mfbrandi

I am not a Campbellian (I cribbed what follows from Wikipedia), but we are sometimes told that Glorantha is built on Campbell’s armature. From Joseph Campbell: a Hero’s Journey: From The Masks of God: Apparently, no one thinks that a metaphor is a metaphor. Why this should be so, I cannot say.

I can imagine a sect of Humakti who are all about calmly accepting their inevitable death when it comes, not about hastening the deaths of their fellow mortals.

And Jeff recently posted this: I sometimes get the feeling that Gloranthaphiles (including the creators) have secret shrines to Orlanth and Ernalda in their basements, but there is a definite strain of the gods must stop interfering or it will all end in tears, too — and there always has been. Of course, the cheesy trope of the gods are powered by mortal worship suggests that there may be less apocalyptic ways to do this than massive bloodbaths every 600 years or so.

OK, Nick Brooke posted that in another thread, but it turned out to basically be this one in a light disguise. And I think what follows fits better here. In poking around, I found this CliffsNotes version of The Hero with a Thousand Faces from Norman Spinrad masquerading as an Orson Scott Card book review (a couple of years before Card outed himself as … well, you know the story). It has case studies — Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (still Tiger! Tiger! to me) and Frank Herbert’s Dune — and is much more sympathetic to Campbell than I expected from the author of The Iron Dream. It is a fun read, at least. If Argrath were to turn out to be a mask of Feric Jaggar, would that make all of us Homer Whipples? I shudder.

Aren’t Gloranthan elements — except Darkness and [cough!] Moon — more like the phases of matter than they are like our chemical elements? So roughly: Earth = solid; Water = liquid; Air = gas; Fire = plasma. Do they need to be seen as competing for space with the chemical elements in a Gloranthan chemistry? I always wonder which species were supposed to have been around “before” the birth of Umath — and I am sure someone here will know — and whether they had lungs (or even gills).

I took it that: to survive the vivisection and re-assembly you had to be pretty tough already Arkat still looked like a (very scary) human after the rebirth If those points are right — a very big if, I know — then if you are up to the ritual, (a) you probably wouldn’t need to be transformed into a troll to play trollball, and (b) you wouldn’t make a very convincing infiltrator. But I usually have things upside down or inside out; maybe that is because I am in the process of being reassembled into a troll — or an oversized trollkin, anyway. Help!

This should have been Janet Jackson’s comeback: “Never mind my ‘wardrobe malfunction’ — what about the human sacrifice before kick-off? Get things in proportion, guys!” I don’t watch sports. I didn’t know what I was missing.

But a consciously re-gendered Harlequin, no? And for that we also have Moorcock’s Una Persson — but she is not such a psycho, which brings us to the Temporal Adventuress and Woolf’s Orlando and Russ’s Alyx. They are transgressive (just by being women with agency), but not IMO Tricksters, so sadly, we must rule them out — but not your Harleen!

Yes, this has occurred to me, too, but has anyone suggested that Ernalda is part of Orlanth, yet? We are supposed to think of the religion of the Orlanthi as embracing Air and Earth, right?

I recently got rapped over the knuckles for suggesting one couldn’t slide a fag paper between the hero (Orlanth figure) and their supposedly external trickster, but reckless, world-endangering, transformative — doesn’t all this fit Orlanth, too? Sooo … are we playing fast and loose with the concept of the Trickster, or … ?

I’ll root for the eunuch bureaucrat, every time, and stay as far away from heroes as I can manage.

I have no argument with that. They can do “beautiful loser” films — Thelma & Louise; Thunderbolt & Lightfoot; Easy Rider; Midnight Cowboy — but two of those have British directors, the range they cover is very narrow, and they are not tragedies. They don’t have happy endings, though. One of the catches is that protagonists are all disposable from the mainstream perspective — criminals, women, and hippies — and are only allowed screen time on the understanding that at least half of them will be killed off. Is Citizen Kane supposed to be parsed as a tragedy? What about Touch of Evil? Ulzana’s Raid ends with the death of a star, but he is not the protagonist. However, Ulzana himself can be seen as a tragic figure: he chooses to fight the Yankees, but it is only ever going to end one way. There is a classic anti-hero in the cavalry lieutenant, but no hero. Only Ulzana and Ke-Ni-Tay have any agency. Surely, this can be converted into a Prax-set scenario.

I cannot remember off the top of my head what Trollpak says, but as a midwife deity, it would be neat if she had no children of her own body. Hers is a tough love — I believe completely hopeless trollkin are euthanised. She is friendly with Yelm, so presumably she is regarded with suspicion by some Uz.

