NotNaNo '23, Day 15: A Weird Fandom Thought

    All right, so I have some strange fandom stuff I want to say, but it will involve heavy spoilers for Mo Dao Zu Shi...and also for Hamlet, in case anyone happens to stumble across this blog after having arrived from another planet and/or the distant past and therefore doesn't know the plot of Hamlet.  (If any such aliens/reverse-isekai-protags are reading this, give it a read!  Widely regarded as one of the greatest works in Western literature, and also very short, as it's a play and therefore can be performed in about...well, I think the runtime on the movie of the entire play was something like three and a half hours?)

    Anyway, my point is just that I'm going to put my NotNaNo update at the start of the post today instead of the end.  Because spoilers.

    So, in terms of my writing today, it was actually pretty disappointing.  I really wanted to hit 50k today.  It's the 15th, the halfway mark, so I have no excuse not to have written that much already!  But somehow I never seem to manage it quickly in NotNaNo, unlike real NaNo.  🤷🏻‍♀️  But I've been having trouble finding a comfortable sitting position for writing for the past few days (that was one of the contributing factors to my low total the last two days), so I've had to be working at a makeshift standing desk and it's pain-inducing for my back, plus the table shifts sometimes and I have to catch it before my laptop can fall, and generally I have more trouble forcing myself to write in this position, but sitting just wasn't going to happen, so combined with a really unpleasant next scene, it was just a "yeah, no" situation.

    Total words in the work:  298,674

    Words written today:  3,660

    Words written in November to date:  48,674

    Pretty version:

    Anyway, now, the other thing I wanted to talk about, which I decided to put after my word count because it gets into MDZS fandom stuff and involves heavy spoilers.

    I think I've figured out a way to do the "read more" line like I used to be able to do on Wordpress, so I'll put that below here...

The problem with being a Plantser

 It's like at this point this thing I'm writing is actively trying to sabotage me.

As it's long (245k and counting) and convoluted, I've had to make mini-outlines drawing the broad strokes story and then others detailing the immediate bits to come.

Where I am now in the story, a war and its immediate aftermath have just ended, and now our heroes have some down time before the work's ultimate foe shows his true colors by trying to...uh, actually I'm still fuzzy on what, exactly, he's going to try to do in the later parts of the story.  He wants to become the next xiandu--translated by Seven Seas Danmei sometimes as "Cultivation Chief" and sometimes "Chief Cultivator" neither of which I'm particularly keen on as terms, hence why I chose to just use "xiandu"--at any cost, but what his methods will be past the current outline phase, I'm not sure.  (But this outline phase will likely last me until December, so... 🤷🏻‍♀️  Future me can worry about it.)  In the current phase, the villain's plans are mostly political in nature.  (Hopefully, they'll remain largely politcal even after, but... 🤷🏻‍♀️)

Anyway, until the villain makes his first move, the work's lead is unaware that anyone is plotting in the shadows...and since fighting to stop someone from seizing power is often a reactive process, particularly in the early stages, that leaves me with holes in the current activities of the work's lead.

The problem is compounded by the fact that this is a work of fan fiction, and the one who's the lead in what I'm writing is not the lead of the original work.  So I have this alarming tendency to gravitate towards the original lead, especially in the outlining process...and especially especially at this particular part in the story, because the original lead is about to set off on a very important sidequest (in RPG terms) that only he can do, while his adoptive brother (the lead of the fanfic) has to stay behind and run the clan.  Having them switch places or having them both go are not possible, but that also means that for a while the original lead has much more to do, plotwise, and that's no good!

I need to figure out what the lead's actual goals are both at this point in the story and overall, only the problem is that I feel like he genuinely hasn't got any goals more complex than the ones I had him outline to a potential new recruit early on in the war:

            “So the question is, what are your goals here, Jiang-zongzhu?”

            “My goals?  I want to avenge my parents and everyone else from my clan—I want to avenge everyone who was killed at Lotus Pier.”

            “And how will you know when you’ve avenged them?”

