Edmund Finney's Quest to Find the Meaning of Life

"Well I think I'm losing my mind, this time

This time I'm losing my mind, that's right

Said I think I'm losing my mind, this time

This time, I'm losing my mind"

 

Beastie Boys - So What'cha Want

 

 

I don't bother much with gag-a-day comics. Absent the enforced coherence of a larger narrative, authors tend to default to their own life experience, and few people are observant enough to poke holes in our daily tapestry instead of merely tracing its all too mundane seams like an overstretched metaphor. For several years, Edmund Finney managed it quite adeptly, until getting bogged down in a failed attempt at a lenghy Clue parody plot and gradually winding down to abandonment.

 

While many a serial has strangled itself with some overgrown plot thread, this one makes an interesting case study. Edmund Finney largely banked on doubling down on otherwise obvious punchlines. When you can laugh and move on, it worked great. In a longer story, this resulted in continually doubling down on the same punchline, until the repetition itself took liminal conscious attention instead of the joke.

Given humor depends heavily on transgressing expectations, overusing any comedic device is risky... but doubly so when that device is overuse itself.

The Dwarves No More Shall Suffer Wrong

"Now we call over the mountains cold

Come back unto the caverns old!"

 

Thanks to Clamavi de Profundis for the excellent compilation / rendition

 

 

To my shame, by trying Gwent recently (long story short, don't bother, it's a bad joke like all CCGs) I fell prey to cross-promotion and reinstalled Witcher 2 after having used it as an uninstalled negative example no less than three times over the past couple of years... and ended up enjoying some of it. Chapter 2 was at least less interrupted (though it's mostly grinding through harpy swarms) but as I close in on the transition to the last chapter the endless cutscenes and over-scripting have reasserted themselves, not to mention perfunctory crafting, bugs, crashes, minigame timesinks, useless maps, misdirecting markers, obtuse quest design prompting trial and error reloads for more timesinks, etc. So, feeling like I at least got my three bucks' worth, I likely won't bother finishing. Despite some obvious talent behind it, it's still a deliberately bad game. Definitely staying filed under the "Bozo" tag. However, I must confess a guilty love for Vergen.

 

As a mixed dwarf / human town, it gets its chthonic aesthetic across without simply being transposed into some giant cave, instead carved into the mountainside and connected by an infernal (yet navigable once you learn a couple of landmarks) tangle of ramps, stairs, short tunnels, ledges and bridges. Aesthetically, everything about it just... works, from the rough, massive, sparsely decorated facades, to the weatherbeaten patina and geometric interiors. It all just screams dwarf - especially the dwarves!

Aside from crassly humorous and randier than other depictions, their dialogue (and surprisingly apt voice acting) nails that trenchant utilitarianism we've grown to expect from fantasy's designated working class heroes.

It reminds me of a specific town in LotRO.

The game has presented several examples of megalithic dwarven construction (Thorin's Hall, Moria, The Hall Under the Mountain) as well as tiny/isolated/abandoned outposts, but Jarnfast is a mining colony. While technically it does possess a music track, logging directly into an "indoor" space prevents it from loading (maybe intentional, maybe just a good bug) leaving you with sparse, distinct ambient sounds: a clatter of machinery, silence, a hiss or shriek of escaping steam, silence, and most beautifully a slow but insistent clang of hammer on anvil... answered a couple of seconds later by a more certain, repeated, concatenated hammer echo from elsewhere. Work, speaking to work.

 

The ambience may or may not be reused from elsewhere. Can't remember. But here? Ringing off the claustrophobic walls, half-carved, along the mine rails, under the overhanging natural rock?

Just beautiful.

While Tolkien's dwarves usually get defined by belligerence, greed or technological prowess, I'd say nobody bothers altering the winning formula much due more to their steadfastness.

My latest Dwarf Fortress broke into a narrow, tangled cave system, and I decided I'd like to move at least part of my goat herd down here in case of aboveground attacks. Enclosing the pasture is slow going, the year being only 37 and forgotten beasts not nearly forgotten enough, but workers are ever so gradually building floor and wall tiles to cover access from the north or east. I'll have them close off the southwest entrance as well, favoring the southeast tunnel's length to line with traps while still maintaining spidersilk gathering access. The entire process complete with polishing and trapmaking is taking years, just a side project to establishing my main living, working, and most importantly graveyard quarters.

But that's okay.

They'll keep working and fending off acid-spitting giant slugs until it's done.

With their bare hands if need be.

In another playthrough a giantess attacked a group of unarmed (with one exception) civilians. They lucked out in the first round and knocked her unconscious, and proceeded to kill her. Gradually. Very, very gradually. Dwarves. Killing a giant. With their bare hands. How gradually, you ask? That shit eventually went on for nineteen pages of text.

Damn, I love elves, I'm still in the Noldorin camp... but can you imagine my hero Elrond sitting there pimp-slapping a giant to death for a solid week just because... well, it gets the job done, don't it?

'Putcher backs inta it boys, ah think shae's startin' ta breiwse!'

In fact, is there any fantasy race that would fit that scenario better than dwarves?

 

Fantasy tends toward grandiloquence by its very nature, and dwarves fill an easily neglected niche for dogged perseverance. Neither graceful, eternal guardians of creation nor plucky upstarts promised dominon of same, literally carving out their own space in the world, Aule's misconceived yet grudgingly accepted progeny bow to no-one. (Mostly because they're busy craning their necks instead.) They're the ones fantasy authors (or game designers) can turn to for hollowing out a mountain scrape by scrape, century by century, fighting on even if fate itself will deny you ultimate glory, even if you're stuck as the middle children of creation.

 

"And dark things silent crept beneath"

Given it's impossible to join any team game where you won't be griefed by spineless, degenerate, troglodytic vermin refusing to fight, spamming surrender votes, quitting at the first sign of difficulty, maybe that steadfast refusal to quit while you're in any position, brutal honesty even if it doesn't make you look good, a willingness to keep plugging away at an act of construction or destruction for sheer pigheadedness, should be brought to the forefront of our escapist fantasies. Though the proud, noble mindset of the elf is clearly superior, at this very moment we desperately need that of the dwarf.

ST: TNG - The Murderclonomat

In an effort to relive my early teens, I am re-watching old episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is both better and worse than I remembered it, as was my youth most likely.
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"If we could teleport anything there would already be weasels in their skulls..."

"I know, right? A show where all sentient life has the ultimate superweapon and they all float around pointing flashlights at each other."

Vexxarr 2017/03/06

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Seriesdate: 5.15

Power Play

Oh, noes! In a shocking and original episodic plot, our heroes have been mentally possessed!

...

... yeah... Yeah, I know, but try to act surprised, ok?

