I’ve been a huge fan of Stargate ever since I started watching when SG-1 first started playing in syndication. It is an impressive franchise. Probably the best science fiction on television outside of Lost. But the latest incarnation of the franchise, called Stargate Universe, hasn’t yet managed to capture my admiration the way the previous two series did. This entry is an attempt to analyze my own feelings with regard to the show and come to an understanding of why that is.

My least favorite episode across all of SG-1 and SG-A is an episode of Atlantis in season 2 called “Trinity”. I remember this episode unsettled and annoyed me almost to the point that I wanted to stop watching Atlantis altogether. Fortunately I didn’t, but the bad taste in my mouth that that episode left me with has never left me.

To understand what I mean I have to give you a basic rundown of what happened in that episode. You see in “Trinity”, there are two separate subplots. In, the minor plot Teyla and the somewhat new character Ronon go to some random world and do something largely irrelevant to the overarching plot. However, what I recall about that is that during the course of the events Ronon betrays Teyla is a manner that greatly angers Teyla. Tayla ultimately accepts and understands Ronon’s reasons for the betrayal but threatens Ronon so that he will never betray their trust again.

At the end of this tension filled trip, Ronon and Teyla come home to find Atlantis in an even more tense and uncomfortable place. Doctor Weir can be heard berating Rodney in the background over the events of the major plot of the episode.

In said major plot, the Atlantis crew discovered a mysterious space station that generates limitless energy from a separate dimension. The ancients developed the station and were never able to make it work but Rodney becomes obsessed with trying to succeed where the ancients failed. Nobody else believes him. And the project would have gotten shutdown only Rodney begs Sheppard to trust him and on Sheppard’s recommendation the project continues. It fails. A solar system is destroyed and Rodney loses all the trust of Sheppard and Weir and just about everyone else on Atlantis that he had built up throughout the first two seasons. Sheppard tells Rodney it will take a while to earn back his trust.

Sounds like a decent and interesting dramatic episode right? So what’s my problem with it? 

Well partly it’s that the episode is weirdly anti-science unlike most of Stargate. More than that, it’s sort of anti-striving. It’s almost elevating caution to a Good in itself and doesn’t really take seriously the idea that progress does indeed very frequently require the taking of risks. The show presents the idea only to tear it down brutally while taking Rodney along with it. That bothered me a lot.

There’s also the fact that this episode was clearly a not too subtle commentary on the super colliders that are being developed here in the real world to test the fundamental laws of physics. It was likely inspired by the stories that got too much press about the possibility of creating black holes in them that were later dis-proven by the application of careful science and mathematics. That bothers me too because although I do believe science fiction can and should serve as warnings for possible risks to society that science can bring, that’s a little too heavy handed a commentary. It seems to be making a pretty clear statement that the possible rewards don’t outweigh the risks and cautioning us not to try. In effect it’s portraying scientists as being all arrogant and greedy in their pursuit of knowledge, doing it for the glory and the recognition and not a desire to pursue the truth. I think that’s utter nonsense.

But really that’s not the heart of what bothered me about this episode. No, the real problem lies in the heavy handed supposed character “development” this episode tries to employ. The Teyla/Ronon plot feels like a forced conflict in order to give Teyla an opportunity to show that she can be more forceful and won’t let Ronon step all over her. But that struck me as unnecessary because Teyla had long since proven her mettle and toughness in previous episodes. It’s a solution to a non-existent problem.

The Rodney subplot is worse. For some reason in this episode, Rodney exhibits all of his very worst characteristics. It feels as if he’s reverted to the way he was back in SG-1 or on his worst days in Atlantis.  He’s arrogant and condescending but in the “I’m truly a Jerk” kinda way more than the “I’m loveably annoying” kinda way he had grown into during the course of just the first two seasons of Atlantis. All that development was lost. He was just kinda a brat in this episode.

Likewise the other characters have reverted. There’s no sense of trust or respect for Rodney that might have come from serving with him for two years and having had him save their butts numerous times even at incredible risk to himself despite his naturally more cowardly nature. Weir acts almost as if she doesn’t even care what Rodney’s opinion is and is looking for an excuse not to believe him. And I believe that distrust and lack of respect was a part of what drove Rodney to dig his heels in even more. He wanted desperately to “prove” himself. But like Teyla, why should he really need to?

The reason they did all this is obvious. The writers wanted to establish the closeness of Rodney and Sheppard by having Sheppard be the only one who trusted him and vouched for him. And they wanted to use that tension created through Rodney’s failure to live up to that trust and needing to redeem himself as a plot hook for future seasons. And that’s fine. It’s just that the way it’s done feels really clunky. It doesn’t feel true to the characters as developed so far.  You’re seeing their distrustful arrogant prideful ambitious and angry bad sides throughout the episode and little of the nobility and courage we’ve seen throughout the rest of the series. None of the character come across looking good in this episode with the possible exception of Sheppard. I almost found myself hating them all. Everybody just feels kinda wrong. The end result is discordant. It feels like we’ve been listening to a brilliant guitarist play song after song only to find he plays the last song with the guitar way out of tune and with a string snapping at the end. It’s jarring. Unsettling.

Stargate Atlantis later redeemed itself several fold over. No other episode that I’ve seen really left you with this kind of discordant feeling about its core characters and their relationships with one another at least. The characters grow together over time and become a deeper more close knit family in spite of their earlier travails.

And best of all they managed to make use of the plot events from “Trinity” as the basis of one of my favorite episodes in the entire series: “McKay and Mrs. Miller”. The ways in which that episode is brilliant are numerous and would take too long to explain here. But it suffices to say that it is an episode that ADDS to the characters development and depth in a seamless way rather than a heavy handed stripping bare of the characters like what occurs in “Trinity”. Even though characters do make serious mistakes in “McKay and Mrs. Miller”, the overall tone of the episode doesn’t make you feel uncomfortable. Indeed you’re left with an overall good impression. Mistakes were made but through team work, ingenuity, and a little bit of self exploration catastraphe was averted. Really, that’s what I might label the Stargate Method. Because it’s how so many of the problems throughout both series are resolved. But not in “Trinity”.

So what does all this rambling have to do with Stargate Universe? Well, it’s simple. In my experience, almost every single episode I’ve seen of Stargate Universe feels like that episode “Trinity”. They are ALL similarly heavy handed attempts at forced character development through stryfe.

Maybe one or two episodes like this could be justified in the course of a larger story in order to build dramatic tension and create an overall darker tone for the series, but having EVERY episode like this is incredibly draining. I feel as if while I’m watching this show I’m adrift without an anchor. There’s nothing in the series grounded enough for me to let myself care about it.  Every single second of every episode I’m waiting for the next character to betray someone or make it clear to me how unlikable they are.

