Writer Wander 034 - Adventuring Parties

What makes adventuring parties so iconic? Join Wander at Dulles International Airport and find out why!

Transcript

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Radwander thirty-four, Adventuring Parties. As with the recording of this episode, I find myself in the Dulles International Airport in Washington, DC. The fabled journey to Austria that I've been teasing through some of the prior episodes of this show has finally taken place. And I currently find myself in the process of getting there, so I'm like in this weird purgatorial state in which I'm not in my destination, but I'm making swift progress towards it. And what has happened up until now is that uh I had a very comfortable flight initially, or relatively speaking. I was gonna take a a flight to this airport from my original location, and from there I was gonna take another flight that would have been around like 5 30 or something, and it would have meant that I would have originally arrived in Vienna at 8 a.m. However, things happened and the flight got cancelled, and um I'm still going to Vienna, but I was rebooked into another flight, so instead of going directly to Vienna after Washington DC, I'm gonna go to London for a total of roughly I think I want to say like an hour. I'm gonna be in London for an hour, and then I'm gonna take another another plane, and that's gonna take me to Vienna, and um by then I'll show up at Vienna at around like 4 p.m. It's not not exactly ideal, still kind of feel like I missed out on a day, but you know what, it's fine. It's two weeks. I explicitly took out a lot of time with the intention about not having to stress out about this stuff, and this is just the nature of really anything that's worth doing. You have to adapt to circumstances that change as you partake in them. No situation ever, or very rarely does a situation ever manifest in the exact way that you planned it to, there will always be unforeseen circumstances, and the spice of life comes from being able to you know put yourself in a position where you can not only take advantage of those little hiccups along the way, but learn to enjoy them and to find happiness in them. And speaking of hiccups, uh I bought a new phone for this trip, and so I'm hoping that uh the audio, despite the fact that I'm I'm speaking very low to not draw attention to myself, and I'm currently standing in the airport lobby waiting for my flight. Um but I'm hoping that this uh this new microphone is able to capture the audio much neater, and even better news, I have a professional microphone on the way from Amazon by the time I return home. So every episode from then on, whenever that point happens, and every episode is going to be of hopefully much higher quality in terms of audio. But I was reminiscing this morning about a feeling that I get whenever I arrive at airports. I believe that in a world that often feels like it's lacking in magic, that often feels like it's deeply secularized, deeply materialized, when you step into a place like an airport, it sort of gives a magic to your steps, right? And I know there's a problem with that. I know that you know a lot of people idolize travel and they treat it like this almost like religious experience. And I think that that's problematic for a lot of reasons because I feel that there's a subset of people that genuinely believe that the only way to have spiritual experiences is to travel, and that's uh that that is a problem. That that's not that's not something um that's not something that I want to encourage in any sense, but it is true that the prospect of traveling, of going on a journey, these are things that speak to the souls, even of people who who in normal circumstances would struggle to recognize the importance of the spiritual, of the internal world, of the of the soul. There's something about that that just comes to me. And one of the feelings that I had, and I've been shopping it around a few people um of late, it's that um whenever I'm in an airport, I feel like I'm a protagonist, and you know, it's one of those things where I don't think I've ever heard anyone else say it, but I feel that you know, deep down there's probably a lot of people who feel the same way, who probably understand intuitively what I'm what I'm talking about when I'm say that, you know. I think I talked about a lot about this kind of concept of you know, images or certain turns of phrases that evoke a very specific specific feeling, despite not necessarily being originally structured around that that feeling. I think it was the sensitive young man episode. So if you're interested in uh in that, then I I recommend you to listen to that episode. But I think with travel it's a very similar set of circumstances, and particularly when it comes to traveling, when it comes to being in an airport, this feeling that it elevates you. I obviously start thinking about fantasy novels as I typically do because in case you you were somewhat not not aware of this, despite the fact that for the last uh 33 episodes it's always been mentioned in some form or capacity. Um, the whole gist of this novel, of this podcast, is that I am writing a novel and I'm chronicling the events of my life, the events surrounding my life while I am in the process of writing this novel. That is why Rider Wander is the writing podcast that's not about writing. Because it's it's a podcast in which I am writing and I'm talking about writing, but I'm not talking shop about writing, if that makes any sense. And obviously, since I always bring things back to the fantasy novels I enjoy reading and writing, one of the most essential elements of fantasy novels in general, of the fantasy genre, probably a pinnacle of it, and it's it's a trope that I feel has vanished in a lot of like the dark fantasy that has come out, but it's experiencing a bit of a resurgence in the world of indie fiction, but it's the trope of the adventuring party. The adventuring party. It is it is one of those things that feels absolutely essential