Gargoyles

"Clever things make people feel stupid, and unexpected things make them feel scared. [...] It was just a matter of knowing the secret of all TV shows: at the end of the episode, everything's always right back to normal."

- Futurama, When Aliens Attack

 

I miss Gargoyles.

 

"To kill in the heat of battle is one thing, but not like this"

 

Well, OK, I couldn't sit through it all now, but I miss being twelve years old and finding a show that transcended children's entertainment as I understood it. Aside from Animaniacs the '90s were weak on comedy cartoons, but they hit a gold-mine of heroic drama. Even amongst the Batman / X-Men hits though, Gargoyles stood out for giving its young audience more credit than the industry as a whole was wont to. Complex antivillains like Demona or Xanatos kept the episodic plots from being too linear. The unusual emphasis on gliding physics got you thinking three-dimensionally. Shakespearean characters dove in and out of various plots with surprising grace, neither completely dumbed down nor too pedantic. Most of all, Gargoyles could at times be unabashedly, pointedly, bombastically, roaringly, operatically gritty and dramatic, above and beyond what you'd think Disney (of all companies!) would permit.

However, I'd missed one particular oddity, lacking the greater context of television in general back then. While some continuity had been sneaking into TV shows over the previous decade, it was still assumed the audience could not be credited with a real attention span, much less an audience of children. Shows defaulted to unrelated, episodic plots reinstating the status quo every single week, and when some like The X-Files tried building longer, more complicated intrigues the results were... let's say unpolished. For the most part, you'd occasionally get at most a two-parter, and when ST:TNG dangled its Locutus cliffhanger, it pretty much broke its fans' brains. The villain of the week still ruled supreme.

Gargoyles starts with the five-part Awakening storyline, which establishes not just static character quirks but backstory and original phlebotina like the stone skins, tears down its status quo twice, shuffles heroes and villains and generally kept knocking you over the forehead to see if you're paying attention. And sure, it was still a children's show and often gratuitously goofy or cheesy... but damn, it also carried a rare implicit statement that utterly despising one's audience is not integral to the creative process.

Ping Shading

I've found my mind wandering toward online gamer culture recently (and not just because I'm trying my hand at Gamedec) and I'm reminded of one glaringly constant quibble. See, from the mid-'90s we've gone through 2D, 2.5D, 3D and back to hipster-retro "pixel art". We've gone from 28.8 modems to cable and fiber optics to having nothing worth playing online because multiplayer quality has stagnated or deteriorated so badly. We've gone from hyperaggressive little cretins charging in blindly to dickless retarded little bitches too scared to ever risk their own scores for the sake of the team.

 

But no matter the decade or the generation or the polygon count, somehow, for almost thirty years running, online gamers still don't know the difference between network lag and FPS. It's... well, at some point the overt effort put into such willful ignorance starts rivaling that of religions. Mind you, we're not talking about specialized knowledge like Nvidia's latest thread-tunneling-vertex-packets, or about the general knowledge no-one seems to acquire anymore. Ping/frames is a very basic distinction which not only affects your favorite hobbies on a daily basis but has done so for uninterrupted decades, to the point that for any gamer it should some as naturally as differentiating between coffee and gasoline. Both keep things running, but they're not interchangeable!

Yet a couple of days ago I saw, as I have in innumerable game discussions since the days of Warcraft 2 and Quake, two knuckleheads trying to fix rubberbanding by turning shadows or reflections off in their graphics settings. I had half a mind to tell them to press Alt-F4.

How has an entire global population who routinely download and upload entire terabytes on a whim not managed to transmit such a minute yet critical factoid over an entire medieval serf's lifespan ?!?

In the Name of the Holey Sprocket

"If I was high

I could be a flame

I would bend the sky"

 

Velvet Acid Christ - Bend the Sky

 

 

Look, I'm a SciFi fan. I can't help but feel a slight rush hearing about the space program ramping crewed missions back up. I do have to remind those getting a little too excited that "possible long-term moon base" doesn't mean "moon city." Far as I know, astronauts've got little in particular to do on the moon except practice pitching tents on more interesting worlds. Also, I'd like to reiterate that any interplanetary expansion would invevitably be a dictatorial echo of Terran politics. It won't save our idiotic species from self-destruction. It'd just erupt in a tiny little faraway ka-boom to accompany the symphony down here.

