What Happened to Dexter?

Dexter was a great idea. A character study of a psychopathic serial killer. Fascinating. We had an interesting concept, a good cast of characters (to build on). Funny and aware dialogue. The second season ended to rave reviews.

But oh, oh did it get bad. How did that happen?

It was a gradual thing. People say it went downhill after the second season, and became unsalvageable after the fourth. It's something we all should have seen, but we all had hope, faith in this great premise. I will give the show credit up-front: I've read the books. The show made some good decisions on where to deviate. With that compliment out of the way...

Plot

Dexter's plot was quite repetitive. It should be noted that Dexter would actually be greatly improved if someone were to go through, and edit the series thusly:

Season 1: Introduction and character study with Ice Truck Killer

Season 4: Marriage of Dexter and Rita. The season 4 serial killer and ending, with the exploration of reconciling a serial killer with family. 

Season 7: Hannah McKay and Dexter. It ends with her being sent to jail. She DOES NOT come back.

Season 2: minus Lilah and Doaxes' death. It EITHER ends with Dexter's capture and execution, or extends to a few episodes past this dealing with the implications of this discovery.

Now, I understand the vitriol at the idea of Hannah being included in this, since she's part of the horrific final two seasons, and the writers had a fetish for her, but hear me out: Dexter has met with three serial-killer-esque women. Hannah was the most well-developed and independent of the three, having a backstory that didn't take a single simple sentence, and clearly having had a life before Dexter. So if we had to pick one, she should be that one. 

Characters

When I build a character, I start with a wooden block with an idea written on top of it in Sharpie. That block is then thrown into a metaphorical wood chipper, and I take what comes out, and use it. For non-writers, that means: I start with an archetype, throw the character into a bunch of situations designed very specifically to break them. Once I know what makes them break, I know them at their core. The problem with this is: what I want may not be what I get. 

For example: I started with a man named Jeffery. Jeffery was gay. A friend of mine and I had an idea to make a gay couple, to troll roleplays where there was an enforced gender percentage (guys and girls had to be the same number), because of the obvious implications that they would all pair up. 

I threw Jeffery in the woodchipper, and he came out a very possessive, angry man with control issues, who was so deep in the closet he came out in Narnia. Theoretically, this doesn't matter. I can still make him come out of the closet and profess his love to some random guy. But it won't be real, and the audience can tell.

Dexter's writers missed this lesson of character-building. The characters are bent and torn depending on what the plot wants them to be.

Each character had a core that was true, but the show wasn't interested. 

Rita's core is a recovering battered woman, but Rita's sexual evolution happens too quickly. In one episode the suggestion of sex makes her clearly immensely uncomfortable, but a few episodes later she gives him a blowjob. This evolution works great for Dexter's character arc, but completely neglects hers. 

LaGuerta's core is a woman trying not to show how vulnerable she is. She's smart, but trying to reconcile her job with her gender identity. Yet, she has several scenes flirting with Dexter which feel out-of-place, her loathing of Debra feels out-of-place--theoretically this could be jealousy on how Debra reconciles her gender identity, but I can't give this show that much credit. She's also frequently shown as being rampantly incompetent, or super-competent depending on whether the show wants her to be. And of course, there's the sudden relationship with Angel.

Deb... oh Deb. Her dialogue feels forced, but that's just for starters. Deb has a pretty good start. She feels for the hookers she works with at the pilot. Her frustration is palpable and easy to empathize with. She's shown as being pretty unlucky with men, even before she falls for the Ice Truck Killer. Here's where the problem is: Deb doesn't learn from her mistakes. She spends the next 7 seasons treading the same waters. A good, a natural, progression for Deb would be: after the Ice Truck Killer, she takes a hiatus from men. Perhaps she gets rather paranoid about men after that, tries to do background checks on them, or keeps having flashbacks. This is somewhat addressed, with her showing some PTSD symptoms with her next boyfriend (I call him Gym Guy) and then having her fall in love with an FBI Agent. But then she goes right back to 'bad guys.' The show tries to throw this away as a Freudian excuse, but that's all it is: an excuse.

At least the show attempts to develop the women. Angel and Matsuka are one-note characters, whose note changes once every few seasons. (Angel's decision to quit the force, for example.) 

There is one giant exception to this rule: serial killers. Almost all of this shows villains and antiheros are fantastically developed. The boy whose first kill was a man who raped him, who begins pimping himself out, felt real, if really sad. Season 4's serial killer is considered the best of all time. And of course, don't forget the Ice Truck Killer. (The weakest, I would have to say, is Lilah.) Of course, another exception to the exception, and there's a big one: Dexter himself.

Dexter

Or, more accurately, how the writers treat him. Dexter starts off well, and the writers have a good relationship with him. They're interested--as are we--and they care to a degree--as do we. But they don't lose sight of who he is: a serial killer. They don't lose sight of what this show will be: a tragedy. It's contemplated frequently throughout the first season, and thoroughly explored in the second: Dexter will get caught. It's only a matter of time.

From there on out, there were minor threats. Character after character would get somewhat suspicious, but then they would forget, or decide they didn't care. 

I will give it some credit: it does end in a tragedy. The tragedy is not Dexter's, but Deb's. Deb goes into a coma. Dexter pulls the plug, and he dumps her into the ocean, then he goes off to get his happy ending, leaving his son with another serial killer. Let's pretend that this all makes sense for a minute. 

Why does Dexter deserve the happy ending? Why should anyone have gotten one? This. Was. A. Tragedy. By the end, almost everyone's lives are destroyed, except Dexter's.

So how did it happen? How did the show lose sight of Dexter, and what was clearly the plan?

Well, it's simple, and it's something authors frequently fall prey to. Authors have to have a strange relationship with characters. If we don't like them, respect them, the audience can tell (Look at Stephanie Meyer's works, and her women, for example) and it makes the journey difficult, if not impossible. However, if we grow to love them, we forget what needs to be done. This love makes it harder to push them, break them, and kill them. I had a huge problem with the above. Then I wrote a slasher film, and got over it. 

The fact is: they loved to break Deb, but they loved to love Dexter. They tried to justify this, tried to say he wasn't a psychopath, that he was made that way--even shoehorned in a brand new character to try and say this. This transition between loveable psychopath and wait-he's-just-misunderstood was at the beginning of season 5. 

Which you'll notice is when the audience started to give up.

But again, the seeds were planted before then. Note how, every time Dexter has to make a very tough decision, it seems to be made for him. Doaxes and Lilah, is of course the biggest example. Dexter considers changing everything, but he is not allowed to make that decision. Lilah makes it for him. 

Audience

One thing I stress, for any medium: don't lose sight of your audience. I do admit, audiences are broad and full of crazies, but an average opinion does start to come out if you listen for more than a few seconds. It's harder to do this with TV Shows, since you can take notes on reactions as it airs. (Of course you can't totally change mid-season based on reactions, but you can always improve for following seasons.) That doesn't mean Dexter didn't manage. 

The show-runner does make a decent point, that we're okay with violence but not with 'love.' I'm going to ignore the cultural landscape (where violence is much less regulated than sex), and say this: if you had led up to it better, it might have worked.

Deb's relationship with him had never seemed like anything other than brother-sister until they tried to declare a paradigm shift. 

But the fact is, they just kept ignoring us. We say the side characters aren't well developed, yet nothing changes. We hate Lilah, so they give us Lumen. We don't like Lumen, so they give us Hannah. We were kinda split on Rita, so of course she had to die.  The most egregious example was of course, in those links, where the show-runner tells us we're wrong for disliking Deb's newfound love of Dexter.

This wasn't a thing a few people were upset about. I haven't met a single person (even on the internet) that had been rooting for this, or even expecting it. We were all blind-sided, in a really horrible way. (Twists with build-up are okay, where it makes sense in retrospect, but twists without it are really bad.) 

Conclusion

All the problems with Dexter fell upon the writers. The actors did their best, and their efforts were rewarded, but the foundation of Dexter--the writing--was broken. Of course the house was going to fall. 

