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| "Quick Admiral Dembski-Bowden. The Rebels are using FORBIDDEN LOGIC!" |
Note: This started off life
as one article, but I had so much to say this is now a two-parter.
Part 1: Loose Canon
We need to get serious for a moment.
Well, you don't, I do. This one may be a little esoteric, a
bit specialist, a bit... picky. But I do feel it important, probably
more important than any other part of this series (not that this
takes much, but still). So, this chapter here is something from my
more earnest interests, because it cuts to the core of where I am
now, not where I have been. You could legitimately criticise me for
being caught up in something I have chose to abandon. I am in effect
pissing into a wheelhouse I used to be in. But this time, I'm sitting
in my own, and GW, and Black Library in particular are pissing
into mine. This actually cuts to the nub of something I'm
actually still prepared to fight over: what is an author, and
to whom do they owe their work, if anyone? This could be worryingly
close to a serious conversation. Fortunately for me, GW and BL have
made this topic a complete joke. So we're back to present
form. This will be pretty long, so I will break it into sub-headings
in case people want to read it in bits, or skip bits they're not
interested in.
“The Mercenary Writer” (Some
General Background and Statement of Intent)
Writing is a funny old endeavour. It
has many layers to it, many outlets. The core principle of Writing is
always the same: to appease an audience of largely strangers using
concepts and devices as old as that of society itself, in order to
teach, impress and/or entertain. Whilst the origins, and ultimate
agreed forms of writing (especially stories) are simple and limited
in type, in the modern age they aren't quite so straightforward.
Ignoring the various forms writing can take since we moved beyond
merely the printing press, there are also differing levels of agenda,
and also different levels of story. We live in an increasingly savvy
and interconnected world; a world built upon stories we love written
by writers we adore, to the extent that some of us (including people
who don't share such adorations) write stories that are directly
connected to those stories. Stories can transcend being mere stories.
They become IP, and IP
is, apparently, negotiable.
I, like most card carrying geeks, feel
deep love for, interest in and obsession with a multitude of IPs
(Intellectual Properties, worlds or universes owned by a company or
estate). Thus I'm familiar with those worlds, and always hungry for
more. But the reality of such properties is that much of the material
I could read is likely to come from another hand to that of its
creator, for both good and ill. This particular rant-post (and it is
little else) such as it is, is not to bemoan the work of what I am
choosing to call “The Mercenary Writer” and their ilk. But I
think it is worth dwelling on where these people are in this
industry, what particular excuses they make for themselves, and what
perspective they need to accept. Because as a writer of my own IP, I
am about to be deeply bitter and scathing. I'm saying that upfront
just so we're clear. We all have agendas, and mine is that many
of these Mercenary Writers are lacking in perspective. Cool? Cool.
As I said, I'm a writer. I've been
working on two principle IPs of my own in one form or another for
over a decade. I'm a perfectionist, so sue me. I'm also an avid
reader, and consumer of most geeky kinds of media. I find that we as
an amorphous, massively divided community are on the receiving end of
a lot of shenanigans from particular (usually corporate) interests;
who are happy to exploit a noticeably devoted audience to make easy
money with often pathetically low standards. I can already anticipate
the Business Apologetics I am likely to receive for this opening. But
save that for a moment. Let's just assume for a second that such
business interests are legitimate enough to pass without comment.
Whether or not companies are right to pursue what is from at least a
dozen or so legitimate perspectives frequently dodgy, is it really
right for such representatives to exploit those situations but also
moan about the consequences of those actions?
My argument here is, categorically, no.
To my mind, the Mercenary writer is in
a position of privilege. They benefit from a number of distinct
advantages over other writers and too many of them espouse regret of
having to deal with the consequences that come from gaining those
advantages. Most Writers after all are not instantly granted access
to a pre-existing audience, receptive to the core tone, genre and
styling of that writer's work (even if it detracts somewhat from the
usual fare for that IP). Nor are they free from the need to do so
much world-building: even authors that base their work in our world
either now or in history can often end up producing more constructs
necessary of their inventiveness than some of the Mercenary Writers
writing for IP. As a writer I cannot emphasise how difficult it is to
build a world of your own, so having a pre-built one is a tempting
thought. So too is already having an audience, skipping months to
years of angst and fear about ones own output. Why still persist
then, with your own stuff? Simply, freedom. The freedom to tell my
own tales, to have the world I want, no compromises, no limits.
