Gormongous

I mean, at the end of the day, people have limited attention to spend, even on the things about which they deeply care. As a medieval historian, especially one who is active while Game of Thrones is in the popular consciousness, I care deeply about applying methods of social justice to neo-medieval settings to challenge popular stereotypes about my field of study, so here I am in this thread critiquing the politics of a game that I rather like, otherwise. It's a well-worn fact that public awareness of history, if not the entirety of humanities, is about fifty years behind current research, so putting critical pressure on fantasy works to question their assumption of racial and sexual dynamics in the actual Middle Ages feels to me like a good way of getting ahead of that curve. I feel like The Witcher 3 captures a fair slice of the moral universe within which medieval people existed and moved (although, as always, with kinship groupings powerless to stop the rape that's inexplicably everywhere and the Church a corrupt and broken institution that ends up doing net harm to everyone else) but falls short in other places, especially the broader social and political landscape. Asking for what purpose do Andrzej Sapkowski and CD Projekt Red focus on incredibly deep and complex situations in individual stories or quests, while populating a landscape mostly denuded of obviously "foreign" peoples and any political intricacies beyond "northern kingdoms vs. southern empire," is an important part of examining what role fantasy works have in our culture, beyond unconsciously white supremacist nostalgia,*** and what roles they can have, in terms of educating and habituating people to norms of the distant past. *** I can't emphasize "unconsciously" enough, because no one reads Lord of the Rings and then starts leaving burning crosses around, but it does leave its readers with the distinct impression that "white vs. black, brown, and other colors" has been a historical reality reaching so far back that it's rightfully ubiquitous in our fictionalized imaginings of the past. There's definitely shades of "Epic Pooh" in that, too, and the fact that that's an essay from 1978 reminds me of just how long commentators of speculative fiction have been criticizing neo-medievalist fantasy as conservative bourgeois fairy tales and "just so" stories without the least bit of mainstream response.

The first "half" of the anime is very well done, but then the second half is rushed and somewhat incomplete. If switching from one to the other or stopping short bothers you, I'd recommend reading the manga all the way through.

You're right, I felt bad myself for dropping a quick rant on how awful Baki the Grappler is and not actually walking the hypothetical listener through why its awful things weren't outrageous instead. With Baki, it's mostly just that everything supposedly awesome happens by writer fiat and doesn't really have any follow-through, so his dad who's so powerful that his muscles make a demon face on his back and who murdered the president of the United States in hand-to-hand combat after calling ahead to warn him that he was going to do it is just kind of there in the story and no one seems to be fully aware of how absurd and impossible it all is.

Well, in that case, it's more weird that medieval "aesthetics" always involve a bunch of white people and no brown people. Yet another reason to stump for Ursula LeGuin, I guess?

Yeah, that is my issue with it. The Witcher 3 does so many things right, for which it's getting justifiable praise, but it also makes the exact same mistakes with race in its setting that thousands upon thousands of fantasy works have made, which it is somehow unfair to criticize. Here, look at the map, everyone: The world of The Witcher books and novels is most emphatically not just the world of Poland. Great swaths of the third game take place in Nilfgaard, the plain-as-day Holy Roman Empire analogue. The Northern Kingdoms are rather obvious as the fragmentary kingdom of Poland before the time of Casimir the Great in the fourteenth century, although individual kingdoms like Temeria have strong flavor from other medieval monarchies like France. There is even a group of islands to stand in for the kingdom of Denmark! The Witcher is Polish, but it is definitely peddling a vision of neo-medievalism that encompasses the greater part of Europe. And, at least for me, what is the most striking aspect of the map? Well, it's been rotated ninety degrees counter-clockwise and cropped so that Poland's eastern and southern neighbors functionally exist no longer. It's just fuckin' deserts and mountains there, move along. That means no Huns, no Avars, no Magyars, no Pechenegs, no Khazars, no Cumans, no Turks, no Mongols, and no Ottomans can have analogues here, none of the nomadic peoples of color who shaped the face of medieval and modern Europe. That's really weird, isn't it? A history of Poland without Hungary or the Golden Khanate is unimaginable to me, yet here it is, and people are defending it as "historically accurate," whatever that means. The Polish have the right to reimagine their history as a fantasy in which all of their historical nemeses no longer exist. I'm not trying to deny that of Andrzej Sapkowski or CD Projekt Red. However, I am going to criticize them, as a historian, a fan of speculative fiction, and a gamer, for giving me yet another neo-medieval world wherein people of color have to be assumed from various fantastical races because they've been carefully excised from the portrait of humanity. In the same way, Gaizokubanou, I'd criticize, with slightly less assurance because it's not my specific sub-discipline, a fantasy work about Joseon Korea if it included analogues for China, Japan, and Southeast Asia, but carefully ignored mention of the Manchu or the Mongols. That's peddling a specific vision of the past that I find a little too pernicious. Also, I can't find a way to work this link into my rant, but People of Color in European Art History is always relevant to any talk of fantasy: http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/

Heh, I know there's probably practical reasons, but it's still jarring to anyone with even a little knowledge. It's like playing a game based on US politics and selecting someone to be "vice president of Tejas."

