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beneaththetangles · 4 years

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BtT Light Novel Club Chapter 20 (Part 2): Tearmoon Empire, Vol. 1

And here is the second part of our discussion on the light novel Tearmoon Empire, Vol. 1! If you haven’t yet, please check out Part 1 of our discussion first.

We’ve got a lot to talk about, so let’s jump right in! Just like with Part 1, Jeskai Angel and Gaheret are joining me in the discussion.

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4. Is there a “god” in this story?

Jeskai Angel: It would easier to write off references to deity as a way to evoke Roman Catholic France…if there weren’t so many examples. One of the last things OG Anne says to Mia in the original timeline is, “I pray that the gods will smile upon you. May you go with their blessing.” Immediately afterward, Mia dies and travels back in time. Coincidence? Ludwig thinks “Surely, she is a great leader bestowed upon us by the heavens…” The narrator makes light of this, but is attributing the situation to a god really so farfetched? Mia died then traveled back in time eight years, accompanied by a diary stained by her own blood. How? Why? While gods don’t come up in a major way, the visit to the church in the slum is another reminder of religion. After Mia arrives at the academy, the escort captain says “May God be with you in your new life at the academy.” Well, Mia is living a “new life” in more ways than one, and again I must ask: how? I couldn’t help but ponder whether the chill Mia feels when she almost ignores Tiona, that sense that she was at a crossroads, “almost as if… As if the decision had already been made,” might be providential guidance. The narrative here doesn’t mention any god, so maybe I’m reading too much into the scene though. On various occasions people compare Mia to the moon goddess, which doesn’t prove much, but is another way the story keeps reminds us about the idea of gods.

There’s also the Duchy of Belluga / its ruler. They form a clear analogue to the pope / the territory historically ruled by the pope, sometimes called the Papal States. It’s played for humor when Mia writes in her diary, “Basically, being the wise person that I am, God in all His Greatness saw fit to make me the chosen one…To put it simply, it is my duty to save the Empire.” Leaving aside the “wise person” bit, remember we’re dealing with postmortem time travel. Is it really that unreasonable for Mia to see divine providence in this?

Again, maybe all these examples are just meant to give the setting the flavor of eighteenth century Roman Catholicism and don’t imply anything about an active role for deity in the story. But I wonder.

Gaheret: I think that there are three ways religion is present in the story: first, as all time travel stories (I would argue), this is a story concerning a fate or vocation. In this case, it is a vocation. Mia is called to be a force for good, and directed towards that end by Providence. And there is a physical reminder of that mission: the diary. I find it sort of odd that the diary would keep changing, taking into account what she does to the timeline, yet she does not expend all day reading it and searching for a way to change what will happen the next day, given her approach to the rest of what is happening.

The other two are: as a force for justice and charity, which clearly presides both the approach of Rafina and that of the international church which aids in preventing the plague and adopts an orphan boy. Placed at the slums, it works for the poor.

And as a political force, given its role in Rafina´s kingdom. We still don´t know the specifics, it is true. There is a moment when Mia is on the verge of praying, but she does not, and as Jeskai notes, at first she comically reflects that she is chosen by God. Which, being this kind of story, must be literally true. I wonder what will happen if Rafina, Keithwood and the rest will think if they learn of Mia´s experience, and how will they square it with the rest of their beliefs, of which we do not know much.

stardf29: Well, when it comes down to it, there are two clearly supernatural elements in play in the story here: Mia’s return to the past, and also the diary that tells her how events will lead to her execution, which even changes as she performs different actions to account for those and show how they might still lead to doom. With no other obvious magical elements in the story, I have to assume that there’s at least some “god” that is at work here.

The question then is, based on that assumption, how much that god is like the Christian God. The thing here is, we have a situation where this “god” seems to have turned back time in order to change the course of history. Now, the whole concept of time travel is one that is very hard to grasp due to how it seems nearly impossible in real life, to say nothing of its philosophical/theological implications. Is this an actual rewind of time? Is this an alternate universe that had followed the same events of history until the point where Mia basically gains the knowledge of events in a parallel universe? Or was Mia’s past life beyond her reincarnation point basically just one long and extremely visceral prophecy that never actually happened, which was shown to her alongside the diary in order to avert a terrible fate? Each one would have different implications on what the “god” of this world is like. And really, at this point, I have no idea what the case is here. I’m definitely curious on this point, but for now, I can at least appreciate that there are higher powers in play here.

Jeskai Angel: I found it curious that throughout the book, there seemed to references to a variety of deities. One is just called “God.” Another is identified as the “moon goddess.” And there’s also broader mention of “the gods.” It’s unclear to me for now which if any of these is actually “real” in-story.

5. This novel seems to take inspiration from European history, particularly the French Revolution. What do you think about the similarities and differences between the story and the history of our world?

Jeskai Angel: Tearmoon Empire uses its background material quite well. This is not historical fiction, thankfully, just fiction loosely inspired by history. The author paints in broad strokes, piggybacking on popular knowledge of the French Revolution to help tell the story, without being slavishly beholden to historical minutia. A great example of this is the “Let them eat meat” quote attributed to Mia. Marie Antoinette never said “Let them eat cake,” but the quote is so strongly identified with her at a pop culture level that putting a paraphrase of it in Mia’s mouth becomes an effective way to tell readers Mia should bring to mind this historical figure. The rest of the book is similar, using historical allusions or resemblances to give readers a feel for the setting and characters.

I also love the overall premise, using fiction to give a happy ending (or so we hope!) to a tragic historical figure. About a decade ago, I took a course on the French Revolution at FSU, under Professor Rafe Blaufarb. It was my first time studying the French Revolution in any depth, and I came away feeling a lot of sympathy for Louis XVI and Marie. So a story where Marie Mia goes back in time to avert the revolution strongly appeals to me.

stardf29: All I’ll say here is that, whereas it seems like for you two, your interest in the French Revolution got you more interested in Tearmoon Empire, for me, it was the opposite: Tearmoon Empire got me more interested in the French Revolution. So that’s +1 for light novels encouraging academic learning. Yay!

Jeskai Angel: I like that Mia and the Tearmoon government more generally are not simplistically presented as evil. Some are rotten apples, as we see at the highest levels of the nobility, but they weren’t all horrible people. Some, like Ludwig, meant well but lacked power to effect change. Some, like Mia, simply aren’t equipped to deal with the disaster. She was selfish and arrogant in her first life, but hardly a monster. It’s impossible to celebrate her death as the story opens, only pity her. Especially in the first timeline, Mia was flawed yet also faced unfair condemnation. This again fits nicely with history. Despite a few philosophers braying about absolute monarchy, in actual practice Louis XVI’s power was far from absolute. (If France really had been an absolute monarchy, maybe the revolution could have been prevented!) Like Mia, Louis and Marie were not educated and equipped to deal with the challenges they faced. Many of the problems related to the revolution preceded them or were beyond their control. They were flawed and made mistakes, yes, but they weren’t evil monsters who deserved to die.

Gaheret: Yes. And even if that was not the case, the tyranny of the revolutionaries was far worse than that the government of the Monarchy. It actually lead to a period of madness and totalitarian terror, followed by an actual Emperor, Napoleon, that created an actual secret police, tried to conquer the world and assasinated the Duke of Enghien. Among other things, because the old France, with all its flaws, actually had some checks and balances between aristocracy, monarchy, the cities, the customs, the Church…

Jeskai Angel: True. So much unnecessary bloodshed and death.

Gaheret: Discrimination among the three states was one thing. A national Church, the Terror and the massive murder of priests, nobles and people of La Vendee was another, and far worse.

In the case of the Tearmoon Empire, things may be more different, but I´m all for Mia.

6. To what extent do you consider Mia “selfish”? Does her acting primarily out of self-interest diminish the value of her actions?

Jeskai Angel: This comes back around to the issue we keep harping on, that Mia is an impressively realistic example of how complicated we humans are. Undoubtedly, some of what she says and does is ultimately motivated by selfishness. Where the narrator goes wrong, in my view, is in talking as if that selfishness negates everything else. She was selfish, period, end of story. I don’t think that works.

When Mia drags her retainers to the slum and gives away an expensive piece of jewelry to help fund medical care for the indigent, there was certainly some selfishness involved (e.g., I don’t want to die on the guillotine again). But as you read her words on this occasion, is it really plausible that she was acting for purely selfish reasons and completely inadvertently spoke in a way sounded more benevolent? Again I remind the jury that the narrator never suggests Mia was a liar who schemed to trick people into thinking she was kind and good. The narrator just claims Mia is a doofus who expresses herself poorly.

When Mia first encounters Tiona and stands up against the bullies, there was certainly some selfishness involved (e.g., I don’t want to die on the guillotine again). But as you read her words on this occasion, is it really plausible that she was acting for purely selfish reasons and completely inadvertently spoke in a way sounded more benevolent? Again I remind the jury that the narrator never suggests Mia was a liar who schemed to trick people into thinking she was kind and good. The narrator just claims Mia is a doofus who expresses herself poorly.

What is more plausible? That Mia is such a derp that she tries to be selfish and keeps failing at it by accidentally sounding wise and compassionate without meaning to? Or that she isn’t purely selfish and her fine-sounding words and deeds are more genuine than the narrator, and perhaps Mia herself, realize?

I think again of the how before Abel’s fight, Mia tries to think of something clever and diplomatic to say…and then wishes him victory, and, according to the narrator, “let slip her true thoughts.” There’s something similar in the scene where Mia tries to convince herself that Abel is just a little kid and there’s nothing special about being with him, and is puzzled with herself as to why she would be so flustered. Is it not reasonable to suppose to that on other occasions, too, Mia’s motivations may have been less purely selfish and more complex than she and/or the narrator realize?

I think of Jesus’ teaching that a tree is known by its fruit. Mia promotes Anne and protects her from workplace harassment. Mia prevents a good civil servant from losing his job and being banished to the hinterlands for trivial reasons. Mia personally leads an effort to provide medical care for the poor by visiting the slum with her retainers and donating that valuable jewelry. Mia saves Elise’s life by becoming her patron and ensuring she’ll have the income she needs to survive. Mia protects both Tiona and Abel by standing up to bullies (notwithstanding how cowardly the narrator says she is). Mia befriends friendless Chloe. Would a person who isn’t good, and who isn’t trying to look good in front of others, really say and do all this stuff? Going by the “fruit test” Jesus taught, I feel compelled to suspect there’s more good in Mia than she or the narrator are willing to admit.

Yes, there’s some selfishness or other ill motives mixed in, but the same is true for every one of us. Why do we obey God? Because we fear God’s judgment? Because we love God himself? Because we want to avoid a guilty conscience? Because we want to go to heaven? Because we want to look like good people to others? Because…etc.? Who but God can hope to answer these questions? But if partially tainted motives are enough to devalue one’s actions, then nothing anyone does ever has any worth. This is part why reading this book was so powerful for me. As I read this work of fiction, I can see how wrong it is for the narrator to harp so much on Mia’s flaws & use them to ignore or minimize her virtues. And I could see that the same is true of myself. Do I ever act out of purely virtuous motives? Probably not. But that doesn’t justify treating everything I do as having diminished value. I want Mia’s good deeds to matter, despite her selfishness and other flaws, because I want my efforts to do good to matter, despite my selfishness and other flaws.

Gaheret: I would add that, apart from these signs that she cares for others, Abel and Anne especially, saving yourself of three years of imprisonment and of being unjustly condemned to the guillotine is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The narrator may say that she is a chicken, but it’s not him (presumably) who may go to execution at twenty. But the important thing, in my view, is that she is growing. If she sometimes does good deeds without realizing or intending them, that’s a sign of hope that one day she will, and a gift, too. I am interested in seeing her triumph against her defects, but I find her to be a very enjoyable character just as she is.

stardf29: Okay, so the reason I asked this question was because this book made me think of something. Mainly: is it really that bad to be self-interested? After all, one can argue that all of our actions, even our most “selfless” ones, are ultimately done in our self-interest: we help others at the expense of our short-term interests because we believe doing so will be better for us in the long term. Even something like following Christ and living a Christian life is something Christians do because we believe it is both the best way to live our present life, and also because we believe in great things in the next life.

Maybe, what we think of as “selfishness” is really just “short-sighted self-interest”: doing things only for what we can gain in the short term, without thinking about how it might ultimately hurt us in some way or another. And that leads us to Mia…

Mia’s actions might be supposedly “selfish”, but what is the big difference between her actions in the current timeline versus the past? It’s that now, she’s acting with a far more long-term view of things, in particular how certain actions made with short-term gain in mind may lead to her head rolling in the future. And with that view in mind, the vast majority of her self-interested actions become very helpful to the people around her as well as herself. And that view, likewise, kickstarts her mind into starting to be considerate of others.

The fact that she’s still mainly thinking of her own interests makes for some good comedy, but I think it also reveals an interesting truth in that being self-interested isn’t bad in and of itself. The key is what we decide our self-interests are, whether they be short-term benefits that can bite us later in life, or long-term goals that help us grow and prevent (sometimes literally) painful regrets. And while Mia has room to grow in this way, having a self-interest of “avoid a revolt that will get my head chopped off” is quite a huge… head start.

…I don’t think Mia liked that pun. My apologies.

On that note, one specific example that sticks out to me right now: Mia selling her prized hairpiece in order to help fund a hospital. Her motivation might have been as simple as “that way it won’t end up in the hands of those horrible revolutionaries”, but in that moment, Mia has grasped one of Christianity’s big teachings: the impermanence of physical possessions. Heck, that’s something even I admittedly struggle with sometimes, and Mia has grasped that concept pretty much perfectly. I can’t see that as anything but admirable.

Jeskai Angel: I think maybe the difference between enlightened self-interest and selfishness is not time (i.e., long-term vs. short-term benefits), but that the former does not exclude looking out for the interests of others, and the latter does. A person can act partially out of self-interest without elevating their interest above the good of everyone else, but a truly selfish person is always willing to prioritize themselves over anyone else.

stardf29: I agree with you, but that does bring up an interesting thought: perhaps always prioritizing ourselves over others is the most damaging thing we can do to ourselves.

Also, when I say “short-term” versus “long-term”, I’m not strictly speaking about time, but “scope” in general. Which includes more than just time, but also things like our emotional well-being and other psychological factors that one could probably do an entire graduate thesis on. There’s probably a better phrase than “long-term/short-term” here…

Jeskai Angel: Maybe “long-term” = effort to consider all the consequences, “short-term” = paying attention only to desired consequences?

Gaheret: Well, Aristotle would say that we always move when attracted by goods, which are goods for ourselves and also open to others, as common goods. Freedom consists in the ability to choose one of these goods over others, and a good use of freedom would be the “right reason”, which brings us to the best we can achieve, integrally considered. Good things usually give us some pleasure and are also beneficial in the long term, because they are in accord with our nature. Beyond Aristotle, one could say that such a decision can also be a vehicle of love: you choose to bring good things to your friends that you share, in a way, to remove obstacles, to enjoy reality… Ideally, growing in virtue means also learning to be attracted by higher goods and enjoy them more fully. So, there is always some good for us, direct or indirect, in helping others. We are not totally disinterested: only God is, because God does not need anything, and gives of His abundance.

So, in this view, the problem with being an egoist is that either one does not follow the right reason because of a blind spot concerning others, as in the one who eats all the cake when it would be best to enjoy it together, or that one loses part of the good he could enjoy. For example, if Mia defends Tiona without thinking about Tiona herself, she gets less of that interaction that if she appreciated the good there is in defending others when they need it.

