Why Kim Resists:

Kim does not resist Howard’s advice because she is evil, nor because she falsely believes Jimmy to be good; she resists it because she falsely believes HERSELF to be good. Howard is not simply a Powerful Man who is attempting to exploit Kim’s actual Goodness; Howard is a GOOD Man who is offering her an opportunity to RESTORE her FORMER Goodness, but because the temptation to “feel good about herself” is greater than the drive to BE Good by a rational standard, and because the former offers far more fringe benefits than the latter does, Kim yields to the temptation.

It is no coincidence that Howard, Chuck, Rich, and Kevin all appear to be allied in opposition to Jimmy; even though all of these Powerful Men have had their fair share of rivalries and fallings-out amongst one another, they can all see Jimmy for what and who he is, and since they are not allied there is no reason for them to treat him as a scapegoat. Ergo, there is no reason for Kim to deny their conclusions, that which she already knows, about him. Were there no standards by which to judge Jimmy or were there no evidence that Jimmy had violated such standards, then Jimmy would be innocent by default, yet in fact all of these characters, including Kim and Jimmy, have pledged themselves to such a standard from the very beginning: “It’s the Law, and it’s enforceable.”

Kim spites Howard at the end of Season Five not because he is trying to exploit her good nature on behalf of a partisan enterprise. Rather, Howard’s appearance forces her to confront the fact that she is no longer the Good Person she once was. Normally, a person like Kim would take the first train out of hell on the road to recovery, and she would be more than happy to let Howard be the train conductor. Yet by this point Kim’s relationship with Jimmy has grown too powerful.

While John Teti misunderstands Kim’s superiors, he understands Kim and Jimmy all too well, especially with regards to their codependent relationship. Kim makes Jimmy feel good about himself; in exchange Jimmy makes Kim feel good about herself. This arrangement worked when Kim also retained the power to restrain Jimmy’s criminal activities. This additional benefit was not a fringe benefit for Kim; it was a service to society, consistent with their practice. Yet as Chuck lost his grip upon Jimmy, as Kim had to go to greater and greater lengths on Jimmy’s behalf, as Howard lost his grip on the legal community, as Rich became a commodity and as Kevin and his company began to predominate, Jimmy’s criminal power grew to unknown proportions, and Kim lost both her ability and her will to restrict him, preferring the excitement of the romantic con.

So it was no longer that the two professionals made one another feel good about each other; a third step was introduced: Kim makes Jimmy feel good about himself, Jimmy uses this as an excuse to commit criminal activity, and Kim feels good about herself only by contrast with Jimmy’s consequent descent into corruption. Jimmy falsely believes that Kim still has the power to restrain him, so he uses her as a safety net and as an excuse for corruption; meanwhile, Kim refuses to play the part of a safety net, but she falsely believes that she can remain a Good Person even as his enabler and conspirator.

Rich, Kevin, and especially Howard see this, to varying extents and in various ways, but Kim denies this to be so, since her codependent relationship to Jimmy continues to make her feel Good about herself. By portraying Howard as the egoist and making him the enemy, she preserves the illusion that she and Jimmy are “using their powers for Good”; even though Teti knows that this is a delusion, even he defends her by pretending that she IS still Good even when she blatantly breaks bad and Howard is actually a witness. Howard’s role is to offer redemption and cleansing to Jimmy; Jimmy spites him. Howard offers the same assistance to Kim, recognizing Jimmy’s influence and intuiting (correctly) that Kim severed ties with Rich and Kevin because “Jimmy had something to do with it”. In fact: both Kevin and Rich insulted Kim’s “autonomy” by criticizing her relationship with Jimmy; this “autonomy” would be the perfect alibi for remaining with Jimmy, except that Jimmy IS autonomy. That which Jimmy represents for Kim is autonomy, and the only reason that Kim is still with Jimmy is that she equates their codependent relationship with autonomy and freedom. Even as Kim tells Howard that she makes her “own choices” for her “own reasons”, she is defending Jimmy, in spite of what she knows to be true.

It is by this point too late for Kim to contain the force of Saul Goodman, and Kim knows this. Kim joins Saul because she cannot beat him; Kim stays with Jimmy because only by so doing can she keep Saul on her side, yet this does nothing to restrain his evil; it empowers it. When any other man tells Kim to do something about him, to “help” Jimmy*, she knows that a path thus proposed can only lead to the dissolution of the relationship. It means that the gambler must give up gambling, admit to the fallacy of sunk costs, and withdraw from the addictive lifestyle. Just as Walt’s addiction to crime is represented by a lucrative “gambling” addiction, Kim’s addiction to Jimmy and Saul is represented early on as Gambler’s Fallacy, i.e. “Sunk Costs”.

The temptation is too great to resist. In spite of her natural predisposition towards Goodness, and owing to the moralistic pride and “self-righteousness” that comes WITH that predisposition, Kim chooses to feel Good instead of being Good. Saul has, in fact, secured the perfect servant via the illusion of freedom. Running from the Devil she knows, Kim falls for the one she does not.

[({Dm.R.G.)}]

 

*Howard has not even yet seen the full extent of Saul’s malice, and Kim, having seen more of it, is probably even more frightened to switch sides.

A Triad of Typology and How People Get Conned:

A Triad of Typology and How People Get Conned:

 

It’s believed that in the Olden Days, especially within the Great Civilizations, there was not yet a line drawn betwixt the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. Similarly, I might suppose that to be Good, to be Intelligent, and to be Right were one and the same; one could not be one without presupposing the other two.

