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praphit · 4 years

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Horse Girl: What happened to white Darren?!

So, I had someone else pick the movie. Whenever others are involved, you gotta have them pick, so that if it's bad, you can blame them. That's how we come to "Horse Girl"!

I went into it cold. All I knew was that Alison Brie is in it, and I'm here for all things Alison Brie.

With a name like "Horse Girl", I thought there was a slim chance that it might end up being a superhero flick. Alison is finally getting her own solo comic book hero franchise. Perhaps she'll have powers similar to Aquaman, but instead of sea creatures, she talks to horses.

I thought that perhaps she'd have the power to turn into a horse; kinda like that movie "Tusk". Have any of y'all ever watched "Tusk"?

Yeah, don't watch that movie; it's awful.

In retrospect, I still don't know why this movie is called "Horse Girl". There is a horse in the movie, but... idk. Plus, shouldn't it really be "Horse Woman"? I do believe that Alison Brie is around my age. But, maybe it's a PR move. Spider-Man, in many adaptations, is really a teenager, but referring to himself as a man. Which is good, cuz I don't want to be rescued by a "Spider-Boy"; having a teenage boy flick things out of his body in order to save me? - I can't get behind that.

"Horse Girl", I can work with, cuz I'm thinking she's fresh to the hero game, unjaded, and has a real future in front of her... maybe one that involves a better code name.

(Look how happy she is... a real go-getter. I question her horse selection though, but she’ll learn. That horse has def been into the stuff.”

"Horse Woman" has already made her bad choices. She's used up. Frankly, I don't have a whole lot of confidence in her.

The beginning of this movie is very girlie. Do I mean that in a bad way? - not necessarily; it's just a fact. Kinda like, um... "Jane the Virgin".

Nothing wrong with that show (I guess... I’ve never seen it), but I can't imagine a group of men getting together to watch it. "Yo, y'all ready to watch a lil Jane the V?! Maybe she gonna pop that cherry tonight, man! She might just pop it! Yeah!"

Is that what the show is about? Her trying desperately each week for love or lust, and neither ever coming her way? What a sad show. But, I hear it's good, just girlie.

Meanwhile, I'm enduring the girliness of Alison Brie's fabric store, zumba sessions, bracelet making time, crying in the shower time, and upbeat convos with girl friends. I'm thinking to myself "When is she going to have her superhero origin moment?" Where's the vat of toxic waste that she falls into?

Have a radioactive horse gnaw on her! Where's the villain?! Where's the fight?! Let's go!

She does have a bitchy roommate and her tool of a boyfriend. Apparently, her roommate thinks that Alison's life style is pathetic: working at a fabric store and home to watch her favorite supernatural cop show (every day). Every now and then, she pesters some horse, its caretakers, and some young girl who rides the horse (I know what you're thinking - “Maybe this young girl will end up being the legendary “HORSE GIRL". Nope. Again, I don't understand the choice of title for this movie). Her bitchy roommate's judgmental pestering does lead to a fling for Alison. A man by the name of "Darren".

He looks more like a "Dave" to me. Or a “Ken”. I wish he had a different name; he probably wishes the same. White Darrens... just... no.

A nice guy, but he's one of those people who should really end their thoughts in convo a few paragraphs earlier. Socially, he’s like a quicksand of blah. A cake with “meh” icing - I blame his name, mostly for this. And his dancing... goodness gracious! He dances like he’s being attacked by hornets.

Though Alison's dancing isn't anything to brag about either. She dances like she’s riding a bull.

But, you can't be a white Darren and dance like that; you've either got to get lessons or make a promise to humanity to never dance. Alison's beautiful. Pretty women can get away with being horrible dancers. In fact, I think it might make them more attractive.

"You know, Alison, you're a 10. I didn't think I had a chance with you, until I saw you dance."

So far, I don't know what type of movie this is. Is it a romantic comedy? - not really, though it has funny moments in it. Superhero flick (I know that was a long shot)? Nope.

It's too quirky to be a drama.

Horror? There are some moments where Alison is sleep walking. I kept hoping that we'd get a scene where she's in the shadows holding an ax. Yes, Alison! Kill! Kill them! - but again, no.

The movie starts going in a mental illness direction. Alison Brie's character slowly starts to lose her mind. We learn that it's possibly something that runs in the family. Those of you who know me, know that I'm a big advocate for mental health care & mental illness awareness. I probably would have really connected with this movie on that level, if it was directed better. There's just too much artsy, wackiness smeared over this movie. I love the idea of this film and I love what the director was going for in many parts, but... idk.

There's a great cast here. Not only Alison Brie, but Molly Shannon... or do I have those two fist names backwards? You know her... "Superstar".

Wait... that’ not right - that’s what popped up though. To my knowledge she has never played Jesus Christ in a musical. Back in the day, she starred in a comedy from... wait a sec...

- you know what?? - it doesn’t matter. Maybe you don't know her anyway. She's good in this; though it's a minor role.

Aaaah, there she is.

Got my man Paul what's-his-face up in here! That’s my main man!

Who... um... y’all probably don’t know either. To be honest, I barely know these people. What am I doing?

I’m trying to say that the acting talent is here! - regardless if you know peeps like Paul what’s-his-face or not. And the bitchy roommate and her annoying boyfriend really made me hate them, so that's points for their acting, I suppose.

This could have been a thoughtful drama about mental illness, with comedy sprinkled in, and making a point. The movie/Tv landscape needs more stuff like that (especially these days, with people losing it, during this pandemic).

It seems like the director was going more for "creative genius" acclaim. Unfortunately, he missed the mark, by a lot. Again, I saw what he (I'm assuming it's a he - I don't actually know) was going for, and there are some really creative parts here, but... the message is a bit muddy, and the pacing is rough at best (not unlike this post).

. You know what, I'm going to go ahead and say it's a man who directed this, because there's a nude scene from Alison Brie that doesn't really need to be there. The director is trying to show the mental collapse of this woman, and... you know... when people lose their minds, they tend to walk through their place of business naked. I'm sure that most male directors would have all main actresses have a similar scene, if they thought that they could get away with it. Picture "The Avengers" director -

"I really think that Scarjo needs to be nude in this scene.”

“Maybe she's in the shower, when her team calls for help. She's so dedicated that she doesn't have time to put on clothes. It'll be a powerful scene. Trust me. Really zoom-in. Annnnd ACTION!"

That scene with Alison Brie is not terrible. Maybe I'm nitpicking.

It would have been a better use of Alison Brie's acting chops to have her walk in looking rough (maybe scantily clad... or in her underwear, if you must), but here could have been some of those artsy shots while she's walking around the store in a bit of a fugue state (if you do that butt-neked, it'll seem gratuitous). But, maybe have her say and do some things that have been building up through the movie, for an Oscar-Nudging climax, and emotional scene of her losing her grip on reality. But, far be it from me to be a backseat director. I'm just a rambling praphit. Just have her jiggle in, cry, and jiggle out. That's better.

Grade: an interesting D

I'm glad that I watched it, because there are a lot of good ideas here, but... you know.

Of course, maybe she's not crazy after all. Things go super wacky towards the end. Something about aliens and clones. Oh, and she does technically get a superhero outfit.

Looking like a Power Ranger for some reason.

There’s also a scene where she (as a Pink Power Ranger) gets it on with white Darren... like out of nowhere. But, did that even happen? Idk.

Was it all in her head? Was the reality of the sitch, that she broke into white Darren’s place, wrapped in pink fabric, and tried to dry-hump white Darren, while he was sleeping? Then, IN HER HEAD, he thinks that’s hot. She only THINKS that they got it on. In reality, he refused her crazy advances, and as a result, she kills him. She beheads him... with a spoon or something. The director is strange, so why not?? Or maybe she takes him (or his head) away as some alien sacrifice. It’s really weird, because after their “ sexy time” the movie just kinda moves on from him. It’s very awkward.

What happened to white Darren?! What was real?! Who knows??

Things get crazier and crazier, until... I don't even know what happened. I guess they're leaving it up to the audience to decide whether or not it's all true or she’s crazy. It's hard to tell, sometimes, whether you've got a clever ending on your hands or a lazy director, who decides "Hey, let's do something really weird in the last scene

and then just... kinda... end."

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commentaryvorg · 4 years

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Danganronpa V3 Commentary: Part 6.13

Be aware that this is not a blind playthrough! This will contain spoilers for the entire game, regardless of the part of the game I’m commenting on. A major focus of this commentary is to talk about all of the hints and foreshadowing of events that are going to happen and facts that are going to be revealed in the future of the story. It is emphatically not intended for someone experiencing the game for their first time.

…Okay, since this is the very last post of the main storyline, admittedly this spoiler warning has become completely moot at this point. But, you know. Tradition!

Last time as we got even closer to the end of trial 6, the audience literally murdered Keebo in the most pointlessly gratuitous death in the entire game, the narrative tried to insist this was necessary in order for Shuichi to both realise he needs to change their minds and actually be able to do so (but it wasn’t), Shuichi was adorably inspired by Kaito to make the impossible possible and Maki adorably agreed that a sidekick of Kaito’s could do that, I had A Lot Of Feelings, ones very personal to me (thanks to Kaito!), about Shuichi’s sentiment of how fiction can change the world… and then things abruptly mood-whiplashed into the worst Argument Armament both gameplay-wise and in terms of how it should have been literally actually impossible for Shuichi to change any of this asshole audience’s minds, even though things really could have been written such that it wasn’t if this audience had just been reacting to all this like actual human beings.

(…I did it! I found a reason to mention Kaito in every one of this chapter’s summary bits! Okay, admittedly I had to kind of shoehorn it a few times – though not remotely all of the times, mind you – but shush, Kaito deserves it, I have no regrets.)

Anyway, with the Argument Armament over and Shuichi having achieved the literal impossible, we’re about to go to the “vote”.

Monokuma: “Puhuhu… I think hopeful Keebo should vote for despairing Tsumugi, without a doubt!”

My god, Monokuma is so transparently just trying to keep things on script and pander to the Danganronpa buzzwords when it doesn’t even make any sense. When at any point during this trial has Tsumugi herself ever seemed to be in despair? And Keebo has hardly been advocating hope recently – Monokuma’s just desperately trying to make it sound like that’s totally still his character. Plus, he’s Monokuma! He’s supposed to be the poster bear for despair! He’s not supposed to want anyone to be voting against despair!

Monokuma: “Cuz that’s what the outside world wants to see!”

Since they’re in control of Keebo now, the outside world is already going to vote for what they want to see and shouldn’t have needed Monokuma to tell them what they supposedly want. Someone’s getting worried. (He really shouldn’t be, because what just happened should not have been possible, but.)

It’s pretty neat how it turns out that the real reason the game made you do the vote yourself the whole time is for the purpose of this bit in which you don’t vote. Though I guess technically they still didn’t need to do that and could just leave you to assume that Shuichi didn’t vote.

(If you do vote here, regardless of who for, there’s just a very brief game over in which Shuichi laments that he was a coward after all.)

Maki: “If she had cast one vote for Keebo then it would be a tie, but—”

Tsumugi: “Oh, there’s no need to worry about that. I didn’t vote either.”

Maki: “…What?”

Shuichi: “Just as I thought… You wanted hope to win.”

Of course she wanted hope to win, but then… why couldn’t she have just voted for herself, just in case Keebo’s body didn’t vote? I suppose this could be a sign that she actually does care about what the outside world wants and would be willing to accept it if they didn’t want the “hope” ending after all, rather than forcing it on them against their will anyway. But the rest of her behaviour a bit later when she realises they didn’t vote doesn’t really add up with that, so, eh?

Also it’s interesting how Maki seems particularly surprised to realise this. I guess she really was taken in by Tsumugi’s manipulative argument earlier that she’d want to be the lone survivor because she’s the big bad evil mastermind, and that Maki’s desire to not vote was all part of her plan.

(It’s okay, Maki! You were right to believe in your own feelings and stand with Shuichi after all!)

Tsumugi: “No matter who he voted for, the only one who survives is Keebo… So in other words, the winner is hope.”

I was going to question whether it’d really be the same even if the audience voted for “despair” to win, which should mean Keebo’d be executed after all and we’ll get the boring everybody-dies ending anyway. But actually he’d just be “punished”, aka being put into a new killing game, so no, that would end up the same as the “hope” ending in which he sacrificed himself to that fate, wouldn’t it.

Tsumugi: “He’ll be participating in the next killing game.”

Maki: “Hold it! Why are you punishing Keebo? If Keebo survives, then there’s no need for him to be sacrif—”

Maki, I appreciate your desire to try and protect your friend, but Keebo is already dead. She’ll just be “punishing” his empty shell.

…Actually, that’s a good question. What would she have done to put Keebo’s empty shell in a new killing game? Would he have gotten a new personality? Would it be the same as his old one with his memories erased, or a different character? Or would the audience have been in complete control of him like they are now? That would have been… disconcerting to his fellow students, to say the least.

Himiko: “Th-That’s not fair! Are you twisting the rules again?”

Tsumugi: “It’s fine, cuz this is all fiction. Maybe it’s a bit forced… but that’s fiction for you, right?”

Ha. Haha. There sure have been a few forced bits in this fiction here and there, both in terms of things Tsumugi did in-universe, and also in an out-universe sense.

Not that this is an excuse. Writers should be trying to make the best fictions they can, not writing off their mistakes and problems with “oh but it’s fiction so it doesn’t matter, right”, as if that’s an excuse to not even try in the first place. This is more of Tsumugi’s mindset of seeing fiction as enjoyable but ultimately meaningless because it’s “just” fiction.

