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[sscolariwords]

Fire and Metal

Shepard's been spending a lot of time in Mordin's lab as of late. EDI put it to an analytical metric, informing Joker and Garrus that approximately thirty-one percent of her waking activity was spent in there. Considering she's consistently been up for thirty eight hours at a time, interspersed by periods of rest that haven't yet exceeded two hours, it's long periods of time. The doctor had joked that the Commander had obviously taken a sexual interest in him, which he unfortunately could not reciprocate given his disdain for alcohol and mood music. Grunt and Zaeed had found that hilarious, and even Jacob had cracked a rare smile.

Garrus, however, is not so amused, in no small part due to the fact that he knows that Mordin's been continuously operating on her, with Miranda's assistance. He knows this because the latter of the two scientists told him, when questioned. Though, the exact wording she'd used had been “improved upon”.

“I laid the foundational work,” she tells him tiredly in the wake of a particularly long surgical procedure, the third in a week, “But Dr. Solus seems to have grasped the idea behind the Lazarus Project in ways that most of my staff couldn't fathom. Honestly, it's a shame we couldn't have brought him on from the project's inception.”

“Shepard's alive,” the Turian growls in reply, “The project is done with.”

“On the contrary, the project was never finished. Cerberus never meant to just revivify Shepard; we meant to make her invincible. Now if there's nothing else?”

“ 'Nothing else'? There's plenty else! You and Mordin need to stop cutting her up like she's a damn science fair display!”

Despite Garrus standing a foot taller than her, fanged and scarred, Miranda is unfazed by his aggression. It only takes a gentle twitch of her fingers to send him careening out of her quarters, buoyed up by a multitude of mass effect fields. The door locks behind him, before the speakers crackle to life.

“If you have objections, Officer Vakarian,” her filtered voice informs him, “Then you are more than welcome to take them up with the Illusive Man, or better yet: Shepard herself. She's undergoing them all voluntarily.”

To be fair, basic operational implants are standard issue for most military organizations throughout the Milky Way. Garrus himself has a neural mod for AR visuals, tagging enemy combatants or directing him to the next objective. But Shepard? At this point, the Turian suspects she's more metal than meat. Bone reinforcements, a synthetic muscle weave, epidermal medi-gel dispeners, the list of augmentations goes on. She can see in the dark, glow in the dark, the scarring from the Lazarus project shining a luminous orange. On Tuchanka the irradiated atmosphere burns his tongue and throat, Grunt gagging as he sets foot on his homeworld, but Shepard doesn't even sniff, as toxicity filters lining her lungs kick into high gear.

They clash with Eclipse mercenaries on Illium, trying to rescue Miranda's sister. At one point, Mordin and Kasumi are pinned down behind cover. The plan is simple: Garrus and Zaeed will lay down covering fire and Shepard will flank the emplacement. The first part of the plan goes well, and one of the mercs drops when the Commander's shotgun puts a hole through him. The other one is from Palaven, though, and familiar with Turian bait-and-switch ops. He goes for his sidearm and fires off two rounds. The first takes down Shepard's shields, the second one hits her in the cheek and her head snaps back.

There's a long, terrible, strangely quiet moment where Garrus is trying to wrap his head around the fact that it's over, they failed, Shepard is dead again, before she pulls herself upright, eyes burning red, blood waterfalling over bared teeth from the gash in her cheek, and grabs her enemy's hand in her own. There's a sickening crack, and as much as Garrus wants to think that it's the pistol that's falling in twisted pieces to the ground, the other Turian's screams inform him otherwise. He stops when the Commander's fist impacts his helmet, crushing his visor. And his skull. Despite being covered in gore, her wound's stopped bleeding by the time the rest of the squad can meet her, cheeks flush with the effulgence of working medi-gel. A few of them, Garrus included, think they should withdraw, considering Shepard just took a bullet in the head. But Miranda pushes past, uncharacteristic worry coloring her face, and Mordin resolves to check the microfibers once they're back aboard the Normandy.

Joker thinks it's cool. Garrus just thinks of Saren, the plating on his face cracked and threaded with alien lights. Tali is concerned, and with good reason. By the time she joins the mission, glitches have begun to present themselves.

In a firefight with the Blue Suns, one of their Combat Engineers deploys an EMP. EDI falls to silence Garrus's HUD winks out of existence, the comms going with it. But Shepard locks up, drops to the ground, eyes unfocused, jaw slack, like a puppet whose strings have been cut. Garrus is the first one to reach her, alarm's sounding in his head as it becomes clear she's not breathing. A moment later his AR feed reboots, and Shepard sucks in a great lungful of air. That one she actually needs a moment to recover from. Only a moment, though, in spite of what Garrus says. She insists she's fine, and offers a hand to get him upright. They are still in combat, after all. The Turian has trouble remembering that; he's still caught on that split second between his HUD restarting and her breathing again, when her biometric feed reported that her heart had stopped.

Later, EDI connects to Sehpard's augmentations' systems to run a diagnostic, reporting the Commander is, from a strictly medical standpoint, fine. The shit-eating grin she gives her long-time Turian comrade is palpable in the air. But then EDI disconnects and Shepard goes fully blind, until they hook the pair of them back up again.

A new surgery is scheduled to correct the problem, Tali to consult on the code language that was used to write the software for Shepard's prostheses, and finally enough is enough.

Not for Garrus, mind you; he's never once been able to convince Shepard of anything, least of all that she's pushing herself too hard. But Thane has a softer touch.

“It's like when your computer has a bug!” she insists, as the Drell bars the way into Mordin's lab, “You don't toss it in the trash, you fix the problem!”

“But that's where you are failing yourself,” he replies, “You aren't fixing the problem, you're postponing it with more and more extensive augmentations. Siha, you must let yourself heal.”

“Thane. There is no time for me to lay around taking antibiotics. I need to be- EDI. EDI, SHUT UP!”

She hears EDI through the comms, even when the AI isn't broadcasting.

“Siha… Shepard,” Thane insists, “You are pushing yourself beyond what your species is capable of.”

“Isn't that the point of scientific discovery?” sniffs Miranda.

“This doesn't concern you!” snaps Garrus.

“And it does you, Vakarian? Limits are excuses that fearful people invent. Shepard is beyond that kind of thinking.”

“This isn't a fitness goal, Lawson,” cuts in Tali, “You're talking about increasingly invasive surgeries to replace failing tissue with synthetic material!”

“Tali,” groans Shepard, “you're supposed to be on my side here.”

“I'm only here to make sure none of the software has a chance of shorting out your brain. I'm not going to pretend this is a good idea.”

“Two weeks ago, I took a bullet to the head and walked away with a scrape! How is that a bad thing?”

“Because it's what the Reapers are doing, Shepard. Remember Saren?”

“I. Am not. Saren. You all need to stop comparing me to that psychopath. I'm trying to save lives!”

“There are worse fates than death, Elaine,” Thane continues, “I worry for you. You don't sleep. You barely eat. Shepard, no matter how hard you push yourself, you are only human-”

“I'M NOT ALLOWED TO BE 'ONLY HUMAN'!”

Is it the increased capacity of her lungs or just her own fervor that allows for such volume. Garrus doesn't know enough about the sciences behind her augmentations to say for certain. But Shepard's roar is enough to shake the bulkhead. Silence falls in the wake of her fury, broken only by her panting.