Video Games: The Stanley Parable

Nobody really wants to explain what this game is, and for good reason. Like Whedon's The Cabin in the Woods the best way to experience it is as a blind virgin. But, I wouldn't have bought it with just that sentence if I hadn't played the free HL2 Mod, so I will go into detail for those who want it.

I want to become an English Teacher, and when I do, I will have three students play this game in front of the class. If none of them follow the narrator entirely, I will. Then we will write an essay about the experience. It's that well-written. Plus, it's hilarious and has a sarcastic British narrator. What else would students want?

I inevitably compare this game to Telltale's The Walking Dead. This seems quite a bizarre comparison, for those who have actually played it, so hear this out. The Walking Dead was heralded for the ability to choose, and shape the game. I don't feel this is true, for reasons I will rant about in another blog post. However, in The Stanley Parable, this is true. Your choices matter.

Your first obvious choice (though there are others before this point) are to pick the door on the right, or the door on the left. The narrator tells you that you took the door to the left. You can decide not to.

If you do, you get walked through a parody of a conference room, with slides such as:

The whiteboards are awesome. On one of the whiteboards, there's a mention of getting someone out of the broom closet. This hints to another thing you can do: go into the broom closet. The narrator is utterly baffled, and if you stay long enough, he insults Stanley, culminating by saying Stanley was stupid, fat, and addicted to drugs and hookers.

You often get dialogue by just standing still. For example, standing in the employee lounge will have the narrator eventually say: "Stanley's obsession with this room was getting a little creepy," and end with: "the narrator said nothing for a very long while, and Stanley began to think the narrator was trying to make a point."

This game has practically infinite replay value. At this time, there has been twenty endings or pseudo-endings discovered, though I personally found one more. There are easter eggs, like a random person you might see, or the phone ringing. My favorite phone ring has to be the one that has you confirm a delivery of 1000 boxes (or some insanely high number) and the next time you restart the game, the office will be full of boxes. Or if you enter the correct code into the keypad before the narrator tells you it, he gives you a lecture about patience, and stop the game for a moment to play jazz music.

The achievements are adorable, inane, and hilarious. The only clearly achievable one, where you click a door five times, is deceivingly complex. The narrator will break the fourth wall, and tell you that you have to do more to earn that achievement. Then you'll have to run around, clicking on many doors, and even stand on top of the copier before you get the achievement. There's several that seem impossible or insane: play for an entire tuesday, don't play for five years. (Altering your computer's clock can do these.) There's even an achievement you can find by simply looking in the options and turning on the achievement.

It really does have to be experienced to be believed.




You thought I was done, didn't you? Nope! If you're still not sold, play the Demo. You'd think it'd be a shorter version of this game, but it is an entirely different game. While The Stanley Parable deconstructs literature, and indeed, games, the demo does this of demos. Like the full game, the demo has many endings and easter eggs to be found. Now I'm done.

Video Games: Assassin's Creed Series

With my penchant for both stealth games, and as Zero Punctuation says, 'faffing about' it's no surprise Assassin's Creed has ended up in my game library.

To be honest, when I first downloaded the series I had no idea it was as, well, educational as it was. I wasn't expecting much out of it, but hey, it was on sale. It didn't take long to realize what I had gotten into, with Assassin's Creed 1. And it pleasantly surprised me. I'm the academic type that is literally about to write an essay about a pop song, so if you make your games smart, you're gonna make me happy.

I didn't even finish the first mission of one before I tried two. And finished two. And Brotherhood. And Revelations. The series had me so hooked, I didn't even have a chance to finish it, if that makes sense. I still intend to finish One, some day.

So, with that in mind, let's talk specifics.

Assassin's Creed I: Since I haven't really played much of it, I won't say much, except that it feels a bit too hand-holdy when I've played all the other games before the first.

Assassin's Creed II: This is the height of the series. If you intend to only get one Assassin's Creed game, this is it. There's several good reasons for this. First: the setting: Italy during the renaissance. Not only do we get to meet great, and real people during this time, but we get to see great and real buildings. Let's touch on a few of these:

Leonardo DaVinci exists in-story, and is fairly historically accurate. The story uses one of the inventions he actually tried to make as a plot point. They don't shy away from the possibility that he took on a male lover. Caterina Sforza, the woman who tells the people who kidnapped her kids she has the ability to make more, is not only a real person, but someone who actually said that. As for locations, the Colosseum gets seen in two different time periods, and the Sistine Chapel is where the final battle takes place.

Ezio is loveable, relatable, and his story is enjoyable. It's no wonder we have followed Ezio longer than any of the other historical assassins.

I feel Assassin's Creed II was the 'perfect storm' so-to-speak. The plot was great. The environment had lots of tall buildings, with minimal guards improbably placed on roofs. On the other hand, there was minimal-to-no 'assassin training' and investing and microtransactions. It would have been better if those things were non-existent, of course. It's funny how, in a game called "Assassin's Creed" I largely wanted to assassinate people.

There was one mission that I really, really hated in Assassin's Creed II. You're to assassinate a man on a boat, and if any of the guards catch you, you fail. You have to take out the guards one by one, and it's really, really fucking hard.

With Brotherhood and Revelations, it immediately becomes inferior to II because the programmers mistakenly believed we actually really loved the investing part of AsCred and really wanted more banal stuff like that. They seemed to just be throwing shit in and calling it 'progress' when it was really a regression.

Things get worse with III. III was, in my opinion, so bad, I gave up on the series. They pulled out one of the best parts of AsCred simply by changing the era: the towering, various buildings. And they added more guards to the roofs. And they included more 'insta-fail' missions. This was before I got a chance to finish the insanely long prologue. I didn't even get to see Conner, or some of the awesome things said about him, because the game frustrated me too much, too early. It's like they completely ignored the standard difficulty curve, and just decided 'fuck it and fuck you.'

IV is out now, but I'm done caring. Assassin's Creed has shown me it will never get better than II, so what's the point?

Random English Rules: Tricks and Tips to Stop Looking Like an Idiot

Let's face it. English is a random amalgamation of several languages, and that makes our grammar and spelling fucked. So let's go over basic grammar questions, and the rules to govern them.

Your v.s. you're. 

Here's the rule. Extrapolate.

Example sentence: Your cat stinks.

Is your correct, or should you're fit there? Remember 'you're' is 'you are.' So then, put 'you are' in place of the 'your.'

Example Sentence: You are cat stinks.

Doesn't work? Then 'your' is the way to go.

Another way to remember is ownage. Do you 'own' your cat? (some people would disagree, but let's just say yes.) Then your is the way to go.

In the sentence: "Your stupid"

Do you own the stupid? (Sometimes, yes.) Then 'you're' is the way to go.

Their vs There Vs they're.

For 'they're' the same rule applies as your vs you're.

If you can put 'they are' in there, and it makes sense, then they're is the word to use.

You also have to ask if 'they' own the object that comes after it. So, "Their car." If they own the car, then 'their' is the word to use.

As for there, you can remember it as a location, or you can just see:
They don't own it
They are doesn't work
So it's there.

Easy.

Our vs are: 

I'm not sure why this is a thing, since they don't even sound alike, but here.

If you are it, it's are. If you own it with someone else, it's 'our.'

Then vs than

Then is usually a statement about time.

"I went to the store, THEN I went home."

Than is usually comparative. "The store was much colder THAN the outside."

So ask yourself, was the store cooler, then the outside happened? No? Then use 'than.'

affect vs effect:

I learned this with a very simple statement.

After you AFFECT something it has an EFFECT.

That makes no sense on its own, I know.

Basically affect means you're taking responsibility for the action. You affect the lake by touching it. Or, you can say touching the water has an effect.

An affect is active. Something DID that. An effect is passive. You're saying it just happened.

An effect will always follow an affect.

Who vs whom:

This works by re-arranging the sentence.

"Did you hear who she is going out with?"

