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woodswolf · 1 year ago

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You said on the other post that you’re open to disagreement or discussion, so hey, I’ll take you up on that! Sorry that this is terribly long; I didn't realize how much I had to say about my feelings about this game until suddenly almost 9 hours had passed defending it.

I agree with you on a fair bit of things here, but the places where we disagree could not be more pronounced. From reading what you said, though, I think we’re approaching the question of “is Talos 2 good” from different directions, and that at least contributes to our diversity of opinion. I’ve been concerned more with whether it’s a good game; you’re more concerned with whether it’s a good sequel. This isn't a bad thing.

To make my own stance clear is difficult, because I still don’t entirely know what I think of it (edit: at least until I fully wrote out my thoughts); I’ll probably have to go back for a few more playthroughs to really dig into things, especially some of the stuff that I could tell I missed (I’ll get into this in a second). For what it’s worth, though, I’ve very much enjoyed the time I had with the game, and while I very strongly agree with some of your criticisms, there are some that I very strongly disagree with, and some that I don’t think are criticisms at all as much as (often warranted) grievances about (likely) intentional design choices.

To start off, I might as well give my chops. I’ve also 100%’d Talos 1 and Road to Gehenna, and it’s also one of my all-time favorite games. Road to Gehenna is my favorite part of Talos 1 for a lot of reasons, but mostly because I find its story more interesting than the base game’s.

As for my path through Talos 2, it’s… interesting. Overall I chose choices that favored individual and societal freedom, preferring raw forward progress to most of the other alternatives presented (more on choices later). I ended up with Byron as my mayor, and Lynerks was present at the dam (though I’ll admit this felt a bit random, other than the fact that I regularly agreed with her in other conversations). I did all of the normal puzzles, all of the golden puzzles, and saved Miranda. For my final choice, I chose that we needed to keep and use the Theory of Everything.

As for the Somnodrome storyline: five people were interested in me from my answers to DOGE, but I was auto-matched with Helga. However, due to choice weirdness, I can’t say I can do an honest review of anything to do with the Somnodrome story because I unintentionally aborted it before I was able to make any meaningful choices in regards to it. Specifically, in the lab in one of the southern areas where Hermanubis talks to you about it, I chose that I was entirely uninterested in it, and the game interpreted that as “okay, you obviously want this technology basically destroyed, then”, and after that conversation it never came up again for the rest of the game.

This is one of the things that I agree with you about. While I don’t think Talos 2 is naïve, it very often conflated otherwise unrelated concepts, e.g. “society should embrace progress which means that life is inherently beautiful and space colonization/terraforming/bioforming(?)/etc. is inherently good”, or in this case, me being personally uninterested in the Somnodrome technology with wanting it disposed of or destroyed. From the prior conversations that had been had about it before I made this choice, I had come to interpret it as “psilocybin for robots”: potentially interesting or fun, but also potentially dangerous, and ultimately pretty worthless. However, Rand in particular kept insisting that this technology was the greatest thing since sliced bread and a lot of woo-woo bullshit that I found profoundly unconvincing and uninteresting, even as much as he tried to dress it up with “we’re built on an inherent moral logic and we can use this to solve it” and so on.

In the only real conversation I had with regards to it, I chose to “give it to the scholars” because “I literally don’t care, but since it has the potential to kill people at LEAST make sure they know what they’re doing before they do” was not an option. Then, in the lab with Hermanubis, I was presented with a choice of “use this untested drug technology right now” or “don’t use this drug technology, and if you insist you don’t want to, we’ll essentially destroy it instead, but we won’t tell you that we’re going to do that until after you insist you’re not interested”. Yes, it’d obviously be bad or unsatisfying game design to not give the player plot armor against any potential bad side effects of it (which definitely are very real, based off some of what Athena said in the ending), in a similar vein to how they’re able to do all of those datastream overloads just fine while Byron was taken out by just one, but I was still entirely uninterested in anything about the “psilocybin for robots” until after I already made the choice to “destroy” it and there was immediately a terminal entry saying “actually this could be a very useful control scheme for the Megastructure”.

It’s definitely frustrating when it happens, and it happens a lot, but not in a way that completely ruins the game, at least for me. Ultimately, there are a lot of sacrifices that have to be made in regard to choice-based narratives like this, and the moment you give the player a finite number of options, nuance will always be sacrificed, especially with the range of options it’s trying to cater to — trying to condense every range of viewpoints from expansionist progressivism to scientific liberalism to religious conservatism into three to six options will always fall short. Talos 1 has this problem as well, though it’s able to hide the seams better due to its smaller scale and more specific focus — there are many dialogue choices with Milton where the option I would want to choose isn’t there, or is interpreted very differently than how I meant it (and only part of that is due to Milton’s occasional less-sound criticisms); similar problems exist in Road to Gehenna. Could Talos 2 have done more to allow nuance and avoid conflating often very disparate ideas? Yes. Would it have been reasonable to do so within the constraints of writing everything else? Probably. Would it have been completely able to avoid this kind of thing? Definitely not, even in an ideal world, because there almost certainly would be at least somewhere that this would’ve gotten stuck.

Frankly, I think that the script would be perfectly fine as-is if it was a choice between factions instead of personal philosophy. It essentially boils down to this already, but making it that much more explicit would help for a lot of reasons. The only way you can be perfectly happy with your faction choice in Fallout New Vegas for instance is if you side with Yes Man, who will set out to do everything exactly as you please to — you’re almost certainly going to be compromising on something-or-other to side with any of the NCR/Caesar’s Legion/Mr. House. I think Talos 2 could have benefitted from having its characters more explicitly sided into factions at the beginning of the story like this, as it’s another alternate way to cover up the seams where there’s a lack of nuance: it allows the player to distance themselves from the things they don’t agree with and focus on the things that they do. It’d also lessen what you pointed out about the characters feeling like mouthpieces for ideas (though I personally don’t have much of an issue with this — I actually really like the main cast in particular, even if I don’t really agree with e.g. Yaqut/Miranda that the existence of life is inherently beautiful and that more life = more beauty and so on, and even if there were more than occasional moments that felt a tad preachy).

To sum up my thoughts on the narrative, I think Talos 2 would be an even better game if the Somnodrome plotline and whatever’s going on with secret societies was entirely cut. As soon as I saw in the credits that the “main story” and “Somnodrome story” were written by different writers, and how drastically things changed as soon as I said I straight-up wasn’t interested in the Somnodrome plot, it was very clear that it was the much weaker plot overall. Making this choice had a lot of effects on the ending that felt very odd as well — Rand was straight up gone in the finale, I never had any of a “secret society plot” beyond the initial interactions with DOGE, and being matched with Helga had no effect beyond one conversation shortly before I told Hermanubis no. If anything, when I do another playthrough, I want to see if there’s a way to say I’m not interested in it even sooner than when I did, mostly because it would be truly baffling from a narrative design perspective if that were the case — it’s already pretty baffling that the option to completely ignore it existed and that it had no effect (I was thinking I’d at least be able to have a conversation with Rand where he’d be mad at me or something, but nope).

That being said, I do like the main story a lot, and I’d argue that there’s a lot more depth there than you’re giving it credit for. While I don’t vibe as much with a lot of the Miranda stuff, I still don’t think it’s bad — but more importantly, I literally could not disagree more with you about the decision to make Athena a diegetic character and her role in the plot. In fact, I think it’s the most interesting choice Talos 2 made, and the most well-executed by a country mile. The player may not get to make (m)any decisions in her story, depending on whether you count saving Miranda or the final set of choices as such (I don’t), but they don’t have to — her story works entirely on its own merits, and if anything, it’s given me an even deeper appreciation for Talos 1’s base game.

I surely don’t have to explain that Athena and Alexandra Drennan are set up as foils or parallel characters; they’re viewed as more important than other characters, they’re both deeply troubled by the implications of the work they’re doing, they even have the same voice. This was even established in Talos 1, in RtG’s Jerusalem, with the three (primary) playable characters being Alexandra, Arkady, and Athena — allegedly the main character from the book we were given chapters of throughout World A in Talos 1’s base game, but recontextualized as Talos 1’s player character via Talos 2. (I’m going to try so hard not to turn this into a spiel on the parallels between Jerusalem and Talos 2, because Jerusalem is straight-up my favorite thing about Talos 1 and the ongoing parallels between it and Talos 2 made me INSANE through my entire playthrough.)

What’s interesting about Talos 2 is that, by making Athena her own character, they’re able to ask a lot of interesting questions about Talos 1 that it didn’t really have space to: about how an experience like the Simulation would affect the new humanity being sprung out of it. We don’t know what choices Athena made or how she ended up where she is — the only thing we know for sure about her experience is that she found the cat secret in B7 (and even that’s not necessarily the case; for all we really know, she could have found Milton the cat at some point afterwards rather than fresh out of the dam) and achieved the Transcendence ending. Everything else is left ambiguous about her specific experiences; all that the writers left themselves with to infer her character from were the more or less universal experiences involved in achieving that ending. What can you really infer about a diegetic player character from those, and from her experiences with life after the Simulation ended?

Turns out, they’re able to dig into a lot. Athena is a very deeply flawed character and at times even straight-up hypocritical. She herself started off as a very idealistic character, driven on by Alexandra’s hopes, to make the choices that she did. She’s always striving to move forward and discover new things, to build people up and move things always onward and upward, setting lofty goals for no reason other than to have a target to meet and (hopefully, one day) exceed. She wants there to always be something bigger and better, but in being such a powerful driving force for the new civilization that she helped to found, she accidentally trapped herself in a myth as the “ultimate savior” and “the only person who knows anything worth anything”. She trapped herself in the exact thing that she was running away from: an assigned role as one mean to overthrow every structure and carve an original path forward. An assigned role as the one meant to kill God and take its throne. Everything that the Simulation forged her and her ancestors to be.

Athena ran away and did everything that she did on the island for the same reason that all of the other First Companions more or less stepped down from public life (minus Byron, and even he has strong reservations; if it weren’t for his friendship with Alcatraz, who actively doesn’t mythologize him, he might not be involved in the game at all). The people of New Jerusalem stopped seeing them as people and only engaged with them as the only thing worse than celebrities: as a messiah and disciples. It’s set up such that the player will be inclined to see them as this, too, but like Alcatraz I simply don’t vibe with that for a lot of reasons, and I was rewarded for it in the ways that characters grappled with their preconceptions of her in one direction or the other was incredibly interesting.

