Lemony Picketing Comatose Jeannies

"You've traveled farther than you've ever before
You can't leave by the way you came in"

 

Mary Crowell - City of Doors

 

 

I been schemin' to be callin' on Warframe this month, since it's putting out. a new minor game mode offering a new intro to game mechanics for new players, doubling as a tour de force for what always set this fundamentally mindless arcade-style loot grind about magic space ninjas apart from its Diablo-esque competitors, FPS-style or not: the art design. Not just "graphics" as in polygon count, but convoluted, rococo, shamelessly flashy art major masturbation. But damnit, though occasionally goofy, they usually make it work. With The Duviri Paradox, they've gone full Dali-tard into outright surrealism... and damnit, they still made it work!

 

Come on, even I'm not jaded enough to deny this looks gorgeous. Nonsensically gorgeous.

It's a faceless VTOL interdimensional bronze-plated rhinoceroboskelepegasus with an ankylosaur tail.

Uh... huuuh...

OK, screw it, sure, whyever the hell not?

Check the swaddled statue. See what I mean about not just graphics?

The hover-sculpture is very, very mobile

Looks like someone read the same edition of The Martian Chronicles* as I did growing up.

 

However, the logical cost of handing control over to people with paint on their brains is... logic. Not that the kid-friendly Warframe was ever much on coherent plots (relying entirely on "a space wizard did it" for its phlebotina and motivations) but this latest oneiric fantasy really piles on the kamehameha moments where the hero overcomes superior foes BY.SHEER.FORCE.OF.WILLLLL!!! and couches it all in a mindscape where emotions are reality yadda-yadda navel-gazing journey to the center of the mindless bloviating.

Which reminds me: enough with the damn genie plots. You know the ones I mean: hero seeks wish-granting macguffin or lands in a dimension where thought becomes reality, discovers the pitfalls of absolute power and the whole thing inevitably factors down to a bimillennially-outdated morality play on hubris and purity of heart. Sure, it's one of the great classic yarn hooks, but much like the schizophrenic "villain was myself all along" twist or superhero pugilism, over the past couple of decades various media have simply driven the precept so far into the ground it would take a tectonic event to dredge up its appeal again. Genie plots were clever enough when Stanislaw Lem and Philip K. Dick were doing them back in 1970, and retained a kick up to the turn of the millennium Serial Experiments Lain / Planescape: Torment era. Now the returns have long since diminished to nothing. Give it a rest. That routine's naught but a symptom of postmodernist rot, the tedious, infantile self-gratification of two generations raised to believe they can remake reality just by screaming at it.

The same goes for the "emotions as real force" angle. Reality does not care one singular quark how you feel. No amount of self-esteem or prayer will ever turn a lump of copper, sand and petroleum into a cellphone. Everything we've gained, everything we can do as modern apes, we owe to the application of cold-blooded reason to twist the unbreakable mechanics of objective reality into a medium conducive to intellect, which is personal existence itself. Emotion is an evolutionary holdover and its management imperative to our development, but its glorification holds such mass appeal precisely because the masses are incapable of developing. Stop feeding the anti-intellectual jihad.

 

It's not like you can't find worthy counterpoints even among children's literature:

"in their hearts they knew that the troubling world lay just outside"

I'd never heard of A Series of Unfortunate Events before the movie came out, so can't speak for the books. I did have a chance to re-watch it recently (love the atmosphere) and was struck by its lamentably unique attitude among modern media toward thought. Where the villain of most stories is a mad scientist, here he's a social manipulator and deceiver by trade. Emotional appeals are used to subvert otherwise competent adults to their doom. Reason and the application of natural laws yield life and freedom.

Yet was this an emotionless movie? Hell no. You'd need gumboots to wade through the schmaltz in some scenes. But it contextualizes the management of one's internal state as tool for interacting with the physical world, NOT as replacement for it. Avoiding self-deception is paramount. Solutions are to be found in reality, not wishful thinking. Learn as much as you can, be aware of your environment, be skeptical, make connections. Don't make believe, believe what is made clear.

