Daring Do and The Brutish Museums · 6:32pm Dec 13th, 2020
Dan Hicks, curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, has just published a new book: The Brutish Museums. Any readers hoping for a story of an evil steampunk version of the British Museum like something from the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen may be disappointed, although the subject matter is not entirely dissimilar. This is an academic work about the Benin Bronzes, pillaged by British soldiers from Benin City, Nigeria in 1897, and makes a case for the return of these and other looted artefacts.
This made me decide it is time to revisit Daring Do and a story I wrote four years ago.
Stranger Than Fan Mail is not a serious story, but it makes a lot of fun about the serious issue of looted artefacts and the restitution of cultural property.
Hicks is currently promoting his serious book with lots of not-so-serious Twitter posts, including:
Yes to a new Indiana Jones movie if the main catchphrase can be "It doesn't belong in a museum"
If this new perspective happens, then we can tell the Indiana Jones fans that My Little Pony got there first.
Let’s first recap the historical background:
Daring Do was first introduced in season 2 (Read it and Weep) as a fictional character in an over-the-top adventure story—an old school treasure hunter who snatches the sapphire stone from the finger-tipped tail of Ahuizotl and drives Rainbow Dash to petty theft.
In season 4 (Daring Don’t) we had the mind-blowing revelation that Daring Do is as real as any other pony, with a secret double identity as author A. K. Yearling. Season 5 (Stranger Than Fan Fiction), parodies fan culture stereotypes, before setting off on another adventure where Daring destroys the temple and flies off to take the treasure to a museum.
Museums throughout our world are full of objects of disputed ownership. Nowhere less than in Britain and France, thanks to our glorious colonial history. In the 19th and early 20th century, the fabulous profits of empire were financing the construction of large public museums in grand classical and gothic buildings. Meanwhile thousands of miles away, the Royal Navy were patrolling the coasts of the colonies, ready to test their new automatic artillery on any corners of Africa that weren’t embracing British control with sufficient enthusiasm. [If you want the full gory details, you will have to read the book, I’m too squeamish to tell that story myself.] Much of the loot they brought home would end up in museums, where it could be displayed to educate civilised people about foreign savages. These days, we don’t do that sort of thing any more. But the artefacts remain in museums such as Dan Hicks’ base, the Pitt Rivers.
The Pitt Rivers is an amazing museum. Fans of His Dark Materials will know it as the place Lyra visits after entering our world, where she inspects some trepanned skulls before moving on to find out more about Dark Matter from the physics department. The museum layout seems little changed since Victorian times, with dim lighting, glass cases packed with artefacts, each with tiny hand-written labels. Prehistoric axe heads, strings of beads, carnival masks, early modern mousetraps, pigeon whistles, rusty old horseshoes, a sheep’s heart stuck with pins and needles, whale teeth necklaces… It’s crazy. Kids love it. It’s almost as cool as the adjoining Museum of Natural History (which has dinosaurs so obviously wins).
The museum staff are not dusty old relics. They are at the forefront of public engagement activities, with exciting projects for local visitors, such as activity days smelting metals and casting axe heads, and other programmes to engage with people from further away, including communities connected to museum connections, like the Maasai Living Cultures project, letting these groups use the museum to tell their stories. You can imagine that it’s difficult to genuinely engage with such communities without addressing the question of what to do about the loot.
Let’s get back to our ponies. Daring Do is basically the pony version of Indiana Jones, but with even more symbolic-of-colonialism headgear.
However, in the last two Daring Do episodes, we see a different side to her character. In season 7 (Daring Done?) she shows real remorse upon reading news stories about the damage she has caused to the local community in Somnambula, and resolves to take more responsibility in the future.
Things take a more radical shift at the end of season 9 (Daring Doubt). After a journey to Tenochtitlan to retrieve the Truth Talisman of Tonatiuh, we hear Ahuizotl’s story, and his tearful explanation that he is not a monster but the rightful guardian of the jungle, Daring sees that she is in the wrong and promises not to take any more artefacts.
It seemed a rather big character development to pack into one episode, but it fitted in the wider context. After all the stories about ponies forging friendships with yaks, griffons, and dragons, and learning to respect each other’s cultures, Daring Do had to be brought in line before the finale. The plot is not just about Daring acknowledging past mistakes and changing behaviour. It’s about letting the indigenous cultural guardian take control of the narrative. In the final scene of that episode, we see Ahuizotl telling his story to a pony audience.
