I have attempted two playthroughs of Final Fantasy IV and choked both times. As a FF fan that ain’t normal for me, to say nothing of how excited I was to play it in the beginning. From what I read on the internet prior, it seemed like IV was the turning point for Final Fantasy becoming the narrative heavy experience that we all know today. I don’t think I’ll sound too lame if I own that the Golbez fight in the castle of the dwarves was a factor in the termination of both of my playthroughs, especially if I add that I was playing it on a DS those times. For some reason, Square Enix decided to buff a boss fight in this remake that was already notoriously hard to begin with.
So playthrough one ended with the Golbez fight and playthrough two ended when I started buffing Rydia immediately before she disappears from the party. I got her to learn bio, which most agree is a thing you want to have in the dwarvish Golbez fight, but my nerves were so fried from all the grinding that took that I just didn’t have the patience to keep playing after that point. Just yesterday, though, I was able to start playing the original 16-bit SNES version and I’m actually getting more interested in the events of the story than I was the first time around. Within my first few minutes of SNES FFIV I was reminded that the effect of the Nintendo DS graphics and voice acting was almost as much of a turn off as the remake’s infamous difficulty spike.
No matter what the subject of a film, painting or video game is, how that subject looks is bound to direct your attention at least as much as the script of the subject’s story. However with video games and commercial cinema there is an oddly quantitative way of judging something as qualitative as visual and auditory effect. To me, it’s comparable to saying that photographs have destroyed the reason to ever draw, or that photography has replaced painting. We could digress even further if we dwell on what ways of looking and sounding are treated as the most “natural” or “appealing” in computer animation (I mean, if I wanna look like Serah Farron in FFXIII, I’m gonna need to spend several grand on plastic surgery).
But for now, regardless of what we are treating as real, let’s at least allow that trying to look “real” is something that is widely valued in both video games and big budget movies. How “real” something looks can be valued with strange single-mindedness, though. For some, the fact that black and white film can have color doctored into them is a good enough reason to do it, regardless if certain decisions were originally planned to have the best effect as black and white images. Digitally adding color to a film like Orphee or Les enfants terribles would, to say the absolute least, be very, very single-minded.
I think this was the mistake that was being made in the DS FFIV remake. Voice acting and 3D graphics were added without consideration for how they would change the flow of the action. The voice actors also sound unsure if they are supposed to be melodramatic or earnest. I get that stories and characters are allowed to have tone shifts, but with the FFIV voices the changes sounded too random to be intentional. In the older version, though, the use of text-based dialogue allowed both the delivery of words and their content to go by the player’s own pace. In this regard, I think the DS remake compares particularly badly to the original. Just look at the different presentations of the desolation of the Mage Village and the theft of their crystal. I found the 16-bit portrayal easier on the eyes and therefore easier to take in. Probably because the scenario was written with a 16-bit image in mind.
Anyway, this is more of a random thought of the day. I’m still pretty early in my playthrough but so far everything about the presentation is working better.
In the last few months I’ve quickly mowed my way through both books Stephen King wrote about Danny Torrance and I think the contrast between them has interesting implications. The dialogue between the two is intrigueing but the second one needs it more than the first, a little too much, actually.
Within the first few chapters of Doctor Sleep dealing with the True Knot characters the town Jerusalem’s Lot is mentioned, to say nothing of the close resemblance between the True Knot and the way vampires are portrayed in both ‘Salem’s Lot and the fifth Dark Tower book. The ‘Salem’s Lot nods contained within a Shining sequel is telling. That this is a sequel about Danny Torrance as an adult emulating his father’s mistakes also adds to the implications here.
As a creative writer myself and a litcrit buff I found this interesting but not sufficient to carry the whole weight of Doctor Sleep. The overly-formulaic story can only lead me to believe that Stephen King’s possibly unconscious wish to comment on his earlier work was his main motivation here. The lack of balance and chemistry between the creative retrospective and the lazy plot construction is just too bad since a few characters are written very well and I enjoyed spending time with them (I’m thinking specifically of grown-up Danny, Abra, Abra’s Momo, Rose The Hat and Snakebite Andi- more on that last one later). In the end I would give Doctor Sleep a C-. I still enjoyed reading it, though, and may actually re-read it at some point.
