Rough Draft of Final Project: "What Are You Afraid Of?"

Horror. It is considered one of the oldest genres, and yet also one of the most underrated. Most likely this is due to the simple fact that horror, as a genre, tends to pop up the most in the exploitation scene of pictures, whether it be the sort of things Roger Corman put out or the sorts of things one sees on the SyFy channel while one is drunk at three in the morning, likely due to the fact that gore and terrible CGI monsters tend to procure more immediate returns than actually writing a decent script (Though this author would argue that some Corman-produced movies are actually pretty crackerjack, like Galaxy of Terror and Piranha). 

But it's also perhaps due in large part to society's vast lack of understanding as to what in the horror genre attracts people. There have been vast backlashes from society against horror, from the criticism of the 80s wave of slashers for being misogynistic (Some of which was accurate, some of which wasn't) to the British list of banned gore films known as the Video Nasties. The sort of voyeuristic desire to look upon the darkness in horror tends to be considered some sort of symptom of madness by The Very Serious People who run society, to the point where famed horror filmmaker David Cronenberg once said in disgust “Censors tend to do only what psychotics do; they confuse reality with illusion.”.

But, as a fan of horror, with a history with the history of the genre, this author has a personal hypothesis of the appeal of horror to the masses, and that appeal is threefold. 

First, he would say that the fear, the legitimate, deep terror, is only part of the appeal, and that there are two other parts one should consider in its appeal, specifically the appeal of creativity and the appeal of broken taboos. And he will explore his history with the genre to show this with the power of critical analysis.

So, dear reader, we must start with what is likely to be the least lengthy of the analyses, and it is speaking of horror as taboo. Perhaps it is because this author has little experience with that sub-genre that this genre that it is getting short shrift, but to be fair, it also happens to get short shrift from the horror fandom in general. The term “torture porn” has grown in vogue as of late to describe this genre, including films such as “Hostel”, “Turistas” and later entries in the “Saw” series that seek to shock and disgust.

One argument could be that films like this have always been around in one form or another, such as the infamous American ending to “Snuff”, the first two films in the “Guinea Pig” series, and the nigh-legendary “Cannibal Holocaust”. But an article by Adam Lowenstein also argues that the term should be more like Spectacle Horror. He also makes the case that the films that the term was coined for, Turistas and Hostel, also have a very dark satirical aspect to them, with “Hostel” in particular being mentioned as a giant satire of American actions overseas. 

This is perhaps very similar to the themes many scholars have read into Cannibal Holocaust, but that's another topic entirely.

But the genre should actually be called taboo horror, for that is its appeal, the breaking of taboos. Steven King says something similar when he talks about “go for the gross out” in his landmark study of horror “Danse Macabre”. And, as Lownstein mentions by bringing up the films “Execution of Mary Queen of Scotts” and “Electrocution of an Elephant,” this phenomenon goes all the way back to the dawn of cinema. 

And King mentioned that in horror films, the gross-out can sometimes reach a point of art, which is what the films seem to be aiming for. He mentions oneincedent in particular, a spider being mulched up by a juicer in the film “The Giant Spider Invasion”, and there is a moment of disgust when a woman drinks it. This spoke to him about the frission touching the audience on a deeper level than these films' paltry narratives can touch upon. But there's the argument about something more being at work to be had.

It is the argument that it's not just a connection at the gut, but a connection of the will, as an endurance test for one's gut, to prove one's strength in the face of the absurd, or perhaps their willingness to embrace it. 

This ties in to well to another of horror's icons HP Lovecraft, who has been called the JRR Tolkein of horror literature for his deep yet awe-inspiring worldbuilding, creator of the Cthulhu mythos and establisher of several of horror's most iconic tropes, such as the concept of the apatetic monster god who who could crush us like ants and not even give a crap (Call of Cthulhu, The Dunwich Horror, The Haunter In The Dark), archetectual geometry that defies rational explaination (Call of Cthulhu, Dreams in the Witch House), and even the ancient astronauts trope that some people actually believe in today (The Shadow Out Of Time, In The Mountains of Madness). None of those people are actually non-idiots, but still.

