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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And Open Letter To All LGBTQIA+ Family Members; #Pride2017

(source)

Hey, it is June which means Pride month and I just wanted to say Happy Pride to everyone. I've been writing these posts for about two and a half years on and off and it's really weird to think about that. I think if I keep posting at a consistent rate I'll reach my 100th post this year and that'd be really awesome so I seriously hope I manage. Another quick note, the flag above is a cool revision to show that gay pride is intersectional and that we do not exclude people of colour and I really hope it spreads wide and far, perhaps to even go so far as to be adopted as the new Pride flag.. Anyway, it's Pride Month and hence I decided to write an open letter to anyone who happens to be LGBTQIA+ reading this.

Hey. Happy Pride 2017, and may every pride month hereafter be just as happy and blessed and full of rainbows. I want you to know that you might be struggling right now, but that's okay. Whether it's a struggle for acceptance, or representation, or legal recognition, or acknowledgement, your struggles are not in vain. I read something recently that I loved, that goes like this;

This too will pass. It may pass like a kidney stone, but it will pass.

I love that. I love you. I think you're special and wonderful and your queerness is a blessing too good for this world. And if you're a person of colour, you are not worth less and your life matters and your queerness isn't worth less because of the colour of your skin, it's just a little different, and that difference deserves recognition, celebration and protection.

Some places in the world still want to deny our existence, and many folk hate us, and fear us. We scare them because we dare to be different. We dare to shake their faith. We dare to be gay, and bi, and pan, and trans, and ace and everything and anything in between. But we've survived worse. And we'll survive worse yet. Love will win. It always does in the end.

Make your mark on this world despite those who would tell you that you do not have a place in it. You are a child of the universe and you have every right to be here. You are a remarkably wonderful person and I want you to know that you matter. You matter so very, very much.

Be queer unashamedly, because life is too short for anything else. Love passionately, live passionately, and always have pride in who you are. There is nothing wrong with you. You are enough. You are queer enough and you are a person enough and you are perfect just the way you are. A wise man said that in Hogwarts, help will always be given to those in need. And in the LGBTQIA+ family, support will always be given to those in need. You have allies everywhere, and help is near. Don't ever forget that.

And if there is one final thing I can leave you with, wear your queerness on your sleeve. Shout it from the rooftops and have pride in being you, you gorgeous human being. This life is short, and finite, and wasting time listening to hateful rhetoric is not worth yours. Make time for you.  Make time to show your pride.

And know that I am proud to call you part of the LGBTQIA+ family.

Happy Pride everyone.

Love yourself.

-Matt-Dave Stevens

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White Men Using Racial Slurs For Edgy Comedy

Louis CK does a brilliant piece in which he comments on how white commentators get away with saying "nigger" by sort of patronizingly saying "the n-word". I love this bit, but then right after he kind of finds himself guilty of doing the same thing Bill Maher recently did, and that's using a racial slur as the punchline of a joke.

While I personally hold the belief that a word cannot be taboo or censored without it's context, and that unless you're using a racial slur as an offensive and derogatory term for a person of a particular ethnic group, you should not lose your job or face extremely harsh penalties, doesn't mean I'm particularly comfortable when white men use racial slurs for comedic effect. Let's be honest, Bill Maher and Louis CK are comedians by trade, they're entertainers, they get paid for what they do or say. By using racial slurs as punchlines, they are making off using racial slurs for laughs. Words that have history among people of colour are trivialized and then normalized, and of course this is to say the very least ethically dubious as well as morally questionable. I mean, if straight people using gay as a synonym for shitty bothers you, white comedians using nigger as a punchline should similarly bother you.

The truth is, that same joke could probably have worked just as well without resorting to a racial slur.

In Bill Maher's case, he made a joke saying that, in response to a joking job offer by a senator to "come work in the fields", Bill was more of a "house nigger".

Bill Maher could have said "house elf" and gotten away with not only a clever Harry Potter reference but also said the same thing and not have put his job and reputation on the line, so at the very least the word's use should be more carefully considered. Bill Maher especially didn't in that moment understand the gall and presumption it took for him as an white celebrity to compare himself to a black slave but you don't need to look far to figure that Bill Maher and Louis CK aren't people with explicit racial prejudices, and the use of these may arise from a more minor character flaw of being blunt and or brash rather than any major racial prejudices.

The concerning thing is when they do it, because they're such high profile figures, there's this message that goes to other comedians that may enable them to use racial slurs in similar ways.

The essence of it all I think comes back to that white men have a privilege black men and other people of colour don't, where they can use racial slurs without having it be something that's ever been used against them. I think because comedians in particular have to be pretty thick skinned because of hecklers, they don't necessarily understand the emotional blow they deal to the everyday person of colour by so frivolously using a racial slur in that manner.

It's unfortunately just something everyone in the world has to learn, and that's just how to be empathetic.

Bill Maher misspoke, and it was pretty bad. But he's not the only one to have done it. And I think he'll likely not come off with as heavy a penalty as he could if he held more republican views, we'd probably campaign harder for his removal from the air and he'd likely have been fired on the spot.

