Writer Wander 037 - The Elven Citadel of Illaris

Yapping a bit about the Elves in Echoes of Heroes

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

I don't want to Rider Wander thirty-seven. The Citadel of Alaris. So for this episode, I'm proud to announce that it only took us 37 episodes, but I have finally successfully implemented a microphone. I think it sounds better than before, but I think the main difference will definitely be more noticeable whenever I get around to recording an episode outside again. But since I'm currently in my room, uh I guess uh, you know, I can't really evidence that right now. But I think that even then it's it's still better, I would hope. And if not, I'll I'll have to fidget with the settings later. But uh about today, the brief writing update, I have not written today because I have an ear infection. And you know, at first I was like, oh man, it's it's just my ear, it's not the typical migraine, because I I also get migraines very frequently. But uh let me tell you, this ear thing, it's been getting on my nerves. And uh I I added the drops, and since I'm gonna go to work later today, I figured this is probably the only amount of time now in the morning that I have to lie down and and catch whatever rest I need to have. So, what better way to use my time than to record a fucking podcast? Um, but today I wanted to talk about the Citadel of Ilaris, and specifically I wanted to talk about elves and you know, just in general, about elves, right? So, to give you some context, right now in the story, as I hinted at in the last episode, uh Finnegan has arrived into the first elven settlement and the only elven settlement that we will find in this novel, uh, at least according to the outline, which is the Citadel of Illaris, right? And you know, I'll just be blunt with you, the Citadel of Ilaris is heavily inspired by by Rivendell, and I'm not trying too hard to hide that. I'm I'm really I'm really not because I don't contrary to the beliefs of most people, I don't think it's bad to wear your influences on your sleeve. I I really don't think it's a bad thing, right? I just think it's a question of execution at the end of the day, right? Someone can wear their influences on their sleeve, but if their execution is on point, then that doesn't that's not really a big deal, right? Uh when you when you mess things up, that's when it really is a big deal. But for now, um I have no problems doing it. And so far, one of the things that writing this section has got me reflecting on was the fact that for a very long time I did not like demi-humans or the other standard fantasy races. What what am I referring to? I I used to have an aversion to creating settings in which there were races other than humanoid races or other than completely original races that I constructed. I whenever I played a fantasy game or wrote a fantasy story, I always visualize my protagonist or my player character as a human of some variety. I was literally like for a while that example of like the dude who's like playing DD, and you're giving all these options for customization for your class or your race, and I'm like, you know what? I really feel like playing a human fighter, and I will always defend that attitude just because I I I just love how ballsy it is. I think it's hilarious when people do that. But, you know, in a sense, I I feel that we unconsciously compare every other race to the human, so it only makes sense that we want to play as them because uh, you know, it it is our fantasy oftentimes is is not just to play a character, but to play a character that feels like us. What better way to do that than being human? But it wasn't until I actually got around to reading The Lord of the Rings that I actually gained an appreciation of the other fantasy races. And the reason I mentioned this is because, as I probably mentioned before on this podcast, I actually started reading The Lord of the Rings relatively late in my life compared to most people. The first time that I read any Tolkien was when I was in my early twenties. Okay, I was in my early twenties when I read Tolkien. So I didn't grow up with Tolkien, and you know, on the one hand, I kinda wish I had, but on the other hand, I feel that encountering his works at such a relatively late age allowed me to experience them in the way that somebody who read them around the time of publication would have experienced them. I wouldn't have had these rose-tinted glasses about what this story was supposed to be. Technically, I I watched the movies beforehand, but I barely remembered them because I I was a kid when I when I watched them. And for a very long time when I first started reading fantasy fiction, I initially started reading out a lot of grimdark fiction because that was what was popular at the time, and that was also the genre of the first fantasy work that I started reading, which is the Elric of Melody Mine Psycho by Michael Moorcock, which is also very good and very influential to me as well. But I didn't end up reading quote-unquote normal fantasy until I I guess technically Dragonlance was the first quote-unquote normal fantasy trilogy that I read, but you know, I I had an aversion to the Lord of the Rings because I had this false notion, this false desire to be a contrarian and to not like what everyone else liked. But I think at a certain point it's sort of like the bell curve, where like the really dumb person on the left side of the bell curve is enjoys the popular things because there's they're popular, and the person in the middle of the bell curve, the you know, the average person, the normal side of the distribution, that person is gonna be like, oh man, like my attitude, where it's like, oh, I don't wanna read the read the popular stuff. Why why would I want to fucking bother with that? That that's so stupid, you know, you fucking sheeple. And then you