Nevertheless I found myself rather basking in my morning newsfeed's mention of the Artemis I launch, aside from an exasperated sigh at the line "followed within a few more years by the program's first lunar landing of astronauts, one of them a woman" - how 'bout you tell us their actual qualifications instead? Or maybe something about intended landing/construction sites? Compare old/new technologies in use since the Apollo Program era? Something besides assuring the public you're striking valiantly against the testicular menace? Because that's not really either of your jobs as rocket engineers or reporters.

 

Still, I could've let that one slide and moved on... but the morality police couldn't. Human stupidity being endless, Reuters' article followed up with this delightful gem: "although no humans will be aboard, [the current flight] will carry a simulated crew of three - one male and two female mannequins" - one step closer to completely eliminating our man-nequin oppressors! Marion-ettes of the world, unite! Yes, those are the results we needed from NASA and the century and trillions of dollars in accumulated aerospace funding it represents: whether they penciled in a ding-dong or a hoo-hoo on the crash test dummies' crotches.

On a completely unrelated topic, I nostalgically reminisced some years back about a sociopathic drama queen from my old WoW server in the mid-2000s. It got more attention than I'd expected from a throwaway obscure anecdote, partly because she had just driven THAT many people nuts back in the old days... and partly because Retrodruid herself, still playing the game apparently, dropped by to sock-puppet some third-person glorification of herself, and likely personally accounted for half the post's hits basking in her renewed attention. Her sheer weirdness derailed my original point somewhat, as her exact antics were only relevant to the extent fellow players wouldn't've stood for the same shit in context from a male, much less kept forgiving and re-inviting him, time after time, for months and years (and apparently, decades!) running. Her apologia's wording however did emphasize key similarities in the cult of personality she'd attempted to build around herself and the general cult of femininity in society at large: the self-appointed martyrdom and conspiracy theories belied by the enormous amount of favoritism bestowed upon her, the claims to special knowledge, the possessive declarations of belonging and betrayal, and the cathartic wail of "I fheel unprotected by-y y-you a-a-aalllllllllll!"

 

All social justice causes in the past couple of decades carry a nasty reek of superstitious proselytism, but femininity's presumed entitlement preceded them all in our cultural consciousness and deserves special attention for its primeval cultish aptness. Such devotional ecstasy can be rarefied and sublimated or "switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp" to repurpose Orwell's phrasing from hate to adoration, at least so long as the new object of worship displays some nominal, performative femininity, be it an MMO avatar or an anatomically/politically correct rocket payload. One wonders why NASA bothered with realistic mannequins at all when they could've just loaded their capsule with a puppet of Snidely Whiplash and a couple of roped together Venus figurines, the better for the crusading masses to affix their dewy gaze to the heavens in meek lamentation of the plight of our plasticine sistren.

Has mass insanity on this scale ever avoided disaster?

Am I the only one in the States glad to be back to regular marketing phone spam now the election's over?

Fantasy Evolved

Continuing where I left off, to better account for evolution in fantasy worlds, the most important step is to switch from top-down to bottom-up thinking. Sounds easy until you remember you're thinking of art, lit or marketing majors (or worse, video game designers) none of which are big on logic or have learned any science since tenth grade, and all of which probably have a massive god complex when it comes to finessing their babies into the exact perfect artistic (and profitable) vision that came to them last St. Andrews' day in a dream while on the toilet at a luxury expositional expo. This in fact makes fantasy storytelling particularly recalcitrant, playing god in a setting with actual gods, as "so the prophecy foretold!" melds perfectly with "this half-assed backstory sounded hella dramatic in my plot outline." It's not like the internet isn't peppered with such rants already, but if you're wondering why anyone would even bother with such speculation, I'll get to that at the end.

