Eating Crow: Rippaverse

On a basic level, I get being anti-woke. I hate performative empathy, toxic positivity, and offensively shallow Marxism as much as the next person with a brain. Yes, woke still exists. Yes, it's still bad. No, it’s not anymore “caring about people” than sticking someone in a Soviet camp.

At anytime someone of less reading comprehension than my seven year old gets lost, refer to the above paragraph.

In 2020/21 I would say I was a fan of Eric July’s content. He seemed to have some strong common sense, without being driven by the insane rage that had taken over so many. He was pleasant and snarky, without being a jerk  

So when he announced he was going to start his own comic book company, Rippaverse, I was excited! Sure! I would need to see proof of concept and whatnot, but as a general idea? Absolutely! I wanted to see what he had to offer. 

I have written reviews on three Rippaverse comics: Isom 1, Isom 1 and 2, and Alphacore. I was generally positive about the three books and handled Isom 1 and 2 the way I would want someone to handle my first written works: as trailers for what they may accomplish. Alphacore isn’t the best thing Chuck Dixon ever wrote, and its art is atrocious, but overall, I liked it. Overall, strong enough to keep me buying. Not the best stuff I had ever read, but I thought it had potential.

Then Yaira 1 came out. 

And then Goodying. 

Holy crap, did I hate those books. The art issues that plagued the first three (particularly Alphacore) were even worse than before. The art was just flat out bad. The plots clearly needed another pass or five before being sent to the penciller. 

Yaira suffered from having too much stuffed into it. There's all these ideas that, on paper, are really good, but they don't interact very well with each other, not in 90 pages. 300? Sure. 90? Absolutely not. The plot doesn't breathe, so it all felt incoherent. And, once again, the art is just... it's a hodge podge of crap. I hate saying it, because it's very clear everyone is rushed. If you can't deliver a good product on time, delay. The story and art are what matter! Saying "Oh, we're on time" is not enough. 

Goodying was bland. Flat out bland. Again, there's good ideas in the text. Goodying being a stoic is a cool idea! Goodying as a character was easily my favorite in Isom 1, and I loved the things revealed about him. But the plot is just flat out bad. It's not serviceable. It's not even mediocre. It's bad. The characters stay static, and the plot just doesn't... do anything. Nothing. It's just there. There's characters I do actually want to see have an adventure, and it's boring to read about them. And that's unforgiveable in a story.

These are just outright bad books. Defending them sounds like a wife with a black eye saying they tripped down the stairs. I wish it wasn't so! But they're so cookie cutter. So corporate. Rippaverse's stuff reads like the kind of corporate shlock I hate Marvel for, but it's supposed to be some scrappy indie company. I take offense at that. 

A splash of cold water across the face. Two, really. That's what Yaira 1 and Goodying were. The problem was that my hatred became retroactive. No longer was I as generous with Isom or Alphacore. They stopped looking like birthing pains and became a “If someone tells you who they are, listen” situation. It’s one thing if you’re figuring out your craft, but this started to look like someone loving the smell of their own farts. 

Unfortunately, July has clarified that for me via his Iliad-length Twitter (it will NEVER be X) posts. Here's part of one.

C’mon, folks, that’s just cringe incarnate.

So. 

Here’s the deal. 

July’s stable of crap is soulless. I can hear the squeaky squeak of the pen in the checkboxes. Once is your first time, sure. I get it. Writing is legitimately hard. You gotta figure out how to structure your ideas to put some soul in, that makes sense. Five times, three of them from other creators, is on purpose. The line just feels so bland and mediocre. Much as I hate 99% of Marvel these days, at least they have the grace to be bad. Bad is clear. Bad is easy. So is good. But mediocre? Get out. 

The problem is that most of the “anti-mainstream” is like this. They have checklists of what they think are in good stories, like it's a form. Like somehow, some way, they can just connect the dots. 

You know who else talks like that? Corporations.

I'm disappointed. I wanted Rippaverse to be good. I really did. But this just isn't it. I spent my hard-earned cash on books that were, at best, mediocre. And considering that I can't seem to find an honest review of any Rippaverse stuff, or even anyone actually talking about it in general, I can't even ascertain if any future books are worth my time or not. 

And that tells me a lot.

