![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI keep on getting Stuck and not thinking of a single thing to do. It's awkward.
Also I keep on writing things here and then thinking nobody really wants to read it, like if I have ungood things to say about shows I'm watching. Like, fans want to see you like things.
... it is difficult to like many things when their politics do not match.
Today is Cleaner Day and my kitchen is without light. Has window, has little lamp, should be fine, ish. But that needs fixing and I have no idea how.
Tomorrow is an Expedition, daytime shopping with my brother, which requires coordinating two sets of employees. The plan is we go and eat and shop. I really hope it works, that would be fun.
But today I'm mostly sitting and staring.
So I'm going to take my thoughts on a wander under the cut.
I have been reading Pathfinder rules and wikis while listening to the Pathfinder audio adventures. Which were quite good eventually. And now I have Pathfinder-ish ideas. But I do not have a Pathfinder game group, or confidence I could play, and I do not have enough knowledge of the setting to write stories in it by a long chalk, nor is it really meant for that. I just have a lot of accumulated annoyance at how a setting designed for lots of interesting conflicts has a lot of gods who are Doing It Wrong, and I want to go fix things. Except part of what I want to fix is the fundamental Alignment system, because they're defining it wrong, and that's just not going to work in a shared universe. So then I want to go and write my own thing. Except I don't have enough knowledge of the setting to file serial numbers while keeping its essence enough to criticise it. So then I just end up with characters in my head talking about Pathfinder, which nobody wants to read.
Between my ongoing interest in time travel stories and my ongoing interest in the ones the story decides are bad guys I am lately thinking a lot about second chances and the kind of characters that get them. Like, I know it's partly the genres I watch, but a lot of stories have a double standard about... oh so many things. People we like? Second chances forever! Break a law? Do a murder? Well they had a good reason so hey, second chances and third and bazillionth. Anyone else? Well why even wonder about their reasons, they're dead now, everyone celebrate.
And the only difference is access. Like, when Captain Cold was first introduced, we got a lot of tricks of light and shadow and camera angle that mean we don't even get to see him clearly, let alone see his emotional reactions. Plus, goggles. He was a blank that did mean things. And then later we got to know him more, which involved seeing his face a lot more and him having actual reactions on it, and then he was on Legends as a protagonist, and we got a whole bunch of backstory and to watch him have big feelings. So now he's Ours and we're meant to like him and mourn him. And he's still a killer? Like, a lot? He's changed very little, if at all. Like, we get the impression he would have been like that for Mick at any point in the last thirty years, so. The difference between good guy and bad guy seems to be how much we understand them.
The difference between raman and varelse is in the observer, not the observed.
And one reason I like Legends is they keep on handing out chances and doing story that actually is about growth and change and becoming better people.
But one reason story in general is so frustrating is you still get more chances handed to straight white men than anyone else, even when there's oh so many reasons not to.
And sometimes the 'second chances' are more like... I get really fed up of Arrow acting like 'father' actually means anything. Like, the simple biological fact is treated like an override on common sense. Abuse is to be ignored, because father. Bad. No.
But then the stories I write in my head are all like... I keep on going back to Flash/Reverse Flash, despite the whole murder issue and the thing where Eobard Thawne is clearly a manipulative creep even if you ignore the Earth X episodes which I hate. I keep writing them into a romantic relationship, because otherwise they're just going to keep looping around wrecking the timeline to destroy each other. Or, you know, there could be forgiveness without the twisted romance stuff, obviously, it's just while trying to figure out what could be important enough to them both that they could drop the revenge... Kissing doesn't solve anything but if they solved things there could be kissing? And I don't get it why the story treats Thawne different for his one murder (because it only ever comes back to the one) when he spent fifteen years trying to undo it. I mean, what does it want from him? He broke time and did something that would erase him from existence and replace him with a whole different timeline! How is that not enough?
... reasons. The story keeps going back to reasons. If he didn't do it because Feelings then the story just plain won't forgive him.
Which seems messed up to me.
Good is a thing you do, not a thing you are. Evil likewise.
