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Author: D. Bethel

Worth a Look

Worth a Look

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As a writing teacher, the research-based portion of my scaffolding tends to always yield at least a few “Do video games contribute to youth violence?” proposals every semester. Honestly, it’s a tired debate but not because of the questions being asked, but for how little conversation actually happens. Lately, the pattern seems to be that when a new study is published that either states that games do or do not incite violent behavior in children, people then post those studies (or, let’s be honest, articles written about the studies) like flags planted in the ground and say, “The problem has been solved,” and walk away until the next one hits.

guns
polygon.com

The point of view Brian Crecente presents in his article is not only unique, but important. What’s most important is not that he picks a side; instead, he actually problem poses the issue as a way to generate discourse and not simply promote the tribalistic partisan yelling that such topics tend to degrade into. To literally pull from my lecture notes, questions that start with a “do” or “is” can only yield yes or no answers, discouraging discussion and investigation. However, problem-posing questions––the classic Who What When Where Why and How questions––don’t do that. They beg for thoughts and ideas and points of view rather than declarative sound bytes. On big topics like this––especially when topics like gun control and mental health are forced into public interest by yet another shooting by a young person––such nuance and differing points of view should be more thoroughly explored rather than just drawing a line in the sand.

What’s also important in this article is that its author is not a single-adjective author the likes of which we normally hear on these issues. He writes as a father, but he is also clearly a gamer, a person who grew up with games––violent games, too, no doubt––and that informs his approach to the topic, which is a new voice in this conversation and one worth listening to, at least.

Superhero movies live and die on their sense of verisimilitude. As discussed when I talked to Elijah Kaine, the X-Men films succeeded at existing within the apparent paradox of being both faithful to the characters but also being incredibly divergent from the source material. The Marvel films (and Deadpool as well) have become renowned for being, probably, the most faithful comic book characters on screen so far, but even then there is a fair share of divergence. But when Man of Steel or Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice land in theaters, they are derided for being too divergent from the source material. Then there are the ultra-devout interpretations like 300, Sin City, and Watchmen which are all over the place in terms of criticism and praise. This exposes the question embedded in all of our discussion of superhero cinema: “what makes a good comic book movie?” An entire Comic Con panel, I’m sure, could be dedicated to this question, but it’s one that Matt Singer surreptitiously addresses in his article as it relates to the ill-fated Green Lantern movie from 2011.

Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.

His basic argument is really interesting––is it damning to be, in a sense, too faithful to the source material?

Green Lantern is maybe the best proof to date that when it comes to superhero movies, faithful doesn’t equal excellent.

I’m sure this point is arguable, but I am not a Green Lantern scholar in any sense; however, it does help to focus the discussion around superhero movies––what does a faithful adaptation/movie look like and is it a movie we want to see?

I started reading Penny Arcade in 2002 or 2003. Since that time, it has evolved into the strangest of pop culture chimeras that evokes a sense of awe but has an underpinning of fear that, for some reason, it could all come crashing down at any moment. As a business, it felt like it expanded incredibly fast, but it withstood the current it helped create. They added more and more people to the fold, but the basic personality and attitude of the site persisted. The two creators went from being struggling, edgy voices of the generation to being––I assume––reasonably wealthy magnates of a new industry, but they seem rather unchanged by the developments. It could be argued that all of this growth and stability came from the direct management of the Penny Arcade business manager and president, Robert Khoo.

polygon.com
polygon.com

With Khoo announcing his exit from the company, it understandably has a lot of people worried. He was the master of the Penny Arcade Jenga tower, and, as he walks away from the puzzle, the worry is that it will, surely, crumble in on itself.

Matthew Loffhagen looks at what a post-Khoo Penny Arcade could look like, especially through the lens of PAX, as the keys of the kingdom are handed back to the original creators, Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Loffhagen focuses on a more legitimate worry than the knee-jerk reaction a lot of the internet provided (basically likening Khoo to an internet Jesus), and looks at the co-creators’ behaviors with fans and controversial statements and stances they’ve taken over the years and how that could impact not only the conventions but also the fans (the famous Dickwolves disaster comes to mind, among others). Drawing the line from one poorly-said statement to a massive PR catastrophe seems easy in this new administrative situation.

