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[talkingsquidphd]

Review: Sebastien de Castell, “Traitor’s Blade” & “Knight’s Shadow”

My name is Falcio val Mond, one of the last of the King's Greatcoats, and if you listen very carefully you might still be able to hear me screaming.

- Knight’s Shadow

I’ve always had a soft spot for reluctant heroes. Their hesitance often speaks to a kind of endearing humility that you don’t find in either the earnest Chosen Ones of high fantasy or the slippery antiheroes of grimdark. It can also be an “emperor’s new clothes” situation, where they initially refuse the call to adventure on the grounds that they have too much to lose – what sane person with people to protect, after all, would agree to subject themselves and their loved ones to anything like the hero’s journey?

[Right you are, Rocket.]

Falcio val Mond, protagonist of Sebastien de Castell’s Greatcoat series, is the epitome of the reluctant hero. Falcio has no reason to be humble, though he often is – he’s perhaps the best fencer in the world, the handpicked right-hand man of a once-powerful king, and the leader of a far-flung group of warrior-magistrates who categorically bow to no one and whose meager goal is to restore peace and justice to the land. He also has little to lose – by the time the first book picks up, both his saintly wife and his beloved king are long dead, killed horribly in ways Falcio was powerless to avert. Instead, from the very first of over two thousand pages, Falcio wants nothing more than to die, and the events of the series – plucky rescues, daring escapes, and hair-raising duels choreographed as tightly as neurosurgical procedures – are minor speedbumps on his path to rejoin those he loves in the afterlife. To Falcio, death is the carrot on a stick that he chases unwillingly through the hoops of herohood, and against all odds, it’s an absolute joy to watch.

For a man more or less constantly on the lookout for ways to die – especially, in Falcio’s case, for ways to nobly sacrifice himself for king and country – the world of the Greatcoats series offers opportunities around every corner. The kingdom of Tristia, an Alexandre Dumas-esque land which it seems almost compulsory to call “swashbuckling,” was once steered towards socialistic utopia by the benevolent machinations of the idealistic young King Paelis. Five years ago, the local Dukes, from whom Paelis was trying to wrest power, banded together to have him killed. All that remains of Paelis’ legacy are the Greatcoats – musketeer-like magistrates and masters of fencing, singing, and law who roam the land settling disputes between the common folk and their cruel overlords. Their secret weapon? The “greatcoats” from which they draw their name – uniforms, Bags of Holding, and bulletproof vests all in one thanks to hidden pockets and bone plates sewn into the leather – which along with their skills make them nigh-unkillable. In the years since the king’s death, however, Greatcoats – or “Tattercloaks,” as they are derogatorily called – have become the political scapegoats (or “scapecoats,” if you will) du jour, blamed for everything from the current plight of the poor to the suspicious deaths of powerful Dukes.

[Some people even respect the Greatcoats as opponents, but that doesn’t stop them from wanting or trying to kill them at every opportunity.]

Hunted and/or hated by everyone from the Dukes and their retained knights to a mysterious order of world-class assassins to the average guy on the street, for Falcio, the so-called “First Cantor of the Greatcoats,” life is an endless procession of narrow brushes with death, usually the result of some barely-eked-out victory in the face of impossible odds. It’s a good day for the First Cantor if he doesn’t end it by passing out from blood loss for the next week (the punchline of more than a few chapters in first book Traitor’s Blade) after a fierce fight or a bout of torture. In sequel Knight’s Shadow/Greatcoat’s Lament, Falcio spends most of the novel slipping irreversibly into death as a slow-acting poison gradually paralyzes him. By Saint’s Blood, the third in the series, Falcio’s tendency towards being very nearly killed – and his equal propensity for jumping back into the fray only half-healed because the world is on line and there just isn’t time – is a running joke that almost everyone in Tristia is in on. What impresses me most about the series is that, despite Falcio’s tendency to fail or nearly fail at almost everything he does, he never feels underpowered as a character – instead, the compelling antagonists against whom he faces off are developed in such a way as to create the sense that Falcio is an extraordinary protagonist whose bare and often pyrrhic victories are nonetheless admirable in the face of very capable villains and almost certain disaster.

[Just another day at the office for Falcio val Mond.]

If Falcio sounds a bit unbalanced as a character, he is, but purposefully so; as with the Greatcoats’ musketeer models, he constitutes just one third of a triumvirate of lead characters who together make up a single semi-functional human. Serving as counterpoints to Falcio’s passionate idealism and suicidal spontaneity are the stoic, logical, and fiercely loyal Kest, whose mastery of the sword rivals Falcio’s; and Brasti, who eschews the seriousness of the other two for persistent sarcasm and practical joking and trades the typical fencing foil for a trio of imposingly-named greatbows that, in his capable hands, may as well be sniper rifles. The friendship between the three is one of the series’ greatest strengths, and plot points which occasionally separate them left me counting down the pages until their reunion.

Seeing as the series’ main trio of men are characterized as the embodiment of certain traits, it’s perhaps unsurprising that their female counterparts start out equally archetypical. Unfortunately, however, without the additive and complimentary relationship shared by Falcio, Kest, and Brasti, the series’ scattered archetypical females tend to come across (at least at first) less as timelessly heroic and more as two-dimensional. Falcio’s wife, whose honor was besmirched in a Braveheart-esque turn before her untimely death, initially codes as an impossibly good “angel of the house” and little more than a motivator for Falcio, fueling his homicidal anger at ne’er-do-wells and his underlying desire to die. His new love interest begins life as a pretty stereotypical female healer support character to the mostly male movers and shakers. Several teenage damsels cycle in and out of the plot of Traitor’s Blade at regular intervals as big strong Falcio selflessly rescues them from certain death again and again. Most egregiously of all, the female villains who (spoilers) eventually emerge as the puppeteers of each book’s grand conspiracies are primarily characterized as evil through their sexual aggression and kinkiness – a particularly ironic case of the pot calling the kettle black considering the novels’ seeming obsession with keeping Falcio bloodied and half-dead at every turn.

[At one point, Falcio is literally crucified and tortured for over a week, during which the novel toes the line between whump and something more… vindictive.]

Luckily, however, many of these characters make great strides over the course of the first two books. Healer Ethalia shucks the angel’s endless patience, holding Falcio accountable for his choices and actions and refusing to support him unconditionally. Falcio’s female wards become deadly warriors and serious political players in their own right, similarly stepping out of Falcio’s shadow and finding their own priorities. The series also introduces memorable female characters who work against other stereotypes – the supernatural sage who guides the heroes on their quest, for example, is a morally dubious, scheming old woman who spends more time scolding the Three Greatcoateers for running afoul of her plans than she does actually helping them, undercutting both the classic male sage and the mother-figureness of female spirit guides. Marking this great progress over the course of a couple books, I’m crossing my fingers the rest of the series will undergo a similar evolution with regards to sexuality. The way the novels develop the trio’s bromance and import a lot of seventeenth-century social norms has kept the world pretty firmly heteronormative thus far, though a few hints here and there have opened a fissure in this facade that I’m holding out hope is expanded in installments to come.

[Because we all know manly devotion doesn’t always have to be totally definitely 100% straight.]

Perhaps my greatest initial reservation about the Greatcoats series was its meticulous focus on fencing in its many, many fight scenes. I had read in a blurb that the author was a professional fight choreographer and feared that, just as the linguistics-obsessed among us have a tendency to undertake pages-long fights of fancy about the etymologies of invented words, the fight scenes would devolve into extended chunks of jargon that the average layman wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of, let alone enjoy. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found the deft and precise explanations of combat maneuvers to be some of my absolute favorite parts. Narrator Falcio balances the clear and evocative explanations of a patient and experienced teacher with snappy humor and rapid-fire pacing to create not just the image of a fencing match, but the emotional rollercoaster and the rhythm of one on the sentence level. As such, these sequences move the plot forward thrillingly rather than forcing it into an eddy (a.k.a. Naruto syndrome) and further characterize Falcio and his friends as knowledgeable masters of their respective martial crafts. It almost makes me miss my high school fencing lessons… almost.

For anyone already eager to jump into Falcio’s tempestuous adventures – or even those on the fence – I can’t recommend strongly enough that you check out the audiobook versions of the series. As an auditory learner, a compulsive multitasker, and a grad student with waning eyesight, I seek out audiobooks at almost any cost, up to and including suffering through stilted narration and dubious character voices if it means not having to subject my eyes to 500 plus pages of tiny paperback print. Greatcoats narrator Joe Jameson is not only perfectly cast as Falcio, but a joy to listen to. At 1.75x speed (a leisurely pace compared to the 2.5x or 3x I usually aim for when reading for work), his cadence and inflection are engaging and lifelike, capturing especially well the main trio’s personalities and mannerisms, and even his soprano-pitched female voices hold up to the chipmunk test. Armed with the audiobooks and a lot of menial labor I needed distracting from, I tore through the first and second volumes of the series in just a few days and have happily started the third. Falcio may be itching for the Great Beyond, but here’s me hoping he, his companions, and their collective hijinks stick around for many, many books to come.

[talkingsquidphd]

My insides all turned to ash, so slow And blew away as I collapsed, so cold

A black wind took them away from sight And held the darkness over day that night

But the heartless wind kept blowing, blowing

[talkingsquidphd]

Tangential Tidbit: Monsta X’s “Jealousy” Subverts the Boy Band Conundrum

I love/stan Monsta X. They’ve got a solid dance corp and rap line, their style accommodates hip hop and straight pop and everything in between, and their MVs are thematic enough to be memorable without falling so far down a concept rabbit hole you can’t find your way out again. (Case in point: “All In,” which pulls off its apocalyptic aesthetic with grace and is just plain beautiful in addition to provoking a lot of great conversations about its potential queer subtext.) When their “Jealousy” MV dropped last month, I was behind on my charts - hence the four week delayed response. Forty five seconds into my first listen, I had added it to my high frequency daily playlist and was jogging back and forth to places with it as my theme music. But beyond the tune and the beat, what impressed me about “Jealousy” is that it takes a pretty tired, conventional concept - the jealous, unrequited lover pining for the oblivious or hostile object of their affections - and subtly uses it to acknowledge one of the weirdest persistent tropes of pop music - i.e., the Boy Band Conundrum.

While boy bands often spawn or launch solo artists - indeed, this seems to be the prevailing career model for kpop idols these days - the bands themselves at least begin as a multi-member affair. Kpop groups in particular tend to run larger than their American and UK counterparts - for every compact TVXQ! duo or Winner quartet, there are several 11-strong Wanna Ones or 13-member Seventeens (confusing, I know). Despite this, in MVs about love and relationships, the convention is to only include one girl (for it is always, unfortunately, a girl, unless you’re Holland) to be wooed. The bottom line? When the boys pour out their feelings in a music video, they outnumber their object of affection by on average 9 to 1, leading to the Boy Band Conundrum - i.e., the inherent creepiness of a double-digits roster of boys apparently pursuing the same girl all at once. Polyamorous relationships aside, statistically, it seems like more than one person is going to get the short end of this particular stick.