 

Remember: fantasy is a top-down system where the rules are handed down by magical beings, while SF is a bottom-up construction upon consistent (if imaginary) physical laws. SF is evolution; F creationism.

However...

I would be curious to see more settings (and to me, fantasy mostly means game settings) bucking that trend, or at the very least doing a better job of worldbuilding than slapping random species onto a random landscape like pizza toppings. Besides, I already promised a post on fantasy evolution earlier this year when complaining about Lord of the Rings Online idiotically drafting dwarf women into front line combat in the name of female superiority and in defiance of Tolkien's well-reasoned dwarven hyperprotectiveness toward their minimally fertile 1/3 female population. Given I already touched on dimorphism (that's what she said) back in 2017, I'll shelve sexual selection for some future date and widen the scope to general morphology/behavior.

 

Let's start with some basics:

Evolution, fundamentally, can be expressed tautologically: what lasts, lasts. (The devil's in the details.) Also, since the cell/body/colony does not get copied over via reproduction, it's genomes, genes or whatever gets reproduced generation by generation out-lasting each other by expressing more favorable proteins/cells/bodies/behaviors. Not a huge issue in works of fiction, until writers forget their creations would need to reproduce in order to continue existing as species or societies - see the dwarf example above. It also means that anything which interferes with reproduction is severely, severely, SEVERELY maladaptive, something to think about when you're designing all those noble, monkish space-elves who do nothing but write poetry and practice their katas all millennium long, but somehow manage to coexist with pod-people and sapient fungi. It doesn't take a war to get over-run and starved out by the numerically superior.

 

Also, something doesn't need DNA to evolve. If your robots or nature spirits make copies of themselves and each has minute differences in their programming/soul/WhateverMakesItTick then those which reproduce more successfully will compose more of the next generations, and so on until they replace the original stock. Saberhagen's Berserkers would long have replaced themselves with a version that doesn't expend resources and endanger itself by hunting down all life in the universe.

 

Aside from that, the general pattern is:

1) shit happens - random mutations in germ line (remember, if it's not passed down, it doesn't count)

2) shit gets cleaned up - natural selection (less adaptive traits reproduce less successfully and so do their bearers) (this is the part creationists like to ignore when scoffing at the idea of random chance producing complexity.)

Remember that even if a body part is not directly harmful or beneficial, it still imposes an energy (nutritional) cost on the organism growing and maintaining it. So please stop sticking all those redundant crests, spikes, limbs and feathers onto your fantasy races! Art majors, THIS MEANS YOU! ... "Dire" badger my dire ass. Remember that mutations pile on very gradually into recognizable features so if you want something to suddenly sprout wings in a single generation, you'll have to resort to an explicit "it's magic" dodge. (The mariner's gills in Waterworld were a real groaner.) Remember also that selection works in the present. Plants don't randomly start producing gigantic colorful flowers just in case bees might appear in ten million years. Exception: exaptation, where a feature you already have acquires a second use, like insulating feathers also aiding flight.

Selection is anything but random. The environment directly impacts which related organisms reproduce more successfully, and therefore how the overall population will look in a hundred or thousand generations. Which is actually good news for writers, because you get to start with a map! And you love maps, don't you, you Tolkien wannabe ha- aherhm, where was I... maps. You probably have a vague map in mind already. You know you want your heroic band of adventurers to cross some snowy mountains and some rivers, exactly one swamp and definitely an erupting volcano or seven along the way. You're already picturing both the boundless creaking taiga and the chokingly dense multicolored vines overwrapping the rainforest. Cool. Plate tectonics and erosion lie beyond my current scope, except to note it's one aspect Tolkien tended to be weak on, slapping mountain ranges perpendicular to each other and rivers flowing every which direction.

Figure out your landscape first, then start deciding where your heroes will encounter various creatures based on a few general rules of adaptation, starting with temperature gradients. (I won't bother citing them one by one, but I should note Wikipedia features a nice list of biological rules)

- Cold environments favor warm-blooded creatures large enough to conserve heat. (Ice-snakes are weird.) Corollary: compact bodies conserve heat better, so cool it with the stilt-legged, bat-eared icewalkers. Even moose and reindeer are stockier than their tropical cousins.