“Every time I try to put up my feet,” she seethes, “Or catch my breath, there's an alarm that starts blaring, somewhere. The entire galaxy is catching fire, and you all want me to pretend it isn't happening. I don't get to do that! I'm 'Commander Shepard, best hope for the galaxy, lookie here, it's my favorite store on the Citadel, aren't I great?'. I was dead! It was your turn to pick up the slack and look after space, and look how that turned out! The council buried its head in the sand, Anderson spends more time bitching about this shit than actually trying to clean it up, and half the outposts in the Terminus Systems got abducted while you were out pretending to be heroes! Hell, even Cerberus doesn't want to deal with this, otherwise they would have sent an army on this wild goose chase, instead of sinking a fleet's worth of credits into bringing me back! SHUT THE FUCK UP, LAWSON, DO NOT TRY AND ARGUE WITH ME. Every single one of you would be quaking in their boots, holed up on Omega, or Illium, or wherever you please, if I wasn't here. You all had two years to fix this dumpster fire of a galaxy, and you fucked that up. So don't pretend I'm not the only reason anything gets done around here; I am not going to stop, certainly not so all of you can feel better about yourselves.”

Shepard plants a fist in the wall at the height of this tirade, cracking the panel, her knuckles already knitting shut when she pulls away. Her eyes are collapsing stars, too bright to look directly into, and every one of her crew members averts their eyes, anger and shame and hurt so thick in the air that it carries a scent. And for a moment, Shepard softens. The glow in her eyes, her scars, fade and she watches them with remorse. But it's only a moment.

“If there's nothing else,” she growls, “Then get back to your posts. Boots on the ground in four hours.”

“Shepard, this repair is going to take at least six-” Miranda begins.

“Four. Hours.”

The door locks behind them, and Garrus's stomach sinks as imagines Mordin wheeling out a cart laden with scalpels. He looks at Thane, tries for words, but neither of them can manage anything. Instead, he suits up, and goes to wait out the remaining three and a half hours down in the shuttle. He thinks of a lot of things. His father, never once approving of his insistence that rules and regulations were the only thing standing in the way of true justice. His own band of misfits, dead on the ground of their hideout, in lawless Omega. But mostly, he thinks about Shepard. He thinks about watching her become a shooting star, in the atmosphere of a planet he can't remember the name of. He remembers watching her die, and wonders if she really came back.

Then he touches his scars, thinking about Omega again. He thinks about needing to be rescued. He thinks about bleeding out in the second story of a slumhouse, and how it was Shepard, full of fire and metal that came to his rescue. And he wonders.

Oh, how he wonders.

[sscolariwords]

It begins with smoke.

This is nothing new from the old house with the flaking paint and overgrown lawn, at the edge of Hateno village. The youth that owns it is widely known as eccentric. A soft-spoken, polite, and very helpful young man to be sure, even if rumors that float back with the peddlers are odd to say the least. And it isn't uncommon to see smoke rising from the chimney, given his predilection for cookery in all its facets.

However, it seems to be rising from the windows as well, heavy with the stench of char.

One or two folks look up when the door bangs open, Link rushing out with a blackened skillet towards the drop-off that encircles his property, but don't investigate further. Not their business, that. Nor do they pay any mind when that girl he'd brought home a week prior rushes out after him, begging forgiveness with every with every step.

“-swear that I will get you a new one, Hylia as my witness!” she's crying, cheeks flush with mortification, “I had no idea that oil reacted that way when exposed to water of that temperature!”

“It's fine,” he replies urgently, before hucking the entirety of the skillet's contents into the river below.

“I didn't! Goddess have mercy, just once I wish something would go right for me!”

“It happens to everybody.”

“Not to you! You can just throw ingredients in a pot and all but dance themselves into lunch for-”

Her point is cut off as the door swings shut behind them both. Folks stare a moment longer, until they're satisfied that there'll be no smoke. Eccentric, those two. But again: not their business.

***

Link comes downstairs a couple days later, and finds Zelda has commandeered his table (and a large chunk of the floor) to accommodate a veritable carpet of literature pertaining to cookery and the mechanics thereof. He quirks an eyebrow.

“I'm doing research,” she replies without looking up from the three individual tomes she's glancing between, “On what exactly constitutes a 'pinch of salt'. Or 'golden brown'.”

Her host steps away for a moment, returning a moment later to set a ceramic jar before her. The princess pauses in her investigation to watch as he unscrews the cap, revealing a mass of granulated salt. She scowls as Link makes a show of offering his thumb and forefinger, pinches a small quantity of the mineral, and then presents it to his liege.

“But not everyone in the kingdom has fingertips!” she retorts, “If I were a Rito, I'd have been thwarted by the ingredient list!”

The Hero shrugs, not committed to dissuading her, before recognizing the book to her right. Not just the title; he knows its scuffed and battered cover, the missing top-right corner, from the kitchens of Hyrule castle. It had been utilized as a missile against him many times by the eternally frazzled head chef.

“I wanted something normal.”

Link looks to Zelda, who takes refuge from his inquisitive gaze in the depths of the manual. “Something familiar. Remember? When a company of knights accomplished something marvelous, slayed a Lynel or ran off a Yiga band, my father would commemorate their heroism with a great feast. After we destroyed Ganon, you cooked for me. I wanted to...”

She freezes as a calloused hand finds her shoulder, offering a comforting squeeze. “You're not your father,” he says kindly.

The Princess purses her lips and bristles, ready to give him an earful, though the words die on her lips when she whirls and finds such warmth in his eyes. She has gooseflesh beneath his hand and it lingers for a long while after he pulls away. The Hero explains bokokin have been sighted by the old Hateno Fort, and planned to “move them along”. He'd be back tomorrow. Zelda spends the rest of the night thinking on what he'd said, how such a dismissal could be meant as a positive.

When she finally happens upon the meaning, the books become pointless.

***

Link returns to find a furnace protruding from the side of his house. That's not to imply that it had been idly abandoned there, as a Hinox would drop a tree trunk. It's bolted into the wall and part of the chimney, familiar orange circuits threaded throughout the structure the stone. The Hero grimaces, scars across his body prickling in remembrance of the destructive nature of Sheikah technology.

He's even less enthused when the door slams open and Zelda comes scurrying out, making a beeline for the furnace.

The Princess has abandoned her finery, trading it for one of his shirts and a leather apron, hair in a bun and tied with the straps on a pair of goggles she must have pilfered from Purah, up the road. She's soot stained, glistening with perspiration, and whispering to herself with such manic fervor that Link wonders if perhaps he's looking at a stranger. He finds some semblance of familiarity, however, when he's able to approach within arms reach of the young woman without her even noticing him, until she whirls around and nearly barrels right into him. He grunts and she squeaks, beginning to offer an apology before recognizing her knight.

“Link!” she exclaims, face brightening instantaneously, “You're back! And with perfect timing; you need to see what I've made!”

He takes a moment to glance at the furnace again, before looking back to her, discomfort written in capital letter across his face.

“Oh shush,” she says, “You'll like this.”

Zelda leads him inside by the arm, and he would admit to being slightly relieved, if pressed. Despite the bulky addition to the building's exterior, the apparatus within is at least smaller than expected.  But though he recognizes the shape of a stove and oven, azure flames lick the bottom of the device. Curiouser still what appears to be a bugle suspended above the device, the nadir of which feeds into a container that is secured into a bellows, of all things. Before he can ask for an explanation, the Princess is shoving him down into a chair, and darting to and fro about the living, room, grabbing ingredients from his icebox, cupboard, spice rack and laying them beside her invention.

“I realized that my mistake was attempting to think like a chef,” she says, taking a skillet, laying it atop the stove, and coating the surface in oil, “All those books were written for people who think in terms of food: gibberish to me. But, once I considered the idea that I had to approach this conundrum like a scholar, then everything changed!”

