Pay the Piper – Chapter Two

Posted by natechen on

Previous Chapter

Having a constant wireless Internet connection with as many Gs as you can find wired directly into your head might seem like a great money saving thing, but the truth is it can be more of a distraction than it’s worth sometimes. When you’re waiting for your handler and her boss to sort out what to do with the lead you turned up is not one of those times. But this particular event bothered me, and not just because I’m more of a ‘Net junkie than the average American. Psychometry is a neurological condition that comes with a lot of perks but also leaves the Gifted with a lot of issues to manage. Ever since the Internet began to work its way into the public consciousness we’ve watched it with a certain degree of trepidation, as it recreates some of those issues in a limited scope.

One of the reasons I, and many of the other psychometrics that work with the general public, spend so much time watching political pundits and trashy TV shows is because we’re watching for the kinds of cultural fragmentation that warns of those issues coming to a head. The last time we saw that among the Gifted was the 1960s, when we were thinking about revealing ourselves to the general public, and after the dust settled from that there were barely enough Gifted left to make coming out of the shadows worthwhile. Needless to say, an event that catastrophic occurring at the national scale isn’t going to be good for anyone.

So while we waited for Eugene and Hennesy to finish observing the last round of questioning with building security I cracked into the building’s WiFi and went back to playing at social media sleuth.

TsunLao is a full time independent pundit and general social media shitposter, the kind of guy who antagonizes white nationalists so he can count them and then explain to anarchists there are only three thousand Neo Nazis in the whole country so they should calm down. He’s also considered one of the lesser lights in the “Bad Apples,” a loosely defined group of twenty to thirty scholars and pundits who’s blunt and antagonistic stance towards cultural gatekeepers have made them perennial thorns in the sides of Silicon Valley. People like the Bad Apples always exist. But they don’t become significant public figures with followings of hundreds of thousands of people unless some kind of major cultural schism is brewing.

Whenever something strange happens in Silicon Valley, Lao and his British equivalent, George Lake, get on the case very quickly and today was no different. The livestream I’d been watching earlier had included both of them, along with a number of more mainstream pundits who still gave them the time of day.

But I wasn’t interested in what Lao and the Bad Apples had to say right now. I wanted to see what they said in the past – someone on the livestream this morning had mentioned bad blood between Lao and the TechVenture set, and I wanted to go back and brush up on those feuds. The most recent was about three months ago and I’d just found the tail end of the controversy – something to do with social media and European censorship laws – when Natalie sat down next to me.

I hate to say it but I tensed up, the hypersensitive girl radar I’d developed in high school and never managed to deactivate pinging like crazy. There’s a simple first rule for guys like me around pretty women: Don’t engage.

“That was impressive work. I was tested on the Protocols, so I know what you can do but… somehow I’d thought it would take longer.”

Second rule, same as the first. If she engages, don’t show fear. “Big part of it was the EMP. It scrubbed so much of the environment there wasn’t much to glean. It does normally take longer, although if no one gets hurt it rarely takes more than half an hour to do the job right.”

She nodded. “That makes sense. I’m surprised they don’t have you in there, assisting with the interrogations.”

“I’d have to be in the room with them, and Hennesy has never liked using PRGs around people who may not be read in on Psychometrics.” I opened my eyes, accepting that I wasn’t going to get enough privacy to dig through Lao’s back catalog just then. “We’d need a warrant anyway.”

“Hennesy got one. Apparently the first thing he did after you agreed to come was apply for one.” Natalie leaned to one side a bit so she could look at me a bit more directly. Her expression was frank and evaluating. “What’s it like, knowing that your just talking to someone is legally the same as demanding phone records?”

Interrogation mode was another one of those little mental disciplines that I can do for law offices that higher me. This was not the time to bring up the fact that using it always left me feeling greasy, because the vast majority of people have a constant stream of scum flowing through some portion of their mind. “The more you dig into people’s subconscious the more you appreciate the value of institutionalized privacy.” It was a practiced line and we both knew it so I needed to deflect, and fast. “How did you get read in on Psychometry, Agent Chase? I didn’t think the Bureau was actively expanding the number of PRG certified agents it had on staff.”

“I worked the Newell High disappearances.”

“Oh.” When six teens disappear over six months from a single high school it makes national headlines and finally not one but three PRGs had been brought in to consult on the case. “Were you on hand when they found the bodies?”

Natalie nodded solemnly.  

Psychometrics get involved with criminal justice at an even lower rate than the general population, and there aren’t that many of us in circulation to begin with so we all talk to each other as a matter of course. Naturally, I’d known the Gifted who worked the case. One of them was with the group that cracked that case and found the bodies. Before they fully understood where they were he’d accidentally brushed against one of the bodies. The doctors are hopeful that he’ll come out of his vegetative state one day.

We know better.

“So you were there when High Top lost it. And that was enough to get you read in on Psychometrics?”

“I just kept wondering what makes someone fall over like a brick in the middle of an investigation, just because he touched a body? I asked enough questions and yeah, it got me read in.” She tilted her head to one side such that, when combined with the way she was sitting, made me want to lean with her just to keep my balance. “So. Let me ask you something.”

“Seems fair.”

“PRI is Psychometric Resource, Independent. PRG is Psychometric Resource, Galactic. What’s the difference?”

I laughed. “Is that all?”

She shifted uncomfortably, turning to sit normally again and looking away. “I mean, it’s weird, right? What are you, some kind of alien?”

“Hardly.” I tucked my hands into my jacket pockets, more at ease now that I was out from under direct scrutiny. “Minds in harmony form patterns, like the constellations in the sky.”

“I’m sorry?”

“It’s the motto of Galaxy. A sort of psychometric support organization, I guess you could say.” I waved my hand at my clothes. “All linen clothing lines, static scrubbed residences and hotels for traveling psychometrics – seriously, if you could read the impressions in the average hotel room you’d never stay in one again – even a few hospitals specially maintained to ensure that we can get medical care without driving one another insane with our overlapping anxiety and pain broadcasts. Scientifically the closest description for psychometry is a really, really overactive case of synesthesia. But practically speaking it’s a massive logistical problem and keeping us from picking up on every stray thought the people around us are broadcasting is a full time job. Galaxy was founded in the late nineteenth century as a sort mutual aid and support organization so some of us – and a number of trusted people without the Gift – could do that work and let the others find ways to contribute to society. One of the things the organization does is serve as intermediaries between contractors like myself and people looking to hire us. The PRG designation just means the FBI contacts me through a handler in the organization, not directly.”

“Oh.” Natalie took a moment to process that. “Why Galaxy?”

“They were very romantic in the 1880s.” I fished out a business card and handed it to her. It had my name and the name and phone number of my Facilitator printed in white on a black background. It also had our logo, a field of stars in two spiral arms that curved to look a lot like a brain. “I’m not saying our taste has improved in the last hundred years.”

With a disbelieving shake of the head she tucked the card away. “I didn’t think galaxy brain was a compliment.”

“I tried telling them…”

“So I know I’m supposed to go through your booking agent-“

“Facilitator.”

“That too, but since you’re here, do you know if you’re booked tomorrow or not?” She pulled off her gloves in order to unlock her phone. “Even as hard as Hennesy has pushed the paperwork on this case I don’t think we can get a warrant for the drone manufacturer until tomorrow, even with your statement.”

Eyes closed again, I opened my own calendar. Internet in the head does come in handy sometimes. “I don’t have to do anything scheduled until next week. Then I’ll be in Seattle for three days, giving my deposition in another case.”

