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earths-roots-grow-up · 4 years ago

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Headcanon abt Prussia’s psychology and historical relationship with Poland underthe cut. I hope you like it :)

Fact: The Polish-Teutonic wars were a series of military conflicts that started in 1308 when Teutonic Order took over polish city of Gdańsk (Danzing) and annexed it (event is knows as Slaughter of Danzing). After that came the first Teutonic War, in which the Order won Pomerelia from Poland. It was the beggining of larger Polish-Teutonic conflict that lasted for over 200 years and some following wars include:

- The second Teutonic War, a conflictr that took place between 1409 (when the Grand Master declared war on Poland and Lithuania) and 1411 when the conflict ended with Battle Of Grunewald. Teutonic Order lost and had to retreat, then manage to withstand the Siege of Malbork. The Knights did survive the defeat, but they never again gained their previous influence and power, while Poland-Lithuania was established as one of main powers in Central Europe. After wiki: "Most of the brothers of the Order were killed (during the final battle), including most of the Teutonic leadership". Many Teutonic fortresses were taken over and only eight castles reminded in Teutonic hands after this conflict. - The Thirteen Years' War, when the Order's Prussian territories began a revolt against the Order and asked Poland for help. Poland was like ‘hell yeah, let me make this my problem!’ and Prussian Confederacy/Kingdom of Poland truce was created. This war ended with the Knights losing and having to give up Western Prussia to Poland. - The Polish–Teutonic War 0f 1519–1521 that ended with a treaty of Kraków - this treaty resulted in parts of Order's Prussian territories becoming secularized as the Duchy of Prussia under polish rule (4 years later). This was sealed by the Prussian Homage of 10 April. There were more conflicts between 1308 and 1521, but I don't want to write an entire book here, so I reccomend the Polish-Teutonic War site on wiki, it has a pretty comprehensive list :). So in super short oversimplified terms, as I understand it: The wars started at the beginning of the 14th century with Teutonic aggression and lasted for over 200 years, during which Poland and the Order pretty much became THE RIVALS. The turning point was the battle of Grunwald when the Order lost a lot of its power, but still had some fight in it. It ended with Teutonic Knights secularizing and becoming a vassal state to Poland. This of course completely turned upside down after Prussia became independent again, got the status of a Kingdom and pretty much whipped Poland off the map in 1700s for 100 years, so I guess Prussia never forgets (which is one of my fav HCs for him xD).

Headcanon:

So my most obvious headcanon that comes from this is the hate/hate relationship that Poland and Prussia have. I believe they really can't stand each other and view each other as enemies. Their whole history is pretty much one somehow dominating the other or attempting to dominate him - from the Teutonic Wars, through Prussia becoming Poland’s vassal and then tables turning and Prussia (& Austria & Russia) partitioning Poland into nonexistence & and the Germanization that followed, until WW2 when they also fought. It’s a pattern.

It's like they live for revenge and each revenge has to be more brutal and dramatic than what happened before. It’s a snowball of anger that escalates. And I HC that yes, all of this was seen by both of them as revenge for the previous hurts and both of them believe the other deserved it for what he did before. The difference between them is that Poland views himself mostly as the victim that fights back (due to Polish martyrology culture, which is strong in the historical nation narrative [The Christ of Nations, etc], and the general belief in the “Germanic Aggressor”) and Prussia sees himself as the conqueror who has been humiliated by someone lesser (due to his general lack of empathy for those he sees as victims, so he would never cast himself as one, he himself wants to be casted as the aggressor, as to him this position means power and agency).

Prussia can never get why Poland kinda glorifies himself as the Victim and The Martyr (an important element of Poland’s identity), as to him that makes no sense, being a victim is pathetic, right? and Poland can't understand why Prussia glorifies himself as the conqueror as to him he's just a bloody tyrant so why would you be proud of that, right?

They see value in different things to the most basic level, which makes communications very hard - and both of them see value in things that end up being destructive to them, bc both the ‘Might is Right!’ and the ‘My suffering makes me SpEcIaL!’ thinking is not healthy. They are both messed up, just differently. But the way they are messed up kinda... makes them the perfect enemies and makes it easy to escalate conflict. They fit in this very pathological way, when Poland needs to “suffer” for his national identity of the Martyr of Europe to make sense and he needs someone to cast as the aggressor, while Prussia needs to attack and conquer to see himself as the badass powerhouse of Europe he wants to be. They are like the perfect toxic relationship - they bring out the worst in each other due to their specific world-view quircks, so it kinda makes sense that their history is so bad.

But my second less-obvious headcanon is:

Prussia began the Teutonic Wars with the slaughter of Danzing because he was young, ambitious and very impulsive. Gilbert has a hot temperament and a strong desire to be active - and he did exactly that, without really thinking through the ramifications of attacking a big established country while being just a young Knights Order. You can see this on macro scale in the Teutonic Wars and on micro scale in the Battle on lake Pejpus where he charged on a frozen lake. He was so into attacking that he never even considered the environment. The thing is, this failures (and his hot temper!) almost killed him. He literally almost died due to the lost wars, lost most of his power and had to completely re-invent himself from a military crusading catolic Knights Order into a secularized Duchy just to SURVIVE and ended up under the Polish boot for years. His biggest enemy’s boot. And he needed to kneel in front of him. This is IMO an incredibly important moment for how his further development went. The Ordnung Muss Sein discipline-is-key culture and the strategic mindfulness that become a second nature to him start here, when he almost dies because of his reckless actions. It also ingrained a sense of deep humiliation connected to the Prussian Homage that only installed the need for power EVEN MORE. Before he wanted power because he hated the feeling that he is less important than Actual Counties and believed he was given unfairly bad cards by being born without land. Now tho there's an extra motive: fear. Fear of being subjugated. And revenge. This kick started the process of creation of Kingdom of Prussia as we know it - so the transition from a wild-child-Order that just went with the flow and threw himself into battle on literal iced-over lake, into a very calculating, rational thinking soldier who assesses the room and everyone in it at the moment he enters and is hyper aware of all the environment and situation that accompanies his conflicts. So I guess the short version is: Prussia is very disciplined and controls his anger very well but that's not how he always was. He’s a powerful force of nature, a wildfire, that is being reigned in by the self-imposed diligent soldier discipline in order not self destruct. It becomes his second nature, he becomes the Machine, bc if he stayed the Wild Child he started as, he would have perished and he is aware of that. So this explains why he is so merciless about his discipline and order - it’s not just a preference he has, on a more primal level it’s about survival to him. Natural tendencies still sometimes slip through, especially when he's tired, drunk or in any way vulnerable. I like to HC that you can hear the more crazy part of him when he laughs - it's such a loud, boisterous, overwhelming laughter that it does not seem to fit his cold, diligent matter-of-fact soldier-persona at all. It's bc what's inside is spilling out in the laughter. You can also see it when he parties ;)

You can also see it in violent outbursts of anger that happen when he is REALLY on edge. They are kinda scary. But most of his ‘anger outbursts’ (and wars) are calculated and planned to get his way with minimal consequences. The truth is, he feels like he failed himself whenever he really looses control.

My other HC about Gil as Teutonic Knghts can be found here, here, here and here if you like my rambly takes :)

#aph prussia #gilbert beilschmidt #hws prussia #hetalia #aph poland #aph lithuania #hws poland #Axis Powers Hetalia #historical hetalia #hetalia headcanons #aph #hetalia world series #feliks łukasiewicz #queque

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tranderas · 4 years ago

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My email to Failbetter Games

I rarely see a reason to hide my motivations or actions. I don’t have a lot of regrets in life, because as I got older- I’m 34 now- I came to understand that it’s pointless. Try to learn, grieve things like lost friendships and loved ones as best you can, and be the best person your emotional and physical state allows you to be.

Anyway

To that end, I thought I’d air out my grievances to FBG in a rather long email. It was a long time coming as I wasn’t convinced emails would do anything. Elias on the Failbetter Community discord server suggested I at least try, and I spent a week of proofreading to make sure I was as courteous as I could manage to be despite my feelings. I’m angry, angry because this game was so dear for me for so long and it feels like the current team has taken it in a direction so much in the opposite of what I find fun.

That anger is unhealthy, of course. Art evolves. Bands change their sound because they get bored or they want to make money tapping into a new audience. Painters refine and improve their style. Writers improve the range of their vocabulary and change tone. Everything shifts in this world. The healthiest thing to keep in mind is the fact that the thing you loved was there for that point in time and nothing can take that away from you, from your favorite game as a child to your favorite bands in your teenage years, you’ll always have those moments of joy.

I want to hold onto this moment of joy that I experience with Fallen London as long as possible, so I wrote this email in the hope of convincing them to alter their direction so I can enjoy it a little bit longer. Except for the signature that contained my real name at the end- not that it’s hard to find if you care, as my facebook url is /tranderas- the text is unmodified. Hopefully this shines light on what I want.

What I don’t want is discussion about my needs. This is my place to explain, to vent, to point people to instead of typing everything out every time someone asks. But enough stalling.

___

Hello, I was encouraged in a Twitter interaction to write in and expand on my thoughts on the game so I figured I would do so now. Since I started writing this email before reading the December balance announcement, I'll address that at the bottom. The sparknotes version of what I'd like is as such: More content in London itself (especially socials), more Zee destinations, a profession uptuning, a fundamental rework of the deck that goes beyond favors, and a non-docks favor buff. From most to least important, the things I'd like to see addressed are:

1. The lack of endgame content within London itself is concerning to me for two reasons:

a. I play FL because it is a social electronic game, and I want to stay in zones in which I can continue to do social interactions. This is the reason I stay in London rather than going to Iron Republic and Port Carnelian, my first and second favorite zones respectively. If I wanted a story rich solo game I'd play Sunless Sea; if I wanted an analogue experience I'd play Blades in the Dark or read one of the books that influenced FL's style.

b. I simply don't like the mechanics of lab or parabola or how they gatekeep content. Because of this I haven't had any free content to pursue since the release of the new heists, and for a much longer length of time before that.

2. I'd love to see the remaining tier 3 professions given something they can do at lodgings. In general I prefer buffs instead of nerfs, especially in story games, and think it would be silly to nerf midnighter/correspondent/crooked-cross downward. Instead, give the others roles, perhaps in special options in the 4/5 card lodgings.

3. With the changes to Paramount Presence and the BDR power creep Notability has been significantly de-emphasized. I'd like that changed. To me the notability grind had the best balance of difficulty to cost-benefit analysis to end reward in the game, and while overcapping removed that, I would like something to use it again to make going above 10 worthwhile more often. Recent BDR items should make going even beyond 15 possible for very lategame players.

4. In addition to more endgame content within London, I'd like more midgame content at Zee. Sunless Sea got me especially interested in Frostfound and Irem, and a roleplay point for my OC is that she'd like to quite literally punch Mt. Nomad to death. Please don't feed us to spiders, though. The ones in London cause enough sorrow.

5. I would enjoy more free spouses that are not seasonal, and more ways to interact with player spouses. Again, it's a social game, and it makes sense to reward a desire to be social with the community. On the other hand, the NPC spouses in the game are limiting in their roleplay potential to the point that I've created a character around the Esoteric Accomplice for one of my OCs to get involved with between one roleplay relationship and another. Now allow me to take a deep breath while I discuss the proposed balance pass. The short version here is that I think it's wrong to release a deck refresh nerf without a fundamental change to what cards appear in the deck, and that the nerf to docks favors and yet another nerf to revs favors is misguided.

Here's the long version: I actually support a removal of the deck refresh mechanic. I got in trouble for calling flash lay resets an exploit on a private Fallen London fan server, and refused to use it until the lab convinced me it was a mechanic intended for use by FBG.

The widespread use of deck resets isn't a problem in its own right; rather, it's a symptom of how fundamentally broken the deck is in its current state. You have cards that are so bad that the narrative acknowledges they're awful and the mechanics give you a way to get rid of them at the cost of objectively worse lodgings. You have story signpost cards that clog up space held by desired cards. It can be nearly impossible to get Portly Sommelier (before deck refreshes i was getting one a month playing 60 actions a day) and dream qualities (my PoSI-ready SMEN alt has DbW3 playing every dream card that comes around). And most lodgings have cards that are objectively bad in a way that no new player can know without reading the wiki or asking someone- the exact problem you claim a desire to address in your announcement.

It's telling that players will do SMEN- a quest chain ostensibly about how much you're willing to sacrifice to some faceless maybe-god- in order to get rid of bad lodgings. I personally only bought back salon (Notability grind), rooftop shack (3 epa wine option), and bazaar premises (5-card potential plus good certifiable scraps/money option) after Trand got St. Beau's Candle, and JanieS only ever got the bazaar premises, her Remote Lodging, and the Orphanage. Even the other 4-card lodgings are only good under specific circumstances, and the rest of the 3s have worse cards with no endgame benefit.

Tranderas and JanieS both use remote lodgings. Trand is stuck with the Advertisements of a New Venture and Devices and Desires cards in his hand. Advertisements is an Abundant-rarity card. Since I have no intention of doing railroad due to disliking its mechanics the card simply sits in my hand. If I discard it, its rarity means it pops back up quickly. I think a way to opt out of story signpost cards such as aunt and railroad would be good progress toward solving the deck problem. There could be a large action or monetary cost involved with both removing it and reactivating it to balance, but without a way to get rid of these story hooks I need to keep refreshing to draw other cards around them.

As for the favors, I consider that part of the change mostly good. However, the docks favors -> Silk expedition doesn't really compete that well with other endgame grinds at the moment. Further, the Revolutionaries favor turn-in was already reduced dramatically this year, and I don't think it needs further tweaking. Rather than tuning docks and revs down, I would prefer to see the other factions tuned upwards, and the cost of earning favors eliminated from their cards (no 10 rostygold donation to the Church, for example). I'd still like to see the faction cards remain in the deck after they're given storylet sources, but made more rare, with the conflict options getting a boost to remain attractive in line with my proposed buff to payouts as they are good for London from a flavor/narrative perspective. In closing, it feels like the current FBG's team has a vision for the game that doesn't mesh well with how I see it and want to play it. Content has consistently moved away from what I want to do, leaving me with only SMEN and cider as goals to pursue (and as mentioned, I've run two characters- Samia R and Tranderas- through the quest chain to its completion). I obviously care about the game enough to want more things I like or else I wouldn't bother writing and proofreading this post or discussing and debating changes on the community discord, so I hope you'll take these opinions and suggestions into consideration moving forward. Regards,

Tranderas

#fallen london #tranderas #writing #game #game design #browser games #failbetter games

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marsandchariot · 4 years ago

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Some thoughts on the natal chart of Heaven’s Gate

William Lilly (b. 1608) popularized the natal chart as a reflection of the individual, but ancient astrology was utilized more as a lens for global (relatively speaking) events like war, agricultural cycles, weather, and the longevity or character of royal dynasties. I love looking at charts in general but I especially enjoy thinking about events’ inceptions as individual narratives that are socially metabolized. Stories jump out of event charts differently than they do from individual charts. If you are someone who considers your own birth chart or the charts of others, make sure also to explore the dates of different events in your life (books, films etc are also fun to examine in this way). Any moment you select is subject to the same archetypal cast of symbols as is an individual life.

