Blade Runner 2049 was a nice way to end the story. My hope at first was that they would carve out a new story out of whole cloth within the same universe, but that was dashed early on when I saw promo photos featuring Harrison Ford standing around in a grease-stained t-shirt and holding a rectangular bottle of Johnnie Walker Black.
It’s 2049.
Rick Deckard has let himself go.
Instead we get a story that overlays onto the original’s and interlinks with it in a subtle enough way that it doesn’t feel like a direct, slavish sequel. The premise here could have easily followed the mold of The Hangover Part 2, i.e. “OH SHIT, IT HAPPENED AGAIN”. In fact, it teases this idea early on when K, the main character played by Ryan Gosling, meets with his LAPD boss and she flips through the profiles of several Nexus 6 replicants still on the loose, a la Bryant’s briefing of Deckard in the original. Thankfully the movie forges its own path. (within reasonable limits)
K is easily one of the best parts of the movie. He’s everything Deckard in the original film wasn’t: empathetic, humane (he prefers to arrest rather than retire, not that he’s very successful in that pursuit), in possession of a decent sense of humor, and invested in the plight of replicants -- it’s made clear very early on that K is a new-model replicant. No two-decade-long mystery kept up by a mentally unstable movie director this time!
Despite all his positive traits, however, he’s hated, or at best ignored. Whereas the original never went into what anyone other than the LAPD and Tyrell Corporation thought of replicants, 2049 pulls no punches in showcasing the reflexive hatred with which most people treat artificial humans. In this sense, K is the perfect protagonist for a story of the 21st century; being a decent man matters little in an indecent world.
The other best part of the movie is how well it integrates all of its influences. 2049 is true to the universe of the original, down to recreating its early-80s conception of the future where Atari and PanAm still exist, along with the Soviet Union. It manages to do this without any of it feeling forced or maudlin, the camera lingering too long so that the point hits you between the eyes like the laser tube round that aerates Leon’s brain pan.
What really stands out, though, isn’t the evocations of the original, but the echoes of all the other works that influenced, or were influenced by Blade Runner. At this point Blade Runner is one of the most influential movies of all time. It makes a poetic sort of sense that the sequel would have the recursive influence of stuff inspired by the original. It’s hard to watch any of the scenes within the monolithic Wallace Corporation, especially the scene of a replicant birthing, and not see the direct influence of Ghost in the Shell. Similarly, K’s relationship with his holographic AI wife -- which is handled with remarkable sensitivity and lack of snark at K’s expense -- is hard to sit through and not think of more than a few anime and manga that have come out since the mid 00s.
There is also a pervasive theme of gynophobia throughout the movie, which could be attributed in part of the general direction of a lot of sci-fi anime since Ghost in the Shell. I think, however, that that theme speaks more to one of the many malaise currently afflicting 21st century Western collective consciousness, along with mass extinction, out-of-control pollution, child labor, and corporate hegemony, all of which are present and accounted for in Blade Runner 2049!
In summary: I look forward to the next movie where Sci-fi Harrison Ford can reunite with his estranged daughter.
The reason nerd/geek/otaku/fujo-whatever subcultures feel like a poor, forced fit into modern Western liberal ethos is because they are.
These subcultures hold in common a preoccupation with the identification, categorization and taxonomy of everything. The preoccupation extends to themselves too -- not just as a collective, but individually as well. Public documentation of one’s media consumption preferences segues seamlessly into public documentation of personal lifestyle preferences. In both cases the documentation is exhaustive, adamant (if not belligerent) and rigid. We can see that behavior exhibited on every sector of the sociopolitical and lifestyle spectrum as it applies to geeks.
While performative self identification can be and often is a boost of visibility for marginalized elements, it is also quite frequently a conservative act. It’s as much about defining what one isn’t as what one is, and in the most absolute of terms. I am a Y -- by extension I am not an X, nor a Z. Do not talk to me about X or Z, do not proposition me with anything regarding X or Z, I am not and will never be interested in X or Z.
At its heart this is an impulse to try and maintain control and self-sovereignty by putting out big loud warning sounds against that which is not the same as you. The performative act of being in these subcultures is an epistemological winnowing down, done through declarative statements of identity -- the performative act of cultural conservatism is identical. This is why, to me, posting of one’s alternative gender preferences, fandoms, music genre or alternative sociopolitical affiliations in social media profile blurbs often feels the same as profiles covered in national flags and/or nationalist icons (or pickup trucks) and containing prose along the lines of “traditionalist, Christian, individualist.“ Functionally they ARE the same act.
At its core the liberal position should be an openness to new experiences and branching out to try many different things. There’s no fear of this hurting one’s reputation or image because the ultimate goal is to make it so that anyone can be or do as they wish. Why fear the potential of change -- a change in experience, or a change in oneself -- when there’s no retribution-based social impulse, in fandoms or at large, to remain the same? I am an X and I will do something completely counter to the norms of X and jump into Y. Why? Why not? I don’t lose X by adopting Y, and even if I do sideline X for a time, there’s nothing saying I can’t come back to it later.
To have a society where the paramount right is the individual’s ability to curate the world around them, everything they see or experience at any given moment -- that’s a model that already exists and it’s called conservatism.
A lot of the perceived social illiteracy of geeky people is because of an acute lack of counsel. The geek doesn’t have a close-knit group of socially literate peers with whom to bounce off and refine their inferences about the world and society. Therefore, the average lead time before a bad or straight-up incorrect belief about How Things Work is far, far longer. In contrast, the so-called Normal Person may formulate just as many wrong observations but, through frequent peer group interactions, is able to “vet” and cycle out these fallacies and move closer to a semblance of social aptitude much faster. This is the crux of awkwardness.
One of the most common and bedeviling fallacies that develops as a result of the no-counsel dilemma is overestimation of what is needed to progress. What that means is geeks, as a result of their misapprehensions of the nature of the world, often believe that they have to collect and embody a huge panoply of things before they can perform an action or make a life decision.
I can’t apply for this job until I have every single one of the bullet point proficiencies under my belt; I can’t be social until people like me; I can’t crack jokes until I’m funny; I can’t respect myself until others respect me; I can’t love people until I’m already loved. You can probably see the dynamic at play: putting the cart before the horse. This is why so many geeks’ lives seem to be held in stasis.
The reality is that no one is ever fully prepared for any action, transition or movement. The reason it’s impossible to predict the future with 100-percent accuracy is because the future is a flux state that’s in a perpetual state of becoming the present. (Soren Kierkegaard’s concept, not mine) Certainty can only be applied to the future when it’s already been experienced as the present, or the past. Similarly, in reality no one is ever 100-percent prepared for a promotion, relationship, a trip, or anything else, because to attempt those things is a decision made in the present which will be executed in the future. (which can’t be predicted)
For many Normal People, this is all a given. Of course you accept a job for which you’re only 75, or 60-percent qualified, because there’s no other way to become proficient in that 40 percent you lack. You respect yourself even when others don’t because the chances of people coming around to respect someone who has no self-respect are 0 percent.
This is the nature of the world. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is either blithe or trying to deceive you into a social kayfabe that conceals the fact they use this unpreparedness dynamic to move themselves forward through life as well. To become something you must first do it, then fit yourself to the mould. If you don’t enter that mould, your chances of shaping yourself are slim to none.
You find, suddenly, that you’ve lost one of your dimensions. It’s inevitable; becoming something that has “fans” is the act of becoming a symbol – comprehensible at a glance, a simplified abstraction of a more complex idea(s), two-dimensional. Even if people self-identify as fans of something appreciably complex in nature, their expressions of fan affection aren’t directed upon all the complex facets of that thing in its totality but rather the simplified symbol that represents it for the fandom at large.
Tolstoy fans aren’t fans of the way in which his prose in War and Peace uses the hysterical randomness of warfare to illustrate how individuals are largely unable to affect the currents of history past their immediate surroundings, etc. Instead, they’re fans of the idea of Tolstoy. The frumpy old Slav in boots with the long-ass beard, the vaguely proto-hippie vibe manifested by his philosophical writing, an image of bumbling Pierre and noble Andrei, an image of proud doomed Anna, broken and repentant Ivan Ilych, something about rustic dachas surrounded by vast thatches of milk thistle and mustard weed. All of those half-formed feelings and vibes get compressed down into the brand that represents Tolstoy in the fandom’s collective, agreed-upon understanding. Thus it is for fans, and thus it is for things and individuals that fans conspire to make into a brand.
Fandom is a network for individuals to converge socially around a shared affinity for something. To be a functional conduit for that convergence, however, the nature of that thing must minimize points of friction and maximize nodes on which fans can connect easily (“Can we all agree that…”). You cannot have a fandom that doesn’t reduce a work down into a caricature of itself, because rasterizing works down into two-dimensionality is what makes fandom work in the first place. Take that away and you have… what? A group of people discussing the various aspects of a thing? The average person would be glancing around nervously wondering if the midterm will be open notes.
