No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.

mirrobs asked:

"The city is the protagonist." Now, I've seen the phrase tossed around a good deal, though I only have a vague working understanding of it. I'm curious if you could talk a bit in depth about what it means, and the impact it A) is meant to have and B) actually has on a narrative. Thanks in advance!

sharpnelshell-deactivated201905 answered:

Oo la la, could I. Park the body, light a pipe, put your feet up.

In a general sense, I think that sentence is supposed to indicate any setting that is so vivid and/or intertwined with the characters’ stories and psychologies as to make it more than a mere background. Sometimes it is a place on which the characters rely so much as to make it indispensable. Say, the Inferno in Dante’s Divine Comedy is a character in its own right, Paris in Notre Dame De Paris could work too, and it sure is hard to imagine Bleak House set in any place but London. Essentially, you can’t take the setting out of these stories without crippling them or leaving the characters strangely bereft.

My tag here is mostly in the context of noir where the city (more often than not Los Angeles and its surroundings, where bright lights and big hopes are revealed to be nothing more than tasteless, neon-lit, plastic decadence trying to pass for wealth – Tinseltown, in a word) is what gives these stories more than half their tone. It’s both where the characters operate and a symbol of their lives — big, dirty, maze-like, corrupted, unstable, deceitful, impossible to keep any dignity in. The Big City, in noir, is a lie, and everything in it, just like everything in the characters’ lives, is a trap.

In The Harder They Fall a group of journalists are trying to scheme a way to con the world into thinking that a tall, big guy who wouldn’t manage to snap a twig if he stepped on it but looks like he could knock you off with a single fingertip, is the greatest boxer around. They call Bogart, who plays the part of a semi-corrupted journalist, to help them pull the trick off, and, there being a lot of money in the deal, Bogart agrees. “Take him to Los Angeles. They like freaks over there.” That trope is so common in these stories, that you grin and think, “well, of course, good ol’ Los Angeles” as if they‘d just mentioned a character you knew well.

The city here is a reflection of both the character’s personalities and their relationships to other people. Big, modern, emotionless, ever-changing, merciless. Think of Marlowe: he’s not Sherlock Holmes, lean and lanky and languid and sharp, who enjoys puffing silently on his pipe while solving a problem with the sheer brilliance of his intellect. He’s blunt, unrefined, tightly wound, cynical, expressionless, solitary, mistrustful. He’s not a genius and he’s not in the business or solving puzzles for the pleasure of the activity. He’s a mercenary: he does his business for a fee and plunges into a case without any idea of what he’s doing. His manners are bad and his English is sometimes worse. He has no friends and he wants none. He is, in essence, a mirror of the place he lives in – dark, tough, dangerous streets where you do or die. The city and the characters’ personalities are so intertwined here you can’t tell if they are like this because the place they live in has changed them or if they’ve chosen to live in this place because they are like this (though Marlowe gives more than a hint that he’d be unwilling to give the city up no matter how comfortable his life would be elsewhere.)

These characters walk the streets in the nighttime and in the daytime and they’re uneasy at every hour; they walk the good parts and the bad parts and they feel at home in neither. The city beats them up, drugs them, kidnaps them, makes them faint, chases them away, and makes them lose their minds, their money, their reputation. Think of the hardboiled detective who has one foot in the world of the criminals and one foot in the world of the cops and is at home, or indeed wanted, in neither. The city is a reflection of that.

One thing that makes the city pop up as a character in these stories is that the characters have no other friends. The noir protagonist goes through life solo. You could probably make an argument that even before noir fiction those kind of mystery stories had a slant for the solitary and that, say, London is also a protagonist of the Holmes stories. But I’d say that 221B is the character there more than London ever is. It’s a perfect little world of method and routine where order is sometimes interrupted and mysteries are solved with the sheer power of the intellect, and it always houses one person, one friend, the protagonist can rely on. That mirrors the workings of those characters’ lives. All this crumbles with noir because all the characters can rely on here is their surrounding: apprehending a criminal brings no real order into their lives because it’s the (inauthentic) order of the surrounding itself that engenders the disruption, and the city is too big, too dark, too corrupted for any of our actions to make any difference. It’s both a mirror of the instability of the characters’ lives and psyches, and a representation of the labyrinth of corruption, lies, and betrayals that no one can escape.

congruentepitheton

On that note, and this is mostly me taking ideas out of my arse, so bear with me, all that is true about the setting in noir is also true about the setting in Grimdark, but location in Grimdark is very much just a backdrop in which awful things happen. It never solidifies into a character.

