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Love/Hate: Dead or Alive 6

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Welcome back to the Dead or Alive Love/Hate series! In this entry we’ll be looking at the most recent mainline game in the franchise, Dead or Alive 6. This game has had a bit of a contentious history, largely due to its pre-release controversies. During the previews of the game, the fanbase damn near rioted, because they believed that Team Ninja were toning down the suggestive content (less skimpy outfits, no boob physics when it was first previewed, etc). Meanwhile, Team Ninja’s attempts to placate the core fans ended up pissing off the esports crowd they were trying to pander to in the first place with the infamous “core values” scandal. We’re now five years from release, how does this game, the current standard-bearer for Dead or Alive as a fighting franchise, hold up in 2024? Read on to find out…

Dead or Alive 6 has a pretty straightforward release history by this franchise’s standards. There was just one release, that being on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. For this analysis I purchased the PC version… mostly because it was absolute hell trying to find a physical copy of the game in 2024 for a reasonable price. The closest Game Stop with a used copy was two hours away. Getting it on ebay would cost me $40+. No game stores or flea markets in a one hour radius had a copy. No one on Facebook marketplace within five hours had a copy for sale. It’s nuts that a game that came out relatively recently is that scarce. For the record, this also applies to Dead or Alive 5: Last Round. I was trying to find a copy to replace the one I sold, and it is simply impossible to find. Tecmo-Koei must have made some really small production runs of the game, or they destroyed a lot of unsold copies or something, because I had a way easier time finding copies of the first four games that came out twenty years ago than I did for games that came out less than ten.

Love

  • New Costumes – Presumably, because Dead or Alive 6 was courting the esports scene, they chose to tone down the sexuality of most of the female characters’ default costumes. Fret not – most of the “classic” outfits are still in the game, and there’s still plenty of sexy costumes here (Tina’s default costume is proof enough of that… and if that’s not enough for you, you can unlock Christie’s bondage gear outfit too). That said: I actually really like most of the new default costumes they’ve introduced. In particular: the new ninja bodysuits for Kasumi and Ayane, and Helena’s dress? These are fucking hot without having to take the path of least resistance by showing a bunch of cleavage. I also quite like Kokoro and Leifang’s new costumes.
  • Tina is a Lefty – After using Dead or Alive as a springboard to a career as a model, movie star, and rock star, Tina sets her sights on becoming governor (it is left unclear which state she would be governor of). While training with Zack, she tells him, completely unprompted: “When I become the Governor, I wanna give the young ones more hope in the future! Welfare is also important. We have to make the lives of the children better!” C-comrade Armstrong!? Tina is actually based as fuck!? I think my heart just skipped a beat. Legitimately: I already liked Tina before this game, but that one moment made her so much more attractive to me.

Mixed

  • The Graphics – I wasn’t really expecting this, but the more I played of DOA6, the more I came to feel that this game’s graphics are a bit of a mixed bag. Dead or Alive has had the best graphics of any fighter for most of its history, but by the time DOA6 released, the AAA fighting competition had really stepped up their game. Mortal Kombat X and 11, Soulcalibur VI, Tekken 7… the competition of “best looking fighter” hasn’t been stiffer for Dead or Alive, and I don’t think Team Ninja have really managed to keep up with them. On the one hand, the character models do look quite nice and I appreciate the more saturated colours compared to DOA5. However, the characters have this soft, almost plasticky look to them which I find off-putting. In addition, while the character models look pretty good, the environments, NPCs, etc are noticeably worse, especially in the story cutscenes. I’m talking models and textures that are reminiscent of PS3-era games in some cases; it reminds me of Resident Evil 6‘s mish-mash of art styles and effort.
  • Break Gauge – I haven’t really mentioned any gameplay changes since Dead or Alive 2, because there either were none, or they were very minor (ie, DOA5‘s power blows). DOA6 is the first time since DOA2 that we’ve had a fundamental shakeup to the core gameplay, with the addition of the break gauge. This is a bar which fills up as you fight and allows you to spend charges to perform special moves: break blows (a single, super powerful strike that uses the entire bar), side attacks (a side-step that chains into a quick attack), break holds (a single-button press hold that will counter any kind of strike for half of your bar), and fatal rush (a series of attacks that can only be stopped with a break hold and ends with a break blow). I’m pretty mixed on their inclusion here. Fatal strikes and break blows are pretty flashy and easy to execute, which can make them feel like a noob crutch. I’d argue that break holds are fundamentally broken though – the ability to break any combo without having to make a proper call is game-changing and breaks some of the fundamental balance of the triangle system. It’s one of those systems that really makes-or-breaks the experience for you, and I’m not convinced that it really adds anything of substance to the franchise’s core gameplay.
    • Oh and I think I should note something: back in 2018 when the game was being previewed, I had mused that the more visceral violence from break blows could potentially clash with the sexy aspects of these games and make the game feel kind of uncomfortable. I’m happy to confirm that they seem to have struck a good balance, because I was never really bothered by it. Break blows look like they fucking hurt, but it comes across as cartoonish, over-the-top slapstick, and is clearly separated from any sexualized elements of the game.

Hate

  • Story – Hoo boy, we’ve really run the gamut of story modes through this franchise, but I was not expecting Dead or Alive 6 to have the absolute worst narrative campaign of them all. DOA6 does a lot of what I liked about DOA5‘s story: we get a whole bunch of scenes of the characters interacting and palling around outside of the confines of the tournament, while also seeking out new blood to test themselves against. However, the execution here is fucked beyond belief, to the point where I prefer Dead or Alive 2’s primitive approach to storytelling to what we got here:
    • First of all, the narrative itself is awful. Most of the A-plot revolves around Marie Rose hanging out with Honoka, who we come to discover is a bastard daughter of Raidou, the villain of the first game (and also the biological father of Ayane). MIST (a new organization which has formed from the remnants of the evil faction within DOATEC) end up capturing Honoka and Ayane in order to resurrect Raidou, which leads to a big showdown between the ninjas and their evil uncle/father once more. This story just kinda sucks. It meanders way too much, and then is way too rushed at the end (seriously, Raidou comes back, gets into one unceremonious fight, and then is dead again). The tournament itself is also an absolute joke once again, having a grand total of five fights for its entirety, and then moving on to more important stuff. To put that into context, we’ve got more sequences of Nyotengu fucking around with the fighters than we do actual tournament storylines here.
    • Then there’s all the side stories, which are a bunch of cartoonish nonsense. Sure, Dead or Alive hasn’t really taken itself all that seriously, but it feels like a bit too much here. A lot of this is laid on the shoulders of Nyotengu, whose popularity has caused her to be shoved into so many characters’ plots for no real reason. She’s just going around trolling everyone with no narrative payoff to speak of for it. I guess all the tengu flying around and krakens just showing up fill out some of the more bizarre aspects of the DOA universe, but it comes across less as worldbuilding and more like they just wanted to shove the new/popular character in your face as much as possible.
    • Then we’ve got the terrible voice acting. This would normally be its own separate bullet-point, but in this case, the voice acting is actively detrimental to the narrative presentation here. Admittedly, there are a few solid story beats: Helena breaking her aloof façade as she begs Kokoro to stay out of danger because she’s the only family she has left. Jann Lee becoming bored now that he’s the world’s strongest fighter and desperately seeking someone who can challenge him. Ayane, Hayate, and Kasumi reunited in order to face off against Raidou once again. Unfortunately, the wretched voice acting takes 99% of the writing and makes it utterly laughable. I don’t get why this is so bad. DOA5‘s voice acting was fine and most of that cast have returned here, so I don’t blame them. Maybe it’s on the vocal direction? It’s pretty clear that Tecmo-Koei have cheaped out on the localization (the lip sync is also no where near matching what is being said), so I wouldn’t be surprised if their penny-pinching compromised this game’s voice acting too.
    • I think it also needs to be emphasized that DOA6 is actually making a serious effort to be good. They’ve even tried working themes into this story. Everything revolves around family here: NiCO wants to bring back her dead father. Kokoro is mad because Helena didn’t tell her that they had the same father. Ayane finds out that Raidou is her father. It’s played so dramatically, that it’s all the more worse that the execution is so laughable.
    • Oh, and to top it all off, DOA6 has perhaps the most baffling chapter select screen I’ve ever seen. DOA5 had an elegant solution: each character was lined up from left to right, then each character had a few chapters which you would pick from a vertical list. You then complete those chapters before moving onto the next character. Chapters were also numbered and you could see all the chapters at once, so you would easily be able to tell what you were supposed to play next. DOA6 has a similar idea, but throws all structure out the window. Chapters unlock non-chronologically, so you end up having to jump back and forth through the timeline to see if you’ve missed any chapters that just unlocked. Just advancing the story is like playing hide-and-go-seek, which is a lot harder than it sounds due to the weirdly-zoomed in camera. All that work, just so you can experience DOA6‘s garbage narrative, the joy!
  • Honoka and Marie Rose – HOO BOY. I know that there was some discontent in the Dead or Alive fandom about Marie Rose and Honoka being turned into the new mascots of the franchise after their introduction in DOA5. I never really minded this too much: sure, they’re clearly fetish-bait and didn’t have much personality to latch onto, but they have cute, appealing character designs, so I accept them. However, now that I have actually played a story about them, I lost a lot of love for these two characters. Firstly, due to their popularity, they’re pushed to the forefront of the narrative, side-lining a lot of the more “major” legacy cast members. Secondly, they don’t really have much personality to speak of: Marie Rose is uptight and dutiful, while Honoka is an airhead who likes to fight people in order to learn their fighting styles. Seriously, that’s about it, the only development they get is that they become friends over the course of the game (not that we’re shown them actually enjoying each others’ company, they just are friends because they have to be). Thirdly, their narrative sections are cringeworthy. They basically amount to watching the two of them dick about at the tournament, getting into fights as they go, until MIST thankfully shunt them out of the narrative for good. Fourthly, their voice acting is atrocious, like nails on chalkboard (note: I do not blame the VAs for this). Every scene they’re in is them speaking in the most sickly-sweet, cutesy way possible, while even the background music changes to make the scene feel like something from a high school comedy anime. I truly wanted to die any time I had to play a new Honoka/Marie Rose chapter.
  • NiCO – Ugh. I hate everything about this character’s design. Not only is she way too “anime” for me, but she’s egregiously pushing the same Lolita design as Marie Rose, despite being “officially” eighteen. And this is actually a problem, because NiCO is (arguably) the main villain of the game. She’s a head researcher for MIST who is trying to resurrect Raidou in order to figure out how to revive her own father. I even think that her voice actress puts in the best performance of the entire cast, and her fighting style is pretty cool too. None of it matters, because she’s this bright-blue coloured hair child that I’m supposed to take seriously? Why is the fate of the world being decided by three school girls in a world where goddamn Ryu Hayabusa exists (not to mention all the other capable heroes in these games)? But… keep everything the same and then age her up ten years…? We’d have a Dead or Alive character for the fucking ages, my friend! Late twenties, serious, evil, blue-haired, anime science woman who wants to kick my ass?
  • No Tag Mode – For some reason, Team Ninja were not able to get a tag mode running in this game’s engine in time for launch, so they scrapped it. Unfortunately, no tag mode has been patched in since, meaning that my favourite way to play Dead or Alive is not even an option here. That sucks, straight-up. Not much more I can say than that.
  • Unrewarding Unlocks – Up to this point, Dead or Alive games will unlock costumes whenever you complete a character’s campaign and the various game modes. It’s always been a solid and rewarding way to incentivize the player to try out all the game modes. DOA6 seemingly modernizes this by giving you fighter coins which you can spend to unlock whatever costume you want. How progressive! However, it turns out that they really “modernized” it: coins drop slowly and incentivize you to play online to get more (where players will be showing off their purchased cosmetics). Costumes also unlock randomly, so you can’t even work towards one that you like best, which goes against the entire point of giving us the freedom to purchase costumes in the first place. With this system, you’re basically taking a lot longer to get the same things that you could get in prior Dead or Alive games, all in an effort to frustrate you towards paid cosmetics.
  • More Games Industry Bullshit – Anyone could have told you that DOA6 would carry on the monetization practices of DOA5, but I don’t think many would have expected them to get so much more egregious with it:
    • First of all, it has to be said: there’s a lot of DLC available for this game. I can’t even get Steam to display all the DLCs with a total price, because there’s just too many of them for Steam to handle listing everything in one place. That’s just crazy, and navigating the DLC shop is a nightmare. This also makes this game’s Core Fighters version even more annoying, since I can’t tell what is bundled and what isn’t.
    • DOA6 also had one of the most egregious microtransaction scandals in history with its hair colour customization system. The game would charge fighter coins or real-world currency every time you changed a character’s hair colour, including changing it back to default. You weren’t even buying a new hair colour to have available (which would be bad enough), but you were being forced to pay for a basic customization option. In response to the backlash, this was changed (although they’ll still totally charge you for hair colour), but it still goes to show how egregiously this game was designed to fleece the player.
    • This game also shoves its monetization in your face. DLC characters will show up in character selection with nothing to show that they are not owned. If you try to pick one of them, the game will then tell you that you do not own a license for that character, intending to disappoint you and push you to buy them. Then, in the story mode, DLC characters’ chapters show up, but if you select them it will prompt you to buy the license. However, what makes this bad are that they will forever show up as “unread” chapters, with no way to unmark them without buying. This makes navigating the story menu even more confusing and frustrating, since they will show up if you try to navigate to “next chapter”. Some real scummy shit.

It probably looks like I hated Dead or Alive 6, but I honestly didn’t. Most of its best parts are just carried over from all the previous Dead or Alive games. There’s just not much new that’s worthy of note, and that which is here leaves me with mixed feelings. It would be fine taken on its own, but compared to nearly any previous Dead or Alive game, it’s a clear step down in quality.

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Geek Hierarchy

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Back in the mid-2000s, I came across a somewhat-famous flowchart which purported to illustrate the hierarchy by which geeks look down on each other:

Geeks live in a pecking order. Every geek is going to be hit with a level of societal shame for having interests outside what is considered “normal”. The common response to this is to minimize that shame: “Oh sure, I may be a geek, but at least I’m not as bad as (insert geekier kind of person here).” I thought that the chart was pretty accurate when I read it. Sci-fi/fantasy literature were easily the most “acceptable” geeky pursuits, to the point that your parents and grand-parents are doing it. And furries… well, they were the punching bags of all geekdom when this was written. Seems pretty legit for 2002, all things said.

However, I was reminded of this hierarchy chart after a conversation with my son, which led me to tracking it down again. While I think the concept of this chart is fantastic, it really has not aged well. You can feel that this was written in 2002 with snippets like:

  • “Pokemon Fans Over the Age of Six”: If this was written in 2002, then it would have been right at the start of the third generation of Pokemon games. This was the time when most of the original Pokemon-obsessed kids grew out of it, moved on, and Pokemania had finally ended… I can see someone at that time looking at a Pokemon fan their age and thinking “Why are you still interested in that kids thing?!” Now though? Open adoration of this franchise by people of all ages is basically mainstream culture since Pokemon Go released.
  • Roleplayers are placed fairly low in the hierarchy, alongside fanfic writers. This doesn’t feel quite equivalent anymore though, not since DND5e exploded in popularity. Being into roleplaying games is also basically mainstream now.
  • Furries at the bottom of the list is also very much a reflection of the time. Furries as an active subculture were still fairly new, and I imagine that the internet caused people to become more aware of the subculture. As a result, this would have been at the time when people were still reacting viscerally to anything furry-related. Even in 2008, I can recall how annoyed I’d get when a forum poster would have a furry avatar and then would submit art where a fandom’s characters had been turned into furries. Hell, a friend of mine once chatted with the guy who managed the website “God Hates Furries”, which we would frequent often for a laugh. It was the furries who would have the last laugh though (fun fact: the guy who managed God Hates Furries and my friend both ended up becoming furries years later). Eventually, the world just kind of moved on from hating furries, to the point where they’re just accepted now. If you walked into a room of geeks and started talking about how you want to use a flamethrower on all the furries, if it was the year 2002, they would have agreed and died laughing. However, in 2024, most people will look at you and wonder “why you are so weird and out of touch?” and “oh, you’re a homophobe, aren’t you?”
  • It’s also worth noting that this was clearly written in a pre-GamerGate world. As I said in my 2013 review of Noobz, the racist, basement-dwelling geek was progressively seen as an outdated stereotype, up until GamerGate happened and showed the world that there really was an ugly side to geek culture and it was not going away. This has only gotten worse since then, with geek media outrage merchants grifting entire fandoms and making any kind of discourse exhausting.

Suffice to say, I had opinions on the old chart. I wanted to see what an updated version might look like in an era where geek culture has become the culture. How does that affect what is considered “normal” and what is aberrant? And how has backlash to this culture change caused certain geeks to be perceived as worse than others?

Well… here’s my take on it:

The chart pretty much speaks for itself, but I do want to provide some commentary regarding the entries. Please note, ranking in the hierarchy is not intended as a value judgement – I’ll clarify my thoughts on the rankings below, but just keep in mind that this is entirely a measurement of how geeks would classify themselves on the spectrum of geekiness.

The Mainstream

  • Firstly, “Celebrity Geeks”. This ranges from your Henry Cavills, Robin Williamses, and Vin Diesels, to your Wil Wheatons, Felicia Days, or Hideo Kojimas. They may be bigger nerds than you are in some ways, but they ultimately transcend above all due to the sheer power of fame.
  • “Mainstream Geek Media Fans” is pretty much a catch-all for most popular media: film, tv, and books, specifically. This would cover all the famous geek properties that are so ubiquitous that you might not even identify them as geeky at all (such as the MCU, Star Wars, A Song of Ice and Fire, The Lord of the Rings, Pokemon, etc).
  • Next up is “Video Gamers”. Suffice to say, gaming is currently the world’s most popular entertainment medium, to the point of being entirely normal to engage with. In spite of this, gaming still has a bit of a lingering stink which causes it be perceived as inherently more geeky than more traditional media. Not a big deal, but enough to knock it down one spot on the hierarchy.
  • And then we come to our first big branch of the hierarchy. Some of these are pretty obvious: anime and Dungeons & Dragons have become straight-up mainstream in the past decade, which has pushed them way up the hierarchy. “Erotic Cosplayers” probably deserves a clarification though: erotic cosplayers may be geeks in their own right, but there’s definitely a perception that they’re “faking” it in order to be a thirst trap for a geek audience. That’s why erotic cosplayers are actually above regular cosplayers, since they are likely to not even be seen as “real” geeks.

Pretty Geeky

  • All the layers we’ve been through so far are geeky, but entirely mainstream. The next couple layers of the branch is where things start getting identifiably geeky. MMOs, by their complexities and life-eating nature, feel like they deserve to be a couple layers down from video games as a whole. This is also where we start to differentiate between the popularity of geek properties. If you asked a random, middle-age co-worker which Star Wars movie is their favourite, you’ll probably be able to have a full conversation. Now, ask that same co-worker which Doctor is their favourite, and the odds of them even knowing what you’re talking about is going to drop pretty significantly. Comic book readers should also be pretty obvious: the MCU is the biggest media franchise in the world right now, but the majority of viewers do not engage with the comics at all.
  • Next up we have “Fans Who Engage with EU Content”. Going off our previous example, you ask your co-worker what their favourite Star Wars is. They say “The Empire Strikes Back” and then you respond with “the Timothy Zahn Thrawn trilogy” and then suddenly the entire conversation comes to an awkward end as they realize how much of a nerd you are. Star Wars is particularly egregious for this, as there is so much EU content that the fans who engage with it are basically an entirely separate fandom from those who just watch the movies. As a result, I think it’s entirely fair for this kind of geek to get placed lower down on the hierarchy.

Fuckin’ NEEEEEEERD

  • And then we come to “Redditors” and the next branch of associated concepts. Tumblr probably would have also had a place here at one time, but it has been largely usurped over the past several years by Reddit as the popular gathering place online for geeks. Reddit, by its nature, fosters insular communities and specialized interests, which can push a geek to the next level of obsession. The branches coming off of it are directly related: “oh, sure, I may be a Redditor, but at least I am not posting erotic fan art/arguing about who would win in a fight/showing off my Funko Pops/etc”. Oh, and of course, every Redditor thinks that Reddit mods are the biggest geeks there.

Out-and-Proud Stereotypical Geeks

  • Then we get to the low-mid layer, where things get undeniably geeky. “Coders” really speaks for itself – if you’re making your own programs and video games, you’re definitely going to be seen as very geeky, even if it’s in a professional capacity. Bronies, LARPers, ren faire folks and furries are all the biggest geek stereotypes, but that’s the funny thing about how things have changed since 2002 – there’s not only way more acceptance for these groups, but they own their geekiness moreso than anyone else on the hierarchy. So, while furries are still somewhat low on the hierarchy, there’s no longer the scorn you could feel for them in the original chart, which is a nice change. No, that scorn has now gone to…

The Basement-Dwellers

  • Aaaand that takes us out of the “socially acceptable” geeks and the looooong drop down to the bottom rungs of the hierarchy. “The Basement-Dwelling Mountain Dew & Doritos Racist Gamer Stereotype” is what it sounds like – the sort of dickhead who emerged during GamerGate to announce that they actually were proud to be the shit stains that everyone thought that gamers had moved beyond a decade earlier. They’re definitely a lot rarer now adays, but when you come across one, you can’t help but cringe.
  • If you’ve been to any kind of geek convention, then you definitely have cringed at a “Geek Who Openly Display Hentai/NSFW Anime Merch”. Say what you will about how acceptable this is, but you can’t deny that most people are going to see this and think “At least I’m not that much of a geek”.
  • Next up is “Geeks Who Whine About Politics/Fandom Purity”, arguably the most annoying people in modern geek culture. Some of this comes from general culture war brain rot, some of this comes from too much exposure to outrage grifters, and some of this comes from geniune concerns about changes to the fandom over time. Whatever the source, they manifest this concern by being insufferable and toxic, polluting fandom discourse and making engaging in the community exhausting. As a result, any fandoms where these kinds of geeks are accepted ends up pushing the less-geeky folks out, leading to an endless spiral where those communities become more and more geeky and more and more toxic at the same time.
  • The next level is, of course, 4chan, notorious for all manner of geeky degeneracy (and home to many of the aforementioned “unacceptable” geeks). This is largely down to how much 4channers have embraced their worst stereotypes as NEETs and degenerates. 4channers may not be so bad individually, but 4chan itself acts as a rallying point for less-extreme geeks: “Hey, I may be a basement-dwelling Mountain Dew and Doritos racist gamer, but at least I’m not a 4channer”.
  • Finally, we have the punching bags of the internet, the incels. These feel like the most obvious omission from the original chart to me, to the point where “incel” has become a mainstream insult. Do incels deserve this scorn? Certainly not all of them, but considering the hateful environments incel forums become and the prevalence of incel mass shooters and the subsequent praise of these shooters within incel communities, it’s no wonder that these kinds of geeks get absolutely shit upon.

