The Crones Are Wasted as Villains

 It’s been a bit of a weird week, but I think it mostly turned out okay, and I got to watch Secondhand Lions again and let me tell you, that is a swell movie. Hopefully that will go up on Movie Munchies soon.

I decided, after going through the two books of short stories last year, to finally start reading The Witcher books and I’m on Blood of Elves right now. I’ll have more thoughts for you upon finishing it. And it’s part of why I decided on this Note today. The other is from finishing up my review of The Witcher 3.

This is only barely a full Note without much of a point other than to touch on something that I missed talking about in more detail on the review.

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The Crones Are Utterly Wasted as Villains

I feel as if I didn’t really talk that much on the Ladies of the Wood from The Witcher III: Wild Hunt when making my review, which is dumb because they’re easily one of the most memorable parts of the game (and they have an awesome and creepy theme on the soundtrack). If I were in complete control of the story, they’d be the main villains and the entire story would revolve around defeating them. They’re pointedly not the main antagonists of the story, and I get why--this is meant to be a wrap-up of the entire Witcher saga, and they’re invented just for this game. In light of that, the makers of the game wisely chose to make the main antagonists of the story the Wild Hunt who are, after all, the ones in the title and are unbeaten villains from the books the games take inspiration from.

But dang, the Crones feel like they should be the main villains.

The Crones of Crookback Bog, or the Ladies of the Woods, are three ancient women who appear as either beautiful women or as hideous beekeeper hags and rule over Velen, the war-torn section of the kingdom of Temeria that serves as a front in the war between the Northern Kingdoms and the invading Nilfgaardian Empire. Nobody knows for sure where they come from, how long they’ve been there, and the true extent of their powers. But many of the common folk in the region worship them, sacrificing children to them by letting them wander a candy-strewn path in the swamp in return for good harvest and fortune. And they collect ears as payment too, hanging them on the trees, and it’s implied they can hear through them. The domovoi that Geralt talks to implies that they can see through the eyes of all the ravens, and there are a lot of ravens in Velen. In one part of the storyline they talk to Geralt by possessing one of their followers being in contact with a tapestry depicting them… woven out of human hair.

When they do finally appear as hideous hags, they have pockets in their aprons and bags which are overflowing with messy human limbs. We see later in the story that they hold a yearly sabbath at Bald Mountain in which they make a stew out of the selected youths. 

Different in-game sources provide speculation as to their true origins and nature, but nothing is ever answered for certain. For all we know, they really are the local goddesses of Velen. It seems that they can’t be killed, no matter how much you may want to..

And what’s worst about all of this? Many of the villagers of Velen are completely in their thrall. When Geralt and Ciri go to confront them, they’re either amused by the idea of you trying to fight their gods, or they act like this is blasphemy. Well sure, they eat people, even children, all the time, but they keep our harvests strong! What else were we supposed to do?

[I have thoughts about connecting this to real life political situations but after the Expanse note I think I’ll stay off of the soapbox this time.]

Except… their role in the story is entirely subservient to the Wild Hunt. They answer to their king, Eredin, and do what he asks. When the confrontation with them comes to the story, Geralt faces the battle leader of the Wild Hunt, and Ciri faces the Crones. Geralt even decides that Crones are much less dangerous despite being apparently goddesses? And he’s right; the hardest parts of the fight against the Crones is that there are three of them and you’re playing as Ciri, because she doesn’t have all the special skills and gear you’ll have developed as Geralt. Ciri killing them is fairly tough for her, but manageable.

This is not how these villains should be handled. They’re basically deities and they’re just minibosses. I don’t like it. They’re well-developed enough to be main antagonists in their own right, and they’re far more interesting than Eredin. 

I’m not saying you’re not ever allowed to make side villains much more interesting than the main villains. But it helps if the side villains aren’t more interesting than the main villain. And if you do have interesting side villains you definitely shouldn’t waste them without using them to their full story potential.

I don’t know if any conclusion would have been as satisfying with the buildup that these characters had. But if you make interesting villains, you have to do something with them. Not necessarily take over the Plot, but they very easily could have been written out in a way similar to “They’ve been defeated but maybe they’ll be back and ticked off.” Orianna gets an ending like that in Blood and Wine.

The narrative needs to reflect the depth of the characters it involves. Especially its villains.

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Witcher III: Wild Hunt Review, Part 3 - Design

 Alright I’m this close to starting a review of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla so let’s talk about design.

