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ellaintrigue · 4 years

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Photo credit: Julio Cortez/AP

George Floyd's fiance pleads against the violent protests: https://www.thedailybeast.com/george-floyds-fiancee-pleads-…

YES, racism is alive and well. So is sexism, rape culture, and homophobia, but you don't see the Me Too movement hurting people and destroying property...

YES, George Floyd was murdered. But this goes far beyond racism. I never deny racism, the recent murder of a black man by two white guys in a pickup was clearly racist. But this is an issue of MEN. And POLICE. Cops have always killed people, it's all a matter of what gets the most publicity. I see a photo collage going around of black people that have been shot recently by cops and I find it offensive. Where are the white, Asian, and Hispanics that have also been shot by the police? What about the recent shooting of a white woman? We are all equals, right? https://apnews.com/57b423dcf5e54bdb801d7ea564416a0a

Foolish liberal hypocrisy. Meanwhile I am seeing younger democratic socialists applauding the looting as capitalism being put in its place. What the hell? You see the first article above, George Floyd's loved one said he never wanted this. And what exactly is the relevance to his death? What did Target stores do to George Floyd? How is the guy walking down the street with a backpack of stolen liquor bottles contributing to justice?

This is bullshit of the greedy and the brainwashed, race issues and social topics have been long lost. The majority of the protesters seem to be males enjoying violence. Which again, is what it comes down to.

While a huge feminist, I have no problem admitting that men have their own separate laundry list of issues. Difficulty speaking out, and difficulty getting help for whatever problems they may have because of the stigma of society where men are still not allowed to admit "weakness." I see it in my own father who has outbursts from being overwhelmed by various things. Having to be a tough guy and a financial supporter to a disabled wife but unable to accept or seek support himself.

There are A LOT of angry men out there. Shit, they're justified for the most part! I would definitely not want to be a man. And that is where the position of authority comes in... overcoming your struggles as a male youth and becoming a cop or correctional officer.

There are so many great cops out there! But, I haven't met many of them. Because not everyone overcomes their past and becomes a good cop. Whatever they grew up with or were born with makes them relish power, control, and violence.

I, a lower class (former middle class) white woman, have been victimized by the police. If you think that's a fucking joke because I'm white, refer back to the original point: POLICE VICTIMIZE PEOPLE OF ALL AGES, RACES, GENDERS, ETC.

A few years ago I read an article about a rapist cop. He raped more than one woman, but when they reported it, they were dismissed because he was a cop. His peers made sure he was above the law. So then he rapes an older black woman, someone's grandmother. She raised hell and he finally got in trouble. Was she listened to because she was black? HELL TO THE NO, women are treated like shit. A black woman? I've seen black women treated horribly my entire life. It's just how it is.

But no one felt like bringing this pig to justice, because, well, white male cop. Cops obviously deal with criminals and folks they will naturally regard as lower class, and none of these folks are going to be believed over a cop. From dating men of questionable backgrounds, I have heard horror stories of prisoners being beaten by cops and correctional officers and all kinds of shit. But who is going to believe some felon over a police officer?

May marked the 4 year anniversary of my ex-boyfriend almost killing me. It was hell, I struggled all month. My mom having cancer, the anniversary, the pandemic, now everyone running around setting shit on fire because they want free TVs... HOLY FUCK. PTSD trigger much?

I've wanted to talk about that, but I felt I couldn't, because, well, he's stalked me since. How did this happen? People think I was a battered woman but that's not true. Women stay with abusive partners and I did not. I got with this guy knowing he had a record, as others before him, but did not expect the onslaught of mental illness. The guy before him was bipolar and would shut down, lay on the bed and just be totally mute or sob. This new guy, after about 3 months into a relationship, would have manic episodes that would lead to suicide attempts. Over time I found out that he was a diagnosed bipolar, and rumored (unconfirmed) schizophrenic. I begged and begged for him to stick to taking meds, which clearly helped over the course of months, but he would stop taking them because he felt he "didn't need them," which is the cruelest cliche of the mentally ill and why so many don't function at all.

So I ended up having to call the cops on him multiple times in the course of 3 years when he lost his shit. Not once did he ever harm me, although you can see, and I can see, now, that it was unhealthy and dangerous for everyone involved regardless. The first time I dealt with the cops over him was when he got a DUI in my truck with his friend. but the friend was driving. I woke up at midnight to this chaos and remember a black female cop intimidating me and screaming at me because I was standing near a beer bottle on the ground and I was "hiding evidence." Which was bullshit since the driver had already been arrested. Who the fuck cares about a random Bud Light bottle lying in my yard? The DUI was in Ocean City. Whatever.

The same fucking night my shitfaced, manic boyfriend logs onto my computer and reads like 7 years worth of texts between me and a male friend, accusing me of fucking him. After a long night of dealing with the other drama it was like hell never ended. He's on my computer, looking at everything I have and accusing me of cheating. Never met the dude, never tried to be with the dude, but that seemed pretty moot. Even if your partner has nothing to hide, you shouldn't be going through their shit. IF YOU DO NOT TRUST THE PERSON YOU ARE WITH, LEAVE THEM. IF YOU HAVE ONGOING ISSUES WITH MANIA OR PARANOIA, GET HELP.

Well, perhaps I seem a hypocrite in protesting violence against women, and I did something I'm not proud of: I punched the fuck out of him. He then got up and put my shotgun in his mouth. He didn't pull the trigger but obviously that scarred me for life. I called 911 and they chased him down in the woods and took him to the mental ward in Salisbury. I dealt with 3 male cops that were kind to me and said I did the right thing by hiding the gun afterward and calling 911. My neighbor also helped me, which I am incredibly grateful for.

I should have left, hands down. But because I never felt physically threatened by him: I felt I was helping him, he could get better, and I kept trying. I have never been a woman that wanted a "project" as some people want, where they find someone to fix or better as a person. But I loved this man and tried my best, stupid as I was.

He was fine for months after that, another huge factor in me staying. We were just boyfriend and girlfriend, enjoying life, until he had another manic episode. Once he went 6 months with no signs of anything at all. Again, at this point in things, I have nothing to candycoat in my life. I am an open book, and in 2018, came out about being raped by a man in 2011, and got judged harshly. I've had to accept that no matter what I say, I will be questioned and put down because that is how victims are treated.

So in 2015 he came home late at night, screaming the FBI were in the bushes and smashing things. He accused me and a family member of conspiring with the government against him and stripped half of his clothes off, threatening to kill himself. Just like that, he would go from a calm person that worked all day to a raging maniac in the most literal form.

I called 911 and was in tears by the time two very tall male cops showed up. That is the main thing I remember, I am 5'2 and these men were both over 6'0 and stood way too close to me. My boyfriend was running around screaming utter nonsense and one cop talked to him, another talked to me. The two men ID'd me and laughed at the fact I always wore lipstick, in the pic and in real life, a habit since I was 14. Then they told me they weren't going to do anything with my boyfriend, who was still screaming and stomping around. I said, "but he's clearly unstable and threatening to kill himself." Both of the cops stood roughly two feet from me, and the heavyset olive skinned officer moved in even closer, shining his flashlight in my face, his breath bearing down on me, and said, "if you call 911 or anyone again tonight, you will both be arrested."

I felt scared of them at this point and they told me my option was to leave my home, leaving my boyfriend there. They asked me if I had family in the area and I said no. "Well, we can't help you then. Plus we want to go and get dinner," the thick one said, before laughing with his partner, who was a thinner blond man. So they waited until I got in my car and left, then they left, leaving my ex still standing screaming in the middle of the yard.

I had nowhere to go, so I went to his aunt's house and spent the night. At one point in the night I heard my boyfriend's truck screech through Berlin, looking for me, but knew I couldn't call 911 anymore because I WAS threatened. And cops can do what they want, no one is going to listen to some white trash chick with a crazy boyfriend.

I called 911 one other time before things got truly worse (I know, right). I got one of the cops that I had dealt with when he put the shotgun in his mouth and he threw him in the mental ward after a brief car chase.

By spring 2016 my boyfriend wasn't working, binge drinking, and seeming off on a regular basis so I somehow managed to drop him off at a homeless shelter despite him initially standing in a Wendy's parking lot screaming I was out to get him.

Finally, in May he became increasingly manic before literally waking up one morning with this weird hollow look in his eyes and screaming the worst threats against me and his family I had ever heard. First I tried to be calm, then I tried to run from him when I thought he wasn't looking and he ran after me and jumped on me. And that was the first time I felt actually afraid that he would hurt me. I thought he would hit me. Instead, he dragged me through the woods by my ankles so hard my leggings were pulled down and became filled with dirt, leaves, and sticks, threw me on the porch and then dragged me into my house. He tortured me for 1-3 hours. I think it was between 1 and 2 hours. Years later I sat down with a shrink and told her, I can't remember, I truly can't. I just remember the intense fear and shame of what it would be like for my dad to come into my house and find me dead. The doctor pursed her lips as she listened to me and reassured me that people with PTSD often have trouble remembering details. In fact, I couldn't piece together how bad the whole thing was until 2018, around the same time I talked about being raped, because I had repressed memories so hard. There was a point where I vividly remembered everything both men had done to me respectively, including a lifelong physical injury I had also blocked out. Like, I knew it was there, I just never allowed myself to think about why.

Instead of killing me, thank fuck, my boyfriend left me lying on a plastic floor mat he had just put a cigarette out in that he been holding over my eye and walked out of the house, stealing my truck. So I called 911, in a sort of daze I seemed the most worried about the stupid truck. But I really couldn't comprehend anything at that point. I shouldn't have bothered calling, because ding-dong, who is at the door, but one of the cops that essentially kicked me out of my house in 2015, leaving me to wonder if my boyfriend would kill himself or burn the place down. The thin, blond cop. The first thing I noticed was his eyes when I spoke to him that day. His pupils were tiny pin-pricks and it was shockingly noticeable. He looked like he was blind or something, because he had wide blue irises with these teeny tiny pupils. Frankly it was creepy, but wasn't relevant to the situation. I told him my ex went nuts, then stole my truck. He starts screaming at me and asking me what I wanted to do, and why the hell did I call. I completely shut down and just felt scared of him. Thinking about telling him about the assault just evaded my head, all I could think was that I was being cornered and I had to get away. He walked around the yard looking at other shit my ex had torn up, yelled at me some more, then left. This cop was almost manic and I was afraid he would arrest me for annoying him.

I finally got my truck back with the help of my grandmother after watching my boyfriend acting insane in front of his boss, who he had driven to. The man got a restraining order against him that week after seeing the violent instability and I made our breakup official at the same time. I knew I was done the second he dragged me through the woods. That was the first time he had ever put hands on me and the torture session would be the last. (I was lucky in that he had tossed me around and suffocated me in a headlock, etc., rather than getting a knife or something... it could have been so much worse.)

At this point, regardless of what people around him did, my now-ex was clearly gone mentally. Not sure how or why it got that bad, but all of his issues just imploded on him at once, almost overnight. So 2016 to 2018 he stalked me and made my life a living hell. He called me and I was afraid to disconnect my number right away because I felt it was a way of tracking him/how dangerous he was any particular day. After screaming for him to leave me alone and calling the cops even more times failed, I felt I had to be nice to him to keep him at bay, or when he started coming into my job, so I wouldn't make a scene. I finally got a domestic violence order in 2017 and stood before the court and described my assault so the judge to decide if I had just cause.

About a month after that, my ex called me threatening to kill himself so I felt super happy about calling 911. Finally they would put his ass in jail. A cop in his early 20's showed up, flirted with me, called his boss and they told me that there was not enough cause to jail my ex. The cop told me to "just talk things over" with my ex and then left after staring at my tits through my sweatshirt.

More time goes by, more bullshit, afraid to go to work, afraid to come home at night. Mace didn't make me feel safer, guns didn't make me feel safer, having coworkers didn't make me feel safer. My dad was screaming at me that I had brought this all on myself by being with a nut for so long. I felt like a hunted animal. My boss complained about me calling out of work over this. Finally my ex's other ex-girlfriend who he was with after me comes into my job, says he assaulted her, and that he was dangerously obsessed with me and my boss finally took me seriously.

I couldn't do anything about phone calls or online harassment. He would message me online telling me he hated me and stuff and I would just block him. Then, one day in September, during Ocean City bike week, he showed up on a bicycle, cornering me in the parking lot of my job as I walked to my shift. I was in utter terror and for a moment he looked like he would attack me again but I just kept on walking, and did not pause. My coworker wanted to know why I was being confronted and I said "THAT'S HIM, THAT'S HIM. I'M SO SORRY, NIKKI, I'M NOT CLOCKING IN RIGHT NOW. I AM CALLING 911."

Two cops showed up, a male and a female and ID'd me, and looked at my DV order. I asked if it was okay for me to lift the sweater on my front seat up to get my purse and the male cop brushed that off, acting like I was a non-threat. But I knew I had to move slow, because, well, cops shoot people. White, black, male, female, non-bindary-gender, whatever.

They saw I had all my paperwork in order then they started fucking yelling at me! They told me they really didn't have time to look for him since it was Bike Week and they were busy! I don't know what else they said to me, I think they were confused about what phone number I used the most because I had 2 at that point. I broke into tears and the male cop said "you don't have to do none of that." I walked back into the store and they came back in again, and my coworker told everyone later on how nasty the cops were too me. I knew it wasn't just me but it was good to finally have a witness this time around.

They looked around for my ex at two known locations then gave up, I had called and asked. 3 days later he attacked his other ex, the one that I had spoken to and they arrested him on both that and my DV order. He was jailed for several months and since then his stalking has been infrequent aside from him popping up on Tumblr this winter to make fun of my cat dying. Because I left him, for assaulting me, he now, in whatever the fuck is left of his mind, wants me to live a life of hell. During one phone call he screamed "YOU WILL NEVER BE HAPPY UNTIL I'M HAPPY."

I'd love to count on him staying gone, but I know better. His brother added me on FaceBook not too long ago and I said hi, and he said "you know you're the love of my brother's life, right?" I told him I wanted nothing to do with my ex. "Not even friends?" I told him that my ex tried to kill me then made my life hell and he said he didn't know and the conversation ended.

I'm not afraid of my ex's brother. I don't think he added me purely to help my ex. This man isn't crazy. This man didn't try to kill me, and isn't going to. But the sheer mindfuckery of it: how can you try to get back with the woman you abused? How can you use threats to try and get back with her? Another time my ex called me and screamed over me posting pictures with my last ex, mocking it. Why would I be with him, instead of the guy that abused me?

...Why would I want to be with a guy that I felt safe with that never abused me? Golly gosh, no idea. But it's all just a headfuck that I will be scarred by for life.

