Amazon UK

Wednesday 28 February 2018

99p_ebooks : #4: Sweet Little Lies: The Number One Bestseller https://t.co/UFEGxwUYbU (via Twitter https://t.co/kEuGbghpi9) https://t.co/dRWdRd19NY


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99p_ebooks : #5: The Nightingale: Bravery, Courage, Fear and Love in a Time of War https://t.co/dkcxbXdsrG (via Twitter https://t.co/sNo6W8ESN3) https://t.co/wtSJaGmWXB


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99p_ebooks : #6: How Hard Can It Be? https://t.co/yUhH9JLdHS (via Twitter https://t.co/aQQnnBacgZ) https://t.co/mhYtpCffsP


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99p_ebooks : #7: Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need To Know About Global Politics https://t.co/nUNfoLpjz1 (via Twitter https://t.co/0YoNby8Lak) https://t.co/jDaipR0U3S


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99p_ebooks : #8: Dangerous Crossing: The captivating Richard & Judy Book Club 2017 page-turner https://t.co/ZM7fIghQLq (via Twitter https://t.co/z4wTSGwjE8) https://t.co/a81vLthMnN


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99p_ebooks : #9: Women & Power: A Manifesto https://t.co/Qcc6ydSyRG (via Twitter https://t.co/Tcs1dSZjNN) https://t.co/IM6lshw4HI


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99p_ebooks : #2: The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst: Now Filmed As The Mercy https://t.co/W2diRDQ5i0 (via Twitter https://t.co/zetM42hoqO) https://t.co/cFMMPNF5Il


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99p_ebooks : #4: Roger Moore: À bientôt… https://t.co/hDjDyBg2s2 (via Twitter https://t.co/9rkOHrdOra) https://t.co/GRA5DFCRAY


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99p_ebooks : #5: Movie Geek: The Den of Geek Guide to the Movieverse https://t.co/oqSWZgraWe (via Twitter https://t.co/n1Y25Lzyl7) https://t.co/1FpaNFB77m


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99p_ebooks : #6: The Mistress's Revenge https://t.co/BZTa8QHL4Y (via Twitter https://t.co/7TCGsyHdUa) https://t.co/CDZ2gWabmX


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99p_ebooks : #7: The Redbreast: Harry Hole 3 https://t.co/nUg1ZMeoZp (via Twitter https://t.co/LrRwd3IM7Q) https://t.co/IVU9NYi6wW


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99p_ebooks : #8: Science(ish): The Peculiar Science Behind the Movies https://t.co/LLwbYNOFBT (via Twitter https://t.co/TdMHxFFova) https://t.co/N1RbKf2hrP


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99p_ebooks : #9: The Overlook (Harry Bosch Book 13) https://t.co/tAIKOysfiW (via Twitter https://t.co/8SxjxKnACe) https://t.co/wYGQXaYjSG


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99p_ebooks : #10: Blood and Sand https://t.co/OZgc7mOadp (via Twitter https://t.co/6oLNBTy7QE) https://t.co/7MRoBJPOFH


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What can cats do?


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#7: Cracked Kingdom (The Royals Book 5) https://t.co/OaJhi0KEet


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#10: The Books of Caledan Trilogy: (An Epic Fantasy Collection: The Tainted Crown, The Brooding Crown, The Shattered Crown) https://t.co/E6kIt6kuYU


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#3: Jamie Cooks Italy https://t.co/ACzIJ6pJqR


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#6: Phantom Tollbooth (Essential Modern Classics) https://t.co/LlKH1QdcOO


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#5: Crash Test Girl: An Unlikely Experiment in Using the Scientific Method to Answer Life’s Toughest Questions https://t.co/dY7Lp1Bl3r


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#1: Jamie Cooks Italy https://t.co/PkvWOEgdXC


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#7: Lizzie Loves Healthy Family Food: Delicious and Nutritious Meals You’ll All Enjoy https://t.co/PcRNmLFqax


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#10: Dirty Genes: A Breakthrough Program to Treat the Root Cause of Illness and Optimize Your Health https://t.co/BCwQ39wajN


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#9: Forging Hephaestus (Villains' Code Book 1)

Forging Hephaestus
Forging Hephaestus (Villains' Code Book 1)
Drew Hayes (Author)
(21)

Buy new: £0.99

(Visit the Bestsellers in Humour list for authoritative information on this product's current rank.)