And yet, for such an innovator, the man was also surprisingly conservative and averse to change. His work brims and bubbles with cartoonish levels of racism, describing with horror minorities and 'half-breeds” taking over, whether it be the cultists of Cthulhu or the immigrants in The Horror At Red Hook, he spoke with terror of the “debased hordes” slowly shambling to breakdown all that “we” (that is to say, his own group of white anglo-saxon protestants) hold dear. 

And the geographer James Kneale, in talking about the role of the crossing of boundaries in his work, mentions a quote of his saying, “Change is the enemy of anything really worth cherishing,” saying that all the innovation and pioneering he did stemmed from his racism, the taboos he brought up and shuddered over were the very thing that drove his creation. And that is, perhaps, the secret to his appeal, that feeling of the taboo and the violation of the boundaries of sane life that he captured though his sheer white boy neuroticism.

Note that this is not an assertion that Lovecraft's fanbase is racist. Indeed a large chunk of his fanbase makes fun of this element of his work, including critic and cartoonist Johnathan Wojcic (Who will be addressed later). But, rather, it is an assertion that the breaking of taboos from which he took his fear touched on something in the popular consciousness that even he only half understood. And that is what fascinates people about his work, taking all that humanity holds dear and revealing it to be a lie we tell ourselves to keep ourselves from comprehending the magnitude of infinity, even if they do not hold his morbid dread of it. 

Steven King in “Danse Macabre” talks about how horror is an inherently conservative genre in “Danse Macabre,” because it is almost always about an imbalance in the natural order of things that needs to be solved. And while this author would not take it that far, there certainly is some degree of truth to that assertion.

And then that leads into the second avenue of horror's appeal, the approach of fear. Steven King in the “Danse Macabre” chapter “Radio and The Set of Reality” talks about tension derived from imagination as a key factor for creating fear, with a very memorable quote attributed to William F. Nolan.

It goes like this,albeit in a version condensed for space: “You approach the door in the old, deserted house, and you hear something scratching at it... The protagonist throws it open, and there is a ten-foot-tall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. "A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible," the audience thinks, "but I can deal with a ten-foot-tall bug. I was afraid it might be a hundred feet tall."

And while there are more factors to fear than the use of tension, which will be gotten to later, this explains perfectly one of the key advantages of found footage films, which have exploded in popularity since The Blair Witch Project.

 “Paranormal Activity” might be the go-to example for this, and indeed this author loves that movie to death, but this report will use the anthology film “V/H/S/2” as an example of the subgenre, namely because of its extreme stylistic variety and also because this author also loves it to death.

The film is extrememly disparate in terms of subject matter and style, with the subjects of each story ranging from space aliens to disturbing demon cults to zombies to even some inklings of cosmic horror. But despite that variety, there is one thing all of them have in common: the stare. Thanks to the nature of the footage, they do not cut away to a different location, they do not take you out of the danger, they just stare through the camera's eye, always in the situation, always there. 

And that's what keeps the films consistently powerful, the fact that due to the necessity of the format there is not even a moment of seeming respite, and thus the tension that King's quote addresses. And on the unknown that that tension leads up to, the film also works well with this thanks to its format.

While at times found footage films have been criticized for use of what some call “shakey cam,” it is actually arguable that the deficiencies of the format can actually add to that piece of the format the lack of seeing. 

The lack of professional lighting and a consistent view of the creature create not only a disturbing sense of reality, but also a sense that the events are actually occurring. This is most notable in Slumber Party Alien Abduction, where the aliens are done in the image of the classical “greys,” and the costumes are very simple. But under the quickly moving camera and the dim natural lighting, it makes the glimpses we do see of the costumes into something nightmarish, distortions of the human form.

This does not just work in films, but also in literature, as Lovecraft knew. One of the best examples of this is, actually, Call of Cthulhu. For, while the description of the titular creature speaks of the typical hybrid of human, dragon and octopus, this is only actually ever used in-story to describe his human-made depictions. The actual appearance of the And the impossible architecture of Rylleh, the idea of which he uses in many, many other stories, could not possibly be described in text, but the insinuation that a person is essentially swallowed alive by its impossible geometry says a lot about it in only a few words.

