Baldur's Gate 3: The Stakes

"Your Achilles' heel
Is a tendency
To dream"

R.E.M. - All the Way to Reno

Baldur's Gate 3's supposedly slated for release (finally!) at the start of autumn. I enjoyed but am not such a great fan of the series (Planescape: Torment being markedly more memorable) as to be too personally invested. However, make no mistake, regardless of your personal opinion of BG1&2, a lot is riding on BG3's success. Decent tactical, narrative, choice-heavy cRPGs are a rare bird, and in contrast to other old genres like pixelated roguelikes or point-and-click adventure games, they cannot survive on occasional garage projects. Kudos to Iron Tower, but it hasn't really lent the same renewed legitimacy to RPGs on the whole that Wadjet Eye lent to 2D detective ventures. As for Owlcat, everything about their two showings thus far appears strained at every seam.

 

Neverwinter Nights launched along with the Inifnity Engine's last gasp in 2002-2003. For more than a decade afterwards developers piled onto the overcrowded "action" bandwagon with Diablo-style hack'n'slashers and Elder Scrolls copycats, rarely peppered with true RPGs like NWN2 and Dragon Age. Not until 2014-16 did RPGs see a revival with Divinity: Original Sin, Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland 2, Tides of Numenera, Tyranny, Dragonfall... but it didn't last. By 2018-2020, two anticipated titles which should have kept the trend going, PoE2:Deadfire and Wasteland 3, both stagnated or outright tanked in quality, thanks to a combination of over-reach, confused design priorities and misconceived political activism. With that, the Black Isle old guard and their proteges were scavenged by the all-devouring void of Microsoft and have ceased to be relevant.

The major problem has been spelled out numerous times: in terms of production costs vs. payoff, true RPGs* fall into a no man's land focused on a small minority of intelligent gamers demanding complexity, but requiring massive content development work-hour investment which in turn mandates mass appeal to boost sales, which means idiot appeal. The main way to dodge that is under the umbrella of a large company willing to invest in a small amount of artistic legitimacy to balance out its brand image. This is basically the service Black Isle Studios provided to an increasingly stagnant Interplay and Bioware to Electronic Arts. On the flip-side, large companies strangle creativity by their very lowest-common-denominator nature, so will excise any content the least bit controversial, or novel... or interesting... yielding role-playing in name only. As soon as they purchase quality, the EAs and Microsofts murder it.

There's an alternate route, name recognition, staking out the geek niche and giving them reason to support you directly, which is basically how Troika Games managed to stay afloat as long as it did and finally produce a true masterpiece, buggy as it was; crowdfunding also gave us the short-lived RPG revival in 2015. But for this to work, we come back to that all-important word: legitimacy. Fans have to actually believe that "role-playing" means something. If all you can deliver is fireball-slinging or dice rolls and force-fed, one-sided, infantile "woke" propaganda, you have irreparably poisoned the well. After several big-name flops, Baldur's Gate 3 now represents the genre's saving throw, and a failure will likely drag RPGs down to the level of garage projects, hoping beyond hope for a Vagrus or Age of Decadence once a decade.

And, sadly, from everything I've heard about BG3, it will flop. Maybe not as badly as Siege of Dragonspear. Maybe not financially. Our many nostalgic preorders may have already put Larian in the black. But the simple fact that it utilizes D&D5e, with all the oversimplification and wishy-washiness that implies, bodes ill for its legitimacy as role-playing, and aside from "looks pretty" none of the other chatter around it has sounded encouraging. Quite the opposite.

So.

Having made the mistake of preordering the damn thing years ago, I might as well roll up a placeholder character, finally take a look at the early access teaser and try to guess whether the end product will have been worth my cash. Let's see how badly Larian's about to screw the Cerberus.

 

 

 

 

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* For the genre's importance and appeal, simply look at how many other genres try to call themselves RPGs without delivering that gameplay: everything from "kill ten rats ten times daily" MMOs to two-button browser games, to roguelikes and squad management, to linear 2D adventure games, to Diablo clones, all desperately counterfeit the RPG label to purloin themselves that all-important legitimacy.

