Once upon a time, it wouldn't be that time again until four times.

Digger

"But in your head
You're all dead
Your brain's cold
From what's been told
And there you sit
Begging change
Don't you get it?
You're still in the shooting range"

 

Switchblade Symphony - Ride

 

 

Like Unsounded or What Birds Know, Digger's another comic I'd meant to talk about from this blog's very inception (given it was just wrapping up about that time) but continually put off until forgetting about it. So, to the assuredly bountiful "stylized black and white fantasy wombat / hyena / demon / Ganesha / troll / shrew / squash / rat / veily monk and absent dwarf epic" fan demographic, here's one for you. Looking back now, Digger seems like the most precise delineation between webcomics' early years when their very validity as a medium was being questioned and even successful ones mostly consisted of pencil-drawn and scanned disjointed scribblings, and this current stage of fancy-schmancy drawin' tablets and Patreon.

It started as basically a five-page riff on Bugs Bunny failing to turn left at Albuquirky: a wombat gets lost while tunneling and comes up in a weird spot far from home. After that, the author freely admits to making it up by the seat of her pants, up to page 50-ish in its entirety and still adding largely random elements all through its run. You can basically see her fleshing out the mythology via concatenation: shadow?child! servants?cold! dead?skins! with those qualities later lent relevance and weight. In this it was very much akin to any number of early webcomics (e.g. Sluggy) but unlike them it increasingly cemented its setting and theme as it went. Instead of jumping haphazardly between genres and promoting an endlessly bloated character cast to sequential prominence, Digger doubled down and tied together its early brain farts into a single narrative.

 

It straddles the dividing line before the explosion of politically correct insanity as well. I've seen a rumor that Ursula Vernon's been quaffin' the woke-aid in recent years. But back around 2010, for all that Digger sported multicultural aesthetics (Balinese and Indian statuary, south-Asian garb) and gender inversions (keep in mind much of the story concerns hyenas) little in it pushed the currently prevalent anti-white, anti-male, heterophobic supremacist propaganda. The almost entirely female cast does contain both stupid and evil portrayals, the women routinely argue and confront each other, the heroine's sidekick's a highly sympathetic male, and in a style reminiscent of that other Ursula's The Telling, Jhalm the recurring male antagonist is portrayed as respectably stalwart in his misinformed lawful neutral obstructionism.

 

All in all, though trying to write a story with no plan is usually just a quaint exercise done for its own sake and not for the result, Digger's one of the few projects to ever make good on "LOLrandom!" In this case, constantly playing fix-up with half-baked ideas likely yielded a better story than would've come from overindulgence in any one aspect.

Once upon a time, there was an opening narration.

999 words

"Whattodowheretogohowtodowithoutyou?

You're-my-pole-star!"

Caravan Palace - Jolie Coquine

 

Watching the first half of the latest Dune movie, I was reminded of one difficulty in adapting the book. A disproportionate slice of its events are interpreted through omniscient narration of various characters' internal monologue, especially Paul's. Think of scenes like the vision after his and Jessica's escape. It's not so much the event itself as an intelligent, highly educated young man's awareness of its implications that lends it its gravitas, that ego-effacing triskelion of convoluted cross-purposes and pitfalls, of being turned into a channel for the flow of history against one's will, of standing on the brink of apotheosis and at the same time a potential end to all that has been. I won't deny young Timmy Shammy's a durn fine thesspeen and did what he could with it, but the scene simply does not work in film. Instead of momentous, it feels dragging. Certainly you're not left with the spine-tingling impression of having just witnessed the story's cusp, and in turn that lack saps subsequent chapters of much of the change in tone beyond "ah crap, dad's dead" or a change of palace/sietch scenery. Yet trying to convey visually the verbal description of Paul's inner realizations would not only eat up screen time but turn the scene into a truly Lynchian acid trip. (And that's what the water of life scene is for.)

But other alterations can be excused far less readily. Take for instance excising Princess Irulan's epigraphs and replacing them with Chani's cheekbones for the sake of shilling the pop tart. Irulan's narration helps not only foreshadow coming chapters but contextualize the story's conflict in historical terms, not merely as the aimless lurching and clashing of hordes of brainwashed simpletons but as the informed machinations of superior intellects within a sophisticated social milieu. And in this case, they could easily have been overlaid on establishing shots as voiceovers.

In other adaptations (sticking with good ones) even omissions minor in length lose their justification for the original passage's illustrative scope.