Because, surely, there must be some limits right? It seems some
Mercenary Writers actually disagree. They're victims, the poor
things. Victims of petty, hateful sweaty, angry geeks who sit in
their mothers basement spotting mistakes. Spotting inconsistencies.
Noticing complete fabrications that make no sense in the pre-existing
world. Oh woe is them! Shall we help? Well, not exactly...
You see, I don't actually think
Mercenary Writers should be bitching like children about the
consequences of the privilege they manipulate and directly benefit
from to pursue the same craft as everyone else. Nobody is stopping
them from writing. No one is stopping them from using someone else's
IP. But here's the thing. Criticism is part of the business. So it is
rather tiresome when big corporations use mouthpieces to put forward
apologetics just to avoid some criticism. As a writer myself, I can't
actually imagine a practice within the world of writing itself,
beyond moral depravity, that is more odious, sinister or indeed
damaging than denying your own responsibilities.
So, let's have an example. For that, I
have Grade A Gold. “Loose Canon”.
We're All Right and None of You Are
I didn't really want to single out any
individual writers or companies when I initially wrote this for my
Non-GW Blog. Not that I have the clout to send a shit-storm in any
person's direction, but I like to avoid making things personal.
However, Games Workshop (and principally its literary satellite,
Black Library) have represented what I feel is one of the most
ridiculous attitudes to canon and continuity that I have ever
encountered, and a particular writer decided to be a mouthpiece for
that attitude: Black Library's Aaron Dembski-Bowden wrote a
blog-post a while ago detailing it, called “GrimDark II: Loose
Canon”. This article, such as it is, has since disappeared off the
net, but it can easily be recovered and read. I've provided a URL to
the article below, pop it into an Archive Website (such as Wayback
Engine) and you'll be able to read it in full. I invite you to do so,
as Dembski-Bowden tried to deal with a number of the issues I'm going
to raise to the bits I quoted, so I would rather you read those so
that I'm not straw-manning. I just found most of his excuses pretty
feeble, and the few I have time for I will deal with either here or
in Part 2. Anyway, here's the offending bit that bothers me, and this
is common both of GW's overall attitude to their material, and
similar to many other big companies that hire a multitude of writers
to make cheap sales fodder for them:
“It’s all real, and none of it’s real.” One of the great mistakes made by almost every fan of Warhammer 40,000 is to take the canonical rules of another license, and crowbar them into 40K. Usually, it’s an unconscious assumption based on a mix between common sense and Star Wars, which is a combination you don’t expect to see everyday. It also works about as well as you’d think.
...
I got it wrong myself, right up until I was in a meeting with the company’s Intellectual Property Manager – a situation I find myself in several times a year, as part of the Horus Heresy novel series team. When I was specifically asking about canon, he replied with something I’ve tried to take to heart: “It’s all real, and one of it’s real.”
First, I'd like to take this moment to
congratulate Mr Dembski-Bowden for trying to tackle the issue of
contradictions found in the IP he contributes to by providing two
contradictory versions of the maxim he has chosen as his apologetics,
and doing so within 4 paragraphs (two of which I've omitted for
reasons of focus). With that exception I will try not to throw much
shade his way. But if you read the article you can probably guess why
I might be right not to pull many punches. Now, to regain the
impersonal approach as best as I can, I am going to concentrate on
the two maxims (as who knows which is right) and take issue with
those, because they are utterly ridiculous in virtually every
possible way. The obvious way being that essentially, this hand-waves
the need to write well with consistency in the setting and to
research it well, which for Mercenary Writing is basically the
point. I will note that Dembski-Bowden tries to argue that this
maxim does not excuse that (reading a lot of Black Library makes me
question the idea that Black Library shares Dembski-Bowden's
convictions, especially with the likes of C.S. Goto still a name on
Black Library bookshelves), but if you need to take an aside to say
“this maxim doesn't cover these two obvious corollaries, but trust
me, doesn't undermine them” then your maxim is weak.
So why use such a maxim? Well, because
geeks are devoted. If you sit in a position of authority, any maxim
from that position of authority will get enough Internet Warriors
parroting it as an absolute edict, whether it was intended as one or
not. The originator of the maxim can always say that wasn't the
intention (which is as easy to say as the maxim, and as easy as the
things you say the maxim doesn't undermine and as likely to be
completely untrue), but if you're in a position of power over
geekdom, especially when professing to be “one of us” to that
geekdom (as Dembski-Bowden does in his article) you should be savvy
enough to know the responsibility involving edicts. Edicts are
dangerous in fan communities. Because they often start as
suggestions, and they end up often being empowered as holy writ and
used regardless of their logical or academic worth.