She pulls a lever on the side of the oven, and the stove-top erupts in blue flames. Link hisses as the wall behind it blackens, but the threat of burning recedes with the fire and his princess reduces its spread by twisting the handle. Even at a simmer, the oil is hissing within moments, and she wastes no time dropping an assortment of mushrooms, meats and vegetables onto the pan. The heady aroma of seared beef swiftly fills the house, and the Hero cannot help salivating, despite Zelda's spiral into culinary madness.

“Artisans keep waxing poetic about the preparation of a dish,” she continues excitedly, “Using abstract terms like a 'pinch of salt'. But cookery isn't about flourish! It about knowing the liter to gram ratio before your ingredients become oversatured in oil! It's about knowing the precise temperature at which meat burns! The exact measurement of spices that produce the desired gustatory sensation!”

Zelda says this as she's loading the bugle with granulated salt. And pepper. And Goron curry spice. The list goes on, until Link is positive that the seasoning alone will be enough to burn his tongue off. But the Princess is utterly enraptured by her work, pumping the bellows like a woman possessed, chatter pouring over her lips faster than a Zora cuts through water.

“This is what I've been missing!” she cries, throttling a massive switch Link did not remember being there yesterday, “No magic swords, no divine intervention! I'm talking about practical solutions for everyday problems; I'm talking about SCIENCE!”

To say that she's laughing as she heaves downward on the massive handle would be too small thinking. The Princess cackles, a frenetic peal of mirth and triumph that drives hordes of nesting birds skyward in absolute terror. Of course, there's also the fact that the entire house quakes when she activates the bugle, the spices hurtling through the tube at speed, until they collide with the contents of the skillet with force equitable to a missile. The oven splits in half, the pan flips over, and the ingredients are catapulted everywhere with startling velocity. Zelda's laughter becomes a shriek of terror and Link avoids braining only by diving backward over his chair. The air cracks with the sound of breaking glass, breaking ceramic, weapons clattering to the floor along side pictures and pottery as the culinary projectiles hit everything. The scent of cooking food drifts off through the windows, and the room falls to stillness as both parties wait tenuously for another eruption. Then the Princess sinks to the floor, glowering at the room.

“Oh, that's right,” she grumbles, “ 'Normal' is synonymous with complete failure. Welcome home, Link.”

The Hero stands, regarding her silently, before bending down. When he rises again, he has a glistening mushroom held between his thumb and finger.

“Oh, come now,” says Zelda, “You don't want-”

But considering how quickly he pops it into his mouth, he apparently does. Her knight takes a moment to regard the flavor, chew it a bit. Swallow. When it's gone, his smile could have melted Hebra.

“Yum,” he tells her, “Thank you.”

The Princess blinks, reaches for a reply but finds nothing, settling at last on matching his grin tooth for tooth. Link pulls two apples out of his rucksack, offers one to Zelda, and then drops down to sit beside her, both of them surveying the absolute mess the house is in. Maybe this isn't normal. But it might be better.

[sscolariwords]

https://instagram.com/p/Ba9Kaz8Aeks/

[sscolariwords]

Male Protagonists to Avoid in your Writing:  An Illustrated Guide.

1.  The Edward Cullen (i.e. the glorified stalker)

How to spot him:

He’s gorgeous.  Brooding.  Bejeweled with countless sequins.  He stresses over and over again that he and the female protagonist have a “connection,” are “soulmates,” or something else that you’d generally expect to hear from that one creepy kid who used to stare at you in class.  Similarly, in true creep fashion, he uses their supposed connection as an excuse to blatantly stalk her, and is narratively treated as nothing short of a romantic in spite of it because he’s attractive (and sparkly) enough to pull it off.

Examples:      

In the Twilight Saga, Edward is canonically over one hundred years old, making it extra creepy that he’s A) hanging around a high school for no particular reason, and B) dating a seventeen-year-old girl.  He uses derogatory terms about past lovers, attempts suicide when Bella tries to break up with him, and shows up at her home uninvited to watch her sleep.  Moreover, his systematic isolation of Bella from her friends and family is all-too reminiscent of real life abusive dynamics.  

How to avoid him: 

Read up on signs of abuse in a relationship.  This is a good thing to do anyway as a means of self-education, but it’s also important for writers who plan to include romantic subplots.  A good one to start with can be found here, at least in terms of emotional abuse: https://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2014/10/13/21-warning-signs-of-an-emotionally-abusive-relationship/.

Try to avoid a blatant power imbalance.  Edward is stressed to be older, stronger, more experienced, and more intelligent than Bella.  Sometimes power imbalances are unavoidable due to species differences, but this can be countermanded by giving the human love interest qualities that make them valuable in other ways.

Overall, if you’re attempting to portray a healthy relationship, try to base it on an equal exchange of power and mutual respect.

2.  The Christian Grey (i.e. the glorified rapist)

How to spot him:

When I first found out that the 50 Shades of Grey franchise was originally Twilight fanfiction, I initially (incorrectly) presumed it to be a joke.  After I’d come to terms with the fact that it was not, my next thought was that it made perfect sense, because Christian is literally Edward Junior on steroids:  the same abusive brand of stalker who gets off on a blatant power imbalance, with the added unpleasantries of excessive wealth and bad BDSM etiquette.  Oh, yeah.  And he’s a rapist.    

Examples:

Christian disregards Ana’s request for a condom, stating “her body belongs to him,” threatens punishment when she refutes his attempts to discretely grope her in public, and at one point, ignores her safe word.  Throughout the book, Ana is pressured into sex she feels uncomfortable with.    

How to avoid him: 

If you’re going to write about BDSM, actually study BDSM etiquette.

Healthy BDSM relationships are forged on mutual trust and a consensual, mutually beneficial exchange of power.  Even if you are writing about BDSM, if you intend to write about a healthy relationship, be sure to base it off of these values. 

Just because a character is dominant doesn’t mean they need to be emotionally callous;  Christian completely neglects Ana’s emotional needs, such as her aftercare (i.e. the period of tenderness recommended after BDSM sessions to compensate for the emotional and physically taxing task of surrendering one’s power.)

In short, don’t use kink as a means of excusing emotionally unhealthy and abusive dynamics.       

3.  The Ross Geller (i.e. the entitled “nice guy”)

How to spot him:

He thinks his hot female friends (and only the hot ones, mind you) are owed to him because he’s “nice,” romantic, and intelligent.  However, upon closer scrutiny he really isn’t a particularly nice guy (i.e. he bullied his sister Monica and benefits from enjoys her emotionally abusive parents’ favoritism), is self-centered, and consistently places his needs ahead of her own.

Examples:  

The minute Rachel begins to find self-fulfillment in her career, Ross becomes jealous and hounds her at work, accuses her of “not having enough time for (him),” and generally tries to make her feel guilty for being successful and having priorities other than him. 

How to avoid him: 

Again, I cannot stress this enough:  mutual respect.  This is literally the foundation of all successful relationships, fictitious or otherwise.

Have your male characters support their significant other’s decisions and allow them to be happy for their success.  

Your male character’s significant other is allowed to do things that don’t necessarily involve him.  Make sure he understands that.

Intelligence in and of itself does not make a character a better person than his fellows, and intelligence does not have to equate the superiority with which Ross appears to associate himself.   

Just look to the healthier couples Friends churned out in its time:  Monica and Chandler, for example, love and respect one another’s goals, and are no the less interesting and hilarious because of it.  

