Fantasy Battles
After watching Yahtzee take apart the XBox 360 game “Too Human”, I saw a trailer for the new Warhammer Online game starting up, so I stuck around. Now, I won’t be playing “WAR”, as it’s called, if for no other reasons than a) I’m still enjoying WoW just fine, thank you, and b) as is so often the case, I’m using the wrong OS. One WAR developer’s mentioned with a wink that he’s working on something important involving his non-Windows computer, but I take that with a Massively Multiplayer Grain Of Salt (MMGOS).
Okay, but I do read the blogs from the beta testers, and it looks like while WAR won’t be a revolution in online role-playing, they have a few nifty ideas, and kudos to them if they make it all work. As I’ve said before, I’ve long grown out of the idea that my fandoms and other people’s fandoms must engage in steel cage matches until only one can stagger out. But the point of this whole entry is the reaction I had to the trailer, a reaction that surprised me. While I might have been interested in the game under other circumstances, I hated the trailer. I had an intense negative reaction to it. Why?
WAR has two ‘factions’ one can play: Order and Destruction. In the trailer, we see Destruction assault a capital city of Order. Death is everywhere, people dying of (bloodless) sword wounds, spear wounds, arrow wounds, magical fire, magical ice, and crushing mass. The trailer shows us the Dwarves, Humans, High Elves, Dark Elves, Greenskin, and Chaos forces slaughtering each other as the city is knocked apart around them. (I am somehow unsurprised that both Elven ‘hero’ avatars are females who manage to make it through the trailer unscathed, and in the case of the Dark Elf, scantily dressed.)
So, of course there’s war. It’s called Warhammer! But the video made something abundantly clear: in the world of Warhammer, Destruction wins.
It may not look like it. The last scene of the trailer shows the three Order races facing some huge monster, and we are led to believe that the resolution is up in the air. But look around the heroes. There are bodies everywhere. The city is smashed. Even should the monster be defeated, Destruction can just come back tomorrow, to a city that’s still smashed and carpeted with the dead.
(Oh, I know that in the game, the city will reset overnight, buildings will spring back into existence, and the citizens will respawn. I’m not talking about the game, I’m talking about the fictional world.)
It takes years to build a city, weeks to construct a building, and decades to produce an adult warrior. It only takes hours, minutes, or seconds to end that existence. Destruction is easy. The years of food and housing and training and socializing that went into that warrior are countered with a single arrow. If all one cares to produce is wreckage, the world is quite willing to help.
(This, by the way, is why I had to give up on Battletech fiction after a while. Excellent games, and the individual novels ranged from okay to excellent, but they painted a reality where a star-faring humanity nearly pounded itself back to coal and steam, called a truce, recovered long enough to rebuild some technology, and then immediately resumed smashing everything within the reach of a Jump Drive. And they did this cycle repeatedly.)
Now, the game isn’t exactly its fiction. Once online, Order and Destruction have nigh-infinite resources in the long run, and new weapons, warriors, and metropolises with the click of a mouse button. But the fictional background shown in that trailer is far too bleak and pointless for my tastes, and unless the WAR loremasters have something up their sleeves, this is a world that offers me little appeal.
A sea of happy oddness
On my morning drive I listened to a podcast this morning interviewing James Randi, noted stage magician and skeptic. He raved about Dragon*Con, calling it a gathering of 37,000 people where everyone is weird, smart, and surprisingly nice. Randi expressed amazement at the way that everyone “fits in” at Dragon*Con, even a cranky 80-year old magician, and that he’d be attending future Dragon*Cons whenever possible.
Fandom sure doesn’t have all the answers, but when we get it right, fandom rocks, doesn’t it?
I hope to go next year. I wanna meet some Mythbusters.
Totalitarian Fan Fashion
tzel reposted an very good article from
Rule One: Steampunk fashion is a real-world reproduction of the clothing that is or could be found in steampunk literature. It’s that simple. Note the phrase “could be” in that sentence.
Rule Two: When in doubt, dress Victorian and then add. Here’s a nice simple baseline. Again, that’s baseline, not Scripture.
Rule Three: Steampunk fashion is about creating an [entertaining] outfit […]. Never feel obliged to take away from the style or appeal of an outfit simply because you fear it will be “not steampunk enough.” There is no “steampunk fashion bible”, and attempts to create one should be ignored.
Rule Four: There is no “steampunk color.” Some people have claimed that steampunk is only brown, or only black, or only white, or only light, or only dark. They are wrong. In reality, Victoria herself may have stuck to black, but the rest of the world didn’t. And we’re not exactly recreating reality here anyway.
