THE GREAT MOCKERY, PART 6: POST-MODERN AND END

Hello all!

Well, I’m wrapping up this series for now. Truth be told, yeah, I’m still doubting myself. I think this was more a waste of time, so I apologize. I am moving onto a happier series next, of how I learned fantasy and how that influenced me.

I’d like to say that I think this series would have been more effective if I could speak more freely. Actually, hell, you know what, if I’m still bothered by something, I’ll post the essays on my SubscribeStar! On https://www.subscribestar.com/dair-productions. …No, wait, that may be worse, because then I’d be criticizing James Morkshop’s product for money and that’d make them more mad. I tell you people, there is a kind of madness and method in that company. They go after critics, but sometimes they go after fans who, out of love for H-40.0, make amazing animations or other content. Content, which could bring in more fans, but JM penalizes them because… JM is a kind of insane that I can’t decipher as an outsider looking in. I’d need their secret decoder ring or something. Anyway. Here’s my final thoughts, AND, what I think will happen in H-40.0’s future. It is probably JM’s future too, because it and H-40.0 are so tied together.

Above all, James Morkshop sells Post-Modernism. Especially so in H-40.0. That darkness I keep ranting and raving about? Here it is: Irreverence and Cynicism. It is as much deconstructionism of what came before as well as making a, really intense replacement. At every level, H-40.0 follows the themes of Post-Modernism (at least in literature).

1) You don’t make stories out of whole cloth; you make them out of fragments that fit together well enough.

2) Everything must be questioned to find the hidden dirtiness underneath (the assumption is that nothing is pure or sincere).

3) Everything is mostly up for interpretation, even the interpretation of the previous interpretation.

4) Related, is nobody gives a clear, unbiased, sincere account of events.

5) Pretty much everybody is a dirtbag if you look hard enough, but they are also worthy of sympathy because they are a dirtbag. (Their worthlessness is value, they are the cast-off scraps of something else.)

6) Breaking the fourth wall and/or using metafiction or metafictional literary devices, to either tell a story or to upturn a story. (Read: It is a story that does not forget itself, and acts like a bad ham actor.)

Now mix that in with some cosmological elements; you don’t have to look far to understand that the space-demon-gods, and other cosmos-junk, are associated with high concepts that go very wrong, like fate, fatalism, honor, perfectionism. Now mix all that in with the common sense understanding of ambiguity: what can be helpful in one situation is harmful in another (fire, venom/anti-venom, water, a self-shooting gun, etc.). Now, finally, mix all that in with Irreverence and Cynicism.

What’s Cynicism? No, not the ancient Greek philosophy—Cynicism is cowardly doubt. A cynic, all cynics, on some level understand that life can go terribly, terribly wrong. Life is dangerous and hard, so protect yourself from it in any way. It is, almost like cynicism is Wisdom without Bravery. Wisdom without bravery. Or, understanding tinged by bitterness. But, that is the charitable definition. Sometimes a cynic is a person who refuses to be happy, because it is too much effort to be happy. …Joyful.

What is Irreverence? Hostility to what is higher or superior. A joke at someone’s expense—well, eh, then again most jokes inherently have someone as a victim. Well, it is just in the name—it is Dis-Respect. From the Greek, dys or dis means ‘to break or unjoin’, so it is the breaking of respect. You can say, nothing is sacred and everything is a target. It is almost as if, everything has a flaw and that flaw ought to be exploited. It is a roundabout way of saying ‘a free-for-all fistfight’.

I hope you can see why that is a problem.

Now, you may defend Irreverence as a key, fundamental, if not vital aspect of reality, to highlight the ironies, paradoxes, contradictions, and naturally ambiguities of life. You would be right. The MOST RIGHT answer is ‘Irreverence in small doses is the healthiest’. In too large a dose, it destroys and does not put back together. When Irreverence is the norm, anarchy is the politics—oh, sorry, I didn’t mean anarchy as a political system, I meant a chaotic wasteland from which a new, demented, dark Eden may arise for whoever has the might, will, and megalomania to impose their vision of reality upon the tainted clay. Irreverence is the first tool of power-grabbers and usurpers.

But that’s a matter for real life, we’re talking about something specific. As a business company, James Morkshop sells cynicism as a form of Entertainment. In the bigger scheme of things, it sells cheap jokes at someone’s expense. Now, sure, JM can escape the serious allegations—say, if some damnfool Christian sues the company for selling Satanism, as what happened with Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s. Even I would laugh at the Christian’s attempt, because JM sells cartoon demons at the worst. The company is ‘only’ selling dark jokes and plastic toys. In the short-term, yes.

In the long term, it trains consumers into parody artists. It becomes too easy, too quick, to make a mocking joke at the bright and lovely things. …In a healthy parody, the higher ideals are the straightman to the zany humor. That changes over time to where the straightman is the only acceptable butt of jokes. Can you, long time fans, look at beautiful things without a thought flicking through your head, ‘I know how I can make this ugly’, hmm?

