Why I Read and Write Fanfiction

(Spoiler for Sons of Anarchy, S5)

I had a conversation yesterday with a fellow creative-type friend, who asked me why I write fanfiction instead of original fiction. He himself is a devoted fan of many of the same things I adore—including Sons of Anarchy—but he does not engage in the fandoms, certainly not to the extent I do.

I’ve been thinking about that question a lot now. Why fanfic?

My answer to my friend’s question is multivalent—and gets more layered the longer I think. First, I don’t write fanfic “instead” of writing original fiction. I write both. It feels odd to make that claim because, though I’ve done an enormous amount of writing in my life, I gave up writing fiction years ago, convinced—utterly convinced—that I was incapable of it. Now I know I was wrong, and my desire to write fiction has become, well, overwhelming. Fanfic is how I learned I could do it.

There are several reasons fanfic appeals to me. I started out, as I think most of us did, as a reader. During series hiatuses (I’m a huge Whedon fan), or after a series ended, or when a book or video game I loved was over, I wanted more. Fanfic fills that void, and some of it does so brilliantly.

Then there’s the instances when a series let me down, when I was dissatisfied with the arc of a beloved character, or with the way the plot had turned. Then I would turn to fanfic to find directions for characters and plots I found more satisfying.

In fact, it was a sort of crisis-level unhappiness with a development in a beloved series that finally pushed me over my certainty that I couldn’t write fiction and made me try. (And here’s the spoiler). When Opie was killed inSons of Anarchy, I mourned hard. Really hard. And I was pissed. I don’t think Kurt Sutter, the series creator, showrunner, and main writer, earned that death. It felt to me like Opie was sacrificed to Jax’s story without sufficient respect for Opie’s own really rich and deep story. It felt like an act of expediency and shock value rather than an integral movement in a complex story arc.

I won’t hold forth more about that, but I immediately turned to fanfic to assuage my sense of loss. But nothing I read met my own need. So I started writing. I wrote for a long time without even telling anyone I was writing, much less putting it online for strangers to read. Eventually, though, I started to realize that maybe I had a pretty interesting story, so I posted it. And a new obsession was born.

As an anonymous reader of fanfic for years, I’d really been missing out. Because writing—and this might well be a phenomenon specific to fanfic itself—is about the community most of all. Fanfic writers and readers are fans first. We share the deep bond  of our love for a series, book, movie, game, etc., a love that transcends the boundaries of the original work. We want more, we need more. Our devotion to the characters—especially the characters—is profound. Sharing it, we bond to each other as well. It’s my experience that no one gets me like fans in my fandoms get me. And of those, the fanfic writers get each other best of all.

So, it’s first about community. Our sense of community with the world of the fandom, with the characters, and with each other. It’s also, though, for us writers, about the thrill and satisfaction of our own creative expression. For me, writing fanfic is more satisfying, so far, than writing original fiction. I’ve been thinking about why that is. And I think it has to do with solving thepuzzle.

The hardest thing about writing original fiction, and I don’t think this is unique to me, is world-building. Creating something from nothing and giving it shape, depth, and color. Fanfic is often thought of as “training wheels” for original fiction—practice—because the world is already built. Thinking about it like that, the heavy lifting is done for us fanfic writers. And I think there’s rather a lot of truth in that view.

But here’s the thing. When a writer creates an original world and original characters, the only limits on that creation are the writer’s own. If a writer creates a character and then has that character do something “OOC” (Out Of Character), well, the writer has the option to go back and change the characterization to fit the action, if she so chooses.

Fanfic writers don’t have that luxury. Sure, we can do whatever we want with the characters we’re working with—we’re all just playing around, this is an amateur gig—so if an SOAFF writer wants Happy to be a touchy-feely over-sharer, hey—go for it. It’s your fantasy. But if you want to write a story and characters which are true to the source world, then the first thing you need to do is know, really know that world, those characters. Once you know them, then you can find the sliver of insight which helps you send them on a path you choose, and do so in a way that has integrity—and that your readers appreciate.

If you want a character who is notorious for his coldhearted detachment and ruthless brutality (um, Happy, looking at you again, buddy) to become a devoted husband and father, you better earn that shit. Your readers will certainly call you out if you don’t. And that’s the part that I find most enjoyable and rewarding. I write bad boy romance of the, um, grown-up variety. Figuring out what kind of woman would be any particular Son’s equal, and figuring out how to earn an honest relationship between them—that’s hard work. And more fun than I have words to describe.

When I write original fiction, my characters are entirely my own, and infinitely adaptable to my narrative needs. Sounds great, but it’s actually, for me, constraining. It’s not as much fun to find the hook, because I don’t have to look very far.

I find the limits of the source material, and of the fan-readers’ often encyclopedic knowledge thereof, to be, ironically, freeing. Knowing that I’ve earned the development of my characters’ relationship and kept the source character true to his canon? That’s a rush and a half. The best review I can get is that my source character, and my SOA world, is dead on.

I have learned in a few short months that I’m a decent writer. It’s been a transformative experience, and, yes, I have hopes that I might be able to turn my original stuff into something people might pay to read. We’ll see.

Is fanfic training wheels? I don’t know. Maybe. But the bike is a Dyna fucking Super Glide.

Hey, Honey Badger, I Found My Limit

POLITICAL RANT ALERT

Before you proceed, read this great blog post on HuffPo: “The Big Lie: I Love My Gay Friends, but I’m Voting for Romney Anyway,” by Christopher Hennessy.

I’ve been trying to decide whether to express a similar sentiment, and I still have misgivings about doing so as strongly as I’m about to, but here goes.

I have always tried hard to respect the opinions of those who disagree with me, but I find I cannot any longer. I am deeply offended by the Republican party as it is currently constituted, and my offense extends to those who would vote for Republican candidates.

• I am certainly offended if you support their positions on social issues.
• I am offended even if you disagree with these candidates’ position on social issues but are supporting them for their fiscal positions—I might be particularly offended in that case. I haven’t worked that part out yet.
• I am offended even though few of the social issues really affect me directly at this time.

On paper, I might even look like one of them. I am a white. I am straight. I am a citizen. I am fully educated. I am not of the 1%, but (thanks to my husband’s corporate income), I am of the 10%. Yes, I’m a woman, but I have no uterus, so I’m pretty sure the GOP isn’t interested in my lady parts.

There’s the no-God thing, though. That aces me out of the Righty Club, I guess.

But, financially speaking, I suppose there’s a decent chance we would personally be better off with the GOP.

And I could not give less of a fuck about that.

Here’s the thing, and Hennessy’s piece says it better than I can, but I’m going to say it anyway:

• If you vote with the intent to legislate the lives of others based upon your religious belief, then your astonishing arrogance offends me. Have your truth; I respect and will defend wholeheartedly your right to believe in God, or Allah, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Why will you not give me, and others, the same respect? Why must your belief impinge on mine?
• If you vote to keep others from enjoying and exercising rights that you yourself take for granted, then your bigotry offends me. How can you not see that bigotry is what it is? You are literally saying “These people who are different from me do not deserve the same rights and privileges that I and people like me do.”
• If you vote for other reasons—to, say, protect your own bottom line, or even that of your own children—but the byproduct of your vote is to endorse the subjugation of other people, then your selfishness offends me.

I think that President Obama has made good fiscal decisions and has done well to get the economy healing. But we can disagree on fiscal matters; I can understand if you think he has not. I can respect your position.

But I simply cannot—I will not—make room any longer to disagree on social matters. This election, right now, is not—IT IS NOT, it cannot be—a matter of fiscal disagreement.  The Republican party wants this to be an election of social issues.  The Republican party built its platform with subjugation, bigotry, hatred, and fear.  Until that changes, no election will ever really be about “the economy, stupid.”

