The Real Fake Thing

How many of you watched Avatar: The Last Airbender?  Not the movie, the show.  Very different aesthetic for a Western cartoon, no?  I'm not what you'd call an expert on Asian history or art, but it seems pretty obvious that the animators deliberately based their creation off of actual Asian cultures.  They didn't just throw some kimonos and almond-eyed character models at the screen and call it a day.  Any of my readers who are experts can correct me on this one, but my best educated guess would be:

Air Benders - Tibet/Nepal
Earth Kingdom - China
Water Tribe - Mongolia
Fire Nation - Japan

This technique has been around longer than you think.  One of the first writers (I'm aware of) to use it is Robert E Howard who based the cultures of his Conan mythos, The Hyborean Age, on real world nations and cultures to create a sense of familiarity among an alien landscape.  Tolkien later did the same with Middle Earth, but with mythology instead of actual history and societies.  In this way, you have a frame of reference to wrap your head around.

Not to say it can't be done creating a mythos from whole cloth.  The catch is that it requires a lot of work and even then you'll probably be drawing on real world sources for inspiration.  A lot of good works have been created that way but you have to ask yourself if you're willing to commit yourself that fully to building a world.

I've written in my book "Exalt of the Weird" that a coherent mythos is important to verisimilitude.  If you're contradicting yourself every other sentence, then you're only going to take your audience out of the experience.  This is especially true for bizarrists and mentalists.

I bring this up because Halloween is approaching.  And wouldn't it be more impressive to your audience if you demonstrated something that actually referenced old superstition or local folklore?  Every place and culture has its stories, mysteries and folk tales.  Their own unique superstitions, blessings and charms.  So what is a ghost?  Do you have an answer for that?  You should.  If you want to get into character and scare people, you need to devote more thought to your mythos and give people the real fake thing.

The Last Airbender

So with M. Night Shyamalan continuing to squander the fame and potential he earned himself with The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable on the resoundingly despised The Last Airbender, my curiosity got the better of me and I decided to watch the show on NetFlix.  Glad I did actually.  I haven't watched anything Nickelodeon had to offer since they released the first Rugrats movie and proceeded to take a steaming dump on the things that made their network popular in the first place.  Yet the Avatar series turned out to be fresh, tightly written, and intelligent.

I bring this up because there's a glaring difference between the show and the movie that nicely illustrates a problem I have with a lot of magic.  In the first season of the show, a group of earthbenders are being held prisoner on a shipping yard in the middle of the ocean.  They're kept under Alactraz-like conditions miles away from the very element they use as a weapon.  Smart move.  And no amount of heroic speeches on the part of one of the main characters was enough to motivate the prisoners to launch a jailbreak.  These men and women were broken.  It struck me as very realistic and a surprisingly grim and unflinching portrayal of spirit-crushing imprisonment I never expected from a family-friendly show.

The movie on the other hand does away with all that logic nonsense and keeps the earthbenders in a regular prison on dry land.  Standing on top of a couple million tons of magical munitions.  And it only took a heroic speech on the part of one of the main characters to motivate the prisoners to remember they have superpowers and launch a jailbreak.  Huh?

If you're going to perform magic, it has to make sense.  Don't violate your own canonical rules, mythos, and restrictions simply because it's convenient.