The Fish In The Pond Do Not Exist For You To Eat
I got asked recently how I felt about women only agreeing to meet new dates at BDSM munches. It’s problematic, they said, because some people in the community don’t want to risk being outed by being at a public place with a bunch of openly-kinky people.
The thing is, on one level that’s an entirely legitimate question: What happens if the people you want to date are only willing to meet you in ways that you’re uncomfortable with? And the answer is, “Then you shouldn’t date those people.”
Which is sad. It’s always sad when you can’t date someone because they have criteria in place that filter you out. I have a huge crush on a porn star who never dates outside of the business, and that makes for Sad Ferretts. I have a huge crush on a femdom who can only date submissive men; that makes for Sad Ferretts. I have at least two women who I’ve had wonderful scenes with at conventions who don’t do long-distance relationships, and that makes for Sad Ferretts.
But there was something about the question that rubbed me the wrong way. I’ve read that question over five times (and I’m specifically not pointing you at it because I don’t feel like having this poor dude’s words dissected by a potentially-hostile crowd). But…
…I felt a certain outrage buried in that question.
I felt like there was an entitlement lurking within his words. As though women? Existed to date him. And like they were committing some sort of crime by filtering him out before they even gave him a shot.
And even if I’m misreading him (which I could be), I know a fair amount of guys who do actually believe that. The older dudes being upset that they can’t circulate at the young people’s munches. The guys seriously upset that nobody at the swingers’ clubs are interested in meeting up with unknowns. The MRAs who are furious at the model-quality bitches who aren’t interested in talking to them.
Again: That sucks. I’ve been in shallow dating pools. I’ve been the guy who can’t get a date because nobody wanted to date the pudgy weirdo. I’ve experienced your pain. And still….
Women do not exist for you to date.
A person does not exist to maximize your shot at fucking them. Treating them as though they’re committing some sort of violation by refusing to give you *your* shot reduces them to an object; they exist as some sort of sexy wrench to unstick your pipes, and by failing to carry out that function they have invalidated themselves.
No. What people exist for is to maximize their happiness.
The way they do that is by filtering out things that are unlikely to make them happy.
When I go to the movies, I don’t watch foreign dramas because past experience has shown I find them boring; I go to Guardians of the Galaxy instead. When I go out to a restaurant, I don’t go to fast food places because I find them greasy and uncomfortable.
Which isn’t to say that I’m correct! There’s definitely some foreign dramas I might enjoy! (Try Oldboy. Those Korean directors are magnificently fucked up.) And maybe somewhere there’s an awesome McDonald’s with comfortable chairs and waiters and a menu with hamburgers that don’t taste like old cardboard.
Yet the question is not, “Would I enjoy some foreign dramas?”
The question is, “If I am spending my time watching movies, what movie category is most likely to deliver me a movie I enjoy?”
I can watch a hundred hours of French drama and like maybe one movie. But I can watch a hundred hours of guys in skin-tight suits punching aliens and love thirty of them.
Call me shallow.
Yet based on those preferences, it’s an entirely sane move for me to go, “Yeah, I’m not watching French drama. It’s just not productive for me.” Which is unfair to the makers of French dramas, who rely to some extent on my paycheck, and may never be able to make a drama again if I can’t rally my friends to buy tickets to see *Le Frottage: The Master Of Rubby-Orlais.*
But you know what?
I am not obligated to make anyone happy but me.
And it is not wrong for me to say, “I don’t want to bother giving your French drama two hours of my life. It might be as awesome as you claim. But I have better leads, and an awful lot of French dramatists battering at my door telling me how different they are.
“Furthermore, you telling me, ‘But you owe me this shot!’ tells me that you don’t think of me as a person – you think of me as a medium to fulfill your desires.”
Likewise, women in the dating pool? They do not exist for you to empty your semen into, or onto. They exist because they’re trying to make themselves happy, and what makes them happy may be Not You. Furthermore, they may have tried a lot of men who are like you, and found your kind to be not the most efficient method of finding happiness.
Them screening you out is not a crime. For it to be a crime, they would have had some natural obligation to date anyone who felt like they had a shot at them – which they don’t, any more than you are obligated to go on a tedious date with every person, male or female, who finds you desirable. You can both say “No.” That’s the glory of this system: you get to choose where to put your best efforts.