I've seen GW Edicts used to effectively
undermine linguistics or even more simply the act of human
interpretative reading in favour of overtly literal interpretation
because of the clumsy use of three words (Rules As Written). Stripped
often of context and meaning, they are easy to misuse. That is not
entirely the fault of the author, but that doesn't mean that they
shouldn't know better. It also means if you're going to use a Maxim,
make sure that if you check anything in your article
that you write (especially one which takes shots at parts of the
fandom, regardless of whether you see those shots as playful or with
actual venom behind them), it's probably the wording of that maxim
you wish to espouse and any times you repeat it, lest you
write multiple distinctly different things.
So, let's deconstruct those maxims and
poke fun at them.
“All of it's true and none
of it's true”
This is the most pernicious. It
entirely undermines the idea of truth by rendering it moot. That
isn't entirely an issue in universes with unreliable narrators, but
take note that this (and the other maxim) ultimately undermines the
role of the reader. You are not trusted to discern, to argue
or to be confident in any truth you are presented with. You are
merely told to distrust and embrace all, which is a self-defeating
fallacy that tries to have it both ways. Let me put it another way:
any lore interpretation, any take-away you have counts, except
when it counts. You are invited to believe as you like, but your
perspective is as worthless as your time, and any effort you spend
trying to discuss or debate any aspect of it can be easily and
entirely undermined by any one individual pointing to this maxim.
It's essentially boasting that as a material to help you understand
that universe (and note it is a fictional universe designed for a
hobby of which part of that hobby is adding to it) it is entirely
worthless. This is the equivalent of getting your car crushed at a
scrapyard just so nobody scratches the paintwork.
“All of it's true and one
of it's true”
This is probably the “correct”
edict, given that of the two it is less stupid. It is still, however,
as an edict, useless to the reader and renders them incapable of
discernment and as a passive agent in the act of being talked to with
all of the conviction of a snake oil salesman selling a homeopathic
pill. Like the homeopathic pill, it is largely empty of meaning or
usefulness, so watered down and pointless that it renders nothing
useful or empowering to the user, whilst endeavouring to reassure the
user of its worth. Whilst containing, at best, trace amounts of it.
Some Black Library books are also probably banged by a leather drum
too. It has a better affect than reading them. Now, this at least
admits the truth is out there. How generous. But it offers no
solution to figuring it out, and one could argue it exists purely to
tell you that you have no right to decide which it is. I
happen to feel that this is the intention, and regardless, it dangles
the promise of a commitment to consistency it has every intention
of not honouring.
Both are problematic for similar
reasons. Principle among which is how intensely self-serving they
are. They both exist to give the writer an alibi from their own
responsibilities, and no matter how earnestly Dembski-Bowden claims
he takes those responsibilities seriously, he has to explain those in
his own words, and I just frankly don't believe that a writer who
sees fit to provide an alibi from an obvious issue is that interested
in those responsibilities beyond face value. It doesn't help that
Dembski-Bowden goes to great lengths to point to obvious interpretive
differences as the reason behind the need for the maxim. Why is this
an issue? Well, there are a few reasons. Firstly, that demonstrates
that no one is actually that interested in going “Right, we should
probably agree on a logic behind how all these things work” but
even beyond that (as for some reasons that's not always possible
anyway) but these obvious examples are used as easy shoe-ins,
straightforward “No arguments there” reasoning. But is a maxim
really needed to explain authorial interpretative differences?
No. Here's why.
That is already an easy enough argument
to make. The problem is not that authors have different views about
how some things work leading to contradictions in rare or even
moderately common cases nor is that somehow unreasonable. It's
perfectly understandable. But using such reasoning for something much
wider in scope forms the linchpin of something insidious. By using
these issues as justification, it saves Dembski-Bowden from going
“Yeah, all those writers who don't bother to research and don't
care? We aren't firing or denouncing them. We just have this maxim so
that you can use it to pretend they don't count any more...” whilst
essentially being there precisely because of issues like bad or lazy
writing so much more than the minor issues he lists. And whilst these
small details may seem petty, it also doesn't change the fact that
the contradictions are there and still happened. One has to ask the
obvious corollary: does the existence of minor contradictions in
storytelling justify a wholesale denouncement of the concept of
canon?
