First-person in High Fantasy

"You know I looked around at the faces I know, I fell in love with the people in the front row." --Hilltop Hoods, The Nosebleed Section

I love it when I have things pre-determined to blog about at the beginning of a day...it just makes it so much easier to post when the time comes.

So right! The first-person p.o.v. in high fantasy. Like I posted yesterday, Buried in the Slush Pile contends that it doesn't work very well, because so much world-building has to happen in a high fantasy narrative, and it doesn't make a whole lot of logical sense for a person to discuss how the world they live in works inside their own head (or to a reader from their own world).

She goes through some limited situations in which it does work for other types of fantasy, but none of them fit my definition of high fantasy (slightly different from hers--I need more than just a completely secondary world. I need magic, pre-modern technology, and non-human sentient races). I agree with her, but only for worlds that haven't been previously established.

If you were to read the first book that takes place in a world from a first-person point of view, it would be very difficult to grasp what's going on. But in a world that's well established, the first-person could work admirably. It would produce a very different sort of high fantasy story, and one that I might hesitate to call high fantasy at all, but in a world that is so well-known to its readers that its rules don't need to be established, the first-person might work admirably, though it would necessarily limit its audience to those already familiar with its world.

...now why you'd want to write a first-person high fantasy narrative is another question entirely. One of the things that sets high fantasy apart and makes it so wonderful is its tendency towards a diverse cast of characters, with different archetypes for different people to identify with, and you would lose that in a first person narrative.

But I don't think it's quite so unreasonable a proposition as she contends.

Tidbits from the Blogosphere

"Get out of my dreams, get into my car." --Billy Ocean, Get Out of my Dreams

Buried in the Slush Pile has done a couple of posts on fantasy recently--one about the difficulties of using first-person narration in it (which I don't always buy--more on that tomorrow), and I thought I'd link to them. Unfortunately I can't seem to link to specific posts on that blog, but they're #2 and #3 respectively as of this post, though sadly that will change. Oh well, you can always search for the key term "high fantasy" there and find them.

Sometimes the Pudding Just Sucks

"I got soul but I'm not a soldier..."
-The Killers, All These Things I've Done

So I watched the season premiere of Heroes last night, and while I eventually got into it (I love what they've done with Sylar, and the transformation of Nathan is interesting as well, as is whatever is going on with Claire), it took a long time to get off the ground.

Most notably, the first five minutes were among the worst five minutes of TV I've ever watched. I mean seriously, the acting, the dialogue, the scenery, the whole shebang, made Sci-Fi original movies look like The Godfather.

Which got me thinking about how entirely unfair it is that once a show (author, book series, director...plug-in whatever noun you want here) has achieved enough success it gets an automatic pass on being good at the beginning. If an unknown show had started off that badly I would have gone back to watching Monday Night Football. I almost did that anyway.

Same applies to publishing, and it's a damn shame. Especially when people get credit that, in my eyes, is entirely undeserved. In my poetry class yesterday a student began his discussion of a book of poetry we were reading with the statement, "I just want to say that even though it seems really dense and doesn't make much sense sometimes, he knows what he's doing. I mean, he's got degrees from Duke and Harvard, so he knows what he's up to."

The sad reality is that this is how a lot of people think. A PhD from Duke in history and an MFA from Harvard in creative writing don't make you a good poet. They don't even necessarily prove you're smart, in my eyes. The proof is in the pudding, but sometimes people change their tastes in order to like pudding they think should be good rather than just saying "This pudding sucks."

I don't know what the solution is, but it's a damn shame.

Soundtracks

"Put me to sleep, evil angel..."-Breaking Benjamin, Evil Angel

Quote today in honor of Crisis Core...and now on to soundtracks and how they build characters!

I'm sure this kind of thing gets studied in a much more thorough and legitimate way in most film schools, but I'm going to share my opinions on it anyway, because it's something that often slips past me when I'm watching a movie or playing through a videogame.

When they're present, soundtracks build characters and soundtracks develop scenes. Sometimes, as much or more significantly than the action taking place. Think about it, would Jack Sparrow be as adventurous without the thunderous trumpets following his one-liners as he leaps into action? Would the love story in Titanic be as tragic without that blasted flute track in the background? Would Jurassic Park be as awe-inspiring without the cymbal crashes and trumpets? (damn those trumpets...they're everywhere)

So. How do we use this information?

...I have some ideas, but quite frankly I'm not going to share them until I see someone else do them first (and I'm confident someone will, because all my other "great" ideas have been turning up piece by piece over the last year. Internet book trailers? Yeah, I thought I was pretty clever with my plans for that. Rats! Foiled again!) on the off chance that no one else will think of them until I can use them for myself. Sorry, but rest assured that once I find someone else duplicating my ideas I'll share them.

And what does this information mean for the future of books?

Well, if you ask me, combine e-books with the undeniable power of soundtracks and you have a pretty obvious answer to that question. Sometime in the next ten years I think we'll see the first e-book that comes with a soundtrack. The technology will have to change to support it, but it will. I'm willing to bet it will start out as an option to store and play music on your e-reader, evolve into a way to control the song you're listening to as you read, move on to soundtracks embedded into the e-book files themselves that repeat tracks while you're on one page a la old videogames, eventually some clever person will find a way to track exactly what point your eyes are at on the page and cue the music that way, and before you know it e-books will be a collaborative creative process involving large budgets, composers, and symphony orchestras.

...and they'll provide something you won't be able to get from a paper copy. Whether and how it'll catch on, I can't predict, but I'm willing to bet large we'll see it happen.

Prequels

"I will try to find my place, in the diary of Jane..."-Breaking Benjamin, Diary of Jane

So. As we speak I have just finished ditching a lecture in order to finish playing through Crisis Core (relax kids, I'm dropping the class anyway). And aside from obligatory zomgwtfamazing fanboy comments I could be making, I realized something very interesting about the way Tetsuya Nomura and crew handled the making of the game.

For those who don't know, it's a prequel to Final Fantasy VII---one of the most popular and beloved RPGs of all time. It's a bit like Star Wars, except for RPGs. It revolutionized the genre and some people are very, very, obsessively dedicated to it. So Nomura et al had to handle it very carefully to avoid stepping on people's toes.

In my opinion, they did a marvelous job of it, in no small part because they left out most of what had occurred in the original game.

For those unfamiliar with FFVII, one of its themes is memory, so there are a lot of flashbacks regarding the protagonist. A significant portion of Crisis Core takes place during the same timeframe as those flashback scenes, and the main protagonist from FFVII actually has one of the bigger minor roles in Crisis Core. So there was significant potential to rehash a lot of the flashback scenes from FFVII.

I was actually looking forward to these, as those scenes and that particular subplot of the game are some of my favorite parts of it. I was surprised, therefore, when Crisis Core left most of those scenes out. Its narrative simply skipped over them---I knew they were there, I knew what happened, but as they weren't important to the narrative of Crisis Core itself, they didn't wind up in the game. At first I was a bit disappointed, but after some reflection I think it was a brilliant move.

It made Crisis Core much more of its own game, and kept the focus on its main character, rather than FFVII's. Rather than the game just being an excuse to relive some of my favorite moments from FFVII, it was a whole new story that didn't really plug into the FFVII story (not in the way I expected, anyway) until its last scene.

I will be remembering this someday, when I write my own prequels, and I think it's good advice for anyone else who plans to as well.

...more tomorrow on another lesson I learned from the game, the use of soundtracks to build characters, and how I think that can be used now in writing, and how I think it will start to be used in the next 10 years or so.