On Badasses and What Makes Them Badass · 6:21am Dec 2nd, 2014
This might be an ill-advised blog entry because I'm writing through a fever and it's late, but this pony fanfiction site is the only place I visit where I can even remotely pretend that me "writing about writing" is relevant to anything people are hanging around to see. I don't even know if a treatise like this exists elsewhere on FIMfiction but whatever, I can't get to sleep and whenever I close my eyes I see weird things which fool me into thinking I'm asleep and dreaming, so I'm gonna do this instead.
So I recently finished the main storyline of Far Cry 4 and was immensely satisfied by it. I mean, the writing isn't stellar by academic or even whatever self-important games-as-art standards are in vogue right now, but really, it's just a narrative framework for emergent gameplay anyway—a framework I happen to like. All of the Ubisoft-era Far Cry games have hit that storytelling sweet spot for me, a pulp-to-realism ratio which evokes the old men's-adventure magazines and digests of the 1950s and 60s with a tiny bit of magical realism thrown in for flavor. The original Far Cry starring Jack Carver started out promising (though as a character Jack himself was far too relentlessly sarcastic for my tastes), but then the story went off the goddamn rails with the third-act introduction of the Trigen mutants, retroactively making the whole thing a sci-fi venture and turning me off to it. Crytek would go on to make Crysis and pull the exact same story-tail-wags-the-gameplay-dog stunt with that through the use of aliens. I finished both of these games, but grudgingly.
[I got off on a huge tangent here about storytelling in video games and why I like the Ubisoft Far Cry approach so much, but I Ctrl-X'd it and put it in a .txt file for safekeeping, perhaps a future or follow-up blog entry.]
Annnnyway!
Later on, while taking a shower, I got to wondering just what it was that made me like Far Cry 4 protagonist/player-character Ajay Ghale so much. After a few moments of deliberation, I had it figured out: Ajay Ghale was a genuine badass.
We've come at last to relevance with the title! Thanks for bearing with all this preamble. I knew I'd get around to it sooner or later.
A little while after this realization, I got busy mentally contrasting Ajay with Jason Brody, the protagonist of 3 (I was well out of the shower by this point, don't worry). I'd found Jason to leave a bad taste in my mouth, for some reason. Superficially it was because he was unrelatable—I'm certainly no trust-fund bro from an upper-middle-class WASP family—but more than that, he was written as a juvenile indulgence of the machismo power fantasy, and power fantasies are something I've never liked. He was a badass as written by 12-year-olds, artificial and manufactured for the sort of player who doesn't understand what makes action heroes appealing or not.
At the risk of summarizing my thesis statement too much, I'll say this: it's about earning. An audience is sold on a character's badassery if the character earns it.
I was in high school when The Matrix came out. Naturally, there came the subsequent teenage worship amongst my peers of Neo as the Ultimate Badass, with sunglasses and a black trenchcoat and everything! Shooting two guns at the same time! Jumping and flipping in slow motion! He knows kung fu! Now, I liked the first Matrix movie well enough, if mostly for the style more than the substance. I noticed after seeing it, however, that all of the traits of the main character my peers would emulate and talk about were those of the third-act Neo, not the first-act Mr. Anderson, the working stiff whose boss yells at him and who happens to like mucking around with computers in his free time. The Mr. Anderson persona didn't last 30 minutes in The Matrix because hey, who cares about him? Red pill time! Let's get him into his black trenchcoat! Yeah! Flips and shit! Shootin' two guns at once! Jumping across buildings! Kung fu!
But Mr. Anderson's transition from Regular Joe to Chosen One was unsatisfying. He sat down in that chair and then his eyes open and I guess he knows kung fu now. We don't even get an 80s-style training montage because he didn't have to train. There was no investment on his part, no sacrifice, no demonstration of his drive or his motivation to rise to any challenge. He just needs to know kung fu to beat the bad guys, so boom, have some kung fu, buddy. Also you know how to use guns now I guess. It's pure, pure power fantasy, and I hold no confusion about why my fellow teenagers loved it.