have like the really highly intelligent people on the right side of the bell curve who share the same opinion of the people on the left side of the bell curve, but for a different reason. And the reasoning there is like, well, oftentimes when a work reaches a certain level of acclaim, it's for a reason. It's not necessarily that it's good or that it's great, but when something reaches that level of fame, nine times out of ten, it's because whether you like it or not, it's doing something that other works of fiction are not doing. And whenever that happens, that's always worth paying attention to, especially if you'd be interested in having even the slightest chance at replicating that kind of success. And when I read The Lord of the Rings, I fell in love with elves because there had been elves present in some of the other fiction that I had read before, but as often happens, right, a lot of fantasy after Tolkien, what they did is that they, you know, they got the aesthetic trappings of elves. They they captured them. And they they took the idea of elves, but they only kept they only skimmed the very surface of elves. Whereas when you look at Tolkien, right, you know, if you have like this generic idea of what a fantasy world should be like, you you look at Tolkien and you think that he's going to, you know, his elves are just gonna be, you know, these tree huggers, etc. And uh, you know, they're very skinny, very pale, all those things are are true to greater or lesser degrees, but uh fundamentally at the heart of elves, there is a metaphysical struggle between impermanence, ephemera, and immortality, and those deeper themes are often not tackled with the profundity that they were tackled in The Lord of the Rings, in the way that they are tackled in more not even more modern, just you know, basically most of the fantasy genre after Tolkien kind of kind of failed at tackling those deeper meta metaphysical themes. And part of what I'm trying to do with the Citadel of Alaris is that I'm trying to describe a place that aside from being a physical space that Finn is moving into, it is also a metaphysical space, it is a place where the environment around Finn is changing in ways that don't logically make sense, but they spiritually make sense. And I want to talk about a couple of the things that I've done with the Citadel of Ilaris and their main inspiration. So, like I mentioned before, Ilaris as a citadel is inspired by Tolkien's elven settings, and in particular, it is physically inspired by Rivendell, by you know, it is this mountainous citadel that is wedged in again in a valley, and you know, there's a there's a river that forms into a cascade that runs to it, but from a metaphysical angle, it is also modeled after Lothlorien, which is Galadriel's Forest. And what I really liked about Galadriel's Forest is that if you read the chapters that took place in Lothlorian, uh Tolkien took a lot of extra time to describe the fact that in Lothlorian time seemed to move differently, right? It wasn't just like this really pretty place that you moved into that was like this idyllic paradise, but the metaphysical properties of the place, you know, the way that time functioned and the way that the natural world functioned was different, right? It felt like you were stepping outside of the of the human order, right? And one of the things that I wanted to do with the Citadel of Ilaris was that how what are ways that I can uh I can get across that feeling without directly copying the things that are present in The Lord of the Rings. And one of the things that I had to think to myself, right, and you know, I guess this can be like a guide for whenever you're trying to think of doing something similar, is that I I propose myself, I propose to myself, what what is the central distinguishing factor of Echoes of Heroes' setting from your typical fantasy world, and from the outset, superficially speaking, it looks it looks like it's not too different from the generic fantasy world, right? You know, by design, it is made in such a way to retain as many aesthetic elements from classic fantasy as possible, but the main difference is that I have metaphysically moved the time frame forward such that this story takes place not in the third age, but in the fourth age, with this which is an age of fading after the heroes of one. So it is a world that in the third age it was already fading, right? You know, this is a metaphysical theme that is found in all fantasy media where you have uh you know you have some initial golden age, and usually the story that you're reading takes place uh a couple ages after the golden age, in which you know the world is fading, but it's still it's still it hasn't you know it hasn't faded past a certain point. But in Echoes of Heroes, the the fading is very much heavy, right? You know, the world is is most certainly moving on from that heroic age and a much faster clip. And one of the ways that I thought I could represent that in the Citadel of Alaris was that when the characters enter this setting, one of the first things that's going to happen is that it that has happened, is that you know they're scaling up this mountain, right? Finnegan is accompanying this group of uh a priestess and her paladins alongside with Ken, and they're scaling up the mountains that lead the way to to Alaris, which has been barred away from humans for a while. And one of the first things that happens is that they reach a point where it feels like they're going so high up that they have pierced the veil of fog that often lies near the the highest points of a mountain. But once they once they do that, what happens is that they almost transition into a different space of being. The sun is no longer visible, however, the sky is caught in a perpetual dusk, right? It is caught in a perpetual dust. The sky is perpetually stuck in this state of like ruddy, ruddy