CROSSPOST: Other Pursuits May 2024, Or, Powers That Be(neath The Sea) – 6.2.24

[Hi gang! I don’t wanna run a whole friggin’ website anymore, all I ever wanted was to make with the fake lies, yelling, and jokes that aren’t worth the legwork for the people, to be a simple blogger. To that end, you can now find me over at The Naming Way courtesy of the truly excellent Pika, alongside such Dudes of Quality as Jason and Brenden! It’s The Bageler will stay up until my subscription runs out next year and I’ll continue to cross-post until then; thank you all for reading, and I hope to see you over at my new pad!]

Other Pursuits May 2024, Or, Powers That Be(neath the sea)

Playlist For The People

Animal Well (Nintendo Switch)

You may have heard some of your favorite video game journalists singing the praises of this in the past couple of weeks, and I haven’t gotten far enough to hit the weird shit they’re absolutely refusing to actually talk about but I agree with their assessments re: what I have seen being a beautiful, mysterious, honestly really difficult platformer-metroidvania, with a unique perspective on enemy-as-hazard rather than as antagonist.

Another Crab’s Treasure (Nintendo Switch)

🎶Under the waves
Under the waves
There’s no solution
To plastic pollution
So give yours to Dave🎵
(Dave is a sea anemone with a gambling problem,
doing crimes to cover his seahorse-racing debts)

ACT is part of a wave of N64-style reatraux releases that all seemed to come out roughly at once, featuring startlingly intense soulslike combat, platforming where the floatiness typical of the era actually makes sense and feels good (because you’re underwater and can swim a little), and a shark who is a dick and steals your house.

The story is surprisingly dark; the Powers That Be(neath The Sea) are muscling/musseling in on the little guy, everyone’s filled with microplastics that serve as the game’s soul/currency analogue, and the denizens of the deep are slowly going irretrievably, violently insane from the build-up of pollution in their systems. None of that stops it from being hilarious (see above), and also having some…worryingly Libertarian-leaning things to say about taxes??? I’m hoping it lands less on “fuck paying taxes” and more on “fuck paying taxes to usurpers who exploit the citizenry instead of serving them”; the last thing I need is Kril telling a pregnant sea-horse not to vaccinate his foals.

Fallout (Cramazon Prime)

I don’t claim to be an especial expert on these games; I’ve played 3, NV, and 4 like everybody else, but I know excellent, emotionally devastating television when I see it, and friends: I HAVE SEEN IT. 

There’re any number of things about this that deserve three mutant lungfulls of praise—the incredibly powerful performances (the three main leads demonstrating roughly the Lawful Good, Lawful Evil, and either True Neutral or Extremely Chaotic Good playstyles), the expansions to the overarching lore of the series (including a horrifying, completely logical answer to the series-centric question of Who Killed The World), and most of all the in-depth examination of the fact that being a ‘good person’ is most often an expression of having good options and opportunities. This show believes that the world is a dangerous, hungry place full of desperate people, but that there is some good left in it, and that deciding to fight for it can make a difference, for ourselves and for others.
My only real caveat is for a level of violence and gore that approaches the industrial; this is an attempt to recreate the hilariously over-the-top meatsplosions the games are well-known for but it uh, it kinda hits different when Uncle Baby Billy is splattering people all over a village or a vault dweller—I am not making this up—sticks a machine gun into a raider’s mouth, fires, then pushes the barrel of the gun out the hole and uses the dangling corpse as a shield while continuing to fire. When it comes to violence, the line between too-cartoonish-to-be-upsetting and make-me-cover-my-eyes-while-watching-on-the-treadmill is thin, wiggly, and blurry, and it’s often impossible to know which side a property lands on until it’s too late; your mileage may vary, but it was the one thing I thought could’ve used a slight tweak.

