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Content, Crusader Kings Series 1, Excluded, Games

The Promised Land RELOADED

This is my attempt at a text-and-images Let’s Play, of sorts, documenting one of my adventures in Crusader Kings II.  I may adjust the format as we go along, let me know if you have any suggestions.  Clicking images should embiggen.

A few caveats!  I am not a super-expert CKII player, nor do I really care to be — I tend to be in it more for the story than anything else.  So I may behave sub-optimally from time to time!  (I may also explain more than needed, since my assumption is that not everyone reading this plays.)  Also, CKII is a historical game, so we’ll be dealing with some real-world stuff here — countries, religions, even a few people.  Generally I’ll try to be sensitive but if it bothers you when I declare holy war against Orthodox Christianity on behalf of the pope, or whatever, this is probably not the best thing to be reading.

CKII is a game with no real defined end goal.  You pick a ruler and a starting time, and you play as successive rulers of that dynasty, until you die out or the game ends in 1453.  I usually try to pick something to work toward to make things more interesting.  I’ve done a bunch of fun stuff, but one previous playthrough was kind of a bust — I wanted to play as a Jewish ruler, with the goal of re-establishing Jerusalem and rebuilding the Temple, only to have a game bug screw up the events that were supposed to make that happen at the last minute.  I have now gotten over my annoyance enough to try again!  (This time I’m not using Ironman mode since a) I don’t care about achievements and b) this way I can reload or use the console if I get blocked by bugs again.)

So!  Can we get back to the promised land … AGAIN?  Let’s find out.

 

The first problem is that there, uh, aren’t that many Jewish rulers.  We’re going to start at the earliest possible date, 769 AD, because we need a LOT of time to get this project done.  There are definitely easier ways (starting with the Kazakhs for example) but this one seemed fun.  So we will start as the Duke of Semien, a tiny little Jewish state in the middle of absolutely nowhere.  (One of the teeny ones to the right of Kassala.)

Yeah, see?  Middle of nowhere!

The other problem is that being a Jew is not exactly a popular choice in 769.  They’re the tiny little blue patch.

Tiiiiiny little blue patch.  This poses a couple of problems.  First of all, everybody around us is going to have an attitude penalty (in CKII, attitudes are numerical values from -100 to 100, and Infidel is -20) and basically not like us.  Second, it’s going to be hard to find people to marry.  Third, and most importantly, anybody who isn’t Jewish, which is everybody, can declare a holy war and come and take our land.  More on that in a minute.

Here is our King (actually Duke, but he calls himself a King) Phineas Gideon.  He is 46 years old with a son who has apparently formed ex nihilo, since he’s never been married.  His stats are pretty crap, to be honest, but we’re going to have to put up with a lot of that since we won’t have much choice in terms of wives, mentors, etc.

Here’s the Prince, Gideon Gideon.  He’s 14 and a bit better, stat-wise, except in terms of Stewardship, which is of course the one that we want the most.

Our initial goal is going to be to accumulate a lot of gold, so that we can use mercenaries to punch above our weight and take over some neighbors.  So we set Phineas Gideon to studying the mysterious ways of commerce.

Gideon Gideon will be tutored by Tessema, a random courtier who happens to be awesome at Stewardship.  We’d really really like it if he learns the Midas Touched trait from him.

Phineas needs to get married, because one son is never enough.  There is exactly one woman in the entire world willing to marry him, so I guess Senalat will have to do.  Fortunately she happens to be an awesome diplomat at age 16, which may come in handy.

Our council mostly isn’t bad, except for our Steward, who completely sucks at his job.  Fortunately, we can just replace him with Tessema.  He won’t like that but he’s not powerful enough to do anything about it.

On the to-do list, eventually: change away from Gavelkind inheritance, which will be problematic once our realm gets bigger.  Not urgent though.

Military: pretty poor.  Admittedly it’s 769 so everyone sucks, though.  We could use some more castles.

Ultimate goal!  We’re … a long way off from that.  But you gotta have goals.

Last important step before unpausing the game is to swear fealty to the King of Abyssinia.  Seems sort of counterproductive, I know, since ideally we want to be king, right?  But Semien is just not big enough to go it alone, and Abyssinia is our biggest neighbor.  Swearing fealty means that Abyssinia itself probably won’t attack us, plus provides a little protection against other people.  On the downside, the King might take our land or execute us, but one thing at a time.

King Oda Gosh accepts our request!  We are now part of the not-very-mighty Kingdom of Abyssinia, and none too soon.

We assign our councilors to their tasks and get working.  First goal, as I said before, is to build up some gold.  I also sent away for a Court Physician, and found this cynical rabbi named Amare.  (This is my first time playing with Reaper’s Due, so I have no idea about this part!)

Every year we can celebrate Passover!  But it’s expensive so I usually don’t.  Sorry guys.

King Oda Gosh is pretty quick off the block.  Not more than six months have passed before he’s declared a holy war against Berbera, which is off to the right of the screen there.  We’re not actually obligated to help, but it looks like a good prospect, so we’ll go along in hopes of some loot.

