#and the giant evil fantasy pope

[zylphiacrowley]

If DSR has taught me one thing it's that WoL has the shittiest peripheral vision.

[rancidslime]

I love that Elden Ring really balances dark fantasy with some very whimsical choices that put me in mind of the old school fairy tales the game is clearly trying to evoke. Yes, you're a semi-mortal whose people were expelled from paradise, here to scramble for the crown of Heaven. Yes, here's a thousand-armed terrible giant, and a dragon made of clear glorious crystal, and a witch living in a porcelain doll stuffed with brambles and moonlight.

But also please enjoy a turtle pope, and a big happy jar who wants to be your friend. A friendly ratman becomes your personal tailor. Look to your left and you'll find Patches playing with his pussy in a dark cave, being Bald and Evil

[kariachi]

Okay, but, if you like Pern but are unhappy with... how much it is shit? I really do recommend Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar series. It’s ain’t perfect (rep can be middling at best, you will be sat there going ‘if I see another age-gap romance I swear to the gods-’, ‘divine right of kings’ is there and makes sense in-universe but also will niggle people, there is so much rape and it’s a bit more graphic- though that one is tempered by her actually treating it as a horrible, evil thing and being really fucking open about it, you will not see ‘but she liked it so it was fine’ in the Valdemar books) but it is still so good.

Things Valdemar does better than Pern

Companions. The angel bondmate horses may not be as cool as dragons, but damnit if the relationships between them and their Heralds isn’t better than the rider/dragon ones

Also, they’re the reason the Divine Right of Kings thing works- in-universe the reason Companions are around is the first king of Valdemar prayed to the gods for some way to ensure his kingdom would always be under the care of good, trustworthy, moral people, and so Valdemar was given the Companions, who only bond to good, trustworthy, moral, incorruptible people who would throw themselves into fire to ensure the health and wellbeing of others, and the ruler must be Chosen by a Companion

Seriously, finally some good fucking ‘divine right’

Leans hard into it’s fantasy setting, so you don’t have to deal with smug ‘everything here is based on science’ bullshit when the science is out a third grade textbook. Is shit weird? Yeah, it’s magic, move along.

The rep is there, which if you’ve read Pern you’ll know is a big jump. POC exist outside of backstory and get to be main characters, queer peeps get to be main characters, everyone gets stories

There are even a-spec characters! One is specifically because she traded her sexual desires, urges, and interests to her goddess in exchange for becoming a holy warrior of protection and vengeance (which her goddess made damn sure was something she honestly wanted to do in the depths of her heart, with full understanding, first, because the gods in this series are Good) but still!

Woman. Characters. Done. Right. There’s a lot of bullfuckery going on, but the women have agency, lead stories far more often, don’t get pushed aside (in their own stories, thank you Dragonflight) for focus on male characters, aren’t pitted against each other in ‘not like other girls’ bullshit

Seriously, all I can picture is if Mercedes had written Dragonquest. Brekke would’ve been the main character and we would’ve gotten her entire fucking story from pre-Search to while F’nor was healing (and he wouldn’t have fucking raped her, not and remained a protagonist, and the dragon shit wouldn’t be nearly so bad, and just it would’ve been so much better)

And I know Pern doesn’t have gods or religion (which, ugh) but y’all I enjoy the gods in the Valdemar series so much? Like, they aren’t generally involved in shit but it’s also very much because they value the free will of their followers? They’ll only get involved if their followers ask it of them. This even leads to differing relationships with differing gods by differing people.

‘But Achi that sounds like a recipe for disaster‘ It is! Karse spends centuries in holy war against Valdemar because a group of fuckers decided to use their religion for power and this hands-off method means Vkandis (their god) couldn’t do anything until the people were in such fear of their own religious leaders that they started asking him for help, and by then it was so bad he had to 1) literally perform the miracle of animating a giant statue of himself, plucking the crown off statue-him’s head, shrinking it down, and using it to crown his chosen Son of the Sun (basically fantasy-pope but Moreso) while granting her all the power one would expect a sun god to grant his mortal representative; 2) burn every corrupt, high-ranking priest in the country alive simultaneously, just to get shit to where something could actually be fucking done before the world ended

We call him ‘Vkandis the Unsubtle’ for a reason, the other one being that when, millennia ago, a kingdom prayed to him for protection from threat outside their kingdom he erected a fuck-off-tall wall of magical fire around their country that only allows those who can be trusted to do no harm and keep their mouths shut in

btw there are gryphons behind the wall of fire. Does Pern have gryphons? No, because Anne was a pansy.

And the thing with the gods leans into something else I love about this series- the characters are people, with virtues and flaws. They make mistakes, those mistakes have consequences (some of them far reaching- why does Valdemar not have magic? Because the last magic user, in an attempt to protect the kingdom from enemy mages, set up a security system that ended up driving every magic user in the kingdom mad and so guess what), and people get called out on them. Sometimes good people do bad things, bad people can have good in them and that doesn’t make them right, the characters are just more well-rounded than Anne’s. Right up to the gods themselves.

It’s not the perfect series, but I really recommend it to anyone who’s read Pern and wanted something less... that.

[voicesbyzane]

Ive only seen 40k, what is Age of Sigmar and whats wrong with it??

Okay so before Age of Sigmar and Warhammer 40k, you have classic warhammer fantasy. I really love warhammer fantasy because there are tons of really interesting factions at play, and it’s not as dour as the GRIMDARK FUTURE of Warhammer 40k. Sometimes good people win. Sometimes there’s joy. At the same time, most factions have a good balance between good and evil (aside from chaotic evil factions like the Skaven, Dark Elves, and Chaos). The Empire of Man is on the whole a healthy society but there’s a huge divide between commoners and nobles, as more and more men are sent to seemingly unending wars and witchhunters kill tons of people to root out wicked chaos. The dwarves are a technologically advanced faction with glorious riches and comfy as fuck mountain halls, but are so conservative in their viewpoints they simply can’t adapt to new problems and survive. The Lizardmen are and always have been devoting their entire existence to defeating chaos, but sometimes their “great plan” includes killing the other factions as they try to settle their continent of Lustria.

Like 40k, the big bad of Warhammer Fantasy is Chaos; They’re the big slightly damp rag of destiny coming to wipe the slate clean. The forces of the world fight against chaos, but eventually, Chaos WILL win. This leads us to the End Times.

