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vvatchword · 6 months ago

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Reading BioShock: Rapture (Part 1: The Cover)

Part 2: John Shirley and the Front Matter ->

“Who the hell is Reggie?” I asked my friends a while back.

Reggie shows up in a lot of BioShock fanfiction. At first I thought he was a fan-made creation that had jumped isolation, but he appeared in enough oddball places that I began to think I had missed something important from canon.

“He’s from the BioShock novel,” a friend replied.

I swore and eyeballed the novel, which has been sitting next to me for about two years now.

BioShock: Rapture is a video-game tie-in novel written by John Shirley (aka Some Guy) and published in July 2011. Originally, it had been slated to release with BioShock 2, which launched February 9, 2010. It did not because it had to work in BioShock 2 elements and the BioShock 1 canon had to be okayed by Ken Levine, creative director of Irrational Games.

Why I’m Reading This Thing

I’ve been working on a BioShock epfic, as you probably know since I won’t shut up about it. I adore working with pre-existing canon in an effort to harmonize dissonant elements and attempt Art (lol); long story short, my fanfiction is for my own satisfaction and nothing more. I like being as accurate as possible; I do not want to lie; and I like to respond to what someone is actually saying rather than the Internet custom of “Inventing a Guy to Get Mad At.”

So of course I bought the BioShock novelization the minute it came out. At the time, I was on about the third draft of my epfic.

I read about 50 pages, writing mean notes in the margins as I went, before I just stopped. I just couldn’t stand it. It was so, so wrong. At the time, I couldn’t have told you why. All I remember was that Andrew Ryan felt pathetic, and that is unforgivable. Ryan should always feel threatening and powerful and real. BioShock: Rapture’s Ryan felt pretentious and annoying and I was pretty sure I could give him a swirly with impunity.

What made this dissonance particularly irritating was that the information presented was not necessarily incorrect, but the tone, social dynamics, and overall implications were… how do I put this? Stupid. Stupid and vapid. The character interactions, the author’s comprehension of social and historical issues, the emotional zing—all void, careless, or off. That subtle off-kilter sensation ends up building into a hell of a thing.

I can stand a lot of bullshit. I even love bullshit. But what I cannot bear under any circumstances is boredom and “safe art.” And BioShock: Rapture was the definition of safe.

I had to realize that this was, first and foremost, a corporate product, lobotomized and neutered and defanged, with all the possible poison sucked out of it. (Coincidentally: just how I felt about BioShock 2.) The person who wrote it didn’t give a shit about it. The corporate execs who commissioned it didn’t give a shit about it. Only Levine probably gave a shit, and only in that the right information was presented. (I don’t know if BioShock 2’s creative director, Jordan Thomas, was involved. He wasn’t mentioned in any of the interviews I read.)

If this had been literally any other book, I would have gotten rid of it and forgotten about its existence. But Ken Levine, creative director of BioShock 1, had been involved, and by all accounts, he hadn’t spared any details. That meant that canon existed in this piece of shit—canon for BioShock 1, my favorite out of the three installments.

I don’t believe in making any more work for myself than necessary, and I don’t always trust wikis: I had to get into this book to find framework for my own.

I had to fucking read it.

The Journal Method

In an attempt to further cement the book in my mind, I first attempted to do a book club with other fans—not once, but four times. My attempts fell through, partially because I fucking hate everything about this book. My brain gremlins scrub it every time I dip my toe in the water. I realized that, to get through this dumpster fire, I would have to write about it. So I decided to use the journal method to attack it, sometimes literally.

See, because I have a jumpy, excitable brain—something like a Jack Russell terrier on meth—I write out my thoughts on the more difficult books I read. These write-ups are usually more like journal entries than about the story itself. It’s not necessarily helpful or interesting to anyone else, but it gives me touchstones that I can return to years later to quickly refresh myself on notes of interest. This way, I retain information and don’t have to re-read whole goddamn books again. Recently I’ve been doing this with Paradise Lost, which is very difficult to read thanks to its archaic English, poetic diction, and constant references to classical myth and literature. It works well!

