The Seashell croons and murmurs its music and commercials and private little melodramas for her alone

Sunday, December 11th, 2022

When I first read Ray Bradbury‘s Fahrenheit 451 back in eighth grade, I wasn’t surrounded by people wearing AirPods, but I suppose Walkman headphones were common enough:

Elsewhere in the narrative I described my Fire Man arriving home after midnight to find his wife in bed afflicted with two varieties of stupor. She is in a trance, a condition so withdrawn as to resemble catatonia, compounded of equal parts liquor and a small Seashell thimble-radio tucked in her ear. The Seashell croons and murmurs its music and commercials and private little melodramas for her alone. The room is silent. The husband cannot even try to guess the communion between Seashell and wife. Awakening her is not unlike applying shock to a cataleptic.

I thought I was writing a story of prediction, describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a month ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned.

The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleepwalking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not science fiction. This was a new fact in our changing society.

As you can see, I must start writing very fast indeed about our future world in order to stand still. I thought I had raced ahead of science, predicting the radio-induced semi-catatonic.

In the long haul, science pulled abreast, tipped its hat, and fed me the dust. The woman with the radio-thimble crammed in her ear the other night symbolized my failure to count on certain psychological needs which demanded satisfaction earlier than I supposed.

It’s about the moronic influence of popular culture

Saturday, December 10th, 2022

When Ray Bradbury passed away a decade ago, I remembered reading a borrowed copy of Fahrenheit 451 in one school day in eighth grade. I don’t know whether the teachers failed to notice, or they opted to show some discretion in ignoring my transgression that day.

The novel is often — usually — misinterpreted:

Fahrenheit is not about censorship. It’s about the moronic influence of popular culture through local TV news.

Ray Bradbury was the atavist’s futurist:

The obvious reading of Fahrenheit 451 reveals a story about censorship. This view lends itself to competing left-right interpretations, making Fahrenheit 451 the unique politically charged book that transcends the controversies of its day and finds welcome in conflicting political camps. Is it about McCarthyism or political correctness? The flexibility of political readings helps explain the 5 million copies in print. But the more subtle and important theme involves passive entertainment displacing the life of the mind. It is less about right-left than about smart-stupid.

Before Fahrenheit 451’s firemen came to burn books, the public deserted books. “I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths,” the story’s Professor Faber remarks. “No one wanted them back. No one missed them.” In attempting to please the masses, publishers took care not to offend the market and produced books “leveled down to a sort of pastepudding norm.” Attention spans waned in the wake of competing technology. “Picture it. Nineteenth-century man with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth-century, speed up your camera. Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.”

In the novel, people stopped reading before the state stopped them from reading. The predictable result was an ill-educated society fit for neither leisure nor the ballot. Women discuss voting for a candidate because of his handsome looks and abdicate the responsibilities of motherhood by dumping their children in front of television sets. The over-medicated, air-conditioned culture is awash in suicide, abortion, child neglect, and glassy-eyed passivity. Sound familiar?

Bradbury’s unpublished speaking notes from the mid-1950s acknowledge Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon — about the Stalinist Great Purge and Moscow show trials — as a major inspiration:

People have often asked me what effect Huxley and Orwell had on me, and whether either of them influenced the creation of Fahrenheit 451. The best response is Arthur Koestler…. [O]nly a few perceived the intellectual holocaust and the revolution by burial that Stalin achieved…. Only Koestler got the full range of desecration, execution, and forgetfulness on a mass and nameless graveyard scale. Koestler’s Darkness at Noon was therefore…true father, mother, and lunatic brother to my F. 451.

In one of the great ironies of literary history, Fahrenheit 451 was itself silently modified in the 1960s to make the novel more likely to win school-board approval as a classroom text:

A special “Bal-Hi’ edition, first printed in 1967, retained the typesetting of the first edition, but the text was altered at nearly a hundred points to remove profanity and references to sexuality, drinking, drug use, and nudity.?” This version was never intended to replace the mass-market paperback, but beginning in 1973 the censored text was accidentally transferred to successive printings of the commercial text. For the next six years no uncensored paperback copies were in print, and no one seemed to notice it. Students eventually noted the differences between their school texts and older mass-market printings and brought this mystery to Bradbury’s attention. Since 1979 new typesettings of the restored text and only the restored text have reached print.

