Robot Hyena

[robothyena]

Tome of Beasts, Reviewed

Tome of Beasts is a new third-party monster book for DnD 5th edition by Kobold Press. I reviewed it here. So is it good enough? Does it have a sufficient number of sexy lady monsters that lure gullible idiots to their doom? Exactly how many SNES games can I reference in a single review? You’ll just have to see for yourself. 

[robothyenawasteland]

GODS OF EGYPT IS ACTUALLY PRETTY ENTIRELY AN OK BUT DEFINITELY NOT GOOD MOVIE

I watched GODS OF EGYPT.

This may come as a terrible shock to some, but GODS OF EGYPT isn’t BAD-bad. It isn’t as bad as EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS. It certainly isn’t as bad as the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, which I won’t even deign to capitalize. It is about as equally bad as the ALICE IN WONDERLAND remake; both have the distinction of being visually stunning and terrifically shallow.

But it isn’t a disaster. The casting foofaraw in the run-up to this movie would have you think it was going to be BAD-bad–imagine my surprise, too. Barring the glowing casting choices (we’ll get to those in a moment), GODS OF EGYPT isn’t nearly as egregious in presentation as it could easily be. It doesn’t have: a) military-wank, b) long descents into creepy, ugly sexism meant to be titillating, or c) a concerted need to show the American moviegoer how scary Muslims are. This sets GODS OF EGYPT apart from the TRANSFORMERS franchise, AMERICAN SNIPER, elements of the MARVEL cinematic universe, and just generally more than half of everything Hollywood has made over the last decade.

Keep reading

[robothyena]

My GODS OF EGYPT review, in which I suffer for your sins.

[robothyena]

LISA: The Painful RPG; or, ‘a father of many nations have I made thee.’

LISA, “The Painful RPG,” promises to be, “the miserable journey of a broken man.” Having completed LISA, I would say this statement is an accurate one.

In a post-apocalyptic world, a drug-addicted former karate instructor named Brad finds an infant. He raises the child in secret, naming her Buddy. She is, for reasons unclear, the only human with a uterus left on Earth (called, “Olathe,” in the game’s parlance). One day, she is kidnapped. Brad sets out to find her.

Keep reading

[robothyena]

I feel confident telling you that LISA: The Painful RPG is my Game of the Year 2015 (whatever that means). At all times in LISA are we torn between sincerity and irony; torn between a story about a very real, very humane struggle, and a world of weird, “internet” humor that continuously pushes us away. It very nearly spins itself apart in the end. That enough of the heart of the thing remains present and beating is testament to its success. Rest in Peace, Brad Armstrong. 

[robothyena]

LISA: The Painful RPG; or, ‘a father of many nations have I made thee.’

LISA, "The Painful RPG," promises to be, "the miserable journey of a broken man." Having completed LISA, I would say this statement is an accurate one.

In a post-apocalyptic world, a drug-addicted former karate instructor named Brad finds an infant. He raises the child in secret, naming her Buddy. She is, for reasons unclear, the only human with a uterus left on Earth (called, "Olathe," in the game's parlance). One day, she is kidnapped. Brad sets out to find her.

Olathe is a frightening world of bizarre visions and dark humor. LISA has been described by some as a "grim," or "grownup," version of Earthbound. I think this both diminishes the complexity of Earthbound, and sells LISA short. Aside from the similarities in graphics and the turn-based battle system, LISA is a creature of a different pedigree altogether, and seems formed from very different stuff.

LISA is a game pulling in two directions. On the one hand, it tells the story of an alienated man trying to be a good father in a world out to destroy him. This is well-trod territory in fiction. On the other hand, LISA is a world of "quirky" characters, surreal situations, and sight gags all jockeying for wiggle room. A good chunk of this humor, I'm told, is based on 'Let's Play' Youtube culture and professional wrestling. Much of this went right over my head, but there is enough going on to keep things moving. Creator/writer Austin Jorgensen has an excellent grasp of idiosyncratic dialogue. Characters sputter and cuss and grumble and shout, and the expressive sprites do major work in giving characters unique voices. From the storyteller Nern's creaky lemme-tell-ya-isms to the wild ululations of the unstoppable luchador "Rage," everyone in LISA has personality.

Yet this humor constantly runs up against the sad tale of Brad Armstrong in search of his adoptive daughter. Brad is haunted by his addiction to a sci-fi drug cryptically dubbed, "Joy," which, we soon learn, turns prolonged users into mutants: stretched-out, mindless creatures recalling the ending of AKIRA. Buddy has been kidnapped by the army of Rando, seemingly the sole remaining organized group in Olathe. Brad must contend with Rando's forces, the various dopey-yet-dangerous inhabitants of Olathe, and a mysterious Glasgow-smile villain named Buzzo, who subjects Brad to various Sophie's Choice punishments--typically, Brad's arm(s) for the life of one of his companions.

Before we dive into that kettle of worms, some thoughts on life in Olathe. What's weird--logical, even--is how LISA presents the world after the end as one both sad and mundane. As the official trailer puts it, "A few strong men, a sea of dipshits and perverts." Although LISA mines apocalyptic movies for trappings, we don't see huge armies clashing. No Mad Max highway wars. Most of the men in this world are despondent sadsacks waiting for the end, sitting alone in hovels and bars, drinking or drugging themselves to death. They trade porno mags for currency and are unperturbed by everything that does not affect them. Those that turn into torpid, rubbery Joy-mutants are left to their own devices; after all, there is no hope for anyone. The only groups that seem lively at all are those obsessed with theatrical displays of masculinity, including a kung fu village and a ramshackle wrestling championship Brad and company can compete in.

The conflict in the story hinges upon Buddy. "The last female," as the game puts it. LISA makes no attempts to soften precisely why all the involved parties want to capture her for themselves. Thankfully, we are not subjected to any voyeuristic Game of Thrones-y sequences. (spoilers follow from here on out.) Brad, we learn, is tormented over the death of his younger sister, the eponymous Lisa, who committed suicide years ago after being abused by their miserable father. Buddy has become his atonement for her death.

LISA plays fast and loose with drug addiction, abuse and the idea of “crazy.” I wouldn't say it is any worse than what you can expect to see on primetime television. It is certainly less ghastly than HBO-fare. Nevertheless, because some of the drug and “'crazy” content is played for humor, that clash of themes returns to the forefront. Some of Olathe's disturbed inhabitants are there to provide kooky little vignettes, while others, like the aforementioned Buzzo, bring assured suffering and terror. In my own playthrough, I found it impossible to reconcile these competing elements. But everything almost--almost, perhaps!--came together in the game's final scenes.

Brad has tracked Buddy to an isle. Brad goes on alone, forsaking his additional party members. He first discovers Buddy in a hut with his aged father, who he kills in a fit of rage. By now, we've witnessed so many hallucinatory sequences that it is difficult to tell what is real and unreal. By Buddy's reaction, we can see Brad clearly did kill her elderly guardian, but was he really Brad's father? Buddy flees and Brad pursues--right into the waiting arms of Rando's remaining forces, some twenty or thirty armed men in all.

In this moment, your party members will show up. No matter which three you picked, they will all implore you to relent, some of them out of loyalty, some out of fear, some because they believe that, yes, Buddy is hope for the future. Brad, beaten and tormented, replies: "All of you people are filling her head with nonsense. Blinding her... You don't understand -- I have to save her."

Brad is unable to articulate what he needs to say. That Buddy is the one thing that gave him a reason to live. That Buddy is a reminder of Lisa, who he believes he failed to save. That Buddy has no obligation to save the world, if the world could even be saved by her reproducing. Forget the fact that to return a sexually reproducing species from the brink, you’d need many more people. Even if anyone in Olathe was aware of this fact, LISA seems to be saying, abandon it for the sake of suspending disbelief. Everyone wants Buddy because they think she can save the world. Brad wants everyone to leave her be.

Brad cuts through the entire remaining Rando army and squares off with the soft-spoken Rando, who, in a twist (because of course there is a twist), is Dusty, one of Brad's former karate students, a timid young man whose heavily scarred face is implied to have been inflicted by Brad in a Joy-induced hallucination long ago. Already shot through with arrows, burned, and stabbed, Brad dispatches Rando, who utters, "Y-you really are the best -- Thank you... for everything," before he dies.

Brad, nearly dead himself, speaks with Buddy, who accuses him of ruining her chance at a life. "People are always going to try and use you... to hurt you," he says.

"You can't just be a father all of the sudden."  

"I'm the one that was supposed to protect you."

"You've hurt me the most."

Before he dies, Brad asks Buddy to hug him, "To know what it feels like." This choice is left to the player. And then, Brad speaks his last. "Buddy... did I do the right thing?"

Curtain drop, roll credits. But then!--a post-credits scene depicts a now-Joy mutated Brad slouching towards a small cabin which contains a sleeping Buddy. The mutant-Brad groans, "Lisa." before the game cuts to black.