I can’t stress enough how very different this is from the Stargate I’ve come to know and love. SG-1 was literally ALL about the close knit family like grouping of the four major characters and their leader Hammond.

The chemistry between these characters was so important and so endearing and compelling that when one of them, Daniel Jackson, left and was replaced the fandom launched a huge campaign to get him to return to the series. The wording of the plea was revelatory. The first two bullet points on the Save Daniel Jackson campaign were:

* We believe in the Stargate SG-1 team as a family of four disparate individuals deeply bonded by their shared history as they explore the universe.

* We believe each of these individuals has a singular character, personality, knowledge, belief system and experience that makes them utterly irreplaceable, their interpersonal chemistry making the team greater than the sum of its parts.

Those ideas of seeing the group as a family and stressing their interpersonal chemistry I think was indeed essential to the quality of the show. Whether you like or don’t like Jonus Quinn it’s hard to dispute that he didn’t fit into the group very quickly or as well as Jackson did. They had to build up new interpersonal relationships between him and the other characters slowly and create that sense of respect and family bond. It never quite stuck in the minds of many fans.

With the later loss of Jack O’Neill in the series they faced a similar problem. They solved it by bringing in not one replacement, but TWO who were both established skilled actors and had worked together on the same show and already had a kind of on screen chemistry that helped blunt the impact of the loss of of O’Neill from the group. In addition, they also wrote it into the story that one of those two characters, Cam Mitchell started with an extraordinary amount of knowledge and respect for the three existing characters. He effectively saw them as his heroes. That pre-existening respect made it easier for the characters to work together. Lastly the other of the new characters Vala had previously appeared in an episode where she interacted directly with Daniel Jackson and that knowledge of each other carried over into the series.

Even with all of this you can find many fans declaring the SG-1 effectively jumped the shark with the loss of O’Neill. That’s how big an impact he had on the show and the fanbase. It just wasn’t the same without him. But it still worked as a show because they core team still felt like a family. They remained close.

In SGA the characters also feel like they are part of a close knit family. There is enormous prevailing mutual respect between the characters. Many of the interactions are endearing. You care about the characters. It gives you pleasure to see how they engage in good natured ribbing of one another. You see them acknowledge each others flaws without letting those flaws define their entire relationship.

Stargate Universe is the opposite. The characters feel as if they are not close at all. Either they are not a family or they are a very very dysfunctional one. As such it’s not fun to watch anymore. It doesn’t give you that feel good feeling. You, or at least I felt uncomfortable, unsettled while I watched it. I was looking for a character or a relationship to really LIKE but the series wouldn’t let me. It only gave me reason after reason to be disgusted with the characters.

Sadly I’m going to have to split this review into two parts because it’s getting late. So that’s it for part 1. In part 2 I’ll talk about specific aspects of the character relationships in Stargate Universe that are causing the story to breakdown and specific episodes that I deplored.  I’ll also draw comparisons between SGU and  Battlestar Galactica from which I feel the series gets a lot of inspiration. Lastly I’ll talk about my hopes for the future and how I think SGU can turn things around and become a series worth watching.

Comments will be enabled on part 2 and disabled here so that we can keep the discussion in one place.
 

This entry is pretty much just filler.  It’s late and I am tired. There are many things I want to write, many entries half formed in my mind but if I were to write them now I couldn’t do them justice. They’d be poor approximations of what they could have been.  But I have to write now so this is what I will write. Just filler.

This is a general problem I keep running into. When I have time to write is always when I am least inspired to write. When my mind is running rapidly and ideas are flourishing within that’s when I’m usually late for work or rushing to do something or in the middle of some interaction I can’t get out of.  So for example this weekend I spent much of it with friends and though I had access to a laptop and could have been writing I couldn’t focus on the writing and so I couldn’t find any inspiration. And now that it’s late I’m too tired to really focus. Tomorrow morning I’ll probably get some inspiration but I’ll have to go to work and I’ll have to work and won’t be able to write until that evening when the inspiration has long ago left me.

As a result when I’m writing I’m usually writing not from inspiration but from memory. And I’ve learned my memory is a piss poor substitute for the power of inspiration. When I write from memory the emotions end up all removed from the piece and what I write ends up sounding wooden, overly technical, and shallow.

Obviously you can’t just wait for those moments of inspiration to write or you’ll never write enough to achieve anything (or even to prevent myself from going insane). If one wants to make writing an important part of their life or wants to write works of great significance, there has to be a deliberate writing endeavor as well. You sit down and focus on writing and just MAKE yourself write.

I am able to do that sometimes and still write decently. But it requires great concentration. I have to sit down and detach myself from everything and focus all of my energy on remembering not just the ideas, the details and the words that came to mind when I was first inspired to write on a topic but also the feelings and sensations that overwhelmed my mind and made the thing that I wanted to write seem important to me. Only when I succeed in that can I write it and feel like I’ve written something worth while. 

It doesn’t always work. Sometimes I’ll spend hours sort of meditating on something I’ve wanted to write for weeks only to be unable to recapture those old feelings. It’s like I missed the opportunity because I’m no longer in that stage of my life and I didn’t write it when I had the chance. I can still remember some of the details of what I was going to say, but that’s a small consolation. I can write it, but if I do it feels like I’m only doing it just so I don’t forget. That’s fine but it doesn’t feel like writing to me. It’s more like stenography.

Sometimes when I meditate though on one topic something even better than recalling the initial emotions happens. I can bring forth a new inspiration! When that happens I am overjoyed because I am perfectly positioned to be able to write it and my mind  goes straight to paper or digital pixels as the case may be unblemished by overmuch time spent over-analyzing and re-examining it.  That first draft will inevitably be, shall we say, really really bad of course. It’s often barely intelligible. But something in the words themselves conveys to my consciousness the feeling that I got when I was inspired. And then I can, over time, revise it to make it more coherent while keeping its essence still intact.

Because of the value I find in this sort of meditative writing process, I often feel like solitude is the one thing I’m always seeking out most.  Honestly at times I don’t think there’s anyone else in the world who enjoys being completely and utterly by himself as much as I do. When I’m alone is the only time when I feel I can really focus. And it’s the only time when I feel my real thoughts can come through. It’s the only time when I feel like me.

