NOTE: This will contain spoilers for Citizen Sleeper and Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector. If you haven't played thse two (excellent) games, parts of this will not make sense to you.
I think the world of Citizen Sleeper is one of the first times I have seen the idea of the Bronze Age Collapse translated into a proper hard sci-fi setting (and not pseudo-archaeological bullshit).
The Late Bronze Age Collapse in our history involved the near-total dissolution of the major civilizations of the time, as people actively reverted to simpler ways of living in the moment while continuing progress on technological development via improving the metalworking of iron. The Hittites collapsed, as did the Mycenaeans, and the Assyrian and the Egyptian empires barely survived. It was the lead-in to what is now known as the Greek Dark Ages.
The games channel the feeling of living in a period of marked civilizational decline, where the world is notably materially worse than before and we are visibly, actively regressing in the eyes of almost every single person across the world, where the best technology available is the detritus of a galaxy-spanning dominant company that went bankrupt ~70 years ago and took with it all the institutional knowledge that mage large parts of society function, forcing people to build something new in its wake.
And despite this, the new generation of talented people who want to make technological and social progress are not blind to the evils of the company that died, or the ones that came after - they are actively, consciously, deciding to preserve the good and discard the bad when it comes to pieces of the past. There is a profound sense of hope that we, the people, will get through this, and what will emerge on the other side of this slump is a better, kinder, more just world.
Juni is the most explicit example of looking to the past with fondness, but we see traces of this elsewhere as well, such as Feng's idolization of Erlin's ideals and in Yu-Jin searching for the fraction drive to try and escape. And even Juni remains aware that the systems of the past did a lot of bad, that needs to be dealt with for things to get better.
More subtly, we see this in all the AI systems that were either sapient or on the verge of it, that were built by Solhiem and only barely kept in check by the governance structures that could not be kept up by any successor authority. Hunter became arguably sapient, Neovend/Navigator definitely did become sapient, and the Gardener probably still counts as sapient despite how much it has ascended beyond what normal people can comprehend with ease. The Overseer and Warden are clearer still, in that they are both remnants of the old world that need to be reshaped into something better.
All this combined gives this image of a world in decline, but one that can be fixed - yes, life is hard, and widespread systemic collapse makes it harder, but there will always be kind people willing to lend a hand, a ear, a few bills, a bit of food, and maybe if we can pay that kindness forward, that can make the difference.
It's a profoundly hopeful sentiment that I find myself clinging into in the dark times we find ourselves in.
NOTE: This will contain spoilers for Signs of the Sojourner. If you haven't played it, this is my personal endorsement for the game being worth your time. It ain't worth much, but that's what I got.
I think Signs of the Sojourner is one of the most underrated games of this decade, and probably one of the best roguelike deckbuilders ever made.
Most roguelike deckbuilders are based around combat, around winning every confrontation and moving ahead. Griftlands, which is one of the few to try and portray the idea of conversation, still presents it as a different kind of combat, with the same models of victory and defeat.
Signs of the Sojourner, on the other hand, while still being a roguelike deckbuilder, presents conversation as a collaborative effort between two parties, who try their best to co-operate during the exchange. Most people are trying to reach some sort of consensus with you, and will try and co-operate to reach a favourable end. There are exceptions - Klaus will chatter on in the conversation where she is trying to steal your item, Li'l Basilio will use double-symbol cards to make accord easier when trying to steal your stuff with his gang, Anais is a guy who can match any card you play but is unbothered by your side of the conversation, and people with grief cards will often make mismatches even when a valid match is available. All of these have diegetic explanations, and fit into the larger world, without denying the basic idea that the majority of people you meet want to get along and work together for the common good.
I don't think I've played any other game where the mechanics of the game mesh this well with the story, and my plays (and misplays) translate this cleanly to expressions of my character. I feel the rush when I barely pull off a good exchange, and I feel the disappointment when I fail, more than in any other game, because of how closely the game encourages me to identify with Rhea. I find myself more emotionally invested here than with any other game.
I have seen a bunch of people talk about how you need to choose to specialize in certain symbols to make progress in your playthrough - however, I don't think this is true. I think it is possible to build a deck that can talk to (almost) everyone - and I also think the game is most rewarding when you do try to build that deck, because you will see how close your character can come to total perfection and trying to actually pull it off is one hell of an experience.
I have so many more thoughts about this game (about Lars and refugees, about Oscar and the impact people have on others, about Nadine and being a social chameleon, about climate catastrophe and belonging and home and so many other things), but I don't think I can get them into a coherent form now. This game has probably become my unqualified favourite, because of how long I have spent thinking about it.
Another Jason Todd crossover idea, this time with the Secret Histories
Note: This is mostly based on my experience with Cultist Simulator. I have not yet played Book of Hours, since I want to get through some modded runs of Cultist Simulator before I move on. If you have not played Cultist Simulator, this might not make much sense to you. Also, if you are not keyed into the Jason Todd fandom, this might not make sense to you.