By the end of the game, my own opinions on Athena were very mixed, because I could see how she got to where she is with all of the trauma and heartbreak along the way, but I also couldn’t entirely forgive her — because as much as she was a victim of mythologizing and deserved an apology for what New Jerusalem turned her/the Founder into, she (and the rest of New Jerusalem) owes an even bigger apology to Alexandra Drennan for doing the same thing to her in turn. Just because Alexandra is dead and can’t see the literal monument she’s been turned into doesn’t mean that she deserves to be deified, and Athena most of all should understand that. (I have a lot more thoughts on Athena and how she ends up being an incredibly interesting blend of Alexandra, EL0HIM, and Milton, but that’s a bit beyond the scope of what I want to say here and going into it would make me go insane again.)

The Talos 2 story we got, overall? It’s pretty good! I enjoyed it, and there are a lot of little things that offer more nuance to the situation — for instance, in Byron’s ending, Neith and Schuyler are able to avoid any personal introspection and growth about what they want to do with their lives, because they’re allowed to go back to doing the same things they were doing before. But if it really dug in and made its story explicitly about Athena and how the new humanity has been affected and essentially traumatized by their origins? That could have been literally incredible and played more with a lot of really fun themes, both originating in and expanding from Talos 1. If Talos 2 chose this plot, it’d be a perfect sequel; Talos 2’s actual story is also very faithful in my opinion, but even if it’s not as good of a sequel plot, it’s at least serviceable, and I’d say it’s a rather logical extension of Road to Gehenna.

As a final note on the story, I don’t see the fact that it involves a Theory of Everything as a flaw as much as just, well, a plot point. I also don’t think it detracts from the philosophy at all, and only serves to raise the stakes — Athena discovered something that could literally destroy the universe if used improperly, and that’s more than enough reason to be conflicted about sharing it with the world! Especially when New Jerusalem had already deified her to the extent they had. But I also really like more existential stories such as the Science Adventure series or Umineko where a Theory of Everything as such is actually rather trivial compared to the weight of concepts that are often thrown around. I have definitely seen cases where the inclusions of such weighty concepts are done poorly, but Talos 2 is very much not one of them — two examples I can immediately think of off the top of my head are the ending twists of Drizzlepath: Genie and Peregrin, two of my favorite games that I love to ignore the ending twists for. The difference in this case between these two and Talos 2 is that the Theory of Everything is introduced as a mid-story twist rather than a cop-out right at the ending, and that it serves to enhance the story rather than detract from the way more interesting stuff that it had going on. Both DP:G’s and Peregrin’s base narratives are so, so, so much more interesting than what their endings imply, because in those cases, the larger concept is used to break the foundation of everything that was established before; Talos 2 uses the Theory of Everything exclusively to add depth, and for a few players, the scale of that discovery could have changed their mind on whether using the island’s technology was a good idea or not. That is a good use of such a weighty concept.

As for the puzzles, I also agree that they’re often too “easy”, but I don’t know if that’s a bad thing or not — I’m very conflicted on it. On the one hand, something I found myself thinking for a fair number of puzzles in Talos 2 was that “this would not be worth a sigil in Talos 1”. The puzzle that specifically comes to mind as most emblematic of this is N2 Rainbow; it’s entirely trivial to solve even if you’re asleep at your keyboard, and that’s only a bit under halfway through the game. There were a lot of other puzzles that felt like this, too, it’s just that that one specifically stuck in my head due to exactly how trivial it is. There were almost never second or third steps in puzzles, except in a few cases towards the end of the game (and almost but not exclusively in the golden puzzles). I did get stuck a few times, but more often than not it was because I was overthinking the clear conditions (e.g. that I need to get an extra piece to the end when I didn’t) than because there was something I genuinely hadn’t thought of. (For instance, I kept thinking that I needed to open the laser gate in N1 Drilling Party from the back for some reason — I genuinely didn’t realize I’d already solved it by getting it open in the first place until I came back later.)

I’m of two minds on this. On the one hand, I was disappointed by the lack of difficulty in the puzzles — I never encountered anything that was “Talos hard” as I think of it, but when I was thinking of “Talos hard”, I was thinking of C7 Prison Break, which I always have to look up a guide for every time I replay just to make sure I don’t softlock myself and have to reset — but there were some puzzles that were acceptably difficult or required particular leaps in order to complete, and they can always add more difficult puzzles via DLC like Road to Gehenna did. It’s also a case of particularly high standards (as most puzzles in Talos 1 and even RtG are not anywhere near as hard as C7 Prison Break).

But on the other hand, I don’t think it’s a terrible change for three reasons. The first is that, in the cases where I really got into the rhythm of it, this faster, more frenetic style of puzzle solving is actually really satisfying. Just going bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, one puzzle after the next after the next, is really, really fun. There were only a few instances where I really felt this, but when I did feel it, it was great. It felt really good to just immediately, intuitively understand the concept and go on solving a ton of puzzles back to back to prove that I know this mechanic really well. There were still less satisfying moments in there where the puzzles were too simple — again, N2 Rainbow — but when the puzzles were both fair and fast, it led to a state entirely unlike anything I’ve felt in, well, any game, really. This game would be extremely fun to casually speedrun, because it lets you do that.

Because the second reason I like it is that, while Talos 1’s puzzles were almost universally more complex than Talos 2’s, they were also a lot more bullshit in places, and Talos 2 fixes that. I’d always had the opinion that some of Talos 1’s puzzles are better than others (B6 Egyptian Arcade and A* Nerve Wrecker my be-loathed), but it wasn’t until I played Talos 2 that I realized exactly how bad both the recorder and mines were as puzzle mechanics. The recorder made it so much harder to experiment while solving puzzles, and as much as I miss the fact that the fun tricks such as duplicating items via recording are no longer possible with the new body-swapping mechanic, the body-swapping mechanic feels so much better to actually play with than the recording ever did. (Even though I know the solution to, say, B5 Alley of the Pressure Plates perfectly well, I still can’t help but groan every time I have to solve it on repeat playthroughs because the recording just feels so miserable to use.)

Mines, on the other hand, are completely gone in Talos 2 (except for the part where you save Miranda) and I honestly couldn’t miss them less. All mines ever really did in Talos 1 was slow you down and force you to wait for their cycles (or to create cycles via jammers in many cases, which just doubles the amount of waiting required). They never made puzzles any more difficult, only more tedious and frustrating, which felt like difficulty until Talos 2 showed that a puzzle need be neither tedious nor frustrating to be difficult, as in N2 Vantage Point, W2 Hollow, or S3 Thrust Vector. (Again, B6 Egyptian Arcade and A* Nerve Wrecker my BE-FUCKING-LOATHED. There are no words in any language strong enough for how much I hate those two puzzles in particular.)

And the third reason that I like it is because the decreased difficulty makes it easier (or will make it easier in my case) to replay the game and experiment with the narrative side of the story. This is where I think our differences in approach come out the most, and to really get into this, I want to step back and take a look at Talos 1 first.

I really like Talos 1’s story, both in the base game and in RtG, but one thing that sometimes frustrates me is that, past a certain point, its pacing is inherently tied to how fast you can solve puzzles. This is less of a problem now, since I already know how to solve every puzzle and have done it multiple times by now, but I remember on my first playthrough in late 2016 that it was really frustrating for me — I wanted to talk to Milton more, I wanted to find more barcodes, but past a certain point, if there were one or two puzzles that I was just stuck on and couldn’t manage to solve, I’d just get frustrated because I really wanted to see what else Milton had to say, or anything else. While Road to Gehenna always had something new to offer after every puzzle, on the other hand, the puzzles take too long to solve to really go through and see the consequences of your choices in an organic way.

Talos 2 offers much better narrative pacing. The easier puzzles make the lulls shorter, but there’s also the fact that Talos 2 has more story to offer in a lot of cases — there was almost always something interesting happening right after solving a puzzle, and there are interesting interactions that you can have with your companions on top of that. There’s a lot more story, and as someone whose favorite part of Talos 1 was the story and characters, all the better for me.

The final thing I’ll bring up is that I think a lot of our difference in opinion is due to differing expectations going in, as I slightly alluded to at the very beginning. From the beginning, I approached Talos 2 with a very open mind, and let it show me what it wanted to show me and so on and so forth. I came in expecting puzzles, and the demo taught me that dialogue choices would also be important and relevant, and what I ultimately came away with is that Talos 2 is less a sequel to Talos 1 than ��an odd but compelling lovechild of Talos 1 and The Forgotten City/Fallout New Vegas”. I very much enjoyed it for what it was, but I don’t fault anyone for wanting more Talos from it — I very much realize that I enjoy Talos 1 and other chamber-based puzzlers for very different reasons than most people (namely that I almost always enjoy them more for their stories more than their gameplay).

Overall, I really, really liked Talos 2, and I think it’s about on par with Talos 1 in terms of enjoyment, with both having trade-offs relative to the other. When disregarding everything about Talos 1’s DLC, though, since Talos 2 doesn’t have any (yet), I think Talos 2 has a very slight edge for me, mostly because the game feels SO much better to actually play. Even if Talos 2 isn’t as hard as I’d like it to be, I didn’t even realize exactly how much the recorder and mines dragged Talos 1 down for me until I saw Talos 2 look at the same mechanics and entirely fix them. If I weren’t in the middle of a huge fanfiction project right now that I’m spending almost all of my time on, I would’ve definitely already jumped in for the rest of the achievements.

Here's my review of The Talos Principle 2. It's not a flattering one, but it felt like some things needed to be said.

First of all, let’s get all of ad hominems out the way. This is not a review in bad faith, nor is in written out of malice. I’m not politically opposed to democracy, liberalism, individualism, humanism and women’s rights. I’m somewhat a nihilist, yeah, but a rather practical one. Meanings can be constructed for ease of living and efficiency and all that jazz. I’m also not a puzzle genre hater. I’ve 100%ed Portal 2, and the only reason I do not have 100% at TTP1 is because I could never bring myself to kill Milton off. Who I am though is a huge fan of the first game. This is clearly affecting my perception of this one, so this is relevant, I think.

I’m a huge fan of TTP1 and I hugely disliked TTP2. Is this game a sequel, does it continue the story? Yes. Is it a spiritual successor, does it continue the _narrative_? No, not at all. It feels different, hits different, and for me it wasn’t in a good kind of way.

First of all, TTP2 is overwhelmingly naïve. I do see that this is a deliberate creative choice, but I strongly believe it does not fit the series. It was a bad idea to take a thought-provoking piece of art and continue it as a message rather than as a discussion. TTP1 had space within itself to engage with its ideas and to form individual conclusions. TTP2 clearly wants to tell you something specific, but to truly listen you need to suspend your disbelief a lot more than before. Where the first game would have tackled a question with some degree of nuance, this one tends to postulate an answer. Would like to explore space for some other reasons than our moral duty to light up the Universe with cognition and life? Do not believe in such things? Good luck. Do not think that beauty exists / is inherently good / matters? Good luck once again, now with a chance to disappoint your companions. The list goes on, and while I’m all for humanism, technocracy and progress, I still felt trapped in reasonings game offered me for it all.