People around me feel noisy. Even when they aren’t making any noise and are leaving me alone. Even when they’re in the other room or several rooms removed. If they are aware of my presence then their presence will at least a tiny bit dig into my sense of peace. I think it has to do with the sense that people are aware of me, are thinking about me, are judging me or watching me or perceiving me. It’s like the knowledge that they know of my existence is itself a sort of crutch because it makes me feel as if I have to react to them in some way, moderate my behaviors or my thoughts to accommodate their existence.

Of course a lot of this is just my crazy paranoia that I’ve never been able to completely shake. But I’ve written plenty about that in the past so no need to rehash it all.

My love of solitude can create a number of awkward situations because I’ve met a lot of people who are in a lot of ways the exact opposite. They both need and strive on companionship.  They get bored when they are alone and would rather be around someone even if the person they are around and they are barely interacting.  Presence matters to them.  And of course a lot of people like this are my friends.  So we have to find some kind of reasonable balance which can be difficult.

Of course none of this is absolute. Undoubtedly if you forced me to be alone for weeks on end it would drive me just as insane as it would anyone else. And likewise if my friends who want to be around people were forced to be surrounded by the same group of people 24 hours a day 7 days a week it would eventually start to grate on their nerves no matter how interesting or fun the group happened to be.

But there definitely seems to be a kind of orientation difference between people some of whom thrive on solitude and others on companionship.  Some people feel as if there’s a loneliness hole in them that they need to fill and that being around other people can sometimes partially plug it or at least help them to forget it’s there. Me I feel as if there’s a great weight on me at all times due to the pressures of others regard and it’s only when I’m by myself that I can feel partial relief from the strain of holding it all up.

Of course people constantly misunderstand these different orientations. And so often someone who needs companionship will think someone like me must be miserable and lonely whenever I spend time by myself. But that’s just wrong. While I do get depressed, often the depression arises much more from me being AROUND people too much and too often and for too long. I’m not “lonely” at least in the normal sense of the word. I’m almost anti-lonely.

I’m not sure if it’s really related to my writing at all. It might just be that I was born this way. But definitely one of the things that I greatly enjoy about being this way is that when I’m alone I am better able to write and the longer that I am alone the better. Eventually I have to go out though and gather more experiences upon which to base my writing of course. But it’s definitely nice to take the time out to be alone and focus all my energies toward bringing something forth out of my chaotic mind that might actually matter.

All that is to say if I were ever a writer, I’d definitely be more of the lock myself away and ignore the world writer than the more socialite type writers who thrive on hanging out with a close knit group of like minded friends and who love getting interviews and recognition.  I guess I’d be more Salinger than Twain.

Here’s a challenge for any Stargate fans out there!  Rank in order of advancement and development of all the various advanced cultures races and societies in the Stargate universe. Only include those at or around the technological level of Earth as of the start of the series.

The following is a list of cultures that I think might be worthy of ranking:

alterans (1st evolution of humans before the split into ori/ancients)
ancients (pre-ascenscion)
ancients (post-ascension)
androids (harlan from sg-1 ep 1-19 tin-man)
aschen (uses bio weapons – from sg-1 eps 5-10 2001 and 4-16 2010)
asgard (thor’s people)
atanik (race that created arm braces from ep 4-03 upgrades)
crystals (crystal people that imitated O’Neill in sg1 ep Cold Lazarus 1-06)
crystals of M3X387 (from Atlantis episode Doppleganger)
daganians (humans from pegasus galaxy, sga 1-16 The Brotherhood)
dendredan (Ma’chello’s people from sg-1 2-18 Holiday)
eurondans (nazi like people, from sg-1 6-07 Shadow Play)
furlings (one of the 4 great races)
galarans (humans with memory device sg1 ep 9-12 Collatoral Damage)
genii (villains from atlantis, i call them nazi farmers lead by Chief O’brien)
giants (from sg-1 season 3-21 Crystal Skull)
goa’uld (parasitic scavenger species primary villains sg1)
hebridans/Serrakins (ion drive group from sg1 ep 7-08 Space Race)
jaffa (goa’uld slaves)
kull (anubis created super solider servant of the goa’uld sg1 ep 07-11)
langarans (jonus quinn’s planets 3 societies)
nox (one of 4 great races)
oannes(ohne) (fish people from sg1 ep 1-12 fire/water)
oranians (reptile alians part of Lucian alliance sg1 ep 9-14 The Ties that Bind)
ori (people who worship evil ascended)
ori (evil ascended themselves)
pangarans (people that created tretonin from sg1 ep 6-10 Cure)
replicators (milky way)
replicators (pegasus)
retou (bug people from sg1 ep 02-20 Show and Tell)
satedans (ronin’s people from sga)
tagreans (planet that threatens the prometheus in episode sg1 6-20 Memento)
talthaun (sg1 episode 07-06 Lifeboat)
taranians (atlantis episodes 2-19 Inferno and  3-19 Vengeance)
tau’ri (Earth, as of beginning of series)
tau’ri (Earth, as of end of atlantis)
tollan (phase through walls people)
tok’ra (good version of goa’uld)
travelers (generational ships that travel through pegasus galaxy sga The Lost Tribe and Travelers)
volsinii (society that created the Keeper from sg-1 ep 2-04 gamekeeper)
wraith  (life feeding villains from atlantis)

Include any or as many of these as you feel you have enough information to rank. Also include any other races or groups I might have left out. (Note that I don’t really watch SGU so I haven’t included any of them)

GOOD LUCK!

You know how people say that if someone accuses you of something you shouldn’t deny it because your denial will give credence to the accusation and make more people believe in it?

I never understood that. For me, I think any accusation that is untrue I would just deny it. My instinct is to tell the truth and in fact I think I’d be MORE likely to tell the truth the more absurd the accusation is. Why would I lie? It’s not like I’d get any benefit from having lied about something nobody is going to believe anyway.

Staying silent always to me seemed to be the more suspicious behavior. It seems unnatural and suggests that the person has some reaction to the accusation that they would reveal if they spoke that they want to hide.

So I guess the fact that I think this way whereas everybody else thinks the opposite pretty much means that anybody could just make up whatever crazy accusations about me that they want. I’ll vocally and immediately deny it, and likely call the accuser an idiot and make such a spectacle of myself that everybody will just assume I am in fact exactly what I was accused of being no matter how irrational that seems.

Life is funny that way.

Just for the record. If you’re getting all your news from watching Fox News, you are learning almost nothing that is true from their coverage of politics. Please start changing the channel.

It’s time for my yearly rant against filling out taxes.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against HAVING taxes. I think we really NEED taxes. A progressive tax system is a great and necessary thing in our society.

