Onyx Equinox Review

 So today in history, according to the Appendices of The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf was chasing the Balrog up a mountain.

So there ya go.

It’s been a weird week, but I did a lot of reading and finished The Return of the King so expect that in the Book Diary soon.

Anyway, I don’t know what to write about but this has been in my head for about a week so let’s go with it.

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Onyx Equinox Season 1 Review

For reasons that escape me, I get ads for Crunchyroll on Facebook. I don’t watch a lot of anime, so I don’t know why this would come up--maybe because I watch RWBY, and that’s on Crunchyroll? Whatever. Most of the ads I ignore because they’re for shows that don’t interest me, but this one caught my eye because I’m a sucker for Aztec mythology and an animated series based on it sounded like my jam.

So!

Onyx Equinox is an animated Crunchyroll original show (those are apparently a thing they’re trying out right now) set in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. The god of the underworld, Mictlancuhutli, decides that because there’s a slight shortage of blood sacrifices he’s going to invade the land of the living and start taking that sweet, sweet blood. The other gods aren’t thrilled with this development, as it will lead to less blood sacrifices for them, and divine douchebag Tezcatlipoca goes so far as to suggest destroying humanity (again).

Quetzalcoatl comes up with a different solution: shut all the gates of the underworld, and then the gods of the underworld will be starved of blood sacrifices. The other gods aren’t thrilled with this plan, but since Quetzalcoatl’s twin brother Xolotl is one of the gods of the underworld, they think that if he’s willing to go that far it must be serious. The problem is that the gates are made of obsidian, the one substance the gods cannot touch, so he has to get a human to do it. Quetz makes a bet with Tezcatlipoca--basically, that the human champion, who will be chosen out of the lowest of the low, will be able to close the gates. Tezcatlipoca bets against. Whoever wins gets the other’s blood sacrifices. And to make sure that he doesn’t cheat, Tez sends his most loyal emissary, Yaotl, a giant god jaguar thing, to tag along on the quest.

With me so far?

So Quetz picks Izel, a young slave boy who no one cares about except his older sister, and his older sister is sacrificed in an attempt to placate the god of the underworld. So he goes with this grumpy spirit jaguar and he picks up some friends, and they go around Mesoamerica to Olmec ruins closing the gates of the underworld to stop the world from being destroyed.

Okay you can probably tell that the god stuff is what interested me most.

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This series has been compared to Avatar: The Last Airbender in its animation style, and its mythic quest. But this isn’t a children’s show. There is blood. Oh fudge, there is soooooooo much blood. Buckets of the stuff. Think the animated Castlevania and in you’re in the right ballpark. And of course, being based off of Mexica mythology, that makes sense. I mean, it’s a belief system that says the gods need blood and hearts torn out to function and keep the universe running. 

But soooo much guts.

There’s also swearing, and that threw me off a bit, because it only comes about three or four episodes in and feels very modern in a way that I didn’t quite like. It felt so out of place. Considering that the theme song is done in Mayan, I would think the makers of the show had the resources to find Mayan curses instead, or mix the two like what Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey does, switching both modern and ancient Greek curses. You get used to it after a while, but at first it was pretty jarring.

The fight scenes also need a lot of work. There are so many times where it seems like, despite there being several characters and monsters, they’re all so disconnected. What should be massive battles where chaos is going everywhere and instead there are separate little duels happening one at a time.

By far though, the biggest weakness of the series is that it’s lead, Izel, is useless. I’ve seen a lot of defenses for his supposed “whininess,” that he’s a guy who has been through a lot. The only person who cared he existed got sacrificed in front of him and now he’s got to save the world while running from monsters. Cool, fine. I don’t have an issue with that. The problem is that the guy’s useless in all the conflicts that come up until the very end. I’m not saying I want every protagonist to be a hardcore warrior type, but he’s not a strategist, not an inventory, not a trapper, not a hunter, not an agile speedster. He’s just… a kid that (understandably) freaks out when monsters attack, and has to not die while his friends take care of it.

That’s not a great protagonist. Especially when all of his friends are interesting and complex AND good in a fight: the twin athletes Yun and K’in who find themselves dragged on this quest; Zyanya, the warrior who survived her city being destroyed by the forces of the underworld; Xanastaku, the healer girl with wings; and Yaotl, the divine emissary that finds himself questioning the gods as the story goes on. I like where Izel ends up, I just wish he didn’t take so long to get there, or spend the entire time screaming and flailing.

If this show is to survive a second season, it needs to clean up its fight scenes and work on its protagonist.

All of that being said: there are some things that are really cool in this series. The design of the show is straight out of Mesoamerica. As this Tumblr post points out, much of the art and architecture is lifted from archaeological sites and artifacts. I remember being a bit weirded out by the some of the designs of the gods too, and while liberties are taken in a couple of cases, a lot of the details in those characters’ designs are taken identifiable in Mexica art. And given how rare it is to see depictions of Mesoamerican deities on the screen, I thought it was super cool.

