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pidayforpi · 4 years

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Alistair Boorswan walked down the street, past the lamp posts, avoiding illuminated areas.

Beak’s down. Hands in pockets.

Everyone knew him. Everyone knew he’s having a bad day. Everyone knew why he’s having a bad day.

It’s all on the news: The famous film director experienced his first project cancellation.

He who once walked proudly under the limelight, he who once strode with his head up...Gone in a single day, in a single fire.

He’s the first to make a reboot of the legendary Darkwing Duck. Now he’s the first to have the egg broken before it hatched.

To make it worse, he’s the first to ever seek funding from McDuck Enterprises. Now he’s the first to be refused sequential funding from Scrooge McDuck himself.

To make it even worse, he’s the first to allow a child to lead a film production. Now he’s the first to have his film production destroyed by a child.

Once the reigning king in the sector, now a joke in the industry.

If it wasn’t for the “mask” around his eyes, everyone could see the swan had been crying himself to sleep every night since.

Alistair pushed open the café door, the motion ringing the bell hanging from the door frame. It was awfully quiet in the café. Nice. Alistair didn’t want more attention. He’d had enough fun talking to the paparazzis.

“The usual?” Asked the barista. The owl behind the counters questioned his patron as he put away his book.

Alistair nodded. “No decaf this time, Franklin.”

The owl barista signed. “You ain’t gonna be up next morning, sonny. Don’t be a night owl like me.”

“Day and night seem the same to me, anyway.” Alistair said as he picked his usual seat: Next to the glass wall, observing the streets. “I would rather stay up all night and sleep all day. I don’t have to deal with anyone this way.”

Even without looking at his face, Franklin could see his customer’s devastated expression. Shrugging, the barista started brewing Alistair’s favourite espresso.

“Whatever suits you, buddy.”

———————————————————————————————

The bell rang again as the coffee machine rumbled.

Franklin raised an eyebrow as he fixed the beverage, but didn’t look back. If someone wanted him dead, he would be dead no matter he noticed or not.

Alistair also didn’t notice. His eyes were so fixated on the street at night, his ears so focused on the sounds of the city, he didn’t realise he was no longer the only customer in the shop.

Let alone that customer was someone he didn’t want to meet.

“Good evening. How may I help you?”

No response. Except for the sound of something metallic being dragged against the wooden floor.

It wasn’t the first time someone weird entered the shop. The shopkeeper had seen it all. But from the reflection on the silver coffee machine, the late night customer was someone he knew. Someone everybody knew.  The duck sat in front of Alistair, dropping his huge chainsaw onto the floor with a thud. It was half the height of the duck, not to mention its spiked tip was stained with blood. The intruder took off his oversized fedora, and tossed it to his side. His feathers were ruffled and unkempt, as if he had just been in a fight. An odour of pungent sewage water could be smelled from his body. A crazed, blue-green colour could be seen from his double-layered irises. If it wasn’t late at night (and the blood-stained chainsaw), Franklin would had kindly asked him to leave the shop.

It wasn’t until the duck placed his order that Alistair noticed his new, unwanted coffee mate.

“A cup of cappuccino, boss.” Ordered the customer in his hoarse, sickly voice.

Franklin replied with a nod, hands still focused on fixing his last order.

“Roger, Mister Starling.”

Alistair snapped out of his ponder when he heard the name he had feared for a month.

He shifted his focused from the streets to the pale reflection on the glass window.

He’s right there.

Just when he thought fate had taken everything away from him, someone’s there to take his life as well.

Alistair felt his body move on its own, standing up and reaching for the exit. It was almost like a reflex arc. He didn’t have to know for sure the danger in front of him. He’s making a run subconsciously.

Of course, his unwanted guest wouldn’t let the host leave before being at least greeted.

“Sit down, swan.”

With just a command, Alistair was frozen in place. The chainsaw was not even touched, yet he obeyed the order as if his legs were being amputated.

He instinctively looked at his opponent, and he regretted that very moment. When his frightened eyes met the killer’s powerful gaze, the calendar on the wall shifted back to a month ago.

In a burning studio, a wide-eyed Alistair stared at the charged cannon. When it fired, he would be a goner. He knew the “props” cannons were real - He saw the kid ordered them, directly from the laboratory. Those particles weren’t just special effects. They were real, lethal electricity. One shot, and his fast beating heart would stop. It truly was a miracle Drake Mallard survived the attacks.

Alistair had never been more scared in his life. Nowhere to escape in the fire. Nowhere to hide in the rubbles. Running away was futile: There’s no way he could outrun a lightning bolt. He ruined Jim’s career, and Jim was going to ruin his life.

“Jim Starling never cuts!” was what Alistair heard when he rushed to the recording camera. Yes. The legendary actor never allowed any failure. Not by himself. Not by others.

Jim failed to eliminate him the first time, he’s probably finishing the job now.

Franklin took a peek at his back to ensure his patron’s head was still on his neck, and hurried with both orders. The only thing he could do to avoid a murder was to facilitate the conversation between the two artists.

On the other hand, Alistair sat down meekly, hands on his laps, legs hanging straight down. Opposite of him, Jim got himself comfortable on the chair as if on a throne: One hand on the table, another supporting his tilted head. He sat cross-legged, his right leg hanging lazily on his left one. The only thing left to complete his criminal mastermind persona was his signature grin, which showed his sharp, menacing fangs.

But Jim right now was wearing a frown instead.

Alistair wasn’t more comfortable, though. He started fidgeting his fingers, his hand movements speeding up for each second Jim remained silent.

It didn’t take long for the awkward silence to break, thankfully.

“An espresso for you, and a cappuccino for you, good sirs. Enjoy.”

Franklin emerged from behind his counter, delivering the beverages to the two fowls. After his last orders for the night were complete, he returned to his reading, yet keeping an eye on his clients.

Rich aroma soon filled the seats. Jim was the first to take a sip at his cappuccino. Foam covered the tip of his beak when he put down the cup. Alistair dared not to mention it, let alone laugh at it, no matter how silly it looked. He used to be a smug person, saying out what was in his heart without filter. But not when his life was at stake.

Alistair didn’t touch his beverage for half a minute. His hands were still holding themselves tight, his eyes fixated on the duck in front of him.

“Drink it, don’t be shy.” Jim reminded (or ordered, in Alistair’s ears). “I ain’t paying for your cup.” Followed by another sip of his cappuccino.

Alistair slowly held out his shaking hand, putting a finger through the middle of the cup handle, pulled his drink closer to himself and paused. However fragrant the coffee was, Alistair couldn’t afford to let himself get blinded. God knows if he put down the mug after a sip, a chainsaw wouldn’t appear at his neck?

He predicted Jim would be impatient with his hesitation and yell at him. But he was just taking his time, waiting for his partner to get comfortable.

Eventually, Alistair pulled the mug close to his beak, and drank. A rather large portion of his espresso, mainly because he didn’t want to put down the mug. He wouldn’t want to know how he would die.

But he felt no pain. No sensation at all, except for the scalding hotness in his throat...

Alistair literally spat out the liquid back into the mug, choking and holding his burnt throat in pain. Jim, on the other hand, burst into laughter, holding his abdomen while laughing loudly in his dry voice. Hearing his mockery, another hot feeling emerged from his cheeks and ears, which were red with embarrassment.

If a passerby saw that scene, they would probably think it was a carefree reunion of two old friends.

Jim grabbed a glass of iced water from the counter, which Franklin had already prepared after seeing Alistair about to drain the freshly-brewed, steaming hot coffee. Jim pushed the glass of water towards Alistair, who immediately gulped down the whole glass and laid back in relief.

Alistair really did let his guard down for a moment, before again realising who was in front of him when the person spoke.

“Feeling better, Alistair?” Jim tried to comfort, showing a kind smile. No one called Alistair by his first name, not even Jim when they first met. Always “Mr Boorswan” or “Director Boorswan”. Alistair looked up and into those eyes, this time in confusion instead of fear.

“W-what do you...want from me?” Alistair finally spoke. “If you want my life, just...d-drag me out into a dark alley and chop off my head. No need for crocodile tears.”

Alistair lowered his voice, visibly sulking. “You know I can’t defend myself...I won’t defend myself.”

It was Jim’s turn to stay silent.

“I know why you are here. I ruined your only comeback chance. I let that brat destroy the movie. I couldn’t get that geezer to support the production. I...didn’t cast you as the main character. Your main character.” Alistair continued, each sentence making him remember what happened just a month ago.

“So you are here to take revenge on me. This classy British director who knows nothing about children’s TV shows. Who only loves disgusting, gritty psychological thrillers. Who...”

Alistair paused. Then again, Jim probably already knew the truth.

“...who broke his own neck, ruining his own career, dethroning himself from his own industry.”

He felt his heart getting sour. He was just a centimetre from crying.

“I have nothing more to lose.”

“If you want me dead, just do it. No one will be sad for me. I’m just everyone’s laughing stock now.”

He could feel the black feathers around his eyes got wet. The street lights outside the window blurred.

Jim let go of his cup, looking down at his feet. If it wasn’t for the tears, Alistair could see Jim’s eyes were filled with sadness as well.

“Forgiveness.”

Jim uttered.

“I want your forgiveness.”

——————————————————————————————

The store returned to silence, the rumbling of vehicles could be faintly heard across the window.

Franklin took advantage of the silence to interrupt.

“Want me to leave, misters?”

“No, it’s fine. Just don’t tell anyone about this, okay?” Jim replied to the barista. If Franklin left, Alistair probably wouldn’t want to be alone with Jim.

Franklin nodded, before focusing himself into reading again, silently listening to the conversation of the two.

Jim turned to face the surprised swan.

“I’m here to apologise, Alistair.”

Of all things, apologising was not one of the reasons Alistair thought Jim was here for him.

“You aren’t the one to ruin the movie. I am.”

Jim put down his originally crossed legs, both hands on the table.

“I was selfish, arrogant, rude...I thought I was and would be the only Darkwing in the world. The one and only Darkwing...the hero on the TV screen in the past, the memory in the heart of those then children in the present.”

“When I knew Darkwing was about to return - from a child, no less - I was excited. Too excited. I was blinded by past fame and former glory, that the excitement channelled into wrath when I knew I was being ‘replaced’. In fact, there wasn’t a thing called ‘replaced’. Darkwing Duck is a character. Anyone can play him. Just because I was the first to have the honour doesn’t mean I have to be the only one. I was just being a grumpy old man on the outside, a spoiled brat in the inside.”

Jim looked up from the table to meet Alistair’s blue eyes, making a sad, regretful smile.

“Not to mention that was your movie in the first place. Your artwork. You have the choice to let anyone past on and receive the torch. You have the right to make Darkwing the person you imagine to be. I should have just stayed in the auditorium and cheered for you.”

“An artist’s integrity really is sacred and inviolable, eh?”

Jim quoted the motto Alistair had lived by, the motto that had brought him to the top of the industry, that had given him the fame he once had.

