It’s been a while since I’ve done any short fiction; this one came to me as I was falling asleep one night, and got stuck in my head. I make no warranties as to its quality. 🙂

The Very Beginning of the End

“You have to listen to me.”

Anthony almost didn’t. The number of useful conversations he expected to have with people who hung out in New York City alleways and hissed out, “You have to listen to me,” in low, croaky voices hovered somewhere slightly below zero. But as a simple reflexive instinct, he glanced over at the source of the voice, and what he saw stopped him cold.

It was a man in a suit of armor. For half a second, he thought it might be some sort of SCA thing, someone who was dressed up for a Renaissance Festival and was also terribly lost, but the armor didn’t look medieval. It looked…damaged. Like a car that had gone through a narrow tunnel and scraped most of the paint off, exposing the bare metal beneath. A few tiny flecks of red paint here and there were all that was left of the original colors.

“Please. There isn’t much time.” The armor came with a faceplate, but it was cracked and shattered in places, exposing burnt flesh. Anthony started to pay a little more attention–if this was some sort of protective gear, and something had happened to damage it this badly, then there could be some sort of crisis. Maybe he could help.

“Okay,” he said, unconsciously pitching his voice in the same tone people used with infants and crazy people. “I’m listening. What do you need?”

“I need to warn you,” the man in the armor said. He leaned against the wall, although Anthony couldn’t tell whether it was out of relief or exhaustion. “It’s coming. You have to stop it, you have to…” He stopped, and Anthony could hear him gasping for breath. “It,” he panted out urgently. “Is. Coming.”

“Okay, sir,” Anthony said. “I think we need to get you to a hospital. You need medical assistance–”

“There’s no time!” the man in the armor snarled, adrenalin giving him a surge of vitality. “It wouldn’t matter anyway, I can’t survive here. This universe is anathema to me. The suit protected me long enough to get through the dimensional barrier, but it wasn’t made for that kind of strain. Don’t worry about me. It’s this world that’s important. You have to stop it from happening here.”

“I don’t understand,” Anthony said. The words sounded like garden-variety crazy, the kind of rambling you’d hear from any homeless guy hanging out in an alley, but Anthony could feel the panic coming off of the man in armor and it felt real. “What’s coming? What’s going to happen?”

“It’s an…effect, a disruption to the laws of physics,” the man in armor replied. “We never developed a name for it–I only realized it existed at the very end, when reality had fragmented too completely to repair. That’s why I’m here–it starts so small that by the time you notice it on your own, I’m afraid it would be too late for you too.” He paused, gathering his thoughts.

“It begins as a memetic infection,” the man in armor said, slowly sinking into a seated position. Anthony came closer so that he wouldn’t have to shout. “An idea without a source, an idea that doesn’t make sense but seems to. People start…” His words dissolved into a wracking cough.

“They start making masks,” he said when he was finally able to resume speaking. “To conceal their identities, to make themselves anonymous. Sometimes the masks don’t even cover their whole face, but it doesn’t matter. They believe it will work, and somehow it does. And they go out wearing the masks, and…”

He reached out and grabbed Anthony’s wrist so suddenly that Anthony didn’t even have time to recoil. Anthony could hear the whirr of servo-motors as the fingers gripped him. “They think they can stop crime. All of it. Everywhere. By going out in the middle of the night, wearing a mask, and punching anyone they find committing a crime. And the crazy thing is…for a little while, it actually kind of works.”

“Um…” Anthony wasn’t sure if that was supposed to require a response. He had no idea what to say if it did–it was so far outside anything he could possibly have expected that he couldn’t even frame an answer.

It didn’t matter–the man in the armor kept talking as though he was supplying Anthony’s half of the conversation in his head. “I know! Does that even make sense? Manhattan is something like thirty square miles with over a million people, but these guys go wandering the streets and just happen to stumble on three or four major crimes a night! But they don’t question it. None of them do, because they’re no longer operating on the same logic they did before. Because it’s already started.”

The man in the armor sagged slightly, as though remembering some private pain. “And it gets worse. The memetic virus gets into the greatest minds of each society it infects–chemists, roboticists, physicists. It gives them amazing, miraculous, world-changing ideas, but…” He lowered his head. “I designed this. Every circuit, every motor, every diode. A functioning cybernetically controlled exoskeleton, capable of lifting a hundred tons and surviving environments from deep space to the ocean floor. And do you know what I did with it?”

Anthony shook his head, but the man in the armor wasn’t really looking at him. He also wasn’t waiting for an answer. “I attached laser cannons to it so I could shoot bad guys. That’s what it does to you. When it’s affecting you, everything seems so clear. So pure. The world’s problems are all caused by bad people doing bad things, and if you can just stop them with your fists or your knockout gas guns or your laser cannons, then everything will be…better.”

The man in the armor let go of Anthony’s arm. His hand hit the ground with a clanking thud. “It’s that damned purity that’s so seductive. Everything seems wonderful at first, the beginning of a new golden age that you and your buddies–because it’s never just one of you, there’s always a team or a league or a secret society, someone who will tell you that you’re doing the right thing–that you’re going to make happen. And at first it all works. You always win.

“But then there’s the other side of it. The criminals…they start finding their own superweapons. Sometimes they change themselves, alter their bodies’ genetic code whether accidentally or on purpose. They stop being bad people and start being monsters. And if they’re monsters, well…don’t you have a duty to fight monsters?”

He sounded sad, now. All the urgency was gone, replaced with a quiet, aching melancholy. “And then, just when you can’t take it anymore and the monsters seem like they’re winning, you get your very own angels to fight against the devils. Like a silver lining to the darkest cloud. They dose themselves with chemicals, blast themselves with radiation, warp their genomes into impossible new patterns, and if you notice that maybe the laws of physics aren’t the same as they were a year ago? You dismiss it. Who ignores the evidence of their own eyes? Who considers the idea that maybe the universe is being corrupted into a different shape?”

The man in the suit laughed. “Who has time? There’s always another bad guy to punch, another monster to stop. A new one every month, sometimes the old ones returning from the dead like a bad dream you can’t shake. More heroes, more villains, the effect slowly warping the world into a never-ending battle for…I dunno. Truth, justice…something like that. You get caught up in it. Everyone gets caught up in it.”

He was silent for a long moment. Anthony wondered if he could try removing the faceplate to give him more air, but before he could try, the man in the suit continued once more. “Everyone…” he said, his voice weaker than before. “So many people, by the end. The battles get bigger, the stakes get higher, the world becomes…stranger. Until by the time you see people doing real magic, summoning actual demons and gods from strange pantheons, it just seems like a part of existence you simply weren’t aware of. Loki? Thor? Oh, they were probably just hanging out in Asgard until last year. That totally happens. It doesn’t even seem crazy.”

The man’s voice had developed an uncomfortable-sounding rattle. Anthony had the feeling he wasn’t going to last much longer. “And you don’t notice that your life has degenerated into a series of endless fights, and that the escapes get narrower and the victories become more and more pyrrhic. Your friends die, they change sides…sometimes they come back from the dead, just like the bad guys, and that doesn’t even seem strange to you anymore. I died once or twice myself, and it didn’t do me any harm.” He shrugged. “We stopped paying attention to the laws of physics ages ago, because there aren’t any rules to anything anymore. The rules of the effect are the only rules.

