Category Archives: Writing

What Went Wrong in Kung Fu Panda 2

13 Saturday Dec 2025

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I’ve noted previously that while I thought Kung Fu Panda 1 and 3 were both excellent movies, number 2 in the series was a missed opportunity. Recently, we rewatched all three movies; so today, I feel like analyzing KFP 2 in more detail. It does a lot of things right, so it’s worth trying to understand where it went wrong.

If I had to summarize, it would be this: the script feels like it wasn’t quite a finished draft. There are at least three major deficiencies:

  • KFP2 relies quite a bit on filler scenes, which was not true about KFPs 1 and 3.
  • Some plot elements are stupid; in particular, Po the panda is made to carry the Idiot Ball at least twice.
  • A number of character elements don’t feel like they are used to their fullest.

Let’s dive in. [Spoilers ahead for the first two movies!]

Filler Scenes

A filler scene, as I’m using the term, is a scene that doesn’t develop the plot or the characters. I should stop and say first that not all filler scenes are bad; an awesome spectacle or funny joke can be its own justification. But leaning on filler scenes to pad the movie length can be a warning sign that your movie doesn’t have enough plot action going on.

If you look at KFP 1, each fight scene has a plot or characterization function:

  • Our intro to Master Shifu demonstrates the skills of the Furious Five and of Shifu, and shows his severe relationship to them.
  • Tai Lung’s escape starts the plot jeopardy, and shows his dangerous skills and something of his personality.
  • The bridge fight shows that despite the skills, smooth teamwork, and mutual trust of the Furious Five, Tai Lung still outclasses them all. He also learns Po’s name, and we learn that he wants to best the Dragon Warrior to prove his worth.
  • The duel between Tai Lung and Shifu explores the relationship between them, and shows that Shifu is no match for his spurned student.
  • Finally, the climax with Po and Tai Lung shows that despite his inexperience, Po is still able to defeat Tai Lung because he has something his opponent lacks.

A similar analysis can be done for KFP 3.

In KFP 2, only some of the fight scenes have a clear function:

  • Lord Shen’s arrival showed that he was a dangerous fighter, but not truly first-rank; and it also introduced his personality and some of his motivation.
  • The fight scene in the musicians’ village showed that Po had matured as a martial artist and settled into a leadership role with the Five, and they worked together closely and trusted each other.
  • The first attempt by Po to confront Lord Shen brings us up against the true story problems.
  • The second attempt, however infelicitously staged, sets Po up for his revelation.
  • The climactic battle on the ships shows Po’s growth and contrasts it with Lord Shen’s refusal to heal.

By contrast, the entire sequence with the team infiltrating Gongmen City and reaching the prison, and then fighting the wolfpack in a chase scene across the city and to the Palace, could have been significantly shortened or cut entirely. And the two scenes eat up a long stretch of screen time: in a movie that was only 90 minutes long, including nearly 10 minutes of credits, the infiltration scene and chase scene together consume about 9 or 10 minutes.

And that’s not even being picky about the length of the other fight scenes, some of which dragged on a bit.

Stupid Plot Elements

People being stupid is not inherently a problem. The problem is when their stupidity comes from the writer without sufficient justification, rather than from their character or circumstances.

On the plot side, we’ll ignore some of the minor offenses and focus on two big ones: Lord Shen’s search for metal, and Po carrying the Idiot Ball.

Lord Shen wants to gather together lots and lots of metal to make cannon. This leads the wolfpack to attack the musicians’ village to steal everything metal that wasn’t nailed down, and a few things that were. As a result, Po first meets the wolf leader and sees Lord Shen’s mark.

The problem here is that you can’t make cannon by scrounging random bits of metal. It needs to be high-quality metal that can easily be cast and can withstand the high pressures of gunpowder explosions. (Early cannon of the type Lord Shen uses were typically cast out of high-quality bronze.)

Yes, I’m being a nerd; KFP 2 is a kids movie and not a tract on metallurgy, and the visuals of lots of junk being dropped into vats of molten metal are effective. But while the attack on the Musicians’ Village was a funny scene, it also introduces a big plothole: Why attack somewhere so far away from Gongmen City (depicted as far enough to require several days of hard travel for Po and the Five to reach) in order to carry back a bulky, heavy cargo? Was there really no metal at all anywhere closer? How much metal did Lord Shen really need, and why not simply capture a copper mine somewhere?

If the objective was to introduce the wolf leader to Po, the scriptwriters could have come up with a better pretext that made sense within the setting.

And speaking of Po… Po is without question a comedic figure. He often gets himself into trouble, and his attempts to talk his way out are often ridiculous and add to the humor. But while Po is often ridiculous, in KFP 1 and 3 he is never stupid. Everything he does makes sense in the situation, or because of his personality and history.

In KFP 2, however, Po is handed the Idiot Ball at least twice. The first case is a minor sin; during their audience with Lord Shen, Po mistakes some sort of small device for the weapon and attacks it. This had no plot significance and was played for cheap laughs (and frankly, could have easily been cut).

The second seriously undermines Po’s character. During the first confrontation with Shen, Po freezes and allows Shen to escape when he realizes that Shen was somehow a part of Po’s backstory. When the team regroups, however, Po refuses to explain what happened to Tigress and the others, reduced to mumbling that it was all part of the plan, somehow. Worse, when Tigress benches him, he returns to the Palace anyway without telling the others, interferes with the rest of the team (who just so happened to have everything well in hand), and needs to be rescued at great cost.

Po’s behavior is extremely out of character. The movie has already shown that he trusts the Five and they trust him. In his pre-Dragon Warrior days, he idolized the Five. And we have seen him repeatedly tell the truth even when it was embarrassing, even for relatively small matters like a fun anecdote during dinner.