The gods also sometimes possess people? And as they do we see some traits come out. When Quetzalcoatl possesses a body, it gets snakelike eyes, and starts being covered in feathers as he remains in the body. Tezcatlipoca gets a stripe under his eyes, smoke from his nostrils, and one of his legs wrecked. And if you know your mythology and Aztec art you know exactly what these traits are referring to!

And I like the depiction of their characters! The series doesn’t exactly have a positive view of the gods, but it does give them complex motivations and relationships, which is more than you usually expect from anything featuring Mesoamerican myth.

Finally, it’s good to see a fantasy story in this setting. The only other one I can think of off the top of my head is Obsidian and Blood (which is very good and you should read it). The aesthetics are completely different. The different kinds of magic are different and cool and I like it a lot?

For instance, Izel has this little dagger with a face on it? And when it gets exposed to blood, it grows into a much longer sword-like blade. You don’t see any swords, but there are a lot of knives, axes, and spears. The twins Yun and K’in are very obviously supposed to bring to mind the Hero Twins of Maya myth. And there’s a teleporting axolotl and it’s adorable?

Basically, it’s not great, it’s got problems, but I’m a sucker for Mesoamerican myth so I enjoyed it very much anyway. I find it sticking in my head for that alone. I realize that’s probably not enough for most people, but it was enough for me.

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Uncharted 4 Review

 Currently reading The Path of Daggers, which I’m almost finished with, and I like it a lot better than I remember. And this weekend I’ll get to play a bit more The Witcher 3: Blood & Wine, which means I’ll be killing some vampires, WOOT!

I finished the story of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End! Anyway let’s talk about it.

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Uncharted 4 Review

This is both a technically and narratively ambitious game and it mostly succeeds in what it sets out to do. That’s the gist of this review.

Some slight spoilers ahead.

I was told that this game was pretty good, and I was not disappointed. See, when I played Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception, I was frustrated and annoyed (though not too annoyed, because I had gotten this game for free when the Playstation Store gave it away). I had seen this game win a bunch of awards and I wasn’t having that much fun playing it. It felt like it really wanted to be a movie, which made it fun to watch and see the story play out, but not that much fun to actually play, which made it not that great of a game. At a certain point it felt as if almost every chapter of the story came with some sort of gimmick, like a chase scene with cars, or with boats, or a cruise ship that’s about to sink, or Nate is drugged or dying of thirst or something. It was dramatic, but it made playing a pain in the butt when the camera keeps shaking, or things are fuzzy, or you’re fighting hallucinations that don’t die while both of the above are going on.

The plane scene was one of the most annoying sequences I’ve ever played.

And those weren’t new to that game, but that one just amped them up to eleven.

Uncharted 4 doesn’t do away with big set pieces, but it’s nowhere near as intrusive to the experience. I felt like it managed to both tell a cinematic story and be a game that’s fun to play in almost every sequence, which is a pretty darn impressive thing to do in my opinion. It does have some pitfalls that stuck out to me though.

For starters, this game is big, and I don’t know that it needs to be. There are certain chapters that have you exploring wide open areas, and that sounds great, the kind of thing that every game is aiming to be these days. But given the way Uncharted plays, it feels a bit wasteful. There are wide open spaces to explore, and very often most of that space is filled with nothing but beautiful scenery. Yeah, that sounds nice, but in practice this means I’m wandering around aimlessly expecting everywhere to be something important or find a collectible, and most of this space has nothing there. So I’m just wasting a bunch of time.

I appreciate there being some space to explore, but too much of it, I start getting tired, and basically give up because most of it is useless. There should not be this much useless space in a game, I think.

The combat’s also been reworked a bit from past games. For starters, there’s no way to block. There’s a hit button, a dodge button, and a button to get out of holds. But if someone swings at you, you just get out of there. And since this isn’t really a close combat game, the camera doesn’t always cooperate in a way that lets you move out of the way. Thankfully, you aren’t in a lot of melee combat situations, but the few that the game forces you into are frustrating because of how the combat isn’t particularly smooth.

One of those situations is the final battle, the last boss fight, in which you are dueling… with swords. Nowhere before have swords been a part of the game’s combat, and now you have a sword, he has a sword, and you’re hastily given directions on how to use them. This made no sense to me from a gameplay perspective, and while it was dramatically very cool, and made sense for a movie, for a game to throw that at you in the last few minutes was silly and not as clever as I think the developers hoped it would be.

The game has plenty of good additions to its gameplay though. The grappling hook took some getting used to, but I like it quite a bit. Stealth has been reworked and though it’s nowhere near as good as one of the Arkham or Assassin’s Creed games, it’s a very good step from where we were in the last two games. There are encounters you can complete without open combat, and I love that, even if I’m not very good at it.

