The Cosmic Horror of Medieval Medicine in Dark Souls 2

Medieval doctors had limited empirical knowledge and scant instruments, but they made up for their shortcomings with a brazen willingness to expound elaborate theories. Among the biggest medical questions of the Middle Ages was the cause and nature of the bubonic plague. The explanation varied tremendously in particulars, but the broad consensus was that the plague was caused by foul air and water, often corrupted by "earthy bodies."

Under certain alignments of the stars, the earth would release putrid gases and liquids that would be distributed by wind and cause the plague wherever it arrived. This plague gas could also emerge from more localized phenomena--rotting food, bodies, dank caves, manure, industrial waste, and tanneries--but plague doctors returned again and again to the idea that the ultimate source of the plague was the depths of the earth.

Earthquakes of course emitted noxious exhalations from deep within the bowels of the earth up into the air, producing an "eternal night" and generating "new kinds of diseases" that come about from the "many poisons that arise therein, spread not by [human] hand but spontaneously."

Earthquakes can and do release noxious and odorless vapors that can suffocate and poison humans and animals. And rotting corpses and other things that smell bad are likely to contain pathogenic microorganisms. The plague doctors err mainly in that they ascribe all these phenomena to a single category and a single source. In doing so, they create an abstraction, interchangeably known as miasma, putridity, corruption, poison, foulness, badness, rot, or stench, which mirrors the way that games generally handle such concepts.

Avicenna connects all three elements-air, water, and earth-to disease by explaining that sometimes pestilences arise from "putridities" that occur "in the bowels of the earth" that then "cause harm to water and air" but that the reason for why this happens is unknown." 

Medieval plague doctors advanced all sorts of arcane theories on minimal evidence, but apparently the source of subterranean corruption was the one topic they were not prepared to speculate on. My source on the topic, John Aberth's Environmental History of the Middle Ages, quotes plague doctors extensively but makes no reference to this seemingly obvious question. The fact that the plane they inhabited, designed for them by God, yielded poison gases whenever pierced seems like a noteworthy fact of theology and mythology. It is an odd fact to take for granted.

Konrad of Megenberg is the scholar most dedicated to the earthly explanation. He describes the plague as "a corrupt and poisonous exhalation from the earth, which infected the air in various parts of the world and when breathed in by men suffocated them to the point of sudden extinction." The terminology evokes ecology--the earth is alive; it exhales poison like trees exhale oxygen. What is this being, lurking in the bedrock, spewing bubonic halitosis into the medieval landscape? Did this not spur the medieval imagination in the way it does mine?

In a post-Lovecraft world, medieval plague theory is a tight-lipped invocation of an evocative premise. Our world is full of vast and ancient poisons, and our health is at the mercy of unknowable machinations of star patterns and the motions of chthonic monstrosities. Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia is a geopolitical version of the concept, in which oil is a sentient entity and its extraction and distribution initiates some vaguely apocalyptic circumstances.

From Software's Dark Souls 2 provides a near-perfect cosmic horror elaboration of medieval plague theory. The first Dark Souls is rich in delving, covering some classic chthonic tropes like the demon volcano city, the skeleton catacomb, and the dark abyss. But Dark Souls 2 ties a list of plague tropes and motifs together to create a thematically linked environmental arc, an arc that plumbs even deeper chthonic depths than its predecessor.

Harvest Valley

In Harvest Valley, a vast tower studded with giant windmills pumps poisonous liquid from the earth. Trenches and pits line the outskirts of the tower, flooded with green miasma. It's not clear what exactly is being harvested. Nothing grows here; the earth itself is fouled. A merchant sells minerals, and the shallow trenches are called The Mines. Aberth tells us that "Windmills, especially toward the end of the Middle Ages, were to develop other applications besides grain and industrial milling, such as pumping out water in order to drain the . . . ever deeper mines of Germany." Elsewhere he advises us "[not to] forget mining, since this was mentioned by Konrad of Megenberg as giving access to deadly vapors or fumes trapped within the earth." Perhaps the windmills pumped the poisonous fluid from the trenches to facilitate mining titanite and other stones?

But no. Laddersmith Gilligan tells us that "there's this monster lady, right . . . and the poison, well, does wonders for her body . . . you know, health and beauty, and that sort of stuff." So it seems that the poison is the product. And this is borne out by the evidence; the tower is filled with enormous jars of the stuff. Mining for poison is not a fantasy in the Middle Ages: mines produced both lead and arsenic as marketable products.

Down the Pit

The poison at Harvest Valley is not a byproduct of mining or some curse that befell the land. It is "found deep within the earth." There is no proper mine at Harvest Valley. The entrance to the depths of the earth is instead found in Majula. The town is built around a structure known as the Pit, which appears to be an enormous well, though this is likely not its intended purpose. Regardless, the well is another classic motif of the plague theorist:

"One [of Megenberg's proofs of an earthly origin for plague miasma] is that air, when it is 'shut up and imprisoned for a long time in the earth becomes so corrupted in some corner of the earth that it may be turned into a potent poison to the human constitution.' This is demonstrated . . . by the fact that wells, when they are first opened after being sealed and unused 'for several years,' typically suffocate with their fumes the first person to go into them."

Within the Pit there is a rat-infested crypt. Rats are the most prominent symbol of the plague to modern audiences, but medieval doctors would have been more concerned with the corpses than the rodents. In fact, some doctors were more interested in whether rats were catching the plague than if they were spreading it. Avicenna indicated that mice and rats fled the earth in advance of a spreading wave of underground putridity. Whether other creatures were susceptible to the same diseases as humans was a topic of much debate, but since all poison and disease were of a single essence, the general intuition was that they were, except in the case of inherently venomous organisms.