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99p_ebooks : https://t.co/l3hT1QzkMk In February 1944 he escaped again this time dressed as a Swedish sailor and traveled by train to Bremen, Hamburg, Lubeck, Rostock finishing up in Danzig. His superbly written narrative is full of suspense and excitem… https://t.co/xBGQDNEiOv) https://t.co/UOg3OWr7lC


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#7: Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains https://t.co/rTsx6UOLMF


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99p_ebooks : 99p ebooks from a great selection of Historical Biographies https://t.co/GNQNLEcR1t (via Twitter https://t.co/FxHAzYd89i) https://t.co/uk3UDaRk4J


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Looks interesting- Ancient Architects Channel https://t.co/G9ihZYvK0y via @YouTube


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Roxanne and her husband were blindsided when their son’s schoolteacher suggested that their five-year-old was autistic. In a five-minute meeting, they shifted from confident parents of a ‘normal’ child to parents who had a son with suspected special needs https://t.co/E66foEXdYj https://t.co/Cz8NjG2sz4


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Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls 2: 100 more stories of extra... by Francesca Cavallo https://t.co/Ke7zL1HqhE https://t.co/izVxMQ9EJQ


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RT @WaterstonesPicc: Francesca Cavallo tells us about how she would like boys and girls to feel when they read Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls 1 & 2. #goodnightstoriesforrebelgirls https://t.co/7b4TH2iPMX


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A Question of Trust by Penny Vincenzi https://t.co/OIasxaR5M1 https://t.co/WgyqoRkzk5


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#10: Diverted: A journey of resilience to the newest frontier of inclusion https://t.co/W83Qt9vuvi


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Make a Date with Harlequin - Vikings and Cowboys oh my! (and a link to download up to 16 free romances!)


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99p_ebooks : You Are Dead (Roy Grace series Book 11) by Peter James https://t.co/8USmIGhEfP 99p https://t.co/1jNMpC9kZY (via Twitter https://t.co/leFiCUeOdX) https://t.co/tmG308vFy2


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#9: Watercolour Workshop: projects and interpretations https://t.co/yPLrFT1EWm


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New post: "Harper Lee's will reveals lawyer holds control of her writings and estate" https://t.co/upV4ZTOvlm Alison Flood After initially fighting to keep the will private, Lee’s attorney Tonja Carter – who found the manuscript for Go Set a Watchman – is named as the executor…


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New post: "An open letter to President Erdoğan from 38 Nobel laureates | JM Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Svetlana Alexievich and others" https://t.co/ueKpQVR85O JM Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Svetlana Alexievich and others Until Turkey frees detained writers and returns to the rule of…


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#4: What Is Different? - Wolfgang Tillmans. Jahresring 64 https://t.co/mT6uciwQZv


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#8: What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions https://t.co/tRBDpj5ihZ


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New post: "Anne Enright: The Genesis of Blame" https://t.co/1nNv7UMaQH


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New post: "William Davies: How Could the Tories?" https://t.co/STWqeJbE2F


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New post: "Thomas Jones: The Italian Election" https://t.co/8zle8YhbZ1


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New post: "Lidija Haas: A Talent for Nonchalance" https://t.co/uCt538rOOM


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New post: "Chris Mullin: Corbyn the ‘Collaborator’" https://t.co/AetPtfjZju


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New post: "Marina Warner: Surrealism in Egypt" https://t.co/47aThwFU1z


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Trash and Treasure: Final Fantasy XV (February 2018)

Trash & Treasure is a miscellany of monthly opinions on SFF, fandom and general geekness from Foz Meadows.