ARMOR & WEAPONS

Alright the armor looks pretty darn cool in this game. I can’t speak to the accuracy of the armor other than I don’t think it is accurate, at least not across the board. There’s a lot of different kinds of armor, like mail and plate armor. Some of it looks realistic, at least to my untrained eye, but a lot of it also looks more like fantasy armor. I appreciate the diversity of it all, and how you can go into battle wearing ridiculous fantasy armor or something more historically accurate.

And also, I really like the swords in this game.

Fantasy on the screen in general tends to go for arming swords, or one-handed swords. Very often they’re wielded with two hands because it’s more dramatic that way. The swords Geralt uses are almost all two-handed weapons. They have appropriately-sized hilts! And crossguards that actually protect the hands! And he holds them with two hands! They’re all very cool-looking, and many of them (especially the ones from different witcher schools) have intricate engravings on the hilts and pommels.They certainly didn’t need to dedicate that much to their design, as I don’t think most players would have noticed much.

Also, when you have runestones applied, they glow when they’re drawn. 

It is a bit weird when you get different kinds of swords, like scimitars, and they’re sort of… warped to have longer blades and handles for Geralt’s style, like with the sword you get from Olgierd. I didn’t mind too much though.

LANGUAGE

So the Witcher series is developed by a Polish studio, and based off of a series of fantasy novels from Poland by a Polish author. And I get that not everything’s going to translate, and the world of the Witcher is pretty widely influenced by stories from all over Europe. But I still feel as if a lot of the names and culture thrown around is way too... English sounding?

I don’t like that “Jaskier” is switched to “Dandelion,” but I get it, and I see that it also gives us the option to call the flamboyant bard in fancy clothes “Dandy” which is very fitting. But there’s a creature type called ‘godling’ which is quite plainly a Slavic domovoi? And his name is “Johnny”? Look, we don’t need to Anglicize the game that much do we? Players know that there don’t have to be things in plain English for it to be fantasy. 

Fantasy doesn’t have to be Anglophone. We know that, right? We all know that fantasy shouldn’t all be based on a mishmash of different parts of England’s history?

Although to be fair, there are things that are clearly not made to be easier for Anglophone players. For instance, the runestones that you apply to your weapons are all named after Slavic gods; and if you know any Slavic mythology, you already have a good idea of what each one does. The Svarog Stones make your swords more likely to set enemies on fire. 

[I’m a bit unclear if these are also the names of gods in the world of The Witcher--no one mentions these deities, and the gods they do mention seem to not be that closely related to the Slavic ones.]

It’s not usually immersion-breaking, but I did find the name ‘Johnny’ sticking out like a sore thumb. There’s also a Gwent card of a character who doesn’t appear in the game, John Natalis, and in a previous game he had the Polish version ‘Jan’ as his first name. The switch seemed unnecessary to me. I preferred it when the names and terms sounded less English.

I suppose the accents are English, for the most part. And I didn’t mind because that’s the case for most big fantasy that comes out now. There are some noticeable alterations. The witchers have American accents, for instance--Letho even has what sounds like a Louisiana accent. Skellige has more Nordic-sounding speech, and the people of Toussaint have distinct French-sounding speech (with some words thrown in). And then there’s Nilfgaard, with an accent that fluctuates between German and Russian, for obvious reasons.

Except the Emperor, who has an English accent because he’s played by Charles Dance. Maybe there’s a book explanation for that I haven’t gotten to yet.

Again, not fond of overusing English accents, but using accents to show regional and class differences wasn’t a bad thing, I think. So overall, good work.

WRITTEN LANGUAGE

So you probably notice if you play the game at all that the written language in-game is not in English? It’s not in the same alphabet that we use. I don’t think it’s in any real world alphabet, but I suppose it might be some sort of stylized Cyrrillic. But I like that it’s not in English. I get a bit confused when I look at fantasy worlds and the writing’s all in English. Obviously, in fantasy and science fiction we assume the characters are speaking their own language and it’s translated into English for us. But when you actually see printed words in places and they’re in English, it makes me wonder if the developers actually thought about it.

Now obviously, your players have to know where things are, and what certain shops are for, but this game does that by making it obvious with sign shapes and such that these places are blacksmith shops or apothecaries or whatever. And while the player can’t read that script, Geralt clearly can, as you can stop at any sign and hit the action button to read, and a subtitle will tell you what they say.

