Tag: mythology

Asimov, Zelda and Grandfathering Continuity

Quan

One of the many past times I like to indulge in is playing classic video games. I am particularly fond of the Legend of Zelda series of open world adventure games. I enjoy that series and games like it for many reasons, chief of which is that the exploring scratches a problem-solving itch: it’s reassuring to know that problems and obstacles in life have solutions, just so long as you know where to look to find them.

But that’s not why I brought up Zelda.

The thing that ties Zelda into this blog is the lore, mythology and backstory running through the games. Over the course of 19 disparate games, which really had (for the most part) nothing in common aside from a guy named Link rescuing a girl named Zelda from a monster named Ganon (or Ganondorf, in some games), an epic, generation-spanning mythology was created with tons of fascinating twists and turns. What makes this even more fascinating is that most of these games were created in a vacuum, with seemingly little regard for the storyline of the games that came before it. Despite that, the masterminds at Nintendo were able to link (pardon the pun) every official Zelda game into a cohesive storyline that makes all of the games feel like one epic narrative.

So what does this have to with you as a writer?

If you ever find yourself with two stories that are only tangentally related, or aren’t really related at all, and you’re wondering if you can somehow tie them together, then Zelda proves that it is indeed possible. Sci-Fi legend Isaac Asimov did something similar when he found a way to link his three biggest book series (Robots, Galactic Empire and Foundation) together via his latter Foundation novels. So let’s break down how these two franchises did it.

1. Find common threads that connect your stories. If you look hard enough, you may find themes or tropes that your disparate stories have in common. With Zelda it’s simple: Link, Zelda and Ganon. Almost every Zelda story flows from this trio of characters. And the games that don’t feature all three have good reasons not to. Nintendo’s solution was to create a curse of reincarnation, where Ganon was fated to always reincarnate every generation or so, and there would always be a Zelda and a Link fated to oppose him. For Asimov, the natural evolution of his universe and the progression of mankind were what tied his worlds together. You could envision a scenario where a civilization that used sentient robots could find a way to expand into a galactic empire, and the Foundation concept could be seen as a natural evolution of the empirical concept. He even insinuated as much in the first two Foundation novels.

2. Pay attention to detail so you can explain inconsistencies and incompatibilities. Inconsistencies and incompatibilities are things that routinely plague dense continuities, timelines and universes. If something gets big enough or lasts long enough, you are bound to find stuff that doesn’t quite mesh together. This is a routine problem that plagues massive comic book-styled universes like with Marvel, DC and Magic: The Gathering. Asimov had this problem long after he passed, and his estate commissioned three of his friends and peers to write new books in the Foundation saga. Their goal was to fill in gaps, explain inconsistencies and modernize the mythology to gel with current technological trends (i.e. there was no such thing as the internet when the Foundation books were written, so now how does the internet fit in the psychohistory of the future? Their solution was a galaxy-wide web that crumbled into disrepair towards the beginning of the Foundation series) For Zelda, it was a matter of taking ideas and concepts that were hinted at in Link To The Past and Ocarina of Time (the two most foundational Zelda stories) and placing them in future games while expanding on their history and roles. The roles of the three goddesses (which started off as unspectacular gems Link quested for in Link To The Past) and the importance of the Master Sword (Which was really just one of a few sword upgrades in Link To The Past) was greatly expanded upon in future games.

3. Make a story that ties everything together. This is a simple and obvious way to link your stories. If you can craft a story explaining how everything links together, then you can help your readers connect the dots and see how everything ties together into one larger narrative. Origin stories can do a great amount of heavy lifting by showing how everything got its start. The Zelda franchise did this masterfully with Skyward Sword, which illustrated how all of the mythos that form the basis of Zelda originated, as well as creating the reincarnation vehicle that would carry the narrative from game to game and through various settings and scenarios. Asimov did the same thing with Prelude to Foundation, which firmly and definitively established that Foundation was set in the universe of the Galactic Empire books, while also including a key character from the Robot books to establish that those stories were also part of the narrative.

