Urban Fantasy and the Masquerade

 

Here, as promised, is the post on Urban Fantasy and the Masquerade which is nigh unavoidable in it. What is Urban Fantasy in the first place and what importance does the Masquerade (with the capital ‘M’) have in it?

 

Urban Fantasy is a relatively young part of the Fantasy genre, putting the general tropes and expected parts of fantasy, such as magic or supernatural creatures, in a regular modern setting - in a more or less urban environment, hence the name.

As you might expect, there is one big problem with this genre: the explanation of how a modern setting would have come to pass in a world with magic, elves, dwarves, and orcs (or other regular fantasy races). Magic would certainly have changed the development of technology and interfered with it, the presence of supernatural sapient species would have changed society greatly. This is where the idea of the Masquerade comes in - and not just in settings like White Wolf’s “Vampire: the Masquerade”. The Masquerade is a law which forbids the supernatural creatures to present themselves to the public and mages to show their magical powers. Usually, there is some sort of supernatural law enforcement involved as well, so this law can be enforced in the first place. Why mages shouldn’t flaunt their magic or why supernatural creatures shouldn’t show themselves is usually not explained too well - the in-world reason, that is. The reason for the writer is rather clear - because the world of the Urban Fantasy setting wouldn’t be the way it is without all of the fantastic elements being hidden.

 

There are two types of Urban Fantasy settings - one where magic is relatively new to the world, where it has just started to work, where the creatures have just arrived from somewhere else; and one where magic was always there and has been hidden for many centuries or even millennia, together with the supernatural creatures.

The first setting usually works better and with less world-threatening problems. If magic is relatively new and a higher power is interested in keeping it a secret, that can work for a little while. Not for centuries, probably not even for decades, but certainly for a number of years. If those creatures have just arrived and there’s relatively few of them around, it is understandable that they will be hiding from mankind, as not to be killed immediately.

The second setting is much harder to keep up, because it comes with more story-logic problems. If magic has existed for a long time, it would have influenced technology and we would probably not have the same technology we do have. Either technology would have evolved to keep up with magic (if magic can threaten people and they need protection) or technology would have been kept down, because there’s easier ways of doing things with magic. It’s even more of a problem with dwarves, elves, and suchlike. Keeping hidden from mankind clearly would never have worked too well - there would have been sights of them which would have become myths and legends and, as soon as some kind of photography was around, documented. If there were technology like ours, half of the internet would be filled with accidentally-filmed orcs and elves, which would certainly break the Masquerade.

 

Urban Fantasy often gets a reputation for being the lazy way of making a fantasy setting - just slap elves and orcs and magic on the real world and work from there. It does have the advantage that there’s no need for long expositions about the world - it is, more or less, like ours. The differences can easily be explained in-story, especially as there’s usually one character who is sucked into the world behind the Masquerade and will ask questions and get explanations for the audience (that’s often the job of such a character).

That doesn’t have to be the case, but it’s really important to sit down with such a setting and work out how and why magic and, when applicable, magical races have entered the world. Which changes they will have made to the environment (perhaps nature is more healthy around Elven settlements or orcs under enchantments are doing a lot of the hard physical labour)? What reasons do the Powers That Be have to keep it under wraps?

If magic is, for instance, hard to wield and the talent is very, very rare, then there will be only a few mages to control. If there’s a very small population of supernatural creatures around and they aren’t too powerful, it would be in their best interest not to get into trouble with the admittedly xenophobic humans.

Yet, even those explanations will not hold for long-term Masquerade, for the presence of magic and/or supernatural creatures for a long time. Sooner or later, their presence will lead to some hiccups, to suggestions that there is something the general populace doesn’t know about. Sooner or later, they will influence the world around them and change it from what we know to something different.

It is also a question of scope. For instance, if we only look at “Vampire: the Masquerade” alone, not at the World of Darkness in general, it could work. Vampires are rare and they are apex predators of mankind. They have a vested interest in humans not knowing they exist - especially as most sleep during the day and are vulnerable then. They also often play on the highest levels, influence and control governments, which gives them the chance to suppress news about them, to paint those who know about them as madmen and -women. They can keep hidden and will brutally enforce the Masquerade which protects them and gives them power.

This would never work for a world full of supernatural creatures, because there would be no way to enforce the Masquerade long-term. There would be breaches and humans are often quick on the uptake. The vampires in the last example can very well just kill humans who get too close to them. One human here and one human there are not that hard to make disappear. A hundred humans who saw that unicorn gallop through Central Park and a hundred others who saw that pod of mermaids swim up the Hudson on the same day are much harder to silence.