Tsumugi: “And how about this for the next plotline? Hope has won but the lone survivor, Keebo, remains trapped… Now he’ll challenge the killing game anew. Will he be able to grasp true hope…? Yeah, an ending like that can work, right?”

My god, Tsumugi, you are a terrible writer and I hope you’re starting to realise this yourself. All of Keebo’s friends are dead and now he’s forced into a second killing game? That’s not hope winning! That’s the most despair ending if ever I saw one! And what the hell does “grasp true hope” even mean? She’s definitely not talking about “true hope” in the sense of the actual meaning of the word, so it’s clearly just a superlative to refer to an even more hopey kind of hope than the hope he already supposedly has. This “plotline” is so dumb, and at least this has got to be out-universely on purpose.

Maki: “What? This is the worst possible ending.”

Himiko: “But… this is bad. At this rate, our deaths will be meaningless!”

Shuichi: “…”

Shuichi is smiling, and he’s been silent for most of this, because he somehow has confidence in the literal impossibility he just pulled off when he really shouldn’t. I wish I could enjoy this final moment of Shuichi being a hero and living up to Kaito’s words as much as the narrative wants me to, but it just falls flat and I hate that it does that.

Shuichi: “Phew… I’m relieved.”

This is Shuichi after the voting results showed that the audience also didn’t vote. I’m glad he was at least a little nervous that he might not have been able to do this, because he should not have been able to do this.

Tsumugi: “Danganronpa is going to end? This killing game full of tense standoffs and backstabbings amongst friends…”

Oh, that’s what Danganronpa is to you and the audience? I thought it was meaningless yelling about hope being better than despair and people getting gratuitously killed because executions are fun or something.

Seeing the audience’s faces disappear from the trial background as they all switch off and stop watching is a satisfying moment all on its own. I just wish the buildup to it had been as good as it should have been to make it feel like this was actually happening for an organic, meaningful reason.

Shuichi: “You never appreciated us… And it looks like you didn’t appreciate the power of fiction!”

I still love hearing Shuichi talk about the power of fiction, even if his use of it here was so, so badly executed. If this audience had actually understood the power of fiction and appreciated these characters like a decent audience should, then things would never have needed to happen in this nonsensical way!

Shuichi: “No one wants to hear your sick, twisted stories anymore!”

This is veering a little bit into making it sound like even the existence of Danganronpa as a work of fiction in the out-universe has been bad simply because it involves people killing each other. But if it really is fiction and no real people are getting hurt, it’s still perfectly okay for stories to have bad things happen to their characters – that’s one of the things that makes stories compelling, after all.

Of course, since fiction can affect reality, people have to be mindful of the messages that their stories give off. But just because a story contains murder, that doesn’t mean the narrative condones it. The message of Danganronpa has never been “killing your classmates is totally okay if you don’t get caught”, nor has it been “being executed if you do get caught killing someone is totally deserved”, regardless of what this nonsensical audience may have seemed to think.

Himiko: “So what are we going to do now? Now that it’s over, there’s no need for any punishments.”

There really isn’t! Now that the outside world has already shown they don’t want the killing games any more, it’s already done. Shuichi and friends have no need to get themselves killed to try and give them a disappointing ending, or to try and make their point about how determined they are to end this.

Tsumugi: “No, it needs to end with a punishment… at the very least.”

Geez, Tsumugi! This is possibly the most sick and twisted decision she ever makes. With everything else, she at least believed she was delivering what her audience wanted. But this, she’s doing purely for her own satisfaction because she still wants there to be horrible executions, even though nobody else does any more.

Shuichi: “Now… if we… continue to live after this… the choice we made won’t really matter. The people will just want another killing game, so…”

No, they won’t! You already (somehow) changed everyone’s minds partly by showing that you would have been willing to die if necessary, but now that their minds have been changed, it isn’t necessary! They’re not all suddenly going to change their minds back just because you didn’t actually die!

This bit of writing does rather awkwardly reek of the out-universe writers desperately wanting to give themselves an excuse for one final execution scene so it can end with something of a bang. Out-universe writers, why are you behaving like Tsumugi.

Tsumugi: “I never expected an ending like that, so I don’t have a punishment ready…”

Don’t you? Not even for the possibility that the blackened wins and everyone else dies? I guess they really never do expect the blackened to ever win, do they. But even then, wouldn’t they have individual punishments ready for every character in case they become the blackened? They could just go through those one by one; that’s always what I imagined would happen in the eventuality that a blackened got away with it. I suppose doing it like that wouldn’t be exciting enough when she wants to kill them all at once for a grand finale. (Have I mentioned it’s fucked-up that she still wants to do this.)

Tsumugi: “I worked so hard to keep this going for 53 seasons and now it’s all over.”

No, you didn’t, what the hell, stop giving yourself way more credit than you deserve. Tsumugi is a teenager, or at least she’s young enough to pass as one. We saw from that one comment that there’d been three years between this season and season 52. Even if the usual gap is shorter than that, that’s still probably something like at least fifty years this franchise has been around. Tsumugi was born into a world that already loved Danganronpa, and she’d have only been working on it herself for the last few seasons at most.

(Plot twist: Tsumugi’s actually like eighty years old, but because she’s a literal fucking shapeshifter, she constantly assumes the appearance of a high school student as her “default” form. Yeah, no, somehow I don’t think that’s what we’re supposed to be getting from this.)

Tsumugi: “Well, that’s fine… If this is a world without killing games now… I don’t want to be a part of it.”

It seems, perhaps, that the main reason Tsumugi is insisting on a final execution is because she wants to basically commit suicide over there being no more killing-real-people-for-entertainment any more? Which is extremely fucked up in its own right, but even more so that she’s then selfishly insisting on dragging the other three into it when they have no reason to die any more.

Maki: “But now, it’s all over. We’re the last ones to suffer from the killing games…”

Yes! Whether you die or not, that’s still true, at least. That’s worth it.

Shuichi: “Come on, everyone! We should be proud! We were able to change the world in the end.”

You were! Somehow. I really wish it was easier to get behind this and be proud of Shuichi and friends for doing this. I really wish it had felt possible.

(The writers are the ones who didn’t make the impossible possible here and I am very disappointed in them.)

Tsumugi: “My plan was such a flawless copy, it even failed right at the end… So I should be able to hold my head up high as a cosplaycat criminal, right?”

Shuichi: “A ‘cosplaycat criminal’?”

Shuichi has some… odd deductions based on this statement in the epilogue, which we’ll get to soon enough. But just looking at it right here at face value, all it seems to be is that Tsumugi is trying to look on the bright side of her failure. She’s trying to tell herself that this is just like how Junko’s plan failed right at the end, so she can be happy because it’s like she really was cosplaying Junko and copying one of her favourite characters down to the letter. She calls herself a cosplaycat criminal, meaning she was copying a fictional crime!

I like how Tsumugi keeps trying to be happy about her Junko-ness during the execution by cosplaying her and copying Junko’s final grin… but she’s not Junko, and she’s not happy about this at all. Which is good, because she doesn’t deserve to be. Only Kaito gets to smile in death.

After even more destruction of the Academy, Keebo’s empty shell sees the rubble shifting, indicating that the other three are still alive under there. (Please imagine them huddling together with Maki using her body to shield Shuichi and Himiko as best she can. You know she would.) And the Keebo-shell just leaves them alone, because the outside world doesn’t want to kill them any more. Them not being visible means there’s plausible deniability that makes it look like he sure tried to kill them good and dead and totally didn’t know they were still alive at the end. Not that I’m entirely sure why he’d need to hide it, since right now, Keebo is the outside world, and they all want them to survive, so it shouldn’t need to be a secret. Maybe they’re just trying to give them some privacy and to let them live in relative secret when they escape. That would sure be far more empathy and decency than this audience ever seemed to have any capacity for, but then, Shuichi did a magic, so, whatever.

…Was this button that was in plain sight and easily accessible on Keebo’s stomach seriously his self-destruct button this whole time? Geez, can you imagine if someone had pressed it accidentally?

This execution music still has the usual “wa-wa-wa-wa, wa-wa-ooh” vocal part that they all have. Here, it plays as Keebo flies towards the wall to blow it open, and it’s in the usual lower key… but it shouldn’t be! This isn’t a killing blow, it’s a victory, again! This is allowed to be in the higher key just like it was for Kaito’s!

Based on the power Keebo’s laser gun displays, I’m still convinced that he could have just used the laser gun to blow a hole in the wall and didn’t need to straight-up self-destruct into it. The audience probably only made him do that because his body is a useless empty shell now anyway.

(Did Shuichi’s magic impossible miracle also make them feel bad for pointlessly murdering Keebo? It better have done. Maybe somewhere in the Team Danganronpa HQ there’s backups of his personality and he could possibly hypothetically be saved? Though he’d need a new body as well now.)

(…But then again, there’s backups of everyone’s personality if you use Flashback Lights, yet I can’t imagine Shuichi and co would be comfortable with creating what would awkwardly just be like copies of their dead friends.)

The credits listing the characters’ names are neat. They were all real people who contributed to this work of fiction, after all, right? …Though that idea sort of falls apart after it goes through the V3 cast and starts listing the DR1 and 2 characters, who were not real in this universe, and then characters like Kaito’s grandparents and such who had lines in certain flashbacks but were also not real.

I also like how the credits are being shown on the screen of a cinema, in which we can see people in the audience gradually getting up and leaving. Danganronpa’s over now! They’ll just go and find something else to watch.

It’s neat that it puts you back to what seems like the title screen before cutting to the epilogue. This isn’t a part of “Danganronpa V3” any more!

I’m glad the epilogue exists to show for certain that Shuichi, Maki and Himiko survived. It would have been incredibly frustrating if they’d just left us with some ambiguous moving rubble and nothing more than that. I’d have headcanoned the hell out of their survival anyway, but it’s nice to know for certain that they’re okay and that I’m not just desperately believing something that might not be the truth.

(That hole in the wall is very high up and I am not sure how they’re going to climb up there to get out of it. Awkward. Maybe it’s cracked enough that eventually the whole thing will shatter.)

Himiko: “To the outside world, huh? I wonder what kind of world it is.”

Maki: “A peaceful world with no fighting and no despair. That’s what Tsumugi said, right?”

It’s still a world where, until literally just now, the majority of the population was quite happy to watch real people kill each other for entertainment. That’s pretty fucked-up in its own right.

Really, though, the first thing the three of them should be doing before they even think about leaving is finding whichever rooms in the dormitory are still reasonably intact and getting some fucking sleep. They haven’t slept since before Kaito’s trial. (And Maki probably didn’t even get much sleep the night before that trial either.) Then they had the full day of that case and trial, including some very emotionally traumatic experiences, investigated through the whole night rather than sleep, then had this trial in the morning for several more hours, including yet more emotional trauma. They should be exhausted, both physically and mentally.

But the main thing about the epilogue is Shuichi’s odd theories about Tsumugi’s final words.

Shuichi: “She said ‘copy’… That means she must have been copying someone, right?”

…

Shuichi: “Perhaps Hope’s Peak Academy and the Remnants of Despair really exist. Maybe Tsumugi was just basing her performance on them.”

No? Tsumugi’s words were not any kind of indication of that at all? It is at least equally likely that she meant she was copying Junko’s fictional plan - more likely, in fact, since she called herself a cosplaycat, not a copycat, and she was always very insistent about not “cosplaying” real people, regardless of whether or not the cospox thing was bullshit.

Shuichi: “She might have been lying when she said ‘copy’. But if she were telling the truth, then… it would make sense that that was a lie.”

Himiko: “What do you mean, ‘that’?”

Shuichi: “What Tsumugi showed us… The way we were when… we first arrived.”

She doesn’t need to have been lying about the word “copy” for it to still mean that Hope’s Peak was fictional, what the hell, Shuichi. You can copy fictional things.

And by “what Tsumugi showed us”, Shuichi is talking not about the audition videos, but about the flashback of their pregame selves in the prologue being excited upon realising they were chosen. Which means that Tsumugi very explicitly did show them a video of that. Such a video cannot possibly have been faked. Tsumugi may have been a shapeshifter, but she was only one person. So that definitely happened, then! This is just even more proof that it was the truth!

Shuichi: “I still don’t believe it. I can’t believe that any of us would volunteer for this.”

Because those people weren’t you, Shuichi! And as soon as you realise that, it doesn’t matter what you would have done in their place because you’re different people! It’s kind of frustrating to me that after Shuichi was willingly accepting that he’s a “fictional character” back in the trial, that he was “created” out of Flashback Lights and fake backstory, he still apparently doesn’t get that this makes him a completely separate person from the moron who used to inhabit his body.

Shuichi: “Even if we were obsessed with this killing game, I still can’t believe we would participate in it. I just… I don’t believe it.”

Because you and your friends here are decent people who would never willingly choose to put yourselves through the terrible ordeal you’ve just been through. Of course you wouldn’t be able to or want to understand the viewpoint of these kinds of one-dimensional assholes from the outside world who apparently couldn’t even accept that people dying and suffering is bad until you magically yelled at them.

(And, like I’ve mentioned, it does seem that the people who chose to audition were specifically people who kind of hated their own lives and therefore wouldn’t mind dying if it meant they got to be in Danganronpa.)

Shuichi: “Ah, but… I don’t really have any logic behind that…”

Himiko: “One of Kaito’s hunches, huh?”