While Daring promised not to take any more artefacts from the Tenochtitlan Basin, the question of what happens to ones she had already taken is not answered. Could this be the start of a lengthy legal battle to get the museums to return them? That approach isn’t Daring Do’s style. It would be rather more in character to have her break into the museum and steal the relics back. We now need some gripping museum heist fanfics.
I would read the heck out of these. I fuzzily recall
- MLP: FiM
- Comedy
- Sci-Fi
- Thriller
Two secret agents and a security guard have Opinions about Art. In between, they find time to fight a monster.I'm far too busy to start a new story right now, but that is a brilliant idea that needs to be explored at some point. I'm remembering this.
Correction: that was from Season Six.
I'm not convinced Equestria as presented even has a functional legal system in the first place.
Honestly, thanks to a more contemporary point of reference in the Uncharted video game series (and because it makes for more intricate storytelling and characterization), for years I've always had it in my head that Daring Do was an anti-hero mercenary. Willing to save the world if it needed saving, yes, but pretty much in it for the treasure first (and possibly for the thrill).
Plus, the recognized "Adventurer Archaeologist" trope is one that's been critically broken down before as largely antithetical to what real archaeologists would condone, so calling them "treasure hunters" or "mercenaries" would be more like it.
Even Ahuizotl as early as Season Two could be an anti-villain: lethal to trespassers and possibly megalomaniacal (if the whole "Daring saved the world" angle from that episode is anything to go by), but perhaps motivated by a desire to revive or protect his no-longer-functioning civilization and its remains?
Of course, it was safe to assume that, because the Daring Do storyline in the show barely explored details such as why anyone was doing anything in them (Ahuizotl tries invoking 800 years of sweltering heat in the valley at one point, and nothing in all the episodes - including the last one - explains how or why).
Which leads me to my bigger complaint against the Season Nine episode: the theme it was going for was a laudable one, but it sits very awkwardly alongside the actual context of the series as a whole. Colonial theft is a fine way to poke holes into Daring Do's heroism, because seriously, why did she get involved with stealing artefacts in the first place?
But between the confusing "it was real all along" angle, the way Ahuizotl's actions don't sit well with a "misunderstood guardian" angle (keep in mind he and the traps resort to lethal force, which absolutely does not get examined in the last episode), and the fact that the show is geared way too hard towards - relatively easy - happy endings (there's no way it was ever going to work in the darker aspects of international plundering for an episode), I'm not convinced the idea worked better in canon than as a cool fanfic spin-off.
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This very much. Indigenous and colonized peoples are not trying to destroy the world via, and I quote, "eight hundred years of unrelenting, sweltering heat" as retaliation for artifacts being looted.
At least this explains why they thought that cockamamie episode was a good idea in the first place. Just add it to the pile of other real-world subjects the writers failed to approach properly.
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I take it you subscribe more to the Quibble Pants school of Daring Do fans than the Rainbow Dash school?
If one didn't exist before, I can't see Twilight Sparkle missing the opportunity to set it up. And write the multi-volume Code of Laws behind it.
Working on it...
An aspect of this problem that I haven't seen discussed before is the question of preservation. The objects in question are treasures, and ones that can give invaluable insight into the cultures that produced them. In a lot of cases, those cultures are extinct, and proposed plans to return them only take into account geographical location of origin.
The Baghdad Museum is a good case in point. Priceless Sumerian treasures, housed not far from their point of origin, were destroyed by ISIS, one of the modern cultures in the region. By 21st thinking, they had a good claim to be the rightful owners of the sculptures and artifacts they destroyed.
There is a chance that the Benin Bronzes might be hammered into scrap by Boko Haram if returned to Nigeria. I haven't read Hicks's book, so I don't know if he addresses this problem, but it sounds like a good read, and I've put it on my list.
Is the possibility of loss an argument for not returning them? No. If our current fashion in morality is to grant the current occupying population of an area full ownership rights to all cultures of that area stretching back through time, then we ought to honor that belief by matching our actions to our claims. Will that cause a lot of destruction and loss of priceless artifacts? Yes, undoubtedly, but if your neighbor wants to destroy his own property, even if it is incredibly valuable, that's perfectly legal in most places.