Eating Crow: FFG Star Wars

 

I have never pretended that any opinion of mine is correct. I have considered writing things that will get more than a dozen reads on this blog and experimented with branding. I have always decided not to, coz I ultimately don’t want this blog to be a brand. I just want people to find someone saying exactly what he thinks, no matter how flawed and sometimes outright outrageous it is. Over the years I’ve occasionally written Eating Crow posts coz I changed my mind on something and think it’s good people read about that on the internet, where everyone is right all the time!

I was wrong about FFG Star Wars. Here's why.

The basics of the game revolve around a set of six dice: the ability, proficiency, boost, difficulty, challenge, and setback dice, pictured below:

Each of these dice share a number of symbols on them that help generate differing types of results. There's a lot of openness in interpretation. While there's a general slowdown from having to sort through the dice, I've found that the amount of richness that can come out of a single roll more than makes up for it. Could you go and have normal dice do this? You can! The core books actually include a conversion chart... and it's a nightmare to use. I wouldn't do it.

The problem?

The dice are about 20 bucks for a package, and in typical FFG fashion there's not enough. You'll need at least two sets of these at the beginning, and you will probably want to just keep getting them until you've got six or seven packs. That's 140 bucks, all told. On just dice.

The core books are also a bit of a money sink. There's three of them, covering the three "types" of Star Wars stories: criminals, military, and Jedi. There's a lot of overlap between them of course, but there's just as much that's unique to that particular book. And they're fun to read! They really are! The FFG folks did a good job making them coffee table books.

About ten years ago I bought all the core books and two sets of dice, over the course of about a year or two, and then went on deployment, got a group together… and hated the game. I was playing with former DnD min maxers in a game that resembled DnD in format… and didn’t play anything like it. Please understand I’d sunk quite a bit of money into this game, was in a place where adapting to a new system was a bad idea (and I didn't really know that) and was criminally short on sleep. I was pretty bummed out, came home, put the books up on my shelf, lost the dice... and then forgot about the game.

The years went by, and then a buddy of mine told me that he really liked the Genesys system and was more than willing to defend it against detractors. I just sorta sat and watched as people came at him about the absurd cost of the system and even its practicality. My buddy went and defended the practicality of the system but made no efforts to defend its cost. I jurst sorta filed it away, while making my own complaints about a system I'd seen not work too terribly well. I respected him for standing up for his beliefs, and resolved to eventually give the games another chance.

Yanno.

Whenever that was gonna be!

And then my kids watched The Skywalker Saga. 

And found those books. And started begging to play. I shrugged, told them sure, and made characters with them. They went acrost the three books, grabbing options and gear relatively evenly. I've not really thought about gear lists in a long time, but boy did I get a new appreciation for them as I watched my kids. For them the gear lists were a direct portal into the setting of Star Wars itself, one that they did everything they could to leverage for their own enjoyment. They just wanted me to read every last item and asked how it worked. And the long prose really helped there, let me tell you! It was actually a lot more fun than I expected, overriding my experiences with the former DnD-heads bitching about they wanted more gear, coz they wanted more options to blow people up with.

But character creation being fun is a nice bonus. I want the game to be good. So I got a set of dice and we went to planet Ord Mantell, where a gigantic kaiju had dropped from the orbiting moon to attack the Imperial base there. And every. Single. Second. Of that session was sheer gold. The kids leaned into the dice, oohing and ahhing over them, asking how they could get more yellows and blues, changing narration accordingly. They understood what the dice were for: crafting an exciting narrative. And they leveraged them as thoroughly as they could.

You really need more than one set of dice to run this game. I'm sorry, but you do. That's about 35 to 40 bucks, just right there. Buy yourself a book and that's a hundred bucks. That. Is. A. Problem. And it's pretty ubiquitous to FFG's money decisions. So, if you don't like FFG, this isn't going to change your mind, and I can hardly blame you.

But.

But.

These two sets of dice solve more problems than most RPG books of the same price. They just do. I'm not gonna pretend to you they don't. And if I can just pick up a set of dice instead of reading yet another blowhard telling me how to fix RPGs I'm gonna do it. Maybe you won't. That's cool. That's on you.The book is really secondary to the dice. All the systems they present work, and they work well, and the books themselves are worth the money you spend on them. 

Together?

Yeah, that smarts.

