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Ta-metru_defender

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  1. Ta-metru_defender
    Essays, Not Rants! 276: Hanging Out
     
    Upon having it recommended to me independently by two friends, I’ve finally started reading The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. And the book’s delightful; it’s a space opera about people on a ship written by a writer who’s clearly seen the same movies, read the same books, and played the same video games as me. It’s one of those books I can’t stop reading but don’t want to end.
     
    It's a very episodic book; while there is a definite narrative throughline, thus far (I'm about halfway through) it's been secondary to the misadventures the crew have been having along the way. And I'm totally fine with that.
     
    Which is strange, because last week I harangued Crazy Rich Asians for spending too much time lollygagging and not enough time plotting. Asians is characterized by episodic misadventures until a whole lot of plot shows up in the final hundred-odd pages, but I found it frustrating.
     
    And I think there's a clear reason why.
     
    And it's not the spaceship thing.
     
    It's characters.
     
    Like I said last week, the folks in Crazy Rich Asians are more cipher than characters, bodies with a trait or two slapped on them to say what's needed for the scene. They've no inner life. The characters in Long Way, conversely, are sharply defined with a rich sense of history to them. They feel distinct, different; like you could hold a real conversation with them. And so, when placed in an episodic narrative, it's fun to see them interact with each other, to watch them hang out.
     
    It's a benefit of long-form storytelling. The deft writing in The Avengers characterizes the heroes well enough that you wish there was more time to see them hanging out together. A book has plenty of space for that to happen.
     
    As do video games. Arguably one of the strongest aspects of the original Mass Effect trilogy is how well Shepard and (most of) his/her crew is sketched out. You have someone like Mordin, a former black-ops scientist/commando turned doctor who also sings showtunes. Which is interesting enough, but it's when he's mixed in with Shepard that things get really good. Interacting with Mordin on his loyalty mission in 2 has you grappling with the morality of the Genophage (a virus that affects the reproduction rate of a martial species). Was it a necessary measure? Do the krogan deserve a second chance? Good characters enhance each other; iron sharpens iron and all that. Captain America and Iron Man each push each other on and force the other to be more stubborn. It's around Inara that Malcolm Reynolds will let the holes in his armor show. Barney and Robin drink scotch and smoke cigars.
     
    The final DLC for Mass Effect 3, Citadel, is essentially all hanging out with your crew. You get small side quests with each one and then throw a big party with these characters you've spent tens of hours over multiple games getting to know. It's great fun and a fond farewell. It wouldn’t work near as well had these characters not been so well done. If the games didn’t give you the time to get to know them or made these characters worth knowing, it’d just be a drag of cutscenes while you waited to get back to shooting stuff.
     
    I think that's a hallmark of good characters; you feel like you know them. The characters of a tv show start to feel like your friends. When I talk about my crew in Mass Effect, they’re my crew, who I fought the Collectors and Reapers with. And with characters like that, I don’t mind watching them going on misadventures.
  4. Ta-metru_defender
    Essays, Not Rants! 274: Andromeda After The Fact
     
    I finally finished my first playthrough of Mass Effect: Andromeda and dutifully started my second (this time as Sara instead of Scott). Ramping up the difficulty to Insanity makes combat much more frantic (and thereby makes the brilliant combat systems that much more fun), but we’ll see how far I get through it before I decide to finally replay Uncharted 4 because a) it’s a better game, 2) I haven’t replayed it, and iii) my god I want to play a game that was actually finished.
     
    Because there’s no doubt that Andromeda was rushed in some places. Its combat may be incredibly fluid, but a much of its mission design is outright boring. Some of the character models look great, but the animation in some parts is glitchy at best and magnificently awful at worst. And the writing. In parts, its great; in other parts it reads like a hasty first draft. And all this is not getting into the wonky pacing and exploitable systems that plague the game. But Andromeda is still a stupid amount of fun – it wrapped up well enough that I started a New Game+ after finishing it the first time. In fact, I’d say that most of its issues are emblematic of the central tensions in many AAA video games.
     
    So let’s start with its look, something that’s gotten a lot of grief on the internet. And rightfully so; it’s very weird to talk to someone who’s mouth is moving, but eyes are lifeless. There’s a fairly important cutscene where a character model just didn’t show up. Heck, even some of the romance scenes, which developer BioWare is famous for, are halting and glitchy. It’s a mess, heightened all the more since the character models and general graphics are pretty good. The animation issues, at times, overshadow everything else that’s going on. Sure, you have pretty worlds and characters and a sometimes-well written and often well-voiced script, but it’s easy to forget all that when the character’s acting is wooden. So maybe BioWare and publisher EA should have pushed the release back a couple months to work out the kinks.
     
    But why is there such a reliance on a game looking 'good?' We’re reaching a point 'good graphics' has become standard, with some, like Kojima Production’s FOX Engine, verging on literally lifelike. Thing is, when everything looks good, that’s no longer enough to stand out, and if your animation is shoddy – as in Andromeda – it becomes glaringly obvious. Other games find ways to complement their graphics: Uncharted 4’s animation is unparalleled, and games like Borderlands and Dishonored stylize their characters and locations. Then there are smaller, indie games like Sportsfriends or Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime which have simple, even retro, graphics, but ones that work with the gameplay.
     
    Which is where Andromeda’s pretty good. Gameplay is solid, the addition of the jetpack and different AI making it much more dynamic that prior Mass Effects’ waiting-and-shooting. And with difficulty on Insanity, it’s got me using the new Profiles feature as much as I can. Andromeda is fun. But some of its missions are terribly repetitive: you go down a lot of corridors and clear out a lot of cookie-cutter bases. Sometimes there are moments of genius, like getting to dash through a battlefield in your space car or the narrative gives mystery to exploring an ancient alien superstructure, but when the vast majority of side missions are fetch quest after fetch quest, it gets really dull. Andromeda is a long game – I logged over 90 hours by the time I beat the game – but its myriad of fetch quests make it out to be padding out the length. Not to mention they distract from the central narrative (which, once it gets going, is actually not half bad). So is quantity or quality better? Uncharted 4 is a fifteen-odd hour game, but its narrative is incredibly tight and doesn’t fall into repetitiveness. It would take a lotta work to fill four full days worth of gameplay with Interesting Stuff, so maybe Andromeda could have used some tight cuts?
     
    I will complain about Andromeda a lot. But I also really liked the game – again, I’ve started a second playthrough. I think that AAA games like Andromeda are reaching a tipping point where the old rubric of what made a game exciting (graphics! gameplay! big budget!) are no longer enough to make a game stand out. I do wish Andromeda was better than it is, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad game. Rather, its flaws are ones we see in a lot of other AAA games – look at Destiny. Maybe there’s a shift coming in the way games are made, maybe the next Mass Effect, whenever it comes out, will get things right. In any case, it’s a perfect adequate game. But we’re reaching a point where that’s not enough anymore.
  5. Ta-metru_defender
    Essays, Not Rants! 273: Mixed Results
     
    I really liked the movie Balto as a kid. And for a kid, it makes sense. It’s about a talking dog, and there’s a goose and a couple polar bears in it too. Plus it’s a story about the outsider getting a chance to prove they belong by doing an Epic Heroic Thing and earning their place.’
     
    Also, it’s a story about being mixed.
     
    Like me.
     
    I’m mixed, biracial, half-Asian; whatever the term du jour is. Which is something I mention every now and then on this blog, because it’s part of who I am and thus how I interpret the world around me and, with it, the narratives that the world creates. In other worlds: I tell you this because it directly impact the way I see stories.
     
    And this is important, because Balto is half-dog, half-wolf, which is a major part of his identity in the story. He doesn’t fit in with the dogs because of his wolfness, but he can’t exactly run out and join a pack of wolves. He doesn’t belong to either group. Over the course of the movie he (spoiler) proves himself to his peers and, more importantly, realizes that his being half-wolf is a good thing, not a drawback. The plot progresses and he gets to save the day.
     
    We don’t see a lot of mixed-race narratives, period. TV Tropes has precious few examples, and many of them are either informed traits or their entire story.. Sure, we’ll see interracial relationships play out (Hello, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend!), but anytime the product of one of those shows up, if the question of identity is addressed, chances are it becomes their whole thing. Growing up, Balto was the only story I knew that had a character who was explicitly mixed and dealt with that. As a bonus, it also wasn’t the only thing he had going on; he still got to do the hero thing.
     
