Matthew
Hello, welcome to this episode of Superhero Ethics. If you are geeky in any way, you’ve probably played Dungeons and Dragons at least once in your life. Have you read any of the Dungeons and Dragons books? Like with Star Wars, there was a whole series of books written in the 80s and 90s and especially the 2000s, and I think some of them are still coming out. I hadn’t really touched them until Paul Christopher Hoppe, the Zen Madman, the giant Buddha, the person who has been a part of this podcast in one way or another since the very beginning, pointed out to me that there are some pretty good books in that series and had me start reading about a character named Drizzt. We’re talking today about a book called The Crystal Shard. It is book one of the Icewind Dale trilogy, which is also the book that kind of kicked off the Legend of Drizzt — a series of 40 novels, something like that, a lot of books.
A lot. Yeah, and it was written about Forgotten Realms. If you haven’t read these books, don’t worry about it. We’re going to be talking about what happens in the book, but also about one of the general themes, how this book holds up, how it has aged, why it was important to Paul when he read it, and why it hits for me today. So with all that, Paul, say hello and talk a little bit about how you came across this book.
Paul
So today we’re going to talk about The Crystal Shard, which is R.A. Salvatore’s first book. I’m not positive whether it’s Salvatore or Salvatore. In my head I always said Salvatore, but now I think — being from Massachusetts or wherever he’s from — it’s probably Salvatore. So that’s what I’m going to say today. Apologies to Bob if that’s wrong.
Which I believe is actually what his friends call him. This is his first book, I believe his debut novel.
It’s the first book in his Forgotten Realms series, the first trilogy, the Icewind Dale trilogy. It’s not the first one I read. I think I read The Hobbit first, but I’m not positive.
I think I read The Hobbit when I was about 12. Then I got these books around the same time — but I got the second and third books, Streams of Silver and The Halfling’s Gem, which are the second and third books in the trilogy. So I read the second book. I’m not going to talk about the plot, but The Hobbit was probably the thing that got me into fantasy — which is kind of appropriate since it kind of got fantasy into existence in a way.
Matthew
And certainly not just fantasy, but also a lot of the concepts we think of as essential to Dungeons and Dragons: the idea of dwarves as miners and fighters, the existence of characters like Hobbits or Halflings, a lot of the different kinds of people characters can be. You can see a lot of the origins of The Hobbit in the first D&D books.
Paul
And similarly, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings drew from mythology, so it’s not like pulling ideas from the ether — but that coalesced things into what became a spawning genre. I would say Streams of Silver, the way it was written, is very different from The Hobbit but also very similar, which we’ll talk about perhaps next time. But it really, along with the rest of the books in the series, sparked my love for writing as much as just for fantasy and reading fiction. I had played role-playing games, but actually hadn’t played much before reading these books. I played the computer games — although maybe that was a little after — and I had the red box set for Dungeons and Dragons, but I didn’t really play with people much until high school. And when I did, I actually never really loved role-playing games that much in terms of playing. Sometimes I did, and I played a lot of them, but I always felt like one of the great things about role-playing games is that it’s collaborative storytelling — where one person is guiding the story and you’re an improv troupe filling in. Other games later really put a fine point on that. But that’s also sort of one of the drawbacks. If you make a character and have an idea of what you want that character to do, and it doesn’t really fit with the story — you have a certain amount of agency, but it’s a little more like life than it is like telling a story. What I really enjoyed about the books was that this world, this setting I loved, felt a little more coherent to me than what often came out of actual games. There’s a momentum and the stories move in a way that campaigns can sometimes drag. That’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed role-playing games or had great times, but along the way there are disappointments. I found myself one morning just ripping — well, typing — ten pages’ worth of material. Shortly after I got my first computer, somehow I didn’t keep going with that. It was just a spurt. I did other writing later, but to me it feels like a world of imagination where there’s a wide scope of potential stories. And this book, The Crystal Shard, is a little more local, while some of the others are more expansive and far-reaching. I enjoyed both.
