#but still needs changes to not require a ton of suspension of disbelief and to truly fulfill its thematic potential

[lttleghost]

youre so real for your transfem jesse interp honestly speaking as a transmasc myself. sorry you have to fight tooth and nail every day against people showing up to "correct" your headcanon

sjdkkf thanks, I'm transmasc too but while I might not relate to every transfem interpretation of Jesse and the anslysis of the text I've done could support her realizing she's any identity that might be described as transfem, I admittedly relate to a no-med no-op and/or gnc transfem Jesse more than I do with his common transmasc interpretation THOUGH that definitely isn't why I fight tooth and nail for transfem Jesse in general

AND LIKE while there definitely are malicious people that have disdain for transfem people or some other gross bullshit that I've met I really don't think(hope) most people are like REALLY trying to dispute transfem Jesse but rather just... don't think of it as a possibility, though that is its own problem and I think for people who aren't purposefully being shitty it's a problem with like... perception and focusing on certain types of trans people or identities or presentations more than others even if unintentionally

[heyitschartic]

I love the Harrow Nova AU a ton, it is one of my favorite fanfic concepts to read for TLT. I think as a concept it's so intriguing just because of how much it turns everything on its head. Gideon the favored, Harrow the reject. The different ways that authors decide to depict this dynamic can be so fun and interesting. Despite this, I've only read one fanfic that didn't partway through break my suspension of disbelief beyond repair.

Something writers need to recongize is that most of the appeal in Gideon the Ninth is the relationship between Gideon and Harrow. It's fun, it's fucked up, it's interesting, and it's tragic. This AU inevitably breaks that usual bond and almost calls for some new, interesting fucked up dynamics. And you'd better deliver it or else you're stripping away some of the best parts of the story for a tacky coat of paint.

I think the problem is that you need to make some serious changes and stick to them without cracking the narrative like an egg on the sidewalk. Gideon as the Reverand Daughter is interesting, but it also requires her to, you know, act like the Reverand Daughter. A lot of the fun byplay in Gideon the Ninth is that the two of them are putting on that facade that the Ninth are fine, everything is okay, we're just two nuns. Their entire house relies on this bluff. But if Gideon is the Reverand Daughter, unless you're gonna completely change her personality, then it's gonna hit the point where you go "why is she still doing this? Gideon wouldn't care about preserving the Ninth the way Harrow would." And if you've stripped that rigid structure from her, then you better have something interesting to replace it, some fun reason that she needs to play the devout nun, or else, inevitably, everything else will start collapsing in on itself.

Harrow's situation is just so interesting on its own. The horror, the grief, the rage, the purpose of a generation given to her and then stripped away. There's so much juicy stuff to work with and if she's playing off a wet noodle, I'd almost wish she'd just do both of us a favor and kill Gideon off.

I like Harrow Nova. I like the concept and I like the stories, but it requires a pretty fundamental change to keep the narrative flowing. Maybe they're sent to something not Canaan, somewhere they're being watched and need to keep up appearances or risk having major plans blow up in their face. Maybe their new personalities force Cav Harrow to take the lead, playing mouthpiece for a Necromancer who can't handle people. Maybe Harrows life is literally on the line and Gideon cannot do anything but play-act the nun or Harrow will get killed.

There are so many fun possibilities for this what if, please use them! Otherwise it will become a fix fic and nobody wants that.

[xb-squaredx]

The Ups and Downs of the Open World Trend

Video games, like any other form of media, tend to follow trends. When something proves popular, game after game will come out hoping that lightning will strike twice. We’ve had the industry dominated by platformers, action games, shooters and now we’ve moved onto our next flavor of the generation: Open World games. There’s some good with this, and some bad, and I thought it’d be interesting to investigate just what this might mean for the industry…you know, until the next trend takes hold.

Of course, it might be good to start off defining what our topic really is. The term “Open World” is a pretty broad one, something so vague that might result in a TON of games getting labeled as such despite only fitting the barest requirements. Kind of like how most any game is an “action” game; the term itself runs the risk of losing its meaning if it’s used too much. But for the purposes of this discussion let’s define “Open World” games as any game that places a large amount of focus on exploring their overworld. The overall size of that world matters only in its proportions to the rest of the game’s more structured environments, if it has any at all. Being nonlinear isn’t required, and it could really belong in any genre. Of course, that still might be a little broad, but let’s give an example.