4.  The Sheldon Cooper (i.e. the annoying autism stereotype)

How to spot him: 

He’s a bloated paragon of autism stereotypes.  He’s got zero regard for the feelings of his friends, considers himself superior to everyone, and is incapable of talking about anything but his own interests.  As someone who’s on the spectrum myself, he’s basically my personal pet peeve.

Examples:   

“His spot” on the sofa, his need to knock three times before speaking to the person on the other side of the door, etc.  These are stereotypical and inaccurate portrayals of some autistic people’s comfort in routine.   

How to avoid him: 

Research symptoms of Asperger’s in adults (and for god’s sake, stay away from Autism Speaks.)  Similarly, try and learn from actually people with Asperger’s, as anti-autism, “cure”-based sentiment tends to run high in allistic academia.  

Study the mannerisms of famous people who may have been on the spectrum, such as Albert Einstein, Allan Turing, Leonardo da Vinci, and Sherlock Holmes’s inspiration, Joseph Bell.

If you’re not ready to depict an autistic character, I’m going to say wait.  It’s okay to admit to ignorance, and it’s okay to wait to do more research before depicting a certain subgroup.        

Try to avoid inserting autistic symptoms into characters to use as comedic fodder.  

Asperger’s coded (and confirmed, by creators and cast) characters like Temperance “Bones” Brennan (Bones) and Spencer Reid (Criminal Minds) have their stereotypical moments, but they’re still successfully presented as lovable, intelligent, and productive characters;  look to them to see better representation of intelligent, autistic characters in mainstream television.  

5.  The John Winchester (i.e. the abusive parent with a redemption arc)

How to spot him:

The John Winchester is a textually abusive or otherwise toxic parent who damages his children’s lives for his own purposes, inflicts emotional or physical harm, and is shown or mentioned to be violent, controlling, and/or neglectful.  However, his redeeming/sympathetic qualities or otherwise heroic actions lead him to be narratively treated as a benevolent character and “good” parent. 

Examples:  

In Supernatural, John leaves his boys for weeks on end in motel rooms, sometimes over important holidays (and keep in mind that this was in the 80s and 90s, when child sexual abuse was at an all-time high.)  He often places his eldest son as the soul caregiver of his other child, despite the fact that he was a child too at the time, and left them both alone with loaded firearms. He also uses unfairly harsh punishments, such as leaving his young son alone at a boy’s home for an entire summer because he stole food for himself and his brother.  His son literally, unironically realized he was being possessed by a demonic entity when it said it was proud of him. 

How to avoid him:    

Educate yourself on the different definitions of abuse (emotional, verbal, physical, etc.) and what qualifies as each.  Psychology Today is a great resource for this (they have some rudimentary definitions here:  https://www.psychologytoday.com/conditions/child-abuse.)   

Feel free to endow abusive parents with sympathetic qualities (in fact, please do;  100% evil characters tend to be campy, boring, and/or unintentionally hilarious) but be aware that no sympathetic qualities negate or justify child abuse.

Please, for the love of God, don’t use the “he was doing his best” excuse as a resolution.  Many abusive parents legitimately are doing their best, and many abused children are acutely aware of this.  It really doesn’t provide much comfort.

Remember that abused children frequently refuse to turn on their parents, often defending them long into their adulthood.  The child’s forgiveness does not equate the parent’s redemption.  

Similarly, I’d personally recommend staying away from the “I can finally forgive him” trope as well;  it’s done to death, and often frustrating to real-life survivors. 

Before the Meninsits™ come for me about this, I am going to be writing a list of female character archetypes as well, and then make lists of positive attributes to include in male and female characters, respectively, to provide a counterpoint.  I might also make a part two of this post for all the other characters I hate, because I fear it would get too long. 

In the meantime, there will be essays like this published at least once every other week, so be sure to follow my blog and stay tuned for future writing advice and observations!

8/7/17:  Updating with the link to the female counterpart post, because people keep asking me for it.  Read it here!  

[sscolariwords]

Fort

Ah, the great library of Denerim palace. A bastion of learning, collection of the great classical works of Ferelden's history, one of Alistair's favorite places to never visit. Why visit the library, when there were the kennels or the kitchen? The kitchen has cheese, after all. A question for the ages, one he fully intended to posit to his wife, whom after a solid two weeks of camping out in a fortress of Dwarven tomes (guides on customs and etiquette, as well as a lengthy map of Orzammar's financial history) composing her self described magnum opus of trade agreements, had elected to return to her cavern and post guards at the doors.

After shattering a window with the improvised missile of the Dwarven envoy's hat, that is.

Alistair admittedly missed all but the aftermath, cheese and dog related matters holding his attention (at his wife's own insistence, to be fair. She had, after all, just spent the better part of a month studying up on the nuances of Dwarven culture and relations). And yet Eamon likened his beloved to a High Dragon in the wake of her rampage back to the palace library.

"By order of the Queen," barked one trembling guardsman as the last of the Theirin line approached, "None are to be admitted into the Chamber of Repose."

"Keep up the good work, Lads," Alistair replied and strode into his Queen's sanctum.

Or tripped, rather, over the desk that had been propped against the door. Regardless, he made it into the room, though not without going ass over tea kettle. Her Majesty, Elaine Cousland, did not look up, as he came crashed in. She did not look up as he clambered back to his feet and shut the door proper. She did not look up when he called her name. She just kept curled up by her spot on the windowsill, legs wrapped up in her arms and hair draped about her like an oaken waterfall as she continued to glare out into the Denerim skies.

"Elaine?" her king called again, "My love, what exactly happened?"

"I'm abdicating, Alistair," she growled, "Just done. Going to just get the dog's leash and go live in a shack in the Free Marches somewhere."

Alistair trotted over, setting down heavily on the seat beside her. Calloused hands rose to brush aside a lock of hair, finding a pale cheek once carved by a Hurlock's blade.

"I'm sure, dearest," he answered, "I'll even build it for you. But why don't you hold off on packing for a moment and tell me what went wrong?"

She threw up her hands, gesticulating wildly.

"After all that preparation!" she snarled, "Weeks spent drawing up a trade agreement, learning Dwarven, making sure the bloody decor was right, and the damnable King sends an envoy weeks and months, hundreds of miles, just to say he's not bloody interested in trading with us!"

Alistair blinked. "He didn't."

"He most certainly did! Ungrateful half pint of a shit; it's not he owes us his whole sodding job."

"What a complete ass."

"The biggest and hairiest!"

"And how did it escalate?"

"When I calmly and rationally pointed out that King Harrowmont was wasting not just my time, but his own, that squirrelly runt had the nerve to derogate me and my ‘sky-addled mud town’ for even daring to think their King wasn't simply the best thing to ever be shat out of the stone! So I... showed him where he could stick his bloody stone sense and bloody royal decree."

"He's still wiping ink off his tongue, you'll be happy to know. How did the broadsword get lodged in your throne?"

Elaine glowered. "I don't wanna talk about it."

The King took her hand in his and began to knead the soft spots between her knuckles. "I'm genuinely curious."

"He called the guards soft."

"Soft?"

"Soft! He said they'd never been tested in any proving, because they had no paragons to aspire to! So I gave them something to 'aspire to'. I'd like to see that runt crack stone like me."

"I imagine most folks would like to crack stone like you. I'm sorry, my dear." "Yeah, I'll bet 'the Royal Envoy is too. Bastard."

"The largest. Come now, shall we go build that shack?"

"No."

"Darling..."

"I'm not leaving this room, Alistair."

