malymin

Wayback archive here.

The twins mention how the themes intrinsic to Superman that they wish to highlight and draw out in their fanwork (such as immigrant identity) get ignored and dismissed by Superman's fandom, in favor of highlighting how the fanworks fit into to a wholesome and "not edgy" checklist. The backlash against depictions of Superman as an adolescent reactionary's wet dream of a gritty and realistic Ubermensch have, themselves, become shallow and reactionary, more concerned with scoring internet discourse points than engaging with deeper artistic analysis.

I'm also thinking about a specific conversation in the comments. A user going by Adell says:

One aspect that I've seen talked about this, in regards to classic characters or series, is how they're not "allowed" to grow anymore. I remember someone saying that the first Star Wars movies were based on samurai movies, westerns, and such, but if you make something Star Wars today, it will be based on previous Star Wars. It will need to reference specific alien races, specific plots, specific people. Even something like The Old Republic, which was an attempt to break away from that at some point, has now become the same recursive storytelling.

This applies to other classic creations as well, Doctor Who, Star Trek, Batman, Superman, they all feel like they have to check boxes on the fan's favorite stories, favorite lines, favorite moments, rather than just actually telling a story.

And Jes and Cin respond:

Oh absolutely Superman has been entering his Star Wars self-referential era. I think it's extra depressing when Lucas said Star Wars was originally inspired by the Vietnam War. It's like this process of regurgitating an allegory without understanding its roots inevitably leads to a sanitization of its inherit political themes.

I think one thing that I miss from 1990's PC games is that there were many games that felt like they just had... an extremely autistic sensibility to them. Virtual life games like Aquazone (written about here by Ackart) and Creatures were not "games" at all, but virtual ecoystems where you were expected to pay attention the biochemistry of your animals' habitat. Maxis games, in general, were minutae-focused - and in the interest of increasing appeal, much of that sense of complexity has languished as EA has taken control of its most popular series.

Even the business simulators of the era had an interest in minutiae that would bore the average child - was I patient enough to reverse engineer the exhibit design logic of Zoo Tycoon (2001)? No, and yet the knowledge that there was a logic fascinated me, as I carefully colored and decorated each individual tile of a isometric map. I watched the smiley and frowny faces as I internalized words relevant to my fascination: "terrain" and "foliage" and "exhibit", "deciduous" and "coniferous", "okapi" and "caudipteryx". I read each species' educational biography, a set of paragraphs that provided no innate gameplay value but was stimulating to the child who poured over encyclopedias meant for adults. Figuring out how to create elaborate features, like moats, that were not explicitly part of the game but emergent from its terrain pathing rules. Voraciously checking the official website for free "downloads" to drop; "DLC" was not an acronym invented yet. Roller Coaster Tycoon held my interest less (I was a Dinosaur kid and not a Trucks/Trains/Construction kid, what can I say), but it too was a world of precision and minutiae; each piece of a coaster's track held meaning for its physical properties, its popularity among guests - and little did I know, even that which surrounded the track made an effect on its perceived qualities, in the eyes of the little toy people that swarmed my park like ants.

Many "PC Games" were simulations first, games second.

I feel saddened by and frustrated this article, where the author feels the need to imply that SimAnt, a game she loved as a child, specifically for its hyper-focus on ant life and focus on strategy, is a bad idea for a game, a sort of failure because it is not and could never be Mario or Sonic. I wouldn't be surprised if this was pushed by the editors; I remember Bogleech, talking about his experiences writing for Cracked, mentioning the way the editors pressured him and other writers to speak with hatred and disgust for any part of the natural world less mainstream than a kitten, no matter how the writers felt. Regardless...

It’s hard to understand the marketing pitch behind an ant colony simulation. Certainly, no one was sitting in a meeting and suggesting SimAnt could be the next Super Mario Bros. While fairly sophisticated in terms of ‘90s gaming capabilities, it sounds today like it might be more in line with an aspiring game developer’s jokey side project. But perhaps it stands as a simple relic of its time. Within Maxis’s early series of games, there was a tacit emphasis on education — a hope that people could learn something by doing it, even if it wasn’t a perfect simulation.

A "jokey side project" by an indie dev would likely not have as much care to detail and realism put into it as SimAnt, I think.

Games full of detailed systems, whether explicitly laid out or hidden so that the player must sus them out; games that reward what spiders called a "botanist's pace"; as strange experimental studios got bought up, they vanished, watered down. Why make a game for a niche, games that only interest shut-in adults and strange children, when you can make a game that "gamers" in the broader sense will like?