I would be annoyed that they’re attaching Kaito’s name to this obviously-flawed assumption… but to be fair I do think Kaito would also have trouble comprehending the idea that anyone would want to do this. This is a fair thing to want to believe, and I’m glad that at least Shuichi acknowledges that he has no proof at all for this part. (And I do like Himiko just bringing Kaito up like that. They’re going to be mentioning him and quoting his inspiring lines all the time in their new life outside and that makes me happy.)

This whole bit is my problem with the epilogue. I’m glad we have the epilogue itself to show that the three of them survived, but I hate the way it then tries to undermine everything we just spent the whole trial on by making flimsy, completely unconvincing arguments for how ooh maybe it isn’t true after all, look, ambiguity~! Despite their attempts to make it seem that way, it’s still not remotely ambiguous to me.

Even disregarding all evidence pointing or not pointing towards it, think about what it would mean if Hope’s Peak and all those characters really did exist in this world. If Tsumugi was lying about everything being fictional… why? What on earth would be the point of telling such a massively elaborate lie? There has to be some motivation to lie, especially when the lie is this huge. She’d have had to deliberately set up all of the of subtle clues that led to Shuichi figuring things out (yes, Tsumugi ultimately told them it was fiction in the end, but Shuichi had deduced himself most of the way there before she did so), and come up with all of the details about “Danganronpa” and its many many series that would all have been completely made up out of thin air. I literally cannot think of any conceivable reason why Tsumugi would have wanted to go so far to lie about this. She indisputably had some kind of audience she was trying to please, but why the hell would pretending that actual history was just a fictional franchise please any of them, if all that stuff really was actual history? And why would they have played along with that lie in their comments?

But aside from the fact that it being a lie simply wouldn’t make any sense, all of the evidence that I’ve discussed throughout this commentary overwhelmingly points towards the fiction thing being the truth of this story. Clues that point away from it are both far less frequent and generally a lot more ambiguous and unconvincing (which definitely includes this one here in the epilogue).

And ultimately, I really believe that the fiction thing being the truth is a better story.

See, the reveal of everything being “fictional” during the trial could be seen as having undermined the entire rest of the story by acting like none of it mattered. But that is not remotely the case. Shuichi goes on to reaffirm that even if their characters were created from Flashback Lights, everything that happened in this killing game still happened, and they still really suffered and died. The story up until this trial still mattered just as much as it ever did – the only thing that was truly revealed to not have mattered was the backstory about the Gofer Project, which was really never that important to the actual killing game in the first place.

But if we’re supposed to believe this claim in the epilogue that actually nothing was fictional at all and Tsumugi was just telling nothing but lies for the entire second half of the trial? Then that really does just mean that none of this trial we just had mattered. And if that’s the case, then why the hell did we even spend several hours on it only for it all to be literally completely meaningless? That is not how to write a story.

Clearly the out-universe writers knew, when they decided to make the final chapter and big reveal of their story be this whole fiction deal, that it would be divisive and controversial. But even then, they had the guts to go and do it anyway, having a whole trial confidently establishing that that’s what the story was about, plus many subtle hints of it throughout the rest of the story that you can pick up on a replay and that I’ve been talking about here. It’s a really interesting, unique premise for a story; I’m glad they went and did it! …And then in this epilogue, after all their conviction, they suddenly get cold feet and go “uhhh actually guys if you didn’t like that story we just told you then here’s a free pass to pretend it didn’t really happen after all, please don’t be mad at us”.

No! You told everyone that story even though you knew it might turn heads, you should be sticking to the fact that that really was the story! Stick to your convictions! Come on, you guys wrote Kaito, you should know what’s up!

That’s what this part of the epilogue reads as to me – not as any kind of remotely convincing indication that this actually is the truth of the story that the writers had in mind all along, but the writers suddenly being cowards right at the end, and it’s disappointing.

The other likely reason the writers threw this in at the last minute is in an effort to make their narrative point about how lies are ambiguous and sometimes you never know what the truth is. It’s that same point they made at the end of Kokichi’s storyline that was apparently half the reason his character was even here. But man, is this an incredibly half-assed last-ditch effort at this that doesn’t really work at all… and while I’m annoyed that they even tried it in the first place, I’m glad that it doesn’t work.

Shuichi’s final observation on Kokichi back in chapter 5 tried to make it seem like his whole character was completely ambiguous; ooh who knows whether he was even telling the truth about hating the killing game, or maybe he really was just full-on evil after all~? But… Kokichi really isn’t that much of an impenetrable mystery. You have to look for it, but if you do, the evidence overwhelmingly points to him being a coward with massive trust issues who did what he did for the sake of petty, selfish revenge, out of no particular evil but also no particular good. The only part of him that actually manages to be ambiguous, purely because there’s never any mention of it at all, is what happened in his past to make him this way. I complained about that part of his character being ambiguous, and I’m glad the rest of him isn’t, because then at least I can appreciate the character that’s here.

Related to this, there’s the plan in case 5, which was designed to seem as though it was completely ambiguous as to who the victim and the killer were. Except there was a very, very easy way to prove that for certain, by opening the Exisal and finding Kaito inside. And there was a less easy but still ultimately convincing way to be sure enough of it, by paying close attention to the way Exisal Kokichi had been acting to realise that actually it was very clearly Kaito in there. Things were not nearly as truly ambiguous as Kokichi had been trying to make them seem.

As for this entire story in general and the whole fiction aspect of it… well, there probably could have been a way to make it truly ambiguous such that it really is impossible to know for sure what the truth is – it would need a lot of rewriting, but I imagine it could hypothetically be done. But that wouldn’t be a good thing, to me, because I don’t think I’d be able to enjoy the story very much at all that way. If we couldn’t ever know for sure what the truth of the story was, it’d mean there’d be no actual truth of the story to grab hold of and enjoy. There’d just be a wobbly ambiguous blob on the surface that’s trying so hard to be multiple possible stories at once that it ultimately isn’t any story at all.

I love subtlety in stories – obviously, or I wouldn’t have done this whole ridiculously long commentary talking about all the subtle bits! But I only love subtlety when there’s actually something deliberate and meaningful that it points to once you take the time to look. And that’s what this story actually is: something with a concrete truth to it, even if some of the evidence pointing towards the truth is subtle and hidden and you have to look for it. It just… also has some extra twiddly bits that are desperately trying to make things seem ambiguous for the sake of making a narrative point about lies, but they really don’t truly throw the core of the story into question at all, because if they did then everything would fall apart.

The writers apparently want one of the messages of this story to be “sometimes things are just ambiguous and you’ll never be able to know what the truth is”. But… the message I’m actually ultimately getting from it, thinking about it here, is that despite how ambiguous things may seem on the surface, there is always a truth, and you can always find it if you look hard enough.

Shuichi: “If lies can change the world just as well as the truth can… Then lies… are just another way of telling the truth.”

Um, no? Having a tangible impact on the world does not stop something untrue from being untrue. Shuichi, why are you the one saying this? You’re supposed to have more sense than that. Apparently the writers are just trying to get him to to wax lyrical about their intended theme of this story even in ways that don’t make any sense for him.

Himiko: “I guess it’s not important whether it’s a truth or a lie. Just what it leads to…”

Shuichi: “Yeah. That’s what I believe.”

That’s a better way of putting this! Some lies or fictions can have a positive impact on people, sure, and maybe you can argue that that’s what really matters. But that doesn’t magically make them true.

(If it did, then, welp, I guess that means Kaito is real you guys, you heard it here first.)

They’re also still not properly distinguishing between deliberately-deceptive lies and wilfully-bought-into fiction, which I wish they had done. There is a meaningful difference between the two.

The training spot is still intact, despite everything! Obviously they’ll hardly be able to use it any more once they get out of here, but still. I am glad it is okay. And leaving it miraculously intact even seems pretty deliberate by the out-universe writers, because man is everything around it nothing but rubble. It is good that they understand how important the training spot is. There are precious memories of Kaito there.

Shuichi: (Was this lie able to change something? Was this lie able to change someone? If it was able to change even the smallest thing…)

Yes, Shuichi! It was! It really, really was.

---

[Chapter-end bonus ramble] [Commentary-end bonus ramble] [Bonus content posts]

#danganronpa #danganronpa v3 #drv3 #ndrv3 #chapter 6 #class trial #epilogue #commentary

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ecoamerica · 26 days

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homespork-review · 5 years

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Spork Introduction

CHEL: Hi! I go by Chel, they or she pronouns, and I’m the one spearheading this project. I still like at least a fair percentage of Homestuck, but after the ending disappointed me a great deal, I got bitter, and when Hussie pissed me off further by Godwinning himself, I decided to do something about it. I’m no longer angry about it, but I felt I’d benefit from picking out what I hate from what I love so I can focus on the latter without annoyance getting in the way, and also to benefit my own writing efforts.

BRIGHT: Howdy! I’m Bright, and I got into Homestuck fairly recently. After ploughing through the archive and digesting for a while, I realised that I was thoroughly annoyed by how something enjoyable had fallen apart so comprehensively. I am looking forward to the time-honoured practice of ripping the story apart to identify its weak points and shout at them.

FAILURE ARTIST: Hello, I’m Failure Artist (call me FA for short), she/her/herself pronouns, and I’m so old-school they burned the school down. I was introduced to Homestuck via Something Awful’s Webcomic thread. I checked the old mspadventures.com site and the latest update was [S] John: Bite Apple. After watching that bizarre piece of animation, I had to know what the hell happened before then. I found I enjoyed the wit of the comic though I didn’t really care much about the plot. It was only when Act 5 came around that I became a serious fan. I currently have 122 Homestuck works on Archive of Our Own. I have a lot of free time, you see. I am very disappointed in how Homestuck ended. Possibly there was no completely satisfactory way it could end but it still could have been better. I feel like Hussie was a juggler who threw a lot of balls into the air and ignored them as they fell to the ground and some fans think not catching them was a master move since you’d expect he’d try to catch at least one. Sadly, lots of the problems with the ending are embedded deep within the canon.

TIER: Hi hi. I am Tier, a very late newcomer to the wonderful world of Homestuck (2018 reader!) and average fan overall. I love this webcomic to bits, but the low points are deep and I enjoy seeking out what the heck went wrong. Not particularly analytical myself, hope that's cool!

CHEL: Cool by us! We’ve already done plenty of analysing before we started, as you may realise from my Tumblr’s “homestuck ending hate” tag (at @chelonianmobile).

FAILURE ARTIST: But let’s put that aside for a moment and talk about the good stuff.

Homestuck is incredibly innovative. It is the first true webcomic. It’s not just a print comic posted online. It uses not just still images and words but also animation, music, and interactive games.

Homestuck is the latest adventure in the series MS Paint Adventures. MS Paint Adventures started as a forum adventure. In forum adventures, the OP acts as a sort of Dungeon Master and other forum members give them prompts. Andrew Hussie’s previous works under MS Paint Adventures were Jailbreak (which is little more than Hussie dicking with the prompters in scatological ways), Bard’s Quest (Choose-your-own-adventure), and the actually-completed Problem Sleuth. Problem Sleuth lacks the music and animation and despite the weird physics shenanigans is a simpler story than Homestuck. The characters aren’t even two dimensional.

Homestuck (and the previous MS Paint Adventures minus Bard’s Quest) are set up like adventure games. Adventure games are where the player is a protagonist in a story and are usually focused on puzzle-solving though sometimes there’s combat. In the beginning, these games were purely text. The player would type what they wanted to do and the game would spout back text describing it - assuming the computer parser understood you.

CHEL: Oh god, I HATED that. I wasn’t around for the heyday but I’ve played a couple and

Pale Luna

was barely an exaggeration (horror warning).

FAILURE ARTIST: As graphics improved, adventure games started using them, but the commands were still in text. Only later was the point-and-click interface created and players didn’t have to guess what exact sentence the computer wanted them to type. Homestuck and the other MS Paint Adventures play with that frustration while paying tribute to the genre. The game within the comic uses RPG elements but the comic itself is set up like those good ol’ adventure games. In the beginning, Homestuck was guided by commands from forum members. Even after he closed the suggestion box, he used memes and fanon created by readers.

CHEL: How good an idea this was varies, as we’ll be showing.

We probably don’t need to describe Homestuck much more. Everyone here who hasn’t read it will doubtless have heard of it. Almost everyone with a Tumblr will have seen fanart, almost anyone at a convention will have seen cosplay. Shoutouts have been made to it in professional works such as the cartoon Steven Universe, and the Avengers fandom latched onto “caw caw motherfuckers” as a catchphrase for Hawkeye to the point that it’s now often forgotten it didn’t originate from there.

FAILURE ARTIST: The Homestuck fandom term “sadstuck” for depressing stories/headcanons somehow leaked into other fandoms. Using second-person is actually cool now and not just for awkward reader fics. Astrology will never be the same again.

CHEL: Now, in the interests of fairness, we will say that when Homestuck is good, it’s amazing, and it’s good often. The characters at least start out appealing and are all immediately distinguishable; even with the typing quirks stripped, it’s easy to tell who said what. The magic system is one of the coolest I’ve ever seen, who doesn’t love classpecting themselves and their faves? Hussie also shows a lot of talent for the complex meta and time travel weirdness, and it is fascinating to watch a timeline thread unfurl. And whatever else one says, it’s a fascinating story that’s captivated millions. I think it is deserving of its title as a modern classic.

