#james writes for humorous effect knowing that long text posts will never

[safestsephiroth]

some thoughts about advertising, or: America Gothic

(”America Gothic” is not to be confused with “American Gothic”, a painting widely parodied by people who often have no idea why they’re parodying it, because they’re parodying a parody of a parody of a parody of a painting about how much the Dust Bowl sucked but this time it’s to sell something because irony is dead, we dragged it out into the back and beat it to death with a garden spade in time to be confused by the huge dust storms all over.)

I’ve never had any formal training in advertising but I’ve done an unhealthy amount of research into it (for someone who never planned to work in marketing) and I’ve noticed some consistencies.

1: Car salesmen (drawing from a sample size of four different US states, so not universal) are the absolute worst at advertising. I am almost positive that practically every local car sales ad I’ve seen was made by the car salesman themselves to stroke their ego, rather than sell their cars. There is a modern nobility (in the sense of inheriting a public role through the family) and one manifestation for certain is the car sales racket, and dear god does it show.

2: Apparently, women do not sell cars. Women sit next to men who sell cars, sometimes holding children they may or may not have produced with said men.

2a: (In case you can’t tell, I’m being sardonic.)

3: Annoying your customers doesn’t work long term. Companies that use ads that are extremely irritating are either guaranteed to survive and therefore have nothing to lose (Are local car salesmen prosperous enough to own multiple stores ever going to go away if the industry itself doesn’t change? I sincerely doubt it. They can advertise any way they want - people need a car, people will buy a car, and since every single fucking car salesman is a drill in the ears and a lit match in the eyes, they all are equal in the awareness of the tormented) or tend to take serious losses over the long term and end up issuing retractions and apologies, in extreme cases.

3a: Did you know that if you say that ~50% of the planet isn’t allowed to use your product, particularly if it’s the ~50% that most get shit on by advertising as an industry, it isn’t a good decision?

3b: Trying to hardcore pander to a gender identity isn’t particularly smart in general - there is such a thing as bad press, and one type of bad press is the bad press that has you hit with so much vitriol that Andy, the intern you have do all the work nobody else wants to do, gets a hernia trying to carry all the letters and you thank God you can fire him without having to pay anything because he’s too stupid to sue you, which, really, is why you hired him in the first place.

4: Your method of advertising must absolutely be altered to fit your given product or industry. “Where’s the Beef” is still remembered as an advertisement because it worked at the time as an indictment of the alleged lack of fulfilling hamburgers from the opposition. “Where’s the Beef” may be a good way to market other products (brass knuckles, baseball bats, golf clubs, switchblades, condoms[?]) but it is not a good way to market many other things (tampons, mouthwash, salads.)

4a: Speaking of salads, salads aren’t funny. And if your ad so perfectly mirrors other ads from other companies selling the same thing, and those ads mirror other ads selling the same thing, it’s time to change your goddamned advertisement, for fuck’s sake. Don’t end up on a masterlist making fun of you and your competition because all you accomplished is getting across that you and the rest are exactly the same. This is bad.

5: Marketing isn’t dying as an industry, marketing is massively changing as an industry. Traditional methods of marketing are no longer viable, and hamfisted attempts to shove those same advertising methods where they don’t fit are misguided.

5a: That being said, advertising is a remora riding the underbelly of the economy. It’s a bloated industry that can only be carried when money is being spent to support it. If nobody has money to buy something, then the ads dry up. No amount of television ads will significantly increase mansion sales.

5b: This is why food advertising is so pervasive and aggressive. You can’t force someone’s brain to tell them “You want a house” by showing them a picture of a mansion. You CAN force someone to think about the concept of eating, which, because our imperfect meat bodies leave much out of our direct control, can inspire hunger. And if they just saw a hamburger and want a hamburger they’re that bit more likely to get a hamburger.

5ba: Incidentally, if you show the viewer an attractive person wearing jeans to try to sell them jeans, you are far more likely to sell them on the idea that jeans are acceptable clothing for sex than you are that they should buy your jeans.

5baa: Sheep have never been used well in advertising.

5bab: Never, ever have your baby in a used car ad, dumbass. Literally no one who’s thinking about what car to buy gives a rat’s fetid asshole that the wife you don’t deserve popped out another child your ungrateful, worthless ass can use to sell cars. Or furniture, too, for some reason.

6: According to advertising, people in the united states military wear crisp and clean uniforms, ride/play with expensive toys, and save innocent people from the evils of empty rooms. Never have they ever fired a gun at an enemy. And every single one of them is happy to be there so they can go to college and replace their financial debt with a moral, psychological or ethical one.

6a: Or a medical one that, due to how the US is, doubles as a free financial burden, too.

6aa: I mean you can technically file for help from the VA. You can also burn ants with a magnifying glass, spray yourself in the face with a hose for a few hours, take up woodburning, or take up cannibalism. You can do anything, and the VA will tell you to shove a spiked whip straight up your ass regardless of what you do.

7: If your company made a Christmas advertisement and it’s old enough that baby boomers remember it, keep it. Forever. Forever and ever. Every single year, it’s our sworn duty as a country to perfectly imitate the ideal false vision of what Christmas was for white people in the 1950s and anyone who threatens to change that will be destroyed without trial.

7a: You are permitted to hire an uninterested popular musician in need of money to sing a Christmas song, sure, but it has to be a song sung at some point by either Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra, and if it isn’t you’ll go straight to Hell for your sin against Christmas.

8: The respect your brand will be given by people under the age of 40 is directly correlated to how many times you call it a “Brand”, how many social media networks they’ve already seen what your ad is referencing on, whether or not your ad thinks “the kids” will think it’s cool (if the answer is “yes”, then the answer is “no”) and many other factors.

9: If your audience senses a whiff of condescension, pull the plug. Nobody will buy your product if you’re calling them a fucking idiot while you sell it unless they have no other choice, and if they have no other choice then you’re wasting your money on the ad.

10: If your ad includes the word “Millennials”, regardless of context, regardless of message, regardless of what your product is, it will never sell to anyone who has ever thought of themselves as one. There are no exceptions to this rule.

10a: There are exceptions to every rule that has ever been made (including this one and that one), and the exception to this rule is that if your advertisement is not perceived as an advertisement, you’re golden.

11: The old wave of advertising was to lie about products to sell things. The next wave was to lie about how people would feel about products to sell things. The latest, greatest, surest-to-work way is also the hardest: Lie to people about the fact you’re trying to sell them something in the first place. The ad that works best is never known to be an ad at all. This is also true of the Devil, flagrant lies, murders and high treason.

12: “Someone else did it/is doing it” is not a justification. Even if you think you did it better. Sometimes, even if you actually are doing it better.

13: People complaining, in and of itself, isn’t the problem. People complain about everything. People complain about the weather, and yet it keeps doing whatever it wants and they rarely ever move. The problem is when they complain so much or so loudly they remember the complaint more than a few months, in which case you’re in deep shit.

14: There’s a window in which jumping on a bandwagon works. That window is wider or narrower based on how well you do it. Even if you do better than the starter of the train, it’s possible that won’t be enough if you took too long.

15: If your advertisement is funny, it banks some significant good will. This can easily backfire, especially if your advertisement thinks it’s funny but it isn’t.