Narratively the game is pretty brilliant--I will admit that I am still kind of a sucker for stories about siblings though, and this one focuses very heavily on Nate and his never-before-mentioned brother Sam. Sam’s lack of mention before now doesn’t really jive that well with what we’ve already seen, though they do at least try to explain in-story why that is, in that Nate thought he was dead and is only just now revealed not to be. It’s a retcon, but at least the writers seem to know it and do their best to try to make it less awkward.

I appreciate that.

The gist of the story is that Nate has given up the adventuring/treasure hunting/thieving life, and then his brother appears again and pulls him back into it to help him save his own life by finding Henry Avery’s lost treasure. Nate, of course, lies to his wife about it, because he doesn’t want to get her into trouble, or get into trouble with her. And of course, Rafe, this acquaintance of theirs has been after Avery’s treasure for over a decade and is coming close to finding it, now that he’s got an army of mercenaries led by Nadine.

YMMV on whether or not Sam is a good character. I can almost go either way with him, because I can definitely see why, by the end of the game, players might not like him very much. I liked him mostly because Nate liked him, and I get how siblings are. But there are times when I could totally imagine why someone who wasn’t his sibling wouldn’t feel too kindly towards him--he kind of takes way too many unnecessary risks for this treasure.

Nate lying to his wife is dumb, but not out of character. And in the end, a thing that I really liked about this game is that it showed that going out and having adventures isn’t a bad thing--in the end, Nate and Elena decide that they do enjoy this life, and avoiding it isn’t good for them. But they need to handle it more responsibly. Searching for the unknown is fine, when you’re not unnecessarily risking your life for thrills.

Also Nate and Elena are kind of an awesome couple? And at no point in the series is their relationship really overly sexualized, like you’d expect in an action story of this kind if it ever hit theaters or television?

Just food for thought.

She has something to do in this game, which is much more than she did in the previous entry, in which she had a couple of sequences before just… not being in the story. Which kind of made sense, but also was a bummer because she’s a good character.

And speaking of old characters coming back and being treated well, Sully’s back of course, and despite being ancient and smoking he’s in great shape. And the voice of reason--telling Nate when he’s being stupid, but sticking around to support him and make sure he doesn’t die.

There’s this running thing with Henry Avery constantly using the imagery of Saint Dismas, the Good Thief, the one who repented at the Crucifixion, and Nate wonders in his journal, “What is Avery’s deal with Saint Dismas?” and I practically shouted, “It’s thematic! The thief who gave up his sin!” And I’m sure that’s intentional, but it’s also because of the whole “Today you will join me in Paradise” thing, and Avery’s own pirate paradise and how that turned out.

In some ways, this feels like the darkest of the Uncharted games, with a sense of finality and the darkness and also there are skeletons all over. This game really gets into just how terrible people can be. But it’s also in some ways one of the most optimistic games in the series? Because despite the darkness that exists in people, they can overcome it, and become better. This game serves as a grand finale to the saga, and shows our characters leaving it much better than when they started.

And I like that.

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People in the Past Weren't Dumb

 I am not obligated to talk about current events, and this will not be a post about politics, but I do want to say: I have seen quite a lot of commentary on both sides of the rift (certainly not an aisle at this point) and most of it is bad. But as I said on Tumblr: I would be a lot more sympathetic to a group of protestors storming the Capitol Building and demanding Congress be held accountable if they weren’t marching on the orders of a madman they worship demanding that he remain in power.

Anyway I read 1634: The Baltic Wars and I have Thoughts.

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People in the Past Weren’t Dumb

I have some issues with 1634: The Baltic Wars, mostly related to Ann Catherine and Oliver Cromwell, but overall I like this story and I like the Plot and I like the optimism of it. The author set out to tell a story that he thought was optimistic about the human condition, despite starting off in what was one of the worst wars in history.

One thing I especially like about this series is that the author is strongly of the opinion that people in the past weren’t stupid.

Let me rewind and explain a bit. The first book in the series is 1632, in which in the year 2000, a small West Virginia town named Grantville is transported to what would become Germany in the year 1632 by what they call the Ring of Fire, an event that has not been, nor is ever likely to be, explained. If you know your history, you’ll know that in that year they’re in the middle of the Thirty Years War, a vicious conflict which all-around sucked.

Of course the Americans, once they get their bearings, have the tactical advantage--they have better guns, for starters, and vehicles, and electric power. And once they start making alliances and enemies they’re happy to start sharing their knowledge with the people they’re friends with in this time. Once the United States of Europe gets rolling, technology starts spreading. It’s not all 21st century at first, because they don’t all have the means for that, but it’s moving a lot fast than 17th century.