The 2D Super Mario platformers are NOT Open World games. They’re collections of short-but-sweet obstacle courses which subtly (or not so subtly) guide a player forward. There are dedicated beginnings, middles and ends to each level and even if there are secrets to find, often they aren’t TOO out of the way from the rest of the stage. Contrast that with the first few 3D Super Mario games. Super Mario 64 gives you the rather large Peach’s Castle to explore as you find more levels, and the levels themselves are far larger than in any 2D one. Mario will often have multiple objectives in each level, with some missions not really requiring you to go through the entirety of the stage. You have a fair degree of freedom in deciding just when to move forward, though there are certain stages you HAVE to beat before others get unlocked. But with all of that in mind, I’d say Super Mario 64 (and Sunshine to a degree) fits more in line with the Open World mold.

Of course, nowadays our standards for what makes a game Open World has changed, kicked off by two titles that really made it big. Those would be Grand Theft Auto 3: San Andreas and Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. San Andreas was really where Grand Theft Auto made it big, with each subsequent game upping the ante on letting players create chaos in larger and larger worlds. Skyrim was seen as a technical marvel at the time, boasting a world of roughly 39 square miles, though quite a few games have come along and obliterated that record. Skyrim in general is treated like a measurement for a lot of people, and to some the value of a game is determined by how many Skyrims can fit within it.

Here we run into one of the major defining points of Open World games: scale. The bigger the better! In some cases, the size of the open world has become another selling point. Now, from a sheer technical standpoint it is often very impressive just how vast these game worlds can be and a sign of how far we’ve come as an industry. To set a game in an actual city or an actual continent and not the rough not-quite-to-scale imitations of the past is to be celebrated, but that scale also brings up MANY problems.

For one, it is an awful lot of work to make these worlds as big as they are. People laugh about all the physics bugs in Skyrim but the developers have their work cut out for them as they scramble to make sure these huge worlds work without the game breaking. We’re asking designers to create entire cities or continents…in some cases even planets and I wouldn’t be surprised if that gets pretty costly, especially as so many games are obsessed with being as pretty and shiny and photo-realistic as they can be. Now I’m sure as developers get more practice with crafting such large game worlds, problems can be ironed out…to a point. There’s still a lot to consider even after you get the workflow down.

You’ve made this giant world…so how are you going to let players navigate it in a way that isn’t tedious? Thankfully, plenty of games seem to have found ways past this issue. Pretty much any Spider-Man game gives you the ability to web sling around New York with ease and in a lot of cases, the simple act of getting from Point A to Point B is fun! You’ve got Batman’s grappling hook and his gliding cape in the Arkham games, the various superpowers the later Saints Row games give you to dash throughout the city and even something as “boring” as being able to swipe any vehicle from anyone in the Grand Theft Auto games to help mitigate travel time. Alongside that, we have the lovely invention of “Fast Travel,” being able to instantly warp to a given area but that alone has problems. A properly thought out Fast Travel system will reflect strong game world design, with lots of interesting landmarks and other important locations that will never be too far from a warp point. Both of the Xenoblade Chronicles games are great examples of that, no area too out of the way to warp to with Fast Travel. So that’s one problem that has plenty of solutions, I suppose, but some issues still plague us.

Once such a large game world has been made…what next? Now the struggle is to fill the world up with enough worthwhile content and unfortunately this is something I still see the industry falling short with. Often rather tedious sidequests are placed in the Open World games of today, like farming for enemy drops or the various collectibles scattered across the map. The sheer scale of a lot of these games make these sidequests utter chores, like finding a needle in a haystack, except that haystack is the size of a city or continent. Often when it comes to worthwhile things to do or find in an Open World game, game developers must walk a tightrope. Make these games too thin on content and you have a mostly empty world that isn’t being put to good use. Put in too MUCH and you have a game with constant distractions that feels cluttered. Generally speaking, the larger your world the more likely that only a fraction of it will remain compelling.

(Seems...a little clustered, doesn’t it?)

I suppose that’s a strength that more closed-off games have over Open World titles. Smaller levels can be tweaked with intimately until every jump, every enemy encounter and every movement on the player’s part feels fine tuned and full of purpose. It’s the kind of fine craftsmanship that really can’t exist in a lot of Open World titles, all too often the world can overstay it’s welcome. Sometimes, bigger isn’t better.