[Some lyrics calling out the Boy Band Conundrum from YouTube channel The Key of Awesome’s parody of One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful.”]

“Jealousy” subtly transforms its cut-and-dry premise with a small acknowledgement of this Boy Band Conundrum. About halfway through the song, we get this line:

[YouTube video for reference.]

Wonho gets momentarily jealous at the attention another member (Shownu) is getting. The camera work at this point directs his attention (and therefore his comment) right at the audience watching. In this moment, the viewer is woven into the story of the song, implicated in a little momentary love triangle involving two members. In a song about jealousy, it seems totally apropos to include and acknowledgement that, in some sense, the members are competing for the affections of the “you” they’re supposedly singing to. Because the iconic “one girl” is absent from this video, the typical dynamic is mapped directly onto the relationship between the viewer and the members.

This has a powerful and ironic side effect. By placing emphasis on the rhetorical competition between the members of Monsta X for the viewer’s or listener’s affections, “Jealousy” strategically downplays the even more ferocious competition between individual fans of the band for the supposed affections of the members. While sharing the same bias as another fan often brings people together into loose and amicable collections of the enamored, deep down, each bias-invested fan is operating in a system precisely the opposite of the Boy Band Conundrum - one in which individual fans struggle, in the face of fan and bias communities of hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, to believe in the rhetorical charade that any given oppa or unni is noticing or addressing them and them alone. This isn’t a matter of denial or naivete - this charade is something a pop fan often slips willingly and knowingly into, a set of hypothetical or affected relations which in many ways makes the experience of pop fandom what it is. In other words: nobody thinks Wonho is talking to them and them alone in this telling moment - it’s the subtle power of the rhetoric here that lets a viewer feel momentarily as if that were to true, or to play at that being true.

...either that, or this only works in translation and is bunk in the original Korean. In that case, oh well! Monsta X 화이팅.

[talkingsquidphd]

Review: Clifford D. Simak, “Time and Again”

For almost a decade, my father and I have been playing this game where he recommends me an amazing piece of pulpy retro sf and then, caught in the rush of work and the vicissitudes of life, it takes me about two years to read it because I only seem to “have time” during holidays and breaks. The first was The Space Merchants (1953), a brilliant, biting novel co-written by the inimitable duo of Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth which was brutally satirizing 1950s advertising and consumer culture way before Mad Men made it cool. Issued mid-high school, I managed to squeeze it in between my senior year AP exams and the start of my post-graduation summer job. The second was Gateway (1977), also penned by Pohl, whose dual story threads tracked a dangerous Russian roulette-like space exploration program and the psychotherapy sessions of a traumatized former explorer. With an original loan date in the summer just before I left for my junior year study abroad, fate eventually intervened and put it on the syllabus to a class I was taking… in my first semester of graduate school. The latest was Clifford D. Simak’s Time and Again (1951), which, after the customary two years gathering dust beside my books for work, I finally managed to finish when a bomb cyclone and ensuing polar vortex shut down life in the Northeast US as we know it.

To the untrained (read: ungenerous) eye, Time and Again is a typical 50s sf yarn with a mystery premise like something out of Jonathan Creek. Twenty years ago, burly white male protagonist du jour Asher Sutton was sent to recon a mysterious planet. In the present, with no warning or explanation, Sutton’s ship returns to Earth, battered beyond repair but still somehow flying. Based on calculations by the boys in the lab, there’s no scientifically explicable way Sutton could have survived the destruction of the ship and the trip back to Earth. So how, asks the dust jacket, is he back, seemingly alive and well? It’s the kind of question entirely typical of sf at this time – how did our intrepid Campbell-esque engineer hero MacGyver his way out of certain death using only his wits and good old science? It, in turn, begs the kind of answer you’d have to animatedly diagram on a napkin while babbling about mirrors and ricochet effects and tricks of the light.

And yet Time and Again almost immediately undercuts this mystery when it admits the answer practically on the first page: Sutton didn’t survive. He died, and a mystical force – a secondary being tagging along in his consciousness that Sutton nicknames “Johnny” – is responsible for bringing him back from the dead. Thrust suddenly into a world where inexplicable Powers That Be can do everything from read and influence the thoughts of others to reverse death and travel through time, Sutton find himself an engineer in a world where science and deductive reasoning counts for very little anymore. In fact, every time Sutton thinks he’s figured something out and acts decisively based on that logic, he’s smacked mockingly in the face by the unreality of his situation. Bouncing from incorrect supposition to incorrect supposition, trying to piece together a complex time-travel paradox in between being drugged, knocked out, beaten up, shot, and even killed a few times, Sutton is an early sf protagonist deeply disenfranchised and wholly at the mercy of the plot.

This, believe it or not, feeds into the central focus of the novel, which is destiny. In Time and Again’s 74th century, capital-m Mankind is very much on the back foot and trying to get back on the front foot by following a twisted version of manifest destiny and colonizing the whole universe. But with so few actual Men left and so many stars yet to conquer, Man has no choice but to create “androids” (not robots, deceptively, but clones) to artificially swell his numbers and provide better universe coverage. Treated like second-class citizens, the beleaguered androids are now making a subtle bid for abolition and legitimacy. What does all this have to do with Sutton, you ask? From his trip to the mysterious planet, Sutton draws a profound epiphany about destiny – that every living thing has a destiny and striking a balance between accepting and questioning one’s destiny is the true route to happiness. Returning to Earth, Sutton plans to write the self-help book to end all self-help books espousing this philosophy of destiny. From clues and individuals sent back in time from the future, Sutton realizes his book has become the ultimate hit – it’s started a war between a faction of android rights activists holding it up as a doctrine of equality and a cadre of Men dead-set on annotating the hell out of it in a Revised edition that reaffirms manly Men’s supremacy. In the middle of it all is Sutton, who in the present day is forced to dodge deadly assassins and seriously pushy book agents alike despite the fact he hasn’t even written the book yet.

Like the twist answer to the dust jacket question, this dilemma of the future war and the book’s effect on it has a sort of swerve ending that I love. Without giving away too much, I’d say Time and Again above all preaches the long game – evolution, not revolution. While the lot of androids is pretty bleak in the novel’s present, Sutton’s doctrine of destiny for all living things – both born and created – promises to significantly influence the thought of the universe in favor of equality and understanding. But, as controversial and dangerous as the book seems to its enemies and naysayers, that’s all it is – a sizeable drop and ensuing ripples in a steadily gathering pool of sentiment which will one day overflow its container. And while this kind of slow progress towards a distant goal of understanding can be frustrating and disheartening in its slowness, Time and Again at least offers the comforting inevitability that the arc of the universe bends towards justice, which is relatively refreshing compared to the “we’re all doomed and that’s all she wrote” noble pessimism of so much contemporary sf.

Aside from the unexpected flouting of Occam’s Razor in the book’s initial mystery, the novel’s most left-field aspect is its deep reverence for untampered nature, glimpsed on Sutton’s visits to the distant past of his ancestors living in scenic Bridgeport, Wisconsin. Having grown up on an Earth so relentlessly manicured it’s like something out of Marvell’s mower poems, Sutton joins in with the mower in mourning the fact that everything about the planet, from the landscape to the weather, seems rustic and hardy but is in fact precisely controlled, and not one thing on the planet is for industry rather than pleasure. Disagreeing with Man’s addiction to pleasure and ease of life as much as their perverse doctrine of manifest destiny, Sutton appreciates the pastoral pleasures of farm life and hard work, waxing poetic about them for paragraphs at a time:

There were times when the work, not only for its sedative effect but for its very self, became a thing of interest and of satisfaction. The straight line of new-set fence posts became a minor triumph when one glanced back along their length. The harvest field, with its dust upon one’s hoes and its smell of sun on golden straw and the clacking of a binder as it went its rounds, became a full-breasted symbolism of plenty and contentment. And there were moments when the pink blush of apple blossoms shining through the silver rain of spring became a wild and pagan paean of the resurrection of the earth from the frosts of winter. For six days a man would labor and not have time to think; on the seventh day he rested and braced himself for the loneliness and the thoughts of desperation that idleness would bring. (226-227)

Time and Again has of course got some problems, especially problems reminiscent of its distant ancestors – for example, a Blade-Runner-esque female character who initially seems powerful, well-informed, and key to the plot, but whose role, after infodumping all her expertise onto the male protagonist, devolves into merely pining for him. And for a novel which hangs its central premise on a text preaching the equality and oneness of all things, Asher Sutton playing human savior to the novel’s disenfranchised Other seems a contradictory misstep at important moments. Only the fact that Sutton, himself now something more/less/Other than human, is bumbling and utterly clueless, being dragged along by fate, manipulated by a vast network of spies, and punished whenever he thinks he’s got things figured out, keeps him from devolving into the self-righteous figure who thinks he knows the lot of the suffering better than those suffering themselves. As a result, Time and Again comes off as a subversive, self-deprecating, oddball 1950s pulp constantly toeing the line between having big brilliant ideas and overreaching.

[talkingsquidphd]

Review: The Last Jedi

CAUTION! HERE BE SPOILERS.

If there’s one thing I took away from The Last Jedi, it’s that you should really listen to your elders and those with more experience. Also, that family ties may be complicated, but are always important. So for this review, I temporarily hang up my quite fetching and authoritative critic’s cape and turned to the wisdom of my family regarding the Star Wars franchise’s newest installment.

[ON THE SKYWALKER FAMILY TREE]

Me: So the most important thing is?

Mom: Understanding what connects Ben and Rey.

Me: And you’re hoping that that connection will be?

Brother: Sistah and brothah from anothah mothah!

Mom: I would be most satisfied with a blood relationship. Preferably common father. The relationship with the father has always been a very central part of the storyline, so I think that Ben and Rey at least have to have a father in common.

Me: But not Leia? Everybody was hoping that she would be one of Rey’s parents and that she would be Rey’s connection to the Skywalkers and yet… you’re not really that invested in her being directly connected to Rey.

Mom: I would be okay if Leia was her mother. I think it’s interesting that in the last movie Leia was emphatic that Rey go to Luke, and then she pretty much doesn’t mention Rey again, does she? And then at the end of this movie they’re together again, but they don’t even really connect – do you see what I mean? Rey’s saying hi to Po and Finn – did you see her and Leia have a moment? But she sent her to Luke. And I think the reason is – if there is a connection between Rey and Leia, I think Leia is sacrificing her relationship with her daughter in order to protect her daughter. But it’s all gotta come out – we’ve gotta find out how Rey and Ben are connected.

