On the Demise of Star Wars

“You were the chosen one”? Or maybe “Strike me down and I shall only become stronger.”

Forgive the provocative title.  My part of the internet bubble churns with much rage at the current incarnation of Star Wars, and especially at Kathleen Kennedy, at whose feet the perceived “Ruined Forever!” has been laid.  There is much angst and schadenfreude over the failure of Solo, but Solo is the crux of what inspired me to write this, as it’s the first Star Wars movie in a long time that wasn’t an instant “yes,” though not the first Star Wars product in a long time that I had looked forward to, and then changed my mind about.

Then I put this post on ice, because I hesitate to post anything that sounds remotely political in this day and age as discourse is getting extremely divisive and it’s hard to please both sides (and there are sides here) when you say anything, and because I have better things I should be putting my attention towards (the next post is almost done, I promise!). But as news continues to evolve and the corporate narrative of “a few disgruntled trolls vs the Last Jedi” explodes to reveal that the Star Wars franchise is Not Okay, I wanted to get my two cents in, especially given how my blog seems to eat, drink and breath Star Wars.

I hope you forgive this opinion piece.

Star Wars: Ruined Forever

Solo has not done well, and Grace Randolph of Beyond the Trailer sums up most of the arguments pretty succinctly in her video, (she has further news on Kathleen Kennedy; she’s a great one, Ms. Randolph) so I won’t repeat it here.  What I find interesting, and likely true, is her comparison to Batman V Superman/Justice League and the Last Jedi/Solo, in that the backlash of the first resulted in the failure of the second, regardless of the second’s merits.  I’ve been watching this backlash build up for awhile, and not a day goes by where I don’t see a video popping up claiming that Star Wars is dead, or that the Last Jedi is a terrible movie, which clashes strongly with the perception I get from the news or from sites like Wikipedia to the point where I wonder how much of it is real and how much is manufactured, though more on that later.

I feel like the only fandom that hates their fandom more than Star Wars is, perhaps, Doctor Who, which is something I talked about all the way back in the inaugural post about Psi-Wars.  This is, perhaps, just more of the same, but I wanted to tackle some of the arguments that I tend to see, to try to sift out some wheat from chaffe.

The New Star Wars Movies Suck!  Unlike True Star Wars Films!

This is the general thrust of most arguments that I see floating around the internet: once upon a time, the Good King George Lucas reigned over a Golden Age of Star Wars, in which all the films were good, and then the wicked stepmother Kathleen Kennedy took over and ruined it forever.  However, I must say, I find this black and white dichotomy more than a little weird, especially the calls for George Lucas to “come back” and fix his creation.

First off, most Star Wars movies suck, straight up.  Look, here’s all the Star Wars movies I can find, in order of release, with opinions based on what seems to be the general perception of those who dislike the new franchise:

• Star Wars (A New Hope): Good
• The Star Wars Holiday Special: Not Good
• The Empire Strikes Back: Good
• Return of the Jedi: Good (though a lot of people at the time really hated the Ewoks)
• Caravan of Courage: an Ewok Adventure: Not Good
• Ewoks: Battle for Endor: Not Good
• The Phantom Menace: Not Good
• Attack of the Clones: Not Good (Saaaaand)
• Revenge of the Sith: Not Good
• Clone Wars: Not Good (Though I must confess I enjoyed the series)
• The Force Awakens: Good (but unoriginal)
• Rogue One: Good
• The Last Jedi: Not Good
• Solo: Not Good

Mileage may vary (I personally liked the Phantom Menace the most of the original trilogy; a lot of people like Revenge of the Sith, I think Clone Wars is underrated; a lot of people might toss everything new into the “bad” bin, while I think people forget the early negative opinions of RotJ, etc), but this seems to be the current internet consensus, and I count 5 good films and 9 bad films.  Of the new films, half of them are “good,” and even if you press the most ardent Disney Star Wars hater, he’ll grudgingly admit that Rogue One “was sorta alright.” So the new stuff hasn’t been all bad, but this idea that Star Wars was good until Disney came along, is just absurd, as is the idea that Lucas “would fix it.”  Lucas has an even worse hit/miss ratio than Kathleen Kennedy, and she’s his hand-picked successor, so no, I don’t think Lucas will “save Star Wars.”