But the thing I never understood is why we have this pointless ritual of filling out an irrelevant form every year in order to have our taxes apportioned correctly?  It strikes me as a really inefficient system in that it requires a lot of individuals to keep track of a lot of documentation and fill out a lot of forms they barely understand. The flaws of this system are many:

- It’s time consuming for the people. This hurts people whose lives are very busy disproportionately.
- It’s prone to errors. In particular the people with lower education are more likely to make errors that could cost them money and even make them legally liable.
- It’s easy to game. Those who are more savvy are more able to not just fill out the forms to maximize their benefits, but are also able to manipulate the system, even lie, in order to reduce their tax burden.
- It creates a lot of bureaucratic overhead. Far too much money goes into processing these forms.
- It’s harmful for the environment. The amount of paper needed to process these forms as well as the costs in terms of gas used to mail these forms around the country is a waste. Even though a lot of people file their returns electronically these days, there’s still tons of people who have not the means or ability to file an electronic return.
- It encourages the development of costly middlemen industries who lend their “expertise” to people to fill out their taxes.  That just drains money away from the poor who are more likely to rely on them.
- It’s extremely expensive for the government when people fail to fill out their forms to have to track people down
- Lots of tax revenue is lost just because the IRS doesn’t have the resources to manage this complex clunky system

It would make enormously more sense to have a more automated system. Most of the information that is required is already filled out in our I9 forms or sent from our employers or already possessed by the government through other means.  The way to set this up is to have a sort of online login for everyone. You login. You setup your information and that’s it.  If you ever have to change anything, say you have a new dependent or something, you can login and change it. Otherwise, every single year you should have to do nothing. You’ll be mailed a check or have your cash deposited directly to your bank account if you get a return, or you’ll be mailed a bill if you owe.  The default system should be intelligent enough to be able to figure out the maximal return you can get or minimize the amount you owe. This isn’t really rocket science. It can be done systematically. It’s not that hard.

All the information based on your normal behaviors that effect your taxes could easily automatically accumulate in this account. If you get interest on a bank account, the income would appear. If you make a purchase that qualifies you for a tax break, the information would appear. When you donate for a charity, the charitable donation can appear. If you buy stocks, the information about the stocks would likewise appear under your profile. All this information exists in electronic form. I see it every time I look at my bank statements. I see no reason you should have to do anything in order to have the tax system be aware of it.

Privacy concerns can be taken into account as well. For example, there’s no reason your account needs to be under your real name. You could be identified by an anonymous identification code. No personal information needs ever be collected or held under your account. The site would obviously be encrypted and all information secured. You could even have control over access to the information in your account so you can share it if you want.

The site could even give you statistical analysis of your returns. So you can see visibly how your tax burden compares to other peoples. This could help avoid a lot of the stupid falsehoods that tend to be bandied about around tax time. Nonsense statements like that the poor don’t ever pay taxes and the rich are soooo overburdened by taxes. You could see quite clearly what percentage of your income went to taxes, how much people in your age group, tax bracket, income group, race, career path, etc. have paid in taxes. There’s no end to the amount of easily available information could be accumulated for you in one easy to access place.

But for now, since we DON’T have a nice system that lays this all out for us in an easy and obvious form, here’s a chart from Citizens for Tax Justice as reported by MotherJones that shows that the amount of taxes paid by the rich are not substantially higher relative to their percentage of income than that paid by the poor:

 

In any case, my point is that symplifying our tax code has typically been a Conservative issue and usually it’s couched in language that says we have to use regressive tax systems that unfairly burden the poor.  But it doesn’t HAVE to be a conservative issue.  It’s entirely possible to simplify the tax system and still keep it progressive.  And such a system I’d say would be substantially more progressive than the one we have now simply because our current complicated system is a burden on people in terms of time and energy required to be spent, and benefits the wealthy (who know all the tricks or can easily pay someone who does) while hurting the poor (who either don’t know the tricks and make mistakes or are required to pay their hard earned money to organizations to do it for them that could be fraudulent).  

Any system that eliminates this kind of dichotomy would be much better for the country as a whole.

I was going to write this review yesterday which would have been the 13th. That would have been perfect. But alas I fell asleep before I could write it.

In any case, I recently completed Final Fantasy XIII. It took me a little over 69 hours. I had had very high hopes for this game. I’ve been waiting for a good final fantasy for many years. Especially, considering how I greatly disliked Final Fantasy 12 and don’t consider Final Fantasy 11 to be a real final fantasy.  X was enjoyable enough though still flawed and X-2 was just kinda silly.

Really the last truly great final fantasy was VII.  That’s a looong time ago. They’ve had ups and downs since then but they never quite reached that level of excellence real or perceived since that age old game.  So when I discovered that Final Fantasy XIII was heavily influenced in a lot of ways by VII I was super excited. I was hoping this would be a great game.

At first I really liked it. The graphics in this game are pretty good. The pre-rendered cut scenes are impressive. But these days all big production games are gorgeous. If they’d released this game maybe a year or two ago it would have been at the top of the pack, but released today, it’s impressive but not shockingly so. And from all reports games like God of War 3 are much more impressive. Still I’m not a graphics fanatic. It was definitely easily attractive enough for me.

The characters at first seemed very intriguing. The heroine Lightning looked awesome. She was described as the female version of Cloud from Final Fantasy VII which I think is a good thing.  More impressive to me was Sazh who to me seemed as unique a character as I’ve seen in a Final Fantasy and yet still a realistic human being.  All the characters had pretty well defined personalities and at least a little bit of a back story to them.

The story starts off pretty intriguing. You’re thrown right into the middle of a rich and complex world. And your situation there is rather confusing. There’s these soldiers doing some kind of “purge”. There are are these words being bandied about fal’cie, l’cie, pulse, cocoon, guardian corp, psicomm and you have no clue what it all means.  Something was happening during the last 13 days and you see random confusing flashbacks about it as well as cryptic voice overs from a narrator who you later find out is one of your characters.

But all that’s okay. I don’t mind an intriguing story that leaves obvious obscurity and holes. I mean if I did I could never EVER watch Lost.  Plot holes in a developing story are not inherently bad.

The problem is…. it never really makes any sense. 

The story comes together and you get these moments that are supposed to revelatory. Only they just fall flat. You remain equally confused or even MORE confused. Or at least I was.  Indeed, even after I had beaten the game I totally didn’t understand what was going on. There’s political stuff happening to advance the plot but it doesn’t make any sense. The people don’t act in a manner that is comprehensible and there’s no real explanation of why they behave in the way they do.  It rather seems like the writers just decided to make the characters do these things even IF it doesn’t make sense just because they wanted certain things to happen.