[ON THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF THE FORCE]

Me: So if I’m not mistaken, it’s very important for you to know how Rey is connected to Ben, but it’s not important to you to know why she has the powers she does, and that’s a good distinction to make because of the stable kid at the end, right? He’s just some kid and he has those powers.

Mom: And that’s what Luke was saying in this movie!  You put all this faith into this hokum, and in reality it all comes down to the Force is a part of everybody, all around us.

Dad: Yeah, listen to what Snoke said: “As your power grew from the Dark Side” – he’s saying that to Ren – “I was told that another would gain equal power on the Light Side because there needs to be a balance.” So, over the past few movies how many Jedi have died? Lots of ‘em. So in theory, they need to pop up somewhere else in order to even out the balance.

Mom: But they don’t even know they’re Jedi. And if Rey never becomes a bona fide Jedi trained-

Brother: But she is the Last Jedi!

Dad: The movie title in some foreign language was revealed to be Jedi as a plural. In English it’s indeterminate, you can’t tell, but in French or something like that it was plural, and that was a big thing – “oh, it isn’t just one!”

Mom: I do think that certain genetic lines do have a proclivity to it. Leia isn’t a Jedi, but she has the Force in her blood.

Dad: [To be a Jedi is] the realization that there’s the Force and it’s in everything and you can manipulate it.

[ON THE BIG TWIST]

Mom: I spectacularly liked when Snoke was saying, “you’re going to turn on that lightsaber and destroy your true enemy,” and he does that, but it’s him that he kills. I thought that was very clever.

Brother: It’s like, okay, yeah, he can see everything, but he also sees what he wants to see, so you just make sure he sees what he wants to see. That was really satisfying. But I thought the way that was going to go was that Kylo Ren was going to give Rey a sword, and I thought he was gonna be like, “I know that this is my true enemy, but I can’t do it.” I thought it was going to be very much more of a “I can’t kill my family, that’s where I draw the line.” And I thought Kylo Ren was going to die there, because I knew that there was going to be a big twist… Kylo is this tragic character, is he good or is he evil, and at the end of the day, he made the decision, and he decided in favor of family.

Mom: Just like Darth Vader brings Luke to the Emperor, but in the end, he kills the Emperor and he saves Luke.

Brother: But I thought it was going to be this really interesting – Kylo Ren gets killed by Rey, because he’s like, “I’m not going to kill family,” but Rey is gonna be like, “I have no family,” and she’s gonna kill Kylo, and she’s gonna kill the Emperor, and then at the end of the day it’s gonna be like, okay, on the one hand, yay! You killed people. On the other hand… that was family. You crossed the line he wasn’t willing to cross because you were so committed to Good.

Mom: But Ben kills his father knowingly in the previous movie. I guess in this movie, he could have killed Leia. He’s going to push it and then you see him let off on the button and then somebody else does. So that’s what’s happening – the Dark Side is becoming more and more unstable, the leader of the Dark Side – so therefore on the Good Side, it should become diffuse and destabilized.

Dad: Just as Po is a hothead and thinks he knows the right answer and that isn’t necessarily the right way to go, Kylo Ren kind of has the same buzz going. “I know what I’m going to do, I’m going to go after Skywalker, we’re going to do this, this is obviously the right thing to do!” And it’s like, nope, you’re kind of missing the bigger picture here.

Mom: He lets the Rebels get away because he lets himself be distracted.

Dad: And Kylo Ren was echoing the stuff from Anakin – “let’s rule this together and we can do this right!” Anakin turning into Darth Vader was, “I have my family and my love, and I want to protect them so much that I want to make everything be very ordered and fixed to remove the dangers to my family.”

Mom: And in reality, he breaks all ties with his family.

[ON BACKLASH AND THE CANON]

Brother: The consensus is that these people who have all these crazy fan theories and would get angry when the canon gets thrown out the window, are the people who go on to write these scathing reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

Mom: If you’re all signed in to it doing one thing, then you’re not really going on the ride. It’s like going on a rollercoaster ride, gripped with terror, because you’re like “I REFUSE TO GIVE IN TO THE FORCES!”

Brother: The other thing that’s being said is it’s a movie for a new generation of Star Wars fans. If there’s a new movie called Star Wars the old generation of fans will watch it no matter what-

Mom: I would argue with that! Because another Jar-Jar Binks and I would have never gone to another Star Wars movie again. There is a limit! And I went to every single Star Wars movie in the theater.

Brother: Yeah, they’re not going to do mistakes, but you don’t have to have the spunky young pilot save the day again, you don’t need to have the Jedi knight doing sword battles again.

Mom: And I didn’t want to see that! And that’s why I didn’t like the casino scene, I’m like, “this is a ripoff of another Star Wars movie.” I want something a little different, I want a new twist on this stuff, or else it’s repetitive.

Brother: So the hero images of the original films are sort of turned on their head, and the characters who are most similar to characters in previous films don’t actually end up achieving much, and you’ve got new and different types of characters being successful in new and different types of ways.

Mom: Right! Rose was kind of this nobody who made a huge difference.

Me: And nobody knows her name in the Resistance! She’s not going to walk into a room and get a round of applause.

Mom: Yeah! At the end they’re like, “FINN!” And Po said, “Rose!” But everybody else was like, “who the hell are these guys?” They knew Fin but they didn’t know Rose.

Brother: And they’re not going to be heroes for what they did. They went, they tried, they failed. At the end of the day, the Rebels got their butts handed to them, and that whole plan didn’t really work. And honestly probably lost some lives, because they might have been able to get out of range a little faster if Po hadn’t done his whole mutiny thing.

[ON PHYSICS AND OPTICS]

Brother: I am glad they had the badass [ship scene.] I was thinking that, I was like, “why don’t they just lightspeed into the ship itself?” But what I thought was going to happen was that she was going to physically shield them and that the ship was going to be slowly blasted away. Because it would have been a more visceral – you know, she’s giving her life, and slowly being destroyed, such that they can escape.

Dad: And I love that that was silent.

Brother: Yeah, my gut reaction that was like, “oh, man, that makes it really powerful.” And then you get the really loud sonicboom and I’m like, “oh, yeah, if you kinda sorta wanna throw some physics at it, it would probably be like the most intense sonicboom you’d ever heard, which is gonna have a hell of a gap between impact and the wave of sound coming through. You just see it and then you hear the crack.

Me: I also liked that there was almost no color in that shot. Because a lot of the scenes, the evil guys were bathed in red, or the good guys were bathed in blue.

Mom: I will say, I did not like the red sand.

Me: And the weird thing where he tasted it and was like, “salt!” And I’m like, “huh, maybe salt is going to come in chemically to how they defend this place.”

Brother: No, I really liked that, because I was like, “oh, law of 2.0, and then he tasted it and was like, ‘oh, salt!’ and I’m like, yeah, it looks like Hoth but it’s not Hoth. I also liked the optics of, “what the hell, he’s driving right into the laser and not getting disintegrated!” But it’s like, “that’s not where the focus of the laser is, it’s relatively low power if it’s far from the focal point!” Yeah, he’s slowly getting disintegrated, but he’s not gonna instantly die.

[ON SOURCES OF DRAG]

Mom: When they were at that town looking for the codebreaker, and it’s so beautiful, and then they’re like, “look closer” and then they do that chase with the animals, and she lets the animal go. It felt very much like a ripoff of the first movie that ever came out where they have the cantina scene – which was fantastic, and magical! – but this was too close to that.

Me: And it wasn’t magical this time because it wasn’t about “look at all the wonder of the universe” – that’s the cantina scene in the first one, it’s this wonder of special effects and the universe opening out, and this time it was like, “okay, haha, smash cut to rich people, they’re the worst people in the universe,” and then after that the joke is over.

Mom: Mostly the coder thing. And the fact that he just sold them out and then just disappeared and you don’t know what happened to him.

Me: I don’t even know his name! I don’t think they ever said his name, he’s just this dude.

Mom: I kept thinking he was going to pick up Rose and Finn and get them out of there.

Brother: Yeah, I thought that was gonna be him in the ship saying, “need a ride?” Like, “I will help you while it’s in my best interest and I will throw you to the curb when it’s not.”

Mom: He had kind of an interesting perspective – “everybody’s trying to blow each other up, just stay neutral, stay out of it” – so the fact that he just disappeared without an explanation did not leave me satisfied. And that weird woman who was the spotty – “oh, I can tell you who can do the job for you but I’m under attack” – she sorta reminded me of the woman in The Incredibles [Edna Mode]. That whole thing was just very weird and kinda out of place.

Me: I kinda wish they had just had them sneak onto the ship and had Rose try to figure it out, and it would still take a long time because Rose isn’t a master codebreaker, they would need to do trial and error, but it would be the tension of, “Oh man, we’re trying to get in here but we don’t quite know what we’re doing, but this is our last ditch effort,” as opposed to “we’re halfway across the galaxy, here’s a bunch of random characters…”

Mom: I thought that once they got captured and they were standing around for an hour waiting to be killed, and then they’re like, “we’re going to kill you painfully and slowly and on my mark-” “Well, do you mean when you count to three, or are you going to count down, or-” And I’m just like, “KILL THEM ALREADY!”

[ON THE CHANGING DEFINITIONS OF “LUKE,” “GOOD,” AND “HERO”]

Mom: You guys never experienced this, but in the first Star Wars movies, Mark Hamill was like, it. And then he had this horrible accident and he got disfigured and they like reconstructed his face and he just did not ever look the same to me and I know it’s weird but he never really acted the same to me. I just never got that really earnest, you know, “I gotta help the Rebellion” – like, young Luke was all about “I’m going to give my life to the Rebellion – I’ll fight to the death.”

Brother: Like, “I will drop from this cloud city before I join the Dark Side.” You’re not really helping anyone, you’re just… incorruptible.

Mom: And this guy was like, “no, I’m not your guy.” I’m just like, what? I mean yeah, he came back in the end and did the thing, but that was a little disjointed to me.

Brother: I liked his thing with Rey where he’s like, “okay, I’m going to train you,” and then he’s like, “you went immediately to the Dark Side, you didn’t even back off from it.” That to me was kind of cool because it’s sort of like, it’s something that Luke is just so unfamiliar with. It’s like Luke is unbalanced in favor of Good. And then it’s like, “oh, Kylo Ren has Evil in him, I have to kill him.” Luke can’t handle the Balance, really. He’s like “everyone must be Good, deep down.”