This is your brain on feminism

Bill Maher recently balked at the current trial against Donald Trump paying hush-money to a prostitute. No matter the legal pretext, this is obviously a condemnation of sex. The man enjoyed. Burn him! Maher warns it won't work any more than it did to bury Bill Clinton twenty years ago, but feigns amazement at this chosen angle of attack which will likely only strengthen Trump's public image. Well, yeah, no shit, it's all they know how to do any more. For closing on a decade now our society has mainstreamed and perfected the nearly sure-fire way to take any man down by employing a woman, any woman, in accusing him of something, anything sexual.

 

Now why does this all sound familiar? Oh yeah... several years ago I ranted on Maher's jabs at Trump during the 2016 campaign, which like every other media figure's fixated obsessively on sex, on painting Trump as a sexual predator. Where did the left wing learn how to pursue this line of attack? You, alright? They learned it by watching you, daddy Bill!

The Pale Blue Eye

We really should be past the primitive cultural stage of fictionalizing/mythologizing historical figures by now. At the very least, the "Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter" genre of stories needs to die... about several years before such idiocy was penned. So first I sneered at The Pale Blue Eye, then wondered what Christian Bale's been doing lately, then thought it looked low key enough not to infuriate me, and maybe an old-fashioned spooky gothic mystery would just about hit the spot, and oh hey, Agent Scully's in it! (And she acquits herself well!)

In fact, the acting in general might be the movie's high point. Florid at times, but then again much like The Crucible it depicts a time and place of florid mindsets. If you don't think Edgar Allan Poe would be that affected, well, historical records disagree, and by historical records I mean the man could go twenty pages on the topic of French draperies, and no, that's not a euphemism. Harry Melling (a.k.a. the stump from Buster Scruggs) (or Dudley Dursley, a name I was happy not to know until now) does an admirable job as the youthfully feisty version of Poe. I thought the performance a bit one-sided until realizing the other half, the bitter, hypercritical drunk, was reflected in the fictitious Landor. Having myself cited or alluded to Landor's Cottage twice or thrice here and always considered it one of Poe's underappreciated tales, an exemplary use of deliberate anticlimax, that character name itself earned my appreciation.

 

But the anticlimax here is not deliberate. Which is to say it's deliberate, but misconceived. Gradually, the second half loses steam. The social scenes drag. The florid drama veers into outright camp. And the denouement, though obviously intended to wring crocodile tears out of the audience, is by now so overused - the one greatest crime, the one unforgivable crime, the one crime which absolutely obsesses our society, the special kind of evil, and if you know which one I'm talking about, well, case-in-point - so overused as to reduce an otherwise workable period piece to a trite little public service announcement reiterated a hundred times a day by every Hollywood hack desperate for unquestioned moral high ground.

 

Pity. It could've been great.

 

Though, really, given Poe's real-life mode of parting with the military, maybe the pivotal denouncement scene an hour and ten minutes into things explains the movie's very existence. It certainly made the experience worthwhile.

 

To quote (and mildly spoil):

 

"I do believe that the Academy takes away a young man's will. It fences him with regulations and rules, deprives him of reason. It makes him less. human!"

"Are you implying the Academy is to blame for these deaths?"

"Someone connected to the Academy, yes, hence the Academy itself."

"Well, that's absurd. By your standard, every crime committed by a Christian will be a stain on Christ!"

"And so it is."

Ah, beautiful. For that scene, much is forgiven.

Sacred Fire

((Faith and the Muse - Arianrhod) Arianrhod)

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Vanquishing Roman legions by the power of positive thinking!

 

Ah, so many quips, so little time, where to start?

Maybe with the title? Sacred Fire: A Role-Playing Game! Branding like that always sounds like buying a pizza proclaiming "assuredly edible food nourishment" right on the package. I can just see the sequels lining up: :Another RPG and :Yet Another RPG.

 

Sacred Fire, a 2D adventure/RPG hybrid about tribal resistance to Roman expansion, came out in '21 as "early access". I bought it a year later, hedging my purchase with the noble enterprise of promoting such projects even if this representative proves bad in itself, only to discover it still unfinished. But, if I'm willing to wait for Colony Ship to crank out its last zones, in the interest of fairness I gritted my teeth and gave Sacred Fire another year... only to now discover at the end of chapter 12 that it's still unfinished. Ah, indie gaming. Such occasional fun.

Nevertheless, I did give its current showing a fair shake, approximating my usual support caster role, which in this case involves casting both arrows and aspersions.

