BARSK: I Come Not to Praise Rüsul But to Bury Him (Plus Zootopia Watch)

   A good night of fervid sleep has allowed me to get a little more distance on Barsk, and realize how, just, totally trippy everything is. The entire last half of the novel is one, what I refer to as a singularity, after another-- basically a climax, but something undefinable beyond that: everything has been leading up to this moment, and you've got a decision to make, and, what happens the moment after the moment everything's been leading up to? It's impossible to say. These on their own are powerful; one after another, in climaxing succession, I don't have the words for.

   I mentioned in a footnote to yesterday's post the plot, the twistiness, the characterization that fit into that. Barsk certainly has heartbreaking decisions made, sometimes as backstory, sometimes climactically. It's got characters who act decisively, but sometimes wrongly, and either have to deal with consequences or else ignore them. The characterization actually can't be told separately from the setting: the characters are all animals, of course, and no matter how anthropomorphic they're not just aliens but alien.

   Which is another surreal, haunting factor.

   It's on, like, a memetic scale (memes=genes for ideas.) It's memetic. Which is what makes it haunting-- the ideas are infectious for one reason or another, and any time alone with your own thoughts, your mind drifts to dwell on these things. I say memetically infectious for one reason or another-- the scars and sacrifices that people go through, and/or are forced to witness, the ways people can be broken, the plot points that seem significant in the moment but turn out not to matter as much in hindsight.

   There's more of this line of thought below, during the spoiler-marked section; all the thoughts that occurred at the beginning of the night, drifting off in the evening. Meanwhile from the end of the night, waking up in the morning, these thoughts: Back to the Future, 1955 Marty and Doc and 1985 Marty and Doc team up with each other, and get "present" (1985) Marty a really nice comb to tame that mid-80s 'do, and thus tame-haired 2015 Marty now shows up with, 2015 Doc who's not "our" Doc because the future's been changed! That doesn't make sense, but it's not supposed to: it's all a metaphor for how little sense the fictional (possibly time-travel) science in something else entirely makes.

   Anyway.

SPOILERS START HERE
(Or, more accurately, a discussion of the constitution of spoilers, starts here.)

Source: Howard Tayler

   I mentioned plot points that seem significant at first but turn out not to matter-- Barsk has so many of these, from misunderstandings of prophecy experienced by characters, to specific actions taken by them, to odd encounters between them, to the entirety of Chapter 31, that actually I think I've said all that I needed to in my own musings of memetically haunting material. I guess all of that's, just part of that.

   What we're talking about mostly is Mild Spoilers- if you've read the blurb or seen the trailers, it's something that gets spoiled for you anyway. Like how Edward being a vampire in Twilight is technically a twist within the book, but one that gets discussed on the back cover. According to the blurb you're going to read already anyway, the characters are all animals, but justified because they're the scientific creations of humans, who are now extinct. Here's where more trippiness kicks in, as I realized last night in that whole thought process about how Barsk is so haunting and surreal: taking all that setting as a given, even though it occurs as something of a major twist in the novel (though I'm still holding back a lot of it,) we've figured all this out and now we must embark on this subplot entirely tangential to the plot of saving Barsk-as-we-know-it, but in the end they decide to keep the secret covered up anyway as part of the deal to hey-lay-off-my-planet. That whole plot, that whole setting, it was all rendered moot in the end, literally moot like they held a council meeting about it and everything.

   On some level, thinking about it now, the decision to reveal this crucial setting detail makes sense, as the whole thing could come off very much fantasy (as per the genre-bend-blend which is tangential to this post so I'm including it as part of an update to yesterday's, things I'd meant to include in my initial review but lacked the time to write if I wanted to get the post up on time.)

So maybe it is justified. I wouldn't mind it so much (as, really, it wouldn't be much of a twist if it weren't treated so profoundly) if this were the first time I've seen this kind of thing, but it's not. Such a twist (to one degree of profundity or another,) that there are these anthropomorphic animals were put here by humans, has been spoiled-on-the-cover a couple of times already in a couple of other different settings (to one degree of spoilage to another.) Like Solatorobo, how box cover art sometimes shows Red as a human boy? Like, thanks, guys, I would have hated for that to have taken me by full dramatic surprise.

Not that spoilers are pure evil or anything of course; some people mind them more than others... If you have to rely solely upon shock value for your story to work, you're doing it wrong, but sometimes of course nothing rivals going entirely naked into an entirely novel world. Both suspense and irony have a part to play, and so I can't say to what degree the blurbists for Barsk were in the right in dropping the origin of these space-faring furries so casually.

I can think of a couple of webcomics, but other than that, yeah. On the mainstream side, there's still a basic need to justify up front why we're looking at a buncha funny animals. It really could be, the ultimate plot twist, if one of these days instead of telling us the human origins of these critters, something that told us straight, flat-out that humans, like I don't know, never happened in this world...

...holy craaaap.

ZOOTOPIA WATCH:
   It says, explicitly, on the world of Zootopia, humans never happened, right? That doesn't mean that humans couldn't have happened off-world. So, Barsk scenario, where RMs have supplanted humanity, gone starfaring, and proceeded to have had their true origins either forgotten or outright covered up? I've long pondered the paw pads on the hands that realistically would never have been used for walking if evolution had happened as the teaser trailer implies; how sociology would have evolved differently as well. This is either on the money or dead wrong, but if this theory is right, this could be the biggest spoiler for the whole film, far beyond whodunnit or not.