[FFML] [fanfic][AMG][XOVER] Drunkard's Walk V, Chapter 6

[Glazius Falconar]

What follows may be considered a rant. Those with delicate constitutions 
may wish to leave the room.

Yes, I'm perfectly aware that my personal preferences are not reflected 
in the larger readership in part, or even in whole.

But so what? I'm still going to swing for the fences and have a little 
fun. Even if in the end nothing changes, if I get enough out there about 
my likes and where something falls short of them, it's a good point for 
triangulation if nothing else.

Anyhoo.

Bob Schroeck wrote:
> Well... it took over a year and a couple bouts with writers'
> block, but Chris and I overcame.  Here it is, the penultimate
> chapter of DW5.  Enjoy.
Honestly, it shows.

The ending impression I got is that you had a list of things that needed 
to happen before you hit the finale, and this is that list, with a 
little character foolery sprayed on out of a can to pad it out. I don't 
have a problem with the events as much as I do with how you chose to 
present them.

Hence, a reverse-engineered list, and some commentary (may contain 
suggestions):

MARA IS DYING
-------------

Yes, fine, good. God Weapons kill Gods, that's what they're for. Why 
didn't anybody notice it until now? Why doesn't anybody notice Loki 
packing mistletoe, which is apparently the only thing Baldur's mum has 
not asked to be extra special nice to him? Because of a plot. That's 
fine too.

What's not fine is:

"It has somehow damaged her already-weakened Celestial structure, the 
web of forces and energies that make up her true being."

I realize you're working under your own cosmology, which has lifted 
vocabulary if not more from In Nomine. And this statement makes sense in 
terms of that cosmology.

But if I was supposed to get more from it than "the God Weapon gave her 
Plot Cancer and she only has two chapters to live" it didn't happen.

I don't need to know the Truth. I can get by with a lie I can 
understand. If for cosmological reasons you're worried about that just 
pass the exposition on to Urd, who knows from lies.

GOD IS BEING INSCRUTABLE
------------------------

Again, why not. It's a perk of being Supreme: you can close your office 
door, and block the window in it with an amusing image of a ceiling tile 
shoved to one side with a pile of tunafish cans visible in the opening 
and the caption "brb werkin in MISSTERIUS WAIZ" in impact fonts.

What I don't get is the runaround.

First, Bell is pretty much a sysadmin of reality finally using up some 
vacation years, and occasionally her pager, which is also reality, goes 
off. If there's a problem, the sysadmin doesn't get the runaround, the 
sysadmin gets told. On that level the runaround is suspicious, but I can 
understand it if, say, Stormbringer is enforcing the first rule of 
Stormbringer Club, that being "you don't talk about Stormbringer Club". 
(Her liberal interpretation of what, exactly, constituted Stormbringer 
Club is part of why no one has looked particularly hard for her.)

Second, the fates don't get the runaround, the fates ARE the runaround. 
Bell may be too much yamato nadeshiko to actually express open 
disagreement, but short stack and her hot sister have no such 
compunctions. They've flipped the metaphorical bird and quite possibly 
several actual ones at Heaven before, and (for example) Skuld would have 
a nice chance to layer on some foreshadowing by hacking the mainframe, 
with possible incidental sightseeing, if she didn't coincidentally 
already have the results.

MEGUMI UPDATES HER TWITTER
--------------------------

"Scene 59: Still not forgiving Mara."

There's a considerable antipathy there, but it's monolithic and 
unyielding to the point that every scene involving Megumi and the notion 
of Mara, present or no, drifts inexorably past-the-event-horizon-style 
into just how monolithic and unyielding it still is.

Antipathy's fine! It makes sense to have it! But part of Chekov's Rifle 
is that you can shoot it in scene three even if in scene two nobody 
suddenly stands up from the table, points at the fireplace, and says "By 
Jove, a rifle!" That is what is happening here and how jarring it is.

CHRIS TAKES TIME TO THINK
-------------------------

If somebody were to write this chapter as a screenplay and then cut out 
all the locations of scenes, they would be one long stripe of "INT. 
TEMPLE" with the occasional "EXT. TEMPLE" for variety.

Movies have budgets. What's your excuse? I mean, there's the opportunity 
here for a nice "EXT. THE EDGE OF FOREVER" or something but he just goes 
and comes back off-screen. Something changes about his demeanor, so a 
little lead-up would be nice.

HELL GOES TO WAR, WHICH IS COINCIDENTALLY HELL
----------------------------------------------

"Ah ha!" I thought. "A siege engine!" I thought. "This is a clever nod 
to Fujishima's borderline-fetishistic love of machines!"

But it isn't. Not exactly. The difference is that, when you load a 
goddess into the barrel of a lovingly-detailed Morser Karl 
self-propelled 60-cm siege gun and fire her into heaven, the gun is 
ultimately superfluous, and it's okay to be ludicrous. Whatever just 
showed up on the doorstep, it's not going to be that detailed because 
it's necessary.

