#like they sell books based on tropes??? so the characters become so flat and two dimensional

[mmmmuffins]

not to repeat myself 2045834 times but went to the bookstore again this week and the bestseller section was so sad... full of colleen hoover and published fanfiction and canva covers and all of it marketed as ‘popular in the media’ which is literally just booktok 😭 what are young kids growing up with 

[darkspellmaster]

Castlevania Season 3: In Regard to the Alucard Situation, or How to make him go Darker and more emo as they drag him into Symphony of the Night

So for those that are going to be reading below the cut, there are spoilers for the new season, the game and the following CD Drama Nocturne of Recollection which follows events of Symphony and introduces past events for Alucard. 

Before I go any farther, I’m putting the links up here and refrecing them by numbers in the peice so that it’s easier to find them. 

1.  Akumajo Dracula X: Tsuioku no Yasokyou or Nocturne Recollection (in English) -Link to the Castlevania Wiki on the subject of the Symphony of the Night Drama CD

2.  Subed version of Noctune of Recollection -done by Shido T. 

3. Shido T.’s Nocturne of Recollection  -Translated Transcript of the drama CD by Shido T. 

So after watching Season 3, and I’ll have a review up of the whole season when I get a chance, I realized why I was so disappointed in the events regarding Alucard. It wasn’t just the idea of Mr. Ellis using christian iconography (Judas Kiss, cross wrapped in thorns, they know not what they do, etc) as he did with Lisa (something he likes to do for certain characters even in his own works -hey Authority how you doing?), that was fine, I was expecting that. And it wasn’t just the idea of an assault (rape, could qualify for it as it was done to him using means that didn’t allow him to consent to something that was being told to him honestly) as a means of making him hate Humanity, that was something I was expecting, again based on Mr. Ellis’s other works, since it’s clear that he’s trying to push Alucard as far as possible from wanting to be awake so that when we get to the Symphony of the Night story it will make sense why he’s in the coffin again. 

No what got to me was that these two bland and flat characters were created just for the purpose of, well, fridging them for Alucard to go dark. (For those that don’t know Fridging is a term used in Comic tropes where Character A is killed so that Character B has some trauma or dramatic growth in comics, and is typically a woman but can be other genders or living things -dog from John Wick for example.) Sumi, or Zumi, and Taka come off as basically put there to die characters. They are strategically created for the express purpose to betray Adrian and die. That is pretty much it. There to build him up so that when he falls he falls far, far farther than before, thus probably forcing Trevor and Sypha to seal him away so that he can repair his own issues or something. 

This is something that keeps gnawing at me. Alucard is not dumb enough to let his guard down like this, ever. Even in the first two seasons, he was crafty about watching and observing Trevor and Sypha to see who and what they were about before trusting them. It’s clear that this season was not written with the same thought process as Season 1 and 2 which were cohesive and thoughtful in how each character and plot beat set up the events that leads to the end of the story of Dracula (and boy oh boy do I have thoughts about Lisa in Hell because...that makes no sense given who she’s probably connected to). He wouldn’t be letting them just into his life like this, he’d be cagey and cautious, given they are unknown factors, and wouldn’t be just randomly sleeping in his bed like this. He’d be locking their doors and locking his. 

To be frank Adrian at this point in time would already have limited trust of humans because he’d have seen his mother die one year before. He uses his glamour to go down to the village and do thing. This has been shown in later games when he’s in his Genya Arikado form in Japan. The man is good at hiding out, and is way older than Trevor or Sypha, so trusting people would be on his low end already. He’s seen a lot of shit (especially if they go the ‘He’s Trevor’s daddy or grand-daddy route) and isn’t a character that is just trusting. Read his lines from Symphony and even Castlevania III, and you’ll see that he’s a man that can trust, but it’s hard to gain that trust. Same with Sonia Belmont in the non canonical game, it takes a long while for him to gain trust with her and eventually work with her to defeat his father. 

Which brings us to the issue with Sumi(Zumi) and Taka. Both characters are supposed to be analogs of people that were harmed by the Vampires who want them to pay for their actions. Both are well voiced, but their characterizations are flat as all get out to me. Which shouldn’t be a surprise as the arc feels like Mr. Ellis was pulling from a dropped idea from his run on Authority. While, yes they are not twins, it’s clear that there had to be some assumption in making them look alike for added creepy factor in this. Which again, rings odd to me that Alucard would allow his room to be wide open at all with strangers, as they have only known him for a short time (remember how he was cautious around Trevor and his regard about killing Vampires). 

Honestly, I would say take them out and replace them, because there is a better story to be had and it already has connections to the series and could bring about two very interesting characters from the Drama CD and expand on Alucard, Dracula, and Lisa all in one go. 

So a quick Summary is needed here about Nocturne of Recollection. The basic parts that are important are that Alucard is dealing with another vampire who is attacking people, and seemingly attacking his new found friend (love of his life) Maria. This turns out to be a former friend/servant Lyudmil, who at one point had been tossed from his village for trying to help Lisa and ended up coming to work under Dracula and serving Adrian. The two became friends, until something happened in Lyudmil’s village and he became a vampire and Alucard went way dark for a while, leading to Dracula’s servant Magnus to come and manipulate Lyudmil into hating Humans more and eventually leading the two friends to fight, and Lyudmil to change sides and work with Alucard, only to end up dying from mortal wounds. 

Just for the record: 

This is Lyudmil 

And this is Magnus: 

Where unlike in Season 3 a made up couple of people can come in and wreck him, I think a far better story would be to use the two characters from Nocturne and build that into Season 4 in regard to Alucard’s story. 

If...and I say this again, If, I were to advise about how these two characters could work better in setting up Alucards fall I would say that they play a larger idea into the savior turned sinner narrative that could really screw up Alucard’s mind for a while. 

So, how would I go about telling this tale of tragedy that could bring Alucard down with out having to resort to a full on sex scene that wasn’t needed to show how intimacy can be corrupted and how people can be betrayed by their own human fallacies...

The arc would start with Lyudmil coming from the town near the castle and Magnus starting out his plans. We start with Adrian doing as he does in the opening sequences and learn that he’s being observed by someone as the night comes into play. This would be Magnus who we learn has been watching the castle for the past week or two. He was a servant of Dracula, and, unlike the other vampires, didn’t make it to the feast. Of course he wants to know what’s up with Alucard and, like the other vampires, has been trying to carve out his own safe place, but with Dracula dead, and him being weaker, it has become very hard for him to survive. So he wants to have the castle for himself as a place to be safe (maybe bring back Dracula). 

Meanwhile you have Lyudmil whom we learn lives at the edge of the town where Lisa once tended the sick. Lyudmil’s mother was the midwife that helped Lisa give birth to Adrian. (For the sake of everything we can say that Lyudmil is the same age or a year younger than Adrian, and his sister is like a year younger than him so. Adrian is 20, Lyudmil is 20 to 19, and his sister, Liliya is 19 to 18.) Because when the Bishop came to arrest her Lyudmil and his sister defended Lisa they were thrown from the city for trying to help her. Since they’re on their own, they’ve been living off the land and with the Night creatures causing trouble, and illness coming because of them, Lily, Lyudmil’s younger sister, is very sick. 

Lyudmil hears word from the few people that will interact with him, that Dracula is dead, and because he can’t think of any other way to help his sister, he decides to take her to the castle and see if any of Lisa’s books are there. Lyudmil takes his sister and heads off with her to reach the castle and find a cure. After a month of travel, since the Castle is now over the Belmont Keep, Lyudmil finds the castle and Adrian senses him, and attacks. Lyudmil is not a fighter so he runs and ends up asking Alucard to not kill him as he just wants to find Lisa’s books to save his sister. Adrian is curious about this, and Lyudmil show’s he’s not lying by bringing Adrian to Liliya who is clearly sick with an illness. He’s not sure if he can help, but he figures that his mother’s books may have something, so he welcomes the duo into the castle. 

Alucard uses his mother’s books to cure Liliya. The two are asked to stay in the castle for Lily to recover. While this is happening Magnus realizes that Adrian was one of the ones that Killed Dracula, thanks to a magic item that lets him see what happened to Dracula in his last minutes. Angry that the son of Dracula would allow Humans into his master’s home and that the boy is living there after he killed his own father, Magnus decides he wants to screw over Adrian for his own personal reasons. 

