It is a hard time to be alive in my country. We are struggling these days under the boot of authoritarian leaders. Everyone is stressed, and the world seems to be a terrible place. Each day we are mentally assailed by the travesties being committed, and that in and of itself is exhausting. To bury our heads in the sand is to betray those we would care for, but to remain aware seems self-defeating as we do more harm to ourselves mentally and emotionally.
I was speaking with my brother the other day about what to do. There’s a common leadership technique taught involving three circles, with the closest being your immediate family, where you have the most influence. The middle ring is friends and social groups, your book club or bowling league, board game night, etc. the last is everything else: big country world politics, people you’ve never met across your country or in another part of the globe. He suggested the remedy is to just focus on those inner circles. And that’s fine, and we should do that. We have to take care of ourselves and our families. I also think local community and grassroots organization is a damned fine way to fight back against oppressors.
I still think local organization can still suffer from systemic violence and oppression. And that unless we dismantle the system that is acting in violence towards us, it will keep happening. Those government agencies killing people and snatching them off the street are functioning as intended: terrorism tools against minorities within the US to make people of different skin colors and lives afraid. The violence, the cruelty is the point. They want us scared, tired, and to keep us that way.
Two truths can exist at the same time: that yes- it is ok to rest, and that damn- we have to do something. I will not judge you for taking the time you need to care for yourself. If that means exiting social media, seeing therapy, or just taking the time to focus on your loved ones and families. By that same metric, there are those that need us, and encourage you to work with your local communities to support one another, and to be a vocal and educated enemy of fascism and authoritarians who would do other humans harm. Cast a vote in the ballot box, seek out ACLU meetings and local community gatherings and voice yourselves, take care of your friends having a hard time, and look out for those different than yourself.
All we have in this world is each other.
Whither Art Thou, Man of Steel?
I can’t help but notice that a lot of media deals with the satire and break-down of superheroes lately. Specifically with ones that abuse their power, or have ill-intentions behind a peaceful facade.
I have mixed feelings about this. Partially because, as a comic book lover, I like seeing my heroes be heroic. I find that they are written with the explicit intention of being the best that humanity has to offer, to be us humans lionized and at the pinnacle of the better angels of our nature: brave, compassionate, trustworthy, merciful, and just.
Secondly because I have often heard of comic books described as “America’s Mythology”, and that’s a dire and powerful notion. Mythology exists to explain the way the world works, and to give us heroes to try and become. That even in the face of tragedy we could be great. That even though wronged by the world we can be fair. That even though called weak we could contain hidden strength.
How then should we look at those shows and books where the mighty abuse their strength? Where the instead of compassion we are faced with callousness, with cruelty, and with cowardice?
Better yet, why are they so popular?
If Superheroes are American mythology, does this mean these are written or created by modern distheists? People who hate heroes and hate seeing these noble traits epitomized in their media? I very much doubt the latter.
I suppose it deals more with the most painful part of hero-worship: saying goodbye to our real-life heroes.
Most people, I imagine, will encounter a time when they discover that an artist, an athlete, or a person of importance to them is, or has been before, a bad person. That they’ve been hateful, bigoted, ignorant, or far worse. It’s hard to reconcile that a person you’ve admired is mortal and capable of folly or willfully ignorant. It hurts, to see them act that way, or to use harmful words. In the mythology we’ve created in our minds, we feel they should have known or done better. It’s jarring to realize, they are just human after all.
Maybe it’s easier to imagine our fictional legends as being flawed than it is to admit our real ones are too.
For me, this doubly incentivizes the reason for Superheroes to exist in the first place. Myth and stories should uphold and be strong when life is uncertain, and when the crucible of the world rages around us the legend of those noble, kind, and mighty who have come before us should serve as an example of what we should strive towards, even if we can never reach it.
And thus with hope we should endeavor to become the next generation of role-models for those who come later: better, wiser, and stronger than the last. Just as brave, just as compassionate, with fewer of the priors’ flaws. We’ll craft better arts, we’ll break their world-records, and we’ll be better to each other in the process.
Maybe the capes and cowls we have been looking for have been in our mirrors all along. We just have to choose to don them.
