Why I Love the Red Wedding

So in case you don't read A Song of Ice and Fire, don't watch the television adaptation called Game of Thrones, don't know anyone who reads or watches either, and you are cut off from all the media that have been poring over them periodically, there's an author named George R.R. Martin who is famous for killing his heroes. His story covers a vast political landscape and brings in a large population of highly detailed characters, allowing him to easily kill three quarters of his characters and still keep the periodic slaughter going on for several more books. His power to fill his readers with rage and sorrow is only matched by his power to instill in them a deep hunger for more of his writing. This is possible for two reasons: firstly that he is a very skilled writer (obviously), and secondly because he defies the literary and cinematic law which I will call the Redshirt Phenomenon.

We all know what a redshirt is. In Star Trek, any time a group of officers go down to an unknown planet or encounter any kind of danger at all, if one of them has a red shirt on and is not a main character, then we know that he is going to die. It's something that lets us know that the threat is serious and we should be worried about the major characters because they might die too. The problem is that they don't. Major characters don't just die in Star Trek, and if they do (as Spock once did in an older movie and as Kirk did in the most recent movie) then they're going to be brought back to life one way or another. It's not exactly a big surprise.

The thing is, the Redshirt Phenomenon exists in nearly every series on paper and television. In monster shows and crime dramas if we see see an unknown character at the beginning of an episode then we know that character will either (and there are signs to tell which one) be killed or witness the killing of another character. In Doctor Who, we know that incarnations of the Doctor and his companions are introduced and eliminated according to a cycle and we can often know whether or not a major character is going to die simply by following news about the actors. When it comes to superheroes, we all know that really central heroes and villains "die"frequently, but almost never stay dead. The fact of this era of easily produced and easily accessible fiction is that the deaths of its characters are highly predictable.

The problem is that buried in the Redshirt Phenomenon are our two conflict desires; one is our desire that the heroes we love do not die, and the other is our desire that they experience real danger or, to put it another way, that they might die. Every story that has ever been told can be fitted into one of a small handful of paradigms complete with character types, types of conflict, and plot outlines; the reason that we still care about so many different versions of the same paradigm is that the good stories have realism. Even stories that have none of what we typically mean by realism today (sex, swearing, gore, etc...) are often still highly realistic in that they have the full vividness of life; they have characters that are unique yet ordinary individuals, they have things that are loved, they have things that are hoped for, they have things that are feared, they have a world of people and things that have names and distinctions. The characters matter, the setting matters, the conflict matters. That's why the redshirt dies, because he was part of the Enterprise crew and that crew matters, and because that crew member is dead the thing that killed him matters. The redshirt's death tells us that the characters whose names and traits we know (the characters who are most realistic) are in danger, and that means the conflict matters.

Yet at the same time, the characters that die (and remain dead) are typically not realistic characters, but are instead props that are there for the realistic characters to express emotions about and direct their efforts and skills towards. In crime shows and monster shows the villain will often have a number of victims throughout the story, but only the last victim will actually be saved; the other ones simply supply clues and emotional stimuli for the realistic, round characters while our emotional investment goes to the final intended victim (usually a child or a damsel in distress). Even when an important character dies, they are still a peripheral character (a mentor, a family member, a lover, etc.) rather than a main character. The really rounded characters do things, we see them assuming different roles, they experience growth, and they play an active, dynamic role in the plot. But if we see the mentor take initiative or assume a different role, it's a rare experience that we take great note of because of that rarity. Even the doomed characters that have almost no attachment to the round characters are still frequently defined by their attachment to something else that the audience is likely to care about (an upcoming wedding, a newborn child, or something else like a child's graduation that is an extension or remolding of those two things (seriously, I don't think there's anything else)) rather than by the kinds of traits that make us attached to the major characters.

The thing that makes George R.R. Martin so powerful is that he kills realistic characters. He has his share of dying peripheral characters, but the books are about one giant war so it would be strange if those characters didn't die off frequently. He is quoted as saying that he wants his audience to "be afraid when my characters are in danger. I want them to be afraid to be afraid to turn the next page because the character may not survive it."And he's succeeded! Martin has succeeded in bringing his story to life because he has given it the realism that is missing from so much modern fiction. To read his books is to be afraid and grieved and in consequence it is also to be joyful. In other words, his books are full of the terrible and wonderful vibrancy of life.