And that’s my modern take on the hierarchy. You could definitely argue that there’s room for refinement and I’m sure I’ve missed some pretty big types of nerds, but I’m fairly happy with the result. Not bad, considering that I put this chart together and wrote most of this article while high on edibles.

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Female Space Marines and the Wokehammer Agenda

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Hide your 3D printer and grab your Imperial Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer, the wokes are coming for Warhammer 40,000! Or so you’d believe if you’re unfortunate enough to be a 40k fan on social media these days. The discourse going on right now is absolutely exhausting and I’m at the point where I just want to get all my thoughts out in one place (and preferably in a place that doesn’t have a 280 character limit). So what is all this hubbub about? Simply put, people are arguing about whether female Space Marines should be a thing… but, of course, it’s really about a lot more than that. Let’s get into it, shall we?

As a note, you don’t necessarily need to know anything about 40k to get through this – I’ll try to keep it understandable, but I’m going to have to nerd out just due to the nature of this discourse, as some of the arguments are nonsense if you don’t know the finer details of the lore.

So What Is This Discourse All About?

In Warhammer 40,000, the main, iconic faction are the Space Marines: genetically altered and enhanced super-soldiers who are amongst the most elite warriors in the galaxy. In the lore of the universe, Space Marines are recruited exclusively from young males. It has been this way for about 30 years now and through several editions of the game.

In recent years, there is a growing (albeit, still minority) desire amongst some fans to relax this bit of the lore and allow Space Marines to also be women. There are several arguments in favour of this, which I’ll get to later, but recently this discourse has come to a boiling point again as it has become a rallying point for reactionaries to bring the culture war to 40k. This is also drawing in a lot of people who have never cared about 40k one way or another, but view it as a battleground to push back against “the regressive left”, or as fertile ground for them to grift people through rage and engagement.

That’s the basics. It’s becoming pretty clear to me that Games Workshop are, inevitably, going to need to formally address this at some point or another. So, as a result, we’re left with the question: “Should there be female Space Marines? Why, or why not?” With that question in mind, let’s look into what I consider the legitimate arguments against, and for, female Space Marines:

Arguments Against Female Space Marines

  • Monastic Elements – Traditionally, Space Marines have had a monastic theme to the faction’s identity. Most chapters straight-up are based out of strongholds called fortress-monasteries, and a lot of chapters have similar levels of religious reverence that you might expect out of monks. You could argue that allowing women in the Space Marines would dilute this aspect of the army… and, y’know what, that would be fair if that was the reasoning given. That said, these monastic elements are already very diluted compared to where they were in 2nd and 3rd edition, and different chapters have different traditions, so it doesn’t even apply neatly across the faction.
  • Fascism/Traditionalism – One could make the argument that the fascist society of the Imperium could be the reason why Space Marines are all male, even if there might be the ability to recruit women. Perhaps The Emperor decreed this, or when he recruited only men to be in the original legions, the chapters have kept this going out of tradition. This could also be a legitimate excuse to keep Space Marines male as far as I’m concerned – it honestly would help reinforce the themes of the setting in ways that are far more interesting and intentional than what we currently have by just handwaving “Marines have to be male, because reasons”. This is a bit shaky though, because, again, Space Marine chapters have incredibly diverse traditions, and the Imperium at large doesn’t seem to have this male/female division in the rest of its military forces (outside of the Sororitas, but that’s because having an all-female army was a loophole for the church to have its own standing army).
  • Artistic Intent – If Games Workshop came out and said “Nah, Space Marines are all male, because that’s what we want and we don’t intend to change it”… then, man, how do you even argue with that? I mean, there will no doubt continue to be arguments (and you can certainly argue about an artistic choice you disagree with), but that’d be pretty clear-cut.

Arguments For Female Space Marines

  • The Lore Changes All the Time – 40k’s lore isn’t the goddamn Bible. Games Workshop need to sell us new toys, and as a result it changes constantly. The past couple editions have seen some of the biggest lore changes in the history of the game. Just in the past few years, we’ve had the story move forward with the Fall of Cadia, the resurrection of primarchs Roboute Guilliman and Lion El’Jonson, and the introduction of Primaris Space Marines. These were monumental, narrative- and lore-changing events which have fundamentally altered the 40k universe and Space Marines as a faction. And then there’s the lore impacts every time a new faction gets added, or a faction gets fleshed out. Recently we got the League of Votann, a brand new faction which now, it turns out, have always been there actually. Before them, we got the T’au, and then we got the fleshing out of the Necrons, which fundamentally altered an existing faction’s lore (for the better, it must be said). In comparison to all of this, changing the lore to allow female Space Marines is miniscule. You could literally change a couple sentences in the lore section of the rulebook to make it work – either Cawl figured out a way to make female Space Marines work, or they’ve always been a thing, but we weren’t privy to it. If you wanted to make it something more elaborate (like one of the missing primarchs is involved somehow), then that could work too, but in my opinion this works best when it’s simple. People who go “But the lore!!!” as an excuse for why there shouldn’t be female Space Marines baffle me, because that is easily the weakest ground for them to stand on in this fight.
  • Gender Essentialism Excuse Makes No Sense – As it stands in the current lore, Space Marines are all male because “the gene-seed zygotes [which are used to turn someone into a Space Marine] are keyed to male hormones and genetic structure”. It’s basically just a hand-wave to explain why things are the way they are, and why they’ve been that way for 30 years. This is one of those anti-female Space Marine arguments that just gets more dated year after year, as discourse about gender and biology become more a part of the public conscious. Like I said in the lore section, it would be incredibly easy to just change this – it’s not like gene-seed is based in any real biology, so it’s not breaking the laws of reality or something for it to suddenly be able to be implanted in women too, whether that’s just retconning it, or having some new development make the process viable.
  • Space Marines Aren’t Inherently Male – This is my personal argument in this. Space Marines are all male, but there isn’t anything inherently male about them that would be lost by allowing there to be women in their ranks as well. About the only thing I can think of is that they all call each other “brother” a lot, but that’s more of a sign of respect and comradery. In terms of the faction’s identity, I’ve seen it argued that Space Marines are a male power fantasy, which holds some merit, but I don’t think it’s strong enough to extend to “therefore there should be no female Space Marines”. Space Marines are effectively sexless – they are pumped so full of modifications that they aren’t really human anymore, they’re sterilized and asexual, and most chapters have no personal connection to any normal humans. Given all this, what is lost by allowing Space Marines to recruit from women as well? They will end up the same weapons of war, not defined by their gender. It’s honestly so small a change that Games Workshop could get away with not even making new models to make this work (at most, they could sell a sprue of optional head swaps, so there’s even a financial incentive to consider).
  • They’re The Poster-Boy Faction – One common argument against female Space Marines is that people should just play one of the other factions which is mixed-gender instead. Maybe they should, because the other factions in 40k are all more interesting than the Space Marines (well, except for the Aeldari, because fuck elves), but Marines get the majority of the attention in the game and are likely going to be the first faction for most players. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to wish that the noob-friendly faction could have some more representation for women as it might subsequently draw more people in. From my understanding, this is pretty much the core argument for why people wanted female Space Marines in the first place.
  • Space Marines Are Meant to Be Personalized – Ever since the first Tactical Marine box was released, Space Marines have been meant to be highly customizable. The entire point of chapters and the various foundings is for you to be able to make up your own custom chapter and tell your own stories. The introduction of Primaris marines in 8th edition reinforced this, opening up the lore so that chapters that used to not have a “lore justification” for having additional foundings now could. Hell, the 40k universe has intentionally been designed as a playground you get to tell your own stories inside, rather than a grand narrative like something like Star Wars or Marvel. It’s an inherent aspect of the miniature hobby that you have full control over the painting, design, and customization of your minis, and that is represented fantastically through the Space Marines’ diverse array of traditions and options. In light of that, if people want female Space Marines in their chapter, it seems in-line with this philosophy to allow it as an option. Similarly, if people wanted their chapter to be all-male, then that would be fine too within that customization, but at least people would have the option this way.
  • There Used to be Female Space Marines – In 1987, Games Workshop sold two women in power armour with bolters and swords. Ever since, they’ve been a contentious aspect of the lore. Were they Space Marines (which were a thing at the time), or were they actually Sisters of Battle (which weren’t a concept yet)? Legend has it that they didn’t sell well, so Games Workshop phased women out of the Space Marines and made them all male to appeal more to the young boys who were their primary audience at the time. Supporting this theory, several armies also had female models get phased out of production, although the Space Marines were somewhat unique as this got extended to their lore as well, which would become more solidified and recognizable to the 41st millennium we know today by the time 2nd edition dropped in 1993. We could argue that female Space Marines are a call-back to the game’s history, although (to be fair) that was a time when 40k wasn’t even 40k.

Those are the legitimate arguments, for and against, as far as I can see them… and it should be pretty obvious which way I lean on this. There are other arguments though, and I’d be neglectful not to go over those as well:

Other Arguments Against Female Space Marines

  • The Sororitas Are the Faction For Girls/Are All-Female – I alluded to this one earlier. The Adepta Sororitas (aka Sisters of Battle) are held up as the female version of Space Marines, but they’re not quite the same thing. While there is some overlap, they ultimately aren’t the same since they are not super-soldiers, are physically much weaker, have a far different aesthetic, theme, and playstyle, and do not have anywhere near the same recognition and exposure as Space Marines do. They’re also 100x more interesting that Space Marines, but that’s a completely different argument altogether… Oh, and there’s also the argument that Sororitas are all-female, so Space Marines should stay all-male. Put simply, in the tabletop game this isn’t accurate: the Sororitas have multiple male units and characters in their army (specifically: Priests, Missionaries, Crusaders, Arco-flagellants, and Penitent Engines; they also used to have several more in previous editions, but these have been sectioned off into the Inquisition supplemental codex or discontinued). You can theoretically make a whole Sororitas army with nothing but male models if you wanted to. I recently got into it with a guy on Twitter who said that these “don’t count” and even argued that Penitent Engines and Arco-flagellants don’t count as male because they are just drugged-up killing machines… first of all, they make sure that these heretics are still somewhat lucid so they can torture them more for their sins, and secondly, at that point do they even consider Space Marines to be male? There are people who will argue that the Adeptus Custodes to be a mixed-gender army because it has six Sisters of Silence units (one of which is a named character, one of which is a generic leader, one of which is literally just a generic transport tank, and three of of which are literally just the same models with different weapons options), but will also argue that the Adepta Sororitas are all female because it suits their argument (and if the Sororitas are not all female, then there is no all female faction in 40k). Ultimately though, this argument is entirely a distraction from the actual discussion about female Space Marines and not worth getting into all the pedantry required to wade through it. Keep the argument on the question of female Space Marines where it should be.
The absolute insanity of calling Slaanesh daemons female is really sending me. Most of the army are full-on hermaphrodites, they’re as non-binary as you can get.
  • Goes Against the Lore – I’ve already addressed this previously, but there certainly is the argument that the existence of female Space Marines goes against the lore. If you view the lore as something that can’t/shouldn’t be changed, then I’m probably not going to convince you, but it’s the shakiest ground you could hinge this argument on. The options available to outright change the lore, or to introduce new elements to make it work, make this incredibly weak and the people making it must be constantly pissed off whenever a new 40k product comes out.
  • Why Are You Injecting Politics Into My Escapism? – Guys, if you are legitimately entertaining this idea, you need to take a long, hard step back and re-evaluate this. You’re saying you can’t enjoy a piece of media anymore because there’s a woman in it? You’re saying that, because they wanted to appeal to a wider audience, you can’t enjoy your hobby anymore without thinking about politics? Does progressive society make you so miserable that you have to retreat into your hobby and try to shut people out? That’s just silly. This is the sort of argument that you can hold and scream to the heavens about, but it’s not going to convince anyone one way or another.
  • It’s Misogynist/Sexist! – LOL. That’s all I really need to say about this take. Basically, some people try to claim that forcing women to go through the initiation process is torturous and would be misogynist/sexist. It’s a transparently bullshit argument and clearly just an attempt to use “woke” words to make their ideological enemies look like hypocrites. Don’t even entertain this kind of idiocy.
  • Why Are You Injecting Your Fetishes Into My Hobby? – LOL. Do I even need to entertain the argument that people want female Space Marines because they want dommy muscle mommies? No one is seriously motivated by this idea.
  • The Wokes Will Destroy 40k! – Finally we get to the core of the latest round of discourse about female Space Marines. In the wake of Gamergate, outrage merchants and political strategists have found that nerds will work themselves into a frothing mess when they think that their properties are being threatened with change. The culture war has made engaging with nerd properties fucking exhausting for the past decade. Star Wars is probably the clearest example of this – the sequel trilogy didn’t ruin Star Wars. Wokeness didn’t ruin Star Wars. The toxicity which has invaded the fandom in the wake of The Last Jedi‘s divisive reaction is what has made this franchise exhausting to interact with. It’s turned into a narrative that woke Kathleen Kennedy and Rian Johnson are trying to destroy the brand, but Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni are there defending it for the real fans… but they are also responsible for The Mandolorian season 3, The Book of Boba Fett, all the shit parts of Obi-Wan, and forcing Filoni’s OCs into canon at every opportunity. Meanwhile, we’ve got Rogue One, which people complained had another (!) female lead before release, and Andor, which is probably the wokest Star Wars has ever been, is nearly universally acknowledged as the best Star Wars project since the originals… So maybe “wokeness” isn’t the issue, but rather that Disney is sucking the life out of the brand and mismanaging it. That’s a long tangent to go on about why the woke 40k argument is fucking bullshit, but it illustrates the point – they’ll point to all these other properties that “wokeness” ruined, but when you look into it, it’s almost invariably bullshit. Female Space Marines are viewed as the first step to wokeness ruining 40k, but I just can’t see it. The entire appeal of 40k is that it’s a fascist hellscape, and I don’t see a single person interested in this setting wanting that to change, including the vast majority of people who want female Space Marines. If you believe the slippery slope argument and that’s what’s motivating you to push back against female Space Marines, you’re a fucking rube. I had an argument years ago with someone who similarly believed that having wheelchair-bound mini-figs was representing the woke-ification of Lego. It was an absolutely mad argument at the time, and the intervening 8 years have shown how fucking stupid this kind of logic is.
I already wrote a ton of words above about Star Wars, but Halo? That was clearly shit showrunning and disrespect for the source material rather than shoving wokeness at you. World of Warcraft? From what I can see, looks like they’re pissed because Blizzard added some gay couples in an expansion, lol.

Closing Thoughts

When it comes down to it, I have the same philosophy when there are calls to make a change in a media property: “is there a legitimate reason not to do this?” With female Space Marines, I see very few reasonable reasons not to introduce them into the game – the impact on the game and lore would be miniscule, while the upsides of making more people feel welcome and giving people more options for their armies is obviously a great thing. Games Workshop clearly agrees as well – just look at the Stormcast Eternals, the fantasy equivalent of Space Marines in Age of Sigmar, who are filled out with a cast of colourful men and women. It’s a different system of course, but it shows you that this is something they’re aware of and that they would do differently if they were to start fresh. If the idea of welcoming more people into the hobby is repulsive to you, then you are the problem.

Also, funnily enough, this whole discourse is reminding me of when I was a crusty gatekeeper in the 40k community. Around 12 years ago, bronies were infiltrating the 40k community. You couldn’t go on Dakka Dakka without seeing a brony avatar and there were several people converting up Space Marine pony armies. People fucking hated it, myself included. This was making a mockery of the game! Why can’t they just like 40k as it is? It completely goes against the tone of the setting!

…then, over time, we as a community got used to it. I stopped caring about all the bronies who were posting regularly, enjoying the hobby. I grew the fuck up. If people want to have fun their own way with their own army, why the fuck should we care? That’s one of the things that draws people to this universe, the ability to carve out your own little slice of it and go “pew, pew” as you fire a deathstrike missile at your opponent’s face. If some more representation would make it easier for others to share in that joy, then who are we to deny that?

RPG Characters Update

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

In October 2020 I released an article about all the different RPG characters I’ve played over the years. I doubt anyone cared about it, but I had fun writing it. Well, I’ve continued playing games since then and have new tales and new characters I wanted to share. The past three months in particular have been some of the most active for me in terms of RPGs… which is actually a pretty big contributor for why I haven’t posted anything on the blog lately, I’ve been really struggling to find time between RPG nights, playing Magic: The Gathering or working my way through more Resident Evil games for future Love/Hate articles. However, let’s take a moment to look into the adventures of my RPG characters, new and old alike!

Orome Arrick (FFG Star Wars)

Orome was very much a new character of mine when I wrote the last article, but we’re now more than 40 sessions deep into this story and he’s really had a chance to develop, find some glory and wallow in his failings. This campaign has been grueling, with the party constantly drowning in debt, wanted across the galaxy and struggling to eke out any meaningful victories. However, Orome’s crowning achievement has to be when the party had a mission on Bespin to pull off a massive heist (we were running The Jewel of Yavin source book at the time). As the party’s pilot, I ended up competing in a race to get us entry to an exclusive party where we could influence the bidders in a secret auction (and then fleece them all and steal the titular jewel). The race was incredibly intense, but my expert piloting got us an early lead before half the competition got themselves destroyed. It ended up being neck-and-neck at the end, with the end result coming down to literally the final die roll where our opponent’s engine blew right before the finish line, giving us a victory by the thinnest of margins. The mission ultimately ended with Orome, in pure scoundrel style, stealing a crimelord’s money and wife and then flying off into the galaxy to find his next fortune.

On the other side of things though, Orome’s life has been a total mess. He’s extremely self-destructive, turning to drugs or alcohol rather than facing any problem in his life directly. It has been a legitimate problem on more than one occasion – I can recall at least two instances where the party needed Orome to pilot their ship but he was too high to do it. Hopefully an opportunity comes when Orome can find the motivation to get clean, he has a good heart and I want to see him succeed someday.

G’Dorah Hirose (DND 5E)

Back when I wrote that first article, G’Dorah was still a theoretical character, one that I was waiting to get a chance to play. Well, I was soon thereafter invited to join a campaign playing through Descent Into Avernus, and G’Dorah finally got the chance to come to life. I made a few changes from my original concept in order to make the character work here (she’s a paladin of Bahamut instead of Eldath, which honestly makes way more sense), but she has been everything I was hoping for. She’s a platinum dragonborn paladin of redemption, marching through hell seeking those who can be redeemed and smiting down those for whom forgiveness is beyond reach. Our party in this game consists of a tiefling monk, a human war cleric and a half-giant barbarian and G’Dorah has slotted into a group as a support/damage character. She can put out a ton of damage in a hit – I’ve had her do over 60 damage with just one attack! Her utility abilities are what makes her most interesting though, she can heal allies, buff everyone with +5 to their saving throws or provide support through her warding spells and religious devotion.

Perhaps the most interesting interactions have been between her and the tiefling. She saw that the tiefling had lost several fingers and assumed that he was a thief and treated him coldly as a result. However, over the course of the campaign she’s come to realize that these fingers were lost because the tiefling was making bargains with hags to protect the group and other innocents. G’Dorah has learned that she is perhaps too quick to judge others and has gained considerable respect for her half-devil companion, to the point where she was willing to trust his judgement. The tiefling had discovered that the barbarian had been overcome by evil influences and G’Dorah trusted him enough to side with him to try to save their companion. This ultimately forced the whole party to beatdown the barbarian until G’Dorah could break the chains which bound his mind. At the time of this writing, there are only one or two sessions left in this game and soon G’Dorah will be tied with Ellri as my highest-level character. I’ve really grown to love her, she’s a lot of fun to play and I really hope she can make it out of Avernus alive. I have an ending in mind that I want to get the chance to play out (I’ll edit it in here after the game is over if it all plays out)!

Valdyr Lenya (DND 5E)

A couple months ago, our regular DM decided they wanted to run a Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign, alternating between that and Star Wars every second week in order to get some more variety. By this point I had decided that my next character would be a druid as I was very keen to try out that class, and so Valdyr was born. Like most of my characters, he’s an edgelord with a tragic backstory (which is funny because there are eight other players in this campaign and somehow the druid is the only goddamn edgelord). Valdyr is a young man who has made some major mistakes and is now at a crossroads in life. He’s spent the last half decade with a band of highway robbers alongside his childhood friend and lover, Arianne. However, a few months prior to the start of the campaign, everything blew up in their faces as a heist turned sour and most of Valdyr’s companions were killed in the process, including his love. He’s now very solemn, trying to avoid attention from the authorities while rebuilding his life and figuring out what comes next. We’re still pretty early into this campaign so things are still evolving, but I view the awakening and expanding of his druid powers and developing the skill to wild shape as a sort of visual metaphor – he’s in the process of becoming someone new.

Maria (DND 5E)

Another returning character! Back in the original article I said that I hoped that the campaign Maria originally appeared in would continue. Alas, it never did! However, I was invited to join a campaign for Curse of Strahd and decided that it was time to dust off one of my favourite characters whose journey hadn’t reached its end. Given that this game starts me off at a higher level, I’ve even incorporated the events of the first campaign into her backstory, with her shriveled arm still being there as a reminder of how far she will go to see her task through. This game is also pretty early on so there hasn’t been much development of her character yet, but I look forward to future sessions. That said, I’ve come to realize that Maria’s flaw is a deep-rooted sense of fanatical self-loathing. She sees the evil wrought by vampires on those weaker than them and internalizes it as a failing of her kind, something that she can’t separate from herself. This leads to her being very cold and distant. Perhaps one day she can learn to let someone close to her, but I fear she will destroy herself before that day comes.

Lucatiel (DND 5E)

My newest character may draw their name from my favourite Dark Souls character, but it is more tribute than inspiration. I was invited to join an in-progress game of Out of the Abyss and was told that a rogue would fit the party well. Having never played a rogue, I was on-board and formulated a character from there. Lucatiel is a kenku, DND’s diminutive and untrustworthy crow-like species. He’s getting old by kenku standards, with greying feathers and an unimposing frame. However, his mind is his real weapon and I mean that quite literally – he’s a soulknife rogue, who creates psychic blades he can hurl at enemies at range, meaning that even if he appears to be unarmed he can put a knife in your gut at a moment’s notice. Lucatiel is easily the most skilled character I’ve ever played, with several ridiculously high skill proficiencies which, combined with his sub-class, make it nearly impossible to fail key skill checks. Again, I haven’t had a lot of chance to play Lucatiel yet, but he’s a very interesting and different sort of character for me, plus his class sounds straight-up badass.

