All the Cake - But It's Just for Looking At: After a few early examples of different media's balancing acts of reward/slap for their characters, Paul Cornell brought up
The City and the Stars*, describing it as very much cake. "Nothing very bad happens," he said, "but you're not reading it for that; you're reading it for the exploration." The world-setting of Iain M. Banks came up too, for the first of
many times this weekend, but I'll leave that for a future thread.
I have to admit I'd find this damned difficult to write. World-building's quite the task when you're just doing one at a time, and it's not hard to find explorers and travel-writers who struggle to communicate what they're seeing without just framing it in the terms of their own culture. To do this while simultaneously
making up new cultures - I admire the writer who can pull that off, especially given how easy and how dangerous it is to do badly. The cultural appropriation thread underlying that sentiment, however, is for yet another talk this weekend, but I'm curious - does Arthur C. Clarke, our example cited above, manage to avoid it or do it appropriately?
Cake and Death Will Be Served at the Following Times: Audiences seem to
perceive strong genre conventions about how we hand out cake and death. In the
words of one panellist, if you’re writing space opera, “people expect
explosions with their starships”. Now, my classic SF reading experience is
broad but
shallow by some standards, I’m not ashamed to admit, but it seems as if that
wasn’t always the case – at least, not among the texts we consider the most
central of the genre. Indeed, aren’t exploding spaceships usually a sign that
you’re reading pulp sci-fi? (Then again, a genre is partly defined by its
common denominators, including the lowest). Is it, therefore, a genre
convention? I dunno; someone who’s read more Ian M. Banks than me tell me
if the Culture novels are full of explosions**.
In
any case, there are genre conventions to be respected here. Some of them are
intentional handwaves – nobody thinks about the
true existential horrors of teleportation, for instance, just about the
explosive consequences of being
telefragged. Some
of them can be permitted without thinking too closely. And yet, not thinking
too closely about it has gone wrong in the past, and continues to do so now.
There
are a handful of vile genre conventions which we can acknowledge only for long
enough to express our abhorrence. Some of the panel ticked off on their fingers
– no
redshirts, no
refrigerated girlfriends, no rape as motivation (a trope itself
bizarrely overused, as if there were many,
many SF authors who couldn’t think of more inventive ways to torment 51% of the
population; as a writer of inventive mental tortures, I have to tell you, you’re
just not putting the effort in there).
So
we’ve got respect for some genre conventions, but we acknowledge that others
need to go. What’s the difference? Well, I’ve touched on it already.
Rape-as-motivation***, murder as vengeance-fuel, and creating characters for the
sole purpose of throwing them on the bonfire of a protagonist’s backstory are
all just fucking
lazy. Proper
character development,
as GRRM could tell you, is the dividing line between
mourning a character and forgetting them, and that’s got much broader
consequences for the work as a whole. If the death of a(n exegetically)
forgettable nobody spurs a war, or a vengeance-quest, or causes a character to
re-evaluate their loyalties or morals, it can seem all the more as if that
character was inserted for that specific purpose. And that’s
so tacky, and
so hated moreover, that it’s hardly worth the trouble.
So genre conventions are a thing to be peered at closely before investing in them - and even then, invested in only delicately (unless you're David Eddings, in which case, keep up the good work). That's cool.
Death Will Be Served Hot or Cold: Please advise your waiter if you would like
vegetarian death.
The panel touched on the subject of the ratio of heroic to
anticlimactic deaths in fiction. In the real world, the number of people who
die performing acts of heroism is tiny.
By comparison, the overwhelming majority – several orders of magnitude more –
just die in their sleep, diseased, of accidents or the consequences of
accidents. Obviously, if your story’s set in a war, you’re probably going to
lose involved characters to fighting or assassination or sabotage, but even
then, there’s no need for it to always shine forth. I’ve got two examples here.
In
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, to
the horror of a passionate readership, several beta-string characters met their
ends off-screen in battle, and most of them did so with not so much as a kind
word to quell the tide of grief. This actually works differently diegetically
and exegetically; within the story, there’s an army outside (and
Death is waiting for you), and everyone’s too
tense to let useful hatred turn to crippling mourning just yet; outside it,
however, the reader can’t just glance and feel the gut-punch of revulsion and
guilt and
keep moving because they have
to. They have no such constraints on their time. They get to mourn
all day long, with no pesky invading
armies to demand their attention. I’ve just rewatched an episode of
Buffy the Vampire Slayer that deals
prominently with death (and not just in the usual way), and it
massively messes with the show’s distinctive
filming style to try to create a similar effect, lingering where a reader
lingers, on the body, on that first sentence when you realise you’ve lost
someone. You know the one I’m talking about;
if you don’t, don’t follow the link.
In
Band of Brothers, the second example I’d
like to take forward here, an awful lot of people are portrayed dying, some of
them built-up main characters, others less so. But the characters around them
are volunteer soldiers in a 20
th-century army; they have their
motivation to fight, and when their comrades die, that’s a chance they all know
they’re all taking. They’re still human –
one does break down, and comes back with PTSD – but they aren’t using
their friends’ deaths as motivation. They’re using their patriotism, mostly, and so the show has no real reason to
linger on the dead. So it doesn’t. This is character death in a very different
context to the example above.
In
both cases, we have unheroic (or rather
aheroic),
often anticlimactic deaths in combat (and an example of a TV show behaving like
a book, but
that’s Joss for you), but dealt with in contradictory fashions. But
the contradiction demonstrates something helpful; the writer has thought about
the context and treated the deaths appropriately. In
Deathly Hallows, Rowling has her main character witness the bodies of
his friends when his decision is already made. He needs no further motivation.
He’s also pretty emotionally dead by this point. But we’re given that glimpse,
still, just to
remind us what we’re fighting****. I wonder if, at that point, she’s
trying to motivate the reader as much as Harry, or whether War Is Hell and that’s
an end to it. But that’s another thread.
So
this largely turned into a post on character death and how to treat it – but in
fairness, so did the talk. Examples of brilliant cake were cited (including the
apparently legendary
Ready Player One), and the panellists touched on the
modern fashion for films which ended with
both
(
The Cabin in the Woods,
Moon and
District 9 were all cited), but for
the most part, it was death all the way. Interesting, given that at least one
of the panellists cited herself as a cake-first-and-foremost woman, that death
should just be more interesting – but then, they say drama is conflict, right?