- Reptiles are good at conserving water and require fewer nutrients, outcompeting mammals in hot deserts. Which is to say, there are other animals than camels in deserts. Look them up.

- "Amphibious" does not mean perfectly adapted to both environments. Keep in mind frog locomotion mainly gets them back in the water as fast as possible. Aquatics would have support and locomotion issues on land (see seals). Please, no prancing mermaids. Also, long flowing hair is NOT hydrodynamic.

- Cave dwellers might see better in dark but more likely favor other senses (see the famous blind cave _____) Goblins probably would not have amazing vision, and even if they're just nocturnal would likely be colorblind to increase light sensitivity (see bats.)

- Islands have a weird effect on body size, with large species getting smaller due to limited resources, and more often small species getting larger due to lack of predators. This would be an excellent way to work that cosmetic re-skin game designers love so much in a logical fashion... and one I never see used.

- Parasites tend to fit their host, both in size and intersecting life cycle. In fact, they closely co-evolve with their hosts over generations, to the point of strictly specializing (especially internal ones) in a few closely related species. Your heroes have nothing to fear from dragon tapeworms. This was one major plot hole in the original Alien movie, addressed in pathetically hamfisted fashion with Prometheus.

- Magnifiy that by orders of magnitude for anything which evolved in complete isolation (e.g. on different planets) and especially do not EVER talk about miraculously compatible alien genetics. DNA is not just a linear code, but produces and depends on a myriad scaffolds, chaperones, cofactors, regulators, markers and processes like tagging or splicing, not to mention the million convoluted signal cascades required for DNA to react to its extracellular environment, all of these developed in tandem between the existing template and iterative selective pressure over literally billions of generations. The odds of something which has never encountered either the same template or the same pressures spontaneously producing hybrid offspring are, statistically, nil! Nil squared! Nil to the tenth! Just... don't! If you want half-alien babies, you'd end up needing to genetically engineer some hopelessly wasteful monstrosity operating on two separate metabolisms at once (and they'd probably be sterile and poisoned by BOTH parents' native environments) to the point any intelligent species would give it up and opt for robots. Golems. Whatever. Sorry, didn't mean to get S all up in your F.

That brings us to the issue of divergent and convergent evolution.

Divergence usually results from separation. Half your elves go over the sea, dark hair randomly predominates in one population, light in the other. One side's taller, one side has longer pianist fingers. Cool, whatever. It can also result from specialization (as Larry Niven so memorably tried to portray in Ringworld) and this is where your handy-dandy map comes in. Do you have populations of elves living in plains/mountains/forests for tens of thousands of years before developing civilization? Give the plainsrunners long loping legs to cover long distances, and the tree-climbers shorter legs with prehensile toes, and the mountain-climbers partially hardened, hooflike foot soles and oversized lung capacity. Chesty elves. Hell, why not? We've tried every other kind.

Convergence generally results from different species adapting to the same necessity, and for fictional purposes largely concerns morphology. Limb shape is a famous example, as each medium strongly favors one or two modes of locomotion, so that even across hundreds of millions of years and distantly related clades, runners, swimmers and soarers will gradually develop legs, fins and wings independently of each other. What does this mean for fantasies set in alien landscapes? Well, if you create an environment of shattered floating islands over a bottomless void, everything from bugs to buffalo would need some way to cross those gaps, be it by flying, gliding, steering the islands, or clinging parasitically to flyers, shooting spores to the wind or ballistic seeds. If you set your adventure among the vertical trunk and branches of a world tree, then climbing adaptations (prehensile tails, low centers of gravity, gripping pads and claws) would predominate as would ways of taking advantage of the world-tree's sap, a world of squirrels, geckos, aphids and orchids.

