Dragons at the Post Office
Or, the New Romantic Era
I hate going to the post office. Like, I’d rather clean the toilet. I’m leery of the contemporary vogue of attributing all of our little eccentricities to “neurodivergence,” so call it a quirk, but one way or the other, I fucking hate doing it. Maybe standing in line galls me. Or maybe, given that I also hate writing my address on anything, I just have a deep-seated dislike of anything having to do with postal systems. A relic of a past life, perhaps, as a Mongol rider murdered between örtöö stations on the steppe (did you know the Mongols had a postal system? Well, they did).
Anyway, roundabout this time last year, I trudged into my local philatelic purgatory and right there, behind the desk, saw an advertisement for a line of commemorative Dungeons & Dragons stamps. To say I rolled low on my initiative for that encounter is an understatement (that means I was surprised).
“I want some of those D&D stamps,” said the guy in front of me to his girlfriend. They looked to be in their late twenties, a Black guy with an afro and an easy smile and a bespectacled, studious-hot white woman with hair dyed raven with a turquoise streak.
“Man, if you told my nerdy-ass 3rd grade self that one day there would be D&D stamps…” I said, and we spent the next couple minutes bonding over our ongoing games.
The stamps were sold out.
If you’re unfamiliar, in a D&D game the players represent the main characters in a fantasy story created by one player/referee called the Dungeon Master. There are numbers and dice and stuff, but that’s the distilled essence. I started playing in the early ‘90s and I still play today. Back then, of course, D&D was for the geekiest of geeks. Today, you can pay to watch people play it. There are even professional Dungeon Masters, a phrase that for most of human history meant chains and the lash, whether in a dimly lit Inquisitorial vault in sixteenth-century Castile or the dimly lit basement of a Chicago kink club. Either way, dice probably weren’t involved. So what changed?
Put succinctly, we’re deep in the throes of a second Romantic Era.
The first Romantic Era roughly mapped onto the initial half of the 19th century, and encompassed authors like Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Some of the writing was great and some of it was pretty insufferable (I never liked Byron), but fantasy was a dominant part of the popular aesthetic, largely in reaction to the Enlightenment obsession with reason, which birthed a lot of good stuff vis a vis humanism and popular government but also unleashed the bloody horror of the French Revolution. So people turned towards imaginative art and literature. Medievalism, Gothicism, and Orientalism* were all products of the Romantic Era.
Flashback to the early 21st century. Right around the time of 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, fantasy slowly but steadily grew more popular. This started with Harry Potter and Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films but mushroomed from there. It’s since become so mainstream that many people don’t really seem to realize it. I briefly dated a woman who saw my playing D&D as being a red flag (it didn’t make me cool in the early 2020s, evidently). She also watched and enjoyed all eight seasons of Game of Thrones. Granted, the cognitive dissonance was strong with that one generally, but it’s a trend I’ve noticed in others who were more self-aware yet just didn’t make the connection that GoT was cut from the same cloth as D&D.
Obviously, broad historical movements never have just one cause, but what we’re seeing is fundamentally a societal reaction to the social attitudes that defined the late 20th century and ultimately landed us in two useless wars. Saying it’s “corporate Boomer thought” is overly simplistic but not entirely off the mark. Yes, the hippies loved Tolkien and there was a huge fantasy influence in rock bands like Led Zeppelin, but that was counterculture and increasingly viewed as juvenile when the Boomers started adulting, to use the parlance of my generation.
But Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, and The Lord of the Rings are hardly counterculture. The entertainment juggernauts of Marvel and DC are even less so. The cultural profile of fantasy has risen so astronomically it’s hard to believe that all this was once considered dorky kid’s stuff that you didn’t want to advertise being into. It’s such a massive paradigm shift that unless you’ve been into fantasy for several decades, you probably don’t realize.
Put another way, I sell geoscientific services to oil and gas companies for my day job. I once made a good-sized sale not on the golf course, but by Dungeon Mastering for some geologists. I’m not sure that’s the first time in history that ever happened, but I’d comfortably wager it won’t be the last.
A new era indeed.
*We cringe at Orientalism today and much Orientalist art was indeed dreadful, dehumanizing, misrepresentative, and voyeuristic. That said, the fascination with “the East” also birthed the first real study of Asian cultures by Westerners, and translation of works from Arabic and other Asian languages. I do not accept Edward Said’s thesis that “the West” has systematically dehumanized “the East” since antiquity, but that’s another discussion beyond the scope of this post.