Subject: When the judgments happen...
Author:
Posted on: 2015-06-27 16:51:00 UTC
They just kind of sit around and support each other, instead of helping the suffering people. There's no effort to do anything but proselytize. Like, they just kind of treat the chaos and horribleness as an obstacle they have to survive. And I mean they're walking right past suffering, dying people at some points and the author just completely trivializes it.
So, this one is about the Left Behind series of "Christian" fiction (I use quotes because the LB god is literally worse than satan). Basically it's a chronicle of the Rapture and Tribulation written by and for people who believe that it will actually happen Any Day Now.
As you probably know, Fred Clark from Slacktivist has been doing a sporking of the series for more than 10 years. It can be found at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2011/08/07/left-behind-index-i-posts-1-50/
As you may not know, Mouse has been sporking the companion kids' series s well, which you may found at http://mousehole-mouse.blogspot.com/
What I decided to do in a fit of insanity was take the Left Behind setting, and try to figure out if, using the books as Rules As Written, it was possible to defeat TurboJesus. This has, among other things, caused me to read the New Testament front to back... in Latin.
Turns out that yes, there are loopholes. The result of my efforts have been turned into a RPG setting, rather than a linear story, and may be found at http://emlia.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Tripocalypse.Tripocalypse
There are a few games in progress, which I'd be happy to narrate.
Please let me know if I did it right!
Which saddens me, because I love dystopian stuff in general and I'm a Christian, so it would be right up my alley... But I've read plenty and I've never seen it done right.
You'd think it would be really easy. It's certainly tempting. Revelation has the plot right there for you--good guys, bad guys, monsters, natural disasters, and even a relatively happy ending. But that's also part of the problem. Depending on how literally you take it, now you have to try to tell a story that's already been written, in ancient poetic language, but tell it in the modern or future era in realistic writing.
The result seems to be a narrative completely overrun by plot holes as the authors assume that just because it fits into the Revelation narrative, they can declare that it happens in the modern world and they don't have to justify its causes or effects. Everything becomes one gigantic deus ex machina, and in the conversion God becomes so inconsistent, capricious, and downright insane that you could mistake him for a three-year-old stomping on a sand castle. People become statistics, the heroes become incorruptible and the villains irredeemable. It's generally a huge mess.
The best apocalyptic fiction I've seen haven't been sweeping whole-world narratives; they've been short stories, snapshots of what a world in such turmoil might look like, focused in on individual people just trying to survive and do the right thing in the middle of an apocalypse that's as much human-caused as anything else.
But those are few and far between. I've given up on it, mostly. People seem to think that just because something's religious, you don't have to write well.
Yeah, that's really a problem with a lot of Christian work... people think that just because it's got a Jesus fish on it, it has a market, so quality is not necessary. Just look at Christian videogames!
As for my RPG setting, I'm trying to make it clear that the Christian Remnant are not the bad guys; arguably TurboJesus is the bad guy, in that he wanted to destroy the earth, but he's been contained so that's not a problem -- what I wanted to do was generate a post-apocalyptic setting that is, at least tentatively, on the way to recovery; it's intended to be an optimistic setting that leaves room for players to do all sort of things (help with the reconstruction, go monster hunting, carve their own little city-state out of the ruins, go sailing and fight Kaiju, et cetera).
Could you give me a hand in making sure it's understood that Christian Remannt are just another group, and not evil?
The whole "Left Behind" series has Christians acting in a very unrealistically callous way toward suffering people. Seems to me that the Remnant would, like any other group of human beings, want to help each other. Some of them might even start to compare TurboJesus to the actual Jesus of the Bible and see the very real differences between the two.
Sooner or later, someone will conclude that they're not the same person, and there'll probably be a schism. People will start saying; "He can't be God; he's obviously not omnipotent if they can trap him!", and, "This is not the same person who preached the Sermon on the Mount". Amidst all that, there'll be decent, everyday Christians going on with their lives, following love-your-neighbor as a guiding principle because that was part of what attracted them to Christianity to begin with. And now they have to deal with the reality of a world that can be changed basically by thinking hard enough at it...
(admittedly, it was a few years ago), and I do not remember the Remnant being "callous" at all towards the rest of the world. Could you please refresh my memory a bit?
