#suspecting a murder plot) but an unsympathetic antagonist. in a few lines in one scene we suddenly see both her and Sewell in completely

[mariocki]

Shadows of Fear: Repent at Leisure (1.5, Thames, 1971)

"Poor Robert. Do you remember what the doctor said? He'd never seen such an advanced cirrhosis in someone so young. He had a liver like a Strasbourg goose."

"Occupational hazard."

"How'd you think that made me feel? It isn't very flattering for a wife to play second fiddle to a wine list."

"I'm sure it was no reflection on you."

"All the same. I hardly changed the pattern of his life, did I?"

"No... but you're asking Harry to make fantastic adjustments. From galley to, uh, captain's table."

"You're a terrible snob, Peter."

"Oh, I am. So are you, my pet. That's what frightens me."

[jayoctodot]

The Silent Patient vs The Maidens

I will start by saying that I understand the appeal of these novels as page-turners. They are easy to read and if you want a twisty reveal at the end, you will probably be entertained and satisfied. That being said, I am SO CONFUSED by the near-universal adoration of The Silent Patient and the reasonably positive reception of The Maidens. The weaknesses of the two are strikingly similar, as well, which doesn’t give me much hope of seeing improvement from this guy, though I am intrigued to see whether he keeps repeating the same (apparently successful!!) patterns. These books were at least super fun to hate.

(For context, I read The Maidens for a bookclub I'm in, because several of the members had read and loved The Silent Patient, and one of them gave me a copy of the latter to read on my own time. I loathed The Maidens and then read The SP for comparative purposes. And because I'm a masochist, apparently.)

SPOILER WARNING! Do not read on unless you've finished both books (or unless you care not for spoilers). Sorry if it gets a bit shouty.

Here are the similar weaknesses I noticed in both:

PSEUDO-PSYCHOLOGY

-> Weirdly similar “group therapy” scenes early on where a cartoonishly unstable patient arrives late, disrupts the meeting by throwing something into the middle of the circle, and is asked to join the group after the therapist(s) speechify on the importance of boundaries (HA! None of these therapists would know an appropriate boundary if it kicked them in the ass) and debate whether to “allow” the patient to join. Both scenes are so transparent in their design to establish the credibility/legitimacy of the narrators as therapists, but instead both Theo and Mariana come off as super patronizing. The protagonists are less and less believable as therapists at the stories progress (though at least Theo’s incompetence is explained away by the “twist” at the end; Mariana, on the other hand, is confronted in the opening pages of the novel by a patient who has self-harmed PRETTY extensively, and rather than ensure he get proper medical attention, she essentially throws him a first aid kit and tosses him out the door so she can pour herself a glass of wine and call her niece... and it devolves from there).

-> Ongoing insistence throughout the narrative that one’s childhood trauma entirely explains the warped/dysfunctional way a character behaves or views the world, which is why the books go out of their way to give EVERY potentially violent character a traumatic childhood; when Theo insists that no one ever became an abuser who hadn’t been abused themselves, I wanted to throw the book across the room. (That is a MYTH, SIR. GET OUT OF HERE WITH YOUR ARMCHAIR PSYCHOLOGY.)

-> Female murderers whose pathology boils down to “history of depression” and “traumatized by a male loved one/family member.” Because, as we all know, depression + abuse = murderer!

-> The “therapy” depicted in both books is laughable and so so unrealistic, mostly because neither narrators function as therapists so much as incompetent detectives, obsessively pursuing a case they have no place pursuing (or skill to pursue - both just happen across every clue mostly by way of clunky conversation with all the people who can provide precisely the snippet of info to send them along to the next person, and the next… until all is revealed in a tired, cliched “twist”). Their constant Psych 101 asides were so tiresome and weirdly dated (also, the constant harping on countertransference got so ridiculous that at one point during "therapy" Theo literally attributes his headache and a particular emotion he feels to Alicia, as though the contents of her head are being broadcast directly into his mind... and I'm PRETTY SURE that's not how it works???)

CHARACTERS

-> Psychotherapist narrators with abusive fathers and pretensions of being Sherlock Holmes, which results in both characters crossing ALL KINDS of ethical lines as they invade the personal lives of everyone even tangentially connected to their cases (and, in Theo's case, violate all kinds of patient confidentiality. Yeah, yeah, by the end, that's the least of his offenses, but before you get there, it's baffling that NO ONE is calling him out on this).

-> All female characters are either elderly with hilariously bad advice, monstrous hulking brutes, or beautiful bitches (except for ~MARIANA~, who is Bella Swan-esque in her unawareness of her own attractiveness, despite multiple men trying to get with her almost immediately after meeting her. I'm so tired of beautiful female characters being oblivious to their own hotness. Are we meant to believe all mirrors and male attention have escaped their notice? If it’s to make them “relatable,” this tactic really fails with me).

-> All characters of color are shallow, cartoonish side characters, and most of them are depicted as unsympathetic minor antagonists (the Sikh Chief Inspector in The Maidens continuously drinks tea from an ever-present thermos, and his only other notable characteristic is his instant dislike of Mariana, whom he VERY RIGHTLY warns to stay out of the investigation that she is VERY MUCH compromising… the Caribbean manager of the Grove is universally disliked by her staff for enforcing stricter safety regulations at the bafflingly poorly run mental institution, because HOW DARE SHE. There's a very clear vibe that we're supposed to dislike these characters and share the protagonists' indignation, but honestly Sangha/Stephanie were completely in the right for trying to shut down their wildly inappropriate investigations).