Right now, a vote for a Republican makes you a bigot, even if you really do love your gay friends, and your atheist friends, and your female friends, and your Latino friends, and your African American friends, and your teacher friends, and your laborer friends, and your friends who are too poor to pay federal income tax.

That’s what I think of the way you think, if you think like this. I might still love you, but, then, I still loved my bitter, angry, self-pitying grandpa who used every racial slur you’ve ever heard of and was usually just a mean old jerk.

Why I’m Resigned but Not Resigning: Holding the Line in a Public University

A few days ago, my incredibly smart, accomplished, energetic, inspiring, honest friend Eileen Joy blogged about her decision to walk away from her tenured faculty position. Eileen and I started our first tenure-track positions together at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE) in 2003. That is the position she has just resigned. I moved to another position at California State University, Sacramento (Sac State) in 2008 (I’m now tenured, but due to the job change lost time on the “tenure clock”).

SIUE and Sac State are very similar institutions in terms of the socio-economic status of their student populations, their situations as large public universities in critically cash-strapped states, the stances of their administrations, and the shifts their missions have undergone in the past several years.

I understand exactly why she made the decision to step away from the institutional academy, and not just because I know Eileen and the personal history she describes. Though the specifics of our careers are quite different, our experiences with the institution of public higher education, especially as professors in the humanities, are the same. Eileen tells it like it is. I applaud her integrity and her bravery.

At public institutions like SIUE and Sac State, we serve students who don’t have much in the way of academic options, mainly for financial reasons. We are these students’ best, maybe only, chance for a quality university education. The faculty, experts in our fields, are knowledgeable, talented, conscientious, and dedicated to making lasting positive impacts on our students’ minds and lives. But every semester it becomes increasingly difficult to do so—and we are swiftly approaching the event horizon.

A lot of it comes, quite simply, down to money. And the money problem is fed not just by the general weakness of the economy but by societal attitudes, suspicions, and misperceptions about higher education that make arguments in favor of funding education controversial almost to the point of scandal.

Despite consistently exploiting it for individual access to financial success, the general society seems to see the academy as a site for some kind of political indoctrination, where “entitled” professors, with huge salaries for cushy 15-hour a week jobs, take long breaks between semesters as they sit around in smoking jackets drinking cognac, reading Proust, and cooking up ways to turn the next batch of wide-eyed innocents into Marxist agitators.

I don’t know if that academy exists anywhere but in the fevered imaginations of right-wing pundits and their followers. I can tell you for damn sure it does not exist in public institutions.

My reality is representative, so here’s it is: During the fall and spring semesters, I work about 70 hours each week. I am on campus about 20-25 hours, depending on my meeting schedule for any given week. While I’m on campus, I’m teaching, conferring with students during office hours, and attending meetings. The rest of the time, working from home, I am grading papers, preparing for my classes, working on program administration, fielding emails from students and colleagues at my own institution and elsewhere, doing my part to organize an academic conference, and developing future courses.

If I can squeeze it in, I’m also conducting research and writing, but I can hardly ever squeeze it in during the academic year. So during my “breaks,” I prepare my proposals, do my research, write, and submit what I write for publication. Because I am a program administrator, I continue advising and administration during breaks as well.

I take about a month completely off. That’s the same amount of vacation time my husband, in the corporate world, gets.

My salary as a public employee is public record. I earned tenure and promotion this year and got a $4000 raise, so I now make $57,000 annually. I have been a professor for nearly a decade.

Is there anything about what I just described that sounds “cushy” to you?

You know what? I don’t mind any of that (well, I’m not a fan of meetings). For the most part, it’s what I signed on for, and I love my job. I am very good at it. My job matters, in schemes grand and small. I have a direct impact on my students’ lives. As a teacher of teachers, I have an indirect impact on their students’ lives.

If what I described fully encompassed my job, I’d still be overworked, but I wouldn’t be complaining much, and I think most of my colleagues would agree.

But the most important part of my job, the part that I love best—working with students—is the part that is consistently, violently beset by the financial demands placed on the university by administrators, legislators, and, ultimately, society itself. We need more money. Period.

As budgets get slashed by astonishing percentages (the statewide CSU is facing another $250 million cut, meaning that cuts over the past year would equal more than $1 billion—yes, with a “B”), the pressure is being brought to bear right on the classroom—that is, on the very heart of the university. Class sizes are rising—and a “discussion” section with 40+ students is, come on, a joke. Faculty populations are dwindling—retiring faculty are not being replaced and instructor rolls are being slashed. Course offerings are shrinking, which has a great and direct impact on majors—with fewer tenure/track faculty and fewer instructors, most of the courses that get staffed are composition courses and other requirements. The courses that make a major deep and diverse, that make it significant and desirable, are the ones that get lost.

The lack of funding has a broader and perhaps more insidious implication as well. With all of us struggling to do so much more with so much less, and with the pundits, politicians, and their public seeming to be willfully blind to our predicament and demanding that we do still more with still less, the morale of the university among all segments of the population—students, staff, and faculty alike—has taken a tremendous blow.

Students are stressed and discontented because their college experience is impaired. As course offerings shrink, students struggle to get the courses they need (let alone those they want). Fewer sections are offered, thus the demand for those sections rises. Ironically, while administrators constantly drive home their interest in controlling “time to graduation”—i.e., moving students through the system as quickly as possible—they are slashing budgets to departments which then cannot offer sufficient courses to allow students to fill their schedules.

And I’m not even really talking about the damage “elective” courses take in this scenario. Electives are often the courses that give students and faculty the most enjoyment, because students tend to be in them by simple choice. Electives are the first to go when budgets get draconian.

Staffing has also been dramatically cut across the university, so administrative staff who already had full-time work to do are now being asked to do two and three times as much, and (much cheaper) work-study students are being exploited and expected to handle responsibilities far beyond their pay grade. The lack of a full and fully trained administrative staff is felt in every corner of a university. Everything happens more slowly and less reliably.

No one, though, feels the pressure of the budget crisis and the concurrent push toward assembly-line degree production like a faculty member. Every time a course cap is raised, the workload of the instructor of that course increases substantially. There is a dramatic difference between teaching a course with 30 students and teaching it with 40 students. Each one of those students means hours of additional work.  More than that though, the course itself cannot be the same. The smaller the class, the more participatory the students. A classroom of 30 students is really about the maximum size for a discussion to really become fully involved. Beyond that, students who would recede into the background become more able to do so. It takes longer for the instructor to learn more names, and facilitating a discussion to ensure that students have—and use—a voice in  classroom becomes less possible the more the course population grows.

BTW: classrooms aren’t getting any bigger. We’re just stuffing more, smaller plastic desks into the same space. If you’re a professor who likes to get students into a discussion circle or who frequently likes students to work in small groups, you’re pretty much out of luck.

That’s assuming that there are even enough desks for all the enrolled students. Oh—here’s another thing. Course caps are being raised to untenable levels, but that doesn’t mean that those larger caps can accommodate all the students who have been displaced by the shrinking course offerings. At the beginning of every semester, then, in virtually every course, we are faced with students desperate to be allowed into our courses—as overloads, i.e., students above the already too-high course cap.  Saying “no” to these students means that they might very likely be forced to add time to their graduation date. Saying “yes” to these students means that our workload increases and our ability to teach the courses themselves could be fundamentally impaired.

It’s a horrendous situation with absolutely no good answer at that level, and we’re forced into it routinely.

I’m not really talking about the toll all this takes on collegiality, either, but the toll is great. Every small victory one faculty member or department gains, every line successfully drawn, guarantees that someone else loses ground. When we are all so beset, a siege mentality is the natural consequence. Being constantly threatened is a sure way to feel paranoid and suspicious.

Finally, let’s talk about the pervasive cultural idea that the academy is some kind of leftist thought factory actively “indoctrinating” students. It’s just ludicrous. Minds are broadened, not narrowed, in a university. That might mean that students begin to challenge the ideas and beliefs with which they came into the university. It definitely means that students will encounter ideas and beliefs with which they have been unfamiliar or which are at odds with those they personally hold.