“I’m not sure how much we’ll want you to do there, but at the least we’re going to want you to confirm that the machines there did actually build the drone we recovered.” I actually felt her attention shift from her phone back to me, a new level of uncertainty dimming the glow of her bright golden presence. I’d never met anyone who projected their mood as loudly as she did. It was a bit uncanny, made worse by the usual nerves a pretty woman gives a right thinking man. “Did your Facilitator say anything to you about being put on retainer? I know Hennesy is considering it, just so we can have you on hand for the duration of this case.”

My eyes flew open. That was surprising, my skills don’t come cheaply and even the retainer fee is pretty steep. “Mix didn’t mention it, no. But I’ll tell him to agree to it if the offer ever comes through. And since you’re offering to pay my bills for the next three months, let me offer you something in exchange.”

“What’s that?”

I did my best to say it with confidence. “A potential motive for the guy who did this.”

There was a very noticeable pause. “Armor… you’ve been a PRG contractor for what, five or six years?”

“A decade plus, actually, and I’m well aware that motives are a dime a dozen, especially when dealing with a massive corporate entity and not an individual. But.” I held up a finger and rummaged through the darker recesses of the Internet. “Consider this.”

Her phone buzzed.

She was too polite to check it in the middle of a conversation, a wrinkle I hadn’t anticipated. “Consider what?”

“It’s on your phone. I just sent it to your phone.”

“Ooookay…” She fished it out of her pocket. “That’s really weird, Armor.”

“Weird is part of the package.”

Natalie spent a minute browsing through the article I sent her. “So what exactly is this?”

“A write up of how a loose collection of aggravating personalities got up and left a major Silicon Valley tech firm in favor of a competitor, only to have that competitor’s banking functions cut off at the knees as almost every financial institution in the nation turned their backs on it.”

“Four months later one of those institutions has a major part of its infrastructure crippled in a terrorist attack,” Natalie murmured. “That is quite the thread to pull on, isn’t it? I’ll pass this on, see if we can get agents to interview any of these Bad Apples.”

“There’s actually one living just an hour or so north of here.”

She looked up from her phone. “You want in on the interview?”

“Got it in one.”

“I’ll ask Hennesy to try and swing the paperwork.”

I leaned back, satisfied with that outcome. Troy Hennesy wasn’t one for finesse, but when he wanted something done the bureaucratic machine couldn’t stand in his way. I’d appreciated TsunLao’s efforts to keep people informed and thought his mildly caustic personality was entertaining but I’d never been tempted to go to any of his live events. Again, new people are not my thing. But there was a chance he was connected to all this, and, if so, I wouldn’t let my antisocial nature, or my admiration for his achievements, stop me from finding out how.

Pay the Piper – Chapter One

Posted by natechen on

Previous Chapter

“Of course no one is endorsing the attack, but the shady practices of these companies have been common knowledge for years. They were warned, repeatedly, that they couldn’t take their market influence and wealth and try and wield it against Americans like they were some kind of aristocracy without creating ill will – some of it from me, I will confess. But as bad as their censorship is, I never called for violence, just a change to the unjust policies.”

“Bullshit, Lao. You’ve never liked the treatment you and your friends got-“

“The fact that bad policy affected me doesn’t change the fact that it was bad. The general principles at work-“

The livestream cut out just as things started to get spicy. At first I thought maybe it got taken down by some corporate drone who’d sensed his employers getting badmouthed and had filed some kind of complaint, or perhaps the host’s trust and safety boards had nixed it preemptively as a favor to their fellow Silicon Valley tech venture. But it only took a second or two of trying to load other videos on the topic for me to realize the problem was on my end. I opened my eyes and saw that we’d gone underground. I’d lost my signal.

“You could have said we were here,” I grumbled, straightening up my seat as Eugene pulled us up to one of the local police vans parked along one side of the loading area.

Eugene snorted and put the car in park. “You’re the one who disappears inside your own head instead of paying attention to the world around you. What was it this time? Meme videos? Comedy podcasts?”

“Chasing down the news on the EMP strike. A surprising amount of information has already made it into the wild, considering the attack is less than four hours old,” I said, pulling on my thin cotton gloves before I hit the seatbelt release. “Backtracking it to the first reports might be informative.”

“Yeah, if that was what you were doing,” Eugene said, climbing out of the car, “and not listening to your favorite pundits rip each other apart.”

I paused with my hand on the door latch. “What makes you think I was doing that?”

“You kept smirking. Besides, forensic media analysis is going to be my beat on this case, not yours.”

“Oh?” I climbed out of the car and studied my longtime liaison over the roof. “Sounds like you’re going to be busy on this case.”

“I’m always busy. But I won’t be in charge of handling you this time around. You get to break in a newbie instead.”

I grimaced, not sure how I felt about that. The joy of being an independent contractor is that you get to work with lots of different people in lots of new places. The joy of being me is hating both of those things. Eugene had been my handler for the Southern California FBI offices for the past four years and, while we’re not friends, he’s familiar. I could try and mold a rookie liaison into a person better suited to my own preferences, Eugene had always kept me on a pretty tight leash, but I’m no enough of a people person to trust my relationship shaping skills that way. I may be a mental marvel but my gifts don’t lie in that direction.

Besides, we were dealing with a domestic terrorism incident where a major financial institution had been attacked with the clear intent of crippling it and throwing the economy into chaos. The FBI thought this was important enough to call in a contractor. And not just any contractor, one who specialized in extra sensory perception. I was going to be under a lot of pressure already, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be worrying about a rookie handler exposing me to the public at the same time.

So I reluctantly followed Eugene towards the crime scene and the attendant alphabet soup. In addition to the local cops and the FBI, I saw Homeland Security, the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco and the California State Police all in evidence, which meant I was going to hear the phrase “jurisdictional nightmare” a lot regardless of who my handler was. It did make finding my new handler pretty easy, there were only two other people in FBI jackets in the room and one was Special Agent in Charge Troy Hennesy, who was way too senior to talk to contractors. Until I saw him on the spot I would have said he was way too senior to visit crime scenes, too, so it wasn’t impossible that he could be filling the role of handler – but then, Eugene wouldn’t have said I was “breaking him in,” the process was more likely to go the other way.

Guaranteed to go the other way, really.

Regardless, that made the woman standing with him far more likely to be the new agent I was breaking in and, at first glance, things were looking up. She was a case study in why men have eyes.

Blonde? Check.

Medium build with appreciable curves? Check and check.

Tasteful suit and jewelry choices? Double check.

“Fitzgerald!” Hennesy called when he saw us approach. Eugene had already spotted his boss and we were moving that way but, too impatient to wait for us, Hennesy took his companion by the elbow and led her through the crowd towards us, shouldering people out of the way as he went. A man of his size doesn’t have much problem in crowds unless he’s wandered into a moshpit and he made it over to us much faster than Eugene could have pushed us through the other way.

“Glad you’re here,” Hennesy said, letting go of his companion’s arm and herding us a bit away from the site of the investigation using primarily his own bulk and a meaningful tilt of his head. A moment later we were mostly sequestered away from the crowd, surrounded on three sides by an FBI van, probably how Hennesy had gotten here, the back wall of the garage, and Hennesy himself, who was six feet tall and nearly as wide. His bald head emphasized a heavy brow that made him look like he was scowling regardless of his actual mood – although in his case appearance and fact often lined up – and when you added in his bulk and ham hands that could tie the average spine into two half hitches faster than most people tied their shoes it was enough to convince most people to stay at a distance. We were as private as we were going to get in this room.