Me too! It's such a dense, rewarding game that I've beaten dozens of times, even though my favorite faction, the Federation, has the worst campaign storyline by far. Thanks for the history lesson!

Depressingly, all I see in gamers' disproportionately hostile reactions to the occasional presence of people of color in neo-medieval settings is the importance of those settings in unconscious fantasies of white supremacy. There's a genuine nostalgia for the supposed days when it was clear who the enemy was and that was because he (or she) wasn't white (even if, in reality, medieval people paid minimal attention to skin color and made no correlation between it and the signifiers of difference that were actually important to them, namely Latin/Frankish culture and Christian religion, until the discovery of the Americas complicated the traditional definition of "heathen"). If even one person of color exists in the otherwise whitewashed world of this game, without playing some kind of villain, it's useless as part of the cultural history arguing that the current system of bigotry and oppression has always existed and always will exist. The Witcher 3 is not to blame directly, but because it focuses on pseudo-Poland's relationship with the pseudo-Holy Roman Empire instead of with pseudo-Huns, pseudo-Mongols, or pseudo-Turks, it becomes another work that reinforces the "historical accuracy" of an all-white pre-modern Europe for assholes on the internet. A charter that I was translating just two weeks ago was about Guglielmo il Moro, marquis of Parodi. It's a stunningly common nickname, especially in the eleventh-century Mediterranean. For centuries, scholars have argued that "dark" epithets were indications of "heathen" behavior, like excessive murdering and pillaging, but now that we're all not tight-necked British noblemen doing history from our solars, it's abundantly clear that they were often self-applied and almost certainly just referred to dark-skinned individuals, possibly from mothers of color whom history didn't note. Of course, the identity crisis from a dark-skinned lord ruling in northwest Italy is just too much for some...

The Furminator! Yeah, my friend's got one of these, and his bossy bitch cat who usually can't stand to be touched or held loves to be groomed by it. It's got magic in it or something.

It makes me impossibly sad that "regent," a person or group of people empowered for a finite (or indefinite but not infinite) time with the entirety of the power normally held by a king or queen, is the term in this game for someone in charge or a single keep in the kingdom, rather than "seneschal/bailiff/sheriff" (a servant of the king or queen empowered indefinitely with a portion of their power, pertaining to a specific estate and its attached persons, and subject to direct royal oversight) or "castellan/constable" (a servant of the king or queen empowered indefinitely with a portion of their power, pertaining to a specific estate and its attached persons, and subject to indirect royal oversight). It makes me feel like no one with any abiding interest in medieval or neo-medieval matters was involved in or consulted on this game... I know, I care too much.

I like this game. Unfortunately, my story is boring. In the tenth grade, I was in orchestra, and for months leading up to Christmas, the orchestra room's whiteboard had a massive (like, thirty-person) gift-exchange map for the main orchestra group. My friend encouraged me to erase two names and replace them with "Pete" and "Gormongous," which somehow struck him as the most absurd names possible to see on such a map. I did, to absolutely no effect, and then ended up using the name at a few LAN parties, which made my friend weirdly furious for stealing his "idea," but I guess we weren't close enough for me to change it?

Fuck, another lean year for Ravenclaw...

I love all of Chris' childhood stories. I always figured that the first story, about his weird shady website and email for selling Warhammer models, was the best, but I'm continually led to doubt that nowadays. Anyway... Body Intelligence Glamour Wisdom Agility Recognition Strength When I was in the ninth grade, I played Baldur's Gate 2 over and over, beating it at least twice in a row. I had a friend who did the same, and every other night, we'd have two- or three-hour phone calls where we'd talk about what we did and what had happened to our parties. Being fourteen- or fifteen-year-old kids, we mostly focused on how we were progressing down our respective romance scripts, to the point that my parents thought for a short while that I was dating a girl named Aerie. They were somewhat disappointed when I found out and explained that it was a video game. Also, a few years before that, I made a GURPS module for Star Trek: Voyager by myself and never shared it with anyone. Since I'd made it using photocopied pages of the core GURPS rulebook, I doubt it was very good at all, but it took me almost half a year to finish and I was extremely proud of it, because I thought it was something no one else could or would do. Star Trek's really niche, right? It only occurs to me now to check online and... yep! Ah well.

It's also been pointed out that he's actually been banned from editing Wikipedia, so it should really be "Game Developer/Ex-Wikipedia Editor," just like they call Jack Thompson "Ex-Lawyer" or whatever.

Yeah, I know. Valve was (and probably still is) arguing from the position that early access isn't a product at all, it's a unilateral service agreement that is completely unrelated to the working game that is or is not delivered. If I didn't make it clear in the previous post, I think it's a bizarre and shyster-ish stance to take, although I understand that the status of early access games is precarious enough that Valve wants to nail it down, even through an unenforceable legal position.