But we're willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, and I think that's a good thing. I'd actually argue that we should do that if a similar situation occurred to anyone else regardless of their political views.

I think we're at a point in time where we know that using a racial slur as a racial slur is a pretty awful and unacceptable thing to do. I'm not saying that we can never make a joke using the word nigger because then half my favourite comedians would have to half their sets. I do hope we can get to the point where we at least stop using racial slurs to get laughs when we don't have any right to use them.

But if you really need to use the word nigger, there are at least a couple creative solutions out there.

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Tragic Backstories; How To Do Them Right

When I think of the many sobstories of characters throughout various media that have never really managed to grab me to the point where my only thought is "tragic backstory is tragic", I started noticing patterns. A lot of stories rely on the punch of a character's history.  And if that history doesn't grab you or is just a little too melodramatic, well, then you're going to watch an supposedly sad scene in the same headspace you'd watch a weather report. Anime recently has been especially guilty of this, and Steven Universe has been a breath of fresh air with how real and developed its characters are.

So what makes an effective tragic backstory? Here's eight things in no particular order that I think you should keep in mind. Also, I don't really have a target platform in mind, but this can be adapted for video game narratives, novels, short stories, screenwriting etc etc. I'll keep the advice general and only get into specifics when necessary.

1. The characterization

No likes a Mary Sue. I also hate the term Mary Sue because it's now been co-opted to mean any female character in any media who doesn't follow traditional tropes, buuuuut that's an issue for another day.

But anyway, perfect people are boring. Flaws make your character interesting. Their own self-interest, their fears, their weaknesses. And I mean real weaknesses, not caring too much or being too heroic. I mean like real, observable flaws. Racial prejudices. Homophobia. Quick tempers. Stinginess. Spitefulness. Arrogance. Carelessness. Misogyny. Misandry. Hypochondria. Naïvety. Mistrust. Jealousy. Ignorance. Rage. Alcoholism. Drug addiction. Abandonment issues. Immaturity. Possessiveness. Stubbornness.

A character is not the events that happen to them, but their actions and reactions. Their growth and regression. And you're going to make a character a lot more relatable if the bad things that happen to them are their own fault. If it stems from their own character flaw. That really hurts.

But overall, a well constructed character always evokes more emotion than a poorly constructed one. Your reader/viewer/player doesn't need to particularly like the character, they just need to care about what happens to them.

2. Don't be overly tragic

An audience can easily feel a disconnect when something is a little too melodramatic. If her mum and her dad and her sister and her dog and her goldfish died, it becomes comedy without being comedic. That's not to say you can't still play up tragedy, but less is more. It's why you cry at the end of a movie where the dog dies but you cannot find a fuck to give when Thomas and Martha Wayne die (again). Less is more. Sometimes the mundane, inevitable sad things are what get to us the most. Think about all the silly normal, every day things that are so freaking sad but we always rely on the same few tropes. Let me just list some for you. People dying of old age, or disease. Hearing mom's voice for the first time, because you never got to meet her. Getting dad's approval for the first time ever. After a lifetime of being told you're worthless, being told that you're special and wonderful. Never getting to tell your son you accept him and that his sexuality doesn't matter. Not getting to hear her voice one last time before she goes. Not getting to say goodbye. Getting at the airport too late. Trying to get her back, but seeing her happy through her window. Watching everyone drift apart slowly. Realizing that the person who meant everything, is now a stranger. Falling out of love with someone for no reason. Losing the child, after trying so hard to getting one. Explaining to your daughter what happened to her sister. Finding out he was going to kill himself, but had no one else to come to but you. Everybody holding hands and taking comfort in the fact that no one is dying alone. Finding him crying uncontrollably, because his wires are tangled and all he wants is for the noise to stop. Being pathetic in front of someone who continually hurt you. Always being told you're stupid, but then having someone tell you your ideas are valid. Knowing that it could have been forever, if you'd just held on a little longer. Finding out it never could have been, because you loved her more than she loved you. Allowing fear to take your dream from you. All your friends knowing you've got severe manic-depression and them just sitting with you, acknowledging your sadness, just quietly supporting. Feeling human warmth for the first time in years. Falling in love with someone, but then realizing you'll never ever have a chance. Unreciprocated love. Never getting that human warmth you crave. Never being acknowledged despite trying your very hardest. Being unable to overcome shame about your own body. Being told your body is perfect for the first time.

Sadness isn't always bad. Remember that it can't always be bitter. Sometimes it's bittersweet. And one of the most emotional scenes you can write is going to be one that ends on a good note. And if it rings home, if it's something that you yourself experienced, it's always going to be more impactful.

Think of Up. That film starts with one of the saddest montage of two people who just... Live. They live their entire lives pretty well, they have hopes and dreams and grow old. Technically, they win. But it's pretty unbearably sad, isn't it? How about Bridge To Teribithia? How about those feels? *spoiler alert* All of that emotional weight happens because of a swinging rope accident. How much did you feel that? And it happens off screen. *spoilers end*.