However, such thinking discounts Khoo himself. If we have learned anything in his decade-long+ tenure as the nerd mastermind, it’s that he knows what he’s doing. Watching everything from PA the Series to Strip Search, it’s clear that Khoo is a chess master, the Deep Blue of business, always three steps ahead of everyone around him. With that in mind, what becomes clear is that Khoo’s decision to leave was not rash; he left because he knew he could and Penny Arcade would be fine without him. While Loffhagen’s very specific concerns are, indeed, valid, I think overall that Khoo is leaving Penny Arcade exactly where it needs to be, even if it isn’t as clear as we would hope.

Let’s Play – Transformers: Devastation

Let’s Play – Transformers: Devastation

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When I got new Transformers toys as a kid (and, perhaps, as an adult…maybe) I tended to throw away the packed-in weapons that the toys came with right away. Back in the ’80s, losing weapons was often a consequence of design; it was a problem that G.I. Joe toys had or M.A.S.K. toys had or He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (but not Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, their toys were perfect…not really, I’m sure they had the same problem)––the tiny blasters or swords fit nowhere except for in the hands of the characters. This was less of a problem for the other toys mentioned (since they could just permanently hold their weapons at the ready), but the point of The Transformers was that, at indeterminate intervals, you shouldn’t be able to see the characters’ hands because they were busy being some sort of vehicle (or electronic device or firearm or planet) and, in that case, there would be no place for the weapon to go. So, they got lost.

However, abandoning the weapons of Transformers toys was a choice on my part, not on behalf of any political agenda I held at the age of 5 and 6, but because I wasn’t buying the toys to recreate action scenes. When I spent time with my friends, the talk around playing with toys often came down to the simple binary of who would be the bad guys and who would be the good guys (the Decepticons and the Autobots, respectively, in this case) so that we could either ad-lib or reenact a decisive battle that would result in either global tyranny or peace on earth. I wasn’t particularly interested in these scenarios, possibly because I’m an only child and would often play with my toys alone, and big action set pieces weren’t fun nor particularly interesting.

TFfamily

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Worth a Look

Worth a Look

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We’ve broached the topic of adaptations from one medium to another a few times over the life of the podcast, but this is a nice, focused look at a unique case. Growing up in the early days of anime proliferation––when titles were few and unprofessional translations could be bought (of varying quality) at conventions––Akira was kind of “the” anime. Not in the sense that it was the only one, but fans talked about it as if the film rested atop the peak of quality, outshining everything beneath it. You had to watch it and you were not going to understand it. It existed as a kind of filmic puzzle box that people would attempt to parse and explain which only further confused the discourse. In spite of that, Akira remains quite an amazing movie when watching it as an adult. Technically, it’s an awe-inspiring work of art. Its story, too, while often confusing and obtuse, does have a lot of incredibly complex social ideas and themes, especially about youth/teenage culture.akira-feat

The truth is that the Akira film is an adaptation of a manga series that wasn’t even close to being done and writer/director, Katsuhiro Otomo, had to draw conclusions that made sense for a two-hour animated film. That’s what makes the movie such a standout from other adapted manga, however. It must carry some legitimacy because Katsuhiro Otomo also wrote and drew the manga; so, the moviegoer must be seeing a glimpse into the future. However, being such a big story, the task of adapting it into a movie that made any kind of sense at all would be an unenviable task, which makes it a fascinating case study in the continuing dialogue about adaptations. Tom Speelman’s article dives into the relationship between the anime and the manga in detailed and cogent fashion, drawing together the point that––despite some uneven spots––Otomo was able to create two masterpieces in two different mediums in the span of a decade. No matter how you look at it, that’s a feat that deserves a closer look.

