So I’m three and a half volumes into listening to the Elric books by Michael Moorcock and I haven’t been Inception’d into the sensory deprivation tank full of urine yet, so I thought you might wanna know my thoughts.  Spoilers?  Not very big ones.  Also these books are old as hell so who cares?

Reminding me of Vampire Hunter D by Hideyuki Kikuchi.  The writing is a lot more blunt than I would have imagined for the towering gothickal shadow he cast over the genre.  Kikuchi’s book may well have been influenced by it.  Indeed, the dispassionate kinda evil pretty men with long white hair that recur in anime might all be descendants of Elric; I don’t know enough deep cuts of Japanese culture to be sure.  That said, Elric is a lot more emotional than Sephiroth or Sesshomaru or Benten or etc etc.  One emotion in particular: Fear.

It’s really common for writers on both sides of the Pacific to characterize a cool badass character as never feeling fear.  I get where they’re coming from.  Cool, badass, it’s a power fantasy, and we’d like to imagine ourselves in hardcase mode as immune to all such weaknesses.  But this trope does feel pretty damn stale by now, and it always undercut the ability for the story to feel like it has real stakes.  If the worst a hero would feel in defeat is annoyed or angry, that’s a lot less intense than him feeling afraid of serious injury, torture, whatever consequences.

So that’s kind of nice, even if the character is still an outrageously special specialboy.  Ladies love Elric.  Apparently he can lay pipe with the best of ’em.  Dickmatism as the kids say.  The stories are not at all explicit about it, but one gal is a queen and is like “i know u killed my bro but take my kingdom, just gimme that somethin somethin.”  He’s characterized as having poor health, in the first book only sustained by drugs, and this specifically manifests as weakness.  What’s his stroke game like if he has no stamina?  He manages to say no to drugs by getting a cool demon sword that sucks souls and gives Elric the life energy, but in at least one of the subsequent books he still needs the drugs.  Had he gone too long without soul sauce?  Book didn’t say.

One disappointment is that he doesn’t show near as much skin as he does on book covers.  About half the search results for Elric art, he at least has his arms and leggies out.  If u got it flaunt it, boy.

Oh, I didn’t really say what I meant by the writing being blunt.  Let’s put it this way:  If this were a movie, almost all of the dialog and much of the characterization would have to be original.  It could not rely on the source material.  In the books, Moorcock just tells you things about Elric.  In a movie, you’d have to show them.  The pivotal character moments have no real buildup, they’re just plopped on you.  It feels like short stories, where there’s no time to characterize through prose and you really just need to spell out what’s going on, if the plot has any complexity at all.

I once wrote a short story wherein I earned the love story through writing, really hard pressed to keep it under 9k words.  I do think the Elric books started as short stories and were collected, at least some of them, so that’s probably why it’s like this.  It mostly feels heavy-handed in the first scene of the first book, where his whole backstory and main conflict are just dropped on you like some Acme traps on Wile E. Coyote.

I wonder about Moorcock’s monster inspirations.  How original are his beasters?   They seem pretty original, but some people know more obscure monster lore than I do; maybe they aren’t.

Oh yeah, and one more thing struck me funny.  One of the books is called The Weird of the White Wolf.  The White Wolf is Elric and he’s having a weird.  But the book doesn’t tell us what the fuck a weird is.  The weirdest thing in the story is how he makes a bunch of really bad decisions for no obvious reason.  The worst is when the dragons come out and he is just totally unprepared for that.  He knew the dragons were there.  Even if he was like, fuck it, let’s do this even tho we’ll be dragonbait, he should’ve been bracing for it the whole time.  Instead when they come out it’s like Moorcock remembering they exist for the first time in pages.

But it’s all big dark fantasy bigness.  Sleesh slash.  Kill the guys, win the prize.  But feel empty inside.  That’s all I’m there for anyway.

–