However, as the years have passed, we have ended up noticing problems, big and small, and they nagged at us until we decided it had to be dissected. Our intention here isn’t to tear apart something we loathe entirely. It’s to take a complex work and pick out what works from what doesn’t. As I said, when Homestuck is good, it’s very very good. But when it’s bad, we get problems of every scale from various offensive comments to dragging pace to characters ignoring problems and solutions right under their noses to an absolute collapse of every theme and statement the comic stood for before.

The comic is ludicrously long; eight thousand pages, or thereabouts, to be specific. Officially one of the longest works of fiction in the English language, in fact. Naturally, we can’t riff that word by word in any timeframe short of decades, and we can’t include every picture, even if that was permitted under copyright law. Instead, as comics have been done here before, we’ll recap most of the time, and include sections of dialogue and pictures when particularly relevant to a point.

Here are the counts we’ll be using, possibly to be added to later if we find we forgot anything. Most of these counts will only start to climb post-Act 5, but we’ll be keeping track of them from the beginning. Most of them could have been fixed with a decent editor, which is sadly a hazard of webcomics, but still frustrating to read.

TIER: Note: we started this endeavor months before the thought of a "technically not but still we'll count it" set of canon epilogues were a twinkle in the eyes of the fandom. That is, by the way, a whole 'nother can of worms that will be dealt with at a later date if that ever comes around. We're judging Homestuck the Webcomic as a whole, so no after the credits stuff is to be noted for whatever reason.

ALL THE LUCK - Vriska Serket constantly gets a pass or gets favored over every other character. This count is added to every time she pulls some shenanigans with which others wouldn’t get away. ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY? - Sometimes it’s not entirely clear whether a thing is supposed to be taken seriously or not. We don’t require hand-holding through every joke, but when, for example, we’re supposed to take one instance of violence seriously while a similar case is supposed to be funny, this count goes up. CALL CPA PLEASE - Instances of creepy sexual behaviour (and perhaps particularly gratuitous acts of violence) from the thirteen-year-old cast. Now, mileage may vary on this one. We won’t pretend that thirteen-year-olds are perfect pure angels, especially thirteen-year-olds growing up in what is openly supposed to be a nightmarish dystopia. However, when full pages focus on said behaviour, there comes a point of it being very uncomfortable to read. Clarification: does not refer to cases where the adults do something heinous, this is strictly when the kids do. CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS - When an offensive joke or comment is made, particularly when not justified by the personality of the character involved, or presented in the narration as being okay. GET ON WITH IT! - When the pace drags. ‘Nuff said. Hazard of the format, but it makes archive bingeing very annoying. GORE GALORE - For unnecessary and/or excessive torture porn which is treated less seriously because it features troll characters, and therefore less “realistic” blood colours. HOW NOT TO WRITE A WEBCOMIC - When the comic does something mentioned in How Not To Write A Novel, and it isn’t justified by the webcomic format. HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING - Characters repeatedly neglect to do something about or even react to terrible happenings, either because they don’t care even if they should or they forget they have the capacity. Not necessarily anything to do with their magical powers, either - characters ignore personal problems that are right under their noses, too. IN HATE WITH MY CREATION - For reasons that are unclear, Hussie chose to create characters he apparently hated writing, or at least ignored in favour of others. Every time he’s clearly disrespecting one of his own characters, this goes up, whether it’s by nerfing their powers or changing their personalities. RELATIONSHIP GOALS? - Romantic relationships in particular get fumbled quite often. Ship Teasing is used with skill, but that skill tends to be lost when the characters actually hook up. Fumbled friendships and family relations can also come under this heading. SEND THEM TO THE SLAMMER - When characters other than Vriska get away with something morally questionable. Covers everything from sexual harassment to not trying to save people from the apocalypse. SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS - Later on in Homestuck’s run, Hussie tried to make up for the offensive humour and casual -isms counted by Clockwork Problematykks above. How successful he was at this varied. This count goes up whenever an attempt at progressivism is waved in front of the reader but doesn’t stand up under scrutiny. WHAT IS HAPPENING?? - When the already confusing plot kicks it up a notch. Admittedly this is as much a selling point of the comic as it is an issue, but either way, we’re going to keep track. Points will be added to when it gets confusing, and taken away when a previous confusing thing is explained adequately. WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM - What is shown about Alternia repeatedly contradicts what we’re told about how different it is from Earth. For example, trolls still use heteronormative terms even after it’s established they reproduce bisexually, and the demonstration of the class structure doesn’t always add up. This count goes up every time that happens. It also goes up every time something happens which strongly implies Hussie was envisioning the human kids as white, despite his later claims that they were always supposed to be “aracial”, and every time their economic statuses don’t add up either.

#homespork #homestuck #review #literary critique #sporking #let's read #reread #homestuck meta

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inkandblade · 6 years

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Stiles has never failed to be impressed by just how much Derek’s desire fights with the magic that is supposed to stop them from breaking the treaty and consummating their relationship early. The Moon’s presence—far more than usual as it seems to cover half the sky tonight—is lending fervor to Derek’s usual enthusiasm. Not that Stiles isn’t damn enthusiastic, too.

They are month or two away from the end of the two-winter wait-period the High Coven set on their engagement. The delay is absurd and inexplicable, even for a body that is known for its bizarre rulings. But, even the most arcane amongst the Council realize that keeping a ‘Wolf away from his Marked Mate on the Full Moon is tantamount to torture. Derek and Stiles are allowed time alone, truly alone, one night a month. They never waste it, but tonight… Tonight there is something more than the usual needwantlust in their not-sex. They’ve been through a Wolf Moon and a Super Moon before, but the fact that they are occurring together has even Stiles’ young magic, and the faint half-threads of their politically impeded Bond, buzzing.

Despite the fact that the magical limits they’re under have them soft in their pants, they’re rocking and rubbing and Derek is, Stiles realizes as his sweats get pulled down for the third time in ten minutes, getting closer and closer to possibly breaking one of the absurdly specific list of intimate dos and don’ts they have memorized.

Stiles licks at Derek’s lips and sits up a little, a bead of sweat running down his back and close to where Derek’s wayward finger is.

“Stop.”

Derek stills.

Stiles hates that he has to be the voice of reason in this: He’s not the cautious one between them, not the one who listens in classes about laws and traditions. He never colored in between the lines as a kid, either. While he’s glad for the few hours they get to be together each month, sometimes he wonders if the privilege isn’t hurting them more than it’s helping. The lines of worry that are now creasing his Mate’s forehead shouldn’t be something that he even indirectly causes.

Stiles does the only thing he can think of that might help right now, and presses kitten-kisses to the angry lines, hoping that they might magically go away. When he moves back to see if it worked, he, well. They’ve faded a touch, so that’s at least something.

“I love you, Derek Hale.”

The corners of Derek’s mouth curl up and his eyes seem to follow and the lines around them and across his forehead are now good ones. Stiles runs a thumb across Derek’s kiss-red mouth and Derek nips at the fleshy pad of it and his eyes grow red around the edges. It must startle Stiles more than he realizes—enough to change his scent—as moments later Derek wimpers. The reaction is understandable, even if the suspiciously wolfy delivery of it is not. Other Packs might try to bully the Hales about their son being sub-vocal, but it’s because they assume he can’t talk in public, rather than realizing the simple truth that he simply chooses not to. Derek has never held back his words from Stiles.

Stiles sits up further, resting his ass on Derek’s thighs and reaches back to gently take his Mate’s hands. He slips his fingers through Derek’s carefully. Derek’s face and hands and the rest of him have started into the Beta shift, but it isn’t complete; there are still eyebrows on his face and only rings of red around his eyes, his hands are hairy but his claws haven’t popped, his ears are just starting to elongate but they aren’t actually pointed.

Stiles hums, trying to make it sound interested and happy, rather than worried or scared. It apparently works. One of Derek’s hands starts creeping around towards Stiles’ asscrack again.

“Hey, big D. We can’t. You know we can’t, and I know we can’t and you are not the kind of boy who breaks rules very often.” Derek tips his head to the side a little, and though his hand stops, it doesn’t retreat either, cupping Stiles’ buttcheek. “And, despite the fact that you’re very much okay with the physical-claiming idea associated with us finally Bonding, you are also generally more appreciative of porn where the twinkier dude is reaming the butch guy. I’m pretty sure that if you were going to choose now to start breaking rules, you’d be trying to figure a sneaky way to be presenting your ass to me, not the other way around.”

Derek opens his mouth to, presumably, answer, but all that happens is another whine. His fangs have fully descended, and when his tongue flicks out to investigate that fact he growls and. Well. Being pissed off at his body just seems to push everything a little further: completely red eyes, mutton-chops and disappeared-eyebrows, pointy ears and holes in Stiles’ sweats caused by rapidly deployed claws.

Stiles squeaks and Derek sniffs and that whine is now almost a cry. It didn’t feel like it, but it’s possible one or two of the claws drew blood. Derek tries to pull back into the mattress, but it’s a pointless effort when Stiles is not only sitting on top of him, but also gripping him tightly.

Derek lifts his head off the sheets and sniffs some more. Everything about his face is suddenly about concentration, and a quick glance at his forearms—pale gray lines snaking up them—explains why.

Stiles moves slowly. He brings Derek’s hands around between them and lifts one so he can kiss the back of it. “They’re some pretty-pale pain lines, babe. I’m assuming you got me with your claws, but I can’t actually feel that it happened. The only thing your magic, wolfy-touch is sucking up is my lower back’s issue with the chair at my desk at work.”

Derek grunts, tracing his eyes across every bit of Stiles face in search of truth, as if he wasn’t able to hear Stiles heart stutter over a lie. Apparently satisfied by the double-check, he drops his gaze to their hands and watches Stiles’ thumb dragging back and forth across his own palm. Derek flexes his fingers and growls in their general direction.

“You can’t shift back, huh?” There’s an idea forming in the back of Stiles’ mind, and if it’s right? Somehow he will make the Coven’s leaders pay. “It’s not…” He swallows when Derek looks back up at him, wide, vulnerable eyes that are all the more shocking as they’re glowing red like blood and murder. “I didn’t think about it before I got here. I was too excited about being here with you. Full Moon is the highlight of my month, every month.” He squeezes Derek’s fingers and Derek squeezes back. “If I’d stopped to think about it though? The Wolf Moon and the Super Moon falling on the same night... They planned this. They allowed us together tonight because they thought you’d crack and give into what they think is an animal inside you.”

Derek tries to pull away again, but Stiles keeps their hands gripped together tight. “Oh no, big D. Don’t. I know they’re wrong. And we’re going to prove it to them.” He lifts his ass up off Derek, the air between them cold, even though the heat is on in the room. There’s nothing as warm and toasty as a one’s own personal ‘Wolf-man. Stiles brings Derek’s hand back up to his lips and kisses each knuckle in turn, then puts it palm-flat on Derek’s chest. He squeezes their other hands together as he basically dismounts his fiancé, and looks at the ceiling-lamp as he flops himself onto his back on the bed. “They’ve been playing the long-game. I’ll admit that the whole two-winter thing sounded plausible, though.” He sighs. “They just obviously never considered that we’re in it for the forever-game.”

When Stiles turns his head, Derek’s features have softened somewhat, but he’s still definitely stuck in his Beta-face. Derek’s eyes are pulled into towards each other, and he opens and closes his mouth a few times before he manages to say something that approximates, “Love you.”

It sounds like he’s speaking with a mouthful of marshmallows, but Stiles understands anyway. Tonight, and he suspects the next couple of Full Moons before their official Bonding, will now be about snuggles and cuddles and gratuitous scent-marking. Well, that and Stiles figuring out just how he can take revenge on the oldest and strongest of the Coven’s members. They will be sorry they made his Mate suffer.

“I love you, too, D.”

[Image Source.] Pornier pornlets and other soppy stuff on tumblr and AO3.

#Pornlet #Ficlet #barely any smut though #sterek #eternalsterek #i just can't seem to get back into the swing of things #writing is hard #alpha derek hale #baby mage stiles stilinski #political shenanigans #forced shift #dubcon but not between stiles & derek #not beta read #i'm tired and i should post this after i've checked it better but i just wanna post something #fluff #this is so similar to the one with them in the elevator #no idea where it's coming from--sorry #+wibble+#lupuscintilla

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cyanmnemosyne · 7 years

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Yuletide Letter (2017)

Dear Yuletide Writer,

First of all, thank you for taking the time to write me a fic! This is my third year participating in Yuletide, and I’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with. :D

If you have matched with me on one of these small fandoms, I figure chances are pretty good that we share some tastes as well. :D So while I’ve tried to provide at least a bit of commentary for each one, please feel free to ignore all my meandering suggestions if your inspiration takes you in a different direction. :) I feel certain I’ll love whatever you write, either way. <3

I also have no preferences as regards length, tense, or POV -- feel free to write the story however it works best. :)

AO3 name: darkcyan

Requested fandoms:

Shirobako

Mouretsu Pirates | Bodacious Space Pirates

Star Ocean: Till the End of Time

Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee

[ hiding the rest under the cut, because as usual, it got long. :) ]

General Preferences:

Yes, Please:

fluff, found family, deep friendships, established relationships, brand new relationships where everyone’s trying to feel their way through, drama if it’s not gratuitous or inspired only by misunderstandings, hopeless pining, hopeless pining that turns out to be reciprocated. People already trusting each other, people coming to slowly trust each other.

basically if it’s emotionally warm, I will probably love it

and if it hurts but resolves in an emotionally warm place, I will love it while crying

AUs. canon-fork or otherwise. I like it best when the characters still feel “true” to their canon personalities, as filtered and changed through the different lens of how the AU differs from canon. For AUs that involve significant worldbuilding (e.g. sci fi AU), feel free to spend as much time as you want on the worldbuilding in addition to the characters.