With the massive success of the Marvel Studios movies and the can’t-help-but-watch trainwreck that Warner Bros. has done with the DC heroes since Chris Nolan left The Dark Knight trilogy, it’s easy to see the Fox and Sony licenses (The Fantastic Four/X-Men and Spider-Man, respectively) get short shrift from comic book fans, especially. Now, with regard to The Fantastic Four, Fox has done itself no favors and Sony straight-up gave up the fight to an extent by––as we all saw in Captain America: Civil War––giving Spider-man back to Marvel in all but the actual rights, so the anti-Fox/Sony arguments do carry a lot of weight, but the X-Men movies have become almost a forgotten undercurrent over which the “superhero movie” genre now flows.

bryan-singer

I think “undercurrent” is the right word and that’s what Dan Marcus’ article does its best to show, recreating how the world felt back when the first X-Men movie was released in 2000. The only successful comic book adaptation made before it––aside from the Superman films––was Blade, but a lot of people didn’t even realize that was a comic book character beforehand; knowing that or not, the movie didn’t make any attempts to really draw that connection, either.

The first two X-Men movies were an interesting and important step because even though they didn’t fly the comic book colors in the way Marvel has deemed necessary in a modern context, it was still obliquely reverent, capturing what was important about the comics even if they changed a lot of details.  While I personally think that the drubbing X-Men: Apocalypse received was mostly unearned and feverish due to its proximity to both Captain America: Civil War and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, without the X-Men franchise it’s fair to say that we wouldn’t have the Marvel Studios that we have now, and the X-Men should just be allowed to keep on keeping on (except for X-Men: Last Stand; that should be thrown into a fire).

 

 

Completing the Circle: The Role of Audience in Fiction

Completing the Circle: The Role of Audience in Fiction

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Picture this:  A dream-like fantasy world––not unlike something you’d imagine from a children’s book––becomes the victim of a devastating catastrophe.  What’s left is little more than hunks of earth, adorned with scraps of vegetation and ruins of homes and castles floating in space.  Survivors are few, but they know––as part of their history, mythology, or religion––that their world can only be brought back to life through the mystical, restorative will of something pronounced “Bass-chyuhn.”

For some of you––probably gamers of the recent era––this synopsis may remind you of the 2011 Supergiant Games release, Bastion.  A post-apocalyptic action-adventure game, the player controls a character simply known as “The Kid,” a youthful adventurer   who lives in a world of suspended ruin, literally.  Pieces of the world that used to be float in space, seemingly unconnected like leaves in a pond.  What’s interesting about the game is two-fold: first, the game is narrated as you play by another character in the game.  The narration is kind of dynamic, responding to how the player controls The Kid as well as revealing story.  Second, but related, is that the world only exists as your character exists; where he stands is all that is real.  For example, at the outset, The Kid wakes up in his bed in a room, which is just a bed on a rock with half a wall and a doorway just floating in the middle of nothingness.  The player can see other floating islands in the background, all at different depths, in different sizes.  The player moves the control stick which causes The Kid to get out of bed and as you guide him up and out through the door the ground literally rises up underneath his steps in disparate pieces, creating a path only as you move forward on it.  It’s an unsettling feeling at first, but you quickly get used to it, especially when creepy creatures are trying to do you in.  The crux of the story is that, despite the utter destruction of the world, The Kid is trying to collect fragments of the world to run a machine called The Bastion (a combination of terraformer, time machine, small town, and space ship) which––when fully powered––has the ability to undo the effects of the Calamity––the event that made the world what it is.

“The Kid” wakes up amid floating ruin. Source: Supergiant Games.

For others, after listening the description at the beginning, it may remind you of the classic 1984 children’s fantasy film, The Neverending Story––the last third, specifically.  The movie is based around a child in our present day finding an old book in a book store called, The Neverending Story.  The viewers watch as he reads the book, which is about a hero, a warrior-boy named Atreyu, trying to save an ill princess and, at the same time, stave off the oncoming cataclysmic event called The Nothing.

