Ahsoka Tano and Trashing Female Characters

 I had an idea to write about how I’m not good at writing Plot, but that’s not much of an essay. More of a paragraph. Basically, I know how a story begins (sometimes), and I have an idea for how it ends, and I have great ideas for in-between scenes. But the Plot that connects it all? Karzanhi if I know how to make it work.

The air conditioning at work broke halfway through Thursday, so that was fun.

The urge to write a Socratic dialogue strikes once again. It probably won’t get done, because I’m… bad at doing those. I’m bad at writing anything that isn’t scheduled.

Also! I have a one year streak on DuoLingo!

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Ahsoka Tano and the Trashing of Female Characters

You know what I hate?

There’s this thing that I see a lot in television dramas. Mostly supernatural television dramas, but aside from superhero shows that’s kind of mostly what I watch when it comes to live-action television shows. A female character (and it’s ALWAYS a female character that this happens to) is introduced, often as a love interest to one of the leads, but not necessarily. But it turns out that a vocal part of the audience doesn’t like her; straight up hates this character. Maybe it’s because she’s written in a way that’s annoying. Maybe it’s because she feels like an awkwardly-inserted wish fulfillment character. Maybe it’s because she breaks up a favorite ship of the fandom. Who knows! So the writers, getting the hint, unceremoniously have this character get violently killed to make the fans happy.

This isn’t good writing guys.

There is a school of thinking that any criticism or dislike of a female character in fiction makes you a terrible person. That’s stupid. It doesn’t. Feel free to do both. But the idea that you don’t like these characters (who aren’t villains, to be clear), so they should die violently, is a bad thing. Sometimes the narrative tries to warp things to make this try to feel justified, by revealing that the female character is in fact someone else in disguise, or she goes evil for no discernible reason.

I would say this happens to Juliet in Grimm, but I didn’t watch long enough to see--but I do recall that she was starting to lean towards evil, and fans hated her for reasons I couldn’t quite understand. It definitely happened to Katrina on Sleepy Hollow, in which fans despised Katrina because… Reasons? The writing wasn’t kind to her, but it made a lot of the characters dumb, so I don’t quite get why she was singled out. So she’s awkwardly turned evil and tries to kill everyone, and has to be killed before she destroys the world, or something.

Supernatural, unsurprisingly, has this a lot. Anna Milton had the audacity to be a minor love interest for Dean, and she reappears in the fifth season trying to kill Sam, and when that fails, goes back in time to kill Sam and Dean’s parents before Sam can be conceived. It also killed Charlie Bradbury, who was kind of a ridiculous wish fulfillment character, but it did so in the stupidest way possible, getting her to act like an idiot to make it work.

I don’t like it when characters are killed off for the sole reason of “We don’t know what else to do.” I’ve written stuff about it. If you wrote a character who has no more story left, nothing left to do but die, then I think it’s your job to think of something else. Likewise, if you write a character, and the audience doesn’t like her, it’s not your job to pander to the audience’s every wish. Their wants are not unimportant, but them demanding that a character be violently murdered for sexism’s sake is not a wish you need to cater to! And if there are legitimate criticisms about how this character is written, you should fix them!

I was thinking about this and thinking about The Clone Wars and Ahsoka Tano. Do you remember how all of us reacted upon her debut in the pilot movie? She wasn’t very popular. And that was kind of fair. She was very annoying at times. Ahsoka was a character awkwardly sandwiched into a canon for making a character for small children to identify with. She had “Precocious Child” written all over her. She had cutesy nicknames for the other characters (remember “Artooey”?? Or “Skyguy”??) and recklessly jumped into adventures that were way over her head and survived things that would have been instant death for other characters, like fighting (though admittedly not coming anywhere close to defeating) General Grievous. She had “Terrible Wish Fulfillment Character” written in neon letters all over her.

Except… now she’s one of the most beloved parts of Star Wars, and one of the best characters the story has introduced in the past few years (more than a decade ago now holy pope I feel old). Her appearances on Rebels were among the show’s highlights, and we’re all still holding our breaths, hoping that she’ll appear in further adventures soon. Ahsoka’s reception with fans has completely turned around. Because guess what? The show’s writers invested in this character and made an effort to give this character development. They saw that fans didn’t like her, and instead of giving up, they showed us how this character can be likable. 

