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Dec. 4th, 2012 09:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynIn response to genarti's tag to this meme...
THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND WHILE WRITING HEKTOR.
First: The time frame. It is absolutely essential to remember, when I am working on him, that Hektor is living in the late Bronze Age. Mary Renault conflated a number of archaeological events for the sake of the two Theseus books and moved the date of the Santorini explosion up so that it was within the same lifetime as the beginning of the 'Dorian invasion', but essentially timed the first one somewhere around 1250 BCE and overlapped the tail end of the second with the childhood/early adolescence of Achilles. Whatever I do with him, I have to work with the events, technology, social development, etc. of that time frame.
Second: The world he lives in. Hektor may be from something very close to our world's history (given that the archaeological evidence points to Troy having been more likely to be a Hittite city named Wilusa, it's only ever going to be 'very close'), but he doesn't live in an inconveniently chronologically distant portion of our world. The world he lives in, the one inside his head and in the social constructs of the people all around him, is a world in which fate is real, the gods are a distant but present and undeniable part of human existence, a king has metaphysical obligations to his people that can and will lead to disaster if not met, and so on. His religion and metaphysical mental structure is as much a part of his conception of the world as the idea that water is essential for life. Nothing about the world would make any sense without it.
Third: The social mindset. Alongside the metaphysical schema that underpins his conception of the world, when I'm writing Hektor I have to keep in mind that this is someone with the social understanding and assumptions of a Bronze Age Greek/Hittite man of high standing. I can't really say 'prince' because our modern conception of the word doesn't apply in quite the same way. He has a nobleman's privileges and obligations and duties, and he expects other people to have and fulfill their own duties, at least within his city and among his people. This all sounds very normal and appealing, I'm sure, but again- our modern conception isn't gonna be the same. Duke Rupert the Impressive of Bavaria, or whatever a modern Western RPer has as their mental model of nobles, comes with a certain set of assumptions about his level of privilege and position. Hektor's assumptions include 'well, yes, of course we have slaves, what else do you do with prisoners of war other than execute them', 'welcome to my home, guest, did you want a woman to go with your bed tonight', 'my father's probably going to name me his heir, but considering how many full brothers I have and how many half-brothers my father's sired on various women who serve in our household, I'm not holding my breath' and so on. Given that Cybele's worship is extremely strong in his part of the world he's somewhat more liberal about the social standing of women than might be expected of his time, but he's mentally categorized nearly all of the women he's met at Milliways as being as strange and foreign as the wild Scythians' women who go to war alongside the men. They'd be unnatural in Troy, but they're foreigners, so he just sort of smiles and nods and puts on his best diplomatic face about it.
Fourth: There are always, always going to be purely physical things that he just does not recognize or understand, and I have to remember to have him interact with them properly. Just off the top of my head, this includes: glass in windows, clear glass in general, electrical light, candles (they were invented in the Qin Dynasty), steel, doorknobs, stirrups, most alcohol other than wine and beer, New World vegetables such as potatoes and tomatoes, lemons and oranges and citrus fruit other than the citron (these didn't make it to his part of the world until after the time of the Romans), guns, crossbows, zippers, indoor plumbing of any kind, sugar, ice cream, recreational smoking, pants (as opposed to breeches or leggings- trousers are a Scythian thing and more than a little weird to see on civilized folk), the written English language. . . you get the idea. When he had to serve his obligation to the Bar's goddess at Happy Hour he didn't bother putting up a sign because the idea of universal literacy is completely foreign to him- and it would've been in Linear B anyway.
