.
The estate of J.R.R. Tolkien is notoriously hostile to adaptations of the man's work outside of literature. Led by Christopher Tolkien, this policy has been in place for decades; what you have seen to date has been the result of a bad deal with a man named Saul Zaentz back in the '50s, using a license of for the core four (LOTR+Hobbit) as the basis for all the media adaptations you've seen to date. Even the best of them--the ones better than we deserved--bear that taint.
Somehow I assumed that Christopher Tolkien was much younger, but maybe I just formed that image a long time ago. Regardless, it’s sad to hear of his passing. Outside of his father, the famed J.R.R., Christopher is probably the one most responsible for all things Middle Earth. He compiled his father’s notes and works into coherent wholes; without him, there would have been no Silmarillion, let alone any of the other works from Tolkien we’ve received since his father’s death in 1973. He’s also been a driving force in the amount of respect Tolkien’s legacy has been treated with; here’s to hoping it wasn’t just him protecting Middle Earth. I can already feel Disney circling in for the kill.
Now the Wokening of Middle Earth makes sense. None of this would be tolerated previously.
The new executors of the estate are not the hardliners that Christopher was, and the Death Cult has to know this. The recent Amazon series in the works shows this. Now they come for Middle Earth. They come for the dreamseed of the West itself. They're using "Death of the Author" to justify their corrupting of Tolkien's great gift to his people- to us. In time, they will do unto him as they did before to Lovecraft, Howard, and many others.
Unless, of course, we fight back.
Gondor calls for aid, Men of the West.
You all know what must be done. First the traitors--the Wormtongues, the Denethors, the Sacksville-Baggins--and then the invaders.
Warfare in Galactic Christendom is, on the whole, a limited affair. Outside of the Crusades, the belligerents aren't out to actually obliterate the planet or wipe out all live on it and so on. They're fighting the party holding the objective; they want to take and hold it for themselves, so destroying it is not on the table because they don't want to incur the costs of rebuilding it from scratch.
Sure, space colonies can get wrecked and castles can get smashed, and so on, but outright Exterminatus and similar weapons and techniques are not done because it crosses the line from "We accidentally shot up the reactor core" to "Fuck this planet, with orbital kinetic-kill bombardment using asteroids. The terraform corp can clean up the place for occupation."
Not that it hasn't happened, or that the means do not exist. It has, and they do. It's that the Church has successfully restrained the nobility from doing so, sometimes using self-interest and sometimes using sanction, and it helps that the Church being ubiquitous ensures that a noble wanting to glass his neighbor fears the Church retaliating against him for doing so.
Which means that planetary warfare, as one would expect, is automatically going to go bad for defenders once they lose orbital supremacy and the invaders attain that high ground. Without severe defensive measures to thwart it, and offensive systems to counter-attack, an attacker can just besiege and englobe a planet--blockading it--and starve the enemy out; only if the timetable disallows this does the script deviate away from this.
Most warfare, therefore, not only happens in space but also within a planetary system and not in deep space. Most of that action happens in orbit over the target planet or its Lagrange points. This is why the Navy is the dominant form of the military institution, followed by their Marines, albeit influenced significantly by the feudal nobility and its own norms.
All of this will be seen in the following Star Knight books, though I won't be spending paragraphs doing "As You Know" infodumps on it.
As for why warfare runs on giant robots? Nephilim. Giants of inhuman flesh and bone required giants of super-powered steel to slay them, and there were legions of them as well as those men who served them. Yes, Red Eyes, Zuzu, and Gori are all of that cursed blood- and they are not all that remains. Then the similarity to a knight's panapoly allowed the institutional inertia to accelerate and now we're here.
Yes, that's a #QAnon drop. I don't want to hear about your opinion on #QAnon; any comments on that nature will be deleted and dumbasses sperging about it will be banned and spammed. This is not about him; this is about what he said since that's independent of whether or not he is a LARP.
What you're looking at here is that someone in the spook world is spelling out what I've been saying privately and publically for a while now: It's About the Narrative.
What you believe to be true (Narrative), you perform in everyday life (Culture). What you perform as normal behavior (Culture), you will enact as state policy (Politics). This is why control of the Narrative matters, and that means Narrative Warfare is really the secular version of Spiritual Warfare; this is why cults and religions are the bedrock of a nation's identity, and therefore Narrative Warfare is Identity Politics because you're fighting over what the foundation of a given nation--a given distinct body of people, all of whom share the same race, religion, and language--is and whomever has control over that has real power because they have faith on their side.