Magnus sets about making the town near where the Belmont keep is turn  on the two young people. He has been showing up at a field near the castle dressed as a merchant who is selling items and collecting flowers to dress up said items. Alucard is wary of him but gives into his human side and figures that the merchant is not that bad. Though all the time that he talks to Adrian, we get these moments of him twisting words to make Alucard question and doubt himself and his reasons of allowing the duo to stay. 

At the same time we learn that Liliya wants to learn to heal, since someone needs to take up Lisa’s job in the village when they go back, and Lyudmil wants to learn from Adrian how to fight so he can eventually become a city protector. The trio start to form a deep bond, and viewers learn that both Liliya and Lyudmil have feelings for Alucard. We spend time getting to know the trio, and use them for the lighter moments in the show, compared to say, Hectors story. We learn about their family and the connection to Lisa, also we learn how their mother died giving birth to Liliya and how their father was killed by some night creature just before Liliya was born. Lyudmil doesn’t like people, but he also doesn’t want kids to be like him. Near the end of the season, Magnus rouses the towns suspicions enough with the castle and the two siblings that when Liliya goes out to get followers a group of men come and capture her and drag her to the village for trial of being in league with the Night creatures. 

Here they basically beat or harm her, trying to make her confess to connections, (this act is unknown to most of the village). Magnus banks on her crying out for help, which she does, and uses that to unleash his minions on the town. Lyudmil goes looking for her when she’s late. leaving Alucard in the meadow where the trio eat together. Magnus, as the Merchant, tells Lyudmil where to find his sister. When he gets into town it’s a wreck and he fights his way into the building where he finds her tied up and the men are scared. Angry, Lyudmil kills them all and rescues his sister, dragging her out to the forest area and leaving her to rest, so he can go and find the monster that is controlling all of this and basically stop them from harming any kids there, as he sees them as innocent in all this. 

Magnus, as the merchant, goes to see Alucard, who has seen the smoke and was already headed for the woods, and tells him what happened. He then leads him to Liliya who is dying from her wounds from earlier. She asks Alucard to save her brother, and then dies. Alucard rushes to the town, fights a bunch of creatures who scatter, as it’s part of the plan and finds a mortally wounded Lyudmil. Conflicted on what to do Magnus comes by as himself and, since he’s an Incubus, starts putting temptations into Alucard’s ear. 

Lyudmil for his part thanks Alucard for all the kindness he offered him and says that he’s glad they had their short time together and that he’s sorry to leave him. Magnus keeps reminding Alucard of how alone he was before the two came, that Liliya asked him to save Lyudmil, that as Dracula’s son he could change Lyudmil to keep him alive, etc. Alucard in a moment of weakness and desperate not to be alone, as Lyudmil has his eyes closed and is ready to die, bites and turns him into a vampire. 

Last episode of the season ends with Lyudmil waking up and finding out he’s a vampire. He’s not exactly thrilled about it, but realizes that he can stay and learn from Alucard how to uses these powers to protect others and hunt down the one that turned him and probably caused his sister’s death. Alucard lies to him when pressed about who turned him, he says it was a vampire, and Lyudmil thinks it was the guy that seemed to control the monsters. 

We now have a set up for Season 4 that makes sense for a fall for Alucard and a far deeper betrayal. Alucard has betrayed his own beliefs, his own word. He’s take a life and twisted it, like his father, and then lied for his own desprate need to make sure that Lyudmil doesn’t leave him because he feels alone. This guilt and grief over the loss of Liliya and his own cover up to Lyudmil, slowly eats away at him and makes him push Lyudmil away through season 4, until Magnus blows everything to hell when he gets Lyudmil to find out that Alucard was the one to turn him. which in turn causes a fight, and Lyudmil to question everything that Alucard had done for him and his sister and leads him in the season eventually to change sides to Magnus and betray Alucard, by litterally stabbing him in the back, and leaving him to die. Where in you have Trevor and Sypha come and find their friend in bad shape wanting to know what happened, only for him to say he fucked up, and begs them to put him in his coffin to sleep after Sypha heals his wounds. 

This would lead to a wide open castle for Isaac for season 5, and a set up for a later season of the Rondo of blood/Symphony of the Night arc.

Having Alucard betray his own beliefs makes him more like his father than killing Taka and Sumi. When Mathias lost his wife Elisabetha, he used his best friend to get what he wanted, which was immortality. He went against his own beliefs about their friendship and focused on his own desires to make his own wish come true, which in this case was to screw over God and Humans for taking his beloved Elisabetha away. Yet, he still wanted that close association with Leon Belmont, whom he’d known since they were kids, and when Leon rejected him in the end it broke everything that Mathias was clinging on to in the hopes of some sense of not being a full on monster. 

For Alucard, who didn’t want to be like his dad, who could walk in the light, who cared for people and had told Trevor and Sypha he would be okay, this action would have been a tipping point. How could he be so damn selfish to turn someone because of his own needs. How could he corrupt Liliya’s dying request to save her brother into some personal wish to not be alone and corrupted it in his mind so that he didn’t have to feel guilty over it. What makes it all the worse then is that he no longer believes he had the right to stand up against his father since they are alike and he did a horrible thing to a friend, just as Mathias had to Leon. Loyalty can also play a part in it, as well as truth and trust, since Alucard is all of 20 at this point. 

You can have a hell of a philosophical situation there about desires, requests, and how far to go to save someone. Are they alike, or is it all in the lies from Magnus. Magnus would also be someone that Alucard could conflict with as it would allow for the two different views of Dracula to show off how they both feel about things. Magnus wanting to be a son to Dracula, to be praised and loved by him as a child or a servant to a master. Someone who cares for the darker side of the man yet feels compassion and empathy for him. Where as Alucard, feels love for his father, he also knows that the man is capable of great evil and needs to be stopped and wants him to be in the light. Magnus could easily be the opposite of Carmilla, someone who is grieving the loss of Dracula as much, or possibly more so, than Isaac as he was probably with Dracula longer. Where as she is glad he’s dead and is free to do as she pleases. 

It just feels like there could have been a better story arc for him in here instead of what we got. There’s so much rich lore in Castlevania and the connections between characters that it feels kind of wrong that the story of Alucard, Lyudmil and Magnus was left on the way side, and in stead we have a pair of characters that are okay over all but ultimately a waste. 

[marginalgloss]

the red telephone

The thing about Control is that I don’t think I’ve ever played a game where I’ve felt such a vast difference between a game’s artistic and technical quality and its total lack of thematic and narrative depth. 

There is a good case for saying that this oughtn’t to be a problem. It’s long been the case that if a video game is entertaining enough, any further ‘depth’ (by the standards established by other media) is unnecessary. This is why we don’t much care if the story isn’t good in Doom. The sense of being there and doing the thing is enough. But Doom isn’t drawing on influences bigger than itself. Clearly it’s been influenced by a variety of things — from Dungeons and Dragons to heavy metal album covers and Evil Dead and everything in between — but Doom is not referential, and it’s not reverential. Doom is complete unto itself. Control is not complete.

Horror films and ghost stories and weird fiction are best when they are about things. Think about The Turn of the Screw and The Thing and Twin Peaks and Candyman, to pick a few examples off the top of my head. They work not just because what we see and hear and read is mysterious. They are compelling because they have intriguing characters and thematic resonance. The Babadook is not just a story about a monster from a book for children. Night of the Living Dead isn’t just about, you know, the living dead. By comparison I find it hard to say that Control is about anything, but it presents itself as adjacent to this kind of work. It is a magnificent exercise in style which trades in empty symbols. It wraps itself in tropes from weird fiction in the hope of absorbing meaning by osmosis.

It feels like a wasted opportunity, because the setup is not without interest. You play as Jesse Faden, a woman supposedly beginning her first day on the job at the Federal Bureau of Control, a mysterious government organisation that deals in high-level paranormal affairs. The FBC is a feast of architectural and environmental detail: a vast Brutalist office complex with an interior that seems to be stranded in time somewhere around the mid-1980s. Everything is concrete and glass and reel-to-reel machines and terminal workstations. It’s frequently stunning.

Unfortunately most of the staff are missing because Jesse’s visit to their headquarters coincides with a massive invasion by the Hiss, a paranormal force which has taken over the building. The Hiss is a sort of ambient infection that turns people into mindless spirit-drones, chanting in an endless Babel. (Conveniently, most of those drones are present as angry men with guns. There are also zombies, and flying zombies, for variety.)