And also, stories keep treating people who love one person as if that is proof there's good in them. And it doesn't compute. Like, every free willed being has the capacity for good. And caring about one single human being in the whole world does not in general meet minimum requirements? Like it's a good start, it certainly beats trying to destroy all life, for instance, but, really, caring about one person is caring about one person. There are a whole lot of tyrants who got married, just for instance. I do not understand stories insistence on it being important someone can has a feelings.
But if it is important, how to make the story care about Reverse Flash? Make him have a feelings.
... he's a creepy stalker dude and should not get rewarded for his behaviour, so this is problematic, but the alternative in canon involves him screaming and dying over and over and over in such a way that it wrecks time, which is possibly more of a problem. YMMV. I mean, it depends which story you're taking seriously, since obviously the real world doesn't wreck time in quite the same way.
But I hate when story throws some characters away because it defines them as Bad.
The thing I want from stories is for the good trick to be going recruiting. Kill an enemy and you're still standing there alone and now there's a bunch more enemies. Recruit them and lo, it is two against the world at the barest minimum, and possibly they have more allies too. And story does do that sometimes, but, not consistently, and we're still meant to cheer at deaths. And I don't.
I miss when heroes didn't kill people. I miss when they were driven by trying to save them all.
I don't like it that that went away.
I blame movie ratings. There's things you can't do in kids stories, so those things get defined as more grown up, when really they're just more complex nasty depressing problems. The kids story solution of lets all be friends and get all our needs met is still a good one.
The needs bit reminds me of Pathfinder again. Because I'm really annoyed about 'evil' races that live out in the wilderness. Like, the good farming land is taken, and the 'evil' races are living places where they're always desperate for food, and that is never brought up in such a way that it means 'possibly if they weren't starving they would act nicer'. Like, adventurers going out into the wilderness to kill the natives is kind of what the world is for and OMG that's an issue. Creeptastic much?
I am going to re read the Blue Rose RPG because I think it was nicer and better about that stuff.
... I realise that the genre isn't really set up so your preferred solution is to build a diplomatic consensus and some trade routes and get affordable food aid to desolate areas and roll out an educational program and just get some civilisation up in here. And yet that's the stuff that actually works, so all the bits about weapon proficiency and bringing good at the point of a sword really wind me up.
But I always want to play a character who can bring food spells and possibly a nice healing church and set up a settlement and support the maximum number of people including the ones the rules say are evil because ffs people don't work that way.
Also their definitions of Law, Chaos, Good and Evil bundle so many things they're a mess. Like Evil is both the selfless-selfish or community-individual continuum and the thing about deliberately hurting other people, except they phrase it as hurting the innocent because everything about the rules says good guys hurt people too. Ugh. And those are different things? Plenty of people are pretty damn self centered and don't look beyond the benefit to their immediate group but aren't that far along the 'would actually torture people' line? Except also being that selfish tends to do harm to others just on the bounce, but that's not the same attitude as deliberate 'evil' in this alignment system, so that's a mess.
And I am epically sick of how RPGs handle mental illness. Moral model all the way? Can fuck off.
'Insanity' is not a sign of evil. Mad gods are mental degeneration are genre features but leave no room for, you know, people actually being people.
Law and Chaos as well is a bundle of messes. Like, it's Stasis vs Change, sometimes, but not centrally. It's Organised vs Disorganised, and it keeps on saying that Chaotic characters lack focus, and if it ever mentions mental illness it files it under Chaotic Neutral (at best) so it's organised vs disorganised brains. But! It's also organised vs disorganised systems, outside your head, AND bundles in hierarchical somewhere in there, but there's plenty of people who aren't a big fan of empire who are plenty methodical in their thinking? Or who are very much into fighting fascism but can in fact string a thought together? So these things do not go together! And then there's the mess that is Law of the Land being bundled with Honesty and Truthfulness and Truth as an absolute value that goes with knowledge and history gods. So the same alignment represents telling the truth and obeying the law, and where does that leave storytellers who disagree with the law as it stands? And like, trying to change the world by way of getting elected in a methodical and lawful manner is all teh way over on teh lawful side, but trying to change it with fighting is chaotic, even if the difference is in how the existing system leaves avenues for change.
I mean I personally would not put Kings in the Lawful Good category. Neutral, sure, could be, and it's a system alright, but there's not the greatest good for the community at large even possible, because this one person is going to be elevated above them all from birth. It's not Good. Except, because genre, here. Like Paladins, who are Good because they kill the right people for the right reasons. I mean, no? How about saving them?