This sometimes happens to her, but less and less. She is not so clueless now, and growing.

7. What are your favorite quotes or moments from the novel?

Jeskai Angel: How am I supposed to answer this?! There are SO MANY wonderful lines and scenes in this book. For sheer awesomeness, I think it’s hard to top the scene where Mia rescues Tiona from the bullies:

“Excuse me, but what exactly are you girls doing? …It seemed to me that you were behaving rather rudely toward one of my subjects. …You see, I love all my subjects, and I love them equally. Even the child of the poorest beggar shall not be denied my affection. No matter who they are, so long as they belong to the Empire, I will not condone any discourtesy toward them.”

If any scenes rivals the above, it might be the duel between Abel and The Artist Formerly Known As Remno’s First Prince, especially after Abel hears his brother trashtalk Mia and threaten to abuse her:

“‘You can call me whatever you want. Mock me. Insult me. I don’t care. But,’ Abel stared at his brother with a piercing gaze, ‘if you say one more bad word about Princess Mia…’ He thought of the girl known as ‘the Great Sage of the Empire.’ He thought of the light she’d brought to his world. For her to be robbed of that radiant aura… Was absolutely unacceptable. …’I won’t allow you to insult her any further!'”

Cue the OHKO.

On a humorous note, I’ll offer the scene before that fight: “Mia didn’t actually think badly of Abel’s brother. She… didn’t think anything of him at all, in fact. She’d completely forgotten he existed until this very moment.” What makes this so great is that throughout the book, Mia keeps forming connections she didn’t have in her first life, seeking allies, making a point of remembering names and faces; she is far more humble and caring and interested in other people than she was in her first life. She even remembers the names of other people’s servants! The ONLY person in the whole story she so completely disregards in her second life…is Abel’s brother.

Gaheret: When the worldbuilding started becoming evocative and unique for me: “The Azure Moon Ministry was the administrative agency for the capital city. The Golden Moon Ministry handled taxes. The Scarlet Moon Ministry was the administrative agency for the surrounding rural regions. The Jade Moon Ministry handled foreign affairs. Finally, the Ebony Moon Ministry commanded the seven armies of the empire”.

Despite not liking Sion on the whole, I agree with Jeskai that this fragment about him is quite compelling:

“To Sion, the ability to feel righteous fury — to be justly angry in the face of evil deeds — was an essential quality for those who reigned over the people. However, how many people could truly empathize with the suffering of others? How many could go as far as to feel anger as if they themselves had been wronged? Even Sion, who had been ready to step in himself, would have done so out of a sense of duty. It came from the mind, not the heart. Faced with Mia’s genuine anger toward injustice, he felt that he saw in her the makings of a ruler who truly lived up to his ideals”.

“Sion Sol Sunkland was born the eldest son of the King of Sunkland. “He who reigns over the people must believe firmly in fairness and hold justice close to his heart.”

This was funny, too:

“Unbeknownst to her, the “knowledge” that she was counting on was entirely based on the romance novel Anne’s sister had written. In other words… Not once did she suspect that Anne — five years her senior — was a complete novice at relationships who had never herself been in love before. “How promising,” she said, completely unaware of her terrible misconception. “With you at my side, Anne, I feel as though I’ve gained an army ten thousand strong!”

This was a great way to introduce a character:

“Abel Remno knew he was a loser. Likewise, he knew Remno was a second-rate kingdom. It possessed neither the rich history and tradition of Sunkland nor the sheer might of Tearmoon. Outmatched by even Belluga in influence and authority, it failed to garner any real respect from its neighbors”.

And this one, again about Abel:

“He focused every ounce of his efforts on one single thing. He raised his sword, and he swung it down. He repeated it. Then he did it again, faster. And faster. He devoted all his time to honing the motion. Ever since the night of the dance party, he’d done nothing else. Day after day, he poured his heart and soul into practicing that one swing. And now, after all the sweat and fatigue and pain, it was time. He swung. Today, he would conquer genius. Today, he would slay a god!”

stardf29: So as I mentioned earlier, one of my favorite moments is when Mia sold her beloved hairpin in order to help fund a hospital to prevent a plague. Two great quotes to go with this moment:

“No matter how precious the item, no matter how closely you try to hold onto it, there will be a day… It may go missing, or it may break… but its time will come. Knowing this, the most we can do is to use it well, and thereby give it meaning.”

And then, for something on the funnier side:

And not only was it stolen, it was stolen by a hooligan of a man, rude and violent and with entirely too much beard to be proper. Not that it’d be okay if she was robbed by a handsome fellow with a dashing crop of finely kempt hair, but anyway…

And then a bit later, during a tea party:

“Whatever I did, I did following my heart. There’s no deeper meaning to it than that.” Which was really just a more diplomatic version of, ��What? I did it ’cause I wanted to. Got a problem with that, punk?”

Later on, Mia forgives a horse for sneezing on her:

“Oh please. Why would I possibly want to have a horse killed over a dress?”

For Mia, it was extremely obvious which one was more valuable. A dress couldn’t help her run from the revolutionary army. A horse could.

And, finally, the one point where I am in complete solidarity with the narrator:

Anne and Tiona seemed equally mesmerized by the two princes as they watched with wide, spellbound eyes. As for Liora… She poked at the meat in the sandwich, confirmed that it was well-roasted, and nodded to herself in satisfaction.

Liora, you see, was a girl who knew what was important.

8. Final Comments

Jeskai Angel: I want to express how greatly I appreciated many-short-chapters format of the book. So many LNs have like three 80-page chapters, and it’s stupid. Like, if the chapters are obnoxiously long, why bother with any chapter divisions at all? As Tearmoon Empire demonstrates, chapter divisions are not some kind of natural resource that needs to be rationed. The capacity to include another chapter break in a book is never depleted. Please, authors the world over, if you’re reading this, I beg of you, write using more but shorter chapters. Please and thank you.

stardf29: I think the whole “having lots of chapters” thing is left over from the novel’s origins as a web novel, where it’s more natural to just post a small chapter regularly. Though many such web novels, upon transitioning to light novel form, get several small chapters combined into larger chapters. So this might be more of an editorial decision. Maybe it’s because in Japan, light novels are still a largely physical medium, and combining chapters saves paper by reducing page breaks? It’s definitely better for e-books to have more chapters because it’s easier to jump to a specific part of the book with hyperlinked table of contents.

Whatever the case, looks like Tearmoon Empire kept all of its chapters in the transition to light novel form. Maybe it’s because each chapter has a witty little title? So maybe the real advice is not just to write lots of small chapters, but to give each chapter a title so that your editor has a reason not to combine them all into larger chapters.

Gaheret: I can´t wait for the next volume! I want it to go full French Revolution.

Jeskai Angel: According to the Amazon page for vol. 2 (which becomes available 19 July), the next book does feature a revolution.

Earlier when we were speculating about the narrator, someone (Gaheret, I think?) suggested the narrator might be an older Mia in the future. But I remembered a certain comment by the narrator, about how Mia disliked her bad ending so much, she restarted the whole game to play over again. It’s an obvious video game joke. But assuming Mia’s world is reminiscent of late 18th/early 19th century France, an older Mia wouldn’t have the frame of reference to make such a comment.

stardf29: Ah yes, there is that to take into account. So… maybe the narrator is one of Mia’s descendants, after Mia has told of her story to her family and they started to realize how things got misunderstood, and then as her story continued to be passed down the generations, that sentiment that she was “misunderstood” also got embellished. In this way, the somewhat unreliableness of the narrator can be explained.

As a final comment for me, I should say that I really like the illustrations in this volume. They are clean, cute, and show quite a lot of emotion. I definitely wish there were more of them, but we still got a good batch here.

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Whew, that was a lot to talk about! Of course, we would love to hear what you think about the novel, so post your own answers and thoughts in the comments!

As a reminder, we will be discussing Infinite Dendrogram, Vol. 4 next! The discussion for that will be posted on June 23rd. See you then!

#Light Novels #Christianity #Tearmoon Empire #Tearmoon Teikoku Monogatari #Articles #Author: stardf29 #Author: JeskaiAngel #Author: Gaharet

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paradife-loft · 4 years

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the other day, I was discussing with @the-mirador about how there was one section in The Golden Compass that I had a lot of thoughts & feelings about during rereading, and wanted to get to at further length than I could really do with just a phone keyboard. having a feeling this would a) be really goddamn long and b) be of interest to other people as well, I decided to just write a public post! so - slightly belatedly, here’s James Rants About The Dialogue Between Lee Scoresby and Serafina Pekkala.

(disclaimer: while I have vague recollections of the subsequent two books in the trilogy, emphasis here on the word vague. some of what I’m saying here may be addressed or dealt with by material from Subtle Knife or Amber Spyglass that I don’t remember right now. this is entirely a “reactions to TGC without knowledge of what comes next” post.)

this dialogue starts out with Lee asking Serafina whether it’s likely the people in his balloon are going to be attacked further if they continue on their current course of action, because going into outright war wasn’t the expedition he signed up and was paid for, and specifically armed conflict would likely do damage to his balloon - his means of making a living, which he’d have to repair on his own dime without the usual reimbursement of wartime pay.

Serafina, to answer this, starts talking about how well, actually everybody is already engaged in war whether they know it or not; she also a bit later explains how choices in the way Lee talks about mean less to witches because they live for hundreds of years and “know that every opportunity will come again”. additionally, contrasting with Lee’s concern with whether he’s charged enough for his transport contracts to make up his expenses, she talks about how witches “have different needs” from humans and so aren’t concerned with profit and value, having “no means of exchange apart from mutual aid” - because all they need to do to fly is take a branch from an abundantly present tree (instead of making all manner of costly repairs to a piece of technology), and they have no need for warm clothing because they don’t feel the cold.

and honestly? this pisses me right the fuck off. I don’t even necessarily disagree with the larger points Serafina is making about how everyone is bound up in the events happening in their time and can’t just push away their involvement because oh I didn’t choose to get into a war - no, you didn’t, but it’s what’s happening and burying your head in the sand in response is going to have consequences just as actively participating would. but g-d do I find it desperately obnoxious when a person or group who operates on a different scale of concern from day-to-day people (or their relevant contextual stand-in), voices this “wise”, implicitly narratively valorised point of view that the regular person’s mundane, venal concerns like how to make a living, whether they’re being given enough information to go into a situation with some amount of agency, whether they’re being taken advantage of and then hung out to dry or not, are shortsighted and petty and immaterial in the face of Destiny TM.

I mean maybe this is just that I’m an adult now who pays fucking rent and not a kid going starry-eyed at the invocation of the concept of witches, but boy did reading Lee Scoresby’s perspective here give me a massive “ahahaha well I guess I sure am American, aren’t I” sense of fuckor.

(but also? big-picture concerns and day-to-day livability concerns aren’t mutually exclusive. it’s come up repeatedly in pieces of Torah and Talmud study groups I’ve attended, places where Jewish law and discussion express ethical living, holiness, in the minutiae of legal arguments over water rights, how to properly materially compensate a person for the loss of a resource they use to live! doing right by others is a matter of learning about these kinds of details, because they have dramatic impacts on the quality of life of people all around you. these things are what make a society good to live in.)

second point that pisses me off: the idea of mutual aid arising only from beings of a different nature from humans entirely, who don’t need to deal with such pesky things as limited time and resource scarcity and bodies subject to the elements, of course not~ like fuck. give me the mutual aid that is a struggle. give me the mutual aid of people who understand the difficulty and the costs and care, desperately, how they can figure out the best way to equitably distribute limited time and resources to the people who need them, in frail and fragile and limited mortal bodies. I don’t want this kind of utopianism in the original sense of the word, where you need to escape the nature of humans’ present conditions of existence to get to an otherwise nonexistent place. Mutual Aid in the initial Kropotkin discussion is about a strategy of cooperation in and amongst the natural world, a method of survival among humans and other animals that are still entirely subject to these weaknesses that witches are not. don’t make it into a way of living that’s wise and superior and unreachable.

....oh, and speaking of human nature, another part that made me want to scream a lot, in the subsequent conversation between Serafina and Lyra: Serafina talks about how there was a time when she would have traded her existence as a witch to be with Farder Coram as a human wife, though it’s impossible because “you cannot change what you are, only what you do”. or: a reinforcement of the narrative’s turning up its nose at Iofur Raknison who wishes to interact with humans on human terms, and forsakes “innate bear-ness” for a ~sad pale mockery of humanness that leaves him and his following less than either proper human or bear. because that’s the damn thing: if you can’t change your nature, and you can either embrace your nature or refuse it and become less than, then no, you don’t actually have the opportunity to change what you do! it’s either “be what you’re supposed to or else you’ll just suck I guess”. (Lee Scoresby frames things in terms of free will which I don’t agree with because I’m a dang materialist bastard, but motherfuck am I ragefully on his side here on the topic of “let people have an actual choice!”)

like, this is my real 100% ride-or-die position on this: fuck “whatever your fundamental nature is”. do mad science! learn how to take a bear and turn him into a human if that’s what he wants! (don’t fucking set up a disgusting hierarchy of “humans are the best and any other sentients will at best be tolerated with tittering amused snobbery while we manipulate them for our own gain“ so that the desire to become a human is fundamentally a coerced one; don’t set up a dang child-mutilation compound out in the tundra to avoid getting slapped on the wrist by your IRB. but y’know, besides that shit.) if a person wants to change something about who or what they are - setting aside discussions of societal coercion that don’t present each option as equally viable because that’s a whole big and important thing but it’s not the point I’m making here - then in abstraction before we get to questions about the repercussions in other parts of We Live In A Society, it is a good thing to look for a way to help them do it. I’m a transhumanist. fuck nature, fuck destiny, fuck limits.

so, I don’t know. perhaps you can make the case that nobody here is an unbiased narrator supported by the story itself; these are just perspectives about what is right that are shaped invariably by the fact that in this universe for the time being, destiny and fate and immutable natures do exist, and basically every culture most of the characters come from has instilled into them, you’ve just gotta make your peace with that. I don’t think I agree with that argument, which is a large part of why these parts of the story make me as angry as they do; there doesn’t seem to be thusfar any indication that fighting against the determinism of “your nature” is particularly admirable. (I say this even in the context of Lord Asriel’s last speech to Mrs. Coulter, honestly, because in this metaphysical reality that he accepts where Adam and Eve and original sin are real things, the idea of humans free from sin doesn’t seem impossible by nature, only by history and the tyranny of decisions made by people and institutions.)

anyway, I think that’s about it for now. so in conclusion, fuck this noise, fuck that noise, this metaphysical-narrative stance makes me angry, and good night! :D

#James liveblogs books #meta #rambling #op #I'm curious to see what happens in TSK and TAS and how that modifies what I'm saying here tbh #because WOW if there aren't substantial changes made.... I'm much pissier about the metaphysics of this setting and story than I used to be #His Dark Materials /

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blindestspot · 7 years

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"Aegon, his is the song of ice and fire"

I've come to realize that it is a cop-out to say that bad writing is impossible to analyze and predict. Because for all writing you can ask the question "why it was written this way?" A bad execution doesn't erase the intention behind it.

Of course, Game of Thrones is an adaptation, so one cannot look at D&D and GRRM's writing as ultimately separate things. D&D might take a few detours but you cannot solely use their writing to predict the ending because their ending is supposed be GRRM's ending. But I think looking at those detours and why these detours exists, allows us a glimpse at that ending.

