I've been talking a lot about FromSoftware games lately. This is because I've been playing a lot of FromSoftware games lately. (If you missed it, I talked about Dark Souls--and my interest in this style of game more broadly--and Sekiro, with some preliminary thoughts on Bloodborne from a few years ago.) So it is surprising to no one to learn that when I got my PlayStation 5, I purchased it in a bundle with both Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Demon's Souls.
This means that I've been playing FromSoftware games very much out of order. The original version of Demon's Souls came out <<checks internet>> in 2009. I definitely missed the boat on that one, and who knows? I may not have had the drive to learn the punishing mechanics back then. Anyway, after FromSoftware released Demon's Souls, they created a spiritual successor that would've felt like a carbon copy had it come from a different studio: Dark Souls, which came out in 2011. The two sequels to Dark Souls were released in the subsequent years. The apotheosis of the form came in 2015 with the PlayStation 4 exclusive of Bloodborne. Four years later, Sekiro dropped. At the time of this writing, the "Soulsborne" community is eagerly awaiting Elden Ring, about which I have purposefully remained almost completely ignorant. That timeline is interesting to me, because it creates an evolutionary map, with components from different games manifesting in other areas--sometimes multiple games apart. For instance, one of the few flaws in Bloodborne is the healing method: blood vials are a limited resource that must be "farmed" off of fallen enemies, discovered in the world, or purchased from the creepy Messengers. This process of finding healing items in-world was abandoned in the three Dark Souls games, yet is a component of Demon's Souls, the first of its kind. In Demon's Souls, you find different types of grasses that heal different amounts, with the rarer, more powerful healing items being (unsurprisingly) much more difficult to find. In Dark Souls, you are given an "Estus flask", a small bottle in which the Fire from bonfires is contained. Your character has a limited number of uses--starting at 5, though a crafty player can get that cranked up to 20 by the end of the game--but the flask refills upon every interaction with the bonfires. Bloodborne streamlines the healing process by only having one major healing item--the blood vial--that is quantity-capped at 20, yet must be found or purchased…a mixture between Dark Souls efficiency and Demon's Souls resource management. It's interesting to see how some components of these games remains the same: Difficulty, of course, as well as environmental- and minimalistic storytelling. There is always a grim tone, endings that range between "well, that was depressing" to "well, that was super depressing", and brilliant game mechanics. Yet there are also inventive lateral steps, aspects of one game that are abandoned, refined, or reskinned in subsequent games. Which is what makes the PS5 remake of Demon's Souls so interesting. I know that it is a very faithful adaptation of the original. Unlike the recent Resident Evil and Final Fantasy VII remakes, this isn't a retelling or reimagining--it's an updating. Yet it kept some of the components of the original game (which, again, I haven't played) that aren't very good. And I think that they're not very good because we don't see them repeated in any of the future games. (I say that with a very large caveat that, though I'm playing through Dark Souls II right now, I can't speak about what's in Dark Souls III, since I've never even loaded up the game.) So here are three gripes about Demon's Souls. #1) The Archstones. The layout of this game world is significantly less linear than any of the other FromSoftware titles. In Demon's Souls, the player is dropped into the Nexus, a central hub that allows the character to teleport to any of the five sections of the world where the adventure takes place. After the introductory components of the game are done, the player can choose any pathway through any of the levels. I approached it in a rotating form, getting further in the first map (Archstone of the Small King) before moving over to, say, the fifth map (Archstone of the Chieftain), and so on. If a player wished to only push through one Archstone entirely before moving on to another, that would be a possibility. That isn't my beef with the system. I like it well enough, though it feels significantly less connected than all of the other games. The world feels cohesive enough, thanks to the tone and art style. But you can't run from Boletarian Place to the Ritual Path, for example, as they're in different Archstones. That in and of itself isn't a huge deal; its effect is minimal, and it really does help make the game be more organized. No, what bothers me is the limited number of archstones (as opposed to Archstones) within each map. The only way to get these crucial checkpoints is by defeating a boss. And while the level designs are sharp enough that, once you've explored the area well enough, you'll be able to activate a shortcut of some sort between where you're respawning and where you need to be, the amount of time spent running between archstone checkpoint and boss fight gets really tedious. Now, all FromSoftware games have this to an extent. There's the gauntlet of Black Knights you have to slalom through to get through the Kiln of the First Flame in Dark Souls, for example. But when you consider how far you have to run from your respawn point to the last fight in Bloodborne or Sekiro, you can see that long sprints aren't really necessary to maintaining the vision of the game. And it got tedious on some of these runs. The last major one, going through the remnants of the Boletarian castle to challenge Old King Allant again and again was the main reason I decided to cheese* him rather than try to defeat him in combat. (That and because he had robbed me of over 10 soul levels with his stupid soul-sucker move and I was done having to regain those levels.) I died more often on the way to the boss than from the boss himself. And that ends up being a really frustrating component of the game. Again, that isn't to say that these later titles don't suffer from the same problem, but all of the subsequent games have checkpoints in places besides just where you've defeated a boss. As Bluepoint (the company that remade this game) was remaking it, why not tweak this super annoying aspect? #2) Soul Form In Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Dark Souls (the three FromSoftware games I'd beaten before taking down Demon's Souls), dying meant some sort of punishment, usually in the form of losing experience points. But that was it. That was the punishment. In Demon's Souls, the character's mortal body is lost upon death. Defeating one of the bosses gives you your body back--or you can use a consumable item for the same effect--but here's the rub: If you die with your human body in a level, you actually make the game harder. This is a broader criticism of the game, but there are some pretty important behind-the-scenes mechanics that are at play which definitely change the way a player chooses to go about playing the game. In Demon's Souls, dying with your body in any part of the world (except the Nexus) will cause the world to have a darker "tendency". Defeating a boss will create a lighter "tendency". Certain areas of the maps will become accessible, NPCs will appear, and other consequences stem from what kind of tendency you've created in each of the worlds. That is an interesting idea, but it is not clear at all that that's what's happening. And, since a dark tendency actually increases the difficulty of the enemies, it means that dying in human form is a great way to make the game harder, which will lead to a greater chance of dying in human form again, which only makes the game harder. But my biggest gripe on this front is the fact that a soul form body has only half the total HP. It's more of a psychological thing, really, but seeing half of the HP bar permanently empty feels dispiriting. Why even have it available? Being human means that you have more HP, yes, but the game is designed to make you die. A lot. So that means that particularly trying areas--you know, the places where you need extra hit points--you're disincentivized to do the thing that would give you the greatest advantage: Be in human form. Because if you do, then you're running the risk of dying in that area and making it even harder. To mitigate this a little, you can equip a "Cling Ring" that increases the amount of total HP in soul form. I definitely appreciated that--I probably wouldn't have been able to beat the game without it--but it also meant that, for all intents and purposes, I only had one ring that I could equip. There wasn't any way to have the extra health and multiple buffs or perks from two different rings, which severely limited my ability to explore different combinations of rings and weapons. I can see some pointing out that the purpose of the game is to be difficult. It's supposed to be hard. And I get that. But the difficulty level is pleasurable only in proportion to how fair the game is. It would make the game much harder if your character randomly exploded, but that wouldn't make it better, because you can't control random moments. Skill and commitment are what takes you through the game, but you are going to die. Unless you're a speedrunner or someone who never takes damage--meaning that the mechanic doesn't matter to you either way--this specific design choice is merely a source of irritation at best and downright frustration at worst. #3) Inventory Management One thing that all FromSoftware games seem to struggle with is how to navigate the inventory. It makes sense why it's difficult: Much of the storytelling and worldbuilding is located inside the items and their descriptions. And these games have a lot of items in them, so there's a lot to keep track of. What Demon's Souls does that really rather baffles me is that it makes your inventory limited. All of the other games avoid this, letting the magical logic of video game inventory screens contain thousands of different items, weapons, knickknacks, and armor types without explaining how the character really accesses them. Now, I'm down for greater realism in video games. I like it when a character's hand gun is replaced in the hip holster while the rifle is slung across the back. I also like it when you press a button and a sword bigger than your body suddenly appears in your hand. That isn't the problem. Since Demon's Souls isn't interested in any sort of realistic fealty on that front, it's so strange when I'm harvesting items from fallen foes only to have the game let me know that I don't have enough space to collect the item. "However," the game tells me, "you may send this item directly to storage if you press the Menu button." Um. Okay. One, why not make it be the X button? You know, the one that I use to clear almost every other piece of on-screen information? And two, why bother? Just let me carry all of the things. I know, I know: They want to have an encumbrance mechanic going on. And you know what? The one that actually matters to how the game is played is a great one. How much you have equipped to the character as a type of encumbrance is a wonderful way of having the player carefully choose what they think will be most useful in the next run. It's a good way of creating consequences for what you place on your avatar. So, since that's where material weight matters, where encumbrance comes into play, I don't see the need to place a limit on how many items the player can carry. It doesn't help that, despite their best efforts and years of iteration on this idea, the storage system is still clunky. Being unable to unequip while in the storage box means that you have to strip your character before interacting with Stockpile Thomas (who chats with you every time and has precious little to say), and though the individual types (consumables, keys, crafting items, armor types, and more) are easily flipped through, there are different buttons used in different situations. This is a pet peeve of mine that has been growing over the past few years, and that's when the same button does different things in different situations. For the most part, this game doesn't fall into this trap. When I press X, it's to interact with the world and that's about all. (This is one of the benefits of mapping the attack buttons onto the shoulders: Circle can always be dodge/run, X can always be interact, etc.) It isn't the same button that I normally use for jumping or what have you. In the case of the menu, however, there's this one thing that FromSoftware (and, in this case, Bluepoint) tends to do that I forget about constantly: Square doesn't always bring up the item description. When you're in the equipping screen, pressing Square will unequip the item. But when you're in any other screen, Square will pull up the item description--a necessary component of the game if you're going to learn anything about the lore of the world (especially in the PS5 version, where loading screens average less than 5 seconds). I can't tell you how often I pressed Square so that I could look at the details of my item, only to realize that I had unequipped it instead. And, without a quick scroll option (other games use Left or Right on the D-Pad; in Dark and Demon's Souls, that's how you swap through the menu tabs), there's a lot of scrolling up and down while looking for a necessary item. It