Above all, remember everything must somehow acquire the energy and chemicals it needs to carry out its metabolic processes. Case-in-point: Herbert's sandworms. Leaving aside the question of whether their burrowing friction would glass the sand around them, no way in hell would they ever filter enough food from desert sand at their size to fuel such an energy-intensive method of travel, in direct contrast to their likely inspiration, baleen whales, which make use of buoyancy and currents. Even if it were possible, they'd get out-competed for food by smaller, more efficient burrowers. If you want a big impressive beast in your story (like dragons) first ask yourself: what does it eat? And does something else eat that better? Moby Dick ate giant squid... did Smaug eat giant flying squid at altitudes other flyers can't reach? This also goes for armies, with the classic question of how exactly the utterly barren Land o' Murder's provisioning all those tens to hundreds of thousands of indigenous orcs. How many Mordors' worth of farmland would it take to supply one Mordor's worth of orcs and trolls?

This brings us to behavior.

Try orcs. They live in close, overpopulated, hypersocial bands but act like Tasmanian devils or other infamously solitary, hyperaggressive beasts. They're basically locusts in a perpetual state of swarming, except swarming behavior is better interpreted as a terminal investment strategy, where an organism responds to drought, overpopulation, other scarcity or morbidity by investing its energy reserves in a massive reproductive / dispersal gamble. Inherently untenable, and functional only as such. Orc-like fantasy/SF races would work better if the author more carefully described a population boom/bust cycle and paid closer attention to the triggers which turn mundane pests into plagues. Note this carries far more plot-driving potential than the basic description of orc-types as "mean and many." To some degree, the idea that they coalesce as armies and pose major threats only under Bolg or Sauron-like leadership approaches this, but how much better would it get by tying it all together with physical and hormonal changes?

In a greater sense, while the r/K distinction is less distinct than once thought, it still pays to think of your fantasy races in terms of their life histories relative to each other. Long-lived, slow-growing, slow-breeding elves which take a thousand years to repopulate would need stable environments, something Tolkien rather elegantly incorporated into those secretive, defensible elvish enclaves like Rivendell. Just randomly scattering around unexplored woods in vulnerable bands would open them up to disaster. Note, great apes are classic K-strategists, and humanoids would not spread easily through that standard-issue dramatic fantasy landscape constantly erupting with volcanoes and getting wiped out by manageddons and genocided by evil wizards at random intervals. You need to give your humanoids some breathing room for them to form believable societies.

Conversely, rapidly reproducing, short-lived, expansive species replenish their populations better after disaster but gradually fall prey to more careful, resilient competitors during stable periods. Klingons would probably live to thirty and have fifteen children each to offset their idiotic hyperaggressiveness.

 

Keep in mind environment shapes both biology and culture. Creatures adapted to constant Under-dark or the deep ocean, even if they can see, would probably not wax poetic about light/dark dichotomies like those of us subjected to circadian cycles; nor would they winter their discontent when they've never seen the passing of the seasons. Burrowing creatures would not have a "high" king like we arboreal descendants.

If you've had the patience to read this far, you might be growing a tad exasperated at my making a mountain out of a molehill. After all, it's freakin' fantasy, dude! It's like, magic! Unsure how something works? It's magic! A wizard did it!

Therein lies the problem. Magic is magical by contrast to the mundane. Make it mundane and kill its appeal. Don't gratuitously fabricate unicorn-fart-powered lightbulbs where "a candle" would fit your narrative purpose just as well. Just as you should do your homework for the fields of basic mechanics or sanitation so you don't need to resort to wheelbarrows or outhouses powered by pixie-dust, get some basic nature documentary understanding of biological principles so you don't need to magically explain why your rainforest's full of polar bears.

 

One common surprise expressed by younger audiences when finally getting around to reading Tolkien, the precursor of D&D or WoW, is just how little magic actually plays into his plot twists. The stories which created high fantasy are in fact low fantasy. Yeah, and that's why Middle-Earth is still the champ. Its author did his homework, and didn't resort to gratuitous, amateurish overstatement where a mere understanding of the world would fit more naturally. When Gandalf casts a "light" cantrip or Samwise tells a rope to un-knot itself, it actually comes across as magical!

I leave you with one last question to be addressed in the future: how would magic itself affect evolution?

