#like. The Narrative is inherently a factor in every story because that’s how fiction works

[starbuck]

the thing is, i love The Narrative, but i also absolutely adore a truly character-focused tragedy where everyone’s downfall is caused not by larger narrative forces, but by hundreds of tiny decisions made by characters who, despite their best efforts, just suck.

[thevalleyisjolly]

Hi there! If you feel up to it, would you be willing to expand a bit more on the idea of white creators creating poc characters who are ��internally white’, especially in a post-racialized or racism-free setting & how to avoid it? It’s something I’m very concerned about but I haven’t encountered a lot of info about it outside of stories set in real world settings. Thanks & have a good day!

Hey, thanks for asking, anon!  It’s a pretty nuanced topic, and different people will have different takes on it.  I’ll share my thoughts on it, but do keep in mind that other people of colour may have different thoughts on the matter, and this is by no means definitive!  These are things I’ve observed through research, trial and error, my own experiences, or just learning from other writers.

The first thing I guess I want to clarify is that I personally am not opposed to a society without racism in fiction.  It’s exhausting and frankly boring when the only stories that characters of colour get are about racism!  So it’s a relief sometimes to just get to see characters of colour exist in a story without dealing with racism.  That being said, I feel like a lot of the time when creators establish their settings as “post-racial,” they avoid racism but they also avoid race altogether.  Not aesthetically -they may have a few or even many characters with dark skin- but the way the characters act and talk and relate to the world are “race-less” (which tends to end up as default white American/British or whatever place the creator comes from).  Which I have complicated thoughts on, but the most obvious thing that springs to mind is how such an approach implies (deliberately or not) that racism is all there is to the way POC navigate the world.  It’s definitely a significant factor, particularly for POC in Western countries, but it’s not the only thing!  There’s so much more to our experiences than just racial discrimination, and it’s a shame that a lot of “post-racial” or “racism-free” settings seem to overlook that in their eagerness to not have racism (or race) in their stories.

A quick go-to question I ask when I look at characters of colour written/played by white creators is: if this was a story or transcript I was reading, with no art or actors or what have you, would I be able to tell that this character is a character of colour?  How does the creator signal to the audience that this is a character of colour?  A lot of the time, this signal stops after the physical description - “X has dark skin” and then that’s all!  (We will not discuss the issue of racial stereotypes in depth, but it should be clear that those are absolutely the wrong way to indicate a character of colour).

This expands to a wider issue of using dark skin as a be-all-end-all indication of diversity, which is what I mean by “aesthetic” characters of colour (I used the term “internally white” originally but upon further reflection, it has some very loaded implications, many of which I’m personally familiar with, so I apologize for the usage).  Yes, the character may not “look” white, but how do they interact with the world?  Where do they come from?  What is their background, their family?  A note: this can be challenging with diaspora stories in the real world and people being disconnected (forcibly or otherwise) from their heritage (in which case, those are definitely stories that outsiders should not tell).  So let’s look at fantasy.  Even the most original writer in the world bases their world building off existing things in the real world.  So what cultures are you basing your races off of?  If you have a dark skinned character in your fantasy story, what are the real world inspirations and equivalents that you drew from, and how do you acknowledge that in a respectful, non-stereotyped way?

(Gonna quickly digress here and say that there are already so many stories about characters of colour disconnected from their heritage because ‘They didn’t grow up around other people from that culture’ or ‘They moved somewhere else and grew up in that dominant culture’ or ‘It just wasn’t important to them growing up’ and so on.  These are valid stories, and important to many people!  But when told by (usually) white creators, they’re also used, intentionally or not, as a sort of cop-out to avoid having to research or think about the character’s ethnicity and how that influences who they are.  So another point of advice: avoid always situating characters outside of their heritage.  Once or twice explored with enough nuance and it can be an interesting narrative, all the time and it starts being a problem)

Another thing I want to clarify at this point is that it’s a contentious issue about whether creators should tell stories that aren’t theirs, and different people will have different opinions.  For me personally, I definitely don’t think it’s inherently bad for creators to have diverse characters in their work, and no creator can live every experience there is.  That being said, there are caveats for how such characters are handled.  For me personally, I follow a few rules of thumb which are:

Is this story one that is appropriate for this creator to tell?  Some experiences are unique and lived with a meaningful or complex history and context behind them and the people to whom those experiences belong do not want outsiders to tell those stories.

To what extent is the creator telling this story?  Is it something mentioned as part of the narrative but not significantly explored or developed upon?  Does it form a core part of the story or character?  There are some stories that translate across cultures and it’s (tentatively) ok to explore more in depth, like immigration or intergenerational differences.  There are some stories that don’t, and shouldn’t be explored in detail (or even at all) by people outside those cultures.

How is the creator approaching this story and the people who live it?  To what extent have they done their research?  What discussions have they had with sensitivity consultants/readers?  What kind of respect are they bringing to their work?  Do they default to stereotypes and folk knowledge when they reach the limits of their research?  How do they respond to feedback or criticism when audiences point things that they will inevitably get wrong?

Going back to the “race-less” point, I think that creators need to be careful that they’re (respectfully) portraying characters of colour as obvious persons of colour.  With a very definite ‘no’ on stereotyping, of course, so that’s where the research comes in (which should comprise of more than a ten minute Google search).  If your setting is in the real world, what is the background your character comes from and how might that influence the way they act or talk or see the world?  If your setting is in a fantasy world, same question!  Obviously, avoid depicting things which are closed/exclusive to that culture (such as religious beliefs, practices, etc) and again, avoid stereotyping (which I cannot stress enough), but think about how characters might live their lives and experience the world differently based on the culture or the background they come from.

As an example of a POC character written/played well by a white person, I personally like Jackson Wei and Cindy Wong from Dimension 20’s The Unsleeping City, an urban fantasy D&D campaign.  Jackson and Cindy are NPCs played by the DM, Brennan Lee Mulligan, who did a good job acknowledging their ethnicity without resorting to stereotypes and while giving them their own unique characters and personalities.  The first time he acted as Cindy, I leapt up from my chair because she was exactly like so many old Chinese aunties and grandmothers I’ve met.  The way Jackson and Cindy speak and act and think is very Chinese (without being stereotyped), but at the same time, there’s more to their characters than being Chinese, they have unique and important roles in the story that have nothing to do with their ethnicity.  So it’s obvious that they’re people of colour, that they’re Chinese, but at the same time, the DM isn’t overstepping and trying to tell stories that aren’t his to tell.  All while not having the characters face any racism, as so many “post-racialized” settings aim for, because there are quite enough stories about that!

There a couple factors that contribute to the positive example I gave above.  The DM is particularly conscientious about representation and doing his research (not to say that he never messes up, but he puts in a lot more effort than the average creator), and the show also works with a lot of sensitivity consultants.  Which takes me to the next point - the best way to portray characters of colour in your story is to interact with people from that community.  Make some new friends, reach out to people!  Consume media by creators of colour!  In my experience so far, the most authentic Chinese characters have almost universally been created/written/played by Chinese creators.  Read books, listen to podcasts, watch shows created by people of colour.  Apart from supporting marginalized creators, you also start to pick up how people from that culture or heritage see themselves and the world, what kind of stories they have to tell, and just as importantly, what kind of stories they want being told or shared.  In other words, the best way to portray an authentic character of colour that is more than just the colour of their skin is to learn from actual people of colour (without, of course, treating them just as a resource and, of course, with proper credit and acknowledgement).

Most importantly, this isn’t easy, and you will absolutely make mistakes.  I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that you will mess up.  No matter how well researched you are, how much respect you have for other cultures, how earnestly you want to do this right, you will at some point do something that makes your POC audience uncomfortable or even offends them.  Then, your responsibility comes with your response.  Yes, you’ve done something wrong.  How do you respond to the people who are hurt or disappointed?  Do you ignore them, or double down on your words, or try to defend yourself?  Just as importantly, what are you planning to do about it in the future?  If you have a second chance, what are you going to do differently?  You will make mistakes at some point.  So what are you going to do about them?  That, I think, is an even more important question than “How can I do this right?”  You may or may not portray something accurately, but when you get something wrong, how are you going to respond?

Essentially, it all comes down to your responsibility as a creator.  As a creator, you have a responsibility to do your due diligence in research, to remain respectful to your work and to your audience, and to be careful and conscientious about how you choose to create things.  It’s not about getting things absolutely perfect or being the most socially conscious creator out there, it’s about recognizing your responsibilities as a creator with a platform, no matter how big or small, and taking responsibility for your work. 

In summary:

Research, research, research

Avoid the obvious no-no’s (stereotypes, tokenization, fetishization, straight up stealing from other cultures, etc) and think critically about what creative choices you’re making and why

Do what you’re doing now, and reach out to people (who have put themselves out there as a resource).  There are tons of resources out there by people of colour, reach out when you’re not sure about something or would like some advice!

Responsibility, responsibility, responsibility

Thank you for reaching out!  Good luck with your work!

[comicaurora]

Hello Red! Quick question with a nearly limitless number of answers. Do you have any tips for world building? In general is good, but I mostly am curious about how you went about making the actual world in your story (IE. the land masses, the mountains, rivers, deserts, and such). How does one go about the process of making the "physical" world their story takes place in?

Ah, jeez. That’s a much bigger question than it sounds, and it sounds pretty big.

First of all, you need to establish the fundamental functional core of the world. What kind of world is it? Not every fictional world is a planet - some are flat, some are hollow, some stretch out into the infinite. If it IS a planet, that’s already setting some limitations.

For instance: the world of the game Exalted is flat, and around the edges it frays out into unformed chaos, producing a fairly solid center with five “elemental poles” that produce the five elements in their purest form - an ocean in the west, a forest in the east, a frozen wasteland in the north and a burning desert in the south, with stone’s elemental pole forming the stable center. Around the edges you start getting weird Wyld influence that produces unpredictable effects and formations.

This game also features a civilization that lives and works entirely inside the massive still-living body of Autochthon, the Great Maker, a primordial being of order and technology, which is functionally a world all its own.

But let’s say you’re keeping things simple and making your world a planet.

Not every planet experiences tectonic activity. The world of Aurora doesn’t, which means mountain ranges and volcanic formations don’t form along the edges of tectonic plates like they do in the real world. Because of elemental influence in this world, deserts don’t have to form inland in the Desert Latitude Zone of about 30º-50º like they do in the real world. These are properties of the planet due to its makeup - the fused bodies of six elemental beings. Thanks to Stone maintaining much of his inner structure, it makes sense that this world would have remnants of his skeleton, circulatory system, etc all buried deep underground, giving this world a very complex system of caves that run deeper than anything on earth could manage thanks to our gooey molten center. Ocean and wind currents are in large part determined by the arrangement of continents, but because of the existence of weather gods in this world, weather patterns don’t have to strictly follow those currents, giving me a bit more freedom of narrative movement.

These are properties of the planet itself that determine properties of its surface. Some planets have molten cores, some are hollow, some are formed around nuggets of alien technology - some are similar to earth, producing similar structures by way of similar rules. Mountain ranges form because tectonic plates collide, so a world with tectonic plates would form mountains in familiar ways. But maybe your world’s volcanic activity is governed by some kind of monstrous volcano deity that bursts through the surface at random intervals to satisfy some incomprehensible hunger.

If you know the basic functional rules of the planet, you can determine what the surface could look like and how it should work.

Another thing to consider: does world-shaping magic and technology exist? If so, they’ll probably have noticeably reshaped the world. For instance, the world of the rpg Numenera has seen eight highly advanced civilizations rise and fall, each one achieving incredible levels of magic and/or technology. At some point, one of them reformed Pangaea. Another one reset the sun so it wouldn’t exhaust its hydrogen supply. These civilizations reshaped the world on a scale you can see from orbit - the in-game map shows that very clearly. The massive, circular artificial mountain range is just the most obvious change - there’s also rivers that go from organically branching to following a strict circuitboard pattern, a star-shaped forest, a giant rectangular slab of rock one hundred kilometers long, and other odd geometric patterns created potentially millions of years ago by civilizations now completely lost to history.

But beyond the world itself, the planet’s surroundings also determine some factors about its surface appearance. Because of the orbit of the planet and the axial tilt, Aurora’s world doesn’t experience the same seasons in the same order as we do in the real world. Its stars don’t stay still like ours do, so they wouldn’t trace out constellations. It has two moons, so its tides and eclipses play out in a much more complex way than ours do. Some worlds have multiple suns, or are themselves moons orbiting massive planets.

Lots of classic sci-fi focused on worldbuilding in almost the most literal sense. Larry Niven was probably the most prolific writer in that regard. Many of his stories were basically just excuses to explore the cool worlds and aliens he’d come up with. His novel Ringworld is exemplary in this regard, exploring a massive artificially-constructed ring-shaped habitat spinning around a sun. Essentially covering a planet’s entire orbit in one million-mile-wide strip of habitable land, Ringworld has a livable surface area of three million earths, artificially sculpted to resemble the familiar earth-like terrain of mountains, rivers, etc. With no inherent gravity, the centrifugal force from the ringworld’s spin is all that holds people to the surface. To keep the atmosphere from spinning out into space, massive walls surround the edges of the ring to hold it in. With no planetary dark side to provide night, huge dark panels spin over the ringworld to provide periodic intervals of darkness. Ringworld has massive storms caused by air escaping through holes punched in the exterior by meteor impacts, one of which produced a truly massive mountain that extends high enough that the summit is actually outside Ringworld’s atmosphere.

When you’re building a world, it helps to start from first principles and build out from there. But you're also building this world for a narrative purpose, meaning you probably start with some idea of how you want it to look in the end. (A pseudo-medieval fantasy world is probably supposed to look like Earth; a story with a really cool snow-empire probably needs somewhere cold enough to build it; etc.)

Functional worldbuilding, in my experience, is a matter of striking a balance between these two opposing directions of development - building the world from the ground up and justifying the features you need for the story from the top down. You can worldbuild a biome map from planetary first principles, but when you get down to story scale, the features you include can be a bit more unjustified. This region may be a jungle on the map, but you can still include a standalone mountain or river if you need one for the story. It’s very important to give yourself creative leeway so you don’t lock yourself into a design you don’t like and can’t work with. It’s probably unwise to improvise huge features, like an ocean or a major city, but if you want this fight scene to happen on a precarious mountainside in the rain, you can just let there be a mountain and let it be raining without having to work out the entire local climate and weather patterns.

[script-a-world]

Submitted via Google Form: So space is 3D with no direction. We have to create an orientation based on our position. But how about aliens in other solar systems and planets. They would orient from their position. If their orbit is inclined and also far up compared to earth, then you have a different orientation. Thus, a lot of orientation problems that are way more confusing then your left my left stuff. Heck what if I had a planet in our solar system in the same orbit plane and incline as earth but the aliens made compasses pointing to the direction of earth's south but they oriented it as up/north. And say if some galaxy organization decided on a universal orientation, how much would that upend existing orientation and make everyone's sense of direction change up even on their own planets especially non space explorers who absolutely don't need a change to orient their own world...

Tex: Which way is Earth oriented? Is the default the Northern hemisphere? Why? It’s mostly cultural associations, isn’t it? There’s some argument as to landmass and population densities (albeit incredibly weak arguments), but it boils down to Tradition™. Australia isn’t literally upside down, and as you’ve indicated, it’s all a matter of perspective.

For reference, this is the current proposed view of a galaxy similar to the Milky Way from the edge (Space.com):

Source: J. Skowron/OGLE/Astronomical Observatory, University of Warsaw

There’s a little bubble in the middle, but for the most part, the galaxy is relatively flat. Quite a lot of galaxies are like this to some degree or another, though the outlier dwarf spheroidal galaxies are relatively rare and difficult to spot (Wikipedia, Mann A).

This is pertinent because it does impart a manner of inherent standardization on forming navigation systems - up will usually be either up or down, not left or right (sorry, Uranus). Because of that, the “is Australia upside down” issue becomes one of perspective rather than “is Australia left or right”.

Most every scifi media I’ve encountered has a ship coming into orbit before landing, so it’s less “throw a dart on the board” and more “falling with style”, and in that case the orientation of the ship doesn’t actually mean much. If, however, things like hyperlanes come into play, then ideally (or hilariously) traffic becomes the norm and it’s more likely that a ship will need some sort of radioed turn signal than a shape that dictates something like “front” versus “back” or “up” versus “down”.

Further Reading

Centripetal Force by COSMOS - The SAO Encyclopedia of Astronomy

Feral: Sailing and nautical references have long been used in science fiction (hello Space Navy), and it’s easy to see why. While there are certain ship directions that require a waterline and are therefore unhelpful (unless tweaked), in general, it makes sense that on a spaceship as on a marine ship “starboard” is a more helpful direction than “right” or “left” due to its stability and ease of reference for anyone onboard regardless of where they are. Celestial navigation has been used for centuries by sailors, and NASA currently uses celestial navigation (albeit a much more sophisticated kind) for navigation via relative positioning to various celestial bodies.  