That said, I kinda hate myself for what this turned into. Is it reasonable? Oh, no, of course not. I started overthinking it at once. You should all know I am Shameful and Cringe and Deserve to Be Thrown in a Well. No balanced human being should care this much about this book or franchise. Thankfully I am deeply imbalanced and have no standards that anyone understands.

I make this readable for my own pleasure. If you come along on the ride, god bless you. Also, feel free to critique or share your own experiences and opinions.

About John Shirley

I’d never heard of John Shirley before this book. According to the bio on the back of this book, he won the Bram Stoker Award for a story collection (Black Butterflies), and has written numerous bestsellers I’ve never heard of, as well as an adaption for Constantine. He was also one of the screenwriters on The Crow.

I do wish I had any sense of any of these things. I do not. Not even The Crow. You’d think that’d be up my alley. I started The Crow and promptly turned it off. This says nothing about his screenwriting, just that I started a movie he impacted once.

I read a few interviews with him regarding the book, which gave me further hints as to his influences. He’s a white centrist Boomer because of course he is. This was the first sign that I should be afraid.

First, socially (and generally) speaking, the more mainstream identities you possess, the more insulated you are, and the less you are challenged to step outside of that viewpoint. The tone and subjects of mainstream media cater specifically to you. You accept this is as “the way the world is” instead of realizing that the mainstream is itself a cultural viewpoint with a limited focus. It takes you effort to empathize with viewpoints outside of your own. Many people never make that effort. The less you attempt to understand alien concepts, the worse you are at doing so.

Second, centrists tend to see every human philosophy as morally neutral. To a centrist, it is the philosophy’s application that can be done Incorrectly or Wickedly.

In my mind, this is supremely stupid. A philosophy is not a law of nature, but a human tool. It can be fundamentally broken in how it approaches the universe; even if it produces good outcomes, its goodness can be outweighed by its negative aspects.

Objectivism is one of these philosophies. If you know anything about it, you know why it’s broken and why it should be thrown in a fire. I will probably explore it in some capacity as I write this piece, but I won’t be terribly exact due to its nature. This is for me to remember what I have read, not to win awards or reach a big audience.

All of this said, I’m coming to this writer in what amounts to a vacuum, with a handful of suppositions based on some quick interviews. I have no perspective on him as a person or artist in any depth. The book is gonna have to stand on its own merits.

About the Front Cover

At first, I began by talking about the prologue, but my criticisms started to spread all over the front matter of the book, which is how you start off with me criticizing the FUCKING COVER.

Generally, covers aren’t really that important, but in this case, I feel like the graphic design implies how much care was taken with the book itself. Someone let the interns do this. I would bet fucking money. The art is completely inappropriate.

How do you choose cover art? Well, what is cover art intended to do? It’s intended to deliver a quick advertisement to the person passing the shelves. It’s supposed to answer questions, like: “What is the story about?” It’s supposed to lure you in. There should be some suggested friction or promised reward.

Look at this fucking thing. What is the art’s focus? Is it interesting? What does it say? Does it give you an idea of the book’s story, characters, plot, setting, or tone? If you knew nothing about BioShock, what would your impression be?

Now, you and I both know (because we are nerds) that the focus is on the globe with the starburst, for we know the starburst is where Rapture is located.

Except that’s not the first thing you’re going to think. The first thing you’re going to do as A Human with Eyes is search for a focal point. The globe seems like a background element, the flare a stylistic choice. You will first latch onto the man and the woman in the bottom left because the human mind is hardwired to look for faces, but they don’t seem to be the focus of the image; in fact, the image feels strangely off, like there should be something else to it.

That’s because this particular image is focused on architecture and setting, with the crowd as flavor over the top; it is best viewed in landscape. The book cover has cut off 2/3 of the goddamn picture and thus completely obscured its original intent. Here’s the original--which is by Craig Mullens, btw. I love it. It’s one of my rotating desktops and I own it in physical form.

"1959," by Craig Mullens

A lithograph of this image was included with a limited-edition game guide released with BioShock 2. It was one of the few special-edition illustrations that did not focus on Big Daddies or Subject Delta. BioShock: Rapture is a prequel, so it couldn’t use any images with Big Daddies on them—it’s not about the social fallout you see in-game. Mullen’s art was, however, a preexisting piece that nobody had to spend any extra money on.

