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joiedecombat · 3 years

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Continuing in the vein of common Pride and Prejudice AU plots: Elizabeth marries someone else!

A lot of the time this is just to set her up as a wealthy widow of a peer and turn the disparity of social standing on its head, but sometimes the writers are out for blood.

Prime example: The Events at Branxbourne by Caitlin Williams.

This is The Worst Timeline. Okay, maybe Amy D'Orazio's Mysteries of Pemberley has it beat for overall bleakness, but Mysteries is a Gothic, they're supposed to be bleak. I'm not sure what Branxbourne's excuse is.

By the beginning of this book, almost the entire cast is miserable. Jane died of a fever shortly after Elizabeth's sojourn in Kent. Mr Bennet had what appears to have been a stroke, and though he survived it's left him physically impaired. Charles Bingley doesn't speak to Darcy any more since Jane's death; Darcy has spent the last several years burying himself in Derbyshire while Georgiana, in the care of her Fitzwilliam relatives in London, has fallen in with the bad influences of the shallow fashionable set. Colonel Fitzwilliam married Anne de Bourgh and didn't realize how much he loved her until she died giving birth to his son. And Elizabeth is married to an Earl who is mentally ill, abusive, deeply in debt and might have murdered his last wife.

GOOD TIMES. The only characters doing at all well for themselves are, oddly enough, Lydia and Wickham... but not with each other.

Naturally things only get worse from there once Darcy crosses Elizabeth's path again for the first time in years and starts to realize just how bad a situation that she's in.

"Do not cry, Elizabeth. I could bear anything but that."

She trembles. Looking about, seeing we are half-hidden by the trees and that there is no one around, I reach out and press her hand, squeeze her fingers tightly, but only for a moment. "My love, do not cry."

"Your love. Is that what I am?"

"Can I be plainer?"

"Yes, please." She surprises me with a broad smile. "Please do be very plain about it."

"You are my love," I tell her. "My only love, till the end of time. Whatever else my happen, and we may expect dark days ahead, never doubt that in this moment, beneath this perfect, blue sky, on this warm September day, you are loved as no other woman has ever been loved before. You are loved for all that you are, for what you once were, for all you will come to be."

"Mr Darcy, if only you had not once hidden your talent for compliments so well, then we might not be in this terrible mess."

I love a good Darcy To The Rescue story as much as anybody, but this one's A Lot. You've gotta be in a mood to wallow in the melodrama, to want to see these characters pushed to their limits by a situation that can't be endured and which their society's laws and mores offer no palatable solution for.

The happy ending comes as it should, but the trip there is an especially rough ride with little comic relief.

Content warning: domestic abuse, depiction of mental illness, infidelity (emotional if not physical), angst, first person present tense narration.

"If you, too, would enter into this marriage for practical reasons, I would be more easy with the notion. Then we would give to each other only what was received."

He smiled faintly. "Alas, my desire to marry you is formed by the wishes of my heart, not my head, so I cannot oblige you."

"If I did feel myself forming a more romantic attachment, I would welcome it. I just want you to understand that I do not know whether it will occur. It must be yours to decide whether or not you can be in an unequal marriage."

"I have considered it," he admitted after a thoughtful pause. "I see how you loved your husband, and I did not expect to supplant that. I shall readily admit that I am a jealous man, and to know that your heart belongs to him is difficult for me to accept. However, my choice is for an unequal marriage no matter what we decide. Either I can be with you--the one I love--or I can marry another and, thus, be with one who might love me but whom I do not love. You see, just as your heart is for Henry, mine is for you. That will not change.

"So, fully apprehending your hesitation, I say yes, I do agree to a practical marriage with you, accepting whatever amount of affection you give to me because I cannot live without you."

Amy D'Orazio's The Best Part of Love, meanwhile, has Elizabeth already married and widowed by the time she meets Darcy. Her husband was murdered in a treasonous plot that required her to live incognito with her family in Hertfordshire for a couple of years, allowing Darcy to make his usual astonishingly bad first impression at the Meryton assembly and fall in love more or less at first sight.

Rather than Branxbourne's unrelenting angst, this book is a whole soap opera: unnecessarily complicated backstory, misunderstandings and mistaken identities, high emotion, a mystery, and a sharp plunge into acute misery in the third act when it turns out that Elizabeth's late husband might be considerably less dead than advertised, to the dismay of nearly everyone involved.

It's a very well-written soap opera, and worth reading if you're looking for that kind of emotional roller coaster.

The essence of the problem was that there was simply nothing he could do for the situation. He had never before been faced with a challenge for which some action could not be taken. He could neither buy anything nor persuade anyone, work at something nor study a topic, take himself away from his pain nor have the pain removed. He did not even have the comfort of despising someone. There was no one to despise, not even himself, for all had acted with honour and integrity and done the best they could with the hand they had been dealt. It was nothing more than a circumstance beyond anyone's control, and that made it insupportable.

After leaving him to wallow about in his despair for a fortnight, his cousins came for him as he had suspected they eventually would.

"Have you left your house at all, Darcy?" Fitzwilliam's face bore a look of vexing kindliness.

"What do you think--that I sit here all day pining for her?" he snapped.

"That is precisely what I think," Saye replied, tousling Darcy's hair as he walked by and then further compounding his sin by not even looking to see the angry scowl Darcy gave him.

This book also contains my favorite version ever of Colonel Fitzwilliam's older brother, here (as in all of the rest of D'Orazio's Pride and Prejudice fiction) named Viscount Saye and characterized as a languid, almost terminally unflappable dandy with very few social filters to speak of and absolutely no fucks to give. He's an affectionate cousin to Darcy and usually gleefully awful, and is a character I enjoy very much.

Content warning: very brief reference to suicidal thoughts, high melodrama.

#the events at branxbourne #the best part of love #pride and prejudice #ongoing adventures in austen pastiche #honestly I wish I could recc more of d'orazio's books #but she has this tendency to do one supporting character dirty each time #the thing with mr bennet in mysteries of pemberley wasn't too bad #but goddamn leave bingley and col fitzwilliam alone

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writtenbyhappynerds · 4 years

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Fanfiction 102- Writing Superpowers

Another week, another lecture. Like supervillains, writing superpowers came up during Fanfiction 101. We see a lot of characters with superpowers, and we have written many many characters with superpowers. Superpowers or gifts or quirks, whatever you call them, can be poorly executed much like characterization; they become vague, mary sue-esque, and they don’t let me as the reader know what’s going on with said character. Defining superpowers is a lot like defining the Rules of the Universe (as discussed in Unit 1 of Fanfiction 101) where defining and setting parameters for superpowers will protect the canon of your characters as well as their validity.

The most important thing you need to do when writing superpowers is to figure out what those superpowers are and what they can and can’t do. I’m very over vague Elsa ice powers that started with being able to freeze things and ended with visions of the past. Magic is the most difficult superpower to write because it is the most freeform, but you have to define limitations, costs and put a cap on those capabilities that don’t involve the OC collapsing from overuse because that’s such a cliche. A great example is The Fairly Odd Parents. Cosmo and Wanda can’t make money, can’t make true love, and can’t kill or bring someone back from the dead. Their time and agency to cast magic on behalf of someone are limited, and they can’t cast whatever magic they want; it has to be limited to what the child they serve wants. Writing setbacks to magic is a lot like writing character flaws. You need to take the time to give limitations. By giving magic limitations you have an easier time creating plot and adversaries for your characters because it’ll be easier to create a character that would really challenge your OC.