    It’s quite unfortunate, then, that I didn’t see much of Star Trek until I was eighteen, but even then just the Abrams film. But that’s a movie about Spock’s journey as a character, one that’s inherently related to his own status as being half-Vulcan, half-Human. Again, the importance here is that though the story deals with Spock’s identity, it is not the extent of his arc. He still has a story of learning humility and teamwork and saving the day and all that, one aspect of which is, of course, struggling with his identity.
     
    I wanna stress just how rare this is. When stories come up with biracial characters that touch on their identity, that’s usually the be all and end all of their story. Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life has Sarah Jane, a half-white, half-black girl who passes white and so uses that to her advantage. Her story is one of someone rejecting one identity in favor of another and thus all but abandoning her mother in pursuit of hedonism. Yes, it’s a story about someone who’s mixed, but it’s about being mixed. Most of the time, when someone who’s mixed shows up in fiction and has a role, that’s their story. It’s about coming to terms with their identity, or realizing that they should embrace both halves and what have you. There’s no conjunction; they don’t come to terms with their identity and save the world, they don’t get to embrace both halves and make the big jump to fund their step-dad’s conveniently priced surgery.
     
    This is why Balto mattered to me so darn much as a kid. I got to see someone in a movie dealing with some of the ###### I dealt with. I got to see someone do all that and still save the day. It’s about being different, but still getting the normal treatment. Differently normal, if you will. I do think stories about mixed people being mixed are important, but equally important are stories where they – we – get to deal with the stuff and still be the hero. I want stories about mixed people that aren’t just about being mixed; I’m more than just someone who’s half-white, half-Asian.
  6. Ta-metru_defender
    So I moved. Was gonna move before the fire, but the fire kinda expedited the actual moving. Already had a place. Was mostly packed. So that went smooth.
     
    New place. Brother and I moved in with my drinking buddy – she and I get along grand even when we aren't drinking. We're in Queens now. New neighborhood, new haunts. Getting the lay of the land, changing my address.
     
    Got promoted to full-time at the LEGO Store. Pilot program we're a part of. I get benefits now – health insurance. Also got Employee of The Quarter. Go figure. No raise, though.
     
    Turned twenty-six. Went on a bar crawl with some friends the weekend before. Got the lay of some part of the land. Found a bar with free darts, free peanuts, and Captain Lawrence on tap.
     
    I'm still moving in. Figuring out my new room, the new living room, all that. Unpacking and rebuilding LEGO.
    I need to buy a desk.
  7. Ta-metru_defender
    By virtue of being in NYU Gallatin, I read a lot in college, sometimes getting through a book every two weeks. Post-graduation I realized that that that was a habit I wanted to keep up. So I’ve made an effort to read more over the past year, and to read different things by different people (with the fun book mixed in there). With that, here’s the list of the books I’ve read over the past year:

    Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
    Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
    The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
    Pawn’s Gambit by Timothy Zahn
    Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
    The Chinese in America by Iris Chang
    Scoundrels by Timothy Zahn
    Life Moves Pretty Fast by Hadley Freeman
    X-Wing: Rogue Squadron by Michael Stackpole
    The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck
    X-Wing: Wedge’s Gambit by Michael Stackpole
    The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
    The Way of The Knife by Mark Manzzetti
    A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami
    X-Wing: The Krytos Trap by Michael Stackpole
    Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds by Gary Alan Fine
    Born A Crime by Trevor Noah (Well, audiobook)
    Ashley’s War by Gayle Tzemach Lemon
    Between The World And Me by Ta-Nehsi Coates
    One Kick by Chelsea Cain
    The End Of War by John Horgan
    X-Wing: The Bacta War by Michael Stackpole

  8. Ta-metru_defender
    Essays, Not Rants! 269: Creative Exchange (and Video Games)
     
    Video games borrow a lot from movies. Snake, on the original box art for Metal Gear, is played by Michael Biehn. Or at least someone who looks just like him. Contra’s box makes it look like you’ll be playing John Matrix and John Rambo taking on the Xenomorph from Alien.
     
    But then there’s Halo, which drew much of its aesthetic wholesale from Aliens. Look at their portrayal of marines in space: the video game’s UNSC Marines sport body armor and helmets almost identical to the Marines in James Cameron’s sequel. Even Halo’s venerable Sergeant Johnson is very much inspired by a sergeant from Aliens. Both forces are fighting against a creepy, parasitic alien that starts out as a small thing that attaches itself to a host.
     
    As much as Halo uses elements of Aliens, however, it never feels like its copying it for lack of better ideas. The game’s plot adds concepts like the genocidal Covenant trying to wipe out humanity, Cortana the glowing blue AI who helps you along your journey, and the mysterious titular Halo ring. Halo also wears its inspiration on its sleeve, making no attempt to cover it up. There’s an affection to its homages and you can tell that Bungie really liked the movie.
     
    Which is kinda how it goes with video games. Gameplay-wise, Halo introduced and popularized several mechanics we now take for granted. In Halo, damage taken isn’t permanent pending a health pickup, rather you have shields that recharge over time. This encouraged players to experiment more, to take more risks – if you got shot too much you could just run off and wait for your shields to recharge before trying again. It changed the way shooters were played, because now almost every shooter has rechargeable health. Halo justified it through your character’s shields, but later games like Uncharted or Call of Duty make no effort to give a narrative explanation. It’s just become the way games are.
     
    I like to talk a lot about how games are a nascent art form, what with Tennis for Two coming out a hair under sixty years ago, and Pong is barely forty-five years old. Since then we’ve seen games grow from basic pixel-ly lines to real-time rendered games that give CGI films a run for their money. Mechanics, too, keep changing. Consider the idea of a cover system, which allows for the player to hide behind something while still shooting. Wikipedia tells me Kill.Switch was the first to implement it, but games like Gears of War and Uncharted really brought it into popular consciousness. There’s an exchange of ideas in video games, one to an extent you don’t really see in other, more established, mediums.
     
    We know what a movie is; there’s fiction, documentaries, and variations thereof. We know what a book is, what a comic is. But what exactly a video game constitutes is kinda left in the air. We’ve Halo, a sci-fi shooter, but That Dragon, Cancer is a game by two parents whose son had terminal cancer. You play a Call of Duty game by running around shooting people, the Sims is pointing and clicking at people and objects, meanwhile Johan Sebastian Joust is played by holding the controller and pushing each other around in real life. The special thing here is that games borrow ideas from each other no matter the genre. An action movie borrowing techniques from an arthouse piece is seen as being daring and cultured, but an early chapter in Uncharted 4’, "A Normal Life," clearly draws on the exploratory narrative games like Gone Home. This isn’t just happy coincidence; Neil Druckmann, who wrote and directed Uncharted 4, tweeted about the game back when it came out. People who make games play games, like games. Even though there’s a massive variety of types of video games, there’s a cross-pollination amongst them that gives games influences from all over the place.
     
     
    Look, I like video games a lot. I grew up playing them and find their evolution to be absolutely fascinating, in no small part to taking influences from all over the place. There doesn’t seem to be a 'wrong' place to get inspiration. There’s no one correct way to tell stories, so there’s something to be learnt no matter where you look. If video games continue this anything works mindset, I can’t wait to see where we are in ten, twenty, thirty years.
  9. Ta-metru_defender
    Essays, Not Rants! 267: Normalizing The Different
     
    It’s easy to dislike folks you don’t know. They’re different. They look weird. You have no horse in their race. They’re those people. The Unknowable Other.
     
    But it’s hard to keep up this mindset, that of the Them, the Other, after you’ve met said other. When you take the time to recognize them as a person, put a face to that Other, it’s much harder to not like them. Suddenly, they become an Us, rather than Them.
     
    Meeting people, however, is hard. Especially people outside our relatively well-defined social spheres. Small towns are small, countries have borders, there’s a limit to the people you see every day.
     
    Enter literature. Books. Movies. Video games. Comics. Anything that tells a story.
     
    Stories are about people of some sort. And there’s no reason they have to be about someone like you.
     
    Take Ms. Marvel. It's a superhero comic about Kamala Khan, a first generation Pakistani-American immigrant who fights bad guys. Amidst all the crime stopping, we get a peek into Kamala's home life. She's balancing high school, friends, family, and faith. She struggled with heartbreak, talks to her imam for advice, and breaks curfew. Her story is new, but at the same time familiar.
     
    But then, when we see stories about her move to the US; and in her first day at school and get a snapshot of her first day of school; I see my own experiences as someone who moved to the US is given weight, acknowledged, and affirmed. It's normal to be different, the book says. I'm not the only oddball, my weirdness is shared. It’s the story of someone moving to the US, maybe it’s your grandparents, maybe it’s you, maybe you were just the weird kid in high school. It may not have been your experience directly, but it’s translatable.
     