(This is a second installment to a short piece I wrote awhile ago. You can read that one right here)
I couldn’t stop my scream of effort. The sound of my voice surprised myself for a second before being swallowed by the roar of the audience. Fighting through my agony, I became aware of them, a wall of flushed, yelling faces and puffy jackets plastered over with foreign flags – red-blue-white, blue-yellow, red-black-gold, blue-white.
It’s a sight you grow accustomed to in this sport: the sea of multicolored crosses all lying on their sides.
And then the pressure stopped pushing up into my thighs. The skis shifted under my feet, leveling off against the hard snow. My ankles decompressed like wound springs freed from a boulder that had been pressing down on them. My weight moved forward; I slid into a crouch, tucking the ski poles under my armpits so that my arms were like the wings on a trussed chicken. I coasted – ten meters, twenty, thirty, until I passed the straightaway and hurtled down the decline.
Wind sliced at my face around the sides of my shooting googles; the yelling from the stands disappeared under the roaring in my ears. As I came down the hill I saw the target range and firing lanes at the bottom. I loosened my grip on my poles by the smallest of fractions to begin flexing my hands to warm them up.
I generated enough velocity to make it all the way to the range without bringing my poles down for a single ski-skate. I had to shift and lower one knee, using a quick Telemark turn to slow to a halt in front of my firing lane. The rifle slapped my back, as if scolding me for the messy technique.
Five black eyes peered at me from across the range. I unslung my rifle and set the base of the stock against my hip as I went to my knees. From there I got into prone position, feeling the cold sting of the sweat-soaked top press against my front. My skis splayed in the snow behind me. With my left hand I positioned the rifle stock against my left shoulder then flipped down the snow guard on the end of the muzzle. With my right hand I reached, without looking, into the underside of the stock, feeling the familiar shape of the four stubby .22LR magazines stowed there. I began to load. The action is so ingrained into my muscle memory that I could divert 90 percent of my attention away from my hands and towards those five staring eyes.
Fifty meters. I train at twice that distance, if not more. I once shot a deer at 350 meters with a 7.62x51mm round under heavy snowfall. I didn’t worry.
Magazine loaded. I nudged my goggles down against the rim of the scope, flipping the lenses up away from my eyes. Eye on scope. Cheek against the cold damp rifle stock. Safety unlocked. Worked the action, one-two, the bolt pushed the first cartridge down into the receiver. Right hand up front; left settled in close, finger rested against the trigger. Aim.
I inhaled (the smells of snow, crushed pine nettles, sweat, the oil-treated wood of the rifle body). Depressed the trigger. Pop. The rifle bumped into the crook of my shoulder. The first eye trembled, turned from black to white.
Left hand left the trigger, worked the action. One-two, the little brass cartridge flies away into the snow with a contrail of smoke. One-two the next round moved up from the magazine and got punched into the receiver. Depressed the trigger. Pop. The rifle bumped my shoulder. The second eye.
Another pop, but I was still ejecting the second round. In the corner of my eye I saw the svelte curve of blue and red and the shock of blond on top. Didn’t I have at least four seconds on the closest tail?
“Ms. Hori?”
I start at the sound of my name. The voice being piped into my ears is nasal, obscured behind mediocre headphones and an even spottier network connection. Onscreen, the Skype window displays a narrow face framed by a pair of thick black glasses.
“Sorry, I missed what you just said.”
The reporter glanced down off camera, at his notes. “Not a problem. I asked whether setting the new personal record in the IBU championship has changed your perspective on the sport or your approach to training.”
New personal record -- the most diplomatic way of saying “you didn’t win.”
“To be honest, not really.”
A pause. “Even though you set the new Japanese record for women’s biathlon?”
I never thought a record like that was worth much in a country where hardly anyone was aware of the sport to begin with, much less participating in it.
“I suppose it’s strengthened my resolve to do better the next time I’m on the field,” I say, going where the reporter’s trying to lead me into. “I also hope that it will help bring more attention to the sport among younger people. Like in school, I guess.”
Any attention at all would be great. The most effective, if not only, method, however, is gold. So far that hasn’t been very forthcoming.
The reporter pauses again to take notes. “Have your neighbors up there responded well to your achievement?”
Up here, the northernmost tip of the country, I’m still what I’ve always been, the weird chick who skis everywhere with a scary rifle (aren’t those illegal?) on her back and shoots deer up in the mountains. “Yes, very much so!”
The interview wraps up not too long after that. I slip out of the backroom – a cramped little annex between the back wall, a long bookshelf and a curtain hung over the entrance.
Barring home or the woods (both of which are technically out of city limits anyways) it’s probably my favorite space in town. The bookshelves are all made from a deep whirly textured mahogany, the ceiling is low with rectangular lights recessed inside it, the display table at the center has an old portable radiator underneath it where Celine, the store cat, likes to nap. The air is always warm and smells like a faint mix of old paper, newsprint and loose leaf tea. It’s small even by local standards, but that’s not a mark against it. A bookstore with limited inventory can make up for it with good selection, and the selection at Serif-san is the best. Besides, anything I want that I can’t find on the shelves I can hound Masa to special order for me.
I go behind the dusty counter and pour myself some tea from the hulking brass kettle on top its hotplate. In the corner of my eye I can see Masa, he’s sitting in the history section, a little cove delineated by two bookshelves in the corner. My dog is with him trying to jump up on him to get at something he’s holding over his head in a closed fist.
“Ah! Hey, hey, down, down!”
I put the cup down on the counter. “Akihi, rok!”
Akihi plops back down onto his paws. Looks at me with a cocked head. What? Why am I in trouble?
Masa pets him on the head, hands over whatever treat he was clutching. “You need to teach me Ainu so he’ll finally listen to me.”
“He understands you. It’s just the important commands he’ll only take in Ainu.”
My mom, who trained him, was the one who made sure of that. She breeds Akita and gifted Akihi to me already trained that way. She’s also convinced that the end of the world is around the corner, grows and hunts her own food and is one of the few other civilians in Hokkaido besides me who holds a firearm license.
He stands up, brushing strands from Akihi’s bushy winter coat off his lap.
“Anyways, how did it go?”
“It was just about what I expected.” I really haven’t done that many interviews at all until now – a dozen since getting back home from Oslo. (Meanwhile, my mom has yet to have sent me more than three texts) “If you don’t give them the upbeat answers they want they just keep asking the question until you cave in.”
“Knowing you that’s probably a good thing.” Masa says.
I shrug and take another sip of tea. Akihi flits by my feet on his way to the portable radiator under the table.
Masa goes over over to the kettle to pour himself a cup. The whirling steam condenses against the bottom of his glasses. “Well, biathlon can use any publicity it can get, right? I’m sure the cover photo shoot you’re doing for that magazine next month will help!”
I groan, rubbing the bridge of my nose. I really wish he hadn’t reminded me of that. I’d never even heard of the winter sports magazine in question until they emailed me last week. I haven’t worn makeup since getting off the JAL flight from Norway. My hair has been concealed under the same ISSF beanie for almost a month.
“Look, thanks for letting me use your computer for this. Can we change the subject? Has my package arrived yet?”
“Why yes, yes it has!” He slides open the drawer under the counter and pulls out a cardboard Amazon box. My name is on it, literally. “Do you have my package though?”
“Yeah, out in the back of the Bongo though.” I point towards the front window.
Past the twin English and Kanji text of “Serif-san” on the glass and the frame of multicolored holiday lights my truck sits parked on the empty street. Akihi excluded, it’s been my trustiest companion since school. The small flatbed is piled with stuff, most of it groceries and the two hulking coolers I’d filled before setting off for town.
“I even saved you the backstraps this time. I hope you’re happy.”
Masa puts the box on the counter and claps his hands. (in the corner of my eye Akihi goes tense under the table) “Oh Haru, I am bursting with joy! And the stew parts?”
I smile, Masa’s deer nabe is a thing of beauty. “All yours. Well, most of it. I’m going to need your help unloading…”
“Let’s do that later. I’m about to close up, why don’t you come over?”
Between the half-frame glasses, the hip wavy (how much did that cost?) mop hair and black turtleneck under the boro-cloth hanten it’s easy for me to forget this is the same nerd I went to high school with. When he skipped town with his acceptance to Todai I expected him back either in a month or never again. No one ever comes back here. Well, I guess I did, but, if you adhere to my mom’s point of view – and I’m not sure I do – I never really left. Yup.