A common exception to writing flaws in superpowers is DC or Marvel Comics. I have seen many many times the scene where, “an OC’s file gets passed around and we the audience get to read a laundry list of superpowers including but not limited to fire, ice, air, metal, lightning, etc.” I understand that superheroes in DC Comics have an abundance of superpowers. Look at Wonder Woman or Superman. Do not fall down that rabbit hole. You will struggle to write conflict for your character if you give them that many abilities. Hell, Superman’s own writers struggle to write conflict for him. It’s why he’s the most iconic but ultimately most boring character. On top of that, the “passing around a file” scene is another very overused cliche. I understand that it’s an easy way for the audience to see what the OC can do, but I think we as writers can challenge ourselves to be better than that. In addition, don’t take away the choice to share from the OC. If we’ve learned anything from X-Men, it’s that superpowers aren’t always taken well and some would rather die than be seen as a mutant or a freak. We know that these unnatural abilities are strange and confusing and that the people who have them need time to grow. They don’t need their supervisors outing them to God and everyone. Let your characters share their powers on their own terms. Let them have a special moment with the cast where they get to feel wonderful and special and magical. You’ll reveal more about the OC’s personality and develop a deeper relationship with the cast. Here’s an example.

Let’s say we’re writing Avengers fanfic. Let’s say we give our OC control over light. Here are two scenes that are revealing the same information to Captain America. One is done on the terms of the OC, who we’ll call Astrid, the other is done by Nick Fury.

*****

Astrid led him back to her room. It was like his own, the same size, and the same basic tidings- bed, dresser, desk, chair. While his had been dark gray, as had the rest of the team’s, Astrid’s was bright white. Steve noticed heavy black curtains tucked back from her window. The black stood out against the white of the rest of her room. She had a smile on her face. Her eyes were alight with excitement, and she pointed up at the ceiling.

Covering the ceiling of Astrid’s bedroom were over a hundred hanging crystals. They had different shapes, sizes, and lengths and all swung from the ceiling on thin clear strings. Astrid turned off the lights. She pulled the black curtains out and covered her window which plunged them both into darkness.

“I had to beg Nick for these. I told him it would be good practice.”

“Practice for what?” A light turned on. It took Steve a moment to realize the light was coming from Astrid’s own hand.

“No one’s really told you what I can do yet. I wanted to show you myself.” Carefully, she pulled one of the crystals down and let it rest in the palm of her hand.

Rainbows bounced off the walls. Tiny refractory lights bounced around the room, off each crystal that was a brilliant gem in the darkness. Off the metal of Steve’s shield. Off the brass buckles of Astrid’s shoes. She grinned merrily, a beautiful cascade coming around the both of them.

“It takes me forever to fall asleep. I never want to stop looking at them.” Steve smiled, studying the way the light danced on her walls.

“Yeah.” He breathed. “I get it.”

*****

And the other, done by Nick Fury.

*****

Steve sat at a roundtable with the rest of the team. At least, he thought he did. Looking around, he could see one person missing from the group.

“Where’s Astrid?” Fury and Coulson exchanged a look. Coulson handed over a file and strode out of the room.

“Agent Dawes is currently occupied. We thought it best to tell you without her.” Fury slid the file across the table. “Along with being an Agent of SHIELD, Agent Dawes joined up because of her… condition.”

Steve opened the file. He could see a picture of a much younger Astrid looking back at him. Her date of birth, her parents, everything was laid out before him. When he flipped the page he found page after page of notes.

“She can do what?”

“We don’t have a real name for it yet. Just light manipulation.” Steve kept reading. The reports dated back years prior, with medic referral forms, personal statements, and even more photographs of Astrid.

“Is Astrid a potential threat too, Director?”

“We all are. Agent Dawes recognized her own risk ahead of time.” Fury took the file back. “She’s been training for years. She has it under control. Stark and Banner already know about her-”

“I’m the last to know?” Steve said angrily. He looked at Tony and Bruce.

“Hey, not my fault you got here late.” Tony turned back to his phone.

*****

Do you see the difference? See how much more personal the first one is? Not only do we get to see Astrid actually use her powers, but we get a moment of bonding and trust between her and Steve, whereas in the second one her personal information is being divulged on her behalf. Not by her. It’s beneficial to make these superpowers personal, in the sense that the OC should be able to tell people on their own. Let them establish that trust with their team, and don’t shove it off to Nick Fury or Coulson or even Batman. It’s their gift, they need to share it on their terms.

Superpowers and The Rules of the Universe go hand in hand in many ways. What I mean is the Rules of the Universe apply to superpowers as much as they do to timelines and cast desires and canon. When you write superpowers, they have to make sense with the world they live in, and not every OC needs superpowers. If you look at Twilight, you’d most likely have an OC with more subtle, less combat-oriented abilities (see Edward’s mind-reading or Alice’s seer talents). If you give an OC something heavy combat-oriented in this universe it feels a little clunky, and a little more like the Avengers but vampires instead of vampires with talents. On top of that, not every vampire needs to have a talent. It’s totally okay to have a vampire who can’t do anything special. I’m more compelled to read stories with those characters because they seem more realistic. It’s okay to have a character less important to the Volturi than Edward or Alice, or less gifted than Jasper. You can explore their individuality without tying them or limiting what makes them special to “they are a vampire and they have a gift.” Another example is Harry Potter. In that universe, the only extraordinary gifts we know of are Olcummency and Parseltongue. One is something you’re born with, the other takes patience and practice. It would be unrealistic to give a Harry Potter OC additional gifts. It would be rare to give them either of the aforementioned gifts because if something is described as rare in the canon, it shouldn’t include your OC. Your OC is not an exception to something’s scarcity.

Let’s talk about powers themselves. I have several gripes with superpowers, and we are going to discuss all of them. First and foremost, something that kind of shows your own ass as a writer is using the -kinesis phrase of a superpower beyond the common ones people know (telekinesis, psychokinetic, etc.). It looks like you just googled, ‘list of superpowers’, and found atmokinesis and put it in because you liked the description. Who talks like that? No one knows what those -kinesis phrases actually mean we just use them because we think they sound cool. Don’t tell me that the character has atmokinesis, just tell me they can control the weather. You don’t need to use big words to make your gift sound impressive. It’s what they do with the gift that makes it impressive. Going off of this, not every superpower needs to be combat-oriented. You don’t need to give people super-strength, invulnerability, or fire powers for them to matter or be useful. It’s actually more creative and more unique if you take a superpower that isn’t combat-oriented and find a way to make it mean something. The best example is the Tumblr post that will be linked below, where the OC’s main ability was helping. It was helping out wherever they could and trying to make a difference and making the lives of their friends, who had some of the “strongest” superpowers in the universe, better. It is beautifully written, an incredible short story, and shows the value of being there for others versus trying to save the day. If you are writing a character with superpowers, I would absolutely recommend reading it.

Finally, make it make sense. With superpowers, it’s kind of like the old saying, “if you describe a hammer hanging on the wall you better use the hammer before the end of the story.” Don’t describe something that you won’t use. So things like controlling taste, smell, temperature, those are things we never see used in the narrative, so there’s no need for the character to have control over them. If you’re struggling to come up with superpowers, the Editor and I have a few methods we’ve developed over the years to get off of and stay off of the superpower list websites:

I like to have my superpowers mirror the character’s backstory. I have a character who was kicked out of their home at 16 and therefore became a “hearth” where they could bind one location to appear at many, and with the turn of a knob bring the group from New York to Seattle to London. I did this to represent the character making their own home once they were exiled. Another example is a character who was almost killed in a tsunami. They can breathe underwater, and swim impossibly fast. You can give characters with a passion for drawing the ability to bring inanimate objects to life, characters who went to Antarctica as a researcher who came back with ice powers, characters who lost their twin that can multiply themselves, or characters who suffered amnesia that can now modify the memories of others. It’s fun to tie the gift to the story, and to me personally, it feels more cohesive when I do that. However, this isn’t for everyone. When you do this, the character’s superpowers shouldn’t become their whole personality. That should never happen in the first place, but especially here.