3. Catharsis and levity; You have to know when to push, when to pull, and when to just be

After a tragic event, you can always squeeze out a bit more emotion. Have your character experience something good, something that allows them to be vulnerable again. Take them to the top of a hill after the funeral, and let them see a beautiful sunset. Let them contemplate how much their loved one would have appreciated. After a massive failure in romance, let them experience paternal or platonic love. You have no idea how impactful seeing someone win can be after a huge loss.

And while this bit applies to film, sometimes silence is the most effective tool.

4. Fake-outs; Used Sparingly, they can just nail you right in the gut

Sometimes when it turns out he's alive at the end, that he did make it out, that makes you appreciate it all him all the more.

But other times, it sets up false expectations.

The Vampire Diaries is particularly guilty of this. By the end of it's final season, death meant nothing. And when a perma-death actually occurs, it has no punch. Nothing. The imagery on the screen is bleak, but you're fucking annoyed. Maybe you really liked that character.

Just remember that after the umpteenth time, it stops working. So use very sparingly. After a string of deaths, have one fake-out. Show that someone makes it out alive.

Sometimes, having a fake-out but then immediately turning that fake-out around your character can also work. It's the man who needs to deliver a letter but doesn't have a stamp, who then finds one at the post-box, but realizes it's the wrong day, and it's far too late for his letter to ever arrive on time.

Just be sparing. It's far to easy for the audience to peek behind the curtain these days, and they'll know if you're doing anything for reasons that don't serve the story, ie. pressure from publisher to establish a franchise, etc.

5. Beware plot-armour

Game Of Thrones saw itself being successful because no one is protected from death or tragedy by mere virtue of being vital to the plot. Anyone can die, anyone is fair game. When you have a set cast of main characters that always make it out of scrapes, you're going to take a lot of emotional punches out because the viewer knows they're going to live in the end, otherwise the continuity will be broken. Like Harry Potter in The Deathly Hallows, you knew he wasn't going to die because, well, he's Harry Potter. Sure, this can be avoided, look at The Great Gatsby (but Nick in this case can now never be put in mortal danger because who tells the story if he dies? Then again... That'd be hella interesting.)

Beware of plot-armour, because it creates predictability. And predictability can work against your audience's engagement.

6. Use vulnerability

I love it when expressively unemotive or stoic characters drop their guard. Blindside your reader. People who are characteristically unfeeling or just always happy letting their defenses slip just the tiniest bit, that's always riveting. But beyond that, every character has a state they don't want to be seen in. Everyone scream-cries. Sometimes you do something pathetic, or futile. It's when they keep trying CPR but it just doesn't work. It's the forth press of the defibrillator long after the pulse died.

And this is where your perspective can come in handy. Novels written in the first person can experience these events as an outsider. They don't necessarily have to happen to the main character. The omnipresent third person narrator can also describe things that might be awkward to fit into the inner monologue of the first person narrator. But first person narrators can also describe events personally, things that are happening or have happened to them, and this can make your reader really feel it. So keep that in mind when deciding how to tell your story.

7. One tragic backstory does not fit all

Personalize your character's history. Dead parents don't fit everyone. Everyone now has dead parents. And for the love of god, rape is not an acceptable tool for drama. Rape for the sake of tragedy is tried and a little offensive actually. Rape for shock value is also not acceptable, as writers we have to do better. I remember making this mistake and learning the hard way. Sexual assault needs to be approached with tact and nuance and it is so very easy to butcher so please, please, please, thinking it over several times before you use it.

Also, things other than death is sad. I remember watching Re:Zero and getting so annoyed by Rem's backstory. It was over the top and overly tragic and it was sad to the point of comedy, but I'd already seen it before. Be careful of repeating tropes of the past, and just because something worked then does not mean it will work now.

Things we don't explore often enough are issues of mental health. We're good at covering depression, but seem to lose a lot of our nuance when speaking about anxiety. Humans are anxious creatures. And for some of us, it can be crippling. When your wires are tangled and everyone else seems to have them connect right, that's an awful feeling. We definitely need to talk about that more.

We also don't talk enough about disability. Losing a sense, or the ability to walk is something that can happen to anyone, and we often take it for granted. Being born with a disability can also make for a very interesting character, and it's relatively unexplored territory lost among the piles of white male protagonists of first time novelists.

8. Through the eyes of a child

Everything becomes decidedly more bleak when you look at it through the eyes of a child. It's like experiencing these things for the first time. It's sometimes even mimics our own experience. Use this! You'd be surprised at how much of the cruelty of society you can reveal when it comes through the eyes of a child. Death isn't just death, it's now the sudden realization of your own mortality. Divorce isn't just divorce, it's the sudden realization that people who love each other very much still can't make it work, despite trying their very best. Losing a friend is like the first time you've ever lost a friend. Now it's not just any dog that dies; it's your first dog. The one you had as a kid.

Our childhood memories are powerful, and we can use them to evoke real emotion.

I don't know if this list is all encompassing but I hope it helps. Far too often we see poorly constructed backstories that just don't hit their mark, and are small blemishes on what would be otherwise great works. Do it right, and you might even be able to repeat those emotions on subsequent reads, or playthroughs, or watches.

I think we just have the ability to make people feel through our respective arts, and pushing that emotional connection to it's limit sometimes makes all the difference.