“Mom and Dad haven’t seen you since you left for the IBU semi-finals. They stayed up for the stream if you can believe it.” He cocks his head, mock-scrutinizing me like one of his table displays. “Oh, and Miki wants to give you a trim based on what she saw in the after-interviews.”
I sigh. Feigned resignation. “OK, it’s a deal, but your sister doesn’t get to touch my hair.”
“No complaint from me. Shall we go together or…”
“Nah, you should go ahead. I need one more stop before heading over.”
He glances back out the window at the truck. “Really? Seems like you got all the stuff you need…” Pause. Realization. “Oh, right. Of course. Well, we’ll have everything ready for you. Just bring the protein.”
I finish my tea and nod, smiling. “It’s what I do.”
The second season of Narcos is a textbook case study for how to tell a dramatic story where the ending is already known. Pretty much everyone with a level of knowledge of the world somewhere above that of a goldfish knows that Escobar’s story ends with a bullet-riddled corpse on top a roof in Medellin, blood all over the tiles and a gut sliding out from under a Macy’s One Day Sale clearance table polo shirt. This kind of scenario gives the writers the freedom to send out the tendrils of the plot in other directions besides the obvious one of What Happens to the Main Character.
A lot of Narcos S2 is focused on the fracturing of the Medellin cartel and the steady obliteration of the Escobar empire. In reality not a whole lot of So much of the show’s first season was defined by Escobar’s almost magical ability to shape everything and everyone around him to his will. It was a brilliant shorthand for the supreme power of wealth in an underdeveloped nation -- an abundance of money might as well be magic powers in a world where no one else has any.
In S2, however, the flow of cash into cartel coffers starts to get constricted, slowly at first and then at an ever-accelerating rate as more and more momentum builds against Escobar. The effect is akin to a mage being cut off from his mana supply. Despite a handful of tactical victories early in the season, just about every episode sees the empire’s power slip. Escobar’s personal agency decreases in equal magnitude until finally, after starting the season emerging from his former prison and walking through a squad of gobsmacked Colombian soldiers unscathed like a narco-trafficante Christ emerging from the tomb, he finds himself completely reliant on the charity and/or stubborn loyalty of others.
It’s at this point, quite late in the series, that we get some of the best character moments out of Escobar, a character who typically alternates between bouts of stoicism and bland sicaro posturing. He gets stoned and speaks with his dead cousin, meets up with his up-until-now nonexistent father and spends a vast chunk of time trying to guarantee the safety of his wife and children. It’s with his interactions with his wife that we get a feel for Escobar’s sense of mortality and impermanence, her telling him that “in the end” they both always knew that it would come down to “just the two of them” in a figurative and literal final shootout with their manifold enemies.
Of course the de-fanged Escobar, despite a last-ditch attempt to return to Medellin from the countryside, is unable to even create this romantic Butch Cassidy-esque last stand together with his life partner. By this point the story’s no longer about him, it’s about the sea changes in the U.S.’ Columbia policy, the power squabbles between the surviving families of the Medellin Cartel and rise to power of the rival cartel in Cali. Maybe the whole season was the work of an illusionist and the real Escobar, the one with divine power over time and space, died in the woods outside La Catedral all along.
People still wig out over the runaway mainstream success of the Game of Thrones HBO series. How could a story with so many apparent strikes against crossover potential -- large cast, complex political machinations in a medieval swords-and-sorcery setting -- become such a cultural phenomenon? It’s less of a stretch than one might assume.
The key aspect is the nature of the in-world politics themselves. Medieval feudalism isn’t just a different form of government from, say, liberal democracy or communism, but an entirely different conception of what constitutes a country. It was the ideal form of government for Western Europe in the Middle Ages. In the wake of decreases in the level of transcontinental infrastructure, less centralization of governmental wealth and a military environment where no one power possessed an overwhelming materiel, doctrinal and technological advantage over its neighbors it was only natural to move away from the Roman style of direct imperial administration via appointed officials. Instead, land would be divided up among trusted families who would have a relative free hand to govern the area directly with their retainers (knights, earls, barons etc.) who pledged fealty to them, not to the king.
Imagine it like the org chart of Burger King. Everyone working at your local franchise is nominally working for the CEO of Burger King, but your daily reality, the crux of power that commands your fear and/or loyalty, is the manager of your Burger King. That manager might have a similar abstract idea about the authority of the CEO, but his own daily accountability is pledged to the branch manager. And so on.
These days in conversation we often tend to use heads of state as a shorthand for the actions or intentions entire nation-state they lead. In feudalism, however, it was no mere metonymy. A contemporary dictator might steer a nation as his de facto property, but kingdom really was a feudal king’s personal property enshrined in the laws of the time. That one-to-one dynamic makes for an easy way for a storyteller to get the audience engaged in abstract political issues like territorial disputes -- we personify each kingdom through the characterization of its leader.
A strong modern-era example of this dynamic is the command structure of the Sicilian mafia as depicted in the Godfather movies. Similar to a feudal monarch, Michael Corleone is the face and will of the Corleone family personified. He is the absolute final authority on all matters, and yet the extent to which his absolutism reaches is forever limited by the extent to which he can command the loyalty of the capos and soldiers beneath him. Though the system is by definition an absolutist regime led by one familial line, the ruler can and often is hampered by dissent and malcontents down the ranks. It extends all the way down to the peasantry, who, in being legally tied to the land they inhabit, are relatively unmoved by the coming and going of different power structures (barring instances where a military detachment might pass by on a “foraging expedition). In this era government isn’t a provider of services and protection to a sovereign tax-paying citizenry, it’s the biggest, worst landlord you’ve ever dealt with. Few tears will be shed when Count Reynault gets the literal axe and swapped out for Count Franz from down the way.
In addition to the monarch vs. monarch level of character conflict, trouble within the feudal ranks provides another potential layer for dramatic plot develop in conjunction with the larger existential conflict -- you need only look at Macbeth or Richard III for working examples.
I don’t usually talk about anime here, but I’m compelled to comment on the now-current TV series Joker Game. As I predicted upon watching the first episode, many anime fans are starting to take issue with the show’s fundamental premise. These issues crop up in the wake of almost every fictionalized rendition of the Second World War, but especially those set from the perspective of characters from the Axis nations.
The obvious nature of the conflict makes it something many people simply cannot or will not view outside the lens of their personal morality. In this worldview, to create or even just absorb works on the subject from a viewpoint outside that view of morality is an inherently immoral act. This is a perfectly valid point of view. The problem that arises is when these personal concerns are conflated with poor writing, which isn’t always necessarily the case.
There are plenty of ahistorical elements present in Joker Game -- considering the show’s core premise of a cadre of superhuman Imperial Japanese intelligence agents conducting solo undercover espionage deep within Allied territory, to not assume ahistoricity from the get-go would be akin to betting a dog will never eat its own vomit. However the majority of these are part and parcel to the suspension of disbelief that has to be made to accept the aforementioned premise. To accept the idea of Japanese superspies who somehow operate outside the direct control of the military government or the emperor is to also accept that they’ll be able to pull off feats like infiltrating deep into occupied France, going into deep cover in London and counteracting the Allied cracking of the Enigma machine, all of which would have been grossly improbable in reality. To not accept the premise, to be unable to suspend your disbelief, is to know that you’ll be incapable of absorbing the work as a piece of storytelling in the first place.
For a specific node of a work, be it episodes of a series or even individual scenes or sequences of events, to qualify as “bad writing” properly it must disrupt the plot mechanisms that power the story’s own internalized universe. The story that breaks its own rules. When this happens it will be obvious, because a true mechanical breakdown wrecks all the stuff that comes later down the line as well.
While Joker Game has had its fair share of silly-bordering-on-outright-egregious writing acrobatics like vastly overestimating the potency of Enigma encryption and the British Royal Navy somehow cruising American waters off the coast of Hawaii (with plenty more bullshit to come!), there hasn’t yet been anything that renders the series inoperable as its own story.
Instead, many of the criticisms that have been voiced boil down to an incapability to accept the premise because the premise is found to be distasteful. This isn’t a trend relegated to TV anime about cartoon pretty boys in tailored suits either. In 2013 a German drama series, Generation War, was pilloried for depicting the Second World War from the perspective of German characters, some of whom were soldiers in the Wehrmacht. While the show pulled no punches about the brutality of German forces in that war, characters were also shown to not be two-dimensional goosestepping stormtroopers either. The argument that comes through in the criticisms is that the crimes perpetrated by the Axis were so severe that sympathetic stories about individuals from those nations, even if true, don’t deserve to be told. It’s worth being aware of this impulse when taking in a piece of alternate history like Joker Game.
They launched the drug and I couldn’t have cared less. Looking from the outside in that seems like an odd thing to say, I suppose. We were a smaller player, one of the smallest at the time -- one of the rodents skittering in the shadow of the major players -- but at the same time highly siloed. It makes a lot of sense in retrospect. The best way to stay in stealth mode is to stick everyone in verticals and set hundred-foot blinders around them.
