One Shyeah To Rule Them All

If you were an adolescent in the early 90s you probably went through the experience of hearing every unfunny douche in your school go around saying “exsqueeze me?” all the time and even though Wayne’s World was okay you still wanted to track down Mike Myers and slap the shit out of him for the legion of double-plus annoying idiots he inspired to imitate him.

That’s kind of how I feel about Tolkien and the genre of pseudo medieval faux European fantasy tropes he unwittingly spawned

Fiction and the fantastic

Fiction should be fantastical. The entire reason fiction exists is because it can contain and express human-created concepts that have no real-world analogue. If you are writing fiction and you are constraining yourself within the set of things that are real and actual and possible, you are wasting your time and your audience's time as well. You want a story about the horrors of war, or the tragedy of drug addiction, or the quiet malaise of 1950s suburbs? They're out there already. That ground is well-covered by actual people and the actual experiences of their actual lives.

But robots and vampires and aliens and time travelers and superheroes and zombies and talking gorillas? None of that is real, or at least not yet.

The Valentine-O-Gram Lesson

In my high school, every Valentine's Day, every single class got disrupted throughout the day by the constant delivery of Valentine-O-Grams. I found this of interest because I was in the principal's office constantly for "disrupting class" but apparently it was okay to disrupt class for stupid Valentine-O-Grams that I never got from anyone anyway. And I came to realize that they didn't discipline me for disrupting class, in the sense that I was preventing the other students from receiving their education -- they didn't give a shit if class got disrupted as long as it was part of their design -- but for disrupting class when they hadn't planned for class disruption. Even though the end result was the same whether class got disrupted by me or by Valentine-O-Gram delivery, my individual disruption was sign that they lacked control and had to be shut down before anyone else realized it. I never got a Valentine-O-Gram but I did get a valuable look behind the curtains at the invisible machinery that makes society work. And maybe that was even a fair trade.