#oh my god this game is full of little spoilers for possible outcomes

[pixelpaladin24]

I have never, ever been more proud of myself for beating a game. This is the most satisfying feeling ever, I swear. This game was extremely hard for me, but I really can not wait to get right back in Krat! I love this game. Every single second of it was, and is, amazing (even if it brought my pulse past 120 bpm 🤣). 🖤

Now, I can properly start my new playthrough on my Steam save. 😏 But I'll play more casually, and only when the mood strikes - I need to get into Veilguard!

[nokomiss]

So I've had a few days to process the Magicians season finale and basically I've come to the conclusion that:

a.) They actually killed off Quentin Like That, did their cast and crew dirty Like That, treated their fans Like That, and thought that the plotting of that story was actually decent, which, loooool.

b.) They are clumsily attempting to pull a Jon Snow, where they want everyone to believe Quentin is dead, but will bring him back at some point in the future.

If it's option A, it's supremely gross. Everyone has listed the reasons already -- the killing the 'white male protagonist' to show how edgy and subversive your show is? Gross. If you've written a show where you have a generic white male protagonist, that's the failure of the writing. And if you've written a show where the protagonist is canonically linked romantically to both women and men (even if you don't put a label on it) and is ALSO explicitly shown to mentally ill and suicidal, and you think the best solution to that is to have them heroically commit suicide, after a season of buildup to a romantic climax with a male character, and have no resolution to that?  Gross. The self-congratulatory attitude of the showrunners is really what made this such a betrayal.

AND then there's option B.

Option B was something I kept thinking about shortly after hearing about the 'oh it's permanent' thing, and then one of the actor's tweets mentioned GoT, which isn't evidence at all but does open the door for the comparison.  I'm going to speak here as a longtime ASOIAF fan/GoT viewer. (I have my own issues with Game of Thrones as a TV show that I won't get into here, but suffice to say I love it but don't view it with rose-colored glasses.)  The reason the Jon Snow thing worked and no one revolted? Was that it was earned. Jon Snow was a central character, but not the central character; GoT has a huge cast, multiple storylines, and if one character dies, even a beloved one, there's plenty of story remaining and, vitally, plenty of bonds to hold the remaining characters together. And, possibly most importantly, it was consistent with the show’s own internal rulebook.

Quentin is the emotional heart of the Magicians -- even the show itself explicitly brings his love of magic and his love of Fillory as the beating heart of the story.  Ripping that away, to use a metaphor from the show itself, will be like when Julia was severed from her soul -- still present, but missing a vital piece.  And the show has a long history of characters fighting against death, and finding ways to cheat it. It’s not a tragedy. It’s a very different kind of tale.

I have a lot - a LOT - of feelings about this, so I’m going to put them under a read more. Some spoilers for GoT ahead, and a lot of feelings about earned narratives, storytelling, characters, hope and betrayal.

Jon Snow's death didn't come out of the blue, either. The tensions and discontent in the Night's Watch were building until there was only one real possible outcome to the situation, and it made sense within context that his brothers would turn on him.  Quentin's death, as part of a really ham-handed finale, was not earned? It didn't have any build-up or gravitas. You had a character who had been depressed, put in to an awful situation with the possessed body of his ex-love, found the fire within him to fight against the Monster, and then... instead of any logical emotional arc, they had him hook up with an ex and go on the most deux ex machina quest I can remember on the show, and then kill himself over a forgettable villain. All the campfire sing-alongs in the world can't make up for the emotional momentum they lost when they took away Quentin's spine.

 When they took away his heart.

And -- here's the thing -- both of these series are based on books. And you know what? In ASOIAF, in canon right now, the last thing to happen to Jon Snow was to die bleeding out in the snow. And yet, when he died on screen, and Kit Harrington spent a year telling everyone he was done with the show, everyone still knew that Jon Snow would return. It made narrative sense.  I've honestly only read the first Magicians book, but I did read the summaries of the later two, and Quentin doesn't die. Quentin is given an ending filled with hope.

And the reason I keep coming back to the 'maybe they're doing a Jon Snow' is that his death? in that manner? Just does not make any sort of narrative sense.  Probably (undoubtedly) it's just me trying to see meaning where there is none, trying to optimistically think that the showrunners had more care for their own story than they do. But Quentin dying with no emotional fulfillment with Eliot, after a full season of fighting to save him, of being dragged through hell by the Monster, makes no sense. If they'd had the two speak at all, conclude their plotline, I would have accepted the death much more calmly. At least there would be emotional catharsis, even if plot wise I was left frustrated.