I have been playing Cultist Simulator for the past few weeks (more accurately, this recent period is the first time I have had any real success with the game - I just got myself a Change:Balance ending, an Apostle Enthoate victory and a Priest Lock-Scar victory as opposed to previous spells with the game which ended very poorly for me), trying to get through all the endings for the base game and also trying out some modded characters. And since I am unable to stop thinking about Jason Todd, my brain went towards trying to connect him to the world of the Secret Histories.
Now, the obvious starting point for this thought process was the Exile legacy, and the way the conflict between the Exile and the Foe is a father-son fight while also being a parallel to the fight between the Colonel and the Lionsmith. It is fairly easy to see the Jason-Bruce dynamic in a similar light - another corrivality that parallels the eternal fight between the two Edge Hours.
However, I think it is much more interesting to try and figure out where Jason fits into the world of the Secret Histories without Batman's name and influence overshadowing his character. (Also, the Corrivality of the Colonel and the Lionsmith is better represented by either Ra's and Bruce or Ra's and Tim.)
The first place I went to was having him as a Name of the Elegiast - mostly because how the Elegiast represents the idea that death is inevitable, and that unjust deaths are remembered and accounted for. This feels very in-line with how I see Jason as an avenging angel of sorts, bringing what is essentially cosmic justice after other avenues are lost.
The second thought I had was that he would be a Name of The Horned Axe, because of how the Horned-Axe feels like a hanging spectre of earned vengeance upon the newer gods for The Lithomachy. While I don't see the Axe and Jason's hatred of the status quo of their world as the same, I definitely think they are analogous, and represent a similar ticking clock for the world.
The third angle that occured to me is the one that sees the Intercalate as analogous to Death in the Family. Here, regrettably, we are back in the presence of Batman and the Joker. The Joker represents the Forge of Days, whose 'love' is all consuming and destructive, and the duo of Batman and Robin represent the Sun-In-Splendour, for the light they represented in the world. The Rite Intercalate (i.e. Jason's murder) is appropriately apocalyptic, and Jason and Bruce are permanently divided at the end. Here, I think Bruce ends up representing The Meniscate - mostly because the Meniscate represents the moon, and also has aspects of Lantern (knowledge), Knock (unlocking secrets) and Forge (reshaping the material world), which align well with my vision of Bruce as a man keen on understanding the world, uncovering the secrets and shaping them into forms under his control. More importantly, Jason feels like a good analogue to The Sun-In-Rags - his light is not what it used to be, but it remains bright and powerful. The aspects of Lantern (knowledge) and Winter (death) also line up with how I see Jason here, as someone who retains his understanding of the world and now can inflict death within it.
I love the idea of him coming across random cultists trying to become Longs or Names, and him being an antagonist like Julian Crosley in the Apostle runs, trying to prevent these cultists from detonating eldritch nukes, feeding a bunch of minds to the light of the Glory, or preparing a feast of flesh for the ultimate meal. I don't think he would be part of the Suppression Bureau, or even remotely aligned with them, but he doesn't feel like a detached observer like Sulochana Amavasya either.
IMO, it would be hilarious to have him be a Name thanks to the universe-altering way he died and came back, and have him encounter a series of Longs that send a deluge of fantastical summoned spirits at him, only for them to fail to kill the guy and cause the aspiring Name to tear their hair out in frustration.
"What do you mean, both King Crucible and Ezeem failed to put a scratch on the guy? How is that even - okay, we'll send 10 Maids-In-The-Mirror this time, that should - not a scratch? Really? Okay, this is bullshit, but nevermind, we will proceed with our ritual to ascend to past the Lesser Crossroads to - oh, he's crashing our base? Well, send our best Assassins and Skintwisters at him and - oh, they all died? And he's coming for me directly? Fantastic. Brilliant. Just when I had finally gathered the Allure and the Watchman's Mirror to finally become a Name. Go ahead, just end me now. Fuck this guy and his whole deal."
IMO, we need more AUs which show Jason interacting with eldritch horrors.