As for how the imposition of a universal standard on navigation would work, consider the history and implementation of the International System of Units (or SI or metric system), why the US does not have a (functional) federally mandated standard of measurement, and how the US, Myanmar, and Liberia (which uses USCS in addition to SI) have managed without complete metrication. The big takeaway here is that standardization like this, particularly across multiple governments is not some one and done mandate by a single authority; even when it’s a really obviously good idea to have a standard so anyone can understand a measurement or hop into a spaceship not made on their planet and be able to use the nav computer, it might not be universally adopted, and it can coexist with traditional standards.

Constablewrites: The thing about directional terminology is that it’s highly situational. If a visitor to my house asks where the bathroom is, I don’t tell them to ascend to 722 feet and then bear south, even though that would be accurate--I tell them to go upstairs and turn right. So a system for explaining where planets are in relation to each other wouldn’t at all supersede any localized means of orientation.

With that in mind, why do your characters need to know where planets are in relation to each other? Especially when that’s constantly changing, due to orbits and stellar drift? Like, we learn in grade school the order of the planets in our solar system based on how close they are to the sun, but at any given moment, that ranking can look very different. It can make sense to establish a region (like the Outer Rim in Star Wars) but beyond that any conversational terminology is going to be generalized and inaccurate at best. Frequently you’ll see a coordinate system, where it’s implied that someone had to agree where (0,0,0) is, which is the sort of thing that’s relatively simple to get consensus on, especially if the coordinates are defined within a system with an obvious central point.

The only time you would really have to be concerned where planets are in relation to each other is when you’re traveling between them. Narratively, the things that will be a factor in such a journey are how long it will take, if we have the supplies (food, fuel, spare parts, etc.) to get there, and if there are any obstacles in the way. Direction is not one of these factors, precisely because it’s so complicated--even if your characters have worked out a way of explaining it, it’s gonna be lost on your reader and therefore doesn’t matter. There might be alien/supernatural beings who are capable of making the sort of calculations a human can’t, but within the story that just means “tell the computer where we want to go and off we pop” becomes “tell Gary where we want to go and off we pop.” Don’t get bogged down in the sort of details that millennia of storytelling convention have decided we just skip over because they get in the way.

Utuabzu: In space, everything is in constant motion, so absolute position does not and cannot exist. Your position will always be relative to something, usually the nearest major body like a planet or a star. On a galactic scale, assuming you’re writing about the Milky Way or a similar galaxy, Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the core of the Milky Way (or whatever lies at the core of your galaxy) is pretty likely to serve that purpose. If you then take the general plane of the galaxy and arbitrarily declare one side “up” and the other “down”, you can use corewards/rimwards, spinwards/antispinwards to give rough directions. More likely though, any spacefaring civilisation is going to have massive databases of the relative positions and velocities of stars to permit interstellar navigation, and any star system inhabited by a spacefaring civilisation would have very well-known orbits for all major bodies. It wouldn’t be too hard to work out different systems so long as the two civilisations had a couple of shared reference points, because once they know what they call whatever body, they could just look it up in their own database and calculate travel paths. Unless something major happened, these databases wouldn’t even need to be updated all that often, as velocities in space tend to stay the same and thus positions could just be calculated from old data.

[dajokahhh]

Alright, time for some pretentious sociological-esque rambling. This is gonna be long as hell (its 1822 words to be specific) and I don’t begrudge anyone for not having the patience to read my over-thought perspectives on a murder clown. CWs for: child abuse, 

I think a lot of things have to go wrong in someone’s life for them to decide to become a clown themed supervillain. A lot of people in Gotham have issues but they don’t become the Joker. I think that as a writer it’s an interesting topic to explore, and this is especially true for roleplaying where a character might be in different scenarios or universes. This isn’t some peer reviewed or researched essay, it’s more my own personal beliefs and perspectives as they affect my writing. I think villains, generally, reflect societal understandings or fears about the world around us. This is obviously going to mean villains shift a lot over time and the perspective of the writer. In my case, I’m a queer, fat, mentally ill (cluster B personality disorder specifically) woman-thing who holds some pretty socialist ideas and political perspectives. My educational background is in history and legal studies. This definitely impacts how I write this character, how I see crime and violence, and how my particular villains reflect my understandings of the society I live in. I want to get this stuff out of the way now so that my particular take on what a potential origin story of a version of the Joker could be makes more sense.

Additionally, these backstory factors I want to discuss aren’t meant to excuse someone’s behaviour, especially not the fucking Joker’s of all people. It’s merely meant to explain how a person (because as far as we know that’s all he is) could get to that point in a way that doesn’t blame only one factor or chalk it up to “this is just an evil person.” I don’t find that particularly compelling as a writer or an audience member, so I write villains differently. I also don’t find it to be particularly true in real life either. If you like that style of writing or see the Joker or other fictional villains in this way, that’s fine. I’m not here to convince anyone they’re wrong, especially not when it comes to people’s perspectives on the nature of evil or anything that lofty. Nobody has to agree with me, or even like my headcanons; they’re just here to express the very specific position I’m writing from. 

The first thing I wanna do is set up some terms. These aren’t academic or anything, but I want to use specific and consistent phrasing for this post. When it comes to the factors that screw up someone’s life significantly (and in some instances push people towards crime), I’ll split them into micro and macro factors. Micro factors are interpersonal and personal issues, so things like personality traits, personal beliefs, mental health, family history, where and how someone is raised, and individual relationships with the people around them. Macro factors are sociological and deal with systems of oppression, cultural or social trends/norms, political and legal restrictions and/or discrimination, etc. These two groups of factors interact, sometimes in a fashion that is causative and sometimes not, but they aren’t entirely separate and the line between what is a micro vs macro issue isn’t always fixed or clear.

We’ll start in and work out. For this character, the micro factors are what determine the specifics of his actions, demeanor, and aesthetic. I think the main reason he’s the Joker and not just some guy with a whole lot of issues is his world view combined with his personality. He has a very pessimistic worldview, one that is steeped in a very toxic form of individualism, cynicism, and misanthropy. His life experience tells him the world is a cold place where everyone is on their own. To him the world is not a moral place. He doesn’t think people in general have much value. He learned at a young age that his life had no value to others, and he has internalized that view and extrapolated it to the world at large; if his life didn’t matter and doesn’t matter, why would anyone else’s? This worldview, in the case of my specific Joker, comes from a childhood rife with abandonment, abuse, and marginalization. While I will say he is definitively queer (in terms fo gender expression and non conformity, and sexuality), I’m not terribly interested in giving specific diagnoses of any mental health issues. Those will be discussed more broadly and in terms of specific symptoms with relation to how they affect the Joker’s internal experience, and externalized behaviours.

His childhood was, to say the least, pretty fucked up. The details I do have for him are that he was surrendered at birth because his parents, for some reason, did not want to care for him or could not care for him; which it was, he isn’t sure. He grew up effectively orphaned, and ended up in the foster care system. He wasn’t very “adoptable”; he had behavioural issues, mostly violent behaviours towards authority figures and other children. He never exactly grew out of these either, and the older he got the harder it was to actually be adopted. His legal name was Baby Boy Doe for a number of years, but the name he would identify the most with is Jack. Eventually he took on the surname of one of his more stable foster families, becoming Jack Napier as far as the government was concerned. By the time he had that stability in his mid to late teens, however, most of the damage had already been done. In his younger years he was passed between foster families and government agencies, always a ward of the government, something that would follow him to his time in Arkham and Gotham’s city jails. Some of his foster families were decent, others were just okay, but some were physically and psychologically abusive. This abuse is part of what defines his worldview and causes him to see the world as inherently hostile and unjust. It also became one of the things that taught him that violence is how you solve problems, particularly when emotions run high. 

This was definitely a problem at school too; moving around a lot meant going to a lot of different schools. Always being the new student made him a target, and being poor, exhibiting increasingly apparent signs of some sort of mental illness or disorder, and being typically suspected as queer (even moreso as he got into high school) typically did more harm than good for him. He never got to stay anywhere long enough to form deep relationships, and even in the places where he did have more time to do that he often ended up isolated from his peers. He was often bullied, sometimes just verbally but often physically which got worse as he got older and was more easily read as queer. This is part of why he’s so good at combat and used to taking hits; he’s been doing it since he was a kid, and got a hell of a lot of practice at school. He would tend to group up with other kids like him, other outcasts or social rejects, which in some ways meant being around some pretty negative influences in terms of peers. A lot of his acquaintances were fine, but some were more... rebellious and ended up introducing Jack to things like drinking, smoking cigarettes, using recreational drugs, and most important to his backstory, to petty crimes like theft and vandalism, sometimes even physical fights. This is another micro factor in that maybe if he had different friends, or a different school experience individually, he might have avoided getting involved in criminal activities annd may have been able to avoid taking up the mantle of The Joker.

Then there’s how his adult life has reinforced these experiences and beliefs. Being institutionalized, dealing with police and jails, and losing what little support he had as a minor and foster child just reinforced his worldview and told him that being The Joker was the right thing to do, that he was correct in his actions and perspectives. Becoming The Joker was his birthday present to himself at age 18, how he ushered himself into adulthood, and I plan to make a post about that on its own. But the fact that he decided to determine this part of his identity so young means that this has defined how he sees himself as an adult. It’s one of the last micro factors (when in life he adopted this identity) that have gotten him so entrenched in his typical behaviours and self image.

As for macro factors, a lot of them have to do specifically with the failing of Gotham’s institutions. Someone like Bruce Wayne, for example, was also orphaned and also deals with trauma; the difference for the Joker is that he had no safety net to catch him when he fell (or rather, was dropped). Someone like Wayne could fall into the cushioning of wealth and the care of someone like Alfred, whereas the Joker (metaphorically) hit the pavement hard and alone. Someone like the Joker should never have become the Joker in the first place because the systems in place in Gotham should have seen every red flag and done something to intervene; this just didn’t happen for him, and not out of coincidence but because Gotham seems like a pretty corrupt place with a lot of systemic issues. Critically underfunded social services (healthcare, welfare, children & family services) that result in a lack of resources for the people who need them and critically underfunded schools that can’t offer extra curricular activities or solid educations that allow kids to stay occupied and develop life skills are probably the most directly influential macro factors that shaped Jack into someone who could resent people and the society around him so much that he’d lose all regard for it to the point of exacting violence against others. There’s also the reality of living in a violent culture, and in violent neighbourhoods exacerbated by poverty, poor policing or overpolicing, and being raised as a boy and then a young man with certain gendered expectations about violence but especially ideas/narratives that minimalize or excuse male violence (especially when it comes to bullying or violent peer-to-peer behaviour under the guise of ‘boys will be boys’). 

Beyond that, there’s the same basic prejudices and societal forces that affect so many people: classism, homphobia/queerphobia, (toxic) masculinity/masculine expectations, and ableism (specifically in regards to people who are mentally ill or otherwise neurodivergent) stand out as the primary factors. I’m touching on these broadly because if I were to talk about them all, they would probably need their own posts just to illustrate how they affect this character. But they definitely exist in Gotham if it’s anything like the real world, and I think it’s fair to extrapolate that these kinds of these exist in Gotham and would impact someone like The Joker with the background I’ve given him.

I have no idea how to end this so if you got this far, thank you for reading!

[pumpkins-s]

(1/2) Hi! I just came here from SLAOS to say that your story is so, so awesome and I saw that part of your trouble with continuing is the association with VLD. Have you ever thought about turning it into something original? It might sound daunting if you've never done that before, but it's not that bad - it's something I've done a few times (though I've never written anything as good as SLAOS!). I could even help you, if you have an outline or something?

Hey!! Thank you for this Ask--it’s always a little startling but so nice to get these occasional reminders people still read (and reread) and enjoy SLAOS. The enthusiasm for this fic has always bowled me over and even years on continues to do so.

In answer to your actual question...I’m afraid my answer might get a little complicated, so forgive me for that, but it opens the door for a lot of things I have previously and continue to think about in regards to SLAOS, and in such a direct context I can’t help but address them.

This might get a little lengthy, so for sanity’s sake, I’ve put it under a cut.

I’ve certainly thought in the past about reworking SLAOS into something original. And writing original work on its face isn’t necessarily something I’m concerned about. I’m an MFA in Writing student. I do that.

I do have concerns regarding SLAOS specifically, though, that make me very hesitant to ever consider adapting it to an original work without significant changes. These are very separate from my original problems with VLD and its fandom nightmares. It’s true that the main, original, reason I stopped working on SLAOS is because of VLD. However, since then, my reasons for not finishing this fic have changed somewhat. I’ve had enough time away from VLD that I think I am capable of going “fuck canon, my city now,” and finishing this fic purely out of love for it, my characters, and the dedicated fans it has. As I’ve always said, the utter love people have for this fic has always moved me--it has helped me heal in many ways I cannot begin to explain and further encouraged me to pursue my dreams of being an original novelist. 

So, my main issue here is not about VLD and its bullshit. There’s a number of other factors influencing my considerations on finishing this fic, such as time and what fics I should prioritize, but I wouldn’t say even any of these are a deciding factor on finishing SLAOS.

For me, it’s a question on whether it is a smart, prudent, or even ethical decision to make in finishing SLAOS. 

Let me say this: I love SLAOS. I love it with my whole heart. Lance and his family kept me company in very dark times, and a lot of it came from very personal places about my own gender struggles, family conflicts, and struggles to find places I belonged. 

But I often question as to whether I should have ever written SLAOS.

Certainly, as a 21yr old, I do not think it is a fic I would start now. But I was 17 at the time, and my perspectives and the amount of forethought I put into my work have changed. 

When I started SLAOS, I had very little plans going in. I loved Lance, I loved angst, I have a known propensity in my work for family drama and death, and I wanted to write Lance the kind of complex, perhaps sometimes tragic backstory I felt he deserved as much as, say, Keith or Pidge, who got that in canon. So, I crafted a tale about a youngest child raised largely by his sister, who is gender nonconforming and free spirited, and who then loses his sister and must learn to live in a world without her--and without his childhood innocence. He grows up, he learns when he must conform to achieve his goals and when he will stand his ground, he learns about the complications in his own family he didn’t see when he was younger, he forms new relationships and tries to work through a grief that never leaves him. 

On the surface, I don’t think any of this is bad. In fact, it sounds like a pretty good story to read or to write. Continuing on, though, the complications form. 

I’m not cuban or cuban-american, and I’m not latinx, and Lance and his family are. I am nonbinary, queer, half-jewish, and the child of immigrants, and all of that absolutely influenced the writing of SLAOS when digging into my personal and family history (even Lance being a youngest child raised primarily by an older sister was inspired by my own grandfather--who was the youngest of 10 children and was raised by his sister)--as too did my childhood in a largely-latinx area of Southern California, and the latinx friends I had and have, influence the story. A lot of it came from very real places experienced, felt, and seen--and what was pure fiction was just that. Innocent fiction written out of improvisation and love for that character.

However, in making Lance and his family less economically-stable, and similar things in the story, I perhaps inevitably wrote into stereotypes about latinx families I’m now more cognizant of. These may be stereotypes that come from many realities, and from many people I have known, but that doesn’t deny they’re stereotypes. Writing a stereotype is not inherently a bad thing, of course, but it does become more sticky when you’re not of that exact minority demographic. I didn’t write into that stereotype intentionally--my logic as best as I can remember was “I want Lance to have a complex backstory. Lance’s family is canonically big. I love big families who are emotionally close--they should all live in one house. Hm, they maybe have financial struggles”--but that doesn’t make it any less there.

I can point to other flaws in the work. The other perhaps questionable improv decision to make Lance’s father a gambler and then kill him off, even if that was pretty much just done on the logic of “oh god I don’t want to write about fathers. I have a shit relationship to my father. Fuck. Shit. I’ll kill him off there” is another sticky issue for me. Ritzie’s introduction scene has...issues, to say the least, as well. These may be scenes and plot points people don’t find issue with, haven’t considered in that light before, or even find me silly for worrying over now, but I am famously hyper-critical of my own work. I can’t help but worry and think often on how to be the best writer I can be, and with the most empathy.

There’s a lot of recent and ongoing discussion about who is allowed to write what stories. Certainly, I don’t subscribe to every opinion just because it’s been argued by someone or other--for example, I’m semi-critical of the concept that one can only write narrators and main characters of their own exact identities, particularly and especially if your work is removed from a plot or major content that deals with that identity. But being critical of some opinions does not mean that the overall thinking on “am I a good person to write this kind of story” is bad.

I don’t question that I was the only person who could have created the McClains exactly as they are in my story. They are mine, my characters, and that is intrinsic to me and who I am as a writer. But, I do question whether I was the best person to write that exact narrative, and whether I should have at least made different choices about some of the McClain’s circumstances and their world. SLAOS isn’t a story about race or wealth, but I cannot deny that those factors are present in the story, perhaps more heavily than others I have written.