The King of the Rats begins to elaborate some of the chthonic mythology of the Pit.

"Long ago, I struck an accord with a human chieftain. 'Twas agreed, Humans would rule the lands lapped by the sun's rays, and rats, all that was below. But humans are liars all, schemers and cheats. Humans are creatures of greed. The time came they broke their word, and hunted us down."

He goes on to refer to humans as "sun-poisoned," implying that indeed there is in fact a dichotomy of poison natures. The chthonic putridities are their natural home, and our home is as foul to them as theirs is to us.

The Gutter

Further down the Pit, far below the Rat King's crypt, lies the Gutter. Laddersmith Gilligan tells us the Pit is "where the people round here toss all their rubbish. Corpses or you know what… Whatever they'd rather be rid of." In medieval cities, trash, including all the muck and nightsoil people washed into the streets, was a major source of stench, and cleaning it up was one of the few suggestions plague doctors made that was both tangible and productive. The Gutter manifests this public health nightmare as a vertiginous cesspool, a teetering frame of timber rising upward in a cavern oozing slime. Pillars of trash, corpses, sewage, and cabinetry descend from the upper reaches. 

If the link between this sewage and the broader theme of the Pit seems tenuous, note that poison in DS2 can be inflicted as well by a lump of shit or spoiled pine sap as by a poisoned blade or cloud of gas.

The Gutter is dotted with poison-spitting statues, a chorus of pulsing vessels that fills the cavern with an eerie disembodied heartbeat.

A tenuous network of rickety ladders drops to the bottom of the Gutter and into Black Gulch.

The Rotten

Black Gulch is spattered in a bright green lichen that evokes the miasma of Harvest Valley. The poison spitting statues of the Gutter are at their most dense here, and they too are coated in the green lichen. Tar pits and holes in the wall are inhabited by creatures that are, once again, unperturbed by poison.

At the bottom of the gulch lies a monstrous agglomeration of past-its-prime flesh called The Rotten. It is a golem of corpses, grotesquely bloated and moist compared to the game's typical denizens, who appear mummified (that's my character, Pubic Shout, on the right, for comparison). Medieval doctors were concerned that plague would spread from "rotting cadavers in cemeteries or left on the battlefield during wars"--The Rotten is an incarnation of their worst nightmares, if they had them. And again, if the environmental links between these corpses and plague/poison in the game are too circumstantial, note that poison can also be inflicted by "germs on [a bat] cadaver."

Is The Rotten the source of the plague vapors boiling up from the earth? It makes a strong candidate. It has the charisma and the potency to putrefy the world. It even has the soul of an Old One. 

But delving is never done. Beyond the Rotten a fountain of coiled, headless serpents offers access to a hidden city that lies even deeper inside the earth.

The Poisoned Dragon

Shulva, the Sanctum City, is a massive Mayan temple within the biggest cave of the Pit. Devotees of the earthly hypothesis of plague formation generally considered caves sufficient sources of miasma on their own, waiting only to be released by earthquake or mining. But the source of Shulva's poison is more concrete.

In true Lovecraftian fashion, the denizens of the Sanctum City worship and protect a sleeping dragon, Sinh, with poison in its heart. The priestesses of Shulva sing the dragon to sleep, ostensibly in its service but implicitly to protect the city from its ravages. Graverobbers coveting the dragon's blood, the Drakeblood knights led by Sir Yorgh, invaded the city from above and fought their way to the center of the Sanctum, Dragon's Rest. Sir Yorgh managed to thrust his giant spear into the slumbering dragon's heart.

"When Sir Yorgh faced Sinh, the slumberingdragon, he drew blood with a flash of his steel,but Sinh responded by spewing forth thepoison that had long brewed within him,blanketing the city in a miasmic cloud."

The only men who remain in Shulva are suffused with poison, their bodies oozing foul vapors. It is plausible to imagine that the miasma released by Sir Yorgh drove the inhabitants of Shulva up into Black Gulch--supplying the corpses of the Rotten, perhaps? Some may have even made it to the Gutter, where their belongings were piled up and scaffolding constructed in a desperate effort to reach the surface and escape the miasma (this hypothesis comes from this Reddit post). 

The game encourages the conclusion that that Sinh was the source of all the corruption in the Pit. He sleeps in "the lowermost depths of this land," preempting the idea that there is some further source to be found still lower in the earth. Yet there remains a tantalizing clue: 

"The King erected a magnificent city, and the dragon slept soundly. Until Sir Yorgh disturbed it with a single great strike, and the dragon could bear its store of poison no longer.The rain of death toppled the city, but restored the dragon's purity."

Conclusions

If lancing the dragon and releasing its festering poison restored its original purity, then the corruption must not be endogenous to the creature itself. Sinh is not a being of poison; he was poisoned himself by something else. On the ultimate source of that corruption, the game gives no further hints, remaining as mum as the plague theorists themselves.

This line of reasoning is sort of just an intellectual curiosity. The conflation of poison and disease into a single status effect category, essentially a new element, is common to a lot of games; what makes Dark Souls 2 unique is its willingness to dive into the chthonic mythology underpinning that element. It is a difference of degree more than kind in its affiliation with the medieval plague theorists. 