There is, obviously, more to Jesse than meets the eye. She spends a lot of time talking to someone nobody else can see. But there isn’t that much more to her. Like every other character in the game she is a monotone. There is no reason to believe she has any existence outside the plot devised for her here. Similarly, the other characters you meet exist only as the lines they speak to you. It works only when the effect is entirely, deliberately flat: the most compelling person in the game is Ahti, the janitor with a sing-song voice and a near-indecipherable Finnish accent. He is nothing but what he is — he has no past, no future. He has all the answers, if only you knew what questions to ask.

Control is undeniably stylish. The interiors are striking, vast, spacious. Even on the smallest scale the game has a great eye for little comic interactions via systemised physics. You can shoot individual holes in a boardroom table and watch the thing splinter apart into individual fragments. You can shoot a rolodex and watch all the little cards whirl around in a spiral. If a projector is showing a film you can pick the whole thing up and the film will reveal itself as an actual dynamic projection by spiralling and spinning madly across the nearest walls. (Speaking of film, the video sequences with live actors are great fun, and this being a Remedy game, there’s a fantastic show-within-a-show to be found on hidden monitors around the FBC.) And all of this before I mention the sound design — the music, which is full of concrète mechanical shrieks and groans — and the endless sinister chanting which fills the lofty corridors and hallways of this place, The Oldest House. 

All of this is very, very good. And most of the time it’s quite fun to play. I mean, you can pick up a photocopier and fling it at enemies. It’s never not fun when almost anything can be used as a projectile. And then you get the ability to fly! At its best the combat in Control feels messy and chaotic — in a good way — but in a way that has little to do with typical video game gunplay. Staying behind cover doesn’t work because the only way to regain health is to pick up little nuggets dropped by fallen enemies, so most of the time you have to use your powers to be incredibly aggressive. The result is that often you feel like the end-of-level boss — a kind of monster — throwing yourself into conflict with a team of moderately stupid players who think they’re supposed to be playing a cover shooter circa 2005. 

That you are given a gun at all seems odd. The gun feels like a compromise. The gimmick of a single modular pistol that can shape-change into a handful of other weapons is neat, but those weapons are just uninteresting variations on the same old themes: handgun, shotgun, machine gun, sniper, rocket launcher. The powers are more interesting and powerful. But of course the gun has to be there; can you imagine them having to go out and sell this game without a gun in it? What would Jesse be holding on the front cover? 

A gun is an equaliser. It evens the odds between the weak and the strong. But if you’re already strong it doesn’t feel worthwhile. You’re clearly so much more powerful than everyone else you meet in Control that after a while you begin to wonder why the game is also frequently quite hard. The omission of any difficulty settings is notable in a game of this type; it suggests that the developers were committed to their vision in the way that might recall Dark Souls. In fact the hub-like structure of the game is pretty clearly influenced by From Software’s games, and though it’s nowhere near as challenging, it seems to be reaching towards the same kind of thing.

It’s a game which demands you take it seriously as a crafted object. But then it has all these other elements cribbed from elsewhere — the generic level-based enemies with numbers that fly off them when shot, and the light peppering of timed/semi-randomised side activities, both of which made me think of Destiny. So there’s games-as-service stuff wedged in here too, and it doesn’t sit at all comfortably with this supposedly mysterious, compelling world that you’re supposed to want to explore.

This isn’t a horror game. There are one or two enemies with the potential to induce jump scares, but given that you can always respond with overwhelming force, it’s never really unsettling. But it’s clearly been inspired by horror. A source often mentioned as an inspiration for Control is the internet horror stories associated with the SCP Foundation wiki. From there the game borrows the idea that unlikely everyday objects can become sources of immense cosmic power — hence we see items like a rubber duck, a refrigerator, a pink flamingo, a coffee thermos imprisoned behind glass as if they were Hannibal Lecter. A pull-cord light switch becomes an inter-dimensional portal to an otherworldly motel. The great part about this is that these little stories can be told effectively in isolation; it’s always interesting to come across another object in the game and to discover what it does. (The fridge is especially unpleasant.)

But experiencing this kind of thing in the context of an action game is entirely different to stumbling it on it online. SCP Foundation is pretty well established now, but still, there’s a certain thrill in stumbling across something written there in plain text, titled with only a number. When those stories are good, they can be really good. Given the relative lack of context, and the absence of any graphical set-dressing, there’s room for your imagination to do the heavy lifting. 

In Control these fine little stories are competing for attention with all the other crazy colourful stuff going on in the background. You read a note and you move on to the next thing. You crash through a pack of enemies and the numbers fly off them. There’s never a sense of the little story fitting into an overall pattern. That lack of a pattern can be forgiven in the context of a wiki. In Control, these stories start to feel irrelevant when you never come across an enemy you can’t shoot in the face. In a different format, or a different type of game, this kind of rootless narrative might be more compelling. 

But what is this game about? There’s a sister and brother. A sinister government agency. Memories, nostalgia. A slide projector. It’s all so difficult to summarise. When I think about the game all these words seem to float around in my head, loosely linked, but not in a way that suggests any kind of coherence. The game always seems to be reaching towards some kind of meaning but it only ever feels hollow. It feels flat. Yet all the elements that are good about Control must be made to refer back to these hollow, flat signifiers. Sometimes the flatness works for the game, but mostly it doesn’t.

Today, it’s hard to see that anyone could see the point in establishing a website like SCP Foundation if it didn’t already exist. Viral media is not what it was in the first decade of the 2000s. Written posts that circulate on social media have a shorter half-life than ever. It’s almost impossible for any piece of writing over a few hundreds words to go viral in ways that go beyond labels like ‘shocking’, ‘controversial’, ‘important’, etc. ‘Haunting’ and ‘uncanny’ don’t quite cut it. This kind of thing doesn’t edge into public spaces in the way it used to via email inboxes, or message boards, or blogs. 

Perhaps the weird stuff is still out there. Perhaps we only got better at blocking it out. With the arrival of any new viral content, today’s audience is mostly consumed by questions of authenticity, moral quality, and accuracy. If you think this creepy story might be ‘real’, you’re a mug. If you promote it you might be a dangerous kind of idiot. And that’s fair: there are a lot of dangerous idiots out there. Yet there’s something to be said for an attitude of persistent acceptance when it comes to the consumption of weird stuff on the internet. I know I become gluttonous when I come upon such things. I want to say: yes, it’s all true, every word. I’ve always known it’s all true. 

[ciathyzareposts]

Return to Zork

Where should we mark the beginning of the full-motion-video era, that most extended of blind alleys in the history of the American games industry? The day in the spring of 1990 that Ken Williams, founder and president of Sierra On-Line, wrote his latest editorial for his company’s seasonal newsletter might be as good a point as any. In his editorial, Williams coined the term “talkies” in reference to an upcoming generation of games which would have “real character voices and no text.” The term was, of course, a callback to the Hollywood of circa 1930, when sound began to come to the heretofore silent medium of film. Computer games, Williams said, stood on the verge of a leap that would be every bit as transformative, in terms not only of creativity but of profitability: “How big would the film industry be today if not for this step?”

According to Williams, the voice-acted, CD-based version of Sierra’s King’s Quest V was to become the games industry’s The Jazz Singer. But voice acting wasn’t the only form of acting which the games of the next few years had in store. A second transformative leap, comparable to that made by Hollywood when film went from black and white to color, was also waiting in the wings to burst onto the stage just a little bit later than the first talkies. Soon, game players would be able to watch real, human actors right there on their monitor screens.

As regular readers of this site probably know already, the games industry’s Hollywood obsession goes back a long way. In 1982, Sierra was already advertising their text adventure Time Zone with what looked like a classic “coming attractions” poster; in 1986, Cinemaware was founded with the explicit goal of making “interactive movies.” Still, the conventional wisdom inside the industry by the early 1990s had shifted subtly away from such earlier attempts to make games that merely played like movies. The idea was now that the two forms of media would truly become one — that games and movies would literally merge. “Sierra is part of the entertainment industry — not the computer industry,” wrote Williams in his editorial. “I always think of books, records, films, and then interactive films.” These categories defined a continuum of increasingly “hot,” increasingly immersive forms of media. The last listed there, the most immersive medium of all, was now on the cusp of realization. How many people would choose to watch a non-interactive film when they had the opportunity to steer the course of the plot for themselves? Probably about as many as still preferred books to movies.