Now, replace 'who' with he/she, and whom with 'him/her.'

So, if you re-arrange the sentence to say:

"She's going out with him" you can see that the above sentence really needs a 'whom.'

An Vs A 

This is all about pronunciation, so hear the words in your head.

"a apple" sounds awkward, so somebody decided it should be 'an apple.' So if you say it in your head, and 'a x' sounds awkward, change it to an.

Context Clues:

I'm going to interrupt the grammar lesson to talk about vocabulary. There are a few ways you can work out vocab for say, a multiple-choice test.

Remember roots, prefixes, and suffixes.

Don't worry, I'm going to explain what those words mean.

A 'root' is a word you can extrapolate (another big word, hang on) other words out of. For example:

Book- something you read
Bookcase- something you put books in
Bookish- Someone who really likes books

So if you know what the root word is, in this case, book, you have a better chance of guessing the answer.

A suffix is like: -ing, -ed, and -able.

This one can be a bit of a stretch for tests, but if you are in a bind, try glancing at the suffixes. "ing" goes with verbs, or words that say you're doing something. "ed" tends to go with past-tense things, or descriptors, so words that say something about something else. -able suggests action, but in a positive way.

If the word is used in a sentence, you might be able to guess what it means by substitution, or looking at the words and sentences around it. For example, 'extrapolate' up above means 'to expand on.' Which I did. I expanded on the word 'book' to get 'bookcase' and 'bookish.'

Here's another one.

"I'm not saying you all need to go to college. There are valuable jobs people need to do that don't need college. Mechanics, for example? I really respect mechanics. I can't even begin to emulate what they do. Mechanics need skill."

So, what's 'emulate' mean?

Well, in the above paragraph, I say I respect mechanics, and they need skills. If I can't even begin something about them, it might well be: copy, pretend to, or start to learn.

You've tried all of this, and you're still lost. This might be a trick that only works for me, but it's better than randomly guessing: 'feel' out the word.

Words can feel good, mean, negative, or positive.

For example: acerbic. Sound it out. With the hard 'c' sound at the end, starting with an 'ac' sound at the beginning suggests a rather bitter, harsh word. And indeed, someone who is acerbic tends to be bitter and harsh.

"Flourishing." The 'f' sound may sound harsh, but feel the word, how it seems to flow with the breeze peacefully. It's a good word.

Anything with 'con' in it is a negative word. (Even the conscience is usually telling you NOT to do something.)

What is a sentence? 

I'm not going to talk about nouns, adverbs, adjectives, and so on. They're boring. The truth is, sentences can be pretty much whatever you want them to be.

What?

The above paragraph was a sentence, with a single word. It doesn't have all the parts a sentence theoretically requires, of course, but it gets the point across, especially if you add tone. Perhaps you're saying it abashedly like you got caught. Or you're saying it in confusion, like you genuinely want to know. Perhaps you're saying it sarcastically like you feel someone is judging you who shouldn't be.

"What?" is a sentence that conveys a single idea. The context of that idea will be created in the sentences before and after it. However, 'what?' is officially a fragment, which just means a sentence that doesn't have all the pieces.

Fragments shouldn't be frowned upon. They can be very useful. They can speed up a story, give a sense of urgency, or suggest someone is thinking quickly or not very well. I prefer fragments to sentences that have so many commas, dashes, and colons to fill two pages. Speaking of those:

Now, punctuation time. 

The funnest part.

Here's a good trick to learn: between the point when the sentence starts and a comma, period, or dash ends it, the sentence should make sense on its own. Like the 'what' above, it has to convey a solid idea.

There is of course, exceptions, because English hates you.

If you have a piece of the sentence that can be removed, like this bit here, without the sentence losing anything then you can have a comma before the sentence is completed.

Now, you might be wondering what a dash is, or a colon is, or a semi-colon is, or a double-dash, and how to use it. (Probably not.)

The truth is: a colon ( : ) a dash ( - ) and a double dash (-- words --) and a comma ( , ) are fairly interchangeable. You can pretty much use them in place of each-other. The exclusion is that colons are largely used to start lists, and double dashes are usually some sort of statement that doesn't quite relate to the sentence at hand,.

Now, the period ( . ) vs the semicolon ( ; ). I know, all you see is boobs, but let's pull our minds out of the gutter for a minute.

Both a period and a semi-colon work fairly the same way; the difference is that a semi-colon tells you the two sentences are closely related. It's like a period is just your friend while a semi-colon is your significant other.

When do you capitalize?

You capitalize after a . a ? and a !. That's it for punctuation. I know I want to--and may well have-- capitalized things after a semi-colon or a colon, but that's not how things work.

You also capitalize names, and places that have a specific name. You wouldn't capitalize the subway, but if a specific subway bus was known as the 'bus of death' you would capitalize it to have: Bus of Death.

Words like 'of' and 'the' usually don't get capitalized in titles, unless they're the first word.

You also can capitalize something that is acting like a human that shouldn't be. For example, the giving tree. The whole time, that tree could have been a Tree. Not because it was a super-important tree, but because it wasn't acting like a tree.

Where do possessive marks go?

Normally I'd go on this whole thing about how it depends, but it's like the argument academia had when I was growing up about 'parent's' vs 'parents' ' vs 'parents's'. The public has decided 'parents' ' is correct.

So, while it is supposed to matter how much of the sentence is quotes, I'm just going to say: all quotes should go outside punctuation. I have never read a book that has put them anywhere else.

What length is a paragraph? 

I'm sure your teachers gave you an arbitrary (made up) number of sentences you needed. The truth is a paragraph is as long as you need to get your idea across. If it is only one sentence you needed then you only need one sentence.

Spelling: 

Seriously, everything is typed these days. If Word hasn't figured it out, your web browser might (if it isn't internet explorer) and if that can't figure it out, google it. Google is a miracle worker in trying to figure out what the hell you want.

Hypocrisy: 

I know I misused some of the things I just taught you. The truth is that I know these rules and I'm just starting to use them too. Especially the one about commas only coming after the sentence was already a complete thought. That one's been a bitch for me.

Video Game Reviews: The Batman Arkham Series

The truth is, I haven't been watching many tv shows lately. I'm running out of ones I'll watch willingly on Netflix (Revolution is taunting me, telling me to pick it up again and mock it), and I've largely been playing video games.

So let's talk about video games.

I was not a big batman fan. Didn't see any of the movies, didn't see the tv shows, and I didn't see the big deal about The Dark Knight. (I saw it once and was quite 'meh' about it.)

I bought these games because, together, they were 8 bucks, and I could throw away that money on something I might like.

And I LOVED it.

Let's start with Asylum:

I knew something was up from the beginning, even though I had seen no trailers for the game. (Did you know games have trailers? I find that odd.) So I was fairly unsurprised when The Joker pulled his trick. Wouldn't have a game if he didn't get away, right?

I quickly discovered how much I enjoyed the combat. Sure, I could button-mash if I wanted. or I could be AWESOME.The combat was very intuitive, and you would usually flow from enemy to enemy without much trouble. (Once in a while the game slipped up, but I forgive it.)

Then I was introduced to stealth mode. The idea of slipping around unseen really gets me, and this game, unlike Skyrim, had very reactive NPCs to your behavior, especially during stealth. You pick the enemies one by one, silently, then watch the others go mad. Feel free to take your time, and watch them slowly lose it. (In one room, a boiler goes off in regular intervals, and if you get them worked up enough, they will begin shooting at it.)

In later rooms, where the Joker is alerted each time a henchman goes down, the Joker taunts his own lackeys with your skill. In fact, let's take a minute to talk about The Joker in Arkham Asylum.

He's hilarious. I know the dialogue can be a bit corny, but you hear him pretty much everywhere. His lines have enough variety you won't go nuts from repeats, and nearly every 'announcement' of his is damn funny.