And this is why I want to talk about GRRM's writing first, more specifically how he accomplishes the appearance of a realistic narrative/plot. Obviously world-building and realistic, psychologically sound characterization play a role. But he also uses a trick in order for the plot to appear more realistic than it is. This trick is a combination of two things: the cast of "thousands", in which is a large amount of characters are well-rounded, three-dimensional, are given full backstories and appear to be important to the main narrative; and the random appearance of luck.

The cast of thousands is a hyperbole but GRRM keeps a very large cast and if he loses important cast members, he is quick to replace them with other characters that also look like they will play an important part of the endgame. Aegon from Essos, Arianne, Val, the Greyjoy Uncles, to name a few, come into the story after important characters like Robb, Tywin and Balon disappear from it.

The “random luck” part is that luck for any character doesn't appear to align itself with the character's moral orientation. Good people have both good and bad luck and bad people have good and bad luck as well. This allows the bad guys to even get ahead temporarily, since they're more ruthless in using their good luck. It's a pattern that culminates in the Red Wedding when the good guys take a huge blow and the bad guys win, fostering the Wikipedia-approved impression that the whole ASOIAF-verse is very "grimdark".

But from there on narrative karma begins to catch up with the more villainous characters, with luck deserting them. And then they are dropping like flies: Joffrey, Tywin, Lysa Arryn, Janos Slynt... Going by the spoiler that are the deaths on GOT (which imply that these dead characters will never win/come out on top in the books and are also very likely to end up dead there)... narrative karma will come for many other bad guys as well. In fact, going by the show, only latecomer and Joffrey/Ramsay replacement Euron Greyjoy stands any chance to pull the "villain gets away with it" trope since Cersei, the Night King, Melisandre and Varys are pretty much doomed and no other important villain is left. (And the latter two are even rather morally gray than outright villains.)

No wonder people start to speculate whether a good guy will become corrupted and evil with this shortest of shortlists of leftover karma-evading villains.

Luck works a bit differently for good guys. It doesn't protect some of them but it protects a few of them quite considerably. I believe the fandom term is "plot armor" which a few characters have to the point that the readers have stopped believing in cliffhangers that put their survival in question. They are just "too important" to die. And that's why after ADWD most people speculated about the nature of Jon's stab wounds or the nature of his inevitable resurrection rather than wondering whether Aegon from Essos would take over his narrative.

They were not fooled because GRRM's trick has an expiration date. People catch on, no matter how many "important" characters he adds and how much "bad but survivable" luck his important characters get. Jon is supposed to appear to have the bad luck to get stabbed to death, but in reality we all know that he will have the good luck to be resurrected.

D&D have mostly (but not entirely) abandoned GRRM's trick. Now this is in part because they're farther ahead in the story but it's far from being the only reason.

There are actually multiple reasons to deviate from the books, so I’ll mention the obvious first: time, budget and effort. If GOT wanted to do all these extra storylines/characters that we know amount to nothing important in the end, they would need more seasons, more actors, more time, more money. It is understandable that they might consider that to be a pointless waste of time.

Another reason is that change can snowball, requiring more change. A small change early on and suddenly original storylines do not work quite as they should. Take the Jeyne Westerling storyline, for example. In the books Robb is sixteen and she is his first girlfriend, to use modern terms. Of course, when given the choice between dishonoring a betrothal to an ugly Frey girl or dishonoring his first serious girlfriend, the choice of a teenager is quite obvious.

In the show Robb is ten years older and re-enacting this storyline doesn't really work. He is not a green, dumb teenager, he is an adult man and should know better. It would play out pretty badly on screen and would be terribly strange, dumb and hypocritical for the character to do. It is pretty apparent that Talisa is the attempt to make him look less like an idiot and to prop him up with a great romance instead. D&D turned Jeyne Westerling into this hot, compassionate, witty, intelligent Doctors Without Borders volunteer, the sort of woman that in the real world would be worth losing your head for. (They actually only changed the name to Talisa because GRRM insisted. So yes, "Talisa" was their way of overhauling teenager-appropriate love interest Jeyne.) Talisa didn't quite work out for a lot of the audience but that's besides the point. We are asking why she was there, not why she didn't work.

A similar thing goes on with Shae and her relationship with Tyrion. In the books, despite seeing her pretty much only from Tyrion's point of view, we know she is only with him for the money, she is a selfish person and Tyrion is abusive towards her. So he makes a bad decision for being with a selfish person like that, an idiot for deluding himself about why she is with him and an abusive douchebag on top of that.

In the show, Shae cares about other people besides herself, falls in love with Tyrion and he doesn't abuse her when they are in a relationship. This not only makes him smarter than his book counterpart for choosing to be with secretly kind-hearted Shae and an actual nice guy for not being an abusive jerk. It actually elevates and makes him look awesome for making this cynical woman fall for him with his wit and charm. It's a total white-wash for Tyrion.

But then it's also just another white-wash for Tyrion in a long line of white-washes. As I said, once you make a change you have to commit to the change. And once D&D decided to make Tyrion the focal point for marketing, promo and everything else for three seasons after they lost Sean Bean, they needed to change book Tyrion in order for him to be a palatable and relatable character. Being a dumb, deluded, abusive douchebag was no longer something he could be. And so a character like Shae was good enough to be used as a prop for that change – to the point of entirely disregarding her original characterization.

Of course that white-washing also encompasses the third reason for abandoning a book plot: sacrificing some plot logic in service of propping up characters. That Shae used to be in love with Tyrion makes her presence in Tywin's bed and her murder kind of way more random than it is in the books. And yet it is just one more of the many, many plot holes that are created to cater to character. That's why Cersei is the popular ruler of Kings Landing in Season Seven despite blowing up the Westerosi Vatican and pope. (Of course, it helps that she has taken over Aegon from Essos' plot and that Lena Headey can chew scenery like nobody’s business. Sacrificing a bit of story logic to replace Aegon from Essos with Lena Headey playing someone really smart named Cersei is probably the most win-win alteration of the books that D&D have ever congratulated themselves on.)

Sacrificing plot logic for character is also why Arya can give the most fearsome death cult in the world the middle finger without consequence when she finally decides to go back to Westeros. The important part of it is that Arya moves on, becomes Arya Stark again. The show cannot be bothered with the realistic minutiae of that decision, what would be required to be able to leave the most fearsome death cult in the world. They don't care, they don't want to get bogged down with it, they wave it off.

And then there is the fourth reason, the one that admittedly fueled D&D's desire to adapt ASOIAF in the first place: the "Oh shit" moment. I used to think of them as water cooler moments, but that's too broad and too narrow. D&D love spectacle and they love surprise moments and both can be "Oh shit" moments but an "Oh shit" moment doesn't need to be that. It's just the moment when a storyline resolves itself with the maximum emotional impact.

It allows their actors to chew maximum amount of scenery (and D&D love it when they do that) and gives GOT emotional weight to make it feel more real, more emotionally involving. Perhaps so emotionally involving that you don't notice the plot holes. (That's a fine strategy, by the way, if you’re good enough to pull it off. Because if your audience weeps properly at the end of Romeo and Juliet, they will never notice how unlikely it was for both characters to get to that place where they would be able to commit suicide in that crypt. A great emotional response can absolutely drown out rational plot analysis.)

Anyway, “Oh shit" moments are not just surprises and high-budget spectacles like the Red Wedding or Cersei blowing up the Sept. They can also be intimate, predictable moments that you saw coming from a mile way, like the scene of Sansa feeding Ramsay to his dogs. This is not only the unsurprising culmination of the Battle of the Bastards episode but also the unsurprising culmination of Sansa's entire Ramsay storyline. They spend nearly two seasons of Sansa's storyline on that moment, for that moment.

So what do these reasons for adaptational changes tell us about the future of GOT?

Well, there is one "Oh shit" moment that they've been working on since the pilot. It has become the sole reason why certain characters have anything to do anymore, why other characters are even featured on the show; it's so important that it's teased in completely unrelated contexts and storylines for ages.

To word it differently: You do know where the focus and the narrative weight lies when you get a single flashback to the creation of the White Walkers while every other flashback is about Lyanna Stark and her baby. Because somewhere at the end of those trail of breadcrumbs, flashbacks, foreshadowing and hints is an "Oh shit" moment that is very, very important to D&D.

Jon's parentage reveal is the most teased about moment of the entire show. There is nothing that comes close to it. It stands to reason that it will be the emotional climax of the show, possibly even outshining the ending.

Now this is going to be a painful moment for Jon. Even GRRM's version of it will not have Jon jumping in joy about the fact that his entire life is based on a lie. There is nothing to suggest that show Jon will feel differently. So if D&D want maximum emotional impact, they need to tighten the screws, they need to make that reveal worse for Jon.

I concur that the obvious way to make it worse is to isolate Jon before, during and after the reveal, to divorce him from all that he holds dear – to divorce him from the North, from his previous supporters, from his family, from his best friend and from his girlfriend. Now obviously, not all of them are going to be upset about the same thing. This is why it becomes quite obvious that D&D used Season Seven to set up a situation in which everyone will be pissed off at him. And this, by the way, perfectly explains why Dany burned the Tarlys, the necessity of Jon/Dany and Jon publicly kneeling in Season Seven. It turns out that it doesn't matter why Jon (and Dany) did these things – if Jon is an honorable fool, a fool in love or someone who figured out that keeping the lady with the dragons happy beats trying to convince untrustworthy Cersei. (Or if Dany is becoming her father.) D&D had him do it (had Dany do it), so the North will hear about him giving up their independence to a “foreign whore” who loves to burn people and hate him for it, and that Sam will be pissed at him for hooking up with his family's killer, and that Dany can feel properly betrayed, thinking her boyfriend only wanted her to usurp her throne. This whole thing is not about the integrity of Jon's character or the integrity of his characterization, or about anyone’s integrity or integrity of their characterization and plot. It's about making Jon’s parentage reveal go as badly as possible for him. It's about creating the ultimate "Oh shit" moment of pain. Nothing matters beyond that, everything is a prop for it. A Watsonian reading of Jon’s motives is as pointless as the theory that Talisa Maegyr was a Lannister spy.

Yes, it’s bad writing to disregard plot and characterization integrity for the emotional impact of an “Oh shit” moment. No one’s denying that. But it’s exactly the type of bad writing that has been with us all this time. If we take bad writing as seriously as good writing, then using previous writing tactics to come to the conclusion that more typical bad writing is awaiting us, is a perfectly legitimate conclusion.

Of course, this begs the question of why D&D put so much weight on that one moment? Why haven't we got so much foreshadowing and preparation for the moment when Dany plants her behind on the Iron Throne or Jaime strangles Cersei? Or even for the moment the Night King gets defeated? Why is there nothing else that comes even close to the amount of prep that Jon's parentage reveal gets? And why is this, his moment allowed to turn every other character into a prop for his emotional reaction? Why does he matter so much? And is this just D&D fucking up GRRM's vision yet once more?

You know GRRM actually told us the answer to this particular question a long, long time ago in A Clash of Kings: "Aegon, [...] He has a song [...] his is the song of ice and fire." This is the reality that GRRM tries so hard to disguise with his cast of thousands. Jon... Aegon isn't just an important character with plot armor, he is the main character. He is the protagonist. This way too large book series is his song, his story. The Song of Ice and Fire is Jon’s. D&D haven't invented that, they simply refused to conceal it as desperately with Aegons from Essos as GRRM does.

Now, if we assume I am right (which I do), then there are basically two ways that this story can end: either with Jon's death (literal or figurative) or him becoming king. Now the classic self-sacrifice for the greater good is the oldest trope around. This means it always has good odds. But these two options are not necessarily mutually exclusive paths. A figurative death could tie in very well with a kingship and kingship might end up in death. But if we are talking about actual lasting, endgame, Aragon-in-Lord-of-the-Rings kingship, then something really interesting is going on.

GRRM once complained that Lord of the Rings makes Aragorn this ideal, promised king without ever explaining what his ruling looked like. What happened to the baby orcs? What was his tax policy? Now if GRRM plans to have a king in the end who is "Aegon Aragorn with a tax policy" then Jon has gotten some training for that already. He has been Lord Commander in the books and the show and he has been King in the North in the show. Since Robb's will is the unresolved Chekov's Gun that is notably still around, there is some chance that in the books he will become King in the North as well. Both positions allow him plenty of hands-on experience for ruling and allow the reader a pretty good idea about what he will do with the baby orcs and his tax policy should he get in power for a third time. (Third time’s a charm.) So what I see is that he is the only character with a sustainable "tax policy" that could allow Westeros to flourish and a claim. (Nope, "ruling sucks, I am better off conquering" is not a sustainable policy for the long-term betterment of a country.) And he is the protagonist, this is his story, he is good guy, he doesn't want to be king, he is possibly (within the in-universe mythology) the chosen one and he has already died once, making a second death a bit anti-climactic. To be fair though, there are people without claims who would make decent regents for a child with a claim, so the self-sacrificial death isn't off the table. (By the way, the historical precedents for child monarchs in medieval English history, which inspired ASOIAF, are mostly pretty darn depressing.) But for some reason, I keep circling back to something I didn't recall when I first start mulling about this subject. I could remember the "Aegon... his is the song of ice and fire" bit. But I had forgotten how that vision of Rhaegar actually begins: "Aegon," he said to a woman nursing a newborn babe in a great wooden bed. "What better name for a king?"

#Jon Snow #Aegon Targaryen #A Song of Ice and Fire #Game of Thrones #ASoIaF #meta

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fairyboydammit · 7 years

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Modules: Compare and Contrast

So I'm gonna talk about RPG modules.

First a little background, I've been playing tabletop RPGs off and on for two decades. Most of my experience is in D&D and other sword & sorcery type games but I've also played a smattering of other stuff, including Star Trek, GURPS, Star Wars (D20, not the West End version sadly) BESM, Shadowrun, White Wolf and Warhammer 40k. I've run about half the games I've played in and have traveled the whole spectrum from “Only lazy uncreative chumps use premade modules“ to “They don't have the monster stats in the module book? They seriously expect me to run this with a monster manual open too?“ So I've had an evolving relationship with modules and premade adventures, these days I've come to embrace them as a wonderful tool for facilitating fun game nights, though I do still love writing my own stuff now and then.

The impetus to write this came from having run two very different modules with wildly different results and with my perspective and experience I'm going to try to talk about why I think my experiences were so different, and what the differences in the modules had to do with it.

So, the two adventures I've been running are Hoard of the Dragon Queen, a module for 5th edition D&D that came out recently, and the Witchfire Trilogy, a campaign written for the D&D 3.5 version of the Iron Kingdoms roleplaying game which I adapted to use the more recent Iron Kingdoms tabletop rules. Some early disclaimers; Witchfire I'm running in person, Hoard I ran over Roll20 and Discord, the parties for each game were composed of different groups of people, the only person these two games have in common is me running them, and I know the players and how I interacted with them have had an impact on how the game goes so I'm going to try to account for those factors in how I judge these modules, but my experiences will color my perceptions for good or ill, objectivity is unattainable.