This is a bit Aquarian in the idea that we can examine the social through a zooming out from or the collapsing of individual psychologies into macro, mythic surfaces. In keeping with Aquarian themes, I watched a bit of the new Heaven’s Gate doc last night. I wouldn’t say I’m fascinated by cults etc etc, but I can’t help responding to a birth time, and Heaven’s Gate has one! For me this is an ideal reading, where most of what I know about Heaven’s Gate is largely through osmosis. It wasn’t until after watching some of the first episode that I learned that the buildup to what we consider the culminating event was actually ~20 years in the making. I have not studied the progression of--or figures central to--the movement. Some people do their best work when they are immersed in research of a subject; I myself tend toward flash or impressionism, so I want to capture this phase before I continue watching the documentary.

RISING NEPTUNE IN SAGITTARIUS

I’m thinking of this placement less as a moment of inception (the way we might read it in the chart of an individual, as the experience of separation from the body of the parent, becoming a discrete entity) and more descriptive of the way we might encounter the cultural phenomenon of Heaven’s Gate at first glance. It may feel rooted in occultism or obscurity—Sagittarius carries notions of philosophy, education, intellectual magic; I’m thinking of The Magician card and its depiction of a single figure controlling all the elements, convening heaven and earth in their alchemical process of discovery. We often characterize movements as centering around a single idea, or a powerful persona, as with Charles Manson or Jim Jones, but there is always a larger atmosphere to examine. Neptune asks us to look beyond superficial characterizations of events in order to understand their mundanity in equal measure to their mystique. Foucault refers to all research as archaeological in that it is a type of unearthing or excavation, a making-sense of objects that may no longer exist and so deliver not direct answers but different articulations of fragmented meaning. What is important too is that Neptune may represent the illusion of origins and root causes. From Stalker (1979), “I dig for the truth, but while I do, something happens to it.” Obscurity is not dispelled, but re-oriented.

CAPRICORN MOON IN 2ND HOUSE opposite SATURN IN CANCER, 8TH HOUSE

We might think of the moon as the id or the unconscious. Liz Greene describes the difference between the sun and the moon as the difference between aspiration and unconscious emotional need—the former describes an active mode of attainment or embodiment, while the latter is a pulsing lack to which one cannot help but respond. The moon is in detriment in Capricorn, in mutual reception with Saturn, who also experiences detriment in Cancer. This opposition is uncomfortable—the emotional needs are difficult to meet. This difficulty may describe the dispositions of those drawn to the Heaven’s Gate movement; Cancer in 8th may describe one who doesn’t feel “at home”—like the Gnostic subject, who pledges allegiance to the god of an entirely different realm, and must suffer alienation in this realm as a result. The moon’s placement speaks to an unsettled sense of self, a need to strive or work toward a comfortable psychological situation. This moon does not “have enough”—not necessarily in a material sense, but they do feel dispossessed, as if their history and culture do not belong to them, or they do not belong to the history they have been given.

ARIES JUPITER IN 5TH HOUSE

The 5th house speaks to creation, production, a making manifest. What Heaven’s Gate purported to give was a way forward—a strategy, a directive. It doesn’t take particularly complex analysis to guess that for the emotionally listless or dislocated, this resolve would have been seductive. Joan Didion’s collection, The White Album (1979), describes this generation far more incisively and expertly than I will attempt to do here; instead, picture the Aries Jupiter as striding confidently forward without fear, of translating subjective experience into universal understanding, resulting in decisive action. This was not just an idea, but a way to manifest one’s presence in the world; not just about joining a collective, but about using the language of collective experience to articulate higher individual selfhood.

GEMINI MARS IN 7TH TRINE LIBRA MERCURY + PLUTO IN 11TH

With two Geminis exiting the White House next month, it feels important to acknowledge the more toxic stereotypical Gemini qualities at play in tearing the country apart for the last four years (though of course the foundation for such a conflict is deeper-rooted and further-reaching than a single presidential term, as it is unrealistic to attribute the momentum of such movements to simply a demagogue). The Trump argument for a stolen election is one element of what has been described as “mass political disinformation.” Gemini cares less about the truth, and more about how a truth is expressed; less about the effectiveness of an idea, and more about being pleased by its shape. And they won’t be pinned down, held to anything they’ve previously said, if in some later context that thing no longer serves them (if you watch enough Bob Dylan interviews you’ll see what I mean—don’t ask him about folk music, don’t ask him what he believes, don’t ask him where he’s from—if you never tell the truth, then it’s almost like you’re never really lying, you’re just saying things, creating momentum through language).

We can see this stereotype on the one hand as, yes, members of Heaven’s Gate were lied to and manipulated. Gemini’s ruler, Mercury, is a slick operator in Libra. Libra quells doubt, seals holes, soothes unease—all the dynamics involved in the appearance of equilibrium or social harmony. We can see Mercury’s conjunction with Pluto as the god of communication acting in service to the god of death. The rhetoric of Heaven’s Gate is designed to ease its members toward radical sacrifice. The 11th house speaks to communities, groups, friends—the social world, and, in this case, social organization and purpose.

The 7th house is the house of the Other, and is where we may look in an individual’s chart to read their close 1:1 relationships. It would have been important for Heaven’s Gate to discredit the friends and families of their members, to emphasize that these are the people that the members should no longer trust and confide in. The Gemini stereotype here, of manipulation and dishonesty, is projected onto the Other—a Them—to consolidate the self, an Us. Mars here makes the disconnection from loved ones particularly dramatic. Mars wants to cut, to define, to separate; it is the individuating act. It is also worth mentioning Lynn Bell’s description of Mars as the protector of the moon, of the unconscious; if the moon feels threatened, it is Mars who steps in and takes over. If an increased involvement in Heaven’s Gate results in members’ loved one’s questioning their involvement, then it is the deep-seated sense of alienation (the moon) that is heightened, ameliorated by a severing of ties (Mars). If Gemini speaks to duality or two-ness, Mars is about making that division manifest.

LEO VENUS IN 9TH

The 9th House in Hellenistic astrology represents temple work or religious duties, and so for readings of individuals alive today we typically adapt this meaning to describe academic or professional institutions, but here we can really embrace the ancient associations. This is absolutely how the institution of Heaven’s Gate represented itself—transparent, loving, and in loyal service to the good, and to the happiness of its members. The “gate” itself feels as if it refers to a 9th house structure (thinking of heaven elsewhere described as a “kingdom”), with Venus at the threshold guiding members toward an embrace of institutional values. I haven’t looked at the charts for Ti and Do, but it feels significant that they are “the Two”—a platonic pair whose relationship forms the wellspring of the movement, which feels very Venusian. We might place The Lovers card beside the card of The Devil, and see the same figures in both cards. The Lovers’ equivalent in the zodiac, of course, is Gemini.

VIRGO SUN IN 10th

If the moon is the id, the sun is the ego—the conscious experience of the self, the path that is chosen, the disposition by which the self feels most connected to worldly perception. The 10th house, “the crown you wear,” positions the ego identity of Heaven’s Gate; what it thinks it is, as a public organization that is meant to efficiently serve its members—to construct and carry out a plan. It is interesting to think of Virgo and Scorpio on either side of Libra, two weights in balance on the scale; this also describes the Persephone myth, in which Virgo descends to the realm of Scorpio and returns with divine knowledge, incurring the changing of the seasons; whose being is intricately tied to the rotation of the earth. Virgo’s responsibility, then, is to bear the fate of the world in their minute actions. Heaven’s Gate in this way positions itself as serving humanity through a practical, incremental system, which relies on everyone “doing their part.”

SCORPIO URANUS IN 12TH

To me it is difficult to find more aptly conflated synonyms for death, unless maybe you replace Uranus with Pluto. Uranian matters are dramatic, revolutionary. They speak to transformative change—as does the 12th house, as does Scorpio. This placement imbues Heaven’s Gate with such an inevitability of death, but the kind of death that is cosmically resonant in that it has the power to change how death in this context is understood. This 12th house, “the bottoming out,” feels like a reservoir that feeds into the Sagittarian Neptune, the sediment that must be continuously re-worked or rediscovered in whatever form it takes in its periods of hibernation. Neptune in Sagittarius may represent the fossilization process of Uranus in Scorpio. I may have more to say about this once I finish the documentary, but I am looking forward to watching for impressions of how “death” is constructed, or re-made as an artifact of social, extraterrestrial liberation.

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dweemeister · 5 years ago

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McFarland, USA (2015)

In Hollywood, certain sports have dominated the sports genre. The proportions reflect their popularity as Hollywood’s Studio System reached its zenith. America’s national pastime, baseball, is well represented. As is boxing, which was once arguably one of the United States’ favorite sports alongside horse racing. American football and basketball had been underrepresented until the last few decades; soccer and ice hockey – perhaps given the demographics of the average Hollywood executive past and present – have not gained much traction among major movie studios (how I hope that changes soon for soccer, but among all the sports I have mentioned, it is the hardest to “fake”). Track and field and distance running occasionally have their moments, like Chariots of Fire (1981) and Race (2016). Simulating amateur or professional running comes down to correcting an actors’ running form – a far cry from teaching someone how to kick a soccer ball properly and strenuous boxing training.

McFarland, USA, directed by New Zealander Niki Caro (2002’s Whale Rider, the pandemic-delayed live-action adaptation of Disney’s Mulan), is the first Disney live-action film on a track and field/distance running story since The World’s Greatest Athlete (1973) – a film that slathers on the slapstick and the cultural stereotypes. Set in the small town of McFarland in California’s Central Valley, McFarland, USA looks at a community glanced over by Hollywood and independent filmmakers. A few hours’ drive from Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean, McFarland is an agricultural community that is heavily Latino, with limited economic opportunities for its residents. That, of course, makes McFarland and places like it the butt of derision from some of its residents and those who do not know any better. It can be a difficult place to live, but even here, the film says, Americana thrives and the American Dream abides.

In the late summer/early fall of 1987, football coach Jim White (Kevin Costner) loses his job at an Idaho high school after losing his temper, accidentally injuring a smack-talking player. He and his family – wife Cheryl (Maria Bello), elder daughter Julie (Morgan Saylor), and younger daughter Jamie White (Elsie Fisher from 2018’s Eighth Grade) – pack their belongings and settle in McFarland, California. Even on their first day, the Whites are frightened of their new home. The place is unkempt, and it is difficult for the daughters to believe they are in America. Jim takes his new job as assistant football coach and PE teacher at McFarland High School, but is soon stripped of assistant coaching duties after a dispute with the head coach. Noticing how many of McFarland’s boys are excellent runners, he convinces the high school principal to support boys’ cross country running – the first year it is sanctioned by the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF, the governing body of California high school sports).

The team, some more skeptical than others, assemble: Thomas Valles (Carlos Pratts), Jose Cardenas (Johnny Ortiz), Johnny Sameniego (Hector Duran), Victor Puentes (Sergio Avelar), and brothers David (Rafael Martinez) and Danny Diaz (Ramiro Rodriguez).

When one thinks of the word “Americana”, certain things come to mind. Small towns with everybody knows your name and white picket fences, children playing baseball in the park, and the corner store/malt shop are elements of Americana, exported to the world via films and television shows made in the United States. But these images are specific to an America of an earlier, more monochromatic time and is arguably geographically specific (not reflecting the diverse Southwest, let alone Alaska and Hawai’i). The country, no matter the time period, is too large to distill into a single idea.

McFarland, California of the late 1980s looks a lot like what it is today. Instead of burger joints, there are taquerías. Quinceañeras are celebrated; there’s a group of men who get together to cruise their classic cars through town (they are mistaken by the White family as “gangbangers” their first night there); and much of the population works throughout the week picking fruits and vegetables in the fields – work that is backbreaking, sweltering, honest, essential.

What makes McFarland, USA most appealing is its normalization and celebration of life in McFarland. Though dramatized, the cinematic reality of this film’s McFarland, California is largely the reality for small agricultural towns up and down California’s Central Valley. The narratives of McFarland deserve to be considered as “American” as equally those from Bedford Falls (1946’s It’s a Wonderful Life), the middle of nowhere in Iowa (1989’s Field of Dreams); and Greenbow, Alabama (1994’s Forrest Gump). Conflict and personal discontent always simmered in these places, despite the idyllic community in Bedford Falls (minus Mr. Potter) and the natural beauty of the middle of nowhere in Iowa and Greenbow, Alabama.

Those things exist, too, in McFarland, California. Jim White, in his first days at McFarland High, obviously does not want to be there nor does he plan on staying longer than he needs to. In forming and coaching cross country, he contends with the familial, economic, and other cultural factors facing his student-athletes’ lives in addition to learning how to coach a sport he has no experience in. As the film reaches the end of its first act, the screenplay by Christopher Cleveland (2006’s Glory Road), Bettina Gilois (Glory Road), and Grant Thompson (his screenwriting debut for a feature film) strays from the White family to show us the familial and peer pressures the student-athletes face. Here, McFarland, USA captures the vulnerability, confusion, friendship (or lack of it), and desire to forge one’s own fate that high schoolers can easily identify with. Many sports movies focusing on a team rather than a single person would allow those individuals to be dramatically indistinguishable (a major problem in 1986’s Hoosiers, a personal favorite). That is not the case in McFarland, USA, which allows its young Latino characters to occupy their unique niche in this film. Thus, in conjunction with its normalization of McFarland’s heavily Latino culture, the film becomes a rousing slice of Americana. Certain people who might be defensive over what “Americana” entails might find issue with what I just wrote, but their definition is exclusionary by default.