Except obviously teh alignments only exist to make a playable framework for a game that is very much about killing people, so, the messes are not a bug, they're a feature. The conflicts they create are where the adventure comes from.
But they annoy me greatly.
In other systems, In Nomine and Blue Rose among them, there's a Fate and Destiny system. I think it's that Fate is the bad thing and Destiny is the good thing? There's a side of your nature that can lead you to bringing the most good into the world for the most people, and there's another side that can lead you to bringing the most evil for the most people. Life is about figuring out which you'll do. And In Nomine is quite explicit that you can do both in one lifetime, albeit rarely, and that the scale available doesn't necessarily match, because it's quite easy to do horrendous evil but quite difficult to do giant good. Blue Rose has a game mechanic where working towards either will get you game bonuses, because those are the strongest facets of who you are.
It's not at all the same as saying someone is good or evil, it's just that they have in them a nature that can choose to do either, and in this particular case this can manifest most strongly in these two ways.
But also, In Nomine is quite clear that being an adventurer or soldier and going out fighting is not necessarily your best Destiny. You might be neglecting your potential as a musician, to the detriment of the world as a whole. Pursuing your best self, the greatest good you can be for the world, doesn't mean beating people up.
I like that bit.
The Flash lately has Barry saying there's always a better way than killing, and they're trying to reach out and make connections and bring people to the light side, and his ever hopeful nature is explicitly the thing that makes him a hero. Is good. Is just... oddly applied.
So, if I were constructing a story, what would I do that the other stories aren't?
No killing. Just, it's boring and annoying. It ends things without resolving them in the Good way. Killing is a bad thing. Religions I am aware of are in broad agreement on this one. It is, at most, sometimes the lesser of two evils in really bad situations. Maybe. But there's probably a better way. So. Killing an enemy doesn't solve anything, if I'm doing the story.
Possibly because they just take a turn through another mode of being and come back. Assorted hells, being a ghost, maybe undeath, possibly time travel undoing things.
Whatever happens, it has to be clear that if you do bad things to people the effect is there is more badness. I mean, you're in control of that bit of badness, and you made it bad, and then there are bad consequences. That's why we don't do bad things, they don't bloody work.
... in a long form story that means someone does do the bad thing and then you see it not bloody work and then they have to think of another way.
Hmmm.
I hate it when the story has different rules for good guys and bad guys. Good guys can do things because they are good, and whatever they do, it will work out in good guy ways.
Except like The Flash involves Barry getting stuck in speed force prison? Losing kind of everyone repeatedly? Consequences, bad ones. So why am I still annoyed with it? Well because they're consequences of the wrong things, or not the things I thought were wrong.
I would write stories with a lot of bad guys with assorted alignments (ugh) and reasons and so forth, and then the thing for the good guys would be figuring out how to reach this one here now today. And some people are obviously a tad bit harder to persuade to come to the light side. But that would be the thing they're trying to do.
I greatly dislike the current mode of storytelling where the bad guy gets arrested and that's the end of the story. I mean the Flash did some interesting things with prison conditions and how people were treated in prison apparently backfiring badly, but, it still hasn't had the good guys explicitly go oops that was our bad, it still has them in fact suggesting they should do it again, so, that's... not so good. Once someone has been identified as the perpetrator of a crime and arrested and taken away from random innocent people, then what? ... Flash and Legends seems to suggest then you can break them out of prison and put them to really dangerous work and that makes them a hero. um...
Good guys are really judgey and don't hold themselves to the same standards they hold others to.
Like it's not attempted murder when Xander does it.
Comics have actually had politics I agree with much more than current TV. Teams with a legal structure they work within. Heroes that spend a lot of time changing the conditions that lead to crime. I like that much better. There should be more of that.
And Star Trek the Next Generation did a lot of good diplomacy stuff, and I'm fed up of the more recent stuff where the solution is boom.
So, that was a ramble that covered my annoyance with good and evil and alignment systems and Good Guys and Bad Guys and stories. Systemic solutions to system problems! Nicer storytelling even for adults! Be kind!
But it wasn't a very organised set of thoughts.
Oh well, I'll go do something else.
