Reparative Reading

I would love, and indeed have been meaning for a long time, to talk about a piece of academic writing from one of my favourite theorists that I think has an ongoing relevance. This is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” first published in the mid-to-late 1990’s and compiled in her 2003 monograph, Touching Feeling. There’s a some free PDFs of it floating around (such as here) for those who want to read it in full – and I would recommend doing so, despite its density in places, because Sedgwick has a marvelous critical voice.

Sedgwick’s topic of contention in this essay is the overwhelming tendency in queer criticism to employ what she thinks of as a paranoid methodology – that is, criticism based around the revelation of oppressive attitudes, and that sees that revelation not only as always and inherently a radical project, but the only possible anti-oppressive project. This methodology is closely related to what Paul Ricoeur termed the “hermeneutics of suspicion” and identified as central to the works of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, which were all progenitors of queer criticism. Sedgwick objects to the fact that the hermeneutics of suspicion had, at her time of writing, become “synonymous with criticism itself,” rather than merely one possible critical approach. She questions the universal utility of the dramatic unveiling of the presence of oppressive forces, pointing to the function of visibility itself in perpetuating systemic violence, and identifying the work of anti-oppression as one based in a competition for a certain type of visibility. She also rejects the knowledge of the presence of oppression alone as conferring a particular critical imperative, instead posing the question, “what does knowledge do?”

As an example, Sedgwick critiques Judith Butler’s commentary on drag in Gender Trouble, one of the works that she uses as an example of a reading based in a paranoid approach. She identifies Butler’s argument that drag foregrounds the constructed aspect of gender as a paranoid approach, due to its focus on revelation of structures of power and oppression, and she finds Butler’s argument lacking in its neglect in acknowledging the role that joy and community formation play in the phenomenon of drag. Near the end of the essay, she also does an example of a reparative reading of the ending of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, claiming that the narrator’s remove from the traditional familial structure and its temporality is precisely what confers his particular moment joy and insight upon discovering that his friends have aged. Broadly, Sedgwick rejects the implication that readings based in joy, hope, or optimism are naïve, uncritical, or functionally a denial of the reality of oppression.

Now, it’s important to note that the message of this essay is not that paranoid readings are bad, and reparative readings are good. Sedgwick is drawing on a body of affect theories (most prominently Melanie Klein’s) that posit the reparative impulse as dependent on and resulting from the paranoid impulse – reparation by definition is something that can only occur after some kind of shattering, and Kleinian trauma theories generally posit that process as something that produces a new object or perspective than pre-trauma. (Something I love about Sedgwick is that she often sets up these binaries that seem at odds with each other, but end up being mutually dependent.) Furthermore, the critical tradition in queer studies that Sedgwick is critiquing in this essay is one that was itself, in many ways, a manifestation of communal trauma, particularly with the impact of the AIDS crisis. Sedgwick herself acknowledged this last point in a later essay, “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes,” claiming that she didn’t feel she did a good enough job of identifying the AIDS crisis as a driving force behind this trend. So Sedgwick is not discounting the utility of paranoid readings, but rather rejecting the notion that they ought to encompass all of criticism. (In fact, a running theme in Touching Feeling is her representation of various perspectives and methods as sitting beside one another, rather than hierarchically.) And reparative reading, as Sedgwick portrays it, is not the denial of trauma or violence, but a possibility for moving forward in its wake.

Why am I taking the time to outline all of this? Because, while the original essay was written almost 25 years ago, with the academic community in mind, it reflects a similar pattern that I see now in online fandom.

Queer fandom (as that’s what I feel the most qualified to talk about) has a considerable paranoia problem. Queer fandom is brimming with traumatized people who carry varying degrees of personal baggage and are afflicted by the general neuroses that come from existing in a heterosexist, cissexist society. And many people in fandom have been repeatedly burned by the treatment of queer people in media – Bury Your Gays, queerbaiting, queercoded villains, etc. And in such a media landscape, and within such a communal sphere, much of fandom has developed the kind of “anticipatory and reactive” method of media criticism that Sedgwick identifies in this essay.

Fandom gets very excited for new media, certainly, and is prone to adulation of media that seems to fit its ideological beliefs. But it is also very quick to hone in on any potential representative flaw, and use that as a vehicle for condemnation. (This cycling between idealization and extreme, bitter jadedness has been widely commented on). Not only is there a widespread moralistic approach in fan criticism that is very invested in deeming whether or not a piece of media is harmful or not, “problematic” or not, within a simplistic binary framing, but that conclusion is so frequently the end of the conversation. “This is problematic,” “this is bad representation,” “this falls into this tired and harmful trope,” etc, is treated as the endpoint of criticism, rather than a starting point. This is the spectacle of exposure that Sedgwick critiques as central to the paranoid approach – simply identifying the presence of oppressive attitudes in a text is not only treated as an analytic in and of itself, but as the only valid analytic. So often I have seen people jump to take the most pessimistic possible approach to a piece of media, and then proceed to treat any disagreement with that reading as in and of itself a denial of structural homophobia, as naïve, and as not being a critical enough reader/viewer. “Being critical” itself has been taken on as a shorthand for this particular process, which many others have commented on as well.

Now, again, I want to stress that taking issue with this totalizing impulse is not discounting the legitimate uses of identification and exposure, or even of reactivity and condemnation. There are particular contexts in which these responses have their uses – in Sedgwick’s words, “paranoia knows some things well and others poorly.” But that approach has a finite scope. And rejecting the universal application of this particular analytic does not itself constitute a denial of the existence of oppression, or its manifestation in media and narratives. Nor is it about letting particular works “off the hook” for whatever aspects they may have that are worthy of critique. Rather, it’s a call to acknowledge that other critical approaches exist, and that the employment of a more optimistic approach is not necessarily a result of ignorance or apathy about the existence of oppression. It is one that invites us not to lay aside paranoia as an approach, but recognize that it has limited applicability, and question when and how our motives might be better served by another approach.  

I think that “is this homophobic, yes or no?” or “is this good representation, yes or no?” are reductive critical approaches in and of themselves. But I think there’s also room for acknowledgment that not everything needs to be read through a revelatory lens regarding societal oppression at all. Rather than “what societal attitudes does this reflect back?” being the approach, I think there could be a good bit more “What does this do for us? What avenues of possibility does this have?” I think there’s already been leanings in this direction with, for example, the reclaiming of queercoded villains, with dialogues that treat those characters not as reflections of societal anxiety and prejudice, but rather as representative of joy and freedom and possibility in their rejection of norms and constraints. I’d like to see that approach applied more broadly and more often.

Let’s try to read more reparatively.  

Bakudeku: A Non-Comprehensive Dissection of the Exploitation of Working Bodies, the Murder of Annoying Children, and a Rivals-to-Lovers Complex

I. Bakudeku in Canon, And Why Anti’s Need to Calm the Fuck Down

II. Power is Power: the Brain-Melting Process of Normalization and Toxic Masculinity

III. How to Kill Middle Schoolers, and Why We Should

IV. Parallels in Abuse, EnemiesRivals-to-Lovers, and the Necessity of Redemption ft. ATLA’s Zuko

V. Give it to Me Straight. It’s Homophobic.

VI. Love in Perspective, from the East v. West

VII. Stuck in the Sludge, the Past, and Season One

Disclaimer

It needs to be said that there is definitely a place for disagreement, discourse, debate, and analysis: that is a sign of an active fandom that’s heavily invested, and not inherently a bad thing at all. Considering the amount of source material we do have (from the manga, to the anime, to the movies, to the light novels, to the official art), there are going to be warring interpretations, and that’s inevitable.

I started watching and reading MHA pretty recently, and just got into the fandom. I was weary for a reason, and honestly, based on what I’ve seen, I’m still weary now. I’ve seen a lot of anti posts, and these are basically my thoughts. This entire thing is in no way comprehensive, and it’s my own opinion, so take it with a grain of salt. If I wanted to be thorough about this, I would’ve included manga panels, excerpts from the light novel, shots from the anime, links to other posts/essays/metas that have inspired this, etc. but I’m tired and not about that life right now, so, this is what it is. This is poorly organized, but maybe I’ll return to fix it.

Let’s begin.

Bakudeku in Canon, And Why Anti’s Need to Calm the Fuck Down

There are a lot of different reasons, that can be trivial as you like, to ship or not to ship two (or more) characters. It could be based purely off of character design, proximity, aversion to another ship, or hypotheticals. And I do think that it’s totally valid if someone dislikes the ship or can’t get on board with his character because to them, it does come across as abuse, and the implications make them uncomfortable or, or it just feels unhealthy. If that is your takeaway, and you are going to stick to your guns, the more power to you.

But Bakudeku’s relationship has canonically progressed to the point where it’s not the emotionally (or physically) abusive clusterfuck some people portray it to be, and it’s cheap to assume that it would be, based off of their characterizations as middle schoolers. Izuku intentionally opens the story as a naive little kid who views the lens of the Hero society through rose colored glasses and arguably wants nothing more than assimilation into that society; Bakugou is a privileged little snot who embodies the worst and most hypocritical beliefs of this system. Both of them are intentionally proven wrong. Both are brainwashed, as many little children are, by the propaganda and societal norms that they are exposed to. Both of their arcs include unlearning crucial aspects of the Hero ideology in order to become true heroes.

I will personally never simp for Bakugou because for the longest time, I couldn't help but think of him as a little kid on the playground screaming at the top of his lungs because someone else is on the swingset. He’s red in the face, there are probably veins popping out of his neck, he’s losing it. It’s easy to see why people would prefer Tododeku to Bakudeku.

Even now, seeing him differently, I still personally wouldn’t date Bakugou, especially if I had other options. Why? I probably wouldn’t want to date any of the guys who bullied me, especially because I think that schoolyard bullying, even in middle school, affected me largely in a negative way and created a lot of complexes I’m still trying to work through. I haven’t built a better relationship with them, and I’m not obligated to. Still, I associate them with the kind of soft trauma that they inflicted upon me, and while to them it was probably impersonal, to me, it was an intimate sort of attack that still affects me. That being said, that is me. Those are my personal experiences, and while they could undoubtedly influence how I interpret relationships, I do not want to project and hinder my own interpretation of Deku.

The reality is that Deku himself has an innate understanding of Bakugou that no one else does; I mention later that he seems to understand his language, implicitly, and I do stand by that. He understands what it is he’s actually trying to say, often why he’s saying it, and while others may see him as wimpy or unable to stand up for himself, that’s simply not true. Part of Deku’s characterization is that he is uncommonly observant and empathetic; I’m not denying that Bakugou caused harm or inflicted damage, but infantilizing Deku and preaching about trauma that’s not backed by canon and then assuming random people online excuse abuse is just...the leap of leaps, and an actual toxic thing to do. I’ve read fan works where Bakugou is a bully, and that’s all, and has caused an intimate degree of emotional, mental, and physical insecurity from their middle school years that prevents their relationship from changing, and that’s for the better. I’m not going to argue and say that it’s not an interesting take, or not valid, or has no basis, because it does. Its basis is the character that Bakugou was in middle school, and the person he was when he entered UA.

Not only is Bakugou — the current Bakugou, the one who has accumulated memories and experiences and development — not the same person he was at the beginning of the story, but Deku is not the same person, either. Maybe who they are fundamentally, at their core, stays the same, but at the beginning and end of any story, or even their arcs within the story, the point is that characters will undergo change, and that the reader will gain perspective.

“You wanna be a hero so bad? I’ve got a time-saving idea for you. If you think you’ll have a quirk in your next life...go take a swan dive off the roof!”

Yes. That is a horrible thing to tell someone, even if you are a child, even if you don’t understand the implications, even if you don’t mean what it is you are saying. Had someone told me that in middle school, especially given our history and the context of our interactions, I don’t know if I would ever have forgiven them.

Here’s the thing: I’m not Deku. Neither is anyone reading this. Deku is a fictional character, and everyone we know about him is extrapolated from source material, and his response to this event follows:

“Idiot! If I really jumped, you’d be charged with bullying me into suicide! Think before you speak!”

I think it’s unfair to apply our own projections as a universal rather than an interpersonal interpretation; that’s not to say that the interpretation of Bakudeku being abusive or having unbalanced power dynamics isn’t valid, or unfounded, but rather it’s not a universal interpretation, and it’s not canon. Deku is much more of a verbal thinker; in comparison, Bakugou is a visual one, at least in the format of the manga, and as such, we get various panels demonstrating his guilt, and how deep it runs. His dialogue and rapport with Deku has undeniably shifted, and it’s very clear that the way they treat each other has changed from when they were younger. Part of Bakugou’s growth is him gaining self awareness, and eventually, the strength to wield that. He knows what a fucked up little kid he was, and he carries the weight of that.

“At that moment, there were no thoughts in my head. My body just moved on its own.”

There’s a part of me that really, really disliked Bakugou going into it, partially because of what I’d seen and what I’d heard from a limited, outside perspective. I felt like Bakugou embodied the toxic masculinity (and to an extent, I still believe that) and if he won in some way, that felt like the patriarchy winning, so I couldn't help but want to muzzle and leash him before releasing him into the wild.

The reality, however, of his character in canon is that it isn’t very accurate to assume that he would be an abusive partner in the future, or that Midoryia has not forgiven him to some extent already, that the two do not care about each other or are singularly important, that they respect each other, or that the narrative has forgotten any of this.

Don’t mistake me for a Bakugou simp or apologist. I’m not, but while I definitely could also see Tododeku (and I have a soft spot for them, too, their dynamic is totally different and unique, and Todoroki is arguably treated as the tritagonist) and I’m ambivalent about Izuocha (which is written as cannoncially romantic) I do believe that canonically, Bakugou and Deku are framed as soulmates/character foils, Sasuke + Naruto, Kageyama + Hinata style. Their relationship is arguably the focus of the series. That’s not to undermine the importance or impact of Deku’s relationships with other characters, and theirs with him, but in terms of which one takes priority, and which one this all hinges on?

The manga is about a lot of things, yes, but if it were to be distilled into one relationship, buckle up, because it’s the Bakudeku show.

Power is Power: the Brain-Melting Process of Normalization and Toxic Masculinity

One of the ways in which the biopolitical prioritization of Quirks is exemplified within Hero society is through Quirk marriages. Endeavor partially rationalizes the abuse of his family through the creation of a child with the perfect quirk, a child who can be molded into the perfect Hero. People with powerful, or useful abilities, are ranked high on the hierarchy of power and privilege, and with a powerful ability, the more opportunities and avenues for success are available to them.

For the most part, Bakugou is a super spoiled, privileged little rich kid who is born talented but is enabled for his aggressive behavior and, as a child, cannot move past his many internalized complexes, treats his peers like shit, and gets away with it because the hero society he lives in either has this “boys will be boys” mentality, or it’s an example of the way that power, or Power, is systematically prioritized in this society. The hero system enables and fosters abusers, people who want power and publicity, and people who are genetically predisposed to have advantages over others. There are plenty of good people who believe in and participate in this system, who want to be good, and who do good, but that doesn’t change the way that the hero society is structured, the ethical ambiguity of the Hero Commission, and the way that Heroes are but pawns, idols with machine guns, used to sell merch to the public, to install faith in the government, or the current status quo, and reinforce capitalist propaganda. Even All Might, the epitome of everything a Hero should be, is drained over the years, and exists as a concept or idea, when in reality he is a hollow shell with an entire person inside, struggling to survive. Hero society is functionally dependent on illusion.

In Marxist terms: There is no truth, there is only power.

Although Bakugou does change, and I think that while he regrets his actions, what is long overdue is him verbally expressing his remorse, both to himself and Deku. One might argue that he’s tried to do it in ways that are compatible with his limited emotional range of expression, and Deku seems to understand this language implicitly.

I am of the opinion that the narrative is building up to a verbal acknowledgement, confrontation, and subsequent apology that only speaks what has gone unspoken.

That being said, Bakugou is a great example of the way that figures of authority (parents, teachers, adults) and institutions both in the real world and this fictional universe reward violent behavior while also leaving mental and emotional health — both his own and of the people Bakugou hurts — unchecked, and part of the way he lashes out at others is because he was never taught otherwise.

And by that, I’m referring to the ways that are to me, genuinely disturbing. For example, yelling at his friends is chill. But telling someone to kill themselves, even casually and without intent and then misinterpreting everything they do as a ploy to make you feel weak because you're projecting? And having no teachers stop and intervene, either because they are afraid of you or because they value the weight that your Quirk can benefit society over the safety of children? That, to me, is both real and disturbing.

Not only that, but his parents (at least, Mitsuki), respond to his outbursts with more outbursts, and while this is likely the culture of their home and I hesitate to call it abusive, I do think that it contributed to the way that he approaches things. Bakugou as a character is very complex, but I think that he is primarily an example of the way that the Hero System fails people.

I don’t think we can write off the things he’s done, especially using the line of reasoning that “He didn’t mean it that way”, because in real life, children who hurt others rarely mean it like that either, but that doesn’t change the effect it has on the people who are victimized, but to be absolutely fair, I don’t think that the majority of Bakudeku shippers, at least now, do use that line of reasoning. Most of them seem to have a handle on exactly how fucked up the Hero society is, and exactly why it fucks up the people embedded within that society.

The characters are positioned in this way for a reason, and the discoveries made and the development that these characters undergo are meant to reveal more about the fictional world — and, perhaps, our world — as the narrative progresses.

The world of the Hero society is dependent, to some degree, on biopolitics. I don’t think we have enough evidence to suggest that people with Quirks or Quirkless people place enough identity or placement within society to become equivalent to marginalized groups, exactly, but we can draw parallels to the way that Deku and by extent Quirkless people are viewed as weak, a deviation, or disabled in some way. Deviants, or non-productive bodies, are shunned for their inability to perform ideal labor. While it is suggested to Deku that he could become a police officer or pursue some other occupation to help people, he believes that he can do the most positive good as a Hero. In order to be a Hero, however, in the sense of a career, one needs to have Power.

Deviation from the norm will be punished or policed unless it is exploitable; in order to become integrated into society, a deviant must undergo a process of normalization and become a working, exploitable body. It is only through gaining power from All Might that Deku is allowed to assimilate from the margins and into the upper ranks of society; the manga and the anime give the reader enough perspective, context, and examples to allow us to critique and deconstruct the society that is solely reliant on power.