Why bother to introduce an NPC like Tom and then have them lynched? Let Tom kick off some plot lines and then the PCs may have some views on what they want to do to them — buy them a drink, maybe, as Tom made their lives more interesting/adventurous. —————————————————————— Oops! You said PCs, not NPCs. My mistake. Are you really thinking of having a community leader succeed in lynching player characters for being insufficiently heroic? Or are you just thinking of having them try and fail to light a fire under lazy players? Or … ?

Except, of course, that he fed Orlanth to Wakboth and declared that “The world will remain as it is now, without interference from any god or goddess.” (The grand declaration rather undercuts the idea that he was betrayed by Trickster.) So maybe he is a good human hero — a liberator — but not such a great Orlanthi, even if he does act like Orlanth. Would a great Christian hero feed their god to their devil? I like to think so, but … So there has got to be something to say about Argrath. He is not totally boring.

This deserves a fuller answer than it will get here, but this will have to do for now: You and Shiningbrow are likely talking at cross-purposes: from the point of view of the Orlanthi (characters), a hero succeeds (or at least isn’t seen as marked for a bad end: “follow this guy — he’s a loser”); from the point of view of literary theorists (readers), a hero who fails may be more interesting — and a tragic hero has to screw up somehow. So it may be unfair to accuse them of falling for the Hollywoodisation of the hero. I love the notion of tragedy as Hubris clobbered by Nemesis (Aldiss’s wording and he applied it to SF, but the idea wasn’t new), but does it work for all — or all worthwhile — hero stories? (By this measure, the Godlearners make perfect Gloranthan heroes, which is OK by me.) I take it you don’t mean something as narrow as “the hero is the protagonist and the hero’s pride/overreaching leads to the hero’s death in failure by the end of the play.” That wouldn’t even work for Oedipus the King: he makes the classic error of “I’ll find the person responsible for this plague” but he is not dead by the end of the play. And the hubris may be spread over generations: “don’t worry, we’ll off the kid and then he’ll cause no trouble” — that undoes a bunch of people (Laius first) but it isn’t done by the hero. Achilles’ choice of a short, glorious life doesn’t obviously make him a tragic hero, but arguably that — and being a killing machine — does make him a hero (though, again, there’s the doubleness of the lit. crit. term and the term as understood by the Achaeans). If he is a tragic figure it is not in getting himself killed, it is in getting Patroclus killed. But heroes are always getting other people killed … Anyway, this deserves more and from someone smarter than me.

Thanks for the suggestion, though maybe this would count against her as a Trickster: you wouldn’t want to be or be with Wile E./Crafty Coyote, or Eurmal, or Loki, or Donald Duck. Bugs is maybe the outlier.

This seems to be a category in which women are short-changed. Maybe the problem is drawing boundaries around the type. There are tricky, clever, appealing, and dangerous women who leave a trail of destruction — like the unnamed protagonists of We Who Are About To … and What Did You Do During the Revolution, Grandma? — but do they count even as Jacks? Are they, anyway, too rational. Is it a phallic category? John Clute is quite good on the Trickster: Do characters like Simon Templar and Raffles really count? They break the law, but they seem to have codes of honour and to be unlikely to burn the whole shithouse down. But, as I say, I am uncertain how far we can push the category. “Ronin Hood” made me laugh, but it looks like Image Comics actually did it.

The Monkey King, Great Sage Equal to Heaven?

I tried being a cynic, but I lacked the necessary enthusiasm for dogs. Diogenes himself seems to verge on the holy fool, which kinda–sorta brings us back to the Trickster. As a kid, I loved the idea of going out at noon with a lamp to look for an honest man … but only on the understanding that I wouldn’t find one. I mean, where would I put him? Here I was only pushing the idea that there is no sliding a cigarette paper between trickster and hero — but then I always rooted for Prometheus, not Achilles.

Or the splitting of the Trickster from the Hero is a reach for plausible deniability — “I would never do that. It was that bum, Eurmal.” — but sooner or later the Hero has to face reality and reintegrate the Trickster. (Or fail, of course.) I mean, the goat never did anything wrong. Except maybe eat my trousers. Gulp!

