#a new story written by a better writer and one whose writing of jade

[ambrozians]

one of the frustrating thing about the senator pullman stuff (outside of the fact that it was written by gail simone) is that we don’t get a look inside jade’s head at any point in the story. we don’t even get any information as to why and how she discovered pullman was her father nor do we see how that affects her.

[mrevaunit42]

Okay I'm going to just be honest with you: Read the fucking legend books. Everything under the old canon. Here's why

First: Every single story is easily accessible and user friendly. Legends handled the massive catalog of its stories so well because every new copy of the book comes with a full complete timeline in the front pages. Literally every fucking book that is canon in Legends is put in a complete timeline to show you the reader where exactly this story is taking place (and it's even funnier when you realize they use New Hope as the before or after marker. Even tells you the years.) From the Old Republic and Revan to the retirement of our favorite heroes, it's all there. Anything beyond that i believe is comic turf and while I love the comics and there's loads of fun ones, it's very hard to know where to start or what's going on especially with Disney printing its own comics. And as far as I can tell all of them have audiobooks so if reading's not your thing there you go. Plus they're fairly cheap. Most of the books are like 7 or 8 bucks (Dollars). Yes The books spoil things in the beginning but only because you tell whose in the story, their species and their job. Helps with descriptions or you could even look up what you're supposed to be imagining.

Second: The genres you get are varied. While you obviously get the classic empire and rebel civil war conflict and there's a lot of jedi, dark side, sith etc etc there's also focus on other people and other conflicts. Like for example zombie stormtroopers. There's literally a like 400 page story about zombie stormtroopers on an abandon Star Destroyer. It's fun and epic and kinda scary. An Ocean's 11 styled heist with Han, Chewie and Lando before Empire Strikes back! One of my favorites is literally a in hiding jedi turned bodyguard for a fucking pop idol. Singer really but still. And there's so much more I haven't mentioned: The war with beings from another galaxy that's a few books series long, Obi-wan's first mission with Qui-gon Jinn, A second galactic civil that actuals pits Han and Luke on opposing sides. Mara Jade (Luke's wife, yes he's married and she's fucking amazing) first encounter with a still fledging jedi Luke. Freaking the Bounty Hunter civil war. And a lot of these you do not need to know about the entire collection to enjoy. These writings are written differently cuz of the different authors but that's only because...

Three: Lucas gatekept all this. No really. Basically you had to ask him what you can write about and he had to approve it because it would be canon. Different writers wrote different things with his permission cuz their stories would be set in stone. The writing varies and you get different millage but on a whole I enjoyed all the books. Anything by Timothy Zahn is highly recommended by me.

Four: Character and Characterization. Yes you will be missing some of your faves: No baby yoda or mando or Rey, Finn, poe. But the characters you get are awesome: Luke's son Ben, a deadly sith assassin who used to date Luke, a personal assassin who worked for the emperor who married Luke, Thrawn *stolen from legends btw* Jagged Fel, Han and Leia's children Anakin Solo and the twins Jania and Jacen. God Jacen. Jacen is the character they stole and watered down to make Kylo sucks. Literally Jacen is just the better, more complex tragic figure that Kylo WISHES he could even be half of. Oh Boba Fett is alive too! and has a granddaughter. And there's are a handful of characters among the dozens these books have. And the best part? The classic characters? Luke, Leia, Han, Chewie R2 and C3PO they're still the characters you know and love. They actually grow and evolve in ways that feel natural for them. None of this stupid han and leia are separated. They are still happily married and getting on each other's nerves in the best way possible. Luke isn't some disillusion edgy beaten down old man. He's a wise yet humorous mentor and leader who never lost that spark of hope and wonder though it certain has been tempered with loss that comes with a long, dangerous life. Honestly you cannot believe how much they stole from legends. it's a fair amount.

I honestly recommend the legends books. Yes they had decades more time to really flesh everything out and set up their novel universe but Disney is a billion dollar company with talented artists, storytellers and writers. They should've just let them cook instead giving us whatever the fuck those half assed movies were. Leia is a fucking jedi knight in legends, still married to Han and a total badass. Warning though Chewie dies during the galaxy v galaxy war. BUT it takes a whole moon to take him out and he's still in plenty of stories.

Star Wars suddenly making every idiot and their grandma jedi but can’t even make Finn a force user

[darlingxdarkling]

I can’t believe my first Medium article is a pop culture piece criticizing Sindel’s depiction in MK11 Aftermath, but you know what? It’s totally worth it.

Full text under the cut in case the article is inaccessible because of Medium’s paywall. I want my pieces to be as accessible to the public as possible.

Warning: Heavy spoilers for Mortal Kombat 11 and its expansion, Aftermath.

Ever since its first release in 1992, the Mortal Kombat franchise is known for its extreme, action-packed violence and gore that led to the creation of the ESRB. It’s also know for its controversial depictions of scantily-clad women; however, did this not deter female gamers from becoming fans of the franchise, myself included. Admittedly I am one of the fans of Mortal Kombat who was late to the party, partly due to my age and inaccessibility of gaming platforms, only discovering Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 in 2010 while playing with my older cousins, who were mostly boys.

Eyes fixated on the pixelated, motion-captured sprites on the screen in wonder, I remember being a fan of characters such as Raiden, Nightwolf, and Sindel. Especially Sindel, whom I grew to adore because of her regal, gothic appearance. Due to the stereotype that gaming is a masculine interest prevalent during those times, I felt alienated at times, having no other female playmate aside from my younger sister. However, seeing female characters such as Sindel gave me characters to identify with in my formative years.

A decade later, I still am a fan of the franchise, and of those characters. With the years that passed, there had been significant changes in the video game industry, and the clamor for better depictions of women, people of color, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and other minorities. Mortal Kombat is one of the franchises that changed with the times, even introducing their first confirmed gay character Kung Jin in Mortal Kombat X, and depicting classic character Mileena and 3D era character Tanya as lovers in the same game, confirming that Mileena is indeed canonically bisexual.

Mortal Kombat X’s female character designs were diverse and realistic too; there were some female characters whose designs didn’t show too much skin, like Sonya Blade’s main costume, befitting her role and demeanor as a tough-as-nails general, and there were female characters like Mileena who had more skin in her costumes, justified by her character’s desire to compensate for her monstrous Tarkatan genes. It’s not perfect, but overall, Mortal Kombat X is a breath of fresh air to the franchise. As a bisexual, an Asian, and a woman, I felt seen. I felt good, because minorities like me are respectfully represented.

As for its sequel, Mortal Kombat 11, there are some noteworthy depictions of real-life social issues in the game, such as colonization, which is explored with Nightwolf’s revamped lore. In the rewrite, Nightwolf is depicted as someone who used to be angry that his people, a fictional Native American tribe called the Matoka, resigned themselves to colonizers in his youth, but was blessed by his tribe’s deity, the Great Spirit, with power to help his tribe move forward after he defended the Matoka’s honor against Kano. The subject of race is also explored with Jax’s ending, where he uses the power he obtains from the hourglass to create a world where Black people were never enslaved, which garnered manufactured outrage despite the lack of any real controversy. Another example is Fujin’s ending, where he uses his power to experience the lives of mortals of different races, realms, genders, and faiths, putting emphasis on the value of integrating with the masses in order to understand and serve them better.

However, there are some aspects of the game that left a bad taste in my mouth. No, that would be an understatement. It left me furiously disappointed.

John Vogel is the lead writer for the franchise since John Tobias’ departure, writing the bulk of the story until he left around after Mortal Kombat X. Dominic Cianciolo becomes co-writer, alongside Shawn Kittelsen. Cianciolo is credited as the Story Director for Mortal Kombat 11, and thus responsible for the bulk of the plot.

After being unplayable in MKX, Sindel returns to the MK11 roster in a Kombat Pack, expansions featuring characters who aren’t present in the main story or are guest fighters from another franchise, such as Nightwolf and the Joker from the DC Universe. At the announcement of their return, I was ecstatic. The way Nightwolf’s character is handled and the added lore left me positive and hopeful for Sindel’s return.

But then, the retcon happened.

Originally, Sindel is the deceased mother of Kitana whose husband was killed by Shao Kahn. She then sacrificed herself through a suicide pact in order to protect the realms, and was brought back to life as an evil queen by Shao Kahn milennia later, but then escapes his hold. Here, she is made to be evil all along, responsible for her husband’s death and willingly coming with Shao Kahn to rule alongside him. Sindel becomes a character from her society’s ruling class who is obsessed with preserving her privileged position. Some fans claim that this new depiction is “empowering”, but is it really progressive?

Today, the terms “empowerment” and “women’s empowerment” are becoming buzzwords used by advertisers and big industry writers in an attempt to sell their product to a growing number of women who takes part in geek culture or play video games, and a society with values that are getting more and more progressive. Some people call this phenomena “woke capitalism”, where a corporation adopts progressive political causes. The gaming industry is not exempt from that; people pay for games, downloadable content, and microtransactions after all.

More often than not, when male writers write “strong” female characters, they tend to focus solely on enhancing traditionally masculine values, such as fighting ability, ignoring what other values female characters have that make them strong, or they tend to be horribly, horribly tone-deaf, which I will explain in detail later. These representations of “women’s empowerment” should force us to reexamine the media we consume, and discern whether these are genuine depictions of social issues or woke capitalism disguised as such.

In the first place, why are so many writers obsessed with “empowering” female characters, instead of writing them as characters capable of fighting for their emancipation?

Empowerment is passive; it’s something granted by those who hold power, not earned nor fought for. In the rewritten Sindel’s case, she is empowered by Shao Kahn when he took her as his wife and gave her the privileges he enjoys. Sindel’s empowerment is selfish; her rise to power did not empower, emancipate, nor liberate her daughter Kitana, nor Jade, nor Mileena, nor the women of Outworld. On the contrary, it made life worse and oppressive for all of Outworld’s denizens, including its women, who now have to serve not one, but two privilege-drunk monarchs who rule with an iron fist. If that’s the values the writers want to impart on their audience, I have serious doubts on the sincerity of their “wokeness”.