And then there is the second type of nightmarish horror, the horror of the bizarre, the things that don't make sense. It is something very much like the unknown, but less in the context of the main plot, and more in the context of the larger setting of the story. That is to say, it means even when we know what the horror in the story is, it still leaves the reader with more questions than answers, and leaves a feeling of weirdness. HP Lovecraft captured this feeling very well in many of his stories, most notably in The Colour Out of Space.

 Said story involves a meteor made up of impossible colors that crashes in the earth and then starts slowly shrinking until it disappears. Afterwards, the people and vegetation in the land start slowly getting warped and deformed, with that color showing up more and more within them. And in the end, the colour coalesces from all the life it has warped into one being and flies off into space, while leaving a part of itself in the water supply. While the area is about to be dammed for drinking water. And yes, the disquieting implications of this are brought up. 

The reader does not even know that the thing is a living being until the end of the story, and even then questions are raised about its nature and what will happen with what it left behind. This is perhaps one of the reasons that Lovecraft considered this his favorite story he wrote.

Even in his more conventional story “The Whisperer In Darkness,” the story is still leading up to the reveal of tentacle-headed unphotographable fungus-lobsters with a base on Pluto who are putting human brains in jars and taking them to space. And by the end of the story it is still unrevealed what they're using the brains for. 

 

And that perhaps is what makes his mythos so intriguing, the repeated hints of a far larger cosmology than is shown in the full text, but a lack of revelation of what that is. Perhaps that is why the mythos has been cheapened as of late, because too much of the material is devoted to explaining it.

The certainly is the perspective of Johnathan Wojcic, a cartoonist and critic who runs the website Bogleech, dedicated to all things monstrous and morbid. He's held a short horror fiction contest in both 2012 and 2013, and his largest piece of advice has always been the same “Less explaination, more mystery”. And that philosophy also shows up in his own work.

For example, in the story of his own he put into the archives of the contest, “The Five,” the protagonist talks about some vague disaster that happened throughout, where people are repeating the last five days of their life before the occurrence. And then, in the end, we get what the disaster is with a single line: “Where, exactly, did all the heads go?”. 

 

And in the sequel, we find that the answer to the question is that they're all rolling to a single point, gathering in a formation that's somehow significant to the narrator. But the appearance of the formation is not explained. Just raising further questions.

And he also continues this idea in his Mortasheen concept, a worldbuilding project soon to become a tabletop roleplaying game, which is much akin to a sci-fi/horror take on Pokemon with the tone of the average Terry Pratchett novel. And yet, despite this tone, he still manages to carry over horror's sense of mystery to the creatures.

In particular, a class (Mortasheen's equivalent to Pokemon's “types”) known as “Unknowns” have this principle to a creature, with beings having such anomalous properties as people being able to remember the results of their actions, but never their actions themselves (Longfellow), a being eternally covered in ever-shifting holes as if moving through an other-dimentional medium (Vorlune), a silicon-based being with quadruple helix DNA that drains an unknown sort of energy from its victims (Vaccuthax), and mineral beings that are not even technically alive, but still act like they are (The Meteor series).

But these themes can be seen all over the series, from the angelic life-giving Oovule possibly being the ultimate evolution of the Zombie type to the Devilbirds and the unknown forces they have tapped into. And while the tone of the series is rather dark-comedy, this creates a sense of horror underlying the whole thing, with things far beyond the game's scope.

Even a follower of his, Christopher Howard Wolf (Known by the online handle Slimebeast), has most of his many, many short horror stories end with no answers. Most of his stories have incredibly ludicrous premises and twists, such as a horrible mascot-posessing demon lurking under Disney property to an ever growing flesh Katamari to a bizarre mockery of a “Stranger Danger” character who abducts children and makes everybody forget them, or a shut-in manchild who makes disturbing videos placing horrifying content into normal programming. But they are still powerful and disturbing because of the fact there's no answer. In most of them, there is no answer, there is no explanation behind the final circumstance, just the faint feeling that there is just something deeply wrong with the universe.

And that is perhaps the reason why, out of all the short horror fiction writers online, Mr. Wolf was known as one of the best. Well, at least until people unauthorizedly using his stories for their own profit drove him to quit. But that's another rant.

And that leads one to the final piece of horror fiction that attracts those who read it: the creativity. It is likely the most attractive piece of horror fandom for many people, due to the fact that a large amount of horror is not all that scary.