Another method we’ve used and we like is contrasting superpowers. If your character is blind, give them telekinesis (Scott 2015). If your character is afraid of heights, give them the ability to fly. If they’re afraid of dogs, make them talk to animals. Learning to get over their fears and weaknesses in the grand journey of mastering one’s powers shows growth, and shows character development, and we should never shy away from an opportunity for character development.

A final method that we’ve recently adopted is genetics. Something you see in Avengers fanfics is that the OC was inexplicably kidnapped and experimented on by HYDRA despite them having no shortage of volunteers as we see in Avengers: Age of Ultron, therefore, the existence of these OCs who are usually kidnapped doesn’t make sense. That is only mildly my business. What is my business is these test subjects having powers that don’t really make sense or that we don’t understand how they got them. It would make sense realistically, that a character who HYDRA experimented on would have powers that affect their vulnerability and less “shoots fire out of their hands.” This is because we can only assume that if they’re not using an Infinity Stone, they’re splicing and combining genes from animals to make a perfect soldier. If that’s your cup of tea, using a genetic connection to explain someone’s powers, go for it. The Editor and I have been using recently is the idea of gifts passing through generations. Let’s return to our new hero Astrid. Instead of being experimented on by HYDRA, having a backstory where she was maybe mugged or is afraid of the dark, or a backstory where she loves creepy-crawly dark spaces, we can say the following:

“Wait… How many people can do what you can?” Tony looked up from his phone to Astrid, who had become engrossed in her newest prism. “Hey! Glow-stick!”

“Mmm?” Tony tossed her his phone. “Oh… you don’t have to friend him.”

“Why isn’t he here?” Astrid stood up and walked back to Tony, handing him his phone.

“Why isn’t who here?” asked Steve.

“My brother Jeremy. He’s like me.” She shrugged her shoulders. “He didn’t want to go. I texted him when Director Fury reached out, and he didn’t want to give up on his Northern Lights project. My cousins said no too.”

“What do you mean, your cousins?”

“Didn’t you know? I thought you knew everything Stark. My gift’s genetic. It’s been in my family for generations. I have my brother, and like, 3 other cousins who can do what I can. I’m the only one who responded to Director Fury’s text.” Astrid sighed. “If my cousin Dixie were here, she’d tell me that means I’m the idiot of the group. C’est la vie.”

****

You can totally make superpowers genetic. It’s something that isn’t done often and is very fun because you can get into subtle mutations or variations of the same power. With Astrid, since we know she controls light, maybe the gene mutates with one of her cousins who can bend light in a way that they appear invisible. Maybe one of Astrid’s children can make the light into solid objects. Try making your superpowers a recessive gene. It could be a fun way to showcase the OC’s support network and give an explanation for their gifts that’s uncommon.

Our final note is that if you are writing a character with superpowers, we want to see the character learn to use those powers. It is so boring to have a character come out of the gate with gifts that they’ve mastered perfectly, OR, have a character initially struggle, but learn and master their gifts in 1 training session. That’s so boring to the reader, because there’s no development, and there’s no struggle. If a character earns their powers and is experiencing the new and wonderful, we want to see that struggle. That way at the end of the story when they have near-perfect control the ending is so much more satisfying because we know what went into that. Look at Avatar: The Last Airbender. The final fight with Ozai and Zuko’s final fight with Azula is the ultimate show of growth and mastery. You clearly see that neither of these boys are the same kids from the beginning of the series. The same is true for Percy Jackson, where all the Olympians have moments where they have powers, but don’t know or can’t use them. Let us see the struggle. It makes the journey more worthwhile. And, speaking of Avatar, no more “can control the four elements.” We’ve all seen the show. We all know the source material. It’s not original and your OC is not the Avatar.

Next week is a big one! We’re talking about diversity. Not only diversity in race but diversity in LGBT, in experience, and how to capture and make your stories diverse, and where it makes sense to have a story that’s diverse.

Xoxo, Gossip Girl

References:

The Ables. https://www.goodreads.com/work/best_book/41929531-the-ables. Accessed 26 July 2020.

https://idontknowartdump.tumblr.com/post/169046958039/inkskinned-writing-prompt-s-at-18-everyone

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itsclydebitches · 4 years

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RWBY Recaps: “A Night Off”

So RWBY has this weird thing going on in Volume 7 where it’ll give me a truly horrendous episode and then manage to turn things around just enough so that, despite my frustrations, I quite like parts of the next week’s stuff. That proceeds to get my hopes up, only for them to turn around mess it all up again in the following episode.

What I’m saying is, I should expect next week to be a pretty rough ride.

First, let me chuck out the details I personally loved in this episode that fit better together than spread out across a recap. Namely, treating Oscar like an actual human being. Thank you, Rooster Teeth, for:

Having him continually be involved by monitoring Jaune’s aura levels. (It likewise hasn’t escaped my notice how much he’s been paired with JNR lately. The fandom might get their new ‘P’ after all.)

Giving Oscar some thoughts and feelings beyond just the Ozpin situation. He’s worried about not having his semblance yet. Hark! A characterization!

Nora very kindly firing back with, “Well, I bet we’ll all be jealous when you do.”

Yang using Oscar as a convenient armrest. Granted, Yang hasn’t exactly treated him well enough lately to have earned that kind of casual buddy-buddy-ness, but if the writing is never going to call the group out on their Volume 6 behavior then I’ll take unearned kindness over continued indifference or cruelty

Jaune going out to the movies with Oscar and them both inviting Weiss. I mean, same issue here. Why is Oscar so comfortable and eager to hang out with the guy who attacked him? I wish that we had some acknowledgment that these kinds of things don’t just disappear once someone apologizes. Jaune still hurt Oscar, badly enough to leave him flinching against a wall... and none of that even takes into account Oscar’s supposed hesitation about lying to Ironwood. He should be acting more like Ren, involved with the group yet wary at the same time.

In addition, keep in mind that Oscar is currently living in this happy bubble where everyone has chosen to forget that Ozpin exists. I’m still highly suspicious of how they’ll treat him once Ozpin is out in the open again and Oscar is the convenient scapegoat for their anger. As said though, for now I’ll take it. I mean, look at that smile.

Right. Onto the actual plot.

We open on the aftermath of the Mantle riots, which is somewhat disappointing. I had hoped the group would actually be involved in that, giving them the chance to tackle a situation where brute force can’t be the go-to answer. You can’t punch out desperate citizens or run them through with your scythe. Instead, Ironwood’s men are handling it and we reconvene with the group the next day, election day. For the record, we know it has only been a day---and not longer rioting as I initially assumed---because Weiss comments that her father dropped that bombshell “the day before the election.” Which for me just speaks to how much time must have passed during those training montages. The political parts of this volume couldn’t have happened in any short amount of time.

We’re shown an interview with Hill wherein she quite firmly doesn’t condone the rioting, but admits that there are good reasons for it as well. Her body guard stands very awkwardly in the background in a way I don’t think the shot really needs.

We then segue back into the group training and, like I mentioned above with Oscar, there are a lot of details here that I really enjoyed. Two of which are Weiss creating a mini version of her knight to sneak up on Winter---yes, please show us this kind of creativity in the actual fights---and Nora and Jaune practicing with a rubber ball. Ren is also deep in meditation while all this going on, which raises some questions about how aware of the world he is in this state. Is he able to simply ignore all the commotion, even Ruby flying straight at him? Is he so deep down that he’s entirely disconnected until he resurfaces? If so, does he only meditate like this when he’s 100% sure he’s in a safe place? Would the group be able to wake him if something were to happen?

