Amazing author. Elric and Corum were formative for me growing up. Strange that his fantasy works have fallen a bit off the radar despite the LOTR and GOT explosions. Moorcock had his own voice in fantasy quite unlike those two (although GRRM's Valerians are clones of Melniboneans) and I'd love to see Elric executed onscreen *well*.
Moorcock is the most underrated fantasy writer of the late 20th century.. Elric of Melnebóne is one of my favorite characters ever and really Moorcock is the father of modern Dark fantasy and morally ambivalent heroism
Great interview. What I loved about the eternal champion arc was the various writing styles Moorcock used to tell his stories. I.e. Elric was not a hero or even antihero. He was aligned to chaos, an antagonist and written as a critique of the “hero’s journey”. He was iconic & great fun too, but he wasn’t a hero or good - more like evil leaning towards neutral. You could say that modern Joker has become something similar to Elric from the 60’s
Absolutely LOVE the books, but I have to disagree....I still wish for an actual fan of the works who happens to be a class A director would make some movies happen!
The sheer scope of the 'Eternal Champions' was amazing. Different people, yet one, different fascets of the same existant being throughout time, space and dimension. Maybe this is what we are?
i m from creta of greece. i hope u see that.. we have inspired youth by elrik and koroum and erekozi. hokmoun i havent read yet! it was completly inspire my life at 16 and still love this storys. just to know that you have funs long time now from greece .my english suck, i know it , sory everyone.. cheers for all the fun i have reading your stories
Great video! Love seeing and hearing Michael Moorcock talk about this books and his characters. Great, great author. I love his Elric books and his Corum books particularly. Thanks for the upload!
@Just Some Guy without a Mustache Holy shit you really are everywhere.
Před 7 lety+3
I want to meet in person this great author, this master of fantasy!, It is one of the biggest dreams of my life, and Elric is one of my favorite characters, I feel very fond of this tormented "king of the ruins".
Recently Michael Moorcock himself announced that he signed a deal with BBC to do a Hawkmoon series based on the Runestaff saga. Let's hope we see something materialized in the future.
God, I'll take anything at this point, as long as they do it justice. I've always said Hawkmoon might make a more easily-adaptable property than Elric for various reasons. It would be amazing to see a proper Hawkmoon film or miniseries. I thought I'd never live to see any of the EC books done as films, but maybe I'm wrong.
I REALLY want to see an Elric film, or more appropriately, a series of Elric films. To me, his tragic story is one that modern film audiences would really eat up. I think the age of the antihero is upon us, and someone could make it as dark as it requires. Something in the 300-genre, or the palette of Lord of the Rings (without the revisionism) and directed by James Gunn or the Russo Brothers...
If it's watered down it will be awful, unwatchable. I agree with you. It needs to be done as faithfully as possible, with a minimum of modern CGI fake bullshit. If not, don't bother, I say.
It's funny when I read my favorite books I actually wish for them not to be adapted now. Believe me u wouldn't want it as well in modern day film making
I totally agree. I have been waiting for decades for a decent Elric film or show or miniseries. Rhaegar Targaryen is such an obvious rip-off of Elric (the Targaryens and Valyria are all stolen from Moorcock's Melniboneans) -- it would be nice for HBO to do the original source material.
3:00 Yep. Games Workshop sues people for using the word Space Marine in their books, and their fans shit on Blizzard for making a space marine game with xenomorphs and space elves, yet the Warhammer franchise is one big fat plagiarism-fest where, unlike Star Wars, whose creator admits that it was inspired by things like the Bible, Joseph Campbell, Seven Samurai, and western movies, Games Workshop still insists that their creation is 100% unique, even though they plagiarized so many things that even their star of Chaos was lifted from the Elric Saga.
Games Workshop steals intellectual property, claims it as their own and ruthlessly prosecutes anyone who even remotely resembles Warhammer. And yes - GW stole from Moorcock.
Read Frank Herbert Dune. It will be clear after you finish it. Tyrannids are Xenomorphs from alien. The concept of the warp was from Moorcock. They stole the most from Dune. I do love the 40k lore more than Dune,but they definitely took way too much from Dune.
I don't know what Blizzard stole from GW because I'm not familiar with the Warhammer fantasy lore. They might have stole something,but it's harder to prove because races like elfs,orcs,goblins,dwarves are myths and legends. They are part of the folklore of some countries.