Not all that long after Williams’s editorial, the era of the full-motion-video game began in earnest. The first really prominent exemplar of the species was ICOM Simulations’s Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective series in 1992, which sent you wandering around Victorian London collecting clues to a mystery from the video snippets that played every time you visited a relevant location. The first volume of this series alone would eventually sell 1 million copies as an early CD-ROM showcase title. The following year brought Return to Zork, The 7th Guest, and Myst as three of the five biggest games of the year; all three of these used full-motion video to a greater or lesser extent. (Myst used it considerably less than the other two, and, perhaps not coincidentally, is the member of the trio that holds up by far the best today.) With success stories like those to look to, the floodgates truly opened in 1994. Suddenly every game-development project — by no means only adventure games — was looking for ways to shoehorn live actors into the proceedings.

But only a few of the full-motion-video games that followed would post anything like the numbers of the aforementioned four games. That hard fact, combined with a technological counter-revolution in the form of 3D graphics, would finally force a reckoning with the cognitive dissonance of trying to build a satisfying interactive experience by mixing and matching snippets of nonmalleable video. By 1997, the full-motion-video era was all but over. Today, few things date a game more instantly to a certain window of time than grainy video of terrible actors flickering over a background of computer-generated graphics. What on earth were people thinking?

Most full-motion-video games are indeed dire, but they’re going to be with us for quite some time to come as we continue to work our way through this history. I wish I could say that Activision’s Return to Zork, my real topic for today, was one of the exceptions to the rule of direness. Sadly, though, it isn’t.

In fact, let me be clear right now: Return to Zork is a terrible adventure game. Under no circumstances should you play it, unless to satisfy historical curiosity or as a source of ironic amusement in the grand tradition of Ed Wood. And even in these special cases, you should take care to play it with a walkthrough in hand. To do anything else is sheer masochism; you’re almost guaranteed to lock yourself out of victory within the first ten minutes, and almost guaranteed not to realize it until many hours later. There’s really no point in mincing words here: Return to Zork is one of the absolute worst adventure-game designs I’ve ever seen — and, believe me, I’ve seen quite a few bad ones.

Its one saving grace, however, is that it’s terrible in a somewhat different way from the majority of terrible full-motion-video adventure games. Most of them are utterly bereft of ideas beyond the questionable one at their core: that of somehow making a game out of static video snippets. You can almost see the wheels turning desperately in the designers’ heads as they’re suddenly confronted with the realization that, in addition to playing videos, they have to give the player something to actually do. Beyond Zork, on the other hand, is chock full of ideas for improving upon the standard graphic-adventure interface in ways that, on the surface at any rate, allow more rather than less flexibility and interactivity. Likewise, even the trendy use of full-motion video, which dates it so indelibly to the mid-1990s, is much more calculated than the norm among its contemporaries.

Unfortunately, all of its ideas are undone by a complete disinterest in the fundamentals of game design on the part of the novelty-seeking technologists who created it. And so here we are, stuck with a terrible game in spite of it all. If I can’t quite call Return to Zork a noble failure — as we’ll see, one of its creators’ stated reasons for making it so callously unfair is anything but noble — I can at least convince myself to call it an interesting one.

When Activision decided to make their follow-up to the quickie cash-in Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2 a more earnest, better funded stab at a sequel to a beloved Infocom game, it seemed logical to find themselves a real Infocom Implementor to design the thing. They thus asked Steve Meretzky, whom they had just worked with on Leather Goddesses 2, if he’d like to design a new Zork game for them as well. But Meretzky hadn’t overly enjoyed trying to corral Activision’s opinionated in-house developers from a continent away last time around; this time, he turned them down flat.

Meretzky’s rejection left Activision without a lot of options to choose from when it came to former Imps. A number of them had left the games industry upon Infocom’s shuttering three years before, while, of those that remained, Marc Blank, Mike Berlyn, Brian Moriarty, and Bob Bates were all employed by one of Activison’s direct competitors. Activision therefore turned to Doug Barnett, a freelance artist and designer who at been active in the industry for the better part of a decade; his most high-profile design gig to date had been Cinemaware’s Lords of the Rising Sun. But he had never designed a traditional puzzle-oriented adventure game, as one can perhaps see all too well in the game that would result from his partnership with Activision. He also didn’t seem to have a great deal of natural affinity for Zork. In the lengthy set of notes and correspondence relating to the game’s development which has been put online by The Zork Library, a constant early theme on Activision’s part is the design’s lack of “Zorkiness.” “As it stands, the design constitutes more of a separate and unrelated story, rather than a sequel to the Zork series,” they wrote at one point. “It was noted that ‘Zork’ is the name of a vast ancient underground empire, yet Return to Zork takes place in a mostly above-ground environment.”

In fairness to Barnett, Zork had always been more of a state of mind than a coherent place. With the notable exception of Steve Meretzky, everyone at Infocom had been wary of overthinking a milieu that had originally been plucked out of the air more or less at random. In comparison to other shared worlds — even other early computer-game worlds, such as the Britannia of Richard Garriott’s Ultima series — there was surprisingly little there there when it came Zork: no well-established geography, no well-established history which everybody knew — and, most significantly of all, no really iconic characters which simply had to be included. At bottom, Zork boiled down to little more than a modest grab bag of tropes which lived largely in the eye of the beholder: the white house with a mailbox, grues, Flood Control Dam #3, Dimwit Flathead, the Great Underground Empire itself. And even most of these had their origin stories in the practical needs of an adventure game rather than any higher world-building purpose. (The Great Underground Empire, for example, was first conceived as an abandoned place not for any literary effect but because living characters are hard to implement in an adventure game, while the detritus they leave behind is relatively easy.)

That said, there was a distinct tone to Zork, which was easier to spot than it was to describe or to capture. Barnett’s design missed this tone, even as it began with the gleefully anachronistic, seemingly thoroughly Zorkian premise of casting the player as a sweepstakes winner on an all-expenses-paid trip to the idyllic Valley of the Sparrows, only to discover it has turned into the Valley of the Vultures under the influence of some pernicious, magical evil. Barnett and Activision would continue to labor mightily to make Return to Zork feel like Zork, but would never quite get there.

By the summer of 1992, Barnett’s design document had already gone through several revisions without entirely meeting Activision’s expectations. At this point, they hired one Eddie Dornbrower to take personal charge of the project in the role of producer. Like Barnett, Dornbrower had been working in the industry for quite some time, but had never worked on an adventure game; he was best known for World Series Major League Baseball on the old Intellivision console and Earl Weaver Baseball on computers. Dornbrower gave the events of Return to Zork an explicit place in Zorkian history — some 700 years after Infocom’s Beyond Zork — and moved a big chunk of the game underground to remedy one of his boss’ most oft-repeated objections to the existing design.

More ominously, he also made a comprehensive effort to complicate Barnett’s puzzles, based on feedback from players and reviewers of Leather Goddesses 2, who were decidedly unimpressed with that game’s simple-almost-to-the-point-of-nonexistence puzzles. The result would be the mother of all over-corrections — a topic we’ll return to later.

Unlike Leather Goddess 2, whose multimedia ambitions had led it to fill a well-nigh absurd 17 floppy disks, Return to Zork had been planned almost from its inception as a product for CD-ROM, a technology which, after years of false promises and setbacks, finally seemed to be moving toward a critical mass of consumer uptake. In 1992, full-motion video, CD-ROM, and multimedia computing in general were all but inseparable concepts in the industry’s collective mind. Activision thus became one of the first studios hire a director and actors and rent time on a sound stage; the business of making computer games had now come to involve making movies as well. They even hired a professional Hollywood screenwriter to punch up the dialog and make it more “cinematic.”

In general, though, while the computer-games industry was eager to pursue a merger with Hollywood, the latter was proving far more skeptical. There was still little money in computer games by comparison with movies, and there was very little prestige — rather the opposite, most would say — in “starring” in a game. The actors which games could manage to attract were therefore B-listers at best. Return to Zork actually collected a more accomplished — or at least more high-profile — cast than most. Among them were Ernie Lively, a veteran supporting player best known to a generation of ten-year-old boys as Cooter, the mechanic from The Dukes of Hazzard; his daughter Robyn Lively, fresh off a six-episode stint as a minor character on David Lynch’s prestigious critic’s darling Twin Peaks; Jason Hervey, who was still playing older brother Wayne on the long-running coming-of-age sitcom The Wonder Years; and Sam Jones, whose big shot at leading-man status had come and gone when he starred in the dreadful Flash Gordon film of 1980.