GUYS. GUYS. GUYS. I FEEL LIKE IM GOING INSANE. THIS WHOLE CHARLIE KIRK SITUATION. EVERYONE HAS SO MUCH EMPATHY FOR HIM AND WHAT HAPPENED AND EVERYONE IS SAYING "I DIDN'T AGREE WITH HIM BUT NOBODY DESERVES TO DIE." IM SO GLAD TUMBLR IS ON MY SIDE I HAD TO CHECK TO MAKE SURE I WASNT CRAZY. BECAUSE MY INSTAGRAM FEED IS FILLED WITH "IF YOU ARE CELEBRATING HIS DEATH YOU'RE EVIL." GUYS. THIS IS EXACTLY THE SAME SITUATION AS THE HEALTHCARE CEO BRIAN THOMPSON. PEOPLE ARE SAYING CHARLIE DIDN'T DESERVE TO DIE AND USING THE ARGUMENT THAT "HE DIDN'T COMMIT ANY VIOLENCE HE JUST VOICED HIS OPINION. FREE SPEECH GOES BOTH WAYS." GUYS. GUYS. BOTH OF THEM DIDN'T DO ANYTHING DIRECTLY. NEITHER OF THEM PULLED A GUN ON SOMEONE AND SAID YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. BUT BOTH OF THEM SUPPORTED THINGS THAT PUT PEOPLE IN DANGER, MADE THEM LIFE IN FEAR, AND POTENTIALLY EVEN KILLED PEOPLE. BOTH OF THEM WERE INDIRECTLY INVOLVED IN PEOPLE'S DEATH. WHEN BRIAN THOMPSON DIED, WE ALL CELEBRATED. WE ACKNOWLEDGED THE BAD THINGS HE DID AND THE FLAWS IN AMERICA AS A WHOLE. WHENEVER SOMEONE TRIED TO DEFEND HIM WE SHAMED THEM. BUT NOW THAT CHARLIE KIRK IS DEAD PEOPLE ARE GOING "OH WHAT ABOUT HIS FAMILY. HE DOESNT DESERVE THAT HE DIDN'T HURT ANYBODY." GUYS. GUYS. WHAT THE FUCK??? IT'S THE SAME FUCKING THING. ITS THE SAME. CHARLIE KIRK HAD A FAMILY, YES, AND I THINK IT'S HORRIBLE THAT HIS CHILDREN HAD TO WATCH THEIR FATHER GET KILLED. THEY DON'T DESERVE THIS. BUT YOU KNOW WHAT ELSE IS HORRIBLE? WHEN CHARLIE KIRK SAID HYPOTHETICALLY, IF HIS TEN YEAR OLD DAUGHTER WAS RAPED, HE WOULD MAKE HER CARRY OUT THE PREGNANCY. WHEN HE SAID "I THINK IT'S WORTH TO HAVE A COST OF SOME GUN DEATHS EVERY SINGLE YEAR." I GUESS HE WAS WILLING TO PAY THAT FUCKING PRICE WASN'T HE. IM TIRED OF THIS. HE WAS A DISGUISTING HUMAN BEING. IM NOT A BAD PERSON FOR NOT MOURNING HIM. HE SAID EMPATHY WAS A "MADE UP NEW AGE WORD" THAT "DOES A LOT OF DAMAGE." SO WHY THE FUCK SHOULD I HAVE ANY EMPATHY FOR HIM.
I find myself reminded of the following exchange by Pratchett. Not exactly one to one, but still relevant, I think.
“Do you understand anything I’m saying?” shouted Moist. “You can’t just go around killing people!”
“Why Not? You Do.” The golem lowered his arm.
“What?” said Moist. “I do not! Who told you that?”
“I Worked It Out. You Have Killed Two Point Three Three Eight People” said the golem calmly.
“I have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr. Pump. I may be -- all the things you know I am, but I am not a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!”
“No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded, And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr. Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Did Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr. Lipvig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.”
Note - If you only care for Jason in a peripheral sense, as a secondary character for adding substance to stories about other primary characters, this is not exactly for you. This is primarily aimed towards people who care about Jason as a character unto himself.
Given the outcome of DC's latest attempt at Red Hood, I think it is fair to say that long-term prospects for the character look bleak. Fair warning, I will now try to convince you that things cannot get better, in the long term.
The other vigilante characters around Batman who kill are always treated by the narrative as making morally inferior choices. There is never any doubt about Bruce being a better man who makes better choices that the mere mortals around him could not. Often, their views on killing are formed before their interaction with Batman, and the narrative frames the latter as an ideal for them to strive towards.
With Jason, it is nearly impossible to let this assumption stand without serious mental gymnastics. Jason's decision to kill the people he considers irredeemable comes after he has seen Batman's way result in the gross miscarriage of justice - and yeah, the Joker going unpunished for his actions does count as a miscarriage of justice.
(Also, I disagree with the impulse to invoke some sort of Watsonian vs. Doylist argument here - DC wants us to take the world seriously as a long-running serialised narrative, so a refusal to incorporate actions having consequences reduces the credibility of the world as a believable piece of fiction that one can get invested in. The custodians of the project need to figure out a way to maintain some form of meaningful consequences within the universe, or else I stop caring about what they have to say. I would imagine I am not alone in this assessment.)
When other Bat-adjacents kill people, they are framed as inferior people who have not seen Bruce's light and glory. Jason's history, for the most part, prevents that kind of framing - here, we can blame UTRH, which made the grievous error of making Jason's perspective the result of his experiences. Jason is killing people because he believes Bruce's way doesn't work, not because he hasn't thought of the idea at all. This means that we unfortunately cannot rely on Jason being inherently corrupt and inferior, and we have to consider, even momentarily, the proposal on its own merits.