5 Dumbest P.O.D. Controversies

~ Barloq ~ 2 Comments

Growing up in an evangelical household, there were lots of things which were considered “unhealthy” to my soul – heavy metal, horror movies, Dungeons and Dragons… perhaps unsurprisingly, all things I love today. However, one magical summer at an evangelical bible camp in 2002, I got introduced to my gateway drug to all things heavy metal, P.O.D. They became my favourite band and held that honour for more than a decade. Hell, at this point I still am incredibly fond of their music even if my tastes have gotten heavier and more depressing. However, during the years when I was really into them, I couldn’t help but notice the ridiculous level of controversy that has come their way with seemingly every new album they put out. Unlike some bands, I don’t even think this is intentional on their part, because the controversies they’ve courted are largely really stupid. So, with that in mind, let’s go over some of the band’s dumbest controversies over the years.

Before we get to that though, I want to cover the one legitimate controversy they’ve had, which would be the whole Marcos controversy. Sometime in early 2003, lead guitarist Marcos Curiel was kicked out of P.O.D. and was quickly replaced with former Living Sacrifice guitarist Jason Truby. It led to a whole bunch of bad blood and he-said-she-said about what really happened. Given that Marcos was brought back into the band when their contract with Atlantic Records expired at the end of 2006, it seems pretty obvious that Atlantic management were behind the split, but no official explanation has been given by the band since (as far as I’m aware).

Also, one last thing before we begin the list proper: I’m not going to pretend that P.O.D. are perfect. They certainly have some songs which could be controversial if the band was more popular than they are now. Their very first album has a (very shitty) song called “Abortion is Murder”, although the band had disowned the song by the time they were signed to Atlantic, so make of that what you will. There’s also a B-side from Murdered Love called “Find a Way” which implies that Obama is the antichrist and another song called “West Coast Rock Steady” which makes a rather dumb, tongue-in-cheek joke that could be interpreted as homophobic. Thankfully, for a Christian band, their politics tend to be much better than you might expect – I haven’t seen any anti-vax or pro-Trump stuff out of them and they were even vocally in support of Black Lives Matter during the George Floyd protests.

Anyway, with all that out of the way, let’s get to the list…

5) Playing Ozzfest 2000 and 2002

Evangelicals are a fickle sort. On the one hand, they love the idea of evangelizing to people and are always happy to remind you that Jesus shunned the religious elite in favour of hanging out with tax collectors, prostitutes and Samaritans. However, actually getting an evangelical to spend time with people they consider to be “lost sinners”? Good luck, as this first controversy demonstrates. P.O.D. have gotten heat from Christians for appearing on soundtracks for Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows and Little Nicky and for touring with bands like Korn and Insane Clown Posse, but the most notable convert-related controversy for the band would have to be their appearances at Ozzfest in the early 2000s. The early 2000s were a really shitty time to be an evangelical teenager. After being energized during the 80s, the 90s and 2000s left evangelicals completely impotent. They continued whining about video game violence and the depravity of rock music, but no longer were their complaints resonating in the larger culture, rather they were making evangelicals even more insular.

As a signal that the people leading the evangelical movement were a bunch of boomer fucks, evangelicals were still railing against Ozzy Osbourne in the early 2000s, despite the fact that he’s a Christian himself. To them, Ozzfest represented a symbol of everything they hated – dark music that promoted a satanic and sinful lifestyle, the perfect target for a reactionary conservative movement to organize against. Then along comes P.O.D., the biggest name in Christian music at the time, performing on the main stage alongside Ozzy, Rob Zombie and Tommy Lee (of Mötley Crüe fame). Suffice to say, the presence of a “Christian band” at these events ran entirely counter to the idea that Ozzfest was a source of all the evil in the world.

Professional dickhead James Dobson said that the band had forsaken their religious beliefs by participating in Ozzfest and there were several young evangelicals who thought that the band was selling out for fame. Looking back on the controversy years later, P.O.D. lead singer Sonny Sandoval has said that this view “didn’t make sense to us because we were called to go to the light and spread the word”. Unsurprisingly, I’m inclined to agree – the evangelical hatred of Ozzfest is more political than theological. They use it as a target, a representation of culture which is offensive to their intensely conservative values (note that James Dobson is the founder of Focus on the Family, which should tell you everything you need to know about what he would consider a “proper” Christian life). Having a Christian band happily playing these shows and using it as an outreach tool suggests that the culture of rock music isn’t evil, opens up the word of God to the people who may need it most and may even encourage Christian teens to take a second look at rock festivals. This is unacceptable for these conservative fundamentalists, so therefore they have to call out P.O.D. for their “transgression” against the evangelical hegemony.

4) Getting Censored Because “Youth of the Nation” Is “Too Violent”

I came across this controversy while doing research for this article and, I’ll be honest, this might be the most buck-wild of the bunch. Back in October of 2012 P.O.D. was scheduled to play Monster Jam Fest at the Majestic Ventura theater when, mere days before the show, the fairgrounds which were hosting the show emailed the promoter saying that P.O.D. weren’t allowed to play “Youth of the Nation”. The reason for this? Apparently the song was “too touchy and controversial” and “too violent” for a family event. If you’re unfamiliar, the song is about the tragic experiences of a group of teens, including a school shooting which was inspired by a real life shooting at Santana High School in 2001. Suffice to say, the song by no means glorifies violence and being against school shootings is in no way controversial, so I don’t understand what the problem is? In any case, P.O.D. agreed not to play the song, but the damage was done – several bands dropped out of the lineup, the venue had to be changed, $130,000 in tickets had to be refunded and P.O.D. themselves eventually dropped out of the show. Making things even more intense though was the fact that the fairgrounds were state property so there was some debate about whether this could be considered a First Amendment issue. Marcos Curiel certainly seemed to want to spin it that way, but ultimately the band moved on without making more of a fuss.

To make things even more wild, this was only a couple months before the Sandy Hook shooting, which should give one even more pause about this entire controversy. The US is a country where a band can be told not to play one of their biggest hits because talking about school shootings isn’t family friendly, while also conditioning their elementary school children to believe that shooting drills, bulletproof backpacks and teachers with firearms are normal, all because they consider gun control measures out of the question (despite overwhelming public support).

3) Censored and Banned Because Album Covers “Promote Paganism”

P.O.D. have had several album cover controversies over the years. While it didn’t become a full-blown controversy due to the band being too small to make a real splash, there was some complaints about the cover of their debut album, Snuff the Punk, whose original artwork featured an angel holding a gun to the devil’s head (this was subsequently changed to a far more family friendly version where the angel was just going to punch the devil mercilessly instead). Their first real album artwork controversy came with The Fundamental Elements of Southtown, which features a surreal, symbolic and mystical album cover by Jean Bastarache. I personally find it fascinating and evocative, it’s easily the best album cover in the band’s career. Naturally, because the cover required some interpretation, Christian retailers refused to stock it, claiming that it was “pagan” and objecting to the presence of a cigar. Christian stores wouldn’t even stock the album until a black box was placed over the cover, all because they couldn’t understand the symbolism.

The biggest album cover shitstorm would come with Payable on Death, which came out at the height of P.O.D.’s fame. The album cover, seen above, features a naked woman with butterfly wings with Latin script (which apparently is the word for the sung part of the preface for Mass) covering her nether regions. The cover alone caused 85% of Christian retailers to ban the album, mainly because the art depicts the woman’s public bone and some people argued that having “Sanctus” covering her genitals sexualized a holy term… because, y’know, naked women are inherently sexual according to these people. This ignores the fact that artist Daniel Martin Diaz is himself Catholic and put overt Catholic symbolism into the album cover (although that’s probably not a plus for some evangelicals, many of them believe that Catholics aren’t real Christians). That’s not even the end of the Payable on Death art controversies though. Noted crank Terry Watkins of Dial-the-Truth Ministries put out a long screed about how the art and symbols depicted in the album and its liner notes are “clearly among the most openly occult and dark I have ever seen”. Suffice to say, it’s absolute quackery and will give you a good laugh to read through. For their part, P.O.D. were now popular enough that they refused to censor their art this time around.

The real reason for this particular controversy? P.O.D. come from San Diego in poor, diverse neighbourhoods. They have roots with evangelicalism, Mexican Catholicism, Rastafarianism and various other spiritual practices which are unfamiliar to your average white evangelical. It doesn’t matter that Payable on Death‘s artwork is overtly Catholic to these people, it’s unfamiliar to their evangelical sensibilities. It doesn’t matter that P.O.D. are professed Christians, these people see a surreal cover like The Fundamental Elements of Southtown and, when they can’t see Jesus blatantly depicted, they assume that it’s because they’re trying to hide SATAN. It’s frustrating but that’s what you get when evangelicals have a cultural monopoly on the faith.

2) P.O.D. Aren’t “Real Christians”

Before I really dive into this one, let’s put this all in perspective – I’m talking about a band which is famously considered lame in the mainstream for being a nu-metal Christian act. You’d think that they’d at least get embraced by Christians for being as successful as they are, but no, as you can probably see from this list of dumb controversies, the Christian crowd are probably their biggest critics. This lack of acceptance from the most conservative parts of Christianity has dogged the band for their entire career, to the point where “not Christian enough for Christians, and too Christian for the world” has basically become their go-to descriptor. In a 2015 interview, Sonny Sandoval described one of their earliest gigs where they were asked to play at a local church, but not even a minute into their set they got shut down for their “ungodly” music. I found a depressing thread from back in 2005 on the (I shit you not) Christian Gamers Alliance forum, which covers such important and debated topics as “Is playing a warlock going to send me to hell?” and “Is Minecraft evil?”. Anyway, the thread in question was about Demon Hunter and P.O.D. and whether they could be considered Christian bands, or were “Christian” at all. In regards to P.O.D. they claim that because they don’t proclaim the name of Jesus in every song and because they don’t stand and preach during their concerts that they’ve sold out to the world. It’s not just this gaggle of weirdos that believe this either, this was a pretty common refrain amongst evangelicals at the height of P.O.D.’s popularity. I found a study by Bobbi Hooper whose thesis paper was about the attitudes of Christians towards various CCM bands and P.O.D. were often highlighted as a band which “wasn’t Christian enough” for many evangelicals because they aren’t overt in their lyrics. There’s actually an anecdote from one participant who said his friend loved P.O.D., but when he went to a concert and they didn’t proselytize to the crowd he lost respect for them.

Then there’s the cranks. Terry Watkins has a whole article about how P.O.D. aren’t real Christians because they swear, have tattoos and don’t adhere to white, evangelical Christianity. The European American Evangelistic Crusade take it a step further, saying that P.O.D. don’t believe in hell, that they believe in a perverted Rasta Jesus and various other ridiculous accusations. Then there’s convicted pedophile David J. Stewart of Jesus-is-Savior fame who more-or-less echoes what the others have said (although he REALLY wants you to know that Jesus wasn’t Rastafarian). All this evangelical gatekeeping can be dismissed outright since, nearly twenty years later, P.O.D. are still out there witnessing through their music the same as they ever were. Evangelicals have just never truly embraced P.O.D. because, in my opinion, they don’t represent the safe, white norm that they want and expect… which is perhaps why, despite all their successes, P.O.D. have never won a Dove award (which is basically the Christian equivalent of the Grammies.

1) “I Am” Swearing Controversy

“I Am” is, without a doubt, the most controversial song in P.O.D.’s career (and, again, this is from a band that has a song called “Abortion Is Murder”). What could possibly stir up such a shitstorm, you may wonder? Simple: a Christian band said “fuck”. Now, this is especially dumb for several reasons. First, the record label got cold feet and bleeped out the lyric, so no officially released version of the song even has the word in it (although there are uncensored, pre-release versions out there with the word intact). Secondly, the band had been publicly using profanity for a decade by this point and had strongly considered putting out an anti-suicide song with profanity six years earlier, so it really shouldn’t have surprised anyone. Third, within the context of the song it makes a lot of sense. “I Am” is an incredibly angry track told from the perspective of someone who has been hurt, rejected by society and who is questioning why they should give a shit about a God who people say loves them. There is a powerful, real sincerity when they say “Are you the one that’s come to set me free? / ‘Cause if you knew who I am, would you really want to die for me? / They say you are the cursed man, the one who hangs from this tree / I know this is the one and only son of God, so tell who the fuck is he?” It’s especially poignant because, prior to the release of this album, Sonny Sandoval had been thinking of walking away from the band. He went on a hiatus for four years, during which he started doing youth outreach where he met a lot of broken teens who clearly were the inspiration for the track.

Naturally, evangelicals took all this into consideration and threw a fit. Jesus Freak Hideout, one of the biggest Christian music review sites, notoriously halved the score of their official review of the album because they felt that the use of profanity soured the entire experience, which just made the controversy even more contentious. If people were talking about P.O.D. at this time, then they were debating whether they had crossed a line with this song (I know that my childhood youth pastor, who was a big fan of P.O.D., was disappointed by the track and wouldn’t let his kids listen to it… again, they bleeped out the goddamn swearing on this track). There were plenty of hot takes about the subject on both sides, from people saying that it’s unacceptable to sin to promote God, to others saying that the Apostle Paul swears in the Bible, the translators just don’t accurately convey this. I think my favourite take has to be from Christian blog The Two Cities, which explains why swearing is nowhere near as big a deal as evangelicals make it out to be:

“Is sin bound to phonetics or intentions? Of course, the issue is not phonetic. It would be absurd to suggest that the F Bomb is sinful because words that begin with a fricative and end with a velar are evil. Well, here’s a made-up nothing word that matches that criteria: “Vug.” Try pronouncing it. It is phonetically very similar to the well-known F Bomb, yet apparently it would not be inappropriate to say! Now, this is an admittedly absurd example, but it helps prove the point. To go further, what of the halfway swear words that have appeared? When someone types “sh*t” on facebook for instance, are they trying to keep themselves from sinning? Has the removal of the “i” rescued one from moral downfall? Or by saying “freakin” instead of the F bomb are we saying anything different? Additionally, what’s the moral weight of saying “A$$” that “butt” does not possess? It’s arbitrary. Completely. Same thing applies to poop=crap=sh*t (it’s the same referent for goodness sake). I’m reminded of something Paul may have said about the letter of the Law here…

“The truth of the matter is that swear words are cultural products that have come into existence in multiple contexts and in multiple languages. In fact, this is an evolutionary linguistic phenomenon as certain words become taboo over time (e.g. faggot). For our American readers, it is generally recognized that “crap” is a more sensitive word for refuse than “sh*t,” but in the UK many regard “crap” to be a cuss word. So words can contain cultural stigmas, but not inherent worth. The excessive use of swear words can indicate a certain heart attitude, such as a rebellious spirit, or indicate a dearth of active vocabulary. But these words per se are not sinful. Thus, there is no inherent moral value in swear words, or any other word for that matter. The Apostle Paul warns us to refrain from crude speech (Eph 4.29; 5.4; Col 3.8), which refers to being crass. Additionally the passages speak to belittling others. Berating a fellow brother — you idiot! — is far worse than saying, “I fell on my A$$.”  What truly matters is the heart.”

Sandoval himself said, in regards to the controversy, “the only thing the Christian community hears is the F-word. They disregard the whole point of the song, because of the F-word. I think that’s pathetic.” Unsurprisingly, I’m inclined to agree.

When it comes down to it, most of P.O.D.’s controversies come from them not fitting into what white evangelicals expect of them. P.O.D. are more than happy to go about their business and preach God to their own people, but the people who are already saved and who don’t accept them to begin with keep finding reasons to tell them they’re not good enough for them. To show why these people need to calm the heck down, I’m going to end with a little anecdote. Back when I was in my teens, the one black family in our evangelical church had their two nieces from Jamaica come to live with them. They were at a church youth event where various Christian rock bands were being played and these two clearly weren’t interesting in what they were hearing. I then happened to put on The Fundamental Elements of Southtown and suddenly they lit up and asked me what band this was. The reggae, funk and rap that P.O.D. weave into their hard rock sound resonated with these two far more than any of the safe, white, evangelical gospel that they’d had to listen to up to that point, and that’s always stuck with me. There’s a wide world out there and, if you still have faith like I do, then we need more bands like P.O.D. to spread the good news to the people who get ignored by wider Christian culture.

Resident Evil 6 Has a Chapter That’s So Bad That It’s Amazing

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

I played Resident Evil 2 Remake back in October and since then I’ve been making my way through this franchise for a future Love/Hate series. I’m on Resident Evil 6 at this point and was dreading and looking forward to it in equal measure. I went in well aware of the reputation that this game has, but was more than willing to give it a shot. While I think the game is a mess (which I will go into with plenty of detail when that Love/Hate series comes out), there was one chapter in particular that went so far off the rails that it went from being awful to a transcendental masterpiece.

A big caveat here before we begin: I took edibles before playing this chapter and they kicked in about halfway through, making this experience even more baffling and surreal for me as I struggled to make sense of any of this nonsense. It was so baffling that I rewatched this whole chapter on a Youtube let’s play just to make sure it was as incomprehensible as my drug-addled mind believed. I was not disappointed and neither will you if you check it out.

The chapter in question is Chapter 4 in Chris’ campaign. Context is everything in this story, so let me set the stage for you so you understand what has happened in this game up to this point. Chris’ campaign opens with him as a drunk amnesiac who gets pulled back into duty by his second in command, Piers Nevan. They investigate a bioterrorism incident in Lanshiang involving mutant soldiers known as J’avo. This chapter ends with the building getting bombed and Chris and his men barely making it out alive. Chapter 2 then flashes back to an earlier bioterror incident in Eastern Europe where J’avo had turned a city into a warzone. Chris leads his men through the city til they encounter someone calling themselves Ada Wong. However, she betrays them and infects all of Chris’ men with a virus that mutates them into monsters. Chris and Piers barely escape, but Chris couldn’t handle the loss of his men and so became the drunken, amnesiac, PTSD-ridden soldier we met at the start of the game. The story then returns to the present, where Chris discovers that Ada Wong has been spotted in Lanshiang and he goes on a revenge quest to kill her, which once again results in the death of all of his men (except Piers). When he finally catches up to her, Chris discovers he’s not the only one after Ada Wong, because Leon Kennedy shows up and stops him from killing her. After a brief pep talk, Chris decides he doesn’t want revenge anymore… it’s seriously that sudden. Anyway, Ada escapes and Leon and Chris split up, with Chris and Piers pursuing Ada. There’s a ridiculous car chase before Ada escapes to an aircraft carrier, where you and Piers pursue her.

So, with that all said, Chapter 4 opens in about the most boring way possible. Chris’ campaign has clearly been trying to ape the gameplay and tone of Call of Duty and Chapter 4 opens with the most generic, low-quality Call of Duty map you could ask for. You’re in the hangar of an aircraft carrier and have to fight your way from one side of the hangar to the other, using shipping containers as cover against the snipers raining fire down on you and the J’avo (who suddenly look like Metal Gear Solid 2 tengu soldiers) swarming you relentlessly. It’s a particularly tedious and annoying fight, especially because the J’avo weren’t dropping much ammo for me. This is also a very large, wide-open area and I completely missed picking up a sniper rifle hidden away in a random room at the start of this mission which would have helped a lot. As a result, I was constantly struggling to actually deal with all the enemies that were getting thrown at me and eventually I had to just rush for the objective. There was a bulkhead on the far side of the hangar that we had to break through and when we get to it I discovered that I had to head up some stairs onto a gangplank over the hangar and then turn around back to where I started and launch a missile that was hanging over the starting area. Then you get the privilege of fighting through the shipping containers all over again, oh joy! So you move up the hangar again and then find that a set of stairs was retracted, so when you get to the far end you have to go through a side-door and reactivate the stairs… which places you back at the starting area and you have to fight through the containers AGAIN (but this time there’s a jet on a turn table shooting at you). Having to fight through the hangar twice felt like padding, having to fight through a third time feels like a joke. This whole section of the game was awful and tedious but it inadvertently lulled me into a sense of boredom that was about to get shattered.

Anyway, you finally get out of the goddamn hangar and get this weird cutscene where Ada has a private conversation with the bad guy in Leon’s campaign, except for some reason she’s having this conversation over a loudspeaker which broadcasts it to the entire ship. Wow, Ada sure is a great super-spy isn’t she? This is literally the sort of material you’d expect out of a spy comedy film and here it’s played totally straight. I’m not really sure why they needed to have Chris and Piers listen in on this conversation anyway. It’s about as stupid and pointless an exposition dump as you could imagine.

From here, you get into a few quick fights in corridors and rooms as you make your way to the ship’s bridge to catch up to Ada Wong. This part is actually reasonably enjoyable in its own right – not only is there a sense of urgency because you keep catching glimpses of Ada just ahead of you, but there’s progression and some actual craft behind the gunfights you get into with the J’avo here. Soon enough, you catch up to Ada and Chris decides that this whole revenge quest he’s been on is no longer about revenge, it’s about “Justice” and so he tries to take her into custody instead of killing her. Ada reveals that she’s about to launch missiles to create zombie outbreaks around the world when suddenly a freaking helicopter appears behind her and shoots her to death. Wait, what the fuck!? Just like that, the whole narrative drive of this campaign is gone halfway through the fourth chapter, now we’ve just got to clean up the mess she left behind.

Chris decides that the best way to deal with these missiles is to get to the hangar so you run off to do that, urgently. You’re immediately faced with a really annoying road-block – a locked door that requires three passcodes to enter. Wow, this imminent missile launch definitely seems like the right time to make the player go on a ten-to-fifteen minute side quest! Jesus Christ. Not only is the area that these three passcodes have been hidden in an absolute maze that easy to get lost in, this is also where the developers decided to confine their Regenerator-wannabes who only show up here and never again in this campaign. While they are clearly modeled after the Regenerators, complete with their own breathing problems (which sound more annoying than creepy), they’re kinda pushovers in comparison because you can kill them with a bit of firepower… so, in other words, like any other enemy in this game.

Anyway, I was slogging through this side quest and this was around the point where the edibles really started kicking in and I realized I had long forgotten what it even was that I was supposed to be doing or why. This whole segment of the game is clearly padding out the chapter, at the cost of bringing the game’s pacing to a screeching halt. My drug-addled mind was having a really difficult time remembering what the fuck was going on in the game, but by the time I got those three passcodes and was able to advance I was not prepared for what came next.