[TV Tropes calls this ‘Saved from the Scrappy Heap’ in case you’re curious.]

Imagine all the cool stuff we’d have missed if the makers of The Clone Wars saw fan reaction to Ahsoka and said, “Fans don’t like her, so let’s have Grievous stab her in season two.” We’d have missed out!

It’s fine to kill characters in fiction; sometimes, I think it works fine to kill them off abruptly, especially if that’s the kind of story you’re trying to tell. But if at any point, you think the only thing you can do with a (non-antagonist) character in a story is kill them off, I think you’ve failed as a writer (in that particular instance; not for all time). If you think you have to kill off a female character because fans hate her, maybe… don’t do that? Consider that maybe you just need to work on making the character more developed? And wonder why this doesn’t happen to anywhere near as many male characters.

The solution should never be, “Violently kill off this character to satisfy the fan’s misogyny.” I’d like to think TV writers are starting to realize this, as there was an outcry a few years back about several prominent female characters on television getting pointlessly killed off, but I also haven’t watched as many television dramas in the past few months. But please--don’t do this. Not every female character needs to be a warrior type like Ahsoka, but they at least deserve a chance to be as well-developed and complex as her.

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Going Past the Planned Ending

 The past few days I wondered if I should enter this writing contest that ended Friday, which I kept meaning to look at but with work and everything I forgot about until right before the deadline. So, uh, looks like that’s not happening. But hey, I have a job! That’s new. It’s cool too, being paid.

Also I’m re-reading The Hobbit. Expect that in the Book Diary soon.

Now let’s talk about SHIELD again.

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Going Past the Planned Ending

“We did plan to end the story here, but we decided, since we had the resources and still have the audience, that we should keep going!”

Hurm. Maybe you shouldn’t.

Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD just aired its 7th season finale, which was also the series finale. And it was fine. Just fine. But the previous two seasons were… well, they didn’t feel quite right. They weren’t bad, by any means, but they weren’t quite up to par with the previous five in my humble opinion. Knowing that they didn’t have great ratings, and having an uncertain future, the makers of the show wrote and filmed their 5th season as if it were their last, and they gave their storylines and characters a darn good ending. But then the show was renewed for two more short seasons, so they had to scramble to make more story out of the one that was effectively concluded.

Now to be fair, this is hardly the worst example of this kind of thing happening. Agents of SHIELD had left a few open Plot Threads lying around at the end of season five, so it wasn’t exactly like they were building on nothing. And as has recently come out, the show has often had to restructure their story plans at the last minute because of executive bulshimflarkis, so they had some practice pulling stories out of their armpits.

And while I think everyone uses Supernatural as an example of a show that went past its planned ending, I don’t think that’s a fair comparison in every case. There are a bunch of shows that had planned endings, one way or another, and continued anyway. Chuck had pretty iffy ratings and kept planning their ending every half-season, only to get renewed and come up with a way to extend the storyline for another half season. That being said, Chuck had a much more comedic tone than most dramas, and continuity was never really its strong suit (look at how many times the original function of the Intersect is quietly retconned).

But Supernatural is a pretty egregious example of the problems that occur when a show goes on further than its planned ending. Supernatural had a well-written, in-depth five-season arc, and when they decided to go past that, the writers decided to try to make a new storyline. Once fans started expressing doubts though, instead of sticking to their guns they immediately changed things. And they kept this up for the next few seasons, switching between Plots in a vain attempt to please the fanbase. And it never ended. It was about to end, and then a pandemic happened that put the finale on pause, so, uh… yeah.

I’ve expressed this opinion before, but I very much like stories that have intricately planned-out story arcs and Plot points. And I get that not every story can do that, especially on television, where you’re at the mercy of unpredictable schedules, actor availabilities, strikes, pandemics, or the studio dropping the axe on you. But very often, when a story ends… it’s best to leave it there. Maybe make a sequel, but to try to draw the story out longer often doesn’t work. It feels like the writers don’t know what to do with these characters who have had their tales concluded, and they’re shuffled around in ways that make their previously-established endings look hollow.

Oh fudge, we’re going to talk about Star Wars again.

