John Walker

I was asked to share my thoughts on John Walker, aka Falcon/Soldier’s Captain America. I’m about halfway through episode four, but I’ve gotten a pretty good read on Walker’s character. Overall I don’t think he’s a good representation of what an Army Ranger would look like if he volunteered for Captain America’s shield. So to do that we’re going to break down what an Army soldier is normally taught to handle, what an Army Captain is actually like and the duties they have on them, how Army infantrymen are different from the rest of the Army, and what experience I had with Army Rangers.

I preface this whole post with the warning: this is an opinion. It may be a somewhat reasonably informed opinion, given that I am an Army vet, but it is only an opinion. Wyatt Russel is a great actor and I've been enjoying Falcon and The Winter Soldier quite a bit, so far. I'm finding the discussion of power from Zemo quite enjoyable, as well as seeing The Falcon show why Steve picked him to be the next Cap.

Y’know what the first thing that was done to me at boot camp? I was forced to stay up for 48 hours, straight. During that time the other unfortunates and I were forced to stand in long lines, for hours, without falling asleep, a task I somehow managed to complete, although I’ll be damned if I know how. We were all asked to take in enormous amounts of information while sleep-deprived. And then we were given four hours of sleep. It was disorienting. Confusing. We just sorta bumbled from one station to the next, trying to absorb as much as we could.

The way we were greeted at Basic itself is what’s known as a shark attack. The drill sergeants get on the bus and scream at you at the top of their lungs, forcing you off the bus, picking at every last thing you did wrong, forcing you along into a path. People are routinely dropped into pushups or whatever else the drill sergeants felt like making us do. It was an entire day of being yelled at over the slightest thing, with you being punished for what others did; if one person screwed up EVERYONE was forced to do as many push-ups as the drill sergeants liked. And they liked seeing a lot of push-ups. You’d go to bed with the drill sergeants yelling at you over the PA system, listening to others around you crying themselves to sleep.

The next day was no better. Nor was the day after that. And the one after that. A seemingly endless number of days followed of being punished for things you did not do but were your fault, because you did not stop your neighbor from doing them. Image became everything. Individual disagreements took a back seat: band together or be worked into a state of complete and utter despair. You learned to pick your battles with those around you, to smile and laugh with those you desperately wanted to injure and maim for being pieces of shit, because you all suffered together. Folks you hated became brothers and stayed brothers, even if you still hated them.

During this point in time you’re taught cadences, marching songs. These songs center around a few themes: nobody is loyal to you (particularly your significant other), the only things that matter are how well you kill people, and living happily ever after is a lie. And, despite how awful Army life is, how spiritually destructive it is, you will probably renew your contract and stay in. And these ideas are ground into you, day after day after day. And you know the really awful thing?

By and large they’re right.

No one is actually loyal to you. Marital infidelity is astonishingly high in the military, as is spousal abuse. Supposed friends stab you in the back to get their promotion. You can claim to have whatever gifts and skills you’d like, but nothing really matters if you can’t live through the next task, whatever it may be. And accomplishing your goal normally doesn’t really feel all that good. One mountain down, infinity to go! The amount of things that can go wrong in a military day is close to 100% of the whole day, all day, every week, for years.

Soldiers are never off the clock. Never. Each and every action done can be brought up in a court marshal and in disciplinary action; there is no private life, not if someone with enough power pushes. You don’t decide when to go home, your command team lets you know when to go home. I’ve pulled 16 hours days unexpectedly, simply because some idiot lost a piece of equipment and no one was going home until it was found, by Captain’s orders! You could be awoken in the middle of the night and yanked out of your house to go see to an emergency of some sort, from something breaking down at command to watching your buddy who got into a drunken fight with the cops.

And you know what? I don’t know a single soldier who doesn’t laugh about every second of it. Actual, genuine, hysterical laughter. No irony, it’s genuinely funny to us! The constant wearing down and facing of utter bleakness produces a dark sense of humor that very few civilians can imagine. Jokes are routinely cracked about suicide, adultery, dying violently, running way, and roasting in the fires of Hell as a way of coping with the fact that we have no actual control over our lives. And we laugh to the point of tears about it all. I was more than halfway there with this sense of humor before the military. Now? I look at things that others would see with horror and chuckle darkly. It can always get so much worse. And it probably will. And since I can’t control it, I maintain the one true control anyone actually has in this world: the right to look oncoming doom in the face and laugh at it, to belittle the certain doom. To refuse to crack.