“But you can’t sustain a universe that way. The laws of physics don’t change because if they did, how could tomorrow possibly be the same as today? Once you can time travel and hop over to parallel reality and rip apart the fabric of space-time to make room for the space gods to come through and judge humanity, how can the universe survive that for long without coming apart at the seams? It can’t. It goes up like a gasoline-soaked rag wherever there’s a convenient flashpoint.”

The man in the armor had slumped down onto his side. Anthony had to lean in close to hear him. “We tried to fix it. The best of us and the worst of us both, we tried to repair the damage. But we couldn’t, not without unmaking ourselves. The whole universe was the effect now, you understand? If we repaired it, it would all just come apart again at the seams. It’s too late for us, but you…you can still fight it. I hope. Don’t let it happen here, Anthony. Don’t…”

He trailed off into silence. The rattling breaths slowly subsided to a chilling silence. Anthony took off the faceplate, but the helmet was empty. If there was any flesh inside the machine, it now existed only in Anthony’s memories.

Anthony removed the helmet. He covered the rest of the armor with trash bags–there’d be time enough to come back for it later. The helmet, though, that was where the interface was. He had to take a closer look–if it was real, if it worked, then he could replicate it. He could make good on all the promises that the man in armor had talked about, do all the things that man never did. He could change the world.

He walked back to his lab swiftly, his brain already racing with potential applications. Artificial limbs, deep sea exploration suits, construction, search and rescue…he could feel the ideas unfolding in his head, designs and breakthroughs etching themselves into his consciousness. He could imagine the finished product, gleaming red and…gold, perhaps? Yes, gold. It would be beautiful.

“Hold all my calls,” he barked out to his secretary as he walked past. He could feel an all-nighter coming on, and he didn’t want to be interrupted. The suit would be his most magnificent invention, capable of doing great things…or terrible, he soberly realized. In the wrong hands, it could be a devastating weapon. He’d have to keep it to himself, use it secretly until he was sure it wouldn’t be misused. By bad people.

“Of course, Mister Stark,” his secretary replied. But he wasn’t really listening.

THE END

I just recently managed to codify my theory about how pro wrestling is unique as an art form – not just Max Landis’ thingy about why pro wrestling is special, which is notable largely because it is one of the few times where Max Landis is not entirely insufferable, and because it (correctly) connects pro wrestling to performance art. But performance art still exists; pro wrestling is just a commercially successful version of it, and that is not unique.

What is unique about pro wrestling is this: it is the only creative endeavor where the audience affects the work in real time. A long time ago some smart aleck described pro wrestling as “a LARP where the wrestlers are playing athletes and the audience is playing the audience, and everybody’s in on it.” And that’s exactly true. Now, of course, pro wrestling is still a scripted affair and on a case-by-case basis the audience doesn’t usually change the outcome of a story as it happens – although this is something that can happen in retrospect, with the most obvious example being Batista being obviously scripted to be a triumphant returning hero at this year’s Royal Rumble and the crowd instantly turning on him because they had believed they were finally getting the Daniel Bryan push they had demanded – which eventually led to the “Boo-tista” movement, Batista turning into an arrogant heel (because it was the only way to get a crowd reaction they could use) and WWE eventually writing Bryan into the World title match as the fans demanded. But it’s more than just simply cheering for the guys you like and booing the guys you hate; the crowd is an integral part of wrestling now.

Consider, if you will, the Bray Wyatt entrance.

Bray Wyatt is a great character with a great hook, but booing him as a baddy doesn’t exactly work because he’s supposed to be creepy and scary; booing him would, in a way, reduce him, make him something less than the figure of awe he was supposed to be. This tied into his entrance: a slow, creepy walk in darkness, lit by his lantern, with Mark Crozer and the Rels playing in the background. The crowds at first tried to figure out how to properly express their appreciation for this character, because you couldn’t just boo him. An early attempt was slow, measured claps in time with the music, which worked reasonably well but still somehow lacked gravitas. At WrestleMania the company tried to amp up that atmosphere by having Crozer and the Rels perform live, which was certainly a glorious one-off but obviously not replicable on a regular basis.

At some point, though, fans gradually figured out that when their cellphones were on in the darkness during Bray Wyatt’s entrance, they kind of looked like fireflies, and fireflies are nothing if not thematically appropriate for a southern cult leader’s entrance, so they ran with it. And it worked absolutely perfectly – and WWE responded very smartly by rapidly moving to sell very cheap little Bray Wyatt lanterns at their events, so fans would have something to sway with, and so WWE could make a little side money off this phenomenon, and perhaps have light sources which might look a tad more ghostly and spooky on television.

Which led to what we now have every time Bray Wyatt comes out:

This is the thing: no other art form does this. None of them come even close. This is not to say that, say, makers of movies and television and books and comics and every other art form with a narrative bent do not interact with fans, or consider their desires, or even change course if they think they have made a mistake due to fan response. But no other art form engages with its audience at this rate or changes their story and presentation based on fan input in mid-course – not even most other forms of performance art, frankly (a field that can be shockingly static in its presentation and conservative in its refusal to deviate from original intent).

That’s why wrestling is unique, and only one of the reasons it is great.

Hi all,

Sorry about the long delay in posting. I’ve been kind of busy with my hobby of curling up under an electric blanket and sobbing at the endless cruel, frozen hell that is Minnesota winter and wondering whether this thing called “spring” is merely a delusion, something that I imagined during the fifteenth year of the endless cold in the same way that people trapped in sensory deprivation chambers start to hallucinate simply in order to keep their brain from shutting down altogether from apocalyptic despair. And that sort of thing takes up a lot of time. By way of apology (or possibly punishment) I’ve written a short fiction piece for you after the cut!

continue reading "First Time for Everything"

I should preface this story by explaining that my parents have always told me that I had a very vivid imagination as a child. They said I was always prone to flights of fancy and wild stories, even though I remember being a peculiarly practical child in my own way. Still, I’ve always figured they remembered things better than I did; so any time I had a memory that didn’t seem to make sense or to match up to the way the real world should work, I’ve just chalked it up to one of those “flights of fancy” and assumed it was my memories playing tricks on me. (You can imagine how vindicated I was when I finally saw the ‘Star Wars Holiday Special’…but I digress.)

continue reading "The Hole in the Wall: A Childhood Reminiscense"

I was talking with Ty Templeton earlier in the week and he explained to me that (while we were talking about gender roles in fiction) he had had real trouble coming up with a list of female protagonists who when introduced were not defined by an element of suffering or hardship. Every female romantic comedy protagonist ever, for example, is defined by their lack of a partner; that’s the entire point of romantic comedy. But this extends beyond just romcoms; female protagonists are almost always given a background of suffering or hardship which they must then overcome (as opposed to suffering or hardship within the story; that’s just dramatic conflict).