just seems clunky to me. Sekiro does a marginally better job in this case, but that's mostly because it at least allowed for quick scrolling. I don't know if there is a better way to deal with this--and its close cousin, not knowing how an item compares to your current stats when you're looking at it in the storage box--but I feel like there must be. It's just so…inelegant. The Good Stuff The thing about all of the stuff I just said, is that it's all pretty minor. Annoying? Yes. Worth ignoring for the overall excellence of the game? Absolutely. I don't know how faithfully Demon's Souls on the PlayStation 5 recreates its predecessor from a couple of console generations ago, but I don't really care: This game is amazing. It will probably go without saying from now on that the graphics of the game are simply stunning. Dazzling lighting effects, incredibly detailed environments, intricacies in areas that are likely overlooked--it's all a visual feast. I played the entire thing in "Cinematic" mode (rather than the "Performance" mode, which reallocates computing resources to increase the smoothness of gameplay) and I was in awe almost the entire time. Though my surround sound system isn't particularly impressive, the sound design was excellent. The echoing of certain effects coming from the controller's speaker was immersive and appreciated. I loved the way a spell felt like a massive blast of power, even if it only did middling damage, thanks to the way the sound design augmented the play. The PS5's advanced haptic feedback means that there are all sorts of tactile telltales, subtle physical communications that pull you into the game more fully. For example, one of my favorite late-game spells is Warding, which ups your defense without cutting down on your agility. When you cast it, there is a very soft pulsing of the controller as long as the spell is active. Once the spell ends, the pulsation stops. If you're in the middle of a fight, you're not likely to notice when the spell ends--too many other things to keep track of--but it's a cool way of informing the player of important stuff that's only there for those who are looking for it. Additionally, the loading speeds are such a nice change. As much as I love Bloodborne, I'm not looking forward to the interminable load times. Yes, they give a chance to read the item descriptions, but since you can't scroll through them, you end up rereading stuff that you've already seen dozens--if not hundreds--of times. And in the case of Sekiro, I think that I sometimes had more than half a minute waiting for the game to load after a death. The feedback loop of "death leads to learning to avoid dying the same way" is shortened when the load screen incorporates fog billowing about for a few seconds and then the game beginning again. It helps immensely in feeling like you're still playing the game, even though you died and have to start that section over again. Plus, this is a FromSoftware game, carefully and lovingly recreated for current-gen systems. That means that it's automatically a worthwhile purchase. There will be times when you have to look up some help on the internet, but that's a feature, not a bug. Being able to see what others have discovered and learning from them is a great way to feel like you're part of the community, even if you are like me and don't actively participate in it. Seeing different strategies, funny stories, great builds, and watching endless lore videos makes the game less a single-session experience and more a multimedia one. Like everything else (except Bloodborne), I don't know when/if I will return to this game. So far, I've spent about 100 hours in Bloodborne, 70 in Sekiro, 60 in Dark Souls, and 45 in Demon's Souls. That is a fair amount of time, now that I look at it. But it's also the order in which I played them, so it shows that there are transferable skills and understanding that goes into each one. I'm working through Dark Souls II and will probably pick up III (if I don't get it for my birthday), and it'll be interesting to see how long I spend in those other worlds. The idea of returning to any of them fills me with uncertainty; they all have robust New Game Plus options--each time through is harder than the first time, but you maintain your levels and gear--but I don't know if I want to expand my experience with the metagame of NG+ or be content to start over from scratch and try it in an entirely new way. Since I don't know which to do, I defer my decision by buying up the other games from the company. So, if you've read these 3,400 or so words thus far and feel uncertain about whether or not I recommend the game, I want to be unequivocal and clear: Demon's Souls is an incredible game and I highly recommend it. Easily the best thing I've played on the PS5 which, considering the age of the system, isn't really saying a lot. That does, however, include Spider-Man: Miles Morales, though…so take that into account, too. --- * "Cheesing" is when you find out some cheap trick to help simplify the fight and make it easier to defeat the boss. Sometimes it can be an accidental glitch: While fighting the Dragon God, I was accidentally picked up by his beefy hand and dropped into the second level of the area. The AI couldn't follow me there, so I ended up beating him without him ever really knowing that I existed. In the case of Old King Allant, I snuck up behind him and poisoned him. It took ten minutes or more for the poison attacks to whittle off his life to the point that a quick attack took him down, but I didn't feel bad about it at all. Around the beginning of October 2020, I decided that I would play a "spooky" game for the month of Halloween. I spent an inordinate amount of time playing Resident Evil: Resistance, the asymmetrical multiplayer mode bundled in with the (too short, sadly) remake of Resident Evil 3.
I should've played Bloodborne instead. As the end of the month neared and my scratch for something spooky still unitched, I pulled out Bloodborne. There was a good chunk of time during November 2020 that I spent shivering in bed as COVID ran through 4/5 of my house, so I didn't put a great deal of time into the beast until around December. But then I hit it hard, with an obsession that I don't normally experience with video games. (Case in point: I own not only the video game and its DLC, but I also purchased the card game and the newly-released, more-money-than-I-care-to-confess Kickstarter board game, as well as three of the four comics and an overpriced-because-it-was-rare artbook. Plus an action figure and some 3-D printed pieces, too. It's…unhealthy.) Because I had finally cracked the code on how FromSoftware games work, I started to expand my repertoire. I asked for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice for Christmas, and was thumping my way through that when January came. The first day of Gayle's chemo, I sat in my car feeling immensely out of sorts. Because of COVID (BoC), I couldn't be with her during her treatment: I had to settle her in a chair and then say goodbye (it's hard to give goodbye kisses with masks on). At that particular moment of me waiting for her to go through her first (as it turned out, horrible) treatment, I felt rather powerless and in need of some retail therapy. Of course, BoC I couldn't really go hang out at a store and just browse. (I have tried that a couple of times, but I find myself so anxious and stressed out about being somewhere I don't have to be that it ends up not really doing very much for me.) So, instead, I jumped onto the PlayStation store on my phone, logged in, and browsed through the Dark Souls titles. As I was planning--at some point--to pick up a PlayStation 5 and the remake of Demon's Souls, I focused only on the trilogy. At that moment, they were having a sale on all three of them, but I decided to have some modicum of restraint and only purchased the first one. I had bought it for the PlayStation 3 back at the tail-end of that generation's lifecycle (and at a pretty low price, I seem to recall), but had only gotten an hour or two into it before setting it aside. Now I could buy the remastered version of the game for the PS4 and have my PlayStation download it while I was away. By the time I got home with Gayle, I had a new game waiting for me. I had Sekiro, Ghost of Tsushima, and now Dark Souls to play with. All three of them helped me to cope with what ended up being a pretty miserable couple of months, at least as far as my non-work life. Seeing Gayle get ravaged by the chemotherapy every couple of weeks was no easy thing, and so, paradoxically, I wanted to play games that were similarly no easy thing. I know that it's sort of twisted. After all, the FromSoftware games have a well-earned reputation of being immensely punishing. It takes me over 60 hours to beat one of them (which does mean that I get a lot of gaming for my dollar bills), and it can be immensely frustrating to die again and again as I strive to beat a boss or a single section of the game. In other words, these games are ruthless and hard and why should I bother going through something so hard in the digital world when my real-world difficulties are weighing me down? That's a fair question, and I think it boils down to the fact that these games--Bloodborne, Sekiro, and now Dark Souls--have shown me that, with enough resolution, study, help, and effort I can defeat hard things. Gayle still has nine treatments to go before we're done with chemotherapy, then over a month of daily radiation after that. We have a ruthless and hard journey still to go. The only way to overcome it is to go through it, which is a lesson that these games help me to internalize. It's more than just a platitude of "this game shows me I can do hard things", too. In the case of Gayle's treatment, there's nothing that I can do to control it. We have steps we take, of course, to help mitigate some of the harder aspects (for example, we shifted her treatments to Fridays so that neither of us has to find a substitute to take our classes). However, it's simply a matter of endurance at this point. We make and keep the appointments; the chemicals do their hellacious thing; we mitigate all we can. That's how we interact with the treatment. But in the video game world, I am again confronted with an enormous, almost insurmountable task--and then I do something about it. Yes, I sometimes have to look up maps, walkthroughs, or guides on how to beat a particular part (I didn't do that nearly as often in DS as I did in BB and S:SDT, though). Much like the chemotherapy, I'm not going through the experience alone. I don't know how else to explain it: I play these games almost as if I want to be able to confront difficult things and beat them; since I can't take Gayle's treatment into myself for her, these games act as a kind of surrogate. It's strange, I know, and I'm not declaring any sort of real equivalency in terms of what she's going through (physical illness and exhaustion, emotional strain, baldness, and much more) and playing a video game. Instead, I think of it as the most fundamental purpose of play, which is to gain vicarious experience. It isn't about Dark Souls somehow competing with cancer as though one is harder than the other--that is a foolish kind of comparison at best and insulting at worst. No, it's more about coping via strain. These games have a formula that is clear to anyone who's played them thoroughly that I think helps to explain why FromSoftware is now so highly regarded. In my view, these games (in general) and Dark Souls (in particular) succeed because of story, environment, and improvement. Story I'd be hard pressed to tell you the ins-and-outs of Dark Souls. (I'm mildly better at explaining Bloodborne, but that isn't because I've played the game enough; I've just watched more videos on YouTube.) I know that there is something about darkness, a dwindling flame, and the need to defeat Gwyn, Lord of Cinders. It's a glum, gloomy world, filled with monsters and darkness, but it's a story about that world. Yes, you play as the Undead Chosen, the one who can--perhaps--defeat Gwyn, but on the whole, there isn't a lot of character-based narrative that's going on in the game. Instead, the narrative is told via the deliberate design of the levels, very brief cutscenes, occasional conversations with NPCs, and the descriptions inside of the items. This is a minimalist way of telling a highly complex and complicated story, which is--from what I can see--the best example of what makes video game storytelling unique from all other media in the past. I've long wondered what the video game storytelling mode is, how it can excel in ways that no other media could. I mean, each major medium has an advantage that's a part of the appeal of it. Cinema has a strong visual component (which, obviously, video games share) and the ability to communicate setting more easily than almost any other medium. Also, naturalistic dialogue--especially crosstalking--is so wonderfully contained within the medium that I view it as the greatest boon of cinema. Theater has the ability of creating intimacy and immediacy because of the proximity between audience and story. Novels can delve into the inner feelings and desires of a human soul. Comics allow for intense control over the speed at which information is communicated. But when it came to video games, I couldn't see what the medium could do that wasn't already done by another (particularly film), and usually better. Then I started to understand what FromSoftware had done in creating the Soulsborne games and I saw it: Video