Such is not the case in the Present Day. By and large, questions of Intelligence, Morality, and Righthood are consigned to the Psychoanalytic Arts. The question of how an individual will behave is determined by temperamental predispositions, just as is the case with introversion, sexual preference and drive, etc. Individuals possessing more “intelligence” will tend to value intelligence, no more egocentrically than those who possess more “conscientiousness” value morality and forthrightness. Those who are the most diligent may or may not prefer morality to intelligence, depending upon the nature of their diligence, often regulated by “disgust”; one may be diligent in the pursuit of a “reprehensible” enterprise which is disgusting and therefore immoral, or one may be diligent in the pursuit of a more “noble” cause if one is more easily “disgusted” by “evil”. At any rate, those who are neither conscientious nor intelligent to the same extent as they are “diligent” and “persistent” will value being “right” above being “good” or “smart”. Righthood is thus distinguished both from “meaning well” and from “being wise” or “being practical”. These people “work harder, not smarter”, and their “work ethic” is an ethic of principled efficiency.

Theoretically, the various types, in effect all fragments of one fully integrated human being, (fractions of an Ancient Greek, if you will) could coexist in harmony, just as these “drives” would coexist in the fully actualized person. Yet in the absence of a binding social order, certain obstacles preclude the harmonious union of conflicting types, and foremost among these obstacles is the “con artist”.

Con artists come in many different shapes and sizes. Some are extremely high-brow and academic. The professor of postmodern philosophy has found the ideal target audience in a legion of grad students who are open to the ideas of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Foucault; it’s easier to lie to people who pride themselves in their own uncertainty about the Nature of Truth. Yet more often than not con artists employ an evil so banal it is disappointing. In the absence of a binding social order, human beings tend to retain in common only the basest of instincts, and as we fall deeper and deeper into the egalitarian paradigm we tend to be reduced to these embarrassing functions. The most damning insult that I have ever received was in the reminder that my body’s most repulsive functions were nothing to be ashamed of, since I shared them in common with all of humanity; all of a sudden, I could only imagine solidarity with my fellow human beings, quite literally, by avenue of a line to use the toilet.

Con artists occupy this domain predominantly. Sex, survival, and power are those drives which, like any student of Freud, manipulators primarily appeal to, and more often than not they regard the remainder of the individuated personality as no more than a mask for these urges.

Yet some people are much too proud to be won over with a cheap thrill, and if they are to satisfy these urges they will only do so by avenue of a specific set of principles. Those who value honesty will only allow themselves the pleasures of sexuality within the context of an established relationship; those who value sincerity will regard sexual consent as legitimate only if both parties care about each other without pretense, but nonetheless to such an extent that meets an established social standard entirely independent of individual desire and preference. Some come to power by their own will; others assume it as a social responsibility. Some people would sooner die as innocent victims than to live as oppressors; others rationalize their survivor’s guilt by priding themselves in their strength. Pride is most often shame in disguise.

The advanced manipulator thus must go beyond the banal drives and to appeal to ego. By identifying what an individual values, based upon that individual’s temperament, the manipulator is able to avail his or herself of an arsenal of subtle tricks in order to appear as an ally to the prospective victim. “Leveling” is easiest in an “egalitarian” society of “liberal individualists”. If I claim to value independence, this value reflects upon me personally. It would appear gauche indeed were I to criticize the sexual libertine or the drug pusher (often one and the same) for giving consenting adults “what they want”, though it would NOT be out of character for an upright police officer. By professing a value, I say, “this is my role; this is me. I shall always come onstage in this guise, and none other.” Thus the individualist must REMAIN individualistic so as not to appear inconsistent, and should he or she take sides with a Collectivistic Social Order, this is damning to both parties; ergo, never the twain shall meet. Coexistence between Individualists and Loyalists becomes not only problematic and fruitless but downright dangerous.

A con artist can easily drive a wedge between individuals of comparable but distinct character, simply by appearing to each as an ally against the rest. Who would one be to resist one’s own reflection? It makes far more sense to antagonize one’s “natural opponents”.

With regards to the trichotomy of Intelligence, Good Will, and Righthood, (the latter an addendum to Aldous Huxley’s veneration of the former two as indispensable corollaries) driving a wedge between “excellent” people is a walk in the park.

Consider the father of Chuck and Jimmy McGill from Better Call Saul. There is no evidence that this man is “unintelligent”, yet he is constantly being abused by grifters with a sob story. Once confronted by a young Jimmy who recognizes a cheap conman for what he is, the father’s retort is one of my favourite clichés of modern television, for it summarizes both philosophy and heroism: “What if you’re wrong?” This same line is employed by Jack Shepard and John Locke from the earlier series Lost, with regards to the torture of a prisoner; unfortunately, since Jack fears one fate and John fears another, even so universal a question fails to solve their particular problem. Liberal individualism wins yet again over Justice. Much like the late McGill patriarch, both Jack and John are men of extremely above-average intelligence, expressed in different ways. They also have this much in common: both have been conned, over and over again.