Although the places King chose to place most of his effort made the book lopsided, the beginning is compulsively readable. I think anyone who loved The Shining would find it easy to get sucked in early on, as it picks up with Danny and Wendy Torrance and Dick Hollorran three years after the events of the first book. I also enjoyed reading about Danny’s tentative journey back to sobriety and almost every chapter that involved Rose The Hat or Abra. Even if the book is unbalanced overall, it’s compelling in some places. This, though, just leads me back to the weaknesses. Near the end when Danny is checking up on the lock boxes “in his head” and the True Knot settles at the Overlook Lodge it seems like some special deep connection with The Shining or more satisfying tie-in with his early work is about to happen.
The reader has known that two of those three boxes contain two of the most memorable ghosts from what used to be the Overlook Hotel. The mention of the boxes at that point prompts you to wonder about how your attention was directed early on: not only was our opening look at Danny, Hollorran and lock boxes three years after the events of the first book fun, but it told us centrally important things about the current story. At that point I was wondering if the True Knot really was just an external danger that telepathically “bumped” into Abra at the right time to set the plot in motion- but now, with the plot converging at the former location at the Overlook Hotel and Danny considering opening the boxes up, it seems like the plot is finally coming together. This place in the story even feels consistent with Dick’s cryptic message from the afterlife: all devils come from your childhood. We even learn that Danny’s father impregnated Abra’s grandmother during an alcoholic blackout and that Abra is his niece. It all seems to be coming together. That the True Knot has an affinity for the Overlook Lodge even suggests a deeper connection from their end as well.
Also, since things from early in the story are now proving their relevance, it also seems like the ultimate function of Andi’s arc may be around the corner. If this character we’ve been following for so long is supposed to have some sort of effect on the overall story and her shooting death truly was not the last word, then it seems like the involvement of Andi’s lover at the end would open that up. Ghosts are a thing in this story, after all, and when Andi died I wasn’t quite sure if she seriously went the whole story (as one of the True Knot members we see the most of ) without actually contributing to the plot or interesting participation with other arcs. It seriously looked like Stephen King brought her in for no reason- now that Andi’s lover is doing things at the haunted place, though, now it looks like we’re gonna see why that character was in the story.
Anyway we don’t. Normally, shutting down the whole antagonistic half of a story without giving a compelling reason why the antagonists are there is a bad enough move. The best understanding we are given is that the vampire-like people found the psychic little girl. The True Knot just happened to wander in from the outside.
Now I don’t think that passive protagonists are always a bad idea. Granted, they need to be handled more carefully than active protagonists, but that doesn’t mean they never ever work: they’re just trickier to do, and Doctor Sleep doesn’t pull it off. There is no organic reason outside of the True Knot for Danny and Abra to be in the same story. One of the reasons why this stands out in such a bad way in this book is that, as a sequel, you’re just tempted to remember the precedents set by the first story. In The Shining, all characters and plot elements had clear purposes and the development of the story does not require a spontaneous outside force- everything that happens throughout The Shining happens with all of the things we started the story with. Now sequels can break rules and conventions set down by their source material if the sequel is a totally sufficient story on it’s own and does not need prior context, but Doctor Sleep is not self-sufficient.
While plot-movers that arrive randomly from the outside are not necessarily bad all the time (any more than passive protagonists are bad all the time) they are generally not a safe bet- random outside occurrences within a story need extra work, sorta like how passive protagonists need extra work, and many writers who use both of those tropes do not realize that. Since Doctor Sleep needs The Shining for context and since The Shining did not take these extra risks, the fact that Doctor Sleep takes them and fails is hard to get around. So if Doctor Sleep does not work as a follow-up to The Shining and is not written in a way that makes it wholly self-contained, this sorta leads me back to my suspicion that a wish or need to look back on older work was Stephen King’s real motivation.