Training and working at something tends to impart more than just the skill or ability you're after. It changes you, it provides perspective, it helps you learn things about yourself. In writing terms, it provides character development. After-the-kung-fu-chair Neo was exactly the same person as before-the-kung-fu-chair Neo, only now another layer had been set down on the power fantasy. It's a shortcut to badassedness that just doesn't work.
Let me tie this back into Far Cry now, because my fingers are flying along the keyboard and I'm starting to belabor points. Thank God I have this fever handy to blame my incoherence on. Anyway, Ajay Ghale's story arc is coming to Kyrat for mundane reasons, getting utterly wrapped up in a civil war he wanted no part of, and coming out the other side of it hardened and cynical. Begging the question of how he knows how to use such a wide array of firearms out of the gate (a sticking point for me which Far Cry 3 shares), Ajay otherwise goes about building up his own significance in the story. This significance is also tempered by flaws: he's unsure, he falters in decisions, he can help or harm others without knowing the whole story or seeing the other side of things.
Jason Brody, in contrast, had greatness thrust upon him, and rather undeserving at that: in the aftermath of some ill-advised skydiving with his fellow privileged friends, he is captured by pirates and escapes more through the efforts of his brother than his own, and then the other characters surround him and assure him at every turn (really, though, it's to assure us, the player) that he is capital-S Special. Lo and behold, he falls into the same instant-badass narrative claptrap that Neo does. You're a badass now because the script says you are. In 4, there is an existing resistance force striving to oust the antagonist from power. These characters help guide Ajay and provide the context in which he is molded into a regime-changing action hero. In 3, by all accounts, the native people are absolutely helpless until Jason comes along, and continue to be after the events of the game are underway. I never shook the sense that I was the only person actually doing anything to possibly improve the situation on the Rook Islands.
In summary, a sellable badass is someone like Die Hard's John McClane, someone who operates within the rules of effective character development and who is allowed to demonstrate what makes them badass—how they earn it. If a writer is trying to tell you a character is a badass because look at all these awesome powers I gave him and he succeeds at everything, then that writer has failed you and you shouldn't buy it.
I hope this made sense to you; I'm a bit out of it right now and my thoughts weren't flowing all that well. In any case, I could easily have gone on, but I really should try to get some sleep. See you next time!
Makes sense to me! In a way, I find it much more enjoyable seeing a character grow to that powerful status than starting off that way. One relative example I think would be *cough* Twilight Sparkle's ascension; it wouldn't make for a good story/entertainment/whaeteveryouwanttocallit if she was born right off the bat as a alicorn that could fix everything (and even afterwards, she still can't) instantly. Instead, we saw her learn and stand through many ordeals to reach that point. And I agree with you on saying a character is "awesome" because they were given so and so ability and nobility by their creators makes them...well, not awesome! (huge OC flaw I see often.)
And hey, late night thoughts are best thoughts!
*falls on face on keyboard at 3:30 AM*
I think this is very well put. Badassery is much more than just strength and ability; it has a kind of attitude of grit and implacability that comes with it, and by merely setting up the effortless defeat of dozens of goons you've only shown the audience the former characteristics. It makes the character too "slick"—They're one of the proverbial rich kids at the camp across the lake—and they're better as a foil for the main character than as a hero themselves, because there's no real journey to follow them on (unless the story's about their learning to love or something).
I think to make a satisfying adventure story, triumph has to be purchased somehow, or some kind of sacrifice has to be made, which I think is another way of saying what you're talking about. So I think the earning of the badass laurels can actually come at either end of the action: Displaying the strength of character to put forth the massive effort to become powerful beforehand, or displaying the strength of character to put an end to the action by heroic sacrifice, a way of being powerful retroactively—Either way it's a form of going "all in."