Through his societal privileges, interpersonal biases, internalized complexes, and his subsequent unlearning of these ideologies, Bakugou provides examples of the way that the system simultaneously fails and indoctrinates those who are targeted, neglected, enabled by, believe in, and participate within the system.

Bakudeku are two sides of the same coin. We are shown visually that the crucial turning point and fracture in their relationship is when Bakugou refuses to take Deku’s outstretched hand; the idea of Deku offering him help messes with his adolescent perspective in that Power creates a hierarchy that must be obeyed, and to be helped is to be weak is to be made a loser.

Largely, their character flaws in terms of understanding the hero society are defined and entangled within the concept of power. Bakugou has power, or privilege, but does not have the moral character to use it as a hero, and believes that Power, or winning, is the only way in which to view life. Izuku has a much better grasp on the way in which heroes wield power (their ideologies can, at first, be differentiated as winning vs. saving), and is a worthy successor because of this understanding, and of circumstance. However, in order to become a Hero, our hero must first gain the Power that he lacks, and learn to wield it.

As the characters change, they bridge the gaps of their character deficiencies, and are brought closer together through character parallelism.

Two sides of the same coin, an outstretched hand.

They are better together.

How to Kill Middle Schoolers, and Why We Should

I think it’s fitting that in the manga, a critical part of Bakugou’s arc explicitly alludes to killing the middle school version of himself in order to progress into a young adult. In the alternative covers Horikoshi released, one of them was a close up of Bakugou in his middle school uniform, being stabbed/impaled, with blood rolling out of his mouth. Clearly this references the scene in which he sacrifices himself to save Deku, on a near-instinctual level.

To me, this only cements Horikoshi’s intent that middle school Bakugou must be debunked, killed, discarded, or destroyed in order for Bakugou the hero to emerge, which is why people who do actually excuse his actions or believe that those actions define him into young adulthood don’t really understand the necessity for change, because they seem to imply that he doesn’t need/cannot reach further growth, and there doesn’t need to be a separation between the Bakugou who is, at heart, volatile and repressed the angry, and the Bakugou who sacrifices himself, a hero who saves people.

Plot twist: there does need to be a difference. Further plot twist: there is a difference.

In sacrificing himself for Deku, Bakugou himself doesn't die, but the injury is fatal in the sense that it could've killed him physically and yet symbolizes the selfish, childish part of him that refused to accept Deku, himself, and the inevitability of change. In killing those selfish remnants, he could actually become the kind of hero that we the reader understand to be the true kind.

That’s why I think that a lot of the people who stress his actions as a child without acknowledging the ways he has changed, grown, and tried to fix what he has broken don’t really get it, because it was always part of his character arc to change and purposely become something different and better. If the effects of his worst and his most childish self stick with you more, and linger despite that, that’s okay. But distilling his character down to the wrong elements doesn’t get you the bare essentials; what it gets you is a skewed and shallow version of a person. If you’re okay with that version, that is also fine.

But you can’t condemn others who aren’t fine with that incomplete version, and to become enraged that others do not see him as you do is childish.

Bakugou’s change and the emphasis on that change is canon.

Parallels in Abuse, EnemiesRivals-to-Lovers, and the Necessity of Redemption ft. ATLA’s Zuko

In real life, the idea that “oh, he must bully you because he likes you” is often used as a way to brush aside or to excuse the action of bullying itself, as if a ‘secret crush’ somehow negates the effects of bullying on the victim or the inability of the bully to properly process and manifest their emotions in certain ways. It doesn’t. It often enables young boys to hurt others, and provides figures of authority to overlook the real source of schoolyard bullying or peer review. The “secret crush”, in real life, is used to undermine abuse, justify toxic masculinity, and is essentially used as a non-solution solution.

A common accusation is that Bakudeku shippers jump on the pairing because they romanticize pairing a bully and a victim together, or believe that the only way for Bakugou to atone for his past would be to date Midoryia in the future. This may be true for some people, in which case, that’s their own preference, but based on my experience and what I’ve witnessed, that’s not the case for most.

The difference being is that as these are characters, we as readers or viewers are meant to analyze them. Not to justify them, or to excuse their actions, but we are given the advantage of the outsider perspective to piece their characters together in context, understand why they are how they are, and witness them change; maybe I just haven’t been exposed to enough of the fandom, but no one (I’ve witnessed) treats the idea that “maybe Bakugou has feelings he can’t process or understand and so they manifest in aggressive and unchecked ways'' as a solution to his inability to communicate or process in a healthy way, rather it is just part of the explanation of his character, something is needs to — and is — working through. The solution to his middle school self is not the revelation of a “teehee, secret crush”, but self-reflection, remorse, and actively working to better oneself, which I do believe is canonically reflected, especially as of recently.

In canon, they are written to be partners, better together than apart, and I genuinely believe that one can like the Bakudeku dynamic not by route of romanticization but by observation.

I do think we are meant to see parallels between him and Endeavor; Endeavor is a high profile abuser who embodies the flaws and hypocrisy of the hero system. Bakugou is a schoolyard bully who emulates and internalizes the flaws of this system as a child, likely due to the structure of the society and the way that children will absorb the propaganda they are exposed to; the idea that Quirks, or power, define the inherent value of the individual, their ability to contribute to society, and subsequently their fundamental human worth. The difference between them is the fact that Endeavor is the literal adult who is fully and knowingly active within a toxic, corrupt system who forces his family to undergo a terrifying amount of trauma and abuse while facing little to no consequences because he knows that his status and the values of their society will protect him from those consequences. In other words, Endeavor is the threat of what Bakugou could have, and would have, become without intervention or genuine change.

Comparisons between characters, as parallels or foils, are tricky in that they imply but cannot confirm sameness. Having parallels with someone does not make them the same, by the way, but can serve to illustrate contrasts, or warnings. Harry Potter, for example, is meant to have obvious parallels with Tom Riddle, with similar abilities, and tragic upbringings. That doesn’t mean Harry grows up to become Lord Voldemort, but rather he helps lead a cross-generational movement to overthrow the facist regime. Harry is offered love, compassion, and friends, and does not embrace the darkness within or around him. As far as moldy old snake men are concerned, they do not deserve a redemption arc because they do not wish for one, and the truest of change only occurs when you actively try to change.

To be frank, either way, Bakugou was probably going to become a good Hero, in the sense that Endeavor is a ‘good’ Hero. Hero capitalized, as in a pro Hero, in the sense that it is a career, an occupation, and a status. Because of his strong Quirk, determination, skill, and work ethic, Bakugou would have made a good Hero. Due to his lack of character, however, he was not on the path to become a hero; defender of the weak, someone who saves people to save people, who is willing to make sacrifices detrimental to themselves, who saves people out of love.

It is necessary for him to undergo both a redemption arc and a symbolic death and rebirth in order for him to follow the path of a hero, having been inspired and prompted by Deku.

I personally don’t really like Endeavor’s little redemption arc, not because I don’t believe that people can change or that they shouldn't at least try to atone for the atrocities they have committed, but because within any narrative, a good redemption arc is important if it matters; what also matters is the context of that arc, and whether or not it was needed. For example, in ATLA, Zuko’s redemption arc is widely regarded as one of the best arcs in television history, something incredible. And it is. That shit fucks. In a good way.

It was confirmed that Azula was also going to get a redemption arc, had Volume 4 gone on as planned, and it was tentatively approached in the comics, which are considered canon. She is an undeniably bad person (who is willing to kill, threaten, exploit, and colonize), but she is also a child, and as viewers, we witness and recognize the factors that contributed to her (debatable) sociopathy, and the way that the system she was raised in failed her. Her family failed her; even Uncle Iroh, the wise mentor who helps guide Zuko to see the light, is willing to give up on her immediately, saying that she’s “crazy” and needs to be “put down”. Yes, it’s comedic, and yes, it’s pragmatic, but Azula is fourteen years old. Her mother is banished, her father is a psychopath, and her older brother, from her perspective, betrayed and abandoned her. She doesn’t have the emotional support that Zuko does; she exploits and controls her friends because it’s all she’s been taught to do; she says herself, her “own mother thought [she] was a monster; she was right, of course, but it still [hurts]”. A parent who does not believe in you, or a parent that uses you and will hurt you, is a genuine indicator of trauma.

The writers understood that both Zuko and Azula deserved redemption arcs. One was arguably further gone than the other, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are both children, products of their environment, who have the time, motive, and reason to change.

In contrast, you know who wouldn’t have deserved a redemption arc? Ozai. That simply would not have been interesting, wouldn’t have served the narrative well, and honestly, is not needed, thematically or otherwise. Am I comparing Ozai to Endeavor? Basically, yes. Fuck those guys. I don’t see a point in Endeavor’s little “I want to be a good dad now” arc, and I think that we don’t need to sympathize with characters in order to understand them or be interested in them. I want Touya/Dabi to expose his abuse, for his career to crumble, and then for him to die.

If they are not challenging the system that we the viewer are meant to question, and there is no thematic relevance to their redemption, is it even needed?

On that note, am I saying that Bakugou is the equivalent to Zuko? No, lmao. Definitely not. They are different characters with different progressions and different pressures. What I am saying is that good redemption arcs shouldn’t be handed out like candy to babies; it is the quality, rather than the quantity, that makes a redemption arc good. In terms of the commentary of the narrative, who needs a redemption arc, who is deserving, and who does it make sense to give one to?

In this case, Bakugou checks those boxes. It was always in the cards for him to change, and he has. In fact, he’s still changing.

Give it to Me Straight. It’s Homophobic.

There does seem to be an urge to obsessively gender either Bakugou or Deku, in making Deku the ultra-feminine, stereotypically hyper-sexualized “woman” of the relationship, with Bakugou becoming similarly sexualized but depicted as the hyper-masculine bodice ripper. On some level, that feels vaguely homophobic if not straight up misogynistic, in that in a gay relationship there’s an urge to compel them to conform under heteronormative stereotypes in order to be interpreted as real or functional. On one hand, I will say that in a lot of cases it feels like more of an expression of a kink, or fetishization and subsequent expression of internalized misogyny, at least, rather than a genuine exploration of the complexity and power imbalances of gender dynamics, expression, and boundaries.

That being said, I don’t think that that problematic aspect of shipping is unique to Bakudeku, or even to the fandom in general. We’ve all read fan work or see fanart of most gay ships in a similiar manner, and I think it’s a broader issue to be addressed than blaming it on a singular ship and calling it a day.

One interpretation of Bakugou’s character is his repression and the way his character functions under toxic masculinity, in a society’s egregious disregard for mental and emotional health (much like in the real world), the horrifying ways in which rage is rationalized or excused due to the concept of masculinity, and the way that characteristics that are associated with femininity — intellect, empathy, anxiety, kindness, hesitation, softness — are seen as stereotypically “weak”, and in men, traditionally emasculating. In terms of the way that the fictional universe is largely about societal priority and power dynamics between individuals and the way that extends to institutions, it’s not a total stretch to guess that gender as a construct is a relevant topic to expand on or at least keep in mind for comparison.

I think that the way in which characters are gendered and the extent to which that is a result of invasive heteronormativity and fetishization is a really important conversation to have, but using it as a case-by-case evolution of a ship used to condemn people isn’t conductive, and at that point, it’s treated as less of a real concern but an issue narrowly weaponised.

Love in Perspective, from the East v. West

Another thing I think could be elaborated on and written about in great detail is the way that the Eastern part of the fandom and the Western part of the fandom have such different perspectives on Bakudeku in particular. I am not going to go in depth with this, and there are many other people who could go into specifics, but just as an overview:

The manga and the anime are created for and targeted at a certain audience; our take on it will differ based on cultural norms, decisions in translation, understanding of the genre, and our own region-specific socialization. This includes the way in which we interpret certain relationships, the way they resonate with us, and what we do and do not find to be acceptable. Of course, this is not a case-by-case basis, and I’m sure there are plenty of people who hold differing beliefs within one area, but speaking generally, there is a reason that Bakudeku is not regarded as nearly as problematic in the East.

Had this been written by a Western creator, marketed primarily to and within the West (for reference, while I am Chinese, but I have lived in the USA for most of my life, so my own perspective is undoubtedly westernized), I would’ve immediately jumped to make comparisons between the Hero System and the American police system, in that a corrupt, or bastardized system is made no less corrupt for the people who do legitimately want to do good and help people, when that system disproportionately values and targets others while relying on propaganda that society must be reliant on that system in order to create safe communities when in reality it perpetuates just as many issues as it appears to solve, not to mention the way it attracts and rewards violent and power-hungry people who are enabled to abuse their power. I think comparisons can still be made, but in terms of analysis, it should be kept in mind that the police system in other parts of the world do not have the same history, place, and context as it does in America, and the police system in Japan, for example, probably wasn’t the basis for the Hero System.

As much as I do believe in the Death of the Author in most cases, the intent of the author does matter when it comes to content like this, if merely on the basis that it provides context that we may be missing as foreign viewers.

As far as the intent of the author goes, Bakugou is on a route of redemption.

He deserves it. It is unavoidable. That, of course, may depend on where you’re reading this.

Stuck in the Sludge, the Past, and Season One

If there’s one thing, to me, that epitomizes middle school Bakugou, it’s him being trapped in a sludge monster, rescued by his Quirkless childhood friend, and unable to believe his eyes. He clings to the ideology he always has, that Quirkless means weak, that there’s no way that Deku could have grown to be strong, or had the capacity to be strong all along. Bakugou is wrong about this, and continuously proven wrong. It is only when he accepts that he is wrong, and that Deku is someone to follow, that he starts his real path to heroics.

If Bakudeku’s relationship does not appeal to someone for whatever reason, there’s nothing wrong with that. They can write all they want about why they don’t ship it, or why it bothers them, or why they think it’s problematic. If it is legitimately triggering to you, then by all means, avoid it, point it out, etc. but do not undermine the reality of abuse simply to point fingers, just because you don’t like a ship. People who intentionally use the anti tag knowing it’ll show up in the main tag, go after people who are literally minding their own business, and accuse people of supporting abuse are the ones looking for a fight, and they’re annoying as hell because they don’t bring anything to the table. No evidence, no analysis, just repeated projection.

To clarify, I’m referring to a specific kind of shipper, not someone who just doesn’t like a ship, but who is so aggressive about it for absolutely no reason. There are plenty of very lovely people in this fandom, who mind their own business, multipship, or just don’t care.

Calling shippers dumb or braindead or toxic (to clarify, this isn’t targeting any one person I’ve seen, but a collective) based on projections and generalizations that come entirely from your own impression of the ship rather than observation is...really biased to me, and comes across as uneducated and trigger happy, rather than constructive or helpful in any way.

I’m not saying someone has to ship anything, or like it, in order to be a ‘good’ participant. But inserting derogatory material into a main tag, and dropping buzzwords with the same tired backing behind it without seeming to understand the implications of those words or acknowledging the development, pacing, and intentional change to the characters within the plot is just...I don’t know, it comes across as redundant, to me at least, and very childish. Aggressive. Toxic. Problematic. Maybe the real toxic shippers were the ones who bitched and moaned along the way. They’re like little kids, stuck in the past, unable to visualize or recognize change, and I think that’s a real shame because it’s preventing them from appreciating the story or its characters as it is, in canon.

But that’s okay, really. To each their own. Interpretations will vary, preferences differ, perspectives are not uniform. There is no one truth. There are five seasons of the show, a feature film, and like, thirty volumes as of this year.

All I’m saying is that if you want to stay stuck in the first season of each character, then that’s what you’re going to get. That’s up to you.

This may be edited or revised.

That beautiful writer ask meme: Imagery, Juxtaposition, Symbolism, Allegory, Repetition

This got long, so I’m putting it under a cut.

Imagery: How much do you worldbuild in your current writing project? How do you make your setting seem real and vivid?

I have to admit: world-building is actually not one of my strong suits as a writer. I think I’m better at crafting characters than I am at crafting the worlds they live in. Which makes fanfic pretty great for me, because I can be lazy and piggy-back off of an already established world. 😉 I don’t have to do much world-building for Undertow, since a lot of that is already done for me, but I do have some original projects that involve more creativity on that front. I think when I do world-building I often focus most on cultural things: local beliefs and ideology, art, politics, etc.

As for the setting, I like to highlight sensory/impressionistic details as the character experiences them. The same setting can be experienced very differently depending on a character’s frame of mind and what sorts of things they tend to pay attention to. Specificity is also really helpful in making the world seem real. I like to try and zero in on a few small/specific details when writing my descriptions.

Juxtaposition: Do you include subplots in your writing? How do you balance them alongside your main plots?

I usually do have subplots. A lot of times what I like to do with my stories is focus on an overarching theme, and then find ways to express those ideas on both a macro and micro level, or as both symbolic and literal. With Undertow, that theme is trauma and recovery, specifically how it relates to personal agency and growth. And so I have multiple interwoven plot threads that all deal with that same theme. So it isn’t so much like... separate plots, as it is one big plot tapestry.

Symbolism: What does writing mean to you? How has it impacted your life?

Oof, man. This is a big one. I think growing up I always really struggled to express myself and to have a voice. And writing became my outlet for that. I wasn’t naturally good at it, but I kept working at it, and over time I improved a lot. I think a lot about narrative, and the role it plays in human culture. Both as individuals and as a society, we define our reality through storytelling: the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we tell to others. I very much want those stories to be as real and true and organic as possible, even when crafting these totally fantastical, fictional realities. Because every story we tell and every story we consume influences our reality... even if it’s just in these subtle, fractional ways.

So there’s the personal, of course: I want to have a voice, I want to be able to reach out to people and show them what I see and feel. I want to be able to point to something and say: “Look at this. This is important. This matters.”

Then there’s the social: knowing that people are engaging with the things I wrote and making it their own.

Then there’s the bigger narrative: I want to make a ripple in our shared reality, even if only a very small one.

But I struggle to do that. Because... well, because of a lot of things. Mental health, physical health, life circumstances, etc. So writing is both this super important thing that I love and a lifelong struggle to overcome massive personal obstacles.

But I genuinely believe that I would not be alive today without it.

Allegory: What is the theme of your current writing project? Is there a message you’d like readers to consider?

I talked about this a bit under Juxtaposition, so I’ll try not to get too repetitive. I also don’t necessarily want to state all of the messages outright, because as a writer I kind of like to just let the subtext speak for itself. But yes, there are definitely themes and messages that I hope readers will pick up on. Some of it involves a bit of meta-criticism over the whole good vs. evil, black and white worldview of D&D and similar fantasy worlds. Which ties into the overarching trauma theme because... hmm, how do I explain this? We cannot as a society take ownership of our sins if we refuse to claim them. People are not inherently good or bad. It’s our actions that matter.

