It’s Very Personal

Why are we drawn to a medieval adventure like The Kingdom on the Edge of Reality? There are so many reasons when you think about it. One of the best reasons is that it’s very personal. Haven’t you heard it said ever so many times that one of the things that’s wrong with our modern life is that everything is so impersonal? Instead of dealing with people we deal with machines, recordings of people’s voices instead of people, menus instead of personal service. Life has been de-personalized; you know that, right? The medieval period isn’t like that, and neither is the medieval adventure.

Advertising loves to sell us the idea of convenience. It lacks a sense of adventure but it’s much more convenient, for instance, to shoot someone with a gun from across the room than to kill someone with a sword at close hand. Guns are part of the de-personalization program. It serves the purpose in the plot of a story when someone needs to be killed, but it’s much more thrilling when it’s done with a sword because it’s much more personal. In the medieval adventure, everything is personal and we enjoy the killing best when it happens up close and requires some skill.

How about transportation? Has that been de-personalized. Does you automobile have a personality? Did you give it a name? A car might seem to have a tiny bit of a personality but it’s basically a machine whether we kid ourselves and give it a name. A horse on the other hand has a very definite personality, and horses are how we get around in the medieval adventure. The meat is cooked on a spit, the wenches are pretty but not too sophisticated, the money is in gold, and the bad guys can be eliminated by chopping their heads off. That’s the best part of all about the medieval period.