Because Nobody Asked Me: What Do I Think about JJ Abrams on Star Wars?
Very recently, a friend brought it to my attention that it had been a month since I posted to the blog. I've been writing mad posts, but admittedly for another blog. And that's only the beginning of the neglect here. Still, as a guy who really cares about popular culture and genre fiction done well, I'm going to shortly weigh in on the burning nerd question of the moment...
How do I feel about JJ Abrams on a Star Wars movie?
The more interesting thing to me is the irony of Disney, the creator of our copyright problems, taking a beloved piece of pop cultural landscape and opening it up to the world for reimagining and reinvention in a way its creator only had minor interest in.
But as far as JJ, my thoughts boil down to two things.
- I'm a huge Star Trek fan and JJ's reboot/reimagining is the best thing since Original Flavor. It gave me back the thing Star Trek had been missing since Original Flavor turned into movies about saving whales and The Next Generation let nonsense words take over for good writing. Excitement.
- Star Wars sure as hell can't get any worse.
O Holy Knight 4 – Controversial Statement
I have one more paladin thought. It's kind of a lame blog post, but it's a thing I feel needs to be said. There may be argument. I welcome it. I will bury you if you try and argue against this. But you should still totally try if you want to. It's just a fair warning.
Paladins are good guys, therefore Jedi cannot be paladins because they are just as evil as Sith...maybe worse because they lie about it. To themselves and the galaxy at large.
That is all. More, non-paladin related things tomorrow. G'night.
O Holy Knight 3 – Cleric v. Paladin
This is a little off topic of why I love paladins. That's partly because I'm not sure I can explain my appreciation for them in a more satisfying way than "their clarity of purpose and ability to actually hurt evil with a gun or sword rather than just perpetuating evil with their gun or sword" just by throwing more words at it. I can clarify my position, but I can't really justify it better than that.
Secondly, my insistence that traditional Dungeons & Dragons paladins don't actually make any sense merely underscores the fact the the clerics don't make any sense either. And if you're going to have two religious character classes that make no sense, you need to figure out what the relationship between them is internally because the fiction fails utterly to suggest anything.
Thirdly, this concept was new to me in that I didn't realize other people were confused about it. That's not a slam, it's just one of those things you instinctively understand and then get confused about when other people ask you why water is wet. Discovering an entire thread on Story Games that tried to parse the difference between a cleric and a paladin was like when I loaned comics to people and they insisted they couldn't figure out what order to read the balloons in.
Guys...it's obvious. Right up until you meet somebody for whom it isn't.
So I read that thread with much interest even though I discovered it mostly after it was over. I can say that, functionally, as in mechanically and by the rules, I have no idea how paladins and clerics are supposed to be different. I think that would depend wildly on the rules secondarily and primarily on whether one agrees with my delineation of their roles. All of which, by the way, are in-fiction.
Clerics
When the night is dark and dreadful. When you have an unshakeable disease or a wound that refuses to heal. When you're having a crisis of faith. When you need comfort. When you need to know which rule you broke that brought judgment down on you. When you need inspiration. When you need a marriage/blessing/christening/funeral/other sacred rite or ritual, you get a cleric.
There is a system, god-given or man-made, that codifies the rules of the deities into what you need to do on a daily basis. These rules can shift and change over time, but this is rarely seismic. There is a comfort in the cleric's presence because he or she represents these rules, the foundation upon which society rests.
Sure, they have weapons and armor, but that's because the (typical fantasy) world is a dangerous place. Clerics are often themselves rich or part of rich orders and kidnapping/ransom is a problem even in civilized places. The itinerant priest is on the edges of civilization where his status will not protect him because "decent folks" are few and far between.
But when he or she shows up, the village feels instantly better. The fortified city knows that deities are on its side. Clerics, on a metaphysical level, a warm blanket. They heal, they cure, they inspire, they are, above all, comfortable.
Paladins are...well, they aren't any of these things.
Paladins
When a vampire has fangs sunk into your neck. When demons threaten your village. When infidels stand ready to invade your nation. When someone requires divine judgment. When Evil threatens. When the situation is so dire that you would gladly get burned in order to fight the fire with fire, you get a paladin.
Clerics work within a system by learning the system. They're egalitarian in a way. After all, anyone who studies can become a cleric. Paladins operate outside and sometimes even in opposition to the system. Clerics discern the will of deities through the lens of their traditions. Paladins hear the voice of their deity directly. And for the paladin, that voice never says "comfort" or "evangelize" or "protect." It only says "kill."