And faith means religion, and religion means spirituality- performative or not. With the recent revelation that the Glow In The Dark crowd created pedo network cults like The Finders, it's not hard to see that this wisdom is well-established in the Upside Down of Spookland.
The more I ponder this, the less crazy David Icke and those like him (e.g. Steve Quayle) seem. Way to go, Glowies.
Friend of the blog Wolfman At Large is very good at making meme compliations. This one? Vikings.
Yes, this includes shots from Vinland Saga, which you should read or watch, and the names of many historical and mythical sagas- all of which are part of Western culture as much as the literature we received from ancient Greece and Rome. Those sagas are fantastic reading in their own right, filled with stories of heroes and struggles that still inform Western culture to this day- the obvious presence in the Metal and Gaming subcultures is merely the most obvious.
This is how we once were. If we are not mindful, we shall need to become like this again.
This is a question that I can't do to my satisfaction with a simple Twitter poll, but it's not a hard one to follow. My background is as a historian; it's where the bulk of my applied writing education wrests. Having read Vox Day's Sumna Elvetica, I wonder if I could do something in that vein- a fictional nonfiction side work.
The idea is that I could write about Galactic Christendom (and its preceding eras) in ways that the main series won't cover, using that more academic approach and formal tone, complete with footnotes and references as if it were a real scholarly work. The audience would not necessarily overlap with the main series, nor would I intended it to, so the covers and other dress would be significantly different to make plain the difference.
No, I don't know what, specifically, I would do other than focus more on the Church and its role in rebuilding Mankind after the Cataclysm into Galactic Christendom. I don't know when I would do this either; a lot of what I do want to do in this vein constitutes spoilers for the main series at this time. Thus the question: What fictional non-fiction would you want to see as an adjunct to main Star Knight books?
Our friends at World Class Bullshitters put out a lunchtime video on Captain Marvel.
Jeff's got it right. This is a mediocre film being hyped as the Second Coming, and all the bad Public Relations surrounding this film is what's going to sink it. I fully expect the same thing that we saw with The Last Jedi to repeat here, and for the same reasons. I went into the bigger reasons for why this is going down yesterday at Empire Must Fall, which you can find here.
Let's get a bit more specific here. Why is the Mouse doing this to the only other film franchise they have that's worth a damn?
For that, let me again point back to a previous Empire post, this about the aforementioned Mouse Wars film:
Anciently, when a conqueror completes a conquest one of the things done do cement control and establish dominance is to change the mythology of the conquered nation. Their heroes get degraded, their deeds defiled, and the conqueror's heroes supercede them in all ways- often with ease. To the generation surviving the conquest, this is insult added to injury, but left unchecked the generations that follow will accept this degenerate mythology as normal- and if the conqueror is wise, they leave an out for the subjects to go all the way and buy into their control. It's the mythological equivalent of killing a man, taking his wife for oneself, and slaughtering his children by her before seeding your own to both remove loose ends and make her accept the conquest as inescapable.
The people running the House of Mouse hate the West and Christianity. It's that simple. They're doing this to signify, by symbolic manipulation, that you're a conquered people due to be displaced and replaced by them and their agents. The comics side of this was the dry run, the shakedown cruise, to see if they could pull it off; as far as the Social Justice Death Cult is concerned, they can and they have, so now they're scaling up to the film versions. Expect all of the outgoing characters to get degraded in fundamental, if subtle, ways before being yanked off the stage for good; expect their replacements to wear the iconic legacies like grotesque skinsuits as they ape the actions without any of the substance that gave the prior actions meaning.
Yes, the people who make those new movies and characters happen will be incompetent. That will be by design; film and TV is a deliberate process by its nature, starting with the producers and other stakeholders. If they want to symbolically degrade before destroying and replacing heroes with their own, putting fuckups in positions to do that and cutting them checks is how you deniably do that thing. This is Basic Bitch Narrative Warfare. You change the stories, warping the past to create the present and put out the future you want to happen, and fuck the other guy. It's straight up 1984, coupled with the insult that many will be compelled to lie so blatantly about what's going on if they want to stay employed.
While the Bullshitters are focused on getting clean entertainment back, and by that they mean "No Propaganda", I know damn well it's worse than that. Fortunately, normies are not yet wholly indoctrinated; they vote with wallets and feet, so I expect a repeat of the aforementioned Mouse Wars film's box office crash and burn next weekend and those to follow. So, I suspect, does the Mouse; Endgame is a month and a half away for a reason, and that has to do with making this film's performance irrelevant in fiscal terms so its narrative impact can be maximized without fear.
