In the Dope Show

"The drugs, they say, are made in California

We love your face, we'd really like to sell you"

 

Marilyn Manson - The Dope Show

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"Many of the great economic masters, though they had originally favored radio-bliss in moderation as an opiate for the discontented workers, now turned against it. Their craving was for power; and for power they needed slaves whose labor they could command for their great industrial ventures. They therefore devised an instrument which was at once an opiate and a spur."

 

Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker (1937)

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"The sensories were an inescapable part of 2110, as omnipresent and popular as television had been in Blaine's day. Larger and more elaborate versions of the sensories were used for theater productions, and variations were employed for advertising and propaganda. They were to date the purest and most powerful form of the ready-made dream, tailored to fit anyone.

But they had their extremely vocal opponents, who deplored the ominous trend toward complete passivity in the spectator. These critics were disturbed by the excessive ease with which a person could assimilate a sensory; and in truth, many a housewife walked blank-eyed through her days, a modern-day mystic plugged into a continual bright vision.

In reading a book or watching television, the critics pointed out, the viewer had to exert himself, to participate. But the sensories merely swept over you, vivid, brilliant, insidious, and left behind the damaging  schizophrenic impression that dreams were better and more desirable than life.

[...]

In another generation, the critics thundered, people will be incapable of reading, thinking or acting!

It was a strong argument. But Blaine, with his 152 years of perspective, remembered much the same sort of arguments hurled at radio, movies, comic books, television and paperbacks. Even the revered novel had once been bitterly chastised for its deviation from the standards of pure poetry. Every innovation seemed culturally destructive; and became, ultimately, a cultural staple, the embodiment of the good old days, the spirit of the Golden Age -- to be threatened and finally destroyed by the next innovation."

 

Robert Sheckley - Immortality, Inc. (1959)

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Video games have been outputting more of an artsy fringe lately, but have yet to truly mature as a creative medium. Then again, how long did television take to outgrow the laugh track? Meh, games've got time. Still, re-reading Immortality, Inc. makes me wonder what Sheckley must've thought of the advent of video games by his death in 2005. Standard railing against new media used to revisit the same premise that increasing media sophistication brought audience apathy: the more work done by the program, the less done by the programmed, and thus new media will collapse civilization. When video games came along, the pretext to angst was flipped around faster than Procrustes could make his bed. They prompt too much action, hyperactivity, over-involvement, and THUS this new medium will collapse civilization.

Civilization having... sec (runs to glance out the window; nope, still there)

Civilization having neglected to collapse, we're left with the unsurprising conclusion that games are just another creative medium, amenable to personal or artistic expression, entertainment or propaganda in whatever ratios the monkeys in question produce and consume. Just like books, theater or television, some (like myself) in every generation will be prone to over-indulge by various standards, but as with every diversion the prevalence of indulgence is less an issue in itself than an indicator of the inadequacy of human life.

Engaging my superhuman powers of forevoyeurism for a moment, I can predict that media, genres and fads will continue to arise now and anon, and the relevant question each time will not be of the new mode's quality, but the quality of its creators and audiences. All the more relevant this to our slightly decentralized modern culture, with gamified public discourse encouraging us to score points against each other on every forum and comments section. The depth and complexity of a video game, more than that of a book or movie, depends not only on a target audience's ability to spot depth and complexity but its ability to behave deeply and complexly. Does your grand role-playing adventure consist of being ordered from HUD marker to HUD marker? Is your strategy just a race to the designated best unit? Is your city an endless reiteration of the same cookie-cutter neighbourhood?

 

Does your identity as an imaginary Werwolfe hold any meaning or are you just another werewolf? Games do hold one great, largely untapped potential to alter our thinking: establishing a personal playstyle, mode of interaction, be it expressed in simoleon expenditure, unit ratios or alignment wheel position... or preferences, or fears or aspirations. It gets you thinking about deliberately making your soul. Who were you in 2021, and who will you be in 2022? Have any words, sights, sounds altered your personality? With or without your informed consent? Are you moving or being moved? In our grand, global, interconnected all-pawn clash of psychological influences, are you a player or just another unit?

EndLand

"I squirm into you, now I'm in your gut

I fell into you, now I'm in a rut"

Marilyn Manson - Deformography

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"The same things I've written a thousand times before. After all, an act can lose meaning if you do it often enough."

 

I'd hoped to have more to say about Strangeland but in the end I find myself resenting its ending more than admiring its high points. I will say that despite its initial setup of a man feeling responsible for a woman's death, it didn't quite go the standard "man bad; woman good" route, and it's rare to find any form of entertainment these days not openly trumpeting feminist male-bashing. Unfortunately it does slide into an older version.

Of course, it would be hard to say much about Strangeland in the first place due to its oft-noted brevity. In fact its GoG summary lists most interactable characters and despite (unlike most adventure games) touting some built-in replay value, you'll make most of your decisions during the first zone. Which prompts the first question: how short is too short?

Before online distribution, the answer was obvious: game boxes cost $50 off the store shelf (expansion packs $35) and contained a predetermined quantity of escapism, long enough to ensure you didn't feel the need to buy from other publishers but also just barely short enough to leave you wanting more of the same. A "game" meant a couple weeks' worth of evenings. Then came multiplayer replayability, endless games, the return of quasi-randomized roguelike questing, and multiple play modes (e.g. strategic overland plus personal mission-running) blowing the roof off the high end of that scale. So why do we still prop up the mandatory low end?

 

Absent the overhead of boxing, shipping and storing physical disks, and given the evident accessibility of modern game engines (seems everything I play now carries the Unity logo) the minimal unit price to justify production has been rapidly dropping. Granted, emphasizing play time over sheer sales figures made a better measure of quality, but of course this can itself be abused by designers (especially startups or dilettantes) padding out their campaign's length with ludicrous timesinks and stalling. "Hours played" has recently grown nearly as meaningless a metric as the number of players in "free"-to-play games. Strangeland feels short, especially to those of us who'd hoped for a second Primordia, but it pointedly automates a repetitive task as soon as you demonstrate you've grasped the concept of mouths instead of forcing you to trudge back and forth, and mocks you for being willing to sit in place waiting for a slow reward. Why not pay $10-15 for a condensed dose of recherché psycho-symbolism you'll remember more keenly than you would a hundred hours' worth of Callin' Duties? As a fan of science fiction, that genre most prone to hard-hitting, thought-provoking short stories, I can't help but think our expectations are to blame for a perceived lack here, and depriving us of much potential interactive quality brevity.

Moving on, this is where things have to get spoilery, not only for Strangeland but for the postapocalyptic furry comic Endtown. For whatever my evaluation's worth, they're both worth an unspoiled sit-through, though neither is world-shaking work.

Aside from constantly retconning its cosmology, Endtown (coincidentally enough) has a major problem with endings. The author has set up some intricate intrigues (the milk and meat storylines starting 2012/10/25 and its followup 2016/12/28 being particularly well developed) stemming from his furries' physical and psychological tendencies and internecine squabbles, yet instead of tying up each plot's threads he lops them all off via some nonsensical wish-granter or other deus ex machina. While personally I was most annoyed by the spaceship that runs on feels, the culprit is usually that space wizard effortlessly invalidating all others''s influence. At the same time, formerly competent, driven (or at least cooperative) characters tend to inexplicably devolve to naive, childishly labile versions of themselves, the better for their newfound incompetence to make room for external salvation or damnation.

