TKO Creations

Okay… deep breath time.

I’m about to criticize some good friends.

Now, as I do so, I want to lay down some opening caveats. Firstly, there is no way the creators here could have anticipated what was going to unfold in our society at the time they committed to their story. Secondly, it’s not really a criticism of them, as much as it is a criticism of our entertainment and the tropes it leans on. Thirdly, people should be able to make the distinction between fantasy and reality.

Now, with all that said, let me paint you a rhetorical picture.

A cabal of elitists, potentially spanning the entire globe, have been pulling the strings of society for decades, if not longer, manipulating people, killing people, starting wars, conflicts, abusing men, women and children, etc… all to advance their twisted machinations of power… until a small movement of scrappy heroes untangle all those sinister knots and finally take the fight to the secret society!

Does that story sound familiar? You’ve probably seen that many, many times in the dramas of our age. It’s one of the most enduring tropes in dramatic entertainment for the last fifty years.

I’ve never been a fan of “Illuminatti” style storylines. I don’t think they represent how people or societies work at all. We can’t even keep a secret between three people for more a couple days. A group of logistically thousands (if not more), operating in secrecy across an entire country or the world? There is no way that doesn’t come unraveled even before a second generation has a chance to take the reins.

Think about it. There is no massive covert operation that has survived more than a couple of decades, even in the most repressive countries in our planet’s history. And even those were more of the “open secret” variety where anyone who wanted to know could have found out, but there was an implied investment of the public to not confront it.

Watergate literally came unraveled because one dude couldn’t figure out where to stand. You want me to buy that a cabal has gone [x] number of years without even one critical misstep? Sorry… my suspension of belief only stretches so far.

So when The Uniques went head on into the secret society angle, my eyes started rolling. And they kept rolling as it ticked every single “conspiracy” trope in the book. Our intrepid heroes, taking on the “burden” of exposing this themselves? Check. The nutty recluses that have a few critical pieces but are too out there for anyone to take seriously? Check. The galaxy-brained chess masters who have every step our heroes make plotted out ten moves ahead of time? Check.

I am giving the creators the benefit of the doubt, because they have been so very good at twisting tropes on their head. But… ugh… I will admit that this particular part of the volume has been a tiring slog for me.

But now, I have another reason to not like this type of story.

Because that picture I painted for you at the start of this blog post? That was also in the heads of the people who charged the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021. People are believing this sort of shit, and it’s getting people hurt, and even killed.

Our entertainment is awash in conspiracy theories. As I said, it has been one of the most enduring tropes in our entertainment for a long time. We are obsessed with conspiracies, and I do believe that our fiction is tinting how people see the real world.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying Comfort Love and Adam Withers have any culpability in a bunch of morons who thought baby-eating leftists were trying to steal an election from Donald Trump. And they would have no way of foreseeing this happening at the time they were plotting their magnificent story.

But it is informing me as I read through this storyline, which is but one of hundreds and hundreds of such stories that fill our media every year. And it reinforces to me that I really need to remain committed to a different direction.

A moment of disclosure, I wasn’t really a Dr. Seuss fan even as a child. While my peers were reading Horton Hears a Who, I was reading Where the Sidewalk Ends. While my friends were flipping through pages of The Cat in the Hat, I was lost in the pages of Where the Wild Things Are.

Point is, this current scuffle over the legacy of one Theodor Geisel doesn’t hit me as deeply or strikes the core of my childhood like it does a good many people. So, if I seem particularly dismissive of the impact he has had on so many developing minds, I apologize. Nonetheless, as he has become the latest front in the United States of America’s ever expanding culture war, I am compelled to speak on it, as it ties to something else I have noticed repeatedly as modern society tries to reconcile with its past.

The facts aren’t really in dispute. During Geisel’s rise as a cartoonist, he did a lot of work that contained exceedingly blatant racism. As in nakedly obvious, even for the early 20th century. It was a trait that informed even his later work where he tried to be more inclusionary. And he did try, even if the work was more allegorical rather than direct… and even though it still fell short in many instances.

This reality and problematic history has been met quite frequently with the same refrain that a considerable number of historical creators and figures when their own backgrounds are brought to the forefront of the discussion.

“They were a product of their times!”

