The line between Show and Fanfiction has been blurred · 12:00am Jun 15th, 2015
It like forever since I last did anything with this blog (I won't make any promises if and when I'll update it again, but keep your eyes peeled). To be honest, my interest has waned a bit because it's been competing with other things (for example, I found two months ago that Marvel had a nice deal and I've been reading a lot of their older comics plus the release of Grim Fandango before that amongst other games). I know what you really care about, but that will come at the end. First, a few other pieces that put together a long while back but didn't post till now.
This may be of only limited interest but I would like to point towards Sarah1281’s It all Started with the Drunken Watchmen, a Hamlet fanfict. Drunken Watchmen is a comedic re-telling of Shakespeare’s story (in prose and without the early modern English), the difference being everyone is more insane than before (except Ophelia, who is sane here (the only one besides Horatio), and Hamlet, who is about crazy as the play). The humor is mostly silly and over-the-top (a running gag where Cladius constantly blurts out that he killed Hamlet Sr., but no really notices; everyone who is mad keeps forgetting who Polonius is (and I bet you did as well, are you mad)). To get a lot of the jokes, you kind of need to be familiar with Hamlet (reading or seeing would probably be better but not by much); plus at least one joke requires knowledge of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. But believe me when I say it’s funny.
Speaking of Hamlet, I’ve also being reading (or playing might be better in my case) To be or Not to be: That is the Adventure by Ryan North (creator of Dinosaur Comics). Here instead, Hamlet is re-imagined in colloquial English as a chose your adventure book (I’ve been playing the electronic version of it on Steam, but whatever), where one plays as either Hamlet (‘emo teen in his early 30s’), Ophelia (‘awesome lady in her late 20s’), or Hamlet Sr. (‘He’s super good at fighting and leading men into battle and naps’). It probably pays to be even more aware of Hamlet than with Drunken Watchmen, because North uses many of the choices that follow Shakespeare’s path (indicated by Yorick’s skull) to take jabs at everything from the stupidity of many of Hamlet’s decisions or words (like the awful sexism, that gets so bad that the narrator seizes control at when certain paths are selected), and more (one of the best bits is that you get into an epic pirate fight, and if you win it, the text then says you’d have to crazy to sum it up in one sentence, which is precisely what the Bard did), but there are a lot of other choices (example: you (as Hamlet) are learn that Cladius is in the church praying on your way to meet your mother; “Man, pretty badass! Let’s kill Claudius in the church!” or “No time for murders now, I’ve got a date with my mom!”) or endings (one ending has use Cladius’s body as skateboard, and you then marry a bear).
In any case, I recommend both of them if you’re interested, and you don’t need to like Shakespeare to enjoy them.
PS: If you have read Hamlet, I have recommended reading the Scooby Doo ending of the play. Somehow, it makes more sense than the play.
Speaking of games, there’s one I really want to talk about. Papers, Please was developed by Lucas Pope and released in 2013. In it, the player plays the role of an immigration officer (chosen through a labor lottery) in the fictional Eastern European country of Arstotzka in 1982, and you have to approve or deny people based on a set of prerequisites. It sounds boring (like work, as some would say), but I found Papers, Please to be a fascinating game.
The requirements for accepting a person start simple enough: have a non-expired, legal passport; so you check the photo, the gender, the issuing city is one of the three from the country, and that the passport isn’t expired. Later on, Arstozkan citizens need to show ID cards, so you have to make sure that everything is in order (district, height, weight, better make sure the name and birth date matches the passport as well) and foreigners need to show entry tickets which later become permits, so you got to make sure that the name and id number matches the passport and that the purpose and duration match what they say, plus it might be fake, so check the seal as well, and that it also hasn’t expired. But wait there’s more, because now id supplements have been added to the requirements of foreigners (are their heights and weight correct, hey they might have contraband or weapons, do they match the brief description on it), and oh if they want to work they have to have a worker’s permit as well, so look at the name, the seal, and the expiration date on that. Also make sure their vaccinations are up-to-date as well. Are they a diplomat, well better make sure their sheet has their name, the right seal, or maybe the person is seeking asylum, or heck the person’s a wanted criminal, so look at the wanted section in the paper.