But either way, happy writing.

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Iron Fist; What works, and what doesn't

Stop me if you've heard this one before; A rich white guy gets stuck somewhere remote and comes back with scruff on his face and martial arts expertise.

I remember watching Arrow for the first time. It was a breathe of fresh air, this new grittiness. It was grounded. From the first episode, I was in love. Episode after episode, this felt mature. It felt like something unmissable.

It just made it all the more disappointing when after watching the first episode of Iron Fist, I knew I'd just seen all this before, and I've seen it done much better.

This isn't some juvenile Marvel versus DC debate, and while I revel in drunken arguments about which of the two is better, the issue isn't about the respective houses that owns the titans being spoken of here. The issue is simply that Iron Fist has a lot to work with, but somehow comes off as entirely derivative.

In fact, you aren't just getting a shitty version of Arrow here. Episode 2 delivers a scene in a mental hospital that Legion's first episode knocked out of the park.

And after that, a fight with some hatchet wielding henchmen tries to bring the show back to its martial arts roots, but all I could think was that at this point in its runtime, Daredevil had done a continuous take fight scene down a hallway choreographed to perfection that was a feat of cinematographic excellence that comes so rarely it'd be a crime to miss out on it. It was unmissable. Daredevil had already done Rabbit In A Snowstorm, which is probably the best episode of anything ever made, dwarfed perhaps only by Jon Snow's siege upon Ramsay Bolton.

There's another moment where Danny breaks into Joy's apartment and I wanted to be impressed by the clearly CG'd feat of jumping off the tip of a pole onto a second story balcony, but then I remember in Arrow's first season, episode 3, there's a segment where Oli climbs up a wall to dig out a bullet. Stephen Amell doing that physical stuntwork was a beyond entertaining to watch. Danny's balcony scene is... Meh.

And I think that's what Iron Fist comes down to. You've seen it all before, hell, you've seen better in other Netflix series. There's more corporate restructuring and legal banter than any Iron Fisting. As comically laughable as the hatchet henchmen were, at least there was finally some fighting. Iron Fist isn't innovative, or new, but that could have been overlooked if it weren't so damn boring.

The score of Iron Fist isn't anything worth writing home about either. I can't say much about it other than that these cheesy hip hop songs almost make me believe I'm watching something way more interesting than I actually am. There's a bit where a guy murders a whole bunch of people to A-ha's Take On Me and he stops singing just before that falsetto part and I couldn't help but think to myself how if I was a mass murderer singing Take On Me, I'd delay my killing to hit the high notes. At this point I was skim watching, trying to find something to care about.

Finn Jones also has some rather unflattering deliveries. His performance as Loras Tyrell was perfectly passable, hell it was some of my favourite parts of Game Of Thrones, so I'm struggling to understand why his lines come off so awkward. Perhaps it's the accent his forcing, or some bad direction but it just starts to grate after a while.

The thing that works the most against Finn as Danny I think the show makes is just how goddamn interesting Colleen Wing is. She's awesome. I mean, she's stupidly awesome. Every time she's on screen I change my opinion of the entire show. She outshines Danny in every way, despite not having a magic hand that can blow up steel doors and stuff. And when we cut form her scenes, I feel genuine sadness knowing I'm going to have to watch either more corporate dicking about, or Danny trying and failing to woo Joy. Jessica Henwick just gives a stellar performance, and a part of me says fucking fire Iron Fist from the Defenders and add Colleen Wing. If Daredevil can join, so can she, and let's be honest here, this version of Danny's a bit of a wet blanket.

As for the "whitewashing" controversy that followed Iron Fist... Well, that takes a bit of dissecting. Iron Fist isn't as guilty of white-washing as it is of the white savior trope. Danny Reed has always been  a white man. And if you need a strong case for why diversifying white roles can work well and add much needed subtext, remember that The Martian Manhunter's alter ego, John Jones, was white in the silver age, but the now definitive version of his alter ego is a black man.


 And while an Asian American actor could have brought a fresh perspective on the role. I doubt Iron Fist would have much benefited from it, knowing what a snorefest the series is.

Netflix also needs to figure out how to do crossovers. As of yet, Luke Cage and Jessica Jones are the only two Defenders to have even met. Hell, CW has three ex-Glee stars in Vancouver at the same time and they'll use that paperthin excuse to have a musical crossover! As interesting and fun as Claire and Jeri are, neither are half as interesting or as fun as seeing main characters interact. Okay, well Claire has some awesome lines. And so does Jeri. They're background characters of other shows and they're both still more interesting than Danny, how?!

Tom Pelphrey does his very best Michael Shannon impression as Ward Meachum, and I don't hate it, but it does make me wish Michael Shannon was actually in the show. Overall, I actually like Tom as Ward a lot. His performance is at least pretty captivating, and if he ever wants to audition for Mad Men or Boardwalk Empire, he most certainly could.

Joy is love interest. I couldn't really find anything interesting to say about her other than that she mostly reacts the appropriate way to a strange homeless man coming into her life and claiming to be her dead childhood friend.

