Glorantha is Myth... right?

[soru]

Sorry, i meant no implication that you or anyone else here would, just that some hypothetical straw man might.

soru

[Christopher Kubasik]

Why does somebody always keep bringing the hypothetical straw man to the party?

He can't drink. Doesn't dance. And can't even serve as a designated driver.

People, let's leave the guy at home.

;)

Christopher

[Brand_Robins]

Chris, re everything you've said:

Yes.

That is all.

[Valamir]

why all of the farmers clothes are spotlessly white after a hard days work in "The Magnificent Seven".  

Thing is, that one in particular, maybe some of the others, does count as a thematic mistake, something that will makes some viewers think of the whole thing as an artificial set-bound Hollywood formal exercise of possible historical interest, instead of a dramatic story that could possibly be real somewhere. I really don't think it has a deliberate symbolic or narrative purpose: sometimes a wardrobe malfunction is just a wardrobe malfunction.

Actually that one was due to the Mexican film ministry being tired of the way Mexicans were being portrayed in American films and since it was shot in Mexico insisted on them being portrayed as clean and articulate (they also insisted on them being given a bigger role fighting for their own freedom).  A rather interesting "meta" reason which actually parallels the sorts of "meta" reasons players might bring into an RPG session to inform their play.

[greyorm]

the alternative is to tell people 'you must ignore the flaws in my art, and if you can't bring yourself to do that, then you are an inferior person'.

Here's my problem with that, Soru, by example:

People complain about the movie "the Matrix" because one of the movie's premises is that it is scientifically impossible to gather usable amounts of energy from the human body and not expend the same or more in gathering it.

This point, even though true, is completely irrelevant to the film. To bring it up is to basically shout, "Hey, I completely and totally missed the point of that whole movie!" Yet some folks cannot get past this detail in order to deal with the actual, meaningful, real issues explored by the film (tangent: whether or not they were explored well is another matter entirely and likewise irrelevant to this discussion).

Whether or not the human body would provide the energy the film claims is not the point of the film. Nor, do I think, is it a "flaw" in the film. It is missing the forest for the trees, and I honestly think modern audiences are trained from birth to do this.

Why do I think this is cultural? Consider the typical 'net conversation, where someone uses an example to support a point and then that exmaple is torn apart AS THOUGH it were the argument -- thus completely missing the point the example was serving within the argument -- as a prime indicator of this. Especially, especially, especially with metaphor. People "intelligently dissect" the metaphor, and yet completely miss the meaning.

"Look, a forest!"
"Hey, look, why is that maple over there by those birch!"

The use of metaphor that doesn't extend logically to similar situations is not a 'flaw' in the argument presented. This is a flaw in the reader, with someone who can't get past the unimportant minutia to what he should be focusing upon, to what is being said. It is a simple matter of focus.

So...the farmer's shirts are white!? So what! They could all be buck naked, and unless how they're dressed is important, it really doesn't matter because focusing on, worrying about it, considering that detail is missing the point (is this what nude theater was trying to say in the 70's?).

It is a failure to look past surface details, details that have no meaning, and into the depths of what is being expressed, actually and specifically, by the whole. Just like the fact that the human body can't produce that much energy is not important.

Forest. Trees.

Now, am I saying such people are "inferior"...no, I'm saying they're driving the wrong way down a one-way street. Basically, they're misusing the road; sure they can do it, but is it getting them anywhere? More importantly, is doing so getting them to the destination intended by the work? If not, then why are they doing that? Just because they can?

So, that's what my problem is with not ignoring the 'flaws' in art, because to me it is like complaining that Picaso's work sucks because he painted a woman with a square head, or that a painting of space has too many colors and planets never form that close to nebulae.


EDIT: Or maybe I missed your point. Not sure -- correct away. I'll let this stand instead as a commentary about how many gamers/amateur authors/readers fail to properly approach myth and symbol-use in story-telling.

[James Holloway]

People complain about the movie "the Matrix" because one of the movie's premises is that it is scientifically impossible to gather usable amounts of energy from the human body and not expend the same or more in gathering it.

This point, even though true, is completely irrelevant to the film.

Yeah, but it's a goof. I  mean, it's not like it introduces some vital element of theme. The writers were trying to sound cool and high-tech, and they buggered it up and spent a couple of minutes doing it. The fact that it's irrelevent to the plot really means that it should have been left out in the first place. Failing that, it should have been replaced with something that wasn't dumb.

Now, "filmmakers sometimes make mistakes" doesn't invalidate your argument. In general, I agree with you. It was just a stupid mistake, and not such a big deal.

