Dear friends, I have considered whether to write this, but like many of my letters it comes more unbidden than not, at hours of the night when my higher functions aren’t working so well. please forgive any candor that is undesired.
I believe the SCA has jumped the shark. Actually, more properly, since I don’t have experience with other kingdoms directly I will confine my argument to ‘I believe the Outlands has jumped the shark’.
Let me explain. I will first say that this comes on the heels of giving xxx a yyy, which prompted no small amount of annoyance on my part, but it is not caused by it. Those who know me will realize that I am breaking my own rules by proclaiming something to be a crisis or some sort of tipping point or other momentous event. This is mostly because I am never smart enough to figure out when those occur or even if they have occurred, and I don’t wish to take the tack of a Doomsday Preacher who predicts the end of the world every week and surely will be right some day.
That said, although giving xxx a yyy is not a last straw nor is it prompting me to concede or throw in the towel, I considered carefully whether it means anything except me getting older and less patient with the same old SCA. I decided it was somewhat true but the pattern of events including giving that award does have some arc. So, I hereby suspend the rules and proceed to do some big picture skrying of the future.
Now, why ‘jumped the shark’? I stay away from things that sound like the fall of the Roman empire or other cries of the inevitable fall of a decadent society. In addition to it being entirely too fatalistic I think it inapt. I have spent the entirety of my SCA career lecturing that the SCA is not a government. Really it isn’t – it is a form of entertainment.
That is why jumping the shark is the right analogy.
So, what is it?
For those who are familiar with media fandom (of which the SCA is in no small part a close cousin, having developed at the cons and being populated by those people), jumping the shark refers to that episode late in the run of Happy Days where they had the Fonz jump a shark tank with his iconic motorcycle.
A tv show is said to ‘jump the shark’ at a certain point. Let us anatomize for a moment what this means and why it applies. Every scripted serial drama has a set of characters and a story arc. The best are charming and most of all the writing is creative and has a certain amount of originality and novelty in what they say about their characters – usually called character development, but when the Fonz jumped the shark tank we knew he was going from a developing character to a stereotype. Of what? Of that character, The Fonz.
At that point the show was doomed. The Fonz would never be anything more than a set of traits – the motorcycle, the jacket, the fake NY accent, the thumbs up Heey. We knew that nothing more could progress. The show would be doomed to repeat itself ad absurdum, and finally ad mortem.
Why does this happen and what does it mean?
It happens to the best of shows for the most innocent of reasons – it was entertaining. As we get more history with the show we become nostalgic and want to repeat this pleasurable experience over and over. We become more and more impatient with the inevitable clunkers – nothing more than the natural result of the creative process - which when we had no expectations were overlooked but now are dire disappointments. So, our demand narrows to only the things we remember best, the most iconic. And in so doing, we contract our horizons. We love the thing to death.
You know when you see this happening. The characters become a distilled version of what they were. What were tendencies in those characters become requirements. There is no surprise or mystery. The stories become absurdly amplified versions of what they were early on, but are essentially repeats of what came before. Although there will continue to be some occasional glories, like a turtle confined by being unable to shed its shell, the organism can not grow and so must eventually wither and die.
Does this apply to the SCA? Somewhat. Although it is not a scripted tv series, it is an entertainment medium and can be viewed as an ongoing series of improvisational plays, event after event.
Again, just looking at tendencies, I can draw myriad analogies to other SCA behaviors in which our choices have become narrower, less creative. We want events to be like we remember so we don’t try new types of events or even change their names. We won’t try new activites or branch out. The event scheduling mechanism seems designed to take away any chance of an original or novel event idea having to compete with others (and so succeed or fail) on its own merits. Instead every event is hammered to fit, painted to match.
As I have stated in other venues, the iconic, defining, part of the SCA is the Crown and award giving.
Worst of all, of late, not just to xxx, but for the last several reigns, there has been a strong tendency for the Crown to give awards to and only to their coterie. I believe they do so because they are guessing instead of knowing. They don’t want to poll the peerages or ask (or even gather award recommendations). They believe or maybe wish that their buddies meet the standards of the past. But they are wrong. By my (perhaps overly optimistic) theory, they do this not simply out of malice but out of impatience. It is just the capricious desire to have that experience of rewarding a deserving person, as they remember it from the past, but as all our lives become faster paced day by day they lack the patience to wait for it to come along naturally. Instead they want it manufactured on demand, each time, every time (I forego here the inevitable comparisons to addiction, but I leave them as an exercise for the reader to fill in mentally).
That, friends, is exactly the same reason why Fonzie had to jump the shark tank.
The good news is where the analogy differs. In a scripted series we are bound by what character developments happened before, good or ill. The arrow of time goes only one direction – forward (except at the end of Dallas, where they disavowed the entire plot as a dream; we see how well that worked out for them).
The Outlands can still change. It should change to fit the times and it can continue to be new and innovative and genuinely surprising and creative but it cannot if we by action or inaction shoehorn it into the mold of the past just to experience that illusory short term sugar high. If this game is to stay entertaining for those of us who happen not to be the crown or its suckups we must.
l.