            “When the Wen Clan is destroyed and Wen Ruohan’s ashes are scattered to the winds, then I’ll know I’ve avenged them,” Jiang Cheng answered firmly.  If it wasn’t for Wen Qing standing right beside him, he would have said considerably more than that, but…

            “A bit much,” the youngest commented.

            “You’d feel the same if our parents had been murdered like that,” the middle one said.  They were brothers, then?

            “What do you plan to do after that?” the eldest asked.

            “After that…?”  The question took Jiang Cheng by surprise.  “Restore Lotus Pier, restore the Jiang Clan, make sure my sister finds a husband who treats her the way she deserves to be treated…”  He shook his head.  “I don’t quite understand why you’re asking.”

            “A man’s goals tell you a lot about the man’s character,” the eldest rogue cultivator said.  “Your goals tell me you’re not the type to plan very far ahead.”

            Jiang Cheng felt his face grow hot as the other two rogue cultivators laughed.

            “But there’s nothing wrong with that!” the eldest added, laughing himself.  “I was no different when I was your age.  And maybe there’s not much point in having far-reaching plans when you’re about to enter into a war.  What good is it having dreams if you end up dying before having a chance to act on them?”

So, yeah.  I mean, that pretty much summed up his goals at the time, and with the war over (and Wen Ruohan suitably killed) those parts of his goals are now achieved.  The only additional goal he's gained has been to see if he can get Wen Qing to marry him (which technically was already his goal then, too, only he couldn't say so with her standing right there (not that he'd have said it even if she wasn't, as he's very reluctant to ever admit what his feelings are (and sometimes that he even has them))) but that's got a long, slow ways to go before there's any action on it.  😅  (I kinda get the feeling from what little I've encountered of the original genre that any romance that gets to the "signed, sealed, delivered" stage before the final confrontation is one that's doomed to a horrible death.  (Though I plan to flout that very thoroughly in this fic with the background relationships...))

Anyway, so the major problem is that where the lead is right now in his own personal story, he's in a stagnant position where the ideal is to reestablish the status quo that his father had lived by (or at least to establish his own status quo in its place) and then work to preserve it.  Which is inherently dull. 😰  So it's like on the current outline, most of what I have for him to do is largely very dull, and/or just reacting to what others are doing.  And that seems like a no-no, especially since during the war he was leading his troops into battle all the time, making this an even more jarring shift.  I mean, I guess I could try to write him having some kind of psychological break because he'd gotten so used to fighting in the war and now that's been taken away from him, but the thing is that he didn't have any problem with it in the original work, in which the war was about twice as long, and even more horrible, and he was just as much in the thick of it, if not even more so.  So it feels out of character to have him be particularly heavily impacted in my thing.

Gnnnnh.

This is very frustrating.

I mean, it's obviously my own fault for a) not realizing just how massive this would end up being and rethinking the whole idea, and b) not planning ahead more carefully regarding the motivations of the lead and especially the antagonist, but...I've been working on it since spring and it's closing in on 250,000 words long, so I feel like I have to see it through or it'll be a total waste of all that time.  More than that, I just plain want to finish it.  I'm just at a little bit of a loss as to how to go about it.

Well, no, that's not strictly true, either.  I could just follow the current outline, virtually ignoring the supposed lead of the fic for most of the next 25k words, but that would produce an end result even more sloppy and disjointed than my usual writing.  And my stuff is bad enough already; I don't want to go out of my way to make it worse!

Honestly, with NaNo coming up (though I'll be doing my usual rebel thing and not actually entering the official NaNoWriMo process), I may mostly take a break from writing between now and November 1st.  Just sit down to work out what the heck I'm gonna do about the whole plot and motivation debacle, then rest my writing brain for a few days.

----------

So, everything above the line, I wrote last night, but couldn't post because getting the long-form quote to work on my phone just wasn't.  Therefore, I put off finishing the post until today, and in my morning bath I came up with a good next scene, which not only addressed the lead's lack of known goals (thus putting him to thinking about them as he moves forward) but also referred back to the scene I was quoting above.  Still doesn't fully answer what his goals are between now and when the antagonist starts making his moves (giving the lead someone to be working against), but at least if he's actively trying to figure out his own goals, that's something for him to do.