The point is to learn how we all engage the world and each other as individuals and as members of our communities. Challenge is not synonymous with refutation. To challenge is simply to question. A belief that withstands questioning is the stronger for it.

Over the past few years, our university (our campus and the system itself) has been engaged in a lively, serious debate about academic freedom, the rights and responsibilities of faculty and students, and the place of current events in the classroom. This semester, with Proposition 30—a tax bill that is crucial to the health of public education in California—on the November ballot, that debate has taken on a very specific focus. We don’t all agree about exactly where the line between academic freedom and inappropriate advocacy lies (hence the debate), but every position on the matter has been stated with a deep respect for our students and with an understanding that it is not our job to tell students what to believe or how to vote. The question we’re debating is the extent to which it’s appropriate to talk about the issues themselves. The fact that it’s even a debate indicates our keen awareness of our responsibilities.

What is our job—and the job of every institution of higher learning everywhere—is to encourage our students to think about what they believe and why they believe it. It is the very essence of our job to help our students develop informed opinions, no matter what those opinions might be.

Now, maybe you don’t agree about the job description. Maybe that’s the heart at which this disagreement lies. Maybe you think higher education is, in fact, nothing more than job training and should be focused on the specific, practical concerns of preparing students for their chosen profession.

It makes me sad that people believe such a thing. It’s clichéd to say so in this manner, but it makes me sad for the future of our society.  We must learn more than the practical minutia of the jobs we think will have the best payoff. We must learn more about the world we live in and the people we live in it with. We must understand why we think the way we think and why others think their thoughts. We must be broadly curious. If we actually do become a society that has as its primary feature a suspicion of critical thinking—a willful resistance to other points of view or complicating information—then we are doomed. Like apocalyptically doomed.

So . . . those are the reasons that I often leave campus feeling resigned to my lot, even though I have a job I love. In fact, writing them all out in this way is . . . a bit sobering. The reason I’m not resigning, despite all these complicating, compromising factors, is pretty simple in comparison: the students on campus every day. I can’t leave them. They need me. They need us. Those of us who understand that higher education needs breadth and depth and that we all will suffer if it turns into vocational training are the front line—and, for students on campus now, the last line—of defense against the corporatization of the academy.

I think Eileen’s idea of a completely democratic and fully accessible “confraternity,” a place where all kinds of curiosity is fostered and where all kinds of lively minds meet, clash, coexist, and cooperate, is a marvelous ambition, and if anyone on the planet could get it done, it’s the intellectual dynamo who is Eileen Joy.

I have respect and admiration for all of my friends who have resigned from public institutions in protest because those institutions are no longer places where intellectual pursuits are widely and roundly esteemed. I completely understand and support the choice they made. But if we all leave, then we abandon the students who need us now.

I can’t quit. I won’t. I can only hope to do my part and stand, arms linked with my colleagues, between our students and the corporate machine trundling through the quad. It will probably run us all over, but at least we can slow it down.

Fantasy, Gaming, Real Life, and THOSE OF US WHO KNOW THE DIFFERENCE

I am a pacifist. I hate real violence. Really hate it. It makes me very sad and physically ill.  And I have Real Life reasons for especially hating gun violence.

On a few occasions, men have hit me (they don’t get a second shot), but I’ve never thrown a punch in my adult life. Punching my little brother when I was a kid doesn’t count—trust me, he deserved it. He’s a little brother, after all.

I hate guns and think virtually no private citizen should legally have one.

In fact, the idea of sport hunting is abhorrent to me.

I am also a gamer. I will take your fucking head off in PVP. And then I will dance over your bloody corpse.

But my preference is single-player gaming, and I LOVE LOVE LOVE combat against NPCs—the more violent and inventive the better. In game, I have gleefully bisected, eviscerated, beheaded, and blown apart countless enemies. I’ve thrown enemies off buildings because they didn’t say what I wanted to hear. I’ve shot dudes in the face at point-blank range because they pissed me off. And I’ve done it when there were far less violent options to be had.

Virtually all of my favorite movies and TV shows showcase violence in some form. There’s almost nothing I love better than a really well-choreographed, protracted fight.

I freeze-frame the goopiest parts of horror movies, so I can get a really considered look at the gore.

None of that speaks to the way I behave with actual human beings in actual, Real Life, circumstances. I can get verbally feisty, but it would never even fucking occur to me to engage in a physical altercation, unless I were fighting back. Gameplay and Real Life are two entirely different spaces.

Which brings us to this week in How Crazy is the GOP, Really?  We have this item from Maine:

To sum up: Colleen Lachowicz, Democratic candidate for state senate, has been “outed” for enthusiastically playing an Orc rogue in World of Warcraft. I don’t want to give any of the loonies involved a link here to their sites, but they’ve had a field day ferreting out comments she’s made online over the course of several years, on the Daily Kos and elsewhere, describing her enjoyment of the game and her general distaste for conservative stances. Sometimes Lachowicz herself has connected politics and gaming, but mostly the right-wing windbag buttheads have forced the connection themselves.

No matter. What’s really pissing me off is the idea they’re trying to sell that Lachowicz’s enjoyment of the game—and the ways she particularly plays her rogue, a class that requires up-close (i.e., melee) combat and stealth—is somehow indicative that she has a “bizarre double life” and that she is somehow really an Orc, and that she is really a deeply violent, evil person.

First, to any WoW player, the idea that an Orc is evil is fucking absurd. They are not human, that’s true. Nor are most of the races in the game. But they have a history and lore that establishes them as nothing more nor less than a combatant in a war—a race that has in many ways been subjugated and has rebelled and repulsed that subjugation.

Second, rogues stab. Warlocks poison. Hunters shoot. Warriors have battle rage. Druids claw. Death Knights—well, sheesh, the names of the things Death Knights do. If you’re going to play the game, as MILLIONS of people do, you’re going to do a lot of violence—FUCKING PRETEND violence. And it’s fun. It’s not necessarily fun simply because you’re stabbing or shooting or slashing or clawing or in a rage. It’s fun because those things, named as they are by the developers, help you to attain a goal—to defeat the enemy and earn some kind of reward, be it loot, which helps you progress in the game; or an achievement, which is a nice pat on the back and might help your guild; or the satisfaction of figuring out how to best some really powerful enemy.

Third, this attack on Lachowicz is sooo clearly gendered. A LOT has been written about the value of WoW in the corporate world and the many C-level executives who play or have played WoW. Here’s an example, from Forbes (such a hotbed of liberalism is THAT). It seems like it’s becoming canon that the cooperative gameplay of MMOs—especially raiding and PVP, which are also generally the most violent—is a valuable tool in the business world because it builds skill in tactics, strategy, and teamwork. Not to mention the value of failure and perseverance.

But here we have Colleen Lachowicz, a woman, a social worker, an avowed pacifist, and clearly a liberal Democrat. WoW is okay for CEOs, but somehow, for her, her seemingly completely typical WoW gameplay is an indication that she is angry, violent, and unfit for office. This smear fits so many anti-woman tropes that I would feel dirty actually listing them. It’s just so damned obvious.

Fourth, the stereotypes of gamers themselves are working here. Despite the fact that MILLIONS of people play WoW regularly, and MILLIONS MORE play video games of various incarnations, society insists on pigeonholing gamers into this idea of an obese, loveless, lovelorn loser living his parents’ basement drinking Red Bull, eating Cheetos, and wearing adult diapers while he keeps his bloodshot, mesmerized eyes trained on a vapid screen.  For female gamers, the stereotype is the obese (WHY DOES WEIGHT EVEN FACTOR????) wannabe “casual” who would really rather be, what, at the mall? if only she had any friends.