Because, here's the thing. When I read that the show had been renewed for Season 5 before Season 4 even aired, I immediately figured that it was a two-season story arc. When Season 4 was so slow to solve the Monster plot, it seemed obvious to me that they were planning on dealing with the repercussions with Season 5.  Probably -- again -- that was me putting way, way too much faith in the writers of the show.  But there are just so many dangling plotlines, and things that were dealt with so  clumsily that they might well have never been addressed at all -- the library, the hedge witches, the magic rations, the old gods, Fillory's issues, really almost EVERYTHING from the season except for getting the Monster out of Eliot's body, and even that failed to address why his growing humanity was even a THING -- that they apparently decided no one would notice because of the Shock and Subversiveness of killing Quentin.  I went into the finale with the absolute lowest of bars, because I could see there was no possible way of wrapping up everything, and I totally expected a To Be Continued at the end. Somehow they still managed to disappoint.

And that doesn’t even begin to address how they treated the other characters.  Kady, reducing herself to just Penny’s girlfriend. Alice’s own character growth stunted to shove her back into what had already been shown as a failed relationship.  Margo, beautiful fierce Margo, abandoning her own plan to save her own best friend because… she liked a dude? And had already solved the fish-issue with her fairy eye?  Penny23, reduced to just a puppy trailing after Julia, even though he had telepathy and was a traveler?  Julia, with her choices concerning her body and entire existence stolen from her again. (because a telepath couldn’t talk to her????)  Fen, totally ignored for the finale? Eliot, never getting his chance to be brave?

That doesn’t exactly inspire a lot of faith for them to make a shift to a show that focuses on diverse characters, when this is how they treat them.

Where does that leave me? With a bad taste in my mouth either way, basically.  I told a friend before the finale that "It's a universe where magic exists! They can fix things!" and it's so simple to canonically bring someone back.  All the writer's talk about realism is ridiculous, this is a show that thrives on the ridiculous and the absurd.  Even if Jason Ralph chose to not return, that doesn't mean Quentin can't. It's very in-the-box thinking if so -- I could think offhand of a half-dozen ways for him to return in a different body, hell, make it a POC one if they're actually that worried about having a White Male Protagonist -- but ultimately I felt most betrayed because this death was not emotionally EARNED by the writers.  It is lazy. It is banal.

And it's ultimately incredibly tone-deaf.  Sci-fi and fantasy stories offer escapism, and when the real world looks like it does now, literally no one wants their dumb show about magic grad school to be about death and despair. The message the fans look for is one of hope. Quentin as a character offered hope -- you could struggle with depression and still find the  beauty of all life, you could find yourself in a magical land, you could find love and friendship and bravery within you that you never realized. That you didn't have to be the hero to be important. So if his death is permanent, like the writers claim -- and at  this point I have literally no faith in them whatsoever -- then it's an incredible waste of what could have been a beautiful and groundbreaking story.  

And if they're toying with the fans... it's misguided, and just frankly has not been earned in the way they think it has, and frankly means they're blind to their own storytelling faults. It's downright mean, and I'm not sure that I would be willing to support their show even if they brought Quentin back, knowing how little they thought of their fans.

[cureforbedbugs]

The Death of Aeris

Before Aeris died, I'd never really experienced anything in media that, in retrospect, actually felt like a death feels.

I was in seventh grade when Final Fantasy VII came out. I'm not sure if people my age still talk about how it felt to play Final Fantasy VII in 1997 (I imagine there's probably a cottage industry of retrospectives, but I haven't looked). But at my school, at least, nothing compared to it in terms of its unique form of media reception until maybe the advent of season-length binge-watching. It's a mode in which everyone follows along at their own pace across a long-form media object over days and weeks, checking in to see how far ahead or behind they are from their friends, taunting when ahead, despairing when too far behind.

I imagine some book crazes are like this, but I never really experienced any of them firsthand. And certainly I can't think of any non-print media with that kind of long-term conversational oomph -- the subject of intense debate for weeks and even months -- that is at the same time very careful and tentative with some thoughtfulness put into other people's progress. We had the so-called "water cooler" shows that everyone was expected to have seen last night, but the sussing out of where everyone was a week or a month into gameplay was much different. It created a throughline of reporting and speculation that felt a bit more like gossip, or some shared conspiracy whose web was still hidden in its entirety.

I bring up that context because a few elements in how I reacted to Aeris's death, about a third of the way or so through Final Fantasy VII, might have been impossible had they not happened at that time and in that way. Perhaps the most important element in that regard was simply that I heard whisperings of that sort of event being possible, without experiencing the kind of full-on spoiler that is now a ubiquitous landmine in trying to figure out what different media are "about" without ruining the surprises.