And what this argument boils down to, what it is, is this - one must trust the existing social order, because the arc of the world will bend towards justice. That eventually, there is a cosmic good that will inevitably triumph over evil. And to be on Batman's side, you need to be able to buy that idea as is. Ideally, DC would prefer you believe it in real life to minimise the cognitive load of buying into the DC universe. This is the basic idea underpinning the outcome of the story.
And the history of the world in the past 60 years, but especially the period post 2005, has shown that this is a fantasy. It would take the average comic reader an increasingly ridiculous amount of effort to believe that the current political order in most countries is even occasionally thinking about justice, let alone the premise of a cosmic sense of right and wrong. It's a less extreme example of what happened with Magneto - the way so much of the world has slid into authoritarianism and bigotry makes all the extra-judicial killing these characters do feel like the only approximation of justice we can get.
We find ourselves surrounded by people eager to sacrifice already marginalized groups so that they can get another chance to be the lucky few wearing the boot of capitalism that bears on everyone else's neck. We find, also, a massive swathe of people who are uncomfortable with this violence, but won't act to prevent it, if it means that they get a chance to be the same kind of boot as the first group. And given that we can see that most of these people in the real world will never see reason, and will also never have to come to terms with the pain they cause, the violence that Red Hood unleashes on people who otherwise would continue to go unpunished feels cathartic.
To me, this also explains why we have seen so many writers try to portray Jason as having been 'rotten from the start'. If Jason was already predisposed to violence, if he was inherently vulnerable to the seduction of violence, then one doesn't need to think about trusting the systems of justice that Batman wants to support. Jason can be slotted into the same pool as Ra's, Talia, Minhkhoa, Kate and Helena - people who are simply incapable of seeing Bruce's way. (The spectrum of where these people lie on the ally to enemy scale is intentional.)
UTRH was itself an overreach in terms of the window of discussion it permitted regarding Batman's morals within the narrative itself. They have been trying to correct it ever since.
Despite my dislike for the actual execution, I think Gretchen Felker-Martin had the right idea - Jason cannot hope to be who he is under Bruce's shadow. He needs his own space where he can exist on his own terms.
Again, if you only care for Jason as a useful tool for adding substance to stories about other characters, I imagine this doesn't mean much to you. It only means something if you care about Jason in an independent fashion.
I think it is time that us Jason fans give up on DC doing anything good with the character. He can never have stories that allow him to exist independently in his own home city. The existence of Batman will not permit it.
Umamusume: Pretty Derby - Beginning of a New Era (film)
Film as a medium is notable for its combination of audiovisual storytelling, but also for its temporal limitations: almost all feature films range between 90 and 180 minutes, or what is expected to be viewed in a single sitting. This limitation has had a unique impact on the sports narrative in film. A single game in most popular team sports will last 3 hours or more, so sports films have become masters of shorthand, commonly expressed through montage; even a climactic game will depict only a few pivotal moments, with the rest of the game implied by transitional shots of the scoreboard.
While this reliance on shorthand renders possible the compression of a season- or tournament-spanning narrative in a single film, it comes with a sense of detachment from the film's ostensible subject, the sport. With a few exceptions, such as the obscure 1999 Kevin Costner film For Love of the Game (which has a bottle episode-like focus on a single perfect game), a sports film is more about what happens off the field than on: teamwork-building, practice, behind-the-scenes drama, adversity overcome. The actual sport is depicted as a series of benchmarks for progress (the team is bad; the team is heating up; the team is winning the championship), not as a complex combination of strategy and physical performance with its own innate, rules-based drama. For example, the most popular sports film of the past two decades is probably Moneyball, a film that as part of its core premise focuses more on the team manager than any on-field player.
This limitation of the sports film became clear to me when someone got me to watch 100+ episodes of Haikyu!!, an anime about a high school volleyball team. Unfettered by the temporal constraints of film, Haikyu!! delves much more deeply into the particulars of its sport of choice, dedicating as much as an entire season of TV to a single match. There is minimal shorthand, so while Haikyu!! does not eschew training, improvement, and off-the-court drama, it is deemphasized relative to the sport; often, the longform format enables the show to depict these things during matches themselves, as there is enough time for characters to struggle, learn, develop, and overcome on the court. As someone who enjoys sports -- even as someone who does not enjoy the time it takes to watch a 100+ episode show -- I vastly preferred this approach, which centers the story around volleyball ("Volleyball" is, in fact, what the title translates to) far more than what you'd typically see in a sports film.