There’s also a huge problem with the narrative as a whole – there is no whole. Plot seems strangely fragmented, with Somnodrome arc being a bitter mix of an afterthought and a cut plotline. What was it for? Same goes for the secret society plot. And the main story, including Miranda, is just flat. Writers want us to care for their characters, but with characters being mouthpieces for ideas this is rather hard.

Also, there’s a Theory of Everything is this game. It just is. With it, the Universe is _postulated_ as being fundamentally knowable and understandable, which is unsettling for such a huge philosophical debate. (Put your ad hominem down, I do believe that the world is cognizable, I just don’t think making this a knowable fact is a good choice for this particular game). Moreover, with the Theory of Everything the science is solved. By one person, who consciously excluded their peers out of scientific progress. One person solved science and nowhere in the game is anyone upset about it. Why? Because writers needed a magical solve-all-problems device, and without it nothing would work plot wise. But with it the plot just seems plastic and cheap.

This story has no room for me to challenge it from the inside, it forces me to go and start a one-sided conversation with its authors, which I do not like. In short, it feels rushed, naïve and incomplete. But this is a puzzle game, not a text adventure. So, are the puzzles any good?

Well, I did not like them. I’m not sure if it means that they are bad, but in my opinion, they are somewhat boring. Most of the time solving them feels mechanical, not that much of ah-a! moments for me. More of the “finally, get this, stupid new puzzle element” and “after 500 hours in portal my brain solves this without thinking”. The other category is “to convoluted to be interesting”. But there’s non zero chance this is me and not the game.

Really bad stuff happens between the puzzles, in those huge open spaces. They get old very fast, and fast travel option isn’t helping much. Some regions are almost impossible to navigate even with the compass, and solving for stars just becomes a chore.

Well, most of the game felt like a chore to me. There are other things I’m upset about, like making Athena, seemingly our main character from TTP1, a chosen-one with a God complex (she IS that even without the myth around her) or not including Milton, but otherwise good plot could have made it work. This one did not. It disregards a very personal thing for a fan of the first game – their unique experience. Maybe the new audience will find this alluring. I certainly did not.

#the talos principle #the talos principle 2 #my posts #the talos principle spoilers #the talos principle 2 spoilers

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bestworstcase · 4 years ago

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We all know that the Gothel twist was terrible and was only there for the sake of having a twist, but if it absolutely have been done, how should it had happened to make it better narratively?

so. i spent a lot of time kind of mulling over and autopsying s3 and my personal conclusion about what went wrong is that tts hamstrung itself with poor narrative structure. and this is going to be one of those posts where i lead with definitions of the terminology i’m going to use, for the sake of clarity and to avoid any misunderstanding.

to whit:

story is the sum total of every element of a narrative: character, plot, setting, theme, and structure.

character is, of course, the people in the story. it’s “who?”

plot is the events that happen in a story. it’s “what?”

setting is the time and place of the story. it’s “where?” and “when?”

theme is what the story is *about.* it’s “why?”

and then there’s narrative structure, which i think is a little harder to grasp because it’s much more invisible than the other things. but it’s the framework of the story, or the scaffolding. it’s “how?” — how are the characters rendered? how is the setting created? how are the events of the plot strung together along the throughline? how is the story built?

now… in my opinion, character is the single most important element of a story; compelling characters can salvage an otherwise mediocre story, and nothing kills a story faster than uninteresting characters.

but the one thing good characters can’t ultimately compensate for is poor structure. if the construction is shoddy, so to speak, sooner or later, the roof is gonna leak. right? and we can see this happen in tts: s1 and s2 are solid, and then bam! we hit s3 and it’s a mess of bizarre pacing and dropped characters, the feelings and motivations of key players get all wonky, the plot loses focus, and things increasingly feel like they’re happening by authorial fiat. the weak structure of the narrative has failed, and it dragged the entire story down with it.

and we can look back in retrospect and see that, yeah, all of these problems existed before; tts always had odd pacing, always had an issue with maintenance of the supporting cast, always relied more on convenience than a narrative really should. but these things didn’t hit a critical mass until s3.

so what does this have to do with gothel? well,

in and of itself, “gothel is cassandra’s mother!” is not a terrible plot twist. the problem with it is a problem of execution, which is to say, the flaw is in the structure, not the plot.

#1: set-up

plot twists are kind of difficult to pull off well, because you don’t want to blindside people, but you also don’t want to tip your hand too soon. you want to surprise, or maybe even shock—but you don’t want your audience to go, “wait, WHAT? that makes no sense!”

do you remember the whole “ricky’s quest” thing that went on in s2? we were told that there was an important piece of foreshadowing somewhere in s1 or s2 that no one had picked up on yet and there was this whole thing of people trying to figure out what it was, and then… rapunzel’s return aired, and ricky revealed that the answer was “cassandra briefly glances into the shattered mirror in rapunzel’s tower.”

and that, + the fact that we know cass is adopted and doesn’t remember her birth parents, + vague visual similarities, is the entirety of the s1-s2 foreshadowing for cassandra being gothel’s daughter.

which isn’t nothing, i’ll grant you, but for something as major as the gothel twist, for something that profoundly changes the worldview and motivations of one of the main characters to such a degree that she completely changes sides because of it, it might as well be nothing.

gothel is afforded zero narrative importance in s1-s2. rapunzel has one nightmare about her, and some lingering trauma connected to the tower that is explored, and of course tromus briefly uses her image to try to control rapunzel in rapunzeltopia. but gothel herself is a non-entity until she abruptly and without warning becomes the emotional lynchpin of the entire conflict in s3. that’s jarring.

cassandra is a complex character whose apparent motivations for turning against rapunzel are meticulously built up over the course of s2… only for s3 to pull a bait-and-switch, sweep all of that set-up under the rug, and replace it with cassandra’s messed up feelings about gothel’s abandonment. even her ruined hand never gets mentioned again—not by her, not by zhan tiri, not by rapunzel, not by anyone. that’s jarring, too.

to use my own work as a point of comparison here, the bitter snow equivalent of the gothel reveal is cassandra finding out that sirin is her aunt and her parents were innocent. like the gothel twist, learning that information profoundly changes how cassandra sees herself and the world, and it’s intended to be a big shock… but unlike the gothel twist, i did a lot of setting up for it:

1: sirin has real narrative importance in the first half of the story, pre-reveal. the fic opens with her, her involvement with the separatists is established early, etc.

2: pieces of cassandra’s backstory are threaded through the first half of the story. by the time we hit the reveal, it’s been established that cass is saporian, that her parents were executed for treason, that this treason involved selling poisoned crops and causing outbreaks of a deadly sickness.

3: there are many demonstrations of anti-saporian discrimination and prejudice in the first half of the story: the way cass sees herself and the alienation she feels from the rest of corona, past incidents where she was targeted for being saporian, basically every time gilbert opens his mouth, what happened to caine’s dad.

4: cassandra discovers evidence of the harsh, unjust nature of the crackdown and realizes that at least some of what she’s been taught about coronan law enforcement and recent history is inaccurate… thus planting the seed, for the readers if not for cass herself, that other things might be false too.

5: caine points out that cass is the reason the separatists don’t let parents join up, and though she doesn’t elaborate on that, it’s because cass is proof that corona will steal saporian children if their parents are accused of treason.

and 6: everything sirin says to cass in chapter 14 is wrapped up in her being painfully, painfully aware that a) cass is her niece and b) probably doesn’t know the whole story—while also trying to stick to the plan. so… while she doesn’t spill the beans there, she knows who cass is, she stops andrew from hurting her, she makes a point of not acknowledging the legitimacy of cassandra’s adoption, and obliquely suggests that sir peter is a murderer… and while she tries to stop cass from interfering with what they’re doing, she doesn’t hurt her, even though she very much could.

so… in chapter 15, when sirin comes out with “actually, the blight was a natural disaster no one anticipated and saporians got sick and died too, your parents were just scapegoats because corona wanted someone to blame, and oh, by the way, you’re my niece,” it’s a shock but not one that comes entirely out of left field. cassandra’s parents being innocent victims of an overzealous and prejudiced justice system is a logical extension of all the stuff that has already been set up, and sirin being cass’s aunt helps to clarify motivations that were previously opaque (such as: why does sirin despise corona so much, why didn’t she just kill cass, etc).

and because all of this stuff is given so much attention in the first half of the story, the way it snaps cassandra’s worldview in half and causes such a massive reorienting of her goals and loyalties feels natural. because it already mattered a great deal to her, and it related to the doubts she was already experiencing.

which like, that’s the key. setting up a big plot twist isn’t about establishing one basic fact (“cass is adopted”) and tossing in one instance of symbolic foreshadowing (the mirror thing) and nothing else, over the course of two whole seasons of a tv show. it is about priming the audience to be ready to accept the reveal.

how could tts have done this with the gothel reveal? here’s some ideas:

1: give gothel a greater presence in the narrative. the simplest way to do this would be to really lean in to how fucked up rapunzel is because of her. more nightmares, more overt moments where we see rapunzel still being haunted by her memory. alternatively, lean more into the fact that gothel was a disciple of zhan tiri.

2: give cassandra’s adoption, and the question of her birth parents, even a teeny tiny glimmer of interest. specifically, let “dad found me after my parents abandoned me” be the only thing cass knows about her adoption, and let that hurt her. she doesn’t even have to be curious about who her birth parents were—just have that pain of abandonment more present in the first two seasons.

3: imply the captain knows more about cassandra’s origins than he lets on.

4: you know the parallel in RATGT where rapunzel screams at cass the way gothel screamed at rapunzel? more of that. like, how delicious would it be if there were many little instances in s1-s2 of rapunzel lashing out at cass with behaviors she obviously subconsciously learned from gothel, only for s3 to pull the sucker punch of cassandra being gothel’s daughter? like! imagine how that could so EASILY make cassandra recontextualize her entire relationship with rapunzel by linking rapunzel’s toxic behaviors with gothel’s abuse and abandonment in her mind? and then in s3 you can really dig into rapunzel interrogating her own behaviors and struggling to break the cycle of abuse.

5: if gothel being a former disciple of zhan tiri is narratively important, it can go hand-in-hand with zhan tiri and the other disciples more overtly targeting cass, specifically. even if we don’t know why until the reveal.

i’ve seen a couple posts from other folks discussing how to “fix” the gothel twist, and many of them involve cass either knowing from the start or finding out much earlier, but while that could work, i don’t think it’s necessary. it’s all about the set up. it’s all about constructing the story in such a way that the audience goes “OH!” instead of “WHAT?!” when the reveal happens, and the specific timing of the reveal doesn’t really… matter.