No, no, no, here’s where I got my wakeup call—one of them—and that was me realizing that authors who write stories/novels for H-40.0 and ‘Battles of Fantasy Nature’ have to truly, truly, imagine some half a dozen horrible ways for characters to die. Named characters at that. Never mind the goofy plot holes, long term fans who may be reading, I mean some of the authors who go out of their way to depict a man being skinned alive, or eaten alive by a monster, or provide realistic depictions of burning to death by flame thrower, or a person getting their skull cut open by a weaponized chainsaw, or no wait don’t faint!

A person may defend this and say ‘Yeah, that’s part of the style’, as clear as saying that fire is hot. Is your blasé defense of this, a little indicative of a dulled spirit? You may defend the style, and I say ‘why are you buying the style?!’ What’s in it for you?

What is the appeal? It starts in stages I think. The first stage is, hands down, H-40.0 has a biting edge, an intensity, that does not exist anywhere else. It is a playground of extremes smashing against each other. It is like an action movie on illegal steroids, the whole setting, with enough schlocky dialogue and one-liners to keep, the technically-a-plot rolling. It is blood guts and horror, it appeals to all those visceral things that we happy, comfortable, well-insulated nerds don’t have. The second stage is seeing the hypocrisy. Every faction—every human and/or formerly human faction is a bunch of hypocrites, who then understand that they are hypocrites or are such utter fools that they sound like stooges. Usually, it goes ‘yeah, I’m a bastard, and you’re a bastard, but we’ll let our chainsaws do the talking’. We, the audience, are especially supposed to laugh at the [Grand Space Empire of Humans], because like real life it is full of power-grabbing, arrogance, unopposed cruelty, and finger-pointing/blame-shifting…but at a scale where whole planets explode because one petty person got mad. First, the over-the-top action, and then the over-the-top human foibles…

Third stage, hmm, I think this is where most newcomers choose to either stay on with the human factions, or jump ship to the alien factions, or the space-demon factions*. Whatever a newcomer chooses, I think around this stage they begin exploring the named characters, those larger-than-life personalities of each political faction in H-40.0. Credit where it is due, the characters of each faction either exemplify, or subvert, the values and ideals (spit) of their given faction, and everything in between. The characters themselves, are, of course, a ball of contradictions—most of them. Most of the individuals are complicated, in order to make them fascinating, but some are a one-trick pony done really well. Each named character, though, is a facet of a faction, a lense to see the greater scope. Dare I say, even in a post-modern medium, that the characters are symbols of their given factions?

[*For those interested in my history, my initial three choices were Space-Elf, Legio XVII—yes, specifically the evil space clerics—or the blue goat-fish people. The giant fighting robots called to me, and I never looked back. …Yeah, all you long-term vets, I hear your hate! I’m a blueberry and proud of it! F*ck all you! Fifth edition codex, right on my shelf! I even have some of the original army boxes—both the army and the actual box.]

After stage three…hmmm, things begin to branch out. Stage four, if you can call it that, is just, learning every stupid gimmick of all the factions, as well as learning the cosmology. Why do the space-demons act as they do? Who is, D’ah God-Emprah of mankind, the ruler of the [Grand Space Empire of Humans], and what are his secret plans? At stage four, H-40.0 breaks up into the realm of fan-made conspiracy theories (read, endless arguments on the Internet) to explore the muddy mysteries (such as they are) of the H-40.0 cosmos. I don’t think most people get to stage four, because it is time- and brain-intensive; most people want to play games with their weirdo space-armies and leave it at that. But, like Dungeons and Dragons, there has to be ‘good enough’ answers to explain how the fictional cosmos works. (For example, what happens after death in H-40.0? You soul goes to the Wyrd dimension to be tormented by monsters for all eternity, unless it is claimed by a more powerful entity.)

Now, you may think, if you are acquainted with other sci-fi settings, that surely there are definitive answers to all the silly questions in H-40.0? Is there a Canon to the events in H-40.0, especially since the franchise is 40 years old?

Incorrect.

I have to thank Luetin09, on Youtube. As a reminder, he is the unofficial Lore Master of all things H-40.0, and so I’m comfortable enough to use him as a source. (Read, he is too big and popular for JM to go after.) It is from Luetin09 that I got the official, JM-approved stance on Canonicity and Retcons—there are no retcons at all, and ‘everything is canon, not everything is true’. I have several quotes from Luetin09 that he has collected over the years, and these quotes are from official creators and managers of James Morkshop. I found this recently in the week, and they all confirmed my suspicions of post-modernism.

To quote Luetin09:

“First up, Gav Thorp, [H-40.0] author and longtime designer for [James Morkshop] who said ‘With [Battles of Fantastical nature and H-40.0], the notion of canon is a fallacy. Battles of Fantastical nature and H-40.0] exist as tens of thousands of overlapping realities in the imaginations of games developers, writers, readers, and gamers. None of those interpretations is wrong.

