The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

"You know the story. But... people can't get enough of them. Like little children. Because, well, they connect the stories to themselves I suppose. And we all love hearing about ourselves, so long as the people in the stories are us... but not us. Not us in the end especially. The midnight caller gets him, never me. I'll live forever."

 

I rarely run across a great film. I very, very... VERY rarely run across anything even bearable on Netflix, among the clutter of politically correct Friends knock-offs and 53 yearly zombie movies of the week. So while the Coen Brothers' name guarantee intrigued me enough to queue up The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, I went into it expecting some piece of contractually-obligated filler or such, and the title story, while not bad, strained just hard enough at being obvious to support that presumption.

Fortunately the rest of the vignettes picked up the slack. Sometimes soulful, sometimes macabre, sometimes wistful yet pervaded by Fargo-style dark humor throughout, they inevitably leave you grasping for a common thread. Most viewers seem to stop at the face value of the Western theme, and in fairness, pop-culture does seem about due for a revival of Wild West stories. The more high-brow line holds this was a movie about death, which certainly features in every segment. However, I increasingly got the impression of an homage to story-telling, and the last Huis Clos story cinched it.

 

Every character seems trapped in a personal fable, a scripted role. Tales, whether told to others or to oneself, can kill. Most scenes are as slow, trite and telegraphed as The Princess Bride, but the greater detail, from tiny shadows and noises to the CGI-glossed scenery Rob Reiner can only wish he'd had back in the '80s, fill in those potential gaps of dead air. You find yourself anticipating the details of the obvious reveal, actively predicting the clearly timed twist, engaged in the story, complicit to the storyteller by projecting edicts of life and death onto the life-and-death situations depicted. If nothing else, it certainly made me introduce the term doughface into my vocabulary.

As for the setting, I can't help thinking that stringing together six plays on storytelling expectations in a genre most would presume to know everything about is itself an act of rebellion. How far do even the celebrated Coen brothers have to go to be permitted to make a movie motivated by neither fad worship nor political convenience? How far do any of us have to reach for storytelling which can stand on its own merit, for a bit of honest lying? At the very least, farther back than Hearst.

The Voyaging Morons' Congress

"In Catholic school

As vicious as Roman rule

I got my knuckles bruised

By a lady in black"

 

Death Cab for Cutie - I Will Follow You into the Dark

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"So, then, obtaining the right to a child was now a distinction not awarded to just anyone."

Stanislaw Lem - Return from the Stars

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"The gun is good! The penis... is evil! The penis shoots seeds"

Zardoz

(a movie which I have never watched, for reasons including but not limited to Sean Connery's crotch)

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Population control is not just a moral and pragmatic imperative. It is inevitable.

 

About half a year ago at the height of the pandemic, I heard someone complain how heavily isolation measures were hitting families' internal dynamics, with children kept home from school every day to drive their progenitors insane. Even heretofore comfortably middle-class parents were suddenly discovering that 2.5 children were two too many. I reacted... perhaps predictably lycanthropic: well, who made them breed in the first place? The rejoinder came more cogent that I'd normally expect: their family size was planned in the context of a wide array of social services, guarantees on which their society unexpectedly defaulted in 2020. These people were born and indoctrinated into a culture encouraging them to follow their mindless, already dominant evolutionary prerogative to drown out their competitors in a tide of redundant progeny, assured they could simply jail their psychopathic little cacodemons for five days a week in communal care.

Stashing offspring in institutions (while always an option for the wealthy to dispose of the spare in "an heir and a spare") seems to have been popularized beyond limited monastic / military use by the British obsession with boarding schools. Sure, sure, you may not think of it that way, but public schools over the past century have acquired more and more of the functions of child jails, from fluff in curricula to justify extra hours to the proliferation of extracurricular activities. Sports clubs, drama clubs, sportsier clubs, music clubs, sportsiest clubs, religious clubs, clobbering clubs, anything, whatever it takes to ensure those hordes of disgusting, superfluous larval vandals don't see the light of day from September to June. The implied (false) promise is that you should breed as much as you can and we'll raise your kids for you.

 

In fact, the amount of encouragement states provide toward procreation makes an interesting observation: for all that no politician will ever utter the phrase "population control" the hunger of the rich for always more cannon fodder, always more wage slaves to lord it over, always more bipedal dogs to eat dogs, ensures that most societies do exercise population control... in the wrong direction!

So, with a billion of us soon to be vaccinated against the (current) pandemic and everyone presumably eager to resume bodily contact, let's reminisce about three Science Fiction tales speculating on the topic of population bombs.

 

Major spoiler alert for all three.

 

 

1) The Palliative

"Ours is simply a world in which more than twenty billion people live. [...] it is out of a deep sense of compassion and for the highest humanitarian reasons that this chemical hoax has been perpetrated"

The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem (1971) opens with a scientific conference on overpopulation in which all arguments lead to concluding the end of the world. The narrator finds himself drugged and hallucinating, thereby experiencing one of the proposed solutions to controlling the masses firsthand. Placed in suspended animation, he awakes in a future built around a fully mature science of chemical mind control. After delving its deep dark secrets, seeing sequential layers of narcotic haze are covering up a reality of abject poverty, sickness and overcrowding, he once again wakes up in the present day to discover it was all a chemically-induced hallucination after all.