games excel at providing audience-chosen levels of interaction with the text. In other words, you can choose how much--or how little--you learn about the story when you're in a video game. Because the player has the choice in how long to spend reading descriptions, looking at environmental details, or seeking out conversations with NPCs, the amount of story told is within the control of the player. Overwatch came close to this, I think, but nothing that I've played has come close to the skill with which FromSoftware tells its stories. Environment Not only is the environment a major component of FromSoftware's storytelling toolbox, it is also a captivating place to be. Lordran is a mysterious place, filled with an immense diversity of locales. From Firelink Shrine to Undead Parish to Anor Londo, each major area of the game feels integral to the world, yet is distinct within it. When I was in the poisonous pits that comprise Blighttown, I once spun the camera up…and saw the flying buttresses of Firelink Shrine. I could see where I had originated from. I saw how far I'd come. Because the game is so tightly tied together, it feels as if everything is a logical extension of what came before it. And the environment has its own internal consistency, too. No, I don't know the reason why the Tomb of the Giants was made, necessarily, but I'm not surprised to see that most of the enemies in this area are gigantic--big ape/dog skeletons, giant skeletons, enormous tombs…it all makes sense that they're there. And the mystery is compelling. Why are there ruins beneath? Why is Anor Londo pristine, a land of perpetual sunset, without even a speck of dust or debris to clutter its marbled halls? How does Sif, a gigantic wolf that wields a massive sword, tie into the flood that killed thousands--perhaps millions--in order to keep the Four Kings locked into the Abyss? I don't know the answers. Some of them are, as a matter of fact, unanswerable. Yet that only serves to strengthen the allure of the game. Just like the player is allowed to choose how she goes about playing and in what order she approaches the challenges, she's also allowed a great deal of interpretive choice. The game has some clear boundaries--obviously, there is a giant wolf that swings about a massive sword and no amount of interpretive arguments undoes that reality--but also an immense amount of room to play within, too. Not only that, but there's always so much to explore. Admittedly, some of the ways one gets from place to place is…rather opaque. I mean, how was I supposed to know to associate the Peculiar Doll (found by returning to the Undead Asylum by climbing to the top of the Firelink Shrine and curling up into a ball in a bird's nest) with the massive painting at the far end of the cathedral in Anor Londo? Yet the thrill of discovering a new place--usually after the thrill of defeating a boss who's been giving you grief for the past hour or so--is intense. Popping open a secret passageway, discovering a shortcut that allows you to circumvent some previous difficulty, or just the excitement of hearing the ominous tolling noise and seeing the new location's name spread over the screen…it's all satisfying and almost addictive in its pleasure. Improvement The game is an action-RPG, but the role you play in the game isn't particularly well defined. Yes, you can level up and choose how your character advances within the stats. The point isn't, however, to come to some great understanding of the past of the character or why she's involved. No, what matters here is that you as a player--the human being holding the controller--will grow and improve. Your growth is commensurate with how much time and effort you put into learning about the game, its mechanics, and how the world works. At the outset, you will die. A lot. And by the ending, you will also die a lot. In between, however, is a massive amount of change. The enemies that gave you so much grief in the early hours of the game will, by the time you're running through on your way to another section of the world, provide almost no difficulty to you at all. You will be able to breeze through the Undead Parish so rapidly that the knights who slaughtered you so often when you first encountered them will barely have time to react to you. And if they do manage to attack, well, you have gained the skills necessary to easily dispatch them. Your character levels up but you also level up. That is something that happens in other games, of course: I'm much better at playing Final Fantasy VII Remake at the end of the game than I was at the beginning. Nevertheless, there's something more tangible in how I improved through Dark Souls. As I mentioned before, I arrived at Dark Souls after defeating Bloodborne, but also as I was tackling Sekiro. Bloodborne has a lot more in common with the mechanics of Dark Souls than Sekiro does, but there were still a lot of things about the originator of the series that I had to learn. The parry mechanic was a crucial thing to understand (one that I still don't have a lot of proficiency in), as well as things like managing the stamina bar. Not only that, but I was trained by Bloodborne to play more aggressively, to jump into the fights and let the rally system help me survive encounters. Dark Souls' reliance on shields makes battles more ponderous and careful, trying to learn how and when to react to the attacks of enemies in a studious, cautious way. Not having the rally system was something that took time to understand--yet I learned. And that's the thing: I learned. I genuinely feel like I'm a better player of video games having beaten three FromSoftware titles. It gives me confidence to keep playing these punishing games--I have Demon's Souls for the PS5 and I'm planning on picking up a copy of Dark Souls II soon--and that is encouraging. Not only does it mean that I feel as though a purchase of more FromSoftware games won't be a waste of money, but it also invites me to think about the games much more than some of the other enjoyable-but-forgettable titles that clutter my hard drive. In Sum In case it was unclear, I do highly recommend Dark Souls. They aren't for everyone (obviously), but there is so much to commend them. I didn't even talk about the dopamine rush you get when you finally beat something that's been your bane for X number of hours, nor the intricacies of the souls economy work. In other words, there's much more to enjoy and explore and learn about in this game than I touched on in this weird review. I'm excited to play more of these games, and I'm glad that there's this back-catalogue for me to enjoy before I, like the rest of the "Souls community", have to wait for Elden Rings to come to pass. The beginning of March is always a bittersweet thing. On the good side, it usually means that the weather is starting to turn. Sky dandruff falls less often (though we've had precious little snow the past few years). The lawn outside my office window begins to start the process of maybe even trying to think about changing its color from depression-yellow to tentative-green. I can crack my window for some fresh air and to better hear the grumbles of traffic. My brother's birthday shows up, as does my second child's. This year, Daylight Saving Time leaps into action mid-month, which means my homeward bound commute will no longer involve squinting against the rays of the setting sun. So there are some definite perks and positives.
The downside, however, is that my schedule almost always puts the beginning of my World War I unit at the beginning of March. And that is, in and of itself, a bittersweet thing--a confession I'm loathe to make, despite it being true. I'm not much of a historian. There's a very narrow subset of historical moments that I know extensively--perhaps to the level of having forgotten more than what most people will ever know--and the rest is expansive enough to cover what I teach in class. I have been steadily trying to increase that knowledge over the years, and while I certainly know what I'm teaching, I don't have a grasp on other aspects of the same time periods. For example, I couldn't tell you what was happening basically anywhere on the African continent during the 13-1800s, except maybe some Napoleonic fighting in Egypt. I'm pretty ignorant about China pre-19th century. The list could go on. My point is that I know what I need for my classes and then a bit more, except for in certain areas where I know more than is needed for my classes. Those areas tend to revolve around the Tudor/Stuart dynasty in England, and the World Wars. And that's the "sweet" part about starting the World War I unit: I'm going from something that I have some knowledge to something I have (comparatively) more knowledge. Feeling confident and comfortable and knowledgeable about something makes a big difference in the satisfaction of a unit. I won't say there's never a question I can't answer, but I can give a bit of an answer to most of them, and that's a good feeling. Not only that, but I'm pretty passionate about remembering and learning about World War I. I focus a lot on the Western Front (going beyond the trench warfare is one of the areas that I aim to improve my knowledge about as time goes on), yes. Nevertheless, I feel like what and how I teach is not only elucidating for the students, but is valuable for how they understand the world that we live in. I can't think of an event of equal importance in the past century than World War I. (And if you want to argue about World War II, you have a lot of explaining on how we would've ended up with fascism and despotism throughout Europe without the catastrophe of 1914-1918.) And, in a lot of ways, I view it this way because my students have a probably-unhealthy interest in WWII and view WWI with dim curiosity at best and outright apathy at worst. Not only do I get to change their understanding of history through this lengthy unit, but I also get to share some poetry by Wilfred Owen, one of my favorite poets, and that's always exciting. So I have some positive things about "starting the war" this week. But there's also some "bitter" mixed in there, and that's the reality that I'm about to embark on my annual trek through human misery, brutality, callousness, and horror. I know that there's a lot of hero-worship of the doughboys (just kidding; precious few people care about WWI vets; our national memorial to the 116,000 killed in the Great War won't be dedicated until 2024), and it can be hard to go against a received tradition of veneration. Teaching about what humans did to each other, and the hell unleashed upon the world is taxing and draining and depressing. I don't dwell long on the Armenian genocide, for example, but it's one of the things that really kicks me in the guts every time I have to explain it. The disgusting waste of life on 1 July 1916 at the Battle of the Somme is hardly something to relish describing, nor its French counterpart that started in February of the same year near Verdun. We read All Quiet on the Western Front to get a view from the German trenches, only to see that it's basically the same as the view from the British or French ones. We see black and white photos, maps, colorized film clips, and modern day images of century-old weapons. I try to give them a broad understanding about the conflict, because there's so much and one must be firm in cutting out details. But I also try to instill in them the understanding of what modern warfare looks like, the pains it can cause, the scars it leaves. Add to that the utter futility of the fight--the pointlessness of the conflict in the first place, to say nothing of the way in which it set up the world for greater misery and bloodshed just two decades later, and my World War I unit is a bleak prospect indeed. So that's why I find March to be a melancholic month, despite its manifest positives. This year, with the world "celebrating" the first anniversary of COVID-19, I'm reminded of how I taught this information last year--parked in my office, looking out at the world through my window, talking to my computer screen with a handful of dedicated students who "showed up" for the actual lecture, rather than relying on the recording. I get to teach in person now, albeit in a modified manner, and that has some positives. (Of course, it also led to me getting COVID and almost infecting my heart-warrior son, so on the whole I'd say it's mostly negative.) Here I sit, then, on the week when we "start World War I" (as I sometimes accidentally say before correcting myself and say "start our study of World War I"), I hope you can forgive me for feeling a mixture of bittersweet emotions. (All right, so the title is misleading: Technically, Jin is a samurai, not a shinobi. But I thought it was clever, so I went with it. Okay, moving on…) During Fall 2020, a lot of really rotten things hit me and my family, not the least of which was an infection of COVID that narrowly avoided hitting my heart-warrior son. Due to this (and a host of other things), Gayle obliged me by letting me buy a new video game. I wanted Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice or Ghost of Tsushima. As the latter was on sale, I bought that. Christmas was around the corner, so Sekiro arrived on my PlayStation 4 shortly thereafter. Suddenly, I had two games set in feudal Japan that required a lot of sword swinging to get things done. Playing the games concurrently--sometimes switching from one to another in a single evening--led to a unique juxtaposition, an insight into how wildly different developers approach a similar concept.