Now, if you have been reading this and the entire time have asked why anyone should care (first off, shame on you, and secondly, why did you keep reading?) then I have one final answer for you and one final note for everyone else. This is not simply a matter of enjoying a story, as important and noble that uniquely human experience is, it is also about our ability to understand and appreciate the world around us. One reason J.K. Rowling killed so many beloved characters is because she was shocked at how casually we often handle death whether in books or video games or in the news. Death is so ever-present that we typically don't give it more than a minute of thought if it happens to anyone we don't know, and what Rowling wanted was to force us to really experience grief. She wanted us to care about her fictional war and not to feel like everything was fine because our heroes had made it through just fine. It would be absolutely debilitating to really feel every death we hear about, but it is a fact that if you are an American citizen you are part of the most powerful and far-reaching nation in history as of yet, and if you are to be an active member of that nation then you must be able to appreciate the consequences of our actions around the world. We must not be like the children of Brave New World who are brought to play among the dying and to learn apathy toward the deaths of others. On some level, when we hear about the massacres in far-off places we must understand that the people who are dying are people who have loves and quirks and dreams and the full vividness of life, people who could have been our neighbor or our friend or our lover if they had been born here instead of there. We must appreciate and understand this, or else we are doomed.

The Theorist and the Lord

The theorist sat in his study
And spewed his monomania over human history
He fell upon kings and conquerors
Striking each down with the stroke of a pen
His paradigm went forth with a roar
Swallowing nation after nation
He flattened all the mountains
He turned each morning grey
He rode his formula out into ages past
And before him all were subdued
Until he approached that dreadful Enigma
The Jew who had crushed Bacchus and Jupiter

The paradigm went to consume him
But the One whom death could not contain
Would not be held by so small a thing
He tried run Him down with the formula
But the Nazarene was too full of life

The theorist came at his Foe from every angle
He made revisions, accounted for variables, made adjustments
But this Wandering Preacher would not be simplified
Alexander had yielded

Charlemagne had yielded 

Washington had yielded
But this Man would not yield

It drove the theorist mad
He tossed and he turned
He did his research
He asked for advice
He did all he could think of
He questioned the historical records
And still the Enigma would not yield
At last it struck him
That perhaps the lofty, impersonal deity
Which he had once written on
Was not so impersonal after all
And he was afraid
And it occurred to him
That maybe he was not the one on the offensive

So he fled
And he built walls
And he prepared his traps
And in a month's time
The Lord had conquered the theorist

Down from the Mountain

Up on the mountain it's easy
Everything is clear and bright
All the food is bread
And all the water is wine

Up on the mountain they all dance
Ask anyone and they will give the Good News
Kneel to pray and the words will come at once
Lift up a song and it will be beautiful
And it will be genuine
The distractions are small
And the glory is great

Up on the mountain our sins seem silly
Saul's hasty sacrifice seems absurdly stupid
Our old hatreds are easily set aside
And the stumbling blocks look so small

Up on the mountain joy abounds
We could sing again and again
With the thriving monotony of children
We could dance until our legs gave way
Because our Beloved is here

But we have to leave

Will it be different?
We've all done this before
We've all wiped away our tears
And returned to our old sins
We've all lost our joy
To the drudgery down below

Down below the traps are laid
The nets are ready and the knives are sharp
The bitter pleasures and the dull addictions wait
Down below are a thousand sacraments of Hell
And before an hour back below is passed
They will have ensnared us once more

But if we are disciples
We must go down
Because we did not go up to find our Beloved
It was He who came down to meet us
So we must also go down

Because that's where the glory is
There amidst the traps and poisons
There in the midst of resentment and addiction
There in the battlefield of common humanity
That's where the inheritances lies
That was written of in our hearts

The Lord is not a fool
This is not for nothing
The joy will be stripped away
The experience will fade
But the abundance of the mountain
Conceals some small treasure
Some little pearl that remains
Because some much else is stolen away
This small blessing shall remain
This brief song is not forgotten
And against our King's humble gift
The powers of the Enemy
Shall be exhausted and dismayed

Yahweh and Cthulhu

The world is dying
The sun burns away its youth
The very galaxies drift apart

On the stage of human politics
The old tyranny is put to the sword
And former revolutionaries continue where it left off
The old schools are rife with stale legalism
So they are overcome by vibrant freethinkers
Who are to sire yet more stale legalists
An empire becomes decadent and rotten
So it is overcome by a rising, savagely heroic power
Which shall grow fat and impotent on the same fruits

The world is dying
Now behold its doom
The ancient emptiness
The great, mad noise
The monstrous hellmouth
Lusting and hungering
After all that is bright and beautiful

It extends its tentacles outward
And up rise the sophists of Ancient Greece
And their kinsfolk through all the ages
Up until the postmodernists of today
Those skeptics who use logic to slander logic
Declaring the one truth that there is no ultimate truth
Who take away the solidity of things
Which is the one thing we all are really joyful about
And who then shame us for infringing on each others' joyfulness