to this genre. This genre would not be the same if it wasn't for all of the classic adventure fiction, adventure storytelling that came about in its inception, be it the classic adventuring party, such as the Fellowship with the Ring, which I think that the main core of this particular trop is this idea that you will bring forth together multiple people from different walks of life that find themselves on a given purpose, on a given journey to reach a certain end or goal, right? And when we think of that, there's something magical to that because on the surface in our lives, based on that description, you would think that there are a lot of equivalent circumstances to that, but when you really think about it, there's really not that many. So, let me give you some examples of what I might mean. Think about school. When you go to school, sure, in theory, you are put in a place with people from various walks of life, though that may or may not be true because depending on where you went to school, you uh almost certainly depending on where you went to school, um, you you probably are surrounded by a predominant group of people who come from a specific um background. But more so than even that, you know, if we if we if you get rid of that aspect, right? If you get rid of that aspect, what you find is that yes, in school you are brought together with multiple people from different walks of life. But w what ends up happening there is that you are brought together with these people, but it's not really something you chose to be involved in, right? You were going to school since you were a kid, your parents voiced it upon you, you didn't have much say in the matter. So that's kind of where like the magic dies. So we're where like the analogy between like an adventuring party and the people you met at school kind of falls apart because there's that element that you know fundamentally that there's just there isn't really that unity of will aside from the fact that you're being forced to do something. And I guess that in theory in theory, there are some adventuring parties in fiction in which most of the characters had the quest foisted upon them. And you know, ignoring the fact that I feel that usually those groups are the ones that are that they're the hardest to root for, and that they're the more the more you know the ones that are usually often the poorly written ones that are not motivated, but usually even in those cases, um, these characters eventually come to understand the importance of the purpose that they're trying to accomplish, and they they do get convinced. Then you pass on to the other example, which is work, and again, I guess here it's a little better. Technically, you have a little more agency about the places in which you go to work, but the thing about that is that with work, again, you know, most people aren't really working in something because they're passionate about it, they're not working in something because they want to be there. Most people they just want a paycheck and they want a job that gets out of their hair and gives them enough money to live comfortably, right? And so, again, you have the circumstance in which people from different walks of life are brought together, and in work it's most definitely often the case. Um, because by that point you are adults, and the people there have some will in choosing that particular job, but it's still not a perfect will because you know, obviously, more often than not, if they had another choice, they'd probably go for that instead. And I guess the the potential outcome of like where this like you know adventuring group dynamic could come about, and I think technically the closest one is your your friend group, right? Because again, it can't be family, it can't be family, because the if it was family, then you use that aspect of people from different walks of life coming together to accomplish a single goal, because the family they all come from a very specific walk of life, you know, that's more like a clan dynamic than an adventuring party dynamic. But with your friends, that's when things, that's when the magic starts happening. Because with your friends, you know, aside from just people you met in school or work, with your friends, these are people that you're only associated with through choices of your own. People who, right, if you if you're an adult, you will probably be friends with other adults that continue to make the free choice to to be involved with you. And since your capacity to make friends is to some degree um independent from your the particular environment or circumstances in which you find yourself in, though it is obviously heavily influenced, um, there's a lot more diverse range of backgrounds that people can come to. So the friend group is the closest thing to an adventuring party in real life. But where does that fall apart? That falls apart because I feel that this is almost certainly the true the truth thing. You see this in a lot of memes, that friend groups, even though yes, you have people from multiple walks of life that freely choose to associate with one another, over time they lose that that sense of forward cohesion, that sense of union of wills, because at one point everyone is like out doing their own thing, like you know, at this point you guys have all seen the memes of like oh me and my you know my friends from my 20s engaging in their own time skip arcs and like doing their own thing. You know, most friend groups naturally like uh they split apart, everyone has their own objectives, their own particular dreams, and so it's very hard to fulfill you know this deep-rooted human desire that it's almost fantastical when you think about it, because I don't think there's ever been a point in human history, maybe with some exceptions, in which you have people who willingly choose to associate with each other from diverse walks of life, who all come together for the purpose of accomplishing a specific objective. Usually either one or two of those elements are missing from the equation