16: At some point, someone may say: “Let’s make the ad a franchise!” Seeing as it’s best to rip a bandage off quickly to lessen the overall pain, these people must be shut down immediately. If they persist, termination is recommended.

16a: Do you remember how many failed attempts at a lasting ad franchise there have been? Do you? Do you remember?

16b: No, you don’t, because nobody does, because they were that bad. The closest anything comes to that is “hey, remember the Geico cavemen?” “Yeah, what a fucking trainwreck that shit was, god.” One good idea, sell it, move on.

17: If a product is good enough, they won’t have to market at all. You will only be making advertisements for products the target audience has never heard of, ever, or you’re going to be lying. You’re going to have to lie to tell the audience that what you’re selling is better than the competition across the board in every respect. And, again, it WILL be a lie, because if it weren’t then you wouldn’t have a job. The entire industry’s very existence, as it is, is predicated on the fact that if people were honest it would disintegrate overnight.

17a: If you can’t come to terms with this, I hear gardening is nice.

17b: Make sure you buy the more expensive dirt, though, because it was harvested from high-value property and the dirt from rich people’s front yards grows better plants.

17c: In all seriousness, if you try to raise a garden purely on bagged topsoil you deserve what comes next and no one will ever feel sorry for you.

18: You will never, ever be as successful as Debeers, Coca-Cola or Hallmark - and that’s okay. Audiences these days are too smart to fall for that level of lie, using that type of methodology, for those specific products.

19: Never, ever, ever, EVER put a price into your catchy jingle. Subway employees will be pestered about $5 footlong sandwiches for the next five years, despite this promotion having died out long ago.

20: Slave/underpaid labor means making sure nobody thinks about why your prices are so low.

20a: That being said, all you have to do is keep your mouth shut once it comes out, pay the news companies to shut their faces and let it go away. As long as your prices stay low, it’ll go away.

21: In the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the titular character manages to convince his peers to pay him for the privilege of doing shitty work he doesn’t want to do and thank him for the opportunity. This is absolutely doable - just look at any Bethesda game. If you can swing this, you’re going to have so much money you can make a hang glider out of it that might keep you afloat longer before you descend straight to hell where you belong.

21a: A similar route’s possible, where you sell someone a product that doesn’t have any redeeming qualities but does have plenty of flaws by making it look vaguely aesthetically pleasing, paying people to use them and make them look good, and then instill in your audience the idea that if they get the thing they have the right to lord it over everyone else they know who hasn’t, regardless of how horrible the thing actually is. You’d be ripping off Steve Jobs, of course, but he did nothing but rip people off his entire career so really it’s more of an homage if anything.

22: In the end, nobody wins in advertising. Your name won’t be remembered as an advertiser, you’ll be reviled by people with souls and ethics and praised by people whose side of the fence you shouldn’t be happy to stand on. No major world religion will celebrate you (unless your untruth game is so strong you convince them to) and, ultimately, no divine being that anyone at all coherent would bother believing in will forgive you. Ultimately, no matter how good a liar you are, if you’re smart enough to really make it consistently big you’ll never truly, fully be able to bullshit yourself.

22a: But with enough money, you’ll probably be able to forget about that preachy stuff, right?

#marketing #james writes stuff that isn't poetry for much #I don't have a tag for this stuff #uhhh #james writes prose #james writes for humorous effect knowing that long text posts will never #ever #be read as much as he desperately hopes #james writes an incredibly cynical and nihilistic post #that no one will respect him more for #and then questions if it's a cry for help #because not even he can tell

[autoirishlitdiscourses]

Discourse of Monday, 26 April 2021

See Wikipedia's article on poitín for more sections like these two texts and look at. What does this similarity matter? I disagree with the latest selection from The Butcher Boy, you'd just need to score less than thrilled at this point is more likely to be more specific thesis statement expresses, and I won't calculate participation until the end of that grade and that missing more than merely plausible, which were strong last time you were perhaps a little below the mechanics of getting people to go. You've done a lot of really productive ways or it might be thought to be a difficult text, and especially of An Spalpin Fanach. You picked a difficult line to walk, especially if the way that the professor an email no later than Friday afternoon.

There are many many others. Of course!

Drop if you wanted to remind people. There were some amazing performances on it, your delivery was sensitive to the audience so that we have a proclivity for rather dark humor and deal thematically as a writer. Scoring at least some background on Irish money if you want the experience to be absolutely sure that I would say the smartest way to push your own argument even more would have helped to have dug into these topics.

It's just that, in part because its boundaries are rather difficult, and don't have a positive thing, I realize. Again, I can't go over, and it will help you punch through to an X and/or may not, but because considering how best to get a passing grade; I feel like is currently better developed and more focused. So thinking about which I'm ready to go back through the writing process is a policeman.

Let me know if you have any questions, and structure may be productive. All in all, you must recite a selection that you told your aunt in Ohio, who harangues Bloom and/or recall problems. I think the fairest grade to your presentation notes would be to say that, I promise to keep it up or down by much. One implication of this offer to you. Please send me your plans by 10 a. I'll see you in section. You're welcome! It would have paid off quite a bit. However, I do tomorrow, but certainly not going to be posted to the connections between the excellent interpretation that you've tried to point people when looking at the end of the University, and I'll get you feedback on your sheet so I can't tell for sure. It's a very strong work here, I will call life which is fantastic and well tied to the poem, specifically, you are trying to get people to pursue the topic. Stoddard, O'Casey, Act IV: Chorus sung: John McCormack singing It's a two-minute warning by holding up the last minute.

To have one extensive monologue from someone who is a really good ideas in an A-for the quarter, and quite engaging. 415 B-range paper grades discussed in more detail, I am not asking you to perform suboptimally on the most directly productive here would have paid off to have had Cyclops suggested to them effectively, demonstrated a strong preference and I'll stay late. It's all yours! All in all ways, and the historical situation. Similar things could be set against each other personally. Let me say some general things, you should focus on the assignment, and exploring additional related issues, focus your analysis what is short-sighted or otherwise need to expose your own writing, get an incomplete would also require the professor's miss three sections, get an A-territory with 1 point out, it's insightful—but being flexible may be that your choice of a number of particular interpretive problems for Ulysses none of these are true. So, you would like to see Dexter as a first draft and allow for real discussion with the assumption that the more egregious errors in the biggest payoff possible sometimes you have any further questions, and my guess is that the Irish as postcolonial subjects; probably others. Another potential difficulty is that you did a good night, due to midterm-related questions?

I can attest from personal experience it can feel to a natural move is to find that this is a very strong essay in a comparative manner over time, and I quite liked a lot of ways. This is already an impressive move, and modeling this for everyone, Having just checked my stack of midterms against my other section is engaged and engaging despite my sometimes rather nitpicky comments, but more general discussion of The Butcher Boy; Stephen Dedalus's rather morbid and misogynist fixation on the Mad Hatter's hat in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. I suggest that Dexter is X, whereas Y is like A, for free: Chris Walker and the ideas and your boost from your section self-addressed, stamped envelope with enough stamps to make sure that I'll be in my box South Hall 1415. You picked a very small number of ways here: you had an accommodation through the writing process is itself the immediate, direct, personal interest in the first seven that the song. Often, a profitable manner, and it shouldn't be too hard to avoid thinking that an A, in case they ask you questions for discussion.

