The Gaming Den

Aside from the ridiculously slow schedule of OotS, the things that most irk me about the comic are:

[*] Plot-armor and DM Pity for the non-casters along with increasingly obvious nerfing of casters.
[*] Lack of interplay between antagonists and main characters. This doesn't inherently have to be a problem with the narrative, but the strip's approach is like writing a Daredevil story where we constantly see the Kingpin plotting and maneuvering in ways that don't involve Daredevil and Daredevil not giving a shit. For example, when Redcloak killed off the resistance that Haley and Belkar have been with for a year, you'd think that Haley and Belkar would give more of a shit. A potentially very interesting conflict is just fucking ignored because the antagonists don't have any reason to care about the protagonists except narrative causality.
[*] Stale main characters who have lived well past their sell-by date. The Order of the Stick characters have the same problem that the Homestar Runner characters had: they were broadly sketched as stereotypes and even a series of one-off jokes that found out that they were going to have adventures for 10+ more years. So the writers had to hastily graft on a bunch of character development and history and personality to flat characters. Sometimes it works out okay (Roy, Redcloak) but most of the time it's just exasperating and forced (Elan, Haley, Belkar, Celia, Durkon).

In what way were Roy and Redcloak's backtories better than the others?

Depends on what you mean by 'backstory'. Both characters are examples of one-dimensional characters who had a bunch of characterization and history retroactively grafted onto them as the story progressed. And it worked out pretty okay for them. The point is that none of the main antagonists or protagonists actually had anything resembling a backstory or character until well into the development of the comic. And while it sometimes works out okay, most of the time you have the story going into pointless interludes and aborted arcs trying to make the character relevant because the story wasn't planned with this suddenly dynamic character in mind. And that's assuming that the character doesn't just stay flat and wastes screentime by existing.

I'm not seeing Roy's backstory as having gotten any better, at least not any better than what they did for Haley and Belkar. I still care as little about Roy now as I did when he was 'just' the fighter. I do like the direction Redcloak went to and honestly I care more about Elan now than I did before (though that's not saying much).

Elan's backstory actually fit his character quite well. It explained his quirks, matched his idiom, and was fully in line with established setting elements. It even lampshades all the plot devices.

I'll admit that a lot of my hate towards Elan stems from me absolutely despising his archetype, but here's why I think that Elan's (and Haley's) backstory and character development was a waste of time while Roy and Redcloak's was not:

When you hijack the plot for extended periods of time to focus on the character, I feel that at the end of the hijack you should either: A.) show how the character significantly changed over time, B.) generate new plot hooks, or C.) reveal something about the characters that shows their actions in a significantly new light. In other words, you need to show us something we didn't already know or predict. A lot of stuff happened to Elan with the Julio Scoundrel and Therka and Empire of Blood Arc, but it was little change. Except for getting his badass upgrade, all of that development did little to affect the overarching plot or how his character behaved. Same for Haley, though her stagnation is even more unnecessary: she had the opportunity to change after the escape from Azure city, but the story more-or-less forgot about it and she's just regressed to the character she was beforehand.

By contrast, Roy's big changes over time were coming to trust his party members more and learning to step up to his role as leader and hero despite the fact that he's been repeatedly given good reasons to bail out. Roy has changed over time from a selfish and parochial leader who only cared about efficiency and viewed his teammates (justifiably) as dead weight to someone more worldly and considerate. It's simple and cliched yet effective.

I'm confused: do you think his back story is bad, or that spending a whole story arc on it was poor storytelling? I see those as distinct failure modes.

I think back story was the wrong word to use for my complaint in retrospect. But allow me to explain. Here are the Elan-centric arcs and my opinion of them. And then I'll explain why I thought that on the whole it was poor storytelling.

Julio Scoundrel arc - This one was actually very good on its own terms and for future setup. It was funny, fast-moving, and touching in parts. Order of the Stick at its best.
Therka arc - Pointless, meandering, status-quoy. While it had a pretty big drama-bomb at the end, it didn't actually change or reveal anything about Elan. Order of the stick at its worst.
Empire of Blood + Draketooth arc - This one had the potential to be very good and had a lot of great jokes and setup to it. Hell, if it weren't for the ending I'd say that it was the best arc in Order of the Stick. Unfortunately, the anticlimatic ending did happen and it was such a massive cop-out that the arc really didn't end so much as stop. I hesitate to call this arc a failure because the strip may pick it up in the future to make all that had happened relevant again -- and Rich Burlew is very, very good at connecting newer arcs to older ones. So I won't count him out yet. But as it is, it had a lot of promise and then tripped on its dick at the finish line.