-> "Working class" characters (or basically anyone excluded from the comfortably upper-crust, educated main cadre of characters) are few and far between in both stories, but when they show up, he depicts them as such caricatures. We got Elsie the pathologically lying housekeeper in the Maidens, who is enticed to share her bullshit with cake, and then a TOOTHLESS LEPRECHAUN DEALING DRUGS UNDER A BRIDGE in the SP. I kid you not, a man described as having the body of a child, the face of Father Time, and no front teeth, emerges from beneath a bridge and offers to sell Theo some "grass." I was dyinggg.

-> There are no characters to root for. Anywhere. Partly because they’re all so thinly drawn — and because we’re clearly supposed to view almost ALL of them as potential suspects, so they’re ALL weird, creepy, or incompetent in some way.

-> The flimsiest of flimsy motives, both for the narrators and the murderers. Theo fully would have gotten away with his involvement in the murder if he hadn't gone out of his way to work at the Grove and "treat" Alicia and his justification for doing so is pretty weak; his rapid descent into stalking and murder fantasy and his random ass decision to "expose" Alicia's husband as a cheater with a spur-of-the-moment home invasion and staged attempted homicide is ONLY justified if the reader hand waves it away as WELP, HE'S CRAZY, I GUESS (after all, he DID have an abusive father and a history of mental illness, and in Michaelides novels, that's ALL YOU NEED to become a violent psycho). I guess we're lucky Mariana didn't also start dropping bodies (because the logic of his fictional universe says she should definitely be a murderer by now... maybe that'll be his Maidens sequel?). But she especially had NO reason to randomly turn detective - and she kept trying to justify it by saying she needed to re-enter the world or that Sebastian would want her to (??), even though she had no background in criminal psychology... or even a particular fondness for mysteries (really, I would've accepted ANYTHING to explain her dogged obsession with the case. WHY were Sebastian and Zoe so certain she would insert herself into the investigation just because one of Zoe's friends was the first victim? WHY?). As for Zoe and Alicia, their motives are mere suggestions: they were both abused and manipulated, and voila! Slippery slope to murder.

WRITING STYLE

-> Incessant allusions to Greek tragedy and myth, apparently to provide a sophisticated gloss over the bare-bones writing style, which opts more for telling than showing and frequently indulges in hilariously bizarre analogies. Credit where credit is due — the references to Greek myth are less clunky in the SP, and I liked learning about the Alcestis play/myth, which I hadn’t heard of before - but OMG the entire characterization of Fosca, who we are meant to believe is a professor of Greek tragedy at one of the most respected universities on the planet, is just absurd. His "lecture" on the liminal in Greek tragedy is essentially the Wikipedia page on the Eleusinian Mysteries capped off with some Hallmark-card carpe diem crap. The lecture hall responds with raucous applause, clearly never having heard such vague genius bullshit before.

-> Super clunky and amateurish narrative device of interludes written by another character; Sebastian’s letter reads like a mashup of Dexter monologues and Clarice’s memory of the screaming sheep, but by FAR the worse offender is Alicia’s diary, where we’re supposed to believe she painstakingly recorded ENTIRE CONVERSATIONS, BEAT-BY-BEAT DIALOGUE, even when she’s just been DRUGGED TO THE GILLS with morphine and has mere moments of consciousness left… and even before that, she literally takes the time to write “He's trying the windows and doors! ...Someone’s inside! Someone’s inside the house! ETC ETC” when she thinks her stalker has broken in downstairs. WHO DOES THAT?)

-> Speaking of dialogue, the dialogue is so bad. Based on his bio, Michaelides got a degree in screenwriting, which makes his terrible dialogue even more baffling.

-> HILARIOUSLY rendered voyeur scenes where the narrators spy on couples having sex. Such unintentionally awkward descriptions. First we had Kathy’s climax sounds through the trees and then the bowler hat carefully placed on a tombstone before the gatekeeper plows a student. Again, I died.

PLOT/"TWIST"

-> The CONSTANT red herrings make for such an exhausting read. Michaelides drops anvils with almost every character that are so obviously meant to designate them as suspects in our minds. There is absolutely no subtlety in his misdirections.

-> The “crossover” scene between the SP and The Maidens makes no sense - when in the timeline does Mariana’s story overlap with Theo’s? They confer just before Theo starts working at the Grove, obviously (though Mariana appears to be the one who alerts Theo to the job opening there? Whereas in the SP, Theo has been obsessively tracking Alicia since the murder and had already planned to apply to work there?), but then are we supposed to believe that while Theo has been psychotically pursuing his warped quest to “help” Alicia, he’s also been diligently treating Zoe, so invested in her case that he repeatedly reaches out to Mariana to get her to visit Zoe and even writes Mariana a lengthy letter to convince her to do so??? And then a couple days after The Maidens ends, Theo is arrested???