It raises up Nietzsche and his kinsfolk
Wrapping it extremities in half-truths and singularities of thought
It reduces a vibrant world of a thousand shades to one dull hue
Everything is economics
Everything is power
Everything is sex
Everything is physics

It wraps its fingers in brightly colored paper
It tells us to explore our potential
It tells us to live our best life now
It tell us fleeting things are more valuable
It tells us to go out and have fun
It tells us that beauty is meaningless and artificial
And then asks us to consider the beauty around us
It tells us that people are nothing
But what thoughtless, loveless atoms do when arranged properly
And then it says religion is to be reviled and destroyed
Because religion oppresses those meaningless arrangements

It wears all these masks
To usher us into the yawning mouth
of Nihilism

But if Cthulhu can only destroy
There must be One that creates
If the whole world is dying
Then it must once have been born

Plato dreamed of the Forms
And glimpsed the Form of the Good
Aristotle saw the movement of the stars
And concluded the presence of an Unmoved Mover
They both ended with an ultimate explainer
That did not itself require an explanation
And it makes me want to jump into the pages
To rush at them and shout and point to the southeast lands
Where Goodness Himself had revealed Himself

The I Am had  spoken a world into being
He had made cosmos to dance out of love
And when that world had began to die
He went down to the mountain
And poured love over us
We who had killed Creation
We who had fled Him in shame and pride
Elohim went down to bless us
And again we chose death
And again Adonai chose love
Again and again He romanced us
And rescued us
And warred against us

We chose dust and dignity
And He chose love once more
A lowly love that endures all torments
Emmanuel stood before the Hellmouth
The Emptiness that was His own shadow
The abomination that was born when He said "I am good"
And implied "I am not evil"
When He said "I am loving"
And implied "I am not proud"
When He said "I am wise"
And implied "foolishness is not in Me"
Before that thing of evil and pride and nonsense
Emmanuel was hung upon a torture device
To be devoured by it

But the fullness of the Man of Galilee
Was greater than the emptiness of His devourer

So against all the Nihilist rot
There stand the living sentinels of truth
Whose roots were set at the beginning of things
And who are sustained by the lifeblood of their Creator
That blood which spilled out like an ocean
And rose into the skies like all earthly waters
To spread from there across all the pages of history
And then to fall to earth as all waters do

There is death creeping over all the world
There is no medicine that can cure the stars
There is no therapy that can keep an empire at its prime
There is only the oncoming storm
The waters of Heaven that will smash the rot to dust
And bring vivid wholeness to all those things
Which rested upon the Holy One of Israel
The I Am

Three Coping Mechanisms for Problems in Imaginative Fiction

Self-Caused Time Travel Event

So there are two basic models of time travel; one model says that when you go back in time everything that happens after the point you traveled to gets reset, and the other says that time is fixed and while it is possible for a time traveler to affect the future/present that effect has already been determined and if they try to change something that they know for certain happened they will fail.

Now, there is a particular problem with the fixed-time model which many writers of imaginative fiction simply love to exploit, which is that in this model two events can simultaneously cause each other. For example, in the television show Gargoyles there was an evil wizard who was falling to his death when he was rescued by... himself. From the future. Who was saved in exactly the same manner. In fact, they actually showed the whole process of the older self instructing the younger self and eventually sending him back in time to become the older self saving and instructing the younger self. So why did this happen? When the wizard was falling to his death, was there any good reason to assume he would be rescued? Of course not! He was only saved because his future, time-traveling self had been saved by his own future, time-traveling self who had also been saved by his future, time-traveling self... You get the picture? These two events are causally cut off from everything else in the universe aside from those relating to the original birth of the wizard! It's completely illogical and it really gets on my nerves...

Which is why I've developed my own theory to cope with the bad logic of this paradox. You see, my theory is that what we see in such stories is the third or fourth incarnation of a cycle. In the first cycle, a time-traveler goes back in time to make some change. Then they get zapped back to their own time and they realize that with the original problem fixed they have no reason to go back in time and fix it. I'm not quite sure what this problem looks like when it's played out, but however it looks the basic idea is that the universe swallowed a paradox and it is finding that paradox very hard to digest. Maybe the time-traveler has/is a copy of himself, maybe there's a hole in space and time, or maybe there's something else I can't even imagine. Whatever the case, the time-traveler realizes that they have to go back again in order to fix the paradox. Then, after at least one more cycle of time trying swinging in and out of balance, we finally get the cycle that you and I see in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Gargoyles, and occasionally on Doctor Who. The final cycle is one in which time is satisfied because both events are caused by each other (in other words, the future event isn't disrupted by the time travel because it is caused by it) and logic is satisfied because the ultimate cause for both events lies in another timeline which logic can recognize even if time can't.