#2: execution

surprising absolutely no one, i’m going to talk about zhan tiri now.

based on what chris has said in various interviews, my understanding is this: originally, cass was originally supposed to be a secret antagonist all along and know about her parentage right out of the gate. her characterization softened early on in the process, her knowing about gothel got dropped, and suddenly the creators needed a way for her to learn that gothel was her mom, and thus zhan tiri entered the narrative.

she is a plot device whose whole purpose is to tell cass “gothel was your mom and abandoned you for rapunzel,” and then fuel her downward spiral. the rest of her character exists in service of that, full stop.

which… like the gothel reveal, having a character whose primary function is to be a plot device isn’t a problem in and of itself. however. “ancient evil demonic sorceress with deep ties to the magical lore of the setting and an entrenched hatred for team hero, whose MO is manipulating people” is a terrible character archetype to use as this kind of plot device, because that kind of character needs to have an agenda in order to function, and as soon as you give them an agenda they develop a gravitational pull on the rest of the story, especially if they’re directly involved with a main character.

and if you’re willing to roll with that gravitational pull, it can be fine. but if you’re not… you get tts s3.

chris has pretty much spelled this out in interviews. he said at one point that they debated multiple potential motives for zhan tiri… but found that anything more complex than “wants the drops and to burn corona to the ground, because reasons” sucked oxygen away from the cass vs raps conflict and eventual reconciliation, which… yeah. so they gave zhan tiri the cardboard motives and didn’t really do anything with her other than trotting her out to give cass a good shove in whatever direction the plot needed cass to fall in every so often.

that zhan tiri is a compelling character in s3 at all is a testament to the strength of her VA and the sheer potential of her established lore, in combination with the fact that she and cassandra are off screen enough to demand that the audience fill in a lot of gaps. but in, like, the actual text, she has all the complex personality of a piece of damp tissue paper and she is, for all intents and purposes, literally just Cassandra’s Brain. every decision, every single decision cass makes in s3 is because of zhan tiri. why take the moonstone? zhan tiri tells her to. why is she so mad at rapunzel? zhan tiri made her that way. why does she attack rapunzel? zhan tiri convinced her she had to. why does she go to gothel’s cabin in TOTS? zhan tiri tipped her off that rapunzel would be there. why does her fragile truce with rapunzel fall apart at the end of TOTS? zhan tiri interfered. why does she try to reconcile again in OAH? she found out zhan tiri was… zhan tiri. why does that reconciliation fail? zhan tiri. why does cass ultimately redeem herself? because zhan tiri stabs her in the back first.

*deep breath*

this is what happens when you troubleshoot a broken narrative with plot devices instead of opening it up to fix whatever is wrong with the underlying structure. in this case, cassandra not knowing about gothel from the get go broke her planned villain arc… and the creators applied zhan tiri like a bandaid, molding this new character into someone who could railroad cass down the preexisting plan for her villain arc.

what needed to happen instead was a wholesale reexamination and reconfiguration of cassandra’s villain arc, her reasons for going down that path, and her reasons for coming back. even if finding out the truth about gothel was still the trigger for it, it’s ultimately not about gothel anymore. gothel is just the last straw.

and in order to work with the characters as-established in s1-s2, the events of s3 would need to be framed that way. if, after all the shit she goes through in s2, cass met zhan tiri, learned that gothel was her mom and abandoned her for rapunzel, and finally just snapped and went after the moonstone because fuck this, fuck you, and then zhan tiri came in with the compassion and emotional validation and the “your mother treated you as a servant and then discarded you for something she thought was better, and so did rapunzel, didn’t she? but i see you, i believe in you, i am your friend, and we can help each other,” and cass bought that because she’s desperate for emotional support and kindness and fuck it, she’s on team demon now, only for her conscience to eat away at her until she couldn’t take it anymore and broke away from zhan tiri for good… then it works, full stop.

like, you don’t have to change a single plot event for the gothel twist to work. you just have to string those plot events along an emotional throughline that makes sense and feels connected to what happened in s1-s2. you can’t use zhan tiri to graft the s3 arc of evil-all-along proto-cass onto canon s1-s2 and call it a day because that doesn’t work! you have to write for the characters you have, not their early planning-stages iterations. if you make a decision early on that breaks your original plan, you have to commit to redoing the whole plan.

and if you do that, if you fix the underlying structure, you don’t need a character whose sole purpose is to railroad another character down a predetermined path that no longer fits her characterization; cass and zhan tiri can instead both be characters, acting according to their motivations and goals, and not puppets pantomiming the ghost of a broken plan.

(you do still have to accept that zhan tiri will pull focus away from the cass+rapunzel friendship, though. them’s the breaks. don’t use zhan tiris if you’re not willing to let them gobble up the spotlight a bit.)

TL;DR: to fix the gothel twist, set it up better in s1-s2 by making the question of cassandra’s parentage, or abandonment by her parentage, important to the narrative at all, or else by focusing more closely on gothel being a disciple of zhan tiri; then execute the s3 villain arc in a way that makes sense for canon cass and what she experiences in s1-s2, rather than using zhan tiri to railroad her down the path evil-all-along proto-cass was supposed to take.

the problem is a structural one so at the end of the day the solution is to fix the structure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

#rta #thank u anon its been a hot minute since i ranted about sTrUcTuRe #Anonymous

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abigailnussbaum · 5 years ago

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The Boys - Good & Bad

Being an itemized list of the strengths and weaknesses of the first season Amazon’s superhero show The Boys, based on the comic run of the same name by Garth Ennis, which I haven’t read.

GOOD:

The show looks good. It’s not tremendously visually inventive on the level of, say, Legion or Doom Patrol, but it’s got a definite style, and not just in the action scenes. The stagings pop, the street scenes look crisp and interesting, the boardroom scenes take advantage of the set designers’ inventiveness. There’s the requisite loss of saturation once our two main characters lose their respective love interests, but it’s not color-graded out of existence, the way a lot of other shows trying to evoke masculine despondency do. A “gritty”, laddish superhero show conjures up certain expectations where visuals are concerned, and The Boys exceeds them at almost every turn.

There are actual episodes! With beginnings and endings and common themes! I had no idea streaming shows could still do that, but The Boys is really good at finding mini-stories within its overarching plot and structuring its episodes around them (which should be a basic implement in a TV writer’s toolkit and instead has all-but disappeared). Episode 2 is about the Boys realizing how screwed they are by having captured a nearly-unkillable superhero who has seen their faces, and trying to figure out a way to kill him. Episode 5 is structured around Annie and Hughie’s visit to a superhero-themed Christian revivalist festival. It gives the entire season a more engaging structure, and pulls you along with the story in a way that most streaming shows don’t even attempt.

There are some genuinely clever worldbuilding choices that emerge from the “what if superheroes, but awful” premise. The fact that superheroes star in their own movies, for example, or that their power competitions become major sporting events, is hilarious, and perfectly conveys the sense of moral bankruptcy that I think the show is going for. And the crossover the show posits between superhero worship and white Evangelicalism is an obvious and perfect fit, tying into the latter’s barely-concealed love of power and authoritarianism. Also, there are some inventive demonstrations of how combining superpowers, limited intelligence, and corporate greed can lead to horrifying results, some funny - The Deep trying to rescue a dolphin from captivity - and some genuinely gutting - the plane crash scene in episode 4 is the queasy highlight of the season, as the viewer realizes just a few seconds before the characters do just how badly they’ve screwed up, and how horrible their future choices are going to have to be.

The cast is uniformly excellent, and pretty much everyone gets a lot of different layers to play. The highlights are Elisabeth Shue, Erin Moriarty, Jessie T. Usher, and Tomer Capon (bit of hometown pride here, but it’s easy to see why he’s such a well-regarded young actor in Israel), but pretty much everyone is good and interesting to watch. Even Karl Urban, who gets the show’s most thankless task - he has to carry most of the story while playing its least nuanced character - manages to infuse some humor and complexity into Billy.

There are a lot of interesting, complex relationships, the top one being Homelander and Madeline Stillwell. As a character says near the end of the season, it’s a relationship that is “hard to quantify” - does he want to fuck her, or kill her, or be her child? Does she want to control him or does she genuinely get off on his desire for her? Other relationships are less fraught - Frenchie and Kimiko are incredibly sweet together - but still a lot of fun to watch.

The show seems to understand that at the root of almost every villain, and certainly privileged ones, is childishness. You see this in the way The Deep sinks into self-pity after experiencing the consequences of his sexual assault on Annie, or the way A-Train becomes obsessed with blaming Hughie for his girlfriend’s death, even though he’s the one who killed her. You see it most of all in Homelander’s resentment of Madeline’s baby and the attention she lavishes on it. It’s simply stunning how openly envious this grown man is of a months-old infant, and it makes every scene the two share almost unbearably tense, because you’re just waiting for Homelander to snap and kill the baby. Which ends up much more effectively conveying the point the show is trying to make than the sudden shock of him actually doing it would have - the fact that this character would clearly feel themselves justified in killing an infant, and is only holding back because he knows there’ll be a fuss, is the sum total of the show’s criticism of absolute power.

(This emphasis also justifies the show’s insistence that Hughie is redeemable, because though he starts out quite immature, he does grow, unlike the superpowered villains. He starts the season killing a super who hasn’t really done anything to him, just for the rush of it, and ends it saving the life of the super whose selfishness destroyed his world, because he’s actually realized that his are not the only problems that matter.)

Someone seems to have realized that having a female (Asian) character whose name is simply The Female is an absolutely terrible idea, and the show gives her a name as soon as possible. There’s also hints that she may be regaining the power of speech.

BAD:

The use of violence - and particularly sexual violence - against women ends up privileging men, even when those men are the perpetrators. Both Hughie and Billy are motivated by the loss of the women they loved, and in both cases the show plumps for the classic approach of single scene featuring the love interest being angelic, and doesn’t bother to shade either of them in or give them a personality or a chance to speak on their own behalf. And even when the victim is a main character, as when The Deep assaults Annie, the focus is much more on him than on her. Annie processes her trauma in a scene and a half, and it ends up being folded into her overall dilemma over how to be a superhero. Whereas the Deep spends the rest of the season coping with the consequences of his actions and folding them into his general lack of self-esteem. While there’s the germ of an important point there - just because this guy has problems of his own doesn’t justify his assault on another person or make him particularly tragic or compelling - the show’s insistence on going back to that well, even as the season approaches its climax, is simply baffling.

