The Importance of understanding the past

This post will certainly skirt my 'no politics on the blog' rule a bit.

I don't really buy recent books (that aren't RPG books, obviously) anymore, there's not really appealing to it. Science fiction, fantasy and horror seems to suffer from a pretty bad exhaustion lately which, combined with the obsession with major intellectual properties which are then destroyed by inept writers (or perhaps on purpose, if you're feeling like being called nuts by people with their heads in the sand) just doesn't really make me want to buy scifi or fantasy novels. The other issue, which I've come to realize following my massive 'born again grognard' phase when I got really invested in the OSR is that fundamentally we (and by extension, most writers) are less and less able to grasp what makes a genre tick.

All we experience in pop culture are copies of copies. Like a telephone game, it increasingly lose its meaning. Ideas. Memes. Tropes. Call them what you want but they exist. Unfortunately people have lost much of their understanding and, when they do spot them, they often generate a sense of hatred for the past followed by a smug satisfaction of pseudo intellect nonsense. The 'trope has been subverted'. Your 'expectations have been subverted'. In actuality it just mean someone wrote crap and felt good about it. No, worse: they felt morally superior.

My most recent purchases in the last few years have been the collected works of H.P. Lovecraft,  Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, an English edition of Tolkien's work (I previous had it as a French translation). More recently (last Monday) I got my hands on Bulfinch's Mythology. Is that book perfect? Hardly, as it is well known that Bulfinch definitely loved to edit out things as to not 'offend' the delicate sensibilities of the Victorian, including young girls. Does that all sound familiar? We should not fear the past and we shouldn't shun it either. If I can keep being pretentious for a moment, I genuinely think anyone out there who is running a Tabletop RPG campaign of any type, but especially fantasy and/or scifi should go out there and read some old mythology. Not the modern takes, not the comic books and Hollywood version where Thor is an alien. These books are, for the most part, either readily available or in the public domain. There is no excuse.

Read some mythology and read some Conan and other pulp works. For science fiction, read the War of the Worlds and other works. You don't even have to like it. I'm not the thought police, you're allowed to dislike it or even think its abhorrent for all I care. Who am I anyway? A nobody. The important point is to at least understand the how and the why of these genres, how they evolved and what form their basis. You can't tinker around with concepts and ideas if there's no grasp of the basics and the core elements. This is how you end with a generation that felt so disconnected from the root elements and the myths that they don't even understand how to play Dungeons & Dragons. Hell, I sure at one point realized that I didn't 'really get it' and then this spiraled in a nearly ten year pretentious-as-fuck phase where I loved to use the term 'deconstruction' as if it meant something. Then one day you get tired of huffing your own farts. You crave the simple, the coherent. Are Conan stories 'deep'? Fuck no. It's pulp, man. However it definitely has lesson to teach on the simple basics of dropping characters in an adventure. The focus isn't on some deeper world building. Its not on some deeper meaning. It's about the how and the why and what adventures this bring.

You have to understand the rules before you bend them.