On Anno Dracula

I got into an argument about doxxing online. And it prompted me to actually start working on that politics essay, because my main point was ‘doxxing is bad and pretending that your side doing it is okay is hypocritical’ and his take was ‘if you don’t support the Left doxxing people then you’re supporting the rise of hate crimes under Trump’s administration’... or something? I dunno, but apparently asking him to stick to one topic was offensive.

But I’m also reading Kim Newman novels, so let’s talk about that.

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On Anno Dracula

I’m currently re-reading Anno Dracula by Kim Newman (who, to my surprise, is not a woman). At least, the first two novels, and one of the novellas. I have read the first four four novels before, but I think I’ll stop after Vampire Romance because, truth be told, I don’t actually like the second two novels. I only just learned there’s a fifth one, and my library doesn’t have it (the douchebags!).

So Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula series goes a bit like this: the novel Dracula more or less happened, but instead of getting killed Dracula actually won. So he took over England, married Queen Victoria to become the Prince Consort, and has control of the entire British Empire. And now that vampires have become public knowledge, plenty of other vampires come out of the woodwork into public life, obtaining public office) such as Lord Ruthven becoming Prime Minister), the military (like Sir Francis Varney putting down rebellions in India), or joining the Carpathian Guard, Dracula’s elite bodyguards and enforcers. Anyone who doesn’t like how things are going are shipped off to prison camps and never heard from again. Unless they really don’t like you, where they put your head on a spike outside Westminster, as they did with Abraham Van Helsing.

The first book picks up with the Jack the Ripper killings in Whitechapel, in which someone is murdering vampire prostitutes, and so Charles Beauregard, an agent of the Diogenes Club, is tasked with finding the murderer and stopping the killings. The second novel takes place in 1918 during World War I, in which Dracula, having been expelled from England, has taken up residence in Germany with his cronies and became the commander-in-chief of the military forces of Germany as Graf von Dracula.

The books are greatly enhanced by the fact that Kim Newman is a massive nerd. He’s a professional film critic and horror movie buff, so many of the characters are historical, literary or film characters. Many of them get only cameos or mentions, but others are important characters. The Karnstein family of the novel Carmilla regularly appear as lackeys of Dracula, and Charles Beauregard’s boss and head of the Diogenes Club is Mycroft Holmes. Mycroft’s brother exists in-universe, but was sent to prison camp for his opposing Dracula’s regime; Newman explained that the real reason was that he’d solve the Jack the Ripper case in no time, and thus rob the first book of its plot. The second book has him appear and confirm that he could have solved it.

Sergeant Dravot of The Man Who Would Be King is a recurring background character. Count Orlok of Nosferatu is the keeper of the Tower of London. Doctor Moreau of Jules Verne’s novel is a mad doctor, and his colleague is Dr. Jekyll. James Gatz has a short appearance in the World War I novel, even calling someone ‘old sport.’ Beauregard meets several criminals who have agreed to stay out of his way while he works on the Ripper case, including Fu Manchu, Griffin, and Professor Moriarty. The idea of silver bullets is explicitly mentioned as being an invention of John Reid. And one of the protagonists of the series is Kate Reed, a character that Bram Stoker wrote but was cut out from the final draft of Dracula.

And the historical characters! A vampire Edgar Allan Poe has his own subplot in The Bloody Red Baron. Florence Stoker appears many times in the first novel. Authors like Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw have small roles in that one too. Orson Welles appears in the final novel as one of the people working with vampires in Hollywood. Mata Hari is one of the vampire spies that the Allies have executed, and her information is pivotal in understanding Graf von Dracula’s plans. And of course, the title of The Bloody Red Baron is a reference to the Red Baron, the German pilot Manfred von Richthofen.

Newman also develops how vampires work in ways that are interesting while still remaining consistent with several other pieces of vampire fiction. Mostly, vampires aren’t killed by sunlight, though they prefer to be nocturnal, and feed on blood, but aren’t weak towards traditional weaknesses other than silver. Different powers are passed through different bloodlines--so Dracula’s bloodline can shapeshift, but Genevieve Dieudonne, one of the main characters, can pick up thoughts and emotions from people around her. And so not all vampires have the same powers, and how different vampires act different is explained in that way.