If this sounds like a Philip K. Dick plot, Lem turns out to have been a fan, which Dick in his customary paranoia interpreted as a COMMIE PLOT OMGWTFBBQ!!!

Though it slightly drags its build-up and rushes its climax, the book retains more than enough punch by its sequential unveiling of just how far denial of reality can drag a society. It supports my oft-repeated point that telepathy negates science as the solution to every problem becomes not solving it but making everyone think it's been solved. When introducing Lem's Return from the Stars I likened it to the softest, Brave New World sort of dystopia while counting The Futurological Congress as his version of a mid-severity, Fahrenheit-451 variety. This may seem odd, as the ending reveals standards of living to have dropped to 1984 levels... but they did so from neglect, greed and myopia, not active malice. Though obligated to point out the plot hole of absent libido-depressing mind control chemicals, I can almost accept the villain's claim that past a certain point, once the species' creative capacity was so terminally outpaced by its procreative capacity, little remained possible but to cushion its gradual collapse into itself. Like Bradbury's prophetic view of our futurepresent, Lem's is an Apocalypse bought and sold by market forces and the mindless glut of mass appeal.

2) The Surgical

"while you and your kind were being prudent and foresighted and not having children, the migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers were shiftlessly and shortsightedly having children - breeding, breeding. My God, how they bred!"

The Marching Morons by C. M. Kornbluth (1951) likely the most influential (if not directly famous) of these three examples, centers on dysgenics. A 20th-century scheister gets frozen by electricity (yes) and awakens to a monstrous population boom of common imbeciles mitigated by a desperately outnumbered minority of intelligent humans. With sterilization impossible for the sheer bulk of ape flesh which also makes warfare too risky (five hundred million tons of rotting flesh) the geniuses of the future, too honest for their own good, need the help of our common con-man to convince the human vermin of the world to exterminate themselves of their own accord. Inspired by Hitler's public relations campaigns for concentration camps, our hero sets up a program of fake rockets to "Venus" meant to lift five billion sub-humans out of the atmopshere where they won't stink up the joint. As a last measure, the future ubermenschen shove him into one as well, and the story ends with him hoist, quite literally, by his own petard.

 

Several points:

 

- The image of a compulsively dishonest real-estate speculator making absurd promises to hordes of degenerate rabble applauding the brilliance of such plans rang painfully true in the 2016 U.S. election, and has by no means lost relevance with the "other" party in power. "Defund the police" - how's that for a three-word rabblerousing slogan?

- Also, in 1951, with the world population closing on 3 billion, Kornbluth's vision of a future swarmed by 5 billion vermin might have seemed apocalyptic. We're now closing in on 8. Eight billion subhuman apes incapable of thought, of creativity, of reason, of anything to elevate them above the existential experience of rats, capable in fact of little beyond murderously producing more voracious, murderous walking redundancies.

 

- Impractical warfare, while necessary to set up the catchier plot point of rockets to "Venus" comes across as too forced. The five billion corpses wouldn't all rot at once. China's upcoming attempt to coin a new term, exclusive speciecide, shows how easy it is to prioritize the Tibetans or Mongolians, then Hong Kong and the Uighurs, then Taiwan and Korea and Vietnam, then Japan and Indonesia, then Europe and Africa and gradually the remnants of non-Han humanity. Just a few dozen million rotting corpses at a time. Perfectly manageable.

 

- Kornbluth's most memorable point however (and one glossed over by works he inspired like Idiocracy) is that dysgenics and overpopulation go hand in hand. The more primitive a mind, the less it can extend beyond its instincts, the more easily it is driven to self-destruction in ensuring numeric supremacy for its gametes, the more easily it swallows the precepts of moral and racial purity and other big lies. Conversely, the more human life is cheapened by overpopulation, the more the rich can employ sheer numbers of wage slaves and cannon fodder in place of innovation or careful planning, the more that infernal coalition of rabble and rabblerousers can afford to exterminate the superior intellects they so fear and despise. 

 

 

3) The Preventive

"there is no rational, equitable, scientific, technological, or human answer to the dilemma of a population increasing in an insane geometric progression. It admits to answering only with miracles - loaves and fishes, manna from heaven, and the like. Twice I failed as ecological engineer. Now I propose to succeed as the god that S’uthlam requires. Should I approach the problem as human a third time, I would assuredly fail a third time, and then your difficulties would be resolved by gods crueler than myself, by the four mammal-riders of ancient legend who are known as pestilence, famine, war, and death. Therefore, I must set aside my humanity, and act as god."

Tuf Voyaging by George R.R. Martin (1986) is a book I've mentioned in passing once before. Though I'd hoped the success of Boobs and Dragons would revive attention for some of his older, better works, I'm not hearing much chatter to that effect. Tuf's draconian problem-solving (think Stannis Baratheon) especially in Manna from Heaven which closes his short story collection, might have something to do with that.