Which brings us back to Strangeland:

"You have one wish left"

"I wish to know who I am"

"Funny. That was your first wish."

No, that dialogue is actually paraphrased from one of Planescape: Torment's more famous anecdotes. But, given that Strangeland's writer's a well-recognized Torment fanboy and the protagonist's constant deaths to advance the plot recall the Nameless One without fail, I can't help but also question the "know thyself" angle. Though Strangeland's "good" ending ostensibly has you embracing your own worth, it reminded me of nearing the end of an Endtown storyline, the heroes having grappled with demons both inner and outer, conquered existential threats and existential despair, only for a space wizard to swan into the picture and snatch up control of the situation, denying them their well-earned victory. Admittedly, it works better for Strangeland's stricter focus on psychology, as mental disorders of most varieties are so difficult to overcome precisely because they turn all your effort against yourself, raising the stakes for external symbols as lifelines.

 

I'll also admit I'm mostly bothered by exactly that one line about his lover's eyes showing him his bright self. In real life, viewing a man through the female gaze yields precisely Strangeland: a world in which the man is ugly, insane, dangerous and broken by default and in need of a yoke and muzzle (or straightjacket) his life worth an order of magnitude less than that of his tribe's females, the value of his existence defined entirely by his potential utility as provider and protector to a woman and her offspring. I can't decide whether to call Strangeland's interpretation naive or insidious, but it rings painfully hollow against realistic observation of the human condition.

 

Torment's best ending packed you off to eternal war by yourself... but as yourself, your full self. Other noteworthy games from that same period like V:tM-Bloodlines also allowed for individual endings, striding into the (proverbial) sunset finally free of various factions' machinations. In Strangeland, after spending puzzle after puzzle struggling for individual integrity, piecing together my own shattered psyche, being thrown a "good ending" bone for embracing an external influence (even symbolic) betrays the player-as-protagonist's efforts. This "freedom is slavery" reinterpretation reeks of recent decades' cultural decay.

In short, I decided stabbing myself is my canonical lycanthrope-approved ending to Strangeland. I am worthless... but <I> am worthless.

To bring this back around to my earlier point, Strangeland is a short story, and short stories depend heavily on Poe's single effect. Ruin the ending, ruin the effect, ruin $5 of the $10 story instead of 5/50. In turn, this throws a new light on Endtown's ruining various character arcs and intrigues by needlessly contrived endings. If one were to view Endtown as a single over-arching metaplot, as the story of Aaron Marx and his magic powers toying with a postapocalyptic furry farm, it might hold together better. But that's not what you find yourself reading on a page by page basis. As each new protagonist's struggle is invalidated by each new deus ex machina, each short story is ruined in turn. Endtown becomes a chain of abortions, of setups fizzling out again and again, character development, future history and phlebotina all tortured into nonsensical conclusions that the beating of that hideous heart ain't so bad since we invented pacemakers.

 Newly failed short "story" attempt, Deliver, is now up for panning at your leisure.

Faith of our Frotteurs

"Cause the inquisition's here and it's here to staaaaaaay!"

History of the World Part 1

Just thought I'd prompt you to think about religious exemptions to vaccination in light of modern sensibilities to interpersonal harm. The same government, the same company, the same school that would gladly have a man fired, blacklisted, ostracised or beaten to death in prison as a rapist on a woman's say-so for no more substantive accusation than a whistle or raised eyebrow as mortal danger to all woman-kind will gleefully permit the subhuman troglodytes who kow-tow before stone-age superstitions to infect as many people as they can with as many diseases as they can, of varying lethality, for claiming their imaginary magic sky-daddy might frown upon public health.

Fine. Fuck it. Cough it up. Spread the love. Might as well. God bless your mucus.

The absurdity of this idiotic species does little to justify any efforts to save it.

But it does raise the question of why we don't have a religious exemption for hooter-honkin', a Church of the Holy Grab-Ass, a Priory o' Pinchin', a holiday of Fellate Me Mother For I Have Sprung.

If you're willing to condemn women to choke on their own blood for the sake of invisible pigeons with harps, I don't see that hoochin' their coochies by the power vested in me by the blueness of my balls would be anything but a step up.

Lockstep 3: Or, there and back again

Minor spoiler for Vagrus: The Riven Realms

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Unable to find any half-skim guanaco milk for my eyebrow perifoliation treatments, instead I've been trying my hand at That Game That Misspelled My Name In The Preorder Credits and so far it looks quite promising, if still awaiting some fleshing out of its various features. Despite taverns including a hint system pointing you to various content, for instance, I've been having a devil of a time finding the various NPC companions to fill my roster, which in turn is preventing me from questing. About to rail against this lack, I ended up glancing at an online cheat-sheet only to discover I'd hounded circles around what should have been an obvious freebie.

Repeatedly.

Plotting all three of my trips to Deven so far with a view both toward accumulating fetch quests for simultaneous delivery and taking advantage of market prices to waste as little inventory space as possible entailed avoiding the unprofitable direct route along the main road, and consequently the hidden ambush site where you can rescue Finndurath the Spellweaver. I'd still have missed her if not for a damn reddit thread.

While Vagrus explicitly advertises a lack of handholding as one of its core selling points, given the importance of companions to questing and logistics, this one's proximity and the location she asks you to visit, you're obviously expected to run into her quite quickly. It's supposed to be a gimmie, a nice surprise while starting out. She's even located in an obvious spot. Too obvious, in fact, so that any gamer worth his salt will instead hit other locations (like the salt mines) for fun and profit instead of plowing forward. Is sweeping for side-quests before main objectives not a core strategy in cRPGs? Is maximizing logistics' profitability not in fact my exact job description as Vagrus? Why am I being denied an early reward for putting more thought into things than running there and back again horse-blindered, ignoring possible rings of power and profit?

It is possible for game designers to predict their customers' reactions so perfectly as to give the illusion of free choice while laying out a linear path. Off the top of my head, Half-Life 2's introduction (running through the apartment building) managed it beautifully. But it ain't easy, and the nerdier the genre the harder the players are to predict. A managerial cRPG exploration sandbox? Quite nerdy.* So why did you predict I'd simplemindedly rush from big city to big city? The more I play Vagrus, the clearer becomes the devs' very, very precise idea of how your early game should unfold, and entirely too much of it depends on foreknowledge of where and in what sequence to unlock stores with discounts, companions and free stacks of loot... while hoping for lucky fetch quest randomization. Its tendency to over-predict player actions clashes with its fundamental randomization.

Oh well. With a third rusty side-chick in tow, at least now I can re-attempt to lick the neck romancer's swamp hole. Later, comes.

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* edit 2022/12/05 - And that's not mentioning the gratuitous LATIN. No really, why did you ever assume your target audience would go for the obvious?

Hey, what's another name for literary cannon?

A knowitzer.

Will Sinfest Play in Peoria?

"Sometimes you wanna go

Where everybody knows your name

And they're always glad you came"

 

Cheers intro

 

 

Earlier this year when I joked about certain webcartoonists flipping their political switch from Tatsuya Ishida to Jack Chick (thereby confirming my prediction about the snowflake generation) I was ironically unaware that Ishida himself had taken a steep plunge in that direction in recent months, having not checked up on his magnum opus Sinfest for several years.