No, I’m not even halfway done. We haven’t talked about infantrymen yet.

Every single infantryman I’ve ever met has been extremely principled, honorable, and uncannily intelligent. There’s a self-possession in them that’s hard to describe, because every last thing I just described is far worse for an infantryman. And at the end of such an ordeal you possess yourself, because literally everything else has been taken from you. Pride, dignity, the illusion of control that civilians entertain themselves with, all of it gone. What you get is a sense of honor and control that one would not think possible to have.  Every single infantry leader I’ve met has a level of focus that should not be possible. Relentlessly goal-oriented, beyond ruthless, they know how to push you beyond what you would have considered in getting stuff done.

But that has a cost. One day I was talking with one of my sergeants, who was former infantry. Some of my compatriots asked him for some stories from “the front”.  Our sergeant proceeded to tell a story about shooting off an enemy’s nose and laughing hysterically with his battle buddies about the way the fallen enemy’s blood squirted out of the hole: an arc like a drinking fountain. Even years removed he had the look of look of nostalgia, over shooting someone’s nose off.  I’ve heard stories of infantrymen being forced to run over Middle Eastern children with tanks because terrorists frequently attach bombs to children, and so to stop was possible death… so you didn’t stop. And laughed. As they ran over children.  Infantrymen talk about these things with a casual, yet steely, acceptance. There is little regret left in them; they could not afford to question what they did then, as it would have killed them, and that would have been one more body bag, one more team of condolence whisperers sent to a grieving family. No thank you, they’re going to live, and sleep at night. And if you have issue with that that’s just too bad.

Being an officer in the military is both better and worse than being an enlisted. On the one hand you’ve not had your individuality ground out of you in the same way as enlisted.  But on the other hand you are taught to dehumanize those under you, while being threatened with jail should they get killed. An officer generally doesn’t have an issue with grinding enlisted into the dirt, depriving them of sleep and sanity, because they’re not people to the officer, but immediately flip the script if the officer’s actions lead to the enlisted’s harm, self-inflicted or otherwise. The enlisted become a means to an end, with the officer being forced to look the other way at all but the most egregious of harm.

Now it’s time to talk about the Rangers. Ranger school is one of the most grueling things one can ever go through: days without sleep, land navigational courses that would make others starve to death, and de-programming training. Most Army soldiers are taught to act as a cohesive whole by giving up their individual judgements. Don’t question, move on, the group needs you to. Rangers have that impulse to blind group think removed, the way a surgeon would take out a cancerous tumor. Formations, uniforms, and other means of enforcing blind group-think are destroyed, because if you can make it this far and become a ranger then you are truly trustworthy. At the same time the image of the Rangers becomes an unconscious reality. You have to look good, because you are no longer you. You are an Army Ranger and must present your group at its best.

You know the things that get trained out of you the most, with all that? Doubt. If you think something you have to own it. People can die if you’re unsure. You also develop a disturbing sense of the blackest humor, learning to lean into the sickest parts of your brain, because every part of that buffalo has been shown to be useful to you. And you will be found out if you’re not in 100%. No one is that good of a liar. No one.  So you have to become the real deal. If you’re not you’ll be drummed out.

People who doubt get other people killed.

People who aren’t willing to be okay with killing other people will get their friends killed.

People who have not learned to accept their darker impulses will crack under them at the first sign of stress.

My issue with John Walker is that he’s not sure enough. The man thinks his time in Afghanistan is awful and wants to cry over it? Boo hoo, you signed up for Ranger school, nobody drafted you! At no point in John Walker’s process would he have been actually forced into something. He signed up. He did it to himself. Entering the Rangers is completely and utterly voluntary. And there’s this curious entitled sense to the John Walker we see on screen. He thinks he’s entitled to doubt.

Doubt is a luxury, a sickly sweet poison that kills all souls that it comes in contact with if there’s too much of it. And for a soldier? A Ranger? Almost any instinctual doubt is too much.