As a present to myself in this, my birthday month, I’m going to indulge in a shameless exploration of my many and complex Feelings about Final Fantasy XV. I wrote a little about its status in the Final Fantasy franchise and its accidental queerness last year, while I was still in the midst of my first playthrough, but found myself unable to manage a full recap once finished. This is because the ending to FFXV is profoundly emotionally compromising, something I was in no way prepared to deal with by the first half of the game – which is deliberate, and precisely why it works so well.

But I’m getting ahead of myself: let’s start at the beginning.

Warning: ABSOLUTE MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING OF THIS GAME.

Final Fantasy XV is a hot garbage mess and I love it to bits, though I probably wasn’t supposed to. As far as I can tell, the decision to make it the first FF game with an all-male party was originally meant to appeal to straight male gamers – or at the very least, to prioritise male bonding as a narrative device – which puts me squarely outside the target audience. But thanks to the many significant differences between how straight masculinity is performed in Japan vs America, the attempt to appeal to both groups at once resulted in a game which is, albeit accidentally, super queer. As an anecdotal case in point, I’m yet to meet a single straight dude who likes FFXV, which rejection stands in stark contrast to its popularity among my queer and female gamer friends. No, this isn’t me giving Square Enix props for queer representation, because it’s not like they did it on purpose: it’s just that, for me and others, FFXV is vastly more enjoyable when viewed as a successfully gay narrative instead of a badly straight one, and you’ll pry that interpretative lens from my cold, dead hands.

The game begins with our protagonist, Prince Noctis Lucis Caelum, recently betrothed to his childhood friend Princess Lunafreya, as he roadtrips to his wedding along with his three best buddies: Gladio Amicitia, his loyal shield and protector, armed with a big-ass sword; Ignis Scientia, who also drives and cooks, armed with throwing knives; and Prompto Argentum, who takes photographs and babbles, armed with guns. Here is what they look like (left to right: Ignis, Prompto, Notics, Gladio):

Their personalities can best be described as follows:

– Ignis: The closest thing in this friend group to a responsible adult and salty about it.
– Prompto: A hyperactive insecure puppy who cannot handle how pretty everyone is.
– Noctis: A sullen emo boy who’d rather talk to animals than people.
– Gladio: A good-natured bro with an allergy to shirts and a lot of repressed emotions.

By these powers combined, they are Team Disaster Gay: four uniquely useless but well-meaning bros let loose in a world on the brink of war, death and magical destruction. They catch fish, go camping, run innumerable errands for random people, and have increasingly meaningful fireside conversations about their feelings, all while driving a super cool car that’s totally better than everything else on the roads. Oh, and they fight monsters, and sometimes there’s a magical dog that not only carries letters between Lunafreya and Noctis, but also eventually lets you travel through time.

Yes, you read that right. There’s a magic time doge.

Here’s the thing about FFXV: in a startling contravention of established gaming logic, the sidequests are the game. Yes, the characters are caught up in world-altering events, and those events are super-relevant to the finale, but if all you do is play the main quest, the game is surprisingly short. All the major character development happens off grid, when your characters are off frolicking in the woods, playing video games (which, yes, is a thing that actually happens); going on dawn photography dates, planning a wedding, and generally hanging out. Which is, by their own respective admissions, why the straight dudes I know who’ve played it have all been disappointed: lacking any connection to the characters (who really, really fail at being Straight Bros, and especially Straight Bros Intended For Straight Bro Consumption), these players have never felt the impetus to invest in the sidequests, whose primary benefit – aside from helping you level up – is to better explore the friendships and group dynamics of the party. But without that vital investment in the characters, everything that happens past the narrative point of no return lacks the emotional impact to make FFXV meaningful.