The series begins with Haviland Tuf acquiring a biological warfare spaceship and needing it repaired. To pay for said repairs, he indebts himself to Malthus-Spelled-Backwards, a planet increasingly unable to feed the constantly growing population it is unable to curb due to a religious prerogative to go forth and multiply... and multiply, and multiply, and multiply, and multiply, and -

He "solves" their problem by increasing their food production. Repeated returns to the planet for further payments find that every time, the S'uthlamese have taken the extra food and used it to extra-extra-copulate, bringing themselves time and again to the brink of mass starvation. By the end their military build-up hints they've arrived at the inevitable conclusion of every overpopulated society: let's forcibly under-populate some other place and split the difference!

Tuf gives them one final gift: a miraculous fast-growing plant yielding absurd amounts of food, thriving under nearly any conditions... and whose commensal microflora will sterlize 99.9% of humans.

 

Science Fiction can place in the realm of palatable, dramatic speculation ideas otherwise too uncomfortable or distant from our daily concerns for honest discussion. Population control will happen.

1) No matter if you can "mascon" your way to willful ignorance for a century (as we already have) you will eventually find your streets choked with humans playing the role of automatons.

2) Dysgenics and overpopulation are conceptual twins. The most basic function of life is reproduction at the expense of other reproducers. The more degenerate, the more basic your populace, the more its actions revolve around that single unanalyzed drive of murderous genomic replication.

3) Population control is inevitable. If it is not undertaken consciously, rationally and deliberately, it will occur naturally, by the time-honored expedients of starvation, epidemics and genocide. In the face of uncontrolled reproduction, any compensating scientific advances can only buy diminishing amounts of time.

 

 

Birth is murder. Life kills to live, supplanting other life. Quoth the giant talking stone head filled with guns: "Go forth... and kill!" A rising population is a de facto declaration of war against one's neighbours, because those extra humans will inevitably demand their lebensraum. The rich hoard and spend human lives like any other currency. If you see them investing in superfluous reserves of population, it's only so they can out-bid each other by lavish expenditure of same in bouts for supremacy. The marching morons and their populist drummers will always prove willing to control the population - of other populations.

Now, in keeping with this theme, I feel inclined to overpopulate this post by a fourth example of three:

4) The Endemic

"This is the year when the computer tells us that the planet is full at last; the goal is achieved; all the striving of evolution crowned."

2430 A.D. by Isaac Asimov (1970) is a short story about the date when the mass of human flesh replaces all other land biomass. On the entire planet exists naught but human cities and oceans filled with a rapidly-reproducing plankton slurry to feed humanity and recycle its waste. That is all... except for one oddball who keeps a few non-human animals as pets, preventing his species from achieving the perfection of totality. In the end, he is convinced to give in to the "enlightenment" of the majority.

And kills himself.

"Over the vast continental buildings some five trillion human beings placidly slept; some two trillion human beings placidly ate; half a trillion carefully made love. Other trillions talked without heat, or tended the computers quietly, or ran the vehicles, or studied the machinery, or organized the microfilm libraries, or amused their fellows. Trillions went to sleep; trillions woke up; and the routine never varied."

 

The Malthusian nightmare is generally presented in terms of inevitable collapse. Yet success makes an even more horrifying scenario, in which the human disease is never treated but metastasizes into a uniform post-plasm, a fully evolved but terminally primitive totality having eliminated all possibilities beyond self-reproduction.

 

What's your end-game?

Y'know, I'm sick of hearing that cheap slam against youth culture: "every new generation thinks it invented sex" because the truth is every old generation feigns chastity, trying its damnedest to fool the new one into thinking sex hasn't been invented yet.

Cutting through the Treacle - Workin' That Photoshop

"Yeah, my momma she told me don't worry about your size"

Meghan Trainor - All about That Bass

 

 

I suppose my Marching Morons post can wait, as I've just installed, played and uninstalled the demo for WH40K: Battlesector, another title pointlessly trying to popularize turn-based multiplayer. While in principle I applaud the return to demos for finished products instead of publishing games in "beta" vaporware stage, in this case it made me unlikely to buy. On one hand, you could probably spot something fishy about Battlesector from one of their promo videos promising "fierce fast-paced combat" ... illustrated in a montage of freeze-frames! On the other hand, tell me what fundamental strategic interface tool is missing here:

Look carefully.

Especially in the corners... come on... it's right in front of you... or rather isn't.

Give up?

Maybe a glance at a truer multiplayer strategy game will refresh your memory.

That's Demigod, the most promising incarnation of the AoS game concept (or as the kiddies call it "MOBA") which unfortunately committed suicide via a mix of months-unaddressed unnecessary micromanagement, balance and lag issues. Demigod really was "fierce fast-paced (real-time) combat" complete with strategic elements like upgradeable team resources, gear management and resource node control. And lookie there, in the upper-left corner: a minimap! In fact Demigod gave you two ways to take in the battlefield situation at a glance, either minimap or zooming out as I did here until the field itself is situated atop a greater fantastic structure, whereas the previous screenshot was... also zoomed out as far as I could.

