First Puffin

[firstpuffin]

Rey and Din Djarin: Onscreen training double standards?

I wish I could find the post that influenced this article so that you know I’m not straw-manning their argument, but I only thought about it afterwards and cannot for the life of me find it again.

  But I do remember the gist of it so excluding what they said about Baby Yoda (which I agree with) here’s the basic idea.

  ((All of these fans complaining about how Rey had no onscreen training don’t seem to have a problem with Din using a spear he’s never been seen training with))

 But unfortunately for the poster these two characters aren’t comparable at all. I mean, just think about it: Din was trained by a warrior culture from such a young age that you may as well say his whole life, whereas Rey is experienced sure, but in using a staff against other untrained thugs. The two can’t really be compared.

  The reason why people complain about Rey is because of this: as far as we know she has never touched a weapon besides her staff and has never had formal training and maybe not even all that many fights to gain experience. We don’t even see Rey doing all that well while protecting BB-8, but it isn’t long before she’s facing down Jedi Masters and warriors, possibly Force wielding ones, who have specialist training in their respective weapons.

  Rey doesn’t have apparently any training before she is fighting at a higher level than we see Din fighting.

 Din Djarin on the other hand has presumably had intense training in any weapon the Mandolorians would have deemed important, and given his new spear is pure Beskar, something stated by Greef to be nearly impossible to find a smith who can forge, it can be assumed that it is an original Mandalorian weapon.

  However, we don’t need to make that assumption because we see more than enough to justify his skills. We see how skilled he is, his reputation and how frequently he has to test his abilities thanks to his action-heavy lifestyle.

   On top of that, while Rey is matching up to highly skilled and specialist Force using opponents, Din’s final match is verses a man without the Force, with at most a small amount of training in the Darksaber, and while wearing Darksaber proof armour.

  That pure Beskar armour might be enough to put him at an advantage against even a trained Jedi and here he is fighting someone who is basically just swinging wildly.

 I understand the complaint being made and if it helps, my biggest problem with Rey is the fact that I like her but she wasn’t done justice in the writing. Din’s fights are far better suited to what we see from him, but if he wasn’t trained his whole life and suddenly went up against Sith lords then yeah, I’d have the same problems.

 But yeah, Grogu is showing far too many untaught abilities; y’know, just like Rey?

[firstpuffin]

Combining videogame mechanics with prose: The Island by Max Brooks

Given I didn’t actually know what prose meant until like a year into my writing course I reckon it won’t hurt to define it early and simply. If it’s not poetry, it’s prose. Fiction is prose, this article is prose, probably the way you think is prose, assuming you aren’t one of those people who think in images. I don’t really get that, but I do think in prose so that’s probably why. Damn, 70 words in and I’m already off topic.

 In my recent quest for novelty I decided to check out Max Brooks’ (I believe he wrote World War Z) Minecraft novelisation, Brooks neither being an author I know nor Minecraft being something I thought would make a good book. And I chose to get the audiobook from Audible, in slight because it gives me more time to focus on it when I’m out and about, but mostly because it’s read by Jack Black and I was super curious to see how he did.

  Black’s not a bad reader, but unless more characters turn up it will be hard to fully gauge- fuck, I’m off topic again.

 Sure, I also love how they use in-game music and sound effects during the reading, but this isn’t a review so check it out yourself.

  Anyway, what I wanted to talk about was how Brooks adapts the gameplay heavy video game into a novel. I’m only two chapters in so any comment on the story has to wait, but I think we share the same assumption on how the world works: it’s an adventure story set in a realistic Minecraft biome and with real-world physics.

  Ha! Nope!

 Right at the start Brooks’ unnamed character, let’s go with the canonical Steve for now, comments on the square sun and how strange it is. Then there’s the island made up of squares, and his own body. Yeah, our hero is shocked to find he has square (he keeps saying square instead of cube and my suppressed pedantry keeps trying to peek out) hands, sans fingers.

  His shock continues as he tries to grab some grass but punches out a block of dirt which shrinks and can fit into a belt pouch he has. He punches a tree, he punches leaves out of arms reach, Steve can’t eat anything that isn’t edible because his body refuses.

  He tries to pet a sheep but that’s not a mechanic so he accidentally punches it and it runs away. Steve is literally a real person thrust into the Minecraft game and restricted to its rules, and bear in mind that all of this is from a first-person point of view as well, so we get all of his internal monologue and raw emotions.

 This is a really interesting creative choice, largely because it’s so difficult to pull off and the book does have to start off slow, which suits me fine, but it may also be a requirement to writing for Minecraft. The game is based entirely around these blocks, these mechanics and this world.

  If you watch the Game Theory YouTube channel then you probably already know (of this book) about the hidden lore and background; whether or not MatPat is correct in his conclusions, there are suggestions and lore prompts all throughout the game, but that may not really be accessible to  the average player.

 Many, many people just build, and mine, and many of these people won’t have seen the Game Theory episodes, so there’s not a whole lot to write about except how the world works, and the atmosphere. I believe these might be what Brooks intends to focus on. As an author known for writing the above mentioned zombie novel, it might not be a surprise that the first hostile mob that Steve encounters is the zombie.

  Crafting in the day while learning the mechanics of his new world, and surviving the mobs at night. Any good book needs a climax and I’m not honestly sure what that’s going to be, nor how I would do the same; sure there’s the Nether and The End but those might not fit the isolated island survival story that seems to be the story.

 I’ve decided that Max Brooks hasn’t chosen to write a story based in the Minecraft world, but instead a story of the Minecraft world. Of course, I am only two chapters in, so don’t quote me on that.

  Yet.

[firstpuffin]

Avatar: the Last Airbender; the shifting dichotomy in episode 3

The interesting part of looking far too much into fiction is that the more you do it the more that writing begins to look like more than just a temporary distraction and more and more like the art that it is. While rewatching Avatar the Last Airbender I picked up on a story-telling trick that probably goes over people’s heads much like it did mine the first few times and I love what it does.