It seems fairly certain that the parallels were not conscious on the part of the developers. The alternative explanations, I think, are either that these plague tropes were codified and collected by the plague theorists and advanced together in the public imagination ever since, or that these disparate forms of badness and their chthonic roots are intuitively linked in the Western imagination. 

I think that some of each is true. There seems to be a general human tendency to dichotomize dirt/cleanliness, where dirt is a catchall for anything corrupt, dangerous, or unpleasant. But on the other hand, chthonic mythologies in other cultures--see the Greek or Egyptian underworlds, for instance--never mention poison at all, so this idea may be unique to medieval Europe.

Wilderness in Fantasy: An Overview

Wilderness is part and parcel of our conception of the fantasy genre. Swamps, mountains, caves, and above all forests are the natural homes of the dragons, faeries, and witches that have fed the genre for centuries. In this post, I want to lay out a brief overview of how the wilderness concept has evolved and informed fantasy, in very broad strokes, and set up some more detailed explorations in the future.

Wilderness is not so much an ecological condition as a cultural invention. It is defined by an absence of human modification--though whether this connotes an appealing purity or appalling desolation depends, essentially, on when you're living. The term has been applied to a wide variety of landscapes, often places with a deep legacy of human influence not apparent to naive travelers, like the Americas. For our purposes, wilderness is an ancient, alien, inhospitable landscape with a deep reserve of mystery.

Cultural relationships with wilderness have undergone some tremendous changes over the last few hundred years, and fantasy has reacted to and occasionally played a part in that evolution. If you're unfamiliar with the topic and are looking for some background information, my conception of wilderness comes from Bill Cronon's seminal essay, The Trouble with Wilderness. Cronon is a brilliantly readable and insightful author, and the essay is well worth the read if you're at all interested in the topic.

The city-wilderness dichotomy in fantasy can be traced back to some of the oldest recorded mythology, when Gilgamesh and Enkidu enter the divine Cedar Forest to kill the monstrous forest spirit Humbaba. This story already holds many of the iconic elements of the fantasy story - aristocratic men journey into an enchanted wilderness to kill its chimeric monster avatar.  

art by Jason Bennett

Christian formulations gave the wilderness a new spiritual spin. It is the setting for Exodus, the 40 year test of faith, and the scene of Christ's Temptation by the Devil. Hermits, saints, and mystics undertook wilderness trials that self-consciously imitated the Temptation. Harsh landscapes offered great tests of faith, but also the possibility of greater spiritual attainment. Demons made mountaintops their homes, but if they were conquered, one was unusually close to Heaven. Depictions of the Temptation also continue the chimera motif, giving the Devil goat horns or chicken legs to communicate his unholy nature. 

Art by Simon Bening

Chivalric Romances are more or less explicitly modeled on these Biblical stories. Knights are judged for their strength and skill in battle, of course, but their most important attribute is their purity. The trials haunting the mysterious forests of Arthurian legends are more likely to threaten a knight's virtue through temptation and trickery than to attack his body directly. 

The monsters, witches, and fairies haunting the forest weren't its only fictional flavor, however. European forests were simply not the dense, unfamiliar, and wild places these stories often depicted. Forests were used intensively for charcoal, firewood, animal forage, and other wood products. They were coppiced, pollarded, and occasionally even planted. Royal forests were carefully managed to encourage, and frequently even stocked, with game animals, carefully monitored by hunting staff to be conjured on a whim for royal hunting parties. While the medieval world was swathed in geographic uncertainty, rife with hostile factions, and bounded by mysterious frontiers, the European forest was, by and large, none of these things. 

In Don Quixote, Cervantes calls attention to this mythic exaggeration. Quixote sets out to find evil knights and monsters haunting a mythic landscape, but instead encounters only working people in a working landscape. Inns become castles, muleteers become brigands, and of course windmills become giants. The distinction has been lost a bit for contemporary audiences, but Cervantes' point is clear: fantasy romances require a wilderness; if there is none at hand, one must be imagined.

Art by Juan Gallego

As fantasy proper emerged in the Romantic period (several centuries after the classic Chivalric Romances were published, of course), its wilderness setting was increasingly pushed out of the contemporary landscape and into new compartments. Gothic novels cordoned the fantastic off within haunted houses and cursed family lineages. Post-apocalypse stories turned the landscape into a wilderness through the passage of time. But the primary current of Romantic fantasy existed in fairy stories--not literary fairy tales, which were also quite popular at the time, but stories about magical and mischievous societies inhabiting parallel or microcosmic worlds, drawing extensively from Celtic and Germanic folklore. 

Fairy stories reified the dichotomy of wilderness and domesticity, remaking the spiritual wilderness of the Chivalric Romance as the magical land of Faerie. Depictions of Faerie vary wildly, but it is generally reached through some sort of Portal--generally found in a natural setting, in the woods again, or down a river, or within a bramble thicket--though sometimes a cabinet or wardrobe will do. It is generally either overlain directly on our world, visible only to those initiated by magic spells, places, or fruit, or found in microcosms much larger than they appear from the outside. 

The "portal to Faerie" device has fallen out of favor to some extent, and in the 20th century fantasy works have embraced the "secondary world" model canonized by Tolkien. In some sense, this can be seen as a return to the fictive wildernesses of the Romances--characters begin at home, on the farm, and some event sends them off on a journey to a distant goal across a countryside filled with war, monsters, and witches. But where earlier fantasies were largely (and my generalization brush is fairly thick here) more dreamlike, mythic, and often allegorical, Tolkien's wilderness was an obtrusively physical place. Pragmatic concerns like food, while addressed with fantastical elements like lembas bread, are as much a concern for the hobbits as maintaining their faith. (The spiritual element lingers in Tolkien-it is not a coincidence that Frodo's wilderness trek in the wastes of Mordor lasts forty days). 