“It’s a jurisdictional-“

I perked up.

“-trainwreck-“

And slumped in disappointment.

“-out here, the locals want to clear the crime scene and let their CSIs process it, the other agencies don’t understand why we’re dragging our feet and the company is already leaning on us about clearing the dock. Normally I’d take more time to bring you up to speed-” which was never how Hennesy had dealt with Eugene or I before, “-but we need to get our asset cracking before someone somewhere leans on someone else with enough pull to get us kicked out. So. Special Agent Natalie Chase,” the blonde offered a sparkling smile when Hennesy gestured to her, “meet Special Agent Eugene Fitzgerald and PRG weakArmor. Eugene, Armor, this is Natalie.”

She held out a hand to Eugene, who shook it in a fairly perfunctory way, then extended that hand to me. I studied it a moment, confirming she was wearing the prescribed pair of thin linen gloves and noting that her hands had long, thin, elegant fingers, gloves or no, before taking her hand and shaking it.

Even with two layers of clean linen between us I picked up stray facts. She used a cocoa butter based lotion. She put vanilla in her coffee and she’d finished a double espresso twenty minutes ago and was worried her breath might smell. She’d expected me to be shorter. That last one seemed a bit out of left field, which meant it must have really been bothering her right that moment.

“Natalie has been read in on the Psychometrics Protocols,” Hennesy was saying, “and provided with all the necessary equipment including a static neutralizer. Your people,” he gave me a look, “have evaluated her psychological profile and case history and think she’s suitable for a Psychometric Resource Handler and offered you as a test case. I trust you were prepped ahead of time?”

“I wasn’t,” I assured him. “But that’s fairly typical in these cases.”

Natalie raised one eyebrow and asked, “It’s typical for PRGs to get assigned a case with no briefing?”

“No, Armor’s people just tell him to go somewhere and do whatever he’s told to,” Eugene answered. “He’s lazy so if a job sounds hard he sends it back and tells them he doesn’t want to do it.”

“I’m just selective in my work,” I replied, giving him a sideways look. “And I don’t like teaching.”

“Or running. Or climbing stairs. Or cooking. Or kitchens in general-“

“You wanted me to try and get a reading on a fry machine in the greasiest diner in L.A. There was nothing to read that the bacon grease hadn’t already obliterated.”

“They cook using vegetable oil, Armor-“

Hennesy cleared his throat and we stopped. “As I said, Natalie has the Protocols down. We just need you to take her through the paces once and give us some feedback on how she does. We’d like to get her certified to liaison with Psychometric Resources and you were offered as the person to do it. I know you’ve done it before and both the agents who certified with you in the past have gone on to fill that role admirably. So we hope you’ll be willing to do it again.”

I sighed. “Fine. But fair warning to you, Agent Chase, I’ll be submitting a report to my handlers on the other side as well, and how I evaluate you will directly impact how willing we are to assign resources to cases you head up.”

“I’ll do my best to meet your expectations,” she said, her smile not wavering an inch. “Shall we get started?”

I glanced at Hennesy. “Am I cleared on site?”

With a grunt Hennesy handed me a contractor’s badge and waved me towards the scene. Natalie immediately moved in front of me, gently moving people out of the way so I could approach the area under scrutiny without brushing against anyone. As we started moving past bits of metal, glass and plastic noted by numbered markers, waiting for the CSI team to come and carefully process, I could finally get a good look at what we were dealing with.

It was an SUV that had gotten overly friendly with the back of a delivery truck. “Which one delivered the EMP?” I asked. “The box truck?”

“No, the locals confirmed that was a normal delivery truck before we even got here,” Chase said. “We’re pretty sure it was delivered by the SUV. The owner reported it stolen two weeks ago and there’s a large pile of car batteries and wire in the back seat.”

That was interesting. I pulled my gloves off and Natalie matched the action, although she replaced her linens with a pair of latex gloves she got from somewhere. “What happened to the driver? Was he hurt?”

“No driver. No brick on the accelerator, either, we think it was a self-driving car.”

I shot her a look. “Who steals a self-driving car?”

“It wasn’t one when it was stolen.”

And didn’t that raise all sorts of interesting questions. I pushed them aside, the FBI had people to ask those questions on payroll, that wasn’t why Hennesy called me in. He called me in because he was in the middle of a fiasco, and it was big enough he was willing to gamble on a little ESP making his life easier. Your tax dollars at work.

“Open the door, please? I want a look at the inside.”

Natalie raised an eyebrow. “You don’t want to look over the chassis first?”

“An EMP isn’t exactly the same as a static neutralizer but it will still scrub metal of any impressions left on it,” I said. “Plastic, vinyl, leather or wood on the interior is another story. If there’s anything to learn, I’m going to get it from the interior.” With a shrug, Natalie went ahead and opened the SUV’s door. I took a moment to breath and sank into forensics mode.

To most people the world is what they see and hear, touch, taste or smell. They process it through the facts they learn through their senses. To some people the world is what they feel, what frightens them, brings them joy, makes them sad. They experience the world entirely through the promptings of their instincts and subconscious. Unfortunately, most people act as if one of these two – the things we see and the things we feel – must be accepted over the other. Very few ever recognize the truth, that both exist in a constant state of dialog with one another in a fashion that is more spiritual than religion, more causal than science. Perhaps one in one thousand ever gets that far, so I understand that you may not understand what I’m trying to say. It will sound arrogant when I say it, I’m sure, but you have to understand that the Gift shows us things that other people cannot see, and so explaining what we learn from it is almost impossible.

So rather than try, I’m just going to ask you to accept this simple truth. The world in our heads, the world of feelings, thoughts and compulsions, is woven into the world of our senses. A lucky – or unlucky – few go further than just knowing that, we experience it through the full range of our senses, physical and emotional.

Like flipping on one of those UV lights CSIs use, the mental discipline I call forensics mode brought the world of thoughts and feelings into sharper focus with a strong emphasis on intent. I could see Natalie’s subconscious mind running through the process of opening the SUV door, her intentions playing out to the mind’s eye a split second before they took place in the physical sense. Once she was done, a glimmer of the thought remained about the door handle, the only impression there after the EMP scrubbed the rest. She moved out of the way and I carefully crouched down and looked around the vehicle’s interior.

Intent sat layers deep inside the SUV, kids intent on going to swimming classes, parents intent on running kids to school, a woman intent on getting to work on time no matter how late she was. Most of these impressions had a kind of buzz to them, a flavor taken from the people who had left them. Natalie’s touch on the door was bright and golden, like her hair, most of what I found in the car was rich and brown, like chocolate. Probably impressions left by whoever had owned it before it was stolen. But there was a thin thread of minty white running through the front of the car.

“Find something?” Natalie asked.

“Maybe. Probably just traces left by whoever turned this into a self-driving car.” When someone does that kind of intensive, hands on work it usually leaves a pretty big mental afterimage behind. Natalie just opening a door had left behind an impression that would still be noticeable in an hour or so, I’d hoped that the equipment overhaul that involved and recent would have left a much bigger mark. “Whoever did this was working almost entirely with the onboard computer here.” I tapped a part of the car console just under the dashboard. “Lots of electronics work involved. I can get a brief impression of a detail oriented mind, disgruntled from working quickly. But the EMP wiped the rest.”