Let's start with the beginnings, both adventures start the party at 1st level, parties fresh out of character creation and open with some action. In Witchfire, the party starts the game as hired caravan guards going through a swamp, they get ambushed by Goblins and must defend the caravan. This is a cakewalk of a combat encounter, the goblins are weak and don't pose a real threat to the party, their objective is to steal from the wagons more than kill the players. I've played through this module before and this is never a tough fight, it serves mostly as a tutorial to introduce combat to the party and set up travel to the city most of the adventure takes place in. When I ran it this time the party wiped out the goblins in about 3 turns and did a good job introducing them to the rules, what they were capable of and how the system worked. The first encounter in Hoard of the Dragon Queen is a village being attacked by a Dragon. With an army. The encounter is actually a series of encounters, the adventurers are approaching the village of Greenest, under attack by the dragon and an army of cultists and kobolds. The first encounter in the series of encounters this entails is very similar to the Witchfire one in some respects, eight kobolds attacking a family, the book states the kobolds will not even attack the party if they don't intervene. So much like Witchfire you have a low-power encounter without much real threat to the party. A key difference I notice is that in Witchfire, once the goblins are beaten, that's the end of the fighting, the caravan cleans up, repairs and heads on to town, the party doesn't have another fight for over a day (barring particularly violent and rambunctious players) in Hoard, this encounter is followed by a series of encounters aiding the villagers of Greenest, the book intends for the party to do about seven of these before getting a Long Rest (in 5th edition, Long Rests restore all hit points and expended spell slots, Short rests can replenish some health but at first level you can only benefit from one Short Rest before taking a Long one) given that most of these encounters involve combat of some kind, potentially lethal combat in some cases, this can be daunting or outright hazardous to a first level party as they have limited means to heal themselves at this point.

After the goblin ambush in Witchfire the party heads to Corvis and meets The Main Questgiver who sets them down the path of the adventure proper with some investigation missions, leaving aside combat for at least an entire game session while the party explores the city and gathers information. Hoard has the party hole up in the town's keep until morning and face a tacitly unfair combat encounter that will likely leave a party member dead. I don't want to get too wrapped up in minutiae or bogged down in encounters, but felt these two beginnings warranted being contrasted. Witchfire opens with a quick and easy fight to introduce the mechanics, and introduces the setting in a moment of peace, when the party has had time to collect themselves from the fight. Hoard bombards the party from the word go, spiking the tension for what could easily be the entire duration of your play session and chasing it almost immediately with another fight.

Gonna switch gears to structure. Witchfire has a positively immense amount of preamble, the book dedicates 32 pages to the background of the city, its environs, the events preceding the adventure, where the notable NPCs are concerned with it and what information needs to be imparted to the PCs, and what has happened that they will have no idea about yet. Hoard has barely a page of content before the first encounter and most of it is just general background on the setting, where the adventure will be taking them and an overview of the adventures events. I don't want to seem overly unfair to Hoard, as being set in the Forgotten Realms means all the lore is already out there in one form or another, so they don't need to include the entire history of the Time of Troubles or the Spellplague at the beginning of this adventure, but what background they do provide is very barebones, giving very one-dimensional accounts of the NPCs and their motivations, which leads to some severe confusion later on.

NPCs can be tricky to write in any situation, simply because it's impossible to hand a GM a script of everything someone might possibly say to account for what a party might be, say or do. Hoard has fairly minimalist scripts, giving most NPCs essentially just a blurb about what they need the party to do, sadly some of its best NPC characterization is wasted on an extended travelling section that my players at least just wanted to be over. Witchfire does a similar thing but goes an extra mile in giving extended NPC dialogues a rough outline. In situations where NPCs will have extended conversations with PCs, the books gives them introductory dialog and a few scripted lines, then lays out some ground rules, stating what the NPCs motivation is, what they know, what they will tell the players, and what they will ask the players. I cannot tell you how useful this extra information was, even when surprised by a situation the book didn't anticipate, the context provided by the additional background gave me enough to infer a consistent and in-character reaction. This forethought also helped turn what would have been exposition dumps into question and answer sessions that were engaging for the players. Hoard had some serious problems with not clearly describing NPC motives and intentions, to the point where I had the party walk in on a character who the book gave absolutely no indication how they would react, beyond implying he'd be kind of a dick about it.

Both of these campaigns have relatively little downtime, throwing developments and encounters without giving the party a lot of time to mess about and do other things, but the way they do this is set up drastically differently. Hoard has periods of intense activity at the beginning and end, with a sort of 'downtime' period in the middle, consisting mostly of travel. This approach is made necessary by the narrative but makes for bad pacing. By the time the party gets to the travel section they mostly just want to move on to the next dungeon/adventure beat because that's what the module has accustomed them to. To further exacerbate things, the travel section isn't even really downtime because of the random encounters and intrigue that persist throughout it, so it ends up being run like a poorly structured dungeon where the party is stuck on a wagon going through it. Witchfire has very little downtime but a much more regular pace, players generally have a period of buildup followed by a period of decompression surrounding each of the dungeons or action beats, which themselves gradually ramp up in scope and intensity before climaxing (usually near the end of each of the three 'books' the campaign is composed of) each one feels like an organic endpoint too, giving the party some good falling action and resolution before leading them into another adventure in the next book.

Let's talk nitty-gritty stuff now, dungeon and encounter layouts. Both of these campaigns have some impressive dungeons and some really fun encounters, Both also take steps to prepare the DM for the specifics of the dungeon environments, though Hoard takes a slightly more cumbersome path. The dungeons in Hoard will often have environmental conditions (light, effects of weather, patrols etc.) listed at the beginning of each dungeon but then not mentioned in the pertinent areas, which can be confusing if you haven't committed the entire section to memory or have lost details in the intervening time in the dungeon. Also, a thing that only happens once or twice but is still really frustrating that Hoard does: Information critical to the party in order to progress/accomplish a stated goal that they have literally no way of obtaining, that is bad structure. Witchfire by and large does a really good job putting all pertinent information in the room descriptions, as well as giving almost every dungeon room a clearly marked “Read this out loud“ flavor text callout (another thing Hoard neglects on a few occasions)

I suppose one more thing is important to cover before narrative structure and I suppose it can be best described as 'progression'. Progression and levelling systems are kind of the hallmark of the RPG genre, to the point where video games say they have 'RPG elements' because after you do a certain amount of stuff a number goes up, and levelling up is important to engagement and helps pace a campaign. I can't really compare these two games in terms of levelling up just because the adventures are different lengths, they use different systemic scales to determine levels and relative power, it just doesn't work that well, but there's another important progression system I can call upon: Loot. Loot is also a hallmark of RPGs and especially in games like D&D your equipment can be as much an indicator of your power as your level. Often times upgrading equipment eventually becomes the only way to improve key aspects of your character's capabilities, so its importance is hard to overstate. Even 20th level veteran characters can be total pushovers without the cartload of epic loot they've accumulated in that time. In Hoard of the Dragon Queen the party will find precisely zero magic items until the penultimate dungeon. Which they will be level 7 upon completing. Even basic equipment is startlingly rare throughout this campaign, with most of the enemies who use equipment having low-quality gear that party won't need. Even the treasure they do find (primarily currency; coins, gems etc.) isn't of much use as they're only in a town long enough to go shopping once near the beginning of the adventure. Now I've run low-magic/low-treasure games before, they can pose unique and interesting challenges and be a lot of fun if you're prepared for them. Whoever wrote this campaign however was not, as well before the party will see it's first +1 magic sword (in the final dungeon btw) they'll encounter monsters resistant to nonmagical attacks, making what should be relatively standard fights to build tension on the way to a real showdown into bone-crunching slogs where spellcasters exhaust their entire arsenal and fighters slash away for hours at enemies they can barely damage. This is, in my opinion, simply an unforgivable oversight in terms of game design. Given the numerous typos and editing mistakes in this campaign it would not surprise me at all if they had just left out some sections where the players were supposed to find some decent equipment, as it was I threw in a few caches to get my party up to having a fighting chance. I'm all for challenging players and giving them a fight that really tests them but there's an art to crafting a real challenge and throwing something at the party that you haven't given them the tools to deal with is not part of it. If I hadn't added my own loot to the game most of the party would be facing the final boss with the exact same gear they started with, and while that can work in some games, D&D is not one of them. Witchfire was a bit of an odd case because of how magic items work in IKRPG and the fact that it was written for an earlier edition of D&D made that a bit off for my campaign but as written, the party found a magic item (albeit a dagger) in the first dungeon, and had the potential to find more substantial equipment upgrades at a fairly regular pace throughout the game, and even had a reward for a side quest be „One free masterwork item of your choice“ at the local weapon shop, so even people with obscure weapon preferences could be assured they wouldn't be left out.

Okay now it's time for Narrative structure, buckle in. One of the big problems I had with Hoard was getting the characters invested, they never stayed in any place long enough to care about it, never spent enough time with an NPC to care about them, never encountered an antagonist enough times to build a rivalry with them, and while some of this I can chalk up to the travelling nature of the campaign, some it I can't. In the extended caravanning section the party has chances to meet up and talk with some NPCs but they're almost immediately shunted off somewhere else at the next stop, the party never returns to Greenest or speaks to anyone from it again. My party's most protracted NPC relationship was with a named Lizardfolk NPC about 2/3 into the campaign and didn't last past that particular dungeon. Even the organizations they were ostensibly working for only spoke to them once the entire adventure. This is not good writing, this is not good engagement, if I was reading a novel about these events I would constantly be asking myself “Why do these adventurers even care?” and I'm sure some of my players asked themselves that at least once over the course of this game, which is not a good sign. Witchfire on the other hand, I will first say has the rather significant benefit of actually being a series of novels, though honestly the roles of the adventurers are written in such a way that I can't even grasp what must happen in the novels, unless they just include a set of characters who make up the adventuring party. I'll actually probably go more in-depth in another piece about the writing in Witchfire but for now I'll stick to my comparisons. By having the campaign take place almost entirely in one city, the party has time, and inclination to get acquainted and invested in it, they're going to be interacting with this place for a while, they're going to go to places and visit people multiple times, the person they spoke to in chapter 1 will still be there in chapter 10 and that makes it easier for them to care. The primary quest giver, Father Dumas, is a staple of the campaign and rather than being relegated to a simple exclamation point telling the party where to go to next, he becomes a person, with a complex relationship to the story, the antagonist, the other NPCs, the city itself and yes, the characters. Even minor NPCs are given life and depth and engender empathy from the players. When terrible events befall the city my players were wracked with concern, vowing revenge on those who did this and putting thought and heart into how they were going to help.

Writing a novel is hard work, so is coming up with interesting and compelling scenarios for games, writing a tabletop campaign is a delicate alchemy of these endeavors and can be tougher than both. I wanted to write this primarily to show how a well-written and structured adventure could be truly amazing for everyone involved, and how laziness, poor structuring choices and a lack of attention to detail can make what should be a ton of fun with your friends feel mediocre, or even like a slog. I've learned a lot from these experiences, and I hope some of it I've been able to impart to others. To anyone out there thinking of writing a campaign or just running something fun with their friends, I hope this has been a helpful look into some of the harder to see aspects of gaming. Happy role-playing everyone!

#Dungeons and Dragons #Tabletop #modules #IKRPG #Iron Kingdoms #Witchfire #Hoard of the Dragon Queen #Forgotten Realms

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prudencepaccard · 7 years

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I think I may finally have gotten Jean-Pierre Melville’s L’Armée des ombres out of my system

like, maybe?

(under the cut there is a self-indulgent essay in French. That is what is under the cut)

Esthétique de personn(ag)e et de lieu dans L’Armée des ombres

L’œuvre de Jean-Pierre Melville est marquée d’une unité et d’une cohérence qui sont renforcées, plutôt que trahies, par une certaine idiosyncrasie. Connu pour ses films néo-noirs, dit à un moment le parrain de la nouvelle vague, Melville a inventé son propre « cool » et l’a mis au cœur de tout son travail. On dirait que c’est un réalisateur bien inattendu pour un film de guerre, et pourtant c’est précisément en adaptant un roman de l’Occupation qu’il a lancé sa carrière : bien avant Bob le Flambeur (1956), Le Samouraï (1967) et Le Cercle Rouge (1970), Le Silence de la mer a été tourné en demi-secret en 1949 d'après un roman de Vercors. Avec L’Armée des ombres (1969)—encore une adaptation—Melville clôt presque sa filmographie, la fermant en boucle à la crépuscule de l’époque gaulliste, une vingtaine d'années après sa lecture du roman de Kessel (qu'il a cependant voulu adapter tout au long de cette période).

Hors de la rubrique de la propagande et du registre héroïque, le film est à la fois typique et atypique de Melville. Dans un essai éponyme, Adrian Danks soutient d'abord que L'Armée des ombres est un véritable film de guerre: "Unlike, say, Godard, Melville’s films are less pastiches or collages of other films and genres than slightly displaced but ‘fully’ formed examples of the cinemas they refer to (thus, L’Armeé des Ombres is still very much a war film, a Resistance film)." Il souligne aussi l'unité de la filmographie de Melville, tout en insistant que L'Armée des ombres n'est pas calqué sur ses films de genre:

Melville’s cinema is more difficult to encapsulate than is often suggested. L’Armeé des ombres is often regarded as of-a-piece with the gangster films (Le Deuxième Souffle [1966], Le Samouraï [1967], Le Cercle Rouge [1970]) which surround it in his filmography, and yet, these evident but misleading correspondences tend to obscure the explicit specificity of the milieu depicted in the film, its faithfulness to and respect for the seminal Resistance novel by Joseph Kessel upon which it is based, the importance of elements of Melville’s own Resistance experience woven throughout, and the unusually heightened warmth and deep humanity that seeps into the chilly sounds and images that define the film.

L'Armée des ombres, donc, ne s'assimile pas facilement dans une schéma générique, mais il fait partie--avec les films de genre (si on les appelle films de gangster, films noirs, polars, ou autrement)--d'une vision et d'une démarche cohérentes, contenant des topoï et des images qui reparaissent, et régies par un traitement scénique, spatiale, et temporelle qui est tout à fait particulier à Melville. C'est une figure radicalement indépendante (et isolée), au niveau politique aussi bien qu'artistique; quand son interlocuteur lui demande dans Melville on Melville s'il est "a man of the Right," il répond, "Well, it amuses me to say so, because everyone else claims to be Left wing, and that irritates me. I hate following the crowd" (159) et précise, "I'm wary of any political credo, and I have no religious beliefs whatsoever" (160) mais que s'il faut choisir, il choisira quelque chose de contradictoire et d'indescriptible: "I'm a Right wing anarchist--though I suppose that's a barbarism and that no such thing really exists. Let's say that I'm an anarcho-feudalist" (159).

Son autonomie, d'ailleurs, est de première importance, et il fera tout pour le préserver sans faire de mal à personne; l'idée que sa liberté "termine où commence celle de son voisin" (pour ainsi dire) provoque la réponse, "[M]y liberty subsumes that of my neighbor, and I respect it absolutely. I would do nothing to harm him, but as a last resort I might arrange to have no neighbors. Which, as you will have noticed, I have done both in this house where we are now and in my country home. I bother nobody, and in bothering nobody I have also arranged things so that nobody can bother me" (160). Melville reconnait volontiers ses influences et ses dettes (artistiques tant que financières), mais résiste des comparaisons à ses contemporains qu'il trouve inexactes; par exemple, il refuse l'idée qu'il a cherché à imiter Bresson: "I sometimes read...'Melville is being Bressonian.' I'm sorry, but it's Bresson who has always been Melvillian...As a matter of fact Bresson did not deny it when André Bazin put it to him one day that he had been influenced by me. All this has been forgotten since" (27).

