There's been a notion percolating in my brain for the past few weeks, and I think maybe its finally ready to come out. The trouble is that its not fully-formed, at least not so much that I can point a finger to it and say: that, there, is exactly what I'm talking about.
Anyone who knows me knows that I like mythical allusions in modern settings. This is not news. I enjoy them whether or not they take place in the context of magical realism; that is to say I enjoy them whether people in the setting accept them as normal or totally flip out because what the Hell, man.
I also really enjoy, for lack of a better term, re-imagined elements. That word probably comes from Wikipedia, where whomever first created articles for the
Battlestar Galactica miniseries (and subsequent television show) described it as a "re-imagined version." So rather than the shows being labeled by date or called simply "old" and "new" they're referred to as the "original 1978" series and the "re-imagined" series.
There's something interesting about that phrase. Re-imagined. Re-envisioned. You imagine something, and then you imagine it a second time, differently.
The seed for this scattered thought, the element that began binding this notion together, is something Rebecca Borgstrom wrote on her
Hitherby Dragons blog (helpfully syndicated at
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hitherbydragons) called
The Song of Jeremiah Gannon.
R. Sean Borgstrom, for those not in the know, is a writer and a developer of roleplaying games. She wrote
Nobilis and several of my favorite supplements for
Exalted. Love her or hate her (and a lot of people do hate her) its widely acknowledged that she is brilliant, but also six different kinds of crazy. People tend to read the things she’s written for games and describe them with a gleeful smirk using adjectives like “cracked out” which, in this context, are intended as complimentary. She routinely thinks up things that are just unspeakably cool but also very unexpected. Calling them “from out of left field” is to do an injustice to the depth of the phenomenon I’m describing. I really don’t think there’s a sports metaphor that works, except to say that maybe they come from a spaceship inhabited by supernatural flower aliens (who may or may not be time travellers) that just happens to be hovering somewhere in the general vicinity of a baseball outfield. But I digress.
So RSB wrote
The Song of Jeremiah Gannon (parts
two,
three and
four for those of you playing along at home) and its absolutely fantastic. It re-envisions the story of
the Legend of Zelda as a mythic tale about God and America and a dozen or so other things. Ms. Borgstrom’s writing is nothing if not layered and nuanced; she has been accused of being dense, to the point of incomprehensibility to some audiences.
That’s where all of this started. And then I played (or actually ran)
Hero’s Banner at Story Games Boston a few weeks back, and borrowed the book from
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locke61dv, and read it. And its good. And there’s this interesting little element in the game where one of the things that drives your character is some mythic predecessor, someone from the tales and folklore of his people who he strives to be like. And if you play multi-generational stories or simply play the game a bunch of times using the same setting, then you have the option of using the stories you’ve previously played out as that element. Your new character is the descendant of your old character and wants to grow up to be just like him.
And the wheels in my brain started to turn.
And I started thinking about
that Mage game that
pax_malificus ran, and how much I enjoyed it. It contained within it a great deal of the intersection between these two things: mythical allusions that were themselves re-imagined. Helen’s Avatar was an old-fashioned angel, one so powerful that it could not be contained by a human shell anymore, and was bound in a phylactery long ago as much to protect the world from it as to protect it from the world. Helen and Kit themselves had both been meddled with by the previous custodians of their Avatars; Helen could be seen literally as a dream her predecessor made real, right up until the moment she opened her eyes and started to move in the world.
All of this catalyzed this weekend with the season 3 finale of (the “re-imagined”)
Battlestar Galactica. The show has contained a number of mythic elements from the start, all of them re-imagined from their role in the original series. On the colonists' side we have the Greco-Roman Lords of Kobol and their various artifacts: the Arrow of Apollo, the Tomb of Athena, the Gates of Hera, the Eye of Jupiter, etc. And on the side of the Cylon we have their one true god, nameless and unknowable, and the possibility that both Gaius Baltar and Caprica Six are receiving regular visitations from his angels, who just happen to take the shape and voice of their respective loves, each other. And the season finale, without giving anything away, really helped to push all of that to a whole new level.
When
foreign_devilry wrote his story-game’d version of
Exalted (which I had the pleasure of playtesting at
JiffyCon), he brought out a similar thing, a thing which exists in the
Exalted universe, but which his system pushed to the fore. On the one hand you have the wonder and glory of the First Age, when golden dreams collided with enough force to reshape the face of the world. And by definition each and every Solar Exalted was a part of that, and also had a hand in its downfall. That’s the curse the Primordials wrought; by the Exalts own hand was Creation doomed to ashes, its halcyon days forever twisted, never again to rise to such heights. And in
foreign_devilry's vision of the game you actually had to describe how it was when things were good, and how it is now that they're bad, and tell the story of how you made it so.
Mythical allusions. Re-imagined.
As an aside, there
absolutely have to be better terms for this than the ones I am using. The trouble is that literary criticism is, at best, a hobby for me. I devoted my academic pursuits to learning history, which has worked out well enough. But I'm awkward and clumsy with the terminology; magical realism is a fantastically cool thing, but I've only known it existed as a concept for a year or two. This jargon is like a second language with which I don't have native familiarty. But, again, I digress.
There's something about those elements that really appeals to me. And I want more of them, both in the fiction that I consume and in the games that I play and create. If roleplaying and story gaming is just the oldest form of make-believe reinvented and given rules and structure, then its worth keeping in mind that all the great epic stories of old were re-told. They were, as they say, transmitted orally and therefore allowed to change a little in each re-telling. And true, sometimes that just means that you end up with one version of a story told by Ovid and another by Vergil, and they're basically the same except Artemis has been swapped in for Athena. But I have to imagine that some of the strength of the stories, some of their resonance, comes from the process of letting them be organic, letting them grow and change as they needed to, until they were, essentially, as cool as they were going to get.
This can all go horribly wrong, of course. Just look at some of the travesties that have been perpetrated by mainstream comics if you don't know what it mean. But it can also go very right. I miss playing
Mage and
Changeling precisely because I miss games that were so well-suited to these themes, and brought them into our modern era rather than relegating them to dusty times of old or just fantastic myth. And if I ever actually get around to finishing a story game of my very own then you'd better believe I will make room to bring them there, too.
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