All of that being said, after the first novel the action kind of fizzles out. The ending of The Bloody Red Baron doesn’t actually solve anything, as fun as it is to see a World War I with vampires. And the next two books slow down even more, with the fourth one actually being made in part from shorter stories stuck together to basically amount to ‘Dracula’s Back! Again.’ without a real plot other than that. The protagonists even go to confront Dracula only for it to be a sort of ‘screw you’ rather than an actual fight and it’s left unresolved.

But dang, those first two books! It’s like what The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen aimed to be, but without any of Alan Moore’s weird obsession with Victorian Era pornography or tendency to try to depict everything in the worst light possible. There are sort of twisted references, to be sure--one scene has Richthofen kill a beagle because Newman wanted a Snoopy joke. And there are sex scenes, and Kate Reed is sort of weirdly sexualized for no apparent reason. Yes there’s a tradition of connecting vampires to sexuality, which is why I excuse it with several other characters, but Reed’s kind of there as an intrepid reporter, and in the second book we’re meant to think she’s an experienced seductress? I didn’t follow that line.

Still, those first two are very good, and the others can still be fun if for no other reason than you want to see how many references Kim Newman can pack into the story, going from the Victorian Era and on into the 1990’s. And if you’re into horror, or vampires in particular, or even just old movies and the like, it’s definitely worth looking into.

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Horizon Zero Dawn Review

I had a lot of motivation to write about politics and social media, but I think that will be very angry so I decided against it. If you’re curious, it would have amounted to:

-Organizing and understanding issues at hand => Good!

-Sharing angry headlines and loudly shouting at the injustice of the world while plainly not understanding what you’re talking about => Bad!

So we can move off of that.

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Horizon Zero Dawn Review

I recently played Horizon Zero Dawn. It was very good. The Plot goeth thusly:

Civilization as we know has ended a very long time ago. The remnants of humanity now live in tribes much less technologically advanced than modern day. However, along with animals and the ruins of the world’s cities, they also share the world with Machines, large animal-like robots that are hunted for parts and for some reason have become more and more dangerous and aggressive as time goes on in what is called ‘the Derangement.’

Our protagonist is Aloy, a girl of the Nora tribe that’s been raised as an outcast for reasons neither she nor her guardian know, and she’s not allowed to ask. She gets an opportunity to find out, only to be drawn into a larger adventure to save the world, discover her origins, and find out what exactly happened to human civilization that the world got into the state it is now.

I got to this game after finishing Assassin’s Creed: Unity, a frustrating morass of a game that made me want to die. And playing Horizon was fantastic because it was a game that worked, was challenging but not infuriating, and made me enjoy playing games instead of just trying to get them done with.

Despite it being technically a post-apocalypse, and the premise being that you fight robot dinosaurs, it’s not a visually dull game. Every area is full of color and vitality. There is a tendency in visual and interactive media of late to make the worlds presented therein with a gray and brown pallet. I love Skyrim, but look at the colors of the game next to the colors of the previous game in the series. Yes, it’s a country based on Northern Europe, but not all of Northern Europe is that muted in color. Not so with Horizon! It’s a beautiful game that splashes color everywhere.

The visual design is also fairly impressive. Each tribe generally sticks to different colors and outfits so that you can easily tell them apart just by looking at them: Nora wear a lot of skins and leathers, Carja wear more finery and less layers for their sunny Sundom, the Oseram have a lot more bits of metal in their clothing, and the Banuk are covered in heavy furs. The outfits look distinctive and they generally make sense.

Gameplay is also fantastic. There are some hiccups; sometimes Aloy won’t fire her weapon when you tell her to, especially if a Machine is running straight at her, or sometimes the prompt for Silent Strike will go away at just the worst moment. But it mostly works! There’s a lot of combat, but when it comes to Machines there’s a huge focus on stealth and tactics; using traps, gadgets, and strategic attacks rather than just filling the thing with arrows.

The expansion The Frozen Wilds amps this up with a couple of new Machines, but overall I wasn’t that huge a fan of them--they tend to be tanks full of health and taking very little damage, all while being of a variety that renders all supposed weaknesses almost moot. These new Machines get in your face and don’t give you much opportunity to do anything other than get spammed with hit after hit and frantically try not to die.

Human enemies are much simpler, and generally very stupid. Which is a bit of a failing, I guess, but after taking on a giant robot T-Rex that’s packing explosive disc launchers and lasers, I suppose it would be a little silly if a human enemy was more overtly dangerous. And in straight-up fights the human enemies can outnumber and overwhelm you--which again, encourages you to take stealth tactics.