Clap your hands for Tinkerbell.

After answering a distress call from a centuries-old wreck on a dark and stormy planet, space-ghosts possess Troi, O'Brien and of course Data. They take some hostages and force the Enterprise to beam up the rest of their space ghost social club. Most of the episode is an excuse for the three actors to spread their emotive wings a bit while Picard susses out the far more rational explanation.

See, they're not really the space-ghosts of a 200-year-old Federation crew.

They're the space-ghosts of 500-year-old prison inmates.

Oh. Okay. Much better. Totes ScieFie!

 

For bonus nonsense points, pay attention to how the almighty transporter moves the plot along. First they declare it impossible to beam down through the constant storms, leading to the wrecked shuttle. Then O'Brien beams down anyway with a signal booster. Then the transporter once again doesn't work. Then it does. Then it doesn't. Then it does. Every ten minutes we need to stop to fabricate new technobabble for why the ghosts can or can't be teleported... and conversely for why the murderclonomat cannot/can perform its function at this plot-relevant point. The whole back-and-forth plays out as wasting air time to explain what was deliberately un-explained in the previous wasted air time.

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Seriesdate: 5.24

The Next Phase

 

While transporting from a damaged Romulan ship, cloaking field interference turns Geordi and Ro into invisible, inaudible space ghosts who can walk through walls. But not floors. Never floors. Space ghosts gotta take the space elevator.

Much of this comes across as slow-paced filler. On one hand, in '92 "phasing" was still treated as a novelty to the wider public unfamiliar with Kitty Pryde or a few other SF/Fantasy examples, but after these past decades' superhero / fantasy movie craze TNG's explanations come across as belabored. On the other hand, the "power of friendship" monologues by crewmembers preparing for the two's funeral would've sounded trite even thirty years earlier. Lesser issues include brilliant engineer LaForge noticing he can leave detectable traces by phasing through solid matter but just randomly punching desks instead of tapping out prime number sequences, or writing his name into a wall. Or worse, aside from the floor issue, you have to wonder what exactly they're breathing while phased out of reality.

 

Still, it gave us some amusing sequences of the two walking through objects, and an engaging chase/fight sequence against a similarly phased Romulan, plus a hilarious one-liner by Geordi reacting to Ro's initially religious explanation of their apparent afterlife: "Are you saying I'm some blind ghost with clothes?"

Also, this:

It's not a phase disruptor, it's a phased disruptor

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Seriesdate: 6.02

Realm of Fear

To mount a rescue/salvage too risky for shuttles in a binary star plasma link strong enough to block tractor beams, the Enterprise beams an away-team to the derelict, because personnel transporters are apparently more powerful than tractor beams.

 

Our not-so-stalwart hero Reginald Barclay, who's already a nervous teleporter and panics when first getting into one, is punished by fate (or screenwriter contrivance, take your pick) for working up the courage to get beamed by getting bitten in the beam by a giant miniature space ghost worm.

 

Reg vs. magic wrinkly space penis: fight!

 

He gets a nasty case of teleports elbow, but everyone tells him he's crazy. Even the computer.

Problem: Comparing teleporting to airlines with Geordi's line "transporting is the safest way to travel" despite the stability problems cited in various episodes. Also that spaceship you're riding is the plane. Your murderclonomat is some kind of mutant evacuation slide. Also, nobody who's spent ten hours between an encroaching lardass and a screeching baby would ever call THAT teleporting.

But then... Crusher's autopsy subject starts ventillating and palpitating, and Broccoli decides to test his fears' veracity, gets wormed a second time and convenes a high council (because that's apparently something junior officers can do on a whim) leading to the discovery of "quasi-energy microbes that exist within the distortion of the plasma streamer" and infect human bodies which makes absolutely no s-

Ah, crap.

TNG invented midichlorians.

Anyway... muffer, bicrobes... spacial ionic stream corpse contractions ionic suspended biofilter... dispersion phase transition ionic frequency... and for no ionic reason pertaining to any of the preceding ionic technobabble, if you give the giant miniature space wrinkly penises a big manly squeeze, out comes space seamen!

 

Y'know, I like Lt. Broccoli and I like freaky space beasties, but this definitely hit the silliness threshold.

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Seriesdate: 6.07

Rascals

 

It's Little Rascals IN SPAAACE!!!

Yeah, this is one of those misconceived wrecks that fans and even its creators would prefer to pretend never happened. While shuttling through "some sort of energy field" Picard, Guinan, Ro and Keiko are teleported... as their child selves. This is explained by damage to specific maturation-triggering DNA, using the common misconception of genotype as direct blueprint for phenotype. Then just to double down on the idiocy:

"Whatever turned the crew into children turned these plants into seedlings."

Good night, everybody! Apparently weeds mature via human genes.

Then, for no particular reason: Ferengi pirates. Kneebiters save day with toys.

Ugh.

Then they get teleported back to adult age by murder-clonin' their maturation genes back into place.

Uuuugh...

 

The couple of decent scenes (O'Brien creeped out by his now tween wife putting moves on him) get swamped in fallout from the monumentally stupid decision to excise some of the cast's best actors and replace them with random kids, at a time when child actors were not selected or coached nearly as well as they are post Sixth Sense. The boy playing young Picard acquits himself well enough and some effort was made to preserve adult speech patterns, but generally their mannerisms remain those of children and it's damn near impossible to take our heroes' plight seriously given they've all just had twenty or forty years tacked on to their lifespans with no insurance copay. Especially Picard, who even emphasizes checking his bald head when he's re-aged... but especially especially Guinan, who would stand to gain freaking centuries!

Other idiocy aside, if you find yourself writing a plot that necessitates hand-waving four characters' gratuitous refusal of decades' worth of extra life, you are writing a bad plot!

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Seriesdate: 6.24

Second Chances

 

Riker leads an away-team to a planet he'd barely escaped eight years prior, only to find a teleporter clone of himself. Okay, sure, why not, crew members get cloned all the time on this show. Picard gets time-cloned, alien cloned, clone-cloned, robot-cloned and whatnot every other season. Wasting no time, alter-Riker starts yelling at his self and hitting on Troi.

While the episode barely crawls through the obvious Riker/Troi/Riker love triangle and the two clones staring each other down to the point of leaving little plot to recount, it does distinguish itself by a more reasoned interpretation of the duplicates as long-lost twins, without feigning the cheap drama of identity conflicts. Nonetheless, the whole thing gets resolved via a trite old "take my hand" clifftop rescue.

Overall... not as bad as the others, but still, meh.

Just one element of this episode stuck with me over the years.