Matthew
I hear what you’re saying. We’re going to get to the book, I promise, but this is pretty much where the conversation will start — role-playing versus books and how it all fits in. I like role-playing for a lot of the same reasons. Yes, it’s fun to roll dice and see what happens, but my favorite sessions, both as a player and as a dungeon master or story master, have made me think of role-playing games as community storytelling. One person is guiding the story and everyone else is sort of an improv troupe — yes-and-ing and filling in. Games go best with a lot of yes-and, though sometimes no-but works too. Funny enough, on TikTok recently there’s been this big debate over how people play D&D and what the right way is. Someone mentioned that as dungeon master they’ll sometimes fudge hit point totals or fudge a roll for the sake of narrative — like, killing this character too easily doesn’t fit the story beat, or a goblin getting a nat 20 twice and doing incredible damage wasn’t what should happen. A lot of people pushed back hard: the rules are the rules, and you follow the rolls. I’m not saying one side is wrong. For me it really comes down to what you’re trying to do. Dungeons and Dragons especially, but a lot of other games, have the potential to basically be a medieval fantasy war game — and more or less originated that way.
Paul
I think so, yeah.
Matthew
And especially now, with miniatures and the way maps are done, you can do some really great, very intense war gaming with a lot of RPG role-playing thrown in, or you can lean more on the role-playing side, or land somewhere in the middle. I’m a big believer in doing what you want and telling the kind of story you want with that group. A lot of people now talk about Session Zero being really important — just getting everyone on the same page about what you’re trying to do. Do you want everyone backstabbing each other? Do you want one happy shiny party? If you want the backstabbing vampire, Masquerade is right down the road — great for it. If you want one happy shiny party, Vampire: The Masquerade is not the one to do. That was the main game Paul and I played quite a lot in high school, which is why I’m bringing it up. Part of why I resisted these books for a while was the feeling that the whole point is for me to create my own place in the world — why would I want to read what someone else has done? What I realized more and more is that a lot of the problems I had with role-playing games came down to imagination. If what I’m imagining and what you’re imagining are fundamentally different, that’s hard. A game like Vampire or other modern-day games, it’s easy to say, okay, we both know what the streets of New York are like. But what’s your vision of a medieval town? What’s mine? And if those don’t match, we’re going to have some problems. As I was reading this book, part of what got me to it, honestly, was Baldur’s Gate 3 — have you played it?
Paul
No, I mean the very old one — the early AD&D games up to but not including Baldur’s Gate. I’ve seen some gameplay, but haven’t played it properly.
Matthew
Yeah, years ago as kids — Pool of Radiance and that whole series. Baldur’s Gate 3, which is probably two or three years old now, really changed the game in terms of narrative storytelling. And it’s kind of funny, because now I’m about to start a D&D campaign, and if I just say we’re in an area near Waterdeep, people know what that is and how things fit together. With that spirit I was happy to approach the book, and I was pleasantly surprised by the nature of storytelling, the characters, and just where the story takes us.
Paul
Yeah, there’s a lot there. And I fully agree — there’s no one right way to game. The thing about role-playing games and really any group gaming is that everybody has to be on the same page to an extent. When it comes to fudging dice rolls, I don’t have any inherent issue with that. But it can go along with something I always had a huge issue with in games — what I’d call DM railroading. Basically: this is going to be the story, this is what has to happen. If it’s like, well, this NPC wasn’t supposed to die here, and the players come up with some brilliant idea to prevent it, and the answer is no, it has to happen — that’s where I check out. You have to recognize when genius has occurred. I’ve also experienced the opposite of railroading, where in one game — I think it was Earthdawn — there were all these riddles and we were trapped in a place and had to solve them. Six of us sitting in a room trying to solve a riddle for hours on end. Kind of boring, but also that was the story. It’s sort of railroading in the opposite direction — the story wasn’t going to solve it for us. I do agree that having people on the same page is important. I’ve been watching a lot of mysteries lately. There are two main categories: cozies and hard-boiled. It’s important to know which you’re in. Is everybody on the same team? Is it about the party going in and probably succeeding? Or is it more backstabby? Is this an HBO show or a USA show?
Matthew
Yeah, kind of. One thing we often cover in Session Zero is: what are things we just don’t want to deal with? I have one player for whom animals being killed is off the table. I was once in a game shortly after my mother had died, and I asked: could we not have a character motivated by the death of their mother?
Paul
Or like, can we not have slavery be a huge factor in the setting?
