Leaty wrote:I've had it on one of my YouTube playlists for a while now. Especially when you compare it to that unbearably awful Nickelback theme song Tobey Spidey had in the first movie, like... I no longer see why Spider-Man needs to exist.
YOU MEAN
THIS UNBEARABLY AWFUL NICKLEBACK THEME SONG? Oh Chad Kroeger, you couldn't possibly have a douchier name if you tried. I mean,
Chad. Chad's the sort of name of the kid who tells you his dad's the dean. Christ. Parents, don't name your kid Chad. You're basically giving him carte blanche to grow up listening to Nickleback. SIDEBAR, BECAUSE THIS JUST HAPPENED: I fucking hate Youtube's goddamn autoplay they've implemented. Jesus, I don't want to hear some fucking youtuber talk over footage from a Spider-man video game, I wanted to just listen to the goddamn Mary Janes song again, I wasn't asking you to fucking serve up whatever the fuck your busted-ass algorithms think I'd be interested in. Christ, I hate the future.
In all honesty, I was one of the old angry nerds about One More Day who quit the series then, and never really got back into it--the whole reboot thing might motivate me to check it out, but there's been so much interesting shit coming out of Marvel that I dunno that I really need to go back to it? Then again, there's no more Fraction-penned Hawkeye anymore, so I guess I should replace that with
something.
I've given a lot of thought to the "Hisao-shaped hole". I've always felt that, from a Watsonian perspective, it was really serendipitous that a guy like him, of all people, would be the one to discover a heart condition. Because, like, the narrative as it stands basically tells us that Hisao experienced no problems whatsoever between his birth and the snow confession, and turned out well-adjusted. He was a saltine cracker, and then the heart attack happened and he became a saltine cracker with a gooey dollop of pathos on top.
Seriously, what are the odds of that? That somebody with a disability would go so long without, like, enduring child abuse or getting bullied or having schizophrenia or something? I think a lot about how weird and kinda-sorta alien it is that all of Hisao's baggage is still brand-spanking-new at the start of the story. I mean, when I was eighteen I was already pretty much a baggage elemental. If I'd discovered I had arrhythmia... I would not act like Hisao, let's put it that way.
The saltine cracker-like nature of Hisao is, as I'm sure the other writers/devs have mentioned before (loudly and at length) one of the weakest parts of KS (and really kind of the problem with making a "traditional" VN). You need a character that is kind of like a cipher so the player/reader/whatever can more easily insert themselves into the narrative--or at least that was the thinking at the time. Treating the project as we did, it kind of made sense to not give Hisao a lot of old baggage--presumably he wasn't that outgoing to begin with, since all his friends desert him post-heart attack, and we could have delved into that a bit but we didn't--and while there are a few lines where Hisao seems aware he's a bit of a blank slate, those are more our own winking acknowledgements of the genre and its failings than real trouble. The standard MO for any game, VNs included, is to make the player feel like the rest of the game centers around them, and so every situation Hisao wanders into is tailor made for his particular brand of bland. It's something you probably wouldn't see any of us do now, were we to create another VN, but then again when you have multiple writers all trying not to step on one another's toes with the protagonist, you're going to wind up with a Hisao. A straight-up story isn't bound by that, certainly not one with a single author--and really games shouldn't be beholden to that nonsense either, but old habits die hard, I suppose...
Stuff like this always makes me think I should really make the effort to actually put up fiction for public consumption again, because the sort of dialogue sparked by stories is always invigorating, but with no deadlines imposed upon myself (and also I mean I don't have a forum set up to discuss the latest word vomit washed up on the shores of my tumblr, and I doubt I'd really want to), I am unfortunately free to continue the process of scrapping, rewriting, scrapping, rewriting, scrapping, getting a new idea, writing, scrapping, rewriting... Don't be like me, is the lesson I would impart to you and anyone else reading this. Eventually you gotta kick that baby out of the nest and hope that it was a bird and not like a human baby, because those cannot fly.
