The idea that you create a world and then just describe what would naturally follow from the initial premise. It's a popular conceit among readers of science fiction and fantasy (and especially a certain subset I won't mention here because I don't want this to be a thread about them and they swarm when summoned).
The idea that you create a world and then just describe what would naturally follow from the initial premise. It's a popular conceit among readers of science fiction and fantasy (and especially a certain subset I won't mention here because I don't want this to be a thread about them and they swarm when summoned).
Though you can have them branch out. Which is one of the half-a-dozen reasons why authors love reusing settings. Because then at least some of the worldbuilding work is done, and you can focus on the rest of the work.
But that's not the same as a story come from the worldbuilding, so much as using worldbuilding done for another story as the backdrop to some second story.
The idea that you create a world and then just describe what would naturally follow from the initial premise. It's a popular conceit among readers of science fiction and fantasy (and especially a certain subset I won't mention here because I don't want this to be a thread about them and they swarm when summoned).
Forgive me if I'm wrong here but I'm pretty sure worldbuilding gets done after the author decides on the story they want to tell. Simulationism seems more like something inspired by tabletop RPGs or other media in which preserving the agency of a hypothetical player is an actual concern.
Narrativism vs. simulationism is debatable within the context of game design but it's absurd to expect the plot of the story to serve and spring from the worldbuilding.
I mean, authors are generally trying to tell stories, y'know? Not writing alternate universe history textbooks.
Forgive me if I'm wrong here but I'm pretty sure worldbuilding gets done after the author decides on the story they want to tell. Simulationism seems more like something inspired by tabletop RPGs or other media in which preserving the agency of a hypothetical player is an actual concern.
Narrativism vs. simulationism is debatable within the context of game design but it's absurd to expect the plot of the story to serve and spring from the worldbuilding.
I mean, authors are generally trying to tell stories, y'know? Not writing alternate universe history textbooks.
Though to be fair, you can sometimes have weird chicken-and-egg things where you start to think of a world, and then think of a plot, and then both of them sorta just come out in a tumble together.
It's really hard sometimes to separate it out as if they are distinct steps. It all sorta works partially together, IMO, when you're writing.
...which I know just comes off as too holistic, but I'm not sure how to characterize it otherwise?
Though to be fair, you can sometimes have weird chicken-and-egg things where you start to think of a world, and then think of a plot, and then both of them sorta just come out in a tumble together.
It's really hard sometimes to separate it out as if they are distinct steps. It all sorta works partially together, IMO, when you're writing.
...which I know just comes off as too holistic, but I'm not sure how to characterize it otherwise?
This might just be due to differences in definitions but, in the same way you can have a setting without a narrative, you can have a narrative without a setting. A hell of a lot of narratives are universal and aren't confined to a specific backdrop.
This might just be due to differences in definitions but, in the same way you can have a setting without a narrative, you can have a narrative without a setting. A hell of a lot of narratives are universal and aren't confined to a specific backdrop.
I guess, yeah – though I find having a setting without a narrative more tangible; you can have an "history book", like you say, without story. But the other way around ? You would have to be incredibly vague. "It's the story of an orphan trying to discover who are his parents" : yeah, it's a narrative without a setting, but it's not very useful to write your story.
I guess, yeah – though I find having a setting without a narrative more tangible; you can have an "history book", like you say, without story. But the other way around ? You would have to be incredibly vague. "It's the story of an orphan trying to discover who are his parents" : yeah, it's a narrative without a setting, but it's not very useful to write your story.
Aesthetics aren't central to the core of the narrative. Joe Haldeman could've decided to write an autobiographical account of his experiences in Vietnam; instead of that, we got the Forever War and it didn't meaningfully change the story.
The problem with meticulously detailed worlds is that they need to fit the story you're trying to tell. Tolkien was highly interested in real world history and mythology and wanted his story to have great mythological weight and sense of temporal depth to it. GRRM's story is heavily rooted in events that happened before the books even start and involves intricate politics. So you could say it was worth the massive amount of time it took them to construct their worlds.
But if you're creating this big, expansive world and all you're doing with it is having people sword each other, you just wasted your time. There's a reason why sword and sorcery writers generally don't bother and would just pull settings and concepts out of their ass, because their settings never need to be bigger than the adventure of the day. Harry Potter only visits magical Britain because that's exactly as big the story needs to be.
You can certainly have stories about settings. It's called a travelogue and is, in fact, a fairly popular genre. They are not really stories that are simulations, however, since they always contain a contrivance to get the viewpoint through the setting.
You can get simulationist stories, but its the kind of thing that tends to emerge from an entertaining playthrough of Dwarf Fortress and not really from a writer's word processor.
Sanderson's rule 1 is a rule I really liked when I first saw it. It was only much later, after some discussion about the Traveller's Road in Exalted and the rules governing it that I realized why I liked it so much: I was a huge fan of Agatha Christie when I was in my early teens and having a puzzle with all the pieces in front of me was something I expected the author would be nice enough to provide as a matter of course instead of any wishy-washy 'this magically works as intended, not as written.'
