Regarding those Doombots armed with lightsabers and explosive golden snitches

(Trigger warning: I use the word "fuck" a lot in this essay, as I often do when talking about my love The Tower. If this will hurt your sensibilities, mute away please)

"No really... WTF??? I suppose he's playing with modern mythologies but... no. It really didn't work for me. " +Adrienne Kent

Adrienne is talking about the big reveal about the identities of the titular characters from Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla and all the ridiculousness that they are. I am currently half-way through my second re-read of this book as book 34 for me in the 50 book challenge, so this may or may not sub in as my write-up for that book when I finish it likely sometime in the next two days.

Now, I get Adrienne's outrage here. Stephen King is pretty fucking ridiculous; at least that's how I felt the first time through as well (though even these pale before his blatant Mary Sue-isms in books 6 & 7, and yet I deeply understand the analogy he's drawing with those instances as well and will cover them when I re-read those books).

The gist is this: I forgive Stephen King a few dumb moves in an 8 novel saga spanning more than thirty years of writing. The end product is still a whole that deeply moves me.

Enough of that, let's tackle those Wolves. Lash and I were discussing the Tower recently while on a laundry excursion, and the ridiculousness of the Wolves' identities came up in that conversation as well. I'm going to try and cover the main points of my discussion with him as to why I only give a slight smile and shake of the head now as opposed to saying something like "and with that, I'm out" (which is an understandable visceral reaction for me. I did once write an essay called "Fuck Stephen King, Fuck Him in His Fucking Ear" mid-way through my first read of book 7. I will share that after +Adrienne Kent finishes that book).

For some reason, it's varying degrees of less ridiculous that King, in the books leading to this, builds upon, changes, adapts or outright mangles other stories from our collective body of culture in order to weave them into the world of the Tower as some sort of Fable analogue for how our modern mythologies are all symbols of greater things in some psycho-babbly Jungian way, but when it comes to the Wolves we have a convergence of three of these--and I think it's this convergence that throws it for people.

I also think this convergence, this absolutely ridiculous convergence, is genius. Let's look at the dark scary figures from our popular culture over the last 20 odd years, they have a lot of traits in common (and the same traits in common with the dark characters of more ancient folklore): evil magic, inhumanity often masked by robes or cloaks, and scary mystical weapons. Our black knights, our bogeymen, are the Deatheaters. They're Darth Vader. For some they're Dr. Doom. All of these things have inhumanity, mythical powers & weapons, and scary cloaks. King's only done what George Lucas, Stan Lee and JK Rowling had already done for us: taken Tolkien's Nazgul and made them modern-scary (which he did by taking from stories of the Black Knight, Modred, Grendel, etc.).

King already set himself up a position where the Wolves couldn't just be mere mortals, otherwise the challenge wouldn't be the same. But to preserve the western aspect of this particular novel, he still needed the black knights on horseback with weapons no mere mortal could stand up to. So he gave us Doombots armed with lightsabers and explosive golden snitches. And they're fucking ridiculous. And if you erase the ridiculous and look at them objectively--they're also pretty successfully fucking scary.

One could argue (I did) that a more masterful ploy would have been to invent your own new archetype. But the problem with inventing an archetype is you've no way of knowing if it's going to work out. Darth Maul is designed to be scary, to look scary, to inspire fear. You know what? He doesn't. Not in any way at all like three seconds of Darth Vader breathing off-screen inspires fear.

The Wolves are meant to be primally scary, and they're simultaneously kind of silly, but they still pull off what they're meant to. They are evocative of the dark and scary monsters of our culture.