Summary: Cops and the severely mentally ill are capable of ruining the lives of anyone, of any color. 🤷‍♀️

#PTSD

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thornstocutyouwith · 3 years

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|| The Basics || Name: Calypso Piper Hisoka Nickname(s): Caly( Only by family) Age: 12/18-30 (Depending) ➥Birthday: September 17, 2152 ➥Birthplace: New York ➥Sign: Virgo Moon: Taurus Mercury: Libra Venus: Mars: Nationality: Half Japanese- Half American Hometown: New York Current Residence: Living with his family/Homeless. Occupation: Student/Bounty Hunter Income: $0-$10,000 ( roughly) Talents/Skills: Yo-yo tricks, playing the guitar, playing the piano, lying, sorting things, playing the drums, martial arts, hiding, singing,tracking, lockpicking, stage Magic, acting. Salary: None Birth order: Youngest Child. Gender: Male ➥Preferred Pronouns: He, him, his Sexual Preference: Unknown Species: Human Intelligence Level: 113 MBTI: ISTP Introvert(44%) Sensing(1%) Thinking(25%) Perceiving(61%) You have moderate preference of Introversion over Extraversion (44%) You have marginal or no preference of Sensing over Intuition (1%) You have moderate preference of Thinking over Feeling (25%) You have distinct preference of Perceiving over Judging (61%). {Bio} (Coming eventually) || Personal & Relationships|| Relationship skills: Aware of his own Feelings, Self sufficiency, resilience, acceptance, doesn't like to be touched or handled by people he doesn't know. Parents: Drama and Ashlin Status: Unknown how he feels about them. Siblings: Lucy and Lucas Status: Strained, mostly because he's blackmailing them for their incest activities. Significant Others: Unknown (9) Ex-Significant Others: Unknown ( 9) Children: None Best Friends: Unknown( 3) Pets: None Rivals: Unknown Enemies: Unknown ( A lot) Education: High School ( Dropped out a few months before graduation) Strengths: Creativity, Curiosity, Bravery, Zest, social intelligence, playfulness, forceful, spontaneous, adventurous, independent, creative. Weaknesses: Obstructive, Pushy, Loose-tongued, Undisciplined, Sloppy, Aggressive, Chaotic, Vague, Reckless, arrogant, selfish. Introvert or Extrovert?: Introvert How does the character deal with anger?: Usually by taking it out on other things or people, mostly other things. ➥With sadness?: He'll go into hiding. ➥With conflict?: He tries to avoid it, but when he can't, he make sure to end it. ➥With change?: He's fine with change, out with the old and all that. ➥With loss?: He can't stand thinking of losing anyone. He will break down if he's particularly close to the person. But he tries not to get too close to people. What does the character want out of life? To just do what he wants to, really. What would the character like to change in his/her life? Probably that he's strayed too far away from his family, that he hardly even knows them in adulthood. What motivates this character? Getting money, having freedom, having fun, taking risks. What frightens this character? The dark, Ghosts, falling, animals. What makes this character happy? Books, music, risks, video games, candy. Is the character judgmental of others? Yes. Is the character generous or stingy? He is stingy. Is the character generally polite or rude? He is rude. Who were they in school? The energetic mute. Occupation they wanted as a child: To be in a band. Living conditions growing up: Middle Living conditions now: Poor Criminal Record: Breaking and entering, theft, stealing cars, assault, reckless endangerment of an underage child, illegal use of explosives, drugs, driving and drinking, fleeing a cop, identity theft, illegal hacking. How does Character see himself/herself? Reckless, brave, cunning, smart How does Character believe he/she is perceived by others? Worthless and stupid. How self-confident is the character? Pretty self-confident. Does the character seem ruled by emotion or logic or some combination thereof? Emotions, for the most part. What would most embarrass this character? Having to show his softer side in public. Morality (Bold One Per Section): Lawful / Neutral / Chaotic ||| Good / Gray / Evil - You are 47.2% Evil. You are 64.1% Chaotic. Religious Belief: None Glasses or contact lenses?: Glasses Character Tropes: Catalyst Hero, Trickster, Fool, Shadow, The Child, The Hermit, The Devil, The Priest, Addict, Monkey, Dragon, Clown, Beggar, Destroyer, Detective, Visionary. Primary Goals In Life: Following his dreams and being free to do what he wants with his life. Character's short-term goals in life: Not dying. Getting cash from bounty's. Sex. Threatening to expose his siblings incest. Character's long-term goals in life: Visiting other countries. Exposing his siblings incest to their parents. Languages Known: English, Japanese Secrets: He knows about his brother and sister's incest. He is a sex addict. As well as a sadist, a sexual sadist ( On occasion). He killed one of his girlfriends. Hates cats. Loves watching children's tv shows, still. Most of the things that happened to him at school. Is a sexual deviant. ( more will be added later. ) Deepest secret: Has a journal of his fears and secrets. Biggest fear: Fear of being bound. (Merinthophobia) Happiest memory: The day he got his first electric guitar. Loneliest moment: When one of his teachers removed him from class and told him he would grow up to be worthless and stupid, then just let him sitting in the hall. Quirks/Mannerisms/Habits: Is a habitual liar and has made up a family that does not exist. Eats like a child even as an adult. Believes in ghosts. Obsessed with children's Cartoons. Shows up unannounced. Always steals the sweets. Has a leather fetish. Is embarrassed of their family heritage. Takes food off other people's plates without asking. Does not like to share hygiene items like hairbrushes, chap-stick, or razors. Keeps a marker on them at all times so they can draw weird things in public restrooms. Has unresolved childhood issues. Is constantly found only partially dressed. Has a weakness for games of chance. Never leaves home without wearing pants, but never wears pants while at home. Is scared of Neon colors. Always blows bubbles in to their drink when they have a straw, even as an adult. Has attempted voodoo. Dresses as a vampire at every costume party, fancy dress party, Halloween, and formal event. Makes paperclip jewelry. Won't drink without a straw. Has had sex with more people than they have seriously dated. Cannot sleep while in the vicinity of a cat. Gets lost all the time. Colors their hair crazy colors every other week. Likes to file their fingernails to sharp points because it makes them feel more dangerous. Is totally responsible for everything that goes wrong. Knows that they are being watched (by the readers). Has an accent that no one knows how to place. Is a heavy sleeper. Thinks cats can see their soul. Sneezes uncontrollably whenever someone talks about cats, reads something about them, or looks at illustrations of any type featuring them, but has no allergy to interacting with the animal itself. Is left-handed, but tries to pass as being right-handed. Wears either mismatched socks or shoelaces. Has a tendency of laughing at the most inappropriate times. Is double-jointed. Treats all of their friends like they are personal evil minions. Goes to the gym at 3am because 'That's when the ghost is there.' Wears removable tattoos. Steals things from people they think need to be punished for something. Has very bad taste in relationships. Talks in their sleep. Eye-rolling, Potty mouth, Snapping fingers, Stuttering, Toying with objects before them, binge drinking, smokes, eats a lot of sugar, is addicted to video games, Still plays with children's toys, clubbing, picks at mouth with his tongue. Loves anime. Savvies: Music, Tech, Fact, Media Style (Elegant, shabby etc.): Rebel, Punk, Goth, Steampunk, Cosplay. How does he/she dress?: Mostly black or dark yet colorful colors on normal days. Usually with purposefully placed tears in the pants and such, and risky looking outfits. Loves mesh, baggy, tight fitting and/or leathery clothing. Hobbies: Playing the electric guitar, piano and drums. Singing. Hunting bounties for cash. Boardgames. Gambling. Chess. Cosplaying. Crafts. Keeping a journal. Learning an instrument. Legos. Modeling. Origami. Reading. Videogame's. Renaissance Faire. Writing Music/songs. Speech patterns: Accented, mellow, chilled, stuttering. Disabilities: Dyslexic, Epileptic. Greatest flaw: Being a risk taker. Best quality: Easily figuring out and controlling a situation. Illnesses/Allergies/Allergic/exe: Seizures, Migraines Addictions: Drugs, Alcohol, Sex, Food. || Physical || Hair Colour: Light Brown Eye Colour: Bright blue Skin Colour: Tan Body Modifications: Has several ear piercing, tongue piercings, lip piercings and chest and lower. Build: Slender / Scrawny / Bony / Fit / Athletic / Herculean / Babyfat / Pudgy / Obese / Other Height: 6′9″ Weight: 146 Health: Very low Distinguishing features: his ears a slightly pointed. Has very, very faint freckles over the bridge of his nose. Scars/Birthmarks: Has several birthmarks on his body, on under his left eye, another two on the right side of his face, five on his back, one inside his ear, and three on his left arm. Along with those, are several scars from his recklessness as a child, one of which cuts down on the nostril of the right side of his nose. Another on his neck and four on his shoulder. As well as a ton on his knee's and legs. Abilities/Powers: Prophecy Construction Restrictions: He hasn't unlocked his powers fully yet, if at all really. The power triggers sever seizures that incapacitate him and prevent him from learning how to use his powers at the current moment. And this will continue to happen in the foreseeable future, even if he is able to figure out the easiest part of it, that is the prophetic visions he receives while having a seizure. This power also has other unknown effects and restrictions to him. || Favorites || Favorite Food: Candy Favorite Drink: Koolaid Favorite Pizza Topping: Taco Favorite Color: Steel Blue Favorite Music Genre: Punk/rock Favorite Book Genre: Dystopian Favorite Movie Genre: Fantasy Favorite Season: Fall Favorite Butt Type: Firm Favorite Swear Word: Fuck Favorite Scent: Cookies Favorite Sayings: " I may not be there, But I am closer than I was yesterday." “That’s what people do who love you. They put their arms around you and love you when you’re not so lovable.” “I’ve lived in darkness a long time. Over the years my eyes adjusted, until the dark became my world and I could see.” “Sometimes it feels better not to talk. At all. About anything. To anyone.” “My silence holds a plethora of syllables I am too afraid to say.”“They call you heartless; but you have a heart and I love you for being ashamed to show it.” " And every time I look at you, it hurts." "First of all, you don't know me. Second of all, you don't me." “Life is wonderful. It’s a gift to be alive, to see the sun and breathe the air. And there isn’t really anything else.” Favorite Quote: “Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.” || Fun Stuff || “Boss” Theme Music: Love The Way You Hate Me/ Hand Grenade/ Hiding Place / Bottom or Top: Top Loud Burper Or Soft Burper: Loud Sings In The Shower: Yes / No Likes Bad Puns: Yes / No Sins: Lust / Greed / Gluttony / Sloth / Pride / Envy / Wrath Virtues: Chastity / Charity / Temperance / Diligence / Humility / Kindness / Patience / Justice Hogwarts House: Gryffindor Element: Darkness Big5: Openness Jugian: INFP ( Alternative Type) MOTIV: Offbeat (Materialist 45% 54% Offbeat 81% 48% Thinking 21% 51% Intimate 21% 56% Vital 50% 54%) Left/Right Brain: Right

#CalypsoInformation

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icharchivist · 7 years

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Okay I understand what you said about death note, but don't you think you're going a bit overboard with the roasting? It's bad for people who know the original masterpiece, yeah, but it does stand alone as a movie. If I watched it with my non-anime-watcher brother, he might go, "Oh, that was interesting." And maybe finally give the original a shot. It did its job getting people familiar and interested in dn, but of course it couldn't be as good, its an entire sieris shortened to one movie

Well I did say when I started it that I wouldn’t have much pity toward the movie either.

And I’m sorry, but we’re talking about a story that was extremely Japanese, and which not only was stripped of its Japanese intend, but also showed off Asians being killed by Light, and especially a bullshit explaination on them picking the name Kira because “in Japanese it means Killer so they’ll think we’re japanese” and them letting messages in Japanese on the crimescenes to pretend Kira is Japanese.

This is not the kind of things to overlook. Whitewashing isn’t something to overlook, and the movie dealt with it in such a poor way, in an actual offensive way, when you adapt something, you at least try to respect it.

And it’s not an entiere series shortened into one movie. They planned sequels. The movie ends on a stupid cliffhanger. And it follows absolutly no plot from the original. Why do you try to use the L. and Kira’s showdown, and clearly call your characters those ways, while you don’t respect the story at all?

Oh and fyi, for as...... much as they are (i’m not found of them), there are Japanese movies adapted from Death Note. The First movie is all about the mindgames between Light and L, and it ends on L. meeting Light. They changed a lot of things, but they kept the focus where it should be: on L and Light’s mindgames and manipulations. It teased for a sequel while actually leaving you with quite a story that was closer to the original. Of course you can’t adapt 12 volumes into one movie. But, especially when you expect sequels, you can try to cut the story correctly.

Listen, when you adapt something, you’re supposed to at least have read the thing. As bad as the Last Airbender Movie was, at least it did show you a Kid who ran away from his duty because he was scared of wars, two others kids finding him and trying to help him learn the elements, and Zuko the antagonist is still someone extremely wounded in hs honor after his father’s abuse.

And let’s be real, The Last Airbender is one of the worst adaptation of all time, it’s boring, and it’s whitewashing, but at least it kept the characters basic traits and journey. Why would you adapt something and keep the name if you’re not going to at least follow the story?

Like i repeated, it wouldn’t have been as bad if say, they did a whole new story where Ryuk just happens to drop the Death Note in America with enteirely new characters. No L. No Kira, an actualy story. Like the Chapter 0 of Death Note, or why not even explore the BB Murder Case since it’s a novel happening in America?

You can take the idea of the Death Note, but not if you take the characters name and the basics of their showdwn while absolutly nothing about it will be respected.(especially since the movie totally overlooked the mindgames between L and Light because Light did a really obvious mistake.)

And how the fuck does it stands alone when it removed the lore? No really??

Okay so, where the hell Ryuk’s come from? Why did the notebook say “Do not trust Ryuk”? What did Ryuk do in the movie that wasn’t trust worthy aside from not letting Light know Mia was doing bullshit? What was the point about this plotline?What was Mia’s deal? We just had to accept that a cheerleader would get into murders right away?Besides have you seen how those two bounded without even blinking at the idea of murders? Especially since Light is supposedly a victim we’re supposed to feel bad for in the movie?

Why do we have to accept that? Why do we have to accept the lowest of effort, of writting a basic Teenage Horror Screenplay, while the actual story was supposed to be One of The Kind?

Seriously though, Awkward Teen with a Crush on Cheerleader Who Gets The Girl After Getting Mysterious Powers is a cliché. Turning Ryuk, a sympathetic figure in the manga, a passive observator, into a sort of creature always pushing you to do bad is cliché. Hell, they removed entierely the relationship between Light and Ryuk while it was the focus of the original.

Not to mention it was a story about a greater scale. The original manga was a commentary on how Law Enforcement works in Japan, and how a priviliged, popular, “will go far” kid like Light, who had access to the information, would believe he would have some reasons to clean it up.But instead, it became a teenage drama. Light was always pushed by other people in the movie to make murders, and he often want to get out of it. Even the God persona is something coming out of their ego, while in the manga it’s something that just happens. Here, it’s kids who want the attention, and get backlash for doing so. An underdog, who just want to keep his life going in school, who plays God just because he was pushed by his girlfriend and because he is a poor kid who’s traumatized.

We went also from a story which was a commentary on Japanese Law Efforcement, to a story who was so oblivious to the Law Efforcement Commentary, that they showed a white cop choke the black lead before letting him go, and you’re supposed to cheer for the cop.

Is it worth showing someone who don’t want to watch anime for them to get interested?? No.

It’s a watered down stupid teen flick which plays on Edgy Fuel. It’s a project that was born and kept going with racist intends. It’s a story you may watch, think “bleh” and leave. Not get interested in more. And if you do, jfc. I’m sorry but I hate the idea some people might come into the manga expecting say, Ryuk to be like this movie bullshit, or Light, or L, or anyone.

And okay, as a standalone movie?

The movie is poorly paced. The exposition scenes are hilariously bad. The characters motivation are inexistant, explained by a sexy montage of them having sex while killing people (of color), showing how immature the whole subject was treated. The montage itself was incredibily bad, the whole idea of seeing the ascension of Light’s godlike persona was totally overlooked for his stupid romance. It gives tragic backstories to the two main leads to explain somehow why they’re like that.

The whole fun of this story, which was to see how L and Light was trapping each other, was ruined by the fact the plot runs on stupid and Light doesn’t make any decision. It’s Mia doing them. L. discover Light is Kira halfway throught he movie because Light fucked up. The manipulations of say, getting rid of the FIB agent, was completely overlooked in a cheap twist. Because that wasn’t important.

The whole plot requires you to just accept they are whatever genuis and overlook the batlant mistakes they make to make the plot running. And, because it didn’t make it through, spelling out the message of “chosing the lesser of two evils”, removing the reader’s freewill to chose who to side with.

It was not fun. It was not exciting. It was seeing Edgy to be Edgy.

And I’m sorry this is insulting? Death Note was a serie that run for 3 years. For 3 years, the authors went out of their way to make an unique story, with unique characters, with a complex view on mankind. They put 3 years to elaborate the themes, to develop the characters, to tie up the looses ends. And Hollywood saw from it just an opportunity of a quick cash, to be Edgy by taking the name and concept, and make the usual soup they do with teenage horror movies.

Death Note wasn’t the franchise to do it. We can’t blindly accept adaptation because “it stands as a stand alone movie”. It’s completely disregarding the fact it was someone else’s work that you decided to strip from everything that made it so unique to start with.

Even more when it’s America disregarding a culture and somehow managing to be offensive toward it, making them the victims of a story they were the main characters of to start with.

So I completely disagree with your point of view on it. I’m sorry if i’m harsh, it’s not against you nonny, much more against the movie.

If an adaptation isn’t capable of getting the basic understanding of the story right, they have no right to claim themselves as such. I’m not asking an adaptation to the comma, i’m asking to an adaptation which would respect its root.

Which isnt what this movie gave.

#Anonymous #ichareply #ichablogging noteflix #ichatalks about noteflix

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judgeanon · 7 years

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A SHORT HISTORY OF FEMALE JUDGES IN JUDGE DREDD FROM 2004 TO 2007

With a sense of newfound stability and confidence brought about by finally being owned by a company that genuinely cared for its characters and stories, 2000AD carried onwards into the new millennium, with John Wagner leading Dredd into a new epic and setting him off on the road to a storyline that would redefine both character and setting forever. One particular staple of this era is the solidification of the strip as a very character-driven, procedural crime drama, building even further on the lessons learned from “The Pit” but also adding a deeper layer of examination of the strip’s protagonist and his relationships with his supporting cast.

Unfortunately, said supporting cast is still running a bit low in the female judges department, although that doesn’t really put a dent on female protagonism in general, as Dredd’s niece Vienna takes a much more center stage. And although Chief Judge Hershey likewise remains a regular fixture, it’ll still take a few more years for Wagner to introduce a new female judge with any real lasting power. In the meantime, however, a new generation of writers and artists will begin introducing several new female judges in a variety of roles, from background extras to one-thrill wonders and maybe even villains...