The End Times is a lore and ruleset addition that details the inevitable apocalypse of the world of warhammer fantasy. Lots of crazy shit happens. I can’t cover all the lore but notable events include:

The Skaven basically take over the world and blow up the fucking moon (no seriously)

Nagash, basically the pope of the undead and most evil character in warhammer lore, returns

The lizardmen go to space (again, seriously)

The forces of chaos body the empire and effectively destroy everything

All your favorite characters are killed in really fun/really disappointing ways

So what follows the End Times? Why, the Age of Sigmar of course! AoS turns up the “Fantasy” dial of warhammer fantasy. Waaaay up. Glowing golden knights in giant magical armor, robo dwarves driving big dumb airships covered in lightnight cannons. Giant Undead skeletal constructs covered in spooky bullshit.

Instead of a complex mythos of different cultures essentially handling different conflicts in different ways, it feels like a big dumb video game. All those factions I talked about? Now boiled down into 4 main alliances. Order (Humans, dwarves, elves), Destruction (Greenskins, Ogres), Death (Vampire Counts, Zombies) and Chaos (Skaven and, er, Chaos). 

No more intercultural conflicts (War of the Beard, Bretonnians vs Wood Elves, Lizardmen vs Human colonizers). No more human elements like civilian life and peacetime culture. Just big goofy armies fighting in big goofy environments for the sole purpose of big goofy fights

[3nlight3n3d-b0y]

Learning: The Women’s War

Intro

So I’m back after a very long time. My last review was on Cinder by Marissa Meyer, but I wasn’t really enjoying the sequel and decided I didn’t want to continue the series. It had just gotten too cheesy as a YA book, which I also think I’ve realized is a genre I don’t like.

As per my next book review I’m not totally sure what to do for it. I’m just started reading Undine  by Friedrich de la Motte Fouque, which is just a really old fairy tale book that I’m not sure would fit so well into the series.

But anyhow, into The Women’s War.

(P.S. sorry for bad cover resolution)

Overview

The Women’s War by Jenna Glass was published just March of this year (2019) and is the first book of the series, which has obviously yet to be continued. It’s an epic fantasy novel and is pretty long at 560 pages and mostly consists of court intrigue, drama, magical development, and, you guessed it, gender commentary.

The book fantasy setting has many of the medieval European tropes (except for a an important organized religion and with even more patriarchy) with mild-fantasy elements, so lots of magic but no dwarves, elves, dragons, or dungeons. It’s more of a A Game of Thrones setting theme but way smaller, less fleshed out, and more magic (which is gendered). It follows a cast of higher nobility across a few kingdoms as they vie for control and safety with conflicting interests, though the idea of who the good guys/bad guys are is pretty obvious by a third of the way in.

The main protagonist is a de-legitimized daughter of the king whose divorced mother ends up casting a powerful spell that cause a massive earthquake and creates “the Curse” which allows women to control their fertility. Needless to say this huge event is the catalyst for the plot. The story consists of a lot of well developed and realistic characters, making the characters the strongest point of the book. The book starts off feeling rather slow but gets faster as it progresses until it ends in an unexpected cliffhanger as a set up for the next novel.

My Thoughts

When I got this book I obviously new it was a super feminist fantasy novel and such. I was a little worried at first that it would be done poorly and it would just be a really ignorant black/white dichotomy of men = bad/women = good or masculinity = bad/femininity = good. Fortunately it didn’t have that at all and there are several good male characters and it doesn’t come across as bashing at all, and in fact despite the feminist marketing and title the feminist theme was more of a well-express undertone.

In terms of its feminist messaging I do have an issue though: it only focuses on rich people and the higher nobility. I don’t know if there’s a single line of dialogue from someone who isn’t somewhere in line to be a ruler or one of their high-ranking servants, which creates some issues. First of all, though it would be difficult to do a political drama focused on peasants, all the female characters were born into great privilege (even the very important “abigails” (prostitutes) in the book had to first be born into nobility to be outcast). This creates the issue that it’s basically affluent women competing with men for more affluence and dealing with specific class gender roles that mostly only effected upper class women.

There’s nothing in here about some peasant woman in a setting based on the time period in which 95% of the population was peasants. As a result it’s not really a “Woman’s War” in the book but conflicts of specific women with an implication that they represent all women. This issue is very much demonstrated in the fact that thought the Curse would have changed society and culture it’s mostly focused on in terms of its political implications.

Full disclosure: I’m really into world-building and it’s usually something I like to read a lot into.

In this book the world-building is also not too great. The setting is pretty shallow and lots of places have pretty lame names. There’s also the issue that though it’s set in a medieval period and it has some organized religion analogous to Christianity there doesn’t seem to be any religion effecting politics or any church establishment. In fact the word “church” doesn’t appear once in the book, and “temple” only twice in a medieval fantasy setting!

These issues in the world-building compromise the plot somewhat, for two main reasons:

Even though its a medieval-European setting it has no organized religion or shared cultural doctrines. This results in a setting where, for example, kings just divorce wives willynilly for nothing more than better trade deals, something that almost never happened historically, especially considering the fact that up until the 16th century a lord would need approval from the Pope to get divorced. This is still a plausible setting element but it’s never explained why and it begs the question why anyone would trust weddings to last a long time.

Now this is one of the biggest issues I had: women aren’t allowed to use magic, which is a really big part of the plot. Why is this an issue? It’s never explained why. There’s not even some throw-away line about it being in their paper-thin religion or mistrust after some historical evil sorceress-queen, it’s just not allowed with no real explanation. In a setting where only women can do certain types of magic they’re not allowed to. Why would they restrict their magical potential by 50% for no reason? Why can’t women get this education when even historically women could get educated in universities in this time analog period. No explanation. In fact there’s a nation that allows literally no use of women’s magic (most of them allow it a little), which includes the heating magic, and they live in glacial mountains. THE PEOPLE LIVING IN GLACIAL MOUNTAINS BANNED HEATING MAGIC?! WHY?! WHY WAS THERE NEVER A WARLORD THAT ALLOWED WOMEN’S MAGIC AND THEN CONQUERED THE WORLD WITH TWICE THE WIZARDS?!

There’s a giant desert wasteland that’s important to the plot, but it has a river going through it. Nobody lives there. Why isn’t there some Egypt-esque river-hugging civilization down there?