The whole plot feels very forced. And it kept making less and less sense. By the end I was ready to throw my hands up in disgust. The lack of realism in the people and the characters behaviors was a huge barrier between me and actually caring about what happened to them. I never felt as if any of the events mattered. I never felt as if I understood what or why my characters were doing the things they were doing. They just seemed to be randomly walking around for no purpose.

After reading a bit more online through wikipedia, reading some of the datalogs and talking to a couple of my friends who are also playing the plot did start to make more sense to me AFTER I beat it. But that’s my whole point. A game shouldn’t require that much effort to really “get”. The entire time I was playing I felt confused to the point that I was constantly annoyed.

The good side of the story was the characterization but even that fell far short of my expectations. You get a couple of neat subplots. For example there’s the Hope/Snow subplot which involves the unfortunate death of Hope’s mom at the very beginning. There’s the Hope/Lightning connection wherein Lightning grows a little more accepting and Hope develops to become tougher.  And there’s the Lightning/Snow/Serah development mostly centered around flashbacks of the time before which shows the guilt Lightning and Snow feel at the center of their characters. There’s also the Vanille/Fang relationship which remains relevant right up until the very end of the game. And lastly there’s the Vanille/Sazh connection which culminated in one of the most dramatically played up scenes in the game. Too bad that last one didn’t really make much sense to me. I totally found Sazh’s reaction to be unrealistic and kinda dumb. And afterward, Sazh forgives Vanille so easily and seems to randomly drop his previous despair so ridiculously easily it almost makes a mockery of the previous scene. Likewise the confrontation between Vanille and Fang whereupon Vanille gets her summons also seemed a bit exaggerated and unrealistic.

But those faults are forgivable. Overall having intriguing backstories for the characters and good character development is important. I’m willing to accept a few little oddities there. The problem is, that’s about as far as it goes. The characters don’t feel like a really close knit group by the end of the game and that seems like it’s essential in order for the ending to make sense. It doesn’t feel as if they’ve interacted enough and gotten to know each other enough for that closeness to develop. You sort of have to fill in the gaps with your imagination. That’s not good.

The side characters are even worse. The only side character outside of your main six that is developed at all is Serah. The rest are just empty husks with the barest hint of a personality that you can get from their behaviors. It’s annoying because some of those secondary characters seem like characters you might start to like or become interested in. For example there’s the whole crew of characters who travel with Snow at the beginning. They have like three tiny scenes in the whole game and they are mostly irrelevant. You don’t even figure out what happens to them in the end. There’s also the Guardian Corp group including Lighting’s friend in one of the flashbacks, Cid, and some other guy I can’t even remember the name of. Cid’s development is particularly pathetic because the game makes it out to be that he is a major significant character but you never get to know him well enough to give a rat’s ass about what happens to him.

The core villains are no better. There are three main ones. Two are just random flunkies. One of those dies a pointless irrelevant death. The other you just keep running into, beating the crap out of and not caring about in the slightest. Again they just aren’t developed well enough for you to care. The main villain was potentially cool. He’s a bit better than the pathetic disgrace of a villain that was Seymour (from Final Fantasy X) but again he just doesn’t cut it. Too much inexplicable long random rants about crap you don’t care about and don’t understand that just about puts you to sleep.

Also when you think about it the main cast really isn’t that creative a cast. In fact it sorta feels like the cast is filled up with too many main characters.  As many have noticed, Hope is a smaller mage-version of Tidus who was the main character of Final Fantasy X. Snow is definitely your typical main hero type sort of the Goku or Naruto character of the game. Fang is another very main character hero type. She comes across as a leader. Her closest analog is maybe Kain from Final Fantasy IV but she’s a lot more involved with the main plot of the story.  Vanille is a remake of the typical bubbly girl characters from nearly every single Final Fantasy game they’ve ever made, only now she’s been elevated to not only being the narrator but a character around whom much of the plot revolves. It’s as if Rikku had been combined with Yuna. Lastly, Lightning is obviously the Cloud of the game. Only, she doesn’t even seem to be the real leader of the party because of the main character problem. She gives almost no inspiring speeches and at no point does it seem like the characters really look up to her or see her as anything other than just another person stuck in the same situation that they are.

So in the end Sazh is the ONLY character of the primary six you control that seems like a significant but clearly secondary character.  That makes him stand out in a good and a bad way. If you want to like a character but don’t typically like the “main character”, he’s pretty much your only choice.  But it also means he sort of feels like he’s being ignored while all the other five characters are fighting for the lime light.

It’s possible that reading the datalogs AS I played could have radically improved my understanding and appreciation both of the characters and the plot. But I never read them. Datalogs are one of those new trends in games that I find incredibly annoying. It’s as if game writers are too lazy to try and incorporate the story into the actual game and just fill in all the gaps in these long text documents you can read whenever you want. It’s extremely unrealistic because in the real world you don’t have a datalog that explains for you everything that is going on. And it’s really unlike any other genre. When you watch a movie or a play you don’t have a separate book to read in order to “get it” . You don’t need to read a ton of supporting material in order to be able to follow television shows whether it be an episodic show like Star Trek or a continual show like Babylon 5.  At worst case you just have to have seen every episode from the beginning and it will mostly make sense to you.  Supporting material might enhance your understanding and many times people go to the internet to learn more, but it doesn’t substitute for good clear storytelling in the show itself. Datalogs are starting to go the opposite way in games. They’re a crutch that allows developers to cut back on the dialogue and the cut scenes that might ground the players in a better understanding of what’s going on.

That’s pretty much all my critiques of the story and characters. To tell you more I’d have to give you complete spoilers.  But my problems with the game run deeper than just a critique of the story elements of the game.  The system and game play also bothers me a lot.

First though, I should note that I found the gameplay VASTLY superior to Final Fantasy XII. In XII the game goes on autopilot about a 25% of the way through and the user has nothing to do at all. XIII in contrast actually has a really neat and creative system. Switching classes through paradigms is fun and interesting and I think the star ratings are something fun to strive for. It’s nice to be able to just focus on controlling one character while your other two characters act intelligently on their own. Also the auto-battle is helpful. Not having to pick all my individual commands every single round makes battle more strategic and less micro-managerial. That I think is something that’s good.

The problems start to arise with the Chrystarium system.  The Chrystarium itself isn’t so bad. It’s basically the sphere grid from final fantasy X except in 3-D and I liked the sphere grid. BUT the implementation is annoying. The game FORCES you to have capped development at numerous points in the game where you can’t level your chrystarium any more even if you grinded for the points.  That’s really annoying. Especially since it continues right up until the very end of the game. You can’t even get access to the last part of the Chrystarium until you’ve already BEATEN the game. That’s really dumb and annoying.  It’s particularly stupid since the points required keeps going up dramatically at each new level anyway. What would be the problem of simply letting users who want to grind and be ahead of the curve do so? The probably with grinding in games is not the ability to grind, it’s the necessity of grinding in games. That’s what frustrates people.