Sigh.

I'll come right out and say this first--the post-credits scene feels like a totally unnecessary addition. An upcoming sequel called, "LISA the Joyful," stars Buddy as the main character, so we know she survives the arrival of the mutated Brad--but this scene. Damn! It does nothing except diminish the poignancy of the previous scene. This man--this miserable, broken man--has maimed his way across a lousy world to save the only remaining child from a life of garbage. But should we be surprised? Is this not exactly what the game promised--what it built toward, with the references to the Joy-drug's mutating effects, the depredations of the still-mysterious villain Buzzo, and the cheaply-spent lives of Brad's many comrades? Why couldn’t you just let me have this?

And so, here, we return once more (and finally), to the clash of ideas. LISA struggles between sincere intimacy and ironic distance throughout its story. This is a cynical world of men who hate themselves and everyone, who drink and puke and cry and don lucha libre masks to fight mutant fishmen and play Russian roulette for porno mags. Yet this is also a world in which one man struggles to save a child--a child smart enough to understand that this world does not have her best interests in mind, yet, in the end, articulates that what she despises most is having her agency taken away. Could Rando--revealed to be the timid former-student Dusty--have given her a life of safety? Had Brad let her go--had he not wrapped his conception of her so tightly with his own traumas--would  that have made things better? LISA does not provide answers. Buddy lives, Brad dies. Hope, in that moment, before the post-credits scene adds a boorishly dark stinger to the end of things, seems distant, yet possible.

LISA certainly charms with its wacky humor and drugged out cartoon images. But the Abrahamic struggle of Brad Armstrong, carried along in fits and starts beneath and alongside this feverish parade of sights and sounds, never fully emerges from the weight of LISA, "the dark humor RPG," until those final moments, when all the suffering is made evident by necessity of climax and plot. “Fate has swept away all my kinsmen to destined death. I must follow them.”

I once said The Last of Us was the very last "Dad Game," I'd ever care to see in games. I spoke to soon. One more will do. Rest in peace, Brad Armstrong. Your sorrow was my own. Your tale was pain enough.

(Did l mention the soundtrack is wonderful? Because it is.)

***On the 'game - play:' I didn't want to delve into the mechanical particulars in this essay. I will note the game's love of permanent character fatalities can be worked around by judicious use of save files. Brad and company's movesets are very diverse and a delight to use in encounters. I'm a big fan of Harvey, the fishman lawyer who hurls litigious papers at enemies to induce status effects. Be prepared for mechanical "jankiness," should you play it yourself, and save often.

[robothyena]

[robothyena]

robothyena:

This is THE DAUNTLESS, a novella I wrote.

You can download the Ebook at THIS LINK, or read it online here.

"Sygemund fought both the undead and the southrons during the war. Now she is on the run. Jarl Angrboda—the most unrelenting commander the Dauntless have ever known—has accused her of treason. She flees into a disintegrating realm of massacre, decay, fear and isolation. But she is not alone: an ominous whale-hunter named Qalpalik has joined in her desertion. But the whaler’s dark designs may prove to be Sygemund’s undoing, and Jarl Angrboda refuses to suffer such insult. There is no more victory left in the North. Sygemund survived the war. Now she must survive what comes after."

THE DAUNTLESS is the fourth entry in my cycle of Warcraft stories called In The Aftermath. No prior knowledge of Warcraft is required to read THE DAUNTLESS. Provided I have done my job correctly, the foreword and text should be all you’ll need. For more information on this series, see this rubric.

This story is about a lot of things. It is about the things we put into fiction and the things we take out of it. It is about the kinds of characters which creators choose to include or exclude from their work, and what stories they choose to tell about them. It is about “dark,” and “mature,” stories. It is about what Warcraft has been, has become, and might yet be. It is about trying to find humanity in the inhumane.

I hope you’ll give it a try. See you on the other side.

It is officially WINTER so I think it's appropriate to repost my story about giant cannibal women of the frozen wastes.

[robothyena]

Far Cry 4: Insurgency & Uncertainty

I'm trying to think about Far Cry 4. About shooty games in general. But I keep thinking about an essay that appeared in the March 1997 of the Chicago Reader: "Losing the War," by Lee Sandlin. I can't do it justice here. It's a comprehensive meditation on World War 2, probably the most captivating thing I've read about it in a long time--and I'm someone who gets drowsy at the mention of WW2. It's really worth reading in full. I'm going to try to sum it up as best as I can, right here. He explains:

World War 2 was an unmitigated disaster, bigger than we'd like to consider; that none of the parties involved could reckon with the powers they were unleashing, nor the effects of which they could scarcely comprehend; that everyone, from the soldiers, to the politicians, to the civilian populations, were joined in a sort of collective madness that allowed the war to spin out into a complete catastrophe and keep going without anyone willing or able to grab the wheel; that the bureaucracies of the various powers were so labyrinthine, the war efforts so total, that the wholesale destruction of life could not be abated, and, indeed, was  pushed to pointlessly ridiculous ends; that Germany and Japan's fatalistic fear of total annihilation, and the Allies' belief in pummeling them into absolute surrender, meant that when everyone should have called it quits, they instead grappled, screaming and bloody, into a final, pointless morass of bloodshed; that the atom bombs: "[were] the culminating moment of the war--it was the point at which the war's graph of escalating destructiveness finally went off the scale and rendered everything that had happened before trivial;" that the whole thing was a useless, insane, hellish calamity.

So let's talk about a fictional insurgency in a blockbuster video game about a fictional nation in the Himalayas that features, among other characters, a redneck in a bandana and a harpoon gun.

Far Cry 4 is a terribly uneasy game. Its plot is at cross-purposes with what the game asks you to do: kill lots of lots of people to make numbers go up. It is--I think--about very real things happening in the world today, even if it isn't any more sure than anyone else what to tell us about them. It is bursting at the seams with what it wants to tell you, but isn't sure it has the words.

It goes like this: the flamboyant son of a Hong Kong gangster named Pagan Min links up with a royalist insurgency in this place called Kyrat, betrays them, and assumes power. The son of the fallen rebel leader is spirited to America as a babe--that's you, herogunguy Ajay Ghale. You return with your mother's ashes years later, and are swept up in the Kyrat's discombobulating civil war.

If you didn't already know, Far Cry 3 was kind of a bugaboo. People said it was racist in its depiction of Pacific Islanders. The lead writer said they were attempting to break apart the white savior myth. People said he was just trying to cover his butt. I think it's possible to try, and fail, and have a thing end up being pretty embarrassing. I'm guessing the producers, directors, and investors didn't have the same ideas the creative team did.

I don't know that 4 fixes what went wrong in 3. The Kyrati people aren't depicted as awkwardly as the Pacific Islanders were in 3, sure. Ajay Ghale is a total cipher; when he does speak, he is usually befuddled, frustrated, and perplexed by his involvement in this war, making all the deaths he racks up even more jarring. It might have been better had he been silent altogether. Some of the imagery is a little rough around the edges, but I think reflexively condemning the use of any non-Western iconography in a work is silly; make some noise when it's done poorly or exploitative, sure, but if it's just kinda... there?[1]

Far Cry 4 dabbles in a subplot concerning Shangri-La, and one ancient warrior's struggle to free that utopia from the grip of demons. Drug-induced vision-quests of this legend haunt Ajay throughout the game's campaign, tottering between belief and disbelief. Far Cry 3 touched on this theme with Alice in Wonderland inspired visions, too; but here they are something at once more concrete and more fleeting; demons, yetis, and supernatural powers linger at the periphery, a mythic world that Far Cry 4's holiday sale ambitions will not allow it to indulge in fully; this is a shootmans game, after all. This is important, I think, to the contours of the game's insurgency narrative.

Basically: the insurgency--the Golden Path--has two leaders: Amita and Sabal. Amita wants to modernize Kyrat, even if that means selling all the artifacts and turning the nation into one giant poppy-field. Sabal wants to preserve Kyrat, which would maintain its priceless relics, but remain poor, backwards, and socially regressive. Both want to kill Pagan Min. In the end, the game makes you kill one of them. Take your pick.

There's a lot of the Arab Spring in Far Cry 4. Specifically: there's a lot of the West's vision of the Arab Spring: a bright revolution of the people, by the people, that seems to have turned into something ugly; the goodhearted actors of Tahrir Square and Bourguiba Avenue replaced by warring militias and religious fanatics. The Spring no longer fit the Western narrative of societies moving inexorably toward Western liberal democratic (capitalist) societies. Isn't that what progress supposedly like?

I'm not going to get into nitty-gritty line-by-line stuff, here. Some of the dialogue is cringy. Some of it works. Some is downright enjoyable. A bunch of the "missions" seem perfunctory, checking off boxes of things-you-do in this sort of shooter before you can get to the next region.