Ty explained that in previous conversations about this, he was able to identify only two female protagonists who didn’t enter the story defined by a hardship they would have to overcome as part of their narrative: Julia Child in Julie and Julia (her story is straightforward; she has a goal – to become a great cook – and she achieves it, and her past traumas suffered during the war and her inability to have a child are not relevant to her achievement) and Erin Brockovich (where Erin Brockovich may be poor/lower-class, but her narrative does not present that as something to overcome; her goal is achieve success in a class-action lawsuit and does so).

I gave it some thought afterwards and added two more: Baby in Dirty Dancing and Marge Gunderson in Fargo. But after that, I’m stuck. So what others are there? Surely there must be others!

I retweeted Andrew Wheeler’s rant about how sexism plays a role in people saying Wonder Woman is hard to write well (there’s more at his Twitter, it gets scathing real fast) because he was mostly right: there is often some misogyny involved when people say they hate Wonder Woman or think she is boring. It’s comics fandom, you have to assume there’s some soupçon of misogyny in the base more often than not.

But.

Wonder Woman is hard to write well, because there is no definitive Wonder Woman. I’ve written about this before, but think about it for a second. There’s a definitive Batman, now: he’s been arrived at over decades. There’s a definitive Superman, a definitive Spider-Man, and we’re only just starting to hit definitive Wolverine over the past few years and even then there have been mis-steps.1 Definitive Daredevil took, what, 180 issues until Frank Miller showed up? So it can take time. In Wonder Woman’s case it has taken over sixty years and counting.

Like: Who’s a “must” member of Wonder Woman’s supporting cast? Supporting casts are important: they define your character’s milieu (assuming they aren’t a lone wolf like Wolverine is). Superman has Lois and Perry and Jimmy; Batman has Alfred and Dick and Commissioner Gordon; Spidey has MJ and Robbie and Betty and Flash and Jolly Jonah. Who’s Wonder Woman’s supporting cast all-stars? Etta Candy? Only shows up occasionally and has no definitive role. Steve Trevor? Hasn’t been prominent for years, even decades. I-Ching? Please. And so on.

Alternatively, who are Wonder Woman’s most notorious villains? Look at this list of Wonder Woman “adversaries” from Wikipedia:

Angle Man, Ares, Baroness Paula Von Gunther, Badra, Bizarra, Blue Snowman, Captain Wonder, Cheetah, Children of Ares, Circe, Cyborgirl, Dark Angel, Decay, Devastation, Doctor Cyber, Doctor Poison, Doctor Psycho, Duke of Deception, Egg Fu, Eviless, Genocide, Giganta, Hades, Hypnota, Jinx, Mask, Mavis, Osira, Queen Clea, Queen of Fables, Shim’Tar, Silver Swan, Superwoman, Tezcatlipoca, Trinity, Veronica Cale, Villainy Inc., White Magician, Zara

So, to sum up: Cheetah, Circe, Ares and Hades? Maybe Dr. Psycho, but then again Dr. Psycho is a character better known for his stint in Villains United than for his classic Wonder Woman stories. Really, this is not the most inspiring list. Of all of those characters, I think Ares ends up being Diana’s archenemy by default mostly because he’s always been the most powerful, but there is no definitive Ares/Wonder Woman story like there are Batman/Joker or Superman/Luthor or Spidey/Doc Ock2 or even Wolverine/Sabretooth, for crissake.

But then again there are no definitive Wonder Woman stories, are there? There are plenty of good runs on the title. I mean, if you do a list of everybody who wrote more than two years’ worth of Wonder Woman comics, you get:

William Marston
Robert Kanigher
Gerry Conway
Martin Pasko
Dan Mishkin
George Perez
William Messner-Loebs
John Byrne
Greg Rucka
Gail Simone
Brian Azzarello

That’s a goddamn Murderer’s Row of comics writing talent right there – and I’m not going to do the “well William Marston only gets in because he invented the character, because really he was just a weird pervert” because those old Marston comics show a real understanding of the form.3 And then you go into all those great writers who didn’t have long runs on the title: Mike Sekowsky, Len Wein, Alan Heinberg, Phil Jimenez, Walt Simonson. Wonder Woman is a title that DC has always made sure had serious talent working on it. So where is the Wonder Woman equivalent of “Year One”> or “For The Man Who Has Everything” or “The Boy Who Collected Spider-Man”?

I should note I don’t think this is simply a failure of marketing, either, or of DC failing to properly promote groundbreaking stories. All of those great writers wrote decent Wonder Woman stories, and DC over the years has made valiant efforts to publicize them and the character generally. Despite a lot of attention and a lot of talent, we’ve never really found what makes Wonder Woman work, and for the most part the result is every time a new writer gets their hands on it they revamp whatever they like, be it turning Diana into a martial-artist spy without powers, the Avatar of Truth, an ambassador from a very very foreign country or the secret daughter of Zeus. This isn’t just a new spin on the character each time, either: Superman as capricious trickster in the Silver Age, Superman as TV reporter in the Bronze Age, Superman as humble, lovable family man in the Whatever-This-Is Age and Superman as Bloggerman in the New 52 are all still identifiably Superman: Clark Kent, who is also Kal-El from Krypton, last survivor of a dead race, and so on.

But if you took no-powers martial artist spy 1970s Wonder Woman, 1990s George Perez Wonder Woman and current-day daughter-of-Zeus Wonder Woman, and gave them different names, they’re barely the same character. Different powers, different origin stories, they’re really different people when you get down to it. There is no definitive Wonder Woman story because there is no definitive Wonder Woman, and that means every time a writer gets an idea about how to make Wonder Woman relevant they tear down whatever they want to get rid of, which is often something another writer spent time building up. Writing a Wonder Woman series is not unlike building a sandcastle, when you get right down to it, and about as stable.

This matters, because people seek out given comics because they’re looking for a particular reading experience more often than not (Batman: gritty noir; Spider-Man: adolescent angst; Wolverine: revenge drama; etc.). If you pick up a random Wonder Woman comic you have no idea what it’s going to be about, because everybody’s idea of Wonder Woman is different; there is no such standard as a “good Wonder Woman story” (as opposed to simply “a good story,” which is in part why Man of Steel was so divisive in comics fandom).

And realistically this is not going to change until a Wonder Woman movie comes out, because when we get a Wonder Woman movie, that will hard-define the character in a way that no comics event realistically ever will (much like Robert Downey Jr. has defined Tony Stark for the next few decades at least). Brian Azzarello’s current run on the character (what I have seen of it, because I don’t read DC comics any more) is good stuff and inventive, but not enough people are reading it for it to make a dent in comics fandom’s collective understanding. It’s going to take a movie, and the self-fulfilling prophecy of “well, nobody will go to see a Wonder Woman movie, so we’re not going to make one” is presently getting in the way.