It’s always hard to figure out how to praise something like this (or The Boys): deeply, openly critical of the ravenous, cannibalistic capitalism (and nationalism) that’s presently literally killing all of us…brought to you by Amazon, one of the biggest culprits of that very thing. There’s an argument to be made about creating controlled opposition in the guise of subversion while actually just reinforcing their control, but at the end of the day I’ll always believe that a True Thing is True no matter who says it, and I’m not gonna lie, it really helps if who says it is Matt Berry:

Final Fantasy XIV (PlayStation Mark V)

I took the free-login-for-dormant-players campaign bait hard, that hook is deep in my facemeats, and I am having a ball. I’ve got a There haven’t been a ton of major changes since I last played about a year and a half ago, and that’s a good thing: the game and its community are dedicated to providing a stable, welcoming experience for new and old players alike. The most significant change I’ve noticed is that NPC companions are now available for instanced raids, so one no longer has to desperately hope that enough people across the entire world want to do Sastasha at the same time that you do, nor struggle with the opaque loot-distribution system. I get all the green glowing gear now, dumb robot party members, so shut up and throw me them heals while I whale on this fishman.

Godzilla Minus One (Netflix)

Holy hell what a picture. 

I’m not gonna spoil anything for you, but suffice it to say that the problem with American Godzilla movies is that they forgot monsters are supposed to be symbols; the impossibly excellent Shin Godzilla used him to represent the Japanese goverment’s lack of flexibility and action in the face of disaster (I believe specifically as a commentary on both past tsunami-responses and the aftermath of the Fukushima reactor debacle, which they’re so touchy about that they outright cancelled a beloved, long-running food manga for criticizing perceived governmental neglect of rural communities following the incident), and Godzilla Minus One has him stand in for trauma, shame, guilt, the cyclical and self-damaging nature of violence, and trying to balance the greater good against the worth of the individual, a historically complex topic in Japanese culture. (It’s also a lot about the legacy of World War II and the lasting impact of being, as one character specifically says, “too cheap with human life”, which I am not qualified to discuss.)

Today, a Godzilla movie made me cry. Go watch it.

Kim’s Convenience (Netflix)

If you’re in the market for something nice and hilarious and extremely easy to watch, but that still has sprinklings of more serious social and relatable family-dynamic issues, then friends and neighbors this comedy about a multigenerational Korean immigrant family running a corner store in Toronto is for you!

Talk To Me (Amazon Prime)

YEAH HI THIS MOVIE RULES; allow me to enumerate the whys:

1. Invents a brand new Ouija-board-level spooky novelty kid-activity in the form of a deeply haunted gripper that serves as a MODEM TO THE AFTERLIFE. Dune popcorn-bucket hell, they should be selling these at the concession as cup-holders.
2. Realistically diverse cast (in fairness I’m not sure what the dynamics of that are in Australia, but I don’t think things there are magically free of racism, so) including one nonbinary character played by a nonbinary actor who just gets to exist in the movie without it being A Thing
3. As I get older I appreciate tight run-times more and more, and had no idea how much I disliked the de rigueur “nobody believes the protagonist” part of horror movies until I noticed that this movie doesn’t have one of those. Everyone is on board with the evil artifact from jump and, being dumdum teens, proceed to use it as a metaphorical bong-stand.. (A…billabong-stand)
4. Kangaroo! In…a distressing context, but still; how often do you get to see one of those.

Movie’s great, a sequel is forthcoming called Talk 2 Me because they saw their chance and Store-Brand God blessem they took it, watch it when you get a chance.

Shōgun (Hūlū)

Whoa buddy what a program, yowza. 

Shōgun is the like 70%-true story of the first English ship’s-pilot to land in Japan, throwing a wrench into a tense succession-crisis and straining Japan’s fragile alliance with Portugal (by being at war with Portugal); the events themselves did roughly, basically happen, and this is a fictionalized, narrativized version of them. It’s equal parts wonderfully complex political intrigue, comedy of customs as all of Japan and a single Englishman mutually horrify each other with the way they exist, relationship drama, Nestor friggin’ Carbonell stealing every scene he’s in out from all the other actors, and reflection on life, death, committing yourself to a cause, sacrifice, and the nature and purpose of power. The acting is the best I’ve seen on television in years, the production value is without equal, and the writing is impeccable and powerful. I like the show, I’m saying.

For my part, I’ve tried to read the book several times, and enjoyed it but always failed; all of the cultural, linguistic, and historical whatnot is fantastic, but it’s got a lot of Written-By-A-White-Dude-In-The-70’s Problems, such as every woman in Japan being absolutely obsessed with the protagonist’s big ol’ Anglo-Saxon dong. The show is making me curious enough to give it another shot though; maybe I can chalk all the xenophobia and specifically-racist-sexism up to James Clavell trying to make Blackthorne look like an ass.

We’ll get there,
—C.W.

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