With a white coach named White (if this was a professional sport, headline writers for sports sections might be having a field day) training and mentoring seven Latino cross country runners, some people might dismiss McFarland, USA outright as a “white savior” movie even though it avoids such trappings. The “white savior” narrative is one where a white character enters a difficult situation created or exacerbated by the personal/sociopolitical/cultural qualities of a non-white character(s) – the former, by exemplifying traits unlike the latter’s, rescues the non-white characters from that situation. The term “white savior” originated from academic analyses of narrative art and has passed into the political liberal vernacular. Too often among political liberals, the label of a “white savior” narrative is enough to dissuade certain individuals from even considering to consume such a narrative – this reviewer is guilty of using that term in a dismissive fashion.

McFarland, USA circumvents the tropes of white savior narratives by framing Jim White as a flawed character, its post-first act glimpses at life among the boys’ families, and White’s attempts to understand the lives of his student-athletes and neighbors. White, who comes off as an impersonal and stubborn ass with a short-fused temper at first, is played wonderfully by Costner. His character learns, through cultural and neighborly diffusion, how those qualities fail to resonant with his student-athletes, their elders, his wife, and two daughters. Over time, he learns more about the boys’ lives and – on his own volition – the difficult work their families tend to. He acknowledges their personal and familial sacrifices, acknowledging that his hardscrabble life is fundamentally different than theirs. In a final pep talk before the inaugural CIF state championships for cross country, White says:

Every team that’s here deserves to be, including you. But they haven’t got what you got. All right? They don’t get up at dawn like you and go to work in the fields… They don’t go to school all day and then go back to those same fields… These kids don’t do what you do. They can’t even imagine it… What you endure just to be here, to get a shot at this, the kind of privilege that someone like me takes for granted? There’s nothing you can’t do with that kind of strength, with that kind of heart.

It is a beautiful moment made possible by the acting from all involved. That though someone like Jim White may never understand the poverty or the anguish that comes with these boys’ lives, their dedication and work ethic is equal to, if not surpassing, that of their affluent counterparts. To whom much is given, much is required. Jim White has given the boys his dedication to themselves as athletes, students, and human beings; the boys of McFarland’s cross country team have given to their coach lifelong respect and the embrace of community.

As a sports film, McFarland, USA is neither innovative nor does it shake off the coil of predictability that almost every sports film is plagued with. Quite a few of its elements are simplified and sanitized (White revived a cross country program that had been dropped rather than establishing it, he also revived the girls’ cross country team that is not depicted at all here, among other things) but that might be expected given the studio (Disney) behind it. But this film is based on a real story and hews as closely as it can to the spirit of the actual story when it can. If I saw the pitch for this film without any prior knowledge, I might have dismissed it as fantasy. McFarland High School’s boys’ cross country team won nine state championships under White until his retirement in the early 2000s, and qualified for consecutive state championships from 1987 to 2013.

Prior to Jim White’s pre-meet speech, there is a montage set to “The Star-Spangled Banner” – commemorating the boys’ brotherhood now linked inextricably with their coach. The attendees’ and athletes’ singing gives way to a solo guitar, showing the audience scenes of that brotherhood. We see the team on a late afternoon run just outside the barbed wire fencing surrounding the prison located near their school. After that run, we see them, talking with their coach amid the crepuscular Central Valley sun, taking a moment to catch their breath. They are all sitting and relaxing atop a tarp-covered mound of almonds ready for market. If that isn’t an example of Americana at its finest, I don’t know what is.

My rating: 7/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found here.

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, click here.

#McFarland USA #Niki Caro #Kevin Costner #Maria Bello #Morgan Saylor #Carlos Pratts #Elsie Fisher #Johnny Ortiz #Hector Duran #Sergio Avelar #Michael Aguero #Rafael Martinez #Ramiro Rodriguez #Christopher Cleveland #Bettina Gilois #Grant Thompson #My Movie Odyssey

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gurguliare · 5 years ago

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Ok, ok, Hieron wrapup notes, pending epilogue

Hadrian: Strengths and problems of Hadrian’s arc are for me aptly summarized in the jump from 1) Hadrian eking out a moral victory of sorts over Samot and the gods at the not inconsiderable cost of taking judgment into his own hands one last time---it’s all well and good to talk about Hadrian being in no position to pass judgment, but then, he wasn’t with Jericho, either, and sending Samot to Aubade is not a neutral choice. Of course no neutral choice exists! and the important thing is he no longer considers himself a mere weapon in the hands of a higher justice, but a person making a decision, which (as it turns out) simplifies the decision exactly as much as being a weapon did back in the day.---to 2) Hadrian cracking a joke about how, if his wife and child were hurt, of course he would pursue Samot to hell and back. Hadrian the family man exists, conflict-free, on a planet of eyewatering sentimentalism. I don’t really understand why. It has something to do with how they chose to handle Hadrian’s “redemption” or anyway recuperation as a character capable of normal communal life, after what I guess we’re now supposed to understand as his antisocial spiral in s1---laugh with me, it’s good to laugh---with his somber diagnosis of Samot as having spent Too Long Away From His Family also applying to his past self. Um.

Of course Hadrian was never intended as a reliable narrator, but it’s hard for me to do much with that when his narrative isn’t countered by anything else in the text; we meet Benjamin and (less often) Rosana in other contexts, but we don’t get their view of Hadrian, much, and when we do it hews to a narrow pattern of concern and exasperation, as if Hadrian were only an aging action hero this close to claiming his retirement benefits. They lament his recklessness but seem not to notice the dogmatism or the listless doubts that replace it. (That’s with the fact that doubt, if anything, makes him a worse husband and father.) Despite her often-stressed importance to the surviving followers of the church, Rosana’s religious feelings are largely a cipher, and she’s almost never in a position to witness or comment on Hadrian’s most dramatic struggles with faith. So “family” and “faith” remain separate, unable to complicate or inform each other. It’s a shame, because I theoretically am really charmed by the story where a man’s incrementally degraded---not even broken!---faith is the mechanism of his salvation, and by the end he and Samot have swapped places, Samot incapable of not pursuing bitter, futile, barbarous justice and Hadrian very relaxed. The problem for me is that Hadrian ironically restored to his devout family through heresy is never treated as the strange accomplishment it is, and it’s not something he has to work for; I know we get Benjamin scenes this season, I understand the narrative function is to gesture to the very thing I’m describing, but I don’t mean “work for” in the sense of “carving out more time for family dinners.” I mean “acknowledging and accounting for Hadrian’s failings,” rather than glossing his escape almost as a matter of removing the temptation of belief, problem solved.

Hella: I’m in a similar place with Hella; I like the skeleton of her complete arc, I don’t think it ever got the development it needed and it’s missing some key connections. I got a lot of joy from Ali affirming the thread of Hella’s relationship to Ordenna, from s1 avoidance to s2 voluntary exile to s3 final, reluctant return and assumption of responsibility. For me, it’s compelling to look back and realize that Hella essentially begins in a place that Hadrian only reaches circa Winter: having not rejected, but unobtrusively fled, a culture which failed to inculcate her completely with its horrible values---in part because she was too cowardly to adopt them---but that left her with a tangle of blind prejudice and bravado, the relief of freedom making her that much happier to perform “big tough Ordennan,” as long as she stayed far away from Ordenna. I love... of course I love Velas, in concept, I love and will always love FATT’s shitty compromise cities, cosmopolitan and democratic of necessity rather than out of any high ideal. Yes! We get it! I imprinted on Terry Pratchett, I don’t need to say it every time! But the fact that Hella identifies with Velas and befriends Calhoun in Velas and that they have this common experience of “shit, maybe the world is a bigger place than I realized, maybe it’s not actually a choice between tyranny and anarchy every time” ... makes me really verklempt. And in Nacre they both fall back on old habits and Velas barely seems real; for both of them, Nacre has an unpleasant tinge of “reality” asserting itself over a dream---for Calhoun, returning there is obviously something he’s always feared, but for Hella it’s the discovery that the Ordennan state was more right than she knew, that gods and magic exist, and aren’t just bogeymen used to keep Ordennans off the mainland; and, on a deeper level, that Ordenna’s narrow pride is a reaction to a far older and more arbitrary authority.

So she kills Calhoun---“If she’s going to, then why don’t I?” Escape is so unlikely, caught between Ordenna and Nacre, that helping others find it would be a frivolous proposition: the only person Hella hopes to save is Hella. Then she goes home to learn that Velas is also in mortal danger, that the whole world will soon be Ordenna (and Nacre.) She’s ensured it. No wonder her nihilism at the start of Winter is much more marked, and she finally starts to accept that escape isn’t there for the seizing, that there isn’t an outside.

And then she... goes to Aubade?

This is where it starts to break down for me, as with Hadrian and his family. In theory, I get why actually showing Hella what it means to live away from savage god-eat-god imperialism gives her the courage and vision to face Hieron head-on. I think the line about “surrounding herself with clever people” is great and gets at the point that her education, her personal growth, are not meaningless just because they’re the product of artificial intervention, fantastical prosthesis. But, I dunno, in execution it’s so spotty. Part of it is that Adelaide has to come to her senses at the same time, but that process happens very quietly and never gets free of Hella’s orbit---the scene where she asks Hella for a reason to leave Aubade is good, but comes at the price of other scenes in which we see them, for example, negotiate the terms of Adularia’s existence together. Hella as Death’s Servant reads too much as "running Adelaide’s errands,” not enough as her ardent champion, and I’m not saying that every Ali character has to become a zealot before they’re done for me to be satisfied, but hey! If this is you redeeming Nacre and its ideals from the start of the show, then redeem those things! And give Hella the space for her return to Ordenna to feel like atonement, rather than “one last job”... it’s such a good atonement, is the thing, the only possible one, because for all that she’s changed, Ordenna is still the one place where you can imagine Hella Varal having something to teach people.

Probably the solution to this would involve triangulating with the sentience of the Anchor; since Ordenna got the plans from Nacre, Adelaide should take partial responsibility in the cleanup there, as well, and not only in releasing Hieron from the curse. Keep the two plots in conversation to the end. But I’m not sure what exactly that would have looked like; something with Hella’s new body, maybe.

Fantasmo: I love Nick. Thanks to Nick for half-assedly speedrunning Fantasmo through Fourteen’s bit of “in lieu of character development, what if: uplifting character regression?” I cracked the fuck up at him using “Dominate” solely to make Samot captive audience. Audience... to the world’s most insipid power-of-heart lecture, which was honestly very sweet as an obvious truth Fantasmo once knew, or knew well enough to mouth. I did love all the grace notes about the Last University in the finale, still nameless, still a refuge.

#seasons of hieron #spring in hieron #friends at the table #happy deathday to hieron congratulations on becoming: discworld

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queen-mabs-revenge · 6 years ago

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I apologize if this comes off as a rude question to a Killian fan, but I think you’d be the best person to answer in a real and logical way: Do you think, given what we know of how the series went, Killian’s character arc might have ended better had he either died from the Excalibur wound or if he had been allowed to maintain his heroic sacrifice at the end of the Dark Swan arc? Not necessarily ‘would he be better off dead than married’, just whether those would’ve been more Him.

Woo boy nonny, you’re out for my life today, aren’t you? xD

OK arggggk ok this is complicated for me bc those two ‘death points’ are very different imo, and also have different implications depending on how close to the story you’re zooming in. For the purposes of this, I’m going to focus on the Camelot death from the Excalibur wound.

On the purely ~*~i’m love him~*~ level, of course I’m rather dang pleased that he didn’t die…permanently in either of those scenarios. I’m always pleased to get more of Killian on my screen. Even if the situations leave me feeling frustrated, I think that he’s a character that’s complexly written enough and well acted enough to be someone I can enjoy picking apart in any scenario.

So OK dealing with both of these scenarios I think you can tackle this from a few different viewpoints (and I hate to always go back to this, but it’s literally like the fundamental way my brain works, so I’m gonna kind of be flirting with those ideas the whole time). Looking at the situations as if I were imagining all the characters in the story to be real people? I think it’s clear what the characters wanted: in the case of the Excalibur wound, Killian would rather have died while helping free his friends than Emma turn him into the dark one, and expressed that clearly. In the case of his death at the end of the Dark Arc, he chose death in part as a way to free everyone from the fate he’d doomed them to, but also to eradicate the darkness once and for all. Because of Rumple’s failsafe, that choice was predicated on false circumstances, and so the idea of Emma going to bring him back, and him not wanting to stay dead as long as everyone else was safe, makes more character sense and is more of a plot point to get everyone to The Underworld. Because the first is more character based and the latter more plot based, I’m gonna focus my attention on the first.

If we’re talking about the character arcs? It’s hard. Basically the way that I would approach that would be “how fruitful were these events in catalysing character progression and growth” and as I’ve said in other posts, I don’t think they—especially the Camelot death—were fruitful at all, and in fact were regressive. This is going to focus mainly on CS in 4-6 as that’s pretty much what I see those events and their value enmeshed with (and, as I’ve stated before, IMO nearly all of Killian’s S4-6 interactions are filtered through CS anyway, so I think it’s appropriate to talk mostly about CS here) and bc I’m a lengthy ho it’s going below the cut.

The thing I had loved about CS was that during the S3 build up to their actually entering a relationship, the relationship was set up to challenge both of their character weaknesses. For Killian, his weakness centres around his desire for freedom and agency (for himself or others), when challenged, leading him to close himself off and/or make pretty shitty and harmful decisions. For Emma, you have the fear from the trauma of abandonment leading her to isolate herself, or sometimes not even enter decisions as to not present the opportunity for abandonment.

So the S3 push-and-pull of Killian giving the reins of the relationship to Emma—stepping in as support when her life or familial relationships were at risk, yes, but in their interpersonal relationship, letting her evaluate him and move at her own pace—addressed both of their weaknesses. Killian explored the vulnerability of willingly giving up control of a situation, and Emma, by going at her own pace, was able to evaluate his steadfastness and begin to trust him for it.

And that was the dynamic that each needed in that moment, and why early CS is still in ways compelling for me — if I ignore the follow through. Because the problem with the two “deaths”, as far as I see, is that they follow this pattern of taking that previous dynamic, and digging in the heels and exaggerating it to an unhealthy level, instead of exploring how the two characters heal together and adopt a new dynamic. The important thing in that push-and-pull exchange is the agency both characters have in it — however, you start to see what, in my opinion, is Emma assuming Killian’s willingness to follow her lead is given, which removes his agency from the exchange…and the narrative starts to romanticise it.