1. Remember that Jeph Loeb run where Logan was one of a race of werewolf-things? What happened with that? It sucked, I remember that much. [↩]
2. Otto is Spider-Man’s definitive arch-enemy. Period. Green Goblin – no, not even close. [↩]
3. Granted, which Marston then used as his personal and weird masturbation aid, but that is neither here nor there. [↩]

The Matrix: Given that we perceive the world entirely through our senses, the ultimate nature of reality will always be subject to irreconcilable doubt.

The Matrix Reloaded: Why yes, the Wachowski Brothers would like large sums of money, thank you very much.

The Matrix Revolutions: If your agent is good enough, you can get a $110 million dollar sequel greenlit before anyone even sees the movie it’s following.

The Terminator: Even though it might feel like you’re an ordinary person powerless to affect the vast sweep of history, you can do more than you might think.

Apocalypse Now: It’s easy to lose your perspective on “sanity” when you get too far away from other people.

Cast Away: It’s easy to lost your perspective on “sanity” when you get too far away from other people.

Road to Perdition: You will never truly understand your father, and you will always miss him.

The Lion King: In a world with limited resources, it’s just better that a privileged class of rulers takes the majority of the food and leaves everyone else struggling over scraps, and trying to change this is evil.

Grave of the Fireflies: No matter how just your cause, when you go to war you will turn people into victims.

I, Robot: Racial prejudice is entirely justified, and all those people who think we can get along are just dupes blinded to the secret cabal who rules the world and plans to murder us all when the time is right!

The Dark Knight: Being a hero sometimes means sacrificing your own personal happiness.

Jurassic Park: Treat the “little people” nice, because they can make your life a living hell if you screw them over.

Resident Evil: Biological warfare is an ultimately suicidal pursuit.

Twilight: Dysfunctional, sociopathic stalkers are sexy because they’re really into you!

King Kong: Wild animals don’t make good pets, and are best appreciated in their natural habitat from a safe distance.

The Shining: It sucks when you’re a kid and parents get a new job that uproots you from your familiar environment.

Room 237: Postmodern film critique can lead you down some pretty fucking crazy rabbit holes, dude.

Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth 2150 AD: It would really have sucked if the Nazis had won World War II.

Stargate: No matter how hard it seems, you have to let go of the past or you might as well be dead.

The Wishmaster: A clear head and the ability to think on your feet are immensely valuable.

The Omen: As much as you love your children, they’re always going to be a living reminder of your mortality and that’s always going to be faintly unnerving.

Friday the 13th: Sometimes people will blame you for shit you didn’t even do, and they can’t be reasoned with.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Hedonism isn’t as bad as some people proclaim it to be, and only uptight prudes get upset about casual sex and transvestitism…and, um, murder…and…er…cannibalism.

Quarantine: Authority figures prefer to operate in secret primarily because they don’t like to be held accountable to the general public for their actions.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey: Risks are worth taking, because ultimately they (sentence to be continued next year)

So Amazon has announce Kindle Worlds, which is kind of sickly brilliant: it’s basically an online publishing house for fan-fiction, wherein royalties are paid to the owners of the IP and to the author of the fanfic. And the royalty to the author is, frankly, not bad – 20-35% of total revenue of digital sales of the work.

Of course, it’s not all candy and sunshine. If you look at the more detailed explanation, Amazon explains that it will own all rights to the work for the entire term of copyright, including (most importantly) reprint and adaptation rights. If the CW likes your Vampire Diaries story so much they want to convert it into an episode or two, then they will pay Amazon instead of you. If the CW doesn’t like your Vampire Diaries story but does like your moody vampire character named Steve, Amazon will grant them “a license to use your new elements and incorporate them into other works without further compensation to you.” This is, to say the least, kind of problematic. The simple explanation doesn’t even say if you’ll be credited as the creator of those elements, which to many fanfic authors I think would be one of the most important things.

And remember, this is for the entire term of copyright, which means for as long as money can be made off it (e.g. until long after you are dead) Amazon will control it entirely. So to call this a “bad contract” is kind of a major understatement, isn’t it?

Well, yes and no. We are after all talking about fan-fiction – something that is only quasi-legal at the best of times. Amazon has found a way for fanfic writers to get paid something for their work (and it’s a pretty reasonable something) and to be recognized for their craft, and if the terms are draconian, they are still a major improvement over what previously existed, which is “nothing, or maybe get sued for copyright infringement.” If Amazon includes some more reasonable terms for compensation with respect to profits from reprints and adaptations it will be approaching “good.” Frankly it’s already more than I expected what this would eventually look like when it happened.

Of course, no discussion of payment-for-fanfic is complete without the standard admonishment of “you should just write your own original stuff that you own and control.” But I understand the desire to write works set in an existing universe all too well. And I am forced to admit: if DC Comics suddenly became a “World Licensor” for this thing, and if Amazon extended its digital publishing to include comics… I would be, at the very least, significantly tempted to write certain properties as I saw fit. I am only human, after all.

22.4.2013

It was not the first time I had enjoyed an espresso with Metromonte (never “Mr. Metromonte,” and I doubt it was his first name – unless he had decided it would be his only name, but it seemed rude to inquire), but it was the first time I chose to inquire about his means of acquiring funds.

“I expect that has been occupying the back of your mind for some time now,” he said, smiling gently as he put down his cup. “After all, Evil Genius is not a job which is traditionally salaried.”

“I don’t mean to be gauche, my dear fellow. But, as someone who has always pursued more – traditional – employment, I can’t help but be curious -”

He waved his hand dismissively. “Not at all. It is rather fun to talk shop from time to time.” (As an accountant I could not honestly agree, but then again, I expect this is just one of the many differences between accountancy and Evil Geniusing.) “Some Evil Geniuses are self-funded through inheritances or terrorist organizations which revere them as living gods, of course – but most of us weren’t born into the position of messiah to a cult or with familial ties to the corpocracy.” A shrug. “For those of us who come from humbler stock, the general idea is that of maximizing the utility of vulnerability.”

“You mean like that person who tried to blow up Oregon last year?”

He waved over a club attendant and handed the man a couple of bills, gesturing at the humidor behind the bar. “No, that was just a garden variety lunatic. A sensible man would have tried to blow up something on the eastern seaboard. North Carolina, perhaps. I think that might have some potential. But I digress. The general idea behind maximizing the utility of vulnerability is simple. Something is vulnerable: make money off that vulnerability.”

“I must confess, I’m still not following.”

“If something is vulnerable, it usually follows that nobody particularly cares about the vulnerability. The shopping carts in your supermarket parking lot, for example. No one particularly cares if they’re stolen, correct? Because they have no particular value outside of transporting goods to and from the supermarket, and even then are only good over short distances. However, as a general rule anything with value is vulnerable in some way, and usually that vulnerability can be exploited.” He paused, looking over the selection the attendant had brought, and selected two Black Patch Reserves, handing me one. “The obvious example is a human being’s vulnerability, which can be exploited for personal gain through kidnapping and ransom. Inelegant, to say the least, but simple and direct.”

“I see,” I said, trying to sound knowledgeable, and also trying to politely find a way not to smoke the cigar he had just bought for me.

