road-trip-girl

hit with the gay baseball bat

hi. i'm hanging out. i like fire emblem and comics and stories and women. i don't post very often.

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eatthepen
@eatthepen

A question I think about sometimes for writing projects is 'what is the minimum viable chekov's gun?'. Like, if you conspicuously put the proverbial gun on the mantlepiece in act 1, what's the least use you can put it to that will pay it off? Can you put the proverbial gun on the mantlepiece and pay that off without firing it? Without anyone getting shot? Not necessarily in a subversive way ('haha! the gun is loaded with blanks!' or 'haha! the gun isn't loaded, but a secret message from the wife's lover is concealed in one of the chambers!') but in a way where someone noticing, picking up, interacting with the gun pays off something significantly less dramatic than violence or the threat of violence?

Today I'm thinking about this in the context of alien megastructures, which apparently I'm just coming up with as settings for everything these days. If I have a story set in a cool alien megastructure because that's a cool place to put a story, how little can I get away with explaining or revealing about the alien megastructure and have it still be enough that people feel the alien megastructure is more than just set dressing

Idle thoughts, conversation starter, tell me about cool books/plays/stories that have deflationary payoffs (which, I guess, implicitly there's a spoiler risk in the comments, I don't mind being spoiled on stuff but I know some people do)


caffeinatedOtter
@caffeinatedOtter

This is a very interesting question.

It's difficult to answer as a general abstract; the minimum use you can a put a particular thing to depends on its specific affordances. Chekov's gun can be used to shoot someone or something; to threaten; to bolster, claim or overturn authority; to change the power dynamics of a situation; as a object of value with those capabilities with which to trade. Chekov's hat, say, does not share all of those.

On the other hand, there's clearly a sense in which "change the power dynamics of a situation" is subtler than "shoot someone". The gun can change a situation simply because everyone becomes aware it's there — or because some, even just one character becomes aware of it!

Some early whodunnit-type detective novels apparently had endnotes, detailing clue-by-clue exactly where in the text particular information became available to the detective, so that the interested reader could double-check for themselves that the mystery was fairly solvable — that they themselves could have with the information given. And while the information presentation in those types of story perhaps verges on adverserial, I think there's a worthwhile point to be gleaned there: that it's possible to get too subtle. Chekov's gun is graspable because it's fired; if the gun's consequences become too abstracted from the fact of its firearm quiddity, is it still Chekov's?


themissileknowswhereitis
@themissileknowswhereitis

i think a discussion like this risks getting caught up too much in the nature of the mechanism and not the nature of what it is meant to metaphorically gesture towards as a concept. (this is perhaps inevitable given that OP is a philosopher. love you dear.)

which is to say - "chekhov's gun" refers to an oft-repeated piece of advice anton chekhov would give to young playwrights, which is typically shortened to something like "if you put a gun on the mantelpiece in the first act, it must be fired by the third" or something like that. this is actually an oveersimplification of the advice chekhov usually gave, which has the neat and unfortunate effect of subtly derailing the point of the advice as it was typically given, not unlike the way people quoting strunk & white's "omit needless words" or another, similar piece of advice, "show, don't tell" do a disservice to both those ideas, thanks to their own preconceived biases as to what the advice means.

because at the end of the day they all mean the same thing. chekhov's best articulation of this principle was "do not load a rifle on stage if it's not meant to be fired later on; writers must not make promises we don't intend to keep."

emphasis on the latter. in other words, if you put something in front of the reader's attention, then you'd better damn well know what reason you had for putting it there and your narrative had better be one that tried to vindicate it. that's all it means. chekhov gave this advice to student playwrights, specifically, because it was meant to help teach them to consider what their play structures really needed, what the purpose of their dialogues, actions, set directions really were about - because, much like many a modern writer, inexperienced hands would often get lost in the details of their narrative to the point that they would stymie their own ability to write the narrative they wanted to be writing in the first place.