Matthew
Exactly. Can you show that these people are terrible without going to that particular place? And yeah, I totally agree about the railroading thing. Honestly, most of the time I fudge dice rolls it’s because I realize I’ve made a mistake — I wanted a challenging fight but misjudged the level of creature, or the opposite. There has to be that balance. And as you said, for some groups being stuck for six hours not knowing the answer is great.
Paul
You have to know your audience. For others, after half an hour someone’s asking, can I roll to find traps again? They know there’s a trap but they can’t find it. They roll one or two off, and you just give them it — you found the trap. So anyway, with all that said, let’s talk about this book, The Crystal Shard. First of all, I’m not surprised you said this book sparked your love of writing, because — and I’m using language that’s often used negatively, but I don’t mean it that way — it’s not my style of writing, but I think it’s very good for what it is. It’s incredibly evocative prose. No one just swings an axe — everything is described with this vivid, illustrative language. I’m curious to what extent that was part of it. I think this book does a very good job of painting emotional, illustrative ideas of what’s happening in every moment. Was that part of what got you into writing?
No, and I don’t think I fully agree with your assessment. I think “purple prose” is very appropriate because the main character’s eyes are lavender. But in terms of general physical description — yeah, there’s a high degree of it. I think it’s primarily the combat where you were noticing it.
Matthew
Yeah, specifically the combat is where I was noticing it.
Paul
I think the combat is actually very well described. I wouldn’t really call it purple prose, but it’s not flat. Purple prose implies overindulgence in adverbs and adjectives, whereas I think a lot of combat description in fiction is fairly lackluster. Salvatore does a great job of it. It’s entertaining in a way that captured my imagination and makes me feel like I can see what’s happening — where people are, how they’re situated, what the terrain is like — and he does it without decelerating the pace. If you’re less interested in combat, perhaps it feels like it drags, but I’d say you’re right that it’s one of the things I really appreciated, even if I wouldn’t sign on to your exact description. And this is his first novel, so it’s not quite at the peak of his powers.
Matthew
And especially with your definition of purple prose as overindulgence, people’s bars for that are going to be different. For me it felt that way, but I can understand why others wouldn’t see it the same.
Paul
It’s not Hemingway — not terse. One of the things I really liked, and this reminded me a lot of the D&D movie that came out a couple of years ago with Chris Pine —
Matthew
And in that, it’s a good reminder that the rules language of Dungeons and Dragons is for the players, not for the characters. So if you’re looking for someone to say, “I can heal you now, but then I’m out of spell slots for the rest of the day” — that’s not what’s going to happen. You get a good sense of who’s a fighter, who’s a barbarian — which at various points has been both a race and a class in D&D. In this first book, there’s no one who’s really a magic user among our group of heroes, but there’s one person who definitely has the skills of a rogue. One person is described as a ranger, but not really in terms of the class in D&D, and certainly no one ever talks about armor class or hit points. I really liked that. It’s reminding you that the game is meant to simulate these kinds of stories, but this isn’t a story about a one-to-one relationship between the rules and the story.
Paul
Yeah, exactly. Having watched a lot of baseball recently, I’m forced to make the comparison of a hard-hit ball that bounces off someone’s glove — whether it’s a hit or an error, that’s a description, an evaluation. But the thing that happened is the thing that happened. It doesn’t actually matter whether it’s scored a hit or an error. Game mechanics can just be a game — a power game where the mechanics are the point, if that’s what you want. But they’re also there to facilitate telling a story and to determine what happens when two characters are in conflict. Drizzt is a ranger by class, right? But no one in the book says “that’s your character class.” That’s just who he is, what he does. All the fighters are just characters who know how to fight. A mage is somebody who went and learned to do magic — that’s why they’re a mage. And that was always one of my pet peeves when playing: characters in dialogue discussing game mechanics. And even worse in live-action — “this person has one more point of status.” What are you talking about?
Matthew
Yeah, exactly. How you draw those lines gets different for everyone, but having the world work this way makes so much more sense. Now let’s talk about the character of Drizzt, because I don’t know if this was the original intent — my understanding is that these books were all labeled later as The Legend of Drizzt. He’s certainly the main character of this book and of the series, and I know he’s someone you’ve often mentioned as one of your favorite literary characters, someone you really identify with. Tell us who Drizzt is, and tell us why he means so much to you.