That hangar bay Chris was trying to get to? It never really clued in to me that he wanted to go fly a jet. Not only that, but for once this isn’t going to get confined to a QTE-sequence, the game literally expects me to fly the jet. So imagine me, already confused and high out of my mind when suddenly the game turns into a fucking Steam Early Access-quality arcade flight game! Let me explain just how insane this is: this gameplay segment lasts, like, two minutes, tops. The devs went to the effort of designing an entire arcade-style jet fighter minigame and give you no time to get used to it. It would almost be impressive, except for the part where it controls horridly. Like I said, not only did they have to design this within the engine they’re already using for the rest of this game, but they have to make it as simple as possible so players can understand how to play it immediately. Now, I’m no stranger to arcade flight games – I’ve played a couple Ace Combat games, Rogue Squadron, Battlefield, etc. However, because this flight sequence is using Resident Evil 6‘s control scheme as its base, it’s not using traditional flight controls (eg, left/right control roll, up/down control pitch) to treat this jet like it’s an airplane. Instead, it’s using Resident Evil 6‘s normal movement controls to treat the jet like a human that can’t stop moving forward (eg, left/right on the left stick make the jet yaw hard in that direction and up/down on the right analog stick controls the pitch). Suffice to say, I was all out of sorts with this control scheme and it probably wasn’t (only) the drugs that were making it so difficult to understand. The way this whole sequence is put together reminds me of the Fallout 3 train hat, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was all sorts of sorcery involved behind-the-scenes to make this sequence actually work in-engine. It’s glorious and by this point I was laughing my ass off at the absurdity unfolding on my screen.

It only gets better though. Piers jumps out of the plane and runs over to deactivate the missile, instead of, y’know, landing right beside it or shooting the fucking missile with the goddamn jet. Since I was playing Chris, the game then turns into a sequence where you hover in mid-air and provide air support to Piers (which, being honest, sounds really boring for the person who gets stuck playing Piers in this scenario). Oh and to make things even better, suddenly a giant fucking mutant J’avo appears from under a tarp and starts chasing after Piers. By this point I had completely lost it, I was laughing my ass off at how absurd this level had gotten. To make things even better, my wife happened to call at this time (she was away seeing family that evening) to say good night and in my drug-induced delirium I tried to explain just how batfuck crazy this level was. That went about as well as you could expect.

Anyway, despite all your efforts one of the missiles gets away “because plot” and Chris and Piers feel bad. While this is technically the end of the chapter right here, the lead-in to Chapter 5 is just as ridiculous and bears mentioning. Chris and Piers are just chilling in their airplane when they get a radio call from Leon telling them to go rescue Jake and Sherry Birkin at an underwater lab. Oh, also, Jake is Albert Wesker’s son, which Chris clearly holds against him. They do what Leon said and head down an underwater elevator, where Chris tells Piers that he’s going to retire when this is all over and that Piers will be his successor. Like, recall what I said earlier – the whole point of this campaign was Chris wanting to get revenge on Ada Wong for killing his men and that got resolved halfway through the last chapter. By having a whole other chapter after that point, the game suddenly has to come up with entirely new directions to take the characters and story which ring hollow given how rushed they are. This is the problem with the way Resident Evil 6 structures its four campaigns – they aren’t four self-contained narratives that, combined, tell a wider story. Instead, they’re three four that weave in and out of each other inextricably. As a result, you’ve got the actual story of Chris’ campaign told by the end of Chapter 4, but then we need Chris and Piers to provide co-op in Jake’s campaign so suddenly they’re given a whole other chapter to go resolve things for someone else’s story. The result is four campaigns that are trying to tell one epic narrative but instead tell four unsatisfying narratives.

Resident Evil 6 has been a ridiculous, insane trainwreck and I have to say that Chapter 4 was undoubtedly the best experience I’ve had in the whole game. The way that it goes from boring tedium to full-on batshit lunacy with a straight face the entire time is just baffling when you sit down and think about what the game is actually making you do. I’ll have a full Love/Hate out for Resident Evil 6 when I’ve gotten through a couple more games in the franchise, so hopefully that will be done before the end of the year. In the meantime, I had to give this chapter its own entire write-up because holy shit did it ever leave me in hysterics.

Lore: The 51st Commandery

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

As I have stated in the past, I’m a long-time fan of Warhammer 40,000. I love the building, painting, battling, lore, etc but one area where I feel like I have been always lacking is the fleshing out of my characters and army’s lore. I usually just come up with a name for the army, maybe name a few characters and then leave it there – any “lore” they get tends to be built up organically from campaigns or impressive deeds during battle. Perhaps the most neglected of my forces is my Adepta Sororitas, which is particularly egregious since they’re also my favourite army. I’ve had this army for more than eight years now and I hadn’t even given my Canoness a name! Well, I decided it was finally time to give my army a proper identity, which was originally just supposed to be a few paragraph overview but it quickly started ballooning into a full-on army profile with several prominent named characters and personalities and a full-on photoshoot. So… yeah, where better to host that then on I Choose to Stand? It’s something a bit different compared to what I usually do around here, but I’ve been considering hosting some creative writing here for a while. Who knows, maybe this will become more of a regular thing in the future? In any case, enjoy…

The 51st Commandery

Stationed in the shadow of the towering spires of Balor’s refineries, billowing plumes of smoke to choke the atmosphere, the shrine-bunker of the 51st Commandery of the Order of Our Martyred Lady stands resolute, a bastion of the Emperor’s light. Within its cavernous halls is a convent of approximately 200 Sisters of Battle who have operated from Balor for more than a century. Following the massacre and martyrdom of much of the Order of Our Martyred Lady during the Third Battle for Armageddon, a contingent of veterans of the battle, led by the newly-minted Canoness Commander Petronilla Magdelaine, were sent to Balor to establish the 51st Commandery. Their founding mission was to provide support to the Order Fenestrus, escorting them to perform their holy duties in war-ravaged worlds in the vicinity of Balor.

However, the nature of the 51st’s mission has changed since its fourth Canoness Commander, Maria Orantes, has assumed the mantle of authority. Her predecessor, the long-serving Angela Impassia, was martyred in defence of a holy Imperial shrine on Rascella. Their position was unexpectedly overrun by Necrons and Angela gave her life to ensure the safe retreat of the Order Fenestrus. This also bought time for her sisters to reorganize and push the xenos back, but by the time they did so there was little left of Angela Impassia to salvage – having been hit by scores of gauss beams, all that could be found of her were a few scraps of cloth.

In addition to the Order of Our Martyred Lady and the Order Fenestrus, the 51st Commandery’s shrine bunker hosts pilgrims, missionaries, relic-hunters of the Order Pronatus, Hagiographers and a handful of members of the Order Familius, among others.

Following the death of their commander, the 51st Commandery had to choose a new leader to carry them forward. While the role of appointing a successor ultimately falls upon the shoulders of the Order of Our Martyred Lady’s Canoness Superior, in practice the decision is often too minor for the Cannoness Superior to personally oversee the selection. It would require a Commandery of crucial strategic importance for her to put her full attention into the decision and the 51st had not earned that level of distinction. As a result, the decision was to be delegated amongst the veterans of the Commandery and this selection would then be passed up through the chain of command for approval. This was how the selection was intended to worth in theory, but in practice the appointment could also be influenced by other interested parties capable of catching the ear of the Ecclesiarchy.

When it was announced that Maria Orantes had been selected as Canoness Commander, this proved to be controversial. The first reason for this was that, while Maria Orantes was unquestionably an esteemed warrior and battlefield leader, command was expected to be passed on to the favourite among the 51st’s veterans, Sister Superior Ludmila Stanbridge. Ludmila had long been seen as the logical successor to Angela Impassia, having proven herself a capable battlefield commander and was dedicated to strengthening the 51st’s relationship with the Order Fenestrus. There were several other candidates in the running for command, including Maria Orantes and Ludmila’s twin sister Sophia, but it was clear that Ludmila held the largest share of support amongst the veterans of the 51st.

The second reason that Maria Orantes’ selection as Canoness Commander proved controversial was that it was strongly believed that the choice was made, or heavily influenced, by someone outside of the Order of Our Martyred Lady. Despite the 51st’s clear desire for command to go to Ludmila Stanbridge, it is not unheard of for the Canoness Superior to select a successor who more closely fits her vision for the Commandery, or even send a Canoness from a completely different commandery to fulfill the role. However, this has done little to stave hushed speculation throughout the halls of the 51st Commandery’s shrine-bunker. While there is no physical evidence to support these suspicions, it is believed that the Ordo Hereticus played a hand in the selection. The Ordo Hereticus have been active on Balor for millennia, but their influence on the 51st began to be felt during the early parts of the Rascellan campaign and has only become more hands-on since Maria Orantes has assumed command. While the Ordo Hereticus and Adepta Sororitas have worked closely since their inception, there are still some among the 51st who express concerns about their loss of autonomy, feeling like they have become puppets to the Inquisition.

Foremost amongst the non-militant orders in the 51st Commandery are a number of Hospitallers of the Order of Serenity who have been ensuring that no sister martyrs herself lightly. While there are several Hospitallers serving in the shrine-bunker and abroad, the two most distinguished members amongst the 51st are Perpetua Kazuhera and Euphemia Pacifica, who have accompanied Maria on several crusades now and saved countless lives in the process.

In spite of all this, perhaps the most controversial aspect of Maria’s selection as Canoness Commander was that her methods differed greatly from those of her predecessors. As soon as she took command, Maria set about preparing the 51st for war. No longer would they be acting as support for the Order Fenestrus, they would be taking the fight to the heretic and xenos directly. For nearly a century the blood of countless martyrs of the 51st had been spilled providing support to the Order Fenestrus. As a result, this mission had taken on a holy significance among many of the veterans of the Commandery, especially among those who supported Ludmila, so this dramatic shift was met with strong opposition. However, it was only Maria’s unimpeachable faith and force of will which kept the 51st Commandery from fracturing entirely.

In her decades of service among the 51st Commandery, Maria had become well-known for her faith and fervour, which reached a level of devotion that was notable even amongst the pious ranks of the Adepta Sororitas. However, it was not always so. In the early years of her service among the 51st, Maria’s adherence to the tenets of the Ecclesiarchy was found wanting and so she was stripped of her place among the Battle Sisters and forced into the Sisters Repentia. Here, exposed to all the dangers of an uncaring galaxy with little more than her desire for redemption, Maria found her faith not only renewed but redoubled as she hurled her body at the Emperor’s foe and laid them low with the roar of her eviscerator. When her tenure in the Repentia was completed, Maria’s renewed faith found herself quickly rising in prominence among her peers until she reached the honoured ranks of the Seraphim. However, this was not enough and Maria voluntarily surrendered herself to the Repentia for a second time. It was a shocking decision as, even then, Maria was seen as a beacon of faith by her comrades. However, Maria declared to them that her faith had never been stronger than when she was in the Repentia and that she desired to temper it there once more. When this second round of trials was completed, Maria’s convictions were stronger than ever and she quickly became the Sister Superior of the 51st Commandery’s Seraphim and held this rank until her promotion to Canoness Commander.

The Emperor laid down his life so that we may live, to bring about this great Imperium. The least we can do is put our lives in His hands, to cast aside our armour and clad ourselves in pure faith. If we die, we do so knowing that it is for His glory, not our own.

-Maria Orantes, Seraphim of the 51st Commandery

Whatever differences there were when Maria Orantes assumed command, none of her Sisters could find fault in her belief and so even the most ardent skeptic among the Commandery was willing to give her a chance to either prove or damn herself. This took the form of a series of holy wars into Imperial worlds around Balor contested by expansionist xenos forces, the Necrons and the T’au. It soon became undeniable that purging these hated foes breathed new life into the sisters of the 51st and opinion began to shift in Maria’s favour. If there was any doubt about the righteousness or divine will of her cause, that was quickly washed away with the opening of the Great Rift, the start of the Indomitus Crusade and the fiery Morvenn Vahl’s promotion to Abbess Sanctorum, which saw Adepta Sororitas of all Orders across the Imperium rising up to make war.

In recent times, the 51st Commandery has been seen fighting Necrons, Tau and Tyranids ravaging worlds in the Ultima Segmentum, before being forced back towards Balor to deal with the Blood Crusade. Most recently, they have been seen fighting under the command of Morvenn Vahl herself in the Charadon system…

Forces of the 51st

Foremost amongst the heroines of the 51st Commandery is the Canoness Commander herself, Maria Orantes. After her two tenures in the Repentia, Maria has come to favour the eviscerator, both as a reminder of her trials and as a brutally-efficient instrument of death. Complementing her melee weapon of choice is a sacred inferno pistol of the Order of Our Martyred Lady, said to have been once wielded by a venerated saint. Maria Orantes leads from the front always and her sisters have learned to follow her into battle without question. While her strategic direction for the 51st comes from a deep-seated conviction to bring death to the heretic, xenos and mutant alike, Maria ultimately desires that greatest of all honours – to achieve the status of Living Saint. No member of the 51st has yet attained such a distinction, but Maria desires this goal above all else. When the time comes for her martyrdom, she prays that her deeds may be recounted amongst the venerated names of saints long past.

One of the most influential members of Maria’s retinue isn’t even technically a member of the 51st Commandery. Instead, she hails from the non-militant Order Dialogus, the Order of the Holy Word. Her name is Agnes Aemulator Existens Paternarum and she operates as a fervent and pious spiritual advisor to the Canoness Commander. Her voice can always be heard intoning prayers across the battlefield to embolden her sisters. However, it is no secret that Agnes also operates as an agent of the Ordo Hereticus, providing linguistic and intelligence-gathering support for them, among other duties. It is believed that this close relationship secured Maria Orantes’ bid for leadership, as the tacit support of both the Dialogi and Ordo Hereticus would have been an influential vote of confidence in her favour.

Among Maria’s retinue perhaps the most revered is Felicity Gracelyn, Imagifier of the 51st. In addition to recounting the deeds of martyred sisters among the Order, Felicity holds aloft a sculpture of Saint Joan the Pierced of Armageddon. Joan was a Celestian in the same squad as Petronilla Magdelaine, the first Canoness Commander of the 51st. During the Third War for Armageddon, Saint Joan held off an entire squad of Orks by herself, giving her comrades enough time to secure their retreat before she was hacked to death by the Orks’ blades. However, when this position was retaken days later, she was witnessed once again by her sisters charging into the greenskin lines where she disappeared in a gout of holy fire, slaying many score Orks in the process. Naught was recovered of her but her rosary and a handful of ashes, which were placed at the heart of her simulacrum alongside the bones of other Sisters martyred on Armageddon alongside her. Hearing the deeds of Saint Joan sets the hearts of the 51st aflame and push them to ever greater deeds in order to become worthy of commemoration.

If the Ordo Hereticus have been more hands-on with the 51st in recent times, then Bethel Ingran is that hand made manifest. Ingran first encountered the forces of the 51st during the Rascellan Campaign while she was on the trail of the radical Ordo Xenos Inquisitor Felix Rex. After they helped her to bring the Emperor’s justice to the rogue Inquisitor, Ingran relocated to Balor, obstinately to continue the Ordo Hereticus’ observations of the population, but also to keep the 51st within arm’s reach if needed. After all, Ingran is a resourceful, calculating and cautious Inquisitor and would prefer to keep a proven-successful resource available whenever possible. Ingran is always found flanked by her Crusader bodyguards who safeguard her and ensure that she lives on to accomplish her mission.


Despite being passed up as Canoness Commander, Ludmila Stanbridge holds no ill-will towards Maria Orantes. In spite of this, Ludmila is Maria’s most vocal critic in matters of strategy and it is not unusual for war counsel to be interrupted by Ludmila’s protests. While some may find this to be insubordinate, Maria appreciates the presence of a dissenting voice, especially one who still holds great reverence throughout the ranks of the 51st. As a result of this, Maria has revised battle plans on a handful of occasions after hearing out Ludmila’s concerns. Ludmila, along with her more impetuous twin Sophia, are both honoured Sister Superiors, leading squads of Battle Sisters to war and earning herself even greater respect among her peers.

  • Ludmila Stanbridge
  • Sophia Stanbridge

Amongst the veterans of the 51st, Seira Ignata, Sister Superior of Squad Ember, has the greatest burden upon her. During the Rascellan campaign, early in her career with the 51st, Seira’s squad were wiped out by Orks and, with the help of a Deathwatch Kill Team which were operating in the area, she managed to avenge her fallen sisters. From there, she worked closely with Bethel Ingran to help him bring rogue Inquisitor Felix Rex to justice and has only risen in prominence since. In fact, just as Ludmila was viewed as Angela Impassia’s future successor, Seira is expected to one day take up the mantle from Maria Orantes when she is inevitably martyred. Perhaps this is why Seira has been entrusted with a copy of the Litanies of Faith. While this is likely not the legendary original copy of Sebastian Thor’s preachings, it is still enough to set the hearts of the Sororitas afire, so why risk sullying such belief? As for Seira herself, she leads squads of her sisters into battle with grim determination, eager to strike down all foes of the Emperor, but is particularly eager to drive a stake directly into the heart of any witches.

  • Sister Superior Seira
  • Sister Superior of Squad Rose
  • Sister Superior Camilla Wend of Dominion Squad Dusk
  • Katherine Nephil has become Sister Superior of the Seraphim
  • Sister Superior Hitomi Feng of Squad Nephilim
  • Sister Superior Lalatina Brody of Squad Aquilla

Whenever the 51st Commandery go on crusade, they are invariably accompanied by masses of Eccelsiarchy priests, missionaries and pilgrims. These hangers-on have proven to be quite useful to the Sororitas, as they spread the word of the Emperor in a more direct and sustained manner than the Order of Our Martyred Lady is capable of accomplishing. In this way, the 51st clears the way so that the masses may receive the word unopposed by any opposing, heretical dogma.

Maria’s fervent leadership has seen the ranks of the Sisters Repentia swell to numbers never before seen in the 51st Commandery’s history. This may be seen as alarming, but the vast majority of the those consigned to the Repentia were put there of their own free will. For them, Maria is an exemplar of the kind of faith they should aspire to and many sisters feel as if they fall short and have shamed themselves. For others, they did not agree with Maria’s leadership when she was appointed but have since come to realize that she was divinely appointed and seek redemption for their weak faith. For some, self-flagellation is not enough of a penance. The Sisters Repentia are always ready to accept these wayward souls and it is considered the honourable first step on the path to redemption to take up the eviscerator in the Emperor’s name.

With influx of Repentia come, inevitably, an influx of Mortifiers – disgraced sisters for whom redemption is no longer an option. All that is left for them is prolonged agony and damnation as they make themselves useful to the Emperor one last time. Most notorious amongst the 51st’s Mortifiers is the Anchorite is known as “The Damned”, a sister who has been locked inside of her armoured sarcophagus for decades. Her suffering has been so prolonged that only the longest-serving veterans of the chapter can remember her sins, but these are so grave that they refuse to speak of them. Younger members of the sisterhood don’t even dare speculate in hushed tones – as they see The Damned launching herself into battle to end her suffering, they fear that their idle curiosity may one day earn them a similar fate.

  • The Damned

Quick Fix: My Life in 2021 in Photos

~ Barloq ~ 2 Comments

Hey, I know that my writing output has slowed considerably in 2021, down from three posts in the first half of January to… well… one (really great) article since then. It’s not that I don’t have ideas – I’ve got a Retrospective planned for months and ready to go as soon as I get time to dedicate to watching the franchise again, and I wanted to write about Gamestonk back when that was in the news. Unfortunately, since mid-January my life has be complete chaos and making time for writing hasn’t been realistic. Not only that, but I’m the sort of writer who needs to have a creative spark in order to make any sort of progress and so I haven’t even had the time for inspiration. It’s only in the last few weeks that I’ve gotten some of that creative spark back, so here I am writing a bit of a reflection on what I’ve been up to lately to stretch some of those creative juices. Hopefully I will be able to dedicate more time in the near future to bring posts to life.

So what really pushed this stressful period of my life into overdrive? Well, first of all, my wife and I bought a house… so that was a break-neck month and a half of stress getting finances in order, dealing with lawyers, banks, mortgage brokers, etc to make that work, not to mention that we then had to co-ordinate the actual move in the middle of a snow storm (have I mentioned before that I live in Canada?).

As if that wasn’t enough to deal with, a week before we moved in my wife decided she wanted to get a puppy. And not just any puppy – a Belgian Malinois puppy. Freaking John Wick 3 attack dog puppy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we have had our attentions fully on him since to ensure that he is properly trained and have had to get a trainer to help. This alone has kept my hands full and away from the keyboard, since basically my entire day gets dedicated to either work or keeping him from getting into trouble until bedtime where I might get an hour of free time if I’m lucky. So, uh, yeah maybe you can see why there haven’t been many posts lately.

Good thing the little bastard is so damn cute though.

That said, it hasn’t been all work for me. I do get a bit of downtime while the dog naps, but that has mostly been dedicated to painting miniatures. I started getting into Warhammer 40,000 again last year and have been expanding my Adepta Sororitas army with some of the new models they received recently. I’m really happy with how they’ve been turning out and can’t wait for COVID to be over so I can get them on the tabletop. Since moving into the new house, my huge pile of shame is now readily available to me so I’m trying to work away at it (which is also nice because I’m on a very tight budget now, so miniature purchases are extremely low priority).

Mortifiers
Battle Sisters squad and an Imagifier
The uncontested centerpiece of the army and probably the best mini I have ever painted, The Triumph of St. Katherine.

Other than that, most of my free time has gone towards reading. Having finished the 2000ad Humble Bundle, I’ve moved on to other comics. First was Strontium Dog, one of 2000ad’s classic, flagship franchises. I bought and read the original series run, which is available in the five volumes of S/D Agency Files. Volume 1 is rough, pulpy fun, but the series really hits its stride in volumes 2 through 4. These stories are incredible, I heartily recommend reading them and getting drawn into the dangerous universe of Johnny Alpha, Wulf Sternhammer and Durham Red. Unfortunately, it all comes to a sticky end with volume 5, the aptly (if unsubtly) titled “The Final Solution” which brought the original series to a close. I am really mixed on it. I feel like it may have worked eventually but feels unearned and rushed at this point in Johnny Alpha’s story, especially the villains’ place in the story. It’s too bad, Strontium Dog has never recovered since then, with every attempt to follow-up or retcon this ending being half-baked and not measuring up to the original run. C’est la vie, even if it’s not the best ending, sometimes it’s just best to allow characters to rest.

Speaking of which, I followed-up on the other four volumes of Judge Anderson: The Psi Files. Volume 1 is just as great as volume 2, showing a more philosophical, rebellious and downright weird side of Justice Department than we get from Judge Dredd. However, things go completely off the rails in volumes 3 and 4. I’d like to know what drugs Alan Grant was on in the late 80s and early 90s because some of the stories he comes up with here are insane. While some of the more philosophical ones are at least interesting, none are satisfying and some are at odds with established characters such as Chief Judge Volt or make no sense (you’re telling me most of the children of MC1 disappear or die and this never gets brought up again…?). Meanwhile volume 4 hinges entirely on one epic storyline about a psychic virus… which ultimately makes no sense. So Judge Anderson dreams she’s on Deadworld? Okay, but how does this leave a psychic virus in her head? And how does this psychic virus even spread? And how are they even supposed to figure out the very fine details which end up defeating it at the last second? It all makes no sense and ruins what could have been an interesting storyline which feels like a prototype for the apocalyptic Day of Chaos which would come years later. Luckily, volume 5 turns things around with far breezier storylines, although it’s still a far cry from the series’ heyday in the early 80s.