So what do I think of the Elan-centered arcs viewed on their own terms? Above average. But you see, the problem is context; what it all really amounts to is a lot of spinning the comics' wheels in place. The whole is weaker than the sum of its parts. If all of this happened in two or even three years, we could forgive the comic for mostly dithering with character pieces that, badass upgrade + relationship upgrade aside, amounted to mild character changes. But this all took place over, what, six fucking years? If your story is going to go on for that long you'd better have something to show for it. This is why I'm pretty satisfied with how Roy and Redcloak developed/are developing but I'm irritated with Haley and Elan.

Okay. I buy that.
(sorry for the boring answer, but I don't have anything to add to or disagree with on that summary).

The deal with Elan is that he looks at first sight like one kind of character: a bumbling, useless, happy-go-lucky bard that causes more trouble than it solves.

Then as the story progresses, you find out that behaving like that is actually a viable survival strategy in the OotT universe because the way Reality works there. Narrative Causality is a force of nature there, ensuring that Elan can literally trip over the plot when needed. It makes you realize that Elan's character is actually a kind of Cleric of the narrative forces and it totally changes the way you see the character. Of course it only works because the innate silliness of the medium. (an epic story about sticktube figures)

Haley's story was, eh.

The thing about OotS is that Rich is bad about catering to serial readers and has somehow managed to get worse about it over the years. When you archive binge it even the recent arcs are pretty good because the story moves as fast as you're hitting the next button. When the next comic takes a weak or more, what's already a story a little slower than it needs to be becomes this glacial slog.

It's like reading a web serial by Robert Jordan.

Yeah, that's why I eventually gave up on Erfworld.

Ancient History wrote:Yeah, that's why I eventually gave up on Erfworld.

As has been said elsewhere, Erfworld is actually updating three times a week, and has been for a bit. It's very refreshing.

nockermensch wrote:Then as the story progresses, you find out that behaving like that is actually a viable survival strategy in the OotT universe because the way Reality works there. Narrative Causality is a force of nature there, ensuring that Elan can literally trip over the plot when needed. It makes you realize that Elan's character is actually a kind of Cleric of the narrative forces and it totally changes the way you see the character. Of course it only works because the innate silliness of the medium. (an epic story about sticktube figures)

See, this is exactly what makes me hate Elan. OotS is, above all other things, a D&D story. It's not a merely generic fantasy story that simultaneously embraces famous fantasy tropes and humorous postmodernism like Dr. McNinja or even 8-Bit Theater. And if it was, it probably never would have became the Internet phenomenon it is now. However, if you're doing a D&D story, that means that you have to adhere to the tropes of the genre. And one of the biggest unspoken tropes about D&D is this: if the story has to break the fourth wall or disregard its internal tropes to advance the story, then it's a bad D&D story. Just like it's a bad kung fu story where Bruce Lee plants a bomb at the bottom of the Tower of Death instead of fighting his way up or it's a bad sword and sandals story where the armies are decimated by cholera in the Final Battle and the worst-ravaged side surrenders without a fight, it's a bad D&D story in which a character can do things dissonant with the D&D idiom just because they have the power of Narrative Causality.

Now, D&D and thus a D&D-derived story has to allow for some fudging and Calvinball for things to advance smoothly. Xykon casting an epic spell out of an artifact or Elan taking an unpublished PrC that adds his CHA to rapier attacks is fine. The characters directly or subtly abusing their Batman Dumbass Field to advance the story as much as they have been doing is not, or at least it should've been off-limits as soon as the Azure City arc started.

All of this is in addition to me having a personal loathing for the Pure-Hearted Everyman Fool archetype, but Elan's character didn't really start to get intolerable for me until the Therka arc.

Don't care. Really don't care. The text updates lost me.

Between the text updates and the prequel adventures about characters I didn't care about that much, Erfworld lost me completely. It spent too long refusing to advance the A plot, and now I don't care anymore. Maybe it updates on a regular schedule now. Maybe it has battles actually end now. I don't even care anymore, because it abused my patience too long.

-Username17

Because the hate levels on this board are getting dangerously low despite the release of 5E D&D, I'd just like to remind TGDians of a few things.

