Makotic Crack

TODAY INSTEAD OF DOING ANYTHING CONSTRUCTIVE cockpuppet AND I BUILT A SNOWMAN, AND THEN WE WATCHED THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY AND LOLLED HEARTILY AT ANGEL-EYES' CREEPINESS AND THE PLOT-SENSING CANNONS

But seriously. That. Film. I need for it to have a fandom. Out of all the works of media I have ever liked, nothing has ever left me with such a desperate, hollow craving for MORE. MGS? If all of the fandom suddenly vanished off the face of the planet it'd kind of suck but I'd have enough awesomestupid in the games to last me for a long time loving it. FF7? I'm craving less. Doctor Who? I seriously have absolutely no need or want for anything besides the canon. But with GBU, I want so much more. More of all the characters. More characters. More backstabbing. More backstory. I have seen it about five times over the space of about six months and every single time it's like watching it the first time and every single time as the credits roll I just want to put it on back from the beginning so it never has to end, like listening to a song on loop. I want the sequel that will never be, I want the prequel that will never be, I want Blondie to put Tuco on his horse and travel off with him on awesome Wild West adventures. this is why i am waiting desperately for 2010 because then I can go back to Leedshome and READ THE GBU COMIC

Basically, I don't think I have ever craved fanfic to read as much as I have for that movie. And naturally, there is none for it. I love reading MGS and FF7 fic, it's completely amazing, but I like producing it more. But for this, I want to read something, and THERE. IS. NONE.

Weirdly enough I'm not craving long plotty fics like the one I'm writing. I'm craving PWP. Not necessarily porn, just - vignettes, anecdotes, drabbles, okay maybe porn a little, oneshots.

It kind of makes me realise just how much I take the ability to find fandom porn for granted. And it sucks that I've fallen so mad in lust for a fandom that doesn't exist.

OH WELL I'M GOING TO HAVE TO CHANGE THAT SOMEHOW WITH MY MASTER COWBOY MANIPULATOR PLAN THAT I HAVE COME UP WITH BUT NOT TOLD YOU BECAUSE THAT'S MY SECRET PLAN

AFTER THIS

I AM NEVER

GOING TO WRITE

GAY COWBOYS

AGAIN



Note - this is just me having a massive anal pain because I managed to MAGICALLY FORGET that you would need more than two horses to pull a carriage. And now have to think of a way a Confederate deserter would kill five horses before The Biggest Badass On The Planet would have time to react, instead of one. It doesn't help that Blondie is slowly morphing into a slightly quieter Solid Snake, and Tuco is pointedly refusing to be funny. AAAUGH I want to pop this 42-year-old virgin fandom's cherry and have it be good for both of us, dammit!

There are two kinds of fandoms in the world, my friend.

Those which tell the story with words, and those which tell the story with silence.



MGS adapts really easily to fanfic writing. While the visuals up until recently have been incredibly minimalist, the dialogue was very maximalist. It had to be. When Metal Gear was starting to develop the beginning of the malignant tumour that was its plot, it had to support it with words, because it didn't have the processing power to create pictures. MGS1 is still considered one of the first cinematic games, and it has some very beautiful cinematography and acting in it that I could sing the praises of all damn day, but at the end of the day it doesn't change the fact that the actors were bobble-headed puppets with arms that didn't connect to their shoulders and mouths that couldn't open and eyes which weren't there walking across stages literally built out of Lego. Characters burst into monologue like opera characters burst into song, because the only way they could express their feelings was through dialogue.

MGS2 and 3 added facial expressions into the mix, sometimes devastatingly subtle (watch Snake during Emma's death, watch the wonderful dissonance between The Boss's stance and face and eyes and voice and name when she tells Big Boss "I feel content"), but still used words to exploit what the action could not, and I think that was always the games' aim - the way MGS4, the one with the greatest acting and graphics, has characters only exposit about the plot because we now don't need them to announce how they feel, we can see it on Old Snake's face the whole time - the way MPO, which used very stark, bare-bones art stills instead of cutscenes, had the classic Metal Gear 'voice' even though it wasn't written by Kojima. Combined with the soaring epic feel of it all, the setting which watches two generations of men grow up and get old and die, the whole big-budget action movie feel, and the density and volume of that relentless dialogue -

- it translates about as well as visual, interactive media ever can into writing.