This is why you have got to stop being paypigs to these people. Stop giving them your money and your attention. There are alternatives, especially from overseas, such as My Hero Academia if you want superheroes made by people that like you and want to entertain you. Domestic alternatives include Jon del Arroz's Flying Sparks, and there's more to come out of the indie world. Walk away from Omelas, folks, before you find yourself to be the forsaken child powering the utopia.
Specifically, The Hero's Journey. Scream all you want about how Hollywood reduced it to Save The Cat, but this is now empirically-proven practical psychology and you're a fool to not be familiar with it- not if you want to actually get somewhere with your fiction. Professor Geek's video below gets into why SJWs aversion to this is part of the reason their fiction fails.
Yes, you can do this in seemingly non-epic stories. It happens routinely. Yes, you can do this with Iconic Heroes. This too happens routinely. The trick? It's done to a secondary character.
Example: Dredd. Judge Dredd is one of the most solid of Iconic Heroes around. The world doesn't change him; he changes (restores order to) the world. The dynamic character change one associates with The Hero's Journey typically applies to another in his stories, and in the aforementioned film that's Anderson. You came to see Dredd be Dredd (same as his comics), but if there is a major secondary character (like Anderson) then count on that character getting the big character-defining arc instead.
Now go back to yesterday's Geek Gab episode. I mentioned this sort of thing in the chat when the issue of how to deal with stories wherein the character you're there to see (like Dredd) has to be a very focused professional just to do their job (e.g. being a Judge in Mega-City One) as intended. The same principle applies; you put the drama-llama chores on the secondary character. Go watch those big franchise films with Iconic Heroes again (like the classic Bond movies) and you'll see this used often when they want some sort of dramatic arc in the narrative.
For my work, at present, this is the role that both Creton and (in a different mode) Gabriela play; Ramsey and Sibley are Iconic sorts, so they aren't there to be changed by events- they exist to refine their being through expressing their core ethos upon the world, which (in varying forms) is to restore order when chaos disrupts it.
Friend of the blog Rawle Nyanzi took the time to mark out one key difference between what I'm doing with Star Knight and what most Space Opera stories assume in their settings. Another friend of the blog, Jeffro Johnson, focuses on this key point:
Galactic Christendom turns that idea on its head. Instead of a humanity governed largely by Enlightenment liberalism or its socialist variant, we have a humanity governed by the ideals of Christianity. They’re not even united politically; just as the different factions in Gundam nonetheless share core Enlightenment beliefs that disregard religion or nation, the different kingdoms in Galactic Christendom all share a belief in the Christian God and His morality. Thus Galactic Christendom presents a truly unique take on the space opera genre, one that goes against the prevailing trend in sci-fi and presents a perspective underrepresented in the genre today.
It's the same approach J.R.R. Tolkien took to Middle-Earth: it is presumed, and therefore does not need to be didactically explained to the reader. No one likes to be preached at, so I don't. I merely took a real-world historical example (Medieval Europe, when and where historical Christendom arose) and use that as the example I built upon to create Galactic Christendom.
There's a sound reason for how and why this came to pass, but that's Ancient History for my story and doesn't get discussed. I despise "As you know, Bob..." infodumps, especially if they are not relevant to the story at hand, so I don't do it- you, my audience, deserve to have your intelligence respected. You want to be entertained, so that's what I do; I posted an excerpt at the Study yesterday if you want to see for yourself that I mean business when I say I'm here to entertain you first and foremost.
As of this post, the Indiegogo campaign to complete Book One is at 35% towards its goal. We're on Day Three and we're already over a quarter of the way to meeting that initial goal. That's fantastic, and I hope more of you decide to book your passage to the far future of the 4th Millenium soon; I'd love to have you along for the journey. The sooner we meet that initial goal, the sooner we can really get this going with the Stretch Goals- and the new Perk that unlocks when we hit $1K. (The campaign page is here.)
Dragon Award-winner (and nominee again this year) Brian Niemeier had a great post at his blog, Kairos, today. The substance of the post concerns how the Leftists seized control over all of the institutions surrounding the cultivation, publication, and promotion of Science Fiction in the 20th Century. Specifically, the erasure of history therein in order to promulgate a new political narrative so that their cultural corruption can continue with little or no opposition.
