That stuff gets old. It’s the same thing every time. There’s little news reporting and lots of opinion and speculation and you can always guess what someone’s going to say so long as you know which channel you’re on. What I’ve found with almost everything in the entertainment industry, and yes that includes the news, is that the providers are always subscribing to their audience expectations and the audience expects tropes and stereotypes. Understanding that and you can predict almost every movie, show, and book plot and can anticipate what each political commentator is going to spew. It’s a little boring.
Which is why I was overjoyed to read a book this week that at least tried to be unique. Author of “The Night Angel” trilogy and, most recently, the “Lightbringer” tetralogy, Brent Weeks has a problem with editing. I’ve read four of his books now and each of them has an almost embarrassing number of grammatical errors and various instances of awkward syntax. Regardless of those, he is still a fantastic storyteller and does a wonderful job of fiddling around with fantasy hero tropes. In “Night Angel” he creates a character who is born into extreme poverty and crime, commits murder to protect his friends and regain some dignity, and then becomes a mercenary assassin. Then the story becomes something similar to the typical redemption plot line with some fun magic and great plot twists thrown in.
What I’ve found that Weeks does exceptionally, however, is showing how children are shaped by their traumatic experiences and how those determine who they become as adults. His thoroughly damaged childhood characters became thoroughly damaged adults. They either have an extreme drive to overcome their difficulties or have almost debilitating fears and obligations that they must uphold from deals made in a desperate adolescence. Sometimes they have both. Sometimes they become monsters. Sometimes you can’t even tell when a person is a “good guy” because the things that they do are so immoral or horrifying that passing a single judgement on them is impossible, even if those actions are entirely understandable and sometimes necessary.
I’ve only recently finished “The Black Prism,” the first of the “Lightbringer” series, and I’m already having a ball. Okay, the syntax is still annoying, but he’s learning. I’d certainly hope he would by his fourth book anyhow. I think that he’s also picked up on how well received his stories about corrupted youths were. So here we go again with another story that begins with a loss of innocence. Okay, it’s more like the innocence was dragged out into the street, forced to watch everything from torture to a porno, set on fire, trampled, and then left out to dry with the crows pecking at its kidneys. We saw that sort of merciless realism with “The Night Angel” trilogy except that this time, instead of having the protagonist become a freakin’ magic slinging ninja, Weeks flipped the hero trope on its head.
In the acknowledgements section at the end of the book, Weeks said that before he started writing a friend of his had said offhand how interesting he thought a book might be if “the [fantasy hero trope] was turned into an [inverted hero trope].” In the first “Night Angel” book we watched an eight or ten year old boy grow to fourteen and then eighteen in the course of about ten chapters, becoming a morally conflicted killing machine and then an amoral killing machine. In “The Black Prism” we see a fifteen year old, obese, illegitimate son (literally a fat bastard) go from being a disappointing, disdained, and ignored village child to being the disappointing, disdained, and coveted bastard of an emperor while carrying an obsession with vengeance and having no combat or political skills whatsoever. The book takes place over the course of maybe a week or two and, while he certainly is heroic in many aspects, he’s not a warrior and not what most people would think of as a hero. He’s not Samwell Tarly either and is neither timid nor weak. He’s a screwup, but he’s tough. He’s not strong, but he’s smart. He doesn’t have much in the way of friends, nor is he good as making them, and mouths off at almost everyone who could help him. To top it off, his need for vengeance, his despair, and his desire to prove himself to his new father force him to exceed anyone’s expectations, especially his own. Even so, he’s still generally pretty useless in most cases and is beaten, insulted, and nearly killed repeatedly. The thing is, his character paired with the empire’s machinations made for a fantastic story!
I often hear readers of such stories complaining about authors like George R.R. Martin putting their fictional children through horrors. Actually, more often than not those who condemn such authors are the people who have heard about a story but haven’t bothered to read it themselves. Typical. Anyhow, the point is that these people become enraged when they read about a child being tortured for sadistic pleasure or babies being murdered to preserve a political succession. That’s the point though. The point is to evoke rage and horror. It’s supposed to be sick. Why do you think that they put The Massacre of the Innocents into the Bible? It’s supposed to manipulate your emotions one way or another. The reason that these people get angry at the authors, however, is that they don’t want to believe that this sort of thing happens in the real world too. It hits a little too close to home.
Perhaps it’s not something that we tend to see often in middle class or wealthy parts of the world, particularly not in America. Even so, I would be willing to bet that similar atrocities happen across the globe. We get exercised over the child labor laws (or lack thereof) in southeast Asia and genocides in Rwanda for good reason. These things actually happen and we feel rightfully sickened by them. At the same time, why do you think we put that stuff on the news repeatedly and make movies out of it? It’s sensational. It’s emotional. It’s horrifying. Call it what you like, be it realism or barbarous voyeurism. Deny it all you like, but you know in your gut that these things make fantastic stories.
Some people are drawn to “Saving Private Ryan” because it’s gory and violent and violence is simple. You kill someone and your problem is over. It’s easier than real life. However some people, whether they realize it or not, are drawn to it to see Tom Hanks struggle to hold himself together and then are fascinated to see how Matt Damon turns out in the end.
Horror and conflict and scars make for interesting characters, characters worth writing about and whose stories merit retelling. It makes for good stories because damaged and broken people are real and you never know how they will react and grow if the story is told well. If that’s not your kind of story, fine. Just don’t start damning other people’s storytelling. Unless you want me to start trashing you for watching “Jersey Shore” and “White Chicks” that is.
Song of the Week: If that blog got a little morbid, here’s something to cheer you up! More cynical realism!
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