DIE another day
Jun. 27th, 2022 11:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraActually DIE 4: Bleed and also DIE 3: The Great Game. (previous thoughts about DIE) Hopefully it is not a spoiler to say that I admire Gillen for sticking to the "20" motif and limiting himself to 20 issues. I am old and cranky and forgetful, I don't want to slog through a sprawling soap opera over the course of a decade, I want a limited, definite story that gets to an end before I've completely lost track of the beginning, thank you!
Everything else I will put under a spoiler cut. I neither loved it nor hated it. The whole Angela-and-Molly plot felt like something I *should* care about, but it didn't land for me; I don't know for sure, but my guess would be that Kieron Gillen doesn't have kids himself and wanted there to be this parenting subplot but didn't really have anything to say with/about it. In the same way that Ash's arc with Augustus kind of fell flat, or that Matt's big moments here are about his parents rather than his children. Or that Ash's big ending is coming back to discover he (I'm going with he for Ash in the real world? in the absence of a definitive statement for something else? but please say if that seems wrong) has a kid now? Why is that his ending, that doesn't really seem like what his story was about?
I also never cared that much about the history-of-RPGs stuff... sort of interesting, I guess. And as pretentious "the deeeep meeeaning and significance of this activity" storylines go, I suppose I would say that doing this one about RPGs landed pretty well, actually. I mean, there are a million of this sort of thing about Sport or The Theater or The Circus or whatever and I probably liked this more than most. Maybe I feel like I haven't seen it as much? I guess T Campbell's Fans did some plotlines about magic dice of power and roleplaying and such... I tried to do some Tvtropes searching to figure out what else I'm forgetting, but I wasn't able to figure out the right searches for, like, the trope of gaming elements having real-world power, or characters that are exploring themselves through in-universe gaming.
Which brings me to The Gender Question. On the one hand I kind of had to roll my eyes - really, *genderfeels* are the balrog? Hundreds of thousands of people manage to transition without getting all murdery about it, this is a lot of drama to be trying to mine from the not-that-extraordinary circumstance of maybe wanting some new pronouns or some estrogen or whatever. And on the other hand, I kind of liked that Gillen did lean way into the "RPGs as a space for gender experimentation" thing and really took it seriously, I think it's fair that it was a huge dramatic deal *for Ash*, I liked Gillen's choice to make Ash genderfluid a) because yay genderfluid characters and b) maybe that did make the situation less straightforward for Ash than "okay I am unambiguously a woman and need to live that out in my real life". I wish we'd gotten a *little* more gender liberation for Ash at the end though... "there's so much I need to tell you" was a good answer/resolution to "I can't say" from the beginning, but let us stay with that rather than the baby thing. And maybe give us some gesture or visual indicator that reminds us of Die-world Ash, to show that inner transformation? I don't know, of course ultimately Gillen has to tell the story he wants to and not what I would find most interesting, but I wonder if I didn't pick up on things here that I was supposed to, that made some of these elements like the baby especially compelling to him.
Everything else I will put under a spoiler cut. I neither loved it nor hated it. The whole Angela-and-Molly plot felt like something I *should* care about, but it didn't land for me; I don't know for sure, but my guess would be that Kieron Gillen doesn't have kids himself and wanted there to be this parenting subplot but didn't really have anything to say with/about it. In the same way that Ash's arc with Augustus kind of fell flat, or that Matt's big moments here are about his parents rather than his children. Or that Ash's big ending is coming back to discover he (I'm going with he for Ash in the real world? in the absence of a definitive statement for something else? but please say if that seems wrong) has a kid now? Why is that his ending, that doesn't really seem like what his story was about?
I also never cared that much about the history-of-RPGs stuff... sort of interesting, I guess. And as pretentious "the deeeep meeeaning and significance of this activity" storylines go, I suppose I would say that doing this one about RPGs landed pretty well, actually. I mean, there are a million of this sort of thing about Sport or The Theater or The Circus or whatever and I probably liked this more than most. Maybe I feel like I haven't seen it as much? I guess T Campbell's Fans did some plotlines about magic dice of power and roleplaying and such... I tried to do some Tvtropes searching to figure out what else I'm forgetting, but I wasn't able to figure out the right searches for, like, the trope of gaming elements having real-world power, or characters that are exploring themselves through in-universe gaming.
Which brings me to The Gender Question. On the one hand I kind of had to roll my eyes - really, *genderfeels* are the balrog? Hundreds of thousands of people manage to transition without getting all murdery about it, this is a lot of drama to be trying to mine from the not-that-extraordinary circumstance of maybe wanting some new pronouns or some estrogen or whatever. And on the other hand, I kind of liked that Gillen did lean way into the "RPGs as a space for gender experimentation" thing and really took it seriously, I think it's fair that it was a huge dramatic deal *for Ash*, I liked Gillen's choice to make Ash genderfluid a) because yay genderfluid characters and b) maybe that did make the situation less straightforward for Ash than "okay I am unambiguously a woman and need to live that out in my real life". I wish we'd gotten a *little* more gender liberation for Ash at the end though... "there's so much I need to tell you" was a good answer/resolution to "I can't say" from the beginning, but let us stay with that rather than the baby thing. And maybe give us some gesture or visual indicator that reminds us of Die-world Ash, to show that inner transformation? I don't know, of course ultimately Gillen has to tell the story he wants to and not what I would find most interesting, but I wonder if I didn't pick up on things here that I was supposed to, that made some of these elements like the baby especially compelling to him.
