[meta] Why LoGG is so late, and what I'm doing about it

[robkelk]

I've been having a conversation with Ross, and some of what he's been saying - none of the particular words, but the gist of his arguments - has made me realize why I'm dragging my feet on the last two chapters of my big Fenspace story, Legend of Galactic Girls.

in short, they're not really in conformance with the Genre Directive ("This is not a dystopia"). They're too heavy on the violence.

Now, this may be a problem with how we decided to approach telling stories in fenspace at the very beginning. We set up a world where people who really wanted to go out into space and explore and colonize could do so, and the very first thing we did in this not-a-dystopia was have a war. Oops.

It's too late to change that, but it isn't too late to keep Fenspace from becoming yet another clone of spacebattles.com However, one of the things we're going to have to do - assuming we want to be not-a-dystopia - is to vastly scale back the armed conflict. And that includes me, so I have to vastly reduce the armed conflict in my stories.

I have other plotlines on the spike - the "man versus the unknown" plot of the first Zeta Tucane expedition is one example, and there are enough possible subplots in the relationships between my major characetrs to fill a novel series.

So, anyway, I'll be putting LoGG on the back burner for quite a while, and writing some stories that don't have a body count. It's past time to remember the "fen" part of "fenspace" ...

(If there's any conversation about this, I'll read it, but I think my mind is made up right now. For my own stories, at least.)
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[robkelk]

And in the hour-and-a-half since I posted that, I've already come up with a good way to finish the plot of Cosmic Party. So this looks like the right choice - for me.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Dartz]

Arguably, violence in stories does not necessarily make it a dystopia.... Neither does pacifism make it a utopia. It really depends on how the story was going.

I've got a whole stock of plotbunnies that skirt the lines a little (A Cabal of GJ higher-ups manufacturing conflicts to maintain their relevance and influence, or someone trying to get rich off of shorting South Korean stocks by tripping off a 2nd Korean War, the Genaros metaverse incident,), but that's where the most fun is to be had.... like DS9 poking Star Trek's directives in the eye to see how well they stood up. Especially when they get stopped, because it feels like peace and decency has been earned somehow, while at the same time playing off issues the characters pursuing them might have and showing that they don't sink.

A planned SS Ciara story opens with the ship crippled and adrift.... how do the crew get out of this? Raymond Garret navigates a speedboat through open space, another speedboat gets lost, while the remaining crew aboard take a gamble at getting power back that will save them or kill them, while the Chief Engineer wades in wavium-saturated coolant to make repairs. A bit K19 -v- Das Boot -v- Ernest Shackleton. Then something a bit Search for Spock trying to find them and rescue them again... by stealing *something*. (More, borrow without permission, and with intent to return), and giving the pirate fleets of SSX base something to do.

Even Shinji flirts with it from time to time, poking at some of the underpinnings of the setting a little, and it makes for a better story than just 'Oh crap, I'm an AI Shinji', because it's believeable that he could still break down into self destruction and despair (Which'd definitely be contrary to the directive).
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[Bob Schroeck]

Arguably, violence in stories does not necessarily make it a dystopia.... Neither does pacifism make it a utopia. It really depends on how the story was going.

And the presentation of the violence, particularly in the sense of how realistic it is. There's a big difference between the depiction of war in, say, "Saving Private Ryan" vs. Doc Smith's "Lensmen" books. If we took our cues from the former, it would be very easy to get dystopic, as we focus on cost of war and its individual toll. However, if we paint the war in bold stripes, and look at it from a distance, it is easy to avoid dystopia, by virtue of portraying it in the space opera tradition.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[robkelk]

Arguably, violence in stories does not necessarily make it a dystopia.... Neither does pacifism make it a utopia. It really depends on how the story was going.

Recent stories - SIRP being a notable exception - glamorize violence. That's dystopian in my books. (It's as if people don't know how to write something that isn't lifted from a FPS or a side-scroller.)

I have decided to at least try to push the pendulum in the opposite direction, and get back to the stated goal of this project.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[Dartz]

The debate about glamourising violence, or showing the consequences of violence without being too angst-dripping about it, has been done elsewhere. Nobody wants a full blown exploitation film.... So long as it serves the story, rather than being the whole point of the story I suppose. It's not just about enemy attack -> enemy shot (with optional excrutiating detail) -> everyone happy again having had fun shooting for Great Justice.

That said, it's entirely possible that I'm just bad/unoriginal at this writing thing.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[HRogge]

Recent stories - SIRP being a notable exception - glamorize violence.

????

[M Fnord]

in short, they're not really in conformance with the Genre Directive ("This is not a dystopia"). They're too heavy on the violence.

I think part of the problem here is your take on the Genre Directive is different from my take, or the intent behind setting up the directive in the first place.

The Genre Directive, when I first wrote it and how I've applied it, was a preemptive strike against grimderp. The general tone of cynicism and misanthropy in science fiction, particularly in American science fiction, is something I have strong opinions about and it's something I didn't want to infiltrate Fenspace as a project - because I knew, eventually, it would happen. And it did, and we dealt with it and it went away. The Genre Directive is our shield against some smug nerd waltzing in here and saying "heh, you silly babies don't realize that X is impossible because people suck and life on Earth would be extinguished in six weeks if it happened."