And I find it more than a little odd that John Walker, a man who has had absolutely no room for doubt anywhere in his life for a long time, has any of it left. Put on your uniform, smile, kiss babies, and then go kill people. The Army puts you in whatever job they can safely put you, at any point in time. I promise you that in the real world John would not have been forced into Captain America’s role. He would have had to audition, to compete with others, and any personality flaws he had would have been spotted miles away. Miles.

Because doubt is a stench that would have been scrubbed off of him a very long time ago. And if it hadn’t John wouldn’t have gotten up there in the first place.

I never thought I’d miss the John Walker of the comics. Brutal and awful as he is, US Agent from the comics at least doesn’t doubt. And that is something, regardless of what he does with it.

So no, halfway through episode four I’m not buying it. This John Walker would have died a long time ago, nevermind gotten three Medals of Honor. And his friend would have died long before this point.

Lost: S1E3

I find it funny that the very first thing that the Lost crew does is release an episode about the nature of knowledge. Given how many people were all about trying to dissect the show and figure it out I find it ironic that the first thing the show does is go out of its way to discuss the basic ideas of information. You've got Kate, for whom information is a threat to truth, Sawyer, who refuses to act on information and condemns a man to death, and Jack tries to let information go and focus on the task at hand. If there is any episode that states the inadequacy of approaching this show as merely as a puzzle to be solved it's this one.

So, the sum up is that the air marshal is dying, and Jack accidentally finds out that Kate is a murderer. The episode dips a bit into Kate's backstory, showing her rather dodgy history with the truth. We also dip a bit into Michael's issues with Locke. And see Sawyer fail to be a decent person for not the last time.

AN ACTUAL SCENE WHERE TOO MUCH INFO IS A BAD THING. HOW MUCH MORE OBVIOUS CAN WE GET?

But seriously, the above scene is hilarious in hindsight when you realize Sun knows English... and therefore knows everything Michael is saying. I dunno, That's a fun layer of stuff to read back later. And this is one of the funnier moments, at least for me. Yeah, I think it's funny.

The truth around Kate is complicated, and is therefore hard to communicate adequately. She had killed the man who had abused her multiple ways, after finding out that he's actually her father. That's... complicated. That's not a simple thing to explain to anyone. So why would Kate even attempt to do so, to anyone? I think Kate is totally justified in not sharing the truth with anyone, ever. It's really not a grey thing, at least to me. 

So yeah, I'm gonna die on that hill.

Come at me, folks.

Moving onto someone else, Sawyer doesn't care about anyone else's truth. Like, at all. I'd forgotten just how insufferable Sawyer was at the beginning. There's a lot of really grinding stereotypical remarks going on, which just grind all the harder when you take characters like Sayid and call them "Al-Jazeera". Sawyer's mind is perpetually made up and that just makes him grate and grate and grate... right up until the end, when Sawyer decides enough's enough and he's going to act on his stupid ideas. It doesn't go well, what a surprise! He talks Kate into giving him the gun the others had entrusted her with. And condemns the marshal to a horrifying desk, because Sawyer is a jackass. This won't be the last time Sawyer condemns people to horrible fates because he thinks he knows best. And it's all out, right here, in the third episode of the show.

Jack wants to focus on the matter at hand, and tries to only use the information he thinks is relevant to that situation, despite everyone else wanting him to jump to conclusions about Kate and the marshal. I really Jack's ending statement: everyone should get the chance to start all over. Given what we'll find out about Jack we know he's saying that about himself is a lot more than he would say that about anyone. Jack has always wanted to be the hero. He's always wanted to be the hero. Now that he's got that chance Jack tries to live up to what he always wanted to be. And he impresses that upon Kate at the end. 

But it's Locke who has the best idea: realizing that the truth can only take you so far, given how fragile everyone can be. Seeing how Michael and Walt can barely carry on a conversation, Locke ignores Michael's hatred to help the father out. I really like how Locke just sits through most of the episode, crafting that whistle, focusing on the one thing he knows he can do right.

And, once everyone starts doing that, for however short a time they can manage, you get this incredible ending.

