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kaigouI'll begin in the middle: the most recent urban fantasy I've read has (thankfully) expanded past the standard western fare of witches, vampires, werewolves, angels and devils -- I'm seeing more South American-influenced, and considerably more Japanese-influenced (thank you, animanga imports), and Slavic also seems to be on the rise. Though I suppose one might argue that vampires themselves, per Transylvania, are inherently Slavic and we've only adopted them into a western mainstream as one more immigrant.
And, of course, most stories have a pantheon of some sort -- whether this be a competitive one (set against a backdrop of generic monotheism) or completely supplanting real-world religion... although that brings to mind CP's remark about the differences between demons and gods: a demon is just someone else's god.
What plays around in the back of my head while reading is that for western readers (more specifically US-based), a lot of these concepts are... how to put it? Not of the everyday, and I mean that quite literally. I recall a conversation with my stepmother in which she professed disgust and repulsion that my sister had purchased a carving of the buddha. The store where we'd shopped was pagan! satan! bad! ...once those ruffled feathers calmed down, not more than a day later we'd finished lunch and decided to stroll the shops, and passed a store with little statues of gnomes in the window.
My sister was puzzled as to what gnomes had to do with selling lampshades, and my stepmother explained the gnomes were protecting the store. Uh. Excuse me? Oh, see, good families have gnomes that take care of the house for you... which segued into an explanation of how on certain dates/holidays you should always put out a bowl of milk or oatmeal or something like that, for the house-gnomes.
(Meanwhile, my sister trotted along behind me, whispering only loud enough for me to hear: "satan! satan!")
But see, it's not pagan nor satanic if the non-real creatures are your own. It's only someone else's non-real creatures that are truly evil.
Right.
That's not an isolated conversation, either. We heard similar stories from many folks we met in Sweden, of whom a number were professed atheists (or apatheists). It wasn't a matter of belief, y'see. It's not like any of them honestly -- well, as far as I could tell -- believed that while they slept little people in red caps ran around and did the household laundry. Maybe some of them did, on some level, though, like my grandparents' neighbors believed that you should avoid crossroads after dark and that if you see a white horse at dusk it means someone is going to die.
It's independent from a specific religion, that's one important point, and the second is that it's something cultural, you grow up with it, and it imbues the fabric of your culture in such a way that it no longer matters whether or not you believe or even notice it, most of the time. It's a kind of non-everyday-ness that is at the same time, everyday.
Fundamentally, I'm talking just about superstitions, but it's more than that: it's the concept that there are sentient superstitions, external to a religious system. Catholic, Buddhist, Pagan, Atheist, Lutheran: you can be this, and at the same time thanks to the culture, also be aware of the proper traditions and protocols for gnomes, trolls, pixies, red caps, russalka, tanuki, kitsune, qilin, diwata, tikoloshe, jogah, patupairehe, and so on.
The problem is that when I think of the US/Western cultures, our superstitious sentient creatures seem to revolve almost exclusively (with some cultural pockets of exception) around a xtian-base: angels and the random demon or more likely the devil with a capital D. Sure, there are folks who believe they have a personal guardian angel, or that the devil tempts them personally, but this is not really a cultural superstition/folklore as much as a sub-culture's folklore that is at best widely disseminated.
For example, say you're driving and you nearly get into a wreck. My paternal grandmother would have thanked god for her safety, and that would be the extent of it. My maternal grandmother would have said, "my guardian angel was watching out for me!" (which is exactly what I mean by 'cultural' since last time I checked the Presbyterian faith isn't that big on personal angels going about preventing car wrecks, but hey).
When overseas, the immediate reactions I've heard/seen were culturally-based... rough example would be the person who blamed the other car's faulty steering on trolls mucking up the car. Whether or not this proclamation is followed by a laugh -- much as my maternal grandmother would have delivered the line -- is rather beside the point.
That is, our reactions in sudden shock or stress indicate our core beliefs. Y'know, the car comes out of nowhere and you barely miss it, and the militant atheist in the passenger seat slams his hands on the dashboard and hollers, "holy mother mary of god!" Or a huge snake slithers across the sidewalk a few feet in front of the wiccan, who jumps back while shouting, "Jesus Christ!"
Blaming (or thanking) superstitious/cultural semi-sentient beings post-event is just a toned down version of the same revealing moment in which you can see a person's core beliefs, stark and clear. Those core beliefs are massively cultural, since this isn't a belief in a religious sense so much as a sort of anthropological belief, a shared set of beliefs that have been nurtured into us.
This is why I get annoyed in stories where pagan/wiccan characters say "oh, goddess!" or similar when shocked: because I'm only going to believe (heh) that this would be the first/primal reaction-exclamation if, and only if, that belief system has been core. What we layer on, as we age/mature, as we grow into (or out of) a religion, isn't what comes to mind in that moment of non-thinkingness and pure reaction. That's when even the most devout lord-and-lady person is going to grab something to hold onto and scream, "jesus h christ!"
Why mention all that? Because I think on some levels what's missing in urban fantasy -- and this is not a critique of urban fantasy itself, mind you -- is that the genre is not playing with any kind of core-cultural folklore, because US mass-culture doesn't really have one. So we go for what, after a while, starts to feel really generic, because it is: vampires, werewolves, witches, oh my.
Every now and then someone gets all rebel on the genre and breaks out with a coyote shapeshifter instead, or a fox, or a dog, a hart, an eagle. (Where are the manatee shapeshifters? The ostrich shapeshifters? You wanna break out, then don't break out halfway, I say!)
But even shapeshifters are still not a semi-sentient, non-everyday basis we're talking about. There are cultures in the US that believe that a certain creature of a certain color or shape is actually a person (good or bad) or maybe a spirit or a ghost, in disguise, but this is not a widespread belief system. Most people just don't think first thing of shapeshifting, for instance: like seeing a white horse at dusk, most folks would say, oh, look, a horsie. When the majority of a culture gives a slight shiver and then laughs it off, then you know you're dealing with a shared cultural core belief.
But the US is just too much of a tossed salad for that, which has its benefits in every day life. It's a significant problem for urban fantasy, though -- I think -- because urban fantasy is all about taking the everyday and making it wildly not. And a heaping of suggesting our superstitions might have basis in reality, or be reality, too. In the absence of superstition/folklore threading through every part of a culture and/or day in the life, then hollywood is the next best source for a substitute -- and let's face it, hollywood is not exactly known for its originality.
Vampires, werewolves, witches, oh my.
What we do have in America is a preponderance of emphasis on angels, demons, and probably most widespread, ghosts. CP and I were discussing this over and after dinner, and I told him about talking to a step-cousin who told us of rocks that were once trolls. His response was that this is obviously a belief in trolls, then, or why else would someone say, "there are rocks that were once trolls"?
To which I could only reply that I've been known to say, "ah, the devil made me do it!" -- and yet I don't believe in a capital-D devil, nor do I even remotely believe on a gut-level that any external force could make me do something. It's just a saying; it's something I take for granted. Does this mean I believe in a religious sense? Nope. Does this mean I'm fully indoctrinated in this culture's foundations? Ayup.
Whether this could be taken a step further and thus create a sense of expectation -- that is, you've always heard of it, so when it does happen, it makes 'sense' somehow -- is hard to say, at least for this particular example. But that's because I wasn't raised with every little bad thing being blamed on devils or even capital-D devil. Maybe that's the difference.
I once lived in a town where anyone who was anyone had a haunted house; the few folks who didn't were often referred to as "you know, the house over on such-and-such street that isn't haunted." (As if it were some kind of abnormality to not be haunted.)
Ghosts are a pretty universal fear/concept. It's not at all uncommon to meet someone who's just moved into a new house and is a bit thrown off by an odd noise or things not seeming to be in the right places, who wonders whether or not the house might be haunted. When it's your first assumption and then you give a slight laugh like, oh, yeah, well... then, again, core cultural belief.