The release of Aftermath takes things up to eleven, where Sindel betrays her own daughter to be with Shao Kahn, who, originally, enslaves her and forces her into marriage, which holds so much unfortunate implications for those in abusive relationships. It doesn’t help that Cianciolo liked a tweet from a fan that said the original Sindel, an abuse survivor, was never an empowered female character and a was bad mother for killing herself and leaving her child behind, bringing even more unfortunate implications not just for women in abusive relationships, but also for people who struggle with suicide. Somehow, Cianciolo and the fans that agree with him ignore these implications altogether and believes that the new haughty, tyrannical Sindel is an example of a strong female character. This isn’t the first time male writers tried their hand at feminist writing and ended up with tone-deaf plot decisions.

Cianciolo took a nuanced and well-written character and turned her into Shao Kahn 2.0. What happened is essentially the creative butchering of Sindel’s character; she went from being a survivor to an oppressor. Shao Kahn already fills the role of a cruel tyrant who refuses to relinquish his privilege for the good of the masses, and rewriting Sindel to become his distaff counterpart is not necessary at all. This treatment of her character isn’t feminist or progressive at all; it’s poorly-disguised misogyny. It’s implying that a woman can only be powerful if she submits to her husband so that he may grant her a taste of privilege reserved for powerful men, an antiquated sentiment best left to the feudal ages. Granted, the fictional realm of Outworld is ruled by a monarchy, but Sindel’s previous characterization is proof that writers can refuse or avoid using that trope.

Emancipation, on the other hand, is an active role; according to Ruane and Todd, it is “a process by which the participants in a system which determines, distorts and limits their potentialities come together actively to transform it, and in the process transform themselves.” This concept can be applied more appropriately to pre-retcon Sindel.

Going back to my days as a highly impressionable teenager, though I grew interested in her for her benevolent demeanor despite her intimidating appearance, Sindel’s roles as a survivor and a leader are what cemented my love for the character. Shao Kahn murdered her husband, usurped the throne, conquered her kingdom, and coerced her to be his wife. Later, she sacrificed herself for the greater good of a realm, and after being resurrected as an evil brainwashed puppet, she finally broke free from her abuser. With her newfound agency, she became a queen of Outworld who recognized her privilege and used it to stand with its masses against tyrants, and she also becomes a doting mother to Kitana, demonstrating great love for her family. When finally removed from her abuser’s influence, Sindel chose to be free, she chose to lead her people benevolently, and she chose to be with her true family. This Sindel broke free from the traditional Outworld power structure that Shao Kahn perpetrated for thousands of years, no longer a bride to be forcefully taken, nor a pawn to be manipulated by its emperor.

If you can look past the scanty costume design standard for video games of that era, the original Sindel could be a female character ahead of her time. Original Sindel not only can kick ass, she also has agency, willpower, and a heart; a strong female character with good writing. For those reasons, Cianciolo’s Sindel is #NotMySindel.

[my-lady-knight]

Favorite Reads of 2019

As seems to be my usual, I’m posting this at what feels like the last second.

Writing this year’s post was hard. I’ve been complaining offline all year that it feels like I read far fewer books I really, truly enjoyed. Even the books I did enjoy, they didn’t stick around long in my head for me to remember details. On the other hand, this list ended up being thirteen items long, so it can’t have been that bad. And having to go back to the books in order to write this list did make me remember how and why I loved them, so there is that.

Presented in chronological order of when I read them:

The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay

The first book I read in 2019, and I knew would end up on this list as soon as I finished. It’s also the first book of Guy Gavriel Kay’s where I finally understood what the fuss was about - when he commits to writing three-dimensional characters with compelling interpersonal and socio-political relationships, he commits. The cultural/social details of this secondary-world version of medieval Spain set at the beginning of the end of the Caliphate and the rise of the Reconquista are evocative, and the scope deftly alternates between being vast without tripping over itself and touchingly personal. Most importantly, this book gave me an OT3 I wasn’t even expecting in the form of Amman ibn Khairan, famed soldier, poet, and advisor now outcast from the city-state of Cartada, Rodrigo Belmonte, beloved cavalry captain with a complicated loyalty to the rulers he serves, and Jehane bet Ishak, an esteemed physician whose path intersects with them both. Together they represent the connections and tensions between their respective, secondary-world Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities, cities, and leaders in this secondary-world Spain and form a triangle of everything the country has, is, and can be. A year later I still love this book.

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays by Alexander Chee

This book is difficult to write about, because I remember loving it as I was reading it, but I can’t remember any of the essays very well several months after the fact (see above). What I do remember is that they were difficult, and complicated, and messy, and they did the thing I love when essays do where the fact that the things Alexander Chee was writing about are super-specific to him made them somehow feel all the more relatable. All the essays were nicely crafted stories and emotional journeys, withAlexander Chee tracing all the various aspects of his life through his writing, as an Asian man, a gay man, an aspiring writer, a professional writer, a resident of NYC, and a survivor of sexual assault, using prose that was both artistic and clear as water.

The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie

Amal El-Mohtar wrote in her NYT review that this book was akin to “Hamlet”, “if [the play] were told from the point of view of Elsinore Castle addressing itself to a Horatio who mostly couldn’t hear it,” to which my response was “huh?” Then I read the book and it a) made so much more sense and b) ended up being an astute, apropos explanation of the kind of book The Raven Tower is. It’s the story of a soldier and companion to the heir of a country investigating the disappearance of its ruler and the ascendency of another in his place. It’s also the story of a calm, patient god in the form of a stone who predates all of history and narrates the changing existence of gods, their power, and their relationship to humans and their civilizations. It’s an understated yet powerful book, full of Ann Leckie’s brilliant and clever writing, world-building, storytelling, and otherworldliness. It’s Ann Leckie. She knows what she’s doing. And it fucking works.

Sal & Gabi Break the Universe by Carlos Hernandez

This book - is bonkers. It is insane. It is one thousand percent over the top. I kept asking myself “why am I not irritated???” Instead I loved it. Sal is the new kid, a practicing magician with as showman’s flair for the dramatic and boundless energy, and he can open up portals into other universes. Gabi is the sharp-eyed, bossy class president and editor of the school newspaper who just knows something’s up with Sal and his shenanigans. Together, they become friends! And open up more portals into other universes. This book is warm and empathetic and funny and kind-hearted. It’s too-muchness quality somehow worked. The whole thing felt like the literary equivalent of a hug. 

The Parting Glass by Gina Marie Guadagnino

This wasn’t a Deep book, but I could not stop thinking about it, nor could I stop recommending it to people. It’s a zippy historical fiction novel set in 1830s NYC prior to the Potato Famine. Mary (or Maire) and her brother Seanin are Irish immigrants working in the same wealthy family’s house, she as lady’s maid to the marriageable daughter named Charlotte, he as a groomsman. Mary is half in love with her Charlotte; unfortunately so is Seanin, and the two of them are carrying on an affair, the aftermath of which leaves Mary in a bind about where her loyalties lie. I love that this book has a queer take on a love triangle that I’ve never seen before, and I loved Mary’s anger and resentment, her unashamed attitude towards her desire for Charlotte as well as other women, and her selfishness as well as her loyalty. I also loved the upstairs-downstairs nature of the book and the clash of Anglo-American and Irish immigrant ethnic and class mores and the larger social and political setting of the city and time period.

The Bird King by G. Willow Wilson

I don’t even know how to begin describing this book. It’s a story about maps and boundaries and borders. It’s an epic of daring escape and adventure about a mapmaker named Hassan with a magical gift and a concubine named Fatima, two friends fleeing the Inquisition after the surrender of Granada, in search of a mythical island ruled by the King of Birds. It’s a story of faith and trust and bonds forged from disparate people, and transformation, transformation of yourself and the world around you because you will it to be so. It’s a beautiful, beautifully written book.

(As a side note, I’m intrigued by the fact that two of my favorite books on here are set during the Reconquista.)

On the Come Up by Angie Thomas

In some ways I liked this even better than The Hate U Give. I loved the complexity that arose out of Bri rapping about the injustices she’s experienced, with people drawing completely different meanings out of her words, people wanting her to use her rapping and her voice for differing reasons, and Bri herself working to figure out the power she has with her rapping and how she wants to use her talents, when it comes to financially supporting her family, standing up for herself, and being herself when so many around her are creating all these false images of her based solely off her words. I loved Bri’s anger, the way she kept speaking before thinking, her loving, sometimes complicated relationships with her family and friends...Angie Thomas’s writing and storytelling is phenomenal.

Kindred by Octavia Butler

I’m not even sure what to say about this book that hasn’t been said but, um, yeah, it’s Octavia Butler, it’s a classic, and really my favorite aspect of the book is how it so effectively bridges the gap between history and present and demonstrates how the two aren’t so far apart, and effectively blends them such that for Dana, the present becomes the past and the past is her present and suddenly she isn’t visiting history at a somewhat removed vantage point, she is part of history, her own history, her ancestors’ history, in all its horror, caught in a catch-22 of needing to repeatedly save the life of her white, slave-owning ancestor who over time grows more and more violent towards her, in order to ensure the chronological security of her own life.

The Weight of Our Sky by Hanna Alkaf

This was a harrowing read. Set in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia during the 1969 Malay-Chinese race riots, sixteen-year-old Melati has OCD, or what she understands as a djinn living inside her that forces her to obsessively count in order to keep her mom alive, a secret she tries to hide so people don’t think she’s possessed. When the race riots break out across the city, Melati has to make her way through the violence in the streets in order to find her mom, all while battling the djinn as its power increases in the chaos. I repeat, this book was brutal. The descriptions of Melati’s OCD alone make it a tense, taxing read - combine it with the violence and unpredictability of the race riots and all the threats to Melati’s safety and her ever-growing fear for her mom and it’s a lot. Even so (perhaps because) I could not put this book down. The recreation of this part of history (which I had no clue of before and knew nothing about) was both immersive and informative, the story was deftly plotted, and I loved how Melati’s characterization and her relationship/the depiction of her OCD and how it specifically affects her in her particular circumstances. 

Jade War by Fonda Lee

CLEAN BLADE CLEAN BLADE CLEAN BLADE

*ahem*

The second book of the Green Bone Saga was even better than the first. It took the story of the Kaul family and the No Peak clan and the worldbuilding of Jade City and turned everything up to eleven, expanding the story beyond Kekon into the global theater, particularly Espenia, bringing into the picture Kekonse immigration, diaspora, assimilation, and cultural heritage - what it means to be Kekonese, to be a Green Bone and carry jade and follow aisho outside of Kekon. The gang warfare between the No Peak clan and the Mountain clan spills over the domestic sphere into the international. Espenia grows more aggressive in its moves to gain control over jade at Kekon’s expense. It’s family loyalties and betrayals, it’s gang politics and warfare, it’s community, municipal, national, and international politics and culture clashes, and the changing world of being a Green Bone and wearing jade in a post-colonial world. Anyone who’s followed me this year because of Peaky Blinders - READ JADE CITY AND JADE WAR. YOU WILL LIKE THESE BOOKS I PROMISE.