(Even if, as I noted, those efforts may be wrong. People make dumbass mistakes. Considering they’re usually the ones who bear the brunt of the punishment for it, that’s their right as well.)
And yeah. Sometimes that means you get screened by lots of people, and go home lonelier more of the time than you’d like. As a guy pushing his late forties, I feel that pressure: looking at OKC, there’s precious few women I find attractive who want to date someone in their fifties, and soon I’ll cross that barrier. It’ll be lonelier. It’ll be a little less fulfilling, being me.
I’ll have to accept that reality. And, if I wish to keep dating, find new ways to make myself a compelling person. Because believing that “all women owe me a shot!” often comes with a healthy dosage of “I don’t have to do anything interesting to be worthy of attention!” and oh, my friend, you’d be far better served finding ways to make yourself more desirable than you are by seething with injustice over the fact that they wouldn’t even look at you.
But life? Is not always fair. And the best you can do personally is to try to find ways to mitigate that unfairness. Don’t complain that women have filtered you out; find some way to widen your personal pool of interest, so other women will find you intriguing.
Maybe by directing a French drama? No, no, a terrible idea: direct a superhero film instead.
(Cross-posted from an essay at FetLife.)
How To Save A Scene And Kill A Book
As I’ve evolved as a writer, it’s taking me longer and longer to write books. The reason for that is simple:
I can fix shitty scenes.
That sounds awesome, but it’s actually a huge problem. Because… well, let me show you a real-life example.
The book I am currently writing now is about a poor kid who stumbles into a job working at the greatest restaurant in the universe. (Yes, a classic variant on that ol “Willy Wonka” plot, but with more gay sex and molecular gastronomy.) And after he got the job, I had this great scene:
He would be sitting in front of five glasses of olive oil that the owner of the restaurant had given him to taste, as a preliminary test of how refined his palate is. (Hint: it isn’t.) He’d be worried about his future at the restaurant – but then a crazy cook would yank him aside, try to sucker him into looking after her hard-to-maintain starter dough while she went off to get drugs. She would succeed, and while she was off doing her drugs, our hero would meet his love interest.
Except that scene wasn’t working.
The problem was that there was no forward momentum – not only was there no tension to string us along through this (note that the hero does absolutely nothing in this scene – he’s a balloon, a patsy, the recipient of decisions as opposed to the maker of them), but it has no emotional rise and fall. What does Our Hero learn during this chapter? Our Hero needs to learn something in every chapter, so we can propel him forward in this boy-to-man storyline!
So after some analysis, I decided what he would learn would be the value of an Inevitable Philosophy. Our Hero is, as of yet, not particularly focused – but the crazy cook is. So the scene becomes about Our Hero learning that the crazy cook is incredibly devoted to her craft, and how he is inspired by her.
Wait. Then why is the crazy cook sneaking off to buy drugs?
Okay, so we change the crazy cook’s motivations. She is not just crazy for cuisine – she’s a cook because she’s obsessed with the concept of novelty, needing to try everything in the world! What better place to try every rare ingredient than in a wildly experimental kitchen like this? And while she loves cooking there’s a crazy new experience in some other part of the space station that she can only experience right now, and she needs Our Hero to watch her starter dough while she nips off to do this incredibly dangerous thing.
But why would Our Hero be inspired by that?
Okay, so we insert a flashback while he is pondering tasting the five glasses of olive oil – Our Hero’s stern parents have been established as religious zealots, but now we see the exact shape of their zealotry. They have an Inevitable Philosophy – a guiding goal that consumes them, has them take great risks to restore the fallen state of a once-great empire. (This is why Our Hero is poor – they’ve been dragging him from starship freighter to starship freighter, living in squalor because they will sacrifice anything to help their lost people.)
But Our Hero? Does not have an Inevitable Philosophy. This is a great disappointment to his parents.
And in meeting the crazy cook, Our Hero comes to realize that Inevitable Philosophies come in more variations than he knew. The crazy cook is absolutely devoted to the pursuit of new things. And if the crazy cook can have that kind of dedication, then maybe Our Hero can have an Inevitable Philosophy that’s different from what his parents can provide….
