Break a Leg

So, I read a lot of fantasy fiction.  And I'm not talking about porn, as the number of this blog may suggest.  The last couple of books I've picked up really got me thinking about one of the most popular conventions in story telling: young, naive, but latently talented guy meets old, experienced guy and they save the world.  There are other people along the way, but it's mostly Frodo and Gandalf, or Garion and Belgarath, or Eragon and Brom...over and over and over.  There's always somebody who's been watching them all their lives and suddenly turns out not to be Aunt Pol, but Polgara: Immortal Sourcerus, 2nd Deciple of What's-his-bucket - the ancient god of blah Blah BLAH!

This convention is shaped by our internal needs to be somebody special - that little farm boy who grew up to be king, or the beggar girl that suddenly finds herself possessed of one of the rarest powers in the world and only she can protect the good and the handsome and intelligent prince inexplicably loves her.  This is nothing new.   Stories like this were being told back before Greece was even an island.

Why do we read these books?

Well, because of the other stuff: the other characters, the other goings on.  We KNOW that the young kid and the old guy are going to save the world.  Oh yeah.  And so we can cast fireballs and fly dragons.  Cuz that would be so cool!  Ok, so more of the good stuff and less of the convention is what I'm going for.  Look at Terry Pratchett's work and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about.

Elves and a superior race?  Superior bastards is more like. Now dwarves: dwarves are good.  They make stuff, the live in mountains, they fight, and they drink.  Magic?  They empower their hammers with the magic of ass-kicking, skull bashing, and head-butting...not necessarily in that order, though.  And humans...in stories they're all a bunch of dullards, except for the one special kid and one old fart, and the thief with the heart of gold, the big dumb warrior and the sexy mysterious magic-using broad that's like 1000 years old but looks 16.

Now in MY story, it's a dwarf, a kobold, a scaven, and a couple of halflings that have nothing to do with each other.  The world they live in is called Beta.  Can you see where I'm going with this?  It's a test world.  And things in the test world don't always get finished.  And sometimes things don't work they way they should.  And people find ways to eploit those disfunctionalities which make up the basic space-time fabric that is Beta.  All the normal people go about their lives playing by the rules as they've been layed out.  But there is always somebody who doesn't want to play by the rules and wants to get all the leet gear and pwn all the nubs lol!!!11!  And of course, somebody has to stop them.

Enter our heros.  Now the dwarf...is a samurai.  How much more unconventional can you be than a dwarven samurai?  And his Emperor sends him on what should, by all accounts, be a wild goose chase.  The emperor send the samurai on The Quest for the One-Sided Coin.  Well, it's looney, but a samurai has to obey his emperor or he will bring great shame on everybody.  So the dwarf goes off and meets the other characters accidentally in a tavern.  Which is TOTALLY conventional, but it's a gaming world convention and one that I felt I could allow.  The kobold is a martial artist specializing in the Drunken Master style; the scaven is a thief who is part man, part rat, and all disgusting; one of the halflings sufferes from a complete lack of fear and/or good common sense; and the other halfling is at one time trying to master the arcane powers inherent in nature and alternately get into a wider real estate market.

Hilarity ensues.  I promise.

I've been working on this idea for quite some time and have a few bits actually written out, with tons of ideas for side characters dreamed up over a life time of living with a wild imagination.  I am going to start turning my will towards this project.  Because it is constructive.  It is something I should be doing.  Lately all I've been doing is drinking and playing World of Warcraft...this is not healthy.

With the First Season of Break a Leg coming to an end and the prospects of future projects uncertain, and IF content will still be needed on this site on a regular basis, then I may, from time to time, subject you to more of this story as it unfolds.  I know I promised something like that in the past with that little cartoon thing, but after the majority of my work got wiped when the server at work crashed...I sorta lost heart.

Oh, and to make this blog have to do with Break a Leg: We should go to conventions like WonderCon and Comic Con and be ourselves to attract attention.

Happy Jenday!

I have been thinking about community a lot lately. I don’t mean community as defined by the location of your house; I think that by now, for most of us, our streets are no longer our playgrounds. As we “mature”, we spend more time indoors (working, watching television, cleaning, cooking) and we only see our neighbors on our short walks to our cars. For those of us who don’t park in the garage, that is.

What I’m referring to as community is a sense of belonging to a group.

You may call the notion primitive; you might even fear that I have fallen in with a guild. Fair enough. Indeed, there does not seem to be as much of a need for community in the original sense: we no longer help tending to our farms or building our houses; the majority of us buy our food from stores and we can hire people to build our custom homes. I’d go on, but you get my point.

However, I don’t think we as modern individuals have outgrown the need for community. As I’ve grown up, the situations life throws at me have grown increasingly difficult, and I myself still enjoy the support of the more experienced and the fresh perspectives of the less. But, as a post-University adult, I’m finding said community nearly impossible to find. I moved hours away from what little family I had here in Canada to find my dream job, only to find myself surrounded by fabulous coworkers—who have lived here their whole lives, have established long-term friendships, and are busy with budding families. Whenever I do seem to find a community, it’s artificial (like the hypocritical hippies in their early twenties who wish they lived in a commune inhabited solely by other beautiful young people) or arbitrary (like meeting once a week at a church or getting together whenever someone “has the time”).

What I’m ultimately getting at is that I think I understand why people go to coffee shops by themselves or even post ridiculous opinions on news website forums, hoping to strike a nerve. We’re looking for a connection, wherever possible.

Both Drew and Jennifer mentioned in their previous blogs that it’s the fans that feed their passions for acting for that same reason, although on a different scale: it is the value of connection. My point is that the company here on this website, the fans supporting this amazing show and the wonderful cast and crew itself, has always been extremely positive. It makes me feel pleased to be a part of this Internet community, which although artificial in terms of need, location and even time, has striven to make an honest, personal connection.

So thank you all yet again, for all the beauty, class, style, and gyrating you are putting into this giant project. After all, Ebay was getting too expensive and I needed some free joy from somewhere.

Femke

See all the fun, all the singing and all the stabbing that went into shooting Episodes 10-12. That's right, stabbings. In this blooper reel we have the first official injury on the Break a Leg set! Bad enough to make us take Flynn (Larry) to the hospital so that the nurses could call him a baby for going there.

You can watch the episode on YouTube or right here on the site.

Episode 16 and 17 are going to be out on the last two weeks of October -- so stay tuned for the final episodes of the Break a Leg season, coming in just a few weeks!

Thanks, guys!

Enjoy!

-Yuri