tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7337188382394867122024-03-13T21:39:07.693-04:00Experimental ProgressBoldly ambivalent since wheneverPerson of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.comBlogger986125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-30190907564263116302017-12-03T13:42:00.001-05:002017-12-03T13:42:09.263-05:00Operating Thesis<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This is barely more than a postlet, but, six months later, it's probably best to put some distance between the front page and the previous post.<br /><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; white-space: pre-wrap;">A random file search lead me to the folder where I kept all my notes for my 2007 Master's Thesis. The story I've told myself and others for years is that my Master's project was a ridiculously close reading of an author's oeuvre of a dozen books, with next to zero secondary sources. But the folder has notes on about fifty different secondary texts, ranging from psychoanalysis to gender theory to genre theory to ecocriticism. Funny how the story in your head about the past drifts from the truth, even when the drift frames you in a less positive light.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #1d2129; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Funny indeed. Later Days.</span></span>Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-4037178062475669782017-07-04T13:47:00.001-04:002017-07-04T13:47:28.891-04:00AnxiousIt's 2000. I've been invited to a high school house party, which a rare thing. I get in the family van, turn the key--and nothing. During my previous trip earlier that day, I forgot to turn off the headlights, and the battery is drained. I stay home.<br />
<br />
(I'm relieved.)<br />
<br />
It's 2002. I'm part of a program where university undergraduates take high school students with them to classes for a day, to give them a taste of college life; I'm on the undergraduate side of the equation. When I get to the room where the undergraduates and high schoolers are being paired up, I'm suddenly struck by how many people are there, pressed against each other, laughing, shouting. I run to the washroom and throw up. I stare at myself in the mirror for a full minute. Then I go out, collect my students, and go about my day.<br />
<br />
It's 2003. Another house party, of the college variety. A friend I've known literally all my life asks me why I never drink at these things. My tongue stumbles on an explanation, that if I did I'd never--what? Never learn to handle these situations otherwise? Never know if I could fit in without drinking? Never stop? I turn it into a joke. The conversation shifts. I leave soon after.<br />
<br />
It's 2006. I'm drinking (I do that now) with a group of MAs and PhDs. We're joined by another group, full of people I don't know. I'm suddenly convinced I'm surrounding by strangers and people who would rather talk to them than to me, and that my presence would only inhibit them from doing so. I finish my drink, make my excuses, leave. I'm not sure if anyone noticed.<br />
(and I spend the walk home debating whether that's the worst or best outcome)<br />
<br />
It's 2007. A friend is getting published, and she throws a party in celebration. I get to the party and I see a backyard full of people--but no one I recognize. I circle around the block once, twice, and walk away. I didn't want my brother back home to know I didn't go in, though, so I spend the next three hours walking aimlessly, until I feel enough time has passed. I send her a nice facebook message, congratulating her on her achievement.<br />
<br />
It's 2008. I'm at my first big academic conference. It's in Orlando, and my family came too, for the themepark trip. I love the panels, and I give my presentation to a room full of people. There's no problem there; there never has been. I've given academic talks, led classrooms, delivered eulogies, toasted married couples, to a dozen, or dozens, or hundreds of people. Talking to a crowd is easy; being in a crowd is awful. I spend the time between sessions reading a book and avoiding eye contact. How was the conference, asks my family, returning from Disneyland. Great, I say. (And it was, pretty much.)<br />
<br />
It's 2009. I'm in a PhD program. Whole new place, whole new group of people. I drink A LOT and indulge in certain behaviours: bursting into loud song, taking breaks from drinking to run laps around the pub. Would someone experiencing extreme anxiety draw attention to themselves in such flamboyant fashion?<br />
(Yes.)<br />
<br />
It's 2011. I'm meeting a friend for coffee. They reflect that when they first met me, I seemed aloof and arrogant, with the way I stood apart at parties and didn't talk to anyone. I smile thinly.<br />
<br />
It's 2013. I'm still drinking to fight down the "flee" response at parties. It works, sort of, but only as long as I keep drinking. And I resent that I need it, and start resenting the people around me too, and lash out.<br />
<br />
It's 2015. I finally figure that out and put binge-drinking behind me. It's a young person's game anyway.<br />
<br />
It's 2017. A colleague (friend always seems presumptive on my part, including--especially including--every single time I've typed it in this post) gives a semi-formal public talk, in a place that's just a few minutes walk from me. I consider going, I want to go, but when the time comes, I'm seized with the worry of an unknown crowd, of a mix of unfamiliar faces and familiar that don't want or need me there, and I stay away.<br />
<br />
I've thought, obsessively and repeatedly, about all of these instances, and others. But I've never typed them out in one place. This blog is nine years old, and I've never felt so bleakly awful in putting one of my posts out there in world. I have extreme social anxiety, and doesn't get explained away, or disappear once I've found my confidence. I don't know if talking about it will help. I know not talking about it wasn't helping.<br />
<br />
Later Days.Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-29665652794767175782017-05-23T23:59:00.001-04:002017-05-23T23:59:28.006-04:00Time Travel Cthulu subquestTorment : Tides of Numenera spoilers below the tag.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>My progress in the game was blocked by a death cult trying to get back into the good graces of its leader, the only being able to open the endless gate, a dimension of nameless Chthulu-type horrors. They slaughtered many of the people in the village, and I followed them to the endless gate. I freed some of the horrors' victims (strengthening the horrors), killed some cultists, and made my way to the leader, where he told me his life story. He was made by a god, basically as a way to test the portal making skill, as the god wanted to escape its pursuer. But it deemed the medicine worse than the cure, and abandoned him. He was in constant pain from the horrors, and a cult worshipping the horrors used him to access them, and killed in their name. He fell in love with one of the cultists, but she died when the pursuer, hot on the god's tail, tracked him down instead. He retreated to the endless gate, but she died. He fell into a greater despair, and let the remaining disciples go wild. This goes on for years. I dive into his memories, replay the day his beloved dies, convince her that the whole cult is a monstrosity, and she murders him. I'm brought back to my own time, and now there's no one blocking the way, and none of the villagers died, because the cult's leader died years ago.<br />
<br />
And this is one minor subquest, which had at least a half dozen other resolutions.<br />
<br />
I really like this game.<br />
<br />
Later Days.Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-2320884491939133652017-03-19T10:54:00.000-04:002017-03-21T15:35:49.052-04:0010 Things That Happened When the U. S. S. Enterprise Has Shore Leave at Deep Space NineA friend of mine had a birthday recently, and she had a general Star Trek theme. For the purpose of the event, I wrote up a TNG/DS9 crossover fanfic comedy routine, and I wanted to post it somewhere enduring. Thus, without further ado...<br />
<br />
10 Things That Happened When the U. S. S. Enterprise Has Shore Leave at Deep Space Nine<br />
<br />
1) Lieutenant Reginald Enidcott Barclay swore off holodecks, but decides that he can see one just once--he's on vacation, after all. So he goes down to the station to rent one of Qark's holosuites. <br />
"Are you sure you can handle this?" asks Quark. "These simulations... they're a lot more intense than the ones you Federation people use."<br />
Barclay scoffs. "Listen, I, I have put in more hours on the Enterprise holodeck than any three people combined. I... I can handle this." He says it again, to himself. "I can handle this." <br />
"Well, ok." Quark hands him the disc for "Vulcan Love Slave, Part II: The Revenge." Barclay steps into the suite for his half hour session. No one on the Enterprise ever sees him again.<br />
<br />
2) Odo asks for Deanna's advice in the gift he picked out for her mother. It's a replica 20th century flapper-style feather boa. Deanna, in the style of every first grade teacher who's had to evaluate a macaroni "I Love You Mommy": "..... She'll love it because it's from you."<br />
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3) Judzia and Worf invite Deanna and Riker to their quarters for a private dinner--or rather, Jadzia invites Deanna against Worf's better judgment, and Riker overhears and invites himself. Jadzia and Deanna quickly find they don't get along; they debate politics, and Jadzia finds Deanna's approach too manipulative, too passive, too indirect. Deanna, for her part, believes that Judzia is too aggressive and deliberately antagonistic. Finally, Worf intercedes, telling them there is no need to fight over him, as Jadzia has already won, and that they are both embarrassing themselves. There's a moment of silence, and then Jadzia comments, "you know, Worf, for someone who can be such a smooth talker when it comes to romance, you sure can put your foot in it." She turns to Deanna. "Did he try his line on you too? About being afraid of hurting you?"<br />
Worf interjects. "Klingon mating is very physically--"<br />
"He did!" says Troi. "Which is odd, because in actuality, he's such a tender lover."<br />
They spend the rest of the night debating Worf's sexual prowess. Worf is so mortified he is still sitting silently at the table an hour after the dinner ends, frozen in embarassment.<br />
Years later, Riker will remember the dinner as one of the best nights of his life.<br />
<br />
4) DS9 Operations Chief Miles Edward O'Brien sneaks onto the Enterprise during the night shift. He goes to the transporter room, sets out his tools, and gets to work behind the console. The next day, the Enterprise transporter chief finds a surprise. Someone has welded a leather chair to the spot in front of his console, and left a big bow and a note: "You're feckin' welcome."<br />
<br />
5) Qark runs into Guinan, and is instantly terrified. Years ago, she gave him some advice on running a bar, and by the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, she's entitled to half his profits unless he can convince her to admit he earned his success on his own. He attempts to wow her with his state of the art holosuites, his Tellarians-eat-half-off Tuesdays, his dabo tables. She is thoroughly unimpressed, until she runs into Morn, who orders his usual. Guinan: "Quark, I have been tending bars for longer than most civilizations have had star travel, and I have never, never met anyone as demanding, as particular, as downright picky, as Morn. I don't know what you're doing here, but if you've got him as your regular, you must be doing *something* right. Consider the rule satisfied." (Because of course Guinan knew exactly what he was trying to do the whole time.)<br />
<br />
6) Ro Laren and Kira have a series of long talks about their hopes and dreams for Bajor, and start a friendship that will last the rest of their lives. Not everything has to be a joke.<br />
<br />
7) Riker contracts a STI from a dabo girl, and gets it treated on DS9 because he doesn't want Crusher to know. Unfortunately for him, Dr Bashir is miffed that Riker doesn't immediately acknowledge him as an equally smooth ladies' man, and "accidentally" lets slip the information. Beverley knows how to let a good joke mature, though, so she waits until Riker's next annual check-up to say "and tell me, Will, are you still experience a burning sensation in your armpits?".<br />
<br />
8) Q pays a visit, unable to resist the two teams in one place. He runs into Garak, who introduces himself and tricks Q into doing some low level magical favors him. Q figures it out, promises to ruin Garak's family and disappears, but this was Garak's plan all along: from the beginning, he figured Q would turn on him, which is why he gave his name as a member of a rival house in the Obsidian Order. Point for the tailor spy-master.<br />
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9) Jake tries to bond with Wesley Crusher (who is still on the Enterprise, despite it being at least season 4 DS9 if Worf's on the station--don't worry about it), but even he's annoyed by Wesley's know-it-all-ism. In desperation, he tries to get Nog to talk to Wesley, but Nog's own Starfleet-born competitiveness places them in a loop of one-upmanship. Finally, Jake abandons them both, and a month later, his essay on how Starfleet instills an atmosphere of unhealthy competitive elitism in its cadets gets published in a space-zine.<br />
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10) On the last day of the Enterprise's docking, the two teams play a friendly game of baseball. Geordi and Data get really into sabremetrics; Riker absolutely destroys his body to make amazing catches; Deanna gets really competitive and uses her empathic abilities to play mind games with the enemy team (Rom eventually needs to be carried out in a stretcher.) The Enterprise crew illustrates why they're the best and the brightest, perfectly fusing together as a team and effortlessly winning the game. But the Deep Space Nine crew have a lot more fun.
<br />
<br />
Later Days.Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-74320751291861988812017-03-10T18:42:00.001-05:002017-03-10T18:42:41.637-05:00Fish, Please: A Spoiler-iffic Review of Finding NemoI'll try to keep this one actually short. I watched "Finding Dory" on Netflix last night, and... it was fine, I guess. I think I came into the film with a net neutral opinion: I'm inclined to support Ellen DeGeneres in a lead role, but I also thought her character in Finding Nemo was pretty one note. She's given a bit more depth here, but overall, there's not a lot of depth to go around.<br />
<br />
Elevating the sidekick to the main act isn't an uncommon choice for a sequel movie, but it is more uncommon for a sequel that gets fully supported by the studio. You can point to a lot of Disney products that spawned sequels, but the sequels themselves are almost always treated like spin-off products. I wouldn't say the world of Finding Nemo had a story left in it that was screaming to be told, but Finding Dory's premise--that Dory has remembered her parents, and wants to try to reconnect--is fine.<br />
<br />
The format is more or less the same as the original--you have two groups that are majorly separated from each other, and both have adventures trying to get reunited. In the original, it's Dory and Marlin and Nemo; here, it's Dory and Marlin and Nemo. They meet occasional threats, but mostly just complicated scenarios, and a lot of colorfully weird ocean life. There's even the sidekick who steals the show--Dory in the original, and Ed O'Neill as Hank the octopus here.<br />
<br />
The movie's approach to disability is kind of mixed. On the one hand, Dory's memory loss is presented as a condition she has to learn to deal with, and a lot of her flashback scenes with her parents involve them helping her develop strategies for that. That's... well, realistic isn't the right word for a movie where fish can breathe in any sort of water regardless of salt content, and a father fish calls his daughter cupcake in a world that clearly has no reference for him to do so. But at least it shows disability isn't a burden, but a part of your life. On the other hand, it's also strongly implied that if she works hard, her problem will go away, which is less reflective of real experience.<br />
<br />
There's also an interesting tension between humans and animals here that never quite gets resolved. The marine center Dori's parents lived at focuses on "Rescue, Rehabilitation, and Release," which is nice, and suggests a virtuous, ethical approach to marine life that emphasizes human responsibility to take care of those who we can. (Would that our own healthcare start with such a philosophy.) But it's worth noting we're told about this mission by Sigourney Weaver, and the celebrity involvement with the center illustrates how commercialized it is. Is there a conflict between caring for sealife and profitting off of them? Given the mass escape at the end of the movie, it seems to imply there is. (though surely some of those sea creatures were *not* suited for a return to the ocean, and just as surely, there was some human death involved in the octopod's aggressive driving. If nothing else, someone's going to suffer for the loss of the truck.)<br />
<br />
The film raises these issues, but doesn't go very far out of its way to say anything about them. It's just a backdrop for general goofiness. And it does that goofiness pretty well, all things considered.<br />
<br />
Later Days.Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-17553738117849797492017-01-21T22:54:00.002-05:002017-02-22T10:16:16.577-05:00Film Buff: A Spoileriffic Review of Hell and BackThis was really distasteful, all in all. Just... ick.<br />
<br />
CW: sexual assault<br />
<br />
All right, plot: three friends work at a downward trending amusement park. After borrowing an evil book from the fortune teller, they jokingly make a blood oath on it, only to have the friend who reneges on it (by not giving a mint to the other upon request) get dragged into hell, with the other two in tow. The oath-violating friend is kidnapped, and the other two set out in a bumbling manner to rescue him. Subplots include the Devil being in love with an angel and trying to trap the other two to pass off to her, and a half-devil, half-demon woman searching for her long absent father, Orpheus (AKA, an expert in getting people out of hell). The whole thing is an a semi-claymation style that should be more endearing than it is.<br />
<br />
Ok, so not a great premise, though in general, I'm always willing to give the "deal with the devil" archetypal plot a go. But the voice cast is an excellent array of some top level comedians: Bob Odenkirk as the devil, T. J. Miller as Augie, one of the two friends (Nick Swardson plays the other; I don't know him, but his performance was good enough); Rob Riggle as Curt, the friend whose soul is in trouble; Susan Sarandon as an angel; Danny McBride as Orpheus; and supporting roles from Maria Bamford, H. Jon Benjamin, Jennifer Coolridge, Kumail Nankiana, Brian Posehn, Paul Scheer, Greg Proops, Dana Snyder, and Paul F. Tompkins, and, while not exactly a comedian, Mila Kunis as Deema the female devil . It was basically that cast list that convinced me to try the film, despite its low Amazon rating.<br />
<br />
Nope. In terms of plot, it doesn't work because of the sheer number of times a character acts without any particular reason, or changes their mind on a dime. Every character in the movie is kind of gross, with the exception of Deema. How much you care about the outcome depends on wanting the leads to get out of hell and rescue Curt, and I was actively rooting for failure at points. It's demeaning to all its female characters--of the four significant ones, two are supposed to be comical because of their grotesque bodies (fatness and age), and the other are ridiculously sexualized. The male characters in regards to the women are either "Good Guys," horndogs, or alternate randomly between the two. And Orpheus' backstory and the movie's climax hinge directly around tree rape.(The worst thing that can ever be leveled at the Evil Dead series is that it popularized tree rape as a comedy trope.)<br />
<br />
Let's unpack that last one. By far the most interesting idea the film has is that Orpheus is an action hero/smuggler type, but in person, he's also a self-important asshole. Danny McBride in general is hit or miss for me, but I think he does pretty well in the role. But it's heavily implied that the reason for his behaviour is a tree molestation. And at the end of the story, our heroes lead the devil into a tree rape ambush. It's all gross, and doesn't improve with repetition.<br />
<br />
A frequent debate in comedy is what, if anything, should be off limits. On the one side, you have people arguing that comedy that's racist or misogynist or turns rape into a punchline trivializes and normalizes certain modes of thought. On the other hand, you have basically the free speech argument, that comedians should be free to say what they want, and that humour can be a useful tool for critiquing social issues.<br />
<br />
In virtually any circumstances, I'd defer to the former argument, and absolutely understand anyone who refused flat out to tolerate jokes on one of these subjects. For me personally, my response to the second argument is that yes, you're free to say that--but being free to say something doesn't also free you from the consequences of saying it. And yes, humour can be a useful tool, but in that case, message, execution, and audience come into play.<br />
<br />
