Dragonwatch vs. Camp Jupiter

 I had this idea, and I didn’t think it was completely fair because I haven’t even read all the Dragonwatch books that are out yet. But I couldn’t think of much else that I wanted to talk about other than that I want Argonian werewolves and vampire dragons in fiction.

I know, lame.

Anyhow I’m playing Discovery Tour on AC: Valhalla, and I’m happy to learn stuff, so far I don’t find it as interesting or as cool as the Discovery Tour for AC: Odyssey, and again I’m more than a little annoyed that it tries to go with “Vikings pillaged, colonized, and enslaved, but they probably weren’t that bad! That was probably just Catholic propaganda! And they probably didn’t even know that monasteries had religious significance!”

Not amused.

Anyway let’s talk about Dragonwatch and Heroes of Olympus.

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Dragonwatch vs. Camp Jupiter

Are you familiar with the Greek mythology books by Rick Riordan? I kind of hope so because I talk about them a lot in Saturday Notes. But basically Percy Jackson and the Olympians tells the story of how the Greek gods survived into modern day, still have demigod children, and those demigods, if they survive long enough, train at Camp Half-Blood on Long Island to learn how to fight monsters and not die. The overarching Plot, told from the point of Percy himself, depicts the return of the Titans and their second war with the gods, and it ends by wrapping up almost everything but teasing more with a quick prophecy that no one wants to deal with.

The sequel series, Heroes of Olympus, introduces a butt ton more viewpoint characters and redoes the war between the gods and the giants. This one introduces the previously never-mentioned or even hinted-at camp for Roman demigods called Camp Jupiter, and the conflict between the Greek and Roman camps takes center stage and drives a large chunk of the Plot.

Got it? Good, okay.

Alright so in the past couple of years I started reading Fablehaven by Brandon Mull. The premise is that there are these sanctuaries that are nature preserves for magical creatures like fairies and dragons all around the world, and the siblings Kendra and Seth Sorenson find out that their grandparents run one called ‘Fablehaven.’ And that’s cool and all, but it also sucks because there’s this organization called the Society of the Evening Star which is hellbent on bringing down the sanctuaries and taking the magical artifacts housed there so they can open the demon prison for nefarious purposes. (Does anyone open the demon prison for benevolent purposes? A clue: no.) To do this our heroes are given magic powers, and join the Knights of Dawn, a group dedicated to fighting the Society of the Evening Star.

The sequel series is Dragonwatch, in which everyone’s like, “Okay, now that the demons are out of the way you guys know that dragons will make their play to take over the world?” And our heroes join Dragonwatch, a group within the Knights of Dawn that tries to make sure dragons don’t take over the world. This involves going to Wyrmroost, one of the dragon sanctuaries, and then going to some other previously-unvisited preserves.

Got it? Good, okay.

In terms of Sequel Series Plots, the point I’m writing this essay to say is: Dragonwatch does it, overall, better.

To be clear, I’m not saying that Dragonwatch is the superior series overall, or that Brandon Mull is a better writer. I think he and Rick Riordan have different strengths. Honestly, there are a lot of characters I have trouble remembering in Fablehaven and Dragonwatch, and I think that Mull introduces more characters than he really has the time to develop them, to begin with. But as a sequel series, I think Mull’s works better.

See, Heroes of Olympus tells us that there’s apparently a completely different, never-before-hinted-at faction of demigods doing Plot-relevant things in the war against the Titans on the other side of the country (in an area our heroes specifically have been around) and we’ve just never heard of them. Neither has anyone else. And in the book that they’re introduced, they’re apparently close enough that it seems like they’re always at least just-missing each other--our Greek-inclined heroes overhear monsters mentioning a son of Mercury, and we’re later told that the Roman demigods led an assault on the Titan fortress, an event never hinted at and no one mentions other than to say that it happened and that Jason was a badass during it. No mention of casualties in that siege, no mention of other events that went down, just… yeah, that happened. There’s also an entire city attached, with a thriving population, its own university--and there are adult demigods all over the country who are happy to play a support role to questing demigods.

It doesn’t fit with what we’ve already been told, is what I’ve getting at here. Camp Jupiter and the Roman faction feels tacked on and it’s obvious that the author didn’t think of it during the composition of the first series.