One thing I've always found funny about All About That Bass' music video: while superficially trumpeting their victory over fake beauty standards, Trainor and her backup dancers are still wearing about a kilo of make-up between them! Similarly, while Battlesector superficially might make good on WH40K's promise of tactical squad management by opting for more cerebral turn-based mechanics instead of real-time button-mashing, at the same time it really wants to keep you from thinking too hard. This is likely due to two conflicts of interest.

First off, turn-based multiplayer has yet to really overcome the tedium of waiting for your opponent to move, so Battlesector does whatever it can to keep your attention locked on how cool something looks while it's happening and not on how little's happening second by second. But just as the compass and map should've been integral to No Man's Sky from the start, some kind of strategic view is integral to a squad management game.

 

Second, Warhammer's camp-goth aesthetics are inescapably geared toward hyperexcitable tweens, and Battlesector is obviously all about the feels of thumping one's chest at playing a blood angel for the glory of Bloody the angel of blood.

Most aggravatingly, this does not look like a bad game. The couple of missions included in the demo show solid tactical basics, with resistances, choke points, melee engagement, range optimization, etc., which makes all the more perplexing Battlesector's conspicuous effort into masking its perceived weaknesses instead of playing its strengths. It's obviously designed for multiplayer given its small maps and low number of units. Fine. But instead of owning that shit, it also worries it won't be exciting enough. It jams your face into the game mat to prevent you from gaining any perspective on its totality of pieces and board size.

The conflict plays out in other ways as well. Battlesector allows you to order multiple units instead of completely locking your camera during animations (Sanctus Reach, ugh!) which should help during multiplayer, but still tries to sneak more subtle interface timesinks past your notice, like not being able to end a turn during animations, or convoluted numerous extra bonus gratis superfluous shot-by-shot firing animations, or slow, ponderous unit motion with built-in pauses at beginning and end, or a bullet-time camera during attacks, not to mention the overextended (albeit, for once, bearably voice-acted) cutscenes.

Battlesector could've done a better job than Gladius at adapting WH40K squad tactics for online play, if it weren't also all about its starry-eyed customer base, hedging its bets on feels instead of marketing stategic functionality. Financially I'm guessing it'll do fine in the short term on the backs of fanboys buying yet another Warhammer title to reaffirm their devotion to the brand, but like its predecessors I doubt it'll be worth buying until it drops to half-price or less. Basically another case of what can you give me that Planetfall doesn't? 

 

For single-player, that game can already give me more status effects, more units, more maps, more guns, more terrain features, More AoE and DoT and RoF, more turn-based tactics in general than even the most generous estimate of Battlesector's potential, and with the same grimdarky space wizard cheese for aesthetics to boot! If you've got all the right junk in all the right places, flaunt it! And, in addition, it allows you to fast-forward all unit moves.

 

As counterpoint to Planetfall (fundamentally a squad tactical) or Demigod (which while it tragically failed for some very valid mismanagement, no-one could accuse of missing its own point) tell me what Battlesector's core selling point is? If "fierce fast-paced (multiplayer) combat" was going to be your edge over Planetfall, then as soon as I fired up the first mission I should've been slapped in the face with an interface designed to allow me to out-think, out-maneuver and out-score my opponents at a glance, not have my nose rubbed in blood marine bleedin' angel blood bloody bloodiness. Or, if you wanted to build an immersive Blood Angel experience, screw the multiplayer, screw the fast pace and build on whatever their particular brand of balls-to-the-wall pyrrhic victory might be in the original WH40K fiction with varied units and abilities and persistent antiheroic characters.

*Sigh*

I'll catch you in the bargain bin a year from now, Battlesector.

More importantly though, think of how many games fail precisely because instead of capitalizing on their strengths, they undermine those strengths and waste time, resources and niche appeal hedging more bets than they can cover, slathering whore make-up over otherwise attractive features. It took twenty years and five installments for Age of Wonders to at long last make good on such an attempt, and that is a very rare example.

Icewind Dale the Second, Part the Second

Continued from here and here.

 

I never want to play this damn game again!

(but I'm satisfied to have played it once)

 

That's me at the time of the big final boss fight. Yes, I definitely should have put that last attribute point into DEX instead of STR. Brain fart. Accustomed to playing with a full complement of druid / wizard buffs, I never quite managed to plug that gaping -5 penalty. Still, I ran one of the harder cRPGs on normal difficulty with a group (ranger / fighter / cleric / monk / moi) which not only lacked arcane spellcasting and relied on potions of master thievery for difficult locks / traps but went against my usual caster-heavy preference.

I gambled on paladin / cleric buffs making up the lack of crowd control to help my front line turn the tables, and barely squeaked through with recitation, prayer, strength of one, protection, monk stuns and the occasional volley of cleric / ranger flame strikes. A stoneskinned monk is a happy monk, and that Greater Shield of Lathander won all the hardest fights for me. 30 damage reduction and 40 spell resistance for 3 rounds cockblocked pretty much everything in the game, and DEX penalties be damned.

OP h4x :)

No wonder they took that spell out.