“I shouldn’t have acted on my own. I shouldn’t have barged into the studio. Hell, I shouldn’t even have met you in the office the first day. You would have done better if you didn’t have me in your life.”

Alistair had been blinking rapidly to hold back tears, but now it was too much for him to bear. Alistair never thought that Jim would say sorry to him. Alistair never expected anyone would say sorry to him. But now, it’s as if someone was there to take the blame with him, standing up for him in front of the crowd. Someone was there to share the pain. Someone was there to be with him.

“I’m sorry, Alistair.”

Jim could see the swan sniffing and whimpering, his eyes twinkling with tears. Just after he said his apology, Alistair burst into tears. Teardrops ran from his mask to his cheeks, dropping onto the now warm espresso. Wails echoed throughout the coffee shop, cries filled the café. Alistair wiped the tears with his purple scarf, but a long accumulated cumulus would had to rain for a while.

Jim moved to the opposite bench, and gave the weeping swan a hug. Jim never knew how to comfort someone - He never would nor had to. Awkward it might be, he really wanted to do something for Alistair.

Surprisingly, Alistair hugged back. He couldn’t care more, whether the duck had any plans in mind, or just wanted to literally stab him in the back. He had been crying alone for so many nights, it felt like a blessing to have someone willing to lend a hand.

At least for one night, Alistair wouldn’t have to cry himself to sleep.

———————————————————————————————

“Okay, I’m good now.”

Alistair sniffed and rubbed his eyes one last time, before gently pushing Jim away. Jim pulled his cup from across the table, and pushed Alistair’s mug towards him. He emptied half of the cup in a single gulp, before returning to his rude self.

Alistair looked at the his mug, seeing his reflection on the liquid surface. He looked even more pathetic after crying, but his heart felt lighter.

Just when he was about to finish his drink, a strong, choking smell replaced the coffee aroma, making Alistair scrunched his face up.

Jim put down his cup to see Alistair staring at him while holding his nose. He stared back with a puzzled expression. “What? Coffee’s gone sour?”

Alistair shook his head, still holding his nose and breath. He pointed at the filthy duck in front of him with his other hand, and managed to whisper without using up much air. “You...stink.”

Jim blinked for a few seconds, and sniffed his body like a stray dog. He then retaliated, shrugging. “Then are you lending me your cologne, pretty boy? It doesn’t seem like you have used it for a month, anyway.”

“And your hair.” Jim continued, pointing at the swan’s supposedly groomed hair. “You look even worse than that Dorkwing boy. Don’t tell me the greatest director of all time can’t even afford a comb?”

“You were saying?” Alistair pointed back at the duck’s feathered whiskers. “You look like you haven’t taken a shower in a month. Don’t tell me the mightiest crime lord of all time can’t even afford a bath?”

Jim sat back, arms crossed. “Yes, I haven’t. Deal with it. It doesn’t seem like you have, either.”

“I...” Alistair paused mid-sentence, not wanting to admit the fact that he hadn’t been taking care of himself. It had been a month, and he already looked as though he was stranded on a deserted island for a year.

Jim sighed, putting a hand on Alistair’s shoulder. “Listen, you are one of the most talented persons I have met. From the papers to the TV, I have learnt a lot about you. Even my team knows you, Alistair! Some people may mock you for your failure, but many more are sad about it.”

Alistair looked up from the ground, turning to face Jim’s warm smile.

“A lot of people desperately waited for ‘Darkwing: First Darkness’, and despaired when it got cancelled. After all, who wouldn’t like a childhood reminiscence, brought to them by the one and only Alistair Boorswan? You don’t know how many people are sorry for you, how many people are cheering you on, waiting for you to come back.”

“McDuck won’t fund the movie? Glomgold and Waddles will! One wants to beat McDuck, while the other wants to get onto the red carpet. Find that Mallard kid - He is more than willing to cosplay. You’ve got the script done, the movie will be done in a jiffy. Make Darkwing a thing. Make your dream a thing. We are all artists, and artists got to do what they think is art.”

Jim picked up his fedora, rubbing its scratched brim edges. “I won’t be able to join you on set this time, but reserve a seat for me at the premiere. Five seats, to be exact. I’m sure my boys would beg to see it.”

The duck suddenly put his oversized hat onto Alistair’s head, covering his eyes. Alistair protested a bit, before struggling to get the accessory off. He held the worn-out fedora tightly with both hands, about to return it to its owner before being declined.

“Keep it. Consider it a parting gift. For now, at least. We will surely meet again, Alistair.” Jim winked at the swan, who put on the hat after a nod.

“Before then, don’t go dying, m’kay? I’m waiting to kidnap you at the prize-giving ceremony, so don’t prepare too long a speech. Alright?” Jim held out his cup towards Alistair, signalling a “cheers”.

Alistair took a silent deep breath to suppress his surging emotions, and held out his own mug, bumping the duck’s cup.

“Alright. I promise.”

———————————————————————————————

“They’re on the house, celebs.”

Franklin confirmed when Alistair was about to take out his wallet.

“That’s for your patronage.” The owl barista motioned to Alistair with his book, and then shifted to Jim. “And that’s for not making my shop a crime scene.”

Jim snickered, and picked up his chainsaw from the floor. “Thanks, boss.”

“Thank you, pal.” Alistair smiled at Franklin, waving goodbye with his new red fedora before being stopped.

“One thing in return, director.” Alistair looked over his shoulder to face his old friend.

“Make that six seats, capiche?”

———————————————————

(I don’t really have much to say but I want to say something)

-I lost track of when I started writing this. I finished it on July 7, and coincidentally, the local TV broadcasted “The Duck Knight Returns!” (DT17 S02E16) on July 5.

-Also I couldn’t think of an interesting title.

-I really want to see more of Alistair Boorswan (or at least, Jim Starling, please?) in Season 3. I really like Alistair he’s so cute okay?

-sorry edgar wright

(I blame @sheepmouse for my sudden surge of interest in Alistair Boorswan/Jim Starling.)

#alistair boorswan #jim starling #negaduck #ducktales #ducktales 2017 #the duck knight returns #story #short story #storyteller

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incarnateirony · 4 years

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God as I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten so cynical about idealization.

In the last few days across various private messages to various friends I’ve said the following things about not understanding people iconizing old SPN as dark or gritty:

Diet dark

Dark but airing at 7PM for teenagers on the WB dark

Dark but airing two hours after Pinky and the Brain dark

Dark but on Fridays at this time I flip a channel to watch a talking cat dark

I’ve said, for example, it wasn’t dark or even gritty really. It was still hollywood glamor, if a little less than it is now. That it was dusty, more than anything

Dusty like offroading in your prius and forgetting to wash your car dusty

Dusty like hitchhiking and maybe stealing some over the counter eyedrops to trade back in for cash and buy a cheap motel room dusty

Dusty like transporting goats in the back of my Corolla dusty

Dusty like that time I slept in a junkyard dusty

I have become an EXCESSIVELY cynical bitch, I see.

Maybe it’s because my life *was* dark and full of grit. Maybe it’s because I DID blaze a dusty path. Maybe it’s because just about anything the guys did in the first few seasons, I did before I hit puberty. Maybe it’s because I lived that and could see through the hilarious glamorization of it all. I don’t know.

Like, do I MISS the vibe of the old seasons? Sure, sometimes. Which is when I, like, go to netflix and watch the first few seasons for that vibe. I much prefer this thoroughly fleshed out and constructed style of modern storytelling in general, but there was in fact a fun Americana vibe to it. I’m not saying it wasn’t fun. But people act like old SPN was some peak macabre horror psychological thriller and not a teenage drama with overexposed lensing for bleached film stock. And that goes on both sides with people talking about it being “problematic” or whatever. Beyond the old era rimshots at gay people and the habit of discarding female characters or whatever -- while, protip, we all tuned in to a show featuring white male leads by choice -- like.

I don’t get it. I literally do not get it. Like as hard as people have romanticized one idealization, it’s like for the sake of argument against the fanon romanticization of that idealization they’ve excessively piled on and built up something to dismantle that barely existed to begin with and, what did exist has literally been show dismantled. Now either side of the fence will scream “codependency, true love/problematic” if brothers like. Breathe in each other’s vicinity. Or don’t just casually let the other die bloody and alone. You know. Basically, whenever they aren’t being absolute terrible human beings that don’t give a shit about their family at all, this flips into magnetic polarization in fandom dialogue. Like, sis, they're eating sammiches. I don't need a 5 page essay on how this "deconstructs the codependency." Dabberens have been on a warpath ever since they dropped Red Meat as the cornerstone sure but literally they're eating bologna and playing foosball chill out.

It’s one thing to like, hm. Take a highlighter to your favorite elements in fanon spaces. Write fics or art that deepen a particular theme or tone. But it’s another thing to like, hold evolving canon to the precedent set up in your own mythologilized fandom spaces.

Things that have /objectively/ changed in the show:

- Genre/cinematography; lighting and set adapted from vaguely horror-esque (halfly to hide the terrible makeup and CGI) to high fantasy over time (in which increased lighting shows that terrible makeup and CGI). Not liking one or the other? VALID!

- Character focus: The first several seasons were pretty much just da bros. Carver era extended into Team Free Will even if people hit denial waves about it. Dabb era seems to play ship-juggling acts and does openly engage in sport like “Oh wow, Rowena is flirting with Cas, I wonder if they’re gonna be a thing :)” while shoving some Sabriel or Samwitch in the way between more central pairs like Saileen or Destiel. Not liking one version or another of this? VALID!

- Mythology: Old SPN demonized literally any tradition that wasn’t christianity. Their alchemists and shamans are, respectively, kind of offensive. Carver only used the established races and a very vague cain and abel concept. Modern SPN is using alchemy and philosophy formerly villainized under the Calvinistic lens. Not liking one version or another of this? VALID!

- Core Principles: While “Family don’t end in blood” has always been there, the current author room’s statements about believing in hope or heroism over tragedy /are/ distinctly different than tragedy-oriented old SPN with the faintest lick of hope-ish-seeming-things with Lisa’s “never too late” kinda slapped on at the end to vaguely tell us there’s silver linings. Characters aren’t fighting just for survival all the time now, they’re often fighting for silver linings. Or gold ones right now. *rimshot* Not liking one version or another of this? VALID!

- Rule of Cool: Literally, this was a thing, and then it wasn’t. Kripke picked cars he liked because he liked them and thought they were cool. Kripke picked guns he thought were cool. Kripke picked name spellings he thought were cool. These are all things he’s said, like, on the record. This is also why the early show attracted more dudes that also operated on Rule of Cool. But maintaining cohesion required less and less rule of cool and more and more intertextual and subtextual poetry that gave less “plug whatever you want in the space with the cool shit” room and more “infinite amount of material that, while defined, all has flexible potential if you think about it and how to employ it.” Not liking one version or another of this? VALID!