Not for lack of trying, Atreyu ultimately fails at the latter part of the to-do list and the fantasy world is left in literal fragments, highlighted by the image of the princess’ castle floating on a lonely bit of land in the vacuum of space, surrounded by other bits of the once beautiful world floating along side it.  Even amid such destruction, the princess assures Atreyu––and the reader of the book––and the viewers of the film––that there was still hope to reverse the effects of The Nothing––in this case, it was an otherworldly entity called Bastian, which happened to be the name of the kid reading the book, a name I’m assuming it’s short for “Sebastian.”  Instead of a floating city––a veritable planet all its own––the child named Bastian is imbued with the willpower to affect Fantasia, the fantasy world in the book he’s reading.  What’s interesting about this is that even though, to us viewers, Bastian is as fictional as Atreyu and the princess, but he represents reality and the fact that the fictional characters of the book he’s reading can’t repair their world––and that only a person in the “real world” can––speaks to the very nature of fiction and narrative itself: the readers are as important to the creation of a story as the writer is.

Fantasia becomes a world of floating ruin.

While I have drawn distinct parallels between these two apocalyptic fictions––and in my research I have seen no overt mention of the movie by the game’s designers––the similarities I found most interesting weren’t the obvious ones, though they are eerie.  Instead, these are fictions about fiction and use absolute destruction and vacuous absence as metaphor for a person’s engagement with fiction––how a reader or viewer actually completes the process that is “fiction.”  Games, like books, when unused sit there on a shelf (or hard drive) and figuratively don’t exist when not in play simply because the whole purpose of a book or video game (or a movie, or an album, etc.) is to be consumed.  Entertainment products are the closest things we have to tangible verbs in the sense that verbs only happen when they’re happening: a runner only runs when she is running, a painter only paints when he is painting.  They are realities conjured by action.  When looking at how this existential dilemma is brilliantly illustrated in the Toy Story movies, it’s not a far reach to think that, were things like books or video games sentient, they would be fighting night and day against this sense of non-existence––call it The Calamity, in the case of Bastion (the video game), or The Nothing, in the case of The Neverending Story.

 

This is my suspicion.

What this means for the player or reader is that consuming entertainment is not completely a passive act.  The books you love don’t exist as you know them until your eyes glance over the words on the page––only then do those characters exist at all for you and they cease to be when you close the book for the night.  With regard to Bastion and video games, the imagery of the ground flying up to meet your every step is a not-so-subtle metaphor for not only how games are processed internally but that polygons are only really processed at all once the player engages the controller––the real world’s umbilical connection to the virtual world.  The point is that these fantastic worlds don’t just exist because someone wrote them––Emily Dickinson wouldn’t be important at all had her poems not been found locked away in a chest; they would be nothing in the cultural and historical schema otherwise because they weren’t being read––fiction exists in individual bursts of imaginative light, a reaction that occurs when a fiction finds its audience, one by one, keeping it alive like the beat of a heart.

Boasts of Bethel: Getting to the Point

Boasts of Bethel: Getting to the Point

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This Boast is framed around Game of Thrones and does not discuss content; so, there are no spoilers contained herein.

I like the Game of Thrones tv show more than A Song of Ice and Fire––the book series its based on––for a variety of reasons.  First, each book has a page length that, at this point, can only be measured in scientific notation.  At this point in my life, I have taken a firm stance and won’t read books over three-hundred pages (though exceptions can occur)––I’ve got too much else to do and my stupid brain isn’t able to remember that much story.  Second (though related to the first), the ten episodes (at one hour each) that make up each season is the perfect amount for me to not only consume and still have time left in my day but to also remember everything that’s going on.  I have my quibbles about the show, sure, but on the whole I enjoy it quite a bit.