Take for example the horror movies profiled by the websites I-Mockery and X-Entertainment, two of the earliest and longest-running websites (If one counts X-Entertainment's spiritual successor by the same author Dinosaur Dracula, which is practically the same anyway) profiling, tributing and poking fun at “trash” culture of earlier years. I-Mockery for example, has a yearly series of articles where they take a look at the site's self-proclaimed greatest horror movie moments.

If one looks at these kills, one would note that they are not particularly scary. They are usually quite excessive, and while that may be disturbing and tie into the earlier appeal of horror as taboo, that does not mean that it is scary. But what they all are is creative. From the death of a man by having a voodoo-doll-ice-cream-bar in his likeness being eaten to a huge rolling sphere of small, toothsome aliens to a man ripping himself open like a sheet of paper, they all have a morbid inventiveness to them.

Indeed, it was X-Entertainment's profiles of the films “House” and “Dead Alive” that convinced this author to see those films, and it was those films that brought him into the fold of horror, namely because those films sounded so incredibly strange. And that is also likely why, out of all of King's works, this author likes Graveyard Shift the best due to its collection of very strange ideas still taken seriously by Mr. King, who shows no shame towards his chosen genre.

It is perhaps in the spirit of Danse Maccabre that tis aspect of horror exists, a making of merriment with the knowledge of death. How appropriate that that is Steven King's title for his affectionate look at the genre

Fear as It Stands

In my research I have found... well, pretty much what I've always expected to find. It re-enforces my general perspective on horror, and overall I feel as if I am on the right track. It's not that difficult to guess why that is, given that a lot of the people behind those works shaped my view of horror, particularly King and Capacabra. They're the ones who ushered me into the genre, so perhaps it is appropriate that they also serve as the research underscoring my foray into why I love it so much.

But, what I've realized about myself in looking at the field of horror is that I think the part that appeals to me the most is the creativity part and not the actual terror part.

The darndest thing is, I've only ever been truly terrified by three films (Rec., Paranormal Activity and V/H/S/2), and while I love those films, most horror doesn't truly scare me. I love the genre for its creativity, how it takes the dark and outlandish and spawns visual poetry from it. God bless the big rubber monsters I say, and god bless the madmen who puppeteer them!

Anyway, I think I'll organize the report around a three-part structure after my thesis, writing on the three major aspects of horror that I think attracts people: the transgression, the creativity, and the genuine terror. I'll be using the films (With maybe a few others that I might add later) in my bibliography to discuss the latter two mostly, as they're the factors that attracted me, and I'll use the websites in the bibiliography to discuss my relationship to the genre via being introduced to it by them.

U understand the concept of academic distance, but I don't know about how distant to remain in this project in its writing. Any chance you could give me some suggestions on how to retain the "proper" academic distance while at the same time making this as personal as I'd like it to be?

What Gives Horror Its Appeal?

That's the question I mean to address, What Gives Horror Its Appeal. This topic hits home for me on a number of levels, the biggest of which is that I think it was the horror genre more than anything else that got me into film, via first exposures to it online via websites like X-Entertainment and I-Mockery and my young reading of HP Lovecraft and Steven King.

I also wanted to talk about it because I feel horror is at a low point now compared to how high it was in the 80s, due to the plague of remakes and the fact that the studios' current strategy of "big-budget, safe, PG-13 CGI spectacle" fits horror really; really poorly, but I feel that it's due for a renaissance due to the growing undercurrent, hence its relevance to pop culture. And I know sooooo much about the topic that it's not even funny, thanks to my vaguely autistic browsing of the internet for horror data and my nigh-religious attendance of the Loft's Mondo Mondays and All-Nite Scream-O-Ramas.

I'd personally respond that it's a combination of both a genuine love of being horrified for the thrill, the joy in seeing the macabre creativity that the genre does and the natural human interest in the unknown (which also happens to be the greatest and oldest source of terror), but that's before doing all the research. And in my research I need to find specifics. Academically trackable specifics so I can make the paper publishable and rub it in people's faces.

So yeah. That is the state of the Union. Any tips?

Tabletop RPGs in My 4chan? Its Moar Likely Than you Think.