Hexarchate Stories by Yoon Ha Lee

With this short story collection, Yoon Ha Lee has not only successfully published fan fiction of his own work in the Hexarchate universe and is getting paid for it, he’s published good fanfiction. The cute Cheris and Jedao backstory pieces of flash fiction he first published on his website are drabbles. One of the original pieces in this collection is straight-up PWP. (How the hell Solaris agreed to it I have no idea, there is literally no plot.) The very last story (also original) is fix-it fic for Revenant Gun that left me kicking and screaming over the CLIFFHANGER that Yoon Ha Lee ended it on HOW DARE YOU I DEMAND TO KNOW WHAT CHERIS AND JEDAO ARE GOING TO DO NEXT YOU BETTER BE WRITING MORE STORIES SET IN THIS AU TIMELINE. In sum, Yoon Ha Lee is a delight, I love him, and I loved this collection.

The Deep by Rivers Solomon

A novella about the weight of history, especially painful, traumatic history, and the necessity and yearning for it when you don’t have it. To be forced to bear the burden of history alone is to be crushed and subsumed by it. To lose or become detached from it is to lose connection to the people you’re from. Either way, it is difficult to impossible to maintain a people’s history alone. Rivers Solomon is such a poetic writer with her prose, painting beautiful images with just the right collection and arrangement of words, all while packing an astutely aimed punch in 160 pages.

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

I had some issues with how convenient some of the magic/magical artifacts felt, and the various threads of the murder plot didn’t tie up as nicely as I wanted, but oh, Alex Stern is a marvel - a survivor in every sense of the word who embraces that part of herself over and over, even as what being a survivor means changes for Alex over the course of the book. A dark/contemporary urban fantasy set at Yale where the university’s elite student societies are also magical societies— Alex is a dropout who got into drugs as a teenager in order to shield herself from the ghosts she can’t stop seeing, recruited to act as overseer of the societies’ magical rituals, and who takes it upon herself to investigate the murder of a young woman not too different than herself. The centrality of power and its abuse in this book is delicious, the read is gripping, and Alex is worth the price of admission. Yes, I will be reading the second book when it comes out.

(Also, this is literally the second book I’ve ever read that makes any mention or inclusion of Ladino (both Alex and Leigh Bardugo are Sephardi.))

Honorable Mentions

Finding Baba Yaga by Jane Yolen

King of Scars by Leigh Bardugo

How Long ‘til Black Future Month? by N. K. Jemisin

Our Year of Maybe by Rachel Lynn Solomon

Dragon Pearl by Yoon Ha Lee

The Boneless Mercies by April Genevieve Tucholke

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 edited by N. K. Jemisin and John Joseph Adams

The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal

Amnesty by Lara Elena Donnelly

Storm of Locusts by Rebecca Roanhorse

Let Me Hear a Rhyme by Tiffany D. Jackson

The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht

Pet by Akwaeke Emezi

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

It’s also been my practice over the past few years when making these posts to crunch the numbers regarding the number of books I’ve read by PoC authors. This year I read a total of 30 books, which is the exact same number as last year, but since I read fewer books this year, they accounted for 47 percent of my reading, compared to last year’s 43 percent. My goal since I started has been to get to 50-50 parity between PoC and white authors, and this year’s the second-closest I got (I reached 48 percent in 2017.) The goal for next year is once again 50-50.

[jasperunbound]

As someone whose favorite Dragon Quest character is Jasper, and has paid close attention to the writing of DQ11, I wanted to write up a post with my sincere thoughts on the idea of Jasper possibly becoming a party member. Putting it under a read more, for length reasons.

So this might not be what people would expect me to say, but, I don't think that making Jasper a party member is particularly deserved. Why do I say this? Two main reasons:

It's not necessary for him to become a party member in order for his character arc to reach a fully developed and satisfying conclusion.

There are other characters whose arcs would benefit far more from becoming a party member.

Don’t let this post fool you into thinking that I'm not absolutely stoked at the thought of Jasper being playable. He's my favorite character from the whole series and I love him, OF COURSE I would love for him to be playable. But rationally, consider his role in the game. He's a villain. He destroyed the protagonist's village, had a part in causing the apocalyptic destruction of the world, and pissed off a bunch of Italians, amongst other things. Not to mention, he dies.

The writers would have to work very hard to come up with a plausible way for Jasper's character to go all the way from that to being a party member. Now it has been done before-- just look at Psaro becoming playable in the DQ4 remakes. But I can't help but think that the extra effort required to make Jasper playable would maybe be better spent developing other characters further.

In my opinion, Jasper is already one of the most complex and interesting characters the Dragon Quest series has ever created. There is a lot of information one can gather about him between all of his appearances in the game, his mannerisms, his backstory, as well as the subtle worldbuilding details surrounding his character. I’ve already made several posts before regarding some lesser known details of his character-- but for one additional example, look at how he still has the book with the coveted Shield of Heliodor that we saw in his childhood flashback, even as an adult:

There are so many deep subtler details like that within the game hinting at who Jasper is beyond what we see of him during the main story, things that hint at what kind of person he is, as well as who he used to be, before he fell into the clutches of darkness.

To make him playable when he’s already so fleshed out as an NPC seems a bit like overkill to me. Especially when taking into consideration the fact that several main characters who are already party members, particularly Jade and Rab, have less characterization and development than him even with party chat taken into consideration. (More lines of dialogue and time spent with a character doesn’t automatically equal more fleshed out-- seriously, why did they not at least get more family bonding moments with the Luminary?)

I do think that regardless of playability, there should be SOME sort of alternate conclusion to Jasper’s character arc that is more satisfying than what we got in the original DQ11-- one in which he redeems himself in some way after acknowledging the error of his ways. In how they killed Jasper off in both timelines, the writers wasted immense potential for interesting character growth and redemption.

But Jasper doesn't need to become a party member to fix that. Even a slightly different outcome where he still dies, but uses his last moments to express remorse and aid the party in some way such as sacrificing himself, could be good if handled well (although obviously because I like him, I would most prefer an outcome where he gets to live and face all the consequences of his actions).

So basically, I’m trying to say that Jasper’s character is already very good, and while I think they should write a more fitting conclusion for him, having him join the party isn't necessary or the definitive best way to go about it. It would be plenty for him to have a redemption arc in which he is still an NPC and is working in Heliodor once more to repair and make up for all the damage he caused, as well as restore his public image. Most of all I would just like for him to be able to express remorse of some kind for his actions to the people he hurt, especially Hendrik.

Now onto my second reason. There are two characters in particular that are also popular candidates for becoming party members who I think would benefit more from becoming playable than Jasper: Mia and Gemma.

In the case of Mia, it's very easy to imagine her becoming playable. She already expresses a desire to travel with the party in the post-game:

And she would fit in seamlessly with very minimal changes to the pre-existing writing. Since she makes her first appearance late in the game during act two, becoming a party member would do a lot to expand upon her character. Erik's characterization would no doubt also benefit.

In the case of Gemma... well... I personally think that she should have accompanied the Luminary from the very start of the game. She goes on and on about how she doesn't want him to leave Cobblestone, and even overdramatically cries in that one cutscene the night before he plans to leave for Heliodor. Common sense begets the question: why the f*ck doesn't she just go to Heliodor with him if she wants to be with him so bad??

To me the way Gemma’s character was written seems very unnecessarily sexist, like the writers just had to have a damsel-y love interest waiting at home for the protagonist or something. If she was a party member she could easily work well as a voice for the silent Luminary, since they had the same upbringing and would likely react similarly to new places and scenarios. She could also develop to be stronger and have character growth independent from the Luminary as well.

But all things considered, it would be way too hard to rewrite her as a party member in that manner, as it would greatly impact the entirety of the game’s writing. But what about the next time we see her, during the beginning portion of the second act? By this point many characters assume that the Luminary is dead. Why not depict her as wanting to honor his memory, wishing that she could have been stronger and gone with him? She could decide to take direct action to prevent losing any more of her friends and family, by enlisting as a militia knight and serving under Hendrik to help defend the Last Bastion.This way she could join the party before or around the same time as Hendrik. It’s just one possible alternative take on her character that I thought up of as an example.

Instead of this ^ she could have a more proactive role in the story.

Overall, Gemma's character truly had a lot of potential for development that went to waste because the writers went against common sense and defaulted her to a stereotypical helpless village girl sort of role. Not surprising considering this is DQ we’re talking about ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but still. If she was made playable her character would have the potential to improve dramatically.

Personally, if I had to pick an NPC, I would want Gemma to be made playable the most. While from a logical/economic standpoint, Mia is the best option. I simply think that considering the time and resources available, making Jasper playable isn’t the best choice for the game. I love him to death but his character has gotten a lot of focus as is, plus writing him in the party would be pretty difficult to pull off properly, so he would be my third choice. (But if they DO make him playable, and write it well... I won’t be complaining, that’s for sure.)

Anyway, that’s all. Feel free to add on with your own thoughts if you’d like.

[rewrite-the-wrongs]

introductions / howdy, pardner

My first short story was about a fishboy and his human best friend. They battled a mutant piranha (whose name I think may have been Mutant Piranha, such was the monumental daring of my creative endeavor) and his army, who were out to destroy a mountain that held a whole planet together. The boys won singlehandedly, because scale was apparently a bit of a mystery to me.

This was the second grade. My teacher--who held me every day as I cried for weeks, confused and miserable and stranded in the throes of my parents’ divorce--understood before I did that I create to a ploddingly slow and steady drumbeat. A sentence is always so much more in my head than I’m able to let out, at first; I have to pore over it again and again, fleshing and flourishing (and often correcting) it, the same way I often have to reread paragraphs or pages or whole books to truly capture their meaning. In a word processor, this back-and-forth is as easily said as it is done; on double-wide ruled paper with dashed-line handwriting guides, the task is magnitudes more time-consuming, especially for somebody as messy as I am. So, while nearly everybody else played at recess on the sandlot and the jungle gym around us, a select few stragglers laid our reading folders on our laps and finished our stories.