This all could have been avoided if Po had simply been honest with Tigress. And it would have been in character for him to do that; he had already told her about being adopted during the journey to Gongmen City. On a scriptwriting level, it was not even necessary for Po to lie if the writer was committed to the existing plot structure. Po could have been honest with Tigress without it changing the plot; she could decide to bench him anyway, since he’s clearly not able to deal with Shen yet.

Dropped Threads

The script makes several gestures toward character development that don’t really pay off as well as they could have. I’m thinking about two in particular: the contrast between “hardcore” Tigress and soft-style Po, and the underexplored character of Lord Shen.

After Tigress describes her training regimen, Po is awestruck and calls it “hardcore.” Tigress notes that it would be a poor fit for Po: “Hard style is not your thing.” Later, in the prison, as Po refuses to explain what happened between him and Lord Shen, he bitterly says, “The hardcore wouldn’t understand.” Tigress responds by hugging him and saying, “The hardcore do understand.” At last, at the end of the final battle, Tigress complements Po by saying, “Now that was hardcore.”

To me, this felt like a false note. Po had won not by being hardcore, but by exploring the subtle principles of soft-style martial arts—his flowing motions are modeled off of Tai Chi. Additionally, Tigress’s character had no further development in KFP 2. In the first movie, we at least learn a little of her stunted relationship with Shifu when she was young, and her resulting ambition to prove herself against Tai Lung; and in the third movie, it is implied that her friendship with the panda toddler helps nourish a neglected side of her personality. But in this movie, her character development is all but ignored. The script could have easily shortened some of the fight scenes to give her more time.

And now, Lord Shen—absolutely a brilliant character, voiced to perfection by Gary Oldman. He’s the most complex of the trilogy’s villains—hungry for his birthright, but also rejecting it; seeking a vast destiny, but fragile and insecure in the face of a single pudgy panda; obsessing over his parents’ rejection of him, but refusing every overture made by the Soothsayer and later by Po himself. But every so often, there is a moment that seems to cry out for further development. Why does he project his own feelings of rejection onto Po during their second fight? Why did he refuse Po’s final offer of redemption? Why does he believe that “[h]appiness must be taken”?

It might seem a bit churlish to demand that Shen’s character be made even more brilliant than it was. But I still think there were missed opportunities there to tighten down some of the loose bits. Again, if the movie did not lean so hard on filler scenes, there would have been ample space to explore Shen more deeply.

Conclusion

What can we take from this? First, spending a little extra time on the script can mean the difference between a fine movie and a great one. It is true that “Great artists ship,” and a studio has deadlines to work under, but that’s no reason to be satisfied with a product that is not yet as good as it could easily become.

(I continue to be perplexed why so many movie productions that cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars often settle for obviously flawed scripts. Given the money on the line, why yoke your movie to a bad script? Yes, writing is hard, but there are lots of skilled writers out there; so why are so many finished movies garbage? KFP 2 doesn’t sink to that level, but the basic question remains.)

Second, if you have to resort to the Idiot Ball, it means that you are trying to cover up a flaw in your script. Take it as a warning light that there is more work to do, and then do that work rather than damaging your characters.

Third, filler that sucks up time from more important characters or themes is a bad thing. The need to resort to filler, even while some of the character interactions could have been fleshed out, should likewise have warned the scriptwriters that there was more work to do.

And on that note, back to my own writing. Sigh…

Johnny Cash and the Art of Adaptation

05 Wednesday Nov 2025

Posted by in Music, Writing

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Johnny Cash, aside from the power and pathos of his own songs, famously performed songs by others as well. Some were written for him, such as the haunting “Thirteen,” written by Glenn Danzig. Some songs he covered; he took one of his greatest songs, “Hurt,” from the band Nine Inch Nails; and listening to Cash’s performance, NIN frontman Trent Reznor immediately reacted, “That song isn’t mine anymore.”

A slightly less famous example is the song “The Man Who Couldn’t Cry,” originally written and performed by Loudon Wainwright III. When we compare the lyrics of the two renditions, we notice a number of very slight changes that Cash made from Wainwright’s original (don’t rely on the listed lyrics, both of them have occasional errors compared to the audio). And I think closely examining these changes can teach us a lot about Cash’s craft, and how we might think about adapting other works or even making our own compositions.

(We’ll neglect the changes in emphasis in Cash’s vocal performance, except for a couple of points to be noted later.)

In the first stanza, Wainwright sang:

As a child, he had cried as all children will
But at some point, his tear ducts ran dry.
He grew to be a man and the feces hit the fan…

By contrast, Cash’s version goes:

As a child he had cried as all children will
Then at some point his tear ducts all ran dry.
Grew to be a man, it all hit the fan

Changing “But” to “Then” can be read to emphasize the inevitability of this change, for the protagonist—how his new impassiveness was a natural response to growing up in a cruel world. Whether that was Cash’s intention or not, notice how subtle the change was, yet how powerful. Cash is certainly putting his own stamp on the song, but he’s changing as little as possible in the process.

Inserting “all,” cutting “He,” and to some degree replacing “and the feces” with “it all” are in part meant to hew more closely to the song’s meter than in the original—which has the effect of making the lyrics less obtrusive. In part, I think that “feces” is a smirky word choice, much improved by “it all”; Cash is more matter-of-fact, and also conveys that “all” of the protagonist’s life had hit the fan, not just some of it.

(One might imagine that in Wainwright’s live performances, he would actually use the word “s—” instead of “feces,” but I have no way to check this. It would certainly match the meter better. Compare with The Doors and their live performances of “This is the End.”)

Cash makes no more changes up until the protagonist has gone through his tribulations and is sent to “a place for the insensitive and the insane.” At this point, Wainwright sang:

He played lots of chess
And he made lots of friends

And in his vocal performance, he puts an overt, ironic twist on “friends.” One wonders whether this is a contemptuous commentary on the sorts of friends one finds in an asylum, or perhaps a clue that the man’s friends were imaginary, his chess games played against an absent opponent. In either case, Wainwright is again smirking at his subject.