Like, look at the Sequel Trilogy. Right from the get-go, it establishes a galaxy where the victory at the end of Return of the Jedi didn’t mean anything. The Empire just bounced back, the heroes are scattered, the couple is broken up, and there’s an even BIGGER Death Star. And the trilogy proceeds to slowly kill off the original heroes. And I’m not saying their bad movies, but they do feel tacked-on compared to the originals, because the story ended, but Lucasfilm (or rather, Disney) decided to make more because they could.

This doesn’t just happen with screen media either. I think Lawhead’s Pendragon Cycle is very good, and I don’t mind the last two books as much as my sister does, but they still feel really weird. Because they’re an in-between-quel of a story that very definitively concluded, much of the tension the author’s trying to build about who does or doesn’t survive flat out doesn’t work, because we already know how this story ends. The tension should be aimed differently.

I’m not saying “Don’t do it.” I am saying that if you’re going to continue a story that’s already concluded, you should definitely pull back and ask yourself, “Do I really need to do this? Does this really need to happen? Will this pull away the emotional or thematic punch from the ending I’ve already made? Will it dull that impact?”

And if the answer is “Yes,” then maybe don’t do it.

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Assassin's Creed and Female Leads

 This has been a bit of a rough week for me, and I’m not sure how I feel about this whole ‘working’ business now that I’m doing it. But overall it’s better than not working, because I’m getting paid! Hooray!

I have this idea for a short story about fighting a boo hag that came to me yesterday so we’ll see if that goes anywhere.

Also it’s the weekend, and you know what that means: turn on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and playing some GWENT MOTHERCLUCKERS

Ahem.

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Assassin's Creed and Female Leads

Ubisoft, the game studio that makes Assassin’s Creed (and several other games but that’s the series I care about so that’s what we’re talking about here today) has recently had some shake-ups in their management, because it turns out that there were quite a few sexist douchebag harassers in there and it’s all coming out like a hot garbage vomit. There’s a lot going on there, but we’re going to focus on one Serge Hascoet, the former Chief Creative Officer, who in general was apparently a garbage human being.

[I suspect he is still a garbage human being, but I don’t exactly have people monitoring his activities right this second, nor do I want to.]

However, the allegations that have come out against him that he sexually assaulted female employees(!!), or that he held business meetings in strip clubs (???), or that he gave unwitting employees baked goods laced with drugs as a prank (?!?) are not the reasons I’m writing this Note. I’m just throwing out those fun facts because when I find out weird things while doing research, I just have to share them. No, what we’re here to talk about is that apparently there were several occasions in the past few years in which Assassin’s Creed was going to feature female characters more heavily, and this man vetoed it at every turn because he’s a chuckmuffin.

To wit:

-Elise de La Serre, the love interest of 2014’s Assassin’s Creed: Unity was going to have a larger role, and was considered for having playable segments, and Hascoet vetoed it. This indirectly led to the infamous “women are too hard to animate” debacle that happened that year.

-In 2015, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate featured two story leads in twin brother and sister Jacob and Evie Frye. Both were playable, and in free roam and in sidequests they could be switched on the fly; but in story missions, while Evie had some content, almost the entirety of the story centered around Jacob, as did the marketing, despite there being no reason not to include Evie in as much playable story content. Evie was the main character in the (short) DLC. Turns out Hascoet actively vetoed giving Evie more of a major role in the story, and the character’s voice actress Victoria Atkin confirmed that there was a culture of sexism at the time when she was working there.

-The protagonist of 2017’s Assassin’s Creed: Origins was originally not going to be Bayek, but his wife Aya. Though she has some playable story missions, including the game’s finale, and has had an actual long-running place in series lore since 2009, Hascoet shot that idea down.

-The protagonist of 2018’s Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey was going to be Kassandra, and only Kassandra, as reflected in the tie-in novelization. Hascoet forced the game to give the player a choice so that you could play as aKassandra or her brother Alexios.

-I can’t prove this, because I haven’t seen anything about it, but there was a rumor that one of the ideas for a DLC for Black Flag in 2013 was a story centered around Mary Read that never materialized.

What was the reasoning for all this? Hascoet apparently is just a dickbag who thinks women won’t sell in video games.