 I leave you with that ending, because there's something special about it. This remains one of my favorite episodes.

Lost: The End

The Iliad

 

This is one of the oldest books in the Western Canon. Most of us think we know it: Helen of Greece ran off with Paris of Troy, a war runs for ten years, and eventually the Trojan Horse happens and Troy falls in a rage of fire, pillage, and rape. All of this was because Paris had made the mistake of slighting Hera and Athena, who wanted their revenge against Paris. And apparently nobody thought to ask "Why the hell are we doing this?" Heck, for a lot of people it's a bit of chronological snobbery. "Look at those stupid ancients! Fighting a ten year war over a woman who clearly didn't want to stay with her husband!"

That. Is. Not. The Iliad. At all. 

The Iliad is not the ten year war. It is toward the end of the war. The humans are tired. They want to go home. A lot of people have died. And folks are just wanting it to be over. But the gods are not through. Hera and Athena are bound and determined to destroy Troy, to wreck that whole city to get back at Paris. The gods keep pushing and prodding the humans into greater and greater acts of violence.

And before you start scoffing at the stupid humans reacting to virtual gods.... go check Twitter. I mean, throw up in your mouth if you must, but go check Twitter. And then ask yourself how on earth some of those ragefests could possibly go on as they have?

"But Nathan," you may say. "That's humanity at its worst." And you're right, but that's not what Homer is showing. Homer shows something much worse. These heroes are doing what they're doing because they're at their best. Their virtues of loyalty, pride in country, courage in the face of  danger, are just as prone to being manipulated as their vices. And in so doing Homer makes a more chilling point: our virtues are actually easier to manipulate, because they are stronger. If someone can short-circuit your brain your virtues can keep you going on for a much longer time than your vices.

But even the idea that the gods' influence is inherently evil is... complicated. Because the ultimate "win" of the narrative, Achilles weeping with Priam, only comes about because Zeus tells Achilles to do so. Many of the moments of actual heroism and goodness that occur in The Iliad are because the gods intervened. So the whole "the gods are bad" is.... reductive. The gods are the gods. Whether you think they exist or not the group-think that they are shown to be doing in The Iliad is very real, and Homer's insight into how far and how long  it can be leveraged is nothing short of chilling.

The number one thing I did not expect is just the sheer anguish in The Iliad. People are killed brutally, explicitly, intimately, and cruelly. The pearl-clutching and "only focus on nice things" part of my brain (gotten from people who claim to want to preserver Western Civilization) spent over five hundred pages dying in the face of Homer's brutal onslaught. And Homer enjoys writing these deaths down, do not doubt it; there's a detail to the killings that speaks of obsession, of being unable to get it out of your head, and whether one likes to admit it or not that level of obsession is frequently pleasant.

But then Homer did something I didn't anticipate. He doesn't just kill people brutally; Homer give s a lot of them stories. And not just "Captain of the Guard" sorta stuff, but goes into sometimes long detail about where this particular corpse comes from. And how their family will miss them. And how nobody on the field of battle gives one solitary crap, because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and now their tongue is on the other side of their head... along with all their brains. Most of The Iliad is about the ruination of family after family after family as fathers, sons, and husbands are brutally killed and looted. It actually gets numbing, how much death there is. 

And Homer doesn't skimp on the living, either. These are not simple characters, by any stretch. Even douche nozzles like Agamemnon have more than a few moments of sheer badassery and humanity.  I mean, you know someone has sympathy when they can find a good moment for Menelaus! The folks that are generally better human beings (like Odysseus) have more than a few moments of weakness, and everyone comes out... with a lot more nuance than I expected. This is easily one of the deepest and nuanced takes on characters I've ever read, especially considering just how large the core cast is, nevermind all the other stories Homer recounts!

That surprise is chronological snobbery on my part, by the way. I'll admit it, freely! It's so hard to look at the past with any amount of objectivity and appreciation in any day and age, but I can't help but feel the poison of our modern age in a particular way. Our demand for squeaky clean, moral characters, who gets over themselves and becomes more, all on their own, is not only not Western, but it's completely unChristian; all fall short of the glory of God. All. All. ALL. The ancients knew it. They embraced it.