Rule 1 lets you get away with a lot, in the same way that a mystery novel can put the P.O.V. character as the murderer so long as all the pertinent details are there. To a certain extent though, it becomes limited by its own cleverness; it tells you, flat out: pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, all while forcing you to look for the man behind the curtain because he's there somewhere, dammit. In Mistborn's own words: there's always another trick.
This isn't bad in the same way that a good mystery novel isn't bad. But it is limiting. Now, personally, I think that the effort it takes to design your rules from the ground up and integrate them into a setting is probably going to make for better world-building and ultimately a better story (or at least one with less complaints), but it shouldn't be your MAIN consideration in the same way that a murder mystery's main consideration are the details of the mystery. Your fantasy setting should not be the main attraction.
All that being said, I'm on the fence about this rule. Personally, I think they're a bit like training wheels. Keeping them on is going to make you look a bit juvenile, but if you need em', you REALLY need em', and if you don't, it doesn't take too much effort to take them off.
I've always thought that the best magic systems are a set of alternate physical laws by which govern a given universe. They do not work alongside or independent of normal physical laws but replace them. and are fully integrated in the setting. This gives the setting a very real feeling of difference from our world and thus makes it more fantastic. Exalted, Mage the Ascension, Planescape and Lord of the Rings all did this very well.
A 'magic system' in a work of fiction is a literary device designed to set reader expectations. It sets the bar for what is 'normal' in a given world with said magic system.
'Magic' tends to be forces that are not completely understood top to bottom by whoever names it magic.
'Magic systems' are the framework of cause and effect in a given story's setting, with regards to a given form of magic. They define the limits of what that magic is expected to do, to a point. The reader knows that if those limits are broken, it's a plot point to focus on- as opposed to simply shrugging and saying 'it's magic.'
It kind of works like a mystery novel. A magic system is designed to set limits to what is possible, just limits that are higher than mundane reality's. It serves to allow a slightly wider field of possible actions any character could take, and consequences of those actions. In other words, a tool. A mystery novel will give you the scene of a crime and the possible tools used to commit the crime, and when done well, the reader is given all of the information needed to piece together what happened before it is revealed in the narrative.
Magic systems allow for a given amount of suspense or gravitas. The nature of 'magic' as opposed to technology is its mystery, and the lack of complete knowledge of it. Abusing this too much makes for boring reading, and allows for magus ex machina plot resolution. Not invoking its mystery at all leaves no room for a sense of wonder. This isn't necessarily bad, it's just a factor.
Brandon Sanderson is known for this kind of thing, and his books have been hit or miss with many readers. I'm more interested in the lower level system to the magic across all of his books that share his 'Cosmere' over-setting; the rules that govern the creation of the magic systems in those different worlds themselves. I want to glean some insight and try to predict what might happen in the setting before it does. I enjoy that kind of thing. Others couldn't care less.
Magic without systems is Tolkien-esque or Lucas-esque; the magical characters will continue to pull (or for whatever reason, fail to pull) a magical solution out of their ass with no real sense of suspense. You don't know if Gandalf will do something big or if Obi-Wan is going to fight back properly at the end of A New Hope, and you're given little knowledge of their limits. They are walking plot devices. You can't appreciate if something they do is impressive (for them) or mundane (for them). There's no sense of scale or comparison or anything.
Magic systems give readers a metric to measure magic users against. It makes them better characters rather than magic dispensing plot devices. Or so I tend to think in general.
I'd argue that Tolkien and Lucas both had magic systems, they were simply spiritual rather than scientific. The rules existed, but the forces were alive so you couldn't necessarily say "If A then Brett happens". Tolkien featured a world that very much functioned based on a Christian rule of the world, and Star Wars clearly worked on some kind of simplified taoist philosophy. If you read any of Tolkiens essays on Christianity it's easy to see what you can expect from magic at any given time.
TL;DR both systems assume a certain amount of understanding of the philosophies inherent to the systems.
I'd argue that Tolkien and Lucas both had magic systems, they were simply spiritual rather than scientific. The rules existed, but the forces were alive so you couldn't necessarily say "If A then Brett happens". Tolkien featured a world that very much functioned based on a Christian rule of the world, and Star Wars clearly worked on some kind of simplified taoist philosophy. If you read any of Tolkiens essays on Christianity it's easy to see what you can expect from magic at any given time.
TL;DR both systems assume a certain amount of understanding of the philosophies inherent to the systems.
Eh, as I think I spoke of earlier (wow that's an old post), when one is simply reading LotR or watching A New Hope, you can only fairly base your view of the magic by what you are directly exposed to. Those essays, those philosophies, aren't exactly required reading or easy stuff for kids to understand. No real attempt was made at dictating the limits of either of those magics. Citing outside work and context defeats the point. At the end of the day, both Gandalf and Obi-Wan's visible supernatural actions had no basis for scale or metric for comparison within the works in question. Gandalf, when he was the perspective character, generally used mundane cleverness a lot; and Obi-Wan introduced a number of tricks that Luke doesn't even properly begin to emulate until the next movie. Every situation Obi-Wan solves with the Force in A New Hope was a series of left-field plot devices one after another, within the context of that first film.
