Lemony Picketing Comatose Jeannies

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

 

Mary Crowell - City of Doors

 

 

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

 

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

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

Uh... huuuh...

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

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

The hover-sculpture is very, very mobile

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

 

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

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reality, discovers the pitfalls of absolute power and the whole thing inevitably factors down to a bimillennially-outdated morality play on hubris and purity of heart.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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

 

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