My villain, that dastardly Mutant Piranha, found himself in prison at the story’s close. Awaiting trial, I guess; I never ventured that far ahead, seeing the big fishy bastard for a coward. “When no one was looking, he stabbed himself.” That’s the last line, stuck in my memory, not for its own sake, but for my poor teacher’s horrified face as she read my final draft there on the playground.

A mom volunteered to type up the class’ stories and get them printed and bound. For years afterward I reread that collection, always proud to have written the second-longest piece therein. I felt the weight of the pages, inhaled the tiny but acrid breeze that came from rapidly leafing through them. Knew it was a whole smattering of worlds inside, that one of those worlds was wholly mine, and I had the power to show it to people however I wished. Yes, I thought, I want this.

*

I’ve been introduced to writing many times over, by many people. Don’t get me wrong--I nightowled the first several chapters to many half-baked novel concepts all through my youth. But teachers have a way of showing a thing to you from new angles.

The first person to impact me as such was a high school teacher who was essentially given carte-blanche to construct a creative writing workshop in the English curriculum. The first semester was structured--you practiced poems, short fiction, humor and essay writing, drama, the gamut. Every semester after, the carte-blanche was passed on: A single assignment due a week, each a single draft of a poem or a minimum of two pages’ worth of prose. Forty-five minutes a day to work, and of course free time at home. By the time I graduated, I’d finagled my schedule such that I was spending two periods a day in the computer lab, and several hours after school every day working the literary arts magazine before I went home to get the rest of my homework out of the way and write some more..

My next big influence came in the form of  a pair of writers who taught fiction at my university, a married couple. One had me print stories and literally, physically cut them up section-by-section as a method of reworking chronologies. Told me stories happened like engines or clocks or programs--pieces that meshed differently depending on how they were put together, rules that held each other in place. The other showed boundless confidence in me, listened happily to some older students who recommended I be brought on board for a national arts mag. They both encouraged me toward grad school, but toward the end of my junior year I began to stumble, and by senior year I was, to be frank, a drunken asshole. Time I could be bothered to set aside for writing began to dwindle. I limped through the editorship with the help of my extremely talented, utterly more-than-worthy successor--and come to think of it, I’ve never truly thanked her. Maybe I’ll send her that message, now that I’m feeling more myself.

*

On feeling more myself:

That drunken rage was brought on by a myriad list of factors, the primary ones being 1) I am the child of recovering alcoholics, and our inherited family trauma runs deep, 2) An assault that will likely be mentioned no further from hereon in, as I have reached a solid level of catharsis about it, 3) Some toxic-ass relationship issues, and 4) I was a massive egg and had no idea (or, really, I had some idea, just not the language or understanding or even the proper empathy to eloquently and effectively explore it).

I had a recent relapse with drinking, technically--a mimosa at Christmas breakfast at my partner’s parents’ home--but I’m not honestly sure I can call it a legitimate relapse. I’m not in any official self-help group, I’ve never engaged in the twelve steps or a professional rehabilitation. I had a very wonderful therapist for a few years but reached a point at which I could not pay her any longer and we parted ways--I miss her dearly, as she truly became my friend and confidante; she was the first person I came out to, and very well-equipped to handle it, lucky for me--but I’m still on behavioral medication. That tiny smidgen of alcohol pushed my antidepressants right out of my brain, and I became terribly anxious and angry and sad all at once, and briefly lashed out during a conversation with my partner behind closed doors. Not nearly the lashing out I’ve released in the now-distant past--more on that maybe-never, but who knows, as I am obviously a chronic over-sharer.

Frankly, I don’t deserve my partner. She endured my past abuses, told me to my face I had to be better, and found it in herself to wait for me to grow. She’s endlessly and tirelessly supportive of me. She sat with me to help me maintain the nerve to start this blog tonight. I came out to her as a trans woman just under a year ago, now, and I’m happier than ever, and we communicate better than ever. Our relationship is, bar-none, the healthiest and stablest and happiest I’ve ever been in.

So, naturally, I apologized fairly quickly at Christmas, and continuing where I’d left off at two and a half years, decided I’m still solid without booze.

If we’re all being honest, though (and I’m doing my best to be one hundred percent honest, here, though I will absolutely be censoring names because no shit), I still smoke way too much fuckin’ weed. High as balls, right now. 420 blaze it, all day erryday, bruh. That self-medicated ADHD life. I should be on Adderall and not antidepressants, probably, but it’s been a while since an appointment and psychiatrists are expensive, so I’m at where I’m at for now. Sativas help a lot. It helps with the dysphoria, too.

I don’t have a legal diagnosis for gender dysphoria, but tell that to my extreme urge to both be in and have a vagina. I’m making little changes--my hair, an outfit at a time, no longer policing how I walk or run or how much emphasis I put on S sounds. If I manage to come out to my parents sometime soon--and it feels like that moment is closer every day--maybe I’ll tell y’all my real, full chosen name. For right now, call me Easy.

*

Anyhow. My goals here are pretty simple:

1) Share words, both those by people I like/admire/sometimes know! and occasionally words I’ve made that I like. See the above screenshot from my notes app. Steal some words if you want, but if you manage to make money off some of mine, holler at ya gurl’s Venmo, yeah?

2) Discuss words, how they work, and how we create them, use them, engage with them, and ultimately make art of them. I am not a professional linguist, but I went to undergrad for creative writing, so, hey, I’ll have opinions and do my best to back them up with ideas from people smarter than I am.

3) Books! Read them, revisit them, quote them, talk about them, sometimes maybe even review them, if I’m feeling particularly bold. No writer can exist in a vacuum, and any writer who insists they don’t like to read is either a) dyslexic and prefers audiobooks or b) in serious need of switching to a communications major (no shade, but also definitely a little shade @corporate journalism).

5) I added this last, but I feel it’s less important than 4 and does not deserve bookend status, and I am verbose but incredibly lazy, so here I am, fucking with the system. Anyway: Art! Music! Video games! I fucking love them. I’ll talk about them, sometimes, too. Maybe I’ll finally do some of the ekphrastic work I’ve felt rattling around in my brain for a while now. Jade Cocoon 2′s Water Wormhole Forest, looking right the fuck at you.

6) Ah, shit, I did it again. Oh well. Last-but-not-last: This is obviously, in some ways, a diary, or a massive personal essay. I will sometimes discuss people, places, or experiences that have informed my work just the same as other people’s art has.

4) Be an unabashed and open Trans woman. TERFs, transphobes, ill-informed biological essentialists not permitted. Come at me and my girldick and prepare to be dunked on and subsequently shown the door via a swift and painful steel-toed kick in the ass. Everybody who doesn’t suck, if I screw up on any matter of socio-ethics or respect for diversity, please feel free to correct me.

*

Punk’s dead, but we’re a generation of motherfucking necromancers. Be gay, do crime, fight the patriarchy, and fart when you gotta. May the Great Old Ones select you to ascend to a higher plane and learn the terrible truths of existence.

Much love--

Easy

[synchronysymphony]

Hi anon!! ☀️ it’s so nice to hear from you!! And how flattering that you came to me to vent 😊

I know how you feel, because Enjolras is my very favorite character ever, and I absolutely love him with all my heart. Once, I was feeling sick at a gig, and I pulled up a drawing of him to look at, and I actually immediately felt better 😂 So it makes me so sad when people are mean to him! I get that he’s a fictional character, and people can write whatever they want— that’s totally fair. I would never speak to anyone about this or tell them to stop, because they have the right to do what they want! Fiction is for fun (among other things), and if someone wants to thoroughly misrepresent this good, loving character? They can be my guest! But I’m still going to be umami about it.

I agree that it’s sad when people represent him so poorly. I made a post about him awhile ago detailing some of the things he does that I love, and I could honestly go on for ages about why he represents hope just as much as Cosette does, and why all the light imagery is so fitting because he’s a light in the world, and blah blah blah. He’s incredibly wonderful, and he’s soft and loving and good just as much as he’s fierce and terrifying. He makes me happy even on my very saddest and darkest days, and because of his message of radical goodness, I’ve become a better person (I know it sounds corny, but I really do think that’s the case). 

Now, I know that a lot of people who write these fics may find Grantaire to be relatable. That’s fair! I do too! But you hit the nail right on the head: in order to make him be sympathetic, they have to make his foil be even more of a dick than he is, which means he has to be, as you said, a borderline abusive monster. Because the thing is, Grantaire is a dick! He’s such an asshole, my gosh. And in this strange new push for moral purity, people don’t want to relate to a character whom they deem Bad, so they have to defang him in order to make him palatable. They victimize him so that none of his bad behavior is his fault, and he can be absolved of blame. Then, he’s just a poor little sad shy baby who suffers from so many problems, not the least of them being an uptight, self-righteous, awful boyfriend who says mean things for no reason and has really bad takes on literally everything because he’s so naive. 

I think, too, that people who write these fics suffer from what I call the DC-Comic Syndrome. That is, everything has to be dark and cynical and chock-full of gritty realism (though really, DC is getting a lot better about that now, so I may have to rename that). Problem is, they don’t really think it through, so their arguments do come down to criticizing Enjolras for having hope. It’s cool to be cynical and jaded, because it’s more intellectual, and smarter, and wanting to change the world is silly and childish, and Grantaire is obviously therefore the epitome of cool. He’s smart and cultured and well-read, yes. But that doesn’t mean that he’s anything more than the 19th century equivalent of that annoying guy in your philosophy class who “just wants to play devil’s advocate” every time someone opens their mouth. 

Then, too, there’s the poor characterization. I’ve seen people say things like “oh Grantaire is better than Enjolras because he actually cares about people” like wow, did we read the same book? Grantaire is awful to people, including his friends, may I add! They tolerate him because of his good humor-- I don’t have my book on me, so I don’t have a page number, but it’s in there-- not because he has anything salient to say, or even because he’s particularly nice to be around. When Bossuet mentions that he’s drinking an awful lot, he immediately shoots back by criticizing the hole in his clothing. Sure, it’s funny, but it’s not very good proof that he’s a warm and cuddly friend. Enjolras, on the other hand, canonically stands around thinking about how great his friends are. He gives Grantaire a chance, even though they both know that he doesn’t believe in the cause, and when Grantaire flubs it, he still happily shares a death with him, he’s ready to exchange Javert for Jehan, and he feels such empathy for the artillery sergeant that he claims him as his brother, and cries when shooting him. He’s a very loving person! I think a big problem is that he isn’t so nice to Grantaire, and this makes people think of him in a poor light. But we have to remember how much Grantaire antagonizes, and yes, endangers him. If we look at the facts, we see that Enjolras is very tolerant of him, all things considered. I think one of his blind spots is his love for his friends, putting that even above the cause, and that extends to Grantaire as well. 