 

Millions of children loved such stories without being traumatized by them. Why is that so hard for the rest of you?

 

 

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* Leafing through his image galleries now, I realize Michael Whelan was responsible for quite a few of my youth's most memorable images. Damn man, good work.

Alien Sandscape

I can't help but think there's a SF story in this one.

It's Lake Michigan, if you're wondering

Biomes separated by shade and light exposure? Of course if you want to scale it up to planetary size you'd have to dream up some physics to support those overhangs. Low grav planet probably. Does igneous stone shear off more or less than sedimentary? Maybe a Hadean low-grav planet? But then you'd also have to justify that large-scale erosion. Acid flows? And what should I translate the ice/sand mix into? Guess ice can stay ice. Ice ice babies? Ice babies vs. cave babies at war? At first contact? Might play nicely into the dark/light contrast. Maybe the sheltered zones should be warmer than the icy surface? Oooooh, I like that: hot Archean low-grav planet bleeding heat into space, Hadean flows freshly eroded, sparse ecosystems, fudge the selective pressures a bit for multicellular life (sulfur atmosphere instead of oxygen? may be an unnecessary stretch metabolically) heat comes from below, cold light vs. warm cozy darkness, maybe cold intellectual light vs. warm cozy primitivist darkness, should humans come in? Representing what? Juxtaposed to what? Maybe preternaturally fast invaders due to more efficient oxygen metabolism? And strong due to Earth grav being stronger?

I'm sorry, when did I start brainstorming?

Well, whatever comes of this, it can't turn out worse than Deliver.

"Discern the Twin Shadows of Selfishness and of Fickleness"

"Shoot myself to love you

If I loved myself I'd be shooting you"

 

Marilyn Manson - Fundamentally Loathsome

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"Of course! Greek and Hebrew are mere play to a heroine; Sanscrit is no more than a b c to her; and she can talk with perfect correctness in any language, except English. She is a polking polyglot, a Creuzer in crinoline. Poor men. There are so few of you who know even Hebrew; you think it something to boast of if, like Bolingbroke, you only “understand that sort of learning and what is writ about it” and you are perhaps adoring women who can think slightingly of you in all the Semitic languages successively."

 

George Eliot - Silly Novels by Lady Novelists (1856)

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"Does she know my film isn't a musical?"

"She has this theory that deep down, every film is a musical."

 

Ozy and Millie - 2007-02-02

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(Note: Spoilers should be minor except for Blade Runner 2049.)

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On a lazy, sunny spring Sunday, methought instead of... okay, in addition to playing games, let's watch a movie. Being a sucker for space colonization, let's try The Colony. That would be The Colony from 2021, not The Colony from 2015... or The Colony from 2013... or the one from 2007... or 1996, or 1995 or y'know, hang on a sec:

"plantation, outpost, territory, camp, protectorate, habitation, diaspora, dependency, possession, post, mandate, exclave" - and that's just from Merriam Webster's online thesaurus. What'cha got against "exclave"? "The Exclave" would make an amazing movie title!

Anyhoo, "Tides" as it's also known looks decent if disjointed for its first few minutes. A space colony space crew consisting of a male, a female and a male corpse crashland on a desolated Earth in the future among storm-wracked mud flats. Striking sparse scenery.

Hope you enjoyed the movie.

Then they're captured by natives and the remaining, injured male cyanides himself so as not to slow the woman down. Yeah. You can probably tell where this is going, and you've seen this musical a thousand times before. The heroine displays superiority over the first new man she meets, is spared from death by a little girl who is then kidnapped by evil men. Then the heroine teams up with another heroine (the little girl's mother) against an evil man and his evil male second in command, summarily seduce and kill the second, find the main heroine's useless failure of a father, shoot, stab and beat up various male redshirts and vanquish The Man! All rendered in state of the art, dimly lit, fog machined, foot fetishist jittercam montages. For the most concise synopsis of the whole mess, try the cusp of the story, a woman's line "he made us into his family" delivered with the same emotive heft and vector as "in space no-one can hear you scream" and conveying every expectation that the audience should view this as the ultimate condemnation of villainy.

