I Am A Cruel God

There’s this meta-trope in media (“meta-” in that it relates to the creation of media rather than the media itself. Adding the prefix “meta” to things doesn’t automatically make it super cool, kids) called Creator Backlash, which basically describes the process in which the maker of a thing comes to despise it, sometimes going out of their way to destroy it. For example, Herge, the creator of the Tintin comics, felt he could never surpass Tintin in Tibet, and so the remaining stories either take a silly (and, frankly, unforeshadowed) dive into science-fiction (Flight 714), or were written to deliberately change nothing about the world or its characters (The Castafiore Emerald, Tintin and the Land of the Picaros).

As I’ve started taking writing more seriously, I’ve noticed this trend in certain genres (it’s always the “nerdier” genres, though that’s its own discussion) that’s perhaps a creator’s hatred of their own work starts even earlier than that. I have to wonder what Alan Moore thought of Barbara Gordon before he had The Joker shoot her (though I don’t have to wonder too hard; he wrote DC Comics asking if it was okay to paralyze Batgirl and editorial’s response was apparently “cripple the bitch”). I have to wonder how George R.R. Martin felt when he killed off your favorite character (this one’s a little trickier to find).

I think this is starting to affect me as well. Way back at the beginning of the year, I wrote about Naviim, the continent-and-a-half fantasy setting that I toyed around with from time to time. And in the second of those three posts (“The Video Game that Never Was”), I wrote about the saga of Daniel and Joan.

I hate both of them. I think it has to do with the fact that they make decisions that make sense for them, from their perspective, but as the omniscient god of their universe, I know the longer-term consequences of their actions, and because I’m not as compassionate as, say the Abrahamic God, I hate that they can’t see how this’ll all end.

Saying that the willingness to write bad things happening to well-intentioned people is the mark of good storytelling (or, to be more direct, that I am a good storyteller), is probably too prideful (it’s not Impostor Syndrome if you literally haven’t published anything). But I do find myself taking a sort of sadistic glee in it, in looking at how miserable my characters have become and justifying it to myself by saying, “You did this to yourself.”

-F