As you can see, I’m obviously a little too invested in details and world building lol.

Speaking of world building though, we learn a little bit more about semblances here. Namely that, like hinted at in Volume Five and recently with Harriet, all their semblances are “evolving.” Jaune can apparently regenerate his own aura now, much more quickly than he could before. And Ruby...

Okay, real talk. Did I miss something here? It’s entirely possible I did, but if not what even was that conversation between Ruby and Oscar? She flies at the pillar Ren is seated under, divides into three rose petal clusters to get around it, and recombines on the other side. You know, the thing we’ve known she can do for a long while now. Since Volume Four I believe. Except then we get this exchange:

Oscar: Have you always been able to do that?

Ruby: I don’t know. I don’t normally think it through that much.

What are you talking about? Of course you know, Ruby! This isn’t a new technique. And what do you mean by, “I don’t normally think it through that much”? Is the writing trying to imply that she’s done the split thing so instinctively in the past she didn’t even notice she was doing it? I’m just massively confused by this moment. Others have pointed out that the writing tends to make up easy to solve “problems” for the cast to deal with so it looks like they’re achieving some kind of growth. The most egregious example being Ruby’s lack of hand-to-hand in Volume 5, culminating in a single headbutt against Mercury. Notably, this supposed flaw hasn’t resurfaced at all since then. Not even, say, when she’s at a party without her weapon and Tyrian attacks...

This feels like another moment where they just threw out something random to make it look like Ruby is improving alongside with the other, actual developments they’ve managed to think through, such as Jaune’s aura. Which is particularly strange considering Ruby was set up as the one to evolve her semblance. Which will probably still happen... but why paint an old skill as new along the way? It’s just all very strange.

Anyway, we get a nice shot of Ren coming out of his meditation where the whole world is gray like when he activates his semblance. Excellent visual cue as to his emotional state. This continues as Ironwood arrives and the group lays into him about needing to trust Hill. Which is hilarious considering that none of them are currently trusting Ironwood. He points out that common ground can only exist “if she’s open too”---unlikely given the second half of the episode---and Nora is about to challenge that when Ren interrupts, asking about mission assignments. Ironwood announces that they’re getting the night off instead.

Note though how guilty Ruby looks after all that talk of trusting others.

We cut to the girls later that night in their room, listening to the election news and getting ready to go out. It’s all very cute, but I think Nora is onto something regarding how Blake and Yang are always together. It’s so blatantly obvious they’re falling for one another, especially after this episode, and I’m honestly thrilled we’re finally getting some queer rep beyond former villains and minor characters. However, I hope that as Blake and Yang’s relationship develops that the writers don’t completely lose track of their co-dependency issues as well. Meaning, Yang totally wrote Blake off because she “ran away,” AKA went home precisely like Yang did, warping a natural and understandable choice into a personal betrayal. Blake in turn broke down sobbing and promised Yang to never ever leave her again. Separation is not a new issue for them. Their desire to spend every waking moment together is definitely cast as romantic now, but it’s also tied up in their inability to function well without each other. As we saw recently, a throwaway comment about fighting with someone else generates legitimate anger in both of them. Couples have to be able to spend time apart, so I hope the writing eventually lets the girls work through all that as well.

For now though, they’re going dancing with FNKI. Very bad dancing based on what little we see. It’s enough to convince Weiss that the movies are her best choice here. Especially since she’s clearly not interested in Hill’s preemptive victory party. We see a tiny bit of that tension between Weiss’ views and Nora’s, but nothing with any substance. We just keep getting tiny glimpses that Nora is potentially passionate about the people of Mantle before it’s all quickly overshadowed by her romance drama with Ren. More on that in a moment.

The two of them plus Ruby make their way out into the streets where Ren admits that, “We spent so much time worrying about how Ironwood would react to the truth about [Salem], but have any of us even considered how we’re going to beat her if we work past that?”

Ruby reminds them that Jinn told Ozpin he couldn’t destroy her. Nora: “Maybe someone else could?”

It only took you weeks to figure that out! Though I love how this still---still---apparently has no bearing on how they view Ozpin. This was another perfect, quiet moment where three characters, notably three of the least angry characters, could have acknowledged how terrifying this information is. How they still can’t bring themselves to tell Ironwood, a man who thus far has done nothing but support them. Wow, I totally get why Ozpin would have trouble telling us. Oh also, we just realized that maybe Jinn’s information was specific to him. Maybe someone else can destroy Salem. That’s a pretty big revelation. I wonder if Ozpin himself realizes that? We should probably try to talk to him at some point.

It’s while they’re talking about the heavy stuff that Ren mutters about how they should still be training. Nora counters that they deserve a night off and the two of them clash enough to walk off angry. We see now at least part of what’s been bothering Ren lately. Nora is a very bubbly, silly, go-with-the-flow sort of person, whereas he is hyper focused on becoming as strong as possible in the hopes of finding a way out of this Salem mess. He doesn’t want to hear compliments while searching for a geist, or have her playing with his hair while on patrol, or turn training into a conversation about their relationship, or waste time on frivolous parties. There’s obviously a happy medium between Ren’s work ethic and Nora’s relaxed attitude, though they haven’t worked through that at all because they’re too busy kissing. Again, more on that in a second.

They reach the party, Penny is there, Nora and Ren dive into another fight that serves to canonize both them and Blake/Yang. Nora comments about how they’re spending so much time together, Ren observes that they’re at least friends again, and the response is,

Nora: “Friends, huh? Just friends?” Ren: “What else would they be? Nora: “Two people who have gone through so much? I think there’s more going on...”

It’s clear at this point that Nora is talking about them rather than Yang/Blake, but the initial comparison holds. Though she uses them as an in to discuss her own relationship, I doubt she was lying here. She clearly views them as a parallel to her and Ren: two partners who have been through a great deal together and, as a result, have grown to love each other as more than just friends. Those who insist that Rooster Teeth isn’t heading in a Blake/Yang direction don’t have much of a leg to stand on anymore. That ship (ha) has long since sailed.

Ruby sneaks away from their fight though nothing terribly exciting happens. She adorably clings to Penny’s arm. They adorably fist-bump (ouch). Marrow and Hill get into a conversation about making change and whether or not she’ll accomplish that within the bounds of the law. Funny... I thought we saw that very same theme last volume. If only the writing acknowledged that there’s a connection between this conversation and our protagonists. We’re supposed to see both sides of the situation here: Hill’s need to bend the rules once in a while and Marrow’s desire to keep the peace; how the law is a man-mad construct that’s far from perfect and the importance of making change in a way that will stick---namely, legally. Here is a complex look at a morally difficult question and notably both Marrow and Hill are minor characters. It’s only when RWBYJNR is involved that the message moves from ‘Each side has a point’ to ‘Teens are 100% justified in breaking the law and anyone trying to stop them is an evil, crazy racist.’

It honestly astounds me that Rooster Teeth can give us that subtly here but never when it comes to our heroes.

When Ruby finally returns she finds Ren and Nora still fighting. As she snuck off we heard Ren admitting---in the round-about way of theirs, pretending that they’re talking about other people---that he’s worried, there’s a lot going on right now, and basically implying that he doesn’t know how (or doesn’t want) to balance a new relationship on top of all the horrific Salem business. Which, fair. The problem is that they don’t discuss this. Hill’s speech about how they’re always stronger together resonates with Nora and she tries to initiate a conversation, asking Ren to explain more fully what’s bothering him. To talk about it. He admits that talking has never been his strong suit.