Compare this to Dragonwatch. I don’t think that Brandon Mull thought of the Dragonwatch organization when writing Fablehaven, but it doesn’t stick out that much. We’re told earlier on that the dragons are dangerous, even when they’re helping the heroes against the demons, and there are plenty of magical sanctuaries we haven’t seen but we know are out there. It’s made abundantly clear that there are a lot of places in the magical world that Kendra and Seth haven’t visited, but are mentioned or alluded to by other characters. In short: it doesn’t come out of nowhere. There is room prepared for this to happen.

Both serieses have this issue of “Everything’s resolved, but now we’re telling you what happens next, and so characters arcs you thought were resolved are back with very little justification.” And that’s frustrating. But when speaking about the main thrust of the Plot and the faction introduced that drives it, Dragonwatch for Mull and Camp Jupiter for Riordan--I think Mull wins out in this case because there is room for this group and this Plot to exist. It doesn’t work that well to just pull another faction out of nowhere and insist they’ve been there the entire time.

And yeah, with long-running series stuff like this is bound to happen sooner or later, but it’s something to keep in mind while worldbuilding. If you have an idea for something to add, make sure you leave room for it in the story you’re telling right now.

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Child Protagonists Again

 My Friday was… difficult because my stomach was giving me trouble, so I was spending a lot of time grumbling and running to the restroom which is Not Fun. And that’s a shame because I was really looking forward to this weekend? Hopefully I’m much better by the time I get to posting this and you get to reading this.

Anyhow I’ve started “Wrath of the Druids” so I’m exploring Ireland in the Viking Age now. And Discovery Tour comes out next week!

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Have a Reason for Child/Teen Protagonists

I know I’ve talked about this before, but every so often these days I see a post on Tumblr that says something like, “Of COURSE YA stories have teen heroes! That’s the genre! That’s the audience! Any examination of why teens or children are the ones saving the world is just being a stupid nitpick!” And I… well, as you can probably guess from my previous writing on the subject, I strongly disagree with that assertion.

Again, I’m not saying that you can’t have heroes who are children or teenagers, and that they can’t do Cool Action Things, but I think it absolutely has to be addressed in the story. I think if you don’t have an explanation for why grownups aren’t doing this, either explicitly supplied to the reader or implied by the subtext, then you’re in an awkward situation and you could have done this better.

Especially considering that there are plenty of reasons why there would be juvenile heroes completing the tasks! It’s not that hard to come up with an explanation of one sort or another. The three that I came up with in my notebook:

ONE--The Adults are dead/busy/incapacitated. Maybe there are capable grownups in the setting, but they can’t handle it because they’re not around. Spy Kids, Young Justice (the season one finale and all of season two), and Avatar use this one. In a couple of those listed examples, the kids are also required to save the adults--that’s the mission at the end of season one of Young Justice and the first Spy Kids.

I give Avatar: The Last Airbender a lot of leeway here too, because from the getgo we’re told all the adults in the Southern Water Tribe are away at war, and it’s lampshaded plenty of times that these kids really shouldn’t have to be the ones to do this, and they go through plenty of trauma because of it, but they’re the ones who have to. Also the Avatar has to be the one to set the world right.

Percy Jackson has this variation in that demigods tend to not live to adulthood, and so of course that kids are the ones who are prepared to deal with the situation. There are no adults, apparently--other than the gods themselves, but we’ll get to that in a minute. The explanation doesn’t feel quite right because it basically means everyone we get attached to is statistically likely to die. The sequel series is worse about that because it straight-up tells us that the Roman camp has adult demigods, they just don’t care about their children marching to war, I guess.

There’s also Wee Free Men in which Tiffany is the only witch for miles. Miss Tick leaves to go get help, and that help doesn’t arrive until the very end of the story. And Tiffany can’t wait that long! She’s got to go save her little brother, even if he’s a bit obnoxious about begging for candy.

TWO--The Protagonists don’t trust the grownups/the grownups are untrustworthy. Basically, the heroes do it themselves because they can’t tell the adults in the setting. Harry Potter runs on this a lot, especially the first installment. The Trio keeps trying to tell the authority figures around them that they just know that Snape is trying to steal the Philosopher’s/Sorcerer’s Stone, and none of them believe them because they assert that the protections around the thing are too strong and that Snape is trustworthy. They take it upon themselves to handle it because no one believes the threat is real.