Finally, I’ve recently started the Attack on Titan manga, having picked up a huge bundle off Humble a couple months ago. I’ve got a love-hate relationship with this series, having seen the first two seasons of the anime and a couple episodes of the third before dropping off of it. It’s at the point where I might even make a “Attack on Titan is Kind of Trash” in the near future, depending on how the manga shakes out. If it’s as frustrating as the anime was for me? Hoo boy, you can count on it. I’m on volume 2 currently and it has been very close to the anime so I’d say count on it.*

Anyway, that’s my life these past few months. I’m hoping to get back into writing a bit more regularly, but it all depends on how life shakes out and if the dog’s training becomes less of an overwhelming situation in my life. Fingers crossed that I can bring this latest Retrospective series to life soon and maybe even come out with a couple writing projects I’ve been plugging away at… we’ll see.

*Post-script: So I’ve binged through a couple dozen volumes of Attack on Titan in the past few days and I’m not so sure about this being worthy of a Trash post. I legitimately enjoy this manga and most of my complaints are going to be nitpicks in comparison to all the praise I have for this story. I don’t want “____ is Kind of Trash” to turn into a hyperbolic, nitpicky complaint platform, I want it to be for popular media that I legitimately did not like or that I think are massively overrated. I will be watching the anime after I finish the manga, so maybe there will still be a post for the anime, since I was unimpressed by the first two seasons, but they’d really have to drop the ball for it to qualify. I guess we’ll see.

*Post-post-script: Oh. Oh my. I may have spoken too soon. Attack on Titan‘s final arc can only really be equated to a Game of Thrones Season 8 level disaster.

Let Them Fight – The Human Characters in the Monsterverse

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Godzilla vs. Kong was easily the most excited I have been for a movie since… well, since right before Covid-19 hit and delayed A Quiet Place: Part II indefinitely. Most of the Monsterverse films are little more than disposable fun (except for the 2014 Godzilla, which is a straight-up great blockbuster as far as I’m concerned), but I got hyped regardless and found myself entertained as I watched the big gorilla and the big lizard punch each other on-screen. To the surprise of no one, Godzilla vs. Kong‘s human characters feel superfluous, which led to the common refrain of “well it’s a kaiju movie, of course the human characters suck!” This feels like a total cop-out though, because not only are there several good human characters in the long history of the Godzilla and Kong franchises, but we had a solid human cast in Godzilla 2014. Think about it – we don’t get any giant monsters until about forty minutes in and Godzilla himself doesn’t show up until nearly an hour has passed. The humans have to hold up the entirety of that first hour and the film doesn’t suffer because of it – can you imagine that with one of the more recent Monsterverse movies? So what happened? How did we get from the grounded human drama of Godzilla 2014 to the melodrama and camp of the latter-Monsterverse? Let’s examine each of these movies in turn and see how the human characters were handled there.

Oh, and in case it wasn’t obvious?

Alright, with that said, let’s get into this…

Godzilla (2014)

At the time of its release, one of the big controversies with Godzilla 2014 (which I’m just going to refer to as “Godzilla” from here on for simplicity’s sake) was that Bryan Cranston’s Joe Brody shouldn’t have been killed off and that they should have killed the film’s actual main character, Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Ford Brody, instead. The reasoning for this is because Joe was a far more compelling character than Ford, which is hard to deny – he’s a broken man driven to self-destructive obsession to try to understand the unexplained nuclear reactor meltdown which killed his wife a decade and a half ago. There’s some good family drama early on where he and Ford reluctantly reconnect and try to uncover what caused the reactor disaster. Cranston puts his everything into this role, and the writing is interesting enough to carry the film on its own long before any kaiju appears on-screen. However, as soon as the first MUTO emerges and Joe dies, Ford takes over and is characterized as a dull, lawful good soldier. I can see how this would be a big come-down from Joe’s more compelling characterization, but I feel like this was an underrated narrative decision which ultimately made Godzilla a stronger film overall.

The best and most distinctive part of Godzilla is that it frames the kaiju action at a human level. The monsters are enormous, rarely able to fit into the frame and they are so gargantuan and unstoppable that the lives and cares of humans are unworthy of their attention. Some of the most memorable scenes in this film are just random humans trying to survive the destruction going on around them, with the audience’s full understanding that it is all unintentional collateral damage. For example, the tsunami in Hawaii or Godzilla going through the Golden Gate Bridge aren’t particularly crucial moments in the plot, but they get so much focus because they show the scale of the devastation that these monsters can unintentionally cause from a human perspective. In this kind of narrative, you need someone on the ground level who would have to be in the vicinity of the monsters in order to progress the story and Ford works perfectly in this regard. Think about it – what would Joe have done to improve the plot if he didn’t die? He’s not a soldier; at most he would be working with Monarch to try to stop the MUTOs. In order to keep Joe in this film, we would either require more dull expository scenes with Monarch (which would hurt this film’s pacing), or he’d have to be awkwardly shunted to the background of the film in order to preserve the narrative direction. Ultimately, killing him off was the most efficient solution – unfortunate, but necessary to preserve the pacing of the narrative.

On the other side of the narrative, we have Ken Watanabe as Dr. Serizawa. He isn’t really a main character per se, instead acting as more of a mouthpiece to deliver exposition and, perhaps unintentionally, deliver memes straight to the audience. He’s in the movie just enough to let us know what’s going on and who we should be rooting for, but he doesn’t make a huge impression. He’s functional and unobtrusive.

That said, Godzilla‘s biggest sin would be how badly it wastes Elizabeth Olsen’s Elle Brody. Like… seriously? You got Elizabeth Olsen (who had just received critical acclaim for Martha Marcy May Marlene and was poised for superstardom in the MCU) and then trapped her in a forgettable role as Ford’s wife. She barely even appears in the movie, but there’s no good reason for this to be the case. She’s a freaking nurse caught in the big showdown in San Francisco, you’re telling me you can’t find something for her to do? Especially in the early hours of the attack in San Francisco, before Ford is even on-site, she should be treating victims, avoiding falling buildings, etc.

Godzilla‘s human characters aren’t the most compelling out there, but you can see that they’re interesting enough to carry a good chunk of the film by themselves and provide a strong narrative grounding which only serves to make the overall film stronger. The monsters are still the main draw, but the humans don’t feel like they’re actively robbing us of anything interesting. It strikes by far the best balance in the entire Monsterverse and looking back it really is shocking how bad the human characters have become in comparison.

Kong: Skull Island

Kong: Skull Island starts out promisingly enough, introducing us to a large and colourful cast of human characters. They’re all clear archetypes (Tom Hiddleston’s your action hero, Brie Larson’s your tough leading lady, Samuel L. Jackson’s your Vietnam squad leader, John Goodman’s your shady, desperate scientist), but they’re interesting enough to give us people to care about and get the plot moving forward. The problem with Skull Island is that these characters don’t really go anywhere beyond these basic archetypes. Once the characters end up on Skull Island, they have little to no development to speak of, with the only real exception being that Samuel L. Jackson’s Preston Packard goes kill-crazy (which is particularly notable because it is implied to be due to PTSD from the Vietnam War which leads to this breakdown, providing some well-trodden political commentary on the film’s 70s backdrop). The lack of development is particularly disappointing with Tom Hiddleston’s Conrad and Brie Larson’s Weaver – you’d think they’d at least give their leading duo something to do other than just look cool, but nope.

Luckily, Kong manages to get away with having such a disposable human cast by treating them as, well, disposable. The cast gets quickly whittled down one-by-one in fun ways at a quick pace. Like Godzilla, Kong: Skull Island wastes several of its talented actors, but I’m less annoyed about it here because Kong seems to understand the how high-profile its cast is and revels in killing them off unexpectedly. If anyone feels truly wasted it would be John Goodman, but he gets a funny and memorable death which helps make up for it. That’s not even mentioning Shea Whigham who, as a recent viral tweet stated, has one of the funniest death scenes ever. It almost feels like a disrespectful way to off one of the most colourful characters in the film, but it’s so funny that it is hard to hold it against the movie.

Kong also has one ace up its sleeve in the human character department and that’s John C. Reilly’s Hank Marlowe. He gets by far the most interesting characterization as a World War II fighter pilot who gets stranded on the island with a Japanese soldier and is instantly endearing to us with his fun personality, capability and desperation to get home to his wife and son who has hasn’t seen in almost thirty years. Seeing him reuniting with his family at the end is surprisingly poignant for a film that is almost entirely breakneck-paced action up to that point.

Kong: Skull Island represents the best and worst of human characters in a kaiju film. On the one hand, the cast is undeveloped and exist mainly to be killed off in fun ways, but on the other hand they’re just interesting enough to carry the plot forward, shuffle us along to a lot of entertaining action sequences and don’t feel like they’re detracting us from the good stuff (Kong kicking ass). While developing a couple more cast members would make the narrative resonate more, this is around the baseline of what you could consider “acceptable” for a broad-appeal adventure movie.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

The number one complaint about Godzilla was that the title monster didn’t show up nearly enough. King of the Monsters came along to try to right that, but the end result leaves me so mixed. On the one hand, this is a fundamentally flawed film, but it might be my favourite entry in the Monsterverse and is the best 5/10 movie I’ve ever seen by far. At the very center of King of the Monsters‘ flaws are those human characters, which are probably the worst in the franchise in some ways.

King of the Monsters has more of an epic, globe-trotting scale compared to Godzilla‘s grounded and human-level scope. This necessitates a larger cast of soldiers and scientists who are constantly giving exposition dumps to explain what big disaster is going on at any one time, which they make sure to constantly update us on. As if this wasn’t enough by itself, we also have family melodrama between Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga and Millie Bobbie Brown (I could not tell you their actual characters’ names for the life of me), who are caught up in a bio-terrorist plot to unleash monsters across the world. This family drama has the potential to be compelling – their son was killed in the attack on San Francisco and it has caused them to grow estranged from each other. Kyle Chandler blames Godzilla for his son’s death and wants to destroy all the monsters, whereas Vera Farmiga uses their loss as motivation to try to save the world. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t explore their relationship any further than that. There’s just no time for human drama with all the action going on and it ends up serving as a way to have a fractured family caught on opposite sides of the conflict.

Serizawa also returns to lead the scientists and he’s about as functional here as he was there. His heroic sacrifice resonates because we’re familiar with the character and he seems like a good person who wants to do the right thing, although he still isn’t very well-developed. As for the rest of the characters, they are a bunch of nobodies. Like, don’t get me wrong, there’s a bunch of people we see a whole lot on the Argo: the lady commander/pilot, the smart alec, O’Shea Jackson Jr.’s soldier character, and probably a couple other nobodies that I’m forgetting because they were all so pointless. Oh and Sally Hawkins reprises her role from the first movie as well, but she was so forgettable there that I didn’t even realize she wasn’t in this as a stunt-casting due to her role in The Shape of Water. Oh, and she gets unceremoniously stepped on early in the film, making her character’s entire existence feel even more hollow.

Unlike Kong: Skull Island, King of the Monsters sticks to Godzilla‘s more serious tone, making these characters all just so dull to watch and entirely forgettable. For example, there’s the scene where Rodan flies over a Mexican town, destroying it from the hurricane-force winds created by his passing. Conceptually, it’s similar to the scene in Godzilla where Godzilla comes ashore in Hawaii and unintentionally creates a tidal wave which wipes out the entire downtown sector, but far less exciting because the film doesn’t bother to make us care about anyone on the ground. Like, they throw O’Shea Jackson and a kid into the scene, but at this point I don’t even know a thing about this soldier and this kid literally just showed up out of nowhere. Not only that, but we don’t even get a proper resolution. One second we see O’Shea Jackson desperately holding onto this kid and then like five minutes later we find out that they’re all fine, not that any of us were wondering anyway. To make matters worse, King of the Monsters does a fantastic job of giving all the monsters distinct personalities. Hell, King Ghidorah’s individual heads have more interesting characterization than anyone in this movie! Worst of all? The human characters actively take up time which should be dedicated to the monsters fighting, especially in the second half of the film. The two most egregious examples are when Rodan and King Ghidorah are fighting and suddenly the film cuts away to dumb drama aboard the Argo and when we get just one shot of Ghidorah wrecking downtown Washington D.C. That’s the kind of moment where some ground-level scenes of destruction could go a long way, but King of the Monsters‘ scope is planted so firmly on its epic, globe-spanning scale that it can’t even take the time to linger on this before zipping the plot ahead to the next big event. Again, I like King of the Monsters and in some ways I think it’s the ideal Hollywood blockbuster interpretation of a kaiju movie, but the human characters are by far its greatest weakness, to the point of being actively detrimental to the whole experience.

Godzilla vs. Kong

I was nervous going into Godzilla vs. Kong, but after seeing the first trailer I was reassured that they had learned one lesson – even if the human characters inevitably sucked, they had pulled off a masterstroke by making Kong the film’s true leading character and emotional core. That said, some studio head out there decided that there still have to be human characters in this movie, and these are a tale of two halves…

For the Kong half of the film, we get Alexander Skarsgård as Nathan Lind, Rebecca Hall as Ilene Andrews and Kaylee Hottle as Jia. They’re all functional at best and serve little more purpose than to drive the plot forward (Lind has researched the hollow earth, and they need Kong to guide them there) or provide a connection to Kong (Andrews is the top researcher on Kong and Jia has bonded with Kong to the point of being able to communicate with him). This half of the film also features Eiza González in an obviously-villainous corporate underling role as she funds their expedition to the hollow earth, but she similarly has little in the way of development or interesting motivation, you just sit there waiting for her sudden but inevitable betrayal. Like most people in the Monsterverse, the humans in this half of the film are purely functional – not actively detrimental or disruptive, but about as uninteresting as you’d expect from a film like this… so better than King of the Monsters, at least.

Speaking of which, that brings us to the Godzilla half of the film, which is centered around Millie Bobby Brown’s returning character, Madison, along with her friend and a bumbling conspiracy theorist who unearth a sinister conspiracy afoot at Apex Cybernetics… and good God, this is by far the worst set of characters we’ve gotten in the entire Monsterverse. Godzilla vs. Kong makes the interesting decision of dialing back on the po-faced seriousness of Godzilla and King of the Monsters and instead goes for a campier tone. This is an sensible idea for a monster movie, since they are intended to be a breezy fun time, but the camp is cranked to the max whenever this trio is on-screen to the point of being grating. It’s to the point of being cartoonish, as these three clowns bumble their way into Apex Cybernetics, somehow avoiding detection the entire way, until they come face-to-face with the moustache-twirling corporate villain. This half of the film also suffers from two egregious sins (actually let’s make that three – Jessica Henwick was cast but cut from the final film, what the fuck movie!?). The first is that poor Kyle Chandler is completely wasted, relegated to little more than a cameo role. A familiar face would have done wonders and I struggle to see how you couldn’t have worked him into the plot in a more substantial manner. The second sin is that the bad guy’s main henchman is freaking Ren Serizawa, the son of Ken Watanabe’s Dr. Serizawa, and the film doesn’t play this fact up at all. Hell, he even dies unceremoniously, making the entire existence of this character pointless. Like, at that point why not just make him a nameless goon? Or just fold his role into that of the main bad guy? I don’t understand this decision and all I can think is that there was significant chunks of story cut out in the final film which may have expanded on his role.

So Godzilla vs. Kong has one set of characters who are functional at best and another set that I actively wish would die. This might have been a crippling flaw for the film but, like I said at the outset, Godzilla vs. Kong downplays this issue by making Kong the true main character. This provides what should be a blueprint for future Monsterverse films where they won’t feel like they have to saddle us with boring or annoying humans and instead focus on the monsters directly. That said, I would like to see a return to what made the first Godzilla film so successful, where the action is shown from ground level with humans scrambling just to survive. King of the Monsters already put the stakes about as high as they can realistically get, so I feel like trying to maintain that kind of scope just isn’t sustainable and instead the right course of action is to lean into the human stakes instead. I really enjoy the Monsterverse and it would be great to see this franchise continue and improve as time goes on

15 Years of RPG Characters

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Like many a life-long nerd, I have played several roleplaying games over the years and have built up quite the collection of characters in the process. In addition to being a garden-variety nerd, I also happen to be a drama nerd, so bringing a character to life is what really draws me to table-top RPGs. As a result of this, I have several characters that I’ve grown really attached to over the years and, reminiscing about them recently, I decided to document them here for posterity.

As you’ll soon see, they start out pretty simple and grow more complex over time. I often start with a basic character idea and then work from there, filling out details as the campaign continues. I also lean towards characters which are charismatic and competent, although I also enjoy playing meat-headed idiots for a laugh. Hopefully you find these characters interesting or inspirational!

Before we get into the TTRPG characters proper, I need to lay a little bit of groundwork. Many of my characters had their basis in one of two sources. The first is Warhammer, where I came up with the names for many of my heroic characters, which would later be repurposed for my own story or RPG characters. The second source of inspiration was a series of unstructured, narrative RPGs I took part in from 2005 to around 2010. These RPGs might be more accurately described as cooperative storytelling, but many of my characters were introduced and developed here and then later readapted or repurposed elsewhere.

Barloq (DND 3.5E)

My very first TTRPG character was back when I was in high school in a very basic and very short-lived campaign with a couple friends. It was a wild and messy time for several reasons. First off, I had to keep this campaign very much on the downlow because my parents still believed the Satanic Panic was real and that Dungeons and Dragons was a gateway to the occult and I didn’t need them getting on my case about it. To try to compensate for that, I tried to play a melee class and gravitated to Paladin, the perfect class for a conservative youth. To no one’s surprise, I was also kind of an idiot – somehow I didn’t understand relative heights and weights at this point in my life. My only real reference point was the character creators in NHL video games, where I’d max height and minimize weight, my dumb brain thinking that I didn’t want to look “fat”. This would result in 6’10”, 130lbs monstrosities and, being a moron, I applied this to my Paladin as well.

Anyway, I called the gangly knight “Barloq”, the name of my Saurus Oldblood general in Warhammer, and jumped into our first session where he was joined by a spell-caster named Atlas. It was as basic as could be – two adventurers at a tavern, when the bartender asks them to deal with some rats in the basement. Unfortunately, this is where the next big mess came in – the DM accidentally made these rats several levels higher than us and they mangled the spellcaster, nearly killing him. I landed a critical hit with my longsword and, feeling sorry for his mistake, the DM allowed it to kill both rats to get us out of the situation alive. It was incredibly messy and, while we had fun, the game died out right there. It was an early taste of fun for me, but I was disappointed by just how short-lived it was and really had no time to develop any sort of character for Barloq. The basis of the character still lives on within me though, with the name “Barloq” being one I reserve for noble, chivalrous, good-natured knight characters ever since. Perhaps one day he will come back and get a full reimagining…

COMMANDO, Arnold Schwarzenegger, 1985, TM and Copyright © 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved.

Bruce Phipps (GURPS)

My first real, long-running RPG experience, Bruce is the character that inspired me to write this whole list in the first place because there’s no way that I’m ever going to get to revisit him. He came about as a result of a perfect storm when I was in university. My friend who had played Atlas in the previous entry joined me in a GURPS campaign that was being run on a forum we were part of. My character was motherfuckin’ Bruce Phipps, a chain-smoking, heavy drinking, meathead, body-building bruiser who had a heart of gold, dedicating his life to protecting his young daughter. It wasn’t unusual for me to play a bruiser, especially at this time, but playing a full-on 80s action hero was totally different and something I could only really pull off in an RPG system as flexible as GURPS.

Unfortunately, the campaign itself became a bit of a shitshow. It started well enough, taking part in mob hits and the like, and the game lasted several months. However, the GM started to get a bad habit of introducing characters from movies and TV shows into the story like a bad fanfic. Soon enough, shoehorning Agent 47 and Dexter into the story became more of the driving motivation of the story rather than the characters’ actions and effectively made us unable to deal with a swathe of unkillable, overpowered enemy NPCs.

During one particularly memorable session, one of these cameo characters was trying to get us to all surrender our weapons to them. Everyone else in the party did, except Bruce. I saw absolutely no reason why Bruce would do this and so I stood my ground and kept passing persuasion checks, halting the game for a good half hour due to Bruce’s stubbornness. Eventually I relented just to let the story continue, only for the character to immediately reveal that this was a trap and that we were all now captured. Everyone else let out an audible “WHAT THE FUCK” but I just shrugged and was like “Told ya so…”

The actual mini I made for Andilus Gallich!

Andilus Gallich (Deathwatch)

After the GURPS campaign crashed and burned, I was still itching to play a TTRPG, but this time I wanted to be the GM to avoid any of the issues I’d experienced in my games thus far. I was mulling all this over when I discovered that Fantasy Flight Games had a Warhammer 40,000 RPG that let you play as a space marine called Deathwatch. My nerdy heart went aflutter and soon I had a whole campaign set up and an avatar to use in game, Andilus Gallich. He was initially named after the Wolf Lord of my Space Wolves army, Andilus Greatsword, but over time I started to develop him more as his own character and appended the “Gallich” to differentiate them.

Andilus Gallich was a Space Wolves Assault Marine seconded to the xenos-hunting Deathwatch and put under the command of a mysterious Inquisitor. Along with a Librarian, Apothecary and a squad of tactical marines, they went on a number of action-packed adventures, purging the foes of the Emperor across the galaxy.

Being Space Marines, I was kind of limited in how I could differentiate Andilus Gallich and give him a personality, but he was a mentor figure for his squad, a factor which I would eventually use to allow him to be promoted to the venerable office of Wolf Priest. The Deathwatch campaign went on for quite a while, but scheduling issues caused it to end prematurely on two separate occasions before I finally decided to pull the plug on it for good. The ruleset of Deathwatch itself was also an issue, being very combat-heavy was fairly boring to me, especially because the game was wildly imbalanced – the standard bolter was capable of slaying any enemy with ease, let alone that one of our squad members was armed with a heavy bolter that could liquefy tanks in a volley! I had to introduce rule changes several times to even have a chance of balancing things and while I had a better handle on what worked by the end of the campaign, it was routinely a curb-stomping for the players.

Ellri Hraustr (DND 5E)

After Deathwatch I was out of the TTRPG scene for several years until one of my friends invited me to play a DND 5E campaign he was organizing. While I was tempted to reimagine Barloq again, I decided that I wanted to play a character who was the polar opposite of what I usually play in RPGs (heavy armoured, giant sword-wielding, lawful good fighters). This gave me the basis for the character, a morally-shady spellcaster. I was initially going to make this character a sorceress, even more outside my usual comfort zone, based on Tharja from Fire Emblem: Awakening, but when I found out that there were going to be female characters played by actual women in this campaign I decided to just go with a male sorcerer. For his name, I went back to the well of my WH40k characters for inspiration, taking the name of my Rune Priest (aka, Space Wolves mage), Ellri Hraustr. Little did I know that this character I made to get me out of my comfort zone would end up becoming by far my favourite character I’ve ever created.

