The most popular page on this website is a blog comparing Terry Pratchett and Ursula Le Guin. Both are huge influences on me, and I’d like to write a bit about how they influenced the Come Bargain trilogy.
(This is a blog about the Come Bargain trilogy, crowdfunding now. If you'd like to support it, you can find out more here.)
The core is how they sit in my heart and the heart of the shows. Their ideas are bound into my mind and are reflected in the core assumptions of the show’s world. A sense of power being something dangerous, best to be used carefully and compassionately. A sense that things ought to be in balance. That the difference between good and evil is not in the lack of evil thoughts, but the rejection of them. That evil is in ignorance and treating others as not-people. That it is more worthwhile to write about the small and personal than the allegedly great and mighty hero. Their ethics, and a sense that there ought to be humour as well as tragedy.
Above all, there is a faith in humanity in their work. People tend to struggle to do the right thing, even when it’s hard. People are people everywhere; danger sits in beings that look like humans but aren’t. To quote the earlier blog:
“Even when writing about absolute evil, people who treat other people as tools to be used, they show the best in humanity. And that’s, ultimately, why they touch so many people. It’s not a fairytale faith in glitter. It’s not a carefully-crafted metaphor for an idea or principle. It’s something that the authors believe - that people are basically good, and worth struggling for, especially when nobody else can struggle for them - and it’s interwoven into every strand of their work, and every assumption they make about how the world works.”
When you come into one of the shows of Come Bargain, you are welcomed as a human being above all. You are valued for your ability to think, create, and feel as yourself, and you are valued as a part of your community. That might be a local mundane community (Come Bargain With Uncanny Things), a court made up of humans seized by a fey monarch (Come Worship Our Uncanny King), or a subversive group deciding on justice for a captured monster (Come Murder An Uncanny Thing).
At the level of the story, that looks like the audience’s creativity and thought being coveted by the uncanny Thing as gifts and praiseworthy things. The mortal characters offering respect and deferring authority to the audience, simply on the grounds that they are human and deserve a say in what happens. The show is filled with choices about how to engage with other people and the Uncanny Things based on your own sense of right and wrong - and encouragement to work with those around you.
Crucially, it’s baked into the world. The currency of trade with the Uncanny Thing is humanity - something precious and celebrated. Whenever you encounter a character, they have a reason to defer to the humans in the audience, and there are tools to encourage people to share information and work together. Decisions are reached by efforts towards consensus, not individualistic heroes. The scale is always small and sliding; there is not black and white, but the whole spectrum of things in-between and beyond.
But most importantly, the audience are trusted to act as people in difficult situations: choosing how to help people in a community, knowing not everyone can be helped; choosing how to behave under the unpredictable authority of the Uncanny King; choosing how to deal with a captive mostly-enemy. The show believes that people will want to work together, try to make the right choices, and that we can trust them both within the imagined world of the show, exploring how to be human, but also as real-world people coming into a space where our performers and other guests are vulnerable. It is a belief that comes in a large part from these two giants.
This show is a chance to explore ways of being human that are kind, cooperative, and struggling towards humanity. Coming in and saying that humanity is worthless would be to baffle everything in the constructed world.
For which I owe thanks to Le Guin and Pratchett for the adamant conviction that inspired me.
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