Blazer-Sharp, Prattle-Ready, Brainless Steel Samurai Banana

An attempt to systematically describe the tropes that form this complex of mythmaking that informs a great deal of low-brow pop culture in works like Spawn, Lady Death, Doom and the Jesus versus Satan fight episode of South Park.

I'm sure there's other analyses out there, possibly with a better name, but until I see I think I'll try to regularize this term.

There are three worlds: Heaven, Earth and Hell.

Heaven is the place of Good and Law and Light, often associated with blue and white and gold; Hell is the place of Darkness and Chaos and Evil, often associated with red and black and green. Earth is the place of struggle between these two primal domains.

The struggle is explicit and physical, involving godlike, often shapeshifting beings using actual physical weapons against each other.

Humanity is naturally aligned with the Good, but can align with Evil through extreme moral corruption of some kind. They can also take direct part in the fight in a limited fashion.

Both realms are inherently hierarchical and often roughly symmetrical in their structure. The hierarchy in the realm of Good, however, tends to be much more explicit and unforgiving which is often a driver for entities to defect to Evil even though in actual practice the hierarchy there is no better.

The ultimate masters of both realms are almost always male and the entire cosmos implicitly patriarchal.

It is often repeated that the master of Good is the creator of the universe and the master of Evil lives only at his mercy; however, in the vast bulk of the struggles described in the stories there is almost nothing in the conduct of the parties that supports this over a much more symmetrical, dualist interpretation.

Wall to wall, racks and racks of vat-grown proto-brains sit in an ever-flowing slurry of nutrient bath.

They are perfect beings of utility: just complex enough to be aware of their own sentience, at least in theory, but hard-wired to constantly feel maximum pleasure all the time.

Eventually they burn out - blissfully, one presumes - and a new one must be grown to take its place.

To be a good person, you can sponsor the project and have a new brain added to the array in your name. You can then go on about your life, knowing that you have helped make the world - objectively - a better place.

The facilities are limited, however, and depending on availability not everyone may be able to afford sponsoring a new brain of their own. Donations to the expansion and maintenance funds are always welcome.

Society is heavily stratified between the progenitors, those who have given life to new brains under their own name, the hopefuls who may have missed this round but may be able to reserve some priority by sufficient contributions to future expansions, and the rabble who must constantly try to make up for their noxious existence by funding the maintenance tier.

Myth
Investors buy small enterprises and use their money to make those enterprises better at competing against their peers at doing what they do. These improved enterprises make more money by virtue of their superior product.


Reality
Investors use their money to buy up all the small enterprises in a particular area in order to monopolize it. Sometimes in order to do this they are forced to invest some money in improving these enterprises or, more typically, manufacturing whatever impressions of improvement are helpful at the moment in the quest to buy out more enterprises - or destroy whatever cannot be bought out. It is never good to improve anything too much, because that money could have been spent on more buyouts and any delay in the monopolization process is an unbearable risk.

Once the monopoly is secure, the investors are free to revert to pure rent-seeking behaviour. Everything falls apart as the entire industry and everything reliant on it is sucked dry and left to rot.

Two points, M and F, are placed along the X axis.

A third point, G, is arbitrarily placed. The resulting triangle almost never has a right or obtuse angle, except in rare cases the corner occupied by G itself.

This setup is filtered through a representation that only shows points along the X axis, discarding all other data.

For any unequal length of GM and GF, given any non-zero value for G.y:

• GM will be longer than the distance from G.x to M.x.
  
• GF will be longer than the distance from G.x to F.x.
  
• The proportion between GM and GF will be closer to 1 than will the proportion of the distance from G.x to M.x versus G.x to F.x.

Example:( Read more... )


One consequence is that, for any given G, the relative difference between GM and GF is always going to be exaggerated when viewed through the flattened representation. Where G.y is much greater than MF, GM and GF may be different by a rounding error while the flat representation shows an enormous bias one way or the other.

So there's the old controversy about AO3 floating around Tumblr and I don't feel like replying to any of those threads, so I'll put down my thoughts here.