If the end result would prove less than Oscar-worthy, it’s for the most part not cringe-worthy either. After all, the cast did consist entirely of acting professionals, which is more than one can say for many productions of this ilk — and certainly more than one can say for the truly dreadful voice acting in Leather Goddess of Phobos 2, Activision’s previous attempt at a multimedia adventure game. While they were hampered by the sheer unfamiliarity of talking directly “to” the invisible player of the game — as Ernie Lively put it, “there’s no one to act off of” — they did a decent job with the slight material they had to work with.

The fact that they were talking to the player rather than acting out scenes with one another actually speaks to a degree of judiciousness in the use of full-motion video on Activision’s part. Rather than attempting to make an interactive movie in the most literal sense — by having a bunch of actors, one of them representing the protagonist, act out each of the player’s choices — Activision went for a more thoughtful mixed-media approach that could, theoretically anyway, eliminate most of the weaknesses of the typical full-motion-video adventure game. For the most part, only conversations involved the use of full-motion video; everything else was rendered by Activision’s pixel artists and 3D modelers in conventional computer graphics. The protagonist wasn’t shown at all: at a time when the third-person view that was the all but universal norm in adventure games, Activision opted for a first-person view.

The debate over whether an adventure-game protagonist ought to be a blank state which the player can fill with her own personality or an established character which the player merely guides and empathizes with was a longstanding one even at the time when Return to Zork was being made. Certainly Infocom had held rousing internal debates on the subject, and had experimented fairly extensively with pre-established protagonists in some of their games. (These experiments sometimes led to rousing external debates among their fans, most notably in the case of the extensively characterized and tragically flawed protagonist of Infidel, who meets a nasty if richly deserved end no matter what the player does.) The Zork series, however, stemmed from an earlier, simpler time in adventure games than the rest of the Infocom catalog, and the “nameless, faceless adventurer,” functioning as a stand-in for the player herself, had always been its star. Thus Activision’s decision not to show the player’s character in Return to Zork, or indeed to characterize her in any way whatsoever, is a considered one, in keeping with everything that came before.

In fact, the protagonist of Return to Zork never actually says anything. To get around the need, Activision came up with a unique attitude-based conversation engine. As you “talk” to other characters, you choose from three stances — threatening, interested, or bored — and listen only to your interlocutors’ reactions. Not only does your own dialog go unvoiced, but you don’t even see the exact words you use; the game instead lets you imagine your own words. Specific questions you might wish to ask are cleverly turned into concrete physical interactions, something games do much better than abstract conversations. As you explore, you have a camera with which to take pictures of points of interest. During conversations, you can show the entries from your photo album to your interlocutor, perhaps prompting a reaction. You can do the same with objects in your inventory, locations on the auto-map you always carry with you, or even the tape recordings you automatically make of each interaction with each character.

So, whatever else you can say about it, Return to Zork is hardly bereft of ideas. William Volk, the technical leader of the project, was well up on the latest research into interface design being conducted inside universities like MIT and at companies like Apple. Many such studies had concluded that, in place of static onscreen menus and buttons, the interface should ideally pop into existence just where and when the user needed it. The result of such thinking in Return to Zork is a screen with no static interface at all; it instead pops up when you click on an object with which you can interact. Since it doesn’t need the onscreen menu of “verbs” typical of contemporaneous Sierra and LucasArts adventure games, Return to Zork can give over the entirety of the screen to its graphical portrayal of the world.

In addition to being a method of recapturing screen real estate, the interface was conceived as a way to recapture some of the sense of boundless freedom which is such a characteristic of parser-driven text adventures — a sense which can all too easily become lost amidst the more constrained interfaces of their graphical equivalent. William Volk liked to call Return to Zork‘s interface a “reverse parser”: clicking on a “noun” in the environment or in your inventory yields a pop-up menu of “verbs” that pertain to it. Taking an object in your “hand” and clicking it on another one yields still more options, the equivalent of commands to a parser involving indirect as well as direct objects. In the first screen of the game, for example, clicking the knife on a vulture gives options to “show knife to vulture,” “throw knife at vulture,” “stab vulture with knife,” or “hit vulture with knife.” There are limits to the sense of possibility: every action had to be anticipated and hand-coded by the development team, and most of them are the wrong approach to whatever you’re trying to accomplish. In fact, in the case of the example just mentioned as well as many others, most of the available options will get you killed; Return to Zork loves instant deaths even more than the average Sierra game. And there are many cases of that well-known adventure-game syndrome where a perfectly reasonable solution to a problem isn’t implemented, forcing you to devise some absurdly convoluted solution that is implemented in its stead. Still, in a world where adventure games were getting steadily less rather than more ambitious in their scope of interactive possibility — to a large extent due to the limitations of full-motion video — Return to Zork was a welcome departure from the norm, a graphic adventure that at least tried to recapture the sense of open-ended possibility of an Infocom game.

Indeed, there are enough good ideas in Return to Zork that one really, really wishes they all could have been tied to a better game. But sadly, I have to stop praising Return to Zork now and start condemning it.

The most obvious if perhaps most forgivable of its sins is that, as already noted, it never really manages to feel like Zork — not, at least, like the classic Zork of the original trilogy. (Steve Meretzky’s Zork Zero, Infocom’s final release to bear the name, actually does share some of the slapstick qualities of Return to Zork, but likewise rather misses the feel of the original.) The most effective homage comes at the very beginning, when the iconic opening text of Zork I appears onscreen and morphs into the new game’s splashy opening credits. It’s hard to imagine a better depiction circa 1993 of where computer gaming had been and where it was going — which was, of course, exactly the effect the designers intended.

https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/rtz1.mp4

Once the game proper gets under way, however, modernity begins to feel much less friendly to the Zorkian aesthetic of old. Most of Zork‘s limited selection of physical icons do show up here, from grues to Flood Control Dam #3, but none of it feels all that convincingly Zork-like. The dam is a particular disappointment; what was described in terms perfect for inspiring awed flights of the imagination in Zork I looks dull and underwhelming when portrayed in the cruder medium of graphics. Meanwhile the jokey, sitcom-style dialog that confronts you at every turn feels even less like the original trilogy’s slyer, subtler humor.

This isn’t to say that Return to Zork‘s humor doesn’t connect on occasion. It’s just… different from that of Dave Lebling and Marc Blank. By far the most memorable character, whose catchphrase has lived on to this day as a minor Internet meme, is the drunken miller named Boos Miller. (Again, subtlety isn’t this game’s trademark.) He plies you endlessly with whiskey, whilst repeating, “Want some rye? Course you do!” over and over and over in his cornpone accent. It’s completely stupid — but, I must admit, it’s also pretty darn funny; Boos Miller is the one thing everyone who ever played the play still seems to remember about Return to Zork. But, funny though he is, he would be unimaginable in any previous Zork.

https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/rtz3.mp4

Of course, a lack of sufficient Zorkiness need not have been the kiss of death for Return to Zork as an adventure game in the abstract. What really does it in is its thoroughly unfair puzzle design. This game plays like the fever dream of a person who hates and fears adventure games. It’s hard to know where to even start (or end) with this cornucopia of bad puzzles, but I’ll describe a few of them, ranked roughly in order of their objectionability.

The Questionable: At one point, you find yourself needing to milk a cow, but she won’t let you do so with cold hands. Do you need to do something sensible, like, say, find some gloves or wrap your hands in a blanket? Of course not! The solution is to light some of the hay that’s scattered all over the wooden barn on fire and warm your hands that way. For some reason, the whole place doesn’t go up in smoke. This solution is made still more difficult to discover by the way that the game usually kills you every time you look at it wrong. Why on earth would it not kill you for a monumentally stupid act like this one? To further complicate matters, for reasons that are obscure at best you can only light the hay on fire if you first pick it up and then drop it again. Thus even many players who are consciously attempting the correct solution will still get stuck here.