-> But the thing I really did hate the most is how Michaelides treats his female murderers (who are both also victims themselves) as mere means to deploy a “twist”; there’s no moment spared to encourage our sympathy for Zoe, who was groomed and manipulated by the only trusted father figure in her life, and even after spending a decent amount of time getting to know Alicia via her ridiculous diary, where it’s so apparent that she’s been demeaned, objectified, manipulated, gaslit, and/or used by EVERY man in her life, she’s sent packing to spend the rest of her days in a coma… HOW much more satisfying would it have been for her to succeed in exposing Theo and reclaiming her voice? But no, she basically rolls over when he comes to finish her off (SPEAKING OF — ARE WE SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE THERE ARE NO SECURITY CAMERAS IN THIS INSTITUTE FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE????), writes one last diary entry, and drifts off forever. And then a couple pages of nothing later, the story is over. GOODNIGHT, ALICIA!

Both books kept me rolling throughout (by which I mean eye-rolling but also rotfl). Maybe I will check out his next effort — I’m morbidly curious what he’ll turn out. It does leave me wondering whether I should give up on thriller novels entirely, though. Are many of the weaknesses of these novels just characteristic of the genre? Maybe I'm just holding these books to unfair standards? I'm mostly only familiar with thriller films — many of which I think are amazing — but maybe you can get away with more in a film than you can in a novel.

...I really only intended to write a handful of bullet points, but more and more kept coming to mind as I wrote, to the point where subheadings became necessary. Whoopsie.

[ayankun]

GOTHAM

insanely rambley HUGE spoiler-ridden seasons 1-4 thoughts under cut

FIRST OFF LET ME TELL YOU I GOT CHILLS

Secondly, let’s think back to how I felt about season one.  A little loose in the narrative, not so much weaving threads as having threads, ones that you keep expecting to pull tight but more often than not just get dropped for other, shinier threads.  All leading to a surprisingly effective character-driven season finale that hopes to prove to you that a few meandering plot points can still add to a sum greater than the parts.

(Oswald goes from umbrella boy to King of Gotham, Bruce Wayne starts at the site of his parents’ murder and ends up taking his first steps into the Batcave, Jim enters as this black-and-white idealist and winds learning from a mob boss that even good men sometimes get their hands dirty to get the job done.  A socially awkward unrecognized genius has a psychic break, leading ultimately to the fall of Edward Nygma and the rise of the Riddler.)

Season two is a blur.  A period of transition from Jim “Good Cop” Gordon Fistfighting Corruption into... Gotham City: Arkham Asylum’s Backyard.  Think how much season one was about only Fish Mooney vs Falcone vs the GCPD and Cobblepot doublecrossing everyone he meets, and how much seasons two and three and four were about the Riddler and Valeska and Tetch and Ra’s al Ghul (and Valeska).  We have the bring-everyone-back-to-life at Indian Hill period to thank for the sudden left turn into the Strange.

WHICH IS NOT A COMPLAINT.

There are so many types of Batman stories, and there’s a time and a place for both Joe Chill and Killer Croc.  Gotham started in one and always knew it was headed for the other.

And B.D. Wong as Strange is a DELIGHT and I really appreciated his dynamic with Miss Peabody.  Speaking of, the bomb defusing scene was a real gem omg lololol give the woman some damn water already.

At the same time, the Fish storyline was like WHOA what EVEN is haPPENINg at any given moment.  And it ultimately didn’t amount to much?  There’s so much waffling between the surviving gang camps where everyone’s either got a kill-on-sight order or a owed-life-debt to each other and the pendulum swings back and forth so quickly it’s not really worth holding onto how anyone feels about anyone else.  That dead/MIA character will come back or the rivalry will be revived or the long-held grudge will be recalled if and when that plot point is going to be drafted, but other than that everyone’s friends and that’s ok.

And like.  Ivy??? Ivy Pepper???????  Why is that ride so wild???  There is no cause and effect, only next next next.  It’s insane.  Maybe watching this all at once rather than over the course of four years lends a different perspective, but holy cow.  Such a ballsy way to do whatever with a character you never had a plan for.

Which brings us to Barbara Kean?!  Season one she was there because they knew she was a Mythos Character but then they were like, wait, whateven is she for though?  Which is a fair question, since having her be the Little Lady Trophy Fiance meant she was a boring and needless character wasting space, not standing on her own and hardly informing Jim’s character either.  So what to do, what to do.  How about we kidnap her, put her through some insanely cruel physical and psychological abuse, make her a psycho-revenge-bride, put her in a coma, have her come back as a 100% Arkham Villain, give her a hench(wo)man, have the henchman KILL HER, have Ra’s al Ghul waltz up out of literally nowhere and say “lol, borrow this arcane mojo for a minute, I’ll want it back later or will I” and now she’s a kingpin of Gotham’s underworld with her own mini League of Assassin?!!!!!!!   !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!    !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Like.  Even if they never had a plan going into it, I’m pretty okay with most of what they came up with.  Better than the lil wifey hanging out at home and having one passing remark about curating a gallery that we never saw and was never mentioned again.

Better off a once-crazy, once-dead mafiosa than the less inspired handling of Miss Kringle.  I won’t even get into that trainwreck I-only-exist-to-validate-manpain-of-my-murderer wait I said I wasn’t going to get into it.