Kathleen Kennedy Ruined Star Wars with Politics

The first woke robot of Star Wars

The argument goes that Kathleen Kennedy, unlike George Lucas, has used Star Wars as a platform for injecting her own left-wing screed into Star Wars.  To this, I say: Have you seen Star Wars?

George Lucas compared the Ewoks to the Vietnamese, heroically defying a technologically superior enemy.  The US would be the Evil Empire in this analogy.  And before you think he cooled down with age, he tossed in a “You’re with us or you’re against us” swipe at George W. Bush in Revenge of the Sith, which in the context doesn’t even make sense (“Only the Sith see in black and white!” oh really, Obi-Wan “The force has a light side and a dark side” Kenobi?).

Star Wars has always been the fever dream of a 1960s activist, only two things changed.  First, George Lucas and Lucasfilms went from ardent hippy activist to more limousine liberal, which is one reason why Kathleen Kennedy is more worried about “representation” than rebellion.  The other, I think, is a cultural shift: Hollywood’s Overton window has moved a lot more than most of the populace.  I don’t think anyone minds the presence of “Strong Women” in Star Wars; Leia has been the prototypical “Strong Woman” of fiction for a long time, but now there’s a much stronger push for far, far more female representation in Star Wars, perhaps to the detriment of the male leads (Finn, at least, seems to suffer at the hands of the writer for no good reason that I can discern other than, perhaps, that the writers don’t actually understand comedy).

But I also want to come out and say that I don’t think it’s the politics that’s ruining Star Wars.  I think it’s a manufactured excuse to justify bad films, and I’ll get more into that later.  How much outcry do you remember about the Jedi Council being lead by a black man (Mace Windu)?  He has his own comic book series, numerous books, features in video games and in the Clone Wars series, and there were some people arguing he should get his own film.  What about female representation in Star Wars? Asoka Tano, a female character, was the break-out character of Clone Wars and nobody called her a Mary Sue, even when she became the Super Special Awesome Character of Awesome in Star Wars: Rebels.  Who was your favorite character in Rogue One? Those of you who aren’t voting for a robot are probably voting for Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen!), who is Chinese.  So this idea that “fans” are opposed to “inclusiveness” is nonsense.

It’s not the politics that’s ruining Star Wars.

Kathleen Kennedy hates the fans

 I don’t feel that I have a responsibility to cater in some way [to those particular fans]… I would never just seize on saying, ‘Well, this is a franchise that’s appealed primarily to men for many, many years, and therefore I owe men something.'” – Kathleen Kennedy

This one I think is true, especially given that Kathleen Kennedy is on the record as disparaging a certain segment of the Star Wars fanbase (as well as other writers and directors).  I find her defense, her attitude that she doesn’t “owe” fans something to be disingenuous.  Of course, she doesn’t “owe” people something, she offers a product and you can pay for it or not: that’s business.  But what she calls “fans,” I call her core market, and what she’s really saying is something along the lines of “I don’t feel the need to cater to my core market,” which is a daft thing to say in business.

I’m not saying that it’s wrong to try to branch out, but it’s generally not well advised to so do at the expense of your core supporters.  For example, there’s nothing wrong with SJGames pushing a simplified version of GURPS that focuses on the dungeon crawling crowd: that’s SJGames branching out.  But if they were to drop all support for GURPS to focus entirely on a new d20 clone, that would be a risky move at best.  Star Wars has a core audience that is remarkably faithful, despite their complaints and criticisms, to the brand, and I don’t think it’s wise to antagonize that core audience just because they happen to be white and male.  

That said, I don’t think that’s actually what’s going on.  I think all the “politics” and fan-bashing and such is a smoke screen for poor management, and Kathleen Kennedy isn’t the only one doing it.

Rent Seeking and Circling the Wagons 

“I know there’s a lot of controversy around this game, but c’mon, it’s Star Wars, I was never not going to buy it.” – Tech Deals