The "so what" about the farmers' shirts being white is that the story of the Seven Samurai was, in this instance, being told in rural Mexico in the 19th century. I'm not saying every detail has to be picture-perfect, and the bright white shirts didn't really bother me, but you can see how it would kind of jar the viewer out of "this is 19th-century rural Mexico." And the setting is definitely part of the point of  the story.

[soru]

This point, even though true, is completely irrelevant to the film. To bring it up is to basically shout, "Hey, I completely and totally missed the point of that whole movie!"

I think we are going to have to agree to differ. The Matrix raises no interesting points, it's an empty stylistic exercise, 'cool' at the time it was produced, these days of academic interest only, mainly to those studying the development of CGI filmaking.

This is precisely because it doesn't have any level of grounding in the possibly imaginable experiences of actual people, it's all about shiny fake character's doing mysterious and nonsensical things for reasons that don't make any sense.

If you can't connect and identify with the characters in a film or story, imagine yourself in their shoes, understand why they do the things they do, then at best you can get some dry aesthetic appreciation, not actual excitement and engagement.

soru

[droog]

I'd like to suggest that the truth of Glorantha lies somewhere between the two sides posited here. It is not one with ancient myth and legend, neither is it the sort of Unified Field Theory world Chris (rightly, in my view) criticizes.

It is modern mythopoetry, inextricably linked to modern ideas and attitudes; in the same way that written fiction of our time cannot escape being part of the video world (compare Lord of the Rings with Harry Potter and ask why one translates much more neatly to the screen than the other).

The meanings we find in Glorantha are meanings of our time. Similarly, The Matrix is neither entirely uninteresting nor the sum of the meanings deliberately placed within it.

When I saw The Matrix at a local theatre in Slovenia, I had the unique opportunity of sitting close to the ideal spectator of the film - namely, to an idiot. A man in the late 20ies at my right was so immersed in the film that he all the time disturbed other spectators with loud exclamations, like "My God, wow, so there is no reality!"... I definitely prefer such naive immersion to the pseudo-sophisticated intellectualist readings which project into the film the refined philosophical or psychoanalytic conceptual distinctions.

It is nonetheless easy to understand this intellectual attraction of The Matrix: is it not that The Matrix is one of the films which function as a kind of Rorschach test [http://rorschach.test.at/] setting in motion the universalized process of recognition, like the proverbial painting of God which seems always to stare directly at you, from wherever you look at it — practically every orientation seems to recognize itself in it? My Lacanian friends are telling me that the authors must have read Lacan; the Frankfurt School partisans see in the Matrix the extrapolated embodiment of Kulturindustrie, the alienated-reified social Substance (of the Capital) directly taking over, colonizing our inner life itself, using us as the source of energy; New Agers see in the source of speculations on how our world is just a mirage generated by a global Mind embodied inthe World Wide Web. This series goes back to Plato's Republic: does The Matrix not repeat exactly Plato's dispositif of the cave (ordinary humans as prisoners, tied firmly to their seats and compelled to watch the shadowy performance of (what they falsely consider to be) reality? The important difference, of course, is that when some individuals escape their cave predicament and step out to the surface of the Earth, what they find there is no longer the bright surface illuminated by the rays of the Sun, the supreme Good, but the desolate "desert of the real." The key opposition is here the one between Frankfurt School and Lacan: should we historicize the Matrix into the metaphor of the Capital that colonized culture and subjectivity, or is it the reification of the symbolic order as such? However, what if this very alternative is false? What if the virtual character of the symbolic order "as such" is the very condition of historicity?

Slavoj Zizek The Matrix, or Two Sides of Perversion
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-the-matrix-or-two-sides-of-perversion.html

We find in Glorantha what we find. And that's its genius.

[pete_darby]

I'd just like to pick up on another points of Chris', which is a bugbear of Gloranthan minutiae hunters: Glorantha runs on myth, but it's a ragbag collection of oftimes contradictory myths and myth complexes.

This much is pretty much a commonplace in Gloranthan discussions, but it does help to get past questions of "So who's right, the Lunars, the Orlanthi, the Malkioni, or who?"

More importantly though, it gets us into the very area Chris starts in: If Le Morte D'Arthur is a christian myth, what are all these pagans doing flinging magic about, and where's the devil? If Genesis is the story of a single faith, why are there many and varied names for God in the original Hebrew, and where the heck did those Nephilim come from? Is Robin Hood a displaced cotter or a disinherited nobleman?

These myths and legends were, though the "authors" would blush to admit it, the products of contradictory syncretic myth systems in collision. To a great extent, retellings of Arthur which place a struggle between christianity and paganism, or which prize "historical reality" miss the point, that the stories are products of Babel mythology, and, in their own way, in emerging from those traditions, in speaking from them, transcend them.