Inspiration gives credit, inspiration gives homage, inspiration dreams and respects. Plagiarism sells someone else's ideas as its own, rejecting any accusation of unoriginality by way of a narcissistic, 5 year old child's tantrum. Games Workshop officially does not even care about having consistency, canon. They just want to throw everything they can grab into their soup. They do not even care about quality in their own rulebooks, there is barely lore in their codices, for races they've had for 2-3 decades. Their translations are even worse, where for instance "engagement range" gets translated with "close-combat/melee range" in the target language (German for that example) - it makes no sense. Full of typos, grammatical errors, the writing style of a google translation that someone made worse by manually going over it and adding errors no electric sheep could dream up. In short: Games Workshop is running a scam.
mr moorcock est un écrivain immense......prenez les danseurs de la fin des temps".une atmosphere entre dali et oscar wilde,mais en arrière fond des thematiques profondes...";Werther de goethe n'est il pas la préfiguration de zombie boy?.....mr moorcock est un visionnaire,il me faudrait plus de temps pour l'expilquer mais je déteste pianoter trop longtemps sur youtube......glorianna est somptueux ,du peter greenaway puissance dix(sans les fautes de gouts)..Sinon je n'ai toujours pas avalé le pillage de zemzkis sur moorcock.Esperons qu'il a pensé a lui envoyé une caisse du meilleur champagne sur terrre pour se faire pardonner........;la distance est mince entre l'hommage et le plagiat.........anyway.........je suis stupide d'avoir raté la chance de rencrontrer michael moorcock...............
I more than disagree with his potshots towards Tolkien. Tolkien is fundamentally different from Moorcock, both as a person and a writer. I never much liked Moorcock as a person or a writer. His main attraction is Elric who is pretty much the original angsty high fantasy/comic book anti-hero. Though his influence is profound in everything from D&D and Warhammer to Wolverine, I never found any real relatable human qualities in any of his characters and frankly can't stomach his worldview in any capacity. However, there is something weird and fun about the Melnibonean Cycle, which I think serves other media like video games far better than epic fantasy literature made for reading (Lords of Chaos and Law clearly influencing the Daedra and Aedra). I think his ideas are great but he's kind of a sloppy writer, jumping from one scenario to the next in his Elric stories without, interestingly for fantasy fiction, ever providing any semblance of conflict or suspense. I don't care about any of his characters enough to care about what happens. We know Elric 'loves' Cymoril, who is an 'amoral' Melnibonean yet who can somehow behave as if she understands love and loyalty, okay, so Moorcock says..... He never shows us anything that substantiates that love or the Melnibonean trait. His villains are less than one-dimensional, as are his heroes who mostly just want to die. The most interesting thing about his works are the occult-esque elements. I liked reading about Arioch, and his many different incarnations. I liked reading about sorcery, traveling in between planes of existence. Although his 'Pantheon' is really pretty much just the Ars Goetia and his set-up of Law and Chaos is ultimately empty.
Basically, the way I see it, the conflict between Order and Chaos is misunderstood by people like Moorcock. It isn't always order vs chaos, many times in history and fiction, it's order vs. order. For example, two medieval monarchs fighting would be Order vs. Order, since they both believe in the same form of government, the same medieval order and power structure, and they could even believe in the same God and go to the same Church, but they're still bitter enemies. The same goes for fiction. Take Star Wars, for instance. The Galactic Empire obviously stands for order, but it's the kind of order that comes with constant, generous helpings of mass genocide and slavery. The Rebellion looks like they stand for chaos, but in reality, they're fighting to restore the kind of order that existed before the Empire, which makes them just as much forces of Order as the Empire is. Neither side sees chaos as a good thing, they're just two conflicting sides that have their conflicting visions of order. Meanwhile, factions in fiction and real life can switch from Chaos to Order based on their status. The Bolsheviks in Russia, for instance, stood for chaos, as they did everything they can to weaken and destroy Russian society during World War 1 and the Russian Civil War. But once they gained power, and both the Russian provisional government and the Czar were gone, the Bolsheviks switched from a radical form of Chaos to a radical form of Order, reshaping Russian society as they saw fit and even exterminating anarchist and moderate socialist groups that they used to gain power. In the same vein, the Sith from Star Wars stood for Chaos, stoking the fires of war multiple times, with the most famous example having the Sith pit the Republic against the Separatists during the Clone Wars. But after the destruction of the Republic and the rise of the New Order, the Sith became forces of Order, down to the point where any potential troublemakers and rabble-rousers were put down with efficiency by the Sith's new Galactic Empire. Moorcock dividing cosmic forces between chaos and order makes no sense when many factions in real life happily skip the line between the two, and other factions can have competing visions of the same element. Two factions that are forces of Chaos can conflict, just as two factions that are forces of Order can conflict, and a force that stands for Chaos would immediately switch to the side of Order when they become the top banana and they don't want anyone to knock them off that perch. This is why I find Tolkien's idea of good vs. evil more appealing. A force for good can work for chaos or order, based on the circumstances. Maybe they'll fan some chaos to overthrow an evil regime that inflicts order at the point of a sword, but they'll switch to order once they overthrow said regime and are now stuck rebuilding everything the previous regime destroyed. Forces for good and evil can stand for order, but their vision of what order is and what it entails could conflict and cause a war between them. It's not just Chaos vs. Order, it's HOW they envision chaos or order, and how they enact it, that makes them good or evil, and whether or not we should root for them or against them depends on that.
