I am writing a formal essay about Tori and the nature of kingliness. when it is finished it will be linked here when
@LadyNighteyes, yes, I absolutely want to hear you talk about Terry Pratchett's use of deus ex machina.
night in the woods is so new but i want to talk about its plot not being great, that fact not really mattering in the context of its genre, and the function and balance of form, character, setting, plot, tone, and theme in weird fiction In short though, weird fiction is a genre that places a lot of weight upon tone, theme, and form. Sometimes at the expense of the other aspects.
Oh good. So. An odd feature of the Discworld novels, narratively, is that it's actually very common for a lot of the heavy lifting of the plot resolution to be done via an outside force swooping in and solving a big chunk of plot that the main characters are helpless against. The odder thing is that it usually works. It's always set up that this force exists beforehand- it's often even a major secondary character. But the way it works is still, on paper, a deus ex machina. The main characters are stumped, so something else comes in and solves the problem for them. Some examples, spoilered in case someone doesn't want to know the endings of a lot of Discworld novels: Spoiler In Wyrd Sisters, the mind of the country takes over the play In Small Gods, Om manages to get an eagle to pick him up and drop him with pinpoint precision on Vorbis's head In Feet of Clay, Dorfl reanimates despite having his chem removed In Guards! Guards!, Errol beats/seduces the King and they fly off In Witches Abroad, the Baron shows up basically having become the god of the swamp and sends Lily running In Lords and Ladies, the Queen's husband shows up and that's what finally gets her to leave In Carpe Jugulum, the Count shows up to tell his family how it's REALLY done In The Truth, Lord de Worde is about to ship William off somewhere less inconvenient when Otto bursts in and kicks a lot of ass In Monstrous Regiment, the Duchess possesses Wazzer, then Jackrum bursts in and blackmails the high command Hell, in Jingo, Vetinari swoops in after Vimes has gotten the donkey up the minaret And, notably, in Going Postal Moist fakes two separate supernatural interventions (Incidentally, Granny Weatherwax specifically is very often in a similar role of "provider of miracles," and only doesn't make this list because she's a main character.) The reason I bring this up in relation to that post I linked is because I think the thing they mentioned regarding plot twists is a lot of why these things that ought to be cop-outs (seriously, tell someone "the main villain is defeated because an eagle drops a tortoise on his head while he's executing the hero" and see how they react) work. For anybody who didn't read it, it's about The Twilight Zone, and Rod Serling's approach to plot twists: essentially, why they work is that the story is set up to ask a question, discuss that question, and then the twist answers it. I think the reason Pratchett's dei ex machina work is because they do that. The Feet of Clay one is probably the single most powerful on the above list, so I'm going to use it as an example. One of the big ongoing themes of Feet of Clay is that of "words in your head." Received principles- ideas and ideals taken from other people that tell you what to be. The golems are treated as machines because they're created by humans and powered by words of belief and go dark and "dead" without them. It's explicitly connected to Carrot's absorption of Vimes' ideals of law and equality- "Vimes put words in his head." When Dorfl has a receipt of ownership put in his head with his chem, the resulting existential crisis is represented as the words "GOLEM MUST HAVE A MASTER" literally eroding away under the realization that he owns himself. The King Golem is driven to murder, insanity, and suicide attempts by the sheer, conflicting volume of words in its head. Dorfl's arc is about realizing he doesn't have to obey and be what he was created to be, a theme that's paralleled (without the key phrase) by Cheery's coming out as female and coming to fit into the Watch and by Nobby's ultimate rejection of the imposed status of "Earl of Ankh." The words are outside restrictions- they give a direction, but it may not be one you want to go if you really think about it. There's no indication in the text before it happens that Dorfl could survive the removal and destruction of his chem. But narratively, there's no other way it could go. The King removed the words that were put in Dorfl's head, but Dorfl doesn't need those anymore, because he's made his own, and they're a lot less flimsy than paper. And a narrative like that's hard to fight on the Disc. It's an emotionally satisfying resolution because it's an answer to themes of the story: they're not machines. You can create your own place in the world different from what's prescribed for you. No matter how deeply an idea is impressed on you by others, you can find your own direction without it. You own yourself. (And, of course, it doesn't solve the whole climax. That's another common trait of these. There's still a vampire to menace with a crossbow and some civic leaders to threaten with an axe, loose ends which Vimes cleans up with aplomb.)