I reiterate, my interpretation only applies within a given work's pages. As the Star Wars movies went on, we saw certain tricks repeated, but very little in the way of limits established. Yoda seems to imply that the only limits are mental. After the prequel movies came out, it was more or less established that in a fight, the person in the most consistent Force-compatible mind state wins by a landslide. Generally, if you want to win in a lightsaber fight, get completely pissed and stay completely pissed.
RotJ: Enraged Luke vs conflicted Vader, Luke wins, Dark side
PM: Focused and roiling Maul vs. Overconfident Qui-Gon: Maul wins, Dark Side
PM: Enraged Obi-Wan vs smug Maul: Obi-Wan wins, Dark Side
RotS: Mildly distressed and desperate Yoda versus a freshly burned and unmasked Palpatine, lashing out? Palpatine wins, Dark Side - but with the caveat that Yoda determined he couldn't win and chose escape rather than defeat.
RotS: Mostly resolutely detached Obi-Wan vs. severely emotionally conflicted Anakin: Obi-Wan wins, Light Side (for once)
I'm not counting the New Hope fight here because that one was thrown, and neither Obi-Wan nor Vader were totally subsumed emotionally while fighting.
But yeah, beyond that we just see a bunch of little tricks and very little in the way of what qualifies one to be a Knight or Master, it all seemed very political/philosophical, focused more on who was less likely to turn sides than who was better at any given practical skill. With the greater group of movies, a vague system has been established. However, within A New Hope alone, it was just one fresh plot miracle after another.
And at the end of the day, 'system' implies 'science,' as in the scientific method, as in a repeatable and quantifiable set of events and results. "Spiritually systematic" vs "Scientifically systematic" is a nonsense comparison, within the scope of the discussion as I understand it.
Eh, as I think I spoke of earlier (wow that's an old post), when one is simply reading LotR or watching A New Hope, you can only fairly base your view of the magic by what you are directly exposed to. Those essays, those philosophies, aren't exactly required reading or easy stuff for kids to understand. No real attempt was made at dictating the limits of either of those magics. Citing outside work and context defeats the point. At the end of the day, both Gandalf and Obi-Wan's visible supernatural actions had no basis for scale or metric for comparison within the works in question. Gandalf, when he was the perspective character, generally used mundane cleverness a lot; and Obi-Wan introduced a number of tricks that Luke doesn't even properly begin to emulate until the next movie. Every situation Obi-Wan solves with the Force in A New Hope was a series of left-field plot devices one after another, within the context of that first film.
I reiterate, my interpretation only applies within a given work's pages. As the Star Wars movies went on, we saw certain tricks repeated, but very little in the way of limits established. Yoda seems to imply that the only limits are mental. After the prequel movies came out, it was more or less established that in a fight, the person in the most consistent Force-compatible mind state wins by a landslide. Generally, if you want to win in a lightsaber fight, get completely pissed and stay completely pissed.
RotJ: Enraged Luke vs conflicted Vader, Luke wins, Dark side
PM: Focused and roiling Maul vs. Overconfident Qui-Gon: Maul wins, Dark Side
PM: Enraged Obi-Wan vs smug Maul: Obi-Wan wins, Dark Side
RotS: Mildly distressed and desperate Yoda versus a freshly burned and unmasked Palpatine, lashing out? Palpatine wins, Dark Side - but with the caveat that Yoda determined he couldn't win and chose escape rather than defeat.
RotS: Mostly resolutely detached Obi-Wan vs. severely emotionally conflicted Anakin: Obi-Wan wins, Light Side (for once)
I'm not counting the New Hope fight here because that one was thrown, and neither Obi-Wan nor Vader were totally subsumed emotionally while fighting.
But yeah, beyond that we just see a bunch of little tricks and very little in the way of what qualifies one to be a Knight or Master, it all seemed very political/philosophical, focused more on who was less likely to turn sides than who was better at any given practical skill. With the greater group of movies, a vague system has been established. However, within A New Hope alone, it was just one fresh plot miracle after another.
And at the end of the day, 'system' implies 'science,' as in the scientific method, as in a repeatable and quantifiable set of events and results. "Spiritually systematic" vs "Scientifically systematic" is a nonsense comparison, within the scope of the discussion as I understand it.
Eh, as I think I spoke of earlier (wow that's an old post), when one is simply reading LotR or watching A New Hope, you can only fairly base your view of the magic by what you are directly exposed to. Those essays, those philosophies, aren't exactly required reading or easy stuff for kids to understand. No real attempt was made at dictating the limits of either of those magics. Citing outside work and context defeats the point. At the end of the day, both Gandalf and Obi-Wan's visible supernatural actions had no basis for scale or metric for comparison within the works in question. Gandalf, when he was the perspective character, generally used mundane cleverness a lot; and Obi-Wan introduced a number of tricks that Luke doesn't even properly begin to emulate until the next movie. Every situation Obi-Wan solves with the Force in A New Hope was a series of left-field plot devices one after another, within the context of that first film.