On the one hand, finding out some of these things feels a bit terrible. Most of these games are very good, and I’m not knocking what we got. But at the same time, it’s troubling to know that there’s a lot of great content, featuring more female characters (which is something the series has kind of struggled with) that got cut because there was a jerkbutt calling the shots, and making all the wrong calls in game design, artistic merit, workplace etiquette and general life choices.

On the other hand: we been knew. Like this isn’t actually that much of a surprise. Assassin’s Creed: Unity already feels halfway like Elise’s story, for instance, because the entire thrust of the Plot hinges on trying to find the guy who killed her dad. Arno feels half-baked compared to Elise’s revenge quest.

And Aya? Aya gets the final word on the story. One of the biggest issues I had with Origins was that despite Bayek being a well-written, fantastic protagonist, it has little to do with the overall story of the founding of the Hidden Ones/Assassins, and the game ends with Aya triumphantly proclaiming a new identity after organizing the most famous assassination in history. She is the one invested in the story of Cleopatra’s civil war. Aya is the one who believes in Cleopatra. Bayek only sees putting Cleopatra on the throne as a means to an end--getting vengeance on the Order of the Ancients (who back her brother Ptolemey) and put their son’s soul to rest in the afterlife. So when Cleopatra wins her war and then works with the Order, and becomes as corrupt as anyone else (in the heroes’ eyes, anyway), it affects Aya more. It hits her the hardest because she’s the one who believed in this queen. And in the end, she is the one who establishes the Hidden Ones as an international organization, and seemingly gives orders to the other bureaus. But the game tries to make this Bayek’s story. He’s a fantastically-written character, but for his story--which the founding of the Brotherhood clearly isn’t.

Getting to Odyssey also feels like it’s kind of obvious in hindsight that Kassandra was meant to be the main character. When you pick your character as you begin the game, the sibling you don’t pick is kidnapped and brainwashed by the villains, the Cult of Kosmos, into becoming their weaponized supersoldier, Deimos. A name that is very clearly masculine, you’ll notice, making it pretty clear that it’s supposed to be Alexios who becomes Deimos, not Kassandra.

It’s frustrating, because the official reasoning for these decisions is because “women won’t sell as the leads of video games.” This is a demonstrably false premise, as proven by Horizon Zero Dawn, Control, Tomb Raider, Bayonetta, Mirror’s Edge, and friggin’ Metroid. It was the same reasoning executives used to not make female-led superhero movies, only to change their tune once Wonder Woman made money.

When will stupid executives learn? When will entertainment industries stop putting terrible men in charge of their companies? When will we get a full female protagonist in an entire Assassin’s Creed game?

Part of the whole point of Assassin’s Creed is that the Assassins often recruit from the people in society who are sidelined or ignored by the mainstream culture--and through a lot of history, especially in the periods that are covered, women fit that bill. And no, the series isn’t always good at that. It often forgets that’s what it’s supposed to be doing. But they set up these complex female characters and just… don’t make them the leads, even when all the work is pretty much already done for it to happen.

It’s just stupid at this point.

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Coyote Waits and Representation

 I got paid, so that’s pretty sweet.

I also feel the need to point out that there is a book series about Navajo mythology by an actual Native American woman called The Sixth World and it’s good, you should go read it? Anyhow on to the Note about a Tony Hillerman novel.

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Coyote Waits and Representation

I first read Coyote Waits in high school in my American literature course. The woman who taught the course before the teacher I had apparently decided that it would be worthwhile to read not just the books that were parts of the standard American English literary canon, and threw in a modern mystery novel. It’s an odd choice, but I’m glad that it was made, because when you take high school American literature courses, you don’t actually read that many books that feature Native Americans.

Tony Hillerman’s novels, at least the ones he got famous off of, are about policemen Joe Leaphorn and/or Jim Chee, who work for the Navajo Tribal Police and solve mysteries on Navajo Tribal Lands. I was kind of astounded to discover that Tony Hillerman wasn’t Navajo, considering that he writes a bunch of books about Navajo characters and sharing Navajo beliefs. There are mixed opinions on him; his books are kind of textbook cultural appropriation, by strict definition, and there are many who feel as if he’s kind of a dick because of it. But he’s also been named Friend of the Dineh by the Navajo Tribal Council, donated a lot of his earnings to helping improving the lives of the Navajo people, actually talked to the Navajo about themselves before writing his books, and many Navajo feel he did a good job of representing their people. Which makes him okay in my book.