Traversal is simple enough. Ledges are mostly clearly marked, and climbing surfaces are helpfully made bright yellow so that they stand out. It’s very rare that you climb up a wall and you have no idea where you’re going.

Helping you throughout your quest is your Focus--a little device on Aloy’s head that lets her scan and notice things in her surroundings, highlighting enemy weaknesses and points of interest. You’ll be using it a lot; and every time you do, your controller will make a noise, which was very unexpected but incredibly cool.

I had some trouble with levelling; you don’t need that many experience points to level up. And because I messed around a lot, with side quests and hunting on my own, I levelled up pretty quickly, so that by the time the Plot really got going, and it was giving me Level 12 missions, I was already past Level 20.  I generally stayed well above recommended levels. Which wasn’t bad, but it felt a bit awkward, like the game didn’t account for you doing extra tasks.

The story is where this game really shined for me. It felt, in some ways, rather like Avatar: The Last Airbender, in that there were different tribes with different cultures and that they all had to unite in order to defeat a greater evil that was born from the extremists gaining power in the Fire Nat--I mean, the Sundom. In the actual shape of the Plot, it doesn’t really fit the mold, but the similar notion of tribes and a world-saving quest reminded me of the themes Avatar brought up.

Aloy is a fantastic character. Apparently Sony had some apprehension about a female protagonist, but it worked very well. She is not given a love interest (though several characters flirt with her), and she is not ever sexualized or belittled. Her quest is her own, and she doesn’t take crap from anyone.

What makes Aloy’s journey interesting is that it’s kind of a straightforward Chosen One narrative, despite the post-apocalyptic science-fiction setting . And it works. It makes sense in the narrative, and at no point do you feel as if she’s not the hero. Several other Chosen One narratives make you question, intentionally or not, the worthiness of the protagonist and whether he or she should be considered as important as all that. Horizon gives you a protagonist who is always likable and sympathetic, while making her strong and believable.

You don’t see that in a lot of science-fiction that’s not of the Space Opera variety. And I think making a great Hero’s Journey in this type of story, with a female character, in a video game that’s fun to play, is one of the best things that’s happened to video games. I’m curious to see if they make more games out of this, and if they do, where they’ll go. I’m optimistic that they’ll be great.

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On Not Following Up on Foreshadowing

This is like the opposite of the Foreshouting essay, I guess?

But I have a lot of thoughts about Avengers, some of which were already essays/Tumblr posts that other people wrote so I thought my review should be my final word on that, and then I also have a lot of weird thoughts on Nil in Horizon Zero Dawn but we’re going to put a hold on that because I need to sort that.

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On Not Following Up on Foreshadowing

I just finished re-reading Son of Neptune by Rick Riordan, the second Heroes of Olympus, and I realized that while in the case of Kane Chronicles I accused Riordan of foreshouting (that is, practically screaming at the audience what’s going to happen). But looking at this other series, he kind of does the opposite? There is quite a lot in Son of Neptune that is foreshadowed and it doesn’t go anywhere. At all. And if it does then it’s downplayed.

For instance, in the original series, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, we’re told about the idea of fatal flaws and heroes. Perseus Jackson’s fatal flaw, as pointed out by Athena, is his personal loyalty--he will go past the ends of the earth to save the people he cares about, throwing caution and personal safety to the wind. He absolutely cannot cut his losses--he will never give up his friends. The thing is it never comes up in that series--at no point is this really exploited by the villains to great effect. It’s just kind of there. The series is good enough that it’s not a massive loss, but it feels a wasted opportunity.

In Son of Neptune, the second book of the sequel series, we’re told at least twice that Percy’s fatal flaw will come again. Phineas, a seer, tells Percy that on their quest he will face a sacrifice he can’t make. Later on, Mars tells Frank that there will come a point in the quest that will fail if it’s left to Percy, because he won’t make that sacrifice--Frank’s sense of duty and honor will have to push them through it, because Percy will refuse to make the choice that needs to be made. All of this spells out that one of the main characters will have to die, and it’s something that Percy won’t be able to accept.

Except… that doesn’t happen. At no point is there a choice that Percy isn’t able to make. In the final book of the series, Blood of Olympus, one of the main characters sacrifices himself for the world, yeah, but Percy doesn’t even know that’s going to happen because all the characters who know about this plan refuse to tell Percy. So the idea that it’s a sacrifice he can’t make doesn’t work because he doesn’t even know about it until after it happens, and he doesn’t seem that torn up.

