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December 11, 2006
CrossGen - Science Fiction and Fantasy Don't Mix...
Part 2 : What was CrossGen Trying to do?
By Colin Glassey 12/11/2006
In most stories involving superheroes, the super-men lay waste to a few thousand ordinary mortals to prove their superiority over the normal humans then face real challenges from creatures like them (super villains, demi-gods, or the gods themselves). CrossGen tried to create a complex sliding scale of power so that differently powered heroes would face dramatic challenges suited to their capabilities. For much of the time the CrossGen writers concealed the ultimate purpose of the Sigils by simply not telling but now most everything has been revealed and the CrossGen grand scheme stands open to judgment.
Personally I believe that the CrossGen writers changed their minds about what was going on, just as the plot line shows the focus of Danik’s effort changed radically quite recently. I believe that early on, the Solus/Danik duo were supposed to be upsetting apple carts, unleashing creative energy, and stiring things up. Danik and his fragments were like the Shadows from Babylon 5, a force of Chaos whose goal was evolution through conflict. The ultimate goal for in the early days of CrossGen was to transform the Sigil-bearers into a force that could be used to go up against the other emotionless Atlantean gods.
However, after a year or more, this idea was abandoned and instead the writers (this would be Tony Bedard and perhaps Barbara Kessel) came up with the Negation as a big bad universal enemy. Once the Negation idea took hold, suddenly the goal was no longer evolution but survival from a gigantic science-fictional menace.
The problems with this transformation were profound and destructive. While gentle characters like Sephia (from Meridian) are quite obviously useful if your goal is to change the minds of cold but ultimately good gods, sweet little Sephia would be chewed up and killed by the Negation in a matter of seconds, thus making the time put into Sephia’s development pointless. Only by changing Sephia, making her into a powerful warrior like Sam Rey, could she be expected to contribute usefully to the war against the Negation. And this was not the point of the Meridian series. In fact it wasn’t the point of any of the series (with the exception of Sigil, maybe).
In fact, it could be that CrossGen died because they ran into the internal contradictions of trying to fit fantasy into the same world as science fiction. They don’t fit together because they are trying to do completely different things. Science fiction is the exploration of how changing technology effects mankind, Fantasy is the exploration of human archetypes in conflict. They are not the same and they can not be the same. Attempts to merge them are doomed to failure.
The point to the CrossGen comics was to explore basic aspects of the human condition, not to explain how scientific development changes human life. The point to the CrossGen comics was not to create super warriors who would be useful in a titanic fight to save the galaxy. So CrossGen, when they made the switch to Negation killed the fundamental rational for almost all their titles.
Sephia (Meridian) was the means to explore growing emotional maturity with a related theme of taking care of things bigger than yourself (like the world of Meridian which is in a ecological crisis). Sephia’s final goal is not to become a warrior princess and conquer all through violence. Sephia’s goal was healing and redemption. She was a strong female character designed to show that you can achieve your goals not through violence but through transformation and healing.
Prince Ethan (Scion) was designed to show readers how a person can resolve fundamental conflicts between worthy but incompatible ideals. Ethan is a highly principled person whose refused to do anything which did not fit his internal moral code, even at real cost to himself and his family. The story of Ethan allowed the readers to explore how you attempt to resolve problems that have no good answers. The way out for Ethan’s insoluble dilemmas is through love, the ultimate human emotion which resolves contradictions through the act of self-denial and creation. So Ethan loves a woman who is equally strong minded and dedicated to her own ideas which are sometimes in conflict with his own ideas. An alternate way of looking at Ethan’s story is to imagine that Ethan is a senior U.S General in the Civil War (like General Sherman) who comes bringing war to the South only to find the daughter of the Southern slave-owning leader is committed to the freedom for the slaves. The conflict between the General’s duty to the state vs. his moral duty as a man committed to justice is a powerful one.
Giselle (Mystic) was the story of how to come to terms with unexpected power (read wealth) after a life growing up a spoiled hedonist. Giselle’s real world analog is that of a 2nd son in an English noble family whose older brother suddenly dies leaving him the owner of vast estates and thousands of people’s jobs depending on his actions. Will the estate go bankrupt or will the new lord find the mental capacity to pull away a life of idleness and actually do some good? For all his life this person hasn’t had a mission, and was confident that other people were going to take care of the hard things in life (Giselle’s story is, to some degree, that of Lord Sebastian Flyte). This is a story which has a great deal of relevance to many Americans who are, sometimes unexpectedly, put in positions of great responsibility.
Sam Rey’s story (Sigil) is a conventional heroic story about a good hearted man who wants to do the right thing for as many people as possible. He doesn’t care about money, power, or fame. He just wants the love of his woman and to do the right thing. Sam Rey is not a very complex person but he does show determination in the face of nearly overwhelming obstacles. As the writers said, they copied the character from Bruce Willis (Die Hard) but there are many previous American actors which exemplify the same ideals (John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and Humphrey Bogart in his later films).