    We live in a world of narratives, we interpret the world as a story. Normal is a narrative. Weird is a narrative. Us and Them is a narrative. When we have one narrative dominating – the 'all-American hero', who is coincidentally typically white, male, and straight is the default and the most normal – anything that deviates is by default outside of the norm. Kamala is Other. I, a biracial Asian-American immigrant am Other.
     
    That is a narrative of import to me, of course. Which is not to discount stories about other people. Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing makes the African Diaspora immediately personal. It’s easy to learn about it from a textbook and think about it in dictionary terms, but when given a face, it becomes more than that. The concept, one that I have the privilege to not have to think about, becomes unavoidable as I read about people – persons with names – who went through this. I hear stories about the people who went through it, who have made their lives in the aftermath.
     
    And so the narrative can change; now Those People who I only knew about in the abstract become individuals with their own stories; recognizably human
     
    Stories are important. Stories let us explore other people’s experiences. Stories let us see each other as we see ourselves. Stories make the foreign recognizable. Stories take Them, and make them Us.
     
     
     
    It’s hard to dislike people once you’ve met them, once you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. Good stories let us in to other people’s lives. Ms. Marvel offers a narrative where the Pakistani-American girl is just like everyone else, Homegoing gives a voice to people you hear about. Alongside all this, they lend weight to experiences, say that, hey, your experiences are valid. Your life is worthwhile.
  10. Ta-metru_defender
    Essays, Not Rants! 265: Book Listening
     
    I’ve been a huge Trevor Noah fan since he showed up on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and started ragging on misconceptions of contemporary Africa by comparing it to the rural US. I found his stand-up special, African American, on Netflix and was delighted to hear him cracking jokes about growing up mixed. Though mine was in no way identical, there was enough familiarity there to really connect. Also, he’s funny. So I was one of the five people who was really keen on him taking over The Daily Show and I also got a chance to see him live last fall in New York when he taped his new special.
     
    Point is, I’m a big fan of Trevor Noah. So when his book, Born A Crime, was available for free on Audible, I got audible and the free book. And by book I mean audio book. A book you listen to. Not read.
     
    As was made plenty clear last week, I have Many Feelings about the Physicality of Books. I got a hold of the audio book because it was ~free~ with the intention of probably intentionally buying the physical version to actually read.
     
    Because who has time to listen to a book?
     
    When I read I like having my full attention on said reading. If I’m listening to music it’s gonna be instrumental (Current favorite: The Transistor soundtrack). I’m the sort who gets distracted easily and can end up reading a page and a half before realizing I was thinking about what to cook for dinner. So listening seems counterintuitive. A little too easy to get distracted.
     
    That said, I did end up listening to a couple hours of Born A Crime while on a long car ride. It’s a great listen, and as a perk it’s narrated by Noah himself and so rife with accents and proper pronunciation of the Xhosa names. It’s a charming listen, and I don’t really feel like I’m missing out on anything I would from reading.
     
    Except for the whole bookiness thing.
     
    Look, I like turning pages. I like glancing back. But one thing that Audible does that I really like is that I can bookmark chunks and write notes down. Well, type notes up. So I can take the recording back to the place where he discusses how his grandmother saw him as being white growing up or how he used language as a kid to jump between social spheres at school. It’s neat, to be sure.
     
    That said, one thing that’s nice-but-daunting is that it clearly says how long each chapter will take you. I’m gearing up to start the next one, but it’s gonna take twenty-two minutes and I don’t know that I have twenty-two minutes. Sure, I could break it up; listen to ten minutes now and twelve later, but it feels like I’m interrupting his train of thought. More so than a book 'cuz I can’t skim the past couple of pages. I can rewind back a minute or so, but I can’t skim. But I can now consume a book while doing something else, like playing video games. Which is how I usually watch The Daily Show or stand-up anyway. So not all bad – but Born A Crime is a pretty meaty book in some parts, so, again, full attention is better. But hard. Because I’m sitting around doing nothing.
     
    Now, Born A Crime is a bit of an oddity, in that it’s read by Trevor Noah, a person known for talking. Where most audio books are read by someone who’s not the writer, with this we get to actually hear it 'as intended.' So does that make it truer to its ideal than the written version? I’m not sure. I lean towards the understanding that if something is presented one way, it is intended to be seen that way. Movie scripts are great and all, but they’re supposed to be movies. A stand-up special doesn’t work as well on the page, for obvious reasons. So does a work that’s meant to be read work as spoken word? Especially if it’s spoken by the dude who wrote it?
     
     
    I don’t know. I do know that I’m enjoying the book, but I wonder if I’d enjoy it more read. I do know that I will be picking up a physical copy eventually to reread and annotate. Will I listen to another book down the line? Hard to say, 'cuz half the reason I like reading is, well, the reading part.
  11. Ta-metru_defender
    Essays, Not Rants! 263: This Is You In This Story
     
    There’s this thing with good stories where you have this gut response of "I wanna do that!" Video games thrive on immersion, by letting you enact what these characters do; meanwhile movies, tv, books, comics, etc let you vicariously experience events.
     
    But what if you do get to be that character? Metal Gears Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Star Wars: The Force Awakens both explore that, by making the protagonist of each story very much a surrogate for the audience, but beyond just being a lens through which the audience can view the world, Raiden and Rey both exist in narratives where they very much are the embodiment of an audience member.
     
    Raiden in MGS2 was very much deliberately envisioned as a pastiche of the player. Where the player played the first Metal Gear Solid, Raiden trained in VR simulations of the first game’s Shadow Moses Incident. This isn’t just backstory, it’s pointed out several times by Raiden’s support team – and outright criticized by Snake (MGS1’s protagonist) as being insufficient training. Raiden has no combat experience, he just assumes he’s gonna be awesome because he’s so good at his VR training. Over the course of the game, MGS2 proceeds to remind the player that they – and Raiden – are not Solid Snake, but rather someone playacting as him.
     
    It’s a fascinating exploration of the relationship between player and game, one that criticizes the power fantasy many games employ by showing how futile it is to try and be a character you’ve played as in a video game. MGS2 deconstructs the relationship between player and game; you get to be the protagonist (or more the protagonist has many similarities to you as a gamer) but as it turns out, it kinda sucks. It’s only when Raiden stops trying to be Solid Snake that he’s able to strike out on his own path. That’s also right about where the game ends.
     
    Similarly but not, The Force Awakens gives Rey a mindset like that of a viewer. Well, maybe a viewer closer to my age. Like me, Rey has grown up with the stories about the Rebel Alliance and the exploits of Luke Skywalker. She knows the same stories we do. Rey, however, exists on the fringe of all that; she puts on an X-Wing pilot's helmet and dreams of flying, but doesn’t leave Jakku until her adventure begins. Again, that’s like a kid who grew up with Star Wars. Rey is, essentially, a fangirl. Like the viewer, like me.
     
    But Rey meets BB-8 and Finn, borrows the Millennium Falcon, and gets swept up in a grand adventure. Basically, Rey gets to live out the Star Wars fantasy: she gets to meet the heroes of the Rebellion and become a Jedi. Now, this is all heightened through Rey’s similar point of view to that of the viewer makes it that much more visceral. Rey is, essentially, us.
     
    In MGS2, the narrative uses Raiden and the player's commonality to savage the escapist fantasy of video games, steadily dressing down Raiden (and the player) until Raiden stops trying to be Snake and does his own thing. The game is able to talk directly to the player because Raiden is effectively a placeholder for the player. Meanwhile, The Force Awakens uses Rey to drive the series romanticism to new heights. Luke was the farmboy on Tatooine who dreamed of more; Rey's that, but she’s also someone who idolizes Luke Skywalker and his adventures and now gets to take part in them.
     
     
    Immersion is a part of good stories and it’s something that can be accomplished by a variety of means – just look at the effect of good prose. Stories can also leverage a protagonist who embodies the same point of view as the audience to add new facets to a narrative. It’s not just to immerse the audience more, though, sometimes they’re actually there to do stuff.
  12. Ta-metru_defender
    Essays, Not Rants! 262: Emerging Exploration
     
    Mass Effect: Andromeda is a magnificently glitchy game. I have seen a crewmate go through osmosis while talking to him, I've fought an alien dinosaur that suddenly stopped moving its body (but still glided along the jungle floor and attacked me), and, through cunning manipulation of my space-car's six wheel drive and boost functions, have successfully driven up a vertical cliff face (though arguably that's a feature, not a bug). Of course, there are weirder visual flaws, like most of a character's face not moving while they speak or the world being so big that the game forgets to load the people I have to talk to to complete my quest. It’s frustrating sometimes – and downright baffling other times that a AAA game would ship like this.
     