I'll be honest. I'm very proud of Untitled, the most recent fic I've written. I don't think it's world-ending and I'm going to do all I can to do better someday because I'm a perfectionist, but I managed to make it do everything I wanted it to do while letting it have its fun, and, for that, I'm proud of it. With that fic, I set out specifically to write a slash fic that felt like it could actually happen in that canon. In the middle chapter, I explain the plot using the mouthpiece of a character who monologues. He tells the characters all about him, and his life, and his feelings, and why he did what he did, and what the main characters have to do to stop the evil plan. It works in writing, because, basically, what he's saying is writing and can be written.





But now, I'm trying to write for the other kind of fandom in the world.


If MGS used words because that was all it had, then Leone Westerns used pictures, because that was all they had. The films were tiny budget, and had to use props the actors brought themselves. The cast didn't even all speak the same language.


That's why the movies have such a great sense of silence, and space.

It'd look wrong forcing that silence and space inside the baroque, futuristic lunacy that's Metal Gear. But in the simplicity of the old West, it's perfect -

- and it doesn't translate well to writing.

I can see the fic in my mind's eye. But I can't write "Tuco and Blondie stare at each other for three hours." It's not a fic, even if that's what happens in it. I don't have pictures. I can't replicate that specific way that Blondie stares at the camera because I don't have access to his face. And I can only imitate his voice as much as he talks anyway, which is little.

I don't know if this experiment is going to work. There's only so 'original flavour' you can write gay porn in, cowboys be damned. But I do want to imitate that sense of space.

Even though I'm more comfortable chucking words at people.



On the bright side, I don't have to include 'gameplay', just invite the reader to sit back and watch Clint being more badass than everyone else.

SO IN AN EPIC FEAT OF SENSE-MAKING IT TURNS OUT THAT THE RECORDING STUDIO PROJECT I HAVE TO DO FOR NEXT SUMMER NEEDS TO HAVE SOME PROGRESS DONE ON IT BY NEXT MONDAY

what, honestly, what

it needs to be a 'commerical music' piece, so basically, a pop song. And a pop song needs a subject and stuff and lyrics are important. SO GIVE ME IDEAS FOR STUFF TO SONGWRITE ABOUT OTHERWISE I WILL JUST END UP PERFORMING A SONG ABOUT HOW MUCH SNAKE LOVES OTACON, AND I WILL, YOU KNOW WHAT I AM LIKE

actually that might work. If I did it in a ballady end-of-an-MGS-game-type song. I could make it the theme to that Original Flavour Snake/Otacon I did!





...now I just need a name. All pop songs deserve a name. Does AMGER sound good?

After listening to the extended version, I'm now basically sure of my theory that Amazing Horse is about Nice Guys.

The woman starts off quite positive towards the man, ready to hear his case even though he and his horse are both pretty ugly. She even licks his horse when he asks, and enjoys doing so. He tempts her with romance and the moment their relationship changes is when he starts talking about the horse's penis - the horse is obviously a metaphor for the man's genitals (it's big and between his legs and SERIOUSLY - "give it a lick", something many men enjoy women doing to penises; "have a stroke of its mane, it turns into a plane, and then it turns back again when you tug on its winky", obviously a metaphor for erection/ejaculation/flaccidity) and when he starts describing his intentions blatantly she figures him out and his later attempts on romance ("I'll take you round the universe and all the other places too") cause her to be unimpressed.

The man isn't interested in romance - his only goal is to get the girl 'on his horse', but he's willing to pretend to be romantic in order to get her on his horse, and when she sees through him he'll become hostile and tell her "shut up woman, get on my horse" - even though she was merely sceptical of him, rather than outright dismissive. In short, he's a textbook Nice Guy.

The cinematography also enhances this. He enters at the start of the cartoon into a scene of idyllic stately home, interrupting the peace with his loud electropop and horse. The camera does subliminal flashes of the horse's ugly face, and zooms into its eternally waiting eyes at the end of each loop - basically, it implies he's going to harass her until she gives in to get some peace and quiet, a typical Nice Guy tactic.

In the extended version available on iTunes, he comes to her later, this time not on his horse but watching it graze elsewhere - promising her that he's not just interested in her for sex - but he quickly proves himself wrong when he mentions the horse's ballsack. Here, she responds with confusion rather than revulsion, but instead of bothering to honour her confusion he tries to force the lemonade on her (strongly implied to be horse urine. I think it's pretty obvious what that part means).

I think what's positive about this cartoon is that even though the dispute is trivial, we sympathise with the woman and laugh at the man for being ridiculous.

Now, I need to get dressed, and do the washing up.