The problem with the way people talkabout 4chan is the simple and fundamental fact that there is no one real 4chan. They're usually referring to the infamously anarchaic (though much tamer as of late) /b/ board when they talk about the place's culture, but the thing is, each board has its own culture. For example, /x/ (the paranormal board) is filled with would-be magicians and cooks alongside some excellent Creepypasta writers, /pol/ (the political board) is filled with neo-nazis and libertarian loonies, /v/ (The video game board) is infamously caustic and bitter and /d/ (the weirdass hentai board filled with hermaphrodite and parasite porn amongst other things) is famous for being the most pleasant f all the boards. But the creative heart of 4chan is /tg/, the tabletop RPG board.

Despite the fact that tabletop gaming has become more and more nitche as the computer RPGs that sprung from its loins have blossomed, and yet they've managed to create massive massive libraries of ideas from this medium, some of them even being fleshed out into full tabletop game systems. So, which medium shaping the message of which am I analyzing?

Why both of them of course! The medium of 4chan,where images and text are posted, posters are anonymous, is the perfect system for allowing the tabletop RPG to make the jump into the 21st century.Luckily for us, we've got a full archive of threads to access to give examples for. And the first thing one notices in the thread is the 'quest" threads.

They're not much liked by a few, and they are so numerous that the aforementioned archive has a specific folte, but they're a good starting point. They're essentially very much like old text-adventure games, where the players  are give na scenario (along with a picture to go with it), and the player writes in their response to do what's next, with the next scenario following directly from what the aftermath of that response is. But there's a twist.

No, it's not that Bruce Willis was dead the whole time, don't be a smartass. It's that the whole thing is moderated not by a computer, but by one single writer, who looks at the answers he gets from the posters,decides which one is best. And this sums up /tg/ use of the medium perfectly.

Despite everything being in an electronic format, from the art to the text to the communication of the players, this captures the main aspect that tabeltop RPGs have always done better than any other medium: the humanity. That experience of having a world controlled not by a computer but by a human, where outcomes are only as predictable as the DM makes them, and where randomness is sane. And also the ridiculousness.

/tg/ is not made up of a bunch of neckbeards who take everything too seriously. No, they are neckbeards of great jocularity and wit! They took apost about sucking 10000 dicks to get a certain game made into a thread on the logistics of sucking 10000 dicks. They turned a "play chessover the internet" thread into a bizarre epic that barely resembles chess in a conventional sense. They took an obviously-trolling furry diaper fetish post and spun it into a thread about how the idea of a diaper of holding could become a near-limitless source of cheap and accessible oil!

This also is a factor adding up to my conclusion: that the medium of 4chan is the perfect place for bringing tabletop gaming into the modern age. Because, the short-lived (Barring archives like the one mentioned above) nature of the threads, combined with the use of images to produce unexpected results, and the quick, anonymous replies that give the writers plenty of time to think of witty repartee, makes 4chan;'s format the perfect place to pull off similar improvisational shenanigans as the best tabletop RPGs, and the best threads pull this off with aplomb! 

And that's what  they've even gotten huge projects done, such as a Neon Genesis Evangelion tabletop RPG or an entire chapter manual for their goofy fan-made Warhammer 40k Space Marine chapter The Angry Marines. And this is perhaps why they are best poised to bring tabletop gaming into the 21st century. Because that spirit of improvisation, that spirit of creation and craziness, iswhat both mediums do best, and they have produced genuine results.

The future of the tabletop rests on the laptop.

References:
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html

Why Pathfinder is Popular

Dungeons and Dragons may not be a videogame, but it is the ur-example of roleplaying games, without which games like Skyrim or Final Fantasy would not exist and which, I'd argue, is actually more influential for modern fantasy than even Lord of the Rings due to compiling and collecting so many sources. And while the main game has gone through four editions, with a hiatus for a fifth one coming our way, that's not what I'm here to talk about.

I'm here to talk about Pathfinder. It's been called the true 4^th edition by many players of the game despite not being produced by Wizards of the Coast (the actual owners of D&D). Its existence is owed to the fact that Wizards allowed their third edition of the game to be open-sourced, allowing any other publishers to use their rules along with a whole bunch of their creatures and races in exchange for a bit of legalese at the back of their books.