But even then, it makes the kitchen look a little dickish, if some random cook can sucker Our Hero in. We want the restaurant to be a place that Our Hero wants to stay, not some place where the unwary are preyed upon. So I tweak crazy cook’s approach – she’s not trying to rip him off per se, she’s just so consumed with her own need to get to this New Thing that she doesn’t quite think about what it would do to Our Hero.
So I fix that. And in the end, what now happens is that Our Hero and the crazy cook get into a furious debate about how selfish crazy cook is, and Our Hero realizes that her pursuit of new things is what gives her an unstoppable drive that Our Hero lacks. He is shamed, because she’s running off to risk her life to try some new and dangerous adventure, and he is so scared he’s unable to taste the glasses of olive oil, lest he discover he’s a failure. Crazy cook tells him that he’s not a failure, helps him try the newness of the olive oil.
Scene.
Not a bad scene. Could use some more tweaking. But it’s good enough to plop down and move ahead in this first draft.
The problem?
This chapter is supposed to be about the joy of discovering what it’s like to work in the most glorious restaurant in the world.
For the overall story to work, this chapter needs to actually be that first electric jolt of being escorted into Willy Wonka’s factory, because the kid needs to absolutely fall in love with this lifestyle. And what I have provided, in a chapter that I worked on for two weeks, is a maudlin scene about the kid’s sense of reluctance, and what a failure the kid is.
And the reason I kept scratching my head and going “No, no, this isn’t good enough” was because the scene was completely the wrong scene. What I need is a scene that plays to Our Hero’s strengths, one where he uses the kitchen to discover something really wonderful about himself, so we can go “Oh, yes, God, I want to be at this restaurant, look at how good it is for Our Hero!”
But because I’m a “good” writer, I kept fixing the scene, adding all the little mechanical beats to it that would make it work. As it stands, it’s a pretty good chapter. Maybe one of the best I’ve written. It’s got some of the best detail work I’ve ever done, some of the finest characterization, some of the best prose. But in the end, what we have here is an extremely good scene that shows a kid coming to a painful realization that he’s flawed – and what the book needs is a happy discovery of what he does well.
When they say “Kill your darlings,” this is what that means, my friends. All things serve the beam. And because I’m good enough to polish turds with extremely fine-grained paper, I wasted two weeks adding structural fixes to a scene that was never going to do what it should have.
That chapter’s in the kill file now. And God willing, I’ll learn the lesson that before I start tweaking, I should ask whether this scene would do what I wanted if and when I repaired it.
A Damn Disney Shame
“Disney’s character actors are required to stay in character at all times. When asked about anything outside of Disney, like current events or characters from non-Disney movies, they’re supposed to act like they don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Dammit. I so wanted to hear Goofy’s take on Guantanamo Bay.
This Season's Christmas Nails
So my mad manicurist Ashley has moved down to Posh in Strongsville, if you want to have some ridiculously painted nails. But this time, I took my friend Jen down for a Saturday Nail Date – which, as it turns out, was precisely the kind of relaxation I needed.
(Yes, I spent Saturday getting my nails done and beating Dragon Age. Pretty sure that’s not #GamerGate-approved-behavior, but there it is.)
Jen got her nails done first, with a Christmas-themed version thereof.
Which led to me being really super-happy when I discovered what happened when she texted with these nails:
I, on the other hand, literally, had decided on cool blue snowflake-nails. But as we were flipping through Jen’s Pinterest account (seriously, now I’m tempted to get a Pinterest account, if only to keep track of cool nails to try), I got distracted by a nebula technique that Ashley emulated:
This turned out to be not quite what was in the Pinterest, but still cool. Ashley tried her best to do a “flick” pattern for tiny stars spread across the spectrum, but her first four attempts weren’t working with her materials at hand. So she stippled with a spread-out paintbrush, making them still very pretty but not quite a nebula, in my opinion. But I love ’em anyway, because they’re super-pretty.
Yay for Christmas nails!
Dragon Age: Inquisition – The Final Review
If the new Dragon Age were an Elder Scrolls game, I’d crown it the best Elder Scrolls ever. Alas, this one feels more like Dragon Age Lite than Skyrim Plus to me. And while I finished it this weekend after sinking 75+ hours into the game, I feel vaguely sick, as though I’d binge-eaten Pringles potato chips for two weeks’ running: not high cuisine, but a greasy fast-food experience that was satisfying but somehow never filling.