On the whole, this production seems a sad story. By 2002 the Infinity Engine was being phased out by new 3D engines (including direct competition from Neverwinter Nights' Aurora Engine) so it seems IWD2 sold less than its predecessor... despite showing a great deal more attention to detail, and I'm guessing work-hours as well. It was even ahead of its time in including a quick load option in its main menu. Lots more puzzle-solving and multi-step quests, fewer repetitive fights (at least in the second half) and more thoughtful dialogues:

Paladins and monks even get a few dialogue options of their own, and I was pleased to see it restricted me from cooperating with some villains or receiving quest rewards -- but a lot less pleased to see a loading screen hint tell you to just cheat your way past even that minimal roleplaying by having a different party member violate your alignment for you. No thanks. I was less than enthused by finding out the hard way that wilderness lore mostly just added some meaningless flavor text. Upon reaching an army encampment my ranger informs me there are lots of tracks all around. Thanks Hawk-Eye, what would I do without you? The writing picks up noticeably in chapter 6 (the voiceover intro especially stands out) though still not quite to the level of Planescape: Torment or even Baldur's Gate.

 

Resource management stands out, not particularly great (1.5mil gold by the end with nothing to spend it on) but providing a wide array of weapons and fewer freebie consumables as a crutch than other DnD adaptations. You get barrels full of sanctuary and healing potions but few enough of the others to make you ration them a bit, and I was happy to hoard 4 level 7-9 summoning scrolls for use in the final fight. Ammo drops were just enough to make my ranger switch to melee or infinite ammo for the easiest fights. Limiting heavy armors to no more than +2 by level 15 seems unduly restrictive but certainly made me hunt for the few good ones. Merchants are spaced out far enough to make their appearance seem relevant... and here's where I have to start bitching.

Inventory management is a nightmare, thanks to obsolete quest items never getting deleted (leading you to think they might still be useful) the existence as far as I can tell of exactly one bag of holding and four identify scrolls in the entire campaign, and that weird "sticky" item clicking that all Infinity titles suffered from. Except, IWD being the dedicated dungeon crawl with lots of different weapons to juggle, made it even more of a chore than Torment or BG. Then you've got the indistinct low-pixel graphics making it hard to see what you're even standing on sometimes. These plus the idiotic pathing makes three, will easily sour most modern gamers on the experience. As I complained about BG1, the pathfinding algorithm's refusal to re-check routes and eagerness to abandon a path if it's blocked for even a split-second (e.g. doors... yeah, every single door) results in taking "the scenic route around a bush by climbing a mountain" or diving into a CloudKill because you saw your friend outlined by a doorframe.

Which brings us once again to padding for time, because IWD2 also abuses that molden oldie game gimmick of dropping you into ambushes upon loading a new zone. Except IWD2 does this for almost every single new zone. Difficulty is not the main issue here (ok, after a few repetitions you just know it's coming) but in the event of an unlucky crit it still interjects an extra, gratuitous (and extra-gratuitous) loading screen every time. In a phenomenon I've cited with one of the Infinity Engine's moden imitators, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, IWD2 had plenty of content to keep players busy and satisfy an "epic" adventure length but still, incomprehensibly, padded its length with brute-forced "puzzles" and some redundant mobs in early chapters, plus running back and forth repeatedly within dungeons. The Dragons' Eye proves especially heinous.

I even had to repeat the cambion twins' big boss fight once, not because it's all that difficult in itself but because it hinges on chasing down one summoner endlessly tossing giants into the fight... from two screens away in the fog of war... where you had no chance of finding her except by mindlessly repeating the fight when you notice where all the adds are streaming from.

Little in this dungeon crawl can compete with its newer descendants. Planescape: Torment remains the Infinity Engine title which has best stood the test of time, thanks to its storytelling focus compensating for outdated mechanics, but with IWD2 especially you have to wonder what rendered Black Isle so insecure as to strain at so many varieties of timesink.

Thou Art God(s)

"divided not by nationality but by ideology and their vision for the new world"

Alpha Centauri

 

 

As I grind my teeth through the inordinate grind of Icewind Dale 2's last chapters (damn thing even has a Groundhog Day mission) I ready myself for another attempt at a King of Dragon Pass long-mode playthrough, meaning among other things choosing which deities to favor.

So I says to myself: does this game really need both an ox god and a cow goddess? Or an earth goddess and a clay goddess? It brings to mind Icewind Dale 2's failure to make me give a crap about the ice goddess Auril for the second campaign in a row. Alright, so obviously the big ice temple is dedicated to her... but beyond that, what exactly are our interactions together? Is there anything to this mythical figure other than justifying some ice sculpture decor? Why should I care about Auril? Why are fantasy world gods so boring?

More to the point, why do gods which would seem interesting enough in a passive medium of storytelling fall completely flat in an interactive medium?

 

KoDP can springboard this article because it banks on immersion in the mentality of a Bronze Age tribe, people who were most often born and died in the same narrow valley and whose minds were occupied by the changing of the seasons, bear maulings and worrying where their next meal would come from... and not much else to flesh out an entire cosmology. As you advance and discover more of their legends, KoDP's gods do acquire some character traits like loyalty or pugnacity, but these had to be tacked on to primitivist concerns like grain, cattle, horses and occasionally bartering with your neighbours for same. Let's face it, our ancestors were boring people with sheepish mentalities:

"Our monster-slaying demigod killed a bull."