Paul
So Drizzt — Drizzt Do’Urden, there’s a T at the end — it’s not just Drizz.
Matthew
Well, that’s funny. I listened to it as a book on tape and the reader wasn’t pronouncing the T.
Paul
Yeah, I guess it’s kind of hard. In later books, they have people mispronouncing his name — like, “what’s a Drizzt?” — and he doesn’t correct them. But yeah, I’ll give the character bio. And I was thinking about audiobooks, and I was like, I don’t think I could listen to books I already have a deep connection with — having someone else’s voice reading it feels weird, you know.
Matthew
And that might also be why some of the prose felt more evocative to me — hearing it read aloud slows it down and amplifies it a bit.
Paul
The spoken word occurs at a slower pace than the written word for most people. A lot of people can read 200, 300, 400 words a minute, whereas the spoken word at more than 150 words a minute is like the Micro Machines guy — an auctioneer or a horse race caller. So I can definitely see some of the prose feeling very different when spoken aloud. And actually, just a quick writer’s aside: often people say if you want to improve your writing, read it out loud, because then you’ll hear things that don’t quite sound right. So that makes a ton of sense. Anyway, Drizzt Do’Urden is a Drow Elf from Menzoberranzan, which is a Drow Elf city, who left — we won’t get too deep into that — but basically was like, this isn’t cool, what we’re doing here.
Matthew
For those who don’t know: Drow Elves are from the underground, generally dark-skinned — a result of living underground — and in this world they’re mostly portrayed as evil. They worship the spider goddess and are unambiguously the bad guys in most contexts.
Paul
The Drow Elves are dark-skinned, underground-dwelling, and in the Forgotten Realms specifically live in the Underdark — this huge expansive underground dungeon system. By game rules they’re all chaotic evil. And R.A. Salvatore asked: what if one of them isn’t? Now, in newer editions they’ve kind of retconned them to be more morally gray, which we don’t have to get into. But obviously there’s something inherently problematic about designating the dark-skinned elves as the evil ones — interestingly, the evil dwarves are grey dwarves, but anyway. The point is there are goodly races and evil races, but among the goodly races, humans are of all alignments. The way I like to see it: the Drow cultures that are prominent are evil cultures. There’s a book called Homeland that’s a prequel and gets into that culture. I think it’s fine for a culture to be depicted as evil because I think most are. But the thing about Drizzt that I always related to was that he grew up in a very evil world and rejected it — was like, no, I’m not going to go around randomly killing people just because that’s what I’m supposed to do. Also, his best friend’s a cat. He’s got a panther in a figurine — Guenhwyvar — and basically he chose to exile himself and leave the place he grew up to try to find a culture that fit him. He became a ranger, loves living in the wilderness, and has this small group of very close friends. And a lot of that is because of racism — in Forgotten Realms, the Drow culture is so extreme that it makes the prejudice more understandable in a way. But throughout the books we see the human cultures aren’t great either. In The Crystal Shard there are the Ten-Towns, primarily human settlements, and then the barbarians — another group of humans with a pretty rough culture. Very chauvinistic, all about fighting and raiding, though you can see where that came from given they’re surviving in a brutal wilderness. And the dwarves are presented as maybe the good culture, with a good king. Were there any female dwarves? I don’t remember any.
Matthew
We’re not going to spend too much time on it. I think there’s nothing about this book that is particularly bad for its time — it’s just a book of its time. That’s all I meant.
Paul
I know, I know. Yeah. There are one or two female characters who exist mostly as love interests or to be rescued, and that will probably change in later books. But yeah, there are no female dwarves and not really many female humans. There’s a young woman the dwarf has adopted who becomes a love interest for the barbarian king. And originally the books were conceived with Wulfgar as the main character — this Conan the Barbarian type.
Matthew
And Wulfgar is a barbarian, but on a raid, most of his band was killed when he was a young teenager. A dwarf adopted him, civilized him, and taught him how to be better.
Paul
Yeah, and made him basically a Mjolnir — a hammer that comes back to his hand.
Matthew
This super badass hammer that always returns to his hand. Exactly.