I’m in the middle of besieging Berber castles and the peasants are asking for money for their like … dance social?  Sure, why not.

Hmm.  I’m not an expert, but this bodes poorly.

What do you think, Rabbi?  Gout, huh?

You had one job, Amare!

One.  Job.

Predictably, diseased beaver secretions failed to help Duke Phineas, and he died shortly thereafter.  Thankfully, Gideon Gideon is almost 16 (the age of majority) and thus will have only a short regency.  That leaves me in a poor position, though, with only one family member to my name.

On the plus side, Gideon Gideon gained Midas Touched when he reached adulthood!  This will help with his crappy stats.

At this point, though, things are going pretty badly for the new Duke.  Our heir is King Oda Gosh, which means if Gideon dies we lose the game.  Also, the war has taken a decided turn for the worse.  The Shirazids (the green country including Harer, between Abyssinia and Berbera) have declared a holy war for Aksum, the core territory of Abyssinia.  They marched over into Berbera, where Oda and I were laying siege, and crushed both our armies.  So at this point Oda’s capital is under siege by a large Shirazid army, while he runs around desperately trying to recruit more men.  I am standing still lying in wait, but if the Shirazids win the war Abyssinia will be crippled and I’m probably screwed.

Oh, also, on reaching adulthood Duke Gideon Gideon turned out to be gay.  Definitely less than ideal dynasty-wise.

Gideon Gideon decides to console himself with “family”, which in this case means “sexing”.  In spite of his natural inclination, he’s managed to acquire a wife (once again the only woman in the kingdom) and is hard at work trying to acquire some sons.

There’s also a measles epidemic spreading fast.  Hopefully it does some damage to the enemy.

In spite of being gay, Gideon Gideon falls in love with his own wife!  A hopeful sign.

The war is still going very poorly, though.  Aksum is now occupied by the Shirazids, and their army continues to rampage throughout Abyssinia.  Our forces have recovered somewhat but are still waiting in their castles until the odds get a little closer to even.

However!  Fellow Miaphysites from surrounding countries rally to Oda’s side and send some armies over.  We quickly raise our troops and lead them to join the fight.  (Red armies are bad, gray are neutral to us, green are ours.)

As is so often the case, one hard-fought battle completely changes the course of the war.  We quickly liberate the castles and towns in Aksum and pursue the retreating enemy back into their own territory.

Unfortunately the Jews of Semien are not, uh, particularly warlike in their abilities.  We’re going to have to work on that guys.

As we reduce the Shirazid castles, good news!  Gideon’s wife is pregnant.  Maybe the dynasty will continue!

In addition to capturing some castles, we got a visiting Sheikh as well!  This is very good, he will bring a fine ransom.

Seriously, Amare?  Seriously?

Aaaand he’s been joined by the entire peasantry of Semien.  You’d think that being a Jew surrounded by hostile religions was hard or something.  We’ll get our Court Rabbi on setting people straight ASAP. 

Hurrah!  Gideon: The Next Generation.

On the downside, my wife contracted dysentery and died shortly thereafter.  Not one to waste time mourning, the Duke searched for a new wife, but this time there were literally no women in the world willing to marry Duke Gideon Gideon.  Fortunately, for a little cash you can “Present Debutante” which creates a new woman from scratch.  Long live Duchess Semhar!

My prisoner complains of his accommodations, which reminds us that he exists.  Now that the war is over, we ransom him back and pad our treasury.

For being gay, Duke Gideon Gideon keeps falling in love with his wives!  Later he fell in love with her again, and it stacks, meaning he had DOUBLE LOVE.

Then, for a while, things went relatively peacefully.  One of the small countries south of Abyssinia fell apart in civil war, and Oda Gosh grabbed half while the Shirazids grabbed the other half.

Semhar acquired an interest in romantic poetry, which we encouraged because it made her lustful.  Not long after, she gave birth to a daughter.

Oda Gosh, getting bored, declares war on the Shirazids again.  This time, because we’re not simultaneously fighting Berbera and he has some allies, it goes much better.  The AI is not super-good at fighting wars — it prefers to sit around besieging castles, rather than confronting the enemy even with a 2-to-1 advantage.  Not how we’d do it if we were in charge, but at least we get some loot from taking cities!

We win the war and take most of the Shirazid territory.  They won’t be much of an issue from here on out, I think.  Also, between the ransom and the looting, I’ve acquired a reasonable amount of gold, enough to pay some mercenaries for a bit.  So I set my chancellor to forging claims against the Duchy of Gojjam, just south of me, in hopes of getting a quick little war going.

Will it work out?  Who knows!  Tune in next time.  Current Year: 779 AD.  Current status: Still alive.