I think you start seeing it from the beginning of S4 with Emma getting angry at Hook when he doesn’t do as she says and stay put with Elsa in 4x03. We get insight into both of their mindsets during the confrontation at the end – Emma is terrified that she’ll lose him and that’s the reason she orders him earlier; he, used to being dynamic, struck out on his own in response. But the point we got by the end of the episode wasn’t that she was right, but that she was expressing her valid fears irrationally by trying to tell Killian to do what she said, no questions asked. And he was wrong in that he didn’t counter a demand he didn’t agree with right away and directly, but took back his agency behind her back when he should have communicated that he had a problem with what she was asking. So you have the unhealthy level of the dynamic being played out, handled poorly, and a set up for forward motion into healthiness being presented.

Except it never really followed through—oh it did in dribs and drabs, which makes this so much more frustrating (their conflict over his holding back information about Ursula, and then the resolution they come to together being one positive move I can think of where they’re venturing more into equal partner territory), but overall the idea of Killian’s capitulating to Emma being a given instead of a choice is the theme that continued—to its unhealthiest apex in S5, with the Dark One arc being the dramatic climax of Emma assuming Killian’s eventual compliance and overriding his agency with her own desires, and Killian, when confronted with being controlled, going to harmful extremes.

And, what that should have done, and what I thought it was doing at the time, was to drag that increasingly issue-laden agency problem out into the harshest light, to the most extreme situation of life or death, and create maximum drama over it so that it could reach a resolution both through character interaction and plot resolution. So that going forward, you would have the two entering into a more communicative partnership and presenting a united front (and negotiating how to navigate what that means) against whatever conflict showed up next (insert forever bitter I NEVER GOT MY FUCKING BATTLE COUPLE face here), or deciding to step back and change their dynamic by moving away from presenting a romantic unit.

But what happened was more of the same, except this time it was treated by the narrative as being just part of their relationship’s standard operating procedure, part of the new ‘normal’ after the major conflict of S5, and not as a problem to be solved. It was romanticised. So you end up with S6 which makes me just want to fling myself into the sun with rage. Lies about the saviour premonitions are Emma taking agency away from not only Killian but everyone around her — it’s the same story all over again, ***walls*** so it’s OK, but no one has the agency to react and to help her because she doesn’t allow it. And as it relates to CS, you don’t get Killian’s reaction to this at all except in sad looks (and That Fucking Cut Scene That Shouldn’t Have Been Cut).

You get a redux of 4x03 with Killian hiding the shears as a way to try to reclaim some agency behind Emma’s back, because she’s shut him out of any solution they could have reached together as partners. But the narrative focuses on what he does as the only grave error of the situation. You have the agency problem embedded in the first proposal – from going through his private things that trusted as a safe hiding place, to her instigating the proposal over his coming to her for help — but this time, unlike in the Camelot situation, her actions aren’t called into question by the narrative, but his immediately very much are both by her at the character level, and at the narrative by isolating him on the realm-hopping extravaganza. Her taking away his agency is very literally romanticised in a proposal.

You have it again right before the wedding with yet another lie to cut Killian off from being able to actively step back to or to step in and help her as her supposed partner — and again, this time the narrative frames this not only as the act of a hero, culminating in her solo take-down of the Black Fairy (with her family literally frozen out of supporting her), but it actually intersperses her actions of lying to him to force him act as she alone thinks is right in with the build up to their actual wedding. Not only does the narrative not call her actions into question, they’re literally put into the most romantic of contexts. The question at that point is never whether or not Killian will follow Emma’s lead, because the relationship never moved past the S5 conflict of Emma assuming he would and acting on his behalf, except unlike in S5, this isn’t portrayed as a relationship weakness, but as Emma’s strength of character, and their romantic apex.

So that comes back to the death question. And my returning question: narratively what was the payoff?

It’s not that from a story standpoint I think that Killian’s character arc was finished when he was dying from the Excalibur wound — for me it’s that, if that moment is a pivotal moment crafted to show the height of agency imbalance in the only real relationship he has on the show in S4-6, then it should have been addressed and resolved with a pivot in dynamic after the dramatic fallout — with the characters either moving together or apart.

As it stands, the dynamic stagnated and regressed so badly into that stagnation that the whole issue that the “death” brought up, with the extreme violation of agency and resulting trauma of S5, was angst for angst sake without resulting growth. Without a complete overhaul of the plot from that point out where CS either grow together or apart due to the consequences of that moment, I tend to view that moment when he’s begging to die in the Middlemist field as just a deeply sad one, now made the sadder for its pointlessness. It’s harbinger of the future unchanging and then utterly romanticised removal of his agency within the relationship continuing through the end of the series. The shower of resulting S5 angst affects his character/relationship arc through S6 about as much as a fridging would have anyway, and it’s really bleeding hard for me to side against the character’s wishes knowing all that in retrospect.

(that said, to reiterate, as a killian fan, i am glad he stuck around? but i’m also glad i get to live in a world where there’s a him that didn’t go through that depressing stagnation? ugh HI YEAH!)

#Anonymous #ouat critical #cs critical #emma swan critical #killian jones #mabsplaining #killian jones meta #I DON'T KNOW LADS #moar tags? pls let me know #lol basically the way i look at it now i'm like -- honestly shit or get off the pot.....or die i guess?#and there was a whole lot of narrative constipation going on there

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fictionfromafar · 3 years ago

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No Honour by Awais Khan

No Honour

Awais Khan

Orenda Books

Publication Date: 19 August 2021

Through the fictional story of Abidi and her father Jamil, Awais Khan presents many of the societal difficulties encountered in everyday life both within rural and urban Pakistan. This is a novel routed in love and loyalty which convincingly makes a case for social change and greater equality within his homeland.

This book commences with a tragic sequence of events which demonstrates how traditional attitudes towards family honour have compelled men to do what would normally be considered unthinkable acts to their own relatives. The impression this gives to the reader is an emerging comprehension that normal life for inhabitants of small countryside communities within Pakistan includes a large degree of fear and suspicion of their neighbours.

This opening highlights how behaviours are monitored through the village elders known as the jirga. Led by Pir Saqid there is danger implicit for anyone who is perceived to break their fundamental interpretation of Islam. Reading this book at the same time as the news was coming through about the Taliban retaking control of Afghanistan, there were definite parallels. As Khan’s poignant narrative reveals to us, the majority of men in the village appear to support the actions and beliefs of the elders, domestic violence against women is very common and perhaps sadly girls in the village do not go to school and cannot read and write.

Living modestly within the village is local butcher Jamil. He is in his mid forties and married to Farida and they have seven children. Their eldest daughter is sixteen year old Abida. She was born quite a few years before the couple were able to conceive again so she is several years older than her two brothers while her sisters are even younger. As his first born child, Abida is the apple of her father’s eye. His deep love and admiration for his daughter is genuine and shines through the novel. He bestows much more attention to her than the rest of his family but he also turns a blind eye to her worrying behaviour. Unlike Farida who is preoccupied with the younger children, he is aware that his eldest is spending a lot of time away from the family home.

No Honour has two narrators with chapters alternating between Jamil and Abida so we get both their perspectives. This is key to the novel as by virtue of their different gender and generation we perceive how both are conflicted between the behaviour expected of them and their own personal attitudes and desires. This reveals a lot about Pakistani society and reveals that while the traditional attitudes are deep routed, they live by their own moral codes.

Abida is able to escape the fate that has befallen some of her peers in the village and the focus of the story moves to the busy and bustling city of Lahore. After leaving the village behind Abida hopes to feel safer but soon realises that there are many more threats in the city. She has also put her trust in a weaker person who is unable to resist the temptations that life in the city brings.

While Abida has been liberated from the deadly motives of the jirga, without the security of her family, her life takes a dramatic downward spiral. Khan immerses us in each development in such an emotive fashion as if each step is painful to write. The only hope for Abida is that somehow the fleeting acquaintances that she has made can somehow lead her father Jamil to her and rescue her from her increasingly desperate ordeals.

Jamil does arrive in Lahore once the family grow concerned at the lack of contact from their daughter, but he is wholly unfamiliar with the city and the lives lived by its residents. Through his viewpoint we encounter a range of characters from different social statuses. An exciting thriller develops where cultural norms are approached and challenged leading Abida to eventually confront her greatest fears. Encouraging by the waning appeal of the jirga, she is then eventually able to contemplate what differences she can hope to bring.

No Honour succeeds in so many ways as a compelling and informative work of fiction. Through Khan’s dialogue we have an exceptionally strong story about family love that is very relatable and believable. The novel also reveals so much about what is good and bad in contemporary Pakistani society. If you read No Honour, I can promise you will be constantly engaged by words that will provoke a range of emotions from sadness, despair and fear to anger and finally, most importantly to hope. The onset of modernity takes place at different stages around the world but there is a realisation that through education and increased awareness the radical interpretations of what is a peaceful religion are no longer legal nor durable. In addition to being a convincing novel, No Honour can be seen as Awais Khan’s tool to bring greater awareness to western audiences of the daily challenges faced in his part of the world and perhaps some inspiration directed towards the domestic market. Without doubt the future must see more liberal attitudes prevail, self interest diminish and a more positive future for Sharmeela’s generation.

Many thanks to Orenda Books and Anne Cater for an advance copy of No Honour and inclusion on the book tour. Please check out the other reviews of this book as shown below.

Awais Khan is a graduate of the University of Western Ontario and Durham University. He is also an alum of Faber Academy. He is the Founding Director of the Writing Institute and has delivered lectures at Durham University, American University of Dubai, Canadian University of Dubai to name a few. He has appeared on BBC World Service, Dubai Eye, Voice of America, City42, Cambridge Radio, Samaa TV, Indus TV, PTV Home and several other radio and TV channels. His work has appeared in The Aleph Review, The Hindu, The Missing Slate etc.

He is the author of In the Company of Strangers (published by Simon & Schuster, The Book Guild and Isis Audio) and No Honour published by Orenda Books.

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introducingtenzin · 4 years ago

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2. Inspiration from competition #competitoranalysis

This campaign is influenced by campaigns and strategies employed by various "competitors" who have successfully expanded their interests and outreach online.

The key strategy of creating viral content to market one's music is inspired by Jacob Collier and Lil NasX. They have both successfully established a professional career and a large fanbase through a 'grassroots' approach of advertising their music and brand through short homemade clips that are popular with audiences online (Feldman, 2021) (Pearce, et al., 2021), as opposed to a more 'traditional' approach which relies on studio quality media advertising supported and sponsored by labels with large financial resources (artists like BTS and Harry Styles are two prime examples who have found success through this technique). There are two main rationales behind choosing a grassroots approach. Firstly, Tenzin does not have the backing of a label or large financial resources to produce and commission professional quality advertising, and therefore must resort to more accessible means. Secondly, this grassroots approach helps initiate the 'genuine' and 'personal' relationship that Tenzin seeks to establish with his fans, the medium of homemade videos helping create an intimate and authentic relationship with his fans. Although having a similar campaign strategy to NasX and Collier, Tenzin's end product that is being sold, which is his music, is unique to him which allows his campaign to stands out from the two competitors'.

Going viral or creating engaging content that can penetrate through the noise on social media, however, can be incredibly difficult (Bigne, et al., 2021). This is why the campaign also takes inspiration from popular influencers or content creators who make videos that go viral frequently. Zach King and Noah Requel are two prime competitors/inspirations who have been selected among the millions of creators who Tenzin needs to compete with to attract and retain attention from online audiences.

After studying hundreds of these creators and viral videos, I have observed that they all employ these key features, knowingly or unknowingly, to create compelling content:

1. Attractive

The first few seconds of a viral video always has an attractive introduction. Whether it is dramatic or unusual scenes, title cards with unique phrases or a person simply announcing that they are going to do something peculiar, the viewer is placed right in the action, drawing their attention and keeping them in suspense.

2. Engaging

The video uses several technical elements of audiovisual storytelling, often unique to this medium, that keep the viewer engaged with the content on the screen. Fast cuts, music, narration, closed captions, video effects and emojis are often used to create dynamic experiences for the viewers and keep them from turning away.

3. Entertaining

Although only 15 seconds in length, the videos are always telling stories in creative ways that capture the imagination of the viewer. Elements such as drama, comedy, conflict, suspense and novelty drive the narrative of these videos - some videos even encompass all five of these elements! Whether it's an accidental viral video or a well-composed government public service announcement, these videos are always entertaining for the viewers to watch.

4. Inspiring

There are always takeaways from these videos, whether they are direct or indirect. These takeaways are further influenced by the creator and the audience. Some creators may simply wish their videos to entertain or inform, but most often make content that the viewers will respond to with tangible reactions like likes, comments, shares and follows. While having an engaging enough video may help gain these reactions, it is common for videos to direct prompt viewers (“like/share for more!”). By inspiring these responses from viewers, the creators not only receive tangible feedback to inform their the success or failures of their videos, but they also help the video gain traction among the algorithms and appear in front of more viewers, expanding its outreach.

In addition to these features, traits like good branding, consistency and authenticity help videos perform well (TikTok Creator Portal, 2021). It is vital, therefore, that the campaign videos employ these methods to ensure that they outcompete competitors and win over online audiences.

It is important, however, that audiences are made clear that Tenzin is not simply a content creator, but also an artist who creates and promotes his own music - the music being the end product that is being sold. Therefore, the music videos, social media posts and website help maintain a branding that is consistent with an artist of a similar calibre. Inspiration is taken, therefore, from successful artists with similar musical styles like Beaux, Arlo Parks and Claud who inform the branding of Tenzin. DIY imagery, baggy clothing, handwritten fonts, informal addressing tones are some features that have been inspired by these competitors and influenced the branding of this campaign.

By combining strategies used by both music artists and content creators, this campaign stands out by reaching out to and growing fanbases in a manner that is uniquely native to the young online culture.