Which is why I say that my step-cousin wasn't professing a belief in trolls so much as accepting without question something that's, well, how it is -- in the first flush of reaction -- and only afterwards maybe laughed off, but it's not really questioned. We don't go around asking ourselves in the US whether or not we should believe in ghosts.
More often the question is "do you or do you not believe" as though the belief is something you can turn on or off. The distinction here is that of questioning the ghost's existence in and of itself versus questioning the cultural assumption that there could be ghosts. Do you see what I mean?
Getting back around again to urban fantasy, the reason I say this lends a somewhat flat feeling (for me, as an American reader) to a lot of urban fantasy is because of the built-in reactions I'm going to have, and the reactions assumed on the part of the author. Again, it's not something we question -- in this case, to not question that of a lack of supernatural/otherworldly cultural assumptions/critters -- and thus american writers are on the same level as american readers. No problem there, really, but it is a problem for me nonetheless.
This is still tangled up in my head so if this phrasing doesn't work, I apologize in advance & will keep trying, but this is how I think of it.
Take the average, mainstream, middle-class, somewhat-religious but not-really-superstitious (other than the most generic) cultural mindset. This average kid grows up hearing fairy tales, some folklore, a dose of superstition (your ears are burning, someone's talking bad about you), and for the most part on some level the kid knows that this is the real world and those stories are not-real. They're part of a fantasy world. The two don't really meet, not really.
The only way I can put it is like this -- and again, recall the 'instant moment of first-reaction after big shock', okay? -- let's say that average American is walking down a street and sees a troll under a bridge. OMFG, the American cries, monster!! Second reaction: is that a troll, WTFOMFG, that's not possible!
The American will likely have (and I see these in American urban fantasy over and over) one of two reactions. Either the not-real has somehow intruded into the real, which raises a whole host of questions and panic about what other not-real may also intrude... OR it's a sign that the person has somehow stepped out of the real and into the not-real, and now the surroundings that look so familiar are of dubious value as well.
If that's a troll over there, that this can't possibly still be Lawrence, Kansas because THERE ARE NO TROLLS IN KANSAS. Hello!
(Witches, maybe, but only during bad weather.)
Just because that looks like my car doesn't mean it is: to have the not-real intrude on the real prompts, somewhere along the way, a massive host of self-doubt and/or questions about the nature of reality and perception because hello, a troll! under a bridge!
Now, let's say I'm like my step-cousin, whose vague answer to "you can't honestly think there are trolls, do you?" was something like "well, not now." The poor beasties seem to be like the infamous snakes of Ireland: scary, but all in the past! Yet the trolls' habits and behaviors are ingrained in the culture.
To compare, here's how I'd extrapolate a Swedish response to the same bridge situation. First, yeah, shock: because if you're not expecting to see someone, let alone a troll, standing under a bridge, you're going to get a slight scare, or at least be startled. Second reaction just might be: "well, duh, where else would you see a troll? Everyone knows trolls live under bridges."
Depending on whether or not you went along with the troll = evil mindset, or had been raised on the variant of troll = scary so stay away from them, the Swede might either wonder how this troll survived when all the rest were killed OR be running like mad to get away while simultaneously panicking over why this troll survived when the rest were killed.
Notice what I'm positing is different: that for someone raised with a solid folklore shared-culture, there's substantial reduction in the "not-real versus real" dichotomy, if it's even an issue at all.
If every year you go with your family to maintain your deceased uncle's gravesite and leave offerings to his spirit because, as your parents explain, if you don't then your uncle's spirit will wander restlessly... then meeting up with a spirit doesn't create a head-on collision between the not-real (what you read in books or heard in stories) and the real (what is unquestionably part of your world). No, meeting with a spirit instead affirms what you've been told all along.
I don't think it's a stretch, either. I mean, there are people who've had bizarre and fantastical experiences and swear afterwards that they were saved by a guardian angel. All their lives they've heard in their families and their churches that there are guardian angels: to see one is not a cause for panic, so much as a surprise but at the same time a massive confirmation. To see a devil or demon is, just as much, also a confirmation if that demonic being was part of one's ingrained cultural framework: yeah, so it's a surprise and a reason to run like hell, so to speak, but it's still a confirmation. "Holy crap, Gramma was right!"
I did spend plenty of time with relatives in the backwoods Deep South, travelling around with each set of grandparents on the annual summer pilgrimages to visit distant relatives who'd been already elderly when Christ was in kneepants. I mean, dirt was young compared to some of these folks, and as a kid sitting on the porches with sixth and seventh cousins, it wasn't unheard of to be warned to stay away from this place, or don't do that.
Haints were the biggest fear, with some classes of haints being more like bogeymen, and there were things to avoid at certain times: crossroads, white horses at dusk, that sort of thing. Oh, and haints can't cross running water. Always good to remember. Another place was Indian burial mounds, though sometimes I had to wonder if every freaking bump in a cove was a burial mound, but regardless, those were Bad Places as well, especially at night.
The sense of things out there in the woods, bumping about, not necessarily evil per se but more likely than not to mess with you if you crossed their path -- these were just part of the everyday world.
First time I ever experienced a haunting, my first reaction was honestly pure fright. My second reaction was: holy crap, the stories were right! And then I went right back to being terrified, but hey: it didn't make me question the fabric of my reality. It just reinforced everything I'd heard every summer from elderly relatives who knew all about it Because They Were Old.
I mention all that because in talking to CP, I realized what it was that caused, and continues to cause, the biggest stumbling block in one of my WiPs. In the original version, the main character hits puberty and starts seeing strange things around her -- and not just the garden-variety haint in the graveyard. More like a bear's head on a man's body, or shadowy rabbit ears on a woman, other things out of the corner of her eyes.
In that first version, the character sees her fingertips changing into claws, and sometimes has fuzzy raccoon-like ears, and is panicked over whether she's turning into an animal. I didn't exactly plan to avoid the issue, didn't much think it out, but I was writing from a mindset of a cultural background similar to my own: that of the rural, superstitious, steeped-in-folklore culture. So the character never once panicked over whether the not-real had broken into or subsumed or even consumed the real; seeing such things around her were instead a kind of affirmation of what she'd heard, and always suspected.
The first few crits were skeptical that someone wouldn't, y'know, panic because, hello, strange stuff! I toned it down, tried to insert a few phrases here and there to shift it so the character was seeing the not-real merge with the real... basically, honestly, I paid lip service to the notion. Then I got a lovely and thorough (and very helpful) response from an agent, who noted that the biggest stumbling block for him was that not once does the character react to this infusion of the not-real.
It didn't seem to matter (or didn't communicate) that the character came from a culture and/or had a mindset that the not-real was always real -- if not actually experienced firsthand. There's no not-real to infuse, so much as a "known about but not really seen firsthand" infusing the real -- but what the agent felt, and this was backed up by multiple crits, was that the character's sanity was in question because the reader(s) could not comprehend seeing any of that and not automatically being thrust into crisis of awareness over whether the not-real was intruding on the real or whether the real had gone bye-bye and now the character stood wholly in the not-real.
I tried my best to rewrite to give the character panic, but it just didn't work, and it's proven to be a stumbling block ever since: because a major part of the character's makeup is that she does not see a division between "here is the real" and "stories told but never proved firsthand".
Some of that is her personality but a massive part of it is her cultural background, and it's that cultural background that (I felt) became a major strength in her ability to deal with the unseen world now seen. Because in some ways, the stories she heard as a child were a kind of user's manual. She's one-up on the average person, for that reason, but apparently readers couldn't suspend their own disbelief because they didn't see the character grappling with disbelief... and I guess the bottom line is that they didn't believe that anyone could, well, believe.