(Previous posts: 1979 to 1982 - 1982 to 1986 - 1986 to 1990 - 1990 to 1993 - 1993 to 1995 - 1995 to 1998 - 1998 to 2001 - 2001 to 2004. All stories written by John Wagner unless noted otherwise. Cover art by Henry Flint)

Our first stop is “Terror”, painted by Colin MacNeil and published in progs 1392-1399 (June-July 2004). A prologue to the upcoming mini-epic of the year, it heavily features a Judge Stuyvesant as part of a small task force of judges investigating the extremist democratic terrorist group Total War. Sporting her own variant on the black bobcut, Stuyvesant runs surveillance on a suspected Total War operative as he falls hopelessly in love with a citizen, acting as a secret bridge of sorts between them and Dredd, and saving the latter from having to spend hours looking at monitors.

Right after the last episode of “Terror” comes “Big Deal at Drekk City”, drawn by Cam Kennedy (progs 1400-1404, August ’04), where Dredd and a Judge Vance take a handful of cadets, including a very aptly-named Cadet Laws on a rather troubled Cursed Earth familiarization trip. Vance proves to be an experienced judge, not just in combat but also at testing the cadets’ attitude, but at the story’s climax she takes a spear to the chest and comes extremely close to dying. Luckily for her, the cadets overturn Dredd’s orders to stay back and return to save both of them, with Laws taking care of her injuries. So a decent outing, all things considered.

And so we get to the first big thrill of this post, the 12-episodes long “Total War”, drawn by Henry Flint and published in progs 1408 to 1419 (September-December ’04). This is also Chief Judge Hershey’s first city-wide crisis in office, as both “Helter Skelter” and the Aliens invasion were events mostly isolated to one or two sectors. The threat itself comes from an alleged two hundred nuclear explosives secretly placed around the city by Total War, the afore-introduced terrorist group. Their demands are simple: all judges must turn in their badges and surrender their power to the public, or they will begin detonating the bombs at regular intervals until they accept or the city has been reduced to glowing dust.

With a clear (albeit hidden) enemy and the tense, gripping pace of a good Tom Clancy novel, “Total War” has little room for character development, and most of it is taken by a subplot involving Dredd, Vienna and a genetically-altered clone. The impersonal nature of the threat also means there’s not much in the way of gunplay or fight scenes, with most of the action being a race against the clock for Dredd and a team of investigators to locate and dispose of the nukes. One thing we do get to see, however, is Hershey at her best as Chief Judge: unfettered, collected and focused, but also willing to resort to certain tactics that many of her predecessors would’ve found difficult to stomach. The most obvious case being the opening page of episode 7, where in a citywide broadcast she concedes to Total War’s demands and orders the immediate disbanding of the judges and a return to a civilian government.

Naturally, it’s all a ruse designed to buy more time as Dredd and company desperately chase every possible lead and exhaust every resource to find the bombs, and to Hershey’s credit it works like a spell. Chief of Undercover Division Judge Hollister also makes an appearance, as does Judge Stuyvesant from a few months back, and it’s actually pretty interesting to see how Flint manages to give the latter’s design a few unique qualities to differentiate her from her chief.

A few female undercover judges, an unnamed bespectacled control judge and a fairly striking PSU judge also make small appearances, and once the crisis is over we get a short and somewhat odd scene where Dredd tries to hand over his badge for racing to save an endangered Vienna from the devastation of a nuclear blast instead of protecting the citizens, but Hershey downplays his perceived dereliction of duty and reminds him that he’s still human. It’s rather strange and almost out of place at the end of a story where her stoicism reached almost robotic heights, but it does make a good job of showing the personal bond that still exists between them. And at any rate, it’s worth it to see her turn Dredd’s catchphrase against him.

By way of intermission, the special prog 2005′s “Christmas with the Blints” (Andrew Currie, January ‘05) has Dredd travelling to Brit-Cit hot on the trail of a married couple of serial killers, which nets us a couple of background female brit judges in a few panels. Then it’s back to the Big Meg for a handful of epilogue stories dealing with the fallout of Total War’s terrorist attack. “After the Bombs” (Jason Brashill, 1420-1422, idem) has yet another appearance by Stuyvesant; “Horror in Emergency Camp 4″ (D’Israeli, 1425-1428, February ‘05) has a quite staggering amount of possible background female street judges, including two named ones called Rush and Woo and a very librarian-like PSU judge; and “Missing in Action” (written by Gordon Rennie and drawn by Ian Gibson, 1429-1431, March ‘05) has not only a young Judge Herriman as a small plot point, but also a very odd female judge with dual straight shoulderpads, platinum blonde hair and a Justice Dept. branded hairband who may be a psi (Anderson, even?), although it’s hard to tell because the badge looks like a regular street judge’s.

(The one liberty Justice Dept. hasn’t crushed: artistic liberties!)

EDIT: via Facebook, Gibson himself has confirmed the judge pictured here is indeed a regular street judge. He also had a few comments about the design:

"Returning to the ‘uniform’ topic, for some reason that now escapes me, I decided to give the female judge from the Missing in action adventure a Justice department head scarf. I think it suits her and makes her less scary for the little girl they rescue.”

Speaking of Psis, a slightly redesigned Judge Karyn reappears in progs 1432-1436’s “Descent” (by Rennie and Boo Cook, April ‘05) with a new pink hairstyle and a psi-flash that leads her and Dredd into the Undercity to rescue some survivors of a hovership crash through the hole left by one of Total War’s bombs. Unfortunately, what they find there is a supernatural entity known as the Shadow King, which Dredd and Karyn had already fought in the Megazine (volume 4, issue 5). In the ensuing firefight, Dredd is possessed by the Shadow King’s spirit and turns into a hulking monstrosity, and Karyn takes her whole “Anderson wannabe” character trait to its logical conclusion by knocking Dredd out and absorbing the spirit into herself. Unfortunately, the Shadow King turns out to be too powerful for Karyn, and ends up destroying her mind and taking over her body. She’s eventually subdued by Dredd and judge reinforcements, and the creature once known as Judge Karyn is locked inside a holding cell deep inside Psi Division’s headquarters, never to escape.

It’s a move somewhat reminiscent of Garth Ennis’ treatment of Judge Perrier or Dekker: bring an obscure character back from the depths of oblivion, use them as supporting cast for a couple of years, then kill ‘em off at a later date. And it can definitely be read as a fairly manipulative attempt at getting some emotion out of disposable characters by offing recognizable names rather than complete nobodies. However, the difference between them and Karyn to me lies in Rennie’s very meta-textual idea of her chasing after Anderson’s star. Karyn, much like Janus, was created as a reserve Anderson and swiftly put aside once she returned. They both have their fans, sure, but the general consensus is that try as they might, they just couldn’t match up to the original. Which is exactly what happens to Karyn in this story. She tries to be Anderson but ultimately isn’t as strong as her, and ends up literally erased as a result. It’s still a very heroic sacrifice, as she dies saving Dredd, but it also has a deeper narrative core that was missing from pretty much every other revival of old, forgotten judges.

Rennie sticks around to write the much longer “Blood Trails” (art by Currie, progs 1440-1449, May-July ‘05), which is his own take on the Wagnerian procedural cop show-style mini-epic. As such it features a nice couple of female background judges (only one gets a name: Weisak), including a surprise cameo by Judge Morinta, the inventor med-judge from “Gulag”, although for some reason she’s now blonde instead of brunette. And of course, there’s the by now mandatory final page visit to Hershey’s office, this time to orchestrate a covert retaliatory orbital strike against Anatoli Kazan, War Marshall Kazan’s clone (also introduced in “Gulag”), for siccing a bunch of assassins on Dredd’s niece. Needless to say, it gets carried out quite swiftly.

A few weeks later, Carlos Ezquerra draws another background female judge in “Matters of Life and Death”, also by Rennie (1452, August ‘05). Wagner returns with artist Kev Walker in tow to deliver “Mandroid” (1453-1464, August-November ‘05), and although the main female character in that story is not really a judge, there are still a few proper ones scattered throughout, including a Judge Kowalski who gets a tender little background moment in what’s otherwise one of the absolute bleakest stories of the decade.

Right afterwards, we get a Tek Judge James in prog 1465′s “Everything In The Garden” (Arthur Ranson, November ‘05). Then Rennie and Flint return for a small epilogue to “Blood Trails”, as Anatoli Kazan, now hunted by his own government, arrives in Mega-City One requesting political asylum in “Change of Loyalties” (1466, November ‘05). Of course, Dredd’s having none of it, but since Anatoli could potentially be an invaluable tactical resource and a goldmine of intel, Hershey asks him to at least talk to the creep before calling for his execution. So what we’ve got here is maybe the first example of the main conflict between Dredd and Hershey, one that continues literally to this day in stories like “Harvey”.

(Also of note: this Brendan McCarthy-esque coloring job by Flint. Talk about seeing red!)

On this corner we have the immovable object: Judge Dredd, with a mindset as narrow as his helmet’s visor, never one to double-think himself or back down, apt to following both his sharp gut instincts and his Everestian mountains of experience, and usually very, very right. On the other, we have the irresistible force: Chief Judge Hershey, focused on the big picture, willing to take a chance on a potentially risky idea that could also bring about huge benefits to her city, confident that they’ll be able to handle whatever pitfalls may appear later on, but willing to listen to all parties involved. That last part is important because with any other chief this is the kind of conflict that would lead to some serious fallout, but Hershey is smarter than that, and more importantly, has seen first-hand what happens to Chiefs who don’t listen to Dredd. Her default way, then, of bridging the gap between the two forces is to plainly ask Dredd his opinion and promise to act accordingly to it, in this case, by letting him decide her vote on the council.

Overall it’s a decent way to avoid some very cliche drama, but there’s a couple of problems with it, not least of all that the sheer number of stories like this has turned it into a cliche in and of itself. However, the biggest problem, for me, is that it reduces Hershey to a bit of an echo chamber or political proxy for Dredd, allowing him to make decisions and direct the course of the city without actually leaving his position as a street judge. It lets him play in both arenas at once but doesn’t chain him to anything. From an in-story perspective it makes sense, since despite everything they still have a history together and Dredd is rarely wrong, but it’s annoying from a character standpoint because it stifles Hershey quite a bit. At its worst, she comes off as just a puppet of Dredd’s, although her directly asking for his council and seemingly agreeing with it on some level helps stave that off. And in a sneaky bit of storytelling, when the council does make its decision on Anatoli’s fate we get to see the result but we don’t get to see who actually voted for what. So whether Hershey actually went through with her promise is left, much like the voting hands, up in the air.

Rounding up 2005 we have a forensic judge at the start of “Nobody”, by Robbie Morrison and Richard Elson (1467, November). The new year then kicks off with a nice handful of background judges through “Your Beating Heart”, by Wagner and Patrick Goddard (1469-1474, January-February ‘06) and the return of Judge Lola in Ian Edginton and D’Israeli’s “Time and Again” (1475, February ‘06), which makes sense considering it’s a sequel to “Tempus Fugitive”. The same story also features an elderly, unnamed scarred female judge as head of a parole board.

Things get a little more exciting in our next stop, with newcomer writer Simon Spurrier, artist Laurence Campbell and (awesomely-named) inker Kris Justice’s “Dominoes” (1482, April ‘06), a story that plants some seeds that would take six years to blossom.

(This is also the first time an artist draws the oversized chains holding Hershey’s badge far as I've been able to gleam, which means I owe Campbell a drink because it’s my absolute favorite detail of her uniform)

Ostensibly, the story is all about Dredd going on a diplomatic mission to Neocuba to handle a prisoner exchange with their president. Two pages in, however, we learn that his ship’s pilot is actually a fanatical black ops agent with a mission of her own: assassinating said president in such a way that it looks like either an accident or a covert sov op. Which she does beautifully and without Dredd ever realizing it. And in a final bit of very sharp writing, Spurrier all but screams she did it all on Hershey’s orders.

Overall, a fair lot to unpack for a six page story. We’ve known for a while now that Hershey favours more subtle, underhanded ways of securing Mega-City One’s interests than blunt force of arms, but something about this one feels like pushing it. Maybe it’s keeping Dredd in the dark about it, or directly targeting a foreign head of state, but if it’s not crossing a line, at the very least it’s toeing it. In a way it echoes "The Chief Judge’s Man”, but having the target be an implicitly corrupt foreign leader makes it slightly less damning than murdering rebellious but innocent MC-1 citizens. And, more importantly, Spurrier decides to end the story without confirming nor denying Hershey’s involvement in it, although at the time it seemed like a sure thing.

From a six-pager to a six-episode-er as Gordon Rennie, Ian Richardson and PJ Holden bring us “House of Pain” (1485-1490, May ‘06), and what a treat it is. Right off the bat we open with Judge Alice, a street judge driving a catch wagon on the graveyard shift, being harassed by a couple of punks. Her scene is mostly set-up for Judge Guthrie’s return, but things get a lot better as the story goes along. First, with a small guest appearance by Wally Chief Judge Hollister going undercover with two others as kneepad models in a pretty funny, albeit pretty skeevy scene; then with Judge Corson, a bomb defusal specialist tek who first helps Dredd deal with a perp’s suicide box implant and later with the main villain’s offshore platform’s self-destruct; and there’s still enough space for Hershey to deliver a short lesson on law economics:

By contrast, “Jumped”, by John Smith and Simon Fraser (1491-1494, June ‘06), only has a lone unhelmeted female judge in a panel, although she is seen with a similarly unhelmeted male judge, so maybe all those fan letters about lady judges being allergic to helmets are finally having an effect. “Neoweirdies”, by Simon Spurrier and Paul Marshall, (1496-1498, July ‘06) has a couple of background sightings but also co-stars a Judge Garris as part of a team investigating murders in a pretentious weirdos competition, including a cheeky little panel of her checking out a naked contestant. Avert your eyes, lest the SJS pluck ‘em out. Spurrier also writes the Pete Doherty-drawn “Versus” (1499, August ‘06), a mostly silent tale featuring a female control judge.

Now we reach what’s probably the most important and certainly the longest story of the decade: “Origins”, by Wagner and Ezquerra (progs 1505 to 1535 -with interludes- September ‘06 to May ‘07). The premise is a heavy one: Justice Department receives a note demanding a ransom for the corpse of Judge Fargo, creator of the judge system and father of justice. With the note is a tissue sample that was taken from a living organism, so if it is indeed Fargo, he’s also alive. Chief Judge Hershey quickly sends Dredd and a team of hand-picked judges into the Cursed Earth with one billion credits and a wagon to follow the trail of the kidnappers. The team includes two female judges: the returning Judge Sanchez from “Incubus” and a Judge Waters. Of the two, Waters is definitely the most impressive, a hardened street judge who acts as Dredd’s second in command early on, leading a defensive action against an army of Mad Max extras with a very calm, matter-of-fact badass attitude that feels quite refreshing after years of more troubled, insecure judges. It also helps that Ezquerra draws her as noticeably older than Sanchez, so it’s clear from the get-go that Waters is a veteran. And near the end of the story, Waters gets another chance to shine as she orchestrates and executes the rescue of Dredd and Fargo from the renegade army of the damned. Overall, she proves herself more than worthy of being in a Brian Bolland cover.

Of course, as the name suggests, “Origins” is mostly concerned with showing the birth of the Justice Department and the events leading to Dredd’s creation, so there’s not much else there that concerns this post, save for one small but crucial page: when the young Fargo is outlining his plans for the creation of a corps of judges armed with the power to dispense instant justice to the United States senate, he specifically mentions the need for choosing “good men and women.” And on the same page we get a glimpse of an early class of judge cadets in training which also includes a couple of women. So here is confirmation that from day one the judges counted several women in their ranks, although admittedly by now this probably wasn’t terribly in doubt.

The final episode also has a predictable appearance by Hershey, who gets the unexpected privilege of being the second to last person to talk to Fargo before he finally expires. The last one, naturally, is Dredd himself, although both of them lie through their teeth about what his final words to each other were. More on that later.

Now, about those interludes. Prog 1521′s “The Sexmek Slasher” (January ‘07) by Wagner and Vince Locke features a Judge Wyler in a supporting role. And Gordon Rennie teams-up with Ian Gibson to bring us “Judgement” (1523-1528, February-March ‘07), a supernatural revenge story guest-starring Judge Anderson in one of her rare not-Grant/Wagner-scripted appearances.

(Also featuring the return of Teddy Dredd!)