This pragmatic view of wilderness paralleled cultural developments like the outdoor recreation movement and the environmental movement. The ideological forces in Lord of the Rings illustrate some of the contradictory tendencies in 20th century views of the environment: the Shire represents civilization, but in a picturesque agrarian format that was rapidly disappearing due to industrialization. Wilderness hinders the Fellowship, but it is Sauron's military-industrial complex that is truly antithetical to civilization. 

A more concrete wilderness has enabled fantasy to engage with nature in more materialistic ways. Dragons are objects of scientific study in A Natural History of Dragons and geopolitical hard power in A Song of Ice and Fire. Geralt, protagonist of the Witcher series, refuses to kill any monsters whose species are endangered. The entire fantasy wilderness world is marketed as a tourist attraction in Diana Wynne Jones' Dark Lord of Derkholm.

The Romantic era also brought a new appreciation of wilderness as an aesthetic phenomenon. Wild landscapes, especially those with enormous trees, jagged rocks, waterfalls, and above all, grandiose topography, were glorified as "sublime," natural temples where the glory of God was especially apparent and spiritual communion was facilitated. The aesthetic of the sublime has been one of the biggest influences on the depiction of fantasy landscapes, serving up topography ostensibly even more excessive and "epic" than nature can provide.

Only in the last 30 years or so has the genre opened up to stories set primarily in cities, which illustrates the depth of its historic attachment to wilderness. Urban Fantasy follows urban ecology in deconstructing the artificial divide between city and wilderness, embracing a worldview in which cities hold as much magic as the countryside--if one knows how to look for it. China Mieville's Kraken makes the city of London a vital magical entity in its own right, and populates it with a wilderness of monsters and magicians dense and varied as its cosmopolitan inhabitants. 

For the rest of this series, I might dive into some of these examples in greater depth (let me know if anything sparks any particular curiosity for you!), explore some of the social denizens of fantasy wilderness, like ruins, werewolves, and fairies, and track their interactions with broader cultural ideas about wilderness.

The Weevil's Advocate

I've been reading John Aberth's An Environmental History of the Middle Ages lately, and one of the sections in it concerns animal trials. In the late Middle Ages, the Church began conducting legitimate legal hearings and executions against animal defendants accused of crimes. Pigs were the main defendant among domestic livestock, since they were abundant in city streets and apparently had a predilection to eat human young. One such pig was dressed in human clothes before being hung in a proper gallows. It's absurd, but in one read, it prefigures modern attempts to grant legal rights to animals - citizenship is a two-way street, after all.

But what's fascinating, and revealing, about these trials is that they were extended to "vermin" as well. "rats, mice, moles, eels, serpents, locusts, worms, flies, caterpillars, beetles, leeches, snails, and weevils" were brought to trial, where lawyers were appointed as prosecution and defense.

Aberth outlines one such trial in detail, and it is a royal hoot. It all started when some pest - the court record describes them as "green flies;" Aberth suggests they were cherry weevils, but this doesn't seem like a great guess to me, though he's probably right that they weren't actually flies - destroyed the vineyards in St. Julien, France. The viticulturists, depending on the grapes for their livelihood, naturally took the case to the bishop's court and sued the flies. Two lawyers, Anthony Filliol and Peter Rembaud, were appointed as their public defenders.

The prosecution wanted the flies excommunicated. Excommunication is "an institutional act of religious censure used to deprive, suspend, or limit membership in a religious community or to restrict certain rights within it." It's not entirely clear what that might have meant for the flies, but fortunately, they never had to find out. The defense argued that since the flies were acting "by their natural instinct alone," excommunication "would be an unaccustomed and unusual mode and form of proceeding" since that punishment is only earned by behavior in active contempt of the Church.

The prosecution argued that men were " created and established that he might rule other creatures and dispose of the terrestrial orb [as he see fit]" - the flies had violated the natural order! But the defense were savvy evolutionary ecologists. Recognizing coevolution when they saw it, they pointed out that natural law "demanded that the said animals live as well as they can off of these plants, which seem to have been created for the use of the said animals."

This was a persuasive case. The prosecution was sweating in their wigs. Rather than chancing a judge's decision, they decided to settle with the flies out of court! The townspeople agreed to set aside a preserve at the outer edge of the village for the flies to live in. The settlement agreement specified the exact boundaries and plant species to be established within. Folliol and Rembaud were not satisfied, however. They contested the settlement, claiming that the land designated "is not sufficient nor suitable for the nourishment of the said animals since it is an infertile place and renders nothing,"

The story ends there, unfortunately, because the rest of the record was eaten by insects. :/

This trial is remarkable for a number of reasons. It resulted in what is probably the first insect sanctuary on record. It shows that "vermin" were granted effective defense attorneys, while in the same time period people tried for heresy, like witches and Jews, had no legal protection at all.

Aberth puts forward the argument that these trials were largely symbolic, acknowledging a transgression of the proper hierarchy of man over beast, and formally reinforcing the natural order. But no one really knows, so we can infer a much more interesting story if we want to. Maybe one of the weevils was an amateur law scholar and sat on Folliol's shoulder during the trial like the rat in Ratatouille.

