#Rather than unsatisfying AND incongruent

[diocletianscabbagefarm]

Not to be chewing at this bone forever but apart from, you know, the literal core facts of the case that Kalina (twice) gave the Bad Kids the crucial clue to uncover the conspiracy (and! killed! herself! to not be a threat!!), there's another point in her favor that she wasn't bad/working against Cassandra which keeps swirling around in my head;

during an old aCoC adventuring party Brennan mentioned one of the qualities he enjoyed about playing her as a villain was that she was always unrattled, just kinda scarily unflappable. And during that mall fight in jy she was just 100% rattled, Brennan described her as horrified (2x), stressed, panicked, and generally just RP'ed her in a way of a kind of frantic, desperate defence, up to the point she got shatterstarred and she got more scary-calm. The one point of contention of her role in the season was that she might've coordinated or orchestrated the attack in the Astral, as the IH assumed at the end of the season, but if that were so she would definitely not have emoted like that.

[wordsandrobots]

Notes on Gundam: The Witch from Mercury Season 1

Hmmm. So we’re calling that a season, are we? OK then. I may as well write up my thoughts, if only to get them out of my head.

There are parts I’ve enjoyed; however, overall, I've found this to be a good-looking but extremely slapdash show. Which, well, it's from the guy who wrote Code Geass so go figure.

Spoiler-filled commentary after this cut.

The main star is the gorgeous animation. Not just the overall style – the animators really nail so many little moments of visual composition (in the latest episode, the choices with Suletta’s interactions with her mother are truly brilliant).

There are also plenty of interesting characters. Miorine Rembran makes for a great deuteragonist, striking a nice balance between sympathetic and unpleasantly prickly. The show quietly but deftly builds up her deep-rooted sense of right and wrong in a way that makes the final stinger to episode 12 hit really hard. We *know* by this point that she will call out things that go against her personal morals, so her reaction to Suletta killing someone in front of her is no trivial matter.

Meanwhile, I think Lady Prospera may be the most successful recapitulation of the Char archetype there’s been in the Gundam franchise. I can sit here and stan for McGillis Fareed all day long but his Char-like characteristics are ultimately an act to cover genuine emotional connections that get in the way of his plans. Prospera, on the other hand, embodies the mix of charm and utter, unrepentant ruthlessness that makes Char compelling in Gundam '79. Plus, she's got a defined, active familial connection to the heroes, something left as mere flavouring in the original.

Sadly, I’m far less enamoured with nominal main character Suletta. She has plenty of nice moments where her awkwardness switches from being a comic trait to a rather sad one. But I can’t get past how she bimbles around the plot with such a profound lack of curiosity. Clearly she's meant to care more about people than politics; nevertheless, it feels unsatisfying to have her not question a lot of stuff that's going on. Her backstory about wanting to better the Mercurian situation barely comes up, replaced wholesale with her feelings towards Miorine. And we're told over and over that she talks to Gundam Aerial and treats it/her as a sister, but we never *see that* outside combat. This relationship drives many of Suletta's actions but the show doesn't show it as anything more than a power-up. You'd have to read a prequel text story to know Aerial can, in fact, think for herself.

I get part of this is how they’ve chosen to deploy the idea of a mind-controlled protagonist. Clearly Suletta's obliviousness is the point. But I think there should have been more interrogation of the incongruities in her personality ahead of the reveal her mum can turn her into a smiling killing-machine at will.

(It’s too early to say how well-handled the idea of a controlled/conditioned protagonist is going to be. In principle, it’s a smart move for a franchise that has always had those kinds of characters but only as tragic secondary foils to our heroes. It’ll be a very different kind of horror to that embodied by the likes of Heero Yuy and Mikazuki Augus, which is more about people consciously choosing to do horrible things to themselves and/or others.)

The place I feel this show falls down hardest, however, is in how it constructs its setting. By which I mean, what the ever-loving heck is even supposed to be going on here?

We are shown in the prologue that Gundams are considered a big enough threat to the dominant powers, those building them are branded as witches and hunted down with crushing military force. Yet however many years later, two companies in the Benerit Group are able to develop Gundam machines with relatively little consequence. Big boss Delling Rembran makes a song and dance about destroying every Gundam without hesitation, then indulges his daughter’s tantrums and put her in charge of developing the original medical application for the giant robot technology. So Gundams are at once a massive military-grade problem and something safely entrusted to the sixth-form entrepreneur club. Which, I mean, fair enough if Delling is making some kind of point from the position of god of his little world, but then we find out the Earthian terrorists have two Gundams of their own and . . . if that's the case, what has Dominicus – the supposed elite witch-hunter squad – even been doing all this time?

All of which are things that could have any number of possible explanations. It’s fiction, you can write yourself out of any corner. Yet I find myself profoundly lost as to the context for all this.

Take the school Suletta, Miorine and their peers attend. What is it for? We barely see any lessons taking place, but it seems to be a muddle of business college, engineering university and pilot training academy. Where honour duels between mobile suits decide important stuff because . . . Delling said it was OK? So is it meant to produce the next generation of military operators? Is there a war on? There seems to be, sort of, with the Spacians oppressing the Earthians who they’ve left behind on a polluted planet but . . . I mean, we see one protest and then a spectacularly well-armed terrorist group show up to make mincemeat out of the Spacian soldiers. If the playing-field is that level, why isn’t the war a bigger ongoing presence? Half of Earth House is described as war orphans but that’s literally the only time the possibility of large-scale armed conflicts happening off-screen is brought to the fore.

In combination with Code Geass, I suspect this may simply be a writer who can’t be trusted to place school drama in a broader sci-fi world with any grace. Nonetheless, I find myself unreasonably bugged by the number of questions I can ask of what happened in this first season.

For example: Benerit Group’s competitors. We’re told they have some, yet the different companies in the group seem to be producing more than enough mobile suits between them to fulfil any military needs going. Who are they selling to, that they could be in competition with someone else? Is there a government? Is Dominicus beholden to someone higher than Delling? Why did you ever pin who gets to inherit the mega-corporation on the outcome of schoolyard fights if you are in sufficiently dire straits that letting teenagers handle the cursed technology is a remotely sane idea?

Similarly, Vim Jeturk, head of Jeturk Heavy Machinery, suffers involuntary patricide at the hands of fail-son Guel because he decided to jump into a mobile suit and go fight the terrorists. He says he worked his way up to the top as an explanation for why he'd join the battle. But – my dude – you are an arms manufacturer. What, your company does the fighting with the mecha it builds? That’s not how that works! And if it is how it works, in this setting, where are the receipts? Are all these companies also employed to oppress the working classes (in a direct, stomp on the head sense)?

If there had been previous mention of Jeturk Senior being a pilot in his youth – or even if his sons being pilots had been presented as more than nepotistic self-promotion of his company's products – then his jumping into a cockpit after weeks of scheming behind the scenes would have been a natural progression. As it is, it looks suspiciously like a choice in service of needing Guel to kill him in a fit of desperation in order to set up a character arc for next season.

And . . . OK, there's an extent to which that sort of thing doesn't matter. I like Code Geass and it's a bonkers mess of plot swerves in service of getting characters to shout at each other dramatically. That's fine. But Code Geass has an incredibly straightforward set-up. It's got a cleanly defined world, split between an empire and the oppressed, with obvious ways for that division to be eroded. I won't say that erosion is handled well. It . . . isn't. Nevertheless, I didn't feel like each new step the story took flat-out contradicted or rendered meaningless everything that had happened prior.

I'm saw someone else on tumblr bring this up at the time: in the space of the first few episodes, we go from duels being something that happen whenever the students get pissed at each other, to requiring a formal process between two parties and a ritual evocation of the scales of justice, to being utterly meaningless because the disputes they're meant to settle can be overruled from on high at any time. This isn't inherently contradictory and could be a commentary on the unfairness of the system. Yet without any indication of how things got to the start of that sequence, the stakes don't so much escalate as arbitrarily shift however is most convenient for the plot.

That's how all of this reads to me. Arbitrary, in ways that don't feel like they have a solid foundation connecting them yet.

Now, I don't particularly want to do this, primarily because comparing something I have found intermittently fun to something I am unreasonably fond of is objectively unfair. However, Iron-Blooded Orphans was the last entry in the franchise, making it a comparison worth making. So: IBO is not elegant in expositing its setting (even if it is relatively careful to build in character reasons for the information to be spelled out) but it is definitely efficient about doing so. By the same point in its run that G-Witch is now, twelve episodes in, we have been clearly told and shown that:

Mars is in the grip of a brutal colonial occupation by quasi-police organisation known as Gjallarhorn.

Gjallarhorn is internally corrupt.

There are factions vying to take advantage of a growing independence movement.

Ordinary people on Mars struggle to make ends meet.

Private military companies use child soldiers as expendable labour and those children see it as a better option than begging on the street.

There are worse options in the form of slavery as 'human debris'; that Jupiter is home to a powerful mafia-like organisation.

That organisation is also interested in using the independence movement to its advantage.

They know routes between planets outside of those Gjallarhorn controls.

Said routes are dangerous because of pirates.

Pirates are a main source and user of human debris.

At least some people in Gjallarhorn are willing to use said pirates to achieve their ends.

Gjallarhorn practices arranged marriages resulting in nine-year-olds being engaged to twenty-somethings.

All this is relevant to the plot and either gestured at earlier than it appears, or fundamental enough as to be obvious. It builds to the point where each revelation coheres with what's come before. This is a world in which everyone is exploited, with clear hierarchies laid out between the different factions. The details flow such that we see why characters are making the decisions they do, even if we don't necessarily think those choices are right or know where they are ultimately leading.

Twelve episodes in to G-Witch, I remain baffled as to why anybody is doing anything. Sure, Prospera (probably) wants revenge for the death of her husband and everyone else in the prologue. But there's no indication as to why Delling is willing to make choices that play into her hands, or why Jeturk should be so gung-ho about trying to supplant him every other week, or – and I know I keep harping on this but come on – why allowing literal children to market a hyper-dangerous technology makes a lick of sense.

The key reason I'm getting so caught on this is that G-Witch sets itself up as a particular type of horror story. We see this in the move from a very bloody prologue to the bucolic school setting. By convention, we might expect the peaceful setting to be gradually peeled back to reveal the violence we already know is lurking underneath, with the attendant peril for Suletta and Miorine as they come to understand the reality of the world they live in. This seems to be where the signposts are pointing. Yet the key to that kind of horror is the reality beneath makeing sense of incongruities on the surface. And that isn't happening. Yes, Suletta being mind-controlled explains a great deal about her, personally. But the rest? As I said, it seems arbitrary, to the point where the reveals themselves become incongruous.

Why, for instance, should Elan Ceres need to send duplicates to school for him? Because it's a point of pride the company heirs pilot their top machines? Then why not perfect the machine away from the school first, so it doesn't kill the real him? Or is the school actually a test-bed for advanced tech? OK . . . but why is it the best option when Elan's backers are developing extremely forbidden Gundam-like mobile suits? Answers on a postcard, please.

Of course, one can construct such answers for oneself, in anticipation of the writing. Take Delling. Based on the latest episode, I wouldn't be surprised if the explanation for his erratic behaviour is simply a very unexpressive man poorly handling genuine feelings of duty towards his daughter. He does shield her from a chunk of debris after all, getting injured in the process, right after making sure she gets into a spacesuit during a crisis, and it would make sense of him indulging her on the Gund-Arm start-up. Trite, but it'd work. The bastard turns out to honestly care for his child while the 'nice' mother figure views hers as a mere tool. Play it again, Sam.

There're just . . . so damn many questions and none of them are really very interesting. It's all A-moves-to-B stuff that should either be invisible or an explanation unto itself. I don't want to be sitting here perplexed by the minutiae of the corporate intrigue the story is dressed up in; I want to be appreciating the final image of Suletta cheerily joking about slipping in the blood of the man she just smashed flat. It's extremely frustrating.

I shall probably keep watching when it comes back in April, out of sheer stubborn curiosity. I can see the shape of a great idea here and the character work is better than I've given it credit for.

But I really could have done with a decent 'ah ha' moment where the details began to click together and so far? It's simply not there.

[is-it-art-tho]

Summary: Dick Grayson is having a hard time and Bruce is there to help.

Dick dragged himself into his apartment, shedding his coat, keys, and shoes on his stiff beeline to the bathroom. In the shower, he dangled his head under the stream, the heat cranked until it nearly burned, and willed the muscles in his back and shoulders to relax, his heart and breathing to slow.