Rule Five: You are allowed to like other genres. If you like a style of fashion that does not fit into steampunk be proud of it. This is not One Fandom to Rule Them All, any more than pulp SF, Trek, anime, B5, fursuiting, Galactica, or Firefly were. It is a way for like-minded individuals to have fun.
Rule Six: Have fun and be yourself. That’s what this is about. Don’t feel compelled to conform with everyone else. Fandom needs individuals and noncomformists. You didn’t join the counterculture just to find a clique within it. Express your vision!
I often feel that there are too many rules, too many pecking orders, too many boundaries in fandom. Perhaps some of them evolved from guidelines intended to help the socially unskilled from being complete jerks. But I think much of it comes from people’s natural tendency to find a leader and be part of a movement, safe inside something bigger than they are. But fandom’s roots are in dreams, imagination, and fun; and when a leader intentionally or unintentionally suppresses that in service to his or her own vision, it’s a mistake.
The very first group I hooked up with, Starfleet, had ranks imitating its fictional namesake. The idea was that these ranks would reflect a recognition of service to the club and a responsibility for the club’s operation. But some of the fans decided that the rank gave them paramilitary power, and that they could make decisions for the other club members. This caused enough trouble that, eventually, Chapter Chairpersons were specifically advised to downplay the “rank” structure in chapter activities.
Conversely, my own first chapter, and the ones that followed it, encouraged personal uniforms of the fan’s own design; ran role-playing sessions in which anything that could be shoehorned into the Trek universe was allowed; and treated ‘ranks’ as a subject for silly wordplay. (Woe to my first chapter chairperson when she attained the rank of Rear Admiral.) We did massive damage to Paramount canon in those days, but boy, did we enjoy ourselves.
I suspect that the modern preoccupation with the ‘right way’ to be a fan is partly the Internet’s fault; by making it so easy for a fan to find people who agree with their point of view, the ‘Net made it less necessary to learn tolerance and even appreciation of the fen who didn’t quite. But it also offers more exposure to new and different ideas, and opportunities to have more fun and meet more people, not to mention more places to buy cool costume and accessory stuff, so there’s no point in technology-bashing.
Recently, I’ve had the privilege of visiting some cons willing to relax the boundaries, ditch the unnecessary rules, and throw wrenches into the artificial fan heirarchies. I love this, and I think it’s beneficial to nearly every fan. So at the next con you attend, help bring some craziness back; wear a hall costume, cheap or fancy, and wear it your way! Wear a leather miniskirt with your Galactica uniform; furry ears and tail of a species unknown to real or speculative zoology; an anime costume where the fabric choice and sleeve length are darn well inaccurate, thank you; or, horrors, a steampunk costume in red and silver! Sure, some small-minded person may write something insulting in their blog when they get home.
So what? You’re having fun.
Brief updates
- 07:51 Down from 38-inch waist to 36. The walking and Coca-Cola deprivation is accomplishing something! #
- 10:46 It’s amazing how motivated I can become from just a bit of kudos and recognition. #
Sent subspace radio by LoudTwitter
Let’s Not Do the Time Warp Again
MTV is planning to remake the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
What a complete and utter waste of time and money. Something as bizarre as RHPS happens once. You can’t make it better; after all we don’t keep going to see it because it’s good. We go to see it specifically because it scrambles one’s brain, rinses it, and hangs it up to dry; all the while supported by Richard O’Brien’s catchy songs, Tim Curry’s matchless hamming, and a theater full of fellow weirdos who, for 100 minutes, are in the same headspace with us.
I wish them good fortune – they’ll need quite a lot of it.
One Small Step
Thirty-nine years ago today…
“Houston… Tranquility Base here… the Eagle has landed.”
From that day on, mankind could only be limited to one fragile world if they chose to be. For the most part, we have chosen that, but I don’t think that state of affairs is permanent. I don’t believe we can afford to let it be so.
A-one, and a-two…
So who was I listening to in the car on the way to work today?
The Dresden Dolls and OreSkaBand. I would have liked to see OreSkaBand when they were here this week, but I couldn’t exaclty take Tuesday off 🙁
I blame my musical taste on my mother, who tricked me into liking classical and folk in addition to the rock I got off the radio; and Tom Monaghan, who ate little more than ramen through his college years in order to acquire a huge and supremely eclectic CD collection.