Naturally, this is all somewhat hampered by the fact that his goals in the original work at this point in the story pretty much were just "run the clan, restore its reputation, etc."  He's a very dutiful guy, all told, which unfortunately caused a lot of friction between him and the original work's lead, just at the time when he needed support the most. 😭  But that's why this fanfic is changing the course of events, so that I--like the mentally-immature individual that I am--can have a version of events where the characters I like don't die, suffer horrible loss (well, beyond the loss of their parents and so on) and suffer needlessly just because...well, if I try to go into that, it'll take all day.

Anyway, I feel like I've yammered on until I've lost the thread of what I was trying to say (if there ever was such a thread), so I suppose I should stop here...

Random Fanfic Stuff (MDZS/The Untamed)

     Because all I can write right now without my heart freaking out is light fanfic, I've dived back into that, because I hate not writing. 😅 So, I wanted to share a comment I left on the second draft of an already completed fanfic... (because yes, I use the Notes feature on Word in between drafts so I know what to change in the next draft, and sometimes just because)

    Hmm.  Not sure if that's legible without clicking on it.  😓  (It's a moment I'm really fond of, though; I often have difficulty writing anything even remotely romantic, so this sort of flirty stuff feeling even remotely natural is really rare for me.)  The reason for the comment is that I ended up showing my mother a .gif I had downloaded of the two leads from the drama, and she thought they both looked like girls. 😠😡😬  This is the .gif in question:

    Sure, they're both very beautiful, but they're also both very clearly men!  😠

    Anyway, the one I'm currently writing is actually based on the live-action drama The Untamed rather than the original novel, Mo Dao Zu Shi (The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation), because I am a deeply stupid person who commits to the strangest things, so when I initially interpreted my heart palpitations as the "curse" of one of the characters because in the rather dark fic I was then editing for posting on AO3 I had ended up killing him off via a heart attack when he was about my age my reaction to that assumption was to promise him that the next fanfic I wrote would make him the lead instead of the lead's adoptive (and later deeply estranged) brother.  Because of that, I wanted to work with the drama's version of the story because I have a list of characters who have to live if it's going to be a happy, fluffy (well, as close as you can get to fluffy in a story with death and war and zombies) fanfic of the sort I typically write.  And on that list are three characters from the Wen Clan.  In all versions of canon, the bad elements (read: majority) of the Wen Clan attack the lead's home and kill almost everyone there, making the lead and his two adoptive siblings orphans, and giving the adoptive brother in particular an especial hatred of all things Wen.  But in the drama, he already knew two of the three Wens who are on my "they must live" list, and in fact had a fairly adorable crush on one of them.  (Who, btw, is the only one of the three who actually dies in canon.  That novel is really hard on its female cast. 😭)

    Soooo, long story short, because of that, he doesn't quite hate all Wens as much in The Untamed, and is still carrying a bit of a torch for Wen Qing, therefore I could make him the lead and still save them if I used that version of canon.  Which required me to rewatch a hefty chunk of the drama (though I stopped before most of the tragic events, since they were going to be prevented by the alternate storyline of my fanfic and why should I do all that crying for no reason? (plus if I had watched the entire thing I wouldn't have finished it in time to start rereading the novel to celebrate the final volume coming out)) so I actually learned that I had forgotten a few details in the first episode when I wrote in an earlier post that there were some problems regarding the hero's revival.  It turned out that there were a few lines of dialog and voice-over to explain that no one in the household had seen the crazy young man's face as an adult, because he had taken to wearing a mask or heavy make-up ever since he returned home a failure, so that's why no one realized that he was gone and the revived hero with his own face had taken his place.  Not quite as simple to explain and digest as the version in the book, where the hero's soul just takes over the unfortunate young man's vacated body, but perhaps a tiny bit more palatable, and more simply allowing them to keep the same actor throughout the whole show.

    Aaaanyway, I also wanted to share a bit I just wrote from this new fic in the drama's version of canon, because I really liked it.  It goes like this:

Jiang Cheng and a few of the Lans hitched up three of the horses to the wagons, and by the time they were done, Wen Qing was lecturing them for not helping the villagers move their belongings into the wagons.