If expecting a primitivist angle to match the feminist, Tides shan't disappoint. See, the space colony can't have the space babies 'cuz space rays. The natives can breed but have fallen back on bronze age / Thunderdome tech. The colonists' return is treated as unthinkably calamitous and to be prevented at all costs, despite representing the only realistic chance at rebuilding civilization. Naturally anyone who thinks the star trekking keepers of the sum of human knowledge would run a better mud flat than a gaggle of utterly ignorant, rapidly degenerating simian dregs must be a space-nazi kidnapping little girls as sex slaves. There is no middle ground!

Not like those nubile young maidens would ever want central heating or food that's not laden with nematodes.

Or an epidural.

 

Somethin' off about all that. Was it the mud flats? Well then switch to ice flats.

 

(Two) Against the Ice is an adaptation of the real-life account of a ca.1910 Greenland expedition. As the title indicates, it boasts no less than two main men and lots of ice. Not the best executed flick, as it presents episodic events journal-style,  consistently failing to build up or exploit each happening's practical or emotional impact. Nevertheless it plays well enough on the sourdough and greenhorn's conflicting personalities and their resilience in some of the direst straits on the planet. The two men pass the time mooning after a picture of the graduating class of Schoolmarm U., brave privation, loneliness, the pitiless elements, wild peril and despair to earn their happy ending. For the finale, a historic love interest welcomes them back to civilization. The men greet her with choked, heartfelt anticipation and respectively respectful acquaintanceship.

 

Still, not satisfying. I mean, aside from passively obstructive Danish bureaucracy it even lacks villains. Let's see, villains, villains, where can we find some more villains... I know, demons!

While Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous improved noticeably in writing quality over its predecessor, Kingmaker, it still stumbled in its interpretation of alignments and twisted its characterization in knots struggling to pander to snowflake idiocy, most visibly in its infuriating roster of NPC companions. Take Ember, a cloyingly cutesy little brat gifted of such charisma as to be able to turn bad people to the side of good by no more erudite or structured an argument than telling them to be good. This includes creatures that are literally evil incarnate, like demons. It even includes one of the multiverse's greatest forces of evil, Nocticula, who also happens to be female. We're even explicitly told Nocticula's male peers Deskari and Baphomet fail where she succeeds, just to drive that point home. Just to drive that point homier, on your way to convert the demon queen you meet some lesser demons. The ones with tits see the light and turn to good. Those beyond redemption just happen to be male.

ARE YOU GETTING THE VERY SUBTLE MESSAGE HERE!?!

Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra.

The spoken or implied rationale behind such overt misandry runs something like balancing the cosmic karma. We must, simply must bash men at every turn to counterbalance all that abuse of women from older works. ORLY? quoth the wolfe, nose to ancient trails. What warrants such retribution in our power fantasies? Is it because Rodney Dangerfield complained his wife (among others) gives him no respect back in the '70s? When he said "take my wife, please" did I miss the part where he said "take her apart an inch at a time with a chainsaw" and is that meant to equivalate to Milla Jovovich hacking asunder men by the hundreds as the titular Evils in Residence? Stacked up against even a single year of filmographic feminism, how many flicks can you remember, ever, in which men are all brilliant, hypercompetent, beneficent martyrs righteously and effortlessly triumphing against woman after woman who are all nothing but filthy, sadistic, bumbling, useless, destructive, moronic slags? How many TV series really applaud men for beating down women? How many books? Comic books? Games? How many songs, paintings, temples. Limericks? Can you not even locate the windmill from which you claim to be rescuing us all?