While it seems that Moorcock is a nice enough man, I can't help but disagree with how he views things. Basically, the way I see it, the conflict between Order and Chaos is misunderstood by people like Moorcock and Rick Priestley, the guy who wrote 40K's lore. It isn't always order vs chaos, many times in history and fiction, it's order vs. order. For example, two medieval monarchs fighting would be Order vs. Order, since they both believe in the same form of government, the same medieval order and power structure, and they could even believe in the same God and go to the same Church, but they're still bitter enemies. The same goes for fiction. Take Star Wars, for instance. The Galactic Empire obviously stands for order, but it's the kind of order that comes with constant, generous helpings of mass genocide and slavery. The Rebellion looks like they stand for chaos, but in reality, they're fighting to restore the kind of order that existed before the Empire, which makes them just as much forces of Order as the Empire is. Neither side sees chaos as a good thing, they're just two conflicting sides that have their conflicting visions of order. Meanwhile, factions in fiction and real life can switch from Chaos to Order based on their status. The Bolsheviks in Russia, for instance, stood for chaos, as they did everything they can to weaken and destroy Russian society during World War 1 and the Russian Civil War. But once they gained power, and both the Russian provisional government and the Czar were gone, the Bolsheviks switched from a radical form of Chaos to a radical form of Order, reshaping Russian society as they saw fit and even exterminating anarchist and moderate socialist groups that they used to gain power. In the same vein, the Sith from Star Wars stood for Chaos, stoking the fires of war multiple times, with the most famous example having the Sith pit the Republic against the Separatists during the Clone Wars. But after the destruction of the Republic and the rise of the New Order, the Sith became forces of Order, down to the point where any potential troublemakers and rabble-rousers were put down with efficiency by the Sith's new Galactic Empire. Moorcock dividing cosmic forces between chaos and order makes no sense when many factions in real life happily skip the line between the two, and other factions can have competing visions of the same element. Two factions that are forces of Chaos can conflict, just as two factions that are forces of Order can conflict, and a force that stands for Chaos would immediately switch to the side of Order when they become the top banana and they don't want anyone to knock them off that perch. This is why I find Tolkien's idea of good vs. evil more appealing. A force for good can work for chaos or order, based on the circumstances. Maybe they'll fan some chaos to overthrow an evil regime that inflicts order at the point of a sword, but they'll switch to order once they overthrow said regime and are now stuck rebuilding everything the previous regime destroyed. Forces for good and evil can stand for order, but their vision of what order is and what it entails could conflict and cause a war between them. It's not just Chaos vs. Order, it's HOW they envision chaos or order, and how they enact it, that makes them good or evil, and whether or not we should root for them or against them depends on that.
You wrote this wall of text without doing much research evidently. Seeing as elric himself points out the distinction between the neutral observation of what can be viewed as an entity of either order or chaos and the moral underpinnings which could be applicable to either. The young kingdoms of elric's world are bastions of intense, pummeling order, but are nonetheless as decadent and bewilderingly evil as any force representing chaos could be.
