So the idea of "body horror" as a genre or generic marker is that you are being transformed into something intrinsically and personally monstrous and everything is terrible. Right? So I figure the reverse of body horror is when you are transforming yourself into something (conventionally) monstrous because it's awesome and beautiful.

Ask me about my reverse-body-horror magical girl fighting game idea sometime.

— Motor Sprite (@nfagerlund) April 26, 2013

And the core idea of the magical girl genre is about undergoing a transformation into a prettier and more perfect version of yourself -- becoming more capable and self-actualized, then performing that capability aesthetically (prettier) and through ritual combat against physical embodiments of negative and destructive psychic forces (more perfect).

I figure? After the first time you have to defend your friends' lives by going toe-to-toe against a monster-of-the-week, your idea of "pretty" is going to change pretty damn quick. Fast and strong and efficient and shiny and bulletproof, and taking down a demon before it even gets a WHIFF of your designated love interest; THAT's pretty. And thus, our heroine's mystic-gem-fueled magical girl transformation gradually becomes more and more inhuman, but, and here's the thing, she is totally cool with this, because she A: has a job to do, and B: is in the process of adopting an aesthetic of function. And the monsters of the week are stuck dealing with eight feet of shiny glittering motion-blurred blade-fingered lantern-eyed (ribbon-bedecked, glass-armored, short-skirted, and let's be clear here, you get a super-legit sparkly transformation sequence before each battle) insectile terror.

( more thinking about video games and practical genre abuse )

Soooo... sometimes I make my own fun.

There's a game called Cave Story, I was obsessed with it, and I still play parts of it several times a week as a sort of electronic cigarette break. But not, like, playing a whole area through or anything. More like, go into the falling blocks room in the hell level and make as many back-and-forth trips as you can with only the fireball and the bubbler until you die. I dunno, it's completely stupid, but I love it. It's relaxing. (This sort of thing only works with games where the controls are super tight, by the way, so that you're exactly as good as your reflexes. If it doesn't present the illusion that you could do it literally perfectly if you were only good enough — while staying hard enough that you'll never get there — then it's not any fun.)

Anyway, I made up a new game-on-top-of-the-game the other week, and I call it "Mountain of Blondes." Because the re-release has a challenge mode with a boss that throws clones of Curly at you, and if you get it down to a third of its health, the number of clones in each drop will keep doubling every time. And their bodies don't go away, so you can try try to completely carpet the room before you die!



Um, yeah.

Just beat Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP for the second time, and wow, just what an awesome game. If you have an iOS thingamabob, it is absolutely worth your $5. I'm actually a little emotional at the moment about things like using semirepetitive environments/enemies/tasks to evoke the aesthetic of old Atari cartridges, and the business with the hit points, and the music.

Okay, let's post a pair of essaylets tonight! This one's been simmering for a while, and it just came up again in a conversation with roler, so I'll get it out for public comment:

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The ending of the Scott Pilgrim movie kind of sucks, and that actually doesn't really bother me. Which might surprise those who've heard, for example, my insufferable Howl's Moving Castle spiel. In short, I think the way the movie engages with video game grammar and video game logic allows multiple endings to harmoniously co-exist in a way not possible when those methods of story aren't invoked. (Wayne's World notwithstanding, because Wayne's World is special that way, and besides, it doesn't work quite the way I'm talking about here.)

Which is to say, video games are a narrative form where multiple endings are equal peers in an integrated whole. Sure, there's usually a "best" ending, but if you do a perfect playthrough to the good ending and then never touch the game again, you actually haven't experienced the whole game. Multiple passes, some of them "failed," are expected and accepted on the road to completion.

This lets the Scott Pilgrim movie diverge radically without becoming an "alternate" take on the story; it remains an integrated part of a single work. Without importing the concepts of branching paths and multi-pass completionism from video games, any ending to a story is necessarily the only ending, which polarizes readers and viewers and forces adaptations to exist in private worlds apart from their sources.