Here's the big picture take: you join the "good guys," fighting the civil war. The good guys turn out to be just as crummy as the bad guys in a lot of ways. There's no "right answer." You make a call on who to kill. Far Cry 4 doesn't tell you whether you were right or wrong. I think it's right to do that, at least. It leaves the conclusions up to you. To wonder what's going to happen to Kyrat, when you go on to confront Pagan Min in his palace.

And then that ending. And the alternate ending. If you watch the "good" ending on youtube--why are people calling it that, anyway?--you confront Pagan Min in his palace. His empire is crumbling down around him. He explains he's sort of your stepfather. That your real father was kind of a bastard. That his heart broke when your mother died, damning him to become a tyrant. You lay your mother's ashes to rest. He says you're the heir to the Kyrati throne. He hops on the last chopper out of Kyrat, wishing you good luck.

And hell, that alternate ending. If you don't bother escaping Min's clutches in the game's intro, you lay your mum's ashes to rest as he just explains all of this to you. And then you go off to have fun shooting guns and stuff as the credits roll.

This is a roundabout way of saying Far Cry 4 presents a world of grey sadness. All of these people are pining for things they've lost or cannot hope to attain. It brings the purpose of mythic elements into a kind of focus. The principal actors of Far Cry 4 are people adrift; looking back into the past at departed golden eras, or running from them as fast as they can. There is no certainty in the before or after for the people of Kyrat. This feels true--or as true as it can--to the uncertainty of the post-colonial experiment still ongoing in much of the world, where the old order was eradicated and people now struggle to adapt to a new one to which they did not consent.

Only… it does not offer conclusions. Could it even offer conclusions? It ends so jarringly--Pagan Min's chopper disappearing into the sky, Ajay, heroic murder of hundreds (possibly thousands), standing in the rubble of the palace, the future unknown; or about to be whisked into god-knows-what mayhem under Min's tutelage in the alternate "secret" ending. There's even a "bad" ending (youtube again!) where you just shoot Min, and the credits roll.

What is to become of Kyrat? Might as well ask what is to become of Iraq. What is to become of Libya. What is to become of any number of places. The West has put so much space between the present and its own ugly revolutions and civil wars that it is easy to forget how long it took to crawl from the wreckage. A youthful America once veered from one conflict to the next over a century of disorder and violence before it could even begin to extract itself from the horrors of its own conception. People ask what the hell is "wrong" with, say the Sudan, yet, when measured against our own timeline, they wouldn't have even begun the War of 1812 yet.

So, to my mind, this is what Far Cry 4 is concerned with, if peripherally and at times awkwardly: the nature of insurgency, its inherent opacity, the simple fact that there are rarely "good" actors in a conflict. I think there's a difference between "gritty" amorality and "grey" politicking of the kind we get out of grimdark fiction, and what is earnestly an attempt to portray the fact that people are complicated, sad primates. I think Far Cry 4 is trying to do the latter. I don't know that it pulls it off. Maybe I just can't stop thinking about WW2 right now.

Furthermore, the game's fiction simply cannot do a damn thing against the fact that Far Cry 4 must be "Fun!" It must be a shooty game, with objectives, and glowy items to grab, and missions of every stripe, and a whole menagerie of animals to hunt, and weapons you can paint cool colors, and funny rednecks, and elephants to ride while shooting grenade launchers. Can a game be A) interactive, B) entertaining, and C) say something about war and insurgency while maintaining a level of decorum in the face of the naked capitalism of the whole enterprise?

Too many hands in the mix, maybe. Too much money on the line, maybe. Then again, I reject the idea that "indies," can necessarily do it "better," than AAA--it certainly seems a bit tougher for the latter, at the moment. But can I blame them for trying? For struggling to put something about something in the middle of this big, ungainly, unsightly mess of gigabytes that is, at the end of the day, a first-person shooter that must sell [x] copies?

Maybe it's not about the Arab Spring. Just my interpretation(!) Like Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Far Cry 4 feels uneasy about the world the way most Western media feels right now; wavering at the edge of overlapping epochs for which we have no clear analog, peering in on parts of the world that do not share our sentiments, who are now subject to struggles which the world is "supposed" to be moving on from. The dim prehistory which precedes utopia, as I once heard it called.

Far Cry 4 won't tell try to tell you how it's all gonna shake down; it won't even guess at it. But neither will anybody else right now, it seems. Welcome to the moment. We're all just waiting.

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[1] This gets into the big discussion of what is and what isn't appropriation, and who can do it, and whether or not a big corporation or an individual doing it is okay relative to how they do it. There will be very interesting holodecks written about this subject in seventy years.

[robothyena]

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare - "A Game"

Last year I critiqued Call of Duty: Ghosts in the form of an interview with myself for Pixels or Death.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare (AW), is out. I watched it on youtube. This isn't a review. I won't be talking about whether or not the gunshoot is good. Maybe it is. This isn't about that. 

VICE Media did a documentary-style ad for AW in the run-up to release that was about the rise of private military contractors, or PMCs. Among the people featured was Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, the notorious PMC group best-remembered for being good at terrorizing the Iraqi population and little else. Several former Blackwater employees were just found guilty of a 2007 shooting in Baghdad.

Robert Rath at Critical Intel already dismantled Vice's advertisement-journalism, so I won't belabor this by repeating what's already been said in a clumsier manner

Spoilers ahead.

The thing about AW is: I don't think Prince et al would have agreed to it knowing how poorly it favors PMCs. Here's the breakdown:

The main character--GunMan, let's call him--starts out in the US Marines pushing back a North Korean invasion of South Korea. It's not clear how North Korea managed to get advanced weaponry, armor, drones, and airships--considering their GDP is mostly turnips and misery--but this is speculative fiction, so we'll run with it. His best friend, Will Irons--no, I'm not making that name up--dies, and GunMan is wounded. Thus follows the Press [x] to pay respects scene, which, I'll admit, Batman: Arkham City already did.

GunMan joins Atlas, run by Will Iron's father, John Irons. John Irons is... Kevin Spacey. He runs the world's largest PMC company and is totally-not-evil, you guys.

You head off to stop a Chechen terrorist who wants to throw the world back into a "natural state," so think a grumpy, Russian Tyler Durden with none of the charm. And a mohawk. He looks suspiciously like the guy from Far Cry 3.

Turns out Spacey had prior knowledge of the terrorist's plans, and allows their bombs to go off at a bunch of reactors, precipitating Atlas' rise to power. You go rogue after the Chechen dies. And here's where it gets interesting: GunMan and friends and are taken in by Sentinel, an international USSOCOM-alike set up to stop Kevin Spacey and his robo-suit army.

For a good third of the game, the PMCs are presented as cooler, more technologically advanced, and more agile than traditional militaries. But then AW does an about-face, you rejoin the US military, and gotta stop 'em.

The result is this... mush. Is AW condemning PMCs? The advertising campaign seemed a little too slick to be a total dismissal... and surely Prince and others weren't going to put their face on a product that shows their bread-and-butter in a bad light. Is AW condemning traditional militaries? Kevin Spacey's monologues on government bureaucracy's ineffectiveness at solving problems seems tailored to our current political climate characterized by gridlock in Congress.

Kevin Spacey claims his effective takeover of the UN and destruction of the US military is necessary, given that US policy has been responsible for huge amounts of death and mayhem since the 1950s... and he's not totally wrong on that? But the whole Atlas thing is basically a riff on the "power corrupts," saying. So what the heck is AW about?

Sledgehammer Games developed AW. Infinity Ward developed Ghosts. Ghosts began with Venezuelan suicide-bombers attacking an orbital death laser. It was about as paranoid and jingoistic as Call of Duty could get without descending into parody so obvious no one would touch it (one would hope). AW ain't like that. In fact, AW looks and sounds a lot like... a goulash of the last few years of AAA shooters, with sci-fi trappings. It makes tentative grasps towards transhumanism themes through the main character's prosthetics, and brushes up against man-and-machine questions raised by advanced war-tech. Drones, it seems to say, are super-cool and can kill a lot of people.

But the world of circa 2055 looks and sounds a lot like the fears of current-day America. North Korea. Drones. Political gridlock. Terrorists. Russians! Russian terrorists? Bioterrorism! Robotics? Prisons? The only thing that's missing is climate change.

Advanced Warfare tries to be a little of everything. It's a frozen pizza covered with all the seasonings in the spice cabinet. It's everything and nothing. It's A Game.

Too many flavors.

I'm a little relieved, you know? In a crude way. I'm relieved that Advanced Warfare's trappings could be so... tepid. Maybe I'm just burnt out on military-fetishization media. My takeaway is that it simply isn't as on-the-nose as Ghosts was, and a few of the previous entries. That doesn't mean it isn't basically a commercial for weapons manufacturers over the next two decades. It totally is. But it is very bland about it. 

I don't know if Sledgehammer--and Activision--actively tried to walk back from some of the aesthetic excesses of recent Call of Duty games. Maybe internally, there was some talk of it. We'll likely never know. My own sense is that the hodgepodge near-future of Advanced Warfare just stumbled into this ditch of checking all the worry-boxes and ended up with this.

