An Update and a Rant

[amberdulen]

Spent most of the weekend watching Lost and Witch Hunter Robin, editing, and playing Runescape. Runescape is like a three-dimensional Neopets, or a poor man's Final Fantasy. (It's free.) Problem with this is that by my dialup plan I only get 30 hours a month connection time, and I've already blown probably ten of them. Although that's probably a

Comments

Excellent.

[subsidaryforge]

New variations are fun and fantastic, but even if you want to make a variation of your own, it's better to know the original source than take a wild shot from a secondary.

Traditionalism is fun, too. I think I liked vampires better when they were alien and not angsty.

[ketsugami]

I can draw an analogy to my days in fan-fiction, specifically in fandoms like Ranma where the source material is done and has been for some time. What people write becomes more and divorced from the original material, in many cases clearly done by people who have read more fan-fic then actual material. Characters become more and more broadly drawn, and often end up reduced to a single iconic trait. Ditto running gags, etc.

A similar process happens to traditional mythology; you get people writing about King Arthur who are are far more informed by "The Once and Future King" or various other secondary sources then they are by any original material.

[amberdulen]

Of course, with Arthurian legend you have to draw a line on how far back you go. Is Geoffrey of Monmouth far back enough? Did the French romances count before Mallory included them? That's why legends are so much stickier than fanfics; the official canon can fluctuate.

[ketsugami]

Very true. And with Arthur you have the even murkier possibility of some actual historical truth behind the legends.

Still, I think it's reasonable to ask that people be at least a bit familiar with most of the source material. Luckily there are plenty of resources that summarize, rather than re-imagine, the early stuff.

[amberdulen]

Well, that's exactly the problem with Arthur -- the idea that there really was an Arturus of Brittania who lived during the Druidic era has gotten /so/ much press that it now /takes precedence/ in many peoples' minds against the longstanding baseline, the Morte D'Arthur. If you want to go that route, though, you have to leave out all the bits that came from French romances (e.g. Tristan & Isuelt) as well as the quest for the Holy Grail. The story is either rendered a mishmash of backgrounds or stripped of its familiarity and charm.

I'm not sure you can expect people to be familiar with the original sources because /that's not what's being presented to them/. The reason behind listening to stories is for entertainment and to establish a cultural consensus. If the cultural consensus is that Guinevere was a warrior princess and Morgana a Druidic priestess, what's the point of a casual listener opposing it? And why would they have reason to believe that there's another version out there?

[media_res]

Why? Because updating old stories with new historical discoveries is speculation in accuracy's clothing. Our best archaeologists can't fully recreate any culture's climate or attitude. The remaining holes must be filled with guesswork. But the grains of truth linking the lies give credence to it all. "How it must have really been" takes precedence over "how it has always been told." Call me a traditionalist, but I think Homer is a better authority on the Trojan war than Wolfgang Peterson (director of "Troy").

Here here. The heart of a legend is not in the evidence--it's in the story. Last year was a big year for gutting legends and stringing them out for the vultures. (Arthur, Troy . . . Troy was a travesty.)