I thought it was a nice touch.

And I don’t know where to put this, exactly, but here seems as good a place as any: the symbols for the Signs you can use match up to (some of them roughly so, but you can still see it) the alchemical symbols for the four elements.

WHITE ORCHARD

White Orchard is close enough to Velen in design that I barely even registered them as separate areas? Okay, it’s a lot brighter and greener than most of Velen, but there are still battlefields littered with corpses, a swamp area, bandits all over, and backwards peasants who are happy to treat people like crap. As a beginning area, it’s good, as it doesn’t have too many really tough enemies and it’s simple enough to navigate. It’s pretty small compared to the main area map, but that’s a high bar and it’s still fairly massive.

Unlike Velen, it’s got blue skies; a good chunk of the world map elsewhere is covered in gray clouds to help give you that ‘the world is miserable feeling.’ And no, the sky doesn’t make this place look happy, but White Orchard is a far sight happier than most of the other locations.

VELEN

Right when you arrive in Velen, you’re by a tree full of hanged men uphill from the ruins of a village ravaged by war. It’s just that kind of place. It’s bleak, and gross, and it does exactly what it sets out to do--this is No Man’s Land. This is the middle of the warfront, the place where both sides are struggling to gain and hold ground. So it’s filled with battlefields, hanged criminals, war camps, bandits, deserters, and monsters out the wazoo. There are parts of the map that aren’t so bleak, but they’re few and far between, and very often they’re surrounded by a dark forest and the guards of the Baron, reminding you that they still aren’t all that wonderful. 

It also looks exactly like the sort of place that might be into worshipping the Crones (I didn’t really talk about them much in the Story section, did I? That’s a shame. New Saturday Note idea!). An ugly swamp dominates a large portion of the map, filled with monsters and fog and all over the place there are ruined farmsteads. Ravens all over, bringing news to the Crones.

And the ears. Oh the ears. From the trees is terrible, but it’s suitably creepy, and it’s something that can be missed if you’re not paying enough attention.

These sections are among the strongest in the game, because you’re in an environment that isn’t hostile as much as just… wrong. It’s polluted by the war, by the Crones, by the monsters, and just how terrible everyone is to each other. 

It’s the perfect environment to tell a Witcher story, because it’s got all the things that Sapkowski likes to talk about: war being Hell, creepy cults, monsters munching on people who may or may not deserve it, common people being trampled by soldiers, and the lawlessness of a region and what that drives people to.

NOVIGRAD

Novigrad is the big city on the map. It is exactly what you want from this kind of setting’s big city: a sprawling metropolis with both an upscale district and a set of slums, where you can find different markets and shops but also cool taverns and bars to hang out in. The story can’t seem to decide between whether it’s really controlled by the crime syndicates or the Church of Eternal Fire--but in any case you can see the influences of both pretty easily just strolling down the street.

After a certain point in the story, the entrances to Novigrad are surrounded by burned corpses of mages and nonhumans that the Eternal Fire has executed. And I think that’s a good reminder to players of the kind of setting they’re in. Most of the time in Novigrad I spent in Dandelion’s place (because there’s a storage chest there) and in the market selling stuff in the shops but you can’t miss it if it’s right there when you fast travel in. You can’t just say, “Oh here’s the cool city hub where the interesting people live!” and forget that it’s a city built on brutal oppression.

I’m sorry if I sound like a prude, but there are way too many hookers in this city. I get that they wanted to give the feel of a vibrant city with a thriving dark underbelly, but it’s a bit… odd that they decided to put that many prostitutes in the game, rather than have them just be a part of city brothels. It’s a bit jarring that we’re told the Church of Eternal Fire, the fundamentalist religious faction, has so much influence and is able to whip people into a fanatical frenzy over people they don’t like, and yet the prostitutes are walking around down the sidewalk from these preachers without a care in the world.

A bit odd, I think.

SKELLIGE

Skellige feels different from Velen and Novigrad--instead of usual medieval and Renaissance architecture and outfit design (as well as language), they’ve clearly got a more Nordic influence, with some Celtic flavor thrown in for good measure. The landscape looks more Scandanavian than Irish (at least, to me who has been to neither of those places).

It’s Irish Vikings.