Despite its flaws and relative brevity, Sacred Fire, though not quite as memorable as Strangeland, is still worth its asking price for sheer density. I traversed its existing content (about 2/3 of the intended total?) in one breathless seven-hour dive, and can see myself replaying it in full. Not to say I didn't nearly uninstall at the very first scene, coming out as it did strong in politically correct idiocy with a warrior princess butchering men by the bushel. Or, later, this little gem:

^ particularly funny because that line about the damsel not needing your protection (you filthy presumably male presumably chauvinist presumably pig) immediately segues into an entire chapter about protecting her from an arranged marriage.*

You can expect a smatter of other standard SJW nonsense, notably the emphasis placed on the Romans as slavers, stemming from the naive viewpoint of The Empire as default baddies, juxtaposed with the usual noble savage, salt of the earth, plucky rebel tripe. This despite your character's possible origins including Celts, who liberally traded their own slaves to the Romans, and Nords, who rather infamously raided all of their neighbours for slaves for much of their history. (Hint: the word "thrall" was not invented by Blizzard Entertainment.)

 

As usual though, feminism benefitting from a majority of the population as default audience, it occupies most of the bigoted pandering, and here's where I have to give the folks at Poetic some credit. They included exactly one token good man and exactly one token bad woman in their story, which is more than you'll see in other entertainment these days. The rest? Saintly mother, plucky clever little orphan girl, hypercompetent swordswoman, erudite and charming healer and bow-woman, stalwart and politically savvy queen... vs. violent father, bumbling orphan boy, thieving cheating orphan boy, braindead thug, sadistic commander, idiot treasonous king, sociopathic Machiavellian raider king, etc. There's hints of a second good male among the Romans. Fingers crossed, but I'd bet on him being revealed as morally compromised somehow.

In a larger sense, while the ancient village politics inevitably recall King of Dragon Pass, Sacred Fire lacks all but the barest hint of that more respectable game's awareness of tribal customs and dynamics, or the intrinsic, impulsive pettiness of human behavior. Even when they're not spewing romance novel drivel, characters simply do not come across as anything other than idealized 21st-century yuppies LARPing.

However...

Sacred Fire also shares KoDP's take on consistently imbuing obscurantism with narrative payoffs to keep gameplay flowing, maintaining a bit of mystery without punishing the player for lacking foreknowledge of the campaign. I would also be remiss not to admit that more than even big-ticket RPGs, it appeases some of my more strident demands from the genre, voiced here in the past.

RPGs are a middle ground between strategy and storytelling. They began as strategy wargames and still function best on that basis. Nevertheless, I make a distinction between RPGs and stat/squad management games. The roguelike random encounter dungeon crawl does not in itself constitute roleplaying. At the other extreme, neither do mere theatrics, declaring oneself performing deeds without some well-defined basis for success and failure and costly decisions.

 

That middle ground between storytelling adventure and plotless tactics was so far best approached by Torment: Tides of Numenera minimizing the grind, integrating noncombat options, timing attacks, lines of dialogue and environment interaction all on the same action ticks on the same playing field. From the other angle, where Gamedec failed so miserably at building up a linear adventure game campaign with character stats and branching choices... Sacred Fire largely succeeds. I've breezed past archery checks but died in two(?) fights so far where forced into toe-to-toe combat, fitting my stat choices, my support caster approach (boosting their confidence, increasing trust, etc.) at least superficially appears to have resulted in higher synergy with NPCs, and choices are carrying over to later chapters with pleasing frequency. Plus, through chapters 3-10 or so, after the introductions and before it starts sinking into Harlequin Romance theatrics, the wilderness adventure story's a hoppingly engaging little page-turner.

However again...

The stat system, while initially multifaceted, gradually boils down to either playing nice or playing mean (with a heavy push toward the former) and while the focus on "psychological" roleplaying is a welcome novelty, Sacred Fire overplays it by a degree of magnitude. The developers chose to utterly ignore practical knowledge (episteme and techne) in favor of emotional manipulation. Steady character development leading into pitched battle scenes makes a solid narrative pattern, but with all actions sharing a common action point pool I've found myself farming action points via dialogue to expend on combat. It just comes across as goofy. Whatever immersion you'd managed to build up goes out the window when my decidedly un-Conan-ish character manages to trounce veteran soldiers mano a mano... because yesterday I came to grips with my feelings of resentment toward Lucy pulling my football away, empathized with a completely unrelated character's love of dogs or leveled up my reassuring cooing skill. At least with old-fashioned XP, you could pretend you're channeling some abstract concept of practical experience toward focused training in your chosen skills and feats. You weren't directly leveraging the power of fee-fees into cranking up your kamehamehas. Primitive, instinctive codependence and wheedling is just parasitism.

