Grumping About Grumpy Jace · 12:52am May 31st, 2018
I don’t like Dominaria’s story.
That’s not to say that I consider it a bad story (nothing can be worse than those godawful Odyssey block novels as far as I’m concerned), but overall I’ve come out from the recent MtG story arc feeling underwhelmed. It more than anything felt it was written solely to hit all of the right plot points and make all the right nostalgia-driven references, with little attention paid to it beyond that. The overall underwhelming-ness I felt from the story is pretty jarring to me since I consider the actual expansion of Dominaria one of the best sets to be released in years, and easily one of my favorite limited environments since the Zendikar and Innistrad blocks.
But one thing that irks me about the story in particular is how Jace was portrayed in it. It’s a fairly insignificant detail in comparison to the rest of the story, but it highlights basically all of the gripes I have with the current Magic story’s direction.
Prior to the Ixalan block, Jace was pretty much the face of Magic, but he lacked a lot of the personality that made other mascot characters work. His characterization was mostly played off as moody, stern, distant, and in flavor text came off as kind of an arrogant jerk more than anything. In the stories proper he’d become slightly more fleshed out as more of a bumbling dweeb who dives straight into danger out of sheer curiosity, but he still remained moody and distant, and to be quite frankly in my opinion, kind of boring.
Then Ixalan happened, and he ended up becoming fleshed out and developed to a degree that he became one of my favorite characters. He’s still the same bumbling nerd acting the part of an intellectual, but by the end of it he’s notably brighter and friendlier towards everyone else, and just overall a fun character to follow.
In Dominaria, however, that was almost entirely undone. In ostensibly the exact same scene at the end of Rivals of Ixalan, Jace appears, only he’s back to being stern and distant in exactly the same way he was before. His actual character development seems to have been entirely negated, and I’ve seen it spur a lot of discussion towards the subject of continuity within Magic’s story and whether this was an oversight.
Then an interview with Nic Kelman, current story directer at Wizards, was published on Gathering Magic. And whoo boy do I not like what he had to say here.
What's your vision for Magic's narrative going forward? Are you looking to expand to other media?
We are absolutely working on expanding out into other media and we hope that expansion will have something for everyone in the same way Marvel or Star Wars has managed so successfully. Some things will probably be geared more toward people who don’t know our worlds and characters, others will be “love notes to our fans,” but hopefully most will be both. I’m already enormously excited about our M19 stories and think they fall into that latter category. I think we’ll be announcing that author very soon, so stay tuned for that.
In terms of a vision for our storytelling moving forward, we want to keep in line with existing canon but also give these amazing creators room to breathe. In the same way there are dozens of versions of Spider-man’s origin story, for example, where the spirit and major beats are all the same, but the details are all slightly different, we want creators to have room to own our stories and characters but still be true to the most important elements of our multiverse, our cosmological underpinnings, and our characters’ existing backgrounds and histories. The example I always use is that, canonically, Jace lost a toe to frostbite but if he takes off his shoes in a comic book, or cartoon, or TV show, or whatever, he’ll probably have all his toes!There have been some concerns about continuity in Return to Dominaria. Can you talk a bit about the creative process and what you've learned?
I think the previous answer probably covers this philosophically, but specifically, we actually had Alison’s scene before Martha wrote hers and the three of us (myself, Alison, and Martha) discussed it and decided rather than copy and paste Alison’s scene into Martha’s story, Martha should write her own version that felt organic to her story and her needs for the characters in that context while still keeping the key details the same.
On some level, I understand what they’re trying to do here. MtG continuity is a clusterfuck of retcons and conflicting stories that all but require retcons to make sense of, so a broad-strokes approach to canon like Doctor Who is probably for the best. But to say that such massively important things such as character development and consistent personality can just be flat-out ignore to “make it work for each story” is a terrible idea. A character’s personal journey should not be negotiable in the same way as minute details of backstory. Whether Jace has learned to become less of a stick in the mud should not be left up to debate in the same way as whether or not he has all of his toes. If a character’s development is unimportant enough to be discarded at any time, what reason do I have left to care about them?
Before now, I would have never said I have more confidence in the quality my own work than in the quality of the official canon. Now, I’m starting to rethink that.
Friendly word of advice, dude. When your talking about a character, say who he or she is. I have no idea who Dominaria is, why we should hate her, and, perhaps most importantly of all, what any of this has to do with "Grumpy Jace".
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Dominaria is the latest Magic: the Gathering expansion. I made this post on the assumption that anyone who would care what I have to say about it would already know what it is.
I don't think Jace has enough "screentime" in Dominaria to know, but remembed that he now hates Lily, and that Gideon is dense as diamonds. With Chandra and Nissa away, Jace was probably more frustrated than distant.
(He also just had an emotional rollercoaster with Vraska)
Vraskace, is the best ship out of mlp, imo
I see it less as reversion to Grumpy Jace and more Jace now really resents Liliana, given that he's no longer in the mentally vulnerable place that let her string him along for so long. Also, he does have to deal with the whole "erased my new girlfriend's memories of me" thing. In any case, we'll see how they handle things from here.
I will give Fan of most Everything that. He found actual proper love that brought him out of his shell, and built him up, unlike what Liliana has up until this point.
And then he has to erase her memories, pretend that it never happened, (at least for now) and then his ex basically shows up and not only tries to pull the same manipulative bullshit she has the last few times, but also drives away his other friends/colleges. A part of him also possibly resents his loss of freedom as in Ixalan, since he had lost his memory and even once it was back he was stuck on the plane he was significantly more free then he is now.
So the shift back to anti-social and grumpy isn't COMPLETELY OOC, as he has every right to be kinda upset.
With that said, Nic Kelman can go screw himself if he truly believes that character development can be ignored like that. If the characters don't develop you have a bland story with very little by way of progress.