emotional pyramids built upon fictional people

or, stories build community

Welcome new subscribers! I won’t do a long preamble, but I’m glad you’re here.

If you’d like to get an idea of the things I’ve posted in the past, I do have a helpful non-exhaustive Table of Contents. You can find many of my essays there as well as links to my essays and short stories published elsewhere. Too, you can find links to my recently published novels. The paperback of Howl just went live this morning, so if you’ve been waiting for the physical book (it’s real pretty), now’s your chance.

Also, for those who upgrade to a paid subscription, I’ll send you my most recent novel Howl as an ebook.

For those who are paying subscribers, you should have received an email from me last Wednesday with digital copies of the book. Check your spam folder if you didn’t see it. If you still don’t see it, let me know and I’ll resend it.

Anyway.

wrap by Kelby Losack

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not like that

A few recent controversies cropped up over the game Bayonetta 3. I’ve never played Bayonetta so I won’t get too much into the game because I don’t know anything about the game. But a few interesting conversations happened around the game that I want to talk about now that the controversies are mostly already forgotten.

See, if I was a smarter person, I would have written about this during the height of the controversies! But I’m just a dummy so I’ll talk about it now.

First, the original voice actor for the English version of Bayonetta quit over pay. This story quickly became more complicated than you’d expect, so I’ll bullet point a few things:

• The actor was paid several thousand dollars for work on a franchise that likely made many millions of dollars.

• Negotiation between the actor and the game studio broke down and they hired a replacement voice actor.

• The original actor, in making her complaints, led some amount of online freaks to go harass the new actress.

• Jason Schreier’s reporting showed that the original actress told quite a few lies

• Some people did some digging and found that the original actress is a conservative and was promoting anti-LGBT causes on her twitter account

• People quickly turned on the original actress

Like I said, this got complicated fast and everyone accused everyone of bad behavior. It seems clear that the original actress was not trying to improve the situation for all voice actors because she was very willing to throw blame at the new actress. And so this was not exactly a labor activist decrying corporate power at the bargaining table.

But I think the attacks on her over her politics got pretty gross and demonstrate the difficulty many people have with class and worker solidarity.

Solidarity means standing up for the rights of even those you disagree with. Even those who you might kind of hate a whole lot. Even those people deserve better working conditions because all workers deserve better work conditions. Just because someone would never advocate for you doesn’t mean you shouldn’t advocate for them.

Because solidarity falls apart once you begin segmenting off who you’ll cooperate with in order to improve conditions. I mean, anyone with a job can tell you exactly which of their coworkers they hate. It can be difficult just being in the same room with them, let alone when you need to work on a project with them for work.

So I do understand that it’s difficult to get along, but the stakes are pretty high, I think, and sometimes you need to subordinate your own personal grievances in order to advance a project that lifts everyone.

More than that, sometimes you need to actively work with people you consider political enemies in order to achieve your political goals. Collaboration can be flexible and often should be.

You collaborate with certain people only when your interests align. For example, some amount of workers are outright racists. Even so, you work with them to improve the conditions of workers. Then, possibly even the next day, you rally against those very same people at city hall over racist policies.

Politics can be tricky and knotty and your comrade today for one goal may be your enemy tomorrow for a different goal.

It would be nice if life were simpler.

Fell in love with a Ghost

At a forum where I discuss things with certain people, I came late to a conversation about Bayonetta that was, to a degree, about this review of Bayonetta 3 by Maddy Myers.

(I was going to put a picture of Bayonetta here, but she’s so absurdly sexualized in every image I can find that I’d feel too embarrassed to post any here)

Apparently at the end of Bayonetta 3, the game confirms her sexuality, which was a contested topic by fans, I guess. Or, maybe contested isn’t even the right word. A lot of people in the Bayonetta fandom believed strongly that Bayonetta had one specific sexual identity. Well, the game seemed to confirm that the opposite was true.

This blew up in various online venues and then went away, as all controversies do.

But I bring this up because an interesting permutation happened in the conversation. I’ll use bullet points again:

• We shouldn’t expect a profit seeking corporation to “do right” (a fraught term) by their characters.

• Media corporations are only interested in representation to the degree that it helps make them money.

• There are great works of art made by people of varying identities that people can seek out instead if they really want to see certain things represented in media.

