by Stormsong
Why create? Simple enough question. Why make a thing? For some people, it’s the praise of their peers or parents. For some, it’s about success, possibly financial. Some want to punish the audience for their hubris, while others wish to reward their audience for their perseverance. Those last two are often the same people…
I have a basic understanding of keyboards. Sometimes I eat them to gain their powers. As such, I am of a mind to commit an exploration of the question of creation and why we do it.
Creation is, at its core, communication. We communicate a concept, a person, an opinion, or even a whole world to the audience. If there is one abiding characteristic to all of this, though, it is love. I’m not talking about a sappy emotion, but about the driven and dedicated kind of love that let Beethoven write his 9th Symphony.
I once asked a learned man to define love for me. I immediately regretted that decision and went to a more learned man after drinking away the memory. Thankfully, he answered more appropriately, offering two definitions: Love is a proactive, conscious choice to give and care for another. If you love something, you care for it. Care is not a byproduct, it is the very act itself from which love is derived. The other definition he offered was this: The joy or recognizing virtue in something or someone. As applied to art, to the act of creating something; we can care about something by putting effort into and by recognizing the virtue of its existence.
So a question then: Why don’t we feel that love all that much anymore when watching movies or playing new video games? Where has it gone? Is there virtue, no beauty in the arts or entertainment? Have the creators stopped caring?
The answer is simple: Our society has lost touch with love of creation and in place of creating art we have become addicted to the factory act of milling out content. Content. Let that word sink in. Not art, not entertainment… Content. It is merely filler, to be eaten, expelled, and forgotten. But it doesn’t require or deserve love, and it does not love back.
Where did this start? Well… it’s complicated, but it starts with artists that we often herald as the greats; men who loved their craft and were loved for it. Let us examine a few examples. I will start with Tolkien, then Roddenberry, Lester Del Ray, Michael Moorcock, and some others. Then finally, I will even address our own humble gaggle, the Black Pants Legion, so that you might understand what I mean by love. Then I will bring us to the example of the only genuine artistic failure you could ever really make; to make something without love.
J.R.R. Tolkien dreamed up the story of the Hobbit to tell his children at bed time and, ostensibly, only wrote it down because his son would get mad at him for changing details during a retelling. But Tolkien didn’t just have a story for his children; care and love for a child is one thing but Arda is a world of mythological and moral complexities beyond a child’s grasp and Tolkien knew that. Moreover, if it was only ever for his children, he would not have drawn inspiration from his experiences at the Battle of the Somme. He loved his children, and his stories were for them, but they were also for his beloved Britain and they were for him.
Tolkien was invested in ideas like culture and history and nested in notions of faith and heritage. He didn’t even need morality to be an objective in his writing; it was going to be there instinctively. However, need or not, he did engage it anyway with all intentionality.
In Letter 131, addressed to Milton Waldman (then his publicist) in 1951, he said, “Also – and here I hope I shall not sound absurd – I was from early days grieved by the poverty of my own beloved country: it had no stories of its own (bound up with its tongue and soil), not of the quality that I sought, and found (as an ingredient) in legends of other lands. There was Greek, and Celtic, and Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Finnish (which greatly affected me); but nothing English, save impoverished chap-book stuff [books for young boys]. Of course there was and is all the Arthurian world, but powerful as it is, it is imperfectly naturalized, associated with the soil of Britain but not with English; and does not replace what I felt to be missing…”
Lacking an English epic, as opposed to one composed in Anglo-Saxon or Norman French, Tolkien desired to offer Britain a Mythology, or something like it. He wanted it to contain his moral truth (he was a practicing Christian) but not be explicitly bound to it, and resemble a Britain from times pre-Christian or at the dawn of Christendom. That Tolkien wrote said story around the characters of a regular hobbit with no great power, forced to the edge of breaking to accomplish a righteous task; a rightful king who first chose to heal the ailing before assuming his princely mantle; and a celestial being who bound himself to mortal form so that he might not deprive men of the right to win their own moral battle… Tells us what Tolkien was trying to communicate (in between spending whole paragraphs on a single flower). Tolkien saw the value of heroes and a people being able to invest in the ideas behind them.