Certain rudimentary forms of con artistry work on stupid, unconscientious and inattentive people: zombies lacking in intelligence, morality, and diligence. Yet if this appears too severe a description, rest assured that it refers to a minority of people that is hardly “oppressed”. Most people excel in at least one of these three qualities, and it is precisely their excellence which is used against them. If one wishes to anger a person, one appeals to his or her weaknesses; loyalty is won by appeal to strength. When Jimmy’s Dad gives grifters money and “a gallon of milk”, that milk is the milk of human kindness, and though the unassuming shopkeep can’t afford it forever, it is nonetheless a testament to his strengths of character that he surrenders so much for free to the “wolves” of the “world”; one must suppose that, every once in a blue moon, the “grifter” is a sheep in wolf’s clothing, as tends to be the bulk of the innocent victims in the Better Call Saul universe, often victims whom Jimmy abuses, though his cynicism somehow endures in the face of innocence.

Consider this scenario: a conscientious young woman is about to surrender a hundred dollars to pay for a con artist’s “cancer treatment”. Nearby, an intelligent young man watches the scene unfold, with amusement. The intelligent young man knows, for a fact, that this hustler is a grifter; he was tipped off just last week by the bartender, who is a very diligent fellow who did his research but didn’t have the heart to stop the grifter from spending other people’s money on the tavern’s tap. (This particular grifter, unlike Joe Pesci’s characters in Martin Scorsese films, pays his bar tab.)

After the transaction has been made, the grifter leaves, as does the young Good Samaritan. The bartender, having witnessed the outcome, asks the intelligentsia: “Why didn’t you stop her giving him that money?” To this, the clever young man asks, “Why didn’t you stop him asking for it?”

In truth: one question does not answer the other, but simply “levels the playing field”. Yet allow me to be the first impartial witness to answer both questions:

Leveling, though inconclusive, nonetheless begins to answer the question, since both men are cut from the same cloth in this instance, just bleached differently. For egocentric purposes, the intelligent man needs people to get ripped off, so as to feel smarter than the victims. By the same token, the diligent man needs people who are wishy-washy and easily swayed to be disadvantaged, so as to legitimize his diligence. Neither man regards the con man as a threat to that man’s own person and ego. The intelligent man sees through the con, or so he hopes to; the diligent man maintains a respectable business, and it’s not his problem if the business benefits from this inferior enterprise, any more than the benefits it gleans from dishwashing and other “lowly” occupations which are paid less because they are “inferior”. Ironically, the very egalitarianism of individualist society transforms people into the most depraved elitists; were we to live under the rule of a more binding moral law, answering to established moral authority, it would fall to the bartender in this scenario to stop the grifter, but liberal individualism allows him to say, “that’s his business, not mine. I’m just collecting his money by my own, honest means.” Under such a paradigm, suppressing secrets is not tantamount to lying, since no one is entitled to the Truth. In both instances, both conspirators have rationalized their conspiracy with the con man, hoping, (perhaps naïvely) that they are not getting conned just by so doing. By a similar device, the victim hopes that she is not simply losing money that could be spent on a Higher and More Pressing Cause. Yet were she to act on this hope in an aggressive way, she would act out of character, for “good people” are not supposed to demand refunds for charitable acts. Even the naturally selfless person is transformed into an egoist under the paradigm of individualism, her egolessness used against her nonetheless.

Not only has such a con succeeded in parting a woman with her money; it has also driven a wedge between three people who would otherwise have made a fine team if compelled to work towards a Common Good. By being so basic, so stupid, so immoral and so easygoing, the grifter manages to turn all of his or her vices into strengths. The virtues of the intelligent, the noble, and the thorough turn to weaknesses, and any peaceful coexistence between them is torn asunder, so that even were one of them to realize this, the rest would resist.

So: this is my question…

Ought we to con them?

To some considerable extent, the prevalence of trickery in modern life is the fault of the victims. The pride and vainglory of each stock character are comedic because they are so myopic and ironic. Of course the wise guy lets the good girl get conned; morality is not his strong suit, so he’ll think less of her for falling for a trick that only good people fall for!! Of course she falls for it. It does not matter if she’s smarter than the others put together; her bleeding heart is all too predictable!! Of course the bartender does nothing; why risk a source of income? He works hard enough as it is!! The least that he can do is benefit from a stupidity tax, and who is better to attest to her stupidity than the wise guy? Grifters will be grifters; at least by collecting a cut of the profits the bartender ensures that it returns to the Beneficent Establishment to which he has pledged his life.

How could the con man resist? OUGHT he to??

 

Some people are subtler. Some will excel in at least two of the three virtues. Their act becomes a juggling act. In one hand, the Stoic holds her moral convictions; in the other: her practical intelligence. When it behooves her to be practical, she throws morality up into the air. When she can afford to be kind, she captures kindness and tosses up discretion. In this manner, she never owes anyone anything, for no one owes her anything. When she needs something, she acquires it by being practical; when she wants to feel good about herself, she acts good, and this behooves her reputation amidst good people. Should she offend another good person by disappointing his expectations, what could she possibly owe to him, and how would she repay him? If he sought his own interests by avenue of goodness, then he was not truly good, for the ethic of Stoicism renounces all rewards outside of pure virtue; if he sought his own interests by avenue of intelligence, then his failure is a testament to his folly, and if he sought his own interests by avenue of diligence, he clearly lacked diligence, as evidenced by his presumptuous oversight. Thus the Stoic wears her virtues like a revolving door of party masks, and dignity lies in knowing which mask to employ at which opportune moment and momentous opportunity.