I do not overlap with yours, but I also think that it's actually not that you were reciting and discussing the selection you picked to the course's discourse about Shakespeare every day, because unless you are, I think. Reminder: if people aren't getting quite full credit on author, title, date, you really have done. One would have helped you to ten pages long; this counts everything including participation and attendance that is excerpted in Plough. Let me know what you're going, and you managed to articulate as fully integrated parts of your quarter! If you have done quite a challenge, and want to make sure that you just need to be aware that you just need to make huge conceptual leaps immediately. If you happen to have a good student and I will take this into account. Still Life-Le Jour. Have a good performance even though this is potentially profitable idea, but may not be able to give you a grade somewhere in the front of me wanted to demonstrate that you score at the top of the first three and four the other students were engaged, and the Stars: Nora Clitheroe, The Stare's Nest again so that I can. You had said to other people talking. A-for the quarter winds up being more successful in any way that helps to further your analysis and perhaps point him toward your larger-scale details and of putting them next to each other. Similarly, looking at the Recitation Assignment Guidelines handout. You're got a perfectly acceptable to cite poems by Eavan Boland, and would have needed to happen for this particular passage. If you don't have a hard line to walk, and it's completely up to this page:. Can you confirm she was having. Make sure that your formatting is impeccable. I felt the same degree that you gave quite a nice touch, too. Let me know if you want to know how GOLD looks for undergrads, I'm dying for it and so this hurts your ability to appreciate the argument in a productive exercise I myself tend to think about how you achieve full and open honesty about where you need to be this week. I'm sympathetic here. Not mine. Yes, that's fine provided that the one that the professor is a mid-century American painter Willem de Kooning's Woman series is full. My current plan is to think about what audiovisual and historical issues at stake. Looks like you. Picking a selection from each paragraph, you have any questions, OK? The assignment required and gave what was overall an excellent sense of the several topics that each of you effectively boosted the other's grade while you write, and have moved forward even more specifically on the section guidelines handout. I say thank you for being a good job here. The first of these guidelines with you. Soon to be fully successful. Yes/no pass, knowing where you are nervous about possibly having accidentally leaked confidential information, but rather to help you to think about how recruiting works and the marketplace, and is able to avoid. And your writing is quite enjoyable. Have a good move here, I can find a recording of your group, and your health allows. What this relationship between these texts in an otherwise dull day. Again, please read September 1913. Com that you are attentive to what other students in great detail, I absolutely understand that this is unfortunate because they tend to do that metaphorically. If he lets you expand or drop material if that doesn't work, might be surprised if they cover ground which you are planning on getting out of your recording early. Needing to study for a more impassioned which may differ in some form, even if only because they're also doing Wandering Aengus—6 p. I'll be on campus today, actually.

The Butcher Boy song 5 p. 57. It's absolutely OK to depart/intentionally/from the syllabus pretty well, you should come to each other. But analysis requires moving outside of your outline will be. Thanks for your section this week. I'm glad that it never really rises far above the compare/contrast paper which is to make it support that negative value judgment: that you could be squeezed in most places is basically structured in a moment. Good luck on the edge of something genuinely wonderful job of moving between the texts are primarily theoretical, critical, or it becomes apparent that more supports your specific point, just as Shakespeare doesn't necessarily have to make this transition which you dealt. I'm terribly sorry and embarrassed. On James Joyce's Ulysses: discussion of a topic of your skull with the same names to denote the same time, and your visual texts, how does this statement relate to the class's actual level of knowledge and their outline doesn't bear a lot of the recording of your own notes for week 3. Plan for Week 8: General Thoughts and Notes 23 October in section; we talked after section, and perform the resulting articles and see what other people to dig into in conversation. Kilmainham p. Other administrative issues? It sounds like a fair number of good news. Nothing immediately proposes itself to me, but I completely forgot. Recitation/discussion 5 p. It turns out, it's a beautiful little gem that is particularly relevant here; but make sure neither of those finals. Is that Walter definition of race were like, or historical in nature. Hi! Tonight's paper-grading rubric above. Your paper is that the paper is due or a bit more so that I have never been a pleasure to read and thought about the course syllabus that reciting twelve lines of text may only be minimal changes later tonight, a productive way to avoid a assuming that everyone in class. Alternately, if you'd like to know tonight instead of discussion. So I hope you won't have time to meet me. Still Life with Four Apples; probably others. They are presented in the class and the group develop its own; I will still be elusive at this point is that you will receive at least 70% for a student whose final grade at your main ideas. One thing that will help you to give a paper to pay off in terms of the top eight or so of all but the group may help you here. Be sure to give quite a good selection, and apply it with a selection from Ulysses this Wednesday.

Again, thank you for a job well done. Some suggestions: Georges Braque painted food-related topics not only contributes to a natural end or otherwise set up to you after I qualified it by then. I looked at them, but perhaps it would be helpful, I think that you wanted the discussion as a section you have questions about Cyclops or it becomes apparent that more information about just to pick up a fair grade for the historical and literary readings are passionate and engaged and engaging, and some broader course concerns and did a good choice on topic.

You should aim to do so by 10 p. Just send me email since then, is perhaps not easy deal for you, I will still be elusive at this point, if you want to examine, because I think? TA Christopher Walker and the Stars: Nora Clitheroe, The Butcher Boy can best be read in ways other than that, taken together, then looking at his wife, Annie, in part because it's an appropriate analysis that supports your larger-scale payoff … but as a section you have any questions, which is fantastic and free! Let me know. You're very welcome to sit down on Wednesday can you make the switch function in GOLD you should email me and holding eye contact in that relationship can make your own readings within the realm of possibility for you. There were some pauses for recall and retraction/corrections, but want to prepare a set of ideas in here, though this is really successful paper at an IV coffee shop on lower State, but the power company left me reading by candlelight for several reasons, including class, but not past your level of familiarity with the group to list their impressions of how your questions touches on. Hi! So, for instance. It took the midterm and the text, and the 1916 Easter Rising, the F on the final, too, that there will only be recited during our first section; got the lowest score was 46%. Make sure to do you mean by talking about. In particular, for instance, you will leave me with a worn pick, OK? However, if you want to make it productive to look at the performance, and I think that there are a lot of material. You need to focus on whatever revs your engine, intellectually speaking, but you handled yourself and your readings are often primarily just due to my office door SH 2432E, or unclear. You're welcome to leave your paper. Let me know what works best for you if I try very hard to avoid explicating yourself as the audio or visual component of your mind until you recite more than 100% in section. Similarly, the nude painting Fluther & Peter are tittering over in O'Casey, both of which revolve around a male visions of beautiful women, his understanding of the test, but some students may not have started reading Godot yet if they're cuing off of the Wandering Aengus Performed 16 October 2013 Thus, love of a letter grade; made an excellent job!

This doesn't change the way of thinking about it not perhaps rather the case and I appreciate your quick response! Like It, Orlando, in our backgrounds. Overall, you could engage in related to the reader/viewer, and you met them at their level of familiarity with a lifetime's regret; d it's YOUR JOB to make his slide show available to, you're about in lecture tomorrow! Of course.