With this context, the fact that the horsegirl gacha game movie is the best sports film I've ever seen is likely significantly a byproduct of the specific sport the film is about. Horse racing isn't a team sport and an individual race does not take more than a few minutes. Because of this, Beginning of a New Era is able to depict races in full, and depict them often, frequently with minimal narrative tissue in between. The characters themselves are often narratively backgrounded; there are only six characters total with any role at all, and only four with a significant role. Even these four are relatively anonymized within the narrative. The protagonist, Jungle Pocket, is startlingly single-dimensional, devoid of backstory or character traits beyond her all-consuming drive to win. Her rival, Agnes Tachyon, while more superficially eccentric, likewise has no past. Neither interact with anyone who isn't either a fellow racer or a coach; their lives revolve entirely around racing, yet there are no stakes to their races other than their desire to win. They don't need money, or status, or anything else, and the only adversity they face -- besides losing -- is the omnipresent threat of injury, which is devastating because it prevents them from racing. (Three of the five characters who race have their careers curtailed by injury at some point or another.)
What matters, then, is the sport. The sport of horse racing, specifically, a sport relatively low on strategy or complexity, so that there is little opportunity for even the in-depth detail that makes Haikyu!! so compelling. Of course, if there were complexity, it couldn't be appropriately handled given the temporal limitations of the medium. This film introduces two different color commenters across its runtime, who combine for a single one-sentence remark explaining the sport's strategy. By far the more memorable line from the commenter booth comes from the play-by-play commenter, screaming at the end of a match:
The trick Beginning of a New Era pulls is to blast everything, from plot to character to complexity, down to absolutely nothing. In this nothingness, it is able to convey a stark emotional intensity so powerful it compensates for everything willingly discarded and then some. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the film's music, which it rarely uses, often willing to let entire minutes-long races play out with the only audio being the pounding of hooves(?) and the layered panting of every racer, before subtly transitioning into an understated electronic beat. It is strikingly minimalistic, much like all the traditional narrative aspects of the film. It emphasizes the physicality of the sport over the emotions of the competitors. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the film's one training montage, which is not actually a montage because it lacks any music at all.
Montages are ubiquitous in sports media as they depict improvement rapidly, bridging the narrative gap between failure and success. But in this film, the training montage appears near the end, after Jungle Pocket has already won the championship handily (thanks to Agnes Tachyon's injury-related retirement). Without music, the montage makes no emotional statement, but its tranquility (set mostly on an idyllic beach) contrasts the next race, where rain hammers down and Jungle Pocket loses to a field of nobodies due to a mental, rather than physical, block. Retrospectively, the montage suggests a misalignment in Jungle Pocket's priorities, an inability to deal with the true limiting factors holding her back, but the neutrality of the montage itself leaves its position and purpose ambiguous until viewed within the film's greater context. Jungle Pocket is a brutish character, incapable of expressing herself beyond her repeated desire to "be the strongest," and the minimalistic intensity of the storytelling supports her point of view, until she runs up against the wall of her perceived inadequacy compared to the retired (and thus unbeatable) Agnes Tachyon.
Nowhere is this conflict between the physical and the mental more clear than in the film's visual decisions, which range from smear frames devoted to a purely physical depiction of speed and emotion:
To surreal, psychological imagery:
It is this psychological imagery that provides the complexity to a narrative otherwise devoid of it, accomplishing through evocation and suggestion what the script, characters, and sport itself lacks. It culminates in Jungle Pocket literally crushing her mental landscape to bits with her hand, releasing herself from the psychological to participate in a final race that is almost exclusively physical in its presentation. And, of course, this dichotomy of presentation feeds back into the core conflict between Jungle Pocket (physical, brute) and Agnes Tachyon (mental, scientist).
It is also, perhaps, the exact perfect mode of presentation for this utterly bizarre franchise, which has as a conceit (horses are replaced by human girls who are superhumanly strong) something that seems to invite further explanation, worldbuilding, a depiction of a totally reoriented society, but is perfectly content to instead show only horse racing. I watched this film with four other people and they could not stop asking "I wonder if horse girls fought in historic wars" or "Are there horse girls who don't race?", questions the film refuses to even gesture toward answering. This may be a battle of body and mind, but in the end, body triumphs. Well, maybe not. The movie ends, in an utterly surreal curveball, with the characters performing a concert. This concert finale is a violent intrusion of the franchise's gacha roots onto a film that is otherwise virulently opposed to idol aesthetic (or gacha-ism; the limited cast means there are barely any characters being promoted), on one hand reasserting normalcy for the property and on the other hand emphasizing via juxtaposition the emotional intensity of what came before. It's also, perhaps, the perfect conclusion to a work that is so keen on balancing the real and surreal, the minimalist and maximalist, the physical and mental.
To add a somewhat pedantic point to this - the surrealist presentation in the film cannot be said to replace dialogue, because the whole point of the film (as I understood it) is that words cannot convey what the characters feel. This is analogous to musicals and martial arts cinema - a race, like a fight scene or a musical number, is the only way to express/understand what Pocket and Tachyon feel.