Let us examine a very different writer now. Gene Roddenberry was rather different from J.R.R. Tolkien. A secular Humanist, he was an atheist for much of his life. By the end he left hints at the idea of some pantheistic belief; that perhaps there was a god of some sort but not one he would name and that was present in all things.
If we examine his most popular and well-known creation, Star Trek, then much like Tolkien’s LOTR we can see the kind of ideas he wanted to communicate. In Star Trek TOS, we see a story of adventurous explorers, each with their strengths, their failings and their own personal tragedies. Captain Kirk, a realist and yet an idealist, is a charismatic yet disciplined man who suffers the loneliness of his position and a lifetime of travel keeping him from ever having a family. Spock is a hybrid caught between worlds, balancing his Vulcan emotions with his human desire to be like his cold, logical Vulcan father; so guarded that no vulnerability can escape and bound to view the world through a scientific lens. McCoy is a man who left behind the death of loved ones to become a doctor aboard a ship on dangerous missions, often the one to see crewmen off to their final rest as he attempts to save lives. We see a through-line of hope and tragedy, cast against the backdrop of an optimistic future.
Unlike Lord of the Rings, which is designed to enthrall us and awaken us to the moral and heroic, Star Trek is designed to entertain and at the same time demand that we ask questions. Time and again, we are witness to strange worlds and ideas and yet rarely are we told to judge. Whether it is the absurdity of meeting Abraham Lincoln in space, the fact that the god Apollo was actually a space alien, or the terrifying complexity of Khan, we are never told how to judge, only to consider and to hope.
In fact, Roddenberry did something profound when, during the Cold War and Vietnam (with the memory of World War II still smoldering in many minds) – he proposed a future where differences were not put aside but instead held up and peace could happen all the same. Vulcans, Andorians, and Humans did not become the Federation because they removed their differences or adopted the same culture.
They informed one another, but Vulcans remained the emotion-suppressing people; the Andorians remained militaristic; the Humans remained explorers and emotionally open – and never once are we told one or the other is wrong or right. We see the difficulties of living with these cultures; Kirk and McCoy pay for their devotion with pain and age, while Spock faces his burden of control alone in the light of his people’s exacting culture. In later series, we see Picard face trauma, Data struggle to be human, and Sisko fight to hold together fragile alliances at the cost of his conscience, but we are never made to judge. We are only asked: What if?
If Star Trek inspired anything besides a generation of scientific dreamers who came to love science, it also taught that we could (as individuals and as groups) remain ourselves and yet be better than ourselves… all during the height of the Cold War. That is not something an unloved story could accomplish.
I’ll wager that, knowing what I’m getting at now, a handful of you are reading this and bemoaning the state of Fantasy and Science Fiction today. Where have these Tolkiens and Roddenberries, these Herberts and Le Guins gone? Why does everything feel flat, without hope or consequence, or heroism, or even the simple question, “What if?” Again, where’s the love?
I could be blithe and say, “Hollywood happened,” and that would not be entirely wrong, but the truth is (as always) more complicated. In good faith, however, I can offer something of an abridged answer. It is a trio of cultural epochs among hundreds that contribute, but it will illustrate my point. In 1977, Judy-Lynn del Rey and her husband Leonard Knapp (best known by the authorial pseudonym Lester del Rey) founded a branch of Ballantine Books called Del Rey Books.
I’d guess that that means something to only a few of you, but to clarify, this was the publisher of, “The Sword of Shannara” by Terry Brooks, “The Dragon Riders of Pern” by Anne & Todd McCaffrey, “The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant” by Stephen R. Donaldson, “The Princess Bride” by William Goldman, and even things like the novelizations of Robotech, Halo, and Star Wars. There is hardly enough word space to go too deep but with summary in mind, now that you know what we’re talking about, let’s pull this thread.
Del Rey Books was/is a juggernaut and is seen by some as the foundation of the Fantasy genre, for both good and ill. You see, for every Sword of Shannara or Princess Bride, there were a hundred more generic novels. In fact, there was a “Del Rey Book Formula,” which younger or even mid-level writers were expected to follow without too much variation. High fantasy, clear cut battles between good and evil, grand quests, dark lords, chosen ones, wise mentors; every trope you could think of was practically a requirement.