Too much of this portion of the map is water. And it’s an archipelago I know, but that also means that so much of the map is area you can’t walk. If you like sailing, that’s okay--wait, no it’s not because so much of the ocean area is littered with sirens so your boat is going to get attacked and eaten to bits. Thankfully you can get maps that will make fast travel signs show up in places you haven’t visited yet, so it makes going from one island to another much more convenient. But the map puts a butt-ton of smugglers’ caches throughout the ocean, and each one has a flock of sirens around it, making it a pain if you want to have all the question marks on the map cleared.

KAER MORHEN

I know that the whole point is that it’s not much of a castle anymore, but would it kill anyone to fix that wall? Seriously, the witchers all live in a castle with a massive gaping hole in the wall??

That aside, it’s a nice place. Compared to the other settings, this one feels more like someplace in the Alps. It’s got fantastic mountain views--one of the first things I did in the game (the prologue takes place in Kaer Morhen) was snap a screenshot of the mountains. It’s a smaller map, with fewer enemies than other game areas (at least, until the siege).

The castle transparently conveys the idea of Kaer Morhen’s status in the world at large: it’s a has-been. The walls are crumbling, the murals inside are faded, and the place is staffed by exactly one guy. The main hall is cluttered with random crap because no one can be bothered to clean it all up and sort it all out.

TOUISSANT

Touissant is a wonderful change of pace because the place is bright and beautiful and fantastic. It’s clearly designed to look like southern France and Tuscany, with its bright colors, bajillion vineyards, and knights all over the place. This map felt more like a fairy tale and it’s great. I’m not saying the whole game needed to be like this, because it doesn’t. It wouldn’t have worked for the kind of story they’re telling. But it makes a very good contrast.

It’s also full to the brim with monsters. Some of them reinforce the fairy tale feel--the giant evil flowers and centipedes fit the theme a lot better than I expected. Others not so much. There are so many vampires just wandering around it throws off that mood. Mind you, it’s also great for atmosphere in the vampire story because a lot of them are in disguise and marked as ‘Hooded Woman’ and you see plenty of those wandering around Beauclair, which will turn up your paranoia considerably. And that’s good game design.

ELVEN RUINS

The elven ruins remind me of the ones you see in Oblivion? Not just that they’re often underground dungeons, but that they’ve got the same basic look of carved white stone with mysterious statues. I know it’s meant to evoke the idea of the Romans or Greeks, an ancient advanced civilization that’s no longer with us. And that’s cool, but it also doesn’t feel very original. Thankfully, it’s not like Oblivion in which it feels as if you spend half the game in these darn ruins, though. They’re easier to navigate too.

MONSTERS

You know, not one of these monsters looks cute, so good on whoever designed these. Overall they’re very well done. Some notes though:

Many of them also look like stuff from medieval bestiaries brought to life. Again, I see plenty of people claim that the monsters are from Slavic mythology, but not all of them are. Quite a few are from Greek mythology, and were made popular in the medieval period through art and heraldry, like griffing, sirens, and harpies. Others, like the vampires, are drawn from all over Europe. Bruxae, garkains, and fleders aren’t Slavic, guys.

On the subject of vampires, in the main game there are only really two types that appear, Ekimaras and Katakans, and they look similar enough that I didn’t really bother learning the difference between them, which isn’t great design. They’re also said to look like bats, which they only kind of do? Vaguely? That design could have been better.

The Higher Vampire design from Blood and Wine is great because it looks freaky and out there but still brings to mind the idea of a vampire? A demonic, batlike creature that wants to suck your blood.

I can’t say I was that huge a fan of the wyvern designs. They look far too.. Chunky? When one of them takes off, it looks very off-balance, because it has such a short tail it’s like a flying reptilian nugget and it looks funny rather than threatening or interesting.

Kikimores are not badly designed monsters or enemies, but it’s a freaking weird thing to design them as buglike hive monsters when their name comes from a creature in Slavic folklore that’s something like an English brownie.

I hated arachnomorphs? I’m not even arachnophobic but I hated them because spiders should not be that big and that fuzzy and that hard to kill.

The Crones are masterfully designed to be the most repulsive hags imaginable. Their design is supposedly based off of the Weird Sisters from one film version of Macbeth. I don’t know! But it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that their design references beekeepers. They’re horrifying and hideous and just looking at them you can tell they eat people because they have human limbs sticking out of their pockets so, uh.

Like I said, overall it’s a very good job.