The Negation series was the most dramatic series as here we had a classic story of a group of strangers thrown together by no choice of their own and forced to work together or die. This story has been repeated often in American life and it is in fact one of the central stories of American history. In this country we often had groups of people thrown together due to random decisions and suddenly they were going to live or die based on whether they could work together despite their differences (see the current TV series “Lost” for just the latest in a long line of stories like this, other examples: the pioneers on the wagon train heading west, the film “Stagecoach”, the passengers of a ship sunk at sea and having to survive on their own, etc.). In (nearly) all other versions of this story the random collection of people do join together and triumph over adversity, some of the group will die (or fall by the wayside) but the group will survive and win in the end because that myth is at the core of the experience of the United States. In the Negation story, the script writers broke the rules at the end and had the group break up into two factions and one of their group even betrays the rest. After all that she has gone through with the team her betrayal is truly shocking (and seems somewhat forced). The Negation writers at the end called into question the central myth of America, namely: shared hardship and shared desire results in a common bond which is stronger than any other emotion.
The Crux series was the most problematic as we are dealing with people who seem very lost and confused, beset on all sides by enemies they know nothing about. They are literally fish out of water and, worst of all, they are in the presence of a man/being and fellow Atlantean named Danik who knows everything! The reason why Danik does not simply explain to his friends what is going on is never explained. These are Danik’s people, some of them friends, all of them fellow Atlanteans. But they have been left on the sea floor of Earth for 100,000 years, why? Suddenly now six are released from the suspension chambers. Why now? Only six are freed but Danik clearly has the power to set everyone from Atlantis free and raise it from the sea. Danik is a god at least as powerful as Solusandra yet he does almost nothing with his power. Why? Danik clearly has the ability (like Solusandra) to give great power to any (or all) of them, yet he does not. Why? Danik knows what will happen when the Australians “transcend” - they will be destroyed in Negation space - yet he lets them go to their deaths and he lets Gammid go with them. Why?
Does Danik not trust his fellow Atlanteans? Is he worried they will revolt against him and seize power on their own? If he really seeks allies against the Negation, why doesn’t he give all Atlanteans Sigils like the ones Solusandra gave? To all these questions, Crux gives no answers. It is a most unsatisfying comic as, at its core, it was illogical.
Lastly we come to The First. These are gods. As gods they exemplify basic emotions. They express fundamental states of human existence on a grand scale. Like gods they wield great powers and they interfere with human affairs for the own purposes. The problem is, who are the enemies of the gods? What gives them drama? What do they want? The answer is: each other. They don’t see the Negation as a threat (they don’t know about it) so they fight with each other. The problem is: their conflict is half hearted. They spend more of their time undercutting each other and not defeating the other side. In fact four of the six top leaders of the gods are in love with each other (across the divide) Pyrem + Ingra, Ganish + Yala. Some of the lesser gods are happy to rule in far-off worlds (like Animora or Mai Shen). The rest seem to have no interest in the other worlds and only leave the world of the gods because they are sent (like Darrow, Bernd Rechts, etc.). The First were never able to achieve anything interesting because all their conflicts were with other members of the First. What is the good of having amazing cosmic power if you live in a world where everyone else has amazing cosmic power also?
In theory we were supposed to care about one (or both) of the main figures: Seahn or Persha. However Seahn was a nasty character with no redeeming attributes. He supposedly wanted to sit on the ruling council of House Dexter, but what for? The ruling council of House Dexter never did anything. So his initial goal was empty and aroused now sympathy from the reader. Then he schemed and murdered his way to rule over House Sinister, helped in large part by the power of Enson (Danik). But to what end? What did he do as the main figure in House Sinister? Was he really more powerful than Orium? Could he control Gannish in any sense? No. He was no leader and he had no vision for what to do with his power. Through all the issues of the First, all the talk, not one person ever had a vision of what they were going to do which mattered.
The only person who seems to have a clue about what to do is Ingra. She actually makes direct contact with a number of the Sigil-bearers and makes use of their powers for her own ends. At least Ingra has some idea of what to do with power, no one else does.
The writer of the First liked to compare her characters to High School students playing their petty games of social dominance in school. Well there are a host of reasons why this does not make for good drama. First, high school is a completely artificial environment. High school students are essentially prisoners of the state, forced to attend school whether they wish to or not. Forced to remain in contact with people they would otherwise never went to even see, much less talk to. Forced to adhere to state mandated rules of behavior which, as adults, they would never consent to. High school students are like adults, with adult bodies and passions, but without the legal rights. How is this comparable to the lives of gods who are (A) immortal, (B) can travel anywhere they like in an instant, and (C) can do whatever they like because there is no authority to stop them? High school students are not comparable to gods.