Bigne, E., Simonetti, A., Ruiz, C., & Kakaria, S. (2021). How online advertising competes with user-generated content in TripAdvisor. A neuroscientific approach. Journal of Business Research, 123, 279–288. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2020.10.010

Feldman, B., 2021. Before ‘Old Town Road,’ Lil Nas X Ran a Now-Banned Meme Account. [online] Intelligencer. Available at: <https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/lil-nas-x-was-a-popular-twitter-user-before-old-town-road.html> [Accessed 1 May 2021].

Pearce, D., Pearce, D., Gay, R., Pearce, D. and Mason, N., 2021. Jacob Collier on managing the complexity of virtual collaborations. [online] Blog.dropbox.com. Available at: <https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/our-community/jacob-collier-remote-collaboration> [Accessed 1 March 2021].

TikTok Creator Portal. 2021. 6 key secrets to success | TikTok Creator Portal. [online] Available at: <https://www.tiktok.com/creators/creator-portal/en-us/foundations-for-success/6-key-secrets-to-success/> [Accessed 9 May 2021].

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wp4peace2018 · 6 years ago

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Connecting to the Conflict.

The Women Partners for Peace trip is the first of its kind. We are the guinea pigs for this kind of experience, and therefore, we are all feeling our way through it. There are plenty of trips to Israel for Jews, for non-Jews, and for different interest groups. But there are rarely trips combining Jews and non-Jews, particularly with a focus on women.

One of the by-products of this grouping is the virgin lens through which we are all experiencing Israel with one another. Not only have I ever been to Israel with non-Jews, but I have also never been with a specific focus on peace, dual narratives, with a subtext of gender and race issues in the US. That subtext is definitely influencing our discussions and the way we are experiencing the programming, which has been one of the biggest surprises of the trip for me. I had prepared myself for the exposure to the Palestinian side of the story, fully expecting for it to be difficult to hear. What I had not prepared myself for how strongly many of the non-Jewish women would identify with the Palestinians, and how that would affect my perspective. Similarly, I don’t think the non-Jewish women were fully prepared for how strongly the Jewish women identified with Israel. In the beginning, it seemed that they were confused about how passionately we felt about Israel; I think they assumed it was more of an esoteric connection rather than a visceral one.

For myself, I care deeply about Israel because it is where I feel at home. It is the one place that I don’t feel like a minority in a Christian world. I am always awed that virtually everyone I see is Jewish - the waiter bringing me drinks on the beach, the cab driver, the store clerk, and just about everyone I pass on the street.

In the US, I assume that no one I see is Jewish. When I was younger, I used to get excited to see an observant Jew in public, identifiable by a kippah, or even more exotically, a Hassidic Jew, complete with black coat and hat, full beard, and tallit (the prayer shawl strings exposed at the waist band). It may sound silly, but seeing a (literal) member of the tribe, was reassuring. Although secular Jewish people may look “white,” we often don’t feel like part of the privileged majority. Not because we are oppressed, but because we know that most people we see are not like us in so many ways.

When I am in Israel, there are Jewish people and symbols everywhere. It is incredibly reassuring, on a subconscious level, to be among people that are like me. I love seeing all the Israeli flags, Stars of David, and even the mezzuzahs on every door I enter. When I am in the U.S., I don’t feel actively “other,” but I am constantly reminded, by the sheer number of crosses around so many people’s necks, that I am not the same.

So being in Israel is reassuring. It is wonderful to know there is a place where I can feel part of majority. It is also comforting to know that even if I am not in Israel, it is there if I need it. I hope it doesn’t sound dramatic to say that Diaspora Jews are conditioned from a very young age to be vigilant about our safety in our local communities. As antisemitism has increased in recent years, the thought has crossed my mind more than once that we may not always live comfortably in the United States. We have been taught all our lives that Jewish people have been expelled from nearly every country on Earth and that we should always have a backup plan. If you think this threat is one from the past, you should know that Jewish people have been leaving France in droves over the last several years, mostly resettling in Israel.

So when I discuss Israel, it is not just theoretical. I am defensive and protective because Israel is my escape plan. Israel is also a source of pride for me and my people. It is shocking to hear from women I have come to admire and respect that I should instead feel shame. I am proud to buy my kids Israel Defense Forces t-shirts, but I think some of the other women on my trip would equate that with buying a t-shirt with the KKK emblazoned on the chest. The IDF is one of the symbols of the conflict and oppression of Palestinians by Israel and I am sure many people would be horrified to learn of my appreciation and support of Israel’s army.

Many people see clear parallels between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and oppression of minorities in the U.S. After all, Israel is clearly in a position of power and the Palestinians in a position of weakness. But there are clear differences as well, the biggest being the influence of other factors when considering the Palestinian’s status. Most importantly, the Palestinians have terrible problems within their own communities with their leadership, corruption, education, and relationships with other Arab countries. Israel is definitely not the sole cause of their terrible situation, but I know many people see it as the primary one, the effects of which exaggerate or even create the rest of the societal problems.

I don’t believe Israel is the root of all Palestinian suffering. I have learned from my group that blaming the Palestinian leadership (or lack thereof) is similar to blaming black communities for the violence and poverty they are facing. Israel is culpable, as are the Palestinians. But ultimately, I don’t think focusing on responsibility is going to move the needle. Brilliant minds could parse out cause and effect of Israeli and Palestinian Authority actions, and nothing would change. Assigning blame is done only to exculpate ourselves; Israelis love to mention that Israel is not to blame for Gaza because it pulled out in 2005 and elected Hamas as its government. But that would ignore all of the years before and since where Israel’s policies toward Gaza influenced the conditions there. Similarly, saying that if only Israel didn’t interfere in Gaza, the Palestinian people there would not suffer fully ignores that Israel did fully withdraw in 2005, and terrorism never stopped and conditions there have worsened. Many Palestinians and Israelis alike believe that until there is no Israel, there will be no peace. In fact, Hamas and other Palestinians leaders say so openly.

One of the messages we received from several speakers was the hope that the rest of the world do one of two things when it comes to the Israel/Palestinian conflict. Option one is to stay out of it completely since it is between Israel and the Palestinians alone and outside influence is not helping anyone. Option two is not to import their conflict into our domestic issues. Using the Palestinian/Israeli conflict as a proxy battle for issues of discrimination, oppression and violence in the United States (or elsewhere) is not productive and not appropriate. The conflict in Israel is unique and fact-specific. What was fascinating is that both Israelis and Palestinians asked us not to import their conflict - in fact, it was one of the only things that seemed universal between both sides.

The next post will help elucidate the reality of living on the border of Gaza and how that has impacted an average Israeli’s life and family.

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stompsite · 7 years ago

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Autopsy: Mass Effect Andromeda

Games are like dogs. You want to call all of them “good boy” and pat them on the head and tell them how wonderful they are all the time, because everyone’s a lot happier when you do, but some games are bad dogs, and you’ve got to take them out back behind the barn and shoot them in the head.

Games are difficult to make. Unlike a film, where you’re photographing what already exists, or a book, where you only have to use words to make things happen, a game requires loads of people to work extremely hard to build an entire reality. As a developer, you have to create spaces. You have to create physics. You have to control lighting. When two objects touch each other, you, the developer, have to ensure that they don’t simply clip through each other. As a developer, you might slave away for years of your life, working impossible hours alongside dozens, even hundreds, of other people, to ship an entire hand-crafted universe.

Games are places you get lost in, and places you call home. Only in games can you travel places, talk to people, and live the impossible. It’s why you mow lawns in the summer, saving up enough cash to buy that new graphics card so you can run the biggest hit. It’s why you wait, shivering in the midnight cold, outside a tacky GameStop to pick up the sequel you’ve been waiting years for. It’s why you draw fanart and write fan fiction of your favorite characters. It’s why you part with your hard-earned cash. You want to go there. You want to live that. You want to experience something new.

Mass Effect Andromeda is a bad dog, and I hate that I have to say that. Hundreds of people put five years of their lives into Andromeda, but the end result was a disappointment. Due to a lot of complicating factors, they weren’t able to make the game they wanted to make. There’s a tendency among gamers to criticize bad games harshly--when you’re eating ramen every day in college, you want an escape. You save up. You budget. If the game is bad, you have no recourse. Good reviews don’t necessarily mean you’re happy with what you got; after all, there’s often a big disconnect between reviewer tastes and player interests.

So it makes sense to lash out. It makes sense to want to have some fun at the expense of the game that caused you so much trouble. It makes sense to want to joke and mock and scream about just how bad it is, and how mad you are that you wasted your time on a game that the publisher spent years promising you was amazing as fuck.

The Witcher 3 is one of my favorite games. It was so good, I found myself swimming around the game’s oceans, just trying to lose myself in the world, performing every task, no matter how repetitive or mundane, so I wouldn’t have to leave. I didn’t want it to be over. With Andromeda, I finally gave up on the side quests, focused on the critical path, and installed as quickly as I could after the credits rolled.

Developers have a tendency to be defensive, and it’s completely understandable. No one wants to feel like their time was wasted. The secrecy of development mean a lot of myths arise. Sometimes leadership makes poor decision, technology doesn’t work like it ought to, pressures to hit deadlines lead to compromised work. You, the individual developer, do not have nearly as much power to make or break a game as players think you do. It’s a miracle any game gets made. Even something like “opening a door” is incredibly complex. And there’s no guidebook, no science behind it, no easy way to simply have an idea and make it work.

I say all this because I want set the ground rules. We’re here to talk about why a game didn’t work. We’re not here to vent our frustrations, as justifiable as that may be, and we’re not here to complain about the developers. It’s human nature to want to blame someone for something bad, and it’s just as human to want to avoid the blame. I’m going to avoid human nature, cut through the bullshit entirely, and try to diagnose the product.

Andromeda had a metascore of 72. It sold so poorly that it went on sale today for $15--that’s 75% off in less than six months after its release, something that only happens for games that sell poorly. If you’re one of the two people I know who loved the game, I’m not asking you to stop loving it, but I am asking you to acknowledge that the game didn’t work for most people. I think we ought to find out why.

This is not a review, this is an autopsy. I am not here to tell you whether or not you should buy the game. I’m here to explore why it failed. In order to be clear and informative, I’m working on the assumption you haven’t played the game, but I won’t be avoiding spoilers either.

So, now that we’ve set the stage, let’s look at the game.

1. Narrative

Mass Effect Andromeda is a clean break from the Mass Effect series. There’s some overlap in the lore--little references here and there--but for the most part, it’s completely its own thing. You, a human, and a bunch of aliens from the Milky Way have flown to the Andromeda galaxy in search of a new home. It took 600 years for your ships to get there.

Somehow, the Andromeda Initiative--that’s the organization running everything--had the ability to see what the Andromeda galaxy looked like at that point in time, despite the fact that light takes about two million years to travel between the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies. At some point between the time you set off and the time you got there, a catastrophe occurred, and some weird, uh… like… energy coral spread throughout space.

On one hand, it’s sci-fi, so we don’t need everything to be perfect. On the other hand, Mass Effect has always leaned a bit more towards hard sci-fi than most games. They acknowledge relativity frequently throughout the series--ships can’t travel between worlds without using these big ‘mass relays’ that were seeded throughout the galaxy millions of years before the story starts. Bioware created an element, Element Zero, to explain how how a lot of the tech in their universe functions. It was internally consistent.

Andromeda suddenly decides that ships can fly at something like 4200 times the speed of light, we can see a galaxy in real-time somehow (but only looked once), but we can’t use quantum entanglement to communicate with Earth any more, even though that’s a technology that’s been in the series since the first game. Andromeda breaks a lot of the series’ own rules to get to where it is.

This alone does not make Andromeda a bad game, but it does do a good job of illustrating a big problem: everything feels thoughtless. I’m not sure how a game spends five years in development and has a script that seems so… careless. Nothing in Andromeda feels logical or natural. In writing, there’s this idea called the ‘idiot ball.’ It comes from the writer’s room for The Simpsons, where one character would get to hold the ‘idiot ball’ one week, making bad choices that lead to the story’s drama. It works in a comedy. Not so much in a game that wants us to take its narrative seriously.

The idiot ball is why the crew of an Andromeda Initiative Ark, the Hyperion, wakes up next to a planet that wasn’t inhabited 600 years ago to discover that the planet is now uninhabitable and the aforementioned weird energy coral thing nearly destroys their ship.

Scientists are generally pretty careful. Don’t get me wrong, they take risks, and they occasionally do stupid things like licking test samples, but you’d think that the Andromeda Initiative might have done some recon first. Maybe, I don’t know, stopping just outside the galaxy, using their recon tech to see if anything had changed in six hundred years? Heck, why not stop outside the solar system to see if it had been colonized, or situations had changed? Of course they end up in a bad situation, because everyone in the game holds the idiot ball.

This isn’t a new problem for the series--remember when a giant robot attacked the Citadel and destroyed most of the Council fleet, and the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, on the Citadel saw it and the robots murder lots of people… and then pretended the giant robot threat wasn’t real? Mass Effect, starting with 2, has always had stupid people making stupid decisions that make no logical sense.

But--and this is incredibly important--they still worked, because they created dramatic moments.

Drama is the tension created by the conflict between a character, their goal, and the thing keeping them from attaining that goal. It’s difficult in the best of conditions to maintain the right amount of tension; a player who is constantly being told they’re the savior of the universe while only being tasked with hunting for wolf pelts is going to feel that the experience doesn’t match the premise. Great drama has stakes that feel important and make sense. Characters who constantly make poor decisions lose sympathy, which reduces dramatic tension, and we, the audience, stop caring.

The Council’s ignorance in Mass Effect 2 is awful writing, which isn’t surprising, since the entire game is a terribly-written mess. But at least it rings true! We can believe the government would ignore an imminent threat to our lives (see: global warming), and it makes us feel like we want to take action. Mass Effect 2’s “Oh yeah? You don’t believe in an alien menace? Well, I’m gonna prove it to you!” is exactly what makes a game work, even if the setup is poorly done. As long as it delivers its dramatic payload, it works.

Andromeda has nothing like that. Everything is twee. There’s some guy on one planet, named The Charlatan, and it’s obvious who he is as soon as you meet him, even though he plays it coy. This Charlatan fellow vies for control over a tiny little spaceport on an uninhabitable planet. He’s trying to wrest control away from a forgettable evil space pirate lady who spouts cliche lines in the vein of “guards! Seize them!” I don’t remember why I cared. I can remember every quest, every reason for doing anything in the first Mass Effect (Saren bad, Protheans cryptic, learn more about protheans, find Saren’s base, interrogate Saren’s sidekick), but in Andromeda, uh…

Yeah. I just finished the game and I’ve forgotten why I did anything. This is because the game never did a good job of making me care about things. Don’t get me wrong, it had situations that I ought to care about, but it made the Bioware Mistake.