The story is a tightly-written tale about a ghost judge murdering members of a crime cartel known for using psykers to mask their activities. The revenant also murders a judge but spares his partner, a Judge Bunns (could it be the same Bunns from 1983′s “Rumble in the Jungle”?), demonstrating some kind of psychic ability to tell the guilty from the innocent, although how innocent a Mega-City One judge can really be is anyone’s guess. Dredd and Anderson’s investigation reveals that the ghost is actually the enraged soul of a long-dead judge, killed by Rico Dredd before he was sent to Titan. But it’s Anderson who connects the final dot and reaches the real source of the apparition: Judge Edek, a veteran psi-judge ambushed and all but murdered by the aforementioned cartel. Crippled beyond repair and frozen in cryo-stasis in the hopes that some day technology would advance enough to heal her, some part of Edek’s consciousness remained, well, conscious, and reached out in anger to another betrayed judge in order to turn them into a revenant and get her revenge. Ultimately, Anderson reaches Edek’s chamber after fighting her way through a gorgeously drawn horde of ectoplasmic monsters and pulls the plug, while Dredd handles what remains of Judgement on his own.

Overall, “Judgement” is a very strong showing for Anderson and a great psychic/supernatural twist on the old “judge turned vigilante” premise of stories like “The Executioner” or “Raider.” Also on display is Gibson’s slight redesign of the psi judge uniform, as Anderson sports twin straight shoulderpads all the way through. According to Gibson himself, the pads helped him make her more “dynamic.” He also had a spot of trouble rendering Anderson’s new shorter haircut, first shown in Alan Grant and Arthur Ranson’s ongoing Psi Division strip in the Megazine. In his own words:

"Then, when I was back doing a Dredd for 2000ad, on a story called ‘Judgement’ ( I think ), Andy was again in the script. But someone had cut off all her lovely flowing blonde tresses, for reasons of their own. So I had to render her thus.”

Rounding up this post we have a trio of short done-in-ones: “Fifty-Year Man” (Wagner and Patrick Goddard, prog 1536, May ‘07) has a female judge, perhaps a public relations administrator, as head of a team putting together a retrospective of Dredd’s fifty years on the streets, with some predictably disastrous results. In a similar vein, a journalist is arrested by a Judge Socks (maybe, her badge is hard to read) after going insane trying to write a biography of Dredd in “The Biographer”, Rob Williams’ first appearance in this project (with Boo Cook, 1537, idem). And we end in a note of tragedy with “The Incident”, by Robbie Morrison and Richard Elson (1538, idem). The story kicks off when undercover Judge Ferrara has her cover blown and is kidnapped by assassins who use a nano-virus to destroy the high tech implant wire on her brain that she’d being using to spy on their boss. Unfortunately for her, both PSU and Dredd are too slow to reach her, and the virus erases her mind. One seriously bleak story, although we do get to see Elson draw some seriously unique uniforms for the Control judges:

In our next episode: the hardest part to write for me. Also, the most important female judge of the new millennium has her prog debut.

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silentauroriamthereal · 8 years

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Every title I could think of was too long, too: Thoughts on series 4 (and 1-3). Johnlock, Mary, Queer baiting, plot holes, how human relationships work, and other things that made me use a lot of caps

All right, folks. It’s 4,500 words long, hahaha. I feel like I just gave birth. Read on, if you dare.

I’ve started this post about five different times now. Sixth time’s the charm?

Okay. I have to start with this: I am a Johnlock shipper. A diehard, it-comes-before-everything-else-for-me sort of shipper. That doesn’t give me that most objective of stances, but there it is. Counting my 8 pre-series 3 stories (303,923 words collectively) and my 5 post-series 4 stories (30,526 words collectively so far), I have now written a total, as of yesterday’s fic, of 1,557,772 words of fiction over exactly 70 stories. That means that 1,223,323 words of the fiction I’ve produced over the past three years has been series 3 fix-it fic. Because that’s when the show runners lost me.

It’s a super unpopular opinion. Or was then, at least! What I see, as a writer and a viewer both, is a pattern in both Moffat and Gatiss’ writing of starting off really strongly, then inevitably copping out and taking some kind of easy out that fails to fully resolve what came before it. It fails to realistically deal with the fall-out in terms of human relationships. I watched Doctor Who for awhile, though I was never a huge fan. On Doctor Who, nothing makes sense. The “science” is obviously not meant to be believable. Personally, I always prefer things set in real life with believable plots and storylines. Despite my beginnings in the Harry Potter world, universes that involve magic and similar elements are not usually my first choice. With a large exception for Tolkien’s entire universe. On Doctor Who, you’re not supposed to believe the plot, and that’s good, because it’s impossible to do so. However, when the human relationships also make no sense, I’m out. And they don’t. I was constantly seeing, particularly when Moffat took over as the main writer, things that didn’t make sense in Amy and Rory’s relationship. And the plots, nonsensical as they were, also never panned out, added up, had the impact they should have, and I generally got the feeling that they’d often not been planned through from the start.

I’ve had the same feeling about Sherlock at least since series 3. And in part, they’ve said it themselves. True, they’ve said that they had some things in mind all along, but they’ve also admitted that they didn’t have everything plotted out from the start. I don’t have an article reference for this, but I remember reading once that Gatiss said that they had not planned what to do with the baby after series 3, that they had written her in to amp up the drama for HLV. That says sloppy planning to me, because a baby is not exactly a goldfish. You can’t give it to a neighbour when it becomes inconvenient (though apparently John did little else in series 4). I maintain that it was a bad writing decision. My point, though, is that they didn’t make a plan as to what to do in the longer term. And every series resolution has had this same problem.

Series 1 ending: Sherlock and John have just silently agreed to die together rather than let Moriarty escape them. Sherlock shooting the bomb would take out the entire building, including the snipers above them.

Resolution: Moriarty gets a phone call, changes his mind, shuts down the snipers, and walks out unchallenged. There MAY have been a massive police search for the snipers and Moriarty, but it was never shown. They didn’t seem to think it was important. It was all onto the sexy naked lady. And there was no conversation between Sherlock and John about the fact that they nearly died, that they agreed to do it together, that they agree that the world cannot be compromised with terrorists like Moriarty on the loose. Normal people discuss things like that, major, potentially life-ending events. But they didn’t think it was important to show us any of that.

Series 2 ending: Sherlock is blackmailed into jumping off a nine-storey building in front of John. The collateral was the lives of John, Lestrade, and Mrs Hudson. He jumps and somehow survives. John is seen grieving fiercely. Moriarty is dead.

Resolution: John is never told that he would have died had Moriarty not forced Sherlock’s hand. (You can say things about the blog here, but I consider that only semi-canon and frequently inconsistent with the onscreen canon, so let’s just leave that out of this discussion.) The writers never thought it was important for John to know that: a) Sherlock had no choice. Not if he wanted John to live. John is still, in series 4, blaming Sherlock for his absence. b) He didn’t know that he was going to die if Sherlock didn’t do it, that there was a reason that Sherlock couldn’t tell him he was still alive. Sherlock’s silence was imperative for John’s safety, and Sherlock – as he has always done – put John’s safety above everything else. Literally everything. He didn’t even know for certain that he would survive the jump, but he took the chance because John’s life, and the lives of Mrs Hudson and Lestrade, mean that much to him. John still doesn’t know that, because the writers didn’t think it was important to include that. Not only that, they refused to even confirm that that was actually the definitive method by which Sherlock survived. Sloppy resolution, and disappointing.

Series 3 ending: Sherlock has just killed someone, for the sake of someone who shot him in the heart. Moriarty appears to be alive. John sends Sherlock off un-thanked and refusing to name his child after Sherlock, which considering all that Sherlock has done for him and his killer wife, is a bit low. Also there’s a baby on the way despite nothing pointing to the Watson/Morstan having an ice cube’s hope in hell of surviving. A marriage based on lies, John not even knowing his wife’s real name and preferring to keep it that way, the most reluctant, grudging take-back scene in history, and a piece of seriously inconsistent characterisation for a man who once got himself arrested for having punched someone for insulting Sherlock. Ugh.

Resolution: None whatsoever. The Watson/Morstan union is still on, though the Watson half is obviously very unhappy and actively looking to cheat (also completely inconsistent with his former characterisation). The Morstan part of the union (and believe me, we are coming back to this character with force in a bit) is apparently nothing like her former self, sugar-coated in the worst of ways and apparently still full unrepentant for absolutely everything, starting from any of her criminal past to having shot Sherlock, to having accepted his sacrifice in killing her blackmailer for her, to having lied her ass off to John from the very start, to pushing John aside to come between him and Sherlock, to making him stay at home with the baby while she goes in his place, all while “playfully” calling Sherlock a pig and comparing John to a dog. The baby is still there and still in the way. Moriarty is apparently still pursuing a posthumous attack scheme. What the ever-living fuck.

Why else they lost me in series 3: because, as I said, I’m a Johnlock shipper. I’ll admit without shame that I’m far more invested in this relationship than I am in the plots themselves. It’s nice when the plot is good. But if this central relationship isn’t working for me, then I don’t give three fucks what happens in the rest of the plot. For me, TST was really bad. I hated it. But TLD was vivisection, if I may. I was never expecting Johnlock to become canon – next point, hang on – but seeing John actively hating Sherlock and beating him half to death when he was already dying (that’s not exaggeration; that’s canon) – not even the hug could redeem that for me. I loved the hug. I would have loved it forty million times more if it hadn’t happened because John was crying about his dead killer wife. I would have loved it even more than that if he’d hugged back. For that reason alone, TFP was preferable for me, just because Sherlock and John were clearly a team again, friends again, happy to be in each other’s presence again. I LOVED that both Sherlock and Mycroft knew instantly, without a word of discussion, that there was no way in hell that Sherlock was ever going to even consider choosing Mycroft above John. John was less clear on that point, but the Holmes brothers both knew that this was concrete, unchanging law, which is completely consistent with literally everything Sherlock has done since TRF. I loved that this wasn’t even a question for him. We’ll get to the rest of the episode.

What I hated about series 3 was that John married someone who isn’t Sherlock. It’s that simple: people were squeeing about the stag night and the dancing behind closed curtains, but at the end of the day, JOHN MARRIED SOMEONE ELSE. This is so far beyond acceptable for me that I felt sick. I was dreading series 3 coming out for the very reason of John’s wedding to Mary Morstan. We hadn’t met Mary yet. I knew that Amanda Abbington, who I knew nothing about other than that she was Martin’s partner, had been cast. I had a friend at the time who argued that they had to cast someone that Martin had strong chemistry with to balance his chemistry with Benedict. I hated that, too. I hated having that chemistry that everyone loves so much challenged. And then HLV took a turn for the better: Mary was exposed as the terrible human being that she is. In a down side, she shot and very nearly killed Sherlock. But his love for John and concern for his safety and knowledge of Mary’s villainy pulled him through and they sat her on her ass and treated her as a client, a client and nothing more. I cheered. And then the writers wrote in a bizarre six-month gap, one in which John was clearly not living with Mary (“months of silence”), and then he made the inexplicable and completely out of character decision to take her back. My heart sank. “But the baby!” you rage-moo, and yes, precisely: the baby. If only there hadn’t been a baby. Personally, I think it’s a disservice to raise a child in a hostile atmosphere, but what do I know. So, I was massively unhappy with series 3, as my 1.2+ million words of ensuing fic might suggest.

One of the worst decisions the writers made, and this is all part, by the way, of my overarching point of how they didn’t make Johnlock canon, was the inclusion of the character of Mary Morstan. They have queer-baited and alternately straight-washed throughout these four series, but this was the ultimate straight-wash: having John ACTUALLY marry someone else. And for me personally, it was just weird seeing that person be Martin’s former actual partner. They had, in an ironic backfiring, zero chemistry onscreen. They had old boring married I-gave-up-and-let-go-ten-years-ago chemistry, and it still didn’t compete with Martin and Benedict’s amazing onscreen chemistry. So we had to watch this thing that they cooked up and shoved down our throats and were told to accept it and believe and love it and defend it. And I just didn’t do any of those things. I hated Mary from the moment she interrupted John’s super reluctant proposal. They wrote nothing that made me believe in their relationship, even had I wanted to forget everything they had already written pointing to a romantic relationship between Sherlock and John. Which I didn’t. They wrote that and sold me and thousands of other people on it, then introduced this third wheel. Amanda promised that Mary would never come between Sherlock and John, but perhaps she should consider shutting her trap and not acting like part of the official PR (not that they’re any better, and I’m still coming to that), because Mary did LITERALLY nothing but come between Sherlock and John.

She immediately inserted herself into their relationship. I blame this partly on Sherlock’s idiotic decision to see John immediately, no matter what he was doing. He assumed, and it frankly should have been a correct assumption, because he was the sun around which John revolved, that John would want to see him no matter what he was in the middle of doing. A bit of bad planning, but if Sherlock is somewhere on the autism spectrum, which people generally assume that he is, then social skills are not his strongest suit. He hadn’t seen the friend he spent two years enduring torture and living on the run to protect and he’d just gotten back. Of COURSE he wanted to see John as soon as possible. And of course John’s reaction was entirely understandable, and entirely predictable. What that scene didn’t need was Mary to further hack away at John’s feeling of insignificance by siding with Sherlock immediately, agreeing that she hated his awful moustache, and ignoring everything her semi-fiancé was going through and stating that she liked Sherlock, as if her opinion had ANY relevance at that point. She inserted herself as their mediator, when they would have gotten there soon enough once John’s temper cooled down. Her pushing at John probably only slowed him down, because John doesn’t respond to pushing. And maybe Mary meant to slow him down. I don’t know. Mary came between them in every way possible. By marrying John, by inserting herself into their duo and pushing John to the side, by fucking up absolutely everything in their lives with her undisclosed past, by shooting Sherlock in the heart rather than dealing with her blackmailer herself and accepting Sherlock’s help. By lying, lying, lying, lying, and more lying. Now there’s a child for them to look after. Now there’s the spectre of John’s failed attempt to love her between them. Her double-faced, lying presence threw off the balance of the show. Her abusive, gaslighting, manipulative behaviour was portrayed as cute and fun and somehow manages to gloss over the canonical reality that Mary was someone who killed people to earn money for herself, showed zero remorse for having done so, zero remorse for her inexplicable decision to try to kill the title character of the show while leaving her blackmailer alive, zero remorse for having attacked her own maid of honour, zero remorse for having lied to John from start to finish, zero gratitude to Sherlock for having saved her from Magnussen, zero remorse for having drugged Sherlock, zero remorse for having left John and the baby behind, zero remorse for having killed that flight attendant and whomever else, zero remorse for having fled John’s side to protect herself as soon as the shooting broke out, zero remorse for having abandoned her teammates without even checking to see if a rescue attempt was possible, leaving them to die or suffer six years of torture, zero remorse for FUCKING ANYTHING except having been caught in her lies. And then she left Sherlock a video telling him to kill himself or get himself killed as a “means to save John” (who wouldn’t have needed saving had he never met her lying ass in the first place!), with no means for John to see said video, and her method failed anyway because John was so racked with guilt over having wanted to or almost cheated on her that he had already made the fucked up choice to displace his guilt onto Sherlock, rendering him incapable of caring whether Sherlock lived or died, in the very worst of his inexplicably out of character actions.

And then the writers credited Mary for having somehow “created” the Holmes/Watson duo, as though they wouldn’t have become what they already were had Mary Fucking Morstan not told them to from one of her posthumous home videos. FUCK THAT SHIT. I have never hated a character as much as I hate Mary Morstan. Her presence on this show ruined it for me.

They could have saved it. They could have, I don’t know, kept her in character in series 4 as the completely terrible human being that she is, played it out to its natural conclusion – have her fake her death to reveal her as one of the nurses who was administering the memory altering drug, who passed Faith Smith’s note on to Eurus Holmes, as part of the whole Eurus/Moriarty/Mary axis of evil. Except that the first two of those people are clinically insane, and Mary is apparently just a quirky narcissist.

All this is to say how and why they lost me as of series 3. For the past three years, I’ve been reading meta (and writing a little, myself) about the romantic coding of the Sherlock/John relationship. It’s ALL there in the show. I never disagreed with that. Let me explain super clearly the ONLY place where I diverged from TJLC: Look, it’s diagram time, courtesy of my shitty Paint skills!