Does this look familiar to you?
The death cult known as "ISIS" routinely vandalizes and destroys all cultural relics and institutions in the areas that they seize and hold. The purpose is to erase the culture of the conquered so that resistance to indoctrination and assimilation into their slime mold culture ceases to exist. A people that does not control their past has no future. It does not matter to what those relics or institutions belong; they are not of the cult, so they are Other and must be obliterated. This is celebrated as "justice".
Does this sound familiar to you?
The Alt-Left (Praise be to the God-Emperor for making that term known.), by way of their Antifa front, are no less a death cult. They too seek to destroy the history of the American nation, first with its institutions (see Gramasci's "Long March") and now with the relics placed as physical anchors for our history and heritage.
Why?
The goal is the same: to seize control of the culture by erasing all outside its grasp. This is Narrative Genocide.
It's straight out of Orwell's 1984. Stalin could not have done better than what the Alt-Left traitors--and yes, if you seek to genocide the history and culture of the American nation, while claiming allegiance or citizenship thereto, you are traitors--are doing now. Fortunately, the Attorney General is already investigating the Charlottesville affair; once the charges come for the major, the deputy major, and Governor McAulliffe (all of whom knew of, participated in, and gave orders to support government agents' willful abandonment of their duties) the crackdown on Antifa and their allies will come in earnest.
And such action comes none too soon. We're already pushing perilously close to countrywide political violence, aided and abetted by traitors in city, county, and state-level government. If the Rule of Law is to survive, then the hammer has to come down now and come down like the fist of an angry God upon one and all. Not just charges, but felony convictions with life-ending prison terms in maximum level security prisons. Let's see how well these fools do in a yard filled with hardened gangsters- many of which look on them with utter contempt.
The alternative is Civil War. If that occurs, then kiss the demographic trends goodbye- along with the Republic.
Music often makes or breaks a film or series. What would Indiana Jones be without the Raiders' March? What would Star Wars be without its eponymous opening and closing themes, or the Imperial March? Star Trek, Doctor Who, and many more have a core of their appeal derived from the music created as part of the production process.
We are foolish to ignore this going forward. As much as many in the PulpRev scene focus upon the written word, and secondarily upon the static image (i.e. comics), the audience likes to see and hear the glory of the hot-blooded heroes as well as read about them. In that respect, music is fundamental to success, and we would be wise to start looking now for friendly bards at all levels of the business all across the world.
Just as we should--and are--building parallel alternative institutions to repeal and replace the converged publishing houses in New York City and London, and we're now making the first moves towards severing the napes of the titans that are D.C. and Marvel, so is it wise to begin bringing musicians into the fold and begin organizing parallels to the equally-converged music business. This will bear fruit when the alt-media moves in film and television begin breaking through, and we'll be in need of their services (and be well able to pay them properly).
Imagine a future where we not only have original music made for our films and series, but we also hold concerts where they're performed live. It would be like the Animelo Summer Live series in Japan, or the live concerts at AX or ACen. Allow me to show you what this could--no, will--look like, if we have the will to see it happen:
In creating my campaign setting, I went well beyond looking at my copies of the Monster Manual and the Fiend Folio. I hauled my ass to YouTube and started looking for all the videos on the Nephilim and the Watchers that I could find. I turned on my scholar brain and began listening (and reading) for core concepts, something that Crazytown is lousy at (because the free stuff is glorified sizzle reel for their books and DVDs), and finally got enough to get working.
"The gods" are the children of the Watchers, the Nephilim, sometimes with assistance from their divine parents. They are giants, of various sizes, and of varying supernatural power.
As the Nephilim were never intended to exist, when slain their spirits remain in the world; these are the demons, and they long for physical existence more than anything else (hence all the possession) and hate Mankind more than anything else (hence all the targeting of men for oppression and possession).
The exact relationship between the Watchers and the Adversary is left for me to decide, as none of the videos spell it out, but I can intuit the likely relationship.
There is definite "purity/corruption" dynamic going on, as the Watchers are the source for all sorts of "corruption of the flesh" (i.e. creation of hybrids and other banned blendings of distinct beings). Unnatural blending of kinds, therefore, results in spiritual corruption (i.e. Face-Heel Turns) and always creates Always Evil monsters as a direct and immediate consequence.