“But ransom is an exploit which in turn gives the kidnapper vulnerability. It is thus imperfect. Oh, would you get the next round, old chap? I rather fancy an Auchentoshan.” I naturally waved at the attendant, not wanting to seem ungenerous after his kind offer of the cigar, and the alert servant immediately went to the whiskey bar, having paid attention to our conversation without ever having had the appearance of it. Metromonte smiled in anticipation. He had extolled the virtue of the Auchentoshan to me the last time we spoke a couple of weeks prior.

“No, an elegant exploit of vulnerability allows one advantage – ideally, without your mark ever having known they were ill-used. Most con men performing long cons, for example, aim to have their mark totally unaware of the scheme even after their bilking.” The attendant arrived with the Auchentoshan in two squat glasses, and we both sipped. It was sweet with cinnamon undertones and much smoother than most single malts, and I enjoyed it immensely.

Metromonte examined his glass, admiring the golden tones of the booze within. “For example. I purchase two Black Patches, knowing full well that you do not smoke, but also knowing you will be embarrassed by the generous gesture and that, if I suggest you get us a round, you will do so. I also know you are not a Scotch drinker particularly, so you will not be aware that I have just suggested we partake of something that costs approximately five thousand dollars per bottle – but I also know it is a damned fine whisky, and that it is likely you will greatly enjoy it. I know you will simply put it on your monthly tab, so you may well not even notice the expense. And if you do – well, you had a fine whisky, and two glasses will not break you. Meanwhile, I have had a hundred-and-fifty glass of Scotch for the cost of two cigars, and while Black Patches are truly lovely smokes, they are only six dollars apiece. Since I will get to smoke at least one of them, I thus effectively profited twenty-five hundred percent on the six dollar cigar I purchased for you – assuming you don’t simply give it back to me, since you don’t smoke.” He shrugged. “And that is how it works. When I don’t explain it to you.”

I suspect my jaw was hanging, a combination of his amazing plot and the cost of the Auchentoshan. Metromonte laughed a bit. “Oh, not to worry. I’ll cover the cost of the drinks, my friend. As an Evil Genius, I do quite well, and it is always enjoyable to explain one’s process, isn’t it?” He sipped at his drink.

“I am terribly impressed, I have to admit. But it seems that this doesn’t quite scale so effectively. Am I missing something? I have always associated Evil Geniuses with loud, arrogant schemes involving massive destruction. Granted, often it was for economic benefit, but -”

Metromonte sighed. “Those damned trust-fund babies and their war-blimps give us all a bad reputation. Far more cost-effective to work in the shadows. Attention is costly. If you want an example… well, I would point to today. I had a very good day today, you see, and I think you might recognize why. You follow stocks, correct?”

I nodded. “Indeed I do, and today was a startling day. There was a false headline, apparently – the Associated Press generated something via social media claiming that there was to be an economic downturn, but it was a false headline that was the result of a hacked account, and…” I trailed off. “My word, that was you?”

“Naturally. And I think you can guess why, given our conversation.”

“Did you short stocks? The market lost about $150 billion, I read.” I paused. “Did you make a hundred and fifty billion dollars today?”

Metromonte laughed out loud. “Oh, my friend, of course not. And no, I didn’t short stocks. Shorting draws attention. However, I had a good idea of how quickly stocks would drop, and then how quickly the financial world would discover that the Tweet in question was untrue. I simply bought low, and sold high – the standard of any day trader. I spread it out over several aliases, of course, but between those aliases I profited about forty-seven million dollars.” A pause. “Really, once you have some money, it’s dreadfully easy to make more of it. The Evil Geniusing is practically a hobby these days, but I need to keep myself busy somehow, and I don’t want to do crochet. Besides, I rather fancy that the world would be better with me in charge of at least part of it, so it’s really sort of charity work.”

“You could go into finance?”

He shook his head. “I’m an Evil Genius by nature, and finance, despite what you may have heard, is not a genius-heavy occupation. Short-term thinkers and bullyboys looking for a quick score, and not much else. Really, you can almost sympathize with that fellow who threatened Wall Street with an orbital laser. Not my style, perhaps, but that man definitely knew how to pick his targets. I understand his Kickstarter campaign to fire the laser earned two million before they shut it down.”

“Mmm.” I said. The whisky really was very good.

A frequent request when I do my mock-AMA posts is “why I should write She-Hulk, superhero lawyer” or commentary on legal issues in superhero comics. I will admit I am not terribly interested in the topic, for two reasons:

1.) The law is my job and this is fun and do you really want your job getting mixed into your fun?

2.) It’s a lot less applicable than people think.

Let me explain #2 for a bit because I think it might serve to illuminate. My daily duties as a lawyer are, of course, law-related, but more important in many ways is how I conduct myself as a lawyer – my provincial law society mandates that as counsel I be courteous, honest, and strive to uphold the law. (Matt Murdock, in particular, often violates the second of those mandates.) In American jurisdictions these tenets still exist but generally they are, I am given to understand, much more lax; here they are not. (Some lawyers will threaten you with a complaint to the law society when you make any comment that could be even construed as an insult. These people are pains to work against, to say the least.)

This is to say that although the legal system in Canada and America is adversarial, my experience with it does not lead itself naturally to superhero comics, where by definition the stories have to be very adversarial. She-Hulk’s Enemy Lawyer, by comics convention, has to be ruthless and efficient and probably not very nice, whereas in my practice I routinely give and receive compliments to the other side on their conduct. Law, done well, is the opposite of dramatic. You seek to make your preferred conclusion mundane.

But there is another aspect yet to why I would not want to write a She-Hulk series, which is that the law is fundamentally kind of boring in many ways. Dan Slott’s She-Hulk wasn’t about lawyering, when you get down to it: it was an adventure series using a relentlessly wacky law firm as a setting. Which is fine, it was a good comic, and the reason it was a good comic is because She-Hulk wasn’t doing hours upon hours of reading discovery notes and making a list of evidentiary points for and against her client, or spending hours telling a client how to conduct themselves upon the stand, or writing letters to opposing counsel promising to employ tactics which are thinly veiled legal threats but only if you understand why they’re threats. Super-dramatic courtroom moments are the exception, not the rule – even in court they’re still the exception. Court is frequently very boring to non-involved parties.

Practicing law, if you are doing it properly, is about paying attention to tiny details and assembling your client’s narrative in the best possible light for a judge (or other decision-maker) to assess: in short, it is leaving the actual climax of the story (the decision) to a third party. Which is how the system works, but that’s directly not what you want out of a good comic book adventure story: you want a story where She-Hulk makes her case so staggeringly obviously that holy crap, how could ANYBODY disagree with that? Which isn’t really about law, you see, and more to the point it should usually offer She-Hulk more opportunity to punch things, which is what we all want to read anyway.

So that’s why it’s not gonna happen. When I want to write comics, I want to write holy shit comics. Law is not about holy shit most of the time. Quite the reverse.

