Han Solo Is Not A Lead Character: Why SOLO Bombed At The Box Office

So Solo “bombed” at the box office this weekend, which is to say it brought it more money than all the people reading this article will ever earn if they all put their paychecks together.  Still, for a Star Wars movie, “half of what Rogue One brought in” is not good news for Disney, so everyone’s scrambling to explain why Solo disappointed. 

Here’s my theory: It’s not that Alden Ehrenreich does a bad job as Han Solo (he does well), or that the troubled production brought bad vibes to the box office (though that didn’t help), or that the movie’s terrible (the first half of the film is flat-out wretched, but once Donald Glover steps in as Lando everything smooths out delightfully).  

It’s that Han Solo is not a lead character, and should never have been given a movie to star in.  

Now, if you’re not paying attention, you might think that Han is a lead character – after all, isn’t he one of the three iconic characters from the original Holy Trilogy?  And yes, Han is certainly prominent.  The movie couldn’t function without him.  

But the role Han Solo plays is not lead.  Leia and Luke are the leads.  

Han is there to push Leia and Luke’s characterization, forcing them to make decisions that in turn make them grow.  Which makes him a supporting character.  

This theory is brought to you by a YouTube video called “Pirates of the Caribbean: Accidentally Genius,” which is an hour-long dissection of why Pirates is so good – and, by proxy, why all the sequels fail.  And one of the main takeaways from that close analysis is that the iconic Captain Jack Sparrow ’s main function is to push Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann into questioning their approaches to life. 

Will Turner is a quiet, talented craftsman, but he doesn’t know when to break society’s rules to get ahead.  Captain Jack is the guy who shows Will the benefits of cheating.  

Elizabeth Swann is a  woman who’s been brought up to believe that she’ll be a trophy wife, though she longs to be something else.  Captain Jack’s incompetence and lack of ambition helps push her into stretching her muscles until she becomes an active participant in her life.  

And Captain Jack Sparrow is… clever.  He remains clever.  But in terms of character arc, Jack Sparrow learns jack squat in the course of the movie.  He’s fundamentally static – which is good, because we don’t want him to change!  What we love about him is that he’s a wastrel, a backstabber, he’s reliably unreliable.

Giving him a character arc is going to be unsatisfying, because any change we make to him will inevitably move him in a direction we don’t like.  If Jack learns to be more responsible?  Then he’s not Captain Jack Sparrow.  If he learns to be more backstabby?  Then he’s an outright villain.  

You don’t want to give Captain Jack Sparrow a main storyline, because right now, where he is, is literally the most fun place he can be.  He’s perfect as-is, because he’s fun to watch – but put him on the main stage, where the emotional backbone of the movie rests upon us being invested in having Captain Jack evolve into someone new, and we discover there’s a reason why Will Turner isn’t as show-stealing as Captain Jack but is much more fundamental.  

(As, in fact, we did discover how disappointing it was, squeezing poor Jack into the role of “hero.”  Even if the first Pirates is so damn good that people keep shuffling back to the theaters in the wan hope that the next sequel will be even 20% as good as the original.)  

No.  Captain Jack Sparrow is there to pressure other people into evolving.  That’s a beautiful, noble role.  Every bad decision he makes is in order to force someone else to grow in order to make up for Jack’s flaws, and as such Captain Jack Sparrow is the ultimate plot device.  Throw him into every pirate movie, he’s gloriously useful!

You just don’t make him the center of the damn film.  

Now.  That’s also Han Solo’s role.  

Han’s there to contrast against Luke’s farmboy optimism, and to force Luke to grow.  It’s Han’s refusal to get involved that forces Luke to learn how to convince smugglers, and it’s Han’s refusal to go on the final mission to the Death Star that makes Luke seem more (suicidally) heroic.  

Likewise, Han’s there in movie #2 to take duty-bound Leia and force her to choose between what she needs to do (smooch Han) and what she wants (lead the Rebellion), leading to a kick-ass scene at the end Empire.  (“I know.”)

Which is not to say that Han doesn’t get some character development – he does, because those first two films are beautifully plotted.  He has a very narrow change from “cynical” to “not cynical” in A New Hope, and then goes from “I stick my neck out for no one” to “self-sacrifice” in ESB.  And then…. doesn’t have much to do in Return of the Jedi aside from be snarky, because that’s as far as Han can go.  

Like Jack Sparrow, there’s only so much you can change Han before he becomes… well, not Han Solo.  Much like Will Turner, Luke can go all the way from “dream-struck farm boy” to “badass black-clad destroyer of Hutts” to “cynical island-bound suicide,” and (with varying levels of success) those are all part of his evolution.  Part of what we love about Luke is that we get to watch him grow.