In short, if I was a novelist conceptualizing this story now as an original piece of work, I do not think I would feel comfortable writing it. I would be concerned about the optics and the potential harm I could cause, to say the least. So, the only original adaption of SLAOS I can see myself ever writing would likely have to be different in many ways.

As it is, I am cautious of any original adaption or thoughts of adaption of SLAOS, at least at the moment--even if it was only released online and never published in any official manner. 

As for finishing the fanfic.. I still have remaining concerns. It is one thing to say I wrote this fic in good faith at 17, it is another to say I made the conscious decision to finish it at 21. Even if my concerns are seen as hyperbolic, I never know what the future will bring, and I don’t need the heat and I don’t need discourse. It’s in the past now. If I finish it, I make it my present. 

This isn’t me saying hands-down I will never finish SLAOS. I certainly know what I wanted to do with the rest of the fic, and I loved the ending I had planned (literally line by line planned. it was a killer ending). The readers and their pure love for this fic have always moved me and made me want to finish this story, if only for them. I’ve heard testimonials on how much this fic has helped people through dark spaces, and that means the goddamn world to me. It’s all I’ve ever wanted as a writer.

But--again momentarily setting aside my real ethical concerns about finishing this--I also have to consider what’s best for me, my career, and my own sanity. I would worry to death about the potential consequences of finishing this fic--who it may hurt, and how it could hurt me. I do not see a world where I finish this fic without modifications to several scenes, and disclaimers in my notes concerning my current adult thoughts on this story and its problems in regards to things that are too rooted in the fic to change, like Lance’s family’s economic situation. And, as of now, I just do not have the time or energy to do that. 

So. SLAOS. I love it, I hate it, I worry about it intensely. I don’t want to let anyone down. I don’t want to hurt anyone. Will I finish it--do I want to finish it? I have no goddamn idea. It’s complicated. that’s the TLDR of this post. it’s really complicated.

Some of you may be completely boggled by my concerns addressed above, some of you may even find them silly. Some of you, for the first time, might look back on this story and see it in a less glowing light. I don’t know. You’re welcome to send me your thoughts and questions. But this is something I have been thinking about for a while and I had to get it off my chest.

Idk. Please try to understand where I’m coming from, even if you don’t agree with my concerns or the opinions being discussed among writers I’ve talked about. For me, these are incredibly real concerns, issues, and fears. 

That’s it. Loraine loves you. Stan Mavis. Peace out.

[bigskydreaming]

Saying that a fictional depiction of a rape is the same as promoting rape is like saying that writing a story about a character being gaybashed is promoting gaybashing. If you have the right to write a story based on your experiences, why don't I? Also, where's the line between depiction and romanticisation? There is none. At all. -- queer survivor who will not let you or anyone silence me.

Literally not something I’ve ever said, so congrats on the reading comprehension and thanks for being the 8,647th person to hop in my inbox or on one of my posts about this subject and attempt to make it about everything EXCEPT for things I actually have said and believe.

And for the record, there is a very clear line between depiction and romanticisation, are you kidding me??? Do you even get how communication works?

A work of fiction that essentially says “here are events that happened,” is a depiction.

A work of fiction that essentially says “here are events that happened, and the way in which they happened is intended to be received as sexy or romantic, as is further evidenced by reader reception in the form of comments about how sexy or romantic that depiction of events that happened was,”

....THAT is romanticization.

I am so, so, soooooooooo endlessly tired of being engaged by people who insist on being willfully dishonest and hypocritical about how much power they perceive fiction as having.

Every other day of the week, fanfic is empowering because it gives literally any of us a platform with which to reach other fans and express our own ideas, storylines and emotions regarding characters we all share an interest in.

But the second THIS conversation comes up, in ANY of its myriad forms, suddenly you’re all like, “ummmmm.....I am just a helpless little author who has never shaped anything I’ve ever written with any kind of specific intent or goal towards how I want the audience to receive or perceive my story?? I wouldn’t even know how to go about doing that? Is that even a thing?”

You all know damn well the difference between a story that depicts rape, pedophilia and incest, and a story that romanticizes/sensationalizes/uses those things as the specific elements that are supposed to result in that story being sexually gratifying to readers who engage with it.

Like, lmfao, I’m not the prude anyone makes me out to be, any more than I’m this evil censor about to go into all your houses and strip you of your ability to write whatever you want. Shockingly, guess what? I’ve written erotica myself! Not about those topics, clearly, but I’ve literally written and sold stories that I wrote with the specific intention of being perceived as erotic, sexy, romantic, etc.....

BECAUSE I, LIKE MOST OTHER WRITERS, KNOWS HOW TO GEAR A STORY IN VARIOUS DIRECTIONS WITHOUT HAVING TO ACTUALLY INCLUDE THE HEADERS “THIS PART IS JUST A DEPICTION” AND “OKAY NOW THIS PART YOU SHOULD THINK IS SEXY.”

LOLOL I’m so fucking tired. Literally the only message I have ever expressed on this subject in all the years I’ve been posting about it, on my own damn blog, in my own damn threads, with people like you always being the one to come and engage ME and still somehow operate under the impression that YOU’RE the ones being silenced here, like I’m the one going around to shut down everything YOU’RE saying every time you even open your mouth on a specific subject.....

Like, did I make that clear enough? Was the irony pointed enough there? Is it maybe sinking in a little, the utter ABSURDITY of people like you streaming into my inbox night after night, week after week, to yell “STOP SILENCING ME, I WILL NOT BE OPPRESSED OR CENSORED BY YOU”.....

When I literally have no idea who most of you are, thus couldn’t silence you even if I WANTED to, which again, is not something I’ve ever even expressed, given that my message on this subject over. And over. And over. And over. AND ALWAYS AND CONSISTENTLY IS:

I am not for censorship. Not only do I hate censorship, I don’t view it as even slightly effective, and at most its like trying to slap a bandaid on top of a wound without any attempt to even examine the injury itself and see how it came to be and what it really needs to be effectively treated.

My viewpoints on this subject have always been about one thing and one thing only: personal accountability.

As in, I advocate for people to just fucking apply a little more awareness to their OWN power, their OWN impact, their OWN platform....even if that platform is only fanfiction on the internet, yes.

Power and impact and influence are all still there, even among fanfic writers, as anyone who’s ever posted or reblogged about the legitimacy of fanfiction as a form of fiction, like, already damn well knows, so its so exasperating seeing that fly right out the window the second anyone asks a fanfic writer to scrutinize their own work to even just make sure THEY THEMSELVES are okay with ALL the potential impacts of whatever it is they’re writing.

Fiction is just language. Language is just a tool for communicating ideas, intents, emotions, experiences and more.

And like literally any other tool in the history of humanity, for this is literally the nature of tools and how they work....

A tool has no inherent ‘goodness’ that makes it IMPOSSIBLE to be wielded in a way that produces harm. It simply exists. And its capacity to help or to harm, to be used in positive ways or negative ways.....depends SOLELY on its wielder and how they apply that tool and to what ends.

Fiction, whether the kind on bookshelves in stores or the kind found only on Ao3....has tremendous power. It communicates new ideas to people who’ve never considered a certain point of view before. It conveys new experiences to people who would never encounter something depicted firsthand in their own day to day lives. It conveys emotions, imbued into the narrative by the author themselves, even if those emotions are not necessarily always what the author thinks they are or intended them to be or not always ones readers truly read into the text versus simply project onto the text themselves. 

But there are an infinite variety of ways in which fiction has power, has impact, can and does reach people. It connects people, linking them via shared experiences or viewpoints or ideas so that a reader seeing themselves represented in what an author is writing can at least say they’re not alone, there’s someone else out there who says or thinks or experiences things similar to them. It can persuade people, exposing them to new viewpoints they’ve never considered before and convincing them of their validity by the arguments written into the text, even if they were never intended that way or the author might not even consciously be aware of making an argument in the text. It can fortify people, reassuring them that a perspective they have on a subject does have validity because here in this story, there’s someone thinking the same things for the same reasons. It can help people heal or even just hold on long enough to heal, by seeing their own tragedies reflected in a fictional mirror that still manages to impart that healing and recovery after something tragic are possible, that there is potentially more good still to come, in a reader’s life just as in a character’s story.

All I have ever expressed, over and over and over, is that its important to always keep sight of the fact that because fiction is just a tool, and not any more infallible than any writer using it to convey their thoughts and ideas and emotions.....

Fiction DOES still have just as much power to harm, too, if wielded irresponsibly. Everything I just detailed above has a flip side. Its a two way street, it can go both ways. Fiction can just as easily connect bigoted people, white supremacists, homophobes, transphobes, etc.....via shared experiences or viewpoints that reflect and empower the perspectives of bigots, etc. It can persuade people to do or think things that aren’t healthy, by exposing them to toxic viewpoints and convincing them of their validity due to a reader being vulnerable to various arguments that are made in bad faith. And no, this does not mean that I’m saying people run out and do what they see depicted or even romanticized in fiction. I’m simply saying fiction holds every capacity to convince people of the validity of something harmful as much as something healing.....it all just depends on how important that particular thing or argument is to their specific lives, how vulnerable or exposed they are to particular arguments, how much weight they give it, etc, etc. There are a ton of factors here. All I’m saying is this IS a factor, its included among those many, many other things. 

Moving on....it can fortify the worst kind of people, reassure them that their prejudices or toxic viewpoint on a subject has validity because a story is seemingly endorsing it without any sign within the narrative that the characters’ perspective on this matter IS flawed, or toxic or unhealthy or prejudiced, rather than just a straight forward and unbiased depiction. And yes, it can hinder personal healing or recovering, by keeping a reader mired in the same kind of thoughts or emotions they’re already currently battling and reinforcing their personal perception that there is no alternative to those things, etc, etc.

None of these are in any way a given, with any given story, any given writer, any given reader. There are tons of variables, as I said.

But also as I’ve said....my only point has always just been that these things EXIST, the potential for these things to happen in this or that way EXISTS, and it is willfully dishonest of fanfic writers and readers to insist on the power of fanfiction to help, to heal, to connect people......while simultaneously trying to absolve themselves of even the need to be CAREFUL with how they wield the power of fiction, because apparently, with fanfiction, its ONLY ever a one way street. Fanfiction NEVER has the power to harm, to reinforce negative or prejudiced perspectives, impart and convince readers of toxic viewpoints and arguments.

How can you pretend that’s not how this works? That saying la la la, I’m JUST a fanfic writer, I only have a couple hundred readers maybe, so by virtue of that, somehow, only good things can result from my writing, there’s noooooooo possible negative impact to any of my work or various ideas I put forth....

Like, that isn’t a thing! LOLOL. That’s not a disclaimer with any power or truth. All it is, is a fandom-spread and perpetuated lie meant to reassure people that here in this space, there is a kind of power that unlike ALL OTHER FORMS OF POWER IN EXISTENCE.....can only ever be a good thing, a positive thing...and thus there is no need for any one in a fandom space, whether writer or reader, to ever have to be on their guard or careful about what they say or believe the way they have to be ‘in the outside world.’ Here, in fandom, you can finally just RELAX, you can just enjoy yourself and have fun and not have to worry about whether you’re doing or saying the wrong thing because none of those things are even a POSSIBILITY here, and anyone who says otherwise is just trying to tarnish our perfect paradise, let the ugliness of the outside world into it via unnecessary and unasked for criticism and scrutiny that isn’t fair to apply here because its not like any of us have any real power, we’re just fans, writing stuff on the internet.

And people are just...DETERMINED not to accept that, or to even LOOK at it as the actual subject being discussed in a lot of these conversations. So you spin everything I and others like me say, turn them into arguments we’ve never actually espoused, warn against the perils of censorship we’ve never actually asked or advocated for, stand tall against the attempts to silence you...THAT HAVE NEVER ACTUALLY EXISTED.

Like....the message that bothers me, the communication that I personally am disturbed by seeing practically everywhere I look in fandom? Yes....its the message conveyed by the mere existence, the sheer volume of fics that depict traumas exactly like mine....but in ways that sexualize them, make them seem more about erotic fantasy rather than the abuses of power that they are in real life. I hate these kinds of stories, and just how damn MUCH of them there are, its true. I’m not denying it, I’ve never denied it. To me, them and all the hundreds and thousands of kudos and comments they receive - even without reading the fics directly, just via a mere AWARENESS that these conversations are taking place, no matter how hard I try to pretend otherwise - to me, the message being conveyed over and over by them is that in the right light, from the right angle, things that happened to me at various points in my life are HOT, are SEXY.....

Like as an example, since apparently it seems I’ve been using my ‘gaybashed’ card too freely and unfairly shutting down conversations like this (lol again, let’s not forget, conversations that I begin, on my own blog, and that not a damn one of you is forced to interact with no matter how hard to play the STOP SILENCING angle when voluntarily approaching ME and trying to shame or guilt ME into not talking so much about this topic, aka SILENCING MEEEEEEEEEE)...

Anyway, all that aside, for this example let me pull from something I don’t talk about as much: the years when I was an escort in my late teens and early twenties, literally getting into bed with much older and extremely predatory men because I needed the money....AND because I was using this in part as a ‘coping mechanism’ to convince myself that sex had no power to hurt me. That thus by doing this I was retroactively taking away my rapes’ ability to harm me in the first place, and thus, I had never really been harmed and was FINE..... Except I was very much NOT okay, I absolutely ended up revictimized and further traumatizing myself because a lot of the people I interacted with at that period of my life were NOT good people and DIDN’T have a care for my best interests or even safety, even while saying and doing all the right things, the sexy things, even the romantic things...

I mean, I’m just saying....I could absolutely, without a doubt, write some of my own life experiences, things that were traumatizing to me and have left lingering scars....I could take some of those and write them in such a way as to have a sexualized or romanticized slant, publish them on Ao3 with names swapped out for some fictional characters and call it an AU.......and I for sure would get comments and kudos about how hot all of that was.

Now, I have no interest in doing that, obviously....but the thing is, I don’t HAVE to. Because those stories already EXIST, even if they don’t exactly match up to my specific experiences and they’re written by people who literally have no idea I even exist, let alone have lived through scenes eerily similar to what they write.

And just like those stories exist....the comments, and the kudos, and the praise and the glorification of these stories, the events depicted within them, the DYNAMICS depicted within them....these already exist as well. And I’m painfully, PAINFULLY aware of that. Every day. Every fandom I’m in. Every fandom I’ve ever been in.

And it SUCKS. I hate knowing that two posts down from some story I’m reading, there’s a story that has people drooling over the exact kind of predator that fucked with me and my head so much back in those years. I hate stumbling into an untagged AU every once in awhile and finding Bruce being depicted as Dick’s sugar daddy, preying on the MUCH younger man that we all normally associate with being his SON.....and knowing from past experience that if I click on the comments, almost without a doubt, judging by the 22 comments on one chapter alone, I’ll find enough swooning over how HOT and ROMANTIC this is, that it will most likely make me violently ill for the rest of the night. Because I so INTIMATELY know that there is NOTHING safe or healthy or not fucking traumatizing about that kind of dynamic with a person who is SUPPOSED to be safe and trustworthy to be around.......and I’m reminded all over again, just like I have been at SO MANY points in my life....how many people just don’t want to HEAR this, because they prefer their fantasy over the reality I know firsthand....BUT NONE OF THAT MAKES MY REALITY ANY LESS REAL OR LIVED THROUGH.

The thing so many of you don’t get is....none of this is even about whether I read these stories or not, none of it is about whether all of them get tagged properly or not....hell, none of it is actually about whether the people writing these fics are actually pedophiles or ‘endorsing’ these things or anything like that....I NEVER ARGUE ANY OF THAT, BECAUSE NONE OF IT IS THE POINT.

The point is just....the sheer bombardment of a singular message across so many fandoms, so many pairings, from so many people....

With that message being, to a very wide audience....with the right character in the right scenario....the things that for various people like myself and other survivors who DON’T like being surrounded by all this either, whether or not there are many survivors who for whatever reason DO find themselves okay with it... 

(And considering our existence and arguments don’t invalidate your acceptance of these things, why do you so confidently tout the idea that YOUR existence and arguments should somehow innately just make all of this less objectionable to us? Just curious.)

The point is, no matter who is writing these stories or why, whether they ACTUALLY endorse these things or would never in a million years find them acceptable in real life (and again, why are you so confident that this is true for EVERYONE who writes these things, and by extension, why the FUCK do you presume its okay to expect all survivors to just give EVERYONE the benefit of the doubt as to why they’re writing these stories, when some of them are virtually indistinguishable from the kinds of things someone who DID find these things hot and sexy to enact on others in real life, would write themselves)....

Like.....none of that matters. Because none of that in any way affects the reality so many of us experience in fandom spaces:

That over and over we’re reminded that what was devastatingly traumatic for us, and impacts every day of our lives ever since.....to a wide audience of others, is just a hot, sexy fantasy and they’re all crying out MORE, MORE, GIVE US MORE.