Advanced Warfare's vision of the future is cynical. Same shit, different decade. But you know, that should please PMCs, weapons manufacturers, and anyone else who benefits from the status quo. In Advanced Warfare, the wars of the future don't seem much different from contemporary conflict at all.

[robothyena]

This is THE DAUNTLESS, a novella I wrote.

You can download the Ebook at THIS LINK, or read it online here.

"Sygemund fought both the undead and the southrons during the war. Now she is on the run. Jarl Angrboda--the most unrelenting commander the Dauntless have ever known--has accused her of treason. She flees into a disintegrating realm of massacre, decay, fear and isolation. But she is not alone: an ominous whale-hunter named Qalpalik has joined in her desertion. But the whaler's dark designs may prove to be Sygemund's undoing, and Jarl Angrboda refuses to suffer such insult. There is no more victory left in the North. Sygemund survived the war. Now she must survive what comes after."

THE DAUNTLESS is the fourth entry in my cycle of Warcraft stories called In The Aftermath. No prior knowledge of Warcraft is required to read THE DAUNTLESS. Provided I have done my job correctly, the foreword and text should be all you'll need. For more information on this series, see this rubric.

This story is about a lot of things. It is about the things we put into fiction and the things we take out of it. It is about the kinds of characters which creators choose to include or exclude from their work, and what stories they choose to tell about them. It is about "dark," and "mature," stories. It is about what Warcraft has been, has become, and might yet be. It is about trying to find humanity in the inhumane.

I hope you'll give it a try. See you on the other side.

[robothyena]

AMERICA'S CONTRACT KILLER: They are not real; they are the most dangerous person on Earth.

((Author's Note: The following is a work of fiction written in the style of a piece of investigative journalism.))

-----

She is seven feet tall: on this point, everyone seems to be in agreement.

They call her the Wendigo; named for the flesh-eating monster of Algonquian Indian mythology. She reports to a board of directors drawn from the CIA's Special Activities Division, the United States Special Operations Command, and the White House. Officially, she does not exist. The alias "Wendigo" is never uttered in her presence, sources claim. She is referred to as "Agent Smith," and never in writing, as the Wendigo is only a myth.

The full scope of her activities is unknown: she is deployed alone, with highly clandestine support or none at all, operating outside international law. She arrives silently and leaves without a trace. Her list of successful "marks," may number in the hundreds. None of them can be confirmed, but the web of growing correlations suggests an ongoing operation rivaling that of the drone program.

This report, compiled from over a year of interviews with Congressional members and staffers, military officials, advisers, aides, and others, pieces together a picture of a woman who some have called America's "Chief Assassin." Due to the highly sensitive nature of this information it is impossible to even hint at the identities of this report's sources beyond the aforementioned. While this article may read like a piece of fiction, every detail has been carefully reported.

The Wendigo lives in what several sources referred to as "The Bat Lair," beneath an unnamed and unassuming building somewhere in Washington DC. Behind unmarked doors, down labyrinthine hallways and long stairwells, through multiple layers of security, the Wendigo lives in a repurposed bunker. Her surroundings are highly spartan: an entertainment system, computer, bed, kitchen, and a gymnasium's worth of exercise equipment. Her favorite workout: hanging upside-down from a pull-up bar by her knees and performing dozens of crunches in this position--while holding a ninety-pound weight.

The Wendigo comes and goes by private vehicle: one of the the black, menacing, unmarked government sedans often seen speeding around the Beltway. Her habitation has few staffers due to the secrecy surrounding her existence.

On most days, the Wendigo is left to her own devices: she reads voraciously and exercises constantly. Sources who have interacted with her say she plainly exhibits photographic memory and has an aggressive recall for statistical facts.

Once every week, the Wendigo is summoned to the White House. The date and times are constantly changed. She arrives alone in a black sedan and is ushered into the Situation Room. The Wendigo never steps into the White House proper: it is imperative that she is not seen.

The Wendigo, however, is difficult to mistake. She is, most strikingly, very tall--almost seven feet, perhaps more--and highly robust. One source likened her physique to that of Bruce Lee, except massively scaled up. She is in her late twenties, possibly early thirties. She is of indeterminate ethnicity, with dark skin and black hair. Variously, sources describe her as Eastern European, Indian, African, Colombian, Native American, and even Australian Aborigine.

Almost every source who has interacted with the Wendigo describes her presence as inspiring a sense of palpable unease. She never breaks eye contact and speaks with a resonant voice. Her affect remains quite calm until something raises her ire; she then speaks quickly and forcefully. Sources note that senior officials of the variety not used to being talked over or down to find themselves awestruck after their first meeting with the Wendigo.

One source recalled the fallout over a video meeting with Israeli officials which took place in the Situation Room during the 2008 Gaza War. The President was in attendance as the groups discussed shared security concerns. The Wendigo, present via audio and speaking with voice-changing software, nearly sank the entire meeting when she accused the Israeli military of "ethnic cleansing."

"She'd done this sort of thing before, but only with our guys. There's an expectation you're not gonna have an outburst like that, and she just started laying into them. The Israelis nearly canned the meeting right there," the source said.

"That was the first and last time they had her sit in on anything with foreigners."

The Wendigo's alleged targets have included terrorists and guerrilla fighters, tycoons and millionaires. The latter category are what make the Wendigo's very existence such an incredible liability for the US government. "If other countries knew the extent to which they've been using her," one source said, "they'd have to scoop their jaws up off the floor."

Sources describe a board of directors divided over how best to utilize the Wendigo. "Originally, they had her going after guys with AK-47s in caves," one source said. "Then that started changing."

Over the past two years, significant National Security Agency (NSA) resources have been diverted into mapping the world's black-market economy, the so-called, "global offshore." Estimated at over a trillion dollars and growing, it constitutes the world's largest economy, one not subject to taxation or oversight.

The calculus surrounding the Wendigo's deployment against the global offshore is described as covertly sabotaging a system too-large and too-opaque to tackle by other means: akin to pulling the cogs out of a runaway machine for lack of a better response. Sources stressed that the Wendigo is not sent after highly-visible business persons or public officials. "She kills the middlemen," one source said. "Single-digit millionaires, at most. The guys doing the screwing-over. Dumping oil on a coral reef, running a factory full of captive workers."

"She's very, very good at that kind of stuff."

Unlike the drone program, which faces mounting Congressional and public pressure at home and abroad, the Wendigo program, also referred to as "Project Smith," operates with complete impunity and outside of official budgets. Money, unsurprisingly, seems to be a hugely motivating factor: the Wendigo has accomplished in a fraction of the cost what other projects seem unable to do.

"She has undoubtedly changed the whole global anatomy," one source said. "People just don't realize it yet."

The deployment of the Wendigo happens as follows: the board of directors determines a target or targets. The information is relayed to the Wendigo, who determines the resources necessary for the mission, or if she will do the mission at all. "She has the final say. She's turned down plenty of missions for ethical reasons. They don't like it when that happens."

At the determined time, the Wendigo is dispatched to an airbase. Her plane is a high-altitude flyer equipped with stealth-technology. The plane's crew never changes; highly trained and highly trusted, they have flown dozens, possibly hundreds of missions for the Wendigo.

The Wendigo's plane never flies a direct route to the target location. Once overhead, she performs a high-altitude parachute insertion, also known as a HALO (high altitude - low opening) drop. According to estimates given by sources, she has performed more HALO drops than any other person, living or dead.

The Wendigo carries almost no equipment. She memorizes topography and satellite images before each mission. She is encumbered only by her armor, a one-of-a-kind synthetic-ceramic suit made to her specifications, and her weapons: knives, and, very rarely, guns. Firearms, sources say, are the last resort. Knives and her own two hands offer a means of obscuration: targets appearing dispatched by local disputes, political rivals, random assailants, or unfortunate accident.

She travels for days, sometimes weeks, to reach the target location. She has crossed the world's most inhospitable deserts, most impassible mountains, and deepest jungles. "She's probably seen things no other living person has," one source said.

She carries no identification of any kind. She is a completely deniable asset. Extraction takes places at locations known only to her superiors and herself, sometimes in another country altogether. On one occasion, a source claims, following a mission in the Horn of Africa, the Wendigo swam across the Gulf of Aden to an extraction point somewhere on the Arabian Peninsula.

Sources are divided not only on the effectiveness and morality of the Project Smith, but the potential ramifications.

"She's killed a lot of bad guys. Guys you'd look at and say, "That's a terrorist." But for every one of them, she's probably killed somebody who we certainly aren't 'supposed' to kill. The kind of people with condos in Italy, or wherever," one source said. "Real s--t-heeled criminals, but not guys who are going out and hijacking planes. Exploiters."

"I believe they could sell the American public on this woman if they could communicate the tangible results of what she's doing. But I don't think they actually have a grasp on it themselves."