I expected this to segue into a cliche, “Well try” moment and we’d finally get Ren and Nora bonding outside of their jokes and silent communication. Sadly, that didn’t happen. Look, I’m all for a renora kiss, but we have got to stop portraying sexual assault as romantic. Because that’s what Nora does here. It doesn’t matter how sure she (or we as the audience) are that Ren will like this kiss in the end. Grabbing someone and kissing them without their consent is sexual assault. Ren has not agreed to kiss her. He hasn’t expressed any desire here to kiss here. He’s completely blindsided by it and is flailing before he gives in.

People will justify this because, again, we all “know” that Ren secretly wants it and will be grateful that Nora got him past his fear. But that’s a terrible message to perpetuate in a world where others insist they also “know” when someone “really” wants them (they don’t) and where kissing or sex is seen as an easy way to supposedly solve problems between a couple. How many times have we seen an angry woman in media essentially told to shut up by a guy kissing her? The message is that her thoughts and grievances aren’t important here. The man knows her better than she knows herself and the second her forces her to start kissing him she realizes that’s really all she needed all along. That trope isn’t redeemed by changing the gender dynamic. Ren clearly has problems with their relationship that he’s struggling to work through. Nora clearly recognizes as much. Yet instead of acknowledging them and overcoming them, she erases any potential development by forcing him into a kiss. I’m sorry, it doesn’t matter how much Ren enjoys it a few seconds in. The continued message that forcing sexual intimacy on someone will fix both their hesitation and your relationship problems has go to stop. Kissing Nora doesn’t magically solve whatever it is Ren has been grappling with for the last six episodes. You know, the stuff they were just arguing about.

Once again, RWBY succeeded in giving me something I wanted, but in a way that severely downplays that enjoyment. I wanted a renora kiss, but not without consent and as a way of ignoring their issues. I wanted more focus on Ren and Nora as a whole this volume, but it would be nice if their characters could exits outside of each other some. Like the criticisms against Blake and Yang, Ren and Nora seem to be a package deal. They don’t fight with anyone else. They don’t go to different activities (why can’t Ren continue training if he’s that focused on it? Let Nora vent her feelings to a friend while he’s gone). They don’t interact with Ruby when they’re out with her. Their arc, it seems, doesn’t exist outside of each other. Which I suppose is better than no development at all, but still.

From then on things devolve rather quickly. While Hill continues her speech---and we see the ever closing gap between her and Jacques---Ruby gets a quick look at Tyrian’s tail before Watts turns out the lights. From there Tyrian proceeds to murder so many people, including attacking Fiona and going after Hill. All the while Ruby and Penny struggle to attack, despite the fact that Penny clearly has night vision and hangs back too long, obviously for plot purposes. It’s when she finally gets him away from Hill that Watts turns the lights back on, making it look like Penny had attacked the crowd and Hill was defending herself from her. I’ll admit, making Penny suitably creepy during the battle helps sell it.

Man do I hate framing plot-lines though. Not in a ‘Rooster Teeth shouldn’t have done this’ sense, just that it hurts to watch people react so badly based on a misunderstanding. This setup works best when there’s no one to refute the assumption. Yet here we have Ruby who absolutely saw Tyrian there, Penny who absolutely saw him with her night vision, Marrow who just made a connection with Hill and took the time to insist, “This wasn’t us, I swear,” etc. We’ve even got really basic stuff like, does Penny have blood all over her blades? Yet based on Hill’s look, all the evidence against Penny being the attacker isn’t going to do much good. Which makes for a more frustrating experience than a sad, yet understandable one.

We end with Jacques thanking everyone for his victory, rigged by Watts. Watts uploads the video of the attack, which has presumably either been altered in some way or just shows Penny in that damning position with her weapons out. If the former, that would at least go a long way towards explaining the inevitable backlash against her. An angry mob in the heat of the moment is one thing, but if Watts is looking to convince the entirety of Atlas that Ironwood is using his robot---a robot the people seem to currently love---to take out his competition, a doctored video of Penny attacking innocent people is far more persuasive. For both them and us the audience, wondering why everyone is this gullible. So far we’ve gotten some truly excellent villainy this year. Let’s continue that with them thinking ahead.

At the very least this should (should) provide us with some excellent development for Penny. She’s long struggled with her status as a robot and being the defender of Atlas seems to have helped her come into herself. Having others accept her differences as a boon will do that. Now that she’s labeled as nothing more than a dangerous weapons again? We should see some inner conflict. The writing didn’t let her or anyone else grapple with her death. For the love of everything, at least let Penny grapple with this.

Finally, Ruby and the others are forced to spend the night defending the city from a ton of grimm. Seriously, take in how many grimm showed up because of an election. Now think about what will happen if Ironwood announces Salem’s existence... I don’t think the cast is admitting to themselves precisely how many lives they’d be sacrificing by pulling that stunt. Ironwood at least (as far as we know) truly thinks he has a shot at winning the war. Ruby has no excuse at this point, with the exception that telling people about Salem is just plain hard.

Insert standard ‘Ozpin was right and they’re being hypocrites’ meta here.

And that’s it, folks! Issues aside, an all around better episode than some of the others we’ve gotten this season. Based off of experience it’ll be a small miracle if RWBY manages to keep that up next week.

Until then 💜

Minor Things of Note

All the people who were arrested the day of the election... do they get to vote? I know Watts rigged things, but potentially keeping everyone that furious with Ironwood from deciding who will oppose him on the council won’t exactly look good... especially combined with the Penny situation. Not that I think RWBY would actually introduce that as a complication. Just a thought.

Another extremely nit-picky thing, but it’s hilarious to me how bare the girls’ room is. Obviously there’s little time or inclination to animate personal items, even the few they have, but it kind of looks ridiculous to have this sterile space with one mirror and one tube of mascara. Here are the exact things we need for this scene and nothing more! I do like that shot in the mirror though.

Fiona getting teary-eyed over Hill being on the council was beautiful. I barely know them, but I like these two.

I’m just gonna post this again...

#rwby #rwby volume 7 #rwby volume 7 spoilers #rwby recaps #mymetas

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pomegranate-salad · 7 years

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Seeds of thought : Wicdiv #31

Guess who’s back ! Everything is awful on so many levels right now but hey ! I managed to heroically squeeze in one more terrible decision and stay up late to finish this ! Wicdiv should come with a label warning. Anyway, you know the drill, thoughts and opinion on the new issue under the cut, not spoiler-free.

MASTERS OF THE OBVIOUS

What does it mean for a story today to be character-driven ? Classically opposed to being plot-driven, this notion seems to imply that both the motor and the goal of the story is not the succession of events but the characters themselves. However, since plot and character are both an inevitable part of any story, this also implies control of one over the other - plot-driven hinting at events leading the character and character-driven at events induced by the character’s personality and evolution. But unless the story is badly constructed, it’s obvious that one element cannot remain static while the other progresses : therefore, the criterion becomes “which element’s progression leads to the progression of the other ?” And so, a character-driven story would not necessarily be one in which there is no event pushing the character forward, but one where who this character is consistently influences the way these events play in the context of the story. A broad way to determine whether or not a story is character-driven would be to ask the question : “could this story be happening to someone else ?” If the answer is no, then the story is probably character-driven rather than plot-driven.

