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6 comments
One thing's for sure... around Lizzie? Don't threaten Mags. ;)
I especially like her "raider" look - honestly very similar to how I pictured her when reading Black, so I'm impressed. You really captured to whole, face you can underestimate look. She'd almost look like a pleasant person if she wasn't, you know, terrifying. Very realistic, too - not overly beautified, tarted up. Looks like an average person.
Really captured her character nicely here and I'll repeat my praise for Black - I like how we glance at her character from another's perspective, rather than her just monologuing. It's especially effective after the brief glance at her in the other piece.
That description of the melting face was absolutely putrid - you definitely excel at vividly describing the most gruesome things. Still have that scene from Sawblade stuck in my head - I think this find its place on the same mental shelf, alongside that fire extinguisher scene from Irreversible.
Believe it or not, 'The Incredibles' was a colossal boon to my own writing, with Syndrome's pretty ubiquitous quote: "You sly dog! You got me monologuing!"
While the line is played for laughs, prodding at comic book heroes, it did make me realize that in real life almost nobody explains themselves. Hell, sometimes the truth doesn't even occur to the person themselves, something I ended up doing for Halo. It always makes writing a challenge, because you want to explain things clearly but you also don't want to hold anyone's hand.
I hadn't seen Irreversible before, the soundtrack from that apparently makes people nauseous. I think I might make use of it! The effects in that scene were amazing, glad you pointed me to it. While I do find gore fascinating (something I apparently share with my mother), I also object to the use of violence without its consequences. I know for a fact the original developers of the Fallout series agreed, and it was lambasted/exalted for its violence even against children. I understand why they did it, too, because the Wasteland isn't a fun and happy place... oh, I'm monologuing... ah, f*#@ it...
... and one thing that drives me nuts about how some people approach the Fallout material (including Bethesda, and arguably even Fallout 2 onward) is how clean and sterile it sometimes is. Killing people is MESSY, psychologically and literally and the way people justify it is probably the most nightmarish thing about it all. I know YOU know what I'm talking about, because Skiddah jumped ship for that reason. Once you start killing to kill? Not a lot of folk will empathize even with that. And yet, time after time, you're asked or demanded to head to some backwater and do just that.
I dunno if you watch any of Oxhorn's videos, and I know he's a religious type, and he likes to talk about morality. He goes on about who's allowed to be the arbiter of the moral code, and who gets to choose to exert morality on anyone. It's fucking s#*!, tribalism>morality in humans almost EVERY time. Just look at Abernathy Farm quest. Mary Abernathy is killed by raiders, so does her father exact vengeance? Of course not, he asks you to get a locket. And the game just treats it like, well, f*#@ it, that's OKAY. You can't negotiate with the raiders, you just step into THEIR turf and start killing EVERYONE. At a certain point, -you- are the danger and they're just defending themselves. So how many bodies do you leave to rot in exchange for one person's life? One locket?
And that's because the killing doesn't mean anything anymore. Raiders aren't people, and the people they're raiding are paragons of virtue. Now it's a Saturday morning cartoon with 50's schtick, laser guns, and campy music.
Okay, sorry, went off the rails a bit on that one.
Glad you liked the story *laugh*
On topic of monologues - feel free to rant at any occasion. I love reading rambling diatribes
I’ve never actually watched Irreversible myself, I’m just familiar with it through a gorehound friend trying to repulse me with that scene - not realizing I’m much more of a gorehound than he is. But really movie gore can’t hold a candle to the real thing - real violence and death is repulsive, turns stomachs and traumatizes bystanders for life. But Irreversible gets it close enough. I think the only way to respectfully portray violence is exactly as it is. I think, honestly, that representing violence as morbidly as possible is in ways more “ethical” than censoring or reducing it - I think some video games, and popular media in general, portray violence as the consequent less means for solving problems, and that’s really not correct. It’s childish, if anything, and encourages a childish perspective. It’s the last resort for good reason.
I watch the s*** out of Oxhorn for the lore. Come for the lore, leave because he completely misinterprets what he’s seeing and subsequently analyzes it with a hammy christian boyscout morality. Still like him, though - seems like an alright guy, if a little preachy. I assumed he was religious but didn’t know for sure - it’s like he’s never heard of moral relativism. If he’s religious, it’s at least because he views morality as having some transcendental basis - my personal view is that the typical strain is basically just a guidebook for cooperation. His views are weird, though - like somehow romancing Curie doesn’t bother him from an ethical perspective because she’s got the emotional maturity of a young child and no romantic experience, but instead because of a hackneyed theory that she’s genetically your grandchild. Also I hate his settlement videos - right, an “immersive” settlement is a lounge full of beautified female settlers in sexy outfits. I mean, I can appreciate both, but don't pretend it's in any way realistic.
Anyway, good and evil are terrible concepts to use when examining human dynamics - a better division would be maybe social and antisocial behaviour, but even that would be flawed. What we conceive of as “good” is weighed down by generations of culture anyway, and considering Fallout is essentially the slate being scrubbed clean, it’s flawed to use our own preconceived notions to examine the world.
I always enjoyed in FNV how every idealistic faction had a perfect rationale for their beliefs, and that’s something I aspire to apply to FO4. These are all people, whether they be raiders, atomites, gunners, or even the Brotherhood or Institute, and people almost never conceive of themselves as villains - and the few who do oftentimes have such skewed perspectives due to their own personal experiences that you almost can’t hold them accountable.
That’s my rambling response, and I very much did enjoy the story.
But look, we both know about the game's golden status amongst ourselves and the community. I guess to take a break from that sort of thing, one of the things I love about New Vegas is the fact that it was created by the original creators, and you can tell. This thing was their baby, and they had a lot of great concepts cooking for years that finally came to fruition.
You can tell their team has a lot of guys on it with a passion for the material, and they're storytellers more than game developers. I don't even know what the f*#@ Bethesda is even doing anymore after I found out that their shooter mechanics were picked up from their DOOM team because they couldn't do it themselves. I get the impression that their Elder Scrolls is THEIR baby and they have a passion for it, and the Fallout series? Not so much.
And you can tell. This is a game that outright states that there's a guy out there (Cook-Cook), with a name, has a profession (Wasteland chef), and his gang has a name (Fiends), AND he has several stories attached to him (Rapist, slaver). I mean, it's one thing to find out he's a rapist. It's another to actually go FIND =TWO= women that he raped and even TALK to them and see two completely different reactions to it AND one of them you can even try to help with the event.
MAN.
SOLID WRITING. And that's why I don't hold back from those themes here, because this stuff happens. It's ugly, but FNV puts it in your face and doesn't hold back. It doesn't squirm at it, it lays it out: This is what happens. It's filthy, it's hard to talk about, but here it is. This is a Wasteland.
God damn, I need to restart my FNV playthrough...