"The problem with something like the Wendigo is: with drones, you have a clear line of causality. Everybody knows when a drone kills someone. But now, every unexplained murder has the possibility of the Wendigo dangling off it. What do we say to our allies? 'Just trust us?" another source said.

The White House is at odds over their SOCOM and CIA counterparts over the Wendigo. The President's office has maintained the largest distance from the particulars of the project, sources say, preferring to focus on the overall effects. And while all three parties are uniformly in agreement over the efficacy of the so-called "counter-terrorism," missions carried out by the Wendigo, they clash over the risks and rewards of the "nation-building," missions, with their murky rationale and murkier goals.

"They're all equally responsible for ramping up the 'rich-guy hits," one source said. "But they don't want it to look like some kind of New World Order. It ain't. A dead terrorist is one thing. But what happens when somebody with a Wikipedia page gets whacked?"

Again and again, sources stressed that the Wendigo seems--from a coldly rational standpoint--an effective tool, but voiced grave concerns over the unknown costs of Project Smith.

"They talk about it like there's a master plan. It's backed by NSA data, so there's that sense of--well, there's this huge black cloud running things," one source said. "But from where a lot of people are sitting, it's going to look a lot like they're just pointing this woman at people and pulling the trigger."

At the center of this debate is the woman herself. Her legal name is unknown, or if she is even a US citizen. She has no prior military history, or it has been erased from all records. Certainly, if someone matching her appearance had ever served in any branch of the armed forces, there would be people who remember her. By all accounts her arrival seemed virtually unannounced.

"She's Boba Fett," one source said laconically. "You don't know what's behind the mask. She could be a spy for all we know. You wanna talk about somebody who 'knows too much?' That's her."

Last summer, the Wendigo HALO-dropped somewhere in the Tian Shan mountain range, on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan. Her mission took her south into the Taklamakan Desert, where nighttime temperatures drop below freezing and water is scarcely a dream. She spent the next three weeks traveling more than two hundred miles west, to the Wakhan Corridor. A slender panhandle on Afghanistan's northeastern border, the Corridor has, since America's Afghan invasion, been considered a hideout of militants with suspected Taliban ties.

Once there, she located and eliminated her targets. Possibly a dozen or more, their bodies unlikely to ever be found. Disappeared in the Hindu Kush, their crimes unknown. She reached an extraction point somewhere in northern Afghanistan a few days later and was gone, having crossed hundreds of miles, three borders, and killed an unknown number of persons. Came and went without a trace.

This is the world of the Wendigo: a person dies, and no one but her will ever know why.

Correction: An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the Wendigo's housing being located beneath an NSA building in Washington DC. The ownership and location of the building remain unknown. A version of this article appears in print on July 30, 2014 on page A1 of the San Francisco edition with the headline: America's Contact Killer.

[robothyena]

Concerning The Legend of Zelda, Eiji Aonuma's Comment and Reversal, Fiction and Money-dollars

Okay, we're doing this.

On Tuesday, Nintendo showed off the trailer for the new Legend of Zelda for the WiiU. People noted that Link--if it was Link--looked somewhat androgynous and not-Link-ish, and so when someone queried Eiji Aonuma (series producer, former director) on the matter, he said: "No one explicitly said that was Link." Expectedly, that got everyone pumped up. Maybe it was a Zelda starring Zelda? That only lasted about 24hrs, though. In an interview with MMGN Aonuma walked back his statements, saying it was made in jest.

I'm going to approach this from two sides. Business and lore. Yeah, buckle up folks.

First, let's peel apart Aonuma's statement. He says, "I don’t want people to get hung up on the way Link looks because ultimately Link represents the player in the game. I don’t want to define him so much that it becomes limiting to the players."

Translation: "I don't want to define Link so much that people can't identify with them, says Aonuma. So we're going to make sure he stays a 17-year old boy."

So, no. I don't think we need to belabor this point to get that it's patently wrong. People respond to avatars they can actually identify with. Skyrim, Bioware games, Dark Souls, MMOs, etc. This should be totally obvious by now. These are games that have made, are making, and will make the payola. We want those greenbacks, right?

The fact is that Nintendo needs women. Here's the relevant data. Let me shorthand it: since young adult women are the burgeoning market in games, and women are nearly 50% of playing population, the need to garner their support is kind of huge. Animal Crossing and other Nintendo products were/are disproportionately bought by women consumers. The success of the Wii and DS were tied to women buyers, and the 3DS is living on that same vine. The shorter shorthand: any freebies they can float out to women will help Nintendo's bottom line. That vine may die without them.

So, the calculus behind a woman leading Zelda (either Zelda herself or a lady-Link (being the main character or a second option))--setting aside even such strange ideas like creative adventurism, diverse storytelling, and the support of one's audience!--is, from a purely business standpoint, not only fruitful, but likely, inevitable.

AND NOW, LORE.

The Legend of Zelda series is a single timeline. Well, it's two timelines, but we're not going to worry about that. Here's the basic thing: Skyward Sword establishes that Zelda, Link, and Ganondorf are actually the expression of an ancient fued/curse belched forth upon the anonymous world they inhabit every several hundred years. Zelda is the reincarnation of the "blood" of a goddess, Ganondorf of an ancient demon-thing, and Link is just the incarnation of something called the "Spirit of the Hero." Not even a soul, just the weird, platonic ideal of heroism spewed back into the material realm whenever the Ganondorf-entity reappears.

SO IT COULD LITERALLY BE ANYONE.

Seriously. If Link is just a meat-sock stretched around a glob of some ineffable semi-divine concept of goodliness, it could be ANYONE.

What an intellectually freeing concept! What a delightful thing they can either utilize or ignore! And that is crucial: Zelda is an invented fiction--it can be stretched, squashed, retconned and reconfigured as necessary. Have all the Links been male? Is it "against" the spirit of the series to have Zelda star in it, or have this Link be a woman? Conveniently, Mr. Aonuma, the seeds of a new protagonist exist in either scenario! Fealty to the text? Well, as we've just seen, you can have Link appear as a woman in this game and point out that you are simply interpreting the lore as laid out by you yourselves! (Or just have it be Zelda--even less work!) Don't want to go with that? Well, just tell them it's a fictional game--an invented fiction!--and point out that times are changing, and you need to make that $$$, and anyway, why not flip the script when you've been doing the same thing for decades? Why not have some fun?

So, there's an idea or two. Make of it what you will.

[robothyena]

In the Aftermath, a Warcraft Story Rubric

This is a rubric for my series of Warcraft stories called In The Aftermath:

The purpose of this rubric is to a) explain what I hope to accomplish with In The Aftermath, and b) clarify the parameters of this series for those already familiar with Warcraft, for while it bears resemblance to the current canon, it may strike those readers as overly divergent, even contradictory.

1) In The Aftermath (ITA) attempts to examine the world of Warcraft through a semi-realistic lens. To this end I have jettisoned, altered, or otherwise shifted canon elements where they diverge from this goal; ie: an over-reliance on the tropes of Western science-fiction/fantasy, and, particularly, lore choices made in service of maintaining the “video game” elements—aesthetics bent to mechanics. This means that that magic is not abundant, that life is fragile, and that people are characters, not constructs. Nations and the leaders of nations do not act out of absolute good or evil but competitive self-interest—self-interest which is, at times, misguided, misinformed, or appalling.

2) ITA presupposes that constant warfare has an energizing effect on economies in the short term, and a damaging effect on societies, cultures, and environments in the short and long term; and that the state of near-constant conflict within Warcraft, which serves the purposes of an iterating, active MMO, does not accurately reflect this.

3) ITA avoids the usage of “named” characters, who bring a bevy of expectations to their appearance. ITA presupposes that exceptional persons—“heroes”—are products of opinion and perspective.

4) ITA attempts to mitigate or otherwise outright eradicate colonial attitudes, tropes, and elements that Warcraft has utilized, knowingly or unknowingly, in the course of its history; many of them holdovers from the science fiction/fantasy genre’s Western, patriarchal, and imperialist heritage. Examples include: jungle troll “Jamaican” accents; pernicious elements of the orcish corruption, slavery, and redemption narrative; elves as Aryan exemplars; etc.

5) ITA strives to maintain a consistent tone: this means avoiding pop-culture references or aphorisms and avoiding the contradictory blend of Calvinism (heroes dying heroically and meaningfully) and Gnosticism (an uncaring and meaningless universe ruled by monster-gods) that plagues western SFF.*

6) The principal cast of ITA is composed of women, who act primarily in competitive self-interest. Where women of import are a minority in the canon, ITA seeks to make them a majority; where women are primarily reactive in the canon, ITA makes them active; and where women’s motivations are primarily oriented upon their relationships with men in the canon, ITA attempts to make their motivations multifaceted, even inscrutable.

7) At all times ITA strives to take what has been presented by the creators of Warcraft and take this to its logical, often stark, conclusion.