I was stuck in a different, far less chic vertical at the time. The first time I heard the name Retinentia, it had already soft launched onto the general market a day earlier. There was an impromptu champagne reception in the lobby where the talk abounded.
“Can’t believe C Lab finally got something out the door…”
“Did you hear the rumor about how much they sank into R&D overruns on it last year…”
“I’ll bet you fifty bucks who chose that fucking name. ‘Retinentia’...”
It was only later that bits and bobs of the marketing started trickling down into my narrow purview. New light at the end of the tunnel; Finally, the mists are cleared; your elders’ minds restored at last. The CEO, a guy around my age who did P90X and had been to Richard Branson’s private island, started showing up on all the right shows and podcasts.
Internal changes cascaded into the organization in the midst of this mainstream media breakthrough. New staff, rockstars straight out of undergrad, (I vaguely remember being something similar. How long ago was that now?) seemed to pour in on a daily basis, virtually all of them disappearing into the burgeoning ranks of C Lab. More and more of the quarterly resources we’d grown accustomed to began to be redirected to Retinentia-related projects, always on “a temporary, needs-based basis.”
Months later, on a particularly crisp morning, I got a push alert on social from an overseas relative: New dementia drug struck by market turbulence. By the time I got off the bus and stood in front of the office I’d read the article four times.
Still reeling from a painstaking, costly run through the regulatory process...
Compounded with astronomical cost overruns in research & development and marketing...
Premiums so high that few physicians would dare prescribe, and fewer patients would purchase…
According to an internal source who wished to remain anonymous…
I looked up from my phone at the office building’s tuna can silhouette. I could already imagine the chaos that had undoubtedly ensued within. I briefly considered turning around and taking an Uber back home.
None of the aspects of highly siloed work applied in times of witch hunt. One week passed. Entire departments burned. One night I walked past the workspace of D Lab, the guys who worked on anti-inflammatories, and saw a vast room, abandoned. The symmetrical lines of darkened flat-screen monitors gave the impression of tombstones in an unlit crypt buried deep within the earth.
One morning I found my boss standing in front of my desk. I felt the sense of inevitability that had been looming over me finally start to slam shut over my head.
It’s only quite recently that I’ve noticed a recurring theme in my life: the fact that I’ve rarely, if ever, been the first choice in the running.
One of the inevitabilities of life is situations in which multiple people vie for one position. Anyone who’s entered or tried to enter the workforce will be familiar with interviewing for a job and being evaluated against all the other people who want the jobs. Still more might be familiar with waiting to get selected for the lineup on a school sports team, being among more than one person vying for an individual’s affections, or hoping for a manuscript of theirs to be picked out from the slush pile. Those bouts of head-to-head competition are the wages of an ostensibly meritocratic society, and the mind tends to categorize them all into the same model of binary outcomes: the winner and the losers.
What fewer people think on is the transitional spaces in between those two classifications. Rare is it that decisions involving choosing between people are as writ in stone as one might assume. History bears out the fact that the crown can, and often is, bestowed upon an imbecile. While some might soldier on with the Royal Dunce, more often the decision is reneged upon and someone else -- one who was initially rejected -- is brought in in a hurry.
This role of being the mulligan shot doesn’t lend itself to being given much thought. Modern competitive societies tend to push the aforementioned model of binary outcomes – the source of adages like “second place is the first loser.” It’s because of this mentality and all the stigmas against being sloppy seconds that many will turn up their nose at an opportunity if they weren’t the first one to get the offer. While one’s hackles should be up, to make a blanket rule of never taking an opportunity as the backup choice is folly.
Just about every significant opportunity I’ve been given in life after college was one where I wasn’t the decider’s first choice. To outline two:
My first real job in life originally gave me a flat rejection, saying they’d gone with someone with “far more experience in the industry.” Months later, the day of my graduation from my master’s program actually, they followed up with me saying they’d blundered and were willing to “take a chance” on me. I said yes and worked for them for two years, outlasting all the hiring managers who’d opted to take a pass on me.
My second job was something I applied to while still at my first and more than rather to move on. I submitted to an already-arduously long interview process, which was extended in its ostensible 11th hour. I got a call from the hiring manager telling me that someone with “considerably more experience” had thrown in an application for the vacant position at the very last minute. Apparently this applicant’s credentials were good enough for them to drop everything, including my own application, which had languished on-and-off for a month and a half. I got off the phone expecting to never hear from them again, only to be contacted again around half a month later asking if I was still interested in the job.
Neither of these scenarios was much fun to sit through as they happened, nor did they do much to endear me to the gatekeepers who’d put me there. It would’ve been the easiest thing in the world for me to raise my finger and issue a “fuck off,” retribution for all the time of mine they’d wasted. This isn’t what I did.
There’s an important distinction to draw here between the notions of pride and self-respect. Pride is a closer cousin to the base hormonal drivers that run up and down the endocrine system. The impulse to land a left hook on the temple of someone who’s wronged you is not all that different from your urge to slam the “fuck off” on anyone who dares tell you no, regardless of context. Twitch responses against perceived assaults upon your personal sovereignty. While these aren’t without their uses, they’re the optimal choice of action far less often than many would think.
In contrast, self-respect has a sense of the future that extends past the next five seconds. A lot of people bandy the term around like a buzzword, or think it’s synonymous with pride, but in reality it’s not a semi-autonomous defense mechanism, it’s your expectations of yourself. Would I have been worthy of my own respect (or anyone else’s) had I took a dump on a perfectly good opportunity? Nurturing self-respect can help to navigate those kinds of decisions in a productive way. And after all, wouldn’t the best vindication be to take a role as “sloppy seconds,” flourish in it and leverage its benefits to build more positive momentum in your life, whatever that may be?
Everyone’s personal calculus is different, but it’s worth considering the idea that the greatest sin in life is passing up an opportunity that’s presented to you on a platter, even one that happens to be tarnished.
[Here’s another fragment of fiction, this time from a scrapped piece that served as a dry run for something I’m writing currently. The premise is a long-abandoned colony planet populated by the descendants of various nations that sent colonial ships a millennium or two ago.]
They pulled off to make an obligatory visit to the shrine of St. Wayfarer. Syene promised to make it quick; the light was fading fast and neither of them was so sure of the local terrain anymore.
Carpets of spiny weeds and low-hanging vine had overwhelmed most of the dirt path leading up. At the cliff they twice meandered past the shrine itself, mistaking it for a termite mound with all the strangler kudzu grown over it. They spent a good ten minutes tugging and yanking the stalks away from the the dark gray stone and speckled bronze, piles of wriggling blue plant matter at the foot of the shrine like a crazy person’s idea of a votive offering.
Syene finished the opening verse and then went off into her own private thoughts. As she whispered under her breath, Nillit looked out at the valley. The sun had almost submerged behind the horizon, the familiar violet mist beginning to rise out of the marshes and meander towards the outskirts of town.
“It kind of looks the same, doesn’t it?” He said, hearing Syene come up from behind.
She was wiping her hands on the hem of her field jacket, leaving oily marks on the waxed dry cloth. “Yeah, except I don’t remember as many wind turbines on Nyserra’s side, do you?”
The rest of Wyndyl’s Rest, with the exception of all the new wireless receiver spikes, looked unchanged from when he’d last seen it: the rounded edges of the recycled bulkheads, the kudzu covering the walls and the green of Plaza Federal across from the library.
“Looks like the old guy’s been doing well for himself,” he said, “though why would…”
Something, a fallen wisteria branch or a dry vine, snapped in the woods behind them. There was a great scream, a squadron of kukri finches bursting out and flying away in a flurry of speckled blue. Syene gripped Nillit’s arm.
“What was that?” She said. “Chitin dogs never come this far out, do they?”
That wasn’t quite true. Nillit could remember a handful of times, way back before they were even in school, when the fire brigade ordered everyone to stay in their domiciles, lock all the doors and secure viewports. He still had a memory of peeping through a crack in chipboard slabs nailed to the kitchen porthole, seeing gendarmes patrolling the marsh’s berm, red coat collars turned up, each man holding a cruel-looking gauss pike at the ready.
He saw no eyes drifting between the trees, heard none of the hunting noises that were halfway between a snuffle and a low whistle bouncing through a long glass corridor. His old hunting rifle was stowed back in the tetra’s luggage receptacle anyways.
“If it was a dog we’d have already gotten jumped,” he said. “We’d better go before it gets dark, though.”
The path to town was unchanged. The road was still two lanes, still paved only with a spread of untarred gravel. Only a handful of the houses looked like they’d gotten a new coat of paint since Nillit seen them last. Orange light radiated through the oval windows. The air was filled with the sound and scent of everyone’s biomass condensers whirring in unison, breaking down marshy biomass into the energy that trickled through their little grid.