Are you even serious right now? What’s even more distressing is that it seems like actual gamers would have to buy into these stereotypes on some level for them to continue to be pervasive.  And that just pisses me the fuck off. I literally know not one single gamer who fits that stereotype.

I, for example, am 48 years old; an English professor; a writer; a political activist; a mother of several boys, most of them grown; married; and, you know, I DON’T LIVE IN MY PARENTS’ BASEMENT.

And fifth: Assuming a normal upbringing and a generally sound mind, THERE IS NO CORRELATION BETWEEN GAMING VIOLENCE AND REAL LIFE VIOLENCE. Think about it. There are literally MILLIONS of gamers. MILLIONS of people play violent, crime-oriented games like the Grand Theft Auto franchise. MILLIONS of people steal, slash, shoot, stab, punch, kick, and explode pixels on a daily basis.

MILLIONS AND MILLIONS more are fans of violent movies and TV—even entries of such extreme violence as the Saw franchise, or anything by Quentin Tarantino. If there were an actual correlation between the average Joe or Jo’s enjoyment of pretend violence and his or her propensity for actual violence that did real harm to anyone, it would be the fucking Wild West out there.

No—it would be the apocalypse. For realzies.

And, finally, sixth: can we please, oh please, pretty please, with a big maraschino cherry on top, please stop heaping contempt on fantasy and science fiction? Seriously. It’s important. Deep down, where lies the truth you’re afraid to face, you know it is. It’s real. It speaks truth to power, and it routinely, as a matter of course, interrogates our contemporary complacencies. Its place in the culture and the canon has just as much foundation as any other genre or literary “period.”

Deal with it, or my troll hunter will kick your ass into next month.

We’re not really like other parents

I have no intention of turning this in to a parenting blog—there are plenty of those out there, and anyway, I don’t do advice (unless you’re asking what courses you need to take to complete your BA in English and apply to the teacher credential program).  But, you know, I am a parent, and I think about parenty stuff, and lately I’ve had cause to reflect on the way my husband and I are parents versus apparently the rest of the parenting world.

DISCLAIMER: This is offered as opinion and reflection, NOT as advice. I have only my own answers (and those only sometimes); I don’t have yours. I have opinions and curiosities galore, and this here is a venue for me to express them.

WARNING: Rambly. That’s how I roll.

My compulsion to tread into parenting territory derives from things I’ve observed or overheard at the gym during the past week. Though I usually listen to music and create a little private bubble around myself, I lost my earbuds recently and went a few days without. During that time, I was exposed to the ambient sounds of the gym. Being subjected to the conversations around me there is something I earnestly try to avoid, because I live in an extremely conservative area (Like seriously. I saw a bumper sticker the other day that read “ANOTHER PLACER COUNTY DEMOCRAT,” and I thought, “Oh shit! They’re tagging us now!”), and I usually end up pissed off by some comment or conversation I overheard.

Anyway, this last week at the gym, the theme seemed to be Affluent Conservative Parenting 2012. Three events of note:

1) I overheard two 40-something men discussing strategies for social media stalking of their adolescent daughters.

2) I overheard three 40-something women complaining about the amount of time they spend doing homework with their children in high school and wondering why the school thinks they (the parents) have so much time to devote to homework.

3) I saw a 30-something woman with four children under school age, and her 3-ish-year-old was absolutely losing his mind, screaming that super-high-pitched banshee thing, with the lung capacity of an Olympic swimmer, and just beating the crap out of mom’s legs. She, obviously frazzled, was trying to negotiate with him, offering him her phone, a smoothie, etc. to appease whatever demon had possessed the brat.

The contrast between these parents and us seemed very stark.

1) The stalking conversation was, to me, really creepy. They were talking about creating false avatars for themselves and friending their daughters so that they could have full access to their FB pages.  The plans for building these fake personae were really involved.  I just kept thinking, “why not just friend your kids your own self? As their dads? Why the subterfuge?”

I understand, certainly, the desire to protect your kids and to make sure they’re not doing dangerous stuff—or to be able to intervene when they are. But I also think that kids need and deserve privacy, and they need and deserve to be able to do stuff that their parents don’t know about—and to get away with it.  That, to me, is an important part of growing up.

They also need to screw up. All the way. Without their parents getting between them and the consequences. Nobody ever learned anything from doing something the right way. I’m not saying they need to be allowed to put their lives at risk, but I think parents have gone way, way, to the other side of the danger spectrum from risk-of-death.

All of that is to say that I never read my sons’ journals or listened in on their conversations. I am Facebook friends with all our boys—and that was a condition of our 13-year-old joining FB. But I’m there as myself. I don’t sneak or stalk. Mainly, I want them to have access to my page even more than I want access to theirs, because some really interesting cultural and political conversations happen on my page, and I like the idea that there’s maybe some modeling going on there.

I am absolutely confident that the boys have all kept secrets, and the grown boys undertook, I’m sure, some real folly in their teens (the 13-year-old is yet too much of a homebody to have had much opportunity for folly). I know for a fact that they continue to do foolish stuff that makes me twitch. But I am equally confident that we have built a trusting, mutually respectful relationship in which they know to come to us for the big stuff. I think maybe that our not sneaking around trying to ferret out their secrets helped build that foundation of trust. Moreover, I feel pretty confident that they understand their own hard limits—because they learned where those limits were.

None of this is to say that it’s anything goes around here. There will never be a 16-year-old driver in my house, for instance. I was a 16-year-old driver, and it’s a freaking miracle that I didn’t kill myself or anyone else, because I used that giant barge of a 1976 AMC Matador like a toy, and I was an absolute menace on the road. I drove drunk. I made the car “fly” and “dance.” That is far too much risk for me to let the boys undertake. But our reaction to screw-ups and rebellion has generally been “Huh. Well, look where that got you. What’d I tell ya?” For us, that’s worked better than panic and fury because they didn’t meet our expectations for them.

2) The homework thing is on the same point. Geez, I totally do not understand this—and I’m even more baffled at the institutional acceptance/expectation that homework is a collaboration between parent and child, even at the middle and high school levels. What the hell?

I see myself as a resource for my kids, at least in those areas in which I have some expertise (which would definitely not be algebra or anything in which algebra might be involved). If they have a question, I hope they ask, and I will help them work their way to an answer. But I stopped sitting down with them and working literally together with them in about second grade. The idea that parents are still working with their kids on their high school homework just blows my mind. Are these parents planning to go with them to college, too? If not, when are they expecting their kids to learn some independence? Are they just gonna throw them into the shark-infested waters of life on their own without even a session with floaties first?

It seems to me that writing your kid’s English theme in 11^th grade so he passes the assignment or even the class is very short-term thinking. Since, you know, writing that theme is intended to help him improve his writing, not yours, and prepare him for college and the world, not you.

3) And finally, the screaming tantrum. This is the event that made me think I wanted to blog about all this. Dear lord, that kid had lungs, and he sustained the most excruciating pitch. And then there was the hitting. I felt so sorry for his mom, and I understand the desperation that led her to negotiate and bribe.

We all see scenes like this when we’re out in public—a preschooler or primary-schooler losing his shit over some disappointment, or because he’s overtired or overstimulated, or he just wants to be a jerk (yes, I believe sometimes kids are just being jerks—and some kids are always being jerks). I really feel for the parents who are trying to deal with it as well as they can. I totally get the bribery, because there’s only so long you can deal with that, and at some point whatever will make it stop sounds like a grand idea. I really admire the parents who are trying like the dickens to wait it out and not react. My reaction—and Jim’s, too, luckily—is different.

Not one of our kids was a whiner or a tantrum-thrower. That might well be because we won some kind of cosmic parenting lottery—though they all came with their own unique challenges that made parenting them an adventure. (I mean really.) They didn’t all manage their emotions perfectly well all the time, and the youngest one has specific anger-management issues of his own, but they never pulled that screaming and hitting bullshit—in public or private. Or, at least, never more than once. They all gave it a go once.

