They Broke Upon This Fortress Like Waves Upon Rock
Rune Soup
Gordon White
4.7 • 861 Ratings
🗓️ 13 June 2025
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
I've been revisiting Ursula K. Le Guin's brilliant essay "The Child and the Shadow". Le Guin was defending fantasy against the sterile modernism of her era—but what happens when that defence needs to evolve? We're no longer fighting a battle between "good" and "bad" fantasy. Instead, we're caught in something potentially more insidious: the tension between authentic imagination and the ersatz.
From the disaster of Rings of Power to the destruction of Star Wars, from AI-generated Jung content flooding YouTube to the Soviet-style creative orthodoxy dominating our cultural institutions—we're witnessing the systematic neutering of the imaginal. But here's the thing: they can't actually touch the real. They break upon authentic creativity like waves upon rock.
Through Le Guin's profound analysis of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Shadow" and Jung's psychology, I explore why confronting our shadow isn't just personal development—it's the key to understanding why authentic fantasy endures while corporate imitations crumble. Plus, I reveal how Bulgakov got there first in The Master and Margarita, showing us exactly what happens when the vital imaginal meets bureaucratic control.
This isn't just about books or movies. It's about the difference between surface-level engagement and the depths where real creativity lives.
Chapter Timestamps:
0:00 - Opening: The Shift from Good vs. Bad to Ersatz vs. Genuine
3:45 - Le Guin's Defence of Fantasy in the Modern Era
8:20 - The Rings of Power Problem: When Creators Think They're Fans
12:15 - AI Jung Slop and the Corruption of the Imaginal
16:30 - Bulgakov's Prophecy: The Master and Margarita's Cultural Critique
22:10 - Reading "The Child and the Shadow": Andersen's Dark Fairy Tale
28:45 - Jung's Psychology: Ego, Shadow, and the Collective Unconscious
35:20 - The Ethics of Fairy Tales: Why Gretel Can Push the Witch
42:15 - Tolkien's True Complexity: Frodo, Sam, and Gollum as Psychic Journey
48:30 - Why Fantasy is the Language of Moral Truth
52:40 - The Problem with "Realistic" Children's Literature
57:25 - Luke in the Cave: Star Wars as Genuine Imaginal Work
60:10 - Closing Thoughts and Shadow Project Tease
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I have been rereading a famous Ursula Legwin essay called The Child and the Shadow. |
| 0:21.5 | And this is part of her spirited defense of fantasy collection, I suppose. |
| 0:30.4 | Most of them are in dreams must explain themselves. |
| 0:33.1 | This one is in the language of the night. |
| 0:36.4 | And it's really interesting reading these defenses in the year of our Lord 2025. |
| 0:43.9 | Because if you've read them, and we're going to look, I'm going to read the whole thing, actually, the child in the shadow. |
| 0:51.5 | If you look at what she's saying, she's mounting a defense of fantasy |
| 0:57.2 | against, I suppose if you think about the time she was writing, peak American modernism, |
| 1:05.0 | better living through chemistry was in full effect. So she's defending fantasy's right to exist. |
| 1:12.5 | Like it's a binary of good versus bad. |
| 1:15.0 | For the majority of her career, |
| 1:17.8 | she faced being put in a tiny little box |
| 1:22.6 | of like genre fiction for weirdos who wouldn't grow up, |
| 1:26.6 | like perverts, like who the hell reads fantasy |
| 1:28.9 | that it seemed like american capitalism modernism and so on needed to crush anything that wasn't |
| 1:40.1 | the gleaming hyperreal of you know white, white goods and a growing middle class. |
| 1:47.0 | What's interesting about that defense today is that something, the shift has happened and the |
| 1:54.2 | defense needs to shift because now, rather than the binary being good and bad, we have |
| 1:59.7 | ersatz versus genuine. |
| 2:02.7 | So I want you to think of the Rings of Power as the obvious example here of like an |
| 2:06.7 | ersatz fantasy, but also the the ruination of Star Wars over the Kathleen Kennedy era is another |
| 2:14.3 | one. And in both cases, I remember with regards to the rings of power, |
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