Let me be super clear: I don’t think that anyone read anything wrong. I don’t blame anyone for having believed that they would make it canon. I’m just saying why I didn’t. We were given conflicting messages. The show said one thing, and the creators said something else – sometimes. I fully agree that they were deliberately misleading. It’s just that I’m a cynic, and I believed the times when they told us what turned out to be the truth. My gut believed it. It wasn’t just the ways in which they said they would never do it, it was how. I saw that that tweet screen cap is going around again, with the person who said they would die if Johnlock didn’t become canon in series 4 and Mark Gatiss responded with “RIP”. It was an incredibly insensitive tweet given that the attack in Orlando had just taken place the previous day. And it wasn’t the first comment of its nature that the writers have made. Mark talks in this video about how “moving” the scene of John taking Mary back is (start just before the 58-minute mark). (Side note: I mis-remembered this as Sue having made this remark, which I’ve said a few times now. Apologies!) It’s said on the Behind the Scenes video for TST that Sue cries every time she sees the Mary death scene. It’s things like this that make me wonder if they’ve been watching the show they actually made, because it really seems like they can’t see their own work accurately. What really put the nail in the coffin for me, though, was what Mark said at San Diego ComicCon last year. He said the following:

“He explicitly says he is not interested. Doesn’t mean he couldn’t be. Doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it. I’m a gay man. This is not an issue. But we’ve explicitly said this is not going to happen – there is no game plan – no matter how much we lie about other things, that this show is going to culminate in Martin and Benedict going off into the sunset together. They are not going to do it. And if people want to write whatever they like and have a great time extrapolating that’s absolutely fine. But there is no hidden or exposed agenda. We’re not trying to fuck with people’s heads. Not trying to insult anybody or make any kind of issue out of it, there’s nothing there. It’s just our show and that’s what these characters are like.” (Here)

He also said in the same article that they were not going to use their show as a platform for representation or other social issues. He said that doing so would ruin the show. These are his exact words:

“Don’t blame us for things that aren’t there. It is infuriating. We get pilloried for these things as if our show – we haven’t even made the thirteenth one yet – has to have the shoulders to bear every single issue and every single campaign point. You can’t do that. It’s our show, they’re our characters, they do what we want them to do, and we don’t have to represent absolutely everything in that ninety minutes. It’s impossible. And it would kill it. It would be deadly to it.”

Yeah. He said that our seeing Johnlock in what they wrote was “infuriating”. It damned well shouldn’t have been, because they’re the ones who put it there!! I can only assume that it was a deliberate choice to then deny it and leave it out in what certainly felt like their final episode. It would have been SO EASY to put it in. With no “help” from that ridiculous, unnecessary Mary video, all they had to do was add something like Sherlock dropping a kiss on John’s forehead as he passed the baby over. That’s all it would have taken. That’s all anyone could have dreamed of, asked for, hoped for. No one was demanding explicit anal penetration in the sitting room with the married ones looking on from the front door. Just a simple little action like that would have said it all, and been enough to confirm the relationship they’ve written from the start. Or it could have been a quick exchange of dialogue in that montage at the end of TFP. John could have started doing something and Sherlock could have said, “John, you don’t have to do that.” John could have smiled into the camera/mirror and said, “Yes, I do. No flat that I live in is going to have a bison skull with no headphones!” And there we would have at least had explicit confirmation that John moved back in. I’ve always loathed parentlock, personally, but I’d have taken it. I’d have taken it and thanked them for at least just making the ship canon after all. And I’d have eaten every word of doubt about their intentions that I’d ever uttered, too.

I don’t blame anyone for believing. Because they could have done it, and they should have. They should have. And you have every right to feel angry and hurt and cheated that they didn’t. Shame on you, Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat. Shame on you for the queer-baiting. Shame on you for leading us on. Shame on you for the lazy writing, the sloppy resolutions, the vast array of plot holes and loose threads.

I promised I would also comment on this last episode specifically, so here it is. Don’t hate me for this, but I have to say that, plot holes and lack of Johnlock aside, I liked TFP better than either TST or TLD. You know why? Because Sherlock and John were a team again, and that’s what I live for. John didn’t actively hate Sherlock. He wasn’t an OOC asshole to him the entire time. He didn’t hurt him, physically or emotionally. They were clearly and wonderfully working together from the very start. I loved his exchange with Mycroft at the end of the scene at Mycroft’s (weird, scary) house, the whole “someone gave him the idea that you would only tell the truth if you were basically wetting yourself” and that that person was John, and his candour in telling Mycroft that. I loved that. And what I liked the most about the episode was how, when Sherlock was forced to make a decision between John and Mycroft, both the Holmes brothers knew without one shred of doubt that there was no way that Sherlock would ever, ever, ever choose Mycroft over John. It was unquestioned. In TLD, there was a hug at the end, yeah. But I also had to endure the beating scene, and Mary throughout. The best thing about this series is that Mary is dead. That’s the best thing I can say. Because the rest was a disaster.

The straight-washing with all of the unnecessary Irene inserts. Lady Smallwood and Mycroft, though at least there was a ray of hope for you Mystrade shippers out there at the end. The Molly scene was BRUTAL. And fuck them for what they did with her character, too. LET HER MOVE ON. And behave like a grown woman, too. Ugh. Poor Molly. The plot holes. THE PLOT HOLES. Better people than me have already written lengthy posts outlining them all and this one is already more than long enough, so I won’t detail them all. The Garridebs massacre. That was cruel. I found all of the references pointing to Mycroft as a closet cross-dresser amusing. Taking after Uncle Rudy, indeed, plus the whole Lady Bracknell thing. I actually laughed out loud at that, whereas I didn’t laugh at anything in TST or TLD at all, ever. I think I watched them both with clenched fists. As I said earlier, I frankly don’t really care about the plots, this one included, though I rolled my eyes massively at the thought that Eurus was behind Moriarty. Sigh. I did like Sherlock’s growth and compassion, and I really liked him taking the time to reach out to her through the violin. I like that they put a woman in Sherlock’s life who was important to him as something other than a failed love interest. The violin conversation at the end was beautiful. The Redbeard stuff was utterly horrifying. Insert more ranting about the associated nonsensical, plot-hole-y stuff here. I think I’m starting to run out of steam, lol. I just want to go and write fiction now. I’ve been writing this post for hours and I could say a lot more, but… I think that’s enough.

Bottom line: you weren’t wrong to believe. I didn’t, but I don’t blame you for it. These writers have done the show and its characters and its audience a massive disservice. For me, Mary was the worst thing they inflicted on this show and on the ship, but it wasn’t beyond hope, EVEN in spite of everything else they did to ruin this relationship in the first two episodes of the series. I can’t help but wonder if they denied it out of sheer spite in response to the fan pressure to make it canon, but that would be blaming the victim. I just wonder how spiteful they have to be. I genuinely think that they don’t see this as having been a malicious action, or that they’ve ever considered that what they’ve done qualifies as queer baiting. Obviously it is, but I genuinely wonder about their intentions. I don’t know, but at this point, all that matters is what they actually did.

I’m emotionally exhausted by all of this, but relieved that the series is over, because I was frankly dreading it, apparently for good reasons. At least I know now what I’ll be busy fixing for the next three years, or possibly forever if they never make another series. Mission: accepted. And now my watch begins. As I said the other day, this is why we here in this fandom exist: because the canon will end someday, and after that, their world belongs to us.

#my massively long thoughts #sherlock #queer baiting isn't a joke #johnlock forever #series 4

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years

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Chief Gates Comes to Oakhurst: A Cop Drama

One day in late 1992, a trim older man with a rigid military bearing visited Sierra Online’s headquarters in Oakhurst, California. From his appearance, and from the way that Sierra’s head Ken Williams fawned over him, one might have assumed him to be just another wealthy member of the investment class, a group that Williams had been forced to spend a considerable amount of time wooing ever since he had taken his company public four years earlier. But that turned out not to be the case. As Williams began to introduce his guest to some of his employees, he described him as Sierra’s newest game designer, destined to make the fourth game in the Police Quest series. It seemed an unlikely role based on the new arrival’s appearance and age alone.

Yet ageism wasn’t sufficient to explain the effect he had on much of Sierra’s staff. Josh Mandel, a sometime stand-up comic who was now working for Sierra as a writer and designer, wanted nothing whatsoever to do with him: “I wasn’t glad he was there. I just wanted him to go away as soon as possible.” Gano Haine, who was hard at work designing the environmental-themed EcoQuest: Lost Secret of the Rainforest, reluctantly accepted the task of showing the newcomer some of Sierra’s development tools and processes. He listened politely enough, although it wasn’t clear how much he really understood. Then, much to her relief, the boss swept him away again.

The man who had prompted such discomfort and consternation was arguably the most politically polarizing figure in the United States at the time: Daryl F. Gates, the recently resigned head of the Los Angeles Police Department. Eighteen months before, four of his white police officers had brutally beaten a black man — an unarmed small-time lawbreaker named Rodney King — badly enough to break bones and teeth. A private citizen had captured the incident on videotape. One year later, after a true jury of their peers in affluent, white-bread Simi Valley had acquitted the officers despite the damning evidence of the tape, the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 had begun. Americans had watched in disbelief as the worst civil unrest since the infamously restive late 1960s played out on their television screens. The scene looked like a war zone in some less enlightened foreign country; this sort of thing just doesn’t happen here, its viewers had muttered to themselves. But it had happened. The final bill totaled 63 people killed, 2383 people injured, and more than $1 billion in property damage.

The same innocuous visage that was now to become Sierra’s newest game designer had loomed over all of the scenes of violence and destruction. Depending on whether you stood on his side of the cultural divide or the opposite one, the riots were either the living proof that “those people” would only respond to the “hard-nosed” tactics employed by Gates’s LAPD, or the inevitable outcome of decades of those same misguided tactics. The mainstream media hewed more to the latter narrative. When they weren’t showing the riots or the Rodney King tape, they played Gates’s other greatest hits constantly. There was the time he had said, in response to the out-sized numbers of black suspects who died while being apprehended in Los Angeles, that black people were more susceptible to dying in choke holds because their arteries didn’t open as fast as those of “normal people”; the time he had said that anyone who smoked a joint was a traitor against the country and ought to be “taken out and shot”; the time when he had dismissed the idea of employing homosexuals on the force by asking, “Who would want to work with one?”; the time when his officers had broken an innocent man’s nose, and he had responded to the man’s complaint by saying that he was “lucky that was all he had broken”; the time he had called the LAPD’s peers in Philadelphia “an inspiration to the nation” after they had literally launched an airborne bombing raid on a troublesome inner-city housing complex, killing six adults and five children and destroying 61 homes. As the mainstream media was reacting with shock and disgust to all of this and much more, right-wing radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh trotted out the exact same quotes, but greeted them with approbation rather than condemnation.

All of which begs the question of what the hell Gates was doing at Sierra Online, of all places. While they were like most for-profit corporations in avoiding overly overt political statements, Sierra hardly seemed a bastion of reactionary sentiment or what the right wing liked to call “family values.” Just after founding Sierra in 1980, Ken and Roberta Williams had pulled up stakes in Los Angeles and moved to rural Oakhurst more out of some vague hippie dream of getting back to the land than for any sound business reason. As was known by anyone who’d read Steven Levy’s all-too-revealing book Hackers, or seen a topless Roberta on the cover of a game called Softporn, Sierra back in those days had been a nexus of everything the law-and-order contingent despised: casual sex and hard drinking, a fair amount of toking and even the occasional bit of snorting. (Poor Richard Garriott of Ultima fame, who arrived in this den of inequity from a conservative neighborhood of Houston inhabited almost exclusively by straight-arrow astronauts like his dad, ran screaming from it all after just a few months; decades later, he still sounds slightly traumatized when he talks about his sojourn in California.)

It was true that a near-death experience in the mid-1980s and an IPO in 1988 had done much to change life at Sierra since those wild and woolly early days. Ken Williams now wore suits and kept his hair neatly trimmed. He no longer slammed down shots of tequila with his employees to celebrate the close of business on a Friday, nor made it his personal mission to get his nerdier charges laid; nor did he and Roberta still host bathing-suit-optional hot-tub parties at their house. But when it came to the important questions, Williams’s social politics still seemed diametrically opposed to the likes to Daryl Gates. For example, at a time when even the mainstream media still tended to dismiss concerns about the environment as obsessions of the Loony Left, he’d enthusiastically approved Gano Haines’s idea for a series of educational adventure games to teach children about just those issues. When a 15-year-old who already had the world all figured out wrote in to ask how Sierra could “give in to the doom-and-gloomers and whacko commie liberal environmentalists” who believed that “we can destroy a huge, God-created world like this,” Ken’s brother John Williams — Sierra’s marketing head — offered an unapologetic and cogent response: “As long as we get letters like this, we’ll keep making games like EcoQuest.”

So, what gave? Really, what was Daryl Gates doing here? And how had this figure that some of Ken Williams’s employees could barely stand to look at become connected with Police Quest, a slightly goofy and very erratic series of games, but basically a harmless one prior to this point? To understand how all of these trajectories came to meet that day in Oakhurst, we need to trace each back to its point of origin.

Daryl F. Gates

Perhaps the kindest thing we can say about Daryl Gates is that he was, like the young black men he and his officers killed, beat, and imprisoned by the thousands, a product of his environment. He was, the sufficiently committed apologist might say, merely a product of the institutional culture in which he was immersed throughout his adult life. Seen in this light, his greatest sin was his inability to rise above his circumstances, a failing which hardly sets him apart from the masses. One can only wish he had been able to extend to the aforementioned black men the same benefit of the doubt which other charitable souls might be willing to give to him.

Long before he himself became the head of the LAPD, Gates was the hand-picked protege of William Parker, the man who has gone down in history as the architect of the legacy Gates would eventually inherit. At the time Parker took control of it in 1950, the LAPD was widely regarded as the most corrupt single police force in the country, its officers for sale to absolutely anyone who could pay their price; they went so far as to shake down ordinary motorists for bribes at simple traffic stops. To his credit, Parker put a stop to all that. But to his great demerit, he replaced rank corruption on the individual level with an us-against-them form of esprit de corps — the “them” here being the people of color who were pouring into Los Angeles in ever greater numbers. Much of Parker’s approach was seemingly born of his experience of combat during World War II. He became the first but by no means the last LAPD chief to make comparisons between his police force and an army at war, without ever considering whether the metaphor was really appropriate.

Parker was such a cold fish that Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who served as an LAPD officer during his tenure as chief, would later claim to have modeled the personality of the emotionless alien Spock on him. And yet, living as he did in the epicenter of the entertainment industry — albeit mostly patrolling the parts of Los Angeles that were never shown by Hollywood — Parker was surprisingly adept at manipulating the media to his advantage. Indeed, he became one of those hidden players who sometimes shape media narratives without anyone ever quite realizing that they’re doing so. He served as a consultant for the television show Dragnet, and through it created a pernicious cliché of the “ideal” cop that can still be seen, more than half a century later, on American television screens every evening: the cop as tough crusader who has to knock a few heads sometimes and bend or break the rules to get around the pansy lawyers, but who does it all for a noble cause, guided by an infallible moral compass that demands that he protect the “good people” of his city from the irredeemably bad ones by whatever means are necessary. Certainly Daryl Gates would later benefit greatly from this image; it’s not hard to believe that even Ken Williams, who fancied himself something of a savvy tough guy in his own right, was a little in awe of it when he tapped Gates to make a computer game.

But this wasn’t the only one of Chief Parker’s innovations that would come to the service of the man he liked to describe as the son he’d never had. Taking advantage of a city government desperate to see a cleaned-up LAPD, Parker drove home policies that made the city’s police force a veritable fiefdom unto itself, its chief effectively impossible to fire. The city council could only do so “for cause” — i.e., some explicit failure on the chief’s part. This sounded fair enough — until one realized that the chief got to write his own evaluation every year. Naturally, Parker and his successors got an “excellent” score every time, and thus the LAPD remained for decades virtually impervious to the wishes of the politicians and public it allegedly served.

The Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts burns, 1965.

As Parker’s tenure wore on, tension spiraled in the black areas of Los Angeles, the inevitable response to an utterly unaccountable LAPD’s ever more brutal approach to policing. It finally erupted in August of 1965 in the form of the Watts Riots, the great prelude to the riots of 1992: 34 deaths, $40 million in property damage in contemporary dollars. For Daryl Gates, who watched it all take place by Parker’s side, the Watts Riots became a formative crucible. “We had no idea how to deal with this,” he would later write. “We were constantly ducking bottles, rocks, knives, and Molotov cocktails. It was random chaos. We did not know how to handle guerrilla warfare.” Rather than asking himself how it had come to this in the first place and how such chaos might be prevented in the future, he asked how the LAPD could be prepared to go toe to toe with future rioters in what amounted to open warfare on city streets.

Chief Parker died the following year, but Gates’s star remained on the ascendant even without his patron. He came up with the idea of a hardcore elite force for dealing with full-on-combat situations, a sort of SEAL team of police. Of course, the new force would need an acronym that sounded every bit as cool as its Navy inspiration. He proposed SWAT, for “Special Weapons Attack Teams.” When his boss balked at such overtly militaristic language, he said that it could stand for “Special Weapons and Tactics” instead. “That’s fine,” said his boss.

Gates and his SWAT team had their national coming-out party on December 6, 1969, when they launched an unprovoked attack upon a hideout of the Black Panthers, a well-armed militia composed of black nationalists which had been formed as a response to earlier police brutality. Logistically and practically, the raid was a bit of a fiasco. The attackers got discombobulated by an inaccurate map of the building and very nearly got themselves hemmed into a cul de sac and massacred. (“Oh, God, we were lucky,” said one of them later.) What was supposed to have been a blitzkrieg-style raid devolved into a long stalemate. The standoff was broken only when Gates managed to requisition a grenade launcher from the Marines at nearby Camp Pendleton and started lobbing explosives into the building; this finally prompted the Panthers to surrender. By some miracle, no one on either side got killed, but the Panthers were acquitted in court of most charges on the basis of self-defense.