• Videogames are not the place to seek great art or even the art that moves us.

Now, far be it from me to tell people to stop getting so attached to fictional people sold to us by massive media conglomerates. This whole newsletter is basically me getting emotional about imaginary people created to sell merchandise.

But I came to the conversation too late at that other venue so I’ll write about it here.

Basically, I think both sides of this are correct. If you want to see powerful art about identity, there are so many books and movies written that explore every conceivable kind of identity, whether the goal is experiencing the representation of sexual identity, gender identity, racial identity, and on and on.

There’s great stuff out there. There’s probably even a list of the 100 Best (fill-in-the-blank) Novels/Movies made by dozens of different websites. Here’s a real specific one right here. So it’s obviously very true that great art exists and it exists for the people who wanted Bayonetta to be something it ended up not being.

But I also think this is pretty flippant advice. If you told me that Star Trek was your favorite franchise and Spock is your all time favorite character but you’re not thrilled with what they did to him in one of the recent movies or TV Shows, it would be kind of shitty advice for me to just respond with, “Read a book instead, like an adult.”

Like, yeah, you could probably find what you were seeking in Spock in a novel instead, but that wasn’t really the question in the first place.

Now, I’ve criticized people who I think are overly attached to Marvel or Star Wars, but should I? Especially when I’m getting ready to publish an essay about how much I love Mario.

Big media conglomerates are never going to take risks with their properties. They want them to be immaculate, with no rough edges that may snag the wrong kind of controversy (some controversies are good - they want these), and immune from criticism. If you become deeply attached to a character owned by a giant company, they will likely let you down. Not just once, but continually. The bigger the company, the more likely this is.

At the same time, I think we should expect more from art, even commercial art primarily designed to sell toys to children. Commercial art, for all its many faults and obvious complicated motives, is the art we’re most likely to encounter throughout life. It’s also the first type of art that’s likely to have a big impact on how we see the world.

My life would be different had I not encountered the media I did as a child. Things like Ocarina of Time and Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula and Gundam Wing had powerful impacts on my life that I can’t easily shake off. I don’t know how different I’d be had I never encountered Final Fantasy IX or Xenogears or even Castlevania 64, but I can tell you that I still think about each of those games all the time. I still think about Dracula and Ocarina of Time and Gundam Wing probably every week.

And I’m an adult!

Commercial art can be good. Further, it should be good. We should demand that it be better, that it be more than it is, that it tell stories that matter, that tear our hearts out, that make us weep or pump our dang fists in the air like I did the first time I heard the Lost Boys chant Rufio in 1992 in the family room at the house I grew up in.

I don’t know nothing about Bayonetta. I honestly don’t care. I’ll probably never play these games. Not because of some narrative choice people on the internet don’t like, but because I’ve already spent the last ten years not playing them.

We can treat all these characters as cynical avatars to suck money from our wallets or the wallets of our parents, but we can also remember that real people made them. Real artists drew them and real artists breathed words into their animated faces, their digitized lungs. Real artists made them real enough for us to fill them with meaning.

Shigeru Miyamoto and teams of designers and artists made Zelda and Link, but so did I. I made them every day for years. Made them when I closed my eyes and let that melancholic world wash through me. I wouldn’t love them the way I do if I hadn’t. Wouldn’t still dream about Hyrule or consider buying a used N64 just so I can play Ocarina of Time again, the way I did as a child.

Art shapes us. It moves us. We live and breathe because of the art that we fell in love with. While it’s certainly true that the best and most meaningful art I’ve encountered was made by weirdos making art for impossibly niche categories of people, it’s also true that I can’t talk with most people about that stuff.

Not because I don’t want to, but because few people have buried themselves deep enough in the ground beneath a medium to excavate those things.

Most of you wouldn’t be here if I only wrote about Kim-Ki Duk or Yasunori Kawabata or zen poetry or Andrey Zvyagintsev or the way I’ve felt in beaten up cars listening to lovesick songs by deranged teenagers who helped me feel alive when I was a deranged teenager.

Commercial art helps build a shared language. We become a community through our ability to discuss experiences that were shared. Through sharing these stories that we all experienced, we come to understand so much more about ourselves and the culture that spat us out.

And so we should demand more from it. Especially since it’s the art we’re most likely to spend decades with, whether we want to or not.