The other villain you spend the game with is much more frustrating... and satisfying to take down. The Riddler has left easter eggs all around the place, and after finding 100% of them, you get to hear him get arrested. The best part of it is the bravado at first slowly giving way to desperation and breaking-the-forth-wall complaints. (He accuses you of cheating, looking up the locations of the eggs on the internet.)

The best easter eggs, by far, are the patient interviews. You get to see, well, hear, Harleen Quinzel turn into Harley Quinn as The Joker puts her under her spell. You get to see Zsasz break his psychiatrist down. You hear Crock remove the guard's hand, and Ivy put her psychiatrist under her spell.

This game must be a veritable treasure trove for long Batman fans, as most characters that aren't part of the plot are represented with The Riddler's riddles.

There are a few segments of the game I should also talk about:

Ivy's boss battle: God did I hate this battle. It's the only time in the game where I had no idea what to do. I eventually figured it out, but I did have some frustrating deaths at first.
Crock's Lair: The first time I played it, I was less than amused. The second time? I was terrified. Every step you made was magnified, and you were aware every step you made was one step closer to getting eaten. I was hoping it would end not due to boredom, but due to adrenaline.
Scarecrow's Scenes: It's not a controversial opinion to say these were awesome, and the third one was the best. I won't spoil anything, so that's all I'll say.

Now, Arkham City:

Arkham Asylum is moved to a walled-off section of the city, and Bruce Wayne gets put there. I'm going to discuss changes from Asylum to City, and give a positive, eeh, or negative.

Positive: The environment is multiplied. It's huge! You get to climb buildings, which is my favorite thing in games for some reason.

Meh: Playing Catwoman. I neither hated it, nor liked it. I mean, I appreciated the boobage, but I couldn't help wondering how the hell that stayed on. I did feel like it often ruined the pacing to keep jumping between the two view points.

Negative: Riddler's riddles got harder. I know that's an odd thing to complain about, but I felt like Riddler's riddles being something to encourage you to explore the environment was great. You got to see everything the GameDevs had to offer. But adding button challenges, and timed challenges ruined it for me. I prefer puzzles, not timed challenges. Timed challenges feel like a cheap difficulty upgrade. I did appreciate that the riddles being solved meant something now, but I was never going to attempt to finish that quest.

Side missions:

Zsasz: This one was randomly frustrating, but never in a way I got angry with it. I'd often just end up at a villain's lair, and the phone would ring. I was aware I could technically ignore it, but I wouldn't, and next thing I know, I'm trekking back to get where I was before the phone rang. The Riddler being behind this was pretty awesome, in my opinion, and the end was great.
The masked man: I wish it had led somewhere. I guess this was supposed to be lead-up, but I didn't really want to wait another game to find out what the fuck was going on.
Rescue the political prisoners: This made me feel more like batman than usual. Hear trouble, swoop in, save the day, then disappear.

I wish there had been Scarecrow-style mindfuckery in this game, but the Mad Hatter bit, and Ra's al Ghul did make up for it enough that I didn't throw any complaints.

The fact is, Batman hasn't let me down  before. Even if people say Origins sucks, I'm going to buy it. I want them to keep making these games, even if, as it is joked by one of the mooks: "Arkham Asylum, now Arkham City, what's next? Arkham Universe?"

People I hate: Stephenie Meyer, author of Twilight

I know it's cool to hate on Twilight, but to be honest, I didn't really hate it. Objectively it is a bad book, nobody can deny that. Its riddled with Mary Sues and Gary Stus, the vampiric rules are ridiculous, the plot is fairly non-existent, the characters tend to come off as the opposite of what Meyer intended, and it's riddled with unfortunate implications.

However, Twilight is, admittedly, an entertaining read. (Not so much an entertaining movie.) Somehow, Meyer managed to make it work, and I'll give her that much.

No, whom I really hate is Stephenie Meyer.

It's no secret Bella looks like her. Meyer has stated her opinion that she feels Bella is just like all teenage girls.

Meyer expected to get full control over casting. At least she didn't throw a fit when she didn't get her way. Unlike when her book, Twilight from Edward's view, was leaked part-way through writing. She threw the biggest temper tantrum I've seen, and said she was not going to write the book. I've always suspected she would pick it up again after the movies. Outside of the Midnight Sun fit, Meyer has been quite horrible to her fans.

Finally, when I look at the 'big three' authors out there, Smeyer is the one with the most houses, and the least money donated to charity. This isn't a reason to hate her, but it is something I felt was worth pointing out.

Meyer liked to misuse words to make herself seem smarter, something she has become infamous for. There is something else about Meyer that people rarely talk about: her most interesting characters are the side characters.

Rosalie was raped on her wedding night, and after getting turned into a vampire she went on a roaring rampage of revenge. Alice got stuck in a mental hospital for years. Leah is the only female werewolf. Emily, the pack leader's wife, is implied to have a very conflicted emotional state.

But we're stuck with bland and angst.

Now, I want to discuss unfortunate implications in her work.

Feminism: I don't mind having a character or two be submissive, or feminine. Portraying isn't the same as advocating. However, to see how Meyer feels about women's role in life, look no further than Leah. Leah is the ONLY female werewolf. She is barren, and this is treated as the worst thing possible. She is also treated as a total bitch for being unhappy her ex-boyfriend left her for no reason, and now she's stuck around him.

Relationships:

Oh my God, where to start.

Edward is a stalker. I know this isn't a new argument. Just look at Midnight Sun--Twilight from his point of view--and you'll find out he actually oiled her window to make it not creak when he came in. This was alluded to in Twilight, where she mentions it's odd that sound isn't made anymore, but it is made much more explicit in Midnight Sun. He is also controlling. In Eclipse, he literally takes her engine out of her car so she can't go visit her friends.

Bella is throwing her entire life away for a guy. This is lampshaded frequently, but usually brushed off as: "Whatever. They just DON'T UNDERSTAND US."

When it comes to the other side of the 'love triangle' Jacob was at least willing to accept no. Well, until Eclipse, when he forces himself upon her.

Now that I've talked about Jacob, I have to mention the idea of imprinting. Now, again, I'm not going to talk too much about the pedophilia aspect. Instead, what I want to talk about is the pack leader and his wife. The pack leader imprints on his wife, and leaves Leah. The wife pretty much had no choice in the relationship, which is compounded when she gets horrifically scarred when he transforms in front of her--which, in a more deliberate author's book, could very well have been a metaphor for abuse. It's clear she feels too ugly to leave him, even if she wanted to. She exudes sadness in every scene she's in. But she's quickly brushed aside, and forgotten about.

I don't mind her religious beliefs creeping into her work; it happens to the best of writers, even if the birth scene in Breaking Dawn seems horrifically out-of-place.

Ok, so I've dissected Twilight. I like to think I have actually added something to the conversation. Let me just finish some points, using The Host as reference material.

Meyer creates a rather interesting idea, but refuses to think it through. Two characters in one body, one being an alien, the other struggling not to fade away. The borderline-apocalypse always appeals to me. Meyer tried to market it as: "Science fiction for people who don't like science fiction." Fair enough, when you consider those who like science fiction wouldn't like this book.

The biggest piece of unfortunate implications here adds onto the relationships part of Twilight. Wanda, the alien, was abused by the guy she ends up with by the end of the book. We are expected to brush that off, like most of the unfortunate implications. Why?

TRU WUV

Explaining Tropes: Mary Sue/Gary Stu

A Mary/Gary Sue is a difficult term to define, and the term is frequently misused. The line between interesting and a sue can be a matter of opinion, something writers are painfully aware of.

There are traits that commonly show up, but are neither the immediate indicator of a sue, nor universal with them.

For example:

• Being beautiful
• Having a hard life (usually to a very exaggerated degree)
• Their look may be unrealistic considering their habits (for example, a healthy-looking anorexic)
• Characters look like a celebrity, or the author
• Unnatural hair or eye color
• A hybrid of more than two species (like half vampire, half werewolf, half human)
• Weaknesses or faults like 'clumsy' or being 'passionate.' 