And when I say the narrative point of no return, I do mean that literally. After spending the first half of the game on the Lucian continent, exploring the regions of Leide, Duscae and Cleigne, the party is finally able to set sale for Altissia, the capital city of the island nation of Accordo. On arriving there, a mysterious woman called Gentiana, who has helped Noctis and the others before, shows up at their hotel with the time doge, Umbra, and explains – in a way that makes very little contextual sense – that Umbra has the power to take Noctis and the others back a week or so into the past, so that they can revisit Lucia. It’s such an incongruous development that, on my first playthrough, I completely missed the in-game implications of such a feature: namely, that what happened next would change the game and its forward trajectory so comprehensively that you’d need the in-world excuse of time-travel to go back and complete any quests you’d left hanging until that point.

By design, the wider political and magical settings of FFXV are complex; so much so that there’s a supplemental movie and miniseries to help explain them. In-game, your primary focus is so tightly on Noctis and his friends that, even when you get earth-shattering political news – the death of Noctis’s father and the sacking of his home city, or the supposed death of his friend and fiancé, Lunafreya – it never quite feels connected to what you’re doing. Even when you’re going on quests to gather ancient royal weapons from various tombs, fighting the inhuman soldiers of the invading Nifleheim Empire and encountering ancient, elemental gods, the grand scale of events feels surreally detached from the day to day business of hanging out with your friends. Which is why any enjoyment of the game is so heavily dependent on whether you, as a player, feel attached to Noctis and his buddies: minus any affection for them, the ongoing dissonance between their preferred life of sidequests and the operatic main plot feels bizarre, instead of – as it otherwise is – a deliberate emotional setup to what happens later.

Left to his own devices, Noctis doesn’t want to be king. He really likes fishing – you can fish whenever you like, with multiple sidequests concerning the acquisition of better rods and the pursuit of bigger, wilier fish – and has a childish disdain for eating his vegetables. Gladio is meant to guide and protect Noctis, but most of the time, that fact is incidental compared to his love of posing for photos, eating cup noodles and flirting with Ignis. (And with occasional women, much to the disgust of Prompto and Noctis.) As the passage of time plays a big role in the game – powerful monsters come out at night, so you’re strongly advised to camp or find a hotel whenever the sun sets – evenings around the campfire are when all your EXP for the day gets processed. You’re encouraged to collect foodstuffs while out in the world map so that Ignis can cook new meals for you all, with each recipe conveying different temporary stat bonuses for the next day’s adventure. (“I’ve come up with a new recipe!” Ignis proclaims, whenever you collect new ingredients.) In addition to any shots you take on purpose, Prompto takes multiple pictures throughout the day, sometimes suggesting group shots at special locations. Then, when you all sit together at night, you can go through the snaps and decide which ones to keep, the characters offering verbal commentary on each shot.

When I first played the game, I kept up an active Twitter commentary of my experience. Here are some of my threads about it, which ought to give you a decent idea of just how ridiculous it is. I cannot overemphasise how joyful, how useless, how wonderfully absurd it is to fuck around in Lucia with your buddies as they roast the hell out of Noctis, camping and eating meals and fishing together, hunting cool monsters and making friends with obstreperous locals who genuinely don’t give a shit that Noctis is royalty, because he’s got a car and a sword and a lot of free time, which are all the necessary prerequisites for being an errand-boy in a rural area full of monsters.

And then Altissia happens.

There’s no way to sugarcoat this part of the game or describe it without major spoilers, which is why it’s so gutting: there’s a massive boss fight that destroys almost the entire city, Lunafreya is murdered for real while Noctis watches, and Ignis is permanently blinded during the battle. You’re shown the aftermath in cutscenes, where Noctis shuts down and refuses to deal with the fact that he needs to complete his big magic quest to save the world, because Luna is dead and nobody is willing to process the fact that Ignis’s sight isn’t coming back. It’s heavy and awkward and brutal, and suddenly you’ve got four best friends who are grieving and angry and can’t talk to each other.