The problem: OTW (the organization that runs AO3) is, for some good (or at least earnest, well-intentioned, good-in-principle) reasons that go to the very reasons for its founding, highly allergic to any moralistic censorship of any kind whatsoever.

Unfortunately, ( CW: references to (fictional) child sexual abuse, and other less severe but still nasty and misogynistic porn tropes. )

Anyway, yes I'm aware much better thinkers than me have spent a lot more time on this. But I'd still like to do this as a reminder to myself how AO3 (which I fully intend to continue using for the time being) got to this point in the first place.

Based on what I've written out, though, I think they can do better. And I think the times are changing in a way that eventually they will.

For indeed, when we came to Macedonia, our bodies had no rest, but we were troubled on every side. Outside were conflicts, inside were fears.

Nevertheless God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us by the coming of Titus, and not only by his coming, but also by the consolation with which he was comforted in you, when he told us of your earnest desire, your mourning, your zeal for me, so that I rejoiced even more.

I know I've made comments like this (not all of them on this blog) about a few games already, so to deal with that:

1. the Mass Effect series was far, far more explicit with this. I kinda feel it's almost less effective for it, though it still remains a baseline for me as a videogame that can be read as an allegory for Christ.
   
2. what I'm seeing in LiS completely blows what I've seen in Doom out of the water.
   
3. there are zillions of games out there that go "descend into underworld, defeat its ruler, save the world, emerge victorious" and that without a lot of other Christ-pointing imagery is generally not really worth spending a huge amount of energy over.

For contrast, here are a few games where I don't read this kind of allegory, which I enjoy or could reasonably be expected to enjoy:

• Anything in the Quake series
  
• Half-Life
  
• Diablo, to the point of actively refuting any such reading
  
• Jill of the Jungle, Crystal Caves, classic Duke Nukem, really any of the old golden-age shareware platformers
  
• Cave Story
  
• Final Fantasy 6
  
• LiS: Before The Storm, if I were to understand it as a work on its own independent of LiS, focussing only on Chloe and Rachel's relationship and Max as just a background character
  
• Freedoom
  
• Doom or Freedoom with Hideous Destructor (in retrospect I'm a bit surprised how I'd decided to specifically reject this reading by making a perverted version of it part of the big bad's villain speech)
  
• Any of the new Doom games from 2016 onwards (there is still some to the extent they resemble the original Doom 1 and 2, but all the other stuff tends to water it down greatly)
  
• The Baldur's Gate series (which may have distinctly Christian or post-Christian themes of redemption and sacrifice, but no allegorical reading easily presents itself)
  
• Tell Me Why, at least what little I've seen of it. The twins are too equal and symmetrical in their relationship in a way Max and Chloe are not.

A great deal of "but what about", "but she doesn't", "Harold, they're lesbians" can be answered fairly simply that I'm not even beginning to aim for a perfect 1:1 here.

( the spoilers begin here )
~

While compiling this list someone on Facebook shared a meme attributing to C.S. Lewis: Love is unselfishly choosing for another's highest good. Anyone who's read how Lewis uses the word "unselfish" in The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters is on alert at this point, especially upon considering the prospect of knowing someone else's highest good.

This is inspiring for me as I write this, but not likely in the way the meme-maker intended. Instead I'm just reminded of all the unselfishness described in those books and why the evil organization in the last Space Trilogy book is called "NICE" and what I wrote here:

The photo is the Ring. That, and not Max's time travel power on its own, is the Ring's true temptation: to make things right again, for everyone, for the world. Even if it means betraying your best friend and consigning her to a miserable death, angry and alone - and worse: turning everything that would have redeemed her soul into something not demonstrably better than "it was all a dream". All to maintain the power structures of the status quo, albeit bringing a few of its chaotic aspects to "justice".

The irony is, of course, that I myself was never able to accept the Christian faith until I gave myself permission to be a little selfish about my own salvation, whereupon everything began to make sense.

I've made snide remarks in the past about what I've described as the worst rationale for sacrificing Arcadia Bay: the insistence that all of my work, what I did as the player, have meaning. I still think it's a bad rationale, and best to downplay in light of so much better; and yet there's the echo of salvation even in that.