Noticing change is /fair/. It’s /valid/. You don’t have to /like/ the change.

Hell. This started addressing fandom romanticization of the early seasons but let’s not pretend Destiel fandom doesn’t have its own versions of this. All the different wings that romanticize the weirdest fucking eras as “the best” rampage too. Like the parts you like. Enjoy content how you enjoy it. But when you build up a romanticized version of a product in your head, you can’t expect the product to perform like the romanticized version.

I know first memories are powerful. Nostalgia is powerful. But have you ever... like... gone to turn on a movie you loved as a kid 15, 20 years ago or whatever and load it up now and realize like, “Wow, I used to like some stupid shit.” And hell. We may even acknowledge it was stupid shit and STILL like the stupid shit. Or the stupid shit may annoy us know, depending. Who knows? Not to say seasons 1-2 are “stupid shit” if you will (or whatever season, 4, 8, whatever Destiel fandom may argue about as The Best on a given day) -- but it feels like attaching to these characters, and then arguing about these characters, without EVER unplugging from the content at all has made people lose that perspective where we, IDK, turn Digimon back on for the first time and go “oh wow this is a lot dumber than I remember it being (but it’s still fun)”. Yes, Pikachu IS annoying to hear squeaking constantly like your parents said before you lit up in holy, righteous fury defending the sparking rat. No, that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun watching the reboot of Mewtwo Strikes Back. It just... perspective.

I dunno. Maybe fandom will in fact pan out differently in 15+ years once people have had the chance at this kind of down time.

Random thoughts.

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faneliacosplay · 6 years

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Top 10 of 2018

C2018 was a year is this nicest way I can sum it up. My precious fur-baby passed away after fighting a horrible illness and is in a happier place, my health went crazy (still is as of writing), and I finally broke free from an abusive toxic person who had been controlling me for a huge chunk of my life. Despite the bad things that happened, I want to focus on the good things of 2018. One of things I began doing in January of 2018 was at the end of every week, I would write down all of the good things that happened to me, be it sewing, watched a good movie, spending time with a friend, etc. So without further ado, here’s my Top 10 of 2018! (I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S ALREADY MARCH!!)

1. The Ancient Magus’ Bride

- I’ve been a lifelong fan of Beauty and the Beast-like stories ever since I watched the classic Disney film. The manga kept popping up in my recommendations for the majority of 2017 and I remember seeing a poster at my local theater for a premiere showing of the first 3 episodes of the then-upcoming anime (I have since regretted not going to this showing). I finally caved and bought the first two volumes of the manga and literally went back to the store two days later and bought the next 2 volumes. I’ve always been a very picky person with my romance be it movie, novel, anime, manga, etc., but this quickly became one of my favorites with it’s excellent world-building, relationships, and don’t even get me started on how gorgeous the animation is! If you want an excellent Beauty & the Beast adaptation, you won’t be disappointed. (I am unashamed of crying happy tears in public while watching the final episode)

2. Satoshi Kon’s Filmography

- My New Year’s resolution was to watch all of the late Satoshi Kon’s works, starting with his debut film Perfect Blue. I had wanted to watch this film for several years, and it did not disappoint. (I kept spamming for people to go and see it when it got a theatrical re-release in Fall 2018) Next was Kon’s final project Paprika, which I watched about 3 times in May and many times over 2018 and still notice something new every time I watch it. Finally, I watched *the* film that I have wanted to watch for many, many years (since 2004 to be exact): Millennium Actress. I was not prepared for how moving this film would be with its themes of the past vs. present, how an ordinary encounter can lead to something so much more, and lastly: love transcends time. If you could only watch one of Satoshi Kon’s works, please choose to watch Millennium Actress. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to watch Kon’s other two works, but I aim to in 2019 (along with reading his works)

3. Slayers

- I watched some of Slayers back in middle school and in summer 2016, but never took off with it until in 2018. I knew I would like this funny series about the adventures of a fiery sorceress, dumb as a stump swordsman, optimistic hero-in-training, and an overly-serious chimera, but I had no idea it would become one of my top 10 favorite anime series! I haven’t laughed so much with an anime in a while, and I greatly appreciated it since my fur-baby passed away and this was one of the last anime we watched together. There’s just something about 90s fantasy anime that’s just so appealing. I will throw in that while I love the tv series, the films are worth watching too, with The Motion Picture being my favorite. If you need something to cheer you up, I highly recommend Slayers!

4. Venom

- Confession: I did not have high hopes for this movie. I was the only one among my friends who was uninterested in this film whenever we would watch the trailers/promos/etc. Eventually after this movie came out, my friends and best friend convinced me to see it. My sociology buddy told me “This movie wasn’t marketed right! Go see it!!” and another told me “This is the best action rom-com of 2018.” The next day my family asked me if I wanted to see it and Bohemian Rhapsody (also an excellent film) and I said “Sure!” This film has since spawned never-ending jokes between me and my best friend. (I ended up making her a Venom scarf for Christmas!) If you’re trying to get someone to see this film, don’t show them the trailers depicting it as a dark, gritty, action thriller, show them the home video trailer depicting it as a rom-com because that’s exactly what it is. I still can’t believe that a movie about a human falling in love with a man-eating gooey alien is real.

5. The Shape of Water

- “2017 will be remembered as the year men screwed up so badly, women started dating fish.”- Jimmy Kimmel, 2018 Oscars. I’m beginning to see a pattern for stories of humans falling in love with monsters. My mom and I wanted to see this film after the trailer dropped in summer 2017 and were disappointed when the film didn’t play here. However, sometime in February 2018, this film played in our town for one weekend, so we dashed to the theater. I don’t even know where to start with how beautiful this film is and since several people I know still haven’t watched it I’ll just state this: Please watch this film. It earned the 4 Oscars it won. (It earned all 10 it was nominated for!)

6. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse

- I almost didn’t see this film. 2018 was a pretty hectic year for me and I didn’t really keep up with films/entertainment news, so I saw no trailers for this film (except for a really short tv ad). All I knew was what my best friend had said: “Brianna, let’s go see Spider-verse. In 3D.” (y’all, 2018 was the year of listening to my best friend) It was so nice not only to see a different Spider-Man, a diverse cast, a well-curated soundtrack, and a completely new style of animation that makes you feel as though you’re reading/watching a comic book??? Sign me up! I’m so happy this film won the Oscar!!

7. Macross Frontier Movies

- I’ve fallen deep into the Macross hole in the past year or two and have no plans of crawling out. The 2008 series Macross Frontier was my first and favorite entry in the series so far. I knew that there were two recap/alternate retelling films made, so when I was free one day I watched them and I was really surprised that I enjoyed them more than the tv series!? I haven’t really mentioned this, but my big problem with the tv series of Frontier was it’s ending being not too good. I don’t want to ruin it since Macross (particularly made after 2001) is a bit unknown in the USA, but I will say that if you want to get into this franchise, start with the Frontier movies or with the iconic Macross: Do you remember love? film. The music is just as good as the tv series, same with the costumes, and the writing is much better! The performance of Northern Cross at the climax of The Wings of Goodbye was really moving. Not “Do you remember love?” moving, but pretty close.

8. Sailor Moon Theatrical Double-Feature

- Everyone who knows me knows that I’ve loved Sailor Moon for pretty much all of my life (ever since the 3rd & 4th seasons aired on Toonami back in the day!) A holiday tradition for me was to watch the 2nd theatrical every Christmas Eve, unfortunately my two VHS tapes finally gave out in 2016. Thanks to Viz Media, this past summer saw theatrical re-releases of all 3 Sailor Moon films. Shockingly, my local theater was showing the films subbed so my mom and I bought our tickets right away. It was so surreal seeing these films that I grew up with on the big screen, and I know non-Sailor Moon fans won’t get this, but hearing/watching the whole “Moon Revenge” sequence in the theater was so intense. This part never got to me as a kid for some weird reason and I had no idea I was crying until my mom pointed it out at the end of the film. With the 2nd film, seeing Luna transform into a human was emotionally moving as always, just 10 times more since it was on the big screen with that nice surround sound system. That night when I got home, I didn’t get any sleep since I still couldn’t believe that this happened. The now 20+ years old Sailor Moon movies got released for the first time in USA theaters. This is an experience I’m going to remember for the rest of my life.

9. Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card Arc

- I was so excited when a sequel to Cardcaptor Sakura was announced. Like Sailor Moon, I watched this series as the heavily-edited Cardcaptors on Toonami. When I got older and learned that there was more anime out there besides the ones I saw on TV, I went back and watched Cardcaptor Sakura to get the whole, magical story and even read the manga, which I believe is the greatest children’s manga ever made. I loved every single moment of the new series and felt as though I were watching another episode of the classic series. The only thing that felt different was that the animation is no longer hand-drawn. (it’s still good) When you reboot or make a sequel to a series be it tv, film, or book, sometimes it’ll miss the charm that made it so enjoyable in the first place. Clear Card thankfully still carries the charm its predecessor had.

10. Little Witch Academia

- I had started this anime around holiday 2017 but didn’t finish it until early 2018. This was one of the most optimistic series I’d ever had the pleasure of watching. I don’t want to compare the two, but the inspirational message that Kiki’s Delivery Service gave me when I was 10, was the exact inspirational message you will find in Little Witch Academia. (and that I needed to hear as a 20-year-old) I was starting to get a bit depressed and losing confidence in myself with my science grades getting lower no matter what I tried, as well as other things in my personal life. After dropping Science, I had a long wait between classes, so I decided to start watching Little Witch Academia again. Seeing our protagonist Akko trying her best at flying a broom and failing was me with my science grades, but her determination to get her broom just a few centimeters off the ground was so inspiring to watch. After this I watched the other Studio Trigger works I had yet to see, and while they’re all good in their own way, none of them have left the imprint LWA left on me. Sometimes when I get frustrated or lack confidence in myself, I tell myself Shiny Chariot’s words of wisdom that motivated Akko throughout the series: “Never forget your beautiful dreams. Believing is your magic!!”

#2018 #2018 in review #The Ancient Magus Bride #millennium actress #satoshi kon #slayers anime #lina inverse #venom #the shape of water #into the spider verse #macross frontier #sailor moon #cardcaptor sakura clear card #clear card arc #little witch academia #brianna talks #slayers

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rwbyconversations · 6 years

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DmC Devil May Cry- Six Years Later

A few weeks ago, I wrote an essay about Dante from the Devil May Cry series and his character development across his six mainline appearances. Doing it got me thinking about the franchise and got me to get around to finishing the DMC games I own in my possession- Devil May Cry 4, which has a great combat system but is let down by having far too few environments and missions, and DmC Devil May Cry, the black sheep of the franchise and one of the most controversial reboots of a franchise. Finishing DmC gave me a perspective that only finishing something yourself can provide.