But don’t tell me to read the books, especially because they’re “better.”  Of that I have no doubt.  It is a fact that tv shows are terrible books because, by definition, tv shows are not books.  However, the reverse is also true.

Nerds’ slavish devotion to source material puts us into a strange quandary––we are super excited that our beloved stories and characters are getting adapted to other media––and, moreover, they’re super successful––but we also become obsessive hair-splitters who feel the need to declare that one version (usually the original) is superior to the other (usually the adaptation).  I had to stop doing that because I wanted to actually enjoy these adaptations––especially when they’re good.  My first major encounter with this “disappointment” was with Brian Singer’s first X-Men movie.  Namely, how characters were shifted around in terms of relationships and ages for reasons that didn’t seem to make sense.  The biggest offender in this regard was the character of Rogue who, in the comics, was the same age as most of the main cast and even had intimate relations with Magneto for awhile.  For the movie, they basically made her a mixture of Jubilee (i.e., Wolverine’s teenage apprentice) and Kitty Pride (i.e., the new student at the school who is initially wary of being a mutant).

Though I enjoyed the movie because, in terms of general characterization, Singer got the X-Men right, I made sure to note that it differed from the comics drastically (I am proud to say that I never cared about the lack of comic-inspired costumes, however).  What turned me around was when I thought back to the X-Men cartoon from the ‘90s––another adaptation I was incredibly excited about.  The series was extraordinarily faithful to the comics despite some dodgy animation and I remember being so excited for each episode to start on Saturday mornings that I couldn’t sit still.  However, the feeling that dominates my memories of the show is mostly boredom.  I eventually stopped watching it about halfway into season 3.  It remained incredibly faithful and was even doing some direct adaptations of stories from the comics, but I just couldn’t bring myself to care.  I realized that the show was too close to the comics, that I had already consumed this content but through a different medium––so why would I want to see it on tv if I have the comics in a longbox?

Great artistic expressions are made by artists––that is, people who are adept at expressing themselves in a particular medium.  A great comic book storyteller does not necessarily make a great film director or screenwriter (re: Frank Miller’s Will Eisner’s The Spirit)––a great director makes a movie great.  If properties are being adapted into other media, I’d much rather see an artist of that medium approach the work so that the adaptation will mean something on its own and to not simply be “the movie version” or “the tv version.”  Such requirements diminish the importance of the source material when being adapted.  I point to things like the Hellboy movies––the second one, especially, feels right at home in Guillermo Del Toro’s oeuvre.  I point to The Walking Dead––both the tv show and Telltale’s episodic video game series.  I point to Darwyn Cooke’s Parker graphic novels.  I point to Game of Thrones.

All of these adaptations are done right––they focus on making a good example of the medium which is neither a “dumbing down” of a property to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, nor a point-for-point recreations of the originals.  They want to make a good movie, game, comic, or television show first rather than just make the source material dance like a marionette.  What makes a good book does not make a movie good.  A good adapter knows that and works with the ideas, themes, and characters of the source material to make them as viable to the new medium as they were to the original.  To do that may require changes, however, but if those changes are made out of the same desire to tell a good story––the same motivation as the original creator––then it should yield good results.  Differences don’t make things bad––that’s called bigotry.  Differences are just different, and as a fan it’s important to ask why––not just in terms of the story, but in terms of the medium.

The truth is the correlation between adaptations and their source material is more akin to alternate universes than family relationships.  They rarely feed off on one another, especially once they get going.  The choices one makes neither adversely nor, necessarily, favorably affects the other.  They are separate entities and should be viewed that way.  I’m sure the A Song of Ice and Fire novels have much more complexity and intricacy in terms of plot and character; I understand that.  Game of Thrones, for a tv show, is just as wonderfully complex and dynamic––compared to other tv shows.  And though A Song of Ice and Fire fans have been clamoring eagerly for book 6 in the series for three years––a book which will hold much more information and story than the tv show could ever muster––I’m comforted by the fact that I know I only have to wait a year for season 5.