Fifth: Renault's historical events. I use Mary Renault's version of the Age of Heroes because it's messy and multithreaded and infinitely more complicated- and thus, more real-feeling- than the stories we get in Bulfinch's Mythology or even in Homer. Homer redacted the ever-living crap out of the tales of the Trojan War, not to mention the stories of the gods, and everything that we've had since his time has been affected by this. Renault used a lot of archaeology alongside the myths we know, and that meant rearranging the neat and pristine stories, sometimes only fractionally, sometimes to the point of near-unrecognizability. There's no neatly defined family or organization of the twelve major gods in this 'verse; you get the Sky Gods (mostly this is Zeus and Poseidon and Apollo), you get the Goddess who is generally acknowledged to have existed first and whose worship has been mostly supplanted by the Sky Gods, you get any number of other local gods and goddesses, etc. Agamemnon was first High King of Mykenai, who married the local queen and imposed the rule of men by force- when he was away at war the queen restored the old religion and the custom of sacrificing the king at the end of his year's reign, and was only stopped when her son killed her to avenge his father. The spiel from the Iliad that Hektor gives Andromache about how he has to go and fight even though he knows he's going to lose is a long-established song of tragedy that bards will often work into this or that tale of a sacked city- Theseus performed it when ordered to sing for the guests at Asterion Minotauros' dinner party. Etc. This kind of thing has to be remembered when I write him and when he interacts with people from other canons.
And finally, sixth: this man is doomed. I cannot emphasize this enough- while I plan to go with a more historical version of events (which will probably last about a month without gods dicking around with humans to prolong things), the Trojan War is coming and Hektor is going to die of a bad case of bronze poisoning. I admit, there's a part of me that wants to have him come into Milliways after he's dead just so that Bar can issue him a Linear B copy of the Iliad and he can throw the book across the room yelling "THAT'S NOT HOW IT HAPPENED AT ALL!", but mostly it's a case of bearing in mind that what happens to him and to Troy is a microcosm of what's going to happen to the Greek sphere of influence. The so-called Greek Dark Ages are coming (in no small part because of the resource/manpower/etc. drain involved in the various Greek kings going to war with Troy, in fact) and nothing is going to change that.
genarti's tag to this meme...THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND WHILE WRITING HEKTOR.
First: The time frame. It is absolutely essential to remember, when I am working on him, that Hektor is living in the late Bronze Age. Mary Renault conflated a number of archaeological events for the sake of the two Theseus books and moved the date of the Santorini explosion up so that it was within the same lifetime as the beginning of the 'Dorian invasion', but essentially timed the first one somewhere around 1250 BCE and overlapped the tail end of the second with the childhood/early adolescence of Achilles. Whatever I do with him, I have to work with the events, technology, social development, etc. of that time frame.
Second: The world he lives in. Hektor may be from something very close to our world's history (given that the archaeological evidence points to Troy having been more likely to be a Hittite city named Wilusa, it's only ever going to be 'very close'), but he doesn't live in an inconveniently chronologically distant portion of our world. The world he lives in, the one inside his head and in the social constructs of the people all around him, is a world in which fate is real, the gods are a distant but present and undeniable part of human existence, a king has metaphysical obligations to his people that can and will lead to disaster if not met, and so on. His religion and metaphysical mental structure is as much a part of his conception of the world as the idea that water is essential for life. Nothing about the world would make any sense without it.
Third: The social mindset. Alongside the metaphysical schema that underpins his conception of the world, when I'm writing Hektor I have to keep in mind that this is someone with the social understanding and assumptions of a Bronze Age Greek/Hittite man of high standing. I can't really say 'prince' because our modern conception of the word doesn't apply in quite the same way. He has a nobleman's privileges and obligations and duties, and he expects other people to have and fulfill their own duties, at least within his city and among his people. This all sounds very normal and appealing, I'm sure, but again- our modern conception isn't gonna be the same. Duke Rupert the Impressive of Bavaria, or whatever a modern Western RPer has as their mental model of nobles, comes with a certain set of assumptions about his level of privilege and position. Hektor's assumptions include 'well, yes, of course we have slaves, what else do you do with prisoners of war other than execute them', 'welcome to my home, guest, did you want a woman to go with your bed tonight', 'my father's probably going to name me his heir, but considering how many full brothers I have and how many half-brothers my father's sired on various women who serve in our household, I'm not holding my breath' and so on. Given that Cybele's worship is extremely strong in his part of the world he's somewhat more liberal about the social standing of women than might be expected of his time, but he's mentally categorized nearly all of the women he's met at Milliways as being as strange and foreign as the wild Scythians' women who go to war alongside the men. They'd be unnatural in Troy, but they're foreigners, so he just sort of smiles and nods and puts on his best diplomatic face about it.