And that strikes the wrong chord with me for several reasons.

First, if Hell really wanted a barrier down, they'd just send Hild, who 
would peel off one limiter-studded glove to the temporary delight of any 
unemployed saxophone players and blow a kiss that, when it connected, 
would make Pluto the largest object in the now-inaccurately-named solar 
system.

Second, I know that Hild isn't in your world with that kind of power, 
but you still don't need to have the first and second divisions of the 
Ragnarok Corps showing up to give a good fight scene.

See, you've already established that EXEC_DHARMA is going to be some 
heavy shit. Even if a momentary break in concentration isn't going to be 
necessarily detrimental to any of the singers, there's a mortal there 
who is essentially playing Hot Potato with the sun and it will not go 
well for him if the music stops.

So when Paradox Triggers and starts working his inexorable way up to 
SSStylish, he doesn't need to be mowing through troops that are part of 
or even led by Hell's top brass. They could be just a bunch of mooks 
looking to get ahead by playing office politics when upper management is 
perfectly content to, as it were, let Mara escort herself out of the 
building once her retirement party's over.

You don't need to go all "unbreakable shield vs. unstoppable spear" when 
all it would take is one stray shot to spark unpleasant consequences.

WAS THIS CONFESSION REALLY NECESSARY?
-------------------------------------

Again, the idea is fine. Doug is journeying into the cleanest of all 
clean rooms and wants to take a walk on the sticky mat first. But from 
what we see on-camera we learn the following:

- Doug has, to use the colloquial, murdered tons of dudes.

- The multiverse is full of fine, fine women.

- Karma flakes are a delicious part of this doctrinally balanced breakfast.

- Doug still has fundamental weaknesses that he will not or can not 
admit to, and they are probably going to bite him in the ass.

- Morale damage is the last refuge of the callow optimizer and beneath 
the true grognard.

And the problem is, I can't tell whether I made that last one up or not.

See, "Thou shalt not kill" isn't in there because God rolled a 146 on 
the Random Societal Strictures table. (But if he did, you know he 
totally ricocheted the dice so he wouldn't end up with "Happiness is 
Mandatory".) It's there because a society where random slaughter is just 
hunky-dory will ultimately have only one member.

Just like the rules of basketball aren't there to guarantee the full 
employment of referees but to make for a better game, the ideal reason 
for moral strictures is to make a well-functioning society full of "good 
people". So in the ideal case Doug isn't talking about murdering dudes 
and chasing skirts because these are the marks on his record, but 
because he's worried these are signs of some deeper and crippling weakness.

And he's aware of this. Or someone in the room has to be. Because I find 
it very hard to believe that they're all just there because of the 
savory taste of imported regret, and don't really care one way or the 
other that anything actually changes.

But even if that's the case, Doug has had time to think about his life 
and how hollow his reasons for doing things may sound. Why be so devoted 
to someone, or to a cause, who not only have no reason of knowing he's 
alive but were prepared for his death -- in a way that people or causes 
that don't involve high-risk conflict as a way of life just aren't.

But even if that's not the case either, none of the four other things we 
learn in that scene are particularly surprising or relevant. Doug's 
killed people - he's a soldier, we could have guessed. He meets hot 
chicks - so the future of interdimensional exploration is pretty rosy. 
He has some fundamental weakness - well, yeah, he's a human, and humans 
in stories about the gods tend to have that. The gods eat karma - well, 
alright, but when's that going to be important? Is Stormbringer going to 
claw her way out of a dimensional rift, moaning "maaaayaaaaa", and claw 
open Doug's chakras to feast on his still-suffering desire?

My point is: a Bollywood zombie movie would be completely awesome.

My ACTUAL point is: the specifics of the confession scene, including the 
list of Doug's sins, really doesn't add anything, so if you're going to 
put the scene in there you can probably elide the process.

MY FINAL THOUGHTS
-----------------

Honestly, you probably could have gotten away with most of this with 
just some scene variety. There's the edge of forever, divine cyberspace, 
the war hell ride, and whatever crazy stuff is going down in heaven, but 
that's all offscreen and we just get some narrow scenes all taking place 
in and around the temple.

In a way I'm only really starting to pry at the weaknesses because I 
wanted something to make the different scenes stand out, and sticking my 
prybar in the logic and snapping some boards is the only way I could 
think to do it.

Also I am aware thanks to the Internet that there actually is a movie 
called "Bollywood Zombie", but it's by an indie Canadian production 
company and is different from what a zombie movie would be done by a 
Bollywood studio. I want a Bollywood zombie movie in the sense that 
"Metal Wolf Chaos" is a Japanese-made American action movie.