The Rape of the Duck

"Would you kill kill kill for me?
You won't be kissing me unless you kill for me"

 

Marilyn Manson - Kill4Me

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"Remember, you're fighting for this woman's honor, which is probably more than she ever did."
Groucho Marx in Duck Soup (minute 1:04:00 here)

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"There's the answer, if you're clever:
Have a child for warmth
And a Baker for bread
And a Prince for... whatever"

- Into the Woods

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Back in the mid-2010s it was quite trendy to voice shock and outrage at duck penises. As it's been a while, let's remind younger readers of this particular bit of pop-culture insanity. Far as I can tell it started some years earlier, with a 2007 paper detailing the peculiar genital morphology of waterfowl, mallard ducks in particular. However, it took several more years for the topic to filter down to mass media, for a video of the explosive eversion of a duck penis to go viral, for comedians to start tacking duck penis jokes to their acts and for "journalists" to start publishing articles like DUCKS ARE SADISTIC RAPING MONSTERS!!! Nor was the hub-bub totally useless; the study's lead author made a career of it.

The basic observations are solid. "Forced extra-pair copulations" do happen in any number of species and ducks really do have weird corkscrew-shaped genitals, unusual in birds which are overwhelmingly lacking in the ding-dong department. But then the animal world is replete with trauma and bizarrerie both, so this particular factoid's time in the limelight is better explained by its political convenience. It was framed as a battle of the sexes. As the "Weinstein effect" and #MeToo witch hunt ramped up, media figures and reddit echo chambers cast as wide a net as possible for any bias-confirming sound bites, and rapist ducks certainly make a memorable one.

 

The original discussion and subsequent reiterations had framed ducks' plight squarely as inter-sexual competition with a clear villain: males started raping, so females (purely in defense against male aggression!) developed convoluted genital tracts to protect against insemination; then the evolutionary arms race continued lengthening and twisting both pegs and holes. The important part is that it fits the fearmongering "rape culture" narrative, complete with lurid high-FPS footage of corkscrew dongs comin' ta getcha! It fits the image activists want to draw, of a world utterly pervaded by violent rapists at every corner, even where you least expect them like harmless-looking quackers, and of masculinity as malformed, Lovecraftian monstrosity. Perhaps even more importantly it also frames femininity as an innocent, protective, united front.

The basic facts are fine. The politically correct framing? Therein lies the bullshit.

 

You might well guess "the unsympathetic side being wrong about everything" is too simplistic an argument to really cover a real-world situation... but you wouldn't guess it from how it's addressed in universities, much less media coverage. The original studies hinged on the females' genital tract being longer, spiraling in the opposite direction from the males' penis (clockwise vs. counterclockwise) and having blind pouches to divert eversion, but however effective those obstacles may prove in foiling giant rapey corkscrew dongs, they are implicitly even better at eliminating males lacking that adaptation. The females' "defense" breeds out non-rapists more effectively than it does rapists. (With demonstrably absolute effectiveness, in fact.)

There is in fact a very widespread group of adaptations in the animal world termed "cryptic female choice" (itself a euphemism for getting away with cheating) which seems more likely to have kicked off the ducks' intersexual arms race. What came first, the duck or the egg? The rape or the cryptic choice? If females' genitals get so good at separating out sperm, at cheating on their mates, that a more invasive penis is the only guaranteed means of insemination, they are de facto breeding that trait into their progeny. A Royal Society published follow-up by the same authors in 2009 dismissed the question of cryptic choice offhandedly with:

"females of many waterfowl species select and pair bond with mates weeks or months before the breeding season" - which time frame seems irrelevant if she's going to cheat on him anyway

- and, more egregiously:

"direct costs of forced copulations are expected to be high for females" - which flies in the face of the injuries up to and including death which males of the vast majority of species incur in reproductive contest. The only way that statement sounds like an argument-ender to you is if you're working on the conceit that girls are just smarter than boys and would never make a bad choice. But remember, our savage mother nature doesn't give a flying duck-fuck about your personal well-being. If an inherited predilection for self-harm results in you leaving more reproductively successful offspring, then the next generations will show more self-harm. "A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg" runs an increasingly relevant saying in biology, counterintuitive as it may sound. Females' control over reproduction, their closer association with the offspring's success, generally affords them a greater care for their own health as proxy for the young's. (In fact females' most common means of avoiding extra-pair copulations is to outsource that confrontation to their male companion via mate-guarding. After all, if the father of future offspring changes, the female may get lower quality young, but the original male gets eliminated entirely from that equation; thus males are more motivated to risk harm both cheating and preventing cheating.) But female prissiness is by no means an absolute. If getting your hands (or cloaca) dirty gets you better kiddies, then better kiddies shall be got.