What’s the Bioware Mistake? Okay, imagine that some guy walks up to you and says “hey, it’s me, your brother! I’m being chased by ninja assassins, and I need your help!” You wouldn’t believe him. It’s a case of someone telling you that they’re important, rather than the person actually being important to you. I felt nothing saving the Earth. I felt a lot more when I lost Mordin Solus in Mass Effect 3. Bioware makes this mistake frequently in its A-plots, but it usually makes its character interactions matter so much more in the B-plots that we can overlook the main plot shortcomings.

Andromeda does the A-plot thing: everyone’s lives are at risk unless you, the single most important human in the story, save them all. It just forgets to do the B-plot thing. There are nice little conversations between characters on the ship and in your party, as you might expect, but conversations with the characters are a drag.

It’s a problem with the game’s dialog on the whole. When you talk to anyone, they… well, they remind me a lot of that great liartownusa photoshop of a fake Netflix movie, “The Malediction Prophecy.”

“It's been 3,000 years since the Malediction, the spirit-plague created by The Order, a fabled army of immortals seeking to unravel the genome of the were-shaman Erasmus Nugent, who seeks to rebuild La Cienega, a bio-weapon capable of stopping Honcho, the deathless vampire king who sseeks to conquer the Fontanelle, the mythical fortress of demon hybrid Gary Shadowburn, who seeks to unleash angel-killer Larry Wendigo Jr., who seeks to release the Bloodfroth, a terrifying evil that seeks ot return the world to darkness.”

People don’t talk like people talk. They talk like fanfiction writers write. Have you ever seen one of those cringe-inducing tumblr story ideas that is just so bad, because everyone’s got these cutesy nicknames and the premise is super goofy and very “I’ve only ever read YA fiction in my entire life”?

Andromeda’s like that. People talk weird. They say things like “excuse me, my face is tired,” and make jokes without charisma. I have this urge to be really critical of the writing team, because they had, I presume, five full years on this game, and they work at a company that is literally built to make story-driven games, and the end result is an experience worse than Dragon Age 2, a game that was rushed through development in 18 months.

I don’t know how this script made it through editing.

This is the kind of writing we tore apart in our sophomore screenwriting classes back in the day. I can understand narratives not working on a larger, more plot-based level, because that requires a lot of coordination between a lot of teams. But basic dialog? How is it so bad?

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Seriously, what is this? How did someone write this scene and go “yeah, yeah, this is good stuff.” How did this make it past animators and editors and marketing? How did this scene make it into the final game?

When your father sacrifices his life for you in the opening of the game, bestowing his role as Most Important Person to you, a character, apparently his friend, demands answers. She looks like Marge in that episode of the Simpsons where Homer uses a shotgun to apply makeup to her face. She asks you “what happened?” Your character, for some unknown reason, replies “to who?” Addison responds “it’s ‘to whom, and your goddamn father.”

I cannot envision a world where someone would: A) not understand that The Most Important Guy’s Death is the topic, B) correct grammar, or C) say “your goddamn father” in that context. It reads like someone trying to write charming and badass, but the situation is “a dude we all care about just died.” It makes no sense. What emotion was the writing team striving for? Did the voice actor ever think to go “uh, this makes no sense”? What the hell happened? How did this make it into the game?

The game presents us with a myriad of unlikable characters who do nothing but screw things up--Tann, Addison, Kelly, and so on. I can understand that disaster can stress people, but I also know that, in the face of disaster, most animals, humans included, have a powerful tendency to stick together in order to face off against a greater threat. In the case of Andromeda, the vast majority of living beings you encounter in the game are Milky Way characters who chose to abandon the colony and become criminal scum in the process. That Sloane Kelly lady, whose name I only remember because I just looked it up? She was the chief security officer of the program. No one should be more highly vetted than she is, but no, after a few months, she cracks and starts a criminal empire.

Why is this story important? Game design is the art of getting players to perform specific tasks that bring about some form of emotional fulfillment. In other words, it’s about establishing motivation. When the premise is stupid, the stakes are meaningless, and the characters unbelievable, it’s hard to compel players to keep moving. What is there to enjoy? What do I gain by playing a game where everyone’s an idiot?

How does a game, from a studio known for its stories, suck this bad after five years of development time? How does that happen? I’m exasperated with the game. I feel insulted by the script. I genuinely want to know how this game got as far as it did, because so many core ideas feel rotten from the get-go.

2. Technology and Presentation

Much has been made of Andromeda’s many animation glitches and bugs.

So, uh, just watch this vid if you want to understand how the game ended up:

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Personally, I struggle with Frostbite, as an engine. EA’s doubled down on it, pushing the tech across all their studios, and I think for the worse. It seems like EA’s development times have skyrocketed since switching from Unreal to Frostbite, and developers have complained at length about the engine. That Kotaku piece linked earlier indicated that wrestling with Frostbite was a big reason Andromeda took so long to develop.

On my computer, Frostbite games are among the buggiest, most unstable games I have. People complained about the load times in the Unity-powered ReCore, but I’ve yet to encounter a Frostbite game with shorter load times. It’s a big issue with the engine. The lighting seems to work really well in the hand of DICE artists, but nobody else seems to have the hang of it.

Suffice it to say, the technology has been called out by a lot of people by now. The animations--in a game that was in development for five years--look worse than they do in an Unreal Engine 3 game from last gen. From a technical perspective, Andromeda needed more time on the cooker. Maybe six months of crunch would have done it, but that team was crunching for a while as it was. The end result was a game that simply does not compete with any other AAA game on the market.

But then there’s the art.

Great fiction often relies on the power of its iconic imagery to engage the audience. Star Wars movies always feel like Star Wars movies. There’s nothing quite as distinctive as the Lord of the Rings movies. Studios like Bungie and Arkane thrive on creating visually distinct universes. Even Bioware’s first three Mass Effect games were fantastically realized.

Mass Effect Andromeda seems like generic sci-fi art you can find anywhere. The alien Kett have some really cool Geiger-influenced stuff, but I couldn’t begin to describe the other two alien species. One’s a robot race that has lots of squares and blocky shapes in their art design, and it feels like I’ve seen it a million times before. The other species, which looks like bad Farscape fan art, looks, uh… pretty normal. Nothing you haven’t seen before.

It’s all incredibly forgettable. If you played Dragon Age: Inquisition, then the vast desert worlds and limited selection of geographical oddities won’t surprise you. Seen the Giant’s Causeway? Someone at Bioware sure loves it. Hexagonal rock pillars are everywhere in Andromeda, some natural, some not.

Again, I don’t really understand how, in five years, the art design ends up looking like… well, this. You know how people made fun of the suit design in Bioware’s other sci-fi series, Anthem, for looking like the bad CG models you see on off-brand GPU boxes? Andromeda has the same problem. It’s weird going from a game like Destiny, where every location feels distinct and fresh, to Andromeda, where it feels like the art just doesn’t have any creativity put into it.

And it sucks to say this.

It sucks to be so harsh. I wanted this game to be great. They were saying the right things about trying to nail that sense of exploration, and early plans for the game, as mentioned in the article I linked earlier, make it sound like they were going for a much more ambitious, exciting game, but they were hamstrung by the technology. That doesn’t explain the writing or the art design, though.

As some of you may know, I’m working on an indie game codenamed G1. I created it, wrote the plot, did most of the design work, stuff like that. Anyways, I wanted to create a really cool, distinct sci-fi universe that sticks in players minds as strongly as Star Wars or Half-Life does. Being a volunteer-only project for the time being (I’d love to pay people, but I am so poor I literally went homeless this summer and am now staying with some family members who are in danger of losing their home as well!), we’ve seen some interesting people come and go. Way back in the day, we had some guys who really wanted to change the game’s entire setting to a much less interesting, more generic environment. Later, we had some guys who were big fans of Ghost in the Shell and wanted to make our character art reflect that instead.

My point is, I get that a lot of people want to do what seems and feels familiar, but I think, for a big, AAA video game, distinctive is what people remember, especially in sci-fi and fantasy. Nothing looks like The Witcher 3, or Dishonored, or Halo, or the original Mass Effect trilogy, Half Life, or… well, you get the idea, right? Distinctiveness rules. Sameyness drools. And for whatever reason, Andromeda is the least-inspired AAA video game I’ve seen in a long, long time.

3. Design.

This, for me, is the big one. I can deal with bad storytelling in a game, because almost all game storytelling is garbage. I can put up with bad technology, because I grew up gaming on the PC, where modding could often turn my games into an unbearable slideshow, and sometimes, I’ve found games that were fantastic despite their poor presentation. But if the design is bad… then we got a problem.

And the design is bad.

As much as I want to speculate on why the design is bad, the truth is, nothing productive can come of that. I don’t know why it’s bad. I don’t know who made what designs, or how much the technology is to blame, or anything like that. All I know is that the design is bad, and I’m going to tell you what makes it bad, so if you decide to develop a game in the future, you at least can be armed with the knowledge of what Andromeda got wrong, and hopefully avoid it yourself.

If you asked me to use one sentence to describe Andromeda, I’d probably call it “a waste of time.”

I mean this literally. I’ve never played a game that wasted more time than Andromeda. Like… holy crap. So much time wasting. People complained so much about certain time-wasting aspects of the game, Bioware patched some of it out.

Here’s an example, and I’m going to italicize it so you can skip reading the whole thing if it gets too boring. Because it is super boring.

If you want to go explore the planet of Kadara, you have to go to the star system, which involves an unskippable cutscene as you ‘fly’ from where you are to where you were. Then, in the star system, you click on the planet, and you fly over to it. You fly too close to it, then zoom back out (this happens every time you move between planets in the game; I have no idea why). Then you rotate the planet on your display until you can select the city, which is on the opposite side of the planet from you.

Now click on that landing zone. You must then verify your loadout, because the game won’t let you change it without seeking out a loadout station, rather than just letting you open your menu and swap gear. You will be faced with an unskippable cutscene showing you landing on the planet. Then you will spawn somewhere that’s nowhere near where you want to go. Turn around. Click on the machine behind you, and select the “go to slums” option.

You will now be around 100 yards away from the slums and the mouth of the cave. Run out of the cave. It’s a big, empty field, so this takes like 20 seconds to do. Jump over the fence. Run another 100 yards or so to a big terminal that lets you summon your car. Congratulations, you have finally spawned. Now spend ten minutes driving wherever you need to be around a planet that’s a pain to drive around.

Every planet is this bad. You’d think they might let you spawn wherever you’d like, and maybe even set up a few different spawn zones on the planet, but no, that’s not how it works in Andromeda. It takes way too long to do basic things. Fast travel points aren’t in convenient spots, but there’s nothing interesting to find other than some crates with trash you might as well break down. Any time you spawn in a base, you’re usually quite far from the person you actually want to talk to. You’re going to spend a time walking across flat surfaces to get to where you need to go.

Contrast that with a game like Destiny 2, which has multiple spawns on each planet, and keeps the social areas with vendors nice and small, so there’s not a lot of down time simply getting between points. Usually, these spawns take advantage of the game’s joyful movement system, as opposed to the flat, empty space in an Andromeda.

There are other ways it wastes your time as well. Consider the UI, which decides to put everything in a list. I do mean everything. There are something like 10 distinct tiers of weapon, for every single weapon in the game. Like the Dhan? Cool, your crafting list will include the Dhan I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, and X, which is weird, because it’s a straight upgrade every time, so there’s literally no point to keep the Dhan I blueprint around when the Dhan X is craftable.

Chances are the Dhan X won’t be craftable, because there’s no reliable method of farming research (I did almost all the quests on all the planets and scanned as much as possible and couldn’t get beyond the Dhan VII), but still, it’s weird that they’d put literally all the guns and their ten variations in one gigantic list of the 20-30+ guns in the game. That’s like 300 something entries in your crafting menu, and you can’t sort between any of them.

Gun mods? Same thing. Rather than letting you, say, sort mods by location type (barrel, magazine, etc), you’re just stuck with a gigantic list, and for some reason, you have to carry them on you, even though the game only lets you swap them out at various stations. Wouldn’t it make more sense to store the mods in the stations themselves?

You end up wasting so much time just navigating menus, trying to find the one thing you want, or being forced into seeking out the physical locations in game that will let you access the menus, because you can’t swap items out at will… it’s frustrating.

There’s this weird fascination with diegetic UI in games, and it sucks. Seriously, there isn’t a single game that benefits from having you go somewhere to access basic menu options. I don’t want to have to go to a terminal to swap out my guns. I’d much rather just press a button, open a menu, and swap my loadout there. Destiny got it right. Fable 3 did not. For some reason, Mass Effect Andromeda wants to be like Fable 3, if Fable 3’s weird menu space had huge amounts of dead space where nothing interesting occurred between the menus.

It’s awful. And I don’t know how the game shipped like that.

But the worst thing of all is the mission design. If you've played Dragon Age: Inquisition, you know that the mission design was extremely repetitive. Every location you went to would have the same few basic missions, no matter where you went. It got predictable. Andromeda is the same way. Go to two big towers on the map, solve a puzzle, go to a vault, press a button, run to the end of the vault, voila, you’ve done it. Scan a bunch of corpses on a planet. Pick up some rocks and plants. Go find the glowing orbs on the planet, and you’ll be rewarded with a poorly written cutscene. Fight the exact same boss on every planet, but don’t look for the variety found in Inquisition, where every dragon had something unique going on that made it kinda cool.

On and on it goes. Every planet, the same thing. There’s a point in the game where you have to go to a place called Meridian, and you go to some ancient alien city, and it’s not actually Meridian, but you don’t know that until you get there. To proceed, you must go to two different towers, solve two puzzles, and then go to a third puzzle, and do a new thing. When you fight the final boss, you will have to engage two similar phases, followed by a third, more unique phase. Every single fucking quest in this game seems to be “do two things, and then the third thing will be different.”

Find out who did a thing? Talk to two colonist, then the third one will say something different. Get artifacts for a museum? Three things. Every quest. Every single quest. Do three things, then move on.