When I re-read the novel as an adult, his response to this event had ended up in an introduction that felt oddly prescient:

About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young Vassar lady telling me how much she enjoyed reading my experiment in space mythology, The Martian Chronicles. But, she added, wouldn’t it be a good idea, this late in time, to rewrite the book inserting more women’s characters and roles?

A few years before that I got a certain amount of mail concerning the same Martian book complaining that the blacks in the book were Uncle Toms, and why didn’t I “do them over”?

Along about then came a note from a Southern white suggesting that I was prejudiced in favor of the blacks and the entire story should be dropped.

Two weeks ago my mountain of mail delivered forth a pipsqueak mouse of a letter from a well-known publishing house that wanted to reprint my story “The Fog Horn” in a high school reader. In my story, I had described a lighthouse as having, night, an illumination coming from it that was a “God-Light.” Looking up at it from the viewpoint of any sea-creature, one would have felt that one was in “the Presence.”

The editors had deleted “God-Light” and “in the Presence.” Some five years back, the editors of yet another anthology for school readers put together a volume with some 400 (count ‘em) short stories in it. How do you cram 400 short stories by Twain, Irving, Poe, Maupassant, and Bierce into one book?

Simplicity itself. Skin, debone, demarrow, scarify, melt, render down, and destroy. Every adjective that counted, every verb that moved, every metaphor that weighed more than a mosquito — out! Every simile that would have made a sub-moron’s mouth twitch — gone! Any aside that explained the two-bit philosophy of a first-rate writer — lost.

Every story, slenderized, starved, bluepenciled, leeched, and bled white, resembled every other story. Twain read like Poe read like Shakespeare read like Dostoevsky read like in the finale — Edgar Guest. Every word of more than three syllables had been razored. Every image that demanded so much as one instant’s attention — shot dead.

Do you begin to get the damned and incredible picture?

How did I react to all of the above?

By “firing” the whole lot.

By sending rejection slips to each and every one.

By ticketing the assembly of idiots to the far reaches of hell.

The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib/Republican, Mattachine/Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse.

Every minority feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse.

His mother-in-law convinced him to join the Theosophical Society in 1892

Thursday, December 8th, 2022

I recently watched American Oz, which “explores the life and times of author L. Frank Baum, the creator of one of the most beloved, enduring and classic American narratives”:

By 1900, when The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published, Baum was 44 years old and had spent much of his life in restless pursuit of success. With mixed results he dove into a string of jobs — chicken breeder, actor, marketer of petroleum products, shopkeeper, newspaperman and traveling salesman — Baum continued to reinvent himself, reflecting a uniquely American brand of confidence, imagination and innovation. During his travels to the Great Plains and on to Chicago during the American frontier’s final days, he witnessed a nation coming to terms with the economic uncertainty of the Gilded Age. But he never lost his childlike sense of wonder and eventually crafted his observations into a magical tale of survival, adventure and self-discovery, reinterpreted through the generations in films, books and musicals.

One minor point jumped out at me: his mother-in-law, Matilda Joslyn Gage, convinced him to join the Theosophical Society in 1892:

Matilda Joslyn Gage (March 24, 1826 – March 18, 1898) was an American writer and activist. She is mainly known for her contributions to women’s suffrage in the United States (i.e. the right to vote) but she also campaigned for Native American rights, abolitionism (the end of slavery), and freethought (the free exercise of reason in matters of religious belief). She is the eponym for the Matilda effect, which describes the tendency to deny women credit for scientific invention. She influenced her son-in-law L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz.

She was the youngest speaker at the 1852 National Women’s Rights Convention held in Syracuse, New York. She was a tireless worker and public speaker, and contributed numerous articles to the press, being regarded as “one of the most logical, fearless and scientific writers of her day”. Along with Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Staton, Gage helped found the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. During 1878–1881, she published and edited the National Citizen, a paper devoted to the cause of women. With Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, she was for years in the forefront of the suffrage movement, and collaborated with them in writing the History of Woman Suffrage (1881–1887). She was the author of the Woman’s Rights Catechism (1868); Woman as Inventor (1870); Who Planned the Tennessee Campaign (1880); and Woman, Church and State (1893).

Theosophy caught my attention years ago. American Oz described it as a way to make Buddhist and Hindu ideas palatable to a western audience. Fans of old-school swords & sorcery fiction can’t help but notice Theosophy’s many mentions of Hyperborea, Lemuria, Atlantis, and reincarnated men evolving through various races from age to age.