The point being: this art was created for BioShock 2, not for the book.

In other words, no special efforts were made for any of this. Slap on BioShock logo! Find some font evocative of art deco (copy-paste-make shape-paste-in-place), and outline that shit in Illustrator one billion percent. Use this beautiful art in a way that says nothing about what the book is about because it’s really not meant for that purpose to begin with, and get your $0/hour intern to slap it all together.

Whallah! Body-slam that shit on a bookshelf and go back to drinking.

The Back of the Book

The bad graphic design extends to the back of the book. The summary is double-spaced for some reason, there’s little contrast between text and background color, the background is noisy enough to obscure the font, and the Andrew Ryan graphic fucks up the indents, making the summary look like a text wall. It’s not, actually. Regardless, the effect is the same: it obscures readability.

Spoiler: it’s probably because they didn’t want you to read it.

This graphic looks better than the book in person and it is still ass.

Oh hey who wrote this summary?

The First Paragraph of This Lazy-Ass Shit

It was the end of World War II. FDR’s New Deal had redefined American politics. Taxes were at an all-time high. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had created a fear of total annihilation. The rise of secret government agencies and sanctions on business had many watching their backs. America’s sense of freedom was diminishing… and many were desperate to take that freedom back.

Uh whose side is this on lol

So, summaries are here to do two things: explain the general Where, Who, and Plot, and Invoke Interest. A summary is the scantily-clad lady-friend with one knee cocked out of a doorway saying, “Come on in.” She gives us a little wink-wink, shows a little skin, I’ll show u soooo much more if u just step this way big boy.

Unfortunately, the way this summary works is more like somebody flinging buzzwords at you as fast as possible while hoping you don’t look too closely. If you are on the political right, it will immediately invoke a certain fuzzy alarm reserved for words like “communism” and “socialist”; if you are on the political left, it invokes your illiterate aunt’s unhinged Facebook rants. One has the sense that said writer doesn’t actually know what they’re talking about, which is a hell of a way to a) start a summary for historical fiction and b) summarize a book that they should, by all rights, have read.

What’s more, if we judge the strength of its hook alone—its only fucking job, I might as well add—it’s weak as balls: the only sentence that pulls you in is the one about nuclear weapons, and that’s because it gives you a sense of urgency and fear of annihilation. Problem: this book ain’t about nuclear weapons. This book ain’t about the end of World War II at all. Wrong subject. Completely wrong.

You might very rightfully say, “Well, this is from Andrew Ryan’s point of view,” in which case I’m confused, because this is not written from Ryan’s point of view. This is written as Information We All Know and Understand to Be True :) The problem being that it is so slanted, and so vague, and so simplified to the point of stupidity, that it puts the summary’s writer in the spotlight at once, which is a catastrophic failure by every metric. This summary makes me ask questions like, “Should I be wary of the author’s ulterior motives?”

Well. To be fair, a BioShock novel by an Objectivist would be a lot of fun—in the same way Miami Connection is fun. I would absolutely read that and cringe and cry-laugh and throw the book and then pick it up again. Very good times would be had. Why? Because somebody cared about it, and somebody is about to say some very, very stupid bullshit with all the confidence and passion in their whole body, and everything in the story is going to align beautifully to that bullshit, and something bullshitty is going to happen and it will be like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

Let’s just say that I love reading Ayn Rand but it’s not for the reasons she’d prefer.

I want you to know that Shirley has been quoted as saying, “You cannot fly a plane without the left and the right wings,” which I will allow to stand without commentary.

FDR’s New Deal had redefined American politics.

That’s the most diplomatic way I’ve seen the New Deal described. Ever. And I was taught American history in West Texas by a basketball coach. It’s so carefully neutral that the first thing I did was read the sentence twice, like that was going to open up a magical window back to the past and show me what harried motherfucker wrote it. If it had done this, I would have thrown an egg at them. Not very hard. So maybe less of a throw, more of a “rolled it across their desk and closed the window to fuck with them.”

“Where did this egg come from,” they’d say. “What the hell. I hope it isn’t a dimension-hopping nitpicker again.”