@@wegg4730 Except representing Order as a force is a mistake in itself. People switch from Chaos to Order and vice-versa. Chaos and Order aren't supernatural forces, they're strategies employed by people to take power and stay in power. The underdogs will create chaos to undermine the current leaders of society and seize power from them, but once the underdogs are in charge, they'll maintain order and snuff out any potential troublemakers before the cycle repeats itself on them. As Littlefinger said in Game of Thrones, "Chaos is a ladder." It's not some amoral force stuck in a grey area between good and evil, it's a social phenomenon that someone uses as a stepping stone to their ascent as the harbingers of a New Order. Having Chaos be represented as if it has its own lords is misunderstanding the role chaos played in human history, and is therefore unrealistic. It makes for good fantasy, but it makes for an unrealistic story.
Amazing author. Elric and Corum were formative for me growing up. Strange that his fantasy works have fallen a bit off the radar despite the LOTR and GOT explosions. Moorcock had his own voice in fantasy quite unlike those two (although GRRM's Valerians are clones of Melniboneans) and I'd love to see Elric executed onscreen *well*.
Moorcock is as timeless as the eternal champion himself, love his books.
Moorcock is the most underrated fantasy writer of the late 20th century.. Elric of Melnebóne is one of my favorite characters ever and really Moorcock is the father of modern Dark fantasy and morally ambivalent heroism
Great interview. What I loved about the eternal champion arc was the various writing styles Moorcock used to tell his stories. I.e. Elric was not a hero or even antihero. He was aligned to chaos, an antagonist and written as a critique of the “hero’s journey”. He was iconic & great fun too, but he wasn’t a hero or good - more like evil leaning towards neutral. You could say that modern Joker has become something similar to Elric from the 60’s
Elric is still a master piece for generations!
Formidable interview... Un grand auteur...
So happy to see Mr Moorcock! Thxs! No movie is needed, everyting is already in the books and can't be better. Long life to you Mr Moorcock!
Absolutely LOVE the books, but I have to disagree....I still wish for an actual fan of the works who happens to be a class A director would make some movies happen!
Never read any Moorcock but after seeing a couple of short interviews i will be reading some.
What a humble person. Love his work.
The sheer scope of the 'Eternal Champions' was amazing. Different people, yet one, different fascets of the same existant being throughout time, space and dimension.
Maybe this is what we are?
i m from creta of greece. i hope u see that.. we have inspired youth by elrik and koroum and erekozi. hokmoun i havent read yet! it was completly inspire my life at 16 and still love this storys. just to know that you have funs long time now from greece .my english suck, i know it , sory everyone.. cheers for all the fun i have reading your stories
Great video! Love seeing and hearing Michael Moorcock talk about this books and his characters. Great, great author. I love his Elric books and his Corum books particularly. Thanks for the upload!
Par Arioch, je ne découvre cette interview que maintenant.
Thanks for posting this. I wish there was more Moorcock interviews on the web. It would be great to pick his brain as much as possible before he dies.
Try Friends of Michael Moorcock on Facebook. He interacts with all readers.
Loved his books of short stories and the great chaos vs order books...
He seems like a lovely man, best wishes to you Michael!
Warhammer steal from everybody LOL IT'S SO TRUE
@Just Some Guy without a Mustache Holy shit you really are everywhere.
I want to meet in person this great author, this master of fantasy!, It is one of the biggest dreams of my life, and Elric is one of my favorite characters, I feel very fond of this tormented "king of the ruins".
Elric sounds like my kind of "hero." I don't want fluff, and Elric sounds perfect.
That was awesome.......great encouragement during the summer of the plague......August 2020
I draw a lot of influence from Michael. I love his writing style.
Je découvre cette interview très tard, mais merci ! :)
HBO please do the Elric series.
Recently Michael Moorcock himself announced that he signed a deal with BBC to do a Hawkmoon series based on the Runestaff saga. Let's hope we see something materialized in the future.
Imagine a series called CHAMPION with Elric as the main character with Corum, Hawkmoon etc and all the supporting characters in one series.
God, I'll take anything at this point, as long as they do it justice. I've always said Hawkmoon might make a more easily-adaptable property than Elric for various reasons. It would be amazing to see a proper Hawkmoon film or miniseries. I thought I'd never live to see any of the EC books done as films, but maybe I'm wrong.
They'd ruin it. It needs Peter Jackson.
@@Empowerless oh great so Elric will be a black man....
still have the paperbacks from back then , epic stories , yes when are the movies to be made?
Moorcock VERY tired in this interview!
It's an excellent interview nevertheless.