Old folk tales ran on a simple premise: bogey-men threaten our tribe's status quo; summon the plucky young prince/farmboy/farm-prince to vanquish them. The protagonist was almost always male... and so was the villain. The princess mostly sat around doing nothing, but nobody argued the a priori assumption that she deserved rescue (plus a crown) for sitting around doing nothing. Women later demanded bigger roles in such stories... but only as heroines. They kept the undeserved crown. Villains must stay male, and women must always be shown as superior in every possible way over men. It's not like the market for such tripe just opened up now, either. George Eliot ranted mid-19th-century in reaction to the extant (and unchallenged) proliferation of inane Mary Sues. Even stories like Against the Ice which ostensibly concern men return constantly to men idealizing and pining for women... whereas in the far more popular Colonies, a heroine is one who racks up the highest male body count.

And what's men's rejoinder? Fire back? Girls stink, boys rule? Perish the thought. Wouldn't be gentlemanly, wot?

Allow us, mistresses, but a meek intimation that three years in Northern Greenland may be preferable to putting up with your shit. The polar bears are gentler company.

 

While not commonly going this route, masculine adventure stories can take place beyond the boundaries of family units. A lone explorer or band of brothers set out into the great unknown, battle wild men or just the wild itself and discover something amazing. Women's presence is not required. You're free to go off and do your own thing (except you don't want your own thing, you want our thing to be yours.) The Hobbit is an exemplary such story within the young adult variety, and in its treatment by Hollywood you can see how much the female power fantasy is threatened by independence. It had to be taken over by women. It needed a Tauriel to bask in admiration, and women shaming men for not being manly enough.

Where male protagonists can act independently, female fantasies absolutely require the presence of men as scapegoats and punching bags. If you'd like to see why, take a look at two last films. Blade Runner 2049 is the story of a man scraping and suffering through an entire plot only to be told at the end almost verbatim: what, did you think you get to be the hero, no, you exist to do all the work so the princess who's been living in safety this whole time takes credit. Mad Max: Fury Road more blatantly pushed its angelic females at the mercy of a cruel ugly male and the titular character himself sidelined by a new heroine. Take special notice though of Nux the third wheel, derided for being disposable cannon fodder in service of the villain ("just a war boy at the end of his half-life") but who is allowed to redeem himself by... becoming disposable cannon fodder in service of women, which is obviously better.

 

#KillAllMen is a smokescreen. Dead slaves are unproductive. The idea is rather to fabricate a life debt to women, men being possessed of some primordial guilt, some original sin to be expiated only by surrendering their lives to the fairer sex. The central message of feminist media is not only the endlessly reiterated "man bad, woman good" but that men's lives are women's to dispose of. Good men serve women. Evil men are against women. And there is No. Middle. Ground. No independence, no individuality. Men are to be permitted nothing of their own. The results are so predictable you can call the final boss fight by level 2: thanks for building up the kingdom and taking all the risks and blame, now let a queen take over. Seeing how many popular old geek staples were taken over by feminists (Tolkien, Ghostbusters remade with all-female cast, Thor-ette, etc.) sets one wondering if women are basically Morgoth: an impulsively avaricious force capable only of perverting their counterparts' creativity toward their own self-aggrandizement, spawning endless tortured and twisted devolved mockeries to plague our cultural wasteland.

They will take endlessly until there is nothing left of you. Stop giving. If Mikkelsen and Iversen really did spend their Greenland sojourn staring at a picture of women, leave that out of the story just as you leave out their bathroom habits and snoring. Your life is not hers. The princess' fate is not your responsibility, rando' farm-prince. Outgrow the primitive fairytale of going down to hell and back (Journey to the Center of the Earth jumps to mind) only to justify yourself as suitable mate.