On the eighth day of the eighth month, Quinn saw a ghost on the George Washington bridge.

It had been an awful night. The tail end of a Southern hurricane had finally stuck New York, and the weather had been unpredictable for the last few days; but even through the driving rain the moon hung low and white and huge over the Manhattan skyline. It was obnoxiously unreal, like someone had deliberately floated it up there as a prop light, and as Quinn drove home his eyes kept coming back to it despite his best efforts to focus on the road.

It was when he was tearing his head away from the moon that he saw a figure in the distance, wet rain poncho smeared with the pastels of city lights, walking. Quinn had seen pedestrians on the bridge before – walking through New York was a pastime of his, and he'd crossed it on foot himself on several occasions – but he only knew of one kind who'd be out here, in this weather, so late.

Fascination gripped him, and he found himself instinctively slowing down, disgusted by his own interest. The relentless storm whipped the pedestrian's rain poncho out into black wings, and the outline of his body as it flared out behind him appeared naked, but still carried on walking – shoulders hunched, arms to his sides, hood pulled tightly over his face. Quinn tried not to think about whether the red dot he'd seen tossed into the wind was a last cigarette, and carried on driving.

For a fraction of a second as they passed each other, Quinn saw the man's face, illuminated by his headlights, shiny with rain. He was middle-aged, jaw dark with stubble, and just as Quinn lifted his gaze to try and meet the man's eyes, he broke into a run; and as he moved behind Quinn's car, it was as if Quinn’s sadistic fascination that had wanted to see someone jump off the bridge had been carried with the man as he passed. Out of the corner of his eye, a broad, dark shape fluttered out to the sea – it was the raincoat.

He's gone! Quinn thought to himself, digging his fingers into the steering wheel. He'd watched a man leap to his death off the George Washington bridge – a life, ended, in a flutter of cloth and nothing else. Guilt curdled up in his chest and he glanced in his mirrors to the spot where the man had been, not sure what he wanted to see; if he was looking to commemorate the life of that unknown dead man, to voyeur, or just to confirm that it was real.

But as Quinn looked desperately back, he saw the hunched shoulders of the running man.

All that was visible of him was a naked outline – a distortion, as if he was made of almost perfect glass - a shower of raindrops in his wake and drops springing from the sidewalk with each lift of his running feet. He was simply there and yet not – an invisible man. He cast no shadow; car headlights glowed through his body, and Quinn could see the rails warping and twisting in the shape of a pair of running legs.

That was when he jumped – cruciform into the wind. Quinn saw the Y of his wide-open arms, and then lost him. By now, he had driven too far away from the site of the invisible man’s jump, and needed to concentrate on the road and not the river below.

Of course, the day after was when he started thinking about ghosts; as the sickly coat of oil shone rainbows over the water, and families left the churches crying for the Marines who had been their family. The media blamed the disaster on a pacifist-terrorist crackpot, some military hero gone rogue; and while Quinn had never paid much heed to conspiracy theories, a conviction grew in his mind that the ghost he'd seen walking on that bridge had been not the omen, but the culprit.

By the time the Shell had grown out of the water, orange and gaudy, it had been the strongest conviction he held.



(thenewyesterday, my NaNo fannovelisation/AU/fanfic from hell. Friend it if you like MGS2 and fanwank but hate Raymond Benson and vague canon fidelity.)

Sigh. Shipwars. I have to admit, it is my fault. I linked the comments to the first anon, and she started posting. And then.

WHAT HAPPENED OUR FANDOM USED TO BE SUCH GOOD FRIENDS whine moan gnash teeth etc.. But it wasn't actually that bad, we got a lot of wanking out in the open, and I have a sneaking suspicion that it wasn't about ships at all - it felt to me more like a combination of 1) semantics and 2) what can be treated as canon or not.

And I've come to realise I am insanely liberal about canon. I don't even really care what canon is so much any more. All I know is that I have this great, big, beautiful universe filled with sexy men and sexy women and sexy dynamics and sexy detail porn and occasionally a sexy plot, too. So when I write something or play something, my canon is - what I want to use at that time, screw everyone else. And when I read something or thread with someone, my canon is - theirs. I do not have to do mental gymnastics to force my oh so perfect headcanon interp into their headcanon interp, because fanwriting isn't about what some random person on the internet thinks about what Snake's dick looks like, it is what the author thinks about what Snake's dick looks like, why they think this, why they think it matters, and whether they can make us random people on the internet believe what they think until the fic or the thread is done.

saiph_nebula was, last time I checked, writing a pretty good fic about Snake being a honey trap in the CIA, which she set after MG2, because according to the Database Snake was in the CIA after he went to Zanzibar Land (and this was a plot point, because Holly was the person who got him the job). Anon on the kink meme wrote a fanfic about Snake being a honey trap in the CIA set before MG2, because it says in the MG2 manual that Snake was in the CIA before he went to Zanzibar Land (and this was also a plot point, because the fic is about him trying to hunt down Fox who had recently defected to Zanzibar Land). Who's canon? Who's right?