So Nygma!  Like I said when I got started with the show, the season one Edward Nygma was crafted as this painfully unsympathetic offbeat loser and I think they fully succeeded with that characterization.  The emergence of the Riddler persona was a welcome change, an upgrade, a spit-shine into something clean cut and confident and stylish.  But I like that, compared to the Penguin, the posterchild for evil-psychotic-villain!Protaganist, for example, they held on to a lot of Nygma’s unlikeablilty in that he’s still an ass, even more of an insufferable egoist, and SO CRAZY he can’t even read himself (which was a big thing about the character before he split in half, so in itself that’s pretty great).

I don’t know.  Maybe you like him and I’m supposed to like him.  I think he’s exactly what he ought to be, and while I'd never want to see him marched off a peer with a bullet in his back, I’m more than happy to see his fellow villain-Protagonists knock him around once in a while.  Penguin and Mooney and now Lee (?!) and Zsasz even are the kind of villan!Protagonist you really root for.  But if it’s any one of them vs. the Riddler, they’re definitely not going to lose.  Nygma’s like in his own category of villain!Protagonist Antagonist.

Of course, the post-Arkham-proto-Riddler who was running Oswald’s mayoral campaign, now HOT DAMN that was a storyline I could get behind.  I almost actually believed they were going to do something great in the Nygmobblepot arena and that was a magical moment.  I think the resulting blood feud, as painful of a 360 as they come, was a sounder storytelling decision and more in line with the show’s Schroedinger’s Frenemies mentality.

And his season four storyline with the Ed Nygma persona challenging the Riddler was a nice full circle.  Sort of closing the gap between this raging banana nutball and the razor-sharp criminal mastermind he could be if tried.  Not SUPER THRILLED with his creeping on Lee but, with all due respect, that’s par for the character so again I say I don’t think I’m meant to like him??

I just spent half this rant on the Riddler so I guess they’re doing something right.

Ok so Cameron Monaghan’s VALESKA TWINS.  Let’s get right into it, shall we.

Holy smokes they did everything right on this one.  Loved the Primal Fear treatment of his introduction, and the way this random circus kid just so happens to start displaying jokey traits that astute viewers will start to suspect that this could be the big bad we’ve all been waiting for --

and then they kill him.

WOW

I was so ready for this kid to grow up to be the Joker, and they rip that dream away and replace it with an idea that anyone can grow up to be the Joker, and damn if that isn’t the nicest treatment of the character’s fractured and obfuscated origin story.  But.  THEN!

THEY BRING HIM BACK and it’s everything you wanted him to be.  He’s just so good.  There’s just the right amount of (IMO, anyway) Hamill-homage in what is otherwise a fully imagined Character who is instantly recognizable as one of many iterations but at the same time outclasses them all.  The high-level narrative and dialogue stuff, the stuff they create for him to do, I mean, is all great.  And then Monaghan brings this manic A++ game to the table and blows it out of the water.  Best Joker performance?  Arguably so, especially when you consider

JEREMIAH VELASKA because this kid can’t stop having stellar Joker performances.  He’s like, two and a half, three of the best Joker performances on the books.  Jeremiah’s distinct visual style, the characterization, AGAIN with the obfuscated we-are-legion origin story hocow.  NO COMPLAINTS HERE.

Anyway so if that’s what we get in return for sending Fish Mooney through a narrative meat grinder, then I guess it’s an even trade.

Pengiun.  What to say about Penguin.  I loved what they gave him in season two, a ton of character stuff because his plot stuff of rags to riches had played itself out.  I felt real bad for his mom, but I really liked that he went and made himself mayor, and even while his story arcs tend to go riches to rags and back again, it’s never not a pleasure watching him claw his way up to where he thinks he ought to be.

For the most part they do a good job stringing together these different Protagonist story-groups, keeping in mind that most of these groups serve mainly as antagonists amongst themselves (when they’re not being buddy-buddy to serve some winding end).  So when you get the villain!Antagonists you can really tell the difference.  I got a little yawny while we were setting up Fries, and by the time we finally locked Tetch up for good I was very grateful.  These will never be main characters and the show knows it and wants you to know it, too.  So while they’re the main on-screen villain, it can get a little stale because the same effort isn’t being put into their lasting appeal.

Um.  Jim Gordon.  Another thing I liked about season four was a strong return to GCPD bidniss.  Season two there was a lot of GCPD, but with Captain Barnes and the strike force and Galavan, so it was a completely different narrative animal than what Gordon was throwing down with in season one.  Then Gordon goes to prison and after that he doesn’t go back to GCPD until well into season three, and by then the story’s about Mario and Tetch and Lee and omg I forgot about Valerie Vale until this very moment whoops.

As was hinted in the season one finale, Jim Gordon went on a very twisty path through the mud before he figured himself out again.  Killing Galavan was like WHAT JIMBOY and that wasn’t even the worst of it.  What I liked most about his stint as a PI was the character’s eventual acceptance that the law isn’t the be all and end all of righteousness, and that there are other means available when enforcing peace and justice.  Not necessarily by killing every evil mayor you come across with your own two hands, but the eye-opening to the virtues of vigilantism is super important when you realize he’s going to be Batman’s main ally down the line and this time in his life is going to be what ultimately allows the future police commissioner to legitimize this kind of shadowy ninja behavior.