I don't want a "game." I want an ant farm, and aquarium, a miniature world which I watch from above like a god - but where even omnipotence meets friction, against the needs and desires of the miniatures within it. I cannot control my Petz' behavior - they will sometimes be aggressive towards each other, or they will snub me and refuse to follow my commands, or they will resent me if I treat them poorly: I prefer this to perfectly kind and pliant creatures, who never say no and never hold grudges, because it feels alive in its friction. I have seen many long time Sims players say that this is why they prefer older games in the series to newer ones; there are more disasters, more drama, more times a Sim's personality causes problems for themselves and others, while the Sims 4 feels to them like a slick and rosy dollhouse where things only happen because the player says so, not because the people or the world say so.

I think about Patricia Taxxon's video where she says that an "autistic sensibility" is a core part of what makes something "furry." I feel like there's other things that carry a core autism-ness, too. But even indie games feel unlikely to satisfy that itch, most of the time.

I don't know where I'm going with this.

Obviously part of what keeps people playing 10+ old games is pure nostalgia, but I think another common element is a feeling that this specific game contains some kind of... essential nutrient or compound, a thing (however small) that satiates a need, and nothing made since then scratches the itch.

People are still playing Spore because nothing else approaches the raw zoomorphic character-creation flexibility of its Creature Creator, no matter what other failings or flaws the game has, what frustrations at its shortcomings people feel. People are still playing Petz because the virtual pet design space has not seen a real indie revival, and Petz has specific characteristics not seen in its contemporaries. Planet Zoo exists, yet I see many Zoo Tycoon players come back to ZT1 and ZT2 because Planet Zoo's own priorities as a game don't scratch the itch. There are people who find the The Sims 4 a poor replacement for the twisted character drama of the second game and the explorable open world of the third.

The thing is, the same can apply to other art. However, while characters and specific narrative beats and concepts can be part of the appeal of computer entertainment, they often ARE the draw of conventional fiction. You can scrub away the lore and characters of Harvest Moon, replacing it with your own, and with your own mechanical tweaks and improvements to what you loved, create Stardew Valley; but if my favorite thing about some popular piece of written or video media is the particular details of the Setting, or a particular Character, creating a "non-infringing" "spiritual sequel" is inherently thorny.

Filing off the serial numbers really only works if your version of the world and setting is completely divorced from its origin, the generic fanon template coffee shop au of itself - but what if it's in a halfway point? Mutated considerably from its roots, but the bones are still recognizable, and to remove them would make the entire thing collapse? Wicked is hardly "canon compliant" to the original Wizard of Oz, book or film - but it's extremely dependent on the fact that it is derivative to function. I don't think any of the artistic problems that can be raised concerning Wicked would be even remotely fixed by cutting it off from its source material.

Frustratedly, I gnaw at the roots, because it's not even the fact that you can't monetize fanworks, and thus publish them in a way that presents them to the mainstream, so much as that combined with how it increasingly feels like you have to monetize your hobbies and passions to justify them existing, and "dude [insert media here] wasnt that good just make something new and original, like a Real Artist."

Neither is Spore "that good"! But there's an itch, powerful enough that people are trying to make new ones, despite the massive undertaking. I look forward to Elysian Eclipse. In the meantime, modders strain against the limitations of the original to transform the experience best they can.

Someone, somewhere, wishes they could write their own version of a story that was powerful to them as a child. Headcanons, like mods, can only do so much.

In 1998, an adaptation of the manga Yu-Gi-Oh! came out.

It was not a faithful adaptation, per say, but it started from the beginning. (Once upon a time, there was a bullied boy who loved games, all games, who was trying to solve a puzzle...) It was common, back then, for adaptations to not only be full of filler, but to also make changes, seemingly on a whim.

Yu-Gi-Oh! is a shounen, and like many shounen, it only has a single girl within its core cast. A lone girl, Mazaki Anzu, conceptualized as a love interest to its titular lead. Her story is a familiar one, among girls of shounen: she starts off headstrong, fiesty, someone with a bit of fire in her, even as the narrative finds excuses to damsel or sexually harass her... and then, as the genre shifts, her personality wastes away, her harsher edges eroding, as she drifts towards the platonic passive Girl-Thing, written by a Shounen Jump author who no longer has time in his schedule to go outside and meet real human women.

In 1998, a minor character - someone only from a single chapter, who barely even spoke - was ascended, to be her equal, her foil, the Second Girl. Her name was Nosaka Miho.