For example, let's compare this movie to Amy Schumer's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7i2qU92wjM">"Friday Night Lights"</a> sketch in 2015. (And yes, there are a lot of valid arguments that can be leveled against Schumer too, but for the argument at hand, the focus is the sketch.) It's a sketch about the prevalence of rape culture in sports, and it works for me. The humor makes a statement about the connection between rape culture and sports, by exaggerating the players' sense of sexual entitlement. In Hell and Back, it gets a decent amount of humor around Orpheus, through the juxtaposition of our notion of an ancient Greek hero known for his devotion to love against his actual character as a jackass fratboy. But the tree rape doesn't have that humour. Basically, it seems to be playing on three ideas:<br />
a) it's funny because it's a reference to Evil Dead<br />
b) it's funny because men being raped is inherently funny<br />
c) it's funny because powerful men being raped by trees is inherently funny<br />
<br />
a) is really more a substitute for humor rather than actual humor. b) and c) are basically just ways of trivializing rape against men, which just perpetuates really awful notions about masculinity. It's gross, and I think a lot less of the film for including it, and a little less of the people associated with the film.<br />
<br />
Incidentally, my favorite gag of the film is a repeated gag where Paul F. Thompson voices a soul undergoing very small amounts of hellish torments.<br />
<br />
Demon: "Welcome to Pizza Hut Taco Bell. What'll you have?"<br />
PFT: "I think I'll have a medium pizza with pepperoni."<br />
Demon: "All out! Only tacos! Because you're in hell!"<br />
PFT: "Oh, I see."<br />
Demon: "Now ask for a cheese pizza."<br />
PFT: "All right. Could I get a---"<br />
Demon: "No! Welcome to hell! Order again!"<br />
PFT: "You know, I think I see where this is going."<br />
<br />
More of that. Less tree rape.<br />
<br />
Later Days.<br />
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<br />Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-23406080619413770112017-01-02T17:42:00.000-05:002017-01-02T17:42:12.516-05:00Movie Buff: A Spoileriffic Review of Black ChristmasWith a lot of older entertainment, or technology, or what have you, after a certain period time, you stop appreciating them in and of themselves and appreciate them more for their historical association and context. For example, I absolutely don't have the patience for using a typewriter, but I can appreciate its significance to the 20th century, and to artistic movements like block poetry or the avant garde, ala <a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/V/bo3631964.html">Johanna Drucker's work.</a><br />
<br />
This shift can also be a self-fulfilling prophecy--you encounter something in the mindset that it's more valuable as an artifact than an experience, and that colours the experience you actually do have. For me, the biggest blindspot that creates is with film. I have this mental stumbling block where I know intellectually that pre-1980s film is full of works just as popular and entertaining as a lot of current stuff, but I almost always go into an older film assuming its greatest value for me will be its historical significance. As such, I start off thinking that it'll be the cinematic equivalent of brussel sprouts--I know it'll be good for me, but I certainly don't expect to like it.<br />
<br />
And that's largely been the mindset under which I've undertaken my great Tour of Horror. For almost a year now, I've been surveying horror films and horror film theory, allegedly in the name of research for One Particular Game (see the <a href="https://literallygames.wordpress.com/2016/06/06/dabble-in-design-until-dawn-and-environmental-storytelling/">other blog</a>). But the earliest I was willing to go was the 1978 Halloween. I just couldn't convince myself that anything earlier would be relevant, especially with my subfocus on the slasher film genre. I was wrong. And it took the 1974 <i>Black Christmas</i> to show me the light.<br />
<br />
The plot is certainly slasher at its core. A sorority has emptied out for Christmas Vacation, reducing its members to those about to depart--the alcoholic housemother Mrs Mac, and the puritanical Clare--and those with nowhere else to go--the Jewish student Phyllis "Phyl" Carlson, the British exchange student Jess, and Barb Coard, the verbally explicit sorority sister whose mother has unexpectedly cancelled her trip home. Throughout the film, they are tormented by prank calls that escalate into misogyny and death threats, but unbeknownst to them, the call is--famously--coming from inside the house.<br />
<br />
That's a probably a good moment to return to my original point, by way of a videogame analogy. For the longest time, I thought of the 1998 game <i>Baldur's Gate</i> as the starting point for the modern Western RPG. It spawned a number of very successful sequels and spin-offs (a list potentially including one of my favourite games and dissertation topics, <i>Planescape: Torment</i>), it's clearly present in the DNA of BioWare, one of the most successful RPG developers still in existence, and its overall emphasis on choice and good/evil alignment has been majorly influential on videogames at large. It wasn't until I sat down last year and actually played a few hours of the game for the first time that I appreciated how meta it was, how thoroughly self-referential the game was in its use of genre tropes that were already well trod. Thus, the potential problem with viewing it as a point of origin, that such a perspective obscures BG's own predecessors.<br />
<br />
You can probably see where I'm going with this, or you will by the end of the next sentence. Before I started this Horror project, my earliest film foray into horror (discounting a probably-too-young viewing of Macaulay Culkin in the Good Son) was the 1996 Scream. Again, we have a major milestone for a genre--Scream set the tone for the postmodern horror film, and spawned imitators and influenced films from I Know What You Did Last Summer to the diminishing returns of Scary Movie to full tilt postmodern horror like Cabin in the Woods or Last Girls. And again, perhaps even more obviously, it's not the origin at all, as its infamous starting phone scene clearly echoes Black Christmas, with a tech upgrade from multiple phone lines to the cell phone. (And yes--there's a good chance the urban legend of the caller in the house predates Black Christmas as well.) My watching of Black Christmas was a very vivid reminder that my preconceptions hold me back.<br />
<br />
This post is veering into essay length, and I've barely scratched the film itself. So let's switch to bullet point.<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>The whole reason I watched Black Christmas now is that I wanted to start the horror film podcast Faculty of Horror, and their first episode is Halloween vs Black Christmas. I still haven't listened to the podcast, but I have at least now seen both films. I'll say, then, that I think Black Christmas wins out. Jamie Lee Curtis is excellent in Halloween, of course, and there's some fun with the supporting cast, but overall, Black Christmas uses its cast to better effect. It also helps that there's less pontificating about people "born evil" and fewer "ugh why are you doing that it is the stupidest thing" moments.<br /></li>
<li>The Internet has decided that Lethal Weapon and Die Hard are Christmas movies. In that case, Black Christmas should totally get counted before them, right? I mean, Christmas is in the name. The plot is centered around the holiday (ie, as an explanation of why there's so few people in the house). And, via the carollers scene, I think it does a much better job juxtaposing the supposed innocence of the season with the violence of its events.<br /></li>
<li>Deviation from Slasher tropes #1: the "innocent" girl is the first one killed. (Hey, the word "spoiler" is in the post title for a reason.)<br /></li>
<li>And what they replace her with is so much more interesting in terms of what the film does with gender. Instead, our final girl is not just sexually active, but pregnant, and steadfast on getting an abortion. I appreciate that the film doesn't vilify her for this stance, and instead presents her boyfriend's insistent claim on her body as extreme. (Granted, it needs to do this, for the ending to work and to make plausible the idea that the boyfriend is the killer, but it's still appreciated.)<br /></li>
<li>Deviation from Slasher tropes #2: Mrs. Mac. Ever notice how slasher killers are weirdly fixated on teens and 20-somethings? Mrs. Mac, the veneer of respectability for the sorority house, is a wonderful character who you'd never find in a later slash flick. Her alcoholism and general resignation mixed with pride over her station at life is simultaneously tragic, comic, and awesome. She loves her sorority and acting as mother to the group, but is also aware that she's a farcical character and somewhat a pitied one, for her failure to create a "real" family and move beyond the sorority. Gender again--the way we undervalue and mock the spinster figure.<br /></li>
<li>Watching a horror movie about a familiar place made monstrous through a stranger's presence takes on a different resonance when you do it in a building where the pipes bang randomly.<br /></li>
<li>I think it was Friedrich Kittler who discussed how uncanny the gramophone was before people became familiar with it. If there's one thing horror film has shown us, it's that any piece of technology, especially communicative technology, can be rendered uncanny if it's pushed in a way we don't expect. Modern cinema has thoroughly--oh so thoroughly--explored this unfamiliarity with the camera, from the Blair Witch Project to the Paranormal series, but I love how the "call from inside the house" does it the household phone. We've come to expect some degree of distance that the telephone (or smart phone) provides; when that distance is eroded, when a female space like a sorority house is violated, the result is horrific.<br /></li>
<li>Deviation from Slasher tropes #3: No gratuitous sexuality. It's a film set in a sorority house, but there's no bikini pool scene, no panties shots, no pointless nudity. There's two nighties: one appears during an asthma attack, and the other is wrapped around a fully clothed Mrs. Mac. Honestly, if anything disqualifies it from slasher status, it might be this one.<br /></li>
<li>It's kind of surprising how little information we get about the killer and his motives. Again, that's partly necessary to make the ending work. And again, I prefer it to Halloween's approach, which was to give a potential origin AND the explanation of the killer being "born evil." I wouldn't say it's a deviation from slasher tropes, but it's certainly different. It keeps the focus on the cast, which I appreciate.<br /></li>
<li>It bears remembering that this entire film is premised around an explicitly gendered threat--the danger posed by sexually threatening phone calls. (And that's a big a problem now as ever. Maybe even worse, given the options open to internet trolls. They don't need to be physically present in your house to ruin your life.) As such, if there's a theme here, it's the mistreatment of women. I like how that's present in everything--not just in our lead and her boyfriend and implicit in Mrs. Mac, but also in details like the police not taking the matter seriously until an assertive male comes and insists on their action. The ending is possible only because all the men around feel it's ultimately okay to leave alone the one woman left standing. If anything qualifies it for ur-slasher status, it's the attention it pays to gender, which is a major part of the subgenre.</li>
</ul>
<div>
So, thanks to Black Christmas, I've gained a new respect for all older movies (mutters under breath: "That were released after 1973.")<br /><br />Later Days.</div>
Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-43562521357404927042016-10-06T11:22:00.000-04:002016-10-06T11:22:12.370-04:00YA drive-byI'm teaching a course on Harry Potter this term, and gave a recent lecture on the roots and themes of YA literature. One of the articles I wound up not using was by a scholar named Mike Cadden. For the most part, Cadden gave a fairly interesting breakdown of YA literature--I particularly liked his discussion of YA as transitional literature and how the notion of length becomes intertwined with quality, but I was much less impressed by this passage:<br />
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
“<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">For
girls, then, our fake realism of today comes largely</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">from
Alloy Entertainment. These are the folks who bring</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">the
tweeners the wildly popular series about <i>Gossip Girls</i>,</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i>The
Clique</i>, <i>The A-List</i>, and <i>It Girls</i>—and what seems
to</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">be
the whole YA gossip-oh-my-gawd-he’s-so-cute-butcan-</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">you-believe-what-that-bitch-said
industry. It’s clearly</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">an
entertainment company and would be a target for those</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">concerned
with representations of adult behavior and what</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">is/should
be important to adolescent girls. I guess you</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">could
say that they’re the guilty beach-reads for adolescents,</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">though
we could argue that it’s without the guilt.</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">But
hey, at least those kids are reading, right? These are</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">novels
that, unlike more clearly comic and contemporary</span></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">realism
like <i>The Princess Diaries</i>, haven’t a tongue within</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">miles
of the cheek—at least not one’s own."</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">I'll confess, I haven't actually read any of these books, which is a definite limitation to my counterargument, but I have seen nearly every episode of Gossip Girl, which I feel gives me some ground to push back here. The accusation that Cadden implicitly levels at teenage "chick lit" is basically the same that was once leveled at the early gothic novel or the 19th century romance, genres which are now arguably read more by academics than anyone else. These books, critics complained, corrupt our girls, filling their minds with trashy drivel and sexual misconduct. You can deal with them at that level if you want, but they're also reflective of the society they're written from, and in that sense, they're almost across the board a deconstruction of how women are empowered and disempowered by societal norms.<br /><br />The "tongue within miles of the cheek" line is a good line, but that's all it is. For someone who has watched Gossip Girl and read critiques of Gossip Girl (Jacob Clifton's old Television Without Pity articles were brilliant, and what got me into the show in the first place), I can say he must not have been paying attention, because the series was all about the ridiculousness of teenage extremities. Maybe the books were different, but given that the series includes Psycho Killer, a slasher parody that recasts the series' leads as serial killers, I'm thinking not. Yes, they're of a very different kind from young adult novels exploring realism and engaging directly with social issues, but to dismiss them so firmly is to perpetuate the same sort of literary snobbery that has long been YA's lot.<br /><br />Later Days.</span></div>
Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-37330954011377669922016-08-31T15:58:00.001-04:002016-08-31T15:58:17.038-04:00Make Room, Make Room<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmJwerYAv3g6wnugBpKh4v_MRH-ToZP6i_if4N99xLh5MnshzULQkyNjCF0BYzSzqMJF7oL_O-NuOX6KtMLEs8HgD-Dq-fBY6W2x6HqxFznYeaxVvNgEmgKDSivemZrQumOhMPO0SSRwJO/s1600/File+2016-08-31%252C+3+46+44+PM.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmJwerYAv3g6wnugBpKh4v_MRH-ToZP6i_if4N99xLh5MnshzULQkyNjCF0BYzSzqMJF7oL_O-NuOX6KtMLEs8HgD-Dq-fBY6W2x6HqxFznYeaxVvNgEmgKDSivemZrQumOhMPO0SSRwJO/s320/File+2016-08-31%252C+3+46+44+PM.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Empty Shelves</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />Pardon the self-indulgence (honestly, what else is one going to do with a blog?), but I'm going to wallow for a moment and pour one out for my old graduate office space, which I finally locked up for the last time today. Not a moment too soon, and probably slightly late--ten minutes AFTER the next tenant comes in is cutting things officially too short. I know the room is property of the university and department, and not meant to be thought of as belonging to any individual students (or groups of students, or post-students). And I know it was selfish of me to continue squatting in the space when other graduate students were fighting for space. And I know that the space, and my attachment to it, are somewhat symptomatic of a degree it took me Too Long to complete. <div>
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And yet... I feel a twinge of real loss at giving up access to it. It's silly to call it a home, but it was a space, a place, that was mine for a very long time. I spent eight years, give or take, in that office; I've dwelt there longer than any other place since moving to Kitchener-Waterloo. In fact, I've dwelt there longer than any place since moving out of my parents' house sixteen years ago. It was a bit of continuity in a changing life, and I'll miss it.</div>
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So it goes, and time marches on. Onwards, upwards, and so forth to whatever comes next.</div>
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(And yes, I see the resonance between a graduate space that I've clinged to for too long and this blog. So don't think pointing it out is clever or something.)</div>
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Later Days.<br /><div style="text-align: center;">
<span id="goog_1383531840"></span><span id="goog_1383531841"></span><br /></div>
</div>
Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-16749953601521375442016-04-24T19:08:00.003-04:002016-04-24T19:08:58.875-04:00A Book, a Loaf of Bread, and Thou--and no offense, but the Bread and the Thou are optionalI just had one of the most relaxing Sunday afternoons of my life. It was very simple; I walked around for a bit, I stopped, and I read for a while. Once at a coffee shop while I had lunch, once on campus, once in the park, and once in another coffee shop while sipping on a frappaccino. And each time, I'd rotate between reading a chapter in one of four books: Brian Staveley's The Providence of Fire (high fantasy fare--also, incidentally, a great title); Darowski's The Ages of the X-Men (an edited essay collection discussing the X-Men chronologically); Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (my first foray into classic literature in a LONG time); and Enevold and MacCallum-Stewart's Game Love (an edited essay collection on play and affection in games).<br />
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All of the books were satisfying. The Providence of Fire had various maneuverings and fights, and The Brothers Karamazov had the first but not the second; in general, BK has proven to be a book that's not really about anything but a very close look at the lives of the title characters. The bit I read today covered a long monologue from Ivan about an imaginary confrontation with God to Alyosha returning to the monastery. Ages of the X-Men had four essays about various aspects of the X-Men early years--the cultural understanding of mutants in America leading up to the X-Men's debut, the way the 60s comics depicted Cold War negotiiations and promoted the commune (two separate essays there), and the way the 70s Claremont-relaunch was driven initially by market concerns. I read an essay from each of Game Love's sections, which meant one from Waern on how players express love for NPCs in Dragon Age: Origins, one from Brown on interviews from erotic role-players in World of Warcraft, one from Lenio taking an exceptionally ontological view of what it means to love an NPC, and finally, a rather lengthy essay criticizing the way sustained videogame play is framed in terms of addiction, whether that's in terms of cognitive science, psychology, or holistically as compensation for a lack in the player's lives.<br />
<br />
But to be honest, very little of the above had any impact on why I found the day so relaxing. The content of the books didn't matter. The exact locations didn't matter. The rigidity of the formula--four readings, four locations, repeat--didn't matter. What matters is that I sat in a public space for a while and read a book. And that act, in whatever variation it might unfold, is like a cup of tea straight to my soul.<br />
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Reading alone at home doesn't put me in that state; neither does reading on the bus, or playing videogames, in public or private. Neither does walking through a place, or talking with someone else on a park bench or hanging out at a coffee shop. Don't get me wrong; I like all of those things, quite a bit. But none of those are relaxing in the same way that today was. If I had to put it into words, I enjoy being in one place while the world flows around me, and the world and I are content to let each other be. I have a hunch that this would be my ideal vacation too--go to somewhere exotic and, instead of seeing the sights or doing adventurous stuff, simply sitting in a corner and watch a different part of the world unfold without worrying about a deadline or whether I should be doing something else.<br />