So, to repeat, by the twentieth-five day on the job, you’ll be flipping through your rule booklet checking to make sure that a man trying to enter has all his documents and that their expiration date hasn’t passed, that he’s the right height, the right weight, is entering for the reasons he says, for the time he says, that the passport is issued from a listed city, that the id number is the same on all documents, that the proper emblem is on the documents, that the photo and description match (fingerprint him if they don’t), that the right gender is listed, that he comes from a country that the ministry has allowed entrance from, that his vaccines are up to date, that he’s not a listed criminal, before you let him enter. And during that, you are going to skim and skip parts and mess up as you work while you sort out people. Oh, but to make matters even more stressful on top of all this, you only get five credits for each person you correctly process (every person you mess up with, a slip is printed out, stating what you did wrong; any more than two of these a day, and you lose five credits in addition to the five you didn’t make; why they need people to check papers when they have such a machine is clearly for gameplay purposes that are not a natural extension of the game, but that’s hardly a complaint), and you are the only one working in a household of five mouths, plus you have to pay for heat and rent each day (and hey if somebody gets sick, medicine isn’t free). Did I mention that there’s a time limit to all this?
But Papers, Please doesn’t just eat at your cerebrum; it sends your moral compass spinning. You find yourself rejecting mothers who are ecstatic to finally be able to see their sons after years of closed borders, wives just after you let their husbands through, people who only yesterday had the right documentation that has been superseded by something else (which as they pointed out spent money on), because they lack the right papers and more while letting in people with the correct ones, but who might be do terrible things because someone ahead of them in line said so (with maybe one exception, you never now if what they’re saying is true, which just makes it worse). You find yourself struggling to chose between detaining people who have counterfeit because one of the guard’s is bribing you to do so more (he gets a bonus for each person you chose to confine) or just simply rejecting them (I don’t hesitate to take people who are on the wanted list or are trying to sneak contraband or weapons in, but people who have documents that have the wrong labels or information, I struggle with, you don’t know if they knowingly or innocently bought counterfeit documentation or if it was an error on the legal providers part or maybe your system hasn’t been updated; yes even if it is a game). All because of a set rules, many of which had good intentions or stupid (but still understandable) causes such as outbreaks of disease in other countries, trade sanctions from elsewhere, protests about immigrants stealing jobs, rebels (who you can help) and terrorist attacks (any of this ringing a bell; terrorist attacks are common in the city you working it because it was taken over and spilt in half from neighboring Kolechia in a recent war, and irredentism and all that). And at times, perhaps cynically, the game causes you to not trust anyone to do the right thing; not the citizens who demanded the changes, not bureaucrats and policy-makers who created the system for those changes, not the, not the people in the line going through the system, not the guards who watch them in the line for those would break the system, not even yourself, the person who enforces the rules of the system. And yet Papers, Please has enough bits of humanity that keep it from going keep completely dark and pessimistic: your son gives a crayon drawing to hang at work, a guard can be reunited with a woman he met during the war through your actions, and more.
But I think what I really enjoyed about Papers, Please is that I can’t imagine the point it’s making being made any better in any other medium besides a game. Sure, there are some bits that I can see through other means. The character Jorji (a smuggler of contraband) makes several (often humorous, his second appearance is him with a badly constructed passport) appearances and while it’s easy to see such a character in a novel or a film, it’s hard to imagine the plain and boring individuals appearing for much of a work. But you need to do those regular folks, you need to do the people where there’s absolutely nothing wrong with (and where there’s nothing wrong about them anymore than the rest of us), just to realize how the atmosphere the game creates makes you interact with them with paranoia, and how the mundane nature just weakens you. You need the hands down experience of the task to even glimpse at the horrors of comprehensive paper nightmares, low-level power abuse, along with the disdain from impatient people in line. You need to realize the reason to all the red tape. Papers, Please doesn’t say whether anything is really right or wrong (I think a quote from the original ‘Yes, Minister’ from the immortal Sir Humphrey sums it up best: “Government [or any system really] isn’t about morality… [it’s about] tability”), but that doesn’t mean it have a point. Honestly, I don’t think I’ll go to the DMV or a security line at an airport the same way again.