What's the Same The setting: Both games take place during a historical moment of Japan--GoT during the Mongolian invasions of the late-13th century, S:SDT during the Sengoku period in the 15th century--and each relies on getting many details right. I'm no expert on this, but my brother (a Japanese teacher and translator) assures me that GoT has a pretty faithful adherence to historical accuracy. There are some liberties taken, of course, but on the whole, it's a faithful adaptation. Sekiro takes place in the fictional nation of Ashina, so there's a lot more room for flexibility. Still, the lightning-angled paper streamers known as shide abound in Ashina as much as Tsushima (perhaps a bit more in Sekiro), and sake features in both games fairly heavily. Pagodas dot the landscapes, miscanthus grass covers the ground, and inspiring vistas of a cloud-capped mountains and foggy valleys add depth to both worlds. Obviously, with both games set in Japan, the characters speak Japanese (though there are English tracks) and approach their duties with a strong sense of duty, honor, and loyalty. The gameplay: Smacking bad guys with swords, throwing alternative weapons to distract or kill enemies from a distance, hiding in shadows to stealth-kill thoughtless guards, and navigating what ought to be unnavigable terrain feature heavily in both games. There are ways to distract guards, manipulate the environment, and even light enemies on fire, regardless of which title you pick to play. Fast traveling, leveling up the character, and even alternative costumes are available, albeit in very different ways from each. Oh, and they're third-person action RPGs, so even genre-wise they're playing in the same sandbox. As is typical for video games, there are also a number of mini-bosses that can be defeated, which helps improve the character's stats, plus a number of larger bosses to defeat. In such high-stakes, one-on-one battles, the enemy has a stamina bar in addition to health bars. Deflecting enough damage--or meting out enough of your own--can lead to the stamina bar dropping low enough to deal major health damage to the boss. The story: In order to save his part of the world, the hero must embark on a quest to resist the influence of an evil usurper who wishes to harm someone the hero loves. By using his skills with the sword--and a trusty grappling hook--he will traverse a wild and dangerous world, filled with enemies in enclosed fortresses and vicious animals who will attack him at a moment's notice. In the end, the hero must confront the man he always considered his father, the man who trained him in the ways of the warrior. The life of the father will then be decided by the hero. This confrontation comes about because the hero has chosen to betray his family and the demands of tradition. Also, both have ghosts. What's Different The setting: Both games are stunning in their executions, albeit in different ways. There's no doubt, though, that Ghost of Tsushima has a superior graphical and visual delivery. Sucker Punch's game is jaw-droppingly beautiful, having taken massive inspiration from Akira Kurosawa's cinematic language to create engaging, powerful cut scenes. Top-notch performance capture work, along with subtle facial animations to match the nuances of the acting all combine with the eye-candy of a late-stage PlayStation 4 game. The world feels almost tangible, with wind whistling through the leaves of grass (and the controller's speaker) and stirring the cloth of the characters. A day/night cycle, as well as weather effects work together to make Tsushima variegated, engaging, and enjoyable to traverse. Not only that, but GoT is an open-world game, allowing the player to explore many nooks and crannies, rivers and streams, mountaintops and valleys. Light platforming mechanics gives Jin--the player character--a chance to clamber around, swinging from branches to boulders in well-designed side-missions. Indeed, discovering the shrines was one of my favorite parts of the game, as I've always reveled in well-made platforming sections (I think the early Prince of Persia titles were superb examples of this). The melding of strictly linear approaches in these mini-missions versus the otherwise open-ended options of the main game is a seamless and logical construction. By contrast, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is an amalgamation of open-world philosophy and conscientious, deliberate "level" design. As is almost always the case with FromSoftware games, Sekiro has a progression of areas of the map that is ideal for certain levels of skill. At the beginning, Sekiro must fight through a memory at Hirata Estate. When I first played this section, it took a solid hour (or more…probably more) to learn the pathways through the streets, the best order to attack enemies, and doing my best not to engage with the soldiers in anything less than the ideal situation. As I beat my head against the final boss fight of the game, some seventy hours later, I chose to return to Hirata Estate and slew my way through without hardly even taking any damage. This is what I mean by deliberate design: Ashina has many places to explore, but they're all within the "tracks" of the main pathways. There are shortcuts--crucial to find if you want to play through without going crazy having to fight your way through the same areas three dozen times--and secrets, but the design is recursive, bringing you back to earlier areas. This creates a really cohesive but small world, one that is finely tuned for its purpose. There are hints to a broader world beyond the conflict in Ashina, but that's all they are: Hints. Yet, I also mean that it's "open-world" because you don't have to play through the game in any specific, set way. There are some required early-game areas, of course--as is the case with Ghost and most every game--where options are highly limited. However, once you reach a certain point, progress can be done in any way you wish. I got stuck on mini-bosses a number of times, so I would go elsewhere and shinobi-stab some fools for a while. It would help me level up, get me better at the game, and sometimes lead to other boss/mini-boss fights that I could challenge myself with. The freedom to choose how to explore the world is contracted compared to GoT, but it still gives the impression of being in control of when and where I fought. Graphically, I have to say that it was always a bit jarring to switch from GoT to S:SDT. The former was always rich with color, its HDR10 color palate expansive and crisp. By comparison, the latter always felt a bit dingy, with washed out colors and a grimy feeling. (This may be a PlayStation 4 issue: I've seen some breathtaking footage of Sekrio on YouTube, which I assume was captured with a high-end PC.) The game is still pretty--mostly in the way that video games are now, with the sharp details that look as good close up as they do at a distance--but not the gasp-inducing beauty that GoT pulled off. The gameplay: Of the two, I vastly prefer playing as Sekiro. That isn't to say that Jin wasn't fun; on the contrary, I had a great time playing as the Ghost of Tsushima--especially when I played the online mode with my brother. It was always satisfying to get a fifty-meter headshot with my longbow (Sekrio doesn't use any bows at all) and watch the enemy rag-doll to the ground. And the way that I could easily flow from one fighting style to another was a brilliant bit of design on Sucker Punch's part. Part of this is because FromSoftware's sense of how to use the controller is so good. It doesn't sound like there'd be a lot of variability in this--there are limited number of buttons, after all, so how could one game's use of the controller matter so much? Yet there is. In the case of Sekiro, the shoulder buttons being the attack buttons means that running and jumping can be done without having to reset my thumb to switch to an attack if necessary. This game moves quickly (not in terms of story…that's a different thing altogether), so the slightest advantage I can have, I want. By way of (yet another) comparison, I recently started playing Marvel's Avengers. I remapped the controls as much as I could to be like a FromSoftware game. I use my right fingers to attack, leaving my thumb open for dodging and jumping. But because the game isn't designed for that level of finesse, it doesn't have the same feeling. Like, at all. In fact, I'm planning on switching back to the defaults, because it simply isn't satisfying. It's sort of like trying to run an HDR10 game on a TV that only outputs 1080i: The higher quality stuff isn't really doing anything for the experience. Sekiro moves like a shadow, practically gliding over the earth, stealth-killing and slashing his way through Ashina. Because of the sound-design, animation sequences, and controller interaction are so well welded, kills feel substantial and satisfying. Flying out of the air to land on an unsuspecting monster's neck is a frequent thrill. And, with the ability to stealth-kill or deathblow an enemy being the same button as my basic attack, I almost never flubbed one. I can't say the same for Ghost of Tsushima. It was always clear when I played Sekiro before Ghost: In the latter game, the R1 button throws a kunai at the bad guys. I can't tell you how many times I thought I was about to chop my opponents down, only to find myself throwing some small knives at them, staggering them backwards. The muscle-memory took rewiring each time. More than any of these specific components, the reality is that nobody can touch FromSoftware when it comes to boss fights. (The closest would be Hideo Kojima during his prime years on Metal Gear Solid, and maybe a couple of times in Bayonetta and Devil May Cry.) The common refrain on FromSoftware games is that they're punishingly hard. That is true, but it isn't about being hard that makes the game worth playing; it's how satisfying it is when you finally make that last deathblow and defeat the enemy that has sent you back to the checkpoint countless times. There's a thrill not unlike going on a rollercoaster when you're squaring off against the Blazing Bull for the fifth or sixth time and you've finally got him on the ropes. Finally putting down a boss (or, as happened so much more often with me, a mini-boss) after so many attempts feels so good. It's honestly addicting, and part of the reason that, after beating Bloodborne a few months ago, I've been flirting with the idea of replaying it. (I have a couple of other games to knock out before I do that, however.) And while I was always satisfied when I defeated a difficult boss in Ghost of Tsushima, they didn't provide the same level of satisfaction as when I defeated someone who had given me grief for a solid hour in Sekiro. All that being said, both gameplay styles are good. Not just good, but really top notch. The designers brought their A-game (I honestly don't know what that phrase is supposed to mean) to the products, and it shows. I thoroughly enjoyed both offerings and had fun while I was there. The story: Despite my earlier, glib way of pointing out plot similarities, the two games are drastically different. And while both have "ghosts", the supernatural is pretty muted in Ghost of Tsushima, while it's crucial to the story of Sekiro. Ghost of Tsushima is a story about revenge and fury, about repelling invaders and unifying a fighting force to stop a great wrong from happening. Its scope is large, yet it remains tightly focused on Jin. He is an interesting character, one who struggles with what he has to do in order to save his island home, an exploration of what happens when one gives up morality for Machiavellian advantage. More than that, the story really resonates because of the aforementioned performances. By being able to see the characters' faces, their emotional responses to the different subjects they discuss, and even seeing the