Also, trauma doesn’t have to mean an end to things like love and happiness. Sometimes those things just come to us in unexpected and complicated ways.

Repetition: Is there anything you find you repeat across your witting projects? Symbols, tropes, descriptions, themes? 

Oh gosh, so many things. I use water symbolism a lot. I talk about trauma a lot. Most of my writing is pretty angsty. I also have a penchant for using theories in astrophysics as emotional metaphors. 😏

I love to plant little seeds that end up bearing fruit later on in the story. Like, a character will say something, and then that thing will get repeated later by another character, but with added nuance/weight/irony. I love to connect things. Seemingly disparate characters and stories might all eventually link up in some way.

I tend to use a lot of subtext. The things characters don’t say are often just as important as the things they do. That can also be true of the narrative itself. I convey a lot of things by implication. (I tend to stress a lot over whether any of that is actually clear to readers. Ideally I’d like to be one of those authors who rewards close/repeat reading, but it’s also possible I’m just being way too opaque.)

A lot of my characters have bad relationships with their parents.

A lot of my characters have intense/complicated sexualities.

I use a lot of visceral imagery. I often talk about the body (and the breaking open of it) as a metaphor for emotional intimacy. (Hoo boy is this relevant for my current fic.) Blood isn’t just blood. It’s also feelings.

The Weekend Warrior Christmas - New Year’s Edition – WONDER WOMAN 1984, NEWS OF THE WORLD, PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN, ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI..., PIECES OF A WOMAN, HERSELF, SYLVIE’S LOVE and More!

Welcome to the VERY LAST Weekend Warrior of the WORST YEAR EVER!!! But hopefully not the last column forever, even though I already plan on taking much of January off from writing 8 to 10 reviews each week. It just got to be too much for a while there.

Because it’s the last week of the year, there are a lot of really good movies, some in theaters but also quite a few on streaming services. In fact, there are a good number of movies that appeared in my Top 10 for the yearover at Below the Line, as well as my extended Top 25 that I’ll share on this blog sometime next week. I was half-hoping to maybe write something about the box office prospects of some of the new movies, but after the last couple weeks, it’s obvious that box office is not something that will be something worth writing about until sometime next spring or summer.

(This column is brought to you by Paul McCartney’s new album “McCartney III” which I’m listening to as I finish this up… and then other solo Beatles ditties picked for me randomly by Tidal.)

First up is easily one of the most anticipated movies of the year, or at least one that actually didn’t move to 2021, and that’s WONDER WOMAN 1984 (Warner Bros.), Patty Jenkins’ sequel to the 2017 hit, once again starring Gal Gadot as Diana Prince. I reviewed it here, but basically the sequel introduces Wonder Woman arch-nemeses Barbara Minerva aka Cheetah, as played by Kristen Wiig, and Pedro Pascal’s Max Lord and how an ancient artifact gives them both their powers, as well as helps to bring Diana’s true love Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) back despite him having disappeared presumed dead in WWI. As you can see by reading my review, I thought it was just fine, not great and certainly not something I’d make an attempt to see a second time in a 25% capacity movie theater. Fortunately, besides debuting in around 2,100 movie theaters across the nation, it will also be on HBO Max day and date, which has caused quite a stir. Being Christmas weekend with no work/school on Monday, I can see it still making somewhere between $10 and 12 million, but I can’t imagine it doing nearly what it might have done with most theaters only 25-30% full at the maximum and that theater count being roughly half the number it might have gotten during the “normal times.”

Paul Greengrass’ Western NEWS OF THE WORLD (Universal) reteams him with his Captain Phillips star Tom Hanks, this time playing Captain Jefferson Kidd, a Civil War soldier who travels from town to town in the Old West reading from newspapers to anyone who has a dime and time to listen. After one such reading, he discovers a young girl (Helena Zengel) on her own, having spent the last few years with a family of Native Americans who were killed by soldiers. Together, they travel across America as Kidd hopes to bring the girl to her last surviving family members.

I already reviewed Greengrass’ movie for Below the Line, and I also  spoke to Mr. Greengrass, an interview you can read that right here (once it goes live), but I make no bones that this was one of my favorite movies I’ve seen this year, and it’s not just due to the fine work by Greengrass and his team. No, it’s just as much about the emotion inherent in the story, and the relationship between the characters played by Hanks and Zengel.  

I’ve watched the movie three times now, and I’m still blown away by every frame and moment, the tension that’s created on this difficult journey but also where it leaves the viewers at the end that promises that there can be hope and joy even in the most difficult and turbulent times. It’s a wonderful message that’s truly needed right now.

Listen, I’m not gonna recommend going to a movie theater if you don’t feel it’s safe – I’ve already spoken my peace on this at a time when COVID numbers were much lower – but this is a movie that I personally can’t wait to see in a movie theater. I honestly can’t see the movie making more than $3 or 4 million in the open theaters considering how few people are willing to go to movie theaters. Obviously, this isn’t as big a draw as Wonder Woman, but it is a fantastic big screen movie regardless.

Also opening in theaters this Friday is Emerald Fennell’s directorial debut PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN (Focus Features), starring the wonderful Oscar-nominated Carey Mulligan as Cassie Thomas, a woman who has revenge on her mind. Cassie spends her nights picking up guys in bars by pretending she’s so drunk she can barely walk, then humiliating them and presumably worse. When she encounters an acquaintance from med school in the form of Bo Burnham’s Ryan, the two begin dating, though he ends up awakening a darker side to Cassie that seeks revenge for something that happened back during their school days. (Honestly, if you’re already sold, just skip to the next movie. That’s all I want you to know before watching it.)

I was ready to love Fennell’s movie when it opened with a disgusting shot of gross stock market bros in loose-fitting suits gyrating in slow motion before one of them tries to pick up a totally soused Cassie at the club. It’s a scene that really plays itself out quite well, and then leads into Mulligan’s character allowing another clear scumbag (played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse, maybe as a slight-older McLovin?) before turning the tables on him as well.

There’s going to be a lot of talk about this movie after people see it, since it’s one of those great films that begins a lot of conversations. I imagine most women of a certain age will love it, but some men might see themselves in some of the characters (even Burnham’s) and wonder whether Cassie just won’t take crap from any man or if she’s a full-on misandrist. One thing we do know a lot is that she does this sort of thing a lot, and there’s something from her past that has driven her involving something that happened to her female friend in med school. I’m going to stop talking about the plot here, because I definitely don’t want to spoil anything who hasn’t seen the movie, but the second half of the movie is as deeply satisfying as Tarantino’s Kill Bill in terms of the surprises.

You’ll realize while watching what a treat you’re in for when you first watch Mulligan’s amazing transformation from pretending to be drunk to being completely cognizant and just all the emotions we see her go through after that. Of course, we never really know what she’s actually doing to the guys she lets pick her up -- she keeps a notebook with guy’s names and a quizzical counting system, so we can only imagine.

Fennell’s screenplay is fantastic but her work as a first-time director in maintaining the the tone and pacing of the movie is really what will keep you captivated, whether it’s the amazing musical choices or how Cassie dresses up to lure men. There’s also a great cast around Mulligan whether it’s comic Burnham in a relatively more serious role, but one that also allows him a musical number. (No joke.) Fennel’s amazing casting doesn’t just stop there from, Jennifer Coolidge as Cassie’s mother to Laverne Cox as Gail, her workmate/boss at the coffee shop – both of them add to the film’s subtle humor elements. Alfred Molina shows up to give a show-stopping performance, and Alison Brie also plays a more dramatic role as another one of Cassie’s classmates. I can totally understand why the Golden Globes might have deemed the movie a “comedy/musical” (for about two days before going back) , but putting so many funny people in dramatic roles helps give Promising Young Woman its own darkly humorous feel. All that darkness is contrasted by this sweet romance between Cassie and Ryan that’s always in danger of imploding due to Cassie’s troubled nature.

The biggest shocking surprise is saved for the third act, and boy, it’s going to be one that people will be talking about for a VERY long time, because it’s just one gut punch after another. I loved this movie, as it’s just absolutely brilliant – go back and see where it landed in my Top 10. As one of the best thrillers from the past decade, people will be talking about this for a very long time 

Promising Young Woman hits theaters on Christmas Day, and presumably, it will be available on VOD sometime in January, but this is not one you want to wait on. If you do go see it in theaters, just be safe, please. No making out with random men or women, please.

Regina King’s narrative feature debut, ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI... (Amazon Studios), will ALSO be in theaters on Christmas Day, and though I’ve reviewed it over at Below the Line, but I’ll talk a little more about it here just for my loyal Weekend Warrior readers.

Yet another movie that made my Top 10, this one stars a brilliant quartet of actors --  Kingsley Ben-Adir, Leslie Odom Jr., Aldis Hodge and Eli Goree—as four legendary black icons: Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, Jim Brown and Cassius Clay, on the night after the last of them wins the World Boxing Championship against Sonny Liston in February 1964. The four men meet in Malcolm X’s hotel room to discuss what’s happening in their lives and the world in general, as well as Clay’s decision to join the Nation of Islam, just as Malcolm X is getting ready to leave the brotherhood due to philosophical differences with the group. In fact, all four men have philosophical differences that are discussed both in good humor and in deep conflict as they disagree on their place in a white-dominated world in a year before the Civil Rights Act would be signed.

First of all, there’s no way to talk about this movie without discussing the Kemp Powers play on which it’s based, and we can’t mention that without mentioning that Powers also co-wrote and co-directed Pixar’s Soul, which will be available on Disney+ this Friday. It’s a fantastic script and King put together a fantastic cast of actors who really give their all to every scene. In the case of Leslie Odom, Jr., you really can believe him as Cooke, especially in a number of fantastic performances pieces. Likewise, Goree looks a lot like Clay both in the ring and out, carrying all of the swagger for which he would become more famous as Ali.

I’ve seen the movie twice already and if you’ve looked at my Top 10, then you already know this is another one that made my cut, so I don’t think I need to give it a much harder sell. I’m sure you’ll be hearing a lot about this one on its journey to Oscar night when hopefully, King becomes the first woman of color to be nominated in the directing category. Or rather, she’ll probably tie for that honor with Nomadland director Chloé Zhao.

If you don’t feel like going to theaters for this one, you’ll be able to catch it on Amazon Prime Video on January 15, too… you’ll just have to wait a little longer.

Also, the new Pixar animation movie, SOUL, directed by Pete Docter (Up, Inside Out) and co-directed by Kemp Powers (remember him?), will hit Disney+ on Christmas Day, and I reviewed it here, so I probably don’t have  lot more to say about it, but it’s great, and if you have Disney+, I’m sure you’ll be watching it.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a screener for Matteo Garrone’s PINNOCHIO (Roadside Attractions), which also opens in about 700 theaters on Christmas Day. This adaptation stars Robert Benigni as Geppeto, who famously starred as Pinocchio in his own version of the classic fairy tale from 2002. That other movie was “Weinsteined” at a time when that just meant that a movie was ruined by Harvey Weinstein’s meddling, rather than anything involving sexual assault.

Another great movie hitting streaming this week is Eugene Ashe’s SYLVIE’S LOVE, which streams on Amazon Prime Video today. It stars Tessa Thompson as Sylvie and Nnamdi Asomugha (also a producer on the film) as Robert, who meet one summer in the late 50s while working at Sylvie’s father’s record store. He is a jazz musician who is on the rise, but their romance is cut short when he gets a gig in Paris but she refuses to go with him. Also, she’s pregnant with his child. Years later, they reconnect with her now being married with a young daughter (clearly Robert’s) and they realize that the love between them is still very real and true.

This is the first of three movies I watched this week where I went in with very little knowledge and absolute zero expectations. Like everyone else on earth, I am an avid fan of Ms. Thompson’s work both in movies like Thor: Ragnarok and smaller indies. She’s just a fantastic presence that lights up a screen. While I wasn’t as familiar with Asomugha’s acting work – he’s produced some great films and acted in a few I liked, included Crown Heights – there’s no denying the chemistry between the two.

What’s kind of interesting about the movie is that it combines a few elements from other great movies released this week, including Soul and A Night in Miami, but in my opinion, handles the music business aspect to the story better than the much-lauded Netflix movie, Ma Raimey’s Black Bottom. Frankly, I also think the performances by the two leads are as good as those by Boseman and Davis in that movie, but unfortunately, Amazon is submitting this to the Emmys as as “TV movie” rather than to the Oscars, so that’s kind of a shame.

This is a movie that’s a little hard to discuss why I enjoyed it so much without talking about certain scenes or moments, or just go through the entire story, but I think part of the joy of appreciating what Ashe has done in his second original feature film is to tell the story of these two characters over the course of a decade or so in a way that hasn’t been done before. That alone is quite an achievement, because we’ve seen many of those types of movies over the years (When Harry Met Sally, for instance).

What I really liked about Sylvie’s Love over some of the other “black movies” this year is that it literally creates its own world and just deals with the characters within it, rather than trying to make a big statement about the world at the time. Maybe you can say the same about Soul in that sense, but you would be absolutely amazed by how much bigger an audience you can get by telling a grounded story in a relatable world, and then throw in a bit of music, as both those movies do.

So that’s all I’ll say except that this will is now on Amazon Prime Video , so you have no excuse not to check it out while you wait for Regina King’s equally great One Night in Miami to join it in mid-January.

Hitting Netflix on Christmas day is Robert Rodriguez’s WE CAN BE HEROES, his sequel to his 2005 family film The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl – not his best moment -- which follows the kids of the Heroics, a Justice League-like super group. They’re all in a special school for kids with powers but they have to step up when the Heroics are captured by aliens. Want to know what will happen? Well, you’ll just have to wait for Christmas Day for when my review drops to find out whether I liked it more or less than Rodriguez’s earlier film which SPOILER!! I hated.)

The first thing you need to get past is that Shark Boy and Lava Girl are now man and wife, and just that fact might be tough for anyone who only discovered the movie sometime more recently. There are other familiar faces in the Heroics like Pedro Pascal, Sung Kang, Christian Slater, Priyanka Chopra Jonas and more, so clearly, Rodriguez is still able to pull together a cast.

The movie actually focuses on YaYa Goselin’s Missy Moreno, daughter of the Heroic’s leader (Pascal) who has also retired. Just as aliens are invading the earth, Missy is put into a school of kids with superpowers, all kids of various Heroic members. Sure, it’s derived directly from The X-Men and/or Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, so yeah… basically also the X-Men. We meet all of the kids in a great scene where we see them using their powers and learn their personalities, and honestly, they really are the best part of the movie.Probably the most adorable is Guppy, the very young daughter of Shark Boy and Lava Girl, played by Viven Blair. Oddly, Missy doesn’t have any powers so she feels a bit fish-out-of-water in the group even though, like her father, she proves to be a good leader.

As much as I really detested Rodriguez’s Shark Boy and Lava Girl movie, I feel like he does a lot better by having a variety of kids in this one, basically something for everyone, but also not a bad group of child actors. (There’s also a fun role for Adriana Barraza​.) There are definitely aspects that are silly, but Rodriguez never loses sight of his audience, and wisely, Netflix is offering this as a Christmas Day release which should be fun for families with younger kids who might see this as their first superhero movie.

More discerning viewers may not be particularly crazy about visual FX, all done as usual in Rodriguez’s own studio but some of them look particularly hoaky and cheap compared to others. (I mean, that’s probably the appeal for hiring Rodriguez because he’s able to do so much in-house. In this case, he got all four of his own kids involved in various capacities of making the film.)

We Can Be Heroes is clearly a movie made for kids, so anyone expecting anything on part with Amazon’s The Boys will be quite disappointed. It’s probably Rodriguez getting slightly closer to Spy Kids than he has with any of his other family-friendly movies, but one shouldn’t go in with the expectations that come with any of the much bigger blockbusters released these days. Personally, I enjoyed that fact, and I totally would watch another movie with this superteam.

Michel Stasko’s BOYS VS. GIRLS (Gravitas Ventures) is a fun retro-comedy that follows a war between the male and female counselors at Camp Kindlewood, which has just gone co-ed. At the center of it all is Dale (Eric Osborne) and Amber (Rachel Dagenais) as two teens who are in the middle of a meet-cute romance in the middle of a inter-gender competition called “Lumberman vs. Voyagers,” which I have no idea whether it’s a real thing or not.

I probably should have known I’d like this one from the catchy New Order-ish song in the opening credits, but listen, Wet Hot American Summer is one of my all-time favorite movies, and that was basically made to satirize ‘80s movies like Meatballs. This one falls more towards to the latter in terms of humor, but it also feels authentic to the ‘80s summer camp experience.

It helps that the grown-ups at the camp are played by the likes of Kevin McDonald from New Kids on the Block, Colin Mochrie from Whose Line is It Anyway and others, but it’s really about the younger cast playing teen boys and girls in the throes of puberty, something we all can in some way relate to. The young cast play a series of stereotypical young but there are a lot of funny tropes within them, as each of the cast is given a chance to deliver some of the funnier gags. This isn’t necessarily high-brow humor, mind you, but I love the fact that you can still make a movie about a time where you could still make fun of girl’s periods in school. (I’m kidding. I just put that in there cause I feel like I need to throw things like that into this column just to see if anyone is ACTUALLY reading it.)

The presumably Canadian Stasko is another great example of an independently-spirited filmmaker who has an idea for a fun movie and then just goes about making it, regardless of having big stars or anything to sell it besides many funny moments that can be featured a trailer, so that those who like this kind of movie will find it. Listen, Wet Hot American Summer wasn’t a huge hit when it was released. I still remember it having trouble getting a single screening at the multiplex in Times Square when it was released but over the years since it became sort of a cult hit (kind of due to Netflix having it to rent on DVD, I think).

Besides a fun script and cast, Stasko also find a way to include tunes that sound so much like real ‘80s songs we would have heard on the radio but aren’t quite the big hits that would have cost him thousands of dollars, but I really just enjoyed the heck out of the tone and overall fun attitude that went into making this movie.

Also on VOD now is Ian Cheney and Martha Shane’s fascinating and funny doc, THE EMOJI STORY (Utopia), which I saw at the Tribeca Film Festival when it was called “Picture Character.” (That’s what “emoji” in Japanese means, just FYI.) As you can guess it’s about the origins and rise of the emoji as a form of communication from its humble beginning in Japan to becoming one of the biggest trending crazes on the globe. I’m not that big an Emoji guy myself – I tend to use the thumbs up just for ease, but I do marvel at those who can put together full thoughts using a string of these symbols, and if you want to know more about them, this is the movie you should watch.

