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kingofthewilderwest · 6 years

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Deponia Doomsday and Meta: Responding to Gripers in Game?

I haven’t finished Deponia Doomsday and I don’t know spoilers. However, I can already say: the fourth game’s opening is fucking brilliant. So brilliant that apparently I have to write this longass analysis nobody asked for. XD

I love when game creators subtly go meta. In-game they might respond to fans’ criticism or make teasing jokes about previous parts of franchise gameplay. For instance, the first Mass Effect had a terrible driving system with the M35 Mako. That gets referenced in ME 3 when Vega and Cortez argue about what vehicles drive best. ME 1 had frustrating elevator travel with awkward conversations, which Garrus jokes about in ME 3′s Citadel DLC. ME 3 dialogue lovingly pokes fun at imperfect parts of the first game, all while embracing it as part of the universe.

Then I got to Deponia Doomsday. Doomsday’s introduction feels like a hysterical middle finger at people who didn’t appreciate the third game’s ending.

And goodness did that ending bother some people.

Which isn’t surprising, I suppose. Killing the main character in your story can upset some fans. I feel sad about this because I believe this was *THE* right ending for the story. That’s not the focus of this analysis, but in short: Rufus getting a perfect ending in paradise would have felt contrived and unrealistic given the rest of the story’s atmosphere... not to mention... can you imagine Rufus settling down and chilling... with what he’s like? Rufus was a character never meant to have a perfect ending, and there’s far more heart, emotion, and power in a death. After ALL this time being an insensitive megalomaniac... Rufus does a purely selfless act... an act which ends up being his last. Damn. That’s cool. I cried. It’s a brilliant, perfectly chosen ending. It made me love these games more.

Obviously, this ending didn’t please everyone. I’m sure Daedalic Entertainment noticed that.

I suspect - but haven’t confirmed - that for those who enjoyed the series, they:

Tried to find in-story loopholes, etc. in the ending, and thereby argue a way wherein Rufus wasn’t dead.

Tried to pester Daedalic into making a fourth game... despite the fact that Deponia was CLEARLY envisioned as a trilogy from the first game’s release. And despite the fact that it’s hard to make a sequel when your protagonist’s dead.

Enter: Deponia Doomsday.

I was leery of this concept. I could tell Doomsday was working with time travel, alternate universes, and the like... bringing us into an AU where Rufus isn’t dead. I feared Doomsday would retcon what was THE most potent and heartfelt point of the entire series. You can’t bring Rufus back to life! You can’t erase his sacrifice! That would take away all the power of the moment retroactively! It’s a shame when stories do that, undercutting what was once great moments... simply to pull a story beyond when it should have ended, and make more money. Deponia was meant to end at three with Rufus’ death... as much as I’m someone who always enjoys more content from my fandoms, this seemed like shaky and unsatisfying ground to tread.

The opening to Doomsday has entirely assuaged my fears. I shouldn’t have worried about retconning great storytelling points... because if anyone knew that the ending of Goodbye Deponia (#3) was The Right Ending... it was Daedalic themselves.

Repeatedly in Doomsday’s opening, the writers pound in the point that Rufus is DEAD and that’s FINAL. They WILL NOT retcon what happened in Goodbye Deponia and they WILL NOT sacrifice the integrity of the story they’ve written.

They get this point across in many ways, but the two most prominent are Goal’s introductory speech and the first Huzzah song.

Goal reflects over what transpired in games one through three:

The end was never our creation. It was there, all this time. All we did was tempt it - the same way a surfer tempts fate, or tempts a shark by trying to outswim it. A for effort.

We crafted spears against beasts, built walls against spears. Ladders against walls and towers against ladders. After that, we built boats, ramparts, chimneys, shaving-foam-pie catapults, and when all our trash threatened to swallow even our highest spires, we built... a spaceship. Powered by nothing less than the destruction of our own planet.

The preparations took decades. What was meant to be an ark became our home. My home. Elysium. None of us ever thought there were thousands of clueless survivors down in that trash. Our bastion of hope became a herald of doom for Deponia.