    But, my god, it’s fun. I’ve sunk way too many hours into exploring the Heleus cluster of the Andromeda Galaxy since the game came out and have no intention of slowing down; far as I can tell I’m 30 hours and maybe 25% in. I’m having a blast. And yes, a lot of the fun is through scripted missions, where I’m told to go to x planet and do y thing; but the world of Andromeda is so big that there are so many random adventures to get to.
     
    Like the time on Eos where I woke the Architect, a colossal robot bent on killing me that I alternately shot at or hopped in the Nomad (the space-car of before) and chased so I could shoot it some more. Or going spelunking in ancient ruins looking for loot and coming face to face with my first Destroyer, a war machine that put up a heckuva fight. Or – so many ors – deciding to storm a Kett base on Eos with an offensive that started with me ramming the Nomad into a few bad guys and wedging on top of an automated turret. Bugginess be tossed, there’s fun to be had! With some well-crafted quests and a vast and interesting world, Andromeda’s side quests make even fetch quests feel somewhat purposeful.
     
    What really helps it out, though, is the emergent fun that comes from the game. Emergent gameplay, as opposed to structure, is an aspect of the game that is not hard-wired into the system, but emerges from it being played. To cite an example from Jesper Juul, there is no explicit rule in Monopoly that a player will go bankrupt, but it happens because of the rules. Emergences. Hence the name.
     
    So Mass Effect: Andromeda and emergent gameplay. Let’s take driving the Nomad through a bunch of Kett and sending them flying. At no point in the game does it say you can use your space-car as a weapon, and yet, it works. Even the self-imposed challenge of climbing up rock faces isn’t hardcoded into the game, but it’s ridiculously fun. Andromeda gives you a playground where the missions are cool, but the fun you make for yourself is fantastic.
     
    Which makes me think back to Destiny, a game with a barebones story and an amazingly fun gameplay. My fondest memory of the game is easily the Vault of Glass raid where me and five other players navigated a treacherous maze and took on – and defeated – Atheon. Sure, the level design and all is fantastic, but what makes it so great were the folks I teamed up with: our banter and teamwork. That’s something wonderfully special that was not intended by the game’s framework, but rather encouraged and permitted.
     
    Mass Effect: Andromeda is a single player game, so there’s less chances of impromptu dance parties (seriously: every multiplayer game needs dancing emotes). But it is still host to one of the best things about games: the freedom to explore a virtual space and, ignoring intended intentions, finding new ways to interact with the world.
     
     
     
    Which in my case has been a fine-tuned assault strategy involving charging right in with my space-car and hoping for the best.
  13. Ta-metru_defender
    Essays, Not Rants! 260: On Deconstruction, Reconstruction, and Also Batman
     
    A deconstruction takes something apart. Shrek shows how weird fairy tales are by pitting the story from the point of view of an ogre. Suddenly the princess promising herself to whoever rescues her is especially bizarre, as is the idea of there always being a noble prince. The point of a deconstruction is usually to display how tropes and conventions in some narratives don’t work so well when held up to some more stringent logic.
     
    In the same vein, the Batman we meet in at the start of The LEGO Batman Movie (and arguably The LEGO Movie) is a deconstruction of the Batman we got used to in Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy. He’s all about
    , singular focused on his mission, and, as we discover, quite a pain in the butt. In essence, we see this singularly focused Batman played out to an amusing end: he’s stuck in a perpetual adolescence and cares for no one but himself (and his desire to fight crime). Of course he’s not well-adjusted, he doesn’t have any friends and doesn’t see daylight. It’s this deconstruction that gives rise to the plot of The LEGO Batman Movie, which lets the movie rebuild Batman into a hero – and leader of the Bat-family. 
    Thing is, The Dark Knight – and Batman Begins before it – aren’t quite deconstructions; at least not in the way it’s easy to assume they are. Yes, the movies do play out some of the complications of Bruce Wayne’s Batmanning: he has to go on the run, people try to copy him, Bruce Wayne ceases to be much of a person in favor of his alter-ego. And there is the whole darkness-no-parents vibe. Nonetheless, Batman is successful at what he does, and the films make the case that yes, a superhero does work. A dude dressing up as a bat to fight criminals is a patently ridiculous concept, but Christopher Nolan and his team reconstruct Batman into a character and vigilante that makes sense in a realistic center.
     
    Take the scene in Batman Begins where Bruce and Alfred are putting together the Batsuit. They buy the components in bulk from different manufacturers, minimizing a paper trail. Even getting the Batmobile from Wayne Enterprises’ R&D department explains away where he gets those wonderful toys. As a reconstruction it acknowledges the flaws of the Batman narrative but works past them for a fuller, more shaded narrative. A true deconstruction would have played out the final climax with Two Face differently, perhaps having Batman refuse to take the fall or even having both of them be completely vilified. As it is, The Dark Knight lets Batman take his moniker and remain an idealized hero.
     
    There are shades of deconstruction to The Dark Knight — take the Batman-inspired vigilante who gets himself killed — but it’s all in the service of ultimately reconstructing the idea – there needs to be a 'superhero,' so Batman will appear the villain so that Harvey Dent can be that person. So it’s easy to mistake the whole movie as an out-and-out Shrekian deconstruction.
     
    Which is arguably what Zack Snyder and team did in Batman v Superman. While Man of Steel wavers, BvS tries its hardest to take apart both Batman and Superman – and superheroes in general. But it doesn’t do so for comedic effect (as in Kick-######) or to explore what we take for granted in the genre (see: Watchmen). Instead, it does… Well, nothing. It reads The Dark Knight as a deconstruction and attempts to imitate it, but since the former wasn’t really a deconstruction, the BvS is building with the blocks; it doesn’t take apart The Dark Knight (as LEGO’s Batman does), but tries to use Nolan’s film as a deconstruct-o-lens. The result is a lot of dimly lit scenes and people grunting and growling at each other about big ideas that don’t make much sense. We learn nothing new about Superman and Batman or the conventions that surround them that would warrant it being a deconstruction, nor does it recreate the mythos in a new way that would be a reconstruction. Rather it tells the story straight, just lathered in a murky layer of grit that can’t hide its (many) narrative flaws.
     
     
    There is room for a solid deconstruction of Batman, Superman ,and superheroes in general – I mean Alan Moore did it in Watchmen thirty-odd years ago. Sometimes it seems there’s a race to take apart beloved genres, and sometimes it works like in Game of Thrones, but there’s room for both, again, Nolan’s The Dark Knight. The trick is to do it for a reason, and not just because you want your story to be about darkness and not having parents.
  15. Ta-metru_defender
    Essays, Not Rants! 254: Xenophobia, Science Fiction, and, eventually, Hope
     
    I didn’t learn the term ‘xenophobia’ from the news, the radio, or a textbook. Didn’t come up in class or any place you’d expect. Rather, I learnt the word ‘xenophobia’ from the old Star Wars Expanded Universe books.
     
    Was in the context of various political factions being distinctly anti-alien. Now, the xenophobia usually stemmed from the Empire and their staunch humans-first attitude and view of anyone who wasn’t as being intrinsically lesser, but some players in the New Republic also held xenophobic beliefs which made working together harder. Key thing was, these people were either villains or antagonists and their belief that someone who looked and thought differently was worth less than a person was wrong. The heroes, Luke, Leia, and even Han, weren’t about that; it was Emperor Palpatine and his ilk who pushed a xenophobic agenda. For a kid in his early teens recently immigrated to the US, it was a pretty clear distinction: good guys aren’t afraid of or mean to people because they’re different.
     
    Now we all know that aliens and hyperdrives and Jedi are fictitious. But, xenophobia, as I would find out later, is a real term used by real people to describe real issues. The idea behind it, though — treating different people differently and meanly — was something I knew was unquestionably wrong because, well, Star Wars books. That and I was, y’know, a half-Singaporen cultural immigrant to South Carolina. But you get the idea.
     
    I’m loathe to call Star Wars and science fiction in general ‘morality plays.’ Heck, I’m loathe to call any good fiction a ‘morality play’ because good fiction doesn’t preach at you. What science fiction does particularly well is, well, it says something without saying something. Diego Luna, in an interview with Vanity Fair, said that the wonderful thing about setting Star Wars in a galaxy far, far away was “…whenever you get too personal, you can say, "No, I'm not talking about you. This is a galaxy far, far away." But with this tool, you can actually make the most effective comments on the reality in which you're living.”* Learning that species isn’t a demarcation for the capacity to do good is good practice for knowing that skin color and country of origin don’t have any bearing on whether someone is ‘good.’
     