Wicdiv is undoubtedly a character-driven story, but interesting as within its story is a story – the Recurrence – that keeps happening to somebody else. As illustrated by the specials, each recurrence has its lots of devastating events, but each time driven by who its players are. The main storyline of the 2014 recurrence is one that could only have been produced by the combination of these particular characters. Despite the presence of external events, they are the main driving force of the story, the ones causing most – if not all - of the plot to unfold. And as we’ve come at a point when we as an audience can map out their goals, their behaviour, their hang-ups, more generally their patterns as characters, we can predict not what is going to happen but what our characters would do with it. When Persephone calls Baal about Sakhmet, we have no need for Baal’s voice or even Persephone’s expression to know what he’s saying : anyone in the fandom can ad-lib it and probably get quite close to the real thing. Our ability to understand these characters means they can’t really surprise us anymore. Their actions always make sense in the context of what we know of them, even if we cannot always guess how they’ll act. And like all great prophets, we miss the fucking obvious.

Indeed, if this issue is a thunderclap, it’s one that comes right after we saw the light by the window and started counting to deduce how far away it is like our grandmas taught us. We knew it was coming. We didn’t know how much we’d have to wait, or exactly how loud and scary it would be, but we knew these increasingly terrible people would do some terrible thing that would lead to terrible consequences. Specifically in this issue, the “shock”, the big story turnaround, hinges on three characters, Woden, Amaterasu and Sakhmet, without either turning anything around ; they act exactly like themselves. And the fandom reactions have been very telling in their phrasing : for Woden, we “should have seen it coming” ; for Amaterasu, “she had it coming”. The story came out of our characters acting in a way that was logical, predictable, and well, obvious.

But let’s take a moment to appreciate how much work went into making it this “obvious”.

After seemingly getting whipped into place by Persephone, Woden betrayed the gods, stole their powers to take control of a giant mob. Because of course he did. But to get to the point where we as an audience could hit ourselves in the head wondering why we didn’t hit bullseye on the prediction board, the authors had to build both a character and a plot setting which, combined, would lead to that situation. Woden is a men’s right activist, if not in title then in spirit : he’s a racist misogynist with a severe lack of empathy using privilege and technology to profit from vulnerable people. Like all his peers, his sense of entitlement is challenged by the new push toward social justice and he’s plagued by self-hatred coming from his own inadequacy. As a god, he’s powerless among the powerful, special but not special enough, forced to work with people he sees as inferior. He was already barely asserting enough domination in the first arcs to keep his own ego afloat ; but in Imperial Phase, he lost everything : his cooperation with Ananke that gave him an edge over the gods, his Valkyries, his independence as he’s forced to work for Cassandra. He was – as much as one can virtually get – emasculated. And these last years have taught us exactly how desperate this type of person gets when they feel even a little bit of privilege disappearing. That’s the character. Now the plot setting is him getting a central role in activating a machine he built with the use of his honed ability to mimic other gods’ powers – which we were reminded of several times in Imperial phase. His partners are A) a woman he’s sexually attracted to who dismissed him several times and B) the purest form of a “beta-male” according to MRAs, an asexual man of colour who connects with people on equal footing via emotions and sincerity in a way Woden never could. And now all these elements combined place him in a position where he can literally take back the power he feels he’s entitled to from the people he feels took it from him in the first place, while simultaneously turning a diverse, multi-coloured crowd into a uniform army. How could he resist ?

Amaterasu was killed by Sakhmet, despite previously calming her down, seemingly because of some foolish remarks which triggered Sakhmet’s anger back. Here again, both their characters and the plot setting had to be carefully established for us to be able to run along the result. Amaterasu is a racist, mediocre white girl whose genuine trauma she deals with through denial and hero worship. She’s never purposely mean but her limited intelligence and egocentrism makes her approach people with a mixture of entitlement and total lack of self-awareness. As for the plot, it pitted her against Sakhmet, discreetly at first – I hadn’t even noticed the parallels between issue #15 and issue #17 before this issue – then literally, Amaterasu’s careless remarks in issue #29 being what triggered the events leading to Imperial Phase in the first place. Amaterasu is a racist, Sakhmet a black woman. Amaterasu has lived in comfort, Sakhmet has known homelessness. Amaterasu cries in front of free-range eggs, Sakhmet is a cannibal. Amaterasu’s outfit is inspired by priestesses, Sakhmet dresses in an overtly sexual manner. Amaterasu is a blabbermouth, Sakhmet is quiet. Amaterasu isn’t so bright, Sakhmet only reveals herself smarter than she let on as the story progresses. Amaterasu is entitled, Sakhmet simply pursues her desires. Amaterasu worships her father, Sakhmet ate hers. The opposition works not only because of their differences, but also because they have just enough in common for friction to appear. And so, when Amaterasu goes on her British Imperialism-laced tirade on the flags of our fathers we know, as surely as the sun rises, where it’s going to take her, and Sakhmet, and the entire story.

Being obvious in stories is underrated. In what is described as a new Golden Age for long form media, there is a push for stories to constantly be clever, constantly surprise their audiences. One perverse effect of that has been the cult of the plot twist, pushing writers to turn the story on its head so many times that no one’s actions seem to make sense anymore ; because the characters’ decisions are being dictated by the need for a constant setting change instead of their own internal logic, they go beyond incoherent characterization and straight into barely even looking like humans anymore. Same thing goes for stories that throw everything but the kitchen sink at their characters, drowning them in such a whirlpool of events that they can only react to things and never really impose their mark on the direction of the story in a way that would allow them to grow as characters in a seamless manner. This is why I was initially so disappointed by the apparition of the Great Darkness in Imperial Phase : because it prevented once again our characters to take control of the direction of the story to instead have them running behind the plot. Seeing them fall in a hell of their own making was simply much more interesting than having this hell created for them. Thankfully the subsequent issues seemed to agree with me, and that’s how we were able to come to this point. The actions of the characters in issue #31 don’t just “make sense”, they seem to impose themselves as the next step in each character’s path, a path that is undeniably, unchangeably theirs. The story is not making itself look clever by twisting in improbable knots or even straying from its course ; it’s taking the simplest, most obvious road and sticking with it.

So how come we still can’t see it coming ? Why do we keep missing the fucking obvious ? I think it says more about audience expectation than it does about the story itself. In Woden’s case, the fact he was openly a scumbag who had been working with a “villain” before seemed to beget either a redemption arc or at the very least a limited influence on the plot. You could call this the Littlefinger paradox : the more overt a character is about their bad intentions, the less likely we are to suspect them of wrongdoing. We like to believe our enemies are wolves, not snakes. Amaterasu on the other hand started as this otherworldly thing of beauty, and even in her more human, fallible moments she seemed nice and innocent enough to be awarded a decent death and not one of the goriest – second only to Ananke’s – and most avoidable deaths in the series. Even after she revealed herself to be this unpleasant, nothing of a person, she still had this smidge of sublime about her, and the comic couldn’t resist make her shine one last time. (I suspect there’s a discussion to be had here on society’s tendency to see white women as “exceptional” whereas women of colour are constantly expected to justify their exceptionalism, so if any fan of colour has thoughts on that, please tag me in). When it comes to being a god, she was a genius, whether we like it or not ; she was “the best performer”, something Baal “when you’re as good as I am” himself doesn’t contest. But that’s the crux of it : she was a great “performer”, not by any means a great person. No doubt there’s a commentary there on our difficulty as fans to reconcile the genius artist with the often mediocre, sometimes horrid person behind them. Amaterasu may be based on Kate Bush and Florence Welsh, but there’s something of Elvis Presley about her : a definitely not-good person, stealing the basis of their art from a different culture, but who has the bad taste of being a genius about it. What should we do as a responsible audience ? Dissociating the person from the artist or rejecting them all at once are equally compelling, defendable options ; nonetheless, the temptation to let the genius speak for the person remains. They can’t be completely bad if they can make something so beautiful.