Likewise, to a lesser extent, Leia.  She’s all duty in the first one, reluctantly romantic in the second, and by the third there’s the vague promise she might be the next Jedi.  Leia didn’t get as much of a chance to grow, but motion was built into her arc.  

Han, however?  We don’t want to watch him grow.  We learned everything we needed to know about him before he walked out of that cantina, and we loved him as-is.  And if you think you can spitball something that’s more appealing than Harrison Ford in his most iconic state, well, shucks, you give it a shot.  But I bet you any change you made to Han frickin’ Solo would be way less satisfying than Han Shot First Solo.  

So where’s a prequel get to go?   

I mean, you’ve got limited range.  Because it’s a prequel, we know Han has to end up cynical and self-involved.  Having that be seen as a fall from grace – i.e., “Han was in a wonderfully happy place and wound up embittered” – would be a hell of a downer film for Star Wars’ light froth.  

So where do you go?  

The moment the film was announced, I said, “Okay, Han’s gonna go from a doofy kid to an experienced smuggler, because that’s really the only story they can tell.” And without too many spoilers – yeah, that’s what happened.  

I think the reason Solo wasn’t met with a lot of enthusiasm was because audiences are smarter than you think.  And people intuitively realized there were one of two outcomes here: either we get a Han Solo that’s not the Han Solo we love, or we get the Han Solo we love in a by-the-rails movie with no character-based surprises along the way.  

Now, we do get a few character-based surprises in Solo – but significantly, none of them have to do with Han, who is theoretically the guy who should be surprising us.  The lead role in Solo falls consistently flat despite Alden’s heroic efforts because what you have in Solo is a static character who’s meant to surprise other people into adapting to his shortcomings, and you’ve given us an entire movie where we instead watch Han dork it up. 

(Because I don’t know where people got the idea that Han was mega-competent – if you watch any movie with Han Solo in it, it’s literally his job to screw up whenever they need to raise the stakes.)  

As such, the pitch of the movie was underwhelming, feeling more like a marketing team than from someone who understood Star Wars.  As other, wiser, folks have noted, a Leia movie would have drawn cheers – not just because Han’s another straight white dude, but because Leia had room to maneuver.  

As it was, what we got in Solo was a film that spends a lot of time asking “What don’t we know about Han Solo?” – questions like “Where’d he get his gun?” and “Where did those golden dice come from?” – and not a lot of time asking questions like “What do we like about Han Solo?”  A smarter prequel would have put Han in the backseat again, the way he was in Force Awakens and the original trilogy, to pressure someone new into becoming something – as I think Ron Howard tried to do with the screenplay he was given, but by then it was too late. 

Now.  To reiterate.  Solo is not a bad movie.  I enjoyed it a lot.  But it is a slight movie, which is a bad thing when you’re an entry in the most famous space opera of all time.  It’s space opera, with huge sweeping sagas and great character turns and magnificent sacrifices, and in Solo what we have is a guy who goes from “less competent” to “more competent.”  

And I’d argue that the reason Solo doesn’t seem like a Star Wars film to many people is because of that choice of lead.  They chose a guy who wasn’t meant to be center stage.  They didn’t know that some characters are popular because they don’t have to do the heavy work of evolving into new people – folks like Han and Jack Sparrow steal the show because supporting characters are the Peter Pans of the stage, they never have to grow up, and as such they can be funny and flawed and beautiful and memorable and wonderful. 

I love Han Solo.  He’ll always be my co-pilot.  

But they shoulda given the film to someone else.  

Yes, I Love The Royal Wedding

My grandmother lived next to me, in the duplex.  We lived in our own lightless world.

Because I had school on the far side of town, and had to get up at 5:30 in the morning to take all the buses to get to school.  Nobody was up.  Walking to the bus was a grim, dim experience, trudging past endless rows of darkened houses; it felt like the world had shut down, and I was the only person alive.

My grandmother was up, though.  She was the only light on in the whole world.

So I walked next door and parked myself next to her, her jigsaw puzzles, and her coffee.  And we’d chat.

My grandmother loved her tabloids.  And I loved to read anything.

So we’d chat about celebrities – “You see what Madonna did?” “Oh yes.” “Well, I don’t see anything wrong with that.” “Neither do I!  She has a right!” – and we’d discuss which papers were good and which were trash (The Star was invariably accurate, The Enquirer was always spreading lies), and we’d debate which celebrity marriages would make it and which would crash.

They weren’t big conversations; just little passing discussions as she was putting together her jigsaw puzzle and I was frantically scrambling to do my homework.