    And that’s the thing about stories: they’re practice. See, folks smarter than me have been trying to figure out why humanity does this whole storytelling thing. One theory is that stories are practice for interactions, a sort of simulation. When we read, we experience it ourselves. It’s science, since there are studies that “…suggest when we experience fiction are neurons are firing much as they would if we were actually faced with Sophie’s choice or if we were taking a relaxing shower and a killer suddenly tore down the curtain” (pg 63 of The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall, if you’re wondering). Stories are practice. They’re parables, where you can learn something by living something in a different way. As Gottschall says, “if you want a message to burrow into a human mind, work it into a story” (118).
     
    Back to science fiction. Reading stories about the real world can be tough, because seeing the awful we know exists in real life existing again isn’t always the funnest thing. Science fiction (and fantasy, etc) are reality adjacent, and so have more leeway. Ursula K. LeGuin can explore classism and sexual identity without pointing a finger at anyone for being a bigot. It becomes a safe space to discuss complex topics and live experiences you wouldn’t ordinarily. Stories can change you, can impact you because, well, the nature of fiction is that it strives to put you in that place. A good book has you working with the writer to empathize and live the narrative first hand. You can’t read a good book and come out entirely unchanged.
     
    And the fantasy of science fiction means that there is a quick gratification to that hope. You don’t have to wait years and years on the edge to know that good will triumph over evil, that diversity beats xenophobia; you just gotta reach the end of the book.
  16. Ta-metru_defender

    AMERICA!

    By Ta-metru_defender,

    Essays, Not Rants! 253: AMERICA!
     
    If you follow this blog you’ve probably realized that my mostest favoritest trope is the rag-tag multicultural team. It’s why I’ll always hold Disney’s Atlantis in high esteem, it’s why I have such a huge soft spot for the Magnificent Seven remake and Rogue One. Pacific Rim, Halo: Reach, X-COM, you give me a multicultural/national team, you make me happy
     
    Really happy.
     
    So you can understand my hesitance when the follow-up to Al Ewing’s very enjoyable New Avengers comics was U.S.Avengers. Here’s what could well be a rah-rah jingoistic comic, while New Avengers (volume 4, if you’re wondering) was this idiosyncratic book with giant mecha, a squirrel convincing a rat army to stop fighting for the bad guys, and mad science.
     
    The first issue of U.S.Avengers is framed around the members of the team talking to the ‘camera’ about why they’re part of the team and, as they are a part of the remade AIM (American Ideas Mechanics) which is overseen by the US Government, about the whole being American thing. For Roberto da Costa, the leader of the team, this means talking about wanting to be American. Lemme make this clear, the first panel of the first issue of a comic book called U.S.Avengers is Roberto da Costa, someone born in Brazil, talking about his wanting to be an American. It culminates in him firmly declaring that he’s an American citizen, something that can’t be taken away.
     
    So right off the bat we have, in a comic book called U.S.Avengers, the definition of American identity being one of an immigrant (who’s also not white, by the way).
     
    But who else is on this team? We’ve got Toni Ho, genius Chinese-American who built her own version of the Iron Patriot which she pilots. Her girlfriend, Aikku, is also part of the team. A Finnish-Norwegian (say it with me:) immigrant, she finds the US different and slightly frightening, but takes comfort in Toni and the others and the space to find herself. And has her own super high-tech suit. We’re also introduced to Squirrel Girl, who stresses her Canadian/American dual citizenship; General Robert Maverick, the representative of the US Government who’s also Red Hulk; and Sam Guthrie, the guy from Kentucky whose interpretation of the American Dream is that of his blue-collar father, one where “there is no ‘them’ to help or hurt.” The first issue ends with an appearance by Captain America (which makes sense), only this is Captain America from an alternate future where she’s Danielle Cage, a bulletproof black woman.
     
    This has been is a stupid amount of summarizing, but I hope you’re following my train of thought here. The image of the American put forth by U.S.Avengers isn’t one of a straight white dude; in the book Americans can be – and are – immigrants, people of color, women, and queer. This isn't something the book hints at, it's a blatant thesis statement put forth in the first issue.
     
    I'm sure you've realized by now that this is important, but let me explain why. For much of American history, the image of an 'American' has been a straight white guy. Even today, especially today, the prevalent narrative of an American is a straight white guy whose family has been in the states for generations. It's that whole idea of a 'true' or 'real' American. U.S.Avengers offers a counternarrative; one that's, well, reflective of the actual US. We can talk all we want about shifting demographics and the changing face of a nation, but until the narrative shifts we're just blowing air. U.S.Avengers reflects that America, as Marvel has been doing as of late: Ms. Marvel is a naturalized Pakistani immigrant; Hulk is Korean-American, one Captain America is black.
     
    So again, this is why diversity is important. If you're doing a story about the modern US then the characters ought to reflect the people who make up the country: a nation of immigrants not just from Europe. We need these stories, we need to see people who aren't straight white guys portrayed as American in fiction if we’re ever going to shift the default image of what an American is.
     
     
    Elsewise we find ourselves in some ersatz 1950s America, and you don't really wanna go back to that, do you?
  17. Ta-metru_defender
    Essays, Not Rants! 251: Who Is The Everyman?
     
    I talk a lot about the concept of the everyman on this blog, though mostly about how they don't have to be white guys. And there's a reason it's such an important thing. Spider-Man shows you don't have to be rich and smart like Iron Man or an alien like Superman to be a superhero, you can just be a nebbish kid from Queens. It's the whole point of the everyman: anyone can be a hero. Especially you, because, after all, the everyman is meant to be you.
     
    Star Wars, with Luke and Rey, takes full advantage of the everyman. The totally mundane farmboy and scavenger turn out to really be special heroes who help save the galaxy. The characters' motivations are built to be universal, certainly more so than the other characters around them. Han's a smuggler who wants to get a bounty off his head and Leia wants to save her planet and the galaxy – Luke just wants to get off of Tatooine. Finn wants to escape from the First Order he used to be a part of, Poe is on an important mission for the Resistance – Rey just wants to belong. They're universal wants, ones more translatable to ordinary life than paying off a crime lord. Again, Luke and Rey could be anyone, including you. And anyone, including you, could be the chosen one.
     
    This is why it's so darn important for there to be diversity in the everyman. Rey is important because she shows that you don't have to be a dude to be a chosen one, to be special. Same with Ms. Marvel, where the superhero of New Jersey is Kamala Khan, saying that, hey, a Muslim girl can be an all-American superhero.
     
    And that's what makes the cast make up of Rogue One so important. Unlike Luke and Rey, these folks aren't particularly special. No one's a Jedi or super skilled smuggler. Jyn, Cassian, Chîrrut, and the others are, in the vein of Peter Parker and Kamala Khan, fairly ordinary people who suddenly find themselves in the right place at the right time and step up. They’re meant to be normal people, like you and me. So they look like normal people, like you or me.
     
    There’s the rub. What do normal people look like? What do we look like? For me, that’s half-Asian/half-White, and based on the majority of (western) media out there, one of those halves is what heroes look like. The other half is usually a villain or, if not a token, then usually a stoic wise, old master. Not a swashbuckling hero or a kickbutt mercenary. That’s the other half.
     
    (In case you haven’t realized, it’s the white half that’s portrayed heroically and the Asian less so).
     
    The diversity in Rogue One, however, flips that on its head – and in frickin’ Star Wars, one of my favorite stories! The heroes of the film come from all sorts of (real world) backgrounds, with a white woman as the lead and a Latino guy as deuteragonist. The others on the core team are a couple Chinese guys, a Pakistani-British guy, and Alan Tudyk as a droid. None of these characters are meant to be particularly special, not even the sense of being super well-trained or anything.
     
    They’re normal people.
     
    Who step up to be heroes.
     
    And some of them happen to look like me.
     
    Of course you don’t have to look like someone to emphasize with them. It’s why I see myself in the crew of Serenity in Firefly or wanna be Rey because she’s the best. It’s why I’m sure you can still wanna be Cassian Andor even though he's Latino and you might not be. But who we see as heroes affect our perception of reality. If the only time we see Asian characters are as wise, old master, then that’s all we see them as. If the everyman is universal, then everyone should get to see themselves as the everyman.
  18. Ta-metru_defender

    2016 In Review

    By Ta-metru_defender,

    Essays, Not Rants! 250: 2016 In Review
     
    Year’s over, so this means I’m looking at the rants essays from this past year. Here we go!
     