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I've known this about myself for quite some time, and in the spring especially, I like to stop in the park on a bench on the way home from work and indulge for a half hour or so; spending basically a full day at it like today is nice but not necessary. And it always puts me in a good mood for the evening.<br />
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I'm curious, though, if it extends the other way. If I get up in the morning and spend a half hour on a park bench before I reach work, will that tranquility be instilled into the whole day? Will it give me at least a morning boost? Or would morning crankiness and work grind chip away at my zen?<br />
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Might be worth finding out.<br /><br />What's your secret to tranquility?<br /><br />Later Days.Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-49663529761819243102016-03-14T16:23:00.000-04:002016-03-14T16:26:47.096-04:00Movie Buff: A Spoileriffic Review of The Final GirlsThe Final Girls is a film with a good hook, but bad follow-through. (Does that work? I guess the metaphor is that the film is a boxer.) The elevator pitch is decent--a group of five modern teenagers find themselves trapped in a 1980s horror film, complete with stalker monster and a camp full of horny counselors. And it's got a great cast, suited for its tongue-in-cheek approach to the material--Alia Shawkat (Arrested Development), Tom Middleditch (Silicon Valley) and Taissa Farmiga (American Horror Story). And the 80s counselors include Adam DeVine (Modern Family, Work Aholics, Pitch Perfect; it's a similar asshole performance as Pitch Perfect, but he's really good at it) and Malin Akerman (Children's Hospital). The problem isn't in the premise, or the actors, but the details.<br />
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If you're going to have a film that mocks the plot of horror movies, even 1980s horror movies, you need to have a reasonably rock-solid plot yourself. And there are some gaps here. I spent the first half of the movie assuming Gertie, Alia Shawkat's character, was Max (Farmiga)'s aunt, because while Shawkat is great in this and I want to see her in more movies in general, she is playing high school age, or freshman college--ditto with Tom Middleditch. You can kind of squint and make the case that this doesn't matter for DeVine, Akerman, and the rest of the 80s crew, since they don't have to be believable as teenagers so much as it needs to believable that someone in the 80s would cast them as such, but for the modern group, it doesn't work. The actors are, again, great, but the roles they're playing could use some re-definition.</div>
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The other problem is the emotional core at the center of the movie. In the movie within the movie, Akerman plays a scream queen, whose role is to lose her virginity and die horribly for it; in the movie at large, she's also Max's mother, who gets killed in the first scene. A lot of the film is devoted to the daughter working through the mom's death through interactions with a fictional character that looks like her mom. It's kind of a clumsy set-up: Nancy, the in-film character, has to be elastic/shallow enough to bond with someone she just met, but real enough for Max's emotional struggle to matter, AND fit in as a stock horror trope for the film within the film. It takes a lot of hoop jumping to make it happen, and I'm not sure it works. A better way to go about it, I think, would have been for Akerman as Max's mom not die in that first scene, go with them into the film, and be forced to replace Nancy after she accidentally dies too soon, to keep the plot going.</div>
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There's a lot of little logic jumps too, where the plot's compromised to make a joke of questionable quality--that's the peril of trying to be a meta-horror film and a comedy. But there's also some really coo bits, both meta and otherwise. The moment where the modern group realise that they're about to meet Max's deceased mom is wonderfully creepy (and would admittedly be a loss if they changed it to my suggestion), and the first half of the fight against the slasher is really cool as it threatens to go against and in their favour. On the meta level, finding out that the entire film universe loops every 92 minutes, being caught up in a flashback, and I can see the humour in trying to restrain the ditsy oversexualized character (Angela Trimbur does a real fun job with the role, putting a lot more into it than it really deserves), even if it doesn't quite get there. </div>
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It's not a bad movie, and it does the aforementioned meta-horror/comedy mix better than, say, the entirety of the Scary Movie franchise. It's not as good as Cabin in the Woods, though it fits light popcorn film a lot better. It has some strong performances from really great comedic actors. But I'd be lying if I said I wasn't hoping for more. There's room for more play, and more critical play, than what's here.</div>
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Later Days.</div>
Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-57932098600017489172015-11-12T13:08:00.001-05:002015-11-12T13:08:09.764-05:00In My DefenseMy defense is next Friday. To say that I am anxious about it would be a severe understatement. I can hardly bear to spend more than an hour or so away from it. I am having an onslaught of dreams where I accidentally sleep through the whole thing (which takes a lot of sleeping, since it's an afternoon defense). The biggest sign of all is that the anxiety has even brought me back to my poor, neglected blog. So this post is going to be a stream of consciousness hodge-podge that will hopefully let me vent some steam.<div>
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The preparation itself is interesting. Up to this point, I managed to avoid most of my worry by focusing on smaller events that were happening between the time the date was set (back in late September) and now. First, I was giving a guest lecture on narrative and ludology for my supervisor's first year course. Then I had another guest lecture on masculinity and game culture for another professor's class (this is turning into a humble brag about my guest lectures, but I'm going somewhere here, honest). Most recently, there was going to Wordplay 2015, a one day event in Toronto showcasing games that feature words predominantly in one way or another--a must-go event for someone whose research area is videogames and text. (I met Emily Short! I made a no to slightly negative impression!) In each case, the dissertation defense was something I was working on in the background and preparing for, but it wasn't until it was the Next Thing Coming that it suddenly started to really affect me.</div>
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The prep is going... all right, I think. I've met with the tech people, so I'm nominally familiar with the equipment in my defense room. I've done enough presentations to know that being familiar doesn't stop things from going wrong, but at least I'll know what to troubleshoot when it does. I've read over and over the dissertation draft, finding all the terrible typos that somehow evaded me before the dissertation went out. </div>
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Actually, I have some advice on that note. For financial and moral reasons, I use Open Office, an open-source word processing program, over Microsoft Office, but I really wish I had converted it into MO before sending it out. The big problem was formatting it properly with the table of contents and page numbering. To make a table of contents, you need to set up headings and subheadings, and there's a bug where OO automatically adds about half a dozen lines of blank space to the first footnote of every chapter, regardless of how many times I take it out. The other problem was the page numbering--university regulations say that everything that comes before the table of contents has to have roman numeral page numbers, and arabic numbering for the TOC and everything after. And again, that's a pain to do in OO. (Maybe a pain in MO too, but it's OO I'm working with) I finally wound up having to copy the whole document into a new sheet entirely so I could start from scratch. And THAT wound up, for some reason, erasing all the alignments I did for my long quotations. I had to go in and re-align them manually, and as a result, I missed about a quarter of them. Suffice to say, OO is not maximized for 300+ pages of formatting.</div>
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I've also met with two out of the three members of my internal committee, which has been a huge source of relief--I'd really recommend it to those prepping for their own defense. Even apart from the useful advice on how to handle the defense, talking with them has reminded me that, at this point, I am the expert; I'm not just the expert on the subject, but on the defense itself. I will certainly have read it through more than anyone else in the room, and it takes a priority for me more than anyone else in the room. That second part in particular is a useful reminder, in that for everyone else, this is a routine thing--while everyone's there for the dissertation, I'm the one with the greatest emotional investment. It's a big deal in my head, but less so for everyone else. I don't think I'm fully expressing what I'm trying to say here, but I find it comforting on some level to remember that the dissertation is less burdensome from other frames of mind.</div>
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It's still going to weigh pretty heavy on my frame, though. The major task left is to prepare the slideshow. That's easier said than done. All in all, I've got a minor or major focus on approximately forty different games throughout the course of the argument, and that means a lot of screenshots that I need to line up. That's a practical aspect of game studies that isn't discussed enough, I think--how presenting a lecture on a videogame differs from more traditional media. Luckily, I have a small bank of images ready to go from previous presentations--video game manuals, Doom, Myst, and Planescape: Torment are already covered. That still leaves, however, two dozen or so games from the second and fifth chapters that need more substantiation. I spent about four hours last night watching walkthroughs of Final Fantasy: Tactics, only to realize that was watching the remake, not the original, just to get a shot of a cutscene that occurred about 3/4 of the way through the game. Film studies doesn't have this problem! (It has its own, I imagine. But not this one, specific problem, in exactly the same way.)<br /><br />Anyway, I'd better get back to the work. I have promises to keep, and hours of Ni No Kuni walkthroughs to go before I sleep.</div>
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Later Days.</div>
Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-72960834448236823872015-10-07T16:25:00.000-04:002015-10-07T16:25:11.407-04:00Story Idea: the ol' f ⊕ fQuick story idea: a fantasy trilogy called "Fight or Flight." First book is "Fight," wherein, immediately, a crown prince type character is ambushed by a potential usurper. The rest of the book is a study of the culture in the grips of a civil war. Epic war fantasy type stuff, ala Game of Thrones. <div>
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Book 2 is "Flight." Same starting point, but instead of responding by raising his own army, the crown prince type goes on the run. Instead of the war fantasy, the operative mode is the thriller novel, with the prince one step ahead of his pursuers. This time around, though, I play with the readers' knowledge of the first book, confounding it in some places, allowing them to predict events in others, by using the same cast of characters, but to different effect. Also include some revelations that shed new light on motivations in book 1. Both books end, somewhat anticlimatically, for a fantasy book, in tragedy. <div>
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The third book is "Or....?". There's a number of different approaches for this one. One would be to take literally, a number of different approaches, sketching out a plethora of alternatives for crown prince beyond those explored in the first two books, and using the readers' knowledge of the fictional world derived from the other two books to fill in the blanks. Or stretch out a single one, that deliberately incorporates parts of one and two. The real question is how far to make explicit the overall model in the last run. Should the narrator play coy about the repeated structure, or is that the point where they nod conspiratorially to the reader? Could the character be made aware of "the multiverse" without it feeling too hackneyed?</div>
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The idea of multiple time lines is pretty common in science fiction, and the retellings of such universes is pretty old hat--I mean, we've even got the "evil = beard" star trek cliche. I think it's a little more rare in fantasy. The closest is the "this story has many tellings" that you get through repeated variations on fairy tales and the like, or the approach where the fantasy world is deliberately constructed as a videogame, and is thus open to restarting and replaying with different approaches. (Vivian Van Velde's books are my childhood go-to for that sort of thing, though others have utilized it as well.) I guess Robert Jordan does it too, in some of the earlier Wheel of Time books, though not to this degree. All right, so it's a hack idea. I still think it would be a fun exercise in plotting. The trick would be to engage the reader in such a way that the repetition is a feature, not a bug. </div>
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Anyway, just an idea to toss out there. But it's mine, dammit, and if any of youse steals it... Well, then I'll have to think of a follow-up.</div>
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Later days.</div>
Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-44087588096911171522015-08-14T17:10:00.001-04:002015-10-07T16:08:23.033-04:00Chrono Trigger WarningAs in, a warning I'm going to make a terrible Chrono Trigger pun. Also, flippancy aside, I think trigger warnings are a useful thing, and I encourage people to do them.
I was proctoring for an examination today, and that means essentially three hours of standing around not using your phone or reading. It was an English test, so cheating is generally at a minimum, which meant I was largely there to escourt male students to the washroom. As the prehistoric pelican said, it's a living.
It's not a particularly exciting living, though, so to keep my mind occupied, I thought I'd spend the time going mentally over the ins and outs of a favorite series. I came into the quick problem, though, that I'm not really a repeat viewer anymore. There are books I'll read again, and episodes I'll rewatch, but an entire series overview isn't where my media interest is these days. So I needed something lengthy that I'd been through so many times that it was more or less embedded in my brain. I waffled a bit, and wound up with the 1995 Super Nintendo game Chrono Trigger.
I'm sure I've talked about Chrono Trigger before, though I'm not in the mood to track down those entries. And I'm also not in the mood to offer much by way of explanation of the game's basic plot or mechanics. So the rest of this post is one for the Chronoheads (as I'm sure they call each other despite me just making the term up).
--I could go through most of the plot in my head, with two exceptions. First, how the party learns about Melchoir--I'd totally forgotten about his Millenial Fair appearance. Second, how the party gets to the Antiquity time period--Lavos' arrival creates a convenient crater. So there you go.
--Unlike its contemporary, Final Fantasy VII, the party-characters of Chrono Trigger don't really have an arc to them. They're just a bunch of happy-go-lucky folk (and Magus) who resolve to save the world from apocalypse. I'm largely ok with that, because they're still fairly fully-realized characters, if a little one-dimensional. You give me a bit of dialogue, and I could still probably determine which character said it. That's memorable character writing, in my book.
--Ozzy's a perfect mid-boss character. He's scheming, manipulative, but not really good at it. He's distinct enough and difficult enough to be acceptable as a repeat character, and hits just the level of annoying you need to make beating him satisfactory, but also sufficiently annoying that it wouldn't be dramatically acceptable for him to be any more significant than that. Other JRPG characters fill similar roles: Liz and Ard in Wild Arms 2, Geshp in Shining Force II, and Ultros in Final Fantasy VI. Disgaea lampshades the mid-boss role to amusing effect. I'd have to go back to check this out, but I think one of the points in Final Fantasy VI's favor is that Kafka is largely presented as a mid-boss (albeit a particularly murderous one) until half way through the game.
--And while he's largely a joke, I always felt sorry for him if you bring Magus in the party to fight him the final time. He expresses anger at Magus betraying the Fiends, and Magus utterly dismisses him: "Hear that? It's the sound of the reaper." Under Ozzie's goofiness, there's some untapped tragedy.
--(I really, really hate to say this, but given the Reptites' and the Fiends'struggle against humans, and how Chrono and co are utterly uncaring about either except for how it gets in the way of their larger goals, Chrono Cross does a much better job of exploring the uneasiness of that dual existence. And given that the fiends seem largely extinct in the future (maybe they're the mutants and such?), their struggle does seem necessary.)
--Two really fun longform accounts of Chrono Trigger:<a href="http://thegamedesignforum.com/features/reverse_design_CT_1.html">Reverse Design blog's version</a>, which as you'd expect, focuses mainly on design; and Michael P. Williams' book Chrono Trigger from the Boss Fights book publisher, which digs more into the cultural and philosophical sides.
--Re-using enemy sprites is pretty common in videogames, and Chrono Trigger is as guilty of this as anyone. (Though I do like the subtle visual suggestion that the Fiends are the descendants of the Reptites.) But what the game does really well is offer variations on monsters you've already encountered that require the player to shift tactics. For example, it becomes pretty clear immediately that Queen Zeal's final form is like the much earlier Giga Gais--a central head, and two appendages. But with Giga, the strategy is to take out the powerful hands and go after the defenseless head after. with Zeal, attacking the hands results in a devastating counterattack. Similar things going on with Guardian and, much later, Mother Brain.
--When all's said and done, my favorite part of Chrono Trigger (besides the time travelling, maybe) is Lavos as a villain. It exists on such a larger scale than any other creature in the game, it played a pivotal role in shaping the history of civilization, and for the most part, right up until the final battle, it bares acknowledges or can acknowledge that the heroes even exist. It's just too alien to think in terms of individual humans.
--I wonder if the giant decomposing corpse of a space monster in the earth's core will create any problems. Also, the whole point of the Antiquity era is that it's a society built from channeling power from Lavos, but where is Lavos getting the energy? Presumably, it's feeding off the earth in some way--if it wasn't, it wouldn't need to inhabit the planet's core. OK, looking at the game's script, it's not clear that that's what Lavos is doing; it may be sucking the earth's vitality, but the big work is harvesting the DNA of its organisms, which it does by... hanging out at the earth's core? At any rate, when the player goes to 1999 to fight Lavos on the day it arrives, it occurs to me that this is the worst possible time to fight Lavos--it's already harvested the life force it needs, and now all it has to do is bust out and leave. Is the earth in much better shape if you fight Lavos (via the Black Omen) in an early era? Or since the difference between antiquity and the future is so much less than prehistoric and any other time period, does that mean the damage has already been done? Chrono Trigger sequel: the Lavos energy crisis.
--Speaking of Chrono Trigger sequels, going back and reading that Lavos (somehow) shaped all evolution on earth does lend some credence to the plot of Chrono Cross. But to say that it was responsible for humanity only, as Chrono Cross claims, is still off. We *see* humanity exist before Lavos arrives, and characters claim that it manipulated more than just humans in Chrono Trigger's final fight. So there and take that, decades-old videogame that is still rightfully considered a classic!
So thinking through Chrono Trigger took up about half of the two and a half hour exam. I spent the rest thinking about this blog post. And here it is.
Later Days.<br />
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Edit: I guess this is what happens when you do your whole post in HTML mode over compose mode; it eats up all your spaces. Well, I kind of like the ridiculousness of the lack of spacing, so I'll keep it as is. It makes the whole thing feel like an out of breath declaration, which fits, given my fannish obsession with the subject.Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-86221903612209500152015-05-30T00:15:00.001-04:002015-05-30T00:37:48.074-04:00Random Thoughts, May 2015 edition: Futurama, dissertations, informed consent in fantasy, and match 3 gamesThis is going to be a combination of updates, and things that have occurred to me.<br />
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"Not sure if _____ or ______"<br />
"You're _____ is bad, and you should feel bad!"<br />
"I don't want to live on this planet anymore."<br />
"__________ do not work that way!<br />"I'll make my own ___________! With blackjack, and hookers!
