User blog:TheRedScorpion/Depth, Complexity and The Adeptus Astartes

My Codex for A Badass
Codex chapters are boring, because they arn't different. This is a sentence I hear alot from people who have yet to discover the Imperial Armour series. But, what is the underlying issue that recurrs? Well, it's more simple than you may think, but fundamentaly, it's an issue of focus, or rather, what you choose to see as "Codex Chapter".

Let's look at some Codex Chapters, The Crimson Fists, The Imperial Fists, The Salamanders, The Executioners (look them up, seriously, these guys... nut jobs), The Fire Angels, The Fire Hawks. These chapters range from the kill-crazy Fire Hawks who's pseudo medieval knightly subsidiary rank structure creates a level of complexity beyond everything I've ever read to the Imperial Fists, who shoot things with bolters. Both of them are codex, but they couldn't be more different. Why? Because none of them are de

fined purely by the question "To follow the Codex, or not." A chapter is more than the names it assigns it's ranks, the numbers of tanks, the number of battles, how many thousands of years it's been around. These are all just meaningless details, what makes a chapter "cool" is the stories of it's heroes. The time's it's come down to the wire, and they've held on. The big damn heroes look alot less heroic if their stood on top of a bloated mass of stuff that I don't want to read.

Ultimately, "depth" is the illusion of complexity, not the actuality. When your readers look at your chapter, you want to create evocative imagery in their mind, to do that, you must create an illusion of depth, whilst maintaining a flowing narrative and conveying the character of your chapter. Spending ten paragraphs explaining just why your battle companies arn't like the Ultramarines, is... honestly a waste of time. I don't want to know, you need to "imply" depth with your narrative.

Implied Depth and Illusions of Complexity
The concept of depth as a value begins with the idea that we are historical and symbolic beings who are formed largely by culture but who also have common human needs, and who experience life with the complexity that I have just referred to. Depth is the word used to capture the representation of the symbolic and historical meaning of life: There is more to us than our surface, more to life than our physical sense of it. For a work of literature to have depth is for it to create a sense of this, to define some of the forces and feelings which give resonance to our being. Now what this means practicaly, is that when you write, you must give your reader a sense that you are writing about more than just the facts and figures, without nessecarily doing that.
 * to explore the hidden forces of which we are seldom aware;
 * to invoke, often through images, the ways in which we think and feel that are not usually represented in common speech;
 * to disclose and dramatize the often hidden effects of history and culture.

In The Final Analysis
In order to evoke the complexities and the depth of experience, the writer has to use the space or time available to him to maximise his impact. Your audience may loose interest, or skim, you don't want them to so:


 * an apt, precise and powerful use of language, one which uses the resources of sound, connotation and description to evoke the experiences to which the language refers;

The more the resources of language and meaning are used to reveal the depth, complexity, lived experience, and full potential meaning of the issues and events introduced by a work, the more we say this work has quality.
 * a feel for the telling detail, and for the comment, incident, nuance of behaviour or feeling which will evoke the most intense and illuminating response, the clearest and most complex or most immediate realization of the experience being described;
 * a use of comparison which illumines;
 * the putting into play of conflictual and supportive relationships between ideas, incidents, voices and characters which brings us as fully as possible into the lived experience of life with all its tensions, ambiguities, richness and meaningfulness;
 * the drawing on our stock of knowledge in order to embed the matter of the text, with all its power and meaning, in the context of our social, historical, and personal lives, and
 * the drawing on our previous knowledge of literature in order to enrich this work with the experience and meanings of other works: we should remember that reading literature is something that one learns to do (it is not a natural capacity), and that literature, like any art form, has its own traditions of meaning, the understanding of which are important to being able to respond fully to the text.

So...
Think about it like this, if "We don't follow the codex" is a, for what of a better expression statisticaly significant portion of what makes your chapter insteresting, I put it to you, that you have missed an opportunity to really seize upon a chance to make a unique and memorable chapter.

Here's a challenge, make a loyalist, monodominant, puritan, codex chapter and make them interesting. If you want inspiration, look to the Charcarodons Astra. They are all of the above, what makes them interesting? The writer spends no time talking about how many men are in a company, and all his time writing about the facinating way they wage war, how they campaign, survive and the rivalries they have with others.

This chapter follows the Codex, is only boring if you don't fully explore just what kind of fighters they are, think of the Blood Angels or Dark Angels, plenty of interesting stuff there and those are both Codex Chapters.