Oh sure, they might be killing to protect, but that isn't the real issue at hand for a paladin. They are there to kill Evil Things, and if by killing Evil Things, Good Things are allowed to thrive, that's wonderful. If the Good Things have to be purged in order to kill the Evil Things, that's equally preferable.
Paladins don't just carry weapons, they are weapons. They never get sick, they rarely get tired, they can heal, but it's usually just to keep fighting. When a paladin shows up, the village feels instant relief. But that only lasts until the threat, whatever it is, has been beaten. Then they fear who will come under judgment next...and secretly know they are as likely to feel the edge of the paladin's blade as whatever Evil Thing was just vanquished.
Comparisons
Clerics are shields, Paladins are swords.
Clerics are antibiotics, Paladins are chemotherapy.
Clerics are blankets, Paladins are armor.
Do a thought experiment for me. Imagine the average priest. Kindly, careworn face, smile lines around mouth and eyes. They're handing you food or giving you medicine. They are probably at least a middle aged man with time-tested values. They may pray for you, beseeching the Lord to protect and comfort you even as they are doing.
No imagine Jeanne D'Arc. She's a teenager, and a woman. She wears men's clothes and armor. She has a sword. She only ever either looks angry or has a faraway look. And you're way more worried about that faraway look because it probably means God is talking to her...or she thinks He is. And if He's talking to her, He's telling her to kill. Do you have a secret sin? Of course you do, everyone does. Do you think she might judge you if God spoke to her of your secret sin? Of course she would. And she's only got one sentence...death.
At this point, I don't even care if the Cleric and Paladin are functionally the same in the rules. They are going to be wildly different in the fiction. And as a gamemaster, I can work with that. I can create situations where the Cleric is the brains and the Paladin is the muscle. I can cast the Cleric as the loremaster and knowledge keeper, the one who knows how best to hit the monster, while the Paladin is the attack dog.
Does that make life easier or harder for the characters? I have no idea, but I know it'll make it more interesting.
PS: Modern D&D, whatever that means, appears to disagree with me. Looking at images and such, I honestly can't tell the difference between Clerics and Paladins. That feels like a mighty fail. D&D players who read this blog, speak up on this. What's the official line on differences?
O Holy Knight 2
As promised, here's a few of my thoughts on the Western Paladin.
No, not that one! (Although this guy did imprint on me a bit, but more on that another time)
I mean this type of one.
Actually, I don't entirely mean this one either. It was years before I heard of the Song of Roland. My first real brush, and it was love at first sight I might add, looked more like this.
Dungeons & Dragons, baby! Get your dice bags and Doritos! It's time to roll a paladin, kill monsters, and take their stuff! And here's how I knew what I was doing.
Man, that brings back memories both misty AND watercolored.
Yep, well before literature or myths and legends, I fell in love with the paladin while playing D&D. In case you were wondering, my favorite of all time was Jombers, the Fist of Torm. That bad ass started out as an NPC fighter, but I made him into a holy warrior!
Here's the thing I didn't realize for a long, long time. Paladins in Dungeons & Dragons make zero sense. They are basically pseudo-medieval crusaders in a Germanic pagan, polytheistic world who had to follow Fauxdeo-Christian strictures. Say whaaaaaa...? Even Crystal Dragon Jesus doesn't really make this make sense.
But at the time, I didn't care. Holy warriors delving into the depths of the earth to kill evil things and bring back treasure to their ridiculously ornate and wildly out of place cathedrals was exactly what I wanted to play.
As for the current best and only paladin "done right," I can't suggest The Deed of Paksnarion enough. If you're going to do D&D paladins, at least this frames them in a conceptual way that makes sense. Go read it now!
At some point in the not-too-distant future, I, too, will be throwing my hat into the ring of "paladins done right." I'll keep you posted, but for now, just go read about Paks. She's pretty damned amazing.
More tomorrow! Probably "clerics v. paladins" since I opened the whole D&D can of worms today.
O Holy Knight
I love Paladins. As far as I can remember, I always have.
This is kinda crazy for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being my own personal views on spirituality and pacifism. Maybe that's one of the reasons I like the idea of a holy warrior so much. It is much easier to fight and die for what you believe in than to just die. That clarity of purpose is hard to come by in real life, which may make it so attractive in fiction.
At any rate, the turnkey moment for my paladin was was the realization that I appreciate paladins across cultures and genres. Sure, the love started with the very Dungeons & Dragons idea of a holy knight dispensing justice from the back of his white charger, but there are some other archetypes I didn't understand my own appreciation for until I tied them into the concept of the Paladin.