And you all just sit back there and just us for saying....”it really bothers us to be surrounded by this message everywhere we turn.”

You shame US for saying this makes our fandom environment toxic and hostile at times.....and you flip the script and ask how dare WE shame survivors, who are probably just using these fics to cope....and literally ALL the people reading and writing these fics are survivors probably, I mean, you don’t know....and of course it’d be wildly inappropriate to ask so its probably best to just assume everyone writing these things are survivors....and thus we, no matter if we are survivors ourselves, have no business SHAMING or SILENCING them for just working through their shit in ways that its not even like it can actually hurt us anyway.

Except it DOES. It IS. And we say that, and you REFUSE TO HEAR US. You say “well this isn’t true for me, so it can’t be true for you or else just doesn’t matter if it is,” even though at no point have I or others I know ever said “because this is true for me, I am assuming it to be true for all survivors.”

You come into MY inbox, and act like you’re standing tall and proud against MY silencing tactics. Yeah, would I love it if I could go even a single day without having to gingerly avoid these stories and all mention of them, all casual references to them, all glowing praise of them, everywhere I look in fandom? Absofuckinglutely. Does me WANTING this thing - this thing we all know is never in actual danger of happening, lol - does this in ANY way ACTIONABLY translate into me censoring anyone, impeding anyone’s ability to write or post or read these things, is it me going in the comments of any of these fics and yelling HOW DARE YOU WRITE THIS and when that doesn’t get me the response I want, going to the blogs of the writers and yelling I WILL NOT BE SILENCED?

No. No. And fuck no. None of these things are happening, none of these things are reality.

And yet here you are, like SOOOOOOO MANY before you and like SOOOOOO MANY who will inevitably follow you in the future....

And your condescension and disdain for me and everything I think and everything I’ve lived through and my willingness or even just the way I choose to talk about it, just JUMPS off the page.

But the thing that will never not just absolutely fucking SLAY me, is the sheer absurdity of the accusations you and so many others level against me for MY censorship, MY shaming of other survivors. MY silencing tactics or whatever....

When you consider the fact that, yeah, I would love not having to see all these stories and other related things every single day. I would LOVE it.

But I’m not doing a single damn thing to make that a reality, to make that a DANGER, a THREAT to you and the thing you enjoy.....

Other than posting about it on my blog, and expressing how I feel about it, and arguing why I wish other people would spend more time considering perspectives like mine on the matter.

That’s it. That’s the whole grand conspiracy. That’s my awful and terrible assault on you and your autonomy and your freedom of speech and your interests and likes.

And meanwhile, here you are, stepping forward to confront ME in my own space about things I’ve said here and nowhere else that you’re forced to engage with and interact with and incapable of avoiding....

And you have the utter GALL to tell ME that YOU will not be silenced by the likes of me.

When every single person who reads this knows DAMN well that you and others like you only send me all these anons......

Because you want me to shut up and just never talk about these things again, as much if not more than I wish all these people would not even stop writing.....but rather just....would consider writing literally ANYTHING else instead.

But somehow, for some reason....when YOU want ME to stop talking....you’re not trying to silence me, or censor me, or any of those other things, oh know.

Its just me talking about my own damn feelings, experiences and opinions on my own damn blog.

THAT’S the real threat to fandom togetherness, community, and freedom of speech and personal autonomy.

LOL. Awfully convenient, wouldn’t you say?

But whatever. Its all good, anon. You go ahead and keep the moral high ground here. You’ve earned it, clearly.

[chiseler]

Utopia and Apocalypse: Pynchon’s Populist/Fatalist Cinema

The rhythmic clapping resonates inside these walls, which are hard and glossy as coal: Come-on! Start-the-show! Come-on! Start-the-show! The screen is a dim page spread before us, white and silent. The film has broken, or a projector bulb has burned out. It was difficult even for us, old fans who’ve always been at the movies (haven’t we?) to tell which before the darkness swept in.

--from the last page of Gravity’s Rainbow

To begin with a personal anecdote: Writing my first book (to be published) in the late 1970s, an experimental autobiography titled Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (Harper & Row, 1980), published in French as Mouvements: Une vie au cinéma (P.O.L, 2003), I wanted to include four texts by other authors—two short stories (“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” by Delmore Schwartz, “The Secret Integration” by Thomas Pynchon) and two essays (“The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window” by Charles Eckert, “My Life With Kong” by Elliott Stein)—but was prevented from doing so by my editor, who argued that because the book was mine, texts by other authors didn’t belong there. My motives were both pluralistic and populist: a desire both to respect fiction and non-fiction as equal creative partners and to insist that the book was about more than just myself and my own life. Because my book was largely about the creative roles played by the fictions of cinema on the non-fictions of personal lives, the anti-elitist nature of cinema played a crucial part in these transactions.`

In the case of Pynchon’s 1964 story—which twenty years later, in his collection Slow Learner, he would admit was the only early story of his that he still liked—the cinematic relevance to Moving Places could be found in a single fleeting but resonant detail: the momentary bonding of a little white boy named Tim Santora with a black, homeless, alcoholic jazz musician named Carl McAfee in a hotel room when they discover that they’ve both seen Blood Alley (1955), an anticommunist action-adventure with John Wayne and Lauren Bacall, directed by William Wellman. Pynchon mentions only the film’s title, but the complex synergy of this passing moment of mutual recognition between two of its dissimilar viewers represented for me an epiphany, in part because of the irony of such casual camaraderie occurring in relation to a routine example of Manichean Cold War mythology. Moreover, as a right-wing cinematic touchstone, Blood Alley is dialectically complemented in the same story by Tim and his friends categorizing their rebellious schoolboy pranks as Operation Spartacus, inspired by the left-wing Spartacus (1960) of Kirk Douglas, Dalton Trumbo, and Stanley Kubrick.

For better and for worse, all of Pynchon’s fiction partakes of this populism by customarily defining cinema as the cultural air that everyone breathes, or at least the river in which everyone swims and bathes. This is equally apparent in the only Pynchon novel that qualifies as hackwork, Inherent Vice (2009), and the fact that Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of it is also his worst film to date—a hippie remake of Chinatown in the same way that the novel is a hippie remake of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald—seems logical insofar as it seems to have been written with an eye towards selling the screen rights. As Geoffrey O’Brien observed (while defending this indefensible book and film) in the New York Review of Books (January 3, 2015), “Perhaps the novel really was crying out for such a cinematic transformation, for in its pages people watch movies, remember them, compare events in the ‘real world’ to their plots, re-experience their soundtracks as auditory hallucinations, even work their technical components (the lighting style of cinematographer James Wong Howe, for instance) into aspects of complex conspiratorial schemes.” (Despite a few glancing virtues, such as  Josh Brolin’s Nixonesque performance as "Bigfoot" Bjornsen, Anderson’s film seems just as cynical as its source and infused with the same sort of misplaced would-be nostalgia for the counterculture of the late 60s and early 70s, pitched to a generation that didn’t experience it, as Bertolucci’s Innocents: The Dreamers.)

From The Crying of Lot 49’s evocation of an orgasm in cinematic terms (“She awoke at last to find herself getting laid; she’d come in on a sexual crescendo in progress, like a cut to a scene where the camera’s already moving”) to the magical-surreal guest star appearance of Mickey Rooney in wartime Europe in Gravity’s Rainbow, cinema is invariably a form of lingua franca in Pynchon’s fiction, an expedient form of shorthand, calling up common experiences that seem light years away from the sectarianism of the politique des auteurs. This explains why his novels set in mid-20th century, such as the two just cited, when cinema was still a common currency cutting across classes, age groups, and diverse levels of education, tend to have the greatest number of movie references. In Gravity’s Rainbow—set mostly in war-torn Europe, with a few flashbacks to the east coast U.S. and flash-forwards to the contemporary west coast—this even includes such anachronistic pop ephemera as the 1949 serial King of the Rocket Men and the 1955 Western The Return of Jack Slade (which a character named Waxwing Blodgett is said to have seen at U.S. Army bases during World War 2 no less than twenty-seven times), along with various comic books.

Significantly, “The Secret Integration”, a title evoking both conspiracy and countercultural utopia, is set in the same cozy suburban neighborhood in the Berkshires from which Tyrone Slothrop, the wartime hero or antihero of Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), aka “Rocketman,” springs, with his kid brother and father among the story’s characters. It’s also the same region where Pynchon himself grew up. And Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s magnum opus and richest work, is by all measures the most film-drenched of his novels in its design as well as its details—so much so that even its blocks of text are separated typographically by what resemble sprocket holes. Unlike, say, Vineland (1990), where cinema figures mostly in terms of imaginary TV reruns (e.g., Woody Allen in Young Kissinger) and diverse cultural appropriations (e.g., a Noir Center shopping mall), or the post-cinematic adventures in cyberspace found in the noirish (and far superior) east-coast companion volume to Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge (2013), cinema in Gravity’s Rainbow is basically a theatrical event with a social impact, where Fritz Lang’s invention of the rocket countdown as a suspense device (in the 1929 Frau im mond) and the separate “frames” of a rocket’s trajectory are equally relevant and operative factors. There are also passing references to Lang’s Der müde Tod, Die Nibelungen, Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, and Metropolis—not to mention De Mille’s Cleopatra, Dumbo, Freaks, Son of Frankenstein, White Zombie, at least two Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals, Pabst, and Lubitsch—and the epigraphs introducing the novel’s second and third sections (“You will have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood — Merian C. Cooper to Fay Wray” and “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more…. –Dorothy, arriving in Oz”) are equally steeped in familiar movie mythology.

These are all populist allusions, yet the bane of populism as a rightwing curse is another near-constant in Pynchon’s work. The same ambivalence can be felt in the novel’s last two words, “Now everybody—“, at once frightening and comforting in its immediacy and universality. With the possible exception of Mason & Dixon (1997), every Pynchon novel over the past three decades—Vineland, Against the Day (2006), Inherent Vice, and Bleeding Edge—has an attractive, prominent, and sympathetic female character betraying or at least acting against her leftist roots and/or principles by being first drawn erotically towards and then being seduced by a fascistic male. In Bleeding Edge, this even happens to the novel’s earthy protagonist, the middle-aged detective Maxine Tarnow. Given the teasing amount of autobiographical concealment and revelation Pynchon carries on with his public while rigorously avoiding the press, it is tempting to see this recurring theme as a personal obsession grounded in some private psychic wound, and one that points to sadder-but-wiser challenges brought by Pynchon to his own populism, eventually reflecting a certain cynicism about human behavior. It also calls to mind some of the reflections of Luc Moullet (in “Sainte Janet,” Cahiers du cinéma no. 86, août 1958) aroused by Howard Hughes’ and Josef von Sternberg’s Jet Pilot and (more incidentally) by Ayn Rand’s and King Vidor’s The Fountainhead whereby “erotic verve” is tied to a contempt for collectivity—implicitly suggesting that rightwing art may be sexier than leftwing art, especially if the sexual delirium in question has some of the adolescent energy found in, for example, Hughes, Sternberg, Rand, Vidor, Kubrick, Tashlin, Jerry Lewis, and, yes, Pynchon.

One of the most impressive things about Pynchon’s fiction is the way in which it often represents the narrative shapes of individual novels in explicit visual terms. V, his first novel, has two heroes and narrative lines that converge at the bottom point of a V; Gravity’s Rainbow, his second—a V2 in more ways than one—unfolds across an epic skyscape like a rocket’s (linear) ascent and its (scattered) descent; Vineland offers a narrative tangle of lives to rhyme with its crisscrossing vines, and the curving ampersand in the middle of Mason & Dixon suggests another form of digressive tangle between its two male leads; Against the Day, which opens with a balloon flight, seems to follow the curving shape and rotation of the planet.

This compulsive patterning suggests that the sprocket-hole design in Gravity’s Rainbow’s section breaks is more than just a decorative detail. The recurrence of sprockets and film frames carries metaphorical resonance in the novel’s action, so that Franz Pökler, a German rocket engineer allowed by his superiors to see his long-lost daughter (whom he calls his “movie child” because she was conceived the night he and her mother saw a porn film) only once a year, at a children’s village called Zwölfkinder, and can’t even be sure if it’s the same girl each time:

So it has gone for the six years since. A daughter a year, each one about a year older, each time taking up nearly from scratch. The only continuity has been her name, and Zwölfkinder, and Pökler’s love—love something like the persistence of vision, for They have used it to create for him the moving image of a daughter, flashing him only these summertime frames of her, leaving it to him to build the illusion of a single child—what would the time scale matter, a 24th of a second or a year (no more, the engineer thought, than in a wind tunnel, or an oscillograph whose turning drum you can speed or slow at will…)?

***

Cinema, in short, is both delightful and sinister—a utopian dream and an apocalyptic nightmare, a stark juxtaposition reflected in the abrupt shift in the earlier Pynchon passage quoted at the beginning of this essay from present tense to past tense, and from third person to first person. Much the same could be said about the various displacements experienced while moving from the positive to the negative consequences of  populism.

Pynchon’s allegiance to the irreverent vulgarity of kazoos sounding like farts and concomitant Spike Jones parodies seems wholly in keeping with his disdain for David Raksin and Johnny Mercer’s popular song “Laura” and what he perceives as the snobbish elitism  of the Preminger film it derives from, as expressed in his passionate liner notes to the CD compilation “Spiked!: The Music of Spike Jones” a half-century later:

The song had been featured in the 1945 movie of the same name, supposed to evoke the hotsy-totsy social life where all these sophisticated New York City folks had time for faces in the misty light and so forth, not to mention expensive outfits, fancy interiors,witty repartee—a world of pseudos as inviting to…class hostility as fish in a barrel, including a presumed audience fatally unhip enough to still believe in the old prewar fantasies, though surely it was already too late for that, Tin Pan Alley wisdom about life had not stood a chance under the realities of global war, too many people by then knew better.

Consequently, neither art cinema nor auteur cinema figures much in Pynchon’s otherwise hefty lexicon of film culture, aside from a jokey mention of a Bengt Ekerot/Maria Casares Film Festival (actors playing Death in The Seventh Seal and Orphée) held in Los Angeles—and significantly, even the “underground”, 16-millimeter radical political filmmaking in northern California charted in Vineland becomes emblematic of the perceived failure of the 60s counterculture as a whole. This also helps to account for why the paranoia and solipsism found in Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient and Out 1, perhaps the closest equivalents to Pynchon’s own notions of mass conspiracy juxtaposed with solitary despair, are never mentioned in his writing, and the films that are referenced belong almost exclusively to the commercial mainstream, unlike the examples of painting, music, and literature, such as the surrealist painting of Remedios Varo described in detail at the beginning of The Crying of Lot 49,  the importance of Ornette Coleman in V and Anton Webern in Gravity’s Rainbow, or the visible impact of both Jorge Luis Borges and William S. Burroughs on the latter novel. (1) And much of the novel’s supply of movie folklore—e.g., the fatal ambushing of John Dillinger while leaving Chicago’s Biograph theater--is mainstream as well.

Nevertheless, one can find a fairly precise philosophical and metaphysical description of these aforementioned Rivette films in Gravity’s Rainbow: “If there is something comforting -- religious, if you want — about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.” And the white, empty movie screen that appears apocalyptically on the novel’s final page—as white and as blank as the fusion of all the colors in a rainbow—also appears in Rivette’s first feature when a 16-millimeter print of Lang’s Metropolis breaks during the projection of the Tower of Babel sequence.

Is such a physically and metaphysically similar affective climax of a halted film projection foretelling an apocalypse a mere coincidence? It’s impossible to know whether Pynchon might have seen Paris nous appartient during its brief New York run in the early 60s. But even if he hadn’t (or still hasn’t), a bitter sense of betrayed utopian possibilities in that film, in Out 1, and in most of his fiction is hard to overlook. Old fans who’ve always been at the movies (haven’t we?) don’t like to be woken from their dreams.

by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Footnote

For this reason, among others, I’m skeptical about accepting the hypothesis of the otherwise reliable Pynchon critic Richard Poirier that Gravity’s Rainbow’s enigmatic references to “the Kenosha Kid” might allude to Orson Welles, who was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Steven C. Weisenburger, in A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion (Athens/London: The University of Georgia Press, 2006), reports more plausibly that “the Kenosha Kid” was a pulp magazine character created by Forbes Parkhill in Western stories published from the 1920s through the 1940s. Once again, Pynchon’s populism trumps—i.e. exceeds—his cinephilia.

[innuendostudios]

We’re talking about adventure games again! Or, more accurately, we’re speaking in the context of adventure games about why some genres are hard to define, different ways of thinking about genre, and what genre is even for.

If you'd like to see more work like this, please back me on Patreon! Transcript below the cut.

Hi! Welcome back to Who Shot Guybrush Threepwood? Meditations on the life, death, and rebirth of the adventure game.

Adventure game.