This, right here, changes all of the assumptions about the supernatural flora and fauna of the setting. It makes reading the Monster Manual utterly useless, and it also makes cosmological assumptions just as useless because that won't be the same either. I can see the Mech Pilots getting nervous from here, as their encyclopedic lore knowledge no longer applies- and neither does the rules mechanics often tied to that lore.
Good.
This is how Dave Arneson, Gary Gygax, and M.A.R. Barker had to do it back in the day. They weren't reading generations of D&D books,
each of which increasingly referred only to other D&D books, but instead taking all of their outside sources and finding ways to make fun gameplay out of it.
It also means that players can rely more on real-world weirdness that spending hours pouring over D&D manuals, which also means that players can stop relying so much on mastery of the rules to make their own fun and find satisfaction in gameplay. They can talk more in real world natural language, and less in game-specific mechanical jargon, and that makes the game (and the campaign) far easier to get into due to removing an unnecessary barrier to entry.
The game works best when players can come at it cold (no preparation) and stupid (no prior knowledge), and removing dependence upon any such things to become effective at the table is a good step for the Game Master to take. Creating your own setting, and setting up the campaign such that players automatically default to their men being as unknowing as they are, is the best way to go about making that work.
The love-in down in Orlando is on Day Two, and the expected teaser for Episode 8 dropped today. Kudos to the trailer team on putting out something that doesn't give away the entire movie, obviating any desire to actually go to the theater to see it.
(Yes, that's from the official Star Wars YouTube channel.)
After the cotton-candy experience of The Force Awakens, I hoped that Rian Johnson would (a) be allowed to bring the awesome and (b) deliver. I haven't seen any related panels or other stuff (aside from that stunt of Rian showing up in the sleepover queue and spending three hours hanging out with fans), so I'm holding off on speculation. If you want that, the Star Wars Explained channel can hold you over for the time being.
I like that this teaser focuses on Luke, Rey, and the Force. Yes, we see--briefly--other characters doing their thing (and I expect that they'll be the focus of later trailers and ad spots), but the big mystery has to do with the Force users first and foremost; the mundane conflict of the First Order vs. the Resistance is the shadow, not the substance, of the Force conflict. If this film goes a long way to rectify the former film's serious narrative deficits, that will be enough to make it a hit with the fanbase and elevate the Sequel Trilogy out of being sanctioned fanfic.
So, like many others, I'm hoping that The Last Jedi doesn't suck. If Rian lives up to his reputation, then that won't happen.
The Mouse and Lucasfilm are putting on Star Wars Celebration in Orlando, Florida this weekend. It started today, and whatever else you can say about the convention organizers you cannot say that they don't know how to deliver on the hype. What I'm embedding below is the big 40th Anniversary panel, which has all sorts of folks who usually don't show up at Celebration doing so, and yes this does have a Carrier Fisher moment at the end. It's very hard not to feel that love for all things Star Wars after watching something like this.
(Note: The channel I took this from has plenty more panel videos to watch. Click through and enjoy.)
It's very easy to fall into the lazy habit of being cynical about everything a corporation that owns a big and beloved thing like Star Wars does, and it is unfortunate that some of that comes from the own-goals that said corporations do far too often, but let us not forget that the core of the business that these corporations operate to maximize their profits stems from the maintenance of goodwill with their proven audience.
(Yes, there's a follow-up to that last bit, but I'm reserving that for another post because it's a buzzkill after that feelgood panel. If you want a clue, here's a hint: it's about that audience, and a plan to change it.)
Right now, the generation that grew up with the prequels are now entering their big earning years. The generation that came in with the Original Trilogy are now settled with kids, and they're running the business now. (Which drives a lot of stuff building on the Original Trilogy right now, and future plans have more ties to the prequels; no one said the Mouse wasn't capable of long-term planning.) They want to take what they love and build on it. They may not know exactly what they are doing (Cargo Cult mindset), but they remember the feels and that's what's driving development.
If we can do anything good for Star Wars, it's to help these folks get the knowledge that Lucas bestowed to Filoni back firmly into the institutional knowledge of the company- and then base all future development on that knowledge going forward. Yes, they need to know the pulps that Lucas drew from. Yes, they need to know the mythology that Lucas drew from. These are the pillars that allowed Lucas to tell old stories a new setting and create a modern mythology; he told the truth, and that truth is what resonates across the decades. If we can foster that devotion to truth, and building things out of love for the truth, knowing that it is that which drives the feels that the fans are so devoted to, then we can make Star Wars great again despite the SJWs doing their worst to converge it.