I’ve also seen so many fics wherein les amis threaten to abandon Enjolras, or threaten him with harm, or don’t listen to his side of the story, or yes, physically assault him, and it’s framed as good. It drives me up the wall! Les amis love Enjolras just as much as he loves them! They mess with him, sure, but they obviously love him a lot, and they would never treat him that way. If he was actually cruel or abusive, yes, I could see them being harsher with him, but that’s a moot point, because he would never. In the original French, he shows his anger with Javert by switching from “vous” to “tu.” He cries, he sits around quietly and listens to his friends talk, he even goes so far as to give the title of leader to Marius. He’s an angel, that’s what he is, and he would never act in the ways that these fics portray. And his friends know that, and it’s obvious that they do, because they feel comfortable following him even to the death. He’s not the conditional member; Grantaire is. Grantaire is the one whose beliefs don’t mesh with theirs; whose ideology can be summarized as “belligerently contrarian”; whose very personality is abrasive and crude. He’s the one who’s only tolerated because of his good humor; Enjolras is there because they adore him, and share the same beliefs that he does. I think it’s a disservice to les amis to see them as any less passionate and earnest as Enjolras, and to portray them as anything less than loving towards one of their dear friends. Think of the controversy if they all were written to turn on Jehan or Joly. There would be a public outcry! The fic writer would be anathematized! So it doesn’t make any more sense for them to turn on Enjolras like that. 

Am I saying that everything has to be a fluffy, happy coffeeshop AU? No, definitely not. I think that mode of thinking is very disturbing, actually. Conflict is good, and characters should do problematic and downright shitty things. But when those shitty things are framed by the narrative as good, then it becomes a lot more suspicious. It’s bad writing, is what it is, and I know that I, who am also a bad writer, have no point from which to speak, but I can recognize poor characterization, at least, and this fandom is full of it. 

Anyway, I’m sorry that I went on so long! I got a little heated. You put it much better than I did, but in short, I agree with you, and I don’t read a lot of fic these days either, unless it’s by a Trusted Source, or by me. Thank you for sending me this! I’m always down to talk about Les Mis or Enjolras or anything at all, really! I hope you have a fantastic day!!! 

p.s. I think you might be interested in this fic by (my girlfriend!!) @amiedelabaisse 😊 

[something-wicked-sims]

Dear Jade, I am writing this to ask a few questions I've had regarding writing in the sims form. How would someone start one of these sims stories? And how would someone keep it from becoming flat, and continue writing it past writers block? Some tips on developing a character inside the story would also be fantastic. Coming from someone who has only written novels and poetry, any advice on writing short pieces to go with photos is greatly appreciated! Sincerely, Mel. PS: This is 100% Real

Wow Mel, hit me with the heavy questions why don’t you Q_Q But you know, as someone who also made the switch from novel writing to sim story format, I kind of know where you’re coming from. Hence we begin…

Jade’s Mega-Fantastic Tips For Adapting to Sim Story Format 

#DearJade to block, as this is an extremely LONG post. 

Disclaimer: These tips don’t apply to everyone. The general rule of simblr is to have fun and DO WHAT YOU WANT. This advice is only really aimed at people who are serious about the craft and want to improve on their writing and how to present it in this medium. Not everyone takes it this seriously, and not everyone needs to. But for those of you who are looking for more direction with your writing, this is my personal, and humble advice. The fact that I titled this “mega-fantastic” was 100% sardonic. I’m just a chick on tumblr. I have a B.A. in English with a focus on creative writing, and nearly 6 months of simblr experience. These are my only qualifications. So, with that being said, don’t listen to anything I say from this point onward. 

How to Begin:Everyone’s writing processes are different. Some people like to map things out, while others tend to go with the flow. If your goal is to write some sort of cohesive linear storyline, and not just sporadic bouts of gameplay, then it’s good to have at least an idea of where you want to end up. Some point to make within your story, or some goal for your main character to accomplish. That way, all the things you do between point A and point B will have a similar thread, and you’re less likely to get lost on random tangents. 

General writing tips: Start with something interesting! Introduce your new characters in an exciting way. If you’ve never heard the phrase “in media res”, now’s a good time to learn it. Start in the middle, at the beginning. It’s nice to already have something going on at the beginning of your story, and don’t put too much time into explaining who all your characters are, what they do, what they like… right up front. It will engage people with your story more if you start off with action instead of description. 

Presentation: Since you’re writing a sims story, you have to think double time. Here, writing is only half of the work. Which is why simblr writers really don’t get enough credit! Think about how you want your scene to reflect in photos. The first sims story I did, I made the mistake of writing it in it’s entirety as a novel, and then having to take “necessary photographs” to go with each scene. I ended up with a great deal of pictures of people walking around aimlessly, or standing in the same room talking, or sitting on a chair talking, or on a couch talking… You get the point. You can still write as a novel and adapt it (which is still what I do), but I would recommend writing your scenes with your blog in mind. Think  “This scene could happen in their kitchen, but what if I moved it to a park instead?”, better scenery, probably more angles/more things to look at. Try to be creative with your screenies. Experiment with different angles. Think about your favorite movies, and the ways they are filmed. Try to incorporate those elements into your pictures. Sims stories have a certain cinematic quality to them, so write with that in mind, because how interesting your photos are will draw more people in to read your writing. Trust me. 

Character Development:Understand that the vast majority of sim stories and legacies unfold over enormous amounts of real life time. If you’re afraid of longterm writing commitments, you should probably run away screaming! No, I’m kidding (kind of), but they are huge commitments. I know people who have been writing their legacies for years. My first sims story took four months to complete and was around 75,000 words in its extracted tumblr form. My point is, it’s going to take a lot of time. Which is great! Because character development takes time. My advice for adapting character development to sims stories is to make sure every scene has a point. If you want to make a post just for fun, that’s great too! But when it comes to scenes that move your plot forward, answer the question “What does this accomplish?”, “Why is this particular scene necessary?”, “Would the story be the same if this didn’t happen?”. 

Simblr writers can spend hours putting together a post. I would think that is a pretty accurate statistic. From the writing, to building the set, clothing your sims, downloading CC, posing them, taking photos, and then editing the photos, each 3-4 pictures you take for a particular scene probably consumed precious long minutes of your life. So make sure that it’s an important scene that you’re spending all this time on. And, of course, just like most anime fans will tell you, FILLER EPISODES SUCK Q_Q (Not always. But sometimes). Anyways, sim story format sometimes forces you to consider what is vital to a story and a character, as we usually make posts to highlight specific moments in our sim-babies lives. I think development is really inherent to this medium, so I wouldn’t worry too much about if your character is developing or not.

General writing tips:

Dialogue is important!

How your character reacts to things is important!

Formatting:There are many different ways to format your sim story, and none of them are wrong. Do what you are comfortable with. If you’re coming from writing novels or short stories, then paragraph format is a great way to go. You can do caption writing, which is writing your text (typically dialogue and similar to playwriting in effect) directly onto your screenshots. You can do textual playwriting, which would be to have short exposition to setup a scene followed by tagged dialogue:

Maria: I went to the store yesterday.Bob: Really? What did you need to get there?Mari: Oh, I just had to pick up a few things for the party Saturday. 

These are the three most highly used formats I have seen used on simblr. I think they all work great, and you can even mix them. Just do what you are comfortable with and what you prefer. Don’t try to stretch yourself to change the style of your writing just to match what other people are doing. 

General writing tips:

One thing I will say is to be wary of your Point of View (or PoV). If you are using multiple PoV’s (as in you swap them between posts) then you should label whose PoV it is for your readers (I do so in my tags), if you use captions, usually changing font color to depict two or more players is the way to go. If you would like to switch PoV within the same post, I recommend using third person point of view e.g. “Bob walked here. Maria said this.”

And how would someone keep it from becoming flat… As I mentioned above, the best thing you can do here is just to make sure your scenes are vital to the plotline, or character development in some way. Don’t bog down your stuff with useless scenes, if your goal is to write a cohesive story. There is a #ts4 gameplay tag for a reason. It is not the same tag as #ts4 story, and people who follow one tag, may not necessarily want to follow the other. As a reader, I’m interested in the storyline. Is your character involved in some shady business? Are they going to find out that their loser husband is cheating on them? I don’t really want to see three different posts devoted to your sim cooking eggs for breakfast. SORRY. #justiceforeggs

General simblr tips:

@medleymisty has recently incorporated the usage of #simnovel for longer text posts. I think this is an excellent step forward for hobby sim story writing. So you can use this tag if you thing it applies to your work!

….and continue writing it past writers block? I can’t answer this! I am not a magician, unfortunately. Sometimes inspiration comes and sometimes inspiration goes. Writers block is a legit thing, and if I had a super-fix for it, I would hand it out lovingly to the world’s writers. But since I don’t, I will say that you shouldn’t pressure yourself ahead of time. Don’t think you need to post regularly. Go at your own pace. If you need a break? Take one. Just bounce right on out the door. I hear there’s a new Mass Effect game out. Go play it! Tumblr will still be here where you come back. 

Remember, this isn’t your job, it’s a hobby. As for how to get inspired or stay inspired, I really feel motivated to work on my sim stories when I am having fun, either playing the game, or putting together some scenes. So just have fun with it. Make Pinterest boards. Dudes, Pinterest is so great for writers, utilize it as a tool! Make character boards and pin things that you remind you of your babies and go look at the beautiful pictures when you’re feeling stuck. Share your boards, too! Lots of simblr’s have pinterests and you can follow them, they’ll follow you back, it’s great. Fantastic. But yeah, just have funnnn and do your thing and when you’re not feeling it, don’t try to force it, because you’ll just regret it and start to resent your stuff, and it’s just a bad time. 

This concludes my massive wall of pretentious text.

[thetalesalchemist]

The media, feminism, and me. A post for International Women’s Day 2017

While I consider myself a supporter of feminism and an ally to its cause, I find that virtually none of my favorite creators, authors, artists, scientists, etc. are female or, more importantly, identify as women. I believe that I can be an ally despite that fact but I have to ask myself if I am truly a supporter for the cause of gender equality.