Actually worldbuilding in general is great if that’s your thing.

Missing scene / other POV / canon continuation fic are also great. (I think what I’m trying to say is I like basically all kinds of fic?)

time travel. is a guilty pleasure of mine. Primarily when used as an excuse to abuse one’s future knowledge to help put the past on a better track (though of course, it wouldn’t be as fun if the changes didn’t start piling up eventually. ;) ) Time travel paradoxes are an interesting thought experiment, but in my fic-reading I’ve got a strong preference for the “eh, changing the past forks the future, don’t worry about it too much” mode of time travel.

Female characters being their awesome selves.

Happy endings. (Bittersweet is fine too :) )

Shipping is great, queerplatonic relationships are great, deep friendship is great. Relationships are great! (I’ve called out my preferences or lack thereof on a fandom-by-fandom basis below in case it helps. Anywhere I say “relationship”, feel free to assume that I’d be just as thrilled by anywhere in the spectrum from “really good friends” through “queerplatonic” to “romantic”)

Humor is good too! I’m usually not terribly interested in true crackfic, but the occasional lighthearted fic – or a dash of humor in something otherwise dramatic to lighten the mood – is great.

I feel certain I’m missing a lot, so let’s just say that anything that’s not otherwise called out in my maybe/no lists is fair game :D

Maybe:

issuefic (which seems to include things like alternate sexuality / gender headcanons? not 100% sure on the preferred terminology here?) I like my issues to feel organically part of the story rather than being a transparent soapbox, but other than that, I think that sort of story can be really interesting :D This is in the ‘maybe’ category mostly because I guess there’s a risk that we might not happen to agree on said issue?? But if it’s the sort of fic you love to write, go for it! :)

Kidfic. Haven’t really encountered much that interested me, but if you want to, go for it. :)

Please, no:

Onscreen sex. Fade to black or references are fine if you feel it’s critical to the characterization / plot, but if we’ve gotten to the point where we’re talking about limb positions, my reaction is almost certain to be somewhere between bored and extremely uncomfortable.

(but honestly I’d prefer no sex at all. comes of being both asexual and a prude *shrug*)

Even if it’s not explicit or onscreen, please no rape / noncon / dubcon. *eyes list* Do I need to call out “no incest”? I don’t think so? But just in case: no incest either please. :)

Not a huge fan of drug / addiction plots either

Relationships, romantic or otherwise, where there’s a significant power imbalance (especially if it’s abused) really bother me, especially if it’s played as acceptable.[1] (If the story shows it as deeply problematic and works through the implications, I’ve been known to have an intellectual appreciation for it, but it’s still not something I really want to read about.)

Most significant age difference fic falls into this bucket for me.

I also feel pretty strongly about free will and freedom to choose, so “I’m taking away your choices by hiding things from you / doing things behind your back For Your Own Good” narratives mostly just make me want to punch things, no matter how good the supposed justification is on the part of the person doing it. So. I’d recommend avoidance. :)

… Emotional manipulation in general, to be honest. Especially, again, if it’s played as acceptable.

Cheating and other forms of deliberate, sustained dishonesty within a relationship. If the characters are lying to each other, they’d better have a really good reason, and chances are I still won’t like them quite as much after. [2]

Gratuitous drama. If the drama could be resolved by the characters just sitting down for five minutes and talking to each other, and the only reason they don’t is ~*~reasons~*~, then I start getting really annoyed, really quickly

Plots revolving around jealousy. It’s a human emotion, but I hate it when characters let it eliminate their capacity for rational thought

Anything that uses “they couldn’t help themselves” as an excuse for making bad decisions. Like. I’m sure there are exceptions. (Actual mind-control?) But in general my response to that excuse is “You’re an adult. Act like it.“

Character bashing. Even the characters I hate are the heroes of their own stories.

Not a huge fan of relentless grimness / Crapsack Worlds. I enjoy some grim sometimes, but I prefer at least an occasional dose of hope with my grimness. I need to have some faith that the ending will be a happy one, or at least cathartically bittersweet.

Related: If I wanted to hear about awful people being awful all the time and how awful everything is as a result, I’d go watch the news. (... Someday I would like this statement to be less true than it was the previous year, instead of more. ;___;) There can be awful people, they can do awful things, but I’d really prefer they not be either the majority or the focus of the story.

[1] BDSM in which said power relationship has been consensually agreed on ahead of time is entirely different, of course. :)

… But it’s also not generally really my thing. :P

[2] For the record, I do not count poly relationships in this bucket at all. All I ask is that everyone who’s involved is aware of and reasonably happy with what’s going on.

Fandoms:

Shirobako

Crunchyroll

Requested character(s): Miyamori Aoi, Yano Erika

Spoiler notes: I’ve watched the show and read the first several chapters of the prequel manga

Preferred pairing(s): gen or Erika/Aoi (side relationships between whatever set of the characters that suits your fancy are fine too - aside from my soft spot for Erika/Aoi I don’t have any strong ship feelings.)

THIS SHOW. I love it to pieces. When I first started watching it, I was in the middle of a bit of a professional crisis of my own (trying to decide whether to change jobs), so this show hit basically all my “I love this” buttons, from laughing and crying about how well it depicted how hard it is to get a lot of creative people to work together (I’m a programmer, not an animator, but the similarities are pretty scary), to laughing and crying at its depiction of writer’s block, to adoring all the little in-jokes it slipped in about anime as a whole (I wish I could remember the name of that harem show …), to loving all the insights into how making an anime actually works, to empathizing like no one’s business with Aoi’s insecurity about whether she was “enough” for the job and whether it was okay to not have everything figure out yet, to Ema’s struggles with imposter syndrome, to Misa’s angst about whether she should stick with a stable job she knows or try for something more like what she really wanted, to …

just.

THIS SHOW.

I re-watched it last year and was struck all over again by how much I love Erika’s casual mentorship of Aoi; she’s one of my favorite characters, and I’m always sorry to see her disappear and I always cheer when she comes back.

So what I’d really like to see this time is a story that focuses on their relationship. A scenario where Erika helps point Aoi in the right direction? When Aoi realizes Erika needs some support?

During that long gap when Erika is away caring for her father, do she and Aoi still stay in contact? Does Aoi ever come visit?

I’d just love to see more of these characters and their friendship.

(Note: I do low-key ship Erika/Aoi, but I also am pretty iffy about workplace romance, especially in such a small workplace, and Erika especially seems like the sort to be level-headed about that sort of thing.

So if you want to take things in a shippy direction, I’d like to request that it either stays at mutual pining or -- if they decide to make a go of an actual relationship -- actually addresses the workplace romance issue. One of them moves to a different company? idk.

But I’d also be 100% happy to see a fic that is completely gen, if that’s what you’d prefer. :) )

(And one final note: Hiraoka. I’m not sure I like him, exactly, but I’ve been uncomfortably close to where he is emotionally, so he gives me lots of complicated feelings. So, if you choose to include him, please be kind?

And if you, too, have dealt with burnout - Erika and Hiraoka had a very interesting conversation at one point that made me think that Erika’s also uncomfortably familiar with it, but has just stabilized in a healthier place. If you wrote a story centered on that I’d probably love you forever, but I’m not sure it’s one even I’d be willing to attempt …)

Mouretsu Pirates | Bodacious Space Pirates

Requested character(s): Lynn Lambretta, Jenny Dolittle

Spoiler notes: I’ve watched the show and the movie.

Preferred pairings: Lynn/Jenny

… Yeah, no, I’m not even going to pretend that I’d be happy with gen when this is an actual canon relationship that is one of the most adorable things I’ve ever seen.

(… Like, my high-pitched yelling about this pairing almost reaches the level of Uranus/Neptune back in my peak Sailor Moon fan years. … … And that’s a lot. XD)

I meannnnn you can do gen if you reallllllly want to. :D I’m sure I’ll still enjoy it. <3

But yeah, insofar as I have OTPs anymore, these two are definitely one of them. XD (And I’m hoping that if you’re offering these two characters, it’s because you ship them too. XD)

Ahem. Where was I?

I really enjoy this show in general - it’s just so refreshingly, unabashedly fun; a lovely warm show about a bunch of ridiculous, adorable, and really damn competent girls being their awesome selves. (With a handful of fond, long-suffering adults on the side.) (And also piracy.)

And I love Jenny and Lynn in particular because even though they’re secondary characters, they exemplify this - every interaction Marika has with them, they’re being their competent, awesome selves, and it’s a true treat to watch.

So please give me these two characters being being their badass competent selves. Or give me something adorably fluffy with the two of them doing nothing in particular. Give me them working together and sometimes having to remind each other to take a break and eat or sleep - or give me that year they spent separate, and their wistful pining, wishing they could reach each other through their holographic displays.

(Okay, ngl, I have a special category of high-pitched yelling reserved for that phone conversation!! When Jenny is giving Lynn advice on being president!! And Lynn’s wistful-but-fond smile as she hangs up!!!)

In summary, please give me more of these adorable canon lesbians. <3

Star Ocean: Till the End of Time

Requested character(s): Nel Zelpher, Clair Lasbard

Spoiler notes: I’ve played the game and am ~ halfway through the manga and seriously wtf did you do to my favorite character less blushing more badassery for Apris’ sake!

Preferred pairings: Nel/Clair

Speaking of high-pitched yelling on the scale of Uranus/Neptune, I am fairly certain that Nel was my official first ever video game crush. This was a bit difficult for me to explain to myself, as I was convinced I was ~straight at the time, but she was so cool that I didn't bother to think about it in too much detail.

And when we are introduced to Clair as her partner, and every single scene in which the two appear makes it clear how strong their bond is -- it was a foregone conclusion that I would start to ship them as well. And Adray's obnoxious insistence on trying to find a husband for Clair just made me even more determined to headcanon them as lovers (or at the very least secretly pining for each other) in addition to partners.

As I said above with Lynn/Jenny -- if you don't ship them romantically, but just think they're great platonic partners, I'm sure I'll still enjoy it whatever you come up with. But in case there’s any doubt, I also very much ship them. :D <3

And either way, I just love their dynamic -- these two strong-willed, intelligent, fiercely competent women, working towards a shared goal that they both believe is more important than themselves. How deep and unshakeable their trust is -- and how even though it clearly tears Clair apart to send Nel out into a situation that they both know may not be survivable, she'll do it anyway. And Nel will go.

I don't have any specific prompts in mind -- if you want to write about a mission Clair has to send Nel off on, and the tension between their fear for and their trust in each other (and the knowledge hanging over both of them that they're doing something that they see as more important than them both), great! Want to just do fluffy interactions during a brief break from the action (do they get vacation? How many people do they have to bribe to get vacation at the same time?), or after the war is done and things are a bit more settled, go for it. In the narrative path where Nel goes with the party into space, does she think of Clair and all the stories she's going to tell once she gets back (if she gets back)? What does Clair think, being left so much farther behind this time than any other time before? What stories does Nel tell when they're reunited?

Got an idea that's burning in your mind and has nothing to do with any of these? I'm sure I'll enjoy whatever you come up with. :)

Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee

Requested character(s): Kel Cheris, Shuos Alaia

Spoiler notes: I’ve read both Ninefox Gambit and Raven Stratagem, and a decent number of the other vignettes/short stories in the world. If you want to check whether I’ve read a specific story, feel free to shoot me an anon ask. :)

Preferred pairings: Cheris/Alaia

Ah, these books. Ninefox Gambit is one of my favorite books I've read this year, and its sequel, Raven Stratagem, was an entirely worthy follow-up. I'm really looking forwards to how the trilogy concludes in Revenant Gun, but in the meantime: fanfic! :D

I debated what I wanted to request, since there's a lot about this series that I like -- the fact that pretty much all of the characters are competent and Done With Your Shit, the way it sets up a horribly broken system and then doesn't flinch away from both how broken it is, and how the vast majority of people have just ... accustomed themselves to the situation, and make do while tolerating the horrible. It makes the system feel sustainable enough to have lasted this long, while still making it very clear why multiple someones would have gone to so much effort to try and tear it down. And yet, it also doesn't flinch from the consequences of the actions that the various characters take to try and tear it down, either. (One of the many reasons I'm looking forward to Revenant Gun -- I'm very curious to see what the consequences arise from the events in Raven Strategem.)

I really enjoy how many characters are queer (including trans!!), and how casually the narrative treats this fact. And the way that many characters' families are factored into their thoughts, even if they're not on the page, in a way that felt very true, but that I feel like doesn't often come up in other novels that aren't explicitly about something family-related.

The casual inclusion of dyscalculia and ADHD is also pretty great -- how it’s clearly an aspect of the characters that have shaped them, while even more clearly not being all their character is.

... So what do I decide to request this year?

Cheris and that one ex-girlfriend of hers who shows up for, like, a paragraph of flashback in Ninefox Gambit. XD

I just ... really liked that little bit of insight we got into Cheris’ history, and would love to see more. How did they meet? Why did they break up? What was the actual most ridiculous drama they watched, and how late did they stay up making fun of it?

Feel free to go in a more serious direction as well (what sort of training incident gave Alaia her nervous tic? what is being Shuos like to someone who didn’t go the flashy assassin route? How did being Kel and Shuos inform their interactions with each other, and the world around them).