I’d owned a copy of the original launch version of DmC but found it dreary and sold it less than a quarter of the way into the game, before grabbing its Definitive Edition during a Christmas sale on really a glorified whim- sort of a “Let’s see how bad it can really get” vibe, but then I put it down and didn’t come back to it for three months because other games and other projects took prominence. But about a week ago I was bored and decided to knock the entire game out in one day due to a lack of anything better to do, and after a few days to mull on it, I decided to write an essay about DmC and how this oddball entry into an otherwise mostly beloved franchise has aged.

1) Pre-development

Devil May Cry 4 was a success for Capcom, selling about two million units in its first month of release when Capcom were hoping for 1.8 million by the end of the fiscal year. On a critical level too it walked away satisfied, with Metacritic rating both the PS3 and 360 releases of the game with 84/100, praising the fluid gameplay and intricate combat system, but knocking points off for a very repetitive campaign which saw Dante literally backtracking through Nero’s stages. But Capcom were hoping for more from DMC4. This was the debut of the franchise on not just the Seventh Generation of Consoles, but the franchise’s Microsoft debut, and the hopes were that DMC4 would be a smash success potentially on par with the numbers Western games like Call of Duty 4 or Halo 3 had made the year prior. 2.1 million was still good, but Capcom wanted more.

The mid-2000s marked a turn in Japanese game development, with the increased costs of HD modelling and Japan’s home market becoming more apathetic about buying games (some Japanese games reported only 10% of their total sales from Japan itself), while the West began booming. With the 7th Generation, gaming went mainstream for many people in the West- as an example of this, I’m sure we all know at least one person who went to college after 2007 and can share stories of nights spent playing Halo over XBox Live. The mass success of the God of War franchise in the West also told Capcom that this gold mine of a market was ready and willing to enjoy some classic hack and slash action gaming.

The decrease in local sales gave Capcom the idea that they needed to begin outsourcing their properties to the West so they could appeal to a larger market, which led to such projects as Lost Planet, Dead Rising and Bionic Commando being made by Western studios. This was largely the brainchild of Keiji Inafune, nowadays known for the utter disaster of the Mighty Number 9 Kickstarter game. Inafune had a mindset of “doing the same thing is going to get us the same results (if we’re lucky). Let’s try something from a different perspective.” Unfortunately for Inafune, his different perspective failed to set the world on fire, with only Dead Rising proving to be a success and making it into the 8th console generation when handled by Capcom’s new Vancouver team, and even that series has suffered some fatal blows due to the poor launch of Dead Rising 4.

Even though Inafune cut ties with Capcom in 2010 (a month after DmC was announced), his idea of Westernizing several dormant properties was still in effect and Devil May Cry became one of the franchises that was outsourced. British company Ninja Theory, known for their games Heavenly Sword and Enslaved Odyssey to the West, were the company Capcom gave a phone call to. While known nowadays more for Hellblade, back in 2010 Ninja Theory were known for two very simply action games that relied more on their stories and usage of motion capture and facial captures to fill in the gaps. What didn’t help was that in the interim period between 4 and the reboot, DMC1 director Hideki Kamiya had since formed Platinum Studios and proven themselves to the West with Bayonetta, a game hailed by many as a spiritual successor to the DMC franchise.

Capcom had faith in Ninja Theory to translate DMC’s vision to the west, and as such at TGS 2010, the first trailer for DmC Devil May Cry was released and... well the rest is history.

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The fanbase’s hackles were immediately raised and knives were out within seconds of the launch trailer dropping. A series that had become known for its over the top cutscenes and wry sense of cheesy humor had been Westernized into another gritty, bleak product. Dante went from the goofball who quoted Shakespeare to a gravelly voiced methhead who smoked. And for a series that prized itself on action and combos, that no proper gameplay was shown at the reveal was a worrying sign. The reveal trailer tainted the whole game right out of the gate; alongside Ninja Theory’s less than stellar track record with action games the fanbase was ready to hate this game on principle if it followed what had been done to Capcom’s other franchises that went on a foreign exchange trip.

Being fair to Ninja Theory though, several extenuating factors must be addressed. Among them is series director Hideaki Itsuno’s admission that he didn’t want to do Devil May Cry 5 yet after having worked on three straight games for the series out of concern that he would suffer from burnout. He wanted to go off and finally make a passion project he had been dreaming of for years in Dragon’s Dogma, which launched in 2012. Additionally, Ninja Theory did try and make a more faithful rendition of Dante, one who even kept the white hair and vibrantly red jacket, but these initial designs were shot down by Capcom, who told them to “go crazy.” In fact one of the people who rejected the designs that were close to classic Dante was Itsuno himself, who saw little point in Ninja Theory just copying Dante’s look if the whole point of the project was a new approach on Devil May Cry.

But the fanbase at the time didn’t know that Capcom were actively encouraging Ninja Theory to experiment, and what didn’t help was the quotes coming from the game’s director, Tameen Antoniades, which would prove to be a series of disasters that plagued DmC’s PR campaign. Tameen, put bluntly, wasn’t ready for the backlash to the game and its visual style and shot back at the fans. When asked by Venturebeat how he felt about the fan reaction to the TGS trailer, Tameen “took a drag of his cigarette and without blinking or pausing to exhale the smoke from his mouth, said: ‘I don’t care.’” People began to mockingly compare Tameen to Dante as seen in the trailer, which caused some fans to question if Tameen had used his own likeness as the basis for Dante.

And unfortunately for Capcom’s PR team, he didn’t stop there, mocking Dante’s original design in a later interview when saying that what was and wasn’t cool had changed in the years since DMC1: “If Dante, dressed as he was, walked into any bar outside of Tokyo, he’d get laughed out.”

I’d like to remind you that Tameen as director of the project likely signed off om some of these alternate concepts for Dante and keep that in mind whenever Tameen or a Ninja Theory staff member talk about A) what is and isn’t cool B) Original Dante’s character design.

The fanbase didn’t exactly make a good case for themselves after the game’s announcement though, with Ninja Theory reporting that they received death threats from some more hardcore fans. It still doesn’t make Tameen admitting he didn’t care if his game sold “a thousand or two million copies” look stellar, nor his derisive attitude towards the original series and its depiction of women, mocking Lady and Trish as “prostitutes with guns.” Ironically, despite being insistent that he’d made the game he wanted to play, Ninja Theory did dial back on methhead Dante, redesigning his model to be more beefy and replacing his voice actor, alongside redoing some scenes to make Dante crack more jokes.

On a technical level, hype was low from the hardcore fans due to simplified combat and, more egregiously, the game being locked to 30FPS on launch unless bought on PC which offered an upcapped framerate. For those unaware, all prior Devil May Cry games had run at 60FPS, including DMC4 which had come out some years earlier on the same console. 60FPS was a requirement by many pro players due to how it made animations silky smooth, so DmC being capped to 30 was an immediate red flag. Suffice to say, the fandom was ready for DmC to be a disaster at launch and began prepping their funeral pyres.

2) Gameplay

Early reviews for DmC were quite positive, with the game earning a Metacritic rating about even with DMC4, but the fanbase were far less forgiving. The 30FPS framerate lock outside of the PC port (which was admittedly one of the more polished ports of 2013, as covered by the late and great John Bain) had tainted the well pre-release and then came back with a vengeance to haunt the console launch in 2013. Without a lock on system, movement felt sluggish compared to the other games, hurting the flow of combat.

Difficulty was a major criticism of the game from long-term fans, particularly pertaining to how the style rank system rewarded damage done over pulling off varied combos. Whereas in the older games the player was punished for repeating moves over and over, DmC’s style ranks were so easy to abuse that so long as the combo was never broken due to taking damage, achieving a SSS rank was child’s play. Aquila’s Tornado and Arbiter’s Trinity Smash were especially broken in this regard.

Being fair to the game, it did introduce several mechanics that were later incorporated into DMC 5 in 2019- enemies get a subtitle during their first appearance (taken from Bayonetta), weapons getting a slight glint when the player pauses to let them know they can launch a pause combo attack (also taken from Bayonetta) and a dynamic soundtrack that racketed up the higher your style rank got, alongside the killing blow at the end of a fight getting a cinematic camera angle. These are all features that were genuine improvements over Devil May Cry 4, and while Bayonetta likely paved the way for most of these improvements, DmC still served as a test-bed to experiment on their integration with Devil May Cry as a whole.

The level design was also a huge step up from the earlier games. Dante’s whip functions made platforming far more varied that it had been in prior games, and these new traversal mechanics allowed for the level designers to stretch their legs. DmC arguably has, even in light of 5, some of the best platforming in the entire franchise, and a gorgeous color palette in some areas when Dante is in Limbo. Gothic European cities were cited as a huge influence by the team, Barcelona in particular, and it shows whenever Dante is outside as he gets dragged into Limbo. The idea of the city itself being a weapon of Mundus that tries to kill Dante is inspired, with obvious homages to Inception, and allows for the designers to make environments that at the drop of a hat can try to kill Dante. The team did their best to bring their unique aesthetic mixture of grunge and color to life, and even goes through a full color script. The downside is that exploration is rarely allowed beyond side paths that lead to collectables, meaning the player is on rails for much of the game.

DmC’s largest gameplay addition is in Dante’s Devil Arms. As he progesses through the game, Dante absorbs angelic and demon weapons from the bosses, gaining Angel Weapons that serve as fast crowd control, and Demon Weapons that are single-target but heavily damaging. Both of these sets of weapons are accessed by holding a trigger button during combat, allowing Dante to fluidly switch between weapons as the situation calls for it. One of my personal favorite applications of this tactic was to use Rebellion’s opening two slices to lead into Arbiter’s Trinity Smash as it was easier for me to read the above-mentioned glint tell on Rebellion. Alongside Dante’s firearms, it gives the player eight different weapons to switch between in combat, allowing for some unique combo potential, albeit potential that isn’t as deep as the original games. Dante losing his styles from DMC3 and 4 alongside the unique moves from those styles like Royal Guarding and jump cancelling was a particularly heavy blow for the hardcore fans, to say nothing of the revulsion generated by the color-coded enemies who could only be hurt by specific weapons.

Another heavy blow for the fans was the handling of Dante’s Devil Trigger, which gives Dante his traditional color palette, slows time to a crawl and gave Dante an attack and speed boost, alongside automatically sending most enemies flying into the air upon activation. The air-boosted hurt the usage of Devil Trigger in the long run, as it reduced whatever encounter it was activated in a stomp for the player- even Dante’s basic combos could tear through enemy health with DT active. Devil Trigger in the original games was a mixture of emergency button and power boost, but here it just serves as an “I win” button on whatever enemy irks you today.

And yet for all that can be said of DmC at launch, it could have been worse. Despite being busy with Dragon’s Dogma, Itsuno still served as an executive producer of the reboot and often gave Ninja Theory advice on areas to improve the gameplay mechanically. One such story goes that Itsuno saw a design for an enemy with blades in its arms. Upon asking what purpose the blades served in combat and being told they had none, Itsuno ordered that the blades be removed. Capcom producer Motohide Eshiro later noted in a Famitsu interview that Ninja Theory had to be reigned in on several occasions in spite of the “go crazy” approach given to them in early design, in order to avoid the game receiving a rating that could potentially stonewall it being sold in physical stores in Japan.