Episode three begins to expand on the main protagonist Aang and the antagonist Zuko, revealing their pasts and who they are as individuals. As the episode progresses there is an interesting shift in not only how they are portrayed but what we see deeper inside them. 

   Zuko, the bad guy, is full of anger and defensive arrogance while being supported by his kindly and wise uncle; Aang, our hero, is excited and happy to be returning home while his new friends Katara and Sokka are hesitant and cautious. Already they are shown as opposites.

   Immediately the episode thrusts Aang’s enthusiasm at us, untempered by his friends as they complain or attempt to prepare him for the worst. He forges onward to his old home, the now abandoned Southern Air Temple.

   The episode shifts to Zuko and the colour pallet is full of reds and blacks; our villain is angry and is approached by a man who is ostensibly an ally but Zuko puts up walls immediately and attempts to turn away but is prevented from leaving. He is forced to be the man’s guest while being questioned about Aang whose existence he denies. 

Aang and co. discover a clue to his destiny and he gets distracted by a lemur which he chases throughout the temple.

   Zuko’s secret is revealed and out of anger he challenges his supposed ally to ritual combat. This fight doesn’t go well for him until his uncle’s advice and his own trauma kick in and he turns things around by pushing a fortuitous opportunity.

   Aang chases the lemur all the way to where his old mentor and father-figure lays, long dead and surrounded by dispatched soldiers. This shock sends him into a mindless rage and while Katara is able to bring him out of it, it is a sad moment that raises concerns for his future.

   Zuko wins the match and shares an unexpectedly tender moment with his uncle.

So what is it that I’m trying to bring attention to here?

   Well the episode contains two stories following the two characters, and their climaxes occur at the same time and each with a very different feel compared to what came before it. Zuko’s story begins grim and unhappy while Aang’s is cheerful and bright; hopeless verses hopeful.

   But after his climax Zuko is- not cheerful but hopeful, feeling stronger and comforted by the presence of his uncle.

   After his climax, Aang is feeling hopeless as his own power and uncertain future scares him and the presence of his friends only seems to help so much.

This switch in the character’s emotional states and feelings towards the future is telling and powerful, giving Zuko the positive momentum that the villain only usually gets towards the end of the series to make things seem worse for the hero. Maybe this is meant to suggest than he is not the villain he is being portrayed as.

[firstpuffin]

Visual storytelling in Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days

This isn’t going to be much of an article; it’s not going to ask any questions nor answer them, but I wanted to bring up an interesting example of visual storytelling in the Kingdom Hearts series. Plus I need to build up a backlog of writing because I’ve had almost zero sources of inspiration of late.

 So simply put, this example occurs in Kingdom Hearts 358/2 days and is when two of the main characters, Axel and Xion, become friends. That sounds a little cheesy, but this is the Kingdom Hearts series after all.

  Axel has been gone for a while, taking part in the events of the game Chain of Memories before coming back to find that his pal Roxas has been hanging out with the new girl, Xion. Any hesitancy he has towards Xion disappears fast and we see the same for her.

  Only in Xion’s case we actually see the moment she accepts him.

 There are a lot of unclear magic systems in the Kingdom Hearts franchise, and Xion is the result of Organisation XIII, who these three characters are a part of, faffing about with the memories of Sora, the series’ lead character. Long story short, Xion is an artificial being made using Sora’s memories in order to replicate his power, but as such she’s not a real person, even by Organisation XIII’s standards.

  So when these three hang out for the first time I noticed that Xion had left her hood up, hiding her face, even though in the previous scene she had it down. I assumed this was because out of some demure shyness towards this person she wasn’t sure of, but when Roxas talks to her, the hood is off.

  Axel speaks to her, and the hood is back on.

  Roxas speaks, hood off.

  Axel speaks, hood on.

 Every time one of these two speak to her, the camera changes and it becomes clear that when they speak the entire scene shifts to their perception of Xion, and because she isn’t sure of Axel the hood remains up. Neither Axel nor Roxas are aware of this and there’s a fair chance that Xion isn’t either.

  But when Axel drops the line “Well, if you’re Roxas’s friend, then you’re also mine” (paraphrased from memory, sorry), the hood vanishes between scenes.

 No attention is ever brought to this, it’s never mentioned again and depending on how much attention you are paying to the small Nintendo DS screen, you may not notice it either. It’s a needless but immensely meaningful detail that the makers added, showing both their relationship and that something is odd about Xion.

 This is just one reason why despite being a drag to play, especially on the DS, 358/2 days has always been by favourite game of the series, and Xion my favourite character (although I’ve also noticed a pattern of my favourite characters being young girls with tragic circumstances which is- worrying).

  The emotional depth and heartbreak in this side-game about connected memories, Nobodies without hearts and whacking things with big keys- well it wouldn’t be half of what it is without the visual storytelling that just can’t be done in ordinary prose.

[firstpuffin]

Sub-par action, fantastic characters: the Fairy Tail anime (yeah, there are spoilers)

You know, for an action series, Fairy Tail should maybe abandon the fighting.

  Okay, not true. But Fairy Tail is interesting in that the action and the story itself are really more of an excuse to expand on the characters. I’ve previously written about how poor the character of Laxus Dreyar is, but in the same piece I mentioned both Erza Scarlet and Jellal Fernandes who are fantastic and complex.

 Hiro Mashima, the author of Fairy Tail, has a really interesting way of bringing characters into the story: they are often around for some time before being expanded on. What I see as the key example of this is Elfman Strauss, a large and loud fella with an obsession with men being men, who in his mind are tough and honourable; Elfman appears early on as a background character, joining in squabbles and shouting about masculinity, but he only ever appears for short scenes until the Phantom Lord story arc.

  Basically the Fairy Tail magic guild are attacked by the rival Phantom Lord guild, yada yadda etc, and Elfman randomly joins the main cast in invading their base. The natural assumption is that he’s going to be somewhat of a red-shirt, there just to show the power of the antagonists, but Elfman actually plays a vital role. He gets the usual emotional flashbacks normally saved for the heroes we already know, and gets a power-up that feels very much natural and internally consistent, and is important to the arc.