But honestly, folks have spent hundreds of dollars trying to do what FFG is offering for a fraction of that. And I find that worth my time. And cash.

RE: What's Wrong With Nerd Culture, Part 2: "With a Bang and a Whimper"

 

Before I joined the Army I was working at a McDonalds. I hated the job with every cell in my body, despite being extremely good at it, so I was grouchier than I normally was. Most people kept a polite distance, except for one particular nerd, Ezra (name changed to protect the innocent). He was.... not nearly as good at the job as I was, but he had this trait of being friendly to the point of irritation.

That's a very low bar for me, for what it's worth.

He was too damn chipper!

Well, eventually he wore out my grump reflex and we started a friendship, of sorts. Ezra talked a whole hell of a lot about pretty much anything on his mind, at a volume and speed that I could barely keep up with, at a pitch that I definitely didn't want to put up with.... but he was kind. He had a good, gentle heart, under the layers of sheer annoyance. And I find true kindness to be in short supply. So I gritted my teeth and decided a bit of kindness was worth the increase in blood pressure. 

Oh, and dear God he talked about his girlfriend too much. Who he swore was real! Promise! She's just far away. I could never remember where.

Starved for roleplaying game time I offered to GM a Burning Wheel for Ezra. I didn't expect much from him, to be honest. I kinda figured he'd futz around with the rule system and probably just make something that would help me pass the time. And, really, at that point, I wanted time to pass. It was still a few months before I would be able to leave, and I knew that what would probably be bad Burning Wheel was still better than no Burning Wheel at all. So I pitched the game to him. I explained that Burning Wheel was not Dungeons and Dragons, that he'd actually have to put work into it to get something out of it, and that I'd help him with the rules but I wasn't going to take it easy on him when the dice hit the table. It was up to Ezra to succeed. He nodded, told me he looked forward to it, and we ended the workshift with me having a twinge of guilt. At the time GMing was a way for me to vent just how frustrated I was, so I looked forward to low-key torturing Ezra's character. 

No, I don't mean that ironically.

Yes, that's messed up.

I've never claimed to be a good person. Ever.

Ezra made a character who had a cruel older brother, which mirrored some of his real life situation. That should have been a tip off for me. I admit it now. But I was so pent up, so angry, so arrogant, that I didn't really think much about what would drive Ezra to make such a situation. I just decided to make his brother as cruel as possible and then to give Ezra the chance to abandon him. Which is exactly what I did; I had a dark elf kidnap the brother and gave Ezra the chance to rescue.... under suicidal conditions. Eventually Ezra failed the tests, and the dark elf told his character that it was a nice try, but he could either give up or die with his brother.  Ezra walked out of the building. I thought I'd won. And it felt good.

And then Ezra set fire to the entire area, using his Firebuilding skill to set up a conflagration so powerful only he could put it out. When the dark elf came out, furious, Ezra offered to put the fire out.... but only once he had his brother. The dark elf laughed grimly, offered his admiration for a job well done, and brought out Ezra's brother.

The thing that impressed me about this whole scene wasn't Ezra's plan, not principally. It was the look on his face when he had initially failed. There was a determination, a total lack of concern, that took me aback. Ezra's character was going to help his brother and damnit if anyone was going to tell him no. To be able to show kindness and help someone who hated him mattered to this irritating young man. It was unthinkable to Ezra to give up. And, while he normally couldn't do anything so heroic, he had a chance to do it here, in this game. He did it with a grace and ease that I honestly didn't think him capable of. The dark elf's reaction really came out of a genuine place of shocked admiration on my part. Without raising his blood pressure Ezra had shown me what a tool I had been. Kindness and forgiveness are real, no matter how they happen.

The thing is that, otherwise, Ezra was a pretty pathetic person. He had that "feel" of a nerd, of someone who had put all his pudgy existence into playing video games and anime and nothing else. His room was lined with differing paraphernalia he'd definitely spent some good money to acquire. With the exception of his girlfriend (who I never saw of a picture of) there really wasn't much talked about other than video games and anime. If there was a drive that Ezra had beyond these things, he didn't show it to me except that one time, in Burning Wheel. 

