7th Station ~TV, movies, games~

[erilaz]

Speaking of Bruce Campbell, I just started watching Season 3 of Ash vs. Evil Dead.

I read a fair amount of non-fiction for pleasure, most recently John Cleese's memoir, So, Anyway....

[Celedam]

"U-niiiii!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kC9-bfsNne8

I'm linking rather than embedding because the poster frame ruins it.

For reference, which might actually be necessary if you're under 40…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCSRPIgKZVk

[Celedam]

Anyhow, next up for me is Sword Art Online, before it too expires off of Netflix.

I'm interested in what you end up thinking of SAO. It's one of the shows that I've been teetering back and forth on watching for a while now.

I watched SAO, and I guess it succeeded in being a Big Deal, like D&D meets Ready Player One, but at the same time it felt like the rump to a merchandizing tie-in, which I don't know is even true, but that's how it felt.

Yeah, I'm only a few episodes into it, but I'm getting the same feeling.

Okay, I just finished it.

As shōnen adventure/love stories go, it's well done but not groundbreaking. Ultimately, I'm disappointed because…

Spoiler: show

…it glosses over so many things that I personally would find interesting: how the players dealt with the psychological trauma of being trapped in the game world; how they organized themselves to wage a very real, years-long war against the game; and then how the survivors dealt with reintegrating into the real world. Those things are mentioned in the story — they even show a player suicide, and they imply there were more — but they're… <shrug> Like I said, they're glossed over.

For example, the introduction of Yui as a mental health care AI that was almost driven insane because she was forced to monitor the traumatized players but then was prevented from comforting them. I thought that was a great concept with lots of potential, but all they did with it was make her a child for Kirito and Asuna to play house with. And then later she was little more than Kirito's implausibly helpful pet. Feh.

What really annoys me, however, is the special school that is established for the survivors so they can make up the two years they missed. That could be an entire series in itself: how Kirito/Kazuto deals with the real-world fame of being the player who beat both SAO and ALO and saved all their lives; how he deals with multiple female admirers while he tries to develop his relationship with Asuna (it's shōnen, some harem is to be expected); how Leafa/Suguha deals with being surrounded by survivors even though she's not really one of them; how Asuna and Suguha get to know each other (as sisters? as rivals? goodness knows many dōjinshi have been written about this); how all of them deal with varying levels of rehab and/or PTSD, in themselves and each other; and how they as a group manage not only the public fallout from the SAO and ALO scandals but also the propagation of the World Seed across the Internet. Again, we know all of these things happen because they're all described or briefly shown in the epilogue, but all we get is that epilogue. I want more.

Maybe I'm simply too old for this kind of story. It's shōnen, so it's essentially a teenage boy's power fantasy, and Kirito/Kazuto has that covered well enough. He has his "hero's journey", so maybe the things I want to see are too incidental or too mature to be included in that journey.

EDIT: Reading the Wikipedia page for Sword Art Online, I see that in the second and third seasons Kirito/Kazuto does gain some real-world fame for beating the games and exposing the scandals, to the point that the Japanese government recruits him as a troubleshooter to investigate other virtual world scandals and crimes. (Which are partly his fault anyhow, since he and his SAO friends propagated the World Seed.) That's intriguing, but I'm worried that it's just a narrative frame for continuing the power fantasy and repeating the same story as the first season.

[Zunu]

I don't think it's that we're too old. It feels to me that anime in general has gotten less complex and imaginative in terms of storytelling, even within the typical genres like shounen/harem. I mean, I watched the hell out of the recent-ish western cartoons Adventure Time and Steven Universe, which were arguably targeted for younger audiences than your typical teen anime. It's when stories surprise you, and you become invested in the characters because there are important emotional stakes. The protagonist changes as a person in ways that seem earned. Anime used to excel at that, now not so much. Attack on Titan was like that to me for a while.

[Celedam]

These days I mostly read either non-fiction if I want to think […]

Augh, I get enough of that already, between work and current events.

And now I'm getting assigned reading for work. They're calling it a "book club", but that's a euphemism; I call it training, and therefore I will do it on company time.

First up is…

Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321437381/

[Zunu]

The video adaptation of the Neil Gaiman/Terry Pratchett book "Good Omens" is out on Amazon Prime, for those who like such things. I haven't seen it yet, may try to take a peek over the weekend.

[Celedam]

[O]ffline I'm currently reading The Player of Games, the second book in Iain M. Banks' Culture series, so my space opera needs are already covered.

I just read Consider Phlebas (first book) a few months back. It was well written I guess, but I still considered it a little bit of a slog, probably in the first instance because like a lot of people it's become hard for me to read full books any more. But also because, while I'm sure it was a rollicking space adventure in its time, with super-advanced tech and singularity-level AI that still plays as hard science, those themes been reused/ripped-off so many times in the years since then that it (unfairly) seems ho-hum in 2019. And also because, while I can appreciate the intellectual accomplishment of getting the details of things like orbital mechanics, microgravity, etc precisely right, in actuality I'm not checking the math, and just care that they sound kind of convincing, so I find myself kind of guiltily speeding over those passages instead of savoring them with any of the degree of attention the author put into them. And finally

Spoiler: show

...I felt that I had to work to like Horza, who is let's face it an asshole, and eventually I did, but then he dies at the end in a way that felt unsatisfying to me, from a space operatic perspective. I get it as literature. Banks was considered a "serious" writer and one of the things that "serious" writers don't do is keep characters alive for mawkish or sentimental reasons, but in this case his death seemed particuarly tacked on.