Mom: He’s trying to be pure Good, and it’s a balance, and a balance is not extremes. In the original movies he always wanted to do the right thing, and then he finds out he’s related to Darth Vader and he starts to have this, “oh, crap, am I evil? He’s my dad, I could potentially turn dark at any moment.” And the other thing is that Darth Vader was trained by Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader as a young Jedi goes kind of crazy, goes to the Dark Side, kills a bunch of people and everything like that. And I think that like Luke has that in his head – it’s that same thing again. Obi-Wan Kenobi failed in his training of Darth Vader and created this horrible evil force, and now Luke has done the same thing. And he was scared, and for a moment he thought he was gonna… and then he didn’t. And when he gave into that, he sealed the young Ben’s fate, because in that moment he saw that this guy thought he was capable of great evil, and it’s like, if your master tells you, “gee, I think I better kill you because you’re capable of great and terrible things,” and then he doesn’t, and then you’re like, “Jesus, I guess I’m capable of great and terrible things!”

[ON LOOSE ENDS, PREDICTIONS, AND SEQUEL WISH LISTS]

Mom: Absolute power corrupts absolutely. And that’s what’s going to happen to Ben now. Ben and Rey both must die, and that will end the ongoing thing. She said something like, “I saw your future.” As long as he lives, she lives, and if she destroys him she also has to destroy herself. Because absolute power will absolutely corrupt him. I was kind of hoping that  would happen in this movie – I’m like, “there they go, they’re going to vaporize, the lightning rods for the good and the bad power are gonna be gone, and they won’t attract anymore,” and then nope! They both survived.

Brother: I did want more people to die. I kinda wanted a bit more of a Rogue One – I kinda wanted [Finn] to like crash in[to the laser] and have it say “yeah, okay, he was a hero, but everything goes on.” But there was quite a bit of hero armor in the movie. Rose didn’t even die! I guess they already killed Snoke, so if they killed too many more people…

Mom: Who the hell was Snoke and where did he come from? And now he’s dead. They also said Ben left and took a handful of his classmates with him. I’m like, “okay, where are thosedudes?” Are those the red-cloaked dudes? I was trying to count how many there were.

Brother: The imperial guards are interesting from a strategical standpoint because the Emperor is going to be able to stop bullets and all these crazy things – the only thing that might be able to hurt the Emperor is a Jedi. So the imperial guard are designed specifically as anti-Jedi. They don’t have blasters, they just have these stupid ‘I will catch lightsabers’ weapons. So I’m like, “that’s a cool detail,” but I can imagine if you don’t know as much about the lore you might think, “what the hell is with these stupid red guys?” Part of me understands that, yeah, in the original Empire, the imperial guard were not that effective, so maybe you learn from that and make more effective weapons to fight Jedi. On the other hand, each imperial guard has his own unique weapon that he’s trained very hard with…

Mom: [At the end of the film] it looks like there’s something flying towards [Luke] in the sky, and he sit there and keeps smiling and I’m like, “oh, somebody’s coming!” And then he just disappears.

Brother: What I thought that was was Snoke said, “we’re going to destroy that island,” and I thought he had gotten that command out, and I thought Luke was like, “they’re coming for me, we’re done for, I’m done for, this is where we die.” But then the only thing I can say is it seemed like that grew into this big cloud of darkness. At first there’s this big field of light and this little spot of darkness growing and growing and by the end it’s like half and half. So I was like, is this Balance coming to the Force? It used to be all of us light people and now it’s down to two and it’s yin-yang-y? It’s one-on-one?

[ON TAKEAWAYS]

Mom: [The] Yoda [cameo] felt totally natural to me because the whole thing about Luke’s character is whenever he needed something, it appeared. When he needed “Ben” Obi-Wan Kenobi, “Ben” Obi-Wan Kenobi finds him and saves him from the Sand People in the desert. And when he needed his father’s love to help him survive…

Brother: If he is an icon of Good, Good needs some help sometimes.

Mom: What you need, you will find in yourself and it will come in your greatest moments of need. Young people not listening to and questioning the experience and wisdom of their elders is key. Seeing so many women in positions of power was really nice. Knowing when to just relax and get out of your own way is another really strong message.

Me: Any other messages?

Mom: It’s a movie, people. Get over it.

[talkingsquidphd]

Review: Stardew Valley

With temperatures dropping outside, we’re entering the season of pumpkin spice lattés and dapper coats, but also a season I tend to associate with introspection, course corrections, and goals for the future – in particular, New Years’ resolutions. Falling leaves and inevitable interrogation during holiday family gatherings force us to ask ourselves the real questions – what did I promise myself last year? Come New Years, will I snooze my aspirations for another 52 weeks, or set a new alarm? The problem with resolutions, of course, is that they demand follow-through, and not just a surge of good-intentioned overachievement confined to the early days of January. Most require small, steady contributions over a long time – a skipped snack or a healthier choice per day for diets, a number of reps or gym visits a week, six inches of stacked books read every month. Resolutions are marathons of responsibility rather than sprints. But what if the experience of running a responsibility marathon could be compressed? What if gradual, persistent responsibility were a binge-able experience?

Enter Stardew Valley ­–a game which allows players to set a New Years’ Resolution and fulfill it in roughly 24 hours.

Stardew Valley is a farming simulator – a divisive genre that leaves some players scratching their heads while others pour countless hours into the management of a virtual farm. The title made a splash in the gaming world upon its release in 2016 not just for its smooth and addictive gameplay, but for its indie status – the entire project was designed and coded by a single guy, developer name ConcernedApe, over the course of about four years. While most folks, if they’re familiar with farming sims at all, tend to draw that familiarity from free-to-play social media and mobile games like Farmville, Stardew Valley descends from a tradition of Japanese farming simulators (primarily the Harvest Moon series, Japanese title Story of Seasons) which in turn descend from an even longer tradition of Japanese RPGs. As such, the goals of the game are less focused on begging your friends for gatekeeping unlocks on Facebook and instead center around building a virtual life in a quaint rural town.

In a single day in Stardew Valley, you divide your time (about 13 ½ minutes in real time) between any number of ongoing projects. You manage a farm you inherit from your grandfather – clearing land, cultivating crops, and tending to livestock. You forage in the wilderness and fish in the valley’s rivers, lakes, and ocean. You explore hundreds of levels of local caves overrun by insects and strange monsters, spelunking as deep as you dare in search of rare metal ores and answers about the town’s mysterious history. You try to befriend the local townsfolk – a ragtag bunch of entrepreneurs, artists, inventors, and working professionals, many of whom you have the option of romancing and marrying. Above all, you work to restore the long-defunct community center, having been enlisted by Tribble-like nature spirits to mend the town’s financial woes and social divisions by collecting and donating a staggering number of farm-related macguffins to the refurb effort.

[You can also buy hats from an anthropomorphic rat living in a ramshackle house south of town and deliver pumpkins as tribute to a shadow monster who sells batteries and other sundries our of his lair in the town sewers. If that doesn’t capture the bizarre spirit of Stardew Valley, I don’t know what will.]

It’s the quietly frenetic pace of everyday life in Stardew – the inevitabilities of daily labor and maintenance which must be done before setting off on any spontaneous adventures – that makes it a simulator for gradual responsibility. Given an hour and a minimum of perseverance, a player of Stardew Valley can confidently say they remembered to perform any number of tasks, without fail, for a week straight. Every day for those seven bite-sized days, they’ll have risen early, checked the weather report, the fortune forecast, and a semi-regular program on either cooking or survival tips; watered and perhaps harvested each individual crop in their fields; greeted each of their animals individually, filled each of their feed troughs or let them out to graze the pasture; milked their cows, sheared their sheep, collected duck and chicken eggs; fed the milk and eggs into cheese churns and mayo machines for processing; fed hops into brewing casks to craft ale, fruit into preserving barrels to craft jam, precious ores into forges to craft metal ingots; whacked weeds that, like arcade gophers, are forever popping up again; checked the forest for forageable plants and the seashore for forageable shells; checked the quarry for rare ores and minerals; greeted and given gifts to a bevy of villagers they’re trying to befriend; and, sprinting home like Cinderella, trying to make it to bed by midnight, remembered to shut the doors to the barns and the chicken coops so their animals don’t get sick. Tasks like these are somehow simultaneously Sisyphean and strangely rewarding.

[Benjamin Franklin’s daily habit trackers have nothing on Stardew Valley.]

Games like this have always emphasized and rewarded this kind of compressed gradual responsibility, often tying it to certain kinds of emotional fulfillment in explicit ways. For example, in Harvest Moon 64, one of Stardew’s spiritual precursors, the player could gift his loved one with a very significant flower to forward their romance. Acquiring the flower, however, required the player to plant it in a hidden grove north of town on the first day of a certain season and remember to water it every day for a month, come festivals or typhoons, and even on rainy days. In about five hours of gameplay – perhaps even consecutive – a player could reap the emotional rewards of a month of gradual responsibility, and the fulfillment of deepening a romantic relationship via long-term habitual devotion.

[Watering the blue mist flower in Harvest Moon 64.]

Since Stardew so clearly has this paradoxical power, can provide gradual responsibility as a more or less instantly gratifying experience, the conversation turns to the age-old question: is this a good thing? Depending on your frame of reference, it seems an obvious and easy response to grab the torches and pitchforks, the ones folks typically arm themselves with when they do things like dismiss online dating as the phony final recourse of a generation too integrated with their phones to interact like real people anymore. Who but a madman, after all, would worry so much about the rhythms and petty obligations a virtual second life? Lacking the power escapism so often ascribed to World of Warcraft or the flexibility of existence available in games like Second Life or Minecraft, Stardew Valley might seem an especially pathetic, niche and limited substitute for life at large. While I would of course agree that the instant gratification of our desire to feel long-term responsible should never become a substitute for actual long-term responsibility, I play devil’s advocate on this one.

I’ve found a lot of pleasure in games like Stardew Valley specifically because of this bingeable responsibility, and done so at points in my life when I felt I needed it more than most. Stardew first enchanted me in my first year of graduate school when, fresh out of undergrad with little more than a genre-fiction-based chip on my shoulder to direct my research, I felt lost in my professional life, unsure of how taking grad seminars on 14th and 18th century literature was contributing to my future as a teacher and scholar of science fiction. Freewheeling from one term paper to the next, picking up and dropping scholarly habits and personas at an alarming rate as I figured out what made my work meaningful, I found in Stardew the opportunity to appease the part of me that made me a good undergrad, but a very uneasy graduate student. This was the part of me that made checklists and spreadsheets to organize my studying, who scheduled every assignment for each semester into Google Calendar within hours of getting the syllabus. What I wanted was to reap the emotional rewards of being meticulous, habitual, persistent, and where grad school didn’t offer them, Stardew Valley picked up the slack until I adjusted to the rewards to a new workflow. Stardew also saw me through some grief – a time when I wanted more than anything to stay on track and be productive and professional in the face of loss, but sometimes couldn’t. Being able to visit the experience of responsibility through Stardew was cathartic, even as it gave me much-needed intellectual and emotional time off. To a persistently work-oriented perfectionist, Stardew Valley represents a unique opportunity to relax and let go in a way only work-oriented perfectionists would consider relaxing.