[And to be fair, it turns out that Snape isn’t trying to steal Stone at all, but SOMEONE is and if they’d paid attention they would have been able to deal with it.]

A notable take on this that I really like is the webcomic Gunnerkrigg Court in which our main character Antimony doesn’t trust the authority figures in the school, and goes on a mission with her friends to solve the Plot, only to require backup. And Jones, one of the good adults in the Court, straightforwardly tells Antimony that if only she bothered to tell her what was going on, Jones could have helped fix everything a lot faster.

You also have things like The Dragon Prince in which many of the adults in these characters’ lives are normally trustworthy people, but the fact is that they would try to stop these kids on their mission if they knew what was going on. General Amaya is a fantastic aunt, but if she knew that the kids were travelling with Rayla to Xadia to return the egg of the Dragon Prince to his mother, she would turn them right around and march them home, and Callum and Ezran know it. This adds the complexity that the adults mean well but still won’t solve the problem and do what the kids know needs to be done.

And sometimes the adults really aren’t trustworthy for different reasons. I cited Percy Jackson above, and the later books reveal that the gods are too divided to efficiently handle the situation. They take forever to really agree that the Titans are returning and that they should go to war with them. And they spend so much time arguing with each other that most of the minor gods defect to the enemy’s side right as Kronos starts recruiting, and bringing many of their less-appreciated demigod children with them.

THREE--only the child/teenage protagonist is equipped with the powers to handle this. There are adults around, and they would gladly handle it if they could, but they can’t because they don’t have the powers necessary. Avatar again comes to mind--Aang is the Avatar, and so he kind of has to do these things because no one else is capable of bending all four elements and being the human bridge to the spirit world.

Or something like Runemarks, in which Maddie is the only person around with any of the titular runemarks and thus, the capability of learning Aesir magic. At least, she’s the only one with a whole runemark--there are other people and animals in the area with partial runemarks, but she’s got a full one, and it’s what lets One Eye/Odin know that she can do what he needs her to do.

It doesn’t have to be powers, as such. The title character of Artemis Fowl doesn’t usually have any sort of powers, but he is the only one with the connections in the fairy world and the intelligence to handle all of the complicated Plots going on. He’s the smartest one in the setting, so he’s the one who gets to fix things. Ir in the case of the first book, the one instigating the Plot because he starts out as a supervillain.

There are, perhaps, variations on all of these situations, and definitely ways to mix and match them. But the point being, there needs to be a something. Maybe it’s a throwaway line. Maybe it’s a quick explanation. Maybe it’s implied more than explicitly stated. Fine, whatever--but you do need to give a reason as to why the kids are doing The Thing, because otherwise it doesn’t make sense! And I (because my criticism is clearly the only one you should really care about, I think) will sit there wondering why a capable adult isn’t handling the problems.

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“Avenge Us,” Star Wars, and Sympathetic Villains

 Hallo! I’ve been thinking about Verdi a lot lately for Reasons. I finished the second Thursday Next book, and I think I’ll be doing either Silver Chair or The Disaster Artist next.

There is probably not going to be a Saturday Note next weekend because I will be out of town.

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“Avenge Us,” Star Wars, and Sympathetic Villains

Alright I had this idea at the beginning of the week and figured I’d go with it. I suspect I was browsing the Headscratchers page for the Sequel Trilogy on TV Tropes, and thinking about how terribly-planned out it was and trying to think of some really good Star Wars media. Some spoilers for Star Wars: Rebels and Jedi: Fallen Order.

The main antagonist of Star Wars--Jedi: Fallen Order is the Second Sister, one of the Inquisitors, Force-users that are trained with the express intention of hunting down remaining Jedi and Force-sensitive individuals. Their numbers reflect their rank. Most of them appear to have been former Jedi, and the Second Sister is no exception--she was Jedi padawan Trilla Sudari, who upon finding out that her master sold her out to the Empire after extreme torture, turned the Dark Side and became one of the top-ranking Jedi hunters.