But I’d say that it isn’t our great skill at parenting that led to our success in completely thwarting the developmental arc of the tantrum-throwing strategy. It’s our sense of self-preservation.

I am, overall, an especially nurturing person, and as such, I can be kinda obnoxiously self-sacrificing. But buried within that bleeding heart is a tempered steel core of self-preservation encased in a thin skin of spite. When a kid pitches a fit, the thought running through my head is more like, “You little asshole, there’s no way in HELL you’re getting that Thomas train now! Or maybe ever!”

Yes, I sometimes think insults at my children, whom I love deeply. I would never ever say something like that out loud. What I would say would be, “Okay. We don’t scream and we don’t hit. Ever. So now we’re going away from the Thomas trains.” But that little spike of spite prevents me from doing something really counterproductive, like caving. Good parenting keeps me from calling my kids assholes when they’re being assholes. Spite keeps me from caving to their bad behavior.

I don’t actually care why a tantrum is happening, at least not as a guide for how I will react to it. I want to get an overtired kid to a nap, or an overstimulated kid to a quiet space, but first, I want the fucking tantrum to fucking stop. Right now. Because it’s really unpleasant, and I don’t want to deal with it. And I don’t ever want it to happen again. It sounds weird to say, especially in the current parenting culture, but that brief little frisson on resentment—of selfishness—has always been a help to my parenting.

Now, we have only one son still at home. By most societal markers, none of the grown boys is a “success.” They didn’t go straight to college right from high school. They still have not gone to college. I’m pretty sure at least one has no interest at all in going to college. (Note the college theme as important to societal measures of “success.”) None of the grown kids did especially well in school, despite 135+ IQs and impressive and varied academic and creative talents. They, at 22 and 25 years old, are living subsistence lives with minimum-wage jobs and crappy apartments.

So maybe you’re thinking, “well, obviously, your parenting style is a failure.” And by the markers I just mentioned, you would probably be right.

But all of our boys are interesting, engaged, compassionate, curious people. They know what’s going on in the world, and they care about it. They are kind, but they are not doormats. They do interesting things. They chase their dreams, and they don’t feel bound by those societal markers to change their dreams. Each and every one of them takes responsibility for himself. They own their screw-ups as readily as they own their triumphs. And they have triumphs. They are people I would want to know, people I would want to hang out with, even without a familial bond.

I’m not sure how much credit we can take for the awesome people they are, but I’m damned proud anyway.

My Adventures on the Normandy, Chapter 5 (Analysis)

MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR MASS EFFECT TRILOGY!

Trying to organize this analysis or whatever it is has been . . . unwieldy—especially after all the slashing I’ve done to get all these posts into some kind of sane length (yes, this all has been the result of my slashing a LOT—be grateful you’re not getting saddled with the other half of this monster). So I’m going to use a cheat with which my students are familiar: headings instead of natural transitions. I’m also going to just dive right on in, rhetorical organization be damned. I’m tired. I feel like I’ve been writing about ME practically nonstop for days and days.

Wait. I have been.

Combat

The Mass Effect combat mechanic is as complicated as any I’ve played on a console. It makes for a steep learning curve, and I spent a lot of time early on screaming at the television in frustration (I mean that literally—I don’t do emotion in half measures).

I’ve yet to get especially inventive with moving my squad around, other than setting them up before I open a door or the occasional “get the hell over here.” But otherwise I’ve really come to love the complexity of the combat. The enemies in any mission bring diverse attacks and defenses requiring serious strategy and problem-solving. Putting together the right squad and building their skills well is key. No one attack will always work in any situation; you have to plan for cooldowns and stack your attacks according to specific enemies.  And some enemies shield others, so you can’t just randomly target oncoming baddies. It helps tremendously to play through more than once and get to know the fights.

It’s a lot like raiding in World of Warcraft, actually. Unless you’re an arcane mage. Silly facerollers. (That was meant in fun, mages of the world. Chill out.)

But the really great thing is that missions are more than opportunities to kill stuff. What you’re accomplishing on a mission matters. The narrative is so intricately woven that even minor missions and assignments feed into it and play out later—and they account for every contingency manifested by the array of choices presented to the player.

Until the Catalyst, anyway. But more on that in a bit.

Reputation

I am pathologically unable to play a predominantly Renegade character. This is a consistent trait of my play in any game.  I can’t be randomly mean or do unwarranted harm. I have a very hard time causing suffering, even for the greater good–even in Pretendland.

The completionist in me would love to experience the things to which a wobblier moral compass (and a firmer grasp on the “pretend” part) would give me access, but alas.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m not above putting some extra hurt on the bad guys or responding to provocation.  In fact, I really enjoy that.  I admit to visceral pleasure at the results of a clean headshot (i.e., no head). I wish Kai Leng’s death had been a whole lot gorier. That asshat got off easy.  But my Shep only goes Renegade when she’s been pushed really far.

I really like the way reputation works in Mass Effect. It’s germane to narrative and character development. You always have the option to make either a Paragon or a Renegade choice (or, often, to waffle, if you feel waffly), but the more you tend in one direction, the stronger your argument gets—so a Paragon becomes adept at appealing to others’ better selves, and a Renegade becomes more intimidating.  Makes sense. And there are nearly infinite gradations available in the balance of Shepard’s personality.

I don’t like the glowing scars/eyes thingy that happens with Renegade characters (which I saw when my husband played one)—I’m okay with the idea that the scars could heal with “positive” energy or get worse with “negative” energy (sure, why not), but WTF is the fires of hell stuff?  That seems to weaken the narrative integrity of the “Renegade” track. The cultural association for glowing red eyes is “evil.” But if a Renegade Shepard were really “evil,” then the narrative of the whole series would fall completely apart. A Renegade Shepard is not, in fact, evil, so the red glow is just a cheap gimmick.

Relationships and Romance

One of my very favorite features of Bioware games is the team.  As much fun as it might be to traipse through the forests of Skyrim or over the ruins of Las Vegas, it can get a little lonely.  I like having a team with me. Sure, there’s more to manage, but there’s also more to do. Other games have teams or companions, but only Bioware games offer real companionship from their NPCs.

These aren’t just tanks and damage boosts you’re trailing around. They are richly realized individuals with their own stories, who react to Shepard’s behavior and attitude and to each other.  One’s game experience is enriched by taking the time to develop relationships, relationships that can go in several directions.

Kinda like life. Only with more explosions.

I always play out a romance story in any Bioware game, not because I want the (barely PG anyway, though fanfic takes care of that) love scenes but because I want the deeper connection between my character and another. That connection between characters enhances my connection to the game and blurs up the reality line just right. I like how it develops the story, and I don’t like my character being alone.

I don’t always play straight romances, but I did throughout ME, and can’t really imagine not. My Shepard is just straight, I guess.

Speaking of which . . .

My last note about romance and relationships: Seriously, Bioware?  All that great flirting, the nice ink, the muscles, the brow, the scars . . . . . . .

. . . . . wait, where was I? Oh—and no Vega romance option? What the hell? My Shep would totally hit that.

Narrative

I’ve already written a lot about the narrative over the course of these five way-too-long posts. I think I’ve made it clear that the story is the most amazing and wonderful element of this amazing and wonderful game series. Here, then, I want to focus on the craft. Because this is a damn well-written story.

The trilogy works seamlessly as a single story, but I do think ME3 is especially strong.  Perhaps I’m just dazzled by the emotional impact. My god, I cried so damn much. My husband, who watched a lot of my gameplay, and I uttered a refrain at the end of just about every mission, once I regained the capacity for speech: “This fucking game, man. This fucking game.”  So much death and sacrifice.  Mordin. The Primarch’s son. Thane (golly, what a scene). Legion. Grunt (almost). Samara (almost) and Rila. And Shepard. I practically needed an IV bolus to rehydrate.