When he got out, his phone was about to vibrate off the edge of the sink, the screen packed with a flurry of unread messages that were still coming in. A quick glance at the names was enough for him to know what they all said, or have a pretty good guess, at least. Barbara, Tim, Damian. He ignored them all, shutting it off and leaving it behind as he wandered into his bedroom, leaving small puddles on the hardwood in his wake.

He pulled on a faded cross-country hoodie and joggers in the dark, and the clothes clung to his wet skin as he tossed a hesitant glance toward his bed.

The type of exhaustion he felt now was the type that clings to bones, that no amount of sleep can touch. Which was just as well, since sleep had not been kind to him these past few days.

At times it was elusive, leaving Dick watching for hours as his curtains faded from navy blue to pale gray with the sunrise. Other times it was a violent, painful thing that forced him upright in bed, gasping and disoriented, his room smelling eerily of burnt furniture and ash, and his ears echoing with screams and sirens. 

He had no way of knowing what type of night this would be, but he was in no rush to find out.

Pushing damp hair out of his eyes, he headed for the kitchen instead. He wasn’t hungry or even really thirsty, but his hands went for his standard late-night fair all the same. He filled the coffeemaker with water and flipped it on, letting the machine’s quiet whirr fill the silence as he grabbed a bowl from the counter and filled it with cereal.

Typically, he would go through this process on autopilot, his mind on a million other things, but tonight his movements were careful and intentional in a way that took all of his concentration to maintain. He had the overwhelming urge to run or break something, to do anything other than sit quietly in a room and stare at food he had no intention to touch, and he knew himself well enough to know that if he wasn’t careful right now, he would find himself back in his bedroom exchanging his pajamas for the black and blue suit tucked in the back of his closet and hitting the streets. But after the events earlier tonight, he knew that was probably the last place he should be right now.

The coffee machine beeped, and Dick moved the full mug out of the way as he muttered to the open air, “Want one?”

The presence he’d felt across the room stirred, and he glanced over his shoulder in time to see the silhouette by the window step further into the living room.

“You won’t be able to sleep.”

“It’s decaf.” Dick’s voice was flat. Without waiting for either acceptance or rejection of the offer, he added more water to the machine, packed in new grounds, and prepared another cup. He watched the dark liquid fill the mug as footsteps behind him crossed from the carpeted living room to the kitchen tile, followed by the gentle scrape of a chair.

When he turned back around, Bruce was sitting, waiting for him. He wasn’t in the cape and cowl, instead still dressed as he had been back at the manor a few hours earlier – a dark mock turtleneck and gray slacks. Dick wondered idly if Bruce had come through the window dressed this way or if he’d simply picked the lock at the door. Either option felt incredibly incongruous with the clean ensemble. If he hadn’t felt so off, he might’ve laughed.

Dick took the seat across from him, and Bruce’s eyes tracked his movements carefully. The younger man was suddenly hyperaware of the bruises and scabs forming along the knuckles of his right hand, left purposely unattended, and the way his fingers were twitching restlessly.

“How is he?” Dick asked after a few long minutes of silence.

“His lip stopped bleeding after a while,” Bruce explained calmly. “He stopped cursing a while after that.”

The dull pain in Dick’s knuckles flared with the memory of Jason’s jaw, hard and sharp like he had punched a brick wall. He was fairly certain he’d fractured a bone or two in his hand – the punch had been sloppy, overly emotional – but he’d decided to let the ache sit there, heavy and throbbing without the temper of a painkiller.

“It was my fault,” Dick conceded. “I didn’t… I overreacted. I must’ve had a little too much to drink or something.” He hadn’t actually had anything to drink at all, but it felt like the easiest excuse in the moment. “I’ll apologize the next time I see him.”

Again, there was silence as Bruce, apparently unsatisfied with this response, simply waited. It was the same tactic Dick had watched him use during interrogations, but in those situations usually someone was dangling a few stories off the ground and the silence was ominous. Here, there was none of that foreboding air. Just an empty sort of waiting.

“It won’t happen again,” Dick added drily. He wasn’t entirely sure this was true. Even now he wished he could be hitting something, something hard enough to tear the skin on his knuckles and send painful reverberations up his arms and into his shoulders. He wanted to hurt. He wanted a pain sharp enough to pull his attention away from the gaping chasm in the center of his chest.

Almost reflexively, he clenched his injured hand into a tight fist and relished the quick agony.

“What I’m trying to understand is why it happened at all,” Bruce said.

“I told you I was just buzzed. It’s not a big deal.”

“You weren’t.” Bruce’s tone was matter of fact rather than accusatory. It felt like an accusation anyway.

Dick studied him with growing annoyance. “What were you keeping tabs on me or something?”

“I’ve seen you buzzed enough times to know what it looks like. You weren’t drunk, Dick. You were wired. On edge. You have been for a few days now.” Bruce rested his forearms on the table, leaning forward as if to get a better look at him.

Dick noted his leg bouncing under the table and stilled it. The sudden stillness made his entire body feel uncomfortable and he shifted awkwardly in his chair.

“I’m fine,” he said, a little too brusquely. “Just need to get some sleep.”

“Have you been having trouble with that lately?”

Dick’s teeth clanked together in his mouth. He rose to pour his untouched cereal into the garbage disposal and let the blades run longer than necessary to grind up the soggy flakes. When he turned it off, the sudden silence pressed against his ears like a physical weight.

“How are the Donovans?” Bruce asked.

The question was soft, so soft that Dick almost didn’t catch it. But he did, and the jittery, violent energy that had been crackling just beneath his skin vanished like air being sucked out of a balloon. He suddenly felt impossibly hollow, like the slightest breeze could topple him, and he welcomed the sharp pain that had exploded in his right hand as he gripped the edge of the sink. It served as another means of grounding him, anchoring him here.

“How?” Dick murmured.

“Barbara.”

Babs. Of course.

She was the only one Dick had told anything to, and even she had only gotten the barest threads of information. She knew only that there had been a housefire, that a child had died.

“You’ve been checking up on them at their new apartment.”

Dick didn’t even bother asking how Bruce could have possibly known this.

“I couldn’t find him,” he explained, staring, without seeing, at a small puddle of milk in the sink left over from the drained cereal. At the same time, he was trying to stop smelling smoke, to stop feeling the weight of a limp child in his arms and hearing a mother’s screams.

Behind him, Bruce did not move from his spot at the table; he did not speak. Dick was oddly grateful for this. For time.

“I looked everywhere, but I just couldn’t find him,” Dick continued, and his voice was flat again, empty like it was echoing out from a tomb. “When I did, it was too late. He was in a crawlspace behind his bed. He was eight. Kyle. Kyle Donovan.”

There was a long silence as Dick stood and trembled with tension, then finally Bruce said, “I’m sorry.”

Dick glanced over his shoulder, half-expecting to find an even, almost disinterested stare and instead he found Bruce’s face a mask of empathy. Like most of Bruce’s expressions, this one wasn’t dramatic. His mouth wasn’t twisted into a frown and his cheeks weren’t glistening with tears, but it was there in his eyes.

And Dick knew that the empathy there was misguided, based on a false assumption that he was struggling to grapple with the loss, that he was mourning. How could he explain how wrong this was?

I’m not mourning. I’m nothing.

After Dick had emerged from the burning building with Kyle in his arms, he’d carefully, wordlessly set the limp boy on a gurney and watched EMTs dive into CPR that he knew wouldn’t work. Mrs. Donovan had been screaming, her shrieks battling with the wail of incoming fire engines, and he’d locked eyes with Mr. Donovan. The man’s soot-covered face had glowed in the light of the flames, and Dick had heard himself offer a too-stiff apology that the man was clearly too shaken to process. And he’d left then, disappearing easily into the shadows amidst the chaos, and arrived back in his apartment still reeking with the uniquely sharp scent of burnt carpeting and furniture and insulation.

And he’d stood in his living room in the dark and waited for something, anything to come. Some semblance of normal emotion, of feeling. He’d grasped for it desperately like a child trying to catch dandelion seeds on a windy day, but he’d come away with nothing. So, he’d showered and gone to bed still smelling of housefire and watched his curtains until morning. And with each passing day since then he’d grown more and more agitated with himself, with his lack of feeling, and eventually that frustration had transformed him into the short-fused terror he’d been all day, culminating in an unwarranted haymaker and a likely-broken hand.

This wasn’t the first time Dick had suspected that something was wrong with him. After his parents had been killed, adults had tiptoed around him for weeks, treated him like a volcano on the verge of eruption, like a glass teetering on the edge of a table. He’d realized afterwards that they had been waiting for him to breakdown, to dissolve into a weeping heap. It would have been an understandable reaction, especially for a kid, but the moment had never come.

Even at the funeral he hadn’t shed a single tear. Back then he’d been called “brave” and “strong.” He’d been congratulated for his composure and he’d taken some solace in that. Perhaps his reaction or lack thereof wasn’t a symptom of a deeper issue. Maybe it was a sign of his fortitude. He’d tucked those fears away then, content never to explore them again.

Then Kyle Donovan happened, and Dick once again felt utterly dead inside.

Empty. The internal silence that made him think of vast, barren spaces; of sand blowing across endless dunes and the cracked, frozen wasteland of the Arctic.

And this confirmed what he had quietly feared all along. That somehow, somewhere along the way something deep and vital inside of him had broken. As if a whole part of his brain – the one responsible for grief – had simply stopped working. Or perhaps it had shriveled slowly over time, unnoticed and choked by neglect like a plant left to wilt in a corner.

There was a time when Dick had thought himself lucky. After the things he’d lived through, he ought to be more damaged, but he’d managed to grow into a fairly well-adjusted member of society. He’d taken pride in that fact, relished it. Gotham had done its worst and he’d escaped unscathed.

To realize now that he’d been wrong, that Gotham had in fact crushed something precious inside of him, was a blow he wasn’t sure he could come back from.

So now as he stood in his kitchen thinking about a child he had failed to save, and struggling even to shed a tear, he found Bruce’s expression, his open but misguided display of empathy, to be like the twisting of a knife.

Suddenly Dick realized Bruce was speaking, a steady rumble in the quiet.

Dick blinked. “What?”

“I said you should sit down.”

Dick sat and stared at the old yellow table between them. It had a sort of retro, 70s aesthetic. The floral pattern in the decorative plastic covering was faded, the petals resembling abstract squiggles more than anything else.

“What’s wrong with me?” he asked quietly. “These things happen and I just… I don’t feel them anymore. I don’t know if I ever did.” His voice hitched then, perhaps betraying his words, and suddenly his vision blurred with tears. “What’s wrong with me?” he asked again.

“We all process grief differently,” Bruce said. “It’s not a matter of right or wrong.”

“But what if I’m not processing it? Babs thinks I’m upset about the kid, I bet you did, too. But that’s the problem. I’m not upset – at least, not like I know I should be. I feel like a goddamn sociopath.” Dick balled his fists in his hair, his elbows braced on the table.

“It’s like I go through life most of the time and I feel normal. I get happy, I get annoyed, I get sad. But when major things happen, like someone dying, I just… I don’t know. It’s like I shut down. I’m just empty. Like I’m physically incapable of feeling beyond a certain point.”

Dick was really crying now, tears streaming down his face and dripping off the tip of his nose, but he didn’t know why because deep inside, his dominant feeling was still an absence of feeling. A painful, gaping abyss.

“Sometimes,” Dick whispered, “sometimes I think – I think I shouldn’t even be here. I should be in Arkham with the rest of the–”

Suddenly there was a hand on his shoulder. Bruce had switched seats so that they were sitting almost side by side. Dick hadn’t even noticed.

“You’re not,” Bruce said, cutting him off. His voice was not hard, but stern, and he held Dick’s gaze as he spoke, his words crisp and intentional as if willing Dick to hear each syllable clearly. “You do not belong in Arkham. You are not broken.”

And suddenly the outburst that hadn’t come when Dick was orphaned or after the housefire, the one that he had begun to accept as being beyond the scope of his emotional capacity, crashed into him like a tidal wave. And decades of grief and pain rushed in to fill the void that had lived in the center of his being for far too long.

It filled him like a physical thing, pushing against the inside of his ribs and chest and threatening to burst through.

Dick dropped his face into his hands as a sob wrenched itself from his throat, as his body convulsed with the force of them. And in the darkness of his closed eyes, he saw it all in sharp relief – every moment he’d absorbed as a child and into adulthood, every crippling tragedy that he’d unconsciously chosen to repress, to crush into a manageable size and pitch into some far-flung corner of himself. Those moments – those pebbles of memory – towered over him now, forming an immense mountain of suffering that he now had to scale.

And he understood now, perhaps for the first time, why he had never done this before; why his subconscious – and maybe it wasn’t so subconscious, after all – had chosen to avoid this part of himself. It was because this was too much, far too much for any one person to climb and come out on the other side whole.