 

Know one classic SF yarn that called it truer than most? You've heard its name, you know the basic plot, but likely have never read the original:

The Lost World, by Arthur Conan Doyle

We open with the narrator almost literally called to adventure by his intended, who turns down his marriage proposal because only a man of great achievement would be worthy of her. So off he schleps to wrestle dinosaurs on her whim. Upon his successful return from prehistory to the lands of the living, she greets him with utter coldness, having already married... some nondescript solicitor's clerk. We end on the following note:

 

"I'll use my own [share of the loot]" said Lord John Roxton, "in fitting a well-formed expedition and having another look at the dear old plateau. As to you, young fellah, you, of course, will spend yours in gettin' married."
"Not just yet," said I, with a rueful smile. "I think, if you will have me, that I would rather go with you."
Lord Roxton said nothing, but a brown hand was stretched out to me across the table.

I am the king of underachieve

Age of Wonders 4

"Opfer dich
Erfüll der Götter Plan"

 

Erdling - Weißglut

 

 

Having bought yet another of their inevitably DLC-riddled games at release price, I may as well admit I've somehow become Paradox's bitch. Frog boobs aside though, I've been quite enjoying Age of Wonders 4. Triumph Studios has benefited greatly from their partnership.

 

That should read "surroundings" but far be it from me to nitpick.

(Also, "master this realm" would flow better than "become the master of this realm".)

(But as everyone knows, I'm not one to criticize.)

 

As per my Noldorin leanings I evenly mixed myself an elven nature / astral empire and dove right into a couple of plays through a grassland-rich continent world, then a coastal desert. My first impression was that AoW now looks like a fully professional product, for better or worse.

The music's meh, relatively bland, but I guess not everything can be Nova Flare or Terratus or Dance of the Cryptek or Lord of the Dead. Or can it? Opinions vary.

In any case, the flavor text has improved.*

That chick cooing her way through the voiceovers knocks the Cate Blanchett impersonation out of the park, but it does get a bit monotonous, and incongruous for the various experts on / authors of magic tomes to speak in the same meditative, soothing female lilt regardless of whether you're summoning demons, traipsing through the astral plane, raising zombies, planting corn or smiting thine enemies with songs of ice and fire. Even if you only hired the one voice, you could've directed her better.

The interface is now fully modernized and fluid, complete with Civilopedia (thank you) toggled map markers, minimap and pointer zooming and taking a page from the likes of Stellaris and Old World in cross-referencing and nesting tooltips even more smoothly on mouseover:

For strategy games with mountains of information to consider, this ain't nothin'! Nonetheless, some corners seem to have been cut, like the tired old scrolling through gigantic unsorted, inexplicative lists and submenus:

Nowhere near as bad as Stellaris' species window, mind you

Also took me a while to figure out manually setting province expansion, and I had to ask DuckDuckGo where to find the "disband unit" button (upper right in its detailed info page, damn-nigh invisible, at least on small interface scale.) They also desperately need some more visible sort of marker or reminder about pillaged provinces (something like Old World's timer icons?) because as it stands I forget to rebuild them for dozens of turns. In an unexpectedly amateurish twist worthy of quasi-vaporware like Crossroads Keep, autosave also lacks any customization, saving every turn or not at all and not even allowing you to delete individual turns, to where after just two matches I've already overshot my GoG sync limit of half a gig. Still, overall, movement, construction, spellcasting, pretty much everything flows very smoothly.

Actual gameplay has moderately improved, but also makes some unnecessary concessions.

 

Adding an expansion-limiting resource called Imperium (roughly equivalent to Stellaris' Influence) plays nicely into gold/mana maintenance (do NOT go three cities over your limit like I did, you've been warned) and props up the game's best facet, smoother escalation. Ever since HoMM and Civ were in diapers, TBS have struggled to balance their neutral or "barbarian" factions, often either overpowered early on or too soon trivialized.** I've seen more modern 4X like Stellaris and Old World work toward smoothing out that transition. AoW4 I'd say trumps them in this department, building on its predecessor Planetfall's use of goodie guards, spawners and dungeons with more interactive outposts and independent towns plus a competitive reputation / vassalage system transitioning pretty seamlessly toward end-game army clashes. Kudos.