All of this is to say nothing of the game’s other charms – the nonchalant strangeness of its amalgamated sources of inspiration, the pleasantly surprising emotional depth of its character arcs, and the slow revelation of a world filled with more secrets and hidden gems than any one player could ever discover. Me, though – I’m in it for the menial labor.

[talkingsquidphd]

Review: Jason Mittell, “Complex TV”

Entering my third year of grad school feels like leaving behind the comforting Shire of coursework and term papers and striking out for the Mordor of dissertation writing. The overall plan is clear – chuck the ring in the volcano, write a book people want to read – but standing in the doorway needing to take the first actual steps of such a grand undertaking has me asking stupid basic questions like:

Imagine my relief when I picked up Jason Mittell’s Complex TV and was rewarded with not only a model of the kind of monograph I aspire to write, but also an encouraging glimpse behind the scenes of an ambitious book-length scholarly project.

Mittell closes Complex TV with several pages admitting the project’s challenges and limitations. Big on practicing what he preaches – more on that later – Mittell decided to publish his scholarly project on serial TV serially, making chapters available online for perusal and critique as they were written. This practice, says Mittell, came with both rewards and challenges:

“Of course, this openness also meant that when I ran into trouble, anyone could see it… my nine-month hiatus felt like a very public failure, letting down readers through my stalled momentum and providing visible evidence of the all-too-common instance of an academic missing publishing deadlines. But such failure can be extremely productive, as the chapter I was struggling with transformed radically during my break…” (352)

This wasn’t the first time I’d heard someone speak to the difficulty and emotional strain of book-length academic writing. But it was, unbelievably, the first time I’d heard it couched in a kind of “it gets better” context – not a disheartening exposé on the part of someone who, for better or worse, went ABD, but a frank admission of specific failures from someone who got through it and whose work I admire immensely. Less “how the sausage is made,” more “getting a peek behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz.” As someone who worries regularly about academia’s tendency to dehumanize its practitioners, it was also comforting to me to see Mittell find space to share these personal reflections in a major academic publication – another aspiration to add to my dissertation checklist.

It might feel odd to start a review with the book’s closing words, but the structure of Complex TV – one of the book’s primary innovations – actually encourages its readers to experience its chapters in virtually any order they like. Why? Formally, Complex TV takes on the tall order of using the form of complex TV itself to tell its story – striking a balance between rewarding intense audience engagement and accumulated knowledge and welcoming audience members who have engaged the material out of order or less religiously. Naturally, the result of a monograph whose chapters can be read in any order is an argument which doesn’t strive towards a single unified thesis beyond ‘complex TV is a thing and takes many forms.’ Instead, the book sets off little Big Bangs in a number of undeveloped galaxies of TV criticism, giving the impression of a cartographer starting in the center of a map and fleshing out in all directions rather than an explorer breaking the next ten feet of a particular trail. Again, the idea of opening up new arenas of thought sounds a lot more appealing to this budding scholar than picking a niche scholarly hill to die on.

[This is how I picture the book’s structure. There are many points of overlap between the chapters and a central point which they all touch on, but each has its own substantial claim to a unique arena of thought.]

The other half of my unabashed love for Complex TV comes from its take on fan engagement. Not only does the book consistently argue that a range of fan practices are both valid and valuable, it does so as a cornerstone of its argument rather than as a tokenized afterthought or a discreet footnote. Mittell’s definition of complex TV itself is built largely around the idea of the “operational aesthetic” – the “conscious accumulation, analysis, and hypothesizing of information concerning how the story is told” (169). Picture this familiar scene: I recently sat down with a couple friends and discussed the most recent finale of Game of Thrones, analyzing (no spoilers, I swear) an extended shot of a particular character pulling a face. Combining character analysis (“this seemed out of character for him”), plot analysis (“the last scene he was in involved X, and he had no clear reason to be in this scene”), and formal analysis (“they put in two lingering shots, they wouldn’t have done that if it wasn’t important”), we came to certain conclusions about what this strange expression foreshadowed. Just like that, we had engaged with complex TV through the operational aesthetic.

To anyone who’s been a serious fan of something televisual for a long time, this probably sounds a lot like just being a serious fan of something. As a superfan of Korean dramas, you might “accumulate” information about a drama’s characters by memorizing their birthdays and blood types, “analyze” a touching bit of banter between the female lead and the second male lead, and “hypothesize” that the second male lead is finally going to get the girl this time. (He isn’t.) But the key to Mittell’s argument is that this metatextual and reflexive behavior is no longer the stuff of obscure fan sites and hobbyhorse email newsletters, left up to the fickle chance of unexpected hits and cult followings. These days, shows are being designed to elicit this kind of engagement from anyone and everyone, and the operational aesthetic is consequently rearing its head everywhere from the water cooler to the front page of Reddit.

[And people like Anderson from Sherlock, long shunned by the daywalkers, can be open about their obsessions instead of turning their office into one big conspiracy wall.]

This blanket affirmation of fan practice allows Mittell to do some fiddly and impressive work on fan engagement. In a particularly excellent chapter on Lost and the evolution of its integral and infinitely complex fan wiki, Mittell navigates a very tricky line, productively distinguishing transformative fan practice (such as fanfiction) from supplementary fan practice (such as recording a show’s canon information in a wiki) without hierarchizing one over the other. Especially intriguing was Mittell’s discussion of “spoiler fan” culture – folks who collect leaked info, surf fan theory forums, and engage in furious analysis in an attempt to “spoil” the show and its secrets for themselves as early as possible. In Mittell’s view, spoiler fans are the operational aesthetic taken to its most extreme conclusion, an exaggerated version of what complex TV definitionally asks of its viewers.

The spoiler fan discussion felt particularly relevant to the ripple in the complex-TV time-space continuum that was Westworld, HBO’s 2016 prestige TV remake of the old Yul Brynner flick. The show inspired a bustling Reddit community which rather controversially pieced together all of its many twists and turns well in advance through a pooling of information, interpretation, and theory. Some considered this a failure on Westworld’s part, assuming that the purpose of a prestige show is to keep even its most dedicated viewers baffled and guessing until the last second. Are they right? Did Westworld underestimate the operational aesthetic and the dedication of fan sleuths, making its twists too obvious to a careful observer? Or was it masterfully designed to reward spoiler fan practices while preserving the show’s mysteries for the non-spoiler-fan audience – a complex TV ideal? The jury, it seems, will remain out for some time.

[The Man in Black is basically a spoiler fan trying to unlock the secrets of Westworld’s operational aesthetic.]

Acting as a further ally to the fan community, Mittell helps validate fan scholars and scholar fans in a chapter urging critics to let evaluation back into the realm of criticism. Sentiments that get a lot of play in student term paper conferences – “I don’t care if you like the book or not, I care what you think about it” – have kept simple statements of appreciation out of contemporary literary criticism to a large degree. Mittell argues that feeling free to declare one’s basic, personal appreciation of a text in the context of criticism would spare us a lot of essays along the lines of “thesis: why Mad Men is great, not because I have a personal reason for liking it, but because of these brilliant universal objective formal things it does, and anyone who disagrees just doesn’t understand its formal, structural, objective genius.” Consciously or unconsciously, Mittell’s call for evaluation in criticism helps free scholars of the popular from a deadly professional catch-22. As a fan scholar, you can choose to hide your fan investments in an effort to ensure your work will be taken seriously as ‘objective’ criticism, but this will inevitably perpetuate the idea that fans are unwelcome in academic discourse, and it might invalidate your work if your investments are later discovered. Conversely, you can declare your fan investments from the start, have a certain subset of the academy consider your work invalid as a matter of course, and proceed through your career feeling like you have something to prove and an extra swamp of unfair assumptions to wade through. If and only if personal fan investment, appreciation, and evaluation shed their stigma in the academy will fan studies fully bridge the gap between academia and fandom. Calls to action like Mittell’s are the baby steps necessary to get us there.

In addition to these broad choices, smaller charms cemented my esteem for Complex TV. Included alongside the holy trinity of prestige television (The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and The Wire) were analyses of Battlestar Galactica, marking the encouraging entry of an sf show into the old boys’ club of mimetic TV that invariably gets play in TV scholarship. To accommodate the invitation to read in any order, each individual chapter had a clear but flexible structure (genre history, general principle, broad survey of short examples, then a case study of a particular show or two and its relevant phenomenon). Finally, Mittell’s affect is clean and conversational, never afraid to straightforwardly signpost where other academic writing might waffle. Take chapter one, sentence one: “This book’s main argument is that over the past two decades, a new model of storytelling has emerged as an alternative to the conventional episodic and serial forms that have typified most American television since its inception, a mode I call narrative complexity” (17). Let’s hope that in short order, I’ll have a sentence this clean and clear poised to incorporate my disparate interests into a dissertation. In the intervening time, I’m sure I’ll keep coming back to Complex TV for inspiration.

[talkingsquidphd]

Review: Boston Comic Con

Cosplaying at a fan convention has been on my bucket list since I was about 12 and binging Bleach under the covers way past lights out. While such an endeavor once seemed as far-fetched as other big-ticket bucket items like stepping foot in Venice, living in Boston – a bastion of East-coast fan culture which boasts not one, not two, but three major cons – made it not only possible but as easy as a T ride to tick that box at Boston Comic Con this weekend.

The cosplay itself was years in the making – specifically, assembled fully for an all-in Halloween costume three years ago and then stuffed in a box in my closet for the intervening period. I played Levi Ackerman, humanity’s deadliest (and shortest) soldier from postapocalyptic anime Attack on Titan. While I have not an iota of Levi’s athleticism and coordination, we’re both neat freaks and my hair looks a bit like his, and that was enough for me. Compared to my costume of several years ago, I scaled down somewhat and went for a lighter “Summer Corps” version of Levi’s outfit, figuring if I wore full-length white skinny jeans, full military harness, and knee-high leather boots, I’d keel over from heat stroke the minute I walked out my front door.

[LTR: Full harness, Levi himself, and my most recent summerfied cosplay.]

Like a tourist craning their neck to take in their first real eyeful of New York skyscrapers, I took a simple, naïve pleasure in quiet spectacles of the con that more veteran attendees have no doubt long outgrown. I couldn’t help but crack a grin at the old-hat dissonance between the guests’ fantastical exteriors and the inescapable mundane – Link withdrawing cash from an ATM, Batman reading a monograph on Russian farming techniques in line for a panel, a fully armored Master Chief munching on a tray of nachos in the food court. I reveled in the unapologetic oddity of the wares – demonic contact lenses, Invisalign-esque vampire fangs, elf ears – and the seriousness with which folks debated their investments. An overheard retort from a husband to a wife clutching a replica Anduril: “yes, but how often are you going to use it?” Let naïve first experiences like this never be undervalued – it brought me such unique joy to see this con through a newbie’s eyes.

