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selfish-swine · 6 years

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Let’s Talk About Star Fox and Character For a Moment - Part 2: OOC is Serious Business

Continued from here. If you haven’t read part 1 yet, then go do that first! You need context! Anyway, this is a long one.

So that whole big rant I wrote up was really just a preamble to get to something I REALLY wanted to rant about but found myself basically writing two rants to get my point across and needed to split stuff up to establish a reference point for what I’m talking about.

Let’s Talk about the fandom’s universally disliked unfavorite, Star Fox Command on the typical topic of how badly it characterized everyone and derailed things and all that hullabaloo.

Now let’s get somethings clear here. First off, I do NOT think Command is a good game by any stretch, mechanically or narratively. It does screw a lot of shit up. Second of all, I am not saying Command doesn’t derail characters senselessly and deserve pretty much all the ire it’s earned from the fandom.

BUT. Big but here.

It is important to not dismiss all of Command for these mistakes. To start with, for as much Command gets flat out WRONG, it also gets a lot RIGHT. Falco and Fox’s bromance is especially strong in Command, and characters like Slippy (who basically never gets written poorly) are still solid. Pigma also gets some actual emotion to his unceremonious death in Assault as a spooky space ghost, to say nothing of the small implications it gives to Andross’ motivations. Then there are things that were just the result of Command having an honestly shoddy translation job all things considered, which especially pertains to Star Wolf. Panther’s third person self-narrations are a misunderstanding of him speaking in an arrogant manner in the original Japanese, and Leon’s infamous liking of rainbows was meant to be sarcastic - but these are things that can not be conveyed in text in ENGLISH (but can in Japanese). Then there is Wolf, which brings me to the real point I want to get at with this post.

I said before it is important not to dismiss all of Command for these mistakes, but really what I should say is it isn’t fair to dismiss Command for the same mistakes other games did before it, specifically Assault. The big offenders of Command, Fox and Krystal, are just as derailed in Assault (if not moreso in the case of Fox), along with Wolf and to a lesser extent, Peppy, yet no one bats an eye because it suits the fandom’s tastes at large (or at least the English speaking fandom), and that bothers me. Out Of Character writing should not be accepted just because you like the direction it takes, because that is disingenuous to the characters.

Let’s start with Fox. Fox’s archetype (to see why archetypes are important read part 1 you weenie) is that of the charismatic heroic leader. There are some subtle differences between his Western and Japanese depictions, namely his confidence (Japanese Fox is in 64 at least more son-in-his-father’s-shadow than Western Fox, but is no less cheeky or cocksure for it), but the general idea stays the same. This is consistent with Fox in the SNES comic, 64, and Adventures (as well as the Farewell Beloved Falco comic). He meets every challenge head on with confidence he can over come it and his sense of justice is strong, and this is reinforced mechanically as Fox being the player avatar, puts us in direct control of confronting these challenges with confidence and bravado.

Assault Fox lacks any of this. He is bland, boring, robbed of any character he once had. He stammers like a teenager more than he ever did as an actual teenager over the simplest of things, constantly walks into traps and danger in spite of knowing danger is ahead and waiting, routinely makes bad leadership choices by no virtue other than the plot necessitating it, and then at the end of the game acts absolutely unemotional to the supposed death of his mentor figure only to later reveal he knew all along his mentor wasn’t actually dead and was just hiding this from his team. Honestly, I might just need to make another rant dedicated JUST to WHY and HOW these ideas are detrimental to Fox’s character, but for now I’m going to leave this simple and possibly revisit the topic in greater depth. Either way, Assault Fox is uninteresting and vapid, underreacting to everything despite being previously established as a smart ass quippy hot blooded hero, and that’s terrible. Yet, noone notices or cares, because at least he didn’t break up with Krystal.

Let’s talk about Krystal next. To say she was treated OOC in Assault is honestly to suggest she had a character to begin with, but in all fairness she does have elements of it from Dinosaur Planet and Star Fox Adventures, if broken and disjointed due to her loss of protagonist status. Going back to what I wrote about archetypes, Krystal was, in DP64, completely set up to be an aspiring hero, but when DP64 became SFAd, she lost that narrative importance and was reduced to a Damsel in Distress crossed with a Macguffin Girl, which totally undermined what she had, but as I said there was traces of something still there. She is bold, brash, heroic and full of justice (much like Fox), but also more contemplative and insightful as well. She’s the wise hero to Fox’s action hero, or should have been at any rate.