Movies, Reviews

Why ROGUE ONE Isn’t My Favorite Star Wars

So, it’s the new year, and I think it’s finally been long enough that I can talk about Rogue One. I like to wait a while, first to give spoilers a chance to clear, but also because my thoughts tend to evolve over time, particularly for movies where I have an emotional attachment to the franchise. The short version goes like this: while Rogue One was by no means a bad movie (one of the strengths of the Disney/Marvel/Lucasfilm monster is that its movies, while not always good, are usually competent rather than confusing disasters in the vein of Attack of the Clones or Suicide Squad) it’s also not a great one, and definitely not the movie I hoped it would be.

SPOILERS, obviously, from here on out!

So I have to say I was always excited about this movie. I was generally pleased with The Force Awakens, but left slightly cold by the way that it reused so much of the story of A New Hope. There was the chance that a new, non-sequential Star Wars movie could take chances and be different, give us something new and cool! And the trailers looked promising. I’m trying, therefore, to engage with the movie Rogue One actually is, rather than the movie I would like it to be.

So why didn’t I like it? It’s complicated, but I think it boils down to characters. Rogue One‘s characters are … sketches, I guess, is the way I’d describe them? They suggest character development and things that might be cool, but we don’t actually see any of it on screen, largely because there simply isn’t time. And that’s the first, most basic problem: there are too many main characters, and their complicated introduction and action set-pieces eat up so much running time that we get hardly any understanding of any of them.

Aside: As we go through them, I’m going to say things like “this character isn’t necessary”. It’s important to understand this to mean “not necessary to the story” rather than “not necessary to the plot“. Because this movie is basically competent, characters generally are given something to do, but throwing in an invented obstacle for them to overcome doesn’t actually justify their inclusion in the story.

This is important, so let’s take A New Hope as an example. All of our main characters are needed, not just for the mechanics of the plot (Obi-Wan and Luke have to get to Alderaan somehow) but for the story. They tend not to overlap one another — Luke is the naive farmboy-turned-hero, Obi-Wan the wise mentor, Han the scoundrel who learns friendship, and Leia the object of rescue who refreshingly turns out to be pretty competent. Two droids for comic relief, and on the imperial side we have Vader as the vicious, mysterious side of the Empire and Tarkin as the cold, bureaucratic side. We need these people — you could come up with an alternate route to Alderaan, but the story doesn’t work with Han Solo or someone like him. (He’s the foil for Luke, his arc provides the final closure to the Death Star battle, and so on.) The point is just because Bodhi Rook has to plug a thing into another thing to save the day doesn’t mean he’s necessary in a narrative sense.

So let’s talk about —

The Characters

K-2SO: I’m actually fine with him, although I know some people objected. Star Wars has a long tradition of comic-relief droids, and K-2 hits the right balance for me — he’s similar to C3PO in that he’s a pessimist, but he’s morbid and his dark humor is different enough to be interesting. He also doesn’t require a ton of backstory or introduction. No problems here.

Bodhi Rook: As you may have gathered from above, the inclusion of this character in the final crew is kind of baffling to me. He starts off as a MacGuffin (the defecting pilot who brings the message) but then kind of tags along, for no obvious reason. He also has a really strange scene with some kind of mind-invading tentacle monster that serves no purpose. (Things that serve no purpose are kind of a theme.) I was pretty sure they were going to kill him off in the escape from Jedda, which would have made sense, but no. Anyway, he consumes some screentime and has to have a heroic moment at the end, with no character arc or payoff. (We never find out why he was willing to make the borderline-suicidal move of betraying the Empire, other then a general good feeling toward Galen and not being in favor of blowing up planets. Why this guy instead of literally millions of other guys?)

Saw Gerrera: In contrast, I thought for sure Saw would join the team. It would make sense — he’s the old, grizzled veteran, to contrast with young Jyn and Cassian, plus he and Jyn have history together, plus he’s in conflict with the rest of the Rebels. (Jyn’s speech scene makes waaaay more sense if the attack plan is suggested by Saw and then the rest of the rebels balk.) Instead he stands around for a while and then chooses death for no reason. (Seriously, you say “I’m done running” when you’re going to make a heroic last stand, not just get blown to bits by a shockwave.) That’s another slightly baffling choice — if he was going to die, the obvious move would be to have him sacrifice himself for Jyn, shove her out of the way of a falling rock and be trapped himself, “Fly you fools!”, etc.

A cynic might say the problem here is stunt casting: Forest Whitaker is in his fifties, a big-name actor, maybe not too enthused about Star Wars. So he comes in, gets into a fancy suit, shoots all his scenes in one location in a couple of days, with no action or anything particularly difficult. I have no idea if this is true or not, to be clear, but that’s what we ended up with.

Chirrut Îmwe & Baze Malbus: This is a tough one for which I am likely to get some pushback. But here’s the thing — I like these characters, they’re fun and potentially interesting (probably moreso than Cassian) but as written, they don’t really have a place in the story. To go back to the idea of narrative necessity, you could remove both of them completely and the movie would work just fine. Chirrut kinda-sorta acts as the mentor/Obi-Wan type, at least he seems like he should, but the movie doesn’t actually give him any of that to do — Jyn doesn’t have a conflict about whether she believes in the Force and doesn’t go to him for advice. He’s a mentor without a mentee. All they really do is shoot/fight stormtroopers, participate in the heroic ending, and die tragically.