And, as always, feel free to ignore my prompts entirely if there’s something you’d rather do instead. :D

#dear creator letter #yuletide #yuletide 2017

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kronecker-delta · 7 years

Text

Cage Zone Thoughts

(Or some attempted guesses about upcoming Android Hell. While making numerous comparisons to Nier: Automata. And a little bit of Nier too. As well as considering some of Cage’s faults, particularly in sexual themes and bad writing.)

As such, spoilers and long, long post discussing such matters below.

I’m not what one would call a fan of David Cage’s work. I’d even say that I think his games are generally just kind of bad, and bad in a way where I’m not sure how they could be fixed.

Because ultimately they’re narrative experiences that have bad narratives. It also doesn’t help that I feel like Cage doesn’t have a central theme a lot of the time. Not a plot, he’s got too much plot in some cases, but an idea as to what the story is supposed to say.

What exactly is the point of Beyond Two Souls? What is Jodie’s life supposed to instruct the player about when they see it through to the end.

Or Indigo Prophecy. Or Omikron especially.

(Heavy Rain is more coherent, if deeply crippled by some parts because it manages to have a point that is sometimes self-sabotaged by other components.)

I bring this up as David Cage has given some... interesting interviews of late as to the direction and story of his next project. In once instance he tries to be clear that there is no political inspiration or greater point he is trying to illustrate. (Kotaku)

Yet in another he claims that the violence that will be an option for the Android rebellion is meant to draw the player in with similarities in real world incidents. To have a message regarding the nature of violent action in protest and revolutionary movements. (The Verge)

Obviously these two statements stand in some measure of opposition. A narrative can’t simultaneously have no authorial message it intends to impart and a clear one meant for the audience. There are further worrying elements. Such as David Cage first saying that it was about Androids and science fiction content as a focus and then later talking about how the story was about humanity.

While still avoiding a ‘big message.’

Perhaps it’s prejudice on my part, but I’m not sure one can write about themes like this, or really anything that might attempt for deep emotional investment from the audience, if there isn’t some fundamental core idea to your attempt.

This fear is what has brought about this essay. Since I’m now concerned that David Cage is going to handle this plot in the same way as his earlier works, which have quite a creative fingerprint to them, I think I can make some educated guesses on the likely direction and potential missteps that will follow.

Suddenly Ensouled

I suspect that the emergence of Android consciousness will not be planned or desired. While there remains the potential that there is some supernatural cause (and given previous stories some element of that being outright or left on the cutting room floor is quite likely) I think even in the case of a mundane malfunction being the origin it will be seen as a problem.

The Android Markus is supposedly ‘special’ for being able to free androids. What this means is entirely speculative at the moment, but I will guess that this ability is not common or easily understood. Cage likes mystery plots, particularly blunt ones where the question the audience has it upfront and with them for a long time. More over the trailers for the other character Kara point out an even stronger trend towards spontaneous intelligence.

This isn’t bad really, even if it’s common. The issue is, at least to me, that its been done enough times that if that’s all you’re doing with it you should really shoot for more.

Take Nier: Automata. There’s an outright robot rebellion plot in it. That is risen and dropped in the span of thirty minutes. That the Machine Lifeforms killed their creators isn’t the important part. The questions is why they did that and what they will do now.

(Much like the background of humanity’s death in that game is a footnote. The story is about what is supposed to be done after that point.)

I’m not too certain about what to expect give his previous games. I’m not optimistic that he’ll be able to swing it into something novel and interesting.

*Kill* and *Fuck*

Especially given how gratuitously exploitative his use of sex and violence has been before. A lot has been said about unneeded shower scenes and female characters placed in peril. I’m not of the mind that this comes from a place of sexualized degradation or some such, but instead cheapness.

It’s cheap and easy to make the audience care about a character by making them a young, attractive woman, and having her almost get killed or sexually assaulted (or both, as is not entirely a unique incident in David Cage games). There’s something schlocky and fake about the way those scenes are used though, that makes them not feel right for the stories they appear in. The serial killer and the dance club strip scene don’t really fit well in Heavy Rain (especially not one after another) and those aren’t the only offenders.

The birthday party torment in Beyond Two Souls is especially egregious in how far and how radically it shifts into tormenting the main character in order to draw out emotions from the player. It’s also not earned yet, as Jodie simply hasn’t been around long enough for that scene to have the weight that is desired. It’s simply assumed that the player will care as it’s about a vulnerable teenage girl crying.

Compare that with the slow descent of 9S. His emotional destruction takes the better part of the last third of Nier: Automata and while shocking, does not come across as unrealistic once it begins. Further it is not played as heavy handed. His love/hate (fuck/kill) relationship with 2B is symbolized by events that occur during gameplay, and not merely stated outright to the player. As I said, Heavy Rain does have a central theme and message (how far would one be willing to go to save the life of one they care about) but said theme is amazingly blunt in realization.

(Or ever better, Pascal. Making the player care about an obviously non-human lifeform grieving over even less human like creatures to such an extent is far beyond what I expect to see in Detroit Become Human.)

Not bad, but definitely worrying to me if David Cage is going to approach social issues. Especially given how extremely cliche, if not outright stereotypical his stories have become when they did such things before.

Added in that he will now be working with characters that are outright meant to be exploited by definition, and I’m extremely wary. I can only contemplate the potential (highly emotionally manipulative) scenes of coerced sexual activity that I see has highly likely in Detroit Become Human. It fits his previous work too well at this point. Once might be called a fluke, but David Cage has defaulted to such scenes for their emotional weight multiple times in the same game at this point.

Furthermore I doubt David Cage is going to play too far from his comfort zone. Kara is likely the designated subject for such roles, and I doubt I will see a switch up in how this works. The switch of support and physical action as seen with 2B and 9S is unlikely to be part of the story. So no Markus being rescued from military androids or Kara being the first to take a human life to save him.

(I suspect the opposite is more likely.)

Railroads End

I don’t think a story driven game necessarily needs choice. Or more correctly, not all narratives need to care about what the player would prefer to happen. Sometimes that works, but sometimes a tighter, more consistent story can be told without trying to fit different endings even if differing routs may be used to get there.

I bring this up as David Cage has had some rocky attempts at choice based gameplay. Omikron really doesn’t have any, as the central plot and ending is immune to any open world shenanigans the player might get up to. Beyond Two Souls barely has any meaningful choices. There is one centrally narrative choice (at the end) but it doesn’t change the post-game epilogue in a meaningful manner. The world’s still doomed to get Ghost Boned in the Ghost Zone.

Indigo Prophecy and Heavy Rain have more, with Heavy Rain being the standout by far. Given that Detroit Become Human is going back to the trio of player characters again (or almost quartet that Heavy Rain had) we might have another case where differing endings that allowed for player characters to die while the plot continues on despite that point. I found that to be quite a bit of fun in truth, if not enough to overcome the other story issues and such.

So while I’m hopeful that this might be a return to better elements, I’m none the less alarmed that David Cage’s decision to shoot for a more cerebral plot than just a mystery/thriller about a serial killer might not play well. Indigo Prophecy is barely coherent past the halfway point.

Which is one thing I haven’t brought up. Even Heavy Rain has cut content involving an inexplicable psychic link between the serial killer and the main character. Every David Cage game has some rather clumsy mystical elements thrown in. Like the multiple factions of Indigo Prophecy and Omikron or the Navajo part of Beyond Two Souls. I think it’s impossible to guess about this right now, but it’s not at all impossible if the real reason Markus can give other Androids free will is some kind of techo-magic Apple of Knowledge or that Kara might be a actual re-incarnation of a dead woman and/or possessed by a ghost from the Infraworld.

We’ll have to wait and see on those points I suppose.

Final Note: I haven’t mentioned gameplay at all because it doesn’t matter. David Cage’s games play like ass. They just do. Telltale is better. I don’t even like them and they still are. The complicated quicktime events don’t add an appreciable investment most of the time as they just plain don’t work.

More conventional controls for the majority while saving the weird ‘artsy’ stuff for specific scenes would be better in my opinion and give more weight to them when they happen.

Or, there’s a reason the visual novel stuff in the forest of myth is the my favorite part of Nier. It’s not anywhere else in the game really. By being used sparingly it has more of an impact.

(Had another essay, but it wasn’t focused on Cage material so I wrote this one up instead. Hopefully I can finish that one too eventually.)

#david cage #video game analysis #videogames #detroit become human #nier automata #beyond two souls #omikron #heavy rain

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dorisphamus · 6 years

Text

Abi Wilkinson should be ashamed of her abuse of Danny Finkelstein

Danny Finkelstein – or Baron Finkelstein of Pinner to give him the title he hardly ever uses – has become the latest person to be the object of a twitter hate campaign.

He is, according to Abi Wilkinson, a Corbyn-supporting journalist, “a racist scumbag” who is “chill with ethnic cleansing.”

It may seem surprising that Finkelstein, former member of the SDP and since that party’s demise a leading voice of “moderate” Conservatism, should be so characterised, even by Wilkinson who believes that “incivility isn’t merely justifiable, but actively necessary.”

His columns in The Times are typically reflective, considered and measured. This has not prevented him sometimes receiving the most appalling online abuse, accusing him of defending paedophilia, for example, because he expressed scepticism about groundless allegations levelled at politicians.

Sometimes this abuse has been tinged with anti-semitism, as with this bit of gratuitous Jew-baiting from a paedophile-obsessed troll in Germany calling himself Dame Alun Roberts.

On other occasions the anti-semitism has been painted in primary colours. The grim reality of twitter and conspiracy websites is that racial name-calling is all too common, and not just for Jews.

Of course, just because you have yourself been the victim of racist abuse it does not mean that you can’t also dish it out. Even the fact that Finkelstein’s mother was a holocaust survivor does not mean that he could not himself be a racist scumbag, relaxed about ethnic cleansing, though it would make such a description particularly painful and therefore, if untrue, particularly nasty.

What has Finkelstein done to prompt such abuse?

Was he seen outside the Court of Appeal, joining hands with Katie Hopkins chanting “Tommy Tommy Tommy!” as the great white hope of British fascism was sprung from gaol last week?

No.

Has he been using his Times column to call for the indigenous folk of Europe to unite to drive Islam back beyond the gates of Vienna, to the Bosphorus and beyond?

No, although in recent weeks he has written paragraphs like this about about immigration and the problems of multi-ethnic societies:

“It is therefore right to argue for control and moderation in allowing the migration that creates ethnically diverse societies; essential to recognise that integration is extremely challenging and will require great political effort; vital to see that civic equality will not happen by itself and prejudice will not easily disappear, both needing to be driven by enlightened leaders.”

Control and moderation! Creating diverse societies! Trying to make prejudice disappear! Demanding political effort to achieve civic equality!

What about international affairs?

As, Finkelstein himself has written:

“The allegation of dual loyalty is one of the most common ways I encounter antisemitism, through the suggestion that my political position on an issue is the result of my “zionism”. This, alongside the posting of comments about Israel to almost anything I or other Jews write.”

So I am afraid some – including, I fear, influential members of the Party that Willkinson supports – will ask, or even assume: he is a Jew, surely he has demonstrated racist scumbaggery in his writings about Israel?

“The Palestinians must have a homeland, they have a right to a homeland, in which they can live in prosperity and peace.

As most people agree, this should be broadly consistent with the borders that existed before the 1967 war. And Israel has made the creation of such a state considerably more difficult by its disastrously wrong and ill-considered decision to allow Jewish settlements to be built outside these borders.”

It doesn’t seem entirely beyond the pale of civilised discourse.

The odd thing about the 48 hours of Finkelstein twitter-hatred is that nobody, even amongst the many who have been piling in to support Wilkinson, has been able to point to a single racist opinion, racist argument, or racist statement that he has ever made.

Her attack came shortly after Finkelstein wrote about the anti-semitism controversy that has dogged the Labour Party. He wrote almost despairingly of the anti-semitism that has been on display both in wider society and particularly inside the Labour Party.

“Complacently, I had always assumed that what happened to my parents couldn’t happen to me or my children. There were too many liberal, progressive people who wouldn’t allow it. I no longer believe this with the same confidence. …

“It’s less the antisemitism itself that has induced this fear. It is the denial of it. The reaction I expect on the left to the rise of antisemitism — concern, determination to combat it, sympathy — is not the one I’ve encountered, at least not from supporters of the leadership. Instead there is aggression, anger at the accusation, suggestions that the Jews and zionists are plotting against Jeremy Corbyn.”

It is entirely of a piece with Finkelstein’s writings over many years: a plea for tolerance and understanding and a determination to combat racism. For what it is worth, I should disclose that I have met him on one occasion, and he was as polite and civilised in person as he always is in writing.

During the height of the twitter-storm, the writer Jamie Palmer asked if anyone could provide a link to a racist article written by Danny Finkelstein. None has yet been provided.

Instead Wilkinson explained that Finkelstein was a racist scumbag not because of anything he had written or said, but because he had been on the “Board” of the Gatestone Institute, an American based think-tank which has provided a platform to some brave and respectable people – Gary Kasparov and Elie Wiesel, for example – but also to some arguing for very unpleasant anti-Islamic policies.