Here's Aberth's telling of the story:

“To modern minds, one of the more bizarre and incomprehensible aspects of the Middle Ages are the animal trials that reached their apogee towards the end of the medieval period during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One cannot help but be bemused by the spectacle of domestic animals such as pigs (by far the most frequent defendants in such trials), cows, oxen, goats, horses, donkeys, dogs, and roosters being put in the dock and solemnly sentenced to death; how much more risible to us is the entirely separate category of Church proceedings that targeted a host of lowly “pests” and “vermin” such as rats, mice, moles, eels, serpents, locusts, worms, flies, caterpillars, beetles, leeches, snails, and weevils, in which it was hardly likely that the animals could be brought to the bar of judgment but where the legal argumentation back and forth between prosecution and defense was even more elaborate, and which often ended in excommunication and exorcism of the accused.”

“In this view, the trials were intended, not as a punishment of animals per se, but rather as public spectacles with a message directed exclusively at their human spectators, namely, that human justice was reasserting its primacy over the animal world and the divinely ordained hierarchy was being re-established, which had temporarily been overturned or challenged by the animal crime.”

“. . . in 1587, the community and parish of St. Julien in the Savoy region of France sued the "green flies" (perhaps cherry weevils) that destroyed their vineyards before the bishop's court at Maurienne. Central to the argument for the defence of the weevils by their advocates, Anthony Filliol and Peter Rembaud, was a principle already enunciated throughout the Middle Ages from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas and going even further back to Aristotle: that brute beasts are judged to live and act "by their natural instinct alone," since they "are lacking in the sense and use of reason." Therefore, to excommunicate the flies for their supposed crime of devouring the vineyards, as the syndics of St. Julien wished, would be an unaccustomed and unusual mode and form of proceeding," since according to canon law as enunciated by Gratian's Decretum, such a sentence can only be promulgated "by reason of the contumacy" of the accused, but "it is certain that the said animals cannot be established to be in contempt [of the Church], since reason and justice do not rule the said animals." 

Filliol and Rembaud were, in fact, making a very modern-sounding argument that animals should not be tried before the bar of human justice at all, since they could not be expected to follow its rational procedures and obey our laws. To the prosecution's argument that "man was created and established that he might rule other creatures and dispose of the terrestrial orb [as he see fit] in equity and justice the defence responded that both and natural law, which were eternal and could not be changed, as well as dictates of reason "demand that the said animals live as well as they can off of these plants, which seem to have been created for the use of the said animals." Apparently, the syndics and community of St. Julien were wary enough of their chances of a favorable judgment to attempt an out-of-court settlement with the flies. On the 29th of June, at an assembly in the town square where a settlement was recorded and read out in French (as opposed to the formal Latin of the rest of the trial record), the townspeople agreed to set aside a piece of land, called Le Grand Feisse, especially for the tenance and for them to live in which lay on the outer edge of the village and whose exact boundaries and species of plants were specified. 

Nevertheless, the counsel for the defense of the weevils still contested the settlement on the grounds that the assigned land "is not sufficient nor suitable for the nourishment of the said animals since it is an infertile place and renders nothing," What the end result was we will never know, for this is the last record that we have on a case that had dragged on for nearly six months: In a sublime piece of irony, or perhaps justice, insects or vermin had the last word on the whole affair by eating and gnawing through the last page of the document recording the trial!

What is remarkable about all this legal back and forth just for the sake of some weevils is how it contrasts with a series of witch trials in nearly the same region and on almost the same charge, destroying vineyards by an act of nature, from a century before. In that case, the accused witches were burned at the stake for destroying the wine harvest through a killing frost, heavy rains, and storms, whereas the flies who were actually caught in the act of eating the crop were treated almost with kid gloves, being provided with a nature sanctuary all their very own (perhaps the first one of its kind for insects, which is now quite common in the modern world). One could say that the witches were associated with the devil in their trials, while the weevils were portrayed by the defense as God’s agents, acting out his natural laws, although witches were not even allowed defense representation, on the basis of a precedent established in heresy cases.”

Killing The Author in KOTOR 2

May The Plot Be With You

In my post on morality in fantasy, I pointed to the Force as one of the best examples of a moral system built into a fictional universe. But the light side—dark side moral axis is only a small part of what the Force does within the story.

Han Solo calls it “one all-powerful force controlling everything,” a “mystical energy field that controls [his] destiny.” That Han doesn't believe it exists doesn't make him any less subject to its whims.

In Skippy the Jedi Droid (a non-canon “what if?” story) Red, the “R2 unit” [sic] with “a bad motivator,” senses what would happen if R2-D2 were to be discovered by the Stormtroopers—Yavin base destroyed, the Rebels crushed, Imperial tyranny forever. To avoid this terrible galactic tragedy, it blows out its own motivator, ensuring the Lars family will buy R2-D2 instead. Red is literally Plot-sensitive. But this explanation is superfluous; of course Red’s actions are determined by the Plot. What alternative is there?

This concept (which seems utterly obvious in hindsight) came to me in Nick Lowe’s essay The Well-Tempered Plot Device. Lowe treats the Force as synonymous with the plot, with insightful results:

 "The time has come, young man, for you to learn about the Plot." "Darth Vader is a servant of the dark side of the Plot." When Ben Kenobi gets written out, he becomes one with the Plot and can speak inside the hero's head. When a whole planet of good guys gets blown up, Ben senses "a great disturbance in the Plot."

“the Force is one of those arbitrary, general-purpose, all-powerful plot devices that can be invoked whenever convenient to effect whatever happens to be necessary at the time. The only ends it serves within the logic of the story are those of the storyteller.”