After passing the rows of new turbines it was as if he’d entered a rift back into the days when his sandals were held together with electrician’s tape and his hands were perpetually stained with congealed indigo tint from working the marsh sifters all day.
The Maroco RX and the pharmacy were still open, a surprise at first until Nillit remembered it was Planetfall Week -- the whole reason he and Syene had the time to drive all the way back up in the first place. Steam crept out the open doors. In the pinkish light emanating from within he could see people jostling at the counter for their spiced clotted cream, kids weaving through legs fencing with cobs of wild maize and miniature toy gauss pikes in hand. As they got closer to Plaza Federal the air started to get heavy with lavender and palm oil.
“I forgot to get my ashes before we left,” he said, taking a hand off the wheel to rub his forehead.
“Ugh, me too. But you heard how Mom sounded, didn’t you? Didn’t seem like a good idea to delay coming over.”
“No, it didn’t.” There were times their mother had kicked up a ruckus over things that turned out to be quite trivial, but Nillit didn’t mention it.
If the rest of the town was little changed, nothing at all had changed about the house. No one had built anything on the lots around it, leaving it dangling off the northern end of town, exactly where they’d left it. The same painted glass whirlygigs hanging from the eaves, the tarnished bronze barometer next to the BM-condenser under the kitchen window. Thatches of weeds stuck out of the cracks in the pavement in front of the carport. Even the toy Covenanter fort Syene and he used to play in was still under the tree, the painted guardian eyes on the walls faded and peeling.
“Wayfarer!” Syene hissed, leaning forward against her seatbelt. “Is she sitting on the porch? Like a crazy grandma?”
“She is.”
Their mother had always cut a unique figure, but that was the first time she’d looked like a frontiersman out of a history book. Her canvas sunhat and vest were faded with decades’ worth of exposure under the marshland sun. The old family shotgun leaned against the side of her chair, a conspicuous box of Maroco-brand shells sitting adjacent. She had, of course, started smoking again, the cork pipe inherited from their father.
“Hi, Mom,” Nillit said, pulling the car into the grassy driveway. “Why do you look like a mountain struggler?”
“Nevermind that. I never knew your father and I raised such lollygaggers. I thought I told you to come before sundown.” She stood up.
“Ran into some snags. Customs on the border was being extra difficult for whatever reason.” They got out of the tetra, both giving her a kiss on the cheek.
Mom grimaced, looking down the dirt road towards town then back at the shotgun resting against her chair. “The border’s tightened up again? Damn. Our side or theirs?”
“Rineé side,” Syene said. “There was a lot of trouble in the city leading up to the holiday. Vandals, a Lachrymi riot, as usual.”
“A likely story!” She slapped her hands together and rubbed them. “I’m guessing someone talked, probably Nyserra.”
Nillit walked around the back of the car to get the bags. “Mom, what are you talking about? And can you open up the port? I want to put the tetra in.”
“No!” She said, almost spitting the pipe onto her sandals. “You will not open the port. Ever.”
“Why?”
“Come inside and I’ll show you why.”
As they walked inside, Syenne leaned over to him. “I’ll call Maroco and check if she’s been picking up her prescriptions on time.”
The inside of the house didn’t seem so bad. A film of dust covered everything, but otherwise the only thing that stuck out was the pyramid of books teetering on the low table in the parlor. Nillit scanned some of the covers as they passed to the kitchen; Lonique, Jen-Enil, Yennia. Names he hadn’t read since his first year in university. Why was Mom reading all these primary sources on fundamentals of augury?
She brought them to the kitchen, stopping in front of the narrow rattan door to the garage and turning to glare at them. “Swear on your father’s ashes you won’t tell anyone outside this house of what I’m about to show you.”
They glanced at each other. Finally, Syenne shrugged. “OK.”
She cracked the door open. A pallid light emanated from within, the same color as stirred honey set in the windowsill on a bright day. There was a noise too, a reptilian-mechanical chitter-clank, but it was the smell that got Nillit’s attention. Underneath the familiar nostalgic funk of motor fluids and condenser coolant -- memories of summer afternoons hanging over Dad’s hulking shoulder to help restore life to the engine of his long-suffering biwheel -- hung an undertone of acrid ozone. It was a smell he recognized from work, a presence that existed, previously, only within the sealed confines of Hermeneutics Lab Six.
There was no way the car would have fit in the port. A dark presence occupied three fourths of the floorspace, blocking out any light that might have come through the front windows. Nillit switched on the light, and almost fainted there in the doorway. It was an augur, bigger than any he’d ever laid eyes on in the lab or even read about. Its outer carapace, an ancient alloy designed to withstand the manifold dangers of space, was battered and scarred, but still intact enough to cast an iridescent reflection of the ceiling light leaning against it. The markings, though faded with at least three, maybe four centuries’ worth of cosmic wear and tear, were clear enough to make out -- it was old, older than any other he’d ever encountered in his life.
“Wayfarer,” Syenne hissed.
**
A whirlpool of half-remembered images crumpling into each other, hissing and fulminating before reducing down to a warm alkaline soup that lapped around her thighs. All around her was the dark, humid purple of a moonless night. A voice reached out towards her from somewhere distant. She leaned forward, the liquid stinging the skin of her legs, recognizing her brother’s voice.
Syenne opened her eyes. She reached out into the blur, feeling for the familiar contour of her glasses on the bedstand, sneezing at the dust kicked up by her hand.
In the morning light coming through the porthole windows she could see that her old room was almost unchanged from how she remembered it. The books were untouched; the clothes in the closet were all the same, albeit slightly more embarrassing now than they had been eight years ago when she left. As she pulled a shirt from its hanger, she heard a voice through the thin inner wall.
“No, Ton, that’s ridiculous and you know it. As far as the border? What could possibly…”
Syenne got dressed in a hurry and went outside to see Nillit standing in the kitchen holding the telephone.
“Ton, listen to me. Just show whichever guard is in charge your Lab credentials. Say you’re on a work-related trip, don’t go into anymore detail. That’s what Sy and I did and we got through, eventually.”
He looked at Syenne and shook his head, pointing at the receiver. Nuleton, he mouthed with a roll of his eyes before turning away to look out the kitchen window.
Her first inclination, of course, was to go to the garage and return to work. Even now she could see the honeyed light emanating from the door. She fought the urge. There wasn’t much any of them could do with the augur at this point. They’d spent the last two days working on it without pause or rest -- removing just one of the meter-thick sheaves of blast armor had taken six hours, which wasn’t helped by the lack of any adequate tools. After that the electronics within, Syenne’s specialty, hadn’t proven any easier to penetrate. The slightest gaff in simply moving wires or manipulating a circuit could cause a catastrophic short, destroying everything.
Instead, she walked outside the front door with a cup of tea.
All the laundry lines were strung out between the houses. Shirts, sarongs, shorts and underwear all waving in the warm wind breathing over town from the marshes. The air was heavy with the nostalgic smell of of fresh marsh froth and condenser runoff. Waving goodbye to someone in a nearby house, the milkman puttered off towards Plaza Federal on a crate-laden bipede.
She found Mother around the side of the house, shoveling a fresh heap of biomass into the BM condenser, the shotgun leaning against the wall again.
“Sy, you’ll have to do your mother a favor and go get more gunk from the Maroco. When you plugged the thing into the grid it burned through a week’s worth of biomass.”
Most augurs that fell out of their heavenly orbit were so old that their self-renewing batteries, designed to allow the internal mechanisms to operate in virtual perpetuity, were all but reduced to sludge slopping around in their housing. And the hulking augur in the garage was the oldest any of them had ever encountered. When Syenne’s brother finally pried the blast shield off from the energy receptacle, and she was able to see how far gone the batteries were, she refused to permit any more tampering until she rerouted a new power source in using a patch of auxiliary cable.
Syenne blew on her tea. “Fine, but answer my question first.”
“What question?” She slammed the condenser lid shut and rubbed her hands on her canvas apron.
Syenne almost dropped her cup. “The same one I’ve been asking the past two days: Where in Tartarus did you find that thing? And how did you get it into the damn garage?”
Mother winced. “Keep your damn voice down!”
“There’s no one here, Mom!” Syenne said, looking over her shoulder.
“That’s what you think.” She picked up the shotgun and slung it back over her shoulder. “Eyes are everywhere here now. Wayfarer’s blessing upon us.” She said, raising her finger and making the sign of an iris on her breast.
