#go back to canon and be robbed of all that nuance and depth

[cloud-somersault]

it's kinda hard for me to discuss canon things because I always am like "oh yeah! in my AU--" and people are like "no...i meant in canon" and it's just

i don't wanna talk about canon LMFAO why would i do that when i've sunk all these hours into this fucking AU man

[vaguely-concerned]

Any tips for a TF POV fic? I want to write one because I too went through a time in my life when I let feelings bounce off cuz that was easier, but I feel like that's not quite on point for him 🤔

God I have SO MANY THOUGHTS about this and they’re all so wordless and frustratingly evasive to me yet (I am in the process of writing a looooooong T.F. POV fic and it gives me much more trouble than Graves POV, probably because as a person I’m quite a lot more like the T.F. Type in real life lol). But yes, here we go, let me try to express some of what I personally try to have as my hm ‘anchor points’ for his perspective. (Heavy disclaimer that these are just my personal & disorganized little musings and by no means the only or ‘correct’ way to read the character!)

- First of all I agree, the image of ‘bouncing off’ doesn’t feel quiteright -- it’s in the right neighbourhood but the wrong address sort of thing, but it’s really hard to come up with a way to explain how I feel the nuance here.

*insert three hours later spongebob meme here* Okay, so the metaphor I came up with is: T.F.’s relationship to emotions is a direct parallel to his relationship to water/the ocean: it’s scary down there, it’s dark, it’s dangerous, and if he should ever be dumb enough to try to go in too deep it’ll kill him dead because boy oh boy on so many levels this man just did not learn how to swim. As far as he’s concerned any sensible person would simply bob along on the surface in a sturdily built boat and try not to think too much about the weird shit that lives down there in the depths. (In this metaphor the layer of artifice and performance so habitual it’s basically integrated into the fabric of his soul is the boat. Y’know, the part that’s Twisted Fate and not just plain ol’ Tobias. I’ll hasten to add that I think both parts of his identity are equally ‘real’ and equally him, but the Twisted Fate part is like… protecting the Tobias part. Keeping him from drowning, as it were. I’m not sure he’d think of it like that himself for the longest time, though, I suspect he has more of a ‘that man is dead’ attitude towards the Tobias part after Graves is gone)

I think what I’m trying to get at is the idea that to him, raw emotion is as hostile and unknowable and unnavigable an ‘environment’ as the deep ocean. (And the only time we see him willingly go there, physically and otherwise, is for Graves, so you know let’s jot that down first of all lol.)

- He seems to genuinely quite like and be interested in people – how they think, what moves and motivates them, their secrets and foibles. So I tend to try to keep the uh ‘detail work’ in his POV focused in that direction. Priority going like 1) people 2) people’s valuables 3) the relative availability of people’s valuables at this moment if you have clever hands and a very charming smile haha

- One of my favourite things about T.F. is that he seems, I don’t know… quite genuinely good-natured beneath it all? If you back him into a corner some sharp and dangerous things peek out (he has survived in his line of heh ‘business’ for like thirty years, and a lot of it on his own), but for the most part and when unthreatened he has a sort of mildly amused and intrigued live-and-let-live attitude to the world even as he’s conning it that I find deeply charming. Which to me ties in with:

- T.F.’s first instinctive reaction to danger (perceived or real) the majority of the time seems to be ‘Flight’. Confrontation and violence are basically his ‘when literally everything else has failed’ options. (As seen prominently in Burning Tides, where he just keeps running and running and the only time he actually starts throwing punches is when he has to because Graves is in immediate danger and they’re backed into a corner. Which feels like it means something huh lol, I often think about what could actually make T.F. angry enough that he would openly express it and that seems to be the most likely angle for it in my eyes.)

- My take on one of the fundamental differences between Graves and T.F. is that Graves has A LOT of feelings but doesn’t quite know it (or more like can’t quite conceptualize it I should say) – he has a hard time identifying or finding vocabulary for feelings that aren’t some shade of anger. Meanwhile T.F. KNOWS he has feelings, he just doesn’t like it, ardently wishes he didn’t, and will do pretty much anything to run away and not have to engage with them haha.

Another important difference: when brought out of equilibrium Graves gets angry, and T.F. gets scared. I have the feeling that beneath it all he’s scared a lot, and it’s why his persona is so oriented towards gaining control in ways where people don’t realize it enough to even think try to take that control away from him until he’s already long gone. Misdirection as a way of life babEY

- This might be too deep in the ‘my WIP/process specific’ territory to really count as general analysis, but I think it’s there in canon too – there’s almost a feeling that he implicitly feels like he has to make up for some fundamental flaw or lack he has at the core? (Not a weird thing for him to end up feeling, considering what happened to him as a kid.) All the rest of him, all the cleverness and style and charm, is there to ‘make up’ for how at the end of the day he’s… wrong somehow. As Graves, who knows him better than anyone, focuses right in on, a coward. And that is CERTAINLY not the whole truth and even Graves in a full rage relents when he sees the effect the accusation has on him and once he gets the actual facts of what happened. But I think that sense of deep unworthiness is what’s stuck with him emotionally. His people left him because there’s something fundamentally lacking and immoral about him. He lost Graves because he’s not good enough, because he’s a coward who leaves people behind. He deserves to be alone. Mix in a ton of survivor’s guilt to taste, and I think you have the like… core emotional wound he’s constructed around.