In my friend’s campaign, Ellri believed that he was destined to bring about the downfall of the gods. Unfortunately for him, he was also a socially-stunted hermit who caused several of his companions to hate him and who planned on murdering them all on several occasions. That said, given his high Charisma stat, he also ended up being secretly super hot and was seduced by a pirate party member in a hilariously awkward encounter. The group went on several adventures but, just as the story was getting interesting and we were really starting to enjoy the characters, the campaign abruptly died out. However, the pirate’s player and I continued discussing our characters’ adventures and this led to us running a follow-up “one-shot” where they led a treasure expedition. This “one-shot” ended up leading to several other follow-ups, until it turned into what is now an on-going, several year long campaign with hundreds of pages of supplemental character interactions outside of the actual game sessions. During all this time Ellri has grown and matured, enduring tragedy, confronting his own demons and trying to make amends, all while raising a daughter and trying to deal with the numerous threats bearing down on the ones he loves. He’s grown so much in the past several years and become a truly rounded and compelling character. He also been with me as I became aware of my own social anxiety, to the point where I’ve kind of passed it onto him as well, inadvertently. It’s funny, for a character I initially created to be the opposite of what I usually do, Ellri has grown on me, challenged my “normal” for an RPG character, and even changed my view on the world in some respects.

Finn Rand (DND 5E)

If there’s one character class in DND which I’d be least likely to gravitate to, it’s the monk… which ironically made it the class I most wanted to try next. So when a friend asked if I wanted to create a guest character for a one-shot they were running, I knew what class I was going to go with. For further inspiration, I had recently watched Iron Fist season 2 and enjoyed it, so I knew I wanted to play a character who was essentially the Iron Fist. I have this strange appreciation for the show’s version Danny Rand, in spite of the various ways it bungled the character. During character creation I rolled really well, getting above average or great on all but one stat… which ended up being a measly six. Given the character’s reputation, I put this towards Intelligence and thus Finn Rand was born.

Finn Rand was an idiot monk who would was obstinately a pacifist, but had no compunctions about beating the shit out of people with his fists alone (in fact he loved it and the contradiction had probably never occurred to him). The party got into a showdown with a group of giants who he tried to negotiate with. When that failed, he negotiated with his fists, constantly using ki to knock them over. He also passed on little bits of wisdom to the party which, while maybe not appropriate to their situation, were no doubt inspirational. He was kind of fun to play, but very one-dimensional since punching and knocking things over were the only things he was really good at and his abysmal intelligence meant that he was useless outside of combat (and, in fact, could be dangerous if he suggested that they try to talk to the vampire lord and see what he says). As a result, I don’t imagine that Finn will be making any returns, but stranger things have happened.

Maria (DND 5E)

It’s undeniable that Dark Souls and Bloodborne marked a shift in the sorts of RPG playstyle I liked. For years I had always liked a heavily-armoured, slow, greatsword-wielding beatstick with little to no magical ability. This carried over in my first playthrough of Dark Souls 2 (my first Souls game), but eventually I started to gravitate to the playstyle I had developed in Bloodborne – low HP, low-to-medium armour, sky-high attack with some magical abilities to supplement it. I like the trade-off of death after only one or two hits in exchange for high mobility, speed and attack, it means that if I make a mistake I suffer for it and it encourages flawless play to get through. Naturally, inspiration from Souls and Bloodborne would eventually carry over into a TTRPG character.

One of my friends wanted to DM a DND session set in the Magic: The Gathering universe and gave me a guide of some characters I could build. This setting had vampire as a player species and I decided that I wanted to give this a try (the vampires in this setting are FAR less powerful than they are in DND). I also decided that I wanted to finally try my hand with a female character and very quickly gravitated to a character inspired by Lady Maria from Bloodborne. I was going to play a monster-slaying paladin at first but then I found out that blood hunter had been added as a new playable class and it was too perfect to pass up. A stoic vampire who uses blood magic and sacrifices her own lifeforce in order to slay monsters, no matter what the cost? I was stoked and couldn’t wait to play her.

…of course, that game never ended up materializing and I was forced to wait until another friend started a game and said we could bring characters we’d previously made into it. I jumped at the chance and Maria finally was unleashed. Funnily enough, this was in a game crawling with regular DND vampires, so the differences between them and Maria were even more pronounced. She was really fun to play as well, effectively translating that high risk/reward playstyle that I love so much while also being interesting character to roleplay outside of combat. Early in the campaign she purchased a magic rapier which she soon discovered was cursed. She kept this on her the whole time, but in the climactic battle against an evil sorcerer, she finally unleashed it, knowing that she would need its power to overcome the villain, no matter what it would cost her. The blade drained Maria’s lifeforce, but still she held on until the villain was vanquished and her entire arm was shriveled and weakened. It was tragic, but she was stoic about it, simply saying that “It needed to be done.” I really hope I get the chance to play her again – this campaign is on a bit of a hiatus after the first storyline ended, but we all said that we wanted to continue it, so hopefully Maria will be back slaying evil soon!

Hatred Bonefury (DND 5E)

Bards tend to fit within a very specific mold, so of course I wanted to make a “different bard” when a friend suggested that we create weird characters for the one-shot they were running. Being a huge metal head, that meant a half-orc bard who goes from town to town playing heavy metal concerts. I quickly gravitated to a Nathan Explosion-type character, complete with the death growl voice (which seriously screwed up my voice for several days every time I played this character… but worth it). This also meant that I was playing an idiot once again, so we got moments of heavy metal badassery where Hatred summons a tree to life to play in his concert, while also believing that the monster ravaging the town is a potato and therefore needs to be turned into chips and french fries to be defeated. He was also, in true Nathan Explosion form, only concerned about the monster because it was killing his fanbase off while they still had money to spend on merch. Again, he was a one-dimensional joke character and my voice suffered in the two sessions this one-shot lasted, but goddamn if he wasn’t a blast to play. I hope that Hatred gets to go on tour again someday soon.

Orome Arrick (FFG Star Wars)

Back when The Force Awakens came out I bought the Force & Destiny rulebook for Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars RPG line. Unfortunately, I never really got a chance to get a game together until this past month when an old acquaintance suggested we get a game going. I quickly gravitated towards a pilot and scoundrel character in the vein of Han Solo, while also trying desperately not to just be a bargain-bin copy. I came up with the name Orome Arrick – like many of my characters he was named after a character I created during the cooperative storytelling RPGs I took part in ~15 years ago. Orome is a young, cocky flyboy, a very capable pilot forced into the life of an outlaw. I was inspired by Netflix’s The Business of Drugs, which shows how cartels exploit desperate people at every level of their business in order to enrich themselves and wanted to reflect that in Orome’s backstory. As a result, the Black Suns criminal organization has manufactured a situation where Orome owes them a crippling debt and has become addicted to booster blue, providing them with a dependable and convenient revenue stream which enriches them several times over. Orome dreams of a life where he can break free of these obligations and explore the galaxy at his leisure, but most of his time is preoccupied navigating the seedy underworld he finds himself in and doing whatever he can to get ahead. We’re only a couple sessions in so far, but I’m really enjoying Orome as a character and can’t wait to see where his adventures will take him.

G’dorah Hirose (DND 5E)

My latest character is one that I haven’t gotten the opportunity to actually play yet, but which is an interesting concept I have wanted to try for a while now. I’ve always found Hannibal‘s portrayal of prosopagnosia fascinating and have thought that it would be interesting to roleplay a character who cannot see the faces of those around them. There’s an delicate balance to strike here – obviously I don’t want to be disrespectful to people who actually suffer from prosopagnosia, turn the condition into a dumb joke, or make it a trait that completely defines the character. I’m relishing the challenge though and think that I will be able to portray it respectfully when the time comes.

Drawing back on the very earliest days of my character creations, this character is a dragonborn paladin (similar to the Lizardman general who kickstarted all of this). I came up with the name G’dorah Hirose for two reasons: as an obvious tribute to King Ghidorah and the actor who portrayed him in the Showa era, and as a “Dorah the Explorer” joke (hey, I said I wasn’t going to make fun of her condition, not that I have to be completely straight-faced). Dorah is a holy warrior of the goddess Eldath and suffered a serious head injury fifteen years ago against a demonic foe which caused her prosopagnosia. She believes that the condition is a result of demonic scarring upon her soul and it has caused her to become even more pious in an attempt to cure her affliction through atonement. I’ve always loved fanatical characters (Maria fits within this mold as well) and G’Dorah is poised to give me even more opportunity to explore this fascination. Even if this potential campaign falls through, I can guarantee that G’Dorah will be getting used sooner or later!

Game of Thrones, Miguel Sapochnik and the Devolution of Battle Strategy

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Last week Game of Thrones fans were finally treated to the battle which the series had been building towards since the very first episode, the biggest battle put to film, the most important battle in Westerosi history: “The Long Night”… and it was, um, something. The battle itself is undeniably a visual spectacle, with incredibly tense moments as our heroes get put in danger and an overwhelmingly bleak tone as all of their efforts to stop the horde of the dead are met with failure after failure. However, if you give the episode any sort of critical thought, the whole facade begins to quickly crumble, assuming that you could even see what was happening (for my part, I watched it on a 10″ tablet with max brightness and could see well enough, but can still acknowledge that the lighting was too dark and lacked necessary contrast to be able to tell what’s going on). The way that this battle was directed and written just makes absolutely no sense from the characters’ perspectives and was obviously designed solely to elicit the reactions that the showrunners wanted at any particular moment. This kind of writing wouldn’t be an issue if it was done well, in such a way that you won’t notice and can justify it easily. “The Long Night” is not that kind of episode, unfortunately, and it really got me thinking about how Game of Thrones‘ battle sequences have nosedived since Season 6.

There are a couple elements which are key to the drop in quality of the writing and direction of Game of Thrones‘ battle sequences. First, and most obviously, the show caught up to and overtook the books in Season 5, meaning that showrunners Dan Weiss and David Benioff have been having to make up the rest of the story themselves ever since. Secondly, the directing duties on the show’s big battles have been passed on from Neil Marshall, who helmed “Blackwater” and “The Watchers on the Wall”, to Miguel Sapochnik, who helmed “Hardhome”, “Battle of the Bastards” and “The Long Night” (among other, smaller episodes).

With this in mind, I want to take a look back at Sapochnik’s battles, analyze the writing, the strategies of the characters and then compare them to Marshall’s battles. Oh, and I really shouldn’t have to specify this, but in case you’ve gotten this far without realizing, this article is going to contain SPOILERS!

Hardhome
I’m actually going to start this article off on a positive note by opening with “Hardhome”, the episode which put Sapochnik’s name on the map and probably earned him the job of directing all of the big battles on Game of Thrones going forward. Season 5 of Game of Thrones was a dreary slog, with such highlights as Dany being ineffectual in Meereen, Sansa’s storyline of “who’s going to try to rape her this season!!!” coming to a satisfying conclusion with her getting brutally raped by Ramsay Snow*, and the Dornish subplot that everyone loves! Then, out of nowhere, comes “Hardhome”, which was so good that it’s straight-up my favourite episode of the show. The surprise factor was probably the biggest thing about it – traditionally, Game of Thrones saved its big moments for the ninth episode of the season, and this was only the eighth episode. Plus, the episode was already going on its way for about 30 minutes before it cuts to Jon, Tormund and Edd all taking a trip to Hardhome to try to rescue the tens of thousands of wildlings camped there.

Sapochnik and the writers then spend the 10 minutes before the battle very wisely. For one thing, they introduce us to some great new characters. Most notable is Karsi, a fierce wildling woman who makes a massive impact considering she only has a few scenes in the episode. We also meet a Thenn called Loboda who, despite being a meathead, is a pretty fun character and effective for what they’re going for. Sapochnik also using establishing shots to subtly show off where the action will be taking place – a confined area just off the beach with a cliff to the side, a wall closing off the rest of Hardhome and a hut where Jon and company debate with the wildlings. I also like that, in this set-up, Jon Snow is set-up as a leader who really knows what must be done – the army of the dead are coming and the enmity between the Night’s Watch and wildlings has to be set aside or they will all die. Jon’s taking a great personal risk coming to Hardhome, not only because the wildlings could just kill him, but also because he’s disenfranchising the Night’s Watch back home. After 10 minutes of debate, Jon manages to convince 5000 of the wildlings to come with him, because he knows that the army of the dead is the more important issue than the squabbling of the Nights Watch and the free folk. However, there are still tens of thousands of wildlings who don’t trust him and who refuse to leave. It’s a strained situation, but it seems like everything it working out about as well as can be expected.

…and then there’s a thunder in the distance and things suddenly go to shit. No one was expecting a battle, not the wildlings or the Night’s Watch, so the fact that everyone is caught off guard and overwhelmed is very much justified. Jon and the other fighters are scrambling to mount any sort of defence, keeping them from breaking through the ramshackle walls while the Night’s Watch evacuates the 5000 wildlings by boat. The battle sequence is visceral and chaotic, but thanks to the establishing shots we got earlier and a very cool long-take in the middle of the battle, it’s easy to tell where everything is happening during the fighting. Then there’s just tons of cool moments, from the horror tone of the wight attacks, to Wun Wun tearing through wights with his bare hands. Then there are two of my favourite moments in the whole series: the fight between Jon and a White Walker (which ends with the Walker looking legitimately surprised) and Jon and the Night King staring each other down as the overwhelming threat of the dead finally becomes clear.

Tactically, the battle makes a lot of sense. The defenders were caught off-guard and have to scramble to mount any sort of defence. Jon’s objectives during the battle also make sense – buy time for the wildlings to retreat to the boats and secure the dragonglass since it’s the only weapon they know of that can defeat White Walkers. The White Walkers’ battleplan seems to make sense as well – their only real objective is to kill as many wildlings as possible in order to bolster their ranks, and considering that they have gotten probably 50,000-80,000 wildlings by the end of the massacre, they’ve clearly achieved their goal. In addition, the White Walkers keep themselves on cliffs high above the battle where they can observe and be safe from any danger and, when the defenders put up more resistance than expected, they send an army of wights off the cliff to outflank and overwhelm the remaining living.

All-in-all, Hardhome’s a great battle. Compared to Neil Marshall’s battle sequences, it has a lot more visual flair. However, it balances spectacle with good writing, making for a battle sequence that is thrilling to watch without having to turn your brain off. Some of this comes down to the fact that it breaks the series’ usual conventions where, instead of having some last-minute outside force come and save the heroes from certain death, instead the whole battle is a desperate and unexpected retreat, meaning that tactical acumen gets a bit of a free pass (spoiler alert: even then, the characters still make better judgments than they do in Sapochnik’s next two battles). Hardhome is especially impressive when you remember that it came during the first truly dreary season of the show as well, providing the one stand-out episode of season 5.

Battle of the Bastards
Then we come to Sapochnik’s sophomore battle sequence, “Battle of the Bastards”. Considering how good “Hardhome” was, I was expecting the best battle in the entire series up to this point. However, even the first time I saw this episode and people were raving about how it was the best episode of television ever, something rang truly hollow and disappointing about it. It quickly became evident than, unlike the previous battles on Game of Thrones, “Battle of the Bastards” prioritizes spectacle over sensible character actions, victory is won through sheer luck and contrivance rather than strategy and heroism, and the show’s attempts to make us think that characters could die at any time are cast aside completely. The writing also takes a nosedive, setting plot beats that the showrunners think will be particularly effective, but failing to string them together in a way that is satisfying or makes sense. Season 6 was, overall, an improvement on season 5, but “Battle of the Bastards” was the moment where it became obvious that this show had completely changed (a fact that many others would not recognize until the idiocy of season 7, but the seeds of episodes such as “Beyond the Wall” were very much planted here).

Season 6 builds up the coming conflict between Jon Snow and Ramsay Bolton, having Jon try (with little success) to gather bannermen to take back Winterfell for the Starks. Irritatingly, he ignores good counsel from Sansa for basically no good reason other than to create conflict between the two of them. “Know your enemy” is just a sound tactical foundation and surely Jon is not stupid enough to believe he would learn nothing from Sansa. It’s literally just there to create conflict, but it’s unearned and it makes the series’ hero suddenly seem like a total idiot. I really want to reiterate this, because people seem to have forgotten such a simple fact: Jon was not stupid before Season 6, nor was he a bad commander – hell, in Neil Marshall’s second battle for Game of Thrones, “The Watchers on the Wall”, Jon’s intelligence gathering, heroic escape from the wildlings and assumption of command are instrumental to the Night Watch’s victory against overwhelming odds. He is also the only character smart enough to realize the bigger picture, that the politics of Westeros are unimportant and are only going to cause the army of the dead to kill everyone when winter comes. Jon Snow is only stupid when the writers need him to be – in this case, to make Sansa look smarter, rather than, oh I don’t know, making Sansa actually do something smart.

Anyway, so Jon at least justifies why they’re staging the attack now, despite being badly outnumbered: with winter rapidly approaching and their supplies dwindling, their window of opportunity is shrinking and they don’t expect to get any more reinforcements soon. So, while the odds aren’t great, this is their one best shot, which is a fair enough explanation (see, show writers, it’s that simple!). He does seem to have some sort of strategy to draw out Ramsay’s forces and limit their advantages, but we don’t really see much of it, nor does it really matter in the end regardless.

The next morning, the battlelines are drawn and they’re set up fairly well, initially – Sapochnik shows off the wide-open battlefield and the sizes of the forces. He also uses a traditional film trick here which shows up in similar battle sequences, where each side in the battle is oriented to face one side of the camera (Jon’s forces facing right, Ramsay’s facing left, as seen in the image above). This is a technique used in battle sequences such as The Two Towers to help keep the viewer aware of what side they’re seeing at any given moment and to keep the action understandable, no matter how chaotic it gets.

However, things start to break when Ramsay brings out Rickon Stark and forces him to run across the battlefield to escape his arrows. Look… I get that Rickon’s in a panic, he’s going to try to run as fast as he can and he’s not going to think to dodge the arrows coming at him. And I get that Jon is going to try to save his brother… but holy shit, no one tries to yell at him to stop? They all just stand there, mouths agape, no one tries to help? It gets even worse though: Rickon gets shot to death and then instead of going back to his forces, Jon fucking charges at Ramsay single-handedly. Inexplicably, he survives multiple volleys of arrows landing all around him and a cavalry charge completely alone. This is just unforgivably stupid. It makes Jon look like a goddamn idiot who single-handedly screwed up the entire plan and who gets tons of his own men killed because of it. Like I said – I can understand him getting emotional about saving his brother and screwing up the plan because of that. If that was the only dumb part about this episode, it would irritate me, but it would be something I could overlook… but no, we’re just getting started…

The big, spectacular moment of the battle comes when the cavalry from both sides meet and Jon is caught in between them in a brutal, visceral and admittedly insanely well-crafted long-take that shows off the insane chaos of the battle. It’s clearly ridiculous that Jon Snow makes it out of all of this completely unscathed due to pure luck (and impregnable plot armour), but that’s so obvious that I’m not going to nitpick about it too much. Then we have Ramsay firing arrows at his own troops on the off-chance he hits one of Jon’s men, a move which shows off the character’s ruthlessness, but also should have caused his men to rebel against him. It’s not like the Bolton men are staunchly loyal to Ramsay, and even if they are, are they really going to be fine with killing their own friends and allies for no good reason?

In my opinion, the point where this battle truly goes off the rails and becomes stupid is when a mountain of bodies just appears out of nowhere and causes Jon and all of his forces to become encircled. Sure, Sapochnik tries to set up that there are mounds of bodies starting to pile up during the fighting but… why? Are people just scrambling to be king of the hill on writhing and screaming terrain? And how the hell are you going to justify that these enormous piles of bodies just so happen to form a crescent shape which corners Jon’s entire army when a unit of Bolton men with shields suddenly and miraculously encircles them without contest? It’s just so stupid and the writers’ intention is transparent – we need Jon and his men to look like they’re all going to die! Just make it happen, dammit!

By this point, the battle has well and truly become a clusterfuck. After several minutes of fighting, the wildlings just show up and get surrounded by a shield wall that came out of nowhere. We don’t even ever find out if Davos and his men were caught up in this – at one point we see them rushing into the battle, but were they caught inside the shield wall? Who knows! If not, why didn’t they try to help break Jon’s men out? Who knows! Also, the “sides” camera trick has been well-and-truly abandoned by the time the shield wall shows up and it becomes hard to tell which side of the battle anyone is even on now. Hell, we don’t know which direction this mountain of bodies is in for several minutes.

But then, the tide turns in the manner basically everyone knew was going to happen – Littlefinger shows up with the knights of the Vale and saves the day. Despite being obvious to anyone who had been watching the show, this “twist” was just plain stupid writing, in my opinion, mainly because Sansa withheld the information of their arrival from Jon for no other reason than to build dramatic tension. Seriously, Sophie Turner confirmed as much herself.

Emotionally the payoff relies on Sansa withholding critical information purely to get a smirk when her plan (???) pays off and it’s like the writers started from that moment and wrote backwards to get there.https://t.co/RzyFhcrtGC
— Dan Olson (@FoldableHuman) May 3, 2019

Again, this is just the writers making Jon look like an idiot purely to make Sansa look smart, without bothering to make her do something that was actually intelligent. Instead, we get a scene that makes her look like she’s making a very petty power play that results in the deaths of hundreds of people for little more reason than to stoke her ego. She really couldn’t let Jon know that there were reinforcements coming that would change their entire battle plan?

Through all of this, Ramsay has actually been a pretty smart battle commander (firing on his own men aside). He figured out Jon’s weak point and lured him into a trap, then encircled his forces and nearly killed them all. However, when the knights of the Vale show up, he knows that he’s beaten and makes the smart call to retreat into Winterfell. Jon had said as much earlier, if Ramsay was smart he would have just holed up in Winterfell to begin with, but he wanted to toy with Jon and made the critical error. Still, based on Jon’s existing forces, he would have won the battle if not for help from an unexpected quarter and a whole lot of pure luck on Jon’s side. It’s pretty bad when you write your villain as being the only one using any sort of tactics, the one who deserves to win the battle, and yet they still lose regardless. Personally, I think it would have been way more interesting to have Ramsay’s bannermen turn on him. This was set-up earlier in the episode when Ramsay refuses to duel Jon and Jon says that he wouldn’t stick his neck out for his men, and when Ramsay orders his men to fire at his own troops. It also would have called back to a really cool sequence from A Dance With Dragons where Stark-loyal bannermen are turning on Ramsay within the walls of Winterfell. Hell, we can even have Sansa be the one coordinating with them if we want to have her do something truly clever without having to knock someone else down a peg to make her look good. All-in-all, “The Battle of the Bastards” is such a wasted opportunity and is emblematic of the way that Game of Thrones‘ writing quality has nosedived. It only really cares about spectacle and “big moments” and sloppily moves between these with poor justification for it. The fact that it turns the heroes into morons for plot convenience is just the icing on the cake.