Whenever I think about the SCP fandom, I go through this cycle where I marvel at the sheer amount of innovative stuff they have come up with and how they are at the cutting edge of hard sci-fi writing in the modern age (one of the 7000 contest entries was about super slippery ice, back when we didn't actually have an explanation for the phenomenon), and then I remember what happened to SCP-2721 and I become overcome with anger and try to stop thinking about SCPs.
I think the conservative part of the fandom that wants representation for minorites to remain locked up in a small space that is easy to ignore remains alive and well.
For those who are unaware of the controversy - there was an SCP, SCP-2721, that was about a pair of entities intended to be weapons for planetary destruction. You can read it here. In case you don't want to, here's the basic gist you need to know - one of the two entities somehow decided to make art about Homestuck and discuss Homestuck and queer issues on Tumblr, and the other joined a group called Gamers Against Weed as Bones. We're primarily concerned with the first.
A lot of people cottoned on to the fact that the experience of an eldritch mass of tissue orbiting near the earth who empathises with the struggle of trans people and feels similarly trapped in a body that contradicts her desired identity of 'woman enjoying Homestuck and making associated art' was a metaphor of some sort. A lot of people said the SCP was bad because 'Homestuck is bad and has no business being invoked in SCPs'. Even the people who ostensibly were not queerphobic said, "But does it really need to have references to Homestuck? I am queer, but Homestuck isn't even good, why are we invoking it?"
If anyone who believes that comes across this post, here's an idea for you.
The SCP isn't saying that Homestuck is good. The SCP is saying that Homestuck is important. And it is saying that Homestuck is important because art that allows people to find themselves in foreign experiences, that elevates people, that gives people comfort and joy, that leaves people as more than what they were before, is important. No matter what you think about the quality of Homestuck, Homestuck is, and will remain, important in the history of queer literature, because it was the first time a lot of young queer people saw themselves represented in the spaces they were in.
And I don't remember seeing this point raised by any of the people trying to defend the SCP and make sure it didn't get brigaded into deletion.
I think the magic of SCP-2721 lies in how it is also a representation of the experience of trans people and how its text doesn't have the Foundation supress Lyris' expression of her identity. It offers outsiders an interpretation of what being trans is like, a lens to try and understand it, and speaks to how art allows to understand things we couldn't have otherwise. It is actually able to break the box that the 2000-series articles were supposed to be about, but I guess we don't actually want that, eh?
To paraphrase Eli, I will love the SCP until the parts that make me turn to dust.
I've been reading a bunch of DP x DC crossover fics with Jason and Danny (sometimes as the central romantic couple, sometimes connected differently) and some of them do manage to utilize the cosmic horror angle well. This got me thinking about how Jason could work in the SCP setting.
From the outset - I think the All-Caste connection gives a great starting point for why Jason coming into contact with the anomalous is sensible. The All-Caste trains him to use soul magic, and trains him to watch for signs of the world stepping to the left of normal. Still, the real first encounter must come within Gotham, while he is established as Red Hood.
Maybe he comes across an anomalous object in Gotham, and somehow ends up interacting with the Foundation. Maybe he comes across some Serpent's Hand members transporting some anomalous texts. Maybe he comes across one of the Children of the Forest, and escapes unscathed somehow. In all cases, he proves to be resistant to the amnestics and memetic agents utilised by the group he is interacting with.
I think it would be interesting to see the Foundation try to deal with him. Maybe this is a symptom of me having consumed all the Kool-Aid, but I think that in this crossover, Jason himself is anomalous enough to merit an entry in the database, and maybe even a Person of Interest file.
I think it would be interesting to have him become a contractor for The Wandsmen (of Kul-Manas). I headcanon Jason as immortal and street-savvy, so I think he would be useful for mapping out places other Wandsmen couldn't risk going to. He becomes the one to produce the first detailed map of Alagadda and Corbenic, by virtue of being able to blend in and walk away from the scrapes when shit gets out of hand. Also, it would dovetail nicely into the storytelling angle of having him walk away from Gotham to grow into a more complete version of himself.
Continuing this thread, it would be hilarious to have Constantine find out somehow, get involved in a few 2-person adventures, get scared shitless, and then have them part for a while. Later, when Jason is back in Gotham (at least part time), we can have Constantine, Jason and the Bats get involved in anomaly-adjacent scenarios where Jason keeps threatening to take John to a live performance of The Hanged King's Tragedy in Alagadda whenever he is minorly inconvenienced. And given that John has seen him use the map he got from the Wandsmen to teleport a guy who he fought once in a bar, John knows to take the threat seriously.
Jason rises from his grave, wanders into and around Gotham, is rescued by Talia, is taken to the League, hangs around being non-verbal and minimally self-sufficient, gets dunked in the best/worst natural spring, comes back rejuvenated.
He comes back with near-total amnesia. He remembers flashes of his death, of flying, and of a long, black cape. He has one clear memory - a large man, dressed in a dark costume, telling him that he is not Jason's father, that he doesn't need teenage rebellion.