OK, now I’m done complaining about the glaring holes in the world-building. At least there aren’t too many of them, it could be a lot worse.

Now the characters are fantastic and show lots of development and easily make up for the problems in world-building. There’s a lot of them and me talking about them would take a while and probably give some spoilers, so let me just leave it at they seem very organic and I enjoyed them a lot.

The writing itself was good. I think I’ve got a pretty large vocabulary but this book still had me looking up words (which is a plus for me I guess). The pacing feels a little off: too slow at the beginning and too fast at the end to the point that events that should be explored and seem very emotional to the readers just get glossed over in an attempt to quickly end in a cliffhangar to set up the next book.

What I Learned:

This book seemed to not so much focus on making a specific point or pointing out an issue or acute social commentary, it was more an exercise of well done expression of a general feeling and perspective.

While this novel did have themes revolving around families, gender, duty, and cultural roles they never seemed strongly emphasized and were written in a manner meant to serve the story first.

In a technical sense I think I learned more. The book was well written with good dialogue in characters, whilst still incorporating flexible themes and commentary, so it’s a good book for those who are interested in writing themselves. It’s also good example of how to write well and how to incorporate certain subject matter without being blunt or obnoxious.

Conclusion

Good book, well written, and constantly keeps you wondering how things will unfold. Loads of good characters and themes, specifically the one of gender, woven into the story in a way that enhances it. Pacing was a little questionable though.

The world building was unfortunately far from polished and that really keeps this setting from being memorable and exciting.

There’s a sequel coming out in a while which I do hope to read to see how the story concludes, however I hope there’s just the one more sequel as the setting is uninspiring which makes me more interested in the story and the ending than further exploring a saga.

Overall 8.5/10. I’m looking forward to the next book and the conclusion.

[dangermousie]

Book Rec - it's a high fantasy this time!

I am very picky about my high fantasy if for no other reason that it tends to be a huge time investment, being usually multi-volume, with each book the size of a brick. Well, that and the fact that the flavor du jour appears to be grimdark and that’s not my thing at all. 

So coming across a series I love is an awesome thing and one I pretty much must share. So here we are, with me about to gush about a five-volume (it’s complete) series by Phil Tucker called Chronicles of the Black Gate. 

Set in a very imaginative and well-developed world that follows the doctrine of Ascension (think castes and reincarnation, taken to extremes), we watch over the course of the series how this world (already brutal, strained and unfair) slowly and inexorably falls apart due to a kragh (think troll) invasion and then awakening of demons… Interestingly, the one series it reminds me of (though the settings are completely different) is Jim Butcher’s Alera. Think beautiful world building, characters driven by extraordinary strength of purpose, epic battles (battle descriptions are one of the books’ major strengths), tragedy, magic, revolts and redemption. And of course (you know me) love. Even though romance is not primarily or even secondarily focus of the series, the two OTPs are basically everything I ever wanted and then some.

The story has six narrators and I list them in order from most to least fave though I like all of them.

Asho - do you like Spartacus? So do I. Asho is a Bythian which, in that society’s belief system is the lowest caste, enslaved and treated little better than animals. Yet Asho gets taken out of Bythos by Lord Enderl Kyferin, a monster of a man who disregards society, on a whim, and made a squire. As the story starts he gets knighted by Ascendant’s Grace (think the Pope’s second in command) for battlefield heroics creating pretty much an impossibility in that religious system - a Bythian knight. Throughout the books, Asho discovers he’s a sorcerer (if there is one thing worse than Bythians in that belief system, it’s sorcerers), embraces atheism, fights to free his people, to save the world. He has more raw power than anyone else in that universe but what drives him is his will and his sense of justice. He has never met an oppressed person or group he doesn’t want to save. Basically think Jesus, if Jesus had a giant sword and was 1000% done with your shit. Oh, and his magic forms a bond with Kethe Kyferin, daughter of Lord Kyferin, who derives her power from what that society views as a heavenly force. Hmmm. Asho x Kethe 4evah. Seriously if you like OTPs that express their bond through battling evil together, this one is for you!

He kissed her back, but softly, and then broke the kiss and rested his brow against her own. “After this is all done,” he said, his breath mingling with hers, “are we going to be together?” “Yes,” she said. “A house, perhaps. You and me, lying naked in our bed. Sunlight coming in through the window. Endless afternoons doing nothing but being together. No danger. No death. No pain. No - no suffering.”

“No suffering,” she echoed, growing more scared.

“Yes. Together. Yes.” He traced the line of her jaw. “Far from this Empire. Far from the Virtues and White Gates and Black. Far from your mother and the Ascendant. From the cycles of Ascension. From all this madness that makes us hate and kill and hurt and maim.”

“Yes,” she whispered.  

Lady Iskra Kyferin - Lord Kyferin’s widow, she has no magic, no sword skills, but she can still take you apart. She is amazing. As the story starts, Iskra revels in her husband’s death, ready to be master of her own life at last. That goes sideways and Iskra continues to fight everything that comes along for her family, for the world. Along the way she becomes a rebel countess, a heretic empress and Ascentant’s Grace (aka military leader of the empire.) She is basically the queen of everything that is awesome. 

Ser Tiron - he used to be one of Lord Kyferin’s best knights but Lord Kyferin annihilated his entire family for something so incredibly petty and pointless, I cannot even describe. Tiron basically went nuts and Kyferin locked him up in a dungeon as a way to torment him even worse than death. At the start of the series, Iskra, desperate for support, releases him from the dungeon for a promise to support her. Through the books, Tiron struggles with loss and madness, grief, rage, and a sense of meaning and emerges a complete badass on the other side. Also, he rides a freaking dragon! Oh, and Iskra x Tiron is everything. It’s one of my all time fave ships now. 

“Iskra,” he whispered, hands hovering over her, unsure what to do, whether he should touch her. Then he leaned down and enveloped her and pulled her into a tight embrace, burying his face against her neck. “You came back. You came back.” The snarling animal that has been raging at his core retreated by slow degrees.

Iskra breathed in deep, raw gasps, then her arms moved around him and she hugged him back, deep sobs wracking her frame, sounds of outrage and horror. “Tiron,” she whispered, her voice a rasp like his own. “Tiron.”  

 Lady Kethe Kyferin - Iskra’s daughter, Kethe’s lifelong dream is to be a knight, something no women do in that society. Through the books she has a crisis of faith (or two), discovers she is a “virtue” (someone who is considered holy for being able to channel certain kinds of power), defeats hordes of enemies and becomes Asho’s soulmate. Pretty darn cool. 