I first noticed this sort of behavior not with Disney, but with EA, especially the release of Battlefront 2 (If I’m honest, I find everything surrounding the business decisions that led up to the release of Battlefront 2 fascinating).  First, EA gains sole access to the Star Wars IP when it comes to games, which is typical for EA: find something that people love, and monopolize it.  So, if you want a Star Wars game, you must go through them.  Second, create a game that looks good: appearance is the most important, because it helps with the hype train.  Third, find a way to monetize the hell out of it, because you’ve got a Star Wars game, people have no choice but to pay, and then brag about it to your investors, to get more sweet investment capital.  When the fans inevitably complain, divert them with empty promises that you’re “listening,” and then wrap yourself in a cloak of some form of morality.  For example, they had a female lead character, and the actress acted as their spokesperson, which gave them the cover of “we’re supporting feminism;” to suggest that they’ve listened to the fans, they employed John Boyega, the actor who plays Finn, to talk about how much he liked the new Battlefront 2.  When criticism arose, they painted it as the rantings of an unreasonable, entitled minority, and fended off criticism of lootboxes and such by wrapping themselves under the mantle of “Free market!” and “Innovation!” But in the end, everything circles around extracting cash from people, nothing else remained.

I think the same can be safely said of Disney’s handling of Star Wars.  If Kathleen Kennedy were really such a feminist, then why has she hired only white, male directors?  If she’s so racially tolerant, then why do black characters get such poor treatment in her films?  If she hates the fans so much, why does she pepper so many of the Star Wars films with so much fan service?  If she hates Star Wars, why are all the films coming out right now such slavish remakes of the original trilogy, or direct references to the original films? Why has she not yet branched out into something truly new?

I think the truth is that making really good fan-based franchises is hard.  Of all the cinematic universes, only one has really been a success: Marvel, under Kevin Feige.  All the rest have failed.  There may be numerous reasons for this, but one take-away must be that it’s difficult, and Star Wars is going to be no different, because even the stuff most people currently agree is “good,” like Dave Filoni’s Rebels, or Rogue One, are still somewhat controversial (and largely seem to be considered good more in contrast with the things fans consider “Bad”), and the stuff most people agree is “bad,” like the prequels or even the Last Jedi, are equally contentious.  If you’ll pardon the electoral analogy, it’s not really red vs blue but a sea of shades of purple and general discontent, and that’s hard for the best people to navigate, and Kathleen Kennedy seems to not be the best of people.

So instead, we get the easy outs.  Ms. Kennedy just grabs directors and makes films, and when they become too different, she fires the directors and makes them “safer.”  When people criticize her work, she falls back and hides under the mantle of morality: if you hate her movies, you’re part of an “the toxic fandom” and you’re a bigot and a bully.  For me, this is a bridge too far, and really the core of this rant: you will never improve if you cannot take criticism.

I get criticized all the time, sometimes unreasonably in my opinion.  There are people who want Psi-Wars to be something that, in my opinion, it was never intended to be.  I see people who argue that it’s too like Star Wars, and that it’s not like Star Wars enough.  I get people who say they would do things completely differently.  But for me, these are not attacks, but valuable feedback.  Some I can use, some I cannot.  They give me a sign of where things are going, how audiences are shifting, and what I could do better.  Where are things too complicated? Where are they confusing?  What could I be doing better?  You have to pick and choose your criticism, and you cannot bow to what each and every person says, but feedback that is honest is feedback that is valuable.  You cannot learn without it.  Those who attack their critics will never improve.

This seems to be a trend, especially with poorly received films with strong female leads (Lady Ghostbusters, Oceans 8, the Star Wars franchise), but this is a mistake.  For an example of a franchise that took criticism to heart, see the Thor: Ragnarok.

Making a Better Star Wars

It seems like there’s a shake-up already in the works, though not before we get Episode IX.  What will happen? I don’t know, but weaker franchises than this have survived terrible treatment.  Star Wars itself is probably predated only by Star Trek for a franchise beloved by fans but abandoned or mishandled by the entertainment industry.  Star Wars endured all the years of neglect from RotJ to the prequels through books, comics and games, and it survived the prequels, and it will survive now: even if you don’t like the films, check out the new TV series or the animated series.  While there are precious few video games (because EA has seemingly forgotten how to make video games, and killed the lonely one Star Wars video game that was set to release), there’s still RPGs, books and comics being made, and some, I hear, are quite good.