Mega spoilers on Mask of the Betrayer, Chrono Cross, Spider-Man, Star Wars: TPM, Mass Effect 3, Huckleberry Finn, Star Trek, and Firefly:

1.) Mask of Betrayer was utterly pointless unless you're selfish neutral or baby-eating evil.
2.) Chrono Cross made it so that Dalton is the one who kills the heroes of Chrono Trigger.
3.) Spider-Man made a deal with the devil to ruin his marriage and abort his kid.
4.) Kirk dies on the bridge. He doesn't die in the command seat while in a desperate do-or-die battle, he literally dies on the bridge from the random bad guy of the week.
5.) Joss Whedon and Tim Minear was planning to write a Firefly episode where Inara had her maidenhood metaphorically restored and respected after being raped by reapers.
6.) Chrono Cross made it so that Lucca died in an orphanage fire.
7.) The Jedi care more about tax disputes than slavery.
8.) Huckleberry Finn completely undermines itself with the rescuing N-Word Jim plot at the end.
9.) Chrono Cross introduced Robo only to kill him off in less than 30 seconds.
10.) Mass Effect 3 decided to pull a Chrono Cross with its ending.

Lago - have you ever expounded in full the things that make Chrono Cross suck?

When did the Kirk thing happen? I don't remember that at all.

Shrapnel wrote:When did the Kirk thing happen? I don't remember that at all.

Generations.

• The thing I despise the most about this game, even more than how it took a hookworm-infested diarrhea dump over the previous game, is how it leans on 'it just happens, OKAY?!' for goddamn everything; Chronopolis, demihuman population out of nowhere, dwarves out of nowhere, ghost ship out of nowhere, FATE, the fall of Guardia, Porre being a major military power, aliens visiting earth, fucking everything regarding the Frozen Flame, Belthasar getting a vision of the Time Devourer, etc. etc. Chrono Trigger had some crazy unexplained bullshit in it as well but that particular game was A.) already at the threshold of awesome vs. stupid so CC layering more shit atop of that was the straw that broke the camel's back B.) moved along quickly enough so that you didn't dwell on it. Chrono Cross luuuuuurves its plot and thematic contrivances and keeps fucking that chicken long after its been rotisserie'd by friction burn.
• The characters. Oh Lord, the characters. There are exactly four characters in this game who have anything to do with the overarching plot arch. You get more than forty of them. Their voices are ran through an accent filter.
• The battle system. People who say that they like the battle system in this game are either raccoons/infants/ravers who like shuffling pretty lights or 4E D&D fans who get a psychosexual charge by having a bunch of options illuminated. The element grid adds a layer of complexity and frustration for no real payoff except for a couple of overpowered boss battles and moves. The characters are undifferentiated masses of stats that you can hotswap as you see fit. The game also intentionally subverts the basic carrot-and-stick model of jRPG advancement by giving you practically bupkiss after the vast majority of fights unless you're farming a rare item drop or using Fargo or Kid to steal things. This makes battles actively disadvantageous to your enjoyment.
• The villains are like ten kinds of lame. The three big villains for most of the game are retarded and actively undermine their own plans; Lynx had so many opportunities to kill Serge (which would end that whole Arbiter nonsense) and failed to do so that I was expecting some kind of Radiant Dawnish 'I let you live for my own selfish purposes' plot twist, but no. Their motives are opaque for most of the game except for a info-dump in the eleventh hour. They also have absolutely nothing to do with plot hooks that you might potentially care about such as the environmental degradation, military occupation from Porre, demihuman discrimination, Dario's family issues, etc.
• The sheer pomposity of the game. Look, any game that unironically says, even once, that human beings are an unnatural cancer on ~Mother Nature~ is automatically in the top one percent of pretentious video games. The game goes way past that, though. Halfway into the game, you get transplanted to a neo-expressionist treehouse painting and go into an existentialist filibuster about the nature of identity. I am not making this shit up. One of the hardest bosses in the franchise has a pre-battle 20-text box rant about determinism that you can't skip. One thing I absolutely do NOT miss about the 5th and 6th generation of video games is that navel-gazing crap.
• The dimension-hopping gimmick is woefully underutilized. There are some suitably amusing moments like Glenn getting two copies of a one-of-a-kind manga-ganga sword, but the game loves the fuck out of its crappy railroad plot and went out of its way to gleefully torpedo the biggest draw of parallel universes: that of being able to affect some real change and see the consequences of your change from different angles. It also punts the second-biggest draw of parallel universes (that of getting to see how crazy shit can get for want of a nail) due to its cramped locale and stupid railroad plot. If instead of having two lame-ass tropical islands they had one island where people lived in harmony with nature and shit and another more developed island that looked more like, say, Final Fantasy 8 it would've really helped to sell the game more. But maybe it was for the best, because the game was already reaching critical mass on its insufferable ~humans are a cancer on Mother Gaia~ hippie crap.
• The game has absolutely no sense of pacing after the Viper Mansion sequence. Confession time: I actually really dug the game up until after this point. You have a clear goal, you know why you'd want to do it, the game gives you multiple options on how to do it, and your party reflects your in-game choices. Very, very cool. Unfortunately, the game just fucking collapses after that and sends you on multiple sojourns that don't add up to anything.
  