 

Those clashes themselves, however, have lost some strategy. While the new siege options and 1-radius town walls add a bit of depth, for some unfathomable reason Triumph decided to throw out the hex adjacency jockeying for position from previous titles which allowed multi-army hordes to chew each other apart from the edges, flank an enemy army with fast harrassers to split them up, or prioritize units in-combat based on angles of approach.

Now the combat map generator seems to just autoselect <=3 armies on each side randomly from within 3 hexes (the ones with highlighted flags above) and sticks them on opposite sides of the battlefield no matter their initial approach. Whether it interfered with the new, larger cities, or they couldn't teach their AI how to maximize placement, or they simply decided to go the more idiot-friendly route for "accessibility" I couldn't tell you, but cutting this feature spells a large step down from Planetfall.

 

They've also similarly oversimplified offensive spellcasting and protection from same. Instead of Planetfall's opposed "operation strength" skill check, a spell jammer now completely prevents all enemy spellcasting in its city's range. Granted, being a province upgrade it can be pillaged, improving the niche for camouflaged raiding, but it's too flat an all-or-nothing proposition.

 

I'm also not crazy about how unit purchasing/upgrades are handled.

 

Still worth it.

Enamored as I was of Planetfall's rudimentary modular design (or Fallen Enchantress' for that matter (or Alpha Centauri's for that matterer matter)) I resent regressing to merely casting global upgrades affecting all units of certain types. It might work well in conjunction with modular units (don't cast a battlemage offense buff if you build them for support casting, etc.) but as a standalone feature there's basically no reason NOT to cast every single buff possible. Their upkeep scales with number of units affected so it doesn't go to waste unless your units are idle, which they shouldn't be. Even the more exorbitant buff spells are offset by reducing attrition among your veterans. Not much strategy here.

Dual town production output for buildings and units makes sense (getting to be a 4X standard) but doesn't mesh well with AoW's existing emphasis on multiple unit acquisition routes, themselves amplified for #4. Neutral / vassal unit purchases are now combined into the Rally of the Lieges, but I've found it for the most part extraneous to my own production... aside from a couple of ogres to beef up my spindly elves' front line. It just overlaps too much.

Compounding the issue further, you store strategic spells for instant casting as in Planetfall, but where Planetfall limited summons to low-tier fodder, AoW4 duplicates #3's top-tier unit summoning. Combined, this means instantly summoning entire top-tier armies to the front line at a moment's notice, trivializing much of an offensive's buildup.

 

All this overlap boils down to a tech tree significantly wider than it is deep. Intended to offer replay value, in any but the shortest playthroughs it yields a multitude of interchangeable units / nukes / buildings with little practical difference. Note the mage above suffers from the usual +5 everything problem homogenizing damage types. While Planetfall wasn't great about this (few or no games are) it more successfully differentiated between mechanical / biological or electrical / burning or armor melting / shield bypass mods. Here you'll rarely see an enemy (e.g. golem) making you consider your damage type.

 

Granted, my Noldorin playstyle skews my perception on several previous points: heavy on mana, range and food, light on production, melee and cash. That skew itself should count as a positive feature. Where individual units have lost some personality, "affinities" (i.e. classes) have gained some. Nothing says old elf magic quite like a march of the ents:

Sustainable tree-herding. Hippie catnip.

 

Combine Nature's stronger mana-dependent instant armies and visibility through all forests with Astral mana production and teleportation and you get a faction that might look weak but can telefrag an enemy's capital across the map while he's busy trying to shift the front line. Six affinities give a decent spread to mix-and-match, redundancy admitted.

 

Though dungeons are now somewhat disappointingly pared down (uniformly single-turn, two-step events) they've at least ditched the pointless all-purpose archeology skill and now not only check for your possession of a skill but incorporate your affinity level in an opposed check (and, visually, just for funsies, show your army composition):

 

Fear my horned god and bone wyvern mount and also guy #3!