Why was he being lectured by someone he was doing a favor for?

…and why was he just doing what he was told?

Scowling, Jiang Cheng turned the idea over in his head several times as he was carrying an old woman's belongings to the wagon.  While she usually seemed quite mild in temperament, when she started ordering people around, there was perhaps just a little bit of his mother in the way Wen Qing acted.  Maybe that was why he was simply doing as she told him to.  It was just habit.  It would fade in time as he became more used to his new responsibilities.  But he shouldn't keep on doing this manual labor, especially not on behalf of Wens.

After he set the things in the wagon, Jiang Cheng turned back towards the rest of the village, planning to think up a good reason he could give to stop carrying these villagers' things around.  He found himself facing the old woman from the graveyard, who held the tiny child in her arms.  "Thank you so much for doing this, gongzi," she said, bowing as best she could while burdened by a squirming child.  "But a fine noble like yourself shouldn't have to be working to help common folk like us."

Was she giving him permission to stop?  What kind of insult was that?!  Did he look like a weakling who shirked his responsibilities?  Did she think he was a pampered little peacock?  Those reputations might not have bothered Nie Huaisang and Jin Zixuan, but Jiang Cheng wasn't about to settle for such a meager store of repute!

"The sooner the work is done, the sooner we can be on the road," he muttered, moving around her.

    Or, to put it more succinctly:

Wen-popo accidentally uses Reverse Psychology.

It is super-effective!

    🤣

    (Hmm, I may be too easily amused by my own antics.)

    Trying to work with the drama's canon has proved difficult in terms of physical logistics, I have to say. I'd already consulted several fan-made maps of China so I'd have a rough idea where the various locations from the novel are, right? There's a line in the drama claiming that the two locations furthest from the Wen Clan's home are the closest locations. These are all real places in China, I might add. Why are foreign fans getting the map better than the people in China who made the live-action version did? Mind-boggling.

    Anyway, because I was also going to rewrite the war (because the novel's 2-year-long war became a 4-month-long war in the drama...and the hero who was supposed to have been the biggest terror on the battlefield missed everything but the final battle!) I needed a map I could actually mess around with. So since I had an account on a map-making site (intended mostly for, like, DMs of tabletop RPGs and stuff), I decided to use that to make my own, using the map from the MDZS wiki, since it seemed like the best and most comprehensive. This is what I ended up with:

    It's not done yet, but this is the core map so far, the one I'm using for planning.  (I'm going to go ahead and post the final map when I post the fic to AO3, but in multiple versions, to show the stages of the war as the alliance against the Wen Clan pushes them further and further back.  Hence multiple lines to show the same thing.)  Of course, that volcano is a problem.  The drama went all out in wanting to make sure you knew at a glance who the villains were, so they (as I mentioned in an earlier post) literally went as far as to make the Wen Clan's home base on a cliff above a literal river of lava, in addition to them evidently having told their architects "make sure every detail reflects how maniacally evil I am, or I'll hurl you into the lava!"  I went ahead and looked up volcanoes in China, and none of them are anywhere near Qishan.  😰  I am astonished that they would do something so goofy.  Especially considering all the lava effects had to be expensive!

    Since one of the other maps (which didn't put anything in quite the same place as the wiki one did (none of the maps I found put anything in quite the same place as any other map did)) had literally just stuck the icons for the clans right onto an actual map of modern-day China, thus giving me modern town names for reference, I went to Google Earth and did some rough and tumble estimates of how far places are from each other, so I'd know how long to assign for travel times, yeah?

    Most of the major cities involved are about 450 miles away from each other.  Yiling and Yunmeng are like 170 miles away from each other.

    On seeing that, I begin to understand why this genre tends to have its leads fly everywhere on magic swords.  Going by land would take way too long!! 😲

    Admittedly, the last time I used Google Earth to figure out distances, it was to fine-tune some of the heroes' wanderings in one of my Greek mythology novels, and obviously a huge chunk of China is enormously large compared to about a third (or less!) of Greece.  But my point still stands!  (Especially if you're dealing with a war that suddenly lasts four months instead of two years:  you'd barely have time to get all the troops moved about before it was over!)