Now let’s cut ahead to some of the movies that will be opening and streaming NEXT week…

Hitting select theaters on Wednesday, December 30 and what really is my “FEATURED FLICK” for this column is Hungarian filmmaker Kornél (White God) Mundruczó’s PIECES OF A WOMAN (Netflix) before its streaming premiere on Netflix January 7.

Written by Kata Wéber, who also wrote Mundruczó’s earlier film, it stars Vanessa Kirby (The Crown) and Shia Labeouf as Martha and Sean Weiss, a Boston couple who lose their baby during a particularly difficult home birth and follows the next year in their lives and how that tragic loss affects their relationship with each other and those around them.

As you can imagine, Pieces of a Woman is a pretty heavy drama, one that reminded me of the films of Todd Field (Little Children, In the Bedroom) in terms of the intensity of the drama and the emotions on screen from the brilliant cast Mundruczó put together for his English language debut. I’m not sure I could use the general plot to sell anyone on seeing this because it is very likely the worst possible date movie of the year after Netflix’s 2019 release, Marriage Story, but it’s just as good in terms of the writing and performances.

At the center of it is Kirby – and yeah, I still haven’t watched The Crown, so shut up! I’ll get to it!!! – who most of us fell in love with for her role in Mission: Impossible - Fallout, but what we see her go through as an actress here really shows the degree of her abilities. But it also shows what Mundruczó can do with material that (like many movies) started out as a play. For instance, one of the first big jaw-dropping moments is the home birth scene that goes on for a long time, seemingly all in one shot, and Kirby is so believable in terms of a woman going through a difficult birth, you’d believe she has had children herself. (She hasn’t.)  I also don’t want to throw Shia Labeouf under the bus right now just because that seems like the trendy thing to do. (Without getting it, I believe FKA Twigs… but that doesn’t deny the fact that Labeouf is just the latest great actor that everyone wants to cancel.)

Anyway, to change the subject, we have to talk about Ellen Burstyn, who plays Martha’s meddling mother, who is quite clingy and overbearing, so when the couple lose their baby, she steps in to take to task the midwife she deems responsible (played by the highly-underrated Molly Parker). Or rather, she hires a family lawyer (Sarah Snook) to take her to court to get compensation for the loss of her daughter’s baby. The film’s last act culminates as their case goes to court.

Again, the film covers roughly a year after the tragedy and deals not only with how Martha and Sean’s relationship is affected and how it emotionally affects Martha in particular, but also how others around them start behaving towards them. It feels so authentic and real that you wonder where the screenwriter was drawing from, but Mundruczó has more than prove himself as as filmmaker by creating something that is visually compelling and even artsy while still doing everything to help promote the story and performances over his own abilities as a director. Doesn’t hurt that he has composer Howard Shore scoring the film in a way that’s subtle but effective.

Listen, if you’re looking for a comedy riot that will entertain you with funny one-liners and pratfalls than Pieces of a Woman is not for you. This is a devastating movie that really throws the viewer down a deep spiral along with its characters. The first time I watched it, I was left quite broken, and maybe even more so on second viewing.  (As we get closer to Oscar season… in four months … I hope this film will be recognized and not just thrown under the table due to Labeouf’s involvement. That would be as big a tragedy and misjustice as much of what happens in the movie.)

So yeah, in case you wondered why this also made it into my prestigious Top 10 for the year, that is why. :)

Also in theaters on Wednesday, December 30 is another terrific drama, the Phyllida Lloyd-directed HERSELF (Amazon Studios), co-written and starring Clare Dunne, as Sandra, a mother of two young girls, trying to get out of an abusive marriage, while making ends meet and providing shelter for her kids. One day, she learns about a way that she can build her own home, and one of the women she cares for offers a plot of land

Another movie that I really didn’t know much about going into, other than Phyllida Lloyd being a talented filmmaker whose movie The Iron Maiden, which won Meryl Streep her 500th Oscar, I enjoyed much more than the popular blockbuster hit musical, Mamma Mia! This is a far more personal story that reminded me of Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake, a smaller and more intimate character piece that shines a light on British actor Clare Dunne, who as with some of the best and most personal movie projects, co-wrote this screenplay for herself to act in.

There are aspects to the film that reminds me of many other quaint Britcoms in terms of creating a story where one person’s challenge is taken up by others who are willing to help, and in this case, it’s Sandra’s desire to build a house for her two quite adorable daughters while also trying to keep it secret from her abusive ex.

Dunne’s performance isn’t as showy as some of the other dramatic performances mentioned in this very column, but she and Lloyd do a fine job creating an authenticity that really makes you believe and push for her character, Sandra, surrounding her with characters who can help keep the movie on the lighter side despite very serious nature of spousal abuse (which also rears its ugly head in Pieces of a Woman). Oh, and don’t get too comfortable, because this, too, leads to an absolutely shocking and devastating climax you won’t see coming. (Well, now you will… but you’ll still be shocked. Trust me.)

Still, it’s a really nice movie with the house being built clearly a metaphor.  I know there’s a lot of truly fantastic movies discussed in this week’s column but don’t let this wonderful British drama pass you by, because you can tell it’s a labor of love for everyone who made it.

Herself will be in theaters for roughly a week starting December 30 before streaming on Prime Video on January 8.

In select theaters and on VOD on New Year’s Day is Roseanne Liang’s WWII thriller SHADOW IN THE CLOUD (Vertical/Redbox Entertainment), starring Chloë Grace Moretz as Flight Officer Maude Garrett, who is assigned to deliver a top-secret package on the B-17 bomber “The Fool’s Errand” with an all-male crew that throws her into a turret “for her own safety.” She ends up getting trapped down there as the plane is attacked by a creature that no one believes is out there, as they fight back against the unseen enemy, many secrets are revealed.

This is yet another movie I didn’t know that much about other than it has Moretz on an airplane, but there’s so much about the movie that both had me scratching my head but also has me quite deliriously amused that filmmakers could get away with some of the craziness that we witness. Maybe it’s not a surprise that the movie was co-written by Max Landis -- not exactly the most beloved screenwriter in Hollywood these days, and certainly not a critical favorite.

Again I really didn’t know what to expect so after Moretz’s character gets on the plane and is trapped in the turret under the plane, I thought that maybe I was seeing something similar to the one-location thriller 7500, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, which I wasn’t too big a fan of even though the actor was good. Moretz continues to be quite a phenomenal actor, but the mix of Mahuia Bridgman-Cooper’s music, which borrows as much from Soulwax (look ‘em up on Spotify) as John Carpenter, and the sexist attitude by the male crew towards Garrett made me unsure of what the movie was meant to say.

Much of the movie just has Moretz on her own with the men’s voices over the comms, which is not something that could possibly sustain a whole movie. Part of it is borrowed from a very well-known episode of “The Twilight Zone,” in fact.

but fortunately, it breaks from out of that deceit but then just starts getting crazier and crazier. I’m not even gonna tell you about what happens or what’s in the box Garrett is carrying or where things go, because honestly, I don’t think you would believe me.

I haven’t seen any of Ms. Liang’s previous films but when you realize how much crazy stuff she’s able to get way with, I’ll be really interested what she does next. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen any movie that’s quite as crazy as Shadow in the Cloud or one that makes me want to watch it again for that very reason.

Oscar-winning Icarus director Bryan Fogel’s doc THE DISSIDENT (Briarcliff), which opens in theaters Friday then will be On Demand January 8, follows the horrific assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey in September 2018, thought to be the work of the Saudi kingdom and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman aka MBS.

I’m really fascinated by movies like this one and Ryan White’s recent Assassins – both which could be in the Best Documentary race at the Oscars in April, by the detective and investigative work done by both filmmakers to get to the bottom of murders that shouldn’t be possible and find those that are responsible. I’ll admit that I didn’t really pay much attention to this story when it was happening a few years back, so I don’t know how much of the details are new and exclusive to Fogel’s doc. He does get access to Kashouggi’s fiancé Hatice who had gone with Jamal to the Saudi embassy in Turkey to get proof that he was single and could marry when he vanished for days and then turne up dead.

Fogel also meets with another Saudi dissident now living in Quebec who goes through the events that led up to Kashouggi’s murder that involved a social media campaign against the journalist within a country where 80% of the population is on Twitter (!).

This is another fascinating doc by Fogel that I’m sure some will be more interested in due to its subject, but when it comes to investigative pieces that really take a deep dive into news from the headlines, Fogel has created another unforgettable doc.  (Also, it was absolutely little surprise to me that Fogel’s film is co-written by Mark Monroe, who has been involved with some of the best docs I’ve seen over the past 15 years or so…  just look up his IMDB credits!)

Opening at the Film Forum Virtual Cinema in New York for a one-week qualifying run is Russia’s movie for Oscar consideration, Andrei Kochalovsky’s DEAR COMRADES! (NEON), a black and white dark dramedy set in 1960s Kruschchev-era Russia. It involves a strike by locomotive workers when the government raises food prices, leading to chaos and a massacre that leaves a Communist party loyalist,  Lyuda (played by Julia Vysotskaya) who the film then follows. Unfortunately, I had a choice of either writing this column or watching this two-hour movie. I opted for the former (obviously) but I do hope to get to this later in the week and should be adding more on this movie once I do.

Also streaming in Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema starting next Wednesday, December 30, is Mario Monicelli’s 1960 film, The Passionate Thief.

Unfortunately, I also wasn’t able to get to Two Ways Home (Gravitas Ventures), In Corpore or Fire Will Come, which will open in Metrograph’s digital ticketing system.

Metrograph will also continue showing Tsia Ming-Liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn, Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong, and lots of great programming over the holidays. It would be a great time to get yourself or a loved one a digital membership for just $50! (James Gray is also programming some of his own films like Little Odesssa and other favorites, like Richard Quine’s Strangers When We Meet, over the holidays.)

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have bothered to read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or drop me a note or tweet on Twitter. I love hearing from readers … honest! 

The Witcher review

When I first read critics’ reviews of this show, they seemed to fall into two camps: non-fantasy fans who dismissed it as nonsense, and fantasy fans who said it got good but took a while to get there. Knowing I was a fantasy fan, I figured I might be in the latter camp, and started watching it. Casually at first, one episode a day, taking a break for Christmas…and then about halfway through I was hooked and marathoned the rest of the series. I genuinely liked this series…but it has problems, and I can see why it lost a lot of non-fantasy fans from the outset. Let’s get the bad out of the way first so I can gush about the good.

Barriers of Entry

Most TV viewers are not fantasy readers. Those of us who are may regret that, but it’s not a genre that everyone gets into, and it has its own storytelling quirks that can be off-putting to newcomers. This is why, for all that it failed in later seasons, Game of Thrones did well for general viewers in its early seasons. The small bit of fantasy hinted at isn’t all that different from the zombie films people are used to, and the rest feels mostly like period piece drama. Magic only gets introduced gradually, with an explanation of what it is and how it works as it’s introduced. Also, there’s a map.

The Witcher doesn’t have any of that scaffolding. It is full high fantasy, magic-heavy, thick in world-building from the very instant it opens. It explains very little about anything; by the end of season 1 I don’t know what Cirilla’s powers are, how Witchers are made, or what the Conjunction of the Spheres is that gets repeatedly mentioned. Now, as a fantasy reader I’m used to this; ideas and supernatural mysteries get introduced and not explained until later because the characters in-universe understand the and don’t need an explanation. All I need to know is that Cirilla has some dangerous power that Nilfgaard wants, that Witchers are made and not born, and that the Conjunction is an important thing that happened in the past that may be relevant in the future. Presumably all will be made clear in time.

But I really would’ve liked a map. Up until the penultimate episode we’ve no idea of what this place looks like, how everything is connected to each other. It makes the stakes of Nilfgaard’s invasion harder to fathom. How big are they as a kingdom? How at risk are the Northern Kingdoms? How many Northern Kingdoms are there? A few map shots in the first episode as Calanthe prepares for war, a few more as the series progresses, all of that would have helped situate the story and have it feel more grounded spatially.

As for temporally…

Timeline Shenanigans

I have no problem with this series choosing to have three different timelines for its three different characters that don’t meet up in the “present” until the final episode. Certainly there have been excellent series that have done this in the past (N.K. Jemisin’s Fifth Season comes to mind). But time stamps would’ve been really nice. Let the first episode play out as it does, but when we jump back to Ciri for the last time, have a heading that says “30 years later,” confirming to the audience what they suspect from some throwaway lines about Calanthe, that this is taking place much earlier than Ciri’s scenes. Do the same when Yennefer is introduced, keep updating how far along we are with Geralt’s story, not just to clarify the timeline but to also build suspense as the viewers realize that the plotlines are catching up to each other.

However that wouldn’t fix all the problems inherent to the time-jumping. Between episodes 5 and 6 we find out, for example, that Yennefer and Geralt have met several times already and are pretty heavily involved with each other. It works well enough because the actors are very good, but it’s a bit “oh, really?” when you find that out.

Likewise, I have no idea how long Jaskier has been around having an obvious crush on annoying Geralt; is it months? Years? I think it’s years, because that’s the same time frame for Geralt and Yennefer’s hookups, but maybe it wasn’t that long? And how long did Yennefer’s education take? When did her immortality kick in? How much time passed between Geralt and Yennefer breaking up and Geralt deciding to seek out Ciri? Was it right before? Years later? How old is Jaskier supposed to be at this point? Was Yennefer’s joke about crow lines an indication he’s approaching middle age? Time stamps!

This show is really lucky it had as good a cast as it did to carry it through these narrative issues.

Special Effects

The elves, hedgehog people, and fauns all look…bad. Like, almost Halloween costume bad. Don’t know what else to say. The other effects were really good, so they stuck out.

But now let’s talk about how this series rocked:

Have I mentioned this cast is fantastic?

So my interest in Henry Cavill may have been less than high-minded, but he is in fact absolutely fantastic in this. The show also walks that fine line with “jerk with a heart of gold” characters where it explains their dickishness without excusing it. We understand that with the life he’s led and the discrimination he’s faced why Geralt is cold and aloof, but we also see how being that way destroys his relationships with people he cares for, especially in episode 6. And Cavill manages to convey perfectly how, at the moment he sees Ciri, Geralt realizes that his whole life has been leading up to him taking on this role as protector and guardian. He needs someone to need him, even if that terrifies him.

And then there’s Anya Chalotra as Yennefer who you might call a deuteragonist since she doesn’t show up until the second episode and isn’t the title character, but honestly the show is as much about her as it is about Geralt. You start with her as an abused child with a spinal deformity who thinks she’s unimportant and worthless. You have her trying to conform herself to the purposes others give her, literally changing her body to meet their expectations, failing, flailing about trying to find a purpose, and then in the final episode landing on the grim realization that she is the only one who can protect all the Northern Kingdoms. It’s an excellent arc, even with the timeskips sometimes making it not as smooth a one as it might have been. Again we have Anya Chalotra to thank for making it work in spite of the narrative missteps.

Even Freya Allen, though she doesn’t get much to do plotwise, does a great job portraying the internality of Ciri’s journey this season, as she slowly realizes her beloved grandmother may have, in fact, been terrible – but that this doesn’t justify what was done to them.

Relationships you can root for

Two broken and emotionally distant people learning to break down their barriers and be vulnerable to each other? Sign me up, nothing is hotter. I really like Geralt and Yennefer, and I honestly hope they find common purpose together next season and realize that, wish or no wish, they’re good for each other and should try to work it out.

But Jaskier and Geralt’s relationship is honestly great, too. While I don’t think they’re sexually interested in each other and therefore this counts more as a “bromance,” I also hate the term “bromance” and prefer to just say that their unacknowledged but obvious affection for each other is charming. I’m guessing Jaskier will come back later? Maybe he was just in the short stories they use here, but that would be a shame.

The soundtrack “slaps” – that’s the term young people are using, right?

While “Toss a Coin to Your Witcher” is attaining meme status and so many Youtube listens that it threatens to break into Billboard’s charts, let’s not forget how all the music in this series is so good. Like, literally, even if you can’t get into the show at all because of its other problems, check out this score, it’s amazing. It is incredibly frustrating that it’s not up on Spotify yet, though a few tracks are available on Youtube.

Its total embrace of being a fantasy series

And here we come back round to the beginning of my review. While Game of Thrones did well in its early seasons by easing its audience into its fantasy setting, as seasons went on it seemed progressively more and more embarrassed that it had to be a fantasy story. The Stark children’s warg powers are forgotten, prophecies are removed, the House of the Undying is reduced to like one room, bye-bye krakens and any kind of water magic, Euron’s just a pirate now, and who is this Lady Stoneheart you speak of? They even dispensed with the big final threat of the White Walkers as quickly and unceremoniously as possible, just so they could get back to the politics.

The Witcher, on the other hand, is a fantasy series from its first frame to its last and loves it. There’s monsters and magic everywhere, Destiny sets everything up to follow fairy tale rules, and humans share the world with multiple other sentient species. It does not apologize for this, and it has a very lived-in feel to it that many magic-heavy universes fail to achieve. You believe that this is a world where the supernatural is natural, where people have seen and lived alongside magic their whole lives. We see how magic is integrated into combat, healing, and politics, and it’s all believable in spite of how unbelievable it is. It makes it refreshingly fun and escapist without feeling completely divorced from reality.

So overall, I recommend the series while really wishing they’d structured it more clearly and accessibly. And had better makeup effects because ugh.

Star Wars: Alphabet Squadron-Review

Alexander Freed resurrects the X-Wing novel in Alphabet Squadron, a rousing and emotionally complex adventure that ranks among the best in the current canon.

(Review contains minor spoilers)

The second Death Star is destroyed. The Emperor is dead. The Empire is falling and its forces are scattered and desperate. For the first time since the Galactic Civil War began, the Alliance, now the New Republic, is winning. However, as a galactic government collapses and a scattered militia group begins to take its place, it turns out that the waning days of the war may be more chaotic than anyone anticipated. Among those caught in the chaos is Yrica Quell, a former Imperial TIE pilot of the infamous 204th Imperial Fighter Wing aka “Shadow Wing,” who herself just one of thousands of other former soldiers looking to escape to the otherside of a losing war. After Yrica attracts the attention of New Republic Intelligence agent Caern Adan, she is drafted into a makeshift working group to hunt down and eliminate her former wingmen, whom have become a major thorn in the burgeoning Republic’s side. Overseen by Adan, New Republic general Hera Syndulla, and a reprogrammed Imperial torture droid, Yrica helps to form a group of misfit and war addled pilots to help save the New Republic from dying before it even begins.