changes in the costumes to match the new moments in the story, I was pulled into Jin's journey much more fully. Video games are unique in their interactivity, but their ability to use cinematic language can't be overlooked. I felt a gentle give-and-pull of being in control of a character but willing to let him go when the story intervened. Sekiro, on the other hand, has very few cutscenes, and though there are lots of conversations, they feel like puppets delivering dialogue. There isn't any emotion in the body language, as the interlocutors remain stiff as they run through their lines. The camera remains free, allowing me to spin around and try to see Sekiro's face to try to gauge his emotional reaction. Unfortunately, this tends to distract me, making it hard for me to pay attention to what's being said, as well as failing in the point of drawing me more into their world. Sekiro takes all information in with the same stoic resolve as he would if someone pointed out that he has a nose. I know why game designers do this (they're trying to get the players to more fully invest themselves into the avatar, and don't want the character's personality to interfere with it), but I really wish they'd stop trying. It doesn't make sense. It didn't work for Solid Snake, it doesn't work for the Hunter in Bloodborne, and it won't work for Sekiro. Blank-canvas characters aren't interesting (I'm looking at you, Bella Swan), no matter the medium. Of course, one thing that video games can do in ways that no other medium can, is tell a non-linear story based on the amount that the audience wants to hear. Sekiro's story is told through small "remnants" of memories that you find as you explore, as well as item descriptions, notes found in the world, conversations over sake with other NPCs, details in the environment, and--occasionally--a cutscene. It's a fantastic way to tell a story, because a player gets as much as she puts into it. For me, this is the great strength of interactive storytelling: Giving the player choice and control, not over narrative trees, but over quantity and detail of the story. That's the other ingredient to FromSoftware's secret sauce, and it's used to perfection in this game. Except for one thing: Sekiro is an actual character, not solely an avatar. Neither of these games allows for character creation--all people who play Ghost will play as Jin; there is only one Sekiro in Sekiro--and that means that the story can be focused on the character qua character, rather than inciting incident for the events of the world. In other FromSoftware games, you can create what your avatar looks like--skin color, gender, height, and more--and pilot that avatar throughout the dark world. And it is that world wherein the story happens. Bloodborne, for example, is about a Hunter who seeks the paleblood. However, it isn't about the Hunter. That is, the player may interact with the world, but that character is in something much bigger than herself. The characters with names, motivations, and backstory are those who create the tapestry and world that the player explores. It's highly enjoyable, but it mostly works because it isn't about the way the player character changes through the course of the journey. Sekiro tries to blend the two, and I don't think it fully succeeds. It tells Sekiro's story competently enough, inasmuch as the plot points are clear (-ish) and give strong motivation for what your objectives are. However, there isn't a lot of emotional grounding. When it comes time to decide whom to betray, there isn't any sort of background to rely on for an emotional feeling. I could pick one of four options in how I got to the end of the story (and then watch the others on YouTube) without having any sort of character-based reason for choosing the way I thought Sekiro might. Since he's such a stoic character, I wasn't able to "read" him in any significant way. This is, perhaps, the biggest flaw of this game. Ghost is replete with emotional moments. There's genuine pathos when a friend dies horribly, and I really wanted to help Yuna whenever her missions popped up, as I viewed her as a great ally. Jin grows and learns as a person through the course of the story, and with the superior cinematography and editing of the frequent cutscenes, I felt much more connected to him. Sitting and composing haikus in the forest, giving time over to watch his naked self contemplate important thoughts while in a hot spring, listening to him discuss ideas and stratagems with his friends--these are the components of a strong connection with a character. There's an emotional vulnerability to Jin that Sekiro simply doesn't have. There's nothing wrong with a stoic, resolute character--but they certainly aren't one that I would want to watch a movie about. I like Sekiro because I can play as Sekiro; I like Jin because I feel for him and see parts of myself in his struggles. Final Thoughts It shouldn't surprise you to know that I don't recommend one game over another. They're both incredible, and they both do their jobs with stunning aplomb. Neither is perfect, and I think both should be played by anyone interested. Perhaps the supernatural dive into Japanese mythology (complete with an eventual slaying of a dragon by the end) is more interesting to you: In which case, Sekiro is the better choice. But maybe historical fiction with a bit of ancestor-help-as-gameplay-mechanic intrigues you more: Take Ghost of Tsushima, then. Either way, you'll have an enjoyable experience. Despite how many times I died because I hit the wrong button thanks to the control scheme of the other game, I'm really glad that I played them this way. Where one lacks, the other shines, and vice versa--though I must emphasize again they are both superb games--and I think anyone interested in spending some more time in the Land of the Rising Sun could do worse than playing one of them. Or why not both? Well, it was nice while it lasted.
I had a goal of writing every day of 2021--an impossible goal, I knew, but one that did a fair bit of motivating for me even during the first hellish weeks of this new year. The thinking behind the goal was to relieve some of my self-imposed pressure to write a certain amount every day/week/month or whatever (though I've still a goal of drafting 30,000 words minimum each month, if possible). I figured that by simply expecting that I write something not work related, I would be able to keep moving along as a writer, slowly accreting the skills that I need to somehow sell my work. I was generous with my expectations: A couple of hundred words in my reading journal would suffice. Not a particularly lofty goal, to be honest. And it isn't as though I had to strain to do that for most of January. I began writing my own TTRPG during the end of my D&D Winterim, and (as often happens with me) I got caught in a flurry of creativity. I spent hours formulating rules, generating a character sheet, and even drafting an introductory module that acts as the prologue to the type of story I'd want this game to tell. That led to almost 20,000 words of work so far, all done in the space of a three weeks, give or take. What's more, I took a Friday off and headed to the great untamed wilderness known as downtown Provo to have some writing time at an Air BnB. I spent the weekend getting food delivered to my door (we are still in a pandemic, after all) and writing what struck my fancy. I generated a total of just over 20,000 words on those three days. Most of them are in my mashup of Red Riding Hood and Bloodborne, but a handful of them landed in the lore section of my TTRPG, too. It was a very pleasant experience, one that was designed to help my mental health as much as my word count. After all, Gayle is not even halfway through her chemotherapy and each time she has to go in it's a fresh ordeal for me. Despite the familiarity with the process of what's going on, the toll it takes on me is greater with each visit. So the trip last weekend did help recharge me a bit, if only because it allowed me to focus on writing without having other worries encroaching. (Gayle stayed with her mother for some of the time, so I could rest easy, knowing that she was being looked after. She was also feeling a lot better by then, so she even came and spent the night with me on Friday.) Despite all of that, this past week was grueling in all of the nondescript, unimportant ways that life weathers us. I can't point to any specific issue--there isn't, like, a phone call from an upset parent or a distressing bill come in the mail--that really made the week a misery. Certainly part of it comes from my dysthymia kicking in. I'm pretty good about keeping my Patronus pills filled and using the medication daily. It helps most of the time. However, "most of the time" is not "all of the time" and this past week has been pretty bad, emotionally speaking, for me. And that brings us up to my failed goal. I wanted to jot a couple of thoughts about The Hobbit into my reading journal to get my day's writing goal accomplished, but I hit a (potentially very expensive) snag: I couldn't find my Moleskine Pen+. This is the pen that I use with my special Moleskine notebooks that transcribes what I write and puts it into a TXT file so that I can digitally archive (and search through) the things that I write. It's one of those unnecessary-but-still-fun-and-cool bits of tech that tends to catch my attention. I had sent off my first Pen+ to get it repaired, which meant that I was without it for a couple of months. A new one arrived just before Christmas, allowing me to again write the way I wanted to. And when I went looking for it in my computer bag, it was nowhere to be found. This has not helped at all. Because of my mental illness, I have a tendency to fixate on things that go wrong in my life. They all add to a greater narrative of my own inadequacies, my failings for making the false assumption that things go right, and a type of "Well, of course that happened" feeling. This isn't healthy, I know, and I try to not let these sorts of things get me down. But, at the same time…they definitely get me down. Since what I wanted to write last night couldn't happen (how can I write in my special notebook without my special pen?), I simply let my goal go. I didn't write anything, not even a paragraph or two of lore for my TTRPG--perhaps the easiest thing that I could jot down. I blame my depression for that. This ennui continues to linger, though, and I keep cycling over my frustration at not doing what I should have done with my pen. It was an expensive purchase, and I really don't want to spend any money on another one. (Besides, if I do, that'll mean the original shows up, right? Isn't that what always happens?) Yet I'm deeply frustrated that I lost it. I have a system for keeping track of how I use the pen, but I have been lax in doing so with it lately. Now I reap the rewards. This sort of woe-is-me obviously isn't healthy, and it probably comes off as annoying. If you feel that way…um…why are you still reading? That seems strange that you're in control of that and yet you're still here. More than that, though, is a recognition that such trivial things can affect me. What I really think is going on is that there are so many things far beyond my control: The pandemic, chemotherapy, the endless stress of teaching and forcing myself to care when I least want to. The list goes on. Losing a pen is not particularly high on the list, but it was one of the things that I could have controlled. I didn't, and now I'm living with that regret. It's a spiral of frustration. Yes, it's only a pen. However, it's symbolic of a lot more to me than just a writing utensil. Hence why losing it meant--symbolically--that I had lost my ability/desire to write yesterday. And that's how a goal gets undone: Depression + life stress + something insignificant = failure. There's no right way to write.
