So, Dragonlance got cancelled....I guess? Should I even care at this point?

The Heroes of the Lance

I try to not get too political on the blog, even if I am elsewhere. This post is a bit different.

I'm not sure I got anything truly insightful to add about the current Dragonlance kerfuffle going except a general sense of being both bummed out yet relieved. The Dragonlance books have a special place in my heart and are nothing but a source of memories for not so much better times as simply bitter-yet-nostalgic times, namely my high school years which were absolute hell yet also the only time in my life where deeper friendship and camaraderie were at the forefront of my life. While I consider them to be rather simplistic and often mediocre fantasy novels they nonetheless played a massive part in getting me into D&D (and tabletop as a whole) as well as making new friends and introducing them to fantasy. They're harmlessly 'okay' in my opinion and in spite of their flaws the main books as written by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman have some genuine moment of friendship and humanity in these characters which elevate an otherwise fairly basic fantasy story. The Heroes of the Lance aren't amazingly complex characters by any means but I like to think their bonds with each others are genuine and touching at times. Sometimes a story can be basic, simple and bland yet still very earnest.

Dragonlance getting 'cancelled' in 2020 is nothing new, especially with Weiss and Hickman's Mormon roots presumably being quite offensive to the very clearly 'Progressive Consumerist'*-aligned Wizards of the Coast. Maybe I could rant and rave about that. Maybe I'm wrong and there are deeper legal thing going on. Somehow I'm not too mad. Sure, maybe I'm angry enough to write a blogpost about it but really, thinking back I have to ask myself: did we really need any more Dragon Lance novels? I haven't read any recent Dragonlance novels in a long time. The series is utterly massive and, as with any long-running fantasy novel series, most are likely to be pretty hit or miss. Generally, my favorite ones are the Hickman & Weiss. The Age of Mortals and everything leading up to it and following it has been quite a mess which broke the setting. The 'Lost Chronicles' seemed little more than an attempt to recapture the 'good years' of Dragon Lance in the mid-to-late 2000 by returning to the Heroes of the Lance.

Ultimately, Dragonlance was always about the Heroes of the Lance and everything else was, at best, a bonus. These characters have come and gone. Their stories have been told and most of them got killed off or retired. While I could decry the loss of one final trilogy by Weiss & Hickman, to be honest I'm quite glad we aren't getting one. Too much of modern pop culture consist of going back to the classics and adding yet another story after the many endings and ruining it to score socio political brownie points. Let Dragonlance's heroes stay dead and retired. Let their story end. Let me remember them as they were, when I was a young teenager and not as a bitter jaded, aging adult.

They earned their rest, haven't they?

*AKA people who pander to Twitter's so-called 'Progressives' while having extremely exploitative companies full of double standards, predatory practices and encouraging consumerist allegiance while supposedly decrying capitalism. The kind of people who think they 'fight the man'...by buying the product of  a global multinational corporation.