More Mass Effect 3 SPOILER Ending Thoughts – The Indoctrination Theory

OK. When it came to the Mass Effect 3 ending, I’d said my piece (spoiled and non-spoiled) and counted to three. I was good, I was finished, I was content. Then I had a brief conversation with a friend yesterday. He’d never played any of the Mass Effect games and wanted some questions answered, so he could put the frothing waves of rage into context. I answered them from my perspective. Then he said something about a theory that was the hot thing on the Intarwebs, something I’d paid zero attention to, a little thing called the Indoctrination Theory. I decided to check into this theory. What I read changed everything.

Essentially, my friend took a stick and jammed it into the anthill of my brain and stirred it all up. The rat bastard.

Oh, and if I haven’t been entirely clear, there are spoilers below the “Read the rest of this entry”. SPOILERS. Spoilers. (spoilers)

Why I Hate On The Walking Dead So Much

I’ve been asked that question before by friends of mine. They know I love zombies and zombie movies. They know I write books about them. They watch the show and can’t understand why I have such a problem with it. I try to explain, and bits and pieces come out, and after I’ve been asked that question I lie awake at night pondering the answers to that very question. Why on Earth do I, a zombie lover, hate on the Walking Dead so much?

I think, for me, it all has to do with missed potential. This show could be great. It should be great. The zombies are awesome, the effects are great, they have, uh, actors, they have an incredibly popular comic as their source material; there is no reason why a story set in a zombie apocalypse that has good effects should make me so angry. But these writers have figured out a way.  I’m going to try to make this somewhat organized, to keep my thoughts in order. Maybe I’ll learn something from all this, What Not To Do In a Zombie Story. In no particular order, here are some of the things that I think make the show so much worse than it should be.

My Spoiler-Free Thoughts About the Mass Effect 3 Ending, And Endings in General (Updated)

An angry gamer, via The Gamer's Paradox.

I finished Mass Effect 3 this weekend. It took me a long time to get there. The game has a ton of content, and I played a lot of multiplayer as well (because playing multiplayer actually makes a difference in your single-player campaign – you don’t need to, but it helps if you aren’t a completionist. I, however, am both, so I played the shit out of the game and it still took me 10 days to play through). I am sad that my first playthrough is over, because I love the game and the series that much, but I’m already into my second playthrough, so that’s OK.

Before I could finish, though, I’d heard enough about the ending to make me concerned. No one spoiled it for me, thank goodness, but even though I made a great effort to avoid hearing anything at all about became impossible. What I heard, though, wasn’t about anything game-specific; rather, what managed to get past my filters was loud enough to make it unavoidable.

That’s what’ll happen when a huge fanbase goes out of their ever-lovin’ minds.

Write What You Feel

(Disclaimer: like all my blog posts, this was written off the top of my head. I have no idea if it makes sense. In all actuality, I should put this disclaimer before everything I write.)

One of the first pieces of advice every aspiring writer gets, shortly after the obligatory “Show, don’t tell”, is this: “Write What You Know”. It’s good advice, in a way. Writing what you know allows you to bring depth and experience to a subject and makes your words ring true to a reader’s ear. If you’re a lawyer, chances are you can make courtroom drama and backstage legal wranglings seem like a peek into a world few get an accurate glimpse into. This can help make your story a lot more gripping and interesting. It also leads to some really shallow stories.

Take John Grisham. I’ve read his stuff before, back in the day when I was in high school. The whole lawyerly angle was cool and neat and nifty, especially since I was fifteen. As the years went by, though, I became acutely aware that, while the legal angles seemed perfectly plausible, the characters didn’t. Everyone looked and acted like cardboard cutouts or archetypical stock characters from every cop show since Dragnet. Identifying with characters is a huge part of investing in a story, and it’s not easy to feel empathy for a mannequin. A lot of authors follow this same path. The ex-cop with the crime stories. The doctor with the medical dramas. Most of these have all the heart and soul of a Wal-Mart holiday display.

But the best ones, the ones that resonate, aren’t just about what the author knows. They are about what the author feels.