This doesn’t have much to do with most of the essay, just thought it was necessary to give some background to what I was talking about. And while we’re on disclaimers, I’ll repeat one I’ve used before: When I use the word ‘mythology’ I do not mean a story that is untrue. I use it to mean a story of religious significance. Religion and mythology are not interchangeable; one refers to a set of stories, the other is a set of beliefs and practices. 

In simple terms: Christianity, with going to church on Sunday, is a religion. The story of the Transfiguration is mythology. As a Catholic, obviously I think it’s true, too. Make sense? Cool.

On to the actual meat of what I’m trying to say!

Re-reading Coyote Waits, I can’t help but think: Native Americans don’t really have a lot of good representation in fiction. I mean, at least they’re there, and they’re not always gangsters, which is more than Puerto Ricans mostly get, but… there are certain stereotypes that writers make Native Americans fit into when it comes to fiction. We could give examples of subversions, or fully-fleshed out examples, sure; but by and large, in mainstream fiction, they tend to lean towards this romanticized ideal of a wise sage, or a noble warrior type, or the melancholy remnant of his people, all tinged with a spirituality that’s vaguely exotic. There are well-written and performed characters in there, but most of them fit those bits, and it’s rare to see characterization outside of that. I recently read a revival Lone Ranger comic that tried to do more with Tonto, and this amounted to… giving him a love interest, basically.

Tony Hillerman, on the other hand, makes his Native American characters (who make up most of the cast in Coyote Waits, at least) actually people. You have Chee, a policeman who vaguely has aspirations of being a medicine man, but none of the skill for it. You have Leaphorn, a policeman who is firmly not old-fashioned in his beliefs, but is kind of tired of everyone but still thinks fondly of his deceased wife. You have Janet who is a big shot lawyer who gets annoyed when Chee pulls the ‘More Navajo Than You’ card. And you have Pinto who is a troubled old man that academics are happy to mine and discard for their papers and books.

Navajo mythology and beliefs are not treated as being Wrong or being Right. They are just parts of life. Chee thinks Leaphorn considers it all stupid superstition, but we do not actually see that when we’re in Leaphorn’s head. He doesn’t seem to believe in it, but he doesn’t disparage it either. At most, he’s annoyed that his late wife’s familial connections make him, by Navajo tradition, obligated to look into the homicide that Pinto’s been accused of committing, as he would rather be on vacation.

Chee on the other hand still holds a torch for the idea of being a medicine man, and so he’s obviously more spiritual. But it’s not as if he’s some Magical Native American stereotype; in fact he feels pretty hopeless, because the only people he’s done any work for as a medicine man were his family, and he’s scared that they were only humoring him. And this doesn’t really have much overall significance in solving the mystery; it’s not like he needs to use shamanism to find the murderer or anything like that.

It’s portrayed pretty much exactly as a white Christian considering seminary would be portrayed, truth be told. 

I think there’s a lot of talk about representation, and how you’ve got to do this or that because that’s how to do it respectfully when you’re showing a minority and fiction. And yeah, obviously you’ve got to keep an eye on how you write, and do you best to be respectful; no doubt about that. But there’s this tendency to feel like you absolutely have to make sure every detail lines up with a rigid cultural expectation. Like, for instance I remember finding a Tumblr blog that had a bunch of links on how to write a Muslim character, and all of them basically said, “No you can’t do that, it’s against Muslim beliefs, so a Muslim would never act that way.”

Tony Hillerman wrote a book and said, “I’m going to portray them as people. Some of them are traditional in their lifestyle, others are not.” And that’s… something not a lot of people do. Many writers are so focused on making sure they make characters who are Noble Representatives of Their Culture, they’re no longer characters but stereotypes. Less offensive stereotypes, which is better than offensive stereotypes to be sure, but still stereotypes. 

There’s variety. There’s diversity. There are people. And while there’s nothing wrong with writing role models, when that’s all you want to do for a group of people who don’t get much representation. Representation is about more than making a token role model, it’s about portraying people who don’t get portrayal a lot, and showing them as people.