Our hero, Cal Kestis, not only fights her, but makes an actual effort to redeem her--despite her being the one hunting him across the galaxy throughout the entire game. Her goal is to grab the Jedi Holocron Cal’s after, which holds the names of a butt-ton of Force-sensitive children, in the hopes of either eliminating them or recruiting them. And yet Cal sees the good in her, and tries to bring her back to the light. And after her final boss fight, it looks like maybe he’ll succeed.

And then Vader walks in, berates Trilla for her failure, and kills her. Her last words are: “Avenge us.”

Which is… odd. Not in an ‘out-of-character’ way, but interesting and not what one might expect. 

It reminded me of Maul’s final death in Star Wars: Rebels. As he’s dying on Tatooine, having been bested for the final time by Obi-Wan, he realizes that he’s there to protect someone (Luke), and asks if he’s the Chosen One. When Obi-Wan answers in the affirmative--George Lucas disagrees, but it’s not out of the question that Obi-Wan himself thinks Luke’s the Chosen One--Maul says, as his last words, “He will avenge us.”

Now both of these cases aren’t really redemption. I don’t think anyone would ever look at Maul’s character arc and call it redemption. I think Trilla’s arc ends just short of redemption, because maybe she’s about to start down that path, but Vader kills her before she can reach it. But both of them are, in their final moments, portrayed sympathetically. Trilla gets sympathetic moments long before her end--Maul only sporadically gets those, and those mostly relate to his brother Savage. But in these sympathetic death scenes, their last words about how they would be, or should be, avenged.

This is odd.

If you’ve been paying any attention to Star Wars, unlike in most pop culture fiction, revenge is almost universally portrayed as a Bad Thing. In mainstream Star Wars media, you can probably drop the ‘almost.’ This is not what being a Jedi is about. Revenge is giving in to anger and hatred, to negative emotions. The Jedi aren’t doing the good things that they do because they want revenge, it’s because it’s the right thing to do--defeating the villains will stop oppression and bring balance back to the universe.

So we have two villains who have sympathetic death scenes, asking or hoping for something that we’re repeatedly told is a Bad Thing, a selfish act that we know (from the way the story works) won’t actually make anything better. They know that a Wrong has been done, not just to themselves, but to the balance, and something needs to be done to fix it. And so they request the one way to fix imbalance that they understand: revenge. They’re not redeemed, and these lines make it clear that’s the case, but they were reaching for it and they still want things to be fixed from the wrongs they’ve experienced, the things that have twisted them to the Dark Side.

I know Star Wars gets some flack from people as being very “Black and White” in its regards to morality. As I’ve explained before, I have never really minded this--I’m not going to complain about the fascist authoritarian government run by space satanist wizards being portrayed as Evil. But I think making the assumption that the setting has absolute Good and Evil means that there are no in-betweens, and that characters must fall into one or the other all the way is a mistake. Here we have two characters who are villains, and are quite wrong in the final wishes they express--explicitly so by the rules of the text. But they’re not portrayed, in that moment, as being worthy of sympathy.

It’s a small thing, but a really interesting bit of dialogue in both cases that shows a complexity in the characters that I think isn’t talked about enough.

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Social Media & Relationships

 You know I just discovered how to make Ubisoft Connect rewards work on Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and that means that I can pick up some free stuff in-game and that’s...handy. I didn’t know this. Hm.

Don’t forget that this upcoming week is when FAT BEAR WEEK begins!

Also reminder that I’ve got a Fun Fact Friday tag on Tumblr for Fridays.

Anyway I’m going to sound like an old person and complain about social media for a bit! This isn’t about fiction/criticism as much as thing I’ve been thinking about.

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Social Media & Unintentional Effects on Relationships

I am going to talk about the possible unintentional effects of social media; this isn’t going to be about misinformation or your information being sold to advertisers or things like that. That’s kind of obviously evil and I don’t know if I’m equipped to talk about that in any capacity other than, “Don’t be a dick, don’t share false information, and the corporations are totally out for your money/soul.”