I don’t want to be the generic internet gamer type here and accuse the developers of laziness, but I can say that the end result feels lazy. I remember, years ago, a Bioware writer saying on their forums that Bioware had decided that three was the ‘perfect number’ or something, and so they did everything in threes. Well, sorry, dude, but you’re wrong. Doing everything with the rule of threes sucks.

You know why? Because it robs the player of dramatic tension. Yeah. It all comes back to that. When you teach your players that they’re going to do two meaningless things for every quest, the player stops giving a shit about your game. When you claim to be making a game about space exploration, but there’s settlers on every single planet you visit, and the quests are the same every time, it doesn’t feel like you’re exploring, it feels like you’re a space janitor.

The rule of three makes everything predictable. Great games don’t have it, unless they disguise it really well. Bad games wear it on their sleeves.

If players can predict what’s going to happen in your game, the tension is lost, and the desire to continue is dampened. Word of mouth dies, nobody recommends your game to their friends, and your sales dry up and you can’t even justify making DLC for your game.

Rule of three design is garbage. It is that simple. There is no case where it is great game design, ever.

I have no idea why Bioware decided to make a game with nothing but rule of three design, but they did. And even when they try to make it interesting, it’s not interesting. One quest had me go to a location, where a person told me “I need a thing,” giving me some absurd reason as to why I couldn’t help them another way. I went where they sent me. Turns out the thing wasn’t there. That’s two places where I wasted time not completing the objective. At the second place, I was told about some big bad gangster dude at the third place. I killed the big bad gangster dude without even realizing it at first. Got the part, went back to the first location, and ended the quest.

The stakes never matter in Andromeda. You’ll always be forced to do something pointless before you can do the thing that does matter. Once, I found a place on a map, but the door was locked, and I could not get in. I finally found the quest that let me in that location, but I had to go to someone’s office. I went there. I tried to interact with a crate that obviously had loot in it, but I could not. Scanning something else gave me a map marker to the original location. I returned there. The door was open. It wasn’t like I’d found a key or anything, the door was just open. Then a vendor from the other side of the map showed up. We had a conversation. The next quest step was to see her… all the way on the other side of the map. Couldn’t we have had the conversation while she was still at the first location? No? Anyways, it was only after this point that the chest became interactive, and I could sift through its contents.

Contrast this with Divinity: Original Sin 2, where my excessive exploration has got me into numerous areas I shouldn’t be in. Look at a game like Skyrim, where someone can say “yeah, take the reward, it’s in that box over there,” but you stole it hours ago while you were sneaking around.

The game forces you around empty and pointless maps for no real reason at all. At least Bethesda places its objectives far across the map as a means of taking you through interesting and distracting landscapes. That’s part of the reason that Bethesda is such a popular developer. Their worlds are easy to get lost in.

I’m not gonna lie, I’d love to sit down with some leads at Bioware and talk about how to make their games better, because right now, their games seem formulaic as hell--Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect Andromeda are virtually identical games in their broad strokes, with the only real differences being the result of the setting.

If you’re a professional writer, you’re probably going “why is Doc using so many words to say things he could be saying much more simply?” Well, I’m being a dick and using this rhetorical device of wasting your time to give you the idea of what it’s like to play Andromeda.

It’s a waste of time, and it’s broken on the conceptual, writing, design, presentation, and technical levels. Nothing works here. Everything is broken. I don’t know how this game made it this far without being canceled. I don’t know how the writing standards for this game were so lax. I don’t know why anyone recommended this game to me, because it is quite literally the worst AAA gaming experience I have had in years.

Ultimately, it comes down to drama. Nothing Andromeda does is dramatic. It tries to use dramatic music and awful cliches to make things feel dramatic, but it doesn’t earn anything. The art isn’t inspiring, the stakes are rarely, if ever, high, the quests are so predictable that all tension is gone.

And it sucks that I feel this way. It especially sucks because the game actually starts out being interesting, making you curious, prompting you to ask lots of questions. By the second planet, you realize just how predictable it all is. By the end of the game, you’re wondering why you stuck with it this long. That 40-or-so gigs of hard drive space would be better off empty.

There are so many other problems with the game. Why do most mods either have negatives that outweigh their positives, or positives so miniscule there’s no point to using them? Does a 5% recharge timer in a 5 second timer really matter? Does a 3% damage boost on a gun with three shots have any perceivable effect? Nope. We could dive into the problems with dozens of quests, more specifics about the writing, and so many other things. There’s so little good to find in this game. It wastes all its time thinking it’s better than it is.

Drama is everything. Use your mechanics and your narrative to create drama. That’s what gets players playing and talking. That’s why they spend money. If you’re not going to do that, don’t bother making video games.

#stompsite #gameautopsy

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ramajmedia · 5 years ago

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Peter Jackson's Movies, Ranked By Rotten Tomatoes | ScreenRant

Peter Jackson is one of the most renowned directors working in Hollywood today. He might be most famous for bringing J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth to life on the big screen (in true George Lucas fashion, he did it perfectly with one trilogy and then divided fans with a prequel trilogy), but he’s directed a bunch of movies besides that.

RELATED: 7 Things in Lord Of The Rings Canon That Peter Jackson Ignored

He actually got his start in the “splatter” subgenre of horror as a young filmmaker in New Zealand. Some of his movies have fared well with critics; others haven’t done so well. So, here are Peter Jackson’s Movies, Ranked By Rotten Tomatoes.

14 The Lovely Bones (32%)

Peter Jackson has only ever made one major misstep in his career, and The Lovely Bones is it. It’s about a teenage girl who is lured into a weird shrine by a pedophile (who couldn’t look more like a pedophile with the thick-rimmed glasses, greasy hair, and creepy smile) and then murdered.

She then wanders the Earth as a lost soul, watching her family as they reel from her death. It could’ve been a powerful work of teary-eyed young-adult coming-of-age drama in the right hands, but Jackson just didn’t strike the right tone and the movie failed as a result.

13 The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (59%)

It spelled trouble the second Peter Jackson and New Line Cinema decided to adapt The Hobbit as an eight-hour Lord of the Rings-style trilogy, because the book isn’t suited to that. It’s basically a fairy tale.

The Lord of the Rings encompasses three giant volumes, but The Hobbit can be read in an afternoon – where did the producers get the idea to adapt both of those to the same length? (Well, of course we know where: the promise of billions of dollars.) The third Hobbit movie focuses on “the Battle of the Five Armies,” an event that has absolutely nothing to do with any of the main characters, leaving them to be sidelined.

12 The Frighteners (63%)

In this horror comedy, Michael J. Fox plays an architect who finds himself able to communicate with ghosts and spirits following his wife’s death. This leads to a run-in with the specter of a mass murderer and the Grim Reaper himself.

One critic has described The Frighteners as a cross between Ghostbusters and Twin Peaks, but it doesn’t have the heft of either of those projects. Tonally, that description is right on the money, but whereas those two can be watched over and over again and never become tiresome, this one runs out of steam before the end of the first viewing.

11 The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (64%)

It wasn’t too long after The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey hit theaters that fans started calling it The Phantom Menace of Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth saga. As the first installment of a prequel trilogy to a beloved and almost perfect cinematic saga that overuses CGI effects, has too many cheesy comedic characters, and ultimately fails to live up to the original, it’s fair to say that that’s an accurate description.

RELATED: 5 Reasons Why The Hobbit Trilogy Wasn't As Good As The Lord Of The Rings (And 5 Why It Was Better)

Sitcom star Martin Freeman has too much of a cynical, wink-to-the-audience quality to carry the weight of one of these trilogies on his shoulders. The Fellowship of the Ring, this ain’t.

10 Bad Taste (68%)

Peter Jackson’s directorial debut certainly lives up to its title. It combines horror, science fiction, action, horror, and a healthy dose of its titular tastelessness for a delightful, if gut-wrenching romp.

Like most first-time directors tackling an indie feature, Jackson leaned into his low budget and made a big-budget movie on a low budget for a rough, messy, but endlessly fun moviegoing experience. The plot sees an alien fast food chain coming to Earth to grind up human beings into meat for their burgers, and it only gets more absurd from there. Surprisingly, Bad Taste put Jackson on the film industry’s radar.

9 Meet the Feebles (71%)

Moviegoers enjoyed the novelty of Jim Henson-style puppets appearing in an R-rated movie with tons of swearing, sex, and graphic violence a couple of years ago in The Happytime Murders. However, Peter Jackson had reveled in this gimmick – and with much more effective results – years earlier with his film Meet the Feebles.

The black-comic tone of the film might not be to every viewer’s tastes, but with catchy musical numbers and a perverse puppeteering style, Meet the Feebles expertly uses juxtaposition to its favor. It’s an adult-oriented delight for people who grew up on Sesame Street and The Muppet Show.

8 The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (74%)

If The Hobbit had been adapted as a two-part film as Guillermo del Toro intended and not stretched out to a trilogy, it would’ve been another story.

In The Desolation of Smaug, scenes that last a paragraph in the book and never should’ve been included in a film adaptation in the first place, due to their lack of consequences and relevance to the plot, are dragged out into half-hour set pieces. In Peter Jackson’s quest to make The Hobbit films as grand and epic as The Lord of the Rings films, what we got are movies that don’t feel grand or epic, but are really lo-o-o-ong.

7 King Kong (84%)

Since the original King Kong is one of cinema’s most revered classics, Peter Jackson took on a practically Herculean responsibility when he signed on to remake it. Jackson has said that he was struck by how much the original made him care about the titular ape, so that’s what he strived to do with this remake.

And it’s fair to say, since he used the motion-capture technology he pioneered with The Lord of the Rings trilogy and cast his Gollum, Andy Serkis, to play Kong, he managed it. We’re never on Carl Denham’s side – we see that the ape is just a fool in love.

6 Braindead (86%)

In his early days as the “splatter” king of New Zealand, Peter Jackson made this hilariously gory horror comedy about a man living with his mother who gets into trouble when he beds the wrong girl and a rabid rat-monkey turns the town into a horde of the undead.

Although it wasn’t a big box office success on its release, Braindead quickly became a cult classic, and in Time Out’s survey of the horror genre’s foremost actors, directors, and writers, Braindead was determined to be the 91st greatest horror film of all time. Simon Pegg also noted it as a huge influence on Shaun of the Dead.

5 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (91%)

Peter Jackson was shooting all three Lord of the Rings movies back-to-back, so if the first one didn’t hit, he would’ve been in a lot of trouble. The first chapter had to make such a strong impression on audiences that they’d be willing to commit to two more movies over the next couple of years.

Thankfully, The Fellowship of the Ring made that impression. It introduced audiences to characters they could root for – Frodo, Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, the whole gang – and successfully sold the weight of what was at stake with a stunning prologue and an ensuing narrative to back it up.

4 Heavenly Creatures (92%)

Heavenly Creatures was Peter Jackson’s cinematic dramatization of the Parker-Hulme murder case, which rocked Christchurch in 1954 and has continued to echo throughout the New Zealand consciousness – in books, plays, novels, and of course, movies – ever since. The shocking case saw a 16-year-old girl and her 15-year-old friend murder the 16-year-old’s mother.

Until then, Jackson was known as the “splatter” guy – this movie proved he was a real filmmaker. This was the movie that gave Kate Winslet and, to a lesser extent, Melanie Lynskey (best known as Charlie’s stalker Rose from Two and a Half Men) their big breaks, and earned Jackson and his co-writer Fran Walsh an Oscar nod for Best Original Screenplay.

3 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (93%)

The closing chapter of Peter Jackson’s big-screen adaptation of The Lord of the Rings trilogy ended things in such a satisfying way that the Academy gave it a record number of nominations, and then when it won every single award it was up for, it also set the record for most wins.

RELATED: Everything We Know (So Far) About Amazon's Lord Of The Rings Series

And bear in mind that it’s unheard of for the Academy to even consider awarding a fantasy movie. Shooting the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy back-to-back was a monumental and ambitious undertaking, but it’s clear from The Return of the King that Jackson was up to the task and then some.

2 The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (95%)

The second part of a trilogy tends to be the best – The Dark Knight, The Empire Strikes Back, The Godfather Part II, The Road Warrior, the list goes on – because it doesn’t have to set anything up and wind anything down. It’s a stepping stone; it’s all action.

However, most Lord of the Rings fans would consider The Return of the King to be slightly better than The Two Towers, because it’s the epic finale and, against all odds, it’s actually a satisfactory conclusion to the story. But then again, The Two Towers has the breathtakingly cinematic Battle of Helm’s Deep sequence that the MCU attempts to top three times a year.

1 They Shall Not Grow Old (100%)

The most impressive achievement of this World War I documentary is the colorized imagery. Peter Jackson took grainy, black-and-white photographs from 1914-1918 and gave them a splash of color and a touch-up to make them look like they were taken today by an HD digital camera.

As a tribute to all the young men who fought in the First World War, many of whom gave their lives, They Shall Not Grow Old is a powerful and poignant study that more than earns its rare 100% rating. The fact that the doc was released in 2018, exactly 100 years after the conflict ended, is the icing on the cake.

NEXT: David Fincher's Movies, Ranked By Rotten Tomatoes

source https://screenrant.com/peter-jacksons-movies-ranked-rotten-tomatoes/

#screenrant

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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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‘When paradigms die’: China veterans fear extinction in Trump’s Washington

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/when-paradigms-die-china-veterans-fear-extinction-in-trumps-washington/

‘When paradigms die’: China veterans fear extinction in Trump’s Washington

“The reality is China is not going anywhere. It’s one-fifth of humanity,” Susan Thornton said. | Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo

President Donald Trump’s push to toughen U.S. policy toward China has won over much of the Washington establishment, touching off a seismic shift in how many Americans view Beijing.

But one group is resisting — those who have spent decades pursuing diplomacy with China and who fear their approach might go extinct.

Story Continued Below

These former officials, diplomats and scholars are wary about the rise of a younger foreign policy generation that is almost uniformly more skeptical of China, never having experienced the impoverished, isolated country it once was. And they’re warning that the increasingly hard-line stance emanating from Washington — from both Republicans and Democrats — could unravel decades of relationship-building, raise the risk of a U.S.-China military confrontation and even lead to a new era of McCarthyism in America.

“I’m a globalist — I want the U.S. to be engaged in the world, including with other major countries like China,” said Susan Thornton, who oversaw East Asian and Pacific affairs in 2017 and 2018 at the State Department and was viewed by some Trump aides as too soft on Beijing. “The reality is China is not going anywhere. It’s one-fifth of humanity.”