Cash makes a striking change by simply inverting the order of the verses:

He made a lot of friends
and he played a lot of chess

And again, he sings the verses matter-of-factly. After so much suffering, Cash says, the protagonist finally found friendship and belonging in the most unlikely place imaginable. Where Wainwright is ironic, Cash imbues the song with a great deal of empathy. He feels for the protagonist in a way that I think Wainwright does not. And he conveyed that with a simple change in verse order.

Everything else stays the same, except for Cash changing “prison” to “jail house” in the final stanza—perhaps for reasons of meter, perhaps because he liked the word “jail” better than “prison.”

What can we say about all these changes? For one thing, Cash had a very light, but deft, touch. He gets great leverage from very small changes, knowing where to cut and where to edit. He preserves the bulk of the song as is, keeping what made it worthy of his attention in the first place—but where he does make changes, they deepen the song and make it more powerful.

Second, notice the mileage Cash gets from dispensing with Wainwright’s condescension. On the one hand, Cash understands that the lyrics are strong enough on their own, and don’t need excessive vocal ornamentation. On the other hand, he made the clear choice to feel for his protagonist instead of creating ironic distance, as Wainwright does. He thus allows a lifetime of pain and suffering to color the song, much as he did with “Hurt.”

So: careful attention to each word; not tweaking things for tweaking’s sake, but combining respect for the source material with willingness to make changes where necessary. Creating new meaning by changing emotional content; again, much as he did with “Hurt.”

Not all adaptations need to make radical changes. (Though sometimes such radically different versions are strong in their own right, such as Alien Ant Farm’s cover of “Smooth Criminal.”) Cash teaches us that subtlety, mastery of craft, and willingness to be forthright can go a long way.

Different Types of Federalism

31 Thursday Jul 2025

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, State Formation

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Modern fantasy/scifi seems to not feature many federal countries (or as we will call them, “federations”)—that is, countries made up of several subunits such as states or provinces, each with certain powers that are distinct from those of the central government. (If a central government has total control over a country, and its subunits or provinces are merely administrative tools of the central government, this is called a “unitary state.” The “districts” in The Hunger Games come to mind.) Yet a federal design gives worldbuilders lots of opportunities for cool setting details and plot conflict.

I live in the United States, and some of my fellow Americans might assume that federations pretty much work the way things do in the U.S.: the states join together as co-equal partners under the federal government, with the same privileges and rights (that is, our federalism is symmetrical), initially for the sake of mutual defense against an outside threat and later to participate in the growing power of the strong federal government. (Alfred Stepan calls this “coming-together federalism.”) In fact, only a handful of federations were formed via coming-together federalism: the United States and Switzerland (which predated the French Revolution), and New Zealand (which did not last long as a federation).

William Riker argued that federations with a weak central government tended not to last long. They would be preyed upon by external enemies, lose internal cohesion as the subunits pull away from the central government and each other, or else decide to strengthen their central government in response—as the U.S. did, when we replaced the Articles of Confederation (which featured a weak central government heavily dependent on the states for its revenue) with the Constitution (featuring a much stronger Federal government with its own taxing power and laws).

(We can see some of these tensions working in real time in Europe, as the E.U. attempts to increase its control over member states and some states resist bitterly, with the U.K. leaving the E.U. altogether.)

If a federation has a strong central government, meanwhile, the central government tends to accumulate more power over time. As Riker put it, “If a federalism is centralized, then the ruler(s) of the federation have and are understood to have greater influence over what happens in the society as a whole than do all the rulers of the subordinate governments. And, having this influence, they tend to acquire more.” Eventually, it might dispense with the federal form altogether and restructure as a unitary state, as New Zealand did.

(This is comparable to the dynamic between a Palace ruler and a Nobility in the model of Samuel Finer, which I wrote about in my first worldbuilding book.)

But that is only one way to do things. (Which is great news for worldbuilders, because it means we have a great set of flexible concepts to make interesting settings with.) Following Stepan, we can actually talk about three ways in which a federation might form:

  • Coming-together federalism;
  • Holding-together federalism; and
  • Putting-together federalism.

Moreover, there are many other possible federal or quasi-federal arrangements other than the symmetrical model. Daniel Elazar lists several, which we will discuss a bit later. First, let’s look at the different ways a federation might form.

Coming-Together Federalism

Riker argues that when a federation is formed among formerly independent states, it only remains a federation if it’s in the interest of both the political organizers and of the states. On the side of the organizers, they should want to expand their power over the states (perhaps over the other states, if the federation is spearheaded by one or two of the stronger states), but not be strong enough to do so by force. If they were strong enough, they would simply conquer or annex the states and form an empire, with a unitary government. (Stepan partly disagrees, as we will note below.)

On the part of the states, they need to have a sense of their own independent identities (or they would simply join into a larger empire), but should want the benefits of federation more than they want to remain independent. Most frequently, this includes protection from external attack, but also the opportunity to benefit from the federation’s increased power—especially the power to invade foreign neighbors!

If the federation ceases to be in the interest of the organizers, or of the constituent states, Riker says, then the federation eventually collapses—either because the states pull away, or because the central government breaks the federal bargain and becomes a unitary state.

Holding-Together Federalism

In another pattern pointed out by Stepan, a formerly unitary country may decide that some sort of federal structure is needed to prevent the country from breaking apart altogether. This could happen if the state is made up of several ethnic or linguistic groups in tension with each other—whether they have coexisted in one country for centuries, as with Belgium, or were more recently glued together, as with India. To preserve the country as a whole, the political regime is willing to transfer some of its power to the subunits (even if it has to create the subunits from scratch, as India frequently does).

Stepan points out that federalism seems to be the government structure best able to preserve the stability of a multinational country, because it best allows smaller communities to exercise their rights as communities. “In fact, every single longstanding democracy in a territorially based multilingual and multinational polity is a federal state. . . . [S]ome groups may be able to participate fully as individual citizens only if they acquire, as a group, the right to have schooling, mass media, and religious or even legal structures that correspond to their language and culture. Some of these rights may be described as group-specific collective rights. Many thinkers in the liberal tradition assume that all rights are individual and universal and view any deviation from individualism and universalism with suspicion, but this assumption is open to question.”