 

Sacred Fire is... pretty decent, surprisingly so in its stat-dependent choose-your-own-adventure buildup of player actions, and well worth a look for anyone interested in the art of game design. Still, I do think its fans are over-hyping it, much as happened with Divinity: Original Sin, simply because it's a welcome novelty straddling two woefully ignored, thoughtful genres. The iron age setting never gels. The different mental blocks overlap too much in practice and encourage/soothe actions are overemphasized to the point I ended up relying on them despite starting in the exact opposite direction. Too much of Sacred Fire caters to parochial, navel-gazing, narcissistic snowflake twits who want to pretend their personal happiness underpins the very fabric of reality. Worthy attempt in its weight class, but it'll take more coldly rational developers to make good on adventure RPG hybrids.

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* I find unending hilarity in just how often the new mythology trips over its own propaganda.

Confession with the Vampire

"Let me say that when he'd finished speaking, no other decision was possible for me, and I pursued my course without a backward glance."

- Interview with the Vampire

 

Apparently yet another of my old childhood friends has degenerated into a full-on raving bible-thumper. This case in particular has no excuse, having benefited from the finest education money can buy. Well, no excuse but grief-induced brain damage. The background involves a death in the family, during the long-agonizing preamble of which they all tried everything... and when that failed, tried the utter nothing that is the supernatural. Post-mortem, my friend is now blaming everyone (inclusively) for having failed to do NOTHING hard enough. Not enough prayer sessions, not enough church visits, not enough faith, not enough monetary donations to the filthy parasitic charlatans selling false hope. Pretty sure even the deceased is catching some flak. Then again, scapegoating is a fine, time-honored religious tradition.

I won't even bother complaining that prayer didn't work. That was a given. Religion could do absolutely nothing to help illness, since by definition it offers nothing real. What the church can do though, and quite expertly, is torture a grieving family with pointless recrimination and a false sense of failure, and foment gratuitous strife when they're most desperate for stability and support. That, and bilk the bereaved for an extra donation here and there while they're at it.

Anne Rice went fame-crazy pretty fast, but that first Interview with the Vampire was nonetheless a memorably insightful read into superlative villainy, not least for its opening depiction of predation on grief, of Lestat ambushing Louis in a moment of weakness with false promises of a cure-all pig in a poke. You see it all the time, whether it's social movements promising you'll need never fear walking the streets again once you've eradicated/enslaved that other, hated demographic guilty of all the world's ills, or palmists and astrologers promising foresight in an uncertain universe when you feel most helplessly adrift, or bankers promising that losing your house is no big deal so long as you take out yet another loan. Have faith in their providence.

 

Pouncing on misery great and small is a hallmark of those peddling the unverifiable. Can't find love? Let Madam FakeAccent's crystal ball reassure you for the low-low price of... how much you got in your pocket again? Yeah, that. Lost a relative in a shooting? Join a(n) (anti?)racist group even if the villain and victim were the same race. Sad and nervous? Realign your chakras! Life plan derailed? Sever all social ties and let us tell you how to unlock your secret alien superpowers! Fat? Try a no-carb diet fad. Still fat? Try an all-carb diet fad. Raped? Go to war against The Patriarchy. Flunked basic arithmetic? Major in diversity studies.

 

But all the charlatans, hucksters, mountebanks, confidence artists and good old-fashioned liars the world over aspire to the apex ambush predator status of the big religions. They are always there. Eternal, unchanging, sheltered from the light of reason. Always there, a steeple on every street corner, more branches than Starbucks, more served than McDonalds, more takeovers than Microsoft. ALWAYS there, waiting to pounce. Not ticket scalpers, not used car dealers, not communism or capitalism, not opium, not even cigarettes at their foggiest peak, not even alcohol in its global spread since antiquity have ever sold so many false promises of comfort as religion, and so irreparably. A cirrhosis patient may rue the odd dram, but jihadists die adulating their lethal poison. And looking at that system, you have to realize the gratuitous strife it engenders is not a bug, it's a feature.