Jason decides that given the nature of the memory, and Talia's offer of a place in exchange for guarding her son, he'll stay where he is. He is eventually led to the All-Caste, where he gains a taste for moral philosophy and a desire for formal education so that he can explain to Ducra why staying in a cave to cultivate a cult for fighting immortal monsters does not, in fact, solve the problem of evil.
He takes his A levels (since the November exams are a good way to graduate faster) and goes to university. Probably Oxford/Cambridge. Narratively, I'm going for a prestigious institute with credibility both in biotech and in philosophy/social sciences that is outside North America. This is to indicate that despite Jason's talent, Talia's connections were crucial in getting a seat. My hadcanon is that Talia is the most talented biotechnologist on the planet, it's just that Ra's in his obsession with eternal life has ignored her daughter's actual abilities and ideas.
He learns about effective social policy and graduates wanting to change the world with this newfound knowledge. He also learns that he is gay. His choice in boyfriends causes Talia much distress. (She maintains that they were all bad influences. Ronnie crashed his car twice in one semester.)
Once he's back, he convinces Talia that the three of them need to get out. Using whatever plot mechanics are convenient, Talia ends up in Metropolis heading Head Industries, and has to take Damian with herself. She can either try to hide him from Bruce, or rip the band-aid off and let him know.
It is decided that Damian will live with Bruce for a few years. Jason is there as a bodyguard. Jason is given a small brief about Bruce Wayne, and the three of them go to drop Damian and Jason off at Wayne Manor.
It's a weekend. The Bats are eating breakfast together when the summons come through.
The Bats see Batman Junior and have a collective freak-out. They may or may not recognize Jason. The standard fanon first interaction between Damian and the Bats happens. Jason provides unhelpful commentary as he watches Batman struggle to complete a single normal exchange with his newfound son.
Then Jason turns to Talia and tells her:
"You can no longer complain about my taste in men."
Talia raises an eyebrow.
"You had a kid with that guy."
Before Talia or Bruce can muster a response, Jason adds: "He can't be good enough in bed to justify that level of unearned privilege. Even the Eton kids at Oxford were better than this. Hell, I'm sure Ronnie was better than this."
"Ronnie picked up 12 points on his license in-"
"Your beloved has no idea what milk costs. Ronnie never stooped to that level."
The Batkids laugh out loud. Bruce is dumbstruck. Talia sighs.
I've been working on a game on and off for about a year. I haven't been able to give it much time recently because of the chemo, but I got back to it recently after a few months of not checking it because I was stuck.
I'm working with Godot in C#, and I have been trying to get a button press to trigger an event across scenes. I tried to figure out why the _pressed() event got triggered in the child scene, but the listener in the parent was not. And today, after months of ruminating on this, I see that the reason is that I had added the callable for the listener in the child scene, and not in the parent scene.
Like, I have been trying to work out signal buses and autoloaders, and all I needed to do was change which scene I had open.
I was able to programmatically generate a non-rectilinear tilemap via code, but I couldn't get a button click to work for nearly a year.
Going through a modded XCOM WotC campaign right now, and this is what one of my best soldiers looks like with the Warden armour (i.e. top-tier armour).
The only way I can explain this is that she is so good at killing aliens that defence is unnecessary. She is an amalgamation soldier, Pistoleer-Rocketeer-Sentinel class. Her kit has gotten to the point where I am chucking her into a group of 6 aliens with 20+ HP on each and expecting that she will kill them all, as long as she can land her shots. And if someone survives her turn, they die to her reaction fire when they try to do anything on their turn, because she is just that good.
Who needs armour when you can kill everything first instead?
I just noticed what this XCOM 2 achievement was called...
I've been playing this game for over 7 years (including the time I played a cracked version in college because I was too broke to afford to buy games), and I've never known this.
I hate how my brain immediately went to the associated lyrics. Now I'm wondering what a Revolutionary War-style mod would look like for XCOM 2.
I haven't even skulljacked the Advent Officer yet, it's too early for me to be thinking of another campaign with completely different mods.
I’m sorry but I need to speak my truth; too many people seem to think Syril didn’t do evil things simply because they like him as a character. (This is not a judgement on liking Syril as a character.) You can empathize with a CHARACTER and understand why they are the way they are while also knowing they are a fundamentally bad person.
He had no community to speak of. He came of age during Imperial rule and probably hardly remembers life under the Republic, which to many was the same thing. He lives on Coruscant, which is an incredibly oppressive place to live. He receives a single shaft of natural light in his home at a certain time of day. He lived under the thumb of his oppressive mother.