Though the death of Lunafreya is tragic, the game situates her as a distant figure, which makes her loss feel less immediately impactful than the consequences of Ignis going blind. Up until this point, he’s been a cook, a driver, a knife-thrower – all skills that rely heavily on his vision. Gladio is sworn to serve Noctis, but his grief at what’s happened to Ignis is strong enough to fracture his loyalty. Despite knowing that Noctis has lost Luna, he’s so angry at Noctis giving up – which he views as a failure to appreciate Ignis’s sacrifice – that he can’t muster any comfort for him. (And not to harp on it, but this makes so much more emotional sense in context if you view Gladio and Ignis as romantic partners.)

It’s at this point that the party embarks on the Saddest Quest Ever. With Ignis using a cane to walk, you can’t run through the map without leaving him behind – and if you do that, Gladio pulls Noctis aside and chews him out. Neither can Ignis fight: he’s there in the battle, but all he does is flail his cane and fall over. It makes for slow and painful going, and when you camp for the night, for the first time in the whole game, nobody wants to view Prompto’s pictures, Gladio goes off to sit on his own, and with Ignis unable to see to cook, the only thing the party can eat is a tin of reheated beans. It’s emo enough to be just a little comic, but if you care for the characters, it’s also tragic, too, because they’re fighting and they’re hurt and oh god, why do I care, what the fuck is this game even doing?

And then, the next day, in the midst of a battle, Ignis figures out how to use his knowledge of magic-alchemy-whatever and monster weaknesses to develop a new fighting style: he yells about how he knows he’s not going to get better to stop the other three from tiptoeing around him, and somehow the four of you end up a little bit reconciled, albeit still in a fragile way.

But the game just keeps on getting sadder. Now travelling through new environments, all destroyed by the big bad empire and its evil magic, Noctis is bewitched into thinking Prompto is an enemy. He attacks his best friend and throws him from a moving train, and you have to keep going without him. With big fights becoming more and more frequent, the focus of the game narrows to something harrowing and survivalist. When the remaining party finally makes it all the way to Niflheim, the seat of the enemy, the whole place is under attack by monsters, and in the process of escaping certain death, the beloved car in which you’ve travelled since the start of the game – the car that belonged to Noctis’s now-dead father; the car you’ve upgraded and repaired and modified on your endless happy sidequests – is completely destroyed. Noctis is separated from Ignis and Gladio and thrust into danger alone, deprived of all help and weapons.

What follows is a tense, torturous jaunt through an enemy fortress to reclaim your friends, who’ve been captured and hurt. You find Prompto there, too, and for one brief moment, the four of you are reunited in battle. And then, as part of the fulfilment of his Grand Magical Destiny, Noctis gets taken aside by the ancient godly powers he’s been courting the whole game and blithely informed that only through his death can the ultimate evil be defeated; that he needs to train and prepare himself.

And then you jump forward in time ten years.

TEN YEARS. Because that’s how long Noctis spends in that otherworldly plane, learning how to defeat his enemy. Ten years in which Lucia, where you spent all that time sidequesting and adventuring with your friends, has fallen into a permanent night full of monsters and destruction. Travelling back to the coastal resort town where you used to take photos and fish near a flashy restaurant, you find it overrun with horrors, the building broken and ramshackle. After struggling up hills that used to be full of easy resources and basic enemies and which are now utterly dangerous, you’re rescued by a teenage boy who you last knew as a child. As he drives you down the broken roads you used to traverse in your long-gone car, he tells you that Prompto, Gladio and Ignis don’t really see each other that much anymore, because the world has gone to shit and they’ve been trying to hold it together in your absence, knowing that you – Noctis – would eventually come back to save them, but uncertain of when or how.

And then you see your friends again. All ten years older, all hardened by years apart.