Overall, though, the story is so powerful, I think, because it’s written with a taut focus and fine attention to detail, but always with a comprehensive sense of the metanarrative and the endgame itself (well, almost all the way to the endgame). Tiny moments in ME1 trigger important moments in ME3; big events in ME1 develop into critical elements of the ME3 endgame.  Small, seemingly throwaway assignments (like scanning the Keepers) turn out to be key to developing the mainline narrative.

Characterizations stay true. Characters evolve naturally, their personalities familiar yet changing subtly as they are affected by the people they encounter and the events transpiring around them.

A deep history and culture has been drawn for every key race and species. We don’t know much about the volus or elchor races–or the vorcha or batarians, really. But we understand a lot about the turians, quarians, salarians, krogan, asari, and geth. Even the rachni get their moment. Their worlds make sense, and their interrelationships make sense, too.  More than that, we care about those interrelationships. It’s not just backstory, stuff you can skim over to find out what you need to kill. It’s story, and it’s integral to everything you work for in the game.

All that might not be especially noteworthy for a multi-tome series of fantasy novels. But for a video game? It’s spectacular. WoW’s lore is very deep, too (as an MMO, I’m not sure it’s a good comparison, but in terms of depth it’s the closest analogue I can think of)—but you can play the game for years at a very high level and not have any idea why the Horde and Alliance are fighting, what happened to the Lich King, or why Deathwing is so very, very pissed.

My husband can attest that it’s possible to play ME and miss a lot of the cultural information—not to know, for instance, that the asari are an exclusively female race or that quarians and turians can’t eat human food—but I don’t know how it would be possible to play and not understand the genophage. Or the Protheans. Or what the quarians did to the geth, and vice versa. Or what a husk is.

It’s like they have psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists and a whole slew of really talented fiction writers (and a couple of poets to boot) on the writing staff, all working in perfect synergy.  And a couple of really good multi-taskers keeping all the threads unsnarled.

From the beginning of gameplay on ME1, details emerge organically and become an epic, ranging narrative chock full of complicated questions. Even though we’re clear about who we’re fighting, we’re not quite so clear about who the enemy really is or whether victory will actually mean salvation.

Which brings me to the next section.

Integrity, Ethics, and Choice

“But sometimes the way a thing goes down does matter, Shepard. Later, when you have to live with yourself. Knowing that you acted with integrity—then it matters.”  Kaidan, ME3

The Mass Effect series—and Bioware games in general—gets well-deserved acclaim for allowing so much player choice.  Players make a lot of key decisions that can powerfully affect the direction the narrative takes from each decision point. Dan Bethel (see link downpage a bit) is right, though, that we’re mainly fooling ourselves—the narrative, of course, has been entirely plotted out, and our actual “choices” are limited to two or three options, any of which feeds us generally in the same direction.

It’s not like any choice you make is going to allow you to defeat the Reapers before they close the Citadel and move it to London. It’s not like you’re going to reason with Saren and he’s going to slap himself on the forehead and cry, “What was I thinking? Tell you what, let’s go get a Peruvian whisky instead. On me.” No. Every one of us is going to kick his ass twice on the Citadel.

We’re all going to lose to Kai Leng on Thessia and then beat him on Cronos. Apparently, we’re all going to kill the Illusive Man, too. (Not that I’m complaining about that.)

From a gaming standpoint, the number of choices and the consequent narrative complexity is truly remarkable, but we’re not actually living a life on the Normandy–no matter how much we wish we were. (Actually, why do we wish that? Shepard’s life kinda sucks, when you think about it. Still . . .) The Mass Effect galaxy and its inhabitants are much more predictable than we in the real world are.

And yet.

Though we’re all going to get to the same place on the Citadel at the end of ME3, how we get there and whom we get there with is very much in play.  That’s determined by the complex and meaningful decisions we’ve confronted throughout the game.

Should you save the rachni queen on Noveria?  She and her spawn are historically responsible for massive destruction, and they’ve made a mess on Noveria itself.  Saren/Sovereign have plans to indoctrinate her for their dark purposes.  Also, she’s a big, ugly bug.  But her plea is persuasive, and she promises to disappear to sing her songs far, far away. What right do we have to destroy an entire species on the merits of what we fear it might do in the future? Is it because she looks like something we’d squash if we had a big enough shoe? Well, Garrus might be a biped, but he looks pretty buggy himself.

The same question comes up again in ME3, where the queen has again been captured by the Reapers and looks, but does not sound, decidedly indoctrinated.  Now she promises to help you fight.

Should you cure the genophage? In addition to being totally hilarious and awesome, the krogan are really, um, bellicose, and, left to breed naturally, they spawn like fish on fertility drugs.  What might you be setting loose on the world when the kill-first-ask-questions-never krogan can breed freely?  Their leaders like and trust Shepard, but they’re not all that enthusiastic about any other non-krogan.  Again, though, is it right to genetically cripple a species on the speculation that doing so would improve the lot of other species?  What’s the greater good?  Do your relationships with a few specific krogan even matter in this decision?

Should you save David Archer?  He’s clearly suffering horribly, but a lot of potentially extremely important information, information which might well help fight the Reapers, is being acquired through his assimilation with the VI.  Should you save him even if doing so ends any chance of saving the galaxy?

What if you have to choose between the geth and the quarians?  The geth have been decimating the quarians for centuries. But it was the quarians who created the geth and then tried to wipe them out when they developed consciousness. When, on my first playthrough, I didn’t have access to the Charm or Intimidate options, I had to choose either to upgrade the geth, which would likely have turned them loose on the quarians and wiped Tali and her people off the map, or to allow the quarians to eradicate the geth. With not-Legion and Tali standing next to me, I chose my friend, despite the quarians’ murky past.  It was a painful choice, and probably the wrong one.

In most of these examples, your mission team is standing with you, but they can be relied on each to take an opposing side, so they’re no help.  These choices are truly wrenching, and subsequent conversations with crew members—about the “ruthless calculus” of war, say—serve to underscore the emotional impact of the ethical quandary you just faced.

And, of course, there’s the final decision, which is as ethically murky as all those which came before. Since my mission was to destroy the Reapers, and since Anderson represents making that choice, I was spun when it was presented as the red/Renegade option. How, I ask you—how can the Illusive Man’s choice be the blue/Paragon option? It made me rethink everything. Ultimately, on my first playthrough, I just could not go against orders, I could not let Anderson down, and I could not do what the Illusive Man wanted. So I blew every damn thing up.

Well, that sucked.

But I love that the game threw that last wrench in there.  After so many hours of gameplay, it can get easy simply to select the topmost, or bottommost, option, because you’re a “Paragon,” or you’re a “Renegade.” The world should be a little topsy-turvy when it’s facing its end.

Huh. That’s a pretty good segue . . .

The ME3 Endings

First, about the original endings.  Yeah, suckage–at least the Destroy ending, which is the only original ending I played. It didn’t suck because of a lack of closure—I prefer that—but because there was too much closure, and what was explained compromised the narrative of the whole series. It would have been so much better if it had been left entirely open-ended. I came to hate my original Destroy ending more and more as I thought about it.  The extended endings are much better because they fixed a lot of the logic problems, but the real problem remains–the Catalyst.

I want to kick that creepy little twerp right in his perky, transparent nose.

Instead of adding my voice to the cacophony of rabid complaints, I’ll link you to a couple of very good sources for explanation about why the original endings were a huge letdown for this epic series (and I’m not using the word “epic” lightly).

Here, a thoughtful blog post on Kotaku, by Sparky Carlson.

Here, a good 20 min. vid, from the  Angry Joe Show (he’s angry about a lot more than I am—but his reasons 8-10, at least, are spot on).

My friend Dan Bethel, though, has written a very smart and thoughtful defense of the original endings over at Known Griefers, and it’s a great read, whether you agree or not.