There's two major indicators of a Mary Sue: How the author treats them, and how the other characters treat them. The author might be incredibly close to or defensive of their character. Any criticism is met with hostility, as if you were insulting the author themselves. Sharing traits with the author, like looks or even their name, is a nearly universal indicator. 

Inside the universe, there are two things to consider: Is the character exempt to the rules of the universe? (For example, Bella getting pregnant by Edward, despite it being explicitly explained that vampires can't reproduce.) Do characters fall over themselves for the character, despite the character's actual quality, or their original temperament? (Like Bella's circle of friends, and Edward's being taken with her despite being a loner his entire life, and how the vampire leaders are willing to break the rules for her.) 

With Sues/Stus there is usually a lack of balance within the character. They are treated as the most awesomest thing that ever existed. They are gorgeous, strong, and loved by everyone. But weaknesses? Faults? Bah! Sometimes writers will attempt to throw us a bone by giving a fault that is considered very minor, but it can't even  begin to balance out their virtues. 

Finally, Sues/Stus will never see consequences for their actions, and if they do, everyone is being 'incredibly unfair' and we are clearly meant to pity the character. 

I want to stress that Sues/Stus are not characters you dislike. For example, Ginny Weasley is liked by most of the fandom, but it cannot be denied she is a sue; she is great at magic, she escapes the second book completely unscathed and with nobody even remotely upset with her, and she ends up with Harry Potter. It is all about how they are treated by the author, and the other characters in the work. 

Things I Hate: Laugh Tracks

I can't stand TV shows with laugh tracks.

Sure, I used to watch a lot of them. I grew up on the Disney Channel, after all. As I grew older, something about the laugh tracks began to rub me the wrong way. Each pre-recorded laugh grated on my brain, until I began to boycott all TV shows with laugh tracks.

Due to my penchant for self-analysis, I began to dig into myself to try and determine why they bothered me so much.

The history of laugh tracks started with an attempt to force people to think an unfunny radio play was funny. Then, it was added to stabilize differences between laughter in studio audiences in multi-camera sitcoms.

Then, it was to cover up the fact that they stopped using a studio audience. That's all well and good, or at least expected.

But I don't feel they have a place in the modern world of television. Now, they're both condescending and awkward, for one thing. When they're used now, completely without the help of a studio audience, I feel like the writers are screaming: THIS IS FUNNY BELIEVE ME IT IS FUNNY LOOK HOW FUNNY I AM HAHAHAHA.

And when it actually isn't funny? It's incredibly awkward. It's like crickets, but with laughs.

Funnily enough, I seem to be in the major minority in this opinion. Scientists actually found that laugh tracks make things funnier. We succum to peer pressure, as a species. Personally, I was always the outcast, so peer pressure wasn't really a thing for me, as I didn't have peers. Perhaps that's why I find laugh tracks grating rather than inducing an urge to conform.

This study suggests laugh tracks aren't going to go away, and I am probably the only one who boycotts shows that use laugh tracks. Bummer.

Netflix Original Series Round-Up: Orange is the New Black

Let's talk about something I know nothing about: Women's prisons.

I've never even seen the outside of a real prison. I don't even know what the inside would look like. So I can't comment much on that.

My town was largely homogenous, meaning we had two black kids and three hispanics in the entire school. So I can't comment on race relations.

You know what I can comment about?

Lesbians. It may not surprise anyone to hear I'm a lesbian. I considered bringing it up several reviews ago, when I was reviewing Emily Owens, MD. I decided my comment about how touching that scene was could stand without that knowledge, but my review of this show couldn't.

Because the sheer amount of gay in this show can be overwhelming, and to be honest, it's the only part of the show I can truly relate to.

Netflix's Original TV shows seem to be taking on a pattern, and it's one I really hoped they would; They won't shy away from issues, their characters are largely gray when it comes to morals, rather than being good or bad, and the tv shows are (generally) quite smart.

One thing my doctor said, when I mentioned to her I didn't really like guys, was: Sexuality is a spectrum. People think you're either on one side, or another, but really, it's like a scale, where one side is women, and the other is men, and you're somewhere in-between.

This show is the first one I've seen willing to portray homosexuality like this. The main character even talks about it the same way, though she gets teased for 'not being gay' anymore. At least one other person in a lesbian relationship seems to have turned to it not really because she's more into girls than guys, but because she's lonely.

However, it's not afraid to shy away from homophobia. Despite being a lesbian, I'll admit, I haven't truly  seen homophobia. I mean, when I came out, nobody was surprised. My last boyfriend was pretty much a girl (I'm sorry, you know who you are). I'm fairly masculine, and I approach gender roles like a guy. I was often told I probably was just dressing like a girl.

I'm not saying this is how all lesbians are: the show presents quite the range of them, from lesbian as a personality trait (the butch one), to lesbian only being incidental to her personality (the ex-girlfriend.)

In fact, since I came out, I've only had one direct experience with homophobia.

Coworker: So, are you dating anyone?
Me: No, I'm kinda taking time to sort myself out.
Coworker: Your last boyfriend sucked, huh?
Me: You have no idea. He cheated on me. With a guy.
Coworker: My ex-boyfriend wanted me to have a threesome with another guy. I broke up with him right then and there. Gay people are disgusting. There's nowhere in the bible where a man and a man are together, you know? (puts dish cloth away.) Hey, will you make me a sandwich?
Me: (snaps) So long as you don't mind it being touched by a lesbian.
Coworker: ...
Me: ...

After making her sandwich, I apologized, and explained she had no way to know that would offend me, and I had given every indication I was straight, and she apologized for offending me.

Yeah, that's earth-shattering stuff right there.

The fact is, lesbians aren't nearly as hated as male homosexuals. The show called "What Would You Do" proved this, by noting almost nobody caused a scene when two girls were kissing in public, but two boys kissing frequently got confronted, and even had the police called on them.

It gets to the point where I sometimes forget that people might be upset when they hear I'm gay. After all, girl on girl is hot, right?

This show reminded me that I really shouldn't start dying my hair rainbow yet, with two characters: The warden and Sandusky.

The warden gets disgusted when he hears Piper supposedly requested a specific bunking partner. When he hears she didn't, and she didn't like the advances of another girl, the warden makes it clear he doesn't like lesbians, and Piper decides not to bring her sexuality up. He starts acting rather pervy towards her.

Sandusky is an evangelical druggie, since being mistaken for a Christian political protester. Sandusky eventually realizes Piper is gay, and goes to the warden, saying she caught Piper having sex with another girl in the bathroom.

The warden decides to put Piper in solitary for 'lewd behavior' (he caught her dancing). Everyone points out he can't do that, and eventually he relents, but it's too late for her to meet her fiance for the holiday.

Piper snaps at him, and reveals she's gay. I will not spoil the finale, but let's just say this moment leads to the climax.

There are two other major stories going on, which I can't comment on too much from experience, but I will say they were touching, and I enjoyed watching them.

An emotionally abused girl gets involved with one of the nicer guards, eventually getting pregnant by him. She decides to coerce another guard into having sex with her, and tell everyone he raped her, which doesn't please the nicer guard at all. (It leads to a rather funny episode, where the second guard lets the first one know he's 'really tall'.)

And, a guard and the cook (named Red) clash, leading to the death of a character, and the fallout from it.

This is not an easy show to watch. It's not a light show, either. It can be pretty funny at times, which eases the harsh realities it presents. But I think everyone should watch it. If not the entire one, at least the episode where everyone convinces Sandusky she can heal people, until she tries to heal a girl in a wheelchair, and gets sent to the mental ward.

America's Next Top Model: A Redaction

In my last review of ANTM  I gave it a rating of 'meh.' Or, a guilty pleasure. Basically, watching it wouldn't change your life one way or another.

But ANTM finally lost me. How? Flixels.

Between being turned into a serial killer by video games, and being brainwashed by TV, I am a photographer. 

This is one of my photographs.

I've worked with models before.

I've even sold several of my photographs.

