The Patreon Letters - 18th November 2017

Hey there, friends! It’s Jackson here with another Patreon letter. This week has been kind of a struggle for me, my mental health has been less than ideal, plus I’ve had to re-do a bunch of uni work thanks to the many failures of The Cloud. To top it all off, it’s my Birthday tomorrow, so I’m just overall not in the best of moods. What I’m trying to say is this: you have to be nice to me, okay!!!!!!

Anyway! What this means is today’s letter is going to be less of an Essay and a collection of thoughts on what’s been going on with me lately. Let’s go.

1: Sonic The Hedgehog

A couple weeks ago, the hotly anticipated Sonic Forces was released, and quickly declared by the entire internet to be a garbage fire of biblical proportions, cast unto this realm by an uncaring and spiteful god. I enjoyed it. It’s three hours long, you go fast, Sonic leads an army of OCs into battle as Eggman attempts to blow up the sun. When I press the button to double boost, the chorus of the theme song plays as Sonic and my OC go super saiyan with the power of friendship. It’s fine.

So I’m a little perplexed and disappointed by the reaction to the game. It’s a janky mess with weird physics made by an unbelievably small team (seriously, check the credits), with a ridiculous grimdark story and a helpfully knowing localisation. It’s another Sonic game, for all the good and bad that brings. Do you want to put up with some hilarious bullshit to go fast and listen to dope, cheesy music? You already know the answer. Acting like it’s a particularly embarrassing failure in a fall which has seen a transphobic south park RPG and the lootbox slavery game just seems unnecessary.

After playing Forces, I went back and played Lost World, which unlike Forces is a much more refined and ‘playable’ experience. You can’t boost and run super fast, there’s no levels where speed collides with physics to throw you into an abyss, the levels involve much more traditional platforming mechanics, it’s not a game that “plays itself.” It’s so clearly a response to all the criticisms that have been leveled at Sonic Games, and an attempt to transfer what people like about the character onto a more popular Mario template. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s pretty cool, especially once you get a hang of the infinite spin-dash.

Nobody liked that game, because it wasn’t Sonic. So they made Forces, which is essentially Generations 2, and nobody likes that either. Which, I guess, is fine, nobody has to like Sonic games and they’re not amazing beacons of Game Design or anything, but it still bums me out a little. I think it speaks to something sad in games culture that so many struggle to approach these games on their own terms. There's lots of bemoaning of micro-transactions, of the loss of "the B game" in the abstract, but in practice the culture still gravitates towards the biggest and most polished experiences.

Not everyone, obviously, this isn't a Something Is Deeply Wrong With Video Games letter (this time), I just like Sonic! It's good, okay!! This is who I am now!!!!

2: Star Wars

On SOS, we often talk about how fantastic a universe Star Trek has, and how that only happened because it came from a bunch of scripts from different science fiction writers largely unconcerned with continuity. It is a collage of ideas layered on top of each other, with contradictions aplenty, an exciting and textured place to play in. Star Wars, however, is an entire universe built on one line.

This is an over-exaggeration, but not by much. Every single work of Star Wars fiction has to grapple with the fact that Star Wars doesn't make fucking sense. Multiple books have been written on the premise that George Lucas doesn't know what a parsec is. The Empire only ruled the galaxy for twenty three years, which is basically nothing compared to the "over a thousand generations" Obi-Wan talks about. This is utterly terrible worldbuilding, but it works well enough as flavour for Kurosawa/Flash Gordon fanfiction. A little less well when that goes on to be the cornerstone of arguably arguably the most important sci-fi franchise of all time.

So it is no surprise that I find the Star Wars expanded universe fascinating. 

Star Wars is this strange mix between small and specific (it's just the story of one family having a tiff) and huge and expansive (with now 9 movies, two TV shows and infinite books) that there's so much more space for friction when it comes to the different ways the fandom engages with it. In Star Trek, you have people that like different shows, that prefer different aliens, that find joy in different spaces of the universe, and all of that exists side by side. For Star Wars, as an example, I grew up with the prequels so even though I don't love the movies exactly, that is the era that feels true for me. This means I have a very different perspective on things like what the Jedi do, and what the Nature of the force is, than someone who grew up with the original trilogy.

These are often fundamental, irreconcilable differences. We talked about this a little in our Knights of the Old Republic II episode, where the central premise of that story revolves around the idea of the Force as this external, literal force, exerting its control on the universe. It's a story that some Star Wars fans love, a fascinating and exciting deconstruction of the rules of the universe. One of the reasons we bounced off it was that just... isn't what the force is to us? The Force doesn't have a will, it's just a a fact of nature that allows you to connect and communicate more deeply with the universe; and the assumption that it does directly leads to the Jedi misunderstanding what "bring balance to the force" means and getting thoroughly owned in Episode III. But the actual presentation of the Force in the movies is vague enough that both of these reads of the universe can co-exist. 

I'm about a third of the way through Heir to the Empire and it's really interesting for these reasons. It presents Leia as a Jedi; she has the Force, she is on the side of good, thus she is a Jedi. A Jedi is something you can be innately, rather than a very old organisation that you can belong to, if you choose. It's not how I've ever read Star Wars, and it's a read that's (probably) about to get booted into nothingness by The Last Jedi. But it's interesting, and reading it is helping me understand why these divisions between certain segments of the fandom exist along much deeper levels than "the old films are better," and while I don't think the book is amazing - I never want to see Han Solo again - I'm enjoying the journey and the perspective it's giving me. If I had the time, I'd deep dive into the (now defunct) EU, but lord knows I don't.

Also, I watched the story for Star Wars Battlefront II and fuck me is it terrible. I was going to talk about it, but it turns out I can write way more words about The Various Interpretations of the force than I realized, and lo I am spared. 

See you soon, friends

Jackson <3