Of course, Cardinal Richlieu has thoughts about this little town popping up, and he starts doing his best to learn this new technology and new historical information. He gets his spies on that ASAP, and before anyone can do anything about it, there are copies of the history and science books from Grantville’s libraries circulating around Europe.

And as 1634 shows, the people of 17th century Europe are starting to learn a few things. No, they don’t have airplanes yet (though one French officer realizes how good it would be for them start making them), but the French have worked out how to make percussion caps by studying the science books. And the Danish start working out how to counter the ironclads that the Americans are starting to build. They don’t quite get there, but only because they don’t have enough time yet to build all the mines and torpedoes that they want. But given the opportunity, they would have.

The people that lived in the past weren’t stupid. They don’t have all the resources we do right now, but that’s not because they were stupid, it was because the times were different. One of the things that bothers me with a lot of speculative fiction, mostly fantasy, is that we see people or creatures that are used to the past are utterly overwhelmed when it comes to thinking outside of their own times. I absolutely hated this aspect of Salvation War--the angels and demons attacking Earth don’t have a clue about how to actually fight humans, using Bronze Age tactics and being completely off guard when that doesn’t work. Heck, Uriel’s psychic attacks that are supposed to kill thousands are shrugged off by equipping everyone with tinfoil hats.

To be clear, there are thematic, and in-universe reasons for this, but it still feels really, really silly and dumb, when the only angelic character that knows anything about modern warfare is Michael, who is sabatoging his own side for his own benefit. There are no studies of human weapons, there are no figuring out ways to counter them. There is just throwing more force, and hoping that it works this time. And the audience cheers because the good guys are humanity, of course, but it’s still a rather boring antagonistic force if it doesn’t understand anything but sheer force and is baffled when that doesn’t work.

[Again, there are thematic reasons which might work for some audiences, but the more I think about it the more it bothers me. That and other things.]

Compare this to Dresden Files. Yeah, the supernatural beings have some trouble with humans, but they understand human nature, and they understand strategy. Maybe they don’t have guns, but they can hire humans or other beings that do, and will happily use them. One of the most horrifying bits in the series is when Harry meets up with his fellow wizards who have just escaped a battle, only to find that the vampires had hired mercenaries to gas the hospital that they’d been recovering in.

The supernatural beings who don’t care about things like guns and bombs are the ones who wouldn’t be bothered by them anyway. The skinwalker in Turn Coat is pretty hard to kill by anything less than an actual nuclear blast, and in Battle Ground the Last Titan takes several gunshots, explosions, and cuts, and just keeps going.

But going back to humans: yes, I think people in the past would be scared and bewildered by modern technology. At first. But soon they’d start to realize how it works, even if they don’t know all the details. After all, do you know exactly how all the components of your computer or phone work? Probably not. But once you get a handle on it, you can get pretty far.

There’s a season finale of the Spanish television series Ministerio del Tiempo in which King Philip II of Spain, upon finding out about what happens to his country in the future, and about time travel, takes some people with him and then proceeds to conquer all of the world and also history. Not to mention that Alonso, one of the main team members, adapts pretty quickly to modern semiautomatic firearms, despite being from a time period when muskets were the common guns.

People (or non people, if you’re writing fantasy/science-fiction) who aren’t up to date with modern technology would start working out how to use it, and how to match it. The people of France in 1632 don’t know how modern firearms work, but at the Cardinal’s urging they immediately start working on how to protect themselves from it, study how they work, and find ways to counter them. Because that’s how humans think. They work out how to adapt and survive, and fight back. Just because they don’t know as much about the science of how modern things work, doesn’t mean they aren’t willing to learn, or to logically work out how to deal with it.

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Teen Titans Was Amazing

 Today is my parents’ anniversary, so there’s that going on. Pro tip if you get married: pick a day you know you can remember so that you never forget your anniversary.

Anyway I am a bit out of it because I had two short work weeks in a row. And that’s cool! But it means that work on Monday is going to be the biggest pain--I might get a burger for lunch that day to make myself feel better. 

I considered doing a ‘Things I’m Glad I Did in 2020!’ Note, but I don’t know if anyone cares, and also I thought of that at the next to last minute (unlike this one, which I thought of at the last minute), and I would want to give that one a bit more time to think of what to put on the list.

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The 2003 Teen Titans Was Great

So I got a month long free trial of HBO Max on the Kindle Fire because of some promotion going on or another, and after watching Primal and a few other things I decided I’d watch a few episodes of Teen Titans. Do you remember that show? Started in 2003? It was very silly at times, but occasionally it was very serious, and had likable characters. A bunch of people mocked/criticized it for being a cartoon with heavy anime influences, which is downright hilarious to consider if you look at the state of 2D animation in the US right now.