For some reason, probably not a good one, the Gatestone Institute’s website no longer reveals who its “Board” members are, or even if it has a Board, or, if it did have one, what it actually did. Instead it now lists a number of what it calls “distinguished senior fellows” rather as though it were an Oxbridge college. Amongst the British “distinguished” fellows are such luminaries as Raheem Kassam, the boastful and absurd former adviser to Nigel Farage, accurately described by Marina Hyde as a “nebbishy shitposter … chiefly known for trailing around after Farage in a coat … with a brown velvet collar” (who doesn’t actually seem to have written anything for the Institute), and Douglas Murray, the journalist and author, who has written copiously for it.

Kassam: “Distinguished Senior Fellow.”

Finkelstein is no longer listed, in any capacity, although in February of this year he appeared in a Gatestone sponsored conversation at the House of Lords with Khaled Abu Toameh, an Arab Israeli journalist. All this was entirely above board, with Finkelstein properly disclosing the event in the House of Lords Register of Members’ Interests, one of 15 paid speaking engagements between October 2017 and June 2018 (none of the others were for the Institute).

Gatestone is, Wilkinson says, an “Islamophobic far right institute” which advocates “deporting my husband from Europe.”

Clearly, if that were true then anyone having anything to do with the Institute would not be deserving of much sympathy. However, it isn’t true.

It is in fact very difficult to see precisely what, if anything, the Institute itself advocates, as opposed to the views of the various people to whom it gives a platform. All contributions to its website contain a footnote explaining that the views expressed “do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or of Gatestone Institute,” but as the Institute’s own views are not made known anywhere readily accessible, the views of its contributors are all we have to go on.

To be sure many, perhaps even most, of the articles on its website are broadly hostile to Islam, certainly to Islamism, and some are very unpleasant indeed. The sheer volume of material published on the “Gatestone” website makes it impossible to be sure, but I haven’t been able to find any article which advocates deporting people like Kadhim Shubber, Ms Wilkinson’s Muslim husband, who is a distinguished journalist working for the Financial Times, either from Britain or from America where he currently works.

Mr Shubber himself drew particular attention to one 2017 Gatestone contribution by Giulio Meotti, a journalist who, judging by his Wikipedia entry, seems to be some sort of Italian Johann Hari who has achieved a certain notoriety for being accused of plagiarism. Presumably he singled out the piece because it was one of the worst and it is, certainly, a stonkingly bad piece of journalism. Under the headline “Are Jihadists taking over Europe” Meotti makes the preposterous claim that “Europe could be taken over the same way Islamic State took over much of Iraq.” The article itself veers rather incoherently from justifiable concerns about Islamist terrorism, through tendentious claims about “self-segregated, multicultural enclaves in which extremist Muslims promote Islamic fundamentalism and implement Islamic law,” (I think these are the mythical no-go zones beloved of the far right), and finally into outright dishonesty with a bizarre claim that the head of the Swedish army was referring to Islam when he said “there might be a war within a few years,” when in fact he was clearly referring to a possible war with Russia. It’s writing of a very low order indeed, but it does not actually advocate deportation of Muslims. Nevertheless, I can see that anyone reading it, and stupid enough to take it seriously, might be more easily persuaded that mass deportation of Muslims was a good thing.

So what of Wilkinson’s suggestion that Finkelstein was, “at absolute best chill with calls for ethnic cleansing”?

Probably she has in mind the Dutch MP Geert Wilders, who has regularly been published by Gatestone. Wilders has described Moroccan criminals as “scum,” he has said he wants to “make the Netherlands ours again,” and in a 2014 speech which led to his prosecution and partial conviction (currently subject to an appeal), he appeared to promise to try ensure that there would be “fewer Moroccans” in The Hague in the future. Whether or not he was actually advocating “ethnic cleansing” of Moroccans (his defence was that he was advocating the deportation of Moroccan dual nationals convicted of criminal offences, and the voluntary repatriation of others) Wilders promotes profoundly unpleasant prejudices.

Or perhaps she was thinking of journalist and best-selling author Douglas Murray, another “senior distinguished fellow” who writes regularly for the Institute, as well as many other publications, including the Spectator where he regularly tops the “most popular” league table published on its website. He is combative, readable, provocative and influential. He has never advocated “ethnic cleansing,” although in a speech in a 2006 speech to the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference (nothing to do with the Gatestone Institute as far as I am aware) he demanded that “conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board.” He expanded on what that meant:

“All immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop. In the case of a further genocide such as that in the Balkans, sanctuary would be given on a strictly temporary basis. This should also be enacted retrospectively. Those who are currently in Europe having fled tyrannies should be persuaded back to the countries which they fled from once the tyrannies that were the cause of their flight have been removed. And of course it should go without saying that Muslims in Europe who for any reason take part in, plot, assist or condone violence against the West (not just the country they happen to have found sanctuary in, but any country in the West or Western troops) must be forcibly deported back to their place of origin.”

It was not quite advocacy of ethnic cleansing (he did not spell out whether “persuading” innocent Muslim refugees to return was to be by use of the carrot or the stick), and it wasn’t published by the Institute, but it was the promotion of an unpleasant, deliberately discriminatory set of policies, and a dog-whistle to those wishing to deport Muslims.

In fairness, although Murray did not repudiate his speech when asked to do so in 2006, or for some years afterwards, by 2011 he had asked for it to be removed from the internet (which is why it is now only available on the Wayback Machine site) and has explained why:

“I realised some years ago how poorly expressed the speech in question was, had it removed from the website and forbade further requests to publish it because it does not reflect my opinions.”

Quite what Murray now thinks is wrong about the speech, apart from it being “poorly expressed,” is still opaque, but he evidently does not believe in ethnic cleansing, and perhaps not any more in “making conditions for Muslims in Europe harder across the board.” Even so, according to former MP Paul Goodman, now editor of Conservative Home, the Conservative front bench broke off relations with Murray as a direct result of it. Whether Finkelstein, who was at one time a speech-writer for David Cameron, was involved in the issue or aware of it, I have no idea.

Wilkinson’s charge against Finkelstein is that he sat on the Board of the Institute while people like Murray were writing for it. It’s a charge that would presumably apply to anyone sitting on the “board” of The Spectator, where Murray is a regular contributor, or of the BBC which has given Murray considerable air-time over the years (although it did also broadcast a guest calling him a “hate preacher,” something for which it then apologised), or even of The Guardian, which invited Murray to take part in a panel discussion about Donald Trump, an invitation which he declined and then rather haughtily wrote about in the Spectator. Indeed, given that Wilkinson herself regularly writes for the Guardian I wonder how “chill” she is with assisting an organisation that offered Mr Murray a platform. Does that make her a racist scumbag too, if slightly less of one than Finkelstein?

It is bad enough to accuse someone of being a “racist scumbag.” It’s unpleasant, it’s aggressive and it greatly lowers the tone of political debate – how can you expect to debate with someone who describes you as such? – but it is in the end just vulgar abuse. One person’s racist scumbag, I suppose, is another’s campaigner for slightly tougher controls on immigration. “Being chill with calls for with ethnic cleansing,” is far nastier and a great deal more specific.

“Ethnic cleansing,” a phrase originating in the horror of the Yugoslav wars, means forcibly driving out, deporting or killing people on the basis of their race or ethnicity. It is a particularly objectionable insult to hurl at the son of a holocaust survivor. It should not be made unless you are very sure of your ground. It is utterly baseless to make it against Finkelstein.

I don’t want to defend the Gatestone Institute. Much of the material on its website is nonsense, and some of it nasty nonsense. Just conceivably somewhere within the archives of the Gatestone Institute there may be some explicit calls for genocide or ethnic cleansing. It would be the work of years to read the outpourings of all the “distinguished fellows” and “writers” named by the Institute, but nothing that I have seen or that she or Mr Shubber has highlighted justifies Wilkinson’s charge that it “advocates deporting my husband from Europe.”

This brings us to Finkelstein’s own position on the mysterious “Board” of the Institute. It seems to have been no more than a publicity device for the Institute. It never met and apparently had no role in the running of the organisation. As Finkelstein described it:

“They listed me on a board and I didn’t actually know at first. The board never met or was asked to meet or had any role and rather lazily, once I do (sic) know, just left it. More recently I thought, mmm, being listed on a board is rather different to making a speech or two and I don’t want to be responsible for everything they do with no actual control, so I asked to be taken off. That I’m afraid is the unheroic truth.”

He also explained that:

“I do not serve on the board and have never had any role of any kind running Gatestone or supervising it in any way. They listed me on the board, until I asked them to stop.”

He had been asked about his membership of the Board in 2015 by Nafeez Ahmed, and specifically about Murray’s “stated views on Muslims in Europe.” He replied:

“I naturally don’t (and didn’t) say that I didn’t know who it was or what it publishes or who it hosts. Of course I do. Being on the Board doesn’t mean I agree with every article or every speaker, nor does it imply that I don’t. … I find Douglas Murray stimulating an worthwhile and often right, without always agreeing.”

This has been presented by some as evidence that Finkelstein tried to conceal that he was “on the Board” of Gatestone, although clearly he did nothing of the sort. He was open about it in 2015 and he has been open about it in 2018, although – assuming his good faith which I do until the contrary is demonstrated – “being on the Board” did not mean much other than that for a year or two he allowed the Institute to use his name for publicity purposes.

Finkelstein’s politics are quite clearly not those of Murray, still less of Geert Wilders. Nobody has been able to produce a single racist word that he has written. He has described the idea that Muslims should be deported from Europe as “obnoxious and mad,” which of course it is.

In any case, he has accepted that he made a mistake and apologised. In fact he has done so more than once.

“Yes I’m sorry I was on it [the Board] and I apologise for the error. Worst of all it gives the legitimate impression I support ideas I think completely wrong and are rightly thought offensive.”

He should not have allowed himself to be named as a Board member. He should have paid more attention to the garbage the Institute was pumping out, and less to the fact that it had also provided a platform to brave and necessary voices like those of Gary Kasparov, Raif Badawi or the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel.

It is very sad that Ms Wilkinson does not yet seem able to accept his apology, and sadder still that she will not herself apologise for traducing a decent man. No wonder political debate these days is so poisonous.

The post Abi Wilkinson should be ashamed of her abuse of Danny Finkelstein appeared first on BarristerBlogger.

from All About Law http://barristerblogger.com/2018/08/06/abi-wilkinson-should-be-ashamed-of-her-abuse-of-danny-finkelstein/

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someguyranting1 · 6 years

Text

What’s in a Scene? How SAO Became the Worst Anime Ever

Sword Art Online is ass. OP to ED and everything in between, the whole thing stinks and I hate it. But I didn’t always. As a matter of fact, when the series first started airing, I thought, “This is okay. I mean, I’ve seen better, but I’ve seen worse, too. I’ll see where this goes.” Somewhere between that and this, though, that stopped being my response to the show. At a certain point, I could no longer form words and was mostly just vomiting blood for the duration of each episode. And I’m not alone in that. Pretty much everyone over the age of 12 agrees that this show sucks.

What they don’t agree on is WHEN it started sucking. When did Sword Art Online get terrible? Some would say it happened when they locked the only likeable character in a rape dungeon and made Kirito’s sister want to fuck him. Others would point to the gratuitous tentacle rape scene, and boy, gee whiz, there sure is an excessive amount of sexual assault in this show. Then there’s the “I told you so” camp who say it was terrible all along and all of the bullshit just made you realize that after the fact.

For me, there’s a precise moment when Sword Art Online goes from being okay to being one of the worst fucking shows ever, and it’s all Yui’s fault. Yeah, you heard me: your innocent daughteru ruined fucking everything. Let me explain.

In the beginning, Sword Art Online had some stuff going for it. Not a lot (the fight choreography was always pretty bad, the cast was always bland, and the premise was never original), but it had a solid sense of tone. We’d seen “trapped in an MMO” stories before, but never with this kind of horror tinge to them. The world of Aincrad had this oppressive air hanging over it. From very early on, there was this sense that just about anyone could die at any moment. The first few episodes do a great job of establishing that. And while it didn’t break any new ground in terms of character writing, it had some good stand-alone episode plots, like the one where all of Kirito’s friends got murdered, and the whole murder mystery thing where they’re trying to figure out how somebody was breaking the rules of the game, and… Actually, those were the only really interesting episodes, but hey, lots of okay show have had less.

The main thing that the show had going for it early on was that underlying sense of dread. It felt like something where nobody, except for this one guy, was ever really safe. Nobody important died after the first few episodes, but that was fine...for a while. If the show was kill-happy all the time, that would be a problem in itself. You’ve gotta pace these things. It’s hard to get attached when characters are going in and out through a revolving door.

Still, by Episode 10, there had been enough near misses that it seemed like Kirito and his harem might be a little too invulnerable. It seemed like the right time to kill someone off to raise the stakes. It’s at this point that they chose to introduce Yui.

If you don’t know (congratulations, you’ve saved yourself from a shitty show), Yui is a little girl who Kirito and Asuna find wandering around the woods near their home and decide to adopt as their daughter. She’s sweet and innocent and might as well be walking around with a timer counting down to her sad death. It’s cheap and lazy enough to introduce a pure cinnamon roll character purely for the sake of killing them off, but that’s not nearly bad enough writing on its own to drag this show down to the total dog shit territory it now occupies.

The bigger problem with this is tied to what Yui is. Yui is actually a fully-sentient AI, which means that she’s the only character in the entire cast who, if killed, could be brought back. And that’s very, very bad for the show because if Yui dies and is then brought back, that renders the threat of death from a narrative standpoint permanently meaningless.