 

So, on a small scale for magic and/or supernatural creatures, Urban Fantasy and the Masquerade do definitely work. But long-term or on a large scale, the world would change and no longer look and feel like the one we are used to. Keep that in mind when you want to write Urban Fantasy. Otherwise, take our world as a jump-off point and think about how the fantasy tropes you want to bring in might have changed it and what it might be looking like today, if elves, orcs, and magic were a real thing.

The Challenge of World Building

 

Unless you work in a contemporary setting, there’s always some world building to do for you. Even if you work in a historical setting, you need to research it to do it right and you will have to convey some of it, the parts which are not common knowledge, to the reader somehow, if they play a role in your story. In short: world building is nigh unavoidable.

 

To what degree you will have to build your own world very much depends on the setting you are choosing. A fantasy or science fiction world of its own will demand a huge amount of building, since you will have to build it all from scratch. An alternate reality will demand much less world building (which is one explanation for the rise of Urban Fantasy - more on that in a future post). A historical setting will demand a lot of research into what was and a lot of understanding of why it was that way - and then a discreet decision about what to keep and what to get rid of. All of these kinds of world building demand a good understanding of how society works, how technology develops, and how people think about change. That is what you should keep in mind whenever you have to change from the reality as it is to a higher degree (beyond inventing some kind of agency or a town or something like that).

 

So, let’s look at the first part: how society works. Society is always built around what people think is the most important thing.

In early development of mankind, food was a big topic, so society was built around finding it. First, that meant hunters and gatherers, then it meant agriculture. Those who knew how to grow food were on top of the society, because they could provide what society needed.

Then, over time, things shifted. Today, history specialists think that agriculture led to war - to fights over fertile land - since you can’t just put seeds down somewhere and expect good results. Some land is fertile, some is very fertile, and in some you will never make anything grow. So tribes started fighting over areas of land where food could be grown well. This might have pushed the importance of men, because they were often the ones fighting in those skirmishes (although it’s not unlikely that at least some women might have fought as well). The knowledge of how to grow things was now the second most important thing after the knowledge of how to win fights. Those who were strong and could wield the early weapons well, those who made those weapons, too, were more important than the farmer now.

With the rise of currency, which probably has been around in some way for longer than expected (as having some general object to trade for), those who had more currency also gained more influence. Naturally, those who can buy more also have the ability of making their own lives - and those of people they like - much better. They replaced the soldier on top of the heap and pushed the farmer and the hunter further down.

With growing towns and cities, the need for administration rose. In a small tribe, the head of it can easily do all the organisation in their spare time, but with a city, it demands the concentrated efforts of a few people to keep things running. Reading and writing became important and, slowly, the administrator topped the wealthy one - because the administrator made sure the wealthy one had shops to spend money at. This was the rise of the politician above the wealthy upper class. This is why even poor landed gentry is still higher up society than the average wealthy person - they were once part of the ruling class that kept everything going.

What does it mean for your society? Well, chances are that things will develop similarly, but who rules depends very much on who you want to put on top. In your fantasy setting, women could have been more common among the warriors, so they were never pushed down into the lower ranks. Perhaps money was created earlier and with it came diplomacy and the ability to ‘buy off’ your enemy instead of taking land by force. Perhaps administration happened early in a more democratic setting and there never were big kingdoms, so you have no nobility. There’s many ways to tweak it, but keep in mind that those on top are always those who are most needed to keep society comfortable. Whether that is through food, through war, through money, or through administration doesn’t matter much.

 

Technological development can be very different in different worlds. Our world could have developed vastly differently, had we made certain inventions earlier or later. Wars would have been different without the invention of gunpowder. Without the invention of the modern car engine, we might have little individual traffic and more public transport, perhaps we’d still have a lot of horse- and ox-drawn carts. Without the invention of electric appliances, we wouldn’t have the internet, smartphones, and many other things. Or we might have a different form of energy and a lot of those things would exist in a different way.

Keep in mind that any kind of technology that proves better in some way (less time to do things, level of energy needed, or level of physical strength involved) will, sooner or later, replace what came before. Humans are like that, if they see more usefulness in something, they’ll switch to it. That’s probably a big thing which pushes us towards where we are now. It’s likely other species with a similar development would see things similarly.

 

To people, change is always both a chance and something they fear. There’s a level of comfort in every step of the development, it’s always better than what came before. Regularity and rituals give humans the feeling of being in control of what happens - and humans like to be in control. On the other side, every development that makes life better for the majority is something which will, sooner or later, win out. People always like more comfort and security in their lives, so if a new development can guarantee that, chances are they will switch to it sooner or later.

The first to change are usually the younger people, those with less routine in their lives, those who haven’t lived by the status quo for quite as long. They are more progressive in general. The last to change usually are the older people, those who have lived their whole lives without that new-fangled thing which is changing society. They are more conservative in general. Please do not take ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ in a political way here. Progressive means, literally, ‘going forward’ while conservative means ‘to protect what is’. Both are important to a degree, which is why it is a good thing to have both groups in your society. In general, though, because it is supported by the younger generation, progress wins out in the end and things evolve.