Creatures that Grow Huge in Mere Minutes

You know what's a really, really basic rule of science? The Law of Preservation of Matter. You know what the Incredible Hulk, the Xenomorph from the Alien movies, and the incredibly quickly aging child from a particular episode of Fringe all have in common? They all break the Law of Preservation of Matter. Basically, any time something grows to three times its original size or more without eating as much mass as it's gaining, that law is being broken.

Now this kind of thing is entirely acceptable in fantasy. Magic can do things like that. It is not, however, okay in science fiction, particularly a science fiction show like Fringe that makes a point of explaining how all its phenomenon are supposedly plausible in some vague way. You are allowed to bend the rules or invent new ones in science fiction, but this is the kind of thing that is just so incredibly basic that it's almost sacrilege to ignore it. And in most cases no one seems to even realize there's a problem!

In this particular case, I have a multiple theories to make my head stop hurting and to reverse my transformation into a giant squid of anger. One theory is basically all about wormholes. In this scenario, the subject in question is actually some kind of special quantum creature (I mean, there really isn't any way to explain superheroes like Thor without claiming they tap directly into the fabric of the universe) which uses tiny, cellular wormholes to draw in the necessary chemicals from all across the universe. This theory works, but it's not really one that I'm happy with simply because I find the idea of a Xenomorph incorporating this into its biology to be so absurd. The kinds of creatures that appear to gain matter out of nowhere often simply don't fit the type of something that warps the very fabric of the universe.

The two other theories I have to explain this can basically both be labeled as alchemy. The first is that the creature in question is able to draw in and incorporate any matter readily available, even if that's only the air that it breathes. Somehow, the creature is able to make those chemicals act as if they were other ones (specifically, the nutrients that a living thing needs in order to grow) or else it is able to rearrange the particles and turn the chemicals it has into the chemicals it wants (don't ask me what happens to the leftover particles).

Finally, the second alchemical theory is that the creature has that matter all along, it was just... hidden. Essentially, the idea is that in this imagined universe there is some way to trick an atom into compressing or expanding beyond its normal size. In fact, it's even possible to trick the compressed or expanded atom into behaving as if it weren't even there. That's why Bruce Banner can step on a scale and see that he's 174 pounds, but when the Hulk steps on the same scale it just gets smashed to pieces. They both have exactly the same amount of matter, but when Bruce is himself much of that matter just hides in a little corner and does nothing. It doesn't weigh anything, it doesn't react to anything, it doesn't do anything that suggests that it even exists. Until he gets angry.

Obviously, all three of these phenomenon would be unlikely to occur naturally even if they were possible, but they are still more likely than a monster growing from two feet to fifteen feet tall without having eaten anything. And so the headache is relieved.

Aliens that Could Never Have Invented Spaceships

Finally, the last problem that I can currently recall is that of monstrous, animalistic aliens that fly through lightyears of space to... eat us. Two examples of this problem are the new movie After Earth in which a race of aliens called the Ursa (which sense their prey by through the hormones released by fear and are otherwise blind even though they can apparently sense the landscape fairly well) relentlessly hunt humans and in Storage 24 in which an alien creature (which is baffled and even frightened by a robotic puppy) stalks a handful of friends through a storage facility. In both cases the aliens in question are highly animalistic (they literally fight with only tooth and nail, they are very predatory, and they are completely naked) and also have spaceships.

The problem here is that the monsters are heroes fight couldn't possibly have built the ships they fly. Even if we accept that these are extremely intelligent creatures (which is a role they certainly don't fit very well) we have to realize that it takes more than intelligence to build a spaceship. It takes an almost playful delight in solving puzzles that is so great you actually go out looking for puzzles such as the formula for converting energy into matter, it takes a collection of beings that are peaceable enough and interested enough in knowledge to preserve and build upon the discoveries of its members, and lastly it takes a complete civilization that can both provide everything needed to build a spaceship and can also support people whose role in life is to simply solve puzzles and build inventions. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see the shrieking, naked, homicidal monsters present in so many alien movies as being able to fit into the society I just described. So how did they build those spaceships?

They didn't.