"So did ours."

"Ours has magic sandals."

"So does ours."

"Well our bull was in a forest."

"Ours was in a field, which is obviously better."

"Nuh-uh!"

"Yuh-huh!"

Cue several centuries of warfare and slavery. Ugh, this fuckin' species... but I digress.

If KoDP's narrow thematic focus justified its gimped godly gamut, I could not make the same excuse while playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker. The setting's myriad made-to-fit deities leave little room for conflicts of interest. Pathfinder inherited this flaw directly from the grand-daddy of roleplaying, Dungeons and Dragons, whose list of gods and godlings managed to be both redundant and useless. Seriously, count the gods of death. Count 'em! And, once again, DnD like KoDP fell into this by trying to hold true to real-world fake worlds, to mythology. I can certainly forgive old TSR for this, as back in the '70s and '80s their niche American audience would've had little clue about any mythology aside from Christian (easily demonstrated by the repeated moral panics when parents discovered their children were playing the role of pagan worshippers) and thus Wizards of the Coast was nevertheless providing novel entertainment.

 

Still, worshipping the god of three-footed rabbits and crossbow bolts or whatnot emphasizes the main problem with creating a game's pantheon by the same rules as real-world religions. Mythical gods were fabricated by primitive, pre-scientific minds to explain the world and are based on physical phenomena. A game, in contrast, is about player actions. If you want players to give a shit about what deity their characters worship, match gods first and foremost to human tendencies, interests and failings. This is, in fact, why DnD's alignment wheel and the Great Wheel of the multiverse make so much more powerful an idea than the divinities who supposedly rule and define and gatekeep those realms. Chaotic Neutral Lycaon-thrope that I am, I can't say I've ever been moved much by Malar but as soon as I read the description of Pandemonium I could not imagine a better fit for my chaotic nature, a non-stop chase nightmare in a world of cacophony.

Give players divine incarnations of what they do (a.k.a. play) not what they are.

Take the Elder Scrolls as another bad example. Morrowind focused on relatively few gods of its pantheon, and the cults of Vivec and Tiber Septim were different enough from each other to allow some identification. Generally though, the series' multitudinous Aedra, Daedra and whatevera fail to sync up with either the player's actions or the greater world. The Shivering Isles expansion was welcomed after the largely mediocre Oblivion partly for defining the possible attitudes (Mania / Dementia) by which players could relate to one of the setting's divinities.

For a better take on supernatural influences, Dragon Age: Origins, while superficially centering on a monotheistic religion, introduced demons matching human drives (rage / sloth / desire / pride) which fleshed out some villains' motivations. Similarly (and almost as prototypical as Dungeons and Dragons) Warhammer 40,000's chaos gods (Khorne, Nurgle, Tzeench and Slaanesh) are more memorable because their nature translates into action. They're not just the gods of badgers or slugs or rabbits. They're gods of doing. Unto others. Without permission.

 

If you truly want to create a memorable pantheon, however, you have to provide enough thematic overlap for ambiguity and conflict, and the two best examples I can think of hail from two different genres. The first, in fact, doesn't deal with gods at all.

 

Consider why Alpha Centauri's original seven factions remained more valid even after the expansion pack's introduction of seven new ones. The expansion factions were one-trick-ponies: mind worms, probing, naval, production. The original leaders' personalities, on the other hand, provided decisive counterpoints (e.g. University vs. Believers (guess which side I was always on)) and overlapped just enough to let you experiment. Deirdre might be the logical choice for mind worms but Zakharov could rush the right techs for the same effect. Morgan could buy his way to technological supremacy, Yang could leverage his industrial capacity into same and the Believers could zerg at least as well as the Human Hive. All this also translated into a lack of alignment pigeonholing. Sister Miriam Godwinson got some nice jabs in on the topic of technological progress, Yang was an authority on both causing and mitigating personal misery, and the Spartans and the Peacekeepers made surprisingly frequent political bedfellows, seeking the same pax by different means.

When it comes to designing an actual pantheon however, the first Pillars of Eternity got it very, very right, and its designers made it quite clear in various in-universe asides that they forged their divinities consciously and purposefully.

For one thing, there are no good or evil gods, but merely incarnations of behavior in both good and bad aspects. Hylea and Eothas, likely the nicest of the lot, gods respectively of flying creatures and general ebulience or of light and hope and rebirth, seem a lot less cuddly when you realize "pretty flitting things" can easily be argued to include marauding dragons, or that light can burn and requires fuel to be harvested. Conversely, even the nastiest gods like Skaen, Ondra and Rymrgand show their value in extremis, providing redress or palliation when nothing else can.

For another, the various facets of role-playing are given multiple routes for players to identify with.

Instead of a single god of war, bellicosity can instead be embodied by fire, rebellion, or pyrrhic light and hope.

Creativity is not limited to the god of the forge but also to the vitality of nature or decorative prettiness.

Death might mean the finality of entropy or a door from one existence to another or the ultimate truth of the struggle for survival.

Secrets might exist to be hoarded, forgotten or perpetuated.

