This week is the last webisode of Outbreak Undead for my RPG Storytime series for this season. Star Wars will begin in December, and I'm heavily in the process of finishing that up so it'll be ready. I find myself strangely more excited about working on these than any of my books.
RPG Storytime is my Youtube show where I take the stories from role playing games I've been running and turn them into narrative stories complete with sound effects, music, etc. and visually told with images and miniatures.
I feel a bit guilty for being so much more excited about doing videos using toys to tell stories about games rather than writing books. After all, I'm in my 40s and should be striving for something more adult, shouldn't I?
But in thinking through why I enjoy it so much, I've come to realize just why I enjoy it so much. RPG Storytime is a combination of my three favorite things to do,writing, filmmaking,and gaming. I get to create a cooperative story with a group of people playing a game. I then get to write it up into story format. And finally I have to figure out how to tell that story visually.
I do wish more people would see them. I've been discouraged by the small number of viewers, and it sometimes makes me wonder why I'm spending time on this. But I can't help myself. Even now, I'm wanting to get through this blog posting so I can continue to work on Star Wars. It's a thrill I get like no other; probably because it combines everything I enjoy doing.
You can find all of the RPG Storytime webisodes on my channel Bandwagon Games.
On my Bandwagon Games Youtube channel I do a series called RPG Storytime. In it we play role playing games and I tell the story through narration, sound effects, and miniatures. One of the games we do this with is called Outbreak Undead. In it, players take the role of survivors during the zombie apocalypse.
One of the interesting features is a method by which you can create a character in the game based on yourself. So you can literally be a character in the game. This made for an interesting element in the show where the players on screen were the characters in the story.
We were all excited about this at first as none of us had ever played ourselves in an RPG before. But the joy of this wore off as the realities of the concept set in. When the players were faced with the reality of a zombie apocalypse and everything that came with it, the game became much more stressful as they were forced to think of all the people they would have lost in such a situation, and all the things they would need to do to survive, and save those they cared about who hadn't died yet.
When we play fictitious characters, and even, to an extent, when we create fictitious characters, we often don't think about all the aspects of life. For instance, when you have a character in a game or a book, you don't think about all of their parents, their siblings, their cousins, their friends, etc. You think of a select few of them. The characters in this game had cats at home they were concerned about, and the thought of them being eaten by zombies was too much. Had they been playing fictional characters, they wouldn't have that stress on them.
The high and low of it was that, though they went into the game excited to play themselves, the stress became too much, and one by one they wanted to switch to fictional ones so they could just enjoy themselves; and you see that reflected in the game.
Outbreak Undead, Second Edition is now on Kickstarter in case anyone is interested in taking a look.
Wonder Woman has been out for so long now it's actually on DVD at this point, so singing its praises is a bit past due, but I think it's important enough to say something even if it's late rather than never.
Like so many people, I had expected this movie to be terrible after all the other DC bombs. Arrogance by the filmmakers had gotten in the way of those. However, it really seemed like they understood the importance of Wonder Woman as a symbol, and got their act together when they made it.
One scene that had made me cringe in the trailers, but brought me to tears in the movie, was when Wonder Woman climbed up out of the trench and led a charge. I still can't put my finger on why it bugged me at first. It just seemed... tacky for some reason. I think it's because the trench warfare at that time was SO grim. All of war is grim, of course, but there are some specific points that just go beyond a fun movie. For instance, Captain America didn't go to a concentration camp. That would have been just... too much.
However, the way it was portrayed in the movie was to have the trenches represent the stubbornness of the commanders, and their unwillingness to do something that needs to be done. Wonder Woman going over the top represented the same thing as when she was scolding the commanders in their plush office; something has to be done now.
Most of all, what moved me about the scene wasn't that she was fighting a war, it was that a woman was standing up for what she believed in, and doing something herself. It was a call to action to women, not just to men. A lot of feminist programs and writings point fingers at men and complain about how things have been. That's fair enough, as chauvinism has been prominent in humanity for as long as it's existed. But nothing is going to change if women don't stand up for themselves and get active.
I've been very disappointed in a lot of entertainment in our culture that's been held up as either feminist, or has been popular among women. Much of it is centered around the idea of women manipulating men to get ahead, rather than having the strength to do something themselves. Fifty Shades of Gray and Twilight were all about women whose loftiest goals were to score the hot guy, and they were considered strong for having won them over enough to get the men to do everything for them. Sex and the City, for all its hype about portraying independent women in New York, at its heart, was all about what sort of rich and famous men they could get into bed. I've even been bothered by Beyonce being held up as a feminist icon after listening to the song that made her famous, Crazy in Love. What bothers me so much about that song is that, after she sings about being crazy for a guy, that guy jumps into the song and sings all about himself! He doesn't support her song or anything she's saying, it's all about HIM.
It's been discouraging seeing women be their own worst enemies as they hold up these non-feminist shows and people as feminist icons. True feminism should be about women being allowed to have the equal chances as men to get as far in the world as their talents and skills allow. Not to see how much they can manipulate men into doing things, then allowing them to take the lead.
