(Note: This article was originally published to JamieMcSloy.co.uk on March 28th, 2020. I’m going through an old backup of the site, which has hundreds of posts that aren’t currently uploaded. As I’m working hard on updating the site, letting these old posts be the daily posts for a while.)
Ridiculous Fiction And The Human Condition
I spent the day doing some boring work: working on templates, adding things to the swipe file and training Dragon Naturally Speaking.
That’s not really worth writing about because in terms of new stuff, it’s more of the same. Also, when you’re working with huge amounts of text to use in a programmatic fashion, nothing really interesting happens until the very end.
Let’s instead take a bit of a detour, because I haven’t managed to touch the Fiction Challenge for the past few weeks due to the various schedule-switching shenanigans due to lockdowns, pandemics and quarantines.
Also, possible economic collapse. We’ll leave that for another time.
Instead, we’ll go to crazy world.
Godzilla, Mothra and Other Strange Beasts
I made a joke a couple of minutes ago on Twitter about something I called “Godzilla Mindset.”
In my mind, this was a simple play on Gorilla mindset and all the other junk tweets that litter the genre of, “Conceive, Believe and Achieve” motivational stuff.
Some people find that quite helpful. I’m not one of those.
Anyway, I got a couple of replies quickly, and realised I know next to nothing about Godzilla.
So I hit up Wikipedia.
It turns out that Godzilla, a strangely impossible monster, isn’t even on the unbelievable end of the spectrum in the universe he’s written for.
There are giant cosmic moths, robot dinosaurs, giant apes and pterodactyl monsters.
And all of the stories follow the same basic format; giant monsters fighting each other.
Ultimately, it’s insanity. But that’s kind-of the point I think I’m about to make.
No matter how ridiculous, someone will buy it. The joy of escapism is that there are an unlimited amount of places to create for people to escape to.
Case in point: Pokemon is by far the biggest franchise ever. It has international, cross-generational appeal. It’s all over the toy market, computer games, movies, TV shows, toilet paper, pencil cases… an absolute triumph of licensing.
But ultimately, it’s a world where people battle fake monsters.
Gamelit
As a bit of a detour, I was researching a genre called Gamelit yesterday evening.
Gamelit is a genre of fantasy where the protagonist unwittingly finds himself in a virtual reality that works like a computer game. Often, this will involve adventure, incredibly pulp fiction (if my reading so far is representative,) and nerd authors living vicariously through their protagonist as they get a harem of girls.
I’m not even joking… a trope of the genre is that the nerd wins every single attractive female in the book, and the women are all happy about this.
To my mind, this is absolutely a perfect example that showcases why I talked about the ridiculous fiction above: if you think you’re overthinking it, you probably are.
People want to escape to faraway worlds. Your job as a storyteller, (in a fictional sense,) is to give them that escape.
If you give them that fantasy, then you can get away with all the things they teach you in writer’s workshops to avoid. Nobody is really watching Godzilla because they want to understand the human condition. It’s a giant radioactive dinosaur fighting an equally unbelievable monster.
Ultimately, people find that believable because they want to.
Give people something they want to believe, and the rest takes care of itself.