Magister Audsley - he is a scholar who discovers all sorts of abilities and truths about society. Can’t really say more without major spoilers. Oh, and he has a flying cat.

Tharok - the kragh leader, the one who spearheads the invasion into the human world and who may be controlled by a demonic power. Or not. I started out bored with him and ended up liking him.

Anyway, go read, now! It’s on Kindle Unlimited.

[true-halloween-tales]

2017: #8-STRANGE MONSTERS FROM ART

Pandora’s Box issues forth a tale each year about monsters in different mediums.  We have previously examined monsters in everything from books, to comics, to even songs (see 2016: #6-STRANGE AND DANGEROUS MONSTERS FROM BOOKS, 2013: #3-STRANGE COMIC BOOK MONSTERS, and 2014: #4-STRANGE MONSTERS FROM SONGS).  Art, specifically paintings, woodcuts, and statues, offer a wealth of monstrous possibilities.  Horror specifically about art is best seen with Rod Serling’s The Night Gallery tv series which was about spooky paintings which each told a tale.  Ray Bradbury’s book and film, The Illustrated Man, was about tattoos that each depicted a future event.  Many horror films have paintings with false peek eye holes.  Sometimes monsters in paintings come alive such as in the recently released It and the evil nun in The Conjuring 2.  The Dark Shadows tv series often featured paintings, from old paintings of unaging vampires to Dorian Gray inspired paintings (see 2016: #7-GUIDE TO DARK SHADOWS).  Jack Nicholson as The Joker in 1989’s Batman walked through an art gallery and said, “I don’t know about art, but I know what I like (see 2017: #10-SUPERHEROES).

There is a lot of spooky art perfect for Halloween.  The Greeks had artwork of mythological figures, and the Middle Ages presented paintings of Death personified.  In 1505, Hieronymous Bosch completed the triptyche, The Garden of Earthly Delights, which features three panels representing the Garden of Eden, the garden of earthly delights, and Hell (see above image).  I particularly like the Hell panel, and it is perhaps my favorite painting.  There are many monsters and horrors that inhabit Bosch’s landscape of Hell.  There are giants rats tearing apart knights, and creeping about are bird-men, fish-men, and even crocodile-men.  One particular marching crocodile-man is my favorite figure in the painting, and I would love to know what Bosch would say his story would be (see below).  

The painting also includes armies, descending moons, fiery pits, and giant human bodily organs converted into objects including rooms.  Similar hellish work to Bosch’s was released in the 1600’s by Jacob Isaacsz. van Swanenburg as seen with his The Harrowing of Hell (see below).

Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare from 1793 produced a perturbed imp and a demonic horse (see below).  Freud kept a reproduction of that painting in his apartment in Vienna.  

Perhaps the most recognizable horror-related painting is Edvard Munch’s The Scream (see below).  The Scream is a series of four paintings Munch painted between 1893 and 1910.  They were inspired by a red sunset that Munch felt like was a scream of nature.  

In 1915 the interesting artistic movement of Dadaism developed, and Dadaists created all sorts of odd art demonstrating the absurdity of life.  Max Ernst produced a forest of woodcuts and paintings that include chairs entirely made out of human bones, flying god-heads, half-human absurd abominations, and an ominous elephant-like monster in his The Elephant Celebes from 1922 (see below).  Ernst spent time as a child with fevers staring at patterns in wood grain, similar to Salvador Dali’s paranoiac-critical method (see 2016: #10-MONSTERS ON THE LOOSE 7).  

Dadaism formed into Surrealism, and Dali’s work has all sorts of melting monstrosities, flaming giraffes, and the like.  Dali’s Paint-Maker’s Plight from 1941 shows an eyeball humanoid similar to costume’s worn by The Residents (see below and 2012: #1-SPOOKY MUSIC).

In 1954 Francis Bacon painted the dark, Figure with Meat, which features a grotesque pope seated between a grossly bisected cow (see below).  In 1989’s Batman, Nicholson’s Joker sees Figure with Meat in the art gallery scene and stops to comment that he likes that one.  

In 1967 Picasso’s untitled Chicago statue was dedicated, and it is a monster that most resembles an Afghan Hound (see below).  I frequently walk past it, but it sure does not bark or growl; too bad it doesn’t.

Surely the cherry, or bloody bit, on the horror cake is Otto Rapp’s Deterioration of Mind Over Matter from 1973 which features a rotting human head melded with a bird cage (see below).

In the last fifty years there have been many artists that have specialized in painting or drawing monsters.  Frank Frazetta created scores of fantasy paintings especially Conan the Barbarian related artwork (see below).  

Boris Vallejo still releases sword and sorcery artwork as well artwork depicting superheroes (see below and 2017: #10-SUPERHEROES).  

Bob Eggleton, Larry Elmore, and Erol Otus release artwork that is oriented towards Dungeons & Dragons (see below for Erol Otus artwork).  Wayne Barlowe has released paintings of aliens, monsters, and even devils.  There is so much available art of monsters, that we must mix them all up in the churning cauldron of creepiness and watch the three best monsters crawl out.

Salvador Dali certainly is an artist who can contribute one of the three strangest monsters appearing in art, but which one?  He produced artwork more surreal than the world had ever seen.  Dali had so many monsters appearing in paintings, it is hard to decide which is his best.  His work contains quite a few stretched out or melting people, often just huge heads held up by supports.  But those are not monsters.  He featured a titan bursting out of our planet in one painting and an elongated black ghost of  Vermeer in another.  His 1936 painting, Soft Construction with Boiled Beans (Premonition of Civil War) features a large monster that is the definitely the first to bubble out of the cauldron of creepiness (see below).  The unnamed monster represents civil war.  It is a weird collection of limbs, and seeing it travel through the desert landscape it is painted in would be fascinating.  It appears to be dismantling itself or removing its own limbs, and it represents self-destruction.