But to a friendless boy who entered a bubble of isolation for two hours on his commute, those tiny discussions were life.

And of course, the crown jewel of our conversations were Diana and Charles.  We loved the royal family, because they were the perfect celebrity – they were born to the lifestyle, so it didn’t seem quite as cruel to look in on them.  They knew the deal: they got to be rich, in exchange for living in a gilded cage.  And the struggles as they tried to be stoic and yet remained relentlessly human were fascinating – they were held to flawless standards, yet griped and bitched and dorked it up despite all that training.

(Now that I think about it, that’s pretty much where my concept that no human is a paragon of virtue comes from, because honestly, with all the pressures applied to the royal family, if you could squeeze the humanity out of someone to make a person conform flawlessly to arbitrary rules, the royal family would do it.  But no; they flailed in the press’s eye all the time, merely by making mistakes that ordinary people wouldn’t have thought twice about.)

And Charles and Diana, well, that was a fairybook gone wrong.  We loved Diana like the tabloids did, we loved the ordinary girl made into a star, and I did not yet understand how relentlessly destructive celebrityhood could be.  I think of Ta-Nehesi Coates’ words on Kanye West: “There’s ample evidence, beyond West, that humans were not built to withstand the weight of celebrity.”

The tale of Diana was unusual and resonant because our journey, the journal of the readers, mirrored Diana’s perfectly.    Usually the tabloids get something dramatically wrong in any story, but in this case everything they got wrong was something that Diana personally believed at the time: that Charles genuinely loved her, that being made into a princess would be a magical goodness, that the tabloids were good and the royal family was something more than a bonsai-contorted remnant of humanity, twisted into position by tradition and remoteness.

And as the reports came in and Charles made his mistakes (“Are you in love?” “Whatever ‘in love’ means,” he said), Diana’s commoner dreams were dashed in real-time with our own hopes so that our heartbreaks were intertwined.

She became the Peoples’ Princess because we had travelled one step behind her.  My grandmother and I knew she had been foolish, but we also had been foolish, and so we forgave her.

But I remember those early days of Diana, back when we were all flush with hope and dreams; I remember getting up with my grandmother at 4:30 in the morning, each of us setting our alarms, to get up early on a school day of all things.  I remember both of us sitting rapt by the television, watching the spectacle quietly, knowing nobody else we knew gave a crap about this wedding but it was a big deal to us and so we watched it in this tiny, dark little pre-morning world that was shared by us and us only.

I was late to school that day.

It was worth it.

And so to this day, I know more about the royals than most people would suspect of me.  Back when I was a punk, with a torn T-shirt and piercings and a regular mosh pit, and I still would spout very firm opinions on Camilla whenever anyone brought it up.   (I’m not excusing what she and Charles did, but honestly, she gets shit on so much for not being Diana, and honestly, who could?)

And now that I’m 48 and a fiercely-liberal science fiction writer, I suspect a lot of my friends will be thrown by my deep and abiding love for the royals.  But I adore the Queen, and I’ve been hoping the best for Harry, and honestly William and Catherine leave me cold but why am I so enwrapped in silly gossip?

I could justify it, but really, it’s just an old habit – one that makes me happy.  I think of my Gramma, and I think of that world we created, and it’s still alive even if only I’m here to sustain it.  (Though to be fair, my wife also harbors this secret love, which is just proof we’re suited for each other.)

So tomorrow, I’ll be getting up early, and turning on our television, and I can’t wait to see what dress Meghan wears.  We’ll be gossiping at the ridiculous hats, and seeing how uncomfortable Charles looks in the role of father as he walks her down the aisle, and it’ll be early with the lights all off and on some level I’ll be nine years old again and having brief talks with my Gramma.

Long live the Queen.

Long live these odd traditions.

I’m In A Kickstarter For Compassionate Fantasy Stories About Mentally Ill Characters! Check It Out.

I’ve had a decades-long battle with mental health, struggling with Seasonal Affective Disorder and social anxiety.  As such, I can tell you that the ways that people with mental illness are portrayed in fiction are… not good.

Usually, the folks with mental illness are the villain, when in real life they’re far more likely to be abused than to abuse. And if they’re the hero, the mental illness is something to be overcome, where they get to the end of the story and break free from all this annoying trouble to never feel sad again!

(That, or they realize that medication is for chumps and they chuck away the drugs to emerge wiser and stronger, which is something that diabetics and heart patients should also do, apparently.)

So anyway, my friend Vivian Caethe got sick of that and decided to Kickstart an anthology of compassionate mental illness portrayals in fantasy settings – and she asked me to write a story for it.  So assuming it funds, I’ll be telling you the story of Rivan and Eleanor, two suicidal wizards who fight to save the world because their madness gives them unique skills.