Natalie made a few notes in a notebook I hadn’t noticed her pulling out, then nodded. “Okay, more than that would have been nice but that’s a start. One more thing to take a look at.”

She closed up the SUV and let me over to a tarp that was spread on the ground. One of those goofy camera drones with four helicopter motors had been smashed up and the pieces were now resting on top of the tarp. It looked like about two thirds of the actual machine was there, including a large chunk of the main body. “They found this when they were doing their first pass. It was under the delivery truck, so we’re operating on the assumption it’s connected to this somehow. What can you tell us about it?”

Back in forensics mode I reached out towards the drone, doing a careful examination of it. “Interesting. Is it okay if I touch it?”

“It hasn’t been processed yet,” Natalie pointed out.

“There’s no conventional trace evidence on it,” I said. “Trust me, I’ve been doing this long enough to know.”

There was a long pause, presumable Natalie was thinking it over and signaling Hennesy for advice. But I could almost certainly guess what the outcome would be. “Okay, go for it.”

I picked up the largest of the drone pieces and carefully turned it over in my hands. I’d hoped it was a custom job, or at least built from a kit. Then whoever put it together would have spent a long time with it, leaving a great deal of psychic impressions on it. No such luck. “It’s manufactured,” I said. “Maybe even 3D printed.”

“Oh?” Natalie looked interested at that. “There can’t be that many places in the nation yet where they mass produce drones.”

“You might be surprised,” I murmured, carefully turning the piece over in my hands. “Still, it’s a place to start.”

I faltered for a moment when I picked up a clear sense of someone filing something down. Someone had held this drone for minutes, maybe even an hour, as they worked to sand off something. A serial number? That would be useful. All of a sudden I smiled. “Well what do you know about that.”

“What?”

I put the drone piece down with satisfaction. “The company that built this put their name on it. Whoever decided to use it in their stunt today filed the name off after they bought it.”

Natalie was smiling as well. “Can you tell what the name was?”

“Of course. Why do you think they pay my fee?”

Pay the Piper – Prologue

Posted by natechen on

(Found this when poking through the back end this week. It was scheduled to go up two weeks ago, on the 15th, but due to incompetence on my part got stuck in limbo instead. So I moved it up to this Friday, originally intended as a blank. Instead enjoy the prologue to Pay the Piper, my next fiction project, and look forward to chapter one next week!

-Nate)

“That is a delivery truck.”

The one snorted at the other’s obvious statement. “I have eyes. So far all you’ve proven is that your satellite uplink can handle livestreaming video.”

The truck was shakey in the frame about thirty to forty feet below the camera. There was a moment as the other fiddled with the camera controls, then the image steadied and zoomed in until it seemed the drone was only a dozen feet up. “That’s better. Noise canceling feature removes the shaking from the frame and keeps it focused on the truck.” The other sounded proud of the tech on display. “Would you like a blow by blow or do you wish to just watch things unfold at their own pace?”

“The truck’s making a left turn,” the one noted. “There’s not much to see. Am I supposed to be impressed that you’ve commandeered a delivery truck?”

“Ah, but that’s just it,” the other replied gleefully. “We haven’t commandeered the truck. It remains in the hands of its rightful owners.”

“Then you’re watching it with a drone.” The tone was dry and rueful. “You’re doing a poor job of convincing me this is the next frontier of warfare. Why should I trust you again?”

“The secret to evolving warfare is to apply the newest tools to the age old problems of attack and defense. This is the age of asymmetric war, when knife and gun are replaced with cunning and preparation.”

“I wish you wouldn’t try to wax poetic,” the one said. “It makes you sound silly. War has always relied on cunning and preparation as much as-”

“Fine,” the other cut in irritably. “We’re more prepared with the new tools at hand. Watch.”

And there was something to watch. The delivery truck came to a stop at a stop light and as it idled there for a moment a second drone dropped into view a few feet behind the truck then, in an impressive display of precision control, slid under the bottom of the vehicle and disappeared.

“Self-guided flight?” The one asked.

“Laser guided by a spotter on the balcony across the street.”

“You won’t be able to keep it there, then. What are you hoping to accomplish?”

“Once it’s under the truck electromagnets secured it to the chassis,” the other said with satisfaction. “It doesn’t require piloting anymore. And no one ever bothers to look under a vehicle at checkpoints. It’s a foot in the door.”

“You’ll need more than that. The payload on that drone is what, five pounds? Ten?”

“All we need, and it was cheap to boot.”

Two blocks later the truck came to a stop just outside the loading dock of its next stop. There was a brief pause as the doors to the building began to open and the other filled the time saying, “Morale has always been a huge part of warfare, and in an asymmetric war in particular how you look to the public is vitally important. Appearances matter so much more than substance, you know. And the brilliance of this plan is that it will allow us to strike without any of the worst kinds of PR. For example.”

The box truck began to pull into the door, only to sputter to a stop halfway into the loading dock.

“What happened?”

“A low strength EMP, taking advantage of the electromagnets already built into the drone. So much of a vehicle is computerized now, all it takes is a little scrambling and they come to a stop. And!” The other smiled an unpleasant smile. “Now we have an even bigger foot in the door. There’s a gap in their defenses just big enough for the killing thrust.”

The truck’s driver and a handful of uniformed building security officers were working to try and push the truck into the loading dock, only to scramble out of the way as a pale blue SUV suddenly revved it’s engine, served hard to the left and slammed into the back of the truck, pushing both vehicles up and out of sight.

“Cutting it a bit closeto keep up your appearances, don’t you think?”

“But no one was hurt.”

The one snorted. “Except your driver.”

“A self-driving car.”

“Oh? Sounds quite traceable.”

“It wasn’t built as one. We stole it and modified it ourselves.” As the other was explaining the video feed from the drone cut out. “And that would be the second EMP. Most of the cabin of that car was stripped out and replaced with capacitors and coils. It’s hard to predict how much damage it did, but if nothing else I expect that block will be without power for most of the day, if not longer. Best case scenario, the world’s largest online payment processor has just lost a quarter of their processing power on this continent.”

“They can share the work out, I’m sure. The losses won’t be as bad as you might think. Hardly an auspicious start to a civil war.”

“You would be the expert on that, to be sure. But even if the can adjust their work loads, the appearance of problems will still hurt confidence in their product and slow investor growth. Wars tend to grow out of the problems we think will be simplest to manage, after all.” The other turned away from the blank monitors and headed towards the door. “It’s not a bad opening salvo. And it ensures the key player in stage two will take an interest.

“You’re sure of that?” The one asked, still staring at the blank monitor.

The other paused in the door. “Of course. We used his calling card, after all. A chink in the armor.”

Next Chapter

Postdated Vacation!

Posted by natechen on

Hey guys! Dropping a quick post to let you know I’ll be taking the next couple of weeks off, due to being on vacation – or rather, being back from a vacation. You may have noticed that I’ve been posting the last couple of weeks, but in truth I was actually absent for most of that time! This time around I managed to get a running start and had content to post for the time I would be gone, but now I’ll need to build a buffer back up, so I won’t be posting anything beyond this today or next week. Thanks for tuning in and reading and I’ll see you in April!

Nate

Disgust Kills Creativity

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The arts in America are dying. If anyone is to save them, then the first thing they must do is overcome disgust.