I reiterate, my interpretation only applies within a given work's pages. As the Star Wars movies went on, we saw certain tricks repeated, but very little in the way of limits established. Yoda seems to imply that the only limits are mental. After the prequel movies came out, it was more or less established that in a fight, the person in the most consistent Force-compatible mind state wins by a landslide. Generally, if you want to win in a lightsaber fight, get completely pissed and stay completely pissed.
RotJ: Enraged Luke vs conflicted Vader, Luke wins, Dark side
PM: Focused and roiling Maul vs. Overconfident Qui-Gon: Maul wins, Dark Side
PM: Enraged Obi-Wan vs smug Maul: Obi-Wan wins, Dark Side
RotS: Mildly distressed and desperate Yoda versus a freshly burned and unmasked Palpatine, lashing out? Palpatine wins, Dark Side - but with the caveat that Yoda determined he couldn't win and chose escape rather than defeat.
RotS: Mostly resolutely detached Obi-Wan vs. severely emotionally conflicted Anakin: Obi-Wan wins, Light Side (for once)
I'm not counting the New Hope fight here because that one was thrown, and neither Obi-Wan nor Vader were totally subsumed emotionally while fighting.
But yeah, beyond that we just see a bunch of little tricks and very little in the way of what qualifies one to be a Knight or Master, it all seemed very political/philosophical, focused more on who was less likely to turn sides than who was better at any given practical skill. With the greater group of movies, a vague system has been established. However, within A New Hope alone, it was just one fresh plot miracle after another.
And at the end of the day, 'system' implies 'science,' as in the scientific method, as in a repeatable and quantifiable set of events and results. "Spiritually systematic" vs "Scientifically systematic" is a nonsense comparison, within the scope of the discussion as I understand it.
I agree you shouldn't need those essays. The point I was getting at wasome that they were written with a specific understanding of who theis audience was and what they would know. Star wars works off the assumption that you have read stories featuring the heroes journey, and Tolkien assumes you're Christian. So to those without those backgrounds it can seem opaque. Whether that's good or bad is a material of opinion.
So I haven't engaged with the EU or any of the books or really anything outside of the first 6 movies, but I'm not sure that Star Wars really has a consistent enough/deeply explored enough philosophy to say that "philosophy" was the entire point of the movie(s)? I mean, there's some stuff about balance and understanding and size mattering not, but it read to me like a pastiche of Eastern philosophy tropes, and not really anything you could build a coherent system around.
Well, that's sort of the way things happen in real life, and history is full of fascinating stories. The world is there, and stories naturally occur as a result of advancing the timeline.
If you build your world in a sufficiently detailed fashion and have a good understanding of the principal actors on a given scale, you can build a story from just asking yourself "What will each principal actor do next?" and mapping out the sequence of what you think would happen next. Then you could zoom in on arcs that seems like they would be interesting and flesh out the descriptive details.
I'm not saying that's an easy approach to writing (as you are basically outlining a whole set of stories at once), or that the resultant stories will be typically easy to sell into any particular genre (other than perhaps alternate history), but if you can build a sufficiently detailed and plausible setting at a scale that includes the principal actors, then the setting will generate stories simply via advancing the setting forward in time.
To give an example, let me narrow the scope to give an example of a planned simulationist approach, on a smaller scale than what might typically be considered worldbuilding: Writing classic Victorian-era romance novels. You could take an English town, generate a list of relevant places (major estates), a list of relevant potential characters (eligible young ladies, their families, eligible bachelors, and eligible bachelors' relatives when relevant), and then advance a simulation of what seems like it would plausibly happen next, on the scale of the local social calendar, based on the decisions that each of the principal actors would make at each step.
This gives you an array of outcomes for said ladies - good marriages, bad marriages, spinsterhood, etc. Then you go back and pick one of the ladies in your simulation who ended up with a good marriage (but not too quickly), and write out the details of her story, using your simulation as an outline.
On the plus side, background characters will be consistent. On the minus side, that's a lot of work to do just to generate an outline.
There's unplanned simulation as well; when authors talk about characters coming alive and telling their own stories, that's them engaging in simulation - they're simulating the character mentally well enough to know what that character would do next, which may in some cases not line up neatly with pre-planning.
In modern day magic has become equal to exotic physics. D&D etc.... are especially obvious examples. Magic has become explainable, a part of the world that simply hasn't been researched enough for people to understand it.
In older Fairy Tales and general fiction, magic is and may or may not make sense or be logical in any way. It may be divine, or born from the very wishes of a human (Dorothy from wizard of Oz magicing herself back home is an great example) or something even weirder. Most of the time there is little to no explanation. Often it is a force that is only wielded by characters that aren't explained in detail. A thing of witches and demons and gods. Akin to miracles given to saints by god or the powers of the faeries and spirits of nature. In mythology, while a lot of the time magic exists, it is rarely explained why or how it works, especially in the often ridiculous detail of modern stories. Odin's throne can see any place in existence and listen to all things. How does it work? No clue. It is a magical divine thingy.