Ignis has learned to live with his blindness, though he still moves slower than before. Everyone has new scars. The four of you join up again, travelling towards the wreck of the city where you all grew up, and because it’s a long journey, you stop for the night. You camp together like you used to do, and there’s a moment where the characters are nostalgic for what they used to have, for the possibility that maybe things can be like this again someday – and that’s when Noctis tells them he’s going to die.

So you go to the city to fight the big bad. There’s an opportunity at this point to use Umbra the Magic Time Doge and return to the world as it used to be, to finish quests there with your aged-up party, but I honestly couldn’t do it. By that point, I’d become too involved with the characters, which is often what happens when I truly love a video game: even knowing that the whole thing is fictional, that the options are designed to maximise gameplay opportunities, I get stuck in my own particular sense of loyalty to the emotional context, which here meant it didn’t feel right to take characters who were visibly ten years older back to a time period where they’d last been young, but where none of the NPCs would point out the contradiction. Which meant I had no choice but to go forwards into the final fight.

The big boss battle is dramatic, powerful, satisfying, staged in successive bouts. But right before the final confrontation, Noctis turns to Prompto, who’s still carrying all the photos he took ten years ago, and asks to see them one last time. Paused on this awful threshold, you revisit the story of these guys and their friendship, looking at all the pictures taken before their world fell apart – and Ignis, blind, is standing there, unable to see, listening to the others reminisce – as the game asks you to select one picture for Noctis to carry with him into battle.

You do this, and Noctis goes in, and he fights the big bad. He vanquishes the enemy and saves the world from darkness.

And he dies.

And then, in the cut-scenes that follow, you see the ghost of Noctis in the afterlife with Lunafreya, his single chosen photo carried with him into death, while his living friends watch a new sun rise from their campsite, three chairs occupied and a fourth left forever empty.

There are other callbacks to earlier scenes and adventures here, too, presented as the credits roll, and I’m not ashamed to say that the combination left me in tears. Because this game, this fucking garbage game with its weird emo boys killing monsters in club gear, stopping to pick garlic and carrots and take selfies with cool rock formations; this dumb queer Blidungsroman roadtrip with its mishmash worldbuilding, irreverent dialogue and endless fishing quests is simultaneously one of the most heartbreaking games I’ve ever played. But that heartbreak only comes if you first invest in the silliness of everything that comes before Altissia: the pain of loss, of finally feeling the weight and significance of the bigger events you spend so long ignoring, is only felt if you actually care about the characters, their feelings and their friendship. It’s a game I suspect I’ll replay many times in the future, but only seldom through to the end, because it hurts too much. All these months later, I still can’t decide if the whole thing is madness or genius, but either way, it certainly made an impression.

And that is how I feel about Final Fantasy XV.

The post Trash and Treasure: Final Fantasy XV (February 2018) appeared first on The Book Smugglers.



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Trash and Treasure: Final Fantasy XV (February 2018)


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#8: Ada Lovelace (Little People, Big Dreams) https://t.co/9UqxV1Ygfr


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#1: How to Argue with a Cat: A Human's Guide to the Art of Persuasion https://t.co/piEmm0mVHg


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#9: How to Argue with a Cat: A Human's Guide to the Art of Persuasion

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“A short work that offers much to consider” – Rainbow People by Nicholas Mosley


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“A short work that offers much to consider” – Rainbow People by Nicholas Mosley

"At around eighty pages in length this is a short work that offers much to consider. The philosophical debates were of interest although the author took as a given the need to save mankind as a species, despite his environmental negligence. In a book seeking to create bridges, to hope that those who come after will evolve into something better, perhaps this is fitting..." - Jackie Law reviews Rainbow People by Jackie Law

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Tuesday 27 February 2018

#10: Educated: A Memoir

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#10: Claiming Grace (Ace Security Book 1)

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February: On The Pile

The Bookmunch crew have been avoiding the dismal British/Irish weather this month by hiding indoors with the likes of Robert Aickman and China Mielville. (They're very wintery, okay?) Anyway. Click though to see what else we've been reading, and let us know what you've got on your TBR piles!