Putting-Together Federalism

Contrary to Riker, Stepan notes that some nondemocratic states, seeking to expand their power over their neighbors or actually conquering them, will preserve the conquered states in a federal arrangement. This is especially likely when the conquered states have their own durable national identities, similar to the holding-together model. Preservation of the federal subunits often allows for smoother administration of the absorbed territories, and makes submission to the conquerer somewhat more palatable to the conquered. Thus, federation can be a type of empire-building strategy.

The most prominent example was the Soviet Union, through which communist Russia dominated the formerly independent states that had broken away from the collapsing Russian Empire. The USSR recognized the linguistic and ethnic pluralism of its vast territories via the separate socialist “republics,” though Russia was unquestionably the top dog and extracted much wealth and resources from the peripheral republics.

(This model is partly replicated within modern-day Russia as well. Moscow treats Russia’s outlying provinces effectively as conquered territory, sucking up their wealth and manpower to benefit the elites.)

Different Varieties of Federalism

We mentioned above that not all federations are symmetrical—not all of the subunits have the same powers and privileges as each other. This is where we have tremendous scope to be creative.

Daniel Elazar noted, “The simplest possible definition [of federalism] is self-rule plus shared rule. Federalism thus defined involves some kind of contractual linkage of a presumably permanent character that (1) provides for power sharing, (2) cuts around the issue of sovereignty, and (3) supplements but does not seek to replace or diminish prior organic ties where they exist.” He lists several types of federal associations between states, aside from the symmetrical federation:

Before the United States Constitution introduced the modern style of federalism, Europe only knew of the confederation. In a confederation, the constituent states still mostly govern themselves, joining together only for limited purposes (usually mutual defense and foreign policy).

In more recent times, new flavors have developed. In a federacy, a larger and smaller power join together in an asymmetric relationship. The smaller power has more autonomy from the federal arrangement than the larger power, or existing subunits of the larger power if there are any; in return, it also has less influence over the governance of the larger power. Real-life examples include Arab Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan, Serbia and Kosovo, or the United States and Puerto Rico.

An associated state arrangement (also called a “compact of free association”) is similar to a federacy, except that either member can unilaterally decide to pull out of the arrangement (rather than needing mutual agreement). Consequently, the member states have even less influence on each other than under a federacy. Examples include the United States and Micronesia, and (for a time, until they withdrew) the U.K. and several of its former possessions in the Caribbean.

Common markets are confederations that focus on economic cooperation, rather than broader political cooperation—such as the Caribbean common market, CARICOM. That said, a common market can sometimes act as a precursor to broader political unions, with the key example being the European Economic Community’s transmogrification into the European Union.

We can also usefully compare federalism with a different political model, the consociation, in which a country is divided not into territorial subunits, but into religious, cultural, ethnic, or ideological groupings, each with its own privileges. Elazar comments, “It is generally agreed that consociational regimes are based on the agreement of elites, each of which must be capable of maintaining control over its own segment in the grand coalition. Thus the segments have to be organized internally on hierarchical lines but governed by the people selected to be at the top.” This is a common strategy where a country is subject to dangerous tensions between communities that must nevertheless figure out how to coexist.

For example, Lebanon features a power-sharing agreement between its Sunni, Shia, and Maronite Christian communities, under which all three must agree on major policies and the appointment of political leaders. Moreover, it has been agreed that the president must be Maronite, the prime minister must be Sunni, and the speaker of parliament a Shia. Consociational arrangements are often more fragile than federal ones, as the Lebanese example shows; but that is often more the fault of the existing tensions between communities that consociationalism is meant to manage.

****

Summing up, we have a whole range of ways in which political units can associate with each other. We can also imagine ways in which the federation members might come into conflict. Subunits might demand more autonomy, or one subunit might block a national policy that other subunits might want, or vice versa. Independence movements might strengthen in a subunit based on linguistic or national identity, if the larger federation does not adequately respect the community’s desires. And on and on.

As a worldbuilder, can you think of ways to use these concepts to make your story conflicts more compelling?

Types of Government Legitimacy

23 Sunday Feb 2025

Posted by in Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, Writing

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Why do people obey a government? And how can you use this in your fiction?

At the most basic, people obey for two reasons: they want to, or they are forced to.

(And for many people, both of these are at work at the same time. Margaret Levi calls this quasi-voluntary compliance, and it’s far more effective than relying on either mechanism on its own.)

For the moment, let’s talk about why people might want to obey a government—or to be more precise, because they believe that they should obey. This is the concept of legitimacy, that a government has the right to do what it does, and has the right to demand obedience from its citizens (and conversely, the citizens have a moral obligation to obey). Philosophers and governments have offered many reasons why citizens should obey their governments, but we can boil them down to four categories:

1. Justice demands it. This category encompasses theories of divine right or divine justice; we obey the government because the gods tell us to. It also includes non-theistic theories of justice; if the institutions of government help to maintain a just society, some philosophers say, that creates an obligation on citizens to uphold those institutions. Even if a particular law may be unjust, they say, it still might be necessary to obey the law in order not to weaken the whole system, which maintains social order and justice.

Needless to say, if the gods do not exist or do not merit obedience, or the society as a whole is unjust, this claim to legitimacy loses some of its force. At the extreme, if society is so unjust that total societal collapse would be an improvement, then justice would demand disobedience rather than obedience.

2. Loyalty to our nation compels us. This theory of legitimacy is based on two claims. First, that we each are a part of a larger whole—a family, a nation, a species—and owe our service and sometimes our very lives to that larger group. Second, obedience to the government is the best way to advance the good of the larger group.