But let’s talk about the ending with the DLC.

There’s so much I love about the last couple of hours of ME3. The squad farewells are well done and provide a sense of closure with these friends who can’t join you on the final push. Shep’s “St. Crispin’s Day” speech is tightly written and moving. The final battle on the streets of London is challenging and complex–and exhausting. I love the rush to the beam and, in the extended ending, the moment Shepard takes to get her team to safety. I love the last moment between Shepard and that team, especially with a romanced Kaidan. Adrenaline and tears all the way to the Citadel.

I even like what happens on the Citadel, for the most part. I think the confrontation with the Illusive Man works really well. (Question: does he make Shepard shoot Anderson–make her actually squeeze the trigger–or does he just make the gun go off in her hand?) I’m a little confused that killing the Illusive Man is both a Renegade interrupt and required to complete the game, but whatever. He needs killing. I suppressed my strong urge to kill him, and let the interrupt pass, on my last playthrough only in case killing him might be why I hadn’t been getting the Synthesis option. That was clearly not the problem.

What really sells me on the ending is Shepard herself. She’s sitting next to Anderson, her dear friend and mentor, the one and only person who has always had her back, as he dies. She herself is grievously wounded and sags against him, probably also dying.

Then Hackett hails her. She is needed. Again. Still she cannot rest.

Without hesitation she asks, “What do you want me to do?” She struggles up and tries to do what’s asked.

Geez, I’m crying as I write this, dammit. It almost doesn’t matter what happens next.

Almost. But that’s when we meet the Catalyst. He seems to me completely unnecessary, and he muddles the narrative of the whole series, even in the extended cut (which does fix his most egregious logic breaks). Do we even need to understand the Reapers? Do we really understand them any better after the Catalyst quits monologuing? I’m unconvinced. I think that trying to wrap up the trilogy forcibly with a long-winded and ludicrous explanation of the Reapers’ “purpose” shoved about 100 hours of very dynamic narrative into one teensy little box—a box into which it could not possibly fit.

It’s an especially astounding lapse because the narrative to this point has been so philosophically deep and astute.

The choices themselves are sound, or could be. By the time we meet the Catalyst, we’ve already been presented with the Control choice, by the Illusive Man, and the Destroy choice, by the Alliance. They have been inverted in Paragon/Renegade terms by their color and situation. Agreeing with the lllusive Man over the Alliance has never been a Paragon choice until the very last decision, so we have that twist to add to our deliberations. The only choice that isn’t presented to us before we even encounter the Catalyst is the Synthesis choice. Wouldn’t it have been more interesting and coherent—more personal and, ultimately, less creepy—if EDI had sussed that out and presented it to us?

I think so.

I try to ignore the Catalyst’s bullshit.

I like sad endings generally, and Mass Effect needed one. I don’t mind at all that Shepard doesn’t survive the end of the trilogy. That’s as it should be. If you can play through ME3 and watch so many friends and comrades sacrifice themselves for the greater good, if you can watch a Shepard mortally wounded on the Citadel squeeze up her last ounce of strength to stand and do what’s asked of her, and still think that she will somehow come out of this alive, then I wonder whether you’ve really been paying much attention at all.

Which is why I hate those last few seconds of my original Destroy ending, after the credits, after the Stargazer, when you see the chest plate of her N7 armor, and it rises with one breath. No. No. No. Must the game muddy up her sacrifice, too?

The creepy kid tells us Synthesis is the “ideal” choice (that right there is reason not to believe it), but I found it too visually silly (glowy green eyes and circuits? Really?)—not to mention ethically bizarre. That served to distance me from the emotional impact. As I mentioned earlier, though, EDI saved the emotional impact at the last second with a particularly powerful final line.

Of the three possibilities (apparently there are 4 more takes on the ending, but they all fall into the three categories of Control, Synthesis, and Destroy), Control is my favorite. It has the most emotional weight, and it allows Shepard’s consciousness to continue. Yes, it makes her something of a god figure, but, you know, she deserves that.

Bioware and Electronic Arts

I don’t think anyone really reads this who doesn’t know me, so I don’t have to worry much about getting flamed.  Thus, as a last little gasp, here are my two bits about the “EA is evil and has killed Bioware” refrain ringing out across the internet (the gaming forums, anyway).

To my knowledge, no one is making games as deeply immersive and complex, with such precise and sophisticated attention to narrative and gameplay, as Bioware. Their work is unparalleled, no matter their business partner. As long as that’s the case, I could not care less how much profit they try to turn with concurrent-release DLCs or any other product. And as far as I can tell, this controversy is kept aloft by gamers whingeing about the cost of Bioware/EA games.  (The ME3 endings didn’t calm things down any, of course.)

A game company is not a utility. It is not a public service. It is not a charity. Their products are entirely, in every conceivable situation, optional. Yes, by the time you purchase the game and the key DLCs, you’ve probably spent at least $80 per game, and you could spend well over $100 if you want to fill the characters’ closets and get extra fancy weapons.  The N7 armor and the Viper V work fine for me, personally.

Bioware/EA doesn’t owe anyone, and has no moral obligation to offer anyone, a cheap game. If you don’t want to, or can’t, spend that kind of money, don’t.  And this is me, just a hairsbreadth from a socialist.

Frankly, I would gladly pay more.

And with that I have said all I’m going to say about Mass Effect.

For now, anyway.

My Adventures on the Normandy, Chapter 4

Oh Sovereign, you dbag.

Finally, on my 3^rd (and latest) playthrough, I got to experience the entire Mass Effect story. And everything was shiny and new.

SPOILER ALERT FOR ALL THREE MASS EFFECT GAMES

Playthrough #3 (Xbox 360, ME 1, 2, and 3) SYNTHESIS (extended ME3 ending):

• Character: FemShep. Infiltrator. Sole Survivor. Colonist. Paragon.

This character was the closest of the three to my own personality. I built her relationships and reputation according to the behavior and decisions that most closely resembled moves I’d make myself. Still pretty Paragon-y, but with a fairly healthy dose of Renegade spirit. I guess you could call me a prickly idealist—an alignment that swings fully between lawful good and chaotic good but hardly ever pauses in neutral territory.

Far as I’m concerned, if you’re gonna be neutral, you might ‘swell be dead.

I did have an eye on ultimately achieving the Synthesis ending, though, so I paid a lot of attention to the reputation meter, and I made room for the Renegade choices I wanted to make by doing every damn thing there was to do in ME2 and ME3.

Including scanning every planet. Not a gameplay highlight.

It was my intention to do every damn thing in ME1, too, but the Mako was such a drag that I just couldn’t face trundling across more random planets trying to avoid or take down thresher maws and Geth Armatures while I sought out Turian badges or whatever. I triggered the final mission with about eight or so active missions in my log. I really have to stop succumbing to my impatience, because I am now sure, based on all the characters from other missions who suddenly showed up on Ilium or the Citadel, that those seemingly innocuous tasks I abandoned fed into the narrative in the later games. And I’d actual gotten pretty competent at driving the Mako, anyway.

Mako = drunken rhino

Oh, well. Guess that means I’ll have to play through again. Pity.

Funny story (funny now, anyway): you know how I said that I did the Hammerhead missions out of order and ended up doing the tutorial mission after the more advanced Overlord mission? I did basically the same thing with the Mako, except that there wasn’t a tutorial mission per se. But I went to Feros first. Feros. With the skyway. The skyway with all the obstacles and the Geth every which way and the certain death if you drive over the side. That Feros.

It’s like a disease I have. A make-life-as-hard-as-I-possibly-can-on-myself disease.

Side note: one of my favorite little overheard convos in ME3 is Vega and Cortez debating the pros and cons of the Mako and Hammerhead. Clearly, I’m not the only one who was not sorry to see driving removed from ME3.

Where was I? Oh yeah.