That isn’t to say that the genre itself is bad, and there are certainly great things that can come from them. Plenty of people out there love to explore detailed words, making for more engrossing experiences. In days past, what amounted to a castle or a town was really just a few meager tiles and screens of content and you really had to stretch your suspension of disbelief and use your imagination to fill in the blanks. But nowadays that isn’t necessarily your only option! Now the epic quest to travel the land can feel genuine! Of course, that’s not everyone’s bag. Some might enjoy Open World games for the freedom they provide. When so many games are such guided, linear experiences, seeing a game that lets you go anywhere in whatever order you want is quite appealing. It leads to making your game time a more personal experience. Not to say linearity is bad either, but I certainly see the appeal in offering people more choice.

Winding down, looking at the more recent Open World games though, I have a fear that narratives are starting to suffer. In some cases, maybe the narrative is given a backseat in favor of fleshing out the world; something else had to give in those cases. Admittedly, I can see why narratives can often be cut as they run counter to a lot of Open World games. Stories have a dedicated beginning, middle and end, but trying to attach that to a game where you can go anywhere right from the start…it can get messy. Players might just intentionally avoid the story so they can go off on their own. In the upcoming The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, for example, the developers have stated that from moment one Link can challenge the final boss and beat the game without exploring much anywhere else, pretty much skipping the story and most of the game in the process. I can see why, from a design standpoint, stories might have less of a priority if players can just avoid them entirely. I’m not saying every Open World game moving forward won’t have narratives tied to them, and I’m certainly not advocating that they SHOULD have them as a standard, but as someone who likes stories in games, I’m worried. When the likes of Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy have weaker stories in their latest titles which explicitly went Open World…it’s a shame. It certainly doesn’t make me excited for the next Mass Effect. Of course, there are games out there that can buck this trend (the Witcher games in particular seem to get past this issue) so there’s hope.

Looking at the Open World titles that have come out in the last few years, as well as one’s still set to come out soon, I do have to wonder when customers will get tired of the genre. How many empty worlds can they stand? How long before developers get tired of designing massive cities to move your character through? Which franchise will attempt to fit into this mold next? We’ve got plenty of established Open World IPs as of right now, from GTA and Far Cry to Assassin’s Creed and Xenoblade Chronicles, so…do we need any more? Did Metal Gear Solid really need to go Open World? Granted, some of these games are experiments to see what works and what doesn’t, but I fear over the next few years that we’ll see quite a few games attempting to force a square peg into a round hole.

I don’t want to be all doom and gloom, as a number of these titles in the last few years have been good, if not amazing. But mindlessly chasing trends can lead to stagnation, and we’ll be stuck in a place where the game’s scope is more important than it being well made or fun to play. Open World is a perfectly valid genre, but it doesn’t have to be the genre. Similar to the surplus of shooter several years back, things run the risk of blurring together. I mean, we’re now at a point where the next Dynasty Warriors is going to be Open World. That doesn’t exactly seem like a good fit for that series, does it?

But inevitably the trends will change and something new will come forth. I suppose Open World games can have their time in the sun for now, and we’ll see what will take the throne next. Puzzle games? Racers? My money’s on visual novels.

Until next time.

-B

[akamaru01]

Ya know what I didn’t want to really get into the shit show that is the discussion on the Sonic movie but here we are

I’m gonna try and make this like an analysis, what it looks like happened in chronological order, and what the hell is going on and maybe a bit on how people are reacting

For a bit more info on me I am currently a studying 3D artist because I will get a bit technical at times

I’ll also put it under a read more because not everyone wants to see it so HERE WE GO starting off with where I think shit went wrong in production (Spoiler: People high up on the food chain probably fucked up big time and interfered too much)

(Note: This will be mainly about the design, not about story)

So obviously as with everything it begins with the original designs made by a character designer. Now from what I have seen the studio actually doing all the CG work for the movie also worked on the cinematics for Sonic Unleashed that released back in 2008. Love or hate the game, you can’t deny that it looked and felt like Sonic. So clearly the studio itself knows what it’s doing.

However, the movie might be made with Sega helping (maybe) on the sideline but the production is controlled by Paramount. That means everything goes through Hollywood Big Wig Executives who probably don’t care about source material and also have no creative abilities and also don’t listen to anyone besides themselves and their investors. SO here is a very short, exaggerated idea of the conversations surrounding the design.

Exec: Hey we’re making a Sonic the Hedgehog movie so make us a Sonic that can fit in a live action movie.