There’s also something here about fear of profound powerlessness specifically in situations where words, generally his strongest card that’s not a literal card (har har har oh we do have fun here), simply don’t work right at the moment when he needs them to the most – he tried to beg for his people not to leave him behind, he tried to convince Graves to get the hell out with the rest of the crew… and it didn’t work. (In Burning Tides you see he’s given up even trying to explain himself, he just wants Out in whatever way leaves both him and Graves tolerably in one piece, even if he won’t be understood or heard or less alone afterwards. It takes him until like half way through the entire chase to even THINK about just telling Graves the truth. In all fairness to T.F. it probably wouldn’t have worked at that moment, but it does vaguely crack me up that he didn’t even consider it until all of Bilgewater harbor was already burning merrily behind them fhsajkfa)

- He has a little bit of a (perfectly justified considering his background honestly) chip on his shoulder, especially when it comes to powerful or arrogant people. There seems to be a special satisfaction in outsmarting and robbing specifically rich assholes (which would also be the people who have the most to steal, so y’know good times all round). From his short stories and few places in his bio you almost get the feeling that he has a funny sort of Robin Hood-esque sense of lopsided justice about it. (Robin Hood-esque only so far as to define ‘the poor’ as the eternally hard-strapped ‘T.F. & Graves Waistcoats and Cigars Fund’, of course lol)

I think T.F. both has a mind that tends more towards analyzing the big picture and also has more direct experience with like… structural/systemic powerlessness and oppression. So the cons they pull are probably partly how he channels the emotions that arise out of that (and the rest he just represses, like the relatable guy he is haha)

- Graves being back would cause some IMMENSE internal conflict in him, I feel – of course all the feelings of relief and attachment and love, but also… so much of who he is now came about specifically to find a way to deal with Graves being gone, with seemingly just shutting down the entirety of his need for real human companionship or closeness for like a decade, things that are suddenly starting to be brought online again and must be tremendously stressful to deal with when you’ve had it completely suppressed and deadened for so long. He’s put so much into trying to be fundamentally unattached to anything, anywhere, anyone (and there are some things here about perpetually being an outsider his whole life that I can’t quite put into words, but that’s a dimension too.) That sort of psychological self defense mechanism doesn’t just contentedly nod its head and go away just because something good happened one time haha. Probably a work in progress there huh (at least he’s not alone in it now <3)

PLUS some bonus Graves POV observations because man. I love writing him, he’s just a marvel of a man

- I know I call him a dumbass all the time, but in a street smart way I think he’s actually quite clever haha, he just has a bad tendency to get hung up on an idea and get tunnel sight. (I’ve based this a lot on the short stories but see also more recently his Sentinel skin voice lines for good examples: he’s incredibly straightforward in that ‘well obviously if it doesn’t affect me personally I ain’t gonna give it that much thought’ way, but you also have glimpses of surprising insight/shrewdness and… I don’t quite know how to put it, but something like an ability to get to the bottom line of something without getting caught up in the details. (I suspect T.F. does find himself lost in the details quite frequently, he’s much more attached to the decorative curlicues of the world.) Graves clearly & frequently has no idea what’s going on, but he strips things down to the essentials very quick: Lucian’s story as a direct thematic mirror to Viego’s, Is There A Sun Lady – Oh, I See, all of this is weird and creepy and needs shooting, and maybe most crucial of all: Isolde doesn’t want to be with her husband anymore so what he’s doing is just like. Extra shitty. He gets what he needs to get and then just barges ahead heedlessly with that. Icon.)

- He’s actually pretty darn eloquent in a gruff sort of way and uses some quite sophisticated vocabulary! And the way this is contrasted with the tendency to slip into blunter coarser language just as readily -- like when he takes the time to describe the monster that takes down the Prince’s ship in such poetic terms as ‘gargantuan’ and ‘the behemoth’s immense, distended jaw’ and it having ‘pallid dead eyes the size of the moon’, and meanwhile during his swim at the beginning of the story we get bastard cold and bastard dark and full of bastard jellyfish and crabs – brings me such immense and unending delight

- He’s more eloquent in his internal voice than he is when speaking (especially noticeable in Destiny and Fate; he does have a tendency to fumble his words when talking lol), and he gets quite easily lost in his own meandering reflective musings in a way I find incredibly endearing. I’d almost call it whimsical at times, honestly, hilarious as that is? Like when he’s literally so absorbed in a line of thought he forgets which way they’re rowing and T.F. has to remind him. (I think T.F. generally has more of a grip of what’s going on around them than Graves does lol)

- There’s an important distinction to be made that Graves actually does, by and large, read T.F: very closely and seemingly also pretty damn accurately. He’s good at (and clearly very interested in) reading his moods, spotting what tactics he’s using interpersonally, when he’s being genuine and when he’s being dissembling.

What Graves is actually bad at is understanding his own emotions, and to not bleed those emotions into other people’s motivations and behavior, especially when he’s upset or in heightened states of feeling, like he is all the way through Burning Tides. He can only name his own feelings in a vocabulary of anger, when it’s pretty clear from the subtext that there’s a whole bunch of other stuff going on there, and he has incredible trouble divorcing those feelings from what other people’s got going on with them right then. He feels hurt, betrayed, and undone by everything that’s happened to him, so the intention to hurt, betray and undo must live in the other person who he feels caused it. In less drastic cases you see him do this a bit when he feels like T.F. is being evasive with him – taking it as a form of rejection rather than realizing T.F. is just lost in his own thoughts, sort of thing. There’s a real improvement in this one between Burning Tides and Destiny and Fate, though, so maybe he’ll have an easier time of it with some time and practice.