No-one is. They are both right. They are using different interpretations of the same information.

I don't mind picking and choosing! The canon has gone past 'sprawl' and into 'spaghetti'. I would not mind if you told me that your Snake/Naomi fic (why does no-one write this pairing, by the way, I suppose I should do it once I get through my massive S/O backlog) was based mostly on MGS1 canon, but using the Saga canon that Snake never knew who his father was until Liquid told him, and the In The Darkness Of Shadow Moses canon that Naomi was a child soldier and fell in love with Snake during her two-year obsession with killing him. This would be completely allowed, completely awesome, and totally cool.

Let's be honest here. I've played quite a lot of video games, some of which were mindless and awful, some of which were clever and fantastic and drove my emotions right to exactly the right points they needed to be. I have never played another game, in my whole life, where the end of one of the games is literally a character talking to the audience about how picking and choosing your own canon is fine as long as you don't force it on anyone else. In game, he had gone, and the person he was talking to was with someone else, but over red-tinted footage of the people in New York, he carried on talking about our right as players to interpret what we want from the story presented in the game.

And people are fighting over whether Snake and Otacon are gay.

The answer is that they are exactly as gay as I want them to be at any one time, based on whatever bits of canon I want to remember and whatever bits of canon I want to forget about. Me. My opinion. And you have no right to question my opinion, because they are also exactly as gay as you want them to be at any one time, based on whatever bits of canon you want to remember and whatever bits of canon you want to forget about. And I am in love with your opinion, it is a beautiful opinion, and I want you to write about it. I want you to thread your opinion with me until I forget I have freedom to decide and believe your opinion, until the thread is over and I go back to having my own interp.

Canon's just a word for the lists of facts we see. It doesn't mean anything, especially in MGS, where we've been told the canon doesn't mean anything by one of the actual, canon characters. Whether we're Manipulating Genuine Scenes for Made-up Gay Sex or for Making Guys Straight, it is still MGS.

It's what Kojima would want.

I should be tidying my room because it's so bad I can't even walk in it any more, but I would rather bite my toenails down to bloody nubs and use them to bait great white sharks. Booo.

I just feel like I want a hug. Probably I'm just getting premenstrual and that would explain it.

Fraaaaah. I guess I should try and write something while my emotions are all messed up. Might be entertaining. I wrote some mindless Gillian/Metal PWP while waiting to be picked up after my music exam, but it's not good enough to work on.

I'll probably end up wasting the evening playing bullet hell shooters or something.

Okay, if you want to watch me squirm in pain, I have a to-do list of everything I need to do.

I'm taking a break from sheet music right now because my sexy headphones are making my head hurt.

It really, really bothers me that Pidgey is named after a pigeon, but is obviously a finch of some sort, most likely a tree sparrow.

Then there's my favourite Pokémon, Psyduck, which is gold, but neither Psychic-type nor a duck. It is a platypus. It evolves into Golduck, which is Psychic-type, but neither gold nor a duck. It is a kappa. It would make more sense for the names to be the other way around. But they're not.

THEN I STARTED THINKING ABOUT POKÉMON GENITALIA. Since they all lay eggs, I think they're probably all monotremes of some sort, with cloacae. That also helps to explain how Pikachu or whatever doesn't have a huge flopping penis poking out. Some of the plant types are obviously symbiotes between a plant and an animal, like Bulbasaur, but lots of the pure plant types can shed spores as attacks, and then there's the stuff with Cubone's mother, so I'm going to assume that some Pokemon breed differently in the wild than in captivity. Marowak is capable of live births, but it kills it in the process - in the wild, most plant types reproduce using spores and seeds. I may as well extend this to fishy type Pokémon releasing sperm over a cluster of roe. All this is handled by the cloaca. It makes as much sense as anything else in Pokémon. oh my god I just figured out by guesswork how to type an accented e, ééééÉÉÉÉéééé okay I'm done but it's so liberating all this time I just cut and pasted it from OpenOffice.