Sinfest, for anyone who's managed to avoid it, was in the early 2000s a quite funny mish-mash of jokes at the expense of everything from cheap genre movies to religions to poetry slams to recreational drugs to both genders to cats and dogs, to really anything the author could punch a line at. Though not exceptionally original, its trenchant, unapologetic vivacity earned it a place in the limelight. After 2008, the author switched gears abruptly to feminism, more feminism and pretty much nothing but feminism all day every day, increasingly foregoing humor altogether in favor of simply bemoaning his masculinity, bashing men as guilty of all the world's ills and upholding women as immaculate victims of male evil. Apparently sometime last year he switched tracks yet again to right-wing conspiracy theory, now attacking "wokeness" which by his definition includes vaccination and holding up traditionalism, including religiosity, as inherent goodness.

 

First, let's address the author's motivation. For a long time, whenever his name was mentioned, everyone seemed desperate to pin down Ishida's exact position on the political spectrum (most commonly as "trans-exclusionary radical feminist") but I was never clear on what viewpoint exactly Sinfest promoted aside from the general hatred of men (and sex as a representation of male desire) connecting all feminism. However, the more recent swerve into anti-government, anti-medicine, anti-globalist conspiracism, by its very magnitude, throws light on his previous devotion to left-wing extremism as well.

He's weak.

That's it. There's the big mystery solved by the very eagerness, the fanaticism with which the author yet again dives into a new subculture. For all his considerable talent as a cartoonist and satirist and the punch thus imparted to his causes, Tatsuya Ishida is probably a very weak-willed individual hiding behind extremist viewpoints as self-justification. I'm reminded of a page from another webcomic, Questionable Content, where a gynoid with a very large, military-grade chassis storms away from a party in indignation at everyone commenting on her height. The page was titled "othering" in an attempt to equate simply noticing any difference watsoever between individuals as an act of imperialist oppression as per contemporary social constructionist mass insanity.

As an aside, having lived my entire life as a freak for various reasons, it's not that hard to distinguish genuine ill-will from people casually asking where your accent's from simply because it's literally all they know about you at that point in the conversation. More generally, it is natural for strangers to begin their observations of each other by the observable, by their very strangeness and "other"-ness, before learning details. You are not being oppressed simply because the world has not been pruned of everyone unlike yourself. Recent decades though have seen a vast proliferation of those who crib their lack of personality off internet quizzes and would rather lop off their own shins than find themselves of a different height than everyone else at the party.

 

With its second big shift in tone, Sinfest becomes an interesting case study in the mentality of natural followers, born-again minions. The particular cult he's promoting at any given moment might be anything, so long as it provides belonging among the saved in defense against an overwhelming wider world (be it presented as "the patriarchy" or vaccines) and forty or fifty years ago he might've joined the Manson Family or Jonestown; I'm downright surprised he's not a Scientologist. Subsuming the self in such a manner makes for some jarring lack of self-awareness... like, say, portraying anyone who accepts vaccination as a self-debasing masochist... while just a month prior applauding one of the heroes in a sexless relationship with a literal succubus... whom he addresses as "miss"(tress) in case the hypocrisy was too subtle for you.

Which brings us to a second point: has this past year's Sinfest really changed that much from its rabid feminist days? From what I've seen, femininity is still portrayed as the definition of goodness. Sex is still evil and harmful to women. Men are still evil unless explicitly subservient to female interests (see the father/husband in prison, the heroes going to save the world by saving a female personification of the year 2021) and no woman can ever do wrong except by masculine influence. That female characters are now wearing overalls instead of Matrix shades makes little difference once you scratch the surface. The idolatry at the center of Ishida's worship is still that of Venus figurines.

The shallowness of Sinfest's transition supports not only my point that snowflakes' desperation to atone for their original sin in being born the wrong sex/race/etc. will translate to traditional religion in the 2020s but, more important, that Ishida's minion mentality manifests most consistently as self-flagellation over his insufficiency as a servant of females. By genuflecting before women, he will never risk having his height noticed at the party. He's still as feminist as he ever was, and as one whose cartoons one might find taped to social "science" professors' doors in universities all through last decade, his non-conversion reflects upon the movement in return.

 

Feminism, for all it masquerades as left-wing politics, is an overwhelmingly reactionary viewpoint struggling to maintain the traditional precept of male debt toward females. Its popularity, its political convenience as justification for attacking men, spiked most noticeably as the sexual revolution threatened to demystify women's most entrenched means of control over men and incidentally the wealthy's ability to control the entire populace by appealing to half of it. Let's not act surprised that beneath all the fabricated accusations of wage gaps and rape cultures we find the same old Mrs. Grundy preaching animal husbandry.

Thief of Virtue

"I'm in the wrong and I've done it all before

I cannot breathe this poison air filled with lies"

 

Combichrist - Throat Full of Glass

 

 

I decided to hit Strangeland before Lorelai for my next adventure game... errr, adventure, and so far it looks promising, aside from the painfully predictable "man bad, woman good" men-are-gynocidal-maniacs feminist setup which I'm hoping (but not expecting) to see discredited before the end. I got stuck before even finishing the first scene, though.

I don't mean stuck in practical terms. I know the next step (and double-checking with the in-game hint system even confirms it) but I've been trying my damnedest to find any other solution... than lying to the nice, helpful old blind man feeding the birds in the park. Or feeding the nonexistent imaginary doves in a post-death fugue state or-possibly-alternate-dimension and they're actually ravens. Not the point! I don't want to lie!

... Can't I just shoot him or something?

Computer games have always had an uneasy relationship with nonviolence, as clicking things on and off (i.e. into or out of existence) is the most straightforward use of an electronic interface even down to single pixels. From there to making the pointer into a gun barrel is a short path indeed. When they do try to get nonviolent (whether to break the mold or dodge parental groups) the results can be unexpectedly macabre.

Take Thief, for instance:

As the forerunner of modern stealth-based games, Thief made quite a splash by pushing you to knock people unconscious instead of noisily fighting them while you sneak to your objective, in direct contrast to Doom and its contemporary copycats dominating the market. Of course, you also had to move the sapped victims out of patrol routes so others wouldn't run across them and raise the alarm. By the time you find yourself lovingly stacking your twentieth unconscious person in a tiny cupboard where they'll never be missed, you might realize that holy shit, this would actually be less creepy if I'd just killed them!

 

In Strangeland's case, you've already established some kind of journey to the center of the mind in which death only means a temporary reset and your main task is reconstructing reality from fragmentary hints. This makes telling a lie, further fragmenting reality, a crime against your solipsistic universe itself while you have every reason to assume (at this early point in the game anyway) that cudgeling the codger for the breadcrumbs in his pocket would only result in him rematerializing on the same bench a minute later.

And that's ignoring the basic distinction that I'd rather be an honest villain than a lying hero.

Time for the Stars

"We were going to be a short paragraph in history and a footnote in science books; there wasn't room for us in the news. I decided that even a footnote averaged well and forgot it."

 

Superficially, Time for the Stars is very similar to other "Heinlein juveniles" - stories written early in his career (late '40s/50s) for the young adult market. Headline: plucky small-town lad adventures through space! Like the others however, it was deliberately written to expand science fiction past pulp laser pistol duels, and little beyond the protagonist's improbable age would doom them as "juvenile" - certainly not in a market where James Bond and Star Wars are considered perfectly acceptable grownup entertainment. Time for the Stars in particular expands upon some logical consequences of telepathy and relativistic spaceflight. Remember that drawing your junior high science teacher used to explain relativity to you, of two twins aging differently as one of them flies near the speed of light? This is about that twin.