And the anthology also has some other pretty kick-ass authors like Cat Rambo and Jody Lynn Nye, and the stories will be looked over by a professional psychologist before publication to ensure authenticity.  And if you’re a writer who likes submitting to anthologies, yes, if it funds it’ll be accepting submissions.

As it is, Unlocking the Magic is 70% funded, so it’s almost sure to get there – but I think it’ll also be a great read.  So if it sounds up your alley, take a look!

I Aspire To Be As Good As I Tell You I Am.

“You’re dating Ferrett?” people would ask my long-time girlfriend when they found out we were dating. “I’ve read his essays on polyamory!  They’re so sweet! He must be wonderful!”

She’d always pause and shuffle her feet. “Well,” she’d finally say, “There’s a bit of a gap between writer-Ferrett and actual Ferrett.”

Which is true. I mean, I told you a story yesterday where I was extremely generous with my wife’s time, and I’ll tell you the heartwarming lessons where Ferrett Thought Something Dumb and then Ferrett Learns Better and then Everything Is Okay In Weaselland again, but…

Everything I write about is a curated version of who I am.

The art of the essay is boiling things down into a single gem of philosophy, and sometimes my life is too painful and messy to extract a coherent thought. Writing about the argument I had with my ex just before we broke up, a splintered screaming match where we both acted like assholes and I don’t know that either of us learned any lessons from it?

What’s the sense in exposing my personal life to present that ugliness to you?

I do have moments of genuine connection, sure, but there’s also the many more moments of what I aspire to be and fall short – I meant to schedule our next get-together but instead got caught up chasing this new flirtation, I meant to listen their complaints but instead I snapped at them for inconveniencing me, I meant to be okay with them dating people but instead guilt-tripped them for not paying attention to meeeeeeeeee.

Writing’s about presenting moments of change. And some shit doesn’t change. Relationships are an endless struggle to battle back the old habits, and there’s often nothing new to report, you just know you shouldn’t do that next time.

There’s ugly arguments in La Casa McJuddMetz, often instigated by me. Stupidities perpetrated, repeatedly, also by me. Thoughtless cruelties I enacted. And yet those aren’t really essays because there’s nothing exceptional about those moments, I just stayed out too late with a date again and forgot to call, again, and Jesus how could you and you’re right Jesus how could I.

So when I write about a beautiful moment I had, and people comment, “THIS IS THE KIND OF POLY I ASPIRE TO BE,” I always cringe and go, “So do I” – because that moment is so beautiful simply because it’s not the usual mixture of lovely moments interspersed with oh fuck I did it again, didn’t I?

Yet there is good news, because writing about what we aspire to be encourages us to be better. The nicest compliment my girlfriend ever gave me was when she said that the gap between writer-Ferrett and actual Ferrett had narrowed to the point where they were almost the same. I’ve become a much different person over the last ten years, in part because I keep holding myself to high standards.

But the problem with that is, if you tune in only occasionally, you come away with the impression that Whoah, this glorious parade of beauty is what polyamory is supposed to BE.

It should.

But I struggle to get there most days myself.

The reality is, well, reality. I worry that society has this binary focus, where someone is either a PARAGON OF BEAUTY WHO DOES POLY WELL or A STUPID FUCKUP WHO RUINS POLY FOR EVERYONE ELSE. And the truth is, if you talk to my exes – or even my current partners – you’ll find plenty of times I did not provide that glorious polyvana and instead was insecure, clutching, nasty, untruthful.

The good news, such as it is, is so were they.

We all blow it on occasion.

That’s just how this is.

So aspire, man. If you like what I do, use that as your lighthouse to navigate by. Just realize the lighthouse is actually another ship bobbing on a turbulent sea, one that occasionally shines bright and occasionally has to pry its wrecked self off the rocks.

But there will be arguments. There will be dreary fuckups. There will be ignoble breakups. I have ’em, you have ’em, everyone has ’em.

Keep those aspirations high, though, so when you screw up you remember to better. I think that’s the best we got.

What’s It Like Having A Heart Attack When Your Wife’s Visiting Her Boyfriend? One Of The Most Polyamorous Stories I Know.

When I had my heart attack five years ago, my wife was out of town visiting her boyfriend. Which led to an interesting dilemma:

When do I tell her what’s going on?

Because my heart attack was a subtle heart attack. It was not clutching my chest and shouting, “THIS IS THE BIG ONE!” It was lying in bed with a dull ache that kept me from falling back to sleep. I almost ignored it, but then I thought: “You know, the last time you ignored a chronic pain, it turned out you’d been walking around with a burst appendix for four days.”