Designer: Okay here you go he looks like regular Sonic but with some texture/material/fur touch ups to look more real

Exec: Too cartoony/Not real enough/Something something make it more like humanoid

Designer: But if we do that it wont look like Sonic, might be too creepy or weird, just looks weird/bad in general

Exec: I can have you fired

Designer: Here it is but people won’t like it

Exec: Yes they will, now get to work and make some posters people will love it (or not, it’s hard to say if they would really care as long as people see the movie and it makes money)

You get the idea. This probably continues all throughout production, maybe eventually they give up trying to change minds or they’re just too tired or it’s too late who knows.

So the posters come out and oh boy they were a thing that exists now

And so people do the thing and dunk on the look of it, get in their criticisms, which I think criticising or not liking something is well within peoples rights ya know?

At this point maybe the conversation comes back something like this

Artists: Yo we told you people wouldn’t like this let’s change it while we’re still relatively early in production (mabey) and can adjust it and not spend months with actual animating/lighting,post production

Execs: No no this is fine who cares it’s not even moving yet it’ll be fine

Artists: No it won’t

Execs: Jobs

Artists: Fuck, alright

So nothing changes, time passes, and here we are and by the way

Trailer editor: Hey for the background music I am thinking something upbeat and fun like the Sonic music from the games

Execs: No no make it edgy and cool like Gangsters Paradise

Editor: .... fucking why

So we got the Sonic trailer drop and guess what everyone dunked on like this isn’t even a shock at this point people analyze and criticise fucking everything (especially 3D) this time it just so happened to be on a massive fucking scale

So from a personal note my reaction was “This looks like shit I ain’t gonna bother with it”. From what I saw the general consensus’ were either basically what I said or “This looks like shit I’m gonna watch it anyway”. Absolutely no one I saw said “This needs to be fixed before the movie comes out” from what I saw people basically were just ready for it to flop and we’ll try again later. Even if some people were calling for a redesign I doubt even they expected what was coming next

So, this seems to be what ended up happening

Execs: -trailer release-

Internet: Yo this looks like shit wtf

Execs: Oh shit we fucked up

Internet: Yeah you did

Execs: Don’t worry we’ll fix this

Internet & Artists: What

Execs: We’ll overhaul and redesign him before the movie releases as scheduled

Everyone else: WHAT 

Because here is what that means. The artists and animators will have to redesign (or maybe go back to an old design), adjust the model or maybe worse completely redo it, change textures, possibly adjust or recreate the rig, REANIMATE ALMOST IF NOT EVERYTHING, adjust lighting, re combine the new CG footage with the live action, make sure it all looks good and no clipping

What’s most likely is that this is gonna be hell for the studio leading up to release if they don’t delay the movie, which they have not said anything about yet and that’s not a good sign. 

But now here is where the biggest variable comes in: How much will change?

Minor changes that don’t affect overall proportions and placement of details means they could keep the same rig and animations and just check for touch ups. HOWEVER these kind of minor changes probably won’t help much, if at all. Honestly besides textures and small changes to fur the only thing that can really be adjusted without much worry is the teeth because they can be the same size and they don’t have to deform or do a lot of crazy movement.

But in order to fix any of the actual problems with it, besides teeth, will require a crap ton more work. Any changes to the eye shapes, sizes or placement, and any changes to the mouth and surrounding areas will require a new or heavily adjusted face rig, which will completely throw off eye movements and lip syncs and those will need to be redone.

Any changes to proportions of any kind will require an adjustment of the rig, which could throw off the animations already set and need to rework them almost everywhere, and maybe redo them completely in a worst case scenario. If the hands change at all they have to adjust every single shot where he is holding or touching something, same with his feet, and really same with his head, quills, freaking everything.

All this in 6 months? Doable, but not without a fuck ton of unnecessary sacrifice.

But we don’t know what this redesign will look like, so it’s impossible to speculate on how much these artists and workers are going to be fucked over and pushed and destroyed for this.

Basically, odds are the artists are gonna be the ones paying for the mistake of those higher up on the food chain, and if the movie does well then, similar to what recently happened with game studio Bioware, they’re going to think “Oh it’s okay that it’s all shit for so long and then we push and destroy our artists at the last minute because it works” which it fucking doesn’t. If they had listened to their people at the beginning, this could have been avoided. No matter what some people still would have been like “ew 3D sonic live action” but no where near this degree.

So the final thing to touch on is some of the reactions after the announcement of redesign. Because I have seen... a lot. All across the spectrum.

I am going to try and talk about some of the more basic groups that these reactions fall under that I’ve seen.