this is what the typical simplification of his advice loses. chekhov explicitly called attention to the act of a loaded gun within the narrative because that was an act of intent on the writer's part, to create a narrative beat by directing their character to load the gun; called attention to the act of that loaded gun being placed upon the mantle or other such surface as an act of intentional delay on the writer's part, to then create tension in the audience have directed their character(s) to leave that narrative beat incomplete and set aside, due to the audience's expectation and/or awareness of the nature of the narrative beat in question, in this case a "loaded gun".

the reason chekhov tells these student playwrights that the "loaded" gun must go off later in the play is to get them to think about if they should've put in that scene that effectively forced their characters to have loaded it, if they're all, writer included, just going to forget it's there two acts later because the gun wasn't truly tied to any part of the rest of the story in the first place. a story that loads a literal gun early on, knowing that the payoff is that the literal gun was never going to be fired, is still a story that follows chekhov's advice. because it has, still, fired the metaphorical gun it intended to - it has still respected the audience's time and anticipation, it has still resolved the problem its writer understood they'd created. and there is no degree of narrative scrutiny too small, and no satisfaction too minor, that can't be paid off by a writer who cares about why they put that detail in the story as much, if not more, than what that detail is in the first place.

reducing the advice down to simply "if there's a gun on the mantlepiece in the first act, it should go off in the third" makes it altogether too easy to get hung up on the metaphorical mechanism of the gun and extrapolate from that part of the aphorism, instead of the advice chekhov was trying to impart - which is that the easy part of the joke's the setup - the part that takes practice is timing the punchline.



love
@love

I finished Dark Souls 2 yesterday! Anyone heard of this series? I think it's pretty good, who knew!

Some thoughts in no particular order:

