Spoilers, Rage, and Toxic Fandom

Several months ago, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance was released on Netflix. Obviously, I binged it the very next day. And loved it. As I'm sure you can tell from the review I wrote of it.

I'm sure it will come as no surprise to you that I had been a member of the 'Age of Resistance Fan Group' on Facebook leading up to the release. I found it a convenient place to keep up with news, see stills and trailers in advance of the series, and geek out with fellow aficionados.

What was very disappointing to me, however, was how volatile and antagonistic that group became after the show was released.

Some people were unable or unwilling to binge the entire season in one sitting. These people asked for others to put spoiler warnings on posts that contained spoilers. And much to my surprise, there was a large and very vocal contingent of fans that absolutely and vociferously refused.

My Review of The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance

I don't know if you know this, but I am a huge fan of The Dark Crystal.

Ok, that's a paltry attempt at humour. If you read this blog at all, you know that I hold The Dark Crystal up as the greatest example of true fantasy that has ever been created. I have written before about the astounding amount of creativity that I feel went into this film. Tolkien did something wonderful when he created Middle Earth; he took elements of existing mythology, added many of his own ideas, and blended it all together into a cohesive (and incredibly well-detailed) world.

Almost all fantasy (excluding 'modern fantasy,' obviously) has followed on that pattern to some extent. Some fantasy worlds do away with non-human races (like Game of Thrones), others add or remove or alter some non-human races (Earthdawn added the Obsidimen and T'skrang, for example), but they're otherwise all more or less the same basic idea of pseudo-medieval settings with magic.

This is not the case with The Dark Crystal.

PinkFae Archive #43: Fantasy: Defining a Genre

Today's entry is another article from the PinkFae Archives. It was originally published on 26 November 2016.

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Normally, when someone says the word 'fantasy,' a person is most likely to think of one of two things:

• A literary genre, or films and television shows in that same genre, involving magic in a world, most likely in the milieu of the European middle ages, that often includes elves, dwarves, goblins, and other semi-mythological beings.
• A desired or preferred sexual activity.

Obviously, we're not going to talk about the second of these. But as gamers, we often find ourselves in games that fit the first.

Board Game Review: Jim Henson's The Dark Crystal

If you've been paying much attention to this blog at all, you know that I am a major fan of The Dark Crystal. I have been ever since I was a young boy and I saw it when it first released in 1982. So it's no surprise at all that I had to pre-order a copy of the board game the moment I heard it was being released.

Of course, the time has come to review that game. Mount up on your landstrider; we're adventuring in the world of Thra!

Warning: This game (and thus, probably this review as well) contains spoilers for the film. If you haven't watched the movie, you might want to do that before you read this review.

Of course, if you haven't watched the movie, why on earth not? Go watch this amazing film right now! This review assumes that you are familiar with the story and the setting, so if you don't know what skeksis, mystics, garthim, Aughra, or podlings are, this review probably won't make a whole lot of sense.

So, with that said, shall we start with the numbers? Of course we shall!

Fantasy

It all started with The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien wrote this epic saga, which captured the imagination of millions. Eventually, this lead to Dungeons and Dragons. Which, of course, spawned a great number of copycat games. Even today, when you use the word "fantasy," it conjures up images of a pseudo-medieval fantasy world populated not only by humans, but elves, dwarves, goblins, halflings, dragons, and a variety of other monsters.

But let's look at the definition of "fantasy:" The creative imagination; unrestrained fancy. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the concept of high fantasy, in a Tolkien-esque setting. I'm just saying that it's not true fantasy. There's no longer anything creative about the typical elves-and-dwarves setting. It was created almost a century ago. Very little has been added to it.

This is one of the reasons I'm so fond of The Dark Crystal. It was new; the world had never before seen Gelflings, Skeksis, or Podlings. This is what I call "True Fantasy," the result of creative imagination, and unrestrained fancy. Rather than reuse what already existed, the creators developed something new.

Film and Book

Hello, and welcome to another week of gaming essays. Sorry it's a day late; I was having all sorts of trouble thinking of a topic for this week. But I finally came up with one: gaming in the world of existing stories.

This has been done many times in the past; I'm sure some of us remember MERP (Middle Earth Role Playing) from I.C.E. Of course, there's since been the new system released around the time of the Lord of the Rings films. There's also the Star Wars and Star Trek games, and the Buffy game, and there's been an adaptation of Hellboy for GURPS, and so forth... and that's not even counting the countless unofficial fan adaptations floating around the internet (like the adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere). But we all see movies and TV shows or read books or comics and think to ourselves, "I want to play in that world!"

DM of the Rings

I'm sure anyone who's ever played D&D knows that the original premise of the game was Lord of the Rings. Especially if you've ever seen the original first edition rules, which try very hard to guide everyone into following the archetypes as seen in the books. Later additions were made, expansions added, alternate ideas tacked on, and now the game is much more open than it originally was.

The focus of the game has changed as well from the original point of Tolkien's works. In the books, it was all about the battle of good vs. evil. The game became an adventure of slaying monsters and collecting treasure.

Nowhere has this been better illustrated than in the webcomic DM of the Rings by Shamus Young. He describes the point of the comic perfectly in the first strip, so I'll let his words stand for themselves.

But my point is this: so many works (both in RPGs and in literature) are so thoroughly derivative of JRR Tolkien's works that the term "fantasy" has come to be a very cliché term. Whereas it once meant "the creative imagination," or "a capricious or fantastic idea," it now means "a work of fiction involving magic that takes place in a pseudo-medieval (or, on occasion, based on other periods or places in history, such as Roman or middle-eastern) setting and often involves supernatural creatures like elves and dwarves, especially as seen in Lord of the Rings."