Maybe a better analogy, if the above ones don't work for you, is that of the urban legends about, hrm... Like if you've heard that driving along a certain stretch of road, your father's best friend's cousin's college roommate once picked up a hitchhiker there and she wanted to go to a certain address and it turned out to be a [graveyard, an old house, an abandoned house]... etc, etc. Then, one night, you're driving along that road and you see something in white flash by your peripheral vision, about person-height, is that a [wedding dress, ballgown, nightgown]... You're not going to have an existential crisis over it. You're more likely to think, "holy crap! Dad was right!"
The other reason for raising this issue of character-reaction (and by extension, reader-reaction) is because of what I see in reading Asian popular literature compared to American popular literature of a similar ilk. If you've not seen the movie or the show, you're probably still pretty familiar with Buffy's response when she first learns of vampires: "no way! no freaking way! look, buddy, you're crazy, this is all crazy, I'm going home!"
It's a complete negation of the real, and accepting it requires a total reversal of her perception of the world. Even having done so, she's then faced time and again with people who in turn deny this expanded reality, who point-blank refuse to see what's right in front of their faces because nothing in their cultural background has ever prepared them for running into it. They're always screaming about the troll under the bridge, when they're not just seeing an oversized homeless guy; the one or two characters who say, "well, of course it was a vampire, because who else stalks dark alleyways looking for helpless necks?" are ones who stand out by a mile.
(At that, more often than not, such "well of course" reaction is often played as knee-jerk sarcasm in the midst of shock -- and then later, it's expected, will come the "holy crap that was a WHAT!? NO, NO WAY!" existential crisis moment.)
This is a strong contrast with the Asian (Korean, Chinese, and Japanese) popular culture literature I've read, where when a ghost or a qilin or a tanuki or even a deity appear, there may be surprise/fear, but there isn't an accompanying existential crisis.
Actually, if anything, the biggest crisis in Asian stories seems most often to be predicated upon whether or not the person experiencing it is the only one: in which case the crisis seems to be more related to seeing/hearing what others can't, rather than whether one is delusional. The subtle emphasis is on the problem of seeing firsthand what others only know of second-hand, and thereby being different. It's this being-different which is, it seems to me, taken as bad, more than what one is necessarily seeing.
In stories where the experience is shared, the characters almost always take it at face value and/or accept it with a great deal more grace than any character in a western setting. Again, it's affirmation of an existing ingrained, deep and broad, cultural framework. (In fact, the character saying "oh, posh, none of that is real," is most often a lone voice rather than the most common reaction.)
Which I think is why some things don't always translate well, and if you're writing with the mindset of one raised in that kind of steeped cultural tradition, then your characters run the risk of seeming to be a bit 'naive' or maybe even kinda 'touched in the head' -- because normal [read: Americans without that bone-deep superstitious-cultural background] people wouldn't just be 'taken aback' at seeing a troll under a bridge.
Assuming they weren't able to immediately convince themselves they'd just been mistaken (or just not even 'see' the reality in the first place out of sheer strength of denial), the overwhelming reaction would reasonably be utter panic. If not panic at the thought that trolls exist, then absolute panic at the notion that they're hallucinating, having a nervous breakdown, going crazy. Because when the not-real intrudes on the real, it's down to two choices for absorbing: either the world is insane... or you are.
Personally, I don't care for writing either option.
Also, when I say "don't translate well" I don't mean just from language to language but from culture to culture, even if we share a basic culture -- if you and I are Americans, it doesn't necessarily follow that you know the rules about passing graveyards and where and when the bogeyman shows up or where to avoid so you don't run into the Jersey devil.
We are too many immigrants, and not nearly monolithic in our folklorish-culture (or the middling version we've got), and it seems to me that this creates an especially high barrier for an urban fantasy author to hurdle: because it creates a fundamental disconnect between character and reader that, I think, heightens the readers' skepticism rather than belays it.
The exception would be 'magical realism' in which the not-real is constantly infused in the real, but this is often from the get-go: that is, there's no moment of familiarity on a character's part because the not-real has always been part of the real from the very beginning. That's not at all the same as a character who runs head-first into the... well, let's call it the 'removed real' (in the sense of secondhand knowledge via folklore/culture), and yet another another length of separation to the character who runs/falls headfirst into the not-real where the second-hand knowledge was always assumed to be fantasy.
I don't know how to reconcile those, but this unspoken set of assumptions that the removed-real could be affirmation rather than reality-negation, might be why sometimes I find myself a bit startled by how easily characters in Asian popular culture see/hear/interact with non-real out-of-legend creatures or deities and don't go into absolute panic over it.
Granted, I don't raise that objection nearly as much as some of the critiques & reviews I've read for books and shows, but I do still raise it sometimes. Then again, the extent of any folklore basis for me is, like most Americans I'd be willing to bet, really only with any depth in the area of ghosts. Maybe to a lesser degree the folklore/stories about devils and angels, but for an entire pantheon of critters or beings?
Come to think of it, for most stories I can process one or two not-real creatures without any trouble; when you get into the fourteenth or the fortieth creature, my eyes start crossing and my skepticism meter's rising. I find myself thinking: okay, I can see haints being scarce enough that most folks only know second-hand, but eight hundred tanuki in Tokyo? Come on.
The other issue with one's culture being mostly focused on ghosts (with next to no non-human semi-sentient creatures) is that this also influences our user-manual folklore. See, ghosts come with their own set of rules, as do any folklore creature. Most ghosts are tied to a place, a time, a specific emotion, some kind of anchor.
That's not just for American culture; it's a pretty universal set of assumptions, from what I've read/heard. And while some ghosts may have some level of sentience (most often showing up as a kind of malevolence), it's still a reduced sentience. No ghost is going to get its PhD, for instance, and most often the ghost is just repeating the same thing over and over, and you're just the lucky person who got snagged this time around.
There are battlefields in the US -- most of them Confederate War, but I've heard stories about Rev War battlefields as well -- where you shouldn't go on the anniversary of the battle, or at night, or some other specific time. This isn't nation-specific, either, because the same thing is said about Killiecrankie, in Scotland.
If you're there at the wrong time and place, you could find yourself in the midst of ghosts reenacting the battle, and woe to the poor lost stranger who wanders into the middle of it and ends up getting mysteriously shot by a type of bullet that hasn't been seen in a hundred-plus years. (Or just scared half out of his wits thinking he was about to get shot.)
I got the same warnings as a kid, to stay away from the Indian burial mounds, because *whisperwhisperwhisper* bad things happen there after dark. It's the spirits of the dead Indians, and they're gonna get you if you're trespassing. (Why they don't get anyone for trespassing during the day is anyone's guess.)
Effectively, our culture teaches us protocols for this removed-real. I recall when we visited Scotland and were being shown around by the son of my father's Scottish colleagues. He graciously took me and my sister off to see most of the campus, and then down to scout out an abandoned building on property adjacent to the university.
It was supposed to be haunted, he told us, quite solemnly. My sister asked him if he'd ever seen the ghost himself, and he replied (and I remember this because it made Perfect Logical Sense because it was an explanation I'd given out myself, plenty of times): "Of course not, you think I'm stupid enough to come here after dark and let a ghost get me?"
In other words, not seeing the removed-real isn't because you can't, but because you're smart enough to pay attention to the protocols so you'll be able to avoid it. Duh.
When I was discussing this with CP, I raised the story of Jenny Greenteeth, a Scottish fairy who supposedly will try to drown kids who stand too close to ponds. Sure, maybe six hundred years ago some brilliant parent thought up the scary notion of Jenny Greenteeth to keep rambunctious kids from falling into scummy water -- but it's six hundred years down the road and it doesn't matter any more whether Jenny Greenteeth is real, imaginary, or just an old story.