SOUNDTRACK

I really, really, really like the soundtrack to this game. Not just because the music is good, but because it’s distinctive. There’s a notion that comes up in some places that the only way to make a good epic soundtrack is by making a by-the-numbers orchestral score. And most of these aren’t bad, but by itself that isn’t necessarily good. A good soundtrack is one that sticks out. Star Wars didn’t have a good soundtrack because it was an orchestra, it was a good soundtrack because it was an orchestra that made obvious shoutouts to classical compositions and opera, elevating the story to a near-mythological level.

The Witcher III isn’t just an epic story involving royals and wars, it’s also a story about wandering the countryside and fighting monsters while interacting with common people trying to live their lives. So the music has some songs that sound like they belong in epics. But an awful lot of the songs on the soundtrack are orchestral music composed by Marcin Przybyłowicz mixed in with the singing and performances of the folk band Percival. The result is something that sounds definitely eastern European, and I appreciate that I don’t think I’ve heard a soundtrack that sounds like it anywhere else.

Mind you, there are some weird things. The song they used for one of the themes for fight scenes, “Steel for Humans,” is from “O Lazare” which is… a wedding song. Which is a very odd choice. I suspect that if I looked at the lyrics for several of the other songs they would similarly be very out of place. It does somewhat bother me because I wonder if those songs were selected because the primarily English-speaking audience wouldn’t understand them, and using harmless songs but changing the music to sound “scarier” when these songs are just… common songs about everyday life? Seems weird. Finding folk songs about killing monsters might be more difficult, but surely a wedding song was not the right choice here?

But also that song rocks, so, I don’t know.

This is one of the most memorable soundtracks of all time and I love it.

CONCLUSION

This is a very well-designed game, duh. There’s a lot of thought put into almost every aspect of the game’s build, and it shows even from a cursory glance. There are things that aren’t quite as well done, but they’re not sloppy, and on the whole with as much going on in this game there are bound to be some things that don’t all come across perfectly. But it’s impressive how much works, design-wise to make an immersive experience like this.

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Esteban Sorrento-Gillis and the Right Side of History

 I’m back.

Okay I should really finish my review for The Witcher 3, and I have a lot of stuff for it written, but I just need to sit down and finish it. I want to do that before I really get into doing more essays about Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, because, as my Tumblr peeps and the fam will attest, I have a lot to say about it.

Also hey I remembered what it was that I was going to talk about a couple of weeks ago, and then forgot. It’s The Expanse.

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Esteban Sorrento-Gillis Sucks

Okay, so I probably need to do some explaining on who the fudge I’m talking about and why this man sucks. And to be clear, he’s far from the suckiest man on the show, not by a long shot. But it was just the way in which he sucks that struck me as a biting commentary on some things I think about sometimes so let’s get into this.

I’m going to spoil some of The Expanse.

The Expanse by James S.A. Corey (who is actually two people using a pen name) is a book series that was adapted into a television series by SyFy (which is what we’re actually going to be talking about today) who then cancelled it after three seasons, and then it was bought by Amazon, who also cancelled it after another three seasons or so. The show is pretty good. The books are better, but the show’s pretty good.

The premise is something like this: in the future humans have interplanetary travel and have colonized the solar system, but have yet to go beyond that limit. The big political powers are Earth, Mars, and the OPA/the Belt, the latter of which is made up of colonists on the different moons of gas giants and asteroids and stuff. They get stepped on by Earth and Mars a lot, who basically hate each other but avoid war.

And then a piece of advanced technology unlike anything anyone’s seen before is developed, and tensions between Earth and Mars dial up to eleven. 

Enter Esteban Sorrento-Gillis, Secretary General of the United Nations, the government of Earth at this point in history. Plotwise, he doesn’t get that much done. His Deputy Secretary, Sadavir Errinwright does some, but his Undersecretary Chrisjen Avasarala gets most things done, and avoids the public eye. When Avasarala actually does get into the spotlight, she laments that it’ll be harder to get things done.

So Errinwright turns out to be in on the big conspiracy in the overall Plot, and when Avasarala finds out, she gives him a chance to turn himself in and try to get out with as little damage to his career as possible. Instead, he tries to have her killed, has his Martian contacts killed, and starts a war between Earth and Mars. He maneuvers his boss Sorrento-Gillis by playing to his ego and doing his best to get this man to consider how he will be remembered as Earth’s leader during the first interplanetary war in human history. When Sorrento-Gillis thinks that maybe Errinwright’s too bad of an influence, he calls his old college friend Anna Volovodov, a pastor and activist, to help him write speeches to inspire hope instead of just war. It doesn’t work because he still lets Errinwright influence him.