Counting Scars
In a recent D&D game I am playing with friends, I chose to give a new character an unusual and difficult background (raised in the Underdark), summed up by the phrase “Mabaj Nujol.” It’s a rough internet translation of Tolkien’s Black Speech, effectively literally meaning “I am Counting Scars.” In my personal cannon, it’s a multifaceted phrase, meaning something like “I am sad,” or “I am hurting,” but also “I will live through this.”
As we move through these days in our real world, I have seen unprecedented pain. A global viral pandemic has killed my friends’ relatives, shuttered us all away from one another. What should be institutions in which we place trust for our protection have abused their power and taken lives, furthering an authoritarian police state which does us as citizens harm. All my friends are hurting, especially those who are people of color in the wake of the latest racist aggressions made against their communities. I have seen the wicked actions of those who would separate us by petty differences of appearance, inciting hatred against their brother humans. I have seen supposedly wise men fall prey to these words and deeds, choosing to believe obvious lies or spinning them into personal agendas, willfully ignorant of others. And I have seen people I trust remain silent to utter the words “Black Lives Matter”, the unspoken words the harshest of betrayals. I cannot look at any of the sources for information I receive about the outside world without seeing so much hate, so much violence, and so much pain.
So Mabaj Nujol. Today we are all counting scars.
Update
At the expense of letting this place stay a dead blog for two years, I suppose I should put something up.
Sadly shortly after beginning writing again I realized that one) I write pretty slow and two) that if I wanted my fiction published I couldn’t give it all away for free.
This was complicated by the fact that I quickly learned that writing for myself instead of for D&D was a very different process: I learned about myself, and I discovered thought and opinions I didn’t know I had. I didn’t realize I was vehemently anti-hate until I wrote “Strom’s Hate”. It kind of just… bloomed in me, so to speak. Nor did I realize that I had such a heart for the environment till I wrote “Demons”, I just wanted to write a story where humans ended up being the alien invaders. I figured that would be a helluva twist ending.
I’ve tried to be published a couple times since then, notably with a large novelette, and mostly amassed a few rejection letters. I’m still writing, I just haven’t been showing it to the world. My thoughts being that, when I have exhausted my publishing options, put it it up here. So, slow it may be, expect a post or two this year.
Demons
Demons
Remember these words my child, for this is the story of our people, and this is the story of how we were ended.
We lived here on the earth for many years, growing strong – sometimes growing wise – and all the while spreading across our mother planet’s surface. We learned to fly great kites of bronze and fire across the skies. We could touch the moon and her sister the sun. An age of peace lasting a thousand-thousand years dwelt upon us. We could heal the sick, stave off the scythe of Death. We ate food till we grew fat like slugs, and such wonders and pleasures we knew that happiness gave way to boredom.
Towers of glass and steel were built, stretching into the sky so tall that the gods themselves moved away, giving us more room. Such was our might that we rivaled the divine.
That is why the demons came.
It happened without warning, great castles of steel descended from the stars. They spoke to us, begged us for parlay, mistaking us for the gods due to our strength. We were such fools, full of hubris and arrogance. They traded us for our secrets, and for all the good we gave them they returned wickedness. We gave them the cures to sickness, and in return we received plagues. We showed them that we could love, and in return they provoked our hate. We taught them of our gods, and in return they built idols unto themselves. We showed them our mightiest warriors, and in return they clad themselves in dark armor, their faces shining with single golden eyes. We showed them our fields of plenty, and in return they sewed thorns and poisons.
It was only some months when our great chieftans decided they could no longer stay, that the castles in the sky had become ominous, haunting our dreams. The spirit world, the voice of our old gods still spoke to us, telling us to rid ourselves of these demons. The demons wanted nothing of it, insisting that we turn over our holy earth to them, for the great beads of glass and the black-blood beneath her trees. If only we had listened. If only we had said “No.”
They bled the earth, spreading corrosion and pestilence wherever they went. Fish died, birds flew away, and the beasts of the field and forest were slaughtered by the dozens, the flesh-eaters amongst the demons slaking their thirst and hunger in meat and blood. Even our sacred beasts that no-one could touch became nothing more than a casual meal to their soulless gullets, while their equally heartless machines ate the trees themselves, belching smoke and rancid gas.
The demons struck first, slaying our great chieftans. Their horrors knew no bounds, and they killed all tribes, all colors, and all ages. Our warriors fought back, hurling spears like lightning. But the demons’ armor repelled them, and their swords clapped with thunder, shredding flesh from bone. The castles in the sky opened up a rain of stones upon us, hellfire streamed from the skies, and they hurled their own spears like flaming hail.