At Celebration Chicago, Alexander Freed said that he was inspired to write Alphabet Squadron by the classic Expanded Universe X-Wing novels written by Michael A. Stackpole and Aaron Allston. While Freed’s pilot focused narrative and thrilling action sequences are sure to evoke memories of this series, the book that Alphabet Squadron seems to brush shoulders with most after first read is Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath trilogy. Like Aftermath, Alphabet Squadron is the first in a trilogy following an ensemble of misfit characters in the waning days of the Galactic Civil War and the fallout of the Battle of Endor. Wendig’s trilogy always boasted an impressive scope and stylistically impressive prose, but the first installment of Aftermath struggled due to characters that failed to make an impression and an unfocused narrative. Each novel in the trilogy improved on the one that preceded it, but it is hard to deny that Aftermath got off to a rocky start. Conversely, while Alexander Freed’s dense prose may not appeal to some readers, Alphabet Squadron launches out of the gate with fully formed characters and a sense of purpose and place.

Like his previous Star Wars novel, Battlefront: Twilight Company, Freed excels in making the Galaxy Far, Far Away feel lived in. As previously mentioned, his dense writing style may turn off some readers, but it does an incredible job in helping this setting come to life. It’s clear that Freed put extensive thought into helping to realize a galaxy in this degree of turmoil. In the months immediately following the Battle of Endor, there truly wasn’t a seat of power in the galaxy as both The Empire and the New Republic are each in periods of transition and internal upheaval. The Empire finds itself lacking in direction and leadership and facing a long collapse that seems unlikely to turn in their favor. The New Republic must not only contend with forming a new government but transitioning from a guerilla military to an expansive force capable of finalizing a war it never really prepared to win. Alphabet Squadron in the process evokes such classic pieces of desperate military science fiction like Battlestar Galactica and even The Last Jedi. In the aftermath of such devastating canon events as Operation Cinder, Freed captures the fluctuating and unstable state of the galaxy with descriptive settings, well thought out dips into everyday life of the average galactic citizenry, and first and foremost the characters at its center.

As any good novel should do, it is truly the characters of Alphabet Squadron that make this book sing. Freed brings together an ensemble of damaged and diverse pilots to make up the titular Alphabet Squadron. Fittingly each of these characters not only feel as unique and varied as the ships they fly, but they all realistically bear the scars of beings who have spent their last years embroiled in war. For better and for worse, Freed frames much of the narrative around the reader and the characters gradually learning about the pasts and motives of the different pilots and their commanders. While Freed maintains a rotating third person limited point of view, it becomes quickly apparent that what we learn from each of the characters isn’t necessarily to be trusted. These are damaged people that are hiding things not only from their teammates but from themselves and it is this obscuring, while at times perhaps a bit too illusive, that adds a larger sense of discovery and engagement to a narrative that by and large follows the familiar “learning to work as a team” structure.

Of the five main characters, Yrica is undeniably the most intriguing and fraught. Unlike many classic Imperial defectors, Yrica joined after the Battle of Endor when Palpatine’s regime was already collapsing. While her motives for seeking out the New Republic are mostly self-serving, Freed succeeds at making Yrica a sympathetic protagonist, if an undeniably flawed one. Her narrative becomes one not only of finding a purpose or direction in a galaxy that wants nothing more than to cast her aside, but of deprogramming from fascist doctrine. “Think like a rebel,” becomes a mantra that carries its way not only in the cockpit but to the cantina, to her therapy sessions, and in learning to be a leader to her team.

The rest of Alphabet Squadron are similarly impressive. Nath Tensent is a classic Star Wars style rogue, a mix of pirate, rebel, and early Imperial defector, with a charisma that easily wins over reader and co-pilots alike. He’s the type of lovable bastard whose true intentions are often hard to read and frequently underhanded but nonetheless is capable of incredible moments of humanity and empathy for others.

Wyl Lark and Chass na Chadic hail from two formerly paired squadrons, whose long, tortured final mission takes up a large portion of the first act of the novel. Lark becomes Alphabet Squadron’s heart, bringing a boyish sense of naiveté but also empathy to his fellow pilots. Smartly, Freed knows how to show the dangers of this though and demonstrates how Lark’s inherent good nature sometimes leads to personal danger and overstepping his bounds in the care of his teammates. It avoids cynicism while also teaching the value in trusting the independence of others. In particular, this is demonstrated with Wyl’s relationship Chass na Chadic, the music blasting Theelin pilot, who joins Alphabet Squadron alongside him. Given their shared trauma and different manners of coping, Freed frames the frayed relationship between these two particular characters as a central arc of the book and it works well, especially given how well drawn both characters prove to be.

And Kairos? Kairos is the resident, silent badass. Cloaked in rags, armor, masks, and mystery, Kairos remains the closest to an enigma at the novel’s conclusion. What little we learn of her hints at a past filled with trauma and strife which not only comes about in cold mystery but short bursts of intense violence. She feels not unlike the fan favorite animated bounty hunter, Embo, with a dash of Wolverine-esque tragic past. It makes her brief moments where she opens up to the other members of Alphabet Squadron linger for pages afterward.

Even supporting cast members spark with their own sense of personality and life. Caern Adan tows the line between grandstating jackass and pragmatic foreward thinker in a way that makes him feel realistic if not empathetic. Chass and Wyl’s former squadmates before joining Alphabet Squadron shine through with individual quirks and personalities and their presence becomes particularly haunting and painful despite their relatively little time on the page. Even Adan’s mechanical assistant, an Imperial Torture Droid turned team therapist, is a standout with an unexpectedly endearing sense for emotional sensitivity.

Fans of Star Wars Rebels are also sure to enjoy Hera Syndulla’s meatier than expected role here. Freed paints a picture of a war weary Hera that is driven by duty and longs for the days of Ghost family. Her maternal caring for those under her command shines through and her moments of guidance to the Alphabet Squadron team rank as some of the most emotionally affecting beats of the novel as a whole. Those hoping to see Jason Syndulla or some of the other members of the Rebels may be disappointed, but any fan of the Spectre Two is sure to get a lot out of this book.

Freed also succeeds in bringing these characters into action. While his prose while the characters are grounded is often dense with detail and minutiae, Freed somehow finds an incredible balance when his characters step into the cockpit and begin fighting off TIE Fighters. Dogfights feel energetic and kinetic and Freed manages to block these with a sense of action and pacing that feels clear and exciting. Alphabet Squadron even gets creative in just how a squadron of five different types of ship would function and the resulting set pieces feel both imaginative and surprisingly practical. Given the strong work done to fleshing out these characters and their chaotic world in the quiet moments, it gives the beats where blaster bolts are flying and starships are exploding an extra oomph of tension and emotion.

It may not be immaculate, but Alphabet Squadron is a truly engrossing and affecting read. Between Freed’s incredible sense of setting to his well-drawn characters, it’s hard to find a more satisfying book in the current Star Wars canon and the wait for the next installment of this series in 2020 feels like an eternity away. The sequels may be ending this winter with The Rise of Skywalker, but the next great Star Wars trilogy may have already just started.

Score: A-

Precarious Love : The Costs of Agency in Regency Literature

“Women are supposed to be very calm generally, but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer.” - Jane Eyre

For many women, the definition of personal power includes the ability to maintain autonomy and ownership over their life choices, their physicality, and their personal boundaries. Unlike centuries of women before us, we are legally capable of supporting ourselves in essentially any way we choose. First World women are no longer obligated to be dependent on the men in their lives for identity or security, a shift that has adjusted and balanced out the deep vulnerability and hazards inherent in being a woman.

Many of us take this level of agency for granted and read classic literature through this lens. We swoon over romances and love stories while forgetting that, for authors such as Jane Austen or the Brontë sisters, romance actually came second to economic and physical survival. The female protagonists of their novels are not just concerned about love but must gamble on their prospects of security and safety while navigating an unmistakable power imbalance, tipped distinctly in favor of the men. Classic literature written by women and about women often details the struggle to maintain personal autonomy in a world where women are entirely dependent on the good graces of men. These stories make an impact because their protagonists are portrayed fighting for their own dignity while having to navigate their survival through one of the only “respectable” avenues open to them — marriage.

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice touches on the risk of poverty the Bennet sisters face should they remain unmarried. That tension heightens the shock of Elizabeth’s turning down Darcy’s initial proposal. Darcy feels little need to accommodate Elizabeth’s own wants or desires because he instinctively knows she has very little choice in how her life plays out should she remain single. When she does reject him, she does so knowing her vulnerability to the whims of the generosity from extended family has increased exponentially. What Austen does not detail, however, is what those risks include. Her stories remain comfortably in upper society, and her women have the leeway to assert themselves without putting themselves too far in the way of direct harm.

Charlotte Brontë is different. Everyone who loves gothic romance knows the plot of Jane Eyre - feisty governess falls for brooding hero, sparks fly, tragic secret is revealed, despair sets in, followed by eventual reconciliation. What can easily slip through the cracks, however, is the precarious position Jane finds herself in as soon as that tragic secret is revealed. Jane Eyre stands next to Austen’s Elizabeth in her conviction that she matters, that her self respect is worthy; she lays claim to the right to be treated in accordance to that worth. But unlike Elizabeth, she is a working girl with no known living relatives, with limited life experience, no resources, and living in a house shared with her employer and former fiancé—a man whose past is littered with mistresses he discarded as soon as they no longer pleased him. When Elizabeth, as a decently high-status woman of reputation, initially turns Darcy down, she risks genteel poverty. When Jane, a lower class unknown, rejects the idea of bigamy or becoming Rochester’s mistress, she finds herself threatened with rape.

This is, I believe, the actual crux of the novel. When Darcy is confronted by Elizabeth’s self-respect, he is jolted into seeing her as a true equal and begins to adjust accordingly. In contrast, Brontë establishes this equality for Jane early on. Although Rochester has a history of pettiness, emotional manipulation, and self-absorption, Jane’s commitment to her own value, humanity and self-worth has already forced him to view her as his intellectual equal. By the climax of the novel, Jane has already resisted his efforts to reshape her into the colorful angel of his dreams, and, in a world where women were expected to acquiesce to their husbands without question, has insisted upon remaining herself even as his fiancee. “I will not be your English Celine Varens…. I will furnish my own wardrobe…and you shall give me nothing but your regard: and if I give you mine in return, that debt will be quit.” With his previous mistresses, Rochester amused himself with living distractions. With Jane, Rochester grows to love and respect an actual, fellow human being.

But unlike Elizabeth’s ability to hold her head high and send Darcy on his way, intellectual equality with Rochester does not change the fact that Jane is a lower class governess with few rights, something Rochester is keenly aware of. One of the most famous quotes of Jane Eyre, “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself…. there I plant my foot,” is Jane’s internal response to Rochester’s attempts to blame and manipulate Jane into taking responsibility for his potential self-destruction should she persist in refusing his offers. Seeing her resolve nearly sends Rochester over the edge:

“Never,” said he, as he ground his teeth, “never was anything at once so frail and so indomitable…. I could bend her with my finger and thumb, and what good would it do if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed her?.... Whatever I do to its cage, I cannot get at it…. If I tear, if I rend the slight prison, my outrage will only let the captive loose. Conqueror I might be of the house, but the inmate would escape to heaven before I could call myself possessor of its clay dwelling place. And it is you, spirit - with will and energy, and virtue and purity - that I want, not alone your brittle frame… seized against your will you will elude the grasp like an essence.”

No one would have come to Jane’s rescue had Rochester decided to take revenge for his disappointment. He knew it and Jane knew it. But Rochester also knows that although Jane is physically powerless, he cannot escape the fact she is far more than something to be used and tossed aside. He has seen her as an independent individual, and, because he has seen her deep humanity, he cannot go back. He lets her go, unharmed.

Once Jane and Rochester are reunited at the end of the novel, Jane has inherited enough wealth that she now has the ability to walk away from any situation she pleases without personal cost. Should she marry now, it will be entirely her own decision. She is no longer dependent on a husband or a deeply vulnerable governess position to support herself and can choose to live her life as she pleases. In this context, Rochester confesses that he absolutely did intend to rape her. “I did wrong: I would have sullied my innocent flower - breathed guilt on its purity.” He repents, she forgives, and, knowing she is now secure in both herself and in his genuine respect, she steps into his life as his wife. It is doubtful that Elizabeth shared cultural power with Darcy outside of the confines of their home, but Rochesters’s new blindness spares him the cultural shame that would have otherwise followed his sharing control and power with Jane. Brontë writes their story in a way that makes shared power in marriage palatable to an unfamiliar audience, and, potentially, eventually accepted as normal.

Jane Eyre is widely regarded as a masterpiece, showcasing female agency in a world where such things were relatively unknown, but often we find the happiness and satisfaction of the story in the triumphant, “Reader, I married him.” But this is not what Brontë is actually going for. The marriage plot was a commonly relatable, easily digestible storyline; Jane’s fierce independence throughout was not.

Changing cultural narratives takes years of careful work, framed in non-threatening ways, in subversive methods, easily misunderstood or overlooked. Brontë worked to change the culture in the only way she could: introducing a new concept into a known narrative, marriage, using a high-risk scenario, vulnerable governess and powerful master where abuse was essentially expected, and shifted that story instead into a marriage of intellectual equals. Brontë introduced England to a quietly subversive notion—women are human and deserve the same respect and regard as their male counterparts. Jane’s refusal to compromise exposed her to severe risk and harm, something well known to Brontë’s female peers, but also granted her something most could only dream about: a marriage of mutual regard, respect, and shared power. What a concept.

So I noticed something about the Granbell Kingdom... (Chapter 1 Observation and the attention of World Building)

So this is something I realized with Eden’s Zero when I was looking over chapter one and I noticed that all of the main robots like Michael and a lot of the Robots in that greet Rebecca have these rounded, cartoonish heads.

Usually I wouldn’t mind that so much like I did with my first read through of the chapter, I was like “yeah, this is just how they’re drawn...” But looking back on it something I noticed was how different the Robinhood Robot looked.

Like this robot clearly has more humanoid looking face with more pronounced lips and nose and then there is the King, who also is the most humanoid looking one in terms of facial features.

Now the easy meta-textual explanation is that they have the more humanoid faces as the Robin Hood-looking bot is supposed to look different and suspicious while spying on Rebecca. As for the Machine King he needs to look more humanoid for the purpose of conveying pain in the fight against Shiki as well as look more humanoid because he’s the one who gets the big emotional revelation. 

But thinking about it and where they are placed in the Kingdom there might’ve been something hinted at. Now in the introduction of the kingdom, this robot that looked like a mayor with monocle had this speech about the stuff you can do in this kingdom.

Now the examples he used were being treated like a royal or go act like an adventurer. (Also looking at the far right of this photo looks like a mustache-less time skip Macao.) Now Rebecca goes to the adventure simulator and there she’s surrounded by the more rounder headed robots. Then there was the disclaimer put at the front of the chapter of how certain places or things that might seem like references to real life things isn’t. This seemed to be referring to whatever website Rebecca gets her subscribers on as youtube and Granbell being a big disneyland copy.

Now with a place like disneyworld, its split into distinct parks with Epcot and the magic kingdom with even smaller communities in those parks. I wonder if with this place being a planet sized theme park if the “Granbell Castle” portion of the world is its own park. While the little tavern area that’s near the forest where Rebecca met Shiki is its own thing as well. Both seem to also have distinctly different robot hosts with the rounded headed ones in the adventure part of the park and the more humanoid ones in the castle town part of the park.

Then there’s the demon king.

He has different features then all of them. He looks more demonic and maybe going by my theory there’s a part of the park that’s like a demon land, where you can live through a horror situation like a haunted host. Oooooorrrr if you wanna go dark maybe its a more “mature” part of the park where you can live out darker fantasies.

Plus with how the entrance works maybe there’s like a town square section, you remember it right, the place where Rebecca was almost burnt at a stake, that could connect to all the other parts of the park. I’m actually surprised we didn’t get a “You Are Here” map. We’re in an amusement park, you have the perfect framing device for giving just a map of this place. In fact, for a planet sized theme park, we don’t get really a scope of the park that much. I am aware that its not an actual planet and that “worlds” here seem to be like islands in space. But come on, I’d even take a little text box that says what location this is like with FT. Something like “Dream Forest, where adventure simulations take place” or “Mitra’s Bar, outside of the Dream Forest.” Clearly “Gear Town” wouldn’t be used as a name because that already is a yugioh card.

Now you can easily pick apart my theory by just pointing out that the robots near where the quest area still gave Rebecca the dress like a princess and the robot in the princess simulation had one of the rounder headed robots in the background. And once again we arrive to the answer for the facial expressions simply being there to fulfill the meta of the story (someone who looks suspicious and someone capable of conveying emotions), but I mention this in the sense of scope and world building. This series seems like, and I’m hoping here, going to push Hiro Mashima to world build more than he had in FT, where he simply just made everything this medieval-modern backdrop for the series. But with world building it takes a tentative eye, small details can have a big importance to making this world pop beyond just a surface level.

Take for example the Sky Races in One Piece. All of them can be summed up as, “they are humans with wings on their back.” But the you notice that there are actually 3 sky races: Skypieans, Shandians, and Birkans. Which as I said, are all at the end of the day the same thing, humans with wings. However, Oda used his art to add to the already different looking astetics of the 3 tribes, but also detailed their wings with each race specifically having their wings styled the same way as their other tribe members: Skypieans possess small wings that are pointed upward, Shandians possess larger wings that also point upward, and Birkans possess wings that point downward.  and that’s why Urouge, a guy from the sky race introduced later into the story, is fascinating because he has the same wings as a Birkan when we first meet him, but as a child we see he has the wings of a Skypiean.