Anyway, in season four, Jim kind of comes back to roost at the GCPD, and finally ousting Bullock as Captain was rough but obviously warranted, and with only one season left that was a good time to do it.  Harper was a nice addition and I’d like to see more of her as a standalone character.  (Similarly, Fox has fit in nicely with the cops, but I’m not overly hankering to see more of his day to day antics.) 

What was my real point?  I really liked the Gordon vs the GCPD dynamics of season one, and while obviously that’s not a story you can tell forever, it did inform the sense that the police force is a living entity that can serve you very well if it trusts you, but before that can happen you really have to jump on its back and break its will LOL.

Also, remember Renee Montoya and Harvey Dent?  Yeah, I don’t either.

SO BRUCE WAYNE, MY FRIENDS.

Gotham is my very most favorite Bruce Wayne story, and much as Batman: TAS is my forever-reference for most Batmany things, Gotham is going to be my heart-canon for Bruce Wayne origins.

It’s one thing to say, “ok so this rich kid watches his parents get murdered in an alley, and from this moment on he vows to do something about it and makes himself a master detective/martial artist who puts on a mask and a cape and runs around at night smashing thugs’ heads in for justice” like it’s a foregone conclusion, a straight-forward A-to-B process, and a wholly other thing to show us, step by step, how he learns to become the thing we all know he’s going to become.

In season one he was this quiet, morose but driven child who didn’t know what to do with this crisis he’d been handed.  He’s a kid who sits in a pool with his whole clothes on, trying to hold his breath for as long as possible because he has no idea how else to become better prepared for handling his issues.  But he has Selina and he has Alfred and he has Fox and he has Jim Gordon, and he will have the Court of Owls and the Valeskas and Ra’s al Ghul who will all play a part in handing him pieces of himself until he has a full set.

He started with this strong sense of right and wrong, a deeply seated desire to put his talents and his money to some sort of use, an earnest diligence towards bettering himself in all ways, and little by little he gets shown just how much of a fragile and defenseless baby he is.  That time Alfred accidentally-on-purpose clobbered him in the eye -- that was the moment Bruce found out they’d all been pulling their punches with him and that he still had so so so far to go.

Of course, at the particular moment, he was going through a well-earned rebel without a cause phase (which will do him well when he calls on those behaviors for the benefit of a wider audience), so I don’t think that realization hit him at the time.  BUT I NOTICED.  Sure he’s got a bulletproof suit and he can look Jim Gordon straight in the eye now and he can fling himself off rooftops like a champ (and when Alfred gave him the keys to the Batmobile I cried a little), but he’s no Batman.  Not yet.  Not quite yet.

But you can see without a shadow of a doubt that he’s gonna be!  Instead of this “Bruce Wayne woke up as Batman” story, we get a look at all the day by day choices and experiences that inform, shape, and depend on Bruce Wayne’s core identity and the way that they will collectively create Batman.

Now, David Mazouz may not have the character acting chops of a Pinkett-Smith or a Taylor or a Monaghan, and he may not be as comfortable living in a everyday character like Pertwee and Logue do so effortlessly, but there’s a steeliness a Bruce Wayne should have, a hauntedness, an idealistness, that Mazouz emotes in spades.  Sometimes his Bruce Wayne does a stunt or pulls a pose that Mazouz KNOWS is Batman territory, and while his awareness of “I’m doing a cool thing look at me doing it” is a little distracting--it’s also SUPER EFFECTIVE and I fall for it hook, line, and sinker.

I’ve always been one of those fans who’s way more interested in the lives and characters of the secret identities (compared to the heroics of the super identities) so hot diggity dog is this the show for me.  All Bruce Wayne all the time.  When we he does put on the mask, it’s all the more powerful for knowing who exactly is wearing it and what’s driving him to do these borderline insane things.

Not 100% sold on Ra’s’ “I saw this in a dream” strong-arm prophecy, feeling like it steps on four years of Bruce Wayne’s self-determination.  Not 100% on how they introduced him and his aims and his baffling reincarnation(s).  But I am 100% on the pronunciation of “Ra’s” because I’m aware that Kevin Conroy et al figured it out somewhere between TAS and Arkham Asylum, but it’s something that they never quite got in Arrow.  (Oliver consistently uses “raysh” but everyone else is a grab bag between that and “rawz”.)

For that matter, David Mazouz consistently pronounces Ra’s with two syllables, so there’s also that.  Wait, hold on.  In Gotham they also draw a hard line between Ra’s al Ghul, the man, and “the demon’s head,” some sort of mystical power of time travel and flashlightiness.  Give one point to Arrow for not being that bizarre.

Long story short, the shot at the finale where Gordon’s waiting on the GCPD rooftop with the spot light and Bruce Wayne stalks up behind him was BEAUTIFUL.  (They also did the thing some episodes earlier where Bruce peaces out on Gordon when Gordon’s mid-sentence with his back turned and I laughed a lot)

Looking forward to their take on No Man’s Land.  Here’s a short story for you at the end of this long story:

One time I was reading No Man’s Land volume by volume from the library.  It was tough because I checked the first time and they had the full set, but then you never knew that the next one was going to be available when you went in for it.