Or rather, provided one is writing, that is the correct way, inasmuch as there can be a correct way. Hmm. If one must write, that is how one writes. Okay, look, pithy aphorisms aren't as easy to craft as Shakespeare makes it seem, so we'll settle with the more prosaic observation that, as long as words get written down, that's how the writing works. Yeah? Yeah. With 2021 fully upon us, trailing the stench clouds of 2020 behind it, I figured I should do my annual "plan for writing during the upcoming year" essay as a chance to lay out some of my hopes as far as my writing goes. I don't remember (nor do I want to look up) my previous year's goals. They most likely didn't happen, since I only managed to finish a novella or two and that was all, to say nothing of the tens of thousand fewer words I failed to write over the course of a twelvemonth. I still keep borderline-obsessive track of the words I jot down in all but my school capacity (like, I don't word count assignments or emails or whatnot), with a spreadsheet that gets more and more complicated with each successive year, so I have a fairly accurate view of how well I'm doing on the word-count front. Good ol' 2020 saw me crank out 482,881 words (as opposed to 2019's 528,743) a difference of over 45,000 words. That's almost an entire NaNoWriMo project's worth of writing. Since I completely failed at NaNoWriMo 2020, that makes sense. So I'm not saying that I did a bad job of writing in a general sense. I know that a lot of writers would love to produce that much content in a year. And while that's not all fiction writing, a fair chunk of it is. And while I lament that I didn't spend more time honing my craft, I can be somewhat proud of having managed to generate close to half a million words in the midst of a global pandemic, massive civil unrest, and frequent personal trials. What I want to do with 2021--as far as writing goes, of course--is to continue on the strengths of the last year. To that end, I decided to modify my goals. While I usually want to put in a certain amount of time into fiction--increasing the short stories that I sometimes create, or getting another bit of worldbuilding into my notes--I also derive pleasure from the act of writing itself. I love to type. I love to write by hand in my far-too-expensive-but-what-are-you-gonna-do notebooks. I love to brainstorm in my beaten-up-because-they-cost-a-quarter-jeez-Moleskine-could-you-maybe-drop-the-price-a-bit-you're-killing-me notebooks. It's great to have a diversity of ways that I go through the physical actions of writing. And, because 2020 taught me better than Steinbeck's title or Robert Burns' poem ever could, "the best laid schemes o' Mice and Men / Gang aft agley", I selected a daily requirement to write. No minimum requirement. No genre expectation. No expectation save that I grace the page with a squiggle or two. On one level, this feels like a capitulation, a throwing up of my hands in the face of the crushing reality of what I have to deal with and submitting to the unbending tide of responsibilities. On another level, though, it has--thus far, at least--been a gentle enough goal to maintain the pleasure of completing it and a steady enough pressure to ensure its continuation. Thus far, I have written every day. Some of it has been therapeutic and emotionally driven, such as the stuff that I write when discussing my wife's battle with breast cancer. Sometimes it's creating a new TTRPG (I'll essay on that another day). Often it's jotting down a page in my reading journal. (This one is particularly useful, as it means that I need to keep reading so that I have something to write about--double trouble!) Because of all the stress that's been my life recently, I've arranged for a couple days off to do a private writing retreat at an AirBnB. It's a difficult decision--COVID is still real and I live in a high risk area. I did go through a bout with the sickness, as well as getting the first round of the Moderna vaccine, so I feel a bit more comfortable making the trip. I also really need some writing time, not because I have a lot of writing that I feel pressing to get out of me (that sort of thing, the fire of a story that will only be quenched by writing it, hasn't happened to me in many a-year), but because I am pretty close to a breaking point, mentally speaking. Almost all of my wells for well-being have been dipping dry and the strain of knowing that it will continue until long past the seasons' change isn't helping in the least. Since Gayle is on her "good week" with her treatment, she and I both feel confident that she'll be all right without me around for a couple of days. (I'm not far away, in case of emergency, plus her mom is willing to be on-call, as it were.) I'm hoping that this will do a little bit of recharging my spirits and that I'll have a bit more fortitude in confronting the rest of what's troubling me. And if it doesn't? Well, you'll know. I'll probably write an essay about it. I hate phones.
Not, like, any specific one. Or even the concept, really. I think it's great how much phones connect people. But I hate them. More accurately, I hate having to talk on them. I don't want to call in a pizza order if I can help it; I don't want to call customer service to work out an issue. I just don't want to be on the phone. (I don't mind talking to friends and family on the phone, however. Go figure.) But why? Tracing my developing personality--and, maybe, finding an answer to the question in the process--can be difficult. How much of what I see in myself is directly grown from what I've done in the past, and how much of it is a result of innate tendencies? I feel like I've grown more introverted over the past couple of decades--was it my mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that made me feel like I had used up all my extroversion? (This one definitely makes sense to me, but perhaps that's just sublimation.) Still, there is one thing that I deeply misunderstood and has continued to affect me ever since it happened in 2001 that may be a clue to my animosity toward Alexander Graham Bell's invention. I worked at the Convergys, a telemarketing/telesupport firm close to where I grew up. I had just graduated from high school and needed a job to get money for the aforementioned mission. The Convergys hired me as an inbound operator. Our client was American Express and it was my job to "activate" the callers' credit cards. Really my purpose was to lie to them ("while your credit card activates…" when the card was already activated) and then try to upsell additional (and unnecessary) features on the credit card. The more features I sold to them, the larger my paycheck would be. I'm not much of a salesman, despite my understanding of words. I figure this is mostly because if I truly believe in what I'm selling (or, in the case of the mission, preaching), then I get myself tied into the sale and feel personally rejected, and if I don't care at all about what I'm selling, then I don't care if someone else wants to buy the product or not. This was certainly true of the Convergys job. I worked there throughout the summer of 2001. Shortly after the terrorist attacks on 11 September, with the strain of starting college, preparing for my mission, and deeply hating the menial, pointlessness of my job, I started looking for a way out. What ended up being the worst thing for me (mentally speaking) was when a customer called in, sick of the endless phone-trees and being placed on hold, and threatened to cut up his card. I told him that the card was now activated and that he could use it immediately, then ended the call. Nevertheless, my 18-year-old brain misheard what he said. I thought he'd threatened me with violence if his card wasn't activated immediately. He hadn't. He definitely only said that he'd cut up the card, not the teenage phone operator on the other line. But my fight/flight response was triggered and a surge of adrenaline tsunamied through my system. I'm not a fighter--like, at all--so the mental connection between that spurt of fear-induced adrenaline forged between me and two things: American Express (a company I don't much care about or give thoughts to) and telephones. I won't say that this is the original "trauma" that led to my telephonic antipathy, but it's certainly a component to it. Nevertheless, becoming an adult has meant that I've had to use the telephone more frequently than I would like. Sometimes I do have to set up appointments or sort out a problem via phone. It's not pleasant and I often try to come up with alternative ways of handling the issue sans that technology. (The fact that I don't want to talk to employees at stores if I can help it definitely limits these alternatives.) So the fact that I've called Gayle's oncologist office two or three times during the first two weeks of chemotherapy is an indication of something to me: When it comes to helping my family, I can overcome my distaste. I was on the phone as soon as my help wasn't enough to help her through the migraines that knocked her down the first day and when the antinausea medication was only making things worse. I hate using the phone, but more than that, I hate seeing my wife curled up in pain and feeling powerless at the sight. Here's what I've learned: Sometimes the only way you can fight for the ones you love is by doing what you don't want to do. I can't go through chemotherapy for Gayle, but I can be her liaison to the oncologist's office. Her fight is against an uninvited return of cancer; mine is a mangled memory that has affected me for many years. There's no parity between these things--one of the hard parts about watching a loved one go through health problems--and I'm not trying to assert that there is. Still, if fighting over the phone is the only way I can help Gayle, I'll do it. My "baby William", which is seven years old next week, is the Complete Works of William Shakespeare International Student Edition. I bought it from William Shakespeare's childhood giftshop, adjacent to his birthplace, for thirty-five quid. It was my big souvenir from that trip and it has been my go-to version of Shakespeare. This is a deliberate choice, as I have a host of copies of the Complete Works. One is the Barnes and Noble discount version. Another is the first copy that I ever remember trying to read, one gifted to me from my maternal grandmother. Another is an illustrated version. I also have the one given to me for my 18th birthday. (That was the first edition that I read completely--poetry excluded.) Despite having so many editions that mean a lot to me, I've focused on "baby William" as the one that I mark and annotate, creating cross-references as they appear and appeal to me; it is the version of Shakespeare that I read for enjoyment. Since 2019, I decided to reread that entire book. I'm on no timeline--there's no rush to complete the canon. I'm simply going through as often as I can, reading when it strikes me, and writing up my thoughts about the play when I'm finished. With that recap of what this string of essays is all about, I'll now give a few thoughts about Love's Labour's Lost. I like it. I mean, it's not the best thing I've ever read, but it has a lot to commend it. There are some enjoyable scenes, and the premise is too ludicrous to hate. After all, who doesn't see the immediate dramatic result of four bachelors declaring that they will avoid all worldly contact--especially of women--for three years in order to become better scholars? The arrival of the princess and her entourage is the arrival of the best parts of the play, with the women not only being more engaging and interesting, but also better sports, more clever characters, and generally worth much more than the attention that they get. The princess of France gets a total of 10% of the lines--her match, the King of Navarre, gets 11%. Those lines are almost always the better ones, and though Biron is supposed to be the main wordsmith and primary protagonist (and he's also the gabbiest character, with 25% of the lines), he always strikes me as a bit of a bore. Take, for example, how the princess talks with her servant. Boyet is a sly observer of people, and he knows that his place is as a server to his princess. Nevertheless, the two will deliver lines of ease and familiarity, though always with the correct distinctions of class maintained. At the beginning of the second act's first scene, Boyet and the ladies are talking about where they are. Boyet explains that it's the princess' role to speak with Ferdinand, the king of Navarre. He urges her to Be now as prodigal of all dear grace Admittedly, I repunctuated the first line of the princess, so that it reads, "Good Lord, Boyet, my beauty, though but mean…", thus giving it a tinge of good-natured exasperation. The point, however, I think still stands. She is incredibly quick-witted and she lets that shine in almost every scene. She and her female companions are able to easily see through the gifts and love-notes the smitten males have sent them, and they recognize that these attempts to woo are just as laughable as they appear to the audience. They play along, just as eager for a good time as those in the theater's seats, all the while knowing the score. There's an insouciant indulgence that I get from the princess ("We are wise girls to mock our lovers so" (5.2.58)) and I really wish there were more lines from her and quite a bit less from the men. Indeed, the male lovers are essentially all interchangeable in a play where interchangeability is a part of the theme. (Interestingly, the next play is A Midsummer Night's Dream where this theme is drawn in even clearer lines.) After all, we have duplicates galore: Holofernes and Nathaniel are both erudites (though the latter is perhaps a more sycophantic version of what he sees in the former); Dull and Costard (and Mote, to an extent) all occupy a similar position in the society; who, save the actors who play them, can differentiate between Longueville and Dumaine? Stand out moments are often derived out of a bit of wordplay rather than pure character, with a possible exception of Costard's confusion about the word remuneration during 3.1. Now will I look to his remuneration. Remuneration! O, that's the Latin word for three farthings: three farthings--remuneration.--'What's the price of this inkle?'--'One penny.'--'No, I'll give you a remuneration:' why, it carries it. Remuneration! why, it is a fairer name than French crown. I will never buy and sell out of this word. (125-130) This play has a tendency--in part because of Holofernes and Nathaniel--to tend toward sesquipedalian expressions. Shakespeare sends up this tendency, parodying it by parroting it with the misunderstanding of the lower class. Since this is seen better (and with more examples) in Much Ado About Nothing's Dogberry, I won't comment more here. Maybe this is where Shakespeare first started down the path that ends with the confounded constable? At any rate, I love the way that Costard does with remuneration what any of us might do with an unfamiliar word: Try to use the context for some sort of meaning. Granted, this may lead us astray--I teach my students the word prodigal every year because there's an assumption that it has to do with a fall from grace or a grievous sin. That it has to do with being a spendthrift isn't really as clear the title of Parable of the Prodigal Son might seem. (It's also refreshing to see some of the characters on the stage being as equally confused about the language as the people in the audience can be: I'm not going to lie, the footnotes and marginalia were crucial in my understanding and appreciation of this play.) Shakespeare also experimented with poetry a bit here, using a lot of rhymes and even different metrical standards throughout. I'm less of a fan of Shakespeare's lyrical period. Some of it has to do with Milton's observation in the second edition of Paradise Lost: "Rhime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially…" (though I might disagree with him that it was "the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter"). There's already a great deal of artificiality to Shakespeare's language, where so much of the syntax is warped to better express his thoughts and to fit within the blank verse's syllabic requirements. When those poetical tricks are amplified by rhyming, my own attention wanes. The bigger issue, for me at least, is it seems to cheapen whatever the character is trying to say, making the rhyme become more important than the substance. While this isn't always the case, it is often enough--especially in this play--that it distracts me. There is one thing that I'm rather curious about, though, and that's how Rosaline is described. Save for two references to her "white hand", Rosaline is commented on with enough racially coded language that I can't help but think that she's Black. An editor of my Norton Edition, Walter Cohen, argues that "only Rosaline's hair and eyes are black" (page 773). The ending of 3.1 describes her as "A whitely wanton with a velvet brow, / With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes" (181-182), which certainly fits for the latter half of Cohen's argument. (I don't know how he got to the conclusion about her hair color.) However, this is turns into a matter of deciding which details have more weight and which have more metaphor. As I mentioned, there are two instances of her hand being called "white" or "snow-white" (3.1.153 and 4.2.121 respectively), and a reference to her brow (as mentioned above). These seem to point toward the idea that she's white--for obvious reasons. But when the men start teasing each other about the women they've fallen for, Biron (who is in love with Rosaline), rejoins the king: FERDINAND These to me seem much more direct a description than the potentially-metaphorical descriptions of her "white hand" and brow. It could easily be a mistake on Shakespeare's part--he's never been one to care a great deal for continuity--to have left in small descriptions of Rosaline's hand; it could also be his inclusion of the romantic ideal that Biron is voicing, rather than describing her actual aspect. If this really is an example of a (presumably) white male wooing and seeking the affections of a Black woman, it's something that I haven't seen explored in all of the literature I've read on the play. (Full disclosure: I've not explored a lot of scholarship on this particular play, and I don't really remember much of what others have said.)