Anyway, the ending of Scott Pilgrim: The Movie is the perfectly legitimate ending that happens if you don't do any of the sidequests* and don't manage to keep Crash and the Boys alive through the fight with Patel. Yeah, it sucks; play better next time! (i.e. read the comics.)

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* Ramona's fights at the library and Lee's Palace, learning how to fight girls, meeting Lisa at the mall (necessary for moving in with Ramona at the end of the Roxy chapter), helping Kim move house, the recording sidequest, facing Nega Scott early enough that you can unlock the Power of Understanding once you get to Gideon, getting a fucking job**, etc.

** Zvi, who hadn't read the comic at the time, pointed this one out: "I do think it's interesting that this is the only movie I can think of where the hero's sole reward at the end of the film is romantic fulfillment. He doesn't have a job, he doesn't have a place to live, he doesn't have a calling: all he's got going forward is Ramona. On the one hand, I disapprove of that as a conclusion for anyone, but, on the other hand, if that sort of thing is going to say with us, I think it should be an ending for boys, too."

Wow, so everything's coming up Scott Pilgrim these last couple days. I'm sure everyone's sick of hearing about it all, but listen, you know that tie-in beat-em-up that Ubisoft said they were gonna make? They got Paul Robertson and Anamanaguchi attached to the project. Click those names, it will be pretty obvious why I am excited, 'nuff said. Wait, one more link. Ok, done.

Balls to chronology! Here’re the Aug/Sept reviews I’m done with, and I’ll post the other ones when I finish ‘em.

( A subset of things I read during August and September: )

And that is why Nova Swing is the most grisly, horrifying book I’ve read all year.

Next time: Return of the King, “City of Roses: Gin-Soaked,” and Infinite Jest.

Things I Read During May

Naoki Urasawa - 20th Century Boys, vol. 1 (5/3, comic)

Huh! This is... pretty darn good. The story is clearly barely even getting rolling, but I really like the characters and the dialogue and the art and the hints of things going on, and man, the setting. This manga has a wonderful sense of place, and its loving and grimy depictions of Japan in the '70s and '90s are a thing I haven't really seen before. Weirdly. (I've certainly read enough manga, you'd think I'd have run across something that felt roughly this real before.)

The cultist dialogue is all hilariously awful, but I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be. Especially since the rest of the dialogue is fantastic.

Saladin Ahmed - "Where Virtue Lives" (5/10, short story)

Well, neither bad nor particularly my taste. The dialogue was really clunky and the characters didn't grab me, but I quite liked the worldbuilding and the magic. So... a wash?

Cat Rambo - "The Dead Girl's Wedding March" (5/10, short story)

Wow! That was really good!

Neil Gaiman, Andy Kubert, Richard Isanove - Marvel 1602 (comic, 5/19)

Shockingly, I liked this a lot!

As you may know, I've got a bit of a standoffish relationship with Big Two superhero comics, but this story did the neat trick of making me care about both the individual characters involved and the Marvel Universe/mythos itself. Bravo.

My current theory is that Gaiman managed this by making the Marvel Universe a character in its own right. Instead of simply using it as an open-pit mine for cameos and opaque references, he made this into a story about the shape and intention of the Marvel Universe qua entity, which I found fascinating and not at all what I was expecting and actually more than a little touching.

Beefs: Seriously, the whole multiverse at existential risk? And this would happen every time someone tried that particular species of time travel, right? I call bullshit on that. Also, the Watchers are unspeakably silly.

Things: I find myself oddly intrigued by the Fantastic(k) Four, despite having had very little previous interest in them. Dr. Strange is simply the shit. Captain America's role and self-presentation are incredibly icky in ways that only a character claiming to be an embodiment of America could manage to run afoul of. I like to think Gaiman was aware enough to know what he was doing there, but who knows. And anyway, Captain America is weird in the first place.

BONUS LEVEL: Braid (5/23, video game)

Dep't of Stories I Never Need to Read Again: Bereaved/jilted man misses his dead/unfaithful girlfriend/wife so hard that he breaks reality.

