Category: On Writing

Is Shirou Sexist? A F/SN’s Fandom Case Study

  12/02/2015       SpoonyViking      60 Comments

Hello, everyone! We’re back with our regularly (hah!) scheduled spooniness. This time around, I’d like to do something a bit different from my usual: I’m going to perform a textual analysis of a post which tries to explain Shirou’s supposed sexism in the Fate/Stay Night visual novel.

Oh, and don’t worry about the fancy-pants title, this won’t read like a college paper – or heck, even a high school one.

Let me make myself perfectly clear: I am not doing this to “call out” the author, or anything of the sort. I am merely using their post to showcase a common issue in fandoms. Also, one thing we should keep in mind is that communication is difficult; after all, it’s not as if we’re all mind readers capable of immediately ascertaining exactly what someone else is saying, so we have to rely on a variety of things to convey meaning: choice of words, tone of voice, body language. As one can imagine, communication solely by written means is even more difficult, since we can’t rely on two of the methods I mentioned. So, I’ll exercise a reasonable amount of effort when analysing the post (emphasis on reasonable; after all, communication is a two-way street, so the burden doesn’t fall only on the receiver).

Here’s the aforementioned post. After the cut, I’ll proceed to the analysis.
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Fate / Stay Night, On Writing

Adventure Time, Continuity, and Tonal Consistency

  03/16/2017       St. Elmo's Fire      6 Comments

I got into Adventure Time about a year ago. It was billed as a spiritual predecessor to Steven Universe, so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. The quality is pretty haphazard – individual episodes can be very good, but for most of its run it seems to throw consistent storytelling to the wind. There’s basically no telling what will happen in a given episode, or how much we’re supposed to care; maybe a given plot point be revisited and turn out to be vitally important a few episodes later, maybe a few seasons later, maybe never. It currently has a number of interesting ongoing mysteries and plotlines, but it jumps between them seemingly at random, which can be frustrating. It overall feels like a show that’s constantly trying and failing to figure out what it wants to be.

There’s one plot point that I found particularly baffling, however, and I think it ties into a recurring problem in shows like these that toe the line between episodic and plotty: they can’t decide whether they want to play a potentially serious topic for drama or comedy.

(Spoilers for episode 6×22, for those of you who care.)

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   On Writing, TV Shows      , ,

Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass, and Open-Ended Stories

  08/30/2018       St. Elmo's Fire      9 Comments

Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass is an RPG by Kasey Ozymy, the developer of A Very Long Rope to the Top of the Sky and The God of Crawling Eyes, two games we previously reviewed. It’s clear that the developer learned a lot about game design in the intervening time; Jimmy is actually fun to play, with challenging battles that never feel like brick walls or games of roulette, as well as a tight and intuitive set of tools and mechanics for you to play with. It also just doesn’t bother with elemental effects, which I thought was a nice bit of streamlining. There’s a ton of content and it’s honestly a steal at $15, so definitely pick it up if you’re in the mood for a jRPG.

(Don’t bother with the postgame, though. It just throws you against the exact same enemies and bosses from the main game with literally no difference except bigger numbers, then caps it off with a really tedious battle that’s a total crapshoot followed by you effectively winning halfway through but having to continue punching your way through mountains of HP anyway. Save yourself the time and just look it up on YouTube.)

Unfortunately, story-wise, the author decided to dive into a completely different genre, and his inexperience in that area is very stark. The premise of the game is that it all takes place in the imagination of Jimmy, a young boy — and because it’s a world of his dreams, it’s also a world of his nightmares. To the developer’s credit, this is not your typical “looks cutesy but is secretly SUPER EDGY!!!” affair: the story does genuinely oscillate between horror and truly lighthearted segments, and most of the horror elements are relegated to the edges, which I thought was very fitting — to confront Jimmy’s repressed fears, you have to go searching for them. It does a really good job of making it feel like the horror is intruding on Jimmy’s fantasy, and that he’s actively trying to push it back.

My issue is that none of it really goes anywhere. The horror elements are all flash and no substance — or if there is substance, it’s so vague and opaque I can’t find it. Individual areas are very well-designed, but they don’t seem to add up into any coherent whole. Supposedly, the horror levels are meant to give us a psychological profile of Jimmy via his worst fears, but I couldn’t find any consistent thread that paints any meaningful picture beyond the most banal, superficial, and obvious reading. I wouldn’t mind this so much if the horror levels were just window dressing, but they’re not. The main story is one of those infuriatingly obtuse plots where everything is ~up to your interpretation~, right down to the ending itself, which explains absolutely nothing, not even what the Pulsating Mass is. The horror dungeons feel like they’re supposed to be vital pieces of the puzzle, but trying to use them to read into the main plot feels like grasping at straws.

More details under the cut, with major spoilers, obviously, but I will say that I don’t think the spoilers will ruin the game for you — the plot’s strength is in the characters and areas, and like I said, there’s not even a big ending reveal to spoil in the first place.