Spoiler: Monstrous Regiment One of the things that really gets me about the situation in this book is that people are hoping for the blessing of an indifferent-at-best greater power while praying for a benevolent lesser power to intercede on their behalf. And that's exactly what they get, but it's political. As in, they finally make a big enough noise to get the attention of Ankh-Morpork, a huge, wealthy, annoyed foreign power. And Vimes, as the ambassador on duty who would rather be benevolent than not, quietly arranges for them to have a chance to at least survive. It's not really what anyone thought to hope for, but it gets the job done. There's a lot of this sort of thing, with big fancy ideas carried out via the efforts of mere mortals trying to do the right thing because they believe, ultimately, that evil shouldn't just win without a fuss. It's really the only way anything gets done. I think the plot works because the power dynamics are reciprocal. It really drives home that these are tiny, flawed people pulled into the center of something so much bigger that they can barely even begin to perceive it. But they are still the ones at the center. They could fail and it would be a blow to every cause they represent. When the story reaches the climax, the struggles of politics, religion, and culture all align in the form of one fragile teenage girl who has been the victim of all these things. And she wins. (Sort of. For a little while. It's a start.) It doesn't dilute the story's power. It escalates the stakes of the characters' quests by orders of magnitude.
I need to sperg out about Serial Experiment Lain later. But I cry when I think about it and my chest hurts, so I gotta build up.
That's a common thing with a lot of them, yeah. Something is weak and vulnerable and spends the entire story needing taken care of by others with more power and then in the end they get power. Temporary, usually, but it's what was needed right then. Spoiler Om in Small Gods and the phoenix in Carpe Jugulum are both that way, for instance. Even Walter in Maskerade to a degree.
I guess Discworld also works because the Dei Ex Machinae (...is that the right, uh, conjugation? declension? grammatical form?) don't come from nowhere. They're part of the story, they're built up, hinted at, they're not the focus, and in at least one case (Lords & Ladies) basically just cleanup crew, the emotional payoff came in the form of the struggling mortals. The DEM doesn't waltz in and solve an unsolvable mess, they're dragged in by the protagonists, and part of the reason why they're even able to help is because the protagonists somehow managed to beat the situation from "utterly hopeless" to having a deceptively simple solution.
Thesis: the use of Hanahaki Syndrome as a plot device in fanfic is a precise parallel to the use of consumption as a plot device in Victorian literature.