Why don't we to this extent? Cause I guarantee you we don't. It's been mostly lost to us. George R.R. Martin plays at this level of sympathy, but even he comes up short. He's a lot closer to our canon than most people would like to imagine.

So why do conservatives try to sanitize our own heritage? Why do conservatives shy away from what made us great and insist on squeaky clean narratives where everything works out?? 

And call it conservatism? 

What, exactly, are conservatives trying to conserve?

And why do leftists not seem to understand they can't run away from it? No matter how hard they try?

The Lie of Self-Identity

light spoilers for Book of the Short Sun to follow

ADDENDUM: As has been brought to my attention, my terms are not well defined. I'll attempt to define the most important one: Self-Identity. By Self-Identity I mean a constriction of yourself to what you think of yourself. I am not using Self-Identity as a noun, but as a verb that indicates a toxic toxic attempt of self-smothering so you may continue to retain your illusion about yourself, including suppression of experiences that would change how you see yourself and the world, trying to change your environment (or yourself) to match an image you have of yourself, lying to yourself that you didn't mean to do whatever mean thing you very clearly did on purpose, etc. Hopefully that clears things up.

I don't recognize the person that looks back at me in the mirror. I just don't. I haven't for decades. The person who gazes back at me isn't who I feel myself to be. The person people seem to know and talk about with my name attached to it I haven't recognized in even longer, and when I do recognize the person they're talking about it's the raging thing I work as hard as I can to restrain (which means I've failed yet again), or this deeply insightful person who is really just the byproduct of decades of heartbreak. There are memories people try to share with me that I find myself completely ignorant of. All I find when I look into my memories is a dark pit. How do you tell someone that you recognize them, but that may really be it? So I smile and play along. The memories I do retain most people don't seem to remember, to the point to where I wonder if I didn't just make them up. Maybe I did. Maybe my memories just aren't real. 

Maybe you're not real.

I've no way of knowing, the vast majority of the time.

Retreating doesn't seem to do me much good, so I just throw myself into whatever situation it is, hoping I'll figure out what's going on. I frequently don't. But I didn't back down. And that means something to me, whatever that's worth.

Gene Wolfe, an infantry vet of the Korean War, has always dealt with identity. What is it? How do you define it? Can you define your identity? Is it an individual's choice, who they are, or is it the community, your relationships, some weird combination thereof? Book of the Short Sun deals with these questions the most directly of the Solar Cycle, and I'd argue it is the point of Wolfe's science fantasy series. We follow along with Horn as he runs smack-dab into the fact that he's not who he thinks he is, over and over. Bad or good begin to blur as Horn's self-conceptions prove to not just be lies but damnable lies, causing more trouble than they're worth, but yet how are you supposed to move about in the world?

How are you supposed to act if you can't develop a proper conception of you? And never will? 

What if your ideas of you don't matter for being a person at all?

I'm not sure what exactly I'm driving at with this blog post. All I know is that the ending of On Blue's Waters, the first volume of The Book of the Short Sun, stopped me dead in my tracks. That first volume is watching someone's self-identity crumble. Horn does truly heinous things that are truly beyond his control but he did them and he experienced doing them and nobody can tell them they weren't his fault because fault doesn't matter and never did. 

He experienced it. 

And that was enough. 

Fuck the whole concept of fault, period.

The rest of the book shows Horn trying and trying to grow beyond his (supposed) misdeeds and failing, over and over. He wants to be the person that he thought he was and he knows he can't do it, but there's just no other thing for him to do, right? If you aren't who you think you are then why live? Why even bother? But he holds onto this mirage we call identity, fighting for it harder and harder. Horn doesn't ask what seems to be obvious to me now: why does what I think of myself matter, at all? But he doens't ask. He gets a lot of people killed over it.

And at the end of that volume Horn finds himself looking into a pool of water. And he doesn't recognize himself. What's staring at himself is a broken shell of a man who Horn does not want to accept.

He failed to retain the mirage.

I put the book down and sobbed for him. And me. There wasn't anything to be done. Self-identity is not real. And it never was. There is no way to sum up a person, especially if it's the individual in question. Because we all want to be something that we're not. And it does us no good, even if we think we achieved it. 