So I get out of the car one day and look there’s a quarter on the ground.  Neat.  It’s mine now!

Going into the library, there was a cart of used books for sale by the door.  25 cents each.  Hell, I’ve got a quarter now, let’s see what they got.

What they got is the No Man’s Land novelization.  For 25 cents, or, in my case, free.

So I read that instead, and turned out I liked it way better than the source comics.  I have a hard time reading comics?  I tend to not look at the pictures, and certain art styles aren’t my jam.  Also when it comes to narrative capabilities, there are different tools and effects inherent to each form, and I appreciated the literary treatment and the internal voice it brought to the table that the comics couldn’t.

Also the author said in the note that his method was to sit down and jam out minimum 2000 words a day and that’s still a feat I admire.

Anyway, that’s my long winded take on Gotham.  Not perfection, but certainly a respectable and authoritative representation of a subject matter we all know and love.  I give it my second favorite Batman portrayal (behind Kevin Conroy and above Adam West) and my absolute favorite live-action Bruce Wayne, hands down.

[murasaki-murasame]

Danganronpa V3 Liveblog Part 14 [Chapter 4 - Trial]

Huh.

Thoughts under the cut.

Well I can’t say this game doesn’t know how to surprise me!

I, uh . . . was not expecting it to be Gonta, at all. I really don’t know how to feel about it. This seems like the sort of case I’ll need to sit on for a while.

Anyway, just to get it out the way from the start, I’m honestly glad that my whole guess about Kokichi’s motives in all this were wrong, since, as I also said, I figured that if I was right, it’d probably be handled badly and just be a really uncomfortable experience. Although on the other hand, my main issue with this case is that I just . . . feel a little empty about what ACTUALLY happened, motive-wise.

I may as well just dive right into my issues with it all. The bottom line is that Gonta being the murderer just . . . came out of nowhere. I’m not saying that you couldn’t suspect him from the start, it’s just . . . he didn’t feel relevant to the case at all until the very last minute, and we had no real way of guessing his motive. I don’t really dislike the idea that he tried to kill everyone as an act of mercy, but it kinda came completely out of nowhere and there was no real way to predict it. And the whole detail of Gonta having lost his memories of even committing the crime made the whole thing just feel . . . weird. I don’t even know if I’d say it was depressing, it just . . . felt weird.

Like, I’ve talked before about how much I love and adore Gonta, and how much I wanted him to beat the odds and survive, but instead of feeling sad about him dying, I’m just left like ‘wait what’.

I also feel like, even though I technically didn’t guess the culprit right at all, the logic of the entire trial felt really . . . simple? I was actually almost disappointed at how simple it was. I expected something much more complicated.

Like, for example, near the start of the case I thought that maybe the avatar user error was about how Kokichi might have hacked into the program in advance to disable the paralyzing effect on his avatar, so that he could have killed Miu and then hid behind that rule as a cover to say that it was impossible for him to do it. But I guess we were meant to take that whole plot point at face value because there wasn’t any real twist to it beyond it being an explanation for why Kokichi wasn’t the culprit.

And on the note of the avatar user error, the whole thing with Gonta screwing up felt . . . lame? Like, you definitely could have guessed it in advance if you thought about his dialogue instead of just brushing it off, so I’m not calling it unpredictable or completely out of nowhere, it’s just that it felt like a disappointing answer to that little mystery. It pretty much didn’t even serve a real story purpose beyond making Gonta more sympathetic in the end, since him just lying to hide his guilt would have caused more or less the same end result. It also lead to the Alter Ego thing I guess, which in itself felt like a slightly weird repeat of, well, Alter Ego, and to a lesser extent Mini-Mechamaru, but I guess that got immediately taken out as a plot point in the execution. It was just weird all around.

I also spent the entire case suspecting Kaito because, well, even though I thought he didn’t intentionally do anything, I thought that maybe Kokichi had messed with something in the program that caused Kaito to unwittingly be responsible for Miu’s death. Maybe there was some weird body swapping/fake identity thing going on that confused the system and made the log-in/out data inaccurate. Who knows. Then I thought later on that the motive put into the game might have been something to motivate him to kill Miu, like info on a cure for his disease. I’m obviously glad that none of this happened, since it means that he gets to stick around for a bit longer, but still.

It’s also just a bit weird that the entire point of this trial was basically ‘Kokichi is pure human evil on every level, he’s a genuinely awful person who manipulated someone into murder, and then spent the entire trial being annoying and insulting people’. I wasn’t expecting much in the way of a redemption arc or whatever, but yikes. Doing all that pretty much just to make everyone else feel bad and make some sort of a moral point to prove his superiority is . . . eh.

I also don’t know how to feel about the idea that he might not have even been telling the truth about the outside world to Gonta, and that everything he did really was just deceitful manipulation to engineer a killing game for no real purpose other than messing with people. Which added a whole other layer of weirdness and, to a degree, pointlessness to everything that happened.

It does still raise the question of what he actually saw in the outside world, especially if the implication is that it’s not equally as bad as the academy or even worse. But it was delivered in a way where it didn’t do much to make me any more curious about the truth.