How the Billboard Hot 100 Lost Interest in the Key Change

Sunday, November 27th, 2022

Chris Dalla Riva, a musician from New Jersey who works on analytics and personalization at Audiomack, explains how the Billboard Hot 100 lost interest in the key change:

When looking at every Billboard Hot 100 number one hit between 1958 and 1990, we see that the key of G major was a very popular key. This was because the key of G major is easy to work with on the guitar and piano, the two most popular compositional instruments during these years. In fact, across the decades, we see that keys that are convenient to use on these instruments (i.e. C major, G major, D major) are more popular than others that are less convenient to use, like B major and Gb major.

But songs don’t have to be in a single key. In fact, 23 percent of number one hits between 1958 and 1990 were in multiple keys, like “Man in the Mirror.”

[…]

The act of shifting a song’s key up either a half step or a whole step (i.e. one or two notes on the keyboard) near the end of the song, was the most popular key change for decades. In fact, 52 percent of key changes found in number one hits between 1958 and 1990 employ this change.

[…]

What’s odd is that after 1990, key changes are employed much less frequently, if at all, in number one hits.

What’s doubly odd is that around the same time, the keys that number one hits are in change dramatically too. In fact, songwriters begin using all keys at comparable rates.

[…]

So what is going on? Both of the shifts can be tied back to two things: the rise of hip-hop and the growing popularity of digital music production, or recording on computers.

[…]

Hip-hop stands in stark contrast to nearly all genres that came before because it puts more emphasis on rhythm and lyricism over melody and harmony.

[…]

As hip-hop grew in popularity, the use of computers in recording also exploded too. Whereas the guitar and piano lend themselves to certain keys, the computer is key-agnostic. If I record a song in the key of C major into digital recording software, like Logic or ProTools, and then decide I don’t like that key, I don’t have to play it again in that new key. I can just use my software to shift it into that different key. I’m no longer constrained by my instrument.

Furthermore, digital recording software lends itself to a new style of songwriting that isn’t as inviting to key changes within a recording.

[…]

Because songwriters in the pre-digital age were writing linearly, shifting the key in a new section was a natural compositional technique.

The totokia was intended to peck holes in skulls

Thursday, November 24th, 2022

The Tusken Raiders in the original Star Wars wield a peculiar weapon that Luke calls a gaffi stick. It turns out that the gaderffii is based on the Fijian totokia:

According to Fiji material culture scholar Fergus Clunie who describes it as a beaked battle hammer (in Fijian Weapons and Warfare, 1977: p. 55), “…the totokia was intended to ‘peck’ holes in skulls.” The weight of the head of the club was concentrated in the point of the beak of the weapon or kedi-toki (toki to peck; i toki: a bird’s beak). The totokia “…delivered a deadly blow in an abrupt but vicious stab, not requiring the wide swinging arc demanded by the others.” (Yalo i Viti. A Fiji Museum Catalogue, 1986: p. 185) It was a club that could be used in open warfare or to finish-off or execute warriors on the battlefield.

Totakia and Gaffi Stick

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is not an instruction manual

Saturday, November 19th, 2022

In what ways, Casey Handmer asks, does The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (and other novels in the genre) fail as an instruction manual?

We know that a Moon city is not a good place to grow plants, that water is relatively abundant on the surface near the poles, and that underground construction is pointlessly difficult. So any future Moon city will have to be structured around some other premise, which is to say its foundational architecture on both a social and technical level will be completely different.

We know that AIs are pretty good at tweaking our amygdala, but strictly speaking we don’t need to build one on the Moon, and I would hope its existence is strictly orthogonal to the question of political control.

Lunar cities, and all other space habitats, are tremendously vulnerable to physical destruction. This means that, for all practical purposes, Earthling power centers hold absolute escalation dominance. No combination of sneaky AIs, secret mass drivers, or sabotage would be enough to attain political independence through force. If space habitats want some degree of political autonomy, they will have to obtain it through non-violent means. Contemporary science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson makes this argument powerfully in this recent podcast, when discussing how he structured the revolutions in his Mars trilogy.