The King watches her a moment. Then he stands and starts gathering up some books from the shelves. Elaine watches him, an eyebrow quirks in befuddlement as he begins to arrange and stack the volumes.

"What are you doing?" she asks, though her husband doesn't answer. He just continues building, until a neat little bungalow stands proudly on the floor. At which point, the King of Ferelden lowers himself onto his rump and scoots into the shelter, before beckoning to his lady love.

Elaine still wants to set fire to Orzammar. She'd like to drop kick Harrowmont right into the blackest pit in the deep roads. But, for the moment, she smiles in spite of herself, and climbs off the windowsill.

[sscolariwords]

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You ever work a night shift? I used to. Emphasis on the past tense.

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She was only three, the first time it happened.

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Fiction: Caelirex

The wind is a knife along Fae’s cheek.

There are many reasons for her discomfort, the most obvious of which being that the breeze is icy even at its warmest, there at the Crown of the World. It’s also because the two pale welts that mar her freckled visage have always been sensitive, ever since the ursalox took her eye, and the synthetic doesn’t channel heat very well, despite the scarlet of her ruby iris. Perhaps the simplest reason is that she’s undone her mask and goggles, let the tide of her autumnal hair out from the prison of her hood, exposing pale tender flesh to the rough tongue of the northern wind, her remaining eye of flesh and blood pressed to the scathing rim of a freezing metal scope. It would be a simple matter to put down the rifle, redress her cranium, and be free of the wintry discomfort plaguing her.

Fae bears it because the goggles are cumbersome, the hood muffling the sound of the peak. Lewen taught her that no lens will ever match the acuity of the eye, and she will bear no handicap in her task, not after so many failures. Instead she clenches her jaw, leans into her weapon and stares anew at the shaggy ewe tied to a spear, on the ledge some meters below her. The beast, dull and apathetic as is character to its kind, noses through the snow, looking for something to eat, unaware of the scarcity of edible vegetables there at the top of a mountain. It had spent the majority of its life within the pen, fed when it was feeding time, sheared when the nights grew long, and never bothering to put a face to the echoing howls that would rise from the woods and mountaintop, as the handler had always been careful to keep his flock well guarded from the hungry wilderness and all it contained. With no experience in the competition of predator and prey, the ewe had no reason to look up, to the clouds obscuring the summit and where, every once in a while, a tip of a snowy wing or a long, sinuous tail would peak out from the billowing sea of white that reached across the sky.

Fae had noticed it, but then she had been looking for it. The errant white plumage that had fallen away from the bleached collective adorning her draconic quarry had marked her trail, leading her as she led the tolk. He was the whole reason she had bought the smelly lummox, dragged it to the top of this God-forsaken mountaintop and tied it up in a bleating offering, where he was sure to see it. He is why the redheaded huntress bears the wind. She’s hunted caelirexes before, but there is only one whose feathers shine as brightly as diamonds. There is only one who truly wears the Crown of the World.

Kanhiōt dances within the clouds, and Fae means to clip his wings.

Unlike the stupid tolk irately bleating for its next meal, the Ranger is well versed in the standard accepted at the Crown, that being one is either predator or prey. Kanhiōt hovers above all others in this hierarchy on pearlescent wings, ruling through the law of tooth and talon and muscle, taking what flesh he ever desired, be it beast or man. Meat is meat, and it all ends up taking the same route out there in the frozen wilds.

Some call him the Dragon. The devout hail him as the vengeance of an angry God. The Wilders know him as a deity unto himself. Fae calls him a pain in the ass, and that’s why he has to die. It isn’t because of the hubris character to her species running hot in her blood, demanding sovereignty over all. Not because the Horizon Initiative has a price on his head large enough to buy her a castle made out of giantbone. It’s because the damn feathery lizard is so smug about the whole thing. No one can debate the fact that Kanhiōt is smart for a ‘rex. What most don’t realize is that he’s smart enough to rub it in your face.

Once upon a time, two years and an eye earlier, Fae had been a frightened little girl crawling onto the icy shore from the wreck of the ship that had born her, Lewen, and so many others hence from the mainland. In those first few minutes it had been just her and the boatswain, one of them creeping out from the shelter of their ruined ship with more care than the other. An arrogant man all his life, the sailor had barked at the scarlet tressed runaway to “get out of the fucking-” before a snarling hulk of white feathers and outstretched talons slammed him to the frozen ground with the force of a missile, snapping bones and crushing his chest cavity as easily as one might break a twig. Whatever wet screaming begun to emerge from his mouth was cut short as the caelirex’s fanged jaws descended on his throat. Then the boatswain was dead and Kanhiōt (though Fae did not yet know his name) turned with bloody chops to regard the shaking girl who stood transfixed, too frightened to even shriek herself. scarlet eyes froze her, and the moment she took to be her last seemed to stretch on forever. The Dragon flicked his ears, snorted, and bent down to seize her former companion’s corpse in his canine-esque maw. Snowy wings, each longer than she was tall, flared out from the ‘rex’s broad shoulders, and Kanhiōt lifted into the sky with a powerful spring of his hindquarters, the backdraft that followed his rise casting the girl back onto her seat, directly into a puddle of water just barely above freezing. A moment later he was gone, and she was soaked entirely below the waist. That night, one spent in shivering nakedness from the waist down as her trousers dried on a spit above the meager fire she had struck, she offered one of the last prayers to ever cross her lips, thanking God for whatever intervention had delivered her from the beast.

What Fae mistook for providence was in fact the first insult in a campaign of harassment that the ‘rex has kept up to this very day. As the wilderness sharpened her into something lethal, Kanhiōt took it upon himself to remind her time and again that she was only human and her kind did not rule the harsh land the roiling sea had dumped her upon. Hunts that had dragged on hours, even days, had a tendency to end with the white fiend plummeting from the sky as she lined up her sights, draining her quarry’s lifeblood with his teeth and carrying them off to parts she could not follow. Campsites she pitched she would return to find destroyed, the tents and equipment sprayed with a fetid declaration of ownership. On the two separate occasions she had bathed in a hot spring (civilization still days away and the bedrock of her upbringing demanding she scrub herself clean) there he had been nosing through her belongings, taking flight with her shirt or pants clasped in his fangs when Fae burst from the water screaming bloody murder. The absolute last straw it came when she and Lewen returned from a ranging to find the front wall of the lodge torn out, other Rangers and patrons screaming of Kanhiōt himself having wrought havoc on them all in a bloody rampage that claimed the lives of four hunters and one trophy: the stuffed ursalox erected in vengeance for having claimed the redhead’s eye.

So we find our heroine seething upon a mountaintop, a ewe squawking on another ledge, scanning the sky for signs of white feathers and eyes like the rubies. The wind bites at her, abuses her bared face, but she endures it for-

That.

Silent under the wind, Kanhiōt slips from the clouds above, wings folded back as his dive carries him behind the lip of the tolk’s outcropping. The rotund farm animal stops in its foraging for a moment, ears perking up to wonder if it did indeed hear something. When the beast is not accosted by four hundred kilograms of scything talons and pale feathers, it goes back to determinedly nosing through the snow.

Fae grits her teeth, daring not to let an oath escape her lips on the chance it could betray her to Kanhiōt, though she’s willing to entertain the idea if it would get him out in the open. She adjusts her position, crawling to the edge of her platform to look over the side of the mountain. A few clouds curl along the rock face, but none large enough for the caelirex to hide within. She scans the cliff, searching for a cave or anywhere he might-

The sky darkens and thunder crashes in her ears as a series of daggers dig into her shoulders and the small of her back. Fae shrieks as gravity suddenly inverts, the rifle clattering to the stony ground as she is buoyed upward. She turns, as much as she is able, finding herself secure in the taloned grip of her archenemy, the very air trembling as his jaws part in a mighty roar. In desperation, the Ranger grabs for the knife resting along her hip, but the motion is roughly disrupted with a mighty flap of Kanhiōt’s wings. Together they dart forward, over the cliff-face, and as one they tilt into a dive straight down the side of the mountain.