light, reddish light that perpetually covers the sky, and you can still see the sc the stars, curiously enough, but there's no sun. And part of the reason why I wanted to get to do that is that I was inspired by this other book, which is like a collection of elven stories, which is you know, at one point they they released ah crap, I forgot what it was called. Um, it was like this series of books that you know it detailed stuff about mythology. I I think it was called The Enchanted World, and you know, they're these very big, beautiful books, and part of one of the first stories, one of the first books in that series had to do with elves, and I still remember this piece of lore where um it talks about how in most mythologies elves are in terms of a state of day, they're associated with either dawn or dusk. That is to say, they're not associated with daytime or nighttime, because these are periods of time that are sort of set, right? They're they're already they are what they are, right? But when you think of dawn, when you think of dusk, part of what lands their beauty is the fact that these are places in time, these are moments in time that are ephemeral by nature, that are transitory, you know, they're sort of stuck between day and between night, and that is part of what represents elves typically in a lot of uh a lot of mythology. They're these creatures that they're kind of hard to pin down because you know, they're sort of human, but they're clearly not, they're clearly something else, right? And that's why it's hard to categorize them, and because it's hard to categorize them, they're they're typically placed in uh these transitional, this is typically associated with these transitional phases during the day. And that reverks the role of uh in Ilaris uh making it a permanent and perpetual dusk, where it's not really perpetual, but you know what I mean. It takes very long to pass. And by doing that, I'm signifying a few things. By making it dusk instead of dawn, I'm representing the fact that the age of the elves is is coming to a close, you know, they're fading, right? It's they're they're near their end, right? Because after after dusk, there comes the night. And you know, once the night comes, it's darkness, it symbolizes death, it symbolizes the end of the of the of the citadel, right? And part of the themes that I was thinking of developing, I still haven't written this into the story yet, but I'm 99% sure I'm gonna do it because I really like the idea, is that when Finn gets the chance to talk about Ilaris with more of the elves, they're eventually gonna tell him that you know the current ruler of Ilaris, Lord Ilarian, he's been ruling it since its founding, so he's been around for a very long time, and when he first founded it, it was daytime, right? And it was a permanent daytime, right? A permanent morning, a permanent dawn, right? However, as the ages have passed, there you know, the the time within Ilaris has passed, and obviously that sounds very obvious when I say it like that, but you know, what I mean is that let's say that you know, during the golden age, Ilaris was a place of perpetual perfect sunshine. Then, you know, in the age after that, Ilaris was like in a perpetual afternoon, and then in the age, in the third age, right, Ilaris was um in the I guess in the later afternoon or something like that. And now, with the beginning of the fourth age, Ilaris has transitioned into this dusk, and the idea is that this citadel of Ilaris, because because time is perceived differently by elves, it also flows differently in their in their domains, and Ilaris has effectively existed over the course of a single day. Of a single day in all in all of its existence. It's literally just been one day of existence, and that day is fading, and the day that the dusk ends is the day that the last elves leave that citadel. And I think that you know that's one of the things that I feel has been lost with magic systems, because I feel that when you make a magic system, you can still do it, but I feel that it's a lot harder to make magic that is symbolically resonant with the themes of the story when you try to attach it to to a given to a given system, right? Because that's what I really like about Tolkien's setting and his handling of magic, is that the magic it isn't just like this mechanic that you play around with, but it's this this metaphysical reality that provides commentary to a given to a given location that it's present in, and because of the fact that there's no rules, you can adapt that symbolism to whatever location it is relevant toward. Whereas it when you make a magic system, yes, you can make a magic system that represents certain themes that are important to you. However, when you make it into a system, you have to focus so much on consistency that the amount of themes that that magic system can represent, it's by its nature more limited. Because then if you have to come up with a new location and you have to come up with another theme for that location, um, I'm not gonna say it's impossible because with writing, there's rarely anything that's impossible, but usually it's certainly a lot more difficult to try and create those new rules for this new for how magic works in this new location because you have to worry a lot more with you know this sense of of uh of consistency in a way that you wouldn't have to do so in under a soft magic system. So that's one of the things that I did in Ilaris. And another things that another one of the things that I did in Ilaris is obviously that uh I made it such that, and I guess this one is a little more normal where you know animals as they near Ilaris and as the they approach the the valley of the elves, animals behave much more differently, they are much more at peace, they are much more comfortable interacting uh with uh, you know, the humans that are present that