...for the entire Sword and Sorcery genre- I should probably point out that beating on this genre, intrinsically, is like slapping around a eight year old girl with one hand tied behind her back. Nonetheless, I feel it is my duty to piss and moan about it, since that is why these 'blog' things were invented, innit? Here goes...
In the beginning, there was Lord of the Rings, an enjoyable bildungsroman romp by a linguistics professor at Oxford that highlighted his love of Celtic and Nordic culture. Over on this side of the Atlantic, you had Robert E. Howard cranking out pulp entertainment in the pages of 'Amazing Stories'.
In this day and age, however, the whole genre hasn't progressed much beyond that. As a genre it's generally related to the craposphere, and not without good reason. There is little or nothing you can take from it and apply to your own life. It is a vacation from life. Its primary consumers are adolescents indulging in power fantasies and blue collar types envisioning a primal world where might makes right. Also, note if you will the constant harping about the decadence of civilization. This brings me to the sword & sorcery genre as it stands now. I'd like to bounce the bitch ball off the heads of these particular offenders:
Dungeons & Dragons:The Role-playing game: What started as a side line for tabletop medieval war gamers in the sixties turned into a phenomenon in the eighties. The game allows you to role-play a character in a medieval/fantasy setting where you can pretend to be a thief, wizard, barbarian, whatever. The style of play is open-ended, in that if you wish to rob travellers on a pilgrimage, set up your own church, storm a wizard's castle, gallivant through a dungeon, or plot and scheme, Black adder-like, in a nobleman's courtroom, you are perfectly free to do so. Ideally, this is in a relaxed social environment with like-minded friends with the same atmosphere of a good poker game.
The trouble is, in order to play this game, you are obliged to understand and be proficient at the underlying rules, which take up literally hundreds of pages. Creative accounting, as it were. The type of people who gravitate towards RP G's tend to be obsessive, introverted types (NEEERRRRRDDDDSSS!!!) who enjoy that type of anal-retentive detailing. That tends to drain all the fun out of it. This leads me to:
MMORPGs: World of Warcraft and it's predecessor, Everquest. If D&D is a gateway drug, than MMORPGs are crystal meth. Watching a MMORPG player, I'm reminded of a lab rat with a diode wired into the pleasure part of its brain. If the rat presses a switch, its brain is flooded with endorphins. The rat will literally starve to death pressing the switch above all its other biological concerns. (How do you kill that which has no life?)
The Lord of The Rings movies: Y'know, I tried watching the DVD of the first one of Peter Jackson's series a while back and I had to turn it off after fifteen minutes. When these came out in theaters, I felt more obliged to see them as opposed to wanting to see them. Well, I saw the first one in a theater; the other two I felt I could wait for a DVD release. It's one of those things you experience, like a six-hour German opera or a performance by a Japanese noise band. (as opposed to something you enjoy.) The point is, this is as good a movie as you're ever going to see of the whole genre. Peter Jackson, is at worst, a competent journeyman filmmaker. In watching it, you realize (well, I did...) that the genre has a ceiling to its level of entertaining an audience. As for how low it can go...
Dungeons and Dragons: the movie- In the press releases for this little cinematic turd, I was informed that the director/producer, one Courtney Solomon, spent TEN YEARS of his life getting this to the big screen. Just think about that...
"Hey, Courtney, wanna shoot some hoops?" "Naw, man, I gotta get ready for a budget meeting with some producers for my DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS movie!"
"Hey, Courtney, you goin' for that promotion at work?" "Naw, man. I quit my job to bring DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS to the big screen!!"
"Courtney, my darling. Let us make love.." "Naw, baby. DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS is my one true love!" Follow that dream, buddy. Follow that dream.
Eragon: Keeping with the spiteful and vindictive tone of this blog, I've considerately decided to pass my snidest judgement on Eragon, a movie I haven't seen and a book I haven't read. Why? It's a Sword and Sorcery trope, dur. From what I understand, it shamelessly cribs from both Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. This makes it a photocopy of a photocopy. It's a twenty-first century knock-off of those Golan-Globus direct-to-video filmed-in-Spain-where-the-actors-speak-their-lines-phonetically crapfests that came out all the time in the eighties. But why such animosity, you ask? The book was 'written' by a sixteen year old kid home-schooled by his rich parents. His publishing deal came about when his self-published novel (well, his parents published it.) fell into Carl Hiakseen's stepson's lap, who sent it to a publisher. The rest, is history.
So. Given the to-do this Chris Paolini's gotten over the success of his 'Eragon' novel, how many more Paolini wanna-bes do you think will be crawling out of the woodwork? Hundreds, if not thousands, of self-published 'novels' about noble heroes and epic quests and ferocious dragons with good hearts and dwarf comic reliefs who fall down a lot on their butts and evil wizards with long fingernails who say things like, "Now, my plan is complete!" and "Fools! You let them get away!" and "This isn't the end, Seth Trueheart!" (cause the kid who wrote the storys' first name is Seth) and fair maidens who are like, totally hot, like Trish Corscaden in like, my Math 20 class, but she's not a stuck-up bitch like Trish, and the fair maiden,(who's named Trisha) is like, a cross between Buffy on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Princess Leia and at the climax of my novel, Seth totally swings across the Cavern of Lava to rescue Trisha, and she's all like, "Oh, Seth, I love you so much I'm totally willing to overlook your acne!" and when they swing back across the Cavern Seth kinda cops a feel of Trisha's boob, but she's cool with that cuz he rescued her, and who should be facing Seth but the Inner Guard of the Lich Warlord, these five guys who totally look like the defensive line of the high school football team, and the head Inner Guard is like, Todd Ames, who pushed me into a locker last week, so he's goin' down. Then Seth totally goes Jet Li Sickhouse on their asses, and the dwarf comes in to help, and Seth's all like, "No! These ones are mine!" and then the dwarf falls on his butt, and after the side of the Cavern of Lava Seth swung back on looks like a cross between Jackson Pollock and a meat grinder, the dragon shows up and says,"Young prince, you had the power in you all along!" (cuz', you see, Seth was a lost prince of the realm all along, so he like, totally gets his own castle where he gets servants to take out the garbage and mow the lawn so his parents can fuck off) and gives Seth the fabled Bong of Eurpideis the Wise, winks knowingly, and flys off into the sunset, and Trisha totally sticks her tongue down Seth's throat, and then the credits roll,and like, Evanessence is on the soundtrack, and like, I figure, as an 'Easter egg' for dudes who stick around until after the credits are over, like, we give 'em a bonus scene, where the dwarf falls on his butt.
Fuck off, Paolini. Fuck off and die, you spoiled little shitbag.
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