Fae tries to scream. She succeeds, though she doesn’t know it because of the wind in her ears, risen from a hiss to a howl. So, not knowing she’s already doing so, she keeps screaming all the way down the side of the mountain, breaking through those scant clouds the Dragon had not chosen as his refuge until she can see the black crags of stone teeth rising up to gorge themselves on her scarred, freckled flesh. In that small part of her brain not gone blank with terror, one that remains ever burning with vengeful ire, it occurs to her that she should take her knife, put it in the awful beast’s eye, and drag him down to the Hells with her. But the voice of her retribution cannot be heard over the raw, terrified adrenaline that floods her veins, over the roar of the wind. All she knows is that she is moments from death.

White wings billow outward, arresting their descent in a fraction of a second, even as Fae is released from Kanhiōt’s foreclaws. She drops forward, dangling by the talons hooked into the seat of her pants for a moment. 

Only a moment.

A strident peal, echoing in its finality, tears the air as it does Fae’s trousers. She plummets all of a half meter to inelegantly flop into the snow bank Kanhiōt hovers over, bare legs hanging overhead, suspended by the awkward tangle of her pants’ corpse around her ankles.

The snow clusters around her face, looking to staunch the invasive heat daring to invade their icy demesne. It is unsuccessful. The crystals in fact recoil in terror as their brothers closest to the redheaded invader dissolve into water, as the indignant fire that rises in her cheeks is tantamount to the heat of the sun. Fae’s legs drop downward gracelessly, depositing her onto her stomach, and she rises onto her hands and knees, face contorted into a savage rictus of white-hot fury.

The snow flees on the sudden wind, and the huntress is met for ferocity by the growling whole of Kanhiōt dropping to face her. His bloody gaze bores into her equally ferocious one, lips curling to expose every one of his of his gleaming fangs and the red tongue that slips over them. There are few things that can match a caelirex in single combat. A pack of hounds, maybe. A human with a skinning knife? Certainly not. But Fae is as stubborn as the mountain is tall. And it’s a very tall mountain.

She pushes backward, rising onto her feet as she nimbly hops, deserting her ruined trousers. The knife is already in her hand, taking the forefront of an experienced, well known stance. The Dragon crouches, his plumage bristling, a growl prickling up from the depths of his throat.

Down to the Hells, both of them.

She moves forward and he pounces, his blanche muzzle ducking low to the ice before his wings life him up once again. It carries him over the arc of Fae’s swing and his talons come forward, planting themselves on her chest. They push downward. She drops, the wind fleeing her lungs in a pained, audible rush rush. The tip of his lithe tail bids her farewell and then Kanhiōt is gone.

Again.

The snow billows around her in a crude angel, and Fae puts an aggrieved palm to her eyes. Having watched him kill so many times, the Ranger is perfectly aware that the Dragon let her live. In anything, that makes it worse. Point: Kanhiōt.

A few moments pass in forced rest before the redhead finds her breath, rising uneasily as she nurses a bruised ribcage. Righteous indignation has dulled to irritated exhaustion, and a white flag pops up in her mind. The day is a failure; time to call it in. Her chest is paining her too much to mount another hunt in real earnest, and there’re only so many hours of daylight left. Time to get her gear and trudge back to the lodge.

The ice, rancorous over the melting of its siblings, rushes in to nip at her unprotected legs. The chill of gooseflesh running up the backs of her thighs, to far more tender flesh, drives Fae onto her feet with haste. Shivering, she turns to where she left her-

Her pants are gone.

She wants to believe they’ve just been obscured by falling snow. She wants to believe that if she digs down a bit, she won’t find blackened stone, but her insulated trousers, slightly torn but nothing a needle and thread won’t fix. She wants to believe that.

Fae’s two years and an eye past optimistic naiveté.

“Oh, you wretched pigeon!” she bellows, whipping around to charge after the shrinking smudge that is Kanhiōt, “Get back here!”

The wind runs its icy tongue up and down her bare legs as she sprints, driving her to numbness in moments, and her bruised ribs moan in agony. Fae slows to a stop, panting.

“Give me back my pants!” she shrieks, seizing an errant rock and hurling it after the caelirex, little more than a distant speck now. More rocks, more screaming follows, even after she can no longer see her enemy against the stark clouds. Exhaustion overtakes her once more, and the Ranger slouches to catch her breath a second time, before straightening and seizing the hem of her coat where it reclines around her hips, trying to drag it down in a fit of adolescent modesty, her cheeks flushing pink.

After a moment, reticence deserts her, alone in the Wilds, and she deflates. She looks up the mountain, as tall as she is stubborn. Very, very tall.

Her equipment, her ewe, awaits her at the peak, providing the feathered rat hasn’t eaten those as well. There are not sounds to express the gravity of the anguish that weighs upon her heart, so she settles for another heavy sigh, before trudging in the direction of the goat path she had traversed, several hours and a pair of pants earlier.

The wind is a knife along her legs.

And when she tells me such, many hours later, wrapped in a blanket and using my handkerchief to stem the tide of mucus that streams from her ruby-tinged nose, I try not to laugh. I really, I do my very best. I fail. I continue to fail a minute later when I’m nursing a newly bruised shoulder and she’s stomping up to the rooms we’ve rented for the night.

[sscolariwords]

Nonfiction: Bioshock Infinite Advertisement Article (2012)

It was a week ago that 2k Games’s announced its upcoming trailer for Bioshock Infinite, in the form of an industrial America style timer that has been slowly ticking down to the twenty-first. Yet this advert differed than the standard in that it included a poll of preferences amongst the already teased at aspect of the game. The audience was being given a choice of what would they would get to see when the preview is released on the twenty-first, those options including deciding which characters were to be featured, a choice between the hulking Songbird and famously buxom Elizabeth .

The notion that there is any sort of contest of preference when comparing a giant steampunk robo-bird and a beautiful woman whose heaving bosoms have become a focus of interest on the internet, is sadly absurd. The fetishization of lead character Elizabeth was reported to have struck a nerve with the creative director of the game, Ken Levine, back in January. "It's disappointing when [Elizabeth's appearance] becomes a focus for conversation because that was never my intent and it's sort of a disincentive,” he said, “I'd much rather talk about what she's going through as a person, but whatever. They have the right to shout out whatever they want."

And therein lies the problem behind our original point of the poll: the denizens of the internet, safe behind the anonymity of their online handles, are going to choose Elizabeth over Songbird because they want her to take off her shirt. Obviously that’s not going to happen in the game, but the history of the internet has proven no reign more conclusively than that of the breasts over adolescent imaginations of all ages.

That is not to say that a poll deciding how the trailer will be cut is inherently a bad decision. It may be a roundabout one, considering it would just expedite the editing and increase hype for the game to (once again) just show everything they have to offer, but it can be regarded as a step towards the true spirit of gaming, that being interactivity.What gaming offers that no other medium can is the chance to become part of an adventure. Audience participation is the driving force behind the entire experience, and thus it makes sense to extend the gift of audience interaction into other facets of the gaming world. On paper, it works. But when Songbird is forced to compare with Elizabeth and her already celebrated assets, the choice of the predictable male gamer should be a foregone conclusion.