The Absurd: At another point, you find a bra. You have to throw it into an incinerator in order to get a wire out of it whose existence you were never aware of in the first place. How does the game expect you to guess that you should take such an action? Apparently some tenuous linkage with the 1960s tradition of bra burning and, as a justification after the fact, the verb “to hot-wire.” Needless to say, throwing anything else into the incinerator just destroys the object and, more likely than not, locks you out of victory.

The Incomprehensible: There’s a water wheel out back of Boos’s house with a chock holding it still. If you’ve taken the chock and thus the wheel is spinning, and you’ve solved another puzzle that involves drinking Boos under the table (see the video above), a trapdoor is revealed in the floor. But if the chock is in place, the trapdoor can’t be seen. Why? I have absolutely no idea.

The Brutal: In a way, everything you really need to know about Return to Zork can be summed up by its most infamous single puzzle. On the very first screen of the game, there’s a “bonding plant” growing. If you simply pull up the plant and take it with you, everything seems fine — until you get to the very end of the game many hours later. Here, you finally find a use for the plant you’ve been carting around all this time. Fair enough. But unfortunately, you need a living version of it. It turns out you were supposed to have used a knife to dig up the plant rather than pulling or cutting it. (The question of how it should survive even this treatment, considering you don’t plant it again in a pot or anything — much less how you can dig anything up with a knife — goes unanswered.) Guess what? You now get to play through the whole game again from the beginning.

All of the puzzles just described, and the many equally bad ones, are made still more complicated by the game’s general determination to be a right bastard to you every chance it gets. If, as Robb Sherwin once put it, the original Zork games hate their players, this game has found some existential realm beyond mere hatred. It will let you try to do many things to solve each puzzle, but, of those actions that don’t outright kill you, a fair percentage lock you out of victory in one way or another. Sometimes, as in the case of its most infamous puzzle, it lets you think you’ve solved them, only to pull the rug out from under you much later.

So, you’re perpetually on edge as you tiptoe through this minefield of instant deaths and unwinnable states; you’ll have a form of adventure-game post-traumatic-stress syndrome by the time you’re done, even if you’re largely playing from a walkthrough. The instant deaths are annoying, but nowhere near as bad as the unwinnable states; the problem there is that you never know whether you’ve already locked yourself out of victory, never know whether you can’t solve the puzzle in front of you because of something you did or didn’t do a long time ago.

It all combines to make Return to Zork one of the worst adventure games I’ve ever played. We’ve sunk to Time Zone levels of awful with this one. No human not willing to mount a methodical months-long assault on this game, trying every possibility everywhere, could possibly solve it unaided. Even the groundbreaking interface is made boring and annoying by the need to show everything to everyone and try every conversation stance on everyone, always with the lingering fear that the wrong stance could spoil your game. Adventure games are built on trust between player and designer, but you can’t trust Return to Zork any farther than you can throw it. Amidst all the hand-wringing at Activision over whether Return to Zork was or was not sufficiently Zorky, they forgot the most important single piece of the Infocom legacy: their thoroughgoing commitment to design, and the fundamental respect that commitment demonstrated to the players who spent their hard-earned money on Infocom games.  “Looking back at the classics might be a good idea for today’s game designers,” wrote Computer Gaming World‘s Scorpia at the conclusion of her mixed review of Return to Zork. “Good puzzle construction, logical development, and creative inspiration are in rich supply on those dusty disks.” None of these, alas, is in correspondingly good supply in Return to Zork.

The next logical question, then, is just how Return to Zork‘s puzzles wound up being so awful. After all, this game wasn’t the quickie cash grab that Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2 had been. The development team put serious thought and effort into the interface, and there were clearly a lot of people involved with this game who cared about it a great deal — among them Activision’s CEO Bobby Kotick, who was willing to invest almost $1 million to bring the whole project to fruition at a time when cash was desperately short and his creditors had him on a short leash indeed.

The answer to our question apparently comes down to the poor reception of Leather Goddesses 2, which had stung Activision badly. In an interview given shortly before Return to Zork‘s release, Eddie Dornbrower said that, “based on feedback that the puzzles in Leather Goddesses of Phobos [2] were too simple,” the development team had “made the puzzles increasingly difficult just by reworking what Doug had already laid out for us.” That sounds innocent enough on the face of it. But, speaking to me recently, William Volk delivered a considerably darker variation on the same theme. “People hated Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2 — panned it,” he told me. “So, we decided to wreak revenge on the entire industry by making Return to Zork completely unfair. Everyone bitches about that title. There’s 4000 videos devoted to Return to Zork on YouTube, most of which are complaining because the title is so blatantly unfair. But, there you go. Something to pin my hat on. I made the most unfair game in history.”

For all that I appreciate Volk sharing his memories with me, I must confess that my initial reaction to this boast was shock, soon to be followed by genuine anger at the lack of empathy it demonstrates. Return to Zork didn’t “wreak revenge” on its industry, which really couldn’t have cared less. It rather wreaked “revenge,” if that’s the appropriate word, on the ordinary gamers who bought it in good faith at a substantial price, most of whom had neither bought nor commented on Leather Goddesses 2. I sincerely hope that Volk’s justification is merely a case of hyperbole after the fact. If not… well, I really don’t know what else to say about such juvenile pettiness, so symptomatic of the entitled tunnel vision of so many who are fortunate enough to work in technology, other than that it managed to leave me disliking Return to Zork even more. Some games are made out of an openhearted desire to bring people enjoyment. Others, like this one, are not.

I’d like to be able to say that Activision got their comeuppance for making Return to Zork such a bad game, demonstrating such contempt for their paying customers, and so soiling the storied Infocom name in the process. But exactly the opposite is the case. Released in late 1993, Return to Zork became one of the breakthrough titles that finally made the CD-ROM revolution a reality, whilst also carrying Activision a few more steps back from the abyss into which they’d been staring for the last few years. It reportedly sold 1 million copies in its first year — albeit the majority of them as a bundled title, included with CD-ROM drives and multimedia upgrade kits, rather than as a boxed standalone product. “Zork on a brick would sell 100,000 copies,” crowed Bobby Kotick in the aftermath.

Perhaps. But more likely not. Even within the established journals of computer gaming, whose readership probably didn’t constitute the majority of Return to Zork‘s purchasers, reviews of the game were driven more by enthusiasm for its graphics and sound, which really were impressive in their day, than by Zork nostalgia. Discussed in the euphoria following its release as the beginning of a full-blown Infocom revival, Return to Zork would instead go down in history as a vaguely embarrassing anticlimax to the real Infocom story. A sequel to Planetfall, planned as the next stage in the revival, would linger in Development Hell for years and ultimately never get finished. By the end of the 1990s, Zork as well would be a dead property in commercial terms.

Rather than having all that much to do with its Infocom heritage, Return to Zork‘s enormous commercial success came down to its catching the technological zeitgeist at just the right instant, joining Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, The 7th Guest, and Myst as the perfect flashy showpieces for CD-ROM. Its success conveyed all the wrong messages to game publishers like Activision: that multimedia glitz was everything, and that design really didn’t matter at all.

If it stings a bit that this of all games, arguably the worst one ever to bear the Infocom logo, should have sold better than any of the rest of them, we can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that Quality does have a way of winning out in the end. Today, Return to Zork is a musty relic of its time, remembered if at all only for that “want some rye?” guy. The classic Infocom text adventures, on the other hand, remain just that — widely recognized as timeless classics, their clean text-only presentations ironically much less dated than all of Return to Zork‘s oh-so-1993 multimedia flash. Justice does have a way of being served in the long run.

(Sources: the book Return to Zork Adventurer’s Guide by Steve Schwartz; Computer Gaming World of February 1993, July 1993, November 1993, and January 1994; Questbusters of December 1993; Sierra News Magazine of Spring 1990; Electronic Games of January 1994; New Media of June 24 1994. Online sources include The Zork Library‘s archive of Return to Zork design documents and correspondence, Retro Games Master‘s interview with Doug Barnett, and Matt Barton’s interview with William Volk. Some of this article is drawn from the full Get Lamp interview archives which Jason Scott so kindly shared with me. Finally, my huge thanks to William Volk for sharing his memories and impressions with me in a personal interview.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/return-to-zork/

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The Unpopular Opinion Book Questionaire

Before I start, credit where credit is due: I copied the questions and format of this post from @resist-the-fear’s post and this wordpress post, because I couldn’t figure out how to add my answers into the original post without messing up all formatting. And I’m really sorry if this upsets anybody, but the idea is cool and it’d be a shame not to continue it on tumblr.

