Mud Warriors

From the first line, Mud Warriors reads as a gritty war novel. One could call this a stylistic parody, but that description doesn't quite hang right because it's not just imitation for comedic effect.

As the player begins to move through the scenario, the first reaction is pure amusement at the ironic contrast between the style and tone of the prose and the actual setting of the story. It may feel like reading All Quiet on the Western Front or Heart of Darkness, but it's just kids having some after-school fun in the mud... isn't it?

No... not really, no. As the protagonist encounters various teammates and opponents in this crayon doodle of a war, there are story beats that -- if one calls to mind one's worldview from the grade school era -- are actual tragedies at the scale appreciable during childhood: friendships damaged or destroyed, enemies made, promises broken, hopes dashed, seeds of cynicism strewn.

Each of the "warriors" is "playing" the "game" for different reasons. Some are confused but do not question the implicit rightness of anything that they are told is a rule. Some take advantage of the opportunity to unleash aggression without censure or punishment. Some remain eager as ever to please those in charge and accept the sudden change of what defines normal without a second thought, no doubt assuming that any dissonance they feel is a personal problem.

Two figures linger at the edges of the consensus reality shared by all of the other children. The first is the Oracle, a proto-adult, "the archetype of womanhood," whom the protagonist dimly senses has crossed some important threshold and now lives on a plane that he has not yet reached. Her small demesne constitutes a separate universe, one where rules are fluid and deeper principles rein. Already, she understands that some truths are too terrible to be contained in mere words and must be perceived directly to be accepted. She waits patiently and does what she can to help one person at a time, keeper of the bridge between the "living" and the "dead." One wonders: Is she part of the system of rules being imposed, or is she a spontaneous reaction against them?

The second is her functional opposite, "Mike the After-School Supervisor," the only grown-up appearing in the work. He is a figure granted authority by the children but wholly disinterested in fulfilling the responsibilities that he has ostensibly taken on. He sits "cross-legged" on his "spotless" bench, "keeping an eye on the war he’s engineered," a kind of anti-Buddha whose main concern seems to be interacting with his charges as little as possible. (In the wonderful GameBoy adaptation of this work, Mike's attention oscillates between self-congratulation and making a quick buck on the distress that he is packaging as fun. Since that version received the active assistance of author Ryan Veeder, I'm assuming that this characterization is intended to be canonical.)

It is so very poignant that the protagonist seems to consider it simply unthinkable to do anything that would break the rules set by Mike, when it's completely clear to the grown-up player that these rules exist solely for the microcosmic ruler's convenience and benefit. The protagonist understands that something is wrong about the game that he's being compelled to play, but he literally can't conceive the true nature of the causes of his plight.

I asked someone with a PhD in English literature how best to describe Veeder's core narrative device here in technical terms, and it wasn't easy to come up with anything succinct. The irony of the parodic prose style is itself deployed to ironic effect when the story turns out not to be entirely ironic, after all. Does one call this double irony, ironic irony, perhaps meta-irony? I don't know, I just know that I went from laughing about this work to frowning thoughtfully about it. And that the next day, compelled to go through it in detail, I began to feel a bit of awe at Veeder's subtle, dextrous -- even surgical -- skill in crafting it.