  Elfman continues to reappear throughout the story, sometimes in the background and sometimes being important.

 Another example is Cana Alberona. She also starts off in the background, chatting to other characters or being a joke, but during the Tenroujima island story arc she suddenly gets fleshed out further. She had a good moment during the Laxus story arc too.

  This story arc begins as basically an exam for the heroes and Cana is oddly desperate to succeed. At some point she has chosen to not to tell her estranged father, valued member of Fairy Tail Gildarts Clive, that she is his daughter until she passes this exam.

  There are flashbacks, internal conflict and guilt until she eventually decides to fess up and there is a really powerful moment as he realises he has a child and that he’s watched her grow up. And Gildarts has only been in the story since the beginning of this arc and yet the viewer is completely invested.

 This is where Fairy Tail stands tall and strong.

  Unfortunately the action is so often- urgh. For example, the Tenroujima island arc has this big action set piece towards the end, but instead of committing to it, the show keeps hopping between different fights happening at the same time, doing so so frequently that there’s little to no progress in any of them until each fight ends on an abrupt climax. That’s poor directing.

 But the fights themselves are often pretty poor as well. Mashima has no sense of scaling conflicts. One later fight pits four characters in a two on two fight, all characters that have been built up for this very moment and the audience are excited.

  So it’s kind of distracting when one team are being totally overpowered, then things flip so that they then completely overwhelm the first pair, and then it flips again, and again. Like seriously, when our heroes inevitably win they’ve been beaten down repeatedly before standing up again and easily, without any kind of power-up, dominate once again.

 This weakness in the writing happens again and again throughout the series and is a cheap and piss-poor means of raising tension, but to anyone who does more than blankly stare at the screen it really grates. We don’t even want some complex, in-depth scaling system for the characters, just keep it consistent with what we’ve been seeing. Internally consistent.

 Internal consistency is probably one of the top five things that I want from any series, and these dodgy fights bother me all the more because I adore the characters so much. With this sort of emotional up and down I can’t help but get exasperated and rant a little bit. And I’m not asking for much either.

  We’ve seen power-ups in the series up until now, the hero Natsu Dragneel has done so repeatedly by eating other magic sources with success (and suffering devastating side-effects which I adore in fiction), and even has a new power-up that he could use to make things feel right. His teammate, Gajeel Redfox, has been gone for three months to train so it would also feel right to see him pull out something new as well.

  But we don’t.

 Yeah, this is all only a pet peeve and none of it has been enough to stop me from watching it. But it’s all fair criticism and I’ve provided the means to fix these and similar problems for any writers who may read this.

  It’s not especially hard to do.

[firstpuffin]

“I have spoken!” But what is it I have said?

When I first watched series one of The Mandalorian I remember telling my brother that the writing wasn’t great, but I was enjoying the new direction for the Star Wars franchise. Less Jedi with the order being little known at this point, and for whatever reason it’s interesting assuming there’s a good reason for it; more exploration of different worlds (let’s just ignore how they keep returning to Tatoo-fucking-ine) and different styles of living for their respective populations.

  I mean sure, the Expanded Universe often did it very well too, but from my experience it was usually from the point of view of the Jedi or those directly involved with them. Sure, I haven’t experienced the entire Expanded Universe, but there’s a lot to cover there without obsession and money on your side.

 After discussing this with a friend I decided to revisit the first series because you always see a lot more the second time watching things (although that’s not the same as spoilers, fuck spoilers, but that’s another article) and-

  The writing is still kinda plain.

  But that’s not where the joy of The Mandalorian comes from. That’s more for another article, but this one is about something that friend said about Kuiil’s “I have spoken” being bad writing (paraphrased as he’s rather acerbic).

  People think of Kuiil as wise and patient, and this even pops up in his Wikipedia profile, but his signature line pretty much shouts the opposite.

 “I have spoken” seems to have charmed a number of viewers, myself included, but why exactly? It’s an arrogant, close-minded way of ending a conversation or shutting down worthwhile discussion; that’s not a good thing in any way.

  Except in fiction that is.

  In fiction it helps form the character of Kuiil: older, close-minded and arrogant, too tired to put up with anyone’s shit. It’s not an admirable attitude, but a story full of admirable characters would be super boring.

 There’s more to this line than showing his character though and from a linguistic point of view Kuiil’s signature line is quite interesting. It serves a number of purposes depending on context, the first use being simply to cut off further discussion, letting him have his way.

  But another use is kinda like that of an exclamation mark, drawing attention to what he has just said. His last line to Mando in episode two is

“And good luck with the child. May it survive and bring you a handsome reward.

I have spoken.”

This- is actually pretty fantastic. I’m going to add that the music pulses for a moment as he says this, drawing the viewers’ attention to it in a fantastic bit of direction (but direction is another article).

  By using the line here as he does, Kuiil is encouraging Mando to think about what he is doing, which is basically selling another lifeform to the Imperials. This isn’t necessarily Kuiil’s wisdom peeking through, but his experience as an Imperial indentured servant (which is basically a slave you eventually release).

  As we likely know if we are reading this, Mando saves the child and runs away and all that, but that’s not important here.

 So to summarise what I basically want to say, Kuiil’s signature line isn’t a sign of wisdom, or even eccentricity, but is a tool he uses to emphasise his speech and opinions. 

   I don’t really know how to close this one off, so do me a solid and think of your own funny ending for me.

[firstpuffin]

What’s the future hold for Baby Yoda? (spoilers for up to episode 3 of series 2)

You’ll have to forgive me for this rushed upload. For whatever reason I’ve had a lot of trouble finding inspiration recently. Thankfully The Mandalorian series two is coming out and so I finally have something to write about.

 I’ve done one piece on The Mandalorian at the end of series one, and in it I briefly mentioned what these experiences could be doing to the memey Baby Yoda (really wish they’d give this thing a name already). As a child in its early developmental stages, Baby Yoda is inevitably going to be hugely influenced by what happens around it, and while even a normal child will likely not understand all of the pain and death going on around it, it’s silly to presume the child won’t still be affected.