Were it up to me, I’d encourage them to set aside this “Legends/Canon” split, or at least weaken it.  The Marvel films drank deep of their comic weirdness and embraced their legacy; they didn’t precisely copy everything, but they understood they had a huge well to draw on and did, and as a result, each film, while formulaic, has something interesting enough to offer that audiences flock to theaters.  By contrast, Star Wars fans feel like they’ve seen the films already (“The Force Awakens was just a New Hope reskinned; the Last Jedi was just the Empire Strikes Back reskinned, and Solo was so predictable that Red Letter Media released a Solo Trailer reaction video before the trailer released, and then edited in the actual trailer afterwords, and got it spot on”), and while I’m not sure that’s entirely fair, that perception makes going to the theater less of a priority, and that’s not what you want from your audiences.  Imagine if Lucasfilm released a KOTOR Star Wars film, or one featuring Thrawn, Mara Jade, the Yuhzon Vong, the Hutt Cartel, Darth Nihilus (or really any Sith from the past), or worlds like Corriban, Ryloth, or Tython?

But what makes me saddest about watching and listening to people talk about Star Wars is that they seem to have forgotten what came before it.  I’ve talked about how much Star Wars has borrowed from, for example, Dune, Flash Gordon, Foundation, samurai films and many more.  If you’re desperate for inspiration, why not draw from those films?  Why not borrow from history and instead of using the First Order as a way of replacing the Empire, why not look at the fracturing of the Empire and its internal wars and its warlords and the efforts of the Republic to reconquer the galaxy with the struggle between their ideals and the hard realities of war.  Want to be inclusive? Have General Leia in charge of everyone and put Gwendoline Christie in a role that doesn’t completely waste her talents.  Bring in Thrawn as one of said warlords, and Mara Jade as your dark and terrible menace, the Emperor’s Hand that the Republic fears.  Give a callout to the Jedi Academy series, with some of Luke’s students trying to help the Republic.  Give us a Dune-like world with a warrior-people who follow a jedi-like creed (the Guardians of the Whills?) who must be talked into fighting back against the nearby warlords or against the sweeping pirate menace. You might even draw from Seven Samurai, by having seven heroic characters gathered to defend that one world. There’s such a rich tradition you can draw from, and it’s such a waste to see it lie fallow.  People are forgetting their history.

What is killing Star Wars isn’t female leads, it’s not politics, it’s not toxic fandom, it’s just bad films and an inability to listen to criticism.  It’s an institutional problem, one that seems fairly ingrained into Lucas Film at this point, so I don’t see it changing soon.  But Star Wars is too beloved to die.  It’ll just do what it did through the 90s and go quiescent for a time, at worst.

On the Demise of Psi-Wars

So given the rancor and frustration around Star Wars, do I fear for Psi-Wars?

No.

I’m honestly more worried about my time and flagging interest in the series, though my backers still seem firmly committed to the cause, and I’m rounding a corner on a particularly sticky issue.  But even if Star Wars dies, which it won’t, I still wouldn’t worry about Psi-Wars because, despite much nudging and winking, it isn’t Star Wars.  That rich tradition I mentioned above is something I definitely draw on for my work, and other works besides, and those works still live on. 40k continues to churn forward, Dune has a new movie in the making, the Metabarons has a new series focused on the Metabaron, a new season of Killjoys is on the horizon, we can expect to see a Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (assuming they survive the turmoil of the Infinity War!) and people still love pulpy Space Opera, even if they sometimes forget it’s more than just Star Wars.

So I’m still here, and I’ll still be here when all the turmoil has died down and this Star Wars mess has sorted itself out one way or another.

Mailanka Rants: It's okay to like bad movies

So, a friend recently linked me to this guy’s channel on movie editing and criticism, and he gets into some pretty deep stuff, but the one that leapt out at me, that I felt demanded greater discussion, was this video.  The question he is asked is this:

Jurassic World: I liked the movie because it felt like a bad B-movie.  Do you think movies can be genuinely good because of their “badness”?

 To which Folding Thoughts stumbles a bit, because how can you call something good because of its badness?  Then he begins to discuss genre, but I think his initial confusion signaled something important: the questioner framed his question badly, and I think I know why.

The question isn’t really “Can bad movies be good?”  but “Is it okay for me to like a critically panned movie?”

The answer is yes.  It’s also not the point.

The Emperor’s New Clothes and Status Anxiety

Perhaps I’m just projecting, but I often see this sort of question crop up, where someone will criticize a movie and those who genuinely like it will bristle and rise to its defense.  They might even hurl abuse at the critic.  Alternately, someone will pretend to dislike a movie that everyone else dislikes, because they do not want to seem to be foolish. This last, this appearance of foolishness, I think, drives the question.  Our audience member likes a film that the critic thinks is very bad.  Is he, then, a fool?