They just kind of sit around and support each other, instead of helping the suffering people. There's no effort to do anything but proselytize. Like, they just kind of treat the chaos and horribleness as an obstacle they have to survive. And I mean they're walking right past suffering, dying people at some points and the author just completely trivializes it.
Yeah, that's the impression I also got... the "good guys" are sociopathic, and the "bad guys" are ineffective.
Things like Buck worrying about getting back to his home office instead of using the fact that he's healthy and in good shape to help move people to safety, stuff like that.
Maybe it's an American thing, but I hope not. I am an Italian living in California, always stop for people stalled on the highway, and some people look at me funny.
Here in Ohio, most people will do things like help each other dig their cars out of snowbanks, because that's just what you *do*; the snow is a common enemy when everyone is trying to get somewhere.
And when there's a disaster, that tendency is magnified. When threatened, people want to help each other so instinctively that it feels completely natural to help a perfect stranger. The more obvious the problem is, the more you feel responsible for helping (especially if you are the only one there), and the more easily you can think of a way to help, the more likely you are to do something useful.
If Buck were a real person rather than a badly-written character, he absolutely would help out. Depending on his training, he could help administer first aid, commandeer a baggage cart as an ad hoc ambulance for those too hurt to walk, or simply grab the nearest struggling individual and help them to the terminal. And it would make for a great story afterwards, too.
When a crisis is huge and right in your face, people don't generally just walk away. They might not act at first; if they don't know what to do, they may stand there staring indecisively until someone figures things out and starts doing something or giving orders. At worst, they get confused and do stupid things trying to help, sometimes adding to the casualties. At best, they work together as though they'd been practicing for years. But they don't just walk away.
I am from the Italian Alps... we may not be famous for our hospitality - if anything we are a lot like Tolkien dwarfs, very gruff - but I guarantee you that in the winter all the homeless people find at least a hallway door that someone "forgot" to lock.
The thing is, TurboJesus and TurboGod and their supposed allies (who barely do anything) in Left Behind are objectively horrible people; but since they use the names of the Christian deities, I want to make sure that my writing doesn't come across as anti Christian. For every Creflo Dollar there are 100 Billie Byers after all.
At the same time, I'm going to go with that only the "Trib Force" folk are sociopathic -- Rayford Steele makes a good villain, especially if his narrative causality makes NPCs automatically think he's as handsome, smart, etc. as he thinks he is -- but my experience with evangelical Christians is that they may believe strange things about biology or astronomy, but they're good people, by and large.
It's an odd culture, to be sure; I didn't realize exactly how odd until I had left it. They still believe things like dinosaurs dying in Noah's flood or being able to dig straight down and hit Hell. They're more likely to be dogmatic and rigid in their beliefs. But as far as their basic humanity goes, you may expect them to be just as decent as any other group of people. They often struggle with guilt and feel persecuted, and can be quite out of touch with the culture around them. Some are fundamentalists because it is so reassuring to them to have every question answered and everything in black and white. All of that is just plain human nature, however unusually it's expressed.
Thanks, do you mind if I use some of your stuff? (Or if you like the setting, just hit the edit button!)
http://emlia.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=Tripocalypse.Religions
... I've once read a MLP:FiM apocalyptic fanfiction. Yes, that was the Christian apocalypse, on Earth. Well, except for the fact that the Christian God was replaced by dragon gods straight out of the author's own UPG pantheon. Oh, and Discord is the Antichrist, and the Mane 6 get to Earth, and the author's self-insert character (well, based on his "spirit animal") is a shaman coyote who has spent 21 years on Earth unnoticed (and gets an eyepatch later due to a raptor attack)...
... It was actually somewhat less bad than you'd expect. I think. I read it a while ago, and I found it awesome, but I had terrible taste in fanfic and I don't really have the time to read it again now.
Here's a link, but it's in French.
That looks delightfully random... and I can actually see Discord as the Antichrist, if you depict the Antichrist as someone who is trying to derail prophecy (and thus save the world).
Derailing prophecy is exactly the right job for the embodiment of chaos.
... But IIRC, he basically got turned into a generic supervillain. I honestly didn't see how anything he did in the fic was chaos-related.
Aw, that's too bad. Discord is such an interesting character concept, it's sad to see him misused.