And Another Thing

Tags

Canon, Fantasy

Courtesy of the good GM, Grehstadt now has its very own long description! Go take a look!

Getting Back Aboard

Tags

Background, Books, Canon, Fused, Sci-Fi

It’s been a while since I was last aboard the Ship. Metaphorically speaking, of course. I figured I’d go over how it all goes together, and then I figured I might as well share it with you guys. Bits of it, anyway!

Gods and Demons in Before the Sun Fades

Tags

Background, Before the Sun Fades, Canon, Fantasy

The world of Before the Sun Fades is a complicated place, filled with strange beings of all sorts. In one country, one religion may be followed; in another, something completely different — and yet, as Rakariel is all too aware, all are true. The key is belief: belief grants power; worship feeds a continual influx of power that might have been the worshipper’s, had they not gifted it to those they worshipped. Humans, individually, may be spiritually relatively weak in terms of the power they can exert unaided — but in concert, the power they can grant is great indeed.

The more who believe in any given god, the greater that god’s power becomes. Indeed, in the end, it can alter almost anything. Lower-rank gods often take imposing physical forms to intervene in world events, channelling their spiritual power through a piece of the material realm. Where belief is strong, these avatars are strong, but where it is weak, they quickly fade away.

In a religious war, the gods may do battle, either on their own plane of being or joining forces with their followers on the material plane. However, most of the time they prefer to posture, attempting to force one another to back down through manipulation rather than outright violence. The death of a god is a rare event that sends ripples through the surrounding pantheons: the domain of the god must be claimed swiftly, much of its power likely already absorbed by the enemy that slew it. Any afterlife depending on such a god, if not absorbed by the killer, begins to fade and weaken.

Afterlives, where present, depend on the god and pantheon. A god may devote part of its energy to maintaining a spiritual realm that its followers may inhabit after their physical death. These realms are entirely dependent on the whim of the god or gods creating them, as is the state of the spirits residing within. Gods may even consume their afterlives’ resident spirits for a boost in power, although this practice is little-known and less spoken of.

If freed from an afterlife, or never permitted to enter one, a human spirit will grow weaker over time until it fades away to nothing. Some enter the cycle of reincarnation, divesting themselves of the majority of their conscious identity in order to live again in the physical realm. This is a somewhat dangerous task if not aided by a god or other being of spiritual power, as a developing body without a fully-fledged spirit is a tempting target, and is likely to be protected by the deities of the parents. Other spirits remain as wraiths: some benevolent and often granted enough strength to continue their existence by those who know of them; others as mad, dangerous beings that suck the life from any unfortunate enough to enter their domain. Any spirit may become a god; any god may become a spirit, depending on the amount of strength they are able to obtain.

Demons, despite the difference in perception, are actually entirely identical to gods. Some demons, such as that fought by Rakariel in her past, are in fact fallen gods whose people were conquered and whose belief system was subdued. These angry, dangerous remnants are made even worse by the fact that many then continue to believe in the new religion’s propaganda of their negative forms, warping their justifiable anger at their usurpation into something truly evil. Some gods have not only created their own nemeses this way, but even on rare occasion been struck down by them. While it is possible to redeem any “fallen” god, it is not an easy task, for either an entire populace must be convinced to believe better of them while they are yet beings of horror, or else their nature must be altered swiftly using a massive focus of power.

Wait, WHAT Now?

Tags

Canon, Fanfic, Fanon, Thoughts

Whoa. Dude.

So apparently, Amazon are starting to sell fanfic. Sell sell. For actual money. (As opposed to fanfic web cred. I have a slowly diminishing pile of that somewhere…) My world is on SIDEWAYS. SIDEWAYS I TELL YOU.

How is this going to work out? I have no real idea. They’ve only got three titles ‘available’ for playing with from what I can see, and none of them even sound like they’d interest me.

Now me, I’m up for this weirdness. That CC-BY-SA on all of my stories says I pretty much have to be. I can’t wave that flag around and then say ‘but this thing is bad’! That would be hypocritical to say the very least! (And I don’t want to anyway.) But it’s weird, as Red Dwarf’s Cat might say, with a capital Wee. For me, at any rate. I spent a lot of time writing fanfic, in that grey area of Fanon, messing with other worlds and weaving the threads into my own pattern. It was fun, it was good, and if I thought I could do it without risk of backlash I’d happily link it here. But I don’t think I can do that, and that’s why this is weird: outside of certain ‘permitted’ fic (Star Wars extended universe, Warhammer 40k tie-in books, Star Trek ditto, Doctor Who, all that stuff), I’ve never, ever known it get more than an author’s discreet nod and wink, and sometimes a lot worse.

And now Amazon are buying up rights and opening the playing field for everyone to not only write the stuff but sell it in a three-way profit arrangement.

That’s weird. (And I am tired enough to be rambling mildly incoherently, although that may also be a product of still being confused by all this, so now there will be a line break to hide the rest of this post.)

Canon, Semi-Canon, Fanon

Tags

Canon, Fanon, Thoughts

In the course of my reading, reading about writing, and occasionally even reading about reading, I tend to group information into at least three, rather than two, distinct categories. For me, canon is what is actually written down in the book, there forever, immutable. It describes the universe of the story, a rigid framework from which all other things hang. Unless the author engages in some serious retconning (and they shouldn’t!), canon will be there forever.

Semi-canon is a more complex beast. Included in here are things hinted at but never spoken in any book, or things the author has said but never included into anything. Subject to change, they might be regarded by some as “Word of God”, but for me they’re more strongly worded suggestions. That’s what you meant? That’s nice, but that isn’t what I read. That’s how you pictured that? That’s nice, but I’ve always seen it this way. And that’s how I want my random pronouncements to be viewed – particularly since anything not written down is, for me, potentially subject to change. Semi-canon comes on a great sliding scale from the practically canon solidity of “yeah, this is the timeline I’ve been using since Day One to keep everything coherent” down to the ephemeral “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if the reason for X was Y? I just thought of that!”

Fanon, meanwhile, is what one or more fans have started to take as read. It has a lot of value all its own – but no fanfic writer should feel bound by its constraints. There’s a whole world out there!

And of course, there’s always the Great Disaster, the fatal moment when a beloved series jumps the shark. As far as my own personal canon goes, anything that happens after that is semi-canon at best. And I hope that if anything I write goes that way, any readers will be sensible enough to take the same view. (And possibly also to warn me that I’ve gone insane. Insane!)

Addition 2013-05-08: Forgot to add, but share your own thoughts! This is just my view!