  A child with empathic deficiencies for reasons such as psychopathy can still develop these skills if helped early and it’s likely that the reverse is true as well. A normal child surrounded by death and pain will struggle to understand why these are considered bad; they will have been desensitised from such a young age that it will be nearly irrevocable (and I only say “nearly” because I suppose some vicious head-trauma could do the job).

 But Baby Yoda isn’t normal; it’s much worse than that.

  Baby Yoda is Force-sensitive. It can feel both emotions and quite possibly life itself, as we see early in series one when it is distressed at Mando is killing Jawas. But our baby is now far beyond that, barely uncomfortable when killing is being done; although I think the damage isn’t quite complete yet.

  Still clearly desensitised to killing, there other signs that Baby Yoda is gonna be kinda fucked up by the end of this. It has a strange... preference for eating living creatures.

 This is hinted at in a light-hearted moment in series one when we see it swallow a frog whole. (deadpan) Oh look at that, the cute baby creature is doing something that many would consider horrific. How hilarious (deadpan ends). But it happens again in series two. Repeatedly.

  Baby Yoda’s food preference is clearly “still alive”. Almost obsessively so.

  When told off for trying to eat a lizard lady’s eggs, Baby Yoda wanders off and straight into a nest of fucking spider eggs, tears one open and just gulps it on down. It’s later attacked at two separate times by little octopus things, but as soon as Mando takes it out of action we see it getting swallowed whole.

 So what would this mean for Baby Yoda? Well probably that he’s going to get a spin off when he’s a few decades older, but that was a given anyway. How about in-world though?

  Well, a desensitisation to killing is useful for a Jedi as well, just look at those guys go. But taking pleasure from it is a Dark Side thing, and we could be watching a new Sith lord be adorably raised by a child soldier with no face.

 This isn’t a given though as Mando has been directed towards Asoka Tano, padawan to Anakin Skywalker and confusing element to the canon (at least to me who can’t remember what is and isn’t Legends anymore). Asoka left the Jedi Order for good reasons and is a good person at her core, even if she is also a child soldier.

  If Mando is able to leave Baby Yoda with her, which admittedly isn’t likely given his popularity, then he is still in his developmental stage for possibly up to a decade. With the proper training and discouragement from getting the munchies for anything smaller than him, he might still be... well, not redeemed, that would suggest the Jedi had it right, but he might yet be salvaged.

 Now yes, lots of animals and even human cultures are fine with eating live animals (and I say fuck you, those animals are gonna be dissolved alive inside your stomach acid, if not chewed up alive), and even in the same episode we see those octopi being consumed in a diner; frankly it’s a weak topic to write about, but you know what?

  I did say I had no ideas.

[firstpuffin]

The problematic character of Laxus Dreyfus from Fairy Tail:

It’s quite common in long running shows to have a one time villain join the heroes: Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sandman from the Spider-Man comics, and pretty much any manga or anime. But the thing about redeeming the bad guys is that they have to have some redeeming features, and Laxus from the Fairy Tail anime kinda doesn’t.

  Okay, he hesitates once or twice, only to then doubles down on his actions.

  For those that don’t know, and considering the name “fairy tale” put me off for years I wouldn’t blame you, Fairy Tail is a series following the members of the titular magic guild Fairy Tail, and the story ran for quite a long time, even getting a continuation recently. It’s big on friendship and hope and the rest of that crap, but it’s mostly fun and I’ve recently started rewatching it and found a few problems in the writing.

 Laxus Dreyfus is the grandson of Fairy Tail’s master, Makarov, and is one of the four strongest mages in the guild, minus his grandfather. He pops up here and there to proclaim his strength and dislike of the weak, but the guild forgives him because he’s part of the guild; he’s family.

  But eventually he decides he has had enough and stages a coup to take power. Laxus has his ally petrify a number of guild members and threatens the rest into fighting amongst themselves or else their friends will crumble into dust. When this fails he sets up a trap that makes hostages of the entire town the guild is based in.

 The point of all this is to make Makarov surrender his position of guild master, but the stress makes the old man ill and he subsequently can’t do so. This leaves Laxus in the position of giving up, or letting the town fry.

  And he chooses to win.

  You could say that both threats were bluffs, but when his bluffs were called he chose to follow through with them, ready to murder a city of innocents.

  Naturally, as Fairy Tail is an action series our hero Natsu Dragneel fights him and wins while the rest of the guild save the city, but this isn’t the end for Laxus. During the fight Laxus thinks he has successfully killed Natsu and appears genuinely happy about it.

 Laxus seems to become more and more unhinged, even appearing to go berserk, but after being beaten he just becomes- well, he calms down. Either Laxus was genuinely bad, or mentally ill and neither of these were explored and as the series goes on he becomes a stoic but reliable ally to Fairy Tail.

  The fuck happened?

 I think this hit me harder than it might because the previous antagonist, Jellal Fernandes, was shown to have actual issues in that he was seemingly possessed and manipulated by someone (and that’s after being a child slave for years), and when he reappears he doesn’t remember much and the possession has gone. He had a solid reason to be bad, as well as time and motive to redeem himself.

  But Laxus? The most convincing reason I’ve found is that Natsu gave him brain damage during the fight.

 There was another couple of antagonists in a previous arc who also become allies: Juvia Lockser and Gajeel Redfox. Juvia is cursed with magic that causes her to be ostracised and so she joined the first group to accept her, but her heart is healed by the members of Fairy Tail.

  Gajeel on the other hand is a proper bastard, brutally injuring people and getting kicks out of beating on protagonist Lucy Heartfillia, enjoying her screams. He literally gets pissed when she doesn’t scream out and is willing to kill her.

  Then all of a sudden, during the Laxus storyline as it happens, he joins Fairy Tail and isn’t at all the same character. I vaguely remember some background to this popping up later so I might need to upload a retraction, but it doesn’t feel right at all.