Sorry it took so long to get back to you on this and that it’s a bit of a rambling mess, words have been real hard recently. Or rather I have too many words, all the time, left and right, I just can’t put them into the right orders to make any sense hahaha, I hope there’s some useful point in this somewhere for you at least!

[blackjack-15]

The Hand(print) of Fate — Thoughts on: Secret of the Scarlet Hand (SSH)

Previous Metas: SCK/SCK2, STFD, MHM, TRT, FIN

Hello and welcome to a Nancy Drew meta series! 30 metas, 30 Nancy Drew Games that I’m comfortable with doing meta about. Hot takes, cold takes, and just Takes will abound, but one thing’s for sure: they’ll all be longer than I mean them to be.

Each meta will have different distinct sections: an Introduction, an exploration of the Title, an explanation of the Mystery, a run-through of the Suspects. Then, I’ll tackle some of my favorite and least favorite things about the game, and finish it off with ideas on how to improve it.

Unique to this game is a section in between Suspects and Favorite Things, titled “The Hardy Boys”. The content it covers should be fairly obvious.

If any game requires an extra section or two, they’ll be listed in the paragraph above, along with links to previous metas.

These metas are not spoiler free, though I’ll list any games/media that they might spoil here: SSH, SCK, mostly non-spoilery mention of TMB and DOG, National Treasure, very spoilery mention of Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders.

The Intro:

Secret of the Scarlet Hand is the game that introduces one of Nancy’s most enduring and obvious character traits — her interest in ancient cultures. This comes up again in TMB, where Nancy once again chooses to do an internship, and once again it surrounds an ancient culture.

 Given that, going forward, Nancy mostly gets “chosen” for her cases, rather than stumbling upon them and choosing to solve, the times when Nancy does make a choice are important for establishing (and re-establishing) her character.

SSH is also the game where Nancy starts being “tested”. It’s not quite as overt as some of the other games, but the culprit does call Nancy into their office at the very beginning of the game, worried that someone will steal from the Beech Hill Museum. 

While we know from the tagline on the outside of the box that we’ll be catching a thief (more on that tagline below) so this isn’t a huge spoiler, it does show how the culprit is setting up Nancy to be tested — to answer their one question; can she stop them?

She can, of course, not the least of which because the culprit is obvious. However, this isn’t a negative part of the game — because for the first time, the culprit is obvious to Nancy as well as the player. Heck, everyone else in the game figures it out too — what they’re lacking is concrete evidence, not knowledge. 

But this is a mystery game — this is a Nancy Drew game — so why would the devs not care that everyone knows the culprit from the very beginning?

Mostly because that’s not the main mystery in the game. Even the handprint — which should be the main mystery, because it’s on the cover and in the title, right? — is a borrowed clue, or a forged signature, if you’ll allow the pun. 

The mystery isn’t who stole the Pacal carving, or who pushed (if anyone) Henrik down the temple stairs, or any other mild mystery that the game sets up. This game isn’t even technically a mystery— instead, as we’re told first thing, it’s about secrets.

This is a game about secrets, lies, and above all, the little inter-personal squabbles going on against the backdrop of a museum exhibit opening. Nancy’s puzzling out who hates who and why, who likes who and why, who each of these people really are at their core, and how this information can help her catch the culprit in the act. 

This isn’t a whodunnit, or a howdunnit— it’s a howcatchem, which is fitting when your villain isn’t a murderer or mischief maker, but a smuggler. Generally, smugglers are well known to the police and other organizations; the problem lies not in identifying them, but catching them.

This is further proved by the Historical B-Plot, which once again doesn’t contain a mystery about who killed the Whisperer, but rather focuses on the relationship between the King and the Whisperer, and how secrets ultimately work to both kill (anciently) and save (in the present day).

Come to think of it, maybe this game should have been called “Secrets Can Kill”, and SCK should have been called “the one where murder is taken Lightly and Awfully and also there’s no puzzles”.

The Whisperer is an incredibly important character, not just because she also knew the value of secrets and knowledge, and was ultimately killed for it, but also because she’s one of the few examples of a theme that becomes omnipresent in the later games — she’s a shadow of Nancy. A woman who knows secrets, who is hunted and ultimately hurt by those whose secrets she knows. The game makes this comparison obvious by the end when, like the Whisperer herself, Nancy is shut inside the monolith.

Fate is the other big player in this game (though I’ll get into this later), thematically speaking. The fate of secrets, as popularized by the well-known aphorism “two can keep a secret if one of them is dead”, is to get out. The secret of the smuggling operation tries its best to get out over and over, resulting in Henrik’s fall and amnesia, Joanna’s temporary firing, Alejandro’s machinations, and, of course, ends with Nancy in the monolith.

Outside of the story, I’ll give mad props for this game being an excellent representation of an understaffed museum before a big opening. Sure, the whole thing is an ADA nightmare (all those stairs, the basement portion, etc.), but the game came out in 2002, before a lot of buildings etc. had to be ADA-compliant. 

People running around, unpaid interns doing the heavy lifting, red tape everywhere — the game embraces these realities of opening a new exhibit on a shoestring staff and budget, and it’s fun to see.