The thing is, we have the technology now to scan things to an amazing degree of accuracy. We could easily make very accurate reproductions of items and then return them. It isn't widely known, but quite a lot of items on display in museums around the world are reproductions already. With exacting copies, even if anti-intellectual barbarians destroy the originals, the art and information is still preserved. The files for the reproductions could be shared by museums around the world, and then maybe I wouldn't have to go all the way to frikkin' St. Petersburg to see those... Sorry. Let's abort that rant, shall we?
Study by experts at levels of detail beyond the capability of the educated layman won't be served by copies in most cases, but no plan is perfect.
Magic ought to serve as well as technology in that regard, and I like to imagine Equestrian museums of the future as full of perfect duplicates of artifacts from all over the world(s), with complete and thorough explanatory plaques, detailing origins, cultural significance, and exactly why 800 years of scorching heat would have been a good thing.
Maybe you can do a post about Dust/Dark Matter and how it leads to consciousness, dæmons, angels, et cetera. As a particle-physiscist, this is in your wheelhouse.
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One point Dan Hicks makes is that the Benin Bronzes had been kept safely in Benin City for hundreds of years, and the biggest damage occurred during the British raid. The question of when to return artefacts can really only be considered on a case by case basis. This is one thing I am happy to leave to museum professionals. As soon as you go into the details of these cases, you quickly become overwhelmed by the volume and complexity of the historical background, and legal and ethical arguments. You need the mind of an anthropologist to take it all in. I don’t particularly want to get drawn into these culture wars.
I kept the impression that the attitude of museum staff is changing. In the past they saw their job as primarily about preservation, so they adopted a hoarding mentality and were very against giving up any of their objects. Some are still like this, but there is now a much bigger focus on education and public engagement. It's when you start talking to indigenous communities that you need to address these awkward questions. Not all groups are asking for the return of artefacts. There are many communities who are happy for objects to remain where they are. If you do it well, and listen to people, then everyone can be friends.
Recent developments in reproduction technology, like the story of the replica of the Palmyra arch, are a very interesting topic.
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This brings up an interesting point, because rights cannot be absolute because, otherwise, some would hurt others indirectly and claim that they act within their rights. As an example, given that land is longer-lived than people, future generations might not appreciate an ancestor who salted the land so that nothing can ever grow on it again. This leads to the principle that one should only either improve land, leave it untouched, but never degrade it.
Ancient artifacts are part of the heritage of humanity. Since, if the owner destroys the artifacts, the owner will no longer have access to them and humanity will loose access to them, a good compromise is that humanity seize the artifacts with fair compensation. After the seizure, the former owner will no longer have access to the artifacts, which is how things would be after destruction anyway and have compensation, while humanity would still possess its cultural heritage.
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I did write a blog post on this a few years ago: https://particlegadgeteering.wordpress.com/2017/10/17/dark-matter-detectors-and-philip-pullmans-his-dark-materials/ and a Twitter thread a few weeks ago: https://twitter.com/g7vdj/status/1328761705057443844
I am also tentatively planning to do a panel discussion on this with some other particle and astro physicists as part of a YouTube livestream event scheduled for the end of January.
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Yes, it's an incredibly complex problem and I'm just glad to see the culture/morality shifting in what I regard as a positive direction.
This applies to nearly every aspect of life! Isn't that cool?
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¡I must watch that YouTubeEvent!
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My reconciliation of Ahuizotl the Bond villain and Ahuizotl the jungle guardian is that, well, no one said a guardian had to be nice. I see him as a runaway arcane intelligence who had decided that destroying all life in the region was a perfectly reasonable way to ensure his charges weren't disturbed. Fortunately, Fluttershy has a lot of experience in debugging conceptual entities. It's not perfect, but it at least resembles something that makes sense.
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The implications of Celestia as Nicolas Cage are too wonderful and horrible for me to consider in great detail.
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That still doesn't keep him from being a monster that needs to be stopped. A guardian AI that decides the best way to protect humanity is to destroy it generally is cast as the villain, even if giving it what it wants might appease it.
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I'm open to the idea that Ahuizotl was a well-intentioned (yet monstrously radical) extremist. Indeed, I think the main problem with "Daring Doubt" is that it doesn't examine that side of him.