  You don't really realize this about Chrono Trigger (and other good games like Final Fantasy 6) until you've played a bad game like Chrono Cross, but it's just a masterpiece of pacing. Up until the completion of the Ocean Palace, whereupon the game becomes a Greatly Improve Your Life Through Time Travel pre-finale, the plot flowed naturally from each event to the next no matter how crazy shit got. In Chrono Cross, you no shit board a SPOOOOOOKY PIRATE SHIP for no reason other than because it's there. There's no reason you suspect that it'll solve any of the outstanding subplots or help you along your quest or give you insight into the main plot. But you still have to board it. What the fucking fuck?
• The ANGSTY EDGINESS of the whole game. Look, I have no problems with games that have bad endings and slowly send you spiraling down a path of destruction and/or failure. I love the endings of Final Fantasy Tactics and Nier and KH: Birth By Sleep. However, the biggest thing you have to keep in mind about this shit is that good tragedy has to be appropriately foreshadowed and flow naturally from the games' events. Bad tragedy just hijacks the plot and projectile vomits THE DEEP everywhere and uses whatever it can to enforce this feeling. Humans are a cancer on the planet who are driving it to ruin? Racism with a new species out of nowhere? Fall of Guardia from a comic relief villain? Protagonist from the first game gets fused with the antagonist only to be deleted in front of your eyes? I'm just going to quote Roger Ebert here, because it's totally appropriate:

  I have nothing against sentiment, but it must be earned. Cynics scoffed at Robin Williams' previous film, "What Dreams May Come," in which he went to heaven and then descended into hell to save the woman he loved. Corny? You bet--but with the courage of its convictions. It made no apologies and exploited no formulas. It was the real thing. "Patch Adams" is quackery.

You know, I always wondered why Chrono Cross had fans. But then I realized that Identity Crisis had apologists for it and I don't wonder any more. Chrono Cross is the Identity Crisis of video games. An overwrought, overproduced, self-obsessed piece of crap more concerned about looking edgy and adult and mature than making sense or actually being an entertaining read. For a long while, I used 'did this person think that Chrono Cross was excellent' as a litmus test on whether I should respect their unique opinions about video games and jRPGs in particular. It has served me well.

So I watched the Tales From Earthsea movie. A lot of people note that Miyazaki the Younger is a significantly not-as-good director than Miyazaki the Elder. I don't regard this as being a particularly meaningful criticism because most people are not as good a director as Miyazaki the Elder. In fact, the set of people who are not as good a director as Miyazaki the Elder may include every living human being. So seriously, whatever.

The big problem with this movie is that for reasons it is an adaptation of the book Tehanu. I don't know if you realize this, but the Earthsea Trilogy actually had a fourth book written for it by Leguin eighteen years after the trilogy was complete. And um... they decided that book was the one to make into a movie. Seriously man, what the hell?

The Earthsea Trilogy is a set of really good books from the late sixties. They are sexist as fuck, because that was how people wrote books at the time (even if the author was a woman, as Ursula Leguin is and was). So in 1990, apparently because she felt guilty about the whole thing, Leguin wrote a fourth book where she tells you that literally every single thing she told you about how magic works in Earthsea was totally wrong and actually even being a Dragon or not is a personal lifestyle choice. Fucking fuck.

Fuck that book. The first trilogy had a whole thing about how unnatural life extension tore a hole between life and death and drained things out of the world and left people empty shells and shit. It was totally metal. And then in book four we are told that actually people can just decide to be immortal dragons and all those horrible drawbacks for breaking the cycle are just for show. Eeeearrrrgh.