This feels, in fact, like a smaller component of the show’s broader problem with sexual ethics, the fact that it seems to have no way of distinguishing between sexual behavior is depraved, and sexual behavior that is just weird or maybe a bit kinky. Like, the fact that the Deep has consensual sex with dolphins is not worse than, or even equivalent to, the fact that he assaulted Annie. The fact that Homelander prematurely ejaculates when he and Madeline have sex isn’t a worse reflection on his character than the fact that he may have raped Billy’s wife. And yet those cases are treated as equivalent by the narrative. It ends up feeling profoundly anti-sex, rather than anti-sexual-violence, an impression that is only intensified when Annie and Hughie - the show’s sole “good”, loving couple - have sex that is completely vanilla (and despite Hughie’s earlier assurances that he isn’t intimidated by Annie’s strength, he still ends up being the dominant one in bed, and she even lets him be on top). It also prevents the show from any serious discussion of the one aspect of sexuality that is unique to its setting, the possibility of supers inadvertently hurting their human partners. The scene in which Popclaw crushes a man’s head between her thighs is the nadir of the season precisely because it’s played for laughs, for that “aren’t we outrageous” vibe that everyone told me the comic was suffused with. When actually you could do something interesting and character-based with it, if the show actually cared to.

(Having said all this, I do think that the show is a lot better on the subject of sexual violence than it could have been, and a lot better than the source material might have dictated. It feels significant that - with the exception of the aforementioned Popclaw scene - we never see any act of sexual assault on screen. We see Homelander and the Deep scoping out their victims, Rebecca Butcher and Annie, and maneuvering them into a position of vulnerability. And we see the aftermath of the assault for both victims. But we don’t see the act itself, in a series that is otherwise perfectly happy to depict consensual sex, even if it judges anything resembling kink. I also thought the handling of Queen Maeve, as a woman who has lived for years under a sustained campaign of sexual harassment, was extremely powerful - again, the focus is on how the abuse twists the victim up and makes them feel powerless and alone, not on any overt act of violence.)

I really don’t get why I’m meant to care about Billy Butcher. It’s not even that I don’t like him - I just find him completely uninteresting. He works as an engine of plot and a way to inject chaos into the other characters’ lives (the repeated device in which he authoritatively promises to solve the team’s problems, only for the show to cut away to him alone, wearing an expression that makes it clear that he has no idea what to do and is about to make everything worse, is pretty funny and effective). But as a character in his own right and with his own story, he just feels too one-note and monomaniacal for me to care about. I care what happens to MM and Frenchie and Kimiku and Annie and Maeve. I even care a little what happens to Hughie. I simply can’t bring myself to give a fuck about Billy.

I don’t see why I should be rooting for Hughie and Annie to make it work. It’s great that he feels she helped him rediscover his moral compass, but in the meantime he lied to her, used her, and concealed the fact that he had murdered one of her teammates from her. Annie has the right of it when she hears his confession and replies “the thing is, I don’t care”. It would be one thing if their reconciliation at the end of the season was more of an ethical one, a case of Annie choosing to rescue Hughie and the Boys because she knows they don’t deserve to die, not because she forgives him. But I got the impression that we were meant to read it as a romantic reconciliation too, which Hughie hasn’t even come close to earning.

If you must have interchangeable Middle Eastern terrorists as your go-to, killable background villains, doesn’t it seem obvious that there should be at least a few positive, named Middle Eastern characters in the foreground? (I suppose Frenchie might count? But given Capon’s heritage, he could just as easily be a Sepharadic Jew, which doesn’t really avoid the problem of Islamophobia that the show cheerfully blunders into.)

The plot kind of loses the thread towards the end of the season, partly, I suspect, because of the need to set up characters and plot points for season 2. It’s a particular shame because the plotting had been so strong in the first half of the season.

The sound mix is terrible. It should tell you something that I even noticed this and worked out the right term to use for it, because I’m usually completely illiterate on these matters. But after the millionth time you’ve had to raise the volume during a dialogue scene, then immediately lower it during an action scene, you start to wonder if there isn’t something wrong.

Overall, this is a much smarter, more interesting, and more entertaining show than discussions of the comic had led me to expect, but I can’t help but wonder if it isn’t benefitting from the fact that we’re so saturated with superhero stories right now. There’s less pressure to be the one subversive superhero story, which leaves The Boys room to be more character-focused, and to use superheroes as more of a metaphor for the corrupting influence of power and the evil of corporate overreach. Its supers feel a lot more like generic celebrities - A-Train is an anxiety-ridden athlete; Annie is a pageant kid; Maeve is an aging movie star whose career and soul have been blighted by ubiquitous sexual harassment. Characters who are genuinely set apart by their superpowers, like Homelander, are in the minority (and even in Homelander’s case it turns out his psychopathy has more to do with having been raised in a lab).

Basically it feels like the people who adapted the comic saved it by telling a story that is much more generic than the original, which may be entirely to the good. But I do wonder whether the second season won’t veer further into exactly those parts of the show that I find least interesting. The final scene seems to suggest much more of an emphasis on Billy’s manpain and his conflict with Homelander, and the introduction of superpowered terrorists threatens to move the show away from the criticism of power that made the first season work.

#the boys #this was a lot better than i was expecting #while still having enough flaws #that i can easily see it falling apart in season 2 #still #if you were holding off because of the comic's reputation #the show is a lot smarter and more nuanced

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marginalgloss · 7 years ago

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the machines inside the machines

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is a long, strange and wholly unique novel. It opens with what seems like the faintly unhinged ramblings of a basement-dwelling stranger, a nameless voice who declares himself ‘…invisible…simply because people refuse to see me.’ It will be over 500 pages before he can fully explains what he means by this.

Understand first that it isn’t literal: for a long while it seems his only struggle is the opposite, what to do once he is seen, a black man in mid-century America, with nothing at all he can depend upon. He has no family and no real friends to speak of: he travels alone, struggling to find a place in the world where he can belong. He’s driven to speak up before others but the world seems determined to beat it out of him before he can raise his voice.

And why should he raise his voice anyway? Sometimes he recalls the words of his grandfather:

‘“…I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I want you to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction, let ‘em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open…”’

At first, for our narrator this seems to bring him nothing but trouble. For a long while the novel trips from one darkly allegorical sequence to the next: the novel opens with a brutal, surreal ‘battle royale’, devoid of context or explanation, in which the narrator’s only prize is a scholarship to a black university; later, he spends a stint chauffeuring a rich white capitalist through a nightmarish tour of the rougher black neighbourhoods; then, forced out of that college, he ends up working in a paint factory alongside an old half-crazy engineer whose words seem to sum up another kind of truth: ‘They got all this machinery, but that ain’t everything; we the machines inside the machine.’

The style is rampaging: big and funny and broad, but also considered, articulate in a conversational way, and capable of moments of great beauty. It’s not for nothing that this book is occasionally compared to Moby-Dick — both are highly idiosyncratic, digressive, and from time to time present the reader with images that beg to be taken as metaphors. Think of the mysterious drops of black liquid placed into the cans of otherwise pristine white paint, due to be shipped off to coat the government buildings. But again, as with Melville, there are moments here of such dreamlike potency that they resist any kind of metaphorical interpretation: think of the long and deeply strange story of old Trueblood, a man accused of an incestuous relationship with his daughter, who tells a story so unsettling and so unpleasant that it has all the quality of a lurid dream. (Naturally, the rich white man listening to it is fascinated: he gives him a hundred dollars, and leaves in a daze.)

After a while the novel discards the episodic format and settles into a longer groove. The narrator moves to New York, visits Harlem, and falls in with an unnamed group of ‘Brothers’. They seem to be a group of Marxist agitators; not exactly politicians nor union men nor gangsters, but with something of all three in the mixture. Brother Jack, their leader, likes our narrator because he turned out to have a gift for oratory and rhetoric after all. When he speaks to the black people in Harlem, they listen. But it isn’t long before we realise that for all their supposed fraternity, the Brothers don’t really care much for our man at all. They want him for his skills, and despite being supposedly anti-racist, they are profoundly uninterested in the problems of the black population which (even in liberal New York) become evident to the narrator at every juncture.

The solution, then, is to cultivate invisibility. It is to take his grandfather’s advice at face value: to become a wholehearted ‘yessum’ man; to become swallowed by the whale, and thrive in its darkness; to so totally merge with the expectations of one’s oppressor that you become, to them, an indispensable friend. What could be more perfectly subversive?

The only problem for our narrator is that it turns out such a life leaves him entirely powerless to help when things become more than the world can stand. Above everything else it is the casual shooting of an unarmed black man that precipitates the events that bring this book to a close. The speech at his funeral remains hauntingly, horribly prescient:

‘“Here are the facts. He was standing and he fell. He fell and he kneeled. He kneeled and he bled. He bled and he died. He fell in a heap like any man and his blood spilled out like any blood; red as any blood, wet as any blood and reflecting the sky and the buildings and birds and trees, or your face if you’d looked into its dulling mirror – and it dried in the sun as blood dries. That’s all. They spilled his blood and he died. They cut him down and he died; the blood flowed on the walk in a pool, gleamed a while, and, after a while, became dull, then dusty, then dried. That’s the story and that’s how it ended. It’s an old story and there’s been too much blood to excite you. Besides, it’s only important when it fills the veins of a living man. Aren’t you tired of such stories? Aren’t you sick of the blood? Then why listen, why don’t you go? It’s hot out here…Here you have only the same old story. There’s not even a young wife up here in red to mourn him. There’s nothing here to pity, no one to break down and shout. Nothing to give you that good old frightened feeling. The story’s too short and too simple. His name was Clifton, Tod Clifton, he was unarmed and his death was as senseless as his life was futile. He had struggled for Brotherhood on a hundred street corners and he thought it would make him more human, but he died like any dog in a road.”’

The riots which follow drive the narrator underground. For him, ‘invisibility’ finally entails a condition of total retreat into the life of the mind. For all its lack of optimism, the implication seems to be that this represents the only route to survival for the black individual in modern America. Neither movements nor institutions of any kind can be trusted.

What matters is for each person to maintain their own humanity while recognising the great and terrible acts of inhumanity that happen every day: ‘the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived.’ And after all that, after all those hundreds of pages of beautiful and sometimes bizarre narrative, the speaker declares that he will emerge from his basement hole. But if he does leave the darkness, we never see it here.

#books #ralph ellison #invisible man

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pluckyredhead · 7 years ago

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Daredevil 101: Xtreem Daredevil

Last time on Daredevil 101 (before we detoured into Man Without Fear), Matt had once again faked his death, leaving Karen and Foggy bereft. He’d also gotten himself a keen (read: terrible) new suit of armor. Because what’s better for a gymnast than armor?

But a new look isn’t enough. Matt’s determined to make everyone believe, really and truly, that the old Daredevil is dead:

See??? This Daredevil’s so different!!! He uses a gun!!!

