Greetings, threes of fans!
Before I launch into today’s topic, allow me to share with you the new awesomeness from the studio of Web Goddess Robyn:
Behold, the cover for the next Ian Mac Roy story, The Confession at Tacitio!
Isn’t it gorgeous? It’s exactly the way I picture the academic sanctuary/monastery of Tacitio, and the background blue is one of those colors that you can almost feel.
I do not have the pre-order set up yet, in part because I’m still tweaking the novella description. I just couldn’t hold off on sharing the cover–it’s too dang pretty to keep tucked away.
Anyway, on to today’s topic in The Hero Ecosystem: The Igniters.
But first–allow me to set the stage a bit.
Some Historical Analogs
Since I stumbled into this idea of a hero ecosystem through a history podcast, I thought the best way to look at each of my rough categories within the ecosystem would be through the lens of history. And rather than pick and choose examples from a wide range of events, I decided to settle on three world-changing events or eras to trace how the ecosystem plays out in reality.
Here are the ones I chose:
- The Meiji Restoration in Japan, in part because we don’t talk much about it in the west, and this is a chance for me to learn more about it.
- The Reconquista in Spain. This is a big one because it covers about 800 years of history, but it has some really clear analogs to my theory. Plus, I just read The Lions of Al-Rassan, by Guy Gavriel Kay, and that book is an excellent example of how to use history as inspiration for fantasy in that it pretty clearly used the Reconquista for the foundational elements of the book.
- The American Revolution, because obviously. I’m still a patriotic child of the Cold War, even though such things are out of fashion these days. Besides, with this being our 250th year, it seemed appropriate.
Obviously, I can’t do a sweeping account of all those events in a limited blog series. My posts get long enough, and I don’t want to test the limits of your patience, good people.
What I am going to do is take one or two category examples from each of these three events and use them to build an ecosystem around a larger story. None of these stories have a “chosen one” or heroic ensemble at the center; rather, the hero at the center of each story is the society or culture that weathered change and came out the other side profoundly different.
So with that, let’s look at the Igniters.
The Inciting Incidents of History
As I’ve developed this theory of the hero ecosystem, I considered whether it was correct to put the Igniters at the top of the cycle. After all, if my thesis is correct, the Igniters are merely the lit match that lights the kindling on the existing pile of thought, grievance, dissatisfaction, and social turmoil. I wondered if maybe I should put the Thinkers at the top of the cycle.
But here’s the thing: all stories need an inciting incident.
Even the true ones.
Societal change can come through massive military conflict or parchment and ink passed across a series of desks until it’s signed by the right people. It can be a slow roll or a tumbling avalanche. It can be a court case, a death, an election, an arrival. But somewhere along the line, there’s a point where the change becomes inevitable.
In literature, we call this the inciting incident. It’s the event that disrupts a character’s comfort or normal routine and sets the main plot in motion. In history, an obvious inciting incident would be the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which precipitated World War I. The groundwork for the war had been laid for some time, and tensions were high across Europe, but it was that single event that threw sparks on the kindling and ignited a continent for years (or decades, if you’re of the Second Thirty Years’ War school of thought).
So in thinking about the inciting incidents of history, here are the three I chose and how they function in the ecosystem.
The Martyr: Crispus Attucks
As I thought about the inciting incident of the American Revolution, several candidates leapt to mind: the Boston Tea Party, Lexington and Concord, even the signing of the Declaration of Independence (though that didn’t happen till after the war was in full swing).
But I almost immediately settled on the Boston Massacre and–specifically–Crispus Attucks. Attucks is popularly known as the first person to die in the Revolutionary War, even though he was actually the second. Whether he stood idly by or participated in the colonial riot, the fact remains that he was shot by a British soldier and died of his wounds, along with four other people in the crowd.
The Boston Massacre occurred on March 5, 1770, and was instrumental in turning the tide of public sentiment decidedly against the British. That great rabblerouser Samuel Adams first called the event a “massacre,” and while it took five more years for tensions to erupt in full-blown conflict, it was definitely a brick in the wall between the colonies and the monarchy.
Now, more than 250 years later, I couldn’t tell you the names of the others who died in Boston that spring, but I definitely know Crispus Attucks. Sometimes, a single name–a single death–is enough to ignite hundreds of years of tension into full-blown war.
The Intruder: Matthew Perry
Lest you think this section has something to do with the sitcom Friends, allow me to remind you that there was another Matthew Perry in history–namely, Commodore Matthew C. Perry. In 1852, Cdre. Perry and his fleet of “Black Ships” arrived in Japan under orders from President Millard Fillmore to open diplomatic and trade relations with the nation.
At the time, Japan was governed by the Tokugawa Shogunate, which was facing severe economic and political challenges. While the nation wasn’t entirely isolated, it did practice a policy of isolationism known as sakoku, and the shogunate had no interest in opening any relationship with western powers.
Perry’s warships changed everything. The Japanese had never seen anything like these “Black Ships,” two of which were steam-powered. Perry demanded negotiations, and Japan signed the Convention of Kanagawa in 1854, which opened two ports to American ships.
Perry didn’t intend to destabilize Japan, but he intruded on a system that was already going wobbly. The fuse was already there in the form of internal political conflict and dissatisfaction with the shogunate. But Perry’s intrusion threw a spark on the fuse and set Japan on a path of rapid modernization with repercussions that echoed for the next century.
Throwing one intruder into a closed society can be a powerful inciting incident for any story. While you can certainly debate the merits of the intruder’s actions and whether said intruder should be there in the first place, the fact remains that if there’s kindling, that spark will probably ignite it.
The Resister: Pelayo
After the Moorish forces swept through the Iberian Peninsula in the 8th Century, a Visigothic nobleman named Pelagius of Asturias (Pelayo) retreated into the mountains of Asturias and defeated an army of the Umayyad Caliphate at the Battle of Covadonga.
The scale of that battle is debated, and it probably wasn’t militarily significant in the overall arc of the Reconquista. However, following his victory, Pelayo declared a Christian kingdom in Asturias and became a symbolic origin point of the resistance to Moorish rule.
Pelayo is an interesting figure. Half-history, half-legend, he’s perfect as an anchor for one side of a long-running conflict. He’s King Arthur, Robin Hood, Paris, Imhotep. He’s the kind of figure everyone can point to and say, “what would Pelayo do?” and then ascribe deeds and stories that may have only partial truth.
But had Pelayo lost the Battle of Covadonga, no one would know his name.
Pelayo looked at the reality of the world around him and said, “nope.” He planted his feet in the mountains of Northern Iberia and said “come and take it.”
Which just goes to show you–sometimes being stubborn is enough to set in motion 800 years of resistance and change.
(My oldest daughter will appreciate that admission.)
In two weeks, I’ll look at the next element in the ecosystem–the Thinkers and Counselors–the folks that lay the groundwork, shore up the rhetorical defenses, and feed the fire of change.
See you then.