But I’ve been thinking a lot lately, now that I know so many people getting married and having children, that I don’t understand the appeal, but also more relevantly to the essay that a lot of us have stuff on our Facebook accounts and I don’t know if that’s… I don’t want to use the word ‘appropriate’ but that’s what comes to mind. I’m not talking about like college parties or that. I mean…

Okay. People have baby pictures. Your parents have baby pictures of you somewhere. Maybe they’re in a visible place in their homes! That’s probably okay, unless you specifically told them not to do that and they’re still doing it. But what I’m seeing on Facebook every so often are people taking pictures of their infant and toddler children basically every other day, if not more often, and sharing them with the world. Sometimes these baby pictures include things like “Baby’s first bath!” or “Here’s my baby wandering around naked, te-he!” 

I’m sorry, would you be thrilled if your parents started sharing pictures of you as a naked baby on the Internet? Yeah, babies are naked sometimes, and sometimes you show people baby pictures. That’s fine. But there’s something quite different between showing the person sitting next to you pictures of your baby taking a bath and it being on the Internet. Of course these things can be deleted, and I don’t know that anyone’s expecting, twenty years from now, all of today’s babies will dig through Facebook and find dozens of their own baby pictures. I’ve noticed that in general people don’t tend to look at older Facebook photos. But that also means that a lot of people are probably not thinking of deleting their old photos.

I don’t think people should be constantly posting pictures of their young children on Facebook is what I’m getting at. Not because it’s wrong at the moment, but I am worried about a generation of children growing up and realizing that their pictures have been on the Internet for decades in embarrassing moments that their parents decided to share with the world. Not just once or twice, but for basically their entire childhood. I don’t want a lot of my baby pictures out in public.

Also with people getting married, there are people’s pictures with past relationships? And that strikes me as weird. Not as bad as baby pictures all over, usually, and I imagine people who get along with their exes are probably fine. I know that some people, upon a breakup, delete all pictures that depict them with their exes. And that used to strike me as a bit much, but at the same time, this is a public platform, and I get that some people might not want to be associated with a past relationship, especially if it ended badly.

But it’s all there. It’s all recorded in Facebook. No, we can’t delete the past, fine, but there’s a difference between admitting and not covering up past relationships, and having them all on display on a public platform. And this one’s trickier than the baby pictures I think, because it probably isn’t ideal to just not post pictures of yourself with your significant other until you’re sure it’ll work out, because that seems overly like you’re terrified of doing anything close to commitment.

I don’t know how this is going to shake out, but I think some time, maybe not soon, we will start to look more and more about how social media affects people in the long-term. Not just in the ‘Facebook is actively showing me things to make me mad’ kind of way (although it is, and you should be aware of that) but in a ‘I am displaying all of my relationships to the world for as long as the Internet exists and that’s probably not healthy in the long run.’

I’m not trying to say social media is inherently evil or anything like that. There’s a lot of good that comes from it, and from being able to share parts of your life with each other and with the world. But I have concerns about how people’s lives and relationships are affected further down the line.

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The Faithful & the Fallen and Predictable Endings

 I actually wrote another Saturday Note for this week, and personally I think it’s quite good (probably better than this one, sadly), but I question the wisdom of writing and publishing something like that, and if there’s the tiniest chance that it could go horribly wrong… well, let’s pass on that.

Anyhow I started the next Wheel of Time and also reviewed the Cassandra Clare “Draco Trilogy” plagiarism debacle thing (for Reasons?). I can’t do a Note about that because I don’t care enough but feel free to go look that up.

And I need to work on my Gunpowder Milkshake review...

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The Faithful & the Fallen and Predictable Plot

So with Wrath I finally finished The Faithful and the Fallen quartet by John Gwynne. It was good. But something I said in my Book Diary post was that I found the conclusion to be more than a little predictable, but if it wasn’t clear there I want to point out that I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Just because I know some of the story beats on what’s going to happen, that doesn’t mean the story has failed.

There are a bajillion Tumblr posts about this these days because of reactions to popular media, but floating around is a notion among writers of pop cultural media that a good story is one that surprises you. And it is good when a story surprises you, sometimes, but that in and of itself is not good writing.

It’s probably… not great to quote Doug Walker given how crap Channel Awesome turned out to be towards its employees, but I remember his commentary on one of his negative reviews, in which his brother points out that the plot twist he spent a chunk of the review eviscerating, well, it is unexpected, and he certainly didn’t see it coming. To which Doug replied, “I wouldn’t have seen it coming if the movie revealed that the main character’s mother was actually broccoli, but that doesn’t make it good writing.”