Fortunately, the tables turned. One of those clueless people foiled the plan. He saved Deponia and all who were left behind. And he saved me. By falling for me... literally.

The end.

Oh? You don’t like this ending? Still hoping for something more upbeat? Well... it’s like I said. Endings and sharks: don’t tempt them.

Though... I got to admit... even after all this time I keep asking myself: If I was able to turn back time, what would I change? What would be the better ending? Or do I just want it to never end?

There’s so much to appreciate about the opening.

First, it’s a rhetorically well-crafted speech, where even the oddest earlier lines of dialogue come around again (ex: tempting sharks) to focus on one point: the end is the end, even if Goal might want to imagine otherwise.

Second, the speech provides a nice recap for the first three games.

Third, it’s the perfect set-up for what Doomsday is about: an alternate timeline than the main trilogy. From a writing perspective, Goal’s monologue gives game players an introduction into the concept of what Doomsday explores. Even without knowing anything about how other fans might have reacted, this addresses to every player what’s important about Deponia’s story: Rufus’ death was a concrete irreversible end, but we can still explore an alternate timeline of “what if.” It solidifies the ending of Goodbye Deponia, makes it clear there’s no retconning the emotions and events of Rufus’ death, while at the same time opening doors to another adventure with our idiotic anti-hero.

That’s damn meta already. But considering that maybe the writers were aware of fans’ mixed reactions to the third game’s ending, this speech could also be a way to address the controversy.

Goal’s speech might be from her perspective, thinking humanity’s poor actions trashing their planet led to the inevitable conundrum she’s in today. However, the ideas of tempting fate and unavoidable endings are also applicable to game playing fans who wished for a different trilogy conclusion.

It’s not just that Goal sees the ending as inevitable. It’s that the writers, from the storytelling standpoint, see the ending as inevitable, too. “It was there, all this time,” Goal says, and they say, too. Rufus’ story was intentionally, unwaveringly written to end like this; the entire series was structured to build to this end, from its foreshadowing to its tone to what makes sense for effective plot arcs. There might have been some “tempting fate” on the writers’ part by what they chose to include... but ultimately... this had to be the ending for the story to work.

Tempting fate would be trying to goad the writers into a different ending... but trying to make something different could make things worse, no? Careful what you wish for, anyone? Endings and sharks: don’t tempt them.

And then, right in her speech, Goal asks, “Oh? You don’t like this ending? Still hoping for something more upbeat?” It’s like she read peoples’ Steam reviews on Goodbye Deponia’s “disappointing” conclusion. And when she goes on to muse about what she might have changed, she wonders if it’s that she wants it “to never end” - as though fans just want to have more and more and more Deponia games, not a trilogy with a definite, uncontinuable brick-wall end.

As if that weren’t enough to drill the point home, we have the opening tune, too. Every single lyric is meta as fuck.

You old amaurotic pinhead! Act like this thing is not dead, and didn’t Run into a brick wall at full tilt already Let me help you fill that gap in memory Living in the waste Was not to your taste But soon you will gaze Truth straight in the face: That all rivers run eventually to the sea

At this stage it’s evident: There will be no happy end Suck it up, princess! No one cares for your tears! It’s over! I’ve no damns to give For second thoughts that you’re stuck with: Looking for loopholes and wondering “what it?”

This again serves multiple purposes!

The singer has always been the in-game “narrator” of Rufus’ life: he chronicles the past of when their fathers “dwelt in a world filled with rubbish and stink.” He mentions historians, lost records, and the like, so we know that, for the bard, Rufus is a historic figure. The bard’s reason for singing the song? The person he lives with is throwing a fit “about dirty dishes congesting the sink” or other minor household slovenliness; the bard’s trying to deflect his fault in not cleaning the house by talking about when things were worse on a planet of literal trash. It’s trying to guilt his house-sharing listener into being appreciative they live in a more clean environment than the Deponians did. So when the bard tells his listener in the fourth game that they’re an “old amaurotic pinhead” who “act[s] like this thing is not dead,” it’s probably because he’s still being harangued, despite the fact that he “close[d] [his] case; there’s nothing left to say” and went “off now for reals” (got kicked out of the house?). Purely from the perspective of the bard, he’s frustrated that this old dispute is still being brought up - it’s beating a dead horse for which he’s got “no [more] damns to give.”