Have been reading a lot of reviews of Dead Space 3 lately, and although I am not terribly concerned about it – mostly because it is not on Steam, and these days if it’s not on Steam I’m not gonna bother buying a game, frankly – but there are a whole lot of people who are apparently really pissed that the franchise is no longer really a horror story but is morphing into an action series. It’s understandable to be peeved, because if you like something when it is one thing, you might want more of that one thing than of another thing. But in the case of Dead Space‘s narrative progression, there is no choice: so long as you want the story to continue, then the horror aspect of it has to eventually end.

Consider: the first installment of most horror franchises is all about fear of the unknown (which, whether said unknowingness is derived from shock or suspense, is the most effective type of fear in a dramatic sense). In Alien, for example, the fear is generated by the characters genuinely having no idea of what they have found re: the crashed spaceship and the aliens therein, and then having no idea of the capabilities of the alien itself. In Dead Space, the characters are ignorant of everything at the start of the game and have to gradually learn what the monsters are, why they kill people and consume corpses, what happened on the ship, et cetera, and what is “known” to the player is only known because of genre osmosis (spaceships have artificial gravity, asteroids can fuck up your spaceship, and so on). In fact Dead Space neatly inverts several tropes to play against the player’s “knowledge” early on – for example, shooting the space zombie monsters in the head actually does nothing (you have to shoot off their limbs instead), which makes a player’s first encounter with the uglies more tense when the space zombies aren’t behaving as space zombies ought to behave according to the rules they already know. But those rules are arbitrary, and Dead Space gets that, which is why it works as a horror narrative. Often the scariest moments in the game are those times when one of your allies’ radios clicks on and shocks the hell out of you because you are primed to think “monster jumping out” whenever you hear something you weren’t expecting.

But when we progress to the second installment of a horror franchise? If your protagonist from the first installment has survived (and due to the inherent nature of sequelitis, they probably have done) you can’t rely on lack of knowledge to provide horror, not entirely, because now both your audience and your protagonist know stuff about the monsters. The answer to continue to create horror, then, is generally a combination of two things: firstly, add some more stuff the protagonist/audience didn’t get a chance to learn the first time out and use that to create fear of the remaining unknown, and secondly take what is already known and recontextualize it in a manner that presents new challenges and threats – fear of the known. In Aliens, we find out that the Aliens are basically an insect race and that they aren’t simply mindless killing machines because they can organize ambushes and evade traps (fear of the unknown) and we also get to find out what happens when there is a lot more than one Alien to deal with, even if you have lots of guns (fear of the known). In Dead Space 2 we find out what the space zombies can escalate into (it is bad) and that there are more varieties, including some which are just not conventionally kill-able like all the rest (fear of the unknown) and we also get to fight the space zombies in new locales, and also there is that bit where you have to stick the needle into your own eye (fear of the known). And this blend usually-but-not-always works.

However, by the time you get to the third installment of your horror franchise, you are pretty much out of “unknown” unless you just start making shit up that might technically work within the narrative from a logistical standpoint but which isn’t exactly aligned with everything you’ve done so far. (Some people accuse Lost of having done this, and although it is not a horror show per se, they had kind of a point.) Given that the fans of your story will generally resent the out-of-left-field “unknown,” all that leaves you with is fear of the known – and at this point your protagonist has suffered so much in the first two installments that they’re not going to be credibly scared of any of it any more. (Not a horror example, but consider how John McClane changes in the Die Hard movies – in the first couple, he frequently desperately prays that some plan of his will work and that he won’t die, and then as the third and fourth progress he is increasingly blase about the insane things he is doing, because his fear has died.) Fear of the known can usually be planned for and dealt with, and when one has to improvise, one knows what will and won’t work within reasonable limits. (The obvious exception here is Cthulhu-style horror where knowledge of the enemy is either actively dangerous to have or completely meaningless because the enemy is too powerful for it to matter, but as a general rule, protagonists in that milieu don’t last past one story for reasons which are fairly obvious.)

In other words, the difference between a horror movie and an action movie is, mostly, the protagonist’s degree of knowledge. Which means as any horror narrative continues and develops, it by necessity has to gradually drift towards being an action movie (or something else, but action is the easiest progression because the two genres are so similar and both strive to hit the same adrenalin-producing nerve in the viewer), simply because the protagonist will learn more and more – you can see this even in many regular horror movies within the three-act structure where the hero, in the third act, finally confronts the baddie. That progression is practically a staple of slasher flicks, and so slasher flick franchises generally invert the formula and remain horror films by having new protagonists in each installment while keeping the same baddie around. Of course, then you run into the problem with that formula, which is that each iteration will feel more and more repetitive until you decide to put Jason in space because what the hell else is left to do?

Got an email yesterday, basically asking: in light of the recent ending to the Wheel of Time series and Robert Jordan’s mammoth experiment in worldbuilding that was that series, did I create the world for Al’Rashad in advance or write it as I go, and do I have a preference – both for that work and generally when I write? The answer is “a bit of both.”

You will hear all sorts of stuff from many, many people about how their characters “surprise them” and how they interact with the world. And let me be clear: I’ve got nothing against the idea of writing a character consistently. That’s just basic sense. But writing is not like DMing a roleplaying game: you determine what your characters do. If something is out of character, well, change the character. You’re the writer, you’re allowed to do that – I am getting a bit off-topic here and it is partially the fault of my memories of this past NaNoWriMo – or, rather, other people’s NaNoWriMo – still not having entirely faded. But the roleplaying game thing is actually fairly apt, because writing a story isn’t like writing an RPG. You only get to peek at the faintest corners of the larger world, unless you want to do, like, a bonus Almanac Of The Universe Of Your Story or something on the side. (Which some people do. Tolkien certainly did. You couldn’t stop Tolkien from writing about the obscure side histories of his world. But Tolkien also had the luxury of more or less inventing a genre, which you will probably not be doing.)

The bottom line is that, if you are writing a story, you probably aren’t writing a travelogue or a guidebook, and thus details get left out. Go back and look at yesterday’s comic page. Alric mentions six countries there that haven’t been mentioned yet in the story. It is entirely possible1 that you will never know anything else about them ever again in the course of the story. They are little more than window dressing at this point. Conversely, however… you know a lot more about the Free Kingdom of Gundring and the Rashadi Caliphate, if you’ve been following the story.

Gundring, for example. You know that Gundring’s government is, effectively, a sort of broad combination of an Althing/parliament and a clan-based monarchy; you know that the Gundring use gunpowder (and you’ve probably noticed that the Rashadi don’t, and suspect that there are reasons for that) and place particular importance on engraving runes into anything they think is important. You know that they’re probably undergoing something of an Enlightenment at present. You know they’re probably not too keen on slavery. All of this informs Alric’s character, and pointedly so because he is very much the primary viewpoint character for the story, so, yes, he comes from the society most analagous to yours.2 The Rashadi? Well, you know they *do* have slavery, but there are deep divisions within their society about it. You know that that society is also tribally based, and likely much more cosmopolitan than the Gundring are – but survives basically on a system of mutual distrust. You know it’s a fairly brutal, dog-eat-dog social structure, and more overtly religious than the Gundring are by far. And you know their architecture is elaborate, even fantastical – which probably says quite a bit about how historically powerful they’ve been. And all of this informs the character of Kahal (who by appearances isn’t even of traditional Rashadi descent like Rayana or Fezay – were this comic in colour, his skin tone would be much darker than theirs – and that tells you something, both about him and about them) and the other Rashadi characters.