Hell, a lot of the time mythology is outright bizzare. Look at Aphrodite born from the thrown away testicles of Uranus or Athena born from Zeus thoughts. Or some of the other weird shit out there. Or like I think there was at least one legend of Baba Yaga literally baking a person and turning them into a super-strong hero that way.
Magic systems are a convention, born of the human desire to understand, to explain and make sense of every detail of things. They make it easier for a story to keep going with a protagonist that is magical or has a lot to do with magic. Because if there are clear and well explained rules for magic, if it is known and quantified instead of a divine or mysterious thing that may or may not make sense, it makes things more consistent and simple. At the same time, it also allows for people to rules lawyer shit and generally creates a bigger world. In a way, it is a sort of.... I guess bragging? It is a bit like how J.R. Tolkien created entire languages, huge histories etc... for his world of middle-earth and the mythology and stuff of the universe. And others go other directions, making the physics of the world. Of course a lot of the time the authors don't research it enough to fully get everything. This leads for example to things like the Meltdowner from To aru Majutsu no Index whose power makes something happen that cannot happen but is treated in-universe as a scientifically understood Esper Powers. (This is less magic in a way, but in a lot of settings magic and science based superpowers are interchangeable.)
At the same time, my personal opinion is that a lot of current concepts of magic aren't really magic. They are, as I stated, exotic physics.
It has become far more rare these days to see a setting or story where magic is treated as a mystery. Nobilis does it rather well, while explaining the universe to a degree, magic as a whole is far more magical. No, the entire world is far more magical. Everything is weird and mythical at its core and the world that mankind sees is nothing but a delusion...
In Nobilis everything is alive. The storm and the waves, the cold bite of winter, the rushing heat of summer. The mountains in the distance and the tree in front of your house. The very computer that you are using is alive and likely smart enough to hold a conversation with you. All things are alive and wonderful and it is glorious. It is a world so utterly removed from our real world that it is very unique.
Another story that I liked was one where the protagonist was a demon keeper. In the context of this story, demons were a sort of living form of chaos and strange energy manifested as beings. They were storms, they were trickery and pranks as living things. Invisible to most people, they would appear as normal forces. A Demon of fire would appear as a flame, a demon of dirt would dirty a place etc... they were inherently necessary for everything. Without them, things would become boring and sad. Playgrounds would lose their atmosphere and children wouldn't laugh and play for long. They were the spirit of excitement and imagination and unique ideas! They were everything that makes the world not a cold set of cogs. And I think that really made it interesting.... the magic in-setting in turn wasn't touched in detail. It was mostly a thing of ideas. Things worked that way because of nature, because of belief. Because that is just how it is and stuff.
Uh, but I am digressing.
Well, to end it. I think that magic systems can be useful tools at times, but are ultimately unecessary for a good writer unless they want to write a story about a mage that researches magic or similar.
So I haven't engaged with the EU or any of the books or really anything outside of the first 6 movies, but I'm not sure that Star Wars really has a consistent enough/deeply explored enough philosophy to say that "philosophy" was the entire point of the movie(s)? I mean, there's some stuff about balance and understanding and size mattering not, but it read to me like a pastiche of Eastern philosophy tropes, and not really anything you could build a coherent system around.
In the context of that discussion, Star Wars (and the Jedi in particular) do not venerate martial power, and instead focus on understanding, knowledge and self control. And one of the themes there in is that martial power cannot, and do not defeat the Sith. And that thematic point ties into quite a lot of philosophies.
So, from a certain point of view, philosophy is the whole point of the movie.
As for a coherent system... there's enough to get feel for one. Particularly if your familiar enough with other systems to do the thing everyone human does and steal like a madman from them. I mean, Star Wars is Buddhist enough I have a book on my shelf explaining Buddhism using nothing but examples from Star Wars, and it hangs together fairly well.
I'll note most of the EU is useless to actively harmful to the idea of building a coherent philosophy, because a lot of the authors have less understanding of spiritualism/philosophy then bricks. The gigantic exception is Matthew Stover, who is pretty amazing on this front. There are parts of The Clone Wars TV series that are good, and KOTOR II asks a lot of questions that answering would help you shore a philosophy up.
Overall, there's enough that you get a feel more or less for what the philosophy of the Jedi and Sith should be, provided your not one of those insufferable idiots going 'the Jedi Order is evul!'. It's not going to map perfectly to anything IRL- I've seen more then a few breakdowns that make it abundantly clear on that front- but it take little effort to make something workable, and indeed, most of the work is done already if you care to look for it (WEG did it way back in 1987 with the first roleplaying books- the Jedi Code is from there).
I mean, Star Wars is Buddhist enough I have a book on my shelf explaining Buddhism using nothing but examples from Star Wars, and it hangs together fairly well.