Adventure game.

Ad. Ven. Ture. Game.

What kind of name is that, “adventure game”? It’s an atypical way of categorizing video games, I’ll say that much. We usually give game genres titles like "first-person shooter," "real time strategy," “turn-based role-playing game.” Real nuts-and-bolts kinda stuff. Meanwhile, "adventure" seemingly belongs on a turnstyle of airport paperbacks, in between "mystery" and "romance." When they slap that word on a game box, what is it supposed to communicate to us?

Other one-word genres, I can see how they get their name. A horror game is horrifying, a fighting game earns its title. But how is exploring an empty, suburban house an adventure? Why is exploring a universe not?

When I started this series, I offered up the rough-and-tumble definition of adventure game, “puzzles and plots,” and said maybe we’ll come up with a better definition later. That was… four years ago. Sorry about that. I know it’s a little late, and a lot has changed, but I did promise. So we’re gonna do it.

Today’s question is: What makes an adventure game an adventure game?

This is a tricky sort of question to ask, because, upon asking, we might stumble down the highway to “what makes an adventure novel an adventure novel?”, “what makes a rail shooter not an RPG?”, and that road inevitably terminates with “what even is genre?”, the answer to which is a bit beyond the scope of a YouTube video essay… or, it would be on anyone else’s channel, but this is Innuendo Studios. We’ll take the long road.

Welcome to Who Shot Guybrush Threepwood? A philosophical interrogation into the meaning of genre in and beyond the gaming idiom, with the adventure game as our guide.

***

The historical perspective reveals only so much, but it is a place to begin.

If you don’t know the story, in 1976, Will Crowther released Colossal Cave Adventure, a text-based story game set in an underground land loosely based on a real Kentucky cave system. The game would describe what was happening in a given location, and players would type simple commands to perform tasks and progress the narrative, usually a verb linked to a noun like a book that writes itself and responds to directives. This was the first of what we’ve come to call “interactive fiction.”

Crowther’s game - often abbreviated, simply, Adventure - inspired a number similar titles, most famously Zork, which was called an “adventure game” for the same reason Rise of the Triad was called a “Doom clone” - because they were more or less mechanically identical to the games they descended from. This is where the genre gets its title.

But the evolution from then to now has been oddly zero-sum, every addition a subtraction. As more and more adventure games came out, the text descriptions were eventually replaced with graphics, still images replaced with animations, the parser replaced with a verb list, and the keyboard itself replaced with a mouse. In the progression of Zork to Mystery House to King’s Quest to Maniac Mansion to Monkey Island, you can see how each link in the chain is a logical progression from the game preceding and into the one that follows. But you end up with a genre that began comprised entirely of words on a screen but that, by the early 90’s, typically possessed but did not, strictly speaking, require language. There is no question wordless experiences like Dropsy and Kairo are direct descendents of Monkey Island and Myst; that they are therefore in the same genre as Wishbringer, despite zero obvious mechanical overlap, is, for a medium that typically names its genres after their mechanics… weird.

(Also, for anyone confused: Nintendo used to delineate games that explored a continuous world from games that leapt across a series of discrete levels by calling the latter “platformers” and the former “adventures,” and an earlier game in that model was the Atari game Adventure, which was, itself, a graphical adaptation of the Crowther original, so what 90’s kids think of when they hear “a game in the style of Adventure” depends on whether they played on computer or console, but that lineage eventually embraced the even fuzzier “action-adventure” and is not what we’re here to discuss.)

So the connection between the genre’s beginnings and its current incarnation is less mechanical than philosophical. Spiritual, even. Something connects this to this, and we’re here to pin down what.

Now, you may be readying to say, “Ian, it’s clear the determinant of what is or isn’t an adventure game is pure association and there is no underlying logic, you don’t need to think this hard about everything,” which, ha ha, you must be new here. I would counter that, as soon as a genre has a name, people will (not entirely on purpose) start placing parameters around what they consider part of that genre. Even if it’s just association, there is some method to which associations matter and which ones don’t. So shush, we’re trying to have a conversation.

***

Another one-word genre named after a philosophical connection to a single game is the roguelike, christened after 1980’s Rogue. And, in 2008, members of the International Roguelike Development Conference in Berlin set about trying to define the genre. (I promise I’m not just going to summarize that one episode of Game Maker’s Toolkit.) Attendees began with a corpus of five games that, despite not yet having an agreed-upon definition, were, unequivocally, roguelikes, an attitude roughly analogous with the Supreme Court’s classification of pornography: “even if I can’t define it, I know it when I see it.” And, from these five games, they attempted to deduce what makes a roguelike a roguelike.

So perhaps we can follow their example. We’ll take a corpus of five games and see what they have in common. How about The Secret of Monkey Island, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, Myst, Beneath a Steel Sky, and Trinity? All five visually and mechanically dissimilar - three third-person and two-dimensional, one first-person and three-dimensional, and one second-person and made of text (no-dimensional?) - yet no one would dispute they’re all adventure games.

Okay! We can see a lot of common features: dialogue trees, inventory, fetch quests. But here’s the rub: to define the genre by the first two would be to leave out Myst, and defining it by the third would leave out Gabriel Knight, and, honestly, any one of these would exclude LOOM, which I think anyone who’s played one would look at and say, “I know an adventure game when I see one.”

For the sake of inclusivity, we could go broad, as I did with my “puzzles and plots,” and, while this does include everything on our list, it also, unavoidably, includes games that provoke the wrong reaction, like Portal - “I know a puzzle-shooter when I see one” - and Inside - “I know a puzzle-platformer when I see one.” Trying to draw a line around everything that is an adventure game while excluding everything that is not is no easy feat.

The best adventure game definitions are written in a kind of legalese; Andrew Plotkin and Clara Fernandez-Vara have both tackled this, I would say, quite well, with a lot of qualifications and a number of additional paragraphs that specify what counts as “unique results” and “object manipulation.” It takes a lot of words! And no disrespect - I can’t have an opinion in less than twenty minutes anymore - but I can’t help thinking we could go about this a different way.

What the Berliners cooked up in 2008 was, instead of a lengthily-worded definition, a list of high- and low-value factors a game may have. The absence of any one was not disqualifying, but the more it could lay claim to the more a game was… Rogue-like. These were features that could exist in any game, in any genre, but when they clustered together the Berliners drew a circle around them and say, “the roguelike is somewhere in here.”

A central idea here is that the borders are porous. If we apply this thinking to the adventure game, we could say that Inside and Portal are not lacking in adventure-ish gameplay; they simply have too low a concentration of it to be recognized as one.

This is genre not as a binary, but as a pattern of behavior.

***

So, to unpack that a little, I’m going to use an allegory, and, before I do, I want you to know: I’m sorry.

In 2014, professor and lecturer Dr. Marianna Ritchey, as a thought experiment demonstrating the socratic method (I’m sorry), hypothesized a conversation between Socrates and Euthyphro (I’m sorry) in which Socrates posed the internet’s second-favorite argument: is a hotdog a sandwich? (I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. We’re doing sandwich discourse.)

Ritchey imagined Socrates asking Euthyphro to define “sandwich,” and sparking the dialectic in which Euthyphro offers up increasingly-specific definitions of “sandwich” and Socrates challenges each one with something non-sandwich that would necessarily fall under that definition: is a hotdog a sandwich? is a taco a sandwich? are three slices of bread a sandwich?

Now, in this scenario, Socrates is - as is his wont - being a bit of a tool. Euthyphro does all the work of coming up with these long, legalistic definitions and, with one, single exception, Socrates sends him back to square one. But Socrates is making a point, (or, rather, Ritchey is): can we really claim to know what a sandwich is, if we can’t explain why it’s a sandwich? Perhaps we should admit the limits of our common sense. Perhaps we should embrace the inherent uncertainty of knowledge.

Or perhaps we could tell Socrates to stop having flame wars and think like a Berliner.

Does “sandwich vs. not-sandwich” have to be a binary? Could we not argue that a sandwich has many qualities, few of them critical, but a plurality of which will increase a thing’s sandwichness? Are there many pathways to sandwichness, a certain Platonic ideal of “sandwich” that can be approximated in a variety of ways? What if the experience of “sandwich” can be evoked so strongly by one factor that some leeway is granted with others? What if many factors are present, but none quite so strongly that it generates the expected sensation? The question then becomes which factors contribute most to that experience, and how much slack can be granted on one axis provided another is rock solid.

A sandwich is not merely an object. It is a set of flavors, textures, sensations, and cultural signifiers. We so often try to define objects by the properties they possess and not by the experience they generate. But a sandwich does not exist solely on the plate, but also in the mouth, and in the mind.

Let us entertain that it’s fair to say a difference between a chip butty and a hotdog is that one feels like a sandwich and one does not.

***

In 2012, the internet was besotted with its fourth favorite argument: “Is Dear Esther a video game? You know, like really, is it, though?” And David Shute, designer of Small Worlds, a micro-exploration platformer (and maaaaaaaaybe adventure game?), countered this question with a blog post: “Are Videogames [sic] Games?”

Shute invoked the philosophical concept of qualia. A quale is a characteristic, an irreducible somethingness that a thing possesses, very hard to put into words but, once experienced, will be instantly recognizable when it is experienced again. Qualia are what allow us to, having seen a car, recognize other cars when we see them and not confuse them with motorcycles, even if we haven’t sat down to write a definition for either. And if we did try to formalize the distinction - say, “a car has four wheels and fully encloses the operator” - our Socrates might pop in to say, “Well then, friend, is this not a car? Is this not a car?” To which Shute - and, by extension, we - might comment that Socrates is, once again, being a buttface.

“If I remove the wheels from a car, then it no longer provides the basic fundamental functionality I’d expect a car to have. But it’s still a car – Its carness requires some qualification, admittedly, but it hasn’t suddenly become something else, and we don’t need to define a new category of objects for ‘things that are just like cars but can’t be driven.’”

What’s special about qualia is that they’re highly subjective and yet shockingly universal. We wouldn’t be able to function if we needed a three paragraph definition just to know what a car is. Get anywhere on Route 128?, forget about it. These arguments over the definition of “game” or “sandwich” ask us to pretend we don’t recognize what we recognize. Socrates’ whole rhetorical strategy is pretending to believe pizza is a sandwich. And anyone who doesn’t care about gatekeeping their hobby will see Dear Esther among other first-person, 3D, computer experiences and know instantly that they fall under the same umbrella. Certainly putative not-game Dear Esther has more in common with yes-game Half-Life 2 than Half-Life 2 has with, for instance, chess.

Shute goes on, “To me, it’s obvious that Dear Esther is a videogame, because it feels like one. [W]hen I play Dear Esther I’m experiencing and inhabiting that world in exactly the same way I experience and inhabit any videogame world – it has an essential videogameness that’s clearly distinct from the way I experience an architectural simulation, or a DVD menu, or a powerpoint slideshow. I might struggle to explain the distinction between them in words, or construct a diagram that neatly places everything in strict categories, but the distinction is nonetheless clear.”

This is the move from plate to mouth. If you’re trying to define the adventure game and you’re talking only about the game’s features and not what it feels like to inhabit that world, you’re not actually talking about genre.

***

So if we want to locate this adventure experience, and we agree that it can, theoretically, appear in any game, we might look for it where it stands out from the background: in an action game. Let’s see if we can find it in Uncharted. It’s a good touchstone because we know the adventure experience is about narrative gameplay, and Uncharted has always been about recreating Indiana Jones as a video game; converting narrative into gameplay.

When attempting such a conversion, a central question designers ask is, “What are my verbs?” Nathan Drake’s gotta do something in these games, so we look to the source material for inspiration. A good video game verb is something simple and repeatable, easy to map to a face button, and Indiana Jones has them in abundance: punch, shoot, run, jump, climb, swing, take cover. All simple and repeatable; you can get a lot of gameplay out of those.

But that’s not all there is to Indiana Jones, is there? There’s also… well, colonialism, but turns out that translates pretty easily! But... Indy rather famously solves ancient riddles. And he cleverly escapes certain death, and has tense conversations with estranged family members, and finds dramatic solutions to unsolvable problems. And none of these are simple and repeatable; in fact, they’re dramatic because they’re unique, and because they’re complex. And Uncharted renders all of these sequences the same way: with a button remap.

When Drake talks to his long-lost brother, or discovers the existence of Libertalia, his jumpy-shooty buttons turn into a completely different set of mechanics for just this sequence, and then go back to being jumpy-shooty. Where, typically, you have a narrative tailored around a certain set of core mechanics, here, the mechanics tailor themselves around a certain narrative experience. And each of these narrative experiences tailors the mechanics differently.

What if we made a whole genre out of that?

Adventure games are the haven for all the misfit bits of drama that don’t convert easily into traditional gameplay. In the old games, you’d never ask “what are my verbs,” because they were at the bottom of the screen. Or, if it was a parser game, your list of possible verbs was as broad as the English language; if a designer wanted to, they could, technically, have every valid action in the game involve its own, unique verb. Rather than specialized, the mechanical space of possibility is broad, the verbs open-ended, even vague, meaning different things in different contexts. The idea is that any dramatic beat can be rendered in gameplay provided you can express it with a simple sentence: push statue, talk to Henry, use sword on rope. Nathan Drake shoots upwards of 2000 people in a single game, but he’s not going to solve 2000 ancient riddles, and he shouldn’t. What makes ancient riddles interesting is you’re not going to come across very many in your life. So maybe the mechanics should be as unique as the event itself. And maybe discovering what this event’s unique mechanics are is part of the gameplay.

The best word we have for these moments is “puzzle.”

Adventure games aren’t named after their core mechanics because, by design, adventure games don’t have core mechanics. Puzzles have mechanics, learning them is the game, and they can be whatever you can imagine. Which is not to say they will be; many games over-rely on inventory and jumping peg puzzles. Even in a near-infinite space of possibility, there are paths of least resistance. But many adventure games have neither, and many are built around single mechanics that don’t appear in any other games.

An adventure game puzzle isn’t simply a thing you do to be rewarded with more plot, it is an answer to the game’s repeated question: what happens next? It was literally the prompt in many versions of Colossal Cave. How did The Stranger find the linking book that took them to Channelwood? How did Robert Cath defuse the bomb on the Orient Express? How did Manny Calavera find the florist in the sewers of El Marrow? It is story told through gameplay, and gameplay built for telling stories.

So I would amend my prior definition, “adventure games are about puzzles and plots,” to “adventure games are about puzzles as plots.”

Beyond that, if you want to know what understand the adventure game experience, you may just have to play one (I suggest Full Throttle).

***

Rick Altman argues we too often define genres by their building blocks, and not what gets built out of them. If you want to write science fiction, you have many components to work with: spaceships, time travel, nanomachines. You can make sci-fi out of that. But what if you take the component parts of science fiction and build… a breakup story? Or a tragicomic war novel? Is it still sci-fi? Let me put it to you this way: if somebody asks you to recommend some science fiction to them, and you say "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," how likely are they to say, "yes, this is exactly what I was asking for"?

Blade Runner is what happens when you use science fiction to build film noir. Dark City is what happens when you use film noir to build science fiction. So what defines a genre, the bricks, or the blueprint? Any meaningful discussion should account for both.

Adventure games are mechanically agnostic, all blueprint. You can build one out of almost anything. We took the long road because the ways we’re used to thinking about genre were insufficient.

***

So: from a few steps back, the adventure game isn’t even that weird. Game genres are usually named after their mechanics, and a small handful are left in the cold by that convention. This would have been a much shorter conversation if not for the fact that video games run on a completely different set of rules from every other medium that has genres.

...but do they, though?

What actually is genre for?

Well, Samuel R. Delany - yes! yes, I’m still talking about this guy - describes genre not as a list of ingredients but a recipe. Imagine for me that you’ve just read the following four words: “the horizon does flips.” If this is just a, for lack of a better word, “normal” story - not genre fiction - that’s gotta be some kind of metaphor, maybe for the protagonist feeling dizzy, or when the drugs start to hit. Whatever it is, it can’t be literal; the earth and sky do not change places in naturalistic fiction.

But they can in fantasy. Certainly stranger things have happened. And they can in science fiction, but by a different set of rules: now there’s a “why.” It’s gotta be something to do with gravity or the warping of space; even if the story doesn’t explain it, it has to convince you, within a certain suspension of disbelief, that such a thing is happening in our universe. Whatever it is, it’s not magic.

These four words can mean many things. Genre informs you which of the many possible interpretations is the correct one. (For what it’s worth, they’re Barenaked Ladies lyrics about being in a car crash.) The label “science fiction” isn’t there to tell you whether a story has rayguns, it’s there so you know which mechanism of interpretation you should employ.

Genre not what’s in the book. It’s how you read the book.