Which brings us to the sexy son hypothesis. In most species, variation in the number of young females can produce is minor, say between two or three. But in males that difference can be between zero (because many do not have a chance to reproduce) and dozens for the NBA stars of every species. And because natural selection hinges on RELATIVE reproductive success, females can often pass down their genetics more successfully by having wildly oat-sowing sons. You may lift an eyebrow hearing that Genghis Khan and his sons might have descendants in the tens of millions, but if true, I bet you've never considered the necessary corollary that so do the queens, whores and courtesans who fucked them! (Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain.)

Revenons a nos canards, that story about plucky, ducky damsels valiantly fending off the assaults of quackling maleficent male-ards falls apart when you realize a female getting "raped" by a male "raping" five other females runs a good chance of producing a son who will rape five other females in turn, as opposed to her loser of an official mate who just sticks by her side and will likely father a son who sticks by one female. One choice might give her four or nine grandchildren, the other thirty-six. The trick is, if you're making that trade-off, to ensure you only select for the rapiest rapist, which is where the convoluted genitals come in. The female's genital tract as "resistance" to rape becomes a proxy for the estimated reproductive success of a potential sexy son. I don't mean to imply any sort of waterfowl or waterfair moral value by this. Again, nature simply doesn't care. Females which produce the rapiest rapists leave behind more grand-daughters inheriting the tendency to produce successful rapists, and so on. The pattern builds on itself. Note, even if you accept the premise that it must have been males' propensity to rape which kicked off such a dynamic thousands of generations prior, the female counter-adaptation has only worsened and accelerated the supposed problem with every generation. And that's the part you don't hear from either college professors or the New York Post.

Also, the question is too commnly posed as either/or: either a stable mate or a rapist. That's not how cryptic choice works. Why not both? Why not have their cake and eat it too? Overtly, females pair-bond with a baseline acceptable male. Whatever rapists come along must beat that baseline viability. If a really rapey one gets through, you've got yourself a sexy son. But, if none of the randos that season have big enough corckscrew dicks to grab you by the ovaries, well, it's not a complete loss, you still have your standard schlub, your plan B as backup. Roll the dice but hedge your bets. Clever girl.

So, first off, realize that whatever perception you have of women as a group as some plucky rebel alliance merely defending itself against the evil testicular empire has not come from objective analysis of reality. It comes of being bombarded all your life with just such sound bites as "rapist ducks" piling on, drowning your reason out by ginned up moralistic calls to save the world from the dire threat of duck rape, or really anything which fabricates a subconscious impression of female entitlement and male debt towards the unfairer sex. Every such random bit of outrage starts from the presumption of exclusive male guilt and willful ignorance of females' shared culpability, profiteering or simply demonstrably exercised agency. (Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain.)

I was living in Illinois in the 2000s during the media circus concerning Drew Peterson, a cop who murdered two of his wives. What makes it an interesting case study is that he was actually married four times, had a history of cheating on and beating on the first two wives and his children, murdered the next two wives (presumably while still cheating on them) and got engaged to a fifth WHILE being investigated for those murders. Note one headshrinker interviewed as to why women keep doing this immediately shifted the conversation to the Oedipus complex, inattentive daddies and women being "at risk of being seduced" in other words shifting all the responsibility onto men. Umm, nope, bullshit! Girls want bad boys. This is female mate choice at work. You want the rapists. You want the murderers. They swagger oh so damn sexy! The same personality traits which make him an overbearing sadistic thug make him irresistible to women. I may be an asshole sometimes (in fact I'm fairly sure I am) but I've never killed anyone. I have zero children. The double murderer has at least six. Which of us is looking like the sexier son?

In fact, a recurring item in both "news" fluff and trash TV has always been the flood of marriage proposals women send to men on death row. Sure puts having a few neck feathers plucked out into perspective, don't it?

 

Second off, if you've ever taken a course on evolution, you've likely had to listen to your professor bemoaning the rampant sexism of Victorian politics refusing to acknowledge the importance of female mate choice in natural selection, because Victorians refused to believe females might have that much power. Here you have a prime example why modern feminist attitudes are so often likened to a Victorian fainting couch. It's all well and good to say look at those pretty peacock tails that peahens have selected for, but we still refuse to acknowledge female mate choice wherever it might have negative implications, like picking the most destructive mates because they want offspring which will destroy the competition, from double murderers to finance bros. The power females wield over males by controlling reproduction is just that - power! - and with power comes superheroic responsiblity for its application. Might not society's refusal to openly acknowledge female agency be less a matter of oppressive patriarchy than women dodging responsibility, whether personally or for the world's ills? (Pay no attention to the woman behind the curtain.)

 

Third off, anyone interpreting inter-sexual conflict at face value as male aggression upon innocent females would do well to remember your Nibelungenlied. There are entirely too many cases to ignore in which a Brunnhilde merely refuses to mate with any unworthy male that cannot best her feats of strength.