The second painter identified by the cauldron of creepiness is Ivan Albright.  Ivan Albright is a painter who used a very distinctive type of magical realism in his work.  His dark paintings show wrinkles upon luminescent wrinkles, cracks, scratches, edges, and the effects of entropy.  His work is both disturbing and mesmerizing (see 2016: #3-BLOODY MESMERISM).  His incredibly detailed painting, The Door, is almost as large as a full sized door, and it looks like a door to the Outer Limits (see 2017: #3-GUIDE TO THE OUTER LIMITS).  But that isn’t a monster.  Surely his best artistic contribution to the imagery of monsters is from his 1943 painting, The Picture of Dorian Gray (see below).  This painting was commissioned for the The Picture of Dorian Gray film with Angela Lansbury from 1945.  The black and white film switches to color when the painting is shown.  If you ever have the opportunity to see this painting, do so; it is located at Chicago’s Art Institute.  It is a large painting, with blood dripping off of Dorian Gray’s hands and psychedelic, magical colors dripping all over the place like 1969 Haight Asbury.  The animistic depth and detail of the painting are incredible.  Dorian Gray looks like he could turn you to stone like a medusa if you met his gaze (see 2013: #2-MEDUSAS).

The third artist suggested by the cauldron of creepiness is that of H.R. Giger.  His work is dark, often grey, and with sexual and cyborg themes.  His 1976 painting, Necronim IV is definitely his most influential work and contains his greatest and famous monster (see below).  The monster is what inspired the design for the Xenomorph alien species in the popular science-fiction horror series, Alien.  There were four original Alien films, two recently made interesting prequel films, and two Alien vs Predator films.  I doubt Giger knew when he painted Necronim IV that it would have the greatest name recognition for the word, alien.  

If the cauldron of creepiness issued forth these three monsters from art in the flesh, and they fought to the death, which would win?  Boiled Beans, Dorian Gray, or Necronim?  It would be hard to find a suitable arena that Dali’s Boiled Beans monster could fit into.  Perhaps a large Greek arena would suffice.  I expect Boiled Beans would stand there – barely – hopefully cognizant of the proceedings and demonstrating some form of sensory awareness.  Dorian Gray would very slowly saunter forward, and each step he took would age the place rapidly like it was being contaminated as in the film, Silent Hill.  The Necronim would move faster than the other two, and would swiftly scamper to the center of the arena, releasing a cold alien hiss.  That would get Boiled Beans attention who would start to shake and move.  The Necronim would attack Boiled Beans since it is a larger perceived threat than Dorian Gray.  The Necronim would attach itself to the mammoth leg of Boiled Beans and start madly scratching and tearing like a rabid black cat.  Blood would gush, possibly not normal blood – but blood made of boiled beans!  Boiled Beans would get in one powerful punch on the Necronim sending it across the arena crashing into the stone stands, sending rock splinters scattering.  Dorian would still be slowly sauntering to the center, very detached.  Boiled Beans vicious blow to the Necronim would cause himself to collapse, with his limbs appearing as a mass of trees falling down simultaneously.  Due to Boiled Beans self-destructive nature, as the dust settled it would be revealed that the large monster died upon collapsing to the ground by being crushed by its own hefty limbs.  The Necronim would inspect Boiled Beans confirming its death before proceeding to Dorian Gray who was still approaching.  The Necronim would be all over Dorian Gray, tearing him to pieces in a bloody blur!  Dorian Gray was already going to pieces, and a Xenomorph would wipe him out, with his arms and legs flying off all over the place.  But the Necronim would not strut away from the battle as a survivor.  The glowing energies of Dorian Gray would have touched the Necronim�� entropic energies.  The Necronim would rapidly rot like it had been aged many decades, and it would burst with its alien acid blood spraying and sizzling.  As the acid fumes filled the air, Dorian Gray’s limbs would reattach and he would stand back up.  The power that kept Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray going was a wish that very much behaved as if he had sold his soul to the devil.  Dorian Gray would walk away from the mass of Boiled Beans and the fuming Necronim and smile… then his lips would fall off.

[warsofasoiaf]

I've been thinking about this for a while, so I decided to find out your thoughts on the matter. How would you go about creating a good fantasy religion?

When it comes to building a religion, the key things to remember is that religion is tied very much to ethics, the nature of reality, the meaning of life (and anything that comes after), and other deep philosophical underpinnings of what it means to be alive, to be good or evil, what responsibilities do we have in life. Religion offered to the people of the past (and continues to offer to the people in the present) profound comfort, meaning, and purpose for the entire life. So, you have your work cut out for you. But this is not beyond the ability of the aspiring worldbuilder and fantasy writer. I’m going to caveat this: I’ve studied religions, but a lot of my studies were focused on western religions. Someone who has studied more Eastern, African, or Pacific religions feel free to add anything. I acknowledge my limitations and have done what I could be as inclusive as possible, but I am certain there was stuff I missed.

Who Are You, Who Worships Me?

It’s tempting to start building a religion by building a deity or pantheon and moving from there, but I find it altogether more productive to look at the society that practices the religion and build up, rather than craft the divine and build down. Unless the piece you’re writing focuses on the perspective of the gods, or has them act as characters, they won’t be the focus of your story, but the society that your characters will be interacting with will have a profound effect on the story you’re writing.

So, when it comes to your society, the cardinal virtues that your society wishes to express will become central tenets of your religion. A society that prizes military strength, for example, will emphasize bravery, duty, loyalty, obedience to orders, hierarchy, and all of the things that enhance military cohesion. Deities will often be emphasized in martial roles, whether against enemies, other deities, or against evil itself. Antiquity often had gods pitted against each other, with the winner in warfare being the “stronger” deity, because clearly, those worshippers were the ones that won, right? The positive virtues and negative virtues of your society will be emphasized in all aspects of life, to include religion, and how it evolves over time.

Did You Ever Wonder Why We’re Here?

The meaning of life almost seems too cliche, but having a reason for existing is tremendously comforting. Religion have, throughout history, offered answers to very difficult and very terrifying questions. Why are we born? What happens do us when we die? Is this the only existence there is? Are all the bad things that happen to me just random, or is there a greater purpose to it all? Your fantasy religion is almost certainly going to have to attempt to address some of these questions in order to seem like a credible religion.

Always make sure to take into account the context of your world to think up of confusing questions that the world has to answer. Does magical talent happen seemingly randomly? Religion might attribute a divine origin to such a thing. Can the dead come back to life? That’s certainly going to factor in to your answers about what happens when humans die.