This also is a good moment of foreshadowing. Again, I haven’t played Doomsday to the end yet, but I’d drink Rufus’ espresso ingredient-per-ingredient if something terrible didn’t happen. In the image above, that looks like Elysium crashed. Rufus talks about how he had a dream where all his friends died. We see old!Rufus destroy the planet with him still on it. I’ve seen fan reviews claim that “Thought 3 was bad emotionally? 4 said ‘hold my beer’.” McChronicle freaks out that he alters the timeline wherein Rufus saves the planet, suggesting we’re now on a timeline where that might not happen. Deponia Doomsday sure as hell ain’t gonna to have some optimal, squishy ending. And this song here foreshadows that: “At this stage it’s evident there will be no happy end.” This game’s story is doomed from the start. And: “Soon you will gaze truth straight in the face: that all rivers run eventually to the sea.” It’s an idea that, you can go into AU territory all you like, you can want something else than the trilogy’s conclusion, it’s INEVITABLE that all alternates will lead to the same, bad-ending sea. The theme of inevitability and tempting fate strikes again.

So there’s all that.

But the bard, more than ever, sounds like he’s talking to game players. The lyrics make the most sense if you hear it as him addressing you.

Gripers in particular.

Every. Single. Line. Sounds. Like. He’s. Addressing. Controversy. About. The. End. Of. Deponia. 3.

You old amaurotic pinhead! Act like this thing is not dead, and didn’t run into a brick wall at full tilt already. As in, all the people who tried to act like Rufus wasn’t dead. These people couldn’t accept that the ending ran into a brick wall: that all the painful horrors happened, and that the ending cannot be budged.

Living in the waste was not to your taste, but soon you will gaze truth straight in the face: that all rivers run eventually to the sea. Dissatisfied players wanted a different conclusion. The bard’s telling them an alternate path wouldn’t have made them any more satisfied.

At this stage it’s evident: there will be no happy end. The ending of Deponia 3 and start of 4 have made it clear Deponia isn’t a story with a happy ending. To deny that would be futile: it’s clear from what everyone’s played that this is how the story’s supposed to go.

Suck it up, princess! No one cares for your tears! It’s over! I’ve no damns to give for second thoughts that you’re stuck with: looking for loopholes and wondering “what it?” Fans can complain all they want. Fans can try to reinterpret the ending to try to explain how Rufus could have survived. But the creators know the truth: the trilogy’s over. It’s ended. It’s sad. Not accepting that means you’re not accepting the reality of the story!

I mean. Holy crap. It literally sounds like Daedalic told gripers, “Suck it up, princess! No one cares for your tears! It’s over! I’ve no damns to give.” IN GAME. Wow.

In fact, the fact that Doomsday exists at all is an interesting response: in some ways, the premise of the fourth game seems to be a “Careful what you wish for” phenomenon. That “if you guys reeeeeaaaalllly want something else and keep begging for something else, you’re tempting fate and you’re going to get an ending that’s even WORSE.” Similar to how Llamas With Hats became increasingly depressing as the creator was pestered to continue the series beyond what it was due, so also is the response here: you’ll get more content, but it won’t be the happy alternative that you wanted.

I don’t want to say that the creators are lashing out against people who didn’t like the ending. I think it’s just as tongue-in-cheek as everything else in the Deponia series: written with a little edge for humorous effect. They’re not addressing grumblers to be rude, but instead to be clear: they’re not changing the ending, and they’re not apologetic about what they wrote here.