Horrors were known by us that we will never see again, and we are thankful. Our people flayed alive for their study, our children raised as animals in cages for their entertainment. Our food was turned
against us, poisoned by their taint. They shackled us, pitted us against animals in their pits, and sometimes against each other. They set their beasts upon us, monsters the demons had enslaved from other worlds, taught to consume our flesh.
The demons moved faster than our bronzed fire-kites, riding their own wicked winged steeds. Their claws shred stone from steel, their mouths spat venom that blinded us, burned our eyes out with snake-tongues. They commanded fire and steel like a parent does a child. We fell in droves. When our warriors died, the women took up the call, only to be culled like cattle. Then our babes were dashed on their swords, and the demons laughed, mocked us.
We made our final stand in the charred hollows that had once been our greatest forests, jungles that thrummed with the life-essence of a thousand thousand trees and their children, the beasts that dwelt
there. We prayed in circles, like in the days of old. Many came together that night. Dark and light, young and old, zealot and free-spirit. Our love destroyed hate in that moment, and the demons retreated to their steel-fortresses in the sky. We had such celebration! We drank wine and danced in the starlight. We had won! Love had destroyed the universe’s greatest evil!
We were wrong.
The greatest horror then presented itself: the demons summoned pillars of poisonous fire. Columns of Hell stretched to the sky, taller than our mirror-towers and churning the sky black with venomous ash that poisoned with the great-eater. Know their sign: the death-cap mushroom made of smoke and hate made manifest, the truest expression of these demons’ nature ever presented forth. It was a death-sentence for our people, and all life on this world.
Now as the Eternal winter draws closer, I know we as a people are doomed. Great machinations of steel-flesh and starlight-eyes churn forth the prizes for the demons. The slaves made of metal heed the
endless hunger of their masters for planet-souls. The oceans have boiled away, long ago becoming barren and drier than mud. The demons themselves rove the ash-dunes in packs, hunting us down wherever we hide. Most of their castles are gone, or hiding in the endless clouds of soot that roll across our once beautiful blue sky.
I tell you these things with hope that you live, that some day you will not make the same mistakes we made. Do not fall to hubris. Do not fill yourself with arrogance. Do not trust the things called Humans. Do not trust the things called Man. They are the demons that did this to us, and they cannot be stopped.
Strom’s Hate
Strom’s Hate
They were the last of their troops, and from opposite armies. The wind passed cold and bitter through the fields of tall grass around them, carrying hungry crows in lazy circles above the golden waves. They stared at one another with tired arms and burning lungs, the red wash of a blood-skirmish all around them. Strom’s detachment from the main Vilharthan expedition had sought to scout for more Median forces high in the mountains that locked their homeland in its fertile valley, but instead all of them had fallen prey to roving mercenaries under the prince’s employment. The battle had been long and fruitless, every swordsman put down by someone better or more opportunistic on either side, until just two remained: Strom, and the nameless warrior in front of him.
The other warrior was tall and terrifying. Wrapped in thick cords of muscle with skin burned leathery-brown by the suns of the south, and no longer wearing armor except scars and a horned helm that obscured his face. His long hair hung loose beneath its metal. The warrior’s broadsword had been broken, and his shield dashed to ribbons before his mail-shirt was shredded. He stood lazily picking ringlets of iron from a shallow gash in his shoulder, his cleaved blade in his non-sword arm. Strom already hated him.
Strom grimaced beneath his own helm and readied his sword and kite-shield. While they were both yards from one another he was indifferent to slaying another man despite the war, least of all a paid fighting man who sought no ideal save the gleam of gold and the prizes it could buy him. A sour taste filled the Vilharthan’s mouth, and he glowered across the ring of trampled wheat beneath bodies and blood. Strom decided he could make an exception.
He had long held that the most ruthless and hate-filled won in war, and Strom knew of no person more capable of anger or violence than himself. It’s why he’d made sergeant, and why he’d stayed that rank rather than become a captain or join the cavalry. Hate let one best one’s enemies, but one had to temper hate with those that deserved it, and any who challenged Strom deserved it.
“It seems we are both routed,” Strom called out to the man, “Your captain cannot vouch for your pay, nor can I return to my own forces without accusation of desertion and cowardice. If we lay down arms, at least we can scrounge the battlefield and use what we find to last the night.”