 

Lastly, and on the more speculative side, let's reverse the polarity. In humans, the neediness of our young prompted increased paternal investment and resource contribution, but that contribution also gave males some value and a greater degree of choice, at least the ones registering as good providers. And there is every reason to believe that our excessive neoteny may have been prompted by cuter females being better at securing male protection and providence. The guy sticks around the pretty girl more than the virago after mating, one child benefits more than the other, increased viability, boom, ya gotcherself an adaptive advantage. Human males have selected for the most effective raptors, for those who can best steal our attention. We love the cute ones. We selected for our own manipulation in the distant past, not for our own benefit any more than those raped female ducks, but because better kiddies were thus got.

 

It applies to a female's viability as mate too. A cuter one instills maternal protectiveness, gets ganged up on less by the tribe's other females, gets more resources. Though men have far fewer reproductive options than women, due to our use as labor we nonetheless do exert some evolutionary pressure, and it is again in the morally wrong direction, picking greedy, manipulative, sociopathic bitches, one obvious interpretation being if she can make your life a living hell, she'll leverage that much more subterfuge and acquisitiveness into promoting the survival of your shared progeny after she throws you under the bus.

 

So stop favoring the showgirls. C'mon guys, we all know we're not that picky. Sexy enough is sexy enough. Wanna really improve the breed? Fuck a librarian.

 

 

 

 

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P.S.: If you're curious about the waterfowl extra-pair copulation question, there was a more multifaceted article published shortly after the penis papers back in 2010. It doesn't largely disagree with them (and I'm sure the author would be scandalized at being recommended by a mangy snarler like myself) but does a much better job of contextualizing the issue:

Sexual conflict in waterfowl: why do females resist extrapair copulations?

 

P.P.S. After I referenced Brunhild, I was so, so tempted to rename this "riding the valkyries"

About Nothing; Towards Something

"Don't you know what it means to become an orgy guy? It changes everything! I'd have to dress different. I'd have to act different. I'd have to grow a mustache and get all kinds of robes and lotions and I'd need a new bedspread, new curtains, I'd have to get thick carpeting and weirdo lighting. 'Course I'd have to get new friends. I'd have to get orgy friends."

 

Seinfeld - The Switch

 

 

Attentive readers (permit me the vanity of imagining I got 'em) may note I trailed off in my Baldur's Gate 3 campaign. A long, uninterrupted playthrough was just making its worse points (say: the romantic interest NPC roster, teleportation, endless variable ratio reinforcement jug-looting, or other timesinks like individual inventory shuffling) chafe more and more and making it feel like a chore. I want to derive what enjoyment I can of my purchase, plus had I continued it straight through my commentary would've sounded harsher than deserved. Larian sank a truly impressive amount of both effort and expertise into making the most of the IP's name recognition, and even where I hate their design decisions, those are at least conscious, elaborated decisions and not slapdash filler or bandwagon-jumping. It's carefully measured mass appeal for a genre somewhat lacking in such.

Is it working? Is it appealing all of the masses? Well, with sales in the millions at full release price, it's at least appealing to a massive part of the masses. Which got me wondering: how does anyone get into games these days? For me, grizzled lone wolf what I be, BG3 is simply the logical continuation of a decades-long suite of declines or improvements in cRPGs. But the rest? How many just snatched it up for the TOTES BADASS opening cinematic with its hawt dragon-on-skyship action? How many bought it for the sex scenes? How many are tabletop gamers who always turned up their noses at computer adaptations but... weeelllll, maybe just this once? How many are MMO fans intrigued by the notion of an offline WoW-clone? Or maybe just Cthulhu fans drooling after face tentacles?

It was always an interesting question to ask in CoH, EVE or LotRO back in the day. The gamers I'd met in Team Fortress Classic or Counterstrike arrived via a predictable trajectory of Doom > Quake > TFC > CS > Call of Duty, and those in WoW had a similar history of "anything Blizzard" or other pissing contests over high scores or the most loot. But Homeworld was full of Ender's Game fans, and EVE-Online full of Homeworld fans, and Lord of the Rings Online or City of Heroes tapped their respective niches outside of computer games for customers whose other electronic interaction consisted of Minesweeper and Solitaire.

 

But that was twenty years ago. The niches had only just been defined, most famous series only up to their second installment (if that) computer games still fresh and edgy. I won't bother reiterating the steep decline to follow. Now they're just something Billy-Bubba thumbs on them thar smert-foan. Just another entertainment industry. Just as by fifteen years of age you mostly know whether you like SciFi movies or mystery novels or not, everyone has some idea of what turn-based "arrpeegeez" are and whether they appeal. Adaptations aside, how much genre/medium crossover still occurs in the third decade of the third millennium?