The gods of Greek mythology are kept in line by several factors. First Zeus is the ultimate ruler and he can (and does) settle disputes. Second, the gods know that if they step out of line too much they can be supplanted by new gods, just as they supplanted the Titans before them. Third, the gods play their games through men, examples of conflict between the gods are rare, and mostly confined to their initial emergence into the pantheon. The only example of a long-term conflict between the gods is between Hephastus and Ares over Venus. Otherwise, when the gods have disputes, they fight it out through men as their proxies.
This is for good reason. A conflict between the gods is either a) irresolvable or b) must result in wide spread change that alters the universe.
Some possibilities the First might have considered:
• Destroy all the Sigil bearers.
• Find out who gave them their power and then wage war on that entity (It would have taken the First about 10 minutes to locate the Danik “fragments” hovering around the Sigil-bearers. In fact Skink/Danik revealed his power directly to Mai Shen, an event that should have – but didn’t – send her back to Ingra with the juicy news.)
• Conquer all the worlds (impose a rule by The First on all the planets). After all, the First are immortal, can teleport instantly from location to location, and have access to fantastic amounts of power. No world could have stood up to the combined might of either of the houses.
• Breed “super-men” on all the planets. The Greek gods followed this tactic, and produced heroes on Earth by breeding with mortal females. We know of at least one example of this happening (Ires from Negation) but the authors made no effort to create plots out of such unions.
• Collect advanced technology from all the planets. The world of the First is devoid of artifacts or technology other than swords and armor. Given that the First can be damaged or even killed by the concentrated energy blasts of huge spaceships, one might have thought the First would express some interest in staying one or two steps ahead of the mortal races? But no, they couldn’t be bothered.
• Begin a plan for the conquest of the other half of the world of Elysia (in other words, end the division by force of conquest). This idea would make more sense if there was actually any conflict between the two sides, but there isn’t. The two sides get along fine.
Persha has the idea of unifying the two sides but she makes no efforts at convincing the members of her own side (House Sinister) and she leaves House Sinister to join House Dexter without any emotional difficulty. She doesn’t really fit with the House Sinister personality in the first place, she isn’t an egotistical Prima Donna and she doesn’t really seem to want to rule over other people. She doesn’t like the old rift between the two houses because she wants her parents to get back together. It’s a simple desire but it doesn’t have any larger significance.
So, the First series was ultimately meaningless. All these costumes, all the sound and fury, signifying – nothing at all. What lesson were we supposed to draw from the First? That ambition is attractive? (Seahn – I don’t think so) That love can last even across thousands of years of separation? (Pyrem and Ingra – highly unlikely) That opposites attract? (Gannish and Yala – what is the attraction exactly?) That even really beautiful and immortal people can lead empty vacuous lives devoid of meaning or excitement? (I think we knew that already thanks to 70 years of exposure to Hollywood movie stars).
Compare the First to Zelazny and what do you see? Sam (in Lord of Light) is fighting for something deeply important. He is fighting for freedom, for technological progress in the face of an entrenched and stultifying world order. This is an important fight and he is willing to die for his cause. He is willing to kill for his cause. His cause matters, it matters in the world we Americans live in. He isn’t fighting to control the world, he is fighting for others. Sam is a hero in every sense of the word. He is a hero god, fighting other gods on behalf of ordinary mankind. Although Sam loses everything to achieve his goal, he does not begrudge this lose because he is a hero.
Consider Zelazny’s other significant god-like hero: Corwin. At first Corwin wants to rule Amber because he feels he is the rightful heir to the throne of his father, but later he learns that ruling means caring about your subjects. To rule justly and well is to give of yourself for the betterment of the kingdom (he sees this acted out in both kingdoms he visits in The Guns of Avalon). Finally Corwin realizes that he wants to rule so that he can preserve order, life, and the chance for people everywhere to live their lives in peace. Corwin chooses order over chaos and creates his own pattern to save the multiverse. In the end, he does not rule and does not need to rule, it is enough that he has saved the many worlds from chaos and disorder. This is an important journey to take, to learn to value other people, lesser people, other things, above yourself.
Who among the First is on such a journey? No one. Not any of the First that we meet cares about anything important. None of them are on a heroic quest, none of them are seriously threatened. They aren’t fighting over anything important because they don’t care about anything important. Does it matter if Seahn is in charge of the House Sinister? No. Does it matter that Persha wants to unify the two houses? Again no, because Persha does not in fact represent a merger between the two ideals of the two houses: individuality vs. community effort. She has no larger plan, just a vague feeling that the two houses should be united again. But she has no vision, and Danik (in the form of Wyture) doesn’t offer one either.
(Copyright Colin Glassey 12/11/2006)
Posted by rakhier at December 11, 2006 05:29 PM