Oren Douek thanx for your feedback ;)
Sauramps team
Good interview, he looks great. I can't believe the books he read when he was four! Who was that gorgeous woman with him at the book signing?
Bill OBarr It's Linda Moorcock, his wife.
Very good interview - merci!
I REALLY want to see an Elric film, or more appropriately, a series of Elric films. To me, his tragic story is one that modern film audiences would really eat up. I think the age of the antihero is upon us, and someone could make it as dark as it requires. Something in the 300-genre, or the palette of Lord of the Rings (without the revisionism) and directed by James Gunn or the Russo Brothers...
If it's watered down it will be awful, unwatchable. I agree with you. It needs to be done as faithfully as possible, with a minimum of modern CGI fake bullshit. If not, don't bother, I say.
It's funny when I read my favorite books I actually wish for them not to be adapted now. Believe me u wouldn't want it as well in modern day film making
HBO should take the work of bringing Elric alive.
I totally agree. I have been waiting for decades for a decent Elric film or show or miniseries. Rhaegar Targaryen is such an obvious rip-off of Elric (the Targaryens and Valyria are all stolen from Moorcock's Melniboneans) -- it would be nice for HBO to do the original source material.
Theres a difference between homage and ripoff.
Why is The warhound and the world's pain unrecognized as a awesome book ?
Hey its Ben Kenobi!
7:00 that's Sapkowski getting an autograph paha
I admire him so much!
I see the edgar rice burrothos in moorcock
Need to meet him in person and not just in an autograph line (would be happy just for that at this point).
Nice interview : )
3:00 Yep. Games Workshop sues people for using the word Space Marine in their books, and their fans shit on Blizzard for making a space marine game with xenomorphs and space elves, yet the Warhammer franchise is one big fat plagiarism-fest where, unlike Star Wars, whose creator admits that it was inspired by things like the Bible, Joseph Campbell, Seven Samurai, and western movies, Games Workshop still insists that their creation is 100% unique, even though they plagiarized so many things that even their star of Chaos was lifted from the Elric Saga.
He is my particular satisfaction
They should do The Dancers at the end of time trilogy
This series was enthralling. It was like seeing the story of Fantasy Genre Jesus.
سداسية ايلريك حاكم ميلنيبوني من افضل ما قرأت
Games Workshop steals intellectual property, claims it as their own and ruthlessly prosecutes anyone who even remotely resembles Warhammer. And yes - GW stole from Moorcock.
How can such a polite friendly English gentleman write about the darkest most moody character ever?
Hello Games workshop??
I believe at 8:00 is hansi kursch of blind guardian fame.
Nope, not him
Makes
Can someone explain how Warhammer steals from everywhere?
Or just point me to an article or some sort? Just trying to understand
Read Frank Herbert Dune. It will be clear after you finish it. Tyrannids are Xenomorphs from alien. The concept of the warp was from Moorcock. They stole the most from Dune. I do love the 40k lore more than Dune,but they definitely took way too much from Dune.
Thanks
I don't know what Blizzard stole from GW because I'm not familiar with the Warhammer fantasy lore. They might have stole something,but it's harder to prove because races like elfs,orcs,goblins,dwarves are myths and legends. They are part of the folklore of some countries.
@DeimonkI see. I did not know that. Looks like you are right 😅
My name is Elric.
I promes I don't line haters
Inspiration gives credit, inspiration gives homage, inspiration dreams and respects.
Plagiarism sells someone else's ideas as its own, rejecting any accusation of unoriginality by way of a narcissistic, 5 year old child's tantrum.
Games Workshop officially does not even care about having consistency, canon. They just want to throw everything they can grab into their soup. They do not even care about quality in their own rulebooks, there is barely lore in their codices, for races they've had for 2-3 decades. Their translations are even worse, where for instance "engagement range" gets translated with "close-combat/melee range" in the target language (German for that example) - it makes no sense. Full of typos, grammatical errors, the writing style of a google translation that someone made worse by manually going over it and adding errors no electric sheep could dream up.
In short: Games Workshop is running a scam.
Half of his books are pretty boring and rambling. One is a really great one: The war hound and the world's pain.