IWSG - On Originality

 

    I usually don't use the suggested discussion questions, but this month's is actually tangentially connected to what I already wanted to write about, so I figured may as well do both!  Here's the August 3rd question:

When you set out to write a story, do you try to be more original or do you try to give readers what they want?

    Obviously, this question is intended for people who are already connecting with an audience, so it kind of doesn't apply to me, as the few things I've posted to AO3 and itch.io have minimal presence and very little in the way of an audience.  (What little audience they do have, I'm not sure what they want, other than LBGTQ+ content (primarily in the form of stories featuring m/m romantic relationships), which is pretty much the only common thread running through almost all of my work.)  And yet, in a way it also does apply, in that my most popular game on itch.io (having more than twice as many downloads as the rest of my catalog combined, and almost as many pageviews as the rest of my catalog combined) is so much more popular that it gives an idea of what people on itch.io really want out of me.  Or perhaps simply "what they want, period."

    Unfortunately, that's something I'm not prepared to give them, because that game (which I wrote and coded in about two and a half weeks for Yandere Jam (if you're not familiar with the term "yandere" you might be happier that way)) is marked as NSFW.  Which it kind of is and kind of isn't.  There's no nudity (well, none beyond a very tame monster sprite with partially exposed, non-nippled breasts) and what little sexual content it has is text-only, very brief and lacks any descriptive details.  On the other hand, it contains a character who derives a sexual thrill from watching a handsome man die horribly over and over again, so it's not so much Not Safe For Work as absolutely inappropriate for people under 18 years of age.  (Or, really, under any age.  Honestly, I was terrified to release it, because it's so unlike me and so twisted, even though it's actually quite tame for what it is.)  Based on the number of followers I've gotten since its release (many of them starting to follow me on days when no other game got any pageviews), it's obvious that there are people on itch.io who would like to see me write more games like it.  But that's just not going to happen.  I don't want to become a NSFW game developer (I'd need someone else to write the NSFW parts, among many other reasons!), and I'm certainly not releasing anything else so demented.  I actually rather wish itch.io would let us "orphan" games the way AO3 lets us "orphan" works we've published there, so they can still be out there for people to interact with, but without the works generating unrealistic expectations regarding future works.

    Hmm, rereading the question, I feel like I kind of misinterpreted it.

    *cough*

    Right, so the actual question was more along the lines of "do you follow the trends or do your own thing?" wasn't it?

    Yes, I knew that all along!  Of course I did!

    I was just testing you.

    Really.

    *ahem*

    I tend to just do my own thing, and if that happens to line up with something that readers actually want, that's great, but I don't go chasing after trends.  Or even keep up with what's currently popular, for that matter.  *cough*  I have a somewhat isolationist lifestyle, I guess you could say.

    I would like to think that I manage to be somewhat original from time to time, though.

    I hope.

    That being said, it's my lack of originality in certain regards that I wanted to post about in the first place.  There's a novel I wrote a few years back that's currently on its second major draft.  It still needs a lot of work before it's ready for anyone else to see it, but one of the things I'm wondering about is if I need to start over on a lot of its world-building.  (Because I do want to release it eventually, in some form or another!)

    As it stands, each nation in the novel's world is based directly on a real world culture from past eras, all of them then technologically advanced to a roughly mid-19th century level.  My original plan was to establish in one of the later books in the series (not sure how many there are going to be, probably between 5 and 7) that the elf-like species that had originally been the dominant one on the planet had abducted humans from all those different actual cultures to act as slave labor.  Due to various factors (mostly having to do with how the elf-like species ran the planet before the humans successfully revolted against them) the different groups maintained a large part of their national culture, language, etc., though many things also changed, of course, including the names they applied to their cultures, and by the time of the novels, none of them have any idea that they used to live on another planet.  I'm now thinking that's way too much convoluted backstory to have to insert in a late section of the series, and I should probably just ditch that part, but since I have so many other question marks about the later parts of the series, that's not my big concern at the moment.