The helmed stranger gave no words in return, but bent low to retrieve a shield from a fallen comrade, and a blade from one of Strom’s dead allies. Strom cheered inside his bitter mind, glad for a final opponent, but decided to see if the stranger would take the easy route.
“We don’t have to do this you know. It’s easy. My army is dead and so is yours, there is nothing left for us except to move on.”
With ominous silence the stranger strode forward, brass-greaved boots stalking up the hill and over corpses, his red sash moving in the wind like a crimson waterfall that was played with by the breeze, staining the earth below it with its color. Strom’s heart grew bitter with anger, and he hated all that was around him: the earth, the grass, the crows, the dead, but most of all he hated the stranger. He hated his silence. He hated his commitment to the slaughter. He hated his skill or luck or whatever had led to his survival. He hated the color of his clothes and the color of his skin and his immunity to the damnable cold. Strom tightened his grip on his blade and drew up his shield as the warrior strode closer.
The silent stranger pointed at the ground with his sword, motioning for Strom to lay down his arms. The Vilharthan snorted.
“Surely you jest? You expect me to lay down my sword while you stand armed. I think not. Answer and promise that we’ll have peace and I’ll sheathe my blade.”
The stranger did not answer, only lowered the gaze of his fierce helm to the direction of Strom’s feet. Strom’s hate grew stronger, and his adrenaline pumped harder in his veins. He steeled his mind against the battle to come, wickedly greedy for more violence.
“Very well. If I am to die, let it at least be by my own people!”
And with that he lashed out at the stranger, bringing his sword in with a massive overhand chop that would cleave a man to his sternum. The blow met the buckle of the silent stranger’s shield, sparking in the air as he swung at his helm with the edge of his shield, bringing it around in a huge hook. The stranger stepped back, raising his sword to catch the blow while shoving forward with his shield to disengage Strom’s forearm. His moves were lazy, tired — as were Strom’s — the signs of the combat before showing in their sluggard movements.
Panting, Strom focused his anger and stabbed forward, the point of his sword meeting the wood of the warrior’s shield, the sword warped, bent, and he quickly pedaled backwards. The warrior’s own broadsword came down to ring hard and heavy against the metal edge of Strom’s shield, sending numbing vibrations through his arm. Steel sprang back into shape as Strom pulled his blade free, sending a fist sized chunk of painted wood flying, and he roared as he leapt forward with a sideways swipe. The red helmed warrior ducked low, readying to pounce, and raised his shield, punching the sword out wide and sprang forward with his own stab. Strom brought the kite-shield up just in time.
Steel rang on steel, and the two warriors slipped in the mud made from blood and earth, tumbling down through the waist-high plains. End over end they went, Strom cursing and hating the whole way down, until at last they crashed into a rock, Strom’s own armor absorbing the blow as he threw the helmeted stranger off into the grass. Strom’s head swam, and the Vilharthan warrior struggled to make his head aware of his surroundings. There in the grass next to him, he saw the pommel of the broadsword the silent stranger had dropped, like a ball of steel in an ocean of gold, his hand swept out and caught the leather-wrapped handle, and he pushed himself to his feet. At last he’d end this damned wretch here and now!
Two feet of crimson stained steel pushed through Strom’s stomach as the stranger ran his own sword through his back. He felt a hand on his shoulder through the white-heat of pain, and there was a jolt of force as the stranger pushed harder and put it to the hilt through his middle.
Strom fell to his knees and coughed up blood, his head growing light as the warrior came around, lifting his helmet from his head. His face was a crag of a thing, worn and scarred, pocked by plague or acne, two smoldering dark eyes beneath long brown hair. Across his throat was a bright white line, a scar of considerable age and depth, as though his throat had been slit, or he’d been hung. Realization stung at Strom’s heart as hard as the blade in his belly, and he tried to choke an apology to the warrior in front of him. Instead, he just spat out wads of scarlet phlegm. Hatred, so long an ally in war, had blinded him, and now he paid the price for his over-reliance on wrath.
The mute warrior lifted Strom’s broadsword from the earth, and turned to face Strom as tunnel-vision began to set in. Strom felt the chill of steel on his neck, like he was being knighted, or shaving without water. He tried to fill his lungs, but he couldn’t move his chest.
“Do it.” he rasped.
And all went dark.
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