Even the opening sequence is uninspired, and unlike Jessica Jones' cool 1920s detective theme song, or Daredevil's operatic theme over a bust forming from blood, you could swop out the intro sequence of The Last Airbender (I have to much respect for the original Nicktoons show do drag it into this) and nothing would change, it's just a dude waving limbs about for a minute or so!

Overall, there isn't nearly enough martial arts, mystical fisticuffs or even old fashion street brawls to warrant this show a watch. It's derivative and somehow a fresh flavour of crap at the same time. If you ask me, you can give Iron Fist and Iron Miss.

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Riverdale; The State Of Things Midseason

I have mixed opinions about this show. I don't want to outright admit it's bad, because it's really not, but it's hard to call it good.

I'm not some Archie Comics uberfan, but as a kid I remember buying the digests from CNA for about R30, which was usually the change I had left over after I bought my Asterix and Obelix comics. I still have a bunch of Archies laying around the house with torn pages from how much I read them. They made me laugh as a kid, and still do. Maybe they weren't deep, or extensive by any means, but they were mine and helped make me the person I am today. And I think that anything that can make a kid who moved around a lot and generally was too shy or didn't stay long enough in one place to make friends laugh is a pretty decent thing and needs no justification of its existence.

I was kind of psyched that CW would be on the show. And when I heard it was being produced by Greg Berlanti, I think I genuinely shed a tear. I love his Arrowverse shows. So when Riverdale caught onto my screen and I finally started watching it, oh boy, were there problems.

Let's talk about them.


While CW does a great job in diversifying the cast, they butcher a lot of characters in the process. I like the the main cast isn't just all white anymore, I think the Archie comics did have an issue there. But I think the Archie comics never had any problem with characterization. You knew from the moment you looked at Archie he was your all-American heart-throb who could be a total klutz and kind of a lady killer, but he had a heart of gold. Betty was the archetypal girl next door, and Veronica was the new stuck up rich kid on the block that you eventually found yourself liking. Reggie was the jerk and competition for Veronica's affections but he was always good for a laugh, Jughead was the unwilling sidekick who would relunctantly offer moral support Weatherbee was the goofy old principle who found himself at the mercy of his student's antics, and Ms Grundy was Professor Mcgonagall.

If you see bare watermarks of those strong characters in the show, you might understand the frustration at the way CW and Berlanti have modernised the show. Furthermore, they removed Grundy entirely. Well, they did and they didn't. They backtracked on Grundy later, because bad ideas are bad. Spoiler alert, Grundy is actually not actual Grundy but someone with the name Ms Grundy who actually has a different name and is someone else. I still wasn't happy, because imagine Harry Potter without Minerva Mcgonagall.
I started liking Riverdale a lot more as soon as not-Grundy left. I think there's a lot more draw in the relationship between Jughead and his dad and between the kids and their parents' drama. When I look back and think about the shows I liked when I was sixteen, Glee comes to mind, and that hyperactive pacing, bright colours, memorable cast are missing from Riverdale.Swap out Finn for Archie, Rachael for Betty and Quinn for Veronica and Glee would have made a better Archie adaptation than Riverdale.
Chuck is turned into a genuine evil person. Sure, chuck wasn't much to write home about, but he was one of the few black characters in the Archie comics and it made me feel a little mad. Betty is also sociopathic, Jughead is broody and 3edgy5me with a constant grimace and the disposition of the type of teenager who enjoyed Edgar Allen Poe a little too much, spouting nihilism and bleak one liners ad-nauseam. Jughead's crown was also changed, and this is for me one of the more heartbreaking ones. I own the double digest that shows how Jughead's crown is actually a cut up fedora with buttons pinning the brim to the top, and it was a unique and interest piece of backstory. The cut up beanie might look a little more relatable, but it's a lot less timeless, I'll say that.

Jughead was also made asexual in recent canon, and well... For all the diversity issues CW fixed, they broke one by making an ace no longer ace. Asexuals are underrepresented in media as is, and as a bisexual who constantly has to deal with bi-erasure, that sucked hard find out.

I personally never much cared for Archie being a klutz, from YA novels to teen dramas, there's enough protagonists who trip over flat ground to get me to roll my eyes for most of it. I'll admit that, at least in Archie's case, it did make him more endearing as a kid, my favourite being how he kept walking into things as he tried to catch snowflakes on his tongue. He later tries to solve this by taping a message to his head to remind him not to catch snowflakes with his tongue, but then walks into a lamp post because he was too busy paying attention to his own reminder.

Archie now is kind of bland.

He's innoffensive for the most part, but there's a reason it's called Riverdale and not Archie; The TV Show.

Oh boy, and let's not forget that queer bait moment with Betty and Veronica at the cheerleading try-outs, what the actual fuck was that about?

The problem with Riverdale is the same problem I had with The Vampire Diaries when it first aired, and that's for the first 8 episodes or so, the show doesn't know what to do with itself. There's a lot of time spent finding it's feet and at the midseason point, it finally has, but the road getting here has been a garbage fire. And like many hard-boiled adaptations, Archie finds itself missing something super vital from its source material.

Whimsy.

You know, like, being playful and unashamedly cliché, being bright and fun and silly.