Paul
And then his adopted sister is the love interest, which is a whole thing. But yeah, apparently Wulfgar was going to be the main character, but writing the book, Salvatore just realized Drizzt is the interesting one. He was supposed to be this cool sidekick, and it was like, no, that’s the more interesting character. He has these journal entry monologues between each part — there are usually three or four parts per book. And this was actually the main reason I thought it would be interesting to talk about: Drizzt is clearly a character whose ethos didn’t come from outside. He had an idea of what he thought was a reasonable way to act, saw that nobody around him was doing that, and was like, well, whatever, I’m still going to do it the best I can. Ultimately he had to leave his homeland in order to continue doing that and not wind up dead. He found that other cultures weren’t necessarily welcoming either, and so he ends up on the edges of civilization, in a place where a few people really accept him as who he is and a lot of people are very suspicious. But he’s constantly pondering what the best way is to go about things, basically having his own little mini Superhero Ethics episode before each part of each book.
Matthew
And I think if there’s any overall theme I’m finding — especially in this book, though I think it’ll be true of the others — it’s really about the individual over the group. I actually made a comment to Paul while I was reading this: all the many times you and I have argued about how much it matters that a person is part of a group versus being an individual — I should have just read this book. The Wulfgar story and the Drizzt story are both sort of parallel, and problematic in interesting ways. The Wulfgar story has this thread of the wild, uncivilized barbarian raised by the more civilized community and turning out to be better, then going back to rule the barbarian community — there’s a lot you can read into that. But in both it’s about what happens when an individual is not like their group. And as you said, there is some justification for the bias against the Drow specifically in this fictional world, in a way that’s not true of biases in our own world. But it still raises the question: when you’re not meeting the Drow, you’re meeting Drizzt. When you’re not meeting a barbarian, you’re meeting Wulfgar. How do people get past that? And a lot of what’s discussed is how important it is for Drizzt that he has this group of friends who see him not as a Drow, but as the individual Drizzt Do’Urden.
Paul
And the most important thing is that he sees himself as who he is. That’s primary. But then the fact that there are a select few people who also see him for that — who accept him as who he is rather than as a representative of a group — matters enormously. He’s not culturally a Drow elf. He grew up in a Drow city and then rejected the culture and built his own. Having that small number of people who see him for him, I think, takes the sting out of everyone else who only sees him as a Drow. It’s like: there are some people who get him, and that’s enough. It would be nice if everybody did — and spoilers, maybe there are some developments along the way thirty-some books in — but having a few really good friends who accept him without sharing the same experience, I think that sustains him. Wulfgar grew up in a certain way — was taken from his culture, otherwise he would have been killed with the other fallen barbarians — and ultimately he chooses what he wants to do. He decides to go back, taking some of what he learned, and makes his own decision. Nobody tells him what to do. He chooses. And having grown up somewhere that isn’t the best, having agency, and being able to say I’m going to be who I want to be, and then having some friends who see that and are like: cool, we like who you want to be. Yeah.
Matthew
Let’s talk for a bit about the villain of the story. A lot of the villain is prejudice, and a lot of it is the situation in the Ten-Towns — this cold northern region where ten towns have to deal with barbarians and dwarves and external threats. First, can all the Ten-Towns and the dwarves unite against the barbarians? And then, can they and the barbarians unite against the larger threat? That larger threat is this wizard named Akar Kessel. And he has come across a thing called the Crystal Shard — an element of power, basically like the One Ring. Whoever possesses it has tremendous power.
Paul
Can I say what it actually is? Sure. Crenshinibon — sounds like a Cinnabon. I think it was actually created by liches, a bunch of undead mages, and then it ended up consuming them. It’s this evil artifact, but sentient. I would say it’s the primary villain, actually. And then there’s also a demon who’s after it, who’s another villain. Akar Kessel is the primary antagonist, but he’s really a stooge for the Crystal Shard. Some other wizards manipulated him — left him to die, basically — and then he found the Crystal Shard and became this great and powerful figure.