Fourth: There are always, always going to be purely physical things that he just does not recognize or understand, and I have to remember to have him interact with them properly. Just off the top of my head, this includes: glass in windows, clear glass in general, electrical light, candles (they were invented in the Qin Dynasty), steel, doorknobs, stirrups, most alcohol other than wine and beer, New World vegetables such as potatoes and tomatoes, lemons and oranges and citrus fruit other than the citron (these didn't make it to his part of the world until after the time of the Romans), guns, crossbows, zippers, indoor plumbing of any kind, sugar, ice cream, recreational smoking, pants (as opposed to breeches or leggings- trousers are a Scythian thing and more than a little weird to see on civilized folk), the written English language. . . you get the idea. When he had to serve his obligation to the Bar's goddess at Happy Hour he didn't bother putting up a sign because the idea of universal literacy is completely foreign to him- and it would've been in Linear B anyway.
Fifth: Renault's historical events. I use Mary Renault's version of the Age of Heroes because it's messy and multithreaded and infinitely more complicated- and thus, more real-feeling- than the stories we get in Bulfinch's Mythology or even in Homer. Homer redacted the ever-living crap out of the tales of the Trojan War, not to mention the stories of the gods, and everything that we've had since his time has been affected by this. Renault used a lot of archaeology alongside the myths we know, and that meant rearranging the neat and pristine stories, sometimes only fractionally, sometimes to the point of near-unrecognizability. There's no neatly defined family or organization of the twelve major gods in this 'verse; you get the Sky Gods (mostly this is Zeus and Poseidon and Apollo), you get the Goddess who is generally acknowledged to have existed first and whose worship has been mostly supplanted by the Sky Gods, you get any number of other local gods and goddesses, etc. Agamemnon was first High King of Mykenai, who married the local queen and imposed the rule of men by force- when he was away at war the queen restored the old religion and the custom of sacrificing the king at the end of his year's reign, and was only stopped when her son killed her to avenge his father. The spiel from the Iliad that Hektor gives Andromache about how he has to go and fight even though he knows he's going to lose is a long-established song of tragedy that bards will often work into this or that tale of a sacked city- Theseus performed it when ordered to sing for the guests at Asterion Minotauros' dinner party. Etc. This kind of thing has to be remembered when I write him and when he interacts with people from other canons.
And finally, sixth: this man is doomed. I cannot emphasize this enough- while I plan to go with a more historical version of events (which will probably last about a month without gods dicking around with humans to prolong things), the Trojan War is coming and Hektor is going to die of a bad case of bronze poisoning. I admit, there's a part of me that wants to have him come into Milliways after he's dead just so that Bar can issue him a Linear B copy of the Iliad and he can throw the book across the room yelling "THAT'S NOT HOW IT HAPPENED AT ALL!", but mostly it's a case of bearing in mind that what happens to him and to Troy is a microcosm of what's going to happen to the Greek sphere of influence. The so-called Greek Dark Ages are coming (in no small part because of the resource/manpower/etc. drain involved in the various Greek kings going to war with Troy, in fact) and nothing is going to change that.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-04 04:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-04 05:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-04 05:08 pm (UTC)One thing I love -- and that you write really well -- is characters who are genuinely a product of their society and milieu, whether that's 21st century America or the Bronze Age or a cooperative farm in a bubble on a gas giant somewhere. It's just so fascinating to look at how differently that kind of thing shapes reactions to all kinds of things.
no subject
Date: 2012-12-04 08:09 pm (UTC)