So what did Assault do? Absolutely rob her of all that and just ram in hard the Love Interest nonsense. Everything about Krystal in Assault revolves around FOX - she has NO agency onto herself anymore, something she even had in Adventures at least at first until she got captured for 90% of the game. Not Assault Krystal, though. Her whole character is defined by her fawning over Fox, worrying over his idiot well being and wanting him to be safe, stammering affectionately like two high school kids who haven’t had their first kiss yet. Yes, she does have some moments free from this nonsense, but those moments are not her DOMINANT portrayal. Even when discussing things with bad boy romantic rival Panther, she focuses on -Fox-. Krystal’s entire character in Assault is dominated by the existence of her love interest.

That is the worst case of “love interest centric” writing you can commit, because when you take the stuff away that doesn’t bear on Fox, you have so little left. I’d honestly consider Command Krystal BETTER than Assault, because her rude angry bitchy self was at least her OWN character and not joined at the hip to Fox. Notice how the cutscene with Fox and Krystal with Tricky, Krystal barely says anything worthwhile to the conversation? It’s all Fox being flustered liked a stupid teenager while Krystal coyishly “teehees” in the background while Tricky hammers in the fact they are romantic interests. No. Agency. But again, no one cares, because its fuel for their ships, amirite?

Now we get to who is in my opinion the worst offender of Assault’s derailing character writing, Wolf. Fox might’ve gone from heroic leader to bland cardboard, but at least he’s still the protagonist. Krystal might’ve been reduced to a vapid love interest, but at least she didn’t have much left to lose to start with. Wolf, though, not only oversteps his boundaries as an archetype, but he PUSHES OUT other characters from their meta narrative roles as well. Wolf is the black hole of Assault’s writing, and he absolutely got away with it because he’s “cool” and “badass”. He is the pinnacle of my point in this rant.

Let’s talk about archetypes again. Wolf’s is that of the eternal rival, the black recolor, the evil counterpart to the hero. His mission is to see Fox undone for the sake of his own ego. In Japan, a little more supplemental information is known, namely that Wolf has a rivalry with the McCloud family name as a whole starting with James, and Fox’s reaction to Wolf’s persistent pursuit is treated more humorously than in the west (namely Fox is subtly dissing Wolf rather than being intimidated by him), but these subtleties do not change the core base that Wolf is an impulsive, rivalry motivated antagonist.

So of course Assault saw fit to.... shift him into a mentor role. This only compounds for the worse when you consider the fact that Wolf only even formed Star Wolf because Pigma manipulated and goaded him into doing it (another Japanese lore tidbit), further cementing that Wolf does not make good wise decisions. He is violent and aggressive and obsessed with his rivalry. Why the HECK is he suddenly giving advice to FOX? Wolf is the WORST person to give advice or take advice from, he is literally Mr. Bad Decisions, but Assault’s writers saw fit to absolutely change his entire persona from an aggressive archrival to a quasi-antihero cool guy big brother-esque mentor... and Fox doesn’t even remark on it! (Another mark for Fox being OOC I suppose).

Worst of all though isn’t the damage this does to Wolf, but rather, to Peppy! Wolf becoming the mentor effectively butts him into Peppy’s meta narrative role, and he essentially replaces him for it. This isn’t to say Star Fox characters can’t develop and shift around and change, but Wolf doesn’t DEVELOP into a mentor, nor does Peppy develop BEYOND it. Wolf just usurps it from Peppy and proceeds as usual. Good character writing is finding how to fit a character into a story - that is, finding a role they fit into and working from there. This is why so many fan OCs fail - they don’t fit into a role, they usurp from canon characters. One need only look at all the Star Wolf OCs that exist purely to replace “uncool” characters like Pigma or Andrew and see the flaws. When you write to replace another character, you aren’t writing true to that character, you are shackling and chaining them down to the one they are replacing. This is what Wolf does in Assault: he is sloppily mischaracterized, and then because of that, he butts into another character’s writing space.

And once more, the fandom at large did not notice or care, because Wolf is “cool”, “badass”, et cetera. This is my beef. This is my issue. So I leave you with what I said at the start of this rant: do NOT just accept changes to a character because it placates you superficially. THINK about what roles it is a character serves and why, and respect that. Don’t just blindly complain about character derailment just when it suits you because you don’t like the change personally, or because it fucks with your ships. Press yourself to be better than that.

#OOC #rant #ramble #meta narrative #character archetypes #melodrama #character derailment

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