In truth there was a finger of worry niggling at the back of her mind. Local law was vague, but the Polmesec’s neighbors were quite eager to profess their everlasting commitment to the safeguarding of sacred augurs. More than one war had broken out over relics uncovered within the contested regions between borders. Syenne didn’t know how game any would be to make an incursion into the neutral cantons, but the thing in the garage would almost certainly be enough to send the fanatics into a tizzy.
A sizzle and pop in the distance. Pink streaks flashed in the air above town. Someone was firing off some early fireworks.
“Mom, we’ve been away, but I grew up here. Wyndyl’s doesn’t have any fundies.” A bottlerocket whistled into the air and exploded with a sharp pop. “Does it?”
“You’ve been in the city too long, Syney. There’s crazies everywhere now.”
(This is a little proof-of-concept piece I put together. The premise is a part-Ainu Japanese female biathlete who lives near the northernmost tip of rural Hokkaido and trains by skiing cross-country into the mountains to participate in conservation hunts of wild boar and deer. Yes, hunting and gun ownership exist in Japan. They are difficult, but not impossible.)
Am I stupid to be out here? Another patch of sleet punches through the lattice of jezo branches overhead and slaps me on the head, half on my wool hat, half on my forehead just above where my face rests against the rifle stock. It stings like hell. My vision blurs a bit, I lose focus on the rifle sights.
There’s always a handful of people found frozen blue up here every spring, almost always hunters with conservation tags like.
From somewhere deep in the back of my head, I hear a voice: See? The mountain god is angry at you. Thanks, Mom.
I duck back behind the tarpaulin. The thin shelter half is the only protection against the Aleutian Low I brought up with me other than my ski boots, insulated pants, old thermal layers and even older parka. Well, I suppose those aren’t the only things; a glint of sky blue-on-tan flashes in the corner of my eye.
“Akihi,” I call out, trying to keep my voice low enough to not carry too much over the wind. “Mama’s freezing her butt off, come here.”
Akihi pads over, kicking up snow behind him as he moves, fat pink tongue lolling and eyes bright blue as if the cold doesn’t affect him in the slightest. I reset the safety on my rifle and set it on my lap, reach out and draw Akihi in. I rub my face in the long soft hair on the back of his neck, wiping off the sleet and inhaling his familiar scent.
He came to me as a graduation gift from Grandma, who bred work dogs for the local farmers as far back as I can remember. His shaggy brindle coat won’t win him any Akita dog show titles, but he’s uncannily good at flushing out deer and boar, which is good enough for me. I like to think Grandma could sense the talent in him as a pup and gave him to me for that reason.
Somewhere -- a few hundred meters away from the sound of it -- a branch snaps with a sound like a .22 long rifle cartridge. The snow that had been piling up on top of it tumbles to the forest floor. Last year another conservation hunter got buried under the snow pile from a broken branch here and died. It was definitely stupid to come up in this time of year.
“It’s not like we’re too low on protein, right?” I whisper to Akihi.
There’s still a few kilos of meat sitting in my freezer right now, a reminder of a bountiful spring. Wild pig hot pot on the porch with a beer, mincing the pukusa and wild garlic I’d gathered while uphill, watching the sun set over the rowan bushes along the road.
But even if there was an emergency -- and it’s not, my caloric intake is always way lower than I’m told it should be -- it would still be easier to take the bus ride to Yamwakkanai to load up my duffel bag with groceries. (not that I trust much of what they sell in the convenience store there)
I’m here because I want to be. Because I can close my eyes and still see the aftermath of my last tournament: the snow cloven apart by a dozen pairs of skis, spectators milling around every which way, cellphone cameras click and flashing, and the girl who beat me to first place. She walks towards me unfazed by the mushy unpacked snow, victor’s bouquet still tucked in her arm; a full head taller than me, sweaty blonde hair tied up in a bun, eyes as bright and attentive as Akihi’s, damp blue-on-white biathlon suit clinging to a body like a pine twig. The name printed on her bib -- Rinne.
“Kaarina Rinne,” I mutter, unzipping my parka a bit to take out one of the venison jerky strips I’d packed up before strapping my skis on and dragging myself up here.
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve pulled up videos of her old runs, high school and Nordic amateur league biathlons, trying to absorb every nuance of her skiing, her shooting through the little video window. I even watched an interview she did with some online sports show. I don’t know a single word of Finnish, but I recognize the moment when the guy asks her about her favorite biathletes. “Magda, Korpela, Mäkäräinen!” Unsurprising choices. Her makeup is perfect, almost like it’s nothing, but so obviously not, (when was the last time I wore makeup? High school graduation?) she hardly hesitates with any of her answers, and when she does it’s with a finger against her jaw and a sophisticated-sounding “Hmmm!” I realize, with chagrin, that I like her dress.
I pull the front of my thermal layer up to my nose and sniff.
Akihi starts to whine. I bite off a bit of the jerky and slip it into his waiting mouth. He ambles off in the opposite direction from which he came, still gnawing at the dried deer meat as he goes. What a brat.
And who’s to blame for that? Thanks, Mom.
No, I’m here out of a hope, however irrational, that I can catch my opponents unawares. To have even just a minute where I’m working while they’re still asleep is sixty whole seconds I get stronger while they sit idle. It’s almost enough to draw my draw my attention away from how the wind slices at my face and neck, how stinky my thermals have gotten, how itchy my wet hair is under this hat, the way this cheapo sports bra keeps stabbing me in the armpit, my worries about whether I should’ve oiled the bolt on the rifle this morning, my legs’ stubborn refusal to start getting rid of the lactic acid scorching them from the inside, how much I need to pee but won’t.
I hear a growl roiling underneath the wind. For a half-second I actually think it’s a bear; Mom was right, I’ve pissed off Nuparikor Kamuy and he’s come down to teach me a lesson. But that’s ridiculous, the few Ussuri that are left rarely come this far north.
It’s Akihi. I see a flash of one of his eyes in the distance. In less a minute he’s somehow made it around one hundred meters up the hill. He wouldn’t stray that far in this kind of weather except for one reason. I stuff the leftover half of jerky into a pocket and sling the rifle over my shoulder. My skis and rucksack are in the corner of my eye -- it’ll take too much time to get back into the skis, and there’s nothing I’ve packed that’s going to be any help at the present moment.
I crawl out the opposite end of the shelter half and start hurling myself up the hill. Immediately, I’m glad I don’t have the extra forty pounds of junk hanging off my back. The incline here is brutal. Within seconds my thermals are soaked in another layer of sweat. I’m counting the meters.
Sixty. Sixty-five. Seventy. My breaths pump out in gouts of steam that ribbon away across the sides of my face. Eighty. I sense something: the slice-crunching noise of another pair of skis. A darkness passes on my right, leaning into the grade of the track, her left ski nicking the outermost edge of my line. Rinne overtaking me. Her slender fish-like form breaking away from the pack, rifle barrel wagging left and right like a finger held under my nose.
Back to reality. Akihi is closer, but he’s not looking at me anymore. His tail sticks up. Eighty-five. Ninety. Akihi is close enough to grab. He shoots off like a nocked arrow, a snarl rising in his throat and rising midway into a piercing bark.
I don’t bother to look where he’s gone. I yank the rifle from my back and flick the safety switch while simultaneously bringing the weapon up to bear. Working off a cocktail of muscle memory and adrenaline now, I feel the smooth wooden stock against my cheek and the underside of the bolt touching the top of my right index finger where it rests just above the trigger guard. I force my exhalations through my nostrils to try and keep the steam from condensing on the lens of the scope. What I don’t control is the subtle transitions of my body into the posture for standing fire.
The twelve-and-four spacing of my legs; the shift of my left arm so that the elbow is parallel with the rifle barrel, steadying my firing platform; the slight forward pitch of my hips; all of that is second nature by way of training.
I start to count. Akihi’s barks recede into the distance once again. I haven’t hit thirty when the deer slips out from a thicket of jezo trees around a hundred meters away. It’s a sika, and a stag at that. His antlers are big and curled. He’s an older one, has probably gotten his breeding done and is therefore perfect for harvesting. His broad speckled flank is turned to me, black eyes wide with alarm, but, in his alarm, seemingly unaware of my presence. He continues to move down the hill.
I shut my right eye and let the universe recede to my left. Akihi’s barking may as well be coming from Sakhalin. The sights line up with the stag’s front half. I make the smallest of muscle twitches, bring the crosshairs up a centimeter, account for the parabola on which my breathing is bobbing the rifle barrel. I intuit the timing of my breaths, make it so that the next parabola’s vertex -- the moment when my lungs are emptied of breath and my aim is most stable -- aligns with where the stag passes in that same second.
My finger is already on the trigger waiting for that moment.
The rifle butt slams into my shoulder like a boxing strike. I forgot to put in my earplugs and the shot hits my ears with equal force. The world recedes into soundless stasis.