The Long Night
Miguel Sapochnik’s latest battle came just last week with the much-anticipated “The Long Night”, one of the longest and most epic battles ever put to film. However, the reaction has been much more negative than I was expecting, being the second-lowest scoring Game of Thrones episode on Rotten Tomatoes and inspiring numerous critical thought-pieces on everything from the poor lighting to the nonsensical battle plans… oh wait, that’s what this is, isn’t it? Seriously though, all of the critiques of Jon and Dany’s battle plans are totally valid, because they really, really suck. I’ll give some credit where it’s due – unlike “Battle of the Bastards”, I actually like this episode. It is truly epic, visually stunning and there is some major tension throughout about who will die and whether any of our heroes will make it out by the end. However, all of this is undermined by the fact that I just can’t ignore how unjustifiably bad the army of the living’s defensive strategy is. If you can, then sure, you’ll probably love this episode whole-heartedly. I just can’t get past it though because, once again, it’s very clearly done to artificially maximize the drama while making our heroes look completely incompetent.

First of all, the entire plan is flawed from the beginning. Sure, they know that they need to kill the Night King in order to defeat the entire enemy force in one blow, that’s a solid objective. Hinging the entire plan on luring him to Bran is… questionable. For all they know, the Night King might not even show up, or he might just send a horde of undead to kill Bran indirectly. Still, I won’t nitpick this too much either, because in the grand scheme of things it’s not that important to the episode’s issues. What rackles me is that they don’t seem to have any sort of idea about the enemy that they’re going to be fighting. Are you trying to convince me that Jon, Dany and whoever else came up with this defensive “strategy” didn’t gather all the people with experience fighting wights and White Walkers, or read history books about fighting them before coming up with their defensive strategy? They have Tyrion on location, a man who led the defence of King’s Landing and won through clever tactics, are you telling me that they’re not going to leverage his talents and figure out the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses, or the vulnerabilities they might exploit? I actually thought that the whole “bad things are going to happen in the crypt” foreshadowing was going to be a misdirect because… c’mon guys, Jon isn’t about to forget the time he saw the Night King resurrect tens of thousands of people right in front of him. Are you seriously telling me that no one, no one thought that maybe the crypts would become a problem if the bodies inside weren’t burned or removed? Apparently not, because the writers wanted that dramatic moment, therefore everyone has to be stupid… and that’s just the dumb shit in the planning phase.

As for the battle itself, Jon and Dany line up their forces… outside the walls… in front of a spiked trench with a single choke point to retreat to… with catapults set up outside of Winterfell and basically no one manning the walls. Bloody hell… As if that wasn’t dumb enough, the Dothraki are then sent to charge into the darkness with the goal of… uhh… winning the battle single-handedly? Dothraki are shock-and-awe light cavalry, they’re obviously going to be ineffective against a literal wall of dead who give no thought to their own self-preservation. This becomes even funnier when you realize that Melisandre showed up unexpectedly and lit all their weapons on fire moments before their charge, meaning that the original plan was apparently to charge in the dark with no way of seeing what was going on and with weapons that would be ineffective against their foe! Predictably, they nearly all get wiped out in moments during an admittedly really eerie shot as the rest of the army of the living sees their fire lights burning out one by one. The scene continues the series’ questionable portrayal of non-white races in how casually it dispatches the Dothraki, but hey the writers got their big, epic spectacle so I bet they’re happy about killing off a race of people uneventfully.

Then when the dead come for the rest of Jon and Dany’s forces, they are predictably overwhelmed and need to fall back into Winterfell. This shows off exactly why being outside of the walls of the castle in the first place was stupid – they’re vastly outnumbered and can barely see their foe, why not leverage their advantages and fight from a position of strength? That’s before you take the trench into account, which is designed in such a way that the defenders are forced through one narrow choke point to retreat. Not only does this mean that the defenders could gore themselves if they are pushed back, but it also necessitates the Unsullied to be nearly wiped out in order to allow as many troops as possible to escape. Again, would they not have been better served holding a narrow choke point where they could maximize damage instead of being overwhelmed and wiped out? Apparently not, because the writers needed a dramatic last stand for them!

Anyway, the dragons then engage in the battle and, predictably, give the defenders a small reprieve with the major damage they can inflict on the dead (although it is a drop in the bucket compared to the size of their entire force). The dragons could have been the key to the defence, but the Night King actually makes a pretty smart move by summoning a blizzard to severely limit their visibility and neutralize their effectiveness. I’ll also give Jon and Dany some credit here – they couldn’t really foresee this happening and so I can’t blame them for not having a plan to counter it. However, relying on Drogon to light the trench was probably not the best idea, but luckily Melisandre manages to set it ablaze and buy the defenders another short reprieve. And what do they do during this reprieve? Fuck all, basically. Apparently no one was manning the walls until the wights start throwing themselves at the flaming trench to create bridges of corpses across it. This one doesn’t even make sense to me… like, why? Did the writers think it was more dramatic to have no one on the walls, as if we’d think the battle was over and won? Why are they not just there shooting at the dead regardless? Even then, when the dead start swarming up the sides of the walls, there are absolutely no defences to stop them – no rocks, no burning oil, nothing. This is especially egregious when you go back to Neil Marshall’s previous battles, “Blackwater” and “The Watchers on the Walls”, which have the defenders explicitly dropping rocks and explosives down on the attackers to keep them from getting up, because that’s just smart.

At this point, the battle starts turning into a clusterfuck of chaos. For one thing, the geography of Winterfell is very unclear. I don’t know if Sapochnik thought that we were well aware of the layout of Winterfell after several seasons here, but… fuck man, I could barely keep track of the characters when I started watching this show, like hell I know the actual layout of Winterfell. At one point, we have a dragon smashing through a courtyard, while cutting back and forth to Sam, Brienne and Jaime who are all surrounded by wights and fighting in… another courtyard, I guess? The proximity of these two areas is not clear at all.

Furthermore, the editing does not help matters any. Characters will be surrounded and overwhelmed when we last see them, disappear for what seems like ages, and then when they reappear, somehow they’re still fighting? At the rate that we see the wights flooding into Winterfell, the whole castle should be swamped with dead very quickly, but there’s still plenty of time for Arya to get into a stealth sequence inside of the keep that lasts several very quiet minutes. And, as much as I love him, how the hell does Davos survive this battle? At one point we see him on the wall by Arya, who is getting swarmed by wights and only escapes because she’s rolling high on her acrobatics and stealth checks. Then, he disappears until the very end of the battle when he pops out and basically says “hey, I’m alive still and was still on the wall the whole time!” This swarming also makes the whole plan with Bran even more questionable, as Theon and the Ironborn should have been quickly overwhelmed trying to defend Bran from the horde of undead that bear down on them.

After getting knocked off his dragon, the Night King nearly seals the deal by resurrecting all the dead from the battle, surrounding Jon before he can deal a killing blow, overwhelming the already-overwhelmed defenders and unleashing chaos in the crypts. It’s clearly another effective move by the Night King, and Jon only makes it out when Dany arrives on Drogon and burns a path for him. Then, because the writers need Daenerys off of her dragon for a dramatic finale, they cause her and Drogon to stand around like utter idiots on the ground so that dozens of wights can swarm the dragon, knocking her off and forcing Jorah Mormont to come to her rescue. This is another moment that’s just so obviously contrived to get the characters into a position that the writers want them in, since it makes Dany look like a total moron for forgetting that there’s still an army of the undead right behind her. Bloody hell, Game of Thrones…

And then we get to the ending. There’s another tense sequence as we see all the characters getting overwhelmed and Jon struggles to try to get into the Godswood to rescue Bran, a zombie dragon blocking his path and preventing him from doing so (it sure would have been nice to know if the Godswood was just on the otherwise of that dragon though, that would have make the scene even more tense). The Night King, all of the White Walkers and hundreds of wights pile into the Godswood, kill Theon and the Ironborn and then the Night King moves to kill Bran personally. In contrast to everything else he’s done so far, this was just dumb on the Night King’s part to expose himself and proves to be the critical error… however, the manner in which it happens is just baffling. Literally out of nowhere, Arya apparently runs through the horde of the undead without any of the wights or White Walkers noticing and then jumps at the Night King to stab him! He catches her, but she does a fancy trick with her Valyrian steel dagger and stabs him to death, killing him and instantly killing all of the White Walkers and wights in one blow… Wow, the dues ex machina weakness of the White Walkers was bad enough, but since that was established in season 7, I won’t belabour it here. Really though, there is no justifiable reason for how Arya could get through that crowd unnoticed and attack the Night King. I’ve seen people saying that she was hiding in the tree above, but if you watch the episode again, that’s clearly not the case. They don’t show us how she does it, we just see the wind past a White Walker’s head, heavily implying that she literally just ran and went for it and, once again, bails our heroes out through sheer dumb luck. It’s a really disappointing end for a threat that the show has been hyping up since literally the first minute of the first episode, and when the show has been hammering home to us that the politicking and squabbling has never actually mattered compared to the threat posed by the dead. Once again, the defenders’ plan was so bad that I was actually hoping that the showrunners would have the balls to just let the dead win and spend the last three episodes with Cersei struggling to stay alive against the Night King.

As for Arya being the one who got the killing blow… well, I think it was a really badass moment, but the more I think about it, the more unsatisfying it is to me. For one thing, it makes the whole Jon vs Night King set-up that the show has been pushing since season 5 kind of pointless. Sure, there was some minor set-up for Arya to do it – she performed her knife trick on Brienne in season 7 and Melisandre mentions a prophecy that Arya will close “blue eyes” (a prophecy that was retconned afterwards to fit this episode, by the way). However, this is basically nothing compared to the seasons of prophecy about Azor Ahai, the legendary warrior who will defeat the darkness and who, based on the criteria for the prophecy, really could only be Jon Snow or Daenerys. I guess the show just decided to drop the whole prophecy it had been building towards for several seasons? It’s not like Game of Thrones is a series where prophecy doesn’t come true either, especially not prophecies from R’hllor the Lord of Light. Sure, Melisandre may get the details wrong, such as when she believed that Stannis was Azor Ahai reborn, but a whole prophecy is never wrong like that. Personally, I think that they just should have gone with the obvious choice and have Jon kill the Night King. It has been his struggle for several seasons now and it’s only obvious because it has been set-up to happen. It just feels like a more satisfying payoff to me than having Arya kill him, considering that there have been basically no stakes built up between the two. It would be like having Jon kill Cersei in the big finale – he barely even knows her, why make him be the one to do it? Honestly, I would have much preferred Arya to get the killing blow on Cersei rather than the Night King. That would have been much more satisfying and deserved, but considering that they had her kill the Night King, I doubt that we’re going to see that happen now.

As you can see, “The Long Night” is a tactical mess which continues to show off the series’ emphasis on spectacle over sense that it had gained since season 6. Going back to Neil Marshall’s battles, “Blackwater” and “The Watchers on the Wall”, it’s striking to see the difference. Sure, Marshall doesn’t inject quite as much visual flair into his battles as Sapochnik, but they do a much better job of conveying the action to the viewer in a coherent manner, both battles are won by the heroes for outsmarting the opposing side rather than by dumb luck, and they still manage to work in an impressive amount of spectacle and character moments. There’s still one Miguel Sapochnik battle to come on Game of Thrones, but considering what we’ve gotten these past two seasons, I’m not holding out much hope that it will be any better than what’s come before.

*I’m being sarcastic of course, but I know someone will take this seriously so I need to specify that. The first 5 seasons of Game of Thrones completely wasted Sansa to an infuriating degree.

Pokemon Sword & Shield: 10 Speculations Based on the Trailer

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

Welcome back! As promised, I have a number of speculations based on the announcement trailer for Pokemon Sword and Shield. With that in mind, if you didn’t read my hype piece or watch the reveal trailer, I would definitely recommend doing so before going forward. Got that? Okay, let’s put on our tinfoil hats and dive in!

(Update: I have also made a video companion to this article with some of the more interesting theories. You can check it out below!)

10) Runes and Nazca Lines

Let’s get the obvious speculation out of the way now, because this is clearly the most tantalizing detail that Game Freak has put into the trailer. In the town with the Grass-type gym, you can see a number of rocks with runes on them, a Stonehenge-like rock structure and a huge mural carved into the countryside which looks similar to real-life Nazca Lines. So what does this all mean? Well the runes remind me of the Unown from Gen 2, but I doubt that they’re a direct link with a Pokemon like they were back then. More likely to me is that the runes are simply describing the events of the Nazca Lines that we see. The environmental art here seems to depict a giant dragon-like creature breathing fire or lightning. There really isn’t a lot to go off of about what this Pokemon may be like, other than it’s large, bipedal and spiky. The art also depicts people and cattle around this Pokemon’s feet, but whether they are worshipping the creature or being killed by it is ambiguous (the fact that there is a person lying upside down to the far left of the mural has me thinking that it’s likely that this ancient Pokemon was attacking people though).

(Edit: Fiore1300 from Discord has let me know that the Nazca lines as I called them here are called “Hill Figures” in Britain. That doesn’t change the implications or the theory too much, but it’s worth updating, thanks Fiore1300!)

It’s worth taking into account the popular legends of Stonehenge and the Nazca Lines when analyzing the runes, Stonehenge-like structures and Nazca Lines in this trailer. In particular, these structures are commonly associated with aliens contacting ancient humanity in pseudo-science circles. This isn’t an unprecedented idea for Pokemon either, as ever since the very first generation there have been several Pokemon which are confirmed to be aliens and others which come from other dimensions. So what could this mean for the game? Well, if this is related to the game’s mascot legendary, then perhaps they will be summoned from space by the villains for the game’s final confrontation, similar to Deoxys in Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire or the emergence of Necrozma in Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon. This seems most likely to me – details like this have pointed towards legendary Pokemon in basically every generation, so the idea that this won’t actually lead somewhere is incredibly unlikely.

9) The Themes of the Mascot Legendaries

Pokemon games always release with paired games, but I think pretty much everyone was caught off-guard by how unconventional Sword and Shield were. However, if history is anything to go by, then the titles of these games are going to be a hint at what we can expect out of the games. Since Gen 5, the titles of the games have always tied directly into the mascot legendaries and their themes in some manner – Black and White referred to the dragons Zekrom and Reshiram and their opposed ideals, X and Y were reflected in the names and designs of Xerneas and Yveltal, and Sun and Moon reflected the designs and aesthetic for Solgaleo and Lunala. Therefore, it stands to reason that Sword and Shield is going to describe something about the design and possibly themes of the mascot legendaries for this game. The most obvious speculation is that the Sword legendary will be hyper-offensive, whereas the Shield legendary will be incredibly bulky, which would be quite interesting to see. I think it’s also likely that they will both reflect knighthood in some manner, since they are often associated with swords and shields (obviously).

The shared wolf’s head in the title design also makes me curious about whether it’s meant to be a hint about the legendaries’ designs, especially considering how out of place the head is on that shield. Personally I’m thinking it’s unlikely that we’d get a hint that obvious, but it is possible that this could signify that the mascot legendaries are a branching evolution like Lunala and Solgaleo were in Gen 7. Also, if the wolf’s head is a hint about the mascot legendaries, then it is inconsistent with the dragon-like beast in the Nazca Lines, meaning that that might be another legendary Pokemon in the game. Perhaps the mascot legendaries fought back against the dragon-like Pokemon and kept it at bay? That would be consistent with the idea of knighthood which is inherent in their themes.

8) Could Beauty Contests Be Making a Return?

Okay, I’ll admit that this is easily the most crackpot theory I’ve got here, but I find it incredibly intriguing. So, as we know, professionally-made trailers are always put together very deliberately. Therefore, I find it interesting how brazenly Game Freak put the above advertisement on display in the trailer. At first I just assumed that it was a bit of background decoration to make the world look more interesting, and it’s definitely possible that that is all that this is meant to signify. However, if it was put in there as a hint, I decided to check out what each of the berries in the poster was for. I see a Cheri, Pecha, Wepear, Lum, Aspear and Chople berries for sure in that image, but there are also a couple curious details. For one thing, that pointy, red berry appears to be a Nomel berry, but those are usually coloured yellow, not red. Perhaps this is a new berry which is going to be added in the game? There is also a yellow, leafy berry which appears in the background of the image which appears to be a Pinap berry, which is also interesting because this berry has been mainly used recently in the Let’s Go games and Pokemon Go in order to make Pokemon drop more candies and level up or evolve your Pokemon faster. However, Pinap berries were originally introduced to be used in the creation of Pokeblocks/Poffins, which were essential for the Pokemon Contests minigame in Gen 3 and 4. Also contributing to this is that the Wepear and Nomel berries which appear in the poster were also used exclusively for Pokeblocks and Poffins. The product that they’re advertising also appears to be some sort of Pokeblock treat, which makes me wonder if perhaps this is a signifier that Pokemon Contests are going to be making their return in Pokemon Sword and Shield. Again, I could be looking into this waaaay too deeply, but I really have to wonder why Game Freak would put such a conspicuously Contest-related poster into this trailer if not to hint at something.

7) Could the Galar Region Be Near Kalos?

This bit of speculation is based on a few details within the trailer and the Galar and Kalos regions’ real-life inspirations. First of all, the Galar region definitely seems to be based on the United Kingdom – this is evidenced by the geography of the map, the architecture (particularly the Big Ben-like clock tower in the steampunk-esque city and the Stonehenge-like objects in the town with the Grass-type gym) and the Scottish-looking clothing of the female character. Gen 6’s Kalos region, in contrast, was very clearly based on France, so if these regions follow their real-life counterparts then they should be very geographically close to one another, more so than any of the other regions in the Pokemon world. This is also evidenced by the fact that the weather vane we see, one of the first images in the trailer, is very clearly topped with a Fletchling, Gen 6’s signature bird Pokemon. Kalos also had a royal aesthetic to much of its traditions which meshes well with the ideas of knights in Sword and Shield, and possibly even suggests some cultural exchange. Now, whether this is true or not, there’s no telling whether this is just an environmental and lore detail, or if Game Freak might actually work it into the game. Just imagine how many people would freak out if you could travel to Kalos in the post-game. That is definitely wishful thinking on my part, but Game Freak are at least hinting that the two regions could be close to one another and the last time that happened we got to explore them both, so…

6) Scorbunny

Let’s move onto the starters for Gen 8. We’ve really got a great lineup in this generation, starting with the very cool-looking Scorbunny. This Pokemon is described as “always running and bursting with energy”, suggesting a fast, possibly physical attacking Fire Pokemon. When you also take into account the soccer imagery in the trailer, this makes me wonder if perhaps Scorbunny’s name has a double-meaning – perhaps the “scor” is referring to a soccer “goal” in addition to the fire “scorch”? The tape across its nose also suggest that there could be a soccer or sports theme to this Pokemon, which makes me wonder what typing its evolutions could have. Fire/Fighting seems obvious, but considering that we already have 3 Fire/Fighting starters, including two which are already quite speedy, I hope it’s evolutions are something more unique.

5) Sobble… the Veteran Player’s Pick?

The somewhat-derpy Sobble has attracted a lot of attention since the reveal trailer dropped. From its chameleon-based design, its timid nature and strong sense of self-preservation, it appears to be a very unique and characterful starter, the likes of which I haven’t really seen before. This makes me wonder how this personality is going to be translated in-game. Traditionally, all starter Pokemon have the Torrent, Overgrow or Blaze abilities by default, depending on their type. These abilities power up their Water, Grass or Fire moves, respectively, when their health is low. This doesn’t seem like the sort of ability which makes sense for a cowardly Pokemon like Sobble, which makes me wonder if Gen 8 might break from convention and give its starter Pokemon unique abilities from the start. Personally, this would be incredibly intriguing if true, as well as a very welcome change.

This line of thinking opens up a few options. For one thing, Game Freak may also decide to give Sobble a unique attack to reflect its timid nature, such as a defensive move like King’s Shield. In the trailer, we see it go completely invisible and then run away in order to hide. There’s also a weird detail in the trailer when Grookey is hitting the rock with a stick and we can see Sobble’s footprints stay for a second before splashing away… again, this could be a crackpot theory, but when we see Sobble running away, could that have been a decoy while the real Sobble was actually hiding, invisible, right beside Grookey until the coast was clear? How would that even translate in game? It’s a really intriguing idea at the very least. I really hope Game Freak does something very unique and unconventional with Sobble and its playstyle, because it has a ton of potential to be an unforgettable starter.

Adding to the idea that Sobble might end up being a “finesse” option for experienced players is that the first gym in the game appears to be a Grass-type gym. Obviously, Grass is super-effective against Water types, so right off the bat the game is suggesting that if you want to start the game in “hard” mode, pick Sobble. This wouldn’t be the first time that difficulty in Pokemon games was based on your starter Pokemon – Gen 1 was notoriously easier if you took Bulbasaur as your starter, since it could breeze through the first two gyms and most of the early-game Pokemon, as opposed to Charmander, which struggled against the first two gyms and many early-game Pokemon. Then there’s my burning love/hate relationship with Chikorita – taking that Pokemon as your starter turns Gen 2 into a cruel torture experiment. All that said, if Sobble is intended to be the “hard” option for players, then would it not stand to reason that it would get an unconventional, finesse playstyle? I would certainly hope so.

Aww who am I kidding, I still love you Chikorita…

4) Grookey

Grookey is easily my favourite of the new starter trio, he’s so adorable that I have been spamming Twitter with #TeamGrookey since the reveal trailer. Of the three starters, he probably has the least information available to speculate off of – he’s described as “mischievous and curious” and at one point we see him hitting a rock with a stick… and that’s about it. Perhaps he will evolve into a Grass/Dark type to suit that mischievous angle? Perhaps its evolutions will use sticks or some other polearm to attack? It’s really anyone’s guess at this point. That said, we do already have a similar chimp starter from Gen 4, Chimchar. I’m curious how Grookey and its evolutionary line are going to differentiate themselves from Chimchar’s line, since Infernape is such an iconic Pokemon. That said, if we basically just get a Grass/Fighting version of Infernape, I’ll still be totally down. It could also be interesting since we’ve already had a bulky Grass/Fighting starter in Chesnaught, so it could fulfil a speedier niche (although then it also has to compete with Virizion, to be fair).

3) Less Gen 1 Fanservice?