which in part this desire that we want to fulfill, this desire that we want to create an adventuring party of of our own. The main advantage is that when we travel, the reason we uh this is where I'm gonna connect to the travel, when we travel when we go to distant lands, and oftentimes that we do it with our friends, it gets rid of that limiting factor in friendship where at least for a small period of time, you and your friends no longer have different goals. You and your friends are united in a single purpose, on a single quest, on a single adventure to accomplish a particular goal. And in that sense, you temporarily become an an adventuring party, right? And that's also what I like about um you know hostels in general. When you know, when you show up at a hostel, again, you know, you're you're all there because of your own volition, because you chose to be there, but you're people from completely different walks of of life, and you can you know, you can stumble into people and just form brief connections on the road to accomplish certain aims. And you might never see those people again, but for that particular moment in time, for that particular purpose, you were able to adventure together, to to do things together. And in that sense, it is also quite similar to an adventuring party where if you think about it in like most fantasy stories, like once the main adventure is over, the adventuring party disbands because they complete they completed their purpose. They did the thing that they set out to do. You know, eventually the fellowship with the ring um uh they break apart after the first uh novel. But in a broader sense, where they where they really break apart is when the when the big bad is defeated, when the the ring is destroyed, and now the comrades are going back to their homes, some of them are hanging out together still, but others um are never to be seen by each other again. And that's just part of it. It's it it is the adventuring party kind of like it sort of serves as a trope that crystallizes the importance of recognizing moments in our lives in which our roads and our paths crossed with people which we might not necessarily have expected them to cross with, right? I remember when I was in school, in my last year of school, and they had this class that was just like about general general life lessons, and one of the things that I remember from that class, which is one of the most important lessons I think I've ever had anyone tell me, was that there, you know, broadly speaking, there's two types of friends, right? There are friends of the heart, and there are friends of the road. What's the difference? Friends of the heart are those people that are always with you, those friends that will always be beside you, that you you will die still being friends with that person, and then you will have friends of the road. There'll be people that maybe during a certain phase of your life you were very close to them, but you know, life changes, circumstances change, definitions change, objectives develop, and now you are no longer close to those people. You are you're walking away from them. And the most important lesson from that is that neither of those are bad. Both of those categories are good. It's just that they serve a different purpose. The Friends of the Road, you know, I remember I had I had a conversation with uh, you know, with an old friend of mine, um, well, acquaintance, more to say, because she was kind of a nutcase. But uh she was always, you know, she had trouble making friends, and she was always whining about the fact that, oh man, um you know, I you know, I want all of my friendships to be deep and and profound. And I feel that a lot of people who have trouble socializing, a lot of introverts, a lot of neurodivergent people, they're they have like this hang-up, like this this irrational desire that every friendship needs to be super deep, needs to be super profound, or else it's not a real friendship. And I think that that's just you know, you're missing the forest up for the trees, right? You know, yes, we can all agree that the friends that you can go very deep with are the best friends. And I, you know, I usually prefer to be around people that I can go deep with. But you know, and this was a lesson that it took me a long time to understand as well. You know, if you want to have a fulfilling life, if you want to have a complete life, you need to be willing to have experiences that you know that don't necessarily go into the deep end. You just come to understand that not everyone has to be like that deep person that you're involved with, right? People choose the level in which they they engage with you, and that's fine. You know, being able to have that, you know, versatility, that variety of experience add spice to your life, and again, that's the beauty of the adventuring party. Whereas, you know, again, I I keep thinking back to like the fellowship, for example. In the fellowship, you can trace out like a few connections inside of the fellowship of the ring that are very close to each other, like the hobbits, uh, f Frodo and Sam in particular, or or Aragorn and uh, you know, and Legolas and Gimli, or Legolas and Gimli, right? But there are you know, on the whole, a lot of them are not as close to each other. You know, Legolas is simply not as close to the the two to Marin and Pivot. And that's fine. That's what that's what makes a group the group, right? Most of them have that sort of relationship to each other because most people are simply are not able to like vibe enough with someone to get to a deep level of understanding and and comprehension. But the adventuring party as a trope celebrates that. You know, it acknowledges that, you know, not everyone has the you know, have like this super deep um, you know, relationship with each other. You know, you can just be people who just getting together to do this thing, and that in and of itself is enough. That in and of itself is special, right? I remember that again I I you know I keep getting hung