Anyway, Tehanu was an insulting and terrible book, and we should all pretend that it never happened. It's like Midichlorians bad. And when the Japanese decided to make an animated movie out of Earthsea, what book did they choose? The one that took a dump on the entire setting, that's what.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:So I watched the Tales From Earthsea movie. A lot of people note that Miyazaki the Younger is a significantly not-as-good director than Miyazaki the Elder. I don't regard this as being a particularly meaningful criticism because most people are not as good a director as Miyazaki the Elder. In fact, the set of people who are not as good a director as Miyazaki the Elder may include every living human being. So seriously, whatever.

The big problem with this movie is that for reasons it is an adaptation of the book Tehanu. I don't know if you realize this, but the Earthsea Trilogy actually had a fourth book written for it by Leguin eighteen years after the trilogy was complete. And um... they decided that book was the one to make into a movie. Seriously man, what the hell?

The Earthsea Trilogy is a set of really good books from the late sixties. They are sexist as fuck, because that was how people wrote books at the time (even if the author was a woman, as Ursula Leguin is and was). So in 1990, apparently because she felt guilty about the whole thing, Leguin wrote a fourth book where she tells you that literally every single thing she told you about how magic works in Earthsea was totally wrong and actually even being a Dragon or not is a personal lifestyle choice. Fucking fuck.

Fuck that book. The first trilogy had a whole thing about how unnatural life extension tore a hole between life and death and drained things out of the world and left people empty shells and shit. It was totally metal. And then in book four we are told that actually people can just decide to be immortal dragons and all those horrible drawbacks for breaking the cycle are just for show. Eeeearrrrgh.

Anyway, Tehanu was an insulting and terrible book, and we should all pretend that it never happened. It's like Midichlorians bad. And when the Japanese decided to make an animated movie out of Earthsea, what book did they choose? The one that took a dump on the entire setting, that's what.

-Username17

And Ursula LeGuin was still disappointed by it, as it fehled even at being a faithful adaptation of Tehanu.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:

• The villains are like ten kinds of lame. The three big villains for most of the game are retarded and actively undermine their own plans; Lynx had so many opportunities to kill Serge (which would end that whole Arbiter nonsense) and failed to do so that I was expecting some kind of Radiant Dawnish 'I let you live for my own selfish purposes' plot twist, but no. Their motives are opaque for most of the game except for a info-dump in the eleventh hour. They also have absolutely nothing to do with plot hooks that you might potentially care about such as the environmental degradation, military occupation from Porre, demihuman discrimination, Dario's family issues, etc.

To be fair, Lynx. It didn't help and just made the Arbiter problem unsolvable, which is why he had to cross over to a universe where he didn't kill Serge in the first place.

Omegonthesane wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:So I watched the Tales From Earthsea movie. A lot of people note that Miyazaki the Younger is a significantly not-as-good director than Miyazaki the Elder. I don't regard this as being a particularly meaningful criticism because most people are not as good a director as Miyazaki the Elder. In fact, the set of people who are not as good a director as Miyazaki the Elder may include every living human being. So seriously, whatever.

The big problem with this movie is that for reasons it is an adaptation of the book Tehanu. I don't know if you realize this, but the Earthsea Trilogy actually had a fourth book written for it by Leguin eighteen years after the trilogy was complete. And um... they decided that book was the one to make into a movie. Seriously man, what the hell?

The Earthsea Trilogy is a set of really good books from the late sixties. They are sexist as fuck, because that was how people wrote books at the time (even if the author was a woman, as Ursula Leguin is and was). So in 1990, apparently because she felt guilty about the whole thing, Leguin wrote a fourth book where she tells you that literally every single thing she told you about how magic works in Earthsea was totally wrong and actually even being a Dragon or not is a personal lifestyle choice. Fucking fuck.

Fuck that book. The first trilogy had a whole thing about how unnatural life extension tore a hole between life and death and drained things out of the world and left people empty shells and shit. It was totally metal. And then in book four we are told that actually people can just decide to be immortal dragons and all those horrible drawbacks for breaking the cycle are just for show. Eeeearrrrgh.

Anyway, Tehanu was an insulting and terrible book, and we should all pretend that it never happened. It's like Midichlorians bad. And when the Japanese decided to make an animated movie out of Earthsea, what book did they choose? The one that took a dump on the entire setting, that's what.

-Username17

And Ursula LeGuin was still disappointed by it, as it fehled even at being a faithful adaptation of Tehanu.

At least it was a better adaptation than the Sci-fi miniseries.

Omegonthesane wrote:And Ursula LeGuin was still disappointed by it, as it fehled even at being a faithful adaptation of Tehanu.

Honestly, the degree to which it didn't follow the script of Tehanu made it piss me off less.

-Username17