But seriously, what about Mareep, who evolves into a bigger sheep and then the bigger sheep evolves into a giraffe, what the hell? I mean, I know giraffes are related to antelopes which are related to deer which are related to goats which are related to sheep but it still seems a bit of a leap. Spearow evolves from a sparrow into some kind of ugly crane. Seriously what the hell. And Cubone must have been developed in a fit of single-minded Oedipal rage on the part of the creator. What the hell.

ALSO, if in ancient times humans and Pokémon were allowed to marry and presumably breed, then most humans in the Pokémon world probably have Pokémon genetic material in them, which might explain the presence of Psychics and Firebreathers and Mediums. It might also explain why Ash in the anime never grows up - he hasn't reached the right evolutionary condition yet. Probably because he's always meeting new Pokémon but never bothers to catch any of them and is therefore the worst trainer ever. I bet he plays the game for fun too, even though he clearly has a Pikachu with the right Nature, the bastard.

How do you do gameiness in fanfic for games?

Most games are pretty 'gamey' - aware that they're games and aren't real in whatever way that may manifest. That's because games, for a long time, weren't able to represent realism, and so self-awareness got grandfathered in. Some games go further with it than others. Some keep it as a joke, like Star Ocean 2's piano ("Something tells me a legendary hero shouldn't have to carry this around, you know?"). Sometimes it's necessary for the player, like the Beginner's Hall in Final Fantasy VII. Sometimes it's used to actually make character observations, like Psycho Mantis in MGS, or how Snake will draw an overlarge weapon or item he couldn't realistically have been carrying before when a very 'gamey' segment is coming up (like how he whips out his SOCOM before he and Meryl fight off the soldiers in MGS, or when he pulls out the Railgun to fend off the Suicide Gekkos in MGS4, overshadowed by the slick 'realism' of Raiden and Vamp's fight).

But, you know, those are all statements made for that medium and that medium only. How do you convert it to fanfic? Do you ignore or accept certain things based on the game? If I was writing an FF7 fanfic I'd reject Barret's suggestion that he 'doesn't know how to use materia' because, considering how readily available the things are in the FF7 world, it doesn't make sense to assume a thirty-five year old terrorist wouldn't know how to at least cast a healing spell - that, I'd write off as a necessity on the part of the player temporarily hijacking Barret's characterisation.

But his response was IC - he yells at Cloud for patronising him, and if you bother to give him the tutorial you get affection points for his date. The same goes for Snake's tutorial segments - it's hard for me to believe that a legendary soldier wouldn't know how to punch someone, even if, to him, 'punch' means 'push the circle button'. But it's all part of their characters and both Snake and Barret respond ICly, so who am I to discount that as part of their characters?

MGS plays a lot faster and looser with the fourth wall, though. I wouldn't mind accepting Snake's tutorials as a joke, because the characters in the whole series have always been aware that they're in games - at dramatic points, too. One of my favourites was a conversation with Sigint in Portable Ops where Snake talks about how everything feels all light and portable, but he likes that he can take it outside. Sigint doesn't understand it. But, at other times, Sigint talks happily about menus and your Camo Index and other things he shouldn't know about. So, Sigint knows as much as the game needs him to know. If the game consciously decides how much Sigint is allowed to break the fourth wall, is that part of his character? Can I?

This article has a few good points about fourth-wall breaking in games (it mentions MGS, Zork, Sonic, Eternal Darkness and so on in order to demonstrate different forms of fourth-wall breaking) and is absolutely fascinating, but it's not really the point I'm trying to ramble about. Games, like the article says, act differently to text. So I'll get back to that:

How would I keep close to the source material by playing with the fourth wall?

Is it right to make references to Game Overs and Action Buttons and R1, genre conventions that no longer apply? (I've seen this done in - and done it myself in - RP, but you can't really do that.)

Or should I be making references to the way fanfiction or RP works?

And if so, how? It's easy to do it in RP, because RP is a kind of 'game' itself. I recently made my MG2 Snake (at damned) praise that the new system let him do more things, but say he didn't like waiting turns - a bit fourth-wally, but in-character (well, I think it was). Nothing the games didn't do.

But, with fanfiction, how do you do it? What genre conventions does fanfic have, anyway? It doesn't feel like published work, even when it's equal quality - I've seen fanwriters discouraged from using certain techniques I've seen used in published books. But when you say a published work feels like a fanfiction, it's usually an insult. So you'd write bad, wish-fulfilment porn, but... knowingly?