Also I keep on writing things here and then thinking nobody really wants to read it, like if I have ungood things to say about shows I'm watching. Like, fans want to see you like things.
... it is difficult to like many things when their politics do not match.
Today is Cleaner Day and my kitchen is without light. Has window, has little lamp, should be fine, ish. But that needs fixing and I have no idea how.
Tomorrow is an Expedition, daytime shopping with my brother, which requires coordinating two sets of employees. The plan is we go and eat and shop. I really hope it works, that would be fun.
But today I'm mostly sitting and staring.
So I'm going to take my thoughts on a wander under the cut.
I have been reading Pathfinder rules and wikis while listening to the Pathfinder audio adventures. Which were quite good eventually. And now I have Pathfinder-ish ideas. But I do not have a Pathfinder game group, or confidence I could play, and I do not have enough knowledge of the setting to write stories in it by a long chalk, nor is it really meant for that. I just have a lot of accumulated annoyance at how a setting designed for lots of interesting conflicts has a lot of gods who are Doing It Wrong, and I want to go fix things. Except part of what I want to fix is the fundamental Alignment system, because they're defining it wrong, and that's just not going to work in a shared universe. So then I want to go and write my own thing. Except I don't have enough knowledge of the setting to file serial numbers while keeping its essence enough to criticise it. So then I just end up with characters in my head talking about Pathfinder, which nobody wants to read.
Between my ongoing interest in time travel stories and my ongoing interest in the ones the story decides are bad guys I am lately thinking a lot about second chances and the kind of characters that get them. Like, I know it's partly the genres I watch, but a lot of stories have a double standard about... oh so many things. People we like? Second chances forever! Break a law? Do a murder? Well they had a good reason so hey, second chances and third and bazillionth. Anyone else? Well why even wonder about their reasons, they're dead now, everyone celebrate.
And the only difference is access. Like, when Captain Cold was first introduced, we got a lot of tricks of light and shadow and camera angle that mean we don't even get to see him clearly, let alone see his emotional reactions. Plus, goggles. He was a blank that did mean things. And then later we got to know him more, which involved seeing his face a lot more and him having actual reactions on it, and then he was on Legends as a protagonist, and we got a whole bunch of backstory and to watch him have big feelings. So now he's Ours and we're meant to like him and mourn him. And he's still a killer? Like, a lot? He's changed very little, if at all. Like, we get the impression he would have been like that for Mick at any point in the last thirty years, so. The difference between good guy and bad guy seems to be how much we understand them.
The difference between raman and varelse is in the observer, not the observed.
And one reason I like Legends is they keep on handing out chances and doing story that actually is about growth and change and becoming better people.
But one reason story in general is so frustrating is you still get more chances handed to straight white men than anyone else, even when there's oh so many reasons not to.
And sometimes the 'second chances' are more like... I get really fed up of Arrow acting like 'father' actually means anything. Like, the simple biological fact is treated like an override on common sense. Abuse is to be ignored, because father. Bad. No.
But then the stories I write in my head are all like... I keep on going back to Flash/Reverse Flash, despite the whole murder issue and the thing where Eobard Thawne is clearly a manipulative creep even if you ignore the Earth X episodes which I hate. I keep writing them into a romantic relationship, because otherwise they're just going to keep looping around wrecking the timeline to destroy each other. Or, you know, there could be forgiveness without the twisted romance stuff, obviously, it's just while trying to figure out what could be important enough to them both that they could drop the revenge... Kissing doesn't solve anything but if they solved things there could be kissing? And I don't get it why the story treats Thawne different for his one murder (because it only ever comes back to the one) when he spent fifteen years trying to undo it. I mean, what does it want from him? He broke time and did something that would erase him from existence and replace him with a whole different timeline! How is that not enough?
... reasons. The story keeps going back to reasons. If he didn't do it because Feelings then the story just plain won't forgive him.
Which seems messed up to me.
Good is a thing you do, not a thing you are. Evil likewise.
And also, stories keep treating people who love one person as if that is proof there's good in them. And it doesn't compute. Like, every free willed being has the capacity for good. And caring about one single human being in the whole world does not in general meet minimum requirements? Like it's a good start, it certainly beats trying to destroy all life, for instance, but, really, caring about one person is caring about one person. There are a whole lot of tyrants who got married, just for instance. I do not understand stories insistence on it being important someone can has a feelings.