If one is more of an individualist, rejecting claims of duty to the group, this claim to legitimacy loses its force in turn. Even if someone believes in group duties in theory, she might reject the worthiness of her particular group and seek to affiliate with another group instead. Finally, one might believe that his government is actually harming the interests of his group, and believe that group loyalty demands disobedience to the government instead.

3. We empower the government through consent. From John Locke on, modern thinkers often base political legitimacy on the consent of the governed. Some thinkers go so far as to say that only consent can ground the power of the government, and that all the other claimed bases for legitimacy (like divine right, for example) are insufficient.

The tricky thing is that in the real world, citizens have almost never freely consented to their governments. In the United States, for example, we adopted the Constitution over 200 years ago; almost no American since then has ever been given the choice to consent to the government we live under. Facing this difficulty, advocates of consent theory often fall back on some version of tacit consent; by continuing to participate in society, you implicitly endorse the original episode of consent.

But tacit consent has limited moral force, because citizens are almost always subject to some sort of constraint or coercion. For example, if we are born in a given country, it takes a great effort to move to a different one. Voting in an election does not necessarily imply consent to your government; you might be voting for the lesser of two evils, out of mere self-defense. And there is no practical way to “secede” from your government if you do not want to consent to its rule over you (so-called Sovereign Citizens notwithstanding!). So one could reasonably argue that mere participation in society does not imply that you consented to that society.

4. Legitimacy from providing benefits. Some thinkers essentially believe that when the government provides a benefit, such as health care or national defense, that creates an obligation in the citizenry to obey—perhaps out of gratitude, perhaps out of the need to participate in order to make the benefit available to your fellows.

These theories are hotly contested by thinkers like Robert Nozick, who argued that you can’t just give somebody something that was not asked for and then demand payment. Others who cautiously accept the principle still object that it doesn’t establish the degree of obligation created; if the government provides a public library, does that obligate you to fight and die in its wars?

That said, this is a very common form of legitimacy in smaller groups such as tribal bands; the chief sees that the tribe is fed, and demands obedience in return.

* * *

In the real world, elements of all of these theories are usually at work. For example, you might obey the king because you believed he was blessed by the gods, but also because trying to overthrow him would lead to massive death and upheaval, and because he’s doing a good job at fostering commerce.

In your stories, you can judiciously emphasize any of these ideas as they mesh with the story you want to tell. Clarity on how a government justifies itself, and why its citizens might agree or disagree, will help you develop your story’s themes more strongly.

Shame and War

19 Sunday Jan 2025

Posted by in Politics for Worldbuilders, War, Writing

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In our supposedly enlightened era, many people would like to imagine that most wars are fought for essentially rational purposes: punishing terrorists, seizing resources, profiteering off of arms sales, and so on. In centuries past, of course, kings and princes would fight wars to avenge personal insult or for self-aggrandizement. But surely we don’t do that sort of thing today? Surely entire countries don’t burn with humiliated resentment and seek revenge?

If only. Countries are collections of people, after all. And emotions still play a significant role in decisions to go to war. In some cases, they may play the decisive role. And fantasy or sci-fi authors would do well to keep this point in mind. As I have noted before, we are apt to forget that people have many reasons to go to war.

I am nearly finished reading Bloody Revenge: Emotions, Nationalism, and War, by sociologist Thomas J. Scheff. (Despite the piffle that infests the field, there are occasionally good works of scholarship by sociologists to be found!) He argues convincingly that in recent decades, much of American academia has been improperly deemphasizing the role of emotion in war, and in society generally. (This is, he claims, part of the move by advancing “civilization” to suppress and delegitimize emotions as justifications for behavior. I wonder what Dr. Scheff would say about the late effervescence of “safetyism.”)

Somewhat less convincingly, Scheff argues that many if not most wars are motivated by suppressed shame, acted out in a dysfunctional international system that mimics a dysfunctional family system in many respects. He argues from the assumption that if national interest were the only issue in a conflict between countries, people are creative enough to work out compromises that are, at any rate, not as bad as the wholesale destructiveness of total war.

Why fight wars then? Scheff argues that the emotion of shame (and probably fear as well, though it is not his focus) leads to alienation between the conflicting sides when it is suppressed and unacknowledged—and also within a country, so that citizens subordinate their own selves to the false solidarity of nationalism, to the extent that they are willing to fight and die in the military (which Scheff calls engulfment). It is this alienation, and the rage erupting out of unacknowledged shame, that leads countries to desire vengeance and fight wars with each other, rather than working out their conflicts less destructively.

Scheff argues that France’s shame at losing Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 was one of the key preconditions of World War I, and motivated French policies that played a key role in triggering the conflict—in particular, its alliance with Russia against Germany, which encouraged Russia to foment trouble in the Balkans. Germany’s own belligerence was, therefore, (partly) motivated by a rational fear of France’s intrigues. He also draws parallels between the secret intrigues of France, Russia, and Britain—each of which kept preparations for war secret from their own peoples, and in some cases even from much of their own governments—to the “triangling” and intrigues to be found in dysfunctional families. Finally, Scheff endorses the standard position that World War II was in large part motivated by Germany’s humiliation in Versailles and consequent desire for revenge, though he adds several lurid details of the psychology of Adolf Hitler in particular.

Scheff nearly falls into the trap of reducing everything to a single variable. He does periodically note that clashes of interests, rational fears, and the like still play a role in decisions to make war; but his foundational assumption that people would naturally come up with solutions to conflict, if not for their emotional commitments, impels him to the conclusion that if only countries would acknowledge their shame and work through their issues, wars would all but disappear.

This conclusion, however, is based on Scheff’s unstated assumption that both parties always assume that war is not something desirable, in the absence of humiliation and rage, or some other “problem” or “conflict” to be resolved. But in some cases, war is simply something that a society does. For example, while the Mongol campaigns against China and the neighboring Muslim sultanates seem motivated partly by the desire to eliminate ongoing threats, the invasion of Kievan Rus was completely unprovoked. The Rus write that the Mongols were unknown to them before their sudden invasion.