They'll get you. Exploiting any weakness, any tragedy. If they can't get you happy, they'll get you sad. If they can't get you and all your family and friends all at once with free picnics, they'll sniff you out when you're weakened, like leopards splitting the sickly off from the herd. And if your increasingly fanatical ramblings increasingly isolate you from saner minds, well, all the better, until all you have left is your all-important faith, and the church, and the church ladies to keep you in line, and the priest always smiling, always friendly, always standing next to the collection box, promising you a false eternity of unlife.

Silence Sprung Upon You

Belatedly (by a month) I realized/remembered/speculate on a likely reason why the pre-dawn chorus (and birdsong in general) suggests such a feeling of rightness to the world.

Because we're monkeys.

 

To illustrate, I thought back to the few times I've seen golden and bald eagles. They're not particularly common in my various habitats, but if their colors didn't give 'em away, their size would. Massive-looking compared even to our more common hawks and vultures, the impression one made upon the local wildlife upon flying overhead was sheer, mute panic every time. Ducks and geese dive for the shore, tree bark scratches with sheltering squirrels, and all the symphonic glory of Class Aves goes silent faster than you can say intermission.

 

Now think of our ancestors, munching various fruit up in the forest canopy. Songbirds must've been part of our alarm system. So long as the fluffy little morons kept chittering away, busying themselves with reproductive contests instead of survival, it probably, hopefully meant no truly terrifying dangers were in range, be these fires, storms, climbing leopards or swooping raptors - and the bigger eagles may certainly carry off great apes' lesser ancestors. Unnatural silence sounds eerie for a reason. If forest birdsong is more or less a constant, a sign all is well with the world, then when it stops... panic!

Equating unexpected silence to some predatory menace hanging over us may add some perspective to my perpetual unease back when my family moved from the noisy city out to a lifeless dormitory town suburb.

Maybe batty man needs more robin?

Phoney it in

"So get your ideas, stack your ammo
But don't come unless you come to battle now mount up, jump in the saddle
This is it: it's what you eat, sleep, piss and shit
Live, breathe, your whole existence just consists of this"

 

Eminem - Survival

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"I mean, monkeys and go-karts was fun for a while, then I was like, oh, you know what’d be cool? Hippos in go-karts. And I was like, yo, what about Draculas with jetpacks?"

 

- the idea of fun of a man with brain as smooth as an egg, from The Good Place

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Observation going back to my old Counterstrike/EVE/WoW days: joke name = joke player.

Players drawing names from mythology, a stable personal fable, technical jargon, etc. could be good or bad from case to case. But the ones named after characters from the latest anime/comic, or a throwaway in-joke about game loot, or random schoolyard transgression like "badassfart6452" or worst of all just using their real-life names as online handles, are almost guaranteed to be utter morons. Not that you can't have a sense of humor, but the "too cool for school" attitude generally does not herald a worthy ally. When your very identity consists of refusal to participate, why the hell are you even here?

On a completely unrelated topic, while visiting family a few years ago and waiting to be seated at a restaurant, the welcome desk featured a TV to help you pass the time, tuned to some MTV-like channel. Glancing at the latest pop-tart flavor of the month prancing around and lip-syncing, my mother mumbled one thing she's never been able to stand is a frigid whore. I had to concur. No matter how expensively choreographed her pouting and gyrations, the bimbo in the "music" video really wasn't managing to convey "come hither" any more than she passed off the generic "oooh baby baby I love you baby" lyrics as poetry.

On another completely unrelated topic, I've been struggling to get into Sunless Sea lately, and it really is more of a struggle than it should be. The practical issues I'll address separately, but for a game banking almost entirely on transposing you into a Victorian gothic landscape in the hollow earth, it appears dead-set on snapping you out of your immersion (aquatic pun intended) at every single step. I'd run across its predecessor, the browser game Fallen London, some years past. Didn't grab me. Now I finally realize why. Sunless Sea is more focused on convincing you it could do its job if it wanted to... than on doing its job.

Is "the power of verse" a Lvl V bard spell or a metaphor?