So I can comfortably say I am fairly familiar with the 'art' side of ANTM. I'm not going to claim that ANTM is one of the highest art forms out there. It's not. It's a reality TV show that is increasingly being taken over by Tyra Bank's ego. 

So, when I say 'flixels' are tacky, and they piss me off, I'd like to pretend I have some credibility on the subject. For those of you who don't follow my links--I don't blame you--a flixel is basically a gif. Part of the image moves. The rest doesn't. It was previously known to the world as a cinemagraph. I think a flixel is in the right direction for a cinemagraph. The flixels I saw were much stabler than any cinemagraph I've seen, and though a cinemagraph and a flixel are basically the same thing, I don't have nearly as much vitriol towards a cinemagraph as I do a flixel.

I'm not going to analyze why. I have to give my therapist something to talk about. 

But, my rage over the fact that every photo shoot the models do is going to be flixels quickly turned into musings. 

When did ANTM jump the proverbial shark? I feel it's happened, but I don't feel flixels were that point. Was it when Tyra tried to use it to launch her music career? Was it the season focused less on modeling, and more on making a 'celebrity?' Was it the fact that Tyra is the only judge to survive all 20 seasons? Was it the fact that there have been 20 seasons? Was it the 'british invasion' season, where America's next top model very loosely interpreted 'America?' Was it the not one, but two contestants that disappeared from the show for no clear reason? Was it the fact that Tyra has now picked up so many jobs it really should be renamed Tyra: supermodel/judge/stylist/singer/dancer/linguist/mentor/photographer? Was it when she started making up her own words?

I don't know. I've tolerated all of it, so I guess I have no room to judge. One thing that has disappointed me about America's Next Top Model is its decision to throw away the art in favor of drama. The enforced drama was always there; The militant Atheist and Christian in season one were likely chosen equally for skill and their likelihood of clashing. Once Sharon flipped out over the nude shoot, they made it a staple of the seasons until the girls stopped being bothered by it. Usually, there was one less bed than the initial group, to create a fight over who was going to double-up, or sleep on the couch or floor. The makeovers have always created a lot of drama, to the point where they pretended they were just done dealing with it, by giving an opportunity to add more drama by telling girls they can refuse the makeovers.

Then punishing them for it. Though I do admit, because the makeovers are done every season, they should know it's coming, and just suck it up.

I also always found it suspicious that, in the top four girls, if not the top three, there was always the one that everyone hated. The one that clashed the most with the group. I won't deny some of them had the skill to stay, but I will suggest they stayed for more than one reason. 

I was subconsciously aware that, to a degree, the show was carefully edited and scripted. The girls all scream when they see Tyra. They all piss themselves over Tyra mail. Several girls have come out suggesting they were edited into personalities they didn't have. They adopt Tyra's words and bend over backwards to feed her ego. And the girls who don't are quickly eliminated. 

The fact is, America's Next Top Model has been struggling to control itself for some time. It has to maintain Tyra's ego (I cannot stress her ego enough), recruit and support models who will have careers, be entertaining as a reality tv show, handle the people well, and keep itself interesting enough to maintain itself over twenty seasons. 

It has done most of these things well up until this point. Tyra gets to do pretty much anything she wants, though she usually limits herself to one or two episodes where she takes more than one job, and she's balanced out by the two other judges. Most models on ANTM have careers after it, even those who were eliminated early on. Whenever someone out-of-the-ordinary comes around: the two pre-op transsexuals, the multitude of lesbians and (as of season 20, homosexuals), and the girls with clear mental health issues (the bulimic girl, the few anorexics, the Aspie, and the girl with severe co-dependency), or plain health issues (the girl going blind, and the girl with short-term memory loss), the show usually treats them with respect. (The only one I feel was unfairly handled was the girl with Aspergers, who would often get marked down for stuff that was part of the disease, but life isn't fair and I should suck it up.) 

The way it has handled keeping itself interesting is the one it keeps fumbling on. Increasingly, ANTM feels less and less like an introduction to the industry, and more and more like a cruel human experiment.

Especially the runways. The video refers to two crazy ones, but I don't even consider these the worst. The first episode of season 20 has one where the runway is down a building. They have a runway that's done quite high in the air, and they have one in the dark, where they know one of their contestants is borderline-blind. (She said she could see the runway only because of the lights on the edges, but somebody did fall, or more accurately, walk into a wall.)

Some of the non-nude photoshoots also seem designed to break the girls down, or press some buttons. There are two photo-shoots done involving heights: one on the edge of a tower, one where they are lifted into the air. They do a photo-shoot with a spider, and bees. Both times, some girls cried.

So I'm done with America's Next Top Model. Maybe I'll just look for amazing photos on art sites. There will be less egos there. (Ha! Who am I kidding?)

Video Games: Skyrim

There isn't too much about Skyrim as a whole that hasn't already been said, so I'm going to be very short about my general thoughts.

This was the second serious game I've ever played. Before this point, I had always exclusively played platformers on the DS and its ancestors. Some would argue that those were serious games, but I don't feel that way. Mostly because it ended there. I got Yoshi's Island, and I played it over and over again when I was bored. I wasn't interested in any other games.

Before Skyrim, I thought $60 on a game was insane. I was like: "Nope, not happening." With the combination of a random Steam sale knocking it down $20, and the fact that I had a friend who absolutely adored the game, I decided to try it. After realizing that, between the games and the dlcs, I'd spent about $85, and I had played 600 hours, I'd spent .14 cents per hour I changed my mind about that.

There are a lot of things about Bethesda games I really enjoy that apply to Skyrim. Bethesda's games encourage you to build your own experience, create your own story. Sure, there is a plot. There are quests. But you're free to ignore them. As I mentioned with Dishonored, you are welcome to determine your own play style. Plus, in Skyrim you can create your own character down to the bone. I like rpg games, and especially ones where you set up your own character, rather than the game doing it for you.

So, instead of talking about the game as a whole, which is largely impossible for Skyrim, I'm going to talk about questlines.

Dragon-killer: 7/10

The main quest. I rather like the main quest, but I do have one glaring issue with it: you cannot tell Delphine and Esburn to go fuck themselves. Sure, you could never talk to them again, but without mods, when they tell you to kill Paarthurnax, you can't tell them: "I'm the fucking dragonborn. You need me. I can just walk away and leave you to die, so shape the hell up."

Otherwise, I have no issues with the main quest. I have a lot of fun with it, from invading the Thalmor embassy to defeating Alduin. 

Civil War: 9/10

Yes, I actually like the civil war quest better than the main quest. I like it for the thought put into it. As it has also been done to death, let me just quickly reiterate one thing: When one of the leaders can be compared to Hitler and to George Washington, clearly a lot of thought and work was put into it. The fact that people have been so divided over Stormcloaks vs Imperials is a good thing. 

This quest encourages repeat playthroughs just so you can play both sides, but I remember thinking I didn't want to touch the Stormcloaks. Finally, one playthrough I did, and I really enjoyed it. It felt like the Stormcloaks were more rewarding, for some reason. 

I like how gray the morality is. No matter which side you pick, parts of Skyrim will be better for it, and parts of Skyrim will be worse, with the thanes being replaced not always being better than their predecessors. 

Companions: 4/10

One of the things I enjoy about Bethesda games is how smart the game is to how you play. Like in Dishonored, Skyrim has bits and pieces of this. However, the companions is where it falls flat.

Even if you have travelled across Skyrim and killed everything hostile from Riverwood to Windhelm, when you approach the companions your accomplishments will never be noticed. Farkas will still exclaim he's never heard of you, which wouldn't be too big of a deal in a setting where news doesn't travel fast... except you literally save Whiterun from a dragon. 

You think he would have paid attention to that.

It's also greatly satisfying to avoid Whiterun until you have done some levelling up, so you can sneak in and kill the giant for them, which I don't think the game wanted you to be able to do. (I've only ever been able to do it as an archer, because if I get close enough to get a swing at it, it will already be dead.)