I would argue that this is made possible in large part because the movies are just a pastiche of Eastern philosophy tropes rather than a really coherent system. There are also a lot of ways in which it doesn't adhere to Zen Buddhism or Taoism or whatever, though, because the Star Wars Moral-Ethical-Philosophical Pastiche is as much Western as it is Eastern, and the result is actually kind of disconcerting when taken as a philosophical whole. I'll start by saying that I know more about Taoism than Zen Buddhism, so most of my examples will run along those lines, but it's my understanding that the two are similar enough at a high level that they should be interchangeable at least in the context of this post.
Tao is dualist, but in a complementary way: Light cannot exist without Darkness, Heat is only meaningful when compared to Cold, etc, and the natural state of the universe kind of arises in a synthetic way from these complements—there's no struggle between extremes, only synthesis. Tao is non-normative in its construction, too, so it doesn't really assert capital-G Good or capital-E Evil. But then, you look at A New Hope, which is... actually a very straightforward story about Good vs Evil and triumphing over the Forces of Darkness. It's positively Manichaean. And there's nothing wrong about using this in stories—it's a time-honored device that underlies some of the best works in the fantasy/sci-fi canon—but it's ultimately very narratively Western. And... well, I don't think it combines that well with the Eastern aesthetic that the Jedi claim to espouse.
Like: it's made very clear in the movies that, in some very nontrivial way, the moral baseline of the universe is "light side", and the dark side is undesirable and, well, Evil. Anakin/Darth Vader falls to the dark side and turns from a fair-skinned faintly handsome Hayden Christensen look-alike into a pale, scar-faced, physically crippled cyborg. Palpatine is a conniving snake of a man who becomes ugly, pale, and hairless—aka visibly evil—at the exact moment his nefarious schemes are revealed to the world at large, in a stunning "Evil is Ugly" moment not seen since Sauron and the fall of Numenor.
The biggest thing that gets me, though, is that at the end of ROTJ, Anakin is thought to have fulfilled the prophecy of the Chosen One by killing Palpatine:
Article:
A Jedi will come
To destroy the Sith
And bring balance to the Force.
And... well, that's not very Zen or Tao at all. Zen/Tao are only dualist in a complementary way. But in Star Wars, "balance" is literally brought to the force by getting rid of the Dark Side. And while, yes, those Sith guys were evil assholes with bad skin and worse fashion sense and probably deserved what was coming to them, the very idea that "Light is Good and Dark is Evil and at the end of the day Good should vanquish Evil" is just fundamentally inconsistent with a lot of Eastern philosophy.
I could go on and on here—for instance, ANH is a classic Campbellian Hero's Journey, a narrative construct intrinsically about striving for betterment, while the principle idea of wu wei (literally: without action/effort) in Zen/Tao emphasizes the importance of being rather than striving; or that in some very fundamental way, by setting up the moral dualism in the world to be between "balance" and "not balance", Lucas et al have actually made it structurally impossible to arrive at the dualistic monism that ultimately lies at the heart of what the Tao is—but I think the point I'm trying to make is: yes, you can read a Zen Buddhist/Tao/Eastern philosophy into some aspects of Star Wars. But it only fits if you're willing to discount the entire remainder of the (very narratively Western) normative message that Star Wars is so intent on delivering.
So, sure, the Jedi espouse some tenets of Zen and Tao on an aesthetic level, but this is a level no deeper than that in which, say, Girl Genius espouses some elements of the steampunk genre. In practice, the Jedi want to triumph over evil just as much as anyone else, and the fact that, at an operational level, they claim to be interested in balance and acceptance and the understanding of all things is just kind of painfully dissonant.
And I guess this dissonance makes it really hard for me to accept that philosophy is somehow the entire point of Star Wars.
and KOTOR II asks a lot of questions that answering would help you shore a philosophy up.
I actually think that KOTOR II does a great job of exploring philosophical ideas, but that those ideas are precisely interesting because they're actually subversive of the "philosophy" of the main series movies. As mentioned above, Star Wars I-VI are kind of morally dualist in their construction, and KOTOR II is in part interesting because it rejects that moral duality. KOTOR II is thematically dark and explores shades of grey in a way that other media entrants in the SW universe do not.
So yeah, I guess I would accept "philosophy is the entire point of KOTOR II" as a statement, if that's the statement you're making.
I would argue that this is made possible in large part because the movies are just a pastiche of Eastern philosophy tropes rather than a really coherent system.
There are also a lot of ways in which it doesn't adhere to Zen Buddhism or Taoism or whatever, though, because the Star Wars Moral-Ethical-Philosophical Pastiche is as much Western as it is Eastern, and the result is actually kind of disconcerting. I'll start by saying that I know more about Taoism than Zen Buddhism, so most of my examples will run along those lines, but it's my understanding that the two are similar enough at a high level that they should be interchangeable at least in the context of this post.
Tao is dualist, but in a complementary way: Light cannot exist without Darkness, Heat is only meaningful when compared to Cold, etc, and the natural state of the universe kind of arises in a synthetic way from these complements. There's no struggle between extremes, only synthesis. Tao is actually very non-normative in its construction, so there's no capital-G Good or capital-E Evil. But then, you look at A New Hope, which is... actually a very straightforward standalone story about Good vs Evil and triumphing over the Forces of Darkness. And there's nothing wrong about using this in stories. It's a narrative structure that's survived the test of time. But it's ultimately a very Western narrative construction. And... well, I don't think it combines that well with the Eastern aesthetic that the Jedi claim to espouse.