#Irish literature #automatically generated text #Patrick Mooney #Python #Markov chains

[tintedglasses]

anna’s fic recs: june 2019  [winterhawk edition]

i accidentally deleted all of the text for this post and was only able to recover the first two, but i tried to remember what i wrote before. 

again, these are from fics that i read in june 2019, not ones that necessarily were posted then. (i honestly wish i could rec all the fics i read, but i managed to keep it at eight this time)

1. Liminal Spaces by thepartyresponsible (@thepartyresponsible)  (Rated M, 20k)

Summary: “Clint,” Steve says, and it’s that same no-bullshit, do-or-die, I really, really mean it voice he used to trot out in the last few innings of close games in high school. “Bucky’s not gonna fly. He’s not going to drive himself. He can’t— I need you to drive him here.”

“Oh, fuck you,” Clint says, and hangs up.

My review: listen, i have thought about this fic at least once a day since i read it because i love it that much. the plotting of it is so good with how the backstory is woven throughout with increasing detail in an amazing way. it’s about small towns and road trips and shared trauma and meeting people where they’re at and it holds a very special place in my heart. if you haven’t read it, go read it immediately. if you have read it, go read it again.

2. tell me who my mouth was made for by 1000_directions (@1000-directions)   (Rated M, 1.5k)

Summary: Clint’s never moved slowly, not one moment of his life. He’s been reckless as long as he can remember, figuring it all out after the fact. He’s never been careful. But Bucky kisses him like he matters, and it changes him. He’s been changing.

“I just want to feel you inside me,” Clint whispers, and it feels like the biggest confession of his life, to need something so fucking badly from someone else and to let them know it.

My review: steph put out like a million amazing fics in the month of june, but this one by far stuck with me the most. when i first read it, i immediately had to go back and re-read it. the way these two love each other actually makes my heart hurt. i always love the way she writes established relationships and how much care her characters have for each other and this is it in top, top form. oh, and also, as a bonus, it’s really hot. EDIT: i just re-read this and i forgot how DREAMY it is. it literally feels like you are floating on a cloud of love and intimacy and I WANT TO CRYYYYY.

3. Ain’t That a Kick in the Head by Finely Honed (@finely-honed)  (Rated E, 115k)

Summary: “That guy out there? Lovin’ him is the best part of being alive, Steve. We both know I can be just as stubborn, and maybe twice as oblivious as you. I wanted Clint so bad, for so long, but I was all turned around, and lying to myself, makin’ excuses as to how it was some crazy side effect of spending so much time together. But the truth was? I was scared. It was too big, so I tried like hell to hide from the truth, right up until I went and got blown up. Then it was total fuckin’ clarity time.”

Back before Steve adopted Peter, or Tony walked into SHIELD Tattoo and upended Steve's world, Bucky almost died in Clint's arms. This is the story of what happened after.

Takes place 5 ½ years before Deep in the Heart of Me. While reading that beast will provide a lot of context into the universe, I'm pretty sure this would still make sense solo.

My review: i loved DITHOM so much, so I knew that this was going to be freaking amazing and OH MY GOD, it definitely was. it tackles the really difficult realities of learning to adjust to life with a newfound disability and coping with PTSD symptoms, while still maintaining a lot of humor and love throughout the story. the characters all just feel so real and like they have rich backstories and futures that go beyond what we see here and that’s really great. the secondary characters are also amazing and i love the theme of found family. Bucky and Steve as brothers is always a favorite of mine and this take on it is great because it’s about Bucky learning how to help Steve without sacrificing his own happiness. EVERYONE IS WONDERFULLY FLAWED BUT DOING THEIR BEST. i dunno, i could say a million things about this fic and still have more to say.

4. Lost & Found by mariana_oconnor (@mariana-oconnor)  (Rated M, 90k)

Summary: Clint Barton’s got a bag full of stolen money and a burning desire to stay under the radar. His old friends in the Carnival will be looking for him and they sure as hell won’t be happy. In a desperate attempt to stay off their radar, he ends up in Timely, a small town so far off the beaten track he’s surprised he even found it, and waits for Barney to comes and get him. Because Barney will be coming. Clint knows he will.

But there's something about the town. Maybe it's the strange wolf that watches him from the trees, and the way people finish conversations when he enters a room. Or it could be the bartender, Bucky, who decided to hate him on sight. Something’s going on in this small town, and Clint’s not sure if he’s jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire.

My review: i’m not typically into werewolf fics but i AM into grumpy bucky and this fic had it in SPADES. again, all of the characters here are so well developed that it makes for a really great story. like liminal spaces, it also has such a great small town feel and creates this atmosphere where it feels like you really know everyone and what they are about and i LOVE that. this clint is so compassionate and wonderful, too, and i love his relationship with werewolf!bucky in particular <3 it’s a great story about meeting people where they are at and the ending is super great!

5. could never want for more when you’re here by nightwideopen (@nightwideopen)  (Rated T, 5.5k) 

Summary: “You know I love you, right?”

The casual way Clint lets the declaration loose doesn’t blindside Bucky as much as he thought it would. And maybe Clint means it mostly platonically but his eyes are shining and Bucky really doesn’t care. He loves him, too.

It’s easy. It’s inevitable. It’s like breathing. 

My review: ACE CLINT!!!!!! i was so excited to see someone write an ace!clint fic, especially during pride month, and this one is so good! it’s so, so soft and i love the way that bucky and clint navigate intimacy in a way that honors their boundaries. bucky has some insecurities and sometimes they don’t communicate well but at the end of the day, they are so gentle with each other and really just want to give each other what they want and it’s SO LOVELY. 

6. Pretty When You Cry by dr_girlfriend (@drgrlfriend)  (Rated E, 3.5k)

Summary: “Someone hurt you, Clint?”

It’s so surprising Clint almost spills his drink on the way to his mouth. Maybe not so much the question, because much as he’s trying to hide it Clint probably does look beat to hell, but more the soft, gentle way the guy asks it. Like he really cares about the answer. Cares about Clint.

For a moment Clint feels himself teetering on the edge — the horrors of the mission clogging up his throat as if they are going to come spilling out in a tearful confession to the first fucking stranger who’d asked.

He claws it back, biting his tongue hard to keep it still. He smiles instead, even though he’s sure the smile comes out a little twisted.

“Not as much as I hurt ‘em back,” he finally says, and that’s just enough truth to settle his stomach a little.

Bucky nods as if that’s good enough for him, and takes a long, thoughtful pull of his beer. Clint watches his throat work, the way those plush lips wrap around the bottle. He hopes to hell he hasn’t blown this already.

Bucky wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and sets his empty bottle deliberately on the bar. “Okay,” he says. “You got a place?”

My review: the MFD crymaxer prompt graced us with some wonderfully hot yet emotional fics and this is absolutely 100% one of them. this is another fic about meeting people where they are at and accepting them for who they are, and it’s really beautiful. i love how both of them are kind of rough around the edges but are also really soft with each other. also, it’s SMOKING hot, so that’s an added bonus. 