Lastly, the “Brass cannon” story is like “Starship Troopers” – a falsifiably satirical critique of popular conceptions of political control. For some reason, libertarians swarm Heinlein novels and space advocacy conferences like aphids in spring. I will resist the temptation to take easy shots, but point out merely that every real-world attempt at implementation of libertarianism as the dominant political culture has failed, quickly and predictably. This is because libertarianism, like many other schools of thought that fill out our diverse political scene, functions best as an alternative actually practiced by very few people. It turns out a similar thing occurs in salmon mating behavior.

It’s a book whose metatextual enigmas attracted credulous postmodernists in hordes

Thursday, November 10th, 2022

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is the Voynich manuscript of American literature:

As the only novel written by Edgar Allan Poe, its historical importance is unquestionable; as a literary work, it is mystifying. Its catalog of atrocities and incidents, which includes cannibalism, drownings, ax murders, shootings (with muskets and pistols), a ghost ship crammed with rotting corpses, a shark feeding frenzy, a landslide, and a mass-casualty explosion, combined with a nightmare symbolism have inspired both interpretation and incredulity.

Long forgotten after Poe had been buried both literally (in 1849) and critically, Pym moldered in ragged omnibus editions for nearly 100 years before W. H. Auden and the New Critics resurrected it for the Age of Academia. Since then, every subsequent critical school has interpreted Pym through its own narrow aesthetic, or increasingly political, perspective. It is a metaphor for the creative imagination; a meditation on God and Providence; a pre-Freudian return-to-the-womb allegory; a rite-of-passage myth; a parable about race. The most recent critical trends generally focus on Pym’s self-reflexive qualities. It’s a book whose metatextual enigmas attracted credulous postmodernists in hordes from Yale to the University of California, Irvine.

But the real mystery surrounding Pym, aside from its shocking and indeterminate ending, is whether it is a flawed work produced by an author under duress or a conscious literary hoax. This is, after all, a novel that begins with a preface from the narrator, “Arthur Gordon Pym,” that stresses the implausibility of the events he is about to recount and ends with a postscript from Edgar Allan Poe, the “editor,” who refuses to complete the story because of his “disbelief in the entire truth of the latter portions of the narrative.”

Not long after the boom in Pym studies began, a few sharp-eyed critics realized that Poe, with his long history of hoaxes and pranks (to go along with perpetual hardship) had produced something dubious.

[...]

Understanding Pym is impossible without delineating the personal challenges Poe faced when he composed it. Starving, with a teenage wife to support, and unemployed during one of the worst depressions America had yet seen, Poe needed to deliver a manuscript as soon as possible, in hopes of a quick payout. That meant repurposing material from the Southern Literary Messenger, plagiarizing from several nonfiction books, and possibly, fusing two different narratives and passing them off as one.

(Hat tip to Castalia House.)

The history of horror is a history of what we aren’t all that frightened of anymore

Wednesday, November 9th, 2022

The history of horror is a history of what we aren’t all that frightened of anymore:

Horror, began appropriately enough during the Reign of Terror. Religion was officially outlawed in France. The Catholic Church had been forced out of the country and if you were going to worship anything at all, it had to be the Goddess of Reason. Graveyards were filled with dead people who were, according to the First Republic, gone forever. They were in an eternal sleep from which there would be no waking.

Into this government-mandated spiritual vacuum stepped Étienne-Gaspard Robert, the creator of the very first horror show: The Phantasmagoria.

The Phantasmagoria was a “Magic Lantern” show that combined sound effects and an eerie music score provided by Ben Franklin’s glass harmonica.

Robert, unlike his various conmen spiritualist predecessors, had to keep an eye out for militantly atheist authorities, so he was very clear about the fact that what his audience was watching was fiction. Ghosts and ghouls weren’t real and it was purely for entertainment.

And by all accounts, audiences found the Phantasmagoria utterly terrifying. Admittedly, Robert was careful to serve them punch laced with laudanum before the show started but that only goes so far. The fear was quite real. But now you can look at what was the most frightening thing in the world in its day and you just sort of shrug.

(Hat tip to Castalia House.)

Firm facts about Dyalhis’s life are few

Tuesday, November 1st, 2022

Will Oliver’s list of Golden Age of Sword & Sorcery stories starts with Robert E. Howard’s “The Shadow Kingdom” — the origin of both the sword and sorcery genre and the reptilian conspiracy theory — and continues with stories exclusively from Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith for the first 25 entries, before getting to “The Sapphire Goddess” by Nictzin Dyalhis:

Nictzin Wilstone Dyalhis (June 4, 1873–May 8, 1942) was an American chemist and short story writer who specialized in the genres of science fiction and fantasy.