This, Dick was certain, truly would break him. What he had experienced in his life, the things he had seen, were the sort of uniquely awful things that demand to be left in dark corners and tucked into locked drawers, lest they take everything from you.

He was only vaguely aware of the strong, yet gentle arms wrapping around him, pulling him in and holding him as he tipped towards hyperventilation.

“I want you to breathe with me,” Bruce instructed. The older man took a few long slow breaths, waiting for Dick to match his rhythm. Dick’s head rose and fell against Bruce’s chest, and after a while it started to work. Dick felt himself calming, if only slightly.

“You are not broken,” Bruce said again, his chest rumbling against Dick’s ear. “And you’re not alone.”

And when Dick pulled back, he saw it in Bruce’s eyes. A profound and gut-wrenching understanding, their mutual experiences with tragedy and loss resonating on a frequency most are fortunate enough not to understand.

And he realized that Bruce had his own impossible mountain to scale and that he had been scaling it for most of his life. A slow, clumsy process that involved just as much time slipping backwards as it did inching back up. And as if for the first time, Dick noticed the deep grooves in Bruce’s face, the lines and old scars that he now suspected had just as much to do with Bruce’s inner battles as his external ones.

“I’m here,” Bruce promised. “I’m right here with you. I won’t let you go.”

And Dick knew what he meant. I won’t let you become like so many of the monsters we stop every night. I won’t let you disappear into the darkness.

“How do you keep going?” Dick asked, his eyes on the table. After a lengthy pause, he looked up.

Bruce’s gaze was distant as if he were genuinely searching for an adequate response and struggling to find one. Finally, he said, “You decide that the alternative is unacceptable.”

Dick considered this. It wasn’t a warm and fuzzy answer; things rarely were where Bruce was concerned. But even so, it fit somehow. It made sense to him.

He nodded then sighed, and the sigh turned into a yawn. Without thinking, he rubbed his eye with his bad hand and cursed quietly.

Bruce rose, retrieved an ice pack from the freezer, and returned to the table where he laid it gently over Dick’s knuckles. “I know I taught you to punch better than that,” he said.

Dick’s mouth twitched into a rueful grin. “I decked Jason in the middle of your dinner party and it’s my form you’re upset about?”

“It was sloppy. He should’ve been able to dodge it.” Bruce’s expression was even, but there was a joking lilt in his tone that Dick imagined most people would miss. Then, more seriously, “I want you to come back with me. Stay at the manor for a while.”

A few years ago, this might have sounded like an order, but now Dick could have sworn it sounded almost like a plea. Bruce’s gaze was fixed on the ice pack, his brows scrunched ever so slightly.

“Bruce,” Dick gasped, “are you inviting me to a sleepover?”

He was already feeling more like himself. Not necessarily better – to be honest, Dick was fairly certain he wouldn’t feel better for quite a while – but he could see a way out now that he hadn’t been able to see before, and it left him with a spark of hope.

Dick was satisfied by the long-suffering sigh he got in response.

“Isn’t Jason staying with you for a few days?” he continued. “He might not want me around much right now.”

“He’ll live.” Bruce rose and Dick followed suit, keeping the pack pressed into his hand.

“I’m more worried about myself,” Dick muttered. “Oh, I’ve been meaning to ask – how did you get in here? You didn’t climb in through the window dressed like that did you?”

Bruce tossed a devious grin over his shoulder but said nothing as he headed for the door.

“Wait, did you?” Dick asked, suddenly desperate. “Did you?”

[myusernameisstolen]

Ok I have a rant

So I’ve been spending this quarantine doing something productive, by which I mean finally reading Homestuck. I’ve meant to read it for a while, just to see what all the fuss is about, and having read it now, I gotta say, I get it.

I fucking love this comic now. I got me hooked, and I’m a fan. Karkat is my favorite, hands down, period, don’t care what context. The comedy is perfect for the characters, and the characters perfect for the comedy. The teenagers are rendered so lifelike, they call back memories of my own awkward teen years. Homestuck is the bomb.com, and I am living and breathing it right now. 

BUT:

I have a HUGE problem with how it ended. Multiple problems, actually.

I don’t know if other people have said this before - that’s probably the case, I’ve never been in the homestuck fandom before, so if I’m not alone in this opinion, i’d love to know.

Firstly, I wanna talk about the buildup that I, personally, feel like I got no payoff to.

Caliborn: The way his journey was written seemed to imply that we were gonna get to see the rest of his journey from point A to Z. The fact that we saw the way his journey began with murdering Calliope, the way him acquiring his minions was shown, the constant references the coat of many colors that we never got to see how he acquired - and then his story arc was cut off in the middle.  We never got to see him develop into the monster we’ve known since his introduction! The critical point where Caliborn becomes Lord English is missing! I felt cheated of this - At that point, even as an antagonist, he was just as much a main character as the rest, and we never got to see the promised journey. 

It may have been the author trying to make a point: that this kind of person isn’t worth our time, investment or attention, but this is cheating! Up until that point, there was a large amount of focus being put on him, and having that storyline just dropped leaves a huge gap in the story, and leaves a reader unsatisfied! It left me unsatisfied!

(if I come across as selfish during this rant, rants are inherently selfish. Go ahead and scroll past if you don’t sympathize - I know no one’s going to really read this, I just feel the need to get this off my chest.)

More importantly, in a series so focused on the idea of the-coming-of-age archetype and its effects on the characters, it feels empty that it didn’t show the final result for any of them, the point at which the characters have squared away everything that they’ve struggled with, that it didn’t show Caliborn taking the final descent. 

This might’ve been another point, that things in real life aren’t so neatly wrapped up as they are in stories - but this just upends the way the story was being told in the first place! It was a self-aware series from the start, sure, but it never made any claims to being anything close to “real life.” After seeing wild antics and shenanigans from start to (nearly) finish, a realistic ending is just wrong.

The Battle: The ultimate climax was seeing the new universe being born, I get that. But I find the fact that all the characters were divided up rather than being together for the final problem to be solved doesn’t sit right with me. More than looking for a peaceful new life, a lot of main characters who weren’t there to finally see him in person were focusing on defeating Lord English, and we didn’t get that catharsis. 

So much of the endgame should’ve been in the story itself, and was left instead too open-ended, to credits sequences and non-canon epilogues, and I just feel like that isn’t in keeping with the rest of the comic. It’s a big tonal shift that wasn’t set up in any way, and having the story just stop when they leave universe B2 for the new universe is disappointing. 

The way I would rather have seen it end is if the story followed them to Earth C, with maybe a time skip of a year or two, and then picked up again. It could’ve gone on a lot longer while they sorted out the rest of the problems from previous sessions after having won the game, maybe even involving Lord English following them to the new universe like I thought it was hinting at when John was opening the door! The ending was too fast-paced for me - it got to the top of the tension, to the climax of the series - and then it just plummeted straight down off a metaphorical cliff without taking the time to climb back down. It needed a proper denouement. 

Most of my problems with the ending have to do with how incongruous and just plain wrong it feels. It doesn’t feel like the end to such a long, slowly-built-up series - it feels like it belongs with another comic entirely.

So here I am, left scrambling in the dust, looking for a proper post-climax wind-down that isn’t there. I’ve got a hungry feeling for something with more rhyme and reason to it than what I got. 

Also, fuck the canon/non-canon epilogues. Just - fuck those.

[tillidontneedfantasy]

‘Romance’ - Camila Cabello REVIEW: Shamelessly In Love

“You know it's been a long time coming,” Camila Cabello sings on the Grammy-nominated smash “Señorita” (which is the most-streamed song of 2019) featuring Shawn Mendes, their follow-up collaboration to “I Know What You Did Last Summer” from 2015. When she sings this line, it’s unclear who the ‘you’ is: Mendes or the audience. Shortly following the release of the track on June 21st, 2019, Cabello and Mendes were seen multiple times out together, displaying affection publicly that would suggest that they are not just friends...because, as she explains, “friends don’t know the way you taste.”

At the release of these stream of photos, many were quick to decide that this must be a stunt as a promotional ploy for the collaboration; but anyone even slightly invested in either one of the pop stars’ lives and music knew that it was, in fact, a long time coming. To any skeptics left, the timeline outlined (yet scattered) throughout Cabello’s second solo studio effort, Romance, should suffice as ample evidence that it’s the real deal, not that she needs to prove it, anyway.

Speaking of that timeline, the main takeaway from Romance’s story is this: men are idiots who don’t realize what they have until they can’t have it anymore. Unrequited love finally turned in favor just too little too late...until it’s not. As two sides of the same coin, “Should’ve Said It” and “Feel It Twice” showcase the two different internal reactions we women go through when someone we wanted for so long doesn’t want us until we’ve moved on with someone else: spite and sorrow. On one hand, she’s dismissive, and on the other, she’s remorseful. In the end, though, this tale has a happy ending, as she seizes the opportunity to finally be with the person she wanted “two years ago” despite the risk. The result? A full, shameless immersion into a world of unapologetic romance. 

STRONGEST TRACK(S): “Bad Kind of Butterflies,” “Living Proof”

Although unlike anything else Cabello has released thus far in her solo career, “Bad Kind of Butterflies” is a compelling and straightforward confessional to her partner that despite her love for him she wants another. “What do I lose if I don't choose and keep it to myself?” she ponders, before ultimately landing upon a decision: “Warning me it’s a mistake, I just know I gotta make it.” Camila deserves some credit here; few people possess this kind of bravery. Many times, people in this situation do keep it to themselves, and then either end up unhappy, live in regret, or make mistakes instead of making an honest choice that will hurt fewer people in the long run. The beautifully haunting production that builds as the song progresses literally gives you the type of bad butterflies she’s describing, as if you’re the one moments away from your possible doom, or maybe an exciting new beginning, or both. Making a choice to follow your heart might trigger an upheaval of your previously planned life-course, but it is never a mistake. Luckily for Cabello, it seemed to work out.

On “Living Proof,” the last pre-release and latest single, Camila indulges in the cliche of linking worship and sex; however, instead of playing as overdone and tired, it just works, mainly due to Cabello’s outstanding vocal arrangement throughout, especially the harmonies in the last chorus. The track is sonically soft and sweet, so hypnotizingly complemented by Cabello’s flawless execution of such a high register; aside from Ariana Grande, no other pop artist can make it seem so effortless. Although the omission of a choir for the bridge and/or outro might be seen by some as a wise choice to balance the cliches, I kind of wish she did it anyway, and her inclusion of one during her wonderful performance on the Ellen Degeneres Show makes a strong case for it too.

WEAKEST TRACK: “This Love”

Perhaps the waltz-like nature of "This Love” is supposed to mirror the dance that Cabello and the subject of this song are playing at, but it fails to do so. When hearing the instrumentals for this track, you are expecting a loving, romantic song. Instead, the listener hears yet again about the games being played by this man and the back and forth between them. The lyrics feel incongruent with the music, and though the track is not bad, it might leave the listener unsatisfied. 

THE IN-BETWEENS

There are plenty of other tracks to satiate the desire for pure romance, as promised. “Easy” and “Used To This” are two gorgeous tracks that perfectly encapsulate what it’s like to allow yourself to be loved when for so long you were unsure if it would ever happen the way you envisioned, making it very easy (no pun intended) to feel happy for Cabello (and Mendes), even so much so that you might find their love endearing enough to temporarily forget that Instagram video (you know the one) (sorry for making you remember it again). Cabello successfully experiments on the sultry “My Oh My” featuring DaBaby, which for some reason is a digital exclusive, and the dramatic and honest “Cry For Me,” which bluntly publicizes a sort of selfishness that most humans have felt but would deny, and gets better with each listen. Other tracks, however, such as “Liar” and “Feel It Twice” tire out quickly. 

BEST PROSPECTIVE SINGLE: “Should’ve Said It”

Cabello sounds most authentic and commanding when she infuses her Latina roots with her pop inclinations. “Should’ve Said It” is effective, unique, and showcases all of Camila’s strengths in a catchy package to which many girls around the globe can easily relate. As Cabello chastises her muse for not knowing what he had until it was gone, you can’t help but vehemently agree while tapping your feet. Can’t you feel it turning into a power anthem already?