  • It's more Dark Souls! It really truly delivers on the experience of "more Dark Souls." I think if I hadn't actually heard about this game's reputation I would have never in a million years guessed that it was less liked, because I feel like it adds a lot of refinement over the original without losing what was so appealing about it? It's just more and it's good!
  • It feels like a really good decision to focus more on fighting and less on exploring areas with convoluted layouts and confusing relations to each other and lots of having to remember where the next thing is. I hate every single stupid puzzle in DS1 (other than Sen's Fortress) and there's a lot less of it in this, although still unfortunately plenty. I think they could probably stand to streamline things a lot more. I still absolutely would never have been able to finish this game if I didn't have Twitch chat guiding me to the next destination at all times and I somehow ended up getting turned around even more than I did in DS1, probably because the game is so long that areas are kinda indistinct and repetitive.
  • ADP is a really funny stat. It's so goofy that you can add levels to increase your estus speed and iframes. I would have never in a million years have guessed this was the stat to pump if you had simply shown me the in-game description of the stats and it feels like it really embodies what I hate about character-building in this series. I feel like you get exactly one thing out of stat-building in these games (gating off different weapons behind series of commitments) and it's probably something you could get from any other series of mechanics. I didn't like it in 1 and I didn't like it in 2, I feel like these games would just be better without stats. Especially since the game puts them all on such severe curves and has so many levels that it basically turns out flat, just gut the whole thing. Yeah, yeah, I know, "I'll probably like Sekiro, then."
  • I played Scholar and I'm curious as to what the original would have felt like, because large numbers of random enemies being thrown at you feels like, the game's defining characteristic, to the point where the running joke on stream was that they call it Dark Souls Too because it's constantly giving you Too Many Guys. I like it a lot, despite all the whining I did! I don't think I could have managed several areas without the enemy extinction mechanic, but nevertheless, this game makes you deal with crowd control a lot more and makes random enemies a lot more threatening. I think some of the biggest challenges I faced in this game where just regular-ass rooms with regular-ass enemies. If it turns out that Iron Keep ends up being my favourite area in a Fromsoft game of all time, I won't be surprised. Absolutely love the way you get its relentless rhythm of reinforcements down, plus Smelter Demon is one of the best bosses in the game.
  • That said, I was surprised by how variable the bosses were! A lot of them feel like absolutely nothing, which is weird in a sequel to Dark Souls considering that I felt like the bosses were by far the best part of that game. A lot of them are super trivial? That said... I think overall it actually had a lot more good bosses too, probably more in number than Dark Souls did overall! It's just a more padded game. But the good parts are good and there's a lot of them. Flexile Knight, Pursuer, Smelter Demon, Darklurker, Sinh, The Three Dudes of DLC1, Fume Knight, Sir Allone, the King's Pets, they're all Artorias-level bangers. It was especially fun that they have multiple bosses that force you to do Orenstein and Smough style crowd control, which was a really fun challenge with a rapier-build that's not well-suited for it. This is in alignment with its approach to enemy layout too, at least in Scholar--it really makes you get good at controlling multiple enemies, which is a great complication layer to any player who spent all of DS1 just getting good at dodging through attacks and now needs an extra challenge.
  • Speaking of padding, like half of the environments in this game are incredibly memorable and half of them are Yet Another Generic Fantasy Environment. For every misty forest part of the Shaded Woods there are like five indistinguishable fantasy castles. I could literally never remember the difference between Drangleic Castle and Undead Crypt and was constantly teleporting to the wrong one. I'm gonna be honest, I think the only actually cool thing about Anor Londo is that it was sunny after an entire game of drabness, but still, that's SOMETHING. These games have no sense of style. They have a lot of ideas, they have a lot of Great Bits (in the comedy sense), but they do not have even a single fuckin' ounce of style. I think the "what if we did Berserk, but made it completely sexless?" shtick is really starting to wear at my patience, especially now that I have read Berserk and know what's great about it and know that nobody involved in the creation of these games knows what that is.
  • You could also call it Dark Souls Too Many Words. Every NPC conversation is twice as long as it should be, you have to go through like five conversations to exhaust their dialogue, and none of the moodiness adds to anything. I think you could cut the amount of dialogue in this game in half and still make the People Who Care About Dark Souls Lore happy. You would probably have to cut every single line of dialogue to make ME happy. I don't care about any of it. It's a boring world and it works better the more you coast off vibes.
  • Except for entering the memories of the war with the giants. That shit was cool as hell and I loved getting a recontextualized version of all the ruins you've been trudging through. I think that was the only time this game made me care about any of its storytelling. You will note that this is because it did it WITHOUT USING DIALOGUE.
  • We need the abyss more now than ever. We NEED the abyss, more now than ever. We need the abyss... more now than ever. We need the abyss, more now than ever. We need the abyss! More now than ever. We need the abyss more now than ever.
  • I really fucking hope the second half of DLC3 is the lowest point in the series. The first half is really fun and a cool environment! The second half is... I spent like SIX HOURS in that god damned snowstorm. On the one hand, it's extremely funny that this series' approach to level design eschews the traditional "one easy version of the idea, one version of the idea with an added complication, one version of the idea that proves you've mastered it" design approach that every single videogame since Super Mario Bros has loved to do in favour of just having a ton of ideas that are one and done... EXCEPT FOR IN THE ONE ABSOLUTELY WORST PART OF THE GAME that takes place during an entire indistinct snowstorm. That sucked. I think I probably would have bounced off the entire game and never returned at that point if I wasn't playing on stream.