Yet the practical ineffectuality of the operation mattered not at all to the political narrative that came to be attached to it. The conservative white Americans whom President Nixon loved to call “the silent majority” — recoiling from the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of the hippie era, genuinely scared by the street violence of the last several years — applauded Gates’s determination to “get tough” with “those people.” For the first time, the names of Daryl Gates and his brainchild of SWAT entered the public discourse beyond Los Angeles.

In May of 1974, the same names made the news in a big way again when a SWAT team was called in to subdue the Symbionese Liberation Army, a radical militia with a virtually incomprehensible political philosophy, who had recently kidnapped and apparently converted to their cause the wealthy heiress Patty Hearst. After much lobbying on Gate’s part, his SWAT team got the green light to mount a full frontal assault on the group’s hideout. Gates and his officers continued to relish military comparisons. “Here in the heart of Los Angeles was a war zone,” he later wrote. “It was like something out of a World War II movie, where you’re taking the city from the enemy, house by house.” More than 9000 rounds of ammunition were fired by the two sides. But by now, the SWAT officers did appear to be getting better at their craft. Eight members of the militia were killed — albeit two of them unarmed women attempting to surrender — and the police officers received nary a scratch. Hearst herself proved not to be inside the hideout, but was arrested shortly after the battle.

The Patti Hearst saga marked the last gasp of a militant left wing in the United States; the hippies of the 1960s were settling down to become the Me Generation of the 1970s. Yet even as the streets were growing less turbulent, increasingly militaristic rhetoric was being applied to what had heretofore been thought of as civil society. In 1971, Nixon had declared a “war on drugs,” thus changing the tone of the discourse around policing and criminal justice markedly. Gates and SWAT were the perfect mascots for the new era. The year after the Symbionese shootout, ABC debuted a hit television series called simply S.W.A.T. Its theme song topped the charts; there were S.W.A.T. lunch boxes, action figures, board games, and jigsaw puzzles. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be like Daryl Gates and the LAPD — not least their fellow police officers in other cities: by July of 1975, there were 500 other SWAT teams in the United States. Gates embraced his new role of “America’s cop” with enthusiasm.

In light of his celebrity status in a city which worships celebrity, it was now inevitable that Gates would become the head of the LAPD just as soon as the post opened up. He took over in 1978; this gave him an even more powerful nationwide bully pulpit. In 1983, he applied some of his clout to the founding of a program called DARE in partnership with public schools around the country. The name stood for “Drug Abuse Resistance Education”; Gates really did have a knack for snappy acronyms. His heart was perhaps in the right place, but later studies, conducted only after the spending of hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars, would prove the program’s strident rhetoric and almost militaristic indoctrination techniques to be ineffective.

Meanwhile, in his day job as chief of police, Gates fostered an ever more toxic culture that viewed the streets as battlegrounds, that viewed an ass beating as the just reward of any black man who failed to treat a police officer with fawning subservience. In 1984, the Summer Olympics came to Los Angeles, and Gates used the occasion to convince the city council to let him buy armored personnel carriers — veritable tanks for the city streets — in the interest of “crowd control.” When the Olympics were over, he held onto them for the purpose of executing “no-knock” search warrants on suspected drug dens. During the first of these, conducted with great fanfare before an invited press in February of 1985, Gates himself rode along as an APC literally drove through the front door of a house after giving the occupants no warning whatsoever. Inside they found two shocked women and three children, with no substance more illicit than the bowls of ice cream they’d been eating. To top it all off, the driver lost control of the vehicle on a patch of ice whilst everyone was sheepishly leaving the scene, taking out a parked car.

Clearly Gates’s competence still tended not to entirely live up to his rhetoric, a discrepancy the Los Angeles Riots would eventually highlight all too plainly. But in the meantime, Gates was unapologetic about the spirit behind the raid: “It frightened even the hardcore pushers to imagine that at any moment a device was going to put a big hole in their place of business, and in would march SWAT, scattering flash-bangs and scaring the hell out of everyone.” This scene would indeed be played out many times over the remaining years of Gates’s chiefdom. But then along came Rodney King of all people to take the inadvertent role of his bête noire.

King was a rather-slow-witted janitor and sometime petty criminal with a bumbling reputation on the street. He’d recently done a year in prison after attempting to rob a convenience store with a tire iron; over the course of the crime, the owner of the store had somehow wound up disarming him, beating him over the head with his own weapon, and chasing him off the premises. He was still on parole for that conviction on the evening of March 3, 1991, when he was spotted by two LAPD officers speeding down the freeway. King had been drinking, and so, seeing their patrol car’s flashing lights in his rear-view mirror, he decided to make a run for it. He led what turned into a whole caravan of police cars on a merry chase until he found himself hopelessly hemmed in on a side street. The unarmed man then climbed out of his car and lay face down on the ground, as instructed. But then he stood up and tried to make a break for it on foot, despite being completely surrounded. Four of the 31 officers on the scene now proceeded to knock him down and beat him badly enough with their batons and boots to fracture his face and break one of his ankles. Their colleagues simply stood and watched at a distance.

Had not a plumber named George Holliday owned an apartment looking down on that section of street, the incident would doubtless have gone down in the LAPD’s logs as just another example of a black man “resisting arrest” and getting regrettably injured in the process. But Holliday was there, standing on his balcony — and he had a camcorder to record it all. When he sent his videotape to a local television station, its images of the officers taking big two-handed swings against King’s helpless body with their batons ignited a national firestorm. The local prosecutor had little choice but to bring the four officers up on charges.

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The tactics of Daryl Gates now came under widespread negative scrutiny for the first time. Although he claimed to support the prosecution of the officers involved, he was nevertheless blamed for fostering the culture that had led to this incident, as well as the many others like it that had gone un-filmed. At long last, reporters started asking the black residents of Los Angeles directly about their experiences with the LAPD. A typical LAPD arrest, said one of them, “basically consisted of three or four cops handcuffing a person, and just literally beating him, often until unconscious… punching, beating, kicking.” A hastily assembled city commission produced pages and pages of descriptions of a police force run amok. “It is apparent,” the final report read, “that too many LAPD patrol officers view citizens with resentment and hostility.” In response, Gates promised to retire “soon.” Yet, as month after month went by and he showed no sign of fulfilling his promise, many began to suspect that he still had hopes of weathering the storm.

At any rate, he was still there on April 29, 1992. That was the day his four cops were acquitted in Simi Valley, a place LAPD officers referred to as “cop heaven”; huge numbers of them lived there. Within two hours after the verdict was announced, the Los Angeles Riots began in apocalyptic fashion, as a mob of black men pulled a white truck driver out of his cab and all but tore him limb from limb in the process of murdering him, all under the watchful eye of a helicopter that was hovering overhead and filming the carnage.

Tellingly, Gates happened to be speaking to an adoring audience of white patrons in the wealthy suburb of Brentwood at the very instant the riots began. As the violence continued, this foremost advocate of militaristic policing seemed bizarrely paralyzed. South Los Angeles burned, and the LAPD did virtually nothing about it. The most charitable explanation had it that Gates, spooked by the press coverage of the previous year, was terrified of how white police officers subduing black rioters would play on television. A less charitable one, hewed to by many black and liberal commentators, had it that Gates had decided that these parts of the city just weren’t worth saving — had decided to just let the rioters have their fun and burn it all down. But the problem, of course, was that in the meantime many innocent people of all colors were being killed and wounded and seeing their property go up in smoke. Finally, the mayor called in the National Guard to quell the rioting while Gates continued to sit on his hands.

Asked afterward how the LAPD — the very birthplace of SWAT — had allowed things to get so out of hand, Gates blamed it on a subordinate: “We had a lieutenant down there who just didn’t seem to know what to do, and he let us down.” Not only was this absurd, but it was hard to label as anything other than moral cowardice. It was especially rich coming from a man who had always preached an esprit de corps based on loyalty and honor. The situation was now truly untenable for him. Incompetence, cowardice, racism, brutality… whichever charge or charges you chose to apply, the man had to go. Gates resigned, for real this time, on June 28, 1992.

Yet he didn’t go away quietly. Gates appears to have modeled his post-public-service media strategy to a large extent on that of Oliver North, a locus of controversy for his role in President Ronald Reagan’s Iron-Contra scandal who had parlayed his dubious celebrity into the role of hero to the American right. Gates too gave a series of angry, unrepentant interviews, touted a recently published autobiography, and even went North one better when he won his own radio show which played in close proximity to that of Rush Limbaugh. And then, when Ken Williams came knocking, he welcomed that attention as well.

But why would Williams choose to cast his lot with such a controversial figure, one whose background and bearing were so different from his own? To begin to understand that, we need to look back to the origins of the adventure-game oddity known as Police Quest.

Ken Williams, it would seem, had always had a fascination with the boys in blue. One day in 1985, when he learned from his hairdresser that her husband was a California Highway Patrol officer on administrative leave for post-traumatic stress, his interest was piqued. He invited the cop in question, one Jim Walls, over to his house to play some racquetball and drink some beer. Before the evening was over, he had starting asking his guest whether he’d be interested in designing a game for Sierra. Walls had barely ever used a computer, and had certainly never played an adventure game on one, so he had only the vaguest idea what his new drinking buddy was talking about. But the only alternative, as he would later put it, was to “sit around and think” about the recent shootout that had nearly gotten him killed, so he agreed to give it a go.

The game which finally emerged from that conversation more than two years later shows the best and the worst of Sierra. On the one hand, it pushed a medium that was usually content to wallow in the same few fictional genres in a genuinely new direction. In a pair of articles he wrote for Computer Gaming World magazine, John Williams positioned Police Quest: In Pursuit of the Death Angel at the forefront of a new wave of “adult” software able to appeal to a whole new audience, noting how it evoked Joseph Wambaugh rather than J.R.R. Tolkien, Hill Street Blues rather than Star Wars. Conceptually, it was indeed a welcome antidote to a bad case of tunnel vision afflicting the entire computer-games industry.

In practical terms, however, it was somewhat less inspiring. The continual sin of Ken Williams and Sierra throughout the company’s existence was their failure to provide welcome fresh voices like that of Jim Walls with the support network that might have allowed them to make good games out of their well of experiences. Left to fend for himself, Walls, being the law-and-order kind of guy he was, devised the most pedantic adventure game of all time, one which played like an interactive adaptation of a police-academy procedure manual — so much so, in fact, that a number of police academies around the country would soon claim to be employing it as a training tool. The approach is simplicity itself: in every situation, if you do exactly what the rules of police procedure that are exhaustively described in the game’s documentation tell you to do, you get to live and go on to the next scene. If you don’t, you die. It may have worked as an adjunct to a police-academy course, but it’s less compelling as a piece of pure entertainment.

Although it’s an atypical Sierra adventure game in many respects, this first Police Quest nonetheless opens with what I’ve always considered to be the most indelibly Sierra moment of all. The manual has carefully explained — you did read it, right? — that you must walk all the way around your patrol car to check the tires and lights and so forth every time you’re about to drive somewhere. And sure enough, if you fail to do so before you get into your car for the first time, a tire blows out and you die as soon as you drive away. But if you do examine your vehicle, you find no evidence of a damaged tire, and you never have to deal with any blow-out once you start driving. The mask has fallen away to reveal what we always suspected: that the game actively wants to kill you, and is scheming constantly for a way to do so. There’s not even any pretension left of fidelity to a simulated world — just pure, naked malice. Robb Sherwin once memorably said that “Zork hates its player.” Well, Zork‘s got nothing on Police Quest.

Nevertheless, Police Quest struck a modest chord with Sierra’s fan base. While it didn’t become as big a hit as Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards, John Williams’s other touted 1987 embodiment of a new wave of “adult” games, it sold well enough to mark the starting point of another of the long series that were the foundation of Sierra’s marketing strategy. Jim Walls designed two sequels over the next four years, improving at least somewhat at his craft in the process. (In between them, he also came up with Code-Name: Iceman, a rather confused attempt at a Tom Clancy-style techno-thriller that was a bridge too far even for most of Sierra’s loyal fans.)

But shortly after completing Police Quest 3: The Kindred, Walls left Sierra along with a number of other employees to join Tsunami Media, a new company formed right there in Oakhurst by Edmond Heinbockel, himself a former chief financial officer for Sierra. With Walls gone, but his Police Quest franchise still selling well enough to make another entry financially viable, the door was wide open — as Ken Williams saw it, anyway — for one Daryl F. Gates.

Daryl Gates (right) with Tammy Dargan, the real designer of the game that bears his name.

Williams began his courtship of the most controversial man in the United States by the old-fashioned expedient of writing him a letter. Gates, who claimed never even to have used a computer, much less played a game on one, was initially confused about what exactly Williams wanted from him. Presuming Williams was just one of his admirers, he sent a letter back asking for some free games for some youngsters who lived across the street from him. Williams obliged in calculated fashion, with the three extant Police Quest games. From that initial overture, he progressed to buttering Gates up over the telephone.

As the relationship moved toward the payoff stage, some of his employees tried desperately to dissuade him from getting Sierra into bed with such a figure. “I thought it’s one thing to seek controversy, but another thing to really divide people,” remembers Josh Mandel. Mandel showed his boss a New York Times article about Gates’s checkered history, only to be told that “our players don’t read the New York Times.” He suggested that Sierra court Joseph Wambaugh instead, another former LAPD officer whose novels presented a relatively more nuanced picture of crime and punishment in the City of Angels than did Gates’s incendiary rhetoric; Wambaugh was even a name whom John Williams had explicitly mentioned in the context of the first Police Quest game five years before. But that line of attack was also hopeless; Ken Williams wanted a true mass-media celebrity, not a mere author who hid behind his books. So, Gates made his uncomfortable visit to Oakhurst and the contract was signed. Police Quest would henceforward be known as Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest. Naturally, the setting of the series would now become Los Angeles; the fictional town of Lytton, the more bucolic setting of the previous three games in the series, was to be abandoned along with almost everything else previously established by Jim Walls.

Inside the company, a stubborn core of dissenters took to calling the game Rodney King’s Quest. Corey Cole, co-designer of the Quest for Glory series, remembers himself and many others being “horrified” at the prospect of even working in the vicinity of Gates: “As far as we were concerned, his name was mud and tainted everything it touched.” As a designer, Corey felt most of all for Jim Walls. He believed Ken Williams was “robbing Walls of his creation”: “It would be like putting Donald Trump’s name on a new Quest for Glory in today’s terms.”

Nevertheless, as the boss’s pet project, Gates’s game went inexorably forward. It was to be given the full multimedia treatment, including voice acting and the extensive use of digitized scenes and actors on the screen in the place of hand-drawn graphics. Indeed, this would become the first Sierra game that could be called a full-blown full-motion-video adventure, placing it at the vanguard of the industry’s hottest new trend.

Of course, there had never been any real expectation that Gates would roll up his sleeves and design a computer game in the way that Jim Walls had; celebrity did have its privileges, after all. Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest: Open Season thus wound up in the hands of Tammy Dargan, a Sierra producer who, based on an earlier job she’d had with the tabloid television show America’s Most Wanted, now got the chance to try her hand at design. Corey Cole ironically remembers her as one of the most stereotypically liberal of all Sierra’s employees: “She strenuously objected to the use of [the word] ‘native’ in Quest for Glory III, and globally changed it to ‘indigenous.’ We thought that ‘the indigenous flora’ was a rather awkward construction, so we changed some of those back. But she was also a professional and did the jobs assigned to her.”

In this case, doing so would entail writing the script for a game about the mean streets of Los Angeles essentially alone, then sending it to Gates via post for “suggestions.” The latter did become at least somewhat more engaged when the time came for “filming,” using his connections to get Sierra inside the LAPD’s headquarters and even into a popular “cop bar.” Gates himself also made it into the game proper: restored to his rightful status of chief of police, he looks on approvingly and proffers occasional bits of advice as you work through the case. The CD-ROM version tacked on some DARE propaganda and a video interview with Gates, giving him yet one more opportunity to respond to his critics.

Contrary to the expectations raised both by the previous games in the series and the reputation of Gates, the player doesn’t take the role of a uniformed cop at all, but rather that of a plain-clothes detective. Otherwise, though, the game is both predictable in theme and predictably dire. Really, what more could one expect from a first-time designer working in a culture that placed no particular priority on good design, making a game that no one there particularly wanted to be making?