In general, Scheff neglects a country’s strategic culture, the way it understands the world and the role of war in such a world. If one “civilized” country goes through a soul-searching process of airing grievances and working through its emotions, and another “warlike” country simply perceives the first country as weaklings who are ripe for conquest, acknowledging shame is more likely to encourage war than to prevent it.

Still, Scheff’s book is an important reminder that emotions in their rawest form, cloaked as they may be in the language of national interest or international justice, often play a role in war. Worldbuilders should keep this in mind, as shame and fear can be powerful tools in the worldbuilding toolbox.

Where are the Healthy Relationships in Modern Fiction?

12 Thursday Sep 2024

Posted by in Self-Actualization, Writing

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Over the years, both as I read and watch popular entertainment and as I put out calls for short stories as an editor, I have noticed a recurring bad habit in some writers: they have their characters speak nastily to each other, with no particular purpose, when they don’t know how to create real story conflict. Rudeness becomes a cheap substitute for drama.

Of late, I’ve started linking this tendency to a more serious one: popular entertainment depicts very few healthy relationships, especially not healthy marriages. Most marriage partners in print or on screen are either infidel, treacherous, unsatisfied, or unfulfilled. This is not to say that writers should instead show relationship partners as blissfully happy all the time; anyone in a successful marriage will say that it takes a lot of work. But little modern fiction shows that work, or successful marriages at all.

Marital conflict is a potent source of drama, to be sure. But fiction is also a source of role models, teaching us what a better life can be like. And at a time when a third of U.S. marriages end in divorce, and growing numbers of people never marry at all, I fear that our stories are only reinforcing this trend. Instead of holding up an ideal of healthy marriage to aspire to, they instead tell us that healthy relationships are rare or impossible. Instead, the audience unconsciously absorbs the idea that it is normal for people to treat each other horribly.

And if people don’t have role models in their own lives for what a healthy relationship looks like, they desperately need to find them in fiction.

Am I overreacting? If I am, then people shouldn’t be told to depict other ideals in fiction, such as racial equality, gender equality, representation of marginalized groups, and the like. If such depictions are so powerful and so needed that we have an entire industry of sensitivity readers to encourage them, then it should concern us when healthy relationships become a marginalized group in our fiction.

Perhaps part of the problem is that it is easier to write damaged relationships than healthy ones. If so, we as writers need to aspire to greater artistic heights—especially when we can teach real people how to be better to others in the process. It does take real effort and skill to make a relationship work. We shouldn’t abandon people to just figure it out by themselves.

(Maybe I need to put out another call for writers?)

Keeping Busy…

08 Monday Jul 2024

Posted by in Lagrange Books, Self-Promotion

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It has been over half a year since I last wrote on this blog, and you would be forgiven for wondering, “What gives?” The short answer is that I injured myself rather badly in December, and it took a while before I was up to doing much writing.

However, my digital pen has not been entirely idle. In fact, three writing projects kept me busy: revising my first worldbuilding book, completing the first draft of my second, and publishing Ron Farina’s new book Sacrifice.

My first worldbuilding book, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders, is one of the things I’m most proud to have written. But I published the book in June of 2020, during the worst days of Covid; and I was also in the middle of law school at the time! By the end of the writing process I was in the mood of “Just get the thing done already!” As a result, there were aspects of the text that I could have made stronger, given time and attention. Additionally, I am less adept a marketer than an author—so it sells a few copies now and again, but not more.

So when my friend Dave Swindle asked if his publishing venture God of the Desert could publish a revised edition, I ultimately said yes. The new edition fixes some infelicities of the prose, adds several more worldbuilding examples, and features a significant expansion of the chapter on selectorate theory. This is the book I should have written the first time around, and I’m very pleased with it. (No idea when it will be published, though! GotD is busy producing several great books, and my turn will come when it comes. Also, we’re changing the name, alas!)

Second, I managed to complete the first draft of my second worldbuilding book, working title “Commerce for Worldbuilders.” Where the first book focused on governments, this one focuses on conflicts in and over the economy (which a reader of this blog over the last couple of years might have guessed). As with my first book, the goal is to give you a small set of powerful tools so that you can build fictional settings with compelling depictions of commerce and the economy, and the struggles that they can inspire. (As usual, most of the work was in deciding what material to cut, and how to arrange the remaining material most effectively.)

It is still just a first draft. There are definitely chapters that need beefing up, and large sections that need rewriting. Still, I think the structure of the book is sound: I managed to organize the material in a way that makes sense, where the later chapters build on the earlier ones and the reader is able to follow along. At least, I think I did! So, no particular timeline on when it will be finished, but the book is coming closer.

Finally, I got to wear my publisher hat. My imprint, Lagrange Books, published Ron Farina’s incredible book Sacrifice: The Final Chapter. Based on hundreds of hours of personal interviews with the families and friends of military servicemembers who were killed in action, it is a searing look at how these remarkable men and women grew up, decided to serve, and affected those around them with their life and death. I worked closely with Ron over many late nights to get the book ready for publication, and in my opinion it is the best book he has written. Don’t miss it!

At some point I’ll start blogging more regularly. (In fact, I think my contract with GotD says that I have to, once the revised edition is published!) Rest assured, I’m not going anywhere.

Story Conflict, Reader Interest, and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”

24 Friday Nov 2023

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Some months ago I read Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my children. I had not read the book since primary school, and it was interesting reading in a number of senses. One of them is that it seems to violate modern advice on how to write a novel—and yet it is a beloved piece of children’s literature regardless. So is the advice wrong? Or incomplete? Or are modern audiences just different than they were decades ago?