The point I am trying to make about worldbuilding is this: you can always bullshit when you need to, and nobody will ever know. If somebody asks me something about some aspect of Pizarri culture I will cheerfully make it up on the spot if need be, and HEY PRESTO it’s canon until I decide otherwise. But your world is an onion. You don’t care about the outer layers – that’s dead skin. You care about the core, which is your characters, and what immediately surrounds them. That’s what you need to know in advance, what you need to build. Everything else is a luxury, and quite often a waste of time.

1. I am avoiding spoilers here [↩]
2. Assuming you don’t live in Somalia. [↩]

The crowd was loud, and in orcish fashion, it was constantly teetering on the edge of a riot. Every orc jostled another orc in the tight quarters of the rocky defile, and every orc so jostled shoved and pushed right back. Even Dorral did his share of pushing and shoving; any orc who didn’t push got pushed, and Dorral knew that it wasn’t a good idea to be the only orc who got pushed and didn’t push back. His blood simmered with adrenalin, and he hoped that this “Truthspeaker” that Korb talked about in such glowing terms would come before the first fight broke out. Korb said that he was a stirring speaker, but this crowd was already stirred more than enough.

The crowd had just started to get rowdy enough to make Dorral start feeling around with his feet for a good-sized rock, when suddenly the shoving stopped and the roar grew to deafening proportions. Every head turned to face the lumpy boulder that acted as a makeshift podium for occasions like this. Fists rose in the air, and cries of “Truthspeaker!” echoed off the walls of the defile again and again. The group of sixty or seventy orcs sounded like five hundred as the Truthspeaker mounted the podium.

He didn’t look like much, to Dorral’s eyes. Dorral had never been the biggest or the strongest orc; his family relied on numbers as much as strength or skill to keep the bandits away. But this Truthspeaker looked like he could barely fend off a goblin raider. From the way Korb had described him, Dorral had imagined some sort of massive, broad-shouldered war chiftain who could snap the neck of a troll with one meaty fist. Yet the crowd chanted his name instead of bouncing rocks off his skull. It made Dorral nervous. He felt like the other orcs, the ones who had seen the Truthspeaker talk yesterday, knew something he didn’t.

The Truthspeaker stood on the podium for a long moment as the chants grew louder and louder, before finally raising his hands in the air. The chant stopped so quickly that Dorral’s ears rang with the silence of it. Then, after a pause that felt like an eternity of tension, the Truthspeaker finally began to speak.

“We are all the children of the One God!” he shouted. His voice boomed down the narrow valley, rolling like a thundercloud gathering strength. “Long before the First Age, before the race of Man awoke, our ancestors strode the world in glory!” The cheers of the crowd punctuated each sentence like an exclamation. “And we stood high in the favor of the One God. We stood as his chosen people. Do you remember it now, the name we once answered to?”

Dorral knew, but something in his heart made him still his tongue. He had no great wish for this Truthspeaker to notice him. He hadn’t felt a shove or a push since the Truthspeaker had began to talk, and the lack of it felt like the silence before a storm. He let Korb shout the word that echoed inside his head. “Elves!”

“Elves!” The Truthspeaker’s words sounded like honey, sickly sweet and dripping, but Dorral could hear the sting of bees behind them. “We have heard of elves. How could we not? They were once our brothers, our sisters. We know the legends of their boundless compassion, their sage wisdom, their bottomless love. We have all heard of the elves.” His voice trailed almost to silence, so soft that Dorral strained even to catch their echoes. “But who here has met an elf?”

The crowd erupted into guttural laughter. Dorral laughed too, at the thought of an elven rider trotting through knee-deep mud in the arse-end of the world to visit them. He’d heard of them, of course; there were always stories of raiding parties that had been driven off by elves, or elven sorties down past the border to punish over-bold raiders. But no elf would dare to venture this far south. Even if one found the courage, they had nothing the elves would want.

“Of course not!” the Truthspeaker shouted, and now the bees were stinging in earnest. “Their boundless compassion faded like the morning mist on the day the sun turned its eye from our features! Their bloodless features grew paler yet to behold our darkened skin! Their refined and delicate stomachs grew sick at our newfound hunger for meat! Our brothers…our sisters…our kinfolk! They saw our transformation, and the elves, with all their sage wisdom…they deemed it ‘corruption’! They deemed it ‘defilement’! Their bottomless love turned to scorn in he span of a single heartbeat!” His voice went from an angry shout to a calm, matter-of-fact tone. “Elvish fathers abandoned orcish sons, elvish mothers discarded orcish daughters. Corrupted and defiled we may be, but we can hold our heads higher than that.”

Dorral almost laughed again–he’d seen his mother abandon two children on the rocks rather than waste food nursing a sickly infant back to heatlh–but something told him to take a look around first. He glanced left, then right, and saw nothing but rapt and spellbound stares. The orcs in the crowd no longer saw a skinny little runt who could barely fight a goblin. They saw an ancient lineage, tracing back to the glory and majesty at the dawn of time itself. A proud heritage cruelly mistreated and neglected by their proud and arrogant cousins. The laughter died in Dorral’s throat as he realized that if it escaped his lips, the crowd would tear him limb from limb.

“And such was the shame of the elves at our imperfections that they punished us for their sins!” The Truthspeaker was in full flow now, his voice painting a picture that the crowd stepped into gratefully. “Did their elders and sages help us? Did they cure us? Did they give us even the hollow gift of pity, a place at the foot of their table?”

“NO!” The crowd shouted with a single voice. Dorral was grateful that nobody could hear him; his voice seemed to have died of fright.

“No!” the Truthspeaker responded. “They drove us from their shining cities! They expunged us from the land of our birthright! They drove us from their sight, lest the eyes of the elves be blighted with even a single reminder of their secret shame!” The crowd howled in anger; if even a single elf had found himself in the valley at that moment, a thousand deaths would not have been enough for him.

“But there are eyes other than the elves,” the Truthspeaker whispered, his voice somehow carrying over the din. “Our elvish kin have banished us from their sight, the eye of the sun now sears our skin…but there is an eye that watches us still. An eye that never blinks. The eye of one that has never forgotten his children, that has never wavered in his devotion to us…even as the elves and their lackeys, the dwarves and the men, tried their best to destroy him for it! But though they weakened him greatly, they could not destroy him. His burning eye has waited for ages to pass, for the elves to grow complacent and forgetful. And now, they have grown soft and decadent, lazing in their gilded towers, resting on their hoarded treasure that is ours by right…while we have become many! We have become strong! We have become mighty!”

The crowd’s roar was a palpable thing now, shaking Dorral like an earthquake. “Now, my friends, my brothers…now is the time for us to take back what is ours! Ours by right!”

“Ours by right!” the crowd cried back.

“Ours by birth!”

“Ours by birth!” the crowd cried back.