Thornton went public with her concerns earlier this month, when she joined about 100 others to publish an open letter to Trump and members of Congress titled “China is not an enemy.”

“Although we are very troubled by Beijing’s recent behavior, which requires a strong response, we also believe that many U.S. actions are contributing directly to the downward spiral in relations,” the group wrote.

Douglas Paal, who held top Asia-related roles in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, said he signed the letter because “I just felt that we were getting one voice out of Washington only, which was conflict and confrontation.”

“People on other side, they tend to focus on the last 10 years but forget the last 40,” he said.

In a sign of how hotly contested such a stance has become, however, a rebuttal letter came within weeks. More than 100 people, many of them with military backgrounds, signed on to the missive, which urged Trump to “stay the course” in confronting China and declared that past U.S. engagement with China “contributed materially to the incremental erosion of U.S. national security.”

The letter was led by retired Navy Capt. James Fanell and was signed by many who came up through the military ranks. Some are part of Red Star Rising, a Fanell-led email group focused on China.

“For too long the names on the first letter have dominated the narrative on US-China relations,” Fanell wrote in an email. “U.S. administrations from both political parties have followed their advice for more than three decades over which the People’s Republic of China has not become the ‘responsible stakeholder’ they asserted it would be. It’s become a much graver threat, with our help!”

The spat, which continues in op-eds, speeches and other forums, is intense and at times personal — the more hawkish side sometimes derides the other as “panda huggers.” But for the most part, it has remained professional, people said. No one said they had been knowingly barred from Beltway jobs or cocktail parties as a result of joining the debate.

Thornton’s case, though, offers caution. She left the Foreign Service last year after her nomination to serve as assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific affairs stalled on Capitol Hill — she’d been tagged as too nice to China.

There’s little question that more American leaders, on both the left and right, now believe the U.S. must be tougher on China. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, has urged Trump to “hang tough” on trade talks with China. Former Vice President Joe Biden, a Democratic candidate for president, drew criticism earlier this year for seeming to downplay the China challenge.

The shift toward a more hard-line U.S. stance on China began during the Obama administration and has accelerated under Trump. It has also coincided with the ascent of Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Xi has expanded China’s military and economic presence by investing heavily in developing countries, and U.S. experts fear the moves are designed to trap those nations in perpetual servitude. The ruling Chinese Communist Party has intensified its crackdown on political dissent at home while also targeting religious minorities. It has placed more than 1 million Uighur Muslims in internment camps, according to the United Nations.

Critics also say China’s rulers view private businesses as appendages of the state, leading to concerns that Beijing could use firms — such as the tech company Huawei — as a tool to infiltrate other countries. Fears are also growing that Chinese students studying at American universities are spies in waiting for Beijing.

Trump’s top aides routinely warn about the dangers that China poses, with some even suggesting a civilizational clash is unfolding. Vice President Mike Pence gave a speech in October that some in China viewed as signaling the dawn of a new cold war. FBI Director Christopher Wray, whose agency has urged universities to more closely monitor Chinese students, has advocated a “whole of society” approach to counter Beijing.

Trump himself is most fixated on trade. He has imposed increasingly steep tariffs on China to pressure it into signing on to a new trade deal that he hopes will favor the United States. But Trump also has tried to keep a warm relationship with Xi — flummoxing China hawks this week when he praised Xi’s response to protests in Hong Kong. Still, even Trump concedes his relationship with Xi has soured.

“I used to say he was a good friend of mine,” Trump said earlier this month. “We’re probably not quite as close now. But I have to be for our country. He’s for China and I’m for USA, and that’s the way it’s got to be.”

A State Department official said the Trump administration welcomes the debate in the U.S. foreign policy community, but pushed back on the notion that the Trump administration is “hostile” to China.

“The United States is not hostile to China. In fact, we continue to seek a constructive, results-oriented relationship with China,” the official wrote in an email. “China has chosen a confrontational approach that extends well beyond its relationship with the United States.”

Still, some veteran China hands worry that Trump’s approach to China presages a new Red Scare in Washington, reminiscent of Joseph McCarthy’s wild accusations in the 1950s that hundreds of government officials were Soviet sympathizers. Some worry that people of Chinese descent, including U.S. citizens, could face discrimination as a result.

“I lack confidence in the ability of the American body politic, not just the Trump administration, at this point in our political history — especially when there’s so much racism, so much anti-immigration sentiment,,” said Susan Shirk, who chairs the 21st Century China Center at the University of California-San Diego. “It’s kind of bringing out some of the worst impulses.”

At times, such pushback has been met with hostility inside the Beltway. Anti-China groups, both new and old, have targeted what they derisively call the China “engagers.”

At a mid-July briefing of the Committee on the Present Danger: China, Frank Gaffney, a longtime Washington figure better known for Islamophobic views, accused these “engagers” of pining for a past approach that “has proven to be an exercise in submission, accommodation and futility as the Chinese Communists have proven to be more monolithic and increasingly hostile than their apologists in this country acknowledge.”

The committee — which relaunched earlier this year after previously existing in iterations that focused on the Soviet Union and Islamist terrorists — includes Steve Bannon, a former Trump aide and hero of the nationalist movement. Bannon, who has predicted the U.S. and China will eventually go to war, was one of the Trump aides who fiercely criticized Thornton before her retirement.

“The political mood means there’s no upside to arguing for engaging China. There’s just a downside,” said Philip Gordon, who held Europe and Middle East-related roles in the Obama administration and who signed the first letter. “But if you’re in this business, and you care about policy and want to be involved in the policy debate, you can’t let that entirely shut you down.”

Others say those who want to engage with China are exaggerating Trump’s policy as being overly hostile to China, and that what’s really driving them is anti-Trump sentiment. In many ways, this group argues, there’s mostly continuity in the U.S.-Chinese relationship. The U.S. maintains a robust diplomatic relationship with China, for one thing. And aside from Trump’s trade push, the relationship has not changed too dramatically, they argue.

“In the president’s mind, China is not an enemy. He’s the head of a commercial republic. He wants to do what he says, which is make very tough trade deals,” said Brian Kennedy, chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger: China.

Some observers wonder whether the spat might cause China to view the U.S. through an even more antagonistic lens, given that Beijing closely monitors such Washington debates. In an opinion column in the Global Times, a Chinese Communist Party organ, one writer blasted the rebuttal letter’s characterizations of China.

“The implication is that the U.S. is the regime that brings most peace to humanity, which is astonishing,” the author wrote. “The U.S. did bring development and security to mankind, but that was long ago. After reading the letter, one doubts whether the writers are criticizing China or the U.S. itself?”

There also is a generational divide in the U.S. debate: younger China hands tend to be more hawkish than their predecessors. Notably, many in the younger crowd declined to sign on to the first letter warning against the drift in China policy, worried it was too nostalgic for a China that no longer exists.

“This is what happens when paradigms die,” one younger China analyst said.

But many of these same people also dismissed the rebuttal letter as one written by hard-liners who lack a serious understanding of multidimensional U.S.-China relationship.

Thornton said that people with more experience in international relations recognize that there are limits to what the U.S. can do in shaping the destiny of other countries. Ultimately, she insisted, there needs to be a robust debate about the nature of U.S. policy toward China, not blind submission to the idea that the U.S. has to be ever-tougher toward Beijing.

“I’m not romantic about China. I’m not romantic about anything,” Thornton said. “I am practical, and I’m not trying to change China. I’m trying to get things for the United States.”

#Foreign #Politics #Trump #Washington

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grimdarkandhandsome · 7 years ago

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SUNLIGHT: INTRO

In the future, an investigative blogger asks me:

'Hey, excuse me. I just wanted to ask, what is Sunlight and how did you get started on this project?'

Oh, sure, i can give a quick answer to that. Sunlight is a scifi about school, space battleships, and imperfect communication between friends. The major character is Hannah, a young woman who signed up for the Navy despite the pressure to get a normal, healthy job. Most people in this setting think of the military as frivolous and obsolete, and it's actually not an exaggeration to say that Hannah has a nostalgic, adventure-seeking streak. Hannah, a recent graduate of Pilar Academy, is the leader of a Close Quarters Combat squad specializing in ship-to-ship boarding actions. She fights with a quad-hammer, strength harness, and magneto glove.

There are really a lot of characters and details in this universe. I used to maintain a wiki on Obsidian Portal about it.

The gist is that it's a set of stories about attending a slightly drowsy military academy, groups of friends unsure exactly what they want or where they are going, and finding love in a world of pointless and harmless violence.

I discovered Sunlight late one night on Tumblr. I was up at 0200 when their server went down, and when it came back up they were accidentally showing me tag feeds from a parallel universe. I stayed up and checked it out; this other universe has some cool differences from ours. They never got Minecraft, for example, but over there Starcraft Ghost is very successful series.

One of them is this series of action & strategy games called Sunlight. They're kindof like slightly less professional versions of Overwatch, as far as i can tell. Anyway it's really big and the series has been around since their 2008. There was even a movie that was somewhat well-received ... according to Tumblr anyway. The only site i’ve been able to access from that universe is Tumblr, so it’s not like i can check their version of Rotten Tomatoes.

The first game in the series, Sunlight, was the debut game of VileMilan Studios (never founded in our universe). It was a FPS with a focus on equipment customization and team play. The art design budget was limited and there were really only three or so allied NPC models. After Sunlight's wild success, Sunlight 2 started referring to these NPCs as Bravo Squad, and the junior writing staff whipped up some bios (and retcons) for them. These ended up on the promotional website in the section designed to show off how narratively rich and cinematic Sunlight 2 was. One of Bravo Squad, Lysa, even became a supporting character in a tie-in novel later on.

My imagination was captured by these minor characters. After following the tag for a while, i found myself spinning stories of their time in training, growing up together. I've actually started to write some fanfiction about the series. Some of the details, admittedly, are my own invention, since the games don't really focus on these parts of the world. I mean i haven't played any of the games but i feel like i have a pretty good handle on the story from all the gifsets. And the planets they visit are definitely canon.

Some Bravo Squad characters i like to write about:

Hannah, called Hammerhand in the marketing. A Medium. Likes warrior-poets.

Perihelion Yamaguchi, called Peri, a Medium sniper. Quiet, contemplative. After graduation she reconnects with her religious family in a big way and becomes the Young Queen Rhiannon.

Lysandra, called Lysa. She knew she wanted to join the navy ever since she read her first Horatio Hornblower book in primary school. Big ego, big ambitions, was the top-graded in her class back on her home planet. Uses a teleport harness, field laptop, and electro drones. A Light.

Shawn. She keeps to herself, but she's part of the group and is good with an assault rifle. Knows the best ramen places. A Medium.

Bu, who fights with two axes and plenty of strength biomods. A low-armor Heavy.

Fiona, with repulsor wings and a heat-seeking spear. A Light.

Some sub-settings:

The early cadetship on the mighty flagship HMS Titan (back before they even had any weapon certificates!)

Pilar Academy, and the windy grasslands used for ground war classes.

Mars, work placement missions against the robot warlords.

The winter internship in the echoing tunnels of the mysterious alien moon Extremis A.

The interplanetary expeditions of the graduates' warband: Dragon Team.

The Bevelled Plains, greatest land theater in the whole sector, created by an eccentric necrotechnomancer as his last gift to the tradition of warfare.

Basic backstory:

It's the future, & all problems have been solved.

Poverty, agriculture, space colonization, gender, artificial intelligence, economics, death, violence, politics... Whatever it is, someone has already gotten there first.

This is a little disconcerting for a young person who dreams big. All the demons that still exist were created for mere entertainment in safe, isolated environments. Ambition is redirected into games and amusement parks.

War is obsolete. Militaries linger on at a fraction of their old budgets, funded mostly by donors and hobbyists.

All intercultural conflicts have so many outlets and safeguards set up that the possibility of violence is astronomically low.

Conflicts are settled by diplomacy or fair arbitration under pre-agreed rules.

And the end of scarcity means that people don't really get serious about fighting anymore.

Furthermore, brain backups, body manufacturing, brain emulation, and artificial bodies are all so developed that lethal injuries are no longer a realistic threat.

If you die, you'll just wake up in a newly-grown body the next day.

But the literary and narrative traditions about warriors survive.

And it is this poison that has gotten into the veins of our protagonists.

War is like sports.

It is hosted by special venues - theaters - such as colosseums and state parks.

Violence outside of predeclared areas is ridiculed.

Armies (a fraction of their historical size) are funded by advertising, merchandise, and tips.

Marketing the combatants is an important part of the military business model.

The actual main character of the Sunlight video games is Agent Golem, champion of the combat tournaments that war has devolved into.

Her life is legitimately dramatic and involves power struggles between sponsors, the pressure of being the best in the world, etc. However, the life of the average war enthusiast is much more mundane.

Military technology is marketed to retrofuturist hobbyists, and features a kitschy exuberance in its design and branding (Electroblasters, Meltaswords, etc.).

There also exist backwater moons that artists have seeded with self-constructing species of robots (Pandoricans), just as something to fight. These are not very dangerous given that death is a totally curable condition.

These moons are somewhere between theme parks, open-air zoos, and live-action video games

Also, gender roles have changed. Most parents and organizations obsess over children's genomes before conception, and the current fashion in this sector is bright, athletic daughters who strive for uniqueness. (Unfortunately, there is only a finite supply of uniqueness available.) Male births are down in the low single digit percentages, and most parents seem reluctant to bother with the gender.

Other influences i draw on in these fics:

Anamanaguchi

The Magicians

Ender's Game

Halo

My memories of playing Mass Effect with Michelle in high school

Also, i like to be conscientious and attach a disclaimer on my fanfiction:

Sunlight and related characters are registered trademarks of VileMilan Studios, Inc., but as it is obvious to us storytellers that characters, narratives, and mythology belong to the people, such trademarks are culturally void. Claims of corporate ownership over thought and folklore, however well-intentioned, can have no artistic legitimacy among fans. Proprietary fiction is a legal fiction. The explorations, variations, and transformations of Sunlight in these fic(s) belong to no one but exist as simple dreams set loose upon the net, flitting from the mind of one fan to another.

#sunlight #writing #fanfiction #sunlight 2 #scifi #creative writing

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