ANYONE WANT TO HEAR ABOUT HOW TALES OF THE ABYSS PLAYS WITH THE USE OF EXPOSITION IN SPECULATIVE FICTION AND WHY THIS IS A HUGE PART OF HOW MILEAGE-VARYING IT IS
TotA, like many Tales games, is out for the blood of certain narrative tropes, and one of the biggest ones that TotA is making a point about is the character who's book-dumb and clueless so that people can exposit about the plot and setting to them. Having the character know very little about what's going on lets them ask questions the audience might be wondering, and then the other characters can answer their question, delivering the information in a semi-natural way. TVtropes calls it "The Watson." You see a lot of it in certain strains of shonen and JRPG protagonists; for instance, Tidus from Final Fantasy X has close to no actual plot importance and exists solely to provide an audience-surrogate outside perspective on Spira, and the Tales series' own Lloyd Irving is actually adventuring with his schoolteacher whose lessons he habitually slept through. So here's what Abyss did: The main character, Luke fon Fabre, is pretty much clueless as it's possible to be. He's a sheltered noble, doesn't remember anything from before age 10, knows all of one person who isn't a servant and he isn't related to, and has never been allowed outside his house in the last seven years. He not only does not know how magic works, he doesn't know the current political situation, basic history, the names of any major political or religious figures outside his immediate family, or the fact that you have to pay money at shops. So, naturally, he asks a ton of questions that the audience is probably also wondering about, especially because the setting is heavy on complicated magical jargon. And people get sick of answering them. Because Luke is a huge brat (since, due to his isolation, he has no social skills or idea of how to interact with people who aren't servants or parental figures), the breadth of his ignorance is so huge, and everyone has important things they need to be doing, people quickly start to give him curt answers or brush him off. Or they give him answers that, while answering the question, are loaded with jargon and don't actually get to the root of what he's confused about. And, since Luke has no social skills, the only way he knows to react to the fact that he has no idea what's going on and no one will explain it in a way he can understand is to get mad and yell at them. This in turn makes everyone even less inclined to try to cater to him, and it's not too long before they take to talking over his head and almost completely ignoring him, because he consistently has nothing to contribute but an endless well of questions and they have more important things to be doing than explaining things to the whiny pissbaby, and Luke ends up not trusting or listening to anyone but the one person in his life who explains things in a way that makes sense to him. Predictably for a Tales game, this ends poorly. Luke screws up big-time in part because he has no idea what the hell is going on, and it's only once he gets some humility and everyone involved starts making an effort to make sure he actually really understands what's going on and isn't just floundering after the closest thing that sounds like an objective that they start making any progress at cleaning up the mess they made. But that's just the plot summary. The thing that makes it really interesting is a storytelling choice that's simultaneously kind of brilliant and deeply alienating to a lot of players: the game aggressively puts you in Luke's shoes. You are given no helpful information beyond what Luke has, and the few scenes the player sees not from his perspective mostly just make it even more confusing. When people talk in incomprehensible jargon or discuss politics and history, you don't have the information to understand them any more than Luke does. You spend the entire first half of the game confused and frustrated and not knowing what's going on and just sort of heading in the direction random people point you in hopes that it'll all make sense eventually, and that's exactly what Luke does. It can be legitimately hard to slog through; many people ragequit the game because of the mix of heavy technical exposition and things still being incomprehensible even with that exposition before they hit the big middle twist and things slowly start to make sense. It essentially reverses the normal causality of the trope: usually, a character is ignorant to reflect the audience's ignorance, but here, the audience is kept ignorant and has it rubbed in their face to force them to empathize with the character's ignorance and frustration at it. I'm not surprised Abyss is one of the more divisive games in the series; being messed with like that can easily be a deal-breaker for a lot of people, especially if they don't realize it's deliberate.