Psychology breaks human personality down into five basic aspects: Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience, Extroversion and Neuroticism. What we call art or creativity is rooted in our openness to experiencing new things, which in turn dictates how much material we have to draw on when we endeavor to create something of our own. We can experience in many ways, ranging from reading books and talking with other people, to traveling new places and eating new foods.

The primary obstacle to experiencing new things is neuroticism, the tendency for the mind to focus on negative circumstances or outcomes. Neuroticism dictates how aware we are of fear and disgust, the part of our minds that warns of potential danger to us or those we care about. The stronger our neuroticism, the more things wrong we will see in a new experience, the more bad outcomes will dominate our expectations.

Neither neuroticism nor openness to experience are inherently good or bad. Overindulging in either one can have bad consequences, ignoring either one can have equally bad consequences. But in the arts, a little less neuroticism than normal is undoubtedly a good thing.

In just the last year of creative work, I have been in theater productions that involved incredible amounts of sweating and bad smelling costumes (as one friend of mine memorably put it, “Fame is stinky”), spent days with ink stains on my fingers from failed experiments in illustration and researched dozens of unpleasant subjects ranging from medical realities to nasty tribal rituals for stories I am percolating. Creative endeavors are rarely scary – although some forms of performance art can be – but they are very frequently gross before they are beautiful. The lotus flower flourishes among muck and grime. Famed animator Don Bluth once said you can show children pretty much anything, no matter how scary or gross, and they’ll be fine as long as you give them a happy ending. Unfortunately, we now live in a society that would rather be spared disgust than struggle through to the beauty at the end.

There’s a new spirit afoot in our culture, a spirit of disgust and revilement. You can see it at work every time we cower before media like Goblin Slayer or Shield Hero that shows us the unpleasant aspects of the human experience, every time artists like Kevin Hart have old statements now outside the orthodoxy used to run them out of jobs or off platforms, every time performers like Chris Pratt are taken to task for their social circles or personal beliefs. Overcome with disgust, our culture shuns these stories, these people, and either runs from them or attacks them. What they won’t do is engage with them, try to learn from their stories or performances, good or bad.

As a result our culture is suffering.

There’s a lot of disgusting things in the great works of literature. 1984 and Brave New World were rife with sexual exploitation, Shakespeare’s works were incredibly crass (for their time, and even now in some respects), Edgar Allen Poe was fascinated with the ways people abuse and torment one another, even Disney films show us a mother murdered before her child’s eyes. And for the love of all that is good, have you seen that pawn shop scene from The Brave Little Toaster? But there were hard lessons in those dark warnings about human nature, and the bright points that frequently followed them took us to heights far above the depths. Art gains its power from truth, and the truth is disgusting and frightful as often as it is glorious and joyful.

There are just not as many powerful but messy stories coming out these days. A film like Casablanca that portrayed the contradictory, often messy characters who couldn’t bring themselves to fight Nazis until after the climax of the movie, who in some cases were willing to give up the fight just to get a little personal satisfaction, would not find much approval today. Now, Nazis are gross and everyone knows better. It’s easy to forget how complicated and messy things were in the late 1930s, and how unclear the evil to come was. 

Neither could a film like Blazing Saddles be made. There was a movie grossly insensitive to the stereotypes and prejudices of its day. By acting so callously, that movie managed to turn demeaning caricatures into a joke, fighting to rob them of power and put them in perspective, suggesting things will work out better if we just stop taking ourselves so seriously. Good humor is a weakness now, blinding us to the fact that we’re being made impure. Then it was a weapon in the face of absurd notions others held, and we can’t bear to think of the days we engaged with those notions at all.

We’re starving our culture, thinking we’re keeping it pure. In the end, we’re just whittling it down. While I love some of the Marvel movies, they’re practically the only movies of note being made today. And they’re by and large bright, shiny, optimistic movies, less concerned with the frailties of the human condition than with its zenith. There’s nothing wrong with that, but a diet of only bread leaves you with scurvy. Our arts have been purified. There’s nothing disgusting in them anymore. And it’s left our creativity horribly stunted.

 

Desty Nova: A Villain Destroyed

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Alita: Battle Angel is a movie about cyborgs punching stuff and the nature of the human experience. The story is theoretically a direct, big screen adaptation of one of my top ten favorite manga of all time, Battle Angel Alita. It’s also a very mixed bag.

This is not a complete breakdown of the adaptation, what I thought was good and what I thought was bad, as that would be an undertaking and I’m not sure I’m ready for it. Visually the movie is pitch perfect, but storywise it runs into some deep, deep flaws, tossing aside many of the themes of the source material in order to produce a trite, overused, downtrodden vs oppressors narrative. Nowhere does that failure come through more clearly than in the character of Desty Nova (just Nova in the film). As Alita’s greatest antagonist, Nova was a cruel and capricious character in the manga, and to an extent the film presents him as such as well. But in his adaptation of the manga, James Cameron throws away the questions Nova was trying to tackle and reduces him to a cardboard cutout of a cartoon tyrant rather than presenting him as the dangerous philosophical and moral threat that he should have been.

You see Desty Nova, the manga character, was trying to develop a scientific theory of free will and destiny. To do this, he would find people and offer to help them do anything they desired – unfettered free will – and then observe what happened to them, and whether they could overcome their circumstances – their destiny. In this process Nova was entirely amoral – he was as likely to assist a vicious serial killer like Makaku as a caring brother and conscientious sportsman like Jashugan, and he didn’t really care if he had to do things others might consider amoral to forward his goals. Eventually Nova would become more sadistic and arbitrary in his actions – Makaku and Jashugan seem to have been early and comparatively benign experiments – and he never hesitated to leverage his technical expertise to smooth his way and help himself survive the ever growing horde of people who wanted him dead.

Through Nova’s experiments we get a glimpse at the idea that our own desires can destroy us. He never gives his subjects anything other than what they want, to the extent of his considerable ability. But they invariably wind up self destructing. Makaku gains a robust cyberbody that can survive almost any situation but, with his limited sense of self, he can only understand pain and suffering and only communicates with others through them. He raises trouble until Alita finally destroys him in a tragic act that he perceives as love – affection from the only person who has ever cared about him in any way. Jashugan loves his sister and his sport, but he devotes himself to mastering that sport so fully that he gets his brain remodeled to make him a better player, ultimately leading to his brain shutting down a few years later depriving Motorball of its greatest player and Shimura of her only family. Nova did things for both these men that made their burnouts bigger and more spectacular – but there’s no doubt that they would have wound up in the same place regardless.

But the important thing about Nova is that he was fascinated with free will. He helped his subjects do whatever they wanted, and in turn he did whatever he wanted to get them there. Controlling people was never a part of his character. And Nova was a genuinely curious scientist. He wanted to understand things and answer questions, he didn’t really care about his own status so long as he could satisfy his curiosity. And he loved flan.

The adaptation of his character is practically the exact opposite.

In Alita: Battle Angel Nova is a tyrant. He rules the city of Zalem and oversees a network of servants on the surface to ensure no one there challenges his position. He is capable of controlling the bodies of those servants, completely overriding their free will. And when confronted with Alita herself, the most fascinating experimental subject for Nova of the manga, the foundation of a dozen experiments into free will over the course of decades, movie Nova orders her execution without expressing the slightest shred of interest. Alita is not a way to try and satisfy his curiosity, Nova just wants the power source in her cyborg body so he can make his own position in Zalem secure.