Deponia Doomsday isn’t made with salt... the creators have come up with another story that’s a fun and worthy addition to the universe. They’re not making another game JUST as a response, but because they came up with something worth telling. However, given as they might have heard lots of complaints, or people trying to explain-away to a happier ending, or people begging for a fourth game... I would not be surprised if they’re intentionally addressing these things intentionally by inserting them in-game.

Now, this whole shpeel that I’ve looked at doesn’t have to be an intended addressal to grumblers. It can also be read as meta addressing any generic game playing fan who might have felt emotionally battered at the trilogy’s conclusion. It’s a simple acknowledgement that the third game’s ending would be reason to make someone emotional. It’s not something that’s attacking criticism, but something that’s discussing the nature of the story itself. Everything in Goal’s speech and the bard’s lyrics fit this bill. It doesn’t have to be the case that it’s any addressal to fandom reaction.

Still... to me it sorta feels like a response to gripers is in there. Not as the sole intention, but as part of it? I’m not saying this is an addressal to grumblers, but that it very well could be.

I suspect that this game’s introduction was written with an intent to handle all of the above I’ve talked about.

Nevertheless. Whether it’s one meta or the other, it’s a brilliant use of meta in Doomsday’s opening. It’s brilliant if it’s just talking about the in-game course Deponia’s led, and how that might make players sad. It’s brilliant if it’s actually meant as a meta response to mixed reviews.

Love it.

Repeatedly, at the start of Doomsday, the writers get across EXACTLY this point: that the ending of #3 c-a-n-n-o-t be reversed. This has two brilliant effects:

It allows the story to explore an AU without retconning the emotions of the first game.

AND. As I said, it’s a middle finger at anyone who might not have liked this ending. It’s not a rude middle finger - it won’t turn away fans or anything - and it’s 100% in the game series’ character. But it’s a way that hits the point HOME that Rufus DIED and that is FINAL.

So for me, as someone who adores what the trilogy did, I couldn’t be more stoked at this meta start. It’s hammered, over and over and over, that the conclusion is what it is. It gives me a new adventure to explore without fearing a plot-irreverent, money-grabbing retcon. It’s amusing, it’s meta, it’s multi-faceted, it’s well-conceived.

Yeah. I shouldn’t have worried about the fourth game’s content at all.

#long post #non-dragons #Deponia Doomsday #Deponia #Goodbye Deponia #Deponia spoilers #Rufus #analysis #my analysis #as always... who knows if my qualified thesis came off as well as is in my head

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innuendostudios · 7 years

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Video Games Are Better When We Don’t Get Prescriptivist About Storytelling

Oftentimes, when I read an essay by Ian Bogost, I start wondering which of the following is Ian Bogost’s deal:

A. Ian Bogost argues a position because he believes it. B. Ian Bogost argues a position because he thinks it’s interesting and he thinks he can argue it, without much interest in whether or not he believes it. C. Ian Bogost is the kind of Philosophy major who sees no difference between A and B.

I wondered this when his ostensible review of Flappy Bird argued that games are inherently ugly, and I wondered it recently in his new piece, ostensibly a review of What Remains of Edith Finch, which argues games are inherently bad at storytelling.

As a person who grew up on adventure games and last year spent forty hecking minutes talking about what games get right about storytelling that no other media do, you can imagine: I am so, so, so bored of this take.

I mean, hey, I appreciate that the next time some YouTube commenter says that my defenses of interactive narrative are arguing against a straw man, I have an article literally titled Video Games Are Better Without Stories to link them to. (Just kidding, I don’t read the comments.) But, honestly, someone writes this take every six months or so. This time it’s Ian Bogost, next time it will be Raph Koster or Frank Lantz. In game critics circles, we never really got past Ludology vs. Narratology, the debate where Ludologists insist that systems interaction and raw game design are what make games games, and Game Narratologists are fictional gremlins who live under the beds of Ludologists. Bogost's arguments aren’t particularly new.

