Doki Doki Literature Club Shows Not Everything Should Be Meta

Beware spoilers for Doki Doki Literature Club, and UnderTale

A bunch of friends recently sat me down to play Doki Doki Literature Club. If you have no idea what a Doki Doki Literature club is, it's an easy way to spend four hours reinforcing to yourself how Visual Novels aren't really for you.

In all seriousness, Doki Doki Literature Club is a free Visual Novel available through Steam, and it's what all your favourite YouTubers are probably over-reacting to right now if they aren't losing their collective minds playing Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy. It's quirky, it's colourful, and if you want my honest opinion, sniffing its own farts.

I was on New Grounds back in the day, I played those flash dating sims, and all the Visual Novels I end up getting recommended play out pretty similarly. You pick whichever girl you think is worth romancing based on still, lifeless images and then make a series of decisions that reinforce your dedication to an anime girl JPEG. You usually play as lacking personality protagonist A, who you're supposed to project yourself onto so he has as few defining traits as possible. His inner monologue is your window into the world as he describes the things that weren't in the media team's budget to display on screen.

Safe to say, this isn't a medium for me.

I play enough JRPGs though, and a lot of them incorporate the story-telling mechanics of a visual novel. Maybe it's anchoring bias, but when the JPEGS and Textboxes end, there's still some part of my brain nagging at me that there should be some form of interaction here. I guess my issue with VNs is that they present me with the carboat dilemma; Sure, a carboat is cool, but even if you could afford one, you'd probably want them separate anyway. on account of how easy it is to just park your car and then rent a boat. Probably cheaper too. And the car boat will inevitably be both a subpar boat and car.

Let's hope that there's never a Steam and Amazon Kindle merger.

To Doki Doki Literature club's credit, there are these poetry writing sections that actually do reveal a little about the girls and their characters. It's not much, but it's something to stimulate the brain after some mindless clicking.

So after you decide who is best girl and you trigger all the flags, you end up exploring that character's route.

At the midpoint is where the game actually pissed me off a little, as you're forced to watch the suicide of one of the characters after sitting through flavour-text written by someone who only has a mild idea of what clinical depression looks like.

After that, we reach a microcosm of the current indie game zeitgeist. The breaking of the fourth wall. The moment the Visual Novel becomes self-aware, and the characters within reveal that they know they're abstractions within a computer program.

I commend your efforts, DDLC, you tried very hard. And I know I shouldn't be mad at you. You're a free product. You're everything wonderful about the indie scene. Dan Salvato, you're doing good work man. Keep it up.

But you have to earn your wink at the camera.

I'll tell you straight that Undertale is great, but there's something that grated me about being punished for playing an RPG like an RPG. However, Undertale at least had something to say. When you confront Sans at the end and he tells you how LVL actually stands for "Level of Violence" and EXP stands for "Execution Points", it's a telling moment. When you get to the end of the game, and Flowee let's you reset the events of the story, you, the player, become the true antagonist of the game. It's a clever and fun subversion.

And upon completing DDLC, the lack of this statement, the lack of this punch at the end, is what got me. Maybe it's how I didn't connect or care for any of the characters. Maybe it's just the obnoxious way the VN tried being 3spooky5me using only the fact that it was a visual novel aware that it was a visual novel. Maybe it was the surreal way being hyper-aware that I wasn't interacting with characters but pieces of data on a hard drive yanked any punch out of the character deaths or Monika's manipulation. Sayori manages to be the only interesting one, by being the deleted data trying it's hardest to avoid being wiped. There are some cool touches, like how their character files are actually deleted from the source folder. The blue screen gag, I will say, was at least the one that got me. I appreciated that. Exploiting my fears about Windows 10 doing what Windows 10 does, you earned the spooks there.

I just felt it all a little redundant afterwards.

There's an alternate ending where if you view all the optional scenes via either save-scumming or fresh installs, Sayori does thank you for trying to make each of the girls happy. Perhaps if this was the ending I ended up viewing, I might not have found the experience so obnoxious. But as is... DDLC didn't leave a good taste in my mouth.

There's something a little off-putting about these digital girls all being head over heels in love with you. There's something off-putting about investing time into getting to know these characters, only to have the experience intruded upon by the horror elements and self-congratulatory spooks. There's something off-putting about putting garbage text on screen and expecting me to do anything other than roll my eyes, because it's soooooo clever that you managed to fake the script being corrupted, Dan. And Christ, that music loop is repetitive as all hell.

Do I recommend Doki Doki Literature Club? If you're into the whole too-meta-for-it's-own-good VN thing, yes. It's four hours worth of free content, and even more if you do a couple fresh installs for multiple playthroughs.

If you aren't into Visual Novels, if you aren't into things obnoxiously breaking the fourth wall, if you kind of just wanted a fun slice of life Dating Sim, if you have any taste in psychological horrors at all... Maybe give it a pass. After all, Newgrounds hasn't gone anywhere and I'm sure you'll find something infinitely more satisfying there.

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What Steven Universe Means To Me

Steven Universe didn't come into my life at a particularly difficult point. I wasn't looking for a new show to watch, I wasn't in a particularly difficult state of mind, I wasn't in one of the many dark periods of my life. In fact, I hadn't heard much about the show until I saw JelloApocalypse's video. While that entertained me, I was still resistant. The eventual tipping point was when my sister showed me the clip of Garnet singing Stronger Than You, and I made up my mind to give Steven Universe a shot.

Fast forward a couple of months later.

I was sitting in an exam I was underprepared for, supremely stressed for, and sleep deprived for. It was open book, so I had all my notes scattered on the desk in front of me, along with the question paper, but then I had a panic attack. Being who I am and dealing with the problems I deal with, this cascaded and triggered a couple of lingering suicidal thoughts, and it was a blow to my self-esteem that would usually take a long time to recover from. I was on the verge of sobbing in the exam venue and I can't tell you how awful and embarrassing that felt.

But something magical happened. I closed my eyes, still struggling to breath a little, and in my head I started singing Here Comes A Thought.

Here comes a thought that might alarm me
What someone said, and how it harmed me
Something I did that failed to be charming
Things that I said are suddenly swarming
And oh, I'm losing sight
I'm losing touch
All these little things seem to matter so much
That they confuse me
That I might lose me

And things started to be a little more okay. I knew the situation I was in was at the very least partly my fault. I hadn't prepared enough, I didn't sleep enough, I didn't manage my time well enough. The heartache I felt for letting myself down was sincerely unbearable. Nevertheless, I persisted.

Take a moment, remind myself 
To take a moment to find myself
Take a moment to ask myself
If this is how I fall apart

This part of the song never fails to well up a little dread in me. Being asked to be introspective and assess the damage, to take a moment and instead of dissociating like I usually would, to find me in all this mess. To ask myself, if this is this how I fall apart?

But it's not, but it's not, but it's not, but it's not, but it's not
It's okay, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay
I've got nothing, got nothing, got nothing, got nothing to fear
I'm here, I'm here, I'm here.

And it was just a thought, just a thought, just a thought, just a thought
It's okay, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay, it's okay
We can watch, we can watch, we can watch, we can watch them go by
From here, from here, from here.

This is not how I fall apart. I am not lost in all the chaos, I am right here. I might have done something less than charming, and all these little worries might swarm and try overwhelm me. But I have nothing to fear.

The suicidal thoughts? That's all they are. Just thoughts. And thoughts pass. They might come back, but they pass. They might pass like a kidney stone, but they will pass.

The repetition of the words "It's okay" is what makes this part of the chorus have such a punch. Whenever you're comforting someone else, you have to try convince them that no matter the issue, it's not the end of the world. No matter how large their mistake, it is going to be okay. And in my mind, singing this to myself, and saying this to myself, makes the difference between a long period of dissociation and apathy, and a recovery.

And this little coping mechanism, this tool on my belt for when life does eventually get hard, came from a show about talking space rocks who solve most of their problems in song.

Steven Universe is a show that means the world to me. It has characters I connected with, songs that struck a chord with me, stories that made me laugh and cry, and little details that fill me with glee. My favourite microcosm of the show comes from Season 1 Episode 2, where Steven and his dad are bringing the light canon to the gems. Steven puts on his dad's CD, and while Greg feels sort of like his work wasn't all that great or important, Steven treats his dad's music like it's the most amazing thing in the world. A real and sincere reverence for something Greg has done, which might be small and insignificant to the world at large.

As a creator, you always hope that the things you make end up impacting someone. That someone appreciates what you've done and the time, effort and heart you put into it. No one sees the entirety of the race you ran, most just get to see you when you finish, and to them, all that matters was whether you did well or not. To see sincere appreciation for your every centimeter of ground you traversed, even if the result was mediocre, is a powerful thing.

As an LGBTQ person, being openly bisexual can often feel like a really big and important part of you gets treated as a thing to ignore or hide or dart around. It's not often that you get to see queer people be unashamedly queer and be genuinely unphased by people who would see us undone.