What is often called Tolkien-derivative was, in truth, far more a product of a curated and controlled genre rather than unoriginal authors mimicking one of the greats. Indeed, Tolkien’s morality was absolute but it was not clear cut and there were certainly no chosen ones, even if there were dark lords. Still, the derivatives were so numerous, one could even blame the existence of Dungeons & Dragons (or rather its aesthetics) on this very cultural zeitgeist.
Many of these stories were broadly entertaining if only barely inspired, but there was still a spark. Outside of a format, these authors did not have the internet or focus groups, so they still had a great deal of latitude that modern (published) authors rarely enjoy. Even so, it was the beginning of entertainment as a factory milled trinket, not a toy hand-carved with care and possibly even love. Love could slip in between the cracks, but it would begin to lack.
But I said three cultural epochs, now didn’t I? Let us examine our second: Dark fantasy and dark sci-fi always existed; Tolkien’s work gets pretty dark itself, but there was of course the nightmarish works of H.P. Lovecraft, the cynical realpolitik of the surrealistic Dune by Frank Herbert, and the Nietzschean brutalism of Howard’s “Conan the Barbarian.” These were already pillars of their own. However, there is a difference between dark fantasy as a broad category and Dark Fantasy” and I think you’ll know what I mean.
It’s hard to say when Dark Fantasy really began, sometime in the late 70s or early 80s, but it is often credited to its god-father Michael Moorcock, the author of Elric of Melnibone. This is contentious because Moorcock might better fit into dark fantasy as a broad category. Even so he certainly became the face of Dark Fantasy as a brand when many authors in that camp echoed his criticisms of the ‘overly bright’ aesthetics of Fantasy such as Tolkien. Whoever the father, the movement was cemented in 1987 with a well-known if simple phrase. “In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.”
1987’s “Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader” rulebook gave name to a thing and by the early 1990s it was picking up steam. Grim Dark was the name of the game, and over the next few decades we would see a gradual increase in the dark themes in fantasy, science fiction, comic books, the emergent video game market, television, and movies. Even today, we now categorize fantasy and science fiction with regards to how Grim Dark it is or isn’t, with new terms flying about like Grim Bright, Noble Bright, and Noble Dark.
In and of itself, dark fantasy is not the problem, but Grim Dark became its own mirror to the Del Rey Formula. Notable exceptions such as Glen Cook’s, “The Chronicles of the Black Company,” stand on their own merits. However many works of speculative fiction have become reactions to the Flanderized moralism of The Lord of the Rings and other works such as the original Star Wars trilogy. There can be no destiny, no object of true evil, no clear morality; in fact it is better if morality itself is decried as naive or hypocritical and evil is merely a matter of perspective.
The beginning of the end came in 1996 with a novel by George R.R. Martin: A Game of Thrones. A good book in and of itself, it would be the harbinger of something deeply unfortunate. Like Moorcock, Martin is critical of moral focus in speculative fiction. In the first book of, “A Song of Ice and Fire,” Martin clearly lays out a highly detailed world, well-thought-out in every regard. He deconstructs the morality of prior eras with the brutal realpolitik of Westeros, punctuated with the beheading of a lead character who, at that point in the story, is one of the only truly moral characters. It is devastating, well written, and abundantly clear in its message: Politics is a zero-sum game, and the people who play zero-sum games are cut-throat and without ethical framework.
You could not choose a more drastic difference between authors, Martin and Moorcock vs. Tolkien and Roddenberry. But this is still true at this point in our tale: These four authors and those like them wrote what mattered to them with little if any regard to outside voices. They wrote their work, hopeful or spite-driven, with love. This, however, was about to change, for our third epoch now comes into play.