In The Aftermath is, above all, a re-imagining and recapitulation of the setting of the Warcraft series, particularly Warcraft 3 and World of Warcraft. My love for the setting, with all its foibles and contradictions, is what drew me to this project. In The Aftermath is a rejection of the Warcraft that does not work and a celebration of the Warcraft that does work, and I hope that my vision is presented as clearly in the following stories as it is here.

 This is not the way the World of Warcraft will end. But it is the way that mine might.

[*Glaring aphorisms--from one specific character in one story--are done with intent.]

[robothyenawasteland]

On Warlords of Draenor & Telling Ugly Stories

[robothyena]

robothyenawasteland:

(trigger warning for talk of assault and wartime conduct)

Expansion of some points I made on Twitter: Warlords of Draenor is the first World of Warcraft expansion that is indelibly, completely part of the pre-Warcraft 3 narrative. Okay, Burning Crusade is set on Draenor and Cataclysm is dealing with events in the setting’s prehistory—but neither of those are a time-traveling(?) adventure to the future-past of Warcrafts 1 & 2.

Read More

[robothyena]

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2: The Movie: The Interview - PIXELS OR DEATH

Castlevania Lords of Shadow 2 is a sequel that takes all the worst parts of nostalgia farming and tired AAA tropes.

My new tragicomedy interview for Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2.

Murder. Mayhem. Ghost-wives. Ghost-children. Ghost-wives and ghost-children that may be time-travel ghosts and/or may be memory-ghosts inside a (vampire)man's head-movies. It's ambiguous. In the literary sense. 

[robothyena]

Concerning Attack on Titan

In a recent interview, retired Studio Ghibli director Hayao Miyazaki said: "Anime suffers because industry staff is made up of otaku who 'don't spend time watching real people,' and are; 'humans who can't stand looking at other humans."

Miyazaki claims anime is suffering a slow, self-referential death, drawing water from the same well over and over. It isn't hard to apply this criticism towards books, video games, movies, and TV, too. But for our purposes we're talking about a very popular anime, and so I'm going to take for granted that what Miyazaki has said is basically truthful at the baseline. It is not irregular for a medium to go through phases of severe insularity. And if Attack on Titan is any indication, anime is going through one of those periods right now.

Buckle up, we have a lot of ground to cover.

While I go over my thoughts on Attack on Titan, it will likely become clear that I have little to no patience for some of the tropes that are endemic to anime. Some of them are harmless, while some of them are toxic. In a followup to the Miyazaki post, others have explained--with far more clarity than I ever could--the problems specific to certain features of anime and otaku culture, and I encourage you to read it.

American AAA video games are going through a similar period of insularity: stories characterized by a distinctly American paranoia; violence done by men defending vague platonic ideals of republic and/or seeking revenge in the name of women and children who were stolen away from them in one way or another. My sense is that harsh reactions to criticism of anime have developed as a defense against, to put it simply, suburban American boys who think Call of Duty is hot stuff but anime is dumb stuff.

This is a roundabout way of saying that the failures of American media neither condone nor condemn the failures of Japanese media.

So, Attack on Titan. Spoilers will follow.

Attack on Titan is the English title of the shonen anime Shingeki no Kyonin (Marching Giants).

(image credit: crunchyroll)

To start: I have tried, like hell, to figure out what Attack on Titan is about. Tried to find the theme. Attack on Titan is about, possibly: the greatness of war, the hellishness of war, the human need for violence, the way people are monsters, the way monsters are people, World War 2, Japan, America, or possibly none of these things at all.

By the end of this piece, I might convince you that the correct answer is all of the above.

Attack on Titan feels like it was assembled in free-fall. I don't envy author Hajime Isayama, whose manga was turned into a full-fledged anime only a year after the first issue dropped. It's an intense sensation to labor on an unfinished product that has become a phenomenon. AoT feels like an author's first webcomic that somehow accidentally became an anime.

This is not to denigrate webcomics, or first-webcomics, or first-attempts, or striving for excellence that exceeds one's skill; you don't get better until you crash a few ships. And were Attack on Titan something I discovered online, a virtual unknown, I might've felt like I stumbled upon a very, very rough gem of a thing. I'd look forward to what they'd do with it, and what they'd do after. Instead, Attack on Titan feels like that first attempt was thrust into the limelight (perhaps unfairly), forced to contend with, well, guys like me who are going to treat it like the high-profile televised cartoon series with a growing franchise footprint that it is.

If you don't already know the basic premise: a post-apocalyptic humanity has walled itself into a vaguely Eurasian city-state surrounded by several other walls separated by miles of countryside. Think fortress-Rhode Island. They're under assault by big, sexless--though not genderless--naked people-monsters called Titans, that mindlessly and compulsively eat humans. The military fights them. It turns out some people can shapeshift into Titans (Titanshifters). The protagonist discovers that he, too is a Titanshifter. Things go cray very quickly.

Attack on Titan has a solid premise. Alternate-earth setting, no huge buy-in of fantasy names or places or technology. Soldiers jump around with hip-mounted gas-powered grappling hooks called "3D maneuver gear," and they fight Titans by slicing open the back of the neck. It's a war story. It's a body horror story. It's the kind of story you can keep tightly coiled and threatening and oppressive and character-driven.

So it's unfortunate that none of this ever really gels.

The unruliest blanket statement I'm going to make is that the dialogue is just bad. I could direct you to pull quotes, but there's no point. You can load up any episode and click to a random spot. It's bad all the way through. Attack on Titan feels like people pretending to read a script. And no, this isn't simply the foibles of anime stage direction, or me bashing on time-honored tropes. Over and over again, characters in Attack on Titan behave and speak in ways that resemble precisely zero real life humans. The only convincing performances seem to occur when people are freaking out over the horror of the Titans. Otherwise: pointless repetition, redundant internal monologuing, directionless external monologuing, inexplicable walk-and-talks, armchair philosopher pep-talks, human nature platitudes, one-note banter, wooden shrieking, and endless endless endless shouting.This isn't a translation issue, though I certainly saw subtitles where a less-than-perfect transliteration was dropped. It is an exhausting show to watch, perhaps because some episodes could have ran less than ten minutes--perhaps less!--were all the useless agitprop thrown out the window.

We can't talk about the dialogue without talking about Eren Yaeger, our boy-hero protagonist.

Eren Yeager is the angriest, meanest gosh-darn Naruto-alike I've seen in recent memory. He bellows and bull-rushes his way through life following the fridging of his mother in episode one and the disappearance of his Crap Anime Dad (tropes again), who injected him with a serum some at some point in the past that appears to have granted him his shapeshifting ability. He joins the military with his bookish best-friend Armin and his alternatively stoic and deadly adopted-sister Mikasa following the death of his mother and the destruction of their outer-wall district by a titan attack led by a couple of the aforementioned Titanshifters.

The narrative, for what it's worth, rejects Eren's boyman-rage at seemingly every turn--he's beaten, battered, and shat on through the whole of season one, barely beating the Season Finale Boss. In a better show, this rejection of Eren's masculine rage and posturing would be capitalized upon, but in the ad-hoc, Pollack-painting-writing of Attack on Titan, any critique feels accidental. Eren is, stubbornly, the protagonist, making even the flattest character seem round by comparison. He feels wholly perfunctory; a young man because demographic demands entail young men, and young male writers tend to write that which is most familiar. Eren's manpain is sociologically removed from American video game manpain, but follows the time-honored traditions of mayhem, sorrow, and rage against a world not oriented around his needs.

Mikasa is representative of not only Attack on Titan's women, who, gratefully, make up nearly half of the core cast, but the principal character dichotomy in the writing. Characters in Attack on Titan tend to fall loosely into two camps--the true soldiers, and the foils. The true soldiers advance the plot, say grim things, talk about monsters and man, and drive the plot towards the common death that permeates the work. The foils exist for brevity, for quirk--they crack jokes, they make daring last-moment escapes, they think their way around corners by the skin of their teeth and sometimes they ask the questions that allow the true soldiers to say some word-salad about death and honor.[1]

The "true soldier" issue will be important later on, so keep it in the back of your mind.

The thing about everyone in Attack on Titan is that since they all end up so threadbare, and because they're reading a script that plays Mad Libs with an anime-Burroughs novel, their wafer-thin-ness becomes very, very apparent very quickly.

I will say this for Attack on Titan: there is virtually zero fanservice. Everyone wears identical uniforms, no one ever suffers from rather specific battlefield armor-damage. There are no hi-larious shower scenes. Apart from something I'll note a little further down, it's good.

Women are never attacked for being women in Attack on Titan. If you fail, it's because you flubbed up. If you succeed, it's because you were skillful. It's very, very refreshing to see a show where women beat the Christ out of dudes much larger than themselves, and then aren't written off as hacks or cheats or gender-spies. It's refreshing to see a show where people don't call women bitches as a casual insult allllll daaaaamn daaaay. It's refreshing to see female characters encounter generic thugs and not have them respond with the tired cliches: "hey honey how's it going, hey there pretty," etc etc.