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Not an original observation, but Futurama's clearly going to be more remembered as a meme generator than a TV show. There's a Buzzfeed article in there, somewhere."<br />
Just posted this on Facebook. I don't really feel like fleshing it out too much further at the moment, but it's an interesting issue.Arguably, Futurama has had more cultural value as a source of memes than as a TV show. That probably still holds if you talk financial value too--but only if you factor in the ad revenue generated by the hundreds and thousands of sites that have deployed variations of these memes to get clicks. It's not money that's going to the show creators. Then again--who creates a meme? Its original coiners, or its major circulators? If I ever have a spare couple of days, it's a new media area I'd like to delve into more fully.</div>
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*The dissertation's reaching a boiling point. My defense is projected for September--though I've only got permission for one more term of grad school, so that's a fun future hurdle--and I'm still coping with the notion of what comes next. I should be applying for things and submitting other things like crazy but... I'm not there yet. It might be the same sort of procrastination that led to the degree delays to begin with, but I feel like something still needs to click. Soon, hopefully.</div>
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*Speaking of clicking, I've been reading Rachel Aaron's The Legend of Eli Monpress. I'll probably have a full review somewhere at some point, but an idea in regards to the series popped into my head today, and I want to preserve it. The magic system in the novel is essentially the animus version, with a genie twist. That is, every object in the fantasy world--manmade or natural--if it's of sufficient size, is inhabited by a lifeforce, a sentient spirit. Wizards can communicate with the spirit, and bind it to them and make it serve them, ala the genie/master relationship. So far, so good. But what Aaron adds to the concept that really makes it interesting is the idea that the current dominant group of wizards, the spiritualists, believe that it's unethical to bind a spirit against its will. The only spirits you can call on as servant, then, are the ones that you enter into a willing relationship with, where both parties supply the other with what they need, and both may break it off, if they wish. In short, it's a fantasy universe where magic is based on the idea of<i> informed consent. </i>That's kind of amazing, and makes the series really relevant in terms of greater cultural issues. Yes, there's a huge difference between consent as relates to sexuality and as it relates to magical spirits, but framing the relationship in terms of ethics and moral responsibility over personal desire creates some really interesting parallels.</div>
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*I gave a talk this week based on the third chapter of my dissertation. I got some good feedback on it, but in a lot of ways, it's the wrong point in the dissertation process to be soliciting feedback from outside of my committee. I'm really glad I did it, and I understand my own argument and how it's perceived a lot better now, but it would have been better to have pursued this sort of thing earlier. At that point of writing, I was too caught up in the idea that I couldn't put anything out there until I had my committee's seal of approval; more experimentation could have been helpful. That's something to remember.</div>
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*Conversation overheard on the bus today: "When I was a kid, I used to read while I walked around, with my nose in a book." "Me too! It really bugged my mom. She thought I'd walk into a tree, or something."<br />
Me, in my head: "I AM ONE OF YOU."</div>
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*This weekend is all about prepping for the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, and writing the paper for the Canadian Game Studies Association. I've got some draft notes, but it's time to flesh them out. If I was a better planner, it'd be a presentation on dissertation-related material, or even a revised version of this week's talk. Instead, it'll be a look at the cultural, economic, and design-related issues involving Match-3 type games. Basically, it's a chance to<a href="http://exgress.blogspot.ca/search?q=%22match+three%22"> take some of things I've said </a> about Match-3 games and put them before a larger audience. I'm thinking five minutes on the social and economic aspects of Match-3 games in general, five minutes on how some of them incorporate narrative skins, and five minutes on how Marvel Puzzle Quest in particular approaches these issues. If anyone's interested, I might put the piece up here when it's done.</div>
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Later Days. </div>
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Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-27943188164894531062015-05-08T16:09:00.001-04:002015-05-08T16:28:03.010-04:00Build A Better Frankenstein: Teaching a Sci-Fi Class, Short Story editionYes, for the pedants in the crowd, it's build a better Frankenstein's Monster. But that felt like too far a departure from the "Build a Better Mousetrap" allusion I was going for, so here we are.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>One of the more time-consuming endeavors of the past term was that I was teaching a second year course on science fiction. It shared a lot with the fantasy course I taught the term before that (and not just because I modeled it on a very similar syllabus). Namely, they both attracted a pretty diverse set of students from across all disciplines. I had engineers, art majors, English majors, chemistry students, social studies--a really interesting cross section of people and ideas. I learned a lot from teaching the course; here's some ruminations on the short stories, to start things off:<br />
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Like the fantasy course, choosing the short story readings was harder than I thought it would be. I think this blog is testament to the fact that I am a very avid reader of science fiction and fantasy, but the short story doesn't cross my path as often as other forms--especially when I'm focusing on more recently published works. Traditionally, science fiction and fantasy are considered "low" forms of literature (much as videogames are often framed as low forms of media/art), but even within a "low" form, there can be a hierarchy, and in terms of mass popularity, short stories are (unfairly) treated as lower than novels. I think I've accidentally internalized that snobbery in my own reading habits to a degree, and it made finding quality, recent short stories harder.<br />
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That said, I wound up relying very heavily on Sherryl Vint's <i>Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed</i> in terms of choosing which short stories to feature. My students, in general, seemed to prefer the novels (maybe an echo of that short story bias?). The cyberpunk short stories--"Johnny Mnemonic" by William Gibson, and "20 Evocations" by Bruce Sterling--generated the most class discussion (perhaps because, as the next chapter elaborates, they were read on a group discussion-oriented day). But it was the short stories that had a socially oriented slant that generated the best individual papers and responses. "When It Changed" by Joanna Russ features a world of just women who are invaded by the first male colonists they've met in over 500 years and "Speech Sounds" by Octavia Butler imagines a post-apocalypse world where people have lost speech and writing; I wouldn't go so far as to say the students writing on these pieces liked these short stories the best, as their papers mostly focused on intensely argued objections, but they were certainly the pieces that they responded to the most.<br />
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I packed the readings a little more tightly than I perhaps should have; while everything was covered, a few pieces didn't quite get the attention they deserved. A part of that was these pieces tended towards the end of term, or immediately before the February break. In order to keep students' attention at these points, you have to be very, very careful what sort of works you choose. It would be nice if they came to class with the reading read and ready to engage every single time, but realistically, that's not going to happen. If I had the class to do over again, I'd probably tweak things a bit so that the "nonideal" attention periods featured visual media-based texts (which students seem to find a bit easier to engage with) or discussion groups, which I find tend to work better for drawing out engagement more than the lectures. In particular, Larissa Lai's "Rachel," John Varley's "The Persistence of Vision," and Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore's "Vintage Season" were all victims of end term fatigue.<br />
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Apropos of nothing, I wish I'd put Ted Chiang's "Liking What You See: A Documentary." The sci-fi idea is that it takes place on a campus where students can opt to get implants to block out the ability to see beauty in the human face, and what that means in terms of commercialism and personal relationships. While apparently Chiang isn't a fan of the story himself--according to Wikipedia, he felt it was rushed--I think the setting and subject would have struck a chord with my early 20-somethings. Your biology makes you shallow! Discuss!<br />
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I've got more to say on the general subject of teaching this course, but I'm rusty on the blogging front; I think I'll break this up into a few pieces.<br />
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Later Days.Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-56593369554187360152015-04-17T09:10:00.003-04:002015-04-17T09:15:14.575-04:00Friday Quotations: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"Back when the rest of us were learning to play wallball and pitch quarters and drive our older brothers' cars and sneak dead soldiers from under our parents' eyes he was gorging himself on a steady stream of Lovecraft, Wells, Burroughs, Howard, Alexander, Herbert, Asimov, Bova, and Heinlein, and even the Old Ones who were already beginning to fade--E.E. 'Doc' Smith, Stapledon, and the guy who wrote all the Doc Savage books--moving hungrily from book to book, author to author, age to age. (It was his good fortune that the libraries of Paterson were so underfunded that they still kept a lot of the previous generation's nerdery in circulation.) You couldn't have torn him away from any movie or TV show or cartoon where there were monsters or spaceships or mutants or doomsday devices or destinies or magic or evil villains. In these pursuits alone Oscar showed the genius his grandmother insited was part of the family patrimony. Could write in Elvish, could speak Chakobsa, could differentiate between a Slan, a Dorsai, and a Lensman in accute detail, know more about the Marvel Universe than Stan Lee, and was a role-playing game fanatic. (If only he'd been good at videogames it would have been a slam dunk but despite owning an Atari and an Activision he didn't have the reflexes for it.) Perhaps if like me he'd been able to hide his otakuness maybe shit would have been easier for him, but he couldn't. Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn't have passed for Normal if he'd wanted to."><br />
Díaz<br />
This struck a bit closer to home than I'd like to admit. It's never too far below the surface, is it? And it matters so much more to you than anyone else.
Later Days.Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-19548856301224997862015-03-29T20:13:00.001-04:002015-03-30T16:13:40.826-04:00Retrospective: Warioland II and THE DISCOVERY OF GREEEEEDOften, between playing big, long videogames, I try to seek out a shorter or older game as a sort of palate cleanser. After <a href="http://exgress.blogspot.ca/2015/03/restrospectivedoes-bravely-default.html">Bravely Default</a>--I'm providing a link even though it's just a short scroll below on the main page--and before I lovingly toss my time into Pillars of Eternity, I decided the game would be Warioland II. A discussion of the difference that the money-loving anti-hero makes, after the break.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Wario is an interesting character--in a lot of ways, he's more interesting than Mario is. Of course, there's a reason for that; Mario is essentially a static character, and if there's a point him, it's <i>exactly</i> that he is a static character. Almost as much as the taciturn ubermale of the FPS genre, his role is to be the constant that anchors his Nintendo series together, and lets the tangential spin-offs stay nominally connected as well. It's fitting, then, that a character whose starting definition is "Mario's Opposite" has, in contrast, at least, a character arc and evolving history. (Alternate version: I'm overthinking this, and the variety of game types Wario's tried his hands at pales before the career of Mario, who's been everything from a boxing referee to a spelling bee coach.)<br />
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<a href="http://86bb71d19d3bcb79effc-d9e6924a0395cb1b5b9f03b7640d26eb.r91.cf1.rackcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/super-mario-land-3-wario-land-walkthrough-box-artwork-640x325.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://86bb71d19d3bcb79effc-d9e6924a0395cb1b5b9f03b7640d26eb.r91.cf1.rackcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/super-mario-land-3-wario-land-walkthrough-box-artwork-640x325.jpg" height="162" width="320" /></a></div>
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Unfortunately, I'm not the person to relate that history. I just don't have enough experience with the Warioware series to talk about them in detail. That's the basic progression of Wario's arc--he starts as the protagonist of a series of platform side-scroller games designed as deviations from Mario games that are still somehow recognizeable as being Mario games to being a money-making schemer with an assortment of weird and motley hanger-ons as narrative- and character-based justifications for Nintendo to sell a bunch of loosely similar Flash-inspired games. And there's something worth saying to be said there as well, as I'd argue Warioware is a predecessor of sorts to Rusty's Real Deal Baseball, both being Nintendo's attempts to play with alternate game models without entirely abandoning their own approach and style.</div>
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<a href="http://www.mariowiki.com/images/thumb/2/2d/Wario_Land_2_GBC_NA_cover.jpg/250px-Wario_Land_2_GBC_NA_cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.mariowiki.com/images/thumb/2/2d/Wario_Land_2_GBC_NA_cover.jpg/250px-Wario_Land_2_GBC_NA_cover.jpg" /></a></div>
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But again, that's not what we're here to talk about. We're talking about Warioland II, and Wario's platforming days. Wario first appeared as the villain for Super Mario Land II: Six Golden Coins for the Gameboy, and that's a game I've got a lot of fondness towards. As a kid, I was terrible at videogames; my younger brother was far better at them, and the epitome of embarrassment for a ten year old is having to admit that your seven year old sibling is better than you in any way, shape, or form. But Super Mario Land II was different--its secret levels, its world map (which is derivative of Super Mario World, but as someone who never got to play it on the SNES, I didn't fully know that) and its forgiving nature (compared to Super Mario Bros 3)--it clicked with me, and I wound up thinking very kindly of it, and even of its vicious antagonist.</div>
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In short, I liked Wario, but with a pre-teen's funds being limited paltry things, my wages went to my main videogame genre of choice, the RPG, and I never got around to playing any of the Warioland spin-offs, not until decades later when I started becoming acquainted with the 3DS Virtual Store. A year or so back now, I bought myself Warioland: Super Mario Land III, and played through it. In some ways, it's a bit disappointing to play it in the context of Super Mario Land II, as the latter is much more of an open world thing, allowing you to play any of its six worlds in any order; Warioland kept the open world, but made it more linear.<br />
Here they are side by side:<br />
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<a href="http://randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com/gw/sml2/map.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com/gw/sml2/map.PNG" height="180" width="200" /> </a><a href="http://martijn.van.steenbergen.nl/projects/warioland/world/EarlyWorldMapShadow.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://martijn.van.steenbergen.nl/projects/warioland/world/EarlyWorldMapShadow.png" height="200" width="200" /></a></div>
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While both are vaguely shaped in a hub and spokes type design, the Warioland map is one way, with some secret offshoots. I can't really blame them--I imagine it makes level design easier to have a firm escalation as opposed to six roughly equivalent areas--but it does seem a little more "on the rails" in terms of exploration.</div>
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Anyway, a more interesting question is how the two games differ on a platform level. World maps are nice, but ultimately, 2-D Mario adventure games tend to come down to jumping and moving to the right and whatnot. And without going into a blow-by-blow of Warioland's design (we are, after all, ostensively here for Warioland II), the difference between it and Marioland II is immediately apparent. First, Wario is just *bigger* than Mario:<br />
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In effect, it doesn't come out to being much different in terms of pixel space, but by just filling out his space a little more, Wario seems much more brutish and bulky than Mario. This sense extends to his move set as well. Mario's relative vulnerability is a truism of the series; if he walks into a Goomba, it's Mario who gets hurt. If Wario walks into an equivalent opponent (and one not armed with, say a spear or something), it's the opponent that gets hurt. And that's a big difference. All through Warioland, I kept having to remind myself that I could knock enemies over by walking into them; I had to keep reminding myself that the option was there. Beyond the leisurely walk to victory, Wario's main attack is a charge into opponents and enemies, and his secondary move (not counting his own power-ups) is lifting up an enemy he's knocked over to toss it at something else. He's physically aggressive in a way Mario isn't (and it's a testament to Nintendo that Wario seems less aggressive even though Mario is the one whose first major power-up is consuming a flower and setting his enemies on fire). </div>
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The differences continue, in resources and plot. While coins are a sideline for Mario and mainly there for a way to gain lives, for the greedy, lucre-starved Wario, they're the point of the whole thing--Wario has to pay a nominal fee to use a checkpoint, and one to finish a level, a game over is particularly harsh because it means losing a treasure or all your coins, and at the end of the game, the ending is determined by how much money Wario has accumulated. Mario, more often than not, is adventuring to save a princess (a notable exception is Super Mario Land II, which happens because Wario steals Mario's castle from him). Wario, in perhaps my favorite twist, fights against a pirate princess, to steal her money. (It's never stated outright that Captain Syrup is a pirate princess, just a pirate, but I feel comfortable giving her a rank of pirate nobility.) I won't go so far to say that it's a feminist statement because, uh, it feels like a misstep to call Wario a feminist, but it's nice to see a subversion of sorts of the tired rescue cliche. In short, Warioland is just close enough to being a Mario game that it manages to constantly make you think of Mario in all the ways Warioland deviates from it.</div>
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Finally, then, let's turn to Warioland II. </div>
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Warioland II takes Warioland's deviations, and doubles down. Perhaps the biggest one is that it removes two Super Mario 2-D staples: the countdown clock and the multiple lives. Wario is, in effect, immortal; rather than ever die from enemy assaults, he is only pushed back and loses a few coins. And in boss fights, it's just pushed back--though in those cases, he's thrown off the screen and has to fight the boss again from the beginning. And to be fair, that's a fairly stiff penalty for some of the later bosses, who take a half dozen well-timed hits to defeat. I think I would have still been able to complete the game without using the Gameboy Advance emulator's save state feature, but it would have been a <b>lot</b> more frustrating.</div>
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Years, ago, in a discussion of the <a href="http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation/9361-Death-Mechanics-and-Dark-Souls">death mechanics of Dark Souls</a>, Yahtzee Croshaw argued that there were two main ways of punishing a player with death in videogames. One approach is to return you exactly to where you where, and the other returns to the player to a past point, making her fight for every inch of progress. The former preserves flow, and the latter maintains challenge. While I don't necessarily agree with everything he says there--especially his hard line that good design can only one or the other--it's a useful starting point for thinking about what happens in Warioland II when the clock and the lives are taken out of the equation. In this case, a lives counter and a timer place the emphasis on performance. In order to succeed, you need to demonstrate a certain consistent level of ability, even if it's "don't get hit too often" and "move fast enough to beat the clock." Removing them shifts the focus to the game's real center: collecting money and exploration.</div>
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Once again, the plot and goals of the game center around Wario accumulating lucre. Here, though, the process is slightly inverted, as rather than stealing the money from Syrup, she's stolen it from Wario, and the game is about recovering it, the minimalist story told through a series of cutscenes. Warioland II also goes one step further in its streamlining, as the world map is gone entirely. In its place, you get an area chart, but it's only available at the end of the game. Rather than finding a lot of passages that lead to secret levels, there's a few of them that lead to a bunch of connected levels; exploring them feels a little like exploring alternate timelines.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The level map for Warioland II</td></tr>