:)
The humanoid psyche?
mr moorcock est un écrivain immense......prenez les danseurs de la fin des temps".une atmosphere entre dali et oscar wilde,mais en arrière fond des thematiques profondes...";Werther de goethe n'est il pas la préfiguration de zombie boy?.....mr moorcock est un visionnaire,il me faudrait plus de temps pour l'expilquer mais je déteste pianoter trop longtemps sur youtube......glorianna est somptueux ,du peter greenaway puissance dix(sans les fautes de gouts)..Sinon je n'ai toujours pas avalé le pillage de zemzkis sur moorcock.Esperons qu'il a pensé a lui envoyé une caisse du meilleur champagne sur terrre pour se faire pardonner........;la distance est mince entre l'hommage et le plagiat.........anyway.........je suis stupide d'avoir raté la chance de rencrontrer michael moorcock...............
I more than disagree with his potshots towards Tolkien. Tolkien is fundamentally different from Moorcock, both as a person and a writer. I never much liked Moorcock as a person or a writer. His main attraction is Elric who is pretty much the original angsty high fantasy/comic book anti-hero. Though his influence is profound in everything from D&D and Warhammer to Wolverine, I never found any real relatable human qualities in any of his characters and frankly can't stomach his worldview in any capacity. However, there is something weird and fun about the Melnibonean Cycle, which I think serves other media like video games far better than epic fantasy literature made for reading (Lords of Chaos and Law clearly influencing the Daedra and Aedra). I think his ideas are great but he's kind of a sloppy writer, jumping from one scenario to the next in his Elric stories without, interestingly for fantasy fiction, ever providing any semblance of conflict or suspense. I don't care about any of his characters enough to care about what happens. We know Elric 'loves' Cymoril, who is an 'amoral' Melnibonean yet who can somehow behave as if she understands love and loyalty, okay, so Moorcock says..... He never shows us anything that substantiates that love or the Melnibonean trait. His villains are less than one-dimensional, as are his heroes who mostly just want to die. The most interesting thing about his works are the occult-esque elements. I liked reading about Arioch, and his many different incarnations. I liked reading about sorcery, traveling in between planes of existence. Although his 'Pantheon' is really pretty much just the Ars Goetia and his set-up of Law and Chaos is ultimately empty.
I disagree, yet I enjoy Moorcock and Tolkien. So...opinions.
Basically, the way I see it, the conflict between Order and Chaos is misunderstood by people like Moorcock. It isn't always order vs chaos, many times in history and fiction, it's order vs. order. For example, two medieval monarchs fighting would be Order vs. Order, since they both believe in the same form of government, the same medieval order and power structure, and they could even believe in the same God and go to the same Church, but they're still bitter enemies. The same goes for fiction. Take Star Wars, for instance. The Galactic Empire obviously stands for order, but it's the kind of order that comes with constant, generous helpings of mass genocide and slavery. The Rebellion looks like they stand for chaos, but in reality, they're fighting to restore the kind of order that existed before the Empire, which makes them just as much forces of Order as the Empire is. Neither side sees chaos as a good thing, they're just two conflicting sides that have their conflicting visions of order.
Meanwhile, factions in fiction and real life can switch from Chaos to Order based on their status. The Bolsheviks in Russia, for instance, stood for chaos, as they did everything they can to weaken and destroy Russian society during World War 1 and the Russian Civil War. But once they gained power, and both the Russian provisional government and the Czar were gone, the Bolsheviks switched from a radical form of Chaos to a radical form of Order, reshaping Russian society as they saw fit and even exterminating anarchist and moderate socialist groups that they used to gain power. In the same vein, the Sith from Star Wars stood for Chaos, stoking the fires of war multiple times, with the most famous example having the Sith pit the Republic against the Separatists during the Clone Wars. But after the destruction of the Republic and the rise of the New Order, the Sith became forces of Order, down to the point where any potential troublemakers and rabble-rousers were put down with efficiency by the Sith's new Galactic Empire.
Moorcock dividing cosmic forces between chaos and order makes no sense when many factions in real life happily skip the line between the two, and other factions can have competing visions of the same element. Two factions that are forces of Chaos can conflict, just as two factions that are forces of Order can conflict, and a force that stands for Chaos would immediately switch to the side of Order when they become the top banana and they don't want anyone to knock them off that perch.