Fantasy Unevolved

"Whether I contemplate men with benevolence or with an evil eye, I always find them concerned with a single task, all of them and every one of them in particular: to do what is good for the preservation of the human race. Not from any feeling of love for the race, but merely because nothing in them is older, stronger, more inexorable and unconquerable than this instinct - because this instinct constitutes the essence of our species, our herd."

 

Nietzsche - The Gay Science #1 "The teachers of the purpose of existence", 1887

 

 

I may not be a writer but I am terrible, so I've been taking Terrible Writing Advice. While for the most part I find JP's sarcastic jabs both incisive and insightful (translation: hating the things I hate makes you a genius) his segment on villains did raise an eyebrow for decrying the will to power as insuffucient motivation for a megalomaniac. Sure, "I wants it 'cuz I wants it" does lack a certain narrative oomph, but here unfortunately narrative conflicts with verisimilitude. As I've laid out the issue several times here before, even with stone-age technology a tribe of naked apes so efficiently concentrates usable resources that evolutionary pressure will increasingly favor not just ability in acquisition but partitioning the take, by hook or crook. We lionize taking the lion's share because that tendency gave our ancestors a higher chance of passing down their genetic material, and we have inherited their predispositions. Powermongering and the race for social status have obviously suffered from runaway selection within our species (indeed may well be more responsible for our increased intellect than tool usage) and being baked so hopelessly into our instincts will fuel any amount of insanity. Asking why someone might want a bigger house than the neighbours' (or by extension, ALL OF THE HOUSES) is as obvious and meaningless as trying to define complex motivations behind the desire for sex or sucrose: a beginner's lesson in evolutionary psychology, which from the point of view of the individual just *is*!

If you must fill in some Dark Lord backstory, focus not on why the villain wants power, but on why the villain's powermongering strategy has shifted from cooperation to domination. Tolkien, for instance, did this quite naturally with his famous Quisling deciding he was better off biding his time and growing stronger under Sauron's newly stretching wing than supporting the ostensibly toothless White Council. Same goes for Sauron himself making a personal power-play at the end of the second age, with his greatest potential opposers' mutual defeat / retreat beyond the boundaries of the world made round leaving him poised to seize control, and his own physical change rendering his previous covert strategy untenable. His motivation never once changed. His circumstances did, and his story accordingly.

While you might say Sauron's not human and did not evolve, fantasy authors invariably base their races on the human lowest common denominator, motivations tracking human ones with little divergence and even less creativity. Which is odd given that fantasy paradoxically is in some ways better positioned than Science Fiction to include evolutionary change. Not only do Fantasy creatures inhabit more natural worlds with fully connected ecosystems (rather than SF's spaceships or run-down cities) and conflict-prone environments which could easily apply adaptive pressure, but Fantasy's kalpa-length timeframes frequently dwarf SciFi stories' more condensed action, allowing for gradual change. Evolution (a hot topic in the late 19th, early 20th post-Darwin media landscape) or the passing of geologic ages featured in many of the stories which jumpstarted SciFi's popularity (think The Time Machine) and also helped Tolkien drag fairytales into modern relevance by providing a LostWorld-ish sense of depth to LotR's history. Ghan-Buri-Ghan the primitive knuckledragger, many passages of troglodytic goblins once again recalling cavemen, the Nazgul's winged mounts* immediately suggesting pterosaurs, and Saur-on himself as master of a world before the world of men (to my teenage self that always read "he's a dinosaur" and canon be damned) consider just how much more believable, more solid as a world, these little touches rendered Middle-Earth.

 

I consume little fantasy in general (Song of Ice and Fire, Dark Materials, Kingkiller Chronicle) but such settings and tropes are inescapable in computer games and much of the frustration fueling this post and its upcoming sequel comes from hopelessly generic landscapes like Faerun, Dyrwood or Ferelden with their rule of placing every single monster in every single zone for the sake of monetizing assets to the fullest possible extent. Still, I'd blame this lack of imagination more on the genre than on the medium, and my last example comes from a webcomic.