Makaku (or a very similar character with an unpronounceable name in the film) is just a pawn that does Nova’s bidding, we don’t even know why he took up working with Nova in the first place. Jashugan’s part in the story hasn’t come in yet but we do see Nova manipulating the Factory master Vector in much the same way. When these character die it’s a nonevent. They had no meaning, nothing to say about themselves or the nature of Nova’s desires and ambitions. They’re just fuel for spectacle, and props that show Nova is Bad. Hollow shells, nothing more.

It’s disappointing to see something you love translated to a new medium badly. It’s worse to see something that was trying to say something profound boiled down to something trite. In the character of Nova, Alita: Battle Angel manages both.

Who in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

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The greatest movie theme song ever written is Ghostbusters. It’s fun, swingy and catchy, the kind of tune that crawls into your subconscious mind and emerges whenever it’s most embarrassing. By the same token, one of the greatest TV show themes ever written belongs to Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, a geography trivia gameshow that I remember fondly from the days of my youth. It was performed by the excellent vocal group Rockapella and it had some of the best wordplay and catchiest melodies on PBS. When the gameshow morphed into a history trivia show with a time travel theme the biggest loss was the theme song and Rockapella.

By the same coin, the one place I’d say Netflix’s take on Carmen Sandiego falls short is in its loss of that theme song.

This new Netflix take on the franchise is not the first attempt to morph the computer adventure games/quiz shows into a story driven animated series. There was a similar take run on Fox Kids in the mid-nineties, and in the spirit of disclosure I should note that I’ve never seen a full episode of that show. Neither have I played any of the adventure games – although we did own the “Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego?” board game and I watched a lot of the PBS quiz shows, which gave me some familiarity with the franchise.

For those not familiar, all iterations of the franchise up until Netflix’s Carmen Sandiego have revolved around detectives from the ACME Crimenet trying to locate and capture renowned international superthief Carmen Sandiego, most notable for her snazzy red coat and hat, penchant for stealing outrageous things from unlikely places, and on the nose naming sense. (Her criminal empire goes by “VILE”. Yes, really.) The franchise also tended to be very upfront with the fact that the audience was expected to participate. Players of the computer games were addressed directly, and called “Player” by name. Likewise, in the Fox cartoon, there was a mute figure by a computer who the other characters relied on for information who they referred to as Player, and who would often be left with trivia questions to answer at commercial breaks – with the expectation that the audience would make guesses as they waited for the show to come back on, of course.

The most interesting aspect of the quiz show, for me as a young child, was that Carmen very frequently got away. The challenges of the show were hard and gumshoes rarely made it through the final round successfully and, if they couldn’t finish in time, Carmen eluded them. Likewise, the other iterations of the franchise kept Carmen a step ahead of her pursuers so that she could sneak away to plot a new crime in a new installment. Her henchmen and goals would change but she was a constant. That made her the most well defined, most interesting part of the franchise.

Moving her from the role of villain to misunderstood hero must have been a natural move for the Netflix writing team. By transforming Carmen from a globetrotting crimeboss to a catburglar trying to turn over a new leaf, the latest incarnation of the franchise does a lot to push the story towards a coherent narrative with clear and constant conflict, rather than just a series of random trivia challenges as in incarnations past.

Carmen was always a bit of a mysterious figure, the better to turn up in surprising situations with no clear motive. This new take preserves that mystique by making Carmen’s origins a bit of a mystery to even herself (Orphans! A writer’s favorite kind of child!) but gives her simple and somewhat idealistic motives that make her an accessible protagonist, rather than a distant antagonist.

Fortunately, although the central character is radically reimagined, everything else about the franchise is firing on all cylinders. ACME and VILE are still part of the world; Carmen is a VILE defector and ACME is a spy network dedicated to finding and bringing down VILE. Carmen’s support team is made up of familiar faces. Zach and Ivy, homages to the protagonists of the Fox series, provide Carmen’s field support while her comms and research person is a Canadian white hat hacker who goes only by Player. And VILE’s criminal network still spans the globe and targets cultural artifacts, so the story still travels everywhere and brings up lots of local trivia like local customs, imports and exports and fine works of art.

There are new elements in the mix, like the ACME agents Chase Devineaux and Julia Argent, who are Carmen’s foils on the other side of the law. They’re introduced in a way that almost makes them feel like red herrings – they work for Interpol at first – but slowly grow to be more and more of a pain in her side. Keeping the ACME Chief as the hard faced lady from the quiz show rather than the floating head of the games and cartoon was a nice touch, even if most of the witty dialog that made that character so much fun hasn’t worked its way into the show yet.

VILE is similarly a mix of old and new. Since they basically appeared only as antagonists who players had to find, VILE operatives tended to appear alone or in small groups and never discuss how their organization worked. With the focus now on a former member of that organization, that’s changed. VILE has many more characters here than in days past, and the only familiar one is The Contessa. Pretty much everything else is made from scratch, and they offer an interesting slew of villains to serve as foils for Carmen. They’re interesting characters who manage to avoid being cartoonish villains, but I must admit I miss the likes of Double Trouble or Vic the Slick. They wouldn’t fit quite as organically in Carmen’s new world so I understand why they aren’t there, but it’s still a small disappointment.

However, after watching all of Carmen Sandiego, I still feel there’s something missing. Beyond Rockapella, that is. Carmen isn’t going anywhere, personally speaking. She’s set out to bring down VILE on her own – fair enough. Maybe she has something to prove. Maybe she just wants to definitively turn over a new leaf. But so far what this radical new direction means for her as a character hasn’t been addressed. That keeps the series from being more than just a romp through a nostalgic property, which is too bad because the studio behind it really put in the work to make an engaging show on pretty much every other front. If we were going to delve into Carmen Sandiego as deeply as we delved into world cultures I might be tempted back for another season. As it is, I’m probably going to pass.

Unless Rockapella comes back. Get on that, Netflix.

Lemony Snicket’s Most Unfortunate Event Was the Netflix Ending

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Dear reader, if you wish to avoid spoilers for Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, then please, look away. Nothing but disappointment waits for you here.

The basic premise of Unfortunate Events is that the story has no happy endings – although it does occasionally have something like happy middles. Indeed, by the end of Daniel Handler’s thirteen book series (written under the pseudonym Lemony Snicket) the Baudelaire orphans will have lost just about every person they meet who is kind to them. Most to death, a few to circumstances a little more vague.

This is a children’s book series.

Now, Unfortunate Events is aimed at an audience on the cusp of young adulthood, intended to engage the growing minds of preteens and young teenagers with the kinds of questions that their rapidly maturing brains are starting to grapple with in earnest. What are good and evil? To what extent can people embody those traits? Why do adults do things that seem so incomprehensible to adolescents and children? The series also warns its younger readers of many things to watch out for in life. Authority figures are sometimes too untrustworthy, incompetent or emotionally comprised to be relied on. People are not always what they seem at first. And, of course, there are no happy endings in life – life always ends in death. And that’s rarely happy.

It’s not fair to say that nothing good ever happens to the Baudelaires. Their lives are hard, but they find friends and moments of peace. But they’re always moving on to the next thing, the next attempt to find the truth, the next attempt to find a home, the next attempt to get away from the evil Count Olaf. And by the time we reach the end of Snicket’s recounting of what he knows of their lives, including his own encounter with the Baudelaires, these warnings have proved true time and again, and the questions have found no easy answers. The Baudelaires do get away from Count Olaf.

It’s easy to run from someone who’s dead.