The opening chapters of a mystery novel may be, by the standards of any other genre, excruciatingly dull. A lot of descriptions of scenery and a dozen characters introducing themselves. But, because you know it’s a mystery, these first pages are suffused with portent, even dread, because you know someone’s probably gonna die. And some of these mundane details are just that, but some of them are clues as to who committed a crime that hasn’t even happened yet. You are alert where you would otherwise be bored. And you know to watch for clues, because you know you’re reading a mystery. Those are the genre’s mechanics.

Genre dictates the attention to be paid.

Words, sounds, and images don’t mean things on their own. They have to be interpreted. If part of genre is the audience’s experience, it’s an experience that audience co-creates, and it needs clues as to how. I’ve said before that all communication is collaborative. Here’s what results from that: all art is interactive.

Video games are not unique in this regard, they are simply at the far end of a spectrum. But if the purpose of genre is to calibrate the audience into creating the correct experience, perhaps it makes sense that the most interactive medium would name its genres after what the player is doing.

So the label “adventure game” is, to the best of its ability, doing the same thing as “adventure novel,” and as “first-person shooter,” if, perhaps, a bit inelegantly. There may be better ways to straddle all these lines, but the shorthand reference to an old text game gets the job done.

So that’s the end of our journey. I really hope we can do this again, and preferably not in another four years, but we’ll see how thing shake out. Regardless, I’m glad you were with me, and I’ll see you in the next one. It’s been an adventure.

[disasterhumans]

i swear this isnt malicious, im curious. if its not okay to have a sentient species be 'evil' or 'good,' (and yeah, both are lazy at best), why is it okay for /creatures/ in DnD to be 'evil' or 'good'? why is it okay for less humanoid sentients, like dragons, to be 'chromatic is evil' and 'metallic is good'? and if we recognize traits even within species in real animals (like labradors being really mellow dogs compared to huskies being high strung) why is it awful for sentients to be different?

[Heads up to critters avoiding C1 spoilers that there is some discussion of the Chroma Conclave arc in this post. It’s not super detailed, and doesn’t spoil specific plot points; it’s mostly general analysis of the framing plot of that arc.]

I’m not sure that I do think it’s okay for sapient creatures to be “evil” or “good.” Or at the very least, I’m not sure it makes sense for sapient creatures to have ingrained moral alignments. At the same time, even just bringing it down to semantics, it’s different to have an evil “race,” versus an evil “creature.” It’s a distinction that gets wibbly, because of course Orcs are just as fictional as dragons. But where Orcs were derived from existing racial stereotypes, dragons are derived from folklore and fairy tales. Part of the point I was making in my previous post is that the moment the word “race” got involved in the project of essentializing traits in fantasy species, the concept became inextricably linked to our real world understanding of race.

“Monsters” and “creatures” are often used as allegories in the stories they appear in–this is how the Chroma Conclave works in campaign 1. Sure, Vorugal, Umbrasyl, Raishan, and Thordak all have character and personality traits. But Matt’s construction has them representing traditional “vices” (wrath, pride, greed, vanity, etc.). It doesn’t make any particular sense why a red dragon is vain, or a green dragon is deceitful, but those details are drawing from a narrative tradition of using symbolism to represent specific themes and attributes. I don’t think that having inherently evil dragons contributes to the problem of implying race has a determining factor in morality in the same way having inherently evil Orcs, Goblins, or Drow does. At the same time, I think that it’s a weak narrative tool if you’re planning on having dragons populate your world as actual characters (and not just allegorical figures). 

The fact that J’Mon Sa Ord is a fully developed character with motives, beliefs, and goals, where most of the Chroma Conclave exist as caricatures* doesn’t make a whole lot of logical sense. What allows metallic dragons to be paragons of virtue and to operate within humanoid cultures, where chromatic dragons are seemingly only interested in acquiring wealth and power? What prevents J’Mon Sa Ord from being a black dragon versus a brass dragon? There may not be anything “wrong” with chromatic dragons being inherently “evil,” but what purpose is it serving? I get that when it comes to role-playing games and world-building that it���s sometimes easier to paint with a broad brush: if your hero can identify an evil dragon on sight, it makes saving the world a lot easier. That doesn’t mean those decisions don’t have broader implications.

I think this question hits at two separate–if intertwined–conversations about some of D&D’s fundamental building blocks. You’ve got the conversation about representations of “race” in the game, and the moral alignment system that makes up a large mechanical component of the game. I have a objections to D&D’s morality system that are entirely separate from my issues with how D&D canon handles race. Morality (much like racial traits) gets simplified into something that can be quantified or fixed, ignoring the ways morality actually operates in the world. I understand the way mechanizing this concept provides a foundation for entry into a complex gaming system. I even think there are creative ways to use and explore the alignment system–sometimes the constraints of a rigid system allows you to explore what happens when you push up against those very boundaries. But the alignment system often logically falls apart the longer you look at it.

As far as personality traits in other species goes: first off, I don’t think dog breeds exist as a helpful point of comparison for this conversation. I am not an animal behaviorist, nor a biologist, so I’m not going to go into the concept different dog breeds having different observed temperaments. I am also not a philosopher, so I’m not really equipped for a larger conversation about sentience vs. sapience. But, the important thing about sapience over sentience, is that sapient beings generally understand the concept of there being “right” and “wrong” actions, and make decisions accordingly. There’s a reason why beasts in D&D are unaligned: non-sapient creatures act primarily on instinct, without regard for morality. 

I will also point to something I said toward the end of my earlier post–“seemingly inherent racial/species differences can be rooted in things that are legitimately value-neutral qualities of your fantasy race.” I don’t think that it’s “awful” to suggest there might be inherent differences across species. You could, for example, have one race in your world have, on average, higher levels of serotonin. That’s not going to markedly affect their actions and morals, beyond them generally having a happier disposition and better executive functioning skills, perhaps. 

The idea that different races are inherently more aggressive, or virile, or “lazy,” are all based in racist and eugenicist logic. That’s without even getting into the way specific fantasy races have drawn on specific racial stereotypes. The very idea that there is some biological imperative involved in morality or behavior is specious. And, look, I get that not every sci-fi/fantasy writer has studied race, gender, and sociology. I get that these things are ingrained into our understanding of the genre. It’s easy to fall back on those narrative and world-building shortcuts when creating a story or setting. I’m not trying to make a value judgment or moral accusation against the writers at Wizards of the Coast. However, I think it’s important to point out the places where creatives are (often unintentionally) reifying negative social dynamics.

At the heart of it, I think the idea of inherent morality is limiting. It limits the stories you can tell, the types of characters and cultures that exist, and it limits an audience’s understanding of what their own world looks like. Fantasy isn’t exempt from acting as a mirror to the “real” world. Its representational work may happen on the level of metaphor and allegory more often than realistic fiction does, but it’s ultimately still exploring themes that connect to the world the audience lives in. By questioning the default assumptions we’ve come to take for granted in the genre, we open up new, and more complex stories to explore and share.

*Two things on my Chroma Conclave comments: 1) I think Raishan exists outside my framing of the Conclave as caricatures–on an allegorical level her “vice,” pretty much requires she have more dialogue. We also see Raishan interact with VM more than any of the other conclave members. At the same time, Raishan plays into a whole other narrative trope which links disease to corruption and failed morals. That’s not a conversation I really want to have right now, but I think it’s generally important to keep in mind that a lot of tropes that exist in fiction are drawn from stereotypes and prejudices aimed at various disenfranchised populations. 2) Absolute none of this was meant as a dig on Matt. I enjoyed the Chroma Conclave arc, and found the allegorical aspects of it to be intriguing.

[gigslist]

Why Is the Metaverse Worth So Much Money?

What is the metaverse, and why is it worth so much money?

Developers discuss the various visions this widely used term implies, the increased investment in thosse making it a reality and the many barriers they face

The word 'metaverse' is becoming almost inescapable, especially for those who peruse technology and games-related headlines.

Most recently, Facebook has been making big noises about transitioning from a social media company to a metaverse one. Meanwhile other companies have raised significant capital -- such as Epic Games securing $1 billion -- towards similar ambitions (Epic even stated in court earlier this year that Fortnite is not a game, it's a metaverse).

Jon Radoff, CEO of Beamable and formerly mobile developer Disruptor Beam, has attempted to map out the companies that have either expressed an interest in the metaverse, or at least could be argued are connected to it, which is extensive to say the least.

With the term already in danger of overuse after these opening paragraphs alone, it's time to question why so many major companies across multiple industries are investing so heavily in a concept some might write off as science fiction.

"The metaverse is to virtual worlds as a website is to the internet"

Herman Narula, Improbable

Indie developer Rami Ismail sums it up to us rather nicely: "The idea of creating an alternative world in which everyone has to use your currency, play by your rules and everyone wants to promote their brands is really appealing to rich people. I mean, I guess we are talking about Fortnite after all."

But this feature would be too short if we just accepted the "Because money" rationale behind the rise of the metaverse. So let's take a deeper dive into what it is these companies are actually trying to achieve, and why games developers see themselves at the forefront of these efforts.

Novaquark, the developer behind user-generated MMO Dual Universe, is so dedicated to the concept that it even refers to itself as a metaverse company. General manager Sébastien Bisch describes the metaverse in much the same way most people envisage it: a single, persistent virtual environment shared by everyone on the planet. The go-to pop culture references are The Matrix or Ready Player One's Oasis if you want a shorthand for what that might look like.

"We believe that the metaverse will be the place where all forms of entertainment and media eventually converge, a gateway where they can be consumed," Bisch explains. "We also believe that the metaverse will be an inherently social place where social media and online discussion groups might eventually migrate as well."

Earlier this year, US-based HiDef raised $9 million for its own metaverse project. Founder and chief creative officer Jace Hall paints a picture of the metaverse of something virtual that interacts with reality, rather than replaces it -- a platform that eliminates the distinction between online and offline.

"For example, whether you spent time working a McDonald's in-game at a virtual mall or McDonald's down the street from your house becomes irrelevant, because the money/value you earned is exactly the same. Literally the exact same currency," he says. "Spend it offline. Spend it online. Order a pizza online, it is delivered offline. Order a pizza offline, get it delivered online.

"Reality is the metaverse, the metaverse is reality. Same thing. It's just what location do you want to spend your time in and at what moment? Consequences of action both online/offline are similar if not identical (beyond physical). Everything interfaces with everything."

Herman Narula, CEO of tech firm Improbable, maintains the metaverse is a more "nebulous concept," instead suggesting it has become a term for more sophisticated virtual worlds that connect a much higher number of people.

"A highly connected environment with lots of interactive players and complex simulation creating rich experiences, something more than a game but less than the real world," he says. "The metaverse is to virtual worlds as a website is to the internet."

He admits the analogy breaks down because not all concepts can flow easily between different virtual worlds. The example he gives is whether a player in a Harry Potter virtual world would want to encounter Master Chief. He instead suggests that, unlike the singular internet we have, there would be many metaverses for people to choose from.

"The idea of creating an alternative world in which everyone has to use your currency, play by your rules and everyone wants to promote their brands is really appealing to rich people"

Rami Ismail, indie developer

But we already have multiple virtual worlds. Every MMORPG, battle royale, shared world shooter, or creation game like Minecraft and Roblox can allow people to explore a digital environment together, so what elevates the metaverse above what currently exists?

Bisch observes that video games mostly offer a limited type of virtual experience, one focused around set mechanics such as shooting or driving. He adds that even the biggest video games with the largest audiences don't truly connect those players together in a unified experience -- it spreads them out across servers.

"Take the concerts that happen in Fortnite," he says. "Yes, these were the same for everyone, but two friends who attended them on different servers were technically not able to share them at the same time, in the same virtual place.

"Very few games have tried to propose a unified, persistent game world for all players, and when they did, the scalability was extremely limited with a cap to the number of players able to play in the same area."

So far, there seems to be a lack of consensus on what the metaverse could actually be, but investors seem to agree there's big money in it. Narula likens it to the formative stages of the internet, and the initial reactions of the dot-com boom investors and first consumer evangelists.

"[They] can sense there is something important about virtual worlds and the metaverse because people spend so much time playing games and increasingly, playing games online," he says. "There is an expectation that wherever people spend their time new aspects of society, culture and economy will follow.

"I think this is a correct intuition but much like the early dotcom era, our analogies from the past can only be imperfectly applied to this new medium."

Ready Player One's Oasis has been the go-to analogy for what the metaverse might look like, but there's debate as to how realistic that is

Ian Hamilton, CEO of UK developer Maze Theory, believes the pandemic has also accelerated interest and investment in the metaverse; not only is there the increased time spent in gaming's virtual worlds, there's also been an increased need for ways to connect with other people online, especially with the rise of remote working.

"I feel like people look to the metaverse to replace 'in real life' social interactions and experiences, but with those expectations they are probably not quite satisfied with what we have now"

Ian Hamilton, Maze Theory

"I feel like people look to the metaverse to replace 'in real life' social interactions and experiences, but with those expectations they are probably not quite satisfied with what we have now," he says.

Maze Theory's own ambitions for the metaverse involve what the studio refers to as 'story living': immersive narrative experiences, such as its Peaky Blinders and Doctor Who VR games. But VR itself -- which fictional works often depict as the entry point into the metaverse -- highlights a key technical challenge of building such a system.

"From a hardware perspective, people will have lots of different entry points and capabilities," Hamilton says. "So how do you create a world rich enough to feel transformative, but populated enough to gain real traction? Even if you take the current VR landscape, the number of concurrent users is challenging. Additionally, within gaming, there are a massive amount of technical challenges to creating persistent worlds that evolve."

Ismail observes that there are many technical challenges to overcome before a metaverse could ever be feasible: "So much of creating immersion in games right now is creating acceptable shortcuts and boundaries for behaviours that people have in real life -- for now, we don't even have a 'metaverse'-esque input and output method.

"Walking is already an almost impossible challenge, with giant walking cages being built to let people move around - that's just one input vector... I don't even understand how they walk in the Oasis."

He continues, citing how much effort and resource it takes to simulate a mostly static version on Earth in Microsoft Flight Simulator, or the struggles to create a virtual reality environment where players can't immediately put their head through a wall. Other developers point out the current limits to the number of players that can connect simultaneously, the language and culture barriers, the internet infrastructure and its inequalities between developed and less developed nations, plus the latency factor that affects any connected experience.

"The main barriers are 'everything besides voice communication,'" Ismail says. "Even if you remove the VR aspect, most games we play now are very clearly defined in what is possible -- the freedom comes from 'emergent' mechanics or behaviours. To create anything resembling a real-life situation, you'd need something that's the Dwarf Fortress of Dwarf Fortresses."

And Hall suggests the biggest challenges might not even be technical. While those may be solved with time, funding and innovation, he says the real challenge will be the use of proprietary platforms and "business models that only focus on extracting value from the user into the publisher instead of a more mutually beneficial equation."

"'Walled gardens' appear to be fundamentally anti-meta in the macro sense," Hall says. "More and more, users seem to be realising the value that they generate and represent. They are demanding recognition and reward for their contributions. As a result, the aforementioned barriers might be overcome in time because it will be good business to do so. We are already seeing some of the pressure mounting and turning into lawsuits. Change feels afoot, and it should be step-by-step."

Beyond the specific barriers that need to be overcome, there has been skepticism among some of the industry's higher-ups. Most notably, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said earlier this year he believed talk of metaverses refers to nothing more than what Rockstar Games has already built with the online versions of Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, and dubbed the term itself a buzzword.

"If you take metaverse, [special-purpose acquisition companies], and cryptocurrency, put them all together, in five years, will any of this matter? I'm not sure that it will," he told investors during an earnings call.

"There's a lot more wanting it to be true... than there is actual demand in the market or tech and ability to make it happen"

Mandisa Washington, CUNY Brooklyn College

Narula likens this attitude to the famous 1995 Newsweek article that labelled the internet as just a fad. He adds: "Much like the early internet there will be a lot of misdirected hype towards the wrong use cases. In addition, tools, technology, business models and consumer awareness all need to catch up before virtual worlds really take off but it is happening incredibly quickly."

Bisch agrees, adding: "Some believed that social media would be a fad and that it wouldn't revolutionize the way we consume content and information; the evolution of mobile computing was also met with skepticism. Time proved these doubters wrong.

"We've never consumed as much virtual content and had as many virtual experiences as we do today. But this content and these experiences are fragmented, only accessible and connected via the primitive form of the metaverse that is the internet. The metaverse is the next step of how we will access and consume these virtual experiences, one that binds them all together."

However, Mandisa Washington -- a mobile developer from CUNY Brooklyn College -- is less convinced, equating the metaverse with flying cars and Star Trek's holodeck: "There's a lot more wanting it to be true... than there is actual demand in the market or tech and ability to make it happen."

She notes that while the prize "seems very sweet indeed to investors," it's the inherently fickle consumers that must be won over. After all, ultimately they are the ones who decide what does and doesn't become popular. And in a world where we already have the internet, any attempt at a metaverse "had better bring something truly revolutionary, not only to the gamer's table, but to grandma's as well."