Wonder Woman was all about a woman taking the lead to DO something, not manipulate a man into doing it. This movie embodied a lot of what I was trying to get across in my documentary about women soldiers in the Civil War. I didn't do that because I praise women who dress up as men, or strictly because they go to war; it's because they stand up for THEMSELVES. They prove themselves as true equals, and we respect them for that.
Wonder Woman is the hero we all need in this day and age.
You
know you've got nothing left to say in your show when all you can do is tease
the audience with "who's going to die next?" Or at least, you should know this. Unfortunately, the producers of The Walking
Dead didn't realize this when they put together season seven; and the audience
didn't help when they enabled them with a record-breaking first episode.
Audiences
turned on the show later in the season as the show went through a
record-breaking drop in viewership.
However, the audiences that turned on the show should have seen it
coming long before that, during the end of season six. First, the pacing slowed way down as the
stretched out the story so it could end on its "cliffhanger," and the
final episode saw the characters wandering through the woods for eternity, only
to be captured yet again, and then we were all forced to listen to a drawn out
speech by Neagan. It was dull,
uninteresting, and clearly intended to waste time. But hey, he had a bat with barbed wire which
had a name! That made it all better,
right?
And
finally he beat someone unseen by the camera, and the season stopped
there. The intent was to make the
audience wonder all summer who he had killed, and they played into that with
all of their marketing. It was the same
sort of marketing that's worked ever since "Who shot JR?" in the
'70s. The difference is, with "Who
shot JR?" and other more interesting cliffhangers, there was a mystery one
could intellectually try to solve. With
Walking Dead, it was just a gimmick.
Like
many shows today, The Walking Dead has thrived off the suspense gained through
major characters being killed. It's a
tactic that started with the show V in the 1980s, and has caught on with
audiences for making the story unpredictable.
However, this is a tool, and it should be used as such. Placing this element front and center
cheapens it, and cheapens the show by making it all about "who's going to
die" rather than "what's going to happen in the story?" Deaths of characters should support the
storyline, not the other way around. But
the writers and producers of The Walking Dead seem to have forgotten that, even
into the first episode of season seven, which did nothing but continue to tease
the audience with "who's it going to be?"
By
the time Neagan quit yapping, I didn't care who it was going to be. I just wanted him to shut the hell up and get
on with it already. And when he did, it
seems as though the show expected us to be impressed with their willingness to
kill off beloved characters. But that's
what they've gotten wrong.
The
death of a beloved character can work when used correctly. The Red Wedding in Game of Thrones worked
because it took the story from being about a straight revenge war into being
one of a family who's scattered throughout the kingdom rising up against a
tyrant who's in charge. The deaths
served the story.
What
purpose did killing Glenn or Abraham serve?
It just means we don't get to take the journey with those characters
anymore. Shows like this have forgotten
that the concept of a story is to take a journey with some characters, and at a
certain point, when you take that away, audiences simply lose interest. Which they did. The show lost more than seven million viewers
throughout the season. It took them a
little longer than it should have for them to come around, but at last they
did.
The
lesson they should learn is, it takes more than a named bat to make an
interesting story. Unfortunately,
though, it seems they haven't learned that lesson, as they've continued the
Neagan story onto season eight.
I had to admit to something last night. When Star Trek and Orville were premiering their initial trailers, I was on board with Orville and was unimpressed with Star Trek. Orville gave us characters and Star Trek gave us... its name. That seemed all they cared about was riding off of the label and CBS seemed uninterested in earning its audience. Plus they were going to make us pay for the pleasure of watching a show whose initial producers, people who were big Star Trek fans, had been fired. It seemed so cynical and Orville seemed so fresh.
I still defended Orville after a lot of people didn't like the initial episode. It was wrestling with itself over its identity, but I believed that was temporary, and these characters would be ones I'd want to follow. However, their second episode showed that Seth McFarlane just can't get past his pop culture references and frat boy vision. (Pop culture references of today, that is, which 300 years from now would be like us making references during colonial days.)
Star Trek, meanwhile, was decent. I wouldn't say great, but it was okay. Someone needs to get them a tripod that has all three legs working apparently, and the director needs to stop going, "Look Ma, I'm directing!" But the characters turned out to be more interesting than I thought they would be. However, it wasn't good enough to get me to pay $5 a month to watch it. They're also apparently not allowing the first episode to be seen anywhere online, so if you missed it Sunday night when they wanted you to watch it, you missed it. (I missed the first half because I don't schedule my life around TV. Either I can see it on my time, or I don't watch it.)
It's a pity because we had two chances at a great Star Trek franchise here. I'm still sort of pulling for both of them. I especially want to see McFarlane get his act together as he's been very helpful to cat rescues; so anything he does I want to be profitable. But they both need to start listening to their audiences, who are VERY vocal, so they have no excuse not to hear them.