I’d be remiss in not acknowledging the importance of Secret of the Scarlet Hand as the first game in what I call the “Expanded” series of Nancy Drew games, moving on from the “Classic” series that covers games 1-5. In the “Expanded” games, which runs roughly from SSH through SHA, Her Interactive pushes the envelope, relying on their now-established patterns and tropes, but also working on making the games bigger, more immersive, more detailed, and more complicated. 

Here in SSH, the locations are bigger and more detailed, your list of phone contacts is longer, the amount of puzzles expands (especially compared to FIN), and the story has a bit more depth and nuance — a good option considering the game is somewhat longer than the first 5 (especially SCK and FIN).

SSH is also important because it’s the first game where the Nancy Drew Universe is really established. 

We have our first mention/appearance of Prudence Rutherford, a character who appears in or is referenced in several games, establishing a canon of celebrities/socialites in the Nancy Drew Universe. There’s also Krolmeister and, perhaps most strikingly, Sonny Joon, whose escapades (and drawings) first appear here. 

With the addition of these and of the Hardy Boys (much more on them later), Her Interactive shows that they’re interested in creating a universe rather than one-shot style games. This trend should hardly surprise anyone who knows that this is also the first game where Her Interactive is an independent distributor. With full creative (and distributive) license, Her became wholly free to build the kind of Universe that we know and love and associate with the Nancy Drew games — and the kind of Universe that the games needed in order to really come into their own.

The final section of this absurdly long intro is going to focus on possibly the most important thing SSH gave us: the Hardy Boys. As they’re introduced in this game (through Bess and George), the Hardy Boys are friends of Nancy who haven’t seen her for a while and show up at Bess and George’s place (or rather, one of their houses), crashing into the game with all the elegance of….well, the Hardy Boys.

This introduces the only voice actor who’s voiced their character from first appearance to present day: Rob Jones, voice of Joe Hardy. Joe’s voice is as iconic as Nancy’s herself, combining smarts with a youthful brightness and a high-energy, can do attitude. It’ll be a few games yet before Frank’s voice settles into the best-known incarnation by Jonah Von Spreecken (who debuts in Danger By Design), but the Hardy Boys’ characters are pretty well set in this game: logical, practical, and studious (though slightly anxious) Frank, and laid-back, action-oriented, and conspiracy-enthusiast Joe.

All in all, Secret of the Scarlet Hand keeps to the solid Nancy Drew formula while adding a few key new items that themselves become part of the Expanded formula. 

It paves the way for the next section of Nancy Drew games and is, if you don’t have access to MHM or TRT, the single best starting point in the Nancy Drew series. Polished, engaging, and always entertaining, SSH is a fascinating and fun addition to a burgeoning series.

The Title:

The title of this game — Secret of the Scarlet Hand — is a bit of a difficult one. It begs the question what is the secret of the scarlet hand, but doesn’t do much in the way of answering it.

The game isn’t shy about showing us the titular scarlet hand; it’s displayed proudly where the Pacal carving is stolen. It’s much shyer about telling us the titular secret, building up the handprint as a Big, Symbolic Clue but never really satisfying the player’s curiosity about it.

There’s more to the handprint than that, but that’ll be covered in the section immediately below.

The other odd thing about the title is that it’s very indeterminate. In SCK, there’s a person who finds out secrets, and is killed — a rather point-blank title. STFD is an obvious pun on “stay tuned” in a television sense, and is easily understood that way. Both MHM and TRT refer to a definite noun within a location, and FIN takes us back to puns/wordplay. SSH, however, has an indefinite subject tied to another noun, and thus is far less grounded.

The indeterminate nature of the title could represent the distractions in Nancy’s way. Ostensibly, she’s just there to help the museum in its build-up to the opening of the Maya exhibit in her capacity as an intern, but that motivation gets cast aside as soon as things start going wonky — aka, beginning with the culprit’s “worry” that the museum will get robbed, and then solidified by the Pacal carving being stolen.

Along the way, Nancy is distracted by everything: taking care of the museum, solving Sonny Joon’s riddles, interrogating suspects, Henrik’s fall, provenance, Joanna’s departure, the Hardy Boys — the list goes on and on. 

Perhaps the indeterminate title is to tell the players that the titular secret is supposed to stay a secret — that while Nancy works out every other secret in the game, the secret of the scarlet hand is just that — a secret.

The MysterySecret:

While there’s no real mystery at the beginning — beyond how a HS graduate from the suburbs of Chicago gets an internship with a Large museum in DC without any credentials besides “I fight crime” — there are secretsfrom the very beginning, starting with the silhouetted Nancy in the cutscene with Joanna. 

HER wanted to show off what they could do, and they did it with panache, making the camera its own character rather than Nancy’s eyes, at least for a scene.

The secrets pile up, however, with the monolith in a box, Sinclair warning you about other thefts around the world, the question of if the Pacal carving/monolith are acquired legally or not, the disappearance of the carving, Sonny Joon, the smuggling ring, “Big Bunny”, Henrik’s fall…the list goes on and on.

The tagline for these games often help spell out the “big mystery” of the game. The tagline for this game is “expose buried secrets and catch a thief red-handed”, but does this actually happen?

Nancy does expose several secrets that are “buried” in some form. The mystery of the Pacal carving theft is buried in Henrik’s memories; the Whisperer is buried in the monolith; the final piece Nancy needs is buried in the painting in Sinclair’s office; the answers to the quizzes are buried in the museum. So definite props for the first half of the tagline — which pretty much spells out the first half/three-fifths of the game.