That’s my two cents anyway.

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Choices in The Witcher 3

I haven’t been as on the ball when it comes to writing these Notes on time, so I’m considering moving these to Sunday or something? I don’t know, you guys let me know. All I know is that I’m frantically writing them on Friday night and Saturday morning. Then again, there’s nothing that says they have to go up Saturday morning…

Anyhow I’m somewhat picking back up my reading schedule, but I can’t read as much during the day on weekdays so it is going pretty slowly.

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Choices in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Like many RPGs, The Witcher 3 has many different choices presented to the player that leads to different outcomes. It’s become infamous among players though, in that many times the choices you’re presented with give no way to win. Sometimes you make a choice that seems like the Good One, the nice choice that you do because you’re a good guy. And it backfires terribly because of something you had no way of knowing.

For instance, there are these three witches called the Ladies of the Wood. They’re evil crones; the Fates by way of Baba Yaga on her worst day. They eat children. They carry around body parts of people they’re presumably going to eat later. And they send you on a mission to go kill a spirit bound to a tree, a spirit that seemingly kills anyone that goes near the tree.

When you get to the spirit, after hacking through the wolves and werewolf guardians, the spirit tells you that it is not evil, that it was trapped here by the Ladies a long time ago. It tells you that it is not the cause of the killings. Furthermore, it turns out that the Ladies have kidnapped an orphanage full of children, and that this spirit has the only way of freeing them. And instead of killing this spirit, you can free it. And if you do that, the children will be saved!

And to be fair, the children will be saved. That’s not a lie on anyone’s part. But you find out later that the spirit in question will go around the countryside, spreading a Hate Plague that makes people start randomly killing each other for no reason, and at least one village has been wiped off the map by it.

There is no “Good” choice in this, that everyone comes away unscathed. 

There are a lot of choices in the game where you’re presented with two options, and neither of them sounds very good. And to be fair, most of them don’t involve a weird spirit bound to a tree. Some of them are a lot less sketch sounding. The good-sounding, helpful option is right there, but there’s a least something that feels off about it, like an itch. The guy begging you for help--there’s some part of his story that doesn’t quite add up, and if you don’t catch it you’ll end up enabling something very, very bad.

On the one hand, I kind of don’t like it, because I end up making a bunch of choices trying to help someone, and it ends up backfiring. On the other hand, I do kind of like this design choice?

I recall that when there were development videos being released for the game Rise of the Argonauts, the creative director would often make the point that in a lot of RPGs with dialogue trees, there is the Good choice, the Bad choice, and the middle one. His game attempted to do away with that by aligning the dialogue choices with the four patron gods and the philosophical ideals they represent; I don’t know if he succeeded, given that in Rise of the Argonauts none of the choices really make much of a difference (in truth, so much of that game got cut in the process of finishing it, which is a shame). There’s one bit where a guy starts an argument with you, and you have four dialogue choices, and ALL of them lead to Jason punching the other guy in the face. 

But The Witcher instead makes it so that there are no Good choices at all--you’re going to have to do harm to someone in order to move on. Sometimes you will do Good, in the long run, but in order to do that, you have to do something a little bit Bad, or at least mean. We could easily try to make this into a “Because that’s true about Life!” essay, but I hate those conversations so we’re not going to do that. But it shows situations that are morally complex. I don’t always like the way they’re structured, but I respect what they’re going for.

It’s a challenge to the player. Because many times players will try to take one way or the other. The Witcher 3 doesn’t remove that dichotomy, exactly, but it changes the way players have to approach situations. You can’t play it as an All Good Guy or All Bad Guy route. Well, you can actually play it as an All Bad Guy route, but the whole idea of “do all the Good Choices to get the Good Endings” way of thinking doesn’t work. Sure, you could follow a guide to see how to get particular endings that you want, but otherwise it’s not as if you can predict what’s going to happen based on what you choose.

You instead have to make decisions by paying close attention to the information you’ve been given. The player has to engage with the game much more closely in order to get the desired story outcomes, if those outcomes are even possible. It can be immensely frustrating, and I don’t always like how everything turns out, but I admire the approach and what the game is trying to do.

I just wish it didn’t keep ending up with me getting screwed over though.

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