I'm not doing too well right now so I'm sorry if this doesn't make sense. So, lets talk about Serial Experiment Lain! One of the things that interests me so much about this show is that over time, it has only gotten more relevant. The technology that appears on the show that we hadn't quite perfected back in 1997 is now in common use today. And the idea behind the wired is somewhat the same as the ideas surrounding internet. The wired exists as a place to exchange information. People can learn pretty much anything from it. But that's not the only thing people are using it for. People are accessing the wired to play games and to connect with others. Which is a key point of the show. As Lain herself says, 'no matter where you go, we are all connected.' The connection that she is referring to is a connection through the wired. People are able to be in near-constant contact with each other. They can make plans and exchange ideas in a matter of seconds. The show doesn't treat this as problematic - rather, it's just a part of most people's daily lives in the modern world. What the show examines is the idea of isolation. Lain is isolated. She materialized from what seems like nowhere and lives in a house where her father is pretty much the only one who addresses her. She doesn't have any friends at the start of the show. When she starts regularly using the wired, it enables her to connect with others and to understand the world around her. And I would argue that the show doesn't necessarily condemn that, either. It's only when Lain begins to dig deeper into the wireless and to expand her consciousness in such a way that she is able to enter it that serious problems start arising. Lain sees the wired as a way to bring people together and to enhance the human experience. The wired is like a large neural network without pain sensors of the capability of feeling lonely. If the entire world connects through the wired, people become one consciousness. To Lain, this seems ideal. People can leave behind painful lives in reality where they struggle for money, for achievement, for recognition, and enter a space where they can simply exist. And in some ways, maybe this is an improvement for the human race. When everyone is connected, no one experiences isolation. But the thing is, being swallowed by a digital world is not as ideal as it seems. There are plenty of things that are missing from the digital experience that exist in reality. The warmth of holding someone's hand, the taste of good food, a beautiful day - those things don't really exist in the wired. And when you think about it, they don't have to. The wired was created to exchange information. It was not meant to reinvent the human experience in such a way that people no longer needed bodies. People weren't worried about the fact that they can't reach through the wired and tap someone's shoulder to get attention because that isn't what the wired is for. But Lain doesn't initially understand that. She's so profoundly isolated that to her, creating a massive net of connected consciousness makes sense. No one will endure suffering and no one will endure loneliness. It's not malicious intent that leads her to try and 'upload' human beings to the wired. It's a desire to help both others and herself. Because Lain wants human connection. She loves her father and she loves Arisu (as a friend or more - that's another can of worms that can be opened some other time) but she can't fully engage with them because she herself is a product of the wired. She's not a 'real human', so she struggles to interact with reality. Lain didn't exist before a certain point, and she won't exist after that point. The world will not know that she existed. She as a character practically embodies isolation. She wants to be part of a world that she can't exist in because her very existence will damage it. Which is why the end of the series is so heartbreaking for people who have experienced intense feelings of isolation. Lain is ultimately not able to connect with reality. However, I would argue that ultimately, the point of the show isn't that 'some people just don't belong in this world'. The show is sympathetic to Lain even while the narrative acknowledges that she makes mistakes. Rather, the point was removing the idea of total isolation. By removing Lain from reality, the concept of total isolation is taken out of that particular picture. That's not to say that no one in the world is isolated - but they are all more adapted to deal with the real world than Lain was. Lain was a concept that was born because she is an attempt to dispel isolation by enabling everyone in the world to be 'connected'. Which is what Lain wanted at first. But when she had the final talk with Arisu, she finally realized that she wasn't necessarily helping anyone by allowing them to be connected. She was taking away a whole plethora of experiences from them - negative experiences, but positive ones as well. And so ultimately she had to make the decision to confine herself to total isolation, thus robbing herself of any chance of being anything other than a representation of human loneliness and desire for connection. Because when she makes that call, she isolates herself in such a way that she can't come back from it. Not really. So is Lain's choosing to remove herself from the picture analogous with suicide? I'd argue that it isn't. Rather, Lain's sacrifice is a way for the narrative to continue to point out the difference between the human experience and the purely digital experience. In a way, Lain never really achieved either. She couldn't interact very well in the human world, but she was more grounded there than in the wired for a while. She's a product of both worlds and, in the end, represents the isolation of both. As a human, she struggles to interact with others. It almost seems like she barely exists. Ultimately, in the wired, Lain is also alone. However, she still craves human contact, which separates her from meaningless pieces of floating data.EDIT (FINISH YOUR SENTENCES ZERO): Lain's sacrifice is Lain embracing her isolation, which could be seen as a metaphor for death. But I don't think that's the only interpretation. I think Lain's sacrifice is an act of love for the world. One final interaction with reality before she's not longer able to touch it. Rather than choosing death, she's choosing to accept isolation and 'cease to exist' despite the fact that her consciousness will remain. Either way TL:DR I need to re-watch that show despite the fact that I can barely sit through the intro without bursting into tears.