Seeing Garnet be an unashamed fusion in a world where we're told to stop holding our partner's hands in public, in a world where even the slightest representation gets labeled SJW propaganda, where life as a queer person can just be really fucking hard... Seeing Garnet being so happy and unashamed, even as Peridot tells her how she doesn't need to be a fusion in public, or always be a fusion, is everything.

The cast of Steven Universe is predominantly female. While gems don't really have sex, most are female presenting. Their feminine coding and use of she/her/her pronouns imply female gendering. And that's huge. My favourite little detail is how Stevonnie is always referred to as they/them/their.

I've never been much good at describing how or why Steven Universe ended up being so impactful. The show has its shortcomings and trying to explain to people why it's so worth persisting through is genuinely tough. Segments other people find intolerable I still get enjoyment out of.

How do you explain to someone that something is just worth their time? How do you ask someone to take on faith that this silly little kids show is a mature exploration of character and gender? How do you tell someone that this cartoon explores war crimes and the complexity of how even the most beloved and genuine people can still do hurtful and horrible things? How do I say that I cried with Steven when he heard his mom's voice for the first time? How do I explain the way the show tackles someone escaping the cycle of an abusive relationship? Or how one can love a person who never reciprocated that love long after they're gone?

Steven Universe means a lot to me. Steven Universe means a lot. I fell in love with the show and it taught me a bit about how to love myself. It gave me a way to cope with some of my shortcomings, and hammered into me that my mistakes are fleeting and that I should forgive myself when I mess up. It put a couple songs in my heart and I'm always a little more chipper for it.

Steven Universe means a lot to me. And I might have ended up a less functional person had I not watched it. Maybe it won't mean that much to you, but I do hope you get to watch it, and I hope it instills at least some small bit of the warmth it instilled in me.

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Let's have a chat about game diffiulty

I’ve been ruminating on game difficulty some. Whilst I don’t want to go into the Cuphead debacle, I’ll concede that some valid questions were asked and we owe it to ourselves as consumers and to the game industry to try and come to a consensus, or at least to figure out what the mainstream and niche answers are.

But I’ve heard the sentiment echoed here and there that difficulty isn’t accessible, and I don’t think that’s true by default. Challenge is one of the core aesthetics of play, and difficult challenges often yield more rewards, especially if they’re fun to complete. Nothing feels better than overcoming a tough obstacle, and knowing that you only did it because you became better as a player.

But I do think that Cuphead’s difficulty does raise an important question that I think we definitely should be asking;

How do we make difficult games accessible?

Here’s a quick refresher; Arcade games were hard. They had to be in order to earn your coins. That difficulty ended up being translated to home consoles in their first iterations, and a whole generation of gamers grew up with tough games just being the norm.

Today, tough as nails games are niche. You still get the odd stand-out here and there, but games are easier, and as a result, more accessible than ever. And unless you’re playing on original hardware, even older tough as nails games are much more accessible thanks to save-states via emulators, although there’s certainly an elitist mentality in the gaming community that frowns upon the usage thereof.

But here’s my main point; Tough games can be accessible, they just have to be worth the challenge.

Touhou, Dark Souls, Osu, Hotline Miami, Shovel Knight, almost the entirety of the SNES library… These are some of the toughest games but are all so fun and rewarding that you have to ask, are we just not approaching difficulty correctly? Challenge is fun. Overcoming adversity is what’s part of why videogames are fun to play.

I think that the difficulty curve of games isn’t too often talked about. Creating a satisfying difficulty curve in a videogame is an art; If it’s too steep, the challenge might ramp up before a player can adjust and needlessly frustrate them. If it’s too shallow, the game might feel like it plateaus, which makes what is meant to be a challenge an exercise in monotony. Most games also have design oversights that can introduce spikes. The infamous Barrel of Sonic 3 & Knuckles comes to mind. A difficulty curve also changes as a player grows in skill. You’d be hard-pressed to find a Dark Souls veteran who still thinks the Asylum demon is a tough fight.

Nailing a difficulty curve is the difference between a game that gets completed and favourably viewed retrospectively and a game that gets lost to obscurity.

While Cuphead seems to be a game that, for the most part, handles its difficulty curve competently, the entry barrier is also a tad thick. Each game has a skill floor and a skill ceiling. The skill floor is the minimum amount of skill required to produce competent play, and the skill ceiling is the maximum skill one can acquire. Usually, any given game wants to have a low skill floor, and a high skill ceiling. Make the skill ceiling too low and mastering the game becomes unsatisfying. Make the skill floor too high and the price of entry is too high for most casual players.

One aspect I think a lot of developers don’t consider is screen real-estate; The more you fill up the screen with, the more information you give to the player, the more likely sensory overload is to occur. Admittedly, this is usually more of a problem with Bullet Hell and Shoot ‘Em Ups than with any other genre, but I’ve seen it occur within platformers. Any given clip of high-level play in Touhou looks like a rave and an acid trip all mixed into one. High-level Osu can be just as daunting. But if you give the player too much visual information before they’ve reached a certain skill level, you’ve effectively neutered their ability to play. If you don’t have practice reacting that quickly to that many on-screen objects, your brain might do a derp and you could make a mistake that you’d usually avoid. Snoman brought up the idea of how poor use of screen real-estate can actually lead to a detrimental experience in a game, and introducing too many elements at once can definitely cause a player to leave a game unfinished.

Inaccessible difficulty can come from another place; Poor frame rate and sloppy controls. If your game feel is awkward and clunky, you’ve added a new dimension of challenge, and PC gamers know how awful playing at less than desirable frame rates can be (although I still think the standard should be 60 frames per second and not 30 frames per second). The common example brought up for control is coyote time or the ghost jump. The extra few frames after leaving a platform in which you can jump. Some platformers extend the player’s collision box in order to achieve this. Others code a short timer, but either method creates the same result; responsive controls.

Long iteration cycles also come to mind. This comes in two parts, the time between the fail state and a point where new progress can be made, and the time taken for a fail state to reset. Both should always be as short as possible. Re-treading old ground too often is never good, and lengthy death animations that boot you to the main menu can just find the nearest garbage bin to climb into. It’s cheap difficulty. It’s artificial.

Telegraphing is also important. Telegraphing is the act of conveying information to the player, whether it be their current objective, or that an attack or obstacle is incoming. Nothing sucks more than a game with a bad case of “where the heck do I go”, and being hit by something off-screen you could never see coming just is poor game design.

Here’s another thing developers might not consider; Effective teaching tools.

How you convey the ins and outs of your game’s mechanics are the way that it teaches the player. I’m not talking about Hbomberguy’s play-conditioning, although it certainly forms part of this. I’m talking about the effectiveness of your tutorials, the resources available, the way lessons are taught. Older games had extensive manuals, the original Final Fantasy famously has an 80 page guide to get you through the first half of the game. Dark Souls is an interesting case in that while there are in-game tutorials, the community itself is the teaching tool. Guys like Vageta311 release tutorials using mined data, many players release build guides, there are hundreds of walkthroughs and of course, the notes on the ground from other players. Games don’t come with manuals anymore, so the way players are taught is essential in making a tough game more accessible.

While this is by no means comprehensive, other aspects to difficulty might just be quality of life; clearly visible boss healthbars, level progress meters, recommended level before attempting warnings, cancel-outs from combos. Stuff that might make the game easier, but also just make it that much more accessible to play. The idea isn’t that you rig the game against the player; you should be giving them a wall that you want them to conquer, even if it is by repeatedly mashing their heads against that wall until it falls over.

From this, I think in order to create a game that is tough but accessible, I think the following conditions should be met:

• There should be a satisfying difficulty curve
• There should be a relatively low skill floor, but a high skill ceiling
• Effective use of screen real-estate
• Solid frame rate and tight controls
• Short iteration cycles
• Clear telegraphing
• Little quality of life additions
• And just a fun game

Fun is subjective, but players will power through any game if the aesthetics are pleasing and the gameplay is fun. Tough isn’t necessarily inaccessible. We just have to be smart about the way we create difficulty and resist the temptation to be cheap.

If nothing else, just include a guide on how to get barrels to move up and down, please.

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I Really Liked Dark Souls 2

(I love this animation with all my heart.)

Dark Souls 2 is the ignored middle child of the franchise. A lot of fans hate it, a lot of fans like it but wouldn't call it their favourite, and then there's me.

I really liked Dark Souls 2. Maybe even a little more than Dark Souls 1.

To clarify, I played the Scholar Of The First Sin version on PC. I have no experience with the original build and I'm not going to do a comparison between the SOTFS and the base game, but there are differences that might make or break your experience, however, I think it's strongly recommended you get SOTFS due to the added quality of life changes. Upon release there was also a slight controversy over the lighting engine which was heavily touted in trailer footage but was conspicuously absent in the final product. This does affect one or two aspects of the game and its iterations, but it can be mostly ignored. With that out of the way, let me get to the game.