Disease might be natural, entropic, a secretive subterfuge, a trial to be overcome, a door into the endless cycle, etc.

 

Basically, Pillars of Eternity's gods allow characters to bullshit their way into half a dozen different personal interpretations for everything they do... and that's the point of the activity. An RPG should focus on choices, a middle ground between "everything goes" or an illogical infinity of right answers on one hand or a constricting single right answer leaving no choice at all on the other. If you're designing a role-playing setting, your very cosmology, your plot-driving forces, should reflect this partial ambiguity: give us just enough rope to hang ourselves with. Gods should be philosophies players follow, actions and choices embodied and not merely colorful animal-headed figures to fill a booklet of flavor text.

 

 

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P.S.: From the little I've seen in Shadowrun: Hong Kong and the better Dragonfall, Shadowrun's shamanistic totems might qualify better than DnD's deities if they focus on personalities rather than merely identities.

Mud

"Prosthetic synthesis with butterfly

Sealed up with virgin stitch"

 

Marilyn Manson - Tourniquet

 

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Spoilert: His name is Mud.

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Mentioning Matthew McConaughey's career as a dime-a-dozen romance movie chew toy reminded me we're supposed to pretend he's a respectable professional now, which in turn reminded me of one hint about a decade ago that he might aspire to more than Hugh Grant's understudy.

 

Mud's reviews inevitably mention either its southern gothic or fantastic realist appeal but conspicuously gloss over the flick's main plot element of Quixotic anti-romance. Much as it gives the first impression of a standard "man bad, woman good" Hollywood plot, it may be more nuanced than it first appears. While most viewers will have no trouble critiquing the title character for fabricating a noble but ultimately destructive self-delusion, pretty much no-one seems willing to note that his Dulcinea is not only unappreciative but more importantly unworthy of his heroics. Moreover, the ending can hardly be read as anything other than perpetuating such misery, brainwashing a (surprisingly well acted) young boy into self-destruction in the name of chivalry. This is less a coming-of-age story, as so many superficially label it, as a subtle subversion by its miseducational value.

For the butt of romantic comedy as McConaughey was, such a role not only ran against his usual type but, as he did an admirable job of it, provides a poignant counterpoint to pop-culture assumptions of justified martyrdom.

Lovely Still Lilies

"The injection of religion

Has a coma-like effect"

Wumpscut - Wreath of Barbs

 

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Webcomic spoiler alert(s):

Minor page 436 plot reveal for the young adult sword and sorcery yarn Daughter of the Lilies

The ending to Lovely People, a relatively short comic about bunny rabbit consumerism and social engineering.

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As happens ever and anon, I'm having trouble writing this post because no matter which end of the argument serves as starting point, the various references will inevitably circle back upon themselves. I suppose I should go back to 2013, when I bemoaned the fixation of modern fantasy worlds on Tolkien and Rice, with an increasing Animesque influence, to the undue ignorance of most European mythology beyond elves and vampires.

 

Of course, it is nearly impossible to think of all that colorful paganism without necessarily acknowledging the Christian authority grudgingly tolerating what little it cannot yet pogrom, inquisit and witch-hunt out of existence. The more I read through Tolkien's early drafts in The History of Middle-Earth, the more I grow to appreciate the importance of his multifaceted grasp of folklore, including Christian mythology, not because Christian superstitions are intrinsically better or worse than competing brands of brainwashing, but because Biblical guilt and penance and redemption were intrinsic to the mentality of the folk whose lore Tolkien eventually lent a modern literary coherence. For two thousand years the same patricians and plebeians, serfs and marcher barons, monks and princesses, milkmaids and cobblers who mumbled their pater noster every night also sidestepped fairy rings, plugged their ears against siren songs and did their best to stay out of some troll or ogre's stew pot. Even ignoring Eru Iluvatar, still Hama or Beregond or Samwise Gamgee's parochialism (the counterpoint to Rivendell's otherworldly airiness) is best grasped via the angle of obedience and faith in an ordered world, a monotheistic master plan, even if it's never spelled out that way. Tolkien's ability to avoid spelling it out that way* helped set him apart and far above his friend and sounding board C.S. Lewis, the crass reactionary preachiness of Narnia being reflected in Middle-Earth mainly in the limited form of factory smoke.

I bring this up because of two and a half webcomics.

 

Daughter of the Lilies is an unnecessarily cutesy, cloyingly politically correct take on sword-and-sorcery fantasy. I should hate it. I can't hate it. Instead of attempting to subvert a particular style to its monomania like most such propaganda pieces, it displays just enough dedication to the genre, to its characters, to its cosmology to remain enjoyable. I was surprised to run into a reference to the Holy Trinity on page 436 and cringed in anticipation of sermons to come. To date, to my continued surprise, they have yet to come.