Braid reclaims some points for bothering to point out that the hero is a total douchebag and that this whole "desire" thing is largely a metaphor in the first place, so that's kind of neat, but I'm not convinced you can have this one both ways. One side of the fence is boring unresolved-male-author's-issues bullshit, and the other side is alienating and didactic anti-story, which can be potentially interesting in literature but will reliably poison a video game.

Never mind that, though, because the gameplay and artwork here are absolutely wonderful, and the time manipulation mechanics make for some truly mindfucking puzzles. (One or two of them are Alundra-class hard, and pulling off the secret achievements or time trials is really insanely difficult.) Good stuff and well worth your $15.

Terry Pratchett - Mort (5/29)

Moving house, mildly brainfried... time to read me some Pratchett.

I hadn't read Mort, brand new to me. I've heard some people recently suggest it as a good jumping-on point for Discworld, and I do think it would probably work as one. This one was pretty early, right? checks Uh, 1987. Right, wow. That's actually pretty impressive, because what you have here is a legit fully-fledged Discworld book, which, dang. Prose isn't up to Pratchett's modern par, and his (or his editors', hard to say) faith in the reader's ability to figure out what's going on is shaky, but it works in a way that the first few books didn't, quite.

Cut and Fucking Paste (5/30) and Edit (5/29)

So say you take the traditional Kirk/Spock OTP as TOS canon. Young Alternate Kirk would have gotten a brainful of that in advance on account of that mind-meld, right? So... yeah. (via zvi.)

(I enjoyed the movie a lot, but am still working out my overall feelings about the reboot. These stories made me happy, though.)

Angélica Gorodischer - Kalpa Imperial (tr. Ursula K. Le Guin) (50books_poc: 2) (5/31)

There are heroes and villains and clever cowards and tricksters and betrayals and battles and emperors and ascetics and madmen. If you like things that are beautiful and crazy epic, put this one on your list.

Gorodischer works the aesthetic of HUGE, on a level I've only seen China Miéville and Hal Duncan function at, and it is a stunningly fine thing. Come for the razor-sharp characterization, stay for the mindblowing historiography and meta-narratives about the nature of storytelling.

So Kalpa Imperial. It's a cycle of disconnected stories about the emperors and commoners and genii loci of that greatest of empires, whose name need not even be mentioned. (You know how these things go.) It is almost as old as I am in Argentina, but wasn't released in English until 2003. You know how Le Guin rolls, so the prose is gorgeous. Being unable to engage the original, I can't say anything about the translation, other than that I'm inclined to trust Le Guin's judgment in these sorts of things and that it reads well.

Pretty much all the stories are individually wonderful, and a few of them left me on the verge of tears (special mention to "The End of a Dynasty, or: The Natural History of Ferrets" and "Concerning the Unchecked Growth of Cities"), but the gestalt and the interstices are where the project qua project gets really interesting. See, for almost the entire cycle, there isn't any overlap. There are references within each story that seem like they should link up and let you orient, but they never point to anywhere you've been or will go before the book's out. The effect is one of massive elbow-room, a history so large that a multitude of histories can dwell within and not impinge on each other. Furthermore, it eschews any teleological idea of "progress"—the first story tells you right off the bat that any technological/political milieu can exist at any point in the Empire's past or future—which makes the feeling of spacious time still more intense, sets you even further adrift in the infinity of history. (Oh, and each story except the last has its own quite-present storyteller, so they all actually cover at least two time periods in duplex.)

Back up: Like I said, there isn't any overlap for almost the entire cycle. The next-to-last story has a single recognizable reference, like a clearing of the throat for what follows. The last story makes me want to write papers.