Qu'est-ce qui caractérise et définit le cinéma de Melville, et en quoi est-il bien adapté pour un film sur la Résistance ? La première partie de cette question est vaste et exige une étude comparative de toute sa filmographie (ce qui dépasse ce travail), mais la deuxième partie peut être considérée dans le cadre d'une lecture approfondie du film. On peut prendre pour point de départ cette citation de Danks, qui réunit le ton, l'espace, la couleur, etc. dans sa description du style melvillien comme il se décline dans L'Armée des ombres:

The film's dream-like, almost clandestine sense of geography, place and period sits alongside equally evocative but austere observations of the realistic minutiae of the Resistance movement. Throughout, it establishes a kind of memory world of isolation, intimate moments, and desperation, producing, in the process, an overwhelming sense of lived experience. One can literally feel time passing in L’Armeé des Ombres, as the cold, seasons, cultural stagnation and desperate actions of the characters are matched by the cinematography’s restricted tonal palette (all green, blue and grey).

Le film est alors à la fois réaliste et onirique, "at once a highly personal...non-naturalistic, dream-like fictional narrative and a kind of documentary"; en effet, "[e]verything and yet nothing seems real" (ibid.). On pourrait le comparer à un tableau d'Edward Hopper; ce dernier est classifié comme un peintre réaliste, mais Nighthawks ne se distingue non seulement par son emploi magistral de la lumière et de l'ombre, mais également par des détails qui détonnent--notamment le manque d'une porte dans le restaurant. L'Armée des ombres contient cette même inquiétude, claustrophobie et irréalité hyper-réelle. Ni tout à fait détaché, ni tout à fait immédiat, le film est marqué par une froideur styl(is)ée qui n'exclut pas de vives émotions.

Au risque de trop insister sur le côté dialectique et contradictoire de l'œuvre de Melville, il faut ajouter encore une tension: celle du personnel et de l'impersonnel. Même si les détails restent un peu flous[1], la participation de Melville dans la Résistance est (vue comme) intégrale à son cinéma. Cependant, le rapport assez apparente entre la vie de Melville et le sujet du film est nuancé par son attitude ambivalente envers la réalité et le passé, qu'il décline longuement dans Melville On Melville. La mémoire est essentielle au cinéma de Melville, mais il ne faut pas la confondre avec l'autobiographie; il s'agit de ce qu'il a vu, et non pas ce qu'il a vécu: "[W]hat people often assume to be imagination in my films is really memory, things I have noticed walking down the street or being with people--transposed, of course, because I have a horror of showing things I have actually experienced" (8).

Cette combinaison de détails tirés de sa mémoire, tels des artéfacts--par exemple, un appartement dans Deux hommes dans Manhattan qui était "an exact reconstruction, without any invention, of a homosexual's apartment [Melville] had seen in Greenwich Village at the time" (73), et de "transposition" qui les éloigne de la vie du réalisateur, donne lieu à une certaine "fausseté" travaillée: "I never work in realism, and I don't want to...I am not a documentarist. And since I am careful never to be realistic, there is no more inaccurate portraitist than I am. What I do is false. Always" (69).

Ses films ne sont donc pas à propos de lui; ils reflètent son esthétique, mais sa démarche est fondamentalement impersonnelle:

You mustn't try to interweave what I do in my films with what I am in life. You know very well who I am in life: a man living in solitude for five--my wife and three cats--who has made it an absolute rule not to associate with his contemporaries...Don't ever think, even if I sometimes feel strongly about the things I tell you, that there is any connection between me and my characters. I tell stories that interest me, or which, transposed, recall a period of my life. But they are never personal stories. Never! Never! Never! It is true that there is a scene in L'Armée des ombres which relates to my private life; but it's the only one and it only lasts two minutes (118).

Plus tard, Melville parle en plus de détail du coté exceptionnellement personnel du film. Il admet qu'il y a mis ses expériences, mais insiste comme toujours sur un manque de fidélité à l'histoire: "For the first time in this film I show things I have known and experienced. Nevertheless my truth, of course, is subjective and has nothing to do with actual truth. With the passing of time we are inclined to recall what suits us rather than what has actually happened" (140). Il reconnait volontiers que le livre de Kessel sera médié et réinterpreté non seulement par sa vision artistique, mais aussi par sa propre mémoire: "As the story proceeds, my personal recollections are mingled with Kessel's, because we lived the same war" (146).

D'ailleurs, il est conscient de faire un "period piece," pour ainsi dire: "The book written by Kessel in the heat of the moment in 1943 is necessarily very different from the film shot cold by me in 1969. There are many things in the book--wonderful things--which it is impossible to film now. Out of a sublime documentary about the Resistance, I have created a retrospective reverie; a nostalgic pilgrimage back to a period which profoundly marked my generation" (140). Nostalgique en effet, car pour Melville les années de l'Occupation sont indissociables à sa jeunesse: "The war period was awful, horrible and...marvellous!...As I grow older, I look back with nostalgia on the years from 1940 to 1944, because they are part of my youth" (141). C'est pour cela qu'il utilise comme épigraphe, au début du film, la citation de Georges Courteline, "Mauvais souvenirs, soyez pourtant les bienvenus...vous êtes ma jeunesse lointaine."

Malgré l'insistance de Melville que sa vérité est subjective et n'a rien à voir avec l'histoire, d'autres résistants voit en L'Armée des ombres une reconstitution très fidèle à leur expérience. Le film représente alors non seulement les souvenirs de Melville et de Kessel, mais d'autres personnes, telles que Henri Frenay, qui a dit de la séquence avant les crédits:

As leader of the Combat movement...I was obliged to return to Paris in December 1941 although I had no wish to see the city under occupation. I got out of the Métro at the Etoile station, and as I was walking towards the exit I could hear the sound of footsteps overhead...it was a curious feeling keeping in step with them. When I came out on the Champs-Elysées I saw the German army filing past in silence, then suddenly the band struck up...and you reconstructed the scene for me in the first shot of your film! (142-3).

Selon Danks, "Melville’s cinema is at heart paradoxical. This is evident less in the look and structure of the films themselves, which often seem so controlled and meticulously stylised, than within the worlds the characters find themselves trapped within" ("L'Armée des ombres"). Plus tard dans le meme essai, il souligne l'importance du ton; le cinéma de Melville est également "essentially tonal: a sensibility (melancholy, poetic, unhysterical) which is founded upon a ‘purity’ of style, performance and narrative action (which is like and yet remarkably different to Bresson). Some of the greatness of Melville’s later films can be found in this interpolation of a consistent, non-melodramatic, and almost abstract style with elliptical but quite classical dramatic structures." Pour synthétiser ces deux signalements, on pourrait dire que L'Armée des ombres est tonalement paradoxal, toujours en train d'aller à contresens de l'attendu. Comme a été observé lors du cours, on "montre et brouille les pistes en permanence."

Le rythme du film est très variable; des courts moments d’action font irruption dans des longues périodes d’attente, et certaines scènes semblent se passer en temps réel—ce qui Colin McArthur appelle, chez Melville, “cinema of process." Au lieu de montrer seulement les “beats" importants de la scène, Melville inclut le processus dans son intégralité, ce qui entraîne toujours une sensation d’attente qui produit un effet soit de suspense, soit d’ennui (selon le contexte) ; par exemple, on voit cette espèce de prolongation--ou plutôt de refus de raccourcir—dans la scène où Gerbier se fait raser par le coiffeur chez lequel il s’est refugié, celle où Mathilde, Le Bison et Le Masque tente (sans succès) de sauver Félix, et celle où Gerbier fait passer des cigarettes aux autres condamnés (cette dernière scène sera analysée plus tard).

Ces limbes temporels sont assortis à un certain manque d’action “productif." Les résistants ne sont quasiment jamais engagés dans des missions de guerre proprement dites ; il s’agit plutôt des réactions contre des malheurs comme la trahison et l’arrestation. On entend Félix parler de leur activité journalière (rendez-vous, parachutage, etc.) mais on ne la voit pas ; le seule exception, c’est la livraison de la radio à Mathilde par Jean-François. Cependant, les scènes d’action « négative » sont loin d’être statiques, et sont marquées par un registre mélangé. Toujours sérieux mais (comme on a vu) jamais complètement réaliste, il réunit des éléments différent au niveau du ton et de l’ambiance, quelquefois dans une seule scène. Par exemple, la course dans le champ de tir, où Gerbier confronte la mort certaine au début et finit par s’évader, est à la fois cauchemardesque et rocambolesque. Une corde surgit de la fumée, Gerbier (quoique blessé à l’épaule) grimpe dessus, et ses camarades l’emmène dans une voiture…tout cela est assez fantasque, et pourtant, les moments précédents étaient profondément sombres, quoique plutôt irréalistes à leur manière (par exemple, le champ de tir semble se prolonger infiniment).

Comme Danks suggère avec la formule "almost clandestine sense of geography, place and period," le spectateur suit avec (au moins un peu de) difficulté les mouvements des personnages et la progression spatiale et temporelle de l'intrigue. Le film commence in medias res dans la zone occupée, et ensuite fait des zigzagues continuelles à Marseille, Paris, Lyon, en Normandie, en Angleterre...on ne voit presque jamais de transitions, le passage d'une ville à une autre; on entre brusquement sur scène, sans explication, et on en sort de la même manière. Le voyage à Londres est une exception frappante; la traversée en sous-marin de la Manche est mise en accent, et le retour en France au moyen d'un saut en parachute est une scène encore plus frappante (et constitue aussi un plus grand cliché). Cet encadrement est approprié pour une paranthèse où Gerbier et Jardie entrent dans un monde différent, régie par une temporalité alternative; la séquence a quelque chose d'incongru, et effectivement contient une scène qui a provoqué des accusations de Gaullisme chez Melville.[2]

Parmi les villes qui paraissent dans le film, Lyon surtout a disposé depuis longtemps d'une certaine clandestinité; c'est une ville habituée au cycle de la révolte et de la réaction (la contre-révolution et ensuite la siège en 1793, les révoltes des Canuts aux années 1830s-40s), ainsi que la lutte entre l'Église Catholique et l'ésotérisme--entre le culte et l'occulte, pour ainsi dire. Jadis la capitale de la Gaulle, Lyon est devenu (selon de Gaulle) "capitale de la Résistance"; en même temps, il avait l'honneur douteux d'être la siège de Klaus Barbie. C'est à cette époque que son patrimoine un peu "obscure" se voit réunie aux actions de révolte qui caractérisent l'histoire lyonnaise, dans l'image du résistant qui s'enfuit par les traboules du Vieux Lyon et de la Croix-Rousse, et que seulement les miliciens français, et non le Gestapo, savent poursuivre.

Comme la plupart des éléments de son film, Melville se sert de cette géographie urbaine d'une manière hautement ambigüe. D'un coté, certaines scènes se passent autour des points de repère qui sont monumentaux, télégraphiques; on identifie facilement les pentes de Fourvière et les grilles du Parc de la Tête d'Or whoops that was actually the gate of the Parc Monceau in Paris. La scène où Gerbier, Mathilde et Jean-François discutent de leurs plans pour sauver Félix à côté de la Basilique de Fourvière est non seulement symboliquement à propos (on domine la ville en maîtrisant la situation), mais aussi tirée de la mémoire de Melville: "I was also among the first young Frenchmen to enter Lyon in uniform. Do you remember the spot where the scene between Gerbier and Mathilde takes place, beside the pigeon-house? It was there, on that little Fourvière promontory belonging to the bishopric, that I arrived in a Jeep with Lieutenant Gérard Faul. Lyon lay at our feet still full of Germans. We left that same evening after installing an observatory on Fourvière's little Eiffel Tower" (Melville On Melville, 147).

D'autres lieux s'affichent à partir du contexte, même si on les reconnait moins bien: l'École de Service de Santé Militaire, Fort Montluc. Et encore d'autres localités sont définis par leur quartier, leur région, mais sont difficile à cerner; elles font allusion, elles évoquent, mais en fin de compte ne montrent pas. Quand Félix se promène dans les ruelles de Saint-Jean avant son arrestation, ou quand Mathilde et Gerbier déjeunent dans un restaurant sur les quais de la Saône (également avant l'arrestation de ce dernier), on a l'impression qu'ils sont enveloppés par l'idée d'un espace, hors de secours et sans point d'entrée ou de sortie (ou fuite) claire. Ce sont des moments plutôt sinistres, que ceux quand surgit un personnage, même (ou bien surtout) un héros. Comme on a vu, souvent le spectateur ne sait pas précisément où les personnages ont été menés par l'intrigue, du moins pas sans un petit délai. On est jeté dans une attente quelquefois insupportable, pareille à celle qui est engendrée par le "cinema of process."

Le jeu du personnage s'opère à coté de, ou bien à l'intérieur de, ces maniements scéniques; ils sont obligés, après tout, d'exister dans ce monde: "The characters of the film act within a social and cultural void which renders familiar French landscapes and iconography (the Metro, city streets, etc.) as Cocteau-like shadow worlds, and that frame an underworld that is reminiscent of but never reducible to that found in Melville’s gangster films" ("L'Armée des ombres").

Les personnages, souvent composites[3], sont dessinés--par Melville (en tant que scénariste ainsi que réalisateur), par la costumière, et par les acteurs--avec une extrême précision juxtaposée à une extrême indétermination. Ce sont des types, des esquisses, mais aussi des personnages totales et des tableaux coloriés; les traits sont gros mais l'image n'est pas une caricature, pas une silhouette. Ils sont sensibles mais néanmoins opaques, avec une intériorité qui reste résolument impénétrables--tout comme le monde qu'ils habitent:

Throughout, Melville eschews conventional character psychology and motivation, for example we never know precisely why particular individuals (particularly Simone Signoret’s seemingly unimpeachable Mathilde) inform on their comrades, and yet his handling of characters (including those who necessarily break these codes) still has a rare sense of balance and grace. Even the characters themselves seldom act out of malice, greed or justifiable revenge (or even out of clear-cut convictions), they simply respond to the contradictory and somewhat unreadable world that surrounds them ("L'Armée des ombres").

Leur extérieur est aussi visible que leur intérieur est inaccessible. Les habits sont un élément stylistique très important dans les films de Melville, et Colette Baudot, la costumière, porte une attention soigneuse aux détails menus; à la différence de Melville, elle y met un peu de vraisemblance historique, un trait que Melville apprécie:

One day while we were filming the shooting-range sequence, the French army captain who was responsible for the technical side of it told me that there was something wrong with the SS uniforms. So I summoned my costume-designer and the captain said to her, “I am from Alsace, Madame, and during the war I was forcibly enrolled in the SS. So I can assure you that a member of the SS always wore an arm-band on his left arm with the name of the division he belonged to.” “No, sir,” Madame Baudot replied, “you must certainly have belonged to an operational division, whereas the SS in the film are from a depot division.” And the captain was obliged to admit that she was right (142).

Les personnages se révèlent en se déguisant; le masque et le visage sont explicitement et implicitement confondus. Quand Gerbier explique son appréciation pour Mathilde, la voix off est accompagnée d'un montage d'identités différentes. Plus tard, elle doit se déguiser pour approprier des vêtements qui serviront de déguisements à leur tour; plusieurs couches de dissimulation séparent les héros de l'action concrète qu'ils tentent enfin à l'École de Service de Santé Militaire. Gerbier se déguise plus provisoirement après son évasion de l'Hôtel Majestic; s'étant réfugié chez un coiffeur d'une manière assez suspecte (hagard, au bout de souffle, demandant qu'on lui rase une barbe qui existe à peine), il craigne que ce dernier ne le trahisse et est soulagé quand il lui propose plutôt de changer de manteau.