But, to put a long story short, they abandoned the third edition for a fourth one after a good run of eight years, due in no small part to an array of massive game balance problems (As in, with the right books you could build a character who was literally omnipotent from level 1), and that new edition was vastly different than any before it, more akin to the less-detailed but more balanced videogame rpgs, and massively divisive.

And, when they changed editions, they also abandoned the company that used to produce their magazines (Dungeon and Dragon) to produce them in-house. And the people behind said magazines, Paizo, had to release something new soon or else go out of business. And the system was still open source so...

Well, that's how we got Pathfinder. And it's been proven to be far more popular than 4^th edition, or at least as it gained popularity it's seemed to eclipse it, to the point where some have speculated that the recent announcement of fifth edition is a reaction to this. But why? And what does this say about the gaming community?

Well, the first thing one notices when looking at Pathfinder is that you can access a large chunk of it for free. Well, that's an understatement. You can access EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF CORE RULES MATERIAL EVER, LEGALLY! And this isn't a hidden fact, oh no, this is actually prominently featured on Paizo's site, the Pathfinder SRD. That's thanks to their use of the open source system to be sure, but to make so much of it available speaks to something.

And I think what that speaks to is the spirit of open-source-ness amongst the gaming community. We've seen a lot of memes and projects develop out of collaborative effort, such as the internet boogeyman Slenderman or the fully-fleshed-out tabletop RPG Adeptus Evangelion. And in the history of D&D I've read, the open-sourcing of third edition was done in that same spirit, to make D&D the fans' and nobody elses'. And while fourth edition moved away from that, with its open-source agreement that was unclear and most often unused, Pathfinder embraced it, and has been rewarded by the market for it. We are nerds and we want to control the things we love.

Also, another thing you'll notice is the rules. D&D 4e gained most of its balance from restricting the powers of each in-game “class” to a set patternof “powers” that only really applied in battle and differed only in the ways they applied themselves to battle tactics. It also gained most of its infamy from this. Though they began breaking up this paradigm later in the edition, Pathfinder did it differently right from the start. Instead of making, say, the wizard weaker, they just made everything else stronger. And those other classes they did weaken, they did so in ways that were subtle and still fun to play (I.E., the cleric could no longer use the best armors and the Druid had much more limited, but still versatile, shapeshifting abilities). Compare the original SRD to see the difference, and you'll see there's a pretty big gap in there. In addition, they improved the classes thought to be Weak, like the fighter and the paladin, and boosted their power. The fighter now has far more things that are exclusive to him, and no levels, and the Paladin's healing and class features have been boosted way up!

This shows what I think is the great triumph of Pathfinder over 4e, which is that it knew what to keep and drop. While the upcoming D&D Next appears to be doing something similar, Pathfinder knew that people liked the old system just fine. Specifically, they liked the fact that classes felt different other than by power source. The Wizard still casts a certain amount of spells per day (Though with weak unlimited-use ones for backup), the Fighter still smacks things straightforwardly (albeit with a lot of extra feats). It's not that people were unsatisfied that they had these nitches, but that they did not fill them well.

And the list of creatures adds to this reverence for tradition. For, while there are quitea few typical fantasy staples like orcs, trolls, dragons, and the typical D&D staples like otyughs, umber hulks, gelatinous cubes, and so-on, the fact of the matter is that they also do quite a bit new. There's a lot of more obscure mythical creatures used, like the Akhlut or the Pukwudgie or the Garuda, alongside some new ones like the Vemerak (A horrible underground scorpion monster with fungus powers) and the Slurk (A slipperey-slimy walrus-fanged frog domesticated by the underground-dwelling Kobolds).

And not to mention, alongside the fantasy staples like Elf, Dwarf, Human, Halfling, Gnome, ect, the races include such things as half-vampires, half-genies, xenophobic winged folk, shadow-puppet people, and so-on.

But nobody is as angry about the inclusion of these weird races as they were about D&D 4e's inclusion of the comparatively mundane Dragonborn (Dragon people) and Tieflings (Demon people). Why? Because they kept them out of core. The weirder didn't replace certain races, as they did with the half-orc and gnome in the first days of 4e, but were instead given their own book (the Advanced Race Guide) and they kept the . Likewise with the monsters, 4e had some baffling omissions from the first monster book, like the Iron Golem, the Rust Monster and all the Metalic Dragons. All those unique monsters I mentioned? They were in the later books, with the first monster book being occupied by the classics (And also the Froghemoth).