 I like character focused fiction the most, action and even plot comes second to interesting and developed characters, which is why I’m having such trouble here. To make it worse, Fairy Tail has some of the most developed characters I’ve ever read; Erza Scarlet was my favourite female character for years until I read Discworld, and even now she’s my favourite female anime character.

  Erza has this complex mix of toughness and softness, masculinity and femininity, strength and vulnerability that I find remarkably compelling, and that’s before her character development that reappears again and again throughout the story.

  Compared to Erza, Laxus is just a flimsy two dimensional character.

 Of course, Erza’s writing isn’t perfect. The author Hiro Mashima develops a disturbing trend of mistreating his female characters, but that pisses me off too much to write about.

[firstpuffin]

Damsel in distress: changing the traditional storyline of a franchise

When a franchise continues for long enough, using the same formula time and again, it begins to get old. Yes, the damsel in distress format is a staple of both the Mario and The Legend of Zelda series’, but it’s really getting boring. Zelda is in trouble, Link saves her; Aryll is in trouble, Link saves her; Zelda is in trouble, Link-

  Yeah, it’s a formula pretty damn well set in stone by now, but so was not having voice acting and the iconic green tunic. Change is happening and it’s mostly okay (I mean yeah, those changes both pissed me off but that’s besides the point).

  But there is a problem in changing this traditional storyline, and that is doing it well. I want change, but I will lose my shit if it’s done wrong.

 So what’s going to make the biggest difference between success and failure? I’d say it’s the intention behind the change.

  I hope I’ve made it clear that I want this change to keep things fresh; the damsel in distress is- well, distressed. It’s a tired formula and while they’ve done some good mixing it up, with Breath of the Wild’s Zelda having depth and rather than being captured, she’s trapped sealing the calamity for a hundred years. But at the core it’s the same story, with Zelda still needing saving.

  I like the idea of beginning with the damsel in distress trope, only to get to the castle to find Zelda is there, but thought she was rescuing Link. Something like this is a subversion of what the past decades have made us expect (assuming the f*ckin’ trailer doesn’t give it away) and would be a fantastic twist.

 What would be the wrong intention behind this change? Ideology.

  I f*cking loathe ideology in fiction. Lessons can be taught with subtlety, but going into a new work with an agenda inevitably ends up with opaque, in your face preaching that ruins the experience. I’d love a game where we play as Zelda, or even a female Link (the story and ideological [yes, I get the irony in that] possibilities of this could be fantastic), but not just for the sake of preaching.

  This would be the equivalent of shitting all over a franchise people have loved since childhood, that helped shaped them growing up, and all to use it as a tool for your personal agenda. That’s not cool Chibnall- I mean dude.

  I guess the difference between ideologies I like and that I don’t like is how opaque they are. Think about it: Harry Potter has been proven to increase empathy in its readers without anybody realising it, while Doctor Who screams it at you until you turn it off.

 And better yet, video games are a fantastic medium for exploring ideas and, yes, ideologies (huh, wonder what the root word for that is) because you don’t just passively observe events, prejudice, etc, but instead you actively experience them. What a fantastic opportunity to try new ideas, rather than making the same on repeat.

[firstpuffin]

BBC America’s The Watch characters: what’s been “reimagined” pt 2

Lord Vetinari, the Patrician, “architect of the city’s normalized wrongness and ramshackle system of governance.”

Alright. I’ve had a little cry, and gone out to grab a beer. I’m ready now.

  The hardest part of about this is how it’s not technically wrong. The city’s normalised wrongness? Well, yeah, he legalised crime after-all; once he dies then the system of governance will be ramshackle as no-one else will be able to maintain it.

  I really hope this is just badly written, as the Patrician has taken all the unavoidable aspects of a city and made it work to become a positive. Unfortunately, it does look like BBC America has made Lord Vetinari less of a genius self-proclaimed tyrant and instead into either an incompetent leader, or a mob-boss.

 The- Archchancellor…? “a wizard, magical advisor, and the Head of the Unseen University.”

  So, is this Ridcully? Or just a nameless wizard? Because that does matter.

  Well, I’ve not seen a picture of James Fleet in character so we’ll see.

 Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler, “the city’s best snitch, with a gang of freelance henchmen at her beck and call.”

  Um, why? I mean seriously, why? Sure, this works as nobody bar the beggars or Gaspode knows the going ons of the city like Dibbler, but snitch? Gang of henchmen?

  Dibbler is a hot sausage salesman with a knack for selling even his sausages (100% pig. not pork, but pig) and whose schemes for bigger business goes wrong because- well mainly because he accidentally always gets involved with the main story. But he’s harmless as long as you don’t buy his dodgy sausages.

  Surely that’s just as useful as a gang boss? And we know it is because it is in the source material.

  Can’t really comment on Ruth Madeley in the part, simply because the part sounds so generic that my beer bottle could do the job.

 Captain John Keel, “former leader of The Watch and mentor to Sam Vimes, determined to save the corrupt and chaotic city.”

  Once again, not quite accurate. Keel never rose above Sergeant-at-arms before he died, and transferred from Pseudopolis shortly before that without any apparent aspirations towards anything more than doing his job.

  I was tempted to say that Vimes pretends to be Keel in Night Watch which might be difficult with Hakeem Kae-Kazim in the role, but given I doubt they’re going down the time-travel route from that book I also doubt they’ll be bothering with that either. I wonder if they’ll give him an eyepatch…

  We don’t actually see the man, except as a corpse, so there’s not much to say about who he is as a person except for Vimes’s memories, so there’s not much else to say here.

 Wonse, “a wizard hopeful in waiting that is frequently underestimated.”

  A wizard only in the loosest sense in that he summons a dragon, but he’s actually the patrician’s immediate aide. The antagonist in Guards! Guards!, Wonse is aiming to put a puppet-king on the throne that he can control. Potentially there is some emotional conflict between Wonse and Vimes, given they grew up together with very different levels of success. I wonder if he’ll die in the same, grimly humorous way…

  Not much to say about Bianca Simone Mannie in the role, or even the role itself at this point. I dunno how charismatic she is, but Wonse in the books needed at least some, although that may not be needed here.