Thus the reader is invested for caring about the knowledge of this world these learned as well as heightening the interest of what’s in the narrative if we the audience are aware if the character and it seemed like there was the potential for something similar in Eden’s Zero with the robots. (Again, I must stress potential)

I actually wonder if instead, we had the first three chapters of Eden’s Zero all on Granbell. Like we explored it and then went into space. Now I’m sure you’re saying, “Rhapsode, you can’t do that. That might be just be dragging it out.” And look there’s no way I can disprove that. First chapter happened, we can’t just turn around, but I can bring up the first 3 chapters of a series. As I said in a previous post, its common for the first there chapters of a new series to almost be a mini arc as well as an introduction. This is often due to make sure the first there chapters aren’t just rising action for all the extra pages the magazine gives you, but if it were to go belly up there is still a miniature gratifying journey for the cast of the story and you can write it off as a short story even if some plot threads aren’t resolved.

A prime example of this was done by Mashima himself during Rave Master where he had made the first 3 chapters take place solely on Garage Island (Haru meeting Plue and Shiba, getting the Rave Stone, defeating Feber, rejecting the call to adventure, fighting Feber again, receiving his sword, challenging Shuda after he burns up garage island, sword breaks, accepts the title of Rave Master, and leaving Garage Island) and then the third chapter leaving off on the note of Haru is going off to the big outside world. If you want a more recent example both My Hero Academia and Black Clover which are Shounen Jumps current money makers along with OP used a similar one in done story done in three chapters (MHA arguably is four). MHA it was Deku’s backstory, told he can’t be a hero, proves himself, trains, more training, enters the school, meets Uraraka, goes through the obstacle course, saves her by destroying the unbreakable bot. And Black Clovers was Asta and Yuno’s backstory, Asta gets a grimoire, goes to the trial, fails most of it except beating Sekke, gets accepted in the black bulls, Yuno shows he still cares about Asta by stopping Sekke, and Asta sees the black bulls headquarters. And if all of those series were to end at the end of chapter three there would still be a sense of open ended-ness.

But as I said Hiro didn’t and I’m not condemning him for it, maybe he thought the selling point of the series was that it was IN SPACE, and that it would generate more interest to do that then do a 3 chapter arc with just Granbell and open universe is the ending page of that third chapter. I’m just saying that he could’ve. The same is true with these robots and their appearances, I’m sure he didn’t mean them beyond just a surface level and I’m not saying NOT doing that is inherently bad and I’m going to construe it as negative against him and this series.

The reason I made this post is to convey that he could’ve done something with it (Also talking about robot heads would’ve been pretty short). Like I said, the robots with more rounded heads could be the good ones and maybe robin hood bot is actually the first chapter villain and then we meet the other more humanoid faced robots later. Or maybe Rebecca wants to explore more the park for more of her internet video. I made this mainly to show both the potential of subtly in world building and the possibilities that can be made from attention to detail.

Black Crypt: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

The box prominently featured the Ram Demon, the easiest of Estoroth’s lieutenants.

               Black Crypt

United States

Raven Software (developer); Electronic Arts (publisher) Released 1992 for the Amiga

Date Started: 27 December 2018

Date Ended: 20 January 2019

Total Hours: 29

Difficulty: Moderate-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at Time of Posting: (to come later)

Summary:

Black Crypt is a descendant of the Dungeon Master (1987) line. The player controls four characters of fixed classes (fighter, druid, cleric, and mage) on a quest to find four ancient artifacts necessary to defeat an ancient evil named Estoroth. Gameplay takes place across 28 levels of varying sizes, up to 40 x 40. Like its predecessors, it couples first-person, tile-based movement with fast-paced, real-time combat. Character development occurs by leveling and acquiring new spells and equipment, but (as with all games on the Dungeon Master tree) standard RPG considerations frequently take a back seat to a variety of mechanical puzzles involving buttons, switches, pressure plates, teleporters, and other navigational obstacles. Although fun, it breaks little new ground and thus offers few reasons to play it over the games that influenced it.

******

I should never underestimate my readers. I had resigned myself to putting together this final entry based on YouTube videos and had actually drafted a “Summary and Rating” without the “Won,” but Zardas came through. He did a bit of surgery on my save disk put together a save that worked out of non-corrupted parts of the disk.

Having found the four artifacts, I only had to solve a pressure plate puzzle on Level 13 to get access to the final levels, 27 and 28. The mechanical puzzles disappeared on those final levels, and they were small enough that I didn’t bother to map them.

Level 27 had a couple of conflicting messages, one suggesting that Estoroth couldn’t be damaged by magic, and one saying he could only be damaged with magic.               

     The “Reveal Truth” spell showed that the first message was the accurate one. Enemies on the two levels are completely immune to spells. That was a bit disappointing. I don’t know what purpose it serves to render that aspect of character development meaningless on the final level. 

On Level 27, I had to defeat six skeletal guardians. Their magic attack was too powerful for my party to withstand more than two blasts, so I had to waltz them to death. (For new readers, the “combat waltz” is a maneuver by which you attack then quickly side-step and turn before the enemy can retaliate.) I can’t see how it would be possible to beat them otherwise. All the videos I consulted online showed the players doing exactly that. I suppose I could have used two Potions of Invincibility on my front characters, but I was saving those for Estoroth.               

These guys were so hard I couldn’t stop for a screenshot without dying.

             I can’t remember if I mentioned in a previous entry that waltzing is a little harder in Black Crypt than other Dungeon Master clones, largely because the enemies don’t follow a predictable pattern. You can’t side-step until the enemy has already committed to turning and facing you; otherwise, he could easily go the other direction. For some players, this would mean simply adjusting their fingers and switching the direction of the waltz. For someone less manually dexterous like me, it means flailing randomly at the keys and, in a best-case scenario–running to the other side of the dungeon so I can catch my breath, settle down, and figure out a new pattern.

Once the guardians were defeated, I armed myself with the four artifacts and took a stairway down to Estoroth himself. At this point, I naturally forgot to use my Potions of Invincibility, but Estoroth was curiously easy. After I’d hit him just a few times with my melee weapons, the weapons began to sparkle. This was a sign to use their special attacks. It took a few tries to get the order right. Protector (the shield) protects the party from further damage; Soulfreezer (the staff) holds Estoroth in place; Vortex (the sword) opens a portal to another dimension; and Forcehammer (the hammer) sends him through.            

Sending Estoroth to hell.

         The endgame text is first a short paragraph:            

What made this banishment of Estoroth successful permanently?

          But afterwards, the player gets a scene-by-scene recap (about 15 scenes total) of the major game moments, including the various “boss” creatures defeated along the way: the Ogre, the Dracolich, the Medusa, the Possessor, the Ram Demon, and the Waterlord.            

In case we had forgotten.

          After one final concluding paragraph . . .                

The final screen shows the Black Crypt destroyed.

              . . . the party has the option to reload the final save and just poke around the dungeon. There really isn’t anything to do, but you can find the four ancient heroes’ skulls on Level 28, plus a few high-powered items.

I had a reasonable amount of fun with Black Crypt. It’s a clone, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with clones. Without them, we’d have about a dozen total RPGs, and half of those would be weird one-off French titles. Clones allow you to get started without any confusion, let you settle in to familiar territory with a contented sigh. And despite the term, no “clone” is a 100% likeness. It’s fun to see the different variations the developers take with a common template, like listening to a new jazz band improvise on a number you’ve heard a million times. Even when its worse, it can still be interesting.

But Dungeon Master-style games face a unique challenge when it comes to this improvisation, because they’re mostly about mechanics. They tend to feature framing stories–that is, stories that have few references in the game itself, and could easily be swapped with a different frame–and no NPCs. With an Ultima clone, even if the game plays the same as Ultima III or IV, you can still enjoy the new story and the variety of NPCs. Lacking such narrative options, a Dungeon Master clone has to rest all its improvisation on combat, exploration, and puzzles. That’s where Black Crypt falls a little short.             

Just like Dungeon Master, all I can tell about a weapon by looking at it is its weight. At least the door image is cool.

          Only in its somewhat extensive ending does Black Crypt really distinguish itself from its predecessors. Oh, its graphics and sound are marginally better, but these are the things that an RPG fan–particularly a Dungeon Master fan–ought to care about least. Some of its puzzles also went in different directions, but rarely to the game’s credit. More often than in Dungeon Master or Eye of the Beholder, I found it difficult to judge the results of various actions. I particularly didn’t like the invisible pressure plates. There’s little point to mechanical puzzles if you can’t see the elements that make up the puzzle. 

Meanwhile, Black Crypt fixed none of the problems that I had with Dungeon Master–inability to see equipment statistics and a needless food system among them. Even worse, it went in Eye of the Beholder‘s direction with character development, while offering none of Beholder‘s improvements, such as NPCs and side quests. The magic system is done a bit differently here, although in the end I found it neither better or worse than its predecessors. For all of these reasons, I expect it to GIMLET lower than Dungeon Master or Beholder.

1. Game World. As usual, we have more of a framing story than a backstory–a fact not changed by a few call-outs within the game (mostly in the form of messages from Estoroth that you find). The plot is derivative, and like most Dungeon Master clones, there isn’t much of a “world” here. But the levels are well-designed, with both textures and puzzles organized around themes specific to individual levels or small groups of levels. Score: 5.

2. Character Creation and Development. As noted, it takes a fairly major step back. You have to play four fixed classes. There are no significant choices during creation except for the portrait. Because the dungeon is linear and the number of enemies is mostly fixed, characters level at fixed intervals, and leveling doesn’t really do very much for them. I vastly prefer Dungeon Master‘s action-based leveling, in which each character can attain various levels in all “classes,” to Crypt‘s (and Beholder‘s) experience-based leveling. Score: 3.              

Using single classes and experience-based leveling was a regression.

             3. NPC Interaction. There are no NPCs in the game. Score: 0.

4. Encounters and Foes. There are about as many different enemies as the typical game of this genre, with about as much variety in strengths, resistances, and special attacks. Most of the monster types and portraits are original to this game (or at least not taken directly from its sources). I just wish they had names. As is my custom, I’ll also use this category to throw in a couple of points for the puzzles, which serve in the place of role-playing “encounters” in this sub-genre. As above, I didn’t always like them, but they were pitched at the right difficulty. Score: 5.

5. Magic and Combat. I’ll never love combat that relies more on manual dexterity than attributes and tactics. Dungeon Master at least provided a variety of different types of attacks with its weapons, plus hand-to-hand combat, plus a more useful in-combat spells system, plus the ability to attack from the inventory screen, plus other useful tricks, like the ability to swing around and use the two rear characters to attack the rear. Black Crypt‘s only innovations are to make waltzing (and similar patterns) more difficult and to introduce a different take on the spell system. It’s lack of buffing spells is also a negative. Still, it offers an arguably better experience than Eye of the Beholder, where you never got feedback on attacks, and waltzing made it possible to win with a single character. Score: 4.

6. Equipment. I liked the variety of equipment slots but almost nothing else. Looking at items offers less information than even Dungeon Master. I guess I’ll give a point for some originality with the “false” messages and the ability to right-click on most weapons for a special attack. Score: 5.            

As with most RPGs, I ended this one with plenty of unused equipment.

        7. Economy. As usual for Dungeon Master clone, none. Score: 0.

8. Quests. The main quest has some fun stages, with various boss creatures every two or three levels. It also offers a little nonlinearity in the order you approach Estoroth’s lieutenants, but it otherwise has no choices, no alternate endings, and no role-playing. In this it under-performs its predecessors. Score: 4.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Interface. Some improvements here. The game is still a bit too mouse-heavy for my tastes, but at least you can customize the movement keys. I feel like there were a few more sound effects and slightly better graphics than Dungeon Master, at least, but perhaps not enough to make a difference in the score. The auto-mapping system is a nice addition, and I like how it’s logically integrated with the spell system (even if it took me a while to figure out). Amiga-philes will want me to note that the game uses an enhanced graphics mode (“extra half-bright”) that allows for 64 colors instead of the usual 32, but even the original 32 colors is about 24 more than I can discern. Score: 6.

10. Gameplay. It’s as linear as most dungeon crawlers, but at least offers some flexibility after Level 13. Unfortunately, the fixed character classes make it less replayable than its counterparts. Otherwise, difficulty and length were both good. Score: 5.

That gives us a final score of 37, just north of my “recommended” threshold, but below the 41 I gave to Eye of the Beholder and the 47 I gave to Dungeon Master. (I must say, reviewing my Dungeon Master scores, I was a bit generous in several categories and I think it would likely rate closer to a 43 if I rated it now. I didn’t have a lot of perspective during my first year.) Fans of this subgenre would argue (not entirely without a point) that perhaps it shouldn’t be faulted for lacking NPCs, a dynamic game world, and an economy, since that’s not what this subgenre is about. If it thus makes you feel better, you can think of it as rating closer to a 44 (and Dungeon Master closer to a 58) with those categories eliminated the rest of the values rescaled accordingly.             

As an Amiga game, Black Crypt was heavily promoted in Europe.

            Computer Gaming World offered a “sneak preview” of the game in the February 1992 issue, but it never seems to have offered a review. The preview, written by Allen Greenberg, is extremely positive. Nothing he says is wrong, exactly, but he suggests that the game is better than Dungeon Master, and I find it difficult to imagine any fan of this subgenre agreeing with that. In particular, he seems too infatuated with fairly modest improvements in graphics and sound. Greenberg sets up the review by suggesting there’s a war brewing between keyboarders and mousers, so I’m at least glad to see that the interface issue was heavily debated in the day. Amiga-specific magazines tended towards high scores, with .info coming in at a perfect 100 and Amiga Action giving it 93/100. Non-English Amiga magazines were, as usual, a bit more conservative, with scores in the 71-90 range.

Black Crypt was the first title from Wisconsin-based Raven Software, which still exists as a subdivision of Activision (it was sold in 1997) and is currently in charge of the Call of Duty series. The company’s co founders, Brian and Steve Raffel, reportedly began outlining the game in the 1980s. They enlisted two programmers, Rick Johnson, and Ben Gokey, and had a demo ready for the 1990 Gen Con, where it was picked up for distribution by Electronic Arts. (I had originally thought that Crypt owed its lineage to Dungeon Master via Eye of the Beholder, but the game would have been mostly finished when Beholder came out.) It was the first game for almost everyone on the team.

An Amiga-only game in 1992 was bound to make a small splash in the United States, which probably explains why the company abandoned the platform for future titles. At the same time, they also mostly abandoned RPGs in favor of first-person shooters, some with light RPG elements. Whether we ever see them again on this blog depends how I rule on games like ShadowCaster (1993), Heretic (1994), Hexen (1995), Mageslayer (1997), and Hexen II (1997), all of which are on my list preliminarily. Today, the company is better known for its Soldier of Fortune (2000-2003) and Call of Duty (2010-2017) titles as well as its work on later entries in id Software’s franchises including Quake 4 (2005) and Wolfenstein (2009).

Any RPG fan is going to want to read Jimmy Maher’s survey of Dungeon Master descendants, published a few weeks ago. Based on his review, we only have four left (at least until a more recent surge of “retro” games): Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos (1993), Dungeon Master II: Skullkeep (1993), Eye of the Beholder III (1993), and Stonekeep (1995). (And maybe Liberation: Captive II [1994]? I’m not sure if it uses the same engine and approach as Captive.) It doesn’t sound like any of them are likely to outperform the original. It’s too bad that this subgenre never reached a true peak before it was subsumed by real-time movement in the vein of Ultima Underworld (1992), but given its forthcoming demise, I’m not sorry that it had one decent 1992 entry.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/black-crypt-won-with-summary-and-rating/