I was, obviously, spoiled for the key decisions in the ME1 story, since I’d made them twice, out of context, via the interactive comic at the beginning of the PS3 version of ME2. Plus, during my gameplay I’d dealt with the Council, I’d become friends with Wrex and Anderson, I’d romanced Kaidan, and I knew what Udina gets himself up to, so even with the additional context of actual ME1 gameplay, I ended up making the same decisions I’d made in my previous playthroughs.

It’s a feature of my investment in the narrative. I am so wrapped up that I worry about changing overmuch the story I’ve come to love. Despite my occasional desire and intent to change up the story and see what else is in there, I can’t bring myself to play a primarily Renegade character, or to kill off characters whose company I enjoy. (I’ve never gotten the opportunity to kill Liara, though. I’d probably do that. She’s really annoying.) I can’t install Udina as Counsillor, because I don’t trust him (and I know not to). I’m too deeply connected to the story to satisfy my clinical curiosity, even though I know there are significant chunks of narrative I’ve yet to see.

I was looking at fan vid captures on youtube and saw a title: “Garrus kills Ashley”—WTF? When does that happen? I didn’t watch the vid, so I don’t know (the Citadel, maybe?), but I don’t think it could happen in my gameplays. I didn’t even bother getting close to Ashley in my ME1 playthrough and never took her on a mission. I figured I’d be leaving her behind on Virmire anyway—plus, she’s not particularly pleasant to be around. But is there a scenario in my gameplay in which Kaidan would die at the Citadel? Yikes. Kaidan gets high-horsey, but at least he can have a conversation with some depth. He’s also nice to look at.
Yes, I know, Ashley is totally H.O.T. in ME2 and ME3. I’ve seen.

Whatevs. I don’t like her.

Ashley has no sense of humor. She’s a xenophobe. And she wears pink armor. Pink? Really? (Wow, are the clothing and armor choices better in the later games—though come on, why can’t FemShep have a dress outfit she’d actually wear rather than a stupid so-tight-it’s-good-she-doesn’t-breathe leather LBD?)

No way my Shep would ever wear this.

I don’t think I would have liked Ashley regardless, but I’m sure that the emotional impact of leaving her behind would have been much greater had I not been well prepared for it. Even so, I still got teary. Good writing.

The one key decision I made differently in my actual gameplay: I saved the Rachni queen. She was very persuasive, and I felt sorry for her, even after being on Noveria for 5 FRAKKIN’ HOURS (that mission just went on and on and on). Anyway, I was curious how saving her would affect my mission with Grunt in ME3. I made that change with great trepidation, though. (It turned out all right, and I saved her again in ME3, again for the first time—that turned out all right, too, though Grunt wasn’t terribly pleased.)

What I did change was combat. I made my 3^rd Shepard an Infiltrator because I’d watched my husband play ME2 with that class, and it looked very interesting. Biotics and tech aren’t really part of the Soldier’s arsenal. Soldiers are all about guns & ammo. And still, oddly, I loved it, though I’m not even remotely a fan of guns in real life.

But Infiltrator, with Slam as the bonus power in ME2 and 3, is freaking god mode, man. It’s awesome. And I got to keep my Viper. Score!

The ME1 gameplay is pretty clunky, comparatively, and the graphics aren’t wonderful, but geez, it’s a five year old game, so it seems silly to complain. However, it was an adjustment coming off of two plays through ME2 and 3.

The story, though, is grand. The ME1 final battle—the whole final sequence from Virmire to the Citadel—is my favorite of the whole series. It’s absolutely cinematic in scale. I love Anderson punching Udina’s lights out and releasing the Normandy so the squad can make a getaway. I love finding out about the Protheans. I love the confrontations with Saren. I love working with the salarians and finding out about what Saren’s been up to with the genophage. And Sovereign. And when Shepard climbs out of the rubble—oh, hell, I love it all. It was exhilarating.

In comparison, the Collector base is kinda lame, actually. Especially in terms of difficulty.

This Shep imported into ME2 pretty seamlessly—which was a good thing, since making even the slightest tweak would have required starting my custom character over from scratch—selecting the “custom” option brought up the default face. But I didn’t feel the need to change anything, and the graphics had improved so much between 2007 and 2010 that everything looked much better.

Another side note: The graphics in the games are strong throughout (especially when taking generation into account), though the tech focus of the graphics is definitely in a different direction than it is in games like Oblivion or Skyrim, for example. In ME, the strength of the graphics is in character motion and things like simulated tracking shots, zooms, and shifting focus. The “camera” does all the moving, and virtually everything but the characters is static. Even water barely moves. In Oblivion and Skyrim, the world itself is very fluid—but the character movement, including in combat, is more limited. I attribute the difference to genre. ME is science fiction, and most of it occurs in interior spaces, whereas the great bulk of action in fantasy games occurs outdoors. You don’t expect the cargo bay of a ship to have a lot of movement going on in the background, but a forest without any movement looks fake. It’s definitely noticeable whenever the Normandy squad lands on a planet with any kind of natural life.

I wouldn’t therefore call the ME series visually “beautiful” (setting aside the cutscenes, which can be stunning). Even the supposed “vistas” are mostly meh.

But back to the recap.

This time, with all the ME1 backstory, playing ME2 and 3 was a much richer experience, even though most of the key decisions had not changed. I had access to more and different dialogue interaction with my squad and associates, and the people I encountered in the cities responded to me differently. Even a seemingly small moment like a heretofore random colonist seeking my help with a medical issue on Ilium made a dramatic change—though the task itself was virtually identical, the nameless colonist became Shiala, the asari whom I’d saved from enslavement by the Thorian on Feros, and my interaction with her was substantially different. Stuff like that happened repeatedly.

Plus I got a bunch of cool emails from people I helped—like Talitha, whom I’d talked out of suicide. I love that shit.

The gameplay itself wasn’t substantially changed by what I actually did in ME1—my squad was the same, as were our missions—but the story was really deepened. The narrative threads that started spooling out in ME1 wove all the way through ME2. And in ME3, an intricate tapestry was completed. (Okay, that was terrible. I’m going to start belting out Carole King any second now. Apologies.)

I started a romance with Kaidan in ME1, and this time it was an actual relationship that built, rather than an option I clicked. It gave me a bit more understanding of his reaction on Horizon.

However. I played this Shep as me. And I’m nice and all, but there’s only so much crap I’m gonna take from a high-and-mighty biotic who can’t even be glad to see me back from the frakkin’ dead for more than 30 seconds before he’s all up in my grill about who I’m working for and whether I’ve gone to the dark side or whatever. After I just saved his damn hide. Cripes.

Far as I’m concerned, that relationship was O.V.E.R. on Horizon. His “apology letter” was sweet, I guess, but came way short. Yeah, yeah, he was spun. Whatever.

Enter Thane. I’m a sucker for a badass with a painful past and a poet’s soul. And he called me Siha. *Flutter.*

Sigh. Those eyes.

Thane’s death is a highlight of the narrative for me, and not because I’m glad to see him go. Quite the opposite, really. The scene ends with a hard punch to my emotional core. (Hmm. Maybe that doesn’t actually sound all that positive, but what can I say. It is for me.) ME3 is chock full of emotional punches, in fact, even more than the first two games. I cry my way through the damn game, and it’s only getting more intense with subsequent playthroughs. I’ll talk about that much more in my analysis.

But Thane writes a hell of a deathbed love letter, let me tell ya.

On this playthrough, I amassed virtually all of the War Assets and finally had access to the Synthesis ending—and I’m not sure how I feel about it, actually. I was kinda creeped out through most of the final scene. And then EDI spoke her last line, and I started bawling.

Maybe I should have my tear ducts checked out.

Okay. I’ve been trying to keep these recaps to no more than 2000 words, so I’m going to stop here. Next up, finally and at last, will be my analysis of the series. Hopefully then you’ll understand the point of the recaps.