 

The sermon did make its expected appearance at the end of Lovely People, a comic dealing with corporate / state surveillance and control. Also bunnies. It's an increasingly pertinent topic, but unlike say, Buying Time which centered on economic exploitation of human socialization, Peony, Peppermint and Marigold's antics address the impossibility of staying good in a society based on toadying. It takes some excellent potshots at social media, psychological dependence on shallow social approval, consumerism and market manipulation by the likes of Amazon, etc. Ending in a self-flagellating Bible quote surprised me as the author's previous works, which I've praised before, dealt with Norse mythology almost exclusively. There's a grand total of one Christian in her magnum opus Stand Still, Stay Silent... so far. So far I say because in her comments below Lovely People, Minna Sundberg reveals she got 'er sum religion 'round 2019... which explains why the only book mentioned (repeatedly and at length) in the newer Lovely People is The Bible.

Allow me to gloat, first of all, about Sundberg numbering among the first of many who will prove my prediction true: that the snowflake generation's obsession with their own salvation from the original sin of being born the wrong race / sex / sexuality will convert seamlessly to old-school religion over the next decade or two.

More interestingly, note the discrepancy in the two's fervor. Where by the end of Lovely People Sundberg falls into a stereotypical raving proselyte attitude, Meg Syverud plays her first angelic interjection into Daughter of the Lilies so briefly as to barely cause a double-take and even admits to some apprehension as to how her audience will view it. Given she took a one-month post-pandemic vacation recently to get some fresh air, I ended up binge-reading the comic archive to date, and did something I rarely do for any cartoonist except Tailsteak: read the author's commentary below page 436. (Lesson? Never take vacations; it gives internet nerds time to nitpick.) I was pleasantly surprised by her correctly identifying the lackluster integration of Christian mythology into other fantasy tropes in contrast to the precedent set by Tolkien and Lewis, and unpleasantly by finding out she's a true believer who got nudged into doing this at (*gag*) Bible study. Still, if I don't fault Tolkien's writings  for the author actually believing those caveman superstitions, I guess I could extend the same courtesy to cartoonists. The proof, after all, is in the pudding.

Continuing that train of thought, Syverud does devote quite a bit of panel space to proselytism... of social justice activism and not Christianity, despite that she implies being a lifelong Christian. Recap: the lifelong progressive is more fanatical in pushing her newfound Christianity, and the lifelong Christian is more fanatical in pushing the current fad of idealized black lesbians.

I also find both cases interesting for their ironic blind spots. Daughter of the Lilies' obsession with fantastic racism and rainbow sprinkle sexuality are even funnier when you remember how readily religion always lends itself to genocide and that opposition to homosexuality and miscegenation vastly predominate in religious (and especially monotheistic) voting blocs, and not among atheists who even if not actively supportive tend not to give a fuck to whom you give the fuck. Let's remember that even the most infamous example of genocide, moral and ethnic cleansing, the Holocaust, centered on a fundamentally religious division no matter its faux-eugenicist veneer.

It's even funnier for Lovely People to end its tragicomic warning against the dangers of a social credit system by posturing Christianity among the plucky rebel resistance, given that religion (from samsara to monotheistic damnation) was and still is the earliest, longest-lasting and still most widespread social credit system in history. As Plato said toward the end of The Republic, dude, wouldn't it be awesome if we could enslave people's minds by making their every living moment feel supervised and threatening them with an eternity of mind-shattering torture whenever they step out of the lines we draw for them?**

 

Thus, with religious repression, we come full circle to the beginning of this post. Religion creates nothing. It co-opts, plagiarizes, re-brands, subjugates, exterminates the competition, enslaves, claims credit for all of creation post-facto. I applaud attempts at better integrating Christian mythology into fantasy fiction, largely because... well, why the hell not? However, we have seen the pitfalls of attempting to build a new mythology around the new fundamentalist beliefs of social activism and have every reason to think that falling back on older, more ingrained superstitions, backpedalling from technocracy to theocracy, will entail vastly more stultifying regression.

 

True believers can make good art, but it is in spite and not because they hold a certain brand of baseless belief higher than its competing dogmas. Go the Tolkien route, not the Lewis one. You do not have to abandon your religion in order to write well about fantasy, but do have to at least momentarily pretend that you're not a special snowflake, saved while the rest of us are damned for mumbling the right poetry and crossing your fingers the correct way. And, unfortunately, both of today's examples show a decided tendency to idealize their own mouthpiece characters of the fantasy fiction they've deluded themselves into believing is real. It's an easy prediction that fanaticism will gradually consume more and more of their innate creativity, forcing every new plot element into a religious mould, à la Orson Scott Card, until burying whatever potential they might've had.

 

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* Yes, yes, Ainulindalë, thanks, I know, I know... but for the most part...

 

** I... may be paraphrasing slightly.

 

P.S.: Both of thoday's creatrices are published by Hiveworks, and I'm amused to imagine webcomics' most virulent swarm of social justice activists might be flipping their collective switch from "Ishida" to "Chick"

P.P.S.: In light of this, it'll be interesting to see what direction Pascalle Lepas of Wilde Life (also hosted by Hiveworks) takes all her talk of the devil.

edit 2022/02/08

Why did you jackasses not tell me I'd consistently misspelled "li[l]lies" through the entire post?

Ah well, you take your comedy where you can these days I suppose.

Also, I was not aware when I wrote this that Ishida himself, the posterchild of anti-male webcomickry, had shifted his message in 2021. My take on that here.