Thrilling and nervewracking in equal parts was the perpetual anticipation of fan interactions as I walked the halls and aisles. Characters in Attack on Titan, the show I was cosplaying from, often exchange a simple, iconic salute:

Like a freemason itching to share a secret handshake, I at first looked to other Attack on Titan-clad cosplayers to initiate it, but it came most often from the unlikeliest of places. As I passed the metal detectors on Saturday, an ultrafemme Princess Peach suddenly snapped to attention and did it; on Sunday, a bouncer on the main floor saluted as I showed him my wristband. Though I mildly botched these left-field salutations, I always felt a small rush of confidence and pride at having allies all around me, hidden in plain sight via another fandom’s cosplay.

Judging by the crowds – or lack thereof – my panel choices were a bit unconventional (no pun intended). While I peeked my head in an exit to the Main Theater to hear Charlie Cox answering questions in his disarming British accent and John Barrowman strutting up and down the stage in a fetching Tardis dress, I elected to skip many of the ‘big’ names in favor of smaller panels I wasn’t so confident would be back next year – mostly voice actors responsible for some of my favorite genre performances in recent years.

First up was Jennifer Hale, the iconic voice actress who brought to life the female version of Mass Effect protagonist Commander Shepard. While Shepard was far from the first strong female protagonist to grace video games, let alone the genre of sf, getting to roleplay a female RPG protagonist for whom (just like her male counterpart) saving the galaxy is just another Tuesday contributed hugely to making Mass Effect my favorite video game series of all time. Hale was a relentlessly positive guest, and even the most mundane questions afforded cute answers. Hale’s dream role? “Something where I get to sing, ride a horse, and be Commander Adama at the same time.” Hale’s opinion on the somewhat controversial term ‘FemShep’? “With female characters in gaming, we’re cutting through a lot of stuff, making the trail as we go. If ‘FemShep’ is an axe to cut through that, then I think we need it – I’m all for it.” It was particularly cool to hear Hale talk about the process of recording for voice acting – how she managed the performance she gave line-by-line, with little context and almost no retakes, is beyond me. True or not, it helped me recoup some of my dignity to hear Hale claim she had just as hard a time keeping dry eyes while recording some of the final scenes between Shepard and Garrus as I did watching them. And of course, as with any voice acting panel, Hale graciously obliged requests to say famous lines as Shepard.

[”I should go.”]

Sunday brought a double whammy of panels. I scooted into line just in time to catch Attack on Titan’s English voice actors Bryce Papenbrook (Eren Jaeger) and Trina Nishimura (Mikasa) doodling AoT-themed pictures on an overhead projector and taking questions from a gratifyingly packed room. The two had easy, goofy chemistry that made the panel a real pleasure. I was particularly tickled when, after admitting they’d almost never cosplayed their characters, they gave a kudos to the dedicated cosplayers in the audience who’d spent (on average!) an hour or two struggling their way into the show’s complex but inescapably characteristic military harnesses.

[Color coded for your convenience.]

I will say that for a brutal, anyone-can-die show which more than earns its TV-MA rating with frequent depictions of people being eaten alive in graphic slow motion, there were a disturbing number of relatively young kids in the audience. Still, they somehow consistently asked the best questions and never seemed hampered by starstruckness. A boy no older than seven or eight got up and asked what their favorite part being voice actors was, which the two ran with for some time. When asked to choose a favorite – a show, a ship, a scene – all the celebrity guests were predictably and diplomatically deferential, often turning the question back on its asker, but my favorite such response came from Papenbrook when asked to choose a favorite role. “Don’t make me choose!” he pleaded. “My roles are like my children, and my children are all screamy and angsty and live inside my head – I don’t want to make them mad.”

[I can’t blame him.]

Finally, I queued up for the Main Theater to sit in on a Q&A with Eliza Dushku, a Whedonverse actress primarily of Buffy and Dollhouse fame. While most of the questions referenced Dushku’s tenure as Faith, a pointed question about female representation in Dollhouse led her to acknowledge the show is in part “about human trafficking,” which both affirms and complicates the thrust of my research on the subject up to now. More than anything, Dushku played on being native to Boston, throwing out restaurant recommendations and referencing local stores where she’d assembled her audition costumes for characters like Faith. And, as always, you learn a new thing every day: Dushku’s family hails from Albania, where she is considered somewhat of a national hero for bringing attention to the small nation via her acting.

Having never attended a con before and therefore having few frames of reference for how most things were handled, the only real criticism I can level against the con this year was that the merch seemed strangely disconnected from the guest lineup which drew me to the con in the first place. No doubt taking cues from a spring and summer lineup of Marvel and DC blockbusters, vendors were stocked to the gills with superheroic souvenirs… despite the fact that the con’s biggest panels and most popular fan experiences drew more often from live-action TV, anime, and cosplay. Despite three midsize events organized around Attack on Titan, merch for the show was thin on the ground; though Jennifer Hale was billed first and foremost as the voice actress for FemShep, Mass Effect merch was nowhere to be found. I might chalk this up to an attempt by the con to differentiate itself from Anime Boston and Pax East (Boston’s video gaming convention), but nonetheless it left this fan a little bummed and almost emptyhanded after three or four full circuits of the vendor floor.

Still, Boston Comic Con was on the whole a great introduction to the world of fan gatherings for an enthusiastic first-timer. I’m already scheming a new cosplay for round two next year – or, at the very least, a visit to one of Boston’s other bustling cons in the intervening months.

[talkingsquidphd]

Tangential Tidbit: Steve Trevor and the Distressed Dude

I’d almost given up on trying to write about Wonder Woman. In the month-and-a-half-long interval between my seeing the film and now*, my initial impressions sat like the last half a bagel in the bag, growing ever staler in the face of a nonstop junketeering press maelstrom which hailed it as everything from the first successful female-led sf/f action IP (I guess Xena, Buffy, Ripley, FemShep et. al. don’t count) to the ultimate proof of male oppression in a world run by feminazis.

Then Jodie Whittaker was confirmed as the first female lead on Doctor Who, the internet lost its collective mind, and suddenly, shouting out Wonder Woman‘s expectation-busting gender politics this late in the game felt a whole lot more relevant and necessary.

Specifically, I saw a lot of people freaking out over the prospect of a female Doctor-male Companion romance, which got me thinking about WonderTrev – a.k.a. the relationship between British spy Steve Trevor and Amazonian goddess Diana. As a superheroic significant other, at least in my corner of the fickle world of internet fandom, Steve Trevor was an instant and near-unanimous hit. Following Wonder Woman‘s release, my fellow Tumblrites quickly filled my dash with Chris Pine paraphernalia, GIFing Steve’s every smile, every joke, and every gratuitous sixpack shot from the healing springs scene. The Lasso of Truth sequence was even parsed frame-by-frame to prove Steve was into some flavors other than vanilla.

[...an interpretation based more on “text” than “subtext,” but still...]

Most importantly, the internet fandom went to work producing a specific subgenre of Steve Trevor appreciation: damsel!Steve. A general fascination with collecting moments of Steve’s physical or emotional vulnerability swept the growing fanbase. Fanfiction authors began putting out hurt/comfort and whump stories imagining Diana’s right-hand man in all sorts of compromised circumstances. Tumblr users combed the comic canon, sharing strip after strip depicting Steve kidnapped, tied up, wounded, clothing tattered, then rescued, slung sweetheart-style in Diana’s arms, making some quip about his ironically unstereotypical ineptitude.

Like a lot of fan practices, this deluge of “distressed dudedom” serves a purpose – supplying a fan demand either incompletely or utterly unmet by the source material. Put simply, the groundswell of damsel!Steve fan media highlights the relative absence of this trope from the 2017 film. That absence is critical. I’m all for giving a standing ovation to Gal Gadot’s Diana, a powerful and refreshingly flawed character who neatly sidesteps the bottomless pit of empty “girl power” labelled ‘Badass Action Girl.’ But I’m also happy to golf clap Chris Pine’s Steve for hurdling the all-too-easy damseldom which a strict genderswap rendition of a classic heterosexual action-hero couple would demand.

By not turning Steve into a human MacGuffin, avoiding playing like the cinematic equivalent of a video game escort mission, and drawing sparing, heavily lampshaded humor from the irony of defied gender stereotypes, Wonder Woman proves that while it may be about feminizing strength, it’s not about masculinizing weakness. Instead, it aims to androgynize a much more interesting narrative device: vulnerability.

[Weakness is a resented liability. Vulnerability is a brave risk.]

To celebrate the film’s lack of male damselhood is not to condemn the fandom’s demand for it. Whether that demand arises from a sociopolitical interest in seing patriarchal gender stereotypes broken, a general kink regarding vulnerable or submissive male characters, or the specific dynamics of the WonderTrev ship, I couldn’t begin to guess and I wouldn’t dream of judging. Viewed through any of these frames, the figure of the “distressed dude” is culturally unexpected and delightfully shocking. Still, in the grand scheme of Hollywood, I’m pleased to see a big-budget romantic pairing consisting of two competent, flawed, and charming characters, either or both of whom I’d be happy to see played by an actor of any gender.

_____

*(an interval filled with fourteen hour workdays and lunatic logistics, though I nonetheless apologize for my absence)

[talkingsquidphd]

Review: Ian Bogost, “How to Talk About Video Games”

I’ve been a gamer since I unwrapped my first Gameboy on Christmas morning 1999, but it only occurred to me to write about video games the way I write about literature last year, when I finally finished Mass Effect, Bioware’s landmark series of sf RPGs. Eager to jump into the fray of video game criticism but wary of being the proverbial “man saying ‘And another thing…’ twenty minutes after admitting he’d lost the argument,” I started doing some searching to determine where the field was at these days, and a single name consistently popped up: Ian Bogost.

By his own humble admission,  if he can’t be credited with launching the field of video game criticism outright, Bogost has brought a lot of attention to a burgeoning body of contemporary work on the subject. A skim of his selected bibliography suggests he’s been writing the same smart-but-accessible monograph on video games for about ten years. He started with Unit Operations: An Approach to Video Game Criticism (2008) and Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (2010); briefly escaped double-barreled academic titles in the early 2010s with How to Do Things With Video Games (2011), How to Talk About Video Games (2015); and took his most recent stab with the newly released Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Secret of Boredom, and the Secret of Games (2017). No doubt I’ll work my way backwards through Bogost’s ouvre eventually, but for my first dive into the deep end of video game criticism, I chose the comfortingly colloquially-titled How to Talk About Video Games. With it came a reading experience that began with a deep sense of camraderie and ended in frustration.

