#i even got perceived by the devs which is TERRIFYING but also cool but also SCARY slash positive

[naturallyexcessive]

V2 cosplay is complete!!

All of this was done in the span of 5 days because I have no sense of time management and wanted to have something before the convention yesterday ;-;

There's lots of things to fix (cough cough the legs) and details I need to add that I didn't have the chance to make (cough cough the wings) but for something done under a crunch I'm really happy with the result!!

[trulycertain]

Deus Ex & the Spirit of Noir

Or “it’s not just the venetian blinds and the scotch and the trenchcoat.”

(Look, I might well be rusty. If someone has issues with my history or my summations of these genres, I’d love for them to tell me. Note: I kind of poked at this and adapted it from a conversation with @casie-mod.)

All right, so I’ve been thinking... Deus Ex and cyberpunk in general, for good and for ill, are so utterly influenced by noir tropes. And oddly, despite not being a direct grandson, I think Deus Ex gets the spirit of noir and some of what it was trying to say better than a lot of self-professed neo-noirs.  A lot of people get stuck on the specific aesthetics or tropes without understanding why they're there. DX falls into that trap sometimes, but it also manages some nice subversions and recontextualises them in some really cool ways. 

*puts on nerd fedora and trenchcoat*

Noir heroes tend to be everymen, cogs in machines. Though I think it's significant that a lot of later noir was written and filmed in the Forties, so many later heroes ended up being tangentially affected by the war in some way. Scarred - mentally or physically - men who kept the world at bay through sarcasm and wanted to trust people but couldn't afford to, with a weakness for women they perceived as damsels in distress. With flappy trenchcoats. And usually a liking for scotch. So on. May sound familiar. 

People often think "jazz score" without understanding that writers were telling stories about disenfranchised heroes who were working-class and viewed as shady and who had often left behind more respectable lives, so they had a social mobility other people didn't and were good at moving around unnoticed - which also meant they often interfaced with black neighbourhoods and black servants. That social flexibility is part of why many noir protags were connected with "respectability" which they then had to turn away from - that's why so many are/were cops, or were in the army, so on. It's a bridge between the “respectable” readers and writers, giving them a relateable starting point, and the worlds of the greyer protags. It makes the protag more understandable. 

For Deus Ex, the idea of transition from a respected position/part of the system to an underclass starts with Jensen moving from police to a morally greyer position in the form of private security work (which would be very much an equivalent of the modern PI, hence its use in cyberpunk), and then that transition is completed/intensified by the augmentations. Is that at times awkwardly handled? Hell yes. They can’t seem to decide whether augs are class, race, disability or none of the above, and whether they should be telling a story like that is an interesting, significant question. But thematically, that arc is pretty consistent with a lot of noir, particularly later, more hard-bitten noir. 

A big thing in noir was class commentary and the way rich, clueless clients are contrasted with the weary PIs. PIs move between the oppressors and the oppressed because everyone equally views PIs as trouble and hates them. (The class + hatred stuff is something DX utterly gets right, actually. There is a big reason they went for a cynical “working-class hero” type in the game.) People hated private dicks and still do. Quite often with good reason. Look at the rl history of the Pinkertons, for example. So you may view the protag as cool, but in-universe they shouldn't be, and they shouldn't straight-up be presented as cool unless it's with nuance and downsides. This is kind of where Deus Ex diverges sharply, because most traditional noir protags don’t have superpowers or wear shades indoors, but at least they balance it with his fallibility and the way his augs close doors for him as well as open them. That “downside of all the cool tech” stuff is part of why I love cyberpunk in general.

A lot of people see the snark as this easy part of noir, as much as lyricism. It's cool, I like it, I enjoy snark. They miss that it comes from pain and oppression, and the societal context for what makes someone "hardboiled."

Like cyberpunk, noir has always been class commentary. It's always been about hatred and societal ills and the little evils people do to each other.

Also, a noir protag does not have to be a PI. Several instances of the genre had protags that weren't, but that stereotype came about because the crime comics and stuff with PI heroes tended to sell well (Sam Spade, Dick Tracy) and then be made into films. Those images are the ones that lasted most, but they're not the only thing. "Gravelly private investigator in a trenchcoat" is not required for noir, even if I like it. (I do. A lot.) 

And the trench and gear? In the case of noir, it was often cheap, and often worn-down (*glares at jensen*), and utterly ordinary. It's working gear, not something fancy. It marked them out as separate and a bit rough.

Megan actually both subverts and plays into the femme fatale trope in ways I adore - it's like Eidos almost set out to make that trope make more psychological sense and be less misogynistic. A lot of writers use femme fatale tropes as an excuse to be misogynistic without realising that several noir writers were female, even if they were working under male pseuds, and used this as a subversion of the damsel in distress trope, because this was often the best they could get at the time. And that happened less than the Chandlers of this world, but it did happen as well as male writers doing the "she had legs that went on for miles" thing. Subverting it would be exactly the modern equivalent and the right thing to do. Noir is all about subversion. It walked the line between being a very popular, sellable genre and one the government hated.

(Noir also doesn't have to be a murder mystery. But that's a whole other thing. And it's not just novels, serials, films or comics, it encompasses a whole... thing. It's not just venetian blinds and red lipstick. Those were just an easy shorthand.)  

Here’s my theory: Like cyberpunk, and like a lot of later comics in the 70s and such, noir came about as a symptom of people no longer trusting their government and being terrified of what they saw as extremism and moral absolutes. Noir's heyday was the 20s to the 40s/early 50s, the Jazz Age and the fall of the Weimar Republic + the rise of fascism. And then with later 40s noir... America, pre-Greatest Generation mindset, saw this weirdness and then eventually saw its people dying. Add that to the Depression, Capone scandals and Prohibition basically growing gangsters from the ground-up, and you end up with people still scarred from economic hardship and systemic corruption, knowing that the cops didn't go into certain neighbourhoods, and trying to balance the fact that their mindset didn't entirely match the boom times of the 40s due to war imports happening around them. Noir was a healthy way of dealing with despair and a sort of... systemic "ugh." Cyberpunk and superhero comics kept this root. This idea that when the government and the police wouldn't help, sometimes someone else would, and this idea of trauma making you into a kind of, at the very least, anti-hero.

So this concept of a dark mood and score coming from the background societal oppression, of the exploited coming back as a hero because trauma has given them certain skills and a very particular perspective, of the hero being spat at everywhere they go and having the opportunity to be part of a corrupt system, whether or not they take it... and flappy trenchcoats... in a video game, the modern equivalent of the written-off comics and pulp novels at the time?

Yeah. I like it.

Cyberpunk always plays with some of the hallmarks of noir, but whether intentionally or not, the Deus Ex prequels got the spirit of the thing. It got that noir comes from corruption, and how easily real life can seem like a dystopia. Rather than skate over the oppression to get to the procedural mystery and cool metal arms the way a lot of cyberpunk does, it put that oppression front and centre. And then it chucked some cool wing motifs and an awesome soundtrack and Renaissance motifs in there, too. Of course I was in.

(Also, yes, the devs were waaay into Blade Runner. Most cyberpunk creators are. But somehow, whether by accident or not - I suspect by accident - they managed to tell a slightly more trad-noir story than BR did.)