Social media sites' infamous propensity for narrowing users' attention to self-reinforcing obsessions has only compounded the pre-existing influence of advertising and other means of market manipulation by the rich, all designed to limit sapience to linear obedience. Does anyone even have a range of interests now? Is anyone still capable of both taking a walk in the park and then taking a virtual walk in Caras Galadhon? Reading a book and listening to a podcast? Liking something but admitting its flaws? Hating something but admitting its strengths? Must everything be fanatical devotion and witch-hunting?

I found myself wondering what anyone who's skimmed my RPG commentary here might expect of me in reviewing BG3. Am I supposed to squee like a demented fanboy at finally getting a big-budget tactical cRPG to save the genre? Or take the hipster route of decrying its popularity? Well, how 'bout neither and both?

 

"Do you ever just get down on your knees and thank god that you know me and have access to my dementia?"

But that might have a lot to do with the question of how anyone gets into a genre or medium nowadays. The internet's early days provided a lot of fan(atics) fora for their narrow interests. Did you like movie xyz? Then buy the novelization of xyz, play the game of xyz, compete in trivia contests of xyz lore, spend every moment on the xyz subreddit, buy the commemorative xyz mug with extra Z! And don't forget the twenty-three sequels!

After twenty years of having one's each and every thought socially mediated, dare one hope that routine might momentarily break down? A brief glimmer of smarter pop culture before the world ends? Decades-delayed throwbacks like BG3 have been derided as "nostalgia projects" and BG3 itself is a shallow, dumbed-down lower-common-denominator of what such games should be. But you don't get to pretend its success is coming solely from nostalgic old Infinity Engine fanboys or that it's a casual game being foisted on an uninformed public like Fruit Ninja.

Is it too much to hope that we're finally seeing larger numbers of economic consumers who merely want to try new things? Who don't need to validate their existence by staying within one group-approved niche? Hell, my first real cRPG was arguably VtM: Redemption, one of the most thoroughly mediocre pieces of interactive cold pizza you could ever consume. But the possibilities it revealed...

... maybe we should ask not just how good a game BG3 is but how good a gateway drug it is.

Here Comes the Rap Break

"Everybody's sayin' that the scatman stutters
But doesn't ever stutter when he sings
But what you don't know I'm gonna tell you right now
That the stutter and the scat is the same thing"

 

Scatman John - (I'm A) Scatman

 

 

Last time I talked about comics, I praised What Birds Know's well-plotted drama with light, in-character comic relief. So this time, let's instead talk about poor pacing.

Out-Of-Placers will definitely draw further comments from me, as (politically correct premise and strained backronym aside) it's not only laudably creative and thoughtfully developed, but also a prime example of integrating some evolutionary precepts into a fantasy (or more likely science fantasy) setting. For now, it was page 100 that caught my attention for one of the best executed comic relief moments I've seen. The last panels' absurdity would be enough in itself, but it also hit precisely just past the peak of the story's most dramatic moment thus far. However, the same comic also interposes expository pages in the middle of scenes. They're invariably good reading, but their placement tends to wreck the flow of any scene because unlike a tension-breaking one-liner, each "field guide" page provides half a chapter's worth of prose.*

 

For a more classic case of derailment, see Tamuran, a decent high fantasy comic which after packing its main cast off to high adventure with shapeshifting, monster swarms, hungry dragons, liches, nature spirits and heirs to this-and-that, has spent the past few years increasingly on "how're things back at home?" and palace intrigue. If curious as to how audiences will appreciate dumping almost all the core cast and laboriously developed set-up to swerve to a couple of new viewpoints from characters whose best features seem knock-offs of that core cast's, well, just ask George R.R. Martin.

 

I also read through another fantasy comic, Kaspall, recently. Not bad, less lively or inspired but nevertheless following through on its premises far better than most. Unfortunately its ending toed the Disney line too much with its tragic backstory excuse, karmic comeupins and keeping the heroes' hands clean... and then it keeps on ending... and ending... 50 pages of 460 resolving various plot threads through confessions and declarations.

 

While on the topic of bad endings, I had praised the follow-up to Dominic Deegan, The Legacy, three times over the past three years. In this case the ending does not drag... but everything up to the end does. The author did admit in a blog post that it had originally been intended as a far shorter story, and it certainly shows. The longer it rambled on, the less of the original idea was visible, from Snout getting increasingly redesigned for cuteness to losing the importance of the written word in favor of schmaltzy codependence, to losing the original central gimmick of filtering the action through Snout's deafness in favor of characters verbosely, tritely and repetitively declaring their pwecious fee-fees at each other.

 

I had compared The Legacy favorably to the newer stuff by Christopher Baldwin, whose work has been quite poor these past few years, but even his best stuff tended to be over before it was over. When he did arrange a poignant limbic oomph for a denouement, in his theater play in webcomic form One Way, it instead felt rushed to fit into a one-year posting schedule, and he got no end of undeserved grief for prodding emotions in the opposite direction from what his audience, addicted to Hollywood sap, demanded.