It's a god-damn airtight miracle to see a bunch of women alongside a bunch of men killing monsters and not a single dude ever making a snide, stupid comment.. It's a god-damn airtight miracle to see a show where people will complain that this isn't "realistic," because in the real world women face so much sexism, so why not (in)accurately present it in a show? It's a god-damn airtight miracle that Attack on Titan seemed to predict that evaluation and say, "screw off, manbros."[2]

Except... it strains at times. It strains (nearly breaking) in a flashback when a young Mikasa is kidnapped by three dudes who kill her parents and, I kid you not, want to sell her as an "Oriental" sex slave (she and Eren kill them all in cold blood).[3] It strains when the entire military and civilian leadership seem to be comprised mostly of dudes, indicating that social stratification seems mostly standard patriarchy. It strains when Mikasa is confronted for possibly having romantic feelings for Eren (yuck). At the contours, you can still see where Attack on Titan was written by a person just like the rest of us. And I don't fault Isayama for these little stumbles stuck in the jello (that's a mixed metaphor). I just want to note them, because they're telling of the ways that even when we try, aggressively, to recapitulate sexist narratives in our work, the little razorblades still creep inside.

This strain extends to the setting, which I've taken to calling "Full Metal Alchemesque." The world of Attack on Titan is perfunctory: a stage on which the human-Titan battle can unfold. This would be all well and good if the characters and conflicts were stronger, but they aren't. Again, perhaps a fault of that omnipresent script that cannot seem to settle on anything. But the world of Attack on Titan feels like papier mâche--Titanshifters locked in battle careen through empty houses, and then houses of people who are made into not-people. The outside world is a vague, empty, temperate land that holds the secrets of the Titans, or at least the miserable macguffin that will surely spell doom or triumph for the human race. Without the believability of characters who act, feel, err as people, and conflicts that feel like they have deeper consequences, the mummer's dance of this future-Earth seems hollow.

Conflicts--speaking of--lack heft. With a number of characters clearly marked Do-Not-Kill, everyone else is plainly fodder, to the point that you can guess precisely who is going to die based on when someone starts yelling. The central conflict surrounds Eren Yeager's struggle to control his Titan-self and the later blowup with a female Titan (who, for some reason, has muscle boobs) who spends half the season killing dozens of her fellow soldiers and beating the snot of out Eren-Titan. I have not read the manga but can already tell the primary thrust of the narrative centers around the various shifters and Eren's manpain. Some of the subplots might have some meat: there appears to be a possibly canon lesbian couple between the characters Ymir and Krista, and prominent transgender character--the latter of whom may be the most honestly enjoyable person to watch in the whole show--but they seem sublimated, at least so far in the anime.

It doesn't help that Attack on Titan doesn't know how to leverage violence. Mook-soldiers are killed and killed again by the giant nekkid-people-monsters; cameras cut away from bites to  show blood spraying across cobblestones and linger upon heads hanging loose from viscera, tastefully hidden by a shadow. Attack on Titan shows you an awful lot of violence and shows you people actually horrified by that violence, and I'm grateful that a pop-anime is willing to try that in an era characterized by a brinksmanship of violence in media. However, Attack on Titan's deployment of violence dovetails uncomfortably with its political leanings.

To foreshorten: Hasama Isayama may have tweeted some rather uncomfortable statements concerning Japanese imperialism towards Korea and China, going so far as to suggest that they experienced population growth throughout the, yanno war crimes, and stuff.

As the blogger nenena notes, authorial blind spots are common. An author might, say, be acutely aware and discerning in the realm of the presentation of women in his work, and scarcely aware of the troubling politics of power present otherwise. Like in, say, Attack on Titan. The primary difference comes in the juxtaposition of military vs. civilian, where the former contain the true soldiers and the latter, well, don't. This is complicated by the highly corrupt military police who show up in the latter half of season one, but they are conflated with the preening civilian bureaucracy. The civilian leadership sends peasants levies to die against the Titans to prevent a famine in the aftermath of episode one; it closes the gates on fleeing refugees; it puts Eren Yeager on trial and is shot-through with religious ninnies and money-grubbing buffoons.

The military, on the other hand, is characterized by true soldiers, such as Commander Pixis, who bears a resemblance--by the creator's own admission--to the Japanese general Akiyama Yoshifuru. But when these men make decisions that lead thousands of casualties, we get a different reaction: mass death in the defense of humanity, for even meager gains, is considered worthwhile. The events of the finale--which wipe out more civilians than an asteroid hit--are orchestrated by taciturn Commander Erwin all with the intent of capturing the female Titanshifter. And so all the gore is legitimized: all those bodies were for a cause. The actions of the military are continuously characterized as absolutely, utterly necessary in the face of an existential threat. And it is an existential threat--there are great big bloody monsters trying to eat everyone.

But, like so much else in the show, it doesn't really know what to do with this information, least of all challenge it. Characters pontificate about Loss and Honor and Bravery and Fear and Becoming Not Unlike The Enemy to Beat the Enemy, and one is left with this general sense that there are simply no alternatives. Of course all those people had to die--we said the right words and we won the battle for a pittance worth of payback, but the perseverance is what counts. At the end of the day, much of the violence in Attack on Titan just is.

Which isn't unexpected from a comic written by a guy in his 20s in Japan. Modern Japan is currently enduring a period of unease pertaining to shifting lines of people and power in the region. A new resurgence of nationalism is currently a hot issue there, resembling current American conservative concerns over declining American power (read: imperialism). Without psychoanalyzing too much, Japan is experiencing the same uncertainty that comes with this era of shifting globalization that has afflicted just about everyone else, and it crops up in media. Like in an anime about giant monsters.

I'm not going to sit here and tell you that Attack on Titan is a jingoistic disaster. It isn't. But its paean to Great Military Men as the saviors of the human race hangs over the entire affair already made shoddy by the aforementioned problems, straining the whole structure. And I will absolutely not pretend that it isn't a lark for an American guy to talk about jingoism in a television show when my own media is outright soaking in it. If Attack on Titan feels a little too-okay with Japanese imperialism in history, then how can we not say The Avengers isn't an open and honest celebration of modern American military might? That Call of Duty advocates unparalleled reciprocal violence and an absolute conviction in the secular-patriotic sanctification of bloodshed? 

It is impossible for me to say anything about Attack on Titan's potentially problematic politics without noting that it pales in comparison to what is routinely and unquestioningly presented and sold to maximal profits in the United States, 365 days a year.

So, maybe Miyazaki is only half right. Maybe Attack on Titan manages to burst the confines of its genre in some respects, while conforming to some of its most tired cliches. On the outside I think it is more failure than success--it just cannot shake the full damage of the script, plot, and pacing.[4]

But in little ways, here and there, it manages to succeed, sometimes admirably and most notably in the case of its women, who are rendered as characters, not caricatures; and though this simple fact should not be extraordinary, it is--not only in anime but across popular media. If I were rating Attack on Titan out of four stars it would get one, and only one, for the women, as signifier of two things: of how refreshing it was to sit through twenty-six episodes of a television show without seeing contempt for half of the human race, and of the sorry fact that this simple, basic principle of presenting women characters as round should still prove so elusive in our own media that when we do find it we have to clutch it like all hell lest it evaporate before our eyes.

Attack on Titan is a product of its time and its industry. I don't know that I could stand any more of it. But I don't altogether regret it.

------------

[1] Armin sortof falls outside this dichotomy in that he's not a true soldier, but he's ensconced in narrative armor, is a foil to Mikasa and Eren's general piss and grit, and is often coming up with plans for the true soldiers to execute.

[2]I don't want to oversell the lack of fanservice. That's the bare-minimum, basement-level what I expect from any form of entertainment that purports to halfway respect the intelligence of it's viewership. Attack on Titan deserves credit for not using fanservice, but it does not deserve praise or adulation for this and this alone--it just means it gets past the front gate of acceptability.

[3] This is the only scene in the series where sexual violence is potentially hinted at or used as a threat, which is fantastic since we're in a media climate where grimdark bad guys use sexual assault to prove they are super-evil.

[4]Budget issues seem to have taken a huge hammer to this show as well, with frequent filtered-flashbacks, still-frames, repeated backgrounds and crowds, and other money-saving practices that too often make it look stilted and lifeless.

[robothyena]

FLUSHED: A Toilet Gaming E-Zine is a one-off zine edited by Samantha Allen, Elizabeth Simins and Lana Polansky exploring the beautiful intersection of videogames and toilets. Let us guide you through an audiovisual journey exploring the role of the porcelain throne within and without the games we play, and break the silence on the intimate bond between the bowl and the console.  Recommended as toilet reading. 