Ultimately the gameplay failed to impress for DmC in 2013, which reflected poorly in its sales. Capcom initially hoped for DmC to break 2 million units like DMC4 had back in 2008, but then quietly lowered the projected sales to 1.2 million. Rumors circulate to this day that Capcom were so desperate to boost the game’s poor sales that when DmC was part of the PS+ membership offer in January 2014, Capcom counted PS+ downloads as part of the sales for the game. In a financial report for 2013, while not speaking of DmC by name, Capcom spoke of a "delayed response to the expanding digital contents market," "insufficient coordination between the marketing and the game development divisions in overseas markets," and a "decline in quality due to excessive outsourcing." Capcom would only report in June 2018, a full five and a half years post-launch, that DmC had met the original sale goals of 2.3 million units. But it wasn’t the gameplay that ultimately turned off the fans and prevented Capcom’s sales pitches from becoming reality. No, that matter fell to the story.

3) Story

DmC’s story isn’t so much a straw that breaks the camel’s back, as it is an anvil. Regardless of your opinions on the gameplay, the story is where DmC comes to a grinding, screeching halt and fails to capture any of the essence of what made Dante and characters from the original setting interesting or even cool. Before we dive into the narrative itself, we need to discuss what started the controversy back in 2010 at TGS, and that’s Dante.

Dante is simply not likable in the reboot. While the original Dante was a goofball and a bit of a jackass, he always backed up his actions with flashy deeds and was ultimately a good-hearted man. In this setting, Ninja Theory try so hard to make Dante cool and badass that it loops around and makes him look like a petulant child’s version of what’s cool- a hard-drinking loner who has threesomes with strippers in his trailer by the amusement park. Dante in DMC4 threw Shakespeare quotes out at Agnus, while Dante in DmC screams “Fuck you!” at demons and writes profanity on clipboards. Nothing about Dante carries that effortless swagger that the original had. His smug, IDGAF attitude tries to make him cool and more fitting for the gritty tone but it’s so different from the original Dante that the subsequent tonal clash makes Dante a much more poorly written character. Again, this is something that must be put at Capcom’s feet and not Ninja Theory, as they were the ones telling the developers to westernize Dante, but the end product stills fails to match up with what came before.

While Dante does have an arc over the game that sees him develop concern for the people close to him and humanity as a whole, the characterization and framing regularly undermines his arc. Dante is written as the archetype of “Jerk with a heart of gold,” but as a direct violation of a core rule of this character- that they must be fun to view and see their antics as an audience member- Dante fails to meet this tenant and it makes his obnoxious, smug and asshole moments taint the character and make it difficult to care for his struggles. Rather than see Dante’s dark backstory that puts his behavior into context and makes you understand why he’s so sullen and bitter, the audience just sees Dante being a smug jackass, and one who takes himself too seriously to be fun like mainline Dante. The one time I buy that Dante genuinely cares for other people is at the Order hideout raid when he stays in order to guide Kat through being arrested, and stays with her as the SWAT officers shoot her and beat her unconscious. His facial expression sells his anguish at seeing Kat be brutalized like this and it contains the best acting from Tim Phillips.

Ironically, despite how hated Methhead Dante was, I do have to wonder what the game would have been like had the developers stuck to their guns and committed to their original idea for the character- someone with psychosis who has no clue if he’s actually seeing and killing demons or if he’s just a mass murdering lunatic. It might have been even worse or it could have made the game work. It’s probably for the best we don’t know what Methhead Dante would have been like, but part of me can’t help but wonder.

It’s important to understand all these problems with Dante, since as the protagonist, the story partly rests on his shoulders. While older Dante had the charisma in most of his appearances to be able to sell the weight of a story moment when he stopped fooling around, reboot Dante’s heavy angst focus means that feat is harder for him to accomplish, and it doesn’t help that his supporting cast are less than ideal.

I mentioned earlier Tameen’s “prostitutes with guns” remark aimed at the DMC female cast, and I think it’s amazing how little self-awareness he must have had to say that when his own story’s approach to female characters is frankly insulting. DmC has one of the most sexist stories I’ve yet seen in any media, and it’s galling when compared to the mainline entries, DMC3 in particular. Kat, Eva and Lillith are all plot devices, Eva being long-dead and existing just to give Dante motivation to kill Mundus, Lillith being the stereotypical sexy villainess who gets reduced to her womb, while Kat is basically the subject of a snuff film with how she gets brutalized by the plot and the camera makes sure you see all of her injuries in extensive detail. And this all goes without saying how the second act revolves around the two female characters in the narrative being traded like Pokemon cards only for Vergil to perform the now-infamous sniper rifle abortion.

It doesn’t matter what joke you’re making in your head right now, it’s still not half as tasteless as this actual scene

Speaking of Vergil, his depiction in DmC is genuinely upsetting and while I’ve seen people argue for Dante’s arc in the reboot, Vergil is almost universally despised and seen as a black mark on the prime version of Vergil. Putting aside the sniper rifle abortion, Vergil is just not written well and he never gives the impression of being powerful. Vergil’s opening scene has him say point-blank to Dante “I’m powerless to stop you,” words that should never flow out of the mouth of anyone claiming to be Vergil. It doesn’t get much better as throughout the game, Vergil hands all the major physical parts of the plan against Mundus to Dante to preserve the secret of Vergil’s Nephilim heritage. The problem with this is that Vergil subsequently never gets to show his stuff in a fight until the very end of the game when he fights Dante and suddenly has a lot of his moveset from the old series transplanted. It makes moments like Vergil hiding behind a barrier at the hands of one demon that Dante has to kill undermine his character and make him look like a coward, to say nothing of his awkward heel-turn which just shows up for the sake of having a final boss. Compared to the depiction of Dante and Vergil’s rivalry in Devil May Cry 3, which was amazing on a thematic and character level, DmC falls flat on its own shoelaces. And the character Vergil gains through his DLC is just further unpleasantness as he rips off Bleach and the Hollow Ichigo fight wholesale. Vergil is just a mistake in this game, and alongside Dante is the cardinal sin in its writing.

Mundus represents a lot of the larger problems with DmC’s story, in particular its on-the-nose message and symbolism. The game is so focused on making sure you get the point that “Hey, we’ve seen this niche film called They Live and it’s the sickest shit also FUCK THE MAN, CAPITALISM SUCKS, WAKE UP SHEEPLE,” that Mundus doesn’t really get to be a proper villain. He’s just this stereotypical slimy corporation guy, with one slight hint to his character in that he’s obsessed with continuing his lineage. The problem is that his lack of writing makes him boring and one-note, a cliche rule-the-world dictator that’s been done to death. He’s not even a major threat in gameplay, his boss fight just being a giant blob monster. It’s visually drab and has the most boring boss fight in the game. Mundus may not have had much personality or screentime in the original DMC1, but he made up for it with a powerful presence that made him feel dangerous. This Mundus is just a bald guy in a suit. The only fear he puts in me is the fear that I’ll drop my controller when I fall asleep.

DmC’s story is a mess. While structurally well-put together, its dialogue is often weak and cringeworthy, most of the villains have no real staying power beyond Barbas, Vergil is a waste of the character name, Kat and Lillith are plot devices and Dante is just a jackass. It’s a cast of unlikable people being unlikable jerks to each other and when the story it’s making me sick with how repulsive it can be with its tone deaf themes and sexism, it’s putting me to sleep with how fucking dull it is.

4) Definitive Edition

The post launch years of DmC weren’t kind to Ninja Theory or Capcom. Capcom retracted their Western development philosophy after a string of flops resulted from it, while Ninja Theory became the whipping boy of the action community for several years post-launch, which led to the now infamous GDC presentation where Dante was photoshopped onto scenes from Brokeback Mountain by someone who had no hand in designing Dante’s old costumes:

Revenge, evidently, is a dish best served cold

What didn’t help them was that 2013 also saw the launch of Metal Gear Rising Revengeance, Platinum’s take on the Metal Gear franchise that quickly gained the adoration of the action fanbase while leaving DmC in the dust. According to Dante’s voice actor Reuben Landgon, Itsuno apparently was extremely close to retiring after DmC, and Capcom had to offer him the chance to finally make DMC5 before he decided to not quit (though this story has been disputed by Capcom USA producer Matt Walker).

Capcom, like many publishers, has taken Sony and Microsoft both refusing to have backwards compatibility in the PS4 and Xbox One as an excuse to re-release many of their old titles on the new console platforms, often slapping a new coat of paint onto the game and potentially adding achievement/trophy support and calling it a day. In the case of DmC though, the team went above and beyond in solving many of the mechanical problems that players had complained about in the following two years.

Released in March 2015, DmC Definitive Edition was handled more by Japanese side of the Capcom team, and they set to work on making DmC more mechanically in-line in with the mainline entries, as covered by this extensive changelog. 60FPS was an advertised feature on the box, Dante got multiple costumes that let players play with white hair, the style rank system was retooled to punish repetition more harshly and a slew of balance changes were made to the core game- some even based on PC mods players had made of DmC’s original PC port like a lock on function, though sadly the adventures of Donté, el exterminador de demonios didn’t serve such a function.

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Rest in piece, you brave soul.

The Definitive Edition goes leaps and bounds in solving the pressing issues of DmC. With the combat balanced and framerate bumped up, the combat had a much better flow to it. In particular the addition of a new mode, Must Style, where Dante can only damage enemies when he has an S Rank or higher, received a warm reception from the fans to the point where it was hoped that DMC5 would adopt it. With the DE upgrades, DmC goes from a flawed game with potential to being one of the best attempts by the West to emulate Devil May Cry’s frantic, stylish mode of gameplay while adding variety to how the combat and level design was handled. But even two years on, the damage had been done; while Definitive Edition was well-received by hardcore fans, it still failed to set the world on fire sales wise, and in fact was outsold by DMC4′s own HD remake that launched that year, even though the Special Edition was a digital only purchase outside of Japan. In fact, DMC4SE’s sales were so strong Capcom noted them as being behind the company having a good financial quarter during 2015, which many saw as an ironic nail in the coffin for any hopes for the DmC universe getting continuation.

There was no saving the story unfortunately, barring removing Vergil’s laughably pathetic fedora and one especially cringeworthy line from Lillith (”The world is at last your bitch, as am I. Nothing left, but to grab it by the hair, bend it over and-”), which means that much of the issues that DmC’s story presented are still haunting the overall product. One new scene added in the game has Dante calling out Vergil for shooting Lillith and causing countless deaths from Mundus’s rampage, but the scene was itself criticized for missing the point in the fan anger to Vergil’s .50 caliber coat hanger. And the further away the player and time gets from DmC’s outdated-at-launch messages and symbolism, the more the script just fails to entertain or educate, leaving just apathy and the ability to mock it.