You remember how, in Super Mario World on the SNES, if you beat the entire secret world you'd get dumped out back where you were except all the enemies now had Mario's face? This is the literary equivalent of that. It turns the structure of the rest of the book completely inside-out. Instead of having a storyteller providing the reader interface to the story, it's written in an interface-less third person; there is a storyteller contained inside, but he's telling stories that exist outside the Empire's history. In fact, the whole thing is flowing backwards: instead of providing the real-world audience with an interface to the Empire's story, the storyteller seems to be providing the Imperial characters an (imperfect and distorted) interface with the real world, stealing our stories for the entertainment of his fictional comrades but getting the details intriguingly... wrong? Right? Priam played by the great bear Orson Welles and Clark Gable as Odysseus and Jameses Dean and Bond as Meneleus and Agamemnon, the good ships Brigitte Bardot and Ava Gardner and Betty Davis, the roofless towers of the house Charge of the Light Brigade burning (and you see what I meant about the Mario heads?), and an eye that sees the world into being. It's a totally unexpected mutation of the project that makes explicit the flow of Gorodischer's heretofore implicit argument re: the relationship between stories and reality, and it does so in a really intellectually exhilarating way while also telling a totally ripping yarn about a caravan and the life's work of a desert guide and royalty in disguise and love and protection and nobility and the fate of a dynasty. No shit.

In short, this book owns.

Still loving Mother 3, but god DAMN is it hard in spots. How hard?



Chapter five boss. I think at least two of those guys were scrolling their way down to zilch when I scored that last hit. (I'd forgotten how stressful those gas-gauge-style meters were! ITEM DEFEND DEFEND DEFEND AUUUUUGGHH!)

Twelve years after the fact, I finally caught up with the cool kids and played through Suikoden. And whoa hey, it was totally great.

I missed the whole Suikoden boat the first time around. I actually rented the game sometime around 1997 and came away totally underwhelmed -- I think the problem was that I had also just rented Beyond the Beyond, and it left a bad enough taste in my mouth that Suikoden's low-res battle textures and slightly gimmicky camerawork were tainted by association. Plus, the first few hours of the game aren't really very compelling, and at the time I didn't have any expectation that it would get any more interesting.

(Also, my god, that box art.)

Anyway, I eventually picked up a used copy, which sat around for years before I finally got around to playing it. But play it I did.

I'm actually kind of surprised at how sophisticated it was, and at the way it alternately honored and thumbed its nose at genre conventions. For example: Your main character is a silent cipher whom everyone admires for his natural leadership ability, sure, but he's also one of the fastest characters in battle, profoundly middlin' in attack strength (especially in the first 3/4 of the game), uses a stick for a weapon, and has all of the darkness-powered instant kill spells in the game. He's a Fresh-Faced Hero in his plot role, but his stats read more like some formerly evil character you'd recruit during the endgame. That's... kind of neat.

I also like the way almost every new capability you can get derives from people power. Upgrading your headquarters, getting better armor and weapons, winning army battles, customizing the interface... it's all about who you know, rather than about what you collect. And the characterization is surprisingly deft for how anemic it is -- pretty much all of the 108 characters felt more solid and real than anyone in, say, Chrono Cross's cast. The writers showed an impressive understanding of the limits they were working under, and they made pretty good decisions about what to leave to the imagination. I think their skill in writing rough sketches that hint at vast depth is a major reason for the dedication of the series' fanfic community. Take the "where are they now" title sequence at the end of the game, for instance -- why did those two characters split up? Why did he run away? What was she doing in the resistance in the first place? Something about it sets the brain on fire.

The plot is fairly basic, but it has some nasty tricks up its sleeves -- I love the way they subverted the mind-control trope at the very last moment, and recruiting 3/5 of the top generals alive while having to actually kill your own father was flat-out painful.

Hell, even the graphics and sound had a lot more going on than I once thought -- I like how they weren't afraid to draw all kinds of animations they were only going to use once, and the character portraits were gorgeous.

All told, I judge it a pretty sweet little game. Onward to Suikoden II. (Pirated, alas; check out what that sucker's netting on eBay these days, ugh.)

Mario: Gypsy strongman.

(Fair warning: The rest of the article is just kind of interesting, not genuine WTF.)