Posted by Tannhaeuser
on 2/27/2009, 1:41 am, in reply to "Re: Question about hypothetical series"
Message modified by user Tannhaeuser 3/2/2009, 12:07 am
Well, first off, Sean, I want absolutely to emphasize that I am not reflecting on your work personally. I think I have seen all of it that you have made available to us, and it has been uniformly excellent in my estimation. What I said in my previous post was entirely unconnected to any one person, and concerned more with the sort of trends that I have seen in A) modern animation, B) updatings of old series, and ( perhaps most devastatingly) C) fan-fiction and fan-art.
Still speaking in general terms, I can’t help but feel that to move the kids into their twenties would not really make for the most interesting series, but for just one more soap opera series about throbbing body parts. My personal attitude toward twentysomething lust is frankly that of the immortal quatrain of Dorothy L. Sayers:
As the years come in and the years go out,
Stories about sex are not, generally speaking, either really adult or actually very interesting. (How many people think about the plot of Debbie Does Dallas?) If one wants an adult version of D&D, I dare say it would be much more like The Lord of the Rings — but that great work is not notably erotic. It is concerned with other, more adult issues.
I totter toward the tomb,
Still caring less and less about
Who goes to bed with whom.
Don’t get me wrong—romance is wonderful and sex in moderation (or even in wild immoderation, as in, say, Lysistrata) is fun. Dungeons & Dragons as I have often said, was a show about growing up, and growing up involves realizing one’s sexuality among other things. However, that is actually one reason why I myself would prefer keeping the kids at their original ages. It is in the teen years that one becomes sexually aware, not in the late twenties and thirties. (If my experience as a High School teacher does not deceive me, I have a feeling that sixteen-to-eighteen-year-old Diana would be far more interested in sixteen-to-eighteen-year old Eric’s body than thirty-year-old Diana would be in thirty-year-old Eric, with whom, in fact, she might be rather bored after all those years in the wilderness.) To observe the kids maturing in dealing with their sexuality is more interesting at the formative stage, if it is the psychology that one is interested in. When the sexual stance, as well as the body, is more completely developed, the interest is — well, subject to suspicions of prurience. Otherwise, one would be just as interested in the sexuality of a forty-year-old, or an eighty-year-old, as of a twenty-year-old. But does anyone want to examine the sexual attitudes of Dungeon Master or Kelek or Martha?
Again, this is not a reflection on you personally, Sean. It’s merely because you raised the sexual question that I thought one should deal with it dispassionately and critically in its artistic effects as they apply to a possible new D&D series. To speak quite coldly, I believe it would be a step backward for fantasy and animation, back to the days of Gor and Fritz the Cat.
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