Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (Daley & Goldstein, 2023)
All I have to say about Honor Among Thieves is that I enjoyed it in a Saturday matinee kind of way. Since that leaves me anywhere from 350 to 750 words short of the online film critics’ social contract, I’ll add some meta-discussion about why such a generic fantasy piece managed to surpass my expectations.
As of this writing, reviews for Honor Among Thieves are running 90% positive at the aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. When there is consensus (but not unanimity)on that site, I sometimes find myself perusing the minority reports for insight into the relative strengths and weaknesses of a feature. Doing so led me to focus and think about one particular aspect of the film: worldbuilding. Those who didn’t like it accused the worldbuilding of being weak, and … it is. Ironically, however, I realized this was the very reason I enjoyed the film.
Worldbuilding generally refers to how authors create the context in which the story takes place. More detailed is allegedly better, with works like The Lord of the Rings, Dune, or Game of Thrones rightly praised because their authors create detailed histories, cultures, and geographies that are not just fodder for trivia games but actually inform character choices and give nuance to storylines.
Conversely works like Star Wars, The Hunger Games, and The Marvel Cinematic Universe can provide lots and lots and lots and lots of details, endless details, but end up contradicting themselves or tripping themselves up because the authors don’t necessarily recall all the minutiae that fans do. Internet blogger Fred Clark spent years giving weekly criticisms of Left Behind, returning again and again to the point that the franchise didn’t understand the vital connection between plot and worldbuilding. The most fantastical plot (and hey, the events of Left Behind are no more improbable than those of The Earthseed series by Octavia Butler) becomes credible when people respond to fantastic events in a credible manner. The most familiar tropes are oddly “unrealistic” when people respond to them in ways that are neither credible nor believable. (How many times have citizens of the MCU confronted destruction on a massive scale only to return to their “normal” lives a few days later?)
Too often comments about poor worldbuilding are limited to logical inconsistencies that mediocre writers think they can plug or patch with retcon explanations. Why didn’t the Eternals help fight Thanos? (Insert explanation here…) Is Darth Vader Luke’s father or did he kill Luke’s father? (Insert Obi-Wan’s gobbledygook here.) Is the Force an energy field surrounding all living things or a bunch of midichlorians? The true answer to these questions is both and neither, because the two stories spring from different imaginations; Lucas’ protests to the contrary, it is evident that the universe building only extended to the edges of the plot.
To paraphrase the late, great, Ursula Le Guin, a great writer, if she is going to insist that a world has two moons, is going to think through the implications that this has on the tides and the seasons, and the gravitational pull, which in turn impacts the biological development of people living in different environments. The writer who postulates that everything is the same as our world except that there has been a rapture or a “snap” may not have to build an entirely new world but then must face the challenge of imagining, credibly, how our world would react to and be changed by such things. As much as I love Mad Max, that difference in “worldbuilding” is what makes Ridley Walker the far superior example of worldbuilding. Both postulate a nuclear catastrophe that drastically changes our world. But one uses that premise as a magical writer’s pass to explain in broad terms how the local setting got the way it is and the other uses it as an origin story that sets in motion the events that lead to consequences described in painstaking and credible detail.
Somewhere (I think it was around Phase Two, but MCU fans may disagree) the Marvel Universe imploded under the weight of its own worldbuilding. The stories were (and are) too diverse. Those that followed their own internal logic and those of the characters didn’t seem to inhabit the same universe. Can Thor, son of Odin, be real in a universe where all “gods” are the mythologizing of Eternals placed by Celestials?
Ironically, the absence of worldbuilding helps Dungeons & Dragons. The role-playing game is, after all, not mythology taking place in a unified world, but a loose set of rules, archetypes (Paladin, Thief,) and artifacts (mimics) that act in discernible ways that are not dependent on a broader mythology. Stories (or campaigns as gamers might call them) are intrinsically local, not global, and don’t have to have anything to do with the game you played yesterday or the day before. A good Dungeon Master is called upon not to integrate the campaign into the history of the world nor to come up with new and original scenarios but to piece together pre-established ones in interesting and fun ways. Heck in literature or drama, the adjective “stock” refers to the material the play company has on hand because the props and characters have been used in so many other plays that it is cheaper to have a wizard’s staff or a thieve’s lute on hand for the next time you have a story with that character than it is to imagine a whole new world from scratch. (Even C.S. Lewis started with a Faun carrying an umbrella passing a lampost in the woods…Narnia was not built from scratch.) The Dungeons and Dragons world is stocked not with ever-new ideas and items from endless imaginative scenario writers but with common items that are placed in books that set out the basic commonalities of the race, item, monster, etc. So while innovation is less, consistency and familiarity are increased.
Quite frankly, part of what I liked about Honor Among Thieves is that I didn’t have to sit through all the credits to see how they were going to tease the villain’s re-emergence in the next five movies. The story is modest, yes, and familiar, yes, but it is self-contained….and there is enough in it for an entertaining movie so long as all it is trying to be is an entertaining movie and not a key chapter in the development of the D&D cinematic universe.
Sufficient for the day are the pleasures of the day.