As a species, our desirability as mates is often tied to how smart we are and how much status we have, but these things are fundamentally abstract and hard to pin down.  If we want to know whether you or I are stronger, we can see who can lift the heaviest object and then have an objective notion as to who is stronger.  But what about who is smarter or who is “better” as a person, more virtuous and wiser?  Maybe you’re more feminist than I am, but is that actually virtuous?  Perhaps you know more scientific trivia than I do, but does that really make you smarter?  We don’t know, because it depends on too many other factors, many of which we do not (and maybe cannot) know.

This struggle drives the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, where the con artists argue that they’ll create a garment so fine that only the wisest and best of people will be able to see it.  This highlights our insecurities: we secretly fear that we’re “not good enough” and we fear to admit this.  What if you’re the only person who cannot see the Emperor’s New Clothes? If you admit it, then people will think you a fool, and we’d rather secretly be fools than admit that we are fools.

So let’s get this out of the way right now: are you smart?  Are you high status?  Chances are, if you’re reading this, you’re probably of about average intelligence, like everyone else.  If you are smarter or stupider than everyone else, chances are that it’s not by very much, because intelligence lies on a bell curve: most people are about equally smart.  Are you high status?  That rather depends on what you mean.  Chances are, if you’re reading this, you’re not desperately poor (by which I mean, you’re not someone starving in a developing country), but you’re probably not the king of the world either, just from the sheer fact that most people are not the king of the world.  Chances are, you are not Bill Gates, Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump.  Chances are, you do not have millions of dollars or the  regular opportunity to sleep with super models..  Chances are, you are average (for someone in a  country with regular internet access and the sort of free time necessary to read blogs).

But the cool thing about intelligence and status is that they can improve.  By “intelligence” we often mean “knowledge and wisdom” and we gain those by learning.  Status often reflects the results of our knowledge, as we put lessons into practice and expand our personal power.  This is a key distinction, and why our vlogger gets flustered, because he’s talking about a completely different thing than the audience member.  The latter is seeking justification for his taste, while the former is trying to improve your knowledge on film making.

“Objectively good.”

Essentially,all models are wrong, but some are useful.
-George E.P. Box

Folding Thoughts mentions the phrase “objectively good,” which is a troublesome phrase.  People will begin to discuss personal taste and such,but he’s likely not concerned with this for the same reason I often am not when I discuss “how you should do X”, not because we’re stating that we know what your taste should be, but because we’re working from a model, and the purpose of that model is to entertain you.

Certain things generally work better than other things.  Do you prefer toast or bread? One of my favorite sayings is “With so little effort, bread and water can become toast and tea,” which is lovely for reasons I’ll get into some other time, but it assumes that toast is better than bread.  Why is that?  Well, the heating of the bread both caramelizes the natural sugars in the bread and creates a maillard reaction with the proteins, both of which are flavors that humans have evolved to love, creating a super-stimulus of better bread.  It’s why you like the thin crust on the outside of a well-seared steak, or why people love fried chicken, and its the basis for why gravy is so good (if made properly, from fond).

But some people like untoasted bread.  In fact, some people like bland, spongy, white wonder-bread, preferably with the crust cut off.  Are they wrong?  Are they stupid?  Well, no.  Heck, I’ll eat straight bread dough and like it. So what’s wrong with us?

Some of this is a matter of taste.  There’s a nice TED Talk that neatly skewers the idea of the “best” of anything (“There is no best spaghetti sauce, there are best spaghetti sauces”).  Different people want different things, or the same person wants different things at different times, and this is part of what Folding Ideas means when he dives into genre: what you want out of Pacific Rim is different from what you want out of Citizen Kane.  What makes one a good movie would make the other a bad movie.

More than that, consider the intent of art.  An artist attempts to convey an idea while entertaining you.  A chef tries to make a meal you will enjoy.  If you liked what the creator gave you, then the creator succeeded.  Period.  The point of a model is to have a mental grasp of what people will probably like.  If you have guests coming over, you’re probably better off feeding them toast and tea than bread and water, as in you’ll have a higher probability of pleasing them, and so we say that this is “better,” not because toast is fundamentally and always superior to bread, but because a loose collection of statistics and experiences have given us this rule of thumb.

