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Look, not all the blog posts can have snappy titles.

I’ve talked before about how a lot of the theories about the ways in which Rick and Morty series creators Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland are trolling the audience are dumb. Many things are taken to be signals or jabs at the audience that pretty clearly aren’t (I’m not even fully convinced that the Red Grin Grumble gag is a shot at a segment of the show’s audience, even though it actually works as one). Certain fans regularly read troll moves or setups for them where there’s little or no evidence that they’re actually there. It seems like after the April Fools unjoke and a couple of troll promos, certain members of the audience have become convinced that “fucking with fans” is the only trick Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland know, to the extent that they’ll dedicate entire episodes or even season arcs to it. Harmon and Roiland were really fucking straightforward with the premise of Rick and Morty from episode 1. It’s a show about wacky high concept sci-fi adventures.

I’m talking about it again now, because smug self-satisfaction is easy and writing actually useful content is hard. Season 3, Episode 8, Morty’s Mind Blowers, has two different lines where Rick denies color-coding the memory vials being viewed. Despite this, the vials do in fact conform pretty exactly to Morty’s guess as to what the colors represent. Rick Sanchez, the character who’s often presumed to be the mouthpiece of the authors when giving an impatient, condescending lecture to Morty and/or Summer, is lying through his goddamn teeth. In several of the wiped memories he’s also depicted as doing something dumb, not in the “Rick’s crazy and does what he wants and dodges the consequences” way the show normally does, but in the “Rick loses a game of checkers to Morty” way. The idea that Rick’s condescension is supposed to be taken as a lecture to the audience by default is demolished, because his condescending assertions of superiority are revealed to be blatant lies.

I don’t think it’s particularly likely that the creators were specifically trying to sink this “Rick is the Harmon/Roiland’s soapbox” theory, I think it was just a dumb theory built on flimsy evidence that inevitably fell down as more information came in.

Still watching Boy Meets World. Had a thought about season 3. The final episode – the season finale – is about the main character Cory Matthews and how he feels about his older brother Eric Matthews moving out of the house to go to college at the end of the school year. The 90s sitcom Very Important Lesson that Eric learns is that his relationship with his brother is important and they barely know each other and now that they’re older the three year gap isn’t really much of a difference and yadda yadda yadda. It’s brought up a couple of different times that Eric has his own friends and his own things to do and basically just always had better things to do than talk to Cory.

Here’s the weird thing about that. In seasons one and two, Eric’s best friend Jason Marsden (played by Jason Marsden) was a recurring character. In season three, that character makes no appearances at all. Season three’s finale revolves around focusing on his own life while at the same time season three in general has had Eric come completely unmoored from his own social life. It also depicts Eric and Cory’s relationship mellowing out significantly from the second season, when Cory was a seventh grader (his eighth grade year is mysteriously not depicted) and Eric did everything in his power to keep Cory’s existence from reflecting poorly on him in any way at all. Throughout season three, Eric is depicted as having a much greater and much more friendly presence in Cory’s life. So the season three finale is about how Eric never does the thing he is frequently depicted doing (without being dragged into it as he was in earlier seasons) because he’s too busy doing the thing he is never depicted doing.

Also, Cory’s entire eighth grade year isn’t depicted, even though the early episodes of season three pick up right where season two left off. At the end of season two, Cory’s best friend Shaun Hunter has just moved in with his English teacher, Jonathan Turner, a series of events that made sense in context. At the beginning of season three, Shaun has been living with Jon over the summer and they’ve gotten comfortable with each other, but Shaun hasn’t ever lived with Jon during the school year. We know this because in the first episode, Shaun expects he can use his close relationship with his home room teacher to avoid getting in trouble for being late to school and is unpleasantly surprised when Jon flat-out refuses to give him any special treatment. I don’t think Cory and Shaun’s exact grade level is ever specified in season three, but it’s definitely true that they start the season fourteen years old and end it fifteen years old. In American education, that’s ninth grade. Season one they were 11/12, season two they were 12/13, and now in season three they have leaped ahead to 14/15 despite the fact that the gap between seasons clearly only extends over the course of one summer.

It’s not like this kind of sloppy continuity unexpected from a pre-Renaissance television show (and honestly, Boy Meets World doesn’t really get good until a few seasons later – its best episode is undoubtedly the season five episode that parodies slasher flicks). Shaun and Cory’s girlfriend Topanga, the two most significant characters in the show outside Cory himself, both have siblings who cameo in season one that get retconned out of existence when they become inconvenient, so it’s not like sloppy continuity is any kind of stranger to the show. It still rustles my jimmies.