Once again, one has to wonder why (when the writing on the wall is in legible red ink) Ken Levine, already annoyed over the sexualization of his character, would enable the fans to pass over Songbird just so they could salivate over a cluster of pixels on their computers for a few moments more. Again, the simplest answer seems to present the most sense.

One can speculate that the needless complication of the advertisement is an offshoot of the gaming mindset. Our key words here, ladies and gentlemen, are “interactive storytelling”. This is what video games have been evolving towards ever since Donkey Kong first hurled his pixelated barrel down at Mario all those years ago, and the determined little plumber in all of us has been scrambling desperately to save not his paramour, but oursever since. We’ve come a long way since then, and there have been considerable leaps and bounds made in the methods of interactivity. Yet for some reason, many developers have trouble just grasping what that should mean. Ideally, the setting, narrative, and gameplay should serve as a threshold for the player to step into the world presented, though time and again the presentation becomes an inelegant trek from plot point to plot point. Quicktime events, moral choice systems and dialogue trees, even time-honored cutscenes have largely become walls that separate the player from the avatar, a too-common fatal distraction in the evolution of this wondrous medium.

It’s promising to see somebody putting their best foot forward and trying something a little different. But if Ken Levine is going to complain about the treatment of his character and then offer up an opportunity to service the demands of a historically immature gaming following, one cannot be surprised if Elizabeth is featured over Songbird on the twenty-first. With only a few days to go, time will tell if the gaming community will meet 2k Games halfway.

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Nonfiction: Braid Review (2009)

I think the last five words of that statement do my job for me.

Braid is really something of a modern day Mario, the story and gameplay aspects drawing heavily on upon the 8-Bit era antics of the mustachioed plumber as he strove to save the princess. That’s all the story really comes down to: save the princess. From whom and why she needs rescuing is fairly ambiguous, as the protagonist (dubbed “Tim”) simply informs us that she was lost to him by his own error, and that the last he saw of her was her braided hair swishing in the wind as she turned away from him in a huff. From thereon, our hero takes to his quest with an infallible focus, never once displaying any sign of faltering or irritation. One could even attest his single-track mind to obsession, a diagnosis further reinforced by the stunning twist towards the end of the game.

Gameplay-wise, Braid is a two-dimensional platformer. That last word there encompasses the two-thirds of the game itself because that’s what it is. The entire game focuses upon getting from Point A to Point B. That’s it.The two points aren’t even really separate from each other; stages are linked by little red doors that can be reached just by pressing right. You may have to hop over a wannabe goomba or two, but that’s it. Crossing the stages aren’t even remotely challenging. The true difficulty of the game lies in the “side-quests”. To unlock the final level of the game, one must collect the various puzzle pieces spread across the six preliminary stages and assemble giant portraits for the protagonist to display in his boxy little house. What enemies that appear in the game (all two of them), are really nothing more than stepping-stones on legs to reach these many pieces. As simple as this sounds, the odd placement of the puzzle pieces make reaching them no easy feat. It is at this point that the fulcrum of Braid’s gameplay comes into effect and the simplicity of the game is lost to the wind.

Tim has the extraordinary ability to bend time to his will. Death is not an option here, for as soon as Tim falls to an flaming pit of spikes, or a killer rabbit sinks it’s teeth into his well dressed form, or he meets an untimely demise by some other machination of death, the game stops and tells you to rewind time. Tim’s upper-hand on death, though seen frequently, is little more than an afterthought in the game, as the real use of our hero’s chronomancing intertwines with the platforming aspect of the game.Stages and levels will provide Tim with access to different abilities, and what once was an impossible puzzle becomes just a maddening one. The difficulty curve of Braid is high, as it does not encourage players to think outside the Box, but rather tells them to insult the Box’s mother, toss it out the window, and start building a real-world counterpart to an M.C. Escher painting. The one with the stairs. Simply put, Braid is hard. Insanely hard.End of story. There is no easy mode to refer to for practice, there is simply Braid Mode, and if you’re still sane by the end of it, either you’ve cheated online or you’re a resident of Wonderland. As enjoyable as an unbirthday tea-party with the Mad Hatter sounded, I ultimately cracked and went to the internet for help. The answers ultimately revealed to me that Braid is indeed a difficulty of its own, as any one solution to the various stages was some kind of twisted love child spawned by an interracial marriage of Complexity and Simplicity. Braid will have you pulling your hair out at the roots and then sheepishly stepping out to by a wig as the problem infuriates you and then the answer embarrasses you for not having guessed it sooner.

Visually, Braid is something to behold, as it doesn’t follow the recurring theme of 3-D sidescroller; when I said that it was a two-D game, I meant it.Every background, every character, every block and cloud and door has been drawn and rendered in loving pastelly detail, making look like something out of a story book. Tim himself is an adorable little thing, fondly reminding some of us of a Hobbit.

Yet, for all its little delights, Braid is not perfect. As far as replay value goes, there’s almost no appeal. There is a speedrun mode available for those with the patience (or lack thereof), but other than that, there’s really only one other reason to go through it a second time. At the beginning of the game, there is a hollowed out constellation hovering beside our hero’s home, meant as an indicator of eight hidden stars scattered throughout the various stages. At that’s the only clue you’ll get. Period. When they hid these things, the developers went to the extremity of making sure that you won’t even know the stars exist unless you stumble upon the extensions of certain stages by sheer luck alone. Even then the reward of collecting all eight is lukewarm at best, offering little but the satisfaction that you have defeated the impossible by finding all eight.

I still wonder what can be said about Braid. Everything that should be said is looming ominously above this paragraph, and any summations of the game in word form will just sound like a rejected spell from Dungeons and Dragons. In the end, though, I don’t think that anything can be said about Braid. My descriptions of gameplay and story are vague on the game’s terms. Words alone cannot encompass the experience of this lovely platformer, so I instead urge you to play the game yourself, dear reader.Braid is not something to be described, but something to be lived.

[sscolariwords]

Nonfiction: Return to Wonderland Review (2009)

Thanks to such cultural chaos, we have to suffer such ongoing depredations as emo-poser sunscreen-wearing vampires enjoying movie deals, when in fact they likely should not have been published in the first place. Likewise the ever-popular trend these days is toward re-treads; i.e., the endless regurgitation of passé zeitgeist that is decades or even centuries old, reworked into a contemporary milieu. One such current in the Tide of Trends is the re-imagined fairy tale (the biggest practitioner of this being the comic publishers “Grimm Fairy Tales”) that re-casts the female lead with some over-sexed, under-imagined blonde teenager with more curves than a bobsled run, who despite said curves – or perhaps owing to them – inspires in those around her no more profound a lust than the zeal to murder her.

In the comic in question today, the redo is Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (this incarnation dubbed Return to Wonderland), and it follows the trend described above in all aspects but the fact that our heroine is not Alice at all, but rather, in a semi-imaginative twist (with a nod to Alice’s ever-hallucinogenic author, Lewis Carroll) her daughter, Caroll Anne. Said progeny of the tale’s original herione takes to her role of unsuspecting patsy quite well, even as Return to Wonderland endeavors its panel-paged darnedest to lay the curvaceous lass in her grave before the turn of page last.

Not to pan Return to Wonderland, by any means. Despite rants about publishing, emos and the given zeitgeist of a given age, there is much to admire in this well-realized graphic novel.