That said, the Genre Directive is not and shouldn't be a shield against conflict. We're not building a dystopia, but at the same time we're not building a utopia either. Fenspace as a world was intended to be space opera and adventure fantasy. Think of it like Star Trek, the original unreconstructed stuff: for every episode where the crew solved things nonviolently, there was an episode where the solution required Kirk to punch a dude. Conflict is part of the genre, we can't just toss it aside.

Now, this may be a problem with how we decided to approach telling stories in fenspace at the very beginning. We set up a world where people who really wanted to go out into space and explore and colonize could do so, and the very first thing we did in this not-a-dystopia was have a war. Oops.

The Boskone War was a bad decision, or a series of bad decisions made worse by the fact that I was completely unprepared for how Fenspace took off and didn't for the life of me have a plot to actually hang off the original enigmatic email from Haruhi. The war was a bad thing yes, not because dystopia but because shitty editorial decisions. Same goes for South is Rising, really, which is why that one's pretty much died on the vine.

(Regrets? Oh you bet your ass I have regrets...)

It's too late to change that,

It's not, really. It would be utter madness to do, involving scrapping 90% of everything and starting as fresh as possible, but it's not too late. It's never too late to change things. But that's a discussion that's better suited for off the forum.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[robkelk]

That said, the Genre Directive is not and shouldn't be a shield against conflict. We're not building a dystopia, but at the same time we're not building a utopia either. Fenspace as a world was intended to be space opera and adventure fantasy. Think of it like Star Trek, the original unreconstructed stuff: for every episode where the crew solved things nonviolently, there was an episode where the solution required Kirk to punch a dude. Conflict is part of the genre, we can't just toss it aside.

"Conflict" doesn't need to mean "violent conflict," though. Consider Gargoyles - there's a vast difference between how often Goliath and Xanatos were in conflict with each other, and how often they came to blows.

And I didn't say we should get rid of the violence altogether. I said the current stories were "too heavy on the violence" - there's a whole spectrum of ways to show conflict, and we're focusing on a narrow subset of that spectrum.

Anyway.

I'm going to try this "reduced violence" idea out in my stories, see how well it works, maybe keep it going if it works well. I'm not going to force anyone else to write the way I want to write.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[shaderic]

The Boskone War was a bad decision, or a series of bad decisions made worse by the fact that I was completely unprepared for how Fenspace took off and didn't for the life of me have a plot to actually hang off the original enigmatic email from Haruhi. The war was a bad thing yes, not because dystopia but because shitty editorial decisions.

Actually, I think that the Boskone war was a good idea.
Sure, there are elements that might not really make sense, but it creates relatively straightforward good guy against the bad guys direct conflict. It's the darker part of the playground, to be sure, but it's hard to have a hero without a villain sometimes.
Plus, it helped establish a core 'law' to fenspace. Sure, you had the Convention before that, but this was a concentrated effort by everyone to enforce law and order across the setting. A centralized effort to stamp out piracy, of the rape and pillage variety.
If we could go back and do it again, we'd definitely do things differently. But, that's the nature of hindsight.
Anyway, onto the whole 'dystopia' topic.
I'm with Dartz on this one. Fenspace can have dark moments and violence. It's when we take pages out of 40K that we start having serious problems. Grimderp is, as the name implies, kinda derpy. Fenspace, while entirely capable of derp, at least tries to avoid the grim.
It's a neat place, where sci-fi finds the magic balance between power level number crunching and 'oooh, shiny'.
I am not nearly as smart as I like to act most days, but Fenspace at least broadens my imagination and makes me speculate. Sure, there are explanations about programming that I don't get, but Dartz's stuff has honestly made wonder more about what having cybernetic technology really means than any thing else I've ever read. It can be dark and eery, but then we have a story about breaking the land motorcycle speed record. Again, bits went over my head, but it's a hell of a ride.
To reiterate an almost forgotten point, violence isn't dystopic.
And I'm not just saying this because one of my only story ideas is centered around a single parent raising a child.

[M Fnord]

Actually, I think that the Boskone war was a good idea.

Sure, there are elements that might not really make sense, but it creates relatively straightforward good guy against the bad guys direct conflict. It's the darker part of the playground, to be sure, but it's hard to have a hero without a villain sometimes.

That was the intent of the thing, yeah. The problem is - and I'm not talking about dark or light or anything on a thematic level here, this is strict pragmatic planning - when we set up the whole Boskone War thing I had no idea where this was going to go. None at all. Fenspace at that point was literally rudderless; I was at best barely in charge because it was my idea, and for the most part it was just a freeform RP thread with nobody providing direction. As a result things went flying all over the place and by the time we'd decided that we needed a Fun Tyrant to ride herd... well, it was too late to change without ripping out most everything and restarting, and nobody wanted to go there.

IMO the Boskone War arc was a general failure not because it was dark or violent, it failed because I failed. I didn't give the team a proper antagonist to fight against and as a result we ended up with a confused, murky muddle of a conflict that nobody really wanted to do anything with but we were stuck with.
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

[robkelk]

Well, it isn't too late to set up something and work with it... Just don't expect me to play too much in Season 1. Season 0 and Season 2 are more my speed.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

[ECSNorway]

I think the lack of definition on the Boskone war is a big part of the reason why almost nobody's really written anything about that. Some of us have mentioned in passing some of the things that happened, but because there's no frame to build the story into, nobody's bothered to actually write it up.

Random example, I tossed a mention into the Valkyrie writeup that I was shot out of one in the dust-up of an early Boskone attack on a convention, and went in to fight with the infantry after. But nobody's written -anything- about that Convention other than that they were there.
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.