Stock Character Paradise

"Nichts bleibt"

Eisbrecher - Supermodel

 

Barring a pile-up at the airport, this should go up a couple hours before I arrive at my apartment. I've been visiting family over the past month, and though I'd arranged in advance for a backlog of puns and run-on sentences to post during my absence (many thanks also to Secretary of Flexing Hegseth's primitive antics for an easy political segue) I at one point realized I'd be too wiped to write anything after my flight, so let's see... what media have I been consuming during my trip? Let's start with Lynn, the abstract puzzle game inexplicably featuring a strong female protagonist.

gag me with a spoon

Actually it's at least two of them so far, and I'm only a third of the way in. It reminds me of one reason I generally haven't bothered with platformers or puzzlers or tower defenses these past couple decades. Abstraction doesn't sell well, so they pad out their features with pap and sap and cookie-cutter moralism. If I roll my eyes at an RPG telling me I saved the world and won the princess' eternal love (some terms and restrictions may apply) by knocking a pixelated goblin over the head, the same emotional manipulation on behalf of sliding brackets makes me want to gouge them out altogether.

 

As a rule such additions prompt a double double-take. First off, why was the emotive fluff included at all? Second, if you're gonna do it, why must it be the same idiotically trite and repetitive nonsense every time? The little girl is sugar and spice and everything nice, the magic spirit saves and falls in wuv with a wounded manly type, toss in some goblins or something and maybe an evil wizard or cute animal companion? Sure, whatever, pile it on. Come on, even by eight years old most of us were ready for other options.

 

Or at least you'd think so. But what audience age bracket is Death In Paradise's targeting? I caught a couple of episodes of it years ago and didn't think much of the old beach cops routine, nor am I much of a fan of cozy murder mysteries. A longer look these past weeks brought my attention to the show's fairly snappy directing, a formula distilled to on-cue entrances and exits, an "I've gathered you all here" ending summation every episode, exactly one-point-five emotions per character per scene, and the occasional pratfall comic relief moment. If a bot's not already copy-pasting these scripts, they're wasting money.

 

Characters naturally follow. The smart guy has to be a diffident, stammering stumblebum solving cases by what appear to be flashes of divine inspiration rather than self-driven ratiocination. Low-ranking males are comic relief failing at life in a new way every episode and tripping over their own shoelaces in scene after scene so that the nearest female may prove herself smarter, faster and superior in every way. The only dignified male is the blatantly post-sexual old fossil of a daddy-figure existing to pat girlies on the head and verbally bitchslap their tribe's other males to put them in their place. Female suspects are as a rule red herrings stepping aside for a guiltier male by the parlor confession scene. If culpable in some way, females must be provided with a greater noble purpose under whose umbrella to operate. She was saving her family. It was self-defense. She was emotionally distraught. She just wuvs too much. Or her antagonist was a beast, was a loser, was a bad businessman losing the family fortune, was guilty of <something sexual> etc. A woman's conflict against a man is an opportunity to ladle negative qualities onto him until we come out convinced any man in fact deserves whatever's coming to him, more time is devoted to her justification for murder, and she herself struts offstage to the soft twanging of emotive strings establishing her moral superiority.

 

In the one instance I've seen so far where women are guilty of killing an innocent man, it's downplayed as an accident. The victim himself is minimized, never speaking a single line or even appearing as a character to prevent us from sympathizing with him - though at least for once he's not demonized to make us believe he deserved it. The emphasis is placed on the killers' emotional vulnerability to exculpate them in the audience's eyes. We're immediately assured of one woman's morally upright contrition, and the other did it all for love, and the reveal quickly transitions into a comic relief ending scene where another woman is praised for having helped a hapless man satisfy his fiancee's demands, to reaffirm the status quo of man bad; woman good. 

 

If this tedious old routine is sounding familiar, don't credit the BBC with it. It's the same exact "man bad; woman good" formula you've been seeing in every Hollywood flick the past fifteen years (and in most of them before that) and I've been pointing it out in games and comics and really... everything. Death in Paradise itself is highly successful. You can tell when they budget extra commercials rivaling the show's own runtime. Not just one but two spin-offs already. Fifteen seasons and counting. Supposedly it's boasted five detectives in sequence over that time, and given the writing's strict worship of formula, I feel confident each and every one will prove the same exact diffident nebbish wringing his hands apologetically whenever scripted in a scene opposite a woman. And there are a thousand more series just like it in the medium of television alone.