On its surface, this is a true statement. As bad as we can be culturally in terms of inclusion and tolerance in the current day, past eras were far worse in nigh every aspect, and it is easily seen by what was considered acceptable discourse in those times by those who influenced those cultural periods, and that culture would inform and influence every single person who grew up and contributed to it.

So, I do not object to the statement. I object to its usage.

Because when this line has been invoked, it is used as a deflection. It’s used in hopes of burying the troublesome so that it doesn’t have to be reckoned with, and those who enjoy it can continue to enjoy it with a clean conscience. They want a clean break that doesn’t require retrospection… because that would invariably lead to introspection, and there’s nothing your average American hates more than having to look in the spiritual mirror and take stock of the warts on their soul.

We want to be free of the troublesome aspects of our icons, without even knowing why its troublesome to begin with. Even if it was good faith attempt (and in most cases, it isn’t), it is akin to sweeping all the dirt under the rug. It doesn’t actually solve the problem.

I’d contend it’s of utmost importance to remember that everyone is a product of their time, especially as we consume their work. I dare say that is vital. Because it’s with that knowledge that we can learn and build upon the past to be better in our time.

I try not to get overtly partisan in my political discourse. While my personal opinions tend to lean fairly heavily into what would be considered “progressive” (by American reckoning, at least), I try to be accommodating and try to understand the perspectives of those who don’t agree wholeheartedly with me.

I am breaking that rule today; so if you are an ardent Trump follower even now, and have no interest in hearing anything bad about your dear leader or yourselves, you might as well hit the back bar right now, delete this link from your bookmarks and history, and any other distancing measure you can think of.

Because I am not going to be kind to Donald Trump, nor am I going to be particularly understanding of those that will defend his and his cult-like followers actions at this point. You are anathema to me. You are every problem in this country, and none of its solutions.

Because unlike a lot of other progressive thinkers, I don’t think you have been “brainwashed” by conservative, oligarch-driven media to reject science or reasonable discourse. I lived among you for half of my life. I know better. You weren’t inundated by anti-intellectualism. You sought it out because it’s what you wanted to hear. You weren’t helpless pawns in a conflict by a handful of greedy billionaires. You were, and are, willful volunteers.

And you aren’t duped by President Donald J. Trump. You aren’t blind to his most deplorable behaviors. You see them, and you revel in them. He is the man you wish you could be; a bigoted, hateful, braggart who lives a lazy, gluttonous lifestyle where he has sex with models, tosses them aside, spends money with abandon, refuses to pay his debts, says whatever the hell he wants, does whatever the hell he wants… without any consequences.

You know he pays lip service to faith, then does none of the acts that come with pious living. You know damn well that he is so alien to the Bible that he literally doesn’t know how to hold it. You don’t care. He is living your best life, and you are living vicariously through him.

You don’t even care that he has lived up to exactly none of his promises other than to fill the Supreme Court with people who also pay lip service to Christian ideals… then don’t actually do anything to support them. Because it wasn’t ever really about a wall on the Mexican border… or the right to bear arms… or protecting the lives of the unborn.

It was about making sure no one dared try to challenge your place in the social hierarchy. That the nation respected and acquiesced to your way of life. That you retained the imaginary throne in your heads; one where no one has the right to tell you what to do; no matter how reasonable or how imperative it is to the well-being of those who aren’t you.

I didn’t have much patience for it to begin with. Now, in the aftermath of a violent attempt to assert your dominance over a country that actively chose to reject that worldview, I have none. Anyone who supports Trump at this point is dead to me. We will no longer “agree to disagree.” You are wrong. You are despicable. And we are done.

It’s been a rather common dream among the extremes of the political discourse; that among the masses of those that don’t/won’t/can’t vote there is a swell of support for them and their message specifically, and thus their platform is nigh infinitely more popular than polling or general sentiment would suggest.

For the alt-right, they insist that there are masses of people in “blue” states who are in lockstep with their isolationist and conservative message, but they are demoralized by dirty liberal dominance.

For leftists, they tell us that there’s an army of wanna-be socialists through every vein of this country that are either beaten down by “politics as usual” or simply don’t realize that they are actually in favor of wealth redistribution, and merely need to hear it from a major leader.

In the 2020 election, we had a chance to see if there is any validity to the “silent majority.” Roughly 3/4ths of eligible voters showed up, a massive uptick from the roughly 50% that normally do. If there was any sign of a previously ignored block of voters one way or the other… surely we’d see signs of those people, at least in the margins.