[…]

Firm facts about Dyalhis’s life are few, as he coupled his limited output of fiction with a penchant for personal privacy, an avoidance of publicity, and intentional deception. Even his name is uncertain. His World War I draft registration card establishes his full name as Nictzin Wilstone Dyalhis, but it marks the earliest known appearance of this name. His first wife’s death certificate gives his first name as “Fred,” and he has been thought to have possibly altered his surname to Dyalhis from a more prosaic “Dallas” — in his stories, Dyalhis played with common spellings, so that “Earth” becomes Aerth and “Venus,” Venhez. According to L. Sprague de Camp, however, Dyalhis was his actual surname, inherited from his Welsh father, and his given name Nictzin was also authentic, bestowed on him due to his father’s fascination with the Aztecs.

His World War I draft registration card and 1920 Census record establish his birthdate as June 4, 1873, and his state of birth as Massachusetts. According to the 1920 census, his father was also born in Massachusetts, and his mother in Guatemala. But in the 1930 census he was reported to have been born about 1880 in Arizona to parents also born in that state. In bibliographic sources, his year of birth was usually cited (with a question mark) as 1879; Dziemianowicz gives it as 1880; and he was speculated to have been born in England — or Pima, Arizona.

Among the imaginative readers of his stories, Dyalhis acquired a reputation for possessing unusual abilities and an exotic history as an adventurer and world traveler. The known facts of his life are more prosaic, mostly centering around Pennsylvania and Maryland. At some time during his youth he lost one eye, as noted on his draft card. He worked as a box nailer in 1918, a chemist in 1920, a machinist in 1930, and a writer for magazines in 1940.

Boo!

Monday, October 31st, 2022

I’ve written about Halloween and horror quite a bit over the years:

Is the Albanian Army going to take over the world?

Saturday, October 29th, 2022

Back in December 2010, Jeffrey Bewkes, CEO of Time Warner, told the New York Times what he thought about the hype surrounding Netflix: “It’s a little bit like, is the Albanian Army going to take over the world? I don’t think so.”

It was the shot heard round the entertainment world:

By buying House of Cards, Netflix would change the market’s perception of what internet video businesses did. “Up until the moment we launched House of Cards,” Holland recalls, “everything that was made for the internet was webisodes — Funny or Die, people falling off horses or getting kicked in the nuts.” Other streamers like Hulu, says Holland, were making early investments in original programming, but it was what she considered “the Comedy Central space” — in other words, low rent. Netflix, they agreed, ought to begin by aiming high.

Because HBO was in hot pursuit, the only way Netflix was going to win was to make an astounding offer. At the time, in keeping with the new paradigm of tech investing, Netflix was selling its story to Wall Street based on rapid customer growth, not bottom-line performance.

The most important thing, according to the prevailing market view, was for tech disrupters to crush the incumbents. Wooing new customers with ludicrous prices that made little long-term economic sense beyond undermining competitors was not only tolerated, it was expected and rewarded. Traditional publicly traded media companies, by contrast, enjoyed no such leeway.

“There’s a thousand reasons not to do this at Netflix,” Sarandos told Fincher. “I want to give you one reason to say yes.” Sarandos and Holland outlined their plan to Fincher and MRC executives: Not only would there be no pilot required, but Netflix would commit to a two-season, 26-episode guarantee, which was unheard of. They also promised Fincher that they would not bog him down with any notes. He could make the show any way he saw fit. And then Netflix offered a staggering amount of money: $100 million for the two-season commitment.

“We made the richest offer that had been seen for something that hadn’t been made yet,” Holland says.

Their sales pitch worked. Fincher’s team chose to go with the streaming newcomer over HBO, the reigning king of home entertainment. Plepler and the programming team were stunned at Netflix’s two-year commitment. “We couldn’t do that,” Plepler says. “We didn’t have the financial flexibility to make that commitment.”

(From It’s Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO.)