 

On the other hand, the ending to Spacetrawler's original run (the one worth reading) was arguably just as downbeat, with the main difference being the forewarning to the audience. And it worked. It fit. Sacrifice should be unsatisfying.

So much as I do enjoy pointing out such imperfections, writing all this out has reminded me they've contributed much to my interest in webcomics for the past twenty years. I don't want the same damn heroic face-off, focus-grouped to death to maximize appeal, reiterated every episode. "The state of the condition insults my intuition" after all. Hell, Mookie was always prone to cheesy, hand-wringing drah-mah and it worked well enough for him. If they are not allowed to dominate a work, flaws can frequently add to its charm. Baldwin was at his best when he didn't even try to neatly tie off loose ends, even stating at the end of Bruno that he imagines her life continuing, and he has simply stopped illustrating it. Lucy Lyall's expository ending to Kaspall was repurposed more successfully into a shorter episodic fantasy detective format in Spare Keys for Strange Doors. And really, if the first story in that series isn't illustrative of the search for perfection...

Well, I guess I can tough out Tamuran's slithering asides or OOPs' didactic ones as well.

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* I'm betting it doesn't feel that way to the writer, since if you already know the contents, it's still "one page" to you.

This is not a picture of a bug

It's a picture of at least three bugs.

(And yes, I'm using the word "bugs" in the general non-scientific sense.)

Classes&Cogitations, 4: What's my motivation?

Paladins and Bards represent D&D's growth from pure dungeon crawl to actual "role"-playing beyond the role of rock, paper or scissors, each leveraging the alignment wheel's law and chaos to make the player think about following a particular ethos. I can't speak for how well it worked in tabletop, but as to the internet age I invite you to tally up the amount of air time bards or especially paladins take up in cRPGs, as well as fan works like DnD-inspired webcomics. However, designating a particular class for heavier roleplaying is at best a crutch. I was pleased to see extra dialogue options for my IWD2 paladin, but if roleplaying really is intrinsic to the game genres named after it, RP choices should pervade any class choice - perhaps not equally, but comparably.

Given that I spent my previous post in the series arguing clerics need tighter links to their deities (shifting divine spellcasting overall toward lawful) paladins should probably just be folded into the greater cleric class, limited and defined by devotion to specific lawful good (or non D&D-equivalent) deities. The other option is to embrace the definition of paladins as knightly orders with a specific mission (combating the saracens, guarding the roads to Jerusalem, etc.) but let's face it, fleshing out such distinctions with sufficient nuance to supply meaningful choices is beyond both the scope and skill of most cRPG campaigns, at least while every game's writers are already devoting most of their time to angel vs. demon lore.

On the bard side, the interpretation of chaotic know-it-alls as jacks of all trades runs into the unnecessary overlap between the ever more prolific playable classes which I decried at the start of this series. The more you implement classes with specific personalities, the more redundant you'll find the one class which can duplicate any (or all!) of their functionality on a whim. See the endless arguments about bards being under/over-powered, from OOTS's Elan to players soloing the original Baldur's Gate campaigns as bardic one-man-bands, to my own defense of their multifaceted support or condemnation of all-purpose scrappers. On the other hand, a class based on musical/recitative performance was always a great idea, as bards/skalds/minstrels/meistersingers/Orpheus/Marsyas/etc. hold an irrefutable place of honor in historic fantasy. They just need to be re-centered on that core (see Pillars of Eternity's chanters) and downplayed in other ability. The harder question is implementing sufficient art or socialization to supply RP choices for social butterflies, without derailing an entire campaign. Does your game actually have anything for a bard to do bardically? No? Then leave it out, and stick with rogues/wizards/clerics.

 

Both classes were party-friendly (to aid their appeal) but their songs and auras' limitless team-wide use, changed at will, was always a bit of a stretch. Personally I'd rather see auras reinterpreted as a single party buff selected after resting, active until next rest. A commitment. Songs should be more unpredictable, reactive to each encounter, novel situations triggering the bard's memory or artistic inspiration, giving him an array of recitations apt to the stimulus at hand, from which he can select one. Bonus points for building up one's repertoire via prior RP choices.

Other classes aren't as hard hit by this roleplaying tie-in.

Campaigns don't usually bother with drudic RP aside from a single-note refrain of "nature good, tech bad" but their neutrality in the D&D alignment wheel gave more leeway. I've never seen the NE/CN/LN eco-terrorist angle truly given its due (especially disappointed by BG3's shallow good/evil choices at the druid grove) but at least it's better than every single bard being a CG Errol Flynn.

Monks and barbarians are better discussed in terms of shallow pop culture fads, but it bears mentioning here that monks' distinction of ki from divine energy was pure 1980s Hollywood exoticism, and has little place in a coherent cosmology. If you want unarmored paladins, fine, but just like paladins and clerics monks need to be more strictly defined by their devotion to The Rule, whatever that may be. A monastic order is more than a self-defense course.