It’s kind of annoying how popular this show got, though, because every other iteration of the team or these characters is stacked up against the show, even though the show isn’t a particularly faithful adaptation of the comics it’s named after. And it’s not meant to be! So when the first trailer for Titans dropped, so many people were laughing about how DC was stupid in trying to make Teen Titans dark, when in truth the original comics were very dark. That doesn’t negate all criticisms of Titans, of course, but let’s not forget that one of the key members was essentially Satan’s daughter!

I talked a bit more about that whole thing here, but basically: complaining that the comics or other adaptations aren’t like the show is like wondering why the character of Quartermain in King Solomon’s Mines the novel isn’t like Connery’s character in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie.

So I watched a season one episode, “Apprentice, Part 1” and something stuck out to me:

This twenty-two minute long episode has a whopping FIVE fight scenes in it. The episode opens with a dream in which Robin is fighting Slade. When the Titans track down what they think is Slade’s base, Robin fights a bunch of Sladebots. He gets dragged off by Cinderblock and fights him while the rest of the team chases and fights the bot driving the boat with the bomb. And when Robin tracks down Slade, they fight for the rest of the episode.

Look, I don’t think that any of the Netflix Defenders shows are this action-packed. And I get it, it’s aimed at a younger audience, they’ve got to have action to make sure to hold kids’ attention, but HOLY POPE that’s a lot of action. And the handful of episodes I watched this past week all consistently had a bunch of fight scenes. Not usually that many. Even a lot of the silly episodes had a lot of them. They tend to be well-animated, fun to watch, dramatic… 

...we did not deserve this quality of action cartoon in our youth, but we got it anyway.

To be clear, this show was not that good at drama. Which it didn’t usually try to do either. But while there are character arcs and development, and it’s good, most of it isn’t that complex, and it’s not really handled in the silly episodes at all. The season-long story arcs were usually only four episodes or so: the one early on that established the story arc, one in the middle of the season to develop it a bit more and remind you it still existed, and the two part finale. They were good, but it wasn’t as if complex Plot was woven throughout a season.

The exception to this is the fifth season, which had huge chunks of the season with the Titans going around the world recruiting.

And continuity wasn’t a strong suite, though it wasn’t that bad either. A lot better than a lot of children’s cartoons of the time. It wasn’t the DC Animated Universe--very few shows can be, as Justice League: Unlimited had a Plot Point that was built off of something that happened in an episode of Superman: The Animated Series a decade previously. Main cast members in the Teen Titans would sometimes suffer trauma and then it’s only referenced once or twice afterward.

I’m also not sure how much time is meant to have passed over the course of the series? Aside from a couple of holidays, and a birthday or two, we don’t really see the passage of time. Which isn’t weird considering it’s an animated show for kids, but by the end of the show, it seems like it’s supposed to have been years that have passed, and it’s not as if anyone has visibly aged at all. 

But you know what? This was the early 2000’s. Television in general was not as heavy on things like continuity or telling episodic stories. I think if we looked at a bunch of shows, both animated and otherwise, from the same time period, there wouldn’t be that much difference in the approach to episodic storytelling.

It was a different time, I guess. Teen Titans existed in this weird spot in the evolution of animation and comic book shows. It has heavy story arcs but also a bunch of humor and silly episodes. It was obviously influenced by anime at a time when that wasn’t really the norm in action cartoons. It wasn’t quite comfortable fully tackling serious issues like racism or puberty, but did make not-so-subtle references to them. It made allusions to the comics but it didn’t care that much about making a faithful adaptation because most of its audience hadn’t read them and barely any of us had realized that we could look up these characters on Wikipedia.

And it was great. Maybe it’s the nostalgia talking--I don’t know if someone who has never seen this show before would watch it and still have as much fun as I did rewatching it. But I’d like to think that it would still very much appeal to kids. Aside from meta stuff, I don’t think there’s anything in the show that aged badly.

It’s definitely worth revisiting, if you manage to find the series somewhere, or get a free trial for HBO Max like we did.

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On Time Skips

 Hello! I am having a weird week. I’m less stressed about life in general and more stressed about Christmas shopping in particular, because without going out to places I have been shopping online and some things take a while to arrive! A couple of things have not arrived! And they should have! It’s not great!

I am a little behind on reading. I meant to watch Two Towers some time soon but my LotR schedule will take a backseat while I watch Christamas movies, I think. And some other things as well.

Also I watched a few episodes of Primal! That was cool.

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On Time Skips

I had this thought in the bathroom Friday morning. Which sounds weird, but I have a lot of thoughts in bathrooms, and the fact that I came up with an idea before Friday evening is, sometimes, very impressive. To me at least.

But time skips! That very useful thing to have between books in a series, or seasons of a show, or films in a film series, that let you pick up a little bit later and find out what the characters are doing. They’re great. I mean, sometimes. Sometimes they’re great. Sometimes they’re annoying as fudge. I know that there are people who absolutely hate them if they’re more than a week, but I don’t quite understand why.