My last memory of him was being shown Halo 4. Which I hated. It felt like CoD. But Ezra was so excited that there was a new Halo I didn't really have the heart to tell him how much I despised the thing he had specifically brought me over to show off. He also showed me that you could now watch anime while you played video games on the XBox, something that I hated even more. But again, he was so excited that a part of me knew it would be wrong of me to shut him down. After a few matches he asked if I wanted to watch Pacific Rim. Considering that's one of my favorite movies...

Eventually it was late and I had to go, having work the next day. Ezra walked me to the door, talking excitedly about the resolution on the TV. And it was nice, to be fair! I'd not seen Pacific Rim look that good since seeing it in IMAX. So I was more than happy to reciprocate. But I realized something really sad in that conversation: Ezra didn't know how to look for anything else. Not anymore. The world was a meaningless wasteland for him, and these few hours he could get with his videogames and his TV was as good as he could see it getting. Ezra wished me luck at MEPS and talked about joining the military himself, probably the Coast Guard. I told him that I'd heard the Coast Guard were all genuine badasses and I'd be impressed at anyone making it through their training. And he'd actually be useful, unlike me, who was going into the Army. Ezra laughed and said something kind and dorky. I forget what it was, only that I honestly felt reassured by him in that moment. I didn't feel too reassured by anybody at that point in my life; the feeling was like water to a man stuck in a desert.

I never saw him again.

I hope Ezra made it out. I hope he figured out how to not be addicted to the machines that sidelined him into a life of insignificance. I hope he went and joined the Coast Guard. I really hope things worked out with that girlfriend, or if not with her that some lady would figure out that Ezra was a genuinely kind soul. But the bitter and mean part of me wonders (with a sneer!) if he's not sitting in that same room, even eight years later, still raving about the latest garbage video game and anime. There's only one direction to the universe, after all, and it's down. 

But who knows? 19 years ago I said I didn't want anyone to remember me. I wanted to be dead and forgotten. With a wife and three children that's changing, one step at a time.  I'm able to change. Maybe he did too! Hopefully we'll both make it. Kindness should.

Although that doesn’t change the fact that Halo 4 sucked ass.

A Return

  

 Yeah yeah yeah I’m back. 

Let’s get this post out of the way, so that we can get back to business. 

It may shock some, but the person who writes in this blog has an almost impossibly strong idealistic streak in him. It has gotten me almost nothing but trouble my whole life. In fact I’d argue that my life is one large proof against just about any form of idealism, at all. 

Idealism: As defined by this blogger, an intellectual framework that helps you skip the boring steps in thinking. A complete and thorough killer of actual thought and genuine experience.

Idealism helps you act. Idealism doesn't necessarily help you act well. And yes, not doing something may be a lot better than doing the wrong thing. I've seen that repeatedly: moving before full information always goes wrong, always, and if you don't think that's accurate you clearly don't pay attention to the world long enough before going back to your phone. Cause things go wrong even when you've actually tried to get the right information. I have fought throughout my whole life to get rid of as much idealism as possible. I have never found the effort to be worthless. The fight against idealism is everlasting. To fight against your own filters is almost too much, but I find that if I don't I wind up doing stupid things.

Like walking away from All the Things Under Heaven and Earth.

When I finished Lilith I felt that something within me had changed. And it had. Lilith allowed me to see the world as I had always seen it, and that gave me peace. But, no matter how much I try to strangle the life out of my idealistic tendencies, there's always something down there. And it turns out there was something down there. Biding its time. I wanted to be like Mr. MacDonald, which is a well-intentioned ideal, to be sure! I set out to simply be a game designer. Try to be simple and let the complexity rest elsewhere.

It's a nice ideal.

Fuck ideals.

The last few months I've been feeling that something was missing. A spark. It wasn't very loud, and it wasn't major, but I found that, just like every time I try to be idealistic - every time!!! - it fails. Maybe, once upon a time, culture allowed us split the difference on the cost of idealism. Because idealism's cost is hard upon you. You deny your individuality to become part of a collective. And that's okay enough if you're part of a real society, where you can roll out of your bed and actually have a culture to support you and make up the difference, idealism might work out for you. We don't live in a culture. We're in a wasteland of awfulness that doesn't know it's dead yet. And so the cost is too high to do anything other than deal with things with as little a perceptual filter as possible and to refuse the filters that others now assume.

Well, last night I didn't sleep so well. And, lying there in the dark, I realized I'd not been expressing something very basic, very powerful, real, within my soul... and that it wasn't happening because I wasn't here.