This is also related to another problem with the game. Final Fantasy XIII holds your hand WAAAY too much. At the very beginning it doesn’t give you any chrystarium points or even give you access to the chrystarium. Nor does it give you TP, nor does it even give you the ability to change paradigms.  Instead you’re playing for hours during which as far as you’re concerned the battles are completely irrelevant and a waste of time.

Also, the game gives you tutorials throughout the game and you’re still getting tutorials all the way in chapter 10. That’s kinda ridiculous. A lot of the things you get tutorials for are things you can easily figure out on your own through experience. For example the tutorial for quests is pointless. As is the tutorial for fighting monsters who are fighting each other. As is the tutorial that explains to you that you now have access to other classes. These are things you can easily figure out on your own.

They really could have ramped up that learning curve a lot in this game. The game seems to treat you like you’re an idiot. I don’t like that in my games.

The other issue is the completely unimaginative or even interesting dungeons.  There is as far as I can tell exactly ONE real minigame in the entire game. Just one. That’s it. And that’s a really lame game. AND you can only play it once. No going back and trying again. Most of the first 2/3rds game consists of you walking literally along a straight line path.  That’s right. A STRAIGHT LINE! It makes for very boring dungeon exploring. That’s pretty bad level design.

The reason for that has to do with the fundamental flaw of the combat system. A lot of the battles are made to be rather incredibly long. The battles are challenging and interesting but sometimes just annoyingly time consuming. Either fewer battles of that length or the same number of battles but just having each battle go faster would have helped a lot.  Then you could actually feel as if you have time to explore or do minigames without feeling like you are being consumed by the combat system.

Later on when the game opens up and you have more places to go you have another problem. It’s a little too easy to get lost. Well that might just be a problem I had because I’m absolutely terrible with directions. But I had to constantly reference the big map since the mini-map wasn’t good enough.  It was nice that they did have a hot key for instance access to this bigger map, but the big map was annoying too. It rotated with your perspective but didn’t have an indication of which way was North. That made it difficult for me to figure out if I was heading in the right direction.  Also when there were multiple levels of depth, I found the map to be almost useless because it would change each time you move up or down to a new level.

Fortunately even when the world opens up *most* areas are pretty uncomplicated so getting lost is not a huge problem in the game.  After a while even at the end you get back to a point where you are mostly just walking along a pretty nearly straight line path. It’s not realistic but at least it’s better than getting lost all the time.

But the bigger problem is that you end up just feeling like all you are doing is fighting again and again and again. There are no real towns to break up the action. There are no real sidequests save those of the variety of “go kill this monster” type which only open up on the third disk and are just as boring.  There are no minigames save the one.  And all of this gives you this overall sense of being harried and uncomfortable. It’s as if the game isn’t letting you have a real break. Your characters are never in a situation where they seem safe and where they might realistically have an opportunity to get to know one another. You’re always on the run. Part of that is the intentional feel of the game and fits in with the story, but it also makes the game feel rushed and enhances the sense of disorientation you feel because of the plot holes and missing character details.

Lastly, my biggest problem with the game play system is the weapon and accessory system.  Usually in these games you look forward to finding new loot in treasure chests. You might find a cool new weapon or a great new accessory you can equip that can radically improve your character. Doing even boring quests can be worth while if you’re getting something awesome for the trouble.

The problem is the items and weapons in XIII start at level 1 and have to be advanced in order to become really good. So for example all of the weapons you get in the game pretty much suck unless you upgrade them. They all have similar base stats to the weapon you start the game with. Indeed you can play with the same weapons you start the game with all game long without ever needing to equip another weapon and you will be able to beat the game just fine.

Instead you spend random other wise useless items to give weapons experience in order to level them up. Only there’s no indication of where you are going by leveling them up. You don’t know how much the stats will increase when you level it up, what hte max stats will be if you level up the equipment completely, or even if it’s worth while to do so. All leveling up a piece of equipment does for the most part is increase how much strength and magic that the equipment gives you. So it’s even a boring process.

Worse, the item expenditure system is a system where you can easily screw up with. If you upgrade weapons and equipment too early, dismantle the wrong items, or just upgrade the wrong equipment you could spend a lot of your items on junk you don’t really need to upgrade. If you waited until later in the game you could have upgraded better equipment with the same number of items and ended up far stronger. So if you make those mistakes early on, you’ll have to do a lot more grinding late in the game to farm for items to use on your weapons upgrades. Even doing that there’s a smart and a dumb way to do it. You have to wait until really late in the game to find the most efficient monsters to kill to farm for items which you can then sell in the shops to buy other items that you’ll actually use to upgrade your equipment. That’s dumb, convoluted, and boring.  You either have to use a FAQ or do a lot of trial and error and a lot of restarting your machine and loading your last save in order to figure it out. The FAQS I’ve seen on the item upgrade system are insanely huge and convoluted. People write software programs and giant excel spreadsheets to help people figure this out, that’s how complex it gets. Why? Why is so complex? It’s so unnecessary.

Of course the thing is weapon upgrading is one of the only ways you can give your characters a boost to make it easier to defeat enemies so you can go through it faster. That’s because as I mentioned above the Chrystarium is constantly blocked so you can’t develop further and there are no mini-games where you might get better items to give you a boost. Even if there were mini-games all the items you’d get would be sucky level 1 items anyway that you’d have to upgrade to make good.

I was so disgusted with this system that I entirely boycotted it. That’s right. I upgraded not a single piece of equipment during the entirety of my play through. There was no point. Any decision I would make would be a bad decision. And yet I was still able to beat the game without too much trouble so in my mind the entire existence of the equipment upgrade system was a total waste of time.

The other thing that annoyed me was teh existence of these main character only abilities, including your Summons. Basically they were abilities ONLY your lead character could use though all your characters could get them somewhere on their chrystarium. So in order for example to use Vanille’s summon you would have to play with Vanille as your main character.  That’s dumb.  As a result of that I never used anybody’s summons at all except I tried out Shiva once, Buhamut once, and Odin twice just to see how it worked.  The summons system itself is kinda dumb and summoning them barely helped me at all in the battles I was in. The summons don’t seem to get that much more powerful as you advance and your own characters with proper strategy can do a lot more damage when you buff and debuff and shift paradigms rapidly and time your attacks effectively. The summons eidolons are just for show as far as I can tell and a waste of my time.