Obviously this is a pretty broad definition of paladin as "holy warrior," but I think that's fair considering how far away from The Song of Roland the D&D paladin is. I'm just widening the net similarly, but feel free to argue in the comments. Now, without further adieu, here's two of my most Eastern examples of paladins I love.
Sohei
"Only three things disregard my wishes: the rushing waters of the Kamo river, the unpredictable dice, and the mountain priests."
-Emperor Shirakawa (1073-1086)
First off, just look at that bad ass! A masked samurai with a sword on the end of an eight foot pole! Shields and big horses aren't the only way to roll like a paladin.
Sohei were the military arm of Buddhist sects in Japan during at least the Sengoku and various Shogunates, especially Tokugawa. These guys are sorta the token example of "fighting for peace" and how relatively stupid a concept that is. But like all Japanese warriors, they made up for philosophical holes by being amazing fighters.
Sohei favored the naginata enough that the weapon has become traditionally synonymous with them. Part of their fame was the ability to spin the weapon so hard and so fast that no arrow would hit them. Otherwise, they armed themselves more or less like the samurai, often incorporating steel helms beneath their trademark white cowls.
"Temple samurai" is a pretty boss concept.
My favorite story about sohei shows that they were thinkers willing to use religious beliefs against their enemies just as deftly if not as often as they did their weapons. There is a tale of an intractable daimyo (lord of lands, akin to a duke) who simply refused to come to accord with the monks in the mountains near his capitol. Normally, the sohei would swarm down the mountain and fight the daimyo's forces. But this daimyo's capitol had grown over a trade crossroads, making the lord very powerful and very rich. This allowed him a standing army strong enough that such a fight would likely end badly for the monks even if they won the battle.
Instead of a massive force, a small cadre of sohei marched down the mountain bearing their shrine's idol, sort of a large, ornate box acting as a, for lack of a better term, Buddhist reliquary. They set it down at the crossroads of the daimyo's capitol, right in the middle of where the merchants conducted all their trade and business. They placed a curse upon the idol and walked back up the mountain.
For several weeks, the cursed idol crippled trade. Nobody wanted to go touch the thing. Most wouldn't even go near it. The daimyo found his brisk trade ground to a halt. He made accord with the monks, who promptly came down the mountain, de-cursed the idol, and took it back to the monastery.
Wudang Monks
You know these guys best from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, starring the inimitable Chow Yun Fat (pictured right) and Michelle Yeoh.
Wudang Monks were real, but their reputation as "holy warriors" is apparently largely fictitious. Since I'm not from ancient China, the fictitious reputation affects me way more than the historical reality. At their core, the Wudang monks are Taoist counterparts to the Buddhist Shaolin (or vice versa) named for the mountain housing their monastery.
On a basic level, they're "Chinese sohei," but they diverge in a few big ways that make them different enough to appeal to me in other ways.
First, they didn't typically go to war, which means no vast armis of Wudang monks. In fiction, the Wudang typically ran in singles or duos, although they would team up with larger groups of non-monks.
Second, and the reason they didn't go to war, is that Wudan monks fought primarily for justice. In a vast land with little access to anything like a modern day police force, an expertly trained fighter who wished for nothing but seeing justice done and stood outside the social order of wealth and privilege would have been an absolute godsend (see what I did there?) to peasant villagers. That's a recognizably paladin idea applied in a very Eastern way.
Third, they retained their unassuming, monkish look. Sohei wore the cowls so that nobody ever forgot that a monk stood beneath all that armor and weaponry. The Wudang wanted to be recognized as monks first and only, they just happened to be really amazing swordsmen as well. No stallions, no big armor, no piles of weapons. This is absolutely a paladin focused through an Eastern mindset.
Lastly, the fictional Wudang are the sorta inspiration for the Staten Island rap supergroup, Wu-Tang Clan.
Okay, this post has gone on longer than I expected. In the near future, I'll probably talk in more detail about the original, Western paladins. I'll suggest the best novel about a paladin (until I write my own, that is). I'll also discuss the difference between a cleric and a paladin in roleplaying game terms since D&D had made that a conversation almost necessary if you're going to write or game in the fantasy genre.