The reason why is that past Dragon Ages were all about the story. The first Dragon Age was so amazingly rooted in character that it gave us six – six! – different opening sequences to get through, depending if you were a Dalish Elf or a Dwarf Noble or a Magi. There was an elaborate story that really rooted us into the events of the day.
And story is, for me, the most critical element of every game. Because every videogame is fundamentally, depressingly, repetitive. If I play Borderlands or Halo, I will be shooting infinite men in the face. If I play a Mario game, I will jumping on infinite Koopas in the face. If I play Skyrim or Dragon Age, I will be fireballing infinite men in the face. Videogames are an endless grind of doing the same task over and over again.
I had a friend, once, who told me that he couldn’t get into Arkham Asylum because of “All the cut-scenes.” He wanted to focus on the mechanics of the game, which is why Halo was so perfect for him: there was just enough story to justify him moving to a new map where he could shoot aliens in the face with increasing precision. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
But for me, story provides the reason for the repetition. Yes, I’m going to fireball twenty thousand Darkspawn to the face over the course of this game. I am going to run across the map and fetch a foozle five hundred times. But why? I am an actor. I need motivation. If I know that I am fireballing this hundred Darkspawn to save the village of Trenzlor, then for me, I’ll do it – not because I like endlessly mashing the X button, but because I want to be the hero of goddamned Trenzlor. The more you can make me worry about the safety of Trenzlor, the more you give me a reward that feels like saving Trenzlor had an effect upon the game-world I live in, the more I will feel rewarded.
The previous two Dragon Ages had repetition, but they also had a story intertwined heavily with their quests. And when I finally collected the ten nug statues, I was frequently given more story – a sense that I’d helped push this Dwarf into a different career, the idea that the Grey Wardens now thought better of me, more conversational dialogues and cut-scenes. There was a reward system that was heavily intertwined with narrative.
Whereas this new Dragon Age, well… it has some of that. But the balance has shifted away from story rewards and towards game rewards. This is why a lot of essays have accused Dragon Age of having a filler problem – now I’d say about 65% of the quests have zero story reward at all.
Like the Rifts, one of the main story processes. There are about 125 Rifts you’re expected to close, and every damn one is the same: fight a wave of monsters that comes through the Rift, fight a second wave of monsters that comes through the Rift, close the Rift. In return for this, you gain +1 Power. “Power” is supposedly a measure of how potent your kingdom is – kind of a story thing, right? – but there’s no story reward aside from unlocking new missions. Nobody ever says, “Wow, thanks for saving me from all these Rifts!” Nothing ever happens to advance the plot: you can literally close all 125 rifts and still be in Act One of the game. The rifts never mutate in response to anything you do.
It feels really static.
And add that to the fact that you can have a story-based quest and then forget entirely what you were supposed to be doing because you got lost on the fucking terrible map, thus stripping away the story reward to leave you with a bare-bones “find the yellow dot” experience, and you wind up with a tale that feels very thin. Even some of the “ally” quests are reduced to foozle-finders – oh, Dorian! I’m supposed to win your love by killing these three groups of Venatori mages! And my reward for that is… +1 approval for each group killed. No new intimacy, no new cut-scenes, just +1 approval.
Dullness ensues.
Maybe if the central tale was as rich as Dragon Age Origins or Dragon Age 2, both of which had super-strong narratives, this could be balanced out. But the central narrative is weirdly unbalanced. Inquisition actually starts out with a tabula rasa character – you have no idea who your dude is beyond a paragraph of boilerplate text – and then you’re given no opportunity to make meaningful choices until ten hours in. So you’re following a guy around who literally has no personality beyond what you choose from the Noble/Snarky/Greedy conversational wheel. (Trusting DA, I thought this purposeful emptiness was leading up to a Big Spoiler that would show me that my dude was Not What He Thought He Was, but – mild spoiler – no, it’s just narrative laziness.) So I didn’t care about my guy until the end of the first Act, and thanks to wandering around endlessly in the Hinterlands, that was 20 hours in.
