Are There Any Valid Criticisms? (aka Kalessin's Rant)

[littlemanpoet]

I will be more precise in my critique of AD&D, Aiwendil. By the way, I was a DM many years ago. I quit in order to clear my mind of the foundationless categories I realized were taking over my mind, and also to give my time to writing and reading stories.

The encyclopedic mish mash to which I referred above reduces all the elements to their lowest common denominator because, as published, the 'tomes' have divorced these elements from their original contexts. Yes, the gods & demi-gods tome categorizes according to origin, but the entites are extracted from their stories. The stories were not merely the vehicles of, but the worlds in which the various monsters, etc. existed. By removing them from their contexts the publishers leave the gamer 'at sea' (at least for those who want the context) or worse, the gamer is left with stock figurines to handle as mere marionettes when from their contexts they are so much more.

Sorry for the melodrama regarding modern education. I think the whole system is flawed, but that, as you say, does not necessarily bear on the discussion at hand.

Star Wars is, as you suggest, basically fantasy in a science fiction setting. But it is good fantasy. ET is a fairly mainstream movie that is based around a simple science fiction premise. It is not really fantasy in any sense. And Star Trek is certainly not. Star Trek is pure science fiction, with high-concept plots and such. It is certainly not fantasy, and has really had no impact on the genre.

I don't consider Star Wars or Star Trek to be bad, but I to consider them to be heavily influential in terms of modern fantasy. I think it is an error to distinguish too strongly between fantasy and science fiction. I agree with C.S. Lewis on this point, who wrote that once we had the whole world discovered, that's when fantasy stopped being written about exotic places on earth and started being written about places not on earth. It's part of why Tolkien and Lewis made their agreement that Lewis would write a space travel story and Tolkien would write a time travel story. They both understood that science fiction, no matter how technologically accurate the modi operandi might be, is the next realm of fantasy.

You can hardly blame things that are not designed to be art for the decline of an artistic genre.

As to blame, I don't know that I'd go that far. What I am saying is that these things which are not necessarily art nevertheless make up the working categories with which the people who buy and sell and write and publish the banal fantasy happen to work. In other words, by and large, these categories as influences, whether art, or intellectual resource, or philosophical paradigm, are precisely that to which their imaginations are limited.

But I would widen your analysis to include Final Fantasy and other variations of computer and RPG games. These products are now part of the cultural landscape and extremely influential.

Thanks, Kalessin, for widening my original categories. As I implied, there are more than I delineated. And you have struck the nail on the head as to what I've been getting at as to cultural landscape.

Back to failure of education. Melodramatic, maybe, but there was a shift in emphasis in roughly the middle of the 20th century away from 'essentials', toward 'self-realization'. This was nationwide in America. It resulted in an entire generation being educated in how to express themselves based on nothing but themselves and whatever happened to be in their environment; this as compared to an education based in the 'essentials', consisting of the best art, literature, language and knowledge base that western civilization had produced. The result is that an entire generation has been cut off from the past. This was a grave cultural tragedy. The results we are discussing in terms of banal fantasy are but one arena of the disaster. If I'm being melodramatic, please show me how.

[ April 06, 2002: Message edited by: littlemanpoet ]