Anyway, that’s when I realized everything about this book was probably going to be wrong: as I stood in an aisle at a Barnes and Noble in July 2011. I’m talking about a sinking feeling and a slight nausea. I actually thought about not buying it and I was at a point in my life where I bought everything with a BioShock logo on it. I was also a stupid-ass far-right evangelical flirting with Objectivism at the time. Big fuck-ups all ’round.

If the copywriter wrote this… still not a good sign, but better than if the author wrote it, because a) this prose is clumsy as fuck and b) the end of World War II is not the point and thus should not lead.

Is There a Right Way or Are You Being a Cunt?

Yes!

What is the point? Andrew Ryan as a person; what history has done to Andrew Ryan; what people have done to Andrew Ryan; Andrew Ryan’s philosophy; Andrew Ryan’s goals; Andrew Ryan’s failures; Andrew Ryan. ANDREW MOTHERFUKCING RYAN. Start with RYAN, not with the historical context.

America’s sense of freedom was diminishing…

In. In what context. Citation needed. Citation please. Loaded language. Loaded like a fucking gun.

The rise of secret government agencies and sanctions on business had many watching their backs.…

Woo. Whooooah WHOOOOOAH hold on there Silver whooooooah I’m gonna need you to hold on a second. This is way too fucking vague.

At first I thought it might reference the USSR in addition to the United States, but by starting and ending the paragraph with America-centric sentences, the “where” and the “who” is most likely “America” and “gubmint” respectively. That’s immediately problematic because those two concepts are so vast.

What government agencies? What sanctions? Who’s the “many”? What are the wrongs? I’m still groping in the dark. My friends in hell, this is a summary. That means I (the Reader) should know exactly what is going on by Sentence One. So far I have the vaguest notions of historical period and authorial motivation as written by a 12-year-old off 4chan.

A lot has been written, but nothing has been said. This paragraph depends on You (the Reader) to ascribe value judgments about these vaguely-referenced enormous fucking political machines. And we can’t because, I mean… we don’t know who they are, what they’re doing, or why they’re bad. Also, given the writer’s clear axe-grinding, I’m kinda wary, so I’m already holding them at arm’s length.

Now, I can appreciate that the writer was trying to give historical context, but in this particular story, that context only makes sense once it filters through Andrew Ryan. Andrew Ryan takes a vast, infinitely-complex part of history and narrows it down to one place, one time, one person, one ideology. If you throw a net that’s too wide, you lose all definition. A fucking metric shit-ton of bullshit went down in the little window between the end of World War II and the founding of Rapture: World War II literally affected every single country and human being on Earth, and even cutting it back to Just America is too vast a subject to simply imply.

What is more, the story of Rapture is not the story of World War II or handsy government, it’s the story of how Andrew Ryan dealt with challenges he could not bear. The minute you focus on Ryan, the summary clicks, and everything immediately grows more concise and clear: then we can have specific government entities and specific events that lead to Ryan building a utopia beneath the sea. Lead with Andrew Ryan and the explicit ways he has been hurt. Make it personal, a story about a person, and make it specific, and for god’s sake, make it FUCKING INTERESTING.

Long story short, this summary feels like you’ve opened a bad theme from a high school student and they need to type so, so many words and it’s 4:46 AM and they are fucking tired and they can only reword Wikipedia so much before they lose their fucking mind.

Paragraphs Two through Four

Among them was a great dreamer, an immigrant who’d pulled himself from the depths of poverty to become one of the wealthiest and most admired men in the world. That man was Andrew Ryan, and he believed that great men and women deserved better. So he set out to create the impossible, a utopia free from government, from censorship, and from moral restrictions on science, where what you gave was what you got. He created Rapture—the shining city below the sea.

Someone is fucking stanning. Someone was definitely arguing on forums that Rapture would have worked great if only… and then they gave a long bulleted list, and everyone called them a big dork even though they’re all on a video game forum arguing about a game from 2007.

Now to give you a little perspective, this book was released fresh after the Tea Party movement had really gotten its feet under it. So I couldn’t help but think: who is writing this? Why is it written this way? Were they trying to channel a libertarian, or did they really mean it? Are they the kind of person who would excuse Ted Cruz?

If we had started the summary by focusing on Andrew Ryan personally, we wouldn’t have this problem.

