(no subject)

I suppose there’s nothing contradictory about being anti-war and pro-death penalty. Maybe you want trials and sentencing before killing people. But it somehow feels emotionally dissonant to talk about all the people you want to execute for warring.

(no subject)

I saw an essay once that argued that shows like She-Ra allow for the redemption of villains by not actually showing that much villainy. We see Hordak’s followers destroying buildings civilians live in, but we don’t see them directly murdering civilians, so Hordak doesn’t have to face audience judgment for it.

On the one hand, this makes it sound like Steven Universe really dug its own grave by showing onscreen medical experimentation on POWs. On the other hand, I never got the impression that She-Ra fandom was any less of a screaming mess than Steven Universe fandom. So maybe the mess in both fandoms is unrelated to war crimes or lack thereof.

(no subject)

There’s one thing I want to do in games, and there are two things Skyrim wants to do. All three of them contradict each other.

I want to take actions and see their consequences. I don’t necessarily want to make choices. You can script a path of linear actions, and I’ll happily follow it, so long as the actions show interesting consequences.

Skyrim wants to give you tools you can freely choose to play with for as long as you want, which contradicts with seeing consequences. In another game, you would hunt a handful of dragons with different abilities and weaknesses. In Skyrim, you can keep hunting identical dragons for as long as you want to keep churning out identical dragonscale armors. Skyrim doesn’t want to have the consequence of clearing dragons from the map, so instead, it makes fighting a dragon in the road as repetitive and tedious as fighting a wolf in the road.

Skyrim also wants to simulate a world that feels realistic. To create iron arrows, you find an iron vein, use a pickaxe to mine the ore, find a designated firewood-splitting log, use a wood axe to split the log, find a smelter, turn the ore into ingots, find a forge, and combine the ingots with the firewood. It would be silly to combine iron and wood directly from your inventory, so it restricts that action by putting a bunch of other meaningless actions in front of it.

Combine tools and realism, and sometimes the realism destroys the tools. You’re going to visit a quest-giver, and a dragon swoops down and eats him, and you have no way to kill it fast enough to save him. If the body lands in a river, you won’t even find it to know he’s dead, or if you didn’t talk to him before it killed him, you don’t even know he was a quest-giver. I have no idea who this was supposed to appeal to.