Before we get into those though I want to say something that kind of applies to all of them: I think criticizing the design and look is okay. Talking about how you don’t like it and why and how it could be better is good, outside of ya know the extreme stuff like death threats or whatever, not that I’ve seen those really around this project but they probably exist.

So the first one is basically where I stand on the issue personally. The design sucked, they should have listened more and let it be more stylized and it still would have fit (because suspension of disbelief is a thing and what they have now certainly doesn’t fit in any more than regular Sonic would). I expected them to release it, it flops, no more Sonic movies for a while. If they were gonna fix it they should have done it a long time ago. I am not happy that they are going to punish their staff and artists for their own mistakes and now they’re trying to cover it up.

Now the next argument is one I have seen around here and there, and I understand it, but don’t completely agree. It’s the argument that we, as a collective group, complained about the design, and now we are at fault that the artists have to redo it. There is some truth that if the internet did not go “This sucks” then it would be over and it would have gone on to release as planned. Personally though, I feel like this takes away 2 things: 1) The right of consumers to dislike a thing and 2) The blame away from the executives who made the decisions not only about the initial design but also to change it so late in production. Should they not be held accountable as well? There is a piece that occasionally goes along with this along the lines of “You’re getting so wrapped in a kids movie” or something like that but like: This might (?) be a kids movie but really the target audience is largely the adults who grew up with Sonic. Also bad is bad and kids movies can be great they don’t have to be trash and also kids movies can be enjoyed by people of all ages.

There are smaller sections of discussion, usually quickly stamped out, about how “They fucked it up this is their fault” placing blame on the artists, but this usually comes from a place of ignorance and not knowing how the process works and who makes all the final decisions. The other side of that is “Whatever it’s gonna be shit no matter what I am/am not gonna watch it regardless” or “Idk looks fun I’ll watch it either way”.

To basically sum it up The people in charge probably fucked up, people rightly were like “Lol look at this shit” and now those same higher ups are gonna overwork the artists to fix their own mistake

[ifancybouquetparadise-blog]

Taken Soundtrack Analysis

 As Taken s action and thriller movie, most of the music is devoted to making the action scenes engaging with the intense and dramatic sound track. In the movie Taken majority of the music was fast and instrumental. The trailer doesn’t have any music with lyric s because the trailer focuses moves on what the character is saying.

The trailer starts off with a soft foreign tone. This song choice set the mood perfectly with the scene. The characters in the scene were at a sweet teenage birthday that her dad attended. The girl received a plane ticket to Paris which explains the foreign feel the sound gives off.

The next music change happens in a hotel as the two main characters talk on the phone. The music starts out quiet then escalates to match the suspense in the trailer. The music keeps you focused and keeps the audience heart beating.

After the hotel scene, the music starts getting louder and fast. The characters are in two different settings, so the sounds gives off a nervous feeling. Kimme, the daughter in the film, was take while on her trip in Paris and father is an on mission to find her. This sets a tense mood for the audience since the climax of the trailer has approached.

This music while the father is on the phone with the kidnapper goes silent. This adds a dramatic pause so the audience can engage and remain focused on the scene. Because of the silence, you can tell there is a huge conflict by the feeling the scene is trying to convey.

The song “There’s somebody here” by Nathaniel Mechaly gives a constant thriller vibe. The music adds an awesome suspense that will lead you into wanting to watch the movie. While the father is on the phone, he is threatening the kidnapper. This makes the music selection a perfect match for the suspenseful scene.

One of the things I like about Taken is that, aside from the main character and his deadly talents, it actually bears little resemblance to real life. Mainly, this is because Mills isn't lone-wolfing it through these adventures, he's got a very highly trained and very capable boss and team working with him. Bryan Mills is the focus of the show, so you can best believe that he still does a ton of butt-kicking, but, even when he's briefly going it alone, you know that the team will be there for solid backup when needed. Also, we never run into a situation where Mills has, personally, killed or maimed so many henchmen that you have to suspend a significant amount of disbelief that he hadn't met his match yet.

Taken is far more tense and suspenseful than the procedurals that fill the airwaves these days, and in that way it's a lot more like watching an action movie than most of the cop/detective movies now. There were quite a few moments where I could feel that something was going to happen, but had no idea what it would be or which direction the threat would come from. Taken also has a couple of overarching plots that really have me interested to see how they will develop into situations that will require the famous set of skills we all know and love.

[someguyranting1]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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