Companions is the first quest you come across that shows one of the issues I have with Skyrim's faction quest lines: You usually become the leader of the quest-line by the end. 

I know it sounds like I totally hate this quest-line, but I don't. Kodlak, and his journal, save the quest-line. The werewolf thing doesn't hurt either. 

Dark Brotherhood: 10/10 

Out of the two Elder Scrolls games I've played, the dark brotherhood was the best quest-line in both of them. Admittedly, the Skyrim quest-line was worse than the Oblivion, but I honestly wonder how they could have topped some of the Oblivion Dark Brotherhood quests. (Getting locked into a house, and having to set up everyone else's death while making it look like you're not involved? AWESOME.) 

The quest-line is well written, with amazing characters. The ending of it is very visceral and painful. Spoiler ends at next bold. When Astrid performed the black sacrament on herself, even after all she'd done, my execution of her was a healing spell.

...yes, my character was that bad at healing spells.

Thieves' Guild: 6.5/10

I don't know why I don't like this quest-line too much. It isn't bad. It's quite solid, in fact, and the nightingale armor is the coolest armor in the game. The characters aren't bad, and the storyline isn't bad. 

It isn't Maven Black-Briar, whom I love to hate. The end of the quest-line is fantastic. I like how the side-quests encourage you to go out into the entire world, and you have to do more than a handful to advance. It also does feel like you earned becoming the boss this time. But out of the 600 hours I've spent in Skyrim, I have only played the Thieves' Guild quest-line once.

Once.

Dawnguard: 5/10

I got Dawnguard because the Oblivion DLCs really added a lot to the game, and Dawnguard didn't disappoint. I've done the Dawnguard quest-line twice. The snow-elf quest-line is the best part of it, and it was one of the things I remember mentioning in a conversation with someone about what I wanted out of Skyrim DLCs: looking into what happened to the Falmer. 

That said, the Dawnguard quest is alright. Not bad, not good. Serana is one of the best followers in the game, if only because they were aware you would likely spend a lot of time with her, even if you didn't  regularly have followers, and thus spent a lot of time on her AI and lines.

I think Dawnguard might have been more fun if you could have secretly been a vampire working for the Dawnguard. Sure, you can secretly be a werewolf, but it's just not as much fun. 

That, and feeling like your initial decision really didn't matter. No matter which side you choose, the end is the same. (Unlike the civil war quest, where the 'end boss' is different depending on your side.) 

I also want to give it props for the soul-cairn: Creepy stuff. I stopped using black soul gems after seeing it, and that's saying something.

Hearthfire DLC: 5/10

The hearthfire DLC appealed to me, in that I spend hours in Skyrim arranging my sword collection (not a euphemism), but I can see how it wouldn't appeal to a lot of people. I wish you had the ability to make the houses even bigger, by adding all the wings, but I understand why it was the way it was. I also wish it offered more customization; if you decide not to put in a table there's a clearly empty spot where the table should have been, and the place feels empty without it. 

Though considering Skyrim's physics engine, perhaps it's best I ignore that wish.

I will acknowledge that modded houses have done better, and the child and marriage mechanic wasn't too solid to begin with, but it was only $5 full-price. I'm not going to scream rip-off.

Dragonborn: 7/10

I am angry this was the last DLC for Skyrim, seeing as my list wasn't done. (For DLCs I wanted one on the Thalmor, one on the Snow-Elves, and one on the Dwarves, at the very least.) That said, this was a great final addition to Skyrim. (Though I do wish all the armors added in with Dragonborn had a weapon-set to go with them.) 

Meeting the first dragonborn is creepy, fighting him is creepier. The decisions aren't quite black or white, and it brought back Hermaeus Mora, giving him a proper Daedric quest. (His quest in vanilla skyrim was the weakest of all the Daedric quests.) 

Skyrim was my first big game. It hasn't been the greatest game I've played, or the one that will stick with me forever, but it will always have a place in my heart.

Now make Fallout 4, Bethesda. 

Video Games: Dishonored

I've been taking a break from TV over-saturation (don't worry, I found some very shitty tv shows to review as well, plus of course I'm reviewing Netflix's "Orange is the New Black.") to kill everything everywhere.

That's the point of video games, right?

I have some major problems with Dishonored. I think it's clumsy, judgemental, and not sure of what it wants to be, and too short.

So why can't I stop playing it? I'm 27 hours in. I've played the game twice over, and I have yet to play the DLCs! (I was only 5 hours in when I decided the DLCs were worth buying, if only due to the Steam sale and the fact that the game was clearly wrapping up.)

Why do I like the game? First off, I'm a sucker for stealth. I like playing Skryim as an archer-assassin, Fallout as a sniper, and the Batman Arkham games as Batman. Dishonored gets a big win for that. I like the setting; scratch that, I LOVE the setting. I'm not a huge historical anything fan, but the steampunk elements really appealed to me. The plot really interests me, though I do agree with Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation that Corvo should have been more: "Wait a minute! I didn't kill her!" It might not have done any good, but it was a lot harder to swallow Corvo just taking being accused of killing his implied lover. I love open worlds that encourage me to climb on the rooftops. I love how the game encourages you to figure out your own way through the game, and is fairly smart about it. I remember having quite the shock the first time one of the guards found the body of another guard, and immediately began looking for me. The AI pays attention to what you do in the environment, and that's fantastic.

However, the longer I play the game, the more it rubs me the wrong way about a few things. As I said, it was very judgemental.

I don't mind games that have a morality meter, and as hamfisted as this game is about its, Dishonored probably has one of the better-done morality meters. (I would call Fallout New Vegas as the best, but this is a close second.) I like games where the game pays attention to you: it really adds to the immersion. The more people you kill, alarms you raise, and attention you gather, the harder and darker the game gets. You are a marker  for the game's place on the Sliding Scale of Idealism vs Cynicism. If you don't kill anybody, or barely kill anybody, the game is fairly light. (The achievement for completing the game with low chaos, which is how the game keeps track of how many people you kill, is called "Just Dark Enough/") Emily, the only child in the base game, is the most stark example: in a low chaos run she is called Emily the Wise, but in a high chaos run her last words in the game are: "The others are all dead, aren't they? Good. I was always gonna have them killed anyway."

For the most part, the game's reaction to how you play makes sense. The more people you kill, the more food for the plague rats, and the worse the plague gets. The exception the game doesn't account for being if you get the ability to make bodies disappear after you kill them. The more trouble you make, the more guards will be around, and the more people will be on alert for you. As you are heavily implied to be Emily's father, and that Emily knows this, it makes sense that she would take her sense of morality from you.

I also think it's neat how the dialogue changes based on how you play the game. If you complete the prologue of the game without being seen or killing anybody, you will overhear guards comment in later levels about how you were a ghost. If you complete the prologue inversely, by killing anything that moves, you will overhear guards say things like: "How many people did he kill on his way out of there?" and imply there was no way you couldn't have not killed the empress. I don't even mind how, the more vicious you are, the more desperate the people are at the end of the game. It makes sense: by this point they know you're coming, and they know you will show no mercy.

I don't know how I feel about you representing the hope of the city, however. The scene that comes to mind occurs in the High Overseer level. You come across three overseers, and what happens depends on your chaos level.

In low chaos: one of the overseers is showing symptoms of the plague. They beg the other two to kill them so they can't spread it. They do, but apologetically.
In high chaos: one of the overseers is showing symptoms of the plague. They are accused of trying to hide it, and brutally murdered by the other two overseers.

It's too early in the game for you to have a true effect on the city, and the people in it. They don't know your end game. They don't even know you're coming, but the game is still paying attention. And it has the eye of your grandmother: antiquated and judgemental. (That's how your grandmother is, right? Right.)

The morality system encourages the stealth, yes. The biggest problem I have with it is: if you are encouraged to not kill anybody, even within the plot of the game (you are able to find a non-lethal way of taking out every single person you need to in the game if you are paying attention) why does the game hand you twenty ways to kill someone? You always have a sword in your right hand, and if you play the game like the game wants you to you are never going to use it. You are still stuck with the sword, however. You can't switch it out for another ability, or anything like that.