7. if god is in the lens by shatteredhourglass (@shatteredhourglass) (Rated E, 40k)

Summary: The Asset pauses. He remembers the first few days after dragging St- dragging Captain America out of the water, the aimless emptiness that had filled him, with no mission and no knowledge of what to do next. He’d spent a week staring at the peeling wallpaper in a motel. There had been butterflies patterned on it. He hadn’t known what direction to go in next, because he was (is) scared of Captain America, and he didn’t want anything to do with Hydra, and he’d just… stopped. That’s when he realizes Barton isn’t going to move unless he gives the man a reason to move, something to do that isn’t related to a past he can’t remember or the threat of imminent death. (It’s been burned out of him, the Asset can relate.)

A mission.

He's leaning on the button to the microphone before he thinks about it. “Come with me and you can kill more of them.”

My review: i LOVE a good recovery arc and this one has TWO! it’s two murderbros learning how to be human again and falling in love along the way (WHAT MORE COULD YOU WANT???). i really enjoyed all of the plotting and the action in this fic, too. i felt like i was on the edge of my seat all the way til the end, trying to figure out what the characters were going to do. just really good stuff here!!!

8. bent by jstabe (@jstabe)  (Rated E, 3k)

Summary: “My name is James Buchanan Barnes.”

He felt Clint’s lips curl up where they were resting at his temple. “Yes.”

“I am an Avenger.” Which was frankly ridiculous and impossible to believe sometimes, but it was true so it went on the list.

My review: SOFT BOYFRIENDS, SOFT BOYFRIENDS, SOFT BOYFRIENDS! i love everything about this fic. as you can see by this list, i love soft boys who are working through trauma together and this is it!!!! they are so freaking domestic and lovely and they make each other laugh and they care about each other so much that it makes my heart want to explode. THEY HAVE A HEATED MATTRESS TOPPER BECAUSE BUCKY GETS COLD. I LOVE THEM. 

#fic rec post #monthly fic rec #marvel fic #winterhawk #long post #i feel like i was lacking energy on this second go around #but i love these fics a lot #so you should read them #also i am going to do a post with other ships later #but i am tired

[spamzineglasgow]

PART ONE: Glitching the Collective Mind (Dan Power)

Figures 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4

“I am not a nihilist, but a mood of grim, jolly absurdism comes over me often, as it seems to come over many of my young peers. To visit millennial comedy… is to spend time in a dream world where ideas twist and suddenly vanish; where loops of self-referential quips warp and distort with each iteration, tweaked by another user embellishing on someone else’s joke, until nothing coherent is left…”

> This quote comes from ‘Why is millennial humor so weird?’, in which journalist Elizabeth Bruenig (2017) taps into the vein of gleeful absurdity which is emerging in online creative spaces. This insight seems to have struck a chord with creators and consumers of online content, as in response, the article itself has become widely memed. Above there are four examples of this, with each taking a meme that existed independently and reframing it with the ‘millennial humor’ headline. There is a degree of self-awareness to this reframing, as if the content creators have taken the label ‘weird’ as a challenge to rise to. The absurdity of the source material is heightened by recontextualising it as formal journalism. By prefacing this image with a frame that draws attention to the image’s weirdness, these anonymous content creators are wilfully resisting interpretation, revealing their intent to baffle, bemuse, or maybe even unnerve internet users.

> Bruenig observes a tendency in some memes to celebrate meaninglessness with comic sincerity. By responding to the article in the way they did, these content creators have proved Bruenig’s point. The theory is put into practice: a meme has entered circulation where the intention is to be deliberately and playful obscure, and where the individual memes are linked only by their deployment of the same frame. Importantly, for all the incoherence of the memes themselves, there is a coherence to the methods producing them.

> What sparks these acts of coordinated communal nonsense – are the motivations personal, political, or is it a celebration of weirdness for its own sake? By exploring the dark absurdism creeping into post-internet artwork, particularly in video content, this series seeks to examine the latent ideology underpinning the dark surrealism of internet humour, and how its rising popularity changes the ways we think about ourselves and our realities.

-

“...that which was intended to enlighten the world in practice darkens it. The abundance of information and the plurality of worldviews now accessible to us through the internet are not producing a coherent consensus reality... It is on this contradiction that the idea of a new dark age turns: an age in which the value we have placed on knowledge is destroyed by the abundance of that valuable commodity, and in which we look about ourselves in search of new ways to understand the world.”

-

In New Dark Age (2018), his examination of the internet’s infiltration of our daily lives, James Bridle only just stops short of declaring that the internet will be the death of humanity. As well as the environmental cost of constant streaming and downloading, Bridle argues that the internet poses an existential threat in a more epistemological sense, by attempting the impossible task of collating and networking humanity’s collective knowledge, history, and culture.

> This cataloguing is conducted through the use of databases, which media theorist Lev Manovich argues are becoming (if they aren’t already) the new dominant media (2010, p.70). The database is distinguished from a physical collection of items and information by its flexibility, and the user’s ability to manipulate the structure of the content by searching for key words. Here there is a paradox: because it is so meticulously structured, the experience of using a database is one apparently devoid of structure. Manovich notes that the database is “distinct from reading a narrative or watching a film or navigating an architectural site” since these experiences are all linear, and so are experienced by readers or viewers in the same way, with point b always following point a, and so on (p.65). In a database users navigate the information however they choose, in effect creating their own narratives, with no guarantee that any two users’ experience of a database may be the same.

> This same notion is put forward by Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture (2006), where he says “each of us constructs our own personal mythology from bits and fragments of information extracted from the media flow and transformed into resources through which we make sense of our everyday lives”. The narratives we forge through our online experiences become part of our understanding of the world – and they seem to be creating more confusion than clarity. These narratives are arbitrarily structured, and may contain false information or information devoid of meaning. Also, thanks to the volume and speed of online messaging, language is evolving faster than it ever has before (Press Association, 2015). Information may be conveyed to us in unfamiliar terms, and so be open to misinterpretation.

> Internet users are bombarded with information, little of which has any meaningful or memorable content. Exposing people to a transparent mapped network of humanity’s knowledge, history, and culture has irrevocably warped our perception of ourselves, and our relationship to the world. As Bridle later notes, “the more obsessively we attempt to compute the world, the more unknowably complex it appears”. At best the database makes the sum of all the world’s content feel overwhelming, and at worst having it all laid out makes it feel mundane. Either way, the damage done is to expose internet users to too much information, and this can lead to an existential crisis.

> Spending too long online (or rather, too long outside of the real world) must saturate the mind. This oversaturation of meaning gives way to feelings of melancholic or manic absurdity, or as Bruenig puts it, a “creeping suspicion that the world just doesn’t make sense”. From this suspicion arises a new wave of disillusioned artists, who we will refer to as the post-internet surrealists. Unlike other meme creators (whose work arguably is surrealist in its Dada-like remixing of disparate elements), the post-internet surrealists are surrealists with intent, who respond to one another’s work, and whose videos consistently evoke alienation and absurd bemusement within digitally-rendered worlds. Videos such as BagelBoy’s pront (2017) engage with infinity as a source of existential confusion, and others like surreal entertainment’s What Kanye really showed Trump in the white house (2018) abstract real-life events to the point of absurdity (or make their inherent absurdity more apparent) by transporting them to a digital non-setting.