 Carcer Dun, “the wounded and wronged Carcer Dun, out to hijack destiny itself, take control of the city and exact a terrible revenge on an unjust reality.”

  Fuck. Where to begin. Carcer is- Carcer- well he’s fucking terrifying and not at all wronged; that’s why he’s terrifying. Carcer isn’t a relatable character, he doesn’t have valid justification, he’s just a monster who always has one more knife and will cheerfully protest his innocence while the blood on the blade drips onto the still warm body. Carcer gives me shivers exactly because he is so wrong.

  I have nothing to say about Sam Adewunmi except that I hope he has an innocent smile, because that makes Carcer worse.

  I’m going to pass on Ingrid Oliver as Doctor Cruces. I liked her in Doctor Who, but the description given here provides nothing towards the character.

 So there is a lot to say here, hence the reluctant 2-parter and my late dinner, but I can’t help but notice some rather worrying absences from this list. Where’s Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs? Detritus the troll (who appears in pictures) and Constable Cuddy? Gaspode the talking dog or Foul old Ron, always being dragged about on a lead?

  How about Wilikins the violent butler, or the Librarian?!

 In all fairness there are many characters we needed to hear about before bloody Wonse or Doctor Cruces.

[firstpuffin]

BBC America’s The Watch characters: what’s been “reimagined” pt 1

Given my unhealthy obsession with the Discworld series and that the books following the City Watch are among my favourite, the upcoming reimagining has been on my mind a lot of late. I can’t wait for January to come along, but until then I have little to do but speculate.

  I want to take a look here at the characters of the series, specifically the profiles so conveniently provided by the Den of Geek website and compare them to what we see in the books. This isn’t with a negative bias, insofar as I can unbias myself, but merely a brief comparison.

 Let’s do this in the order of main characters:

Samuel Vimes, “Captain of The Watch, disempowered by a broken society that’s reduced his department’s jurisdiction to almost nothing.”

  A very bare description but not wholly inaccurate. In the first book- Guards! Guards!- Vimes is disillusioned with his place in the city of Ankh-Morpork, drunken, sloven, all largely thanks to his Night Watch being a joke to the community at large.

  But this description isn’t quite right: Ankh-Morpork isn’t a broken society as instead it works. Under the Patrician’s guidance the Night Watch are largely unneeded, at least ostensibly; you don’t need to catch illegal thieves when the legal Thieves Guild will do a much better job of it for you. Vimes is a broken man, but only because he hasn’t found his place yet.

  Richard Dormer at least looks the part. I’ve seen official artwork that shows Vimes as neat and proper looking, but in the books he’s always described as “scruffy”. I don’t watch trailers so I haven’t seen him in action yet, but the worst thing I can say is that the decision to not give the Watch armour was a huge loss.

 Lady Sybil Ramkin, “last scion of Ankh-Morpork’s nobility, who’s trying to fix the city’s wrongs with her chaotic vigilantism.”

  “This is where the fun begins”. But really, where to begin? Why “chaotic vigilante”? Is middle-aged dragon breeder not bad-ass enough? In the later books we don’t see too much of Lady Sybil, but she does start appearing more, and the dramatisation can easily do this much sooner without issue.

  What we really wanted from Lady Sybil was a big middle-aged woman, which would be nice representation for that demographic.

  There’s not much to say about Lara Rossi in the role except that she doesn’t really look cut out for dragon-breeding.

 Carrot (Headbanger) Ironfoundersson, “the idealistic new recruit, raised by dwarfs, but really a human abandoned at birth.”

  Not a whole lot to say here. Carrot wasn’t abandoned so much as his family massacred by bandits, but whatever.

  Adam Hugill looks big, orange and handsome, and is dressed neat enough to pass muster. I’m looking forward to watching him.

 Angua (Delphine) von Überwald, “tasked with Carrot’s training and keeping the rookie alive.”

  Well, this is… well it’s the reverse really. The second book, Men at Arms, has the Watch forced to take in minority officers, and being a werewolf Angua is a shoo-in. She is trained by Carrot and serves to show the reader how the people of Ankh-Morpork view Carrot’s bizarre charisma.

  Marama Corlette is an interesting choice. Angua is meant to be tall and beautiful, with long blonde hair (treated with products meant for dogs), but whose werewolf side manages to come through in a disconcerting manner.

  Marama is portraying her as a short, scruffy character with very short hair. She’s going to lack the disharmony that makes Angua’s beauty so much more than fanservice. Still, probably not her choice and it will be interesting to see how she deals with the werewolf inside.

 Cheery Littlebottom, “the ingenious non-binary forensics expert, ostracized by their kin and finding a new home and identity.”

  Probably giving Cheery a little bit too much credit here: she’s skilled, yes, but she has to learn forensics when she first appears in the third book, Feet of Clay. She’s not non-binary, quite the opposite, but I’ve already discussed that here, and neither is she ostracized as such. Given that she’s not a unique non-binary individual but just a part of the larger Dwarfish sociological problem, I feel that they’re missing a major opportunity in cultural sexual expectations here.

  Going by pictures alone, I’m not even sure Jo Eaton-Kent is even playing a dwarf, but wouldn’t it be better to have an actual dwarf actor play the role? And I guess if they aren’t going to bother with armour then why bother with beards, but once again it drops a whole bunch of the nuance of the source material.

 Lord Vetinari, the Patrician, “architect of the city’s normalized wrongness and ramshackle system of governance.”

  Oh.

  I intended to say that Anna Chancellor had some big, big size twelve shoes to fill after Vetinari was portrayed by Charles Dance, but apparently that’s a non-issue as the Patrician is now fucking incompetent!

  I need to calm down. I genuinely need to take a break after reading that. Bye.

[whitepeopletwitter]

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

God, I remember when I started sixth form (last two years of high school in the UK, seen as a more university style learning environment) and the teachers kept complaining about how quiet we were during lessons.