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The game plays more or less the same as Warioland, which means it too walks that line between not being a Mario game yet still similar enough to one that you're constantly thinking about them. If I wanted to be academic about it, I'd say it's the videogame equivalent of the uncanny, creating an experience that is similar to Mario games but just different enough to seem unsettling. There is, however, one significant difference between play in Warioland and Warioland II. In Warioland, there were various power-up helmets that gave Wario powers: bull horns, dragon head, rocket pack. Here, instead, there are enemies that alter Wario's state. A bat with a sledge, for example, flattens Wario, making him shorter, and allowing him to float. A fox with a fire pipe (or something) sets him ablaze, which makes him continually move in a single direction (only changing when running into something) but also capable of smashing fire blocks. The effects are usually temporary, always reversible, and never last longer than the level at hand. The consequence of this change is that it once again shifts focus from performance to exploration. In regular Mario games, you attempt to keep, say, a fire-powered Mario or a Raccoon Mario in levels that don't necessarily contain either as a way of gaining advantage. Here, altered Wario states are not about maintaining some sort of advantage over enemies, but solving a puzzle that's been placed before you. </div>
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The levels are standard side-scroller fare--you generally move from left to right, and each handful of levels is thematically the same, leading up to a miniboss. Chapter one (and the first branching secret chapter, chapter two) are all themed around Wario's giant castle, and so you spend a lot of time playing with the drainage system and so forth. The chapter that follows one if you don't go the secret route is also called chapter two, so the level naming tends to get complicated quickly, so we'll just abandon the whole thing. The main quest line has you going through a series of levels on a boat, a train, through the maze woods, through an urban city (!), and through Syrup's castle. The alt secret levels have you going through a cave, a subterranean Aztec city (also !, though a little more expected in the fantastic milieu), a factory (which leads to one of the harder final bosses), and a haunted house. It's all standard stuff, though the more industrialized/urban settings make it feel appropriately non-Mario. (Donkey Kong Country does something similar.)</div>
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Plus,this the boss of the city levels is a b-ball playing rabbit. So that happens.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 12.8000001907349px;">I'm guessing there's a designer who was fond of <i>Space Jam.</i></td></tr>
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While the accumulation of gold was the whole point of Warioland, in Warioland II, it's more a means to an end. In addition to completion or the discovery of secret routes, each level of the game has two other lucre-based subgoals. Somewhere in every level, there's a room that leads to a matching mini-game, where you have to find the match for a given card depicting a generic enemy type among eight cards. 50 coins buys you a brief look; 100 a medium look, and 200 a lasting look. And if you make the match, you get a treasure, which nets you a small cash amount (I never bothered to learn the exact amount, which is admittedly lazy) and notes on the level map that the treasure has been found. And at the end of the level, there's another game, where you pay money to reveal parts of a card depicting a number from 0 to 9, at 50 g for a subdivision. If you guess the number correctly, you then get a piece of a treasure map. And if you collect ALL the pieces--that's one from every level--then you get access to a secret bonus level. More on the level in a moment, but it's worth noting that this suggests that exploration is valued above wealth, since the latter is a means for encouraging the former; the only problem with that thesis is that the cutscene rewards for full exploration are always Wario getting away with a sack of money (sometimes, a literal sack, with a dollar sign on it. Wario is a fan of the classics). </div>
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Remember how Warioland II is about exploration and taking your time over performance? Well, the bonus level is the exception to that. While it doesn't have timer-related death, it does introduce a timer, and, appropriately, it demands an excruciating level of skill above and beyond anything required in the rest of the game. I'll spare you all the details, but include a few highlights that had me spamming the save state (video credit to <a class=" yt-uix-sessionlink spf-link g-hovercard" data-name="" data-sessionlink="ei=l44YVZCAFZKMqwOmu4CQBg" data-ytid="UCpF5oGpU91S5gHbT8lppXGw" href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpF5oGpU91S5gHbT8lppXGw" style="background: rgb(255, 255, 255); border: 0px; color: #333333; cursor: pointer; display: inline-block; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; font-weight: bold; height: 22px; line-height: 13px; margin: 0px; max-width: 315px; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; text-overflow: ellipsis; vertical-align: top; white-space: nowrap;">Blaziken257</a>):</div>
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First, there was this bit where I had to ferry a monster through narrow tunnels to throw it at a set of monster blocks:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis__8QBTUSUO6hEO4ejWk-KU3xd1XmvuVOZnYhitCv2QKC44q7YlC2oRJnr0ghRV-e1Ix9y7fEQD_4WMRMcPqCNBk40uFmIRe5dj8N5JPlBH5QfLOPDuGDG0iHMDMEl-4A39Ct7D3N9XL3/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-29+19.47.38.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis__8QBTUSUO6hEO4ejWk-KU3xd1XmvuVOZnYhitCv2QKC44q7YlC2oRJnr0ghRV-e1Ix9y7fEQD_4WMRMcPqCNBk40uFmIRe5dj8N5JPlBH5QfLOPDuGDG0iHMDMEl-4A39Ct7D3N9XL3/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-29+19.47.38.png" height="179" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCjeI55j2no51xcdXtfoGn-_Tm62pi_jr7Ld0K1SaB1t0q5PH2uXbkIqTazm1IxQA9b7rMC0zenZiBBZVK4d7pLXU9sTzDXS_Aw7xGl6MFsXS0wHU0SYBs05wW5ysKIIzlHAowSFQb_EAV/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-29+19.47.42.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiCjeI55j2no51xcdXtfoGn-_Tm62pi_jr7Ld0K1SaB1t0q5PH2uXbkIqTazm1IxQA9b7rMC0zenZiBBZVK4d7pLXU9sTzDXS_Aw7xGl6MFsXS0wHU0SYBs05wW5ysKIIzlHAowSFQb_EAV/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-29+19.47.42.png" height="179" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlhtmVQg2HSx_5sdaQeaCTmTOKdwVtrcU4_8tpO8_dgrRmIA2xBLjoOc0_P72165GT9lwFCzEQCLfJuPIZXvr6qp46dC3tK-sKf6yYn9ykY2DkQz45HinCwgZ2BdkzhkZZmhT-SNH_IeZN/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-29+19.47.54.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhlhtmVQg2HSx_5sdaQeaCTmTOKdwVtrcU4_8tpO8_dgrRmIA2xBLjoOc0_P72165GT9lwFCzEQCLfJuPIZXvr6qp46dC3tK-sKf6yYn9ykY2DkQz45HinCwgZ2BdkzhkZZmhT-SNH_IeZN/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-29+19.47.54.png" height="179" width="320" /></a></div>
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Then there was a section where you have to cross a platform that is only solid for enemies, by repeatedly jumping on one, pushing it to the right and using it to jump over the gap:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBO5BsSd6FJ8jDemrPBg8APO6npwme176AWew2fQQQLXAIJ3kdPlY_K5_I7lp6Z4hjvbzVZMR7m71MNWO9dT0YpQJTVI6_h3zm6EsycOwFadFzConUsyOEbhdpvyx3apG5O1tJgzdYF0ut/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-29+19.48.15.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBO5BsSd6FJ8jDemrPBg8APO6npwme176AWew2fQQQLXAIJ3kdPlY_K5_I7lp6Z4hjvbzVZMR7m71MNWO9dT0YpQJTVI6_h3zm6EsycOwFadFzConUsyOEbhdpvyx3apG5O1tJgzdYF0ut/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-29+19.48.15.png" height="179" width="320" /></a></div>
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And then there's a bit with about a dozen vertical jumps with no margin for errors:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaBfZ00W-B4Av7UgTC8MkQDoIhMi8OgstGM7OG7bBl4hLKfdodhCm-9V7O_pUNfwGARDsJjHsvOmngnj9vjvU2BKgaveKZyso-6pB9IALWzMTCOwQPASKCoNWzBBhfbmq17yfIM-IvB_SI/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-29+19.48.39.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjaBfZ00W-B4Av7UgTC8MkQDoIhMi8OgstGM7OG7bBl4hLKfdodhCm-9V7O_pUNfwGARDsJjHsvOmngnj9vjvU2BKgaveKZyso-6pB9IALWzMTCOwQPASKCoNWzBBhfbmq17yfIM-IvB_SI/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-29+19.48.39.png" height="179" width="320" /></a></div>
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Next is a bit that combines two of the others, where you have to use flying enemies to make vertical jumps:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA9OhgMUuhkduWGmZ3hB6CERzbjPNe_-kS5n-UnCrBxLWWiEEAUUTszDVC5ncWK_-pbwJ_CYhZFkTDhq6Sv79-R4Da7pktN_-4SuIEXbafdIB3lLvTG1wRzLw0ypHYlhi75KAjcMPRz5GL/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-29+19.49.04.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA9OhgMUuhkduWGmZ3hB6CERzbjPNe_-kS5n-UnCrBxLWWiEEAUUTszDVC5ncWK_-pbwJ_CYhZFkTDhq6Sv79-R4Da7pktN_-4SuIEXbafdIB3lLvTG1wRzLw0ypHYlhi75KAjcMPRz5GL/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-29+19.49.04.png" height="179" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvF_ixOhwcwKNp4ojb3TsbXSZCZcjrsimV1nq3cB7Nh-rSUW-fBzwmTh8l_cgKvVKApAdotmoo6I2-iirb4GEzv0SjaZEw400s0qp9Ce6YtGh0pAHhPKS9V06E8eQofmxd6hs64MWbFOMD/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-29+19.49.12.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvF_ixOhwcwKNp4ojb3TsbXSZCZcjrsimV1nq3cB7Nh-rSUW-fBzwmTh8l_cgKvVKApAdotmoo6I2-iirb4GEzv0SjaZEw400s0qp9Ce6YtGh0pAHhPKS9V06E8eQofmxd6hs64MWbFOMD/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-29+19.49.12.png" height="179" width="320" /></a></div>
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And finally, there's the boss of the area, a giant spear holder standing on an enemies-only platform, which means you have to perform twelve consecutive ground pounds to defeat him, all in one go. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ2mCElSvHqjMFV26TlS2U_FLx4WzklYOso-33fq7vc0dAywl7q7Q0T5lJfiOG2EfCr3eVYdGzkCYpXpmoYdBqVULhPYYHt1lKG6MlIcTWzy-0Ilec-i4bTFIZweArIl9WD1VtZF82pv0a/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-29+19.50.43.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ2mCElSvHqjMFV26TlS2U_FLx4WzklYOso-33fq7vc0dAywl7q7Q0T5lJfiOG2EfCr3eVYdGzkCYpXpmoYdBqVULhPYYHt1lKG6MlIcTWzy-0Ilec-i4bTFIZweArIl9WD1VtZF82pv0a/s1600/Screenshot+2015-03-29+19.50.43.png" height="179" width="320" /></a><br />
I got to the spear holder, but after a few dozen attempts, I admitted that, baring sheer luck, the number of ground pounds needed will always allude me. There but the grace of a final money-bag-holding cutscene go I. (Also, I feel it has to be said: damn, this level is creepy. The eyes, ears, and mouths inserted into the background are weird, especially the mouths that are spewing water.)</div>
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It's an interesting design for an interesting game. Rather than focus on performance and defeating enemies throughout, Warioland II pushes the platform adventure more towards the puzzle and exploration side, de-emphasizing the agon of fending off enemies. Even in this special level where performance is more demanding than anywhere else in the game, the demand of fighting the enemies is virtually nil in comparison to mastering the techniques needed to navigate the area's puzzles. In the first game, Wario was defined largely by his greater propensity for physical violence than Mario. By removing the threat and longer term consequences of minor enemies, Warioland II shifts the focus away from action towards puzzle, while still letting the game feel like the first. Exactly what Wario means as a character is a hard thing to pin down--what does antihero even mean in a genre typified by platform jumping? Eventually, Nintendo will sidestep the question by turning him less into Mario's strange double and more into his own weird self with the Warioware series; here, Warioland II offers a way to expand on the original without losing entirely what made it interesting to begin with.<br />
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Later Days.</div>
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Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-49422186948968674022015-03-22T15:47:00.001-04:002015-03-22T22:18:48.116-04:00Restrospective:Does Bravely Default Bravely Rise Above Default?Normally, when I finish a game--especially a game that spent over a hundred hours of my life, from beginning to end--I've got something to say about it, even with JRPGs, which, when not doing something noticeably different, tend to cohere to a small set of cliches. Nier has its ruminations on genre and violence. Chrono Trigger is still cool for the way it depicts a struggle against a being who literally doesn't comprehend that the heroes of the story exist, because they exist on an entirely different scale of being. Radiant Historia encourages the player to think in terms of a sequence of events instead of connections in space.<br />
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But Square Enix's Bravely Default doesn't have any of those things. Everything I can think of to say about it is interesting largely in the way it came from somewhere else first. Even the fact that it has killed my interest in playing JRPGs AND the fact that it is a pastiche stitched from other JRPGs are both the major talking points I used for crafting my response to Ni No Kuni.<br />
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Part of this I have to admit is my fault; I've played many JRPGs over the years, and that has worn into me certain expectations and familiarities, which if I didn't have, it would have made BD seem a lot fresher. But really, so much of the game seems a rehash of other things I've seen. Repeating large portions to shake up what we take for granted about the plot was Nier's big schtick. Playing with temporality in turn-based combat was Radiant Historia (as was the reality hopping in later). The build-a-town mini-quest has been done from Dark Cloud to Breath of Fire (although I'll give points for adding the 3DS' Street Pass functionality to the mix). Even the plot is jumble of JRPG cliches about restoring the four crystals to save the world, and yes, there's a twist, but again--conventional JRPG story with a last act twist is a cliche at this point too. It would help if the characters were a little more developed, but really, they're just typical stereotypes with a weird fixation on--<br />
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Wait, no! I've got it! The unique part of the game is its party chats concerning food! ...Except Dragon Warrior has had the same party chat function, and it's no more food-oriented than Star Ocean. Carry on, then.<br />
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More on the search for anything worth searching for after the break.</div>
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<a name='more'></a>Let's talk about the game's story first. (Spoilers follow) The story starts with a rift that opens up in the middle of a continent of Luxendarc (subtle), the game's world. It swallows up Tiz Arrior's home village Norende, and his search for survivors leads him to Agnes and Airy. Agnes is a vestal who's been raised from childhood to care for the sacred crystal of Earth; Airy is her cryst-fairy helper. They're on a quest to reawaken the crystals, as Bad Things have resulted from their corruption: increases in earthquakes, a putrification of the ocean, general monster rise, and the rift in question. But Agnes is also being chased by the Eternian Sky Knights, who are fighting against the Crystal Orthodoxy, her religion. The two (three counting Airy) team up, and they're soon joined by Edea, the spunky Eternian who turns against her people's excess, and Ringabel, the would-be ladies' man/amnesiac. They travel around the world, defeat the necessary opponents in their way, restore the Crystals, and enter a Pillar of Light---only to have time reset, and none of them able to come up with a better course of action than "well, let's try that again."<br />
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This brings us up to chapter five, about half way through the game. And it's not quite true that time has reset--while they've been brought to a point before most of the game's events have happened, events have changed enough to suggest they're in an alternate world. So it's a parade around to re-reawaken the crystals, with all the human bosses you fought the first time around available as optional fights, albeit with stats raised to make them more of a fight. Once that's done, you fly back to the pillar of light, wake up in a new new world, and you... do the whole thing over again. And again. And then one more time for good measure. Now, throughout the game, the human opponent characters have been hinting that they had a good reason for killing the Crystal Orthodoxy, interfering in a civil war, encouraging barbaric animal cruelty in the name of fashion, and developing a more robust health care system (they're on always on point): fifteen hundred years ago, when the battle between the Crystal Orthodoxy and the opposed forces reached a high point, a messenger looking suspiciously like Agnes came down and told them that the crystals would eventually be used for.... something... bad. And the two immortals on respective sides (the Sage Yulyana and the vampire De Rossa) carried this message down through the decades. And it takes about seven chapters for anyone to get around telling this to the four teenagers single-handedly tearing up their armies.<br />
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To be fair, around chapter seven (fourth time around the parallel universe merry go round), the team starts to become suspicious of their marching orders of their own accord--not enough to confront Airy, mind, but enough to do a lot of passive aggressive "..........." speeches, another hallmark of the JRPG. Then, when the fifth Pillar of Light has been established, Airy finally reveals what players figured out a while ago: she's been playin' the whole team for a bunch of saps, see (say in 40s gangster voice for full effect) and all this time we thought we were saving the world (well, some world, anyway) we were actually linking parallel worlds together, which makes it easier for her master Ouroboros to channel energy from them by devouring them. There's a final dungeon, a confrontation with Airy in a shiny new form, and several rounds with Ouroboros. First, the dragon monster is largely immortal, but Del Rosso fuses with him to get rid of that problem (which is apparently a thing immortals can do NBD); then he starts devouring new planets to heal himself, which countered in a heart-warming-ish moment where your added friends' worlds' heroes break free, and encourage you to go get him. Ouroboros is defeated, the multiverse is saved, and our heroes go their separate ways: Ringabel uses the poorly defined rules of travel between worlds to rescue his world's Edea (oh, around chapter 6, he regains his memory, and figures out he's alt-world version of the villain characters, but one that had specifically failed to save Edea before being pulled into Airy's alt world). Edea rejoins the reformed Sky Knights; Agnes rejoins the reformed vestal keepers; and Tiz falls down dead because apparently he was animated by a divine presence working against the Ouroboros the whole thing and was never alive at all, why not. The End.</div>
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In broad strokes, it's not a terrible plot, and even sensical, from a JRPG standpoint. The first four chapters are rather standard fare, with the enemy Knights becoming almost comically monstrous against our protagonists' good. Admittedly, that's all there so it can be reversed in the later chapters,in the sense that the lead characters realize their actions aren't ambiguously good. But it's a pointless sort of reversal, because it takes so long to happen, and it all could have been adverted if any of the enemy characters, in any of the parallel worlds, had taken five seconds to sit down with the protagonists. It's character misunderstanding delaying plot resolution at its worst, and stretching it out over the entire game is exhausting. There's also a big gap in character development (with some late developments, admittedly, in the chapter seven optional quests); turns out that when your entire cast except your immediate party is reset every chapter, characters don't develop very far. And our main cast wind up rather unresolved as well. There isn't much room for resolution in terms of romantic arcs when one of your four options leaves the rest of the party for his original world, and the other turns out to be a body possessed by a Celestial.<br />
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The repetition really wears thin on a gameplay level. Chapters 5 and 6 are particularly tedious, as even the side quests feel like the same thing, only with a few stats increased; chapters 7 and 8 change the combinations of side quests in interesting ways, until you hit the final gauntlet of being challenged to defeat all twenty four one after the other in a rather masochistic final challenge, but that 4th act slog kills a lot of the game's momentum. The real tedious part is that from chapter 5 up to the end of 8, there's no new areas, which both severely reduces a traditional RPG appeal of exploration and seems like a fairly cheap re-use of assets by the developers. </div>
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As I said, while I was playing Bravely Default, I kept thinking about the games it reminded me of. The first time my party went back earlier, I thought, ah, it's pulling a page from Nier. I've talked about this aspect of Nier before, so I won't go into too much detail. Essentially, once you complete Nier, you can play it again a few more times, and each time, it reveals more of the story--the cutscenes change, but every other aspect except the ending remains largely the same. The result is to reveal that your team's actions are morally questionable, and, ultimately, that the player's actions are questionable as well, pursuing monstrous goals in the name of game completion. Bravely Default has the repetition of play, but the reversal of morality never quite happens. Because it's a new world each time, we never get to see the opponents we knew developed deeper so much as variations of them that seem to function independently of our actions. In the last chapter, the optional boss battles--all against members of Eternia--are all nonfatal, and they seem to be cheering us on, but it's hard to come up a reason that fits with the vicious monsters we fought in chapters before that. Likewise, when it was revealed we were journeying alternate realities, I thought it was a bit like Radiant Historia, where the plot has you travelling back and forth in time around alternate realities as well. The difference is that in RH, the traveling is all in the name of changing history; here, the characters have very little agency other than following what they're told.<br />
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So much for plot, then. Let's talk about some of the other stuff. </div>