 

 

The infographic depicting the two Rikers' divergence via teleportation signal splitting. In a show whose explanations most often bordered on the Necronomical, here was a sane, clean summary of the plot's premise in a concise .gif, all the better to offset the twenty minutes wasted on frowning and smooches.

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Star Trek's famous teleporter has a quaint origin story. Apparently back in the '60s the Original Series had wanted space-boats to carry the crew, but couldn't afford to paint a plywood shack and stick some blowtorches on it to call it a shuttle so ended up telling the actors to just stand there and, ummm... we'll just overexpose you while playing some wind chimes... or something. After that it was one of the show's staples, and every subsequent script had to deal with the casual, unthinking interjection of an immensely overpowered futuristic transformative technology into what they had intended as a relatable high seas space adventure.

I don't know about later series, but this misconceived budget cut proved a consistent millstone around TNG's neck. Usually it had to be pointedly ignored, technobabbled out of commission to justify the crew in doing anything other than sitting in a transporter room zapping everything into or out of place. When it took center stage, it did so to farcical effect. Look at the scripts built around it: one half-decent yarn about Riker's past and personality, Little Rascals in Space then space ghosts, more space ghosts and even more space ghosts. If they're remembered well at all it's due to the efforts of Colm Meaney or excellent guest stars like Dwight Schultz and Michelle Forbes, but the plots were crap!

 

Because the transporter was so hastily concocted, they could never even decide on its properties.

If it's off by one atom you stop existing (Barclay's fear) but apparently it can create or destroy mass (adult vs. child bodies) with no side-effects.

Teleporter interaction with cloaking field emissions phased Geordi and Ro out, but they never try stepping into a transporter beam while phased to see what happens.

You either need to stand motionless on the platform, or you can teleport a whole village wherever you please.

Subjects are either frozen in place during transport or they have time to go three rounds with a one-eyed snake.

It can be blocked by a storm on the surface of a planet, but not by a stellar matter stream.

It can be used to separate diseases from bodies unless it's plot convenient not to.

It can age and reverse-age people, but this limitless fountain of youth is never discussed again!

Signals can apparently be duplicated in multiple containment fields... begging the question of why everyone isn't teleport-cloning entire armies with fully-charged phasers.

 

Hell, if this superweapon were logically developed, every Trek spaceship would consist of massed transporter bays with ancillary systems built around them. You wouldn't even need living quarters. Just keep the crew stored in batteries until you need to dress them in red shirts.

 

And therein lies the main problem, the murderclonomat's infamously flawed basic function, molecular disassembly and reassembly. It does not so much transport as destructively analyze its target at origin and replicate a fresh copy from the stored pattern at destination. When our very existence depends on assuming the Ship of Theseus remains whole as long as not too many of our synapses get replaced at once, a full strip and refit every time you hop the equivalent of a bus makes a jarring conceptual nightmare for Star Trek's peaceful post-scarcity society. Basically StarFleet consists of endless clones being murdered and freshly constituted to certain death on a daily basis. No wonder episodes built around it looked so ridiculous. Most of the writers' energy must've gone into avoiding the obvious intrinsic horror of that infernal machine.

And all because Gene Roddenberry couldn't find a wrecked VW van to repaint as a shuttle!

Full Frontal Nerdity: Four Lives' Initiative

"Put the tape on erase

Rearrange a face

We always liked Picasso anyway"

 

Devo - Through Being Cool

 

 

Hard to believe Full Frontal Nerdity has run almost twenty years now. It was always Aaron Williams' parvum opus back in the days when print and webcomics were still at war. But, after Nodwick's end, Use Sword on Monster's mixed success as genre bender and PS238 getting bogged down in OceansUnmoving-overextended storylines having nothing to do with the school, FFN has defaulted to the most reliable fix for those of us who enjoy Williams' humorous take on game plots. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, it's been focusing more on such plots in recent years.

While the elements were always present, it took a long time for it to settle on its recognizable boilerplate: two panels on average of players sitting around the table, largely cut and pasted with cut-rate gradient backgrounds, and maybe one panel of new drawings. For once, that's not entirely bad. At its start, FFN aspired to much wider geek humor, from commenting on the latest gadgets to superhero movies to video games to largely failed attempts at introducing sitcomish extra characters to random goofiness.

It was also subtitled: "Four geeks. No lives. Roll for initiative."

 

At some point the writer seems to have decided people don't need to beat themselves up for putting some thought into their hobbies and unceremoniously dropped the self-deprecating subtitle. And, while random pop culture commentary still makes its appearance, it's been gradually perfecting the art of retelling an RP campaign three panels at a time, with most information conveyed as text with a few illustrations and copious reaction shots from participants. You only get the highlights reel of course, but speculation on how a particular campaign premise might play out when subjected to players' powermongering and narcissism makes for surprisingly entertaining reading as you watch the protagonists pervert each new plot twist into hilarious disaster.

While I'm sure COVID exhaustion and other pressures largely account for Nodwick.com's constriction toward FFN with its smaller format and lighter workload, it's also been replacing longer stories because it can accomodate medium-length plots with the same four stock characters in commedia dell'arte fashion without the need for lengthy exposition or development. The premises lacking full-scale stories' engagement prove quite entertaining as thought exercises, and this is to a large extent what draws people to RPGs as a concept in the first place: personally spinning a premise within the constraints of an artificial reality.

Scaramouche in Middle Earth. Sure, why the hell not? It's got initiative, it's got life, and it can be played by as many geeks as care to don the mask.

Yes Sex Scenes

"Well he never bleeds and he never fucks"

Nirvana - Stain

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"Did you really tell my kid that sex is... pleasurable?!"

Becker S4E16: Let's Talk About Sex

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"Controversies had arisen about the morality of sexual broadcasting. Some countries permitted programs for males but not for females, wishing to preserve the innocence of the purer sex. Elsewhere the clerics had succeeded in crushing the whole project on the score that radio-sex, even for men alone, would be a diabolical substitute for a certain much desired and jealously guarded religious experience, called the immaculate union, of which I shall tell in the sequel. Well did the priests know that their power depended largely on their ability to induce this luscious ecstasy in their flock by means of ritual and other psychological techniques.
Militarists also were strongly opposed to the new invention; for in the cheap and efficient production of illusory sexual embraces they saw a danger even more serious than contraception. The supply of cannon-fodder would decline."

 

Olaf Stapledon - The Star Maker

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"Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was:
'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?'"

 

George Orwell - 1984

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NSFW warning: the topic incurs this by definition, not going to bother warning about every single link. Don't get fired for Oglafing on the job.

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To summarize my previous point in No Sex Scenes, there is one very good reason to avoid depicting sex or sex appeal in any creative endeavor, be it a picture or song or video game: it's bad art. It inevitably distracts and detracts. Reproduction is the lowest of lowest common denominators, the fundamental, most primitive function of all life. Leaning on this basest crutch indicates incompetence in whatever else your work should be conveying.