However, the existence of the leader only abilities of the summons illustrates another big flaw in this game. If your leader dies, YOU DIE. That’s RIDICULOUS. Even if you have two supporting characters both capable of bringing you back to life and in the mode wherein they could, you still lose. That’s particularly idiotic toward the end when you face enemies that have instant death abilities. There’s nothing more dumb than dieing because some stupid ability happened to hit your main character.

The good thing is, dieing is no big deal in this game. You can always retry and the game puts you right before the battle you died in anyway and you can always just run away to avoid the battle if you don’t want to do it again.

They also have these things called deceptisol and other various “sols” that make you hard to be seen by enemies or make you stronger when you fight them or something too. I don’t know. I never used any of those either. I kept saving them for when there would be battles toward the end that I’d desperately need them for in order to win. But that never happened. I beat every enemy in the normal game without ever needing those.  Of course maybe they are better for all the useless “go kill X” quests I never did that you can go back and do after you beat the game if you want.

Another feature I never used was the ability you have to develop other classes through your chrystarium with your characters.  That opens up like in chapter 10 or something (recall the game only has 13 chapters).  Each character has 3 main roles  that they can develop in and then they can do the other 3. Only their development in those other 3 always sucks at least throughout the lower levels and the costs in chrystarium points are prohibitive with very little reward at all.  So I didn’t develop any of those other three classes for any of my characters at all.

The sign of a very flawed game is one in which players don’t feel any interest in using many of the game’s features. That’s how I felt with Final Fantasy XIII. I didn’t use Summons, Alternative Classes, Item upgrading, or various Sols at all. The only items I ever used were potion and phoenix down. The only special abilities I used were libra and renew (not quake, stopga, etc.) I didn’t need any of that and I still beat the game just fine. I only did like 25 of the quests though. So maybe if I’d played through more of the harder ones I would have had more use of more of those game characteristics. But even THAT’S a major problem with the game. I feel very little desire to do that. It’s boring and un-fun. The ONLY reason I’m thinking about playing more is just that I want to see what all the characters stats are if you level them up 100% of the Chrystarium.  And the main reason I want to do that is so that I can confirm for once and for all my very last criticism of the game. And that is….

Final Fantasy XIII is Prejudiced Against Sazh!!

It’s true. Your party consists of:
two mages: Vanille and Hope who have really high magic  but low strength and low HP.
two warriors: Snow and Fang who have really high strength and really high HP but low Magic.
one all around good character:  Lightning who has pretty high strength and pretty high Magic, and decent HP

and then there’s Sazh:   He has a bit more HP than Lightning (sometimes) and by a significant margin lower Strength AND Magic than Lightning.

That’s a pretty big deal. He’s the Kihmari of XIII. There were times in my game while leveling up everyone’s Chrystarium equally where Sazh had lower or as low Magic not just than Lightning but as Fang and Snow! At times he seemed to even have weaker strength than Vanille!  It’s ridiculous.

The only justification I could see is that he does get some pretty good abilities fairly early on. For example he gets access to some of the higher level Black Magic spells as a ravager fairly early and he also has the various physical ravager abilities like flamestrike, etc.  But Hope gets those same black magic spells just as fast if not faster at times and he has WAY higher magic to utilize them with.  Likewise Snow and Lightning get the flamestrike, etc. ravager abiltiies almost as fast and are better at them. However, Sazh does get some awesome synergist abilities really early. He gets Faith and Bravery really early which can greatly help your party out. But that’s kinda a wash because Hope instead gets Protect and Shell which are also helpful but Sazh doesn’t get those.  Besides it’s helping others not making Sazh an equal of anyone.  Later on Sazh gets Haste pretty early which IS a big deal and can be a huge help for your party. But again its not enough to equalize Sazh to anyone else.

By  the end of the game though Hope also has Faith, Bravery, AND Haste as well as every single major black magic spell and again ALL of these abilities work better for Hope than they do for Sazh because his magic power is like twice as high.

The end result. Sazh == Useless. 

I submit that by the end of the game there is no rational reason to use Sazh on your party rather than Hope. The ONLY possible justification would be that you just suck at keeping people alive and so you need a synergist with more HP than Hope has.  They basically share the same ability set but Hope is just plain better.

Actually all the other characters are just plain better than Sazh too.

So the only reason to use Sazh are character based. You either use Sazh because you like his personality or you use Sazh because you think Hope is whiny and annoying and you need a Synergist. (and trust me you DO need a Synergist in the late part of that game. You really REALLY do).  Even then I might suggest trying to level one of the other characters in synergist, like say Vanille, instead even though that’s not one of her main roles. Sazh is THAT much worse. At least he was for me.

On the other hand, I didn’t finish filling out my chrystarium. So maybe if you sum up all the Stats all the way through Sazh ends up not that bad. Maybe the last levels are really good for Sazh in some of his other classes in terms of ability score boosts. I highly doubt it.

Also I should note that according to my brother who looked at the FAQ, some of Sazh’s weapons upgrade particularly well and become some of the strongest weapons in the game. But THAT just means that Sazh is more ITEM dependent than any other character in the game. And that sucks too. Why should you have to grind more if you want to use Sazh then you have to with anyone else?? Also according to my brother even those ability boosts in his weapons aren’t enough higher than other people’s max stats weapons to make up the relative stat gap between him and other characters.

CONCLUSION!

Phew.

All that being said, Final Fantasy XIII is still a decent game. It’s SIGNIFICANTLY better than Final Fantasy XII, in my opinion which was a travesty. And I’d even say it’s better than VIII (which was one or two major plot holes away from having a great story). But it’s strictly worse than X in my ranking (despite X’s idiotic SIN plot and pathetic main character) and maybe a bit worse than IX (which also had many plot holes). It’s way waaaaaay below the awesomeness that are Final Fantasies VII and VI.

Part of the thing with XIII is that I am hyper critical of it BECAUSE it’s a Final Fantasy. Probably I wouldn’t have been as harsh on it if it were a game made by another company. I’d still have the same criticisms but I wouldn’t consider it a fundamental disappointment. Also I’m a lot different from when I was when I first played these games when I was a kid. I’ve experienced many more games and many more stories since then and I’m a lot more impatient and intolerant of stupidity.

But I can’t change what I can’t change. I really AM very disappointed. I was hoping for something more impressive. At the very least a game with characters I could fall in love with or a story that would keep me at the edge of my seat yearning for more. But no. While I found the game play enjoying and challenging enough to keep me coming back to playing, by the end of the game I just kinda wanted to get it over with. I was so confused and lost with the incoherent plot that I stopped being interested in the next cut scene. It just became clear that they were never going to explain everything in a manner that made everything make sense.