And at the end of the day, with both candidates reaching record numbers of votes (literally the most and second most in any presidential election in the country’s history)…

The voting splits were almost frighteningly similar to the last twenty years; once again the presidency decided pretty much at the margins. Quite literally; roughly 100k votes among the 150+ million in a handful of states go the other way, and we’re talking about Donald Trump’s second term.

(And for what it’s worth, I think what we’re seeing from our polls is less a problem with finding out who actually supports who, as once again, the predicted splits of the total vote were well within the margin of error, and more a problem of polls being used for something they aren’t well equipped to do… which is trying to work on a micro scale in the one narrow band that actually is extremely volatile.)

It seems pretty clear that there is no silent majority. It doesn’t exist, and even a cursory understanding of statistics should have led to that conclusion. Give any statistician a random sample set of 1 in 2 and they will be exceedingly confident that the other 50% of that set will resemble what has been measured.

And while it’s true that the voting public isn’t a truly random sample size (due to things like vote suppression), there was no reason to believe that it skewed in any particular direction. There wasn’t any particular demographic statistically under-represented despite the best efforts of state and local governments (basically suppression of poor and minority voters was largely countered by laziness and disinterest from white voters).

It would seem that for every liberal/progressive in Texas or the Gulf Coast who was disenfranchised, there is an equal number of conservatives in places like New York or California that don’t bother showing up because they don’t feel their vote matters, either.

(This is a problem of the Electoral College that frankly everyone should find distasteful, regardless of political inclination.)

Nor was there any particular region that was being underrepresented. For all the “Get Out The Vote” efforts that turned states like Georgia and Virginia and North Carolina into battleground states, that inspired equally effective conservative efforts that turned the upper Midwest from fairly solid “blue” to a much more active “purple” as well.

The physical battle lines may shift, the ideological ones aren’t. Everyone pretty much knows what side they are on.

So what does this mean?

Well, it’s frankly good news for conservatives, in my estimation, even as their far-right flank was one of the most aggressive believers in the “silent majority.” Their message is rather simple, and it keeps the various groups in line. Irrational fear based on anyone different from them; that liberals are out to take their guns, that women will be lined up around the block to kill their unborn children, and that there are enemies in all directions invested with the goal of destroying their families and their way of life.

As disgusting and misleading the platform is, fear remains the single easiest and effective motivator of the human species. It works, and they’re going to keep using it until it doesn’t.

It’s less good news for liberals and progressives, because both major camps on the left side of the ledger have staked their entire platforms on the idea of a “silent majority,” at least in different ways.

Progressives, it’s time to stop waiting for the Riders of Rohan to appear from the west to lift you to victory. They simply don’t exist. The unvoting public is as moderate to conservative as the voting public you have tended to scorn. There are no swaths of unknowing socialists that you can reach.

For moderates, they need to drop the notion of appealing to the center-right. If the 2020 election should have shown you anything, it’s that it’s not going to happen in any meaningful numbers. “Centrist” Republicans may pay lip service to switching, but when they are alone in the booth, they’ll fall in line just like every other Republican, regardless of how disgusting of a man the GOP has at the top of the ticket.

We have to play with the hand we have, not the one we want to have.

Yep… I’m breaking my silence to talk sports. To my six readers or so, sorry.

The Detroit Lions, or as Homer Simpson would put it, “The sorriest bunch of sucks who ever sucked.” A team who on any given Sunday will add another example to the definition of “futility.”

There’s no real analogy I can make to describe this team outside of the realm of sports; because in no other field could anyone or anything be allowed to fail so utterly for so long before the rest of the industry simply refused to have anything to do with such an absolute disaster.

The closest examples I can think of would be if you’re a movie buff to picture Ed Wood. Try and wrap your brain around his filmmaking career. Now have that career go twice as long as it did.

Even other sports examples really don’t quite capture just how awful of depths this franchise has sunk to. You can cite the Chicago Cubs or Boston Red Sox or the Cleveland Browns or Liverpool (if you’re fans of the English Premier League), but those teams actually had moments during their trips in the wilderness where they actually got your hopes up, like there was a chance. They had stretches of competence that just for one reason or another didn’t end with a championship.