Oh, wow, Dwarf Fortress has a mouse interface now!

I don't get to say this often, but we're gonna party like it's 1999.

Bebop's Elevator Pitches

"I don't feel a thing and I've stopped remembering"

 

(Spoilert for Cowboy Bebop.)

 

As speculative "genre" fiction has been mainstreamed the past couple of decades, we've all gotten more prone to expecting our entertainment to provide entire imaginary worlds instead of single narratives. But fleshing out supplemental material, be it side-quests, backstory chapters or a good, old-fashioned bottle episode is hard to do without diluting or derailing your main plot. So I got to thinking, hey, you know who did a good job keeping its filler filling? That old anime I keep yammering on about!

About a third of Cowboy Bebop's episodes were one-shots having little direct impact on the main character's development arcs, but they're nonetheless remembered quite fondly even when they diverged from the setting's accepted tone and phlebotina. Mushroom Samba set a brisk pace while owning its designation as the most obvious comic relief chapter. Toys in the Attic is a creature feature with a deliberately nonsensical (yet classic!) ScieFie justification. Wild Horses gives a nod to golden age SF rocket jockeying. Cowboy Funk turns a bit of fun at the genre's pretenses, posturing and space western tendencies into a character study of the main protagonist. If fact, even seemingly random "villain of the week" installments tended to reflect somehow on the team's personal fables, like the opening's parallel to Spike/Julia, Waltz for Venus' futile mentorship or Heavy Metal Queen obliquely addressing the free-roaming cowboy mindset.

 

But let's look at three in particular:

Brain Scratch features a transhumanist Matrix cult promising digital transcendence via Heaven's Gate quality web design.

Sympathy for the Devil an unaging, murderous child.

Pierrot le Fou frequently sneaks its way into ads for the show due to its stylish visuals, being one of the few episodes named not for music but in this case French cinema. Granted, it's hard to do the killer clown routine wrong, as our visually oriented species is quite sensitive to facial disfigurement as a sign of inherent wrongness. However:

Pierrot's character design stands out for its overt simplicity, lacking the usual pancake makeup or any scars or growths or prostheses or the other gimmicks by which Hollywood adorns its horror clowns. His costume, from Penguin-ish top hat, suit and cane to his absurd ruffle, rather than terrifying, looks ineptly buffoonish, failed even as parody. All of which actually enhances Pierrot's intrinsic menace and weirdness, his unselfconscious over-the-hill foppery feeding into his gradually revealed infantile mania.

 

That infantilism I would argue links all three examples together. The villain in Brain Scratch is a comatose tween hacker cobbling himself a clique by any means necessary without regard for consequences. Sympathy for the Devil's titular devil is frozen not only in time but in sociopathic juvenile entitlement. Whether intended by the various writers or not, you do get a sense of repeatedly calling into question childish innocence. Innocence is also irresponsibility, a misnomer for the harm caused by unfettered id, inherently morally incapable.

 

That point dovetails nicely with the show's main theme, of the crews facing their pasts. Facing is not the same as regressing, and while Jet shows some basic understanding of this, Faye and Spike can only complete their arcs once they have grown to contain their past selves. You could, if so inclined, see an added comment on this point briefly in the finale, when a former presenter of the cancelled bounty hunter show appears as a background event, in almost unrecognizable calm and mundane counterpoint to his hyperactive stage persona, returning to take care of his family. Boy howdy, for a show about happy-go-lucky gunslingers, Bebop sure carried a hefty dose of "grow the fuck up" didn't it?

Exposition Imposition Reposition

"Wir tanzen elektrisch
ganz hektisch"

 

Eisbrecher - Fanatica

 

 

Ruin has come to our family:

Charles IV, King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, had a long and successful monologue detailing the unfamiliar political situation into which players were about to immerse themselves.*

Then he stuck a tadpole in your eye. No, wait, different story. Halfway through Act3 of Baldur's Gate 3, I've been thinking back to what a good first impression the opening cinematic made years ago, wordlessly allowing the Illithids' Lovecraftian creepiness to carry the sinister tension calling you, noble hero, to adventure or reasonable facsimile thereof. Before characters could believably lip-sync, such introductions commonly shared the marketing stage with more nonsensical fare imitating old SF/Fantasy book covers pre-commissioned with generic dragons/rockets. See Diablo, NWN, Temple of Elemental Evil, etc. Even now, opening sequences are arguably the one spot where cinematics still serve a needed role, plus it gives you something to play at conventions for hype.