For example, it's made very clear in ANH (and ESB and ROTJ and the prequels) that, in some very nontrivial way, the moral baseline of the universe is "light side", and the dark side is undesirable, and, well, evil. Anakin/Darth Vader falls to the dark side and turns from a fair-skinned faintly handsome Hayden Christensen look-alike into a pale, scar-faced, physically crippled cyborg. Palpatine is a conniving snake of a man who becomes ugly, pale, and hairless—aka visibly evil—at the exact moment his evil plans are revealed to the world at large, in a stunning "Evil is Ugly" moment not seen since Sauron and the fall of Numenor.
The biggest thing that gets me, though, is that at end of ROTJ, Anakin is thought to have fulfilled the prophecy of the Chosen One by killing Palpatine:
Article:
A Jedi will come
To destroy the Sith
And bring balance to the Force.
And... well, that's not very Zen or Tao at all. Zen/Tao are dualist, but in a complementary way. But in Star Wars, "balance" is literally brought to the force by getting rid of the Dark Side. And while, yes, those Sith guys were evil assholes with bad skin and worse fashion sense and probably deserved what was coming to them, my point is that the very idea that "Light is Good and Dark is Evil and at the end of the day Good should vanquish Evil" is actually very structurally Western, and fundamentally inconsistent with a lot of Eastern philosophy.
I could go on and on here—for instance, ANH is a classic Campbellian Hero's Journey, a narrative construct intrinsically about striving for betterment, while the principle idea of wu wei (literally: without action/effort) in Zen/Tao emphasizes the importance of being rather than striving; or that in some very fundamental way, by setting up the moral dualism in the world to be between "balance" and "not balance", Lucas et al have actually made it structurally impossible to arrive at the dualistic monism that ultimately lies at the heart of what the Tao is—but I think the point I'm trying to make is: yes, you can read a Zen Buddhist/Tao/Eastern philosophy into some aspects of Star Wars. But it only fits if you're willing to discount the entire remainder of the (very Western) normative message that Star Wars is so interested in delivering.
So, sure, the Jedi espouse some tenets of Zen and Tao on an aesthetic level, but this is a level no deeper than that in which, say, Girl Genius espouses some elements of the steampunk genre. In practice, the Jedi want to triumph over evil just as much as anyone else, and the fact that, at an operational level, they claim to be interested in balance and acceptance and the understanding of all things is kind of painfully dissonant.
I actually think that KOTOR II does a great job of exploring philosophical ideas, but that those ideas are precisely interesting because they're actually subversive of the "philosophy" of the main series movies. As mentioned above, Star Wars I-VI are kind of morally dualist in their construction, and KOTOR II is in part interesting because it rejects that moral duality. KOTOR II is thematically dark and explores shades of grey in a way that other media entrants in the SW universe do not.
So yeah, I guess I would accept "philosophy is the entire point of KOTOR II" as a statement, if that's the statement you're making.
OK, this is all a fair read. And I can honestly see how you come by this view point. It's not actually the one I ascribe to, but that's because of one thing the EU (old and new) really likes to ignore.
George Lucas never intended for there to be a Light side of the Force.
This is actually pretty well documented, but the idea was there was the Force, and then there was the Dark Side, which was an corruption of the Force. A cancer, was the way Lucas describes it. And from what I understand of taoism (forgive me if I am wrong, my knowledge here is somewhat superficial) that kind of imbalance is bad in pretty serious ways- you start hurting yourself and others.
(I'm aware that I'm probably missing all kinds of subtitles here, but this looks, at least superficially, like the kind of failure state taoism pushes against. If I have this wrong, I apologize.)
Now, the EU on the whole is fucking god awful at engaging with this. To the point where the 'balance of good and evil' is the norm, because... well, NA people get that. It drives me up the wall in its worse moments (fucking Tython) but it pretty undeniable its there and persistent, to the point where the origin point feels strange and weird. Stover was pretty much the only author to really engage with the original view point, and it made his books so much better (seriously, if you enjoy this kind of stuff, Shatterpoint, Traitor , and the Revenge of the Sith novelization are good reads that I will recommend without a second thought).
Also, that prophecy is misleading on a lot of levels. You left out an important bit of context from that quote. Here's the whole thing:
"The Great Holocron contains many references to the prophecy of the Chosen One: A Jedi will come
To destroy the Sith
And bring balance to the Force.
Records are unclear about this prophecy's exact origin, or whether the above words were the actual prophecy or a concise interpretation. Several accounts indicate that the prophecy was the subject of debate as far back as twelve hundred years ago, but it may in fact be much older."