are visiting there, or with the elves that are pre uh visiting there, because the you know the the approach to nature is a lot less parasitic, uh, or at least rather than parasitic, right? Elves are more in tune with their environment than humans are, and that's obviously a common theme with elves across across all of fiction, right? But in the case of Ilaris, right, I made it so that you know in the city you have a bunch of gardens, and you have just a bunch of like squirrels and and foxes and you know you know wildlife just running around the city and it's it's perfectly normal. Like no one it's not interrupting the flow of things, it's just a thing that happens, you know, this wildlife they they crisscross into our domains and it's perfectly fine. We have no we have no problem with it because our metaphysical outlook on life is is completely and utterly different, right? And I I really enjoy it, in part because one of another thing that I don't like about the way that most people handle elves in fantasy fiction is that I feel that when most people Copy Tolkien. There's nothing wrong with that. You should copy. You should copy good ideas all the time. But a lot when a lot of people copy Tolkien, they only copy the aspects of elves that have to do like with the the green elves or or the the wood elves, you know? The ones that uh Legolus comes from where like they're they're just in the forest all the time. And honestly, I find those elves like boring. Like I I really like I prefer the Noldor or the High Elf archetype where it's like yes, they're they're in tune with nature, but they also construct cities and they have an advanced they have an advanced culture while still being in touch with with nature, and that's the main inspiration that I have uh for for my elves in in my in my setting, right? You know, it's not it's not so much like these elves that are you know just chilling in the forest and stuff like that, like hippies. Like I really don't like that archetype of elves. I feel that it also misses the the main themes of the story because even Tolkien's forest elves were not we're not on that level of tree hugging, right? And you know, I feel it it really is a hippie bastardization of of what you know the the traditional fantasy theme that was present there, and also in terms of beliefs, uh the elves themselves, I'm not sure what attitude they have toward deities in general, right? Um you know, I I don't think they're against them, but elves, it's not so much that they're pantheists, right? It's just that the way that they visualize themselves, right, so they they don't visualize themselves as subordinate to gods in the same way that that humans do, because the way that elves visualize themselves metaphysically is that they they see themselves more like angels, right? They are metaphysically, they view themselves as metaphysically superior entities to human to humans because they are closer to the divine. And so when they describe this concept of the weird W-Y-R-D, which uh, you know, in our understanding is more equivalent to fate and destiny, the way they describe it is that humans are and dwarves are what they call uh bird weirdlings, right? People who are subject to the weird, to destiny, to to fate, right? And the way that elves visualize themselves is that they acknowledge the existence of the weird, but what they say is that they are not they are not subject to it, they they walk alongside it. And I think I have an intuitive understanding of what that means, but I I don't think I'm capable of putting it to words right now. So I I really, you know, that's one of the beautiful things about a first draft, like I mentioned in the in the last episode. I can just put this idea there, and I can be not a hundred percent sure, or even thirty percent sure, or even ten percent sure of what I'm referring to with that idea. But once I get back to it during the outline, I can flesh it out more, make it more coherent, make it more profound, make it deeper, and that's certainly what I hope to do with this concept of the of the weird. But like I said, elves, they sort of they visualize their relationship to the divine, not in a fully equal role, because I don't think they would consider themselves equal to the divine, but they they certainly their level of subservience and the way they visualize themselves in that way is is a lot a lot less, right? And part part of what I'm you know I'm dealing with is how how can I keep making elves feel alien, right? Because I don't you know I feel that um one of the problems with modern fantasy fiction is that again we we're just we're just turning these different fantasy races into palette swapped humans, right? And that's not that's not really fun, right? I feel that, you know, you know, the common the modern the modern way that elves are are dealt with from what I've seen is that they're typically treated as you know very very arrogant, very bureaucratic, very, very stuck up, and I feel that you know there's nothing wrong with you giving flaws to elves, but I feel that a lot of the m metaphysical fundamentals of what elves were supposed to be has been lost on people. And I think it's a message that's worth worth exploring again, and that's what I'm trying to do in in Echoes of Heroes, and I'm trying to you know to take my time to try and revive a lot of those those classic fantasy themes in the measure the measure that I that I can. But um I'm still working on Ilaris as a as a as a place that I'm in, uh that I'm visiting in in this story, and uh I hope that things continue to work out, right? And I I hope that soon I'm able to uh to push forward and you know just finish this book. Um I I haven't been too long into it. I I don't even know why why I'm phrasing it that way. But uh but yeah, and I also hope to get rid of this ear infection. But uh, you know how it is, ride or wander, signing off.