In sum, someone please make the Chirrut & Baze movie, comic book, whatever, the story about them adventuring around and bickering about the Force, and I’d happily read/watch/buy it. But as far as Rogue One goes they don’t really add anything, and they take up a lot of running time between their introduction, their show-off fights, and later dialogue.

The need for all these characters to be introduced in random ways make the plot of the first half of the movie kind of a convoluted mess. We’ve got Jyn breaking out of jail, being dragooned to help the rebels, going to Jedda, picking up more characters, going to meet Saw and picking up more characters, so it’s a good 30-45 minutes before we even have our main crew together. Crucially, very little of this time is spent getting to know them, and a lot more on fights and running away from things. The first character beats really come on Edu, when Cassian has to decide whether or not to kill Galen, but we’ve had nothing to that point to let us know why he would go either way.

That brings us to our heroes, Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor. Jyn is, theoretically, the protagonist, which means that her actions should drive the plot, and her character arc should define the overall story. But it’s just not there — I don’t even know what her character arc is supposed to be! To … become a rebel? Except she was already a rebel before Saw ditched her. To learn something about her father, or alter their relationship, or something? But they never meet. To struggle with Cassian about idealism vs. realpolitik in the Rebellion? She’s already pretty cynical, and in any event that never actually happens. She doesn’t even have much personal hatred for Krennic, since she doesn’t seem to recognize him and vice versa.

As set up, Cassian is in the real protagonist’s spot in the story. He’s the one who gets the mission to get the Death Star plans, and he gets set up with the moral conflict of rescuing vs. killing Galen. We see him casually murder an informant early on, setting up that he’s grown jaded and cynical in the Rebellion. All the ingredients are there for a character arc, but it never actually happens, and the focus stays relentlessly on Jyn.

Jyn, meanwhile, has nothing about her character that doesn’t relate to her being Galen’s daughter. Does she have any particular skills? Hobbies? Relationships? We get almost literally nothing. It’s kind of a shock when Saw reveals that he raised Jyn and trained her as a rebel until she was sixteen — why isn’t that scene in the movie? It might give their reunion and his death a little weight! Instead, she’s Galen’s daughter so Saw will like her, then she’s got to rescue Dad, then she’s got to do what Dad wanted, then she dies.

This is, ultimately, where the movie falls down. You can debate whether it’s okay to end the movie with everyone dying or not, but for me what it comes down to is that a tragic ending, in order to actually have tragedy, needs well-developed characters. I might have cared more about Jyn and Cassian being blown up if we’d gotten to know them a little better; instead I cared more about Chirrut and Baze, possibly because their actors have more charisma. (It’s also a weird choice to give everyone tragic death scenes and then have the superlaser take out half the planet, since it makes all the earlier tragedy meaningless.)

It’s hard for me not to imagine what might have been. One approach would be to just drop everyone except for Jyn, Cassian, and K-2SO. Figure out an arc for Jyn and for their relationship — an obvious candidate would be idealistic Jyn vs. cynical Cassian, with him secretly ordered to kill Galen, and eventually coming to remember his idealistic roots due to her steadfast heroism. But give it some time to breathe, to have some witty dialogue between the two of them, to find out who they are.

Another approach would be to keep the ensemble cast but cut out all the backstory and introductions, leaving more time for character development. Keep the plot very straightforward — a team of Rebels is assigned to get the Death Star plans. Jyn, Galen’s daughter, is put on the team, who are at first distrustful of her as a novice, but she eventually wins them over. They have to sneak around Imperial bunkers, fight guys, etc, and the team members each have some kind of purpose and unique character. I’m thinking of this modeled on Aliens, for example — most of the marines have personalities and character, but we don’t get complex backstory, we just see their camaraderie and how they react to the newcomer. (It’s really strange when Cassian on Yavin says, “Hey I’m going to help and I brought my friends!” And we get a shot of a bunch of rebels we’ve never seen before, who are clearly cannon fodder. Are we supposed to feel something? But if we’d actually seen a crew of guys earlier in the movie, and then they all show up to help, it works!)

There’s other things you can quibble about here — gender issues, for starters. (Main female character is accessory to her father, near-total lack of women extras. There’s a TV Trope called Men Are The Expendable Gender that’s always been a pet peeve for me, where we can have main characters be women and kick ass, because they only get hurt if its plot-appropriate, but the horde of expendable extras have to be men because they die in droves.) But for me personally, it’s these character issues that are at the center of it left me feeling “meh” when I left the theater. As Star Wars movies go, I have to put this one below the originals and Force Awakens. (It’s sure as hell better than Revenge of the Sith, but that’s a low bar.) And it’s a shame, because I really wanted to like it.