There's so much about Lain that touches the same notes that made Neuromancer so powerful. Fever dream technology that can seem futuristic and relevant way past the era in which it was imagined because it's more about our relationship with technology than any specifics. Profound isolation and the desire to transcend human limits. Then finally meeting Spoiler Neuromancer and oh man, Wintermute and the realizations and implications of all that.
I'd need to rewatch the movie to be able to reproduce it properly, but a few years back I had this whole long breakdown about how Pacific Rim is kind of remarkable in that while the antagonists' thoughts and motives are never directly shown, the more you think about their behavior, the more tactical sense most of what they do in the movie makes. (Which is extremely unusual for a story about vague evil aliens sending giant monsters to exterminate humanity, because usually those kinds of antagonists are complete idiots if you think for two minutes.)
actually you know what, I think I remember most of it anyway. Like, okay, this is Pacific Rim, so before any arguing about tactics you have to accept the premise that for whatever reason, the Precursors have decided that the best way to do what they're doing is to send kaiju (as opposed to, like, a swarm of bioengineered xenomorphs or something), and that there's some reason they started out slow and escalated. I could headcanon around those sorts of questions if I wanted, but my focus here is on what they actually do during the plot of the movie. Before the movie, they've been following a pretty strict mathematical schedule in the timing of the attacks. But after Newt drifts with the kaiju, suddenly that schedule goes completely out the window- Hermann was predicting double events starting in several days, but instead one happens immediately. The kaiju they send are Leatherback (a giant gorilla-looking thing with an EMP on its back) and Otachi (fast, mobile, with the ability to spray acid, a long bladed tail capable of puncturing jaeger armor, and the ability to fly). These two kaiju head straight for Hong Kong, disable three of the remaining four jaegers in just a few minutes, and then Lady Danger engages Leatherback while Otachi makes a beeline for Newt via the drift connection. Mako and Raleigh fight Otachi, Newt and Hermann drift with a kaiju again with the specific intent of finding out more information, and the jaegers get sent to the Breach to be greeted by a double event, with special Category 5 guest star Slattern showing up partway through to make it a triple. Which, you know, pretty standard action movie threat progression, and works just fine narratively even if you only approach it from the perspective of random mindless giant monsters. But, to put it another way, here's what happens: Newt drifts with a kaiju brain. He learns a bunch about the Precursors, and they learn a lot about him. They now know the humans are weak and the majority of their resistance is concentrated in one place, where Newt currently is, and they have a line to him. They don't know how much the humans learned or how quickly they'll be able to act on it, so they decide to press their knowledge advantage now so the humans don't have time to react to the information leak. They now know on a broad scale the way jaegers are made, so they slap together a giant EMP and stick it on a kaiju that's big enough to take a few hits, and send it and a bleeding-edge prototype through to try to eliminate all the remaining jaegers in one go. (My theory that Otachi is a prototype is because it's pregnant. This isn't beneficial to it as a weapon; Babytachi isn't big enough to be a threat on the scale of an adult kaiju, and is going to use up resources and add weight. But it'd make sense if what happened was that they were working on a more advanced version of the acid flyer design and then suddenly this opportunity came up, and they went, "Well, this wasn't going to be the final version, but we need the fastest striker we have right now and if that means sending this breeding stock one out, so be it.") They orient towards Newt because they picked up that he was in the Shatterdome; if they'd destroyed that, it wouldn't have mattered if the jaegers managed to survive, because they wouldn't be able to repair or refuel and their command center and all their civilian backup would be gone. After the second drift, the Precursors know the humans took very heavy damage in the previous battle, and while they didn't win in one shot, a second hit could end it. They may also predict the humans are going to target the Breach. They don't expect the EMP trick to work a second time (particularly since it didn't stop all of them the first time), so instead they set up a trap- Raiju and Scunner engage the two remaining jaegers near the Breach, letting Slattern come through as surprise reinforcements. ...Which would have worked, too, except that they didn't predict the nukes.
