Reaching Your Audience: Culture and Media

A lofty goal for any writer is finding and reaching your audience. As writers, we start out with a great idea, nurture it and grow it until it sprouts. Once it attains full growth we release into the world much like the seeds of a dandylion. Some stories reach across cultural boundaries and some fall short.

A good example of stories reaching beyond cultural boundaries are the Lord of the Rings trilogy. When JRR Tolken sat down and penned those stories, he was writing for a British audience. Over the past 75 years or so, those stories have been adopted by audiences worldwide. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies have also crossed those barriers and gathered a worldwide audience.

An over night explosion was the Harry Potter series, regardless of where you stand with it’s author. Children and adults the world over were sucked into those books. Book stores couldn’t keep them in stock when they were first released. Midnight openings with thousands of eager readers flocked to bookstores to get their shiny new copy of the latest book. I came much later to the series, and I have read them all. My personal favorite is Book 3, but that is a tale for anthor post.

An example of a story that should have crossed barriers was the Keanu Reeves film, 47 Ronin. On the surface this movie had everything and then some so why did it fail? Because the western audience it was intended for didn’t understand the Japanese culture it came from. I was one of those folks. I was wholly into the movie until the ending, and it killed the whole movie for me.

The Associated Press did an interview with the director before the movie was released and he expected the movie to do great things.

Rinsch said he took on the film subject and sat down with Keanu Reeves about two years ago. They wondered how they were going to take on a popular Japanese tale and do it justice. Rinsch said they decided to make the story their own, making “it a Hollywood blockbuster and see it through that lens.”
“These themes of revenge, loyalty, perseverance, were things we knew from the very beginning were universal,” said Rinsch. – Yuriko Nagano, Associated Press, Nov. 18, 2013

While the themes are universal, the presentation was very much Japanese. And it takes an understanding of that culture and it’s history for the ending to make sense. My husband, who is very much into anime, Japanese culture and grew up watching the samurai movies of the ’80s, wound explaining the way of honor and why it had to end the way it did.

As I was researching for this post, I found this is actually loosely based on historical events. I read some of the Wikipedia article and I may do a deeper dive just to satisfy my curiosity.

Movie poster for 47 Ronin

Quote of the Day

Living with Conan

Robert E. Howard (REH)’s best known character is a sword welding barbarian and yet he isn’t. Conan has a code he lives by. His barbarian instincts give him an edge when he deals with the bad guys. Yet he acknowledges that he can not survive on instinct alone.

Conan learns languages, reading, and writing. REH shows us Conan doing this stuff for himself even though he has people to do it for him. In some stories when he wears the crown of Aqualonia, he has people doing stuff for him. Even before he becomes Kings, he learns the customs and languages of whichever group of people he happens to be adventuring with. Most adventure authors focus on the blood, battle, and babes, and less culture.

(Possible Spoiler Alert!)

Hour of the Dragon shows Conan off in both the ruler and the lone individual fighting to take back his country and save his people… If you haven’t read it perhaps go read it and then come back to this post? Or if you have no clue then maybe I can tempt you into giving REH a try. We first see Conan in the middle of a battlefield talking strategies, tactics, and the logistics of caring for an army in the middle of a war. Advisors, servants, military leaders, etc are flowing around him in the tent, he is the focus of their universe. A man in control of his world and his fate.

Later we see Conan (Are you sure you want to read spoilers if you haven’t read the story?) being spirited away by the bad guys. A victim to forces beyond his control, REH gave Conan a strong aversion to magic and the supernatural. He fights to regain control of his person and his fate. Often REH describes him as a lean lone wolf or a lion prowling amongst men. As he is escaping his captors he runs and fights like the cornered wolf. He is willing to accept help from anyone that can aid him, and yet he is willing to protect those same people if a threat is offered.

At one point while Conan is on the run, he questions whether he even wants to go back to being king. And instead go back to an adventuring lifestyle, only the demands of having his kingdom taken from him urge him to fight it out with his enemies.

I believe REH and Conan still have much to teach us in this modern age. And I realize the time period in which these stories are written paint a less stellar view of both women and minorities. Take it with a grain of salt. When we look back at our current literature there will be some cultural differences from now and the norms of then.

Cheers, james

P.S. Go read Hour of the Dragon.