Parents Who Watch Phantom Menace Have Children Who Watch Phantom Menace
The other day, my 5yo son started humming the Imperial March. Now, we'd watched the Star Wars Trilogy with him when he was, like, three. And he is pretty precocious. But it seemed a bit of a long shot that the song had somehow imprinted itself on him two years ago when he could barely follow a conversation with bread. The weirdest thing was how familiar that tune is to me. I fell right in with him for a couple bars before realizing the whole scene was weird.
"Hey, where did you hear that song?" I asked.
"At Evan's house. He was playing Lego Star Wars." Thoughtful pause. "Dad, can we watch Star Wars?"
I said yes without thinking, and I meant it. But the question of which Star Wars movies we would watch and in what order instantly took center stage of my mind. At first, I thought the answer would be an easy one. We'll only watch the good ones, obviously.
Well, the good ones and Return of the Jedi.
But then my friend Jeff called me to task. "The week he starts school, you're going to introduce him to Star Wars...but not the Star Wars all the other kids know? You're a terrible parent."
My gut reaction was, "Or I'm the only good parent!"
And I stand by that to some extent. Those prequels are terrible. Really terrible. They took a series of movies I'd seen countless times, one of which I'd even heard before seeing because my mother was VERY pregnant with me when she saw it in the theater, and sucked the life and joy right out of them.
But I did hear those Clone War cartoons are pretty cool. And of course there was potential in the prequels before Lucas turned the whole thing into a latrine. Countless allusions and suggestions across books and comics showed that. Was there a way to introduce the entirety of the Star Wars movie canon to my son without wanting to drill through my own eye?
Another friend to the rescue, this time Brett Grimes of the famed Superboy and the Legion of Superheroes entry to Kanye + Comics. He linked me to a post on Absolutely No Machete Juggling suggesting the author has nailed the viewing order for Star Wars. It's really quite inspired and I won't steal his thunder by explaining it all here. Essentially, the order boils down to IV, V, II, III, VI.
I'm going to give it a try on myself while showing them to the boy. If nothing else, it ought to make Return of the Jedi look thousands of percent better. And then, even if it's a mistake, we can watch a bunch of Clone Wars cartoons. That's a win, right? At least a Pyrrhic one? Maybe?
Damn you all over again, Lucas.
Vive la Différence: Science Fiction and Fantasy
Vive la Différence is a new feature of the blog (probably, note previous posts) where I take a couple things that have been (sometimes inexplicably) intertwined with one another and talk about what, to me, are the core differences between them.
Today's two sacred cows ready to be slaughtered, ground, and grilled are the venerable statesmen of nerdery...science fiction and fantasy.
Even undergradutes in Nerdery or Geekonomy are aware of Clarke's law that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. This more than anything save the overlap in fandoms explains why these two genres have been so closely linked. While the early days of "hard science fiction" tried (and typically succeeded) in grounding their worldbuilding in hard science facts, this eventually fell by the wayside for the most part.
Eventually you get into the areas of Space Opera, such as Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, or the Star Wars franchise, that don't even try and hide the fact that they are essentially fantasy stories with the trappings of science fiction.
"But how does it work?" the fan says. "It's futuristic, advanced technology!" the author might reply, "so it just does." And, for the most part, this has been perfectly acceptable. Although, every now and then you'll find a series of sci fi novels that tries to pay more than the usual amount of lip service to science fact. The Honor Harrington series comes immediately to mind.
Nevertheless, there is still a moment where we, the reader or viewer, have to suspend our disbelief and just accept that the tech works because the fictional people have discovered some esoteric fact or formula that we have yet to stumble upon.
Which sounds dreadfully like magic if you think very hard about it. Is there a great distance betweenthe scientific laboratory with its bubbling beakers and Jacob's Ladders and the alchemist's workspace with its bubbling beakers and stuffed alligators? Is there a great distance between the scientist's unintelligible scribblings on a blackboard and the draconian scratching of ancient glyphs on the diabolist's floor?
I have come to the conclusion that the main difference between science fiction and fantasy is one of attitude. Generally and broadly, in a science fiction story, when something inexplicable happens, there's someone there to insist that there is an explanation. In fantasy, at some level, it is entirely appropriate and accepted to shrug your shoulders and figure faeries did it.
This isn't to say that there aren't rules for magic. John Butcher's Dresden Files exemplify the marriage of vague science fact with eldritch fiction. The energy for spells has to come from somewhere, there are sympathetic energies, etc. But at the same time, there are beings ancient and terrible who are what they are because they are beings of magic and nobody is even considering subjecting them to the scientific method.
And this isn't a bad thing! The supernatural fills us with a cold, quiet dread that defies our modern understanding of the world. That's it's job.