    Five Most Popular/Viewed Posts
     
    #5: *general internet frustrations*
     
    Mockingbird became my favorite comic this year for a variety of reasons (feminist, funny, fantastic). But when the final issue was published people got mad. This is about that and why we can’t have nice things, and why Mockingbird and the fallout remain important in the larger dialogue of fiction and fandom.
     
    #4: A (Civil) War of Flaws
     
    I really liked Civil War, in particular for how well done and earned I thought the conflict was. This is primarily because it was born out of character flaws, something that’s terribly important in developing good conflict. Makes it engaging and, rightly, tragic.
     
    #3: Where Josh Explains Why You Should Fund His Movie
     
    I made a thesis film this year! And it’s finally almost done! I’m mad proud of it still and really can’t wait to have it done (just need a few sound effects, mixing, and a score!). It was also a lot of me putting my money where my mouth is, what with diversity and all that, as this post goes into (also, we ended up within budget! Woo!).
     
    #2: The Beauty of Pokémon Go
     
    If you’re wondering, I still play Pokémon Go (I finally got a Blastoise yesterday!). I really think the community and hype that sprung up around it when it was released was truly beautiful. The blurring of the line between gaming and reality is fascinating, and Go illustrates just how it can build a community.
     
    #1: Of Zootopia
     
    Man. Zootopia was – is – important. It’s about bigotry and ignorance and forgiveness and prejudice. It was relevant at the beginning of the year and is, frustratingly, even more relevant at the end of 2016. This movie shows how effective stories are at conveying truths while saying so much about, frankly, racial tensions is magnificent.
     
    Josh’s Pick of Three
     
    #3: To Tell The Truth
     
    I love the idea of storytelling as lies that tell the truth. This is me exploring that while somehow managing to tie in poetry, theatre, and television. It’s fun, and, well, this is pretty much what I studied at university.
     
    #2: The Give And Take of Books
     
    Since graduating, I’ve made an effort to read more (the past six months have consisted of: Ready Player One, The Windup Girl, Pawn’s Gambit, Homegoing, The Chinese in America: A Narrative History, Scoundrals, and Life Moves Pretty Fast). Homegoing was particularly wonderful and it ended on a personal note. This post is about books and the way we interact with them. It’s what makes books so important.
     
    #1: Letting Different People Be Different, Visible Diversity, and Something Something Diversity Something Star Wars
     
    Between Rogue One and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, its been a great year to see people who look kinda like me on the big screen (Kubo and The Two Strings doesn’t count for a variety of reasons that I will rant about later). Diversity’s important, it’s always been important, and I will never not be excited about the fact that there are now Asian protagonists in the Star Wars world. Crazy Ex also does away with stereotyping and, y’know, it’s important that we let people just be people.
     
    And that’s it for 2016. Thanks for sticking with this blog even when the post is just a ramble about science fiction. 2017’s coming up, expect more rants essays about diversity, Marvel movies and Star Wars, feminism, and whatever I want, really.
     
     
    Cheers.
  19. Ta-metru_defender
    Essays, Not Rants! 244: An Asian-American Superhero
     
    I wasn't sure how I felt about Silk when she first showed up in the Spider-Man comics, but it was when she got her own series – and a narrative no longer intrinsically tied to Peter Parker – that she really came into her own.
     
    But on the on the one hand, yeah, another webslinging spider-themed hero? We've already got a lot with Peter Parker, Miles Morales, Gwen Stacy, and Miguel O'Hara in books of their own; do we need one more? The thing is, Silk brings with it – like each of the other spider books – a unique story and character.
     
    Obviously, there's Silk/Cindy Moon herself. One of the things that hooked me into the book is something somewhat shallow, but terribly important: Cindy is Korean-American. Yes, I know, I'm ranting about diversity again. But listen. There are precious few Asian superheroes, even less so with their own books. There will always be a thrill in getting to see someone who looks like you represented.
     
    But Cindy's Asian-ness isn't just a lip service done through line art and surname, the story in Silk features distinctly Asian elements.
     
    So quick recap, Cindy got bitten by the same spider that gave Peter Parker his powers, but due to some bad news involving spider-killing vampiric Inheritors (it makes sense in context), Cindy was locked alone in a bunker until the threat was over. Released early, Cindy is looking for her family who have disappeared during the years she was away.
     
    Still with me? Now here's the thing, the decision to lock Cindy away is not a malevolent one, in fact Silk does great work to ensure that while we know it's a really sucky situation, it was one done out of love. As Cindy follows the trail of her parents, she finds that they never stopped trying to find a way to cure her and protect her from the Inheritors. When Cindy finally finds her parents – after traveling to the Negative Zone, teaming up with a dragon named David Wilcox, and discovering her mother is the undead slaying Red Knight – it's a happy, heartfelt reunion.
     
    Never along the way does Cindy ever think that finding her parents isn't worth it. She's posed as a villain for Shield and takes a job at J. Jonah Jameson's Fact Channel, all in an effort to discover what happened to her parents. The central theme of the arc, one espoused firmly by Cindy, is family first. It's a story of unquestioning filial piety, one that is returned in kind by Cindy's parents. Now, family loyalty is by no means a uniquely Asian thing, but Silk's emphasis on it allows the book to strike a wonderful narrative balance between an Eastern focus on community and the self-determinism more prevalent in Western narratives. Are you beginning to see why I keep harping on diversity being important?
     
    That said, Cindy doesn't live a merry angst-free life. Her time in the bunker did a number on her, and so Cindy seeks counseling. Her sessions often provide narration for her adventures as she confides in her therapist, which is a fun narrative tool in itself, but the portrayal of therapy as being something both normal and healthy stands out as special in comics. It’s not a sign of weakness, but rather a way for Cindy to work out anger issues and the newfound stress of getting used to a modern life (and being a superhero). It’s a profound addition that subtly destigmatizes getting help while allowing space in Cindy’s life to focus on her family without too much angst.
     
    You know what’s coming next: This is why diversity in fiction is important. Sure, you could have had the looking-for-family narrative with anyone, but by attaching it to a Korean-American family you instill it with a little more weight and offer a representation of a different way of looking at the world. Silk is a wonderful book because it does all that and tells a plain good story while it’s at it.
     
     
    Man, ain’t diversity grand?
  20. Ta-metru_defender
    Essays, Not Rants! 238: Language and Story
     
    Language is weird. Conveying language is even harder. How do you make a story where the main characters are all speaking a different language, but gear it to an English-speaking audience? Do you give them vague accents or pull a Sean Connery and let Russian-in-English sound suspiciously like a Scottish brogue? Then what if the they interact with English speakers? How do you flip that sense of the other, where the person speaking the language you understand isn’t understood by the characters you’re following?
     
    The play Vietgone, a story about Vietnamese immigrants to the US after the Fall of Saigon, merrily blazes its own path. In a delightfully post-modern fashion, Vietnamese is rendered in contemporary English. Main characters Quang and Tong interject ‘dude’ while speaking regular, American English — despite it supposed to be in Vietnamese. Because of this, we, as an audience, are firmly with them. We speak the same language, we understand them, we identify. There’s nothing stilted about it, it’s just people talking like people talk.
     
    See, there’s this stereotype about Asians in and around the US is that they (we?) are so completely foreign, so other, that assimilation into normalcy isn’t really a thing — that the adjective in front of the noun is the more important word. It’s something that’s colored by the media in many ways, from Full Metal Jacket’s refrain of “me love you long time” to a certain recent piece by a major news show involving some idiot in Chinatown. When Vietgone positions its protagonists as speaking normal English, it empowers them to get to be normal. Quang and Tong aren’t presented as being other or foreign, instead they’re portrayed as normal as they would be had this story been about a bunch of white people moving somewhere else.
     
    As for the Americans? Vietgone, a comedy, renders English as a series of loud, disparate, American-y words, yielding ‘sentences’ along the lines of “Cheeseburger shotgun Nixon!” It’s legitimately hilarious, but it underscores how confused and away Quang and Tong are. They don’t understand the people around them — and neither do we. As for the American who does try to learn Vietnamese and speaks it poorly, he is depicted speaking a horribly mangled version of English, flipping the funny foreigner trope well on its head. By building a language barrier that puts the audience on the in with the non-English speaking cast, Vietgone creates a space where the white Americans are seen as the other, not the immigrant Vietnamese.
     
    So? What’s the big deal about this?
     
    Diversity matters.
     