She scares the hell out of plenty of kids, and plenty of kids thus know the protocol that if you don't want to get drowneded! by Jenny, you stay the hell away from the pond's edge. Does this achieve parental satisfaction? Sure, but that's just a side-benefit by this point.
In America, by contrast, our protocols are more often than not predicated on the dominant religion, of Christianity. You do bad things, you'll go to hell; you do good things, you'll go to heaven. Angels and devils may have an impact on your life -- or maybe you just have relatives who believe this is so, even if you mostly dismiss it yourself -- but these remain similar to ghosts in a single important facet. They're not personal.
CP's response was that it's still a matter of reinforcing good behavior by threatening punishment, basically: if you do bad things, the pixies will push a book off the shelf and it will fall and bonk you in the head.
Except that comparison is flawed, I say, because it ignores an important difference. In a religious (meaning afterlife-laden reward/punishment system) setup, the pop-culture version is that angels help you do good things, and devils tempt you to do bad things.
In a folklore here-and-now interaction, what causes the book to fall on your head isn't whether you did bad or good, in general. It's whether you did bad or good personally to that pixie: did you stop putting out a bowl of milk on the proper holidays? Did you leave out gifts for the house-gnome and cause it to think you're trying to buy its loyalty? Did you trespass on the Red Cap's private turf and not even leave an offering for the violation?
There's no protocols for pissing off a devil, or an angel: we don't have folklore (that I know of) that outlines how to make sure your guardian angel doesn't quit its job, or even how to cause it to want to quit. Nor do we have protocols, in general, for how to avoid irritating the devil/demons -- it's more likely that they come after us as a definition of 'being a devil' rather than only rousing thanks to our own ineptness or malice in disturbing them.
(Yet another argument for the Jersey Devil being an adaptation of an earlier folklore tradition, but then, regional devil-like creatures do have protocols in their folklore.)
That lack of required misbehavior to prompt devil-human madness -- because in the broadest of American generic-folklore, devils show up uninvited (mostly) and talk/tempt you into doing bad. Their behavior may influence your behavior, which is not at all the same as forgetting to lift your feet over a bridge and by that bad deed (broken protocol) giving the capital-d devil an opening to do bad things to you. Demons, like the Jersey Devil, are throwbacks to our dominant culture's origins, in Europe -- but these are mostly regional, and not really that influential throughout the national, broader, culture.
That's the other major difference between American folklore (or our paltry facsimile) and the older/deeper folklores from elsewhere: we don't really have a folklore where it's personal. When you stumble into the Indian burial mound at midnight, if there are haints coming after you, it's because they're repeating what they've done a million times before to anyone else stupid enough to get lost in the woods after sunset.
When you decide to spend the night along the trenches where Lee made his stand south of Fredericksburg, if you spend the night quivering in fear at hearing horses and gunshots and people dying, well, it's not personal. There's no folklorish assumption that this is entirely for your benefit, and if it were some other person the experience would be expected to be pretty similar.
Part of the "for your benefit" comes from the question of whether or not you can negotiate. Most ghosts, you can't; you just run like all-get-out and hope to hit consecrated land, or cross running water, before they get to you. (It's a lot like crossing the street in Paris: can you get to the other sidewalk before the taxi gets to you? If you do, the taxi just moves on to its next victim, and there's no point in trying to reason with it. Just run.)
In the folklore traditions from all over the place, a multitude of stories will teach you the protocols for talking your way out of, or tricking your way out of, an interaction that is anything but rote. If you can [get the kappa to spill water, give the brownie a fake name, confuse the russalka, refuse to eat or drink] etc, the antagonistic creature will have to [give you a treasure, grant a wish, let you go, promise to be your friend]... etc.
There's a level of sentience that recognizes you as you: which is where you get stories of someone doing a job for a non-real creature and then later seeing it on the street and saying hello, at which point the non-real creature realizes you [stole an item, used an ointment, lied somehow] etc and retained the 'second sight', and the punishment is the creature rips your eyes out.
See, there's protocol for you. Don't go about recognizing suspicious creatures/monsters. Or if you do, just don't let them know you do.
This in turn is lead-in to a review/analysis of two Asian history-fantasy series, in which if one is Shinto the other is Buddhist, but both are predicated on the same assumptions I've explained here: that the removed-real has always been there even if not experienced firsthand. There's a lot of interest (to me, at least) in these two series, and a lot of symbolism in one of them, and that's the other major part of a folklorish protocol -- the shorthand.
Well, it's a kind of shorthand, and it's not like we don't have that in our current generic urban fantasy. Vampires can't see themselves in mirrors, can't go out in the day, have to be staked through the heart: when a vampire doesn't obey these rules, readers require this violation of the folklorish protocol to be spelled out, because otherwise we get annoyed. Look, we complain silently to the author, don't you know the rules?
(Further illustration on that: if a character doesn't observe the protocols for passing by a graveyard and attracts a ghost as a result, and the ghost then offers to negotiate -- or responds to the character offering -- my reaction would be: wait, it's not a haint? What is it, then? Because everyone knows haints don't stop just because you're offering to exchange riddles with it, geez, author. Same goes for vampires and werewolves. Stray far enough from the folklore, and you might as well do us all a favor by not calling it a vampire. Call it anything else and thereby let us know we should ditch our existing protocol assumptions.)
We kind of take our own culture's symbolism for granted, and again with the non-monolithic (and highly regionalized) American culture -- not that we're alone in that, just that we tend to have a worse case of it thanks to tossed-salad culture. That means if you draw from any but the dominant religiocultural elements (that is, Christianity), then some symbolism will just pass readers right on by.
Maybe you're aiming for the subtle, which is what most authors intend when they're recreating folklore and don't want to make the sources obvious. Like, oh, I don't know, like retelling the Cinderella story and having the main character's favorite shoes be clear-plastic slippers: it's a very quiet nod to the origins, and most readers may even miss it if they're not steeped in Disney.
But there are other times when you want that symbolism to be visible, to play a part in the story, especially if you're telling a story that otherwise is confusing, or multi-layered, or whacked via method like inverted storytelling or dubious narrator. Or when you want to increase the ambiguity in a story without undoing the effort via sledgehammer -- so you add a scene in which the malicious antagonist is framed against a bright window backdrop such that he gives the impression of being limned in light and haloed. You're counting on the reader to see and recognize that halo'd effect as being implications of divinity per our shared cultural folklore about angels -- and to use this in turn to understand more about the character, or (in this case) perhaps to be less certain of the character.
Symbolism like that works best with a broad foundation -- not just in terms of the breadth of options available but also in terms of the amount shared with your readers per the cultural framework. You want them to catch the symbolic moment and take it into accord when puzzling out interactions and developments. It's a clue you want the readers to understand, and if the readers don't, the reading experience is that much less for the lack.
However, I'll get into that in the next post, probably either to continue later tonight or some point tomorrow.
And, of course, most stories have a pantheon of some sort -- whether this be a competitive one (set against a backdrop of generic monotheism) or completely supplanting real-world religion... although that brings to mind CP's remark about the differences between demons and gods: a demon is just someone else's god.
What plays around in the back of my head while reading is that for western readers (more specifically US-based), a lot of these concepts are... how to put it? Not of the everyday, and I mean that quite literally. I recall a conversation with my stepmother in which she professed disgust and repulsion that my sister had purchased a carving of the buddha. The store where we'd shopped was pagan! satan! bad! ...once those ruffled feathers calmed down, not more than a day later we'd finished lunch and decided to stroll the shops, and passed a store with little statues of gnomes in the window.
