![]() But I have to settle on a tone for how I describe the world of Legend in the rulebook, and an ethic that will inform the scenarios I’m writing for it, and my Dogme 95 is to not to assume any genre or even a sense of a storyteller. If you want to use Jewelspider for comedy or high fantasy or grimdark takes on Legend, or if you dig good vs evil romps and the panto ethics of alignment, go right ahead. I'm not going to tell you how to run your games. This might just be one of those ideas whose time has come, because as I was writing this post the SF author and critic Damien Walter published a piece about the need for science fiction to escape genre. For example, listen to this podcast in which Rebecca O’Brien explains what appeals to her about Coppola’s The Conversation and how the movie “sets itself up almost as if it is reality the story is told without any adornment.” That was the point of a lot of classic early-‘70s movies, to throw away the nursery book of arcs and tropes to find a more truthful way of depicting human drama. There’s a much lesser version of the true story of Nomadland that does all of this, melodramatizing Fern’s story into one of redemption." Here’s the problem that needs to be solved for the leading man or lady to be happy by the end of the movie or damned because of their bad behaviour. "Filmmakers and artists in general have a tendency to judge their characters. ![]() When these people talk about their life experiences, their loves, and those they’ve lost, it rings true. You can hear the difference from actors reading lines. Most of the participants really are nomads. This goal came into focus for me the other day while watching Chloé Zhao’s movie Nomadland. What happens there, even if the setting is fantasy, happens as it does in life, not fitting itself to tropes and story formulae, but simply as the result of colliding goals, characters’ actions and reactions, and a bit of pure chance. What I want my roleplaying games to do on the other hand is to evoke “real” settings. Genre means incorporating familiar elements in familiar patterns, which is fine if you prefer fictional narratives to the kind that real life throws out. Nowadays roleplaying frequently embraces genre, and it’s fashionable for referees to talk about the game in terms of act breaks and inciting incidents. That right there is pretty much what I want my upcoming Jewelspider RPG to be: fantasy, but not of the fantasy genre. The tone of the whole thing must be realism, not romance.” “We must select only such characters as would naturally be involved in the events to be depicted, and they must behave exactly as real persons would behave if confronted with the given marvels. H P Lovecraft, who endured a hardly easier existence than Harold Biffen’s, expressed a similar idea when he set out a manifesto defying the dominance of genre in science fiction: This seems to echo the thoughts of a rather more successful real-life writer, namely William Wordsworth, who argued (almost a century before Gissing's book) that "the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants" and went on to deplore readers' "craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies." And that was before Twitter. That’s Harold Biffen, one of the characters in George Gissing’s novel New Grub Street, expressing his ideal of a style of fiction that asymptotically approaches reality. For my own part, I am going to reproduce it verbatim, without one single impertinent suggestion of any point of view save that of honest reporting.” Other men who deal with low-class life would perhaps have preferred idealising it-an absurdity. Dickens would have made it ludicrous-a gross injustice. Now, such a love-scene as that has absolutely never been written down it was entirely decent, yet vulgar to the nth power. As I came along by Regent’s Park half an hour ago a man and a girl were walking close in front of me, love-making I passed them slowly and heard a good deal of their talk-it was part of the situation that they should pay no heed to a stranger’s proximity. Dickens understood the possibility of such work, but his tendency to melodrama on the one hand, and his humour on the other, prevented him from thinking of it. I want to deal with the essentially unheroic, with the day-to-day life of that vast majority of people who are at the mercy of paltry circumstance. ![]() Zola writes deliberate tragedies his vilest figures become heroic from the place they fill in a strongly imagined drama. The field, as I understand it, is a new one I don’t know any writer who has treated ordinary vulgar life with fidelity and seriousness. “What I really aim at is an absolute realism in the sphere of the ignobly decent. ![]()
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