As far as representation goes, I've seen a great many "color-blind" castings of plays. Often, it's a fitting choice, as the character's race doesn't affect the story in deeply noticeable ways. However, having Rosaline be "canonically" Black really makes a large difference in how race in Shakespeare can be discussed, to say nothing of the fact that she would be the only Black female character in the oeuvre (Cleopatra, being from Egypt, may necessitate splitting the claim in two). Aaron the Moor, from Titus Andronicus, the prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice, and Othello in his play make up the primary characters of color. There's a valid and worthwhile argument to put Caliban (from The Tempest) in that category, too, as well as Shylock and Tubal (the two named Jews from Merchant, though whether or not Jessica would count is a matter for a different essay). I may be wrong here, but I think that's the entire list of people of color in the plays. I find this sort of thing really important. Shakespeare as a product of white nationalism and British imperialism is one of the more uncomfortable aspects of his legacy that I struggle with. It's hard to love something so unabashedly when I know that the thing I love has been the means of hurting other people, even those far removed in time and place from me. And while I operate under no delusions that Shakespeare was some sort of proto-progressive or in any way looking to provide token characters of a different race or religion, I find a lot to unpack in the conversation between Ferdinand and Biron about a Black woman. There are so many cultural assumptions that Biron is refuting as he confesses his love for her, and the idea that Rosaline is a clever, complete human never fails to come across to the reader. Despite white supremacists' claims to the contrary, there most definitely were Black people--and other people of color, too--that lived in the highly metropolitan and economically-vibrant London during the Elizabethan and Jacobean time period. Though it's fair to say the majority of people were white, it's ahistorical to think that everyone in England was white at that time. The slave trade in England began just two years before Shakespeare was born (which was 23 April 1564, if you were curious), meaning that his entire life was spent with his country trading in the lives of human beings as if they were cattle. Not only were Liverpool and Bristol slave ports, but as Reni Eddo-Lodge points out, so were "Lancaster, Exeter, Plymouth, Bridport, Chester, Lancashire's Poulton-le-Fylde and, of course, London" (Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race, page 5). Black people have always been a part of European history. Reflecting the world around him, Shakespeare seems to have incorporated a minority-race character, a Black woman. Who knows? Perhaps she was inspired by any of the sundry "sources" of the Dark Lady in the Sonnets--"Lucy Negro, [a] bawdy-house keeper of Clerkenwell's stews, or Hundson'd mistress Aemilia Lanyer, or else Pembroke's silly paramour Mary Fitton" (Park Honan's Shakespeare: A Life. Page 230). Personally, I doubt that. It makes more sense that he bumped into people of color throughout his life in the red-light district of London and that filtered into his art. While I would like to put more time and thought into this argument, I think I'll end with a final bit about the second play in this reread: Love's Labour's Won. We have two references to this "sequel" (who knows if it actually continued the story from the first play): One from a man named Francis Meres in 1598 (meaning he saw it when it was a brand new production), and another from a bookseller in 1603 (when the play would've been comparatively older). Neither lists the author of the plays, nor what they were about. Considering the unorthodox ending--the princess and her entourage leave unmarried, as the death of the princess' father necessitates her departure, meaning that the recent lovers never get married--it isn't a surprise to think that there's a sequel somewhere out there. Like Cardenio, another lost play by Shakespeare, we only have vestigial wisps that float around the historical landscape, evanescent and intangible. Maybe if we had that play, I would be able to assert my interpretation about Rosaline more fully. As it stands, this play is on its own. It's light and strange, a valuable if faulty addition to the Complete Works. Definitely worth checking out… …unless you're thinking of picking up Kenneth Branagh's musical version. That one is not good. At all. Read it instead, if you have to choose. New year, old habits. I've been in the habit of tracking things I do for a number of years. Whether it's words written or books readen, I try to keep a running list. This is to give me a sense of movement in an otherwise very similar existence: The cyclical nature of my job is reassuring in its familiarity, but it can be disorienting if I'm not careful.
To that end, I jot down the titles of everything I complete during a year. For esoteric reasons I don't fully understand, I categorize my entertainment input in two: Books, and Everything Else (except music). In 2020, I read/watched/played 119 comics/movies/video games. The number is not necessarily accurate. I will put things like "Christmas cartoons", which was probably a good two hours or so of The Amazing World of Gumball, Captain Underpants, or Teen Titans GO! Yet I lumped them all together, rather than counting each one separately. I didn't count Avatar: The Last Airbender, which was watched by my boys in the van during our commute time. I will put something like Deluxe Invader ZIM #2, which is actually a dozen comics in one. Also, it's only completed things. That's easy for something like movies (I watched all of the Jurassic Park films with my kids this summer), but I ended up stopping my rewatch of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles season 2 with, like, two episodes to go. So it didn't make the list. Even The Haunting of Bly Manor, which I have three or four episodes left, didn't get added on, even though each episode is nearly an hour long--meaning that two episodes combined is more than some movies' runtime. And while 119 titles is quite a bit (especially considering how many hours I obsessed over Bloodborne these past few weeks--and, let me just say, that completing that game was a personal accomplishment), what really strikes me is that I only had 37 books or plays read in 2020. I'll admit that there were some…interruptions to how I normally live my life. I did find it harder to concentrate on the written word during the pandemic, and I even fudged my numbers a little by including books that I wrote and finished during 2020 (two novellas actually, my lowest output in years). Some of the books are the annual retreads: Pride and Prejudice, Things Fall Apart, and All Quiet on the Western Front always crop up in the first half of the year. Hamlet…well, I don't actually reread Hamlet each year. I do watch the film with my students though, so… My point is that despite my best intentions, I don't do a lot of reading. Author Joe Hill said that you can get a rough sense of how many pages you read per day by seeing how many books you finish in a year. At 37 titles, I read only 37 pages a day, on average. Part of me feels insulted by this. The rest of me realizes that's probably more true than I'd like to think. It's also tricky, because I only count what I've completed during the year, regardless of how long it took me to get there. I started The Iliad a couple of different times throughout my career, but I only finished it this summer. (That was a complete read, though; I restarted and finished it in 2020.) I finished London: The Biography after it sitting on my nightstand for three years. So it's really an incomplete list. I put all of that down because it's on my mind and I think it provides a bit of context for what I'm about to describe. I finished Stephen King's The Gunslinger: The Dark Tower I today after trying to read it for…I dunno, twelve years? Something like that. An old work buddy gave me his copy of The Gunslinger (and the frustratingly titled The Drawing of the Three, which is the second book in the series…why does it have the number 3 in the title, then?) and I've picked it up a handful of times since then, only to put it back down. After becoming more accustomed to King's writing style, I decided to give The Gunslinger another go. This is in part because I bumped into a former student who was picking up one of the later Dark Tower books and said that, once you get to the third entry, it is really good. That's a bit of a slog, if you ask me. Still, I decided to try it. After all, I reread The Eye of the World and The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan in the hopes that, by the time I eventually get to the third book I'll actually really like it. A man can dream. And I think that's what my problem is with The Gunslinger: It feels like a weird dream. There's a place for that, of course. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are excellent examples of dream fiction (both of which I read this year, as a small aside). A lot of Neil Gaiman's work fits into that mold, too--a place where imagination is the fuel of the story. The thing is, I'm not a huge fan of the genre. Or, perhaps more evenly, a little goes a long way for me. And when it comes to King, I've come to expect a different kind of story. Part of the reason It is one of my favorite novels of all time is because the world is grounded, making the fantastical seem more plausible. King does this in other works, too: 11/22/63 and Pet Sematary stand out to me in that way. (The Stand, which I picked up again when the pandemic struck--wonder why--kind of blurs the line a bit more than I prefer.) But when it comes to The Gunslinger, well… The problem I have with dream fiction is that the stakes feel artificial. Since nothing can be taken as real, sacrifice and death, pain and worry all become meaningless. The impermanence of the situation leads me to apathy. In the case of The Gunslinger, I had a hard time believing that Roland was in a real world with real people. He may shoot his way through much of the book, knock boots with a tavern wench, and traverse a seemingly-endless underground tunnel, but is any of it "real" to him? Chapter Five is essentially a twenty-five page conversation, which turns out to have somehow taken ten years and maybe the skeleton is the corpse of the man in black he's been chasing… King himself admits that the book is a cowboy Western take on The Lord of the Rings, which in and of itself both sounds amazing and totally bizarre. The execution of the book--for me, at least--was tedious and meandering. The rich characterization that King does so well in his other books felt lacking here. Forgive a digression here: For almost all authors (Austen and Shakespeare feel like exceptions to this, though I'm sure there are others), the way that we get to care about characters is through exposure to them. Why does it mean so much to see Hagrid carry Harry Potter out of the Dark Forest? Because we've spent so much time with both characters. Why does It clock in at over 1,400 pages yet leave you wanting more? Because we've spent a lot of time with those characters and we have come to care about them. Why do shows like Doctor Who and Supernatural have such loyal fanbases? Because they've spent time in those worlds. The best short story can't connect with the reader as securely as the tenth book in a series for the simple reason that we readers haven't gone through the adventure with them. Now, there are seven books in the Dark Tower series, so there's definitely a chance to get to know Roland. In fact, I can't really fault this first book for not being more since there's a long journey ahead and this, the slenderest volume of the series, isn't going to give me a lot of time with the gunslinger. However, the time I spent with him felt inconsequential. I think this comes from a couple of things. One, Jake comes into the story with his own confusion and inability to remain connected to the world that he came from. At this juncture, Jake feels like a narrative add-in, a character dropped into the story because the idea struck the writer and so he put him in. Then, unsurprisingly, killed him off. I didn't get a strong sense of the gunslinger and the boy becoming close or gaining a lot by being together. Sure, Roland explains how he earned the right to become a gunslinger because Jake was there, but the narrator could have given us that section of the backstory by having Roland reflect on his own past. Jake felt extraneous and randomly included. I don't know if that is a criticism that stands up with the rest of the series, of course. But it is how I felt for this individual book. One thing, however, that I really did like, was what I mentioned earlier: The last chapter of the book--what should be the climax and resolution, a full-fledged battle, according to most fantasy tropes--is a twenty-five page conversation. The book begins "The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed." That sets up the goal, which is attained by the end of the book: Roland the gunslinger catches up with the man in black. But, rather than duking it out, the two sit down around a magically created fire and talk. Thanks mostly to the video game Bloodborne, I've been thinking about eldritch horror a lot more recently. (I had a spat with it about thirteen years back; I even have a couple of Lovecraft anthologies on my shelf.