...Except this doesn’t actually make any sense, because Matt’s original plan was to convince people that he wasn’t Daredevil. If Matt’s dead, and the new Daredevil is obviously a different person, won’t that prove more than anything else that Matt was the original Daredevil?

(I mean obviously the whole thing is just an excuse to put Matt in some very on-trend armor and have him growl and wave a gun around, but the story logic should still hold up.)

And what’s Matt doing when he’s not in costume? YOU GUYS IT’S THE DUMBEST THING:

JACK BATLIN. Matt you incredible loser.

Anyway he creates this identity as a Times Square con artist, or “social engineer” as he calls it. It pays the bills, apparently.

Meanwhile, his old friends don’t know what to make of the new Daredevil:

IT’S BECAUSE YOU’RE IN LOVE WITH HIM, FOGBERT

And speaking of love, Elektra’s still around, although this character doesn’t act like any Elektra I know:

This scene exists for no reason other than to show what a manly badass Matt is. Ugh.

Anyway, Matt is uninterested in rekindling things with Elektra, who eventually gives up and leaves town - but he obviously can’t get back together with Karen, either, since she thinks he’s dead. He settles for, um...teaming up with Captain America to dress up in ridiculous costumes and infiltrate a nightclub for hackers?

Literally everything about this page is hilarious. I couldn’t make head or tails of the insane plotline, but please enjoy the fact that they are talking to a stripper (maybe???) named EMOTICON. And the dialogue!!! “Ring-a-ding!” ��Maybe they don’t like your rap!” AMAZING. We definitely all talked like this in the 90s. Also: THOSE COSTUMES. What a pair of losers.

But all good or at least entertainingly incoherent things must come to an end. I’m assuming Marvel wanted to wrap up the armored Daredevil business for whatever reason. They informed Chichester that he could write five more issues, then he was done. Pissed, Chichester told them he wanted an Alan Smithee credit, referring to a pseudonym used by directors when they want to disavow any connection with the finished product. So this last profoundly terrible arc is credited to “Alan Smithee” and artist Keith Pollard.

Anyway, it features this guy:

His name is Kruel, which...I mean, this is coming from a writer who named a character Emoticon, so sure. He’s horribly burned and can’t remember how he got that way, but knows it happened years ago and involved quite a few people who are important to Matt: Foggy Nelson, Karen Page, Ben Urich, Glorianna O’Breen, and DA Kathy Malper.

Every time he attacks one of these witnesses - who have absolutely no idea what he’s talking about - some of the memories come back, so he works his way through, starting with Ben:

Luckily, the “new” Daredevil shows up in time to rescue Ben and Doris. But Ben has his suspicions of this allegedly new superhero:

Fool Matt once, shame on you. Fool Matt twice, he jumps out the window and fakes his death.

Anyway, Kruel continues to work his way down the list of witnesses, moving on to Glori, who is ironically photographing Matt’s old apartment for a story for the Bugle:

Unfortunately, Matt doesn’t show up this time:

Yeah. So Glori was written out before Matt even went to Albany, broke up with Foggy with no explanation off page and hasn’t been seen since, and gets brought back for one issue to get thrown out the window by a one-off villain in a story the writer wouldn’t even put his name on. Comics are bullshit.

Matt hears on the news that a Bugle photographer was killed and goes to investigate:

Matt is pretty self-involved in that “everything is about me, I ruin everything” way, but it’s fairly logical to assume that all the people he knows are being attacked because he knows them, because the fact that Glori, Foggy, Karen, Ben, and Kathy were all at the same place before any of them but Foggy had ever met him, especially when Glori should have been in Ireland and Karen should have been in Vermont, stretched credulity a tad.

Anyway, gradually Kruel’s memories come back: he worked for Fisk and stole from him, and Fisk chased him to a remote rural diner where all five of the Daredevil allies above were hanging out for completely random reasons:

You tell ‘em, Karen!

Fisk burns down the diner with Kruel in it, presumably killing him (but not actually, as we know):

So there you go: all of these unconnected people were at this random place at the same time, and then Fisk erased their memories. This is the dumbest fucking story.

Anyway, in the present day Kruel is still making his rounds, and he goes after Foggy next:

Matt lunges for Foggy while Fisk - who has temporarily teamed up with the “new” Daredevil to deal with this threat - keeps Kruel busy:

This page makes me laugh so hard.

Anyway, Matt stops Fisk from killing Kruel and then introduces himself to his lifelong best friend, again:

Fisk in the background there also makes me laugh. He’s so happy for them! Or pissed he didn’t get to do a murder, whatever.

Anyway, that’s the end of this idiocy! Next up: a new writer, a new breakdown, and Foggy finally finds out the truth!

#daredevil #daredevil 101

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lesbianyaomo · 8 years ago

Text

kuroshitsuji’s trouble with emotional resonance

So after reading the most recent chapters and revisiting a couple arcs of the manga, I've pinpointed some things that made me lose interest in the series in the first place. Some people have already pointed out Toboso's problem with arc pacing, and here I have some thoughts about her problems with character development, and why Ciel and Sebastian are probably the most boring characters in the whole series (but also where that could change after 127).

Toboso really wants to write about how the world is a dark and unforgiving place (hah, like we haven't seen that before) but she does this in a way that's uninteresting by making Ciel untouchable. Since the start of the series, he's never gotten seriously hurt, and even any incidents that should leave lasting emotional scars are just shrugged off. For a series that wants to try to explore dark matters, it fails by giving Ciel no real stakes: he has a demon butler who can accomplish almost anything, and he lacks an emotional connection to almost everyone–the exceptions (the people he inarguably feels affection for) are Madame Red (dead), and Lizzie, so the options of making him lose someone are few. He has not yet failed at an important case nor a goal, and never experiences any real consequences for his actions. It makes for a poor story and an uninteresting character.

This also means that basically every character other than Ciel and Sebastian are infinitely more interesting and complex, because they're actually vulnerable. They can lose, get hurt, die, change, and develop as people in a way that Ciel hasn't for the entire run of the series so far. This is the reason I really, really love Soma, Agni, and Lizzie's characters, and why I really wish there was more time devoted to them. They're just genuinely good people who don't respond to pain with cynicism and arrogance; they use it to better themselves and to uplift the people around them and slkfajklsdfgh that's so?? good?? And honestly, so refreshing in a story where Ciel has been treated like the moral authority so far; not moral as in he's a good person, but moral as in the story supports his vision of the world and everyone in it as morally cold/uncaring/hostile, and portrays Soma, Agni, and Elisabeth's types of viewpoints as hopelessly naïve. So far, they've been barred from the main storyline except for a few impactful arcs (Curry Competition arc and Cruise Liner arc, respectively), so their interpretations of morality aren't dwelt upon by the storyline nor put on the same level as Ciel's dog-eats-dog cynicism.

But, back to Ciel. There's no reason for him to remain a static character (and Kuroshitsuji being a 'dark' series is no excuse; characters can develop even in 'dark' stories). Ciel has a lot of room for growth, and one very, very visible option is to direct his development by addressing his perception of the world, which is profoundly damaged because of his trauma. It actually makes a lot of sense as a part of trauma, especially to the degree that he experienced. The thing is, it's written like that's the only real way to deal (Ciel's reasoning for killing off all of Baron Kelvin's victims, anyone?), the only real way to view the world, and it's nothing that needs to be 'recovered' from. According to the narrative, creating emotional barriers, repressing your trauma, and dealing with things ruthlessly is the 'right' way to do it. So far, two characters (Agni and Soma) we've seen handling pain in another way, by healing and improving as people, have been punished for it, and it remains to be seen what will happen with Elisabeth.

I have a small, tiny ray of hope that the aftermath of 127 will actually lead to some sort of character development for Ciel. Since Madame Red (and maybe Doll), this is the first time Ciel has a positive relationship to someone who has been killed, and this time the victim is truly blameless; the incident possibly resulted from Ciel's actions rather than the victim's. Agni's death and Soma's reaction to it (by god I hope Toboso actually gives us at least a chapter to dwell on Soma's grief before moving on with Ciel's Great Adventures) is an opening for her to show that Ciel's actions do have consequences for people who are proximate to him, and for Ciel, most importantly, to realize the same, that his actions guided by his present view of the world will create loss and pain if not necessarily for himself, then for the people who he might not necessarily consider friends, but thinks of positively. It would be much more interesting than just having him give another boring speech about grey and grey morality and how the world is terrible, etc.

Toboso's good at giving us one-off poignancy, that much I acknowledge. The close of the Circus arc, for example, was very moving and made us sympathetic to the circus members, but she has a lot of trouble following through and drawing tragedy out to actually mean something. She always ends her tragic storylines with Ciel brushing off any emotional impact they could possibly have on him with a lofty monologue about the Way the World Works, just as she did with the Circus arc, which not only makes him extremely unsympathetic but also stunts his growth as a character and makes him very static. I'm hoping (against hope) that Toboso manages to seize upon the significance of Agni's death and actually tie it in to the emotional part of storytelling, rather than just moving it along as a plot device.

#kuroshitsuji #black butler #kuroshit spoilers #i really don't care if you want to fight me over saying bad things about ciel so go away #i need a clever tag for my text posts #dark does not mean good

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preserving-ferretbrain · 6 years ago

Text

Going Bullshit

by Robinson L

Monday, 17 March 2014Robinson L tears into Libba Bray's Going Bovine and makes several unflattering comparisons to the works of Melina Marchetta, Catherine Fisher, and Douglas Adams~

One of the accolades Melina Marchetta's On the Jellicoe Road received on publication was the Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in Young Adult literature. That was for 2009. In 2010, the award went to a book entitled Going Bovine by Libba Bray. After reading Going Bovine, I can only conclude that 2010 was an exceptionally dry year for Young Adult fiction.

The book starts out promisingly, with our protagonist, Cameron Smith, narrating a near-death experience he had at Disneyland when he was five years old. Bray's writing is evocative, and she really nails the fuzzy, almost dreamlike logic with which a five-year-old views the world.

Then we snap to the present, twelve years later, and things go downhill fast. Cameron is now seventeen years old, a jerk, and a loser. Taylor Markham of

On the Jellicoe Road

can be an asshole as well, but she’s always dynamic and interesting—whereas Cameron Smith is the kind of jerk you just want to slap about the face until he gets over himself already.

It takes an irritatingly long time to get there, but things finally pick up when Cameron gets diagnosed with Cruetzfeldt-Jakob (“mad cow”) disease, which will kill him in a matter of weeks. An angel with a punk aesthetic named Dulcie visits Cameron in the hospital and kicks off the novel's plot, which is that a mad scientist named Doctor X has opened a dimensional hole which threatens to destroy the universe, and it's up to Cameron to find him and convince him to close it again. Oh, and Cameron's mad cow disease is actually a byproduct of this dimensional hole, and Doctor X is the only person in the universe who has the cure.