At first I assumed my confusion as to all the terminology stemmed from being dropped "in medias res" then wondered if maybe I'm expected to have memorized all of Fallen London to know exactly what the macguffins and mooks I keep encountering are. Then I realized explanations are considered extraneous. It's just random nonsense. In the worst tradition of the D&D monster manual, monsters have vaguely monstery names and dice-rolled attributes, loot is made to sound valuable via random thesaurus abuse, gods and leaders referenced in abrupt bombast failing to establish their spheres of influence. As flavor text, individual snippets might evoke terror, pity, mystery or the macabre competently enough, but as storytelling or an actual setting? It's a mess.

All your "z" are giving me a case of the zzz-s.

 

Though Zunlezz Zea obviouzly ztirred zome welcome interest in storytelling in a medium increasingly dependent on algorithmic randomization for its content, it's taken a more recent exploration/managerial/RPG to make a good on that promise. I've voiced my complaints about Vagrus: The Riven Realms, from spinning the elfemism treadmill to poor combat to struggling and failing to predict its customers' behavior to misspelling my name in the preorder credits. But I can't fault their dedication to fleshing out the setting.

Sand captain vs zee captain refusing a quest: let's compare.

Aside from smooth descriptiveness, look how many tidbits those three paragraphs integrated into the game world at large: about Thatmas' personality and hints of his existential conflict, about the mechanics of undeath, about the politics and influence of one particular faction, about honor as interpersonal instead of institutional. All that in one in-character quest decision. Compare to "generic mobsters are generic" above.

Age of Wonders serves as in-series example of progress. Even when, after a decade and several iterations, it grew into its tactical focus and strategic aspirations, #3 and Planetfall paid little attention to their setting or mood. The recent AoW4 on the other hand invests due effort into events themed according to alignment or playable classes (a.k.a. affinities)

Rhyming fey, situational humor like conjuring an illusion to play a strategy game against a bad strategist in your place, magic tomes extolling the art of their craft, ruin descriptions hearkening back to creation myths, it may not be Avellone-quality game dialogue but #4's flavor texts now laudably, consciously adhere to their fantasy backdrop instead of merely being cobbled together from random fantasy jargon. Good progress, keep it up.

This distinction between perfunctory random filler and actual coherent writing did by no means just recently crop up, as game "writers" tend to slap pop culture references together with a bunch of old-timey thees and thous (or lasers and warp drives) and meta call it a meta day. In fact it used to be worse.

Et tu, Avellone?

Much as I loved the first game twice over, I've never been able to motivate myself to finish Fallout 2. I've tried three times over the decades, repeatedly quitting when I hit a ghost or talking corn stalk or my character snarking out of character at the shaman in my starting village. My most recent campaign lost steam around Vault 15, aaand... I'm done. Uninstall. This will be the first Black Isle title I've filed under the Bozo tag instead of Laurel or Hardy. It's not just frustration. I've finished the Icewind Dales, Penumbra, Arcanum, Gabriel Knight, and a host of other infuriating oldies despite their flaws. But the adolescent feigned nonchalance rubs off on you. Jokes about graphics cards, random space aliens and Star Trek shuttles and the bridge scene from Holy Grail, the rando' bullcrap just never slackens.

 

 

If the game's creators keep insisting they're just going through the motions and can't be bothered to give a shit, why should I? In retrospect unsurprisingly given the two series' cross-pollination, the problem was reiterated with Wasteland 2 a decade later.

 

While it is occasionally possible to own such nonsense, provided it's played lightly enough, even inattentive use of stock phrases can wreck immersion. Consider one of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous' more gruesome quests involving the terrifying ecorches and their victims.

If you don't like the view, try my hobbit's angle

"Ow the pain"? Is that supposed to be some obscure blurb or did you just give up on doing your jobs? Even if you were trying to lighten the inherently grim mood of FLAYING PEOPLE ALIVE, the whiplash induced by going from Dante's Inferno to Bugs Bunny in two phrases flat, mid-scene, robs the event of any impact, be it macabre, frightening, compassionate or humorous. It's out of character and out of the world you're paid to create for us.

Here's one of the many differences between tabletop roleplaying / GM-ing / bullshitting with your friends around a pizza, and publishing something for public consumption: to us, you are manifest in your work. You can't play off it; you are it. You can't act above it all; you are it all. Nonchalance is just laziness and incompetence. This is an important step in moving past the Betty Boop stage of a creative field: start seeing disparate elements as a coherent whole.

 

And if you can't do that, if you're just slapping 3D models, loot icons and copy/pasted genre jargon together and calling it a game, if you're playing the "too cool for school" card to cover up being a dunce but still expecting high scores, well, don't complain if rumours start labeling you a frigid whore.