So, over time we see a clear trend for what they tend to keep: Keep the things that aren't broke, fix the ones that are, and keep it diverse. While 4e made some drastic changes to the system, some of which were great, some of which were total failures, Pathfinder took a look at the previous edition, saw what people didn't like, and fixed it. At the same time, given the examples I mentioned, they also managed to add new and exciting ideas to the game, but, at the core, the game was still 3e, minus the glaring balance problems.

And so, the core lesson to this is just that: When you are handling a licensed brand KNOW WHAT THE CORE IDEAS ARE AND HOW THEY APPEAL TO THE FANS! Now if only Michael Bay could learn this...

Reference Links:

http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/

http://www.d20srd.org/

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/features/9293-The-State-of-D-D-Present

On Ads and Consumption...

I do sort of see the decrease of control over advertising as terrifying. After all, they are  gathering data on us without our permission, shoving ads in our feeds for shit we don't want and ideas we shouldn't want. But, the thing is, this easy conveyance of information is a double-edged sword.

For, this conveyance of information can also be used against those in power. It can let anti-corporate campaigns get huge amounts of buzz for anticorporate campaigns in cases like the Occupy movement, or the movement to kill SOPA. And it also enhances the Streisand Effect, IE, if a corporation tries to take something down, inevitably far more people are going to watch it.

This happened most certainly with the film (Coming out this Friday at the Loft) known as Escape From Tomorrow, shot entirely at Disneyland and Disney World. The fact that it was flipping the bird at Disney and the fact that people all thought it was inevitably going to be taken down by corporate lawyers was likely what gave it so much buzz and hype, dending a lot of people to see it.

And even by looking on "Knwo Your Meme", you'll see a whole bunch of memes taking corporate ad campaigns to the domains of parody and mockery, articles on Cracked listing various corporate marketing transgressions, lies and cruelties, and posts with thousands upon thousands of notes dealing with the ways corporate America manipulates America's body image.

Yes the free exchange of information in this age has increased the ease with which corporations can manipulate and push their lies on the public. But it also increases the ease with which these lies can be killed by mockery and skewering in the public discourse. In a way, it resembles the idea of "culture jamming" that was once thought to be merely a countercultural pipe-dream

Now if we could just get the terrifyingly horrible Trans Pacific Partnership to go viral like we did with SOPA...

FROM HELL'S HEART, I STAB AT THEE MARKETING DEPARTMENT! IN HATE'S NAME-

Since I wasn't able to show the ending in class, I will not just be showing the Little Shop of Horrors original ending, but also several other nixed endings:



All of these endings are notable in that they were nixed by test audiences. Note that they are all endings where the protagonist loses/fails. Note also that these endings are far more emotionally powerful (Or, in the case of Little Shop of Horrors, far more badass) than what eventually ended up on-screen.

And that's what prompted that tyrade (considering I got a D on that report, it should be called nothing else), the fact that art is destroyed to try and sell it to people who don't like to be challenged, who prefer Hollywood fluff to real, emotional resonance.

And that's not knocking happy endings mind you, that's me knocking those happy endings that reek of copout and contrivance. But who's to argue that the sorts of people they'd get to go to free test screenings, who'd presumably be going on a whim for light entertainment, are exactly searching for that.

And that's why I place the blame solely on marketers. I mean, they have little motivation to individuate their audiences for the tone of said films, even though they do shit like that with every other motherfucking demographic, because the easily-put-off idiots are where they get most of their sales.

And that's what makes me angriest about the entire profession of marketing, they actively make their own product worse to either sell it better too or swindle better from the pockets of stupid people. And while they're so fucking smug about how they are the "bestest most scientificest way" to get people to buy bullshit, they never actually give a shit if their hypotheses about how "we must ruin this to make it sellable" are wrong because nobody holds the fuckers accountable for RUINING EVERYTHING! Just like the fucking Chicago-school economists.

Before you go, keep in mind, meddling for marketability is what almost killed Brazil. And that's why I think most marketers should be locked up in a government bunker beneath the Utah Salt Flats. Or shot into the sun. Either way works for me.