"We've been here before," she says. "Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter -- and MySpace and Second Life before them -- have collectively invested billions into trying to make themselves indispensable and unavoidable. I think where they've been successful is in emerging markets, where they can essentially follow AOL's old model of positioning themselves as the 'gateway to the internet.'

"But in more mature media markets, or in countries like China, with barriers to newcomers and well-established competitors in the social space, I just don't see how any one company plays its siren song loudly enough to be heard over the din."

She also suggests that, for all the experience developers have in creating virtual worlds, any metaverse that does take off might not originate from the games industry.

"Video games are very much a 'You must be this engaged to participate' situation, which generally requires some combination of access, money, time, and equipment," she says.

"Video games are probably our 'roughest' communication medium, in terms of how smoothly and intuitively people are able to consume it. Language barriers aside, books, music, film/TV, and oral forms of communication are generally so seamless that people need relatively little instruction or prompting to be able to consume -- and potentially produce & manipulate them. By contrast, games literacy is just nowhere close to that level of intuitiveness. Even among self-described gamers, you can readily see how much impact prior exposure/training has, rather than genuine intuition, by simply providing a different input style than a person is used to -- say, swapping a Wii remote for a footpad DDR controller.

"This is an ongoing challenge for game devs, to be sure, but I see it as an insurmountable barrier to any hope of a game-based metaverse."

"Some believed that social media would be a fad, the evolution of mobile computing was also met with skepticism. Time proved these doubters wrong"

Sébastien Bisch, Novaquark

The increased investment, and Radoff's sprawling metaverse map, also indicates another challenge that may be near impossible to overcome: competition. While there will be some collaboration, most companies investing in creating the metaverse will inevitably seek the dominant position so often depicted in science fiction. Again, whether it's The Matrix or Ready Player One's Oasis, there's usually one metaverse the world becomes immersed in -- something that Ismail believes we should avoid.

"Almost everything about the Oasis is the worst-case-scenario of the idea of metaverse," he says. "Everything has collapsed into one monopoly that is apparently brand-licensed with everything, the interface is a helmet so I'm unsure how it works, and even if you ignore all that now you have to do a fetch quest in a more brutal online version of EVE Online."

Hall insists that no one entity would own the metaverse, just as no one owns the internet, while Hamilton points to the competition over other transformative technologies.

"Normally they start out as a series of successful experiments and start-up businesses that do pretty well," he says. "Then one or two big players become the dominant ecosystem and take over. And the network effects of these top dogs knock everyone out. [That's] probably quite a realistic vision.

"Taking social media as an example, there were all sorts of quite successful front runners -- MySpace, Bebo, Friendster but over time Facebook and WeChat in China have become the dominant players."

Narula brings it back to his theory of multiple connected virtual worlds rather than a single metaverse, and again points to how people engage with the ones that currently exist as proof of why a metaverse is inevitable.

"It is my belief that we underplay how invested people are in the life of the mind," he concludes. "In one sense, we are already living in mental virtual worlds. Gaming has been quietly fulfilling humanity's needs for decades in this mental life. Far from being 'just' entertainment, gaming structures, play and goal-oriented models all help deliver the essentials for psychological health and well-being of an individual.

"In gaming, people are actively growing, striving to overcome challenges and creating new experiences which ultimately fulfills as a whole. The needs being fulfilled are universal and innate and include the need for competence, autonomy and relatedness. And that is the promise of the metaverse, that these human needs will find greater fulfillment."

by James Batchelor

Source: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-08-20-ashley-maidy-joins-riot-games-as-head-of-global-consumer-products

[fairytail-whathesays]

Mangaka’s Manual

A list of 50 things every mangaka-to-be should be made to swear on before putting that pen to paper.

While fantasy and fictional events may not reflect real life, the personalities, attitudes, and actions taken by the characters within the story do. With that in mind, I will not portray in a positive light actions which bring unwarranted harm to other fellow humans, most especially evil actions such as rape and pedophilia. I will not fail to portray them in a negative light and will treat sensitive topics with the utmost care.

I will not portray my main character as so incredibly dumb and/or naive as to be impossible to sympathize with.

I will not portray my main character as so incredibly dumb and/or naive  as to be incompetent without the aid of “the power of friendship”, “the power of emotions”, or “nakama power” unless an in-story reasons specifically exists for said powers boosting my main character’s competency or efficiency and not that of others alongside them. This is unrealistic and breaks the suspension of disbelief in the story.

I will not portray any character as so lustfully overcome by the sight of the female member of the human species as to given heart-eyes by the mere appearance of one or unreliable amongst his friends should one jeopardize or threaten his friends or his mission. This paints a negative picture of the character’s priorities for a relatively low return of “comedy”. The same goes for any character towards the male sex.

I will not portray any character as so lustful that they can be counted on to flirt with, ogle, inappropriately touch, or provide unwanted or unwarranted attention to a member of either sex. This is unrealistic and no one in real life, hopefully, actually acts this way.

I will not portray a woman’s love life as her sole aim, goal, or reason for existence or action in a story, ever. This is insulting and, even though there are women in real life who pursue love voraciously, it should never be the only concern a woman has.

I will not minimize the role played by women in my story, to the point where merely rewarding her with a successful romance at the end is her end goal achieved. I will strive to produce, if not active, then at least three-dimensional women who can move on if their pursuit of love should happen to fail.

I will include prominent nonwhite characters in my manga.

I will include prominent LGBT characters in my manga.

The LGBT characters I write will not be lustful predators, one-dimensional comedic relief, or killed off to result in a cast that is suspiciously free of LGBT characters. I will to the best of my ability avoid stereotypes that harm the LGBT community.

I will take the utmost care and delicacy in approaching topics of mental illness, making sure to portray mental illness itself not as something to be feared because it produces evil, outside of widely accepted cases like psychopathy.

Even virtuous behaviors are dangerous in excess and best put to the side in serious situations. I will strive to show my characters taking the options which provide the least risk to themselves and others when at all possible, and if they decide risk their life, it will not be for such ideas as “pride”, “chivalry”, or “honor” when safer options exist.

On the note above, a man’s pride is not equal to his life. A man who loses his pride will gain it back with time. A man who loses his life will never get it back, and a man who throws away his life because of a threat to his pride can be said to have deserved it. I will not portray pride itself as something worth dying over, as this teaches dangerous ideas to anyone young who may peruse my manga.

I will not portray rebellion to authority, anarchism, or complete disgust for the idea of rules as inherently admirable. Authority itself is not evil, and rebellion against it is not inherently good. Rebellion against authority should only be portrayed as acceptable when that authority is visibly corrupt.

Any suffering portrayed in my story should have reason behind it, and this is not to say that all suffering should contribute to a muse’s character or arc, as pointless suffering does exist. What this means is that if the suffering I portray is not adding anything notable to a scene or arc, it will be cut like any other scene, as the basics of storytelling demand. “Torture porn” becomes the result otherwise.

Fanservice will not drive the scenes I create and the scenes in my manga will not be interjected at random with scenes that show off female characters’ bodies. Fanservice is to be the icing on the cake, not the cake itself. Fanservice pertaining either sex should not be part of the same scenes that show torture or humiliation.

I will produce fanservice to equal amounts per sex. If there is prominent female nudity in a scene, I can and will counterbalance it with equal male nudity, and I will not shy away from drawing a man’s penis as if it would turn me gay if I do.

I will not portray a character as a brooding asshole who should be loved regardless. Any character I intend to be loved by another character will need positive qualities to justify it, and this will be done without excusing or hand-waving the negative qualities.

I will not write a main character as completely static and unchanging, most especially a central protagonist and most especially if their behavior lines up with any of the above described negative qualities I am to avoid in the first place.  A character who is not perfect is a good character, but one who is not perfect and learns lessons and changes is a better character.

I will not write any character at all who always wins. This is unrealistic and diminishes any threat I wish to provide to the story, especially if wins are obtained without any significant losses or permanent changes.

Redemptions for villainous characters will be handled with care and not merely handed out as a free pass. Tragic backstories provide reasoning for actions if done well--and only if done well--but not excuses. A character cannot be redeemed without an effort to change on their part or a realization of the sort that causes them to act, and a character who is redeemed merely by being defeated may as well have not been a villain at all.

I will showcase an approaching antagonist’s threat level in terms of how much damage they deal to the characters, not how much damage they deal to the surrounding environment. Houses can be rebuilt, lives cannot. Blowing up an entire mountain range will mean nothing to my audience if my protagonists simply power through anyway.

I will maintain a careful relationship with my fans and a smart mindset when it comes to how much I allow them to influence my work. When my fans ask for something or complain about something I wrote, I will carefully confer with my editors whether the fan desires being heard are wise directions to push the story in or not, and I will do so while to the best of my ability maintaining the tenets described in this manual.

I will take accountability for the things I write. That is to say, I will be careful as to who I enter contracts with so that I can write my story without too much damaging interference from editors, and if I allow my editors or my fans to sway me into a decision I am not happy with, I will admit this instead of blaming it on the people who are unhappy or saying that I intended a decision that wasn’t really mine from the beginning.

Bruises, scars, and broken bones are not phenomena that only happen to men. They happen to women as well, particularly those who are just as active on the battlefield as their male compatriots, and I will not sacrifice the realistic depiction of the consequences of battle in order to maintain the sex appeal of a female character.

Quantity does not equal quality and commitment does not equal coherency. Larger amounts of praise for my work do not mean the smaller amounts of complaints are invalid, and I will examine both sides of my fanbase with an unbiased eye when interacting with them.

A blind audience cannot read a manga, and so I will not treat my audience as if they are blind. If something fairly obvious happens onscreen, I will not have my characters hold the audiences’ hands through what just happened with their comments. They can see for themselves.

Abuse is never funny. Inversions of the typical, commonly accepted treatments of abuse in fiction (happening to men instead of or at the hands of women) are not funny merely because of the gender inversion, and I will not treat them as such. A woman that mistreats a man will be given the same narrative treatment as a man who mistreats a woman.

I will have the entire framework of my story planned out from the beginning. While stories that evolve over time are natural, a story being made up from arc to arc with no prior planning is not the natural progression of a story. This is a basic story-writing skill and I will not neglect it. The basic sequence of events will be planned out before I put pen to paper.

I will spend an even amount of time on each part of my cast. Opportunities to show side characters evolving will be taken, and I will not be afraid to leave my main character out of the spotlight for a while. 

I will not portray any character that looks, acts, or thinks in a child-like manner as pursuing or being involved in a romantic or sexual relationship. This is pedophilia, and no amount of attempted justification will change that.

Love plots that rely on reincarnation, destiny, or any other factor that removes a certain amount of choice or personal agency to function are not love plots and I will not attempt to write them into my story.

I will avoid the pitfalls placed in my path by my predecessors in the endings of their manga: a satisfying conclusion to my story cannot merely be achieved by tying off characters in romantic relationships and showing them married with children.

I will strive to make satisfactory explanations for new events possible, and if it sounds hollow or weak in my head, I will keep working on it before I show said event or said explanation.

Sequels are nice, but they are as vulnerable to unwritten frameworks as single-shot stories. If I intend certain plot threads within my first story to be continued and resolved in a second, I will make sure that second story is constructed start-to-finish before I make the decision to allow it to carry said plot thread. One innocuous plot from the pilot cannot carry an entire second story when most of the other plots were already resolved.

Death will not be a cheap device for drama in my story only to be undone later. If I need a character around for more involved matters later, I will not bother to fake killing them off in the first place.

I will not shy away from consequences and sacrifices in my story. Even in such matters as romance comedies, a character will have to work for their achievements and goals, and not merely have their story reduced to “winning everything”. 

I will not make the overarching antagonist the main protagonist’s brother. That plot point is overused to death and entirely too coincidental.

I will not fail the hype I have built up for incoming antagonists. My characters will struggle to defeat them, if they defeat them at all, and I will not show an allergic reaction to the very idea of my protagonists not winning a battle or retreating. Merely assuring my audience that the antagonists were strong, just not enough to compare to the protagonists, is a band-aid patched over a gaping wound.

I will not portray intangible attributes such as “resolve”, “determination”, or “emotion” as enough to win a fight with a stronger or more skilled opponent. These tropes have been endlessly written, decried, and mocked, and no audience has any patience for them anymore. 

I will be careful with the power levels achieved in my story. A balance must be created between the protagonist’s power and that of the stronger peers--while my protagonist should not simply win every battle, I cannot continue to push the stronger allies out of the story to keep them from ending battle-heavy arcs early. 

I will be careful with who I enter contracts with so that I can ensure that my story stops when I want it to stop, and will not be pushed and dragged through the mud when I am out of plot points because publishers desire more money from my series. Everything dies, and avoiding this just tortures what remains of the story and the fanbase.

My fans will be treated with respect, as it runs paradoxical to mistreat those whom I want to pay attention to my work. Even loyal, content fans will be dissuaded by mistreatment of the unsatisfied ones. This is professionalism and I will practice it every day. 

To put to use the enduring and wise words of one of the heads of Nintendo, a bad chapter that gets delayed is eventually good, while a bad chapter published immediately is bad forever. If necessary, I will take hiatuses whenever I need more time to properly organize and write my story’s journey from point A to point B.

If I am lucky enough to have an anime of my manga made, I may run into moments where filler is created in order to give me more time to publish chapters without the manga overtaking it. If this occurs, I will do my best to give my input to the filler team where possible to ensure the new material meshes with later manga chapters without contradicting them. I will also attempt where possible to ensure the greatest quality possible from filler, as it is a reflection of my work even if it is non-canon.

I will think ahead and have a plan for my antagonists and decide beforehand if I want them redeemed, and if so, I will ensure care is taken that they are not shown crossing moral boundaries that would make them pure evil and make their redemptions weaker. I will also plan ahead and show the details of my redeemed antagonist’s moral character before I have them redeemed, not after, so that the redemption feels earned.

What works for my central protagonists should be equally as applicable to my side characters or antagonists. If resolve is enough to win a fight when my main character is fighting (and it shouldn’t), it should also be enough to carry side characters and antagonists through their battles. Otherwise, this becomes hypocrisy and character favoritism on my part.

Comedic relief is to be judged the same as any other aspect of my story. Perversion, invasion of privacy, abuse, and obsession are not acceptable forms of comedic relief and I will not attempt to brush criticism of them aside by saying they are. Better yet, I will portray them the negative way they deserve.

Science, logic, and physics are to be used carefully. Neglected as they are in manga from all eras, using them merely to hype up a character I favor spits on their applications.

I will not attempt to apply science, logic, and physics in ways I have not thoroughly researched, as fantasy logic cannot always cover my weak spots. It is better not to include these things at all than to get them dreadfully wrong and appear unintelligent because of it. 

[comingupforblair]

Franchises that are either panned or hit or miss like PotC are almost never heavily criticized and the fandoms are rarely berated for liking them. I'm not quite sure why the DCEU fandom has been the butt of all the rude jokes. I can't help but think most of the bitterness comes from MCU stans who think the success of anything DC is bad news for Marvel, but I could be wrong. Any ideas yourself?

I really don’t know. I wish I could say. I think a big part of it has to do with the frankly selfish attitude of Marvel fans who have acted offended at DC’s mere existence over the last four years and frequently wanted Them to just give up and not make films anymore, even as They claim that the films could never hope to reach the same level as Theirs. 

Zack Snyder’s involvement also has a lot to do with it as I can’t think of another director who has ever invoked such vitriolic hatred. Not even scumbags like Woody Allen or David O Russell get anywhere near as much shit. He’s an easy target and I remain convinced that people wouldn’t be anywhere near as harsh on these films if any other creator was behind Them. If everything was exactly the same but done by George Miller, for example, people would be a lot more receptive or just indifferent. I can’t imagine people going out of Their way to harass him after a personal tragedy or anything like that.

There’s also the fact that the DCEU has happened in the shadow of the MCU which has been held up as some great success story and whose way of doing so has become a blueprint to surefire success, a plan a refusal to follow to the letter is seen as the height of foolishness. Such a narrative completely ignores the context in which DCEU films exist (They needed solo films for Thor and Captain America because most people in the general public didn’t know the first fucking thing about Them, about which the same cannot be said of Batman or The Flash, and the same people saying this have shown a tendency to immediately reverse Their position and cry ‘’plagiarism’’ the second any similarities are noticed). 

There is also the fact that the DCEU has had, since the very beginning, a very different goal from Marvel and pursued it and people seem unable to fathom that a company wouldn’t want to follow the same path that has worked out so well for another. There’s also the fact the MCU films have made fun and enjoyment not only Their dominant goal but increasingly Their only one, even at the cost of potentially powerful drama. The MCU films made a huge point of lampshading the inherent silliness of Their films at every turn while the DCEU has played it all completely seriously and people have gotten used to knowingly silly films.