See, contrary to any writing lessons you may have picked up from watching Once Upon a Time, we don’t actually need to know what happened in every minute of your main characters’ lives. Time skips between installments gives you the freedom to skip stuff that isn’t interesting, because most people’s lives aren’t nonstop action, or even particularly good stories. So say one installment of the story shows the beginning of a war, you don’t actually need to tell about every engagement or movement or whatever that happens in the conflict. You can skip to a key moment in the war.

The problem is when the time skip is used to cover basically everything interesting that might have happened. So if one installment starts the war, and the next one ends it years later? The audience is going to feel a bit jipped in that they don’t get to see what the war was actually like. I think the worst example of a time skip I can think of is the five year time skip between the first two seasons of Young Justice.

See, the first season of Young Justice ends with the Justice League realizing that while they were mind controlled by the villains, they have sixteen hours that are still unaccounted for, and they don’t actually know what the villains’ plan is. The second season picks up five years later, where members of the Team are no longer teenagers, there’s a new Team, a bunch of new Leaguers, and several of the character dynamics have changed. So this leads to having to awkwardly show the audience what the heck happened to everyone in the five years since, AND who the new characters are and what their backstories are, while ALSO trying to tell you the story of the alien infiltration and invasion of Earth. Like yes, I get that they wanted to introduce a bunch of new elements to the story without having to go and introduce it episode by episode, and considering everything they didn’t do that badly, but it’s still really annoying that so much happened and we have to play catchup instead of just letting the story happen.

Why are Miss Martian and Beast Boy siblings now? Why did she and Connor break up? How many of his teammates did Nightwing date? How did Tim become the new Robin? Wait, there was an in-between Robin who died? How did Jaime get alien technology attached to his spine? How does Wonder Woman have a protege with the same powers? Why is Aqualad evil? When did Artemis and Kid Flash retire? Why is Ocean Master out of the Light? Why not just tell us these stories, instead of skipping past them and then dropkicking us into an alien invasion story that also happens to have enough discussions about the rest of it so that we know what happened?

I think the makers of the show did figure this out. When the show got revived, and a third season got produced, there’s another timeskip, but it’s only two years, and a lot of the changes that happened feel more organic and easier to follow. New characters are introduced out of nowhere with little explanation, but they’re not main characters so it feels less egregious.

I remember that there was a bit of the Tumblr fandom for Legend of Korra that was shocked that between the first two seasons there was a six month time skip. And this baffled me because of Young Justice but also because that’s actually a good thing. Look, we don’t need to see Korra going around to everyone and restoring bending with her Avatar powers, we need to move to a new story and see where the characters go afterward. Again, and we don’t need every detail! We need to move to the part of the story where things happen again!

Sometimes there should be a time skip. If you pick up right where you left off, but feel like a lot of time has passed, or that a lot happened that doesn’t seem probably in such a short time frame? Probably should have had a time skip. If there wasn’t Luke and Rey’s Plot in The Last Jedi (because the previous movie ends on a cliffhanger there), I would say that movie needed a time skip, because the First Order gets over being exploded remarkably well. NO I WILL NOT GET OVER THAT! A time skip would explain how they can pull a dreadnought out of their butt to bomb the Resistance base from orbit right after they suffered a crippling loss and had to hastily evacuate their own planet.

I suppose that a good couple rules of thumb would be these: 

-Is the time skip being used to hop over all the good storytelling opportunities? If not, it’s fine. If it is, then maybe don’t do that. Your audience could feel like they missed something or they could wish that they were getting robbed of a much more interesting story featuring characters they care about.

-Are you picking up the next installment right afterward? If so, then think about what’s going on in the story, and if it makes more sense for there to have been some breathing room between installments. The audience is smart enough to understand that stuff happened in between in that time.

Like many storytelling elements, they serve a purpose. So think about why you’re applying or not applying it. Tell the most interesting story possible, and use a time skip to avoid the unimportant bits of the narrative (between installments, of course), or don’t use them to make sure you cover the important parts that the audience won’t want to miss.

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Why the Masquerade?

 You know, about a year ago when I was stuck I could always do a movie review or a Note about books I’ve been reading. But now that I have the Book Diary and Movie Munchies, I don’t know that there would be much point to those nowadays.

I also considered a Note about what books I would adapt into television or movies if I were a famous and powerful Hollywood person, but that would quickly devolve into “These books are good, go read them!” and again, we have my Book Diary for that.

Today is the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe! Reminder that the patron saint of the Americas made herself known to an indigenous person in his own language.

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Why the Masquerade?