First impressions run deep, and my first impression of Bogost came from his brilliant five-page introduction to the book, “Nobody Asked for a Toaster Critic.” I was immediately struck by his style – casual and conversational, peppered with thornier academic language and non-sequitur humor in equal measure. But more than that, I felt an immediate comradeship with Bogost as he laid out the problems often encountered by academics working in a budding area of popular interest. As the title suggests, Bogost compares being a critic of video games to being a critic of toasters, as video games and toasters are consumer objects we generally agree need recommendation more than artistic analysis, review more than critique. But the jokey, self-deprecatory playfulness of the first couple pages turns into a rallying cry for any scholar of video games unsure whether their object of study is “worthy:”

And with a toaster or a gallon of mail-order milk, there is something preposterous about writing criticism – particularly criticism of objects we use as much as experience. This is probably why whenever I write criticism of videogames, someone strongly invested in games as a hobby always asks the question ‘is this parody?’ as if only a miscreant or a comedian or a psychopath would bother to… Really, nothing was ever immune to the preposterousness of committed attention that criticism entails. Not literature, not film, nor theater, art, food, wine. We just stopped noticing that the criticism of forms like these are just as bonkers as critiques of toasters or video games. (xii)

To be fair, the field of science fiction criticism has been around forever compared to that of video game criticism; sf’s first academic journal popped up in 1959, with more springing up in the 60s and 70s, while video games have only seen consistent academic interest from their users rather than their creators in the last two decades or so. Still, I understand the awkward walk Bogost has to walk to write academically about something with a popular following and about which a lot of shop has been talked by industry pros. I am, after all, just getting up on that balance beam myself, and every day I have to resist the urge to walk around with a chip on my shoulder, defensive about what I study from the moment I first shake someone’s hand. Having had this experience – the moment of “really?” and “you get paid for that?” – I admired the firm, measured confidence in his subject Bogost expressed so clearly in these opening pages. In fact, despite the brilliance of some of the collected essays, the introduction proved to be my favorite part of How to Talk About Video Games.

Perhaps I should have seen it coming, then, that my least favorite part of How to Talk About Video Games would be its conclusion, in which Bogost’s easy confidence crumbles and he indulges in some counterproductive rhetoric and metaphors I find sadly familiar as a scholar of sf. The trouble starts in the collection’s final essay, “Perpetual Adolesence,” which reviews indie walking simulator Gone Home and its debatably pat queer coming-of-age storyline. Recounting the controversy surrounding the game – namely, an all-together-now chorus of praise for its storytelling and representation followed by a handful of secondary reviewers claiming the emperor had no clothes – Bogost throws his hat into the ring on the side of the naysayers, claiming the game’s characters and premise are “too archetypal to become truly literary” (176) and comparing Gone Home‘s sycophantic reception to the hype and praise of ultimately adolescent triple-A games in the industry at large. The punchline?

…what if Gone Home teaches us that videogames need only grow up enough to meet the expectations other narrative media have reset in the meantime?… What if games haven’t failed to mature so much as all other media have degenerated such that the model of the young adult novel is really the highest (and most commercially viable) success one can achieve in narrative?… Perhaps the coming-of-age story told in Gone Home is not just Sam’s but that of videogames themselves. (178-179)

I’ve heard this story before, and it never ends well. Sf has struggled for literally decades to free itself from the mire of this “adolesence” argument and its implications. At least once every five years, someone in the sf community comes out with some bold manifesto which:

claims sf as a genre is like a hedonistic teenager – quickly approaching adulthood but refusing to accept it, and therefore becoming part of the problem of mindless mainstream media

dismisses anywhere from forty to a hundred years of the genre’s history as some sort of awkward gestation period we should forget ever happened, and

urges the genre to grow up, shed its cocoon and emerge as a beautiful butterfly with gossamer wings made of pretension and formal experimentalism.

This argument is toxic for three reasons. First, it claims a whole tradition of media is morally or artistically bankrupt when it never really is. Second, the fact that these arguments always seem to hinge on throwing a huge part of the genre’s history under the bus never sits well with the dedicated creators, fans, and critics to whom that history is still hugely important, which creates further hostility and distance between the academic and non-academic communities. Third, the call to arms to help the genre reach maturation always seems to involve mimicking some other genre rather than blazing new trail – see, for example, the debates around the increasingly “cinematic” landscape of the triple-A game industry of late. In the eyes of these manifesto writers, to “grow up” requires a genre to discard those things which uniquely characterize it rather than doubling down on them, and that never struck me as the right move for any genre, ever.

Bogost’s argument is one half-turn beyond this tired one. He sidesteps the call for video games to “grow up,” but only by arguing that they don’t need to anymore, because all the other mainstream arts have stooped down to their level. Instead of video games ascending to the marble throne of “art,” they’ve been joined on the jungle gym by mainstream fiction, television, and film as these media have degenerated into a juvenile identity they once escaped. Bogost’s account of these downfalls is practically apocalyptic:

Gone Home reveals a secret that turns out to be an obvious one, and one much bigger than videogames: today, narrative writ large is mired in a permanent adolesence that videogames can now easily equal, the modest, subtle pleasures of the literary arts melting under Iron Man’s turbines, impaled by Katniss Everdeen’s arrow. (180)

Besides the insulting and frankly lazy use of superheroes and YA as shorthands for immature, empty pleasure – a trend I thought died in the early 2000s with the rise of geek chic – Bogost’s dismissal of all games as fundamentally adolescent here disappoints me because it reveals the loopholes and unfortunate undertones to his triumphant introduction. After all, Bogost never claims in his introduction that video games are worthy of study – he in fact argues everything is equally unworthy of study. Bogost’s calm acceptance of video games forever being stuck in adolesence leads to an equally nhilistic conclusion which hopes for the dissolution of the very field he’s helped create, in addition to a few others:

There’s not enough land to till in games alone. Nor in literature alone, nor in toasters alone. God save us from a future of game critics, gnawing on scraps like the zombies that fester in our objects of study… Eventually, we might hope, books like this won’t be necessary or even possible, because games will no longer make sense as a domain unto themselves… (188)

This is yet another bad argument I recognize from sf – the “death and reincarnation through absorption” metaphor. The basic idea? Genre X is on its deathbed; perhaps it used to be good and isn’t any more, or perhaps it was never that good to begin with and the jig is up. Either way, it has two options: die, end for good and be remembered by no one, or die, be reincarnated as some sub-iteration of a more popular genre, and live on in some small way. Obviously the second is more appealing – better to leave a legacy than nothing at all, right? But the “absorption” metaphor is always, always a scare tactic used by those who are themselves scared. Video game criticism will never run out of things to say, and doesn’t need to worry about securing that legacy, especially if it must do so at the expense of its current energy and success. Despite games criticism being poised to be the next big interdisciplinary pursuit which bridges previously disparate fields of study, Bogost somehow ends How to Talk About Video Games with a placid bashing of the medium which amounts functionally to slinking away with one’s tail between one’s legs.

I had high hopes for finding a cross-disciplinary ally in Bogost; I still hope to find that ally either in early Bogost, before the cynicism set in, or in his most recent publication, which may move past it. But for now, all I can suggest is that the scholar of the popular – especially those looking for a fellow academic willing to give a pep talk and help hold the line – give How to Talk About Video Games a pass.

[talkingsquidphd]

Review: N.K. Jemisin, “The Fifth Season”

I am so late to the party on The Fifth Season that I’m walking in the door just in time to see the weary host collecting the very last of the half-full Solo cups more puntual partygoers left behind on their way out. In an effort to avoid rehashing the many well-earned praises already sung for this novel in the two years since it’s come out, I’m only going to highlight the two threads which stuck out most to me.

First, on a thematic level, The Fifth Season is very much a novel about who gets to be angry and when. Orogeny – the half-scientific half-magical ability to manipulate natural forces – gives its users the power to do great and terrible things, from quelling massive earthquakes to causing volcanoes to erupt. These powers, and in particular their destructive tendencies, can be triggered by losing control of powerful negative emotions like anger. For this reason, the orogenes are taught from childhood to suppress their emotions, carefully monitored for outbursts by harsh overseers called Guardians. The Guardians justify the hegemonic and abusive control they maintain over the orogenes – up to and including the authority to execute them with impunity – by focusing rhetorical attention on the orogenes’ capacity for destruction. But orogene powers can also be used – and are indeed necessary – to save the Stillness, the novel’s natural-disaster-plagued, single-continent world. This dynamic should be familiar to anyone who’s played Bioware’s Dragon Age trilogy of RPGs, particularly Dragon Age 2, in which a parallel conflict between forcibly cloistered mages and their templar overseers takes center stage.

Because the danger inherent in their expressing strong emotions is virtually all that’s known about them, all of The Fifth Season‘s orogene characters at some point narrate the experience of censoring themselves and their emotions in an effort to present themselves and their powers as non-threatening to an ignorant stranger. They downplay their abilities, make no sudden movements, and take even the most balatant insults and abuse with pointed sangfroid, all in the hope that these behaviors will prove what they should not need to prove: that they are not a danger to others. In a crushing moment, orogene narrator Syenite is forced to face the truth that even making these defensive moves and following the abusive rules of the Fulcrum (the strict, segregated orogene society) provides her only the illusion of safety, realizing:

…that she is a slave, that all [orogenes] are slaves, that the security and sense of self-worth the Fulcrum offers is wrapped in the chain of her right to live, and even the right to control her own body. It’s one thing to know this, to admit it to herself, but it’s the sort of truth that none of them use against each other – not even to make a point – because doing so is cruel and unnecessary. (348)

Even more pointed is the revelation that the orogenes were only classified as second-class citizens after a particular orogene, Misalem, sought revenge for his family quite literally being consumed by an unjust system:

Regardless, they died, and it was Anufameth’s fault, and [Misalem] wanted Anufameth dead for it. Like any man would. // But a[n orogene] is not a man. [Orogenes] have no right to get angry, to want justice, to protect what they love. For his presumption, Shemshena had killed him – and became a hero for doing it. (418)

In a cultural moment where the difference between a person’s life and death has thinned to a split second in which they are perceived (for whatever reason) to be a threat, reading these moments of rhetorical spin and fruitless self-censorship felt unfortunately relevant. Come the novel’s conclusion, to see characters who’ve been taught to suppress their anger and frustration get the chance to not only express those powerful emotions, but use them to save and preserve and create, creates the sense of payoff the novel ends on despite many major lingering questions.

