daakjenaar

[daakjenaar]

Sci-fi writers not being racist and unimaginative challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)

I had a dream that I tried to write this recently and accidentally replaced it with footage of me playing Deep Rock Galactic when I tried to post it, so I’ll try my best to not do that.

I know saying that a lot of fantasy and science fiction worldbuilding is barebones and bland is a pretty tepid take. In many fictional settings, the idea of nationality, ideology, and race are conflated. One and the same, effectively. Mass Effect has the Turian Hierarchy and the Salarian Union, galaxy-spanning governments made up of almost singularly the species turians and salarians respectively, who all believe in roughly the same things, have the same broad personality, and have seemingly been stagnant for thousands of years. Deviation from the turian mentality is treated as a unique trait worthy of ascending a random NPC to a supporting character. To all other races, the idea that humans can believe in different ideologies is fascinating. I think it’s an uncontroversial take to say that this is pretty bland writing, and at least a bit racist. Outside of the special and unique (and overwhelmingly European) humans, all other cultures are monolithic and simplified. 

I should stop myself here because I genuinely have at least half a dozen essays’ worth of Mass Effect topics I would want to go on a rant about. I should move on.

Orson Scott Card’s writing beyond the original Ender’s Game is also emblematic of this approach. In his sci-fi universe, all of the countless worlds that have been colonized are entirely monocultural. Specifically, they are takes on cultures from the point of view of a 30-something center-right mormon in America in the 1980’s. Highlights include a world colonized by the Japanese which bears the name Divine Wind, which translates to ‘Kamikaze’, which might be in slightly poor taste. There is also a world with a predominately Chinese population that is notable for a) being largely covered in rice fields, and b) not knowing what neurodivergency is. It gives overwhelming ‘I read a Wikipedia article and skimmed a really racist history book and am now an expert on all other cultures” vibes. He also wrote Xenocide and Children of the Mind, so maybe we should stop taking him seriously.

So often, worldbuilding in fiction refuses to reckon with the idea that the nations they depict can be anything beyond overwhelmingly monocultural stereotypes of real-world people. After all, it’s much simpler if all of the aliens are just caricatures of other people that really exist, right? No work needed. Oh no, what's this picture of a T'au doing here?

This took me a while to write because I’ve got a lot of takes on the topic of writing and worldbuilding, and it was hard to figure out what to include and what to save for a more focused post later. On that topic, I do have another one planned focusing on my personal, insignificant takes on the ingredients to make a coherent backdrop for a story, and some hot takes and blanket statements to make about worldbuilding as a whole. It’ll hopefully be something more positive and constructive than this.

EDIT MADE MINUTES AFTER I POSTED THIS: I forgot to include the funniest example of all time, the world of Warhammer Fantasy. There are some incredible examples of this kind of worldbuilding. Kislev, the Lizardmen, Cathay, Nippon, Araby, the Tomb Kings, Bretonnia, all comically transparent carbon copies of the most obvious, stereotypical parts of real-world cultures that managed to become a relatively successful media franchise that helped to launch Games Workshop into the company it is now.

#mass effect #mass effect is actually kinda bad #worldbuilding #orson scott card #ender's game #warhammer #sci fi #short essay #okay but seriously mass effect is baffling #did we all forget the line about autism from the dlc #orson scott card is a hack

[daakjenaar]

heya, i really hate to do this, but with recent struggles ive unfortunately ran out of money to pay outstanding bills on where i used to live due to a frustrating period of unemployment. while im okay and steady where i am now, support to pay these bills and the penalties they have built up would be very much appreciated, anything you are able to give would go straight to this. please share as well, and lastly, thank you for anything youre able to do to support us.

[daakjenaar]

The greatest use of CGI in movie history (I am being unironic) (SPOILERS FOR SPEED RACER)

It’s the final five minutes of 2008’s Speed Racer. Of course the greatest CGI sequence was in a movie directed by the Wachowski sisters, that makes perfect sense.

