Monday 20 March 2017

The Bloke in a Costume Problem and its Remedy

In the comments on the last post, Zak made the point that, well, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness is a thing which exists, and it surely does. It got me thinking about refining the point I was trying to make, which is basically this: animal fantasy needs to be more than just blokes wearing costumes. In the TMNT cartoons and film (though I've not seen the most recent iterations), being a mutant turtle is essentially cosmetic. Donatello and Raphael and chums are four American teenagers who live in a sewer and fight baddies. They can go inside their shells: this is the sole concession made to the notion that these are turtle people. 

Imaginative cowardice seems like a slightly harsh way of putting this approach, but that's what it is, to me. Thinking of a concept and then completely failing to bother following through on any of its implications even slightly.

I want to call this the "Bloke in a Costume" problem: rendering a potentially powerfully imaginative choice a merely cosmetic one.

What's the antidote to the bloke in a costume problem? Being more imaginative, of course. How do you do that? Study the world and learn from it. Watch animal behaviour in particular and think about it. Empathise. Some pointers:

I was stroking a murderer, a savage. Gos knew that might had always been right, that the Vikings slew the last two kings of Northumbria because the Gokstad ship could come so strongly in from sea, that William had cavalry at Hastings as Edward III had archers on the wings at Crecy, that the press barons of the year I was writing about were right about re-armament...Hitler and Mussolini, Gos and irreclaimable villein kestrel, seals that preyed on salmon and salmon that preyed on herrings that preyed on plankton that preyed on something else: these knew that God had given a law in which only one thing was right, the energy to live by blood, and to procreate.

Unfortunate, dark and immoral goshawk: I had myself been subjected to his brutality. In the beak he was not formidable, but in the talons there was death. He would slay a rabbit in his grip, by merely crushing its skull. Once, when he thought I was going to take his food away from him, he had struck my bare fore-finger. It had been a Bank of England apprehension, a painful impotence, a Come-you-here arrest by all-powerful police - I should only have hurt myself horribly by trying to get away, and was already being hurt. He had held the glove with one talon, the bare fore-finger with the other, so tightly that only one method of escape had been open to me, and that had been to tear him in half. In the process I should have pulled all the flesh off the finger, like stripping the rubber off an insulated wire. Not from courage, but from necessity, I had stood quiet and unprotesting, speaking to him calmly until he let go.

A homicidal maniac: but now he was enjoying to be stroked.

-From The Goshawk, by TH White

What stories fail to convey is the violent greed of the mole, which scuttles along its tunnels eating the worms, bugs and grubs that fall haplessly in. There is nothing cute about a mole tunnel. It is a vast pipeline trap. And for a gentleman dressed in a velvet smoking jacket, mole is the most violent diner; he bites off the worm's head, then with his claws squeezes out any earth left in the worm, before sucking it down like spaghetti...

-From Meadowland, by John Lewis-Stempel

The life of an Adelie penguin is one of the most unchristian and successful in the world. The penguin which went in for being a true believer would never stand the ghost of a chance. Watch them go to bathe. Some fifty or sixty agitated birds are gathered upon the ice-foot, peering over the edge, telling one another how nice it will be, and what a good dinner they are going to have. But this is all swank: they are really worried by a horrid suspicion that a sea-leopard is waiting to eat the first to dive. The really noble bird, according to our theories, would say, "I will go first and if I am killed I shall at any rate have died unselfishly, sacrificing my life for my companies"; and in time all the most noble birds would be dead. What they really do is to try and persuade a companion of weaker mind to plunge: failing this, they hastily pass a conscription act and push him over. And then - bang, helter-skelter, in go all the rest.

-From The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard

If you can create a race of goshawk-people who will willingly inflict pain and violence on somebody ten times bigger just to make a point; if you can create a race of mole-people who are very gentile, well-dressed and wise one minute and insatiably greedy assassins the next; if you can imagine the many ways which intelligent penguins would dream up to betray their acquaintances and profit from their deaths, and much more besides, then you will be a man, my son.

