Evil Turns Upon Itself... Not
Greetings, my friends.
A long, long time ago (the 1980s or thereabouts), a fantasy saga was written that would become an international phenomenon. It was a story of evil forces trying to conquer a world, and of good battling evil. A motley band of heroes was united despite their differences, to save the world from evil dragons and dark goddess. Their adventures in three books covered dungeon crawls, forgotten places, epic battles and noble sacrifices. However, buckling most fantasy conventions, good did not wholly triumph at the end of the trilogy, but: "the balance is restored. The evil dragons will not be banished. They remain here, as do the good dragons. Once again the pendulum swings freely." So Fizban or Paladine claimed in the last pages of Dragons of Spring Dawning.
My friends, that was a lie. And it was not the only one. Balance was not restored. The pendulum has not been swinging freely, but been kept stiffly on Evil's side by author conspiracy and unsubtle force. Evil does not turn upon itself...or it sure doesn't do that as often as Good seems to. Dragonlance readers, I say, have been deceived and cheated, of everything that Dragonlance originally promised to be.
Where does one start? I'm sure that you, Dragonlance readers, can think of things that came after the Chronicles that disappointed you or turned out differently (too differently) from what you expected. You may know people who stopped reading Dragonlance for those reasons, and been tempted to do the same yourself. You may have been fed propaganda about letting go of the past, dealing with change, sucking it up, being a real Dragonlance fan and swallowing whatever they give you. Keeping in mind Fizban's above quote, realize that current Dragonlance fans have had to see in Krynn after the Chronicles:
Don't speak to Dragonlance readers of "balance." Don't say evil turns upon itself when Good is the side always falling apart, and Evil is always the stronger. Good manages to stay around out of sheer, dumb (author-determined) luck. Dragons of Summer Flame was written by the same people who wrote Fizban's pretty speech. Promise broken. Or maybe Fizban was mistaken. I'm sure this can be explained to me that authors have the license, even the obligation, to drum up suspense in their books, to stack the odds against the heroes, to make readers root for the underdog and to build battles and calamities up to an exciting, world-shattering climax....but come on. There's only so much tragedy and melodrama one can swallow before all these odds-stacking stunts and calamities look like extremely contrived crap.
Or maybe there's some maturity of writing style here I'm not properly appreciating. Some undetectable metaphor for the forces in the decadent real world that "W&H" are injecting into their books. Or a literary trend. A technique of creating characters that I'm not appreciating: Now heroes are so penned in by difficulties or so insignificant or fallible that they're virtually useless, baddies so finely crafted, detailed and lovingly portrayed, that all in all, you wonder what the "heroes" are even there for. Token roles, cameo appearances? And how can I root for the underdog when I'm just disgusted by them? You know things are ultimately going to fixed by deus ex machina; Evil will not turn upon itself, good guys will fumble all the way to the the finish, some will die, and only enough will survive this one trilogy to weakly bat at the even larger disasters looming in the next. Krynn will undergo its clockwork cataclysmic upheaval, set for every few years. I don't think this is the Dragonlance most readers expected or wanted to see. The "Overwhelming Evil" card has long been grossly overplayed and readers have the right to be sick of it.
The Dragonlance we got to love in the Chronicles and Legends, and the Dragonlance promised in Fizban's speech, has been definitely and irretrievably killed. How we deal with the drastic changes to Dragonlance does not change the fact that fundamental changes happened...we were deceived, surprised, shocked, betrayed, disappointed, hurt... deeply affected by the trends started in Dragons of Summer Flame. Weis and Hickman changed, and whether or not they know it and intended it, Dragonlance has changed in style and feel along with them. If you're rabidly stuck in the Fourth Age and hate the Fifth Age, you have a right to. If you hate the War of Souls and what it's trying to with Dragonlance and the Fifth Age, you have a right to too. Because someone is taking what you loved and changing it into something else. It's simple as that.
And if you think the War of Souls is going to take us back to the kind of Dragonlance we had in the Chronicles, I think you're kidding yourself. Fizban's promise has long been broken and forgotten, and you no longer have the same people around who were responsible for Dragonlance in the 80s. Change may be inevitable in real life, but Dragonlance is now handled by ego and money more than it's directed by the vision we were originally attracted to. And was that change absolutely necessary?
It's been said before that the real Dragonlance has long been dead, and it's just us now standing around an operating table watching Wizards try to shock the mutilated corpse back to life. I wonder.
I remain
Your finely crafted and detailed baddie,
Raist666
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