Kinda like Glee was.

I miss Glee, I really do. And Riverdale makes me miss Glee more. I look at Riverdale and miss Ryan Murphy's hyperactive style. I miss those lightning fast deliveries and lightning fast cuts, with those sugary sweet moments that made me cry. Glee gave me the "coming out" talk I never got from my parents. Glee introduced me to more genres of music than I can count. Glee also was just so epic, even to this day.

And despite having a Glee crossover in the comics, Riverdale decided to take no influences from the show other than musical set-pieces.

There's a good show under all this. There are moments of pure gold in there tucked between the vacuous crap that only the die-hard CW fans and teen drama lovers are going to get to see.

Riverdale is at best the modern take on Archie you didn't really ask for, and at worse, a show that butchers a lot of its source material as well as themes that its network is known for being great at tackling, whilst being at the Pretty Little Liars end of the quality spectrum, if even that.

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Screen Crunch; A Handful Of Problems

When porting games onto a handheld, or even sometimes when designing graphics without proper communication with the programming team, a fun little thing happens where a game can literally be made too large for the screen it's going to be played on. We've all been there, we've all felt the icy sting of being hit by enemies and obstacles you can't even see;

The magic of Screen Crunch.

Now I thought this might be only be an issue affecting handhelds and retro games, but hey, it happened a whole bunch in the life cycle of the PS2 and sometimes it even happens on modern consoles.

Usually screen crunch happens when a game made for a system intended to be played on a large screen is ported to a system with a much smaller screen, and thereby "crunches" the player's field of view. Less often, graphical assets are made too large for the available on screen pixels, and thereby making less screen visible. To illustrate, here's Sonic The Hedgehog on the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive versus Sonic The Hedgehog on the Game Boy Advance.

And here's Sigma Star Saga for the GBA, a game with sprites wayyyyy too big for the GBA's screen.

This immediately adds a layer of artificial difficulty, since the player has to now react to objects they can't even see. In some games it's worse than others, ie. turn-based RPGs aren't going to show the same difficulty spike due to screen crunch as an action platformer.

The easiest way around this is to, of course, design smaller assets, and adjust physics accordingly.

The unfortunate downside is that smaller sprites don't often sell games.

Graphical fidelity is a marketing moneyshot that the publishing industry has to rely on to push products. After all, you can't physically play a game trailer, you can only look at it, and if it doesn't look good, it won't sell. I think gamers have unfortunately adopted the mentality of appreciating graphical fidelity over visual aesthetic.

But that has changed! Look at indie metroidvania game Axiom Verge, which make excellent use of HD screen space and sizes down the sprites, while upping the mechanic prowess of it's protagonist.

Yes, that little speck of  a person is you. And the advantages of this is that you *always* know when an enemy or obstacle is incoming and you.

I think this is something to always keep in mind. And while graphical fidelity is always nice, it should never come at the expense of your game's mechanics. And while it's easier to simply aim for higher resolutions and absurd amounts of anti-alias and millions of on-screen particles and polygon counts that you need a calculator to reach, sometimes you can achieve the same level of engagement by simply using a better colour palette, more striking character designs and some thought through world-building.

Visual aesthetic is going to always trump graphical fidelity. It's basically the entire selling point of Nintendo games, they sell consoles with last generation hardware but make characters and games so iconic that they can compete with modern triple A titles. Case in point, Super Mario 3D World on the Wii-U is much less graphically intensive than The Witcher 3, but the two reached nearly the same level of critical acclaim (SM3DW reaching scores of 9 to 9.6, with the Witcher 3 reaching scores of 9.3 to 10).

That's right, PC gamers, a Wii-U game reached the same level of greatness as one of the juggernaut games on the personal computer, and did it while wearing a furry cat costume.

So when designing your own games, just remember, you don't need to be a graphical juggernaut. You don't need assets that take up that much screen space. Just make a good game and give it its own flavour and quirk. Visual Aesthetic sells just as well as graphical fidelity.

And above all, let us poor gamers see the fucking bottomless pit coming.

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#MenAreTrash; A few thoughts

A new thing has been popping up on my social media feed, which is a collection of anecdotes, counter-culture statements, statistics and reactionary statements attached to the tag #menaretrash.

The air is poisoned, the ice caps are melting, and men are trash. Probably unsavoury, but in the general sense, it's true. Some are going to argue about it, and it's going to be mostly pointless because the arguing usually doesn't accomplish anything. If we all dropped everything and combined our human intellect and resources for a day, we could probably solve it all. But then we'd  all have to take a day out of our lives, and we only get so many of those.

My first thought was, well ,yes, I suppose, men have historically oppressed women, been violent towards women, subjugated women, sexually assaulted women, hell, men have done all of the above to other men for not being "manly" enough. You could swop out trash for any number of adjectives, including but not exclusive to garbage, shitty, genocidal, misogynistic, toxic, oppressive, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and in the most general sense it will ring true. Hell, you don't have to look far, there are parts of the world where women aren't allowed to drive, study, organize, choose who they eventually marry, show any parts of their bodies among other things. In the western world there's a gigantic debate about whether a woman is even allowed to make a choice about a fetus growing inside her. Men are literally bothered with the physical insides of a woman they can't see and subsequently try making laws to control those bits because God forbid women make their own choices.