                                                            ***

Even in her Fifth Harmony days, Cabello exhibited an unprecedented stage presence. Her first solo album, Camila, proved her star and staying power. There are many ways in which she has leveled up since, as displayed throughout Romance: her vocal range and control are much stronger and cleaner, she has trialed new musical styles that surprisingly suit her, and the production on almost every song is intriguing enough to make you want to listen again. However, the album feels lyrically lackluster; maybe this is because Camila proved to be a great lyricist with her debut, and the quality of writing on this album seems to match its predecessor rather than exceed it. That is not to say that great lyricism implies Shakespearean prose; sometimes, simplicity works just as successfully, if not even more so, as it allows for accessibility. The closing track of Romance, “First Man,” is an example of Cabello’s moving utilization of such simplicity. On an album that can feel repetitive at times considering its subject matter, an ode to the love Cabello shares with her father comes a bit out of left field, a refreshing final pull at the heartstrings. Mentions of jackets for cold weather and making it home safe remind us all that love- whether it is romantic, platonic, or familial- is loudest through the little things. Camila is clearly full of love, and if she continues to build on her ability to tap into it and express it honestly, the sky will be her limit. Grade: 3.5/5

DISCLAIMER - REVIEWER’S BIAS: I never cared for Fifth Harmony much when they were together, so Camila was not really on my radar until she was suddenly on everyone’s with her hit “Havana.” I remember watching her perform it on some awards show and being absolutely blown away by her stage presence. I knew she would be opening for Taylor Swift’s reputation Stadium Tour, and since I of course was attending I decided to listen to Camila shortly after its release, and I was surprised at how much I liked it! Although I enjoy this album very much, I was expecting a bit more from Romance; none of the songs have felt as special as “Consequences” or “Something’s Gotta Give” or “Havana” from her debut, and although I don’t think an artist should ever try to replicate past success or follow formulas that they think might get them there, I feel like that extra punch I was expecting from this album is missing. I still think she did a great job though- I was completely blown away by her vocals and the production, and I am excited to see where her career takes her.

[obsidianarchives]

Game of Thrones Recap: S8E5 - "The Bells"

Well, that was laughable. I try to avoid such sweeping declarations, but intellectually confounding or narratively unsatisfying don’t quite capture the forced climax and nonsensical storytelling at play in this week’s episode. I’m not here to yuck anyone’s yum so if you enjoyed this week’s episode, don’t worry we’re still going to have fun, but it’s important to be clear about what didn’t work for so many and explore why. Two locations this week, so let’s get into it!

Dragonstone

This week opens with Ned Stark Varys penning a note, revealing that Jon Snow is the true heir of the Targaryen bloodline, when one of his little birds comes in to reveal her poisoning attempts have been unsuccessful thus far as Daenerys, fearing a traitor, refuses to eat. Foiled on Option A, the Spider of Westeros throws caution to the wind and approaches Jon in the open with treason and his plans to supplant his Queen in favor of her nephew, who flatly rebuffs him as he has done all season.

Tyrion, who watched the entire exchange from the parapet, immediately goes to snitch to Dany, who initially suspects Jon as the traitor. She rightly surmises that the spymaster only learned from her Hand, who must have been told by Sansa, who in turn learned from Jon, so it appears doubtful she’s letting anyone off the hook. For the moment however she deals with Varys’s betrayal, and he is forced to burn his Maury DNA test results before the Unsullied take him away. In a moving farewell between longtime friends, feeling honor bound to let Varys know it was him, Tyrion and the Master of Mess share a final embrace. Varys admits he sincerely hopes to be wrong about Daenerys for his friend’s sake as much as the realm’s. With a stealthy Drogon waiting in the shadows for Momma Dee to say the word, his sentence is pronounced as Jon looks on, noticeably disturbed as the husk of Varys burns in the background.

From that fire, we transition to Daenerys sitting in the hearth next to the Painted Table as she presents Missandei’s sole possession brought across the Narrow Sea to Grey Worm, her slave collar. A real No-Limit Soldier, he throws that mess into the open flame because, WHAT KIND OF GIFT IS THAT?!?!?!? Why would he want the mark of her enslavement to remember her by? Let that burn just like the racist Westorosi, but we’re coming to that. And that was her only possession? So you didn’t give your girl nary a dress? I see you Dany. Besides, Grey Worm already has all of her hair products in his room, so he’s good.

Their grieving is interrupted by Jon, who she consents to see in private, and both parties are clearly conflicted between the affection they feel for each other and their call to duty. Dany admits she has never felt the love of the Seven Kingdoms that Jon or even Sansa engender, only the fear to keep them in line. Jon professes his love for her, but when Auntie tries to get a little freaky, Jon has to tell her he got on board with Alyssa Milano’s sex strike and is withholding the Valyrian Steel. Stung by his rejection, Daenerys declares “alright then, let it be fear.”

Tyrion again pleads with Dany not to raze the city of King’s Landing, claiming the people will ring the bells in surrender if they know the fight is lost. It struck me last episode how unusual it was that the show seemed to be telegraphing that it was a foregone conclusion that Daenerys’s army would win, even as it took pains to show us how much more even the odds were now, and that continued this week. The conversations were never about how they would win, or if they even still could, but begging her not to run up the score too much when she inevitably did. It was an odd choice barring one hell of an unforeseen swerve in their fortunes, but we’ll get to that when we hit the capital. In any event Dany acquiesces to Tyrion’s wishes if the city bends the knee, but gives him a final warning that Jaime was captured trying to get back to Cersei, and that his next mistake will be his last. The fact that Tyrion is still alive at this point speaks wonders for Daenerys’s patience (and his plot armor) but put a pin in that idea.

King’s Landing

Joining the armies of the North and the Vale with what remains of the Unsullied and Dothraki, Jon and Tyrion arrive on the outskirts of King’s Landing where the troops are setting camp for the battle. Also making their way downtown are Arya Stark and the Hound, who pass through the lines to enter the city on a mission to kill Cersei (and Clegane’s brother the Mountain) and end the war before it even starts. Tyrion, who we saw earlier calling in a favor from Davos, meets with his brother Jaime and repays his debt from season four by freeing the Kingslayer from captivity and near certain death. He again drives home the notion that Cersei will undoubtedly lose the war and die in the aftermath unless Jaime can convince her to flee King’s Landing (in a ship Davos has set for them) and sail to Essos to start a new life with their unborn child. It’s another evocative scene, as the acting in the show remains unparalleled, drawing on years of history between the brothers, who know they’ll likely both be dead soon, but are damned to try and fight for their family and their own idea of chivalry.

Day breaks, and we’re treated to flawless cinematography and orchestral arrangements dripping in tension as the Iron Fleet and Lannister armies are joined by the Golden Company, preparing to defend the city. The peril of the common folk is made plain and they have no choice but to hide indoors and barricade themselves from the carnage as tightly as possible, which also serves to provide the context and spatial familiarity with the battlefield that was lacking in the Battle of Winterfell. Their best laid plans however are of no concern to a dragon as Daenerys knew what to expect this time and easily out maneuvers the Scorpions from Euron’s naval assault and those covering the walls, blasting through the main gate of King’s Landing and rendering the greatest sellsword army in the world entirely irrelevant. They really should have brought Cersei’s elephants.

Taking that as their cue, Dany’s army — fronted by a surprising number of surviving Dothraki — lay waste to Cersei’s defenders. It wasn’t as much a battle as a rout, with the ease of victory leading to the question of why she didn’t just do this as soon as she touched down in Westeros in season seven. Cersei, overlooking the city, is in full denial and tries to maintain the facade of being in control as Qyburn appraises her of the situation, repeating platitudes she knows are empty as her eyes can’t help but expose her fear. We get a great scene of Jon and Grey Worm (with Davos for some reason) side-by-side handing out the fade to anyone who steps up until the two armies have a stare down in a corridor of the city and the Lannister troops see no choice but to throw down their swords in defeat. The bells ring, and Daenerys has finally won the crown she has believed to be her birthright for her entire life. And then the episode goes off the rails.

Staring around at her new kingdom, Dany eyes the Red Keep, face quivering with rage instead of relief or joy, and she decides to fly off and burn stretches of the city and the smallfolk at random for funsies. Blame whoever decided to play “Sicko Mode” I guess because the beat flipped and she went off. Taking the cue from his Queen, Grey Worm restarts the attack, as it has now gone from a siege to a sacking. He looks back at Jon, who is trying to hold his forces back, in disgust and presses on with anyone who is here for violence. On the ground, the leader of the Unsullied is a broken man out for retribution and seeking to drown his pain in the blood of his enemies. It’s an understandable turn for a soldier, but what made Daenerys flip? Even Cersei, who burned the Sept of Baelor and everyone in it, was left looking at the scene more shook than she has ever been.

As I said in last week’s review, I don’t have a problem with Dany burning King’s Landing to the last ember if that’s what she had to do. It’s the how and why that was so perplexing, not the what. If she decided to come out of the gate bucking shots for payback and rage, I would have been with it. Instead she decided to be surgical and measured with her strikes, only taking out the Scorpions, and after breaching the city walls left the fighting to her troops. So why then, once the bells were rung and the city bent the knee to her, did she then decide to start roasting the citizens? That was the time to fly straight up to Cersei’s wine porch and burn the whole thing down if it was about her fury and loss. THAT’S revenge! Killing the smallfolk that Cersei doesn’t care about serves no purpose to either Dany’s ascent to the throne or a quest for vengeance and is wholly incongruent to who she has been shown to be.

Yes, the notion that Daenerys can be desensitized to violence and her knack for solving her problems with fire and blood is part of her character, but there’s a hop, skip, and a jump from that to wanton destruction of those who are not her enemies. If that descent is the story you want to tell, I’m on board, but tell that story! The arc could have been more believable if the series had shown eruptions of actual random cruelty instead of men baselessly whispering about it behind her back. Never has her wrath been shown to be directed at the truly innocent rather than those who she perceived to have wronged her, solely for the sake of sadism and fear. I could believe she’d willingly burn King’s Landing and accept incidental murder of the townsfolk if it meant pushing Cersei and her army off the throne. It is a complete paradigm shift to suggest she would instigate that wholesale slaughter for no other reason than a manufactured derangement. The unnatural progression and suddenness of her frenzy led to an immediate disconnect and incredulity that renders impotent what should have been a reveal full of that earned pathos. Failing to recontextualize the past seven seasons of her arc, viewers were instead thrust into a narrative that had been spoken into existence but never sufficiently shown.

Beyond that, her behavior in the episode flies in the face of her all-consuming motivation in taking the throne. Even if you accept that she would burn civilians for the sin of not loving her and embracing her as a savior, why would she wait until the very moment she had attained everything she’d ever dreamed of? For Daenerys, who we’ve seen be single-focused to the point of myopia and perhaps callousness, to suddenly veer wildly into ignoring the throne for the sake of indiscriminate violence just didn’t track. She didn’t fly straight to the Red Keep and claim her crown, nor did she seem concerned with killing Cersei, the pretender who was sitting on her place, blocking her destiny, and the woman who had her friend and advisor Missandei beheaded. So again, what was the point of it all? For all Dany knew, Cersei did sail to Pentos with a child no less driven to return to King's Landing and regain a throne after it's sacking than the Mother of Dragons had been for her entire life. But rather than a meditation of the cyclical nature of violence, or the corruption of power, the lesson seems to be don’t give a dragon to a pyromaniac.

In the streets of King’s Landing, Tyrion and Jon both got put into the Mr. Krabs blur and are confused as to why no one told them Dany might do something like this (Narrator: They all did). Jon in particular traded brooding on a cliff for brooding in the middle of a battlefield and killing anyone with the nerve to interrupt his smoldering in the distance. Meanwhile Jaime is forced to take the long way around and ends up in a disappointing and hilariously petty fight with Euron Greyjoy underneath the collapsing castle. There is some great cinematography here as the chaos above via Drogon falls down around the two tired men. Jaime is mortally wounded by Pirate Pacey, but still ends up killing the Crow’s Eye (with no Dragonbinder) who dies smiling, declaring himself the man who killed Jaime Lannister. Wrong!

Seeing the castle literally falling down around them, the Hound tells Arya to give up her need for revenge while she still can, before it consumes her wholly as it has him. It’s another affecting scene drawing on years of earned interactions, as the Hound has been the next best thing Arya has had for a father since she had to watch Ned lose his head in King’s Landing. The emotions swirl, as you remember this is the first time she’s been in the city since that day, probably the first time she’s been inside the Red Keep since Syrio sent her away to protect her, and now Clegane is doing the same. She thanks him, using his given name of Sandor, and for these two hardened warriors who have been sustained by hate and vengeance it’s the closest either of them can come to admitting they love each other. Arya reclaims her life, and the Hound goes to finally end his own suffering, but hopefully not before taking his brother out first.