Much of the substance of the article have already been pored over: Patrick Klepek pointed out that, whether or not you think games should tell stories, people are going to tell stories with games, so this argument is pointless. (Patrick’s piece also links to Danielle Riendeau’s Twitter dissection of Bogost’s piece, which goes through several of its major points.) Austin Walker followed up by pointing out that even a bad story can make a game better than it would be with no story at all. If you care about the history of these arguments, Errant Signal summed up why Ludologists keep tilting at windmills over two years ago, and Emily Short wrote some thoughts in 2011 when it was Jon Blow’s turn to make this argument. (Jon shows up in the comments and they have an... interesting back and forth.) And, for broader context, Elizabeth Sampat brought up how, if Ian Bogost were a woman, male gamers would certainly accuse him of trying to ban narrative games, but, since he’s a man, his arguments will probably be used by male gamers to dismiss narrative indie games.

Before I get to the thoughts I want to add to this discussion, I’ll focus on one of the better exchanges I saw on Twitter: Scott Benson brought up what we could call The Myth of the Medium Store: the Medium Store is the place where, once you’ve thought of a killer story you want to tell, you pick out the best medium for telling it. The Games Are Bad At Stories take typically stems from the idea that most game narratives would be better served had they picked a different medium from the Medium Store.

Scott points out that, in the real world, Medium Stores don’t exist. Giant Sparrow didn’t make What Remains of Edith Finch because they thought it would work better as a game than as a film; they made it as a game because they’re game designers. I run into this framing in my own work and it causes me all kinds of anxiety - why do I make video essays? Do I adequately justify the use of video in my work? Couldn’t I just write articles like a normal person? And I can come up with all kinds of answers to this question: video allows me to illustrate points in a matter of seconds that would take paragraphs to render in text; I think text is just as much a medium as video, and I don’t think most print articles have to justify their use of text; these days video reaches a wider audience than text does on the internet, which makes it a more viable medium for me. But these are all ways of answer a question that I no longer believe is worth asking. I make video essays because I’m a video essayist. In some fantasy world where anyone can become good at any medium, maybe I would choose print over video. But, in this world, with this brain I was stuck with, I am better at video essays than I am at writing articles. I enjoy it more. My writing works best when it’s meant to be read aloud. Video works for me. That’s reason enough.

And my favorite response to Scott’s tweets (included in the link above) was Carolyn Petit’s: “A movie with the same plot as Gone Home would be fundamentally [about] different things, or [about] the same things in fundamentally different ways.“

Carolyn says, in far fewer words that me, what I was trying to get at in the ending of Story Beats: it doesn’t matter whether you think the plot element of “main character makes friends with an inanimate object” works “better” in Castaway or Portal, because the two are accessing completely different sets of emotions in the audience. Watching Tom Hanks say goodbye to Wilson and throwing the Companion Cube in an incinerator yourself are not the same experience. Comparing them is like comparing a chicken egg to a Faberge egg; which is better? The question is meaningless. You can’t cook with a Faberge egg and you don’t leave a chicken egg on your mantle. They are superficially similar but they serve very different purposes.

(And after watching the Super Bunnyhop video about What Remains of Edith Finch’s Cannery level, I don’t understand how Bogost can argue that this scene would work better as a non-interactive film.)

So, most of the valid talking points having been picked over, what’s left for me to say?

I think what’s most frustrating to me about Bogost’s take, and takes of this kind, is that it’s easy. I should throw Bogost a bone and mention that he has authored some very, very good games writing in his time (and so have Koster, Lantz, and Blow). I don’t mean to sell him short. But writing off interactive narrative is and always has been intellectually lazy.

It’s not difficult to look at a medium and see what it has difficulty doing that another medium does well. Video games have trouble with pacing, with players who fuck with the system instead of roleplaying, and with branching narratives quickly becoming too unwieldy to author content for. Movies have none of these problems, so it’s very easy to point at these issues and say Edith Finch would be better as a movie.

What is much harder, and, to me, a lot more interesting, is articulating what a storytelling medium does well.