Someone asked Riordan once what was the instance where his fatal flaw comes up, and he answered with “Oh he had to learn to let his friends take the spotlight and finish the Big Bad instead of taking all the glory for himself.” Which A) isn’t what his fatal flaw was, B) never came up to begin with and C) not what happened at all!

There’s a bit towards the end of Son of Neptune in which Juno tells Percy that “the one who will cause you the most pain is the one closest to you.” And it’s framed as if Annabeth, Percy’s love interest, will screw things up in the quest and make everything worse. And given that we’ve been told her fatal flaw is hubris, that’s going to hit pretty hard learning that she’s screwed everything over. Except the next book comes, and things go to Hell in a Handbasket (almost literally--Annabeth and Percy fall into Tartarus, like actual Greek Hell), but it’s not Annabeth’s fault! And I know that Juno hates Annabeth to begin with, but you can’t have an actual goddess tell us “This character will screw up” and then not have that happen! Annabeth does nothing wrong, and her actual quest which sounds like it’ll be incredible mostly amounts to her following some symbols and then outwitting a few people.

Finally we have Frank Zhang, who is told from the get-go that his life is tied to a piece of firewood. If that piece of wood burns out, then he dies. He’s too powerful of a demigod to not have any limits, or something, so he’s given that one. Naturally he’s very apprehensive about this, keeping the stick wrapped up in his coat pocket all the time. He’s told repeatedly that it will burn out some day, and when he frees Thanatos from his chains, the personification of death tells him that they will meet again under less pleasant circumstances.

Frank doesn’t die by the way. Not that I wanted him to, but given all the talk of sacrifice, and his whole life line being a plot point, you’d think he’d come dangerously close, but he doesn’t. This is less egregious, because we’re not told when he’s going to die, unlike the sacrifice example or the screwup one, but it is a bit of a ripoff that Riordan telegraphs that Frank’s got something big coming, and he doesn’t even get close to getting killed. No closer than any of the other characters, anyhow.

If you straight-up tell the audience that something’s going to happen, you have to make it happen. This is more basic than Chekhov's Gun, it’s basic storytelling. There are two ways I can think of this not working:

ONE: As a joke. In the film Rango, for instance, we’re told many times by the narrators, a trio of mariachi owls, that Rango is going to die. When, at the end of the movie, our lizard protagonist is still standing, the owls admit that they’re really surprised that he’s alive, but since everyone dies eventually they’re still technically correct.

TWO: As a subversion of destiny. There are plenty of stories in which a certain destiny is foretold for a hero, often a very bad one, and said hero will go out of his or her way to prove that free will is a thing and that destiny won’t happen. I like these, because the notion that we’re constrained to doom sucks and is just boring and I hate it.

Neither of these work for Riordan’s examples, because prophecies have never worked that way in this universe. They always come true. Always.

A lot of times the audience will pick up something as foreshadowing, and it wasn’t intended that way. That’s not what I’m talking about. When you foreshadow events over and over again, and then they don’t happen? That’s not good writing guys. That’s pretty bad. That’s, like, BBC’s Merlin bad, where they go on and on about stuff that’s going to happen in the first season, and almost none of that stuff comes true. The statements that you tell your audience have to mean something. And maybe you’re worried about carrying it out in a way that’s satisfying, but you still have to do it.

Do what you set out to do.

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Rick Riordan and Norse Myth

I am weirdly tired today, and once again I hate being alive, but I need to write this note for the week.

So here we go.

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Rick Riordan’s Approach to Norse Mythology is Very Strange

Did I write about this already? I don’t think I did, other than mentioning it on a Tumblr post. But I’m re-reading Son of Neptune and I’ve been having a lot of thoughts about American Gods recently, and I came back to this thought again on my morning walk: Rick Riordan does some weird stuff with Norse myth.

With Percy Jackson and the Olympians, his approach to Greek myth is sort of ‘superheroes meets Harry Potter’. All the heroes are demigod children of Greek deities, and they almost all have a set of superpowers or abilities based on the godly parent. They go on quests and fight monsters and such. It’s not quite like Greek mythology, but it’s definitely close enough that one can see how it fits, and considering how much the modern superhero owes to the heroes of Greece and Rome, it makes sense that when retelling this story to children you take it in a direction that’s more along the lines of the stories they’re more used to.