(True story. I also likely burst said appendix in a mosh pit at a Rise Against concert with my daughter, but that’s another tale for another time.)

So I went into the ER, convinced I was wasting my cash. And the ER wasn’t sure, either; my EKG was fine, my blood levels were normal.

Do I ruin my wife’s weekend – she only gets out there every couple of months – for what might be a false alarm and some annoyingly large bills? I mean, if I’m in no actual danger, then there’s no sense making her worry. But if there’s a risk and something bad does happen, shouldn’t she deserve to know?

I finally texted her around 3:00 in the afternoon, when they said they were thinking about keeping me overnight, and it had become obvious that this was at least serious enough to discuss. I told her that this was a precautionary measure, everyone was just being super-careful – despite two rounds of blood exams and a battery of tests, nobody had found anything yet. Our daughter was here looking after me and so was our friend Heather, and I was fine.

(Which I was. Because I grew up with my Uncle Tommy, who was a hemophiliac who had regular hospital stays thanks to his condition, I find hospitals to be comforting. If I was scared, things would have been very different.)

She opted not to drive back. I was probably fine, and in good hands.

It wasn’t until my eleventh (!) hour cooling my heels in a spare bed that they finally, finally, confirmed the enzymes in my blood that my heart was in trauma. I was indeed having a minor heart attack, and sure enough the pain tolerance that let me walk through a burst appendix was shrugging off the cries of thrashing cardiac muscle.

But by then it was 11:00 at night. And she was three hours away.

“Don’t drive down now,” I told her. “You’ll put yourself in danger, driving sleepy and scared, and all you’ll do is sit in an uncomfortable chair next to me while I doze. I need you tomorrow morning, so get rest, get up early, and come to see me before I go in for my catheterization.”

“You sure?”

I pondered it. “I’m sure,” I told her. “I’d rather you get here rested and without a car wreck.”

And here’s where the polyamory kicks in.

She snuggled into bed with her sweetie, anxious and concerned. And her boyfriend said, “You know, I was thinking of putting the moves on you, but it feels a little disrespectful.”

“Are you kidding?” she shot back. “I guarantee you he told me to stay here because he knew sex with you would be the best kind of distraction for me. If you don’t sleep with me now, he’s gonna be pissed.”

And she was right. Because polyamory, for us at least, is about priorities. There wasn’t much I could do for her in that hospital bed except make her life worse, and though I wanted her – I always do – I didn’t need her then.

Whereas what she needed was an intimacy that I, at the moment, could not provide, and someone I personally trusted was there to deliver that. Because while Gini would return to dote upon me while I had a triple bypass and a hellish recovery, on that particular night my needs could be banked and hers prioritized to help bolster her against what was sure to be more stressful days to come.

We joke about it. Because yeah. On the night of my heart attack, she was with her boyfriend. And that was where I wanted her to be. Because I loved her.

That’s hard to understand if you’re not polyamorous – or if you’re more terrified of hospitals than I am. But it’s real. And it was good, and continues to be. Because for us, the dating isn’t something we do when we’ve got spare time – the dating is rooted deeply in our lives, with partners who are friends and support methods, and when we’re in trouble they’re not jettisoned aside but drawn closer.

It’s not always easy, mind you. Sometimes poly’s hard as a heart attack. But when it works, it makes all the other crises so much easier.

Why God Of War Is A Better Family Drama Than Any Oscar Movie

God of War is about a Greek demigod who slaughtered his entire pantheon in a blur of rage and revenge – sort of like Kill Bill, but bloodier.  But that’s in the past – now he’s settled down with his son, grieving because his wife has died, and he has to take his kid, who he barely knows, to the top of the mountain to scatter her ashes.

Oh, and he has to kill about a thousand people on the way.  You don’t get anywhere in videogames without slaughtering people.  It’s like Chinese kung-fu films where you can’t get a tuna at the market without exchanging a flurry of blows with the fishmonger; the violence is built-in.

Which is weird, because the game is violent and ridiculous and over-the-top, complete with quicktime events where you literally rip someone’s shoulder off and stomp their face into jelly.  But the story….

The story is deep and affecting, because you have this man who only speaks in violence.  He’s old, wrinkled, scarred.  Words are unfamiliar territory for him – and though most of what he says involves telling his young son not to ask questions, when he speaks it is with a slow pause, like some rusty engine starting up slowly, because he has not mastered the art of translating emotions into words.

He’d left all of that skill to the mother, who is now dead.  And the son respects his father, but also fears him, and does not understand him, and there’s this complex dance between them as the son tries to be a man but knows instinctively that he does not want to be this man – but he won’t get his father’s approval unless he becomes his father.