    I will yammer on and on and on about this, to the point where I think 2016 is Essays, Not Rants! Year of Diversity (2015 was the Year of Feminism), and that’s because it’s important. Vietgone tells a familiar story (two people fall in love!) with a familiar backdrop (the aftermath of the Vietnam War!) but from a completely different perspective (did you know about the refugees from Vietnam in the aftermath?). Not only does it work as the story of immigrants and refugees, but, by positioning these people as the main characters the play allows them to tell their stories. This is the aftermath of the Vietnam War as told by those who saw their country and homes fall. It’s a different story, but not one that feels the need to dwell overlong on how different and special it is. It’s, like all good stories, a story about people first. One where they get to tell it and we get to listen in.
  21. Ta-metru_defender
    Essays, Not Rants! 233: To Tell The Truth
     
    How do you tell the truth? Saying “Alice and Bob broke up” may be what happened, but is it the truth of it all? Breakups are messy business; did Alice break up with Bob or Bob break up with Alice? Did Bob break up with Alice for Charlie? Suddenly there’s a narrative attached to the happening, which in turn colors our perception of what happened. It may be less accurate, but it could be closer to the truth. Maybe the truth is Bob feels like his heart’s been ripped out. But there’s gotta be a better way to say it.
     
    Enter fiction. And writing in general, actually, since trying to capture that elusive truth is one of the things poetry does so well. When Matthew Dickman describes the act of a dance in “Slow Dance” as “The my body // is talking to your body slow dance” it’s decidedly not factual (bodies, um, don’t talk). Heck, it’s not even strictly grammatically correct. But, what it does do – along with the rest of the poem – is describe the truth of that dance “with really exquisite strangers.” Throughout “Slow Dance” Dickman invites you into a space where he paints a picture of all those thoughts and feelings that accompany dancing with someone. He’s crafting an experience for you to be a part of, letting you know how it feels to be there. The truth of it all.
     
    It really is poetry’s modus operandi, that, sharing a truth. For all the silliness of Lewis Carrol’s “Jaberwocky,” it vividly places you where it was brillig; in “False Security,” Sir John Betjeman makes you feel like a child again, where going to someone else’s house at night is an adventurous quest in and of itself. It’s not enough to tell you what’s happening, it’s about telling you the truth of what happened.
     
    But poetry does it through image-heavy words, how do you show it? Take a look at musical Fun Home, which I recently saw before it closed (thank you, Nathan). Towards the end the narrator, Alison Bechdel, expresses how she wants so badly to remember how things were doing a pivotal point in her youth, but how does memories fade quicker than she can remember them. The play illustrates it beautifully, with the furniture that’s made up the set of her home (where her memories have played out) receding into the stage as she chases after them just moments too late. Again, not ‘realistic,’ but heartbreakingly true. How better to communicate the realness of memories fading away? It works.
     
    Which brings me to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, because a lot of my thoughts and ramblings have been pointing towards that show lately. The show’s musical numbers are largely born out of a heightened emotional state, be it feeling excluded at a group hang or the stress of a parent coming to visit. These songs sometimes serve as a culmination of a sequence and let us into the singer’s mind. A striking example is the second song in episode eleven, wherein Rebecca finds herself at one of her lowest points — everything she’s been striving for has blown up in her face. So she sings this song rife with self-loathing, this incredibly harsh, unflinchingly brutal song — a song that she has the imaginary crowd join in on. Now, in the real world, people don’t get a musical number when their depression closes in on them. But, that feeling of despair with a crowd in your head singing your ills is absolutely true.
     
    I talk a lot about how fiction’s all a lie. But it’s a lie that tells the truth. Because sometimes the lie of fiction tells the truth better than a factual account. Least that’s the best way to explain Bob’s really sad poetry about the breakup.
  22. Ta-metru_defender
    Essays, Not Rants! 232: Visible Diversity
     
    So I recently started Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Finally, I should say; you’d think with a Marc Webb directed pilot I’d have watched it sooner. Anyway, once you get past the somewhat off-putting title (which, as the theme song says, is a sexist term and the situation is a lot more nuanced than that), Crazy Ex is a lotta fun. It’s a musical equal parts cynical and idealistic set in a relatively mundane setting where no matter how outlandish it gets, the character relations stay heartfelt. It’s great.
     
    But that’s not what this post’s about.
     
    Look in the backgrounds of a scene in Crazy Ex or the backup singers and dancers in a musical number. It looks unlike a lot of what you usually see on tv, and not just because of the singing and dancing. Crazy Ex has made an effort to fill its background with people of all colors. Not just one person-of-color in the background, but a variety of folks who you don’t usually get to see on tv (or in media in general). I mean, c’mon! When was the last time you got to see an Asian guy as part of a musical number! Where he wasn’t the token background person of color? Since there’s, y’know, a few other non-white people populating the scene?
     
    Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has been remarkable at filling out its cast – both main and bit players! — with people who aren’t white. The person protagonist Rachel obsesses over is an Asian guy named Josh (*cough*). The Major Client she has to land for her law firm is black, some of the peopler competing in the guac competition at the Taco Festival are Latino. And the people at that Taco Festival also run the racial spectrum.
     
    Am I making a big deal about a small thing? Yes. Because it’s a small thing worth making a big deal about.
     
    It’s easy, all so easy to fill out a scene with a bunch of white people peppered with the occasional sprig of diversity. But what Crazy Ex does that’s so cool is take that diversity and ratchet it up several notches, and then make those sprigs of diversity visible. You don’t have to squint to find your background minority.
     
    Star Trek Beyond did something similar. Not only is the background crew of the Enterprise noticeably more diverse, but, once again, the featured people in the background aren’t all white. The crew members we see disappear into a cabin while making out are an Asian guy and a white woman (*cough*); the woman we follow as the bridge is evacuated is an Indian woman. Heck, the leader of the super high tech space station, Commodore Paris, is played by Shohreh Aghdashloo who was in The Expanse. She’s the person who tells Kirk, what to do, by the way; and that’s great.
     
    And this is the part where I have to mention Rogue One. Because, again, diversity! Heroes! Chinese actors! A Middle Eastern actor is the pilot! Diego Luna! Forest Whitaker! But! But but but! It’s also the small stuff in the background. The Rebel troops we see in the trailer are racially diverse (and the LEGO AT-ST set coming out features a black guy as the generic rebel trooper). Again, these are small details that give the world a fuller feel.
     
    And it’s friggin’ important. Because this is fiction, and fiction reflects reality, and reality is remarkably diverse. White-as-default isn’t gonna fly anymore. Yes, I have a personal investment in this because, growing up, I didn’t see a lot of heroes who looked like me. Over the years I’ve gotten used to turning on the tv or sitting down in a theatre and not expecting to see myself represented (or represented as anyone other than The Other). Yeah, I try and fix that in
    , even if it’s just a student film. 
    But.
     
    It’s changing.
     
    Star Trek Beyond firmly proved that Sulu wasn’t the only Asian on the Enterprise and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is inclusive as all-gets-out in who gets to be in its musical numbers and who gets to be multi-faceted people on tv. And Rogue One, well, I’ve already ranted about that.
     
    If this is the sign of fiction-to-come, I can’t wait.
  23. Ta-metru_defender
    Essays, Not Rants! 230: Zombieland: A Treatise on Life in a Post-Consumer Society
     
    I mentioned it as a joke last week, but this week we’re going for it.
     
    I’m so sorry.
     
    Zombies have long been used as a means to comment on the perils of consumerism. Mindless hordes doing things without thinking for the few capable of independent thought to stand up against. Zombieland takes the conceit one step further, within the film self actualization is only possible in a world free of the shackles of traditional consumerism.
     
    Much of the conflict in Zombieland takes place in the ruins of grocery stores, downtown areas, and, climatically, a theme park. The main characters too exist outside of the established economy; Columbus and Tallahassee loot and rob cars in the post-apocalyptic wasteland (the titular Zombieland) and before the outbreak Wichita and Little Rock were con artists, stealing rather than working jobs. But it’s now that they’re no longer part of a consumerist society that they are able to really come in to their own.
     
    When Columbus and Tallahassee meet up with Wichita and Little Rock there is a great deal of distrust. Distrust that is primarily due to them fighting over guns and a car, of which there are not too many. Their strife is born of competition over limited resources — the backbone of a consumerist society. It’s because they’re holding on to one of the principle tenants of a pre-Zombieland world that they fight; as long as they live by the rules of consumerism they won’t be able to truly develop a friendship.
     