(I really wish Disney/Lucasfilm would get away from having everything be tied super-tightly to the original trilogy. Just give us like … the adventures of an imperial pilot escaping after being shot down in a random battle, and the rebels he befriends. Or anything that’s not literally tied to the original trilogy plot. Sadly, since the next stand-alone is Han Solo, this seems unlikely…)

Content, Movies

Doctor Strange and Origin Stories

A few weeks back on Twitter, I had a small rant about origin stories in superhero movies, specifically how I generally dislike them. The specific target of the rant was the origin stories in movies that have been remade frequently, so that the beats of the origin story become like the Stations of the Cross — nerdy Peter Parker, radioactive spider, Uncle Ben shot, great power = great responsibility, etc. (Someday I want a version where the Waynes make it out alive. I’m sure there’s a comic.) However, today I saw Doctor Strange and thought a little bit more about the origin story thing. Since I have nothing better to so (lies, I am horribly procrastinating) I thought I’d write something down.

SPOILER WARNING for Doctor Strange and some other popular superhero movies everyone has already seen!

So, Doctor Strange is, on the balance, not a very good movie, for a variety of reasons. (As you’ll see, I think a chunk of that can be blamed on the way the origin story is handled, but there are other problems.) The way it unfolds looks like this: we see Kaecilius (I will never learn how to spell that) break into a library and steal a page from a book, and also behead a guy so we know he’s the bad guy. The Ancient One chases him and fails to catch him. Then we cut to Dr. Stephen Strange, establish that he’s a brilliant neurosurgeon and kind of a dick. He has a car accident, in which his hands are badly damaged. He tries to get doctors to fix them, but nobody can. Eventually, he finds a guy who tells him about a magical healer, and he goes to Nepal to find her. It turns out to be the Ancient One, who demonstrates magic for him and eventually agrees to teach him stuff.

Dr. Strange learns a bunch of magic, some karate, and gets some backstory explained and some Chekhov’s Guns set up. Then Kaecilius (I’ve just got it in my copy/paste now) shows up, attacks the Ancient One and her people, and generally wrecks everything. The Ancient One dies, Dr. Strange has to fight the bad guys, and then he resolves the plot with a bizarre trick pulled out of nowhere. (Then there’s a stinger tying it to the Infinity Gauntlet saga because it’s the Marvel universe and of course there is.)

I think two things that seem contradictory at first are in fact both true:
1) The origin story stuff is the best part of the movie.
2) The origin story makes the movie’s structure fail utterly.

The first one is self-evidently true. Origin stories are often the best parts of superhero movies. As was pointed out in the Twitter discussion, they capture the purest part of the superhero fantasy — the time when an ordinary person discovers they have awesome powers and how cool that is. All but the broodingest of superhero movies have a scene where the hero plays a prank, flies around for fun, or generally just revels in the use of his new powers; even Batman typically has a scene or two where he clobbers some muggers and looks like an omnipotent badass, which probably counts as fun if you’re Batman. Doctor Strange is no different — there’s psychedelic journeys, Strange stealing books from the library with portal magic, and playing around with time magic. It’s also the part of the movie where there’s a lot of good humor and character-building moments.

In contrast, the whole second half of the movie, after Kaecilius attacks, is awkward and rushed. Literally hours pass in-world between “oh no here they come!” and the potential apocalypse; the only time Strange stops running is to have his stab wounds stitched. There’s a good moment at the death of the Ancient One, but otherwise it’s straight from one set-piece to the next, with very thin connective tissue. There is, essentially, no plot. Kaecilius wants to summon the Dark God, which means destroying three sanctuaries. So he attacks the sanctuaries, and keeps attacking them until he succeeds, but then Strange undoes his success. Roll credits!

Why is it awkward? Because the plot has no room to breathe. The action set-pieces, which are admittedly pretty spectacular, take up a lot of running time, and there’s only enough left over to tell the very barest bones of the story. The audience has no investment in stopping Kaecilius other than that he’s going to destroy the world — Strange doesn’t know him, and the other characters who have never demonstrate a personal connection. At one point, Kaecilius tells strange that the Dark God isn’t so bad, and he really just makes everyone live forever, and Strange actually has no way to refute this, because he has no idea what’s going on. All he ends up going on is that Kaecilius and his friends murder people, and the Ancient One kinda-sorta tries not to. We as the audience have the same problem!

The squished structure exists, of course, because the origin story takes up half the runtime. Like all the worst origin-story offenders, it’s essentially two movies running back to back. First there’s the story of a guy who become a superhero sorcerer, and then there’s a story about that sorcerer having to fight some unrelated bad guy. A few bits and pieces carry over, but they’re mostly unconnected. (There’s what I can only describe as a half-hearted swipe at a love interest.) This is always going to be a problem for a movie with this structure.

This is more or less where I was at re: origin stories before. But the failings of this movie got me thinking about the examples of origin stories that do work, because the problem, as I said, is that the origin story is often the best part of the movie. So what are your options?