I'll also note that it got soft retconned hard: Obi-Wan later says this in the RotS novelization: "I have scanned this prophecy; it says only that a chosen one will be born and bring balance to the Force; nowhere does it say he has to be a Jedi." And a bit later on, author's notes from The Jedi Path reference book (which had a blacked out page on the subject) was that he had a full prophecy written out, but was told to nix it by LucasArts, so they blacked the page out and blamed it on Palpatine. Ultimately, we have no idea what the prophecy actually said outside one fairly contested source from Jedi vs Sith (I need to get that damn book- there's a solid amount of lore it set, and quite a bit of it got retconned) and by everything I can find that was deliberate, which makes me really wary of that quote.
And of course, the movies were not great at getting this point across. Something I've found about the prequels is Lucas has really neat ideas- and is really bad at communicating them. When given to someone better at execution they can really shine, but when not- well, see the prequels. As an example, the RotS novelization is pretty beloved by the fanbase, in contrast to the much more conflicted reception of the film.
So I get your view point, and more often then not I'm right there with you in grumbling, but I do think the prequels at least are a lot closer to the mark then you might think at first glance. I'll also admit I support this view because I find it way more interesting and fertile ground then the more straight forward good vs evil (not that Star Wars has exactly been straight forward on that front), both from a thematic stand point and from a 'OK, I need to do characters for Star Wars' (I GM a Star Wars game).
If I was going to explain the prequels in taoist terms as I understand them- and I am aware that I am probably getting things wrong- the Jedi Council is out of balance, leaning very strongly yin, though to a lesser extent then most of galactic civilization. Enter Anakin Skywalker, someone who is very strongly yang influenced, whose power and ability shakes the Council and forces them to reexamine their views, leading them to cycle back towards yang and a more balanced philosophy. Unfortunately Palpatine is driving the galaxies shift from yin to yang with as much fury as he can, destabilizing things and bringing great pain to the galaxy so that he might ultimately profit. And he is driving Anakin's yang inclinations, already stronger then he can handle, to extremes, isolating him from the Jedi Council who cannot understand him, and him from the Council who he cannot understand. The exception is Obi-Wan, who is far more balanced then most of his fellow in large part thanks to his long association with Anakin. Things ultimately fall to tragedy when Anakin embraces his yang to the exclusion of all else, destroying himself, his friends, and a great many others in the process.
I'm aware I'm probably screwing this up in places- in particular, I'm not sure about where to place Palpatine. I'm unsure what a villain looks like in taoist tradition stories (or if they have a villain in the western sense of the word). I'm also unsure how taoism handles someone like Palpatine, who is very true to his desires, but those desires bring suffering to others. And I'm making some assumptions that might be false about what taoism considers a failure state for its teachings- I'm assuming to much yin or yang falls under 'and bad things happen, avoid this if possible'. Lastly, I'm pretty sure I'm leaning to hard on yin and yang.
Assuming I'm not to far off base though, it hold together pretty well as far as I can see. And yeah, I sorta am discarding a few of the more western normative elements- but it was pretty easy to do so, and I basically didn't need to twist the story at all to do it.
(Though the OT is less then normative as well- Luke discarding his lightsaber and stopping fighting being the answer that ultimately saved his father and himself is so rare @Aleph started a thread to find more moments like it, and to almost no success. For all the OT used a very standardized story structure, it did so in such a way very few stories have used before or since.)
But at the end of the day, your right about the very 'good vs evil' plot of Star Wars. I just think there is quite a bit more room to discuss things then there is with Girl Genius and steampunk (which yeah, Girl Genius is not steampunk).
So I think a lot of our differences stem from us viewing media through different lenses. Like—and I apologize in advance if I misrepresent your views here—you may think that authorial intent is important, whereas I think it's often subservient to social context and the reader's interpretation. Or: you may think that narrative content is the primary determinant of what a movie's "point" is, and I think that narrative structure often plays a similarly (if not more) important role. And I don't think that makes either of us wrong, but it means we can look at the same data points and come to very different conclusions. Ultimately, consuming media is a personal experience anyways, so, like, whatever, y'know?
I'm unsure what a villain looks like in taoist tradition stories (or if they have a villain in the western sense of the word).
Hm, I think they'd be stories about personal growth for its own internal sake (rather than personal growth to defeat a particular external threat), e.g. something like Fearless. Although I wouldn't really say that this class of stories is Taoist-tradition in the same way that I wouldn't say that, I dunno, The Iron Giant is Christian-tradition—even though the titular giant robot is actually a pretty compelling Christ figure*. Globalization and increased connectivity have kind of blurred a lot of the cultural lines, anyways. * like, he literally descends from heaven (because he's from outer space), sacrifices himself to save a town from a nuclear weapon (i.e. saves mankind from its own sin, since it's set in the cold war era and stuff), and resurrects (puts himself back together with space robot technology) while the faithful look on. Basically robo jesus (although not our@Robo Jesus) in everything but name
For all the OT used a very standardized story structure, it did so in such a way very few stories have used before or since.
So I just want to point out that I'm not saying that Star Wars is bad or anything. I may think it's bad at certain very specific things, but there are really very few pieces of media that aren't. The OT movies are narratively (and experientially, I guess) very good movies with top-quality execution.