I think the Force can be extended even a bit farther than that. It puts the proton torpedoes down the exhaust pipe, gets Luke to Dagobah, brings Leia and Lando to rescue him from the bottom of Cloud City. But it also brings the Emperor to power and turns Anakin Skywalker from a hero to a villain. It creates the whole fabric of the fictional universe: Ben Kenobi tells us that the Force “binds the galaxy together.” The Force represents all of the choices the author makes in the story, including the decision to write it in the first place.

Star Wars is not unique in its inexplicable and capricious magic, much less in its arbitrary and clumsy plot developments. But it may be the only fictional setting that makes these phenomena tangible and literal to the characters. The Force is more concrete than fate or destiny, more prosaic and malleable than God.

A few of the better Star Wars authors have addressed the adolescent moralism inherent in the universe. The results often feel more like contortionism than coherent moral relativism, but it’s better than ignoring the problem entirely. Only two stories, to my knowledge, really let characters grapple with this fate incarnate.

In Into the Void, the antagonist, Dal seeks to escape the Jedi and the Force, pitying his family and friends as “slaves to the Force.” He tells the protagonist,

“You might think it serves you, but you serve it. You never have your own thoughts, because the Force is always on your mind. You never fight your own fights, because the Force fights for you.”

 Substitute "plot" for Force; you get the idea. The dialogue here shows the author is at least conscious of the problem, though the exploration doesn’t go much deeper. 

The only story that really engages the opportunities the Force offers for metafiction is Knights of the Old Republic 2.

The original Knights of the Old Republic plays the Star Wars formula straight. It turns Luke Skywalker's archetypal struggle against the temptation of Dark Side into a game mechanic, a moral barometer/personality test that tells you what kind of person you are and predicts the decisions you will make later, when it matters. In KOTOR 2, developer Obsidian, and especially writer Chris Avellone, set out to critique the inherent absurdity of this model, the way it restricts player-controlled character development and the way it contorts gameplay and storytelling.

Star Wars stories in nearly every era are iterations of essentially the same cosmic war. In the now-defunct Expanded Universe, the conflict between the Jedi and Sith extends back 7000 years before A New Hope and over 100 years after it. Some of the best stories reduce their scope towards the lives of individual characters (the original Han Solo adventures, for instance), but what writers and audiences both love best is to pit enormous armies representing the forces of good and evil against each other. These galactic conflicts cause terrible collateral damage, destroying trillions of lives and stymying political progress.

KOTOR II attacks the Force as the in-universe cause of this suffering, taking KOTOR’s Jedi Civil War as its iteration of this perennial conflict.

The story arises from the Battle of Malachor V, in which Revan and the Exile (the protagonists of the first and second games, respectively) used a superweapon to destroy an enemy fleet, killing many of their own Jedi in the process.

While the destruction of the Death Star was an unambiguous good, the victory at Malachor V feels much more contemporary. Nearly every character in the sequel is a direct exploration of the post-traumatic stress created by that one battle. The Exile becomes a “Force Wound,” cut off from the Force by the pain of the massacre. Her evil counterpart is Darth Nihilus, also a Wound created by the battle. Bao-Dur is driven by guilt for creating the super weapon. The player’s mentor and antagonist, Kreia, finds both the logic and means for her quest in the aftermath of Malachor V.

Kreia's relationship with the Exile is central to the plot. According to writer Chris Avellone,

“Kreia is my mouthpiece for everything I hated about the Force, and then I let her rant.”

“She sees in the player a chance to turn away from predestination and destroy that which binds all things, giving the galaxy back its freedom.”

 Kreia lies and misleads and contradicts herself so much in her dialogue that her goals are left ambiguous, but the Jedi in the game believe that her main goal is to use the Exile to create a Wound in the Force. As Master Vrook puts it, “You are a breach that must be closed. You transmit your pain, your suffering through the Force. Within you we see something worse than the teachings of the Sith. What you carry may mean the death of the Force… and the death of the Jedi.”

The superficial interpretation here is a bit flummoxing—why would Kreia believe this to be possible, let alone desirable? But with Lowe’s concept in hand, we can see that Kreia isn't merely trying to destroy an in-universe energy source. She's literally trying to thwart the force responsible for interfering with the destiny of her galaxy's citizens, forcing them to endure endless conflict and oppression for sadistic entertainment. For a character in a fictional universe to attempt to sever contact with her own creators is wickedly postmodern, and it could only really come off without seeming trite in a setting in which authorial whim has an established in-universe avatar.

If Kreia had succeeded, the legacy of the Sith would have ended: the events of the original trilogy would never have occurred. She would literally have gone back in time and prevented George Lucas from making the films.  That's a neat feat of metafiction. Perhaps this is why aiding Kreia’s scheme is never an option for the player – ending the Force as a font of magic is plausible within the confines of the fiction, but ending the meddling influence of the authors is unfathomable.

(The main point of this post is to showcase KOTOR 2's postmodern premise, and that's done. The rest of the post is a more direct look at the game itself and how it fails to live up to the potential of that idea. It's not probably very interesting unless you've played the game, though. Unless you're the sort of person who reads reviews for entertainment. Like me.)

Review

KOTOR 2 gets a lot of cred for its tone and its ideas. KOTOR wonderfully captures the feel of the original Star Wars trilogy, while the sequel feels intellectual, dark, and provocative in comparison. As much as I respect Avellone’s ambition, and while I appreciate the quite evocative tone KOTOR 2 intermittently achieves, I think it’s rather a failure all around.