As with other Heinlein stories, he doesn't miss the opportunity for social commentary, but where to modern writers that would mean #killallmen or #killallwhites or #killallstraights fanaticism Heinlein tempers even his favorite topic of individual freedom with reminders of the grim necessities of shipboard life and unified action in the face of unknown dangers. And, as the opening quote's equanimity indicates, most opportunities for the hero to angst over / bemoan his fate are quickly brought up against the reality check that he entered his career by informed choice and in all fairness doesn't have it that bad. I find it most similar to Starman Jones (albeit rather more chipper and less fixated on shipboard etiquette) in how pointedly it builds up the stereotypical hero's journey only to break it down. In fact its last-chapter musings by a temporally-dilated fish out of water seem like they might've at least partly inspired Stanislaw Lem's Return from the Stars (<--- caution: entirely unresearched speculation.)*

 

Strangely, a recurring theme throughout the novel is the hero's lack of understanding of the true nature of his adventure, whether due to his youth, his low rank or his uncharacteristically average intelligence for a Heinlein hero. The author even emphasizes the irrationality of their proposed mission statement (and by extension, interstellar colonization as a SciFi trope) halfway through: "There are too many people as it is; why encourage new colonies? A mathematician could solve the population problem in jig time - just shoot every other one." Eventually, the book becomes less about the trials and victories of daring explorers (or the "specialness" of their skillsets / superpowers) as about the necessity of maintaining the spirit of exploration so as to prevent humanity from falling into scientific and social stagnation. 

 

 

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* edit 2023/10/18

As Return from the Stars was published five years after Time for the Stars (and only decades later in English) the reverse would appear to be the case. Lem even starts his story basically where Heinlein's wraps up, revisiting the theme of the spirit of exploration.

 

Mort

"You put your hand on top of mine

You're talking fast but talking blind

And I can't bring myself to meet your eyes"

 

Missy Higgins - Cooling of the Embers

 

 

The comic PvP Online started as jokes about Ultima Online, branched out into other games and the usual Star Wars / Trek gamut of geek humor of twenty years ago and I wasn't particularly bothered by the fact I didn't play or watch most of the stuff it referenced because video game contrivances made excellent fodder while the many genres we now take for granted were still being established. I've barely skimmed the intervening fifteen years, and nothing I've seen makes me want to. Seems mostly to have coasted on its existing name recognition and remaining readers' brand loyalty. Unlike most of his early fans, I saw nothing fundamentally wrong with the shift away from games toward romance/office/domestic themes... except the author didn't particularly have anything to say on these topics. The mix of Dilbert and Who's the Boss was doing nothing for me. In the early 2000s Scott Kurtz was basically the Jay Leno of webcomics: a very small, simple repertoire of jokes thriving on brusque everyman congeniality instead of originality or wit. And, like Leno, his success depended on typos and flubs from the local press - or rather from the game industry. Such an entertainer's livelihood depends on the liveliness of the news cycle. As long as the universe (real or fictional) is feeding him punchlines, Kurtz is rather good at fleshing out endearing setups. When he turned to stale sources, he turned stale himself.

 

But this year he did something else.

Mort.

A short (~50-ish pages? so far) series centered on a father and son inspired by the author himself trying to deal with his father's severe illness. Normally such a shift in topic can't help but remind me of Kanye West milking his mother's death for audience sympathy for months after years on end, but there's no denying the death or suffering of those close to us has fuelled some of the most impressive expressivity in art throughout history. (Or least impressive as well; taking a family member in for life-threatening surgery kicked off A Murder Mystery - such as it is.)

Mort is beautiful. It lacks the blatant self-censorship of Kurtz' posturing as either the patron saint of webcomics or a social justice warrior over the past fifteen years. He didn't feel the need to replace his own father with a black lesbian whose pain would be more significant for being born a morally superior breed, or write the two men cowering in righteous fear of their female superiors in the natural order, being put in their place by women every single page. The few overtones of his usual routine fade before the real anguish of breaking down the social niceties blanketing our day-to-day lives, the relationships we took for granted. Even the initial gimmick of portraying death as an '80s sitcom wacky neighbour breaks down after a few pages in favor of the simple dark humor of swallowing your pride to help a loved one with basic physical needs. And it works. Beautifully. He's found a source of punchlines most wouldn't dare touch (especially knowing where they go) and he's writing excellent, laugh-the-pain-away setups.

I don't know if he'll continue, and given the emotionally charged subject matter certainly couldn't blame him for shelving this particular side project... but I hope it goes on, for the rest of our sakes, even at the cost of his own sanity. It's selfish of me, but in another decade I may very well find myself re-reading these strips as instructional material.

We all might.

 

Life's funny that way.

Plot Hooker With a Hack of Gold

"She sees a mirror of herself

An image she wants to sell

To anyone willing to buy"

Green Day - Extraordinary Girl

 

___________________________________________

Moderate spoilers from The Order of the Stick

Irrelevant spoilers for a badly-written character from Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous

___________________________________________

 

Back when I was fourteen I came up with the best idea for a novel: science fiction, but with no science! It was gonna be, like, space guys, but not in space. Also, monsters. Is that not the most awesomest and most original idea evar!?!

 

One of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous' few well-written moments comes while ransacking the lair of a mad scientist experimenting on demons. You set loose a witch who'd been sentenced to burn at the stake beforehand, only for him (of course it's a him in this particular case; man bad, woman good - repeat the mantra) to say "crusader, didn't you ever consider some of the witches condemned might actually have been guilty?" and proceed to attack you in the name of his demon lord.

Yes, categories are usually established according to some observable (albeit often misinterpreted) trend. Wer-wolfes bite people, damnit!

But that's a one-liner from an enemy redshirt, belying the idiot-friendly tripe pervading Wrath's portrayals of good and evil. Meanwhile Ember, the witch companion you interact with for five variously ludicrous acts is a cheesy, infantile parody of a Mary Sue, a perfect light of goodness and clairvoyance who needs do no more than pout for even ersatz divinities to obey her demands.

 

Because of course your witch friend is an exception to all witchy ways. She's speshul.

And of course the orc is a noble paladin. She's speshul.

And of course the kobold is a mysterious benevolent sage in kobold's clothing. He's speshul.

And of course the succubus is reformed to goodness and an invincible spotlight-stealing plot-trampler. She's speshul.

And of course the female drow you chase down turns out to be good at heart and only victimized by a man. She's speshul.

And of course your aasimar, being male, is a token watered-down "evil" bishonen bad boy. He's the wrong kind of speshul and he needs you to emotionally manipulate him into boyfriend material.

Needing a break from that nonsense, I decided to fire up Vagrus: the Riven Realms instead, a managerial strategy game with turn-based squad combat and a strong role-playing side. Sure, they misspelled my name in the preorder credits, but I'm not nearly shallow enough to complain about that repeatedly and at length every time I mention Vagrus... y'know, that game that misspelled my name in the preorder credits? Anyway, I schlep on over to the first major city and start recruiting companions.

Of course the orc is a noble warrior who doesn't live by his people's code of brutality. He's speshul.

And of course the drow has abandoned his people's underground empire. He's speshul.