    If one of the central themes of Zombieland is that people need other people — it is after all a movie where survivors come to realize they’re stronger together than separate — then that true friendship is only possible when they no longer subscribe to traditional views of consumerist culture. This is made clear when they finally do become friends. It’s not when they’re fighting a horde of zombies together, this is far from a battle-forged friendship. Rather, they only truly bond when they utterly destroy a gift shop together. Unlike many of the other locations visited by the survivors, this gift shop is in immaculate condition. All the gaudy trinkets and shiny rocks are still on the shelves, nothing’s out of place, even after Tallahassee dispatches of the lone zombie in the shop.
     
    It’s in this place that Columbus first stands up to Tallahassee, a significant character moment as it shows him beginning to come into his own. Immediately after that character moment, however, he knocks something over by accident. Then another deliberately. The others join in and a montage of them destroying the stores contents ensues. It’s a blithely irreverent destruction of private property and also a rejection of the need for silly tchotchkes that have worth just because they’re supposed to. The act of destruction unites them and marks a shift for the characters bonding and sets them on the path to self-actualization.
    According to Zombieland, it is in this post-consumer landscape that real relationships can thrive. Where before Columbus only knew his neighbor by her apartment number, now he has people he trusts — and he learns Wichita’s real name too. Wichita and Little Rock put aside their grifting ways and Tallahassee finds space in his vengeful anti-zombie agenda to care for other people. All they needed was to be free of the consumerism.
     
    Writer’s Note:
    There! Did it! It’s a little half-baked and there are some ideas that could be explored more (in the climax Wichita and Little Rock are stranded in an amusement park ride, trapped by their want for the vestige of consumerism that is Pacific Playland; Tallahassee wants a Twinkie which he only gets after he’s learned to be content with other people and not need something mass-produced), but, hey, this was more for fun/to prove a point than anything.
     
    Also I’m so sick of the word ‘consumer.’
  24. Ta-metru_defender
    I mentioned in my last entry that I've been running a Star Wars: Edge of The Empire RPG with some friends over the summer. Which is great, 'cuz I love tabletop and I've got a good group. So I'm gonna be rambling about those games on here.
     
    Let's start with the players; the crew of the Flying Flask. Character creation was a lot of fun back in June.
     
    First up, we have Tengen'benwen'henfen, a Chiss Pilot/Commando who, uh, pilots the Flying Flask. Ten's ex-Imperial too and, as such, has an anti-establishment streak a mile wide. The party recently found out that he was part of the Imperial Security Bureau, soooo there's some distrust there.
     
    Also aboard is Khal'ees'idrogorider, a Chiss Thief who also happens to be Force Sensitive and has a lightsaber, courtesy of a dead Jedi parent (the party didn't find this out until the third session). Leesi's a kleptomaniac and will pickpocket at will. She's also not that great at lightsaber and Force rolls, causing Ten to term her the worst Jedi ever.
     
    Jobi Kan Benwobi is the muscle. A big, hulking Nautolan Heavy/Marauder) with little willpower and intelligence, she befriended Leesi in an Imperial prison (Jobi was in there for tax evasion). Has a blaster rifle named Jobi Jr. with a bayonet. Very skilled in any form of combat and has blindly shot down stealth fighters by pure luck (multiple times). Also known to punch allies when overwhelmed by emotions during arguments. Also: Loves money. A lot.
     
    Then there's Francesca, a Twi'lek Charmer/Gambler. She will talk her way out of anything and everything and give inspiring speeches to allies during combat. Has a cybernetic arm after losing her left arm on Cholganna. Recently acquired some combat skills and, during what's probably her fifth session, got her first kill (there was much celebration).
     
    Lastly, there's Bobba Gump Fett, a Zabrak Bounty Hunter Assassin. Is known to disappear into, uh, seedier buildings of town and leave allies hanging. Has been stuck on the ship lately because the player hasn't been able to come to many sessions.
     
    The players, though, are their own beast.
     
    Ten is played by my brother, Benji, a total Star Wars nut who has some background in acting and writing. Studying to take over the world.
     
    Sasha plays Leesi, and she writes plays, movies, and everything else. Frequently dominates at Game of Thrones trivia.
     
    My girlfriend, Kat, plays Jobi. By virtue of hanging out with me she's a strong grasp of story. Unlike Jobi, Kat's a genius who's working on a PhD in Particle Physics.
     
    Benji's girlfriend, Jen, plays Fran. Science-type who's actually researching cybernetics and stuff along those lines.
     
    Bubba is played by Dylan, does advertising but also writing in free time. Also Star Wars nut.
     
    Having players who are creative types really helps; they'll get into character and throw a lotta curve balls around, even if especially when it screws with their goals.
  25. Ta-metru_defender
    Essays, Not Rants! 224: Regarding Movies About Two Superheroes Fighting Each Other
     
    If you were to put 2016’s blockbusters in a museum, Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice and Captain America: Civil War ought to be displayed next to each other. They’re the sort of movies that, when looked at together, take on a whole new dimension. Because one is far more successful than the other.
     
    To understand why Civil War succeeds, you don’t have to look much better than at how BvS fails. Both movies have the same conceit: Two heroes fight each other. Thus, if you want both characters to remain sympathetic, they’d better have a dang good reason to be fighting. Funnily, both movies end up on the topic of collateral damage. In Civil War, Tony Stark/Iron Man and Steve Rogers/Captain America disagree on whether to put the Avengers under UN oversight, something that is complicated when brainwashed assassin Bucky Barnes enters the fray, forcing Steve to go outside the law. Bam, conflict.
     
    In BvS, Batman doesn’t like how Superman is so powerful and causes so much collateral damage, and Superman doesn’t like Batman because he, um, takes the law into his own hands? Right off the bat the difference is clear, Civil War had a clear conflict, BvS was murky at best. Watching BvS, I was never sure why they were fighting, what it was they disagreed on. Furthermore, BvS has no complications in the conflict between Batman and Superman; they don’t like each other in the beginning, and continue to dislike each other the same amount until the fight. In Civil War the accords form the initial conflict, which then get complicated by Bucky’s reappearance and what they uncover about Zemo. Meanwhile, in BvS, the status quo between Batman and Superman doesn’t really change.
     
    Which is weird; you’d think that with Lex Luthor running around with Kryponite and Zod’s corpse he’d be in a good place to incite some tension between the two. However, he doesn’t have any direct bearing on the plot until he kidnaps and threatens Superman’s mom well into the second hour (blowing up the Capitol sends Superman into exile and doesn’t directly escalate the conflict between the two heroes). Compare this to Civil War, where Zemo (who fulfills the same role as Luthor) blows up the UN (and frames Bucky), thereby setting Cap on a path that’ll put him at total odds against Tony. That’s before he sets Bucky on the other Avengers too, by the way. In other words, Civil War escalates the animosity between its two heroes. By the time they come to blows, we totally get why.
     
    The coming to blows bit is where we see another divide. In BvS, Batman and Superman’s fight is just a skirmish before their big brawl against Doomsday. Civil War has a big airport fight with all the heroes happen before Steve and Tony’s one-on-one. This ordering shows where the priorities of each movie lie. See, you save the best, biggest, and most important climax for last. Rey and Kylo fight after Poe blows up Starkiller base. Frodo climbs Mount Doom after the battle of the Pelennor Fields. If the fight against Doomsday is the Biggest Moment of BvS, then the “Dawn of Justice” subtitle becomes the most important part. Which is weird, because the whole movie up to that point has been ploddingly trying to excite us to watch the heroes fight, only for the big thing to be them teaming up. Despite Batman versus Superman being the dang title, the ending tells us we’re not supposed to be interested in watching them fight. In Civil War, however, Steve and Tony throw down comes at the very end and proves a catharsis for the entire movie.
     
    Okay, so, there’s actually a lot more about these movies. Both of them have a third party who joins them in the climax, though where Wonder Woman gives interesting looks throughout, Black Panther brings an additional point of view to the plot and ends up being the only true hero. Both have heroes manipulated into fighting, but while Lex kidnaps Superman’s mom, Tony finds out Steve’s best friend kill his parents (and so Tony fights Bucky [and Steve] because he wants to, while Superman is doing it because he has to). Then there’s also BvS contorting Batman and Superman into being funhouse mirrors of their accepted selves to fit the plot, while Civil War sees Steve and Tony’s own flaws orchestrate their undoing.
     
    But I’m at my word limit and it’s getting late here, so I’m ending this here. Point of all this? Sometimes it’s worth watching a lesser movie to appreciate one that does the same thing better.
     
    Except for Fant4stic. That movie just tells you what not to do.
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