This one might end up being wishful thinking, but in the trailer we see thirteen Pokemon, plus the three starters at the end. It is perhaps notable that only one of these Pokemon is from Gen 1, Pikachu, and that’s mainly because it’s the series’ mascot. The other twelve Pokemon on display come from the other generations:

Gen 2 – Hoothoot, Tyranitar
Gen 3 – Flygon, Wailmer
Gen 4 – Munchlax, Lucario (using a Z-move!)
Gen 5 – Minccino, Zweilous, Braviary
Gen 6 – Meowstic
Gen 7 – Wishiwashi, Grubbin

Considering that Gen 1 tends to have the most well-known and iconic Pokemon, it seems to me that this distribution of Pokemon appearances was a very deliberate choice by Game Freak. Think about it – Pokemon games have been pouring on the fanservice for Gen 1 for years, especially since Gen 6 and Gen 7 with the high number of Mega Evolutions and Alola variants, respectively. When you consider that Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee just came out as well, it makes sense that Game Freak would not only dial back on the Gen 1 over-saturation, but would also try to draw in fans of Let’s Go and Pokemon Go into discovering other Pokemon that they may not have been aware of. At the very least, if Sword and Shield can put a bit more balance into the generational representation, that would be very much appreciated for series veterans and newcomers alike who may be growing weary of having to catch yet another Rattata.

2) There’s Got to Be an Aegislash Regional Variant… Right?

Okay, this one is pure speculation on my part, but it seems pretty easy to implement and likely in my opinion. When considering the themes and designs that the names Sword and Shield might suggest for the mascot legendaries of the Galar region, the most obvious issue that comes to mind is that we already have a sword and shield Pokemon – Aegislash (which is one of the strongest Pokemon in the game currently). As a result, I’d think it should be fairly safe to say that the mascot legendaries aren’t going to be a literal sword and shield, but shouldn’t Aegislash get some sort of special treatment in a game which basically embodies its name? This certainly wouldn’t be unprecedented, as Sun and Moon had regional variants of previous Pokemon appearing with new typings, moves and abilities. For Aegislash, this could be something as simple as an altered design on their shield and sword to make them fit into the Galar region’s cultures better.

All of this said, the biggest issue to this theory is that Sun and Moon also did absolutely nothing about the fact that there already were sun and moon Pokemon, Lunatone and Solrock, and then did nothing about it. Could they not have given them a unique Z-move or something at least? Hopefully Game Freak doesn’t miss a prime opportunity again, because some sort of special attention for Aegislash seems like a no-brainer to me.

1) Meltan and Melmetal Distribution Method is Probably Going to be Bullshit

This is another bit of speculation which isn’t really based off of any hard evidence, but it’s something I’ve been dreading since Meltan was announced. Basically, Meltan was announced on September 25, 2018, probably more than a year before Sword and Shield will release. This new Pokemon and its evolution, Melmetal (seen above) were exclusive to Pokemon Go and Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee. It also very recently became possible to acquire shiny variants of these Pokemon in Let’s Go for a limited time. They are also considered Mythical Pokemon, meaning that they are generally not able to be acquired in-game through normal means, often requiring some sort of event to become available. This is what worries me about how these Pokemon are going to be integrated into Sword and Shield. You see, I have a living Pokedex and live by the old mantra of “Gotta catch ’em all”. In the last couple of generations, new mythical Pokemon have been handed out in-game via codes for a limited time. However, I have a sinking feeling that Meltan and Melmetal will only be able to be acquired if you transfer them from Let’s Go to Pokemon Sword and Shield. Game Freak has gone on record saying that they want to let players transfer Pokemon from Let’s Go to Sword and Shield, which lends credence to this idea. It also wouldn’t be the first time something like this happened as well – in Gen 4 you could get Manaphy by beating the spin-off game Pokemon Ranger and then transferring an egg a Gen 4 game. This was the only way to get Manaphy until Gen 6, 10 years later, when all mythical Pokemon up until that point where given away throughout 2017 via code. It is now 2019 and if you missed out on the mythicals released in 2016 or 2017, it could still be years before we get another chance at them. If this is the case, then if I don’t get Let’s Go in order to get Meltan and Melmetal, then my only chance to get them will be via trade or waiting for ~5 years for them to be given away again… sigh, such are the trials of being a Pokemaniac.

What do you guys think? Do you have any theories of your own that I missed? Do you think that I’m completely off-base with my ideas? Feel free to let me know in the comments below, I’d love to discuss it with you!

Pokemon Sword & Shield: 5 Confirmed Features that Have Me Hyped

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

The tonal whiplash is real: I just got off of a pretty dire warning about isolationism and white supremacy, and then we’re straight into a hype piece about the next generation of Pokemon. That’s just how we roll here at IC2S. I’m hoping to have more Pokemon content starting this year, with videos on Youtube and Twitch streaming by the time Pokemon Sword and Shield release. If you haven’t seen the reveal trailer, you can do so below:

Suffice to say, I’m hyped for these games. After going through the trailer a few times now, I’ve noticed five details which have gotten me hyped that I want to point out. Tomorrow, I’ll go over some of my speculations as well.

5) More Detailed Animations and Graphics

This is a bit of a given considering the move to the Nintendo Switch, but Pokemon Sword and Shield look gorgeous, easily the biggest leap in visual quality this series has seen since at least the 3rd generation, if not the biggest leap ever. It’s one thing to see a screenshot and marvel at the detailed environments (more on those later), but it’s another to actually see them in motion. The Pokemon themselves are also very vibrant and, thankfully, retain their cartoony look. I was maybe just a liiiittle worried that they might go the Detective Pikachu route and make them start looking more “realistic”. The animations have also been improved as well, and we see a moment in the trailer where the player character walks down a set of stairs… such a mundane-sounding thing, but in motion it’s actually quite remarkable. Seriously, if you still haven’t watched the trailer, do it!

4) The Galar Region Looks Quite Diverse

Each Pokemon region always comes with its own distinct flavour, although some stand out a bit more than others. The Galar region is shaping up to have its own distinct flavour and plenty of diversity to its environments. In total, we see a grassy farming town which is presumably where our character begins their journey, an awesome-looking Zelda or Dark Souls-like misty forest, an urban environment which almost looks steampunk in terms of its aesthetic, a snowy mountain village which also appears to have an icy beachfront (what the hell…?), a stadium, an awesome-looking mine shaft and a laboratory. That’s not all either, there is a map shown during the Nintendo Direct which shows that there even more environments that we haven’t seen yet and strongly suggests that Galar is based on the United Kingdom. My only concern here is that the Galar region appears to be quite linear, so unless I am wrong the options for player exploration are going to be considerably limited during the main storyline. We’ll have to see as the release date gets closer, but for now that’s something to keep an eye on.


3) Random Battles Are Confirmed… and DexNav as Well?

After the release of Let’s Go Pikachu and Eevee and the significant changes to the core formula in those games, there were hesitations amongst fans about whether elements from those games would carry over into Gen 8. In particular, there was a lot of debate about whether Pokemon would appear in the overworld or if they would be encountered in random battles as they have been traditionally. Personally, I would have loved for Pokemon to appear in the overworld, but considering that Let’s Go also didn’t even have traditional battles against wild Pokemon, it’s a trade-off that I’m willing to accept. Battling has always been what I love most in Pokemon, so having it confirmed as a core part of the experience was enough to ease any lingering worries I might have had for these games.

Also interesting to me is that, in the trailer, the random battle occurs while the player character is tip-toeing through the grass. Unless this is purely an aesthetic animation, this suggests that the DexNav from Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire is returning, or perhaps some other form of sneaking mechanic (maybe tip-toeing reduces your odds of encountering wild Pokemon). This will definitely be a feature to keep an eye on in future announcements, but don’t be surprised if a sneaking mechanic is officially revealed sometime soon.

2) Gym Battles Return!

It took a moment for this to really sink in, but holy crap, gym battles are back in Gen 8! I touched on it very lightly in my Gen 7 Love/Hate post, but the traditional gym battles had been replaced in Pokemon Sun and Moon with “island challenges” – contests which varied from island to island which would involve collecting items, battling wild Pokemon, solving puzzles and then eventually battling a boss-like totem Pokemon. They were interesting, but I never found them as fun or challenging as gyms were. So the fact that we appear to have a Grass-type gym confirmed in the trailer, it’s safe to say that gyms are back in some capacity. The Grass gym also appears to be the first gym that we will have to face, meaning that the Fire starter is going to be the starter of choice for players wanting an easier early game.

1) Sports…?


The trailer ends on a very curious note, with the player character stepping out onto what is presumably a soccer field, especially considering that they are dressed in a soccer uniform. What exactly is this going to entail? Could this perhaps just be something tied into the story? After all, we don’t even see the player character bringing Pokemon in with them. However, we do see Pokemon battling in a stadium elsewhere in the trailer, so it seems more likely to me that this has something to do with battling. Is this the new “gimmick” mini-game, similar to contests from previous generations? Is it a new battle style, like the battle royales in Sun and Moon? Will it be more like the sports stadiums in Gen 5, which were basically just daily trainer battles? Or will Game Freak totally surprise us and make a full-fledged mini-game akin to the awesome Monkey Soccer from Ape Escape 2? If I can play soccer with basically any Pokemon, stats incorporated and all, I’d probably shit myself from excitement. You know what you have to do Game Freak: my underwear won’t thank you, but my heart will.

That’s it for now. Tune in tomorrow (fingers crossed) and I’ll go through my speculation for what we might see in Pokemon Sword and Shield!

The “Other” Cinematic Universes

~ Barloq ~ Leave a comment

When it comes to cinematic universes, we all know the story: Marvel’s only getting better as they go, DC has struggled to get any sort of consistent quality going, etc. However, with as much attention as these franchises get, it’s easy to forget that they’re not the only ones making their mark on the cinematic universe trend. There are actually quite a few current cinematic universes out there now, some several films deep, that have continued to grow without the attention and scrutiny that Marvel and DC seem to inspire. There are also many more on the way (keep an eye out for Hasbro, they seem to be pushing the hardest), but even after 10 years of Marvel dominance, most have failed to actually get underway. With that in mind, let’s look at the less-appreciated landscape of cinematic universes.

Note: I’m only going to be looking at franchises which are still ongoing. To determine if it constitutes a cinematic universe, I’m only looking at major releases (for all I know, The Asylum has a Mega Shark cinematic universe, but I’m sure as hell not going to go digging for turds like that). I’m also looking for franchises which aren’t just following a normal, linear progression from film to film. Spin-offs don’t necessarily constitute a cinematic universe either, although if there are multiple spin-off films in a franchise then it could apply. Oh, and goofy cameos and tongue-in-cheek jokes don’t count either (so no, Transformers and Friday the 13th aren’t in the same universe). Ultimately, it’s all down to my discretion. Got it? Great, let’s buckle in.

Honourable Mentions:

Star Wars (image source): Again, this is down to my discretion, but I don’t feel like Star Wars is quite at “cinematic universe” level yet, at least in the way that that label gets applied anyway. For the most part, Star Wars in the cinematic landscape consists of films which follow on from one another (whether as prequels or sequels). Even the spin-offs we’ve had in Rogue One and Solo were just prequels to the events of the main stories and given less prominence, so I’m struggling to really count these on the same level as, say, your average Marvel or DC solo film in their respective universes. Now, with the groundwork laid by The Last Jedi and Disney’s desire to milk this franchise forever (…those are mutually exclusive ideas, I swear), we might actually be getting to a point in the next couple of years when Star Wars is an interconnected universe of various divergent characters and storylines, but until then I have a hard time viewing it as more than a very epic saga.

Alien vs Predator (…vs Blade Runner???) – I’m only not counting this one because there has been basically no official word on whether these franchises still are, or ever were, truly linked in the first place. Basically every Alien and Predator film since has ignored the continuity established by the AVP movies, although they have never completely separated. To make matters even more confusing, the Alien prequels went and made it official that Blade Runner takes place in this universe as well. Considering that all of these separate franchises take place nearly 100 years apart from one another, it makes the continuity pliable, but it would be awesome if we could give AVP another shot at greatness.

The Tarantinoverse(s) – Yes, these films all technically take place in the same universe (click the image on the side to see the entire, complicated breakdown as to how), whether as actual events (Inglourious Basterds, Pulp Fiction, Django Unchained, etc) or as films within that universe (Kill Bill, From Dusk Till Dawn, Death Proof, etc). There are also a number of characters who are related (most notably, Vic Vega aka Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs and Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction). Here’s the thing though: none of these connections really matter. I mean, is Vincent affected in Pulp Fiction by Vic’s death? No, it’s just an easter egg for fans, and that’s what everything in the Tarantinoverse is – there’s no actual crossover or overarching plot (especially when you can just say “eh, it’s a movie in that universe!”), so I’m not counting it. Like I said, my discretion.

And so, let’s move onto the actual cinematic universes, shall we?

5) The Dark Universe – Is there any surprise that this is the worst of the current crop of cinematic universes? I mean, let’s look at the situation: Universal had the first successful cinematic universe back when they were releasing their classic monster films. For almost 20 years now they have been trying to recapture that success with failure after failure. The Mummy laid a decent groundwork for this, but then Van Helsing failed and scuppered that idea. Then they tried once again to set up this universe with The Wolfman, but it was a commercial and critical failure (although I love it personally and feel like its reception will improve over time).

After so many false starts, suddenly Marvel’s cinematic universe model began getting successful and Universal decided that they wanted a piece of that pie. As a result, Dracula: Untold was produced with the explicit intention of aping Marvel’s formula to finally get the Universal monsters on screen again. The resulting film was just plain dull – the source material didn’t fit a PG-13 summer action tentpole treatment and the resulting universe it was selling (PG-13 grimdark anti-heroes facing some nebulous ancient evil) was unappealing, so once again Universal was left in a lurch with a stillborn franchise.

With yet another failure under their belts, Universal almost immediately jettisoned Dracula: Untold from memory and then got to work on what was arguably the most seriously committed effort to reboot their monsters properties: The Dark Universe. Universal clearly went all-in this time, snatching up some major star power with Russell Crowe as Dr. Jeckell and Mr. Hyde, Javier Bardem as Frankenstien’s Monster, Johnny Depp as The Invisible Man and Tom Cruise as (ultimately) this universe’s version of The Mummy. Since The Mummy was the only reboot Universal had any success with, perhaps it is natural that they’d try to launch their universe with it, along with the consistent quality that comes along with Tom Cruise. Unfortunately, despite the huge marketing push and the big talk about how this was going to be Universal’s big shared universe, The Mummy proved to be a rare Tom Cruise misfire which single-handedly put the future of the entire franchise into question. Things have been quiet on The Dark Universe front, with many assuming it is dead since its two main producers have departed the project, but there have been some occasional rumblings to suggest we haven’t seen the last of it.

I feel like the issues with The Dark Universe were twofold. First of all, I don’t think that aping Marvel’s formula and attempting to reboot the Universal monsters as quasi-superheroes is ever going to work, nor is attempting to shoehorn all of these movies into the PG-13 summer action blockbuster template a good idea. I understand that a smaller, more traditional horror series would not make as much money if The Dark Universe had met its ambitions, but at least it would not be competing with the juggernauts, would be carving its own niche in the cinematic landscape and would be a considerably safer investment. Dracula: Untold had already failed in part because of this. It doesn’t matter how much money and star-power you throw at a project, if the concept is rotten at its core, then it is going to have a very hard time gaining traction.

Secondly, I feel like The Dark Universe was hamstrung from the start by its two main producers, Alex Kurtzman (also director of The Mummy) and Chris Morgan. Both are blockbuster scriptwriters and producers, with Kurtzman being known for the modern Star Trek films, the first two Transformers, Cowboys & Aliens and the Now You See Me franchise, and Chris Morgan being known for the Fast & Furious franchise, Wanted and 47 Ronin. They’re both involved in big, successful action franchises, but none of those franchises are really known for their great scripts. To make matters even worse, Guillermo del Toro was originally asked to helm The Dark Universe, which could have been incredible if Universal would allow him to lean into these characters’ horror origins. There is some hope for The Dark Universe still: it’s being rumoured that renowned horror-producer Jason Blum is being given the reins of the franchise. However, as it stands currently, The Dark Universe is little more than a cautionary tale in franchise building.

4) The Monsterverse – This is the universe that inspired this list, because while Legendary hasn’t been subtle about the fact that they want to bring Godzilla and King Kong together once again, they haven’t been hammering audiences with their world-building (unlike, say, The Mummy or Batman vs Superman). In fact, you could easily be forgiven for not realizing that Kong: Skull Island was a part of the same universe as Godzilla, outside of the subtle references to Monarch and the post-credits scene. I feel like this will probably be emphasized more by the end of the upcoming Godzilla: King of the Monsters, but at least it’s refreshing that Legendary isn’t counting their chickens before they’ve hatched.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the Monsterverse is that, like the Universal monsters, it’s building on a foundation that originated the shared universe concept in film in the first place. The Toho Godzilla films had their own colourful cast of monsters that would feature in each others’ films and the original Godzilla vs King Kong was one of the earliest and most notable major franchise crossover films (also, while I may not prefer the direction of this incarnation of Kong, I can’t deny that it’s a part of the character’s roots). Unlike the Universal Monsters, Legendary is succeeding by keeping the Monsterverse true to the roots which made them successful in the first place. Also, Legendary has been killing it in terms of direction and cinematography thus far – Kong: Skull Island is downright beautiful at times and Godzilla has some of my favourite direction of all time (seriously).

The Monsterverse has also had some pretty decent quality thus far, with both entries being quite fun, if disposable, entertainment. Granted, giant monsters are much easier to fit into a dumb action blockbuster mould, and neither Godzilla or Kong: Skull Island had much ambition to be anything other than that. Considering that they’re giant monster movies, they don’t really need to do much more, but some more interesting human characters would go a long way. Godzilla: King of the Monsters could theoretically improve this one aspect, but we’ll see. If Legendary can keep the quality up, the Monsterverse could easily move up a slot in this list.

3) Cloverfield Universe – This universe could have easily topped the list if not for the release of the absolutely putrid The Coverfield Paradox, which has soured the franchise’s name overnight and turned it into a punchline. That said, the quality of Cloverfield and 10 Cloverfield Lane can’t be denied, and the chance for more cool genre films with genuine surprise to them is too much of an allure to pass up after one misfire (even one as disastrous as Paradox).

Cloverfield was a very intriguing Hollywood experiment, forgoing a huge budget and star power in favour of an ingenious and mysterious alternate reality game (ARG) marketing campaign. I got caught up in the Cloverfield hype leading up to its release and had a lot of fun with the ARG, looking for clues and speculating on what the monster was going to be. Cloverfield was also one of the earliest modern found footage films and, I would argue, one of the best utilizations of the concept. Oh, and lest we forget, Cloverfield was also the film which brought us Matt Reeves (far and away one of the most ambitious and consistently good blockbuster directors in Hollywood). The film left plenty of unanswered questions and for years there were rumblings of a sequel, but nothing materialized (even though it looked like Super 8 was going to fulfil that promise).

Then, suddenly, franchise producer J.J. Abrams had an idea to use the Cloverfield name to promote smaller, quality genre films and loosely tie them together. The first film they tried this on was 10 Cloverfield Lane, which was originally a stand-alone film that underwent reshoots to make it fit into the concept of a “Cloverfield movie”. The film was announced quietly and with minimal marketing, relying on word of mouth, a couple teasers and a release date 3 months away to build hype. There was some talk about whether this strategy would work, but work it did – 10 Cloverfield Lane was another success for the franchise, in part because the film was so damn good that the cynical nature of its creation didn’t really matter. It didn’t really connect to the previous film in the franchise, but it didn’t need to: if Cloverfield was a signifier for a type of quality genre film that you could expect, then bring on more Cloverfield we all said.

Of course, it’s important to understand that this is the sort of goodwill which was paramount to the firestorm of hype that exploded upon announcement that the third Cloverfield film had secretly dropped on Netflix during the Super Bowl… and the resulting disappointment when it turned out that that film was utter shit. Like I said, when your shared universe is only loosely connected between films, Cloverfield becomes a mark of quality. Releasing a bad film taints that reputation. Worse, releasing an awful film throws all confidence in that franchise into the wind. Who knows, another Cloverfield film could be good, but it might take years of good films to get the bad taste of Paradox out of our mouths.

2) The Conjuring – The Conjuring universe is remarkable for a few reasons. One, it’s based primarily on the stories of one real-life family (although the veracity of those stories is suspect, naturally). Two, these are all full-on R-rated horror films, whose considerable success should put Universal’s attempts to reboot their monsters to shame. Three, this franchise’s shared universe it at a point where it’s becoming comparable to the MCU. Seriously, The Conjuring is the beating heart of this franchise, but Annabelle is almost on par in terms of box office success, and The Nun has just released with the franchise’s biggest opening yet, purely off the success of the character in The Conjuring 2.

In terms of quality, the films are generally solid. The Conjuring and The Conjuring 2 are both classic horror films in the vein of The Exorcist (I personally preferred The Conjuring 2), which do a good job of making the supernatural seem plausible and which are buoyed tremendously by solid direction from James Wan and the performances of Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga. The spin-offs have been more of a mixed bag, with Annabelle: Creation being generally considered quite good, while Annabelle and The Nun have been met with a negative reception. That said, as spin-offs in an explicitly niche shared universe, they seem to still have an audience who are interested in them. With smaller budgets and this built-in audience, The Conjuring universe manages to find success by marketing to its own niche, rather than going for the mass audience and viewing $800 million as a failure, such as Justice League. If more studios would realize this and try to find other genre niches, we might have more successful shared universes out there.

1) X-Men – And finally we have the other, other superhero shared universe, the long-running X-Men universe. In fact, thanks to the Disney-20th Century Fox acquisition, this universe is almost certainly reaching its death-knell with upcoming release of X-Men: Dark Phoenix, after 19 years of ups and downs.

Back before the MCU took the world by storm, X-Men was the superhero franchise of most consistent quality (next to Spider-man, anyway), and for a long time it was just that – a franchise, not a shared universe. But then the Wolverine spin-offs happened, which turned into a trilogy of its own with Origins, The Wolverine and Logan. And then Deadpool and Deadpool 2 were released, and suddenly X-Men had become the full-on cinematic universe it was so well-suited to become. Hell, you could even argue that the franchise’s main timeline fits in the shared universe idea, with two different eras of X-Men interacting in Days of Future Past (the best X-Men movie, in my opinion).

X-Men has had some major lows (The Last Stand and Origins), but it has also had considerable heights (X2, DoFP, Logan, Deadpool) which have allowed it to succeed for so long, and it was always good to have a serious competitor to the MCU. Lest we forget that this shared universe has also gifted us with one of the best superhero castings of all time in Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, not to mention the Ryan Renold’s Deadpool or Michael Fassbender’s Magneto. I don’t have high hopes for Dark Phoenix, but I can only hope that it does this franchise justice and allows it to go out on a high note.