I wouldn't say I found every moment perfect. There's still plenty of convoluted design and one or two segments that really jump rope with the line between tough and unfair. However, on the whole, Dark Souls 2 is a bit easier than it's predecessor, and the difficulty is a little more constant.

My first thoughts as I booted up the game was that, well, the engine is a little different. It does a decent job of emulating the feel of Dark Souls 1, but there's a little bit less weight to your character. While the instep you do when turning around can make traversing narrower walkways a bit clunky, overall the game still has that deep, satisfying feel. However, the change in engine does show itself in two major ways; Backstabs and Parries/Ripostes are entirely different. Disregard all muscle memory from the first game, because it won't even help you a little bit here. This actually annoyed me a little bit, because unlearning my habits from the previous game didn't come easily. The way these features work mechanically also vary completely. Whereas you only sort of had to be behind an enemy in order to backstab in the first game, In Dark Souls 2, you have to be behind an enemy, facing their back, and then you enter a sort of checkForBackStab state. Your character feels infront of them with the hilt of their sword, and if that connects, regardless of whether the enemy's back is still turned, you perform a backstab. While I assume this balances PvP a great deal, it doesn't much help PvE. It's awkward and sometimes you don't enter the checkForBackStab state, even when you're clearly slashing an enemy in the back. When you parry, you also don't immediately riposte. You have to wait for your enemy to fall on their bums, ask permission from gods on high, and then when everyone's done rolling for a perception check, you are allowed to riposte. It's awkward and doesn't carry the same weight and flow it used to.

For starters, the parry window is no longer solely dictated by the item you use; it's partially tied to the Adaptibility stat, which also adds to how quickly you perform actions like chugging Estus. Endurance, which controlled how high your stamina was and how high your maximum equip load can be, now only adds two points of stamina per level and poise, and the Vitality stat dictates how high your max equip load can be. These changes drastically alter the way you build.

The other major change is the starting amount of Estus. For those not in the know, Estus is essentially your health potion. You can only carry a finite amount, and they replenish at every bonfire (ie, checkpoint). You're only given one Estus flask to start with, but between the Majula and The Forest Of Fallen Giants, you can get back up to 4 in about 20 minutes if you know what you're doing. There's even an Estus shard close to the main Majula bonfire by the well for an easy second flask. To compensate for the lack of Estus, there's a new health item introduced that doesn't replenish at bonfires, called the Life Gem. Now these are interesting because they restore health over time, unlike Estus, Life Gems can also be used while walking. There's a fair amount of tactic involved in choosing when Life Gems or Estus would be safer to use in a fight. And since life gems restore health over time, one could even consume a Life Gem in anticipation of taking damage. Sure, you had humanity in Dark Souls 1 which was easily farmable if you managed to get to The Depths and had a Covetous Serpent Ring, but Life Gems are more easily come across and can be hoarded.

Speaking of farming, some enemies now get tired of being repeatedly stabbed to death and unceremoniously trod off into the distance after one too many respawns. While Dark Souls has always been more about skill mastery than repetitive grinding, if you're 1000 souls away from a level up and there's just some dude that's easy pickings, he'll eventually stop being easy pickings. Yes, some enemies can be farmed out of existence, which alleviates challenge in some areas if you die really often and can be seen as a reward for your persistence, but I've never found this mechanic to be of much use. Truth be told, just before fighting The Lost Sinner there's a particularly annoying enemy placed right next to a bonfire and I make a point of farming him out of existence just so I can do that run in somewhat relative peace.

Death also has the added caveat of removing a percentage of your maximum health until you turn human again. Sure, there's a cap, but it still feels like an unnecessary handicap. It does discourage reckless play, but also means you're always treading on eggshells.

You now also don't have total invincibility when walking through Fog Walls. There's a couple frames in which you are entirely vulnerable and can be interrupted, I suppose to discourage our mad dashes for the boss door. It just adds frustration when you end up having to face a long gauntlet of enemies before a boss, like the Undead Chariot.

Shields are also rather... Discouraged. It takes some time to get to a shield that blocks 100% of physical damage. In Dark Souls 1 that was the norm and sacrificing 100% physical blocking usually meant gaining something of value in return, such as higher stability, or a higher percentage of magic blocking, or in the case of the Grass Crest Shield ie. only shield you should even consider using, faster stamina recovery. In Dark Souls 2, shields are nerfed to encourage other options. For example, the off-hand can be used to carry a torch or a staff or a crossbow instead of being used solely for protecting your face from the pointy bit of the skyscraper cleavers being swung at you. While this does encourage more dynamic builds, it also just means that if you wanted a shield you're usually stuck with the bottom tier trash until you beat The Pursuer and you can wield the mighty Drangleic Shield. The problem is that the Drangleic set is pretty great. In fact, I finished the game with the Drangleic Sword and Drangleic shield and while you might call me uncreative, I didn't find a weapon half worth wielding until the ass end of the game and by then I already invested so much into my current gear I wasn't willing to give it up.

I think that concludes a not-at-all comprehensive list of changes. I'll try to bring up Dark Souls 1 a bit less now.

So the name of the game remains unchanged. You are a person in a fluctuating state of undead, and thou who art undead art chosen. So it's your job to go murder at least four very big and scary dudes, and then do the climb to the last very big, very scary dude. The game has a convoluted way of saying that and it takes a bit of time for you to realise just what it is you're actually supposed to do. However, Dark Souls 2 is a little more clever than I initially gave it credit for. See, you can go murder four very large dudes, or murder enough smaller dudes to get 1 000 000 Soul Memory, which is all the souls you've ever accumulated in that playthrough. By using Bonfire Ascetics, you can also reach this number by respawning bosses (at a New Game Plus difficulty). So progression is pretty open-ended for the first half of the game, and there aren't any unnatural locks like in Dark Souls 1.

You start in the tutorial area which is actually entirely optional, but Snuggly is back so if you want to test your faith in RNGsus for a good drop then you should pay him a visit. From there you go to Majula, the central hub and it's deceptively small. From Majula you can go to The Grave Of Saints, The Forest Of Fallen Giants, The Shaded Woods, Heide's Tower Of Flame and The Gutter. It has two covenants and there's a surprising amount of fun in filling it up with NPCs. Firelink Shrine had this rotating cast of characters that appeared as you progressed, but Majula gains more inhabitants as you clear your way through. While the characters are less memorable this time around, it feels rewarding just to fill up space with people to talk to. Breath of The Wild did this thing where the town's theme would have an instrument added when you brought it a new inhabitant, and I wish Dark Souls 2 did the same. I think Majula's theme is just a little too ambient, but I can always recall the first few notes of the main melody off the top of my head. Most of the music in the game falls into the category of orchestral ambience, more to set a tone and fill silence than anything else. None of it is bad, but nothing is especially memorable. I think the intended order is probably a run from Majula to The Forest to Heide's to No Man's Wharf to The Lost Bastille to Hunstsmans Copse Earthen Peak to Iron Keep to The Shaded Woods to Tseldora to Shrine of Winter and then go through Drangleic Castle and from there go to endgame, but the order of a lot of these can be mixed and matched. I'd be surprised if anyone's playthrough ends up being very similar because there's a fair amount of open endedness, especially in the order in which you do bosses.

And I do have my favourite and least favourite bosses.

I really liked the first encounter with The Pursuer, if only because failing it means that he deems you unworthy to face him just yet, and you have to climb all the way to the top of The Forst Of Fallen Giants to get another shot at him. I like Najka, she's puts up a decent fight, even if she becomes a lot easier once you find the one piece of rubble she can't bury under. I love how the Smelter Demons stabs himself to set his sword on fire in this tantrum because you hit him a bunch. The Undead Chariot is this really cool puzzle where you have to navigate a crowded tunnel with a speeding chariot trying to mow you down, and you have to find something for it to crash into while avoiding constantly respawning skeletons. I love the first Dragon Rider fight because if you don't extend the arena, he can just throw himself off the edge if you bait him correctly and that always makes me laugh.  The Duke's Dear Freja is just this creepy spider who I refuse to fight one on one, there are three summon signs you can find because she's just so tough. She's armoured from head to toe and can only be hurt if you stab her between the pincers.

The worst was fighting Mytha, The Baneful Queen for the first time. There's an out of the way pipe you have to set alight in order to set the windmill alight which drains the poison from the arena you fight her in. The fight is a nightmare mess if you don't do this, even with the poison ring. And if you do set the windmill alight, she becomes a total pushover. The Covetous Demon is also... There...? He doesn't do much. He's a blob that honestly is more of a formality than anything else. There's also a bunch of horde boss battles, such as the Royal Rat Vanguard, Prowling Magus And The Congregation, The Skeleton Lords, The Bellfry Gargoyles, all of which I think kind of sucked, although the Bellfry Gargoyles were more enjoyable just for the throwback to Dark Souls 1. I understand that they're testing the skill of crowd control but usually crowd control in Dark Souls amounts to smart aggro. Mages have a couple spells with Area Of Effect but when you play Strength/Dex, it amounts to a question of "can your sword swing in a wide horizontal arc?" and if yes, yay, somewhat easier, if no, boo, sucks for you. Add on the fact that mages have to Lock On to even aim anything and these become just a chore to deal with. Throwing a large group of dudes at me isn't difficulty, it's a dick move and that's beneath you Dark Souls.