The .308 round hits the stag just behind the shoulder, clipping the top of his heart and dropping a lung. He jerks back from the force of the impact. I hear his flank slap against the ground. Legs thrash, then twitch, then nothing.
I lower the rifle and work the bolt, catching the spent brass in midair before it can disappear into the snow. I catch the acrid scent of cordite emanating from the open, smoking receiver. In the moment after the echo of the rifle’s report hangs a pregnant pause where I cannot move a millimeter, as if the kamuy bind my feet to the earth while the stag’s spirit bleeds away out its nose and eyes. Akihi’s barking draws closer once more. I can move once more.
A rosette of bright red blood marks the snow near the stag. It’s as perfect a shot as I’ve ever managed on any deer, and in standing position no less. It’s too bad Akihi was the only one around to see it. I take off my gloves and touch the stag on his still-warm neck and whisper a prayer of thanks to Hash-uk Kamuy. The stag’s glassy black eye stares at me.
Once the prayer is finished I pull the makiri knife from my boot and begin the real work. Turn the deer so that it rests on its spine. Cut around the anus first, separate the colon from the surround pelvis muscle. Steam rises from exposed tissue. The familiar fetid smell hits me and my saliva gets sickly sweet at the back of my mouth. From there I slice the hide up the center, moving around past the genitals. I start cutting into the pelvis area to carefully separate the urethra without severing it. When that’s done I move up to the top of his sternum and slice the hide downwards until the blade reaches the bottom of the ribcage. Another tricky part now. I stick in my index and middle fingers, feeling the stag’s internal body heat still radiating out from the dark red cavity. (another sensation I’ll never quite get used to) I tug the hide up and slide the blade in the space between my fingers, crescent curve facing up towards my face so that I cut away from the stomach cavity. Down, down until I reach the smaller cut I made near the pelvis. The stag’s lower half is laid open now, the stomach sac bulges out wet green veined with streaks of white, steam rising like it does from a pot of nabe going at full boil. I set the blade against the bottom of ribcage, grit my teeth and begin sawing. The noise is like a carpenter’s saw going through a sheet of balsa wood. Bone shavings clump up in the crook of my thumb. In this way I slowly bisect the stag’s ribcage up the length of the sternum. Right as I begin to worry about the blade of my knife, the job’s done. I release the knife from my aching grip and stick both my hands into the newly cut incision. With a grunt I yank open the ribcage. Cartilage and bone crack and pop.
Akihi whines and comes close.
“No,” I say between heavy breaths, pointing a blood-soaked finger at him. “You did a good job, but you wait.”
He sits on his haunches.
The heart comes out easily. It’s about twice as big than I’m used to. I cut a slit in the membrane and slide the heart out into my hand like a wet sponge. Akihi begins making noise again. This is what he was waiting for. I carve off a sliver of the heart and give it to him, rubbing his head as he snaps it up. My hand leaves a faint red streak in the fur above his eyes.
Back to the space between the ribs. I slice out the thin diaphragm tissue and separate the esophagus from the throat. This done, the whole digestive tract is now freed up to be pulled down from the bottom of the animal. Esophagus, stomach, intestines and colon are out onto the snow in a wallow of blood. The saliva goes sweet in my mouth again, but it’s finally done, and in record time. My hands are shaking now, mostly from the shock of the cold after having been buried in the stag for so long, but I’m able to sift through the pile of entrails and save the liver and the kidneys -- important cuts, very important. I’ve never liked kidney, but Mom would kill me I ever left any in the woods without saving them for her. Finally, I reach back in and pull out the tenderloins, a part I do enjoy, one of my favorites in fact.
I’m panting and covered in sweat. The arms of my parka are red up to the wrists with clotted blood and bits of sinew. The steam rising from the carcass is starting to recede. In this weather there’ll be plenty of time to skin off the rest of the hide, break down the limbs and torso to begin hauling back down to the base of the mountain where I parked my Bongo. For now I give myself a moment to cool down surrounded by the tang of fresh, mineral-heavy blood and the faint rhythm of Akihi’s paws passing through the snow.
Firewatch is a good videogame. It follows the tradition of Gone Home, taking the so-called “walking simulator” narrative adventure game and playing with the trappings of more established game genres to add more tactile substance to the experience of playing it. There is however, as there is for virtually any narrative adventure of any merit, heavy debate over the story the game tells. One of the main criticisms in that it employs a twist ending that cheapens or even invalidates the experiences the player has in the game’s middle part. The main rebuttal to that criticism is that the critics are erroneously placing the game in the context of more traditional games where escapist heroics are the main thematic thrust.
Both sides are right. They are both also wrong. Firewatch’s ending doesn’t resonate as clearly as it should, that much is true. Why it doesn’t, however, isn’t because it should’ve had more to do with that middle part, nor is it because of some mental shortcoming or misinterpretation on the player’s part. Firewatch is a game driven entirely by the story it tells, and its problems stem entirely from storytelling that itself misunderstands the proper way to deliver pathos and catharsis.
The climax of Firewatch is Henry and Delilah’s discovery that the conspiracy that had consumed the past few weeks of their lives, one in which two delinquent teen campers were stalked, a watch tower was broken into, Henry was knocked unconscious, his radio lines tapped, incriminating conversations recorded and used as indirect blackmail and more, was all a paranoid delusion. There was no government involvement. Instead, all the aforementioned acts were the work of Ned, a lone man living in the woods to escape from accepting the death of his son, who died in a climbing mishap that was Ned’s fault.
The intended effect seems to want to be tragedy -- in the end neither Henry nor Deliliah have any real escape from the things in life that are haunting them. Here’s why it doesn’t quite work:
Thriller vs. Tragedy
The proponents of Firewatch’s ending tend to argue that the game’s middle part, the supposed government conspiracy that turns out to be work of Ned’s misdirections, is a manifestation of the game’s true theme, that of personal responsibility, inability to face that burden and the tragedy that ensues when anything in the world can feel like a viable alternative to making that confrontation. This is entirely true. The fallacy here, however, is the assumption that any criticism of the conclusion is an argument that that middle part, the false thriller, should have been the game’s main thrust.
One of the cardinal rules of tragedy going back to Sophocles is that that the tragedy must be a foregone conclusion. At no point should it ever made to seem like the narrowest of chances to escape their fate, and even then that hope is something that exists in the narrative to either impart dramatic irony, where the audience knows full well that it’s a false hope and the hook is that none of the protagonists know it, or something that falls to pieces in a series of disasters that cascade together a spectacular trainwreck at the story’s finale.
Firewatch has neither of those. This isn’t the fault of the ending itself so much as the middle section’s failure to provide the necessary dramatic backing to give it the dramatic heft it deserves.
The phony suspense story is presented with more or less utter veracity. Few attempts are ever made to even hint at the idea that the conspiracy the main characters are uncovering could be the work of their paranoid imaginations. Gone Home, a narrative adventure that tells a highly personal story seasoned with false suggestions of a ghost story, never goes nearly as far as Firewatch to sell the idea that a ghost may be afoot -- because that would detract from the game’s thematic heart. It’s no wonder so many people who play Firewatch buy into the idea that the conspiracy is actually happening and is the secret focal point of the game, the game itself hard-sells the player into believing it.
An argument could be made that this misdirection is by design, to immerse the player in the exact same progression of emotions Henry is feeling at the time. Viewed through this lens, the game’s progression to its conclusion is successful. The problem is that it’s a lousy way to tell this kind of story. Without that distance between protagonist’s knowledge and audience’s knowledge in which dramatic irony can develop, a tragedy mutates into a thriller.
Thriller: Will our heroes escape their fate?
Tragedy: When will our heroes realize that their fate is inevitable?
It’s too bad that Firewatch felt the best way to communicate its themes was to have them as spinachy sides to a large portion of creamy empty calories. They deserved better than that.
This is an except from the fantasy novel I wrote around 2009-2010 while in grad school. Completing it was likely the greatest achievement in my life up to that point, and I still have a soft spot for it today despite the massive amount of rewriting it now requires.
This is the opening scene from the second half of the novel, when the mercenary company central to the story, the Gray Landser Company, has double-crossed an incompetent employer and left him to die in the mountains at the height of winter. The Landsers are on their way home south to Antolyn, a remote Patagonia-esque region, but still need to cross leagues of foreign territory.
Snow thawed early even in the northernmost regions of Messecht. By the time the Gray Landsers and the other two mercenary companies emerged from Falconhead Pass, the rivers had shaken free from the ice floes and the frost barely survived into late morning when the thawing rains came down in warm sheets.
Menander and his squad stopped to fill their canteens by the swollen bank of a nearby creek.
“Fuck, look at that,” said Semaphore, one of the soldiers newly assigned to the ad-hoc squad. He stood and pointed, his ever-present oboe tucked under the armpit of his overcoat.