A weakness in this that I can cop to immediately is that this whole assessment hinges on my opinion that Doctor Sleep fails as both a sequel and a stand-alone story. That’s totally my opinion but I think that if a book fails in the roles it is presented in, then it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that there was a motivation at work that is not connected to how it is presented. If a book that appears to be a sequel does not work as a sequel and cannot be self-sufficient on it’s own, then I think it’s reasonable to suspect that the author had some other feeling or intent in mind.
Since the relationship with early Stephen King novels is front and center, I don’t think it’s going too far to think that this is largely a statement on The Shining. Another statement on \ interpretation of The Shining, the Kubrick film, prompted Stephen King to make his own statement in the form of the 1997 miniseries adaptation. King has felt the need to comment on The Shining in a way that he does not comment on a lot of his other works. While he likes little understated world-building nuances revolving around The Dark Tower, he does not normally make frank connections and statements. Maybe there’s something I’m not getting but I think The Dark Tower is the only other story where King felt the need to say something himself in his own work (granted, that was way more literal than the Danny Torrance stories).
So I was listening to a recording of Sam Harris’s Waking Up podcast just now and was put in the uncomfortable position of getting exasperated with one of my intellectual heroes (Harris).
Harris was interviewing Jordan B. Peterson, which I thought was exciting given Peterson’s thoughts on mythic archetypes. I’m a creative writer myself and I’m also a total spazz for literary criticism, mythology and history. I was kinda stoked about this. But before they got to what I thought would be really interesting they began by discussing a legislative measure in Canada protecting gender identity from spontaneous public heckling.
Soooooo I’m a trans lady myself (on HRT for over two years and been totally out for as long) so I realize I have a protective emotional impulse on this topic. But I think there are glaringly obvious reasons why these legal policies should not be seen as absurd on their face.
Yelling random invective is something that you could end up in court for. If I loudly scream ‘fuck you’ while we are arguing in public I can reasonably expect legal charges. The basic way of behaving in question is not something the mainstream would disagree about beforehand. We all agree that random and spontaneous verbal harassment should have some kind of legal protection or social consequence.
Peterson trots out the Canadian protection of gender identity and preferred pronouns as if people would be hashing it out with you on a regular basis and it wouldn’t be reasonable to impose a legal penalty for it. I know I’m just relaying an anecdote here, but I work in an elementary school. It requires you to be around all kinds of people all day. In general, my gender identity and preferred pronouns are not a problem. Around the time I came out I was assured personally by many of my coworkers that I had nothing but support from them.
I’m not trying to say my lucky experience is normal but I am saying that there is such a thing as an ordinary expectation of civility in mainstream culture. All our lives we’ve learned that baiting trouble is a bad idea so I don’t see how legally protecting preferred pronouns and gender expression is somehow beyond the pale. It does not demand anything that general social mores do not already.
Large diversity of different non-binary pronouns are mentioned by Peterson as a problem and a dangerous foreign step into something static, delicate and necessary. The volume of different pronouns alone is, for Peterson, an indication of scary Marxist post-modern nutjobs taking over the world. Listen to the video yourself if you think I’m exaggerating. Peterson mentions social justice tribunals and means for determining unconscious biases that he says are not supported by science.
I realize that Peterson sees the pronoun question as the ‘bath water’ and the suspect unconscious bias examinations as the ‘baby’ in question here, so he presumably sees the pronoun issue as the tip of the bigger iceberg and, implicitly, not strictly culpable. The segue from the specific policy protecting gender expression and preferred pronouns to Peterson’s general anxieties about social justice kicking open the door to cultural fluidity is glossed over. After talking about employers being sanctioned for the bigoted language of their employees while on the job or with the public, Jordan Peterson says this that this is in keeping with “other elements in the background that are equally reprehensible” and then starts with the social justice tribunals.