Matthew
Well, and that’s kind of my point. To me he’s a really interesting villain because he’s kind of just a nobody. That’s part of the point. The wizarding community is presented as awful, with very strict rules of apprenticeship. One wizard was getting in the way of the others, and they basically manipulated his apprentice: if you kill your mentor, we’ll let you sit at the cool kids’ table. It’s one hundred percent bullying — taking advantage of someone who’s weak and mild-mannered, but doesn’t have a heart of gold. Not every person who gets bullied turns out to be the nicest person in the world. Many do, and bullying doesn’t make people bad, but sometimes being bullied leaves you in a position where, if you get a chance to be the bully, you’ll take it. And he takes it. He kills his mentor, they immediately abandon him, he finds the Crystal Shard, and now it’s: I have the power, I’m going to get everything I’ve ever wanted. He finds local women to bring to him, unites all these groups, and I just thought it was a very interesting take on a villain — not someone who’s been power-hungry all his life, but someone who just wanted to fit in, and when he got rejected was like, fine, I’ll build the table and force everyone to come to mine.
Paul
Exactly. I was going to say he’s kind of a loser — which isn’t entirely wrong — but I think you were more spot-on with calling him a nobody. He’s this not-very-good apprentice wizard who’s probably not going to make it. He gets manipulated and stumbles onto power. And to me it’s not really a “power corrupts” story — it’s more of a “power reveals” story. He didn’t have any clear idea of what he thought was right or good. He was just going along. And then he gets a lot of power and uses it basically for whatever he can think of that he’d enjoy. He’s not a great military strategist, and I think the shard itself is frustrated with how dopey he is — he’s not following the plan as well as he should. And then the demon shows up, wants the Crystal Shard, and is basically just hanging around waiting for Kessel to screw it up.
Matthew
Yeah. And “power reveals” is really the best way to put it. The biggest, strongest person at school is not automatically going to be a bully — sometimes they’re going to be wonderful. And it’s not that the smallest, most marginal person is always going to be a wonderful victim with a heart of gold. Sometimes a person would happily be a bully, they just don’t have the ability. And then you make them big enough to push people around on the playground — sometimes they’re going to.
Paul
Right. Wulfgar’s seven feet tall, and I think he’s a little more than 200 pounds.
Matthew
Yeah, probably closer to 300. The descriptions of his muscles are many.
Paul
Copious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I see what you’re talking about.
Matthew
One thing I found interesting — and again, I don’t mean this as an attack on the book, just an interesting sign of how things have changed — is the relationship between the main dwarf, Bruenor, and Wulfgar, his adopted son. There’s a big deal made about how Wulfgar is getting ready to go out on his own, and dwarves are miners and smiths, and one thing a dwarf can do is forge his magnum opus — the one greatest thing he’ll ever make. It won’t be bettered. What he does is forge this incredible hammer called Aegis-fang that can knock down multiple people at a time, always flies back to Wulfgar’s hand, and is just, you know, plus five everything. The book makes a big deal about how essential it was for Bruenor to do this, because as a manly dwarven warrior, he could never tell Wulfgar how he feels about him. And he knew Wulfgar would never say it either, but this was their way of expressing it to each other. And I don’t mean this to attack the book — this is just how people thought at the time, and some still do — but reading it I just kept thinking: it’s okay to tell your son you love them. I promise. So much of that I found very frustrating, because I see that idea as so damaging. That’s probably me projecting a lot from my own relationship with my father, which is problematic, I’ve talked about it at length. But I do think there’s been a real cultural shift recently around men talking about their emotions with other men. This book isn’t particularly bad in that regard compared to anything else from its time, but it’s definitely written in a time when that’s not how men were supposed to express their feelings.