My idea here is that mostly there is no romanticizing of the setting. The characters never have a reason for that kind of love/hate relationship with the city because grimdark never deceives them with false hopes. It doesn’t cover its streets in fake gold in order to attract them and then traps them into idealising its bright lights even after they’ve grown bitter and aware that it’s plastic all the way down. It just shows them the rot and they can take it or leave it.

And possibly somewhat related, grimdark has to work with completely new, made-up places so it can’t rely on those old tropes that make you smile wistfully and go, “Oh, this is set in New York, bet there’s going to be a fresh-faced young boy who’s going to be framed for murder after discovering that nobody wants to give him a job,” or “Hollywood! bet this is about some failed actress turned either prostitute or corpse or some such” “Chicago? Could be about street crime, could be about gangsters,” so it’s the public, as well as the character, who has less of a relationship with the setting.

witty-observer

What might be the way, then, to craft a fictional world with the baggage and depth of a real world city? Someone could write hundreds of novels and still only scratch the surface of the connotations imtimately known in reality. Look only at the moment when youths in red are spotted in St. Louis, or the smug politician grin under the eyes of the Washington monument.

What’s the most intriguing element to me is how the environment is rarely consciously addressed. The narrative doesn’t exposit verbosely about the history of the city, unless there’s a character with dreams of grandeur.

There’s something about the concept of history and the merging with the current life that riles people up. Either people forget, or they will make damn sure no one else forgets. Wouldn’t you do anything to be immortalized in the history of future generations if given even the sliver of a chance? For every “Et tu?”, there are billions of others who get sucked through the machine of life.

It’s so very difficult to tap into a person’s influences, especially your own. So seeing characters getting caught up in betrayal and madness because of flaws they may not even understand themselves, well. We the audience may never actually, truly learn, but it’s a way to actually try, no?

Endless talking about this is fun! Let’s see where it goes, eh?

congruentepitheton

> What’s the most intriguing element to me is how the environment is rarely consciously addressed. The narrative doesn’t exposit verbosely about the history of the city, unless there’s a character with dreams of grandeur.

My instinctive response is, “Because there’s no way to pull this off.” But disclaimer: I’m probably the worst person to ask this to because worldbuilding really fails to catch my attention. I’m mainly interested in what makes people tick and how their surrounding tries to make them tock, so it’s the relationship between the two that I look for, not pure worldbuilding itself.

For what my opinion is worth here: the problem with going on about the history of your fictional place before getting your readers emotionally invested in a character is that it will read like a textbook. It will be a sterile list of things that have happened to people the readers don’t even know, and, to be blunt, it will bore them. If they don’t know these people why should they care? And if you don’t give them a reason to care, why should they stick around? No matter how well-crafted the history of your place is, we read stories to feel something, not as an intellectual exercise.

It goes back to the old “don’t open by describing the weather, I’m not here to read a weather report, I don’t care about the weather.” Same thing about history and politics and sociology and agriculture and whether the place has wheels or goats or spaceships. Why should I care? What emotional stakes do I have in it? I don’t know anyone in this place.

It’s one thing to show the characters’ relationship to their surroundings, to show them stuck and stumbling and struggling to get in or away — that’s conflict, that pulls you in easily — but it’s entirely another to give the characters the backseat and focus on the place itself first and foremost. It’s hard enough to do that with real world places to which people may already have some connection, it’s nearly impossible to do it with fictional worlds you have to describe from scratch. You’ll have to deal with an incredible amount of dry, unemotional exposition before you even begin to give them the sense that they can navigate the place, and once they can navigate it, why should they if they have no connection to anyone there?

This is not to say some people may not be interested in all this, but there is indeed a reason this doesn’t happen, and you have to be conscious of the fact that if you want to go there you’re giving up all the tricks of the trade to keep the audience breathless and wide-eyed and at the edge of their seat. You’re trying to appeal to intellectual curiosity and there’s no guarantee they will be any more interested in the subject than they were interested in math at school.

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.