It’s not so easy to forget someone who chased you for years, setting fire to everything in his wake, and who died saving the life of a woman he hated – but loved in the past.

For a little while, the Baudelaires have peace on the secluded island where Olaf died. There’s food, shelter and no enemies to speak of. But there’s no challenge and when body and mind go unchallenged they rot. So they end the diary of their activities there – later found by their tireless biographer, Snicket – and set sail into the unknown. It is the end of their story by virtue of being all that is known to be told. Perhaps they thrived. And perhaps not.

In this mix of hope and melancholy the tale of the Baudelaires is summarized to perfection.

Netflix ruined it, as is their way.

Now I’m going to be very, very hard on the final episode of Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, but lest you think this means I disliked the production, let me take a moment to praise it. The writing carries over much of the book’s love of wordplay, incredible prose and sense of tongue in cheek fun at the forced dreariness of the story. Nothing in life can be as dull and depressing as Snicket’s take on the adventures of a handful of orphans. Part of the point of the novels is to point out how the endlessly bright and optimistic nature of many children’s books, replete with constant happy endings, is absurd. But rather than push this overbearing optimism to the point of parody, the absurdity is simply turned upside down. It might be easy to miss that and treat Unfortunate Events as something to be played straight. Nothing, from the written dialog to the actor’s performances, the set designs to the musical score, ever makes that mistake.

And speaking of production values, they are incredible. The sets are gorgeous and fun, the music fits the story perfectly and the actors are all spot on. In particular, the delightful Neil Patrick Harris as Count Olaf and the droll Patrick Warburton as Lemony Snicket absolutely nail their parts, bringing roles that could easily become grating or boring to life with a gentle touch.

The Netflix adaptation is, on the whole, excellent. But their ending undermines the entire premise of the story. You see… the Netflix ending is happy.

Now, I’ve come out in favor of happy endings in the past, particularly in the case of Edge of Tomorrow in contrast to its source material, All You Need is Kill. But the important caveat to that is the change of the core narrative from one of falling into fatalistic resolve to one of discovering hopeful courage – a change to the ending only makes sense with the change in message. Unfortunate Events has no such change in its core narrative.

Thus, the Netflix adaptation makes two core mistakes in its final episode. First, it explicitly shows the salvation of a mismanaged group of colonists on the isle. At the time everyone there was suffering from poison. In the novel the Baudelaires find an unconventional antidote but the leader of the colony takes it himself, but doesn’t tell anyone else, instead leading them off the island towards what he says is a place they can find what they need to formulate a conventional remedy. He’s the story’s example of incompetent leadership, contrasted against the Baudelaires’ parents, who leave a diary on the island which the orphans read to find their own solution. In the Netflix adaptation, the colonists set out for the dubious yet conventional antidote before the orphans find the unconventional substitute. We later see the substitute being delivered to the colonists as they row away – making it seem much more certain they survive. In the same sequence we also see a  number of side characters from throughout the series finding the end of their minor goals, giving them happy endings as well, something the novel also avoided. The core idea of Unfortunate Events, that there are no happy endings, is lost.

The second error is like the first.

Incidentally, it’s not Olaf’s Last Act. This tiny moment of redemption offered to Olaf’s character is thematically appropriate. Almost every other character is more complex and conflicted than Olaf is until he takes the time to save Kit Snicket and, by showing this tinge of good will in the character, we see the idea that people are more than what they seem paid off once more. It doesn’t make him a good man. But there was undoubtedly a capacity for good in him that went tragically underused.

No, the final failure of the Netflix adaptation is that, after we see the Baudelaires sail into the sunset to the new and unknown challenges of the rest of their life we come back to poor, lonely Lemony Snicket, who has spent all his time chronicling their life as a final tribute to his lost love, Beatrice, who, in the novels, closed knowing he would never know the end of the story – thematically appropriate because you can never guess the end of your life from the vantagepoint of adolescence – and we cut the knees out from under that moral. Because Lemony meets Beatrice.

Not his lost love, but the little orphan girl the Baudelaires take in themselves, Kit Snicket’s daughter and Lemony’s niece. She comes and finds him, and tells him the Baudelaires are fine. And we get closure, knowing that everything’s going to be fine.

That was not the point.

The point was to tell adolescents that, although their struggles are real and never really go away, they’re also good and they make you a better person. So take the good times when they come and never shy away from the bad things. There’s nothing guaranteed but a wild ride, and that’s okay. The wonder of the ending of Unfortunate Events is the unknown. The refusal to give pat, happy endings was what set it apart. And, in the end, Netflix lost that. It’s not like everything else the show achieved was lost. But it was unfortunate.

The Incredibles 2 – Stasis Hurts

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There are many movies that would be good if they stood alone but, produced as sequels, come up short. No one would have blamed Pixar if The Incredibles 2 proved to be one of those movies. The original film was a classic, easily one of the best five films Pixar has done, perhaps one of the top three. Following that kind of an act is hard. Very hard.

But the shortcomings of The Incredibles 2 are more than a little sequel driven disappointment. The film lacks focus, vision and the parts of its characters that we loved the most. As a story it’s disjointed and has no real arc for most of its characters. And worst of all, it feels like it started taking itself too seriously, where the original was so self aware it brought us the term monologing. What am I talking about?

Let’s start with the characters. That’s where the biggest and most egregious errors came from. The only character in this film that has anything that feels like an arc is Bob Parr, Mr. Incredible. That may be unsurprising, given that he was the last film’s main character, but everything else about the story feels like it’s constructed to make Helen the main character. She’s the one out in the world, confronting the driving conflicts. But nearly half of the film is spent on Bob trying to be a stay at home dad to his kids, which is funny and lets us see a lot of the three younger Parrs who were all very fun in the previous film, but the problem is Bob doesn’t really have any conflict here, he just needs to get to know his kids a little. He does, we do, and that’s it.

Now, one of the best parts of The Incredibles was how charming and authentic the Parrs felt, not just as individuals but as a family. And that charm and authenticity is in this movie as well. But in the original, we got to see the Parrs as a family engage with the story and its conflict. In the sequel, the Parrs are a quirky family or superheroes for most of the time, rather than being the quirky family of superheroes they were at the end of the last film. Bob getting more invested in his family is nice, and he rarely seemed deeply involved with his kids in the first film, so this is at least a step forward for his character. It just feels extraneous. The writers at Pixar didn’t take the time to work all these character bits into the story in any way, and that’s lazy because it leaves us with a bunch of stuff in the middle that feels aimless.

Violet also shows a little character growth in this film. Where in the first film she was too shy to talk to her crush Tony, now she’s putting a little too much of her own value in holding on to that achievement and when it slips away from her she’s crushed. By the end of the film we see her a little more confident in her own standing, willing to leave Tony on the street corner while she rushes off to help her family with a quick bout of hero work. Likewise, at the start of the film she’s irritated with being left in a defensive role but by the end she realizes that her skillset makes her more suited to play support than anyone else in the family and makes peace with it. These are both good character beats for Violet but we don’t see anything but the beginning and end of them, whereas the previous film clearly shows violet’s struggle with being confident and the very moment when she stands up and takes control of her fate on Syndrome’s Island. Also tying both of her character arcs back to Tony is kinda lame.