When someone asks me what they’re likely to find on my iPod, I answer “almost anything from a Bach symphony to Japanese bubblegum punk.”
Walked a mile-and-a-half today. I really need to do this earlier in the morning before the mercury tops 80.
Grown-ups of Time
I recently finished Series 4 of the revived Doctor Who. In many ways, the finale wrapped up and tied together the last four years of programming, as Russell Davies is moving on to other projects. The finale was a slam-bang affair, one comparable to ST:TNG’s “The Best of Both Worlds” in breathtaking moments and an edge-of-the-seat cliffhanger. However, the finale underscored certain themes of Davies that I hope to see put to rest.
Originally, the Doctor was a political fugitive from his people, but he eventually evolved into a crusader of Time and Space, saving individuals and entire planets from oncoming disaster. His fourth incarnation sacrificed himself to save the existence of the universe from one man’s foolishness. The Doctor was clearly fulfilled by his never-ending quest.
When the Doctor returned to television, he was in some ways a broken man. He had been at least partially responsible for the destruction of his race in an attempt to prevent an apocalypse (a futile attempt, as it turned out). Other characters made much about the Doctor as the bringer of Death. Of course, he repeatedly staves off even greater death and destruction, but apparently one gets minimal points for that.
Rose Tyler’s love healed the Doctor, and in fact he began to return the emotion openly for the first time in the 40-year history of the show. But he then regenerated into a new body and personality, and Rose was forced to leave him, and he sank into depression and despair. The crusader of Time and Space was replaced by a sad, lonely immortal who kept on keeping on mainly because he didn’t have anything better to do.
When the villain of the finale mocks the Doctor for creating a band of “Children of Time”, willing tools who will aid our immortal in the destruction of lives and worlds, it’s completely unfair, and yet the Doctor shows hurt and shame. What he’s really done, of course, is give a succession of companions a broader perspective, the skills and the confidence to defend themselves and their loved ones, and the ability to make the awful decisions at times when the Doctor isn’t around. They are “Grown-ups of Time” now, but the Doctor is too busy wallowing in failure to deal with that.
The new helmsman, Steven Moffat, has written episodes that temporarily bring back the crusader. While Moffat’s Doctor in these tales retains a vulnerability that the older series did not give him, he remembers his role as the defender of Life, and revels in the challenge. I absolutely hope that future seasons return to that philosophy, as the worn-out, depressed Doctor is a shadow of the beings he once were, and I become sadder with every episode in which he flails about desperately.
Why have I gone on at length about this? Because the older Doctors, the Fourth especially, represent in many ways the person I’ve always wanted to be. Assertive, cheerful, full of wonder, and up to the challenges of life. Frankly, the Doctor these days has a far emptier life than I do, and it’s hard to see the fictional hero I’ve felt so connected to suffer so. I guess this is something of a “Get Well” card to my old hero.
Further points, with spoilers, below
Thinned blood
My Mom’s back in the hospital. The blood thinner she had been prescribed caused some internal bleeding; it seems to have stopped, and she’ll probably be out again by the weekend. But… oy.
We found a Jamaican cafe / grocery less than two blocks from us last night, and I tried curry chicken for the first time ever. Extremely yummy, though I’m not used to eating anything that shade of yellow; nor am I used to picking that many tiny sharp chicken bones from my teeth. Oh, and an hour later, my stomach was not pleased with these new spices at all. Still, yum.
The apartment building I live in is very nice, but it’s still an apartment building. One of the tenants on my floor has had multiple summonses taped to their door in recent months; this last weekend, they moved out in a flurry of activity (mysteriously bringing a mattress into the place in the process). Well, police showed up a couple of days later to pound on their door, and there’s an eviction notice taped there now (which doesn’t exactly change much at this point). I’m actually sad. They seemed nice enough, and it’s a shame when people’s mistakes land on them so hard.
At this moment, I am rather physically and emotionally weary. I’ll be fine, it’s hardly life-threatening. But the assertiveness I have been trying to encourage in myself in recent months is eluding me a bit just now. Of course, now is when I really need it.
Oh, and the smoke’s back in Portsmouth this morning. Koff.
Seven Words Ain’t Enough
Lots of people have posted about George Carlin’s passing. I’ll miss the man; he and Steve Martin were the first two comedians whose albums my parents took away from me 🙂
Much has been made of his dark, often nihilistic humor lately, but many seem to miss that it was the humor of a disappointed idealist who knows that people are better than this, dammit, and hopes like hell that they’ll remember it in time.