Religion offers other answers as well. Early religions attempted to make sense of the world and phenomena, because, as I’ve mentioned before, knowing why something is the way it is offers tremendous comfort. The fear of the unknown is one of the oldest fears in existence, and it’s one of the most pervasive fears even into our modern day, because the unknown calls into question a human’s mastery over his or her environment and ability to control and handle situations as they occur. Not knowing means losing one of our most powerful attributes: our ability to think rationally and plan accordingly, and this feeling of disempowerment is wholly terrifying. Good horror makes uses of feelings of weakness to amp up the fear effectively, and the use of the unknown, the paranoid cloying that something is out there but we have no idea what it is, where it is, or how to stop it, is amazing. It’s comforting to think of the sun as a flaming chariot powered by a god who wishes to keep us warm. After all, chariots are something familiar, even if the scale is beyond us, and a powerful being that looks out for our survival helps guard against the fear that at any minute, the sun could go away or expand into a giant and burn us to a cinder.

Now, a big part of religion is the concept of the sacred mystery. In the more ‘public’ sense, this would be supernatural phenomena that cannot be explained by rational means, and this forms a crucial understanding in the relationship between the mundane world and divinity. How the divine interacts with the world, if at all, is critical to understanding the relationship between any divine figure and the mortal practitioner. In the more esoteric sense, a sacred mystery is knowledge that is not commonly available to the public, accessible only by initiation and elevation to the proper rank. This was done in Greco-Roman mystery cults, as an example. In a fantasy story, for example, this is excellent for bringing in elements of the supernatural while keeping it rare and out of public hands.

Don’t fear that any point is too esoteric or minute to be important. The meaning of the divine have launched wars. Just to take an example, look at all the early theological disputes as to the exact nature of Jesus in Christianity. Arianism, Monophysitism, Monotheliteism, there was a tremendous amount of discussion and excommunications over aspects that seem almost trivial to a layperson, but this was a matter of the soul and of life everlasting to the people who lived in those times. Just because it seems unimportant to you, it can still have great significance to those who believe it. The same is true in fantasy as in reality.

The Path to Power

Now, religion is, like any other institution, controlled by humans, and humans are many things, but one thing that they are good at is building power structures. Religion has often been used as a vehicle to power. In some cases, this means an out-and-out theocracy, where political power is exercised through the clergy, but it hardly needs to be official. When a religion can control something as powerful and meaningful as an immortal soul, even without any official political power, the clergy will exert a great deal of influence.

Of course, when it comes to designing a religion, one of the big questions that will determine how much hard and soft influence said religion will have on the society at large. An informal, deeply personalized religion based on direct relationships with divine entities will not be very organized, but will still form a significant part of the daily lives of practitioners; in ASOIAF, it’s considered proper to perform important moments in front of a heart tree so that the Old Gods may bear witness, yet there does not appear to be an organized clerical hierarchy. A more organized religion will have a much more formalized organizational structure, with sacred texts and formalized rituals. Religions like Christianity and Islam are very organized, and as the number of worshipers grew, so did the size of their organizations.

The size of the organization is critical, because that determines the amount of resources it has. The Catholic Church was the largest organization in medieval Europe, and as such, had a truly gigantic amount of resources in both money and land, and that translated into a lot of power. The most powerful Popes could cow the mightiest kings of Europe, send ambassadors to distant lands, call Crusades and sanction invasions that forever changed the face of Europe. The most powerful Caliphs left their stamp on Islamic philosophy and jurisprudence that affected the way the religion is practiced today.

Now, as you might imagine, the bigger the organization and the wealthier it is, the more attractive it is to gather money, power, and influence, just like any secular organization. Corruption is present in all organizations, even the tiniest and weakest ones, and the largest and most powerful ones will definitely have corrupt officials, and those in power will use their organization to protect their power for reasons both benign (if I lose this power, I can’t help my flock) and malicious (if I lose this power, then I can’t help myself), and everywhere in between. As might be expected, corruption in any religion would be abhorrent to honest practitioners no matter their rank, corruption and hypocrisy rankle any outsider, and so anti-corruption movements would result. There were plenty of anti-corruption initiatives in Catholicism, and this ranged from peasant revolts who railed against inequality and classism to reformist Popes who cracked down on simony and usury. These anti-corruption initiatives can form critical moments in the history of your religion…or are a perfect way to have a conflict over the course of your novel.

What is a God, Anyway?

Now, of course, if you have a religion, you’ll need some sort of divine figure or idea. There has to be an origin for these sacred mysteries after all. Whether you have a monotheistic religion, a dualistic religion, a polytheistic religion, or even an atheistic one built around a philosophy, the big thing to capture is a sense of something much larger than humanity.

In a one-god religion, it’s important to settle exactly how powerful the god is. Monotheism typically asserts that the one god is all powerful, and has no peer, but that is far from the only way that works. Henotheism asserts a single divine essence which takes the form of many valid gods, and monolatrism, where many gods exist but only one is worshiped. In this latter two cases, defining the relationship between the gods is critical to the nature of the divine. Can a mortal worship the underlying divine essence of henotheism (or even comprehend it)?

In a ditheistic religion, the relationship between the gods becomes even more important, because usually whatever the one god is not, the other is. This dichotomy is often central to the formation of the world, and the religion offers a lens of contrasts and binary choices. Zoroastrianism is one of the most influential ditheistic religions I’m aware of, and it stresses the constant choices that mankind makes, to do good or to do evil, and this impetus of behavior affects many aspects of Zoroastrian societies.

In a polytheistic religion, the gods typically resolve around certain spheres of influence, and so it might be possible and necessary to pray to certain deities who have access over this sphere. Polytheistic deities typically emphasize human characteristics, and not all of them benevolent. The Greek Gods might bestow favor that ended up with horrible things happening to them. Susano-o got into a fight with his sister and flayed her favorite pony and threw the skin at her. Tezcatlipoca and Quetzlcouatl constantly unmake creation to show each other up. Odin repeatedly tried to renege on deals. Eshu walked around with a hat that looked different depending on how you looked at it just so people would fight over it. Taken as a strictly secular observer with modern values, you could probably say that these gods were, well, dicks (apologies to anyone if I called your god a dick), but they seem so strikingly and extremely human: concepts and personas taken to their immortal conclusion. Death is also a real thing for these gods. Many of the Tuatha died, including Nuada and Lugh, and they eventually lost Ireland. The Norse Gods were all fated to die on Ragnarok (save for a select few). The Aztec gods were built around death and sacrifice providing power. These concepts were all special, magical, and relatable.