On the other hand... so do lots of things.

There are a myriad flavors of filler and ways to pander, from guns to food to housepets, and any observer of our social norms and taboos must at some point step back and wonder at this one otherwise quintessentially mundane activity both demanded and villified far more than others even considering its primordial appeal. It's like half the species is for it and the other half is against it.

 

I'd planned this topic six years ago, ever since making the momentous discovery that sex is not real (when I say "topic for another time" I mean it... no matter how long it takes) but gradually realized it would require more than one discussion. For now, let's shift the discussion to comics.

 

Sandra and Woo ran a joke recently about a young girl listing events she'd like to see included in the Winter Olympics. In case you're not up on your Freud, her every idea subconsciously resolved to contestants humping each other, prompting teasing by an older girl. In any sane world everyone would chuckle at this apt little reminder of how obliquely our puberty can kick into gear, tip Novil and Powree a well-deserved quarter and move on to blogging about video games and science fiction. Painfully aware we do not live in a sane world, I checked the comment section for the inevitable wave of puritanical twits decrying the creators' sexual perversion and swearing off ever reading the comic again. Suffice to say the same crowd posturing as protectors of innocence would have had no problem with Sandra and Woo portraying the same little Heidi impersonator dreamily fantasizing about other sexual rituals like long walks on the beach, being serenaded by a boy-band, waltzing in a dress worth more than a house or being presented with diamond jewelry by a fantasy prince. To his credit, the writer decided to flip prudes the finger after that and wrote the next few pages about teenage girls playing top trumps with a deck o' dick pics.

 

The Legacy of Dominic Deegan, sequel to Dominic Deegan, Oracle for Hire, also upped the ante recently. From the start it made liberal use of nudity both female and male (in contrast to the original) to the point we've all become entirely too familiar with the hero Snout's... snout. After a recent depiction of Snout having a one-night-angry-stand with a voluptuous vegetarian, the author answered his critics thus:

"The choice to show an uncensored sex scene, as well as numerous depictions of nudity, is a direct response to the years and years of uncensored violence I depicted during the Oracle for Hire years. Never once did I hesitate to draw mutilations, decapitations, and showers of blood when there was a fight, but I always censored sexual intimacy and natural nudity."

To my No Sex Scenes angle, I would counter that Mookie's also been contriving situations involving nudity (no particular reason the characters would find themselves au naturel in unnatural situations like magical dreamscapes; might as well be represented by ideograms) but his point remains valid. Back in the 2000s Oracle for Hire provided that over-the-top cartoonish Tom&Jerry ultraviolence while at the same time successfully billing itself as a "nice" progressive sort of comic full of hugs and kisses and addressing the conventional social hot buttons like misogyny, racism and homophobia. However, I'd go one further. Oracle for Hire was always full of sex, and kinky sex at that. It never shied away from courtship rituals, from graphically depicting pining, rejection, dates, declarations of affection, questions of fidelity, gift-giving, grand gestures of devotion, weddings and everything else pertaining to the paraphilia we glorify as romance.

Mookie asks: if violence, why not sex?

I would ask: if half of sex, why not the other half?

I always had to roll my eyes at hearing fans of the first Witcher game struggle to praise its by the numbers "kill ten rats" routine or its gratuitously MortalKombatish third person slashing, when we all knew we were in it for the gratuitous nudity. Especially for the infamous collectible cards memorializing the various women in each town eager to jump the itinerant dashing hero's bone(r)/(s). I did get around to trying Witcher 2 at one point, only to find the gameplay choked to death with cutscenes and the casual sex eliminated with extreme prejudice. Oh, sex is supposedly still included (though I didn't get that far) but now strictly leashed to romance plots and supplication minigames. It's more sophisticated now.

Oh, hey, waitaminute, you know who addressed sophisticated sex? Oglaf, the comic which started as pornography but soon found the comedic value of us monkeys' humping instincts overtaking conveyed sex appeal. Every once in a while the authors flip the proverbial fingerer to purveyors of classy humping, to the ludicrous attempts to justify what neither deserves nor needs justification. One of the more incisive observations pointed out how the myth of Odysseus is "fixed" from a limbically satisfying glut of sex and violence into social respectability simply by being couched in a man's devotion toward his wife - and thereby implicitly family, tribe, etc. in ever-widening social spheres.

 

Back in 2016 I briefly mentioned my progress from being born into worship of both the supernatural and of women to apostasy from both, and how easily I had slipped in my early teens from traditionalist chivalry in defense of weak women to modern feminist servility in defense of strong women. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss... with a pixie cut! It took me almost two more decades to gradually discern feminism's partial role as "a new velvet glove for the old iron fist of sexual repression" not a product of but a reaction against the sexual revolution. Just as Biblical coveting always did, feminist rape paranoia and outcry against "objectification" fills a market demand for justification to leave female desirability in place while at the same time demonizing concomitant desire, fabricating male guilt and penance. While I used the term puritanism to describe the moralistic posturing against Sandra and Woo's acknowledgement of pubescence and the centrality of sex to... sex... that descriptor only fits most readers in a purely figurative fashion, being modern, enlightened, woke inquisitors desperate to position themselves on the right side of the witch hunt. Not that you'd ever be able to differentiate between Mrs. Grundy's old and new incarnations from their stance, which is sort of my point.

 

Does anyone ever decry gratuitous romance?

Not with any expectation of legitimacy. We men used to at least mumble under our breaths about "chick flicks" two decades ago (try doing that now) but even then we accepted as transgressive and actionable our complaints about movies being derailed for the sake of women's morally superior kink of supplication before uterine fiat. In order for sex to be considered permissible, it must always be lent some utilitarian implication. The man must prove his heroism first, or sacrifice himself, or both. Sex can never simply be a quotidian, pleasant shared experience. It must be the absolute zenith of human aspiration, to be sought at any cost, through however many trials or convoluted dialogue minigames... and must always be paid for in blood, or at the very least a lifetime of servitude toward the woman so magnanimously demeaning herself by permitting you to touch her.

The demonization of sex varies slightly with time and place... but when has romance ever been demonized? When has the female slant on sex ever been considered morally wrong? Prompted comic fans to declare, en masse, they'll never read again? Required authors to defend and justify their decision to portray a candle-lit supper in a page-long apologia struggling to point out "hey, at least it's not as bad as when I had that one guy feed his enemies their own entrails"? When has a wedding ceremony ever required a NSFW warning? When has the obscenity of the RomCom supplicant standing outside his love's house begging her countenance to shine upon him ever been pixelated? When has an "I love you" ever been bleeped?