L'identité individuelle est toujours et partout subordonnée aux besoins du réseau, et il est impossible de s'affronter à ces contraintes sans désastre. Félix Lepercq déteste le chapeau melon qu'il doit porter pour compléter son masque de collaborateur, mais ne peut s'en débarrasser sans se détruire lui-même; en faisant tomber son chapeau dans une ruelle du Vieux Lyon, son arrestation résout de manière tragique le conflit entre l'individu et la collectivité. Quant à Mathilde, son refus de se débarrasser de la photo de sa fille (un refus comparable, quoique de manière incomplète, à l'hésitation de Félix de porter son chapeau), mène à sa ruine.

Comme Melville lui-même (né Grumbach), plusieurs résistants emploient des noms de guerre; mais à la différence de Melville, ils ne servent pas à cacher un surnom juif--en fait, ils ne cachent aucun surnom, car on sait bien que "Le Masque" s'appelle Claude Ullmann et que "Le Bison" s'appelle Guillaume Vermersch; Mathilde, Gerbier, Félix, et Jean-François et Luc Jardie n'ont pas de nom de guerre du tout. Ce mélange de vrais et de faux noms créé une double confusion: le nom de guerre prend une certaine authenticité en même temps que l'authenticité du vrai nom est remise en question--peut-être que les noms sont tous des noms de guerre ?

L'ascétisme qu'on retrouve chez Le Samouraï ou Un Flic touche aussi aux personnages de L'Armée des ombres. Dans un sens, les critiques du film ont eu raison en accusant à Melville d'avoir comparé les résistants aux gangsters; ils ne sont pas des tueurs à gages comme Jef Costello, mais ils tuent quand même, et dans la même froideur, fut-ce contrainte et affectée. Eux aussi ont leurs rituels[4], leurs objets fétiches--des chapeaux[5], des cigarettes, des photos, des radios, des pilules de cyanure. La relation entre les combattants aussi est caractérisée par le soupçon et par une solidarité incomplète, ce qui n'est guère surprenant pour un réalisateur qui était, au fond, assez paranoïaque: "Commerce with men is a dangerous business. The only way I have found to avoid being betrayed is to live alone" (116). Il cherche à représenter l'amitié dans ses films justement parce qu'il n'y croit pas: "...I don't believe in friendship...That is one of the things I don't believe in any more, but which I don't know myself and therefore like to have in my films" (Melville On Melville, 59).

Il n'y a jamais de consommation, ni de reconnaissance. Les frères Jardie ne connaissent jamais l'engagement de l'autre--selon Melville, il l'a écrit ainsi pour atteindre la tragédie en évitant le mélodrame (Melville On Melville, 144); le réseau ne saura jamais du sacrifice de Jean-François (et Jean-François et Félix ne sauront jamais pourquoi ils n'ont pas été sauvés); et Mathilde est compromise par son amour pour sa fille. Enfin, les résistants sont heroïques non en dépit de, mais en raison de, la futilité de leur travail: "The central characters of L’Armeé des Ombres live by a necessary but abstract code, an unspoken and perhaps unspeakable mode of making sense of and reacting to the shadow world of occupied France. The impossibility of this code is underlined by the dramatic emphasis of the film, which focuses upon the inevitable betrayal between comrades rather than the positive outcomes of the characters’ essentially heroic work" (Danks, "L'Armée des ombres").

Il serait peut-être utile de terminer avec l'analyse d'une scène qui relie tout le discours précédant à propos du style par rapport au ton, rythme, à la cinématographie, au personnage, à l'espace, etc. Dans son commentaire audio sur la DVD Criterion, Ginette Vincendeau appelle le partage des cigarettes à Fort Montluc, juste avant la fusillade, la scène la plus "pessimiste" du film. Avec les scènes de torture, le vol de nuit, la descente en parachute, etc., le rituel de la dernière cigarette constitue un des gros clichés du film (Lindeperg dans Hewitt, 208), mais l'importance de la scène dépasse le pure forme; sinon le cœur du film, elle sert certainement de charnière, puisque c'est à ce moment que notre protagoniste se retrouve au seuil de la mort, hagard et mal rasé (comme on ne l'a jamais vu, même au moment où il dit au coiffeur, "...pour la barbe"), et radicalement isolé quoique plus entouré (littéralement encerclé) de camarades que jamais.

La scène commence à l'extérieur de la cellule, et la première perspective qu'on nous donne est celle d'un garde SS; après s'être promené dans un long couloir, il ouvre le judas de la porte et Melville "se permet"--pour reprendre le langage de Vincendeau--un grand geste vertueux, où la caméra passe à travers le judas et entre la cellule; cela commence donc avec un gros plan et termine avec un plan d'ensemble. À l'intérieur de la cellule, on retrouve un tableau de sept résistants, qui se ressemblent dans leur attitude et leurs circonstances, mais qui se distinguent aussi, représentant "toutes les sensibilités de la Résistance [et] composant ainsi une palette d'idéaux-types" (Guigueno 82). Même sans avoir lu le livre de Kessel, on peut esquisser une histoire et une identité pour chacun des condamnés à partir de leur âge, leur mine et leurs habits--il y a un ouvrier, un étudiant, un bourgeois, un paysan, etc.

Il y a deux rangs de prisonniers, adossés à des murs opposés (ceux qui sont perpendiculaires à la porte, alors personne n'est directement en face du judas); Gerbier est à gauche, au milieu de deux jeunes hommes qui ont l'air d'être des étudiants, et d'un vieux qui a l'air d'être un paysan; à droite sont un jeune homme qui a l'air d'être un ouvrier et deux hommes plus âgés (on dirait un autre ouvrier, et un bourgeois). Cependant, bien qu'il s'agisse (au niveau de la composition) de deux rangs parallèles, le montage insiste sur la circularité de l'espace et de la communication des condamnés. Pendant que chaque prisonnier lance le paquet de cigarettes à son voisin (et ensuite attrape le briquet qui circule aussi), la caméra ne quitte jamais leur visage; on ne voit qu'une seule personne à la fois, et le contexte spatial est caché.

Du coup, il n'y a pas de distinction entre la communication avec un voisin de droite et avec un voisin d'en face, sauf peut-être que ce dernier exige un peu plus d'énergie--surtout la deuxième fois, où l'ouvrier âgé, qui a toujours eu l'air un peu dur (peut-être puisqu'il a été torturé), jette le paquet d'une manière presque violente. Cela dit, on est toujours laissé avec l'impression d'une transition homogène: c'est un circuit électrique dont le courant se communique non seulement par la transmission des cigarettes, mais aussi par l'établissement du contact visuel qui la précède. Le cercle est brisé lorsque le voisin de gauche de Gerbier prend la dernière cigarette, mais il s'y était déjà résigné, car on le voit compter les cigarettes avant de les faire passer; en offrant le paquet à son voisin de droite sans prendre en prendre une cigarette, il s'était sacrifié.

Ce stoïcisme est mêlé au pathétique. Gerbier a déjà eu des moments de mélancolie et de désarroi, mais lorsque la caméra le retrouve à Fort Montluc, il atteint son nadir. Il ne s'est jamais douté, même quand il était question d'étrangler un jeune homme avec un torchon, mais maintenant il semble abandonner; ses jambes repliées sous son corps, il se redresse à peine pour tirer un paquet de Gauloises de sa poche. Son attitude est reflétée par les autres prisonniers, qui ont tous, comme dit Vincendeau, "the same dejected posture." Chacun réagit d'une manière plutôt différente, mais il s'agit de décliner la même condition; lorsqu'ils songent, simultanément mais cinématographiquement un par un, ils pensent tous à la même chose.

Effectivement, il n'y a pas de seul "POV character" dans cette scène--ni dans le film en général, d'ailleurs. Aucune perspective--même pas celle du protagoniste--n'est privilégiée, mais en même temps, la caméra ne sert pas d'œil omniscient. Il s'agit d'une perspective fragmentée, voire diffractée. Après que le voisin de Gerbier prend la dernière cigarette et qu'ils échangent des regards de regret et de résignation, nous avons la fausse impression de prendre la perspective de Gerbier: dans un apparent champ/contrechamp, on le voit se tourner la tête et regarder dans la direction de son autre voisin, et ensuite on voit les pieds de ce dernier. Cependant, il n'y a pas du tout de "eyeline match"; en regardant on ne voit pas ce que verrait Gerbier. La perspective est autre; le montage nous trompe.

Après la circulation des cigarettes et du briquet, il n'y a plus de mouvement, plus rien à faire, et presque plus rien à dire; le reste de la scène est encore plus introspective que le début, chacun fumant en silence pendant que la caméra lui explore le visage dans le même ordre que la distribution des objets s'est effectuée. Il s'agit d'une attente pareille à la scène dans l'Hotel Majestic, sauf que là, le dialogue entre Gerbier et l'autre prisonnier a provoqué une tension productive, alors qu'ici il n'y a pas de plan, pas d'espoir; on est dans une tension négative et passive où la seule action possible est la réflexion. Le spectateur a l'impression que cette partie de la scène dure cinq minutes plutôt qu'une.

Comme la plupart de ces scènes sombres et interminables, il y a très peu de dialogue: le paysan annonce son intention de garder sa cigarette "pour toute à l'heure"; le garde SS dit aux prisonniers (en allemand) de se dépêcher de fumer, puisqu'on viendra bientôt les chercher et "il voudrait pas d'ennuis"; Gerbier traduit; le paysan ironise, "On a les ennuis qu'on peut !"; et un jeune prisonnier, celui qui a eu la dernière cigarette du paquet, déclare, "Cette fois, c'est la bonne." Chaque ligne constitue un punctum qui flotte dans l'espace atone de la scène. Hors la traduction de Gerbier, il n'y a aucune réplique; au lieu d'être une réponse, chaque ligne de dialogue rompt le silence. Ils parlent, mais ne se parlent pas--au mieux ils s'adressent et au pire ils s'apostrophent.

La scène des cigarettes est à la fois le contrepoint et la préfiguration de l'exécution et évasion suivante, et ensemble les deux scènes forment une séquence qui, dans un certain sens, récapitule le film entier. Il y a là la solitude qui est toujours en tension avec une camaraderie instable, l’anonymat qui trahit une profonde intériorité, et l’austérité qui cède, ou plutôt mène, à des moments d’improbable transcendance. Le désespoir est envahi par l’espoir, et inversement ; on est laissé avec une impression de grandeur mais aussi d’une grande banalité. Le style de Melville est bien adapté pour un film de guerre clandestin : son mélange du personnel et de l’impersonnel, du réel et de l’onirique, de la couleur et du monochrome (il a désiré de filmer un film noir et blanc en couleur, avec seulement des taches vifs pour « rappeler » au spectateur qu’il était capable de filmer en couleur), de l’action et de l’inertie, ont tous l’effet de souligner les conflits internes de cet état de vie. Il n’est guère surprenant que L’Armée des ombres est souvent considéré l’un des films les plus authentiques sur la Résistance ; Melville n’est pas le seul réalisateur qui l’a compris, mais il l’a représenté d’une manière incomparablement polyvalente.

Footnotes

[1] "Le parcours de...Melville...de l'expérience de la Résistance à l'adaptation différée de L'Armée des ombres, explique la singularité du film. On sait peu de chose du Melville résistant et combattant de la France libre, sinon ce que lui-même a bien voulu en dire...Ce témoignage mêle le cinéma à des événements militaires et un premier engagement résistant à tout le moins obscur : jamais le nom de Melville n'est cité dans les histoires des mouvements Combat et Libération et son pseudonyme n'est pas enregistré au fichier des agents du BCRA" (Guigueno 80).

[2] Melville a trouvé cette accusation aussi ridicule que l'idée qu'il a présenté les résistants comme des gangsters: "It's absolutely idiotic. It's absurd how people always try to reduce to its lowest common denominator a film which wasn't intended to be abstract, but happened to turn out that way" (Melville on Melville, 142). Il précise que Jardie a été décoré par de Gaulle tout simplement parce que Jean Moulin l'a été, et aussi parce que "[he] thought it would be interesting to show how de Gaulle decorated members of the Resistance in his private apartments in London so as not to jeopardize their return to France" (148).

[3] "In the film, as in the book, Gerbier represents seven or eight different people" (Melville On Melville, 146).

[4] "These types of stoic, often joyless and strangely sacred rituals are for Melville’s characters a way of distancing themselves from the world, of maintaining an impossible purity or of simulating a rigorous professionalism. It is in the moment when this ritual, professionalism or purity breaks apart that the characters’ demise is prefigured or marked" (Danks, "Great Director profile: Jean-Pierre Melville").

[5] Dans la piste de commentaire, Ginette Vincendeau souligne le caractère auto-réferentiel et presque badin du plan des chapeaux des officiers allemands dans le vestiaire du restaurant où Jean-François rencontre Félix.

Bibliographie

Danks, Adrian. “L’Armeé des Ombres” Senses of Cinema Issue 1 (1999). "Great Director profile: Jean-Pierre Melville." ibid. Issue 22 (2002). “The Outsider Auteur? Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris by Ginette Vincendeau” ibid. Issue 32 (2004). “Together Alone: The Outsider Cinema of Jean-Pierre Melville.” ibid. Issue 39 (2006).

Guigueno, Vincent. “Le Visage De l'Histoire: ‘L'Armée Des Ombres’ Et La Figuration De La Résistance Au Cinéma.” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d'Histoire, no. 72, 2001, pp. 79– 87.

Hewitt, Leah D. Remembering the Occupation in French Film: National Identity in Postwar Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Nogueira, Rui, et Jean-Pierre Melville. Melville on Melville. New York: Viking Press, 1972.

#Jean-Pierre Melville #Nazis cw #film criticism

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ladystylestores · 4 years

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The nimble enterprise: How to balance innovation and execution

Innovation is top of mind for many large organizations. However, most “innovation recipes” are created for smaller companies. Others completely ignore the reality of driving business results. Striking a balance between fostering innovation and ensuring quarterly business results is so challenging that companies often spin out a company division to pursue innovation, untethered from the brutal day-to-day reality of a performance and results-oriented culture.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Below I’ll map out three key tenets that can help enterprises balance innovation and business results, shared from my recent experience working with a top retail brand.

The challenge the client faced is a common one: As a national retailer, they make national buying decisions. This gives them unprecedented economies of scale. However, product demand is local. If you’ve ever been on vacation in Miami in December looking for snorkels and swim trunks, but all the stores are carrying space heaters and mittens, you understand the nature of the challenge.

Our goal was to build a tool to allow the company’s various buying teams to calculate demand on a per-product per-store basis with special provisions for seasonality as well as ever-shifting local tastes.

1. Take a start-with-one approach

We initially weren’t able to identify a real “customer” for the tool. (We had personas, and we knew the department we were building for, but there wasn’t a true buyer in mind. As a result, it was difficult to articulate which value proposition we wanted to deliver and to whom, and it was impossible to get feedback.

We decided to focus on one customer (again, our customers were the retailer’s buyers), one category, and one store. While this seems counterintuitive, given we needed to be able to scale to hundreds of buyers and thousands of stores, we needed to focus on delivering value to an actual buyer. Once we were able to do that, the planning and strategy around scaling could move more quickly.

Every organization operates under a time crunch. Shifting our focus to one buyer slowed us down in the short term, but it gave us the opportunity to learn some deep lessons about our customer that turned into much better decisions for the product and faster future delivery.

The lesson is to go narrow and deep with one customer, then scale horizontally to the periphery.