That second particularly grates, as Vagrus pedals furiously along the elfemism treadmill.

You introduce a race of antagonists: evil, underhanded troglobites. Call'em orcs or goblins. They sing songs about going down. They're pretty cool. Now readers/players demand more orc characters in the story. Now they want to identify with the badass orcs, since it would give them an excuse to act "evil-lite" and still claim they're better than the average orc. Pretty soon orcs/goblins are looking less and less antagonistic, and comic after comic starts treating them like some beleaguered ethnic minority. They even move aboveground, improve their posture and start dressing like spaghetti western injuns.

Problem: now what are we supposed to slice'n'dice in caves?

Solution: introduce a completely new race. Oooh, let's make them fallen, mutated elves (a very non-Tolkien original idea *wink-wink*) 'cuz that always drums up some drama. "Drow" sounds like a badass title. Make'em evil so the players don't feel sorry for killing them and give them some cave adaptations like shadowy dark skin to blend in the dark and make them dishonest and underhanded and treacherous so they're even more hateable. Cool, huh? So cool, in fact, that readers start demanding more of them, and then start identifying with them and demanding drow heroes who can act evil-lite yet still bemoan their fellows' greater evil.

 

Problem: now what're we supposed to mince and mash in caves?

Solution: introduce a completely "new" race. Make 'em sneaky and underhanded and evil and hateable and cannibalistic ("looks like meat's back on the menu, boys!") and give' em some cave adaptations like pale cadaverous skin for lack of pigmentation. Call 'em "wraiths" because that won't cause any confusion and this completely new and original fantasy wraithsrace will solve our evil-oid humanoid scarcity FOR EVER AND EVER and ev- seriously though, set your clocks.

It's a variation on the red queen hypothesis. Each newly introduced character/category is defined from the start as more extreme than its predecessor, but in reality this only places it in the same niche vacated by that predecessor as it bred out to generalism. How many times this cycle will repeat is anyone's guess, though if the "specialness" inflation of real-world social movements and religions (ever more puritan, ever more vegan, ever more queer) is any indication, the sky's the limit. For now let's just consider the typhoid Marys, the Drizzts and Thralls watering down fantasy races, those speshul little snowflakes. Let me ask you something: was Legolas elvish? Was Elrond? Galadriel? Even the second-stringers like Thranduil, Glorfindel, Haldir, Arwen? Did any of them need to become the antithesis of all things elvish to stand out from the crowd? Did Tolkien go "roight then, first elf I wrote was an ancient, gracious, graceful, wise guardian of the land, so enough of that, next elf must needs be an adolescent vampire!" Or a seraph. Whatever.

 

While I stand by my criticism of GreedFall, there was one character I liked, and surprisingly he hailed from my temperamentally antithetical faction, the theists:

Petrus (at least in the first half of the game I played) didn't need to be holier than all the other thous around him to get his point across. His personality was not defined by either one-upping or renouncing his group designation but owning it, a welcome undercurrent throughout GreedFall but less pronounced in other characters. In fact, he slightly reminds me of another badass grandpa from another fantasy religious order, O-Chul the paladin's paladin from The Order of the Stick... and O-Chul in turn brings us full-circle back to Wrath of the Righteous.

See, O-Chul may or may not have tamed one of the villains (spoiler alert as to which one) while the villains help him captive and tortured him for months on end - with the prerequisite of susceptibility on that villain's part and an extensive build-up of tenuous game-playing metaphors and uncertain rapport. Contrast him to Ember from Wrath, who routinely turns gangs upon hordes upon armies of demon-worshippers and demons themselves from evil to good by no more than flatly telling them to be good - with the writing doubling down by outright commanding you to believe that cheesy platitudes just sound more convincing when they come from this insipid little snot because she's so convincingly good. A witch mind you. The good witch of the worst. *

The descriptor we need to introduce here is "facile" and it applies to both the basic design of characters like Ember and their expected interaction with the world. After his imprisonment, O-Chul delivers his rescuers a list of their common enemy's attacks. How did he get it? By instantly and effortlesly discerning it via telepathy? By just asking and having them tell him their secrets because he's too cute to refuse? By stumbling upon it via heroic luck? No. "One saving throw at a time." He remained a Lawful Good paladin and played his strengths under the circumstances, awaiting the right moment for decisive, unflinching action toward the greater good. He endured, and in enduring not only grew strong but strengthened his allies.

If you create a paladin it should be because you want to play a paladin, not a barbarian with better public relations. If you insert a witch class into your game, it should not consist of people wrongly accused of witchcraft! Space dudes not-in-space is not an original idea. "Dudes" is not a fantasy race! Character designs like "orc that doesn't act orcish" or "drow that doesn't act drowish" aren't just facile in their concept but in their interactions' overwhelming focus on the non-issue of their exceptionality instead of more personal motivations. Is it so impossible to create a witch character with her own personality and with actual struggles to overcome by personal choice, effort and sacrifice who still acts like an illicit practitioner of occult magic? Was Dragon Age's Morrigan so unpopular a character?

And yes, it's damn near impossible to discern how much of this idiocy is due to pop fiction writers' professional incompetence or their intellectual inability to move past such clichés or just disinterested pandering to the retard market they believe they can't capture otherwise. I'd bet on the third factor overwhelmingly. And yeah, admittedly, I did think up "space dudes not in space" at fourteen... but after a few pages realized the plot was going nowhere. Within the year I'd abandoned it altogether. Vagrus is now two months old and Wrath three. By June the degenerate munchkin brigade you apparently think requires your undivided attention will be ashamed they ever associated with your brand name... not that you could pry them away from Hello Kitty Online in the first place no matter how hard you Mary your Sues.

 

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* There's an obvious parallel to be drawn here to real-world social activism. A white person declaring all white people are racist, the "one good man" declaring all men rapists, the religious believer declaring we are all sinners, all are implicitly setting themselves up as holier-than-thou... by doing absolutely nothing aside from moving the goalposts.

P.S.: You misspelled my name in the preorder credits!

P.P.S.: If you're going to bring up Fall-From-Grace, I'll get to that, geez, gimme a break.

The Order of the Stick

"Send in your skeletons

Sing as their bones go marching in again

[...]

The page is out of print

We are not permanent"

 

Foo Fighters - Pretender 

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Vaarsuvius: "I deliberately chose to cast the weaker form of Dispel Magic earlier so as to reduce the likelihood of it accidentally unraveling our own spells, which likely had a higher - "

Belkar: "Just say it was magic. Nobody cares about that stuff anymore."

 

(T)OOTS #1247

(mind the small spoiler)

 

As The Order of the Stick launches drifts into its last chapter, I've been wondering at its oscillating relevance to online subcultures during its relatively long lifespan as a chief representative of RPG-inspired comics (D&D 3.5e in this case) and the recent strip quoted above seems to have nailed the shifting baseline. T-OOTS started in the early 2000s, tracking the Infinity Engine series' and Neverwinter Nights' peak popularity, which allowed it to capture not only its implicit audience of tabletop gamers but many like myself with no access to tabletop groups but whose interest was piqued as to the more complex mechanics offered outside computerized hack'n'slash automation. But judging by the complete lack of conversation around roleplaying in online games, the two markets have either diverged again... or one has ceased influencing the other.

