I realized, thinking about things that I like, that many of my favorites are things that are often considered excessively mainstream, derided as shallow or commonplace. I like Halo and Naruto better than (name your "smart" SF game) or Death Note. I like Lord of the Rings, Leiber, and even D&D tie-ins (if they don't suck) better than A Song of Ice and Fire.
But why? I actually am the biggest snob in the world, I hate anything I perceive as pandering. So why do I prefer a game primarily associated with frat boys to one that's supposed to be all epic and deep and crap?
There are two things. The first is, Halo has depths aplenty, if you care to look; it can be enjoyed on any level from "feel like shootin' somethin'" to "if there were a conlang for the Elites (and just why isn't there, Bungie?!) I would learn it". Naruto, as I've mentioned before, is the only recent work that holds together, almost completely, on the philosophical level. Tolkien...doesn't count, if you don't like Tolkien you mean you don't like fantasy. But Leiber pretty much did low fantasy as well as it can be done, noir fantasy if you will. D&D tie-in novels are no less shallow/stupid/anachronistic than non-tie-ins, but the setting is always deeper, 'cause, y' know, it's had thousands of dollars invested in deepening it.
Things that are only concerned to convey an enjoyable story are almost always extremely deep (if they don't cut too many corners along the way), simply by trying to be interesting. Works made primarily for enjoyment, are more enjoyable; I'm sorry if that's confusing. If you wish to deny that paintings made to beautify some villa or sculptures made to beautify a church are better than those made to "deconstruct" some "bourgeois" principle, all I can say is, "I'm very interested in the access/assistance software you must be using, because it has become evident that you are blind." Johnson was wrong about the only good things being written for gain, but the only good art is that concerned with Beauty first, and the True and the Good second—especially since the primary Good of art is beauty.
But my second reason is my main one. All those things that claim they don't pander, the things that are all edgy and "smart" and subversive? They lie. They do pander. But not to the people. They pander to an elite. Far worse than attempting to please the groundlings, they mock the groundlings, for the applause of the elite. This hurts art, because the current elite likes to think of itself as worldly and smart, able to "deconstruct" principles. Bull. They're not deconstructing their own principles, they're just vilifying the "Other" (which is an overused expression, but of use here). If you question their values—if you deny that women and men should have identical roles in a culture, for instance—suddenly it's 1840, and you just spat a chaw of tobacco on the preacher-man's shoes, coming out of a dance at a honky-tonk with a floozy on your arm. A Puritan is still a Puritan even if you change his rules; the Prohibitionists were the great-grandchildren of a bunch of Scottish brewers.
There are two elements of this (this is factor 2-a of my point). First is easy; writing to an ideological audience cheapens work. That message you should've sent by Western Union still charges by the word in the courier you're using, dude, and you could've spent that money better. I am not saying art cannot have messages—several of my favorite stories are just philosophical debates punctuated by swordfights—but the moment your story itself is distorted for the sake of some "point" you have joined the company of Jack Chick and Leni Riefenstahl.
The other element (2-b), related to the previous, is that "smart" and "edgy" really means "pointlessly sordid". It's not mature, and it's not realistic; it's puerile. Apparently "the less a story resembles Great Green Gobs of Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts, the more mature it is" was actually counterintuitive to some people? There's a boatload more maturity in old horror movies than in the modern crop, whether it be the crappy slasher films or the crappy torture porn or the crappy zombie movies. I know, the "crappy" is redundant. Our whole political life is dedicated to removing instances of such things from the real world (well, 'cept for zombies)—it's really always been the purpose of politics, even when we used similar things to achieve it. But why make fictional instances of such things? Is it some weird romanticism, some evil mirror-Quixote (beardless?) that's nostalgic for Elizabeth Bathory and Giles de Rais? No, probably not; it's really, probably, just arrested development, the twelve-year-old who thinks any game not rated M is beneath him and thinks sneaking peaks at the softcore Showtime puts on at 1 AM makes him adult.
These two often intersect, though. Fantasy and science fiction, especially, love to wallow in the sordid and depraved as a part of their "deconstructing"...something. Feminist writers are really bad for this, of course (men = evil, pick a flavor), but so are others. It's a commonplace for every noble in a fantasy setting, except the ones allied with the protagonists and sometimes not even then, to behave like Giles de Rais or at least Foulque le Nerra. Guess what? Those guys were unusual. There's a meaning to the expression "shocked the conscience of their day", and those guys did it. There wasn't a legal infrastructure to stop Foulque, but Giles was hanged. And the infrastructure that made it possible to hang Giles grew, in the four centuries between him and Foulque, from the two institutions that are always vilified, usually in cowardly effigy, in fantasy stories. The sources of law and order, the things that made justice possible whenever they were strong, were the King and the Church. But the Lysenkoism that passes for history in the modern world won't admit that—it undercuts our republican absolutism to point out that the only thing that made life livable in another era, was a strong monarchy with an established church. And so it's hushed up, just like the fact the Cuban "Revolution" was a bunch of upper middle and lower upper-class professionals running roughshod over the peasantry.
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