My sister was puzzled as to what gnomes had to do with selling lampshades, and my stepmother explained the gnomes were protecting the store. Uh. Excuse me? Oh, see, good families have gnomes that take care of the house for you... which segued into an explanation of how on certain dates/holidays you should always put out a bowl of milk or oatmeal or something like that, for the house-gnomes.
(Meanwhile, my sister trotted along behind me, whispering only loud enough for me to hear: "satan! satan!")
But see, it's not pagan nor satanic if the non-real creatures are your own. It's only someone else's non-real creatures that are truly evil.
Right.
That's not an isolated conversation, either. We heard similar stories from many folks we met in Sweden, of whom a number were professed atheists (or apatheists). It wasn't a matter of belief, y'see. It's not like any of them honestly -- well, as far as I could tell -- believed that while they slept little people in red caps ran around and did the household laundry. Maybe some of them did, on some level, though, like my grandparents' neighbors believed that you should avoid crossroads after dark and that if you see a white horse at dusk it means someone is going to die.
It's independent from a specific religion, that's one important point, and the second is that it's something cultural, you grow up with it, and it imbues the fabric of your culture in such a way that it no longer matters whether or not you believe or even notice it, most of the time. It's a kind of non-everyday-ness that is at the same time, everyday.
Fundamentally, I'm talking just about superstitions, but it's more than that: it's the concept that there are sentient superstitions, external to a religious system. Catholic, Buddhist, Pagan, Atheist, Lutheran: you can be this, and at the same time thanks to the culture, also be aware of the proper traditions and protocols for gnomes, trolls, pixies, red caps, russalka, tanuki, kitsune, qilin, diwata, tikoloshe, jogah, patupairehe, and so on.
The problem is that when I think of the US/Western cultures, our superstitious sentient creatures seem to revolve almost exclusively (with some cultural pockets of exception) around a xtian-base: angels and the random demon or more likely the devil with a capital D. Sure, there are folks who believe they have a personal guardian angel, or that the devil tempts them personally, but this is not really a cultural superstition/folklore as much as a sub-culture's folklore that is at best widely disseminated.
For example, say you're driving and you nearly get into a wreck. My paternal grandmother would have thanked god for her safety, and that would be the extent of it. My maternal grandmother would have said, "my guardian angel was watching out for me!" (which is exactly what I mean by 'cultural' since last time I checked the Presbyterian faith isn't that big on personal angels going about preventing car wrecks, but hey).
When overseas, the immediate reactions I've heard/seen were culturally-based... rough example would be the person who blamed the other car's faulty steering on trolls mucking up the car. Whether or not this proclamation is followed by a laugh -- much as my maternal grandmother would have delivered the line -- is rather beside the point.
That is, our reactions in sudden shock or stress indicate our core beliefs. Y'know, the car comes out of nowhere and you barely miss it, and the militant atheist in the passenger seat slams his hands on the dashboard and hollers, "holy mother mary of god!" Or a huge snake slithers across the sidewalk a few feet in front of the wiccan, who jumps back while shouting, "Jesus Christ!"
Blaming (or thanking) superstitious/cultural semi-sentient beings post-event is just a toned down version of the same revealing moment in which you can see a person's core beliefs, stark and clear. Those core beliefs are massively cultural, since this isn't a belief in a religious sense so much as a sort of anthropological belief, a shared set of beliefs that have been nurtured into us.
This is why I get annoyed in stories where pagan/wiccan characters say "oh, goddess!" or similar when shocked: because I'm only going to believe (heh) that this would be the first/primal reaction-exclamation if, and only if, that belief system has been core. What we layer on, as we age/mature, as we grow into (or out of) a religion, isn't what comes to mind in that moment of non-thinkingness and pure reaction. That's when even the most devout lord-and-lady person is going to grab something to hold onto and scream, "jesus h christ!"
Why mention all that? Because I think on some levels what's missing in urban fantasy -- and this is not a critique of urban fantasy itself, mind you -- is that the genre is not playing with any kind of core-cultural folklore, because US mass-culture doesn't really have one. So we go for what, after a while, starts to feel really generic, because it is: vampires, werewolves, witches, oh my.
Every now and then someone gets all rebel on the genre and breaks out with a coyote shapeshifter instead, or a fox, or a dog, a hart, an eagle. (Where are the manatee shapeshifters? The ostrich shapeshifters? You wanna break out, then don't break out halfway, I say!)
But even shapeshifters are still not a semi-sentient, non-everyday basis we're talking about. There are cultures in the US that believe that a certain creature of a certain color or shape is actually a person (good or bad) or maybe a spirit or a ghost, in disguise, but this is not a widespread belief system. Most people just don't think first thing of shapeshifting, for instance: like seeing a white horse at dusk, most folks would say, oh, look, a horsie. When the majority of a culture gives a slight shiver and then laughs it off, then you know you're dealing with a shared cultural core belief.
But the US is just too much of a tossed salad for that, which has its benefits in every day life. It's a significant problem for urban fantasy, though -- I think -- because urban fantasy is all about taking the everyday and making it wildly not. And a heaping of suggesting our superstitions might have basis in reality, or be reality, too. In the absence of superstition/folklore threading through every part of a culture and/or day in the life, then hollywood is the next best source for a substitute -- and let's face it, hollywood is not exactly known for its originality.
Vampires, werewolves, witches, oh my.
What we do have in America is a preponderance of emphasis on angels, demons, and probably most widespread, ghosts. CP and I were discussing this over and after dinner, and I told him about talking to a step-cousin who told us of rocks that were once trolls. His response was that this is obviously a belief in trolls, then, or why else would someone say, "there are rocks that were once trolls"?
To which I could only reply that I've been known to say, "ah, the devil made me do it!" -- and yet I don't believe in a capital-D devil, nor do I even remotely believe on a gut-level that any external force could make me do something. It's just a saying; it's something I take for granted. Does this mean I believe in a religious sense? Nope. Does this mean I'm fully indoctrinated in this culture's foundations? Ayup.
Whether this could be taken a step further and thus create a sense of expectation -- that is, you've always heard of it, so when it does happen, it makes 'sense' somehow -- is hard to say, at least for this particular example. But that's because I wasn't raised with every little bad thing being blamed on devils or even capital-D devil. Maybe that's the difference.
I once lived in a town where anyone who was anyone had a haunted house; the few folks who didn't were often referred to as "you know, the house over on such-and-such street that isn't haunted." (As if it were some kind of abnormality to not be haunted.)
Ghosts are a pretty universal fear/concept. It's not at all uncommon to meet someone who's just moved into a new house and is a bit thrown off by an odd noise or things not seeming to be in the right places, who wonders whether or not the house might be haunted. When it's your first assumption and then you give a slight laugh like, oh, yeah, well... then, again, core cultural belief.
Which is why I say that my step-cousin wasn't professing a belief in trolls so much as accepting without question something that's, well, how it is -- in the first flush of reaction -- and only afterwards maybe laughed off, but it's not really questioned. We don't go around asking ourselves in the US whether or not we should believe in ghosts.
More often the question is "do you or do you not believe" as though the belief is something you can turn on or off. The distinction here is that of questioning the ghost's existence in and of itself versus questioning the cultural assumption that there could be ghosts. Do you see what I mean?
Getting back around again to urban fantasy, the reason I say this lends a somewhat flat feeling (for me, as an American reader) to a lot of urban fantasy is because of the built-in reactions I'm going to have, and the reactions assumed on the part of the author. Again, it's not something we question -- in this case, to not question that of a lack of supernatural/otherworldly cultural assumptions/critters -- and thus american writers are on the same level as american readers. No problem there, really, but it is a problem for me nonetheless.
This is still tangled up in my head so if this phrasing doesn't work, I apologize in advance & will keep trying, but this is how I think of it.
