Fantasy and the Weird

You know, for a shy person who doesn't like to step on toes, it's really hard to just be like, "Hey, I'm gonna go disappear and do productive things for a while.  Don't bug me."  Especially in a house that doesn't really have a separate place for me to work.

I need to not complain.  Don't complain.  So I'm just observing.  And trying to think of a way to do what I need to do.

Homestuck continues to be a thing.  A crazy thing.  It and Adventure Time are my cartoony indulgences.  Legend of Korra is not an indulgence.  It is a necessity.

I think one of the coolest ideas for creating a world is to play with video game motifs.  It's something that Homestuck does, and most video games (obviously).  There are quite a few other stories that I can't think of at the moment, and plenty of webcomics that don't have an overarching  plot, all of which mess around with video game (and other pop culture) motifs in building the world of their story.  Scott Pilgrim is another good example of this.

Themed worlds are definitely easier to create than wholly new ones.  And "wholly new ones" are probably impossible.  But what I mean is it's easier to say, "This story is set in the Prohibition Era U.S." and present a world that a lot of people will recognize.  It's not as easy to develop the epic sweeps of the history of Arda.  Honestly, one of the most interesting aspects of the Inheritance Cycle was Paolini's experiment in world-building.  He used a lot of the trappings of stereotypical fantasy (men, elves, dwarves, and dragons) but he worked hard to make it his own.

Honestly, and it's taken me a while to realize this about myself, I prefer my worlds a little weirder.  Doctor Who's version of reality is very engaging partly because it doesn't take itself seriously.  Worlds you can laugh in make the moments of sorrow that much more poignant.  Which reminds me of Up.  Goodness, that movie is brilliant.  I won't even get started on that, though.  The Avatar world (again, the Asian-themed cartoon world and not the giant-blue-tentacle-people world) has hilarious things like platypus-bears and the recurring tragedy of a man and his cabbages, but their existence only heightens the feeling when we learn about an important piece of Iroh's past, or see a pair of brothers doomed by the upbringing their father gave them.

And Homestuck is definitely weird.  It's like Hussie dropped in the Weird-brew teabag and just left it there in the piping water until the ratio of Weird to water made the tea into a non-Newtonian fluid.  Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey Weird tea.  That's what Homestuck is.

And that's why I love it.

Now, some people can't take that seriously.  The irony of that statement is fully intentional, yes.  What I mean is that some people lose all their disbelief suspension and miss out on the ride because it's just too weird.  But I was never nearly normal enough to get along with people who like their world always straight vanilla.  Sometimes you just need to have some bacon ice-cream and get over it.

There's a smaller version of a dragonfly, and some wise guy/gal named it the damselfly.  That's an official thing.  That's the kind of world we live in.  We name bugs after medieval mythology.

There's a beetle out there somewhere that, as far as I know, can haul around a banana that's way bigger than it is.  Ants can lift things 100 times their weight.  If fleas were human-sized, they could jump football fields.  In the depths of our ocean, the wildlife glows, and the invertebrates down there are more mind-blowing to watch than a model of a four-dimensional object.

Our world flipped the lid off the can of weird before we came up with the semantic concept that weird corresponds too.  Also, we're capable of exploring semantic concepts that could never occur, and live in those mental spaces fairly comfortably without going entirely insane.  Most of the time.  There was never a Zeus, God of the Sky, man, but we sure as heck know about the stuff he did.

I guess what this Weird tangent was about is that we all need to settle down and non sequitur all over everything once in a while.  It's more honest.

Also, people like me need to drag our heads down out of the clouds every so often and do some manual labor so we can know this world we're living in isn't just made out of semantic space just because that's how we can (kind of) comprehend it.  There's stuff to it.  And it happens.  It keeps hapening.  You gotta eat something that's alive (or once was) in order to live.  Dog my cats, but that kinda sucks, doesn't it?  All it takes is a gulp of something suitably not air to cut off our respiration, and we go out like a light.

 I'm gonna stop there before I get too morbid.  I guess that's the kind of stuff I think about, and I bring it all back to stories because I'm wired that way.  This was all another defense of fantasy as a storytelling medium, I guess.  Or something.  I don't even know.

I'm still thinking about that deep sea jellyfish.