People I trust have said that Consider Phlebas is one of the worst books in the Culture series, and that later books are better. People have also said Consider Phlebas was meant to be difficult to get through, as hinted at by the title which is a reference to T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Nevertheless, the whirlwind-tour-through-the-galaxy format serves as a good introduction to the Culture.

It's too early for me to make a judgement about The Player of Games.

After a few false starts, I finally finished it. (Yay, vacation!) It's better than Consider Phlebas, but that's not saying much.

The blurb, so to speak: "Special Circumstances", the Culture's grey ops division responsible for subverting rival civilizations, recruits a renowned game theorist to travel to a recently contacted stellar empire in the Lesser Cloud, learn the empire's foundational and all-important game, and then play the game in a once-every-six-years grand tournament that determines the empire's ruling class. His participation in the tournament is supposed to be a sort of diplomatic mission, and his matches are supposed to be exhibitions with no real stakes, but things escalate quickly.

It's better than Consider Phlebas in that there is one continuous narrative, rather than a series of seemingly unrelated episodes, and the protagonist Gurgeh is more likable. Other than that, however…

Spoiler: show

…there's not much of an actual story. The empire's game is described as being too complicated to understand without years of study, so there is a lot of telling rather than showing. In a nutshell: "Gurgeh played a match against X; it was a struggle at first, but he rallied at the end. Gurgeh played a match against Y; he easily defeated his opponent." A lot of that, spread out over two hundred pages.

The thing is, with all of the contextual clues that are given in those two hundred pages, the game appears to be a super-sized version of Sid Meier's Civilization. This book was published in 1988, about three years before the first release of Civ, so the author might have been right to think at that time that readers would not understand. Thirty years and a zillion different 4X games later, however, it's old hat.

So if the game isn't the story, then what is? Frankly, it's a lot of on-the-nose social commentary. Just consider the following points:

1) Iain Banks is an old-school Scottish socialist;

2) His "Culture" is an early fictional example of what we now call "the singularity" — a hyper-advanced, post-scarcity, perfectly socialist utopia; and

3) In this book, the "game" is a metaphor for politics, the "tournament" is a metaphor for elections, and the "empire" is a metaphor for the real world, most likely Reagan's US and/or Thatcher's UK as viewed by an old-school Scottish socialist.

I won't go into details because they're really on-the-nose and therefore tiresome. You can probably guess without ever touching the book. Although I will say, given this view of the Culture, I now understand why Horza and the Idirans hated it so much in Consider Phlebas. I also understand why Horza was so unlikable: Banks was trying to write about someone who rejected his utopia without really understanding why anyone would.

I don't think I will continue with the Culture series. I've given it two chances now.

[Zunu]

I've read a chapter or so and still have it nominally on my to-read list so I won't check out your spoiler, but your non-spoilery portions don't bode particularly well. As I may have mentioned before, I've read a couple of his "literary" works, The Wasp Factory and The Bridge, and at best Banks is a rather grim slog, although one does feel like one has accomplished something vaguely meritorious upon completion. But as I have said, I don't know that I have it in me any more for too much in the way of "important" fiction that requires a lot of work.

On a lighter note, I enjoyed Amazon Prime"s Good Omens miniseries. It was fairly faithful to the source material and the two actors who played Aziraphale and Crowley (Michael Sheen and David Tennant) were pitch perfect.

[Celedam]

I've read a chapter or so and still have it nominally on my to-read list so I won't check out your spoiler […]

It's not really a spoiler spoiler, but okay.

On a lighter note, I enjoyed Amazon Prime"s Good Omens miniseries. It was fairly faithful to the source material and the two actors who played Aziraphale and Crowley (Michael Sheen and David Tennant) were pitch perfect.

Unfortunately, HBO's Chernobyl is sucking up all the oxygen right now.

---

In other news, Neal Stephenson's Fall; or, Dodge in Hell drops today. A quasi-sequel to Reamde.

I'm on the waitlist for it at my local library — number 18 of 20 requests as I write this, on 8 copies.

In the meantime, I've started The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker — also borrowed from my local library. We have a fantastic library system here.

[Celedam]

"I think it's time to live for me."



---

In other news, I've caught up on both Attack on Titan and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D..

Both are going pretty much as expected. Although…

The protagonist changes as a person in ways that seem earned. Anime used to excel at that, now not so much. Attack on Titan was like that to me for a while.

I don't see Attack on Titan as a character-driven story, at least not in the traditional sense. I see each character as an avatar or archetype for a specific trait that emerges in the broader population during a time of war. Eren is the rage against the enemy, Mikasa is the desire to protect what you love, Armin is the inspiration or innovation under fire, Conny is the loss of innocence, Sasha is the human will to survive, Jean is the professionalism earned in battle, Levi is the grim resolve to do what must be done, and so on. So if you're looking for character development, you need to look at the entire squad as a character and how it changes as the war progresses.

Spoiler: show

Commander Erwin was the desire to rationalize the war and understand its root causes, which is why he was killed off just before the squad finally arrived at Grisha Jaeger's basement. There was no longer a need for him as a narrative tool.