Archetypicality

It's hard to blog in the morning when you don't have internet.  I spent most of the morning reconfiguring my family's wireless router so we could get on, then trying to get an old computer to download Guild Wars 2 for this weekend.  It seems that the problem is that it doesn't have enough RAM to download the client, let alone anything else.  Solution?  I guess we're gonna go buy enough RAM to get to 4gb at some point.  Then, maybe, the computer will work out.

I'm a little dazed this week, I guess.  Having a heard time putting it together and getting going.  Maybe I need to set my alarm for earlier.  I dunno.

I've covered the importance of diction, word choice, and characters to writing, and how those apply to building the world your readers will see as they absorb your prose.  In no way have I been exhaustive on those topics.  There's almost always more to say.  But I think I've given you an idea, at least.

One of the things I love about fantasy is the archetypes.  To the other-trained eye they look like clichés:  overused character tropes.  But depending on the kind of fantasy you're telling, the wise and arcane counselor can be quite effective.  It's always best, though, to try for new and interesting combinations—and keep diction and character in mind while you deal with archetypes.

There aren't just archetypical characters, like the Wizard or the Fledgling Hero.  There are archetypical settings, too.  Mordor is an archetypical Wasteland ruined by the villain.  Swords of Power and Words of Power are both also archetypical elements.

So what's the difference between a cliché and an archetype?  Basically, archetypes are old.  Old like the Epic of Gilgamesh old.  Arthurian legend is a good source of archetypical ideas, as are the epics of Homer and the canon of the Greek and Roman pantheons.  The other thing about archetypes is that they are closer to allusions than to clichés, and by using them you are referring to and acknowledging a vast history of stories told.  It's this past-reference that makes archetypes a good thing.

Here's what you have to beware of, though.  It works for alternate histories, and somewhat more casual fantasy, to rely on thinly veiled archetypes.  For example, there are characters with names like Marduk, Vulcan, Tempus, Leviathan, and Tiamat in the world of Hearthstead.  That's because my cousin and I decided that one of the motifs of Hearthstead would be direct allusions to mythological figures and places.  But Hearthstead isn't high fantasy.  Again, that's not a mark against the world.  But it's an identifier.

If you're doing high fantasy, it's expected you're building a huge historied world for your story to take place in, and if that's the case you really don't want a Gandalf stand-in.  Someone very old and very wise?  Okay.  But a wizard with a giant beard who dies and comes back to life is not a good idea.  You should probably also avoid taking names directly from the real world.  No Zeus.  Maybe you can take some names like Zachary, but ehhh maybe not.

This ties in to diction/word choice big time.  It's best to have an idea of what the people of the world call things.  You're probably writing in English, but if it's a fantasy world you most likely don't want to have everyone naming their babies and their places things like Philadelphia or Johnny.  There's also the whole thing of not overdoing x's and y's.

If you're basing a world or a part of the world off of a particular mythology or real-world culture, using naming conventions from those are a good idea.  Norse, for example, or Spanish.  However, if you want mad props for creativity, spending a long time hashing out the nitty gritty details of names, their spellings, and their meanings is probably requisite—as is trying to veil any real-world ties as much as possible.

Even then you'll be using archetypes, for much the same reasons as you're going to have people in your story.  Stories are retold with new (or mixed-up) contexts.  Your job in world-building is to create a place with a set of contexts that's intriguing for the reader.

One story that does this very well is the Avatar series, actually.  Not the movie Avatar with its uninspired story, but Avatar:  The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra.  The former introduced a world where, basically, the whole thing is Asia, and people learn martial arts that allows them to control the elements.  By "the whole thing is Asia" I mean the four main peoples of the Avatar universe are based on real-world Asian peoples.  All the names, cultural motifs, and much of the spiritual/magical element of the show derives from this Asian center-piece.  That's one reason why The Last Airbender movie was completely terrible.  In The Legend of Korra, time has moved forward (pretty rapidly for fantasy) into what seems to be 1920's era city-life, complete with industry, high-inventiveness, and mangled city politics.  The metropolitan lifestyle has affected many of the visual characteristics (such as fashion and ways of moving) but the Asian background is still there and still strong, including the fact that all the names are still created according to very not Anglo-Saxon conventions.  This is a good thing.

So I talked a bit about archetypes and naming things today, and I'm sorry if it was a bit jumbled.  I did say I was scattered.  That's all I really have to say for the day.  See you tomorrow.

Ciao.