Hurly-Burlewd

A few months ago I splurged on PDFs of The Order of the Stick books, padded with a few extra pages and author commentary, from the first volume of which I excerpt the following:

 

Year 2005, two years after the strips in question:

"The “bardic nudity” strips were a lot fo* fun to do, partly because I got the chance to show that while these were stick figures, this was not a strip for young children. While Elan’s nakedness is somewhat innocent, Haley’s desire to check him out indicates that yes, this strip will sometimes drift into “PG-13” territory. Strip #28 was kind of my “warning shot” to those who would be offended by mildly adult material. Not that it worked; when #35 came out, I got more than a couple emails from people who were offended at the sexual suggestion. Which, incidentally, is actually far tamer than that in #28."

 

then, year 2015:

"I also realize now why people were offended by strip #35 and not #28. It wasn't about the inclusion of content that implied sexuality; it was the fact that in the former strip, my female lead character was in control of her own sexuality and in the latter she was reduced to a sexualized object."

- and then he goes on for another paragraph self-flagellating over his "male gaze" and making apologies to the political correctness police.

 

Oh for fuck's sake Burlew, stop being facetious. We know you're smarter than this. #35 is indeed tamer than #28, both in its sexuality (slight cleavage vs. full nudity) and in its entitlement (the men ogle covertly, shamefully, while the woman does so brazenly, imperiously) and that's without considering the litany of double entendres. Even the minimal effort of logic the author routinely applies to villainous banter, pratfalls and attacks of opportunity would reveal his original, 2005 interpretation hit far closer to the mark. Of course even in 2005 he missed prudishness' unspoken function to criminalize and cash in on guilt. Is anyone? ever? prudish about the other half of sex, the all-pervasive female paraphilia of romance? Did Burlew himself feel the need to pixelate Roy and Celia's candle-lit courtship ritual? I refer you to my Yes Sex Scenes post.

Even if we naively accept the proposition that <a gaze> inflicts harm (gorgons and kryptonians excepted) Haley gazes at a lot more of Elan than the men ever glimpse of her. Is Elan "in control of his own sexuality" to borrow a stupid phrase?** Neither Elan nor Haley are showing off on a conscious desire to attract a mate but Haley at least had the INT score to be aware of her situation if she'd cared to. While you're treating sexuality as harmful, just for the sake of argument, you may want to address Elan's infantile stupidity, so severe in early strips that if he'd been female the audience would now act outraged at a counterpart male Haley committing statutory rape with an Algernon-level retard. And I mean the mouse.

No, obviously your audience did not run a detailed, objective harm analysis of both situations to weigh the characters' ethical comportment in a fair and impartial manner. Which you might've assumed given your audience is an audience. On teh internets, no less. The herd merely reacted to a waved matador's flag, lurched in the direction dictated by a scriptural dichotomy of good and evil, attacking the designated enemy which in any discussion of the sexes means men by default. Page #35 shows men enjoying the sight of a woman. Burn the men! Page #28 shows men being made to suffer by a woman. Ha-ha, they're being burned! That's it. That's the entire cogitation. Beyond glorifying women and demonizing men, to SJWs the rest is filler and justification.

So, after Burlew's sane but uninsightful 2005 assessment and his 2015 overwrought kow-towing to fanatics, what would his commentary be in an imagined 2025 re-release of book #1? Can woke proselytes ever pull out of their self-gratifying dogmatic tailspin? Are twenty years long enough to go insane and back again?*** We've seen that with other new faiths like Scientology, it's more often the next generation, born into the faith, which shakes itself loose. And when it comes to snowflakery, the thought of what that backlash will look like is getting scarier every year.

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* Yes! I'm not the only one who constantly makes that typo! YEEEESSSSSS!!!

** By its very nature sexual attraction/attractiveness is something you cannot truly be in control of, not only because it is inherently interpretive, but because it is the most obvious, direct example of your genetic imperative wrenching control of your brain away from your conscious mind. Even if you were sexually attracted to something utterly lacking intentionality, like... gravel... neither you nor the gravel would have as much say in the matter as your pre-sapient instinct to hump gravel. (Ooooh, yeah, baby, scree me like that.)

*** Insane and back again: A trademark-safe halfwitling's tale.