First, you can leave out the origin story. This feels controversial, which is weird. Most movies don’t have long sequences at the beginning explaining the origins of the characters! This is why we have exposition and flashbacks, which (if used deftly) can get the job done without wasting time. The first Blade movie is a good example. The movie starts with Blade already being a badass vampire-murderer. We get a little flashback about how he got there, but that’s it! The Ed Norton Hulk explains everything we need to know about how Hulk came to be in the opening credits with a wordless animation. This is particularly useful for heroes like Batman, Superman, Spiderman, etc., where everyone in the entire universe already knows the origin story.

Second, you can make the origin story the entire movie. This is actually a surprisingly natural choice, since the origin story typically has an arc all its own — from skepticism to excitement to a sobering realization of danger, from weakness to strength, from fear to courage, etc. All you really need to do is make the completion of the origin story (the point where the hero steps out on his own) basically the end of the movie, so that the objective of the movie is the completion of the origin story. This is so straightforward many non-superhero movies do it as a matter of course; think The Karate Kid and similar. The Matrix arguably follows roughly this trajectory too.

Why don’t the superhero movies do this? The main reason, I think, is lack of patience and fear of audience disappointment. In this format, the first movie doesn’t have the hero saving the universe or generally running around under his own steam; the end of the movie is “graduation”. In Doctor Strange it would mean that the story of Strange learning awesome powers and becoming a wizard would be the whole movie. Perhaps he clashes with the other students, learns to befriend them except for the villainous one who cheats, and ultimately is tripped of the Ancient One’s protection at a critical moment and has to step up. (If this formula sounds familiar, it’s basically Harry Potter.) But … then we wouldn’t have the clash with Kaecilius and Dormamu?

I’m a little baffled in this case, actually, because who cares about Dormamu? Comic book fans, but they’re not going to skip the movie anyway. But in some better-known cases it makes sense — if you’re rebooting Spiderman, you can’t not have the Green Goblin, or Superman without Lex Luthor. I think it’s an adaptational problem — the movies are handicapped, in some ways, by their source material. They have to do the origin story, which comes from one text, but also the most popular villain, which comes from a different text. If you don’t, then you risk not even getting a second movie!

Sometimes, therefore, they attempt the third solution, which is to tie the origin story and the rest of the plot together. You still do them both, but have enough common elements that they feel like a single movie instead of two separate ones. This is the most common thing superhero movies actually attempt, because it means they can have their origin story cake and eat it too, but it’s the hardest to do from a writing perspective. As noted above, the origin and whatever popular villain/threat you’re using generally come from very different parts of the source material, and attempting to just mash them together can go really wrong. At worst, it ends up relying on staggering coincidences. (The guy who hates the hero in his ordinary identity just happens to get superpowers and come back for revenge! Note that in Dr. Strange, Strange arrives at the Ancient One’s school, by chance, just a few weeks before Kaecilius attacks and destroys it, after months of recovery and medical work. Good thing he didn’t wait longer!)

There’s a few successful examples here though. Batman Begins works, probably because it takes a ton of liberties with the source material to hammer the origin story and rest of the plot into a single piece. (Arguably it belongs in the former category!) It’s worth noting that they took a huge risk not including the Joker in Batman’s first outing, since he’s the only villain most of the non-comic-book-fan audience would have heard of. (It paid off, obviously, since they got to essentially give the Joker his own movie.) The first Iron Man movie also more or less makes this work, with the whole movie being a single arc of Tony’s progression from self-centered jerk to hero. But it’s also possible to try this and fail horribly — Man of Steel comes to mind, and some of the Spiderman outings.

So that’s my more nuanced take on origin stories: they’re fun, but you really, really can’t take the “origin story for an hour, then cut to a different story for an hour!” approach and expect the resulting movie to hang together. If you can’t lose the origin story, it’s much better to stretch the origin story to the full movie (and risk the audience not staying around for the next part) or blend the origin story with the rest of the plot (and seriously stray from the canon, plus the risk of doing it badly). Doctor Strange just does neither, which is one of several reasons why it’s pretty bad in spite of being pretty and well-acted.

News

UK Publication for THE GUNS OF EMPIRE

A thing I can finally talk about! The short version is this: The Guns of Empire will be published in the UK by Head of Zeus on August 9th, probably only as an ebook but with other editions possibly to follow. (More on that when I know it.)

The slightly longer version: Astute readers may have noted the lack of one of Steve Stone’s wonderful UK covers for The Guns of Empire on Goodreads, etc. My original contract with Del Rey UK was for three books, and I learned earlier this year that they would not be picking up books four and five. (Also that Michael Rowley, my excellent editor there, would be leaving for new ventures.)

Needless to say, this was a bit disappointing, but my main worry was that it would mean there was no way for UK fans who had been following the series to get book four. My agent and I started looking at various options, including just throwing it up on Amazon ourselves if we had to. (In which case you’d probably have been treated to my excellent stick figures on the cover!)

Fortunately, it didn’t come to that. Nicolas Cheetham at Head of Zeus, who’d been one of the initial bidders on The Thousand Names, was excited to pick up where Del Rey UK had left off. Importantly, they agreed to bring the book out in a simultaneous release with the US; I’d been having nightmares about having to tell UK fans they were going to have to wait another six months. So, many thanks to Nicolas and Head of Zeus, and I can finally reassure everyone in the UK that they won’t have any delay in getting their Shadow Campaigns fix.