But what about “catch a thief red-handed”?

There are indeed thieves afoot, and Nancy does catch them, in all fairness. She catches the “thief” that steals the Pacal carving and the thief looking to steal the secrets of the monolith. But the phrase “red-handed” is obviously a reference to the titular “Scarlet Hand” (as well as a recognizable aphorism in English), and therein lies the trouble.

The true secret — or mystery, if you like — in this game is what the “scarlet hand” means, and to figure that out, we have to first dive into the significance of a handprint.

Handprints are usually a signature or an identifier – we fingerprint everyone from felons to teachers, and so the primary use of the word “handprint”, whether literal or figurative is to denote a signature.

The word “signature” when involved with crime, however, takes on a slightly different meaning; a “signature” here is an identifying behavior or “quirk” that a criminal has that differentiates their crimes from other criminals’. The obvious corollary that follows from a criminal’s signature and the phrase “red-handed” is the metaphor of “blood on the hands”. All of these sayings mark a specific crime performed by a specific person.

Except that’s not the case here.

When Sinclair is mentioning the other thefts that have him “worried” about thefts at Beech Hill, the red handprint comes up here as a specific signature, seemingly appearing like clockwork when the Pacal carving is “stolen”. 

Except it’s not the same culprit at all. 

Like the culprit in Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders committing three murders to conceal the only murder he had motive to commit, Henrik uses the red handprint as a smokescreen, trying to make it seem as if the theft is one of many (so it won’t be questioned) rather than an act of attempting to save the carving by stealing it first.

In this way, the handprint is a mask, serving to identify the culprit without actually identifying him at all. One of the greatest parts of the mystery/secret behind the game is that the handprint is a forgery, confusing the lines of proof just enough to make the player take a step back and think.

In the Introduction, I mentioned that Fate plays a big part in the overall plot of this game, and it’s here that fate really comes into its place of importance.

From the beginning, the Pacal carving is “fated” to be stolen, so much that when it happens it’s not really a surprise as much as a signal to the player that the introductory part of the game is over. 

It’s a joke both in- and out-of-universe that Nancy is fated to find mystery wherever she goes, which adds another nail in the pre-determined nature of her internship.

It’s the unchanging fate of secrets that leads Sinclair to bustle around attempting to stop any hint of his smuggling operation from getting out while at the same time watching Nancy carefully as she solves the mysteries and exposes the secrets that he needs to get his hands on the secret of the monolith.

Nothing shows the hand of fate more, however, than Sinclair not actually being caught by Nancy. The Poetic Trio reciting their end-of-game lyrics simply say that the villain is stewing in his own miscalculations, and, other than giving him the wrong "treasure”, Nancy has absolutely nothing to do with Sinclair being caught. 

Fate ultimately has more power than even Nancy in this game, leaving her not to “catch a thief red-handed”, but simply giving her the opportunity to “expose buried secrets”.

It’s a solid mystery from beginning to end, as Nancy tries to figure out how Sinclair could have pulled off the theft before realizing that it wasn’t Sinclair after all. Joanna and Alejandro do their best to muddy the waters and distract Nancy (and through Nancy, the player) just long enough to make the game feel like a true adventure.

The Suspects:

  Joanna Riggs is the first person you meet in the game in an opening cinematic meant to show off what the game engine could do and to tease us with a silhouette shot of Nancy.

She’s also the least-impactful character in the game, which should stand as a testament to how good this game is with its inclusion of characters into the plot. Joanna’s in charge, basically, and gives Nancy her go-fer tasks until the Pacal carving is stolen.

She’s supposed to be a bit “quirky”, with her non-sensical Latin and her whining to Nancy about how the only thing worse than a highly prized and expensive carving going missing is her mom leaking her prom photos onto the internet (a v weird thing to equate, honestly), but she’s also the most innocent of the bunch, as her only crimes are over-spending on an artifact that the museum really couldn’t afford, and having the worst taste in employees/business associates ever.

As a culprit, Joanna wouldn’t have been a bad pick — it’d be a basic case of theft-for-insurance-money — but she’s certainly the most boring option, so I’m glad that she’s got nothing to do with it. That kind of a crime really wouldn’t fit the Hardy-Boys-aesthetic that’s going on in SSH anyway.

Henrik Van Der Hune is the employee in charge of glyph translation and the man who apparently was the sexual awakening of quite a few of the Clue Crew. He’s also a recent addition to the staff after he heard of their new Mayan exhibition pieces, so I can’t for the life of me figure out why he wasn’t the immediate suspect for the police, especially since it’s his handprint.

Henrik did a bit of a National Treasure-level spoof on the cops, stealing the carving first so that it wouldn’t get stolen later. He orders the cinnabar to make the handprint in Joanna’s name (really Henrik?? Like you didn’t know it was Sinclair all along?? Why??) and pulls off a moderately daring heist, considering he works 50 feet down the hallway from the carving.

Of course, if this were to come to light, the game would be over with no real bad guy nor tension, so Henrik takes a fall down the Insanely Dangerous replica stairs and winds up with a bad case of the forgetsies. At 61 years old, he’s lucky he didn’t bust his hip.

Henrik is a culprit, but he’s not the culprit, which is good, because I’m not sure that HER had the time or space to tackle the moral issue of a thief who loses their memory and can’t technically be tried for a crime that they didn’t knowingly commit.