The Shadow Kingdom is the origin of both the sword and sorcery genre and the reptilian conspiracy theory

Tuesday, October 18th, 2022

Will Oliver ran across a list of early Cthulhu Mythos stories and took up the challenge of tracking down and reading all of the stories in order, which got him wondering what a list of Golden Age of Sword & Sorcery stories would look like:

Finding none online, I decided to create one.

Starting with the well accepted premise that the genre, or sub-genre, known as Sword-and-Sorcery started with Robert E. Howard’s “The Shadow Kingdom,” I knew I had a starting point, August 1929. As a generation is approximately 20 years, that would take the end point of the list to August of 1949, or simply the end of 1949. This makes sense in that the date falls right before Gnome Press began reprinting the Conan stories in hardcover and well before the 1960s resurgence.

Kull by Robert E. HowardI was a bit embarrassed that I couldn’t have rattled off “The Shadow Kingdom” as the name of the first sword & sorcery story:

Robert E. Howard’s short story “The Shadow Kingdom” from Weird Tales magazine is the origin of both the sword and sorcery subgenre of fantasy fiction and the conspiracy theory concerning a hidden species of advanced reptilian beings disguised among us while covertly controlling the levers of power, which has been a recurring theme in fiction and conspiracy since the story’s publication.

Apparently the idea of reptilians was popularised by David Icke, a conspiracy theorist, in 1999:

Michael Barkun, professor of political science at Syracuse University, posits that the idea of a reptilian conspiracy originated in the fiction of Conan the Barbarian creator Robert E. Howard, in his story “The Shadow Kingdom”, published in Weird Tales in August 1929. This story drew on theosophical ideas of the “lost worlds” of Atlantis and Lemuria, particularly Helena Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine written in 1888, with its reference to “‘dragon-men’ who once had a mighty civilization on a Lemurian continent”.

Howard’s “serpent men” were described as humanoids (with human bodies and snake heads) who were able to imitate humans at will, and who lived in underground passages and used their shapechanging and mind-control abilities to infiltrate humanity. Clark Ashton Smith used Howard’s “serpent men” in his stories, as well as themes from H. P. Lovecraft, and he, Howard and Lovecraft together laid the basis for the Cthulhu Mythos.

In the 1940s, Maurice Doreal (also known as Claude Doggins) wrote a pamphlet entitled “Mysteries of the Gobi” that described a “serpent race” with “bodies like man but…heads…like a great snake” and an ability to take human form. These creatures also appeared in Doreal’s poem “The Emerald Tablets”, in which he referred to Emerald Tablets written by “Thoth, an Atlantean Priest king”. Barkun asserts that “in all likelihood”, Doreal’s ideas came from “The Shadow Kingdom”, and that in turn, “The Emerald Tablets” formed the basis for David Icke’s book, Children of the Matrix.

Historian Edward Guimont has argued that the reptilian conspiracy theory, particularly as expounded by Icke, drew from earlier pseudohistorical legends developed during the colonisation of Africa, particularly surrounding Great Zimbabwe and the mokele-mbembe.

Fans of old-school swords & sorcery fiction can’t help but notice Theosophy’s many mentions of Hyperborea, Lemuria, Atlantis, and reincarnated men evolving through various races from age to age.

(Hat tip to Ben Espen.)

The Velaryons are described as having white skin, ghostly pale hair and purple eyes

Sunday, October 16th, 2022

A recent HuffPost Entertainment piece opens with the assertion that the cast of House of the Dragon is visibly less white than its predecessor, Game of Thrones, which is interesting, because the original features large numbers of quasi-Mongols, quasi-Middle Easterners, etc.

Anyway, one of the co-creators recently claimed the “increased” diversity wasn’t intended to appeal to left-wing ideals:

“I think it was not that simple,” Ryan Condal said. “I think the reason that it’s been a successful choice … is because it was thought out. It wasn’t just done perfunctorily or wasn’t just done to tick a box or … to be seen as progressive.”

Condal, who is also a showrunner for the HBO series, then followed up this statement with one that seemed to somewhat contradict his previous remarks.

“It’s 2022,” he said. “It’s a different era than these shows used to be made in. We have an incredibly diverse audience that’s not only across America, but in multiple countries that speak all sorts of different languages, that represent … all the colors under the sun. And it was really important to see some of that reflected up on screen.

“This is a fantasy world. I think if this was a historical fiction piece, it would be a more nuanced discussion. But I think simply because this is a fantasy world, if we believe in dragons, and shape-shifters and [the fictional canines] direwolves, we can believe everybody in the story is not white.”