 

Plot-based cRPGs in particular though can also use that precious first impression to intrigue the player with their... well, intrigue. Too bad the backstory for most of them reads like every damn fantasy paperback to ever grace the dollar bin:

1) Once upon a time everything was groovy. Peasants lived in harmony with their lice and tapeworms, kings only skinned alive whoever deserved it or was ugly enough that nobody cared, and fair unspoiled damsels only cheated on their boyfriends twice a week unless it's a holiday.

2) But then! Smart (therefore evil) vizier/wizard made something clever and therefore evil OR something smart killed the goddess of cuddly puppies and frosted cakes OR stole the queen's favorite eyeliner.

3) Therefore we all now live in Camden, NJ and only YOU, intrinsically better than everyone else for thine pancreas of cosmic justice (as foretold by prophecy 17-A, paragraph 15, footnote λ) can bring back the glory days of assuredly edenic primitivism!

Lining up my next RPG after BG3, I was torn between either getting back into that-game-that-misspelled-my-name-in-the-preorder-credits (a.k.a. Vagrus: The Riven Realms) or Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms, impulse-bought at half price and likely twice what it's worth mostly to see what Chris Avellone's been up to. His influence is certainly not visible in either the standard elves/dwarves/orcs/churchgoinghumans setup or the opening cinematic.

 

the great be-triter

Wow, who could've ever predicted THAT GUY would betray anyone? Seems like such a stand-up feller, real brimstone-of-the-earth type. By the way, if you think the static capture looks goofy, the animation, instead of just shifting superimposed images in the usual contemporary foil-embossed low-budget cinematic technique, tries to tilt and rotate various body parts to suggest movement. You'd get Exorcist flashbacks if it didn't completely clash with its wannabe serious tone. Like one of those toddler storybooks with moving cardboard parts... depicting an orphanage bombing.

 

In broad strokes, both Alaloth's and Vagrus' intros play at the same basic cataclysmic pantheicide boilerplate, by the exact same means. But even with a bad idea, there are more and less dignified ways to pad it out. Show, don't tell, hint at later narrative payoffs, and for the love of all that's hackneyed, you don't need to spend five minutes laboriously explaining to me that you have DRAGONS, DEVILS, ELVES, DWARVES, ORCS and CLERICS.

Everybody and his grandma has dragons, devils, elves, dwarves, orcs and clerics.

Please notify me only if you DON'T have dragons, devils, elves, dwarves, orcs and clerics.

So how might you unfurl that same menacing backdrop of hellfire and damnation without the hopelessly cheesy gimmick of a big red devil standing in a literal fireball growling at the viewer? Or the companion piece of a damsel running from a C-series featured creature:

 

that "jazz hands" thing she's doing really kills me

Well, try maintaining a coherent thread for one thing, and remember you're supposed to be inviting the player to discover the world, not telling him what it is. You're answering the question "is this the type of fantasy story that includes assassins" not "who shot JFK?"

 

Much of Vagrus' introduction was played across a single panel gradually altered to showcase the wealth of old empire, the gods' destructive war, its aftermath and the painstaking partial recovery to current bleak reality. The feeling of loss and catastrophe lies as much in what fades out of each panel as what fades in, the call to adventure inherent in the gradual, cautiously hopeful dawning as you zoom into the end of the montage, only to break into full light again as your own role is introduced. Spot-on work.

 

But only with Alaloth's ridiculous suite of ultra-extreme closeups to otherwise inexpressive, uninformative faces did I look back and notice how aptly Vagrus' cinematic had eschewed direct personification in its figuration. Imperial divine rule old and new is represented by looming stiffly-masked statuesque cohorts. Recognizable bodily shapes are absent or relegated to the background of half the panels. Even when front and center, they DON'T LOOK AT THE CAMERA, furthering the postapocalyptic feel of alienation.

 

How do you portray incipient hellfire and damnation without casting: fireball? Nothing says terrible glory quite like hefting the sun itself as you perpetrate war crimes, does it?

And yes, much of this difference in subtlety is due to the two games' different target audience. Alaloth appears at first glance a dime-a-dozen, idiot-friendly Diablo-clone Action "R"PG clickfest, whereas Vagrus is a turn-based, squad-strategical, unabashedly verbose, economically complex, managerial sandbox exploration RPG strewn with gratuitous Latin. 

 

However, that in itself begs the question of whether you should want your book judged by its cover. I would argue one of these examples reaps far more intrigue from its first impression. Hint: it's not the one with the bobbleheads.

 

__________________________________

 

 

*Darkest Dungeon and Kingdom Come: Deliverance, respectively

You know all that socially responsible, constructive, paid labor you've been doing? Ever try to track down how many landfills it's contributed to over the years?

Came ill, sans saints

"It's my business to catch the overtones of the soul, and you won't find those in a parvenu set of artificial streets on made land."

 

What don't you know?