Which is, ironically, the last thing the father wants – but he can’t see how his efforts not to speak of his bloody past are grooming his son to become another brutal killer.

This is, in its own way, more affecting than any Oscar family drama.  And I don’t say that as someone who disdains Oscar family dramas; for the last twenty years my wife and I have watched every one of the Best Picture nominees as a winter ritual, and Moonlight remains a brilliant, affecting film.

But God of War has an advantage that Oscar movies do not: it is a videogame.

It takes advantage of the medium brilliantly.

Films, by their nature, are handicapped because they cannot be boring for too long or they lose most of their audience.  So they have to compress humanity down into beats and scenes, because all a film has is dialogue and actors to keep your attention. Every scene has to be interesting, even if it’s slow, and most of them have to advance the plot.

So one scene becomes the stand-in for a lot of repetitious scenes.  We open on a kid eating cereal in a shitty-looking apartment, making himself breakfast and getting himself ready for school, and the camera pans to the mom passed out drunk on the couch and we go, Oh, this is how the kid wakes up every morning.  And if he goes to school, and bullies shove him around, we go Oh, this is what a typical day at school for him is like.

But movies don’t deal well in typical.  If the entire story was the kid showing up at school on Monday and getting bullied, and showing up on Tuesday and getting bullied, and showing up on Wednesday and getting bullied, and showing up on Thursday and getting bullied, and admit it you’re already skimming this sentence because you know Friday’s coming, he’s getting bullied, when’s the change?

Films and novels consist of interesting moments, and if those moments are repetitive, we lose the momentum.

To compensate, films have gotten very good at showing you the one scene to show you what the baseline is like, before moving on to the next scene where they show you something different.

But what they’re not good at is that real-life sense of tedium.  That repetitious sense of waking up for the seventh day in a row to find that your mom is still passed out on the couch, and you’ve had this same conversation with her about needing to drink less a thousand times, with all the variations, and there’s no forward movement because that’s who she is and she can’t be anything but that, but you still have to have the conversation again anyway.

You know what makes videogames interesting, though?

They’re more than just story.

As noted, videogames can be interesting when they’re not telling stories, because they can disperse the story across puzzles and battles.  In God of War, yes, I’m talking to my kid – but to get up the mountain I also have to slaughter these draugr who want to kill us, and then I have to row the boat across the lake to get the gatebreaker chisel, and then I have to figure out how to get through the door to the next challenge.

And in between, Kratos and Atreus talk.

And the talks are pretty much the same.  Atreus, the kid, wants to know what’s going on – he’s ten, he’s curious, he’s hopeful.  Kratos, the dad, fears all of this curiosity will get him killed, quiet down, focus on battle.

Which means there is a staticness to those conversations that, emotionally speaking, you experience in real time while movies have to short-hand.

I’ve spent twenty, maybe thirty hours with Kratos and Atreus.  And there’s been some progress – but honestly, I want to shake Kratos because I get Atreus’ frustration with his dad first-hand.  I’ve seen that wall of manly bravado keeping his son at a distance when all Kratos wants is emotional connection, and I’ve watched him do it for long after it’s become apparent to everyone that it’s not working, and it’s monotonous and sad and dysfunctional but because – like real life – there’s other shit to do, it’s not the whole of who they are.

This bad relationship of theirs is a background noise in a very real and visceral sense.  In most movies, that relationship would have to be front and center because you only have two hours, you have to have movement.  But in thirty hours of game, there’s probably been two hours just of repetitive emotional beats grinding in just how relentlessly not working their dynamic is, and yet that repetition is not boring because in between them I’m also smashing trolls.

Which isn’t to say that movies can’t gain an emotional beat from repetition.  Of course they can, and do, and cinemaphiles will point out movies that accomplish it.

But what I am saying is that the emotional effect of the game is deeper because you spend more time with it.  Because when Kratos finally does start to change, even if that change is a finger-sized crack in a glacier-sized mound of machismo, it has a profound impact because you’ve spent almost four days of work shifts in close shoulder-to-shoulder proximity with this dude and after this much time you weren’t sure he could change.

(Even if you knew that, like movies, the plot would of course depend on him changing.  It’s never about what’s inevitable in stories, it’s how you feel when those moments arrive.)

Roger Ebert infamously said that videogames couldn’t be art, but movies aren’t books and videogames aren’t movies.  Movies are good because they find strengths that books don’t have, and vice versa. And one of the strengths that videogames have that movies don’t is that the appeal of videogames is only partially in the story.  Which means that a clever writer can drag out the question of “Will they or won’t they?” to an absurd extent that would be an Andy Warhol-style grind in cinema, and yet have it work emotionally.