For years, films with obscene budgets have been racing to try and reach the point with CGI where it can perfectly mimic reality, where practical effects and props are entirely done away with and replaced by some underpaid VFX artists working obscene hours. Any Disney project of the last decade is perhaps the finest example. With budgets to match a small nation’s GDP, they have repeatedly tried and failed to make the finest examples of bland hyper-realism. The trailer for the new Ahsoka series, where the titular Ahsoka fights with white lightsabers in a mostly grey environment, is just the newest case of this. In the drab, depressing Lion King remake, the last few MCU movies I bothered to watch, and seemingly every new Star Wars project, Disney has used a titanic budget to make a shoddy simulacrum of what 70’s movie prop artists could do with a box of scraps.

The real reason for this is that, at the time of writing, VFX artists lack the same union backing as those who work in practical effects. It is cheaper to make people slave away in front of a computer for months on end to render Chris Evans in his newest low-contrast, boring American flag outfit. The fault lies with the executives, who decided that this was the best way to both spend money and treat their fellow human beings, and that this is the direction high-budget cinema should go in. So many high-profile films are just messes of shitty CGI that seems to get worse every year. And I don't want this to be some annoying "RETURN TO TRADITION" post, this is specifically calling out the really big-budget stuff. I've gotten really into low-budget indie horror movies again, and the last few years have been an incredible time for those.

Now, back to that scene in Speed Racer. What does it do right? First of all, I think it justifies itself. The idea of making something so vivid and fluid with mostly practical effects just doesn’t seem feasible. This is a bizarre, cartoony neon-coloured nightmare of a racetrack that refuses to make sense. Bright colours pour out of every single place they feasibly could, and then a few others. It’s absolutely sensory overload, but it’s beautiful sensory overload. Every scene in the movie is high-contrast and visually appealing, even the dark and gritty moments.

On another level, I think it also knows how to hide the weaknesses of CGI. You mostly view objects from a distance and behind a layer of effects, and that makes it hard to see how bad some things might look in a clear close-up. Even when it really zooms in on a car, it’s in a moment where it feels so weighty and is still moving around too much to pick out flaws. Even managing to get across the vibe that these are heavy machines with momentum behind them is impressive, and more than I can say for a lot of CGI-heavy scenes. Nothing feels like it moves in an unnatural way, and the real humans inside of these color-vomit deathtraps don’t look out of place.

I think the thing it does best, though, is context. This movie is many things. Goofy, shockingly earnest, and stylish. The final scene is the culmination of all of that. The cars are doing frankly absurd things. The Mach 6 is doing some kind of car judo flip in the end of the grand prix scene. The flashbacks that come up help set the mood and take your mind off of analyzing the visuals of the scene to the point of finding flaws. I cannot emphasize this enough, this movie is about someone who loves his family and drives cars so well that he ends up halting an attempted corporate monopoly and reveals an insider trading scandal, and the film is all-in on this. They want you to be genuinely invested in this plot, and I still am on every viewing even as an adult. The visuals, the music, the culmination of the plot, it all gives this scene what it needs to work and stand out as perhaps the greatest application of CGI ever. I am being unironic.

Again, if you wish to give pointers or kill me with hammers, please do so and/or kill me with hammers. I finished this at 3am while listening to nu-metal and installing bootleg Starsector mods.

#speed racer #movies #cgi #animation #the matrix #disney #stars war #please tell me how to do tags well #essay

[daakjenaar]

Manic creativity in the best cRPG

I’m not doing anything else with this Tumblr account, so I’ll post my inane ramblings instead.

There is a fine line to walk when trying to fit so many ideas into one video game. Walk too far on the side of serious, realistic content, and you’ve brewed a modern Larian Studios game where an insistence on being down-to-earth is utterly destroyed by a comic-relief encounter with some sort of whimsical chicken in between body horror and misery. Or to a lesser extent, have an otherwise mostly serious story get derailed by something lighthearted but altogether harmless, as is the experience with so much of Fallout 2. Walk too far to the side of cartoony, goofy subject matter, however, and watch as your writing becomes the wrong kind of laughable the moment you try to get mature. See the Borderlands series for a fine example.