 

With this at your disposal, ask yourself where your world is coming from and where it’s going. It’s not about writing a history where you put down the dates on which important kings were crowned or someone realized that you can eat seafood. It’s about realizing how your world got the way it is and which stations it passed on the way there. How your dominant species reacted to the changes. Who is on top of society and why? (And, please, if your world has magic, don’t put magic users on the bottom - due to their skills, they will always be on top or near the top.) What is their technological level and how did they reach it? Those are the questions you should ask yourself and see answered before you commit to using that world.

Death of the Author

 

In many discussions about the character of certain creators, the term ‘Death of the Author’ is bandied about to justify continuing to consume their books or other media. Unfortunately, this is not what the expression means.

 

In 1967, French literary critic Roland Barthes published an essay titled ‘La Morte d’Auteur’, in English ‘The Death of the Author’. In the essay he demanded a change in the way texts (and other forms of media, such as paintings) were interpreted. This heavily relied on looking into the creator’s life and trying to connect characters, situations, or full plot lines with their life or the people they were close to in some way. Often, this went so far as to not interpret the content of the text at all, because the critic or literature professor got so caught up in all their hard-earned knowledge about the author. Instead, Barthes demanded to completely disconnect the author from the text and only seek answers to the intention of the text within it, not within the person who created it. The essay was published in English in the following year, which introduced a much bigger group of people to the concept.

 

This, however, is not a blog post about how the concept changed the perception of texts and other media. You can look into this video by Lindsay Ellis to learn more about that. This blog post is about people misusing the expression to justify their support of authors or other media creators who shouldn’t be supported - most recently J.K. Rowling. (There’s also a video by Lindsay Ellis about J.K. Rowling and death of the author in her case.)

 

First of all, there is a definite difference between consuming media by a dubious creator who is already dead (in the physical sense) and media by a dubious creator who is still alive.

The creator who is still alive can use both the money and the platform given to them by their fans to further their toxic opinions and support their causes. This means J.K. Rowling, for instance, has a platform through Twitter and other social media to peddle her trans-phobic ideas and she earns money through the Harry Potter franchise (and her other novels) which she can donate to groups fighting against trans people as well. If you consume her media for money, if you buy her books, watch her movies for a price (movie theatre, streaming services, DVD/Blue-Ray purchase), you help her support her cause. If you follow her on Twitter or other social media, share her tweets, and like them, you give her more of a platform through which to peddle her ideas. There is no separating the art from the artist in this case, because as soon as you consume the art or recommend it to others, you also support the author and, through them, their toxic cause. If you feel you can’t part with the Harry Potter franchise (which is, indeed, an important part in quite some people’s lives), you could consume second-hand media - buy books, DVDs, or Blue-Rays second-hand instead of immediately and don’t stream her movies, but you can watch them on TV, since in this case she doesn’t get money for everyone who watches, but a general sum. (I’m definitely not suggesting you should pirate anything, because pirating is wrong).

The dubious creator who is already dead can no longer use the money you pay for their work and doesn’t have a platform through which to peddle their ideas. H.P. Lovecraft, for instance, was horridly racist even compared to people in his time, but he’s long dead, his stories are in public domain (so no money for racist organisations in possession of the rights), and he will certainly not pop up on social media to rant about all those ‘not-WASP people with no breeding’. If he did, you could be sure it’s a comedy account and it might even be fun to follow. You should still be aware of the shortcomings of his stories, of the racist undertones especially, but you can consume the media without supporting his cause, no matter whether it’s first- or second-hand.

That’s the big difference between cases where the author is really dead and the cases where the author is alive and you’re only pretending they’re dead.

 

Now, there is a certain difference between media controlled by one dubious creator (such as novels) and media where one dubious creator is involved (such as TV series, for instance).

In the first case, the dubious creator gets quite a big share of the earnings, provided you consume the media. Some may stay with their publisher and agent, but they’re still going to get quite a bit of the earnings, which for popular media can be quite a bit of money.

In the second case, the dubious creator gets a much smaller share of the earnings, there’s a lot of different creators involved, and the media is more of a team effort. Here, there’s still money in it for the dubious creator, but it’s not quite as much.

Ideally, you’d not support anything by a dubious creator, but that can be quite difficult. There’s also the question whether or not the creator realizes they’ve supported a toxic cause. We all make mistakes, so when a dubious creator realizes the error of their ways and distances themselves from those errors, consuming their media again becomes acceptable, since the money you spend on it will not go to a toxic cause and they will no longer advocate for it on the platform you might be supporting.