Edgier humor like Futurama will occasionally make half-joking admissions that sublimation of men's sex drive is abused, harnessed and monetized by religions, governments and corporations... but even they will not dare admit that women have always done the same by their very nature. We don't hate sex, not entirely. We're with sexual desire inducing subservience in men. We just oppose sexual satisfaction, because sexual dissatisfaction is so profitable. Where would our species, where would women be without that crowded periphery of disposable outcast males willing to do absolutely anything for the slimmest hope of a lay?

So if you agreed with my last post that we should have No Sex Scenes... are you willing to say the same against romantic scenes? And are you mentally competent to spot your own innate and indoctrinated bias?

Colony Ship: A Post-Start Roleplaying Summation

"Freezing red deserts turn to dark

Energy here in every part

It's so very lonely, you're six hundred light years from from home"

 

The Rolling Stones - 2000 Light Years From Home

 

 

I actually hadn't planned on doing a play-by play of Colony Ship. Based on my experiences in Iron Tower's previous The Age of Decadence and to a lesser extent Dungeon Rats it didn't seem like it would pay off. For one, I expect a story difficult to discuss without spoilers. For another, play-by-plays are far more entertaining when player experiences can diverge. Iron Tower's strictly controlled XP availability, skill checks and max-difficulty dice-rolling combat simply do not allow enough freedom of action to compare notes. "Oh, it took this guy twenty reloads instead of forty before the RNG went his way?" doesn't make for much of a plot.

Still, they did learn a few lessons from AoD's mixed success. Less useless skill / faction / weapon redundancy with more options in fewer categories, better integration of noncombat skills beyond talking, more attention paid to explanatory explanations and UI elements. Ingredient gathering and crafting have been dropped, but given I used AoD to reference crafting's unsuitability for story-based RPGs that's one loss I don't mind. You can recruit up to 3 party members (depending on charisma) with the caveat that I've run across exactly three in the first chapter, and they're not very interesting. I opted for Jed the down on his luck shotgun-totin' scrounger. You also get more customization options in the form of implants and gear with overlapping functions (e.g. can't wear both a visor and full helm at the same time) and gadgets like a shield or cloaking device. Fewer indoor zones, larger maps make the new map teleportation a real time-saver, especially as you'll be bouncing back and forth around zones endlessly hunting for that next skill-up.

 

In case the title didn't clue you in, this is a SciFi game set among the likely dissolution and degeneration aboard a massive "generation ship" after a few generations have passed. I find the topic interesting enough myself and will never forgive Robert Heinlein for doing it so much better than I ever could with Orphans of the Sky, Colony Ship's biggest influence. Aesthetically the game is short on bells and whistles much like it predecessor, and suffers from some poor handling of verticality/transparency making it difficult at times to know what floor your cursor's hovering over. Still, it does an admirable lot with the little it has.

The Hydroponics zone once again demonstrates the immersiveness of otherwise simple textures and models with properly applied lighting and distance. The rectilinear town built within stacked shipping containers which serves as your starting hub isn't far behind, playing up its bidonville precept as skillfully as more famous titles. The music is still simple yet apt for the most part, with so far one noteworthy track in the factory zone standing out as rather bangin'. Iron Tower's writing was mostly good to begin with and has improved in consistency and attention to detail.

 

I statted up my new self as per my usual support caster preferences.

 

From the start, the xenophilia/phobia alignment suggests an endgame twist of meeting aliens in Alpha Centauri. Plus, if one NPC told me "nah, we'll never live to see it" I'd take it as banter... but when every other person you meet says you'll never see your destination, dramatic irony dictates you'll probably see your destination. Time and plot advancement will tell.

 

One of AoD's main criticisms was its absolute dependence on min-maxing. You had absolutely no reason to half-level secondary skills, as they'd never overcome any challenge. Colony Ship tries to address that with gain by use instead of giving you points every level to allocate, skill tagging for bonus gain and the ability to boost a couple of skills by one point at the start, which in a ten-level campaign actually means something. Also, failed attempts in some encounters can still boost an under-level skill, especially speech. It's worked pretty decently so far, and I've been able to work up just enough non-tagged skill boosts for partial completion... but...

 

Without spoiling too much, by the end of Ch.1 I found myself falling farther and farther behind, relying entirely on save scumming and lucky crits - Mercy, the outskirts gang, the mind worms, the blatantly obvious scav ambush in mission control etc. - which all grows especially odious in long stealth missions where you repeat the same twenty moves thirty times over so you can reach the same few critical dice rolls every time. I did manage to polish off most content except a few skill-barred pieces of loot and the "courthouse" fights. Now, at the doorstep of The Factory, I honestly have no idea whether I'll be able to even finish the game.

 

So I decided why the hell not, let's give Iron Tower its own tag here and devote a future post to a play-by-play of Chapter 2.

At least a few of you might be amused by seeing me fall flat on my face.

Такого как Путин

Quote of the day

"Tim goes away, so who looks like Tim? It's usually not a Sarah" 

At the top of Europe's banks, it's still a man's world 

- Reuters dutifully toeing the anti-male line on international women's day

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Navalny aide urges Russian women to protest against Ukraine war

- yesterday's headline

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Several years ago while channel-surfing I landed on what seemed to be a discussion of art, in this case a sort of table I think. It turned out instead to be a feminist rant against the "objectification" of women, as the furniture in question had sides/legs carved in some semblance of caryatids. Naturally, it was not in the speaker's interest to address the obvious question of why, if this was an attempt to diminish women, were they included at all and not replaced with male models. As usual the feminist spin hinges on willful ignorance. Ignore the blatantly obvious observation that our one-step recipe for beautification, our requirement for appreciating anything, has always read "just add woman" where male figures would be ridiculed for standing around doing nothing.

We would have no trouble seeing the issue clearly if we imposed parity on our points of comparison. If I told Bob he's a looker and Ben to put a bag over his head, I would obviously be favoring Bob and mistreating Ben. Only when called upon to reaffirm our instinctive devotion to female safety, prosperity and happiness do we immediately accept such insane propositions that it is somehow worse to be considered beautiful than ugly by default, worse to be provided for than saddled with providing for others, worse to be protected than thrown to the wolves, that all this somehow oppresses those being praised, provided for and protected. And we will self-flagellate over such doublethink even as we praise, provide for and protect one sex as more worthy of beneficence than the other.

