Hello, hello, hello. I… am your beloved… guy on the internet… Welcome back!

First of all, The Failed Technomancer, chapter 21, is live. Poor Cortex… that’s my teaser this time. Poor, poor, poor suffering Cortex.

But beyond that, this was a good week. I’ll give more details on my writing exploits later, but I struggled with Hazel Halfwhisker this week. I could hardly get a word out, and when I did I often ended up deleting more than I wrote. I fought and wrestled with this one key scene, and it wasn’t until Thursday that something broke and I wrote 3000 words in one sitting. Such a relief! That alone almost got me to my weekly goal, but not quite.

Bloggyness Review: Leo

I don’t like Adam Sandler.

Hopefully it’s obvious that I’m not talking about him as a person—I’ve never met the guy, and I don’t keep track of the lives of celebrities. And I’m not saying that he’s not funny, creative, or a good actor, because he’s clearly got his legions of fans to back him up and I just do not care enough to tussle with those diehards. But, I do most often find his work annoying, crude, and low-effort, and as a result I’m immediately uninterested when his name is associated with something. There is the rare exception that works for me—Murder Mystery was pretty funny—but those are few and far between.

Leo might be one of those exceptions. Might.

In Leo, Adam Sandler voices the titular aging lizard who, after decades being a pet in the same classroom and watching kids come and go, knows a thing or two about fifth graders. When a substitute teacher disrupts the class and starts making kids take home the class pet to take care of it, Leo starts to find purpose in life by imparting some of the wisdom he’s collected to help fix these kids’ problems, or at least make them easier to bear.

If I did number reviews, I’d give Leo a 6/10. But I don’t do number reviews, and everyone weighs numbers differently anyway, so I need to find another way to describe what I mean by that. Leo is probably worth watching. It has many genuinely hilarious and touching moments, and a lot of moments that felt really half-baked. It’s a very solid B- or C-tier movie, but I wouldn’t compare it to true cinema like Into the Spider-Verse, because that would be just unfair. It has very meaningful messages of the value of wisdom and the applied knowledge of the elderly, adapted to the unique needs of modern kids (while also acknowledging that a lot of the struggles we have across generations are more universal than we might initially think), but it doesn’t preach or beat you over the head with those messages. Its animation is pretty and very expressive at times, or very effective at elevating a joke, while stiff and cheap at other times. It’s a movie that’s perfect for a streaming service, because I genuinely had a good time watching it, but I wouldn’t go to the theater for it, and I probably wouldn’t pay to rent it.

Wow, that’s a lot of hedging.

I think the reason I’m trying to be careful not to give Leo too much praise is because of the context I learned about this movie in. In the circles I walk in this here internet, people were screaming praises about Leo—funny jokes, pretty animation, a better story and stronger characters than Disney’s Wish—and these things are true, but I think these things were exaggerated to levels that Leo just couldn’t keep up with because Leo made the sin of being likably decent while everything surrounding it was garbage.

So, Leo, as a movie, I say is okay, and I would recommend with a friendly-but-lukewarm fervence. Don’t clear out your schedule for it. But if you have an open evening and want to watch a family movie with far less potty jokes than you might expect from Adam Sandler, and if you’re willing to tolerate Adam Sandler’s super weird old man voice, you’ll have a good time.

Discussion: Evil Races in Fiction

A few weeks back while scrolling through the Twitter I discovered a blog post that really resonated with me. It was titled “Musings: The Necessity of Evil Races in Fantasy and the Experiences of Drizzt Do’Urden,” and I hope the author would find it fair if I summarized the general argument of his post with the following paragraph (his own words):

It is a great irony that, in an attempt to do away with racial stereotypes and promote individualism, the ‘corporate’ stream of thought has instead homogenised [fantasy] and the possible stories one might tell within it. They have removed from the genre the character of its modern mythology in favour of bland corporate language.

Jack, Chronicler of the Northlands/The Lost Lore Scholar

(I should note, Jack is primarily talking about tabletop role-playing games, specifically Dungeons and Dragons, but I think what he says is still relevant in the world of novels and movies. How long has it been since we’ve seen an inherently evil race in a new story? Or, at least, one used with elegance. Most of the time we just end up with faceless robots or mindless monsters, a la every Marvel movie that needs to be wrapped up with a messy CGI fight scene.)

The author’s big focus in his blog post was Drizzt Do’Urden, a drow (dark elf). Drizzt has a lengthy literary history, and a big part of what makes his stories so compelling draws directly from the fact that his race is inherently evil, but he craves goodness and rightness. Overcoming the legacy he was born with ultimately made him one of the most legendary heroes of the Forgotten Realms universe, and such a story would not exist if inherently evil races were purged from fiction.

I agree with Jack. I don’t like limiting the number of stories that is it possible to tell. But to go further, I don’t like the restriction on thought and imagination that exists in this mindset of “fictional creatures can’t be inherently evil.” Ought we explore, invent, and imagine things in fiction that do not exist in the real world? Isn’t the point of fiction to imagine what is not and ask ourselves, “But if so, then what?” Fiction (more specifically, fantasy) is at its best specifically when it explores impossibilities. That’s the whole point of the genre.

As I observe it, this mindset seems to stem from an inability to separate fiction from reality: a common argument is that inherently evil creatures in fiction perpetuate real-world stereotypes and prejudices, which is easily seen as utter rubbish by anyone capable of discerning what is real and what isn’t. Or, perhaps better said, which immediately reveals the prejudices of the person making the argument; to point at an inherently evil, entirely fictional group of creatures in a story and immediately, without irony, say, “That’s X group of people!” means that person first had to have some part of himself/herself that associated those people with those traits. It’s more revealing of the accuser than the accused.

Inherently evil creatures are simply a tool that writers can use intelligently or ineptly, or that they can choose to pack up and leave in the toolbox. A tool, nothing more. Some stories—Lord of the Rings comes to mind—make amazing use of inherently evil creatures, and the story would have been weaker without them. Other stories don’t need such creatures, and that’s fine, because fiction has limitless potential to tell stories in either direction, and both can produce emotionally compelling narratives of completely different flavors.

As for me, I plan on making use of inherently evil rats in my mouse books. I don’t understand why so much of mouse fiction paints weasels, and similar creatures, as the ultimate enemy to mice. True, weasels are predators that eat mice, but by that logic you could set up hawks as the ultimate enemy to a mouse. No. When a mouse casts a long, jagged shadow, one that takes the mouse’s sweet, cute qualities and makes them look raw and vicious, what does that shadow look like? Not a mouse—a rat. As well, I think pairing off creatures against what are essentially larger, stronger, darker alternatives to themselves, rather than an unrelated threat, is more interesting anyway.

Writing Updates

Hazel Halfwhisker is at nearly 16,000 words. While that’s not as much writing as I had wanted, I’m still quite pleased with it.

I have no updates on any other writing projects, as almost all of my actual writing time is getting poured into Hazel Halfwhisker, and my completed projects are still waiting for a response from the organizations I submitted them to.

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Send-Off

What about you? Do you like evil orcs? Dark elves? Do you enjoy a story like Drizzt’s, where a creature overcomes its dark heritage? If not, why not? I’d be curious to hear your thoughts, or examples of stories that do these things well versus ones that don’t.