The flipside of this, for me, is the JJ Abrams created television show Fringe. I realized that all the wild happenings that kick off each individual episode (including some Big Picture elements I won't discuss due to their spoileriness) could easily be described as spells, precognition, or simply magic. But every time Walter shows up on the scene, everybody turns to him and say, "Whaddya think, Walter?"
And even if Walter doesn't immediately know, his attitude is always that he can figure it out. "But I can't know for sure until I get back to my lab." He should just have a sign. Or I should have a drinking game. Or both.
Now, some wily magus in a fantasy story might act the same way. And there is certainly a point of suspension of disbelief for both types of story. But the attitude is certainly more at home in one type of story than the other.
As a writer, this was a big discovery for me. Did I want to dwell on the details of the weird happenings? Did I want them to be explainable? Did I want my intrepid heroes to stare into the eye of the unknown and overcome their fear to deal with it? Or did I want them to hitch up their lab coats and insist it make an accounting of itself?
Thinking about the tone and feel of the story I'm planning helped me decide if it would work better as sci fi, fantasy, or some mash up. But if it is a mash up, I still know which style I wanted to emphasize. I mean, in a 50-50 situation, everybody still angles for the hyphen, right?
So vive la différence, science fiction and fantasy! We love you for different reasons, but we may not love you deeply until we know those reasons!
Apollo and Dionysus Wear Spandex
Monday we discussed the Apollonian & Dionysian dichotomy. As I mentioned at the end of the post, this is a thing that is on artists' minds a lot but not always at the conscious level. When you take that constant tension and place it under deadlines in a medium that thrives on kinda ridiculous concepts (like, say, comics), it's going to bubble up to the surface like swamp gas. There are dozens of examples in superhero comics of this dichotomy, but I'm just going to hit a few of my favorites and most fun.
World's Finest - This is the code name for a Batman & Superman team-up (originally in World's Finest Comics, hence the tag). On the surface, these two fall into almost quintessential examples of Apollo and Dionysus. Superman is a veritable sun god bringing light and reason to the world with his solar-fueled super powers while garbed in radiant garb. Batman resembles a cthonic creature inhabiting a dark world choked with the miasma of madness. But this most obvious of examples also demonstrates the interplay. Batman fights madness with cold logic, cutting reason, and a can-do attitude Apollo would have found most appealing. Superman, on the other hand, is a being of feelings and intuition. No great tragedy drives his crusade for goodness, he does what he feels is right. Thousands more words could be said, but these two are a great example of the dichotomy as dialectic.
Orion - Son of a dark god raised in a world of goodness and light. I admit, Orion is framed as a little more "good v. evil" than "emotion v. reason," but he still fits the thesis pretty well. He is consumed totally by rage. So totally, in fact, that he has to have a super-science living computer called a Mother Box to calm his more furious tendencies.
The Rest of the Fourth World - Orion is the most obvious example, but Mister Miracle who must overcome his fear in order to escape a literal hell, Darkseid who is another visually cthonic entity that is driven almost entirely by will and reason, and a whole lot of other characters that are allegories. Again, it's mainly framed as "good v. evil" but there is an awful lot of raw emotion v. cold reason going on at the same time.
The Hulk - If Orion is pointing in the general direction of Apollo and Dionysus, then the Hulk is a giant neon sign that hangs right over their door. Emotionless scientific genius Bruce Banner loses control of his feelings and becomes a rampaging engine of destruction. The Hulk is literally Bruce's worst nightmare made real; a desperate problem that's all his fault that can't be solved by the power of reason. The thing is, in the rare moments the Hulk is calm enough to reason with, he's an unstoppable powerhouse that can be pointed in the right direction and solve all kinds of problems with raw rage that couldn't be solved any other way.
Green Lantern - Honestly, as much as I love the Rainbow Lanterns as a concept, they do muddy the waters somewhat for this example. Still, a power ring is the most powerful weapon in the universe that can literally create anything the user imagines (Creativity) but only if it can be harnessed by the wielder's willpower (Reason). Every single time a Green Lantern fires up his ring, he's filtering his creative urges through the lens of his intellect. This is why boneheads like Hal Jordan tend to make things like guns and boxing gloves instead of, you know, interesting things.
I'll stop for now, although there are plenty of other examples (probably a bunch I haven't through of yet). Feel free to suggest some I forgot in the comments! If absolutely necessary, hit me with an "umm...actually" if you think I've got one wrong. Also, for my readers that are less superhero nerds, feel free to introduce some examples from other corners of literature.