2. Be transparent about your goals

Another problem we needed to solve was that our very large, very complex problem space made governance and transparency problematic. Stakeholders want as much information as possible so they can ensure the initiative stays within budget and progress guidelines. Too much information overwhelms. Too little information doesn’t adequately tell the story.

The antidote to cumbersome governance processes is to create a governance narrative driven by customer needs. In this way, any status updates, progress updates, or budgetary updates are presented in the context of “what we achieved for the customer,” rather than the minutiae of specific functions, features, or arbitrary governance stage-gates.

We focused on customer value instead of features we would build. You can better serve customers through focus and simplicity; shifting your focus to what the customer values allows you to have the kinds of discussions that lead you to take features out to better serve the customer. In our retail case, our buyer customers valued speed and transparency. They wanted the algorithm to make product-assortment decisions as quickly as possible, and they wanted to understand why the algorithm made those decisions.

To promote transparency, we created a one-page scorecard, publicly posted, written in the language of the business. Anyone at any time could see where the team was in their progress, every 10 business days. This kept the status honest and elicited course correction conversations much earlier in the process when they were needed.

Lastly, we created road maps based on outcome milestones for the customer, rather than the delivery of features for the system. Again, this changes the nature of strategic discussion and adds a level of transparency that serves many stakeholder groups well from a communication perspective.

3. Separate planning from strategy to enable innovation

People often conflate “strategy” (why and what) with “planning” (how and when). For the most part, inside the walls of corporate America, when people say they’re designing a strategy, they’re actually designing a tactical plan. It was important for us to separate the two so that we could innovate on the planning front while ensuring we were holding firm on strategy. Each tactical planning decision can be pressure tested against the strategy (e.g., “Does this thing that we want to do help us reach that goal?”)

Conflating strategy and planning, which companies typically do, creates planning logjams and a never-ending series of meetings that don’t come to any resolution. If you can get directional alignment on the “what” and the “why,” the “how” and the “when” become a much more linear planning exercise, and you can explore multiple “hows” for any given “what.”

For example, after we’d calculated the demand curves for all the products in the first category and were able to algorithmically “place” the items on the shelf to confirm shelf space dimensions, we integrated the new assortment algorithm into an actual physical store and started to use real live customers and real live data to validate our assumptions.

We then re-validated the strategy and the plan: Why were we doing this? So that we could have the right products in the right stores at the right time. How were we going to ensure the right product was in the right store at the right time? By using same-store sales data to calculate demand curves to understand per-product demand over time. The important part to understand here is that if our how had been incorrect, we could have pivoted to a different approach while still staying true to the underlying why.

Our project had initially been scoped in such a way that it left no latitude for experimentation and ongoing discovery. This made innovation impossible. But by separating planning decisions from strategy mandates, we were able to make space for discovery and improvement. Each delivered category became an inflection point of innovation.

We were able to use what we learned in the implementation of each category to accelerate the implementation of the next category, and since products selected by our algorithms were actually shipping to stores, we were also gathering valuable data on the algorithms’ accuracy in calculating demand.

The bottom line

The events of 2020 thus far have outlined the importance of organizational agility. Organizations will continue to seek out new ways to innovate while maintaining high performance.

By following the three tenets outlined above, enterprises will be able to more effectively achieve the delicate balance of innovating while still executing and achieving quarterly business results, ultimately making both customers and shareholders happy.

Tirrell Payton has been working in agile environments since 2006. He is a Scrum Alliance Certified Agile Coach and consultant at Nooma Group, where he serves senior clients in the retail, bio/pharma, and banking industries.

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ntrending · 5 years

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The nuclear mutant is still evolving

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/the-nuclear-mutant-is-still-evolving/

The nuclear mutant is still evolving

A nuclear weapon test on Bikini Atoll (US Department of Energy/)

In the early morning of April 26, 1986, reactor number 4 in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded. In the middle of a safety test, energy levels plunged, so the operators withdrew the majority of the control rods to force the reactor back into production. It began to overheat. Hoping to neutralize the system, the scientists pushed the rods back in, but unbeknownst to them, they were tipped in graphite, an accelerant. Kaboom.

If you spent the summer watching HBO’s Chernobyl through your fingers, this is old news. The prestige drama sacrificed quite a few facts for narrative’s sake and should not be mistaken for anything approaching a documentary. But the creators carefully embroidered their five-episode miniseries with cultural and scientific detail: The sets, in the words of the New Yorker‘s Masha Gessen, are “reproduced with an accuracy that has never before been seen in Western television or film—or, for that matter, in Russian television or film.” A courtroom scene, in which three characters explain the minutiae of the disaster, graphite and all, dominates the finale. For five grueling episodes, the show maintains its commitment to realism, if not reality.

That makes it different from much of the atomic storytelling of the last three-quarters of a century, which stoked the public imagination with wild tales of nuclear mutants. But as we’ve learned, the real aftermath of radioactive devastation can be just as terrifying.

A scene from Chernobyl (Pixabay/)

In August 1945, the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. But careful censorship meant Americans knew few of the details, especially about radiation and its effects. That meant public sentiment was complicated, and often contradictory. For many, “the atomic bomb was seen as sexy,” says Cyndy Hendershot, an English professor at Arkansas State University and Cold War pop culture expert. They grooved to rock ‘n roll songs like “Atomic Baby” and wore new swimsuits named for the Bikini Atoll, a major American nuclear weapons test site.

But the growing anxiety of a nuclear apocalypse needed an outlet, and Hollywood’s monster movies provided. “There were serious dramas that dealt with the actuality of nuclear war,” Hendershot says, “but people didn’t want to see that.” Instead, they turned to B-movies—low-budget, high-drama affairs—that took a sideways glance at catastrophe. These films, Susan Sontag argued in her landmark 1965 essay, “The Imagination of Disaster,” allow a viewer to “participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself.” You went into the theater scared, but you may have come out chuckling.

“The original mutants were ridiculous,” Hendershot says. In 1957, The Amazing Colossal Man and The Incredible Shrinking Man debuted within a few months of each other. Both are about average Joes exposed to nuclear radiation, with disastrous and diametrically opposed effects. Fifty feet tall and growing, the super-sized man terrorizes those around him. Psychologically ruined by his transformation, he destroys Las Vegas while wearing “a diaper-looking thing,” Hendershot says. He’s ultimately gunned down by the military. The shrinking man, by contrast, is at the mercy of every lifeform around him. He’s bloodied by his house cat and collapses after fighting a spider off with a safety pin. But he ends the film mentally intact: he will soon be reduced to atoms, but finds peace in the realization that all of creation is made up of some very small pieces.

Movie poster for the 1954 Japanese Godzilla (Toho Company Ltd./)

In these and other American films, mutants were treated poorly, Hendershot says. They may have been victims of atomic testing, but to the wider world, they themselves were the menace. This ensured every movie had its “Disney ending,” as Bill Tsutsui, president of Hendrix College and a Japanologist, calls it. If there was only one dangerous individual (or, in Tsutsui’s favorite sub-genre, the “big bug movies,” one colony of oversized ants), the military could contain the threat and keep society safe. In contrast, Japanese cinema, made by and for people with firsthand experience of nuclear devastation, was more sympathetic of mutants. And it allowed both personal and political ethical dilemmas to go unresolved.

Director Ishirō Honda released the first Godzilla film in 1954. (In Japan, the monster is known as Gojira, a combination of the words for “gorilla” and “whale.”) The film, produced in the wake of that year’s Lucky Dragon No. 5 incident, in which an American hydrogen bomb test in the Bikini Atoll contaminated a Japanese fishing boat, tells the story of an ancient monster awakened by H-bomb testing in the Pacific. A respected zoologist spends much of the film defending Godzilla’s right to live, but ultimately helps to destroy the creature for the good of mankind. A scientist who creates a dastardly “Oxygen Destroyer”—the only weapon capable of defeating the monster—destroys his notes and drowns himself alongside Godzilla so that no one can ever recreate his work. Despite their sacrifice, at the end of the film the characters conclude that so long as weapons testing continues, “it’s possible that another Godzilla might appear somewhere in the world, again.” It’s both the perfect segue to a sequel (of which there are now 34) and an earnest call for nuclear non-proliferation.

In “The Imagination of Disaster,” Sontag wrote “[t]here is absolutely no social criticism, of even the most implicit kind, in science fiction films.” A decade later, that kind of context-free storytelling felt increasingly impossible, even in the U.S. In 1979, Three Mile Island generation station in Pennsylvania suffered a partial meltdown. Between 1965 and 1982, the number of Americans who supported the United States’ decision to drop nuclear bombs on Japan dropped 7 points, to 63 percent. That year, a million people gathered in New York City’s Central Park to decry atomic weapons, in what was then the largest protest in American history.

Social criticism was everywhere, including the silver screen. As the Cold War progressed, nuclear weapons and power plants moved from the realm of science fiction to the world of political thrillers, and from the B-movie to the Oscar-worthy. Two critical darlings, The China Syndrome, which premiered in 1979, and Silkwood, which came out in 1983, focused on everyday Americans determined to expose cover-ups at generating facilities.

Film poster for Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (Reynold Brown/)

HBO’s Chernobyl, in many ways, is a modern mutation of this narrative DNA. Subordinates push back against their bosses and fail. Colleagues lie, cheat, and fight for favors. It’s standard workplace docufiction—a radiation-poisoned The Office. When nuclear mutants do appear, their presence is understated, at least compared to a 50-foot-tall man in a giant diaper. At the end of the first episode, a dying bird falls to the pavement. The proverbial canary in the coal mine, it twitches violently as locals, unaware of the hazardous materials streaming out of the nearby power plant, innocently run errands around town. Later, the series depicts a crew of “liquidators” tasked with killing every creature they can find in the “zone of alienation,” an area of restricted access around the exploded reactor. Their goal? To prevent the wild, stray, and pet animals from spreading any radiation in their fur.

Today, the Chernobyl exclusion zone has expanded from an initial 19-mile radius circling the power plant to a 1,600 square mile blob straddling Belarus and the Ukraine. Despite the contamination, which will persist for thousands of years, all kinds of organisms, from birds to humans, still live and, crucially, eat inside the exclusion zone. The risks residents face are real. While wildlife is thriving in the absence of large human settlements, barn swallows sport albino-spotted feathers; wild boars, made radioactive by a diet of contaminated mushrooms, roam from Sweden to the Czech Republic; and scientists worry European gray wolves residing in the zone may spread their mutations to populations across the continent.

As for people, there appears to be an increased risk of certain illness among those in or around the zone. Drawing tight connections between radiation exposure and public health outcomes is next to impossible, and findings are often controversial, but studies have linked Chernobyl fallout (along with other factors like diet, alcohol, and age), to an increased risk of miscarriage among women in affected areas. Research has also tied contaminated milk in Belarus to an increased risk of thyroid cancer in children.

A poster for The Incredible Shrinking Man (Reynold Brown/)

For the rare few who can afford to remove pollutants from local soil or haul in new dirt, it’s possible to safely grow food in contaminated areas, says Kate Brown, a science, technology, and society professor at MIT. Just look at Atomik Vodka: Earlier this month, a team of scientists announced they’d successfully distilled grain grown in the exclusion zone into a safe-to-drink spirit. But the technical intricacies of soil remediation aren’t what made the vodka a viral internet sensation. It’s our obsession with the exclusion zone—that most forbidden of places, ruined by humankind’s hubris and reborn in our absence.

Since the Ukraine opened the Chernobyl zone to tourism in 2010, thousands have taken state-sanctioned tours of abandoned towns, nature-reclaimed ruins, and even the power plant itself. Their experiences are documented across social media, including on Instagram. Claims the site is a destination for social media influencers are greatly exaggerated; the exclusion zone certainly hasn’t replaced the beaches of Bali. But that may change, as Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whose qualifications include having previously played a Ukranian president on television, is intent on fixing his country’s “brand.” That starts, he says, with making Chernobyl a different kind of hotspot.

Despite the abundance of permitted tour vans, illegal visits to the site persist. A community of “Stalkers,” inspired by a first-person shooter game, enter the zone over and over again. The majority appear to be young men, Brown says, drawn like Daniel Boone to the frontier, determined to test their mettle. They bring along Geiger counters—not to avoid radiation, but to find it. Some drink the water and eat apples hanging from the trees.

Stalkers take exclusion zone exploration to the extreme, but they may be motivated by the same thing as the above-board Instagrammers. Brown speculates many people are drawn to Chernobyl not just for its history, but because they feel it may represent the future: “As we worry about climate change, and the habitability of our Earth, I could see people having those fears,” she says. “And what we do when we have fears? We watch horror films”—or take terrifying trips—“and scare ourselves so our anxieties subside.”

Seventy-four years after the atomic age began, the nuclear mutant staggers on. They face fierce competition in the marketplace from films and television shows about more contemporary fears, like viral outbreaks and terrorism. And as fears of nuclear war subside and the realities of climate change make themselves known, the campy terror of the 1950s has long since been replaced by the quiet horror of dying animals and decaying landscapes. They’re no longer the result of random chance or blameless accidents, either, but of deeply human error. More than ever, they’re our monsters, and if we’re willing to listen, they have something they want to tell us.

Written By Eleanor Cummins

#Environment

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recentanimenews · 5 years

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Crunchyroll Favorites 2018 Part Three: EVERYTHING ELSE!

This is it--the final installment of CRUNCHYROLL FAVORITES 2018! In our first feature, we talked about our favorite anime and manga of the past year, and yesterday we shared our favorite video games. Today, we wrap up with one of my favorite parts of CR Favorites: "EVERYTHING ELSE!"

Instead of posting individual articles for everybody's favorite movies, books, music, TV shows, sports moments, life moments, and so on and so forth, we just pile them all here into the "Everything Else" installment and share what's important to us that isn't related to anime, manga, or video games.

Just like before, the rules are simple: only stuff that came out in 2018, or continuing works that had a major milestone last year. You're gonna get to see a lot of different lists from different people--let's get started!

Nate Ming

The Night Comes for Us- Timo Tjahjanto brings most of the gang from The Raid and its sequel back for this absolute onslaught of perfectly-choreographed action that refuses to let up--or look away. This one's for the hardest of hardcore action fans, and absolutely not for the squeamish.

Mandy- Nicolas Cage teams up with the stylish and totally gonzo Panos Cosmatos for a trippy, violent ride that starts as a horror story and ends up as a wild action/revenge flick. A friend of mine pointed out that Mandy is the closest we'll probably ever get to a live-action Berserk, and y'know what? He's right.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse- It's rare when, while watching a movie, I don't want it to end. It's almost as rare when it wraps up and I immediately want to watch it again. Into the Spider-Verse has it all: pure emotion, an outstanding soundtrack, action that's like greased lightning, and characters I want to spend even more time with. More like this, please.

Fighting in the Age of Loneliness- Jon Bois--already known for his insightful, fun breakdowns of sports minutiae--teams up with Felix Biederman for a deep dive into the stories that make the history of mixed martial arts. Even people who aren't MMA-heads will dig this--check it out and learn why people fighting in a cage for money is so compelling.

Amanda Nunes vs Cris Cyborg- And speaking of that, in just 51 seconds Amanda "Lioness" Nunes took down the undefeated Cris Cyborg, trading shots until Cyborg caught a huge overhand right and dropped. What a showdown--women's MMA has always been great, but now is the time of legends.