“Ours by blood!”

“Blood! Blood! Blood!”

“Now is the time, my brothers. The Burning Eye has opened at last…and his light will lead us from this cursed place to the shining heights of glory once again!” The Truthspeaker held both his hands high over his head, and between his cupped hands, Dorral could see a shimmer like a haze of heat over the mud flats on a summer day. It was faint, almost incorporeal, but Dorral knew it for what it was. A lidless, burning eye. Dorral felt like it pinned him to the spot. It stared at him and him alone, like it knew what he was thinking. Perhaps it did.

Dorral returned home that night and cleaned his sword, ignoring the questions of his family. He had never been much good with it, but he felt certain that he was about to get far too much practice.

Almighty Kfish: Any thoughts on the cancellation of Hellblazer?

I, personally, am looking forward to the PG-rated adventures of John Constantine! I cannot wait for John Constantine to start talking like a mid-90s Pete Wisdom and call baddies “ruddy plonkers.” Also, when he defeats the Devil with the power of friendship, and then he and Superman go out for waffles and talk about their women problems. “How do I tell Wonder Woman – who I am dating – that I do not get the point of her invisible plane?” “Oh, Supes, you plonker, you don’t know nuffink, cos my lady Zatanna, she wears these fishnets all the time and then when it is time for romance, she takes them off!” Seriously, who will not love this?

Andrew Miller: Or – for something off the wall – a discussion of why Western pop-culture audiences find tropes taken from medieval Japan – ninjas, samurai, etc. – appealing, while tropes taken from other times and places – India before the English, sub-saharan Africa, the Aztec Empire, etc. – find so little traction. I have a pet theory it has to do with Japan being the one place where European imperialism was felt the least, but I wonder what your thoughts are.

Well, Western fascination with Japanese culture started out as a fad in the 1880s and never really stopped. That was when samurai first became popular with western audiences, and ninja followed shortly thereafter. This is mostly for two reasons. Firstly, samurai and ninja translate fairly simply to Western audiences because you can – inaccurately – just make them into knights and spies, both of whom were popular fiction tropes even back when Japanese concepts were first introduced. Secondly, your imperialism theory is fairly accurate – because Japan was never really conquered in the colonial era it remained exotic, whereas, say, the Mughal Empire were just the guys the British beat up and took India from, and it’s hard for imperialist cultures to really get impressed with the guys who they defeated. That was really why Japan became such a fad in the first place.

Miles: My group of friends have really enjoyed Through the Ages, if you have time for a Civilization-type game.

I don’t mind Through the Ages, but it’s not a “Civilization-type game.” Through The Ages is a tech-tree game, which is not quite the same thing. A proper civ-game has exploration, military conflict, a reasonably complex economic engine and a tech-tree. Through The Ages has a great tech-tree mechanic which is ninety percent of the game, then a very simple economic engine to power the tech-tree, dumbs down military conflict to “make sure you have roughly the same number of troops as everyone else, because the game favours the defender overwhelmingly” and has no exploration whatsoever. Oh, and of course it’s just yet another Euro that you win only by getting victory points, and although I don’t get offended by VP-racing like some gamers do, a proper civ-game should offer up more options for victory than “get the most VP.”

I much prefer the new Sid Meier’s Civilization boardgame (the one by Fantasy Flight) for when I want a proper civ-game experience. It is, to be sure, a bit clunky in terms of its rules because it tries to adapt virtually every aspect of the computer game series into a boardgame, but: it has a good tech-tree, exploration and board control is absolutely vital to winning, the military race matters a great deal, and it has multiple victory conditions. Also, it does the “each civilization gets its own distinct special powers” thing, which I am always a sucker for because I love variable player powers in games – they offer up so much additional headspace. So that is usually my civ-game of choice. (If I want something quicker and lighter than SMC for a civ-game, I will generally go for Olympos.)

Thornae: I’d like to add another vote for the webcomics thing – what are your current weekly reads?

Nothing earth-shattering – I tend to read webcomics in chunks-at-a-time rather than weekly. XKCD, Penny Arcade, Girls with Slingshots, and Chainsawsuit (which is the funniest comic Kris Straub has ever done, by far) are about the only comics I read as-they-come. No, wait – I admit that I sort of hate-read Menage a 3 regularly. I love Gisele’s art – it’s a near-perfect marriage of classic Dan DeCarlo-style blending-of-good-girl-art-with-Archie-storytelling and anime tropes – but the fact that every single character in the comic is a terrible person and the strip doesn’t seem to get that just blows me away. I mean, I admire the strip’s dedication to normalization of the broad range of human sexuality, but Gary is a pathetic, unlikeable wimp, Didi is apparently completely amoral, Zii is incredibly irritating, Yuki is basically the worst person in the entire world, and if Dillon were straight his neverending gay crush on Gary would be even creepier and predatory than it already is, and believe me I could go on at length. But the art is lovely, so I keep reading it and hating myself for it – and it’s not because it’s porn, because it’s not even very good at being porn because the decision to avoid showing genitals is distracting.

(Also, if the sound of someone blowing a guy is “mf mf mf mf” then – I dunno. All I am saying is: I have received my share of oral sex, and I would not say that “mf mf mf” is onomatopoeiacally correct.)

Al: Ever had to give a best man speech? Any good stories about it, or advice to give?

I’ve never been a best man, but I have made speeches at a few weddings as a friend of the couple, and it’s not really a forum to show off how dazzling and brilliant you are as a speaker, frankly. It’s not about you, it’s about them. Think of two or three good anecdotes in the neighborhood of “embarrassing, but not mortifying, just funny/cute” (you can invent details out of whole cloth if they make the story better, because nobody will challenge you on this), chain them together, say that you’re happy to see them together and explain why, raise your glass, done.

Last week I had a curious dream about me reading a crossover between Quantum Leap and Doctor Who.  This would not be particularly stunning except that I’m like the one contributor to this blog who cannot stand Doctor Who.1  Indeed, what made the dream amazingly vivid is that I was constantly thinking “Why am I reading this?  I don’t even like Doctor Who.”  Also, I have checked and I’m pretty sure the first Doctor Who was in the dream, which is disturbing because I wouldn’t have known what that guy looked like before he appeared to me in a vision.  This is like one of those creepy stories about somebody visiting an ancient castle for the first time and remembering a past life spent there, except that my past life was apparently a colossal dork.

After I woke up and thought about this some more, I realized that a) Quantum Leap/Doctor Who certainly makes sense and b) it would be cruel of me to withhold this concept from the universe just because it doesn’t turn my crank.  (I am choosing to pretend no one has ever thought of this before, despite the fact that Doctor Who has been crossed over with literally everything I have ever heard of.)  Maybe somebody else can get some mileage out of it.  So for those of you looking for a plot for the next great fanfiction, this one is on me!  (Adding the buttsex is up to you, though.)

continue reading "I’m meeting you halfway, you stupid hippies!"

1. Hopefully Seavey is being plagued by dreams about James Nguyen meeting Tommy Wiseau, to balance things out. [↩]