He’s content to engage with the straw-man argument that detractors are complaining that “everybody in the story is not white,” when the real complaint is that the characters’ ”pure blood” is a key element of the story:

The character Corlys Velaryon (also known as the Sea Snake) in “House of the Dragon” is portrayed by Steve Toussaint, a British actor of Barbadian descent.

Due to this, House Velaryon — a prominent family in the series whose members are pivotal players in the story — is characterized by darker skin and silvery-white, or sometimes dreadlocked, hair. (Not every character with the last name Velaryon fits that description, though.)

This departs from the show’s source material. In George R.R. Martin’s book “Fire & Blood,” the Velaryons are described as having white skin, ghostly pale hair and purple eyes.

This has put Toussaint on the receiving end of racist criticism online from Westeros purists.

That is no true Velaryon!

Condal said on “TheGrill” that the decision to make House Velaryon Black was inspired by the family’s unique place in the franchise and something that Martin had said years ago.

“Why we went to the Velaryons in particular was because that felt like the most fantastical race in the show, and it felt like … these were people from a lost continent that we don’t really know that much about,” Condal said.

“We know they all have silver hair, we know they have an affinity for dragons, some of them. And we know they are seen, as quoted in the books and in the show, closer to gods than to men. So what does that all look like?

“And it always stuck with me, this article … where George had talked about, at first when he set out to write these books, considering making all of the Velaryons Black. … Black people with silver hair — and that always really stuck with me as an image.”

Condal also noted that the time period in which “House of the Dragon” takes place is not that far off from the fall of Valyria in the franchise’s lore.

“I said: ‘Well, Valyria was this enormous continent, a very diverse and well-populated nation that fell into the sea. Why couldn’t there have been a line of Black Velaryons in that story?’” he remarked.

“I think if you’re willing to take that first leap of suspension of disbelief, you really come to [the idea that] it feels integrated and intrinsic to the show in a organic way.”

The showrunner also said that having a Black family on the show helps differentiate “people on screen and remembering who’s from what house.” He added that this aids in highlighting the “questionable parentage” of Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen’s very white-looking children, who have the last name Velaryon.

“I think there’s a lot of visual benefits that come along with it,” Condal said. “And because Corlys has such a rich and diverse family line himself, just simply making that one turn on him to cast Steve Toussaint, his entire family becomes then a diverse cast. And it’s a really interesting way to populate the show with a bunch of different faces that you may not have seen in another high fantasy show or in the original series.”

There are no Black Valyrians

Sunday, October 9th, 2022

“Game of Thrones” superfans Linda Antonsson and Elio M. García Jr. have been collaborating with George R.R. Martin since before HBO’s hit adaptation of his “A Song of Ice and Fire” books, but when Martin publicized their new book on social media, they were “called out” for their supposed racism:

Soon after Antonsson and García created online forum Westeros.org in 1999, Martin recruited them as fact-checkers for his book “A Feast for Crows.” In 2014, they served as coauthors on “The World of Ice & Fire,” an illustrated companion book for the series of novels.

Critics have taken issue with Antonsson’s blog posts, some dating to more than a decade ago, in which she decries the casting of people of color in “Game of Thrones” to play characters that are white in Martin’s books. In one post from March 2012, for example, Antonsson complained about Nonso Anozie, a Black man, getting cast in the role of Xaro Xhoan Daxos, who is described as pale in the books. Five months later, she celebrated the fact that white actor Ed Skrein was cast to play Daario Naharis, despite a rumor claiming the network was looking to fill the role with someone of another ethnicity.

More recently, Antonsson wrote that the character of Corlys, portrayed by Steve Toussaint on “House of the Dragon,” was miscast. “There are no Black Valyrians and there should not be any in the show,” she said of the common ancestors of Velaryons and Targaryens.

Antonsson contends that upset fans are criticizing “cherry-picked statements stripped of context.” She tells Variety that it bothers her to be “labeled a racist, when my focus has been solely on the world building.” According to the author, she has no issue with inclusive casting, but she strongly believes that “diversity should not trump story.”

“If George had indeed made the Valyrians Black instead of white, as he mused on his ‘Not a Blog’ in 2013, and this new show proposed to make the Velaryons anything other than Black, we would have had the same issue with it and would have shared the same opinion,” Antonsson says.

