May 2012 Media Thread

I never liked FF7 all that much, and Xenogears suffered from a translation that, while adequate and free from obvious errors, had a writing style I didn't care for.

I'll certainly endorse Vagrant Story as being very good, though.

Incidentally, my 3 most favorite JRPGs of all time are Final Fantasy 6, Lunar Eternal Blue (the original Sega CD version), and Disgaea: Hour of Darkness.

So you probably never got to the point where the game engages in a complete repudiation of the "caveman sci-fi" ideal, then. (It happens when the group reaches present-day Zanarkand.)

It seemed to me that EY's point there was not to castigate Rand for not following Bayes, but rather to point out the flaw in ever creating a "closed system":

Science isn't fair. That's sorta the point. An aspiring rationalist in 2007 starts with a huge advantage over an aspiring rationalist in 1957. It's how we know that progress has occurred.

To me the thought of voluntarily embracing a system explicitly tied to the beliefs of one human being, who's dead, falls somewhere between the silly and the suicidal. [...]

The vibrance that Rand admired in science, in commerce, in every railroad that replaced a horse-and-buggy route, in every skyscraper built with new architecture—it all comes from the principle of surpassing the ancient masters.

Moreover, this isn't a "premise". EY is not assuming a premise that Rand (or anyone else) is bad-because-not-Bayesian; he is using Objectivism as an example of what has elsewhere been called "worshiping the finger that points to the moon."

I've always been confused by the broad message of acceptance (even/especially of alien species) and how that contrasts with his disapproval of homosexuality.

Thing is, keeping this sort of thing mostly in backstory is problematic in itself. There's a truly astounding number of failure modes for media dealing with feminist (or other social, but I'll just talk about the feminist case for simplicity) issues, but one of the more common ones involves making a female character hypercompetent in exposition but limiting the latitude of her choices in narrative. The idea is probably that we get to feel good about watching an empowered woman (not to mention that Strong Female Characters are a selling point in their own right) but at the same time get the pathos that comes with watching other people (e.g.) save a damsel in distress. But the flaw in this line of thinking, of course, is that alleged empowerment tends to feel a bit hollow if it's not backed up by onscreen use of power. With a couple of honorable exceptions, after all, we don't watch action movies to hear the characters talk about how badassed they are.

Now, that's all fairly orthodox feminist media criticism, albeit without the normal jargon. I should probably mention, though, that I think a related problem infects a lot of genre fiction, and not only that dealing with empowered females and other persons of social interest: namely, modern genre fiction takes a remarkably dim view of proactive heroes in general. You can blame some of this on the popularity of the straight Hero of a Thousand Faces plot: narrative conventions don't allow anyone playing Luke Skywalker to display latitude of choice, because all the choices have already been made for him. But even in highly non-Campbellian stories -- the James Bond plot, for example -- it's rare for protagonists to take major action which is neither requested by some authority nor forced by immediate moral or physical necessity. About the only conventional exception is in romantic subplots.

There's also a partial exception in print SF, but in a lot of ways that's a genre isolate.

The protagonist's backstory (and first-chapter-or-two-story) is that she's been spending years sneaking under a security fence to hunt game, keeping her sister and mother from starvation and prostitution after her father died.

And herself.

Eliezer may claim that "it is an unvarying rule of fiction that problems are solved by protagonists"

Like everything in fiction, sometimes this rule is broken. Deus Ex Machina is generally frowned upon, but it exists. And sometimes problems simply aren't solved at all, or end up being solved by people unrelated to the main plot.

This could be interesting. In no particular order.

1. Morgaine, The Mists of Avalon.
2. Rakka and/or Reki, Haibane Renmei.
3. San, Princess Mononoke.
4. Lessa, The Dragonriders of Pern.
5. The Rowan, The Tower and the Hive.

I'd add Saber and Irisviel from Fate/Zero, but I haven't seen it yet. No doubt you'd do a bang-up job on Fate/Stay Night's Saber.

His point wasn't that she was (necessarily) a bad character, just that she wasn't what the media and general public wanted her to be.

Cazaril, Curse of Chalion

of course I don't know if you've seen it.

I'd link you to the LJ post that pointed out the economic unrealism to me, but it's flocked. Basically, they have a rich high-tech Capitol and twelve downtrodden low-tech Districts, and with that much tech there is no reason for poor people to be living like that - it would make more sense for tech to be cheap and go out to as wide an audience as possible.

The cultural unrealism is around the Games themselves - 24 teenagers, a boy and a girl from each district, fight to the death in a usually-hazardous-in-itself arena once annually. Winners get to be celebrities with PTSD; losers, obviously, die. In some districts these are habitually chosen by lottery, but in others select kids are trained and volunteer. This whole thing seems obviously abhorrent to our audience, but I don't think it's completely implausible for a society to work like that for the following reasons:

• The Capitol, the ones who run the whole thing and threaten contestants' families and so on to ensure cooperation, has brainwashed itself into seeing this as retribution for a bloody uprising some 74 years before the novel starts. I think humans are pretty good at being brutal to outgroups they can conceptualize as evil or as having wronged the ingroup. Not punishing children for the sins of their ancestors is a fairly recent development, still isn't practiced effectively, and doesn't seem unlikely to be lost in a history like the one preceding the story.

• The parts of the Games that ordinary Capitol people see (the "interesting parts" that are handpicked to air, the interviews under duress where contestants must be appealing in order to have a chance of being given resources while they're in the arena, etc.) are not crafted to highlight the nastiness. They are crafted to make it look like an exciting, if risky, action game full of fascinating young people. The fact that the contestants with training beforehand are a) volunteers and b) are most likely to win and therefore stay in the public eye for more than a few weeks makes it even less obviously sickening.

• The whole setup requires a small handful of evil, ruthless people with some foolish beliefs about social engineering, and a lot of people who are oblivious ninnies controlled by social expectation and highly distractable, and that everyone who is neither be timid, otherwise occupied, and/or unable to organize. This does not look at all unlike a population of humans to me.