The Patreon Letters - May 13, 2017 (Patreon)

Hello everyone, and happy weekend. This is going to be the first of our weekly letter series for $5+ and up patrons, about what we've been up to and what's on our mind. I don't intend for these to be especially long, but you know how it can be when writers are given an empty page and a broad perogative to make something. So we'll just have to see. 

First off, updates to the network in general: 

- we're prepping to record Abnormal Mapping 63, covering Myst, which we'll do next weekend. Send us questions! Here or at podcast@abnormalmapping.com

- Second Officer Slog's second episode  came out Tuesday, covering the second book of the pilot of the Deep Space 9 relaunch. If you love Star Trek at all, it's a great podcast that we'd love to get listeners onto! Share with your nerdiest friends. It's really meant for people who don't read these books but liked the shows on Netflix or whatever.

- our newest podcast, The Amory Score, is just going up now!  Jackson's working hard on that, and it's very cool, so please look forward to it. 

- my latest LP for Myst wrapped up, which you can now watch in its entirety  in preparation for our next episode. Monday I'll be starting a playthrough of Full Throttle, which is going to run for three weeks.

As for myself, there's two things I'd really like to talk about today. Lately I've been dividing my time between trying to finally finish 30 Rock and wrap up Nier: Automata, and I have #thoughts about both. 

30 Rock is a strange show to watch in 2017 because so much of its politics already feel dated. The racial dynamic feels born out of an Obama-era optimism that many people have opined on at length. I worry that this will be one of those shows that ends up feeling revolutionary in ten years because it was progressive in a way we aren't any more. The world bending towards regressivism means that the kind of dumb liberal comedies of naught but five years ago are starting to affect a sort of hazy revisionism, a look back at a time we all kind of felt but was never real and we wish we could recapture. 

The place where this feels most uneasy in a year like this is with Jack Donaghy. Jack is cut from the mold Sorkin-esque heroes turned buffoon, a sort of James Spader-in-Boston Legal conservative boogeyman who lives rich and free with an abhorrent ideology that is only offset by the character and actor's charisma and the bonds they share with the 'good' characters in the cast. Jack is a Reagan-worshipping millionaire with exquisite taste in everything and voracious need to be successful in business with business being defined as all interactions with another human being.

Jack Donaghy is a cartoon, but he's a cartoon who speaks to a sort of wish fulfillment for most people in America. As a wealthy executive with all the trappings of power, his foibles and abuses of power come across as a broad parody of the way we are packaged America as working. Rich people might be weird, but that's just because they have the power to enable the things we all think and do just turned up to absurd levels. And while they might espouse values that we find objectionable, they're still people who interact with us and with whom relationships can form and common ground created. 

It paints the powerful into a caricature of the Liberal best case scenario: someone who has an offbeat humanity hidden by their piles of money who is in on the joke that all of that power is meaningless in the fact of the power of friendship and the universal experience that binds us all together. In a year like this year, in a week like this week, it's hard not to look at that and feel like it's a dinosaur of a world view. Watching the show, laughing along with it, is a strange bittersweet feeling of still recognizing the cultural touchstones of an America most of us were raised up believing in, but which bears increasingly zero resemblance to the world we inhabit.

But hey, I'm only at the end of season 6. No spoilers for the final season, thanks. 

I'm going to speak not-exactly-spoilery about Nier: Automata, but feel free to skip down to where I stop. I'll add a bold intro to let you know. I know people are sensitive to stuff around the New Games. Nier is a strange experience for me, as someone who had a pretty middling reaction to the original Nier after being oversold it as something revelatory, I find that seeing so many of the themes repurposed and laid out in a new, more baroque configuration is a struggle between accepting that it's been done so much better and my general malaise at seeing it all being done again.

This happened from the jump, too. I know that Austin Walker over at Waypoint talked about how the Route A playthrough is meant as a primer for people totally unused to the ideas of AI and humanity that run through Nier and other sci-fi of its ilk, but I find that framework faulty from the very beginning. Shortly after your first hour you're given constant, unyielding verbal jabs by your companion shit-boy 9S that the machines you're fighting might sound alive and might talk about being afraid but they're just using words. They might seem to imitate human behaviors and even show the structures of society and family, but these are just mimicked behaviors from the humans they drove off-planet during the Great War. They are the Enemy, they are Inhuman, and they are Bad.

The problem with that isn't that it's clearly the wrong answer, it's that it's so clearly the wrong answer that Nier never even bothers to stop and refute it. 9S remains a sort of synthetic bigot throughout the game, decrying machines as unworthy of consideration as people even as they're shown over and over again as being not just very similar to the androids, but often capable of a compassion and emotional spectrum that the androids seem built to suppress and decry. The machines live and love and worry and celebrate, while androids fight and order and investigate, but the game (at least up towards the end of Route C) never offers any sort of moment where the characters (and 9S) in particular have to reckon with the double standard they have applied through the necessities of war.

It isn't that Nier is unaware of this fact, it just remains wholly unremarked upon. The game seems very content with expecting you to do all the dot connecting in its world, but it does that within the framework of a game where the characters are constantly discovering new truths about themselves and the world they inhabit but then firmly refusing to make the connections and denying the obvious realities to themselves and to the player through their conversations. This reticence towards self-examination is certainly a choice, but it's a choice that leaves me ambivalent about the game itself. Why lay out a grand framework for such rich thematic material and then shrug and suggest the audience should draw their own conclusions? 

I don't particularly think art that exists as a machine to bring together scenarios that drive audience-arrived conclusions is that interesting. I already went into this thinking that personhood is a loosely defined structure abused by culture for negative ends. I don't need 30 hours of RPG to reaffirm that. I am, unfortunately, confronted by the failures of that truth every day.

ANYWAY, ENOUGH NIER. That's going to be it for this first letter. I went on longer than I originally anticipated, but I hope that people have enjoyed it well enough. We're still not sure if these are going to be exclusive to Patrons forever, or for a length of time, or maybe we'll change which tier they're available at? I don't know. This whole Patreon thing is a mystery. 

But thank you so much for your support. It's exciting to know people like us, and care about the work we do. There'll be much more of this in the future. 

M