 

"In a strange city lying alone

Far down within the dim west

Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best

Have gone to their eternal rest"

 

Larval apes stow their monsterous casings back into the closet, having collected the moles in the disorganization, the midnight veil lifted and kneeled shut another year, oh dearly beloved, did you remember to compliment that queer little brat-a-tat-tat from next door's whore with the tricorne hat urning ricks, rolling stoned, massing the gathering, magic treating a card boarded wind owes into the bellyache of the beast? Historiologically you're a nape chafed adderally, ring-a-ding-ding-a-ling the band back together again for one last score last haul last chance to see, you can do anything you pout your mined to crypt o' currents, see?, but nothing edgy or risqué, touchy or passé, you digger? Gold stars align for thee in offense, don't get defensive about your institutional prejudiss and prejudat, loose the cannon on other, come patriots, rally behind the energized baseline is one hundred by definition, but what monster soiled the bedsheets in whose eyes you're an unspeaking posteriority?

"The waves have now a redder glow--

The hours are breathing faint and low--"

Hyper! Venti! Late! Weight, don't! It gives me anxietease!

"But light from out the lurid seas

Streams up the turrets silently--"

What do they know? Retreat? No, surrender! Render unto theses on the wrongs of man

"There open fanes and gaping graves

Yawn level with the luminous waves"

 

made to rock the boat but not the draft

 

"But not the riches there that lie

In each idol's diamond eye"

diamond, mind your manners or we'll rough you down to size.

"Not the gayly-jewell'd dead

Tempt the waters from their bed;"

What don't you know?

"In various ways throughout this book I’ve tried to suggest that the horror story is in many ways an optimistic, upbeat experience; that it is often the tough mind’s way of coping with terrible problems which may not be supernatural at all but perfectly real. Paranoia may be the last and strongest bastion of such an optimistic view -- it is the mind crying out, "Something rational and understandable is going on here! These things do not just happen!""

 

What don't you know? "We have a new buzzword too, for anyone who admires competence, knowledge, learning and skill, and who wishes to spread it around. People like that are called 'elitist'"

 

[Their] "shrines, and palaces, and towers,

(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)

Resemble nothing that is ours"

Nothing, that is, ours is harder than anyone else says. Simony many my need, it's a rich man's woe

"No rays from the holy heaven come down

On the long night-time of that town"

So instead purge a tory? You've "crossed the line to find the money's on the other side"

 

What don't you know?

"So blend the turrets and shadows there

That all seem pendulous in air,

While, from a proud tower in the town

Death looks gigantically down"

What don't you know? Hung up your facade last night everlasting, only to mask yourself with an ACME umbrella, but some anvils need to be dropped you from the act of god-given rights of man and cities of gods justify war of Kultur, all appropriation.

But every currency devalues if debased.

The university of human experience abhors a vacuum.

What don't you know?

"The Carriage held but just Ourselves--

And Immortality"

 

Not that! Never that, anything but that

"who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes"

Thou art god, but most gods "would rather die than think -- in fact, they do so." Sail away, or in loco flow. Are you afraid of the dark? Better to be afraid of the light-skinned.

"want me to save the world? I'm just a little girl" can do math with a can do attitude adjustment, can do sci entsagen to entgegen mann to ease the stress of positioning, can do historevisionism, can do engineering socially net worked over

"Around, by lifting winds forgot,

Resignedly beneath the sky

The melancholy waters lie"

Maybe the ivory trade ban sapped the tower, or maybe the ivory grin of the ides of marcher barons resembles all too closely your own, deeper beneath the layers of foundation of civilization

"whiles I see lives the gashes do better upon them"

I fear you played most foully for it all makes sense until you use your senses. What don't you know?

"Whence flow the aimless waves whose chance combining
Gives each frail cosmos its eternal law"?

Just, it's departmental, this one deals with crimes against the over-easy, this one with melanocities on a hill, this one with RUR all poor, the one on the west coast plans wooden holiday party hats keeping each brain warm against the chill above the clouds, above the air, above the there

"Thirty thousand mighty suns shone down in a soul-searing splendor that was more frighteningly cold in its awful indifference than the bitter wind that shivered across the cold, horribly bleak world."

You're so above it all, but what don't you know? The witching hour descends and lifts, the certainty of human insufficiency drowned in cock, tails and corny syrupy platyhelminthic 'tudes, études in scarlet lettering, all canalizing the dribble of thought away from self imp prove ment of the perverse city of delusion where we do not kill we only use their own aggression against them and anyway who do they think they are and certainly "I might and you might but neither of us do though and neither of us will" to power incarnate but never inmentate your fill and still want more to fill you up, never be enough to fill you up, never be enough to fill you up the hill to fetch beyond the pale beyond the veil beyond the hell of knowing everything you don't know-it-all boils down to ACTION! roll camera obscurah-rah-rah, go team, there is no I, no lonely perversity in the mob's scrutability

"And when, amid no earthly moans,

Down, down that town shall settle hence,

Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,

Shall do it reverence."