Boss weapons are now super accessible. Instead of having to upgrade a thing and check off a myriad of tasks, now there's just some dude selling them. Not just boss souls, boss spells, boss armour, boss souveniers, you name it. Which means there's now an actual choice behind popping a boss soul for the extra change in your wallet or saving it for that Dragon Rider Bow which launches javelins instead of arrows.

The journey from Things Betwixt to Throne of Want was an enjoyable one. Some points sucked, most points didn't but my first save file was the one I beat the game with, and I came back for seconds and thirds. I can't really say that about Dark Souls 1, because I'd so horribly stuffed up my build that I just threw it all away after the Taurus demon, which took me about 3 hours to reach. But then again, all of that experience carried over, so I might be a little biased. But I think I can say that Dark Souls 2 might be a better starting point, even if just for the extra shine. And that's just the thing, isn't it? No one really knows what their opinion on Dark Souls 2 is because it's always being compared to Dark Souls 1 in the back of our minds. I know I liked it and I had fun and I recommend that it should at least be a pitstop on a journey through the Soulsborne games if not a full blown detour.

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Dragon Ball Evolution

This movie sucked. I'm not going to make any pretenses about that, Dragonball Evolution was a mess, more of a mess than my life is at any given point and that's saying something.

But for all the hate it gets, a lot of people don't remember why it ended up a mess. Because, if anything, Dragon Ball should be one of the most adaptable anime properties of all time.

To clarify, I'm not talking about why the film itself ended up being a mediocre chore of a film where only Justin Chatwin's forehead vein was having any fun. I'm talking about the conceptual flaws, which feed almost directly into the film's major flaws. Before I get into that, I do want to say a couple of things in the film's defense;

1. It's not bad because it varied from the source material.

Plenty of adaptations are actually served better by straying from the source material. Some films can recreate their anime counterpart shot for shot and still come out a hot mess. Some of the changes are, and I loathe actually saying this, actually for the better. I think the more correct argument would be that Dragonball Evolution didn't understand the core appeal of the source material. And yes, I think I am getting too caught up in semantics but if we can't deliver actually helpful critique then we can't ever hope for an improvement.

2. The whitewashing is bad, but it's surprisingly the least flawed aspect of the film

Dragon Ball's universe sits in this weird place where elements of fantasy and sci-fi are ever present, and it takes place both in the past and the future. It's weird and wonderful with characters from all walks of life. Honestly, I kind of wish that the white-washing was the worst part of the movie.

3. There are some surprisingly decent production values

The movie came out in 2009. While the CGI hand farts were out of place, there are plenty of moments where the film shows that there is an at least competent production team at work. Plenty of places where the film shows some of the least convincing and out of place special effects known to man but there are some decent shots.

Now, on to what I think is the biggest problem with not only the concept of Dragonball Evolution but also the Dragon Ball series;

Despite what Akira Toriyama's intentions were, Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z (and onwards) are just two different stories.

Here's a fun fact, Dragon Ball actually didn't immediately sell very well. It was this weird little story from a guy whose bread and butter was making dirty and smutty gag manga. You can see the influence from Dr Slump (Toriyama's previous work) in practically every chapter. I theorise that the first drafts were probably filled to the brim with a bunch of smutty jokes and some poor editor probably had the unfortunate job of telling Toriyama to get back to the action sequences of the action shonen he was trying to make. As a result, it took a while for Dragon Ball to be brought over to the west. On top of that, the first translation of the anime is a weird bastardization that only lasted about 13 episodes. We wouldn't see a continuation of that translation until years later. This will be important later, I promise.

Conceptually, Dragon Ball is also just an out-there manga. If you didn't already know, Dragon Ball started out as a spoof on a well known Chinese fable called  Journey To The West. Son Goku is actually the Japanese reading of the name Sun Wukong. Goku's staff, the Nyoi-Bo is just Sun Wukong's staff Riyu Jingu Bang with a different name. They both even fly around on clouds! I remember watching a version of Journey To The West on television as a child and I loved Dragon Ball even more finding out this fact later in life. But it just highlights what a little oddity the original Dragon Ball was. It was quirky and smutty and funny but most of all, it was charming. In fact, to further highlight the contrast, the kamehameha wasn't actually Goku's original signature move. That honour actually goes to the Rock, Scissors 'N' Paper (or Jan Ken fist if you have taste), which is either a somewhat clever spoof of fictional techniques used in martial arts movies or just the most obtuse way of saying punch in face, poke in eyes and palm on cheek.


(source)

Now here's the kicker; In Japan, Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z aren't two separate entities; They're just one long continuous story. In the west, because of how late in its life Dragon Ball became popular and how niche anime was and how weird manga publishing can be, Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z were simultaneously brought over as separate entities. The Dragon Ball Z anime also aired at the same time, and the difference is night and day. Dragon Ball Z is practically synonymous with the genre of shonen, and it was prototypical of a lot of the tropes and story beats later manga would then follow. Dragon Ball Z is this fantasy martial arts anime and the stakes are raised dramatically. Sure, it maintains some of Toriyama's signature slump humour but at this point in his career, he was better at writing action shonen than he was at making dirty jokes.

Chances are, you remember a lot more of Dragon Ball Z than you do of Dragon Ball. I remember the community following Dragon Ball Z had in my schoolyard playground. We'd all pretend to be Z fighters and whenever we had access to hair gel we'd spike it up and pretend to be super saiyans and I'm pretty sure every boy born in the 90s has at one point tried to perform a kamehameha. One of your friends had a copy of Budokai on his PS2, and if not, you were that friend. Every Spur and Mike's Kitchen in the country had a dedicated PS2 for playing Budokai Tenkaichi, just so you'd beg your parents to take you there so you can have another go at it. It aired every day at 17:00, right after we all got back from after school day-care. Dragon Ball Z was practically essential in establishing Otaku culture in the west, and was part of the Anime Starter Kit back when I was a yungin' (those dudes who had Saint Seiya as part of their starter kit must feel fucking ancient)

And it makes sense that Dragon Ball Z would be one of the first high budget anime adaptations the west would see.

But here's the only issue; Dragonball Evolution so desperately wants to adapt Dragon Ball Z, but what it's actually adapting is the original Dragon Ball.

And I actually feel sorry for it. If Dragonball Evolution had to start with the plot of Dragon Ball Z, it'd be in medias res. Everyone already knows each other, the characters are all established with backstory and have each all had character arcs. Dragon Ball Z spends most of its exposition time either retconning the original Dragon Ball or introducing new characters. On top of that, major studios and publishers don't seem to trust western audience with foreign material. As a result, showrunners, producers and directors get this weird idea that foreign properties need to be "westernized" in order to make them more relatable to the domestic market, which is a gross misunderstanding of why we even watch anime. So, if you're still with me, Dragonball Evolution is a westernized adaptation of an anime adapting a Japanese adventure/gag manga spoofing a Chinese fable that actually wants to adapt a westernized version of the anime of the Japanese martial arts manga that's the big brother of the adventure/gag manga that spoofs a Chinese fable.

This project was almost destined to fail.

Trying to craft a cohesive story in all this would have been a nightmare. It's so obviously jumbled and thrown together with stylistic influences that ranges from Michael Bay's 2007 Transformers to Avatar; The Last Airbender to chinese martial arts b-movies to whatever film Chow Yun-Fat thought he was acting in.

In fact, Chow Yun-Fat (he was Master Roshi if you were too lazy to google) actually acted in a much better adaptation of Journey To The West that manages to be a better Dragon Ball movie than Dragonball Evolution.

If that's not bad enough, in 2008 (one year before Dragonball Evolution was released) a movie called The Forbidden Kingdom came out with a functionally identical set up that loosely adapts Journey To The West, except it doesn't make you hate yourself for wasting an hour and a half of your own life.

Dragonball Evolution didn't need to be as unambiguously awful as it was. When you have a world inhabited by dinosaurs, dragons, anthropomorphic talking animals, cyborg supervillains, super powered aliens, weremonkeys from space, time travelling swordsmen, fighters fusing their physical forms together to become one better fighter... You have to have a certain set of skills to fuck up so badly that all of that becomes uninteresting. AND YOU HIRED CHOW YUN-FAT AND JAMES MARSTERS HOW DID YOU MANAGE TO FUCK THIS UP??? 

With a few changes made at the start, I bet with the same actors, the same production crew but with change out the writer and director for people infinitely more competent at their jobs, and there's an enjoyable film in there. Somewhere. Deep down. Really, really deep down. 