But this utopia suffered a great tragedy. This is the story of how it all came to be… and how it all ended.

A tragedy!!! In my BioShock? It’s more likely th an y ou th in

Look at the way this is fucking phrased, I can’t…

I can’t

Why Are You Like This

This is a great time to talk about auxiliary (or helper/helping) verbs and passive voice, because this summary is lousy with them, and this is a textbook example of how they can suck the tension straight out of a premise.

The Tools

Passive voice indicates that something has been done to the subject. The subject is not an actor in their own right: they were affected, and they were powerless to stop it. They are, by definition, inactive.

Auxiliary or helping verbs are myriad, but the most common ones are “are,” “go,” and “has.” In function, they tend to soften sentences—probably because they imply the action has been finished. They are also colorless, weightless, and have no emotional oomph: auxiliary verbs are 100% structural.

The ideal is to say as much as you can with as few words as you can, and that means using the most proper and powerful words possible in the best possible places and arrangements.

Back to the Summary

Remember what I told you that an ideal summary should do?

You want a summary to be immediate and punchy. You want it to suck the reader in. You want a sense of who all the major players are and the problem involved.

In this case, it’s Andrew Ryan, Bill McDonagh, and probably Frank Fontaine. There should probably be a government entity represented by some toady, too. Maybe even some suggestion of specific bills or social movements. Hint that Ryan’s got an ideal and that he sold the fuck out of it, and that people believed so much in that ideal that they’d abandon everything they worked for to go under the sea.

It was the end of World War II.

World War II gave me a little jump of interest, but on the whole, I feel nothing. This is a state of being and it’s just chilling here. There’s no problem. In fact, this is the definition of a solved problem. I’m all about no-Hitler! Okay! Good! Yeah!

So?

Taxes were at an all-time high.

Passive voice is used here because it’s explaining a state of existence. A state is, by virtue of its nature, inactive. Nothing is happening. It already happened. Here we are, standing here, breathing, existing, taxed. All righty.

So?

The only tension we get here is from the construction of the sentence itself. This is a loaded sentence—it implies that taxes are bad, it implies that they’re being improperly used, and it gives no actors—but that turns your focus onto the summary writer, not onto the story itself. It’s like these taxes just materialized out of the ether. What’s more, we don’t know where these taxes are being levied or what’s being done with them. This shouldn't be passive. Who's the actor?

In some ways, thanks to the placement of this sentence, this implies that the taxes are a major subject. You head to the next sentence expecting expansion on the tax problem.

Coincidentally, that’s not a great load-bearing sentence. I can think of nothing more boring than taxes. It’s only interesting if you’re some kind of crazy reactionary asshole who operates solely via political slogans.

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had created a fear of total annihilation.

Finally, some tension! Now we also have a setting! Unfortunately, it’s enormous—it’s worldwide. So are we talking about worldwide taxes? As in, raised taxes were a worldwide phenomenon?

Wait a minute. What the fuck are you

The rise of secret government agencies and sanctions on business had many watching their backs.

WHERE ARE WE? “Secret” is a little exciting, but what “government agencies” and “sanctions” and what are they doing? Who is the “many”? Taxes + business means I see an economic concern front and center. So why is nuclear weaponry in here?

On another note, why is this so fucking dry? It’s like I’m reading a Wikipedia summary. The only powerful language has been “secret” and “all-time high” and “total annihilation.” What the fuck is going on?

Everything is so vague—so problematically, memeishly vague—that now my hackles are up. This sounds just like a boomer on the bus yelling at his phone. This is Neil Breen levels of indistinct. I don’t like it. It sounds like someone who doesn’t know what the fuck they’re talking about, and this is a fucking HISTORICAL NOVEL.

I am now completely switched off from thinking about the story. It doesn’t seem like there’s much of a story at all. In fact, this sounds like it’s going to be unfocused conservative ramblings. I am now thinking not about the story, but about the writer as a person. I’m starting to wonder if even the author doesn’t know what they’re focused on—which implies a story without a solid structure—which implies a story without a through-line.

I don’t want to restate everything I just said, but you can see the problem, right? Things are just happening. Every occurrence is shared as a state of being. The people suffering are unnamed, and the ways they are suffering is indistinct. The friction is indistinct, too. I have no idea what I’m rooting for, I have no idea what the subject is, and we are four sentences in.