Remember: as of this episode, that’s the ONLY interesting thing about SAO. Death in media isn’t interesting because, “Oh, they’re dead! That’s sad! I’m sad!” It’s interesting because it inherently changes the dynamics of a story. A character who was once a force in the narrative now ISN’T. Any arc that they might have been going through is cut abruptly short, and from this point forward, the writers can’t rely on their presence to move the story forward or build up other characters.

Most stories never pull that trigger, and I’m cool with that because, like I said, it’s hard to write around. I’m okay with a show being a little toothless as long as the story is engaging and the characters are fun. Also, there are plenty of ways to make your characters suffer without killing them off.

However, when a show acts like death means something and then does something that very transparently reveals that the writers aren’t willing to sacrifice potential plot lines, it’s like watching Mickey Mouse take his head off at Disneyland: it ruins the magic. There are RULES against this kind of shit. If a character dies and is then brought back, you might as well write, “And then they got on a bus for a couple of weeks,” for all the fucking difference it makes.

Obviously when the show was airing, I was really dreading this prospect. I was hoping that the show would pull something out of left field, maybe fake me out and kill Asuna or Kirito off, instead of do the stupid, obvious thing that it was definitely going to do. But then, I got to the end of Episode 12 and I watched Kirito and Asuna mourn for little baby Skynet, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.

IT WAS WORSE! They don’t just kill Yui off in the most trite way possible; they do it while immediately undercutting all of the dramatic weight of the moment because, as Yui is being deleted, Kirito pulls some techno wizardry out of his ass to store her in an inventory item. And because of that dumb dragon feather episode, we know that means she’s coming back. They could AT LEAST have left it ambiguous as to whether or not they could bring her back, but, “Nope! Can’t let anyone think their waifu might not come back! They might stop watching and giving us money!” However, even that isn’t the most asinine thing about this scene.

In this moment, as they reach the game master’s console in the depths of this dungeon, Kirito reveals the heretofore unknown fact that he’s a PhD-level programmer, thus irreparably ruining his character forever. Kirito was already stupidly overpowered, but at least it made a bit of sense. He was a beta tester, so his base skill level being higher than most other players’ was justified. Doing Kendo in real life gave him good reflexes. He also spent, like, the first year of the game solo queuing instead of socializing to reach his ridiculously high experience level. That became less believable as he also proved to be the most eligible bachelor on the entire Internet, but you can at least justify that as girls having a crush on him for saving their lives, rather than that coming down to any innate social skill on his part. It’s easy to justify a lot of things about Kirito because he has no defined personality at all. However, when you add to those traits the fact that he’s got the scripting skills to not just hack the game from inside it, but to custom-write code in the space of a few seconds to store data as an in-game object, I’ve gotta call bullshit.

Hacking games requires time and at least some knowledge of the source code. There’s no way Kirito has that. Even if the thousand or so carefully selected beta testers for SAO were data-mining the shit out of the game, they only had it for a little over a month during summer vacation and they only saw a fraction of the content. It would be hard to get a full picture of how the game works in that time frame under NORMAL circumstances, but SAO is also the first game of its kind, built from the ground up for incredibly complicated, brand-new proprietary hardware.

Already, Kirito’s doing something that nobody outside the company should know how to do, but even if we assume that there’s a command already in place to store a script as an in-game object, think about what he’s storing. Yui is a fucking AI, the most complicated kind of program conceivable. Her code needs to be immense to account for the broad variety of situations she might need to deal with, and it also needs to be capable of rewriting itself on the fly in real time. Kirito is taking that huge, complex code, saving its current state of operation, and converting that information into a custom item in a game whose script he must be figuring out in real time, all in the space of a few seconds. NO! NOT FUCKING POSSIBLE!

In this moment, Kirito ceases to be a real human being and I lose all suspension of disbelief for this entire show. It’s just not believable that any person could be capable of pulling off the shit that we’ve seen him do up to this point. Maybe some of it, but not all of it, and especially not A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD FUCKING CHILD!

Also, as if he wasn’t special enough already, the scene establishes a few moments earlier that he and Asuna are the only people to ever experience love or joy in SAO during the entire two years that the game has been running. This is so fucking stupid, it hurts!

This scene amazes me for how thoroughly it manages to ruin the entire show. It would be bad enough to ruin the whole story by implicitly admitting that they never plan to kill off anyone who’s had any kind of character development ever again (unless dying is part of their story arc), but in doing so, they also manage to make it impossible to relate to their PROTAGONIST. From this point forward, the show has no dramatic stakes. It CAN’T have any. Kirito’s been established to be able to do basically anything, and we now know for a fact that no one important will ever really die.

Furthermore, if you want to nitpick, this scene raises a ton of questions, too, the big one being, “WHY?! Why is THAT what Kirito did with his backhand access?” If he had the time to isolate a huge, complex program and store it as environmental data and write a custom script to save that file to his personal computer, why didn’t he, I don’t know, globally reactivate the game’s logout function? He had access to the fucking source code! And that would’ve been a lot simpler! There was probably just one value he needed to set from True to False, or maybe a few lines of code that had been commented out. Comparatively speaking, it would have been easy, and he’d have been saving, I don’t know, upwards of, like, 7000 people’s lives? But no. Preserving his wife’s Tamagotchi is a lot more important than that.

There’s been a lot of complaining in this review and not a lot of hard analysis, but that’s because there’s not much in this scene to analyze. This is one of the most flat, boring scenes that I’ve ever watched in anything. Every shot is static and dull, especially the obvious, predictable reaction shots that it uses to ham-fistedly attempt to tug at your heartstrings. Furthermore, the set is a blank, white room with nothing going on. There’s basically nothing to even look at here. That said, if nothing else, I guess I can take solace in the fact that nobody was even trying when they made the scene that ruined the whole show.

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mst3kproject · 5 years

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111: Moon Zero-Two

In his review of Serenity, the late Roger Ebert defined ‘space opera’ as being like horse opera, but with space instead of horses. I can think of no better description of Moon Zero-Two.

Captain Bill Kemp and his co-pilot Kaminsky were once heroes, the first men on Mars, but now that a proper colonization of the solar system is underway, they’re reduced to running a salvage operation. The opportunity to do something more profitable knocks when Evil Businessman Mr. Hubbard asks them to help him crash an asteroid on the far side of the moon – an asteroid made of almost pure blue sapphire! Meanwhile, Kemp is also trying to help a woman named Clementine Taplan, who’s supposed to be meeting her brother Wally, but nobody’s seen him since he sent her the invitation four months ago. And isn’t it interesting that Wally’s lunar mining claim is exactly where Hubbard’s asteroid is going to hit?

I actually really like this movie. The visuals are often silly, but it’s quite well-made and the ‘space western’ feel is fun. The actors are decent, the effects aren’t bad, and when you think about it, it’s surprisingly hard science fiction. The only overtly unrealistic things in it are the artificial gravity and the characters’ bad habit of going for spacewalks without a tether.

Moon Zero-Two’s overall aesthetic probably made more sense when the movie was new than it does now. It is, indeed, rather painfully late-60’s, but nothing about it is just gratuitously weird – everything has a purpose. The music, for example. Tom Servo complains about the ‘free-form jazz’ but it’s as effective at suggesting the free-floating emptiness of space as the Jaws theme is at saying ‘shark!’. Indoor scenes have a more grounded soundtrack and even the low-gravity barfight is not scored the way the parts that take place in vacuum are.

Likewise, the odd outfits and plasticky wigs serve to emphasize the artificiality of the environment. The ‘natural’ late-60’s-early-70’s look, with loose clothing and long hair, would have been entirely out of place here. This is a world humans have had to build from the ground up – nothing else is natural here, so why should the people be? The moon colonists try to jazz up their world a little with their fanciful outfits and theme nights at the bar, but they can’t even make a dent in the relentless desolation of the landscape. They barely even make one in the self-consciously futuristic white of their cities. Kemp says ‘we will always be foreigners here’, and the sets and costumes reinforce his point.

In Clementine’s case, what she wears also serves to show how comfortable she is in this environment and in Bill’s company. When she first arrives on the moon she is covered from head to toe. As she adjusts, she trades her weird headpiece for a wig. Finally, we see her with her own hair hanging down.

On another level, clothing in this movie is about vulnerability. Bill and Clem come closest to being humans in the natural state (nude), when they are near death from over-heating in the un-insulated moon bug. Bill’s two topless scenes are supposed to be about his dislike of vulnerability turning into a willingness to show vulnerability around Clem, but they don’t work very well because both of them are such clichés: she catches him coming out of the shower in what’s supposed to be a joke, and then there’s the ‘couple who won’t admit they’re falling in love have to undress because of the heat’. I can see what they were going for, but I wish they’d found a better way to do it. Both scenes get some very powerful eyerolls.

(ETA: I probably should have said something about how Bill is in love with Clem like twenty minutes after his previous girlfriend died, but I only just dealt with something like that in the EtNW review for It’s Alive and I decided not to bother.)

The idea of vulnerability brings us to the movie’s main theme, which is that while space is a place of limitless potential, full of things like rich nickel veins and sapphire asteroids and other opportunities for science and profit, living there is always going to suck. In the future of Moon Zero-Two, there is a large population of humans on the moon, but anything above and beyond a very basic lifestyle is rare and expensive. There’s the tiny hut we see that Wally Taplan was living in, Kemp’s complaints about the cost of drinks, and the difficulty of getting anywhere that’s not a tourist center. Danger is everywhere – as one character observes, ‘nobody dies slowly on the moon.’

These dangers are mostly hidden from casual travelers so as not to frighten them (witness the monument, around a corner where only residents will see it), but vacuum, heat, cold, and radiation are ever-present. It’s much like modern air travel, which is perfectly safe as long as everything works and everybody does their jobs, but all it takes is one mistake, one faulty component, and everything goes down in flames. This makes Moon Zero-Two stand out from other sci-fi movies that rely on alien monsters to scare the audience, forgetting that space itself is really far more frightening than any number of extraterrestrial teeth.

This isn’t a horror movie, though – Moon Zero-Two bills itself as ‘the first moon western’. I’m not sure if it’s actually the first, but it’s definitely a moon western! I mean, we’ve got miners, tycoons, shootouts, and untold riches in a wild new frontier with dangers around every corner! As a bonus, setting it on the moon avoids the troubling questions of who has a right to this land, and doesn’t allow the writers to use ‘angry natives’ as one of their generic dangers. Western clichés pop up repeatedly, but unlike the cliché nudity, these are actually entertaining as each one comes with a sci-fi twist. There’s a saloon, but the barfight takes place in microgravity! Bill and Clem may overheat and die in the desert, but that’s because their moon bug has broken down rather than because their horse stepped in a gopher hole! These fun little uses of the tropes are a running gag in themselves.

Moon Zero-Two is also another movie where it’s a load of fun to look at what the writers and production designers thought the future would be like versus what actually happened. The film-makers probably thought they were being very forward-thinking, with their personal computers and satellite communications. Of course now we scoff at the briefcase-sized computers with their single-colour displays and giant keypads, but at the time it must have seemed quite futuristic! It makes me wonder what people fifty years from now (if there are any left) will think of the interactive hologram technology we depict in movies like Avatar and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

For all these things to like about it, Moon Zero-Two is a long way from perfect. Everybody on the moon seems to be white and there are far more men than women, although the women we see are portrayed as competent and intelligent (except for Hubbard’s collection of bimbos, barely able to sound out the words on their Community Chest cards… though when we consider Harry, I suppose we’re meant to assume that Hubbard just likes surrounding himself with stupid people). We relate to Bill as he seems like just a guy trying to make a living, but he’s a bit too much of a bitter grouch to really be likeable. I would have liked to see some more personality for Clem and Kaminsky, too.

The biggest thing that just feels like it’s missing from Moon Zero-Two is any idea of what’s going on down on Earth. This is not, of course, essential to the story – it’s notable that we never see Earth, only what’s happening on the Moon and in space – but considering when the movie was made I was curious what it would predict for the outcome of the Cold War. In the opening, we see an America and a Russian astronaut who are rivals until they are both swept up in the (extremely capitalist) race to colonize the solar system. In the movie proper, the Russians vanish. Somebody sneeringly asks where Kaminsky is from, but it’s not clear whether this is a cold war thing or just garden-variety xenophobia. What happened? Have the Russians left the moon as the British-American colonization project got going? Do they have their own bases elsewhere on the surface? We never find out, and it makes me wonder why the opening sequence brought it up.

Speaking of the opening sequence, I do love the theme song. It’s so cheerful and catchy, and it makes exploring the solar system sound like a really good time!

Outside of the Russian movies, which had been badly-translated and mercilessly cut down, I think Moon Zero-Two might be the best film ever featured on MST3K. It is very easy to make fun of, being so obviously a product of its time, but it doesn’t have any of the egregious errors of acting, pacing, or cheapness that ruined so many other good ideas in such movies. For the most part it uses its clichés in an entertaining way and we don’t really hate any of the characters except the smug, cackling Hubbard, whom we’re supposed to hate. Its visuals, audio, and story never bore us, and the story has only one major coincidence in Clem and Hubbard both going to Bill for help – but what we’re told about Bill’s past and present doesn’t make this seem too unlikely. As I already mentioned, it doesn’t need a whole bunch of technobabble to get the story going, and still manages to be pretty good fun.

Perhaps the highest praise I can give to Moon Zero-Two is this: it’s probably the only MST3K episode where the riffing actually annoys me, because I’m trying to pay attention to the movie.

#mst3k #reviews #moon zero two #60s

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