Conventional wisdom for authors is that a strong plot is based on a strong conflict or interweaved conflicts—and that each scene needs to advance the conflict in some way. (Or perhaps every other scene, if you follow the Deborah Chester model of action-reflection-action-reflection.) Without conflict, it seems, audiences get bored and simply stop reading.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory seems to follow this model initially. We are introduced to the desperate poverty of the Bucket family, which is juxtaposed against the delectable decadence of a wondrous chocolate factory in the same town. The stakes are raised by the contest of the Golden Tickets, and one by one the tickets are claimed by other children who are truly horrid in their own ways. Charlie, meanwhile, shows his virtue by accepting his suffering without complaint, and doing what little he can to help the rest of the family.

But once Charlie finds the last ticket, the conflict as such seems to vanish. Charlie and Grandpa Joe go from one wonderful experience to the next, passive observers rather than active agents in the story. The other children suffer various unexpected fates, of course, but what exactly is the underlying conflict?

Moreover, the narrative gleefully brings itself to a halt several times, and invites the reader to enjoy such diversions as Square Candies that Look Round, which play zero role in the plot. Especially in such a short book, why does Dahl allow himself such self-indulgence?

Perhaps the more useful way to address the first issue is to reframe it. The story is not presenting a conflict—it is presenting the reader with two mysteries. The first mystery, created by the contrast between Charlie’s selflessness and the other children’s incredible vices, is whether Charlie will receive his just reward, and whether the other children will receive their just punishments. And the story goes on to answer that question in the affirmative, presenting a straightforward morality play as the other children receive punishments that fit the crime, so to speak. Charlie, being a good boy, does not overstep his bounds during the tour and seems to be in no danger.

Or is he? During my reread, I was struck by the depiction of Wonka himself. He seems indifferent to the danger that the other children are placed in, and even seems to relish the thought of Veruca Salt heading off to the incinerator, for example. As their parents understandably go into panic, Wonka blithely promises that “they all come out in the wash.” The net effect is quite sinister—and Dahl is a master of sinister, as you can see in his stories for adults such as “The Landlady.” (One might even be tempted to read Wonka as a devil-figure, with his goatee and his profession of tempting children with sweets. Dahl certainly had the literary chops to be thinking in that direction.)

So the other mystery is what are Wonka’s intentions, especially with Charlie? And this mystery is deepened as the story progresses, until we finally learn that Wonka was looking for a successor. In that one moment of eucatastrophe, both of the key mysteries of the story get resolved in a whoosh of joy.

But what of the Square Candies that Look Round, and other such flourishes? My read is that Dahl was trying to maintain a sense of wonder, even if it didn’t advance the plot per se. Rather than presenting conflict specifically, Dahl’s technique is to provoke interest in general. Conflict is only one tool to provoke interest; mystery and wonder are others.

Slavish focus on plot action was not always mandatory for authors. In earlier eras, authors often would digress into various topics just because they were interesting. (One could think of Victor Hugo’s multiple-chapter celebrations of, for example, the sewer system of Paris.) Today, that sort of thing seems to have fallen out of fashion—with some notable exceptions. Neal Stephenson sometimes gets grief for his unexpected monologues on the proper way to eat Captain Crunch cereal and the like.

I don’t believe that modern audiences are so very different than in former years. Yes, attention spans are shorter, and some readers are conditioned to expect more action. But if, regardless of these challenges, you think you can provoke reader interest with a sparkling piece of writing even if it doesn’t advance story conflict, I would say go for it.

Governments and the Quick-and-Dirty Triangle of Public Policy

09 Monday Oct 2023

Posted by in Economics, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, Writing

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In the previous post, I discussed several basic functions of government—while inserting snide remarks about whether governments actually carry out these functions. Anyone who pays even the slightest attention to the news will understand why; governments often claim to pursue a given goal, but then enact policies that seem designed to a) be ineffective at achieving that goal or actually make the problem worse, and b) happen to benefit the ruling faction politically or monetarily.

Why? In the basic model of public-choice economics, it is because all government officials act in their own personal best interest, at all times, even if that involves neglecting or victimizing the populace. If there is any hope of good policy, says this model, it can only be when it is in the personal interest of the officials to deliver good policy. (This is why democracies tend to have better policies than autocracies, at least on average: politicians need to at least look like they are furthering the interests, or perceived interests, of at least half the voters.)

We needn’t accept the strong form of this model, at least not all the time. We can still recognize that some political figures and bureaucrats genuinely want to do a good job. But good policy is hard to pull off, even with the best of intentions, because governments don’t always have enough information to make good judgments about complex policy choices, and often don’t even understand the information they do have. This is related to the “knowledge problem” of Hayek—people are better at accurately perceiving their own personal surroundings and experiences than they are at interpreting imprecise representations of the wide world that have gone through several rounds of abstraction and reification.

In an environment of insufficient information, it is very easy for even a small faction of self-interested actors to put their thumb on the policy scale, so to speak, so that policies end up favoring them. It is also easy for well-intentioned ideologues to push policies that seem nice in the abstract, but prove hideously inappropriate for the real world.

For worldbuilding purposes, we can boil down the messy workings of policy formation into a triangle with three points. One point represents the “best” policy that could be arrived at, assuming that governments were perfectly benevolent and omniscient. (This assumes, of course, that you know what the “best” policy would be for your invented society; but hey, it’s your story.)

A second point represents the most likely policy to be arrived at assuming benevolent intentions but imperfect decisionmaking, given the limitations of available knowledge and skill among policymakers, their mental models, and the capabilities of existing government structures, among other bits of administrative friction. (You can throw in the workings of the political system as a further obstacle, if you want to be ambitious!)

A third point represents what policy would be set if government officials were strictly maximizing their own personal interests (or alternatively, the interests of the state as against the populace or rival states—or a combination of both!). This is trickier than it seems; as we discussed with regard to taxation, an actor’s evaluation of its best interest will depend on its values and time horizon, among other things. But as a rule of thumb, it still gives you something to hang your hat on.

This is not meant to be a rigorous exercise, but a quick and dirty way to think about policy choices in your invented setting. For any given society, or even for specific policy areas in the society, you can arbitrarily decide at what point (within the triangle) public policy is going to land—and then you get to imagine how it ended up that way!