I suspect that way back when — when we still expected Masters of Luck and Death any day now any year now at all — we none of us thought that going to church would be heroquesting. It is, I suspect, an inside–outside problem. The story of the hero’s confrontation with the external monster may sometimes stand for our confrontation with our inner demons, but when our ritual re-enactment of stories of fights with external monsters becomes a tool to help us fight … err, real external monsters, my brain starts to itch — and not necessarily in a good way. But for good or ill, this is the recursive nightmare of the Arkatland theme park — to which we all happily paid the price of admission — in which we get to see a man not-at-all-figuratively wrestle with and dismember himself. Shame about the collateral damage. Pass the popcorn. To drag this back to the point: is Orlanth’s “hero’s journey” something that begins as a response to/atonement for the murder of the Sun, or is the murder of the Sun an integral part of the quest? It seems to me that you start with the Sun as divine authority (the demon in the brain that makes us see the world wrongly and suffer because of it) [THESIS], so you murder the Sun/god [ANTITHESIS], and you recreate the world so the Sun is more fusion reaction and less divine father/cop in the head [SYNTHESIS]. Rinse and repeat till you have only the mundane world left/you have reached psychic liberation/you have stepped off the hamster wheel of rebirth. Very roughly right? So Nysalor and the Red Moon are the divine reasserting itself within time (keeping us from Nirvana/liberation, whatever they preach). If you see Orlanth as the architect of the Great Compromise — rather than the idiot tool of Trickster and the Sun Spider — then they will be the number one targets of the Orlanthi hero, and the dead civilians and the fallen empires are just details. But if Orlanth were to reassert himself within time, he would be part of the problem. Hence Argrath & the Devil. But if the perfect Orlanthi hero is the manifestation of Orlanth and the hero is always fighting themself, then who gets swallowed and who gets dismembered? I don’t have all the answers. Hell, by trying to squish too much together, I probably end up with none of them. Fail better next time.

Before we knew the light of the Sun, three friends felt something nagging at the backs of their brains: there was something they didn’t understand, but they couldn’t say what it was; it was infuriating. The wisest of them said, “Be calm. Let us meditate. Perhaps an answer will come.” “Where shall we sit?” The wisest of them marked three lines meeting at a point. Now each had their own space to sit, facing the centre and the void. No one can say how long they sat, for back then the rise and fall of the Sun did not mark the passage of days. Perhaps they sat for an aeon, perhaps it was only a moment. Zorak Zoran opened three eyes, screaming. He burned, and soon others would burn around him. He said, “Now I see, but it gives me no peace.” Argan Argar opened two eyes. He looked around and said, “These will be useful. Xiola Umbar, why do you not open your eyes? Do you not want to know this new thing?” Xiola Umbar smiled and said, “Are my eyes closed? I think that they have always been open and that we have always been bathed in Light. But perhaps, my friend, you will always find comfort walking in the shade.” And she laughed, rose, and stood behind Zorak Zoran. She laid her hands on his shoulders, and he was quiet — for a short time, anyway. ————————————————————————————————————————— A new thread to get away from the gonzo Arkat stuff. A new telling of the myth because “for a time they viewed it from a distance” in the Trollpak version was bugging me.

Isn’t this what happened to Zorak Zoran? And man, I really stings. If an illuminant is burning from the inside, stand well back. Do not return to a lit firework. Aren’t the watchwords of the Orlanthi religion — seen capaciously — “there is always another way” and “violence is always an option”? These are sometimes seen as being in opposition, but one can combine them: there is always another way to unleash Hell. Arguably, this goes all the way back to Orlanth’s accepting Death from Trickster and using it on Yelm. Then the question is whether Orlanth is a numpty who acts impulsively and lives to regret it, or is subtle and playing the long game. In the long run, murdering the Sun worked out just fine, but at the time — oi! So just how un-Orlanth is improvising weapons of mass destruction? If I were the cattle raider on the Clapham omnibus, I would be terrified by Argrath’s shenanigans, but if I were Orlanth themself, wouldn’t I be looking down fondly and saying, “That’s my boy”? Again, Orlanth and the Orlanthi are a blindspot for me — or maybe grit in my eyes — so I may have that all wrong. As for Arkat (illuminated among the Aldryami, one supposes), surely he would stop at nothing to further his war with himself/plunge into darkness — ZZ Arkat was always in the cards, even if there was a post-war period of reflection in the Autarchy/Empire of Peace. So problematic how? Or problematic for the bystanders because Arkati, all-too-Arkati?

I don’t know though: as a naïve hick from the sticks, the Welshman is quite “relatable”, no? A bit of a Rurik the Restless. (I suppose it depends on the teller of the tale.) This comment is really just an excuse to plug the absolutely stunning film by Éric Rohmer, Perceval le Gallois.