5) Conclusion- Left in Limbo

DmC Devil May Cry is... alright. It’s not the worst game I’ve ever played and there’s far too many good things here for me to even call it a boring game. The level design and color palette has real moments of beauty, the combat system is a decent showing from Ninja Theory with Capcom supervision and the Definitive Edition showed that the teams from both cultures acknowledged the feedback and made a more mechanically satisfying game to play. DmC is one of the best Western attempts at emulating the over-the-top action of Japanese games alongside Darksiders 2 and does deserve credit for being a satisfying experience to play.

Where it falls apart is whenever control is taken from the player. This story is just terrible and wrought with bad choices that haunt the entire experience and taint the game by association. DmC’s cutscenes are almost slimy in how detestable they are, and it is odd that they inspired such loathing from me on my first run while I was left feeling nothing towards the entire cast other than pity towards Vergil due to what had been done to him on a writing level. I must repeat that I have never played a game as derogatory in its depiction of women as DmC and I pray I never will.

DmC is a flawed experience, perhaps one that you should experience yourself so you can formulate your own opinion on the matter. I wouldn’t recommend it for full-price but if you see it on sale for ten bucks, you can do worse- if nothing else, get some friends over and laugh at the story to get past the cutscenes and onto the mostly-decent gameplay. But you can also do a lot better, being honest. Ultimately DmC is this weird relic of Capcom’s attempts to branch out into the West, and one that ultimately just.. happened with no real lasting impact. Itsuno went on to make DMC5, Ninja Theory and Tameen redeemed themselves in the eyes of many with Hellblade and then got bought by Microsoft, while Capcom finally started to turn around and starting with the 8th console generation, made a concentrated effort to return to the “Capgod” reputation that they had before the 7th gen. Everyone came out of this story with a happy ending and got what they wanted, but that leaves DmC as this odd relic of a weird time in gaming, albeit one that certainly made... memorable experiences.

Thank you for reading.

I guess a million years just comes in at... about five or six.

#devil may cry #dmc devil may cry #dante devil may cry #devil may cry 5 #vergil devil may cry #devil may cry analysis #kat devil may cry #ninja theory #capcom #hideaki itsuno #tameen antoniades

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0bfvscate · 6 years

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Bright Movie

Screaming ‘We’re broken people now’ for every minor inconvenience is now an inside joke btwn me and my friends

Will Smith talks to his unnamed wife about the fairy at their bird feeder for a solid five minutes. I clocked it. Nothing happens in that entire scene. It’s just two people standing at their counter talking about the fairy in their bird feeder.

Will Smith goes outside and it is like the director is interrupting his own movie to tell me about how much he loves Boyz n the Hood

WHY ARE HIS NEIGHBORS HAVING A COOKOUT AT 7AM!?

Almost everyone in this movie is either a cop or a hilarious throwback to depictions of gang violence in 90′s tv and cinema

At one point a character actually turns to Will Smith and says “Yeah, they’re gangbanging up at Altamira like it’s 1999.”

It was at that moment that I paused the movie to google the director and discovered he directed Training Day (2001)

Not surprising to learn in the middle of a movie so dated I could have used it to do the dude’s horoscope

"I wish you weren’t a cop. Everybody hates cops.” Hey David Ayer this is a movie about fairies not Training Day 2. How about you spend a little more dialogue explaining why Will Smith’s daughter needs to go to Grandma’s house, anyway?

Five minute exchange between Will Smith and Jakoby about how orcs can smell basically anything, from lies to sexual frustration. It was at this point that I wondered who was shipping the two leads.

Worldbuilding in this movie is nothing but exposition and news clips, but there is one scene where they go into ‘Elf Town’ and we learn that all elves are rich, because..............................

All orcs are discriminated against because they sided with the Dark Lord 2,000 years ago. “Wait a minute,’ I said to myself. “Does this take place in Middle Earth?”

The movie continues without answering this question, or explaining how the Dark Lord differs from Sauron in any way

In fact, there is no evidence within the film the Dark Lord isn’t Sauron, which really makes me want to see the gritty urban reboot of Hobbiton

While we’re talking about Hobbiton, where is the rest of Middle earth in relation to Modern Day LA? And how did magic influence colonial expansionism?

Everybody hates Jakoby to the point of violence and wants Will Smith to distance himself from him to prove he’s one of the Guys. Will Smith plays a very good Racist Who Doesn’t Think of Himself as Racist

Will Smith stops the car in front of a full-on beating, turns to Jakoby, and asks him what comes first; the Police Department, or other Orcs. This is terrifying and watching Jakoby stutteringly swear his loyalty to the cops makes it worse.

The movie basically acts like this scene never happens again after this point. Will Smith sort of redeems himself by the end of this movie, but not by apologizing or recognizing his mistakes.

David Ayer is at my door, knocking, asking me if I liked Dirty Harry.

One of the best scenes in this movie is watching the LAPD talk down a man covered head to toe in mud, swinging a sword, and screaming bout prophecies. I feel like this is the kernal of idea that the whole movie sprung from, and if the rest of the film started there and built on it, it would have been AMAZING.

Unfortunately, it turned into one of the weaker parts of the movie. This character does one more mysterious thing before he is revealed as just another stock character from a cop drama, this one being the position of a low-level urban disturbance. David Ayer shows his inexperience with real people like this by not ever explaining what’s actually wrong with him. The character is part of some secret magic club that everyone talks about as being sssuuUUUuuper important, but we literally never see them again.

A shoot out happens.

Tikka the Elf is introduced. She wears overalls, does backflips and doesn’t speak English. David Ayer breaks into my house, hits the pause button, and tells me much he loved Milla Jonovich in the Fifth Element

Tikka can only move by backflipping or being physically carried from place to place

The audience is introduced to the Magic Mcguffin that will carry the plot from here on out. It seemed a little silly, but the non-powered casts’ response to it feels very authentic. Their response is exactly why stories like this persist.

Unfortunately, this scene is also used to show why the Mcguffin is so difficult to wield, and the ensuing chase scene instantly stops making sense

One member of the antagonist raiding party grabs the Mcguffin in order to bring it back to his employer and not only disintegrates, but takes out three people in his cohort as it’s happening.

The Mcguffin can barely be transported safely

In Repo Man (1984), the Mcguffin is equally powerful and equally dangerous, and part of the plot is that absolutely nobody wants it. I feel like this would have been a better story to use at the foundation then Training Day or Escape from New York, which the writing team seemed to be drawing from

There’s also a convenient excuse to keep the cast within an accessible range to the plot, otherwise they would catch a plane to Argentina or something

There’s an effort to make elves seem scary, as if making them scary is a deconstruction in and of itself. It’s like the past seven Tolkien movies didn’t establish that Elves are killing machines who are against genocide by the grace of God

Orcs threaten to kill them even though the text of the movie says they should be honorbound to protect them

A prophecy gets brought up again and the soundtrack acts like that’s a big deal, even though we have no idea what the prophecy is and we’ve been following boring gangland violence for over an hour

Chicken Tikka is sick, dying and speaks English

It’s a good thing she is, because the plot was at a complete standstill

David Ayer is watching the Fifth Element on my computer next to me while I try to focus on his film

So we go back to the house with the underdeveloped anti-magic cult/gang and Noomi Rapace is playing Chicken Tikka’s abusive ex-girlfriend even though the script identifies her as her sister. I have to wonder where the decision to sex up this interaction was, and why they didn’t just have them be ex-lovers since that’s clearly what everybody on set wanted.

Will Smith reveals himself as the only person in this film who can use the Mcguffin

At the end of the movie Jakoby is super excited about being a part of a prophecy that I still don’t know. I’ll never know.

Super long, awkward comedy scene in a hospital that doesn’t advance the plot and doesn’t feel natural

Where was the editor

Was there an editor

Oh god finally we’re at the end of the movie and complaining about the events of the movie being edited for public consumption, but as they’re falling quiet and accepting the doldrums of everyday life, they see Tikka in the crowd and the end credit music starts

IDK why that was shot as some kind of touching and poignant scene. We’ve known for thirty minutes now that she survived.

Usually in movies like this, as the protagonist is settling back into their everyday life, we see a glimpse of the wonders behind the veil to offer hope and excitement for future adventures

But this is a world without a masquerade, so there is no veil, and we know that magic is still alive and well in this world

In conclusion, this movie is great to get drunk to and scream at with your friends

#bright #netflix bright #urban fantasy #fantasy #low fantasy #long post #review #sporking

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themyskira · 6 years

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Wonder Woman Annual #2

Previously in FUCKITY FUCK FUCK I FORGOT THERE WAS AN ANNUAL AS WELL: Diana prepared to face down her most terrifying foes yet: the Dark Gods.

Who or what are the Dark Gods? Dunno.

What do they want? No clue.

What is this awesome and terrible power that they wield? So far, mostly just the ability to shoot lasers out of their eyes and incite people to deliver badly-written villainous monologues.

Why are we supposed to be so pants-pissingly afraid of them? Because James Robinson told us so.

Last issue ended with the Dark Gods manifesting over Washington DC, at which point it was revealed that they are… giant floating statues, I guess? But, like, scary floating statues. With lasers. So scary.

And then moments later, a couple of Star Sapphires arrived to whisk Diana away so she could appear in this shitty annual.

Diana is teleported to the Star Sapphires’ home planet of Zamaron, which is heavily battle-damaged.

The two Sapphires who brought her here are called Miss Bloss and Miri Riam, who are apparently pre-established minor Green Lantern characters — something I had to figure out on my own, because Robinson just assumes we all known them, and that Diana does too (I’m reasonably sure they’ve never met). The one time his overexplaining might have actually been useful, and he couldn’t be arsed taking a panel or two to make introductions.

Diana yells at them that she’s too busy to help with whatever their deal is, and launches into a recap of last issue. But, you know, that was all of two weeks ago, so by all means, spend a page getting us up to speed.

She’s also still throwing around ‘crazy’ and ‘insane’ like they’re going out of style.

“…and although I’m not certain — the woman who told me was insane at the time--“

How about ‘possessed’, ‘out of control’, ‘somewhat incoherent’ or ‘compromised’? Any of these would be more accurate in this context, as well as not equating mental illness with dangerous and violent behaviour.

But anyway, essentially Diana says ‘my world is being attacked by the Dark Gods and it’s my fault’, and Miss Bloss is like, ‘well, if that was your fault, then our thing must be your fault, too’, and points up at the giant floating Dark God statue thing that Diana has somehow failed to notice until this exact moment.

Oh, goody.

Diana starts questioning them about what happened. Honestly, that’s really all she does these days. If she’s not delivering plot recaps herself, she’s setting up allies for flashback-exposition or allowing villains to monologue at her. Oh, sure, occasionally she fights somebody, but mostly she’s just a vessel for tedious exposition.