I just made someone angry with each of those takes, so moving on.

There are ways to maintain a balance. The simplest way is to stick to one side and cut out everything that doesn’t fit, to curate a game to be a cohesive experience. As much as it’s a shame that so much of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 was forced to be cut, for all its faults, the game is a serious take on a classic, perhaps overdone franchise with a clear thesis. The balance between comedy and maturity can be achieved, of course, but that is easier said than done. As much as I hate to praise the works of Chris Avellone, I must cite a second project he worked on, every terminally online person’s most formative roleplaying game. Fallout: New Vegas is by no means a flawless game, I’m still amazed that the same quest can jump between the absurdity of helping a bunch of zombies piloting prop rockets to their holy land, and genuinely feeling conflicted about their treatment of their non-ghoul scientist ally. Of course the ghouls need these model rockets, that makes perfect sense, but did they need to gaslight this poor human into helping them? The quest I’m citing is the go-to for anyone singing the game’s praises, but any number of the game’s regions are host to the same kind of mix of the two tones. With high-enough quality in your writing, even the most disparate vibes can mesh.

But that’s a high bar. Saying to “just write good enough to make it work, lmao” is useless advice. Writing is exceedingly difficult, and good writing even moreso. So what if you try doing everything at once? Every idea, regardless of cohesiveness, coherency, sometimes even quality, all thrown into a bizarre soup of raw creativity.

If that sounds like a good time, then I urge you to get yourself a copy of Wasteland 3. All at once, it is one of the most engaging, fascinating, and baffling video games I have ever played. A point where it crosses the threshold from ‘a few weird ideas’ to a display of sheer, manic creativity. The kind of game where I encountered a weaponized statue of Ronald Reagan and the robot anarchist commune said statue is fighting. Where many quests center around a society of people named the ‘Monster Army’, who wear outfits taken from an off-brand Spirit Halloween and inhabit an old, buried mall. All the while, this Monster Army is under constant threat from a bunch of crazed clown-themed bandits who bring pain and destruction wherever they go. A partially-mechanized army of well-organized raiders seek to pillage and claim the post-apocalyptic snow-swept lands of Colorado, lands currently led by a man who wields a comically large warhammer wrapped with an American flag, sitting upon a throne of guns.

Wasteland 3 is a truly, genuinely bizarre title. At every turn, the game has some new idea to throw at you. The tone is so erratic that there really is no tone anymore. In its own way, it is such a strange and incoherent game that it comes full circle into making perfect sense. The most faithful attempt at recreating a classic psychedelic film in a game format. The game’s own drug imagery aside, every facet of its story seems to be focused on baffling and throwing off the player. The gameplay itself is quite good as far as cRPGs go, but the story is why the game has stuck with me so strongly for well over a year after playing it. Even when the game gets serious, there’s still an air of delirium. Sure, everything seems to be making sense now, but when is this important character going to do something fucking weird? I know it’ll happen, I’m just waiting. On paper, Wasteland 3 should be a mess, incoherent in all of the worst ways, and a cautionary tale. In contrast, though, it broke the idea of coherency so hard that it makes perfect sense. You just need to be in the right mindset to pick up on it, the kind of mindset you get in after clearing out a clown-bandit circus camp or watching a (good) Ralph Bakshi movie. 

There are absolutely points being made, satires to be found among the bizarre vignettes, and moments that justify the game’s strangeness. I’m sure that the murderous Reagan statue’s saying something witty about America, and I can’t help but look for some meaning in the Patriarch of Colorado and his throne of guns. A game written by a more self-serious writer might try to add a few more layers of abstraction, but Wasteland 3 dares to ask the most important question.

With a sufficiently large gun, can I kill Ronald Reagan? If you know anything about writing essays and wish to malign my sloppiness here, please direct unto me your rage in great detail. I am a failed arts student, and thus too lazy to properly structure arguments.

#wasteland #crpg #video games #short essay #am i doing this right #how do i tag posts correctly #fallout #ronald reagan i guess #the s blade has a hackblood charge