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   Horror, On Writing, Recommendations, RPGs, Video Games      , ,

Monster, and False Advertising

  02/14/2019       St. Elmo's Fire      17 Comments

So I recently took a look at the anime Monster (commonly referred to as “Naoki Urasawa’s Monster” to help you distinguish it from the pages of porn you’ll get by searching “monster anime”). When I saw the pitch, it sounded right up my alley: a talented doctor sacrifices his career to save a young boy over a politician, but later discovers the boy has grown up to become a serial killer. Sounds like a deeply philosophical piece about personal responsibility and the value of human life, right? I’m all about that stuff.

Turns out, that’s not what it’s about in the slightest. What it’s actually about is an absurdly convoluted mystery about the serial killer, who was actually serial killing even as a kid because of a convoluted secret evil government conspiracy to make him into a supersoldier, but he was ~so awesome~ he killed everyone in the facility and struck out on his own, and also there’s another evil government conspiracy in there somewhere. I don’t know exactly, I stopped watching after 10 episodes.

Because that’s simply not what I signed on for. The real story is nothing at all like the prologue; the doctor character actually resigns from his job so he can investigate Villain Sue, and his doctor skills are reduced to a tangential quirk as we focus mainly on other characters doing their own investigations, all of whom are equally bland and uninteresting.

This all makes me think about the purpose of plot twists, and when they’re valid and when they feel cheap. This isn’t a bait-and-switch exactly; it’s not even just a twist for the sake of a twist. But it still feels dishonest. The real premise of the story isn’t what you’re sold in the beginning. If you had told me from the start that this would be a detective novel about a giant conspiracy, I would have been better able to judge whether it aligned with my interests and adjust my expectations going in. But that’s not what I was told the story would be about, so instead I’m just annoyed it won’t engage with the things I picked it up for.

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   Anime, On Writing, TV Shows     

Dragon Age, Choices, and Railroading

  03/18/2019       St. Elmo's Fire      52 Comments

I’ve been getting into Dragon Age after Act and other friends recced it. I played Origins a little while ago, and recently finished Dragon Age 2. But for all the talk of the excellent writing and the meaningful choices the game offers, I found myself extremely disappointed and frustrated with just how little freedom I actually had, especially in DA2. There’s a really baffling disjunct between which characters you are and aren’t allowed to kill or save, and which choices are respected and which get quietly retconned or ignored.

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   On Writing, RPGs, Video Games      , , ,

Yahtzee Croshaw’s Dev Diary

  06/21/2021       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment

In 2019, Yahtzee Croshaw (the game reviewer who does Zero Punctuation) challenged himself to make 12 games in 12 months and document his progress every fortnight. As someone interested in game design myself, I checked them out and I recommend you do too. They’re all short, free, and incredibly varied.

In this post I’ll give my own ranking, and short thoughts on each one.

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   Action, Horror, On Writing, Platformers, Puzzle, Recommendations, Sim, Video Games      ,

Into the Breach and Star Renegades

  10/22/2021       St. Elmo's Fire      8 Comments

Into the Breach and Star Renegades are two very different games from two completely different developers, but they have a number of things in common I thought worth analyzing.

The premise of both games is identical: Alien invaders are attacking, and you must defend humanity by traveling across timelines and passing on your knowledge and technology every time. Both games have no true ending: After the end of every run, win or lose, there is always another timeline under threat that you must jump to.

What’s interesting is that despite this similarity, their execution of story elements is diametrically opposite, and both left me unsatisfied in different ways.

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   On Writing, Roguelike, RPGs, Video Games      ,

Knights of the Old Republic, and Author Dialogues

  09/24/2022       St. Elmo's Fire      7 Comments

Recently I decided to play Knights of the Old Republic, a wRPG set in the Star Wars universe. I initially ignored it because I’m not into Star Wars, but I decided to give it a shot to see what all the fuss is about; it’s supposedly one of the Great Story RPGs.

There are in fact two KOTOR games, and I found them a fascinating study in contrasts. The first was made by Bioware (the Dragon Age guys), and the second was made by Obsidian (the Planescape: Torment guys), making them a uniquely perfect comparison point between the two RPG giants.

The Bioware one is garbage. The Obsidian one is a fascinating deconstruction of the franchise that understands stories need to have themes and an actual point. But there’s actually a third side also worth examining here, which is audience reaction. See, after KOTOR2’s director said outright that one of the characters is his mouthpiece, a lot of players accused the game of being a one-sided author screed. This is despite the fact that, to me, he couldn’t have been more obvious telegraphing his intent to have a dialogue with the player, not a monologue. I think it’s worth analyzing what contributed to that reaction, and I think it’s related to the differences between Bioware and Obsidian.

(As games, they are both agonizingly terrible and Obsidian should just give up on trying to attach game mechanics to their stories. Seriously, how did everyone say “Combat is so tedious we need to automate it” and not realize something had gone horribly, horribly wrong. Someone please kill D&D with fire it is so bad and I hate it so much.)

Spoilers for both games if you care, but I was spoiled for KOTOR2’s major twists and it didn’t harm my enjoyment of the story. It actually even mocks the idea of revolving around a central plot twist.

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   On Writing, Recommendations, Video Games      ,