I’d recommend researching ancient religions and seeing how they explored these concepts (and others) to make your religion feel genuine.

Bringing it Together

Just like anything else, you will be building a lot of things from single ideas that will invariably change. Do not fear change, and this is especially true for religions. After all, the changes you make, you can incorporate into the fictional history of your religion, as it grows and shifts over time, just like everything else (hopefully) in your setting.

For example, the religion in my fantasy setting started with a single idea. I wanted to build a society where doing good was a real concern, so I based it off Zoroastrianism. The religion was a dualistic one, with one good and one evil deity. Doing good actions strengthened the good deity of creation, doing evil strengthened the bad one. At the judgment day at the end of time, the two deities would fight, and the winner would be the one strengthened by the active thoughts and deeds of worshipers. If the good deity won, it was a remaking of the world into a land of endless paradise and plenty. If the evil deity won, the world became an endless suffering pit. This resolved the issue of free will, because mankind and free will is the active shaping force of the end of the world. It assigns significance to actions because everything that everyone does matters in judgment day, even if ever so little. The ethical framework of this society, then, becomes rather judgmental, as each evil deed is not only a crime against man, but against existence itself, and villains became interesting as they justified their crimes to render them good, or even went so far as to do other things to stave it off, and in one particularly horrible case, believed that the patient suffering of his victims offset the damage he was doing.

Then, to make matters more interesting, I made a religious schism that was based off the Great Schism of 1054, naming them after their implement of religious purity. One side, the ones who follow the sacred fire, believe that action is the principal driver of good, and so their doctrines resolve around actively doing good. The other side, who follow the sacred waters, believe that contemplation and thought are the most important, that one must actively think good and the action will follow. To the fire side, thought without action is impotent, empowering nothing and permitting evil to triumph, strengthening the evil god. To the water side, wanting to do good because of benefit (even just to strengthen the good god for the hope of the eternal paradise) is selfish and strengthens the evil god. Now, there’s actually a lot more theological discussions and some of it concerns secular concerns of power. The spectrum of belief has heretic hardliners who believe in violent action to eliminate the other sect before they do more wicked things, to more mellow followers who believe that the other side is misguided by not actively evil, to active Unificationists who attempt to use theological argument to reconcile the two sides with a variety of compromises. There’s even a sect in the hills that are fundamentalist Rejectionists who say that the schism is a sign of corruption and that there needs to be a return to a simpler, purer form of the religion, and that all came from one idea of a man constantly quoting scripture as if every single line he said was pregnant with meaning. I have (horrible) sketches of two grand temples devoted to sacred waters and sacred fires with beautiful architecture and ideas for how this schism will play out to create conflict for the protagonists, and how their ideas on it shape their actions. Follow the path where it takes you, write your notes, and don’t be afraid to come back and make revisions.

Thanks for the question, Overlord.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[hedgehog-goulash7]

Movie review time!

Saw a "buzz" screening of Guy Ritchie's new film, "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword" the other night.  So...I went in really hoping I would love it, because, you know, King Arthur! And Guy Ritchie (auteur of the “Sherlock Holmes” films, which, as you know, I dearly adore...)!

But, sigh...at best I can say there's some lovable, rapid-fire "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" or "Snatch"-ike banter among the boys here and there. And the main Scooby gang -- er, I mean, Arthur and his band of good guys -- are attractive and sometimes endearing.

But honestly - you know me, I like loud movies, but this has to be one of the most overwhelmingly loud movies ever made. This doggoned movie bangs and booms and crashes EVERY SINGLE SECOND, to the point where I think they must have employed every single drummer in all of England and told them to just have at it, boyos. It's all a bit too much incessant pounding, bashing noise, with no breaks. I mean - the Middle Ages couldn't have been THAT noisy.

And on top of that, they've larded into the soundtrack an instrument called the "tromba marina" (which, despite its name, is a medieval stringed instrument that is neither a trumpet nor has anything to do with the sea..) that has a deep, threatening, ominous tone -- which might have been effective if it had only been used a couple of times, but which comes in throughout the movie, over and over and over, until you want to yell "OH MY GOD ENOUGH WITH THE TROMBA MARINA!" (Which may in fact be a phrase that has not been uttered since the late 1400s.)

There's really not a whole lot of King Arthur in this movie, at least the King Arthur you know. It's the Arthurian legend done up as a brawny he-man high fantasy (with a LOT of nods to iconic fantasy artist Frank Frazetta, whose paintings seem to have inspired the look and feel of "King Arthur.” Or maybe Conan the Barbarian did - it’s hard to tell...). 

 Whereas Ritchie's "Sherlock Holmes" films amped up the action element (which was already there in Conan Doyle) somewhat, and employed Ritchie's trademark fast-cut flashback/flash-forward montages as fragments of Holmes's ever-nimble, futurist mind, "King Arthur's" careening flashback montages are just there...with no real story purpose. And the Sherlock Holmes movies also benefited immensely from Hans Zimmer's clever, zingy soundtracks, which add so much to the fun. Ritchie’s Holmes movies are really love odes to Sherlock Holmes, while existing in their own comedy-action-adventure milieu. I sometimes wonder how much we need to thank RDJ -- that irrepressible on-set improviser -- for the joy and lightfootedness of the Holmes movies. Probably a lot.)

“King Arthur” is, shall we say, a male-heavy movie. The only female character of any substance is a "mage" -- standing in for Merlin, who is mentioned, not seen -- played by Astrid Bergès-Frisbey as that stoned Goth girl in the back row of your film studies class.The other women in this story pretty much exist only to be slaughtered and imprisoned.

The movie's saving grace, however, is Jude Law, as the evil King Vortigern. Always elegant, with simmering, coiled menace lurking just beneath the surface, Law is terrific (though perhaps a tad too close to his current "The Young Pope" character...but he seems to be having a good time chewing the scenery -- elegantly -- as these very NOT-nice guys...).  When Law is onscreen, it’s fun and interesting.

So -- if you want an expensive-looking, overwrought mess of a high fantasy set in some quasi-medieval time period with tons of bashing action, incessant pounding drums, battle elephants (!), giant snakes (why'd it have to be giant snakes??) and other monsters appearing out of nowhere just because...a movie that just barely tips its hat toward the actual King Arthur legend here and there...and with regular gratifying outbreaks of Jude Law -- then this is for you.