Unlike similar comics like Nodwick which drew humor from players' contrariness, tOOTS focused on the inherent absurdity of living and dying by fantasy role-playing gimmicks, at first with regards to specific game mechanics, then widening its scope to RPG campaign storytelling conventions. Meanwhile in pop culture at large, the fantasy / superhero craze legitimized by the Lord of the Rings movies ran its course from initial hype to diversification to watering down by lowest-common-denominator and now regressing to 1970s camp. If the first X-Men flick came out today, they really would be wearing yellow spandex. The supply of gamers who liked computer adaptations and would eat up commentary on original recipe dungeoneering might be running out.

More generally, the referential humor on which T?OOTS initially relied is going out of fashion. From the late '90s to about 2010 the unprecedented personal expression facilitated by the internet built up a tidal wave of "I've heard of that, who says I haven't" material as every little clique and fanatic fringe carved out its turf. Read some early Sluggy Freelance strips for a taste of just how reliant on in-jokes and catchphrases the success stories of the time were, or purportedly scifi strips like Melonpool and Zortic. Unabashedly derivative as it was, (t)oots at first depended on a trend now more or less collapsing under its own redundancy and the various entertainment industries' unfathomable output. Universal references (e.g. Seinfeld, Mario Kart, The Da Vinci Code) are far more easily lost in the shuffle now and World of Warcraft has gone from the game everyone's playing to the game everyone can tell you when and why they quit. Even if a fad peaks high its lifespan is far shorter now and jokes about last year's Star Wars movie will rapidly fall flat. Dungeons and Dragons itself looks more and more frustratingly antiquated, with attempts at modernization in 4e/5e having done more harm than good as far as I can see as an outsider.

On neither of those levels would T-OOTS be entirely doomed, since it rapidly grew beyond strict D&D rule jokes and stopped indulging in other pop culture references around the time of the Dune sandworm jokes. But its audience's mentality may have changed more thoroughly. The devil's in the details and as Belkar so aptly pointed out, nobody cares about that stuff anymore. It presented complex plots and chains of causality hundreds of strips in the making, but nobody wants to figure anything out anymore or kick ourselves for a twist we should've seen coming.

 

Contrast the way hints are given for two random computer games I've talked about in the past month. Whereas The Secret World's fan sites (circa 2012) attempted to emphasize investigation by only gradually unveiling puzzle hints, encouraging you to keep linking as many clues as you can after as little help as possible, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous' (2021) feed you screenshots of the exact tile layout or password sequence, the faster to light up your achievement icon without the onus of independent thought, thereby also motivating developers less and less to fine-tune their creations' logical presentation. Even in terms of combat, instead of addressing the over-randomization of D20 rolls, Wrath leaves it in place and instead feeds you obvious "I win" buttons in the form of mythic feats with infinite effects so you can cheat your way past the numbers altogether and pretend you've mastered the system. Anecdotal examples such as these only fall into place as gradual retreat and capitulation to our loss of fundamental skillsets once you watch an otherwise rather intelligent grad student in the sciences struggle to divide 2 by 0.5 with a calculator.

Obnoxious as it could be most certainly was, the L33T subculture pervading game discussions when Rich Burlew started cracking wise about spot checks and baleful polymorphs still accepted the presuppositions that challenges are to be met, skills applied and clever solutions applauded. As Full Frontal Nerdity confirms, Belkar the lackluster ranger is not the only one to have noted the gradual shift away from rules-based gaming to self-gratifying flights of fancy, though I think Aaron Williams is kidding himself by assuming it's because everyone is now comfortable with D20 number crunching. An entire generation has grown up with pervasive cash shops in every electronic game, convinced that cheating by bribing the developers is more important than actually playing. Why sweat the arithmetic when you can just buy a win and bask instead in the parade the NPCs throw for "your" victory? You can't tell me that mentality hasn't transferred from desktop to tabletop as well.

While I myself prefer to focus on analyzing games' world-building, I can do so because others have playtested and nitpicked the practical side of gameplay. Unfortunately the pugnacity inherent in finding flaws where flaws exist back in 2003 has died off as we've traded adolescent boy bombast and abbrasiveness for the mawkish propriety of middle-aged soccer moms.*

So where does that leave Toots? How much of the old special nerdy interest group has it managed to retain?

Will its final volume reaffirm the characters' existence in a modern rules-governed wargame world or regress to preoperational make-believe and prescientific heroics? Will anyone still blurt out "wait a minute, I had a 22!" or figure out how to use INT in the arena of STR/CON or count the number of spell slots before a caster fight, caster fight (caster fight!) or will we simply be treated to characters squinting and grunting as they lob nondescript kamehamehas at each other?

 

 

 

 

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*The fact that even as outlandish a phrase as "mawkish propriety" already shows up on Google only compounds the problem of creativity, but that's a topic for another day.

 Whenever anyone/anything tells me to have fun, I can't help but hear an "or else" implied.

Conundrum Unworthy of Solving

I was chugging along at a pretty decent pace in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, but one particular "feature" sapped my little remaining enthusiasm for its mediocrity: those stupid tile puzzles.

 

The basic idea is arranging a set of two-square (domino-style) tiles along the floor according to a starting pattern. Solid basic notion, idiotically implemented for several reasons:

1) They can be slotted forwards or backwards, but nothing indicates the position they'll take once laid down. There is no rationale behind discerning this by trial and error.

2) Instead of universally recognized ideograms (plus signs, hearts, etc.) they use their own script... which is actually a great idea I'd be glad to support (I've even requested an alienese keyboard) if the resulting characters weren't so similar as to blend together, making them an unwieldy chore to memorize.

3) The tiles are too small to see in your inventory, and for some insane unreason were drawn with a pointless reflection effect in the middle further obscuring details.

4) Even if you understand the basic idea and know how to start, you're left with at least four paths to suss out by mindless trial and error (due to the second symbol on each tile) requiring several clicks to open a slot, select a tile, confirm your selection, then when it turns out it was the wrong one, select the slot, pick up the tile, confirm your de-selection, backtrack thus a few tiles, etceteree, etceterah

5) According to online chatter, in order to get even the slightest hint as to their meaning you supposedly have to drag along one of the most annoying companions in a very annoying roster, meaning you're arbitrarily punished for unrelated roleplaying choices.

I would've been willing to put up with all that nonsense. I did the first, simple, introductory puzzle and returned three acts later for the second, only to be completely stumped... only to be told by an online cheat-sheet that the instructions were in this case a red herring.

... yeeaaah. Fuck it.

At this point even the infamous "rubber ducky" puzzle from The Longest Journey made for better gameplay, and I finally realized they're doing it on purpose. It's meant to waste your time squinting and randomly ignoring one instruction or another. This is not a puzzle at all. It's an interface timesink. Instead of intellectually challenging and rewarding problem-solving, this is yet another pure playtime padder like the fights requiring 1/400 odds opening dice rolls. Skip it. Despite having more than enough content for epic-length run-throughs, Wrath's developers still patheticaly, insecurely padded out the campaign's length by mindless repetition every chance they got.

Come on, Owlcat. You're far from the pinnacle of your creative field... but you're better than this.

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edit 2021/11/23

What really singes my tail hairs is that just a lope and poke later I ran across a truly entertaining puzzle in Wrath of the Righteous:

Pulura's Fall took me about five tries and ten minutes to solve and aside from being a reading test instead of visual pattern matching, gets right every single error in execution the other got wrong.

1) No uncertainty as to which symbols light up when you click something.