up on this concept of the friends of the road. You know, uh I remember like uh I I think I came to some form of this realization very early on, though I didn't internalize it fully. Where I would often go to celebrate um Halloween or or birthdays in McDonald's and when I was a kid, and uh I'd go to like a little playground in the McDonald's And it would often happen that, you know, for the day that I was in that playground, I would meet a kid that sort of like became my best friend in that playground. And then after I left the McDonald's, I'd basically never see that kid again. And if for all intents and purposes, that kid inhabited a very small slice of of my life. But you know, I can still appreciate it, even though I don't even remember his name. I can still appreciate the fact that I know he at one point he was there. He formed a part of it. And that's again, that's the beauty of the adventuring party. It's, you know, let's let's cherish this moment in which all of us got together to do this thing. To accomplish this goal. And even if we're people that in normal circumstances we wouldn't really necessarily get along with each other, we can get along in the fact that we we did this together. We faced this goal together. And that's something that's definitely informing this novel. Um up until now, Echoes of Heroes. You know, the there will be multiple phases in which the the adventuring party sort of forms and and reforms. And right now, I just wrapped up the first character, the first arc of the story, uh, in which they they've escaped the swamp and and the pirates and the first party, which was Finn, Ken, Heraldr, the you know, the Viking kind of guy, and Tosted the dwarf. That arc has come to an end, and Tosted and Heralder have exited the scene, and that's another thing. Heralder died. Uh well, actually, he didn't die, I'm not sure what I want to do with it. Um, more on that later, actually. Uh, but not not in this episode, because uh it's very interesting what happened in that writing session. Um by So instructor to C3, you know, a young kid, an old man, a strapping Viking warrior, and a dwarf. You know, it sounds like the setup to one of those jokes about like people walking into a bar, but that's an adventuring party. And one of the big themes, or one of the things that I want to delight in within Echoes of Heroes is just the the joy of ephemeral experiences with people that you stumble along the road to, you know, the joy of like meeting someone for a specific amount of time and then parting. And maybe you'll see them again, maybe, maybe you won't. I mentioned in earlier episodes that uh part of the structure and the approach I want to take to this series, I want to structure differently, where I kind of want to I'm visualizing the plot structure as like a network of of different story beats that are relatively independent from one another. So I want to structure like this uh this series of novels as if it's an expanded universe story, um, where there's not necessarily like this massive narrative thread, but rather a bunch of like different stories that the that various interesting characters in this setting are are becoming a part of. And I feel that that lends itself to that because there will be characters that you know cross into each other in a certain phase of this journey and and they simply never see each other again. And that that's part of the charm. That's part of what we're what we're actively looking to do. But uh, you know, female experiences, what can I say? That's what I'm doing right now. I'm um by all accounts, I'm stuck in a boring-ass layover. There have been countless people in this airport that have walked off to their own adventure to continue their own their own lives. So sometimes while you're sitting around in a place you can overhear traces of conversation. I remember just earlier I was like lying down for rest and I was talking hearing a woman talk about how, you know, she traveled for fun and how you know she used to have a a partner with whom she you know she took advantage of the fact that she had no kids and they had a double income, so she she would travel all the time. But she no longer had that partner. And, you know, I never um I didn't he overhear the conversation long enough to I don't even think she mentioned it, you know, why it was they left. But you know, it's it's an open thread that I will never have the answer to. But the fact that I was able to see that little that little shard of that person's life in that moment before they walked away, and I'll never see them again. I didn't even catch your name. I think there's a beauty to that in Japan, in a lot of media from Japan, there's often this symbolism, uh, and I think this it comes from the Buddhist tradition, um, the symbolism based on the cherry blossom tree. And you'll see this everywhere, you'll see this in like Japanese literature and anime and manga. And the cherry blossom tree is a beautiful tree, but it only blooms in a particular season and it quickly vanishes. And traditionally, in Japanese culture, the cherry blossom was used to symbolize impermanence, the but not just impermanence, right? Which is the Buddhist theme, where it's like this idea that you know this current in life is is temporary and fading, and you know, that's obviously also something that you see in Catholicism, but you know, more than just impermanence, it's the beauty of that impermanence that just because something is not there forever, just because something eventually shrivels away doesn't mean that it's beautiful. In fact, the the the key pre-proposition of the cherry blossom as a symbol is that it is beautiful in part because it is fading away, and you can tie that into a whole bunch of stuff, you can tie that into the elves, for example. The idea of elves fading away is kind of similar to the cherry blossoms, and there's beauty and ephemera in little encounters on the road, and that's part of the value in adventuring parties. But Rider Wonder, hopefully he'll be in Vienna by tomorrow, signing out.