A good summary should be about 3-8 sentences long and punch you in the face. So far I have experienced the literary equivalent of a dry gnat fart.

Let’s move ahead.

That man was Andrew Ryan, and he believed that great men and women deserved better.

God I hate this fucking line. It says absolutely nothing about Andrew Ryan or Objectivism.

What is “better”? Better than what? Under what circumstances? What does Andrew Ryan believe? Why should I be interested? Why are you sharing this in past tense before the story even begins? This sounds like something tension should be attached to. Why is there no tension here?

Andrew Ryan is based on Ayn Rand, and Rapture is based on Objectivist ideals. People live and die as Objectivists. They fight for Objectivist ideals. On this very day you can go to YouTube and look up a recording of Andrew Ryan’s speech and some dumbass has uploaded it to YouTube with a slideshow of patriotic imagery. That’s how accurately Ken Levine cleaved to Objectivist ideals: that actual libertarians look at the message of the game and go WELL ACKSHUALLY

I think I’ve figured out why this is all so vague, though. Objectivism is controversial and Objectivists have no shame whatsoever. We can’t have controversy in our fucking BioShock! Maybe the powers-that-be defanged it because they didn’t want to deal with fallout. (Ha ha ha ha aaa h a ) Maybe they defanged it because they wanted to sell it to as wide an audience as possible, and they didn’t want to insult anybody holding $20.

Did they not play the game? Because that’s embarrassing. It definitely puts BioShock Infinite in a new light for me. There’s no way for us to accurately understand Ken Levine, a public figure, as a human being—all we have are little snapshots of him in time and second-hand accounts, which by their natures will vary in truth—but I’m starting to wonder if he started to raise this big middle finger, like: “ooooh u want me to be safe? Fuck youuuuuuuuu”

Which I can appreciate, obviously.

This fear of controversy is prime executive behavior. Executives, as I’ve learned over time, are fucking morons. Have you ever met an old man with the personality of a 15-year-old? Think Elon Musk. Well, there’s a reason for that. Because they hold the purse strings, you can’t talk to them honestly, because there’s a real chance they’ll take offense and strike back at you right in the pocketbook. Because they’re so wealthy, they can buy their ways out of suffering, so the fear of god is never slapped into them, and they have absolutely no conception of what true loss is. It’s not that they can’t fail, but their failure is so much more insulated than ours is. It’s how you end up with Oceangate: people to whom life has said “yes” so often that they have no respect for physics.

Executives are so used to being coddled that any pushback deeply wounds them. They can afford to be psychologically insecure. As a group, they are fertile ground for Objectivism to take root; they are most likely to see themselves as the Randian Ubermensch, for they also tend to be unreasonably wealthy—and that’s because of their innate genius and capability, right?

This is the height of an unchallenged viewpoint.

So he set out to create the impossible, a utopia free from government, from censorship, and from moral restrictions on science, where what you gave was what you got.

This is sentence eight, at the end of an 11-sentence-long summary, and ladies and gentlefolks, we have finally HIT THE FUCKING PLOT. I am going to hit a motherfuckin copywriter is what I’m going to fucking do.

THIS IS THE PLOT. This is where all the tension should be. This is where we should have our actors. This is the plot! It’s about Rapture! It’s about building Rapture!

Look how they wrote this shit!

The story should, by all rights, begin with a question: can Andrew Ryan build Rapture?

The extremely literal dumbass will say: “Yes hurhur.” But stories are not built on certainty, my fellow assholes. They are built on questions and friction and problems. We know how it ends, yes. Technically we knew how it ended when we started BioShock 1, didn’t we? The question you’re answering isn’t Yes/No, it’s WHY.

That doesn’t mean you treat the story as though the city is already built. Hypothetically there was a point where Rapture was just a very nice dream. That should be interesting in and of itself. The point of tension is Rapture’s production—the reasons why people want it, the acts taken to produce it, the actors who try to stop it, why someone would stop it, the ways you attract citizens to inhabit it without alerting the entire universe, the process of upkeep. Worldbuilding shit. What are Rapture’s pros and cons, the devils in the details, the kind of society that evolves from a place like this?

