What is a monster?
And what does that say about us?
I just wrapped up seven weeks of near constant travel, a lot of it in a car, which gave me quite a bit of time to knock out a few books I’d been meaning to read — thanks Audible! One of those books was Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, which, in the author’s own words, tackles the topic “what do we do with the art of monstrous men?” This is a subject I find super fascinating, and I think the journey of Dederer’s book is pretty incredible, landing in a place I would not have expected and becoming, to my mind, a key text of contemporary cultural criticism (although Dederer herself would probably side-eye the idea of creating such a canon).
Why I’m talking about that book here, though, is because it might be the first thing I’ve read that expends real effort defining what a monster is. And I thought, for all my interest in RPGs — which are traditionally monster-heavy, and which publish literal Monster Manuals — this was worth thinking about.
So here, in chapter 2 of A Fan’s Dilemma, is how Dederer defines a monster:
[A monster is] someone whose behavior disrupts our ability to apprehend [their] work on its own terms. A monster, in my mind, was an artist who could not be separated from some dark aspect of his or her biography.
I immediately paused the audiobook when I heard this and thought about its implications. Because, spoiler, I don’t think this definition of monsterhood applies exclusively to assholes who make art.
Speaking of the Monster Manual, I figured that iconic tome must offer some kind of definition of the term too. As I sat down to write this, I grabbed my Fifth Edition manual off my bookshelf, and sure enough, on the first page of the introduction, there’s a heading “What is a monster?” And immediately underneath —
A monster is defined as any creature that can be interacted with and potentially fought and killed.
Direct. Utilitarian. Violent! Surely, though, this is just a plain mechanical explanation of what Dungeons & Dragons considers to be a monster — maybe there’s more nuance to be found by reading further. (There is, kind of!)
Most of the monsters that haunt the D&D world… are threats that are meant to be stopped: rampaging demons, conniving devils, soul-sucking undead, summoned elementals — the list goes on.
This definition still lacks the complexity of Dederer’s, but I do find something compelling in the phrasing “threats that are meant to be stopped.”
I want to dive into Dederer’s definition some more, because I think it begs unpacking (something she spends a couple hundred pages doing; I’ll do my best to condense here).
“Someone whose behavior disrupts our ability to apprehend their work on its own terms” tells us that determining a monster requires two inputs — their behavior and our perception. That means that monsterhood is, at least in part, subjectively constructed, the result of a mental negotiation between their work and our knowledge. Someone seems like a monster to us because, when we engage with their work, all we can see is the terrible thing we know about them. Dederer calls this “the stain,” and with a fantastical metaphor that feels right at home in an RPG, she explains that, depending on the severity of a stain, it can travel back in time to a person’s birth, and forward in time to color everything they’re ever going to do. Or maybe it doesn’t — that depends on the subject (you) considering the monster in question.
I absolutely see this subjectivity in play in my own fandom. I used to love The Cosby Show. Ryan Adams’ Prisoner was my favorite record of 2017. I can’t enjoy either anymore, because I can only think about the deeds of the person at their center. But… man, how about Thriller. I understand the accusations around Michael Jackson are awful, and I understand there’s a lot of pain there, but — there’s no world where I stop listening to Thriller. There just isn’t. The record means too much to me. So, for me, Michael Jackson’s stain travels back in time to somewhere after Bad… maybe the Free Willy song sneaks in there too, I dunno.
And you might be thinking, wow, you hypocrite. How could you make such calculating distinctions and consume the work of someone like that? Don’t you care about their victims? Isn’t that more important than your feelings?
(We’re going to go on a journey here, condensing a lot of the book’s thought into one paragraph; if you feel like I’m making too big a leap, all I can say is, hey, Monsters is super worth your time.)
The revelation of Dederer’s book is that she ultimately upends those questions, arguing that they miss the point of what it means to love art. Instead, like so many other things, those questions cast us in the role of perpetual consumerhood, subsuming our spirits to a capitalistic system which gives rise to so much monstrous behavior in the first place. She likens this topic to the question of how you or I can combat climate change — it’s a smokescreen, meant to shift responsibility from the architects of society’s machinery to individuals who are subject to that machinery, guilted into feeling like if they’re not making the right individual choices as consumers, the world will suffer for it. But just like your recycling a can of Coke doesn’t make much of a dent against the corporations lobbying for EPA deregulation, my choosing not to listen to Thriller doesn’t make the world noticably less monstrous — which is not to say that either of those things aren’t a valid personal response to a fraught world. It’s just, if we’re always worried about whether we’re consuming content virtuously, whether we’re spending our money “correctly,” we’re letting capitalism define us in an area of our lives it shouldn’t touch, because it’s ultimately antithetical to the part of us that loves and appreciates art, which is an emotional response. You love what you love. If you stopped loving something because of what its creator did, that creator has become a monster. But that’s between you, the work, and its creator.