I have two simple theories on this matter; one being that they stole the ships and the other being that they themselves are just as much tools as those crafts they are carried by. In the first scenario these are savage but intelligent cave aliens who came into contact with another much more developed race at some point in the past. These other aliens showed them their fabulous technology, tried to interact with them, and finally got killed for it. The monsters that we see then took the vessels of their vanquished prey and familiarized themselves with them. In other words, they are technologically parasitic savages. This also explains why these aliens invade Earth instead of terraforming new planets (if they want the land) or mining other celestial bodies (if they want resources) since they don't actually know enough about their own technology to use any planet they can't survive on.

The other theory is that they were either enslaved or bioengineered by another alien race that is actually drawing the strings. This makes sense since any seriously developed civilization would probably send probes on ahead instead of risking their own kind in any exploration of space. Perhaps their medicinal skills are advanced enough that the advantage of a probe that can heal outweighs the risk of disease. Of course, this theory also makes things very interesting for any story in which the heroes valiantly defeated some army of feral extraterrestrials. In this scenario, the invasion humanity is so happy to have survived is only a fraction of the onslaught our distant enemies are capable of unleashing.

A Thanks For Stumbling Blocks

Praise to the Lord
The Holy One of Israel
Who has made me weak

I was of fortunate birth
With a robust mind
And a tall frame
I could have been anything

But my Father is wiser than that
He gave me flaws to match my strengths
He saw the idol I might have built
And took a knife to the wet clay
Slicing at imagined tendons
Carving away the smug grin
He saw my own Tower of Babel
And contaminated all the bricks
Tweaked all my mathematics
And sent storms to bring it down
He did it at the beginning
And He has done it again and again
Whenever I was foolish enough
To resume the work

I have walked the steady descent to Hell
More times than I can count
And each time I was turned back
It could have been easier
I could have gone farther
But He put a knot in my gut
And gave my feet a clumsy gait
He made a procrastinator
Who fears crowds and offices
And struggles with small talk
He gave me vices and weaknesses
And sacred stumbling blocks
To save me from myself

So praise Adonai
For those little moments
When I can't help but see my wickedness
When I'm heading to Gehenna's gates
And He knocks the wind out of me
Throws me to my knees
And waits to receive my prayers

Thank God
That I am not the me I could have been
The one that climbed the mountain
Of mortal ambition
And, finding it empty,
Died of starvation
And praise the I Am also
That I am not the other one
That never felt temptation
Because there's a glory that's only seen
When you've been knocked senseless
Struck down in the middle of evil deeds
And, out of nowhere, made to kneel
That's when you get it
The sight of the Cross
The glorious, fearful, powerful, costly Cross

I can almost hear it sometimes
Echoing from the coming ages
I hear a moment resonating
Perfectly in tune with just one line
Sometimes I think I'm dancing to it
That song that I will sing
Loud and giddy and full of life
Before all the angels and all the Church
When I stand before my beloved King
And sing the story of my life

It's costly, like all glorious things
The price is the sum of all my flaws
If I had been given a choice
I probably wouldn't have made the exchange
I am too foolish and afraid
But it was never my choice
And thank the Lord for that
Because I was made to sing that song

Disharmony

There should be tears
There should be a rush of feelings
I should be impassioned
I should be overwhelmed
So why am I so cold?

I hear myself laugh
I consider my expressions
My murmurs and nods
Are they real?
Am I faking it?
Putting up a facade?
Am I simply playing the part
Of the person I think I should be?
Do I read the moment like a script
And select the proper mask?
I don't know...

But I do know one thing
I know the inquisitor is too loud
If the laugh is true, it is due to the subject
It is because my attention is outside myself
Of course it turns hollow when the inquisitor comes
When I turn away from the bright thing outside
To the dim view of my own passions
My skeptic tells me my smile is false
But the skeptic is a fraud

Perhaps the laugh was fake
Maybe the worship was not genuine
But if it was real, I find the same thing
The real mountains become cardboard cutouts
The roaring fire becomes painted lightbulbs
The inquisitor is a destroyer
A debunker who blots out the sun
And then asks why the plants are all withered

I stand surrounded by life abundant
The wonders of Creation shining bright
The glory of the Creator, my Beloved, all around
Waiting to be breathed in
If I could sit still
If I could forget myself
I could take that breath
But my mind wanders
And I pass the Glory by
Ignorant

I watch a sunrise
And in an instant I spoil it
By thinking about the watching

I am all out of place
With my mind and will at war
With every aspect of my being
Disjointed and uneasy

But this is my hope
That is broken thing
Will be made whole
That the patchwork heart
Will be made one
That I will forget myself
And then remember joy

But until then I act
If I am inattentive in prayer
I pray for my inattention
If my mind grows impatient
And wanders from its object
Let my dutiful hands stay the course
My mind will return to them again
If only out of boredom