And the peasants rejoiced. Or revolted. Or whatever.

[mrissa]

One of the many nice things about peasant uprisings, as plot points go, is that the peasants are everywhere. You don't have to do a particular lot of maneuvering to get your protagonist near potentially-uprisable peasants. They're around. There's a reason they call them commoners. Your characters walk into a bar. Peasants! They buy some fruit. Peasants! They go to have their shoes re-soled. Peasants! They want to hire a fishing boat. Peasants!

Unless you're in that one period of Hungarian history, of course, in which case Aristocrats! but other than that.

That being the case, why don't more authors write peasant uprisings for me? They make me so happy, and they're easy. It's not like you have to sit around for very long thinking really hard about what on earth the peasants might find to get angry over; there's plenty. You don't have to draw the long family trees with the million crossed branches, because they're peasants; no one cares if they're actually their own fifth cousin twice removed, especially not them. In fact, there's a lot of stupid stuff you don't have to bother with in a peasant uprising. And blood is compulsory. Rhetoric may even be compulsory, too. So by then you have your choice about whether you want to bother with love and whether you want them consecutive or concurrent, but the point is, you already have blood and rhetoric, so you're good to go.

I'm not saying it has to be every book. I'm just saying, for your plot development needs, please consider the peasant uprising. It's fun! It's fresh! It's versatile! It's got barricades! Haven't you always wanted barricades?

I thought so.

Comments

[sksperry.livejournal.com]

The problem with pheasant uprisings is they tend to be messy, what with feathers dropping everywhere, and depending on their angle of flight it can be hard to get a shot off, and...

What?

Oh, peasant.

Never mind.

The peasants are always revolting!

[zalena.livejournal.com]

I agree entirely. I am also interested why there aren't more self-interested peasants betraying people. But I think the point here is that peasants aren't so much characters as plot devices.

This is all reminding me of Westmark, which is one of my all time favorite treatments of civil war. (Maybe because it was one of the first.)

Re: The peasants are always revolting!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This book is not just homage to that entire series.

No.

Not only that.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

*sigh*

[zalena.livejournal.com]

Plus Cynthia Voight's Jackaroo, which is one of the most overlooked fantasy cycles for young people, along with Joan Aiken's Go Saddle the Sea and Bridle the Wind, both of which feature lots of peasant characters. (As I recall. It's been a while.)

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

Brandon Sanderson (http://mistborn.livejournal.com/), one of last year's Campbell class, has a peasant uprising combined with the heist genre in his second book, Mistborn. I enjoyed it immensely but there was a lack of barricades. Maybe next book. :)

Re: The peasants are always revolting!

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

Ooooo...I heart Westmark so much.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Hypothesis; perhaps the thing about peasant uprisings that disinclines people to do them is that something to do with focus more on mobs than on individual characters.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

The problem with pheasant uprisings is they tend to be messy, what with feathers dropping everywhere, and depending on their angle of flight it can be hard to get a shot off

My family moved house because of a pheasant uprising once.

No, seriously. My parents had decided that self-sufficiency was a good thing, and that the urban environment was not the best for us, so we moved from Dublin to half-way up a mountain in the wilds of North Cork. The first year they planted a sizable garden and neighbouring cattle ambled in and ate everything. So my father put up a hefty fence, and the second year rabbits tunneled in and ate everything. So the following year he buried chicken wire to a depth of a couple of feet all around the garden, and somebody released an enormous flock of pheasants for the hunting virtually next door, and they ate everything. At which point my parents said "sod this for a lark" and moved somewhere more civilised, though not alas back to Dublin. I suggested putting a canopy over the garden but nobody paid me any attention; to be fair, I was eight.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

I'm sold. There will definitely be a peasant uprising in my next book.

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

Hm. Kind of. I'm halfway through Book 2. It's veryveryVERY good so far. I'm finding that Sanderson is not getting as much buzz as other newer authors are and it makes me sad, because I think he's simply fantastic. The end of Mistborn gave me chills--I went from "No, he can't possibly be going there," to "Oh my God, he IS going there, I hope he can pull it off," to "That was the most brilliant thing I've read this month, where is the next book?"

[sksperry.livejournal.com]

I get that a lot. *g*

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

I like peasant uprisings too, but they tend not to lead to qualitative changes in the underlying social system, which is most fun of all.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

Funny, I love a good peasant uprising but I always think they're too complicated to write. When I was reading a lot about 1848 I wrote many chapters of a peasant-uprising novel, only I had this character to start with who was not peasanty enough so then I had to figure out how she would have learned to read and everything and then I wanted to work out the entire political structure and the new concept of meritocracy, sort of a NCO/commissioned officer deal and I got so busy nailing down the details that I stopped writing.

I guess you would say that I should just have forgotten about my NCO and had five hundred farmers with pitchforks. I might revisit that, actualy.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

Our comments overlapped! I dispute! Or rather, perhaps you have summarized my problem as "I wanted my peasant uprising to result in major power shifts," see below, 1848 Europe, and that's hard.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I never read the later books after Jackaroo -- they were coming out just as I was finding an entire new genre, so I ended up ignoring them. I should go back and find them maybe?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oooooh.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Those people should read more Simon Schama, then.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I want more 1848. Any particular books standing out in your memory?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

But I wouldn't say that you should have forgotten about your NCO. You can have both! It's not always easy, but sometimes it's worthwhile!

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

I dispute that 1848 is best categorized as a bunch of peasant uprisings. Those were bourgeois-democratic revolutions which used peasants as muscle.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

Okay, strictly speaking yes, I was starting to think about that as I wrote my comment but was carried away by enthusiasm. I also suspect that it might be definitional, because of the theoretical weight of what "changes in the underlying social structure" means, which requires some kind of education. Maybe you could do it with a religious figure. Hmm.

I think you can have all the advantages of the peasant revolt as discussed in this entry, though, even with your rising-middle-class instigators or opportunists or whatever.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

I read Hobsbawm's The age of revolution: europe, 1789-1848 and I liked it a lot, but he is a man with an agenda--communism in this case--so be careful to read for that.

[pixelfish.livejournal.com]

I really like his magic systems....they're usually fresh and interesting. He really should be getting more notice, which is why I pimp him when I have the chance. :)

Is book 2 of Mistborn out? I didn't think it was....or are you one of the lucky advance readers?

[careswen.livejournal.com]

I'm already on board. The LARP I've been writing for *cough cough* a while is heavily dependent upon a peasant uprising.