The rest of the Book of the Short Sun delves into this concept much harder and provides an answer, of sorts. I'm not really going to get into that now. But the beginning of self-knowledge is to be able to let go of the concept that you know who you are. And that you will ever fully learn who you are. You are larger than you know, infinitely so. So am I.

And no cheap thing like self-identity is going to even scratch the surface of the depths.

Every translator is a traitor, and that goes double for the lie of self-identity, which is when you try to translate yourself to yourself.

What a miserable concept.

Idolatry, in one of its purest forms.

Lost: Season 1 Episodes 1 and 2 (Pilot)

 

I have been sitting at my computer for the last fifteen minutes trying to sum up what this pilot has meant to me, over the years. This was my first time I understood craft; I watched this pilot and realized what they were doing, why they were doing it, and I wanted to do it myself. Heck, needed to do it myself. It's also a beautifully shot pilot. The pilot not only holds up to nostalgia but helped me realize that this was as close to an ideal of a serialized beginning as you can get.

Lost is, at its heart, a fantasy; you are changing elements of a setting to explore them in a different way. Fantasy is about making things just alien enough to where you can look at the unchanged elements with fresh eyes. The Lord of the Rings is about exploring love versus power; change power to an actual dark lord with a magic ring that has addictive properties, and you have a compelling take on why love will win out. Lost is a fantasy about dealing with what's precious within you. Do you give your light wisely, do you try to push people away to protect yourself (and thus put yourself in Hell), or do you try to destroy it so you can get away? There's as many answers to that question as people, but Lost is a treatise on how you relate to yourself, and thus to others. Lost adds the Light of the Island to further clarify the theme of relationship to self and others, as well as the Man in Black to show how to not relate to that Light.

Lost is not dualistic. The Man in Black is not an anti-Light; he is an anti-Jacob, but that's not the same thing.

Every episode of this show lets us see how the subjects of the episode are going to relate to themselves and each other, and why. And the pilot is in this structure, with fine style. We learn about Jack, principally. I say principally, because this pilot accomplishes the staggering goal of introducing us to each primary character while not telling us a whole lot about them: show don't tell. Even Jack isn't explained a whole lot and we see his flashbacks! We are deliberately shown only the surface. The pilot sticks to stereotypes. Jack is the rugged hero, Kate the helpful mate, Locke and Sawyer the mysterious outsiders, Hurley and Charlie are the man-children... we could just keep going. 

Everyone is archetypal. Elemental. Primal. The writers show us a preview of how the characters might interact together, without going into too much detail. They clearly know their characters well enough to be okay with putting them in situations that shows them at their most reactive, with each character running into situations that they just wouldn't do, not normally. A lot of these previews are meant to be partially deceptive; we know that Locke is sitting around because he's in shock and trying to process being able to walk again. But we're not told that. It's all surface, but the surface is so intriguing that I found myself being willing to just go along for the ride.

And then the pilot dies. 

And everyone has to ask "What's out there?". 

I love that it's Charlie that's asking. He's got a recovery arc ahead of him, even though we don't know it the first viewing. Out of all the characters Charlie fears the unknown most. Addiction is an answer to the unknown: going to something known, to the point of hurting yourself. But known things are just as dangerous as unknowns. The fact that Charlie asks this from left to right is going to give American viewers a tinge that this is the right question to ask. There's a deliberate discord in this shot, where Charlie is definitely not asking because he wants the answer. But he's shot in a way where we want to know.

It's a brilliant shot.

And it's a brilliant pilot. Because it tells just enough, while showing that we don't know anything. And then making us want to know more. Question after question is poured out, along with excitement and intrigue. And then it ends the episode with a literal question to a problem that there is absolutely no context for.

This pilot is as good as it gets. What a freaking amazing show.

Suihkulahde: Session Twelve, Trait Vote the First

I tried something different this time: I didn't push for this arc as if it was the last, and spent most of the time building forward. And it was a very strange experience! I've always striven to make sure each arc was self-contained. Even if my sessions aren't, they all added up by end of the arc. But this focus led me to suggest skipping parts of the narrative in The Undertow that could have been really interesting.

So I may or may not have gone the other way.