Oh, Just Publish the Fucking Thing Already

This post is likely to be a minority view. It certainly goes against a lot of conventional wisdom. But it’s a viewpoint, maybe worthy of consideration, maybe not. Your mileage may etc etc.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about how other writers go through the process of putting words onto paper (both virtual and actual). Some of it is about how they write, what they listen to, their favorite chair. Other parts are about how they either plan to or already market their work. The rest of the time, though, it’s all about The Rest of It. The publishing aspect. Critiques. Discussions. Edits. The birth process from Unpublished to Published. The messy, bloody, screaming struggle to bring something into the world that fills you with joy and wonder, and eventually, the panicky thought what the fuck do I do now?

I want to talk about that part.

I Am The World’s Worst Writer And I Totally Suck

I go through crippling periods of self-doubt when it comes to my writing.  Luckily, at the moment, I am not in one of those trenches of despair where every word I type including “Sincerely, Aravan” looks ungainly and wrong.  Bad word choice.  Probably spelled wrong even though there isn’t another way to spell it.  Tone is flat, metaphors lame, characters boring, setting insipid, point pointless, and everything I’ve ever written should probably just be gathered and burned so I can crawl into the supply closet of some abandoned factory somewhere and never have to reveal my stupid face to the world.

Other days, I feel even worse.

If you’re a writer, or have ever written, or ever plan on writing so much as an email in the future, then I hope you go through this feeling of utter self-loathing several times in your life.  Why?  Because I am a small bitter person who takes some measure of meager self-satisfaction from the joint suffering of others and will take whatever mean-spirited path I need to in order to make myself feel better.  But also because I think it makes you a better writer in the long run.

The Horror of the Mundane

Much horror fiction involves some sort of supernatural agency visiting despair, terror, and suffering on the living.  Most of the rest features depraved mortals whose love of torture and sadism borders on the fantastic.  It’s cathartic for the reader and writer both, letting the fear and worry and stress that builds up during the course of everyday humdrum human existence relieve the pressure.  Stephen King’s Danse Macabre does an excellent job exploring horror in this light – if you like horror at all, you should read it; it’s fun, funny, and informative – and talks about some of the everyday anxiety that ends up being expressed through popular movies and books.  For example, he posits that the reason The Amityville Horror was such a success when it was first released is that it hit a nerve among people going through the financial instability of the inflation-crazy 1970′s (what if your house was haunted and you couldn’t sell it?  The horror!).  He also talks about the 1950′s era of giant bug movies (fear of living in the Nuclear Age) and alien invasions (fear of the Soviet Union).  Basically, it forms a road map of national anxiety as expressed in horror films and books up to the early 1980′s.  The book came to mind after this morning.

Weapon of Choice: Zombie Apocalypse Style Part Tres

In my last two posts, I’ve been the exploring the concept of what weapons I would want with me during a zombie apocalypse.  My assumptions are that I can only use weapons that are commonly available to civilians and can reasonably be obtained fairly easily, and also that I’m in the Worst Case Scenario: on foot, traveling by myself.  First I dealt with shotguns, then I dealt with other firearms.  Along the way I discussed Unitaskers, objects that are good for just one thing and for nothing else, and which I want to avoid.

Today: hand weapons.

Weapon of Choice: Zombie Apocalypse Style Part Duo

In my first post, I started a conversation about what my weapon choices would be during a zombie apocalypse.  It’s gotten other people to post their thoughts too, which is cool.  I’m restricting my thoughts to weapons I already own, or could realistically acquire with little trouble in today’s world, so any civilian-accessible weapon that could reasonably be acquired.  I’m not going to worry about being ultra-specific, since I’m assuming this would be a long-term loadout, and things will break and need to be replaced with similar objects, so specifying a particular type of scope or stock will not be part of the plan.  Part 1 dealt with shotguns, due to their near-synonymous nature with zombie-fighting, and today I will go a little further, spending much of this post dealing with two things, one of them being firearms.

But first, the Most Important Thing: addressing Unitaskers.

Weapon of Choice: Zombie Apocalypse Style

A comment on my Zombieland post from yesterday has had me thinking.  In a zombie apocalypse, what would be my weapon, or weapons, of choice?  Nearly always, someone asked that question would answer “shotgun” without hesitation.  I can understand this, to a degree: a shotgun does horrific damage at close range, capable of ripping through an undead head with deadly efficacy; the action of pumping a shotgun just before a fight just sounds cool; and it’s nearly fetishized in Zombie Culture at this point. 

That said, I would never carry one, with two exceptions.