In that sense, videogames can mirror life.  Because life isn’t just interesting emotional beats.  You gotta go to work, you gotta run errands, you gotta grind.  If all you had to focus on was evolving your relationships, maybe you’d get better at it, but there’s always something else to do that distracts.

The “game” part of videogames, in God of War, is that something else that distracts.  Kratos and Atreus aren’t connecting because they have war to distract them. Their endless incompatibility isn’t coming to a head because the grind of levelling up calls them – maybe they’d fight, but honestly, they’ve got a greater task.

Which means when they start to connect, it’s powerful.  It’s art in a way that Ebert couldn’t conceive of because he couldn’t connect with the game portion.  But if you can, there’s a drama here that’s revelatory in its own way, and it is stellar, and I recommend it if only to show you what games can do when they’re taken off the leash of trying to be merely cinematic.

Why I’ll Be Deactivating My FetLife Account Next Monday

So if you haven’t heard of the impending FetLife strike, now you have. A lot of FetLife users will go temporarily dark next week to protest the crappy way FetLife aids and abets creepy dudes and predators.

I imagine you all have a lot of questions, so I’ll make the rest of this a Q&A.

What’s Making People So Upset That They’re Temporarily Quitting?
If you’re a woman on FetLife, and you post pictures or anything sexual, you can expect to get creepy dudes hitting you up for sex sooner or later. Many women get stalkers, or extensive rape fantasies, or even out-and-out rape threats in their inbox.

Now, there is a “block” button on Fet, but that requires you to actively a) seek out that user, and b) block them.  Considering that some high-profile women get 90+ emails a day from dudes, many of them anonymous dick profiles, the old advice of “Just block them if they bother you” isn’t quite enough to stop many women from saying “fuck it” and walking away from a social media site that has become a chore.

There’s plenty of tools FetLife could create to help ameliorate that: allowing people to screen emails from new users / users with under X friends / users of a specific age and gender ranges / a better block functionality. But despite the fact that women have been complaining vociferously about this shit for the seven years I’ve been on FetLife, the Powers That Be at Fet have chosen to devote their programming resources to other tools.

Which is a shame, because a lot of women have already left FetLife because, well, creepy rapey assholes. Hence: Going temporarily dark to encourage John Baku – the owner and lead programmer – to prioritize these tools, stat.

(EDIT: John has said that he’s got two projects in the pipeline that he’s got to do for legal reasons, and then by May 18th he hopes to do a comprehensive review. That’s a good sign; I hope this newfound focus will continue.  But to be fair, changes have been promised before and not been forthcoming, so people are skeptical.)

Is That All?
Sadly, no. FetLife’s official policy of “You can’t name names of people who have abused you” in your posts leads to FetLife protecting people who are active abusers, making them more likely to ban someone for mentioning an abuser than they are the abusers themselves.

That’s a more complex issue for me personally, because while I do believe victims by default there are always shit-stirrers; I’ve seen bad actors, mostly anti-SJW factions, trying to weaponize innocent statements on non-kink social media into accusations, so I’m a little less trusting in the goodness of the unrestrained Internet.

Still, fact is that FetLife largely seems to view its users of all genders, no matter how unsavory, as useful for as long as they can generate hits and content for them – remember The Wolf? – which is a problem that needs better solutions.

I’m honestly not sure what that solution is, so I tend to focus on the first issue of “developing better tools to screen out creeps,” but the problem that Fet tends to grant large audiences to random predators is still an issue worth noting.

So That’s The Official Stance Of The Walkout, Then?
Nope. Just mine. This is a wildly disorganized movement, and I don’t claim to speak for everyone.

So You Think YOU Walking Away Will Cause FetLife To Tremble? What An Ego! What Balls!
Let’s be honest here: You take away the people, and FetLife’s got nothing. We are both the market and the product.

And many people I used to like seeing here have been driven away by creepy dudes on FetLife, making it less likely that I’ll return. For every person going, “Well, it hasn’t bothered me and I’m still here!” there’s probably at least one (and maybe two or three) user who is no longer here to have the debate.

So if I leave? Nah. Not such a much. Hell, I did go dark for about two months during a recent mental collapse, and – surprise! – Fet kept chuggin’ along.

But if lots of people leave, as they have already? Well, FetLife loses everything and becomes MySpace or Ello.

I’m kinda hoping they realize this and start prioritizing better tools. I mean, why is it controversial at all to to want to retain productive users who generate nice pictures and kink for us, and screen offputting choads who do nothing but spam random people with badly-written fantasies?

But Hasn’t FetLife Been Working On Solutions?
Look. My day job is being lead programmer on a site about as complex as FetLife, with hundreds of thousands of active users.