Well, I'm back.

For the five people who read this blog, I hope you'll find your way back. I'm going to keep relating my journey, however strange it is, along with just the random things I find myself getting into.

I hope you're along for the ride. I'm driving, no matter who tags along.

Batman vs. Superman: Ultimate Cut

 

I can't begin to tell you how much I hate the theatrical cut of this movie. It is all wrong. All of it. There's not a frame that makes sense, not a line of dialogue that adds up, it's a nihilistic mess of a movie. Just writing about it makes me want to spit on my screen, just in pure rage. Now, yes, I've got some attachment for Batman and Superman, but just the craft of the theatrical cut is beyond awful. On a technical level it is an incoherent mess.

You may have noticed I hate this movie. 

And, let's get this out of the way, I like Man of Steel. Clark being portrayed as a person who needed to figure out how to forgive humanity for being shitheads is an incredible thing to portray. Most of the flaws people point out about the movie are overblown, at best, petty and spiteful at worst. It's not my favorite movie ever, but it's definitely a good movie, showing a Superman that I, personally, can believe would exist. My hatred of Zack Snyder's other work is probably to the amusement of all my friends, who periodically poke me, just to see the explosion of spite that results.

And then one day someone told me the Ultimate Cut was coherent. They didn't like it, but it was coherent. Turns out that the corporate morons had completely screwed up the cut.  I was asked if I wanted to watch it. 

And, to be honest, I didn't, not at the time. I still had the words from HiTop in my head: Batman does not kill. Batman is a symbol, symbols teach us how to behave. Batman is all about not repeating the action of losing his parents, all over again, by having some little boy wake up without those parents.  I wanted to believe that Batman's willpower was immaculately iron. Now, all my other ideals are totally incoherent with that. I think people are not invincible ideals, that they're barely capable of good on a good day, nevermind a bad one. The Joker is right: all it takes is one bad day.

In the intervening years my trust in the American mythology of superheroes has faded. Perpetually stuck in a corporate death grip, unable to move on and become something different, these characters are a hollow reflection of what we are: controlled by corporate interests, unable to move on. They're not human, and we don't allow ourselves to be human either. Why I hadn't connected that before, I don't know.

Afghanistan happened.

"Not our country," is a phrase I've heard tossed around. As in, actually spoken. Aloud. The world shook its head sadly and said the most damning words I've ever heard: "Well, it was inevitable."

No, it was not. Damn your ideas right to the hellhole they belong, that was not inevitable, just convenient. Not to mention cowardly.

Something broke inside me, watching the whole thing. Turns out that casual cruelty isn't just limited to fetuses and folks of minority ethnicity, a fact I've experienced far too often, but just hoped that my self-hatred could explain the seemingly boundless cruelty of humanity.

Nope. Turns out people are just cruel, as a matter of course. It's the human condition.

That weekend my family went to the zoo. I love tigers. Thank Calvin and Hobbes for that, I suppose, but man they're majestic things. And they're killers. Born killers. Made to eviscerate and terrify and stuff raw meat down their throats. "God's tenants", as per Psalm 103. A tiger knows what it is. It's a killer. It has no issue with this fact. If a tiger denied what it was it would die, as it's literally made to only eat meat. It's honest because to be honest is to live.

Staring at this magnificent picture of death, a thought began to form in my mind. I didn't quite know what it was until about an hour later, when I was sitting down at a playground with my wife. I tried to bat the thought away. I really didn't want to go where I was going, but an entire generation of people were being left to suffer under a terrorist organization. All 'cause of the red, white, and blue. Reality no longer matched my model of it. And I had to give in. Had to. 

"I can't like superheroes anymore. Because of Afghanistan."

My wife, as thoughtful and quiet as she is, let those words hang in the air a moment, as they mixed with the sounds of laughter and creaking playground equipment.

Me being anxious me, I mistook the silence. "Does that make sense? I don't know how else to explain it right now."

Those green eyes can just cut my soul to ribbons. She looked at me, and as she always seems to, saw straight into the cloud of grief. And through it. "It does."

I sat there, trying to figure out what had just happened. What I had just said, why I had just said it! And somehow I knew. It was time to watch this movie.

I thought I was ready. I was not. 