You could say that Peterson is not specifically laying blame against transpeople here, but he is also trotting out an implicit association between gender-nonconforming people and social break down. Jordan B. Peterson is a big boy and I think we can safely assume he knows that he’s making the association. The fact that he glosses over it could mean that he doesn’t think it matters, that he takes it as a matter of course or that the audience should know already that the pronoun lead in was a “ringer” to begin with- that it never was the real subject. None of those possibilities provide a sequential justification for the association.
(I don’t wanna dwell on things beyond Peterson’s bald subject jump, but he mentions that he’s worried about the dialogue concerning biology and gender identity- read Julia Serano and Susan Stryker. The trans community is interested and active in that conversation and making it sound like you’ll be slammed in an iron maiden for mentioning it is stupid)
My next big problem here has to do with what I think is a misunderstanding about non-binary language. Let’s start with something nice and plain and personal. To say nothing of the genuine experience of non-binary individuals, non-binary language can make the early steps of coming out easier to understand for trans people within the binary. This I’ve experienced.
In my early twenties I made my first earnest attempts at coming out. In the interest of staying on topic I’ll try to not digress too deep into personal anecdote. I barely knew what I was doing at the time and soon I became anxious to be familiar with a body of information that would make my feelings easier to talk about. I began reading everything I could find about gender variance throughout history and current psychological wisdom. I found book-length studies of male crossdressers, historical texts and pop culture commentary. A lot of it was extremely interesting and academic curiosity alone would have been reason enough to read all that in the end.
Curiosity may have been the only reason in the end, since nothing I found addressed what I wanted: what I wanted was to understand my dysphoria and find a way to think clearly about feelings that would help me to put self-destruction behind me. It just didn’t happen during my gender bending psychology, pop culture and history kick. A book about gender-fluidity did speak to what I was feeling though. A day putzing around in Barnes & Noble put me in touch with Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein.
I said earlier that I wasn’t going to make this particular entry all about me and my life. I’m really not, even now: I’m just trying to explain how language without it’s emphasis on designating someone as male or female has practical applications for trans people within the binary, like myself. I was raised in a starkly non-conformist mixed-race environment both before and after my parents’ divorce. As the child of a single mother- and also as a female-identified queer -I need no convincing as per feminism or the oppressive nature of historical gender roles. A basic part of my nature spoke to a particular state of being- to express it would be to walk into a rhetorical nightmare of “you think femaleness is X”. I had no way of discussing or understanding it, even to myself. For me, learning how to think and talk about gender outside of the binary was a much-needed kiss of life, even if I myself am not non-binary.
So let’s wrap this up: dysphoria has to do with a visceral experience of being required to live in total resistance to your gender identity. If I may hearken back to my parenthetical remarks about Jordan Peterson, I’d be all ears for a definite verdict from evolutionary biology or neurology relating to gender identity. The conflict between how I was reared versus how I felt is so staggering and mysterious that I can’t help but wonder about biological factors. But however amorphous this notion may be for a cis person, let us at least stay with the bedrock that dysphoria is total panic and confusion; dysphoria is to be driven toward what you need because where you are right now is fundamentally not supportable. Dysphoria will tell you what you need to get away from but it will not tell you where you are going. My resistance to dysphoria has taught me that I am a transwoman. I know that now, but simply knowing the word ‘dysphoria’ and the concept of gender-variance could not have told me how I would make sense of things in the end.
In case that’s too wordy: gender dysphoria is a visceral, repulsive experience that does not endear you to normal ways of discussing gender. Non-binary language can be way of disarming aspects of this early on, even if one is not non-binary.
I think that might be all I have to say about this that requires any sort of minutia. And, although I said it would not be, it was largely anecdotal. What I wanted to do was explain one or two plain reasons why a gender-nonconforming person would benefit from non-binary language, whether or not they are non-binary. As far as legal protection and rational expectations go, you cannot yell ethnic slurs or insults without legal sanction- I’m not convinced that protecting gender identity demands anything more of society.
AilixChaerea 