So it's no surprise that Putin's feeble political opposition has a photogenic female calling on women to protest the invasion of Ukraine. It would work. If you get the women on board, men too will rush to champion women's newest cause as they always do in their desperation to curry favor. But Yarmysh's quoted comment "I’m sure that in Russia there is not a single woman who will welcome this dishonest, meaningless war" sounds just as willfully ignorant as that PBS feminist's rant against her own favored status. Russian women did welcome the war. For over twenty years. And if they do finally turn on their darling Tsar it's not in view of sending their men out to die grabbing resources from neighbouring tribes (after all, that's what men are for) but the growing fear of tightening the belt back home in response to the economic crunch of becoming a rogue state. The Tsar can murder as many men as he wants (in fact it only reinforces his image as winner of dominance contests and therefore the ideal mate) but he is judged on his ability to protect and provide for the females of his tribe.

On a completely unrelated (and more comical) issue, let's talk about Donald Trump. He was often accused of being a dictator, but his labile, attention-seeking ineptitude quickly revealed him as something far more pathetic: a dictator's fanboy, aping the perennial winning strategies of autocrats while lacking the basic understanding of where or how to deploy them. Take one of his most infamous speeches against South American migrants and refugees. As a mere droplet of his constant deluge of oral diarrhea it's almost impressively garbled but nonetheless reveals the effect he sought.

"I don’t want them in our country. And women don’t want them in our country. Women want security. Men don’t want them in our country. But the women do not want them. Women want security. You look at what the women are looking for. They want to have security. They don’t want to have these people in our country. And they’re not going to be in our country. It’s a very big thing."

Trump is incompetent enough a politician to state such uncomfortable matters bluntly and thus ran afoul of women's insistence on maintaining their deniability, but Putin (like true autocrats in general) merely plays the part and lets our primal social ape undertow pull in his favor. As just one proof, look for the endless publicity shots he's taken as a barrel-chested he-man, the sort any cavewoman can really trust to spear a boar for dinner, brain some other man with a rock to take over his cave and finally die defending her from bear maulings. You think the infamously anti-gay dictator took shirtless photo-ops every year to appeal to his male constituency? Get real. He did it because nothing wrings a pair of ovaries quite like the image of a high-class strongman. That's what women want: the best murderer. Prince Charming.

Which brings us back to Tim. You remember Tim, from that quote above decrying male preponderance in top economic/financier positions? Yeah, there's a reason so many more Tims than Sarahs desperately claw their way to such ranks: women's never admitted but consistently reinforced message that if you're not that Tim (or that Vlad) then

You.

Are.

Nothing.

The aforementioned deniability also explains why far fewer Sarahs bother occupying such positions. Putin's invasion of Ukraine has the potential to finally see him deposed, and he runs the knowing risk of winding up a war criminal. But whatever his losses (if any) you can be sure they will not spill over to his ex-wife who saw him through his rise to power then bragged about him still supporting her after their divorce or the myriad likely mistresses, prostitutes and groupies for whom he bought a house or a car over the years.

Sarah can climb halfway up the ladder, just high enough to catch Tim's eye, then take him for half of everything while never risking the fall which comes with condemnation of Prince Charming's crimes.

Deniability is a wonderful invention.

Meanwhile, the fact that three billion women can't wait to jump on a sadistic tyrant's dick is precisely why other men have no choice but to either emulate such behavior in some small way or be erased from the gene pool. Even if the majority would suddenly refuse collusion, the uterine status quo would reassert our gender dynamic by the next generation. You will be grudgingly permitted to reproduce... so long as you work yourself to death bettering your mate's social standing, wheedle steal and capture whatever she demands and finally rot in the trenches in a grab for another tribe's tea to send back home to your own tribe's females.

You want real objectification? Try disposability.

 

Happy Women's Day.

Especially to the Ukrainian men dying in hopes the half of their tribe born more worthy of life might have homes to return to, and being spat on by feminists as patriarchal oppressors.

Fucking Happy Women's Day.

By the Humblest Things

Two weeks. If Ukraine holds out that long, I'm guessing we might see the war over by that point.

Based on the rate of new cases, China's current COVID spike certainly looks as though authorities have lost control of the situation. As a chaotic neutral half-man I would be remiss in not pointing out the ultimate inadequacy of authoritarian control, which never provides the safety it promises in return for subservience. But, more importantly, it will take two weeks to see how many more have been infected by the current outbreak, and with enough coughing China may find itself no longer fit to invade Taiwan or anyone else... for the moment.

If China no longer needs a distraction, we may see a week of stalling from Russia, and given there was never any gain for Russia itself in this idiotic massacre in Ukraine, Tsar Putin might even suspiciously rediscover his magnanimity and agree to some propaganda-laden peace resolution painting him as both a hero and a martyr... for the moment.

If so, World War 3 might get postponed until the Chinese re-position themselves for an offensive in another year or two, at which point Russia will suspiciously rediscover some dire threat on its borders and invade... maybe Ukraine or Georgia again? Maybe one of the Baltic states? Whatever makes the Chinese enslaving nation after nation seem the lesser evil.

Bah, NerdLord: To Battle!

Mount&Blade made its name initially as a sword-swinging physics demonstration, so perhaps it's not surprising they didn't bother changing their winning combat formula. While it's hard to tell at first, foot movement makes it slightly easier to sidestep attacks without letting you get away from your opponent, and horses maneuver a smidge less like motorcycles, but I might be imagining even those small momentum tweaks. I took a while to notice (due to fighting on foot with my crossbow) that in contrast to horses being able to bowl over infantry endlessly in the old game, now polearms have a ridiculous amount of stopping power to where half a ton of cataphract will occasionally dead stop like a sparrow into a window... on a half-starved shoeless bandit's pigsticker. Might need some finessing there, TaleWorlds. There's also some incongruity in skill gain. For example even with a lower learning rate, riding levels up an order of magnitude faster than athletics.

As far as battles go, they also overcompensated their terrain generator's friendliness. The playing field for each combat is supposed to be generated from your surroundings on the overland map. In the old game, this meant fighting in mountainous areas could sometimes land you in some dauntingly jagged locales (as my screenshot here demonstrates) but now?

 

It's a bottle map, get it?

In lowland areas you'll be fighting on a plain dotted with mounds or dunes no taller than waist-high. In mountains or hills or cliffs or ravines you'll be fighting on a suspiciously flat plain flanked by mounds or dunes marginally taller than waist-high... situated between all that unreachable rougher terrain. While it looks nice the first few times you quickly realize too much variety has been sacrificed for contriving cavalry-friendly encounters, or in the Simpsons' words: "every week there's a canal - or an inlet - or a fjord!" Yes, it was necessary to tame the original's randomizer. Now you could do to relax a few parameters.