I would love to play with the genre conventions and problems caused by taking games into fanfic, but I seriously don't know how, yet. I have tried, but not only did it not make sense, I didn't like it.

This is the only reason I haven't written anything specifically for an audio format, too. I wouldn't know how to write something specifically for audio.

Opinion piece says Crisis Core blends gameplay, narrative in revolutionary ways

Since the beginning of cinematic gaming, there has always been this struggle between balancing the experiences of both narrative and gameplay.... So how do these two seemingly opposed forces integrate smoothly? For some games, there's too much traditional story-telling which detracts from this core gameplay fun factor (take PS3's Metal Gear Solid 4 for example)

I WILL TOTALLY AGREE THAT MGS4 IS CUTSCENETASTIC BUT DID YOU JUST SERIOUSLY JUST IMPLY THAT MGS4 DOESN'T USE ITS GAMEPLAY TO TELL THE STORY

SO

MUCH

RAGE

Thing is, the article it links to is actually intelligent and well-written and makes points I don't disagree with. But that swipe at MGS4 was NOT DESERVED AND PATENTLY WRONG

YOU SIR

ARE THE REASON THAT SLASH FANGIRLS ARE THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO LIKED MGS2

AND THE REASON THAT CLOUD GOT RETCONNED INTO A TOTALLY UNIRONIC WHINY HERO FOR ADVENT CHILDREN

AND THE REASON THAT PEOPLE LOOK AT YOU FUNNY WHEN YOU SAY YOU THINK VIDEO GAMES ARE A CLEVER AND WONDERFUL MEDIUM FOR STORYTELLING


GRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHGSJGF

So I read the official MG2 translation script.

I'm not entirely happy with all of the dialogue changes, but I like the official version more, for the most part. I'm not too thrilled about them randomly making breast jokes about Holly to remind us that YES SHE IS INDEED AN ATTRACTIVE WOMAN OH MY GOD OVARIEEEES, and I don't like how they've translated a few specific lines, and I still don't understand the point of all the name changes (yeah, okay, Ultrabox The Four Horsemen had to go, but in what world is Jungle Evil a better name than Predator? And sexy Natasha Markova sounds so much more musical and graceful than frumpy Gustava Heffner, doesn't it?) but, overall, this is score one point for the Spirit of Woolsey.

Snake, in particular, is much better in the translation. I'm not pleased with "No, I don't have a family" over the more assertive (if more awkward) "No. I have no family.", since the latter version is something he says about FIVE TIMES in MGS1, but he seems much more human. He gets a lot more dialogue and he comes across as a lot less professional and cold. He pretty much openly fanboys Natasha Gustava, which is great and hysterical, and the Spirit of Woolsey really showed off here:

[Context - Natasha is dying in Snake's arms.]

MSX2
SNAKE: NATASHA? OH GOD, NOT YET, NOT YET...

PS2
Snake: The ice is starting to thaw between the East and West. Gustava, it's time to start planting your feet on the ground... take control of your life and start living! Gustava... don't give up now...

HAAAAA OMG HE JUST GIVES AN INSPIRING SPEECH ABOUT ICE HE'D HAD NO PRECEDENCE FOR, YOU CAN JUST FEEL THE TRANSLATORS RUBBING THEIR HANDS IN GLEE

I'm not sure what's better - ridiculous incoherent sobbing out of nowhere, or ridiculous incoherent pep-talk out of nowhere. Am I allowed to take both?

Snake's other real crowning relationship in this translation is with Holly. Instead of hitting on her pretty blatantly like in the original, he basically goes EW GIRLS NO and teasingly tells her that she's making him really uncomfortable, and Holly basically goes 'OH SORRY MY FAULT I DIDN'T MEAN TO SEXUALLY HARASS YOU SORRY' and it makes her even more lovely. She's fast becoming one of my favourite female characters in this series and that's really horrible because she shares my name and nationality to some extent and basically has my dream job, so I'm pretty sure you're all mouthing 'canon-Sue wish-fulfilment' right now.

But, back to the point, the one moment that got me really hard in the retranslated script involves Holly. It's a totally new sequence, and turns a vaguely creepy scene into something really awful.

In the original, Snake's making stupid jokes about ordering Holly a limo after killing Big Boss, and Holly basically tells him to grow up (he doesn't). I mentioned in my other ramble that it was creepy.

In this version, Snake tells her he has 'one more job to do', and tricks Holly into thinking he's about to kill himself in front of her with the gun she's just given him. Of course, it turns out that it was a joke, but it isn't funny, and Holly yells at him that it wasn't funny, and she's right.