Making their way to Maegor's Holdfast to try and survive the destruction, Cersei and Qyburn are escorted by the Queensguard when the roof caves in. While the Queen and her Hand are saved by the Mountain, three of her sworn swords are killed and the castle exposed. Meeting them at the foot of the stairs is the Hound, who easily dispatches the other three survivors and we’re finally ready for Cleaganebowl! Qyburn tries to reason with the Mountain, not realizing everyone has been waiting to see this for years, and gets yeeted into the fallen debris skull first, killing him. Seeing this, Cersei picks up her skirt and saunters right on out of the way of the blood feud because her name is Bennett and she CLEARLY ain’t in it.

In one of the most beautiful shots of the series, the Hound starts to summit the steps towards the brother that scarred and traumatized him, only having eyes for him as the world ends around them and Drogon flies overhead, lighting the skies ablaze. The burned man and his decaying inhuman tormenter hack at each other, each blow echoing back into eternity as for both of them this fight started a generation ago. Cersei, now completely alone, her ambitions falling around her as the very painted map of Westeros she commissioned to mark her new empire cracks and withers in the face of true power, her joy turning to ashes in her mouth, has retreated fully into despair, but who else is there in her lowest moment than her brother and lover Jaime? Shame on me for thinking last week that the writers were giving weight to his character arc and just hiding their hand, he went right back to exactly who he said he was as a simp for Cersei who can’t get right.

The Hound and Mountain continue their conflict as Sandor runs his brother through the gut with his sword, and Ser Gregor doesn’t even flinch. You should have gone for the head! Qyburn did his zombification job a little too well, a fact he’d likely lament if he weren’t already dead. The scene expertly cuts back to Arya, now trying to make her way all the way back out of the dying city, interlacing the pounding she’s taking on the streets dodging the carnage, with the blows the Hound is receiving from his brother as though they were one body. There are a few too many near-death fake outs for us to believe Arya is truly in danger, the way we might have if the POV character were, say, Ser Davos (who comes from Flea Bottom), but the connection between her and Sandor makes it worthwhile. As the Mountain presses his little brother against the wall strangling him, there’s a moment it feels like we might get another of his face smashing fatalities a la Prince Oberyn (RIP to a real one!), but the Hound pulls a page out of Lyanna Mormont (gone too soon) and stabs him in the eye. This still doesn’t kill him, because what is dead may never die, but Sandor Clegane masters his fear and rushes his brother, taking them both through the walls of the Red Keep and plunging into the raging fires of the burning castle where they both meet their end.

Finally having enough, as Dany’s path of destruction has now ignited the wildfire caches under the city left by her father, Jon puts away his sword and leads his troops out of the city. Arya meanwhile is forced to leap into action, trying to save as many people as she can, even if that’s only a mother and her daughter. Between the Dothraki, and nearly being burned alive by Drogon however, it takes a miracle for her to save herself.

Underneath the castle, Cersei and Jaime’s Pentoshi adventure is cut short as the falling rubble has sealed their only escape. Realizing she doesn’t want to die in a prison of her own making, her last facades fall apart and she crumbles in her brother’s arms under the weight of her folly. Both knowing these are their last moments, he comforts her, preparing to die as he’s always wanted, in the arms of the woman he loves. There would be no satisfying death for the longest running antagonist of the series, and many were disappointed as we had already seen Cersei “stripped of all her finery” as she took her walk of atonement through the streets of King’s Landing. With no cathartic payoff, or larger consequence to her oft-mentioned pregnancy, the lack of gratification is endemic of the problems many have with the writing this season, and one of the most deliciously evil, yet human characters of television history deserved a send off befitting of her stature.

As the path is now clear for Daenerys to take her throne covered in ash (not Snow) fulfilling the vision of her future from The House of the Undying in Qarth, Arya awakes to see the charred bodies of the innocent she was trying to save in a scene right out of Pompeii. She also finds a single, pale horse which she rides out of the city dripping in symbolism and riding out the end of the episode, closing with The Rains of Castamere.

On the whole, I will say that the episode was wonderfully directed and beautifully shot. For my disappointment with the Battle of Winterfell, Miguel Sapochnik’s work on the Siege of King’s Landing excelled on a visual level. The shots of Drogon destroying the Scorpions and later laying waste to the city gave great respect to the depth and dimensionality of the terror and awe of dragons and their ability to dispense death from above at any moment. The chaos of both that flight from destruction, and the mores of human depravity as Daenerys’s army abandoned any pretense of rectitude and gave into their hedonism was laid bare, and as always, was accompanied by a masterful score. The acting also needs to be singled out, as each character sold with absolute conviction the moments they were stepping into. It’s truly a shame that so much genuinely wonderful work was overridden by slipshod writing and character decisions born out of an artificially imposed deadline and a strained sprint to the finish line.

Either way, we’re here. Get ready for the series finale next week! Look forward to capping it off with you then.

[bakechochin]

The Book Ramblings of August

In place of book reviews, I will be writing these ‘book ramblings’. A lot of the texts I’ve been reading (or plan to read) in recent times are well-known classics, meaning I can’t really write book reviews as I’m used to. I’m reading books that either have already been read by everyone else (and so any attempt to give novel or insightful criticisms would be a tad pointless), or are so convoluted and odd that they defy being analysed as I would do a simpler text. These ramblings are pretty unorganised and hardly anything revolutionary, but I felt the need to write something review-related this year. I’ll upload a rambling compiling all my read books on a monthly basis.

A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole An American friend recommended me this (or I mean technically he’s Russian but I’m not going to get into that because it’s not important to this ramble), citing it as a legitimately hilarious book, an idea that my cynical mind was fully willing to haughtily scoff at. I opted to read it not only because of the really nice Penguin Clothbound edition, but because, from what I’d heard, it was a picaresque narrative set in a colourful New Orleans setting with plenty of memorable characters, and if I’m going to read any American literature, this seemed like a safe bet.  As it turns out, the fact that this story is a picaresque narrative isn’t what first stood out to me as this book’s main strength; this is very much a story defined by its characters, to the extent that the few short bits of secondary reading on this text write pretty much solely on Toole’s achievements in terms of the characters that he’s created. Ignatius J Reilly and Myrna Minkoff are honestly two of my favourite characters in any book, not because they’re necessarily likeable (because they really aren’t) but because they’re interesting and humorous and diametrically opposed in a fascinating way. These two are certainly the standout characters; the majority of the other characters are noteworthy, but perhaps only really as examples of stereotypical character moulds (niche and relevant only to the setting as said stereotypes may be). Much of the comedy in the text is based on evoking laughter at figures who you’d feel bad for laughing at, which is all good fun when such characters are such blustering caricatures that one cannot help but laugh at them, but in other cases it doesn’t really make for enjoyable reading. Ignatius’ mother, for instance, is such a pathetic and pitiful character in her own scenes that any intended comedy at her expense just seems a tad cruel. There is a recurrent theme in the text of characters who are seemingly only introduced for a very small scene in a very minor role are then roped into the overall grand story, and their exploits are narrated on for seemingly long after they have had any relevance to Ignatius, the book’s main driving force. This is perhaps ameliorated when said extra side stories follow characters who are interesting in their own rights; Jones, for instance, is a bloody hilarious character, even when absolutely bugger all is going on in his own story until Ignatius enters the fray again. The setting is very colourful, and made yet more absurd with its cast of caricatures and odd preponderance for utilising wacky costumes for comedic effect, and this absurdity perfectly reflects the story, a story that goes significantly more off the rails than I was anticipating. There are twists and turns and cases of mistaken identity and characters running into each other at hilariously inopportune moments, and whilst the plot takes a while to set all the pieces in motion, when it does it’s a fucking joy to read. I didn’t know how a picaresque narrative could properly end when it is comprised entirely of wacky self-enclosed encounters which all have their defined individual beginnings and endings, but this book’s ending is surprisingly satisfying, as well as being in keeping with the medieval wheel of fortune structure that is constantly brought up in Ignatius’ monologuing. This text is apparently now on some American school curriculums, which certainly adds up to me because, when reading it, I was put in mind of the texts that I looked at for GCSE, in that the text is defined by its few blatantly obvious central themes that don’t require much extrapolation, and subsequently result in there not being much in the way of innovative or novel secondary reading pieces on the text. Perhaps this tidbit of information can be extended to explain my rather petty and subjective complaints about the novel; I did this sort of shit with the texts I had to read for GCSE too. I’m glad that I read this out of choice as opposed to being forced to learn about, because it’s far better for enjoyment than for education in my opinion.

I didn’t actually read any more novels this month, so I made up for it by reading an absolute fuck tonne of short stories.

From Shadows of Carcosa: Tales of Cosmic Horror: ‘The Squaw’ (Bram Stoker) - a short and well-written little piece with an ending that was both satisfying and metal as fuck ‘Moxon’s Master’, ’That Damned Thing’ and ‘An Inhabitant of Carcosa’ (Ambrose Bierce)  - very well-written and compelling pieces, though varying in how memorable they are (my favourite probably being ’That Damned Thing’, because it seems less like a snippet of a wider story and more like a full pieced-together narrative) ‘The White People’ (Arthur Machen) - astounding writing both in its mind-bending discourse on the meaning of evil and its ability to uniquely convey the terrifying unknowableness of the cosmic horror genre with the narrative voice of a child, though I fail to see the connection between the two ‘The Willows’ (Algernon Blackwood) - excellent at imbuing a novel location with a unique sense of dread, though the past tense narration perhaps jumps the gun somewhat when it comes to revealing the fates of our characters (and perhaps the grand villainous entities from another dimension seem a tad incongruous in this rather small setting) ‘Seaton’s Aunt’ (Walter de la Mare) - very compelling writing that turns out to not be about much at all; a fantastic depiction of childhood fear that doesn’t really translate as well when the story’s characters reach adulthood ‘The Colour Out Of Space’ (HP Lovecraft) - a slow build-up of imaginative and fucked-up strangeness in a cool rural setting, really capturing the essence of the cosmic horror with a truly unknowable and unique threat

Miscellaneous short stories: ‘The Dualists’ (Bram Stoker) - certainly well-written but any thoughts that I have on it are completely overshadowed by the fact that this is among the most fucked-up short stories I’ve ever read - it goes beyond cheery Grand Guignol fun times entertainment and is instead just really fucked and unsatisfying ‘A Dream of Red Hands’ (Bram Stoker) - well-written and possesses a pleasant enough ending, but it was more Christian-centric than I expected and less gratuitously bloody for a story with such an evocative title ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ (Ambrose Bierce) - absolutely fantastic from its exciting action sequence to its phenomenal ending, with American history nonsense just vague enough so as to be accessible ‘The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether’ (Edgar Allan Poe) - a short and darkly funny story with an absolutely fantastic chaotic dinner scene ‘Axolotl’ (Julio Cortazar) - delicately written and weirdly thought-provoking even though it’s seemingly not really about anything at all ‘Mr Miao/The Tiger Guest’ (Pu Songling) - a striking and dramatic story about social decorum and crazy animal curses, which was basically what I expected from my limited frame of reference to Chinese fiction (and had more in common with The Tiger Who Came to Tea than I would have reasonably expected)

[swimintothesound]

Artistic Integrity and Commercial Success | Part 2

This is a follow-up to my last post about Drake, Travis Scott, and artistic integrity.

A Mixed Bag

We now find ourselves in the summer of 2017. Almost a year removed from both Drake’s Views and Travis Scott’s Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight. I’ve personally had enough time to fully digest each release, and more importantly to this conversation, I’m beginning to see how these two albums will sit in their respective artist’s discographies. We have just enough distance to see how these two have changed and where they’re heading next.

At the time of writing, Drake has already released a follow-up to Views in the form of a “playlist” titled More Life. Meanwhile, Travis Scott has released a slew of features, loosies, leaks, and other things that sound like a euphemism for shitting your pants. Since Trav’s position is a little more complex (and part of his inevitable multi-month-long lead up to his next album), I’ll start this by diving into Drake and his year since Views.

Personal Views

My primary complaint with Views was that it was just okay. If You’re Reading This made me a fan of Drake the year before, and I was disappointed that his next proper follow-up was so unsatisfying. I liked what Views was going for: a musical journey through the seasons in Toronto… but the album didn’t quite stick the landing. All that concept ended up meaning was that there were three types of songs on the album: R&B, hip-hop, and dancehall.

One of the reasons Drake works so well as an artist is because he walks the line between singer and rapper like no one else. Adding dancehall into the equation threw him off his own game. If You’re Reading This was almost entirely rap (which made it an easy entry point for me) but his older albums tend to walk a much finer line. On Views you just have individual songs that do one of these things (and don’t do it particularly well). “Redemption” is a classic Drake relationship slow jam. “Hype” is a braggadocious turn-up track. “Controlla” is one of Drake’s first forays into his Caribbean island sound. None of these tracks are too offensive on their own, but as an album, it proves to be a jarring jagged listen rather than a compelling journey.