Yes, movies fair better than games in these areas: they have tight pacing, the protagonists stay in character, and their narratives are linear. But those qualities are not what makes movie stories good. We don’t walk out of a movie raving about how the story didn’t branch and the main character didn’t jump up and down on their sidekick’s head. What really makes a movie work at storytelling is often more intangible, and harder to fit into a pithy list of reasons why movies are better than video games at telling stories.

It would be just as easy, and just as intellectually lazy, to mount a defense of telling stories in novels and not in films. After all, films have a famously hard time adapting themselves from novels without drastic changes. Movies tend to be very external, where novels can easily give us a character’s thoughts, and the only (inelegant) solution most movies offer for this is voiceover. Movies tend to be capped at 2 hours, 3 tops unless you’re on the arthouse circuit, and that streamlining tends to be far, far less nuanced than a novel that may take the better part of a month to work through. But, again, no one says what makes novels great is that they are long and very internal - by that definition, Hemingway was a terrible writer.

What makes a medium good at storytelling is a set of mostly aesthetic reactions. What makes movies good at stories is their essence: moving pictures can do things that text can’t. Watching a semi-truck flip over in The Dark Knight works in a way it never would on the page, in the same way the narrative payoff at the end of Braid works in a way that it never would on the silver screen.

When we start talking about a medium’s essence, it’s tempting to get, well, essentialist: that if that hard-to-quantify something about games is interactivity, than games should focus on that interactivity to the exclusion of as much else as possible. Games are systems, so they should focus on systems, and systems work better when they aren’t hampered by stories. But, again, this is like saying a movie shouldn’t involve sound because sound is a radio thing, and shouldn’t involve words because that’s a book thing, and shouldn’t have actors because that’s a theater thing - motion pictures are at their best when they are just pictures and motion. This is, obviously, ludicrous. Games can be just as additive as any other medium. Games are moving pictures, and text, and music, and actors, and interactivity. Even a tiny amount of interactivity added to an otherwise mostly filmic experience can make all the difference - this is what makes The Walking Dead work.

We are acclimated to the ways that telling stories in any medium other than games is weird. Films never mounted a defense against “why isn’t this a novel?” We just raised a few generations of people with narrative films until they forgot to ask the question, until no one would think to ask such a dipshit question. Novels, movies, plays, radio dramas, operas, they all have their weirdnesses as storytelling media, we are just so acclimated to those weirdnesses that we don’t see them. We see past them to what makes them valuable.

I’ve spent the last couple months while I was finishing up school keeping myself level by playing a lot of adventure games. I love adventure games. If someone is giving me a lens through which something I love is worse, I will accept that lens if it reveals discrimination, racism, homophobia; “this thing you love is bigoted” is a worthwhile perspective. “This thing you love is, by the criteria I’ve just outlined, inauthentic” is not a worthwhile perspective. “What Remains of Edith Finch would work better as a film” is not dissimilar from “What Remains of Edith Finch is not a real game.” It’s a way of saying that an experience you may have found worthwhile wasn’t actually worthwhile, and I don’t see how this enriches anything. This won’t make better games. This won’t make better stories. This just tells designers (not directly but implicitly) not to make games they want to make and players not to enjoy games that they enjoy.

Ian Bogost isn’t saying anything that Jon Blow wasn’t saying in 2008. Every time a piece like this gets written, all the people who enjoy stories in games come out and write their rebuttals, and however many months later another article comes out that ignores every bit of it. This conversation doesn’t advance because the people arguing against story in games consider the conversation over. They repeat themselves as though they’re waiting for everyone to get the message. Meanwhile, people like Aaron Reid and Porpentine and Anna Anthropy and Brendon Chung keep doing unprecedented things with stories in games and they keep finding their audience. Only one side of the game narrative conversation is advancing, and that’s the side that interests me.