Unlike some, I never saw much problem with leaving Tom Bombadil out of The Lord of the Rings, he mostly serving to work up the fairytale atmosphere without plot tie-ins. I did lament removing the entire greater Old Forest / Barrow Downs sequence, which presaged both the ents and wraiths of later chapters and showed the wide reach of evil in Middle-Earth, and let the hobbits earn their plot-critical shortswords. Worse yet: leaving out the dunedain. Aragorn is not only the son of Arathorn, not merely royal brat #594 riding into town on his high-horse and demanding a throne jus' 'cuz, but the latest leader of a millennium-running guerilla resistance movement. Gathered support from his northern kinsmen cemented the good guys' historical, geographic and political continuity. Replacing them with a random visit from a lone Elrond not only came across as... a bit goofy... but partly restricted the scope from Tolkien's more mature worldbuilding approach toward a standard power fantasy adventure wherein designated heroes save the world.

Or take as another example Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, set in a world experiencing at least partial ecosystem collapse - hence the title, artificial pets having become a luxury item as more species die off. Blade Runner pretty much ignored that angle, but I've always been irked by the loss of a very minor scene in which a tiny spider futilely struggles to bite through human skin. The various juxtapositions of human/android/animal interactions set up a creeping existential dread backed by "as above, so below" comparisons* largely absent from the more character-centered movie... albeit partly compensated by Rutger Hauer's inspired rewrite of his final speech.

 

While we're on PKD and creepy-crawlies, Linklater's otherwise excellent adaptation of A Scanner Darkly left out the recounting of a sexy chick who'd rallied three male junkies to her apartment to rescue her from a bug invasion. Though eager to get in her good graces (and pants) they protest the singular bug in question is harmless. Her reply "If I had known it was harmless I would have killed it myself" becomes a lynchpin of the novel's attempt to humanize addicts in comparison to nominally healthy, mockingbird-slaying human psychology. Given the exchange's brevity and its reflection on the rest of the story (hint: where else does the word "harmless" show up?) was it not more plot-relevant than the sex scene?

Sometimes changes truly are warranted by the medium. The Road was brilliant in both book and movie form, but the book winds up with a passage which never fails to bring a tear to my eye:

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

I don't care how many screenwriting/directorial awards you've won, I give you little chance of doing that paragraph justice on screen. It was replaced, however, in poignant fashion, with the screen fading to black and fading in aural ambiance evoking a different brand of irreparable loss of the mundane. A well-conceived and well-executed compromise.

But more often than not, such changes are simply concessions to the movie-going public's presumed mental feebleness compared to the page-flipping public. Innumerable books' nuance or emotive punch has been sapped by a Hollywood happy sappy ending. Even when the ending itself is not ruined, its setup still can be. The classic adaptation of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine from 1960 omits a short episode after escaping the Morlocks. The traveler stops so far into the future that the Earth has become tidally locked with the Sun. No trace of civilization lingers, not even ruins. Along an endless, freezing beach naught survives but smears of planktonic scum and oversized, scavenging crabs. No sound greets him but the wind, and the chill of eternity encroaches ever closer. Faced with the futility and finality of existence, the time traveler hops back to his own time, to save the degenerate, yet cozily familiar and reassuring, Eloi. In the movie version, omission of the final shore leaves the impression of a hero rushing to the year 802,701 to lead a glorious rebellion of the meek against the predatory. But in the book this doubles as a retreat from ultimate reality. Is continuing the good fight a quixotic limitation of human intellect then? The vapid gesticulations of a short-lived and short-sighted ape incapable of grasping the fullness of its own place in infinity? Or a humble admission of same limitation and resolution to work within one's means? And why is this added layer presumed off-limits to the payer of a ten-dollar movie ticket yet not a ten-dollar novel?

_________________________________________________

 

* I still maintain PKD hit that theme more solidly in his best story, Second Variety.

Once upon a time there was a <blank>

Then it got shot.

Naive Little Pieces

"They'll never know where she got her weapon"

Kidneythieves - Arsenal

 

Hold it!

Stop everything, we need to address this very pressing issue.

Whenever cartoons, video games or whatever want to pepper their natural landscapes with something colorful that isn't flowers, they often default to the familiar white-speckled red mushroom. Case you didn't know, it's poisonous! Well, not horrifically poisonous... some even try to get stoned off it. Also, almost everyone already knows about it... but! But being colorful it attracts the attention of small children, whose low body mass increases the likelihood of a toxic dose. And here our entertainment products are promoting this vile peril!