So, Papers, Please is definitely a wonderful game, not always a fun one, but certainly a tense one, and a thought-provoking one. I don’t know if games are art (a term that quite frankly has gotten so political as to be rendered useless unless defined ahead by the person using it), but Papers, Please does fall in a select group of video games that that interest me for reasons that doesn’t have to do with gameplay or even being enjoyable to play. Games like the original Fallout (another game with a messy, bleak, and gray world where morality is even more ambiguous) or Starcraft and Chrono Trigger (games whose plots and characters that are made up of tropes and archetypes that we’ve seen elsewhere dozens of times in their respective genres, but stand out whether it be due to their incredible atmosphere, in the case of the former, or the amazing script of the latter) or Day of the Tentacle (the Lucasart adventure game with a great sense of humor). And if that’s not praise, I don’t know what is.
Glory to Arstotzka!
And now for the part you probably cared most about.
I had written the parts on Shakespeare weeks, probably months before this episode, Slice of Life debuted, but it feels appropriate because I had Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (one blogger I like referred to it as the greatest fanfict ever) on my mind while watching it. Actually, the title of the episode might as well have been MLP: 22 Short Films About Ponyville. If you’re not aware, that wonderful season 7 Simpsons episode where Bart asks if anything interesting happens to the denizens of the show’s city and then it proceeds through a series of short events, most of them interconnected with each other even its nothing more than a lead into another. Both of them are tales that moves away from the main characters onto once that had small role or even no role to begin with. I had picked up that vibe long before the Mayor had taken out her rubber mallet and decided to bash in the obvious at the end. The comparison however, is not favorable for FIM. Ponyville is not Springfield, and the residents of the latter far out exceed the former in terms of depth and personality. Having at least a base would have been helpful for Slice of Life, because the characters feel too shallow to hold the episode together nor do we really have an reason to care about them if it wasn’t for Cranky and Matilda.
For what it’s worth, there really was no other way for an episode that was going to focus on the various minor and fandom characters to work. If this had been about say the ‘fandom six’ (Ditzy, the Doc, Lyra, Bon Bon, Octavia, and Vinyl) and the rest dealing with the bugbear because the main six were gone (to show that Ponyvile residents can take care of themselves) like a ‘typical monster of the week episode’ it probably would have been stretched out with lots of filler (this one was as well at times; the whole bit with Vinyl and Octavia, especially the dash to the ceremony, certainly went longer than it needed to be). But by becoming partly a commentary on the show itself (I smiled when the residents gathered around and gossiped on the main six having a conversation and wondering what it was about this time; it just showed how weird those main characters talks are in the show when you get down to it), and the role of the background characters in any show (although, again I’ve seen better in Rosencrantz), and by giving a problem that had a host of problems, not just one (a wedding that came a day before everything was ready) it lets the show be cleverer than it really could have been.
