LeGuin on commodified fantasy

[glandis]

So Ron mentioned realizing the Roke/Rolke connection over here, and that got me thinking about reading some Earthsea. (ASIDE: shouldn't there be more acknowledgment of the Hogwarts/Roke School connection?) I wasn't up to digging out the original trilogy (I'm pretty sure opening those boxes would disrupt my living space for months, plus "what if they're not as good as I remember?"). I respect Tehanu, but it's (fully intentionally, I think) not the kind of fantasy I wanted to read right then. So I read Tales from Earthsea, and The Other Wind, and was well-nourished by them (I find those stories successfully blend what I remember as great about the original trilogy with the mature realizations of Tehanu). In her forward to Tales (wish it was available on-line - the whole thing is worth reading), LeGuin wrote:

"Commodiified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their truth-telling to sentimental platitude. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great story-tellers are copied, stereotyped, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.

What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life - of a sort, for a while."

I'd been meaning to post this as an explanation as to why I'm interested in Circle of Hands despite the fact that I'm generally not interested in gaming something as ... bleak as it seems to be. But it screamed-out upon reading pink slime fantasy and so ... it's here as its' own post, unless Ron moves it.

What to say about the subject that LeGuin didn't already express better anyway? Well, I watched 10 minutes of the SciFi/Syfy/whichever-it-was-then Earthsea miniseries, which certainly cements my understanding of what LeGuin rails against in the quote. But generally I have a bit more tolerance for commodified fantasy, a bit more appreciation of what's available from "life - of a sort, for a while." And I'd add that, to my eye, commodification is a trap that doesn't even require intention by the practitioners. Historically D&D (I'd claim) is an example of slipping towards commodification without even meaning to - that even before managerial intent to churn out commodified fantasy, the danger of treating (e.g) Drow that way was lurking, due to some combination of human nature and the reality of playing RPGs. So the transition from cool-thing to pink-slime was and will always be murky.

Still, sliding into the slime is something I'd certainly like to avoid. Circle of Hands is set from the start to cling to invention, truth-telling, intellectual and ethical complexity; set to reject platitude, sanitization; set to reject commodification. That's why it grabs me.

Similarly, in "4e barbaric pschydelic", I'm impressed by how reducing the options - creating a subset, for these particular people, in this particular game - accomplishes some of the same things. I've been feeling particularly shy and leery of trying to post about D&D of late, but I'm thrilled that the 4e game is happening and that you're posting about it, Ron. I'll be eager to read more as it unfolds.

(Another ASIDE: Ged and his gebbeth would probably be my touchstone for running the Sorcerer game I most want to run, but I find that thought incredibly intimidating.)

[Ron Edwards]

I'm breaking a number of my own rules about posting with this one, you'll see.

Buy them anew if you have to, but read the original Earthsea trilogy, cover to cover.

Regarding your quote from LeGuin: STAR WARS. STAR. FUCKING. WARS. Insert whatever "but this bit was good" proviso in there you feel. But Star Wars is very much BAD. I say this as a twelve-year-old who was nuts about it ... but with a weird simultaneous sinking feeling that only intensified.

Intention is completely irrelevant. Someone might be trying to make pink slime, they may be trying to produce something Totally Awesome, or they might not care either way. I spit on "intention."

Thanks for the kind words about Circle of Hands. I hope that's how it turns out, in the finished form.

You just provided the single best possible case for organizing a Sorcerer game with Ged & gebbeth as the touchpoint concept, regardless of any other features for the setting.

[glandis]

Hi Ron -

Damn, I knew you'd react to "intention", but I didn't want to craft a "just for Ron" way of saying it ... I think the only aspects that matter to me are that a) when you're perfectly OK with slime if it's gonna help you sell/convince people to play/whatever, you're MORE likely to get slime, and b) if you're paying attention to complexity/truth-telling/coolstuff, you're LESS likely to get slime. Oh, and that it started happening in actual-instances of D&D play even before it became obvious in D&D product. There MIGHT be something interesting about that, for RPG history and design as it meets real-world practice, but like I said - I'm feeling pretty leery about that kind of discussion of late. I simultaneously feel like I know a LOT (I was there, damnit! - my name's in Polyhedron 2, or 3), and that I don't know enough (well, I wasn't living in the Midwest/at TSR/whatever). Anyway - ignoring "intention", let me know if there are any issues with a & b above.

Star Wars - I think we've been there before, and I'm mostly with you, with the slight added respect for "life - of a sort, for a while" I already mentioned. I actually think the horribleness of the prequels makes people think more fondly of the originals than they would have.

Some part of my brain does periodically search for a spark that'd get a gebbeth-demons Sorcerer game running. But I've yet to overcome my concerns that a) it's even a fit (where is "merge with your demon" in the Four Outcomes?), or that b) I stand any chance of doing justice to the concept. Maybe the re-read (yeah, OK, screw fearing for my tender memories) will trigger something.

And thanks for breaking your rules. I'm not sure how/why, nor am I asking, it just seems appropriate to say thanks.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Gordon,

...  that it started happening in actual-instances of D&D play even before it became obvious in D&D product.

Huh, my thinking is that it's the other way around, but maybe that question is unanswerable.

I simultaneously feel like I know a LOT (I was there, damnit! - my name's in Polyhedron 2, or 3), and that I don't know enough (well, I wasn't living in the Midwest/at TSR/whatever).

I know what you mean. I just had a bad experience with someone who "was there" in the whole Lake Geneva et cetera scene, who was apparently committed to the idea that he and his friends, only, were in possession of The Truth, and was genuinely vicious about it, as in the rest of us should really shut up, completely. My response to you is to value the LOT that you know and never mind the purism of the insiders, who seem committed to narrative-control in a way I find suspicious. I'd like to listen to what they have to say, but so far, I've found about 75% of that to be defensive posturing, as well as plain mean.

[Callan S.]

Random observation from a random: I'd say flattery is the key element, rather than commodified. It's not that it has a 'life - for a short time'. It's that people will soak up flattery. It's easy to make money that way. And some audience members will get to the point where they accept nothing other than flattery - anything that requires chewing, let alone is hard to swollow, will get a vicious responce and they potentially will attempt to poison the appreciation of other audience members, hitting your sales. Thus pink slime is the safe bet. No chewing required.

[glandis]

Ron-

...  that it started happening in actual-instances of D&D play even before it became obvious in D&D product.

Huh, my thinking is that it's the other way around, but maybe that question is unanswerable.

Well, I'd agree that it's the pervasive presence in product that's most problematic (alliteration unintentional, I swear!). It's just as I think about what I actually remember (perhaps a bit unreliable), and consider the playgroup-as-creative-force, it seems likely that most everything showed up in SOMEONE's play first. The (perhaps overly-simplified) personal example I'm drawing on is "the Ranger", which I remember trying to include before (and after) there were/we had "official" rules for it. One attempt resulted in a pure commodified/slime worst-of-Aragorn clone and a few play sessions that were only headed to "this King Returns, too", with no fun for anyone but the Aragorn-player and (maybe) the DM. Another went well, with all PCs associated with a decently metamorphed to the DMs world dunedain-group. And once we had the "real" rules ... still hit-and-miss, maybe more miss. And once that Drizt-thing happened ... well, I'd pulled away from D&D by then, but I swear he's a problematic slime/commodity influence on "ranger" in d20/D&D to this day.

Callan-
I wouldn't elevate flattery to the key element. I'd say it could even be seen as simply a (very good) tool for commodification, but I'm not so attached to commodity-as-key that I'd defend it much. Still, even if I was ... flattery and its', um, addictiveness is important, no question.