Miss Bloss describes the Dark God’s attack:

“Even to recall it now, it feels like a dream or vision from another world. Almost like we were looking at ourselves from outside of it all.”

The first time I read this, I took it to be a figure of speech. I interpreted it as an expression of Miss Bloss’s deep level of shock at the devastation she’d experienced, that it still felt unreal, as though it had happened to somebody else.

I was giving Robinson too much credit: he meant it literally.

As we’ll learn in a few pages’ time, one of the Dark Gods has some kind of power over people’s perceptions, enabling him to induce in others a sense of unreality and dreamlike detachment. We’ll learn that the Dark Gods have deliberately used this ability in order to confuse enemies and limit their ability to respond to or even comprehend attacks.

Frazer Irving — who illustrates the flashback, along with a couple of other scenes in this issue — plays into this well. His stylised art and colour work lends a somewhat eerie dreamlike quality to his pages, creating a sense of altered reality.

Unfortunately, Robinson can’t write dreamlike.

So what in theory should be an eerie, confusing, unreal flashback instead just turns into Miss Bloss telling us that her memories of the attack are eerie and unreal and hazy… aaaaand then proceeding to describe the attack, the enemy, his name, the concept he embodies, his powers and the precise reason why he was able to kill so many Star Sapphires, all in exacting detail.

The Dark God who attacked the Sapphires is called Karnell and he calls himself the god of love, but the love he embodies is dark and gritty and edgy and corrupted. He can sense any ‘impurities’ or ‘flaws’ in a person’s love and rub it in their faces. When he does this to Star Sapphires, something something their rings freak out and they spontaneously combust.

Diana asks, ‘yeah okay, but you didn’t know that this was my fault when you dragged me here, so what gives?’, and Bloss and Miri are like, ‘welp, our leaders are all dead, Carol Ferris is busy in another comic, we all frankly suck, and you were a Star Sapphire once in that Blackest Night crossover event.’

At which point I went, ‘wait huh what??? but that was before the New 52 reboot!’, before remembering that Geoff Johns’ entire preboot GL run survived the reboot for no other reason than because Geoff Johns gets whatever he wants.

Diana agrees to lead the Sapphires against Krakoom (I’m sorry, I’m not going to bother to learn his name, he’s not worth that kind of time), and the Sapphires respond by giving her the Nazi salute due to an unfortunate artistic miscalculation.

Diana: And if I am going to stand among you — fight alongside you — let me look the part. Sapphires: As you wish it, so do we, Wonder Woman… be a Star Sapphire once more.

And with that, they give Diana a makeover.

It’s not a bad costume, especially when you compare it to her Blackest Night design. That one tried to ape Carol Ferris’ hideous then-costume, which featured hip cut-outs and a plummeting neckline that ended around the crotch area, by giving Diana a bathing suit with hip-holes and a bared midriff. This design retains many familiar Star Sapphire costume elements — the stiff pointed white collar, the combination tiara/mask, the starburst symbol, the long gloves and high boots — without going into creepy male-gazey territory.

buuuuut it also looks like Diana is wearing a pink apron over her usual costume, and that is something I cannot get past. It also varies wildly across the issue, depending on which of the four credited artists is drawing it.

By the way, I say ‘makeover’ because despite violet blaze on her right ring finger, it took me several times flicking back and forth before I was certain that Diana had been deputised into the Corps as opposed to just being given a new costume in order to “look the part”, as she put it. I know this sounds like it should have been self-evident, but Robinson gives absolutely no indication of any deeper change in her. Not even lip service to the fact that Diana is connected, through the power ring, to the emotional spectrum and the violet energies of love.

Contrast this with Diana in Blackest Night: Wonder Woman #3:

“Extraordinary. All of them, in their way, have tried to explain it to me before. Hal, John, Kyle… even Guy, may Ares watch and aid him. But it defies all attempts. There is no way to describe it. What it is to wear a power ring, and feel emotion made manifest. To wear fear on anger or will or hope on one’s hand… To wear love. Too beautiful for words…”

There’s a lot about Wondy’s Blackest Night tie-in that’s flawed and frustrating and flat-out bad, but this page gets it right. If you’re going to make Diana a Star Sapphire — going to give one of the most loving hearts of the DCU the power to channel her love into tangible power — then you need to acknowledge the weight of that.

In this comic, it’s as insubstantial as a costume change.

Flying up to confront Kratakoa, Diana wonders if she could really have summoned the Dark Gods. Supergirl said she brought them into this plane with a careless wish, and… oh, come to think of it, she did inadvertently make a wish during the recent Dark Nights: Metal crossover, while coincidentally handling some magical wishing metal. But nah, that couldn’t possibly have done it!

She reaches the big floaty statue and a bloke with spiky wings emerges from it. It’s Klangalang, and he’s got his monologue cued up and ready to go!

He opens with a fairly standard ‘ahaha, I’ve been expecting you, hero!’, and the implications fly straight over Diana’s head.

Kibble: You came, Amazon! Sooner than I expected, too! Good… I’m going to love this! Diana: You’re some kind of seer, too? You expected me?

Let’s review: The villains Diana supposedly summoned, the villains who have been trying to kill or neutralise Diana before she can interfere in their plans, have attacked the Star Sapphires in advance of their invasion of Earth. Despite not knowing about Diana’s connection to their attacker, the Sapphires reached out to her for help, teleporting her away at almost the exact moment that the villains launched their opening assault. Now the one villain who hasn’t joined the invading force is cackling that he’s been expecting Diana.

Even a half-competent hero should be able to join the dots and realise they’ve been deliberately lured away. Not so Robinson’s Diana, who gazes at him wide-eyed and demands, ‘omg, u expected me? are u psychic or sumthin???’

After a couple more rounds of obscenely dense questions from Diana (along with another out-of-character ’crazy’ slur), Klunk ends up having to straight-up spell it out for her. He also explains how she summoned the Dark Gods.

Krunch: You wished for the gods’ return. Well, here we are. Here I am! Diana: Like a dream, but yes, of course. But I meant the Greek pantheon, not— Krump: Gods! That’s all you said.

Small nitpick: Diana would not think of her gods the “Greek pantheon”. She’d be more likely to call them “the Patrons”, “my gods”, “the gods of my people”, “the gods of Themyscira”, “the gods of Olympus”, “the Olympians” — she knew them as all of these things long before she knew Greece, or any world outside her island home, existed. The only reason she might refer to them as “Greek” is for the benefit of people in Man’s World, as a point of reference.

More importantly, are you friggin kidding me, the friggin layers of incompetence here from our supposed hero

accidentally makes a wish while wielding a weapon of magical wishing metal

manages to make the vaguest wish possible, opening a loophole for THE WORST GODS to infiltrate reality

immediately forgets she ever wished it

why would she even wish for that?! her gods haven’t gone anywhere!

To be somewhat fair, the reason she doesn’t really remember it is that “the God With No Name” (YES REALLY) made it all feel like a dream so that she wouldn’t realise she’d made an irresponsible wish and needed to immediately rally everybody together to resist the Dark Gods.

Except… that in itself doesn’t make any sense.

There are two possibilities here: the Horse With No Name could have clouded Diana’s memory of making the wish after the Dark Gods were pulled into this reality — in which case, why? How would she even land on the conclusion that she’d accidentally summoned some evil gods that she’d never heard of, when her intent was to call on her own gods and she’d had no indication that it had even worked?

Alternatively, he clouded her mind in the moment of the wish, to render her thoughts vague and imprecise and open the door for the Dark Gods’ invasion. Which doesn’t work either, because it turns out that the Dark Gods are pretty pissed off at being pulled out of their awesome reality.

King Koopa: War was declared the moment you dragged us from our home… our beautiful world — which you regard as the ‘Dark Multiverse’ — we see as a paradise… where we were more than even gods to our worshippers… we were everything!”

So basically their plan is to turn Earth into a desolate hellscape just like their home.

Diana, who has already been told that Kraig is a god of corrupted love, conveniently forgets this fact just so that Robinson can tell it to us again.

Diana: You call yourself a god of love. What kind of love wants to be feared? Love is unconditional. KHAAAAAN: Spoken like the addled naive romantic I expected. Love always comes with conditions. Sometimes, I confess, I question… am I god of that love, of those conditions behind it? But then I realise… I don’t care.

Cool story. Glad we can agree on one thing, at least.

He monologues for a couple of pages about how he’s going to open her eyes to the truth of how horrible and selfish and corrupt love is, then draws Diana into his mind so that he can monologue some more.

We learn that the world of the Dark Gods was forged by a group of divinities called Titans, “much like the reality of your own Greek pantheon” (incorrect, you’re thinking of the Protogenoi; the Titans were the second generation of gods). But because these Titans were hardcore, they did it by smashing five other realities together. And into this terrifyingly dark edgy metalscape came… +~teh D4rK g0dz~+

Robinson then undermines the super-extra-double-dark feel he’s going for with another embarrassing name and an accidental rhyme.

“We Dark Gods followed, as gods do. King Best and then the rest.”

KING. BEST.

But wait, we haven’t even gotten to Kalamazoo’s dark edgy totally original backstory!

In fact, this is so dark and edgy and original that I’ll throw in a quick content warning here for descriptions of domestic violence and shittiness towards sex workers.

“You’ll meet a boy — his mother broken by a wanton father who forced her to cheapen herself further with wraiths and under-beings. The mother died — beaten to death. When he saw her blood still dripping from the fists of his father, the boy ran, fearing the same fate. The boy loved his mother, but hated his father and the world. Both emotions — love and hate — burned so brightly that even from within the darkness of our world, their glow caught the eye of mighty King Best.”

Domestic violence! Sexism! Slut shaming! Fridging! It’s like a game of grimdark bingo!

After three goddamn pages of this, Diana suddenly twigs what we all figured out eleven pages ago, ‘oh now waaaaaait a minute, you didn’t lure me here so that your buddies could invade Earth while I’m distracted, did you?’

Klinger responds by almost murdering Diana, and is only stopped by the intervention of the Star Sapphires. They all retreat, and Diana proposes a new plan: all the Sapphires will channel their energy into her, something something, true love wins the day.

So Diana flies up to Kimberley, sword held aloft and blazing with violet energy, and announces, ‘boy did you make a mistake when you told me that you used to be a sad boy child! now I have only love in my heart for you!’

Karma Khameleon is like, ‘oh no, love! my one true weakness!’, and I’m like, “d… didn’t we just have this story?”

Then Diana straight-up stabs him with her love sword, and Korgo fades away with an ‘I’ll beat you next time, Captain Planet! Next tiiiiiime…’

Diana farewells the Star Sapphires, and Robinson shoehorns in this bit of virtue signalling:

Miri: Please… Diana, think of us as your sisters, too, for all time. Diana: Or “brother,” I notice. Miss Bloss: Love is love, no matter who bears the heart.