Remove the highschool setting and center Goku and Bulma, then we'd have something more in line with the spirit of the manga. Remember that Goku and Bulma's relationship was one of the most compelling parts of the original Dragon Ball. The city girl and a country boy going on an unlikely journey is a strong set up just from the contrast between the two leads, and their resulting friendship is pretty humanizing and endearing. Change the visual effect used for energy attacks like the kamehameha from wispy smoke to those striking lightbeams, and the film becomes a ton more palatable. Chi-Chi being more of a secret cage-fighter type wasn't the best change in direction either. She's the daughter of the legendary Ox King, one of the scariest freaking dudes alive. Just have her... Be Chi-Chi. How do you guys have more regressive decision making than the author of a manga where a little boy determines the gender of a person the same way Kevin Spacey does? I am also struggling to find the depth added by making this a coming of age highschool romance. Also the cool stuff like a flying cloud and a magic staff that can stretch to any length or taking a rabbit who is also a mob leader and putting him on the literal moon... There's so much fun stuff you could have done and you just left that shit on the cutting room floor!

In the end, I suppose Dragonball Evolution isn't about making a good movie, or even about making a decent Dragon Ball adaptation.

It's about cashing in on a license.

Someone needs to take away Fox's toys from them so they can't fuck up any more licenses OH HI THERE DISNEY.

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Trying To Overcome Failure

If I don't try, I don't fail, right? I'm trying, but I'm just scared. It's a big risk. What if I'm incapable of doing it? What if I try and I fail anyway? I feel so goddamn worthless all the time, I don't think I could handle adding more failure to my practically non-existent self-esteem. Failure puts me in an objectively worse position than I am right now, and while success might put me in an objectively better position, trying and failing-

That's all bullshit.

Not the words themselves, the fact that I feel that way. Hi, my name is Matthew, although I mostly go by Matt-Dave though because I have generic Bible name that usually makes me about the fourth Matthew to enter the room on any given day in a crowded place. I am also afraid of failure. So much in fact that it's actively prohibited my chances at actually accomplishing something more times than I am willing to admit. I don't know when it started, I just know this is how I live now. Take no risks, always play it safe, sometimes do my best to avoid anything even remotely stressful.

Let me explain what I mean.

In my years as a student, I've failed to hand in assignments, assignments that could have saved my grades and prevent another failed University module, because I'm a serial self-sabotager. I tell myself that I'm incapable. The stress I have about the stress I'm going to have doing the assignment outweighs the actual stress of the assignment. I know it's a bad idea, but fuck man. I open the specification and that document gives me anxiety. The idea of having to go through the stress and pressure of uni is so overbearing that hell, I remember a week I couldn't will myself out of bed and I spent the day in bed watching How I Met Your Mother, not eating, and crying. I also said some seriously awful stuff about myself.

And I guess I kind of hate myself. I don't know why. I know I have things to be proud of myself for. I shouldn't put myself down so much. I know that I have people who care about me and that I'm worth something. Hell, I wrote a book, I was in a band that released four songs shittily recorded through a guitar hero mic in my bedroom, I did a bootleg post-hardcore cover of Lana Del Rey's Summertime Sadness just to prove to myself I could. I got into Computer Science at University and worked my butt off to get here.

So why do I struggle with feelings of  inadequacy and self-loathing? Where does all the self-doubt come from?

Imposter-syndrome is one of them.




(image source)

There's an anecdote from Neil Gaiman. He talks about how he felt out of place at a gathering of famous artists and scientist and other people of note. He struck up a conversation with Neil Armstrong, who felt the same. Armstrong says that everyone in this room has made something, or done something incredible. Gaiman interjects by reminding him that he was the first man on the moon. And still, Armstrong says he simply went where he was sent.

The human mind is such an overwhelmingly self-doubting machine that you could be the first man to go where no other man has ever set foot, and still think you're not as good as everyone else, that you're faking it and a fraud whilst everyone else is the real deal.

Many of my peers who started with me had overtaken me by far at the end of my second year. Some of them would go on to graduate within the three year minimum, whereas I still have a long way to go. It was hellish and disheartening. Then, money suddenly became scarce. We couldn't pay my fees at the start of third year and I didn't qualify for a loan so, yay. Studying went on hiatus.

Six months later things perked up again. Those six months were mostly me trying to work and make something, and mostly laying in bed, contemplating life and aging and death. It was a very defeatist attitude.

I did something before I started studying though; I tallied up what I did.

I opened a spread sheet, checked how many credits I needed to graduate (It was in the ballpark of 400), and lo and behold; I'd achieved 144 of those credits. I was actually close to halfway. One semester could actually put me halfway to my bachelor's.

That's not to say I didn't rack up a ton of failures along the way; But holy crap. I got so caught up in how bad I was doing in life that I'd forgotten how I was actually doing pretty alright.

There's something called the Dunning-Kruger effect; It basically boils down to people who are incompetent overestimating their ability, whereas people who are competent underestimate their ability.

And while we do often overestimate, we much more often underestimate ourselves.

Depression and Anxiety are also huge contributing factors.

When you have both, you sort of  have these two people always screaming at you; a super defeatist, depreciating one. That person tells you that you can't do it. That person tells you how worthless you are. That person takes every chance they have to break you down. The other person is a high-strung, panicking hypochondriac that is telling you the stress from doing it is going to kill you. Don't even try. And oh my god, how awful is it going to feel when you can't even do the basic parts? Those two people feed off each other, always screaming, never stopping.

Except both those people are you. That's you depreciating yourself. That's you working yourself into a panick. Sometimes you're not even conscious of doing it. You just hear your screaming at yourself in your head, and then you think that it's true.

But it's not. It's not, I promise.

I'm not your doctor, I can't tell you how to overcome your depression or anxiety. I can tell you one of the ways I do is writing these stupid blog posts. I write. I know that when I don't, I bottle it up, and it eats me alive. Sometimes I can't bring myself to do it. But it gets easier. It gets much, much easier. But it takes time. Sometimes it's still very hard, but then you get a little better at dealing with it. It might never go away, but each time you get up, you get a little better at it.

 If you're anything like me, you've experienced a lot of the above. You've gotten in your own way. The term I like to use is self-sabotage. That's what it feels like I'm doing. Sabotaging myself.

Sometimes it's like that song by Lit. It's no surprise to me/I am my own worst enemy/'Cause every now and then I kick the living shit out out of me. I get in my own way. I am stopping me. How do I get around myself? How do I fight myself and win?

Well, get up. When you knock your own ass to the ground, get up. When you trip yourself, get up. When you push yourself into a hole, climb out. When you stop yourself, start. It's really that simple. It's like jumping into a cold pool. You've gotta take a deep breath, count to three, then run. Focus on just going as fast as you can. There's no time for thinking. Then jump. It's going to be cold, and you know it's going to be cold, but you're out their in your costume and the wind from standing out there is going to make you colder than just jumping in already. And when you hit the water, make the biggest fucking splash you can.

Also, take care of yourself. Do the basics, brush your teeth, brush your hair, take a shower, eat three meals, drink a glass of water, tie your shoelaces. Tell yourself it's going to be okay. Because it's going to be okay. Are you hearing me? It's going to be okay. It might feel awful right now, and like the world is on fire. It might feel like everything is collapsing in on you but it is going to be okay. Everything is going to be okay.

That's about all I can say on it.

I don't have much to give as a final word, so I'm going to borrow a couple phrases from people who can strings words together a little more eloquently than I can.

Oprah said that you have to think like a queen; A queen is not afraid of failure, failure is a steppingstone to greatness. But for me, Edison set it best;

I have not failed; I have simply found 10 000 ways that do not work.

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What Metroid Means To Me

You've heard it all before. In the 80s, there weren't a whole lot of female protagonists in games. Then came Metroid on the NES in 1986, and rumours wildly circulated about who was under the armour, until someone finally managed to beat the game with a good enough time to unlock the ending, and bam; we'd been playing as Samus Aran, the bad ass female bounty hunter who'd come to end the space pirates.

I guess to reiterate further, Metroid has seen a hiatus of sorts. Before Metroid; Samus Returns, we hadn't really seen a 2D Metroid game since Metroid Zero Mission in 2004, a remake of the NES game. It's been kind of a dry spell... Well, not for me personally. See, I actually didn't have much investment in the franchise until recently. I liked Metroid Fusion, but I hadn't actually beat it, I only got about 70% of the way through with a rather low completion percentage. I had heard about the genre-defining Super Metroid and had seen some cool speedrunning tricks, but I didn't really understand much of it. Metroid was like this little pocket in the sphere of media that I knew deserved my attention, but other things just kept pulling me away. Life is busy. It's hard to spare a minute to invest yourself in an entire new franchise. But then Another Metroid 2 Remake dropped. I snagged a copy, knowing Nintendo Nintendon't want me to get my grubby little hands on it. And I kind of it didn't enjoy my first attempt at playing through the game. And I guess, maybe I hadn't earned it. There were plenty of videos analyzing and deconstructing AM2R, but I couldn't really relate.