Take the average, mainstream, middle-class, somewhat-religious but not-really-superstitious (other than the most generic) cultural mindset. This average kid grows up hearing fairy tales, some folklore, a dose of superstition (your ears are burning, someone's talking bad about you), and for the most part on some level the kid knows that this is the real world and those stories are not-real. They're part of a fantasy world. The two don't really meet, not really.
The only way I can put it is like this -- and again, recall the 'instant moment of first-reaction after big shock', okay? -- let's say that average American is walking down a street and sees a troll under a bridge. OMFG, the American cries, monster!! Second reaction: is that a troll, WTFOMFG, that's not possible!
The American will likely have (and I see these in American urban fantasy over and over) one of two reactions. Either the not-real has somehow intruded into the real, which raises a whole host of questions and panic about what other not-real may also intrude... OR it's a sign that the person has somehow stepped out of the real and into the not-real, and now the surroundings that look so familiar are of dubious value as well.
If that's a troll over there, that this can't possibly still be Lawrence, Kansas because THERE ARE NO TROLLS IN KANSAS. Hello!
(Witches, maybe, but only during bad weather.)
Just because that looks like my car doesn't mean it is: to have the not-real intrude on the real prompts, somewhere along the way, a massive host of self-doubt and/or questions about the nature of reality and perception because hello, a troll! under a bridge!
Now, let's say I'm like my step-cousin, whose vague answer to "you can't honestly think there are trolls, do you?" was something like "well, not now." The poor beasties seem to be like the infamous snakes of Ireland: scary, but all in the past! Yet the trolls' habits and behaviors are ingrained in the culture.
To compare, here's how I'd extrapolate a Swedish response to the same bridge situation. First, yeah, shock: because if you're not expecting to see someone, let alone a troll, standing under a bridge, you're going to get a slight scare, or at least be startled. Second reaction just might be: "well, duh, where else would you see a troll? Everyone knows trolls live under bridges."
Depending on whether or not you went along with the troll = evil mindset, or had been raised on the variant of troll = scary so stay away from them, the Swede might either wonder how this troll survived when all the rest were killed OR be running like mad to get away while simultaneously panicking over why this troll survived when the rest were killed.
Notice what I'm positing is different: that for someone raised with a solid folklore shared-culture, there's substantial reduction in the "not-real versus real" dichotomy, if it's even an issue at all.
If every year you go with your family to maintain your deceased uncle's gravesite and leave offerings to his spirit because, as your parents explain, if you don't then your uncle's spirit will wander restlessly... then meeting up with a spirit doesn't create a head-on collision between the not-real (what you read in books or heard in stories) and the real (what is unquestionably part of your world). No, meeting with a spirit instead affirms what you've been told all along.
I don't think it's a stretch, either. I mean, there are people who've had bizarre and fantastical experiences and swear afterwards that they were saved by a guardian angel. All their lives they've heard in their families and their churches that there are guardian angels: to see one is not a cause for panic, so much as a surprise but at the same time a massive confirmation. To see a devil or demon is, just as much, also a confirmation if that demonic being was part of one's ingrained cultural framework: yeah, so it's a surprise and a reason to run like hell, so to speak, but it's still a confirmation. "Holy crap, Gramma was right!"
I did spend plenty of time with relatives in the backwoods Deep South, travelling around with each set of grandparents on the annual summer pilgrimages to visit distant relatives who'd been already elderly when Christ was in kneepants. I mean, dirt was young compared to some of these folks, and as a kid sitting on the porches with sixth and seventh cousins, it wasn't unheard of to be warned to stay away from this place, or don't do that.
Haints were the biggest fear, with some classes of haints being more like bogeymen, and there were things to avoid at certain times: crossroads, white horses at dusk, that sort of thing. Oh, and haints can't cross running water. Always good to remember. Another place was Indian burial mounds, though sometimes I had to wonder if every freaking bump in a cove was a burial mound, but regardless, those were Bad Places as well, especially at night.
The sense of things out there in the woods, bumping about, not necessarily evil per se but more likely than not to mess with you if you crossed their path -- these were just part of the everyday world.
First time I ever experienced a haunting, my first reaction was honestly pure fright. My second reaction was: holy crap, the stories were right! And then I went right back to being terrified, but hey: it didn't make me question the fabric of my reality. It just reinforced everything I'd heard every summer from elderly relatives who knew all about it Because They Were Old.
I mention all that because in talking to CP, I realized what it was that caused, and continues to cause, the biggest stumbling block in one of my WiPs. In the original version, the main character hits puberty and starts seeing strange things around her -- and not just the garden-variety haint in the graveyard. More like a bear's head on a man's body, or shadowy rabbit ears on a woman, other things out of the corner of her eyes.
In that first version, the character sees her fingertips changing into claws, and sometimes has fuzzy raccoon-like ears, and is panicked over whether she's turning into an animal. I didn't exactly plan to avoid the issue, didn't much think it out, but I was writing from a mindset of a cultural background similar to my own: that of the rural, superstitious, steeped-in-folklore culture. So the character never once panicked over whether the not-real had broken into or subsumed or even consumed the real; seeing such things around her were instead a kind of affirmation of what she'd heard, and always suspected.
The first few crits were skeptical that someone wouldn't, y'know, panic because, hello, strange stuff! I toned it down, tried to insert a few phrases here and there to shift it so the character was seeing the not-real merge with the real... basically, honestly, I paid lip service to the notion. Then I got a lovely and thorough (and very helpful) response from an agent, who noted that the biggest stumbling block for him was that not once does the character react to this infusion of the not-real.
It didn't seem to matter (or didn't communicate) that the character came from a culture and/or had a mindset that the not-real was always real -- if not actually experienced firsthand. There's no not-real to infuse, so much as a "known about but not really seen firsthand" infusing the real -- but what the agent felt, and this was backed up by multiple crits, was that the character's sanity was in question because the reader(s) could not comprehend seeing any of that and not automatically being thrust into crisis of awareness over whether the not-real was intruding on the real or whether the real had gone bye-bye and now the character stood wholly in the not-real.
I tried my best to rewrite to give the character panic, but it just didn't work, and it's proven to be a stumbling block ever since: because a major part of the character's makeup is that she does not see a division between "here is the real" and "stories told but never proved firsthand".
Some of that is her personality but a massive part of it is her cultural background, and it's that cultural background that (I felt) became a major strength in her ability to deal with the unseen world now seen. Because in some ways, the stories she heard as a child were a kind of user's manual. She's one-up on the average person, for that reason, but apparently readers couldn't suspend their own disbelief because they didn't see the character grappling with disbelief... and I guess the bottom line is that they didn't believe that anyone could, well, believe.
Maybe a better analogy, if the above ones don't work for you, is that of the urban legends about, hrm... Like if you've heard that driving along a certain stretch of road, your father's best friend's cousin's college roommate once picked up a hitchhiker there and she wanted to go to a certain address and it turned out to be a [graveyard, an old house, an abandoned house]... etc, etc. Then, one night, you're driving along that road and you see something in white flash by your peripheral vision, about person-height, is that a [wedding dress, ballgown, nightgown]... You're not going to have an existential crisis over it. You're more likely to think, "holy crap! Dad was right!"
The other reason for raising this issue of character-reaction (and by extension, reader-reaction) is because of what I see in reading Asian popular literature compared to American popular literature of a similar ilk. If you've not seen the movie or the show, you're probably still pretty familiar with Buffy's response when she first learns of vampires: "no way! no freaking way! look, buddy, you're crazy, this is all crazy, I'm going home!"
It's a complete negation of the real, and accepting it requires a total reversal of her perception of the world. Even having done so, she's then faced time and again with people who in turn deny this expanded reality, who point-blank refuse to see what's right in front of their faces because nothing in their cultural background has ever prepared them for running into it. They're always screaming about the troll under the bridge, when they're not just seeing an oversized homeless guy; the one or two characters who say, "well, of course it was a vampire, because who else stalks dark alleyways looking for helpless necks?" are ones who stand out by a mile.