So, here we go...

1. A Popular Book or series that you didn’t like.

1) Feels like the Twilight Saga would be the obvious answer (and it IS), but I’m gonna go for pretty much all of Dan Bown’s novels and I’m gonna explain my dislike with The DaVinci Code

This novel actually angered me so much that I wrote my master’s thesis on how Brown deliberately mislead the majority of his readers into mistaking his fiction for actual facts in order to sell more books.

The gist is, any and all art historic descriptions and information given within the book are fully fictional. That includes a page of “facts” (labeled as such) preceding the novel itself (which doesn’t contain any actual facts at all) and a note underneath stating that all descriptions of paitings were accurate. Spoiler alert: They’re not. I majored art history in school and did a lot of research, but, honestly, anybody who’s interested in art history and knows the very very basics about the renaissance and other time periods can easily disprove all of the novel’s supposedly accurate art descriptions.

And, to be truthful, I have to admit that Brown is really fucking good at fiction. He’s also really good at writing his fiction around and over existing art historic knowledge and twisting it without making it too obvious for careless readers. That’s kinda cool. And I get that disguising fiction as fact isn’t a new trend. I mean... Defoe did when he falsely claimed that Robinson Cruseo was a factual report of a true event, because the readership of his time period wasn’t familiar with adventure fiction. But what really annoyed me was 1) how many readers actually believed Brown to have uncovered some genuine conspiracy and 2) that Brown kept feeding into the delusion of those fans again and again through comments in interviews and webpages, even though he fully knew it’s all fiction, because he himself made it up.

  2) And then there’s the Wanderhure series, written by a German writing couple under the pseudonym Iny Lorentz. I’m not sure if this has been translated into English, but it’s been highly popular in Germany and several other countries (won some awards and was made into a series of TV movies and whatnot). It is, quite honestly THE WORST BOOK I HAVE EVER READ IN MY WHOLE LIFE.

The first novel was recommended to me by relatives because parts of it take place in a city that I have lived in for quite some time, and it’s a historical fiction based on a medieval poem. The premiss of the novel is great: during the middle ages, a young and respected girl gets accused to have sinned by some townspeople and nobody believes her to be innocent, as she is just a girl. She gets cast out of her city and home, left with no other choice than to become a traveling whore if she wants to survive. She ends up becoming quite successful in her profession (in the sense that she has many high ranking clients from both church and state who pay her with lots of money and other favors) and returns to the city that cast her out long ago to have a huge effect on politics and religion.

The story was quite intriguing to me, both due to the interesting plotline as well as the reference to the city I live in. HOWEVER, it is horribly written. All characters, especially the protagonist, are unbelievably flat. There is no character development whatsoever, even though the story offers plenty of chances to find it. I read through the book because of the locations... houses that actually still exist, that I have been in, Gateways that i’ve walked through, roads that I’ve travelled on. Those are very well described. It’s easy to figure out each and every step the characters take on a map and that’s really cool. But the plotline was destroyed by less than mediocre characterization and simple, unimpressive language. Every time a character is supposed to feel something, the sentence literally goes, “She felt xyz” - and that’s as descriptive as it gets. There’s no atmosphere created and not an ounce of fluidity in the sentence structure. The whole narration is as dry as brick and the story reads like a two dimensional still drawing of a 3D rollercoaster ride.

2. A Popular Book or series that every one else seems to hate but you love.

I honestly don’t think that there’s any book series that EVERYBODY hates. And I do think that all the books I love, are actually pretty popular. Buuuuut...

I’ve seen the Mortal Instruments series getting a lot of hate on tumblr. And I fully understand why Cassandra Clare isn’t everybody’s favorite author. I don’t like her methods and procedure at all either. But, I have to say that I do like the basic plotline of the Mortal Instruments. I’ve only read the first three novels, and I have no clue what happens afterwards. And there’s a lot to be criticized, be it Clare “copying” existing dialogues, or some really flat and ... well, just plain naive characters. BUT the plot itself is cool. So, I felt positively entertained and liked it. Love would be a bit of a strong term, though, I think.

3. A Love Triangle where the main character ended up with the person you did NOT want them to end up with (warn ppl for spoilers) OR an OTP that you don’t like.

Not giving any spoilers, but the Demon’s Lexicon Trilogy. I really, really disliked the reveal of an actual pairing in the third novel. It didn’t make sense to me, and I wasn’t reading for romance to begin with. It kind of cheapened the story because the love interest side story suddenly got A LOT of attention that it didn’t before and that shifted the focal point of the overall plotline. (Loved the first book, really liked the second, couldn’t care less for the third, tbh)

4. A popular book Genre that you hardly reach for.

It’s either crime fiction or esoteric non-fiction.

I’m actually into a lot of different genres: almost all types of fiction (YA, dystopian, sci-fi, political, thriller, mystery, adventure, horror, fantasy etc.), also children’s books, travel books, hobby and craft books, satires, other humorous books, biographies/autobiographies, educational books, historical books both fiction and non-fiction...

Doesn’t matter, but crime fiction (as long as it doesn’t contain anything else) is just so boring to me. Also, it feels to me as if most crime fiction heroes solve those crimes with A LOT more lucky coincidences than I would hope actual crime fighters depend on.

And esoteric books are just completely outside my personal interests. Either the stuff described in those books feels like fiction to me while being sold as non-fiction, or it’s stuff that I feel should not be aquired through books but personal encounters and explorations.

5. A popular or beloved character that you do not like.

Definitely Clary Fray from the Mortal Instruments. Man, she is soooooo slow on the uptake and so naive in so many ways. And she’s also kind of a horrible Mary Sue, not just because of her name... (I mean, really? Clary, Ms Clare? 😔) But also because of how she is so awesomely good at everything and how she always thinks of the perfect solutions for everything when nobody else does. Kinda... very little room for character development. But, then again, who needs that, right?

6. A popular author that you can’t seem to get into.

Aside from Dan Brown? Here’s my unholy trinity...

1) Stephenie Meyer (yeah, the Twilight one) - I was actually sent an e-book copy of Twilight right before it became such a huge success. I started reading it, because my friend recommended it and praised it so highly. But, I couldn’t make it past a couple dozen pages. The writing style is just so bad, I couldn’t continue. The characters were so flat, I lost any and all interest in what was going to happen. And the story wasn’t all that intriguing either, especially because it was loaded with antiquated world views, especially Bella’s character and what was deemed right for her to do was just... WOW, it was just so unbelievably bad, lol. I was so surprised that it actually ended up being successful.

2) E.L.James (the 50 Shades one) - For years, I genuinely believed that it was impossible to write worse than Meyer. Boy, was I wrong. I tried several times to read more than ten pages of 50 Shades of Grey, and I failed every single time. It’s not just a bad story, I’ve seen children’s books for toddlers that have a more interesting sentence structure than what she comes up with for an adult audience. Her language is so dull and non-descriptive that even the supposedly racy sexy bits read like a phone book to me. Honestly, I DON’T GET WHY anybody ever had any interest in this book series. The language is unspeakably poor, the plot takes all the wrong turns it could possibly take, the “research” done before writing the book... I don’t even know where that load of complete misinformation could possibly come from.

3) Iny Lorentz (the writing couple I mentioned above: Elmar Wohlrath and Iny Klocke) - Just bad, bad, bad writing. No concept of character development, fiction asthetically written like non-fiction, no use of language to create atmosphere or convey emotions. They write neutral snoozefests. And... I can’t bring myself to write any more on them.

7. A popular book trope that you’re tired of seeing. (examples “lost princess”, corrupt ruler, love triangles, etc.)

Mary Sues and Gary Stues. But Love Triangles are a very hot contender.

8. A popular series that you have no interest in reading.

All the different Shades, lol.

9. The saying goes “The book is always better than the movie”, but what movie or T.V. show adaptation do you prefer more than the book?

Definitely Stand By Me which is Stephen King’s The Body. That movie is about as great as that story could have possibly been when put onto the screen. The actors were so perfectly cast, the cinematography, costumes and set design really captured the time period, atmosphere and geography, and the facial expressions portrayed all the right emotions beautifully.

