nic

game? designer??

  • they/them

various credits on:
The Banished Vault
Arcsmith
John Wick Hex
Quarantine Circular
Subsurface Circular
Vienna Automobile Society
Sun Dogs

 

P&P microgames:
In the Court of the Skeleton King
The Garden
Tallships

 
Chicago



having vague thoughts about the relations between lore-brain, deepfake stunt casting, and the lack of a desire for performance and interpretation.

just to take the star wars deepfake casting as a single item (Cushing, Fisher, Jones, and Hamill) I initially thought these scenes were about a showing off of VFX tech, something that is very typical to star wars. I am put off by those scenes not just because of the uncanny valley of the images, but also how they aren't really about anything but the VFX performance. I don't remember a single word that came out of the digital mouths, regardless of the quality of the surrounding scene or movie.

aside from the labor point of view, which is just cast a damn actor that looks enough like the person it's fine people can suspend their disbelief, I hadn't thought much about those scenes in a while. but something else has tied this to lore-brain, the gamified understanding of modern intellectual property that seeks out wikis, easter eggs, post credit scenes, cameos. there's a lot going on with lore-brain but I think a core tenet is that everything in a media property requires some kind of validity, to be blessed as Lore by a higher power (generally a corporation). this kind of thinking tries to stamp out variations, or differing performances and interpretations, of scenes and characters. by definition lore-brain wants one single canon, and having two actors play the same role goes against this, so you end up with the deepfake.

it is apparently unthinkable that another actor would ever play Luke Skywalker. you cannot hire a James Earl Jones impersonator, his voice must be recreated with AI. I think this is less about the unwillingness of the audience to suspend disbelief as it's a bottom-up and top-down cyclone of enforcing Lore, and historical variations are preferably forgotten (see Hulk). The only exception to this that comes to mind is they rattle through Spiderman actors faster than I can keep up. anyway these aren't really fully thought out thoughts because I don't do media crit, but it all kinda rattled through my head at once


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in reply to @nic's post:

(obviously) i don't fully agree with this (you know my Opinions here) but I do think there's something in here that I do think is true -- the enforcement mechanism for truth lies in the Corporation (well, the "rights holder", who these days for these mega-IPs is usually corporations), and I think to the Corporation this is more a question of... consistency of ownership, if that makes sense.

like, if you cast another guy to play luke skywalker or whatever, you're now on the hook for that person to own a little bit of luke skywalker. no matter what you do, fans will always see that guy as like, 10% of what makes luke skywalker into luke skywalker. that's not great for the Corporation, since they've already sewn up airtight the contract between Mark Hamill and Disney/Lucasfilm, and any versions of Mark Hamill Skywalker are now like, indisputably and entirely a Disney Product.

that doesn't strike me as Lorebrain creeping upward as much as it is Corporate Control reaching downward, from the Disney legal folks down to the actual creative product. I don't think there is actually any concern from lorebrained nerds that another guy would play Luke (barring taste differences), because there's actually a good precedent for this sort of ensemble casting that I think about all the time, and it's comic books getting different creative teams but working in the same continuity.

comic books have had 1000 different versions of Captain America forever and like, that's no big deal? a different author/artist team is on the comic and now Steve Rogers looks and acts v different. this has always felt analogous to me of recasting an actor -- the mannerisms might not be exactly the same, the portrayal is def different, but the character should "feel right" in whatever way that means.

but that sort of thing gets a lot messier when you move into these more tightly controlled spaces of corporate IP. now captain america is One Guy and he has to be That Specific Guy otherwise disney will lose money on Another Guy and the "ownership" of the character will feel more split among different actors, which limits Disney's control of the whole operation.

anyway i do think it's fucking stupid and people will, of course, accept recasting, if the end-product is good. unfortunately i'm not sure anyone at the corporate level cares if the thing is good anymore, so when fans don't like a recasted product the Corporation decides "well the recasting was the problem" and not the fact that the product was just dogshit

I have to admit to a pretty big blindspot when it comes to comics and my overall point is probably more focused on movies and >2000 era IP management. That said, I agree, and it certainly does feel like fan lore-brain and corporate IP enforcement is more or less the same ideology.

it also gets interesting with a Filoni type person who is publicly both fan and corporate enforcer, who I think is emblematic of the phenomenon we could have only reached now, 40+ years after the original trilogy. Filoni represents that dream of the fan uplifted into the role of creator, and actively manages fan expectations (which is where I see the lore-brain from the bottom up). I may be wrong on this and you certainly know more about his work than me though!

something that I thought of while writing this, jumping genres certainly is an excuse to recast. Rosario Dawson is taking over for Ahsoka, Pedro Pascal for Joel. so there's a certainly level of nuance and politicking there.

yeah i mean... I don't think you're far off. I just tend to think the fears about fandom lorebrain tend to be exaggerated -- I think that what lorebrained nerds tend to obsess over is less "consistency" than "continuity".

I think plenty of very Lore-Heavy IPs often bounce around all over the place on consistency in terms of tone, storylines, character motivations, etc, and that's all fine as long as it feels like there is a continuity overall. if there is a reasonable context or logic to things jumping around, it's totally chill, imo. it's when things just contradict other things for no real reason that fans get mad. and, of course, that's... sort of entirely subjective, so hard to gauge, etc etc

which is why getting creators with actual visions is important, and it's why I don't like Filoni when he gets into his mode of creation that feels extremely safe and rote. Which he's not always in, based on his history -- I think he's done a lot of really fascinating, original work with star wars in the past -- but I think when he gets conservative & safe, the product suffers. Which you could probably say about literally any work of art ever, frankly.

also yeah kind of different tangent but I do think there's a vague "excuse" to recast when you're jumping mediums -- though imo I think recasting should just happen if it feels right! i am a big believer in If It's Right For The Work, Go For It.

i think you’re right on the continuity point, and I am biased in that I really enjoy a lot of discontinuity in storytelling and lore, being able to interpret things differently is fun! and naturally this is all caveated with the worst excesses of lore-brain online are people who just try and talk the loudest anyway. the average Mandalorian viewer doesn’t really care, not nearly as much as Disney (which was your first comment)

yeah there's a whole OTHER level of this whole shit which is that the loudest people "in a fandom" tend to be a numerical minority... but there are other reasons why that's happening lmao

a LOT of my day job is asking people "i know you saw [x] fan uproar, but actually numerically do you think that is a majority of fans or just The Fans That You See"