However, in XIII’s favor, I will say the last scene in the game is rather beautiful and an impressive end that does make beating the game worth while. The music in this game is also really good as with all Final Fantasies, though for me it did kinda blur together at times and I didn’t really get a good “feel” for the various character themes. It’s definitely not music that will stick with me like the music in early final fantasies did. However, it is music that I wouldn’t mind listening to when I’m bored and I’d be more than willing to buy the soundtrack.

The very end with the credits was a little anticlimactic and I kept wishing for more to happen after the credits but nothing did. Maybe there’s a secret ending that didn’t unlock. I don’t know. But at least the ending wasn’t insanely long to the point that you get bored like it has been in past Final Fantasies.

So here’s my final verdict. I’d give it a 7, maybe 7.5 out of 10. It’s a good game and it partially restores the majesty of the Final Fantasy name, but many flaws and a seeming kind of laziness on the part of the scenario and dungeon developers and story writers keeps it from achieving true greatness. If you like long fantasy RPGs it’s worth playing as there aren’t a lot of other great ones out there. But if you’re yearning for the days of the old Earth shattering awesomeness of the classic Final Fantasies, well you’re just going to have to keep waiting. Square still has a ways to go.

Congratulations fanbinbin9000! You’re the first and with hope the last to ever be banned from this blog!

This user is a spam bot. And a really interesting variety. Most spam bots I’ve seen just drop by post a single piece of spam and then disappear never to be seen again. Not so for fanbinbin9000. Rather this spam bot subscribed to me and friend requested me (which i ignored) and then continued to repeatedly post spam comments on several of my really old entries. It’s quite odd. Each spam comment is completely rambling and incoherent. The only comprehensible part is a link to some weird links to london jewellry store. 

If you’re curious, you can read the spam here.

I read too many fantasy and fiction books. As a result many times when I am tired and in my cynicism I start to fear that people I care about are under attack. I imagine that there are forces beyond my control, malevolent forces, trying to hurt the people I care about. Sometimes they are people, just like you and me, only full of irrational hate that leads them to hurt without remorse. Other times they are beyond human and either do not understand the harm they are causing or revel in it. Most often though, I don’t know why they do the things that they do. My imagination does not run that deep. I just feel that they are.  And it bothers me. It angers me I would use all that I can to will those forces away and end the harm they are causing. I will find a way to fight them.

But then I wake up from my dark daydreams and remember that the world is mostly much simpler. Things just happen. Sometimes those things are bad. Sometimes they are good. But there is always, always a logical explanation. And almost always it’s the simplest explanation that works best. No mystical supernatural beyond normal unnatural forces. There’s just us. We’re bad enough.

Still, ever in the back of my mind a million other paranoia driven possibilities forever reside. But in all worlds real and imaginary the one truth remains. That there is a need to believe in others and to fight to make them better.

Earlier today I had a conversation with two friends about stories and understanding. Basically they were observing that there were certain people who seem to miss what is to them the most obvious things in stories. Of course I was one of the people who was “missing” stuff.  As a result it seems that they and I have rather completely different tastes in stories. Stories that they say “makes perfect sense” really leave me feeling frustrated and annoyed because too much is left out. I end up feeling like raging at the author or writers and shouting at them “Why don’t you just explain it already!!!”

My friends theorized that it’s different ways of thinking. Different brain compositions of a sort. Some people, that is, experience things more emotionally through their senses. So musical and visual clues, clues in tone and style, and clues in symbolism and imagery speak more directly to them and their brains are able to process the information in order to fill in the gaps that the author obviously intended the reader to fill in themselves.

In contrast, other people have a more concrete logical mindset. Things need to be related through cause and effect. When given the pieces of a puzzle they can fit them together very well to make a whole, they can even do it rapidly, but without all the pieces they can’t imagine what might fit in those missing spots even if the author obviously intends the readers to bring their own experiences to bear in order to fill in those gaps. And the lack of the pieces will just annoy the hell out of them.

My friends observed that it tends to though not always be the kinds of people who end up in Math majors and engineering type programs that tend to think in the second category. In contrast it tends to be artsy types who think more along the lines of the first category.

Yeah that second group is definitely me. I’m much more comfortable in the world of things I can experience directly and understand fully and completely than a world of guessing and wondering. That kind of abstraction process is forever uncomfortable to me because it just feels like there’s no right answer to me. So I can come up with a million guesses and they all seem equal to me. I see no reason to believe one explanation for how to fill in the gaps over another. None of them  “just feels right” to me.  Though of course my friends it’s the opposite. If I propose a possible explanation they’ll give me a flat look and just say “No.” In their minds there’s a right answer and the reasons my answers don’t work are wholly obvious. 

What’s weird of course is that they agree. They come to their explanations independently but it’s always the same explanation. That suggests that they are really seeing something I don’t rather than just making things up out of thin air. Though for all the sense it makes to me they might as well be doing some kind of mysticism or magic in their interpretive process.

Me, I’ll just read the explanation online and think the writer is an idiot for not explicitly explaining the things I read in the piece of work itself. I can’t help but part of me always thinking that that whole abstract reasoning thing is a load of make belief bull. My mind just doesn’t work that way.

Of course the sad thing is, I really WANT my brain to work more that way. As I think it would make me a better writer. Hence I try at times to read poetry and more poetic short stories just for the practice. GEnerally I end up reading these dozens of times over without having a clue what they are talking about until it is explained. And yes I know poems can have lots of interpretations and there’s no real “right answer” as the writers say, but trust me, my my random guess interpretations tend to be so far off the mark that nobody else in the world sees them the way I do.

Then again there are some very excellent writers who do live more in the world of the concrete and I’m not just talking about Journalists and historians. Fiction writers like Brandon Sanderson are definitely more concrete than others like say Jacqueline Carey or Robin Hobb or even Robert Jordan for example. But even Sanderson the more he writes the more he seems to excel at this kind of poetic abstraction process and emotional invocation.

Me, I only ever can do it when I at the height of my depression. Everything else I write feels very stale and flat to me. I don’t give the reader an opportunity to misunderstand me because I explain things is extreme detail. Ironically though the level of detail seems to lead to more misinterpretations of nearly everything I write than I would have ever thought imaginable. It’s amazing how much people can manage to not read especially if something is long.

Anyways, styles of writing and how they relate to different ways of thinking are definitely subjects worth thinking about especially for those aspiring to write regularly either for fun or for profit or to scratch that ever unscratchable itch.