I’m gonna do that thing again where I shill the work of someone several orders of magnitude more popular than me as an excuse not to produce real content. Today’s lucky winner is Terrible Writing Advice, a YouTube channel that largely just takes writing advice that’s well-trodden and familiar, inverts it, and then delivers it in a sarcastic tone. The delivery is entertaining and it’s a fun way to get the basics if you’ve never taken a serious stab at writing anything before (or you did, but decided to do so without seeking out any advice on how to be good at it whatsoever, because that’s about the only way you’ll have missed the advice TWA is inverting).

Back in the GM’s guide posts I wrote about how theme is critically important to a story, and trying to make a theme work in an RPG is both very important because it’s important to all stories, but also very hard because it’s an improv, collaborative narrative with no revision process. As a sort-of demonstration of this, I’m going to look at how the failures of the 2012 Amazing Spider-Man pretty much exclusively come down to failures of theme. The plot, setting, and characters all fundamentally worked, but the thematic connection between them all was a disjointed mess and it torpedoed the entire film.

Continue reading “The Amazing Spider-Man: A Failure of Themes” →

Here is the section of worldbuilding that’s basically just “the society is feudal. Fedualism goes to some dumb places sometimes.” If you’re not intimately familiar with how feudalism works and you’d like to know more, you should play Crusader Kings 2. If that’s prohibitively expensive or time-consuming, maybe read this post as a substitute.

Continue reading “The Feudalized Empire” →

Of all the organizations I worldbuilt that one time, I think this is the one that has the most potential to actually be interesting and useful in other settings. This one, or the Miracose Order. Neither of them are really great as-is, but I’m leaving the work of figuring out how to sand off the rough edges to other people, because Comic Con is coming up and I want a buffer.

Continue reading “The Sorcerer Clans” →

Hey, remember when I dropped a few posts of setting building onto this blog, with the Miracose Order and the Order of the Magi and stuff? Of course you don’t, it was self-indulgent worldbuilding of dubious value even to my own GMing, let alone someone else’s. So anyone we’re going to do more of that now.

Continue reading “The Imperial Legion” →

Today we ask the question: What happens when an insignificant force meets an insubstantial object? What happens when a soldier who can’t kill anything opens fire on a security guard who always dies?

Continue reading “Storm Trooper Vs. Red Shirt” →

I don’t like D&D 4e. The current narrative its apologists are building is that people only disliked 4e because it was sold under the D&D brand. The old narrative was that it got really good like eighteen books in if you just use MM3 stats, and I didn’t really care about that narrative, because no one reasonable is going to question my decision to stop giving 4e second chances after the first seventeen books. This new narrative, the idea that 4e is any good as a tactics game, is more troublesome, because if people believe it, they might actually think that 4e is a good model of how to design tactical gameplay. And dear God is that not the case.

I don’t really want to get into a whole rant about it myself because that would require digging up my 4e books to talk about it, and it’s been the better part of a decade and two or three moves since I last cracked one of them open. Plus, I can’t open those books without getting a little depressed, because they were part of the 3-4 years or so of my life when I lost the ability to get hyped about anything, and settled into that position so many modern consumers are in, where our ability to anticipate things caps out at cautious optimism, and that rarely. The book is made of broken promises and lies. I don’t really play Guild Wars 2 much at all for the same reason, even though it totally is one of the best MMOs on the market right now.

Anyways, since I can’t find my 4e books and don’t really want to bother anyway, I am instead reprinting the words of some other guy who examined why 4e skill challenges were a disaster. This might not seem like it’s much of an issue for the new “4e is a tactics game” narrative, but demonstrating that the team working on 4e were bad at accomplishing their goals absolutely helps build the plausibility of their tactical combat being just as bad. Talking about 4e’s skill challenges doesn’t provide direct evidence that 4e combat is bad, but the team being unable to get one system functioning properly should make you skeptical of claims that they did such an amazing job with another. The obvious follow-up here would be to actually examine combat, but I’m pretty sure the only people who care about 4e at this point are deluded fanboys, so I probably won’t bother unless someone else’s words fall into my lap and I can use it to avoid writing a blog post for a day.

Comments from our unwitting guest poster have all been italicized, but only because I couldn’t find a way to put them into Da Vinci Forward Regular font.

Continue reading “The Failure of Skill Challenges” →

So, there’s this thing in the Rick and Morty fandom where they talk about show creators Justin Roiland and Dan Harmond like they’re mavericks who discard basic storytelling just to troll their audience. If that sounds like it would result in terrible stories, you’re right. A show that runs on the principle of upsetting its viewers would be awful. Because obviously it would be, that is its goal.

Rick and Morty isn’t actually like that at all, though. It’s just that the fans are the kinds of people who produce this image:

So it shouldn’t be surprising that they’ll also try to build up the show’s creators as master trolls while lacking the knowledge of basic storytelling needed to realize that the narrative they’re building paints Justin Roiland and Dan Harmond as incompetent jackasses (which, by the way, they are not).

Continue reading “Rick and Morty Really Is That Good” →