I think about that a lot.

In the effort to shock you or get a reaction, sometimes media will do something really dumb. Sometimes it’s characters acting in a way that’s contrary to their natures or common sense. Sometimes it’s a villain pulling something out of his armpit to make everything worse when the story’s about to wrap up. Sometimes it’s a reveal that contradicts everything you’ve been told. It’s not good writing is what I’m getting at, but the decision was made because the story needs something that the audience didn’t predict and that’s what the writers came up with.

The Faithful and the Fallen doesn’t really do that. Not much, anyway. There are some twists, yeah, but the conclusion of the story isn’t far from what you might expect. By the end of the third book, you have a pretty clear idea of where all the characters’ arcs are going to go, and now you’re sticking around to see them get there. And because you’ve spent all this time with them, you want to see it happen.

Basically, if you care about the characters, if you’ve been following their stories, and you’ve been paying attention to the overall story, then you know where it’s going. You don’t know how it’s going to get there, but you have the general idea. When you finally reach the end of their stories, it feels like a reward. And I’m not saying that every story or character arc needs to feel like that; there’s something to be said about character arcs that end in non-standard ways. But that should not become a new standard. You shouldn’t just twist out of satisfying endings when they don’t make sense because you absolutely MUST make sure your audience doesn’t know what happens in the end.

[The biggest twist, as I said in the Book Diary post, is that Lykos lasts as long as he does. Honestly, he’s a character that outstayed his welcome and continues to be a pain in the butt. I get that it’s probably the point of his character, that the author wanted to create this absolutely detestable villain, but I just found him annoying and I couldn’t quite figure out how he wasn’t dead two books ago.]

Maybe the story could have done with more twists in it. The only really big one to the Plot happens at the end of the third book, and while it’s a big character moment for our hero, it’s not actually that much of a game-changer in terms of Plot, and I can’t help but wonder if the story would have done better without it.

If a story does insist on surprising you, it shouldn’t necessarily be with a plot twist. You can very easily surprise the audience by playing with the expected tropes; that way you’re not actually changing something in the Plot, you’re just showing a different perspective that isn’t what you usually get. The opening to the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer comes to mind. It doesn’t rewrite Plot or undo any character development for it to work. That one has the advantage of being the first scene of the series so it can’t really overwrite anything that came before (except the movie, I guess?). But it’s something that sets the tone for the series and your expectations without derailing the story.

I don’t want to know how every story ends. But I like being able to read serieses and thinking to myself about what the characters’ actions mean, about how they relate to the Plot, and about how it all comes together, and then feel as if my thinking actually had merit, whether I was right or wrong. I want my thoughts on the story to actually have some weight, and not be something jerked around for the author’s fun. And it should certainly feel like the author’s been traveling down a planned road by the time we reach the ending.

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Assassin's Creed: Valhalla & Going All-In

 Why hallo, I have had a weird week, but it’s over now and I can kick back, relax, and play “Siege of Paris.” And maybe I’ll FINALLY get to watching Gunpowder Milkshake on Netflix.

Also expect an update on the Book Diary. It’ll take a while after that because I’m reading Wrath by John Gwynne which is fairly long.

Anyhow.

Saturday Note.

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Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and Going All-In

I have been talking some trash about Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla lately and I want to be clear: there ARE things I like about this game, hence why I’m still playing it. And there are a few things it does really well. I considered making this Note for ImpishIdea (and I still might adapt it), but given I’m going to bang on about Plot for a bit, I’m worried that I’d feel the need to explain every single Plot element and I don’t want to do that for a bunch of strangers.

What I really like about Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla is how all-in it is in its approach to telling an Assassin’s Creed story. I’ve complained in the past that many Assassin’s Creed games don’t want to lean too heavily on the overarching mythology and Plot because they want to attract new players. The prequel game that explains the origins of the Assassins, for instance, doesn’t really have that many overt callbacks to previous games in the series or much care about continuity. It’s frustrating. The main writer for that game is actually a newcomer to the series, which seems a bizarre choice in doing an origin story.

Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla doesn’t have that problem. Not only does it have veteran AC writer Darby McDevitt as the lead writer for the game, and so he crams the story with as many callbacks, references, shout-outs, and little bits of backstory and worldbuilding. We find out how the Order of Ancients is taken down and rebuilt into the Templar Order, we find out what that whole ‘Father of Understanding’ business is about, we see SO much First Civilization content in the game, we move the Modern Day Plot along, we meet Juno again...it is ridiculous how much stuff is packed in there for long-time fans. I have been questioning if this storyline is even comprehensible to players who haven’t been following this series for years, because many of the reveals rely on understanding details from previous games.

This game has callbacks to just about every major game release in the series except for Liberation (which is arguably not a major release, sadly) and Syndicate (which is downright bizarre because that one also takes place in England. Unity I think doesn’t get one until the expansion “Siege of Paris” but that kind of makes sense so I’ll count it. There are random bits like the Yggdrasil medallions that the Order of the Ancients wear, similar to the one Shay wears in Rogue. The Sage business from Black Flag. The storylines in London, Winchester, and York are pretty directly homages to the missions in the original game. The puzzles and short video and practice Animus things from the Ezio stories. And so on.

Likewise the mythology segments also have so much material? I didn’t know how they would manage to combine the binding of Fenrir, the building of Asgard’s walls, the Mead of Poetry, and Mimir’s Well into one story that’s coherent, but they did? And it all ties into the First Civilization story by making Ragnarok into a distortion of the Toba Catastrophe. IT’S SO COOL.

This is a series that repeatedly has things happen and mostly hints at bigger things to come, or that it will explain what it’s talking about, but then never actually gets to those things or explanations. It’s immensely frustrating. And then this game comes along and just says, “You know what? It’s time that you got some payoff to all the things we’ve been talking about all along.” I really appreciate that.

The whole ‘Let’s do a slow burn story and by that I mean not do any major reveals for the overarching story for years on end’ is a popular thing with long-running series because, again, they want to attract new viewers, readers, or players in the audience who would get confused by heavy continuity and would rather be comfortable slipping into the thing right in front of them without years of backstory. And that’s understandable. But if you’re telling a story in that format you have to have things moving forward, and you can’t keep delaying every reveal and major story point. Then you get things like Assassin’s Creed: Origins which dumped the series’s main villain and barely explains how it ties into already-established lore, all in hopes of not overwhelming the player.

I’m reminded of a thing, and I want to say that I heard it in a promotional behind-the-scenes video for the PS4 Spider-Man game, in which someone on the team says that in a conversation with Stan the Man, Stan Lee explained that his approach to comic book writing was this: go all-in on every issue. Put as much action, as much drama, as much COOL STUFF as you could in each installment, because you don’t know if this is the first or only installment that your reader is picking up and you want it to be as memorable and cool of an experience for the audience as you can each time. You don’t want people picking up one comic and deciding it was boring, and it was because that was a boring filler episode; you want each one to stand out and be a chance to be someone’s favorite.

And that’s a good approach to comics, and it’s a good approach to long-running series of any medium. And yeah, okay, I get it, sometimes you’re going to have to delay putting in some things for drama so there can be a big reveal later, or not everything you want fits in one installment, or there are budget issues or something. That’s okay. But you do need to make each issue, or game, or webpage, or book or whatever actually feel like it’s worth reading, especially several installments in, so that the audience feels rewarded for sticking with it this far, and newcomers get a sense of what the entire story’s like. 

Every part of the story should try to be a reward for having read/watched/played it.

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"The Only Way"

 I am currently reading Burr by Gore Vidal, which is interesting to say the least because of its view of the Founding Fathers. I have some pictures to put up of last weekend still to do. But I’m happy because I can take it easy this weekend! Not only because I’m not going anywhere, but because I don’t have work as Mondaybor Day is Labor Day!

Anyhow this was prompted by this past week’s episode of Marvel’s What If…? on Disney+. So there will be some spoilers for that, though I won’t give away the episode’s ending, I think.

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“This is the Only Way!” Is it? Really?