 

I've mentioned Selkie here before in the context of webcomics' treatment of fatherhood. It's a science fantasy story about a human adopting a child from a species of (suspiciously humanoid) aquatic predators with claws, webbed digits, razor-sharp teeth and poison spit. Lot of potential there, predictably squandered in an effort to keep the Sarnothi relatable and familiar to the audience in the worst tradition of Star Trek wrinkly forehead aliens. They could, for instance, not have been given hair to increase their drag while swimming, but you're just scratching the surface there. A recent comic addressed the heroine on a playground as "Sarnothi of the climber bars" and I couldn't help but groan at the wasted potential. A swimming species would likely not develop a very strong grip for climbing. Otters don't do chin-ups. Sharp slashing claws and webs don't mix - see drag again. Nor do flippers generally maintain spring-toed musculature, but I guess it was more important to show the young heroine bouncing around in gym class with the human children. Nor are poisonous species, for that matter, particularly prone to develop massive overpowering musculature (picture viperacondas or mantispiders) but a species of spindly ambush predators using one-hit poison tactics wouldn't have yielded an imposing enough strongman in the figure of Mr. Scar-Kill-Him-Die. For that matter, how did their hunting style develop and how does it compare to human/wolf prey-harrying tactics... and given the impact such organization has on social dynamics, how would their society differ?

The entire spectrum of differences between Atlantean aquatic / predatory specialization and human plainsrunning prey-harrying is wasted because:

1) The author's desperate to drive home a politically correct message of coexistence and unity, willfully ignoring necessary divergence

2) The author just wanted to make them cool, but never considered they don't need to out-human humans to retain their coolness as fanged, poisonous sala-Man-ders

If you'd like to see a better take on the same divergence, you could try War with the Newts by Karel Capek (you remember, the guy who repurposed the word "robot" to its current usage?) War with the Newts' fairly relentless dark humor largely stems from humans' incapacity to recognize the other species' capabilities and danger, simply because it does not manifest in cozily familiar human facial expressions and social interactions. Moreover, the greatest danger stems precisely from our similarities in newts' ability to absorb human ideologies... while repurposing these in pursuit of their own instinctive drives and biological prerogatives.

So how might our current fantascifi worlds better integrate the truism that aliens are alien? Well, I've rambled enough for one night, so I'll cut off the observational half of my musings here and devote the next post to the speculative half.

___________________________________________________

 

* Weirdly, Tolkien denied consciously tailoring the flying beasts as pterosaurs, and true enough in early drafts featured in The History of Middle-Earth, they're initially just nondescriptly vulture-like.

I am vary funny.

Tower of Time

"I'm free to roam on dummy screens and magazines"

Massive Attack - Group Four

 

Tower of Time starts with a tot. What? Don't look at me like that, I didn't make this shit up.

Upholding his people's noble tradition of runnin' like a lil' bitch

 

Oh, wait... it's an RPG's opening sequence... all hands, brace for exposition!

Let's see, once upon a time fluffy bunnies, then bad happens and everything is tax day forever, which is to say until someone invents plucky young farmboys and saving the world comes back into fashion. Also there's a good king and a meeee-steeerious shadowy figure that's probably an evil wizard and a gluteus ouchimus crystal throne, and then you fight some walking skeletons. Right. Y'know, you could've just said "fantasy story" and saved us both thirty minutes of cutscenes and slideshows.

 

I thought coming down with COVID last week would be a good time to clear through some more of my unplayed game collection, and started with a title I was sure I'd be able to dismiss after a few hours like Slay the Spire, or would disappoint and frustrate me into quitting despite its potential like Mordheim. Instead, Tower of Time seems intent on earning my grudging respect by building upon the lowest common denominator. And I do mean lowest:

While you handle exploration and puzzles through a standard isometric dungeon crawl interface, combat encounters place you on a certain number of pre-made maps. Enemies usually spawn in randomly from gates all around you. Mow 'em down as they come, arcade-style. Will you also be forced through an alternate mode babysitting helplessly fragile objectives? You bet! Do the maps offer enough diversity to create new tactical challenges? Hell no, just keep redirecting to whichever portal's currently spawnin' baddies, keep wiping that windshield from side to side, unto victory! Your playable characters are hardly more ambitious, with a pared-down four-attribute stat system and five resistances plus armor, and yes, inevitably my very first piece of loot already sported a +3 resist all effect invalidating choice.