I hereby decree that everything must be done to combat the menace of toadstools! All products featuring them must be yanked off the proverbial shelves and replaced with products promoting nice, safe tofu, which despite clearly being the superior foodstuff has been unfairly mocked and marginalized for generations. Obviously that toad-humper Mario's first on the chopping block.

What?

What're you looking at me like that for? Why are you not dropping everything to join my cause? Clearly my only course of action is to start an anti-muscarinic activist group and begin forming hashtag mobs to hound every author, every graphic artist, every movie and game studio until they conform to my demands for combatting shroom doom! Soon, I trust, a multibillion-dollar publicity campaign shall spring up, and any shroom sympathizers will be blacklisted as we righteous ones morally cleanse all media and all society beyond. All of society shall be defined by anti-toadstool, pro-tofu affirmative action.

 

Sound ridiculous?

Now consider this is an actual, verifiable, physical danger (children are in danger! won't somebody please think of the children?) not some nebulous "institutionalized prejudice" demonstrated by the fact I'm not king of the world yet.

 

On a completely unrelated note, The Lord of the Rings Online added Umbar in the last months. While less virulently stupid on average than the Gundabad zone's quests, whichever "writer" was responsible for the previous pile of garbage is obviously still on the payroll. Or at least one of them. Though, amusingly, her (safe to assume "her") influence is only discernible in unfiltered, unedited form in half a dozen quests on one isolated island in the earliest corner of Umbar. The good orcs are back:

 

And they still sound or act nothing like Tolkien's orcs but that's okay because we're standing up for marginalized minoritorcs and that's good because fantasy racism is bad, mmkaaay? Meanwhile the entire new main plot centers on a warrior princess countess baroness whateveress sailing off to save her kid while her husband repeatedly sings her praises. That at least could still be salvaged, but time will tell.

 

And of course the newest Dune adaptation needs to crank up Chani's appearances waaayyyy before she ever appears in the story. Is there anyone who didn't predict that utterly groundbreaking minority viewpoint?

And yes of course the latest Dominic Deegan chapter is some ridiculous conflation of fantasy dwarves with Taliban misogyny. What else could there be to talk about?

Or you could look at Baldur's Gate 3 whose companion roster permits nothing but sexy young bisexuals. At least its homognomos and trans-dimensional ringmaster don't take up the whole plot... but you do realize that shit ain't mandatory, right?

Not everything needs to be about the toad tofu.

Do none of you find it odd that in the name of diversity, every single one of you flaunts the exact same badge of moral superiority? Shemales and shefemales and the almighty glory of yaoi, all lightly dusted with melanin for a more exotic flavor? We used to express other themes in fiction! Strategic resource dependence, nuclear disarmament, EXPLORATION, the weighing of one's legacy against the public good, entitlement and modesty, the worth of a life, living a life of worth, fear both personal and societal and the overcoming of same, artistic expression, the environment, honor, compromise, industry and the working class, the yoke of material possessions, home and belonging, freedom vs. authority, safety vs. adventure, superstition vs. reason, future vs. present, crime vs. oppression, snobs vs. slobs, tradition vs. adaptation, intellectual isolation, integrity and the isolation that comes with it in turn, driving passions beyond sexual pair-bonding like revenge or greed or fanaticism (though I can see why the snowflakes of all people would want to dodge discussing that last one) or fuck it, anything, anything, ANYTHING other than yet another garish little wail and moan about the evil oppressive patriarchy and female empowerment!

 

When every. single. mother.fuckin. book/movie/comic/game/painting/song/tweet or particularly melodious fart must in every instance pay homage to your desire for more power, you already hold all the power. And what are you doing with it? What is our society's net cultural output channeled towards under your absolutist control? Endlessly complaining that you don't have enough power!

Of course the real mafioso grave-digging sadistic twist of this gigantic moral cleansing campaign lies in who's actually doing the work. 'Cause for the most part it ain't the trannies. It's heterosexuals promoting homosexuality, men glorifying women and white guilt to the thousandth generation, all of them brainwashed, bullied and blackmailed with the threat of blacklisting into producing racist, sexist propaganda against themselves.

 

There is no surprise as to the provenance of her weapon. He made it, loaded it and handed it to her.

How is a raven unlike a writing desk?