For starters, there is the protagonist herself. Caroll Ann Liddell is by all accounts set up to be the weak-willed sobbing pair of breasts on legs that end up brutally murdered, most often in the shower, as is the tragic norm for women in graphic media today. But that’s the good part; just she’s set up to be the stereotypical slasher fodder. At some point she apparently ripped her way out of the comic, subdued the artists and writers – and their abhorrent blood-soaked jaibait fanservice fantasies – and poured salt in their eyes until they agreed to expand her brains to exceed the proportions of her breasts.

Thus Caroll Ann, despite her bitchy, goth sex-goddess style, is in fact a girl who embraces family values, has the sense to favor out a high school boys who aren’t scumbags, and is very happy to kick the teeth in of any Wonderland residents intent on reducing her life expectancy. Though not quite a sword-slinging badass, Caroll Ann is certainly capable of defending herself from perverse Mad Hatters, lying suits of Cards, and cannibalistic Carpenters. At times, though, she seems a little too eager to lay judgment upon her offenders, as a run in with the Queen of Hearts’s subjects demonstrates. As such, despite her (usually justified) bloodlust, Caroll Ann succeeds in proving that it’s not always a choice between brains or blonde… though she dyed her hair black, admittedly.

As far as characters go, the only other one worth mentioning is Wonderland itself and and such will be revisited shortly below. That said, let us move onto the artwork. Visually, Return to Wonderland is a colorful romp through a stylized abattoir - that oddly enough comes together in a sort of smooth beauty that should delight the eye of most genre fans. If the foregoing strikes the reader as either too or insufficiently eloquent there really isn’t a broad spectrum of quality that one can find in comics these days; in the event of a lack of specific style to fit the theme, really it comes down to the artwork being good or terrible, in this case falling into former. Yet as easy on the eyes as the entire style is, the content itself leaves it rather faded on the edges.

For starters there’s the fanservice overdose. Granted, Grimm Fairy Tales tends to aim towards the “horrific-yet-sexy” versions of our beloved childhood fables, yet here the “sexy” part of that credo seems to have been dosed with steroids. Nearly every single panel starring our dear Carroll Ann has some sort of gratuitous cleavage shot. One can infer that she’s supposed to be marketed as a sort of badass sex symbol, but at some points it’s just thematically inappropriate. For example, when Carroll Ann attends the funeral of a very dear relative, both her inner monologue and mascara laced tears inform us that she’s heartbroken at the moment. At the same time, her breasts have also followed her to the party – and the barrage of cleavage does nothing but detract from the overall dramatic value of the moment. 

Then there's the portrayal of Wonderland itself. Throughout the entire story, the writers try to style the setting as a character in the story, having everyone insist that the place has a sentience unto its own, but despite these claims, the atmosphere just doesn’t carry the weight. The only things attempting to kill Carroll Ann are the demented residents of this open-ended looney bin, making Wonderland more of the Arkham Asylum to Carroll Ann’s Batman. By the same token, Wonderland -- despite being described as the “face of madness” -- doesn’t quite plumb the depths of insanity itself. Everyone living there just seems to be a murdering psychopath. Period. Sure, they’ve all got a few screws loose, but psychosis isn’t the only form of insanity. Going beyond that, if Wonderland is “the face of madness”, why didn’t it spend more time trying to drive Carroll Ann insane herself and have her join the ranks of its brain-addled legions instead of playing the slasher-film card?

To sum it all up, though one could argue that Return to Wonderland was not quite insane enough to satisfy a horror junkie metaphorical "scary bone", it is an enjoyableread  nonetheless.The artwork was good, the character development solid, and the narrative managed to neatly tie off the established plot threads without copping out with a money grubbing cliffhanger.

[sscolariwords]

Nonfiction: Gears of War 2 Review (2009)

Gears of War takes place on the fictional world of Sera, where humanity has found itself on the brink of extinction at the hands of a genocidal alien race. One way that Gears stands apart from similar scenarios in the genre is that these baddies – known collectively as The Locust Horde – come from deep underground rather than the vast reaches of space. As the war drags on, the COG finds itself in short supply for meat to send to the grinder, and begin recruiting anything that can hold a gun; though a convicted war criminal, Marcus fits this description, and so is granted an early release from the stockade.

While the original Gears was an unqualified triumph, Gears 2 significantly ups the ante. Let’s start with the weapons. The accuracy/distance ratio has since been improved with basic weapons like the assault rifle, allowing for actual ranged combat in the event no sniper rifle is at hand. Sidearms have also been bumped up allowing for actual usability in combat. While in Gears One the pistol offered little more than a bit of asymmetry to the character models, now a well-placed shot can explode heads, a privilege formerly reserved for the sniper rifle. Grenades are fun, taking the sticky-grenade concept pioneered by the Halo series to a new level, letting the player stick their bombs to the wall as proximity mines, detonating when offenders close in, sending chunks of meat flying everywhere. Otherwise, players have a love/hate relationship with explosives: they hate the clunky, hard to aim boomshot; love the pinpoint accurate and devastating torque bow. Perhaps best of all, the assault rifle retains its chainsaw bayonet.Show me a gamer that doesn’t love that, and I’ll show you someone better suited for Animal Crossing 2 than Gears.

As for the enemy, they’re bringing more to the game as well. The Locust not only look hardcore, but even a lowly drone shoots well enough to back up his snarling, lipless visage. Like so many aspects of the chaotic shooter, the Gears 2 AI has seemingly acquired a dose of steroids – so be on your toes. Rather than sit on their heels, waiting to receive your headshot, the nasties leapfrog through successive points of cover, raining an ungodly hail bullets on you and your squad; but don’t despair – if one of your men falls, and if you’re hearty enough to leave the relative safety of cover, they can be revived. But if you’re callous enough to stay in cover and let them bleed out, you’ll be mistaken to think you’re safe – no cover is safe for long, as snipers pepper you with fiendish accuracy with and maddening skill for the flanking maneuver. While you’re stuck with you’re head down, a host of melee troops close in with shotguns to beat your skull in and blow your head off, or worse, chainsaw you into soggy bits of would-be hero.

That’s not to say you’re outgunned. In the event that you don’t have a friend with whom you can play co-op mode, Gears 2 features a large cast of human AI allies that ply the combative arts with equally fiendish dedication and strategy-- with the added bonus of not doing it to you.

To put a cherry on top of this splendid blood-soaked, snarling, visceral delight, Gears 2 presents players with a new, ferociously difficult Horde Mode. In layman’s terms, Horde mode lets you pick your favorite multiplayer map and your favorite character to play as (from either Gears One or Two, thanks to the nifty linked achievements feature). Then, as the helmeted rookie or battle-hardened R. Lee Ermey doppelganger dropped in the sewers or a dilapidated, abandoned city, you’re in short order beset on all sides by wave after wave of assorted, homicidal Locust hell-bent on ripping you limb from limb. One can play this mode alone, or with up to five players via Xbox Live.

Finally, far from being merely a gore-fest, Gears is in fact a deeply cinematic tale of heroism, tragedy, and all-too-human frailty. Between battles with the Locust, Marcus mentors – first grudgingly, at last affectionately – the squad’s newbie; comrade Dominic Santiago desperately searches against all odds for his captive wife, and old friends and brothers in arms are reunited and torn asunder as the last vestiges of humanity struggle to stave off extinction. Backed by an all orchestrated score, the sweep and scope of the tale provides for moments stunning, humorous, and heartbreaking.

Gears 2 won’t be easily summed in a few short words, scarcely even in the many words above. But all in all, its celebration is greatly deserved as the many elements blend to create a true and gripping masterpiece.

Gears of War 2 is indeed an Epic win for Epic Games.