When a film critic like Folding Thoughts expresses what generally works and what generally doesn’t, He’s not staking out critical ground and saying “Only fools like this”, but rather, he’s pointing to techniques that work and do not work.  If you’re going to make a movie, you’re probably better off listening to him than you are discarding his advice.  But if you’re an audience member, his advice is mostly good for getting a sense of whether or not to take a risk on a movie, not whether or not you should like it.

If we want to discuss flaws, of Jurassic World, I can totally cite some.  Given that the original Jurassic Park was a celebration of what we knew to be accurate about dinosaurs, why aren’t we updating the series with the latest paleontologist finds (such as feathered dinosaurs)?  What’s with the excessively long death scene of the children’s care-taker?  It seems almost pornographic to have that death go on and on in that daisy-chain of murder. And why is it relevant that the monster is “part velociprator?”  Humans aren’t part velociraptor yet Chris Pratt can control them and we spent the first half of the movie establishing that a relationship is vital to controlling them, evidently unless you have the right snippet of their DNA in which case you get magic powers over them.  And then, why do they suddenly become good at the end?  Nothing changed, as far as I could tell, other than that the writer first wanted a cool human to control velociraptors, then scary velociraptors killing people, then finally an awesome scene of velociraptors killing the big monster.  And what does it say about the themes of the film when we have a strong working woman who is shamed for her lack of attention towards children and her romantic frigidity towards a man, only to have it melt when he rescues her? 

At the same time, I definitely enjoyed Jurassic World more than I thought I would.  I liked the forays into genetic engineering and the creation of monsters from a pulpy perspective.  I’m also more politically conservative, and thus I’m less interested in feminist themes, and I must admit I quite enjoy the sight of an attractive woman fleeing monsters in a jungle while in heels (I also very much enjoy those old-time jungle movies where Tarzan rescues Jane from whatever, and this movie certainly had that vibe, which probably part of what appealed to our audience member, what might be one of the things he meant by “b-movie”).  I also found it visually exhilarating, and it tugged on some nostalgia for the original Jurassic Park.  So I liked it.  It worked for me.

Could it have been a better movie?  Sure.  And it’s important to see how, to take lessons from things that didn’t work or were unnecessary.  Perhaps the movie says something about the continuing appeal of a damsel in distress, if done right (and murdering a damsel in distress over several minutes is probably not an example of “done right.”).  Did the movie really need villainous velociraptors?  If you want to have a discussion about man’s relationship with dinosaur, why not go deeper into that, in a more consistent way, instead of making it the side-show to the film?  In fact, if you dive into what Folding Thoughts has to say about films, you’ll find most of his criticism has nothing to do with what you know or understand about film-making.  He’ll dive into the details of film editing, for the most part, much of which is very new to me.  By listening to his criticism, I’ll learn more about what would make a better movie than I did before!

I thought this was an RPG blog?

What I want you to take away from this is the realization that the point of “rules” and “what’s a good movie or not” aren’t there to tell you what you’re allowed to like and what you’re not allowed to like.  They’re there to advise you on the creation of quality content, and to warn you away from content that’s probably not great.

As a role-player, you create content.  We know GMs do this, but even players do it.  We have whole books dedicated to “doing it right” or entire swathes of criticism about which RPGs are good (GURPS is one, BTW) and which are bad (Rifts, totally Rifts).  These offer guidelines and observations.  Does it mean you and your group are “wrong” for “enjoying bad games” or for “playing wrong?” Of course not.  If it works for your group, it’s fine! The advice might be wrong, or maybe it’s trying to take your game to the next level: The games I ran as a teenager worked.  The games I run now are better.  They have tighter flow, better characterization, smoother mechanics.  It’s not a binary question of good or bad, but a messy graph with an axis of “better” and “worse” crossed with axes of taste, genre and interest.  “Quality” is a rich, complex map that’s difficult to navigate, and criticism offers some useful directions to explore.

Remember when I discussed how intelligence and status are both abstract and can be improved? If you take criticism personally, if you curl up defensively against criticism to protect your fragile status, then your status will never improve, and you’ll never grow as a person.  If you learn to unclench, if you realize that criticism cannot hurt you, only improve you and you use it to improve yourself in your own way, your intelligence will grow, and your ability to make things happen (your power) will also improve, and people will appreciate you more (that is,you’ll gain more status). Good criticism is not an attack, but a gift!