 

Now, some people might say that every creator of media is free to do what they want - and they’re correct, of course. As the consumer of said media, however, you are also free to do what you want. That means that it’s your decision to support or not support those creators. You’re free to do so, but you must realize that you’re indirectly also supporting their toxic cause and that might not be what you want to do. You need to keep that in mind when you make the decision.

The World Building of The Case Files of Henri Davenforth

 

Last week, I put out a review of the series “The Case Files of Henri Davenforth”, a mystery/police procedural series set in a fantasy world which is more or less a magic-infused version of our early twentieth century. This week, I want to take a look at the world building of this series, especially the racist and sexist aspects, which are tackled in an interesting way.

 

The first thing to note about the world of the series is that humans are far from the only sentient beings. There are dwarves, dark elves, brownies, dryads, and several were-creatures so far as well (and every additional book might add another species). The interesting thing is that the author doesn’t use them as a stand-in for any kind of real-world minorities. The different species are integrated into the world, they live among the humans, they work in different jobs, from low-grade workers to high positions (such as a museum director), they own and lead stores as well. The only kind of prejudice I’ve encountered so far (in the fourth novel), is the idea that werefoxes are too mischievous and unreliable, which makes it harder for them to get jobs. There’s also no prejudice towards humans with different skin tones - both a medical examiner at the precinct and the new magical examiner hired in the fourth book are dark-skinned, but not treated differently because of it.

This take on how different species that have lived together for a long time would interact is actually one I’ve always thought made most sense. First of all, there’s no reason humans would see skin colours as something specific while sharing the world with elves, dwarves, and other beings. It would be easy, however, to fall into the trap of making people discriminate against other species. This also makes little sense once you think about it. If humans, dwarves, elves, and other beings have lived together for a long time, the usefulness of people from all species has already been proven. They have built towns, cities, and kingdoms together, worked and fought in teams. There’s no reason for them to think that someone who happens to be a dwarf is worth less than a human, for instance. Their next-door neighbour might be a dwarf and they might be very glad to have them living there.

It’s also a lot of fun to see all those different species together. To have a member of the investigative team immediately accept that a werewolf would know that there was someone smoking in a house they delivered the mail to as the postman. Of course he would - his nose is far better than that of a human. Of course a dwarf might be smug about the fact that it needs more humans to transport a certain amount of a metal than it would take dwarves, because dwarves are stronger and everyone knows that. Of course the dark elf officer at the precinct can be a much greater threat with a new fighting technique, because he’s much faster and more agile than a human. That’s just the way of the world and nobody sees it as anything special.

 

So all is perfect in this world and people are just skipping around, all equal to each other? Of course not. There is no racism, but there’s sexism. As at the beginning of our twentieth century, women do not have the same chances in life, the same access to education and the workforce as men do. The current ruling queen of the kingdom the stories are set in is adamant that this has to change, that women have to have access to every job. She is pushing for it and she’s not happy to hear of cases in which women are turned away from a job for being women (as happens in the fourth novel, where she overrules the police president, because he didn’t want a female magical examiner).

The sexism is not excused, however, nor is it simply accepted by the majority of the female characters in the books. It’s still there, embedded in the morals (which are pretty late-Victorian) and in the past, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be challenged and that it will always be that way.

It’s notable that the main force behind ending the sexism isn’t the traveller from earth, the woman who was kidnapped and dragged into this world and does have another approach to the treatment of men and women. The main driving force is Queen Regina, who was born and raised on this world. Neither do women approve of the sexism, whether it’s female police officers who are restricted to domestic disputes, women who feel threatened and are brushed off by the police because they’re considered hysteric, or women who are not considered for a position merely because of their sex. They do make it clear that it is not okay for them, that they don’t see themselves as anything less than a man. Therefore, the ‘White Saviour’ trope (which wouldn’t fully work, because Jamie Edwards, the traveller from earth, is part Asian) doesn’t come to pass. It’s not the person from another culture who knows better and teaches the stupid locals. It’s the locals who see the problem and act against it. Jamie joins that fight, but she doesn’t start or lead it.

 

The technology level of the world is also interesting, since it, too, matches the early twentieth century on earth instead of the medieval times as so many other fantasy settings. There are cars around, but they don’t usually make more than thirty miles per hour (there’s also the superstition that it would hurt humans to move faster, just as there was on earth at that time). Jamie boosts the technology by introducing things from her own world which are quite often realized with the additional help of magic and also by the female guild master of the Guild of Artificers. Magic is integrated into the world with about five percent of all humans being born with magical talent. Magic and technology work together, so there’s no technophobia or suchlike. A technical object can be powered by magic and magical objects might include technical parts.

 

The world building of “The Case Files of Henri Davenforth” is as interesting as the cases Henri and Jamie take on in the novels. It doesn’t overshadow the actual story and there’s no big information dumps, yet it introduces the reader well to the world and keeps them informed about everything they need to know.