(In Amaterasu’s case however, I think her death came a little too late for us to really feel the weight of this dilemma. Gillen wrote in his notes that she was originally set to die at the end of Imperial Phase part I and indeed, Amaterasu in part II felt like a character who had outstayed her welcome ; her only contribution was to make herself even more insufferable. It definitely made her death easier on the audience, but I think it’s a shame she died after the charm had worn off for good.)

In both Woden, Sakhmet and Amaterasu’s cases, Wicdiv subverted our expectations precisely because we were expecting a subversion, a turnaround, something other than what the character was obviously out to do. We are so used nowadays to stories either removing or constantly making their characters change course, that a character being set in their ways and simply continuing down the downward slide without immediate consequences is something we’re not really used to anymore. Were we expecting Woden, Amaterasu or Sakhmet to get better ? I think some of us were, and I don’t think that was either wrong or far-fetched. I don’t think Wicdiv’s message is that change is impossible ; it’s rather that change takes time and effort, it takes being able to trace your own path even in the face of external forces. And as we’ve discussed on this blog before, one of the defining traits of the gods is their lack of time that constricts them to youth until death. They are self-contained characters by obligation more than choice, something that’s illustrated perfectly by Sakhmet’s trauma-filled, cat-like persona : the potential to get better or worse is always present and always one right or wrong word away, but there is no stability because there is no willpower strong and consistent enough to drive her away from this floating state.

These past arcs, the gods have been more cumbersome and drudgy than ever, stubbornly keeping on their set path, each of their moves more predictable than the last, and the story has therefore become that much more linear. This is neither a coincidence nor a flaw : because the characters suddenly took control of the story – and it’s an interesting theory to imagine Ananke as a stand-in for the controlling authors themselves being banished from their own story as the characters rebel against them – things are not allowed to move as fast or unpredictably, because people, for the most part, are neither fast nor unpredictable. And therefore they shouldn’t be written as such for the benefit of making a story look dynamic.

Does this mean that now that it’s been definitely established who our characters are, they’ll just keep running deep in the ravine they dug for themselves ? The answer this issue gives us is a bit more nuanced, and much of this nuance is carried by the dialogue scene between Cass and Dio, the two closest characters Wicdiv has to “good people”. In this scene, they are everything everyone else in this issue isn’t : tactful, brave, personal, deep. They are also subtly out of character : for someone as direct and awkward as Cass to be this oblique and thoughtful and someone like Dio to choose a long-term friendship above the immediate happiness of being able to get things of his chest, it’s a sign of how close they’ve gotten to each other and how meaningful this relationship is to the both of them. Because we know them so well as characters, we know what their first instinct is and therefore what doesn’t come naturally to them. Complexity is built on obviousness.

This dialogue has of course many levels of comprehension : first it’s a slam on the mythical friendzone, then a reflexion on the nature of friendship relatively to love, and then a more tragic observation on Dio’s selflessness. But there’s also an undeniable meta quality to it : faced with his own feelings as a person, Dio refused to take the obvious route. And Cass equally refused to have the obvious reaction. This is a conversation they will not have. It’s all hypotheticals. These two people looked hard at who they were and where this would take them. They looked at the ravine they had dug, and they decided to turn back. And this doesn’t mean their other instincts won’t run them into the ground – in fact, that’s precisely what happens a few pages later – but for the sake of each other they were able to alter their course. Characters in stories are not chained to their own passions ; just like us, they are able to take a look at themselves and decide what they want to do with who they are. In Imperial Phase, the gods seem to get dragged underwater by their own weight, too despondent or even self-satisfied to shake themselves up. But this is no fatality, only a reaction to the terrifying perspective of growth and change.

And really, who among us can pretend to have changed who they were without any kind of external prompting ? In a story like Wicdiv, no plot event is strong enough to turn a character on their wheels ; the seeds of Persephone were present in Laura long before her symbolic death, and her issues will come back every Winter until she addresses them. However, by caring for each other, by wanting to be better for each other, change can and does come. Imperial Phase has seen its characters bring out the worst in each other, but it has also seen them definitely take control of their story. They have no choice now but to take a good look at the devastation in their path and draw the necessary consequences. Their story must continue. Their story must end. But perhaps there is room for one more rewrite.

WHAT I THOUGHT OF THE ISSUE

One way I measure the impact of an issue is by checking how many reviews and Tumblr posts it generated. And while issue #30 apparently left people a bit bemused – it got maybe half as many reviews and posts as usual – issue #31 was one of those big shakeups of an issue, dazzling people everywhere. It speaks to the Wicdiv team’s consideration for their characters that an issue containing the death of a character still manages to make waves, despite how frequent an occurrence this has become. Sparks also started flying again graphic-wise, not that McKelvie and Wilson ever took a break, but this is clearly where we were supposed to tip our hats, and I do so obligingly.

Given all that, surely I can be forgiven for being a bit down on this ? At this point, I have to question my own tendency to be left somewhat unsatisfied with the issues that are obviously meant to be “the big ones”. Maybe it is simply that I don’t like big plot moments and I’m more comfortable reading slow build-up pieces. Part of this is also the downside of the creative team’s media presence and remarkable openness about their creative process : Gillen has repeatedly said that this issue was where the “payoff” of this arc was starting, so we knew for months that this was the one with “the events”. And just like there is no quicker way to ruin a joke than to announce it’s going to make you laugh, directing my attention to an issue that’s supposed to be the one with the fireworks will immediately make me second-guess my enthusiasm.

That said, there are some concrete elements of this issue that I didn’t like. The cut between Woden drawing the gun and the moment he shoots it was absolutely grating to me for reasons I couldn’t quite place ; Gillen did a write-up of this creative decision in his notes and while I do understand now the reasons of their choice, I still would have preferred for these two pages to be consecutive. At some point, a time unit is simply too small to be cut in two without losing energy or coherence. It actually took me a few seconds to understand what was happening on the second page because it seemed to me at first that there had to have been an ellipsis.

I also rolled my eyes a bit at the last exchange between Amaterasu and Sakhmet. I have no problem at all with Amaterasu continuing to be insufferable to the very end, but the “you thought it was over, SIKE !” move is one Wicdiv might have pulled one too many times. And the final straw on “being family” only added to the cliché atmosphere of the page.

Generally speaking, this issue felt maybe too formulaic for me to really get into it, which is a problem I’ve encountered with many of the Imperial Phases (I and II) issues. And it doesn’t help that these issues feel wobbly as a whole, meaning I can’t really maintain a constant level of enthusiasm for this arc. The idea of splitting the characters into groups to get different narrative threads to emerge was an interesting one, but it has also partitioned the plot in a way that didn’t leave much room for deepening its sequences – again, not a coincidence that the best issue of these arcs is the one that used precisely that limitation as a formal basis. And while everything I’ve written above on the virtue of obeying the logic of the character rather than trying to shake up audiences at all costs remains true, it also means that just like with Rising Action, Imperial Phase (I and II) are arcs whose primary goal is to take us from point A to point B of both its plot and theme, to the detriment of the content of the arc. In Rising Action, the target was our own delusion that a happy ending could be achieved by removing the “villain” : a straight take on superhero comics that constantly read as disingenuous for the sole purpose of making us aware of its second layer. Imperial Phase is a bit less linear due to its segmented storylines, but the same double-dealing is at play here : this is a phase that is incredibly straightforward yet constantly winking at you to make you question its straightforwardness. If Rising Action was about the delusion of action, Imperial Phase is about the delusion of stagnation. Our temptation to believe fighting the villain would solve everything was logically replaced by the temptation to believe no fighting at all would mean happiness. That being at the top meant nothing could hurt you. That simply keeping on keeping on couldn’t possibly bring violence and suffering. And just like with Rising Action, there is nothing wrong with exploring that theme or making that point, but if that’s all the arc does, then it’s lacking in substance. This is the limit of the arc-as-argument structure : once you get the point, you get restless waiting for it to conclude. It’s right in the title : Imperial Phase implies we’ll be moving on from that phase sooner or later. Meanwhile, there isn’t much to do besides twiddling your thumbs waiting for the arc to get there. I know what these issues want to tell me. I got it. I got the concept.