They also revealed the deal with the tile stone at the end of the chapter, and so I guess that was also just Kokichi being manipulative and wanting to make himself seem powerful and important. Huh. It doesn’t really . . . tell us anything new. So that’s a bit disappointing.

I mean, I’m still curious about what the hell is even going on in this story behind the scenes, but this chapter didn’t necessarily change things too much in that regard.

A big part of this is probably just that I’m still not a fan of Kokichi as a character, especially after this chapter. He’s just kinda awful. He isn’t even that interesting or nuanced in terms of him being an antagonist out to perpetuate the killing game. He mostly just comes across as a self-absorbed compulsive liar. I really hope he gets more interesting during the rest of the game.

It’s kinda hard for the whole message he tried to send of ‘the truth is depressing and you all suck for wanting to discover it!’ to really land with me when it’s, again, not exactly a new point, and he went about it in a really contrived and forced kind of way. I know it was obviously intentional, but I related pretty hard to how everybody’s reaction in the end wasn’t ‘wow you’re right Kokichi, the truth IS depressing!’, but instead ‘what the fuck is wrong with you, Kokichi?’. I don’t exactly think that Shuichi of all people needs to be told that the truth is depressing and maybe isn’t worth pursuing. That’s literally his entire emotional hang-up.

I wonder how much of my perpetual annoyance at Kokichi is caused by how I really adored Komaeda as a character, and that Kokichi doesn’t really compare favourably to him. It feels wrong to compare them, but it’s impossible not to. I just feel like Kokichi feels way more shallow and one-note and unsympathetic than Komaeda ever did.

Also, just to continue this whole rant a bit more, now I’m left confused about the little stinger moment in the virtual world, and his apparent grudge against Kaito. I feel like none of that came up at all. This isn’t even entirely about the fact that my speculation about how that all connected and what Kokichi’s motives were was wrong. As I said, me being wrong about that part is almost a relief more than anything. I’m just confused that NOTHING seemed to happen with those details. Kokichi definitely pinned a lot of the blame on Kaito throughout the trial, but near the end it’s like he just shrugged his shoulders, went ‘actually Gonta’s the culprit’, and then the entire trial just veered off in a completely new direction. It was odd. I really thought that Kokichi had a grudge against Kaito specifically due to some sort of jealousy and bitterness, but . . . maybe not? Or maybe it just hasn’t come to the forefront yet? Both of them are still alive, so maybe it’s just being pushed off until later. The fact that the moment of Kokichi talking to himself about how he acts when he finds someone he likes didn’t really come up again was more confusing and weird, though. That seemed like such a big, ominous, mysterious little moment, but it kinda got forgotten about. I hope it’ll come up again later.

I feel like I’m more or less alone in being so annoyed at Kokichi since everyone seems to love him. Well, I see where people are coming from. I mean, I loved Komaeda as a character, so it’s not like I don’t get the appeal of manipulative and antagonistic characters. But something about Kokichi is just insufferable to me.

Then again, I’ve also seen lots of people hate Shuichi for being boring, and even though I get where people like that are coming from, I can’t help but side-eye everyone’s tastes. Shuichi is my wonderful boy and I will protect him.

Anyway, before I forget, I should comment on the Monokubs for a minute. For one thing, I was surprised to see them BOTH die during the execution. But most of all, I’m almost 100% certain now about them somehow being related to the survivors of whatever killing game Rantarou took place in. Or something like that. The way Monotaro kept talking about how he was on the verge of remembering stuff kinda spells out that he was involved in some stuff in the past. I’m not sure where that’s going to go, though.

Back to the case, as I said before, it just felt . . . simple. And the surprising parts didn’t really feel ‘difficult’, they just felt . . . surprising. I dunno how to put it. I feel like there were only a tiny handful of moments in the entire trial where I felt unsure about exactly what to do. The vast majority of the time I instantly knew what the answer was. Sometimes the exact wording of the answer threw me off a bit, but I basically always knew what the game expected from me. I think I mostly got a bit thrown off at a few of the ‘pick a truth bullet out of the entire list to answer a question’ moments. The Hangman’s Gambit sections were also a little iffy but I think all of them were ones where it just took a while for me to understand which exact phrasing of the answer the game expected from me.

Even in chapter three where I basically guessed the culprit immediately, the actual logic of most of the debates still threw me off big-time. I really doubt that it’s JUST because I decided to play this trial during the afternoon rather than at midnight like the earlier ones.

Thinking back at my last post, I think I guessed most of the main points of the trial in advance. There were definitely things I didn’t fully grasp, but most of them were things that I don’t really feel too bad about not being able to guess, in hindsight. I do feel kinda dumb about not considering that the toilet paper could have been used as a rope, though. I think it just threw me off that the roll seemed entirely ‘intact’, and not as if it had been unraveled out.

I wonder if the game genuinely expected me to be surprised by the details of how the virtual world worked, because I figured that out immediately.

I’m really happy that Kaito wasn’t the culprit, one way or another, even though it makes me feel even more bad about suspecting him yet again. I don’t think I can be blamed for that, though. And really, I didn’t think he intentionally did anything. I was just paranoid that Kokichi might have done something to somehow make Kaito unwittingly kill Miu.