Okay, a quest to save the world/universe/multiverse from complete destruction is cool and all, but in context it jars with everything that's gone before—there's been plenty of supernatural build-up to Dulcie's arrival, but all very magic realist and with a certain amount of ambiguity as to whether Cameron is just suffering from hallucinations due to his Cruetzfeldt-Jakob. Leaping from there straight into a madcap caper to find the one man who can avert the end of the universe as we know it makes the book feel more than anything like a bad 80s Doctor Who story than anything else, except even more incongruous because at least in Doctor Who you kind of expect the fate of the world to be at stake sooner or later.

Anyway, Dulcie gives Cameron a sort of wristwatch which will hold his illness at bay, and sends him off on his grand quest along with his new friend and sidekick Gonzo, a hypochondriac dwarf Chicano whom we eventually learn is also gay. Despite Bray playing Minority Bingo, I didn't detect anything terribly problematic with Gonzo's depiction—which isn't the same as saying that there's nothing problematic there—though I did notice his tendency as a Latino to,

as our friends at Unskippable put it

, slip into Spanish every other word. They later form a trio with the Norse God Balder, who has been trapped in the body of a lawn gnome (it's a surreal book). Balder is easily the best character in the story, so of course he dies toward the end in an event which was transparently foreshadowed early on when he randomly initiates a discussion of Viking Funerals.

Prompted by Dulcie, they set off on a series of bizarre real-world adventures with supernatural overtones which vary in quality from kind of cool to teeth-gratingly bad. My problem here is that for the most part, Cameron has no real plan: he has to find Doctor X, but he has no strategy for doing so, nor does he really develop one over the course of the story. Throughout the novel, Cameron and company just stumble barse-ackwards into one misadventure after another. Now if at some point he decided that he's better off just going with the flow and adopted that as a strategy, it could be kind of cool, and totally in keeping with the unplanned, structureless feel to the plot. Instead, while Cameron can be reasonably proactive when it comes to addressing the problems of a given situation, he's almost entirely reactive when it comes to moving the overall plot forward, as if his player is so profoundly uninterested in the main plot that he has to be constantly railroaded through it by the Author-GM. For the reader, the effect is less of an inexorably and inevitably unfolding series of events than a slightly disjointed bunch of interesting incidents inexpertly welded together.

Even if Cameron were more of a proactive character though, we'd still be a far cry from

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

. In the “Dirk Gently” books, Douglas Adams was able to make bizarre coincidences feel like part of some grand, cosmic pattern which all fits together in an overarching harmony. In

Going Bovine

, Libba Bray's use of bizarre coincidences feels more like a lazy plot device to move the story along. The coincidences get a kind of explanation later on though, as we'll see.

Another problem is that it feels very much as though Bray never actually settled what tone she wanted to strike with the book, the upshot in this case being that much of the stuff that happens in

Going Bovine

is too grounded in reality to write off as parody or farce, yet too silly and over-the-top to take seriously.

One of the biggest offenders in this regard is Bray's occasional dips into social commentary—which might actually have been a good thing if someone had only come along in the revision process and persuaded her to step away from the bloody Themehammer. As it is, Cameron's school, where the teachers tell the students just to concentrate on the test material and not bother trying to learn the subject, represents the book's zenith of subtle and believable discourse. Pretty extreme, but sadly plausible.

Then there's Cameron's encounter with a therapist after his first major fit, and before everybody learns about his Cruetzfeldt-Jakob. School officials suspect drug use, and send him to a counselor—she asks him one question: “are you on drugs?” and when he tells her (truthfully) “no,” she proceeds to take up the rest of the hour reminiscing about bad trips she had when she was younger; at the end of which she tells him she thinks they made a lot of progress in that session, admonishes him not to take drugs, and refers him to a specialist. I find the lack of professionalism at work in this scene appalling—granted, that's sort of the point, but apparently, the only way Bray could think of to depict the problems of the psychiatric profession is by creating a cartoon caricature who is ignorant of the most basic, fundamental rule of counseling (i.e. that you

listen

to your patient). I've no doubt such people are out there, and some of them might just have licenses to practice—but Bray is sadly mistaken if she thinks pointing out the extreme wing-nuts of a profession makes any sort of point about the general practice.

The specialist she refers Cameron to examines him like an actual fecking professional and gives him a prescription for antidepressants, prompting Cameron to narrate ironically that he went to a therapist who didn't listen to him and told him to stay off drugs and then referred him to a health specialist who did listen to him and who put him on drugs. I found that observation quite funny, and there's actually a great point buried in there, but paired with the Nation's Worst Ever Therapist it loses most of its edge.

And then there's the most painful sequence of the book: Cameron's misadventures with the Church of Everlasting Satisfaction and Snack-'N'-Bowl (CESSNAB). Despite its name, CESSNAB gives no signs of being a religious or spiritual organization: it's more of a secular commune for spoiled, self-indulgent, privileged twenty-somethings to indulge a doctrine so goofy, UFO cults probably laugh at it behind its back. The doctrine is basically: “Be happy, and everything will be all right, and you can do anything you put your mind to,” along with the removal from people's lives of anything which is construed as threatening to make them unhappy, per their slogan which makes me cringe whenever I think about it: “Don't hurt your happiness.” (I think just typing that relieved me of two or three braincells.) So basically, a community with utopian aspirations that's actually a tightly-controlled dystopia, but so blatant that even an utter fool could see through it in nothing flat.

It wouldn't be so bad, except that Cameron is not only an utter fool, but a complete idiot on top of that, and falls for CESSNAB's transparent bullshit hook, line, and sinker. This subjects the reader to pages and pages of Bray wringing out a line of discourse which was obvious to anyone with anything approaching what we would call sapience the moment CESSNAB trotted out their philosophy, culminating in this spectacular piece of dialogue spoken to Cameron by a sort-of revolutionary just before she brings the whole organization crashing down:

“What if those so-called 'negative feelings' are useful?”

My tiny mind is fecking blown.

Seriously, Bray? The book is aimed at older teens, and this particular piece of discourse would be patronizing to ten-year-olds. Offhand, I can't think of the last time I've encountered a book which has so completely insulted my intelligence.

This is the most egregious incident, but it isn't the last one. Later on, Cameron encounters a Wishing Tree, which Dulcie explains really works, but it gives you what you want in your heart, rather than what you literally asked for. This strikes me as a stupendously sensible way to have a wishing machine operate; whereas Cameron complains that it ought to grant wishes literally. Dude, have you never read

The Monkey's Paw

? All right, fair enough, neither have I, but have you never encountered the

concept

of “be careful what you wish for”? Just how big of a rock have you been living under your whole life?

As in the previous incident, Bray situates Cameron in the position of Reader Surrogate so that the more knowledgeable character is not only lecturing him about the frickin' obvious, she's lecturing me. If Bray wants her protagonist to be a dumbass, that's totally legit, but treating the reader like a dumbass along with him—uh-uh.

While the sheer idiocy of the CESSNAB sequence and the general condescension are deplorable, it's the ending which ultimately sinks

Going Bovine

. Cameron tracks down Doctor X, who refuses to help him save the universe because of his generically tragic backstory, and so much for that plot thread. Before Cameron can try something else, his time runs out on his disease and he's confronted by the story's villain, the Wizard of Reckoning (which, as villain names go, is pretty friggin' awesome). After the Wizard drops a bombshell which I will come to presently, the two embark upon an esoteric chase sequence which it will take a much smarter or more inebriated head than my own to make sense of. The chase ends with Cameron pulling out the End-Of-The-Book-Emergency-Plot-Device he picked up towards the beginning of his adventures, thus apparently banishing the Wizard of Reckoning and waking Cameron up.

… Yes, you read that right. The epic twist which the Wizard of Reckoning reveals is that Cameron's been in his hospital bed dying of Cruetzfeldt-Jakob this whole time, and all his adventures with Gonzo, Balder, and Dulcie were an elaborate hallucination cooked up by his subconscious. Now Cameron's time is up, though, and the Wizard challenges him to accept his fate and die peacefully.

[1]

The story closes with Cameron reflecting on how the hallucination gave him the chance to really experience life for the first time, and then finding Dulcie in the afterlife and hooking up with her—maybe. I'll let Dan summarize my thoughts on this conclusion: “

The only thing worse than an 'it was all a dream' ending is an 'it was all a dream … OR WAS IT?' ending

.”

Granted, this didn't come completely out of left field. It was technically foreshadowed by a couple of weird flashes Cameron has back to his sister and their parents during his adventures—though since several of these flashes show him events outside of his hospital room, they don't exactly support the interpretation that these are moments of him seeing what's “really” going on. But even if it was foreshadowed, it doesn't change the fact that at the eleventh hour, Bray snatches away the ultimate goal Cameron has been striving for throughout the bulk of the book and replaces it with—nothing, really, or at least, nothing that's at all comprehensible to non-lit majors. As anti-climaxes go, that's pretty epic.

It may be useful to compare the ending of Catherine Fisher's

Corbenic

. As with most of Fisher's work, I took a while to warm to

Corbenic

, but I enjoyed the ending, and didn't feel the least bit cheated by it, even though it could be fairly characterized as “and then I woke up and it was all a dream … OR WAS IT?” I think

Corbenic

works for a couple of reasons, none of which are applicable to

Going Bovine

. First, because the ambiguity in the former does not totally derail either of the textually supported interpretations: if you choose to believe all the magic stuff is real and Cal really has found a mystical grail which will heal the fisher king, there's plenty of interpretive space for you. Second, because the possibility that the magic is a delusion on Cal's part is not treated as an eleventh hour plot twist, but is rather a running theme throughout the book. And third, because the goal Cal has been striving for still has value even if you choose to believe he's hallucinating—you don't go through the whole book with him trying to reach a specific point, only to have that point rendered irrelevant and swept aside at the last minute.

Next to everything else, I don't greatly mind that the book has a tragic ending, but let's not kid ourselves: this isn't

On the Jellicoe Road

, where tragic elements are inextricably bound up with the beauty and power of the story. This is

Going Bovine

, the story of a young jerk who learns something of what it means to be alive, to accept the necessity of death, and then dies—it could just as easily have been the story of a young jerk who learns something of what it means to be alive, and goes on to live a nicer, happier, more meaningful life, without it making a lick of difference to the rest of the book. The tragic ending doesn't actively harm the story, but it certainly doesn't enhance it.