    What I'm really worried about is how for some reason I thought it was a good idea to have some of the cultures also have some partial parallel history to their Earth counterpart.  So, for example, the country inspired by Ancient Rome had its own Hadrian and Antinoos tragedy, the country based on France had its own revolution complete with a lot of heads being chopped off, the country based on Ancient Egypt had its own Akhenaten religious upheaval, and originally I was going to have the country based on Japan have its own Meiji Restoration, but that one I already scrapped and turned into more of a reverse Meiji Restoration.

    I'm not too concerned about the Hadrian and Antinoos one, since the basic idea--powerful ruler falls to pieces when his boyfriend suddenly dies--is not all that complex or unique, and I had a lot of differences both pre- and post- the boyfriend's death.  (Naturally, they don't have those names, of course.  But the Antinoos-analog is from the Ancient Greece-inspired country.)  The tragedy (which is very recent to the events of the book, as one of the leads was in fact a former schoolmate of the Antinoos-analog) plays a pretty heavy part in the cultural landscape of the book, so it's good that I'm okay with that one, 'cause I absolutely cannot remove it without reworking a lot of stuff I really like.

    The Akhenaten one is a bit more questionable, but I'd prefer being able to keep it, because mine had the twist that it was successful, unlike the real Akhenaten's restructuring of his country's religion.  Thus, in my novel, the Egypt-analog is the only monotheistic nation in the world.  (With one exception, the elf-like race had purposefully avoided abducting people who were from monotheistic cultures, in part because they couldn't make their slaves accept them as new gods if the slaves only had one god.  Although the main off-the-page reason was that one of the things I didn't want to have in this fictional world was any religion that seeks converts, because...well, for a lot of reasons.)  Still, maybe it's inappropriate?

    In any case, it's the revolution in the France-like country that I'm really worried about, to be honest.  I mean, it does have a lot of differences, first and foremost being that in the novel the queen and her children survive, because a secret society replaced them with body doubles before they could be executed by the revolutionaries.  (They tried to save the king as well, but he had been kept in a different prison under tighter security, so they failed.)  Said secret society, of course, being the real reason for the revolution, as both it and every villain in the entire world are after the pieces of an ancient magical device (which they see as a super-weapon though its purposes are not military), and one of the people after the pieces knew that the royal family had one, and so they fomented the revolution in the hopes of getting their hands on the piece in the ensuing chaos, but the secret society managed to rescue the queen (one of the society's leaders) and her children, along with their piece of the thingy.  (The revolution was likewise very recent in the book's timeline, and a major part of the plot of book two is going to be the heroes having to ferry the queen and her children to safety with her brother, the king of the Germany/Scandinavia-inspired country.)

    Ultimately, maybe the problem isn't the revolution, but the fact that I put it in a France-like country?  I had all the countries basically positioned to roughly line up with the locations of their real life counterparts, but if I shifted them around, maybe that would fix (or at least vastly improve) things?

    Like, if I deleted the France-like country altogether (Europe is unfortunately over-represented as it stands, so not much loss there) and moved the China-like country over where the France-like country was, then the revolution in question could have been in the China-like country, which would have made it all the more shocking to its contemporaries.  And then I could make use of all that I've learned about Chinese culture lately.  (Plus I could introduce a new character for book two who's inspired by Wei Wuxian! 💗 Not that I could do him justice, but...a girl can dream!)

    Hmm.

    Y'know, I'm feeling pretty good about that idea.

    Although I might need to keep the "abducted Earthlings" part if I'm going to have an England-analog (or rather an island with a Celtic-inspired culture) off the coast of a China-analog, since in a real world neighboring polities tend to have a lot in common, both linguistically and culturally.  But since I've already set up the elf-like race and the fact that they used to tyrannize the humans, that's not too much...hopefully...