This is a welcome and needed change to the Star Sapphires. The fact that they have been portrayed up until this point as an all-women corps (with the exception of a few briefly deputised blokes) is bound up in ugly gendered ideas, exemplified by Geoff Johns’ comment in 2009 that “anyone can join, but most men are not worthy”.

But there’s something gratingly self-congratulatory in the execution of this course correction. Robinson’s doing the absolute bare minimum here — including one or two male background characters in a handful of panels — and flagging it as progress with a phrase associated with the LGBTI community. We haven’t even seen a single named male Sapphire, let alone one with a speaking part; I think it’s a little premature to be looking for kudos. And either Miri or Miss Bloss could very easily have been replaced in this story by a new male character.

The Sapphires teleport Diana back to Earth, where she finds DC a smoking ruin. And as the air clears, she sees—

—wait for it—

—this is truly shocking and terrifying—

THE DARK GODS MADE A MEGAZORD

THEY MADE A FUCKING MEGAZORD WITH THEIR DUMBASS FLYING STATUES

A GODDAMN MEGAZORD WHO WHAT HOW WHY.

Diana’s face does this:

#the james robinson shitshow #comics talk

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whattheschmuck · 8 years

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Dear Crystal Dynamics,

For the next Tomb Raider game I would like to see several things happen:

**I had made a post like this on Twitter fairly recently and figured it would be prudent to share my thoughts on here as well. Please note that there might be several add-ons in this post (meaning that some of these weren’t on my Twitter list).

1.) Sam.

I have to say it right off the bat: Lara is a flat, one-dimensional character without a fun-loving foil there to interact with her, emphasize different parts of her personality, and help bring her to life. The human, relatable side of Lara is what brought so many new fans to the series in 2013, and without Sam we don’t really get to see that side of Lara. Crystal Dynamics, you should really reconsider throwing away all of that untapped potential.

2.) Tombs.

I want to see tombs that are central to the plot rather than being added into the game as optional extras. After all, isn’t the game named Tomb Raider?

3.) Puzzles.

Speaking of tombs, the puzzles need to be made more difficult and logic puzzles need to be incorporated rather than only having the standard physics puzzles. I want to be shown how brilliant and intuitive Lara is.

4.) Globetrotting.

I want to see Lara actually go globetrotting rather than recycling the “stranded and fighting for survival” trope again...and I’d like to add that it is possible to follow through on this suggestion and keep the current combat and leveling systems. All you need to do is provide us gamers with several regions/maps to explore (each having their own plot-centric tombs too, of course!). I don’t care if the map sizes are cut down to facilitate this--you can get rid of all the extra outfits for all I care! When we, as gamers, are told that Lara’s going to be globetrotting we expect to see actual globetrotting! Having a single Syria segment does not count, sorry.

5.) “Daddy Issues.”

NO. DADDY. ISSUES. Please! It’s such an overused trope in every TR-verse and it directly contradicts who the Lara you’ve created is! How is she supposed to make a name for herself if she’s stuck following daddy’s research and walking in his shadow? It’s a double whammy: it compromises the integrity of her character and strips her of her independence--which happens to be one of the traits that made her so awesome in 2013! Just let Lara be her own person instead of defining her by who her parents were.

6.) No Hero Cliché.

If you want to make Lara a reluctant hero then by all means go for it! But don’t make her a white knight. That’s not who your character is and it’s not who you’ve developed her to be. Lara’s a survivor who is setting out to make her mark, to find adventure. Focus on that and Lara’s own personal interests. If she has to stop a big bad cult of religious fanatics to get what she wants, so be it. But don’t make this a narrative of “Trinity is bigger than I ever imagined. They have to be stopped.”

7.) Better Villains.

The villains in Rise were weak and underdeveloped. Take Ana for example, she was so transparent that her betrayal didn’t even come as a shock to me...why else would you guys throw a shady character that we’ve never met before into the game if not to have her be an antagonist? Here’s the frustrating part: she actually had the potential to be a wildly complex and multidimensional character--she just didn’t get the development she deserved. I didn’t know what hers and Richard’s relationship was like, I didn’t know what kind of a relationship her and Lara had or how close they were, I didn’t even know if she was lying when she said “I loved Richard” or if there was actually some capacity for moral ambiguity there! I swear, this kind of waste should be criminal.

8.) Enemies.

There needs to be a better variety of enemies in the game than what we’ve seen so far. I mean, the very first Tomb Raider game had dinosaurs in it for Pete’s sake! And while I’m not saying you need to throw dinosaurs into the next game, what I am saying is that I’m tired of fighting dudes with machine guns and immortal warriors. You clearly want to delve into the supernatural with these games so do that! Create something wacky and terrifying yet still fun to fight because you pretty much have full creative freedom to do so here--your imagination’s the limit! And while you’re at it, please give us a real boss battle!

9.) Gameplay.

Bring back the days of boat chases down the canals of Venice. Add more variety to the gameplay instead of serving us yet another plate of mass slaughter. For example, let us play through flashbacks instead of making us watch them. Or better yet, Rise took place in Siberia and Trinity clearly had a lot of technology at their disposal, right? So how about a high-speed snowmobile chase across Siberia’s treacherous terrain? Variety.

10.) Stop Clumsy Croft 2K17.

Stop making Lara look like the clumsiest, most lucky bint in human existence. Literally everything falls apart beneath her; it’s overused and it actually has the complete opposite effect of what you apparently intend it to have. Instead of putting me on the edge of my seat, stuff like this actually detracts from the drama of the game because I’m more focused on making fun of Lara for being worse than Nathan Drake in terms of breaking pretty much everything in sight despite being a brilliant young woman who graduated from UCL, one of the top-ranked universities globally. Cut back on this and show us that Lara has gotten skilled and hardened since Yamatai. Show us that she’s the Tomb Raider.

11.) “A Hardened and Experienced Survivor.”

Shouldn’t Lara have retained something from the island if she’s supposedly more “experienced”? I’m not saying that everything has to carry over from the previous game, but I shouldn’t have to relearn how to recover arrows from corpses. I also feel like a “hardened survivor” would at least be prepared for an adventure with a pistol, survival knife, and some rope. Worried about people who are new to the series having a steep learning curve? Put in an optional tutorial sequence at the beginning of the game. Otherwise just take a leaf out of Uncharted’s book and combine the tutorials with the actual gameplay.

12.) Improved Melee.

I cannot stress just how much this needs to be addressed. Tomb Raider’s melee combat system is imprecise, clunky, and just not that effective in actual combat. Here’s the thing: we know that Lara’s a bit of a scrapper based on the fight she had with the Trinity thug in Croft Manor around the beginning of the game. So why can’t we get her to fight hand-to-hand like that in the actual gameplay? Even if she lost her fight with the thug, she certainly seemed a lot more effective in close-quarters combat in that cutscene than she ever has in actual combat with her axe(s). I get that using the climbing axe as a weapon is becoming sort of a trademark for reboot Lara, but it’s just not practical and I personally feel like it should be dropped as a weapon (besides which point she already has the bow as her signature weapon). Explain the melee change as being a result of her having taken self-defense classes following the events of Rise. Just do something.

Below the read-more link is a continuation of this list with things that are a little bit more of a personal preference than the things I’ve listed to this point. Feel free to look over them if you want!

13.) Dual Pistols.

There’s a legitimate canonical reason for this. As we all (hopefully) know by this point, Roth was not only a father figure to Lara but also her mentor. He taught her everything she needed to know for survival--including how to fight. Now, Roth also preferred to dual-wield pistols so considering that and the fact that he is the one who taught Lara to fight, it’s not unreasonable to assume similar fighting styles between them (when Lara’s not scavenging for weapons). Thus: Lara dual-wielding pistols. It’s a nice way to honor Roth’s memory in future games and it gives a neat (in my opinion) backstory to Lara’s iconic dual-pistol combo. CD, make this happen!!

14.) Companions.

The presence of helpful companions (for select missions) who can hold their own can only help enhance the overall gaming experience. Having companions (like Sam for instance) would give Lara some people to banter with and help bring her character back to life. Making Lara a lone wolf hasn’t done anything for her character, there’s too much missing without someone else for her to bounce her thoughts off of. At the very least I would like to see Lara communicating with other people on an earpiece. The main thing is to have her consistently interacting with others who actually know her in some way, shape, or form because that’s when she shines.

15.) Scars.

This is actually more important than I think you realize. Give me the actual scars from Yamatai, not this thing you’re doing where the only scar you gave her is the Vladimir-pistol-whip scar artistically placed beneath her right eye. It’s cool that you included the scar from her first kill but it’s not enough. Lara’s origin story was ugly, dark, and gritty but she survived. Why would you want to erase that? Lara’s skin is a blank page and her scars are the words printed on it to tell a story. That’s the point: they were originally supposed to be kept on her character model to tell the story of how Lara Croft became Lara Croft.

It looked like you were going to stick to that plan too when you released the first Rise trailer that featured her in therapy. Her hands were scarred, she was having flashbacks, she was anxiously foot-tapping...it was perfect. But then you eliminated all of that. Here’s the thing, Crystal Dynamics: having those “ugly” scars is what will make Lara beautiful because they showcase her determination, and they showcase how powerful she is to have received all of them and endured. They most certainly would not make her look weak if that’s what you’re afraid of. Give me the deltoid scar, give me the scars on her chest, and, while you’re at it, give me the left eyebrow scar on her turning point model. Give me all of it because I want to see Lara for the undeniable badass she is.

16.) PTSD.

Mental illness is not a weakness! Let me tell you something: I am currently on three different medications (Wellbutrin, Trazodone, and Vyvanse) and I know that doesn’t make me weak. In fact, it makes me infinitely stronger than all of you big shots making the calls on Lara’s character because it is incredible that I have made it this far when I have struggled with mental illness for eight whole years! It takes strength to force yourself to get up in the mornings when you feel completely dead on the inside. It takes strength to force yourself to work harder than all of your classmates in spite of this because you had an undiagnosed learning disability and were at a disadvantage right from the start. It takes strength to tell yourself better things are coming when you feel like you have nothing worth living for.

Just living life takes strength. So how dare you call mental illness a weakness! Being mentally ill makes you anything but that, and I think that PTSD would be a testament to Lara’s character and her inner strength. Scratch that, I know it would be and I know that her having PTSD would make for an incredibly compelling narrative that also addresses very real and very serious real life issues. Mental illness is nothing to be ashamed of, it’s a common human struggle that many people go through. What isn’t human is magically coming out of the entire Yamatai ordeal with your psyche completely intact. That right there is what will make you lose fans: suppressing Lara’s humanity and locking it in a fridge. Stop worrying about controversy! There is nothing controversial about a person going through normal person stuff. Nothing. Stop making excuses and just take a chance for once!

#Tomb Raider #Rise of the Tomb Raider #Lara Croft #Crystal Dynamics #Shadow of the Tomb Raider #?#wish list #Tomb Raider Reboot

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