First off, folks, there is a plot to this movie. And I actually like it. Motivations are clear, the action flows from one beat to another. There's a healthy amount of inference going on, but the movie does actually set up the points to connect between.... unlike the theatrical cut. Which does not. I like having to put the pieces together myself, so long as there's something to assemble with. I mean, I do like Terrio's work in general, so it was nice to return to his plotting.

Superman's depression, as a result, makes sense. Continuously mistrusted and hated for doing the right thing will do that. And Clark needing to figure out he was going to do with his "just rewards" was a compelling hook. The movie paints Clark's deteriorating outlook as a natural progression someone would go through. Clark does his best to fight it, but there's only one rule to the universe, and that's down! By the time we get to the end Clark has been psychologically manipulated and battered.

Now we come to Batman. I'm not going to try to convince you why I like this character now. Tigers are killers, and if you don't like that go get in the enclosure and let me know what happens when mealtime comes up. Bruce has collapsed under the weight of his own failure, something repeatedly brought up, time and time ago. Only one rule to the universe, folks! Bruce is human, he's going to collapse. After twenty years, Bruce had given up. And so Lex pushes him, manipulates him, sets him up.

Yes, the Martha moment actually makes sense in the movie. Move along.

The ending of the theatrical cut was actually my favorite part of the movie. The whole movie goes bonkers, I love the turnaround from Batman after the Martha moment as it's portrayed by Affleck, Gal Gadot is always amazing to see as Wonder Woman. But Clark's arc always felt hollow. It doesn't here. Clark's last moment of trying to reach out to the best in someone else paid off. He finally got through. 

And, with Lois there, Clark realizes that she is his world, and therefore the world must be saved.

Bruce is rejuvenated. Superman sleeps in his tomb.

As I've stated before, there was a hole in my soul, where a narrative of some cultural significance should be. You can't make it up, you must receive it from others. Making up your own narrative is a fabrication of the modern era.

What did I receive from this movie? Which pretty much no one else likes?

That people are horribly flawed, and that if you keep looking at the big picture it's going to destroy you. Either you'll get addicted to changing the world and become a psycho like Lex or Batman at the beginning of this movie, (SJWs/alt-right this is your fate) or you'll drown in despair, like Superman almost did (which is what I'm trying to get out of). There is no way to fix the big picture. Too many profit off of it being wrong to be able to change it. It's just that simple. I can't change the reward system of the world, because entropy is a guarantee and one can always set themselves up to profit off it.

But if you forgive the world? Forgive it for being screwed up, irredeemably so, and find someone to love? You may have a chance. It won't be easy, because you have to give up being addicted to a cause. You have to cut yourself free of the dopamine rush, entirely, and just see the world around you.

Notice I didn't put this in "I've done it" terms. Of course I haven't. I so badly want to fix things, to get that dopamine hit, to feel important. And I've been trying to rectify that need with what this movie showed me. Why on earth should this be sufficient?

The other day I was walking to Walmart and I saw a man trying to carry some furniture out of a store. I could tell he was having a rough time. I just stopped, held the door, and then carried a few things out with him. We laughed about how bulky things were, and then moved on. When I got into Walmart I saw an aisle covered with cans. Employees were scrambling around with a panicked looks, trying to pick it all up. As I went past I bent over, grabbed a bunch of the cans, and helped them get it into their carts.

I didn't even realize what I'd done until I got home and realized I was feeling peculiarly hopeful for someone of my disposition. I just felt... light. Free. I'd seen someone who needed help and I helped, simply because that was right in front of me.

I didn't hear the dopamine scream in my head, demanding I change the world.

I saw someone. I helped. And that was it.

For once I wasn't scared of where things were going. It wasn't loud and noisy like thinking about how to save "the world", it sure wasn't sexy and glamorous.

But at that moment I believed that a man could fly.

I don't know if that's sufficient, but dopamine ain't the way to go. Especially if it does no one else any good.

Which I assure you, screaming into the echo chamber doesn't.

Harry Dresden: Stormfront

 Mild Spoilers Incoming!

I have been begged, commanded, threatened, etc. to read the Dresden files for the better part of ten years. 

"You sound like this guy!"

Ug, no thanks. I have to put up with myself as it is, why would I want to consume more grade-A shlock? Just because the very few folks who read this blog like it doesn't mean I don't question my own judgment for writing it and y'all's for reading it!