2) No unnecessary overlap or similarity between symbols (i.e. no "daughter" "doubter" and "draughter")

3) No graphic fuckery.

4) No multiple clicks to execute a single action.

5) No depriving you of information for having better taste in companions.

(Kestoglyr did groan at one point, but that may have been more related to the unremitting horror of his tortured existence than a puzzle-solving hint to his halfling overlord.)

 

It even includes a possible red herring depending on how you interpret the hints, but this can be eliminated methodically.

So... yeah, Owlcat. You really are better than that!

"Through a Feminist Lens"

"I have learned two ways to tie my shoes. One way is only good for lying down. The other way is good for walking."

Robert Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

 

 

Primitivists, religious apologists, Rousseauists, conflict theorists and other simpletons will often point to misapplications of scientific principles (scientific racism, social darwinism, etc.) as proof of technocracy and rationalism's evil. A trite little insult. We already know any new technology can be used in a smart or stupid way. You can use your automobile to drive to work or to drive over your neighbour's dog. One is generally considered better than the other (depending on the dog) and we don't need fifty pages of circular deconstructionist masturbation to arrive at that conclusion. Nuclear fission can make bombs or power plants. Why should it surprise us then that science itself, when it was a new invention, was also subject to the same test of applicability?

Moreover, why do we not apply the same distinction to social critique? Why not admit that mindsets adopted for dissecting fiction novels in the 1960s lack the same relevance to geopolitics or mammalian sexuality? Why not admit that the test of applicability was already applied to postmodernism... and the stupids won. We are now stuck cleaning up fifty years' worth of radioactive anti-intellectual fallout.

The Open and Shut Secret World: "Multi"player

Part of a series on the death of a bad game with excellent atmosphere. Presume spoilers.

__________________________________________________

 

"Screaming stars, impale me with beauty!"

Dance, monkeys, dance.

 

The Machine Tyrant was the last boss of The Secret World's second group instance, Hell Raised, and on hard difficulty served as a litmus test of players' expertise. Many a group spent many an hour wiping repeatedly only to finally give up. Even more groups were sabotaged by spineless little millennial twerps who died once or twice and immediately ran away instead of trying to figure out the fight. To be sure, it could look like a stroll through Castle Heterodyne at first glance.

 

First off, he hit like a motherfucking truck full of trucks (I say that as a habitual healer who had to struggle to level off tanks' constantly rubberbanding HP bar) and could PBAoE one-shot anything in a medium radius, requiring the tank to "active dodge" out without error - while maintaining aggro... and many a group wiped five seconds into the fight because DPS didn't slow their roll while the tank dodged. MT also periodically gained a nigh-invulnerable shield and ran to the middle of the arena, after which the tank had to aggro him into the yellow light pillar up above.

That red AoE circle? It locked on to one player and chased him. They increased in frequency as the fight went on.

Those orange AoE circles? They almost filled the arena and MT cast them when running to the center, which increased in frequency as the fight went on.

That yellow AoE pillar? The one the tank needed to drag MT into? It did enough damage to kill anyone but the tank in a couple of seconds and could spawn right on top of you without warning.

If he stepped on you, you died.

If you DPSed while his (damage-reflecting) shield was up, you died.

If you stood next to the tank for even one (cleaving) basic attack, you died.

Oh, and he continually stacked a DoT at infinite range, requiring constant group-wide cleansing and healing... while you were often scattered out of range by the constant one-shot-kill AoEs.

Oh, and did I mention it's a DPS race? If he activated his enrage timer, everyone died.

Fun!

No, really. MT was a blast. Technically it was several kinds of blasts all at once, but you catch my drift.

TSW was a single-player, linear adventure game. Almost all content was solo, its skill system was an unbalanced mess largely due to the shoehorned, gratuitous, pointless PvP and PvE advancement consisted of mindlessly grinding the easiest, quickest five-man instance (usually Polaris or Darkness War depending on the patch) for hundreds upon hundreds of times. That being said, it also included some truly excellent fights, albeit overusing ground AoE. Multiple phases, twin bosses, triplet bosses, adds, exploding adds, blocking terrain, chase scenes, enrage timers, body-blocked buff beams, splitting and stacking the team, shrinking fields of play, persistent AoEs requiring careful positioning, invulnerability, what TSW lacked in terms of player abilities' interaction it made up for in its imaginative use of enemy abilities. Very few fights felt like the standard tank'n'spank of MMO infamy... despite being exactly that. Some bosses introduced in the Tokyo patches (The Manufactory) made MT look trivially simple by comparison.

 

Machine Tyrant's worst and best feature was that it could not be taught. You had to know the limitations of your skillset and time cooldowns appropriately on a shifting battlefield. Nobody could tell you "stand here and click this button" to give you a false sense of accomplishment for obeying orders like a mindless grunt. Sadly, in most fights, three of the team's five players could do exactly that. Instructions compiled by various player groups for each dungeon were usually written separately for the tank, the healer and the three DPS.

- Tank instructions read like some twisted pages-long time travel short story where interweaving sequences of events had to either be performed with the grace of a minuet or disrupted precisely when the bomb timer flashes zero.

- Healer instructions reduced to a couple of paragraphs mostly detailing when a special ability (e.g. Cold Blood) had to be used and foreseeing aggro spikes.

- DPS instructions just read "don't stand in the flaming puddle of death, dumbass" and a second line about hiding/stacking during phase transitions.

 

Funcom obviously anticipated most of their customers would be idiots and set up a system allowing oligoi to carry polloi. However, requiring only one and a half of five participants truly understood what was happening had the predictable effect of further splitting a customer base already divided between puzzle-solving, PvP, number-crunching and immersive adventuring. Many never bothered playing any role but damage and claimed expertise based on gear levels for pressing three buttons by rote as per some wiki's cookie-cutter build. Their underlying incompetence grew painfully obvious whenever they hit a fight like MT requiring them to direct their own movements.

 

For as long as the right customers stayed and continued to carry the idiots, things looked superficially good. But whenever the lynchpins went AWOL, the various times TSW's multiplayer interest crashed, it crashed hard and fast.

Hell in Earth

"I look for you in heathered moor, the desert and the ocean floor

How low does one heart go?

Looking for your fingerprints I find them in coincidence

And make my faith to grow"

 

Suzanne Vega - Penitent

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"But above this gate, and behind it even to the mountains, he piled the thunderous towers of Thangorodrim; and these were made of the ash and slag of his subterranean furnaces, and the vast refuse of his tunnelings. Before the gates of Angband filth and desolation spread southward for many miles. There lay the wide plain of Bladorion. But after the coming of the sun rich grass grew there, and while Angband was besieged and its gates shut, there were green things even among the pits and broken rocks before the doors of hell."

 

J.R.R. Tolkien - Quenta Silmarillion (1938?-39?)

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"Thus it can be said that in 'The Silmarillion' there is no 'religion', because the Divine is present and has not been 'displaced'; but with the physical removal of the Divine from the World Made Round a religion arose (as it had arisen in Numenor under the teachings of Thu [a.k.a. Sauron] concerning Morgoth, the banished and absent God), and the dead were despatched, for religious reasons, in burial ships on the shores of the Great Sea."

 

Christopher Tolkien - 1987 commentary on his father's first draft of The Fall of Numenor (1936?-37?)