INCOMING PRESS RELEASE:

[QUOTE] It's finally here. I wrote a tragicomedy or--possibly comic-tragedy--review of the peeing mechanics of Conker's Bad Fur Day from the perspective of Bryce circa November 2001 age 12. Or perhaps I found it deep in a box of middle school memorabilia, from the glory days of the TF "Fightin' Indians," and our absolutely-not-a-problem pep rally move, the "tomahawk chop"? (yes this was a real thing) What wonders await you in FLUSHED zine, alongside numerous other contributors? What other grievous faux-paus will a younger Bryce commit in his search for Objective Review Truth? It's only a dollar folks. That's one American dollar. You could spend that on a little bottle of toothpaste, or save it for when Manhattan floods in the 50s, but really, why not enjoy yourself right now with some toilet gaming? That's the god's honest truth, people. [END QUOTE]

Someone fire that PR guy... and get me a copy of FLUSHED!

[robothyena]

Games I Enjoyed In 2013

These are some games I enjoyed in 2013. Not all of them were made in 2013.

Actraiser

You are God. Or Zeus. You fight monsters in ultra-hard platformer levels, and then you build cities using an arrow-shooting cherub. I was 1 ½ years old when this came out, so cut me some slack.

Awesomenauts

MOBA-like 3v3 platformer that's more Super Mario World than League of Legends. None of my friends play this so I've suffered alone in online matchmaking, but it's still hecka fun. Great characters. Great sounds. A skill-cap I can actually understand. Fast and frictionful. Good.

Bookworm Adventures Deluxe

RPG Scrabble. And the script is funny in an endearing 90s Nickelodeon way.

Bomberman Hero

There's a level called Clown Valley. Guess what's in Clown Valley.

Botanicula

Amanita Design games feature precisely Zero lines of dialogue or exposition and are probably the better for it. This doesn't say much for my chosen profession. Five little critters trying to save their otherworldly tree from ruin. Amanita might be at the height of their powers with this one. Call it "Miyazaki-distilled."

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons

It has a rather tiresome flub with Evil Women in the end of it, but this thing is mechanically whip-sharp and smarter than it looks (worldbuilding by slow reveals). Another dialog-free charmer. Sad as heck. A better movie-game than all the billion-dollar movie-games that happened in 2013.

TheCatamites games

I can't pick a single game by thecatamites. Every one of them is a little coil of an idea that unfolds rapidly and then just ends. thecatamites games are the only games that simulate a crash to conclude themselves. There is nothing as beautiful as a thecatamites game crashing. It means the thought has concluded. Frankly hilarious writing in every one of them. thecatamites does retro like no one else. I have a tough time explaining what's spectacular about them. Start with Glory Days of the Free Press and go out from there, ye brave pilgrims.

Chivalry: Medieval Warfare

This game is probably impenetrable for a lot of people. It's a physics showcase and an extremely aggressive arena fighting game that rewards the cruel and punishes the unsure. This game might prove that first-person close combat can't be done. Might prove that it can. I can't tell.

Depression Quest

It's coming out on Steam. It has helped people; will probably help many more people. It's a tundra lake of a game. I'm not going to explain that metaphor. This game is the Real Sh*t. Sorry I cussed. But it is. It's a game about managing or not managing depression, and all the things that go along with that (which are many and myriad). Someday there will be an article in an as-yet realized publication referring to Depression Quest as "postmodern." Try not to let that worry you. They'll put this one in the Smithsonian someday. Go play it.

Eldritch

I normally do not enjoy roguelikes and their relatives. Spelunky, Dark Souls--games I like to watch, not play. The high skill-ceiling, the randomization--never sat well with me. Some (cruel) person gave me Eldritch for xmas, so I gave it a try. Shoutout to David Pittman for delivering on a canon female protagonist and standing by that. Shoutout to the dude in that Steam thread to said Pittman was soiling Lovecraft's legacy. Credit to your species. ANYWAY, Eldritch is *incredibly difficult.* I'd read people actually saying Eldritch was easy prior to playing, and I now know those people were lying. But it's scary and fun and difficult in a good way, even if I can't get more than five feet inside without an eldritch horror slicing my skull off.

Gone Home

You've heard about it. For what it's worth, I liked it.

Proteus

One of those not-game exploration games. It's a game, though. I find little things whenever I play it. Relaxing. Pretty.

Remember Me

I've talked about this one before. Jenn Frank--to paraphrase--called it a 7/10 you must play. Like Pacific Rim, it looks and sounds more like the kind of media that will be commonplace ten, twenty years from now. In a year when a number of AAA titles seemed to despise the very existence of certain groups of people and/or advocate for literal fascism, Remember Me does neither of these things. People will come back to this one, years later. Call it the Beyond Good and Evil 2.0 effect. People will say we read too much into this. I'd say we only read into it as much as these uncertain times demanded we dredge out. An amber chunk containing a little piece of tomorrow.

Saints Row 4

Best character creation in gaming, right now, hands down. Funnier than Grand Theft Auto V. Better at open-world antics than Grand Theft Auto.V Has a more likeable cast than Grand Theft Auto V. Not without problems. But for what it sets out to be? Yeah, good.

Scarygirl

A platformer with a unique aesthetic that manages to evoke nostalgia without relying on callbacks. Maybe this was just my response, but Scarygirl feels like playing a platformer when I was a kid, without actually beating me over the head with its own retro-chiq. A sober yet colorful little game.

Shelter

A Mom game in a year full of Dad games. A game about a Mom preserving life in a year of games about Dads taking lives. Another dialogue-free tear-jerker. Inhabits a landscape sitting just on the edge of unreal. Sometimes scary. Sometimes breathtaking. Understated. It might be perfect for what it is. I don't know what I'd change. Play it in the springtime, and then go outside and lay under the sun.

Team Fortress 2

I got back into this game after years away and found a different game. Enjoyable as heck these days. The side-modes--hide-and-seek, medieval mode--are worth the price of admission alone (free). My friend has described it as a first-person shooter made with a platformer's eye. I think that's a pretty accurate description. Get a few friends. Give it a try.

Thomas Was Alone

A funny platformer. Really, that's it! A funny, smart little platformer with great lines. It's quite a year when a good narrator and good lines can give a group of differently colored blocks more personality than photo-realistic crimetagonists voiced by highly-paid actors who get nominated for Oscars. So much going on under the hood in this one.

The Undergarden

You are a sea-critter in a vast, underground ocean, bringing life back into the darkness with pollen-spores and your jam-band friends, reactivating the luminescence of your world. There's no real "objective" beyond getting to the end of each stage. Ambient and evocative. You could skip lighting up the world, for all it cares. It asks nothing of you. You light up the world on your own time. Can't tell if it's genius or a fluke. Passed without a whisper when it was released. What is this world? What are these creatures? Impenetrable questions. Reminds me of the questions I used to ask of games as a child. What does this monster do for food? What lies beyond that flat skyline? What happens to these people when the hero has left them behind? I do not understand The Undergarden, but I think it understands me.

Ultra Business Tycoon III

If Porpentine quit the Game Business (™), and just did the Story Writing Business (™), she'd probably be in The Paris Review and New Yorker under lists of whatever complies Vibrant, Contemporary Authors. Does in single sentences, with appalling regularity, what most writers require a paragraph--or several paragraphs--to accomplish (if they're lucky (if at all)). The economy of language on display in the average Porpentine game would make Ernest Hemingway faint (after he finished his drink). Makes Twine sing like a gosh darn canary. Porpentine makes "text games" that flee the text and inhabit your brainpan with more alacrity and verve than most highly-polygonal mega-games that come out of the money mill could ever hope to accomplish. UBTIII is a "meta" game about "games" that has reams more to say about games, what we take from them, what we put into them, what they do to us, than any other smart, clever "meta game" that has happened as of late (sorry, Stanley). UBTIII is the tip of the spear. 

I liked other things this year. But these were a few.

[robothyenawasteland]

A Modest Design Overhaul of the Cast of Street Fighter

Inspired by much of what has been going on recently in gaming channels, what follows are my suggestions for bare-minimum overhaul to the cast of Street Fighter (4). This means: mitigating racial stereotypes, reducing female objectification, and fixing tonal inconsistencies that go along with them. These are also an attempt to bring the visual design of the characters more in line with their background material. I have no delusions about Capcom suddenly turning over a new leaf. These are merely some ideas.

Read More

[robothyena]

This bare-minimum ground-floor "sprucing up" of the cast of Street Fighter is a) likely to get people rather mad at me, and b) an ad hoc thing which I felt did not warrant a full essay. I've had conversations with people about the value in offering "fixes" for inherently broken IPs, for trying to reassess and "reclaim" a work which has calcified along old, serrated lines we can no longer touch. And while I don't think this kind of thing is likely to agitate anything on the part of the creators (after all, they are not obligated to change their work), I think it is a necessary sort of exercise if only to remind us, constantly, of what has gone wrong, what continues to remain wrong, and what we must strive to never emulate going forward.