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One thing I will give Bravely Default credit for is that it uses 3DS interconnectivity for more than just the minimal. You could play the game without these features, but it can also help a lot. The main example is the project to rebuild Norende. Essentially, you start with one villager, and every time your 3DS finds another (or someone with the demo, or the game data or something; I never quite figured out the specifics) your villager population goes up by 1. You can then assign villagers to tasks to open up new areas of the village or upgrade an existing village. For example, if I assign 1 person the item shop, it might go up a level in 30 minutes; if I assign 2, it'll be 15 minutes, 3 10 minutes, or something like that. And the village is always upgrading, as long as Bravely Default is in the cartrdige slot, even if the 3DS itself is in sleep mode. Upgrades are either more items available for purchase from the travelling merchant, or more options available for special moves (more on that part later). It's a nice feature, though worked into the plot a little nonsensically: Tiz tells us how happy he is periodically that the rebuilding is happening, but really, the village is just a way of getting stuff for the player. And I'm not sure how Norende is shipping items across universes. Periodically, the shops give you items, quality based on the upgrades you've done. The other feature is that players, when they add villagers, can also send nemeses, enemies for the player at hand to defeat in bonus battle type things. Again, nice, although by the time I got to Bravely Default, the only nemeses I got were level 99, so a little out of my league. The way I played the game, the village was fully upgraded shortly after chapter 4, so it kind of faded for significance in my mind. (I don't know if that is a typical rate of village completion; I had very few villagers for most of it, but the 3DS also spent a lot of time on sleep mode.)</div>
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There's two major elements left to discuss: the Job System and the combat. Let's do Job System first. Remember those twenty-four human bosses I mentioned earlier? Well, while you have to fight some of them, many of them are optional battles. And not only that, but after chapter four, they're optional battles again--in chapters five through eight, you'll have the opportunity to fight each one at least once, with a stat bump each time. The end result reminds me of another JRPG, but an old school one--Shining Force II, way back on the Sega Genesis in 1993 (and yet ANOTHER candidate for the "Things This Game Reminds Me Of" sweepstakes). Shining Force II had dozens of party members, but for the most part, hero character development was set at a nil; the protagonist Bowie (I live in hope that the default name is a David Bowie reference) talked so rarely that I was startled every time he did--oh yes, my protagonist ISN'T a inveterate mute. The result is that the stars of the game's plot aren't the heroes but the villains, especially in the second half, where their in-fighting and bickering drives the plot more frequently than anything the heroes happen to be doing. While Bravely Default isn't THAT bad, it's striking that after the first four chapters, the most significant relationships the party has is with the villains they're constantly revisiting. Unfortunately, since it's a different batch every chapter, there's not much you can do in the way of development, but Bravely Default makes the wise choice of the player explicitly NOT killing the human bosses after chapter six--they always slink away after the fight--as well as toning down their over the top evil in favor of absurdity: three female characters get together for a Girl Power club, and fight you, because why not? And the singer character is rescued by the thief, in a very unlikely romance. And so forth. This builds to the final chapter, where it's pretty clear they're fighting not out of misunderstanding, but to see if Edea et al. are up for the challenges ahead. It's a shift that's pretty limited, in that the antagonists can't grow because the chapter resets, but it's a nice acknowledgment that even the game knows your attention is in the baddies.</div>
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I digressed there. The reason why you want to fight every one of these individuals at least once--even the aforementioned vampire Del Rosso, who is particularly annoying, as you need to beat four difficult dragons first, and blaze through a dungeon--is that each drops one asterisk. There's some plot stuff to justify their existence, but the gist of it is that each one represents a job that you can train yourself in, after beating the character holding the asterisk. Combats yield Job Points in addition to Experience Points, and go towards leveling up your job level; each job has fourteen levels, and when you hit a new level, you get a new active ability (that's abilities you can execute in combat) or a passive one. Passive abilities are equipped, and you can equip one secondary job as well, to have access to the active abilities it provides in combat, though not to the stat bonuses each job has. Passive abilities are assigned a value of one through four, and you can equip up to five, but only as much as the total value equals five. It's kind of a shame this value maxes out at five, as you hit that at the end of chapter four, but given the scope of abilities, in terms of game balance, it's probably best to stop there. </div>
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Abilities range from the rather useless (carry two shields, instead of a weapon) to extremely powerful (cancel all enemy elemental attacks for four turns). The connectivity factors in here as well, as you can add friends with the game to a friend's list (or, if you have no friends with the game, like me, you use the game's default friend bots) and sync four friends up to one character each--you then have access to all the job abilities that friend has, for that character. In practice, it's nice but unnecessary, as the course of playing through the game left me with at least enough Job Points for every character to have leveled up to max in at least ten jobs, which is enough for most purposes (especially since I wound up playing with two Ninjas and two White Mages; diversification was nice, but unnecessary). The job system isn't a Bravely Default original, but that's kind of the point--Square Enix is clearly harkening back to the job systems of earlier Final Fantasy games, which are much beloved among a certain type of fan whose interest is towards min-maxing characters. </div>
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And that leads to the combat itself. This is where my final revelation of the game took place. It becomes especially clear in the chapter seven and eight optional bosses, where certain combinations of the human antagonists become nearly impossible to beat without planning and carefully setting up the right support and secondary abilities. Bravely Default isn't the meaningful repetition of Nier, the time traveling hijinx of Radiant Historia, the grind of Ni No Kuni, or the enemy-based focus of Shining Force II; rather, its real comparison is <a href="http://exgress.blogspot.ca/2011/04/grapes-and-raisins-resonance-of-fate.html">Resonance of Fate.</a> Not in the immature maturity of its sexual innuendo (Thank God), but in the fact that the game isn't really about the story. Rather, it's about the mastery of an incredibly complex, even obtuse fighting system. While Bravely Default isn't as obtuse or as complex, what becomes clear in those final chapters is that it's pushing you towards not just a single winning combination, but to really consider the cause and effect of choice. So let's dive in to what it has to offer.</div>
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First, there's the combat rate. There's not a lot to say here other than it's entirely at the player's discretion. Over the years, the rate of random combat encounters in JRPGs has met with a number of different approaches. Bravely Default puts it in the hands of the players, as they can set the rate at 100% increase, 50%, 0%, -50%, or -100%, at which point, there will be no random encounters. (And the game warns you that there is, consequently, no experience or job points.) It's a nice measure of control, and suggests the player-based approach to combat that characterizes the game.</div>
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The skeleton of the system is typical JRPG turn-based combat. The enemy stands on the left, the player characters stand on the right, you select options from a list, and they all execute a turn's worth of commands. If someone was somehow transported directly from playing the original Final Fantasy in 1987 on an NES directly to this screen, well, it would still be confusing, because time travel, but they'd already have the mental vocabulary they need to make sense of the basic situation. The first complication is the eponymous Brave and Default features (and you'd think that would have been a big clue right there, that the game is combat-oriented--it's named after its combat features). Selecting Default functions kind of like the Defense option in most turn-based RPGs; you don't attack, but attacks directed against you do less damage. The difference here is that you also accumulate a Brave Point. Brave Points can be spent on certain active abilities, but their main purpose is fueling the Brave command. If the player selects the Brave command for a character, then a secondary battle menu appears over top of the first one. And a third, and up to a fourth, if she selects Brave again. All of these commands are executed at once during that combat turn. The catch is that each Brave you use consumes one Brave Point, and while you can bank up to three (more if you have the right Passive ability attached), you can also go into negative. Every single attack consumes one Brave Point, and every end of combat turn adds one. But if you started with zero and Braved twice, that means you're at negative one at the start of the next round, which means you can't do anything that round, or anything until the next round, when your Brave Point sum is up to zero again. You can go up to a total of negative three below, and there are various active and passive abilities that burn up enemy Brave Points or contribute to the party's BP.</div>
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In a short fight, Brave means you can end things faster by virtue of attacking four times in the first round (although watch out, if you don't pull it off, and the enemy gets three free rounds against you while your BP total builds back up to zero). In a longer fight, it's harder to tell if it's to your advantage, given that you'll be doing the four turns anyway; spreading them out becomes less of a big deal. The system reminds me of the time-based stuff available in Radiant Historia--there, you can manipulate the action order directly, so that within ten or so moves, you control exactly where your characters' attacks happen--with the proviso that if you chain too many of yours together, the enemy will get a big chain too. Since Brave and Default happen more on the individual character level, they're not as involved. But their use begins to matter more if you, say, you need to heal twice in a round, or want to use a BP-fueled ability. (And again, I'll give the game credit here, as one of the tutorials and in-game chats discuss how a good BP-induced combo is Braving to be able to simultaneously raise a character with a phoenix down item and healing them immediately after; Bravely Default is good at pushing the player towards micro-tactics.) But where it really starts to matter is in the Special Moves.</div>
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The Special Moves are... complicated. Basically, every weapon type has its own condition, and once that condition is met, you have access to special moves. If you have a dagger equipped, and you use an item five times (not in a row, not in a single combat, not the same item) then after that fifth item is used, on the next round, you get to access a special move. And there are three levels for each move set; using an item five times will get access to the first level special move, but if I do it fifteen times, I have access to all three levels, including the third and generally most powerful. And there are nine types of weapons in all, each with their own condition: katanas' specials are based on how many times you've defaulted, fists' depends on how many times you've made a critical hit, staffs on how many times you've healed something. The special moves are also highly customizable. Remember when I said special move options can be acquired at Norende? Well, those options, once you've got them, can be set in between fights. Some options are clearly a "insert most powerful option you have here" type--you're not going to select the 10% power boost if you have the 50% one. Others are trickier, as you can set the special to have a certain elemental attribute, a certain status effect, and a certain enemy type weakness. For example, if you know you're going to be fighting a water demon, you'd set the special to demon-slaying and lightning (the damage type water beings are weak to in the game) and let 'er rip. The caveat to this is that the first time you go into a boss fight, you generally don't know what type you're dealing with, and you can't change specials in the midst of a fight, so there's also some resetting going on here. </div>
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The other thing about special moves is that they create a timed period after you use them, until a short song plays out. While this song is playing, a stat boost is in effect. The Level 1 Bow special, for example, Maximum Draw, boosts the team's Crit Rate. The level 3 Bow special, Angelic Pillar, boosts team magic defense. And if you execute another special move before the music signalling the first one fades away, the bonuses stack. And through that, a turn-based game becomes a carefully managed time-based game, where you're racing to fulfill the requirements for some character to use a special again before the current special's bonuses fade away. I wouldn't say it's impossible to win the game without special moves, but when you've got a massive attack bonus going (although the bonuses generally max out at certain level), a lot of bosses go down a lot faster. </div>
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And that's where Brave and Default become crucial options again. A lot of the weapons' special move requirements mean that they're not practical for creating long special chains against a boss. Axes are nice, but their requirement is that their special moves are accessible based on how many kills you've made--that means in a fight against a single boss, you can use that special once, max. A katana, on the other hand, has specials depending how many times you default, and a sword based on how many times you brave. Used in a manner timed well, in combination with a healer, you can keep a special chain going much longer--although this in term limits which jobs you're likely to take into combat, as you're more likely to take the jobs that give proficiency in swords, katanas, and staffs. It does create a significant tension, though: you're racing to address the opponents' moves while trying to create a string of conditions that will net you the next special before the current one cuts out. Do you have your fighter use an item to give your healer more magic points? Or is it more important that they Default for the turn to access a special move and keep the chain going?</div>
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And that's not even the end of the combat depth, though that's the most significant part. There's also the ability to send and receive moves. You can choose to store a particular move, and then, when you StreetPass other players, they'll receive it, and have the option to use it in battle. Notably, this includes special abilities, which can perpetuate the chain in a pinch. The stored abilities are each only useable once, but it can be very useful, especially if you're a low level player unleashing a level 99er's devastating attack. Plus, don't forget the customizability related to jobs; in addition to the main job's abilities, the player selects a secondary job active abilities, and the passive abilities. Given there's about at least six passive abilities associated with each job, that's 144 options to spread among four characters, allowing for a LOT of combinations. Finally, there's the Special Points (because in addition to job points, experience points, brave points, health points and magic points, another point system is what this game really needs). Special Points allow you to press Start at any point in combat, freeze whatever's going on, and do one move of one character that takes precedence over all else. You can have three in all, and they accumulate while the game's in sleep mode; alternatively, this is also where the game sneaks in its in game purchases, as you can pay for them to be renewed as well. It's a rare option, given the difficulty of getting Special Points, but nice to have in a tight spot.<br />
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As an example of how this all plays out in actual game, here's the strategy I used on near end boss Ouroboros. First, I prepped my team with the appropriate special moves and jobs that supported them. Having fought and reset, I knew Ouroboros was dragon type with a weakness to Water/Ice, so I set my special abilities appropriately. I had two characters set as ninjas, and two as healers. Ninja class' class ability (each job, while it's equipped, has one passive ability always in effect; it saves up on the passive ability slots to plan ahead here) is to dual wield two weapons at once without penalty, so I equipped them both with one katana and one sword, so that the fighters' role would be to default to max, then brave and attack four times, in a cycle that repeated every few rounds, to maximize the speed at which they'd get access to the sword and katana special abilities. They had sword magic as their secondary active job, so they could cast weapon magic that would give their attacks water attributes, thus doing extra damage; one was doing extra extra damage, by wielding a sword that was strong in damaging dragons. Their passive abilities were a random assortment, except that both had boost sword magic, which makes sword magic more effective, but at the cost of extra Magic Points. </div>
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Both my healers were equipped with staffs, but also with the associated staff Special ability that restored Brave Points and Magic Points as well as health points, which was essential, as I rarely had to waste anyone's turn using an magic point restore potion, when I could have been attacking, healing, or defaulting. One healer was set up with time magic as a secondary ability, so I could cast re-raise, which means that if someone is killed, they automatically come back to life, once. The other was set up with Spiritmaster powers, which include protection from status ailments. The fighters focused on defaulting and braving when default reaches maximum, and using specials when necessary; the healers healed every round, except when their secondary tasks were needed, and used specials whenever they could, as the longer requirements for their powers (heal 10 times, when it's generally only MP-effective to heal once per round) meant that they needed to use a special and start saving for the next one ASAP. In the face of that routine, the specific enemy was almost redundant. </div>
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I think my mood towards the game has mellowed in the shift from discussing plot to discussing combat; that is a good indicator of where its strengths lie, I think. If there's any "message" behind the game (besides don't trust fairies blindly), it's that the unity of friendship triumphs over an overwhelming foe, a concept only slightly less sophisticated than a credo espoused by a Care Bear. But to the game's credit, it pays more than lip service to this notion, as between the move sharing, the job sharing, and the town aid, it really does earn its ending where the worlds of the other player friends you've added pitch in to help (at least, it does if you actually lived in a place where the Bravely Default players were common, and you used these abilities regularly). The fighting system is a much readier feature to hang one's hat on.<br />
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I wish I could find something worth talking about the game on a scholarly, research level. I have elsewhere (dissertation in fact) discussed its reliance on an in-game journal for some plot details and the usual compendium of monsters, items, and the like. And it does have some nice design features--I particularly like its version of the tutorial mode, which is the player performing a task it requests to show she can do it, then getting a small reward on completion--it's a very small compensation, but at least it provides an actual motivation for seeing it through. I guess if there is something worth talking about here it's how much Bravely Default *is*, rather than a game attempting a unique message, a game that is very, very aware of the history of genre it draws upon. In some ways, it's an ossification and distillation of what's been done before. It's the perpetuation of a particular brand of game culture, in that sense, and it seems to have been embraced as such among its fanbase.<br />
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If you're looking for quality of story, I think BD will leave you wanting more. But if you're in it for the desire to customize your own maxxed out team of turn combat glory, it'll hit just the right spot--if you can put up with slogging through the first half and unlock all the abilities, at least.</div>
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Later Days.</div>
Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-64502793912728838102015-02-28T16:01:00.001-05:002015-02-28T16:01:55.223-05:00Nierly Done with this Pun foreverI had to play a few hours of <a href="http://exgress.blogspot.ca/2014/07/nier-criticism-guide.html">Nier</a> today to get the point where I could talk about its book-like interface system for the dissertation. And I had to play to that point because Nier's endgame (spoiler, I guess?) doesn't really leave things in a state where doing that is possible.<br />
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What I found is that Nier is a wonderfully complex game (albeit somewhat graphically low for a mid to late Xbox 360 game), one whose eventual story is set up right from the start, and design choices that contribute to the overall aesthetic in a meaningful way all build on each other. It's an unusually rich, creative game for a JRPG low budget (for AAA, anyway) game.<br />
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I never want to play it again.<br />
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I felt the same way going back to Ni No Kuni (which is much more diminishing returns than Nier) for its dissertation section; there's a point in lengthy games where enthusiasm is displaced by entropy, and trying to research the game at the same time only makes it worse. Nier's a wonderful game, and I could (and have) written pages and pages extolling its virtues, but I really, really don't want to subject myself to having to go through it again. Ah well; I'm an hour or two in and at the shrine where Weiss becomes a party member, so the end's in sight.<br />
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Later Days.Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-12090682683907508372015-02-17T15:14:00.003-05:002015-02-17T15:15:04.068-05:00Dissing the Dissertation<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: -0.03cm; orphans: 0; text-indent: -0.03cm; widows: 0;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Two excerpts from the dissertation:<br /><br />Another
Sierra game, the 1991 remake of the original </span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Leisure
Suit Larry</i></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">
came with brochures for in-game locations, and the questions were