So while the dungeoneering angle's currently underdeveloped, it definitely retains room to grow. (Hint-hint, Triumph. Hint-freakin'-hint.)

 

You'll also see small but meaningful steps forward in a number of side-details. I've been wanting to see terraforming worked back into these games since the original incarnation of Elemental: War of Magic (or more aptly since Alpha Centauri) and AoW4 makes a minimal effort of it, with some affinities recasting provinces to suit their terrain bonuses. (Nature gets a twofer: grasslands AND forests.)

Most healing spells now also give only temporary in-combat hit points, removing the tedium of entering combat just to heal your units and increasing attrition on longer forays away from your borders.

Those all-important combat terrain features match or improve upon Planetfall's showing, for instance with brush that can confer a ranged defense bonus and also be set on fire for a burning DoT, reminiscent of D:OS.

 

What can I conclude? I don't entirely agree with some of their design direction, but nonetheless can't deny AoW4 is an improved and fun mix of personizable strategy. And since I shilled out ninety bucks for an expansion pass you'd damn well better build on this shit, you tulip-munching swindlers!

 

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* I'd say more about the flavor texts and general mood now, but I'm saving it for a comparison with Sunless Sea, Fallout 2, KC:D, etc.

** I really think more games should be taking a page from Alpha Centauri, scaling the neutral faction's or environment's threat level all the way to existential along a campaign's length.

Fantitsy Gaming

Anyone else think it's weird that game designers now spend half their time pandering to the self-important fops pretending they've transcendended biological sex (the "theys") ... and the other half still forcing sexual dimorphism where it really, really shouldn't apply?

 

Really. What the hell am I looking at?

 

The 2 wonders of Age of Wonders 4.

 

The real kicker is that it would've been easier for them to just use one character model for both croaker sexes, and no-one in the audience could've claimed to know the difference anyway.

 

Can these boobs* get any more ridiculous?

Of course they can!

from D:OS2

 

What are those? What is even under that garment? Is she fostering a pair of hedgehogs on her bleached rib cage?

 

Oh, gods below and above, I recant, just leave it at frog boobs!

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* Pun very much intended.

P.S.:

Lest we forget the giant tentacled worm with glowing nipples.

Cowboy Bebop: You All Meet in a Tavern

Though I'd watched the show in order from beginning to end at least one full run, I'd forgotten an unusual detail: Ed, the cast's most obvious source of comic relief, only shows up in episode 9 of 26. Not to say Cowboy Bebop lacked humor until then, but it relied on the three more important cast members poking fun at themselves or each other, or bit players in Stray Dog Strut, Gateway Shuffle and Heavy Metal Queen, all relatively lighthearted to offset the heavier installments. You can see this most obviously in Ballad of Fallen Angels, the start of Bebop's core dramatic arc, where it falls to Faye to lighten the mood at least marginally by stumbling around handcuffed with her tits ready to pop out of her marvelously impractical evening gown - and to absorb the punchline. The comic relief's arrival frees the core three to shift toward bleaker plots, with the very next episode, #10, diving into jilted Jet's backstory.

 

I would certainly expect late arrivals in a longer series. When you're playing with thousands of pages of fantasy epic or decades' worth of comic books, dropping heroes in and out of the adventuring party is expected. Conversely, a formerly minor TV series basking in unexpected success will add to its roster as the seasons wear on. But a show scripted for exactly one season should logically have crammed the main cast into the first episode and most episodes after that, whether to tantalize the audience with the series' full spectrum of possibilities or to maximize their bought and paid for character designs and animation, or just because the cast wouldn't function split off from each other, every character being a flat hero / jokester / love interest / plucky ingenue / mascot / nerd / sex symbol / antihero, all relying on the others to spout their inane catchphrases to form some semblance of conversation.

One result of spacing out the entrances is that Cowboy Bebop's core trio get more time to be goofy, relaxed, and generally at home before they're required to crank up the pathos. They're far more multifaceted than expected, with Hard Luck Woman counting as one of the few times I've ever truly improved my opinion of a fictional character.