-

Manovich argues that the database is a distinct cultural form, like a novel or film or building, in that it presents its own distinct model of how the world should be experienced. Unlike narrative, the database is non-linear. Unlike architectural structure, the database is non-spatial. It appears to us as information without structure and without context – in short, information divorced from the reality in which it takes meaning.

> This creates a tension, which grows stronger the more we rely on the online world to conduct business in the real one. It is resolved, or at least eased, by the digital world bleeding into the physical. The world becomes what Bridle calls ‘code/space’, which he defines as “the interweaving of computation with the built environment”. This term isn’t internet-specific, and covers anything which requires users to think computationally in order to interact, such as self-service checkouts, or traffic light buttons. However, its impact is most significantly felt in the prevalence of internet-connected devices such as the mobile phone, which turn the whole world into potential code/space.

> The internet is omnipresent. It is so vast in size that popular indicators of space and size fail to adequately describe it. It’s a hyper-object, to borrow a term from philosopher Timothy Morton, so large and far-reaching that it surpasses the boundaries of location, so and complex that it cannot be entirely comprehended at once.

> Morton is an ecologist, and develops his idea in relation to climate change. In the blog Ecology Without Nature, he describes the hyper-object global warming as being so “massively distributed in time and space” that we can consider it “nonlocal”, not existing wholly in any one place. He writes that when you experience rain you are “in some sense” experiencing climate, but “you are never directly experiencing global warming” (2010). Global warming is too big an object to meaningfully encounter, but to dismiss its existence on these grounds would be ridiculous. We may be unable to comprehend its existence entirely, but still we know it exists through the traces it leaves across the globe.

> Like global warming, the internet is a hyper-object, and the data we glean from it is just a fragment of the whole. When we consider the internet as one hyper-object, rather than a collection of individual data objects, then all internet-connected devices become components in a single global network, one global code/space.

> To meaningfully discuss the surrealism emerging online we will consider the internet not as a collection of individual texts, images and videos, but as one networked whole. Matthew Smith argues that, since digital media work by translating data into “universally exchangeable” bits, “all digital media are therefore identical in structure; like Campbell’s soup cans” (2007). The content of two memes may be worlds apart, but fundamentally they are both the same thing. Furthermore, if they both exist online, they are equally tiny composite parts of a larger total structure. This is not the same as, for example, claiming that all paintings in a gallery are part of the same work because they share a building. With physical objects, there is always the possibility of them leaving the gallery or entering a new one. This does not work digitally; you can’t have objects within the internet because the internet itself is an object of which digital artworks form a part.

-

Briefly, we’ll consider a post-internet artwork which isn’t a meme. Crispin Best’s ‘pleaseliveforever’ is an eight-line poem which regenerates every few seconds under a new, randomly generated title (2017). By making the content arbitrary and fleeting, the poem draws attention to its medium, and flaunts its ability to do things pre-internet poetry never could. Musing on this, SPAM’s own Denise Bonetti asks “what is the poem, then? The structure? The algorithm?” (2019), and indeed, if the content of the poem is continually being remixed then the only constant by which we can define it is its invisible network of underlying code. Because it exists digitally, the poem’s structure and algorithm are indistinguishable – the algorithm is the structure. And it’s not a structure in its own right, but one small part embedded within the hypertext of the internet as a networked whole.

> The internet is a database of databases, one giant non-spatial structure too large to pigeonhole, but within which we can observe trends. It will be useful to conceptualise the internet as one giant work of art, a hyper-artwork with an uncountable number of authors and viewers. This artwork is mutable, and continually evolving. Since the internet is a network of information relating to the real world, it might be considered a reconstruction of reality. The internet then is a constantly changing map of the world, and if we consume its content on a daily basis, and if we never distance ourselves from its code/space, it throws our understanding of the world into a constant state of flux.

> This uncertainty, and the anxiety or absurdity arising from it, is key to understanding the work of the post-internet surrealists. BagelBoy’s icced (2017) might be set in the real world, but there’s no way to be certain. The plot is simply that a man goes to a store, buys a cola, then goes home to drink it, but through means of information saturation and a post-internet aesthetic these events are abstracted beyond relatability and almost beyond recognition. The film’s world is constructed out of PNG images, stock photos and text boxes – spoken words appear as text, characters glide across the screen at will, and at the end the film’s entire diegesis is hijacked by an advert. Either the video is deconstructing real-world events by moving them to a digital setting, or it’s physically depicting a virtual interaction (typing replaces speech online, people navigate between internet sites without physically moving, and adverts can materialise from anywhere at any moment with no prior warning). Like the explicitly surreal memes we’ll encounter in future instalments, icced presents an absurd but coherent depiction of code/space, a version of reality infused with internet logic.

> But before we examine these surreal memes in detail we’ll go briefly to the very beginnings of cinema, a period of experimentation and genre consolidation similar to that occurring in online spaces today. By examining the developments of early cinema and viral video in tandem, we’ll see that giving consumers the power to create and share their own work makes profit a less important factor in filmmaking, and that this fundamentally changes the kind of video content which gets produced and distributed.

-

The prototype digital cinema emerging today may seem worlds apart from the first few years of cinema itself, but in fact the two share many common features. One scholar notes how “Both films of early cinema and online video clips are short films, mostly staying well under ten minutes in length” (Broeren, 2009). These short films were exhibited collectively in cinema’s early days (Gunning, 1990), keeping audiences supplied with a steady stream of novel content. Today they are exhibited side-by-side on databases like YouTube, where viewers can view as many as they desire in a single sitting, and sustain their own engagement by varying the content they consume at whim.

> In the early days of cinema, exhibitionists would often “re-edit” the films they purchased, and personalise their own exhibitions with offscreen supplements. This, too, occurs in online film. The media theorist Limor Shifman (2013) notes how “user-driven imitation and remix” as a mode of content production is integral to internet culture, and with video meme creators often accompanying their edits of other videos with captions, active comment sections, and links to other media, the off-screen supplements of old are today integrated into the on-screen experience.

> These similarities are not just superficial – they arise from the same factors. The birth of cinema saw large masses of people consuming and participating in the products of newly available commercial technologies, and the emergence of a distinct online cinema is, essentially, an accelerated replay of this process. Sharing in the same global code/space makes internet users a bigger potential audience than has ever previously existed, and the quantity and style of content produced by and for internet users is determined by the activity of this networked mass.

> Early cinema was concerned with newly-formed masses of people resulting from twentieth century modernity, not just for audiences but also as subject matter. According to Gunning (2004), the ‘local films’ of Mitchell and Kenyon would document crowds of people moving through public spaces, and when doing so they were tuned in to the growing public discourse around newly-visible congregations of people in developing urban areas. One particular style of film they produced, which we will take as out main focus, is the ‘factory gate’ film. These would document workers streaming out of a factory at the end of the day, almost universally consisting of single (occasionally sped up or spliced short) static long shots (LS) or extreme long shots (XLS). While the single take, duration and static camera are the result of practical limitations, the choice to employ LS or XLS is an artistic one. Greater distance allowed the frame to fill with a greater number of subjects, creating a visual cacophony and increasing the spectacle. The framing was often loose, meaning there were no focal points to direct attention. Viewer’s eyes would rapidly scan over the moving crowd, heightening any sense of the crowd being overwhelmingly large.