"I love the characters and I think you would too!"

Go away I'm busy. With... stuff.

"This is hilarious!"

... so what? I go straight for dark midnight and you want to pull me in on the promise of a good laugh?

Explanation is not defense.

Well, finally Morgan did exactly what you do when I put up that much resistance: she just bought the book and dropped it into my lap, telling me to shut the fuck up and read. I'm not sure why I don't take offense to such a direct action, but I don't.

I mean, you told me to shut the fuck up and read, Morgan, so who am I to say no?

Okay, yes I sound like this guy. Over the last ten years my roaring self-hatred has gone from apocalyptic level storms to a merely horrific hurricane, so I can think that maybe it's good to have a shadow of a compliment thrown my way? PROGRESS IS PROGRESS.

And yes, he's funny. Probably in a very similar (and tragic) way that folks think I'm funny.

The author can plot like nothing else. Jeez.

Alright, so one of the things that someone brought up was the.... constant fixation on sex that Dresden has. Now, granted, when that complaint was logged with me I rolled my eyes. I read and enjoy Wolfe, sweet summer child, the stuff in here is child's play. Absolute. Child's. Play. In comparison to Wolfe's treatment on sex and women in general. Bob bothers me, sure, but Dresden himself?  He screams trauma. Now, whether or not fiction could use more stories than recovering from trauma? That I don't know, but the simple fact of the matter is that most females reading this post were at least sexually harassed, if not assaulted, and male sexual harassment/assault is not usually reported, not directly.

We got semi(??) accurate numbers on one sex. We know we don't have accurate numbers on the other.

If you want good fiction you need honesty. Sorry, folks, it's the only way to really do it. You need craft too, but without that honesty something just isn't good. So if you have a whole bunch of folks writing about horny men who need women to keep them stable does that scream as a cliché, or that a lot of men in our first-world countries are in deep deep trouble and the few who care to talk about it choose fiction to do so? That the world most men are in is so against them that the only way they can grieve is by writing books about grieving, which then get construed as cliché?

Two young fish were swimming around. They bumped into an older fish who told them the water particularly fine that day. A few minutes later the younger fished turned to each other and asked: "What the hell is water?"

I'm going somewhere with this, folks hang in there.

See, the thing that fascinated me about Dresden the character in this book was his stubborn insistence on doing the best that he could with what he had, despite having clear preferences for the easier thing. It's a constant theme in this book: Dresden clearly wants to take the low route, but his memories of his mother, along with his father's strength, prevent him. Prevent. There isn't much of a choice throughout the book. Dresden just sorta gripes about how it would be so much freaking easier to just take the low road, and is bitter about how the one time he did take the high road all he's gotten for it is crap.

Bob aside, the through-line for Dresden is clear. He wants to objectify those around him and can't seem to bring himself to do it.  His descriptions of people are clearly those of someone who wants to reduce the world to flesh and concrete. And the few times he talks of his family it's quite clear why he's hesitating.

And then he comes to the house. Victor's house. Now, one of the things that folks do not seem to get is that lust is a cover-up for heartbreak. It is not a proclivity so much as A solution to the problem of a broken heart. Y'know what another one is?

Rage.

Folks will generally oscillate between these two, if they're in this particular framework. Notice I said oscillate, not one or the other. They're two poles of the same choice.

You picks your drugs and makes your choices, childrens!

Harry is constantly, constantly, constantly picking lust over rage. It's not a great choice, but he's picking what he thinks of as the lesser of two evils and all that. But there, at that house? Lust has been set as such a revolting choice that all Harry has left is his rage.

What follows is a beautiful moment of Mercy.  Harry gets a moment where, because he hadn't burned his previous bridges with his parents, his relationship with their memory saves his grumpy ass. 

It's awesome.

Victor Sell, on the other hand? He has not. He's destroyed his family, raped his wife over and over, and decided that power is the only thing that matters. You've spent the entire book in Harry's head as he has to grapple with this question... and it's not even a fight with Victor. Victor doesn't show up till the end because he made his choice a long time ago. And so he's literally consumed by symbols of rage. I mean, you can't get more elemental and primal than the images that Butcher picks here. It's amazing.

So yeah, I found this useful and fun. I'm on board!

HAPPY?????