4. Decide what and what not to reference. Sometimes you’re going to run into elements that just won’t fit no matter how hard you try to explain them away. It’s at this point where you need to be judicious about what you reference and what you just retcon away or leave to the reader’s imagination. It’s okay to let some things be mysterious and let the reader ty to connect the dots in his or her own headcanon. The analyses, theories, conversations and debates among Zelda faithful about where things fit in the three distinct timelines that comprise the majority of Zelda games provide fuel for the fandom between games, and only serves to strengthen the franchise. Breath of the Wild claiming to have happened so far along in Zelda history that all previous games had faded into (pardon the pun) legend only added more fuel to the debates, with questions like “why did the merfolk-like Zora race evolve into the avian Rito race when the world was submerged in Wind Waker, only to show up alongside the Rito in Breath of the Wild?” Likewise, Asimov’s Robots/Empire/Foundation saga left a lot of unanswered questions that his successors tried to address in their Foundation books (with varying degrees of success).

5. Create a timeline. This was done masterfully with both Zelda and Foundation. And is often used when sorting out major events in large sagas. When you create a timeline of the events in all of your stories, you can easily show how events in one story lead to or influence events in other stories, and readers can see the progression of things and gleam the bigger overall picture. Zelda’s taking the three possible outcomes of Ocarina of Time and splitting them into three different timelines to fit games into was brilliant.

When done well, linking your disparate stories can breath new life into your older stories. Readers new to your mythology will have reasons to go check out your older material to see for themselves how it all connects. And the meta-narrative is great for building the brand of your saga. You might even be able to take themes and ideas established within your newly created continuity and mine them for new stories. The two novels I am seeking representation for as of this writing are separate and happen in seemingly unrelated universes, but I have snuck in Easter eggs and hints in both stories (and plan to in future stories as well) that more than hint that the two worlds are somehow connected.

You do run a risk of confusing your readers if you only haphazardly try to connect everything. So if you are going to go this route, make sure you do it with the utmost care.

This time I’m giving a double recommendation. This official Zelda compendium outlines the narrative that connects every official Zelda game from the very first Legend of Zelda all the way through a Link Between Worlds. And Asimov’s Prelude To Foundation provides the framework of that informs everything you read about in all of his Robot, Galactic Empire and Foundation novels. I strongly recommend both books as examples of what I’m writing about.

Zelda: Hyrule Historia on Amazon

Prelude to Foundation on Kindle

MORRISONING: Presenting Wild Ideas the Grant Morrison Way

Quan

In my list of top ten favorite comic book writers, Grant Morrison is in my top three, along with Fred Perry and Christopher Priest. There are very few projects his name is attached to that I won’t read or haven’t already read. I first became a fan of his with his epic run on JLA, and have devoured everything of his from his since, from his Invisibles book to his work on X-Men, Batman and Superman.

What I love about his style of writing is that he is able to concoct these wild, mind-blowing, larger-than-life concepts and ideas and make them seem not only feasible, but natural within the confines of the story. That is the true mark of a good storyteller, and it is one of the essential aspects of telling good stories in the genres of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Morrison has taken mundane police procedural tropes and expanded them to a cosmic scale in Green Lantern. He has taken some of the crazy, noncanon ideas of the campy Silver Age Batman and made them legit for today’s dark and gritty Batman…while also giving him a son! He has turned the core tenet of X-Men on its head by making Mutants trendy in the Marvel world and humans the endangered species. He gave the Justice League a grander, more epic rogues gallery and introduced the idea of the League being a new Pantheon. He told you that every conspiracy theory you heard of or were afraid of was real in Invisibles. He broke the fourth wall with Animal Man before Deadpool made breaking the fourth wall cool. He write a book about cyborg killer mechs piloted by household pets that just want to go home in We3. He quantified, populated and mapped 52 alternate realities in DC’s Multiversity. And this is just a small sampling of the ways he expanded the lexicon in his stories.

So the question is how can you introduce mind-blowing ideas and concepts into your stories that will wow the reader? Here are a few ways to do it:

1. TAKE THE FAMILIAR AND TWIST IT

Morrison Famously did this with his take on an alternate version of Wonder Woman. He wrote a version of Wonder Woman that is a stark contrast to the current “Warrior princess” iteration that has come to define her, and developed her as a more youthful, pacifist hero akin to how she was originally portrayed back in the 40s.