Paul
I agree and I disagree. I think those two characters are who they are, and I don’t think they should be written differently now. The culture is what the culture is. There’s nothing wrong with having characters like that — you can convey it with the author angling to show some of the downsides, but the characters themselves don’t need to change. I grew up with the opposite experience. Every night my dad would help me go to sleep, tell me a story, and say, “We love you just because you’re you.” He’d say that every night except when he was away shooting on location. And I grew up surrounded by a pretty hippie community in Manhattan Plaza in Manhattan, where a lot of my teachers were women — so I didn’t grow up in that culture that I know is more predominant in the US, especially at that time. I can’t fully speak to that experience. But I can say obviously not everyone grew up that way, and I believe there are still a lot of people growing up with this idea of what men are supposed to be. I do think the broader culture has shifted — men and boys expressing emotions is more generally acceptable now, even if there’s a backlash too. I’ll also say: I don’t think there’s anything entirely wrong with not always communicating love and affection verbally. I like to do it — but also, I’ve come to appreciate the language of expressing emotions in other ways. Growing up in Taekwondo, for example, I knew what my teacher thought of me even without certain things being said. And more specifically — this is a particularly common thing in some East Asian cultures — my wife is Chinese-American. Her dad said maybe two words to me in the almost fifteen years I knew him before he died. The one time I remember him actually speaking to me was when I drove him to the casino alone. He just said, “Thank you.” And it hits differently when those are the only words someone ever says. And he would also make dumplings for me — an absurd amount of vegetarian and vegan dumplings. My wife’s mom, when she wasn’t well and we were staying to help her with medical things, would wake up at five in the morning and make congee and dumplings. In some cultures, that’s how you say I love you. And I think that’s okay — as long as both people speak that language and understand what it means. So: verbal communication has real value, I appreciate having grown up never feeling I shouldn’t express my emotions, and I think it sucks that there’s this shaming of men who do. But I also think the ability to communicate nonverbally has a lot of value, and recognizing that different cultures express things differently is important too.
Matthew
100%. I want to clarify two things. One: you said at the beginning that maybe the writer could have angled a bit, and I think that’s what I’m actually talking about. You’re right that it would change these characters if they did do it differently — I have nothing against characters who have that perspective. And I totally agree that these things are emphasized differently across cultures. I’m also autistic, and it is harder for my brain to read the unspoken signals. That’s not true of everyone. For me, it was — and I wish I had screenshotted the exact passage — in part because the Drizzt sections are first person and everyone else is third person. It really felt like it wasn’t the author conveying things from Bruenor’s perspective, but the author saying: “Isn’t Bruenor a great example of manhood?”
Paul
Yeah, fair. And again, I think this might be another spot where reading and listening create a different experience. When I’m reading, I’m hearing it in my own voice and can put my own spin on something. When you’re listening, you’re hearing it in the reader’s voice and they might be adding their own spin. And it’s certainly harder to reinterpret. I’ve also reread this — about two years ago when it was snowing, it felt like the perfect time. And this year when it started snowing again, I started it again and then was like, I’ve got too much going on. But I’ll probably reread Streams of Silver before we cover that one, if we do.
Matthew
Yeah. The last thing I want to talk about — we’re already at about an hour and I wasn’t going for too long — is the Halfling character Regis, who in many ways was my favorite in book one. In book two I’m like: you’re going places I don’t think I’m okay with. We’ll see where that goes. He has a pendant that’s basically a magical item of persuasion — he’s able to enchant people to think what he wants them to think, to listen to him and be convinced by him. In book two he starts doing some real shady stuff with it. We’ll get to that. But in this book, more than anything, he’s the person who understands that these people need to unite and put aside their petty differences. Some of the differences are pretty significant, but still — you’re fighting over fishing boats when someone’s coming to burn your towns. He uses this magical ability to get people to do what we as readers clearly feel is the right thing. Towards the end of the book, though, they start to figure out what he’s been doing and he starts to lose credibility. What was your take on his story?
Paul
I think you can go back and listen to our episode on the end of Supergirl season one. It’s pretty much the same thing: brainwashing people to make them do the right thing.
Matthew
Exactly.
Paul
I don’t remember whether he also does some things to get some cushy perks for himself along the way. I think he might.
Matthew
He’s a rogue, and in D&D there’s always been this feeling that it’s kind of okay if you’re part of a guild.
Paul
Right, right, right. As long as you’re part of a guild. And yeah, I mean, I’m fine with convincing people. It depends on the situation. If you’re using mind control to get someone to do something you think is in their best interests — that’s pretty subjective. Maybe if they’re selling death sticks or whatever, I’ll co-sign that one. But yeah, like — telling someone they shouldn’t wear purple? I’d deeply object to that. But convincing people to stop bickering and get murdered alongside everyone else, instead of uniting? Yeah, that seems okay. For me it always comes down to: what are the positives and negatives? Overriding someone’s agency is a default bad, but it’s not absolute. If someone’s about to walk off a cliff by accident and you just say “turn around,” I’m fine with that. This is mostly like that. If you were mind-controlling individual people to force them to fight when they wanted to run away, that would be a different thing entirely — no, no, no.