  • Remember that bit in the Hercules Against the Moon Men episode of MST3K where there's a giant sandstorm on screen that they refer to as causing "DEEP HURTING" and by the end of it they've all gone completely mad trying to find something to make jokes about when there's absolutely zero stimulus on screen to respond to and Crow resorts to singing Row Row Row Your Boat in a despairing voice? That was like four minutes of screen time! THE FROZEN OUTSKIRTS ARE SIX HOURS OF THAT.
  • Sorry. I just get mad thinking about it. Maybe that abyss guy had a point.
  • Okay, okay, one more thing, while I'm complaining about DLC3, I also didn't like the boss with the knight summons where it seems like you should probably bring SOME number, but if you bring too many, they make the fight just purely random and cheese through the entire actual boss. I think these games are at their best when they're presenting you with a challenge and saying "trust me, you can do this one, I believe in you" and at their worst when they're like "well, you figure out how much challenge you want" which is why I think regular summoning is completely at odds with what's fun about them, and this was just the worst parts of that with none of the camaraderie of real human connection.
  • I think I might have cared more about the gender change coffin if I cared about what my character looked like in any way. This is not a cool character I'm embodying, this is just a generic fantasy avatar, what do I care about self-expression? Twitch chat had to walk me through actually figuring out how you're even supposed to SEE the gender signifiers on your character--which I guess probably is a very funny statement about gender--and I had genuinely forgotten that this game technically has a character creator. I care a lot about this sort of thing in other games! But in this one? Naw. Jane Darksoul2 is not a woman, all my character expression was through VIOLENCE, not appearance.
  • That said I did get invaded by someone named John Darksoul2 who had my exactly build and equipment loadout. I think that's probably the funniest thing that's ever going to happen in any of these games, so maybe it's not so bad if character expression only exists for the benefit of the absolutely insanely high level remaining online community of this game. I cannot believe how much effort some random person was willing to put into fucking with me, personally, on a level that required them to actually even imitate my playstyle. Insane levels of intimacy in a dumb PvP game.
  • Other all-time invader: the guy who cosplayed perfectly as Maldron the Assassin under that name, helpfully lead me to the actual Maldron through a series of in-character gestures, then went along with the rest of the Maldron script in stereo with the real NPC. Deeply bewildering. Unbelievably funny. Yes, of course he betrayed me, too.
  • The fact that invasions are mandatory in this game definitely made me realize that they're actually not so bad. I'm still never ever going to do a summon in this game, but maybe doing more online PvP would be fun? I feel like it's really fun to see how other people play and it's a great way of mixing up the repetitiveness of doing the same thing over and over again? I still think they take way too much time, especially when you have to go find a safe place to actually fight the invader in, but still, I like that they make the world feel less lonely. That said, I don't know how I'd feel if the player pool wasn't so small in this particular game, because every invasion left me CRAVING a runback incredibly fiercely, which... did in fact happen a lot, but only because I don't think there's that many people online at any given time. I bet probably if you're playing Elden Ring you get different people every single time, which wouldn't be as fun for the "okay, I'm sure I can get him THIS time...!" factor.
  • The extra NPC invaders are really funny too. I got SO worked up over some of the Forlorn encounters by the endgame, they end up having some insanely funny comic timing just through sheer virtue of how frequently they spawn. I hate that motherfucker so much. I thought the Pursuer was going to be the real recurring encounter that left an impression on me, but no, it's fucking Forlorn.
  • Finally, on a personal note, I had a lot of fun trying a rapier dex build in this after steamrolling DS1 with the zweihander, str, and a shield. Admittedly I was motivated by trying to prove Twitch chat wrong about not just coasting off how powerful str is builds are, which I HOPE I've finally done, but then people started talking about how big the damage on the rapier was so maybe nothing short of a soup ladle run will please these monsters. Seriously, though, I love the range of character expression in these, and it was fun to try a build that had absolutely massive blindspots that I had to deal with through totally different mechanics than I did first time around. Apparently a lot of people who played this game literally NEVER used the parry? I don't think I could have ever beaten the game without it, it was like, the number one source of Making Things Happen that I had in my toolkit, since the rapier has no stagger, no area of effect, and dogshit tracking. It simulteneously felt like I was playing a completely different game than someone with a str build would have been playing while still obviously working with the exact same mechanics, just radically different approaches. I love this shit so much. Honestly, this is the real thing that keeps me invested in these games even when the theming whiffs hard, the action is just that rich. I really understand how there are people still doing PvP in these games so many years later!

Anyway, I liked this game a lot! And like, as much as I've got complaints about it... I'm excited because I know they did a lot more iteration from here, but more importantly, the iteration that they DID do in this one feels like it's nothing but huge steps in the right direction. Other than the fact that it's too long and padded--I think if they'd cut half the game's content and just only went with the good parts, you'd still have something as long as DS1, but so much stronger than its high points? Well, anyway, next up on my plate is Bloodborne and I'm really excited to see where they take things from there, in terms of pacing, but also in terms of world design and theming. In conclusion, Dark Souls 2 is a land of contrasts and we need the abyss more now than ever.