Don't expect more originality or coherence out of the basic setting either, with its standard-issue skeletons / orcs / giant bugs segueing into steampunk automatons as enemies.

 

But if any of you have read my other reviews you might guess this is the point where I say "however"... so yeah:

However...

 

As trite a basic plot as it lays out at the start, Tower of Time dedicates some effort to expanding upon it, level by level, unveiling more of the backstory as you descend, to justify each new enemy theme. It's not a coherent narrative per se, but I'd be remiss not to admit I myself advocated just the year before ToT came out for more megadungeons arranged around factions sequentially displacing each other, with only the loosest justifications. And, while not exactly the "Mad Max with dragons and magic wands" I called for as a logical consequence of a world's life-force fading, ToT does manage to maintain that theme of decay better than most RPGs claiming such. As consistently hackneyed as individual elements may be (the nature-loving elf, the gratuitously Scottish dwarf, the ridiculously overblown Organthe) the overall assemblage does manage to avoid strict white hat / black hat dichotomies to a susprising and refreshing extent.

The same goes for gameplay: trite and simplistic setup, decently fleshed out. Those four basic stats actually lead to less min-maxing than you'd do in a standard D&D cRPG, your pre-made character roster nonetheless has some leeway in skill choice, and the windshield wiping routine (at least on hard difficulty) is spiced up by varying movement speeds and skill cooldowns. Even the elemental resistances are given more relevance than usual via massive differences from monster to monster as in Divinity: Original Sin. Puzzle solving, while leaning harder than it should on pixel-hunting or non-sequiturs, is fully integrated into your progression through each level - and if you don't believe me, check out the user reviews bitching about being confused by simple binary net puzzles.

 

Don't expect much relevant difficulty. By strictly tying your characters' leveling into your dungeon progress (i.e. no EXP for kills) and feeding you an easy cash/loot grind via "challenges" in town, ToT keeps a fairly strict rein on your power level. On hard difficulty I've been clearing most fights on a first try, with about 1/5-1/10 fights requiring a second try and occasionally being repeatedly frustrated by hitting high resistances to my overwhelming reliance on magic damage (due to my general "no filthy hu-mons" party membership rule denying me archers or the toughest tank.) But the most common source of failure is just random bullshit enemy waves spawning offscreen and instagibbing my back row, not anything pertaining to actual strategy or tactics.

And sure I could go on: the simple but aptly wistful audio, the few and not particularly convoluted moral choices nevertheless lent some relevance by splitting your party's opinions and acting as a favor minigame, the voice acting better than I'd expect, if somewhat hit-or-miss (Whisper sounds less like a mysterious mystical mistress of magic and more like a petulant valley girl) plus the writing, weak on dialogue but charmingly given unto its overblown epic worldbuilding, or the visuals, not particularly impressive on a small scale but showing more vision when it comes to multi-layered, cavernous interiors, despite failing to play up its upended floor/ceiling gimmick.

Tower of Time is... mediocre by design. Not bad by design, an accusation I was more than ready to hurl against it when I first fired up that plucky farm-boy intro and saw the "resist all" boots. It gets more than its share of flak from both sides of the quality divide: too simple a game for fans of RP classics, too complicated for the braindead Diablo 2-3 farmers. If you were to compare it with the wealth of skill/spell integration of Owlcat's Pathfinder adaptations, or with the coherent worldbuilding and characters of Tyranny or The Age of Decadence or the latter's stringent difficulty settings, then yes, ToT falls miserably flat. But once I realized how hard it feigns mindless loot-grinding Diablo-clone trappings at first glance and nevertheless then tries to trick that brainless ARPG audience into tasting tactical gameplay and looking past good vs. evil tropes, I can't help but give ToT some credit for trying to elevate expectations.

Some.

Not too much credit, mind you.

Still, for generic $12-20 RP-lite fare, it's better than it could've been.