Patreon Letter - 10th February, 2018 (Patreon)

It's Jackson here with the Patreon Letter! Hello! I made a terrible mistake! 

Usually what I do when I write these is I sit down and think "what the fuck did i actually do this week?" then try to write something along those lines. Problem is, I, uh, I did that. I did that earlier in the week. I've been thinking about Evangelion non-stop and I wrote a blog post about Evangelion. It's a good post, you should read it. 

Problem is, I've just continued to think about Evangelion all the time. So now I have to write the letter and that's right, well done, you guessed it,

Part One: Even More Takes On Evangelion

Evangelion 3.0: You (Can) Not Redo is awful. I did not like it when I was watching it, and with every day that passes I hate it even more. It has now been a week since I watched it, which means I'm ready to throw both myself and it into the sun. I can't believe they made a more full of cynicism and self loathing than End of Evangelion and this time it wasn't even on purpose. That's impressive. They deserve some kind of award.

Okay so here's the fine line that Evangelion has always walked. It's a series first and foremost about depression. The entire thing hangs on a very simple metaphor: Shinji doesn't want to get in the robot, but he does because he wants his dad to like him. The entire series is an exercise in trying to get him to realize how toxic that is and start to live his own life. That's it. That's the whole thing. It's not that deep. 

The problem with that metaphor is that it relies entirely on the interior mental state of the characters being the driving force of the show. Shinji has to be his own worst enemy. Same with every character, they have these traumas inside them that if they could only overcome maybe they could be happy. At the end of 2.0, Shinji does it, he finds purpose, he lives for himself. And then you find out that ends the world anyway because fuck it, nothing matters.

The villain of the Rebuild movies is not Shinji's depression, but Gendo Ikari, who actually is playing a stupid chessmaster game with his son's mental state and tricks him into ending the world twice in the same fucking movie. He does everything right and it always falls apart. This isn't his fault, sometimes you choose to live and the world has other ideas.

Making it so you can literally point to a character and go: him, he's the one responsible for everything, he's the bad guy, makes the entire thing fall apart. That could be interesting if the movie ever acknowledged it but instead it makes everyone seem like idiots and completely undercuts the themes of the series, because all the scenes with Shinji are just watching him go through the depression motions all over again. It sucks and refuses to engage with literally any of the ideas the previous movie brings up. I'm still mad.

Basically what they did was make the Metal Gear Solid 4 of Evangelion because shooting your series in the foot for a misguided attempt at metatextual commentary is the way to ruin me entirely and ensure I will never be free from thinking about your story.

The day after I watched it I watched Cowboy Bebop: The Movie which was perfect and beautiful and basically the greatest palette cleanser of all time. I have absolutely no takes whatsoever. I love the friends. 

Part Two: Horizon Zero Dawn

Every so often I pick up an AAA game for cheap and stick my head in to see what's going on with open world games these days. Usually it's an Assassin's Creed game, because I like to run on rooftops. Origins is a) too expensive and b) almost entirely bereft of rooftops, so I picked up Horizon and holy shit it's just too much. It's too much video game, it's overwhelming, please give me a little less.

Horizon is designed around a variety of robot dinosaurs and fighting them with hacked together post apocalyptic bows and traps. This is an incredible idea for a video game. The last time I played it I spent fourty five minutes walking around the world and shooting every Fox i could see until one finally got a Fox Skin. I then crafted an unlimited fast travel pack. I did not fight a robot dinosaur once.

When you are actually fighting the robot dinosaurs, the game is good. It's not amazing, but it's good. I wish there was more focus on setting up traps and preparation and the game wasn't so desperate to get you into the moment to moment of the hectic battle. But it's a really good core. And then you spend the majority of your time just doing a bunch of open world stuff, because of course you do!

Anyway it's fine, it's exactly what I expected, it's an open world game that is alarmingly beautiful to look at, you can see the unpaid overtime and low wage freelance contracts on the screen. It is Video Game. Business as usual. So let's do it, let's talk about The Story.

So obviously the premise of the game and the design of the characters is super racist, we know this to be true, it is not up for debate or even worth my analysis. The tribes are all at war with each other over differences in interpretation of (to the audience) obviously foolish and primitive religious beliefs. It's so fucking horrifically bad about this shit that I'm surprised there's not been a joke about using every part of the robot. God damn.

Hilariously, the team at Guerilla has clearly expended a huge amount of effort in making sure their world is diverse. The various tribes are full of men and women of all races. No expense has been spared in building a bunch of varied NPCs, in ensuring the world isn't just white people with dreads. All it does, obviously, is highlight how absurd the premise of the game actually is.

Anyway all that aside, the dominant tribe in this region is called the Carja, who came into this position by enslaving literally everyone else and building the biggest guns that they can. But it's okay, they killed the pro-slavery king and now they hate slavery. Slavery bad. The Carja are good now. They want to help.

It's clear that aside from the big mysteries of the apocalypse, the main focus of the world building in the game is how everyone reacts to the evil nation becoming a good nation because they killed the bad king. This is handled with about as much subtlety as a brick being thrown at another brick, with a side helping of both sides-ism as you see the angry peasants throw fruit (fruit!) at the messenger of the nation that, not two years ago, was murdering and enslaving everybody they met.

I crave an actual RPG with good politics and worldbuilding in my soul, this hurts so much. It's clear from all my complaints that I am basically going "god this should just be Monster Hunter" on one side and from the other "god this should just be The Witcher" so I should finally play those games instead and uninstall Horizon. 

Til next time, big games. Maybe I will play Red Dead Redemption 2 when it goes on sale in 2020 and we will begin the cycle all over again.

See you in a couple weeks, folks,
Jackson <3