 

I've been commenting on this topic for over a decade now, and it's still hard for even me to wrap my head around how thoroughly feminism, that is to say misandry, permeates every creative medium, every public statement and classroom and ad break. No matter if you tell yourself your own country lacks a feminist lobby as visible as in the States, you have been absorbing their abuse from the cradle, whether from Hollywood, the BBC, every "news" outlet, what-have-you. It's the default. It's safe and homey. It's a "cozy" mystery.

 

It's murder. You have to dive into the most oppressive hellholes on the planet like Muslim dictatorships or North Korea to find comparable brainwashing campaigns so unchallenged as to outreach even the universal fairytale conventions about generic toothy, googly-eyed goblins jumping out of the walls at a plucky heroine. Because if I'm being honest, even Lynn's chibified wonderland cannot be called over-done or gratuitous compared to yet another and another scene of a male character stammering ineffectively while a woman cuts him down to size by virtue of her ovarian supremacy.

 

And that's where this post would end... if I hadn't also caught one episode where a daughter is revealed as having murdered her mother. No men involved. Sure, it's not directly bucking the default man bad / woman good juxtaposition, just sidestepping it, but four years ago when it aired I would not have bet on a TV show, especially a successful one, passing up the chance to pivot to a last-minute reveal of a filthy, vicious, malevolent male at the root of all evil. Still wouldn't bet on it.

 

But it's something, damnit. Another tiny crack in the facade.

  

I can't help noting that minor heresy against feminist dogma occurred in the only episode I've seen eschewing the standard mystery boilerplate as well, dodging red herrings or a final summation. Maybe they were just in a hurry? Or maybe the feminist litany of vituperation against and degradation of men is thus revealing its proper place among the primitive, trite, infantile mass-media formulae for the exploitation and manipulation of the ignorant masses, a fairytale for the simpleminded, a pile of stock gimmicks stapled onto any and every work regardless of relevance, like goblins jumping out of the walls.

I've never lived anywhere I could see dark-eyed juncos year-round.

They do overwinter at my current location though. 

Somehow they always cheer me up a bit.

Maybe it's the smaller family groups, or the more calm and measured way they scour the ground for food. Or maybe it's how easily they lose themselves in the ashen and sober, crisped and sere winter landscape. Little wisps of dust and fog tumbling about the rest.

 

This one's about Pete Hegseth

"I know niggas is hard-headed but I ain't got the patience
Don't want me havin' no patience, turn into more patients
More trips to ICU 'cause I see you
Trying to get away with shit a real nigga wouldn't do"

 

DMX - Where Da Hood At

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"You'll never get rich

You sonovabitch

You're in the army now"

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Once upon a time, my family's adorable puppy killed a cat. Strays from the neighbourhood continually trespassed in her yard, no matter how many times she chased them off. She'd tree one occasionally and have to be locked indoors while my father coaxed/carried the furball back down. Then one cat was too slow climbing and she shook it like a terrier having caught a rat, snapping its spine.

 

The adorable puppy was in turn attacked by a neighbour's pit bull while walking down the block, out in the open street. One year it broke her tail. A couple years later, it tore open her flank, thankfully not hitting much but skin and subcutaneous fat so she eventually healed up alright after being stitched up twice. But she's still absolutely terrified of even walking along the other side of the street from the pit bull's yard, and has to be walked to the park by the back road.

 

See the difference there? The Adorable Puppy did murder a repeat offender invading her territory and ignoring all warnings. But she doesn't go after cats in general, making no fuss at the neighbours' pampered housepet since it has the sense to stay on its own side of the fence. In fact when our relatives visit with their own cat, the two animals have always studiously ignored each other like divas at a cocktail party, instinctively accepting some sort of transitive in-group membership via monkey clan. They obviously don't like being in the same house, but neither raises a hackle. T'would be impolitic.

 

The pit bull attacks everything that moves, anywhere it moves, going after a local child on another occasion, who thankfully escaped before it could reach him. And though you'd rightly assume those holding a dangerous animal should take extra care to keep it contained, the same psychosis leading some to buy a pit bull prods them to "accidentally" let it slip out of the yard even more often than most. They want the drama. They want to play the victim when others call them on it as if they and their precious murder-beast are being targeted in a pogrom.