Also, I have to say, out of all of King’s movie adaptations, and while neither The Body nor Stand By Me are categorized as horror, the scene where you can see the dead boy’s face is one of the scariest, most horrific moments I can think of in a film ever. It gave me nightmares when I first saw it, and still, to this day, I have to close my eyes when that scene comes up. And the cool thing is, it’s not meant to be specifically horrifying, or gory or scary. But the simplicity of the sudden glimpse into dead eyes, to me, is scarier than any monster I could imagine and does King’s reputation more than justice.

[unpopularly-opinionated]

Extensive Ramble/Rant Regarding How to Fix The Mummy (2017)

Forward:The movie wasn’t terrible, it just could have been (and should have been) a LOT better. These are in no particular order and wouldn’t all work together in the same movie, but are changes that I feel would’ve made the movie significantly better.

1: They never should have gone to London. Believe me when I say this, I am a HUGE England fan, like beyond fan-status to creepy-stalker-status. I'm an American born-and-raised but my room is entirely decorated in Union Jacks and other misc. English stuff. I'd pay a million dollars to have been born English. So believe me when I say they never should have gone to London.

It added nothing to the overall story save that it was where Prodigium (the fancy monster hunters club that Jenny and Dr. Jekyll are a part of) was located. This movie is called the Mummy, it should have remained in Iraq where the sarcophagus was initially found OR been taken to an off-site, maybe temporary, base for Prodigium in Egypt perhaps. It should have remained in a Middle-Eastern desert area to keep the setting.

The only real reason I can find for them going to London (beyond the plot point about the Crusaders that I'll mention next) is that every movie goes to London these days. Why? I don't know. It's an amazing place surely, but so is a million other places on the planet. Why they always choose London, I don't know.

2: The Crusaders shouldn't have been involved. Unless I've seriously forgotten, I don't believe it was ever actually explained WHY some random crusaders had Ahmanet's ruby OR her dagger. It just seemed so random and clearly was meant as only an excuse to take them to London.

I suppose it could be argued that they stole it during the Crusades however it makes very little sense why they would intentionally separate the ruby from the dagger and bury them in two different places, or if they somehow knew it was an artifact of evil then HOW do they know? It's never explained, and it should have been, or avoided altogether by just keeping crusaders out of the story completely. There's too much missing context and/or history that overall makes their addition fall flat.

3: The movie should have opened with sex. As is with pretty much all supernatural action movies, it's the power of love that drives the main character to win the fight. This is totally fine, completely expected, and sometimes strangely a welcome addition to a movie. Except, there actually needs to be a love connection for this to work.

Honestly, at no point in the movie do I actually feel that the love between Jenny (Annabelle Wallis) and Nick (Tom Cruise) is real. Frankly, I'm STILL convinced that before that scene in the beginning where she accuses him of stealing her map, they had never met and she was just making up the whole damn thing about the hotel room sex.

The movie should have opened up with them in the alleged hotel room having sex and then when morning comes he slips away with the map and him and Chris (Jake Johnson) go out into the desert in search of treasure. Even if it was just a brief scene chopped up into a 10-second clip, that still would have added some potentially significant character development to both Jenny and Nick, as well as some much needed relationship development.

Because there was little to no development for their romance, it made the scene at the end where she dies and he stabs himself with the dagger to become Set fall completely flat. She comes across as nothing more than an acquaintance throughout the movie, one not worth becoming the Egyptian God of Death to bring back to life for.

4: Jenny should have stayed dead. As I said, some of these may be conflicting and this one might conflict a bit with the last one but actually doesn't have to completely if you want to develop the relationship and then kill her off.

I should preface, it's not that I don't like Annabelle Wallis, she's a good actress, attractive, and someone I could in theory see a typical Tom Cruise character hooking up with.

However, Jenny is not a good character. In one scene she's telling Nick that she thinks they pissed off the old gods, something that if anyone said in the real life you'd think they were completely mental, but in the very next scene she's in, when Nick is telling her he's seeing Ahmanet and that he's cursed she think's he is the mental one.

Now if she's lying then of course the obvious question is WHY is she lying when she literally just mentioned something about pissing off actual gods just a minute ago, but if she's not lying and genuinely thinks Nick is crazy then again WHY when she works for an actual monster-hunting secret society that deals with crazy monsters and curses all the time?

This is a trope I see in Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Supernatural movies, shows, books, games, etc. ALL THE TIME and it's a really obnoxious one. You live in a world where you are completely aware that monsters, or magic, or other unbelievable things exist and yet when someone you know says they have seen something equally unbelievable YOU DON'T BELIEVE THEM. It's infuriating. You know monsters exist, so why would you be so surprised that your friend has seen one? You wouldn't!

5: Nick shouldn't have gotten away at the end. Given their casting choice (which I'll mention in the next one) this idea is definitely an unlikely scenario but just hear me out.

Assuming Jenny stays dead in this improved version, after Nick stabs himself with the dagger, becomes Set, and kills Ahmanet, he should have gone over to Jenny's lifeless body and been upset over her death, and then immediately have been caught by Dr. Jekyll and Prodigium with the movie ending with Nick being locked in one of their cells as Nick, possessed by Set, yells at the camera.

It was unlikely because obviously Tom Cruise is supposed to be the face of this upcoming cinematic monsterverse, but I think it would have been significantly better had he been caught by Prodigium. Hell, the next movie could open with Dr. Jekyll interrogating Set/Nick about Jenny's death. Who better to understand a man with evil inside of him than Dr. Jekyll himself? The next movie could be about finding a way for Nick to bring Jenny back but having to do so while helping Prodigium locate another monster, all while dealing with the literal God of Death inside of him occasionally possessing him for a time.

6: Nick's character shouldn't have changed dramatically by the end. This one might take some explaining, as I'm not saying he shouldn't have grown by the end of the movie because obviously he should. All character should, especially when they've just been introduced to the existence of monsters, dark magic, and real Egyptian gods.

What I am saying is that the character we are introduced to from the very beginning is not the same character we see at the end. From the beginning, we have a sleazy guy who slept with a woman to get a map that leads to ancient artifacts he can steal to sell online for profit. In other words, he's basically an overall bad guy.

He's also not implied to be very intelligent throughout most of the movie, not to say he's dumb as a rock but he isn't very clever or wise. He isn't the Indiana Jones or Nathan Drake type of ancient treasure hunter who deciphers ancient texts and follow history to find hidden artifacts to put in museums later, he's the Aladdin type of treasure hunter who stumbles across treasure or needs a direct map to it and when he finds it he immediately thinks to use it for selfish gain.

In the end however, this seems to change because suddenly he can put two-and-two together that stabbing himself with the dagger will turn him into a god so he can fight off Ahmanet, and that he can use this god's power to bring Jenny back to life, and that he has to run away before Prodigium sees him because he knows they'll capture and/or kill him immediately for being Set.

This could be argued as me being nit picky and if so then so be it. I don't think Nick's character as shown to us throughout a majority of the film is nearly smart enough or capable of the self-awareness required to be able to do all of those things. This is another reason why he shouldn't have gotten away in the end of the film, because he shouldn't have known that he should have run in the first place.

Yes, yes I understand that the signs were all sprinkled throughout the film that Prodigium would kill him to stop Set, that the dagger would turn him into a god, and that this particular god was the god of death. I still don't think his character should have picked up on those signs, or at least his character should have been described as more of an Indiana Jones/Nathan Drake type character instead of a petty for-profit thief that he's portrayed as.

7: It shouldn't have been called the Mummy. I don't actually have an idea or suggestion for what it should have been called instead, but it just shouldn't have been called the Mummy. Contextually it makes sense given the movie is about a mummy, however the obvious comparison to be made is to the older Mummy movies with the same name despite them not really being all that comparable.

The older films were significantly more comedic in nature and played off as more of an Indiana Jones film if Indiana Jones brought his whole family for his adventures (and no I'm not comparing Crystal Skulls to The Mummy movies). Calling this movie the Mummy, while it recruits hype from any fans of the older films, would ultimately harm this movie given that it's nothing like those movies and would likely garner spiteful ratings by those who saw it believing it to be like the older movies.

It'd be like if I made a movie about a sci-fi treasure hunter and named it Indiana Jones. The only direct links are that his name is Indiana Jones and that they're both treasure hunters, but obviously my movie is nothing like the old Indiana Jones movies because mine is set in space with a sci-fi setting. Ultimately I would just be shooting myself in the foot naming it Indiana Jones.