…but while the first act is one of the best Dragon Age moments ever, with you facing down the Big Bad in a truly cinematic spectacle, the story dribbles to a close. Events are poorly explained. Promises are not kept. There is much talk of the Big Bad’s plans, which sound really magnificent, but he never gets close to doing that – and more importantly, after much blathering on about the nature of the Gods, you don’t get close to seeing any of the questions he raised answered. (First rule of writing: if you tell someone about a place extensively, the reader kind of expects to go there at some point.) The biggest and most interesting choice that gets made in the game has much more of an effect upon [CHARACTER REDACTED], who was my favorite character in a past game, than it does upon you – which just serves to make you wonder who the hero of this game actually was.
(Though I loved the post-credits ending. I did. And I loved seeing what happened with [CHARACTER REDACTED], who I hope is the hero of the next Dragon Age. I just wanted more answers.)
Don’t get me wrong; what they do, they do magnificently. I loved my romance quest so hard. And some of the others are great – in particular, the way they handle BDSM dynamics with Iron Bull’s romance is nuanced and expressive. Varric’s characterization is brilliant. The politics at Orlais were wonderful. What Bioware gets right, they get right better than anyone. But that rightness is like having the occasional act of Shakespeare buried in a massive tome of 50-Shades-of-Grey-fanfic – for every great moment I treasured, there were five fetchquests that I just killed time doing.
Which leads us to the weirdest action of Dragon Age: the War Council. Which I have such mixed feelings about.
At first, I thought the War Council was just an absolute waste of time. You have three agents, who you can assign to various tasks, which are completed by… waiting. If you hang around and do nothing for a small War Council quest of 12 minutes, the quest will complete and you’ll get a small reward. Or you can assign your agent to a big quest that takes five hours and get a big reward!
I thought “Christ, they’re just acknowledging that this game is to kill time.”
But as the game went on, I started to feel rewarded. I was going to spend four hours in the Exalted Plains anyway! It was nice to come home to something after grinding! It felt less like busywork and more like another layer of gratification, so I began to warm to it.
Then the weird thing happened. I was romancing [CHARACTER], and our story had progressed far enough that more options were appearing. And a new quest quietly appeared on the War Council: Get her family crest.
And I realized that I had people working for me now. The War Council wasn’t killing time; it was a way of setting the priorities of my new organization, which was pretty damn sweet. And so I could use it to do all sorts of favors for people I liked, having my assistants work on their needs, and that felt like a strange empowerment. As the all-powerful Inquisitor I was, strangely, lacking the power to call people in to talk to me – no, I had to spend five minutes manually running out to the edge of the damn parapets every time I wanted to talk to Cullen – but I could have my agents out doing my bidding while I was slaughtering Templars. So good! And I felt like it was a very potent tool that I wanted more of.
But then I had one story-based mission where I was investigating the weakness in a Big Bad’s armor. And I had to use the War Council to ferret that out. Except I’d assigned all my agents to super-long quests for max rewards, so I had no free agents. So I had to do meaningless filler quests for two hours until someone freed up – for no apparent reason, I couldn’t say “Wait, this is more important, come back.” (Which made even less sense since I could talk to my agents in independent conversations at the castle.) And then I finally got the agent free, and waited for half an hour – again, doing filler quests, though all I wanted to do was face down that Big Bad – and discovered that I had to do two more War Council missions, waiting around for another hour total before I finally got to unlock the Big Bad’s weakness.
….Which did, I admit, help considerably in that battle. But I’d gone from “Oh, I’m doing optional quests for my friends, how lovely!” to “Jesus, why do I have to wait another 12 minutes for Cullen to unlock this thing?” And so, in the end, I was totally weirded on the War Council. It’s a good idea. But it’s also a chokepoint. And that chokepoint got very frustrating at other times.
In the end, I’m harsher on DA than I could be. It was a good game – not Game of the Year Game, maybe, but good enough. But Dragon Age comes from a heritage of games that had strong story, which is why we played them, and what we got here was a good story interlaced with a lot of stuff that’s not story at all. It’s watered down. And putting the Dragon Age name on a game gives us expectations, and what I expect of DA is a narrative that locks me in.
The narrative didn’t. I gave it until the end. It had some nice moments. I’ll always remember you fondly, Act I. But I did what the game wanted me to and min/maxed with a Knight-Enchanter (thanks, Michael R. Underwood, for clueing me into how massively overpowered that class is), and took down the villain without ever even drinking a potion. And I got one nice moment of mystery and miracle at the absolute end – which, in the style of this game, nobody ever bothered to ask me how I felt about it.
I like it when they ask. I do.