Of course, I'm not sure if it was intentional that it plays into the MGS4 trailer 'I have one last mission' suicide-consideration in the creepiest possible way, but it's a retcon that really works. It really does point out that Snake is, at this point, having a mental breakdown before Holly's eyes, and even Holly's last words to him change from a more resigned 'oh that crafty Snake running off ditching girls like James Bond it's just one of his more charming traits' to a simple 'How low can he get?'

I don't quite like how the script forces quite childish, informal speech patterns on characters who are supposed to be professional - it makes the whole thing even more campy, which honest to god is not needed in any Metal Gear - but, overall, it's nice to read the script in English.

Been playing MGS4 a little more (I'm up to, um, a familiar boss in a familiar place).

Without spoiling too much -

I think a few people on my flist might appreciate a little insinuation in MGS4, where Snake and Otacon discuss wolf-dogs. Snake says that wolf-dogs are more comfortable on their own than with people, and claims he knows because he lived with similar dogs for years. I think the implication is that he released the dogs into the wild when he could no longer keep them, which would fit his personality a lot, too, as well as fitting the symbolism of the dogs (isolation, Snake living and feeling like an animal).

This act is intense. It's almost as if the rest of the game so far has really been a prologue for this act. I managed to remain totally dry-eyed during most of the game so far, but welled up at a certain scene involving something unfortunate happing to an inanimate surveillance camera.

( Spoilermeta for Snake's physical appearance after the end of Act 3 )

EDIT: Vamp refers to a female lover as 'Queen'. He referred to his sort-of-lover Fortune as 'Queen'.

He referred to Solidus as 'King'.

...It's canon now, right?


EDIT TWO: OH GOD NO TV TROPES HAS BEEN HACKED

WORST THING THAT COULD HAPPEN TO ANYONE EVER

When I first got into fandom at eleven, I showed my mother my fanfic. It wasn't any different to me to, say, taking home pasta necklaces I'd made in school.

As I lost my innocence, I began to become ashamed of my work. And for five years I have resolutely hidden everything I have ever done. I covered my fanart with my arms so no-one saw it, I hid my fanfic under my bed. I nearly FREAKED when my mother read a fic I'd left on screen while I'd nipped off to the toilet, and did the same when my father picked up a drawing of Cloud from my bedroom floor. For three of those years I'd show Miri my things, but then I stopped being able to even do that. My parents know I'm in fandom. Hell, my father even knows what slash pairings I like, even though he can't see Snake/Otacon himself (although the last time I was playing it he walked in on the love-on-the-battlefield scene and basically made a load of comments about how Snake had more chemistry with Otacon than with Meryl but that's neither here nor there).

But now I've taken Dad to see Video Games Live with me, and he's starting to get interested in game fandom, and I know that Mum would have the biggest fattest crush on Snake and ship him and Meryl if she ever payed MGS1, because he's totally her thing, and -

Basically, I want to stop being a closet fan.

I'm proud of what I create and what I enjoy and I want to share it with my family a little more.

My dad's promised me he'll play MGS2 when his new video card arrives, and I'm so hopeful and excited. I'd love to talk about the game with him.

I've always had a good relationship with my parents, so I don't know why it's so hard just trying to strike up these conversations, or answering their questions when they pick up one of the figures on my shelf and ask 'who's he, with the gun?' or 'what's she like, the one in the pink dress?'. I'm nearly eighteen, goddamn. Most kids my age don't even acknowledge their parents exist.

I suppose I just want to be closer to my parents, and fandom is pretty much all you'd find in me if you cut me open and looked inside, and so all I probably want is to just feel happy with being myself around them. But I don't know. Auuugh.

I'm going to pimp the MGS Slash Secret Santa signups because WE NEED MORE PEOPLE


I got 21 people in last year, and this year I've run up four so far, so please pimp this everywhere!

It says a lot about me that, when I go to make a post in a capslock comm, I hit my Capslock key, begin typing, and find I'm typing in lowercase. I've done this fifteen times today.

Also, I really hate it when you get those white lumps on your tonsils.

Okay, so Snake and Otacon have finally developed personalities and are being affectionate and sweet and sad and lovely. The game's getting much more self-aware as well and there's some nice CHARACTERISATION and PLOT THAT ISN'T WHINING showing through.

I'm going to keep feeling very very very negative about it, though, so if it pulls out a major OH GOD NO on me I can breathe a sigh of relief that at least their kid isn't called Albus Severus. SO I HATE THIS GAME.