In confronting such a prospect, the con man’s best bet would be to turn the conflicting personalities against one another, either by involving her in an enterprise that eventually will require her to use both techniques at once, to extremes that their inherent opposition can’t withstand, or by getting her invested in an enterprise that, up until a certain point, requires excellence in one suit, only to shift gears very suddenly midway.

 

Yet OUGHT he to do this? Does she “deserve” it, if she ostensibly “deserves” nothing?

 

Ultimately, those who pride themselves in their immunity to con artistry would benefit morally from being taken down a peg, even (and perhaps especially) if they pride themselves in being “moral” people? In employing our strengths, we all too often vainly ignore our weaknesses, to the detriment not only of ourselves but of our fellows. By practicing “counterconning”, a Deprogrammer may manage to finally bypass the psychic defences of his or her fellows. All of them have conspired in the victim’s victimhood, and even if the victim was himself misled by egoism, their collective evil is great enough to warrant its exposure, and this can only be done by forcing them to get over themselves.

 

[({Dm.R.G.)}]

Why Ripto Rages: a Supercharged Argument. (OUTL!NE.)

Problems with Ripto’s Rage:

-    Introduction: Why I am not Biased by Nostalgia.

o  Why you might suspect that: Bias for the Past.

§  The first game for PS1 I owned.

§  Played on and off for twenty years.

o  Counterargument One: Games older to me than Spyro, of which I am more critical:

§  Sonic the Hedgehog 2.

§  Sonic C.D.

§  Wario Land.

§  King’s Quest VII.

o  Counterargument Two: Games newer than Spyro 2, for which my nostalgia is stronger and my admiration greater:

§  Jak and Daxter trilogy.

§  Ratchet and Clank trilogy.

§  Sly Cooper trilogy.

§  In all three of these instances:

·     I finished the trilogy, whereas I never acquired Spyro the Dragon: Year of the Dragon until I got Spyro: Reignited. My sister didn’t even know that Year existed.

·     The success of the first sequel was what prompted me to buy the third installment, and in two out of these three (Jak and Sly) I ended up preferring the second to the first game, in spite of fond feelings and intrigue for the first, personally and critically.

o  Who I was when I first played Spyro.

-    Fewer Worlds makes Backtracking Awkward.

o  The Ladder in Glimmer.

§  Moneybags is right there. Greed is no excuse for the inconvenience.

§  Not much to be found up there anyway.

§  The Balloonist Routine: How distant ledges used to work alongside quotas.

·     Why it works, especially in Magic Crafters.

·     The New Alternative:

o  The Ladder in Autumn Plains.

o  The Vortexes.

§  Why can’t I just fly? Compromising player agency when it’s not necessary to even implement that skill here.

-    Acquired Abilities.

o  Swimming underwater with no need for an air supply: no mean feat for a dragon who could not touch water in the first game.

o  Climbing, as discussed.

o  Head-smashing.

o  Abilities as Currency.

o  Perma-flame when you need it least.

-    Temporary abilities.

o  No faeries kissing you.

o  No arrows on the track.

o  Only one (obnoxious) combination, in Metropolis, when you’re already tempted to leave.

o  Flying is less rewarding than in the Flying Levels.

o  Point System is demoralizing: kill count in a kid’s game.

o  Idle springs.

-    Getting a Life:

o  Old Format:

§  Gnorcs are Gems in disguise; gems have been stolen, as were the eggs abducted by the thieves.

·     Sense in terms of lore.

·     Sense in terms of morality.

·     Sense in terms of design.

o  Kill Gnorcs, get gems, advance.

o  If a Gnorc has been killed already, it produces a Life Token.

§  Enough Life Tokens add up to a Life, like rings, coins, or wumpa fruit.

§  Life tokens indicate Gnorcs that have already been killed, marking territory that has been explored, like breadcrumbs or Ariadne’s thread. This relates to the presence of gems and crates as pathways to new territories.

§  Lives may also be found in cute chests with eyes. What’s inside? A Dragon-shaped Life. It all makes complete sense.

§  Health can be restored by devouring butterflies that are contained within the local fauna and fungi.

o  New Format:

§  Enemies may or may not be working for Ripto. In fact, several of them are simply combatants in a conflict wherein Spyro plays as double-agent, taking ample casualties for both sides in order to further his own objectives.

·     Breeze Harbour/Zephyr.

·     Metropolis/Robotica Farms.

§  When enemies are killed, they release white balls of light, most presumably their Souls, which appear to be pure (unlike the evil spirit who haunts the statues in Colossus, who is distinctly dark and alters the colour of the statues it inhabits). No sooner do they give up the ghost than these light spirits are drawn into magic goalposts which harness the energy to fuel temporary power-ups for Spyro to exploit once he meets his kill quota.

§  Lives are only acquired by eating special butterflies, which most often appear in bottles. Whereas the original Spyro RESCUED beautiful, magical creatures, this one feeds them to his accomplice, not unlike Ripto does.

-    Puzzles become more obnoxiously childish and contrived, since they are no longer to be discovered as natural outgrowths of the environment.

o  Haunted Towers: Perfect for an Open World.

§  How I learned how to win.

§  Faeries, Supercharge, and the Knight’s Gauntlet. (Analogous to High Caves from earlier.)

o  Idol Springs:

§  Boxes, Tikis, and Shapes, oh my!!

§  Puzzles feel less relevant to the “Real World” because they do not require the player to be resourceful about the environment.

