Using Darkness to Change the World
Writing and I have had a fairly symbiotic relationship since I was very young. I am one of those weird children who enjoyed writing far more than reading at first. I discovered as I grew older that the reason behind this was as a result of me being both bored and disillusioned by what I was forced to read in school.
The first major hallmark that marked the start of a permanent and vital shift in my writing career was a gift given by my grandmother. And on that day, she gave me a piece of advice that I have never forgotten: “Ross, it’s not that you hate reading. But that you are reading the wrong stuff.” I was thus handed the Hobbit. My love for fantasy had begun.
My grandma once again exceeded my expectations and not only got me dead set on the Hobbit, but Harry Potter as well, ensuring that I was one of the children that JK Rowling intended to grow up with the books. I was an oddity in that I read the Lord of the Rings books between the different Harry Potter novels. My next turning point was with Fellowship of the Ring.
The Hobbit was a novel I had enjoyed greatly. But one part of the story was considerably more liked, especially in regards to my imagination than the rest. The dark forest of Mirkwood, which was home to giant spiders, toxic water, and a darkness that was magical in nature had me spellbound. It was a locale unlike anything I had ever seen, and to this day is still a favored setting in my writing. Most important about Mirkwood though, was the Necromancer that had made it that way.
When I read the word Necromancer for the first time, I immediately looked up the meaning. Spellcasters who summon Undead as their servants. A concept that is to this day a favorite of mine. The other meaning of Necromancer refers to an incredibly evil wizard. This second definition became more important as I read Lord of the Rings. For anyone who knows the story, realizes I had discovered Sauron himself and became fixated on him. But the start of Lord of the Rings is when the writing I began soon after began to take root.
Near the beginning of Fellowship, an encounter with a horrific monster, specifically Khamul, second in command of the Nazgul, better known as the Ringwraiths caught my attention. This was a warning that would usher in my age of Dark Fantasy. The concept, known as Cerubus Syndrome, is when an incredibly dangerous character appears in a story to warn the reader that terrible things are about to happen. And Khamul was the Knight of Cerubus, bringing in darkness as only a being like him can, on his zombie horse.
I happened to read the third Harry Potter book soon after I finished Fellowship of the Ring, and the Dementors coincidently first appeared in this novel. Like the Ringwraiths, I immediately fell in love with these creatures of darkness, and misery. I even caught that Dementors drew inspiration from the Nazgul.
Unfortunately, I finished both serieses, and was left wanting. Lord of the Rings was written by a pacifist, so while the movies made the fight scenes absolutely amazing, the books did quite the opposite. Harry Potter suffered from a different problem. The magic was too basic. After getting into Dungeons and Dragons and seeing what fantastic magic was capable of, Harry Potter just felt… empty. Minus the Imperius Curse and Fiend Fire, I felt like the magic in that universe was, for lack of a better term, weak.
It was at this time, that three very important events occurred in very close time frames. September 11th, 2001 happened, and my cynicism that is prevalent in my personality began to take root. Second, my other grandmother bought me a video game called Tales of Symphonia that forever changed my life. After the lies I discovered about America thanks to watching our country get attacked by terrorism, my imagination was ripe to plunder by the video game. With themes not limited to, fantastic racism, corrupt churches, evil angels, justified villains, and incredibly psychologically scarred heroes, it was just the story I needed.
The final piece was the novel Eragon. While the story does get criticized a lot, two major aspects of this series were what I needed, to finally break free of the shackles holding me back, and start writing my own stories. Not only was the author very young, but the magic in that universe was exactly what I had been looking for. Magic with a deadly price to pay if used incorrectly, and capable of doing incredible feats such as altering memories, stealing souls, and wiping out cities faster than military carpet bombing, I finally had the foundation to write the story I always wanted as a child.
The story that would eventually become The Search For Eden Series began as I entered high school and just like with Harry Potter, the story got more grim as I got older. What began as a lighthearted adventure, turned into a deconstruction that has incorporated Demons, Undead, Eldritch Abominations, and the evil that lurks in the hearts of men.
High school also marked another video game entering my imagination, completing the cycle of darkness that had begun with Lord of the Rings. Final Fantasy 6, is a game that deals with the psychological torment and recovery of an entire planet. In a plot that is very terrifying considering the modern world, a killer clown becomes the general of the most powerful army in the world. The fascist empire that he commands the troops of seeks world domination, but in the end, the clown wins out even over them. He kills the emperor and becomes G-d due to a magical artifact that conveniently (or inconveniently) chose to appear at that moment. As a result, Kefka, who already was deranged, even for a clown, destroyed the entire world. That’s the halfway point of the game by the way. For the next year in the game, Kefka recreates the world as a monument to death, destruction, and nihilism. By the time he is finally stopped, the killer clown G-d has committed complete genocide against every single magical being in universe and driven 90 percent of the human race to suicide.
To say that Final Fantasy 6 is my favorite video game is an understatement. Finally, I had found a medium in fiction that told a story as dark as the one I had begun to write of my own free will. And considering that this game is hailed as among the best video games ever made, I was renewed in hope that my story ideas were not only good, but potentially award winning with enough work.
College came and I had continued to write stories, while realizing that the timeline needed to be shifted farther and farther back within the universe I was weaving. Finally, I settled upon a starting point. At the same time, I became the target of a brutal cyber bully campaign in real life. After a year and a half of being psychologically tortured to a degree that the average character in the stories I had been obsessing over a good portion of my life could match, I finally had the emotional input to really bring my story, the most important story of my life, into reality.
With the voice I had sought, though not from the source it was given, the novel named “The End of Utopia” was born. Within the last year I finished this book, and the anthology that allows a reader to peer into the depths I created was spawned soon after. The second of these two books is published, and this marked a major hallmark and achievement for me. After a life so scarred by betrayal, it was a nice change of pace to have some positivity in my life.
Looking forward, I have at least another year of college to go, and have been exploring another outlet for my writing. Especially with the political upheaval I found that my skills were needed in another area, and thus dove into the dark cesspool of political theater. I have already written much in both fiction and reportive to the end of speaking on politics, but now my voice has much more importance. And after everything I have suffered through, I can handle the backlash and criticism that I was most certainly be receiving for voicing my opinion.This is where the readings from Writing, Literacy, and Technology come into play. My ideas have been along railroad tracks, but this class is a station of sorts. A chance for me to gain new information that can be reflected in my dark fantasy writing, which also comes into play in my political posts. For one realizes that to truly appreciate dark fantasy as a genre, they must be willing to deal with the stark and very dangerous realities of the world.