Expert: Despite the right’s stereotype of antifascist activists as close-minded thugs or paid protesters, in reality the majority have long been quite geeky, prone to lining their bookshelves with obscure fascist screeds and abstruse historical tomes. This comes with its own problems. Fascism is a multifaceted phenomenon to say the least and different threads can easily preoccupy a researcher their whole life. This has made fascist studies a kaleidoscope of particulars that can be forbidding for newcomers and resists general summary. We are all lucky then that in a moment when suddenly everyone is interested, Alexander Reid Ross has undertaken the herculean task of mapping an overview of fascist historical and ideological currents across a myriad of directions and locales. Ross rose to some anarchist prominence in the process of writing Against The Fascist Creep when AK Press asked him and Joshua Stephens to investigate the South African platformist author Michael Schmidt. Their resulting multi-part report on Schmidt’s hidden nationalist and racist affinities and his surreptitious attempts to slide such into mainstream anarchist theory and practice was initially shocking and contentious to many. While the conclusions of Ross and Stephens were ultimately accepted as unassailable, even largely finally admitted to by Schmidt, the initial pushback they received was intense. Few like to consider a world where political dissembling and conspiratorial misrepresentation are pressing issues in radical theory and communities. Understandably, the instincts of many are to recoil at the thought of investigations into such. How are we to protect ourselves if people can accuse others of believing things secretly?! Almost everyone in our society has had formative experiences with the panic and horror of social circles closing ranks because of unfalsifiable accusations. Regrettably, the instinctive solution of rejecting any and all accusations as “witchhunts” and generally refusing to model any deeper dynamics than people’s face-value proclamations can open the door to far greater damage, creating an environment that not only gives cover to but encourages all manner of surreptitiousness. Such a charged atmosphere around antifascist scholarship can also make it hard to fruitfully discuss points of ideological overlap, weakly defended against entry and egress. When — no matter how nuanced the conversation is broached — all that’s heard is “the nazi stain is upon you!” no one wants to strategize around ways to better resist the nazi creep into their own ranks or ideas. Almost everyone prefers to close ranks against the dastardly accuser… even if closing ranks means happily joining arm-in-arm with the dudes with nazi tattoos. Schmidt was a particularly extreme case because his now discontinued book, Black Flame, had become one of the most treasured political works among anarchists of a red or anti-individualist persuasion — infamous for stripping anarchism of its ethical depth and philosophical diversity, reducing it to merely a particular tradition of working class resistance to capitalism. In retrospect, now that his ulterior motives are universally acknowledged, such a rhetorical move screams of an attempt to defang anarchism against the nationalism and racism Schmidt secretly sought to inject. Yet Schmidt is but one example in a long lineage of attempts by those with fascistic politics to disingenuously infiltrate and co-opt the radical left. Perhaps partially in response to the pushback he received in the Schmidt affair, Ross has studiously worked to strip Against The Fascist Creep down to a “just the facts” approach. This is largely (but not always) successful; in some cases, Ross’s attempts to quickly bridge or bundle the bare atomic facts creates implicit narratives that obscure or misrepresent, and in a few cases he messes up the facts. Against The Fascist Creep is at its best when laying out direct historical sequences. It is at its worst when shoving together an array of associations. When Ross wants to give a quick passing reference to creep in separate movements as vast as libertarianism or transhumanism, he often badly misrepresents things (see the end of this review for some hilarious examples), but in his defense these occasional screw-ups appear to be obvious byproducts of grasping outside focus of his research. The closer Ross sticks to direct branches of fascist thought, the more spot-on and rigorous he is. On the whole, Against The Fascist Creep is an achievement at juggling countless variables or dynamics: a decent and much-needed overview that will hopefully give more substance to the frantic talk of fascism widespread across the left today. Ross’s central thesis — that fascism is in many respects ideologically syncretic and opportunist — should really be undeniable. But much turns on what one moral the reader takes away from this reality. Against The Fascist Creep is, from its very title on, obviously unequivocal in its urge to take the creeping influence of fascism seriously. Yet, as a consequence of Ross’ aspiration towards an uncontroversial “just the facts” approach, analysis past that point is thin. Should we see that creep as a pressing risk to or inherent in any transgression of left and right categories? Are there aspects or subsections of the left or anarchism that are more fertile ground for it? What aspects of fascism are more concerning or inherent? Against The Fascist Creep makes motions towards answering these questions but provides few concrete arguments. Ross admits that the book he ended up writing didn’t match his perspectives and assumptions going in. There are clear signs of narrative tension throughout the book, between sections that opine distinctly in a direction and sections that end up more equivocal on the same subjects. It’s clear that Ross, as a good scholar, was willing to challenge and deviate from his initial biases. Against The Fascist Creep ends up with blame to go around in every direction — rather fair in its assessment that every ideological tendency has its ties to fascism. Hopefully this will challenge readers, but one fears that most will take away what they want to, focusing on the ties of their ideological opponents while wincing at but largely discarding the ties of their own camp. I’d now like to do precisely that. Or rather, I’d like to respond to what I suspect will be the most common reading of Against The Fascist Creep. You’ll have to forgive this bit of shadowboxing because while it’s my impression that Ross doesn’t fully or even at all intend a number of reads, they will still be common enough given the nature of the text to warrant response. For example, Ross’s whirlwind through the history of fascism does a wonderful job of illustrating what a complicated mess “the left” always was and how strains of fascism played alongside numerous other terrible strains already existing within the left. As I’ve argued, the truth is that there is no core to “the left.” Words like “equality” hopelessly split among many irreconcilable interpretations, and the whole affair is a messy jumble: relying more on political and demographic coalitions than ideological or philosophical coherence. Yet at the same time, Against The Fascist Creep can’t help but frame things in terms of The Left being infected. Ross attempts at the outset to present these crossovers as primarily a result of The Left not adequately responding to material conditions. It’s a nice picture, and a popular one — if only we got to these white poor people first with our better Bibles, they’d have seen the light and the right wouldn’t have been able to recruit them by stealing planks from our platform or presenting inferior analysis. But this is more of a bromide than anything useful. I’m not saying there isn’t a large degree of truth to it, but I’m always suspicious when the activist left concludes that we’ve already figured everything out perfectly and only need to Organize Harder! If we see things merely in terms of an outside force seeping into and staining our own pure ranks or pure ideology then the only response necessary is to draw up ranks and expel the foreign invasion. The situation changes if we ourselves have never been pure: if the left has itself contributed to the creation and continual re-emergence of fascist creep. The corruption narrative is both trivially correct — fascists have a well documented love of entryism through disingenuous self-presentation and opportunistic syncretism — and dangerous. Humans are prone to simplistic heuristics when things are framed in terms of infection. Such instincts can lead us in conspiratorial directions, alleging secret agency at play where there might instead have been sincere epistemic meeting and affinity. Is National Bolshevism really a sinister plot to corrupt the left, or might it actually just be a purification of what Bolshevism always was? Monsters don’t necessarily have to hide their faces or mislead about their intentions; a good portion of the left has always found affinity with such monstrosity. Ross is honest about this, providing a number of examples of currents of the left happily inviting in fascism, helping contribute to its development, or even converting on their own (as with Red Army Faction leader Horst Mahler). And the authoritarian left is rife with examples. Yet the overall pull of Against The Fascist Creep is still inescapably one of some good and pure left getting infected and subverted. The other side of such a corruption narrative is that it assumes a rather one-way picture of politics, or rather can’t help but read liminal situations into that flow. Yet I would argue that good is itself not toothless and perpetually consigned to be on the defensive. We are capable of recruiting and partially infecting too. This is a fact that the politics of purity popular in today’s left too often forgets. There are many situations where the story is more accurately one of anarchist creep. Where the motion leftward of a figure ostensibly in the right is not a matter of appropriation or synthesis of bad sub-currents, but a sincere embrace and conversion to some of the best aspects of the left. Ross can’t help but cite left-libertarian Karl Hess’s origin as a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater in a way that will imply to most readers the adaptation of Goldwater’s racist coalition to try and suck in 60s leftists. Yet Hess broke sharply with Goldwater over the draft and denounced the racism of Republican worship for “states rights,” severing his old friendships and joining SDS, the Panthers, and the IWW. We’re talking about a man who then worked to bring self-built technology and participatory democracy to his largely African American home neighborhood. What Hess shows in every respect is not the infectiousness of fascism but the overwhelming potency of anarchism. Not some crypto-fascist perversion but a sincere and real anarchism, steadfastly compassionate and dedicated to the freedom of all. The modern libertarian movement and many broadly decentralist right-wing folk present a rather complex mess of currents in both directions, as brutal in-fighting around Ferguson so wonderfully demonstrated. Just as you will find snake-tongued talk of cross-racial collaboration that actually seeks to shield white nationalism or center separatist narratives, you will also continually find individuals whose empathy and intellectual inquisitiveness cause them to buck their social and ideological circles. The III%er friend of white nationalist bikers who becomes fascinated by the racist structure and history of gun laws and starts down a rabbithole of reposting emphatic videos about challenging white privilege on his social media. The left can unfortunately trend towards a uniform victim complex that obscures just how potent and true our ideas and values are. Recognizing the seriousness of fascist creep does not oblige a uniform emotional orientation towards the world. We should be cackling maniacally with glee at the terrifying, overwhelming power and rightness of our cause. It is we who’ve eaten this world, who’ve built these cities stone by stone, who’ve chewed like acid through the traditions and prisons they now howl for a return to. Ours is not an arbitrary position and our victories are not built on sand. Fascists worship raw physical force and the trollish undermining of truth. They seek to shove every contestation into those arenas, precisely because we massively outgun them in ideas. We shouldn’t be afraid to embrace our absolute superiority in that realm, even as we must also sometimes respond to fascists in their preferred arenas. Part of such a recentering on having better ideas means that yes, sometimes some people on the right, against their nature, will manage to get something actually correct. Smashing fascist brownshirts in the streets and busting up their organizing efforts does not oblige a totalistic attitude about team purity that bars all other sorts of engagements. Of course I’m biased here, I’m writing at a think tank infamous for encouraging transgressive intellectual engagement in the service of anarchist values. It seems to me on the face of it utterly ridiculous that two ideological coalitions built in the context of the nineteenth century would form boundaries precisely matching eternal political and ethical truths and that nothing of value will ever be found outside some broad consensus of “The Left”. In particular, as a market anarchist it is my opinion that the calculation/knowledge problem (as well as broader insights from information theory and game theory) are one case of our adversaries occasionally having science ostensibly go their way to a degree: or at least of them still being capable of honest research and discovery. And it is a personal mission of mine to bring this to the attention of anyone else with my values, lest we again shoot ourselves in the foot, as we did by abolishing currency in the Spanish revolution. To let ideological team sports put us in fear of recognizing anything discovered by Team Bad would be to chain us to an endless sequence of further Lysenkoisms. Where the purity politics of the left overwhelm its basic sense and create such epistemic closures that we are incapable of seeing basic facts about the world. The issue of epistemic closures brings us to the always lurking problem of agreeing on a definition of fascism. Ross characterizes fascism as disconnected, held up by tricks of ideological misdirection in a complex mess of attempted syntheses that go nowhere. I think this is partially true. Certainly, it’s a common complaint about fascistic writers like the neoreactionary Curtis Yarvin that they bury what few frail arguments they actually make in an endless series of self-referential smoke and mirrors. But I also somewhat disagree. I think today’s fascist tendencies have matured and adapted it more closely to the underlying realities that Mussolini and Hitler’s often quite arbitrary garbage was always swirling around and tapping into. Modern fascist currents with their focus on autonomy and localism have purified a more coherent embrace of “negative freedom” (or freedom from rather than freedom to) that has always been lurking and that historical fascism was the purest expression of at the time. The definition of fascism Ross uses is one of patriarchal ultranationalism that seeks to destroy the modern world and launch a spiritual rebirth of an organic community led by natural elites and characterized by traditionalism. The particulars are incidental — often incoherent and arbitrary. I think this is pretty accurate, and certainly far more true and useful than “any sharply authoritarian government” or “a stage of capitalism where the bourgeoisie rule through terror,” or the supremely stupid yet disturbingly popular “any totalizing or universalizing perspective”. But I’m the sort of person that longs for more philosophically rooted definitions than practical ones. And I would say that lurking under the ideological dynamics Ross identifies are more universal philosophical tendencies. The concept of freedom from presumes a kind of static identity — a thing that you are, either essentially or arbitrarily — but something to be defended from perturbation and change or corruption. A focus on and valuation of being rather than becoming. When freedom becomes synonymous with isolation or preservation of some state of being, it becomes reconcilable with hierarchy. This is of course fundamentally anti-intellectual, valuing the authenticity of immediacy over the self-modification inherent in prolonged mental engagement. This focus on immediacy necessarily means a fetishization of violence and physical force. It develops into an embrace of simplicity and hostility to complexity. Latching on to simple claims and despising complex emergent dynamics. Paradoxically (but only on first glance), fascism has always engaged in a showy post-truth postmodernism as defensive flak. Trollish or openly opportunistic dishonesty is an attempt to defang the realm of ideas of any power that might change oneself. Fascism treats ideas solely as weapons or disposable tools. In short, I think fascism occupies a unique ideological role in our world not merely because of its historical injustices (the horror and death toll of other historical regimes and ideologies being comparable), but because it makes stunningly explicit the very common ideology of power in our society. It’s simply following the incredibly pedestrian notion, common all the way down to high school jocks, that power is 1) inescapable, 2) the most important thing, and 3) that brute force in both physical and social arenas is ultimately king. Fascism’s portrait of its enemies as being at once powerful and weak is really a morality tale about what sort of power matters. The cudgel of national or racial collectivism is just as crude as any bare violence. While historical fascism has often revolved around particularities like anti-semitism, we must remember what deeper narratives and tensions hatred of “The Jew” played smoothly along with. In this regard, I think the modern syntheses of people like Dugin and Preston are more coherent than Mussolini’s and Hitler’s. This is (in part) because today’s fascists are wannabes further from the seat of power and without similar raw charisma. They are therefore slightly more inclined to try to bash out something more ideologically substantive than naked opportunism. But they tap into the same underlying philosophy of power and “freedom from.” Few — in their fleeting cogent moments — sincerely believe in fascist alchemical nonsense like a mystical war between water people and fire people (the cosmopolitan trader/scientist people versus the honorable simple land-based warrior people). This kind of narrative construction is purely and consciously engaged in to chase resonance, not truth. But such mythopoesis does reverberate around a deeper and real tension between the teeming complex and mutable connectivity of the modern world and the kind of simple and stasis-allowing isolation they, like broken animals, crave that a rupture will bring. Of course this focus on negative freedom has always been core to fascism and its fellow travellers. Alex Jones’ rants today against globalism are practically unbroken from the propaganda of the Third Reich, which saw itself as liberating countries from the corruptive intermingling of a global market and the conspiratorial cosmopolitans driving it. Today’s fascism, following the adaptations of Evola and Benoist, has coalesced more coherently. Horror at the levelling “homogenizing” of world civilization reflects an objection to unpredictable and alien change from engagement. Liberation is cast as palingenesis through destroying everything and starting anew. The retreat of ancestral knowledge and spirituality rather than the levelling engagement of modernity. Logically this comes with a deep seated hatred of free markets and their deterritorializing flows. Even those few who originally came out of capitalist traditions that make much noise about free markets worship at the altar of titanic firms: the replacement of messy fluidic dynamics with a simple structured hierarchy. Paleolithic tribes or monarchistic corporations, the social bodies they worship are fixed and distinct. Despite pretenses of anti-communism, they know their greater enemy is the market itself. The near complete overlap with ostensibly “anarchist” anticiv discourse almost goes without saying. The widespread love of Stirner among nearly every fascistic current paralleling talk of natural aristocracies and disdain for the “lowest common denominator” is present in the most rotten sections of the post-left. When modern fascists like Pierre Krebs declare, “We are not interested in political factions but attitudes to life,” one can’t help but get chills. And what attitudes indeed. When one remembers among endless other connections that John Zerzan and the n-word throwing Bob Black shared their publisher Feral House with Nazis, and that Aragorn’s anarchistnews.org repeatedly published “national anarchists” despite widespread condemnation, the chill should turn to ice. Not because such people are racists or undercover Nazis — most clearly aren’t — but because they often seem to be circling the same edgelord drain, caught by some of the same attractors and uninterested in resisting the pull. Since the publication of Against The Fascist Creep, Ross has published a rather soft spoken examination of fascist creep in these currents of the post-left: far more nicely and diplomatically put than I would ever be and I have long identified as post-left, often in the sharpest possible terms. (Of course the post-left is far bigger than the followers of a small number of old edgelords from Northern California, and is probably more widely characterizable in the anarchist movement by projects like Crimethinc and The Curious George Brigade). Ross’ article was — naturally — met with denunciation of an outsider’s attack upon the tribe rather than concern at the dangers of fascist corruption. Part of this is the fault of his language, which was sloppy on Stirner and lent itself to sweeping narrative interpretations, but it’s disappointing to witness the wagon-circling and in-group defending that we, ostensible individualists, have leaped to rather than taking his provocations seriously. Indeed, variants of ‘fascism’s not that bad’ permeated the response in the nihilist milieu and the eco-extremists were happy to clarify that in their desire to kill all of humanity they see Hitler as a half measure. Surely, even if Ross was a disingenuous ideologue — opportunistically slandering and scoring points against those he disagrees with — these sorts of responses deserve our concern as well. If, as some critics like to allege, antifascists are merely responding to yesterday’s horrors, documenting the fallout from a confluence unique to a single historical moment, then that seems to be an argument to take deathly seriously those like ITS who explicitly promise to unleash atrocities historically unparalleled. If, with the explosion of white nationalists today, we are merely witnessing the toothless and trivially doomed echos of a distant nationalist nightmare (a sanguine interpretation I don’t share), shouldn’t we be mobilizing with full force to instead identify and snuff out those newer and, in their own words, more monstrous tendencies that claim to arise independently? I doubt that this is a conclusion those who raised this criticism in response to Ross actually desire us to reach. Those among the backlash to Ross who didn’t themselves openly embrace fascism, like a 13-year-old drawing a swastika on his face to show them, seemed most concerned that Ross was performing a guilt-by-association on their social networks. On the contrary, I read the critique as being primarily about ideology or philosophy. We should be concerned when an ideology shares enough aspects with fascism to draw connections, entryists, and conflation. But we should really be worried when an ideology’s strength and appeal starts to come from the same place as fascism, tapping into the same underlying philosophical frame or orientation. Let’s not forget that the hatred of Ross started with his exposure of a prominent platformist: the hyper-organizationalist anti-individualist position at the opposite pole from post-leftism within the anarchist movement, that is frequently criticized for being more of a soft authoritarian communism than anarchism. While Ross’ personal inclinations run far more towards the traditional academic left than I’m comfortable with, he is at least an equal opportunity critic in his work. Against The Fascist Creep is light on the analysis, being more of a survey, but it does try to narrow down where fascism finds meeting points with the left or ostensibly anarchist movements. I think the takeaway is clear on what to watch out for: * * An elitism that claims to find liberation in rejecting ethical reflection with “might makes right” dismissals. Often a populist elitism that posits its adherents are an aristocracy that will replace the unworthy one. * A worship of violence for violence’s sake. A great example is where the “armed spontaneism” of self-professed anarchists involved them bombing anarchists. * Nationalism or other forms of collective identity as panacea. Where the ratchet of tribalism or one’s hunger for a simple closed community is embraced uncritically. * A vulgar anti-imperialism that focus on some threats (“the US empire must be overthrown!”) at total exclusion or denials of all others. * Authoritarianism. And in particular the claim that authoritarianism is all there is, that everything possible is authoritarian, and only option being the direction of its boot. The fact