So, the dialog rides its banality to new depths for a series already known for clunky writing, the voice acting is awful — apparently the budget didn’t stretch far enough to allow the sorts of good voice actors that had made such a difference in King’s Quest VI — and the puzzle design is nonsensical. The plot, which revolves around a series of brutal cop killings for maximum sensationalism, wobbles along on rails through its ever more gruesome crime scenes and red-herring suspects until the real killer suddenly appears out of the blue in response to pretty much nothing which you’ve done up to that point. And the worldview the whole thing reflects… oh, my. The previous Police Quest games had hardly been notable for their sociological subtlety — “These kinds of people are actually running around out there, even if we don’t want to think about it,” Jim Walls had said of its antagonists — but this fourth game takes its demonization of all that isn’t white, straight, and suburban to what would be a comical extreme if it wasn’t so hateful. A brutal street gang, the in-game police files helpfully tell us, is made up of “unwed mothers on public assistance,” and the cop killer turns out to be a transvestite; his “deviancy” constitutes the sum total of his motivation for killing, at least as far as we ever learn.

One of the grisly scenes with which Open Season is peppered, reflecting a black-and-white — in more ways than one! — worldview where the irredeemably bad, deviant people are always out to get the good, normal people. Lucky we have the likes of Daryl Gates to sort the one from the other, eh?

Visiting a rap record label, one of a number of places where Sierra’s pasty-white writers get to try out their urban lingo. It goes about as well as you might expect.

Sierra throws in a strip bar for the sake of gritty realism. Why is it that television (and now computer-game) cops always have to visit these places — strictly in order to pursue leads, of course.

But the actual game of Open Season is almost as irrelevant to any discussion of the project’s historical importance today as it was to Ken Williams at the time. This was a marketing exercise, pure and simple. Thus Daryl Gates spent much more time promoting the game than he ever had making it. Williams put on the full-court press in terms of promotion, publishing not one, not two, but three feature interviews with him in Sierra’s news magazine and booking further interviews with whoever would talk to him. The exchanges with scribes from the computing press, who had no training or motivation for asking tough questions, went about as predictably as the game’s plot. Gates dismissed the outrage over the Rodney King tape as “Monday morning quarterbacking,” and consciously or unconsciously evoked Richard Nixon’s silent majority in noting that the “good, ordinary, responsible, quiet citizens” — the same ones who saw the need to get tough on crime and prosecute a war on drugs — would undoubtedly enjoy the game. Meanwhile Sierra’s competitors weren’t quite sure what to make of it all. “Talk about hot properties,” wrote the editors of Origin Systems’s internal newsletter, seemingly uncertain whether to express anger or admiration for Sierra’s sheer chutzpah. “No confirmation yet as to whether the game will ship with its own special solid-steel joystick” — a dark reference to the batons with which Gates’s officers had beat Rodney King.

In the end, though, the game generated decidedly less controversy than Ken Williams had hoped for. The computer-gaming press just wasn’t politically engaged enough to do much more than shrug their shoulders at its implications. And by the time it was released it was November of 1993, and Gates was already becoming old news for the mainstream press as well. The president of the Los Angeles Urban League did provide an obligingly outraged quote, saying that Gates “embodies all that is bad in law enforcement—the problems of the macho, racist, brutal police experience that we’re working hard to put behind us. That anyone would hire him for a project like this proves that some companies will do anything for the almighty dollar.” But that was about as good as it got.

There’s certainly no reason to believe that Gates’s game sold any better than the run-of-the-mill Sierra adventure, or than any of the Police Quest games that had preceded it. If anything, the presence of Gates’s name on the box seems to have put off more fans than it attracted. Rather than a new beginning, Open Season proved the end of the line for Police Quest as an adventure series — albeit not for Sierra’s involvement with Gates himself. The product line was retooled in 1995 into Daryl F. Gates’ Police Quest: SWAT, a “tactical simulator” of police work that played suspiciously like any number of outright war simulators. In this form, it found a more receptive audience and continued for years. Tammy Dargan remained at the reinvented series’s head for much of its run. History hasn’t recorded whether her bleeding-heart liberal sympathies went into abeyance after her time with Gates or whether the series remained just a slightly distasteful job she had to do.

Gates, on the other hand, got dropped after the first SWAT game. His radio show had been cancelled after he had proved himself to be a stodgy bore on the air, without even the modicum of wit that marked the likes of a Rush Limbaugh. Having thus failed in his new career as a media provocateur, and deprived forevermore of his old position of authority, his time as a political lightning rod had just about run out. What then was the use of Sierra continuing to pay him?

Ken and Roberta Williams looking wholesome in 1993, their days in the hot tub behind them.

But then, Daryl Gates was never the most interesting person behind the games that bore his name. The hard-bitten old reactionary was always a predictable, easily known quantity, and therefore one with no real power to fascinate. Much more interesting was and is Ken Williams, this huge, mercurial personality who never designed a game himself but who lurked as an almost palpable presence in the background of every game Sierra ever released as an independent company. In short, Sierra was his baby, destined from the first to become his legacy more so than that of any member of his creative staff.

Said legacy is, like the man himself, a maze of contradictions resistant to easy judgments. Everything you can say about Ken Williams and Sierra, whether positive or negative, seems to come equipped with a “but” that points in the opposite direction. So, we can laud him for having the vision to say something like this, which accurately diagnosed the problem of an industry offering a nearly exclusive diet of games by and for young white men obsessed with Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings:

If you match the top-selling books, records, or films to the top-selling computer-entertainment titles, you’ll immediately notice differences. Where are the romance, horror, and non-fiction titles? Where’s military fiction? Where’s all the insider political stories? Music in computer games is infinitely better than what we had a few years back, but it doesn’t match what people are buying today. Where’s the country-western music? The rap? The reggae? The new age?

And yet Williams approached his self-assigned mission of broadening the market for computer games with a disconcerting mixture of crassness and sheer naivete. The former seemed somehow endemic to the man, no matter how hard he worked to conceal it behind high-flown rhetoric, while the latter signified a man who appeared never to have seriously thought about the nature of mass media before he started trying to make it for himself. “For a publisher to not publish a product which many customers want to buy is censorship,” he said at one point. No, it’s not, actually; it’s called curation, and is the right and perhaps the duty of every content publisher — not that there were lines of customers begging Sierra for a Daryl Gates-helmed Police Quest game anyway. With that game, Williams became, whatever else he was, a shameless wannabe exploiter of a bleeding wound at the heart of his nation — and he wasn’t even very good at it, as shown by the tepid reaction to his “controversial” game. His decision to make it reflects not just a moral failure but an intellectual misunderstanding of his audience so extreme as to border on the bizarre. Has anyone ever bought an adventure game strictly because it’s controversial?

So, if there’s a pattern to the history of Ken Williams and Sierra — and the two really are all but inseparable — it’s one of talking a good game, of being broadly right with the vision thing, but falling down in the details and execution. Another example from the horse’s mouth, describing the broad idea that supposedly led to Open Season:

The reason that I’m working with Chief Gates is that one of my goals has been to create a series of adventure games which accomplish reality through having been written by real experts. I have been calling this series of games the “Reality Role-Playing” series. I want to find the top cop, lawyer, airline pilot, fireman, race-car driver, politician, military hero, schoolteacher, white-water rafter, mountain climber, etc., and have them work with us on a simulation of their world. Chief Gates gives us the cop game. We are working with Emerson Fittipaldi to simulate racing, and expect to announce soon that Vincent Bugliosi, the lawyer who locked up Charles Manson, will be working with us to do a courtroom simulation. My goal is that products in the Reality Role-Playing series will be viewed as serious simulations of real-world events, not as games. If we do our jobs right, this will be the closest most of us will ever get to seeing the world through these people’s eyes.

The idea sounds magnificent, so much so that one can’t help but feel a twinge of regret that it never went any further than Open Season. Games excel at immersion, and their ability to let us walk a mile in someone else’s shoes — to become someone whose world we would otherwise never know — is still sadly underutilized.

I often — perhaps too often — use Sierra’s arch-rivals in adventure games LucasArts as my own baton with which to beat them, pointing out how much more thoughtful and polished the latter’s designs were. This remains true enough. Yet it’s also true that LucasArts had nothing like the ambition for adventure games which Ken Williams expresses here. LucasArts found what worked for them very early on — that thing being cartoon comedies — and rode that same horse relentlessly right up until the market for adventures in general went away. Tellingly, when they were asked to adapt Indiana Jones to an interactive medium, they responded not so much by adjusting their standard approach all that radically as by turning Indy himself into a cartoon character. Something tells me that Ken Williams would have taken a very different tack.

But then we get to the implementation of Williams’s ideas by Sierra in the form of Open Season, and the questions begin all over again. Was Daryl Gates truly, as one of the marketers’ puff pieces claimed, “the most knowledgeable authority on law enforcement alive?” Or was there some other motivation involved? I trust the answer is self-evident. (John Williams even admitted as much in another of the puff pieces: “[Ken] decided the whole controversy over Gates would ultimately help the game sell better.”) And then, why does the “reality role-playing” series have to focus only on those with prestige and power? If Williams truly does just want to share the lives of others with us and give us a shared basis for empathy and discussion, why not make a game about what it’s like to be a Rodney King?

Was it because Ken Williams was himself a racist and a bigot? That’s a major charge to level, and one that’s neither helpful nor warranted here — no, not even though he championed a distinctly racist and bigoted game, released under the banner of a thoroughly unpleasant man who had long made dog whistles to racism and bigotry his calling card. Despite all that, the story of Open Season‘s creation is more one of thoughtlessness than malice aforethought. It literally never occurred to Ken Williams that anyone living in South Los Angeles would ever think of buying a Sierra game; that territory was more foreign to him than that of Europe (where Sierra was in fact making an aggressive play at the time). Thus he felt free to exploit a community’s trauma with this distasteful product and this disingenuous narrative that it was created to engender “discussion.” For nothing actually to be found within Open Season is remotely conducive to civil discussion.

Williams stated just as he was beginning his courtship of Daryl Gates that, in a fast-moving industry, he had to choose whether to “lead, follow, or get out of the way. I don’t believe in following, and I’m not about to get out of the way. Therefore, if I am to lead then I have to know where I’m going.” And here we come to the big-picture thing again, the thing at which Williams tended to excel. His decision to work with Gates does indeed stand as a harbinger of where much of gaming was going. This time, though, it’s a sad harbinger rather than a happy one.

I believe that the last several centuries — and certainly the last several decades — have seen us all slowly learning to be kinder and more respectful to one another. It hasn’t been a linear progression by any means, and we still have one hell of a long way to go, but it’s hard to deny that it’s occurred. (Whatever the disappointments of the last several years, the fact remains that the United States elected a black man as president in 2008, and has finally accepted the right of gay people to marry even more recently. Both of these things were unthinkable in 1993.) In some cases, gaming has reflected this progress. But too often, large segments of gaming culture have chosen to side instead with the reactionaries and the bigots, as Sierra implicitly did here.

So, Ken Williams and Sierra somehow managed to encompass both the best and the worst of what seems destined to go down in history as the defining art form of the 21st century, and they did so long before that century began. Yes, that’s quite an achievement in its own right — but, as Open Season so painfully reminds us, not an unmixed one.

(Sources: the books Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing by Joe Domanick and Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces by Radley Balko; Computer Gaming World of August/September 1987, October 1987, and December 1993; Sierra’s news magazines of Summer 1991, Winter 1992, June 1993, Summer 1993, Holiday 1993, and Spring 1994; Electronic Games of October 1993; Origin Systems’s internal newsletter Point of Origin of February 26 1993. Online sources include an excellent and invaluable Vice article on Open Season and the information about the Rodney King beating and subsequent trial found on Famous American Trials. And my thanks go out yet again to Corey Cole, who took the time to answer some questions about this period of Sierra’s history from his perspective as a developer there.

The four Police Quest adventure games are available for digital purchase at GOG.com.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/chief-gates-comes-to-oakhurst-a-cop-drama-2/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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readingraebow · 6 years

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The Firm Section One

Chapters 1-7

1. How is Bendini, Lambert & Locke different from other firms? What is their turnover rate? It's a much smaller firm and it's in Memphis (which most of the other large scale firms are in Chicago or New York) and it pays better than almost any other firm in the country. They only have 41 lawyers on staff and half of them are partners. This is definitely not the norm. They want everyone to become a partner and basically guarantee that you will become one. So basically they promise that if you work really, really hard for your first few years, you'll be able to relax more when you make partner because you will have earned it. They also pay reaaaally well and basically all of their lawyers become millionaires by the time they're 40. And most retire somewhere in their 50s with a very, very healthy chunk of change. Their biggest selling point, however, is that their turnover rate is zero. No one ever leaves their firm unless they retire. They also offer way more in the first year than all of McDeere's other offers. And they provide a home with a low interest mortgage as well as a brand new BMW. Basically since they're in the middle of nowhere and have to entice their new hires to move to the middle of nowhere, they offer a lot of very shiny perks. They also don't hire very often and they hand pick their new candidates. Mitch McDeere is their only candidate at this time. So basically it's either him or no one for this hire cycle.

2. Why, as Kay explains, does the firm wish all the associates to be homeowners? They want the new associate + family in Memphis since that's where they'll be working so a new home is an incentive to move. Plus they generally work associates 80 hours a week and Kay says it's sometimes more like 100 hours during tax season. So their theory is if the associate has a strong marriage they will be happy and if they're happy, they'll be productive and that will equal profits. So basically they want to make life more ~comfortable while they're working the associate to death and their wife just has to sit ideally by. But it's also a status thing. The firm likes to ~keep up appearances and if everyone who works for them has a really big, nice house that looks better for the firm. So they lease you a smaller house up front but expect the family to be in an even bigger house in five years and so on.

3. All of the firm's employees have moved from different places. While eating lunch with the partners, Mitch is asked if he's accustomed to eating grease and many mention that they're not used to the greasy southern cooking. Is grease a regular part of your diet? Would you be able to handle a completely southern dining palette if you were in Mitch's position? Hmm. Grease is kind of a part of my diet? I absolutely love fried green tomatoes and definitely cook them every chance I get during the summer. And I do tend to each fried food maybe once a week, if that? But, on the other hand, I don't like super greasy foods and my stomach definitely can't handle them on a more permanent basis. I wasn't raised in the south and I'm not sure I've ever really had truly southern cooking. But from the sound of it, I would not be able to handle it. I like some fried foods but for the most part I could leave them? And southern food is usually heavily spiced and I absolutely cannot handle that at all. So if I were in Mitch's position, I would definitely be the guy who had heartburn for 20 years, haha. I probably would not be able to handle that at all and I'd be off somewhere panicking and making a salad, hahahaha. *would actually die from all the grease*

4. At the end of the second chapter, what are your feelings about the firm? Do you think Mitch should accept their offer? Honestly it sounds way too good to be true???? But I get why it's appealing to Mitch and Abby. When you're super broke and paying all of your big bills is a struggle and needing a new car but actually getting one seems light years away? Yeaaaaah. I totally get that feeling. So I get why taking an offer that has all of those perks sounds appealing. But if all of the other successful firms aren't offering those things and this is the only one that is, doesn't that seem a little suspicious? Honestly a lot of the people who work for the firm also sound sketchy??? And that conversation with Kay was super weird. Yes, I would love to be a trophy wife (or Emily Gilmore; either is fine) but I would also like to make my own decisions. And the things "encouraged" by the firm are just super weird and controlling. But the money is super tempting and I would probably take the offer, if in Mitch's position. Plus I find the firm fascinating so if he didn't accept, we wouldn't have a story, haha.

5. What occupies the half of the 5th floor that's not the partner's cafe? What goes on there and what do we learn about the McDeeres' visit? The other half of the fifth floor is security. It's a bunch of cramped little offices and, I'm assuming, surveillance and such. One of the offices is occupied by the head of security, a Mr. DeVasher. From him we learn that the firm is seriously into wire tapping and basically they were watching the McDeeres the entire time they were in town. They bugged the hotel room (and had people in the rooms on either side), the limo and the phone. And we knew most of what he said. But basically they liked the firm and all the perks and DeVasher thinks he'll sign with them. And then we went into a lot of stuff that doesn't make any sense yet. But it sounds like they basically watch everyone who works for them at all times and the entire office is bugged along with all of the houses of everyone who works there???? (That would also explain why they like to provide homes and cars for their employees.) And there was a lot of stuff about the FBI and New York being suspicious and that they have to get a handle on the situation or two of the associates and a cop will end up dead. Soooo. Maybe that's why their turnover rate is zero??? No one ever leaves they firm. They're just quietly killed instead. *gulp*

6. On Mitch and Abby's first day in Memphis, what do they learn has happened? How does Mitch spend his first day at the firm? They learn that two members of the firm have died. Martin Kozinski and Joe Hodge died in what they said was a boating accident. Apparently they were on a "business trip" and there was some kind of explosion. But the details are sketchy at this point. Though these are the two who were going to be "taken care of" so none of those details are probably actually correct. But that's the story the firm is going with. And on Mitch's first day at the firm, instead of sitting behind his new desk, he and Abby attend both funerals.