TV Tropes has a thing they call “the Masquerade.” It’s when, in fiction, especially urban fantasy, there is a secret world of magic, or aliens, or vampires, or robots or whatever, and they don’t tell the normal people about it. After all, if the Muggles know about the Secret World, then--

Well, what, exactly? Why can’t the Muggles know about the Secret World? And in fantasy worlds, constructed worlds, the mages don’t have much reason to hide their powers. So why would they decide to do it in our world?

The very obvious answer is because it’s easier on the writer. If we lived in a world with magic, and monsters, and robots all out in the open, the world would look very different from the way it does now. But that requires crafting a brand new history of the world, but one that still has enough landmarks that it’s recognizable to the reader. If Rome had immortal wizards, chances are the landscape of the world would be very different, and trying to make a modern world with that premise in the background would make it very difficult to believably shape it into anything we would find familiar.

You could skip that, but it would feel cheap somehow. Lindsay Ellis’s video on the Netflix movie Bright talks about this--it’s a world in which orcs, elves, fairies, centaurs, and dwarves live alongside humans, but it’s still our world, our culture, and history, fashion, and technology have apparently been exactly the same as our world, with only some minor things, and the fact that somewhere in the past there was a Dark Lord that orcs sided with that tried to take over the world using magic.

But it certainly is possible. People have been doing alternate histories for ages. The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud is a good fantasy example of this. The Hellboy comics also have the BPRD as a public agency, but how much the public knows about, like, monsters and demons is unclear until we get to the apocalypse storyline, where it’s hard not to notice the giant monsters overrunning the United States.

There is the very common notion that it isn’t safe for everyone to know about the Masquerade. And the Muggles aren’t the ones who have safety in question. As is pointed out in Dresden Files, while yes, individually a monster or mage could take on any human, or even a group of humans, there are quite a lot of us. As is pointed out, when humans get their stuff together, we can wreck most supernaturals with our guns and explosives. We do see monsters being dropped by conventional weapons. The reason the supernatural world keeps us in the dark is for their own safety.

Also it’s easier for monsters to eat us if we don’t know they exist.

[Harry Potter has the International Statute of Secrecy, but in that setting it is very unclear who would come out on top in a Wizard vs Muggle conflict, as we very rarely see the two sides get adequate preparation for the fights. There was a popular claim that bullets would beat wands every time, but this is unconfirmed, and we do see that actual wizards usually weren’t hurt much by the witch trials of Europe.]

There is also the idea that it’s safe for us. In some settings, influenced one way or another by Lovecraft, knowing the full extent of the supernatural is actually really bad and it hurts us. There are settings in which there are worlds upon worlds that humanity at large just isn’t ready to deal with, and the widespread panic of knowing about there being monsters everywhere isn’t worth risking by our heroes.

Maybe the Masquerade is enforced because of Rules. Maybe the gods don’t want people to know about them because it removes the need for faith if there’s proof of gods everywhere. Maybe it’s kept in mystery why the rules are there, but the authorities have it there and assure us there’s a good reason.

Here’s the thing though: a lot of urban fantasy doesn’t have any explanation whatsoever.

This came up in the discussion for the sporkings of The Iron Druid Chronicles, where one of my astute readers pointed out that there isn’t an explanation for why the supernaturals keep everything secret from the Muggles. There’s none! One could give the theory that they’re afraid of people being hostile, but our main character becomes immune to death in the second chapter, so I don’t think that’s it. And I think that this is one of those tropes that gets used all the time that people take it as part of the genre, and many times authors don’t question why.

Angelopolis was an even worse example. There’s apparently a secret world of angels that secretly runs the world, and the “good guys” (I put that in parentheses because they’re foul and have concentration camps but ANYWAY) have extensive documentation about this and Biblical history, and no one says anything. There’s also Supernatural, which by season five had entire towns being wiped off the map in the Apocalypse, and yet apparently no one in the government even realizes what’s going on? Even though they had an FBI agent on the Winchesters two years before who got mysteriously murdered?

Why do the characters not go public? In some cases, how could they not? I’m not saying don’t have the Masquerade in the story--by all means, do. I’m trying it myself in my writing. But give an explanation for it. There has to be a reason that the characters are adhering to it. You can’t just tell me that it’s because that’s what everyone else is doing. That’s not good fantasy writing. Write reasons for characters to act the way they do, for the rules to work the way that they do. That’s basic writing.

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Writing Powerful Protagonists (and Antagonists!)

 Sleep, sleep, what is sleep?

I came across this post recently, which has me… concerned about Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, because it makes it seem as if you’re essentially playing as a whitewashed version of the villains from Secret of the Kells.

Also I want to write about Wheel of Time, but I feel that I’d be more insightful once I actually finish the series. 

So let’s talk about something else instead.

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Writing Powerful Protagonists (and Antagonists!)

[I may have written about this kind of thing before. If so, I’m sorry. But I’m on a tight deadline and didn’t sleep very well.]

