Anime’s Secret Sauce

UPDATE: Misha Burnett responds.

I would always watch anime and think, “I can’t draw, but I could sling words like anyone’s business.” Then I would sit down and write a story, but I would always get the feeling that something was missing. Why didn’t my work have the spark that my favorite animated stories had? Was it because of visuals? Was it because I wasn’t good enough?

No. It was because I didn’t embrace the mythic.

Twitter friend Corey McCleery points out how modern stories often lack true magic:

Alrighty folks, it’s time for another thread. On magic, and, to a lesser extent, magicians and wizards, in fantasy.

This is what I think about while hitting the gym.

So, let’s dive in.

There’s something about older fantasy of all subgenres (epic fantasy, sword and sorcery, etc.) that seems to be missing in modern literature.

Magic.

And I don’t mean throwing about fireballs or conjuring up specters from the vasty deep. I speak of something more subtle.

It’s a rather indescribable quality, but it permeates the entirety of the works, even if a wizard or enchantress never shows up in the pages. It’s a richness, a whiff of the unearthly that permeates everything. Magic is the best word to describe it.

Modern works don’t have it. They’re fun, but they don’t have the same feel as Lord of the Rings, or Conan, or the Dying Earth, or even parts of Nine Princes in Amber, let alone someone like Dunsany.

I think it comes from the viewpoint being written.

Modern fantasy writers tend to, with treatment (prose, style, description, plot) or theme, focus on de-mythologizing. Sometimes it’s intentional (I’ve had discussions about how Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles do this) and sometimes it just shows a lack of craft.

Worldbuilding consistency is important, yes, but many of the rules developed should stay behind the scenes. It is also a difficult thing to master, showing the unearthly in that which is explicitly unearthly, much less showing the unearthly in everything.

Craft and style are also, in this day and age, a difficult thing to develop. Everything is in, nothing is bad writing unless it is. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is toxic to someone who wants to genuinely increase his skill. No standard for performance, you see.

So some authors just can’t handle the unearthly. Maybe they came up with a cool naturalistic explanation for magic. Maybe they just can’t write a deity showing up with the proper gravitas. That’s unintentional.

It’s the intentional stuff I’m not a fan of.

At its least offensive, de-mythologizing turns into what I’m now calling the Scooby Doo Effect. The strange and unearthly has a COMPLETELY UNDERSTANDABLE explanation. It robs the mystery from magic (in this case, magic is referring to fireball throwing stuff) for example.

At its worst, de-mythologizing becomes snobbish and condescending. Here the target is usually one of two things: religion or tradition. It either ridicules folks for believing or participating in them or accuses them of trying to hoodwink and deceive others.

But enough of this modern age. How is the older stuff different? Simple.

It doesn’t de-mythologize. It mythologizes.

It’s to varying degrees, of course, but it brings a gravitas back. And of course it varies, as some authors mythologize and de-mythologize simultaneously.

Robert Jordan does a bit of both, though he falls on the mythic side moreso. His magic is a little too divorced from the mystic, but he is hardly the worst offender, and it is nitpicks. Now…the Forsaken, he goes straight into myth.

Thirteen madly powerful sorcerers serving the Dark One, each with a specialized set of horrors. One brewed monstrous armies, one mind-controlled the aristocrats of entire countries, others leading armies with seemingly invincible stratagems.

To de-mythologize such things… it is what all de-mythologizing does. It reduces them. Jordan plays them straight. It stands out for that fact, and they’re so memorable that it’s been four years at least and I can name twelve of the thirteen and describe all of them.

And friend of the blog Alexander Hellene points out that too often, modern storytellers reject myth in an attempt to look enlightened:

The mythic, the sense of wonder, is important in a genre called “fantasy.” The modern trend towards “deconstructing” and “demythologizing” things that humans have been participating in for millennia is ugly and deliberate. “Rationality!” proponents exclaim. “Skepticism!” “An end to superstition!”

“Progress!”

It’s anti-human, and it’s a trope I’m right about sick to death of.

Humans need myth. Myth speaks to the unknowable in a way that all the academic theories that are supposed to perfectly explain the world do not. Because there are some things humans will never know. What arrogance to think we’ll ever be able to know everything.

Another blogger, Emperor Ponders, develops this idea further, blaming the de-mythologization of magic on Dungeons & Dragons.

What does all of this have to do with anime?

Everything.

A lot of the most popular anime embrace the mythic. Dragonball Z is all about mysterious, otherworldly powers — gods, demons, aliens — battling it out for the fate of the universe with a force that increases due to the user’s own will. Inuyasha revels in its embrace of demon slaying and magic shard collecting, with no one trying to “explain” either. Even My Hero Academia, which has a strongly scientific mindset due to its Western superhero inspiration, focuses more on big philosophical questions of right and wrong, of courage and cowardice, of power and how best to wield it.

What they don’t do is reduce everything to the level of the everyday.

When you de-mythologize, the only conflicts you can truly have are political ones — this group wants to take over this block, that group is gathering supporters, we need to arm up to beat Lord Whatsit’s militia, etc. Deconstruction takes the grand and the magnificent and reduces it to the petty and small, because humans are petty and small in this view. The highest good becomes amassing more wealth or controlling more people. Evil is reduced to a medical problem, little different from a broken leg or brain damage. All grand philosophical questions can be resolved with the right blend of carrots and sticks.

This isn’t exclusive to progressives and SJWs, either — most people who grow up in developed countries embrace the scientific materialist worldview as the proper way to perceive all of existence. Thus when they sit down to write their stories, the magic must always be systematized and explained. It ceases to be magic; instead, it becomes sufficiently advanced technology. Anything else feels odd, like a rule of existence is being violated. Anything else feels silly and childish. Anything else feels illogical.

As MHA shows, the scientific worldview works when used in its proper context. But when used for the central questions of what is good and right, it can only fail, for it reduces all humanity to germs fighting over a fraction of a dot.

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The magic in Shining Tomorrow is deliberately non-systematic because magic is not science. Back the Indiegogo right now!