If I don’t support a woman singer her songs and her albums am I a feminist? If I don’t watch women led films or television can I be a feminist? If the anime I like has weak female leads used primarily for fan service or has an overwhelmingly male cast am I supporting the feminist cause?

I find that few of the games I play have female playable characters. Even fewer with female leads. I watch several hours of wrestling a week and rarely, if ever, pay attention to women wrestlers. I watch several all male promotions: ROH, NJPW, and NOAH and I could not care less that there are no women on the roster. I used to be a sports guy but have since fallen out of watching SportsCenter every morning years ago. Still none of the athletes that I care about are women. I don’t watch any sports for them. As if women’s sports are for women.

In every genre of entertainment and in any expressive medium, I seem to avoid anything that has women in a central role. So, perhaps, my claim that I am a feminist is just that, a claim.

The question I must ask myself is “Do I avoid female-centric art?” If I think that I don’t and that I only am predisposed to liking male-centric things or that male focused art is better, does it matter?

I find that rappers like Killer Mike, Jay Z, Slug, etc. are better than Trina, Remy Ma, and Nicki. I prefer singers like Julian Casablancas, Chris Cornell, R. Kelly to Beyonce, Alicia Keys, and Lily Allen (who is my fav woman singer), There is no female directer that I follow or whose style I recognize like Snyder, Tarantino, Abrams, Nolan. The Ava DuVernay’s and Katheryn Bigelow’s of the world are award winning visionaries but I couldn’t describe their style or bodies of work. I had to Google other women directors because I’m simply not familair with any who wasn’t an actor first. There’s no actress that I prefer to my favorite actors. Amy Adams is in a few of my favorite recent films but she wouldn’t crack my top 20 for on screen performers. I’ve seen the majority of several actresses’ entire bodies of work and it doesn’t seem to matter to me. I find it hard to fathom that I would see a movie because an actress was in it. For some actors, I would.

In this scenario I’d have to ask myself why is this? Is it because of the subject matter or their work? Or is it something like the quality or my perception of it? Do I believe that their works are inferior to their male colleagues? Perhaps, the roles women are given in Hollywood and the music industry are typecast. Or I just avoid these women’s work because I am sexist? Idk.

In games I think my issue with supporting women and female leads has definite room for improvement. I never create a woman as my avatar. I’m male, identify as a man, so I’ve never, when given an option, chose to play as a woman over in a man when you could create a character. In Dishonored 2 I did choose to play as Emily instead of Corvo but you don’t create either character. I don’t think I know any game creators, directors, art leads, writers, etc. other than Amy Hennig (the writer and director of the first few Uncharted games) and Jade Raymond (of Assassin’s Creed). I will play a game with a female protagonist but I’m not sure if I avoided a game because it had a woman.

Thinking critically of myself I don’t think I would play Final Fantasy XV, my favorite game of last year, if it had a cast of four women. I’m not sure the marketing would capture me in that case. I would hope that having a female lead cast would not have prevented me from playing FFXV. I like Nathan Drake more than Lara Croft. I can’t tell if that’s because of the writing, Nolan North’s performance, or sexism. In Resident Evil 6 there were four campaigns with only one with a woman as the lead. Some campaigns had women characters but the driving focus of the narrative was on the men in them. Ada’s campaign was my favorite but that may be due to the execution and style of the others. In Overwatch my mains are split 50/50 which is a credit to Blizzard for diversifying its cast and the roles they play to encourage its players to be a different hero. In gaming I can’t tell with certainty why I seemingly don’t play games with women playable characters. It could be the style of the game-indie title skew more towards equality (not yet equal though) of female leads than AAA games. Maybe the genre of game is part of it. I prefer action oriented games and those overwhelmingly have guys as the protagonist.

In anime, none of my favorites have a woman lead. In some cases, like Bleach, the girls are there as fan service or damsels in distress. While they all have characters and motivations, their purpose within the story isn’t as important as the fellas that move the story along. I especially love Shonen style battle anime and there will seemingly always be a focus on men as it’s target audience in Japan is young boys. My favorite anime series is Full Metal Alchemist, a series with male leads yet is written by Hiromu Arakawa, a woman (Arakawa’s name is Hiromi but she uses a male pen name).

When it comes to wrestling and (real) sports I, simply, prefer watching the men. When I was a teenager I would watch women’s tennis cus upskirts hehe now that I’m (less im)mature I know now how silly and wrong that was. When I was that age professional wrestling in the US overly sexualized women and that’s the reason why I would watch it then. I would outgrow that behavior too because promotions focused on aesthetics and the women that they hired were trash performers. It’s only recently with NXT generation of women wrestlers (and Natalya too) that I care about women’s wrestling in the US. I love the Japanese style of wrestling, puroresu, but I don’t watch Joshi (female) promotions. I will seek out Joshi matches but at the time, I haven’t yet done the research and the promotions aren’t as easily available as New Japan Pro Wrestling. Back to real sports, now that I, more or less, know what I like. I do not watch any competition between women when there is a male alternative. With MMA I kind of luck into watching women fight as they’re on the same card as the men. I watch only World Cup for women’s soccer. I don’t think I’ve seen a high level soccer game on television other than WC. When I attended UAB, I never watched women’s basketball but went to a few men’s, I only went to one women’s soccer game and I didn’t support any other women’s sport on campus at all. I don’t follow the WNBA at all. I can only name a few players and can’t name a champion team. In women’s NCAA I only know about UConn because they’ve been so dominant. But even without watching ESPN regularly, I can tell you who’s hot and what the teams are doing in the NBA and men’s NCAA.

TLDR:

The crux of my problem is that I don’t know how much fault I bear in having an aversion to women’s artistic pursuits. While I feel like I am a feminist and am all for equal rights and pay, I do not seem to care much or at all about the creative work that women produce. I think it has to do with the exposure of their work. There are very few works of art that have a female lead that are marketed towards me. But I recognize that I should seek these things out as well. I should support women’s work because that, presumably, would help get more women hired in the fields and mediums that I enjoy consuming. In sports I can see clearly that I’m biased toward male competition and I don’t know how to fix that issue. Watching women’s sports would help a bit, sure, but I’m not a huge sports guy and so I’ll generally watch only the “major” events. Those events are, of course, overwhelmingly male. For the arts, literature (which I didn’t touch), film, music, tv, anime, games, etc. I need to consume more works by women featuring women to send a messages to labels, publishers, channels, and studios that there is a demand for their products. The thing is I’ve done things like this before every summer I look for new artists and try to find their work and I regularly seek out new anime. So I think I need to try to find new news sources as well and, perhaps, that would help alleviate the problem I have of not being exposed to what’s popular, critically acclaimed, and highlights women. There’s a lot of work that I have to do to be more inclusive in my hobbies. I’ve tried to do so in the past and while I think I tried to do so sincerely there was little to no impact on diversifying the types of art and its creators that I consume. In order to call myself a feminist and mean it, I NEED to try more works by women. What do you recommend?

[swipestream]

Legends

A year and a half ago, I wrote a post about David Gemmell and how in my opinion he saved sword and sorcery fiction in the 1990s.  I think it was after that that I found out the Legends anthologies. The books are subtitled “Stories in Honour of David Gemmell.”

I was not familiar with most of the authors and was gun shy considering the quality of supposed original sword and sorcery anthologies of the past nine or so years. I knew nothing about the publisher Newcon Press. Also the books retails at $20.86, which is not cheap for a trade paperback.

I took the plunge ordering Legends hoping to cleanse the palate after reading The Book of Swords late last year.

The book has a nice cover featuring Druss’ axe. Publication date was November 2013. Contents include thirteen stories. Most stories are 20-25 pages long. Ian Whates edited the book. Stan Nicholls’ introduction is about how the Gemmell Awards came to be including some of the more mundane nuts and bolts of producing such an award. The devil is always in the details.

I had a few days off after Christmas with a trip to Canada to go dog sledding (getting in touch with my inner Jack London). I read this book on the trip up (the wife drove), at the hotel, and the trip back home. I wrapped up the last story or two at New Years.

“Or So Legend Has It” by James Barclay is a mixed bag. He has some good battle scenes and action including innovative use of sorcery and battle wizards. The downside is more dialogue or rather banter between some characters who end up as a group for hire at the end of the story. I have read worse and the pluses outweighed the minuses.

Gaie Sebold’s “A Blade to the Heart” has a non-human, but something like a troll or ogre who is a war-leader infected with sorcery that will turn him into a wraith. A mysterious stranger arrives at the keep offering help. This a quieter story but it works and did keep my attention.

One of my favorite stories in this anthology is Ian Whates’ “Return to Arden Falls.” A dandy hires a veteran of an epic battle that defeated a would be dark lord. What happens when the dark lord attempts to return from an apparent death?

Storm Constantine’s “The Drake Lords of Kyla” is less blood and thunder but interesting anyway. An historian travels to explore the ruins of a passed race of sentient reptiles hoping to discover something of importance.

I was never in doubt with Tanith Lee’s story. Her “Tower of Arkrondurl” did not fail in my expectations. She might not have been blood and thunder but she was a fine practitioner of the Clark Ashton Smith side of sword and sorcery.

I have never heard of Jonathan Green before. His “Who Walks with Death” is one of the best traditional sword and sorcery stories I have read in years. A fine mix of the supernatural with action. This is how to write a barbarian setting for jaded tastes.

I read Joe Abercrombie’s “Skipping Town” when his Sharp Ends collection came out in 2016. I did not bother rereading the story and frankly don’t remember anything about it two years later.

Juliet McKenna’s “Land of the Eagle” almost reads like a young adult story and I mean that in a good way. The importance of a symbol for the sense of identity of a conquered people.

“Hail to the Oak” by Anne Nicholls has a pseudo-Roman background with a northern princess taken as hostage to the capital city of the stand-in Roman Empire. She becomes though a sequence of events involved in plotting that brings down the emperor.

Adrian Tchaikovsky has a series of books where the peoples have insect totems. “Sword and Circle” is well done with the exception of one thing. He has an aging swordswomen. I have a response to the idea of an aging swordswoman- post-menopausal osteoporosis. Our sword wielding femizon is going to break a bone pretty quick in her mid to late 40s. The action is well done though.

“Fairyland” by Jan Siegel is another quieter story but has a very nice turn of events.