§  While some of these devices warrant explanation, most of the explanations are as simple as, in my own words: “this tiki lamp is a very picky pescatarian.”

-    Flying Levels stop when you find secret areas, even if you do not want them do stop.

-    Our “Villain” has a Reason to Rage.

o  All we know about Ripto is that he was accidentally transplanted from another world and that he decided to take refuge in Avalar, a home already to diverse species that often butt heads with one another, both figuratively and literally.

§  While Ripto ostensibly expressed a desire for conquest, (“Say hello to your new king.”) this is forgivable for two reasons:

·     A “King” is distinct from a “Tyrant”. The Dragons Themselves inhabited a Dragon KINGDOM, implying a certain regality whose splendor:

a.          Justifies the expulsion of Gnasty’s Minions in the first game, and

b.         Makes Avalar’s technocratic, multicultural mishmash of a battlefield pale in comparison: a World less worth fighting for, except as a means by which to return to Dragon Shores, where, inexplicably, the Gnorcs have either taken over or been turned into slaves. (Weren’t they gems just a minute ago?)

Ripto, apparently a displaced monarch, may be qualified to rule, but who stops him? Elora, because this threatens her power.

·     Elora’s version of the events is the only account we have, and she has shown signs of bossiness and bias already, especially towards Spyro, Hunter, and Moneybags.

o  When Elora demands that the Portal in Winter Tundra be deactivated, Ripto loses his path home.

§  What would Spyro have done? Just as Ripto does: plow ahead into the New World, lighting things on fire and occupying territory. Ripto’s conquest is nothing more than the same strategy that made the original game so engaging.

§  This also explains why the wealth of orbs that the Professor was using for his experiments has been displaced. It wasn’t the villain who stole it, unlike in the original game; it was Elora’s doing.

§  Considering that Ripto only has two henchmen at this time, one of whom is too slow-witted to understand the command “Go through the Portal”, there is no reason why the faeries couldn’t just store the orbs in one safe place, such as, say:

·     Glimmer, a mining colony, parts of which can only be reached by climbing or flight. (This makes me wonder how Gulp got INTO his Overlook to begin with.)

·     Colossus, a Buddhist Temple in the Mountains, far out of reach of giant dinosaur creatures.

·     Behind a forcefield in Hurricos, past a series of propellers that cannot possibly hold the weight of Ripto’s minions.

·     Aquaria Towers, an underwater city. (Can Ripto or his minions swim underwater? They don’t look it, though they’re not dragons.)

·     Fracture Hills, behind several feet of rock that can only be opened by Satyrs versed in the ancient art of bagpipe music, whose song can make even the Earthshapers dance on demand.

·     Zephyr, in a military barracks.

·     Breeze Harbour, on a flying ship, perhaps?

·     Scorch, where doors can only be opened by using a Superflame attack.

·     Shady Oasis, behind a grate that can only be opened by eating magic fruit and being a hippopotamus.

·     In a secret ice cave in Winter Tundra, or perhaps the Magma Cone.

·     Behind one of several cracked walls in Autumn Plains.

·     In literally any flying level.

·     Agent Zero’s Hideout. (Under supervision.)

·     Metropolis. Enough said.

o  Ripto only conquers Autumn Plains after Crush is killed in his own dungeon and Ripto and Gulp are forced to flee Summer Forest.

o  When Gulp, Ripto’s trusty steed and last surviving ally, is killed, he avenges the death of his minions by bombing the Portal that brought him here in the first place, devoting his remaining efforts to the development of mechanical surrogates for his fallen allies.

o  Ripto is simply the scapegoat.

§  When Gulp is killed, Elora and the faeries reward Spyro by turning Gulp’s Overlook (Gulp’s home and the setting for his demise) into a suntan parlour, crediting Spyro with bringing peace to Avalar while blaming Ripto for creating trouble between rival sects.

§  Presumably, two such warring sects are the Breeze Builders and the Blobpeople in Zephyr, who MUST be manipulated to reach this stage in order to acquire their Talismans, though no further Talismans appear afterwards.

§  There is absolutely no evidence that Ripto inspired such bitter rivalries. Judging by how quickly the professor tends to operate, how slowly Ripto moves in taking new territory, and how advanced the arms race is between the birds and the blobs, it would appear that they had been at war far longer.

o  Why does Ripto hate dragons? They do have a way of killing his friends and allying with any cute faun who works against him (and not just Elora, as we observe in Fracture Hills). This also explains why he tends to resent faeries and use them to feed Gulp.                              [({Dm.R.G.)}]

Human Sacrifices and Stripteases: Conventional Evil in Media and Why "Human Rights" are No Excuse for Censorship.

Every modern art form has had a Golden Age, and the most brilliant content produced within the medium has been the most controversial and provocative. Film, literature, music, theater, and the pictorial arts have all “pushed the envelope” with regards to their subject matter and its presentation.

Video games have notoriously been no exception to this, and attempts to censor them have been as diverse and inane as any other. Yet for all the best efforts of the medium’s founding members, it seems that no one could have predicted where the most dangerous threat would emanate: from within the Audience.

Gamers and designers have, by and large, “sold out” with regards to the normalizing tendencies of the millennial marketplace. We live in such an era wherein creativity must bow before commerce, and the laws of commerce have been worked out with such daunting bureaucratic accuracy that they have come to act as surrogates for ethics. This puts us in a precarious position indeed, for while we might be tempted to pride ourselves in “how far we’ve come” and departed from the “archaic” religious superstitions of previous generations, this has only made us susceptible to more absurd and arbitrary control schemes.