But if it is important, how to make the story care about Reverse Flash? Make him have a feelings.
... he's a creepy stalker dude and should not get rewarded for his behaviour, so this is problematic, but the alternative in canon involves him screaming and dying over and over and over in such a way that it wrecks time, which is possibly more of a problem. YMMV. I mean, it depends which story you're taking seriously, since obviously the real world doesn't wreck time in quite the same way.
But I hate when story throws some characters away because it defines them as Bad.
The thing I want from stories is for the good trick to be going recruiting. Kill an enemy and you're still standing there alone and now there's a bunch more enemies. Recruit them and lo, it is two against the world at the barest minimum, and possibly they have more allies too. And story does do that sometimes, but, not consistently, and we're still meant to cheer at deaths. And I don't.
I miss when heroes didn't kill people. I miss when they were driven by trying to save them all.
I don't like it that that went away.
I blame movie ratings. There's things you can't do in kids stories, so those things get defined as more grown up, when really they're just more complex nasty depressing problems. The kids story solution of lets all be friends and get all our needs met is still a good one.
The needs bit reminds me of Pathfinder again. Because I'm really annoyed about 'evil' races that live out in the wilderness. Like, the good farming land is taken, and the 'evil' races are living places where they're always desperate for food, and that is never brought up in such a way that it means 'possibly if they weren't starving they would act nicer'. Like, adventurers going out into the wilderness to kill the natives is kind of what the world is for and OMG that's an issue. Creeptastic much?
I am going to re read the Blue Rose RPG because I think it was nicer and better about that stuff.
... I realise that the genre isn't really set up so your preferred solution is to build a diplomatic consensus and some trade routes and get affordable food aid to desolate areas and roll out an educational program and just get some civilisation up in here. And yet that's the stuff that actually works, so all the bits about weapon proficiency and bringing good at the point of a sword really wind me up.
But I always want to play a character who can bring food spells and possibly a nice healing church and set up a settlement and support the maximum number of people including the ones the rules say are evil because ffs people don't work that way.
Also their definitions of Law, Chaos, Good and Evil bundle so many things they're a mess. Like Evil is both the selfless-selfish or community-individual continuum and the thing about deliberately hurting other people, except they phrase it as hurting the innocent because everything about the rules says good guys hurt people too. Ugh. And those are different things? Plenty of people are pretty damn self centered and don't look beyond the benefit to their immediate group but aren't that far along the 'would actually torture people' line? Except also being that selfish tends to do harm to others just on the bounce, but that's not the same attitude as deliberate 'evil' in this alignment system, so that's a mess.
And I am epically sick of how RPGs handle mental illness. Moral model all the way? Can fuck off.
'Insanity' is not a sign of evil. Mad gods are mental degeneration are genre features but leave no room for, you know, people actually being people.
Law and Chaos as well is a bundle of messes. Like, it's Stasis vs Change, sometimes, but not centrally. It's Organised vs Disorganised, and it keeps on saying that Chaotic characters lack focus, and if it ever mentions mental illness it files it under Chaotic Neutral (at best) so it's organised vs disorganised brains. But! It's also organised vs disorganised systems, outside your head, AND bundles in hierarchical somewhere in there, but there's plenty of people who aren't a big fan of empire who are plenty methodical in their thinking? Or who are very much into fighting fascism but can in fact string a thought together? So these things do not go together! And then there's the mess that is Law of the Land being bundled with Honesty and Truthfulness and Truth as an absolute value that goes with knowledge and history gods. So the same alignment represents telling the truth and obeying the law, and where does that leave storytellers who disagree with the law as it stands? And like, trying to change the world by way of getting elected in a methodical and lawful manner is all teh way over on teh lawful side, but trying to change it with fighting is chaotic, even if the difference is in how the existing system leaves avenues for change.
I mean I personally would not put Kings in the Lawful Good category. Neutral, sure, could be, and it's a system alright, but there's not the greatest good for the community at large even possible, because this one person is going to be elevated above them all from birth. It's not Good. Except, because genre, here. Like Paladins, who are Good because they kill the right people for the right reasons. I mean, no? How about saving them?