Once again, the answer is no,
and once again, the denouncement is entirely self-serving. The people
who make the contradictions give themselves an alibi, merely at the
cost of the value of the whole endeavour and everything it stands
for. It provides grounds for undermining debate of the entire process
and ultimately its only point of consistency is that it consistently
alleviates the one source of responsibility, authority and blame, of
blame and responsibility, retaining only the authority bit,
naturally. Its self-serving nature betrays it from any iota of being
well-meaning. They know you're going to find problems in the fluff.
Here is an edict detailing how they'd rather make a dismissive excuse
than accept those contradictions as an issue to one day deal with, or
simply to accept. They'd rather pull the whole thing down
around them than admit they are wrong sometimes.
They are basically throwing the baby
out with the bathwater. Just to make sure they can't be accused of
not giving a baby a proper bath. Whether you take my perspective or
Dembski-Bowden's is for you to decide. If you take mine, I urge you
not to buy Black Library. Their attitude undermines the value of
their own fiction.
A Few Quick Rebuttals
This is basically it for Part 1, but I
want to deal with a few of the potential issues brought on from my
focus on this edict:
Am I Straw-Manning?
Maybe. I wont deny that I gloss over
Dembski-Bowden's attempts to discuss nuance around the topic. But the
fact is that he argues that fluff is so open to interpretation that
it needs a maxim that he himself seems to have taken a not entirely
obvious interpretation from to regulate whether people are right to
be ignored about differing authorial interpretation (which also
conveniently acts as an alibi for awful and canon-dismissive writers
like C.S. Goto). Ultimately, the position appears to have less to do
with genuine issues and how they are addressed and more the fact that
GW's writers don't like criticism and rather than taking the bridge
between producer and consumer for granted and exploring the nuance
intelligently, they decided to just pull the bridge down to avoid the
need for it. I'd describe the apologetics that GW use for in-universe
facts as a shitshow, and I find that shitshow only further
exacerbated both by Dembski-Bowden's efforts to explain it away and
by the gullible fanboys who bought it.
Why Now? This Article Is Offline!
Writers can hold very long grudges.
Particularly when it comes to things about writing that other writers
do or say that rankles you, especially when those bastards are more
successful than you. But I have more pressing reasons than authorial
jealousy. I happened to notice within the recent Ork Codex discussion
of their fluff in a style that clearly suggests that this edict is
still the way GW views presentation of its own lore. So actually,
this is very relevant, and their reluctance to enter the public arena
to have it challenged since is as telling as most of their other
actions.
But... But... Unreliable Narrator...
Etc
Naturally this edict also suits the
setting that 40k inhabits. On the face of it, this kind of attitude
makes sense, until you look at it closely. Because it is pretty damn
obvious that they aren't remotely consistent with it. For one, just
look at the style they adopt. If they really embraced the idea of
this kind of artificial mystery, there would be more scenes we
weren't privy to. To use but one example, we are told, clearly, what
happened to Ghaz when he retreated from Armageddon. How he is saved by intervention from Mork (and perhaps Gork). Why the detail? This also belies a major problem
with this edict. If all of it could be lies, why worry about
presentation? And indeed, that's part of the problem. Do they really
believe it's all propaganda or do they just hide behind that excuse?
It seems to be a much more commonly adopted position when talking
about the origins of Orks, or the nature of Xenos, but when it comes
to Space Marines, we have full details, biographies, dates and
dialogue. If GW always played by their own rules, and used it
thoughtfully, this would be relevant. It's pretty obvious however
that it's just pulled out when people ask questions.
This is it for Part 1. In Part 2 we're
going to talk more about Canon, and how Black Library's edicts on the
matter are not only irrelevant, but erroneous. We'll conclude why
Loose Canon is so damaging and why they need to readjust their attitude. Not that they will, of course, but they should.
******************
P.S. Here's a link to the
Dembski-Bowden article used in this rant:
http://www.bscreview.com/2011/03/grimdark-ii-loose-canon/
(you will need to use an archive service like Wayback Engine to look
at it though)
P.P.S. Aaron, if you ever read
this, I used your surname 15 times. Typed them out individually, went
through the document 3 times to make sure I'd spelled it right each
time. You didn't even bother to check the two times you used
one edict. So maybe next time leave the sass about your own
fucking audience out of your corporate shill pieces, and maybe
they wont think you're a douche. Peace.
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