Instead there was a sense of unease, an occasionally remarked upon twist that was coming up, and lots of conversation about whether one could tell it was coming or not, an almost vindictive knowingness from those who already experienced it -- "oh, you'll see." Because this conversation was only among my friends, it didn't take on the feeling being a microcosm of a fandom. We didn't really know anything about fandoms, not being particularly savvy online (in 7th grade I mostly trolled strangers in chat rooms and then giddily ran away, like a prank call, before looking up recipes for banana pancakes).

So the environment was not exactly like ruining a plot twist in a movie; it was more a sense that something was coming, maybe tonight, maybe the next night, maybe next week, and that when it happened, you'd know, and you'd never really see it coming, unless maybe you did (there were a few claims from friends further along in the game that they saw it coming, a claim I find hard to believe). And it would change everything.

It's that contemporaneous commentary on the ongoing action while also being inscrutably aware of something far off in the future that I think is very difficult to replicate now. There's too much information everywhere, too many ways to cut off or clarify that odd game of telephone that non-internet-based media fandom lent itself to in an era with lots of media in it but few ways to reliably learn about it without some prior knowledge. A bit like how other media -- horror movies, The Wire -- had to transform in the mid-2000's when the ubiquity of cell phone communication dried up older storytelling tropes that built suspense through patchy connections.

Because I was so persistently, if only mildly, ill at ease in the first half of the game, and because I had such a strong sense that something bad would happen, the cut scene in which Aeris is finally murdered had the kind of protracted, crystallized impact of a trauma, a sense that you're seeing something that was fated to happen and will always recur (in memory), and that, at this very moment, your brain is encoding a loop that will keep its jagged little hooks in you forever. I see Aeris in a pink dress, bent, seemingly in prayer, maybe a slight smile, and I see her being run through. I see my dad, defeated, on the side of the bed, and my sister is crying before he even has to say anything. (How did he put it?)

YouTube breaks my memory's imperfect telephone-game chain, and I see, watching the clip again for the first time in what must be a dozen or more years, that the animation itself is not nearly as crisp or as subtle as it is in my memory; the characters are chunky, polygonal, little better than the little moving sausages in the normal gameplay by today's CGI standards. In my mind, Aeris is remarkably well-rendered, the scene -- the slicing -- more grisly. But I'm also surprised at how much fidelity parts of the scene have retained, the blocking of the characters, the ambiguous facial expressions, the stillness of it.

I was wild with questions after Aeris died, or, more accurately, with a demand for answers. I remember finally going to a text walk-through I'd avoided to see if there was any way to have prevented this outcome. If there was any glitch to make Aeris come back into the party, a zombie compromise. Not that I could tell. She was just gone from the game, and with so much left to finish.

I was a completist -- if there was some marginal character that one might conceivably miss (Yuffie, say), I would beat the game again just to have the satisfaction of having the full set, as it were. So there was the basic functional disappointment of having an eternally unfinished collection. I don't want to underplay this feeling -- for god's sake, it was just a video game.

But I'm returning to it now because Aeris's death had a subtle psychological impact on my sense of what Final Fantasy VII actually was, in a way that makes me remember it so fondly and so sadly, and with remarkable frequency given I'm a good decade past a point where I've even more than glanced at a video game. Final Fantasy VII was different -- it wasn't just a game where you do everything you're supposed to do and finish it, maybe cheating a little along the way, maybe not. It's a game with an ugly little hole in its center, and you muddle through as best you can, knowing that it will never and can never be truly "won," and hence can never really be over. Not all the way. You finish as much as you can finish; there's a scar.

Even my own behaviors with Final Fantasy VII after beating the game once have echoes in my experience with the actual ugly little holes that I imagine most of us build our lives around. I vividly remember finishing Final Fantasy VII on a subsequent attempt after unlocking Aeris's final limit break -- the special, "final" move that can only be accessed after many more hours of gameplay than Aeris is realistically given, unless for whatever reason you are obsessed enough to do it anyway. The upshot was days and maybe weeks of sitting in my parents' basement, drinking diet soda, running around some remote little forest or peninsula, killing monsters in a mind-numbing sequence of auto-pilot maneuvers to slowly build up Aeris's experience. In my mind the limit break itself was anticlimactic -- but how could it not be? It didn't matter. She had to die.

The key resonance for me in Aeris's death is not just the death itself, its shock or, alternatively, those post-hoc rationalizations that it could be predicted; it is the way that the process of experiencing that death, that way of carrying it with you, forever stains the whole experience, dampens it with futility but somehow inflames a compulsion to retrace the steps anyway. You fight the same monsters, hoping that maybe just once the screen will darken and the skies will open up and something will change.