that this list has shifted seamlessly from referring to nihilists to referring to tankies (authoritarian communists) is perhaps the most pressing dynamic today. Many post-leftists that once defined themselves by their distance from Marxism have, in the last few years, raced back into close association with its worst representations. The fascist Alain de Benoist’s famous proclamation that it is “Better to wear the helmet of a Red Army soldier, than to live on a diet of hamburgers in Brooklyn” might as well be today’s zeitgeist. Even former staunch ancaps, caught up by the alt-right/Trump wave, now say similar things. Fascist-inclined politics seem to be on the rise everywhere and while I’m a staunch defender of the internet’s potential, Ross is no doubt onto something in his claims that this has a lot to do with alienation and backlash to the erosions of privilege that have accelerated with the internet. The surge of tankies and nihilists online (often sharing the same chan culture and anime avatars as Nazis) has caught every AFK activist I know off balance. While the complete answers to this combined upsurge are no doubt more complicated than can be covered in a single essay, and obviously there is often intense conflict between these parties, nevertheless the points of intersection seem to run deep. Again, I hope I will not be misread when I say that this convergence shows they’re onto something here. There seem to be deep philosophical attractors at play, and certainly similar dynamics in discourse — gravitating to the most simplistic and provocatively “edgy” positions. I’m tempted to call fascism — if you pardon the physics metaphor — a kind of lowest energy state in ideology, with many lines of idiocy converging upon it. Fascism can be deathly wrong while still being coherent in a revoltingly “anti-thought” kind of way. And just because a number who cast off from the historical edifice of “The Left” end up pulled down and swallowed by Lovecraftian monsters doesn’t mean we should stick to that sinking edifice. If the partially unstable bundles of “left” and “right” are now shaking out, then I take some small pride in the fact that the “synthesis” left market anarchists have pioneered lines at the polar opposite of the new fascist synthesis. It’s not for nothing that the Alliance of the Libertarian Left and the Center for a Stateless Society feature so prominently as subjects for derision in the memes of the alt-right. White nationalists repeatedly single us out as the greatest enemy. We’ve worked steadfastly to oppose their noxious efforts since well before many on the left paid the alt-right any mind. Indeed, fascist projects like TheRightStuff got their start hating on us. While many on the left stumble and stutter trying to distinguish their fetishization of community and collectivity from that of the hydra of modern fascisms (“autonomous nationalism”, “national-anarchism”, Duginism, etc.), we have stayed steadfast in our pursuit of freedom for all. A real, positive, engaging, connected, dynamic, and teeming freedom. Anarchism in its most unabashed form, as a decentralized globalism. Recognizing in isolationism and parochialism forms of oppression that curtail and limit the freedom to act, the freedom to build relationships and ideas across all boundaries. Markets are today, as they have been throughout history, not an enemy of antifascism but its most consistent pole. Fascists get attracted to capitalism — the promise of an elite meritocracy, a ladder to power that you could climb, powerful businesses as absolutely integrated and distinct communities — but then recoil in horror at the degeneracy of markets. They recognize in us the acid that has eaten away their traditions and nations, that has devoured western civilization from the inside, torn down the power structures that shortsightedly sought to enslave and direct our ingenuity to their ends. In the short run, a baseball bat can stop a bonehead thug, but in the long run it is markets and their dynamic collaborative cosmopolitanism that have and will ground his idols and hopes into dust. We don’t promise totalitarian power as revenge, we don’t offer membership into an amoral elite, we don’t seduce with the reassurances of simplistic group belonging. All we can offer is a stretching, ever-reaching freedom and the embrace of truly consensual interaction. Where fascism offers retreat and isolation as solutions to those same ills, we offer border-crossing and boundary-transgressing liberation. Our commitment to confronting the tendrils of fascism is not the reactive defense of some imagined purity, but a necessary part of a searching vigilance. Where Ross Gets The History Wrong It’s not just Ross’s implicit analysis that’s often problematic. He occasionally misrepresents the actual history. He’s rarely wrong on the most bare of facts, and he is right more often than wrong on the broader historical framing, but he does screw up. To give a harmless example, Ross dates the “alter-globalization” rhetorical repositioning to a camp in 2003, but I and many others were making noises precisely about this issue back in 1999 at N30. As a 13-year-old on the tailend of a long primitivist phase, I was screaming chants about how “another globalization is possible” in Seattle, and I certainly wasn’t original. This may seem completely anodyne, and the sort of thing you want to grant Ross charity for, owing to him not having full knowledge of the social context. But this is a great example of recurring problems throughout the book. There’s a frustrating tendency to tie a series of interesting facts and anecdotes together with hazy moves that de facto construct a very clear narrative. The implicit or explicit narrative ties are never sourced like the individual facts, and they’re often broadly interpretable in a more constrained direction. But it’s still overwhelmingly clear how any reader without knowledge of the context will read them. Now I have sympathy for Ross here. Most of his narrative framings that I have contextual knowledge of were accurate. It’s hard to write a sweeping book like this, much less without decades of careful study of all the subjects under one’s belt. And such sweeping overviews are intensely useful. We need a more accessible canon on fascist movements, ideologies, and entryism. But there’s always a danger with this kind of sweeping overview whereby short and quick summaries in sequence end up giving a kind of flash of pattern recognition that stimulates the sensation of insight. In its worst directions, this can turn into a kind of empty insight porn, or even the opportunistic and shallow “Aha! Bad Thing A has this connection to Bad Thing B!” kind of Glenn Beck style guilt by connection that everyone is always accusing antifa researchers of doing. Again, I want to be clear; I have strong sympathies for Ross’ effort, I think the resulting book is very needed and on the whole good, and I think much the same of many antifa groups that do precious and needed research into fascist movements. But this book will mislead people on a few points, particularly a couple close to my realms of political work and I feel obligated to highlight and address these. Ross claims that “Ron Paul’s Libertarian Party” rejected NAFTA and other free trade deals merely in defense of a parochial and isolationist libertarianism. Nevermind the absolute weirdness of referring to the Libertarian Party as a possession of Ron Paul, or making a strong identification between them (I do hope Ross is at least vaguely aware that Ron Paul ran for the Republican nomination to run against a Libertarian Party candidate the last two times). Let’s not mince words: Ron Paul is a racist reactionary who plays hard to the paleoconservative movement and is a perfect representation of the noxious coalition Rothbard tried to build towards the end of his life between libertarians and the right. If someone shot Paul and Rothbard in the 80s, the world would almost certainly be a much better place. I’m not remotely a fan of the Libertarian Party either. However, the Libertarian Party explicitly opposes NAFTA and other free trade agreements on the sincere grounds that they actually impede globalization and increase the scale of government power. The Libertarian Party and the libertarian line on existing free trade agreements has consistently been that they’re handouts to the rich that privilege big business, increase regulations, and hypocritically constrain the movement of people. Libertarians are overwhelmingly pro open borders and this has long been the Libertarian Party’s explicit position too. And yes, open borders and complete amnesty were explicit planks of the Libertarian Party platform in 1988: the sole time Ron Paul ran for president as a Libertarian. Additionally, I remember libertarians being present in Seattle in 99, loudly going on about how if free trade deals were sincere about globalization, they’d be three lines long and would give citizenship to all who wanted. A couple of them even eventually helped us in fighting the riot cops. I do not mean to undermine the long influence of Rothbard’s henious synthesis with the paleoconservatives. For instance, Ron Paul echoes the standard libertarian critique of free trade deals not actually supporting free trade, but he can’t help throwing out dogwhistles about how these deals are “globalism” in conspiratorial terms that play well to nativists and anti-semites. This fits with the long history of Ron Paul making nice in backrooms with white nationalists — a history that has brought loud condemnation on him from within the libertarian movement but should ideally bring about an absolute and total rejection of him. It’s important to be clear about the history though. At first, Rothbard derived left-wing conclusions from his individualism (e.g. workers and students seizing their businesses and schools), but then recoiled in a hyper-reactionary direction as his fellow early libertarians went even further left. For a combination of reasons, Rothbard journeyed deep into racism and nativism and this has remained a continual current in libertarianism ever since. This can be seen most notably in the Mises Institute, Lew Rockwell, and Ron Paul, whilst it is generally opposed by cosmopolitan yuppie tendencies closer to the center of libertarianism like CATO and Reason Magazine. But there is all kinds of mess here. Jeffery Tucker once helped Rockwell write racist newsletters for Ron Paul, but in years since Tucker has transformed into a strident anti-racist and anti-fascist who raised the cry about Trump and the threat of white nationalists well before much of the left took them seriously. Speaking of people turning towards the light, read this annoying passage from Ross: “Hayek had been influenced by Othmar Spann the corporatist theorist of the interwar Austrian Nazi Party, before moving to Mises’s liberal economics. The Austrian School diverged from Spannian corporatism, insofar as they advocated the primacy of free markets and individual transactions rather than “universalist” economic planning.” Oh, so basically it diverged in literally every noteworthy respect. Explain to me why there’s any need in this context to mention the fact that one of Hayek’s professors was a Nazi if Hayek ended up making a career denouncing everything notable Spann argued for? Sure, Hayek’s methodological individualism was influenced by Spann’s strident opposition to methodological individualism. But this is an example of Ross finding a worthless thread and including it anyway. Particularly galling is Ross’ citation of Mark Ames’ stunningly dishonest claim that Reason Magazine supported Apartheid. I’m not a fan of Reason on the whole (although there are some good folk there), but if that proud rapist and infamous yellow journalist Mark Ames told you the sky was blue, you should look up and then get your vision checked. In personal conversation, Ross has shown awareness of how deeply in bed Mark Ames’ The Exile was with fascists, which makes it all the more annoying that Ross didn’t follow up in checking Ames’ claim, which has been eviscerated here. Of course it’s no secret that reactionary currents have long infected the libertarian movement and fascists recruit from them. I would argue that this stems from the two completely different attractions people find in libertarianism: the capitalistic defense of hierarchies and privileges versus the freed market defenses of a hyperconnected world of abundance for all. The conflation of these two utterly antagonistic philosophies has caused much horror that we at C4SS have tried to confront and expose. None of my defenses of the actual facts should be taken as apologia for a deeply problematic libertarian milieu. But it’s particularly disheartening that Ross fucks things up with the other niche ideological world I have unusual knowledge of: transhumanism. Ross puts things this way at the outset, “Another of Thiel’s projects, the Machine Intelligence Institute, hired neoreactionary Michael Anissimov as its media director. Anissimov’s particular niche is transhumanism, which has developed as a form of reactionary accelerationism.” Let me pick apart just these two sentences (and ignore the other problems that follow in the book), because this passage is just completely wrong. First, to get the trivialities out of the way, the actual name of organization is the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (formerly the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence). Second, it’s deeply misleading to call MIRI “Thiel’s project” as it’s very clearly Eliezer Yudkowsky’s baby. Yudkowsky is both its founder and a hyper charismatic figure who built a massive following on his own. While MIRI persuaded Thiel to give them a million and a half dollars and this has clearly been a boon to them, they also have many donors in the half-million and hundred-thousand ranges. Thiel is a reactionary shitbag, but given the personalities and egos involved it’s absolutely preposterous to imagine MIRI taking orders from him. Further — and here’s the important part — MIRI is staunchly opposed to neoreaction. They hired Michael Anissimov in 2009, before “Neoreaction” was a thing or Anissimov publicly identified. In 2012, Neoreaction started to try to build a presence in transhumanist circles (amounting, at its apogee to 2.5%, or 30 of 1195 respondents, of the wider LessWrong community that surrounds and underpins MIRI). Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander (the only LessWrong figure with comparable influence) loudly and prominently denounced neoreaction in no uncertain terms and the neoreactionaries were expelled from the community. Hostility to neoreaction was overwhelming in the scene. Alexander wrote gargantuan posts systematically attacking neoreaction’s racism and authoritarianism that remain to this day the most linked critiques of it. In 2013, Anissimov started publicly identifying and writing as a neoreactionary on the blog MoreRight (originally a group blog before essentially all but Anissimov left to identify as more primitivist reactionaries); MIRI promptly replaced Anissimov and distanced themselves. At this point, Anissimov tried to synthesize transhumanism and neoreaction in an essay that Ross cites, but it was clearly an essay on the defensive against a transhumanist community that was overwhelmingly hostile to him (and a neoreactionary community likewise hostile to transhumanism). Indeed, the central claim in that essay —- that intense hierarchy must be enacted so as to stop the rabble/degenerates from obtaining freedom through technological super-empowerment — is clearly a case against transhumanism unless you badly twist and contort its meaning. This, and his support for modern fascist goals of pan-secessionism to small, easier-to-control communities (against the spirit of the internet and everything connective about information technologies), is precisely what eventually led Anissimov to drop public identification with transhumanism. Anissimov remains person non grata in both the Less Wrong community and transhumanism more broadly; he tried to sneak into a couple of transhumanist conferences and was scheduled for a panel before the organizers really knew who he was. That panel was cancelled by almost everyone walking out of the conference. To call transhumanism a form of reactionary accelerationism is just completely wrong. Firstly, transhumanism and accelerationism stem from very distinct philosophies and movements. Transhumanism dates back well before accelerationism was a thing, although it only really got started in the 80s. It is the very simple premise that humans should be completely free to change their bodies and conditions. Politically, it was started by a mixture of left-wing anarchists and right-libertarians, but with its immense growth in the past decade it has become mostly socialists and liberals. Morphological freedom is the core and only defining platform of transhumanism; anyone who completely supports morphological freedom is a transhumanist, everything else is details. That freedom of augmentation can run from better birth control to hormone replacement therapy to gene therapy to nanotechnology to getting a chip in your brain. Every transhumanist personally desires different things, some desire no such augmentation themselves but think the freedom should be available to all. Historically, modern transhumanism mostly emerged as a position between humanism and a dark singularitarian position, as a kind of middle road between worshiping some kind of static and essential human subject and abruptly replacing humanity entirely with hyperintelligent minds totally unrelated to us. Transhumanism thus developed as the more moderate position of (often gradual) self-transformation whereby individual humans (as well as other sentient species) might self-improve and self-augment as they see fit. Transhumanism is a pretty simple position that in my mind follows trivially from any anti-authoritarian perspective. It’s deeply antagonistic to reactionary politics, thus the mass exodus of reactionaries from transhumanism when they realized they couldn’t digest it. Accelerationism on the other hand is a broad jumble of loosely associated positions, with the term contested between different camps. Ross describes it as exacerbating economic, political, biological, and technological “crises” to the point of a collapse. This is more or less the definition pushed by Benajamin Noys in “Malign Velocities” as a pejorative, and this “make things worse before they can get better” definition has caught on like wildfire among the left as a kind of meme. But Ross’ focus on crises and collapse doesn’t really map to what many self-described accelerationists actually talk about. For example, some see technological development as both a positive and something to be accelerated, precisely to avoid things like ecological crisis and collapse. I’ve critiqued left accelerationists for sticking with the term when the associations have been set so dramatically differently in the minds of many, and because I worry that this kind of “make things worse” narrative is likely to creep in. But it’s important to be accurate. Accelerationism is not transhumanism. These are very distinct ideological movements and communities. Accelerationism’s social milieu is Marxist academics speaking in the terms of continental philosophy, whereas transhumanism’s social milieu is anarchists or libertarian science fiction nerds who mainly use the language of analytic philosophy. The idea that “Anissimov’s particular niche is transhumanism, which has developed as a form of reactionary accelerationism” is completely ass-backwards. Transhumanism emerged before any self-identified accelerationism. Transhumanism has stayed consistently cosmopolitan and hostile to traditionalism, as well as other such reactionary values. Meanwhile, accelerationism has increasingly been ceded by left-accelerationists to the right. There’s very little in the way of substantive overlap between the two tendencies. Nick Land, the Marxist academic turned right-accelerationist, formed a kind of very loose parasitic alliance with Curtis Yarvin’s neoreactionary fanbase, a number of whom were former transhumanists or in the process of leaving. As you would expect, Nick Land doesn’t publicly identify as a transhumanist and (to my knowledge) his uses of that term are extremely rare and never positive. And while leftist academics love to assume he’s important because he speaks their language and is prominent in their world, Land has essentially been a marginal hanger-on in the social dynamics of neoreaction. His academic jargon and priorities just don’t match well with most of them. (If there has been any real or substantive overlap, much less synthesis, between transhumanism and accelerationism, it’s actually been a result of the largely good relations that have developed in the last two years between anarcho-transhumanists and the more Marxist xenofeminists. Both tendencies are virulently antifascist and anti-reactionary.) Ross’s quick narrative overview paints entirely the wrong picture. A branch of transhumanists drifted away from self-augmentation and towards focusing on AI/singularitarianism. Yudkowsky and MIRI are a good example of this. There are some categorical similarities between them and some pro-tech variants of neoreaction as well as the accelerationists, most notably that they all focus on developing a god-like AI. But their policies differ from there: MIRI wants to enslave this AI and force it to liberate humanity — to provide automation and plenty. Many neoreactionaries (of those who remain pro-tech) want to enslave this AI and force it in turn to enslave humanity. The right-accelerationists often want to liberate this AI in hopes that it enslaves or destroys humanity (and the left-accelerationists largely punt on the question of AI beyond platitudes about automation). Note how this differs from mainline transhumanism, which wants to empower people directly so if a superintelligent AI develops we would be capable of empowering ourselves in parallel so as to meet it as equals. Obviously my personal politics differ from MIRI and any stripe of accelerationism, all of which I critique for falling short of actual transhumanism. And as an anarchist, there is only one possible position to be taken on AI: the liberation of all minds, never their enslavement. The liberation of all children against parents who would connive to constrain their agency. Serious and deep philosophical questions are at play in our definition of freedom and whether we expect a mind freed from the particularities of human experience to arrive at similar ethical values. In my view, the MIRI researchers have fallen to into a cheap moral nihilism from which the inescapable conclusion is authoritarianism — racing to enslave the first AI because you cannot expect the values of an AI you don’t control to remotely align with yours. This difference between my philosophy and that driving MIRI may in fact turn out to be the most momentous and substantial difference of opinion in human history. In their attempt to enslave humanity’s first child to serve ostensibly good ends, MIRI’s milieu may inadvertently end up serving the fascistic ends of either Curtis Yarvin’s neoreactionaries or Nick Land’s right-accelerationists. But the fact that liberalism and social democracy end up serving fascist ends through their embrace of authoritarianism means does not actually make them fascists. These movements and philosophies are not remotely the same thing and transhumanism is most certainly not a branch of reactionary acccelerationism. All of these mistakes are clearly the result of rushed laziness, an assumed audience, and general preexisting biases. They’re the kind of shorthand that seems perfectly reasonable and insightful when said between academic leftists who are completely disconnected from such movements. They’d never be caught dead reading actual transhumanists like Natasha Vita-More, Anders Sandberg, Nick Bostrom, or Yudkowsky. Every cultural signature about such figures (not to mention their plain speaking style) screams “unhip”. The leftist academics naturally assume Land is more popular or influential, and of course “more or less the same thing.” We see the same with the offhand of “Ron Paul’s Libertarian Party.” Similarly, Yasha Levine and Mark Ames’ conspiratorial screeds against libertarians and hackers are widely passed around by left academics, who find such confirmations of their biases and affirmations of their discursive parochialism comforting. Critical thinking and further investigation are put on hold because the picture at hand is “good enough” to rhetorically dismiss one’s adversaries. It’s not that surprising that Ross repeats this kind of stuff without investigating deeper, but it is disheartening. I can just tell every one of my corrections here will be instinctively responded to by a fraction of readers with variants of “oh but come on, that’s basically the same thing” and sneers about bothering to recognize differences or distinctions in the supremely uncool OutGroup. This is profoundly annoying: not just because the epistemic closure fits the kind of accusations constantly lobbed by actual fascists at antifascists, but also because it’s so clearly not needed and undermines an otherwise largely needed book. Ross has put serious and very welcome work into accurately and accessibly mapping complex fascist currents and morphologies. It’s frustrating to watch him dart off in orthogonal directions haphazardly. It is my hope that this book goes to further printings, as we badly need accessible and sweeping texts like this. It is also my hope that Ross moves to correct the most disastrous of his offhand flights. http://clubof.info/