Except obviously teh alignments only exist to make a playable framework for a game that is very much about killing people, so, the messes are not a bug, they're a feature. The conflicts they create are where the adventure comes from.
But they annoy me greatly.
In other systems, In Nomine and Blue Rose among them, there's a Fate and Destiny system. I think it's that Fate is the bad thing and Destiny is the good thing? There's a side of your nature that can lead you to bringing the most good into the world for the most people, and there's another side that can lead you to bringing the most evil for the most people. Life is about figuring out which you'll do. And In Nomine is quite explicit that you can do both in one lifetime, albeit rarely, and that the scale available doesn't necessarily match, because it's quite easy to do horrendous evil but quite difficult to do giant good. Blue Rose has a game mechanic where working towards either will get you game bonuses, because those are the strongest facets of who you are.
It's not at all the same as saying someone is good or evil, it's just that they have in them a nature that can choose to do either, and in this particular case this can manifest most strongly in these two ways.
But also, In Nomine is quite clear that being an adventurer or soldier and going out fighting is not necessarily your best Destiny. You might be neglecting your potential as a musician, to the detriment of the world as a whole. Pursuing your best self, the greatest good you can be for the world, doesn't mean beating people up.
I like that bit.
The Flash lately has Barry saying there's always a better way than killing, and they're trying to reach out and make connections and bring people to the light side, and his ever hopeful nature is explicitly the thing that makes him a hero. Is good. Is just... oddly applied.
So, if I were constructing a story, what would I do that the other stories aren't?
No killing. Just, it's boring and annoying. It ends things without resolving them in the Good way. Killing is a bad thing. Religions I am aware of are in broad agreement on this one. It is, at most, sometimes the lesser of two evils in really bad situations. Maybe. But there's probably a better way. So. Killing an enemy doesn't solve anything, if I'm doing the story.
Possibly because they just take a turn through another mode of being and come back. Assorted hells, being a ghost, maybe undeath, possibly time travel undoing things.
Whatever happens, it has to be clear that if you do bad things to people the effect is there is more badness. I mean, you're in control of that bit of badness, and you made it bad, and then there are bad consequences. That's why we don't do bad things, they don't bloody work.
... in a long form story that means someone does do the bad thing and then you see it not bloody work and then they have to think of another way.
Hmmm.
I hate it when the story has different rules for good guys and bad guys. Good guys can do things because they are good, and whatever they do, it will work out in good guy ways.
Except like The Flash involves Barry getting stuck in speed force prison? Losing kind of everyone repeatedly? Consequences, bad ones. So why am I still annoyed with it? Well because they're consequences of the wrong things, or not the things I thought were wrong.
I would write stories with a lot of bad guys with assorted alignments (ugh) and reasons and so forth, and then the thing for the good guys would be figuring out how to reach this one here now today. And some people are obviously a tad bit harder to persuade to come to the light side. But that would be the thing they're trying to do.
I greatly dislike the current mode of storytelling where the bad guy gets arrested and that's the end of the story. I mean the Flash did some interesting things with prison conditions and how people were treated in prison apparently backfiring badly, but, it still hasn't had the good guys explicitly go oops that was our bad, it still has them in fact suggesting they should do it again, so, that's... not so good. Once someone has been identified as the perpetrator of a crime and arrested and taken away from random innocent people, then what? ... Flash and Legends seems to suggest then you can break them out of prison and put them to really dangerous work and that makes them a hero. um...
Good guys are really judgey and don't hold themselves to the same standards they hold others to.
Like it's not attempted murder when Xander does it.
Comics have actually had politics I agree with much more than current TV. Teams with a legal structure they work within. Heroes that spend a lot of time changing the conditions that lead to crime. I like that much better. There should be more of that.
And Star Trek the Next Generation did a lot of good diplomacy stuff, and I'm fed up of the more recent stuff where the solution is boom.
So, that was a ramble that covered my annoyance with good and evil and alignment systems and Good Guys and Bad Guys and stories. Systemic solutions to system problems! Nicer storytelling even for adults! Be kind!
But it wasn't a very organised set of thoughts.
Oh well, I'll go do something else.
no subject
Date: 2018-10-30 01:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-10-31 09:19 am (UTC)