This point has been disputed by some using Logan as an example of the fact that darker superhero films and ones not from the MCU can do well too but eI see the positive reception of it as another example of a degree of bias against Zack Snyder, especially as the elements that people cited as more mature (The increased swearing and frankly jaw-dropping levels of violence) are exactly the frankly immature examples of maturity that people accuse his films of being rife with, which is not to say that Logan didn’t deserve it’s success or acclaim.

The DCEU has also been something of a victim of past successes. The Nolan films are an obvious source but the animated films and shows also count and the bias against Snyder can be seen there too. People will absolutely crucify him for elements that were just as, if not more, present in those adaptations (The Jesus symbolism being one of the more prominent examples as it was much more overt in Richard Donner’s film). 

The absolute worst example of this has to be the handling of Superman which is almost invariably compared to the Christopher Reeve version, with the latter held up as how the character not only should but MUST be portrayed and Snyder’s version having his flaws exaggerated to a staggering degree to make the comparison more loaded against him. Such a statement of course ignores the fact that Superman has changed massively since 1978, with the portrayal of him there already being a bit outdated by that time and something of a relic from the silver age. 

Superman is unique among fictional characters in that there has only been one major portrayal of him that people can flock to and venerate and hold up as an example of the character. Every other major character (James Bond, Batman, Sherlock Holmes) has been allowed to evolve with the times but Superman has stayed frozen in 1978 and that’s exactly where purists want him to stay and it’s easier to believe that Zack Snyder just doesn’t understand Superman or actively hates him than it is to concede that maybe They need to accept another version, one that will appeal to people who are unused to seeing a version of the character that They can relate to. Add in Chris Reeve’s real-life tragedy, activism, premature death and deserved idolization and it’s no surprise at all that people have such a hard time letting go.

This is another area in which Marvel has had a distinct advantage as They have worked predominantly with characters that most of the general public don’t know and that has given Them license to change things as They wish, both major and minor. People don’t know how much Thor has been depowered or that Iron Man isn’t anywhere near as sarcastic in the comics. They don’t know how different Black Widow’s back story is or of the huge changes made to characters and, as such, They don’t get angry about Them. 

A perfect example of this would be the way Marvel wrote Wilson Fisk/Kingpin in Daredevil as being inarticulate, painfully shy and heavily implied to be on the Autism spectrum, all of which radically contrasts his portrayal in the comics. Warner Bros do something similar with Lex Luthor (Making the character’s personality different in some minor ways while still keeping the core and essence of Them completely intact, in this case emphasizing his immaturity and making Lex more over the top and heavily implied to suffer from some kind of untreated disorder in addition to at least some of his behavior being attributed to his horribly abusive childhood) and people raise holy hell and accuse it of having nothing in common with the original, which is usually just the version They have in Their heads from other portrayals.

There are more factors and I’m open to hearing theories from others as to why the DCEU has received such a disproportionately harsh and critical reception compared to other franchises. I know there are people reading this who are probably sneering and saying something along the lines of ‘’Maybe it’s because the films are just BAD. Did you ever think of that?” and I’m sure I’ll hear from Them soon enough and I won’t pretend that there aren’t legitimate criticisms of these films, both specific and to the universe as a whole, nor will I tell anyone They’re wrong if They politely and respectfully decide that it just isn’t Their thing.

But I think most reasonable people, even people who are lukewarm about these films or outright don’t like Them, can concede that They certainly aren’t deserving of such an extraordinarily nasty reception as They have been given.

[accelerando]

thoughts on worldbuilding as art and worldbuilding as ancillary to narrative, not a vauge but a slate of thoughts i’ve had after reading a friend’s post

-- (edit) to clarify beforehand, not all of this is a direct response to my friend (pazi, whom i recommend you follow cause shes a rly cool SF author) i'm partly responding to notions about worldbuilding that i’ve heard from other people and partly elaborating my general thoughts about worldbuilding here, so dont take this as a rebuke of what she’s written on the subject but more as a reframing of the concerns from a worldbuilding-to-worldbuild author’s perspective

i agree there's other ways to go about writing a good story and that worldbuilding in itself doesn't make things inherently more consistent-feeling or less contrived and self-servey feeling but i find it useful

ofc i enjoy the research and so on in itself, and like, learning about these different fields and stuff that i read on and compose my thoughts about... also it's been an important thing in my personal approach of like expanding out in my personal horizons of like... what could be possible. what could we look forward to. though certainly i’m not infallible but i like to think about it from that angle

and ofc not everyone is going to have that goal, or need it. its naive at least for sf/f spaces to try and convince people that if your story is in need of fixing up, what it absolutely/foremost/at root level, needs, is better worldbuilding. i think worldbuilding CAN produce interesting ideas and concepts but its not inherently about that

certainly people who aren’t that into math but don’t know better can get caught up spending ages calculating the exact orbits and day cycles of their fictional planets and such or trying to break into conlang because they think they have to do that. and like tbh... no, but a lot of “smart SF” resources tend to emphasize these kinds of details and like it looks cool to have little number statistics on everything so surely itd be even cooler if those were all worked out to minute accuracy, right?

not necessarily; if your story doesnt absolutely depend on little details like that i do think you can afford to fudge it at least somewhat. an SF story doesn’t have to be a meticulous after-action report of the technical failure of some spaceship, which is often based on wildly fantastical technology anyway, even if NASA scientists wrote a paper on it at some point. the Orion Drive is case in point of this imo; a speculative engineering project based on “existing tech” that never got further than cold war paper in the 50s and yet people claim we could build them “like a battleship” with no ill effects. where are all the tried and trusted Orion shipyards then? how about the completely harmless nuclear tests? who can promise shock absorber technology capable of shielding a ten thousand ton skyscraper against a nuclear bomb every second?

these kinds of inconsistencies show up all the time in hard SF and “hard fantasy” as i might call it, and “good worldbuilding” often gets related to the ability to throw up lots of little details, calculations and citations of physical principles or complex self-consistent magic, which can go unquestioned as long as nobody in the audience has any better idea of what the author is talking about, or cares enough to pick it apart. but calculation without purpose does not necessarily make a story feel more in context or less contrived

that in mind, i find worldbuilding useful. it is an art in itself for one, and (to clarify for my own sake) worldbuilding is enjoyable to me just because it is interesting for its own sake, to me. and at some point, any world implies stories to be crafted, can give good guidelines and details to draw upon. i don’t think that that promise of worldbuilding is inherently vapid, nor that worldbuilding and firming up the setting of a narrative are unrelated. RPG settings of course can give good examples of this; one is given a setting rubric with which to guide the establishment of a finer narrative

and certainly this can become a trap when presented as an ideal, that one must have a setting in order for good stories to spring forth, with background worth exploring. even for those who want to worldbuild, few can give a concise answer as to what “good worldbuilding” entails besides basically, “study more”, and “good worldbuilding = good writing”. study more planetary orbits, more orbital physics, more biology, more linguistics. few can give general roadmaps to aid worldbuilding for creating a... setting, rather than a mess of disparate and unconnected details. so what if the orion battleship’s engine and aerodynamics and life support are meticulously worked out if your story is about a greater interplanetary war and you can’t describe the first thing about what life is like under the war or make the story’s conflict more reasonable and interesting than “good american colonial marines analogue” versus “bad socialists / insectoid aliens” etc? what is the (hi)story tying these things together?

imo, worldbuilding is a strain of storytelling at a different scale - fictional groups and factions and things interacting in fictional relations. and like writing a good story that lends itself to inspiring interest and like, fanwork and headcanons and fanworldbuilds etc, writing an interesting and compelling world that inspires smaller-scale stories is not a mutually inclusive or exclusive separate skill. we don’t have to try and be meticulously dialectical, and account for all relations in the world that led to the realization of each event in the story, although imo it is certainly interesting to see what people come up with in trying. but what makes a world compelling depends on who you ask, and being able to graph out the daycycle of a planet indeed does not correspond to universally increasing appeal, or even making your setting more internally consistent. meticulous and well-connected and interesting/wanted are not, universally, mutually inclusive. ultimately, a story needs to be something you want to write

and personally i do want that. i like exploring how futures or other worlds could come to pass, what conditions might enable them to come to pass, in ways that relate to what i know of “reality”

i also think though, that again, a lot of worldbuilding focuses much on detail over general connectedness, which is important to creating a world that feels... compelling imo. the story of the world becomes disparate as effort is concentrated in unrelated elements.

and i try to connect the elements of my world... how are things in the world constructed, in a general sense? details are important too, but they’re not all-important; there are places they are needed and places where they aren’t. a lot of things can be generalized, which doesn’t necessarily equate to oversimplifying. you can just say “there were multiple factors involved here, but the general arc was ____” rather than “the Zorgon empire did ____ and that was the whole story of it”. it’s like how we don’t have to write out the characters’ detailed lives on all the days between when interesting stuff happens in a novel.

(though claiming realism can easily be disingenuous certainly. if we take studies and accounting of existing “real” things as the rubric for our worldbuilding and storytelling, even people at the “forefronts” of study and thought constantly disagree on and find uncertainties in their interpretations of the world. even if it doesn’t “march on”, science and study are not objective, etc)

but yeah. it’s fun and interesting to me... worldbuilding can be fulfilling, but it isn’t necessary to make a story fulfilling. worldbuilding for a story can have you vastly extending the scope of the story you’re aiming to tell, and not everyone wants to or needs to do this to make a good story about individual people. though i do wish i could get into less meticulous material more easily, or other material in general

what’s the takeaway from this? i guess mostly that imo worldbuilding and storytelling draw on the same skillset of being able to relate actors in a story, although in worldbuilding there are ofc also many minute fields one may be expected to specialize into to create details about the “actors” (factions, machines, etc) in question. and so i agree on the notion that creating a compelling story does not depend on a compelling world, though from the standpoint that i enjoy worldbuilding myself and do think it can produce interesting novel concepts - but you have to be writing with the intent of producing interesting concepts. worldbuilders whose main intent is to remake your standard Colonial Marines but with more NASA are probably going to produce mainly Colonial Marines with more NASA

ultimately a compelling story or world or both is going to be a matter of combining and interacting ideas in interesting ways or ways that speak to you

[yasbxxgie]

Sadie Barnette Reclaims Her Father’s Black Panther FBI File As Art

Artist Sadie Barnette’s family tree includes a 500-page FBI file. In 1968, the United States government placed her father, Rodney Barnette, under surveillance. For decades, his every daily detail was logged and noted. Family members, employers, even his former high school teachers were interrogated. The reason for the target on his back: Rodney was a founding member of the Compton, California chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.

In an era where J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI sought to actively, though covertly, criminalize and destroy the Panthers—and arguably any prominent or rising Black political leader—the elder Barnette was of hundreds of activists subject to state-sanctioned harassment and intimidation, their organizations infiltrated and discredited. Other revolutionaries were incarcerated; some were assassinated.

Growing up, Sadie Barnette’s father’s history was never a secret. It seems almost inevitable that the young artist whose work is dedicated to excavating the constructs of identity would turn her gaze to his FBI file, newly available through a Freedom of Information Act request. For Do Not Destroy, her first solo exhibition in New York City, Barnette reframes the pages of the dossier as a father-daughter conversation. With the intervention of her own visual presence—through unapologetically girly embellishments and abstractions—she subverts the government’s narrative with her own. The spurts of hot pink spray paint on black-and-white pages restore a sense of sinew and blood, returning a dignity of wholeness to the life described therein. And so, it is from an inheritance of being targeted and surveilled, that Barnette has grown a garden of reclamation.

Mass Appeal sat down with the Oakland-born artist to learn more.

Mass Appeal: Your family knows what it is like to be targeted, to be painted as a “terrorist.” What are some of your thoughts on the current administration’s rhetoric and actions in dehumanizing and criminalizing believers of Islam, refugees and the undocumented?

Sadie Barnette: One of the things that was really striking about my dad’s file was that my dad was fired from his job at the Post Office because of his involvement with the Panthers. But, the law used to get him fired was something that President Truman had put on the books. It was an Executive Order that talked about behavior unbecoming to a government employee. That’s what they used to get my dad fired because he was cohabitating with a woman who he wasn’t married to… That was behavior that was unbecoming of a government employee. But, the reason that law was put on the books was to get gay people out of government jobs. So it’s another one of those examples where people think “Oh, this law doesn’t affect me. I’m not Muslim. I’m not an immigrant. I’m not trans. This has nothing to do with me.” But a similar law or laws can be used to target whoever the government is considering inconvenient at the time or whoever is questioning things or fighting for their rights. That’s definitely something that we have to keep in mind today.

Was activism and an awareness beyond self-interest part of your birthright or did you come into your own political awakening?

It was always something I held in my heart… I looked at situations with systemic analysis. If the police beat someone up or say if somebody in the family didn’t have access to something that they needed, I would always see it through a lens of systemic problems in our country. When I was in high school, I was very aware that students were being criminalized and were being shuttled along this school-to-prison pipeline. So those things were always on my mind. And growing up in the Bay area, there is a lot of activism and systemic analysis.

How did that activism and analysis start to factor in or feed your artistic growth?

I think they definitely go hand-in-hand. All art is political even when it’s not. Because it’s still a political choice if you are choosing to ignore politics. Often times, just the act of making art or changing the way people think even if its meant as an act of poetry is inherently political. People need escape and fantasy and fiction and need to feel beautiful and seen and heard. So for me even in my work that isn’t directly talking about the FBI file, it is still a commitment to… The act of making art is still a commitment to humanity.

What prompted your dad to want to look at your father’s file, and then what prompted you to want to work with the material?

My dad always wondered what experiences were tied to his FBI surveillance, harassment and intimidation. He wanted the file and so filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get it. It took about four years to get the file. I’m not sure what at that exact moment made him want to really face what a lot of people don’t want to look at. It can be too painful. But, he knows that it is bigger than himself. He also was very lucky that he wasn’t assassinated at the time or thrown in jail. He really is a strong person that survived a lot and still is able to see the value in sharing his experiences. I’ve always been interested in telling the story of my parents and also the activism and the cultural outpourings of that time period. This just seemed like the perfect way to do that—using this file for good and reclaiming it.

Did you wrestle with how much of the file you should work with or alter or how much you should let it speak for itself?

I definitely had to wrestle with it. The fact that the project’s first debut was at the Oakland Museum for the Black Panther exhibit, All Power to the People: Black Panthers at 50 really helped give me confidence that this could be framed and contextualized properly because the show is really dedicated to talking about the full complexities of the Black Panthers, not just like the cool image or that kind of thing. So being included in the Oakland Museum exhibition was what really made me excited about making the final decisions as to how to use this material.

I think it will be the type of project that’ll be ongoing. I’m not the kind of artist that thinks this is the like the ultimate or some kind of end. It’s no [laughs] magnum opus—it’s ongoing. One of the things I value about being an artist is that you can be unsure. You can question and try things. I’m sure I will work in many ways with this file. At some point, I’d like to make a book project with it. My intention often when I’m making art is not about making things; it’s about seeing things. So, the re-framing, the juxtaposing of these files and just a few gesture on my part was really what I wanted to do to allow the pages to speak for themselves and then for the viewer to bring something new to it.

The work also calls into the conversation the political activists that were murdered. Others were arrested and some still incarcerated to this day. Is it imperative to you as we celebrate the 50th Anniversary of the Panthers?

Absolutely. It is hugely important. And I think it is something that we still don’t know enough about. There are a ton of names of people in my dad’s file who he knew, who were his mentors who were killed. John Huggins. Bunchy Carter. They were murdered at UCLA. It is a double tragedy if their lives were not only stolen and taken away from their families but that they are also not remembered in the historical consciousness.

Have you become a student of the era as a result?

Definitely. I’ve been reading several books. One is called The Burglary by Betty Medsger. She basically was one of the reporters to receive the first batch of stolen FBI files around 1972 from this small FBI office in Pittsburgh. These anti-war activists realized that the movement was being surveilled so heavily that the only way to expose what the FBI was actually doing was to break into this office. I’ve been learning a ton about J. Edgar Hoover. It’s amazing to think that these activists were just regular, hard-working people. They weren’t criminals, they were actually repelled by [the thought of] breaking into this office, but they knew it would be worse to let Hoover run the FBI unchecked and run democracy into the ground. The other book is Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of The Black Panther Party by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr.

What did working with this file teach or surprise you about your dad or by extension about yourself?

Well, it’s hard to say. I’m pretty close to my dad so most of the things I knew already. I definitely learned more about our government than I did about my family. Questioning the government, dissent, is legal. It is written into the Constitution. If the government isn’t working properly, then the people are to change it. But people who are in power want to protect their power. As a descendent of slaves and Native Americans in this country, I have never felt like we are included when they say “We the People.” I’ve never felt like this country was mine. My ancestors built this country, but it was never for them either. I’ve always felt that if this country was actually going to be for everyone, then we would have to first really face some things that people don’t want to talk about.

Do Not Destroy is on view through Saturday, February 18, 2017 at Baxter St at Camera Club of New York (126 Baxter St, NY).