It's very very definitely VR, though. The fact that it snows out whenever he gets hit; the flashbacks upon game over; and, most evidently, the fact that the Game Over text reads 'Mission Failed'. Let's think about it. Snake's death in MG1, MG2, MGS1, and the Tanker chapter of MGS2 all yielded 'Game Over'. Snake's death in the MGS1 VR Training, the MGS2 VR Training, the Snake Tales, Metal Gear Ac!d (non-canon) and in Ghost Babel (wrapped into Raiden's VR Training), and Raiden's death in the Plant chapter in MGS2 (repeatedly hinted as being 'VR'), all yield 'Mission Failed' (the Snake Tales and MGS2 game over also yield grey snow).

What do you get when Snake dies in MGS4? 'MISSION FAILED' and grey snow.

Ooo er.


I've always been quite interested in the portrayal of Snake from a fanservice perspective - certainly for the obvious reason, but also because it's very unusual to see a male character actively portrayed as 'sexy' in a game. 'Pretty' is fairly common, as is 'tough', but Snake is really the only character I can think of who's portrayed as an actively sexy male in the same way that a female in a game would be portrayed as actively sexy - he shows skin, is very self-aware about his own sexuality even if only from a look-but-don't-touch perspective, and has exaggerated 'sexy' physical attributes (the ass (obviously), the overall shape of his hips, waist and chest) the way a female character would have the same (usually breasts, ass, waist and legs).

One thing MGS4 does which is interesting is it still looks at Snake with the same eye, even though he's an old man. He still moves like he used to. I realised that in the Briefing scene before Act 2, he wears an outfit where you can actually see his nipples underneath, and he's still fitter and slimmer than Otacon. It sort of draws attention to what he has become, and the fact that he's become that way so early that his overall force of habit of being a self-aware, attractive man still hasn't worn off.

Actually, despite having a perfectly serviceable physique still, I notice the Octocamo suit bulks him up to a shape comparative to Naked Snake as opposed to his natural, light frame. Since Kojima's already stated something about how MGS3 was with a young Big Boss who looks like Solid Snake and how MGS4 is therefore with an old Solid Snake who looks like Big Boss, I find it difficult to accept that this wasn't intentional. I bet it's going to come up in the story at some point (NEITHER CONFIRM OR DENY THIS, PLEASE).

I think that Powerup Comics is actually a really beautiful comic. It is one of the few truly bad things to become truly good - not ironically, but postmodernistly.

It uses the webcomic medium to its maximum potential, attracting trolls and hecklers and using them as part of the environment of the comic, using the lack of censorship and quality control in order to exploit itself. P^U could not work as anything other than a webcomic. Not a print comic, not a cartoon, never a book. To this degree it is a successful webcomic.

About the story, then. The jokes here are never explicitly told - yes, there is a 'joke', but it only serves to further develop the real 'joke' - the character of Shadow. Shadow's smug grin and crossed arms and self-absorbed narcissism are accepted from people working in his particular medium. By what is not said, we get to see elements of the real Shadow, the author who uses him as an avatar. To take an obvious example, Dadow says so much about Shadow's relationship with his real father that the whole arc serves almost as a backstory arc for him.

Through the comic, Shadow is shown to be a surprisingly delicate portrayal of the screaming angry internet twelve-year-old we all know and love to hate. Other screaming internet twelve-year-olds are parodied, resented, and this is certainly not absent from Powerup Comics. Yet the comic shows us things which make us ask why Shadow became the way he did, and then tells us the answer while showing us yet another terrible, unfunny 'joke' written by Shadow. Shadow's psyche is laid bare through his comic - his desperate friendship with Chug, his unhappy childhood, his desperate need to be wanted, to be liked, by other people, by himself. Shadow is a beautifully well-developed character and he's also the comic's real 'joke'.

I argue that Powerup Comics isn't a dreadful gamer comic, or even a parody of a dreadful gamer comic. Powerup Comics has perfected the webcomic medium. Powerup Comics is a very well-written, touching, deeply funny story about the author of a dreadful gamer comic, told only through his writings.

MGS4 NOT HAVING NON-CANON EXTRAVAGANZA - "METAL GEAR 2": SNAKE'S REVENGE

I'm going to be taking a different tactic again, because I honestly couldn't stand to play this game for long.

I'm sorry.

I need to get stronger.

( Once upon a time, in Manhattan... )

If the ending left you confused, look at this.