All of these things allow you to understand how this character is fully rounded as a person and how he has come to be who he is. Syril’s biggest problem is that he simply cannot begin to fathom any nuance. This is shown to us immediately when he talks to Chief Inspector Hyne about the two corpo cops that were killed by Cassian. Hyne immediately understands every bit of nuance to the situation and why, through this kind of malicious compliance, they can keep the Imperials happy and keep their jobs while doing the least. Syril DESPISES this. He organizes a raid and MULTIPLE people get killed all because Syril could not understand the complexity of a situation.
We see this again when he cannot turn his cop brain off and continues his relentless foolish quest to get Andor, simply because he cannot understand that he himself is the one that has ruined everything. He knows the Empire does bad things and STILL pursues Dedra. He helps the Empire with their anti-Ghorman propaganda by being a double agent. He has blinders on so tight that he can’t begin to put the pieces of his own flaws together and how he’s being used as a pawn by the regime until the very last moment. All he sees through the blinders is Andor and Syril’s possible sympathies for the Ghormans evacuate his brain immediately. He aided in dooming the planet. He would get ruthlessly judged in any tribunal had there been any for him.
I would have been a lot more okay with the way Cinta died if killing off black and brown characters for the sake of the development of white characters weren't already a pattern for Andor.
I see the tragic sort of irony in the fact that Cinta seems almost invincible in the face of danger from the Empire— she's so alert and competent and ready for anything— of course it could only be an accident that she wouldn't see coming. And I see the interest in the concept of there being a death on this mission not because of the Imperial crackdown the group was afraid of, but because a green kid could only see that outside danger instead of the even more likely dangers of within-group panic and disorganization.
But it all rings hollow when over and over and over, the writers of Andor kill off darker-skinned characters just so the lighter-skinned ones can have their character development moments. Taramyn and Gorn dying first and fastest at Aldhani, Birnok being introduced just to help Cassian plan before he's killed off immediately so Kino and Melshi can get their moments instead. Then tossing Nurchi in there just to die just because, I guess. The way Clem is mostly there for his death to be a catalyst to Maarva and Cassian.
And so all I can think about watching this scene is wow, what a surprise, we killed off the brown girlfriend so the white one can have her moment of tragedy and eloquent monologue. It makes me furious, it makes me sad, it makes me bitter and resentful that this just keeps happening and happening in a show where I KNOW the writers are capable of doing better and yet they CHOOSE not to every. single. time.
As an Indian, I find myself not particularly surprised or aggrieved at this, since this falls into a wider pattern of disappointing Indian representation in Western media. There are also a bunch of other factors, which lead me to see this as the expected result.
First - Vardha Sethu being a British actor was part of why she got cast. Professionally speaking, she is part of the British TV industry. That's why she's on the show that has hired a bunch of British actors to fill out the roster. I feel reasonably confident in my belief that they were not looking to represent Indians in Star Wars, and Cinta was a happy accident.
Second - until Across The Spider-Verse, I didn't think I would ever see decent representation for Indians in mainstream media from the West. And given that a broad character like Pavitr would not count as great representation if he was Black or Latine, I think we're unlikely to have it go much farther than what we have now.
Third - India is not a massive enough market for most Western media to merit special targeting, nor are Indians living outside the country a massive enough demographic to merit special consideration. I don't see this changing anytime soon, at least not enough for Western production companies to take a direct interest. Indians are likely to see themselves represented well only in Indian productions - and even that will depend on which specific sub-industry you are looking at.
Does it suck that the first Indian person to show up in Star Wars got murked for a white girl's character development? Yes, it does. But Hollywood couldn't manage to give Irfan Khan a script worthy of his talent for the decade he spent there, so this is to be expected. Priyanka Chopra has been there for longer, and she hasn't had any of her English-audience work come close to a fraction of her performance in Barfi or The Sky Is Pink.
And hey, maybe they go back to Golak from Visions sometime and we get something better than this.
I'm seeing a lot of people try and litigate if Cinta's death counts as a 'bury your gays' moment, due to the origins of the trope being based in the disposability of queer characters over the straight ones and ambiguity over whether it is actually an essential feature of the trope.
However, I can propose an alternative.
Whether it counts as an instance of the trope or not, what it is, is a kick in the teeth. And the writers clearly want to kick the audience in the teeth. To top it off, Vel's speech to the offending kid is meant to hurt even more while we, the audience, are curled up in pain.
And given the moment we are in, where queer people stand to lose what rights we have gained over the last few decades as authoritarianism rises across the globe, it would be really nice for media that features us to not kick us in the teeth. Even if it is service of its broader themes, even if it fits the story, even if it is given the gravity and weight it deserves. I just don't want to get kicked in the teeth right now.
This is what happens when you don't watch things you complain about, or you're simply racist. Those 2 aren't even the first LGBTQ characters in Star Wars, and they've been the official couple for years now. And the most important thing, that's not Bix.
"How was I supposed to know they're two different characters? They're both brown! What do you mean, one is Latine and the other is South Asian? Neither of those places exist in Star Wars!"