(Intro post here)

This is a scrap bucket for miscellaneous issues raised by the previous posts in this series.

( Read more... )

Conclusion

I think it's safe to say there is nothing conclusively disproving any alternate timeline's continued existence as a parallel universe, any more or less than we have in real life without time travel powers - but neither is there anything evidencing it. In any case, everyone acts like it's the final result that matters, because that's all they can ever hope to experience.

But I do believe that, based on what is portrayed in the game, no one - not even the player - actually experiences anything that would empirically support the continued objective existence of new timelines created through the focus. While a blazé heedlessness of their possibility is not called for and care should be taken while acting in a situation that one intends to "abandon" with an imminent focus, I do not believe any action should be taken that assumes their reality.

While doing more "moon" string searches in Lewis I find this perfect summation of the reasoning in my last post:

But the human mind will not long endure such ever-increasing complications if once it has seen that some simpler conception can ‘save the appearances’.

My own biases

The time travel stories I was familiar with as a child never postulated parallel universes, and only later in life did I see them become integrated into the fictional work as a way to explain away the grandfather paradox. I think the first might have been Mostly Harmless in which Arthur travelled to numerous alternate Earths looking for a home - which of course presumed constant, regular porosity between the parallel universes of the sort totally unseen in Life Is Strange.

Going from the summaries of parallel universe episodes in Doctor Who confirms my recollection that the parallel universe model became much more popular in the late 1990s and 2000s - in other words, all of Max's, Chloe's and Warren's lives. (Relatedly, the Simpsons episode summary below has always used the language of arriving into different realities; it was first written in 2010 with numerous edits since that preserve this language, whereas the episode itself aired in 1994.)

Other than the commentary by those three characters, everything in LiS is evocative of the older sort of time travel story, the kind which focusses on the magnitude of the unintended consequences of changing the past and generally either ignores the grandfather paradox or assumes the time travellers themselves are somehow insulated from it.

(The oldest, it seems from wiki, deal little with consequences of interfering with the past at all, but instead are about either only movement forwards in time (with or without hope of return to where they had started), or people going back only for their own edification or that of those they visit and either have no other effect on the past or at most find themselves to be forgotten contributors to historical events. No parallel universes in these, in any event.)



Two final timelines

For reference as to how the final timeline should look without Max's memory of that which has no longer happened, here's a summary of all ingame events from Chloe's POV.
( obvious spoilers )

(Intro post here)

We see two distinct time travel abilities in the game: focus and rewind. Max's questions of alternate realities mostly come up in the context of a focus, though there is no inherent reason why this cannot be a concern for rewinds as well.

It is possibe that Max creates a new alternate reality with each press by the player of either rewind button - or even every frame of a continuous rewind. This has consequences that are quite unfortunate, and I dare to submit both therefore and despite, unlikely.

( Read more... )


Conclusion

Everything about the way the story is written presupposes that no real alternate universes are created by the rewind, although at least one instance of it is mildly suggestive of such a creation in a manner similar to focus - which shall be dealt with in the next entry.

The final decision point in Life Is Strange is certainly a conundrum. The way it is articulated is much closer to what Saruman presents to Haladdin in The Last Ringbearer than the moment of weakness in The Lord of the Rings but the game is clearly more connected to the latter while missing both the originating quest to destroy the Power and the final moment of ultra-rational, involuntary eucatastrophe present in either. So I decided to see if drawing some parallels could help come to an answer.

( The Hella Ship of the Ring: obvious LS, LR spoilers )

The knucklebone jiggled in Sam's grasp as she took it from one point of articulation to another on the sheet. She shooed it away as it tried to head-butt her eraser as she made the changes.

Krys was going to be in town in three days. Sam was just glad her wife had no love for animated human remains, which made her job vastly simpler. The slaughterhouse and tannery at Hsion'Abaad were quite happy to let her glean what she needed and charged very reasonable prices.

It helped that she'd made damn sure before she'd set into town that none of her paperwork referred to the town as "Xionebarr". The locals had no love for the Commonwealth nor for what its official language did to their names.

( She had two plans before her and only time and parts to build one.... )