What are the effects? Most immediately: we see something which might be called a tendency towards making things “family friendly”. Whenever any art form becomes commercialized in the mainstream, it tends to become gentrified, sentimentalized, and made palatable and “wholesome”. There is, of course, nothing intrinsically wrong in such an aesthetic, and it certainly has its place, both therapeutically and socially… yet it has its limits, and to confine an entire art form to such limits is to put a tiger in a box.

Attempting to reach the “widest possible audience”, we initially target nuclear families. “Children’s films” become “family films”; cartoon animals are set against the backdrop of a narrative that not only inherits adult subject matter but that would be most recognizable only to the adults of the target generation of parents. Disney and Pixar’s Finding Nemo had no such nonsense; its genius was in its appeal to a primordial sense of wonder that is timeless and does not wither with age: the Oceanic State. DreamWorks’ response Shark Tale is another matter. Hardly as subtle nor as profound as its predecessor Shrek, a truly inspired take on faerie tales, many of whom were originally quite gruesome on purpose, Shark Tale was a shameless attempt to cash in on the undersea market in an iconically DreamWorks fashion, complete with the voices of Will Smith, Angelina Jolie, and, of course, Martin Scorsese. The famed director of gritty, brutal crime films lends his unmistakably high-pitched voice to a comical pufferfish who navigates an underwater crime world that, in large part, is modeled unsubtly but tactfully after Goodfellas and Casino, as well as old-school rival The Godfather. How is this a “family film”? Because to kids it appears to be a “children’s film”; to parents, it makes light of DeNiro’s darker moments.

Already we can observe the dangers of the “family friendly”. Even in targeting the nuclear family, producers of popular media are all-too-often tempted to substitute adolescent defiance for childlike wonder, pretending the former to be more mature than the latter simply because it follows in biological chronology, as adolescents are also often tempted to presume. The consequence is that the films we show our kids, often the films we watch alongside them, always have an element in the background of that depravity which is typically sequestered to the mature rating.

The problem is aggravated when marketers observe the modern family. It’s become a matter of common horse sense that a large, probably growing faction of the market does not conform to the tradition of the nuclear family. The adult animated series BoJack Horseman uses this to both great commercial and artistic affect; Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s postmodern fable uses animals and people to illustrate the lifestyles of unwanted children, sexual deviants, chronic divorcees, and the infertile, often poking fun with that heavy hand (hoof, or paw) that only the sufferers themselves brandish. Yet what spurs BoJack Horseman’s genius is its brutally honest attempts to buck the jockeys of modern media: Political Correctness.

The “Politically Correct” is essentially the “family friendly” for grown-ups. Most significantly, its target audience is a class of “disenfranchised consumers” (a paradox peculiar to countries with prosperous economies) who seldom reach the conventional standard for psychological maturity, owing to various extenuating circumstances. Thus, the game becomes to pretend that such a standard is nonexistent or illusory, to coddle the outlier and to make the target audience feel “safe” and “included”, “respected” but not “understood”. Upset any one of these prerequisites, and the curtain falls, the illusion of inclusion shattered. So essential is this strategy to contemporary commerce that it has even become an expectation, so that any sort of majoritarian marketing is ostensibly tantamount to Fascism.

No generation has bought into this as completely as the youth of the present day, and the media of the new millennium has been so saturated with this tendency, one that has haunted the backgrounds even more menacingly than the mobster references in Shark Tale, that we have by and large come to regard it as (though it were) an ethic. There’s hardly a popular form of media alive today which does not bend to the demands of the “underrepresented”: the all-too-common outcast.

So what’s the problem? In order to summarize the dangers, we must return to my generation’s most treasured art form: the Video Game.

When I first played the original God of War on PlayStation 2, I was not entirely sure why. I hadn’t played any hardcore hack-and-slash combat platformers since EA Games’ acceptable Lord of the Rings games, which at least had the advantage of incorporating elements of Tolkien’s books that had not made it into Jackson and Walsh’s film franchise (upsetting the prejudice that Electronic Arts is just a bunch of Nazis with no sense of respect for tradition). Truth be told, Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time had its fair share of fighting, but it was just choppy enough to render me averse to the genre, and were it not for Prince’s time-based puzzle gaming, I would not have endured it. The main quality that drew me towards God of War was a nostalgia for ancient Greek culture, most significantly its timeless mythology and that style of drama we call “tragedy”, which everyone from the Florentine Camerata who invented opera to Friedrich Nietzsche, Stanley Kubrick, and Brad Pitt have tried to recreate.

To put it in Spartan terms: this God of War did well. The story of Kratos was gripping, captivating, devastating, exhausting, intriguing, grueling, and fundamentally cathartic. None of this could have been achieved were it not so brutal, though perhaps Roberta Williams of King’s Quest would give Sony’s Santa Monica Studio a run for its money. What I knew to expect going into it was what I’d grown to expect from some of the imagery in Prince of Persia and The Lord of the Rings: “puzzles” would be less akin to Tetris and Bejeweled and more akin to positioning a human sacrifice for execution.