Avellone’s anti-Force thematic material is barely detectable in the incomprehensible stew of conflicting plot arcs and interpretations. The game's abrupt release and cut content are only partly responsible for this; the restored content mod and suggestions from developer interviews show that the plot would have only become more complex with further content, and the ending would scarcely make any more sense. It is the apotheosis of what TV Tropes calls the Gambit Pileup.

What really kills KOTOR 2, for me, is the sense that Obsidian was more interested in pointing out KOTOR’s flaw than in improving on them. The game kind of hates itself. Rather than adding mechanics to engage with the game’s new thematic ambitions, Obsidian carried over the systems from the original without substantial modification. Then the game’s dialogue incessantly mocks and deconstructs its own mechanics with self-righteous cynicism. It creates an infectious tone of bitterness that highlights all of the game’s many shortcomings.

Avellone’s thematic ideas suggest a cognizance of the limitations of dichotomous moral storytelling, but the stories it tells reflect a blind adherence to their framework. The obsessive need for every quest to resolve to good and evil outcomes corrupts the value of the prodigious quantity of narrative. Humor, charisma, charm, and depth are subdued in favor of morality plays populated exclusively by pitiful mothers separated from their children, poor starving beggars, gamblers in over their heads, and greedy thugs.

What’s worse, the game asks the player to make these moral choices outside the framework of any apparent character motivations. In KOTOR, the player is presented two former identities, both of which appear in flashbacks and dialogue; moral choices emerge from the recovery of one or the other of these identities. KOTOR 2 provides no such context. Without motivation and characterization, moral choices in this game are laid bare as artifacts of a dumb mechanic. The game mocks you for buying into it, but constructs all of its stories to fit it. It implores you to find a middle path but never presents the option to do so.

Unlike in Return of the Jedi, or the original KOTOR, the protagonist makes no single emotional choice to determine the outcome of the game. Instead, the player decides the fates of three worlds; together, the ramifications of these decisions will determine the fate of the Republic. This Hari Seldon counterpoint to the grandiose battle of KOTOR would be refreshing if the persistent, pernicious moral reductionism didn't result in such unsatisfying stories.

Sinister Landscapes in Black Death

A placeholder post to showcase screenshots from Black Death and some Caspar David Friedrich paintings as loose points of reference. Click on one to enter slideshow view.

(This one is by Thomas Cole, called Cross at Sunset)

Why Fantasy Needs Postmodernism: Morality

This post is meant as an introduction or synopsis of a concept that should be very familiar to long-time readers of fantasy, especially fans of some of the postmodern-influenced contemporary fantasy I'll be covering in this series (and if you're not a fan of Game of Thrones, c'mon). Anyway, don't expect anything groundbreaking here.

Fantasy Violence

Fantasy, high or low, dark or heroic, usually involves a lot of murder. Bloody sword fighting and gruesome monster slaying are so deeply enmeshed in the genre that few works are bold enough to eschew them entirely. There is a bit of dissonance, then, in the fact that fantasy works are often belittled as children's media. Children can't be exposed to raw ultra-violence, so fighting that takes place in these stories has to be put in some kind of context, a space where it is regulated, justified, or comprehended.

The Heroic Frame

There are a few moral frames that are typically used for this purpose. The first, because it's probably the oldest, is the heroic frame. It views violence as an occasion to demonstrate personal virtues: loyalty to the clan, willpower and courage, but most of all strength and skill in the practice of violence itself. This sort of violence is often ritualized in formal duels and accompanied by song, dance, and often a minimum of actual death. It represents warfare in many indigenous cultures, and in Western cultures it has become entirely subsumed by sports.

Some fantasy works, especially products of historical cultures, use this frame for violence (The Iliad, Beowulf, The Worm Ouroboros) but it is not typically sufficient in works that involve larger political strife. Most contemporary works that depict men who fight and kill for personal honor use that trait as a shorthand for evil.

The Postmodern Frame

The newest frame for violence, as far as I'm aware, is postmodern. The postmodern frame paints violence as the inevitable consequence of ecological, economic, and political conflicts. They make no attempt to justify violence, occasionally commenting on the tragic circumstances that spawn it. It generally acknowledges that both parties bear some blame for violence, that both believe themselves to be doing right in some measure. I'll be covering some of these works in this series, but some conspicuous examples are The Wire, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and Game of Thrones.

The Moral Frame

The one overwhelmingly common frame for fantasy violence is moral. The moral frame is familiar from works like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter. The binary of good and evil in these worlds is common to many religions, but most directly reflects and references Christianity. Western fantasy has deep roots in late medieval chivalric romances (King Arthur and his many continental counterparts) and the expressions of morality in contemporary fantasy can be traced back to those explicitly Christian stories.

Much of early modern fantasy was explicitly allegorical and, especially insofar as it was aimed at children, contained explicit moral lessons. In a long tradition of what Simon Schama calls "grafting," Christian authors used pagan stories, creatures, and settings to enliven what was essentially Bible commentary. C.S. Lewis' Narnia books are the most famous example, though he got the idea from his predecessor George MacDonald.

The Lord of the Rings series, written by Lewis' friend and fellow Christian fantasist JRR Tolkien, was often interpreted as a comparable allegory, especially for political realities at the time he wrote it (World War II) or conceived it (World War I). Tolkien found this unduly limiting; his ambitions were broader. Steven Allen Carr tells us that:

Tolkien in fact encouraged the view of his work as an open-ended allegory, yet denied particularly specific allegorical applications. . . . According to National Public Radio, Tolkien considered Lord of the Rings “an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power,” – in other words, a kind of master allegory.