We wouldn’t talk. They’d tell us to do something and we’d just sit there quietly and do it, until eventually they just said “hey, guys, it’s okay to chat while you work!” and then everybody would start talking.

One teacher described it as creepy.

And I just remember thinking, what the fuck did they expect to happen? We’d all been taught from the age of four or five onwards that talking in class was bad. That if we did it, we’d be told off, or punished, or in some instances maybe the entire class would be punished along with us, just to make sure we really got the idea. It was a whole thing.

But now, because we were sixth-formers and therefore ‘grown ups’, we were suddenly expected to flip a switch and be able to talk as much as we liked? The whole reason we were in sixth-form was because we had worked hard, done well at school, and generally followed the rules— but still the teachers couldn’t understand why we didn’t just talk to each other.

Now I’m at uni, and seminar tutors are having a similar problem. People will talk in seminars, but a lot of them will insist on raising their hands and waiting to be called upon first. “Don’t put your hands up, just shout at me!” the guy keeps saying. But they keep doing it anyway.

Like, I really don’t know how to tell these people that you can’t train somebody to act in one way for over half their lives, and then suddenly expect them to start acting differently just because the expectations have changed.

[biofomission]

This is why you gotta treat kids like actual people

[firstpuffin]

Flirting with fun:

Flirting is a playful word, right? It’s fun and not at all serious; that’s why I chose it. I’m sure that Journey has a story and if not then there is plenty to make one out of; there doesn’t seem to be any kind of agenda being spouted, but I actually had a few thoughts of how I may be able to fit one in (because agendas are so goddamn prevalent everywhere that even I can’t help but look for them). But what’s important, and one of the reasons why I’ve fallen in love with Journey, is because it’s just good fun!

  And I wasn’t going to play it.

  I’m not actually very good at trying new things, sticking with variations on a theme, but during quarantine the Playstation store gave out two games for free and I figured, sure. I decided to give Journey a try as I have it now and-

  DAMN!

 I’d classify Journey as more of an experience than a game and you play as a cloaked thing wearing a sweet scarf that lets you fly! Well, lets you jump and then guide your fall, and there are shiny upgrades that makes both your jump and your scarf longer.

  I’m not a skilled reviewer so that’s basically what I liked, but more than that it’s made me far more eager to step out of my comfort zone more often if it’ll help me find games that excite me like Journey in the future.

 I found a game called My Big Sister thanks to this new experimental me. My Big Sister stole my heart almost immediately with its top down, pixelated charm and relatable characters. I was obsessed with this game possibly more than I was about Undertale or American McGee’s Alice, right up until the end.

  You remember my article on why Alice gets away with the It-was-just-a-dream trope? Well My Big Sister did it wrong. There were fascinating strings that were left loose; the main character’s change in personality, the “loop” they focus so much on, the terrifying Lady-on-the-wall villain and more more more. There was this fantastic moment when the titular big sister breaks the fourth wall and, if you take long enough, murders you.

              I struggled to sleep that night and I freakin’ loved it.

  But none of these had a conclusion: the Lady stopped appearing, the sister never broke the wall again and the loop was… well, I don’t know. It’s emphasised right up until the end, only for the main character to wake up from a coma which suddenly means that everything was made redundant. The loop was no longer a thing and actually made less sense now, I don’t know if the sister was actually depressed- I’m left blank.

  Because there is no real-life result from the dream, it made the entire story irrelevant.

 Now I still love My Big Sister (what a misleading name), and I absolutely intend to revisit it to try and make sense because it was great, and I bought another game by the developers (Red Bow).

  Both Journey and My Big Sister have encouraged and bolstered this new desire to try new games in me, and I’ll always be thankful to them for that. So if you are reading this then do me a solid and buy these games and support the developers.

[firstpuffin]

The really weirdly bizarre escalation in the Katekyo Hitman Reborn manga:

Those of you who have watched the anime will have at least an idea of where I’m going with this one, but Katekyo Hitman Reborn (Reborn for short) struggles with the problem of story escalation.

  Basically, without a sense of escalation a long running story will fall short. You know how Superhero comics, films and television often gets kind of bizarre? Iron Man goes from fighting terrorists to saving half the universe. Smallville Clark Kent starts off punching mooks with superpowers to fighting immortal Kryptonian monsters.

 Reborn begins as what is known as a gag manga: an episodic series where humour is more important than story or depth. But following the likes of Dragon Ball, Reborn eventually moves into the realm of action and plot.

  “But what is the premise” I didn’t hear you ask. Our hero Japanese 14-year old Sawada Tsunayoshi (or Tsuna) turns out to be related to the founder of a mafia group and naturally that means he needs to become the next leader. Reborn, the titular Katekyo Hitman (hitman home tutor… it’s manga, deal with it) is sent to groom him into the perfect mafia boss, and is completely unperturbed by the fact that Tsuna is both an idiot and a wimp.

 So once the story actually begins, Tsuna is sent to capture some mafia criminals (criminals even by the mafia’s standards) and while the villain, Rokudo Mukuro, has some grand plans, him actually succeeding at them is a whole other thing.

  Then for the next story, he has to fight a branch of his mafia who have equal claim to the position, but they are jerks and so he resists (also, he and his friends would be murdered if he didn’t win).

  Both of these are pretty low stakes, only really affecting the criminal world, but definitely escalating. So presumably the third story arc is something like an intra-mafia battle, right?

 Tsuna has to save all of reality.

 What, the fuck?

I’m not kidding in the slightest. The antagonist, Byakuran, has the power to cross parallel realities and has ruined all infinite of them (shut up! just think Crisis of Infinite Earths from DC) in an attempt at designing his own world. Tsuna and his friends have been dragged 10 years into the only remaining timeline in order to stop Byakuran. Should he fail, all reality is gone.

 So what’s the next storyline? Tsuna has a squabble with some more mafia.

 What, the fuck?

 The next story isn’t much better but there’s no point in going into it. The damage has been done.

  The escalation of Reborn shoots way beyond reason, before plummeting down to something more acceptable.