(At that, more often than not, such "well of course" reaction is often played as knee-jerk sarcasm in the midst of shock -- and then later, it's expected, will come the "holy crap that was a WHAT!? NO, NO WAY!" existential crisis moment.)
This is a strong contrast with the Asian (Korean, Chinese, and Japanese) popular culture literature I've read, where when a ghost or a qilin or a tanuki or even a deity appear, there may be surprise/fear, but there isn't an accompanying existential crisis.
Actually, if anything, the biggest crisis in Asian stories seems most often to be predicated upon whether or not the person experiencing it is the only one: in which case the crisis seems to be more related to seeing/hearing what others can't, rather than whether one is delusional. The subtle emphasis is on the problem of seeing firsthand what others only know of second-hand, and thereby being different. It's this being-different which is, it seems to me, taken as bad, more than what one is necessarily seeing.
In stories where the experience is shared, the characters almost always take it at face value and/or accept it with a great deal more grace than any character in a western setting. Again, it's affirmation of an existing ingrained, deep and broad, cultural framework. (In fact, the character saying "oh, posh, none of that is real," is most often a lone voice rather than the most common reaction.)
Which I think is why some things don't always translate well, and if you're writing with the mindset of one raised in that kind of steeped cultural tradition, then your characters run the risk of seeming to be a bit 'naive' or maybe even kinda 'touched in the head' -- because normal [read: Americans without that bone-deep superstitious-cultural background] people wouldn't just be 'taken aback' at seeing a troll under a bridge.
Assuming they weren't able to immediately convince themselves they'd just been mistaken (or just not even 'see' the reality in the first place out of sheer strength of denial), the overwhelming reaction would reasonably be utter panic. If not panic at the thought that trolls exist, then absolute panic at the notion that they're hallucinating, having a nervous breakdown, going crazy. Because when the not-real intrudes on the real, it's down to two choices for absorbing: either the world is insane... or you are.
Personally, I don't care for writing either option.
Also, when I say "don't translate well" I don't mean just from language to language but from culture to culture, even if we share a basic culture -- if you and I are Americans, it doesn't necessarily follow that you know the rules about passing graveyards and where and when the bogeyman shows up or where to avoid so you don't run into the Jersey devil.
We are too many immigrants, and not nearly monolithic in our folklorish-culture (or the middling version we've got), and it seems to me that this creates an especially high barrier for an urban fantasy author to hurdle: because it creates a fundamental disconnect between character and reader that, I think, heightens the readers' skepticism rather than belays it.
The exception would be 'magical realism' in which the not-real is constantly infused in the real, but this is often from the get-go: that is, there's no moment of familiarity on a character's part because the not-real has always been part of the real from the very beginning. That's not at all the same as a character who runs head-first into the... well, let's call it the 'removed real' (in the sense of secondhand knowledge via folklore/culture), and yet another another length of separation to the character who runs/falls headfirst into the not-real where the second-hand knowledge was always assumed to be fantasy.
I don't know how to reconcile those, but this unspoken set of assumptions that the removed-real could be affirmation rather than reality-negation, might be why sometimes I find myself a bit startled by how easily characters in Asian popular culture see/hear/interact with non-real out-of-legend creatures or deities and don't go into absolute panic over it.
Granted, I don't raise that objection nearly as much as some of the critiques & reviews I've read for books and shows, but I do still raise it sometimes. Then again, the extent of any folklore basis for me is, like most Americans I'd be willing to bet, really only with any depth in the area of ghosts. Maybe to a lesser degree the folklore/stories about devils and angels, but for an entire pantheon of critters or beings?
Come to think of it, for most stories I can process one or two not-real creatures without any trouble; when you get into the fourteenth or the fortieth creature, my eyes start crossing and my skepticism meter's rising. I find myself thinking: okay, I can see haints being scarce enough that most folks only know second-hand, but eight hundred tanuki in Tokyo? Come on.
The other issue with one's culture being mostly focused on ghosts (with next to no non-human semi-sentient creatures) is that this also influences our user-manual folklore. See, ghosts come with their own set of rules, as do any folklore creature. Most ghosts are tied to a place, a time, a specific emotion, some kind of anchor.
That's not just for American culture; it's a pretty universal set of assumptions, from what I've read/heard. And while some ghosts may have some level of sentience (most often showing up as a kind of malevolence), it's still a reduced sentience. No ghost is going to get its PhD, for instance, and most often the ghost is just repeating the same thing over and over, and you're just the lucky person who got snagged this time around.
There are battlefields in the US -- most of them Confederate War, but I've heard stories about Rev War battlefields as well -- where you shouldn't go on the anniversary of the battle, or at night, or some other specific time. This isn't nation-specific, either, because the same thing is said about Killiecrankie, in Scotland.
If you're there at the wrong time and place, you could find yourself in the midst of ghosts reenacting the battle, and woe to the poor lost stranger who wanders into the middle of it and ends up getting mysteriously shot by a type of bullet that hasn't been seen in a hundred-plus years. (Or just scared half out of his wits thinking he was about to get shot.)
I got the same warnings as a kid, to stay away from the Indian burial mounds, because *whisperwhisperwhisper* bad things happen there after dark. It's the spirits of the dead Indians, and they're gonna get you if you're trespassing. (Why they don't get anyone for trespassing during the day is anyone's guess.)
Effectively, our culture teaches us protocols for this removed-real. I recall when we visited Scotland and were being shown around by the son of my father's Scottish colleagues. He graciously took me and my sister off to see most of the campus, and then down to scout out an abandoned building on property adjacent to the university.
It was supposed to be haunted, he told us, quite solemnly. My sister asked him if he'd ever seen the ghost himself, and he replied (and I remember this because it made Perfect Logical Sense because it was an explanation I'd given out myself, plenty of times): "Of course not, you think I'm stupid enough to come here after dark and let a ghost get me?"
In other words, not seeing the removed-real isn't because you can't, but because you're smart enough to pay attention to the protocols so you'll be able to avoid it. Duh.
When I was discussing this with CP, I raised the story of Jenny Greenteeth, a Scottish fairy who supposedly will try to drown kids who stand too close to ponds. Sure, maybe six hundred years ago some brilliant parent thought up the scary notion of Jenny Greenteeth to keep rambunctious kids from falling into scummy water -- but it's six hundred years down the road and it doesn't matter any more whether Jenny Greenteeth is real, imaginary, or just an old story.
She scares the hell out of plenty of kids, and plenty of kids thus know the protocol that if you don't want to get drowneded! by Jenny, you stay the hell away from the pond's edge. Does this achieve parental satisfaction? Sure, but that's just a side-benefit by this point.
In America, by contrast, our protocols are more often than not predicated on the dominant religion, of Christianity. You do bad things, you'll go to hell; you do good things, you'll go to heaven. Angels and devils may have an impact on your life -- or maybe you just have relatives who believe this is so, even if you mostly dismiss it yourself -- but these remain similar to ghosts in a single important facet. They're not personal.
CP's response was that it's still a matter of reinforcing good behavior by threatening punishment, basically: if you do bad things, the pixies will push a book off the shelf and it will fall and bonk you in the head.
Except that comparison is flawed, I say, because it ignores an important difference. In a religious (meaning afterlife-laden reward/punishment system) setup, the pop-culture version is that angels help you do good things, and devils tempt you to do bad things.
In a folklore here-and-now interaction, what causes the book to fall on your head isn't whether you did bad or good, in general. It's whether you did bad or good personally to that pixie: did you stop putting out a bowl of milk on the proper holidays? Did you leave out gifts for the house-gnome and cause it to think you're trying to buy its loyalty? Did you trespass on the Red Cap's private turf and not even leave an offering for the violation?