Second, on a technical level, The Fifth Season uses this recurring narrative technique of dissociation followed by recognition which taps into the very heart of sf for me. Put simply: the novel’s several narrators all experience moments of uncertainty in which they’re not quite sure how to interpret the sensations they’re feeling or something they’re witnessing. Often, this occurs when an orogene is experiencing or watching some orogeny technique they’re unfamiliar with. They begin to describe it in purely phenomenological terms – what it looks or tastes or feels like – and eventually stumble their way into understanding how this work of orogeny connects to what they already know about their powers. The effect is like someone starting to facetiously describe a stool to you: they tell you it has three legs, so you imagine some kind of animal, and it’s only when they tell you those three legs hold up a flat surface that your brain shifts wildly from imagining some unknown animal to imagining a common inanimate object. Take this scene, in which a senior orogene colleague of Syenite’s uses her orogene powers in tandem with his to perform the delicate operation of removing poison from his veins. First Syen describes the sensation of having her powers chained to his and used:

And then his power folds around her, and she stops seeing with anything like eyes… He drags her up, falling faster, searching for something, and she can almost hear the howl of it, feel the drag of forces like pressure and temperature gradually chilling and prickling on her skin. // Something engages. Something else shunts open. It’s beyond her, too complex to perceive in full. Something pours through somewhere, warms with friction. Someplace inside her smooths out, intensifies. Burns. And then she is elsewhere, floating amid immense gelid things, and there is something on them, among them // a contaminant // That is not her thought. // And then it’s all gone. She snaps back into herself… (164-165)

The retroactive explanation of the situation only comes a moment later, when Syen realizes what her colleague has done:

It’s the first lesson of orogeny. Any infant can move a mountain; that’s instinct. Only a trained Fulcrum orogene can deliberately, specifically, move a boulder. And only a ten-ringer, apparently, can move the infinitesimal substances floating and darting in the interstices of his blood and nerves. // It should be impossible. She shouldn’t believe that he’s done this. But she helped him do it, so she can’t do anything but believe the impossible. (166)

It may not seem significant, but Jemisin’s consistent use of this dissociation-recognition one-two punch throughout the novel does two things for me. One, it allows the novel to have strong, competent main characters like Syenite who know what they’re doing despite the fact they occasionally align with the reader in that they don’t fully understand what’s going on. Compare this model to the classic Doctor Who setup of the genius and their idiot assistant who asks all the exposition-triggering ‘stupid’ questions the audience needs answered to understand things like fantastical action and non-Newtonian laws of physics. Both the “competent protagonist occasionally caught off guard” and the Doctor-Companion model allow for moments where strange or confusing elements are explained to the reader, but only one creates characters like Syenite, who are down-to-earth and competent and persist when the situation extends them beyond their competency.

The second thing this dissociation-recognition technique does is model the key sensations sf so often seeks to evoke in us. Almost by definition, sf tends to describe new and fantastical worlds – worlds with “other people living other lives and facing other struggles” (373). But at some point, these worlds and people and struggles become familiar through some striking parallel to our own world’s past or present. The significance of that piece of sf becomes tied to the ways it resonates with the lives and struggles of its readers, and so it comes to pass that an epic journey set long ago in a galaxy far, far away can become an analogue or metaphor for our lives, despite its apparent far-fetchedness. By including these moments of dissociation and recognition, The Fifth Season highlights the pleasure of this uniquely sf experience.

At any rate, The Fifth Season was a delight and I sincerely doubt it will take me another two years to pick up its sequel, The Obelisk Gate.

[talkingsquidphd]

Review: Scott Westerfeld, “Spill Zone”

Full disclosure: for getting me so into sf I decided to pursue a graduate degree in it, Scott Westerfeld can probably claim equal credit alongside Douglas Adams and my sf-paperback-loving dad. As a teen, I loved Westerfeld’s books for two reasons. One, Westerfeld’s protagonists tended to spend a lot of time exploring forests and mountains in ways that made my seemingly parallel rural New England surroundings more magical. After reading Uglies, for example, the sight of disused train tracks winding off into the woods gave me a little thrill as I imagined Tally and company hoverboarding along them. Two, Westerfeld was one of the few authors I knew who consistently delivered young adult (YA) dystopia that treated its protagonists neither as children, as does a frustrating, infantilizing subset of YA, nor as adults, as does an equally frustrating, overmaturizing subset of the genre. Rather, Westerfeld treats his teen protagonists as that ever-shifting, conflicted, and deeply powerful third entity entirely: actual teenagers.

Part of this has to do with how Westerfeld handles the “Chosen One” trope so prevalent in YA, in which the protagonist discovers they are some unique exception to an otherwise universal rule and therefore the only one who – supported by the “friendship” of Not-So-Chosen-Ones – can save the world. Not long ago, I heard Canadian sf author Jo Walton frame the difference between American and Canadian YA dystopia largely based on how each handles this trope. While American YA dystopia is about a Chosen One saving the world by overthrowing some monolothic institutional hegemony, Canadian YA dystopia tends to be about an average teen trying (and sometimes failing) to save their neighborhood by doing the best they can. According to Walton, this is a microcosm of the difference between American and Canadian sf – while American sf often explores fantasies of political agency, Canadian sf tends to be about people without that agency still trying to get things done. By Walton’s standards, Westerfeld’s YA dystopia intriguingly comes down somewhere in the middle; while his protagonists are often Chosen Ones who have special powers and/or lead amazingly coordinated political resistances, the fight is often not stacked in their favor, the “power of friendship” is no silver bullet, and they don’t always win. This adds real stakes – stakes that many products of the YA dystopia boom seem too timid to wager.

Little wonder, then, that when I picked up Spill Zone – my first Westerfeld in years – I spent 90% of my first reading trying to decide whether it was A) YA and B) the kind of fiction I had so idolized Westerfeld for writing in my youth. The answer to A, I decided, was ultimately not as important as I first thought. The answer to B, I am happy to report, is a firm yes.

To touch briefly on the graphic novel’s YA-ness – it’s definitely a mistake to assume Spill Zone is straightforward YA from its seemingly straightforward YA dust-jacket premise: Addison, a teenage girl with a camera and a younger sister to feed, regularly sneaks into a forbidden, bizarro-world nuclear fallout zone near her house and takes photos to sell to a black-market art world eager for a peek inside the “Spill Zone.” While this describes the starting conditions of the plot, it primed me to expect from Spill Zone a “freedom of press” story, its driving conflict between a rebellious teen artist and authoritarian forces trying to conceal what could be a government cover-up. Not so.

In the course of its 200-page run, Spill Zone quickly takes five or six left turns into even weirder territory, eventually boasting a plot which involves animate telepathic stuffed animals, heavily mutated talking wolves who somehow know Addison’s name, and a parallel “Spill Zone” and survivor in North Korea. Yes, North Korea. The result is a dark and original premise that gets darker and stranger with each turn of the page. Content-wise, there are definitely bits that would probably make librarians think twice about shelving Spill Zone as YA, including a few f-bombs, but I hesitate to hang my “YA-or-nay” judgment on these moments. After all, Westerfeld’s books never pulled punches, from the flesh-stripping, bone-shaving plastic surgery of the Uglies series to the terrifying metaphysics of Midnighters to the graphic epidemiology of Peeps and The Last Days. That Westerfeld always pushes the envelope a bit with his YA is part of why I loved it so much as a teen.

Moving swiftly on to how Spill Zone stacks up against earlier Westerfeld, all I can say is I wish Westerfeld had collaborated on graphic novels in my formative years, because Alex Puvilland’s art is what kicks Spill Zone up a level. With a style that hovers in the territory between iconic cartoonishness and hasty, gritty sketchiness, Puvilland’s visuals straddle the child-adult line even as Westerfeld’s writing does. The pointed juxtaposition of color palettes – an earthy range with grey undertones for the outside world versus an eerie but invitingly bright pastels for the Spill Zone – separates the two areas visually while also characterizing them. While the outside world is functional, dull, and a little gruff, the Spill Zone holds at once the neon wonder and unnatural horror of the unexpected. Most of all, Puvilland’s visuals convey the strange simultaneous motion and stillness of the Spill Zone. Addison’s decription of the effect overlays a series of portraits of brightly colored frozen tornadoes hovering in midair:

Standing waves pop up all over the Spill Zone… Dust devils that never settle. Unending ripples on a telephone wire. Amber waves of grain, waving even when the air is absolutely still. In motion, but so posed. A photographer’s dream. (58.1-59.1)

The art is at its best when the panels take on Addison’s first-person view of the Spill Zone as seen through the lens of her camera. On a basic level, this technique adds extra drama to sequences like chase scenes in which Addison is being run down by monstrous denizens of the Zone. But panels which superimpose the aiming sights of Addison’s camera on the view at hand are often the moments in which the graphic novel is giving the story’s photography thematics the most room to play. Perhaps the most intriguing threat the Spill Zone poses, for example, is its flat zones, where buildings, objects, and even people have been flattened into two-dimensional images, seemingly trapped in the surface of sidewalks and roads. Touching these flattened subjects, we learn, means being flattened oneself. Scenes where Addison must avoid the outlines of these terrified, two-dimensional people who have been flattened into the asphalt seem evocative of her necessarily conflicted attitude to her own photography and the Spill Zone as a whole.

While Addison’s trips to the Zone to make both art and money are more than justified by her situation, the enterprise is faintly tainted with the selective (and, in some ways, exploitative) view of the Spill Zone which her photography conveys. Addison attempts to combat this with a series of invented rules about her trips to the Spill Zone; most importantly, she never photographs the dead, many of whom have been reanimated as static “meat puppets” by the strange power of the Zone. Addison’s reticence to photograph certain subjects combined with her fear of the flattened begs the question: is Addison, through her photography, flattening the horror of the Spill Zone by presenting it as a commercializable visual narrative? Is her photography any different than the kitschy cafes and souvenir shops which are also shown to profit off the Zone? Some would argue that both the top-secret mission Addison undertakes on behalf of the North Korean government and the novel’s superhero-origin-story cliffhanger ending move Spill Zone past petty quibbles over the ethics of her photography project and on to more heart-pounding dilemmas. I, however, sincerely hope that the series doesn’t lose this thread moving forward, as Addison’s conflicted artistry is in my view what most makes her a worthy and classic Westerfeld protagonist.

Spill Zone isn’t flawless. As the first installment in a series with clear ambitions to juggle a lot of characters and tricky topics, the graphic novel (perhaps forgivably) tosses some things in the air that either never seem to come down or bonk you on the head at odd moments. For example, a character who I had comfortably relegated to the “side character” bin of my mind palace elbows his way into the main plot in the final pages, exuding vibes of shoehorning in a romance subplot at the last minute. I would love to be proven wrong about this, but the jury will presumably be out until Westerfeld and Puvilland get us a sequel – one only hopes they won’t keep us waiting the seven years it took to assemble Spill Zone. For now, though, Spill Zone is everything I wanted in a new Westerfeld – fiercely loyal to the YA dystopia I still love in a way that is utterly compelling to me ten years later as a PhD in English and returns me to the roots of my passion for sf.