 But even weirder, it manages to work. The arc with Byakuran destroying the cosmos doesn’t have a whole lot of emotional depth, but unbelievably high stakes, whereas later stories have intense emotion. The mafia in the next story has a long but forgotten history and the members of which almost perfectly match-up or reflect Tsuna’s own friend group.

  It’s intense, it’s emotional, and I’ve passed my word limit so tah-rah for now.

[firstpuffin]

Oops

Thanks to personal reasons at home, I'm not going to be uploading today. I'll make a point of doing so next week.

[firstpuffin]

Misunderstanding the message

Modern television could learn a lot from the Discworld series, and apparently so could the upcoming Discworld series from BBC America. How so? Well it will probably be in the title that I haven’t written yet, but they could learn about how to effectively introduce social topics with subtlety.

 I’m currently re-listening to Feet of Clay, the third book following the City Watch and more specifically, Samuel Vimes (of ever increasing rank) and I’m reminded of how I always intended to write something on how Discworld and Sir Pratchett deal with social issues. In the previous book he explores racial issues, with Trolls and Dwarves (who are hated enemies) and even the undead; Detritus the troll is teamed up with Cuddy the dwarf during an investigation and they develop a mutual respect; Angua is a werewolf who is obviously hiding it and has to deal with her crush who, despite otherwise being 100% accepting of everything, has an unexpected dislike of undead.

  The best part of all this is how it’s never the main point. Somebody is running around with a dangerous weapon and the Watch are trying to find him before Vimes leaves the Watch to get married (or really just before the weapon kills again). Exploration of relationships and tensions between the races is simply a natural occurrence when they are put together and very little emphasis is put on it. This is in stark contrast to, say, Dr Who where they sit behind a dumpster and chat about it.

 In Feet of Clay we have some more racism: Angua the undead turns out to be prejudiced against the lifeless Golems. We also get a new character in the dwarf Cheery Littlebottom and yes, go ahead and laugh, she expects you to. Cheery is- not transgender, no matter what BBC America tries to tell you.

  She’s a dwarf and she’s a female, and that’s it.

  And that’s the problem.

  Now I love this little bit of dwarfish sociology, but while there is obviously the two sexes, there is only one gender: male (or dwarf? it’s kind of irrelevant at that point). On a side note, this is why it’s so useful to have a distinction between sex and gender; Sir Pratchett could never have so easily explored this side of Dwarf society if the concepts were one and the same.

  Dwarves are all short, muscular, bearded and gruff; they fight, they quaff and they sing about gold, and they all go by “he”. Dwarvish courting is a confusing mess where they have to cautiously figure out if their partner has the desired genitals.

    Cheery Littlebottom is not transgender, she is just openly female. Well, she’s trying to be. The trouble is that the Dwarves are conservative as all hell so she’s struggling to express herself. Obviously this feels a lot like an exploration of gender dysphoria, but she’s not actually transgender and by our definitions she’s CIS gendered. When in Making Steam, the Low King of the dwarves, or Low Queen as it is revealed, makes steps to allow female dwarves to be openly female, any social commentary kind of dies out as Cheery is no longer fighting accepted social rules.

  The fact that BBC America has apparently tried to make her this beardless drag queen (and I mean that in an descriptive sense rather than derogatory) just shows a complete dumbing down of the message.

 I’m really bemused by what BBC America are trying to do here and I’m eager to watch the series when it comes out in January; in part because it may just be a break-out success, but more likely because I do enjoy watching a good train wreck.

[firstpuffin]

One good thing about the Star Wars prequels: them ending

Yeah, yeah, funny joke I know. But that’s not what I was trying to do. Sure, I took advantage of the natural joke but that’s not what I meant by it at all.

  There are quite a few good things about the prequels: the flashy fights, the music, and possibly most of all the fan theories. Jar Jar would have made an amazing Sith if only because no-one would expect it, and Hayden Christensen playing such a stiff Anakin Skywalker because that’s how he struggles to marry his own emotions with the Jedi teachings.

  But what I want to talk about is subtly different, and is the accidental result of writing prequels to a story set in an evil tyrannical space-empire. I’m talking about how the movies had! Absolutely had to end badly for the heroes.

 How many decades have we had movies with happy endings? It’s really quite absurd at this point that so few directors have tried to change this up. Sure, you could say that people like a happy ending, but have you ever looked at a newspaper? Watched a horror movie where the villain does win?

  Fact is that we humans are a miserable bunch who enjoy other people’s misery so a bad ending (as we see in so many video games) isn’t all that risky of a move.

 And also interesting, and something that might not have been accidental, is how the endings to each movie ends progressively worse:

  The Phantom Menace ends ostensibly positively, even with Qui-Gon’s death- but this great man who could have done great things with Anakin, who understood the difficulties the boy would face far more than the other Jedi, dies. He’s gone, leading the galaxy down a dark path.

  It’s pretty obvious how The Clone Wars is darker: lots of Jedi Je-die (I’m sorry, I felt that pun and it needed to be let out lest it eat me from the inside) and a war begins. On a more personal note, our heroes are defeated and even the Grand Jedi Master is unable to prevail over Count Dooku, and good ol’ Anakin loses an arm, stepping down the path where Darth Vader waits.

  And Revenge of the Sith- well I’m not sure how much needs to be said. The senate and Anakin fall, and the Sith Empire and Darth Vader rise. Padme dies (although she was so boring that’s almost a positive), and the Jedi are crushed; all this leads to the world where the original trilogy began.

 The movies end progressively worse, and that’s just the endings. The movies themselves get darker too. I think that’s one reason why the prequels still seem to stand stronger in people’s opinions than the recent trilogy, following Rey and Kylo Ren.

  Those movies are objectively better, and yet I believe they get far more hate. Sure, there is an element of nostalgia, but I think it’s also because they are shallower. Things happen in a sterile sort of way, Rey is the first trilogy protagonist not to lose an extremity and I think that reflects a lot about the writing of the films. She had it easy. The movies always ended positively.

  It was just kind of dull.