Overall, I found my focus on crossbows served me well in early fights. Most bandits lack cavalry, and even the most notable exception (khuzaits a.k.a. tartars) lose most of their mounted archery advantage against a good high-accuracy volley from massed imperial sergeants. Even storming bandit camps by night is easier this way, as you can pick half of them off piecemeal with easy headshots without risking your troops. And, given completing such quests finally gives me more renown, I've been making quite a name for myself quarreling the querulous. I am the bolt in the dolt, I am the terror that twangs in the tundra, the dart in the desert, the flechette in the forest, the sureshot on the shore, I am the beam in my brother's eye!

 

It helps that the AI could use some work.

 

Leeroy, you are just stupid as hell.

Bandits just charge blindly at you, which is fine, they're supposed to be fodder. Empire troops with a leader will hold back, hold ranks and send horse archers to skirmish... even when they only have one horse archer. And even when their numbers are more threatening, the fact they always split widdershins oversimplifies your troop deployment.

I discovered all this by finally enlisting in the Southern Empire's armies as a mercenary clan. The political side of things will require a separate post. Militarily, your role as a landless mercenary is less tied to major offensives, leaving you to farm bounty money by cutting off reinforcements or hitting targets of convenience behind enemy lines (the danger of that follows below) but given the Southern Empire's first war was against the Khuzaits, I lucked out that my first serious fight took place in a village.

By my scutus and tribus, Metachia shall not fall this day!

All those houses and fences broke their damnable light cavalry's momentum making them easy targets, and a friendly merc clan provided frontline fodder.

However, the next few battles also bring up a major new feature, and one way in which it detracts from the standard RPG angle. Time in Bannerlord is far from some meaningless measure of your game length. Characters are born, age and replace each other. You may notice the calendar in the bottom right of some screenshots has gradually been counting up through my original incarnation's lifespan. As one consequence, your companions are now randomly generated and no longer immortal, which is my longabout way of saying: RIP Artimendros the Robber, we hardly knew ye. Unfortunately, this also precludes any pre-written characters, and while the original's line-up weren't overly-verbose (to about the level of Baldur's Gate 1 companions) they nevertheless added qite a bit of charm, like the abusive drill sergeant, the dashingly promiscuous exotic adventurer or the noble girl who knows everything she needs to about adventuring and warfare because she can recite all of the epic poems.

Nevertheless, as in city simulators where you might find yourself tracking the misadventures of some hapless laborer, stories sometimes write themselves. At one point the enemy took the town of Onira, which inconvenienced me personally as I had a quest to hand in there. Seeing an army assembling nearby I joined it, and sure enough it headed to recapture the town.

The fact that I, a lowly mercenary, was contributing more troops than any of the nobles, already worried me. I outright facepalmed when the army's leader, one Rustica of Clan Hongeros, one-eightied the army at the last minute to spend the night at a nearby village, thereby delaying the siege just long enough for enemy reinforcements to arrive and weaken us before siege towers could be built. It took several days for a new force to gather and retake our property, too late for my quest. So now I have my first grudge within the Southern Empire: clan Hongeros.

Sieges being a contentious topic in M&B will require further observation.

I will say that while superficially similar in the focus on choke points, the siege of Onira resolved faster with less tedium than the old variety.

 

Large battles in general now play differently from medium-sized ones, despite being basically the same deal with more waves. Individual formations can now benefit from your companions' bonuses, and you yourself can lead one and will be relegated to this role when subordinate to a lord during a siege. Cavalry will sometimes break off their charges and regroup, archers are harder to bait into switching to melee weapons by just riding near them, infantry are less sprone to waste their throwing weapons at long ranges. Where a medium-sized fight of around a hundred will be decided by the initial clash, a battle with 200-1000 on each side keeps evolving from that point, looking more like old-timey warfare with small clumps of warriors duking it out here and there, forcing you to keep an eye on whether your infantry or your cavalry are currently getting mobbed and regrouping them appropriately. In fact (being an adventurer like me) I took an arrow to the... face... (maybe I shouldn't wear my stylin' wolf pelt into battle?) so I got to observe NPC commanders doing very little fighting aside from picking off a straggler now and then, mostly riding back and forth as if actively giving orders.

 

I won't deny all this nuance caught me off-guard. Some encounters were real nail-biters oscillating advantage between myself and the enemy to the last handful of combatants.

 

Two cataphracts and three crossbowmen left standing still counts as a victory, damnit! Also, under those conditions, my one deserter to the enemy's seven means morale more or less decided the outcome, so keep your buttered grapes well stocked, bannerlords!

And yet, woe is me. Mine luck runneth outeth and disaster struckest mine army-eth.

After some time in the khuzait and northern wars I got a bit overconfident and decided to raid one of the far villages, thinking the local lords would be called off to join armies. I was just barely wrong enough to lose.

 

For all that's changed, defeat seems much the same as it was in Warband. You irrevocably lose all regular troops in your army, your named companions are scattered to the wind and may require ransoming, and you yourself are dragged around by your captor... which, if you're particularly unlucky, will land you at the far ends of the Earth when you do finally receive a (costly) ransom offer or manage to escape. Alone in enemy lands, potentially far behind the lines, you'll have a whole new adventure trying to reach some friendly villages and begin the arduous, seasons-long reconstruction of your forces. While this is a rather unique mechanic among cRPGs, it tends to result in a damn near impossible situation for some character types, as even a looter band might re-capture you... and re-capture you, and re-capture you. In a show of poor planning, the system was not adjusted for Bannerlord's far larger map and therefore greater distance to safety as a ransomed loner.

 

Dear reader, I don't mind admitting that in this case... I cheated. I crashed the damn game. I cheated and I cheated, again and again, until I lucked out and made it out of enemy lands to the Sturgians. Through the subsequent year of painstaking recruitment and training, I could not help but think it sure would've been nice if I had a fief of my own where I could've stockpiled some reserves.

Thus, it seems, I must wheedle my way into the nobility.

_______________________________________________________

edit 2022/03/05

Sadly, my deliberate game crashes corrupted my ironman mode save file (cheaters never prosper, kiddies - except they usually do) and I'll need some time to mourn my original self before I reroll. This will likely be the last post for my original playthrough.

No Sex Scenes

"Tell me, have you ever thought of writing for a living? Rather than preaching?'

‘I don’t think I have the talent.’

'Talent shmalent. You should see the stuff that gets published. But you must hike up those sex scenes; today’s cash customers demand such scenes wet."

Robert A. Heinlein - Job: A Comedy of Justice (1984)

__________________________________________________

"There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. There was even a whole sub-section--Pornosec, it was called in Newspeak--engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography, which was sent out in sealed packets and which no Party member, other than those who worked on it, was permitted to look at."

 

George Orwell - 1984 (1949)

__________________________________________________

“Now, concerning this vidshow.”

“Tuf and Mune? You’ve seen it, then?”

