I'm going to take issue with the claim (made earlier in the thread) that CoH is only popular because everyone's all world-weary and disillusioned these days, whereas in the past they were naive romantics, the poor fools, etc, etc. For a start, I don't think that actually is the case– that view of the world seems more of a media fantasy to me, and not a new one. It has not been my experience that most people these days live lives of bitter, endless despair, at all. Yes, journalists and such seem to assume they do, but that hardly makes it true. It's all just another kind of romanticism, really, anyway.
I tend to get a little annoyed by those kind of sweeping sociological explanations of why anything sells. Sometimes they're valid, of course, but it does seem like somebody will always come up with one every single time. I mean, can't anything get popular because it's, you know,
good, rather than because Society Did It?
Also, it is fashionable to praise things primarily for being supposedly
particularly relevant to "these times", for somehow tapping into the Zeitgeist (if a Zeitgeist is in fact something capable of being tapped into). I call this faint praise indeed, because if you really believe that's the secret of something's appeal, it follows that it's liable to get stale very fast. (In fact, the angst–is–all attitude was really more of a
90s thing, as far as I can recall. So on
that measure of "worth" CoH would have been dated before it was ever in print!)
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I think CoH is cheapened if it is merely perceived as a part of a greater story; no, it is so powerful, so forceful, too grandiosely tragic, that it accumulates meaning that does not, even tangentially, support the "thesis" of ultimate eucatastrophe in the world. The cost is so stunning, and the ignorance of the "gods" so complete, that we are left with little choice but to embrace the story on its own terms.
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But
tumhalad, it
is part of a greater story. You can't really ignore that, just because otherwise you feel it doesn't quite mean what you'd like it to. It takes place in an incredibly complex fictional world with a long past and future history. Doesn't dismissing all
that cheapen it?
EDIT:X'd with Morth and Form; typo.
EDIT2: revision.