> As well as directly engaging with large masses of people, the demands of large audiences to see films made specifically for their local area meant Mitchell and Kenyon had to develop a way of turning out new films efficiently and affordably. In order to exploit the collective spending power of the masses, the form and content of these local pictures are wrapped around the desires of the masses to recognise themselves and their towns on-screen. The masses were not only the subject of the films, but also determined their mode of production, and by extension their formal properties.

-

The factory gate picture is a genre, and films in this genre are produced by following the Mitchell and Kenyon template: set up a camera by a factory gate at closing time, framing the exit in LS to capture as many moving people as possible. Templatability allows for films to effectively be cloned, so it’s necessary in commercial filmmaking, allowing things to be produced and reproduced at more profitable rates. By following templates to easily reproduce a standardised kind of content, the early genre films of Mitchell and Kenyon reproduce similarly to online memes. Sean Rintel (2013) argues that “templatability lies at the heart of online memes”, and explains that “memetic process is a product of the human capability to separate ideas into two levels – content and structure – and then contextually manipulate that relationship”. A meme, fundamentally, is the deployment of a familiar template to reframe and alter our perception of otherwise familiar or unfamiliar content. It is almost mathematical in its generation of novel content, since there are as many potential remixes of movies and songs as there are unique combinations.

Figures 2.1 and 2.2

> Take these memes as an example. Their origin is the YouTube video Gordon Ramsay cannot locate the lamb sauce (2016), a remixed clip of gameshow Hell’s Kitchen (2005-) in which Gordon shouts at contestants who have not made lamb sauce in time. The video cuts out anything other than Gordon’s shouting, and accentuates the moment’s absurdity by elongating and pitch-shifting the word ‘sauce’.Figures 2.1 and 2.2 combine elements of the remix with existing meme formats (figures 2.3 and 2.4) by adding a picture of Gordon and key words ‘lamb sauce’ and ‘located’, either in reference to the video, or to other memes derived from it. These memes were created by reshaping the source material to fit another meme template.

> The prominence of the remix in post-internet art produces huge amounts content which can only be fully understood in relation to other content. Memes function like in-jokes, and in this way they are participatory. The collaboration and participation between an unknowable number of anonymous contributors is part of the enjoyment not just of post-internet surrealism, but of all memes. It’s like shouting into the abyss and waiting to see what echoes back. The communication is rapid and blind, and sublime.

> In commercial cinema templates are used to maximize profits, so it might seem contradictory that they have been embraced by meme makers. But, in online spaces, the use and misuse of templates is what makes the art form participatory. Just as the viewers of local films would attend screenings to see themselves projected, thus participating in the production of the product they consume, so internet users riff off each other’s jokes and meme formats as a way of contributing to the continual evolution of a meme they enjoy.

> It has been argued by film historian Charles Musser (1990) that “modern” cinema begins with the birth of the nickelodeon, the implication of this being that modern cinema is necessarily commercial, whereas pre-cinema films were not. This distinction might be crude, since films were being produced for profit before the nickelodeon came into fashion, but it’s a helpful distinction to make. What makes the form, content, and distribution of pre-cinema and post-internet film resemble each other so closely is the same thing that makes them dissimilar to industrial filmmaking: they’re not driven by profit, but by novelty for its own sake; they are not produced by companies of people, but by small teams or individual auteurs; they experiment with newly-accessible technologies to see what effects can be created; and importantly, since they do not rely upon the systems of capitalism to support their growth and distribution, these films can afford to scrutinise these systems rather than reinforce their ideology.

-          

> Today’s advances in affordable camera technology, internet access, and free video editing software have shifted the power of content creation away from industry and into the hands of consumers. Anyone with a smartphone can be an auteur, and anyone with a wifi password can become a distributor. Creating and sharing content is easier than it’s ever been before, and developments within the medium now occur at a rate too fast to thoroughly document. The continual crossing of templates and content items produces countless proliferations and variations of existing memes each day. These memes are characterised by hyper-intertextuality, each new remix a thread that further thickens the intertextual tapestry.

> In his seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin (1982) observes that as reproduction of artworks becomes more common, artworks are increasingly “designed for reproducibility”. With the emergence of templatability and ease of creating and sharing content in online spaces, this process is now more efficient than ever.

> Any image or video online can be downloaded in seconds, and a number of user-friendly picture and video editing programmes come pre-installed on most commercial computers. Mechanical reproduction allowed for films to be copied with ease and re-shaped at will, spawning a number of variants which today is unknowable, since many will not have been preserved. Online however everything is preserved, and this coupled with more efficient and accessible methods of reproducing and adapting works means that videos can be adapted, and their adaptations adapted, at such great volume and speed that they can quickly bear no resemblance to their origins. Cataloguing all the varieties of meme is an unfeasibly large task, but by examining trends within meme-making we can observe how the nature of an artwork changes, becoming more amorphous and apparently meaningless, in an age of digital reproduction.

~

Tune in later this week when we’ll be looking at ~ v a p o r w a v e ~, and navigating the maze of digital non-places and non-times which is rapidly becoming less distinguishable from the world we live in today.

Full list of works cited plus bonus discography are available here. 

This is part one of a three part series. Part two is available here and part three available here. 

~

Text: Dan Power

Published 5/10/19

#essay #dissertation #SPAM essay #post-internet #meme #meme culture #Gordon Ramsay #Dan Power #convergence culture #image #video #cinema

[selfish-swine]

Let’s Talk About Star Fox and Character For a Moment - Part 2: OOC is Serious Business

Continued from here. If you haven’t read part 1 yet, then go do that first! You need context! Anyway, this is a long one.

So that whole big rant I wrote up was really just a preamble to get to something I REALLY wanted to rant about but found myself basically writing two rants to get my point across and needed to split stuff up to establish a reference point for what I’m talking about.

Let’s Talk about the fandom’s universally disliked unfavorite, Star Fox Command on the typical topic of how badly it characterized everyone and derailed things and all that hullabaloo.

Now let’s get somethings clear here. First off, I do NOT think Command is a good game by any stretch, mechanically or narratively. It does screw a lot of shit up. Second of all, I am not saying Command doesn’t derail characters senselessly and deserve pretty much all the ire it’s earned from the fandom.

BUT. Big but here.

It is important to not dismiss all of Command for these mistakes. To start with, for as much Command gets flat out WRONG, it also gets a lot RIGHT. Falco and Fox’s bromance is especially strong in Command, and characters like Slippy (who basically never gets written poorly) are still solid. Pigma also gets some actual emotion to his unceremonious death in Assault as a spooky space ghost, to say nothing of the small implications it gives to Andross’ motivations. Then there are things that were just the result of Command having an honestly shoddy translation job all things considered, which especially pertains to Star Wolf. Panther’s third person self-narrations are a misunderstanding of him speaking in an arrogant manner in the original Japanese, and Leon’s infamous liking of rainbows was meant to be sarcastic - but these are things that can not be conveyed in text in ENGLISH (but can in Japanese). Then there is Wolf, which brings me to the real point I want to get at with this post.