[2]

The book has its good points, but they're massively outweighed by the structural issues and the painful attempts at social commentary, and that's even before we factor in the ghastly ending. It still may have some value as a curiosity—many of the ideas in there strike me as pretty unique and imaginative—but in the final analysis it fails as a narrative, which is perhaps the worst failure a work of literature can commit. I suppose folks who are into surrealist adventures and don't mind “and it turned out it was all a dream … OR WAS IT?” endings may still find it worth a read, despite the condescending and ham-fisted social commentary, but to everyone else, I encourage you to do yourself a favor and don't bother.

[1]

This raises the rather glaring question of why Bray treats Cameron's defeat of the Wizard of Reckoning as such a big deal, as he then goes on to do

exactly

what the Wizard had been telling him to do anyway.

[2]

Actually, the fact that I don't strongly care whether Cameron lives or dies is pretty damning in its own right.Themes:

Books

Sci-fi / Fantasy

Young Adult / Children

Emocakes

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~Comments (

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)

Arthur B

at 18:18 on 2014-03-17Wow, that does sound messy. It feels from your review like there's a whole mess of stuff in there which might have been interesting treated in isolation but doesn't really belong all thrown together in the same pot. (In particular, "let's have wacky adventures with a magic dwarf and a garden gnome - by the way, the punchline is terminal illness" feels like a wonky premise to begin with.)

Out of interest, how long is the book in terms of page count, and how deep in do you get before the whole Doctor X deal kicks off?

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Alice

at 18:43 on 2014-03-17You know, I read this book a couple of years ago, but I'd completely forgotten everything about it except for vague memories of Dulcie and Gonzo. The little that I do remember about the book meshes pretty well with this review, though, and I certainly remember disliking it.

The worst thing about it was that -- despite all the wacky shenanigans -- I just found it really dull. And I can forgive a book many things, but I find it very hard to forgive being bored by a book, especially if I'm not getting anything else out of it.

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http://ronanwills.wordpress.com/

at 00:15 on 2014-03-18Maybe I'm just not intellectual enough, but I tend to be immediately put off by surrealist novels. Basically if the back cover blurb reads like a string of random bullshit (this book has robots! and time travel! and parallel dimensions and talking walruses named Steve who are also stock brokers and Santa Claus fighting a cyclops and) then I stay far, far away.

So this sounds like the sort of thing that would drive me absolutely batshit insane. It's not even that stories like this tend to be confusing, it's that for all their wild and wacky imagery I find them incredibly boring. I'm not entirely sure why- maybe it's just because there's so little to actually latch onto emotionally.

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Robinson L

at 22:36 on 2014-03-18@Arthur: Yep, pretty messy.

According to wikipedia, it's 496-pages long. Unfortunately, I can't tell you offhand where in that Dulcie appears and starts explaining about the Dr. X stuff, because I listened to the book on CD. I would guess it's within the first 100-125 pages, though.

Alice: I can forgive a book many things, but I find it very hard to forgive being bored by a book, especially if I'm not getting anything else out of it.

Oh, I hear you, there.

I don't think I was too bored by

Going Bovine

(it's been a while since I read it, now), though I might have been more so if I'd actually had to read it instead of listening on audio.

@ronan: Interesting perspective. Personally, I don't mind surreal so long as it's mostly coherent; if I can follow along with the characters, then I've got something to latch onto emotionally, and that will usually see me through. A lot of Douglas Adams' work, especially his "Dirk Gently" books could be described as surreal, but they're rarely esoteric, and I like them a lot.

To give Bray her due, she keeps

Going Bovine

mostly on the lefthand side of that ledger. The characters are consistent throughout, and though the events of the novel are often bizarre (again, Norse god turned into talking lawn gnome), the way the characters respond to and interact with the weird elements is plausible enough. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it felt internally consistent to me ... that is, up until final chase and confrontation with the Wizard of Reckoning, where it all fell apart.

From your example, though, I don't think not being an intellectual is the main problem ... it sounds less like "I'm going to do really smart things with metaphor and symbolism and the like" and more like "I'm going to dream up an excuse to throw all these cool ideas into the same story and not bother trying to make it work in terms of plot or character or the like."

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James D

at 19:47 on 2014-03-19Has anyone seen the movie Jacob's Ladder? It uses a similar plot device to a certain part of Going Bovine, namely that Jacob is dying the whole time and the movie is essentially a dream, except I think it works because Jacob still has a character arc, his struggles in the coma dream still matter, as they are psychological struggles, like coming to terms with the death of his son, which it is suggested was his reason for abandoning his life as a professor and becoming a postman.

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Robinson L

at 20:30 on 2014-03-19I haven't, but I'm prepared to believe that it can be done in such a way that it works.

In fact a lot of what happens in

Going Bovine

is still meaningful, because Cameron's wish is to live, and the hallucination let him do just that by giving him a ton of interesting and thrilling experiences - which, come to think of it, still sounds more like cleaving to the letter of the wish, rather than following the spirit as Dulcie explained. But the main goal he's given at the beginning of the quest (find Dr. X and convince him to save the universe) is still rendered moot, which is why I consider the book a narrative failure.

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Arthur B

at 20:52 on 2014-03-19I think part of what makes

Jacob's Ladder

work is that it's all about Jacob discovering and coming to terms with the twist, instead of being aware of what the basic problem is all along.

In particular, it's constructed as an argument that coming to terms with the fact that you're at death's door

significant and important, even if nobody ever knows you were reconciled to it except you, for the few seconds you have left before nonexistence beckons. Here Cameron is fully aware that he's got a terminal illness for most of the book, and it sounds like the purpose of his hallucination was not so much to wake him up to the fact of death so much as distract him and keep him entertained for a while until he no longer had the energy to sustain it.

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http://ronanwills.wordpress.com/

at 21:33 on 2014-03-19Jacob's Ladder was a solid idea, but in practice it left me frustrated because the execution of the twist made it feel as if the preceding story was pointless- the film gives the impression of going somewhere right until it ends very abruptly, at which point it becomes clear that everything up until the twist was basically just killing time. I remember individual scenes from that movie very vividly, but I couldn't honestly summarize the plot beyond "weird shit happens to a guy, then the movie ends".

@Robinon L Yeah, I think you articulated more clearly what my problem usually is. There's a certain kind of writer that seems to delight in emptying their mind straight onto the page and giving form to whatever stray idea happens to come to them. I've just never seen the appeal of that kind of story-telling (even The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy got too much for me in places) but a lot of people seem to find it appealing.

An author who (sometimes) does this well is Haruki Murakami. A *lot* of weird things tend to happen in his stranger books, but he generally keeps the reader confident that the plot is actually going somewhere. The exception is Kafka on The Shore, which devolves into incoherent nonsense fairly quickly.

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James D

at 23:05 on 2014-03-19

Jacob's Ladder was a solid idea, but in practice it left me frustrated because the execution of the twist made it feel as if the preceding story was pointless- the film gives the impression of going somewhere right until it ends very abruptly, at which point it becomes clear that everything up until the twist was basically just killing time. I remember individual scenes from that movie very vividly, but I couldn't honestly summarize the plot beyond "weird shit happens to a guy, then the movie ends".

Well, I've seen the movie a few times now, and I very much disagree. The preceding story is essentially Jacob at first recoiling from the truth - he imagines a future in which he has divorced his wife, left his children, and quit being a professor. He lives with a hot chick he knows from the post office and lives a life of few responsibilities. However, guilt and grief and questioning of that fantasy regularly intrude, in the form of weird events and reminders of the truth - he eventually faces the fact that his son died in a pointless accident and returns to his wife and children, he figures out some sort of explanation for his death in Vietnam (whether or not it's actually true is debatable), and having made his peace he accepts his death. He wouldn't have accepted his death in the end if the previous parts of the movie hadn't established the conflict and the character. It was vehemently not "just killing time."

Now, whether or not you view Jacob's internal psychological struggle to come to terms with tragic events in his life and the uncaringness of the universe in general as relevant is another question entirely.

The movie doesn't really spell any of that out, so a valid criticism might be that it's too subtle, obscures too many important plot points. I don't think so myself, but I'm not trying to imply that anyone who didn't "get it" is stupid. However, it is a film that makes more sense with repeat viewings, and if you didn't enjoy it the first time there's still a good chance you'll enjoy it more the second time.

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Sister Magpie

at 00:50 on 2014-03-24I feel the need to weigh in on Jacob's Ladder since I really liked it and agree with James. Though I do understand feeling like the whole story is basically wiped away with the final twist, I read it more the way James did, that everything about Jacob's life was set up to help him come to terms with death and do what he needed to do.

Btw, the chiropractor played by Danny Aiello in that movie is based on a real guy--a chiropractor who, having been to him, actually is a lot like Danny Aiello.

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Robinson L

at 20:36 on 2015-06-30So, my sister ptolemaeus recently read another Libba Bray book,

Beauty Queens

, because, apparently, it's supposed to be an answer to

Lord of the Flies

She ... did not like it. It sounds like the satire was about on par with that of

Going Bovine

- she said if Bray had just come out and written her points, it probably would have been

less

heavy-handed.

She also described the book as incredibly tokenistic: among the titular Beauty Queens you have the lesbian one, the deaf one, the Indian one, etc., and all clearly written by an author who is not and does not understand how to write any of those things.

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Robinson L

at 15:15 on 2016-03-31

Ronan: An author who (sometimes) does this well is Haruki Murakami. A *lot* of weird things tend to happen in his stranger books, but he generally keeps the reader confident that the plot is actually going somewhere. The exception is Kafka on The Shore, which devolves into incoherent nonsense fairly quickly.

Returning to this discussion because I actually just wrapped up listening to an audio recording of

Kafka on the Shore

a little while ago. And yeah, I got lost and bewildered early in because Murakami frontloads the strange and esoteric stuff pretty heavily. However, I pressed on, and it turns out that later on in the book, most of the really confusing stuff actually does get something approximating an explanation. There's still a strong undercurrent of vagueness and ambiguity surrounding the more supernatural material, but by the end of the book I could understand the basic story just fine. I'm sure there's a lot of rich nuance and subtext which blew right past me because it was too subtle and esoteric for me to apprehend, but I got the basic gist and it made sense, and I'm content with that.

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Robinson L

at 03:02 on 2016-04-30Oops, I forgot to mention that though I found

Kafka on the Shore

satisfactorily comprehensible, and I'm glad I read it, a section later in the book comes with a trigger warning for sexual assault. Granted, it's in a dream sequence and is doubtless part of all the esoteric symbolism which mostly went over my head—and although dreams can seem to effect reality in the universe of the book, the protagonist meets the other character in real life again at the very end, and she shows no signs of having experienced it, which I optimistically take to mean that it was all something which happened just to the protagonist and not really to her—but that doesn't make the scene itself any less problematic and icky, especially with the protagonist's repeated insistence (which in this case appears to be accurate) that he literally cannot stop.

#Ferretbrain #Robinson L #Going Bovine #Young Adult

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