What I had not gleaned from reading the reviews was that game reporters would often expose the most damning plot details without a spoiler warning. With regards to that “human sacrifice”, it ended up being as significant for character development as some of Walt’s most unforgivable moments in Breaking Bad. The human sacrifice was far more than a mere ragdoll on a string, his execution far less “family friendly” than falling from a cliff in Wile E. Coyote fashion or, as DreamWorks had managed, getting conked on the head by an anchor. (Not to be confused with Newswoman “Katie Current”.) Before my eyes I watched one of Kratos’ unsuccessful predecessors get pushed up a slope in an iron cage, begging, whimpering and screaming for mercy, with each step coming inches closer to a device designed to burn him alive… and I was doing all the pushing and the immolating!!

How did Sony Santa Monica get away with this? It was obvious: God of War was a game for adults who loved Greek mythology and war games. Kratos had to be the sort of guy who would light a “loser” on fire just to “honour the Gods” and to advance himself; he was a Spartan warrior with a vendetta again Mars Himself. We’d already seen the remains of Kratos’ other predecessors decorating both the entrance and the interior of the gauntlet. We know that this will be our hero’s fate if he does not progress, surviving at all costs, including the lives of those he meets along the way, however harmless and friendly. The Gods demand it, and those Rationalists who are snide enough to challenge Divine Command Theory would do well to read a bit of Greek mythology before they spite a Greek Deity’s Will. On top of all of that: the deceptively convoluted series of death traps and challenges is quite linear. When the time comes for Kratos to light that guy on fire, he has no practical alternative; there are no side-roads, and this road goes only one way.

Thus we see the three core ingredients in edgy game design that pushes the envelope, heightens the Art, and makes our stomachs squirm: Cultural Context, Machiavellian Rationalization, and a Mature Rating that, like a good fence, a harness, or a dog leash, empowers to the same extent as it restricts. Already, too, we see the dangers inherent in this: boys who hear tell of these M-rated games get the distinct impression that this is “okay for adults” but “not for kids”. To the same extent as they wish to be “grown-ups”, they might play with matches and toy with the idea of arson, however flippantly. They recognize that “mature” material is “really bad”, but they also internalize the notion that it is considerably MORE bad than that which they see on Tom and Jerry. Lighting someone on fire is only “okay” in the context of Reservoir Dogs; dropping an iron or an anchor on someone’s head is relatively acceptable.

Thankfully, we need not busy ourselves with too much dispute about the effects of media upon the mind of the child, for most children operate under a significant amount of supervision. Yet what about those aforementioned “disaffected” adults who are stunted in their psychological development? When media becomes censored, a veil is cast over it. The stoppering of progress is akin to the shutting of a hatch, especially when a leak has broken out within its chamber. We were content to tread water as the water level rose, but now that the ceiling has been sealed we are to drown.

God of War, to my mind, was never intended to promote violence, nor even to glorify it, though Kratos’ fate does raise some questions on that point I shall not address herein. Like most games notorious for their “graphic” depictions of violence, (“graphic” by the standards of the Sony PlayStation 2 console) God of War produced a sense of release, achieving that sort of catharsis that Greek tragedy was known for, meeting its artistic goals. By pushing the envelope, it shocked us into a state of vulnerability; reminded of the brutality of history, we were pacified and grateful for modernity.

Yet what happens when that envelope is stopped? All of a sudden, that depraved, Dionysian psyche which is seeking new forms of shock value must content itself with trails already blazed. Producers begin to mass-produce those forms of evil which are proven to sell, given a long and growing blacklist of those forms of evil which are too “triggering” even for millennials. The shock wears off, as does the talk, but the material remains, getting recycled, over and over and over again, like the “consumable T.V. violence” of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. For want of new, ingenious forms of catharsis, developers repeat the same old tropes: immolation here, hanging there, et cetera. All of a sudden, the new generation comes to regard THESE things as being “normal”. The modern adult is in the position of the aforementioned boy: so long as one believes one’s self to be indulging in a “permissible” evil, one worthy of an audience, one not QUITE “as bad as” a less conventional evil, one can content one’s self in feeling “normal”.

Most people, clinically, make decisions MORE based upon projections of normalcy and abnormality than they do off of Good and Evil, especially when the latter distinction is so difficult for modern scientists to quantify, whereas the former is all too easy. It is for this reason that practices such as mob lynchings and dragging men behind pickup trucks were so prevalent for so long in the United States (though let us not forget that equally violent forms of anarchist protest against Police Brutality are no better, by the same token). Even in fighting evil, we commit conventional evil, and most often it is against the unconventional evils that we express our own evil impulses. Ergo, the rapist is everyone’s favourite scapegoat, the racist following closely.

That which is a marginal danger for the boy becomes an imminent problem for the adult. Because we KNOW that we are adults, we are less likely to suspect our own susceptibility to suggestion. If I produce games, those limits which I must observe in publishing are presumed absolute. A boy aspiring to play his older brother’s fighting games is not in the same position; he understands the relativity of restrictions based upon age. Yet such a sense of relativity disappears in a globalized marketing standard that might very well be enforced by the United Nations as a Human Right. If I cannot put rape into my game, though I can put immolation, the line I observe is presumed to be absolute; if NO one is allowed to see the former but the latter is acceptable, I internalize and outwardly affirm this ethic: rape is absolutely bad; arson is relative. What is to stop a vigilante, then, with my same, universalized conviction, from setting an alleged rapist on fire? Not much, and let us not pretend that human beings do not have a history of burning people alive under suspicion of evils that are not conventional by accepted moral orthodoxy.