Beyond these poorly executed character arcs no one in The Incredibles 2 changes or grows. Dash’s desire to test himself from the first film was one of the most understandable and relatable things in the original, and he even got to formulate one of the film’s core ideas, that if everyone is special no one is. In the sequel he just gets distracted by gadgets. And Helen has something that could be a character arc, doing much of what Bob was doing in the last film and trying to push Supers back into the limelight, but again that doesn’t seem to challenge her in any way. Other than lampshading how it makes her a bit of a hypocrite, the story does not force her to justify what she’s doing in anyway or admit to Bob that he was right about how necessary bringing Supers back was. Likewise, while she misses JackJack’s first power, that’s never presented as a heavy moment for her. Helen just goes out, does some heroing, and comes home. It lacks weight.

In fact, the whole conflict in the film lacks weight. The original film made it seem like Supers were coming back already, a whole second film about making superheroes legal again feels extraneous. And the fights with the Screenslaver also lack weight. It’s not gory or in your face but the fact is, in The Incredibles people tried to kill each other and died quite a bit. There’s a suicide attempt in the first two minutes. Mr. Incredible finds the corpse of one of his friends rotted to a skeleton in a cave. A lot of Syndrome’s minions meet with fiery ends. That kind of immediate danger feels absent from The Incredibles 2 with its low impact mind control plot and general lack of menace. Perhaps that’s meant partly as a reflection on Evelyn, who is a pretty lackluster villain, but mostly it feels like the movie is just going through the motions.

There was an interview with Brad Bird which I recall reading in which he said the studio was open to making another Incredibles film so long as they could come up with a good story. At the time I wasn’t sure what he meant. Now, I suspect that he had set out to tell a story he had strong feelings about and had worked out all the details for, but once it was over he had nothing more he really wanted to say there. The problem was, people (Bird included) loved the characters and world that came out of that story. So Pixar cast about for ideas about what to do with them next, and over time half formed ideas drifted together and formed the core of this sequel. Pixar is an excellent creative studio, so they were able to grasp all the charm and heart of those characters. But without a story to drive them forward a part of the magic was lost. The Parrs remain in very much the same place they were at the end of their first film and it’s painful to see. Maybe they didn’t need a sequel. Maybe there is a better format to try this with. But for now, I’m content to consider the Incredibles franchise complete. If Bird is wise he won’t reopen it until he has somewhere to go.

The Shield Hero Complaints – Delete Anime Critics

Posted by natechen on

I swear, I just wrote this post.

No, that’s not true. The problems with the Goblin Slayer reaction sprang at least in part from a failure to pick up on the symbolic threads of the story – and probably a few missteps on the part of the production staff. This time around there’s no real excuse, the people complaining about the story of Rise of the Shield Hero are just being stupid. Worse, they are guilty of dereliction of duty. If you complained about Shield Hero incorporating a false accusation of rape into its story then you missed the mark so badly you should never review anything again. Hang up your hat and go do something useful with your life.

This post is not aimed to my usual audience (although please read it if you enjoy reading me yell at people who aren’t you). It’s aimed at every vapid, intellectually lazy, useless idiot who saw the first episode of Shield Hero and immediately spouted the Culturally Approved Party Line. You should all be replaced with a thirty second propaganda video on loop because that would have the exact same value to the discourse.

Listen, I’m going to explain this to you slowly, in small words, in the hopes that some part of you can register what I say and process it enough that you might up your game, just a little bit, at some point in the future.

The job of a critic of fiction is to take a work of fiction and think about it in the context of the culture it was made in and what the author(s) of that work were trying to accomplish with it, then examine how well the author accomplished those goals and, finally, explain all that to their audience. For an anime critic in America that job comes with the added responsibility of translating the foreign culture of Japan into terms that makes sense to American audiences, not always an easy task given the very large gaps between what makes sense to us and what makes sense in Japan.

Except. In the case of Shield Hero that isn’t difficult at all. So listen, ignorant and stunted critics, for I am about to do your job for you.

Japanese culture values appearances very highly and, once you lose face, it can be nearly impossible to recover. The consequences of a single misstep can ruin a person for life, and damages the prospects of everyone associated with that person as well. Worse, it doesn’t require an actual misstep to ruin some people, just rumors, particularly if that person is from the bottom end of the social scale. Like in American literature, good and bad, confronting injustice is a running theme in Japanese fiction, and Shield Hero is no different.

The story of Shield Hero starts with a very worn premise about a normal person transported to a fantasy world, a bit like the Chronicles of Narnia. In this case, the hero is transported with three other strangers and each of these men (and they are all men) find themselves attached to a magical weapon. They have been summoned with the hopes that they will be able to save the world. As you might guess from the title, our protagonist is attached to a powerful magical shield. His fellows sneer at him for being stuck with a worthless looking “weapon” and none of the champions native to the world join to help him prepare for the coming dangers.

None, except for a woman who seemingly takes pity on him and helps him get ready for his work. But after a single day with him she steals his money and turns him over to the local constables as a would be rapist then runs of to join forces with one of the other summoned heroes, leaving our protagonist despised, scorned and traumatized by the betrayal.

That’s the beginning of Rise of the Shield Hero and, as you might expect, it leaves the hero at his lowest point so he can –as the title implies – rise up to greatness. It’s also not the whole story.

You see, the Shield Hero has a unique standing in the world he arrives in. Tradition speaks of him as a particular ally to demihumans (essentially a despised ethnic minority in the country where he arrives). In addition, it turns out that the woman who framed him is second in line to the throne. We see other characters in the world do equal or worse things than those the Shield Hero is accused of but since they target the weak or the despised, or they themselves are simply powerful, they suffer none of the indignities that the Shield Hero must go through.

This builds greater and greater resentment and anger in the Shield Hero, creating problems beyond the physical danger he must face and the social ostracization he faces. His very hatred is a danger to him and the small handful of allies he manages to collect. The story is as much about him recovering his own sense of self as it is about his overcoming the social and physical dangers he faces.

Astute commentators will note the biting commentary this story offers on Japan’s standards of social punishment, which are rarely applied equally. They might even go so far as to draw parallels between this storyline and works of American Literature like To Kill A Mockingbird or perhaps just known historical cases that bear superficial resemblance to the inciting incident of Shield Hero like the lynching of Emmett Till. The truly daring might bring up the fact that the way Title IX has been applied in the past several years has resulted in more and more minority men being run off of college campuses under very dubious circumstances, many of whom have later found some small solace in collecting millions of dollars in court damages from the colleges that wronged them, and how Shield Hero is an easily digestible warning to examine ourselves and make sure we’re not going down the wrong path.

But I’m not going to do any of those things.

Instead, I’m going to point out how you dissolute wastes of Internet bandwidth who have the gall to claim the title of Critic behave just like the villains of Shield Hero. Just as the nation where the Shield Hero arrives revels in its religiously granted superiority over demihumans and dismisses all their trials out of hand, demeaning their champion because he is a morally inferior entity without reflection on themselves or his circumstances, you have rushed to mouth your preapproved condemnations about disbelieving survivors so you can claim the moral high ground over misogynists who just want to get away with raping women. There can’t be any kind of nuanced discussion or examination of cultures or parallels, or even what the author might have originally been intending with his story, because you already have the gospel truth and that proves you’re a good person.

Well, if there was any justice in the world your total failure at meaningful criticism would result in your being driving off the Internet by jeering masses that see you for the self-righteous drones you are. But, as Shield Hero points out, there is rarely justice in this world. And that means that, while you may hate it, The Rise of the Shield Hero is the anime you deserve. I hope you choke on it.