For the rest of us -- well, I was glad I saw it for free, because that was $12.50 I would have spent to be annoyed.

Still waiting for "Sherlock Holmes 3," Mr. Ritchie, and hoping that you got all of this out of your system and will be back to the lighter touch you had on the Holmes movies.

Let's see if the critics agree with me, shall we?  Till then - off to see "Guardians" this weekend, yay!

[dungeonsanddinosnores]

You're going to have to explain on how you stabbed the pope in dnd? (I read Jordan's tags)

So, our gang of idiots rolls into this town which is basically Fantasy Vatican, the whole belief system in their religion revolving around music and what not and the 'pope' being this grand conductor. Earlier in the adventure our halfling-rogue finds this emerald sword of chaotic evil and basically goes ape shit for it tryong everything in his power to become evil so he can wield it.So, we roll up into this town and at the center of the Fantasy Vatican is this giant pipe organ being played by the Grand Conductor. Our rogue gets this idea that, "whats more evil then murder hoboing a pope!?" Many successful stealth rolls later he gets close enough to stab the pope. My character the groups illustrious bard hucks a crowbar at the rogue to make sure the Pope doesn't get offed; rogue gets stomped by the towns guardsmen, We then have the amazing idea to rob the Vatican after freeing the rogue to get his god damn evil sword back. And thus began my Bards quest to become the 'Music Pope'

[lafortis]

⭐️hey nice job. what’s the book recommendation you’ve posted about a couple times lately?

thanks virtual gym buddy, it’s thanks to you :3.

i’m. glad you asked. :DDDD

it’s R. Scott Bakker’s The Darkness That Comes Before, the first book in his Prince of Nothing trilogy. it’s about uhhhhh... it’s complicated. but basically it’s like. the main character is a hybrid of batman, sherlock holmes and a supercomputer. he goes out into a fantasy world after his people spent 2000 years in seclusion, brought on by a giant fuckoff apocalypse that destroyed this world’s version of the roman/greek empires. the rest of society has carried on and the hub of humanity is sort of meditteranean, indian, persian ish? other main characters include the biggest toughest barbarian, who comes from essentially a scythian type culture? a prostitute who lives in what is essentially the vatican i guess. and a wizard spy who is part of a sect of wizards whose life mission is to uhh prevent another apocalypse basically? basically there’s like. weird fuck aliens. who want to murder everyone on earth. cus uhh then they won’t go to hell. becauuuuse... 

“There are no crimes,” he mumbled afterward, “when no one is left alive.”

so basically yeah! uhh there’s an ancient conspiracy to bring about the apocalypse but for real this time, the wizard spy guy is spying and tryna stop it, except no one respects him or his other wizard friends cus no one has seen the evil fuck aliens in like 300 years. there’s a new pope who is oddly good at everything, he’s gonna call a holy war on the muslims basically cus they control jerusalem. everyone listed above kinda worms their way into the holy war one way or another, and then it’s basically a speedrun of the first crusade. 

it’s uhhhh COMPLICATED and HARD TO EXPLAIN so sorry if that does not sound very appealing. i have yet to really perfect the pitch of it (to be fair neither has the fucking author or his publishers marketing team lmao they don’t know what to do with it). another way to pitch it is basically a realllllly dark high fantasy world, with some lord of the rings influence, with the twist that there’s objective morality. the author’s stated intent on making it was to make a fantasy world religion influenced by like old testament and old hindu morality, where like if you fuck up you’re just damned no take backsies. so this is that, and everything kinda stems from that. he’s i think a philosophy phd dropout, with a sharp interest in neuroscience, and it’s also kinda about his philosophy, which can kinda be summed up as neuro-skepticism? where he thinks that the further neuroscience advances the more we’ll realize that motivation comes from nothing, that man’s search for meaning will end in the realization that meaning was a useful evolutionary tool. that also plays a really big roll: the title refers to what the main characters cult thing refers to motivation as, i.e. the “darkness that comes before” the self, the place they can’t understand where their decisions etc. stem from, i.e. their soul, which they’ve made their life mission to understand and therefore comprehend the absolute. the stuff about there being no crimes when no one is alive is also a neat philosophy thing, which i don’t necessarily understand fully but it’s part of the metaphysics of the universe too

IF YOU CAN’T TELL I HAVE A LOT TO SAY ABOUT THIS FUCKING BOOOK. as unappealing as i may have made it sound, it’s my favourite fucking book/series and it’s hardly close. i’m hoping to meet the man himself soon, i missed the last fan meetup a year or two ago. i fuckin moderate the subreddit for it cus i started a reread/first time read discussion thread for it. it’s just. so nuanced and complex and intelligent and heartwrenching at times and kicks so much ass at times

NOW. uhh. fair warning. the content even when it’s not requiring a trigger warning is somewhat really dark. in Those Scenes it really need a TW attached. there’s uhhh. r*pe. a lot. as drama, in war, by creepy aliens, by one of the main characters (the barbarian). the reason i still like the series as much as i do is because i know bakker knows what he’s doing when he does it; he’s not putting it in for fun or to get off to it like some fantasy writers i could mention, it’s an intentional horrible morass of evil shit (i think he also said it was intentionally to alienate his more progressive readers, make them go “holy fucking shit”, that type of thing. not cus he hates them but just cus sorta sympathizing too much with any particular character or liking the world too much really doesn’t go along with the themes lmao). i was real suspicious he would end up being a fucking terry goodkind type of fella (there i mentioned his name) cus there’s like a fifty fifty when you read this type of book. like several main characters are obvious power fantasies for a while for instance. but no he knows for sure what he’s doing.

that tangent aside, yeah, consider there being every content warning you can easily imagine being on this book. if any of that sort of thing triggers you or anything you should probably avoid. if it doesn’t it’ll still squick you out to be entirely fucking honest, but you can probably make it thru

i guess that’s another thing i like about it, it’s part horror. also part lovecraftian metaphysical horror but it’s reeeeeeeaaaaally subtle. like just barely there except for one recurring part in the second series and one specific part in book five or six. so YEAH.

i guess the best recommendation would be “if you liked game of thrones” maybe? that’s the best cultural touchstone, but it’s not that similar. just in the sense that they both are dark and serve as deconstructions of a lot of standard tolkienian fantasy tropes. 

ANYWAY YEAH! that’s my spiel. i impart you all with that recommendation and the ability to infer my reddit username if you so choose i guess