Fortunately, these arcs do more with their characters than Rising Action did besides making their point, meaning there’s still a lot to like and explore. I mean, I still find enough every month to write 2000+ words about it. Still, maybe the whole thing is playing just a bit too tight and controlled for me, which made sense for Rising Action but less so for an arc that’s all about indulgence and letting things decay on their own. This was particularly notable in this issue precisely because this is where the explosion of violence is supposed to start again, yet it still reads as an impeccably budgeted master plan. Fortunately, Wicdiv is still the best at conjuring triviality and ugliness exactly when you need it, and Amaterasu’s opened throat as well as Persephone’s stills are proof of that. We have two more issues to go, and I hope we see more of that messy, disorganized side of decadence rather than the cold ticking of its clock.

But most importantly, Kieron Gillen, a scene at the British Museum was our one chance to see a dodo bird in Wicdiv and it didn’t happen. I will never forgive you.

#wicdiv #seeds of thought #long-ass form

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awinetintedmuse · 4 years

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On Gods as Characters and Powers in Fiction

Well, I lasted a total of one day before I had a rant that needed writing out. Heads up, this is going to get a bit... literary theory-y, so be prepared.

First, let’s talk about gods. In fiction, and in my writing, my belief is that in general gods should not be considered characters. They can have characters, they can be characterized, but they themselves should not be characters because of the power they wield. They are the deus in deus ex machina; interactions with them are best served when they drive the plot rather than engage with it. In essence, the one dealing with the problem should not be the god, but the ones engaging with them, because otherwise, there isn’t a problem.

A few caveats to this though. This obviously isn’t the case if one is writing about gods interacting with each other. It’s also not the case if the god is acting in such a way that he or she is not able to act within the story as a god might. For example, in the Bacchae, Dionysus is a god, but he is in disguise and is thus not acting within the story as the same sort of god that say, Zeus does earlier when he interacts with Semele.

The reason for this is because of power.

All plots are driven by problems, that is to say, something needs to happen so that things can progress. A god however, can instantly fix most problems. Even minor gods or gods that do not take on the characteristics of what we in the west think of as gods ( such as Chinese or Japanese ideas about gods, where they can die and are limited in various ways ) can still fix most common issues with no effort.

Because most gods are immortal, impossibly strong, contain powers that can literally craft the cosmos, and also happen to be able to wield these powers at will, it is impossible to simply craft them in fiction as being equals to anyone without restraining them severely, like how it’s done in the Bacchae.

The reason for this is because a huge power discrepancy results in conflicts between characters, as it does in people. People resent being constantly overpowered and overruled by those they cannot defend themselves against. If you know that the person in charge could, with a thought, smite you, you’d not so readily speak out against him. Such is the stuff of dystopian horrors.

But if we assume that what we are writing is not meant to be a dystopian horror, then you end up unable to write much at all. Example, if your characters need to acquire an object, a god can probably just create it, or summon it on his own. There, story over. To avoid this, you end up playing a version of the no telephone trope in horror movies, where you have to go to greater and greater lengths to explain why your characters can’t acquire aid.

Thus, it becomes easier to simply relegate gods to positions where they are characterized, but not characters in their own right, in the sense that they are not part of the main cast. If they are, then in general you don’t want them simply fixing all the problems and doing whatever they want, because they’ll take over the story. But nor do you want to have to play the game where you have to keep trying to find reasons that they can’t do things without making it seem like they’re giant assholes who could help but won’t.

Comics, meanwhile, take an entirely different approach. They power up all their characters until there is no difference between them and the gods that exist in their world.

Wonder Woman fights Ares, Superman fights Darkseid, The Flash is literally the fastest being in existence, ect. The problem is clear: at some point you end up where there are literally no possible challenges for them to face without either depowering them or gaming out the telephone problem in horror movies.

However, comics have found a third, almost equally awful way to fix the problem: instead of focusing on the characters, focus on the powers themselves and the source of them and make that the constant issue to deal with.

You may realize that’s why for the last like, 20 years or so, every Flash comic is somehow about the Speed Force breaking/having issues/having heartburn/falling apart, while Superman comics have been spending their time endlessly writing and rewriting various kinds of kryptonite and effects while coming up with mystical reasons why somehow this keeps happening.

For those of you who prefer Marvel, this is why the Hulk’s powers now come from some kind of mystical source about good and evil or some shit, Spiderman has had his origin written and re-written a dozen times about how he’s the embodiment of the spider totem or something, and the less that’s said about crap like the Starbrand or how Ghost Rider’s writers can’t decide if he’s from hell or heaven the better.

Essentially, rather than focus on the characters and have them solve problems, writers instead spend their time hashing and rehashing how their powers work and giving those problems to ensure that they never have to actually handle the problem of their heroes being impossibly strong invincible superbeings.

This is also how you get Batman, the smartest man on earth who is also the best marksman who can literally defeat anyone if he’s got like five minutes of preptime.

In case you’re wondering, this would be like if in Pirates of the Caribbean they spent their time talking about individual planks in the Black Pearl as the way to defeat the pirates.

The result is to make most villains irrelevant, or to force them to become impossibly powerful as well. This is how the Joker is now also an impossibly smart superbeing who is invulnerable and invincible and can think a thousand steps a head and can’t be stopped. But that description can be given to nearly any big bad for any superhero these days, because power creep has gotten so bad that it’s everywhere.

Of course somewhere along the way they realized that there was a fourth option, which was to simply put heroes against themselves. Thus we now have nearly infinite amounts of evil Supermen, Batmen, Spidermen, Iron Men... Hell they turned Captain America into a Hydra Agent because they literally could not find a way to distinguish him from any other hero due to the fact that he’s basically an impossibly strong superbeing himself now.

Thus I return to my original statement: gods should not be characters. You may have realized that modern day heroes are now gods themselves, at least narratively; sure Batman may not look like Zeus, but he’s equally as insulated from the results of his actions. Sure, Spiderman isn’t Quetzalcoatl, but he’s equally invincible inside the realm of comics.

Power creep plus a loss of suspension of disbelief has resulted in them essentially being walking, talking deus-ex-machinas.

Of course, all of this would be bad enough, if series weren’t going out of their way to constantly introduce new, even more powerful entities into their series, which only causes more power creep. In Marvel it’s the Beyonders, in DC it’s now Dr. Manhattan, but before him it was Perpetua or whatever her name was, and before her it was the New Gods, and it’s simply a never ending cavalcade of passing the buck to avoid looking at the core problem.

Gods, as gods, as omnipotent, all powerful entities, make really really terrible characters. It is impossible to get the audience to buy into the threats they face, and it’s impossible to make them believable.

Thus, the only way to solve the problem is to not make them as such. Or in the case of gods themselves, to make them the thing that drives the plot rather than the character who deals with the plot.

#ooc #rant tw

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holley51u899-blog · 6 years

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Wrongdoer Defenses Of Mistakes From Truth As well as Mistakes Of Regulation Guide.

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