Double Banana

Aka “Green Shirt + Red Shirt = Rosarius!”

I’ve been away from 40k for awhile, due to cost and losing my American crowd to play it with, but my hunger to be a part of that universe has driven me once again into the unloving, cold arms of GW, and I’m painting a Crimson Fist army (it’s going very well, thank you, the prettiest minis I’ve painted yet, though still not up to the standards of Koen, Roomie or Walter). I’ve also been getting to know a group of people at a place called Gameforce, and it’s been nice. I was really making inroads today, which is a shame, because something really got beneath my skin and made me walk out early.

I’m watching a battle between Orks and Space Marine, and the Ork player is a little iffy to me. The way he measures bugs me (for range: front of model to front of model), and “accidentally” snatching up failed rolls and tossing them with the next batch (unless someone points it out), forgetting rules if they inconvenience him. Really, smaller than I’m making it sound, more “round up for me, round down for you,” sort of gameplay, and this already begins to bother me. But then he really starts to pull something that really gets me going.

He keeps saying his units, in plain sight, have cover. I finally get up and say “Dude, look, he can see all of them but like four. You don’t get a cover save!” Then he argues that his units are intermixed, so he does. And the thing is, he’s right.

Lemme explain:

If you have a bunch of guys behind rocks, they get cover saves, like so:

SSSSS (space marines)

RRRR (some rocks)
OOOO (Some orks)

If the Space Marines try to shoot the Orks, the Orks get cover. Makes sense.

Units provide cover too.

SSSSS

GGGGG (Some grots)

OOOOO

The Orks are behind the Grots. If the Space marines wanted to shoot “through” the Grots to hit the Orks, the Orks would get a cover save. This makes sense, as the point of sending a vanguard is for them to die first. Duh.

But he pulled this:

SSSSSS

GOGOG
OGOGO
GOGOG

Now, he can only see about 3 of the 8 Grots, and 2 of the 7 Orks. If he declares he’s firing at the Orks, the Grots give them cover. If he declares he’s firing at the Grots, the Orks give them cover. You can only fire at one unit, and since these are technically two units, each unit has a cover save (even, incidentally, if you hit them with artillery). They just march around, ignoring cover, because they don’t need it. Orks that are supposed to have a 6+ armor save suddenly all have Rosarius, superior even to Space Marine armor, for a third the cost. Victory was assured, because he picked the ideal army to use this tactic. Completely cheesy.

The worst thing? Completely legal. Completely legal asshatery, if you ask me.

(He’s not the first to come with this, after a brief perusal online. You find plenty of discussions, replete with the foul-mouthed offensive-defenses you’d expect from twinks defending practices they know are twinky. A common house rule is: You cannot both give and receive cover to/from a unit,” and that seems reasonable to me.)

“Ok, so just don’t play against him” says Bee. Well, I don’t plan on it. Even if he relents and admits this is a crappy way to play, or if GW (finally) comes out with a rule against it, his attitude bugs me. See, I know I’m going to lose when I play. It bugs me, but I accept it, because playing will be fun. It’ll be competitive too, as players use superior strategies to defeat one another. Feelings will be hurt but, hopefully, friends will be made, and I’ll have stories to regal my friends with. Yeah, I’ve been on the benefiting side of overpowered cheese (Space Wolf 2e codex with that magical teleport device), but I remember realizing it was cheesy after a few games, and honestly enjoying my “invincible” SW scout “Roark.” (He never died. Really.) I remember losing alot as Black Templar, and never winning as Chaos. That’s how these things go. As one fellow (Tommie, I think) said “Whatever happens, just smile.” That’s a good attitude to have.

But I don’t want to play if I have to get into yelling matches about the rules, or have people tell me to look up stuff on the internet. Just because a loophole isn’t against the rules doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. The fun of the other player matters too. As Tony said “I want to have someone to play against again after I win,” and that takes sportsmanship.

I’m really disheartened. I was hoping to get back in, and now I’m nervous that this sort of thing will be wide spread. If so, I’ll focus on friends I make, and playing with the Knights (they play 40k too). I feel bad I walked out, but I wasn’t really planning on it, it just sort of happened because I needed to cool my head and I wanted to paint (needed a new brush). Hopefully, though, I’ll feel better next week.