When he set out to take on Egyptian mythology in The Kane Chronicles he actually takes a slightly different approach. The heroes are not children of the gods; instead, they are descended from the pharaohs, and that makes them more suitable to be the hosts for the Egyptian gods, who are much more like spiritual beings than physical ones. And this fits with Egyptian myth, with more focus on magic and mysticism, and about restoring Order and defeating Chaos. It takes a lot of cues from the Greek series in terms of overall plot and the character types, but the worldbuilding was different enough that it stood out.

And then he did Norse mythology in the series Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard, and it didn’t really feel like Norse myth? Even aside from all the pop culture references. All the main characters are demigods again, which feels off right from the get-go. The idea that the gods had children with humans wasn’t unheard of in Germanic nations, and many countries’ kings claimed that they were descended from Odin. But it wasn’t anywhere as near as common as it was in Greek myth. If it was something like Scion, in which every pantheon has demigods, that would be one thing, but with Kane Chronicles we’ve already seen that Rick Riordan understands that not all mythologies use them as heavily as Greek and Roman.

Demigods don’t really get elemental superpowers from their parents in Greek myth, but again it works in Percy Jackson and the Olympians because it reads like a superhero story, a form directly descended from Greek myths. But Norse myths aren’t like that? Their modern-day descendant is the fantasy genre, sword and sorcery, that sort of thing--so having the the heroes be demigods with different powers because of it doesn’t really feel like Norse mythology. It feels like applying the template of PJO to the new series. Which is what he always did, but it’s more obvious here.

It’s also the first one of Riordan’s serieses that has a character who is explicitly religious, and that’s Samirah, a Muslim character. Which is fine, and Samirah’s great, and the books explain that contact between the Islamic world and the Viking Northmen was a thing that’s on the historical record. But Heroes of Olympus features an Italian-American, a Mexican-American, a Chinese-Canadian, a Native American, an American from the Deep South, an African-American from New Orleans who explicitly went to a Catholic school and whose mother was into Voodoo, and a Puerto Rican whose family has been on the island for generations and can trace her lineage back to conquistadors… and then we’ve got Kane Chronicles, of which huge chunks take place in Egypt, and one of the characters is Middle Eastern and has an Arabic last name… and the first time we talk about religion, it’s Islam, in the Norse series?

I’m not making this up, it’s a bit odd, isn’t it?

And the Norse gods are all oddly cool with it? I’m not saying anyone should start a fight with them, as Samirah explains that while she knows the Norse gods exist, she doesn’t seem them as divine deities to be worshipped, and Heimdall kind of nods and is all like, “You’re right, we’re not worthy of worship, we’re pretty terrible.”

This series is in part where Riordan’s negative attitudes towards the gods is in full force as well--at the end of the last book we find out that Odin actually had some of the McGuffin they had been searching for half the book and he just didn’t think about giving it to them because that’s not how he thinks. Which is pretty at odds with the Norse mythological idea of Odin, the god who is constantly trying to put off Ragnarok. He’s always trying to put off Ragnarok but he didn’t think to help the heroes do it because it never crossed his mind?

It’s a bit like Riordan stomping around shouting, “The gods are so stupid!”

There are some elements that the trilogy does pretty well, like the protagonist being dead. See, he’s not just dead, he’s one of the einherjar, the warriors who were chosen to go to Valhalla. And that gives the heroes a ‘hub’ of Valhalla, and that’s kind of cool.

But there are other things that just stick out as very strange and stray very far from Norse mythology? Ratatoskr, the squirrel that runs up and down the World Tree with gossip? In Magnus Chase he’s a gigantic squirrel monster that kills anyone it comes close to and it telepathically insults them? I know that there are different interpretations of the character, but this is the guy who’s a joke character in SMITE.

Loki’s also remarkably one-dimensional. He’s an interesting character when he first shows up in the original novel, but after that his motives are just “I’m going to destroy everything,” with little subtlety or substance. And he’s defeated by the Power of Friendship. And I get that Riordan has a brand and everything, but considering how the final battles in every other of his series go, it felt a little lame. This is Norse myth! The world is supposed to perish in flame! The sun and the moon will be devoured by wolves! And yet Loki is defeated… by the power of friendship? Not he and his friends all teaming up, by Magnus bragging about how he has friends and Loki has none. Like… this pales in comparison to the final battle against Kronos, or Reyna strangling Orion, or the gods facing Apophis. It’s just… fluff.

And it doesn’t feel remotely like Norse myth. So the entire trilogy felt a bit off to me.

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