It is this combination of forces – a stagnating form of generic tropes on one hand and a patronizing imposition upon the adult conscience on the other – that poses the greatest threat to the millennial Zeitgeist. The irony would not be lost on the great critics of modern media such as David Lynch and Raphael Bob-Waksberg. When Diane tells BoJack that television “normalizes” behaviour, this is only partially true. Media in itself does not normalize behaviour, until media itself is normalized. So long as media remains a forum for free expression, it keeps innovating ways to shock us into our catharsis. Yet the moment that it is met with a bureaucracy which treats its marketing interests as moral imperatives, having won a generation of loyal consumers who act as a mob ready to lynch anyone’s career, (or worse) media collapses in on itself, and that which was previously “daring” and “provocative” becomes the new “normal”. This is aggravated by the peculiarly millennial tendency for forgetfulness.

Critics in defence of political correctness might cuttingly contest that normalcy is nothing new in itself, that even the classic Greek plays reused tropes, yet “society” continued to “progress” and “mentally healthy adults” were not afflicted. That would be well and good, but for several bugs: in the first place, those who were NOT regarded as “mentally healthy” all too often saw a side to their “healthy” social superiors that those same “adults” would have been loth to see within themselves, hence the scapegoat gives the “tragedy” its name. Furthermore, to speak of “society” as though it were one entity and “progress” as though it were culturally universal is a conceit only imaginable to modern Westerners. The integrity of Greek “normalcy” lay in its adherence to tradition, one peculiar to a Greek society. To be born Greek was to live Greek; Kratos makes his deal with a Greek God (one indigenous to Greece, apparently, for Kratos later meets the Norse Gods in Scandinavia) in the context of a war against the “barbarian” non-Greeks (some of whom were likely those same Scandinavians).

Yet this is not our current “society”. The globalist culture can no longer accommodate the nationalism or communalism of earlier societies established upon peculiar traditions, and all such traditions become secondary to “Universal Human Rights”. To be born American in the nineteen-nineties is not the same as to live American in the year 2020, and few of us will be able to repeat the sins of our fathers nor to attain those goals we set out to attain as boys (though perhaps the girls will adopt new dreams to make up for the boys’ loss, since these dreams may be won at the latter’s expense).

Political correctness operates not like a temple but like a marketplace, for it was within the market itself that this disease was born. It is an ethic for consumers and those wishing to sell to them. In sales training, we learn that people like to buy but not to be sold to. The most effective sales agencies are those who manage to sell your desires TO you, and if they should disappoint you, it is because you are no longer the target demographic, and salespeople go where the money goes. Millennials who preach Human Rights and Political Correctness are simply the most pious consumers of conventional evil, and their enemies are simply those whose evil and whose virtue are too abnormal to be advertised. So long as traditions are the preferences of an older demographic and a regressive society unfit for the global market, we do not question the Present.

By and large, the universal rating used by Designers to regulate one ANOTHER is “N.S.F.W.”: “Not Safe for Work”, a fitting slogan for a generation of corporate guinea pigs turned into automatons on a production line devoid of either voice, dignity, or imagination. The implication is that nothing is too “mature” which is permissible and “correct”, yet it may not be the sort of game that your boss would want to catch you playing. (Perhaps supervisors would rather see you spending company time on Tetris?)

One game Not Safe for Work (or Home, probably, though when has that stopped anyone?) is House Party, a raunchy dating game set among a group of young singles wherein the male protagonist (female coming soon!! No puns intended.) manipulates nonplayable characters, mainly women, into various sexual and suggestive acts. Several times, voluptuous girls presumably in their twenties are exposed to the elements by avenue of blackmailing and deception.

None of these achievements further the story, usually. By contrast with God of War, the game is very admirably nonlinear. No Divine Authority mandates a sacrifice of clothes or dignity; the protagonist rarely needs to compromise another character in order to “advance” towards a teleological destination. One might therefore suggest that the sexuality in House Party is “gratuitous and male-gazey”, as Gina Cazador says of her own role at the start of BoJack Horseman’s fifth season and the first season of the show-within-a-show Philbert. Yet it is precisely BECAUSE these indulgences accomplish nothing that they are so tempting, so reflective of the mind of the player, and so cathartic for players who would NOT do such things in Actuality but who might harbor a vendetta against those who do, a vendetta which is often irrational and subconscious, much like Diane Nguyen’s media crusade against Hank Hippopopalous.

Most of us would sooner have our flesh seen than seared; there ought to be no doubt that lighting someone on fire is worse than coercing that person to take off her pants. It is precisely BECAUSE God of War rationalizes acts of utter depravity that it seems relatively noble, and it is precisely BECAUSE a striptease is an indulgence which more civilians enjoy that we invent so many rules for its proper context and we harbor such antipathy to those who overstep those bounds; they mirror our own perversions, as the success of games like House Party evidences beautifully. Yet even if one evil were tantamount to the other, (by extremely puritanical standards) what is most important is that BOTH be allowed to exist, to perform their respective dances, and then to waltz offstage in the manner of the BoJack Horseman penultimate episode. Each form of shock, however gruesome or uneasy, serves a vital human function, both psychologically and socially, and so long as it does something new for the medium it furthers the Art. Place even one expressive form in a cage, and the Art ceases to be an upward striving and degenerates into a brutal, fatalistic sacrifice.

[({Dm.R.G.)}]