The Disney version is devoid of any moral teaching whatsoever

Saturday, October 1st, 2022

The last four generations of Americans have been swimming in a sea of feminist propaganda our whole lives, Rachel Wilson argues:

We don’t even notice the feminist themes and messaging bombarding us daily. They feel like universal truths because that’s all we’ve ever known. A fish doesn’t know it has always lived in water until it somehow ends up on dry land. De-programming feminism works much the same way. This analogy is a brilliant segue for me to ruin one of people’s favorite childhood movies, Disney’s The Little Mermaid.

[…]

The Little Mermaid was originally a Danish folk tale which told of a young mermaid who lived under the sea with her widower grandmother and five sisters. She rescues a handsome prince from drowning and falls in love with him. She learns from her grandmother that humans have a much shorter lifespan than the mermaids’ 300 years, but that humans have eternal souls and can enter heaven, while mermaids become seafoam and cease to exist upon death. The longing for an eternal soul is just as much a part of the Little Mermaids’ longing to become human as is her infatuation with the prince in the original story. In the folk tale, The Little Mermaid does gain human legs in exchange for her beautiful voice, but she always feels as if she is walking on knives. She also is only able to gain a human soul through union in marriage to the prince. If not, she will die with a broken heart and turn to sea foam. In this version, the prince does not marry the Little Mermaid, but chooses to marry a princess from a neighboring kingdom. The Little Mermaid despairs, thinking of how much she sacrificed and her imminent demise. She is offered one final chance when her sisters bring her a dagger from the sea witch. If she kills the prince and lets his blood drop onto her feet, she can become a mermaid once more and return to her life in the sea. The Little Mermaid can’t bring herself to do this and instead throws herself and the dagger into the sea. Because of her selflessness, she is granted an afterlife as an earthbound ghost. She can earn an immortal soul by doing 300 years of good works for mankind and watches over the prince and his wife.

[…]

In the Disney version, Ariel is a little girl with big dreams. She has a stern patriarchal father who wants to keep her under lock and key for the sake of tradition, societal expectation, and safety. Yes, she falls in love with Prince Eric, but her main motivation for wanting to live on land are her dreams of independence and liberation from her father’s rules. She is a privileged princess who has everything, but only wants the one thing she can’t have- life on land as a human. When she expresses this to her father, he ruins her secret trove of human treasures and forbids her to return to the surface, knowing that it would likely spell her demise.

[…]

This song was an anthem for rebellion against the patriarchy. In fact, that is the central theme of the Disney version of the story. Ariel disobeys her father, uses witchcraft to do exactly what her father warned her not to, and ends up getting herself kidnapped by the sea witch. Her father, King Triton, then has to intervene and save her by allowing himself to be captured in her place. Because of this, the whole sea kingdom ends up under the dominion of the evil sea witch, spelling certain doom for the merfolk. Eric risks his own life to kill the sea witch and frees King Triton. The king then (absurdly) apologizes for trying to stand in the way of his sixteen-year-old daughter’s foolish dreams. He forgives her disobedience and recklessness which almost got the whole kingdom annihilated. Ariel gets everything she wants, and the message sent to young girls everywhere is that your dad is a big meanie head who just doesn’t want you to be independent and have fun. All the men in your life must sacrifice their very lives and even all of society if that’s what will make their little princess happy. Also, there is no negative consequence for being disobedient, lying, deceiving others, or practicing witchcraft as long as it makes you happy. The “happiness” of young beautiful women is all that really matters. The men will rescue you from all the trouble YOU are responsible for causing because that’s all they’re good for. The End.

In contrast to the original Danish folk story, we see that the Disney version is devoid of any moral teaching whatsoever. The original story teaches that the most moral path possible, the one that leads to eternal salvation, is self-sacrifice for the love of others. It teaches young women that a life of service to those they love and to humankind is what saves them. The original Little Mermaid was willing to sacrifice her own life and even her chance at a soul to prevent harm to the man she loved, even if he married someone else. There was nothing in it for her whatsoever. Her motivation couldn’t be purer, and this is what saved her in the end, even though she did not receive temporal reward in this life. This is in line with Christian morality, which is probably why Disney, run by Jeffrey Katzenberg at the time, completely inverted it. The meaning and moral of the story was turned into the polar opposite of the original.