In addition to this third-wheel genre-hopping love triangle, Views came with some of the corniest lyrics in Drake’s entire career. From Cheesecake Factory namedrops to questionable punchlines, the tiredness of Views has already been covered pretty extensively by the internet at large. If you’d like a good laugh I’d highly recommend checking out Dead End Hip Hop’s discussion of the album (timestamped for maximum enjoyment).

And on top of all this, Views comes in at 81 minutes long, it was loaded with uninspired features, retreads of previous ideas, and Drake even tossed “Hotline Bling” on the end to artificially inflate his numbers. As a result, the whole thing just feels like one big overly-long incongruous jumble of Drake.

More Life, More Everything

In March of 2017, Drake released his next project, a “playlist” titled More Life. Coming in at 22 tracks stretched across 82 minutes, More Life falls victim to some of the same pratfalls as Views, but manages to improve on nearly all fronts.

First off, there’s a discussion to be had here on what the fuck it means to be a “playlist” as opposed to an album. It may just be a cop-out to avoid being criticized in the same way as an album, but perhaps because we have no barometer for it I ended up liking More Life far more than Views.

Viewing it as a playlist actually, lends credence to the different sounds that Drake flirts with. It allows freer experimentation and doesn’t bound the release to any traditional musical box. And I know I just shit on Views for being uneven, but the lack of thematic cohesion actually works in More Life’s favor. It allows Drake to hone his dancehall obsession, experiment with harder beats, dip into grime, and utilize a deeper roster of guest features. In fact, there are some songs on More Life that don’t contain any Drake at all. It’s interesting to pose “no Drake” as a point in favor of a Drake release, but I suppose that’s just another side effect of being a playlist.

Unlike Views, More Life is largely segmented by genre but allows each “sound” to exist compartmentalized in its own little section. The album opens with “Free Smoke” a hard-hitting rap intro which immediately bleeds into “No Long Talk” a UK-influenced club banger. From there the album throws you an immediate curve ball with the dancey “Passionfruit” which officially serves as the introduction to the Dancehall section of the album.

The dancehall stretch of songs peaks with “Blem” easily Drake’s best dancehall track, and one of my new personal favorites. “Blem” leads directly into “4422,” a Sampha solo track that breaks up the Drake monotony, transitions perfectly to a surprise Lil Wayne interlude and then melts into “Gyalchester” one of Drake’s best pump-up songs of all time.

“Gyalchester” is followed by a slew of traditional rap tracks with features from the likes of Travis Scott, Skepta, and Young Thug. From there “Nothings Into Somethings” marks the album’s pivot into the albums R&B section. Finally, the album's final handful of tracks shuffle through a little bit of each sound in Drake’s repertoire.

All of this leads to the final track in the playlist “Do Not Disturb” a pensive Snoh Aalegra-sampling track that finds Drake reflecting on his life since the release of Views. In one of the songs more telling lines Drake explicitly talks about where he was mentally while making his last album 

“Yeah, ducked a lot of spiteful moves / I was an angry youth when I was writin' Views / Saw a side of myself that I just never knew”

In addition to name-dropping the title of the album, it’s also tradition for the last Drake song tends to be one of the most reflective on each record. While that usually means self-aggrandizing and reflecting on his own accomplishments, the line above stuck out like a sore thumb to me upon first listen. It shows that a surprising amount of development and growth has happened in the past year, and it’s interesting to see Drake reflect negatively on an album he’d released less than a year ago. It also spoke to people like me (or Drake fans in general) who felt let down by Views.

This line combined with an equally self-aware voicemail from his Mom on “Can’t Have Everything” have completely quelled my fears of another artistically-regressive Drake album. That said, there’s still plenty wrong with Drake. From writer’s camps to being a culture vulture, to losing his soul, there’s still lots to criticize. Separate the art from the artist and all that.  

I guess it’s apparent I like More Life quite a bit. The album is as long as Views, but manages to handle everything it does better. From the lack of dumb-smart punchlines to a more varied (but organized) listen, I think releasing a “playlist” freed Drake up to experiment more which is exactly what Views was lacking.

I’m mainly happy that he got out of this apparent rut, and doesn’t seem to be compromising his artistic vision to chase a sound that will make him money. At this point, he’s one of pop’s biggest stars, and people will listen to anything he puts out, so maybe this is all a moot point, but at the very least he’s trying out new things and not chasing money. He’s essentially too big to fail, so when the money chases you there’s really no need to get validation through numbers.

If releasing a playlist frees you up to more artistic experimentation then it’s better for Drake, the listener, and the culture. If breaking out of traditional marketing cycles and release dates gives you more mental energy then go for it. Drake obviously saw Views for what it was: a flawed album. You can criticize Drake for a lot of things, but you have to admit that this level of self-awareness and reflection is pretty rare for someone as big as him. I appreciate the fact that music’s biggest star can still take risks, even when there’s an easier path that already exists. 

Read Part 3 Here

[clairehosking]

Reading Notes

Ian Bogost wrote a piece in the atlantic, here are some of the notes I took on my second reading, as in-line replies.

A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories, like the ones that play out fictionally on the Star Trek Holodeck. In this hypothetical future, players could interact with computerized characters as round as those in novels or films, making choices that would influence an ever-evolving plot. It would be like living in a novel, where the player’s actions would have as much of an influence on the story as they might in the real world.

Okay straight off the bat that seems a pretty specific definition of story, which requires:

complex characters

Player Influencing plot

“Living in a novel” (which I’ll take for meaning complex simulated environments)

It’s an almost impossible bar to reach, for cultural reasons as much as technical ones. One shortcut is an approach called environmental storytelling. Environmental stories invite players to discover and reconstruct a fixed story from the environment itself. Think of it as the novel wresting the real-time, first-person, 3-D graphics engine from the hands of the shooter game. In Disneyland’s Peter Pan’s Flight, for example, dioramas summarize the plot and setting of the film. In the 2007 game BioShock, recorded messages in an elaborate, Art Deco environment provide context for a story of a utopia’s fall. And in What Remains of Edith Finch, a new game about a girl piecing together a family curse, narration is accomplished through artifacts discovered in an old house.

Okay so environmental storytelling is seen as an attempt at holodecking b/c it allows for rich environments, while artifacts imply or relate the life histories of complex characters, and player has influence in the sense that they move the plot along.

The approach raises many questions. Are the resulting interactive stories really interactive, when all the player does is assemble something from parts?

I think you doing the assembly rather than having someone assemble something for you is still a meaningful difference.

Are they really stories, when they are really environments?

I think I can only answer this when I understand what your definition of story is.

And most of all, are they better stories than the more popular and proven ones in the cinema, on television, and in books?

On this measure, alas, the best interactive stories are still worse than even middling books and films.

I’m a little confused by this standard. In terms of storytelling, are games falling short of the holodeck, or falling short of books and movies? b/c they seem like different questions to me. The holodeck question is about whether games meet the specific criteria to become the dreamed-of interactive movie. If the question is whether they measure to books/films, it’s more about whether games have equivalent ways to express characters and events but not necessarily whether it matches up to a linear, player-involved, immersive environment standard.

In retrospect, it’s easy easy to blame old games like Doom and Duke Nukem for stimulating the fantasy of male adolescent power. But that choice was made less deliberately at the time. Real-time 3-D worlds are harder to create than it seems, especially on the relatively low-powered computers that first ran games like Doom in the early 1990s. It helped to empty them out as much as possible, with surfaces detailed by simple textures and objects kept to a minimum. In other words, the first 3-D games were designed to be empty so that they would run.

An empty space is most easily interpreted as one in which something went terribly wrong. Add a few monsters that a powerful player-dude can vanquish, and the first-person shooter is born. The lone, soldier-hero against the Nazis, or the hell spawn, or the aliens.

Those early assumptions vanished quickly into infrastructure, forgotten. As 3-D first-person games evolved, along with the engines that run them, visual verisimilitude improved more than other features. Entire hardware industries developed around the specialized co-processors used to render 3-D scenes.

Ok so games are kinda doing the complex simulated environments part?

Left less explored were the other aspects of realistic, physical environments. The inner thoughts and outward behavior of simulated people, for example, beyond the fact of their collision with other objects. The problem becomes increasingly intractable over time. Incremental improvements in visual fidelity make 3-D worlds seem more and more real. But those worlds feel even more incongruous when the people that inhabit them behave like animatronics and the environments work like Potemkin villages.

But failing at the complex interactive characters part. True. (Some interesting experiments by SpiritAI and the game Event[0] however.)

Worse yet, the very concept of a Holodeck-aspirational interactive story implies that the player should be able to exert agency upon the dramatic arc of the plot. The one serious effort to do this was an ambitious 2005 interactive drama called Façade, a one-act play with roughly the plot of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It worked remarkably well—for a video game. But it was still easily undermined. One player, for example, pretended to be a zombie, saying nothing but “brains” until the game’s simulated couple threw him out.

Also failing at the plot-influencing part and emergent events part (but some interesting experiments -- blood and laurels, for instance).

Environmental storytelling offers a solution to this conundrum. Instead of trying to resolve the matter of simulated character and plot, the genre gives up on both, embracing scripted action instead.

In between bouts of combat in BioShock, for instance, the recordings  players discover have no influence on the action of the game, except to color the interpretation of that action. The payoff, if that’s the right word for it, is a tepid reprimand against blind compliance, the very conceit the BioShock player would have to embrace to play the game in the first place.

True, this is what 3D games do. But I’d argue that other games give up on the fully simulated environment in order to resolve simulated characters and/or simulated plots. All three of these things are happening they’re just not happening in the same games.

In 2013, three developers who had worked on the BioShock series borrowed the environmental-storytelling technique and threw away both the shooting and the sci-fi fantasy. The result was Gone Home, a story game about a college-aged woman who returns home to a mysterious, empty mansion near Portland, Oregon. By reassembling the fragments found in this mansion, the player reconstructs the story of the main character’s sister and her journey to discover her sexual identity. The game was widely praised for breaking the mold of the first-person experience while also importing issues in identity politics into a medium known for its unwavering masculinity.

Feats, but relative ones. Writing about Gone Home upon its release, I called it the video-game equivalent of young-adult fiction. Hardly anything to be ashamed of, but maybe much nothing to praise, either. If the ultimate bar for meaning in games is set at teen fare, then perhaps they will remain stuck in a perpetual adolescence even if they escape the stereotypical dude-bro’s basement. Other paths are possible, and perhaps the most promising ones will bypass rather than resolve games’ youthful indiscretions.

I love Gone Home but I certainly don’t think it shows the limits of what can be achieved at all, even within this palette of techniques. So far it feels like this article is trying to point out the weaknesses of games trying to holodeck, but Gone Home never felt like an attempt to. It felt like it was trying to glean which storytelling techniques come naturally to games and explore them.

* * *

What Remains of Edith Finch both adopts and improves upon the model set by Gone Home. It, too, is about a young woman who returns home to a mysterious, abandoned house in the Pacific Northwest, where she discovers unexpected and dark secrets.

The titular Edith Finch is the youngest surviving member of the Finch family, Nordic immigrants who came to the Seattle area in the late 19th century. It is a family of legendary, cursed doom, an affliction that motivated emigration. But once they arrived on Orcas Island, fate treated the Finches no less severely—all its lineage has been doomed to die, and often in tragically unremarkable ways. Edith has just inherited the old family house from her mother, the latest victim of the curse.

As in Doom and BioShock and almost every other first-person game ever made, the emptiness of the environment becomes essential to its operation. 3-D games are settings as much as experiences—perhaps even more so. And the Finch estate is a remarkable setting, imagined and executed in intricate detail. This is a weird family, and the house has been stocked with  handmade gewgaws and renovated improbably, coiling Dr. Seuss-like into the air. The game is cleverly structured as a series of a dozen or so narrative vignettes, in which Edith accesses prohibited parts of the unusual house, finally learning the individual fates of her forebears by means of the fragments they left behind—diaries, letters, recordings, and other mementos.

The result is aesthetically coherent, fusing the artistic sensibilities of Edward Gory, Isabel Allende, and Wes Anderson. The writing is good, an uncommon accomplishment in a video game. On the whole, there is nothing to fault in What Remains of Edith Finch. It’s a lovely little title with ambitions scaled to match their execution. Few will leave it unsatisfied.

And yet, the game is pregnant with an unanswered question: Why does this story need to be told as a video game?