Why are they talking about it like it’s already been built? Why are they using past tense for a story that I haven’t read yet? I read a lot of stories knowing how they end. I don’t read for the sakes of endings. It’s like some dim-bulb somewhere was like, “Uhhhhh historical fiction uhhhhh it already happened so uhhhhh let’s write it in past tense…”

All stories have already happened by definition. It is finished. It lies in your hands. You talk about it in present tense in a summary because the reader’s experience is the important part. Reading is about the experience, not about the ending.

Someone somewhere is a colossal dumbfuck and I hate them for even touching my smart fucking video game. Don’t even speak its title. Get the fuck out of here you fucking clown and go back to reading shitty YA.

But this utopia suffered a great tragedy.

“This utopia suffered,” like nobody saw this shit coming. Like nobody was involved. We’ve gone from blaming everybody to blaming nobody. Like there was a natural disaster or an alien attack or God reached down and flicked Rapture into space.

This is. Just. Just the worst.

What the fuck am I reading about? Who are the shakers and movers? What are the focal points? A summary can’t and shouldn’t give you the whole story, but it sure as hell should give you some sense of what the trouble is and who’s causing it.

This line is what really kicked my brain in gear: the summary is so fucking hands-off. It doesn’t make any promises; it doesn’t fucking commit. It’s a vague scene with no actors in it. You might be tempted to say, “Well, Andrew Ryan is mentioned!” But the problem is that he’s mentioned off-hand, like he just kinda exists in the ether with the Bad Gubmint and the Many and the Taxes. It doesn’t introduce any problems and it doesn’t stand for anything. It’s just so vague and mealymouthed. Grow a fucking spine and stand for something you fucking cowards.

This idea offers a small possibility: that someone didn’t like the subject and described it at arm’s length—what they thought the author was saying while feeling deeply uncomfortable.

Whatever the case, this summary offers nothing. It isn’t even hot air. It’s a little gasp of lukewarm something-or-other. It has no scent, no function, no body, no face. Like the tenses it employs, it simply exists.

I’m pretty sure nobody loved this story while they wrote it and it shows. And if there’s anything I don’t trust, it’s work nobody gives a shit about. Being shitty isn’t the ultimate failure: being boring is. And this shit is boring.

AND IT’S JUST THE FUCKING SUMMARY.

Hope Springs Eternal

I remember reading the back of this novel before I bought it and feeling my stomach sink. I still bought it because I was that heartsick for a big ol’ BioShock novel. The only fanfiction anyone ever writes is instant-gratification short-form and that makes me very sad. At the same time, one must be sensible: writing a novel is a lot of fucking work, and one should be fucking grateful one gets anything at all. In fandom, where everything is a product of passion and free time, one must be particularly respectful of this.

But this is not fandom; money has changed hands several times along the way; and I expect certain standards from something for which I have exchanged funds. BioShock: Rapture was not written because somebody believed in it or loved it; it was written primarily to be a Product. It is cynical, as BioShock 2 was cynical, to appeal to as many as possible—which means that by definition, it is insecure, afraid, and says fuck all.

This is bad, okay. This is very bad. This is somebody who didn’t understand the game on some of the most basic levels imaginable. Things like: what is BioShock about? What is the moral system and philosophy in BioShock—as intended, as it actually landed, and as represented by different characters and the player? What does BioShock say about idealism and those who adhere to ideals at the expense of human wellbeing? How are characters influenced by world tragedies on a personal level? What happens when you have an entire population of radicals and there’s no longer a convenient Other to hate?

What makes BioShock interesting?

Whoever wrote this summary has no fucking clue, and what’s more, they don’t particularly care. All they understand is a Bad versus Good dynamic. Anything more complex makes them snort and stomp like a mule deer, and they’re just about to fling themselves off sideways and hurtle through an elementary-school window screaming about liberals or transgenders or something.

This had better be a copywriter because I’m about to roll some stinky-ass eggs y’all

Part 2: John Shirley and the Front Matter ->

#bioshock #bioshock rapture #bioshock 2 #bioshock infinite #essays #writing #fanfiction #vvatchword #vv reading

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