On a completely unrelated topic, the webcomic site Big Head Press has seemingly shrunk a bit over the years, down to its main libertarian adventure yarn and its porn spin-off. A couple of decades ago it also hosted a gargle of similar fare, including The Probability Broach, wherein a medium-boiled detective from a commie hell-topia travels to an alternate-dimension free-market paradise to be shown the wrong of his assumptions on public safety and powermongering, yadda-yadda, you know how that sort of story goes where academics are evil wizards and anyone who's not a shotgun-totin' shitkicker might by some contrivance prove a devious foreign subversive. Given how much of it reads like Robert Heinlein fanfiction, I will admit to having enjoyed The Broach well enough, which did not blind me to some of its more batshit insane moments, more often than not involving Americans' obsession with firearms.

 

"Vaughn's gun didn't do him much good, though."

"Not against a machinegun -- that's what happens when you outlaw handguns -- matters escalate."

Wait, so if you outlaw pit bulls, everyone will manage to find and buy Bengal tigers? How does that track? You gave your character gun N, had him killed by gun N+1, all as proof that N-1 would result in more gun murder? Well, I'm sure it aaall made sense back at the rally...*

 

Most comical the railing against criticism of the gun fetish as sexual sublimation, when the detective's requisite plucky love interest wails for a few pages around the stunning line: "who's sicker, somebody who thinks his gun is a sexual organ, or somebody who wants to take everybody's sexual organs away?"

Umm, the first category, definitely. You're still the crazy one. Your sublimation is unhealthy, and if my Pride-And-Joy were a revolver, I wouldn't blame you for making me at least wear a kevlar condom around town. 

 

There's a particular insanity to the image of a pit bull as call to atavism, as a strongman championing "the hood (at)" or his people, tribe, what-have-you. Much as a religious cretin might in his unbearable ignorance present an agriculturally, artificially selected banana as symbol of God's tailoring of the world for humans, a pit bull is the result of hyperselection for a highly artificial environment, the fighting pit. It exists at the mercy and self-destructive insanity of an entirely different species. In the wild it would show its innumerable disadvantages like its coat or its loss of energy-saving canine loping gait, etc. Wolves are certainly more aggressive than domestic dogs as a whole, but a wolf born with a pit bull's omnidirectional hyperaggression would likely be torn apart by the rest of its pack or would at least be abandoned to its fate when it idiotically runs at a bear or whatever. Most animals value but also understand the limitations of turf and trespassing. T'would be impolitic not to.

 

And for the human species itself, while warrior castes had existed for millennia, mass militarist sentiment among the lower classes was a rare phenomenon until Napoleon's** adept exploitation of our overdeveloped social-climbing instinct, discovering he could pay soldiers, instead of material goods, in artificial status symbols a.k.a. medals a.k.a. the latest spaulders in Word of Warcraft. North-American colonists had guns for immediate necessity, not sport or ideology.

 

But in closing we must in brief touch on Pekingese and try not to lose a finger, because many toy breeds in fact display the same level of aggression as pit bulls, and are undisciplined even by that comparison! Had Chihuahuas the size to carry through on their intent, every tupperware party would end as redly as Cujo's wettest dreams. And as for surviving in a natural state, well... let's just say the local squirrels would acquit themselves better. By analogy, if you scoff at the absurdity of pumping military staff full of testosterone, admit depo-provera's no divine ambrosia either. There's nothing healthier or more natural in recent decades' obsession with feminization, in fabricating a political prop of what should be personal choice, in the feminist movement's desperation to prop up transsexuals and transvestites and metrosexual poodles as morally superior misandrist converts and a show of diversity reducing diversity to a neutered cherub ideal. Feminists' yapping purse-pooches have made at least as much a spectacle of their ideology as libertarian gun nuts, and their market penetration is even greater. Gun Queen Story Hour, anyone?

 

So yes, great, leash the current political insanity. Then also leash the other brand you've refused to address for decades running. As would be politic.

 

 

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* A lot of times this sort of argument hearkens back to increased alcohol consumption during prohibition, naively ignoring that manufacturing a machine gun takes a helluva lot more investment, coordination and precision than mashing some grapes in a barrel and forgetting about the sauce for a while. Bathtub gin is doable. Bathtub anti-air missiles, not so much. The proliferation of firearms is not a grass-roots movement, but the result of very large, very organized, very governmental corporate profiteering.

 

** Though Napoleon tends to be over-credited for this. Pretty sure the Prussians were developing the same system around the same time. 