By the 1980s, the internet entered its embryonic stage and by the publication of A Game of Thrones in 1996 we were already in the age of chatrooms and websites. In 2001, The Lord of the Rings became a film juggernaut, giving birth to a new age of Fantasy and Science Fiction in Hollywood, and it was as profitable as Solomon’s mines. Then, in Spring of 2011, Martin’s, “A Game of Thrones,” hit live on HBO. I cannot overstate how important this moment is, not as a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire (for though I was at the time, the halo has long faded away) but from a logistical perspective.
Fantasy was not just something for big movies; it was marketable for television (which was rapidly becoming streaming). It was born into an age where social media meant near real-time audience interaction with creators, where criticisms were posted by YouTubers the day of release, and the rising Twitter ecosystem grew in influence.
Something happened then that the Del Rey’s Formula would pale against. Film is necessarily limiting compared to literary text. Even with a mini-series, much like Peter Jackson’s LOTR films and the Sci-Fi Channel mini-series Dune before it, Game of Thrones was forced to eschew its nuance rapidly over the seasons. At the same time, the real-time interaction between author and audience, or rather more fatally, marketer and audience meant that fan feedback was immediate and amplified. Add to that, influencer culture was on the rise and the signal-to-noise ratio became catastrophically blinding.
Three things happened rapidly: One: Companies who once had to work in information vacuums with weeks or months in between release and feedback were now assaulted by it within hours or even minutes of release. Second: Unstable social media algorithms favor negative feedback because we as humans are attuned to negativity as a survival mechanism. Third: Marketing in companies came to the seemingly reasonable strategic conclusion: They had to dominate (buy) the influencers and inform the audience what was trending or they would be capsized by the waves of informational noise Twitter was now firing at them in volley. They would seize that control and in turn subject themselves to the influence of the loudest voices on the internet, rather than either the common majorities or the devoted students of any craft.
This meant that repetition of success was the primary strategy. If dark fantasy, deconstructionism, cynicism, and the ever envied R or M rating were successful like they were with A Game of Thrones, then they would be everywhere else. Inversely, if material of any kind was risky it had to be subdued and have its hard edges sanded off. If it was too intellectual, it had to be reduced so that the most average middle-schooler could understand it; but if it didn’t feel intellectual it had to be shined with an intellectual veneer that rapidly bordered on the pretentious. It could not offend; it could not be smart or dumb, and it could not deviate from the notable successes in formula.
That it was dark fantasy was half fluke – If it had been The Lord of the Rings in 2011 and A Game of Thrones in 2001, I doubt the outcome would have been overly different. However, the cynical nature of Martin’s work did gel nicely with the tone set by the negativity-chasing algorithm.
Thus, a new “Del Rey Formula,” was born. Cynical, mediocre, and all spectacle; and what can you remember of entertainment from the mid to late 2010s? Even as we moved from the piss-filter era of game design, film adopted a muddy, colorless, and desaturate aesthetic. Every show embraced cynicism and Hot-Topic nihilism, Flanderized the original brilliance of A Game of Thrones and following it’s own rapidly diminish aesthetic value.
Even the things that were reasonably good were mimicry of or parallel to the HBO titan. The Walking Dead, Vikings, Rick and Morty, Breaking Bad, Spartacus: Blood and Sand, Hannibal, The Boys, and the list goes on. It either had to be dark or irreverent and it was best if it was both. There didn’t have to be a point, and if you could piss on something in the process, all the better. Love was becoming a dying commodity.
Now, I will state for the record here; I love dark fantasy as much as I do bright fantasy (The Chronicles of the Black Company, Berserk, War of the Lions, etc.), but one can be a fan of something and know when they are being fed slop (and AI wasn’t even a factor here yet). In 2015, a pre-existing term came to coin, and it summarized what we have today: Content.
We don’t have stories anymore, not like we did. We have content. We don’t have Tolkien, and by the end of the 3rd season of HBO’s, “A Game of Thrones,” we didn’t really have Martin either. People like Roddenberry and Moorcock are disappearing from these shores, departing for their Undying Lands, and George Lucas is soon to follow… and what are we left with?