“Next you have Andy Hall, also [H-40.0] author and game designer for [James Morkshop] talking specifically about canon and retcon. He says ‘It all stems from the assumption that there’s a binding contract between author and reader to adhere to some non-existent subjective construct or true representation of the setting. There is no such contract and no such objective truth.’

“Then you have [Fanboy of the Armless Failure], well known [H-40.0] author, who said quite simply ‘There is no canon. There were several hundred creators all adding to the melting pot of the IP’ (intellectual property); and lastly one I found from Marc Gascoigne who worked as a general manager for [Umbral Archives] in the early period of its inception during the late 90s and early 2000s. He said, ‘Here’s our standard line. Yes, it’s all official, but remember that we were reporting back from a time where stories aren’t always true, or at least 100% accurate. If it has a [H-40.0] logo on it, it exists in the [H-40.0] universe or it was a legend that may well have happened or a rumor that may or may not have any truth behind it.’

End quote.

Names were changed as appropriate, as Mr. Thorp, Hall, and Gascoigne no longer work for James Morkshop. ADB.

I find it weird, because everyone becomes their own story, instead of being a part of a bigger story*. You can say, ‘It is your story, make of it what you will’. …That is a fat load of sh*t from a franchise that made its name by riffing on other stories until it became self-sufficient to be its own demented narrative. Maybe it’s the smug hypocrisy that burns my bones. A smug, petty deconstructionist that thinks he knows better, because he can tear something apart and give a half-assed answer in its place.

[*This is compounded that nobody would want to live in the H-40.0 setting anyway, because James Morkshop has to be two-headed about everything.]

…All right, enough of my hate. Even I’m tired of it. BUT, I promised my future predictions, and I’ll get them out of the way. And hey, if I’m right, I get to be that obscure guy on the Internet who was true!

1) James Morkshop and its properties won’t go away. Like I said, it has a biting edge/intensity that’s is not anywhere else to be found. It does not have an effective competitor in this regard. And, yeah, to be honest, I wouldn’t go for anything less intense at this point. …Uh, intense, but a few notches down from the highest notch.

In addition, JM is still a company, and has a corporation’s survival instinct. It has, over its years, proved to not be afraid of cannibalizing its own properties if that will ensure long-term survival. Plus, it is a monopoly for all intents in the miniature wargames department.

2) James Morkshop will die, because of:

a) It will be compromised by the [UNSPECIFIED POLITICAL MOVEMENT THAT RHYMES WITH] ‘voke’, by having new generations of writers influenced by that said movement. Those new writers will destroy the core values of JM and H-40.0 (such as they are). This is nothing new or surprising now. Post-modernism set itself up for failure IRL, because the [UNSPECIFIED POLITICAL MOVEMENT] eats post-modernism from the inside-out; the Po-Mo has no defense against its own cancer.

b) It will survive the compromising times/culture wars by watering itself down. The company may not be infiltrated, but outside pressure or scrutiny will convince JM to water down its intensity of the setting. ‘No, we are not selling topless sex-demons from outer space’, says JM to cover its butt. The watering-down will be the end, because no new blood will be interested. The old guard won’t leave, but new kids won’t be as impressed.

b-2) JM will not die from watering down, but will have to go into a kind of hibernation period, and from there it will spread parody material once again, in better seasons.

3) James Morkshop will have a Miltonian/humanist-Satanic figure rise to great prominence and go from being the great antagonist to the great protagonist. This will take some explaining. For all you people who don’t know enough to get my references, don’t worry about it, skip to THE END.

[For long-term fans, the Armless Failure will become the Miltonian savoir-destroyer of the setting. Yes, that Armless Failure, because of his prophet, ADB, his biggest fanboy. This shouldn’t surprise any of you; the Armless Failure will be painted as ‘the only sane man’ or as ‘the least stupid option in a galaxy full of stupid options’. Said Armless Failure is perfectly suited to be a Hero of Humanism: He is full of willpower and intelligence, and has all the strengths of mankind and the demon-gods, and he has none of their weaknesses. From a cosmological point, as a being ‘between men and gods’, the Armless Failure is at the perfect, upside-down junction, because he is above men, and the gods are uselessly insane. He is set up to have mastery over the Material and Wyrd dimensions. Like a Humanist Hero, he shall earn dominion over the natural and supernatural by his own efforts.]

3-TLDR) The Armless Failure will become the hero, which will disgust the fanbase so badly that JM is forced to hit the big red retcon-button IF the company survives the trauma of losing so many fans and stockbrokers.

THE END

…Thank you all. For those still here, I’ve got a happier series next, ‘Life Lessons from Anime’. It will be more biographical, but it will be about how I was changed by stories. I want to share it all with you. See you Monday!

More to follow!