They definitely could have tried, but I don’t think it would have worked.

As a culprit, Henrik could have worked, but there’s just not enough time to have him fake-steal and then steal for real. It would have been cool to have him be faking amnesia and sneaking out of the hospital to Burgle…but it would have taken a more advanced game engine and a much longer game to pull it off.

Alejandro Del Rio is an ambassador who works at the Mexican Consulate and is the epitome of “just because you’re technically right doesn’t mean you’re actually correct”. 

While he’s right in that a ton of artifacts were stolen from Mexico (and other countries, but honestly he only cares about Mexican artifacts), but he’s incorrect in blaming Joanna and others like her, since those thefts didn’t happen in the number and scale that he’s referring to by 2002 (as opposed to, say, British archaeology in the early 20th century, as is touched on in TMB), and Joanna acquired the artifacts legally.

His cause is right, but blaming those who aren’t responsible does him no good — and can actually hurt him, as is the case in the game, where no one really takes him seriously.

He’s also an uptight, rather humorless character, but has a touch of Devilry about him (he’s not above blackmail, for example, or “trading information”) that makes him slightly different from Jeff Akers in DOG.

Alejandro’s biggest claim to fame is in fanfic, where, like in canon, he is Totally banging Joanna, and is apparently Very Physically Gifted. Good on you, Alejandro.

As a culprit, Alejandro would have been a rather hackneyed choice, as he’s the one who’d obviously steal the carving and monolith to transport it back to where it came from. It would also include giving him more to do in a game than setting up his Hate-FWB to take a call for something he, in all honesty, knew she didn’t do.

Taylor Sinclair is an art dealer with facial hair that’s sort of a grotesque work of art in and of itself, and also happens to be the culprit. He also has a CrimeFursona named “Big Bunny”, which is honestly enough to lock him up and throw away the key.

Sinclair is part of the black market and is looking to sell the carving and the secrets of the monolith in order to make it rich, which is a pretty standard motive, but is notable for including smuggling in a Nancy Drew game rather than a Hardy Boys novel, so that’s a point for him.

SSH is a howcatchem, so Sinclair’s real job in the game is to avoid leaving behind proof — and he does an excellent job. Granted, Henrik steals the Pacal carving before he can manage it, but until he shuts Nancy in the monolith and takes (what he thinks is) the treasure, there’s no piece of physical evidence to tie him to his crimes.

But, like all egotists, Sinclair’s failure comes because he just couldn’t resist being a cackling madman.

As a culprit, Sinclair’s perfect for this game. He’s slimy, untrustworthy, and pretty much everything you imagine a smuggler to be. He doesn’t really need any fleshing out beyond what he already has, because he lurks in the shadows for most of the game, only appearing when he has to in order to get information.

The Hardy Boys:

Honestly speaking, the Hardy Boys are the most important “innovation” of this game, and are the addition that really created the Nancy Drew games as we know and love them today.

Not only do the Hardy Boys establish that Nancy isn’t alone in this universe — that there are others her age out there like her, who solve mysteries and catch bad guys — but they also give the game regular phone friends who are established as capable of helping Nancy solve anything she asks for. 

This makes a lot more sense than Bess/George/Ned suddenly becoming Super Sleuths, and frees up Ned/Bess/George to offer help and have dialogue more appropriate to their increasingly-fleshed-out characters.

And that’s the real benefit to the Hardy Boys: they allow for varied characterization for Nancy’s friends. 

Before this game, Bess/George/Ned have all been indistinguishable from each other, possibly excepting Bess’ lame puns. From this game on, each reoccurring phone friend has their own personality, their own quirks, and their own areas of expertise.

Also, I adore the Hardy Boys (and have since I was small), so it’s great to see them semi-regularly. I love that sometimes you call them together, sometimes it’s one or the other, sometimes they appear in game…it’s really nice to have these characters to lean on and provide entertainment and freedom to the Nancy Drew world and formula.

On a final note, I don’t find it to be a coincidence that this is the first game with the Hardy Boys and that it’s also the most Hardy Boys-eque game so far (smuggling plots, false thefts, a suspect nearly dies and then decides to help out, the Hero Detective is trapped with no obvious means of escape, etc.). It’s a nice nod to the source material, and I appreciate it.

The Favorites:

I love the focus here on knowledge and on the quizzes as Nancy learns with the player. It’s one of the few games to truly be “edutainment” in the sense that it was meant back in the early 2000s, and I really do adore the pure and unbridled appreciation for learning in this game.

The puzzles in SSH are well-placed and make sense as part of the museum exhibit, allowing for the classic puzzles that Nancy Drew games (and players) know and love without having them feel kitschy or out of place.

Hands down my favorite thing in this game is how much characterization it features. Nancy’s in fine form, as are Bess and George, and the Hardy Boys, but even minor characters like Franklin Rose and Poppy Dada and Prudence Rutherford all have their own unique voices, problems, motivations, and secrets. 

The four suspects are well-introduced and fleshed out, and do things simply for their own reasons rather than attempting to sound suspicious for the developers’ sake. It’s a great trend, and one that continues to grow (despite a few misses) as the series goes on.

Hat-tip to the Hardy Boys again here. I’ve said really all I want to say, but it’d be lying to not include them in the list of my favorite things about this game.