Throughout this entire story arc, Errinwright, Anna, and Avasarala (who is on the run and having space adventures because Errinwright tried to have her killed) all lament how easily bendable Sorrento-Gillis is, with Avasarala even calling him “a bobblehead.” Because Sorrento-Gillis doesn’t care about Earth, or humanity, or the solar system. No, what the leader of humanity’s homeworld cares about is his legacy and reputation.

When Errinwright is finally exposed as a traitor, and Sorrento-Gillis has him arrested, Errinwright monologues about how spineless the man is, and how Errinwright was at least fighting for Earth’s supremacy, whereas Sorrento-Gillis was only leading Earth in the war because he was fighting for his reputation. He only wanted to look good in the history books.And after he’s led away in handcuffs, Anna approaches Sorrento-Gillis to congratulate him, only for the Secretary General to be like, “Thank you, because thanks to you, I won’t go down in history for causing millions of deaths! That’s all on him now!” And a horrified Anna realizes that this man is just as garbage as Errinwright said he was.

There is this common religious belief I see marched around quite often on the Internet by all sorts that Esteban Sorrento-Gillis subscribed to--the notion of the “the Right Side of History.” You see this all the time, and it’s a handy thing for historical fiction and dramas; see “History Has Its Eyes on You” in Hamilton. But as an actual belief to subscribe to, I have to classify it as a religious belief that I cannot subscribe to. I say “religious” because it’s not something based on fact but belief. Specifically, the belief that future generations will hold the same ideology that the person saying it does, whether that is progressivism or conservatism or whatever ideology one subscribes to. It is the notion that in the future people will be more inclined to be moral. And this isn’t something we know will happen for a fact.

History says quite the opposite, in fact. We know for certain that people’s opinions of history change all the time. We are having something of a national conversation about this in regards to which historical figures should be honored with monuments and which shouldn’t. What was the “Right Side of History” fifty years ago certainly isn’t today, and I don’t think our morals today will be viewed the same way in fifty years. That’s just how it works.

And look, there are a lot of people, some of whom subscribe to this belief, that tell me that we’re about to be overrun by authoritarians of one sort or another. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I can tell you I don’t care if the followers of the potential fascist regime don’t like me. They can suck a brick!

The belief that there’s a “Right Side of History” is belief in an afterlife. That future generations will remember us as good people. And maybe they will, I don’t know, but making that your goal in life? That somehow, after death, you will get to live on as a sainted figure? That’s one of the weakest afterlife beliefs I’ve ever heard, and yet I keep seeing it touted as a definite thing, about how this or that currently living person will be remembered well or badly, or how we’ve got to keep in mind how future generations will see us.

But here comes The Expanse, which shows the potential dangers of this line of thinking. Esteban Sorrento-Gillis is the politician who wholeheartedly believes in the notion of the Right Side of History, and he’s an idiot. He’s the worst kind of politician. A weak, spineless coward who is so desperate to define his legacy that he barely ever considers what the right thing to do is. Sorrento-Gillis doesn’t care about the right thing.

Compare this to Avasarala, who prefers working behind the scenes with none of the publicity, and has the foulest mouth of any character in the series. She doesn’t care what anyone thinks of her (except maybe her family), much less future generations. She can’t afford to. She’s busy getting things done.

And we have this problem with politicians today, don’t we? Politicians who care more about appealing to voters of one side or the other than actually getting stuff done? Who introduce and vote on bills not to pass them, but to be able to say that they voted on the Correct Side of that issue in their campaign ads when an election comes up. They don’t care about us, they don’t care about the country, they care about holding on to their seats and getting their name somewhere shiny.

I don’t know, politics on The Expanse spoke to me in a way that most shows involving politics don’t. And while yes, I suppose antagonist characters obsessed with legacy aren’t new, I think this one stood out because Sorrento-Gillis isn’t a villain, he’s just… one of their puppets. And until the end of his role in the story, he never even realizes how stupid he is. I suppose he does resign, but we don’t see him on screen doing that, so I imagine even with that he thinks it’s some noble act that people will love him for.

Idiot.

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