So this week’s episode of What If…? was good, I think, but it suffered a bit because the premise didn’t work for me. The title is “What if Stephen Strange lost his heart instead of his hands?” and it’s if he was still dating Christine, and instead of losing full use of his hands in the car accident Christine died. And he pursues the mystic arts and becomes Sorcerer Supreme and the events of his storyline continued as they did in his movie, until after defeating Dormamu he decides to use the Time Stone to try to go and save Christine. It doesn’t work, and every attempt to save her life and relive that night ends in failure. He’s told, upfront, that this is a destined event, a fixed point in time, or whatever you want to call it. This is a thing that absolutely has to happen in the timeline in order for him to become Sorcerer Supreme.

Except it’s not.

We know it’s not. Because we saw his movie. We see that this is not a thing that has to happen for him to be become a powerful sorcerer. We know this for a fact.

This reminded me of Doctor Strange’s whole bit in Infinity War and Endgame, in which he tells Tony (and the audience) that he has seen millions of different possibilities and there’s only one in which they come out victorious. And again, I have trouble buying that one because we see several times throughout Infinity War that the Avengers and friends come really close to stopping or killing Thanos several times. And if they did, it’s not like he has a contingency in place to keep his plan going. It’s not like all of the almost-got-him’s are because of inherent character flaws from the heroes--in many cases it’s basically luck that Thanos survives. If Peter Quill had decided to shoot Thanos in the head instead of punch him. If Thor’s axe had gone a bit higher. And so on.

I’m also reminded of Rumpelstiltskin’s Plot in the first couple of seasons of Once Upon a Time, in which it’s revealed that the entire story was a play by him to be able to find his son again using the one method of magic possible to travel between worlds. Except as the show keeps going we keep seeing more and more methods of travelling between worlds, some of which Rump, being an immortal sorcerer who collected artifacts and travelled far and wide, would have known about. The longer the show runs, the more ridiculous it is that the only possible way Rump could think of to get back to his son was a convoluted curse that involved temporarily losing his magic and filling a town in Maine with people he despised.

My point is this: if you tell your audience that the way the Plot is happening is the only way it could have happened, you have to sell that to the audience. You have to make the audience believe that. You can’t just say “It has to be this way” and then fail to make it evident that it’s true.

Now this doesn’t apply to times when this explanation is used and it’s obvious BS. The BBC Merlin has an episode where a sleeping curse is afflicting Camelot, and the Dragon tells Merlin the only way to fix it is to kill the source of the curse, his friend Morgana. And as he struggles to keep himself awake for hours on end, and keeps failing to find some alternate solution, he eventually poisons Morgana and refuses to give Morgause the name of the poison used until she lifts the curse. And he justifies it as being the only way, and it’s dumb, but at the same time he’s called on it a lot by Morgana, who turns evil after this because of this precise occurance. And the advice to kill her in the first place is given by the Dragon, who is not always a truthful source and has reason to want Morgana dead. It’s a dumb decision, and “the only way to fix things” may be said, but it’s arguably BS in-universe as it is out.

I have a lot of other issues with this show, and with the character’s decisions in that one episode, but I don’t think it’s too egregious.

Likewise, there’s a bit in the mythological section of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla in which, after Tyr has his arm torn off by Fenrir, Odin gives a not-apology, and Tyr replies that it was fated to happen so he doesn’t blame his BFF for making him lose his hand--it had to happen that way after all. And even though it’s not explicitly said, it’s very obvious that this isn’t true. Yes, the Aesir see it that way, because of their fatalistic view of life, but this entire business would have been avoided had Odin not been a raging douchebag so terrified at his upcoming demise that he gets trigger happy enough to try to kill Loki’s son Fenrir the second he lays eyes on him. Again, this reasoning is obviously BS.

If you tell your audience something, the thing that makes the entire story work, you’d better make sure the rest of the story backs it up. If the story tells us something has to happen then if we spend the rest of the story telling ourselves it could easily have happened otherwise… well, then it didn’t quite work. You should never leave a point in the story in which the audience is always asking why they didn’t just do it another way, if it can’t be answered by something like, “It’s how that character thinks/acts.” Because yeah, sometimes people don’t act in ways that are entirely logical. But if there are obvious loopholes to a situation, or if it all comes down to luck, you absolutely cannot tell us that it has to happen the way that it does.

Especially with that Doctor Strange example from What If…? because we’ve explicitly seen that it doesn’t have to happen that way.

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