But the other day, I sat down and beat Metroid Fusion.

My hands ached, after beating Neo-Ridley. I was sore after beating the SA-X. Now, it was just the Omega Metroid.

And there it went.

It caved rather easily but considering the death to my hands that the SA-X was, an easy final boss was pretty welcome if a little anti-climactic. So now what? My playthrough was clocked by the game as four hours and twelve minutes long... How could that be? It felt like such a full, complete adventure? I immediately needed more.

Metroid Zero Mission went down much faster, clocking in at three hours 18 minutes. Kraid was a little too easy for my liking, but Ridley posed a decent challenge. Mother Brain came, and her stupid circle lasers killed me on my first try. Okay. Fine.

I went in, and bam. Spamming Super Missles took her down with ease. And that was it, I thought BUT THEN NO AND WHAT AND OH MY GOD

I'm not going to spoil the end of Zero Mission, since it was almost spoiled for me, but it just... That's how you reboot a game. My expectations were subverted and the immediate juxtaposition in gameplay was such a trip.

And then when I picked up AM2R, I beat it within two days.

The immediately apparent thing was the quality of life adjustments AM2R made, on top of being a damn good game, on top of being a damn good Metroid 2 remake. People aren't kidding when they say DoctorM64 and crew made a better Metroid game than Nintendo have in *years*. It's not immediately apparent when you pick it up, but if you've been playing Metroid for any length of time, I can only imagine what a fresh breath of air it must have been. Going in with no experience with Metroid versus going in with two games completed under the belt was like playing an entirely different game. Sure, I wasn't pulling off any crazy wall jumping tricks or shinesparking sequence breaks, but damn, when I lined up a shinespark perfectly to get that one item hidden in the wall, that was pure bliss. There's a section where you need to charge a shinespark, do a screw attack, then uncurl and shinespark mid-air. It's nothing compared to the crazy tricks I've seen done before, but being able to pull off something that felt so high-level was just an amazing feeling.

That's what makes Metroid special.

Metroid isn't about the first trip. I'd even say the first trip is the most tedious. I picked up Metroid Fusion and Castlevania; Aria Of Sorrow at about the same time, and I dropped Fusion, but have since finished Aria Of Sorrow a total of 4 times now. I love both games, but I knew which side of the debate I fell on.

Until now.

Now, the line isn't so clear any more.

I still haven't played the quintessential games of both franchises (Super Metroid and Symphony respectively) but I had a clear idea of which I'd enjoy more when I eventually did pick them up.

Now I have no idea.

Maybe the lack of the Ledge Grab from Super Metroid is going to be the deciding factor, and maybe some of the more antiquated design choices of Symphony is going to swing me towards camp Samus. But my god, I'm excited to play both in a way I haven't been for a videogame in a while. Where I had no desire to pick up indie darling Axiom Verge, I now would like nothing more than to add it to my steam library and immediately complete it. I looked at Momodora IV as a soulslike metroidvania, but now I look at Momodora IV as soulslikeMETROIDvania. The influences are so much clearer to me now. I get it. I understand.

There's a moment when you're playing Dark Souls where the game just... Clicks. It's a quiet moment where the pieces line up and you see the game for what it is and you can honestly and sincerely say, "I get it."

That was what it was like diving back into Metroid. Just after the SA-X fight, I remember the click. All because some guy liked a kinda jank gameboy game so much he decided to give it the remake Nintendo didn't think it deserved and in the process, not only made Metroid relevant again but introduced hundreds, maybe even thousands of gamers to a franchise so buried in obscurity they may not even have heard of it until now, a franchise suffering a death so undeserved it's almost criminal.

The release timing of Samus returns is suspect to me. It kind of looks like Nintendo saw the hype a fan project got, DCMA'd it, outsourced a quick remake of their own and just reaped the rewards. Yes, they're in their full legal rights to do so but it just stinks of moral bankruptcy.

Overall, Metroid is important. It's a cultural milestone for gaming. And if the story behind the first Metroid seems outdated or irrelevant, we have an entire category on steam for Female Protagonist, because we're so tired of playing as generic white dude with scruff on his face



Metroid is important. For me, it's a breath of fresh air that practically sparked a gaming revolution. But it's also just a set of great fucking games. I had recently itched to play something, something different. Something gripping.

I didn't expect to be power gripped.

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Review: Marvel's The Defenders

The Defenders was a breath of fresh air for me. I'd actually started to lose faith in the Netflix shows after Iron Fist soured my opinion to the extent that I couldn't bring myself to rewatch Jessica Jones, which I've wanted to do for a while now. Having watched Daredevil season 1 three times now, I've felt like I've neglected the Marvel/Netflix series that I'd actually enjoyed the most. But Defenders was exactly what I needed, a fun little romp through an adventure that brings these large characters together;

And the result is refreshingly greater than the sum of its parts.

Crossovers are always kind of a fickle thing. They can sometimes end up as pandering fanservice or worse, a mismanagement of several pieces of intellectual property. And because of the rather special circumstances that occur to make a crossover event possible, it's usually very short lived.

Defenders, however, is none of these things; It has a compelling narrative with tastefully handled interactions between characters who all have decent amounts of screen time while being only as long as it needs to be, if perhaps maybe even dragging on a bit too long near the end.

I have my gripes, but they're my favourite kind of gripes, little ones. I think I do want to get those out of the way so that I can sing my praises for what I think is actually one of the best shows you can watch on Netflix to date, so without further delay, let me get on with it, and of course, spoilers ahead.

The ending kind of sucked. Not the last episode, the last thirty minutes or so of it. Elektra's motivations don't make a whole lot of sense to me. She's framed as having now rediscovered her affection for Matt, and even murders Alexandra upon being ordered to kill the Daredevil, whom Alexandra can't even bother to learn the name of. It's an endearing moment, and one that really put me on the side of Elektra; she'd overcome her instinct to blindly obey and did something that was... Well, as heroic as Elektra can manage.

But then she proceeds to kind of beat the snot out of Matt but also kind loving him, and proclaiming how she's doing it all for the sake of fucking with Matt. I was under the impression that her motivation was to now procure the dragon remains in order to craft an elixir that would enable her and Matt to live forever. Which is selfish, but in a human kind of way. It just doesn't sit right, and the ending looks like a lot of outtakes splattered together in order to Frankenstein an ending.

Everyone also starts hailing Matt as heroic, when his actions, in the end, were clearly misguided. Matt still thinks he can save Elektra from herself. Matt didn't sacrifice himself for the city; he died trying to save the love of his life, and in the end, probably endangered his team.

Also a neater explanation of how this man survived having a 30 story building dropped on him would be nice. The final shot is of Matt in a church presumably some ways off, but he still technically died in New York. It makes very little sense that he wouldn't end up in a hospital close to the accident. I suppose it's setting up an arch in Daredevil season 3, and that's rumoured to be the acclaimed Born Again story, but I felt even my forgiving suspension of disbelief stretch to its limits.

I hope you like hearing about Kunlun. Because you won't stop hearing about it, and it highlights just how B-grade Iron Fist's mythology is. I don't know if it's the delivery of this word specifically, but it just ends up not sounding right to me. I get that the Kunlun mountains are a real place, but it just doesn't sound like it. It sounds like a fake place with a fake name that I came up with when I wrote bad fanfiction as a twelve-year-old. Maybe that's on me but I cannot be the only one who thinks this.

Finally, god damn, Colleen Wing is sidelined wayyy too often. Everything about Colleen is so well-rounded, from her motivations to her actions, she's human and her jealousy over Danny finding a team to work with is for me a moment to pure for this world. Why the fuck is she not getting top billing? Danny doesn't do any of the notable detective work, Colleen does. Danny doesn't come up with any of the best ideas, Colleen does. Danny can't even motivate himself to stop being such a goddamn downer all the time, Colleen does. She even gets the idea to use the bombs to collapse the building into the tunnel beneath it. Colleen's agency was genuinely refreshing. She's got as much right to be a Defender as everyone else on the team, if not more so. If a blind dude in a bright red costume can be a Defender, a trained swordswoman can too. Colleen Wing is to The Defenders what Stephanie Brown is to the Robins. Part of the club in every sense of the word, always left out of the conversation when we're giving credit.

With all that out of the way, let me gush.

Charlie Cox can make standing still and dramatically flexing his knuckles into a genuinely emotionally impactful scene. I could practically feel Matt's struggle with his inner rage as my own. Matt gets a couple of really hard-hitting emotional beats, and when he talks to the boy he did pro bono work for, explaining life with a disability and where the real strength in overcoming it lies was a heavy scene. Charlie Cox manages to steal the show in all his scenes, and the stunt work during Daredevil's fight scenes are always phenomenal.