Funnily enough, I've just started playing "The Last of Us," and one of the things I appreciate is how Joel is a badass without being at all superhuman (aside from his ability to take bullets, but that's just a concession to the medium, and is shared with his enemies). The mechanics make you earn your victories either through tricky stealth or conscientious collection of ammo and shiv parts, and Joel even has to take a timeout after a fight to deliberately bandage his wounds with finite supplies—No hiding while you regenerate—so it makes it all the more impressive when he chokes someone out or beats them to death with a pipe. Like John McClane, he just feels like an exceptionally tough ordinary dude, who's earned his toughness by surviving for 20 years in this zombie wasteland, which you can see in the lines on his face and the grey in his hair and beard that appear after the present-day prologue.
God, I remember those Matrix fans from when I was a teen, too... I mean, it was a neat movie—And in that case that slickness mentioned above was the whole point—but do not wear that black trenchcoat, man. Y'all don't even know kung fu.
Incidentally, what do you think of Brock from Venture Bros.? He's the archetypal image that pops up when I think of "a badass," but of course he's played slightly for comedy and his extreme combat CV is continually hinted at.
Also, here's hoping you feel better soon
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Twilight's actually a great example because, especially in fan commentary on the season 4 closer, you see who never really moved past the juvenile power-fantasy stage of writing appreciation.
"Wow, Twilight's a badass!" some did say. Well, no, not in that case. Despite what some folks would have you believe, Twilight was not a badass when she lost her cool against Tirek and went all Dragon-Ball-Z on him. She was as much of a "badass" in that situation as Rarity would have been if given that power, or Applejack, or Scootaloo, which is to say "not much." Folks got swept up in the wow-factor a bit too much—it's the powers demonstrated that people were latching onto, not the character wielding them. Twilight gave in to her emotions, lost her characteristic rationalism, and abused the power that the other princesses had entrusted to her. It was, ironically, a demonstration of a moment of weakness, not strength, and to the writers' credit it's apparent that that was their intention for the scene. The power of zapping Tirek into dust wasn't the answer, it was the power of friendship!
I would argue that Twilight is at her most heroic when she's demonstrating why Princess Celestia chose her to be her special student in the first place, and later an alicorn: because, under normal circumstances, she is a pony who wouldn't abuse power or privilege. She is studious, thoughtful, and even-handed (hoofed?), and sure she's prone to slip-ups in social situations and getting frustrated when she's not immediately successful at something, but that's just good characterization. That kind of thing happens to everyone. It makes her relatable. When she does try to use her magic as a shortcut or for less-than-honorable reasons (the Want-It-Need-It spell comes immediately to mind), it always backfires and she learns a lesson from it. Twilight is good at magic, but through backstory and history it's consistently been shown that she's always worked hard to self-improve, which sets the stage for us buying her awesome moments. She earns it! She didn't try to kamehameha that ursa minor in season one, after all.
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Important things about both Die Hard and The Last of Us's stories is that we are introduced to these characters before they start developing into the action hero needed for the events later on in the story. In the beginning, John McClane is a schlubby divorced cop with jet lag and Joel is a thirtysomething widower dad with a revolver down in the den. We get to witness their transformation, or at the very least witness what they apparently had in them all along. A real badass rises to the occasion; the Neo knock-off drawing in the Trapper Keeper of the kid who sat next to you in Biology class probably needed occasions to rise to him, and that ain't how it works in good storytelling.
Brock was, originally, a caricature of the inexplicably powerful and competent action heroes of 1960s comics and Saturday-morning cartoons, and his scenes of slaughter and mayhem were more for laughs at how over-the-top it all was than genuine satisfaction at seeing a character overcome the odds. As the series went on, however, Brock, like all the other characters, got more and more fleshed out. He still kicked ass to the point where you'd be interested in those scenes just to see the new and creative ways he'd have to separate bones from ligaments, but we also got insight into his insecurities, his failures, and his issues. In this way, Brock went from being a deconstruction of the Action Man (also a Hasbro property, coincidentally) archetype to being a sad, lonely, pathetic has-been in his own right, just like all the other Venture Bros. characters (I remember either Doc Hammer or Jackson Publick admitting in the DVD commentary that the show's main theme is "failure"). Crackin' heads is all Brock has in his life, and that's hardly badass.
Also I am feeling better today, thank you for your concern! The fever is gone, and I'm pretty achy but otherwise functional.