Matthew
And I think what I like most about how it’s handled in this book is that the ethics aren’t really discussed so much as the consequences. What happens is he gets caught. And later, because of that, when he does have genuine warnings — accurate ones — they literally don’t believe him. And for me, yes, everything ties back to our own world. We live in a world where a lot of people are trying really hard to convince others of things we know are true, and those people aren’t being believed. Some approaches are dry fact-laying — not very effective. Others involve fudging the facts a little, or using incredibly emotional appeals. And we’re seeing what happens when you do that too much. I’m really interested to see where the books take that, because I think there are very good conversations to be had about: when you need to convince people of something and they’re not believing it, and their ignorance is going to harm not just them but everyone, what is both ethically and strategically the right way to convince them? Those are two related but separate questions.
Paul
Yeah, I agree. The strategic question is at least as interesting, maybe even more consequential. A few years ago, someone shared a statistic to illustrate how terrible something was — it had to do with the carbon footprint of a certain space trip, and the claim was that it had equaled the combined emissions of half the world’s population. I was like, that doesn’t sound right. And I looked it up: it turned out to be off by a factor of four billion. The person had confused the total for the bottom half of the world with the average of the bottom half. When I pointed it out, their response was: I’m not going to correct myself when it comes to criticizing people I think are bad. And I said: I can’t trust anything you say anymore. You were wrong — that’s okay, we all get things wrong. But when you willfully let the wrong statement stand, we’re done. And that’s why, when you’re saying it might be okay to use emotionally manipulative appeals to get someone to see reality, I don’t have a huge problem with that. But if you’re going to lie in order to get people to believe the truth, where does that go? Now you might even cause them to double down — “see, they were lying.” Why on earth are they going to believe the first thing you’re trying to convince them of? So in the situation with Regis, it’s literally an existential threat — you’ve got to win the first battle, you can’t worry about the second battle yet. But when it comes to convincing people of scientific reality, you can lose people, they spread that to others, and you can have some real big problems.
Matthew
Yeah. We do. And yeah, that’s a great thing for us.
Paul
That’s why we read fantasy books.
Matthew
Not really, but yeah — some escapism is helpful. All right. Well, this has been fantastic, Paul. Thanks so much for recommending this book to me.
Paul
Thank you for reading it. My pleasure. I’m going to keep reading them.
Matthew
Yes. And I do think listening to a book on tape is reading. I’m not going to get into that debate. The author had words in their head, put them into a medium, and now those words are in my head — words have been transferred from one head to another. We’re going to read the other books. Not next week — we have a lot of other great things coming, but it’ll be something to come out soon. On our Star Wars podcast recently, we’ve been talking about Mando, Mandalorian and Grogu. I’m not sure when this episode is going to come out, but either shortly before or after it, we’ll have things on the new He-Man movie, as well as the mining of late Gen X and early millennial nostalgia for content, and probably something about The Boys and some great other stuff. Please check all that out. Paul, of course, you can find their writing on ZenMadman.com. Tell us a little bit about what you’re doing over there.
Paul
Yeah. So I’ve got a poker newsletter called Friday Night Is My Monday Morning. You can sign up and have it in your inbox every Friday, or you can just go to my website and read it there. It’s about poker, but I often make analogies and metaphors, drawing connections to various other topics — fairly varied. And I’m also going to have a page with links to my fiction, and maybe you’ll even be able to get some of it right there on ZenMadman.com.
Matthew
Definitely worth checking out. I’ve enjoyed them. I’m a poker player so I enjoy the poker side, but there’s also a lot about how you deal with losing, how you make a plan, how you start something and begin at the beginning. Please check all that out. Please check out all the great things on TheEthicalPanda.com, and most importantly, may the force be with you.
Paul
And something I wanted to add — this would have been funnier if I’d done it earlier, but: may the fleas of a thousand reindeer nest in your genitals.
Matthew
Yes! That is a quote from the book. Brilliant.
Paul
Peace.
Matthew
Peace.