There's no protocols for pissing off a devil, or an angel: we don't have folklore (that I know of) that outlines how to make sure your guardian angel doesn't quit its job, or even how to cause it to want to quit. Nor do we have protocols, in general, for how to avoid irritating the devil/demons -- it's more likely that they come after us as a definition of 'being a devil' rather than only rousing thanks to our own ineptness or malice in disturbing them.
(Yet another argument for the Jersey Devil being an adaptation of an earlier folklore tradition, but then, regional devil-like creatures do have protocols in their folklore.)
That lack of required misbehavior to prompt devil-human madness -- because in the broadest of American generic-folklore, devils show up uninvited (mostly) and talk/tempt you into doing bad. Their behavior may influence your behavior, which is not at all the same as forgetting to lift your feet over a bridge and by that bad deed (broken protocol) giving the capital-d devil an opening to do bad things to you. Demons, like the Jersey Devil, are throwbacks to our dominant culture's origins, in Europe -- but these are mostly regional, and not really that influential throughout the national, broader, culture.
That's the other major difference between American folklore (or our paltry facsimile) and the older/deeper folklores from elsewhere: we don't really have a folklore where it's personal. When you stumble into the Indian burial mound at midnight, if there are haints coming after you, it's because they're repeating what they've done a million times before to anyone else stupid enough to get lost in the woods after sunset.
When you decide to spend the night along the trenches where Lee made his stand south of Fredericksburg, if you spend the night quivering in fear at hearing horses and gunshots and people dying, well, it's not personal. There's no folklorish assumption that this is entirely for your benefit, and if it were some other person the experience would be expected to be pretty similar.
Part of the "for your benefit" comes from the question of whether or not you can negotiate. Most ghosts, you can't; you just run like all-get-out and hope to hit consecrated land, or cross running water, before they get to you. (It's a lot like crossing the street in Paris: can you get to the other sidewalk before the taxi gets to you? If you do, the taxi just moves on to its next victim, and there's no point in trying to reason with it. Just run.)
In the folklore traditions from all over the place, a multitude of stories will teach you the protocols for talking your way out of, or tricking your way out of, an interaction that is anything but rote. If you can [get the kappa to spill water, give the brownie a fake name, confuse the russalka, refuse to eat or drink] etc, the antagonistic creature will have to [give you a treasure, grant a wish, let you go, promise to be your friend]... etc.
There's a level of sentience that recognizes you as you: which is where you get stories of someone doing a job for a non-real creature and then later seeing it on the street and saying hello, at which point the non-real creature realizes you [stole an item, used an ointment, lied somehow] etc and retained the 'second sight', and the punishment is the creature rips your eyes out.
See, there's protocol for you. Don't go about recognizing suspicious creatures/monsters. Or if you do, just don't let them know you do.
This in turn is lead-in to a review/analysis of two Asian history-fantasy series, in which if one is Shinto the other is Buddhist, but both are predicated on the same assumptions I've explained here: that the removed-real has always been there even if not experienced firsthand. There's a lot of interest (to me, at least) in these two series, and a lot of symbolism in one of them, and that's the other major part of a folklorish protocol -- the shorthand.
Well, it's a kind of shorthand, and it's not like we don't have that in our current generic urban fantasy. Vampires can't see themselves in mirrors, can't go out in the day, have to be staked through the heart: when a vampire doesn't obey these rules, readers require this violation of the folklorish protocol to be spelled out, because otherwise we get annoyed. Look, we complain silently to the author, don't you know the rules?
(Further illustration on that: if a character doesn't observe the protocols for passing by a graveyard and attracts a ghost as a result, and the ghost then offers to negotiate -- or responds to the character offering -- my reaction would be: wait, it's not a haint? What is it, then? Because everyone knows haints don't stop just because you're offering to exchange riddles with it, geez, author. Same goes for vampires and werewolves. Stray far enough from the folklore, and you might as well do us all a favor by not calling it a vampire. Call it anything else and thereby let us know we should ditch our existing protocol assumptions.)
We kind of take our own culture's symbolism for granted, and again with the non-monolithic (and highly regionalized) American culture -- not that we're alone in that, just that we tend to have a worse case of it thanks to tossed-salad culture. That means if you draw from any but the dominant religiocultural elements (that is, Christianity), then some symbolism will just pass readers right on by.
Maybe you're aiming for the subtle, which is what most authors intend when they're recreating folklore and don't want to make the sources obvious. Like, oh, I don't know, like retelling the Cinderella story and having the main character's favorite shoes be clear-plastic slippers: it's a very quiet nod to the origins, and most readers may even miss it if they're not steeped in Disney.
But there are other times when you want that symbolism to be visible, to play a part in the story, especially if you're telling a story that otherwise is confusing, or multi-layered, or whacked via method like inverted storytelling or dubious narrator. Or when you want to increase the ambiguity in a story without undoing the effort via sledgehammer -- so you add a scene in which the malicious antagonist is framed against a bright window backdrop such that he gives the impression of being limned in light and haloed. You're counting on the reader to see and recognize that halo'd effect as being implications of divinity per our shared cultural folklore about angels -- and to use this in turn to understand more about the character, or (in this case) perhaps to be less certain of the character.
Symbolism like that works best with a broad foundation -- not just in terms of the breadth of options available but also in terms of the amount shared with your readers per the cultural framework. You want them to catch the symbolic moment and take it into accord when puzzling out interactions and developments. It's a clue you want the readers to understand, and if the readers don't, the reading experience is that much less for the lack.
However, I'll get into that in the next post, probably either to continue later tonight or some point tomorrow.
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Date: 18 Nov 2008 07:06 am (UTC)The thing is, sometimes actual experiences will color the way we see some things (I dreamt a house we would live in for years, every time we moved. And it was haunted. By a shadow that stood in my doorway. And my great-grandma stayed in her house, waiting for my great-grandpa to pass. When he did, so did she. And I saw an uncle right after his funeral, trying to take care of my aunt. And he's still around her.) So, ghosts to me are much more real than to others.
So, when I read some things, I probably read it with more of a 'why yes, that could happen', even when it's from Japan or China. Or maybe, especially.
And because (so far) my experiences have been benign, I have a real tendency to not panic or feel threatened. Just, interested.
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 18 Nov 2008 03:37 pm (UTC)This is really interesting, and definitely highlights a problem that I didn't even realize I was having with a lot of urban fantasy/paranormal romance/that sticky genre defined somewhere between those two categories. As much as I enjoy analysis, I don't really want the main characters to immediately approach these not-real things analytically, because to me what the characters are dealing with is (or should be) extremely unsettling, whether on a personal or existential level, especially since the stories are often set in my world. If it's a different world, and obviously so, I will accept just about anything, but I would like there to be that sense of unease or displacement.
In many Asian works, it seems to me that when a character stumbles into something of the not-real, even though it has always been there, it is dealt with by the character as firstly unsettling and, secondly, possibly dangerous, and the character (often) doesn't deal with it by going "oh well, you know, WEREWOLVES, they'll rip your throat out as soon as look at you, so I better deal with this by meaningless posturing."
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 18 Nov 2008 07:30 pm (UTC)I think we also have gremlins, in a way -- I've read a few ghost stories about hairy bipedal creatures who inhabit cellars. A friend apparently has one of these living in her family's old farmhouse (they also have the requisite grumpy elderly male human ghost). The thing is bipedal, about 3 feet tall, covered with hair, apparently malignant, and (unfortunately) doesn't confine itself to the cellar. I would consider this kind of entity more creepy than a ghost, since they're not human (or formerly human) and one doesn't know what rules it would be governed by.
(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 18 Nov 2008 08:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 19 Nov 2008 12:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
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