Does this line of thinking have any bearing on the games we play? I certainly think so. A few months ago I wrote about how much I love the DIE RPG and in particular its bestiary, which, in addition to presenting creature stats, also lists real-world people and things that a creature can provide a good metaphorical echo for in the meaning-packed world of the game. For instance, DIE tells us that centaurs can be stand-ins for “obnoxious frat bros” or “terrible nights out”; demons can represent “your average multi-level marketing scheme.” I think this should be the standard for concepting TTRPG monsters; I want to know what my monsters do and also what my monsters mean. It’s not a huge leap to find commonality between Dederer’s definition of monsterhood and what Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans have done in DIE, channeling our emotional responses towards real-world terrors into fantastical creatures that stymie our fantasy selves’ progress. Depending on what emotional effect the revelation of a beloved artist’s monstrous deeds have had on you, perhaps in a DIE-style RPG abstraction they might be represented by a cockatrice (men “full of toxic masculinity,” “anyone who draws you into their orbit”) or a ghoul (“anyone with odious personal habits”).
In a broader sense, though, I really like Dederer’s definition of a monster largely because it’s so subjective. I like that it makes us consider that our own perception of a being defines its position as much as what that being has done. I think it’s a good thing to keep in mind as RPGs have begun to break from the straight-ahead murder dungeons of the 1970s and 80s and into a space with richer options for solving problems through nonviolence (the no-combat run is a real thing now). If we’re defining monsters as “any creature… that can be fought and killed,” I think we’re only telling part of a story. If we instead look at a monster as something we’ve helped to create through our knowledge and possibly even our love, I think there’s just so much more storytelling potential.
If, after all, monsterhood is a combination of one person’s work and another’s perception, couldn’t we all be monsters? This is precisely the conclusion Dederer draws, especially in an era where people can know so much more about us than we’d ever want them to — we could all be one desperate moment or revealed secret away from being dubbed a monster, if we hit the right unlucky breaks. And, though I agree that in our worst moments most of us have probably done a thing or two that, if the internet latched onto them and used them to define us, would seem unsavory or untoward, I don’t think most of us deserve to be fought or killed for that. Which is not to say we shouldn’t, for instance, punch Nazis — we definitely should — but rather, that largely we could use a little compassion. And just like with the question of art, sometimes when you love someone, even knowledge of the horrible things they’ve done may not be enough to turn your love. It’s a heavy space to play in, but a compelling one.
I’d like to wrap this up by looking back to the original RPG bestiary, 1977’s first edition Monster Manual for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Like the Fifth Edition text of the same name, this manual gives two definitions for monsterhood. Let’s start with the second, less illuminating:
The secondary usage of the term is in the usual sense: a horrible or wicked creature of some sort.
Pretty straightforward. But the first definition the original Monster Manual gives is more interesting…
Its first, and most important, meaning is to designate any creature encountered — hostile or otherwise, human, humanoid, or beast. Until the encountering party determines what they have come upon, it is a monster.
I like this definition a lot. While it’s not entirely dissimilar from what’s in the Fifth Edition book, by equivocating the violence from the definition, I think we get something a lot closer to what Dederer’s saying, despite coming at it from a lack of knowledge. The overriding point: any creature can be a monster. If one of the party members found themselves on the other side of a player’s subjectivity, they, too, could be a monster. Until we figure out what we’ve met out there, we can never be too sure. And once we’ve had a chance to learn — once, maybe, we’ve learned too much — well, then we know what we’ve got on our hands. But are we strong enough to make the choices we need to? This brings us back to the Fifth Edition definition after all — perhaps monsters are just things that are “meant to be stopped.” And sometimes, that includes us.
~~The Plugs Section~~
Mortified Chicago, the live lit/comedy show I coproduce, is celebrating Mortified’s 20th anniversary on Thursday, November 30 with a blowout show at the Vic Theatre including special guests like David Pasquesi (The Book of Boba Fett), Katie Rich (Saturday Night Live), Maggie Winters (The Righteous Gemstones), Brendan Kelly from the Lawrence Arms, and Mark Rose from Spitalfield! Get your tickets here — this is gonna rock!
There’s so much music I can’t enjoy as much anymore, Ryan Adams included. I think about that all the time, separating an artist from their work. Like MJ for you, I just don’t see myself never listening to a few artists that are usually on repeat