“Indeed,” said Tuf.

“Goddamn,” Tolly Mune said, grinning crookedly. “So what’d you think, Tuf?”

“I am forced to admit that it evoked a certain perverse fascination in me, for obvious reasons. The idea of such a drama has an undeniable appeal to my vanity, but the execution left much to be desired.”

Tolly Mune laughed. “What bothers you the most?”

Tuf raised a single long finger. “In a word, inaccuracy.”

She nodded. “Well, the vidshow Tuf masses about half what you do, I’d say, his face is a lot more mobile, his speech wasn’t half as stilted, and he had a spinneret’s musculature and an acrobat’s coordination, but they did shave his head in the interests of authenticity.”

“He wore a mustache,” said Haviland Tuf. “I do not.”

“They thought it looked roguish. Then again, look what they did to me. I don’t mind that they took fifty years off my age, and I don’t mind that they enhanced my face until I looked like a Vandeeni dream-princess, but those goddamned breasts! ”

“No doubt they wished to emphasize the certainty of your mammalian evolution”

[...]

“To my best recollection, at no point was carnal knowledge of your body included in my terms, Portmaster Mune. [...] the purpose of this melodramatic albeit daring voyage was to return [my cat] to my custody, as per the terms of our agreement, and not to deliver up your body to my” he blinked “lusts. Furthermore, you made it perfectly clear at that time that your actions were motivated by a sense of honor and fear of the corrupting influence the Ark might have upon your leaders. As I recall, neither physical passion nor romantic love played any part in your calculations. ”

Portmaster Tolly Mune grinned. “Look at us, Tuf. A damned unlikely pair of star-crossed lovers. But you’ve got to admit, it makes a better story.”

Tuf’s long face was still and expressionless. “Surely you do not defend this grossly inaccurate vidshow” he said flatly.

The Portmaster laughed again. “Defend it? Puling hell, I wrote it!”

 

George R.R. Martin - Tuf Voyaging, Second Helpings (1985 - a decade before he started publishing "Tits and Dragons") 

____________________________________________________

 

 

Hey, internet, wanna know one of my deep, dark, thick and stiff secrets? In addition to this crap I've also written pornographic stories (under a different alias, so don't bother searching (I said stop that!))

I toyed with the notion and scribbled a few paragraphs here and there for about a decade before working up the nerve to post a few to a free site several years ago, in a fit of desperation over my lack of productivity in writing other fiction, and over my lack of talent in my many additions to this blog. This was it, I thought, this is all I'm good for, this is the best I can do, the lowest possible dreck, jackoff material, so I might as well.

 

And it worked. Where I can't even bring myself to finish a "true" work of fiction beyond a couple of pages (growing ever more painfully aware of its worthlessness with every shuttle of the cursor) the porno-tales didn't matter, didn't scare me, and by now have accumulated a combined word count in the five digit range. Worse yet, hit counts revealed even my least popular such sodden yarn was ten times as successful as my most viewed page here on the blog... which isn't saying much, but in context still twisted the proverbial knife. Seems if I want to be heard on any topic from politics to food to space travel to primitivism, I'm better off doing so in between typographical hip thrusts. Kerning your brains out, so to speak.

I had, in other words, made a startling discovery: sex, it would appear... sells!

 

At least I find myself in abundant company along my slide toward the lowest common denominator. When Ghost in the Shell wanted to convey its status as not children's animation, it did so within five seconds with a naked chick backflipping off a high-rise. Netflix made a decade's worth of profit marketing ridiculous teen sex comedies, then when it wanted legitimacy gained it by more complex shows like Dark, starting every other episode with a teen sex scene. Cyberpunk 2077 may have bugged out at release whenever you shot... or drove... or picked something up... or breathed, but they made damn sure the customizable hoo-hoos and ding-a-lings were fully operational, I tell ya wut, and tossed a naked chick at you as soon as you start. Also, yes, I am quite the vivid eroauteur. Thank you for noticing.

 

But to me this topic has become inarguably symbolized by George R. R. Martin, largely because I was a fan of his older works long before I got into A Song of Ice and Fire in the early 2000s, and I was more aware than most of his keen ability to impart both gut punches and food for thought without the need for any of Boobs and Dragons' sex and little of its violence. A Song for Lya or Dying of the Light for instance tied their entire plots around a sexual relationship as did to a lesser extent Fevre Dream's cusp of mate protection, but in each case it is enough to know the characters in question are horny for each other (or... not) for the relationship to impact the rest of the narrative. Lya's tame sex scenes even seem gratuitous for its length at a couple sentences each. Precisely because of its universality, reproductive behavior requires no lengthy explanation or illustration. While Hooters and Dragons has plenty to teach about mythopoesis, historical revisionism and the willful ignorance of medievalism, the need for a sense of proportionality and antithesis in fantasy fiction, political factionalism and fractionalism, personal fables, superweapons and overdependence on same, religious idolatry, the tragedy of the commons, etc., you would lose none of that by dropping the half of the epic minutely describing people taking their pants off. Any more than anyone remembers anything else from those books about punching Martian goblins besides Dejah Thoris' wardrobe, or anything from the later Dune books besides the Honored Masturbators.

And yes, I get it: ASoIaF was written to sell, and it certainly did, a half-sordid, half-brilliant nest egg toward the end of an otherwise respectable career. But, just as I realized I can't promote my sociopolitical or aesthetic views in erotic stories whose target audience will skip any paragraph not detailing the conjoining of groins, I doubt the watered-down Seven Kingdoms manage to impart any meaningful impression beyond that to the vast majority of an audience who just came for the hawt codpiece clanging, and the author of The Sandkings deserves to be remembered better than "that Melons and Dragons dude."

As for us plebs scuttling about in the shadow of such colossi to our assured dishonorable graves, we should keep in mind the issue of gratuitous sex is only part of a larger spectrum of dishonesty in artistic expression. Resorting to sex scenes to hold the audience's interest is merely a sign of poor writing, a glaring lack in developing your other themes to stand on their own. In fact, one of my observations upon taking a serious look at erotic story sites (aside from the surprising abundance of incest themes - Freud was apparently more right than he knew) is the common albeit sparse attempts to pervert sexuality itself into propaganda on some hot-button political issue like firearms or abortion or marijuana. Almost invariably, it makes for poor eroticism illustrating the pitfall of engorging any secondary consideration to subvert a work's main interest, be it political or religious pandering, shilling to some financial backer, sport, crime and astrology, etc. Sex is merely the most obvious such trap for its lowest-of-the-low common denominator status and its role as the most frequent source of cultural taboos across time and space.

And having reached that topic of demonization, I shall shelve the remainder of this discussion for the second half:

Yes Sex Scenes.