Still too many subplots ultimately go nowhere or feel unsatisfactory. Take the Simpsons example here, we get the problem (Dr. Nick is being let go for malpractice), another problem comes up (Grandpa thinks he has problems), Nick goes into action (he calms Grandpa down and starts shocking him), and then solution (Grandpa thinks he’s cured and the charges against Nick are dropped). It takes less two minutes and yet it remains one complete and funny story and much other bits in the Simpsons are like that. By comparison, for Bon Bon’s, we get her friendship with Lyra, she then goes after the bugbear, and nothing, and nothing, and then finally she comes back saying the beast is defeated, off-screen. That’s not a complete story. One could quibble with example that it misses the point, the focus should be on the wedding, and Special Agent Sweetie Drops** does not. True, but then it’s the job of the writer to a) find a way to do so, or b) write something else that would. At the end of the day, both the bugbear and the wedding should have been better connected with each with the main character bits (that is the normal side characters) focusing on the latter, which are constantly messed up by the former, leading to alternative solutions (the doctor needing his suit done, and couldn’t get Rarity so he had to bowl instead, and later ditched that, and got just a scarf***), worked like this, and it worked for me overall, as did the Sparkler/ Amethyst Star helping as the wedding planner bit; problem comes up, bugbear prevents obvious solution, new solution is found).
** I did like Bon Bon’s double life as a concept. It’s a reversal to how it is normally in the fandom, with Bon Bon being the weirder one in the pair with Lyra (no hands mentioning is great too). Given how the former is usual nothing more than a foil to the latter (seriously, name the fandom personality or even any common quirks Bon Bon has; can’t do it right), it felt fresh.
***Maybe it’s because I’m so used to Doctor Whooves and Assistant, but his voice did not work for me. If only they got David Tenant. Actually, quite a few voice didn’t work as well (Lyra’s at times and Octavaia’s) but I actually like that Vinyl didn’t talk or have her name stated.
Still, questions do remain. Why exactly would the royals (Celestia, Luna, Shinning Armor, and the rest) think that a wedding between two random donkeys (or a donkey and an ass) is so important to be at as opposed to tending to their royal duties? When we see the six main characters outside town hall, why do we not see Steve Magnet? I’m still sure what the whole point of Gummy’s scene was beside “Pinkie’s silent, dumb gator is funny because he thinks in ten dollar words” (that has to go over the head of small children). And did Derpy really just use child labor in making the invitations? I don’t know. And what the hell was up with Steven Magnet’s rather cynical and threatening comment on how others don’t care about the marriage, just the wedding (which is actually un-show like). It was just mentioned and then forgotten. Considering that the whole wedding is the main plot to begin with, that strikes as something important. (As a side note, I’m not sure what to think about Steve as a character to be honest, because I’m can’t decide how much of a stereotype he is; at least they make him the wedding planner, I guess).
With Slice of Life, the line between show and fanfiction has been moved and smudged. I have to wonder if it means that the various characters like Octavia and the Doc now have to be written in-character (that is based off this episode) to be acceptable. If such, I can’t help but feel a sense of annoyance. Because just around this time last year, I was at MLP-MSP (which is ending on right now, and I skipped for various reasons), and I remember Rogers and Larson saying that the fandom characters are ours to play with. While they certainly aren’t required to follow those words, it comes across as intrusive (I wonder if this is how other writers feel about fanfiction in general). I hope this going to leads to one long debate in the community about what role fandom works play and what this episode means. How serious should we take it comparison to the rest when judging the works of others.
By the way, I tried to write as much of a review without mentioned the pander factor. Because that’s what this episode is, a pander to the fandom****. I don’t know what the little kids who were the original audience of the show think about this episode, and to be honest, part of me wishes I had headed up to the Twin Cities to get a general reaction. But I left with very mixed feelings. Because the thing is, I enjoyed myself more than I thought I would. That’s right, for all my criticisms this was the most enjoyable episode for me in ages some more fine tuning and less fandom jokes and in spite of the pandering they found a good premise to do it. Can I saw I smiled and didn't dislike it. So as you can see, I'm a very confused man. And when I get confused, I watch TV. Television is never confusing. It's all so simple somehow. And now even that has me confused.*****
****If they want to pander to me, all they have to do is put these [url= https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4TedkQP_hM]gals in there. And step on it.
*****If you got the reference in this last part, pat yourself on the back. Otherwise, may the television gods have mercy on your poor, uncultured soul
