On the Theo-Economics of Fantasy Fiction (Odd Columns #2)

These Odd Coulmns are one of the things we’re doing while we’re quarantined, but if you’re looking for something to do, might I suggest picking up a copy of our book? It’s called The Horn, the Pencil, & the Ace of Diamonds and you can find it here

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You know. Generic fantasy setting.

One of my biggest complaints about fantasy fiction is that it’s not really weird enough. Oftentimes, it’s possible to talk about a “generic fantasy setting” – something halfway between Lord of the Rings and Conan the Barbarian, a pastiche of the middle ages that is polytheistic, which is populated by a variety of “races” which all have about one and a half personalities between them, and one pantheon worshiped by everyone. Also there are no black people because of historical accuracy.

I hope the sarcasm on that last sentence is obvious.

It’s a genre that’s been eaten almost completely by nostalgia. We want to re-experience reading The Lord of the Rings or A Song of Ice and Fire or The Dragon-Bone Chair or playing Warcraft or Dragon Age for the first time, so we dive back into it. Yet, every single time we do we repeat the same world-building sins that have been encoded into a dozen different Dungeons and Dragons settings.

Tristiran, a very frustrating cleric from the video game Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Which is also a very frustrating game.

One that occurred to me a while back is how religion functions in these worlds. Properly speaking, none of them should have anything we recognize as religion: yet Dungeons and Dragons and its derivatives always feature a Priest or a Cleric or a Paladin or similar, and they are devoted to a god that is personally – measurably – involved in their lives. Many of these works portray the gods as being empowered or sustained by belief (a bit of semi-postmodern clap-your-hands-if-you-believe if you will.)

It may be possible, within these universes to measure the direct amount of power that is generated by an act of devotion: one orison, one tiny miracle; do the rosary, get something bigger. This looks like an exchange between the person and the deity. Moreover, it is one that would necessarily have a magnitudinal component to it (otherwise, why not perform a huge number of low-effort devotions? What would be the point of sacrificing a bull if sacrificing a chicken would do?) Where does this lead?

Now, I went to Catholic school, so I’ve been involved in a great many discussions of what faith is, but at no point is it shown to be a transactional thing, which is exactly what many of these fantasy settings essentially portray: you perform the ritual, feed the god, and you get the power to cure a hangover or something. If you perform more rituals and perhaps bring other people into the fold and get them to perform the rituals and feed the god, then you get more power.

This sounds less like the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and more like a MLM (No, not Marxism-Leninsim-Maoism; despite all the talk about rent strikes we aren’t quite to that point, haha….unless…?) In Fantasy Worlds, religion seems to be less about finding solace in a community or a shared narrative than it does a Multi-Level-Marketing scheme run by Pan, the goat god.

Yeah, you get a bit of divine intervention if you play your flute in the meadow, but the real returns come when you get 10 people to play their flutes in the meadow. Or, for best returns 10 separate meadows.

Or, perhaps the congregations of different gods would behave more like community activist groups: the Priest of Cloacina would appeal to more people and earn more sacrifices (donations) by installing plumbing and checking the quality of water in wells; maybe the priests of the gods of commerce and travel would form armed gangs and extort devotions from travelers in return for safe passage.

In short, it seems to me that the congregations of various gods in a fantasy world would be less like the congregations of different religions in the real world and more like the behavior of fringe political parties, corporations, and criminal syndicates.

You don’t pick up a novel with a dragon on the cover to hear about someone dealing with this guy, who is a ghost who works in a call center. ….unless…?

All of this being said, it would probably be difficult to do too many works where this sort of thing is laid out blatantly like this: as strange as it seems when laid out like this, I feel that it too closely resembles our own world to serve as effective escapism.

Who knows, though? Maybe someone’s working on a cycle of novels right now where this logic has been mask-off from the very beginning, the gods operating on the same logic as a corporation in contemporary America: extract the highest amount of the desired currency (in this metaphor, faith) and damn the long-term consequences.

Kind of makes you wonder how long the various religions would last in this world.

Of course, now we’ve gotten to the point where I’m trying to come up with a joke about the Exxon Valdez and chrism, so I’m just going to stick a pin in this and abandon it for the day.

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