Sun Gods & Wine Gods – Dichotomies in Pop Mythology
Welcome back, pseudo-scholarly nonsense! I have missed you! (Although my readership has, perhaps, not.)
I've got my eye on a project in the future that makes my ideas on meta-myth and pop mythology more cohesive and coherent (I hope). This means I have to turn my mind's eye back to the sort of philosophical thinking that excites me so much and probably mystifies so many of you. Ah, well, if you must blame someone or something, blame my recent read of Supergods. Although I've been thinking for a while I needed to stop some of this "life and thoughts of the writer" stuff and return to my four-color philosopher roots.
Today I'd like to take a look at the contrast and possible dialectic of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. A little background on the source of the names. Apollo is the perpetually youthful Greek god primarily associated with the sun, dreams (especially in terms of prophecy), and (the light of) reason. Dionysus is the perpetually youthful Greek god primarily associated with wine, intoxication, and the accompanying ecstatic madness that came with drinking. The Greeks themselves didn't seem to see the two Olympians as opposing forces per se, that literary and philosophical school of thought came later. However, Parnassus, the mythic home of poetry, drama, and all other arts, was tied tightly to both Apollo and Dionysus so they were connected at the fault line of art in the Greek mind.
A great deal of effort and evolution has gone into contrasting Apollonian and Dionysian modes of thought, especially the explicit use of them as rivals or opposite forces; a sort of yin-yang of the artistic Western world. I want to zero in on the more modern and, especially, post modern look at the concept as a dialectic rather than an antagonism. Putting the two modes at opposite ends of a spectrum with myself in the middle of an ongoing conversation between the two feels more true to the artistic process and, of course, is the sort of "majority rule" philosophy that has trickled down into literature and, especially, my pet corner of pop myth - comics.
I gravitate toward the dialectic because it is, frankly, how I work and how, it seems, the majority of artists work. My Apollonian mind, the place of reason and order, is not the source of my stories (or, were I a differently oriented artist, my visuals or poetic phrasing). Art begins in the emotional, in the visceral, in the feeling of things. I feel something, even if it's as simple a concept as "excitement" or "adventure" as in a lot of low art, and the feeling is so strong that I have to create a conduit that will share it from me to another person or group of people. I have a Dionysian urge to share the ecstasy (or agony; they're two sides of the same coin that is Extreme Human Feeling) with others. It is overwhelming and, if not given an outlet, will find its own way out in a manner I may not enjoy as much.
But how can I do that? Emotion is the foundation of all human thought, as any good psychologist will tell you, so I should, in theory, be able to share it with others. But for all its foundational power, it is also a slippery, ephemeral, and notoriously difficult to quantify area of human experience. Which is also something any good psychologist will tell you. Even communicating anything about my emotion at least requires some sort of language (even if it's visual as opposed to verbal). And here enters Apollo and his light of reason. While my stories cannot start in logic and reason, they must pass through that lens so that they can be ordered into something others can understand. I must filter the raw, emotional power through a logical framework in order to communicate any of it to my fellow humans.
That logic might be a conventional three act story structure or it might be recognizing that our minds are programmed to think of reds and oranges as hot and blues and violets as cold. It might be something more slippery yet still logically purposeful such as juxtaposing two words with rhyme (there's language again) and thereby connecting them in the mind of your audience to create whole new ripples of interconnectedness.
It might be any of a million such things and these are the things one is taught in "art classes." So the auteur who says that classes have nothing to teach her because she's working with the raw, visceral power of emotion and rules will only shackle her has a point. Without that power, she will have no fuel for her art. However, she is also deeply wrong because without those rules, even should she choose to ignore or flaunt them, her art will be a mess devoid of meaning to any but her. Apollo and Dionysus are not enemies. They share a complicated, symbiotic relationship to create art.
So you can imagine that a lot of artists when have personified this dialectic into their work. A sizable number of artists + years of working with broad, mythic characters and concepts + tight deadlines + the freedom to innovate as they saw fit + literalizing every internal concept = superhero comics = Apollonian & Dionysian pop mythology.
So now that we are armed with a basic understanding of Apollo and Dionysus as artistic concepts and now that I've given you a basic idea how that can filter down to superheroes, come back Wednesday and we'll look at some of my favorite examples. I've got a few in mind, especially some obvious ones, but anybody feeling clever should put some ideas into the comments. I'd love to incorporate your ideas.
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