Sandra Unerman’s “Mountain Tea” is a sort of story that is generally not my cup of tea (forgive the pun). It was written well enough to keep things interesting.

I have seen Stan Nicholls’ Orcs in the bookstore but never paid any attention to him. “The League of Resolve” is full blown balls to the walls sword and sorcery. Two estranged brothers who belong to a people whose nation was destroyed come together to save someone they both love. Great, great story.

Reading this anthology was a 180 degrees different experience from reading The Book of the Sword. I had never read 11 out of 13 authors. I will be checking out more by Green, Nichols, Tchaikovsky, and Whates especially. I don’t feel I was robbed of time by any of the stories. It gives me hope that good sword and sorcery fiction can still be written with the right attitude.

A sobering thought is Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith created sword and sorcery fiction. As far as I can tell, all the writers for Legends are from the United Kingdome of Great Britain. I desperately want Americans to produce something like this.

In a better world, Legends would be a mass market paperback with distribution to the book chains in the U.S. The book is 259 pages with a fairly large type. Probably would not be much over 300 pages as a mass market. There is a Legends II which I will be writing about.

  Legends published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

[matthew-kassel]

A Lament for The Village Voice

Peter Barbey, who’s owned The Village Voice since 2015, announced yesterday that the weekly alternative newspaper founded nearly 62 years ago will cease publication—in print, at least. It isn’t clear when exactly that will happen, but one gets the sense that the last print edition of the Voice will be published with little fanfare, given that Barbey wants, as he explained in a statement, to reorient the Voice as an online multi-media product with events, rather than a print product whose website operates mostly as a weekly dumping ground for the stories that run in the newspaper.

I can’t say Barbey’s move surprises me. But it does sadden me somewhat, given that The New York Observer, where I worked for three years, ceased publication of its weekly print edition in 2016. The joint disappearance of those two papers, papers I loved to read in print, feels personal. 

We in the news business aren’t supposed to be sentimental about print anymore—media critics and press prognosticators and jaded journalists all envision a time, not far off, when newspapers will migrate online for good. (Grant Glickson, the president of the NewsGuild of New York, told me last summer for a never-published media piece I was working on—for the Voice, no less—that he believed The New York Times would be one of the last news organizations to print a newspaper. “I can't see that happening for at least another decade,” he said in an email.) But I still can’t help but feel a tinge of sadness every time a newspaper company replaces paper with pixels, and it’s not solely the result of nostalgia. 

I read the Times almost every day in print, and find that I chance upon stories I never would have discovered online. The Times’s website is a marvel, and nothing beats it for breaking news, but it’s still oppressive to comb through; newspapers remain, to me and others I’ve spoken to, the best source through which information can be found serendipitously, which is a rare pleasure in a media environment dominated by algorithms and curated news feeds and trending topics and meaningless tweets.

When I moved to New York six years ago, I started regularly reading the Voice for the first time. I can’t say that I thought it was a great paper—J. Hoberman, the Voice’s longtime film critic, had just been sacked, and a few years earlier, Nat Hentoff, who wrote for the paper for 50 years, had been let go, too. It felt to me like the paper was, in its stories, somewhat desperately groping for an idea of cool that made it very uncool. Acquired in 2005 by New Times Media, the Gannett of alternative weeklies, the Voice had been homogenized. It was no longer the iconoclastic newspaper of legend that published such muckrakers as Wayne Barrett, Andrew Sarris, Robert Christgau, Ellen Willis, Tom Robbins, and countless others. 

Still, I valued the paper’s presence in the New York media ecosystem, and felt that, by reading it in print every week, I was partaking of some ritual that I knew would soon be gone. I began writing for the Voice in the fall of 2012—a weekly web column on the city’s best jazz shows—and it was thrilling. But when I wrote my first print piece, on the demise of the Lenox Lounge, the Harlem jazz club, I walked the streets of Manhattan in a giddy daze until two in the morning in January, waiting for that week’s papers to be delivered to the red plastic bins that will now, I assume, sit uselessly on street corners until they are either discarded (the likely option) or placed in museums.

Though I wrote a number of pieces on jazz, a subject I care deeply about, for the Voice, I never fooled myself into thinking that I was in any way continuing the legacy of Gary Giddins or Francis Davis, both of whom wrote brilliant jazz criticism while at the paper, and were given the chance, with the encouragement of their editors, to develop their ideas in big, sprawling, rangy essays. The Voice just doesn’t do that anymore; that kind of writing is, it seems, mostly inimical to the modern web, which doesn’t tend to reward originality.

When Peter Barbey bought the Voice two years ago, there was a renewed sense of hope among many journalists and longtime readers that he would revive it as the swashbuckling rag of yore. He spoke solemnly about his respect for the paper’s past, and announced his intention to bring back writers who had either decamped or been fired, including Christgau (who has since written for the paper) and Hentoff (who died in January). Greg Tate, the sui generis music critic who wrote for the Voice from the 1980s until 2005, has since contributed a few cover stories to the paper, too. 

“It is one of America's great newspaper brands in terms of potential by the pound," Barbey told Politico shortly after he acquired the Voice. "I unequivocally believe there's great value in the Village Voice brand."

That’s true, but the journalism published in the Voice since Barbey’s purchase hasn’t lived up to its past—and I don’t know if it ever can. While the film criticism is quite good—Bilge Ebiri’s reviews are worth seeking out—I often find the feature stories bland and irrelevant and the culture stories either late to the game or overly trendy. Its listings have been eclipsed by events newsletters like the Skint and Nerd York City. The recent addition of a lively front-of-the-book section allowed the paper to more easily mix up its coverage week to week, a welcome change, but the paper never felt vital to the city in the way other alternative weeklies I’ve come across do, like Portland’s Willamette Week, which has top-notch news coverage and a great culture section. 

Nevertheless, I still read the Voice every Wednesday with the hope that it would improve. 

Without the newspaper, we’ll see how the brand holds up. Perhaps, with the elimination of the paper, the Voice’s editors will have the chance to focus their mental energies on building up the website and making it better. It can feel quite draining and schizophrenic—and I know this from experience, having worked at the Observer—when you have to edit pieces for a print edition and then modify them for the web, so readers won’t be thrown off, say, by a headline that worked well in print but needs to be changed before it’s published online. With a small staff, that process can be demoralizing.

And with a fresh redesign, the Voice’s website looks handsomer than ever, and is, in a way, more robust than the paper itself, which has through the years been getting thinner and thinner as print advertising revenue dries up. Like the New York neighborhood it’s named after, the print edition of the Voice feels more like a palimpsest than a necessary document.

I just went to the corner and picked up the latest—and perhaps last—print edition of the Voice. Skimming its table of contents, I can’t say any particular story caught my eye or piqued my interest. The cover image, however, did stand out to me: a black and white photo of Lou Reed, who, as you probably know, died four years ago. Perhaps the print edition of The Village Voice has been dead for that long or longer, too, and I was just never willing to admit it.

[colemanspilde]

The Director and The Muse

How An Indie Darling Finally Gave An Oscar Nominee Characters Worth Loving

From Hitchcock and Hedren to Tarantino and Thurman, there has been no shortage of skilled directors collaborating with young ingénues – but in this age when viewers go to the movies not just for escapism but for relatable filmmaking, it can take a special partnership to make a movie that combines those two traits in a way that continues to affect the ticketholder long after the theater lights go up. Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig are one such recent auteur/actor pairing. Beginning with their first collaboration in 2010’s “Greenberg,” Baumbach and his muse have managed to churn out three films that not only afford the viewer a great deal of laughs, but a deep sense of empathy.

Since Noah Baumbach appeared on the scene with his first film “Kicking and Screaming,” which depicted a group friends trying to figure out their next steps after graduating college, his work as a director and writer has been a favorite of young arthouse film lovers – those who prefer their coffee black, their cinema French, and their cigarettes lit. Baumbach’s films found a place amongst those who liked to watch studies of irredeemable characters that crashed and burned. Characters like Bernard Berkman in “The Squid and The Whale” and Margot in “Margot at The Wedding” weren’t exactly people to root for – the former a cheating husband with little regard to his family and the latter a young author using her sister’s life experiences for her own writing.

In “Greenberg,” Baumbach’s next major film, Ben Stiller stars as the titular character: a stilted and apathetic middle aged man that moves into his brother’s home after suffering a nervous breakdown – typical Baumbach fare. While not a bad film altogether, “Greenberg” suffers from the lack of likability of it’s title character – a curious notion, as Baumbach’s previous work never felt quite as hard to stomach, even with characters that aren’t emotionally appealing. The difference: Greta Gerwig, a new face in Baumbach’s filmography that proved to be the film’s glowing light, making it difficult for the audience to settle on the gloom of the film’s subject. The first few minutes of the film are spent following Gerwig’s character Florence as she runs errands throughout Los Angeles. In just these short scenes, Gerwig proved herself to be one of the most likable characters in Baumbach’s filmography up to that point. Florence has a wonderful kind of kind glow about her. She waves to a car that lets her into the next lane but moments later tells her boss Phillip Greenberg (Chris Messina) that she doesn’t need her check that day and will gladly take it the next. Her character is eager to please and reluctant to be an inconvenience, leaving most viewers with any sense of decency able to relate to a character that they barely know.

Enter Ben Stiller, the introverted and neurotic Roger Greenberg, whose entire shtick is writing letters to businesses he feels could be doing better while lacking the drive to improve his own life. Roger is by all standards a classic Baumbach antihero. Roger and Florence soon become acquainted when Florence comes to pick up her check the next day, and the two quickly become love interests after that. Through the rest of the film, we’re given very little insight into what drives Roger. His interactions with Florence seem to always end in arguments, a fact that makes very little sense to the audience to due Roger’s paper-thin backstory. The two characters quickly reconcile each time only to end up fighting again, leaving the viewer to become jaded towards the film early on – Roger’s neuroticisms become tiresome before the second act even begins – until Gerwig returns to recapture the viewers attention. The push and pull between the two characters does set up a laugh here an there, but overall Greenberg is ironically swallowed by the same lack of joyousness that it’s title character exhibits. Still, it is Gerwig that holds the film together even when it’s practically begging to fall apart. Towards the end of the film, Florence looks Roger dead in the eye and asks, “Do you think you could love me?” Most audiences will find themselves looking back at Gerwig with a resounding yes.