Menander looked. He saw a black shape tucked in between the talons of ice still floating on the water. A thin arm was propped up at an unnatural angle, resting on the ice. The remains of the clothing were shredded and torn beyond recognition.
“Gess, grab it.”
The soldier standing on the opposite bank of the creek flinched. “Eh?”
“With the spear, I mean.”
Gess laid his jezail down against a rock and took up his sentry spear. Holding it with the blade pointed at his breast, he eased the shaft out into the water. The narrow wooden haft struck the corpse between the shoulder blades and sent it drifting to the side against the current.
“Argh. It’s a heavy bastard,” he said, his breaths roiling into the air in gouts of steam. “Looks to have been in the drink for awhile.”
The flesh was white and stretched taut with the gaseous swelling particular to the long-but-not-too-long dead. Menander could see no large puncture wounds, but he decided to take no chances. He unscrewed his canteen and upended it back into the rushing water. “Pass word to the rest, Kaun. We aren’t drinking anything from this creek.”
The girl, a tan-skinned Subaltesian who stood a head and a half shorter than anyone in the Gray Landser Company and always looked like a nervous meerkat, sprinted off along the riverbed. She was the fastest runner in the company, a perpetual blur of herringbone gray and oily black hair.
Semaphore turned to him, water sloughing off the hood of his rain cloak. “You think this is one of ours? I mean, Tylos’ soldiers?”
Menander bit his lip. The rivers here threaded down from the northern mountains, it was true, though it had been months since the Gray Landsers and other mercenary companies abandoned the rest of Tylos’ army to, ostensibly, be wiped out by the hill tribes. He did not know if the mountain streams flowed slow and unobstructed enough to bring relatively intact bodies all the way down into the lowlands. And if so, why only one?
“I don’t think that’s the case,” Gess said. He set down the spear, grabbed the biggest patch of rags he could find and tugged the body halfway onto the bank.
Semaphore made a sharp sound between his teeth. “Gah, Gess, that’s unclean.” On the march out of the mountains Menander had learned that the younger man was a devoted follower of the Tessellation, the strict -- and a bit sanctimonious -- Trihedron school. Menander did not know how Semaphore would respond if he asked him to handle a corpse.
Gess pulled something from under the body. Out came a wet bolo sword, unadorned except for a few strips of peeling wicker tied around the handle. Water poured out from the pinhole at the tip of the wide sheath. Next he extracted a short stabbing knife and an empty knapsack. “See? Hill men wouldn’t leave these on him if they could possibly manage it.”
Something in the air started to turn, feel wrong. Menander regrouped the squad and made back towards the column in a staggered, long-winged delta.
Strong Female Characters - All The Birds Singing by Evie Wyld
Just when I thought I could not be stopped, when my chance came to be king / The ghosts of my life grow louder than the wind
The paradox of writing a -- pardon the term -- Strong Female Character who doesn’t fall into self-satirical or fetishistic farce is that the necessary traits are the same ones many writers would think need to be abolished. Negative traits, shortcomings, weaknesses and sensitivities. Strength isn’t the absence of flaws, as many lesser writers assume, but the tenacity to cling to the positive in the presence of the negative. Successes only hold meaning when you know that you can fail.
It’s a keen understanding of this dynamic that makes Evie Wyld’s 2013 novel, All The Birds, Singing a living, breathing thing. A story that could’ve easily ended up as a flat thriller with a few literary ambitions is, in Wyld’s hands, elevated into an exploration of how its central character has come to be the stolid gravity well around which a flurry of dark asteroids swirls ever closer to a point of impact.
That character, Jake, is introduced as a tough and laconic Australian woman living, incongruously, in the British countryside on a gray isolated island. The middle of nowhere. We’re shown that she lives alone, wields a rifle, owns a tough sheepdog (named Dog) has no interest in socializing with the provincial locals and manages a flock of sheep by herself. Right off the bat, we also learn that something dark is nipping at her heels. The novel opens on Jake examining the brutally mutilated remains of one of her prized sheep. It’s not the first mutilation that’s happened on her property, and she’s beginning to worry about who or what could be the culprit.
This ongoing anxiety is a mechanism that allows Jake’s tightly wound persona to begin to unfurl for the reader. She’s reluctant to go to the authorities for help, or almost anyone else for that matter. At first this comes off as the act of someone determined to be independent at all costs (Strong Female Character), but very quickly it becomes clear there are deeper, more ominous reasons for her anti-social proclivities.
Jake’s sole friend on the island makes repeated suggestions that her attitude may have something to do, obliquely or directly, with the mutilations, an insinuation that she dismisses, but can never fully refute. When she passes by one of her first suspects, a group of local male teenagers, they notice her and begin to make an obscene pantomime in her direction. In a lesser story, this would have been a set piece to showcase the Strong Female Character’s strength in how she would beat up her harassers, here they’re another ominous totem among the many that being to sprout up from the island. The teens pose little tangible threat to Jake -- she’s physically strong, armed and owns a guard dog, but they’re a small prism projecting a bigger image of the inescapable dangers, real and imagined, of a woman living alone in an isolated area. The petty vulgarities of the teens accentuate the ominous possibility that something far more threatening occupies the island. These dangers aren’t scoffed at by Jake, she recognizes them and they occupy a space in her mind adjacent to her psychological and physical toughness.
The sense of slow unfurling throughout the novel is driven by its structure. In contrast to the prose, which is as direct and unsentimental as the events it describes, the story’s structure is somewhat unconventional. Jake’s story is split into two differently told halves: one about her life on the island trying to track down the thing that’s killing her sheep, the other about all of her troubled past leading up to the events that brought her to England. The latter half is told in reverse, starting with the most recent events and winding all the way back through Jake’s teenage years and adolescence. Rather than be a pointless literary flourish, this structure allows Wyld to present different parts of Jake’s past as ciphers to the actions she continues to make in the “present”.
It’s also shown that chaos and danger edge towards Jake constantly, a phenomenon that’s contributed to her supreme endurance as well as her weaknesses in the present. The other suggestion, far more implicit, is that she’s the one drawn towards chaos, a subconscious penchant for destruction that only ever inches into the outermost margins of the story until the very end, when we’re shown the catastrophic childhood events that, arguably, sets the pattern in motion.
Again, it’s those hints of self-sabotage that strengthen Jake as a character. By the end of the story, we’re no closer to knowing what it is that’s killing the sheep, but we know do what the killer represents: a personification of Jake’s own suppressed, subconscious penchant for destruction. This penchant that played a central part in derailing her life is the same one that allowed her to survive and escape all of her worst moments. Thus, the killer is also the personification of the novel’s central themes: Accept me as part of you. Accept that the path to the future sometimes necessitates the destruction of the present. Accept that your greatest weakness can, in different circumstances, be your greatest strength, and vice-versa.
Jake is a flawed, vulnerable brusque, self-sabotaging, often unlikeable character. Without these traits she wouldn’t be one of the strongest female characters in modern literature and All The Birds, Singing wouldn’t have been nearly as stellar a story as it is.
Darth Vader wo horobosu zo -- Star Wars: The Force Awakens
There’s not much to say about Star Wars: The Force Awakens on its own without referring to it within the context of the six other films that came before it. As a standalone work it’s a solid sci-fi adventure movie, a longish but otherwise punchy, smart aleck-y experience that stands in contrast to the pseudo-intellectual bent of recent SF films like Interstellar and Ex Machina. It feels like Star Wars.
It also bears some of the now-established tics, both good and ill, of its director, JJ Abrams: good action scenes, imbalanced bad guys prone to shouting a lot, quick pace despite long length, an obligatory scene of mass destruction which serves no purpose but to raise the tenor of the central conflict.
But no one’s first impulse will be to examine this movie purely on its own merits. Say what you will about the idea of a “soft” reboot, Star Wars 7 will only -- and rightly -- be judged as an installment in the larger series. Does it live up to the pop-mythical standards of the original trilogy of the ‘70s and ‘80s? Does it exorcise the demons of the dysfunctional prequel trilogy of the ‘00s? How Star Wars-y is it exactly? Your ultimate opinion on the film will be linked inextricably to these kinds of questions, and your opinions on the larger series and what it means to you.
Therein lies the irony. I enjoyed this film, but I suspect it’s because Star Wars means far less to me as it seems to for many other people in my generation. Mythologies are defined by their transcendence of what’s possible to mere mortal engines like men, and thus impossible to be surpassed by anything within man’s own capabilities. To mythologize something on some level or another, is to encase it in a crystalline structure. Suspended there it can never be touched, modified or revisited. Immutable and eternal. How could a sequel to the Bhagavad Gita, regardless of its provenance or literary merits, be anything but unsatisfactory hubris?