New Star Trek lacks all of the Shakespearian pretense of the old, filled with cynicism and judgment where there should be hope, all with the shiny joy of the actors being allowed to say Fuck now, like we were in middle school… and not a single “What if?” in sight. Star Wars is a hollow shell of itself, where Luke Skywalker, who once risked death to rescue a Sith Lord because he still saw good in him, would think to kill his own nephew out of a passing moment of fear. Game of Thrones became a recursive spiral of predictable character deaths and shock value, and The Rings of Power has as less to do with Tolkien’s work than even the lowest-brow Del-Rey budget-bin novel. And Moorcock? No-one is going to make Moorcock’s work into a show nowadays; it would be revolting to too many, and to others it would just look like a rip-off of its own protege, The Witcher.
Why do I bring all this up? There are two reasons: Because there is hope, and it requires us to acknowledge fault and seek the antidote. I say fault because there is a fault to be had. It would be easy to blame algorithms and businesses, people like Martin in his cynicism or the Del Reys, or Bezos or a million studio heads and investors. Rightly, they share a portion of the blame.
But no. To know who is to blame, then to quote V, we need only look in the mirror – it is us. We the people are to blame, not because of some conscious decision but because of a million little decisions: We are fed bad films and somehow we accept it, and when we are served more we act shocked, as if we didn’t ask for it by our own inaction. We either carry the negative waves of social media or we hide rather than challenging them.
But even if that assessment was unfair, even if saying it is our fault is unkind, it doesn’t change that no-one can change this but us. If we do not force it to change, either by adding something new or taking our support away from the Content mill, then we might as well be to blame.
And the antidote? Well that’s us too. We the consumers, we the viewers, we the little ones waiting for Tolkien to tell us a story. Let me offer you an example from my part of reality – The Black Pants Legion. We are a bundle of self-described, “Shit-Posters,” who revel in the absurd and the epic alike because it makes us happy and it makes you happy. The real trick is, even if it makes you (the audience) happy – if it did not make us happy, you would know and it would die away. The secret sauce is that we do this because we love to do this. There’s that word, love; our society is addicted to content, not art. We are squandering our “What ifs” and there is no love in that.
I sit in the music mines with Goat and Maestro and others as we harvest the songs from our think-meats, while Crow and Hutz slam their heads violently against computers to make them render videos. Iden carves away at edit after edit, and Krispy and Red cramp their fingers to fill pages with art so that we can keep on creating. Bionic Babe and Digs keep and organize this royal mess and allow every video to reach YouTube, Twitch, the Patreon, and wherever else it belongs. And that’s only a handful of our number: Beeple studios is 30+ people and WBPL76 nears 100. Every part of this gaggle does it because we love to.
Do you know what we don’t do? We sure as hell don’t try to remake Star Trek and then act like it’s ours. Perish the thought – let Roddenberry and those actually like him make Star Trek. If the Legion tried to make Star Trek, Data would use the brown note to humiliate the crew and kill Worf, proving that the brown note is truly threatening. The episode would be called: “Commander, I Am Going to Shit Yourself…” (Credit for that episode to Techie95, a scholar and a… scholar)
No. We make what we love. We don’t ask permission. We don’t file off the edges. We don’t make anything we don’t want to make. We don’t sing someone else’s song or forge other people’s vision. We make our own, we make what we want and we make it when we want. We take the blows, we get back up, we keep going, and we do not squander our “What Ifs.” As a result… We are never ashamed of what we create. If it wasn’t perfect the first time… well, we’ll get it next time. We clean the blood off of our lips and we keep going for the next goal.
Tex, in a pep talk, once said to me (and I’m paraphrasing), “What we have is magic. You have magic, and you can use it to make people smile. That isn’t content, that is art. Content is a sin. Art… is something else entirely.”
So what is the point of this entire rant? Don’t chase algorithms. Outgrow formulas. Crash into walls and try new things, and above all, do what you do with love. Never let what you make just be content; never be content with slop, and all those little, “What Ifs?” Don’t squander them. They’re precious, and you should take a hold of them like they matter.
Because they do.
Storm Song is a musician, sound engineer, video editor, and Hussite revolutionary. Hailing from dry mountains near that wrong turn at Albuquerque, his name strikes fear into those who just want a moment of silence. Leave him an offering of sushi and he may just spare your eardrums!