26 comments:

  1. As a quick example, would you say the Looney Tunes anthropomorphic characters are what you're looking for, i.e. Bugs desire for carrots?

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    1. I think they prove his point. Just as TMNT only relation to being turtles is the shells, Bugs Bunny only relation to being a rabbit is his love of carrots.

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    2. Carrots, I've been told, are actually kind of bad for rabbits if that's all they eat. So I look at Bug's constant carrot eating as less an animal behavior and more an analog to the three-pack-a-day smoking habits that Americans in the 1930-1950's apparently all had.

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    3. Yeah - don't get me wrong. I love Looney Tunes. But it would be cool to get inside the rabbit psychology a little.

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  2. So, "All Orcs are Evil", "All Hobbits like food", and "All Dogs go to Heaven"?

    (Sure, having no role-playing guidelines whatsoever is lazy. But I would rather have mechanics that enforce the fact I am not a 2m biped with opposable thumbs to keep me aware that I am playing an animal. Humans can inflict violence for no reason, or be two-faced, or sell-out friends without having to be animals.)

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    1. No, I think I'm saying the opposite of that. "All orcs are evil", "All hobbits like food" etc. is just more "TMNT have shells" laziness. What I want is: All orcs are evil. So what next? There are half-human half-turtle mutants. What next?

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  3. And since TMNT&OS was invoked, and I happen to have it on hand:

    While it is a Palladium book - where "role-playing" is having "Scrupulous" and "Aberrant" alignments rather than "Good" and "Evil" - and the animal descriptions are only a few lines at best, we are still told that beavers "are family oriented", camels are "vicious", and moose "guarding young are very dangerous".

    Role-playing is where you find it.

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  4. I wouldn't call it cowardice so much as laziness, which is the typical cause of only concerning one's self with the surface and not considering the meat underneath.

    I think the same principle is in operation when people choose elf or dwarf characters just because the stats are better and proceed to play them as just short guys with beards or good looking guys? with pointy ears. No consideration of perspective for a being who's grown up in underground tunnels or on remote mountain tops, or one who's been around for centuries and for whom everyone around is living the equivalent of dog years.

    Or hell, keep it closer to "home". Playing a samurai or ninja, or a viking, or even the equivalent of a feudal knight, and yet for all intents and purposes the outlook and behavior (if not the unfortunate default murder hobo sociopathic) is that of a typical 21st. century westerner.

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  5. I think you would find avian races insatiably attracted to the battlefield aftermath, reveling in the shiny things and meat, meals.
    The lycan types, maybe including gnolls (depending on if you do the gnome / troll or the hyenaman) are consummate thieves, greedily snatching any food not directly supervised; always posturing for control, or brutally submissive to their master's whims. Cannibalizing all but their own. They bury their treasure once it becomes any sort of encumbrance.
    Lizardfolk cannot be charmed, they live and die by their primal instincts alone (a particularly difficult roleplaying choice!)
    It's too late, can't think of others, but what a great thinking exercise and building point!

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    1. For making gnolls like hyenas, one good way is all adolescent male hyenas get kicked out of the clan and then go wander around as hunters/thieves/bandits/mercenaries/adventurers until they either prove themselves enough to get another clan to adopt them or all die.

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  6. I thought immediately of this from Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l5JxFGevig

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    1. I've seen that film a few times and never quite liked it. I'm not sure why, because I love Roald Dahl and Wes Anderson. Too much of a good thing?

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  7. I don't think you go far enough.

    Animal people must not just be animalistic (in whatever sense of the word) but they must also be fully removed from the realm of the human psyche. They have to think in a way that a human culture would never think.

    You could have mole people, sure, but you could also have gentleman tunneldwellers who eat raw prey with disgusting relish, but that could be a human culture. And honestly, that sounds more interesting.

    (On the other hand, mole-culture molepeople are easy to explain. They're mole people with molish culture, and of course its different. But if you have mole-culture humans, you lose a little bit of the explainability, but it becomes more freakish in the imagination. Why would humans live like this if they didn't have to?)