*****

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Wealth [Commerce?] for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)

Government’s Role in the Economy

09 Monday Oct 2023

Posted by in Economics, Politics, Politics for Worldbuilders, Writing

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We’ve repeatedly alluded to the role of governments in structuring the economy. The full role of government goes well beyond a single blog post, or even a single book, but we can still lay out a few basic ideas to structure how we think of governments’ role in the economy in our worldbuilding settings. We’ll begin by talking about what ideal governments do, and in a later post we will discuss reasons why the real world often falls short of the ideal.

Let’s begin with a simple inventory:

Providing and enforcing laws. We’ve discussed how commerce thrives in stable societies where the threat of violence and banditry is low, and we can rely on enjoying the fruits of our labors even far in the future. The more secure that property rights are, the more complex commerce tends to become.

Notably, you don’t need a formal government to have and enforce laws. Several societies achieved a degree of social and commercial stability without a formal government, because a customary or religious set of laws was widely agreed upon and followed. Examples were/are the Nuer, Somali tribes following customary law, and the Jewish diaspora. Some societies in a border region even maintained a shared legal code even while at war with each other, such as the Law of the Marches between England and Scotland.

Similarly, it’s not necessary that a territory follow a single law code. In medieval England, the law merchant would compete with royal courts, which in turn competed with the courts of local lords. Today in America, the states often compete to provide laws that are favorable to particular industries, and companies also can use private arbitration to settle disputes.

Still, it seems that formal governments tend to be more effective at maintaining a stable legal system, on average. Or at any rate, the provision of law and order is one of the most compelling justifications that governments can give for their existence.

Providing public goods. How one defines “public goods” strongly depends on one’s level of cynicism, but in general we can say that there are certain kinds of things that governments have historically paid for that often do not get paid for in their absence. Militaries, road networks, and massive irrigation projects and drinking water are typical examples. One of the classic justifications of government is that by levying mandatory taxes and directing unified projects, it can overcome the collective-action problem and ensure that everyone benefits from public goods that everyone wants, but no one is able to fund on their own.

Again, many are quick to label something a “public good” when in fact it could be provided privately, as long as the necessary incentives are created and methods exist to coordinate people and resources. Mercenary units have existed since the dawn of time, and private companies often build roads and water projects if they are able to charge for them. Robert Nozick imagined a contractual mechanism in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia for people to commit money to a project and only be charged if enough other people join, and today we actually do this on crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter. I myself have hoped for a long time that we could replace much of our tax code with crowdfunded public works (and published a rather amateurish short story on that theme—but we all have our old shames!).

Nevertheless, there is a sense felt by many that certain goods and services ought to be provided collectively, and not through market mechanisms. National defense and crime prevention are prime examples.

Redistribution of incomes. The oldest governments known, in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, spent the bulk of their efforts on gathering food and then distributing it to their populaces. Ever since, some level of social support has been practiced by nearly all governments. The scale of such redistribution varied widely between, say, the Soviet Union and Victorian England. But in general, governments usually recognize that their power comes from their (control over the) populace, and that allowing large numbers of people to starve to death does not serve their interests (if it can be prevented cheaply enough, anyway).

Redistribution is expensive, and often bitterly resisted by those who are forced to pay for it. And it is also quite common for redistribution to be manipulated to produce, ahem, unexpected beneficiaries.

Aside from the three roles above, economists typically point to three other roles that seem, to me, rather less universal:

Stabilizing the economy. Economic fluctuations and crises are of concern to states, for several reasons. (But not all states are able to respond usefully; and not all states’ responses are effective.)

In one interesting example, he Babylonian Talmud records that the Temple in Jerusalem would use a portion of its treasury to buy food products if market prices were unusually low, and then sell them to the market once prices rose. [Find the cite.] The text is silent on whether such market activity was meant to be stabilizing; but the profits from such trading were spent on “extra” sacrificial offerings, rather than being retained, suggesting that profit was not the motivating factor.

Maintaining competition (or the reverse!). Often, governments use regulations to prevent markets from being dominated by particular actors. For example, governments might impose a fixed rate on rail freight so that farmers are not squeezed by the rail companies. A city might require that marketplace stalls have a maximum size, so that many sellers can fit in the town square. 

Conventional economists aside, often governments do the opposite: reserve an entire market sector for a designated monopoly. This can be done for purely self-interested reasons (such as to enrich a government minister or an ally), but governments often justify monopolies in situations with high barriers to entry, such as the need to outfit a private navy to deepen trade links with the East Indies, or building fantastically expensive semiconductor plants. Creating a monopoly, it is sometimes believed, can prevent “wasteful” competition in situations where it would yield little benefit.

Similarly, state monopolies are often advocated for in situations prone to “natural” monopolies, such as a water utility that needs to build pipes to every building.

Finally, and most speculatively, we have:

Correcting externalities. Often, commercial activity creates costs that the participants can shift to others, such as pollution or the depletion of natural resources. Since the participants don’t bear the whole costs, they have incentives to act in ways that are, globally speaking, not optimal. Governments often (claim to) act to control such misaligned incentives. For example, the U.S. government has a cap-and-trade system to limit harmful emissions from power plants, and many have advocated for a carbon tax to discourage energy-intensive behavior.

*****

Now, merely listing the potential activities of governments does not tell you what governments actually do, or why. As we know, governments often have different motivations than the welfare of their peoples. But this post is already going long, so we will discuss a three-part model for government motivations in a future post.

*****

(This post is part of Politics for Worldbuilders, an occasional series. Many of the previous posts in this series eventually became grist for my handbook for authors and game designers, Beyond Kings and Princesses: Governments for Worldbuilders. The topic of this post belongs in the planned second book in this series, working title Wealth [Commerce?] for Worldbuilders. No idea when it will be finished, but it should be fun!)