Krysten Ritter does Jessica Jones phenomenally. Her cynicism somehow endears her more to me, and you can genuinely see the issues of someone struggling with their identity, not wanting to be a hero, but also being entirely directionless. But my favourite scene was actually watching Jess do her actual job; Being a private investigator. There's an interesting juxtaposition between how each hero does the busy work, the tedious part of the job. Daredevil and Luke usually use fear and intimidation to interrogate, but Matt does sometimes lawyer up to get the job done. But Jess doing the mundane investigation work was just an interesting sight to see. Because Jess is good at her job, make no mistake, but there's just something funny about seeing someone who could punch a man so hard he sees the curvature of the earth digging through public records for information. My favourite part is when Jess shows just how good she is at her job and how freaking insightful she can be, in her own crude way, when she gets Matt to relate to the daughter of the dead architect. I wasn't actually expecting Charlie and Krysten to get as much screen time together as they did, but the two of them knocked it out the park.

Luke Cage gets by far the best introductory scene. "I believe these belong to you" and "And you let them?" are the two best-delivered lines in the whole show, fyt me IRL. Mike somehow has chemistry with whoever he shares a scene with, but his best moments are with Krysten and Finn. Cage and Danny have some bro moments that I just couldn't help but grin wide at. It was endearing and I warmed up to Iron Fist a lot more, and I think that's the biggest strength of the show.

And Danny, Danny, Danny... It took me a while. I eventually warmed up to him. I admit, when Jess punched him the fuck out, I smiled a wide smile. Watching Luke smack Danny around a bit was also just... Deserved. But in the end, I concede; Danny isn't all that bad after all. Danny is the kid of the group, and he's at his best as kind of a lovable goofball. Which is a lot like how he is on the Ultimate Spiderman cartoon, as weird a comparison as that is. Luke humouring Danny's stories about punching out the heart of a dragon was an entirely endearing moment. Yes, Iron Fist is still the weakest character out of all the Defenders, still getting outshined by Colleen. But it was endearing. And Colleen and Danny have some moments of genuine chemistry on screen.

But then again, I ship this. Look at those bedroom eyes. DON'T TELL ME I'M SEEING SOMETHING THAT'S NOT THERE LOOK AT THEM THEY ABOUT TO FRICKLE FRACKLE

Also a quick shout out to Madame Gao's force powers, where were you hiding them, why were they so cool, how come you been holding out on us fam?

Overall, The Defenders really was just.. Fun.

I had fun watching it. I had fun seeing my favourites all interact. This was worth the wait and while eight episodes seem short, it's a bingeable, watchable, fun little adventure and besides an ending that goes on a little too long, Defenders... Was good. Defenders was good.

It's worth your time. It's only eight episodes long. Give it a watch. Have some fun.

If nothing else, you get to see a lot of people punch Finn Jones right in his overly depressive face.

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Gender. Let's Educate Ourselves.

"Gender is like the twin towers. There used to be two of them, but now it's a really sensitive topic."
~Meme that showed up on my Facebook feed

I admit I laughed when I first read that little nugget of wisdom. Gender seems to be one of the most contentious issues of the last few years or so and we still haven't found much of a productive way around talking about the issue. Adding to the confusion is the lack of proper differentiation between gender and sex, and the conflation of the two by the layman's definition.

Transgender rights are also one of the core focuses of the modern LGBTQ+ movement but much like gays and lesbians, the fight for equality has been an uphill one for trans people. Trans people also make up an even smaller portion of the population than cisgender gays, lesbians or bisexuals, and thus even within the movement had their fights lose priority to whatever was the more pressing matter, something I've been guilty of in the past. It reminds us that activism isn't perfect.

But if we want to learn, we have to make the choice to educate ourselves. So let's do just that.

For the sake of thoroughness, I want to do a quick recap on the current state of things. Historically, gender and sex have been conflated and used interchangeably. Within that definition of gender, it was and still is widely accepted that there are only two genders corresponding to two biological sexes; male and female. This is what's known as the gender binary; you are either one gender or the other. There is no state in between.

A common way to view gender is by the XY Sex Determination system. Your DNA carries a pair of sex chromosomes which define your biological sex, either a pair of X chromosomes (resulting in XX chromosomes, or homogametic sex) which would make you female, or a pair that includes an X and a Y chromosome (resulting in XY chromosomes, or heterogametic sex) which would make you male.

Another way to view gender (and this is the weakest in my opinion) is by primary sex characteristics, or as the few folks who actually view it this way, by whether or not ya'll got a penis or a vagina.

You can live your whole life by these definitions. Hell, you can meet transgender people and fit them within the gender binary just fine, because humans are pretty good at putting things that are vaguely alike into neat little boxes.

Real life, however, is much more complex.

Debunking most of these are pretty easy. I'm s firm advocate for dropping the gender binary, but many people might not feel that way. If you're still with me, and if you're one of the people on the fence, maybe I can say a couple things that'll make you rethink your position.

First, let me debunk all both previously mentioned forms of gender binary;

Through the XY Sex Determination System we know that men are born with XY chromosomes where as females are born with XX chromosomes. However, there are several documented cases of babies born with  XXY chromosomes, also known as Klinefelter Syndrome. Those affected produce less testosterone and develop smaller testes. XYY Syndrome which affects a small percentage of men, symptoms can include becoming taller. In the past, men with XYY syndrome were referred to as "super males". Turner Syndrom, in women, occurs when one of the two X chromosomes is missing.

As you can see, there are people who don't adhere to conventional chromosomal pairings that are still referred to as men or women. Chromosomes are the determinators of biological sex, but by that definition, sex can vary wildly through different chromosomal pairings.


Next is primary sex characteristics. This one is a lot easier to debunk because it doesn't take much of a logical leap to conclude that some people can be born without or with an excess of primary sex characteristics.

This is where intersex people come into play.

Intersex people are born with any variation of sex characteristics, which can also include a chromosomal pairing that isn't XY or XX. Intersex people can also develop genitalia that fits somewhere in between male and female genitalia.

If one wanted to, one could describe intersex people as the third gender. The gender that is neither male, or female, but is either somewhere in between or both. Once upon a time, we used the word hermaphrodite, but this has become stigmatized and can be misleading. As of writing, the preferred term is intersex when referring to humans. For animals, however, the word hermaphrodite is still mostly used.

Because we observe hermaphroditic qualities in animals. Mostly invertebrate such as worms or slugs exhibit hermaphroditic qualities. And there are several species of hermaphroditic animals that reproduce asexually (talk about being told to go f*ck yourself).

I think it's telling how complex gender is since all I've so far done is shown that biological sex is complex and that one can be born perfectly healthy but not perfectly fit any definition of male or female. But biological sex is only part of the equation since one's biological sex can be incongruent with one's gender.

Basically, when your biological sex and your gender identity are incongruent, you would be transgender.

Gender is also more of an umbrella term encompassing one's gender expression and one's gender identity. These two may seem the same but they're fundamentally different concepts.

Gender identity is your own personal experience of gender. Your gender identity can correlate with your biological sex or it can be incongruent. But gender identity is internal. It's how you feel on the inside.

When your gender identity is incongruent with your biological sex, you can sometimes experience what's known as gender dysphoria. While it affects most transgender people, being transgender does not immediately equate to having gender dysphoria. Some transgender folk can live their entire lives without ever feeling it. Gender dysphoria is also much like depression, in that it can be a mood or state of being, but it can also be a diagnosable mental illness.

Gender expression is the final term on the list. This is the one I think people are least familiar with. Gender expression is how we outwardly express our gender. How we physically manifest our inner gender identity. From clothing to pronouns to hair to voice to the way we stand. It's any way we outwardly express what we feel. What we do, how we do it, how we look, and how feminine or masculine we present any part of ourselves.

Your gender expression, however, can run entirely incongruent to your gender identity.

That's an out there concept, isn't it? But think of it this way. Transgender people who are closeted for any reason have to present themselves as cisgender. They have to express themselves in a way that does not correlate with their gender identity, but rather their biological sex. Some may choose to simply not express extreme versions of said gender identity. These would be your demigirls or demiboys. Sometimes you can express an incongruent gender just for the fun of it. We basically built the entire drag subculture around incongruent gender expression.

And if you've made it all the way here, I want to present my case. If your Sex, Gender Identity, and Gender Expression can all be incongruent, then by doing some simple math, we have at least 3 (male, female, other) times 3 (Sex, Identity, Expression) different types of people! 9 different combinations of people! That's weird and cool and great! Humans are diverse things and we can be born with not a goddamn thing wrong with us and come out so different.

Why not express that through our language?

I've avoided using the term Gender Spectrum. The term has a lot of stigma attached, but honestly, it's what describes us. We exist on a spectrum. And no position on it makes you better or worse than anyone else. It just makes you different. And if you were born a boy who identifies as a boy and expresses himself like a boy, like I do, then... Well, I suppose it makes no damn difference, doesn't it? Sure, maybe it might mean someday I'll have to tick a few more boxes while filling out census forms but really, you're unaffected by it.