In all this it did strike me to wonder if this will accomplish anything. The feminist side of me is revelling at all the butthurt manbabies with hurt emotions because a bunch of strangers on the internet called them a bad thing, and some of their friends kind of agree. The skeptic side of me did start to wonder if this isn't an exercise in futility. After all, it's hard to imagine this having any longevity apart from the initial traction it's already gained.

While I've read some genuinely rock-solid points in not only defense for the tag and it's users but definite reasons to support it, I've also read a bunch of defenses which can ultimately be summed up as "because you don't think men are trash, maybe you are trash". Sure, it's a clever way to put down a detractor and there are plenty people I don't want to debate the issue with because, let's face it, the ratio of people with something genuinely interesting to say on the matter versus special snowflakes who've never been insulted in their lives is disproportionate and well, at some point I have to get back to scrolling through memes and geeking out over stupid 90s videogames. But there is a culture of dismissiveness. They disagree, so they must be mostly conservative, which means the eventual argument that's going to break out from this will mostly be a waste of time. I'm not going to ask anyone to listen to every argumentative ass-whistle, because most of it is a steaming pile of crap. But there are valid criticisms. And you are going to run into one, eventually. And you're not going to want to, but I urge you to consider for a moment pushing aside doubts and trying to listen.

Another weird thing I've noticed happening is the defenders of the tag trying to almost deny detractors the right to criticism. And I'm not going to give any detractors credit here, as of yet the most nuanced thing anyone has managed to say is that generalizing is generally bad and calling half the people on the planet garbage is probably not the best way to get them on your side. Sometimes detractors devolve into criticisms of the far left, which is weird because it's not the far left that's saying this, it's actually normal women noticing terrible things and vocalizing an observation they've made. Your beef isn't with those darn leftists and their little feminist clubs, and it might feel that way because it is people with generally left-leaning political views propagating the tag, but just listen. You're going to have to tell real women who've been through real trauma why you think they're invalid for vocalizing an observation about their every day experience. And yes, perhaps the nomenclature is objectionable and you're perfectly entitled to that opinion, hell, it's a rather popular and valid opinion, you also have to try put aside your own personal objections and try understand why this isn't a viewed as a put-down on men and as a statement about everyday womanhood in South Africa.

If nothing else, it's a pretty interesting social experiment. The amount of men responding to #menaretrash by actively proving how trash men can be is astounding, like watching a bee repeatedly fly into a window. Furthermore, let's be real, we tolerate and even glorify song lyrics, television and media that actively call women bitches and hoes, but when men get called trash, we react like a bunch of precious snowflakes who've never been insulted in our lives. It's a little eye-opening, if nothing else.

Look, I'm not saying to not be critical of it, because let's face it, there is going to widespread use of this to backhandedly talk down to almost literally half the planet and you know what, yeah, that's a shitty way to do anything. No one wants to be scrolling down their feed on some idle Tuesday and be told their entire gender is trash, regardless of how well-intended it may be. I also don't know if I feel great about people putting the tweets on shirts and making money off them. I get it, bills to pay, capitalist economy, free market, if you're good at something don't do it for free. I don't care about what people wear on a shirt, wear what you want, none of us are going to escape the degradation of entropy anyway. But if it doesn't rub you a little wrong that the people making these shirts don't care about the message behind it and just want to make a quick buck off a social media trend, you're a more sensible person than I am.

I do think that if women can go through their entire lives being referred to by gender specific slurs, even when those don't apply to them (ie, being called a slut for wearing skimpy clothes despite not being especially sexually active, and this is of course not avocation to call a woman anything but her name) us dudes can take one for the team and deal with women calling us trash, even if we don't deserve it. If only to get one man to open his eyes and say, huh, so this is what women go through.

But all in all, the air is poisoned, the ice caps are melting, and men are trash.

Sure, the both the aforementioned and the responses to them ring true. Not all the air is poisoned, not all the ice is melting, not all men are trash. But despite repeatedly saying that a stupidly large amount of air is poisoned, a stupidly large amount of ice is melting, a stupidly large amount of men are trash, it's not like a lot of people give a fuck about poisoned air or melting ice caps if it's not happening right in front of them. Life is full of little worries. People have jobs to get up for in the morning, debt to pay off, taxes to do, groceries to buy, existential dread to keep at bay. If it's not my air that's poisoned, if it's not my ice that's melting, why should I give a fuck, and who are you to tell me that I'm a bad person for caring about my own issues over the issues of others?

Naturally this logic is a little flawed, because these issues affect everyone.

But getting people to care about the issues that don't directly impact them is hard. It's really fucking hard, trust me. And if you're saying you've never avoided or put down a good cause just because it was inconvenient at that point in time, you're lying. Hell, I'd wager as to say you probably do it on a regular basis. We've got limited time, we've got limited resources and honestly, limited fucks to give. And yeah, we've all at some point gotten made because someone called us out on it, and it does feel like bullshit because most of us are generally not bad even if we could be better. Sure, it's probably wrong of us to get mad and it probably isn't bullshit, but that's how it feels because life is hard and fuck it, we've got to keep ourselves entertained before we all fuckin die and our existence just ends and the more time spend getting called out is the more time that could have been used laughing at tasteful memes.