Another is that you would never quite be sure (opening credits aside) which new faces are here to stay. I noted the tragic damsel from the very first episode was teased for a good ten minutes as a possible addition. Faye herself looks like a comic relief one-shot in episode #3 and only joins the crew in #4. The eager young martial artist from Waltz for Venus again looks ready to fill the plucky comic relief role exactly one episode before Ed shows up. Spike and Faye are simply left to linger in the audience's imagination as the default power couple until late in the series.

 

In overall effect, the visible universe is not bounded by the protagonists' adventure. There really is no designated five-man band with fixed roles. Comings and goings are part of life not bookends to it, and the immensity of the world is left to weigh more poignantly upon our semi-competent underdogs. But we'll have to talk about the cyberpunk angle next time.

Cat'sCradoodledoo

I was in time to catch the pre-dawn chorus today, and must say that:

1) It's amazing that something so mundane and irrelevant can lend such a feeling of rightness to the world.

2) I know lots of songbird species should have onomatopoeic names, but much like constellations you pretty much have to take grandma's word on it that it really makes the image or word she says it does. Either my feathered neighbours need to enunciate better or they're not saying "chick-a-dee" any more than those trapezoids look like the giant Orion.

Fabricatus Inquisitorum!

"[Religion] meant that an ignorant, stupid lout who seldom bathed and planted his corn by the phase of the moon could claim to know the final answers of the universe. That entitled him to look down his nose at everybody else."

 

Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

 

 

Last year when Johnny Depp managed to avoid getting lynched I cautioned that such an over-hyped, symbolic victory over politically correct thuggery meant nothing so long as Depp keeps making movies in which he gets slapped by random women to proclaim he deserves it. He contributed more than his own share to shaping the culture which presumed him guilty for being born the wrong sex. Take that conclusion, square it, and you'll arrive at how I view J.K. Rowling being blacklisted for "transphobia" in stating the most blatantly, benignly factual observation that plastic surgery and hormone shots (or more commonly, simple opportunistic pretense) do not erase half a billion years of evolution.

 

It was a few months into this blog that I threw a brief critical glimpse at young adult fiction born of the self-esteem movement, citing a widening gulf between stories like Ender's Game or the Heinlein so-called-juveniles in which youths triumph via superior cleverness or erudition, sacrificing and suffering along the way, and the new '90s/2000s breed of more widely identifiable (read: lowest common denominator idiot-friendly) protagonists stumbling to success on nondescript magical specialness, more often than not openly flouting the necessary primacy of reasoning ability, the defining measure of existence itself.

Rowling justified and in no small part created the generation of overentitled snots now responsible for her own ostracism. Even five years ago I remarked snowflakes' puerile cliquishness is driven not only by the ever-present instinct to gang up against others but by an internal fear of being discovered as ordinary, by a self-hypnotic denial of their own inadequacies. Where a personal grasp of science, philosophy and the general workings of reality fails to bear out their mommies' and schoolteachers' promises that each and every one of them is the best in the world, self-affirmation as members of an elite social group (be it racial, sexual, dietary, whatever) may at least temporarily assuage their bloated expectations. It doesn't take a cryptologist to decipher the link between that and entering adolescence with the expectation of incipient wizardly powers instead of a drive to acquire astronaut knowledge.

 

At least the X-Men learned to fly a plane, damnit.

The snowflakes have established their own myriad Hogwartses, schools of thought deriding thought in favor of guaranteed existential superiority over straight/white/male muggles. Every sub-sapient piece of genetic filth whose idea of personal worth reaches no farther than its own gonads can now hold itself superior to the world's foremost minds by declaring itself a "they" magical in some intrinsic, unanalyzed, indefinable fashion.

Enjoy the fairy dust backwash, Rowling.

Do you ever wonder what pretext they'll use to murder you?