Sonny Joon is a great little easter egg (albeit a retroactive easter egg) and I thoroughly enjoy his presence in the game. “Hurricane Sonny” blows in and sticks around for the rest of the series, and it’s a joy to experience.

The best puzzle in the game…I really enjoy the audio quiz thing, but I get how it wouldn’t be other people’s cuppa. I’m gonna go ahead and say that it’s figuring out how to get the last artifact from the Poppy Dada painting, as it requires you do jump through just the right amount of hoops, and gives you some hilarious conversations while you’re figuring it out.

The best moment in this game hands-down is when Prudence Rutherford insinuates that she killed her mother-in-law for the necklace. It’s hilarious.

The Un-Favorites:

There are, however, a few things about this game that make it into the least-favorite category.        

Collecting the packages with the different artifacts is almost wholly reliant on luck and patience, and it can be extremely annoying to have to go to sleep and wake up 4/5 times in a row before the final package arrives. As this would be an easy fix, it sticks out especially in my mind as being a pointlessly annoying thing.

Taylor Sinclair’s tie. No art dealer would wear that. It looks like a bottle of mustard and a placenta had a baby.

I do hate (as noted below in the Fix section) that you can only call certain people on certain phones. Phones don’t work that way — not even back in 2002 — and it is frustrating to have to travel back and forth or wait for morning to make a game-progressing phone call.

The worst puzzle in the game in my opinion is probably lugging the monolith stones around, because it really bothers me that if you take the shortest path, Nancy drops them, but if you take a slightly longer path, she’s totally fine. 

While I can see how the quizzes might cause some people problems, if you take notes like the game encourages you to do (I remember taking notes in a spiral notebook for the first…10 games, about? Until we moved to sticky notes, because as me and my sister got much older, we didn’t need to write down as much), the quizzes are a walk in the park.

The worst moment in the game (which is still a great moment, just definitely my least favorite) is when the sirens go off in the museum. It’s loud, obnoxious, and Joanna just APPEARING suddenly makes me jump every time. It’s a testament to how good this game is that this is the worst moment I can think of.

The Fix:

So what fixes does SSH need?

Honestly, not many.

It’d be great to simplify the phones, so that any person you can call on one phone you can call on any phone (avoid the travel back and forth from the hotel to the museum, in other words), and to have deadlines or exact moments for package delivery so that you’re not waiting days (in-game) for the last straggler to show up.

Other than those small quibbles, however, there’s not much that needs fixing or refreshing in SSH. It’s educational, entertaining, difficult enough on the first go-around to keep you on your feet, but not so hard that replay value is lost — and there are no puzzles so bad that they make the game lose replay value, either.

SSH is a great game, both as #6 in the series and as a first game to those who can’t access the Classic Games, and is a delight to play — both the first time and in replays.

[pilferingapples]

Les Mis BBC: First Episode First Impression

Well, the actors are as excellent as I hoped they would be!

Cut for Spoilers or whatever term applies here

I really really really wanted to be wrong in all my misgivings about this series. I wanted to be blown out of the water by the whole thing, and have to make repentant posts about the error of my ways. 

Alas, this is not a Repentant Post. 

I liked some things! The set and scenery and props were all genuinely lovely. I enjoyed the animals everywhere? and the nigh-omnipresent beggars in Paris? Nicely done!  And I really, genuinely, appreciate the constant background French; I know just enough to recognize it when I hear it and it does add something to the atmosphere of the piece. 

The actors! What great performances! I want it clear that NOTHING I have to say in the way of character critique is down to them. Oyelowo is as good as I’d hoped he’d be, and that is saying a lot; Collins is doing a wonderful job with Fantine’s shyness and defiant hope; and the bit-part characters like Magloire and Nicolette are really standout. 

I really appreciate the inclusion of the Pontmercy Family situation, and Gillenormand being placed in this first episode makes his social relevance more clear IMO; he feels less like random comic relief than he sometimes can. Really, the whole Pontmercy-Gillenormand family conflict is a standout in the episode; Gillenormand’s emotional manipulation of Tiny Marius and  general domestic tyrannizing was very effectively shown (the scene with the toy soldiers!!!), and my heart was broken all over for Marius and for Georges. And Tholomyes is an amazingly perfect skeezeball; his PUA approach is clear and skin-crawling from the start.

*** Real quick Basic Plot Rundown: this episode covers roughly the era from Waterloo to Fantine being abandoned by Tholomyes. I say roughly  because it weirdly changes the timeline of Fantine’s life to sync up more with Valjean’s;he gets released and goes through the silver theft with the Bishop when she’s getting dumped.   The issue with that is of course that in the book Fantine is dumped in 1817 (the year 1817, when it was 1817); Cosette should just about be getting born around the year of Napoleon’s defeat and Valjean’s release, and now I guess she’s about a year old? This doesn’t necessarily have to be a big issue for chronology if the show’s just going to have Fantine and Cosette suffer for an extra two years (though: D:D:D:D: ) , and heaven knows Hugo is shifty on personal timelines, but...Les Mis *does* have certain unavoidable historical events it has to sync up with, so I’ll see how it plays out. 

Besides Valjean’s last little while in prison and Fantine’s courtship and abandonment, this first episode covers the Georges-Gillenormand-Marius family situation, with Georges limping home from Waterloo only to be refused access to his son. The show cuts between the three ongoing stories so they all progress more or less in sync. We get far enough along to see Georges watching his son in church without Gillenormand knowing (thanks to Nicolette, who’s the only woman in the Gillenormand house so far), Fantine holding Cosette in their apartment and wondering what they’re going to do after Tholomyes leaves them, and Valjean curled up in the road after robbing Petit Gervais.