Content

Shadow Campaigns ages

Someone asked how old the characters in Shadow Campaigns are, which I think I can answer without being spoilery! The Thousand Names starts in 1208 YHG, so at that point (plus or minus a few months, I don’t have everyone’s birthdays) we’ve got:

  • Marcus d’Ivoire – 35, b. 1173. He fights in the War of the Princes (1198-1202) as a lieutenant, then returns to the War College for more training to become a captain.
  • Winter Ihernglass – 22, b. 1186. She runs away from the Prison in 1205 but takes some time to get to Khandar.
  • Janus bet Vhalnich – Unknown, but probably late twenties.
  • Raesinia Orboan – 19, b. 1189. Her “death” occurs in 1204, so she looks closer to 15-16.
  • Bobby Forester – 17, b. 1191.
  • Feor – Unknown, probably 18-20.
  • Jane Verity – 23, b. 1185.
  • Sothe – Unknown. Definitely thirties, probably older than Marcus.

I’m working from my notes here, so if I contradicted the books they’re probably right and I changed something later.

Hope that helps! If you have further questions drop me an email or Twitter.

Twitter

On Twitter and Character Limits

So right at this precise moment of internet time, people are saying that Twitter may raise the character limit on tweets, from 140 to 10,000. This may or may not be true, of course, but it prompted some interesting discussion and thoughts which I feel moved to record.

As an ex-software guy, I feel like I understand this. Twitter, the company, is having some trouble and looking to shake things up. As an engineer, the 140 character limit is weird black magic; the number 140 derives from the SMS standard, which has long since ceased to be an issue on phones, much less the internet. It’s a technical limitation people have inexplicably clung to, as though we’d continued packaging files in 1.44 MB chunks even though CDs existed. (If you understood that you are probably old. I hate to be the one to tell you.)

“Well,” people say, “you don’t have to write long tweets. The people who want to can, and the people who don’t want to can still write short ones! More choice is good, right?”

First of all, hypothetical straw man, the question of whether more choice is always good is somewhat contentious, to say the least. It goes beyond that, though, because that thinking takes into account the needs of one group of stakeholders, call them the writers of Twitter, while ignoring the needs of the readers of Twitter.

(Parenthetical. Obviously many of the writers and readers are in fact the same people. However, it makes sense to talk about them separately, because those people might adjust their behavior separately. i.e. if writing becomes harder, I might write less and read more. The same person belongs to different stakeholder groups depending on her task! Software is hard guys.)

A social network, stripped down to its bare essentials, is a mechanism for connecting these two groups. They form a virtuous cycle, what’s usually called the network effect. The more people who are writing worthwhile things, the more readers will join; the more people who are reading, the more writers will join. The key is that both are essential — if all the readers leave, writers will too. (Probably. See below.)

The question to ask, then, is when you make a change to the software enhancing the experience of one group (by allowing writers to write long posts) are you damaging the experience of another group? In this case, judging by the people who are complaining, the answer appears to yes. The people who are against this change aren’t worried about being forced to write long posts, they don’t want to read them, or more precisely have their feeds cluttered up by them.

The success of Twitter has always been difficult to understand in terms of features (“It’s a social network that doesn’t let you write very much!”) but it becomes easier when you look at the features from a reader’s point of view. The 140 character limit doesn’t serve writers of tweets (it can be annoying!) but it’s essential for trying to make sense of a feed; it forces writers to condense their points into a couple of lines, which can then be scanned easily. Reading Twitter is already often compared to drinking from a firehose, but for all that it’s still easier than the alternatives for trying to vaguely keep up hundreds of people.

Facebook, among its other sins, is guilty of serving the writer at the expense of the reader. The easier it got to update, and to embed media in updates, the more useless the News Feed became, until they were essentially forced to solve the problem by culling the feed algorithmically. (Which ultimately goes to a dark place since you can tweak the algorithm at the behest of advertisers.) Now you can’t do on Facebook what was once its basic purpose — keep up with the things that your friends post in roughly chronological order. With each post potentially occupying a large amount of screen real estate, scrolling through your feed is nightmarish.

(Twitter might truncate posts instead, with a “read more” button. This is equally bad, because it leads to a feed full of snippeted half-posts. We already have this functionality — I’m doing it write now, by blogging and then tweeting the link. Except since it’s not automatic, I actually have to think about what to put into the tweet to get people to click on the link.)

I would actually argue that keeping readers happy is more important than keeping writers happy for the health of a social network, for two reasons.

  • Readers absolutely require writers and a good reading experience in order to use the network. But many writers are pathological narcissists and/or teenagers with infinite spare time, and will write even nobody is reading and the writing experience is terrible. (For evidence of this, see 99% of all webpages in the 90s, mine very much included.)
  • There are more readers than writers. Or, rather: Some people read but don’t write, or don’t write much, and most people read more than they write, so they occupy the reader role more often than the writer role.