Way the other way.

I think I may have overdone it. Slightly. But this wasn't a total wash. We had created a prologue of sorts for the rest of the game. There had been a lot of tension between Anneli and Nomi. This arc hadn't removed the animosity completely, but it did put Anneli and Nomi on the same side.  By putting the sisters in a situation that removed them from their friends (and preventing them from able to communicate the problem to said friends) Anneli and Nomi forged a completely unique bond. And that's where we cut it: a rekindling of sorts between Anneli and Nomi. It's not perfect, it's certainly not pretty, but they won't necessarily be at each other's throats in future arcs.

So before we start this trait vote here's the traits as they stand:

Anneli

Call of the Island, Righteous,  Mortally Wounded in the Head | Shaky Hands | Slightly Clumsy, Bound to Akseli, Commanding Aura, Driven (Pilot)

When Sabina's Castle ended, Anneli was in a very interesting place. She had just saved the Argentum Empire from Aloysius, but was unable to figure out how to address Nomi. The entirety of this arc was about Anneli's assumptions getting just shattered. Seeing that Nomi, who Anneli had abandoned in confusion, had not only changed, but was pregnant, with a husband that had loved her, would have been enough. 

But then she failed her sister and Nomi's husband, Constantine, was killed. And then the Akseli helped mend her broken body, changing Anneli's soul. That's a lot. A lot of a lot.

So when looking at the traits I know I'll be suggesting swapping out Righteous for Fearless, drop Slightly Clumsy, and add Tough.

Nomi

Educated, Call of the Sea, Spite, Deceptive, Compulsive Liar, Callous, Charismatic, Memory’s Influence, Bitter, Guarded

Ah, Nomi. From NPC to PC, there's been a lot of development for this character that Andy first envisioned as just simply "Anneli's sister". Nomi, having lost her husband Constantine, needed a new anchor. And I think she found it? Or at least is willing to look for it? Even that much is a lot. And I think she's willing to find a new anchor.

I'll be suggesting swapping out Compulsive Liar for Snarky, nixing Guarded, and adding Aggressive.

Lead Up to the Vote

The first thing we had to figure out was how long Anneli, who'd taken a mortal wound, was out for. Given that life-giving water from the center of the earth was available, I decided that would help Marian, Telos, and Decima heal Anneli, giving dai quite the boost. So I told Andy that all healing checks would pass, giving Anneli +3D to dail Health rolls. The water also meant that, no matter what happened, the recovery time was at the minimum. That's a bit of cheating, I know, but it's the life-giving water. Those 3 dice really helped! Andy passed like a champ. Five months of recovery! So that's what the downtime is.

Feedback

I next asked folks for feedback: things they liked, things they didn't like and wanted addressed, as well as things they wanted introduced. With the format explained, I led.

Nathan (GM)

I really liked the character work going on; no matter how wonky things got Andy and Lena stayed relentlessly focused on how things affected their characters. They also played a lot with subtext, describing in pretty great detail little facial shifts and other stuff that I just adored. All the little twitches that siblings are so sensitive to they played up. It was great.

Less great was my own lack of focus. I had tried a few things that fell apart as they hit the table and had created a bit of a mess. I had partially intended to not make an arc that was self-contained, but felt that I had gone too far. 

I personally wanted to see more of what made someone become a member of the immortal Council. What did it mean to be immortal? What had to be given up? And what if not all of them were good? What did that look like?

Andy

Andy agreed that the character work was really strong and enjoyed it. He and Lena had crafted some really good emotional scenes. The arc had retained a good emotional core. He also really liked going back to the Argentum Empire and seeing it again.

Andy's criticisms were... completely on point, and not what I expected them to be. Andy said that the plot about the stars vanishing had been more or less dropped, and that had been a primary piece of concern for Anneli. Andy also wanted to see more of the fallout from the time traveling that happened, specifically the Dahaka. What had happened there? He wanted more definition on it.

I honestly just kinda expected them to want to drop the arc entirely.

Andy also asked about somehow getting back to the Ring of Tears. He wanted to reconnect Anneli to that piece of the past.