(This sort of conjures up the idea that game designers sit down with a linear plot and attempt to holodeck it, which I feel is less and less of a thing)

The whole way through, I found myself wondering why I couldn’t experience Edith Finch as a traditional time-based narrative. Real-time rendering tools are as good as pre-rendered computer graphics these days, and little would have been compromised visually had the game been an animated film. Or even a live-action film. After all, most films are shot with green screens, the details added in postproduction. The story is entirely linear, and interacting with the environment only gets in the way, such as when a particularly dark hallway makes it unclear that the next scene is right around the corner.

One answer could be cinema envy. The game industry has long dreamed of overtaking Hollywood to become the “medium of the 21st century,” a concept now so retrograde that it could only satisfy an occupant of the 20th. But a more compelling answer is that something would be lost in flattening What Remains of Edith Finch into a linear experience.

Yep, I would agree with that.

The character vignettes take different forms, each keyed to a clever interpretation of the very idea of real-time 3-D modeling and interaction. In one case, the player takes on the role of different animals, recasting a familiar space in a new way. In another, the player moves a character through the Finch house, but inside a comic book, where it is rendered with cell-shading instead of conventional, simulated lighting. In yet another, the player encounters a character’s fantasy as a navigable space that must be managed alongside that of the humdrum workplace in which that fantasy took place.

Something would be lost in flattening most “walking sims” and narrative investigation games and that’s the experience of space itself, perhaps the most prized thing holodecking adds to stories (after all, if you want to participate in an ever evolving, player influenced story, you could do d&d instead).

These are remarkable accomplishments. But they are not feats of storytelling, at all. Rather, they are novel expressions of the capacities of a real-time 3-D engine.

I disagree. “novel expressions of the capacities of a real-time 3-D engine” are the “telling” part of storytelling.

The ability to render light and shadow, to model structure and turn it into obstacle, to trick the eye into believing a flat surface is a bookshelf or a cavern, and to allow the player to maneuver a camera through that environment, pretending that it its a character. Edith Finch is a story about a family, sure, but first it’s a device made of the conventions of 3-D gaming, one as weird and improvised as the Finch house in which the action takes place.

Such repurposing was already present in earlier environmental story-games, including Gone Home and Dear Esther, another important entry in the genre that prides itself on rejecting the “traditional mechanics” of first-person experience. For these games, the glory of refusing the player agency was part of the goal. So much so that their creators even embraced the derogatory name “walking simulator,” a sneer invented for them by their supposedly shooter-loving critics.

But walking simulators were always doomed to be a transitional form. The gag of a game with no gameplay might seem political at first, but it quickly devolves into conceptualism. What Remains of Edith Finch picks up the baton and designs a different race for it. At stake is not whether a game can tell a good story or even a better story than books or films or television. Rather, what it looks like when a game uses the materials of games to make those materials visible, operable, and beautiful.

Right, so it rejects holodecking and tries to convey character, plot and space according to its own language. This feels like saying games are bad at holodecking, not necessarily bad at stories.

* * *

Think of a a medium as the aesthetic form of common materials. Poetry aestheticizes language. Painting aestheticizes flatness and pigment. Photography does so for time. Film, for time and space. Architecture, for mass and void. Television, for economic leisure and domestic habit. Sure, yes, those media can and do tell stories. But the stories come later, built atop the medium’s foundations.

What are games good for, then? Players and creators have been mistaken in merely hoping that they might someday share the stage with books, films, and television, let alone to unseat them. To use games to tell stories is a fine goal, I suppose, but it’s also an unambitious one.

lol

Games are not a new, interactive medium for stories. Instead, games are the aesthetic form of everyday objects. Of ordinary life. Take a ball and a field: you get soccer. Take property-based wealth and the Depression: you get Monopoly. Take patterns of four contiguous squares and gravity: you get Tetris. Take ray tracing and reverse it to track projectiles: you get Doom. Games show players the unseen uses of ordinary materials.

And if I take a story, shake it up and scatted it all over an environment? Is that the aesthetic form of storytelling?

As the only mass medium that arose after postmodernism, it’s no surprise that those materials so often would be the stuff of games themselves. More often than not, games are about the conventions of games and the materials of games—at least in part. Texas Hold ’em is a game made out of Poker. Candy Crush is a game made out of Bejeweled. Gone Home is a game made out of BioShock.

The true accomplishment of What Remains of Edith Finch is that it invites players to abandon the dream of interactive storytelling at last.

This doesn’t make sense to me. You’ve made a good case that games can convey character and plot well through “novel expressions of the capacities of a real-time 3-D engine”, and you’ve made a case that environmental storytelling doesn’t achieve holodecking, but I’m not going to rule out that other techniques might.

Yes, sure, you can tell a story in a game. But what a lot of work that is, when it’s so much easier to watch television, or to read.

A greater ambition, which the game accomplishes more effectively anyway: to show the delightful curiosity that can be made when stories, games, comics, game engines, virtual environments—and anything else, for that matter—can be taken apart and put back together again unexpectedly.

To dream of the Holodeck is just to dream a complicated dream of the novel. If there is a future of games, let alone a future in which they discover their potential as a defining medium of an era, it will be one in which games abandon the dream of becoming narrative media and pursue the one they are already so good at: taking the tidy, ordinary world apart and putting it back together again in surprising, ghastly new ways.

But this sort of gets why games have stories at all, which is that they are necessities to explain and contextualise the weird things game engines produce. I’d argue that regardless of whether you feel game stories are as good as books, some  “novel expressions of the capacities of a real-time 3-D engine” need narrative context to be understood and enjoyed by players. Rapture is less rapturous without its story. 

[housebeleren]

Theros Beyond Death Odds & Ends Part 2

Just when I thought we’d gotten most or all of the info we were going to get on Theros Beyond Death before the holidays, a couple more tidbits were dropped. And the Magic community (and I) have thoughts about them.

Theme Booster Rares

First up, we have the announcement of the Theros Beyond Death Theme Boosters. Normally, I’ve given literally zero thought to these, but this time, there are changes. 10 rares, two of each color, that will be possible pulls in the Theme Boosters. Of them, a few seem potentially interesting for Brawl & Commander, particularly the three below.

Once these were previewed, the opinions came in rapidly, and from what I’ve seen, the feelings are generally quite negative, mainly regarding the distribution method. I confess that I am... torn.

On the one hand, I understand the theory behind these cards. Every set has some number of cards that are designed for Commander, and don’t particularly fit into the set itself. Think Clone Legion in Dragons of Tarkir or Indomitable Creativity in Aether Revolt. These cards are basically unplayable in Limited,  rarely find uses in Standard or other Constructed formats, and end up effectively being whiffs when opened in normal boosters. As Commander has grown in popularity, so has Wizards’ need to create more cards geared towards it. Putting these cards in the main set would warp Limited too much, so an ancillary product is really the main option that makes sense.

On the other hand, this contributes further to the issue I was mentioning in my last post, which is that it’s getting increasingly difficult to keep track of the cards in a given set and how to get ahold of them. Additionally, every card printed not in the main set has the possibility of being the next Nexus of Fate, not intended for major Constructed play that suddenly finds itself a $50 card as the lynchpin of a Standard archetype. We’re seeing this with Korvold, who’s spiked up in the last month as he’s found Standard play, and it’s likely that there will be more. If these cards end up being very limited in supply and the single prices are high, it’ll end up being a major feel bad.

I’ll just say for me, the jury’s still out on this one. If the supply of these is very small and I have to shell out more than a couple bucks to get the ones I want, it will be very frustrating. And let’s be clear, I am NOT at all interested in actually purchasing the Theme Boosters, just to end up with piles of Commons. (Seriously, you get SO MANY Commons. The chaff abounds.) But if they are readily available for reasonable prices, it may turn out that people are being too preemptively critical of this move.

Either way, I do think Wizards needs to do some simplification of the product lines. Shit’s getting confusing AF.

Theros Beyond Death Story

Thennnnn there was this little drop: Theros Beyond Death Story on Cards

In particular, “Note that for Theros Beyond Death, there are currently no plans for an ebook, so make sure to check out this page throughout preview season.”

And, as confirmed by the good people at Hipsters of the Coast, there are no plans for MTG web fiction either.

This is, to put it mildly, disappointing. After several years of solid story presentation with tight connections to the set design (Tarkir-M19, to be specific), this past year has been one misstep after another. 

A Brief Digression

First up in the past year, Guilds of Ravnica & Ravnica Allegiance have basically no story whatsoever, though the “life on Ravnica” bits of web fiction were enjoyable, if tangential. The greatest shame of this is that Django Wexler “The Gathering Storm” series is truly a fun read, and was well-integrated with the corresponding sets, but probably failed to get high readership due to the super-delayed and bizarre method of distribution. Fortunately you can read all of it HERE, and I highly encourage you to do so, because these were honestly my favorite MTG stories since M19.

Despite the lack of lead-in lore, War of the Spark had the benefit of having probably the most story-engaged player base Magic has had in years, thanks in large part to a truly outstanding and honestly game-changing trailer. Then it succeeded in squandering virtually all of it by presenting a mediocre book (which failed to deliver on a number of preset plot points, such as the Jace/Vraska mind-erasure scheme) and a set of cards that was largely incongruous with the corresponding book beyond the most rudimentary of plot points. 

Dack Fayden not getting a card despite being a major viewpoint character in the book? That card where Liliana confronts Bolas and defeats him with the Chain Veil that didn’t actually happen? And there are countless other similar examples. I get it, these things happen, and as has been pointed out many times, the timelines involved in MTG’s card set creation don’t line up well with the story timelines. 

But at the end of the day, it was unsatisfying. Magic is a brand, it is a business. And the end result of all the hype of War of the Spark? I felt let down, less interested, and less invested in the brand than I did before. To be absolutely clear, I have purchased less sealed product from Standard sets, participated in fewer draft events, and consumed less MTG related content since War of the Spark than in the 3-4 years leading up to it. And I know I am not alone. The story matters, because for huge segments of the playing population, it is a critical way in which we connect to the cards, aka the product. Without that connection, it becomes *just* a game, and there are tons of games out there.

These feelings were amplified by the complete absence of story from M20, an otherwise excellent core set, the decision to make the Wildred Quest (which I have heard is excellent) only available as an e-book (a format I do not typically engage with), and the total and utter clusterfuck that was War of the Spark: Forsaken. (Don’t take my word for it, take The Professor’s.)

Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

Which brings us to now. Theros Beyond Death is coming up. Standard, despite being better since the recent bannings, is failing to draw interest. Tournament attendance is down.

Magic needs story right now. 

Magic needs something compelling to remind its fanbase why this is a property worth being invested in. We have the imminent and triumphant return of one of Magic’s most beloved heroines and..... we’re not going to get any story for it? It’s just going to be the cards and some synopsis on the website? 

Why should I care?

Believe me when I say I would rather there be no story at all than have some poorly-written and problematic word vomit the likes of which we got this year. But I can’t help but reiterate how disappointing this turn of events is. My honest and sincere hope is that Wizards (and Hasbro) have learned that the answer doesn’t lie in trying to monetize Magic fiction through hastily-written books or by placing it behind paywalls. After this last year, I’m going to be very hesitant to spend money on Magic story going forward.

Instead, let people who love and cherish these characters write the story, give them time in advance to do it, then offer the story freely to the fans. Return to the method we had in the glory years of Magic’s story, which was really not that long ago, and the stories will monetize themselves. This is because the fanbase will be bought in again, and they will therefore be invested again. At least I will. 

Here’s hoping.