I said before it is important not to dismiss all of Command for these mistakes, but really what I should say is it isn’t fair to dismiss Command for the same mistakes other games did before it, specifically Assault. The big offenders of Command, Fox and Krystal, are just as derailed in Assault (if not moreso in the case of Fox), along with Wolf and to a lesser extent, Peppy, yet no one bats an eye because it suits the fandom’s tastes at large (or at least the English speaking fandom), and that bothers me. Out Of Character writing should not be accepted just because you like the direction it takes, because that is disingenuous to the characters.

Let’s start with Fox. Fox’s archetype (to see why archetypes are important read part 1 you weenie) is that of the charismatic heroic leader. There are some subtle differences between his Western and Japanese depictions, namely his confidence (Japanese Fox is in 64 at least more son-in-his-father’s-shadow than Western Fox, but is no less cheeky or cocksure for it), but the general idea stays the same. This is consistent with Fox in the SNES comic, 64, and Adventures (as well as the Farewell Beloved Falco comic). He meets every challenge head on with confidence he can over come it and his sense of justice is strong, and this is reinforced mechanically as Fox being the player avatar, puts us in direct control of confronting these challenges with confidence and bravado.

Assault Fox lacks any of this. He is bland, boring, robbed of any character he once had. He stammers like a teenager more than he ever did as an actual teenager over the simplest of things, constantly walks into traps and danger in spite of knowing danger is ahead and waiting, routinely makes bad leadership choices by no virtue other than the plot necessitating it, and then at the end of the game acts absolutely unemotional to the supposed death of his mentor figure only to later reveal he knew all along his mentor wasn’t actually dead and was just hiding this from his team. Honestly, I might just need to make another rant dedicated  JUST to WHY and HOW these ideas are detrimental to Fox’s character, but for now I’m going to leave this simple and possibly revisit the topic in greater depth. Either way, Assault Fox is uninteresting and vapid, underreacting to everything despite being previously established as a smart ass quippy hot blooded hero, and that’s terrible. Yet, noone notices or cares, because at least he didn’t break up with Krystal.

Let’s talk about Krystal next. To say she was treated OOC in Assault is honestly to suggest she had a character to begin with, but in all fairness she does have elements of it from Dinosaur Planet and Star Fox Adventures, if broken and disjointed due to her loss of protagonist status. Going back to what I wrote about archetypes, Krystal was, in DP64, completely set up to be an aspiring hero, but when DP64 became SFAd, she lost that narrative importance and was reduced to a Damsel in Distress crossed with a Macguffin Girl, which totally undermined what she had, but as I said there was traces of something still there. She is bold, brash, heroic and full of justice (much like Fox), but also more contemplative and insightful as well. She’s the wise hero to Fox’s action hero, or should have been at any rate.

So what did Assault do? Absolutely rob her of all that and just ram in hard the Love Interest nonsense. Everything about Krystal in Assault revolves around FOX - she has NO agency onto herself anymore, something she even had in Adventures at least at first until she got captured for 90% of the game. Not Assault Krystal, though. Her whole character is defined by her fawning over Fox, worrying over his idiot well being and wanting him to be safe, stammering affectionately like two high school kids who haven’t had their first kiss yet. Yes, she does have some moments free from this nonsense, but those moments are not her DOMINANT portrayal. Even when discussing things with bad boy romantic rival Panther, she focuses on -Fox-. Krystal’s entire character in Assault is dominated by the existence of her love interest.

That is the worst case of “love interest centric” writing you can commit, because when you take the stuff away that doesn’t bear on Fox, you have so little left. I’d honestly consider Command Krystal BETTER than Assault, because her rude angry bitchy self was at least her OWN character and not joined at the hip to Fox. Notice how the cutscene with Fox and Krystal with Tricky, Krystal barely says anything worthwhile to the conversation? It’s all Fox being flustered liked a stupid teenager while Krystal coyishly “teehees” in the background while Tricky hammers in the fact they are romantic interests. No. Agency. But again, no one cares, because its fuel for their ships, amirite?

Now we get to who is in my opinion the worst offender of Assault’s derailing character writing, Wolf. Fox might’ve gone from heroic leader to bland cardboard, but at least he’s still the protagonist. Krystal might’ve been reduced to a vapid love interest, but at least she didn’t have much left to lose to start with. Wolf, though, not only oversteps his boundaries as an archetype, but he PUSHES OUT other characters from their meta narrative roles as well. Wolf is the black hole of Assault’s writing, and he absolutely got away with it because he’s “cool” and “badass”. He is the pinnacle of my point in this rant.

Let’s talk about archetypes again. Wolf’s is that of the eternal rival, the black recolor, the evil counterpart to the hero. His mission is to see Fox undone for the sake of his own ego. In Japan, a little more supplemental information is known, namely that Wolf has a rivalry with the McCloud family name as a whole starting with James, and Fox’s reaction to Wolf’s persistent pursuit is treated more humorously than in the west (namely Fox is subtly dissing Wolf rather than being intimidated by him), but these subtleties do not change the core base that Wolf is an impulsive, rivalry motivated antagonist.

So of course Assault saw fit to.... shift him into a mentor role. This only compounds for the worse when you consider the fact that Wolf only even formed Star Wolf because Pigma manipulated and goaded him into doing it (another Japanese lore tidbit), further cementing that Wolf does not make good wise decisions. He is violent and aggressive and obsessed with his rivalry. Why the HECK is he suddenly giving advice to FOX? Wolf is the WORST person to give advice or take advice from, he is literally Mr. Bad Decisions, but Assault’s writers saw fit to absolutely change his entire persona from an aggressive archrival to a quasi-antihero cool guy big brother-esque mentor... and Fox doesn’t even remark on it! (Another mark for Fox being OOC I suppose).

Worst of all though isn’t the damage this does to Wolf, but rather, to Peppy! Wolf becoming the mentor effectively butts him into Peppy’s meta narrative role, and he essentially replaces him for it. This isn’t to say Star Fox characters can’t develop and shift around and change, but Wolf doesn’t DEVELOP into a mentor, nor does Peppy develop BEYOND it. Wolf just usurps it from Peppy and proceeds as usual. Good character writing is finding how to fit a character into a story - that is, finding a role they fit into and working from there. This is why so many fan OCs fail - they don’t fit into a role, they usurp from canon characters. One need only look at all the Star Wolf OCs that exist purely to replace “uncool” characters like Pigma or Andrew and see the flaws. When you write to replace another character, you aren’t writing true to that character, you are shackling and chaining them down to the one they are replacing. This is what Wolf does in Assault: he is sloppily mischaracterized, and then because of that, he butts into another character’s writing space.

And once more, the fandom at large did not notice or care, because Wolf is “cool”, “badass”, et cetera. This is my beef. This is my issue. So I leave you with what I said at the start of this rant: do NOT just accept changes to a character because it placates you superficially. THINK about what roles it is a character serves and why, and respect that. Don’t just blindly complain about character derailment just when it suits you because you don’t like the change personally, or because it fucks with your ships. Press yourself to be better than that.

#OOC #rant #ramble #meta narrative #character archetypes #melodrama #character derailment