Lena

Lena agreed about the emotional core. She had found that, as weird as the plot had become, its focus on character was amazingly consistent. She also agreed that she wanted to see more of the consequences of the time travel. What had they accomplished? What sorta backlash was coming? Lena then asked if we could find a way to not only get back to the Ring of Tears but to see more of the fallout of the Lone Keep cult. Nomi had been a member of that cult for a while, what would happen if dai ran into more members of that former cult? I honestly hadn't expected that.

The State of the Sky

Andy brought up a good point: the plot about the vanished sky had dropped out. Part of it was that introducing Nomi significantly affected the plot, changing the focus of the story. So now that we had resolved the myriad conflicts brought about by bringing the two sisters back together, what were we going to do about the sky?

I said that I didn't really know how to approach the problem and wanted to broach that with the folks at the table. Naturally speaking the cloud that surrounded the planet would be dying down around five months or so. Now, speaking on a meta level that wasn't a problem; we needed to determine what answer we wanted. I broke down the three states we could do: sky remains black, cloud goes away, or something strange happens. If the sky stayed black that would mean someone was probably keeping it that way, and that while that would change the plot it would keep Anneli's motivations intact from the start of the campaign.

We all opted for that: the sky would stay dark. And that meant someone was keeping it that way. Which kinda implies the meta-goal of the next arc. I think. 

The Trait Vote

We're finally here! The trait vote! Here's the actual thing. We listed out our suggested traits, and then started to have our conversation.

Anneli

Nathan

Drop Slightly Clumsy, change Righteous to Fearless, and add Tough as Nails

My logic was that Slightly Clumsy, a trait earned from a Mortal Wound from years ago, just didn't really apply anymore. Anneli was no longer the Righteous icon dai had become in the eyes of the Argentum people, but had become a fearless, badass warrior, whose body was toughening up in the face of constant adversity.

Lena

Drop Slightly Clumsy, Righteous to Cool-Headed, add Aura of Determination

So Lena was in complete agreement about nixing Slightly Clumsy and Righteous, but wanted to add Aura of Determination. Anneli had been the bedrock of the sisters, constantly helping Nomi regain dail composure at key times. So Lena wanted something to reflect Anneli's leadership, but at the time she didn't really know what particular trait she wanted.

Andy

Drop Slightly Clumsy, swap Righteous for Dreamer, add Aura of Determination

Turns out nobody thought Slightly Clumsy and Righteous should go. But Andy wanted to go for Dreamer, as that allowed Anneli to take dail experiences with Dream and seeing other things from other worlds and making that a part of dail plans. Lena and I adored that idea, and took to it at once. Lena, who was looking for a trait, loved that idea.

And so this is what we ended up with:

Drop Slightly Clumsy

Swap Righteous for Dreamer

Add Aura of Determination

Nomi

Nathan

Drop Guarded, Swap Compulsive Liar for Snarky, add Itching for a Fight (C-O Intimidation, start in Aggressive stance)

I saw Nomi as becoming more open and not as openly secretive, as well as being openly hostile to those who got in the way of Nomi and dail sister.

Andy

Drop Compulsive Liar, swap Bitter to Grief-Touched, add The Killer

Andy saw Nomi as opening up more, and emphasized dail's growth from Bitterness to someone who was may be willing to grieve. The Killer makes Nomi better at Fight! and Ranged and Cover. 

Lena

Drop Educated, swap Callous for Familial Loyalty, and add The Killer

Lena brought up that Educated didn't come up... at all. Not at all. Like, at all at all. Lena wanted to get rid of Callous because, at the end of the day, Nomi had started to care about something... dail family. The rest of the detritus hasn't gone away. And this was another situation where The Killer just became a unanimous vote. 

Drop Educated

Swap Callous for Familial Loyalty

Add The Killer

And there we have it! We're going to take a break, as Andy and I go onto do an eight session gameof Hearts of Wulin while we all digest everything that went down. In about a month I think I'll start writing up my thoughts on the arc and see what it is I want to throw at the campaign. The idea of going and ending the darkness that was unwittingly started by Mikansia but now continued by... something else. Maybe throw in some of the folks from the Lone Keep, get some time glitches and loops thrown in, all from bad members of the Council?

We'll see!