As such, I am immensely sympathetic to Fet’s situation here. Code is complex, and not easy to change at the scale they’re working at. It took us years of planning to implement a new checkout process because we had to clear out old code and handle a thousand crazy edge cases – and all the while, everyone was like, “Just make it happen, it’s simple.”

It. Is. Never. Simple.

In addition, FetLife has to deal with laws in international countries, and with their payment processors shutting them down, and all the issues coming with porn, and maximizing ease of use for users. All the while dealing with a rabid user base that fights like weasels trapped in a paint can over what they want – and probably for a lot less money than most e-commerce sites take in. (Given that my wife is on the board of a couple of conventions, I find that users assume that people are getting rich off anything that’s perceived as a large-scale operation, even when it’s actually a hand-to-mouth experience.)

Slim resources, legal battles, and vociferous users? Even if you have the best of intentions, working there has to be a nightmare, done mostly for the love. I do genuinely believe that Fet as a whole wants to do the right thing, even if I disagree with those right things are, because they’re in the web of a lot of tangled issues that are not easy to sort out.

And I keep seeing people in threads telling them about the simple solutions, enraged that they can’t just pull a rabbit out of their ass and have it done in two months. Folks… they can’t.

But that said…

If they’d listened to the multitudes of complaints I’ve seen erupting over the past six years, they’d have some of it done by now. These aren’t new complaints; they’ve just been mostly ignored over a loooooong period of time. And one of the new big features they rolled out – an “improved” user search – actually made it easier for stalkers and creeps to find people in all sorts of photos and videos, leading me to believe that nobody at the top of the chain is seriously considering the average female experience. (They had to roll it back after its debut, which is never a good look.)

So personally speaking, I don’t think they have been working on a solution, not seriously, until it exploded in their face. Which, to me, signifies that they’re not driven by anything but things exploding in their face. Which means the more exploding, the better.

They gotta prioritize features that improve the user experience, and I think that starts with better filtering tools and more comprehensive tools. Clearly, the block button alone isn’t doing it for a lot of people.

How DARE You Tell FetLife What To Do?
Well, people do that all the time to me at my job. All the time, in fact. They’re called “customers,” and they leave us feedback – some of which we agree with and change for, some of which we disagree with and don’t, some of which is nice, some of which is bitchy.

This temporary walkout, crude tool that it is, is a way of telling Fet that yeah, you need to prioritize this a lot more than you have.

And frankly, this shouldn’t be controversial. I notice a lot of the people reacting very negatively to the walkout are right-wingers who are big on the free market – well, this is a customer base telling its client that they want changes made. That’s literally what good capitalism runs on – customers weigh in, the companies make changes to satisfy them.

In a sane world, this complaint would be viewed as simply as that.

(And there are a lot of people using this walkout to shill for their kink-platform-of-choice, which is also capitalism, and I encourage that as well. But I like FetLife. Currently, most of my buddies are here and I know how it works. I’d prefer it change rather than me walk away like I did with LiveJournal and CompuServe.)

So You’re One Of The Good Guys, Huh?
Nope.

Lemme repeat that: Nope.

Up until about six months ago, I thought it was a compliment to find an attractive woman and hit the FetLife equivalent of “like” on all the photos I found appealing. Then it was pointed out to me – not directly, but in a flurry of FetLife essays from various people – that some women really fucking hate that shit. Enough women, in fact, that I realized that some of the people I’d done that to had probably been very much off-put by that.

I didn’t mean to creep them out – but if I did, they deserve better tools to keep tools like me away.

Look. I try to be honest about all my flaws, and I’ve fucked up with consent, and I’ve fucked up with communication, and I’ve left bad tastes in people’s mouths more than once. I don’t want to, and I’m disappointed in myself when I do, but I’d be lying if I said I was an angel of beauty here.

Not everyone finds me creepy. But those who do should have an effective, flexible, and FetLife-supported way of keeping me out of their lives. And though I acknowledge that Fet has to devote resources to deal with laws like SESTA and the way that America seems hell-bent on shutting down payments to anything to do with porn, they also need to make things easier for the women on here.

Because they deserve better. And I’m happy to go dark for a couple of days if it helps remind people that yeah, nobody should have to log on here to find their inbox filled with creeper.

Am I A Bad Person If I Support The Goals Of The Strike But Don’t Want To Participate For Whatever Reason?
Nope. But the event’s here if you wanna look at it.

Ponder, and wonder. And let’s all hope that Fet finds a good solution, and keeps going, because honestly? I want to see it thrive.

I just don’t think it can when its policies are driving away the people posting nice things, y’know?