You can do this in your stories by taking a convention or idea that people have assumed goes one way, and portraying it in a totally different light. When your readers expect a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, give them a peanut butter and turnip sandwich instead.

2. NEW EXPLANATIONS FOR ACCEPTED CONVENTIONS

Morrison’s fascination for Superman knows no bounds, and at every opportunity he is reexamining and reinterpreting what makes the Man of Steel so iconic from different perspectives and angles. And with each examination – whether it be normalizing all of Superman’s wacky Silver age abilities in All-Star Superman or having him team of with 51 other versions of himself in Final Crisis, he comes up with different reasons why Superman is the one great constant of herodom.

This is where you have the opportunity to take something ordinary and make it fantastic. Take that peanut butter and jelly sandwich and convince people that the unique combination of peanuts and fruit is the secret elixir of enhanced knowledge if eaten in the right balance with some rare fruit you just found out about on Google at exactly noon Pacific time on Friday the 14th. Hey, it worked for the Da Vinci Code, right?

3. EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS A LIE

Morrison did this best with Batman and the X-Men. With both he introduced concepts that turned both franchises on their respective heads, that are still being used by creators years later. Making Batman a type of legacy character, first with Bruce being exiled through time and influencing entire generations, then with introducing a legit heir, letting his first protoge wear the cowl for an extended period of time, and having Bruce publicly acknowledge that he was funding Batman, broke many Bat-taboos and created new possibilities that have been mined for future stories. Likewise with the revelation that humans were the true endangered species in his New X-Men run, which also flipped the Wolverine-Jean Grey-Cyclops love triangle into a Jean Grey-Cyclops-Emma Frost love triangle, revealed an evil twin sister to Charles Xavier…and introduced the idea of secondary mutations.

You can do the same. Take some established convention, idea, genre or trope and invert it, and see what comes of it. The high fantasy manuscript I am seeking an agent or publisher for as of this post is a meta-critique of many conventions and tropes used in JRPG video games. And I am currently developing a new comic book series about a team of superheroes strictly forbidden from doing any actual crimefighting. So tell people that your Peanut butter and Jelly sandwich was not intended for human consumption.

4. MAKE THE WILD SEEM MUNDANE

This is basically the opposite of the first technique. Instead of making a normal convention fantastic, you take a fantastic concept and present it as normal. Crossgen Comics’ book “Mystic” was set on a modern world where magic was the source of energy rather than electricity. It is a weird concept to wrap one’s head around, but in the story it is presented as a perfectly normal, everyday thing. Doing this serves to make your wild ideas understandable and relatable to the reader, and you aren’t just hitting them over the head with some new concept that would stretch suspension of disbelief. And when you do this, you often don’t have to do a lot of explaining of your wild idea or how it works. It’s just something that is woven into the fabric of your setting from the start. The peanut butter in your peanut butter and jelly sandwich comes from a rare peanut plant that once granted eternal life but was diluted over the aeons into just a regular peanut.

5. GO BIG. THEN GO BIGGER.

Morrison’s biggest claim to fame is that he is the guy that takes a concept and blows them out to larger-than-life proportions. It has been a formula that has been done before Grant, but he was one of the few able to do it with a style and flair that added gravitas and made the concepts truly mind-blowing. It was his idea to send the Justice League one million months into the future to meet their future selves, in a mind-blowing, time twisting tale where the only way they could save the world from Superman’s future greatest enemy was to literally create that enemy in the past.

When coming up with your crazy ideas, ask yourself how outlandish or unbelievable you can get with your concepts. What is the most far-out, unbelievable problem your protagonists could find themselves up against? What is the weirdest, wildest situation they could find themselves in? Now ask yourself how they get out of it. Take the filters off. Take the limits off. Let your imagination go anywhere and everywhere. Then find a way to explain it and make it believable. (Doctor Who does this on a regular basis) Every bite of that peanut butter and jelly sandwich creates an infinite number of different realities where the jelly changes into different flavors as you bite it.

These are just a few ways you can incorporate mindblowing concepts into your stories.

Give them a try and see what kind of wild ideas you can bring into reality. And while you’re at it, go eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Here is a fascinating book from Morrison studying the idea of superheroes and linking them to modern mythology. It’s the basis of a lot of his wild ideas.