I am not even sure this makes business sense, except in the extreme short-term. For Twitter’s perspective, people who buy promoted tweets, a subset of writers, are the customers. Readers are the product. So improving the customer experience by degrading the product is a short-term solution at best. Picture a restaurant lowering prices by using poor-quality food. The ability to write longer posts might please advertisers for a while, but if it drives the reader base away it’s all for nothing. (Every site or publication that uses ads faces this dilemma — how much to degrade the reading experience to favor the advertisers. It’s a fine line.)

In summary, I think this would be a bad idea. The 140 character limit is Twitter’s competitive advantage over other social networks, because of the readability standards it imposes on their writers and the ease of reading that creates. I think they meddle with that at their peril. Remember, once you start down the dark path (that is, taking control of the reading experience away from the users) forever will it dominate your destiny.

Awards

Annual Award Begging Post, 2015 Edition

It’s that time of year again, when we authors push our collections to the center of the table and cough, meaningfully, until people take the hint. So here’s what I’ve got!

tl;dr — Two short pieces in particular, “The Shadow of Elysium” and “The End of the War”, I would love to see nominated in the “Novelette” category. You can get “The Shadow of Elysium” on Amazon or audible. “End of the War” is available as a free PDF, or free as a podcast.

(You can see what I’m up to next year in my 2016 preview post.)

Novel-wise, there’s The Price of Valor and The Mad Apprentice, released in July and April respectively. Later books in series are tough to get on awards ballots, but if you enjoyed them and wanted to nominate, I wouldn’t dissuade you!

I’ve had a pretty productive year in terms of short fiction. Here’s a quick summary:

  • “The First Kill”, in Blackguards, from Ragnarok Publications. Also available as an audio short! A Shadow Campaigns story about the first meeting between Sothe and Andreas. (6,500 words)
  • “The Guns of the Wastes”, in Operation Arcana, from Baen Books. Also available in audio as a free podcast! A new recruit reports for duty aboard an enormous land-ship battling hordes of steampunk spiders. (7,500 words)
  • “REAL”, in Press Start to Play, from Vintage. The creator of an Augmented Reality Game gets more than he bargained for. (5,700 words)
  • “The Shadow of Elysium“, from Penguin. Also available as an audio short! A Shadow Campaigns novella about a young man who learns he harbors a forbidden power. Continues the story from “The Penitent Damned”. (15,400 words)
  • “The End of the War”, in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June ’15. A finalist for the Asimov’s Readers’ Awards — read online for free! Also available in audio as a free podcast! Lonely soldiers chat in the depths of space while directing robot armies against each other. (11,000 words)
  • “Magic Beans”, in Coffee, Hot from Circlet Press. Late-night guests at a coffee shop discover their new coffee-maker is a sex-powered inter-dimensional warp drive. (15,600 words)


So what can you nominate me for? I’ll keep a running tally here, updating this post as things change.

  • Hugo Awards! If you’re a member of the 2015, 2016, or 2017 WorldCons, you can nominate for the Hugo awards. As for the Nebulas, the last three stories on my list all count as “novelette”. Nominations close March 31st.
News

What’s Up In 2016

PALACE OF GLASS_final cvrIn the spirit of collecting things in one place, I thought I’d talk a bit about what’s going on for next year. (I’ve also collected the things I did last year in my Annual Awards Begging Post.) So here’s what’s coming up, book-wise. (Please note that release dates, especially far in the future, are always tentative; this is all based on the best information I have as of 1/1/16.)

The Palace of Glass, book three of The Forbidden Library, will be released on April 12. There’s more great art from Alexander Jansson, which I’ll post some of here as we get closer. You can pre-order now!

The Guns of Empire, book four of The Shadow Campaigns, will be released on August 9. Needless to say I’m very excited about this one, and I’m (still) in the process of working hard on it. And it’s also up for preorder!

GunsofEmpire

Going forward from there, my next project is Forbidden Library book four. After a great deal of outlines, negotiation, and head-scratching, we’ve decided that this will be the final book in The Forbidden Library series, meaning there will be four in total instead of five as I’d mentioned earlier. Let me emphasize, though, that this is not going to be a case of me wandering off and leaving a story unfinished; book four will have the conclusion that I’d planned for the series from the beginning. It will release sometime in 2017, although I’m not certain precisely when.

After that comes Shadow Campaigns book five, which is also the end of that series. Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that finishing The Guns of Empire was a bit of a forced march, and book five will be released a little later in the year (probably October, although it’s not set yet) in 2017 to make sure there’s enough time for everything.

There may, at some point, be a second Shadow Campaigns novella. It fits in roughly between The Shadow of Elysium and The Guns of Empire, but I don’t know at present when I’m going to have the time to write it. I’ll keep you posted.

After that — unclear! In all probability, something cool and new. I have more stuff I want to write then you can shake a stick at (seriously, IdeasFile.doc is now like thirty pages long) so it’s a matter of picking and choosing. Good times ahead!