7. What is Mitch's first impression of Nathan Locke? What had he heard from Lamar about Locke? That Locke is literally terrifying?? Basically he has really black, sinister eyes and has the most ominous, evil presence Mitch says he'd ever felt. Mitch hadn't met Locke before he signed on and according to Lamar, no one was really ever allowed to go to his office. He told Mitch it was because Locke is eccentric and liked to be left alone. Or something like that. But he's probably the front man for whatever shady thing is going on in this firm.

8. Why does Oliver Lambert ask to see Mitch? He asks to see Mitch for two reasons: one, to invite Mitch and Abby to dinner on Saturday night. He says that he and his wife like to go out to dinner and they usually invite a group and so he's invited a few other people from the firm and wants Mitch to come/feel welcome with them. But what seems to be the real reason he asks Mitch to see him is to lecture him on confidentiality. He gives him this long speech about how you never talk about a client with anyone else, especially not your wife (oh, he drives this point home) and probably not even other people at the firm, unless they're directly involved in the case. And especially not to other lawyers around town. But esPECIALLY NOT YOUR WIFE. Which is super weird and fishy???? It's almost like Mitch has told Abby something and Lambert knows it and is telling him not to do that??? But if this actually happened, it wasn't something we've read. But basically Mitch knows all of this already because it's covered in law school? So it's just an all around weird conversation.

Section One Reading Journal

So. Wow. I haven’t read any John Grisham in quite a while. And off the top of my head, I think the only one I’ve actually read was Runaway Jury. (I honestly can’t remember if I’ve even read any of the others?? Though I own almost all of them.) And I read that back in high school (and I remember it taking me quite a while since they’re kind of long and, in some places, dry and I hadn’t read a lot of ~variety then and still had trouble with stuff. So I think it took me like a month though I do remember liking it well enough). So, yeah. Apparently I’m way over due for more Grisham, haha.

Anyway, I don’t really know what I was expecting from this? I haven’t actually seen this film (though I think I’ve seen all of the others) but it’s definitely not been what I was expecting. I’m really enjoying it a lot and I pretty much flew through this section. I’m super intrigued by this firm and all of its shady dealings. And, lbr, I’m always here for legal dramas. So while I was a little on the fence about actually reading this and even considered changing my pick for this category, I’m glad I went ahead with this. I’m really enjoying it and I am really excited about reading the rest of it.

So, a few notes from this section: that firm seems super interesting but suuuuper sketchy. Like wow. The money is great but all the work they’re shoving at him? By the end of this section, he sounds so overworked, I would literally be dead if I were working that much. How do they actually expect him to finish everything they’ve thrown at him?!?! If he’s supposed to spend most of his time studying for the bar (which I thought you actually took before you got a job but okay) then why are they throwing so much else at him?!? Don’t they want him to sleep??? Or actually, you know, spend time with his wife????

Though I would love to have all the perks that come with that job. A low house payment and new car? Um, yes please. But I almost don’t feel like it’s even worth it?? Because that’s a lot of hours and he’s not really eating or sleeping. Sooo. Side-eyeing the firm for making him do that.

But, anyway, yes. Super interested in where this is going and what this firm is even up to. Because wow so much shade. So can’t wait to move on to the next section!! I hope ya’ll are enjoying this so far, as well!

#trcbooks #2015: the firm #2015 reading challenge

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bohatala-blog · 8 years

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New Post has been published on Bohat Ala

New Post has been published on https://bohatala.com/movie-content-analysis-the-departed/

Movie Content Analysis "The Departed"

Introduction

“The Departed” is an American crime film, released in 2006 was directed by Martin Scorsese and written by William Monahan. It was produced by Graham King, Brad Grey, and Brad Pitt, and featured stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon, Martin Sheen, Mark Wahleberg, as well as Alec Baldwin. It had been considered as a remake of Honk Kong crime thriller film known as Infernal Affairs. During the 79th Academy Awards, it was nominated for five Academy Awards, in which it won four of them; Best Director for Martin Scorsese, Best Adapted Screenplay for William Monahan, Best Picture for Graham King, and Best Film Editing for Thelma Schoonmaker. The film is an old drama that shows gangster exploration. It also features how Billy Costigan, a police informer works as an undercover to monitor the activities of the Irish mobster and Colin; a hardened criminal works as an informer in the police to the gangsters. In The Departed, Martin Scorsese demonstrates a perfect example of a classic gangster-genre where he uses Motif, Mise-En-Scene, Symbolism, and Cliché to illustrate the overall theme of incompetence, corruption, and also the fight between the police and the criminal.

Theme

There are many themes in this film, and one of the major themes includes the concept of identity, which affects actions, self-assurance, dreams, and also dreams. There was a father-son relationship that went throughout this film. A father figure in the movie is an act by Costello; he was the father to both Billy Costigan and Colin Sullivan. Costello’s foil in the film was Queenan, which is another father figure role in the film. Both sides were presented as an Irish-American father archetype. Also, Sullivan calls Costello “Dad” at any time he wants to inform him of the next activity of the police. Colin Sullivan acted as a pretense as good guy in the day, but reported to Costello every night they saw. Another part of his act is the way he hid his real identity from the cops in the State Police, as well as his personal friends. His ambition was also motivated through climbing the rings of the society in the highest height he could go which is a symbol of the Gold Dome of the Massachusetts State House which is very close to his home. As much as he climbs, he still always bears in mind his major connection with Costello. His ultimate respect for the law enforcement institution was shown to be almost real.

Furthermore, another part of the theme of this film is the rotten system, which allows the bad guys to consistently hurt good people, such as Costigan. Alec Baldwin played a character where he largely represented this system (rotten system) where he was a straight stereotypical Republican. He was also a man who didn’t even think Sullivan was a suspect and he was so confident vouching for him and consistently praises him, and he still keeps unintentionally undermining the work that are attempted by the characters Mark Wahlberg and Martin Sheen. Where they tried to run some snitches, (done by Costigan) in order to capture Costello. But the police and government were in support of Costello for several reasons.

The movie was more of some sorts of deceptions. There was this borderline corruption as well as incompetence that went through different characters, most especially through the characters Dicaprio and Wahlberg/Sheen. The real life situation of some bad activities that go on in the Government which constantly occurred was a replica in this film. It resulted in such catastrophes just as the one in Iraq War, as well as a reaction to Hurricane Katrina. It was also seen in the regular deception and scandal that enfolded Washington in largely increasing amounts.

Finally, the final scene shows a rat on the window ledge of Sullivan’s home. Though Scorsese acknowledge the fact that it indicates something and shouldn’t be taken literally, however, it symbolizes the “the quest for the rat” as shown in the film and also an indication of distrust among the characters in the film. The view of the window where the rat was is to really portray the film as a gangster film, just like any other ancient gangster movies such as Scarface released in 1983, or White Heat in 1949.

Plot

Frank Costello who acted as Nicholson, an Irish-American mobster introduced Colin Sullivan who acted as Damon in his childhood to an organized crime in the Irish neighborhood of the well-known South Boston. As he grew, Costello keeps educating him to become a unique mole within the Massachusetts State Police (which specializes in organized crime), until the Special Investigations Unit accepts Sullivan. Prior to the graduation from the police academy, DiCaprio is recruited by Wahlberg and Sheen to go undercover, while his family is tied to the organized crime that makes him an amazing infiltrator. At a point in time, he drops out of the police academy. On the cause of a fake assault charge which was aimed at increasing his credibility, he was charged to prison.

Different infiltration went on and on in the film and Sullivan starts a romance with a police called Farmiga. But Costigan keeps seeing her under the condition of his probation, and they just had to begin a relationship too. The moment Costello breaks loose a sting operation, each mole started knowing about one-another’s existence. As it were, Sullivan is then told to search for the “rat” and then asks Costello to obtain information to identify who the informer is. Costigan keeps chasing Sullivan through the Chinatown, and when this ended, none of them knows each other’s identity. Also, Queenan was tailed to a meeting with Costigan through the roof of a building. Queenan was still able to order Costigan to run away quickly while he confronts Costello’s men by himself. But unfortunately, Queena was thrown off the building to his death. After they left, Costigan pretends to join their crew. News over the television reveals that Rolston who is a crew member has been a spy, for the Boston Police Department.

As Queenan’s phone was used to track other some of the bad guys, thus, Costigan was reached by Sullivan, who never wanted to abort his mission. Costigan was able to help in tracing Costello to a cocaine drop-off, a point where a gunfight starts abruptly between the police and Costello’s crew, this then result in the death of most of the crew members. Later, Costello was confronted by Sullivan, and he admits he is an informant to the FBI. As Costello tries to pull a trigger against Sullivan, Sullivan shoots him countless times. The next day at the police force, Sullivan was applauded by everyone. As Costigan comes to Sullivan to restore his true identity, and also to collect his pay for the job done, he notices Costello’s envelope on Sullivan’s desk, he immediately left the arena, and this made him believed Sullivan has his enemy. Sullivan was scared of retaliation; he immediately erases Costigan’s records from the force computer system.

Costigan had an affair with Madolyn without Sullivan being aware of it, but she informs Sullivan of her pregnancy. Later, Sullivan happens to find out she was listening to a CD containing some incriminating conversations that were recorded between Sullivan and Costello from Costigan. But Sullivan could not successfully mollify her suspicions. Sullivan immediately contacts Costigan, who opens up that it was Costello that recorded the conversations. They then decided to meet in the building where Queenan was killed.

It was on the roof that Sullivan was caught by Costigan and then he handcuffs him. Costigan actually arranged others to join him. Anderson was also seen to appear on the roof, while he draws out his gun against Costigan, in an attempt to justify his actions, exposing Sullivan as revealing Sullivan as Costello’s mole. At that moment, Costigan immediatey asks Brown the reason why Dignam did not come along with him as requested by Costigan, but Anderson never answers him. They then move to the elevator, as soon as it reaches the ground floor, Dale shoots at Costigan, and then also shoots Brown, and he reveals to Sullivan how Costello had been using his more than one mole to act in the police. On hearing this, Sullivan shoots at Dale. A funeral service was held for Costigan, where Sullivan observes Madolyn is filled with tears. Just as they were leaving the gravesite, Sullivan tries to talk to her, but she ignored all his words. The moment Sullivan reaches his apartment, Dignam ambushed him and the shoots him as he enters.

Motif

The motif used by Martin Scorsese in this film was how he explored a fascinating piece of creativity in the movie. He scattered Xs at almost every scene throughout the movie, where some were more difficult to detect than the others. He used them as a symbol to indicate an impending doom, these were very cool.

Mise-En-Scene

The film is illustrated by some mise-en-scene elements. These elements are a constant theme featuring the gangsters that want to by any means achieve success and get to the top. But somehow, they were seen to become the object of sociological study, and their ambition and greed actually doomed their quest to ethnic assimilation. This film reveals the story of the pretense between of a cop within the criminals, as well as the criminal within the cop. A different layer of realism and texture is featured in this film through the way each scene is put together.

There was this classical connection between in the film is the good and evil that was perpetuated. There were different representations of interpretation to the different decision impacted from the characters. The mise-en-scene of this film is totally based on good and evil among each character.

Furthermore, the characters were all about heavy Irish accents, and the Boston streets play a major role in this film. They really portrayed the Irish culture throughout the narrow streets, the region, where all the gangsters know each other and their neighbors understood what was going on and they all kept their mouths shut in a cooperative manner.

There was more portrayal of psychology in this film. Considering the mental toll that is taken up by the character who pretends to be a cop amongst the Police and he’s a criminal, as well as the one who pretends to be a criminal, but is actually a cop. There was also a role of psychology with Colin Sullivan’s girlfriend and even Billy where they to communicate with one another and there is this confined emotions and energy. The major task for Colin was to find the rat, and Billy was the rat he was to find. This was an organized feeling of paranoid trust issues and thoughts.

The make-up and costumes were another role of mise-en-scene in this movie. The roles performed were a clear depiction of the clothes being worn by all the characters. For example, the gangsters wear bland casual outfits just like beige, brown, and black which make them stereotypical in their appearance as henchmen in the organization. Frank Costello, who is the leader, was seen to dress in flashy expensive suit to make him different from the others. Obviously, his outfits represent how powerful he is. The police maintained the usual street trooper uniform or the bland collared shirt and also with their tie, which is usually light blue or white.

Colors usage was very symbolic to this film. The scenes in the department of the police are brightly lit with natural light, and they made sure all the officer and detectives have their bland, lightly colored wears which represent them as the good guys. All the gangsters, who are definitely the bad guys had beige, brown and black as stated previously. In addition to this, there was the use of red which foreshadows and occurrence that will take place especially ending with violence and/or bloodshed.

The film was perfectly lighted. There was this lack and white feeling of the 1950s in the film. Also, the lighting is perfectly bright for a feeling of the good guys. Also, the shadows, darkness, and lighting represent crime that occurred in the shadows. Anytime it shows, the criminals are often in dimly lit building, though half of their faces can be seen from the shadows of the light.

At the end of the film, a shot of a quick rat was shown. It was an indication and representation of the plot, that is, the film was about the chase for the rat, and the theme totally demonstrated self-identity as earlier stated.

Symbolism

There are few symbolisms in this film. The movie is a portrayal of who Matt Damon is. He was the exact opposite of who he really is, and it became difficult to say if he was actually a gay or not. He was also able to use the gold dome. The gold dome building is the Massachusetts State House, generally known as the commonwealth’s capitol building. A view of an entrance at the building, but when he moved closely, he was becoming sure of an entrance through it.

Another symbolism is the rat in this film. It was revealed at the end of this film and it symbolizes obviousness – the killers in the movie. This was demonstrated in the plot, how they were chasing themselves till they killed each other.

Finally, the building is a symbol of the Massachusetts State House. It was visible through several scenes in this film and keeps having different characters featured around and in it. In summary, the major significance of this symbolism is that it was the major ambition for Colin Sullivan. It was obvious that he keeps looking at it from his apartment as many times as he wants. For Damon, the building was his own political ambition so that he could achieve the shiny gold dome of the state house – his ultimate goal.

Conclusion

The overall action of this film was mind blowing and it is one of the greatest films of all time in the history of the American films. The significance of the creativity from the director was explicit to the reality of life and the story line depicted some instilled thoughts in the mind of the audience and viewers. The camera work on the Boston streets kept the movie alive and realistic as well as the special effects which are kept to a minimum during prolonged gunfights, making the movie so unbelievable. The film sprouts out some energy in its viewers as the actions were realistic with respect to the story lines.

The director, Scorsese was able to use broad outline to characterize the interchangeable pulp epics within the film, thereby modestly trapping some intrigues from its audience. The film actually transposes some basic materials which demonstrate the approach of hos the characters acted as an undercover within the police force and the criminal. “The Departed” is a very rich and operatic film that had improved on the previous movies directed by Scorsese. Though it lacks romance, but there was character development, cinematography success, great fight scenes, and heavy atmosphere. It is also provided with suspense, drama, great camera work, violence, and a bit of romance. The Departed is a must-see for everyone.

References

Mise-En-Scene: The Departed. (2011). Retrieved November 16, 2015, from http://jcoverland.tumblr.com/post/13817117028/mise-en-scene-the-departed

Plot Summary. (2007). Retrieved November 16, 2015, from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0407887/plotsummary

The Departed. (n.d.). Retrieved November 16, 2015, from http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/TheDeparted

The Departed Movie Review & Film Summary (2007) | Roger Ebert. (2007). Retrieved November 16, 2015, from http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-departed-2007

The Departed Analysis, an essay fiction | FictionPress. (2007). Retrieved November 16, 2015, from https://www.fictionpress.com/s/2356697/1/The-Departed-Analysis

There’s X-cellent symbolism in ‘The Departed’ (2007). Retrieved November 16, 2015, from http://www.ew.com/article/2007/01/30/theres_xcellent

The Departed. (2015). Retrieved November 16, 2015, from https://ibfilmsas.wikispaces.com/The Departed

What is the significance of the Massachusetts State House in the Departed? (2012). Retrieved November 16, 2015, from http://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/8192/what-is-the-significance-of-the-massachusetts-state-house-in-the-departed

What is the most ham-fisted piece of symbolism in a movie? • /r/movies. (2015). Retrieved November 17, 2015, from https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/3mlqj4/what_is_the_most_hamfisted_piece_of_symbolism_in/

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years

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Chief Gates Comes to Oakhurst: A Cop Drama

Daryl F. Gates

The Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts burns, 1965.

youtube

Daryl Gates (right) with Tammy Dargan, the real designer of the game that bears his name.

Visiting a rap record label, one of a number of places where Sierra’s pasty-white writers get to try out their urban lingo. It goes about as well as you might expect.

Sierra throws in a strip bar for the sake of gritty realism. Why is it that television (and now computer-game) cops always have to visit these places — strictly in order to pursue leads, of course.

Ken and Roberta Williams looking wholesome in 1993, their days in the hot tub behind them.

The four Police Quest adventure games are available for digital purchase at GOG.com.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/chief-gates-comes-to-oakhurst-a-cop-drama/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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