However, it's life changing for someone else.

Having a set of words to describe your experience is like learning how to spell your own name. For someone, this is a tool to describe their everyday experience, a way to normalize how they feel. That's important.

I think there's sect of people who believe that kids online are making up genders to feel special, usually the same people who use the phrase "I identify as an attack helicopter" because it'll make stranger on the internet laugh or something. And I think it's that kind of person who really needs to ask themselves what would even be so wrong about that?

Making up words for things is how language evolves. A word for where you personally fit into the gender expression that might describe a different experience from someone else is important, because it might also describe the experience of another person. Imagine we got mad at music genres for inventing new subgenres (actually wait, we do do that. Anyone remember when the metal community lost their collective shit over metalcore made by teenagers who stood a little too wide, and then the glorious meme that was crabcore was born into this world?)

We don't lose our minds every time there's a new film genre, or videogame genre, or music genre. Why are we so mad at new people genders?

Either way you slice it, science doesn't support the gender binary, the human experience doesn't support the gender binary and why on earth would you want it to? The weirder and wackier we come out the box, the better. Humans aren't factory assembled, and diversity is great.

So let's all just be excellent to each other, okay?

Here's a great video with Emily who is an intersex person herself.

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Faith.

I am not a man of faith.

The world is built upon arbitrary truths. They are provable, they are tangible, they are usually resolute. For every action, there is a reaction. And while I may not know the first link, I can trace the chain back far enough to come to a satisfactory answer. As I grew into myself I found that the few things that do bring me closer to comfort are that which I can find evidence for.

I do not regret this. It is a part of me that I cherish. An attribute I hold dear. There's enough skeptic in me to ask questions for the sake of discovering the truth.

It has never failed me, except in one occasion;

Faith in myself.

I list my own accomplishments as mediocre. I know what my hands are capable of based on what they have created and accomplished. And while what I have done with my life may seem mediocre to some, I do know my own private victories. But those victories are private. My trophy cases are empty. I did not come from a participation award generation, and I don't know whether or not that's a good thing. All I know is that a person's worth is often measured by what they've achieved. What accolades they've received.

Based on this, it's hard to have faith in myself. I find myself in a loop of attempting to prove myself to me, but in order to know what I am capable of, I look to the evidence of what I've done. My limits scare me. I know the meat suit I pilot well enough to have found where the wires are clipped and which joints need greasing. I understand that the longer I function, the more outdated my hardware becomes. I know how fast I can run a kilometer. I know the highest grade I've achieved on a math test.

Based on what is, it seems that I am not capable of very much.

It's hard for me to take on faith that I am capable of more. There's not much evidence of that. It's a scathing reminder that while a nurturing environment can assist us in achieving our potential, our nature defines our limits. And I fear, that based on current data, I have already reached mine.

Taking on faith that I am capable of more is a tough thing to do.

A lot of people like to throw around quotes about how we're afraid of reaching our potential. And while they make for great graduation speeches, real life proves itself to be a little more complex.

I am glad that life is complex. I am proud of my nature. I simply wish that I was able to have a little more faith in me.

Faith is hard to come by.

I think this is perhaps the only time skeptical thinking has ever been detrimental.

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Two years later; Does my Disdain For Organised Religion Still Hold?

If you've ever been disillusioned from a belief system you were indoctrinated into as a child, it's understandable that you'd bear some animosity towards it.

And when I drew the straw that broke the camel's back I had to watch a part of me crumble into dust without as much as a warning. I was mad. I was mad that I had internalized the teachings into my person that made my life harder, that made me feel feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing that would take years to shake. We'd drifted from different congregations as we moved but the one I remember the most was the NG Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church, I think...? Weird Afrikaans things I never learned the English words for) and the commonalities and differences between it all was part of what eventually drove me away, because Christian teachings are scarily inconsistent across the variant sub-sections.

To top it all off, I was an objectively worse person when I still had held Christian beliefs. There wasn't a lot of wiggle room for me to grow as a person whilst juggling the dilemmas of everyday life alongside the morals and values that had been instilled to me by various mentors, teachers and parent figures growing up.

After it all, I became a rather aggressive atheist. The belief that theistic religion was toxic had enveloped a piece of me with a bitter rage. I still do believe it can be toxic, and I witnessed first hand at what made it toxic, but I've since mellowed.

Then when I did my thirty day blog challenge, I was to write a piece about my thoughts on religion (which is coincidentally the piece that has the most views), I remember revisiting those memories made me even angrier. Fuel to the fire. A reminder.

But the writing helped heal.

And as such, in 2017, as with any beliefs one holds, it's good to review and ruminate on them to see if you've changed.

Don't get me wrong, I still do get angry when I see someone misusing religious authority or citing religious texts as a moral reason for hatred or bigotry instead of using empathy like I know they're capable of.

But if I had to be genuinely honest, I do not harbour the intense hatred I once had for religion. Hating takes energy, These days I'm a permanently exhausted pigeon, and life is short and everyone is going to die and succumb to the sterility of entropy so nothing we do in this life matters and everyone and everything that has ever existed is insignificant.

That is to say, life is too short.

I mention this because I've noticed in harbouring hatred towards organised religion, there's a tendency for atheists to also hate religious people.

And that's something I think is objectively wrong.

A lot of atheists hold inherently Islamophobic views. And while I think neither Islam nor any religion is above criticism or parody, I do think Muslims deserve all the same rights and respect that I'm afforded. That's just how we should treat fellow human beings.

This came up recently with a debate in some Facebook comment thread about whether or not the Hijab is a valid form of female empowerment, to which I replied as thus, and I paraphrase; There's this core tenet of feminism which states that no one gets to police how any woman empowers herself. And while I think it's healthy to criticise any idea, I do think we have to distance criticism from cynicism.

Atheists would take a symbol like the Hijab and invalidate simply on the grounds that it's a religious symbol. And while to me, a piece of cloth is a piece of cloth and I have no desire to show any given cloth much more respect than any mundane cloth would earn, if that specific cloth empowers someone, than it deserves to at least be acknowledged as a symbol of empowerment, even if I would also say that in certain places, making it mandatory does take away from its ability as a symbol of empowerment, such as the case when a chess grandmaster was banned form entering the world championship for refusing to wear the hijab.

I'm still a vocal advocate for freedom from religion and separation of church and state. While I may have become more moderate, I do think such examples are detrimental and worthy of criticism.

However, if I had to answer the question of whether or not I'd press a button that would instantly destroy religion, wipe if from the face of the earth, to be forgotten and never dug up again...

I don't know if I would press it.

Faith in something has given comfort to the dying, the sick, the old. It's saved some people from severe depression. It's formed communities. I'd press a button that made every religion clean up its fucking act and stop active attempts at making the world a worse place. I'd press that button hard.

But I know that faith helps some. It gets some people to sleep at night.

And I'm a firm advocator of having the right to believe in whatever you want. I think everyone believes something that might not be entirely logical or is at least unverifiable. I believe people are at their core are good. I believe that everyone suffers in this life and you're likely going to receive as much harm and hate if not a great deal more than you dish out. I believe everyone deserves a chance at redemption if they are willing to make a conscious effort towards it. I believe death isn't a fitting punishment for any crime.

I fully acknowledge that religious beliefs and faith are not one and the same. Faith can be held in things that aren't religious. Human beings are imperfect and sometimes we just have to go off our gut feelings because we don't have all the information.

I'm not trying to dissuade anyone from believing in what they believe in, truth be told I encourage the diversity of thoughts and positions it may bring. I think life would be a little more boring if we were all the same and I genuinely think that religion has made certain people objectively better and has done them a lot of good. There are plenty of churches that do charity work for their communities and I can't fault that in the slightest. It provides people with social interaction which is a basic human need, and creates a network and support group to fall back on in hard times. Hell, I wish there was a place atheists could meet up and discuss philosophy and philanthropy and socialize instead of the clusterfuck that currently is the YouTube atheist community, I'd love to create or be part of a secular house that has secular equivalents to church bands and youth camps and retreats, not for the theology of it but just the experience of people getting together and exchanging ideas and teaching and supporting each other.

Religion has many practices that were created out of necessity and frankly I wish there was a way to translate some of those practices into society in a secular fashion. LaVeyan Satanism recognized this and incorporated rituals for the psychodrama into their branch of atheism/anti-theism (although this is a topic for another week that I would love to dive into).

But perhaps wishing for all the benefits of organized religion without the drawbacks is wanting to both have my cake and eat it. Maybe there isn't a way and we're all better of just being the secular apes that live and die in the meaningless fashion that nature intended before the universe collapses in on itself. I don't know, I don't have all the answers.

But I just don't have the energy to hate religion anymore. Life is too busy to spend so much time on one thing.

But if there's any takeaway from all this, don't let religion stop your kids from enjoying Harry Potter, that's just a daft practice. Ignorance and bigotry are always inexcusable and that much I do still find a minute in the day to loath.

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