Maybe we won't ever understand each other, and me pretentiously trying to hold a higher ground while deriding both sides is just an attempt to feel better than everyone else and bolster my own ego. But truth is that the air is actually polluted, the ice caps are actually melting, and men are actually kinda trash. Not all air, not all ice, not all men. But too much air, too much ice, too many men.

And we're all going to get to that age where we're going to have to leave a legacy, plant trees we'll never sit under, fuckin leave something for our idiot great grandchildren we'll never meet. We probably don't want to leave them unbreathable air, melted ice caps and trashy men.

I don't wanna leave my great grandkids trashy men.

So I guess I'm just asking, hey, guys, going forward, can we try not be trash? If nothing else, can we stop sending unsolicited dick pics?

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Ghost In The Shell (2017); A Post-Mortem

Warning: [Beware of a few major spoilers for the 2017 live action film adaptation of Ghost In The Shell]

After having decided to watch Ghost in The Shell (2017), I can honestly say that I had mixed feelings. The more time I spent with Scarlett Johansson, the more uncomfortable I became with her as a protagonist. It wasn't abundantly clear why. She was alright, she could be a little stiff at times, and some lines were delivered a little awkwardly but overall her performance was inoffensive. I could even tune out and enjoy her stoic portrayal of The Major.

When the twist at the end arrived, it hit me hard. It was problematic. Here's why;

1. There was an Asian-American actress cast as The Major, buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuutttt...

So [Spoiler Warning] in the end it turns out Motoko is a runaway girl captured by Hanka Robotics and turned into a cyborg after rebelling against society... Or something. I'm unsure if my memory is foggy or if it just wasn't clearly explained but hey, her name is Motoko, and she is Asian.

Too bad she gets twelve seconds on screen.

I admit, I got angry. I was like, wow, that was just condescending. The studio went through the trouble of casting an Asian-American actress but couldn't be bothered to actually give her the lead role. I could practically hear the snide remark of some studio exec saying "See, we did cast an Asian-American as Motoko! We've got no racial prejudices!"

I had to look up Kaori Yamamoto, who plays the younger Motoko.

2. There's literally no reason for Motoko to be white.

There could have been. There could have been. I'm serious, there was a way to make this film show an active awareness for white normativity and add a layer of depth to the film that would have made this a breakthrough title that played entirely to the strengths of a caucasian lead.

All they had to do was say why Motoko's cyborg body was white.

And not subtextually, not in a throwaway line (if there even was a throwaway line, I definitely missed it) all they had to do was explain that Motoko was white because she was made to resemble a standard of beauty at the time, and that even in a dystopic future, society still views caucasian features as superior to that of people of colour.

Have her look at some mannequins in a store, or an ad on television, or something. Show Motoko that her face is an ever-present, an unobtainable ideal. Something. Anything. Instead, Motoko's cyborg body is white because Motoko's cyborg body is white. It could have been asian, or black, or indian and with the sound reasoning of there being no reasoning, no difference would have been made.

I get that studios are afraid of displaying to much left-leaning politics since it might alienate a part of the audience. But if you don't want to alienate the left as well as your core audience, don't make mediocre whitewashed adaptations of anime.

3. Problematic queer subtext

There's a moment where Motoko finds a sex worker on the street and they sit in a secluded room, and Motoko feels the sex worker's face. Motoko does this because she pangs for the feeling of organic skin and wonders what a human body feels like. The end result is that there's some rather heavy sexual tension. Which then makes you question Motoko's sexuality, and any hopes of queerness is bashed by the heteronormativity of her relationship with Kuze who is then revealed to be Hideo, Motoko's love interest fomr before she was taken.

Good old fashion queer bait strikes its head again.

Overall it's damn frustrating because there are parts of the film I really liked! The scenery was gorgeous, and I love Michael Carmen Pitt (although I still think there are plenty of Asian American actors who could also have gotten the role and done just as good a job). The Geisha automatons were creepy and spectacular. The film's fight choreography and stunts weren't much to write home about but they were entertaining. Some scenes were lifted right out of the original anime film and several shot by shot comparisons reveal how faithful this film was.

I've heard tell that a lot of the subtext is missing, and while I can't confirm that, I do feel like the film was a little thin with it's existential questioning but that's hardly it's most egregious offense.

Which means, with the way that this film flopped on opening weekend and the unfortunate casting of Death Note (My eyes roll into the back of my skull just thinking about the name 'Light Turner', ugh), this means that while GitS was, if taken without the aforementioned issues, an inoffensive adaptation, it wasn't great. It wasn't stellar. I don't even know if I could stretch it as far as good. It was passable. It did a couple things very right, but it did some Major (hah!) things very wrong.

And that unfortunately means it's still going to be a long ass time before Hollywood gets anime right.

Here's a great think piece from PBS Ideas Channel, check it out.

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