An alternative I was thinking of was that the heatwave would act as an overzealous deterrent to thieves. Or else the heatwave was a side effect of that prophecy Daring Do mentioned:
And Rainbow says something similar later:
Though there's definitely an 800-year heatwave involved, either way. Ahuizotl himself admits it, so it can't purely be attributed to Daring Do being an unreliable narrator (which was one way of getting around his portrayal in the original "Read It and Weep").
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Both seasonal positions. ... Can you believe autocorrect did that to "reasonable?"
FoME: I want business cards that list my occupation as Debugger of Conceptual Entities!
Anyway, that brings up the question of why the Macguffin is being guarded. If it's valuable and thieves might steal it, that's understandable and relatable. If it's dangerous and thieves might use it, guarding it is still understandable, but is it seasonal to then use it in order to keep it from being used? That really is AI sort of thinking. Or religious doomsday cult; that works, too. Still solidly villain territory either way.
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I don't think the show would've said as much outright, but there are clues that you could interpret as Ahuizotl being religious, or belonging to an Equestrian equivalent. In "Daring Don't", Twilight references a Quetzalcoatl priestess, and the ceremony to replace the last Ring of Scorchero looks very much like a mystical ritual (though I wonder why there are tribesponies here and not in other Daring Do episodes?). Plus all the temples and (sacred?) magical artefacts fit neatly into an ancient religious context.
Ahuizotl being a guardian might also work as a holy obligation if he's a kind of priest in charge of the "parish". Might go some way towards explaining why his methods are so extreme: sacred duty is serious business, after all.
Perhaps even explains why his deathtraps are so elaborate: each one is an arcane and specific cleansing ritual. For a terminal value of "cleansing".
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Next book: Daring Do and the Kool-Aid of Guyana!
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Oh! :O This is a very good point, and the kind of detail that's easy to forget.
I always sort of figured he was some kind of spirit guardian at first, similar to what you suggest. I do rather like him just being a weird monster that's also a nefarious mastermind trading in dark markets for power, though.
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That's all far too seasonal. I don't think we're overthinking this nearly enough. As Twilight says "there is more going on here than meets the eye. In every Daring Do book, there always is". We need at least a few more layers of deception. Of course, Daring Do is an unreliable narrator. It was her plan to get captured so she could get inside the fortress. And so is Ahuizotl- he is just as a good a storyteller. The ritual to bring on 800 years of unrelenting sweltering heat could have been an elaborate plot to scare pony adventurers away from the Tenochtitlan Basin. He just had to lure Daring Do along to witness it. Unfortunately Rainbow Dash's unexpected arrival messed things up. But we can't rule out that the whole thing was set up by AK Yearling's publisher - who is the one who really profits from the whole enterprise. Or that Discord isn't actually the one pulling the strings.
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Well, who do you think gave Twilight the author's secret address? Who do you think ran the educational institution that made Caballeron a Doctor? Who offered Ahuizotl the chance at cooking 800 years in the first place, so long as he collected all the rings like a video game character? Who taught him to use elaborate death traps rather than straightforward killing? Who taught Daring enough history and geography and ancient mythology to find these artefacts, as well as taught her enough trickery to get out of the temples alive?
Who can possibly cover up Daring Do's adventures on such a massive scale? And who has had a long, long time to cook up all these complicated plots and counter-plots, which simultaneously end up feeling like a big deal and get everyone involved in a stalemate?
Clearly the whole thing was masterminded by Celestia. Because she was bored and wanted something fun to read.
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I think an evil publisher is a considerably more realistic villain than Discord. :V
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Why not Discord as an evil publisher? Come to think of it, did we ever learn who ran the shop where Spike bought the enchanted Power Pony comic?
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Even better if the Rings of Scorchero only create a ring of scorching heat around the Basin like a barrier.
But Celestia being bored and setting it all up makes more sense than anything else. That would explain why all the bizarre and insanely dangerous stuff seems to happen so frequently in modern Equestria. Pity poor Twilight now that she's on the throne. She'll constantly be bothered by functionaries asking questions like, "Is the griffin invasion is still on for next summer?"
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Whoever it is, definitely the same pony.
That final episode is disgusting and insulting.
"So... what were you doing destroying that town miles and miles away from the place you supposedly guard?"
"SHUSH! This is propaganda! You're not supposed to think!"
"Oh, sorry."
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They didn't go with my plan for a panel discussion. I'll see if I can do this at a future event. But there will be short talk on this by a dark matter professor tomorrow at 18:30 UTC - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ef25pcDGsI