Thus the story is not meant to represent World War 1 specifically; it can be mapped onto any war. The Ring doesn't represent nuclear weapons; it represents any war machine of unbalanced power. As a "master allegory," the iconography of Middle Earth has had a long and illustrious history as a political narrative, particularly in foreign policy. This history is reviewed in Steven Allen Carr's 2002 piece Confronting Lord of the Rings as Allegory.

Following in Tolkien's tradition (and reflecting the shift to secularism and away from symbolism in art generally), most contemporary fantasy works are not allegorical. The stories they are telling don't come from the Bible or reference its characters in a specific sense - Obi-Wan is not intended as a Christlike figure (though Gandalf may be). But they persist in reaching for Tolkien's "master allegory," which in the abstract refers to the existence of good and evil in the judgments and outcomes of the world itself.

(Image from http://chipweir.weebly.com/the-hobbit-reading-blog/gandalf-a-christ-figure)

In Christianity, Evil literally exists, is personified by Satan, and is propagated by minions under his sway. The Dark Side of the Force, Sauron, and Voldemort, are all to a greater or lesser degree analogues of this system (the extent to which this is literal or simply implicit can vary, but the result is the same). Evil is portrayed as a temptation that acts a test of the protagonists' moral fortitude and commitment to Go(o)d. One's position in this divine conflict is to some extent preordained - entire races are irretrievably corrupted to evil, while some men are born to be righteous kings who fight on God's behalf.

Murder committed against Satan's servants is justified, even necessary. It's a task that needs doing, that can only be completed by virtuous and powerful men, and the completion of which improves the world and reflects well upon them. When Sauron's forces are defeated, Aragorn pardons his human thralls, but hunts down and kills every orc that can be found. It was only recently, in the postmodern era, that it became possible for us to memorialize the nearly three million people Luke Skywalker killed when he destroyed the Death Star.

Of course, Christian fantasists didn't apply their worldview to stories to justify and contextualize violence meant primarily for entertainment. Dragon slaying was a spiritual metaphor. Recapitulating the worldview of medieval fantasies today is not, I think, a harmful instance of cultural appropriation, but it certainly feels inadequate and superficial.

Escaping the Moral Frame

Binary moral narratives should by all rights be dead by now. They simply don't suit the realities of a complex and globalized world, a multicultural world, and a world informed by a wealth of scientific context. The binary worldview has a bunch of corollaries with destructive consequences for real people. Its implicit racial and national essentialism, legacy of classism, and the jingoist dehumanization of putative enemies express themselves in pernicious social issues.

That said, I'm not going to argue that fantasy fiction is actually causing these issues, or that alternatives will make a meaningful dent in changing them (though it can directly achieve smaller goals, like representation of diversity). Fiction is just one part of a massive cultural dialogue, and the dialogue determines the influence of individual works as much as they set the dialogue.

I think it's more interesting to argue that binary morality limits storytelling in a profound way, and that stories that escape it are opening a whole new world of plot and characterization opportunities. Video games offer the most extreme case study. RPGs (Bioware is by far the most prominent example) often mechanize morality explicitly by applying good and evil point values to certain actions.

Players expect that making "good" choices will have the intended results, eliminating a degree of spontaneity and failing to make the player question the limitations of their understanding and intentions. Storylines must be written to fit into this binary framework, pruning away ambiguity and stories that function more on quirk and flavor than moral conflict. In extreme cases, players stop thinking about their choices at all and simply vote by party lines. Games encourage this by rewarding ideological purists with special items and abilities.

Ambiguity is interesting, provocative, and fun. It creates complex characters. Imagine a character like Arya Stark happening in Lord of the Rings, or Ender Wiggin in Star Wars. Remember how clumsy Anakin Skywalker's turn to the Dark Side was in Revenge of the Sith, how artificial and strained it felt. And as much as you might hate it at the time, you know it's a good thing for narrative interest when bad things happen to good characters - when old mentors and assholes aren't the only protagonists with faulty plot armor.

When violence isn't the righteous removal of evil from the world, it needs to be addressed in other ways. It regains some of its rightful brutality, and it can resensitize us to its realities. Characters see the consequences of their choices; they experience grief, guilt, and pain, and grow as a result. Readers are forced to empathize with enemies who once would have been anonymous soldiers trudging into a heroic meat grinder.

The best postmodern stories present several sides of a story. The Wire and Game of Thrones encourage us to identify with some characters over others, but they never let us accept that people like Cersei Lannister are simply evil. Their actions have logic and context, human emotions, and emerged from a particular personal history.

By presenting multiple perspectives, postmodern fantasy can illustrate the limitations of our viewpoints and ideologies, calling attention to if not resolving partisan and international gridlock (condemning people who disagree with you as evil feels great but is ultimately counterproductive). Smart writers can also incorporate material forces that drove historical conflicts in our world.

For the purposes of this piece, I tried to stick to very popular examples I could count on most readers having some familiarity with. The rest of this series will highlight a number of postmodern fantasy works more or less off the beaten path, so if you're here looking for recommendations, hang in there and check back later.

PS While modern authors have done great things with non-binary morality, it's certainly not a new approach. And outside of genre literature, things have been a lot more nuanced for a very long time.

PPS Postmodern works are not inherently superior to binary works. I still love Star Wars. :/ Execution matters as much as anything, and there are of course dozens of hacks writing postmodern fantasy, especially now that Game of Thrones is so popular. I'll be one of them, some day!