This is why I find Tolkien's idea of good vs. evil more appealing. A force for good can work for chaos or order, based on the circumstances. Maybe they'll fan some chaos to overthrow an evil regime that inflicts order at the point of a sword, but they'll switch to order once they overthrow said regime and are now stuck rebuilding everything the previous regime destroyed. Forces for good and evil can stand for order, but their vision of what order is and what it entails could conflict and cause a war between them. It's not just Chaos vs. Order, it's HOW they envision chaos or order, and how they enact it, that makes them good or evil, and whether or not we should root for them or against them depends on that.
Game of Thrones is predictable garbage!
While it seems that Moorcock is a nice enough man, I can't help but disagree with how he views things.
Basically, the way I see it, the conflict between Order and Chaos is misunderstood by people like Moorcock and Rick Priestley, the guy who wrote 40K's lore. It isn't always order vs chaos, many times in history and fiction, it's order vs. order. For example, two medieval monarchs fighting would be Order vs. Order, since they both believe in the same form of government, the same medieval order and power structure, and they could even believe in the same God and go to the same Church, but they're still bitter enemies. The same goes for fiction. Take Star Wars, for instance. The Galactic Empire obviously stands for order, but it's the kind of order that comes with constant, generous helpings of mass genocide and slavery. The Rebellion looks like they stand for chaos, but in reality, they're fighting to restore the kind of order that existed before the Empire, which makes them just as much forces of Order as the Empire is. Neither side sees chaos as a good thing, they're just two conflicting sides that have their conflicting visions of order.
Meanwhile, factions in fiction and real life can switch from Chaos to Order based on their status. The Bolsheviks in Russia, for instance, stood for chaos, as they did everything they can to weaken and destroy Russian society during World War 1 and the Russian Civil War. But once they gained power, and both the Russian provisional government and the Czar were gone, the Bolsheviks switched from a radical form of Chaos to a radical form of Order, reshaping Russian society as they saw fit and even exterminating anarchist and moderate socialist groups that they used to gain power. In the same vein, the Sith from Star Wars stood for Chaos, stoking the fires of war multiple times, with the most famous example having the Sith pit the Republic against the Separatists during the Clone Wars. But after the destruction of the Republic and the rise of the New Order, the Sith became forces of Order, down to the point where any potential troublemakers and rabble-rousers were put down with efficiency by the Sith's new Galactic Empire.
Moorcock dividing cosmic forces between chaos and order makes no sense when many factions in real life happily skip the line between the two, and other factions can have competing visions of the same element. Two factions that are forces of Chaos can conflict, just as two factions that are forces of Order can conflict, and a force that stands for Chaos would immediately switch to the side of Order when they become the top banana and they don't want anyone to knock them off that perch.
This is why I find Tolkien's idea of good vs. evil more appealing. A force for good can work for chaos or order, based on the circumstances. Maybe they'll fan some chaos to overthrow an evil regime that inflicts order at the point of a sword, but they'll switch to order once they overthrow said regime and are now stuck rebuilding everything the previous regime destroyed. Forces for good and evil can stand for order, but their vision of what order is and what it entails could conflict and cause a war between them. It's not just Chaos vs. Order, it's HOW they envision chaos or order, and how they enact it, that makes them good or evil, and whether or not we should root for them or against them depends on that.
You wrote this wall of text without doing much research evidently. Seeing as elric himself points out the distinction between the neutral observation of what can be viewed as an entity of either order or chaos and the moral underpinnings which could be applicable to either. The young kingdoms of elric's world are bastions of intense, pummeling order, but are nonetheless as decadent and bewilderingly evil as any force representing chaos could be.
@@wegg4730 Except representing Order as a force is a mistake in itself. People switch from Chaos to Order and vice-versa. Chaos and Order aren't supernatural forces, they're strategies employed by people to take power and stay in power. The underdogs will create chaos to undermine the current leaders of society and seize power from them, but once the underdogs are in charge, they'll maintain order and snuff out any potential troublemakers before the cycle repeats itself on them. As Littlefinger said in Game of Thrones, "Chaos is a ladder." It's not some amoral force stuck in a grey area between good and evil, it's a social phenomenon that someone uses as a stepping stone to their ascent as the harbingers of a New Order. Having Chaos be represented as if it has its own lords is misunderstanding the role chaos played in human history, and is therefore unrealistic. It makes for good fantasy, but it makes for an unrealistic story.
HolyknightVader999 have you ever read anything for sheer pleasure instead of critical analysis?
@@mikelooby9248 Yes. But this isn't one of those.
And ironic because he Was angry At Grant morrision for stealing Jerry corenlius