As someone who got one of those rare refunds for a Steam game after buying it on early access and having it fail to work even after it went into open release, I can tell you, as of a little over a year ago, Valve staunchly denies that purchasing an early-access game constitutes purchasing a product to which any consumer rights can adhere, especially a refund. At times, certain members of their support staff were unwilling even to admit that I had purchased a game at all, at least not insofar as I was acknowledged to have a reasonable expectation of ever being able to play it. Everyone to whom I spoke treated me, seemingly as a matter of corporate policy, like someone who had bought a lottery ticket and was now trying to return it after it didn't win me a fortune. I imagine that, whatever else Valve changes with its refund policy, its attitude towards early access will remain that it's a well down which you throw money in the hopes of a game rising to the surface, and if one does not, you take it up with the well and not with them.

Oh, that's my bad. I didn't see that. I personally don't think Fares is a bad writer, meaning incapable or malicious, but I think the non-central plot elements of Brothers are frequently somewhat lazy. In general, as a sometime writer of speculative fiction, I've found that it's dangerous to try and write fairy tales, a lot of the time, since they exist exclusively to explain why things are the way they are, and that often means that they're capturing a lot of ugly societal trends like flies in amber.

Syn, I love you, but you're taking a lot of what people are saying in the worst way possible. They just don't like a video game (partly) because its treatment of women is weird. Does that mean they're saying that Brothers shouldn't exist or that Fares shouldn't be allowed to make stuff? I don't think so, certainly not in this thread. They just don't like some of the choices he made, whether intentionally or accidentally, as is the case with every creative work ever made in the history of humankind. For a few of them, it makes Brothers a bad game, but not one that should be literally censured or rewritten. Bjorn, especially, was just playing "what if," thinking about what could have been done to answer his own criticisms and not outlining a prescriptive way to make future games. It's cool that Fares' questionable choices did not detract from your enjoyment of the game, but that doesn't really make anyone else's distaste for the game less valid.

I mean, the developers made the conscious choice to have several woman in their game but to represent them poorly. Granted, they're a small proportion of the total cast of characters, but it's not like they meant it to be a story about all dudes (as might have been gathered from a title that employs both the word "brothers" and the word "sons") and some ladies were accidentally included. They deliberately made a game that was almost all dudes and then made the only women in it dead, in danger, or evil, which says a lot about gender, really. Some people might not like that and might feel that it's not a good game because of it. To feel that way and say so on the internet is not "singling it out," it's having the conversation about gender that should happen with every game these days.

Valve rolls out refunds for Steam. It appears that they're using two hours of play or fourteen days of ownership, whichever comes first, as the cutoff. It's not a huge step, but it's definitely a step away from "beg random people in Steam support until someone decides to say okay."

Not to comment on the game itself, by which I was deeply underwhelmed but which impressed the friend with whom I played it, but this seems like an increasingly common argument against having to bother with appropriate and respectful treatment of a game's peripheral subjects. On the Paradox forums, fans (and occasionally devs) repeatedly counter requests for better or more complete gameplay mechanics for non-European factions with "It's called Crusader Kings II" or "It's called Europa Universalis IV," implying that it's already going above and beyond the call of duty to make the rest of the world playable, forget about interesting. Similarly, people have criticized Mad Max: Fury Road for not being completely about Max, as if the title is a promise or something. Honestly, I don't understand it at all. It's not like an artist painting a portrait just needs to do a good job with the subject's features and then can fuck around with the background. It's not like Dostoyevsky just needs to make the brothers Karamazov believable and interesting while leaving the rest of Russian society to be lazy stereotypes. If you include something in a work, you should care enough to make it good. If you don't care, why is it in your work?

We're looking to do Time of Eve for the next podcast. If you have important opinions about that anime and would like to share them with the world, let me know!

My current game: figure out what language this awkward sentence is clearly translated from. My best guess is Italian.

Yeah. The movie was in production, one way or another, for almost fifteen years. Even just in the past couple of years, it was getting extensive re-shoots, mostly because it was bombing with test audiences. It's fully possible that there was a complete non-verbal cut of the movie that was re-shot with dialogue.

I agree. As distressing as it is for the economy to be in shambles, it's less distressing in the broader scale of things, strictly speaking, if the cause of that was concerted, malicious, and secretive government action, rather than a massive, unknowable, and unpredictable array of factors reaching back centuries and across the globe. One of those is manageable, even just in the narrowest sense of the word, and the other is truly uncontrollable. There's a type of mentality that'll reach for the most upsetting and improbable explanation to a situation if it's the only one that gives said situation a singular cause to blame and perhaps eliminate. In other words, it's a lot less distressing for some people to claim that the US government, already a massive and powerful entity, engineered 9/11 to get even more massive and seize even more power, than to acknowledge that being a superpower means something different now and that ideologies have started to fight each other more frequently through other means than outright wars.