    LOL, sorry for turning this into basically "me talking to myself in public" about a planned re-write for a novel that who knows when the heck I'll get to it (I'm still in the middle of rewriting and releasing an entire series of novels, and absolutely should not deal with this single novel (that is intended to be the first in a series) until I've finished dealing with the series which is already partially released and has a complete set of first drafts already written, plus I'm committed to writing a visual novel for a friend before working on my own projects anyway) but I think this has proven very useful to me.  :)

Some Thoughts on Ancient Burial Practices

             So, lately (when I’m not working on my visual novel), I’ve been reading a book about the royal tombs at Ur.  Specifically, it’s an out-of-print book I found at the antique mall near my house; the book was the one that was published to accompany the national tour of the artifacts from said tombs when their home museum was being renovated about twenty years ago now.  (Ugh, I feel old.  I remember being awed by the artifacts when that tour came to town here…after I had moved back home after dropping out of my first attempt at getting a Master’s Degree.)

            Anyway, while the book has me pondering a lot of different things—mostly regarding the appropriateness (or rather lack thereof) of a bunch of European and American archaeologists going around digging up everyone else’s ancient kings and then toting (many/most of) the grave goods back home (as Hergé pointed out in The Seven Crystal Balls, how would the people of Europe feel if a bunch of Egyptians came and started digging up all their kings?), also wondering just what those ancient dead would actually think about the matter if you could travel back in time and tell them what would happen to their graves a few thousand years later—what I just read last night has put me on a more precise and yet also highly speculative train of thought.

            Specifically, what I read late last night was about Ur’s excavator, Sir Laurence Woolley, trying rather futilely to explain why one of the “Royal Tombs” had more than seventy other bodies in it, apparently the bodies of retainers sacrificed at the time of the king’s burial.  This was accompanied by various more modern scholars trying to explain it—with a four page sub-essay on some literary examples from recovered Mesopotamian texts (a sub-essay that was not marked out in any way as different from the rest of the text, so it looked like a page was simply deleted from the file pre-printing)—and ultimately the only answer anyone could come up with was “well, we don’t really know why so many people were sacrificed, but it’s not like other cultures didn’t do the same thing, even if 70+ is a lot more than the usual number.

            It got me to thinking, though, about just how such a practice could have gotten started in the first place.  Because, if you think about it, funerary human sacrifice is typically found in the cultures whose technological level is still pretty low.  They’re stratified—obviously!—and certainly highly sedentary and agrarian, but it’s not the sort of thing you normally find in a culture that has, say, developed the steam engine.  The kinds of cultures that usually practiced funerary human sacrifice were typically also cultures where you would expect human life would be pretty highly valued, since life was so hard; why throw away a strong, healthy young person who could help the civilization survive?  (It would be another matter entirely if the extra bodies in these tombs typically belonged to old, sickly people!)  Now, yes, of course they’re more valuable as sacrifices for exactly that reason, because of their value to the society, and yet if you think about the typical items buried with regal dead, they’re things with artificial value, rather than true value.  All the gorgeous gold jewelry in the world has very little true value in a survival sense:  its value is based entirely on aesthetic reasons, nothing utilitarian.  (And, now, educational value when the jewelry in question is ancient, of course.  But that’s our civilization, not theirs.)  Sure, the dead were often buried with weapons, but they were often elaborate ones that were decorative more than functional.  It’s not a perfect point for a great many reasons (even when you only look at cultures and funerary human sacrifices that fit my basic point) but I hope the core of my logic at least makes sense:  I’m more trying to set up the reason that the entire practice, world-wide, feels like it’s a bit off and could do with some theoretical explanations that come from outside the box.

            Most of the modern scholars trying to explain the phenomenon, in terms of the particular examples at Ur, were really bogged down in typical archaeological theory.  One even structured it as a change in the nature of kingship, etc.  The kinds of reasons that are only applied by scholars at great remove from the subject in question.

            I want to look at the notion from a more human, more “in-world” view, even if it’s also far more speculative and entirely unscholarly.  Though what I’m about to go into is purely in the case of those cultures that didn’t also practice non­-funerary human sacrifice:  when human sacrifice is already part of the culture’s everyday operating parameters, applying it in a funerary context is going to seem far more normal.  (And it is, of course, extremely possible that some of these ancient cultures did, in fact, practice non-funerary human sacrifice, but only in a way that left no material traces, or at least none that archaeologists have so far discovered.  Or that they practiced such sacrifice at a time in their even more remote past, and it was that which shaped the funerary version, which remained part of the culture long after the non-funerary version ceased.)