Honorable Mentions: Braven, Creed II, Hereditary

Nicole Mejias

A more stable life- 2017 and 2018 have been very trying years of my life, and I’m glad I made it through in one piece. Depression is something I’m still battling with, but it’s something I’m thankfully more in control of these days. I’m very grateful for my close friends who helped me when I felt I was lost; without them I wouldn’t be here. Thank you! Let’s conquer our goals in 2019!

CEO x NJPW show- I talked about this show briefly in my CEO 2018 report, but my goodness, it was quite the mind blowing show! I never expected NJPW to make it out to Florida of all places, and I certainly didn’t expect the world of fighting games and wrestling to come together in beautiful harmony! It’s a show I’ll remember for a very long time.

Crunchyroll Expo 2018 experience- It was my first time going to this event, and I was very impressed by pretty much everything the convention had to offer! Add in the bonus of meeting up with colleagues face-to-face for the first time and network with amazing folks, and it was an event that I was very happy to be a part of. I’ll be back again this year!

Working for Crunchyroll- The biggest highlight of 2018 was when I got the chance to work here, which was something I didn’t think would happen. Started as a video script writer, then moved on to becoming a features writer and editor! This job has helped me out in so many countless ways, and I’m really blessed to be here and that I’m working with such an awesome group of people!

Daniel Dockery

Beginning My Crunchyroll Writer Journey- Writing about anime for a lot of websites usually requires some handholding (“Hey kids. Have you heard of anime? Before I begin my actual article, here’s a half page about what anime actually is.”) Luckily, Crunchyroll came along and has let me geek out about One Piece for six months. God bless them.

Creed II- After his awesome performances in Universal Soldier: Regeneration and Day of Reckoning, it was only a matter of time before Dolph Lundgren became the heart of a major blockbuster.

Deadwood Movie Hype- It’s finally happening. The Deadwood movie that’s been talked about since 2006 is going to be in front of me in 2019. I don’t want to say that the power of my dreams made this happen, but I will. You can thank me all now.

Shrimp Tacos- Have y’all had these? They’re great!

Peter Fobian

Shonen Jump- I promise I’m not getting paid to tell you that Shonen Jump made history in 2018. They made the most popular comics magazine in the world FREE. They’re selling access to one of the largest collections of comics in the world at a pittance. This is the best deal in the history of comics, hands down. I’m only one month in and have already burned through over 20 volumes of manga. I’m actually going to catch up to One Piece. This is unreal.

Annihilation- I almost missed this movie since they did very little way in the promotion, and man am I glad I saw it in theaters. An awesome sci-fi horror film with a great premise, great cast, some fantastic effects, and a legendary ending. Even if you were underwhelmed by the majority of the film, those last 15 minutes aren’t going to leave your head anytime soon.

Wanikani- Various life circumstances have made it hard for me to continue in-class Japanese studies so I started up Wanikani in January at the recommendation of a friend. It’s the easiest to keep up with language studying app I’ve managed to main pretty consistent all year, finishing off 2018 with a 2000 written word vocabulary is pretty good, I think. I really want to hit max level...

Ricky Soberano

All of the wine I’ve drank- Cheers to speaking about the difference between organic, kosher, vegan, and orange wines. Biggest cheers to figuring out my preferred wine region (Piedmont) and enjoying every Barbera and Barolo I had the privilege of consuming.

The streetwear collabs that mattered- Thank you, universe, for finally getting it. The same people that love manga and anime can also love fashion and finally have a means to show it off to the world. This is why the Primitive x DBZ drop popped off. This is what made the Uniqlo x Shonen Jump collection so important. I can’t wait to see even more in 2019.

Crazy Rich Asians breaking the world- Everything was riding on this film to do well. The future of Hollywood’s treatment towards Asian casts, writing, and films hung in the balance and it slayed the box office. The phenomenon surrounding it was as electric as the film itself.

Japanese Breakfast’s article on H-Mart- My uncle had passed away a few weeks before one of my favorite singers published her first article for The New Yorker. It’s a beautiful testament to coming to terms with identity as an Asian-American, mourning, and food.

Everything that Childish Gambino has blessed us with this year- This special supernova doesn’t need to go so hard on every project that he works on but he does anyways simply because he can and if you can’t appreciate that then you can enter that black hole over there.

Emily Bushman

Victoria Schwab- One of my favorite authors because she writes fantastic stories, and her new YA book, City of Ghosts, is no exception. It’s like a cross between Stranger Things and the best parts of Scotland, with just a DAB of Harry Potter, and I love everything about it. Her other new novel, Vengeful (sequel to Vicious), also soared high for me with three superior villains who plotted death and destruction, all the way to a satisfying conclusion.

Supernatural- I’m late to the game... but why does it feel good to do something as bad as binge-watching 13 straight seasons over a three month period? To be fair, my friend and I are only on season 9, but we’re getting there. Slowly. Steadily. The checkout lady at our local grocery store approves. And if I’ve learned anything from this, it’s that everyone should have a moose in their life. Get your moose, people. Get your moose.

Haunting of Hill House- The original book by Shirley Jackson (of “The Lottery”) was a favorite of mine, but the Netflix adaptation took it to a whole new level. Love the book, love the show, and love the questions about what it means to be a family, what can happen when a family turns against itself, what it means to be a ghost, either alive or dead, and, most importantly, how the trappings of a perfect life can turn into the ties that bind us down.

Sticky Toffee Pudding- This is a British thing, but I live and die for it and was recently reminded of how much I love it when my best friend begged me to make it for her, gluten free. It’s the perfect gooey sweet sheet cake, with to-die-for caramel toffee sauce. Please try this. This is my favorite recipe, from my favorite queen of internet food blogging, Deb Perelman. You can make it with Cup for Cup, a gluten free flour substitute, and it tastes essentially the same. >> http://bit.ly/2fE1OvW

Strange the Dreamer- Written by Laini Taylor, it’s a YA novel about a boy named Strange, the Dreamer. It’s a weird mix of pseudo-Egyptian Gods, alchemic research, and impossible puzzles that is both fascinating and, well, dream-like. It is unusual, the outlier in a field of run-of-the-mill stories, but it entranced me, and I eagerly await the sequel.

Nick Creamer

The Haunting of Hill House- Ostensibly based on the classic Shirley Jackson novel, Netflix’s Haunting of Hill House abandons the book’s narrative entirely, and instead tells a story about family, forgiveness, and the meaning of home, all filtered through the profoundly haunted titular house. Though the film’s dialogue can get a little clumsy, its evocative cinematography, psychologically scrambled cast, and sharp understanding of horror make it satisfying both for its thrills and its sympathetic emotional core. In a year I’ve spent binging whatever horror anthologies I can find, Hill House has risen to the top.

Offerings- As the follow-up to the staggering concept album White Lighter, Typhoon’s Offerings had some serious shoes to fill. The resulting album absolutely blew me away, with its comparatively stripped-down sound offering a harrowing journey through the steady disintegration of a fraying mind. Lines like “the part of you that I love is still in there, even if it doesn’t know my name” cut to the heart of watching a loved one fade away, and offered understanding in a very tough year. Offerings is a difficult listen, but it’s worth it.

Cooking- After a former housemate gifted me and my roommates a slow cooker last winter, we embarked on a lengthy journey to actually learn how to feed ourselves. After a long and arduous year of training, I am proud to say I can probably avoid incinerating a chicken at this point, and perhaps even prepare a soup. Getting there!

Kara Dennison

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch- I will never stop talking about this, and you can’t stop me. It’s my happy union of Charlie Brooker’s hardcore video game geekdom, my love of choice-based gaming, and my inexplicable desire to disturb myself at every given opportunity. It’s been at least a year since I lifted my hands off a keyboard and walked away because I was so affected. That’s how hard it got me.

Gabutto Burger- A recent trip to visit a friend in Illinois ended up with us at this anime fan-friendly burger place, run by a Japanese family and branded to the gills with mascot characters. It’s as close as I’m going to get (for now) to going to a collab café, plus the food was amazing.

The Night Before Critmas- I wish I had time for the full Critical Role experience, but their one-shots are just right for my schedule. This Christmas-skinned D&D campaign told the flipside of The Nightmare Before Christmas, with dangerously-skilled elves setting out to retrieve Santa from a legally-distinct talking bag of bugs. Their Crash Pandas campaign was no slouch, either.

Crunchyroll Social Media- This year I got to stick a toe in our social media department, running accounts for shows like Magical Girl Ore and How NOT to Summon a Demon Lord. I’ve loved getting to see what the fans enjoy and find more for them between episodes!

----

And that's a wrap for Crunchyroll Favorites 2018! Thanks for joining us for this three-parter, and we'll see you next year! If you're in the mood for more CR Favorites, here are the links to past years' features:

Crunchyroll Favorites 2017 Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Crunchyroll Favorites 2016 Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Crunchyroll Favorites 2015 Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Crunchyroll Favorites 2014 Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Crunchyroll Favorites 2013 Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Crunchyroll Favorites 2012 Part One | Part Two | Part Three

Crunchyroll News' Best of 2011 Part One | Part Two

What were your favorite "everything else" parts of 2018? Remember, this is a FAVORITES list, not a BEST-OF list, so there are no wrong answers--sound off in the comments and share your favorites!

-----

Nate Ming is the Features Editor for Crunchyroll News and creator of the long-running Fanart Friday column. You can follow him on Twitter at @NateMing. His comic, Shaw City Strikers, launches January 15, 2019.

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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Free Orgasms, Neon Lights, and Pepto-Bismol at the Korean Pavilion

In the corner of the Venice Biennale's Giardini, the Korean pavilion makes an exciting first impression. A fantastical medley of technicolor neon conveys the shapes of a roaring tiger, peacocks, and dragons. A fake advertisement for Pepto-Bismol is surrounded by the blinking bulbs you'd see on a Broadway marquee. Above all this, a cheeky neon sign spells out "Holiday Motel," and to the side, a light box advertises "Free Narcissistic People Disorder... Free Orgasms," and more.

The work, entitled Venetian Rhapsody, is by Cody Choi, and is a direct comment on his inclusion in the vast European art spectacle, inspired by Macau casinos, Las Vegas motels, and the work of Patrick Tuttofuoco. "This work is talking about the double-crossed reality... of Venice, capitalism, and art. This is the conflict of contemporary artists being in the Venice Biennale," the "Komerican" artist, who moved from Korea to the States in the early 80s, says.

Lee Wan, Mr. K and the Collection of Korean History, 2010-2017. Photographs and assorted archive objects. Dimensions variable. Installation view at the Korean Pavilion, 57th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by the Artist. Courtesy of the Artist.

The pavilion is a collaboration between Choi and Lee Wan. The latter is showing his collection of archive material that traces power relations in recent Korean history through an installation titled Mr. K and the Collection of Korean History. "I collect items that represent a particular era or those that have become symbols of an era beyond their original functions or values," he says. Lee has been collecting this selection of newspaper articles and official records, as well as knick knacks and ephemera, since 2010, and has also added a box of photographs from the life of a "Mr. Kim" that he scavenged at a market. Tiny statues, a rotary phone, and a Newsweek cover all scatter the walls in an accumulation of information.

Born in 1936, "Mr. K" as the exhibition dubs him, lived through some of the most tumultuous times in Korean history. "I wanted to show the influence of politics and power on the life of an individual. I also wanted to contemplate what that individual means to a nation," Lee says. Mr. K becomes a kind of "universal" Korean, with his acronym nickname invented by curator Lee Daehyung.

Lee Wan, Proper Time: Though the Dreams Revolve with the Moon, 2017. 668 clocks. Dimensions variable. Installation view at the Korean Pavilion, 57th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by the Artist. Courtesy of the Artist.

But how much can an individual life tell us about the country as a whole? Lee is skeptical of neat narrative-building: "The life of an individual that I paint and imagine based solely on photos may, in fact, be entirely different from the individual's actual life. Likewise, it may be impossible to understand the circumstances of a country merely based on fragments of history that I collected. Yet, what is important is that people and the society often come to have similar memories of the past, as is recorded in history." In other words: nationality might be complicated, but cultural memory is still important.

Lee is also ambivalent about the concept of "Koreanness," noting that the country has undergone change from a military regime to a more openly international, neoliberal government in the past 50 years. "Frankly speaking, I am not entirely sure what it means for something to be 'Korean,'" Lee says. "Traditions no longer exist in ways they used to before, and Korea has seen modernization, thanks to the help of foreign nations. Given such circumstances, I think the expression 'Korean' is more multi-layered and comprehensive in meaning."

Cody Choi, Cheesekhwa (Color Painting) – RED, 2016-17. Oil on canvas. 124.3x161.7 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.

Choi is similarly doubtful about the stability of this definition, especially as it relates to the label of Korean art. His work Cheesekwha - Color Painting expresses this problem, playing with Western expectations of Korean art. Punning on the popular and minimally-toned paintings that are typical of the Dansaekhwa movement, Choi instead writes the names of colors onto the canvas in different shades. "I think it's still in progress," he says, on the development of a national artistic movement. "That's why I try to be honest myself. That's what I'm trying to do with my art."

At the same time, Choi feels a pressure to take part in the "-merican" part of his "Komerican" identity. "When I moved to the States in the early 80s, I studied at the Art Center College for Design under Mike Kelley. I got the sense that most American artists' expression is very aggressive. That kind of expression we never learned in Korea. Asian philosophy says: 'Don't express yourself! If you do, it means you're shallow.'" Choi's own artistic temperament is to take a less direct but still humorous approach, for example in The Thinker, that recreates Rodin's famous sculpture out of toilet paper and Pepto Bismol, which the artist downed by the bottle when he first arrived in America, in response to the stomach trouble and culture shock.

Cody Choi, The Thinker, 1995-96. Toilet paper, Pepto-Bismol, Wood. Installation view at the Korean Pavilion, 57th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. Photo by Riccardo Tosetto. Courtesy of ARARIO Museum and the Artist.

Elsewhere in the Pavilion, Lee considers the accumulation of labour as a model for citizenship, such as in the installation piece Proper Time, in which 668 clocks are each affixed to the wall, programmed to the relative time it takes a person in a different country to earn enough for a meal. Drawing on Einstein's statistical theories, the work incorporates a vast amount of research and evaluation of personal stories, and takes into account all the minutiae of what makes our lives different.

"Labor has always been the most basic and important act of exchange necessary in order for humans to continue to lead their lives," says Wan. "At the center of many problems and conflicts that we see in the world today are disparity and imbalance between these values." In this piece, as well as the Made In videos and associated objects that chart the course of Asian nations through the production of export products, Lee zooms into the individual memories, stories and personalities that all add up to create a singular culture, whether it's a silk weaver in Thailand sending her daughter to college using the fruits of this labour, or the women affected by declining demand for Korean wig manufacture.

Lee Wan, Made In, 2013-present. 12 documentaries and 12 objects. Made In objects installation view. Photo by the Artist. Courtesy of the Artist.

Over the last 50 years, Korea has become much more open to an international market, and yet, according to this pavilion, it is still finding ways to construct its identity. On this point, Lee mentions a telling fact from his years of research: "In the 1990s, there was an interesting government slogan that read 'What is Korean is international.'" If you try to define yourself by what's outside yourself, it's hard to find what was inside all along.

The Korean Pavilion is open as part of the Venice Biennale through November 26, 2017.

A Modern-day Pinocchio Takes on Rape Culture and Fake News

A Powerful Piece of the Venice Biennale Comes to Brooklyn

This Colossal Marble Horse Sculpture Represents the World's Problems

from creators http://ift.tt/2sk8wQh via IFTTT

#IFTTT #creators

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