And that's the kind of stories that Gloranthan players can make: I'm not saying should (all you should do is play the game you enjoy). But it seems to me that the melting pot of empowered myths generates such stories emergently.

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hi Pete,

Thanks for picking up on those points.  Since no one had mentioned them specifically, I thought I'd buried them somehow.

And the rest of ya'... We're not RPGing "At the Movies" here, so be careful!

droog, I think you're point about Glorantha (and HQ play) being a mix of past and present is well taken.  There's simply no way to literally go backward in our thinking and storytelling.  That said, Greg has made it clear he built Glorantha to help us do that very thing -- so it's part part of what Glorantha and HQ is about. Not as an intellectual exericise in Edith Hamilton style Mythology -- but, in the ideal, as an actual experience.

Certainly today's RPGers are influenced by cinema and TV.  I would only add that an aspiring screenwriter who actually read Homer, Shakespeare, Beowulf and Malory would find more in common with a contemporary screenplay -- and more to learn from in term of laying out words on the page and structuring the tale -- than he would from novels written during the time of cinema's history. Counter intuitive, but true. "Literary" today means thick blocks of text that often take pride in the densityof the language. The works I just mentioned are pointed visuals that get on with it.  

Much like HQ's resolution rules, in contrast to AD&D and many other RPG resolution mechanics.

Did I just create an anology of HQ resolution to Homeric Poetry? Yes! Because I'm not talking about a one to one analogy of product. These days I'm obsessing on analogies of creative process across media and metaphores to convey the differences what is produced in different creative agendas of play.

Christopher

[soru]

here's another way pf putting it:

Glorantha is _really_ myth.

In Glorantha, a story can be both naturalistic and epic myth, at one and the same time.

soru

[Mike Holmes]

I think that what Soru, Droog and others are getting at is that Glorantha is Mythic, not Myth.

OK, forget I just said that.

Chris, are you familiar with Chris Lehrich's definition of Myth? I think this is the problem here. Myth, as it existed in civilizations where it was a living thing, and not as it is in ours where it's a phenomenon to be observed, is about the act of explaining reality. So it very, very much has to make sense. It's basically about making sense out of the real world which can seem very senseless to some people.

So, no, when it's pointed out that Glorantha has some myth quality, it's not saying that it's like a storybook where things can be handwaved. Not in the slightest. Yes, we believe that we're making fiction, and it would work to play it your way. But it also works on another level to require Glorantha to be internally consistent as though it were "real" myths (if you'll excuse what might look like an oxymoron but is not), that we were creating.

Not to even get into the "myths within myths" concept. Looked at another way, Glorantha is a hard, hard world in which myths have power. Not any more Mythical than our world is. Just fictional.

Mike

[Christopher Kubasik]

Hand waving?

Hand WAVING?

Mike, a quick question:

Is the "world" of The Iliad hard or soft? (And, as I hope I've made clear by now, when I use "world" in that context, I'm referring to the world as we know it from that specific telling of the story.)

Is the "world" of The Odyssey hard or soft?

Is the "world" of Le Morte D'Arthur hard or soft?

Is the "world" of Beowulf hard or soft?

Is Middle Earth hard or soft?

Because I see them as hard worlds. And those are the stories I've been referencing. I'd love to hear, if you do, why you think those worlds are soft?

(And I don't know if you caught it, but I made a special plea for folks not to get caught up in the word "Myth" a while back -- and pay more attention the tales I was referencing. Did you miss that? Or are the world's of the tales I'm referencing actually all soft and I never noticed it before?)

Christopher

[greyorm]

I think we are going to have to agree to differ. The Matrix raises no interesting points...etc.

Soru, thank you for providing with your response an excellent example of the point I was making about missing the forest for the trees. That sort of thing was exactly what I was getting at! (On the other hand, if it was an unintentional example, er, well...oof...)

[droog]

Certainly today's RPGers are influenced by cinema and TV.  I would only add that an aspiring screenwriter who actually read Homer, Shakespeare, Beowulf and Malory would find more in common with a contemporary screenplay -- and more to learn from in term of laying out words on the page and structuring the tale -- than he would from novels written during the time of cinema's history. Counter intuitive, but true. "Literary" today means thick blocks of text that often take pride in the densityof the language. The works I just mentioned are pointed visuals that get on with it.  

I don't agree, Chris, though I've got a lot of intuitive sympathy with what you're getting at. I think that none of the tales you mention (in their original form) are anything if not a display of 'the density of language'.

'Words, words, words.'