*) And though that game does an excellent job of dealing with the cosmic horror themes, I don't think I've seen anyone describe the terror of that genre as well as the man in black does to Roland. Chapter Five does a lot of things, and while I rather doubt that this Western/fantasy/grimdark tale was meant to also include eldritch fear, the existential dread conjured by the man in black pushes the story into that genre, too. Here's a passage: 'Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die?' (287-288) Can you imagine what it would be like to be that fish? To be dragged out of the world you know and then, suffocating in an unfamiliar ocean of air, die as you watched beings oblivious to--or worse, the causation of--your plight pass you over? That is an almost unimaginable terror…an eldritch one. Eldritch horror is facing the insignificance of humanity in the face of powers larger and darker than ever before dreamed. In "The Call of Cthulhu", Lovecraft writes, The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to corelate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Black Seas of Infinity, 1) For the man in black, we humans are the fish in a small pond of existence. The idea of so much being out beyond us, past human ken and comprehension, is humbling to the point of disheartening. We do so much in our small scale and view ourselves rulers of the world, yet what can we do in the face of our own mistakes and the turns that consequences inevitably bring back home to us? Like a virus can take a human life (a reality that we've seen iterated thousands of times these past few months--a reality that many millions more outright deny), so too can the comparatively tiny actions of humans accumulate into trophic cascades that may end up ruining the only home we have. We don't even have to go into cosmic horrors to see the effect that size has on us. A single individual's actions can no more change the climate than a twig in the Mississippi will dam it. But you get enough twigs… The idea that there are things bigger than us is maddening. For Roland, it's about interacting and becoming part of light--a metaphysical escape from the eventual nihilism this kind of thinking often leads to. For us, we rest more comfortably in our "placid island of ignorance" than trying to confront the larger (or much, much smaller) worlds that surround us. In Bloodborne, the world the player inhabits is surrounded by enormous eldritch beings called Amygdala. They hang from gothic spires and observe the player from afar. However, until the player gains "insight" (a currency in the game, but also a metaphor), these creatures are invisible. After gaining enough insight, the player is able to perceive what had been there all along. What the man in black is pointing out is that there is so much more in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies, just like Hamlet told us four hundred years ago. From what I can tell, we have two ways of approaching this: To embrace the reality that there is so much more than we can every possibly learn or understand, or to cave inwards, cocooning ourselves against all uncomfortable aspects of reality. And it's a choice that we have to make again and again. So, should you read The Gunslinger? I don't know. For me, I didn't really like the vast majority of it. Nevertheless, I'm curious to see where it goes. I would say that if a seven-volume epic is too intimidating, don't start. Now that I've begun the journey, I may just have to see it all the way to its cyclical end… ___ * I know about Lovecraft's disgusting racism. I'm not a fan of the guy, and his writing is…well, it certainly exists and can be read. His impact on the horror genre is inescapable, even if I think, as a human, he was a sleaze. Squeaking in at the tail end of December, I finished reading the 37th book of the year. (I finished number 36 three days ago, a Young Adult version of the Spider-Man origin story, told from the point of view of Mary Jane. I may write about that later.) Since I'm trying to finish Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson (in order to be able to start Rhythm of War; or perhaps the Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin; or maybe another Art of Magic: The Gathering book; or a history book called Plantagenet that is, as one might assume, about the Plantagenets; or maybe Hamnet, a rave-reviewed novel about the death of William Shakespeare's son; or perhaps the new Attack on Titan that arrived on Christmas Eve, to say nothing of the scores of older, unread books adorning my shelves), I feel as though I've read enough pages to constitute more than simply 37 books. Maybe in 2021 I'll do a page-count instead of title-count to see how that makes me feel.
Anyway, the reason I read Of Dice and Men is because David Ewalt's history about the creation and progress of Dungeons & Dragons is key to my upcoming Winterim. January 2021 will see me and another teacher at my school doing a three-week intensive course on tabletop RPGs, with the original brand smack dab in the middle. We'll also be looking at a handful of other versions of RPGs, then tasking the students to create their own new TTRPG. It should be a lot of fun, and though I'm not quite as excited for this Winterim as I have been in the past (truth be told, I've never been less pumped for a Winterim than I am this year, though it has nothing to do with my topic, coteacher, or students enrolled), mostly because my life feels like a pending storm is on its way. That has left me feeling a bit despondent, a topic I wrote about here, if you want details. Nevertheless, I am on break, which means that I'm reading new D&D manuals, watching YouTube videos of people, trying to wrangle enough patience to try playing with my kids, and finishing up the reading of this book. You know…teacher on break stuff. One of the things about Ewalt's book is his unabashed appreciation for the game. It's true that there is a level of geekery that Dungeons & Dragons attracts, so it shouldn't be surprised that someone who is interested in the past of the game is also interested in the game. Nevertheless, I liked his tone: It's inviting and general, yet clearly connected to the source. He'll use metaphors that require footnotes, but it's not done in a condescending tone, and they always help add to the world of the game that he's documenting. And though I knew a bit about the beginnings of the game thanks to the documentary In the Eye of the Beholder, there are a lot of extra details that Ewalt puts into the book that contextualized what I saw in the film. Not only that, but there is space in a book to go over parts that aren't as tightly refined as what In the Eye of the Beholder could cover. One example that I thought was interesting--and, frankly, underserved--was the chapter on the satanic panic of the eighties. The passing awareness I have of that particular moment in the pop cultural history has always been light, and I was hoping that there might be more in it with Ewalt's book, but he remains focused on D&D for the entirety of that chapter. (I'm interested to see what my students think: They were given the assignment of reading the entire book before we start in January, so they should come in prepared to discuss sections like that with me.) I also liked how he walked me through the history of the different editions without getting bogged down in minutiae. I've only recently started playing--a handful of students introduced me to D&D 5e (fifth edition) a couple of years ago--so though I've been aware of tropes and how to play TTRPGs to a certain extent, I didn't see how there could be so many changes to what seems like a pretty solid foundation. And what's the difference between Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and the others? Ewalt manages to navigate this area pretty well, bringing about the salient historical points and putting everything into the narrative of a small, ambitious business, complete with the missteps and mistakes that led to nearly losing the game entirely. It didn't all sing to me, though. There are moments when he narrates a campaign that he's in with his friends, and while I appreciate what he's trying to do with that, it felt a little self-indulgent and not really the point of the book. This happens more toward the end, as Ewalt's love of the game and his excitement interacting with the potential of the new edition (this was written before D&D 5e came out) overpowers the narrative structure that he's been working so hard to establish. His digression on trying a LARP-lite experience was puzzling, as it didn't seem to really connect with the point of his book. I mean, I'm glad that he had fun at Otherworld where he had an opportunity to play a scripted campaign beyond the tabletop, but…how does this really fit in with discussions about the original creators, their own foibles, the process of creating a game with such massive influence on the pop cultural landscape? Admittedly, the subtitle of the book is The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It, and since Ewalt is one of those people, I guess it makes sense that some of his own life leaks in? I found it distracting, though. I read Ethan Gilsdorf's Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks a number of years ago, so I had already passed through a contemplation about what it means for someone to try to join in with the LARPing community and to balance an interest in exploring fantasy fiction. In fact, a lot of Ewalt's experiences mirrored Gilsdorf's. It made that particular section of the book a bit samey, though that's not really Ewalt's (or Gilsdorf's) fault. On the whole, however, I found the book to be worthwhile. I like history, I like pop culture, I like D&D…this is definitely the sort of thing that would resonate with me. I would probably recommend it to anyone who's looking for a bit of an insight into what might otherwise be an opaque topic--why do people pay so much money to just sit around and tell each other stories?--and also fans of the game will likely enjoy this trip down memory's dungeon. If you're only passingly interested in how tabletop RPGs got started, then you're probably fine missing this one. |
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