It was definitely interesting seeing him be the Argument Armament person this time around. It’s not unprecedented to get cases like this, but still. It’s mostly intriguing because I still feel like the game is setting him up to be a culprit later, in the sense that his illness might eventually push him to murder someone in a desperate attempt to escape and get treatment. So in that case, I just wonder if they’d use him a second time for that section, or if they’d have a separate person step in to defend him like what happened in this chapter. The latter option seems more likely, but getting two cases like that in one game would seem a bit odd.

And on the whole note of Kaito maybe being a killer later, I hope that it’s not intended to be a huge surprise if that’s where it goes, since we’ve spent the entire last chapter and a half setting up this whole plot point in the brightest neon coloured text possible. I guess we’ll see.

It’s also worth considering that we probably only have one case left in the game, MAYBE two if we do cut the cast down to just two people in the end, so if Kaito IS meant to be a killer soon, it’d be a bit lame to have what would potentially be the final killer be so predictable. Ignoring the obvious emotional weight it’d have, there’s just the simple fact that if there’s just one case left, then if there’s one specific character who’s being set up as a future culprit, there’s no real alternative option. Even if there’s two cases left it’d basically be a 50/50 possibility. But with how this chapter went, and how it ended, I feel like whatever’s going on with Kaito will come to a head in the next chapter. So we’ll see.

It’d definitely be depressing as hell to see Shuichi need to expose Kaito as a murderer and lead him to his death. Hypothetically. And it’d hurt to potentially see Kaito spend an entire trial lying to Shuichi. But we’ll see. Maybe I’m completely wrong about where this is going.

Come to think of it, I feel a little silly about devoting this entire chapter’s set of free time events to Kaito since he ended up not dying, but hey, it’s not a bad thing. Even if I definitely think that playing his events got me into an inaccurate head-space in terms of trying to guess at the direction of this chapter, it was still nice to see his events through to the end. It would have been worse if he’d died before I got to see them all. Especially since I really did love his free time events as a whole. I’m glad I did them.

And on the note of free time events, part of me wants to try and max out Kokichi next just to see if maybe there’s some redemptive core to his character to potentially shift my feelings toward him, but for one thing I have a feeling that for story reasons Shuichi will refuse to spend time with him now, and for another thing, I don’t even know if I care enough to keep talking to him. This late into the game I’d rather do what I can to max out Maki’s free time events. I hope I can get that done in time.

Oh, and before I forget, I feel a bit stupid for not realizing that the key card Kokichi had gave him access to the secret room in the library. I had to see someone else point that out for me to put two and two together. I genuinely forgot all about that plot point, since it never really came up again after chapter one. I suppose that if anyone wanted to call it bad writing, that Shuichi never seemed to figure out what it was for, I couldn’t really blame them, but I don’t feel too annoyed about it.

Anyway, that’s basically all of my main thoughts on this trial. It was . . . a weird one. From what little I’ve seen of people’s thoughts on the game, I think I’m probably in a minority for feeling so deflated and disappointed in response to it. That’s fine. Not every case is going to work for everyone. I just think it took some bizarre turns in it’s final act, and wasn’t anywhere near as complex and interesting as I expected.

After how intensely negative this entire post was, I should clarify that I didn’t outright hate this chapter, and I’m not gonna stop playing the game or anything. It just didn’t really work for me in the end.

On a positive note, I guess I should specify that I really appreciate Miu’s attempts to set up a scenario to kill Kokichi in. Her whole plan was great, even though it was pretty easy to guess in advance. But I mean, I can’t help but cheer for anyone who wanted to murder this dude. I ended up liking her character in general a lot more than I thought I would. Apparently she was designed to be as intentionally off-putting as possible, which I can see, but she was so over the top that I couldn’t help but like her. I think most people would agree with me on that.

Also, as a side note, I took a look at the extras menu for the first time. I figured it’d have spoilers in it so I kept putting it off, but in the end I just felt that if they gave me the option to look into it now, there probably won’t be any spoilers. And I don’t think there are, thankfully. I'll probably just flick through it all once the game’s over, so I just sorta skimmed through the list, but the ‘intimacy scenes’ option kinda caught me by surprise. I know that there’s gonna be a bonus post-game Dating Sim Mode, but I didn’t expect to see this sort of option in the extras. I imagine that, unless it’s a joke option of some kind, it’s probably equivalent to the rank ten social link events in Persona, or something. I’m not exactly expecting anything, y’know, explicit, even from an option called ‘intimacy scenes’. I think that was what it was called anyway. I’m kinda surprised that the option seems to already be available, and that it’s not part of Dating Sim Mode. But I didn’t check it so maybe I’m wrong about it. I’m basically just expecting romance-y date/confession scenes, and/or some fanservice-y CGs. Since the title image thing for it seemed to have both Kaede and Shuichi on it, I hope that the events in it aren’t confined to just one or another of their POVs. That’d be nice. I have the same sort of hope for Dating Sim Mode, as I think I said before.

Basically what I’m saying is that I want my Shuichi/Kaito romance route, even as a non-canon extra thing. That’s basically all I want, lol.

But yeah I think that’s it for today. Not sure if I’ll play any of this tomorrow or if I’ll take a break.