thus reflective of the game’s so-called, and more than slightly
misogynist, humor: “What do the cowgirls have at the Palamino
Ranch?”; the correct answer was “c: Jugs o’ moonshine.”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: -0.03cm; orphans: 0; text-indent: -0.03cm; widows: 0;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: -0.03cm; orphans: 0; text-indent: -0.03cm; widows: 0;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">And </span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: -0.03cm; orphans: 0; text-indent: -0.03cm; widows: 0;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; text-indent: -0.03cm;">the
1988 game </span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; text-indent: -0.03cm;"><i>Wasteland
</i></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; text-indent: -0.03cm;">not
only had a booklet of paragraphs, it included fake entries to
dissuade players who would “cheat” by reading ahead. The very
first entry, in fact, is one of these</span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif; text-indent: -0.03cm;">:</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-left: 0.96cm; orphans: 0; page-break-before: auto; widows: 0;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"> 1 You
creep up to the window, and in the soft muted tights [sic], you see a
tall woman with long, blond hair. She sits before a mirror and
brushes her hair, then stands and walks over to the sunken tub to her
left. She kneels and her blue, silken robe drops to the floor. She
turns the water and steam slowly fills the air. You watch in
fascination as she reaches down into the tub, whirls, and points an
Uzi in your direction. ‘Stop reading paragraphs you’re not
supposed to read, creeps.’ She sighs deeply. ‘Next time I’m
going to demand they put me in a Bard’s Tale game, this Wasteland
duty is dangerous.’ (1)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">The problem with writing a dissertation on the subject of the history of videogames is that the history of videogames is full of stuff like this. Yeah, it's sexist, and, as dissertation me claims, arguably outright misogynist, but mostly... it's just *embarrassing.*</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;">Honestly, off the top of my head, the only game stuff I can think of that's funny that was clearly supposed to be funny is some of the stuff from Saint's Row the Third and some of the more absurdist endings for Japanese fighting games.<br /><br />Later Days.</span></div>
Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-77157829476970006652015-02-14T22:24:00.002-05:002015-02-14T22:24:45.157-05:00Feminism and RhetoricI've been teaching an online first year rhetoric course this term. And what that means for our university in particular is that all the readings have been chosen beforehand, all the lectures recorded before I was ever assigned the course, and all the assignments planned ahead of time (but I still get to write the final, which.... thanks, I guess?). And as you'd imagine, not all of the texts have been ones that I would have chosen. They're all wonderful texts for a rhetoric class, just not the particular texts I would picked; it's a matter of personal preference, more than any other consideration.<br />
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In particular, I was uncertain of this week's reading, a section from Hélène Cixous' Laugh of the Medusa. It's a good read, but not what I personally would have picked out as the singular example of rhetoric and feminism. (That the course has only a single text on rhetoric and feminism is a different issue.) It is, I thought, too complicated, too complex in its use of language, too steeped in psychoanalytical discussions about the phallus. I braced myself for a reading response set that suggested the class had listened to the lectures and skipped the reading (a fairly common occurrence, given some of the responses although I also have a large number of really good responses on any given week, and I do my best to encourage such responses).<br />
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As you can probably guess from my own rhetoric, I was wrong. The reading has led to more thoughtful, engaged responses than anything we've done so far. Yes, there have been some half-hearted engagements, as always, but most of the class has responded with above average engagement, especially some of the women, who have mentioned that the essay speaks to them on a personal level. I'm drawing three conclusions from this. First, it has been a humbling reminder that my students are better and smarter than I've been giving them credit for. Second, it attests to the power of Cixous' writing, that it still resonates. And third, it suggests that, sadly, a lot of her critique still applies, that women today still feel pressured to write in a voice not their own.<br />
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It's been an eye-opening course, in more ways than I was expecting going in.<br /><br />Later Days.Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-10417881022782368812015-02-09T23:39:00.000-05:002015-02-10T01:01:31.367-05:00Book Triad: Women in FantasyI'm not planning on turning the blog into nothing but book reviews, or even reviews, but as I said before, I've got a backlog of book review content. In fact, one of the advantages of having a backlog is that I can do a bit of picking and choosing in terms of grouping similar books together so that I actually have something significant to say that applies to all three.In this particular case, that means pairing two recent reads with an older one, by way of contrast. After the break, we have reviews of Terry Pratchett's The Wee Free Men, Lois McMaster Bujold's The Sharing Knife, and Patricia C. Wrede's Thirteenth Child.<br />
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I'll warn you in advance--these are all books that got me thinking a fair bit, so the reviews are lengthier than usual AND I have a lot to say afterwards. All worth saying, of course.<br />
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<tr><td colspan="1" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><span class="readable reviewText" style="font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 1.4;"><b>The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett. </b>After nine year old Tiffany Aching's grandmother died, people carried on as best they could. But then the Baron's son went missing, and there was that business with the old woman everyone thought was a witch. And now, the fairies are back, and they've kidnapped Tiffany's little brother, and she knows no one would ever believe her. Thus, she has to go get him back herself. Good thing she has the Mac Feegles--the toughest inches-high fighters to ever headbutt the world in the face--on her side.<br /><br />This is the first book in the Tiffany Aching series, a series set in Pratchett's Discworld, but aimed for a younger audience. The other three books in the series follow a very clear pattern: Tiffany, in a bit of arrogance, overrreaches herself and unleashes an ancient creature that wants to reshape the world in its own image. She confronts it, and learns the secret to beating it is not to see it as the enemy, but understanding it as something alienated but not alien. Add some inch-high hijinx, and you've got a nice metaphor for the process of growing up (which, admittedly, puts it much in the same vein as every YA fantasy ever--the better ones, at least). This book is different--the Queen is an invading force, not one that Tiffany inadvertently calls to her. Still, because of what the Queen represents--childhood never-ending, forcing the world to fit your wishes, isolating yourself from the world--it fits the larger "growing up" metaphor.<br /><br />Moreover, in a way, this story isn't really about the Queen but about Tiffany defining who she is in the wake of the death of a person very important to her. And on that level, it's near flawless--I read a lot of fantasy, and I'd be hardpressed to name another that hits its emotional beats so well--every Granny Aching scene is heart-wrenchingly well-done. The MacFeegles are great comedy relief, with just enough personality between the various members to distinguish them. I haven't read this story in years, and this time, looking back, I'm reminded of what a girl-friendly story this is. It's a fantasy story with great female characters (protagonists and villain) that doesn't have to go the "strong female character" route.<br /><br />My go-to description for the book is "Harry Potter with Hermoine as the main character," and Tiffany's brainy side is definitely in the Hermoine cast. But there's also a strong resemblance to the Hobbit and the Bilbo Baggins type--an ordinary person thrust into extraordinary circumstances who copes not by becoming some epic, all-powerful hero, but by thinking things through and trying to do the right thing--and much more than Bilbo, this comes not out of the idea of some inherent Tookness but because of Tiffany's upbringing and the people in her life. The book's not perfect--while the dialogue in the extended encounter with the Queen is spot-on, the actual descriptions of the dreams seems kind of tenuous, and not in a good "dreams are indescribable" sort of way, but in a confusing "what's going on here, again?" sort of way. And Tiffany herself could use a lesson in subtlety every now and then. But for the most part, it's a great start to a great series. This is Pratchett very high on his game.<br /><br /><b><span style="font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;"> </span><span style="font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;"></span></b><span id="freeTextreview1188181841" style="font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;"><b>The Sharing Knife: Beguilement by Lois McMaster Bujold </b> starts with Fawn Bluefield running away from home after learning both that she is pregnant, and that the child's father isn't the man she hoped she was. Unfortunately for her, she runs straight into a malice, a creature bent on stealing people's life forces. Lakewalker Dag--an older man, with one hand lost to his fight--is nearby, and the two battle together to fend off the threat. Of course, an ancient evil unfathomable by man pales in comparison to what awaits Fawn when she brings a Lakewalker home... I have a policy where I tend to skip over any fantasy book that contains the word "love" in its plot description. Beguilement is both an example of why that policy is in place, and why choosing it limits my reading options in a negative way. It's not that I've got a blanket ban on all fiction depicting relationships--I've got multiple seasons of Gossip Girl, Gilmore Girls, and Everwood under my belt. It's more that it often seems like a substitute for plot, and that the end is never in doubt, and when both those hold, my attention wanes. And they both hold here; if you took out the first half of the book, Beguilement is basically a rural romance story with a veneer of fantasy thrown in, a story of an older, foreign man trying to win over a rural town to claim his bride. And while some of the more obstreperous town folk put themselves in his way, the outcome is hardly in doubt--Aragorn isn't about to lose a thinking contest to the local bar thug. And I had absolutely no patience for the "will they or won't they" portion of Fawn and Dag's relationship--it was a pretty foregone conclusion rather immediately.<br /><br />However, the second half of the book is also the book's strength. So much of mainstream fantasy is focused on epic scale--the warring Houses (with the capital H), the rise and fall of nature, the final battle of Good versus Evil. Rarely do we see anything on the day to day life of people in these worlds. Bujold offers that here, and that change is refreshing. It's also, I'll note, a difference that's often gendered; if I think of the best known authors who have followed similar tactics, the names that come to mind are Robin Hobb and Ann McCaffrey, and it's probably not a coincidence that it takes female writers to write about the "small" matters of day to day life and marriage in a fantasy world. That, I think, is what I'm missing when I enforce my "no love in book jackets" policy, and it is policy that could arguably be said to be a gendered one.<br /><br />Ultimately, it's still about 150 pages of wedding hijinx that don't escalate beyond an errant hornet's nest, fifty pages of YMMV vanilla sex, and 150 pages of demon fighting. The two main characters are likeable if not amazingly so, and it has a slower pace rare for fantasy without getting bogged down. So if that's your thing, this is the book for you.<br /><br /><b>Thirteenth Child by Patricia C. Wrede. </b></span></span><span style="font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">Eff Rothmer is the elder twin sibling of Lan Rothmer. Lan's the second seventh son of a seventh son, which makes him a focal of considerable magical power. Eff, on the other hand, is a seventh daughter--and a thirteenth child, which, as some unpleasant extended family members continually remind her, means she's doomed to go bad and bring ruin and bad luck to her family. Things improve for Eff when her parents move to a town on the frontier where no one knows her status, but all the same, she's careful to stay withdrawn and away from magic, so none of that thirteenth-ness ever comes out. No one outside her family--not even her close friend William--knows her secret. You'll notice I mentioned the frontier a sentence ago, and that's an important part of what makes this book unique. Most fantasy is set as a pseudo-medieval story; Thirteenth Child is a pseudo-American frontier story, where the United States isn't yet entirely settled, as the land to the West is populated by wild, magical creatures such as sphinxes, steam dragons, and stranger things that haven't been discovered yet. When a strange uprising of bugs in the frontier require her father--a University magician--to investigate, Eff, Lan, and William are part of that team. And there, in a Rationalist camp that refuses all magic use altogether, Eff will finally have to face what she's feared her whole life.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">This book is doing a *lot* of interesting things on a lot of different fronts, and I'm a big fan of it on that side of things alone. The frontier is the traditional stomping grounds of sci-fi, but Wrede proves there's a lot that fantasy can do with it as well. For starters, magic essentially constitutes a system of science in this alt-America, or rather, several systems of science--there's magic as characterized by the Avrupan school (the predominant one), the Hijero-Cathayan, and the Aphrikan. Now, on the one hand, this allows a radically different history to unfold, as the technological advantage that Avrupe (Europe) held in the age of imperialism doesn't happen, allowing other cultures to meet it (presumably) on more even footing. But at the same time, there's a level of cultural appropriation going on in pursuing, say, Aphrikan magic (or is there? Does cultural appropriation exist between cultures on equal footing?) not to mention erasure--there's a wild magic outside the Columbia settlements, but notably not a Native Columbian people (although I'd be very surprised if they didn't turn up in full force in future volumes (you can tell how intrigued I am with the series by the superfluity of parentheses.)) </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">And then there's the gender side of things. I recently read Bujold's Beguilement, and it left me a little cold. And I wondered if there was something sexist in my disinterest, that I was predisposed to dislike fantasy that dealt with more ordinary day-to-day life that's often more marked as feminine. With Thirteenth Child, I can say that's not the case. It is about day-to-day life--specifically, Eff's day-to day-life--and I was pretty much riveted throughout. And Eff's reticence to draw attention to herself and explore her own potential is a great metaphor for the performance of femininity we often still demand today. In fact, it's almost too great; it borders on being the Plain Jane trope, wherein a female protagonist believes they're the most boring, ordinary person on the planet, when the evidence for the opposite is screaming loudly on every page--and it's invariably a straw trope brought out to be torn down in the story's conclusion. But that's a pet bugbear of mine. Anyway, it's a deft interplay of American frontier life, traditional fantasy, science as magic as cultural value, and on top of that, there's the Rationalists--in a world of magic as science, those who refuse to use magic and rely entirely on technology become, basically, their world's Mennonites, and that's yet another fascinating reversal, one that's explored very neatly by a character near to Eff. All in all, it's a book that shows why some of the most innovative fantasy is fantasy not aimed at an adult audience.<br /><br /><b>After-ramble</b><br /><br />....Still here? I told you it was going to be a lot. You know, for someone who constantly talks about how he's not trained or experienced enough to write about gender issues, I sure have written a lot about gender issues. And I sure do get defensive of that perceived lack, as evidenced by my invoking of Girls Gossip and Gilmore in the Beguilement review. It's not quite as bad as "I've got one black friend!" or "Not All Men!" but it ain't the most flattering shade of brown.<br /><br />That said, thanks to Thirteenth Child, I think I'm in a better position to say what I disliked about Beguilement.(All right, I'm cheating--I got it reasonably well the first time, but I'm moving that paragraph down here and expanding, to create the illusion of a more classical thesis - antithesis - synthesis sort of thing.) As I said, the core dilemma rang inherently false, or at least hollow. I never doubted that the wedding would go through, just as I never doubted Fawn and Dag would be a couple, more or less from the moment one reflected on the ample shape of the other. It was a foregone conclusion, and a lot of romantic comedies are similarly structured so that the end is always in sight.</span><span style="font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">On the other hand, it's not like fantasy is this genre of constant surprise; the victory of the hero in a fantasy story is usually a foregone conclusion too, and in fact, I tend <a href="http://exgress.blogspot.ca/2011/04/book-trilogy-review-first-law-by-joe.html">to get a little disgruntled</a> when it goes any other way. I don't mind things turning out well for everyone--but I do prefer an actual turn. The difference here, I think, is that the obstacles were all external things fairly easy to overcome. In fantasy, it's not unusual for the external conflict to be a literal version of the character's internal conflict--Willow's exploration of magic in Buffy, for example, dovetails with her exploration of her sexuality (magic also functions for Willow as a source of addiction, instrument of vengeance, and symbol of redemption--might want to nail that down, Whedon). For Beguilement, for me at least, both internal and external fall flat. The external, for most of the book, is superficial, and the only internal conflict between Dag and Fawn was Dag's uncertainty in loving again, and since we don't get the reason for that it's an internal struggle we see from the outside, in the book's second half. (Given what happens to Fawn, she really *should* have had more conflict; the book moves past what would really should be a physically and mentally debilitating event for her to skip to the romance in fairly short order.) </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;"> Contrast this with Thirteenth Child, where the external conflict is kept relatively low key throughout--even the bugs come in rather late, and as a minor threat at best, since they don't threaten Eff's family or home directly. But her internal struggle against her own repressive measures is clear and intense, even if the outcome isn't particularly in doubt (more on that in a second). And contrast it with Tiffany, who faces a much more traditional "save the day" quest plot externally, but internally, is doing something much more complex about grief and growing up. Even if the struggle in the protagonist's way is an illusion, I want it to be a *good* illusion. To get at the problem from another angle, I'm not a fan of David Eddings' later work specifically because it's epic fantasy where the heroes are massively overpowered against the bad guys. There's not only no illusion that they might lose, they actually come off as bullies at times for being so absolutely relentless against a much weaker force.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">Ok, that's Beguilement. Let's talk about the one element of Thirteen Child I wasn't so crazy about: what I'm calling the Plain Jane. It's a trope fairly prevalent in fiction in general--particularly romance stories--but it's become more prominent in fantasy and science fiction recently, for reasons that should soon be fairly obvious. The romantic version is a woman who's utterly convinced of her own average, mundane nature, a conviction that frequently goes so far as to think of herself as ugly. In fantasy/sci-fi, it often goes one step further, where she's not just convinced of her average appearance, but that she has no other gifts as well. And inevitably, through the course of the story, she's proven wrong, and comes into her own power. Bella of Twilight is the poster girl for this (although it'd be a very plain poster of course, and she'd probably be wearing a thick sweater or something); there's also more than a little of it in Katniss, and, as I noted, in Eff.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">On the most superficial level, I don't like this trope simply because it's such an artificial construction. In order to make the eventual reversal make sense, the author has to start laying in the groundwork pretty early on, which makes the protests of ugliness/plainness/ordinariness a case of the protagonist that doth protest too much. (Really, Eff? You can't think of a single reason why William would spend so much time around you? Not one?) Film versions exacerbate just how labored a construction it is, when the "plain" girl is inevitably cast as a clearly beautiful female actor. Plain Jane is a cliche, and a tired one.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">...And by this point, incidentally, my male entitlement is now so unchecked that if I was at a restaurant, the waiter would be pointedly making comments about how I'd feel more comfortable if I shed some layers (okay, that metaphor worked better in my head). Yeah, it's a trope, and yeah, maybe it is overused. But it exists for a reason and serves a significant purpose, and to ignore either is to ignore the reality of women in Western society. Look; it's a fairly traditional trope in fantasy and fiction in general for the protagonist of any gender to start off as an ordinary person thrust into un-ordinary events, and changed into extraordinary by them. And it's true that boy protagonists tend to shed the "oh, I'm ordinary and couldn't possibly be anyone special" at a much faster rate than girl protagonists. There's a reason for that, though--a lot of boys grow up being told they can do anything, that it was within them to fulfill their greatest potential. For a very, very long time, girls got the other message, that their potential was something useless or dangerous, that needed to be suppressed. Feminine modesty was--and in many ways, still is--held up as the ideal. You'll never get a husband if you try to be smarter than the boys. Don't be loud, it's not ladylike. (And somewhere behind that sentiment, a series of intensifiers, ugly ones. Be quiet. Stop talking. Don't be a bitch.) Don't make waves. Don't fight back. Behave. Be a good girl. Be Plain Jane, in short. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">And Eff is an exaggeration of that, but not much of one. She internalizes everything that her relatives say is evil and dangerous about her magic, and does her best to hide it, while her brother is encouraged to revel in it (and he's also a good example of how the "Be Mighty, son" message can also fuck you up). The reversal is predictable, but powerful (maybe more powerful?) for that predictability. As a certain somewhat-popular song would tell us, take that repression, and let it go. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">Where it gets complicated, though, is where any well-known reversal gets complicated--if you set up the same premise every time, that premise is always getting exposure, even if it is just there to disappear in a later act.The worse version of the plain jane is the implication that it's a cause and effect relation: be the quiet, ordinary girl now, and you get to be the extraordinary girl later. That in order to become the mockingjay, you have to first prove yourself worthy by being the plain jane. An even worse version that this transformation can only come about through the hands of another person, that you need someone else to unlock your own potential. And the worst version is that this someone has to be a man. Think Cinderella: some day, my prince will come. Suffer virtuously--and quietly--now, and some day soon, real soon, honest, your prince will come and love you and that love will be your proof of how awesome you are. (For all that it rubbed me the wrong way, props to Into the Woods for depicting a situation a little more complex than that.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">Katniss has that, a bit, in Peeta and Gale, though it's mostly the virtuous suffering. As does Eff, though Wrede mitigates it a lot by emphasizing how much of it is Eff's traumatizing internalization. My understanding of the Twilight novels is that Belle eventually grows beyond the model to become something more, but in that first book, she is absolutely the plain girl elevated by the love of an older vampire man whose love gives her the release from that plain life. Fawn in Beguilement has it, in that it's Dag who recognizes her true value. But it's a little more complicated than that--Fawn spent most of her life as the good, virtuous girl, then, the one time she rebelled, she gets pregnant, and flees town in a panic. And in fact, one interpretation is that that's what causes the initial strife of the story, that she's so convinced she's lost the good girl status forever that So in that way at least, Bujold goes against the ordinary virtue model, and honestly, if it's going to be trotted out, I'd rather it was like this, to illustrate that good people can make mistakes.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">But another problem with the Plain Jane model is that it erases the other option, the girl who's proud of her exceptional nature. That's what I like so much about The Wee Free Men's protagonist, Tiffany. She's smart. She's different. And she's proud of being both those things. Her grandmother was a personal example of how women can be exceptional without having to hide it (and the scene where a younger Tiffany proudly presents Granny Aching with the feminized, idealized Shepherdess statuette she won is *devastating* for the way it implicitly pigeonholes her into a more socially acceptable feminine ideal). Like I say in the review, I see a similarity between Tiffany and Hermoine, and I'm very, very pleased to live in a world where the exceptional Hermoine Granger is available as role-model. (Less thrilled that she has to share the spotlight with Harry Potter, who gets to be more exceptional at much less effort, and Ron, who is, let's be honest, below average who's been lifted up. Gender double standard right there. Woman has to work twice as hard for half the credit.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">I've got an odd relation to these texts, because I relate to both models. Personality-wise, I tend towards a quiet passivity that's often marked as feminine (though when a guy does it, it's stoicism). And I can certainly relate to Tiffany's sense that she's different and the oscillations back and forth between being proud of that and being afraid there's something wrong with you. In fact, the two feed off of each other, where I've been told more than once that my quiet awkwardness comes off as arrogant intellectual disdain. But on a pretty significant level, I can't relate entirely, because there's an entire embodied reality here that I get to opt out of by virtue of appearing as a white, middle class dude. (I'm basically my own Plain Jane. Plain Dick, if you will.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">I don't envy the fantasy writer trying to craft a female fantasy protagonist. Does she appear to be a Mary Sue? A Plain Jane? Is she too passive, and relies on others to solve her problems? Is she too aggressive, and thus offputting? Too much of a tomboy? Too girly? Is she a Strong Female Protagonist, and all that entails? There's a thousand pitfalls, and armchair critics like me camped out every step of the way. Honestly, I think it's too much weight to put any one character. The solution--if there can be a solution to a really complex problem born out of the turmoil of constantly shifting social standards--is to present a variety of different women, in body shape and temperament. Frozen was actually a pretty good step in this direction, as Ella and Anna were clearly different in personality and outlook (kind of the same body type, though). The recently ended Legend of Korra slowly and subtly became a showcase of great female characters. Rat Queens, the comic series, is a little more overt in its aims, but also does a good job in this regard. But the series I want to close on is an older one--Tamora Pierce's writing. Now, her Alanna series and its spin-offs are a great example of a variety of different female protagonists, but the series I'm thinking of in particular is the Circle of Magic books. It's got a magic system that creates a powerful metaphor, revolving around nature and crafting (and crafting both traditionally gendered female AND male, to boot); it's got a focus on magic as metaphor for growing into yourself; and it's got three different female characters (and a token male) who manage to mix up the typical stereotypes, as well as other significant ones that are added as time goes on. (Plus, normalized, nonheterosexual relationships, which are almost unheard of in YA fantasy.)<br /><br />Hmmm. Someone should write a paper on approaches to nature, craft, and gender in Tamora Pierce's writing.<br /><br /><a href="http://ecommons.usask.ca/handle/10388/etd-08122008-120718">Oh right.</a><br /><br />What, you thought this focus on women in fantasy wasn't going to end with a plug for a white male writer? Hey, it's Plain Dick talking here!<br /><br />Later Days.<br /><br />edit: I found out later that the book's Native American population do not appear in force later, and in fact, don't even exist, as in Wrede's world, no one ever crossed into the Americas from the West. In particular, she says she did this because she didn't want to write stereotypical Native Americans, and instead, their... alter-descendants? have a significant impact on Asian culture. (Although we don't actually see that, not in this book at least.) .And that this caused a bit of a stir when the book came out. Kind of makes my criticism of gender look like complaining about the safety conditions of the boiler room on the Titanic. Good cause, but in retrospect, not the big issue. I'm a believer in it being okay to like problematic things--in this case, potentially racist things that perpetuate the erasure of Native American (and Native Canadians, and I guess Native South American) cultures, even if your intentions are otherwise. And really, Wrede is just an extreme case of what frontier science fiction in particular and pseudo-medieval fantasy have done for much of their history. But maaaan--it takes a lot of good will not to reduce this whole thing to "let's do a frontier myth where we can skip over the genocide part."</span></td></tr>
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Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-69462158151245599702015-02-01T21:31:00.001-05:002015-02-01T21:31:33.356-05:00Book Triad: Could Be Worse Ever AfterAh, the blog. Or, as it is at the moment, that thing I do when I'm between videogames, just finished a book, and there's no new shows on because it's Super Bowl Sunday. There's been an alarming build up of book triad reviews building up over the course of the last year or so. I haven't done one of these since 2013. My goodness. That means there will also be a lot of me going "wait, wasn't this the book with the guy who did that thing? To that unicorn? Or was it a pegasus?".<br />
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Let's get right into my equine questioning, with reviews of Karen Miller's Empress, Jonathan Stroud's Heroes of the Valley, and Peter David's Fable Blood Ties, after the break.<br /><br />
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<b>Empress by Karen Miller. </b><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">Hekat, born as an unwanted daughter to a man and woman struggling to survive in a near lifeless country, is sold into slavery. But she's certain she's destined for something more, and she's not afraid to do what's necessary to make that happen. She becomes a warrior and, alongside the warlord Raklion and the priest Vortka, she forges a testament of God's power. I admire the construction of Miller's world; from top to bottom, she presents a fully-formed warrior culture complete with religious fanaticism, a long way from the usual fantasy knights and dragons. And the world is reflected in everything, even the sentence construction. Here's an example: "She did not look at Vortka, she did not need to look to feel his concern for her. Foolish Vortka, there was no need to worry." All the characters think in this comma-spliced way, and it goes a long way to enhancing the sense that you're looking at a different world. At the same time, I can't say I found the book particularly appealing. Even aside from the brutality of the warrior culture, Hekat is a fairly unappealing character. She's arrogant, quick to anger, and slow to admit any mistake. And there's not any particular suspense in what's going to happen to her--the book's CALLED Empress. She's probably not going to die as a slave, you know? The book could be read as a sort of female version of Macbeth or Richard III, but the lack of suspense in the ending makes the whole thing sort of a drudge. It gets better as the book progresses, and the last third or so, while still fairly predictable, is at least foraging into new areas. I can't say I'm particularly compelled to follow it, though. I respect Miller's writing ability, and might check out another series by her, but I think this one ends here; it's just not my thing.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;"><b>Heroes of the Valley by Jonathan Stroud. </b></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">First, let's mentally adjust that 4 to a 3.5. Good? Right. I was a big fan of Stroud's Bartimaeus trilogy, particularly for its snarky lead/narrator, and the way it challenged traditional YA fantasy tropes. And Heroes of the Valley does some challenging as well. In particular, its satirical target is ancestor worship. In the valley where the book takes place, a group of legendary heroes reluctantly banded together to rid the area of trolls, and now the descendants of each hero claim their ancestors were better than the others, even though all the stories seem to be the same with the victim and hero changed, and the heroic deeds often involve a lot of murder and thievery. And there's more trope attacking with the lead, Halli Sveinsson, who, the book is quick to tell us, is stumpy and squat, quite unlike the traditional Viking hero. And when he tries to leave the family to avenge a great wrong, he learns just how relative the term "hero" can be. The book builds nicely, and a final twist fits well with the overall themes. But at the same time, it just never grabbed me quite as much as Stroud's other stuff. Maybe it's the change in lead--Halli is clever, but a little too earnest for my tastes. Or maybe it's just a personal preference, that I tend more toward the high fantasy or steampunk sort of thing than the minor scope Viking tale Stroud's telling. Still, it's worth a read if you're a fan of his work.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;"><b>Fable: Blood Ties by Peter David. </b></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">Call it a 3.5. Bored with life in Bowerstone after the heroes won the day, charismatic rogue Ben Finn travels elsewhere, only to get caught up in a power struggle involving strange beasts, one with a very close connection to him. This is a much better book than David's last one set in the Fable universe, the Balverine Order. That book, to get around the problem with setting a book in a world determined so much by user choice, created blank slate characters. The problem there is that the characters were pretty white bread. Here, the book's protagonist is an existing Fable 3 character, Ben Finn, a gun-slinging rogue. Granted, there's still some trouble with adapting a playable story to a book--the book makes a point of stating right off the bat that it's based on one of the possible endings of Fable 3, and yours may have been different--but on the whole, the balance it strikes is better. Add to the cast the acerbic also-prexisting Page, and an insulting-slinging gnome, and you have a group that play to David's strengths in writing comedy and dialogue. The plot is the book's weak point, as it revolves around Finn's connection to a character which is told to us rather than showed to us. And the fact that it uses more source material than the previous book means that it's a little less accessible, or at least that those who have actually played Fable 3 will get a little more out of it. But it's a fairly amusing book, and stands above the admittedly low bar for video game novelizations.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #181818; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">It's been a while since I've done the Book Triad; as a reminder, the way it works is that I present three reviews I wrote for Goodreads on three books I've read, then spend a paragraph focusing on how they fit together, or compare. And given that I'm not selecting based on this paragraph, sometimes the connection is a little tenuous. Lower your expectations is the message I'm trying to convey here.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #181818; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;"> Actually, more seriously, lowered expectations is a good summary of these three books. They were all fine, but somewhat disappointing. And disappointments tend to be exacerbated when reading fantasy books, because there's so much more book to be disappointed by. At 350 or so, Blood Ties isn't too bad, but Heroes of the Valley clock in at nearly 500 and 800 pages respectively. When you're reading something you're not enjoying as much as you'd wish, that extra length is dreadful. In each case, I respect what the authors were trying to do. Empress avoids a lot of the fantasy cliches of a female-led book set in a male-dominated society--by going with a more flawed protagonist, Miller definitely differentiates herself from, say, Tamora Pierce. Videogame-based stories are *always* going to be a bit of slog, unless constructed from the ground up to deal with the support required for such a story; I think the broadly satirical nature of a lot of the Fable series (remember, this is a game series that started with the ability of the PC to fart in order to impress people) really detracts from its narrative potential, so David is basically making a lot out of a little. And Stroud's book winds up being its own rhetorical jab against the notion of hero worship in fantasy. Each one, essentially, attempts to twist fantasy conventions to say something new, or at least different. Maybe deep down, what I'm looking for in a fantasy story is just a recitation of those conventions, and part of my distaste for these books is that they're trying to move away from exactly what I want. And yet, I can't shake the feeling that each of these authors have done better. With David and Stroud, I've seen them do better. And with Miller, it really feels as if she's still finding her feet. Well, if nothing else, I still appreciate them for trying.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #181818; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 13.8000001907349px; line-height: 19.3199996948242px;">Later Days. </span></span>Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-733718838239486712.post-31063825834661028922015-01-11T18:18:00.001-05:002015-01-11T18:18:16.218-05:00Movie Buff: A Spoileriffic Review of Into the WoodsFirst: it's no Through the Woods, the horror-based graphic novel by Emily Carroll. Though both works use travelling in woods as metaphor, it's to rather different ends, and, frankly, Carroll does it better. Rather, it's the musical turned movie. In case you're unfamiliar with the plot, its essential idea is that it takes four strands of fairy tales and puts them in a blender. There's the baker and his wife, who are trying to break a witch's curse by collecting a cloak red as blood, hair yellow as corn, cow white as milk, and shoe gold uh, gold; a girl going to grandmother's house; a boy Jack trying to sell his best friend, the cow; Rapunzel of corn-yellow hair, and Cinderella, who probably doesn't need further explanation. They all get in each other's way, and, long story short, the survivors work together to fend off a giant woman. As you do.<br />
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Two of the music numbers in particular stuck with me, not because of the music really (honestly, all of the songs were kind of forgettable), but because of what they said about fairy tales. The first was sung by Prince Charming and his brother, where they try to one up each other with tales of love-lorn woe: respectively, that one keeps fleeing the ball at night, and one is stuck up in a tower where the only means of access is her hair. And it's hilarious. One rips his shirt open in a fit of passion; the other does too, because, well, you can't be upstaged when you're singing to no one in the middle of the woods. It's a song that perfectly captures the campiness of the project, the gentle mocking of the whole idea of Prince Charming.<br />
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Likewise, my other favorite also skewers the idea of fairy tale. Near the end, the aforementioned survivors are quarreling over whose fault the giant woman's assault is, and eventually they turn their accusations to the witch. She takes all of five seconds of that before launching into her own song, then being swallowed up by the earth, the gist of the song being, "Fuck all y'all, everyone has life tough, I'm outs." First: the witch is played by Meryl Streep, so already it's a recipe for being awesome. You'd have to actually work at making Maryl Streep bad in something. Second: I like the point of the song, which is that, yes, if you need fairy tales, if you need good and evil, then you do need someone to blame, but life isn't as simple as that. Also, fuck all you guys, like any of you are any better. Which, really, is something we all feel, isn't it?<br />
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It kind of lost me in the second act, which is unfortunate, because it's where things are supposedly getting interesting. The second act is where the happy ending of the fairy tale gets deconstructed; instead of everyone's happily ever after, the giant's wife shows up, and people start dying at an alarming rate. Now, that's a premise that's got potential, especially if you want to point out that rather than living in a fairy tale, it's better to have your "moment in the woods" and go back to the rest of your life. But it felt like the film was going in too many directions--pathos for the multiple deaths and resulting despair, some farce in the baker's wife having a fling with Prince Charming ("I'm in the wrong story!"), and somehow wrangle an actual happy ending. But it didn't really work for me. Take Cinderella and the Prince's parting--their final words post-break-up are "I'll always remember the girl I chased after" and "I'll always remember the prince from afar." It's played as this bittersweet moment, but really, it's terrible--they are basically saying to each other "I really wish you turned out to be the imaginary version of you I had in my head, and getting to know you made things worse." Now, that's a great sentiment in a farcical send-up for fairy tales. And a good character beat for a realistic relationship. But it's played straight, and... eh.<br />
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Or take the Prince's fling with baker's wife. Ok, it kind of sets the idea that she gets a bit starstruck by royalty. And that, for whatever reason, the woods really do it for her. But she's one of the more grounded characters in the story, and before this point, her main arc has been getting her husband to realize they need to work together for a child. The seduction happens a little too instantly, in the face of all that. But again, the subsequent part where she realizes that she was glad the moment happened, but prefers her own life--good, mature relationship beat, good farcical bit. But then she's immediately killed by the giant woman after coming to this conclusion, so it comes across that the story is punishing her for sexual violation. Which is kind of a mixed message.<br />
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Or take the giant woman. Now, even by the original story standards, she's pretty justified in coming down and being angry; Jack stole from her and murdered her husband after she welcomed her into his home (less justified: the mass destruction towards people who had nothing to do with her plight). So the struggle against her is less good versus evil and more "well, whatever we few remainders need to do to stay alive." The song to commemorate the fight "Not Alone" kind of gets at that, when it discusses how there's no good or bad, just sides, but at the same time, it's pitched as kind of a rallying lullabye--I think I would have preferred something more darker, and Pyrrhic. <br />
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I didn't mind what the film was trying to do. Taking shots at fairy tales and exploring the woods as a sort of Bhaktinian carnival (you can't spell carnival without the letters for carnal!) are both good things. But I like my characters a bit more developed, or my farces with a bit more of a knowing wink. So while the actors are great and the concept is fine, it didn't come together for me.<br /><br />Or to put it differently: singing numbers that aren't as catchy as I'd like them. Emotional beats that lacked the development needed to pull them off. Radical shifts in tone. It's a modern musical, all right.<br />
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(Final thought: Even though the metaphor is more apt, the sexual awakening subtext for Little Red Riding Hood does get a little creepy when the part is played by a 13 year old/)<br />
Later Days.Person of Consequencehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04788436443987713504noreply@blogger.com0