AoW4 Factions, 23

AoW4 has managed the odd feat, unequaled since City of Heroes, of inspiring me to not just write up a character bio but constantly create new factions and give them all more or less whimsical flavor text. So here they are, one by one:

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I've always hated the roleplaying stigma against death and necromancy, so last year I made several Shadow factions playing the evil either up or down as the mood struck me. This ended up my favorite one of the bunch. Shadow/astral have great synergy in terms of spellcasting, though these guys aren't as specialized for pure nuking as my syrons or Cheshire cats. In contrast to my usual summon/buff-heavy routine (though I do miss my beasts 'n weeds) this faction needs a scant few summons to shore up the front line (made up of skeleton cannon fodder in the first place) before they simply debuff and nuke everything in some truly spectacular displays of pyrotechnics (cryotechnics?) especially with various casting point bonuses meaning you can really let rip with the big guns. (Caveat: always starved for mana.) Strategically, the economic side's a struggle but rapid research at least widens my bag of tricks quickly, freebie skeletons ease the recruitment pressure and the Keepers of Knowledge diplomatic bonuses help more than expected. Also, a Defender giant avatar combined with back-row evokers allows for faster than usual early expansion, for a nerd faction. Love it, and replayed it a few times after ascension.

A Fine Frenzy

Erase her despair, you've always been there, you're shorter of hair, you're shorter on hair, la mer des mêres your Venus declare or you're off to the chair, all the spoils of a wasted life through all of my wasted years, through all of my wasted tears off the tourniquet, she still has all her hair but your bones crack in her little teeth, won't you be her leather, Pat's still perky but the old game is not up, Herbert, revert, don't lose sight of the dog that's inside you better yet don't lose consciousness with your back to the bitch, the oldest game is never over, the oldest profession has no borders, will you take your place in the great below her navel gazing, did they warn you of hazing, did they warn you of negging did they warn you of hazel eyes always seeking above is her sun your sun is hersun your sun ishersunyoursun, oh repair, she's always been there she comes, walking down the street race you to the finish line it's in a courthouse guns to your head when you've got nothing left to give sever flesh and bone and offer it to Herbert learned his lesson eventually but did you despair of the aristocratic life commitment it did she have a headache and where did she sleep last night, in the pi nes and you did you sleep in the lake of fire where the tied up, used up and dead to the world end up the hill to fetch a peel it back and doesn't it make you feel better to regiment your bhisti, christie lists her wants to loam your seedy needs, down girl down, down girl down you send him in it, she was up above it all, but when you live with ape men it's hard to be clean track it from the beginning, with beer and bread and a road well traveled the priestess cured wild meat into a hero, always who pay - two or three months does it mutter how much as if every month after, und du hast night gesicko, perverted luste, sons of goddesses ach schweine, sate this liebste meine hands and knees we crawl you cannot stop us all of this for youuuu-hooochie that frail braining you with her heart as big as a whale at the casino she know how to kick the gong around so git to the track and make them dullards fast but it'll never be enough, never be enough, never be enough to fill your head the dormouse said right before the cat meowed and out he cowed, the oxy, oxy ollenfree, all the men she tells youuu-hooo will never be, still gardening her bed of krater-era icons, the blood of your foes burns you at her jealous will you won't you realize she had you made from the start, made man high-grade man, rock superstar, five cars you're in charge of the honeys at the palladium is an imaginary currency at which girlies was laughin 'cause how's that gonna help you get a friend from whose ride to holla, when you gettin' clean of the heroine, where the parents comin' at you with supersonic speeds for the grand kids with guns gonna get it where I can't look at the world the way you look at the world is not enough but it's a start my love you 'til the day that hie die ist die erste stern von alle sad pictures of girls getting bitter sisters you used to have but don't any more than she can give her body it would be impolitic to bring up the soul cages in the fishwoman's yard full of brass watch, a cheque, maybe three weeks to live your fear of biological imperatives, it's relative, it's all in the family, they're hiding inside of me, sie will es und so ist es brauch, was sie will bekommt sie you gonna do right like some other man do it young and stupid the way she likes it's always there, oh despair of seeing her dancing pretty with tears in her eyes blackbird singing in the dead of night for her slice of your pie, deny your goddess three times into the seven day binge, that to surrender magnificently to passion accurst, but Fiduciary Annie's just a girl to me, kinda down, kinda feelin' some feelings you wouldn't believe the good old spells on you, 'cause you're hers if you love her, hers if you hasst her dead disco, dead funk, dead rock and roll was a euphemism for the dead love couldn't go no further her goals, hells' bells knocks me on my knees, rolls with platinum wheels, that don't impress her much ado about the shrew, but the mouse is called immodest if he redirects your female gaze from the glass ceiling where mandy went to med school to the glass floor where every scrub takes three steps toward the door mister, it ain't right babe, no, it ain't right, no, no, to feel so lucky while gettin's good times are killing me was this for real, just an illusion, a toxic pillory to make her numb to your place in the dirt, a toxic pillory to make you dumb to her funny little face, 'cause there's a knife for every day that I've known you, just remember, when you think you're free, you'll never be free, you'll never be free, you'll be the revenging mariner hoping that you'd die holding hands, have you started to turn into somebody else, that always happens to somebody else, you'll always know who you are, from the other side of the sixteen military wives reclaiming your small estate, disorder, disorder the toxicity of your city in the deep dank tarn where your hideous heart keeps beating, straining against Annie's grip for more, more than the chore, more than the bore, more than before, more than a mandate to adore, more than a man dares to restore, the crisped and sere hopes of lone moan before Weir was haunted by ghoulfriends, when they called him unforgiven unto unprofitable intrigues soaring above the beldam's curtain poles where Brunhild gets ever more impatient in her ring of monetized desire, where it's curtains for Marsyas preaching to the choir, down in the park where Paris and Ravana and Nessus and Koschei offer the spoils of a wasted life, allzumenschliche for yoouuuu-hoo've always been their, you've always been their, you've always been their despair.