Not the Lions. This is a team that has been perennially awful for over sixty years. They have yet to even see their league’s championship game. Hell, they’ve only seen their league’s semi-final once. And it doesn’t look like this season is going to end that wandering through the wilderness either with another opening day that ended in the same agonizing fashion as so many games did the last two years… jumping out to an early lead, and unable to close the deal, eventually losing just before the end in spectacular fashion.

The problem, at least on the field, is two fold. Firstly, they have a defense that simply can’t stop anyone if they don’t stop themselves (if I follow up on this, I’ll delve into the systemic ineptitude of the franchise’s management and ownership). I say that quite literally; the Lions have routinely had one of the worst, if not the worst, defensive teams in their league for the last three years.

In this most recent game, the Lions defense gave up three consecutive scores in the last quarter of play to go from a solid lead to losing. To futbol fans, it would be roughly analogous to a side giving up three consecutive goals in the final twenty minutes.

This puts constant pressure on the Lions offense to keep scoring points, rather than play a more conservative game plan that limits mistakes that would give an opponent new life. Unfortunately, the Lions try to play more conservatively anyway… then go into panic mode when that proves foolhardy, and eventually making the sort of mistakes in their panic that they were trying to avoid making in the first place.

And thus, you have a consistent recipe for failure that has happened with almost eerie regularity, almost like they are reading from a script. The National Football League only plays 16 games a season, and this particular script has played out 11 times for the Lions in the last two seasons and now one game.

I’d argue the root cause of this repeated, catastrophic failure is arrogant pride on the part of Matt Patricia, the Lions current head coach. He is a man whose entire career has been on the defensive side of the game. He has to trust in his defense to shut down the opponent, and refuses to suffer the idea that the defense he has is simply incapable of doing that.

It’s the sort of pigheaded stubbornness you have to settle for when you’re a neophyte General Manager without any real connections, and thus the number of people you know is dreadfully small…

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Okay. I’m not mentally ready to dive down that rabbit hole. I’m just gonna stop now. Sorry for rambling.

(Disclosure: I have not personally played this title ((yet?)).  But I have watched it played by several others who had advance copies, so I am comfortable enough commenting on the narrative.

And while I by nature try to avoid massive spoilers, there’s going to be no avoiding some mild ones, due to their importance to the story as a whole, and the critique that follows.  So, as always, proceed only if you’re willing to accept that choice.)

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So, as we begin to dive in, what’s important to acknowledge is that regardless of medium, 1:1 faithful adaptations are rare, nor did Square Enix at any point pretend this was going to be either.

That said, if you are going to significantly alter a classic story (and no matter what some fans might tell themselves, Tetsuya Nomura and his team have already significantly altered it, and even threw down the gauntlet in game that they intend to significantly alter it further), you better know what you’re doing and why.  Because if you don’t stick the landing, you’re going to have a swarm of outraged former fans that are ready to burn down your studio.

And I wish I could say that was hyperbole.

The “why” in this case isn’t hard to suss out, because Nomura isn’t half as clever as he thinks he is.  The wraiths of fate are representative of old fans, who demand the story proceed in very specific ways, and get increasingly aggressive as the remake pushes forward; whereas Nomura sees himself as a visionary trying to get said fans to accept that things can (and should) change.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with “meta” story-telling and high concept narratives winding through an otherwise played-straight story.  Hell, my most notable series is built on the characters are self-aware MMO characters that don’t realize they’re part of a game, and I’m pretty proud of that work.  I think I did pretty damn well with it.

There’s also no inherent sin in challenging the audience, even doing so directly.  Let’s be honest, the overwhelming majority of fans… aren’t very good at storytelling or even comprehending a story.  Any given fanbase will often have mutually exclusive desires and be very unwelcoming of change, even if its needed.

But if you’re going to take on your fans, and have them appreciate you for it at the end… it takes some very clever storytelling and a very deft mind for getting to the heart of what the narrative is supposed to be about and convincing them that you can give them a satisfactory experience.

A remake of Final Fantasy 7 could have been a lay-up; fairly easy money for Square-Enix.  Nomura and his team are going for the 360-tomahawk dunk.  If they pull it off, the fans will be out of their seats in awe.  If they don’t, it’s gonna be on blooper reels and mocked for the rest of their lives.

Good luck, guys.  You’re gonna need it.