    So if you want to have animal people who are truly alien, you need to have ant-people that actually have the biologies and loyalties of ants. Or plant people that only live for a single season. Or anglerfish women who carry their husbands attached to their belly.

    I'm sort of cheating, because I'm using biology as a primary driver for behavior. (It's almost necessary, because humans have adopted nearly every behavioral strategy under the sun at some point.)

    Bowerbird people who can't recognize each other except by the jewelry that they wear. Cat people that are utterly, completely incapable of loyalty/cooperation except to their immediate family. Mushroom people with long-term memory, but no short-term memory. Etc.

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    1. I think all the ideas you raise are great and that is kind of what I'm talking about. Nobody has tried to properly think through the implications of mushroom people or bowerbird people or cat people. And they should because while they couldn't get close to actual animal psyches it throws up so many interesting ideas.

      Another thought: people who were compelled to live as moles due to a curse would be quite a good location/lair for a hex crawl.

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  8. Hmmm. I think the problem is that if you go down this road (animal characters must be, well, animalistic), then it stops being fun to play. You've mentioned Werewolf the Apocalypse in the past; that game had Lupus characters, werewolves who were born wolf. It always sounded really cool, but you'd have to be a really good, really imaginative roleplayer to pull off being a wolf in a human body in a human world, and have it be 1) convincing, 2) fun for you and 3) fun for other people at the table. I'm not saying it's not worth trying if you can pull it off, mind.

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    1. I think that's definitely true for PCs to a point, but not for NPCs or monsters. There it's really an added bonus for animal characters to be properly animalistic and not predictable based on human motives.

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    2. Lots of people get mauled in real life here in the U.S. because they ascribe human motives to wild animals and fail to predict their behavior. That bear doesn't want to be your pal, folks.

      That being said, if a players and GM's do their homework decoding a nonhuman race's motivations and behaviors would be a rewarding puzzle to solve in a campaign. (Kind of like Margaret St. Clair's "The Man Who Sold Rope To The Gnoles" only with a more positive outcome for the protagonists.)

      Not to reduce a potentially awesome exercise in world building/role playing to a dice roll, but I wonder if there might be a mechanic in there that works like the Reaction tables in D&D. Maybe different tables for different races, with some kind of modifiers for how many steps removed the participants are. (Human vs. Neanderthal would only be a -1/+1, whereas Human vs. Thri Kreen or Human vs. Modron would have increasingly wider bonus/penalty. I dunno...

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  9. So what you want is Watership Down, TH White's wonderful animal chapters from Arthur's eduction in The Once and Future King, Jonathan Livingston Seagull -- a writing style that I associate with English writers in the 1970s, although really only Richard Adams meets those criteria out of the three examples I listed (TOAFK was written earlier but it's popularity peaked in the 70s, and JLS was written by an American).

    I love that approach, but I also think there are other ways to write compelling animal-people stories: animistic oral traditions give us loads of wonderful animal characters from all over the globe, some of which eventually morph into fable and fairy tale versions of the same, and either approach could make a cool game. Ditto for children's stories about more anthropomorphized versions (Peter Rabbit, Winnie the Pooh, Frog and Toad).

    As for TMNT: in defence of the comic book source material, the use of turtles was a satirical ploy to poke fun at Frank Miller and draw interesting grotesque/comic pictures. It was never about turtles qua turtles.

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    1. I've never read TMNT but that's a good point.For a comic that does look at 'uplifted'/modified animals (and takes it more seriously), check out Grant Morrison's We3, about a trio of abducted pets turned into a lethal cyber-team. It's flawed, but weirdly moving.

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    2. I forgot about TH White's ants, but yeah, that's a good example.

      You are right of course about animal-people not having to necessarily be realistically animalistic and rooted in folklore. That also isn't done enough in RPGs.

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    3. Yup, Watership Down is basically the gold standard here.

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  10. I think once you get past the idea that animal-people should be more animal, and less people with suits on, you get into the difficulties of how to do it. Part of that is making up some sort of code or language to describe complex behaviors and resultant ways of thinking that can be read by a DM or player and put into use in a game.

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