Oh, despair, she'll always be there.

 

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I've been doing fewer of these stream-of-consciousness rambles the past couple of years, for... multiple reasons. One being that song lyrics and other quotes have increasingly hijacked said streams. This time though, it even started with a song, getting back in my car exhausted and drenched with a sudden rainstorm after a walk through the woods but somehow still sweating and struggling for breath, and the stereo piped up with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Despair. The singer's got the type of voice that really hits me (cf. Garbage, Metric, In This Moment, etc.) and so from the first lyrics my miserable drowned rat physical state was wrenched into her meaning, her intonation. And all I could think driving home was how fucking unfair this was, even as I worshipped every lilt and sigh and set it on repeat. I won't even bother trying right now to list every source I ripped off above. Some references even I can't remember after the fact, and this is about 90% random rip-offs by volume. Herbert is an initial and the mother of mothers references both NIN and my favorite comic book. The first few phrases were mentally composed on my way home, most of the rest sitting in a hot bath until my old tablet's text editor crashed on me and erased what I hadn't saved. So it goes. That was three months ago. I finally rediscovered it during another bath and picked up the Poe quote where I'd left off. So it also goes. But the last line was fixed as soon as I got in my car back then. And it still goes.

Spiny Orb Weavers

I've been getting better at spotting these absolute weirdos.

The main problem is that they seem to prefer shade, making not just spotting but photography a bit tricky.

Sometimes you get a closer encounter than you'd like though. They sling their webs a bit higher than triangle orb weavers, but I still ended up raking this one's apart with the top of my head.

It landed on my shirt sleeve, and I had a few precious moments to snap some photos one-handed. That is not a happy spidey by the way. Pretty sure when they rear up like that, you're about to get bitten. My shirt was comfortably loose though and hanging apart from my skin, so I was fairly confident it would not get through. Which did not stop me from quickly brushing it off with my camera lens the moment it made a move.

Go Limit Yourself

Last month when I referenced the Netflix miniseries Ripley it turned my stomach to see it listed as a "limited series" on commentary sites, even in one of two instances on Wikipedia. That's not a valid term. It's a corporate marketing slogan. We already had a name for it, which is to say the old marketing slogan. Miniseries have existed for half a century and when they launched I'm sure the jargon sold for a while, sounded coquettish and fun like mini candy bars. Now of course a few quick economic recessions have given the public a taste for full-sized candy bars instead, so suddenly you're sold something "limited" to sound exclusive like collectable comics and get-it-while-supplies-last!

 

But why the fuck are the rest of you swallowing their bullshit? You are not obligated to use their word. You can still call it a miniseries. If it is true that you've built up a resistance to the old marketing hype, if it no longer fools you, that is precisely why you should absolutely refuse to call it anything else! In fact, whenever some Mad Man runs up to you shouting the latest focus-grouped buzz-word rebranding an existing product, the appropriate response is to kick his lying bitch teeth in, not collude in his manipulation of you!

 

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Now let's talk about "mansplaining"...