[prussiantique]

Ode to Hushabye Valley – Notes

Sweet and sincere; apropos for the good lady @hushabyevalley​ whose art inspired it, I should hope. Here’s the usual note that accompanies most of my poetry, and I must apologise: it’s long and while I would be overjoyed if one were to read it, I do realise it’s not particularly interesting. Nonetheless, I would like to explain the hows and whys of a dedicatory poem, so if you want to understand all the allusions of the poem, please read the bit up till the second line of ‘===’s. Under those will be a more technical look into the workings of the poem. If you happen to stick with me from start to finish, then you have my sincerest thanks :) === So, the poem begins with an invocation to Hushabye, the eponymous lady of both the fantastical valley and the castle that is situated therein. Please visit the good lady here or here. Now, world-building is a fundamental aspect of high fantasy and science-fiction, and the world of Hushabye Valley is, at least to me, one that is suffused with romance, timelessness, fantasy, and quiet pathos,– something which I find in all three of the good lady’s ‘tales’: Hushabye Valley (fantasy), Calabi Yau Forest (fantasy), and Ada (sci-fi, but otherwise suffused with the same charm as the others). While the combination is becoming far more popular these days, high fantasy and slice-of-life are not related genres traditionally, as high fantasy is predominantly preoccupied with grand narratives and quests (think C. S. Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkein) while slice-of-life is focused on the memorable moments of everyday life. I find the good lady makes them work wonderfully well, hence the rather odd turn of phrase in ‘complete with beauty, mild and grand’. ‘Mild and grand’ are not cognate ideas, but by placing them both as interlinked qualities of a singular ‘beauty’, it (hopefully) suggests the all-encompassing nature of the splendours that Hushabye portrays in the valley. Puns and allusions are important in an ode of this kind: in a celebratory poem, it should be evident to the addressee exactly what it is that they have done or created that has garnered said praise. In equal measure, if one is sincere about one’s praise or admiration, one’s writing should show a certain amount of knowledge and love of that which is spoken. Some of these are, admittedly rather straightforward, such as ‘misty’, which alludes to the good lady’s tumblr ask: ‘Throw a question into the mist’; ‘a face of marble’, to the rather adorable groundskeeper and main character of Hushabye Valley, Marble; and ‘the archways of a bygone year’, to the banner of Hushabye Valley’s Patreon page. The last one is a little tenuous, if I had to be honest, as the emphasis in the banner is on the four plinths that flank Marble, but I felt ‘archways’ scanned better poetically than ‘plinth’. If I had to use ‘plinth’ instead, I’d have rewritten the line as a hexameter one thus: “Between the plinths engraved with words long worn away;” ‘Queer’ is another word I chose due to its double meaning, due to both its more traditional sense of strange or unusual,– and thus apropos to describe the faerie aspect of Hushabye’s ‘tales,– as well as the presence of yuri/girls’ love therein. I do realise that queer is a complicated word today, but I hope the phrase ‘love sincere’ dispels any doubts regarding which side of the fence my sympathies sit regarding the matter. The word ‘art’ ties into the idea of magic and fantasy as magic, like alchemy, was considered a branch of learning historically, and thus described in the same way we would talk about liberal arts. Of course, Hushabye herself is an accomplished artist of the visual kind, making this another fairly straightforward piece of wordplay. ‘Enfold me in your art’ is just something that I ask of good narratives: I like being immersed in something if I sincerely enjoy it. This ties into the last line and my word choice therein. Castle Hushabye is ‘a fonder home’ to the speaker of the poem, and it’s important to note the use of ‘fonder’ quite specifically. ‘Fonder’ is a comparative adjective, and when considered alongside the context of the speaker, who is evidently a traveller, it suggests that home or haven offered by Hushabye is a place that the speaker finder more loving (not merely lovely) than wherever the speaker originated from. Considering the state of the world today, I would happily escape into the good lady’s worlds and narratives and stay there. While reading, I am reminded of one of Tennyson’s lyric interludes from The Princess: The splendour falls on castle walls                And snowy summits old in story:         The long light shakes across the lakes,                And the wild cataract leaps in glory. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.         O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,                And thinner, clearer, farther going!         O sweet and far from cliff and scar                The horns of Elfland faintly blowing! Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying: Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.         O love, they die in yon rich sky,                They faint on hill or field or river:         Our echoes roll from soul to soul,                And grow for ever and for ever. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying. Beauty and pathos mixed into one, much like the good lady’s tales. <3 === Now to the more dry and technical parts of the piece. If you’ve no interest in the mechanics of poetry, feel free to head off. I promise I won’t mind. I will admit, the poem was intended to be a far longer work when I first started work on it, but that was quickly whittled down when I decided it’d be an acrostic. Long poems are, in addition, generally not something that most people enjoy reading. As this was a poem intended to be read by the good lady herself, it had to be kept short. The main thing I am genuinely unsatisfied with is the unusual rhyme scheme. It’s not irregular, per se, but rather it lacks a certain symmetry that I would have liked to have seen in a poem for someone whose work I sincerely enjoy. The poem’s rhyme scheme follows thus (each letter representing a rhyme word): a b b a c d d c || d e e d f f The ‘d’ rhyme appears four times in the poem as opposed to the two times of every other rhyme, which is, from a poet’s perspective both incongruous and weird in a rather untidy way. Now, ideally, the rhyme scheme of the poem would have looked like this: a b b a c d d c || e f f e g g which would have been better as each quatrain is kept self-contained in terms of rhyme; or, alternatively: a b b a b c c b || c d d c d d would have been another acceptable alternative, slowly phasing through interlocking rhymes in a similar manner to Terza Rima or the Spenserian stanza. An acrostic does pose a challenge poetically as, if I may put it this way, not all letters were created equal from a poetic stand-point. Different opening letters can create difficulties, whether it’s finding words with the correct rhythm or finding words that have a relevant meaning to the poem. Very frequently, the primary problem posed by an acrostic falls into one of three categories: words that begin with the correct letter but have absolutely nothing to do with the contents of the poem; words that fit perfectly into the poem but begin with the wrong letter; or words that have both the correctly letter and meaning but do not fit the rhythm. This last point is actually the cause of a great deal of the metrical irregularity of the piece, with frequent trochees,– as seen in the first foot of lines 1, 7, 9, 11 and 12,– and more occasional spondees,– as found in the first foot of lines 3, 4, and 14,– beginning the lines of what should be  predominantly iambic poem. Just a reminder for anyone who is less familiar with the poetic terminology, iambs, trochees, and spondees are metrical feet or stress patterns in poetry: iamb: ˘ ¯ or unstressed-stressed  (e.g. To be or not to be) trochee: ¯ ˘ or stressed-unstressed  spondee: ¯ ¯ or stressed-stressed In a short poem like this, one good skill to have is the ability to juggle the competing demands of metre and expression without being gagged by them. While one needs to express an idea within a confined space and obey the rules at the same time, one has to do things tastefully after all. An example of this would be in line 3:   ¯          ¯     /  ˘    ¯   /  ˘         ¯      /   ˘   ¯ / ˘     ¯ such   things   I   ere   had   scarce   partaken   in. While it does scan properly, it also falls rather awkwardly from a modern tongue due to the fairly archaic, but more flexible, syntax. Now if we were to expand it and rearrange the line into something more commonplace today, we can not only see how poetry condenses and re-patterns thought, but also how we ourselves have to ‘translate’ archaic poetry mentally to properly understand it.  Thus: such things I ere had scarce partaken in can be expanded to: such things [that] I [before] had [rarely] [taken part] in and can be further rearranged to make: such things [that] I had [rarely] [taken part in] [before] Moving onto structure: although I’ve split it into two stanzas, I would like to argue that the poem could and should be read, structurally, in three different ways: as an acrostic of two words, Hushabye and Valley; as an ode, with an unequal tripartite structure of strophe, antistrophe and epode; as a sonnet, with a false volta in line 9, and a true volta in line 13. I need not go into the acrostic, I think, as it’s probably the most straightforward part of the poem. The ode is where the invocation to ‘Hushabye’ plays its part. Ode are explicitly poems that laud something or someone. In addition, the structure of the poem’s primary movements can be split into three, albeit unequal parts: the strophe, in which the speaker invokes ‘Hushabye’ and describes the initial wonder that he/she experiences; the antistrophe, directed instead to the ‘Valley’ itself, where the beauty that is lauded by the strophe is exchanged from more enduring qualities like ‘tenderness’ and comfort, ‘as suggested by the word ‘languid’. The epode is the sudden change from invocation to imperative as can be seen in the verbs ‘Enfold’ and ‘bid’. As a sonnet, we have to read the poem as a single stanza. The rhyme scheme, however, supports this as it can neatly separate the poem into three quatrains and a couplet, the very same as many types of sonnet. From this perspective, the four lines beginning with ‘Valley’ instead belongs to the same continuum as ‘Hushabye’ and ‘A face…’, rather than being a distinct stanza of its own. This final way of looking at the poem, as a sonnet, is perhaps the only one which also offers a reason for the metrical shift in the final couplet. Rather than being in iambic pentameter, the two lines are actually alexandrines, i.e. iambic hexameter, with a caesura or break in the very middle of those lines, as can be clearly seen in: ‘Enfold me in your art, || and bid me never roam:’ The alexandrine is fairly unusual in English poetry but, when used in a predominantly pentametrical context, serves to slow the pace of the iambs and to create a falling motion, a perfect technique if one wanted to finish a poem in a manner that suggests as much affection as ease. === Long way to go, but if you’ve managed to get here, then you have my sincerest thanks and affection~

[ethnotebook-blog]

Zine Project

 IMMIGRATION: The Promise of a Better Life Meets the Harsh Reality of An American Immigrant

What is Immigration and why do people choose to immigrate?

We are all born citizens of the country of our birth. We are raised in the customs and culture of that country and its people our whole lives, and it molds who we are at the most fundamental level.

I am American, and having been born and raised in this country has had a tremendous impact on the way in which I see the world. My grandmother was born Portuguese, and she lived in her home country until she was eighteen years old. That being the case, even though she has lived in the United States for over fifty years now, she still sees the world around her from a very different perspective than I do, or even the way her friends her age who were born here do.

Where we come from is an immeasurably strong part of who we are and where we might go in life, and for most people, leaving our home country seems daunting, or even counterproductive to our life goals.

Unfortunately, in many parts of the world, this cultural identity and lifestyle becomes incongruous with a person’s needs and aspirations. Some citizens find themselves unable to support themselves or their families financially because of their home country’s economic state. Others are persecuted for their religious beliefs or political opinions and as such no longer feel safe in their country of birth. Many find themselves driven from their home countries by the destructions wrought by war or disease. Others still, simply are unsatisfied with the atmosphere or opportunities available to them where they are and seek out a new path.

No matter the reason, when a person chooses the leave their birth country behind and start again in a foreign country, they are taking the first step towards immigration. The path to gaining citizenship and residency in their new chosen country is often long and unforgiving, but in the end they are presented with the promise of a new home that will hopefully be the solution to the problems which drove them from their old home.

Why do so many immigrants choose to come to the United States?

There are certainly a great many advantages socially and economically to American living when compared to the countries most of our immigrants come from, but the same could be said when comparing most third world countries to anywhere in Europe. So why do they so often choose to come here rather than settle in France or Britain?

Historically, large waves of immigration coming from Europe to the US have been promoted by war, and in those times of turmoil America seemed to be safely enough removed to be seen as a safe haven. However, those fleeing Europe during either of the World Wars would have been even further removed from the fighting if they had settled in South America somewhere, so why did they choose to come here?

The answer is simpler than most people think. Propaganda. For centuries, the United States has been promoting the idea of The American Dream, and its allure is more than enough to bring most immigrants straight to our doorstep.

What is the American Dream?

The United States was founded on ideals of freedom. Freedom of religion. Freedom of thought and expression. Freedom from tyranny and oppression. These ideals still play a huge role in how our society functions, but for the purpose of immigration propaganda, it is thoroughly overhyped.

The most common factor which drives an immigrant to choose America is the belief that by coming here they can have and do anything their heart desires. Education is of the highest possible standard, and job training is readily available. If you are coming from an impoverished country with little or no means to provide for yourself or your loved ones, America might seem like the perfect place to build a new life. And it many ways, it is a huge step up from the places immigrants often leave behind, but things aren’t nearly as perfect as the world would like to believe.

If the American Dream is to be believed, every American, no matter their race, class, or heritage, should be able to achieve stability, wealth, success and happiness. Everyone should someday have a beautiful two-story home with a yard, a white-picket fence, and a dog. Every family should have two perfect children who get to go to a good school and grow up in a good neighborhood. It’s called the American DREAM for a reason; that is every parent’s dream for their child.

Unfortunately, what the US doesn’t go out of their way to share with potential immigrants is that the Capitalistic society on which this country is built lends itself to a lot of hard work and a majority of citizens that never reach that ideal ending. There is still poverty, violence and racism in this country, just like in every other country in the world, regardless of the perfect picture the American Dream would like to portray.

Immigration is only the beginning.

What challenges come with Assimilating afterwards?

The process to become accepted first as a temporary immigrant with one of a variable of visa statuses, and then hopefully, eventually, as an American citizen, is long, complicated, and difficult to navigate, but it is only the beginning. Even after an immigrant is granted a status allowing them to legally live and work here, they still have to find a way to belong here. Assimilating to a new culture and integrating one’s self into that culture can be just as challenging as earning citizenship.

Today, most legal immigration to the United States comes from Mexico and Central America. The first, and in many areas from this region only, language spoken by these immigrants is Spanish. The United States of America does place some positive emphasis on language skills in the workplace, but for the most part, we are a country that only fluently speaks English. For immigrants trying to truly build a life here, learning and mastering the nuances of English, easily one of the most complicated languages on the planet, is a massive hurdle to their long term success here.

Beyond language, immigrants must also find some balance of preserving and respecting their individual cultural heritage while also accepting and integrating themselves into our own culture.