In Gerwig’s Florence, Baumbach seemed to have found one of his first characters that actually felt lovable, a fact that he clearly took note of when he brought on Gerwig not just as the star of his next film “Frances Ha,” but also as the co-writer. The additional credit for Ms. Gerwig gives the film a sense of levity, which is both a departure for Baumbach as well as a breath of fresh air for his loyal fans and new viewers alike.

As a black and white film that recalls new wave cinema and focuses on a twenty something trying to find herself in modern New York, it would be easy for audiences to refute “Frances Ha” as pretentious independent arthouse fodder – and perhaps under Baumbach alone it may have been – but the addition of Gerwig turns what could easily have been a mundane character study of a black sheep into a deft and relatable comedy with one of the most likable titular characters in recent memory.

During the opening scenes of the film, audiences are introduced to Frances and her best friend/roommate Sophie (Mickey Sumner) through a montage of the two gallivanting through New York and bantering in their apartment. At the end of this scene, Sophie protests when Frances tries to leave the bed to go sleep in her own, asking her to stay under the condition that Frances takes her socks off, to which she obliges. From these opening few minutes, it is clear that we are seeing a different side of Baumbach. Not only are we paired with two female leads - something Baumbach had only done once before - but they already seem to be inherently likable, but relatable as well.

In the next scene, Frances asks Sophie to tell her “the story of us,” which affords the viewer a sort of warm insight into the private details of their best friendship as well as a brief perspective on both character’s goals and how those things weave into the girls’ relationship with one another. This is another relatively new approach for Baumbach. Within the first few minutes of the film the audience is given a clear glimpse of who these characters are and what drives them both personally and as friends. Sophie wants to be a publishing mogul while Frances wants to be a world famous modern dancer, with Sophie publishing a coffee table book filled with pictures of Frances. Unlike “Greenberg,” which left people wondering what exactly was the driving force in the main character’s actions, “Frances Ha” lets us know right away exactly who these two women are. This allows the audience to enjoy the film as it unfolds before them instead of overthinking the characters intentions.

When Sophie decides not to renew their lease in favor of moving to her dream neighborhood, a rift begins to form between the two friends that sends Frances on a nomadic journey through the boroughs of New York. In the film’s most exuberant scene, Frances runs, skips, and twirls her way through the streets of Chinatown to David Bowie’s “Modern Love” after finding out that she’ll be moving in with two of her friends. This scene is the clearest testament to Gerwig’s affect on Baumbach’s filmmaking. In any other film of his, a scene even half this jovial would have felt completely out of place, but seeing Gerwig naturalistically gallivanting through New York without a care in the world somehow seems to fit into the narrative perfectly under her skilled performance.

But “Frances Ha” doesn’t always maintain this jubilant nature. As the film continues, we see Sophie and Frances drift further apart. During a visit to Frances’ Chinatown apartment, the two friends have a much more stilted conversational tone than they did when they were regaling the story of their friendship’s potential future. After a few quick jab’s at Frances’ new hipster digs, Frances hits back at Sophie regarding her Wall Street-type boyfriend, calling him “the kind of guy that buys a black leather couch and is like ‘I love it!’” It’s not only Baumbach and Gerwig’s sharply written line that delivers the laughs, but the fact that as it’s spoken, Frances is propping herself up against the wall into an impromptu headstand. Watching this, one can’t help but realize that even under Baumbach’s skilled direction the line would have simply fallen flat without Gerwig’s skilled delivery and characterization. By now it’s clear, these two bring out the best in each other.

In another scene shortly after, Frances is no longer living in Chinatown and everything seems to be up in the air for our protagonist. She’s living with an acquaintance from the dance company she works for, too reluctant to contact Sophie after drunkenly yelling at her to not “treat [her] like a three hour brunch friend,” and now at a dinner party full of people she barely knows. Gerwig is particularly skilled at making awkward small talk seem charming, and Baumbach efficiently conveys this, as he cuts back and forth to different people around the table becoming enamored with Frances, a fact that she doesn’t even seem to notice.

After dinner, while the party is winding down, Frances speaks up and delivers a small, drunken monologue about the feeling of discovering someone’s one true person in this world. Gerwig and Baumbach keep a particularly careful balance in this scene, with only two cutaways to different characters while the camera focuses steadily on Gerwig, who delivers the film’s most poignant moment – one of the best in Baumbach’s entire catalogue.

By the final scene of “Frances Ha,” Sophie and Frances have reconciled and all of the characters that came and went in the brief glimpse of Frances’ life show up to watch an independent dance that Frances organized herself. After the show, while talking to one of the choreographers at her company, Frances turns and catches Sophie’s eye, causing the two best friends to smile, and the viewer instantly recalls Frances’ dinner party monologue, realizing that Sophie has been Frances’ person in this life the entire time. It isn’t romantic, but it is subtly sincere and most importantly, heartwarmingly relatable.

The final moments of the film see Frances getting settled into her new apartment, the first time she has lived alone since we’ve met her. Gerwig’s mannerisms give off the air of a new, more confident Frances. In the second to last shot of the film, Frances writes her name on a slip of paper for her mailbox. She turns around from her desk and looks at her new apartment, and for the first time in the entire film, the shot slowly zooms in on Frances’ face while she smiles and takes in her surroundings. Before this, the film had played out entirely in stationary single or dolly shots, but it is important to note that Baumbach saved the one zoom of the entire film for this scene. The shot makes us feel like we went from watching a stranger’s life unfold from afar to making us feel like Frances is a close friend, possibly even a version of ourselves. Without Gerwig’s performance, this shot would’ve been entirely devoid of any romanticism, but her presence in the film turns what could have been just another Baumbach picture into his magnum opus.

In “Mistress America,” the duo’s third and most recent outing, we are once again treated to a glimpse of the intimate connection between two enigmatic women. Unlike “Frances Ha,” these characters wouldn’t necessarily be labeled as friends so much as a misguided mentor and her would be ward. Gerwig plays Brooke Cardinas, a flighty semi-socialite in New York who does everything and nothing, only finding a temporary purpose when her soon to be stepsister Tracy (Lola Kirk) calls her out of the blue.

Baumbach and Gerwig’s third collaboration is their zaniest yet. While “Greenberg” was a complete dramedy and “Frances Ha” could be called a coming of age story, it’s clear from the moment we first see Gerwig’s Brooke in the middle of Times Square shakily stepping down the stairs with her arms outstretched proclaiming “Welcome to The Great White Way!” – and watching her realize that she said it a few steps too early – that “Mistress America” is about to be an outright screwball comedy. For the next few scenes the audience is swept up in Brooke and Tracy’s burgeoning sisterhood. Gerwig delivers lines at a lightning fast pace with absolutely expert timing. While dancing together, Tracy briefly mentions her mother to which Brooke quicky and coolly interjects, “I watched my mother die…everyone I love dies!” While it would be easy to turn this character into someone with zero depth who says things like this just for laughs, Gerwig plays Brooke as a character whose quirks don’t just come at face value, even if the viewer doesn’t realize it until the latter half of the film.

In a callback to a plot device from Baumbach’s “Margot at The Wedding,” Tracy is using Brooke’s flaky yet entrancing behavior as material for a story she plans on submitting to her school’s literary society. However, Kirk’s character isn’t simply lured in by Brooke’s eventual implosion alone, but by her unabashed confidence as well. While Hurricane Brooke sweeps up everyone in her path, Tracy stays in the eye of the storm, becoming a more assured young woman in her own right thanks to Brooke’s fearlessness. The two stars have palpable chemistry which Baumbach uses to his advantage with whip smart dialogue, cuts, and pacing so fast that it will make your head spin.

Gerwig’s Brooke is a much different character than Florence or Frances, and Baumbach is sure to depict her that way. Brooke’s personality is much more established than the timid Florence and more neurotic than Frances. However, Frances and Brooke do have similarities. During a particular scene in “Frances Ha,” Frances mutters, “I’m so embarrassed, I’m not a real person yet.” Brooke’s character, while slightly more grown up, is certainly not a real person yet either, though if she’s embarrassed about it the audience would never know. In fact, her driving force is to become an actual adult. Brooke craves to be free from running between odd jobs as a Soul Cycle instructor and a middle school math tutor, and she sees a restaurant venture as her ticket out, catapulting the film’s narrative into its second half.

It’s here where the screwball really becomes apparent and where Gerwig and Baumbach do their best work in the film. Brooke suddenly whisks us off to Connecticut (with Tracy and two friends in tow) to hit up her ex best friend/current nemesis Mamie-Claire, now married to Brooke’s ex boyfriend, for an investment. Once we arrive, we’re swept into the action as Brooke, Tracy, Mamie-Claire, and the rest of the cast shuffle through the expansive glass house. Each character maneuvers through the scene with careful precision, and Baumbach lets the jokes rip fast, barely giving the viewer a chance to catch their breath before the next one hits. Baumbach isn’t a complete stranger to this type of comedy, but keeping Gerwig at the forefront during this pivotal scene is key to the film’s charm.

Baumbach’s films have often been a study of youth and what to do with it, and as this scene comes to a head, Brooke receives a call from her father notifying her that he’s decided not to go through with the wedding and that she and Tracy will not become sisters after all. When he asks what Brooke will do for Thanksgiving, she laments, “I’ll probably just end up doing something depressing but young.” Suddenly, Brooke fits into Gerwig/Baumbach mold. Florence is afraid of spending her youth making bad decisions with men, Frances can’t figure out what to do with herself or her youth, and Brooke is desperately trying to hang onto hers. In the scene just prior to this, Tracy narrates a part of the story she’s writing about her stepsister, describing Brooke’s youth as something that “had died, and [Brooke] was dragging around the decaying carcass.” The film concludes with one final line from Tracy’s story, describing Brooke as someone that other people are drawn to, calling her a “beacon of hope.”

A beacon of hope seems to be a fitting definition of Greta Gerwig in the Noah Baumbach universe. Prior to Gerwig’s turn as Florence in “Greenberg,” Baumbach was simply a notorious auteur in the new wave of modern arthouse cinema intended for young adults. His characters weren’t incredibly nuanced, didn’t have many motivating factors, and were designed as studies of unsavory personality types. If moviegoers saw themselves in a Baumbach film, it was likely to be in a single action of one of his famously unlikable characters. But with the addition of Greta Gerwig as both star and writing partner, Baumbach allowed his movies to harbor both characters and plots that are fully developed and relatable – giving the audience an incredibly affecting yet satisfying experience; a visionary director with an enigmatic star together to create movie magic.