            So the question is, what would make a culture decide to kill the healthy in order to bury them with the dead?

            The typical scholarly answer is usually “so that they may attend on the deceased in death as they did in life” in one form or another.  The form of service varies—household servants, concubines, guards, etc.—but that’s the basic motivation that’s usually used as an explanation for the sacrificial practice.

            And I’m not saying it’s wrong.  It’s probably right…but that’s after the practice was established.  How did the practice get started?

            Like so many questions, it’s one that can’t be answered (without a time machine).  But I feel like I’ve hit on some possible explanations.

            Take a culture where the king (or other powerful/wealthy male) was often buried with his concubines, lesser wives, maybe even his primary wife.  How did that get started?

            There are a couple of possible explanations, or rather two major pools from which many possible explanations can be derived.  The most charitable one would be to assume that the first king (or whatever) who was buried with one or more of his concubines/wives/etc. was buried with concubines/wives/etc. who had loved him so much they took their own lives in mourning at his death; their suicides might have been covered up and called a sacrifice, particularly if suicide was viewed as shameful for the culture.  A less charitable (and more likely, in my opinion) explanation would be along these lines:  king (or whatever) dies without issue, but a handful of concubines/wives, with whom he was known to have been intimate not long before he died.  His successor does not feel secure in his position, and worries that if one of the dead man’s concubines/wives turns out to be pregnant, then the baby would be a threat to his position.  The solution?  Sacrifice all the concubines/wives before they have time to figure out if they’re pregnant, and then the dead man’s potential children die with him, and the successor’s position is secure (at least from that particular threat).

            How about a culture where the king (etc.) is buried with his household staff.  What might explain that?

            There are a lot of possible explanations for the start of that one.  Maybe he was assassinated, and his household staff needed to be silenced quickly lest news get out…or the assassin-turned-heir be fingered as the responsible party.  Or maybe he was assassinated and it seemed to be an inside job, but no one was quite sure which member of the household staff was responsible.  Or maybe he died of a particularly nasty illness and it was worried that it might be a plague (or it just plain was a plague) and his household staff was judged likely to be contaminated—or maybe they were in fact visibly suffering the same illness—and needed to be put to death to keep the disease from spreading.

            And one where the king was buried with some of his soldiers?

            The easiest explanation is that the soldiers in question were deemed too loyal to the old king, and likely to turn on the new king, particularly if the new king was not the old king’s son.  Or maybe the old king died in battle, and the soldiers in question were those who failed to save him (though depending on the culture, it might seem like rewarding them for their failure).  The assassination possibilities from the household staff bit above could also easily apply here, too.

            Of course, all of these describe individual incidents, not an entire cultural tradition.

            But see, that’s the kicker.  All of these also involve secrecy, right?  The new king doesn’t want anyone knowing he’s killing the old king’s concubines in fear that they might be pregnant, so he says he’s “sacrificing them so they can continue to serve his late majesty in the next world” or whatnot.  So what happens when he dies?  His own heirs, remembering what he had done for the previous king’s funeral, decide they should emulate it, because surely he knew what he was doing, since he was king and all.  Then the heirs’ heirs do the same thing, and it becomes tradition, accepted into the culture’s basic beliefs.

 

            Obviously, I’m not saying “yes, this is what happened!”

            I’m saying “this makes sense to me as how this sort of thing may have gotten started.”

            I could be so totally wrong that no civilization ever went through any of these steps.  Or maybe it happened once or twice, but most of them came to their funerary human sacrifice in radically different ways.  (Maybe those cultures originally had non-funerary human sacrifice practices that we just don’t know about because they were just too old.)

            But I thought it was an interesting “what-if” kind of theory.

            Also the kind of thing I might use in some piece of fiction at some point.  If I ever have a situation where it might apply.  (Probably more as world-building than as a direct incident in a story...or maybe not.  Who knows?)

            And I thought I’d post it to the blog because…hey, I need to start posting things that aren’t just the monthly Insecure Writers’ Support Group stuff, right?