Okay, Actual Commentary time! Please assume a Personal Opinion disclaimer for things after this point:P 

***

Several of the people I was watching with felt the constant cutting between scenes was jarring or hard to follow; I don’t know if that was the issue but I do think, overall, it just didn’t work as well as it might have. The individual scenes were very brief and the constant bouncing back and forth prevented them from building up any emotional momentum. I think..conceptually, I can see where it would be interesting to twine Valjean, Fantine, and Georges together, in many ways, but none of that thematic connection really came through either (Maybe most disappointingly to me, Valjean’s family is never mentioned, so the potential to connect all three of them as families torn apart by social inequality is lost). It really felt like just Three People Having a Bad Time in France.  it really is hard to follow, because it starts to feel...kinda dull , just a collection of sad anecdotes for no purpose. 

The dialogue doesn’t help. When the show leans heavily on Hugo’s writing (sadly, mostly with Tholomyes) , it’s fine, of course. But the original dialogue is clunky, pedantic, and weirdly flat throughout--and utterly lacking in nuance. It just aggressively clunks at points. 

Valjean and Javert suffer the most for this. Javert basically states aloud his share of the Confrontation while lecturing a bound Valjean for ...reasons?? It’s never really clear. But hey, here you go, Valjean, have Javert’s entire backstory! ( I should say that Oyelowo almost sells it. He is incredible , and does a great job making Javert feel both his adamant self and humanly affected by the world around him. Just. some of this dialogue. Geez.)  This is also one of those episodes with a weirdly more unpleasant Valjean; he doesn’t assault the Bishop, but he does  much more consciously rob Petit Gervais, laughing as he scares the kid away and grinning as he first examines the coin. He also just...yells at people a lot? and argues with the Bishop and asserts his hatred of mankind very bluntly. I found it hard to believe this Valjean had any of the original’s internalized self-hatred or sense of being  lower than a dog; he seems  solidly outraged by his treatment, and confident of the injustice of it all. Which is definitely fair and all, but just...isn’t quite Valjean.

 (Also, as I mentioned above, we don’t really get any of his pre-prison backstory; not an unusual adaptational move, but it sure doesn’t add anything to his motivation.) He seems both more casually violent and less emotionally deep than I’d expect a Valjean to be; I can’t believe , at least not yet, that he’s actually felt the Bishop’s forgiveness as a challenge in any way, even though the Gervais scene ends with him curled in the road--it just doesn’t feel connected. 

Fantine does  get more time--unfortunately, and unavoidably, much of that involves Felix:P . There’s also some brief conversation with Favourite about the general situation of grisettes. I think it’s a good addition, and puts in some useful context. (That said, I’m deeply uneasy about the attempt to portray Fantine and Favourite as actual  friends-so much of Fantine’s story comes from her being really truly isolated. If she’d had real friends to help in the crunch, it would change things-- and if she thinks  Favourite is a real friend and then Favourite fades on her, that’s even worse than canon and makes Favourite  worse than in canon. Hence, Unease.)  

Visually, there’s ..I won’t say nothing wrong,  and certainly I can have fun for ages going over the details of this or that outfit or hairstyle (and I really do  find the weird combos of Looks to be very distracting; if I knew less about the period it wouldn’t be,no doubt, but I do  know a lot about How It Should Look and the fact that it doesn’t  Quite sometimes makes it all feel like it’s happening in a generic Fantasy 19C) . But there’s no BIG thing wrong, it’s...fine?  

It’s just ... it’s just fine. There’s no particular strong visual feel to it, nothing really striking-- unless you count the weird 60s-Acid-flashback-looking timeskip moment. It really does  feel like LM 2012 in its more visually striking moments, and outside of that, it’s just very much a competently filmed period drama made in the last ten years--but that’s all. Without the specific characters, I don’t think there’s a single frame of it I’d recognize as being necessarily Les Mis and not any other random BBC Period Drama. 

I guess this is really my problem with the characters and the story too-- it’s...Fine, it’s technically there , but too often there’s no sense of depth or specificity to it. Part of it’s the dialogue, part of it’s the weird pacing/ story jumps , part of it is because no one ever seems to be given a moment to respond-(Fantine crying for all of thirty seconds after being abandoned before the show decides we need her up and talking and dry-eyed was really actively jarring to me)--

There are a hundred little details I could go through but the overall effect for me was just a whole lot of Underwhelming. Yeah, there’s the Pee Scene and the (correct and fitting) visceral discomfort of Everything About Tholomyes (he ,at least, really is a Triumph of Skeeze). But the real problem so far is just that it feels like a visual outline of a story; it’s not pulling together into feeling like a lived world. It’s not taking my heart, even though, despite my surface grousing, I really want  it to.  It’s here, it’s fine, it’s Whatever; but all my really strong emotional reactions either Cringing  or Cooing (over the very excellent babies). My heart didn’t break but the once, with Tiny Marius, and it really really  should have been in pieces by the end of the episode. 

I’m of course  going to keep watching, as much of it as I can find a way to see; it’s Les Mis and I really  am  impressed with the actors.  Maybe next episode, when the various stories start to come together a little, it’ll all feel more solid and more memorable. Right now, though, I’m sitting at a solid “ meh” about it.