It’s not a real discussion. This is little more than a way of “heating up the takes.” An article about Flappy Bird that says it’s kind of janky in a way that’s interesting is a valid but rather uninteresting article; an article about how Flappy Bird proves that all games are grotesque? That’s a hot take. Ditto how an article about how What Remains of Edith Finch is interesting but might have worked better as a film contorts itself into an article about how the entire medium of games has failed at storytelling. And, I’m sorry all, but I’m over it. I hear new arguments defending stories against Ludologists every few months, and I haven’t heard a new argument against game narrative in nine years. These opinions are not just bad, they’re boring.

So can we be done with this now?

#writings #interactive story #ludology vs narratology #ian bogost

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clairestroman67 · 4 years

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These Eyeball-Hazard Fasteners Are the Worst Part of Wrenching

Wrenching, for the most part, is pretty fun. You get to learn how things work. You're assembling or disassembling physical objects where you can see your progress. It's very, very satisfying. That is, until you run into something that requires a circlip. Circlips belong in the deepest pit of hell. In case you've been fortunate enough to avoid these garbage nightmare fasteners, they're C-shaped clips that snap onto things. They often have two little loops where you can bend them apart with a set of special pliers in order to slide them into place. The loops can be inside or outside of the C-shape, but either way, See: tpms reset tool reviews. they suck!Circlips have a number of different names, including "snap ring," "C-clip" and "Seeger ring." However, the most fitting name of all is one of several that even Wikipedia felt was appropriate to include: "Jesus clip." Circlips are so prone to popping across the room and so easy to lose that they do, in fact, cause people to take the Lord's name in vain, if not utter a few words that you really shouldn't repeat around small children or your mother. My friends and I had to install several of these contemptible clips when I replaced the Volkswagen Type 4 engine's pistons and cylinders. There are still probably several circlips lost in that garage. The exact circlip pliers I ended up with, which I don't recommend.Even the pliers designed to put circlips on are hot garbage. The only ones we could find at the AutoZone closest to the Volkswagen had removable ends to fit different sizes of circlip holes. That sounds great until you realize that these end attachments don't lock in very securely and also like to snap off of the pliers at really inconvenient times. That often results in the circlip itself popping off into an interdimensional wormhole, never to be seen again. There are single-size circlip pliers out there, and that's a really tempting purchase for whenever I inevitably do a full rebuild of my terrible VW's engine. I will hate my life the second I have to deal with those circlips, though. This is my free time! I thought this was supposed to be fun! Why can't I have nice things?Regardless of which pliers you use, the curved little points that poke into the holes of the circlip tend to slide off of said clip before you actually get the stupid thing on. Maybe the circlip starts tilting at a perilous angle. Maybe you didn't slide the ends of the pliers far in enough. No. 7: The offending pliers with tiny angled ends to fit into a circlip.That's when circlips often snap off the pliers directly towards your eyeballs. I understand that this is why safety glasses exist, but that doesn't make it any less startling when you have a small metal projectile flying straight at your eye. It's as if they have a built-in homing beacon to aim right for the most vulnerable parts of your face. There's a less offensive version of the circlip called an E-clip, named such for the extra material inside the C that that make it look more like an E than a C. These don't require the use of special circlip pliers to install or take off, but no! E-clips suck, too. I am convinced that the "E" stands for "evil."An E-clip.My Porsche 944's shift lever is attached to the rod that goes back to the transaxle with one such E-clip, and I have lost track of the number of times that this particular circlip variant has popped off mid-drive, forcing the unlucky person behind the wheel to hold the stupid rod onto the shifter until they can bring it in and we can find another E-clip. That circlip sucks so much that attempts to make a better, more durable shift lever have ditched the circlip entirely in favor of a normal friggin' bolt. From my perspective as a person who does this stuff for fun, there are zero redeeming qualities to these garbage fasteners beyond their ability to pop into tight spaces. According to Seeger, whose name still is synonymous with these awful things, their circlips were patented in 1927 as a cylinder locking device. 1927! How the hell have we not found a less frustrating fastener in 93 years?

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