I remember back when I was in middle school or so, all of the fantasy writing advice was about how you shouldn’t make your protagonists very powerful, to avoid making them Mary Sues. I don’t know if many of the fantasy authors I read today ever heard that advice, but I suspect they either haven’t or decided to ignore it. 

There is a noticeable trend in fantasy, especially urban fantasy, to write characters who are powerful. They are wizards, demigods, heroes of unmatched skill. And you know what? That’s okay. That’s fine. Having a powerful protagonist isn’t a bad thing. The trouble is when the story doesn’t serve to challenge that protagonist.

Let us take, for instance, Superman. I have heard it said very often that Superman is a very boring character because he is unkillable. And in a badly written story, this is true--the tension is gone because we know that Superman will not die. This was, in fact, the problem I had with the animated film Superman vs. the Elites--while the ideological conflict was interesting, the final battle was meant to be a tense duel where we were supposed to be concerned about Superman’s wellbeing in a fight where no one was wielding any of Superman’s weaknesses. I kept yelling ‘He’s SUPERMAN!’ at the screen the last twenty minutes of this film.

But a good Superman story pits him against powerful opponents. Now, a powerful opponent doesn’t necessary mean someone who has strength to match Superman, although it sometimes does. Lex Luthor can work as a perfect foil to Superman not because he can counter Supes blow for blow, but because he can arrange situations in which Superman’s powers will not save the day instantly. The comic Superman for All Seasons comes to mind. And even then, the issue isn’t “Will Superman die?” but “Will Superman be able to save everyone?”

Still, it is a very difficult balance to walk, and I don’t know if all authors can manage it. Dresden Files, for instance, does a pretty decent job, but by populating the world with characters who are just as powerful, if not more so, than the protagonist. He also spends a large chunk of several novels trying to figure out exactly who the antagonist is, as he’s an investigator by trade, so he can’t exactly just blast the bad guy when he first appears anyway. And when he does, they turn out to be powerful wizards or magical beings as well, so he has to use his wits. Yes, Harry Dresden is a powerful wizard, but he’s hardly the only one, and power doesn’t equal everything in the world Butcher has created. Battle Ground culminates with a battle against a Titan, in which Harry doesn’t have a hope of beating by himself.

Compare this to, say, Hounded, the first book in The Iron Druid Chronicles, in which when the main character finally fights the antagonist which has been apparently trying to kill him for centuries, he easily outfights and kills him. Also the main character becomes immune to death in the second chapter of the book. That is… precisely how not to write a powerful protagonist. 

Wheel of Time, which I’m reading now (so again, I could be completely butt-backwards--I haven’t finished the series yet), has some issues in this regard, and I have mixed feelings about how it handles it. Yes, Rand is powerful, and yes his main antagonists are the powerful Forsaken, who are around his level in magic. And many of them take disguises and make elaborate plots to lure Rand into a trap to kill him. AND Rand is also trying to navigate politics because everyone wants something from the Dragon Reborn, and this hinders his job significantly. Also he’s slowly going insane. And the other characters aren’t anywhere near as powerful, and have more of a challenging time defeating opponents. Yet when Rand actually gets to battling a Forsaken, it seems as if that in direct confrontation he curbstomps them one by one. 

And like I said, it takes a while to get there; very often he gets saved by one of his friends too, so it isn’t exactly like Rand shows up and hits the Win Button. But it is a bit frustrating to me, at least, that so many of the Forsaken just get one-shot’d with Balefire or stabbed. Then again, like I said, I am far from finished with the series, and I know that this series has a habit of bringing back characters that we think are dead.

One of the troubles I have with Trials of Apollo by Rick Riordan is that the new villains aren’t really that powerful, in comparison to past villains of previous serieses. They’re deified Roman emperors, with a powerful corporation. So they should be something like mythological Lex Luthors, but in essence they’re… not. Partially because they’re in a book series aimed at kids, I imagine, but aside from Nero, they tend to be very straightforward about their plans, challenging heroes straight on and stamping their company’s name on everything. When our heroes have conquered gods and primordial personifications, it’s a little bit of a downgrade to move to three guys who essentially have some superstrength, a lot of flunkies, and keep attacking the heroes who can summon lightning or floods or earthquakes or zombies head on, it’s a bit difficult to take seriously. Yet the narrative does.

Although again, I haven’t finished this series, and I want to reiterate that I’m way above this series’s target audience by this point in my life.

There is a balance you have to make. The easiest way to make this balance is to make a believable powerful protagonist work is to give him or her equally powerful antagonists. But if you don’t do that, you can make it work through adding enough complexity and making the villains smart enough that the heroes can’t just blast them on page ten. The key to making powerful protagonists is, quite simply, by writing competent antagonists.

[I suppose that also writing an interesting and well-developed protagonist is also key in this, but I’m tired and this has gone on long enough so far.]

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