By being given a grenade, mine, sword, two lethal and one non-lethal variant of crossbows, and a gun as weapons, along with the ability to summon plague rats to eat someone alive, the ability to possess someone and make them leap to their death (and quickly unpossess them so you don't die with them) and do things such as stop time as someone shoots at you, possess them and move them into their own bullet so they die, the game is slyly giving you a knowing wink and going: "Come on. I know you want to! I won't judge (I totally will.)" If you sneak above a guard, it will tell you if you press x, it'll just kill that guy for you. And of course, they create a whole sophisticated combat system they encourage you not to use. (The sword fighting is awesome, and you can one-shot kill people if you fight a chain of them, and upgrade an ability.)

If you take the 'kill everything' route, the game is incredibly gorey. There's a bit of psychopathic satisfaction in knowing you can decapitate someone and carry their head around that section of the level as a good luck charm. The game always slows down when you kill a target, so you can enjoy the view of your character throwing a sword in their neck.

On top of all that, while sneaking around, you will more than once find signs of humanity in your victims. It is an odd thing to complain about, yes, that you will witness guards talking about getting married, or hear about their affairs, but the game seems confused on even that. The heart mechanic, a very interesting and creepy piece of equipment that tells you the secret story behind everyone, has generic lines for guards. You can hear a guard talking to a maid about how they should just run away together, point the heart at him, and hear: "He always eats well, even as his wife and child grow thin."

On top of all that, one of the studios involved in making the game is called: "Revenge Solves Everything." The game just needs to tell me where it stands: am I a bastard for stabbing that guy, or not?

I am not denying that Dishonored is a fun game, or that you can do very fun things with it. Here's a guy who sets everything up as a horrible accident, for example. I just think if somebody had sat down in the planning stages and cleared up where the game is on just murderizing everything, it would have been an amazing game.

New Girl

I think this show exhausted my 'quirky' tolerance. Seeing as that's all this show seems to be about. ZOOEY DESCHANEL'S CHARACTER IS QUIRKY.   This show screams it every minute of every episode. It has good moments, mostly with the guys, and as a girl-centric girl, I never thought I'd say something like that, but it feels like this is pretty much a stand-up routine about a crazy girl that just never ends.

Sure, I was okay with it at first. I could handle the mess of hormones and crazy that Jess was, for quite a while. But I just couldn't keep handling the zany levels of quirky.

I smiled once. (The least funny game they've ever played. Hee./) Does this make me a heartless person? Maybe. Who could get tired of Zooey Deschanel? Me, apparently.

Hart of Dixie

Like Dexter, I would give this show different ratings based on its season.

Season one kinda sucked. I don't know why I kept watching it, and frankly, when I did, I usually binge-watched it when Hulu told me my episodes were about to expire. It was about a whiny, neurotic girl thrown from the city into a more rural town than I'm from. (And considering that at least 60% of my High School were farming kids, that says a lot).

Then, character development happened. Yes, Dr. Hart is still neurotic, but it is more frequently played straight, laughed at, referenced, and thoroughly better handled than it was in the first season. Lemon grows from a spoiled bitch into spoiled sweet. Dr. Brieland gives up his vendetta against Dr. Hart, which greatly helped the show improve.

So now, it focuses a lot on relationships, and Dr. Hart not knowing what she wants in life. While yes, this is definitely a 'girl show' it's a fun girl show. The tangled relationships all feel real, and so do the characters.

I am concerned that, with Lemon and Wade owning the Rammer Jammer together, that the show might go downhill again, focusing mostly on their squabbles, but it's an example of the show growing, taking a risk, and I can't argue with that.

Raising Hope

There are two forms of comedy I love: nonsensical comedy and satire. A satire is poking fun at something that genuinely happened, or happens. A nonsensical comedy is when it's revealed Maw-Maw's mother is alive, so Maw-Maw's mother is brought in to live in the house. Maw-Maw's mother and Maw-Maw have had a feud for years, until Maw-Maw gives her mother a quarter. The mother then shits herself to death. It's all okay, because Maw-Maw can't remember her mother's visit, but seems to think she and her mother reconciled sometime long-ago.

Raising Hope manages to hit both of those, but is usually just a straight nonsensical comedy.  Jimmy, previously known as doofus--not in a mean way, I call my rabbit the same thing--fathered a baby to a serial killer, and is now trying to raise it. He still lives with his parents, and he's crushing on a girl who works in the supermarket. Oh, and his great-grandmother, Maw-Maw, who has Alzheimers, lives with them. Whereas The Riches couldn't figure out how seriously it wanted to take itself, specifically when it came to it's character's drug habits, Raising Hope knows how seriously it wants to take itself: Not at all. Especially when it comes to Maw-Maw,  whose Alzheimers moments are always played for laughs.

Sabrina has to be my favorite character, who seems to be the 'straight man,' to the family's crazy guy, at first. Sure, she draws faces on the fruit and re-arranges the store she works at, but that's just because she's bored.  Then it's revealed that she sleeps with pantyhose on her head at night. Why? Spiders.

'Nuff said.

None of the characters, except Sabrina, are particularly intelligent, moral, or rich. Unlike shows like Revenge, Pretty Little Liars, House of Cards, and so on, I feel like I've met most of these people, making this comedy strangely relatable. Sure, it takes place in a not-quite-reality, but so long as it's a consistent not-quite-reality, I'm perfectly fine with that. (The logistics of them being allowed to keep Maw-Maw just because she threatened a few cats, and a serial killer being let go because she survived her execution, are nonsensical, but standard in its own universe.)

This is definitely not for everyone. While it's a smart comedy, it's not a realistic one, and it could bother some people.

The Riches

Well, to relax the vitriol Hemlock Grove brought out of me, I watched The Riches again. Now again, I adore two actors in this show. Eddie Izzard, of course, and Shannon Marie Woodward. Now, let me be clear. This show isn't a good show. It just doesn't piss me off half as much as Hemlock Grove did. Unfortunately, while I loved it the first time, I didn't like it that much the second time.

The sexually confused child is handled very well. Their gypsy culture is handed... alright. (Not that I know anything about gypsy culture.) Unfortunately, drugs are the center of the show, and it's handled  very inconsistently. One minute, the mother has a total meltdown because she can't get her 'urban' drugs, next she's being introduced to 'suburban' drugs, next her husband goes on quite a hilarious drug trip. (Eddie Izzard is much too good at comedy for that not to have come out as funny as it did.)

The youngest kid doesn't seem sure whether he wants to be a girl or a boy. He's introduced as a girl, then revealed to be a boy. The family is very supportive of this, but tells him for this con, where they pretend to be a dead guy's family, he has to choose a gender.

The only bits worth watching were not found on youtube. The introduction, where they pull off a grand con to get presents for the mother getting out of jail, and the drug trip in episode 10. After that... it isn't really worth it. It isn't that this show is bad. It just wasn't good either.

I think all the show's problems stem from the fact that, even by the second season, The Riches hasn't figured out what it wants to be. Hiring two great comedic actors, Shannon Woodward and Eddie Izzard, for what seems to primarily be a drama. It opens with a comedic scene, and as an author, I know openings are there to set the tone for the rest of the work. It ends on a cliffhanger that can only go badly, and to be honest, if the cliffhanger had been resolved, I might have liked the show better. This isn't fair to the show, but it's true.

It really does seem to want to be a drama, with Minnie Driver's character's drug problem, and the youngest son's transgender issues being taken very seriously--most of the time. The arranged marriage plot is very heavy-handed, but the comedy just seeps in, with the girl being arranged to marry a very mentally challenged man, who the show alternately makes fun of and attempts to take seriously.

So perhaps The Riches was attempting to be a Dramedy, but it never really finds the balance between comedy and drama to really make it work.