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Continuing my perusal of The History of Middle-Earth on and off this past year, I'm nearing the focus shift from First Age plots (Beren and Luthien, Turin Turambar, etc.) to The Lord of the Rings, after the success of which the author grew reticent to ever publish his earlier stories for fear they would kill the looming sense of mystery, trivialize the glorious past defining Frodo&co.'s world.

 

Leafing through these old drafts though made me realize one reason the Land of Murder and its precursor, Hang-banned, still impress the reader with their presence more than similar realms of eee-veeeel fantasied by Tolkien's copycats. They have a presence. Important plot point: you can backpack to Mount Doom!

To illustrate that, let's utilize one of the aforementioned copycats. Actually, since Wrath of the Righteous is an adaptation of Pathfinder, itself a spin-off of D&D, itself largely inspired by Tolkien(tm), this would be a copycatcubed but let's not wrangle over scientific jargon here.

While Wrath's writing and atmosphere don't exactly overflow with talent or inspiration, I do like the Worldwound itself (presumably described in detail by the tabletop campaign setting) for its sheer scale. Taking up half the playable area, a Hell On Earth the size of a country really conveys that overwhelming menace which a simple magic portal cannot, no matter how many skulls and green flames you slap on it.

And, loathe as I am to admit any debt to the company which more than any other has ruined online games (and a fair proportion of offline ones by extension) Blizzard Entertainment in its early years also grasped this space-filling impact of physical presence. Albeit positioning its labyrinthine highway to Hell vertically, the first Diablo game never failed to remind you you're pacing atop the legions of the damned even among the peaceful, melancholy grisaille of Tristram.

 

Still, demonslaying yarns like this ultimately place a magic portal at the bottom of the maze, at the center of the rifts and that boils the whole story down to the logical imperative of closing the gateway of evilosity, after which, no matter how powerful the devils are they'll be powerless to reach our world. Makes for a nice climax, but at the expense of sustained tension. Which brings us back to Tolkien.

 

In early drafts Angband (the second fortress of Sauron's old boss Melkor/Morgoth, for the unsilmarillionitiated) was not merely a euphemistic "hell of iron" in some obscure Sindarin translation but referred to literally as Hell in the main body of the text. Just as Melko himself read in early drafts like a direct copy of Milton's brooding, decadently noble prince of darkness, Angband simply took fifteen years longer to lose its literal interpretation as hell... but not its significance as such. And it was located in Middle-Earth, vaguely north-west of the Shire's future location. Forget Mordor; you could backpack to literal hell. (And, presumably, back again.)

I find two aspects of this interesting.

1) What if the limits of evil were geographic?

Remove the designation of super-supernatural, flatten the multiverse back down to a universe, and position infernal might contiguously (albeit superlatively) with more mundane magic. You might say that takes some of the excitement out of it, but it's basically the world in which religious believers already live 24/7, imagining they've witnessed a miracle every time their local priest does a thumb trick or somesuch. And, while I'll gladly condemn their abject stupidity, one certainly can't fault the faithful's enthusiasm. Would Hell itself be less or more impressive if it were situated in our own world istead of another dimension?

What if Hell were in Chicago... say, West of Ashland along the Eisenhower maybe?

As the elvish saga goes, they crossed the Helcaraxe from the garden-of-probably-Eden, kicked Morgoth's ass and locked him in his stronghold. For four hundred years. For four centuries the ersatz devil lurked just beyond the gates of Angband. What if the "gates of hell" were neither hyperbole nor allegory but a literal set of doors you drive past on your way to work, and The Devil could invade as easily as unlocking his deadbolt? You really would need eternal vigilance. Cultures living near the perimeter where grass wilts from mere proximity to malice would by necessity be shaped by their vigil, markedly different from more peaceful lands. They would get less opportunity, less room to develop naturally.

 

To a small extent you do encounter situations like this in fantasy stories, but they're rarely taken to their logical conclusions. Would there be a worldwide, pan-species draft for wardens of evil? (See: Dragon Age: Origins and the Wardens) Or would farther cultures simply take advantage of nearer ones' lack of alternatives, like Western Europe letting the Eastern half suffer every Asiatic invasion? (See: DA:O and the dwarves (come to think of it, that game did pretty good on this topic)) And, if the devil is truly immortal and would simply escape and set up shop somewhere else if defeated, would the guardian cultures put much effort into beating back the armies of evil or focus merely on containment? How would they handle contamination? Would customs agents wave evil-detecting wands at every port town to detect orcish contraband? Would they need to import protective amulets? And if they were getting subsidized by the entire rest of the world, would they never want the siege to end, in order to maintain their revenue stream?

Minas Tirith's militarism was defined by this sort of never-ending struggle: a city of captains and guards, passworded gates, hilltop beacons, concentric defensibility all hammered home its plot relevance as bastion against the darkness. The elvish enclaves of the first age equally so, as each seems defined by natural defenses or concealment be it caves, encircling mountains or impenetrable forests plus confounding enchantment. But Tolkien's copycats too often rattle off grandiose locations (e.g. the Worldwound) then forget to think through the sociological ramifications implied, settling for generic medievalism and towns which, aside from maybe a garden fence, seem to have put no more thought into defending against THE EMBODIMENTS OF CHAOTIC EVIL SET LOOSE UPON THE WORLD than they would against a dozen half-starved kobolds.

2) Would the devil then still be a religious figure?

This has been a constant point of contention in RPG lore at least since I started looking into the genre from around Y2K, and I still remember the quizzical tilt of my head when I found myself walking up to Vivec himself to ask him what it's like being a god. Faith, cult, religion would not carry the same meaning in a universe of verifiable supernatural beings, where you can sit down for a mug of ale with Thor at your local tavern. Atheism would be an untenable viewpoint in such a world (and for how ridiculous it sounds, I refer you to your companion Is0bel's comments in Shadowrun: Hong Kong) but neither would unshakeable blind belief be required except for absent gods. As his son so wryly noted, it's a bit ironic for J.R.R. Tolkien the practicing Christian to have cobbled together a world in which, for much of history, the only religion in the usual sense of the word was Numenor's Satanism. (Or maybe it was a carefully weighed reinterpretation of antediluvian decadence; either way, the distinction stands.)

Faith is necessary to prop up the unprovable, misinterpreted and illusory. A congregation praying at a stained-glass window depicting an angel exhibits faith, but if the same angel were to burst through that window, it would remove the need for belief. So how can you reconcile both religious faith and extant, pinchable deities in the same universe?

Make the gods lying and/or incompetent bastards, elusive to the point of frustration or simply misinterpreted by their believers.

If their existence is not in question their deeds and influence (and possibly even identity) must be. The problem with most of these fantasy worlds is the absolute certainty with which lore books declare deity X created relic Y in year Z. Let there be ambivalence! Let there be confusion! Torment: Tides of Numenera actually provides many fine examples, as the hapless inhabitants of a world suffused with Clarkian sufficiently advanced technology are constantly founding one cargo cult after another around heroes, monsters or places, disagreeing not on the observable existence of these but on their respective sway upon reality. If you seal an evil in a can, people will worship the can, but a reliable, certain god would rob them of the chance to supply their own certainty. Faith, as an un undisprovable declaration of self-importance by proxy, cannot survive independent verification.

 

For a brilliant example of the greater fantasy world dramatic potential of unverifiable divine intervention, see Durance's dilemma in Pillars of Eternity 1 (the one worth playing.)