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February: On The Pile


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Promises, #Patience & Star Trek: Discovery


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Promises, #Patience & Star Trek: Discovery

Welcome to a Kickstarter-sponsored-Smuggler-curated essay by contributor Tansy Rayner Roberts.

Warning: this essay contains spoilers for Star Trek: Discovery season 1

Star Trek has always been about promises, and ideals, even when it hasn’t entirely lived up to them.

Star Trek: Discovery felt like a promise. I still remember the intense excitement around the trailer, mainly from female SF geeks I know. The sight of Michelle Yeoh and Sonequa Martin-Green, two women of colour in Starfleet uniforms, walking across a beautiful desert planet while discussing professional development and mentorship… oh, yes. Give me that show.

The first two episodes dangled that show in front of our eyes, and then ripped it cruelly away. We got the dynamic bridge crew duo of Captain Phillippa Georgiou and her protegée Michael Burnham. We got aliens and adventure and a sense of joy and honour in serving the Federation… and over the course of a cinematic, gutting two hours, we lost it all.

I was riveted, and betrayed, and I mourned that the show that the trailer promised us was now, apparently, over. Star Trek: Discovery was not that show. It was something else.

So what was it?

 

Over fifteen weeks, we got a more complex, mysterious and compelling Star Trek than ever before. From the moment the Discovery arrived to “rescue” Michael from her prison transport, we were encouraged to question everything.

Usually, Star Trek hands you its formula on a plate from episode one: here is the ship and/or space station you are about to fall in love with. Here are all of its relevant crew members, and their individual backstories/quirks. Here is a medium stakes adventure to get you started. It’s all going to be mostly like this, but we might switch out some characters later and let Riker grow a beard.

Star Trek: Discovery was harder to read, and not only because its initial two-parter was about a different Starfleet ship altogether. We got to know our cast of main characters incredibly slowly, as they were introduced under a number of weeks. Right from the start, Discovery was a beautiful, special, different ship… but also a dangerous, uncomfortable place to live, thanks to an awkward disconnect between its original mission as a science vessel, and its current identity as a warship.

We were encouraged to question the ethics and motivation of the ship’s clearly dodgy Captain Lorca, who showed his colours early on, but managed somehow to preserve the illusion that he was damaged but mostly heroic, largely through the superpower of being white, male, and played by popular British actor Jason Isaacs.

(Ah, Captain Lorca, so excellently distracting with your earnest speeches and your inappropriate workplace behaviour, and your suspiciously extensive wardrobe of black leather outfits that you just happened to have available whenever it was time for the crew to put together a ‘cosplay as criminals’ mission)

Star Trek Captains are traditionally beyond reproach, the voice of the Federation and Starfleet. They are authority figures and mentors and we feel safe around them. Lorca never felt safe.

More importantly, Michael Burnham never felt safe. Our hero, this fascinating figure who does represent our Starfleet (the ideal Starfleet, not the desperate and occasionally fascist government body we were faced with in this version of the show) started out broken and gradually put herself back together thanks to friendship, a solid crew, and a shiny ship.

It’s vital that Michael starts out trusting no one, including herself, and that she’s constantly questioning her instincts, because the haze of paranoia she lived inside allowed the show to slip all kinds of fascinating layers past us. Michael’s lack of trust in Lorca made it possible for him to stay unrevealed as a blatant villain until very late in the show, because she also didn’t trust Tilly, Ash Tyler, Saru, her father, Stamets, Starfleet, or anyone at all.

Likewise, Michael was seen as untrustworthy by many, including those on the ship who had known her the longest, such as Saru and that other members of her former bridge crew. We were so busy sympathising with our earnest, complex, broken hero and the fact that everyone (including her) saw her as the enemy, the real enemies were able to get away with a LOT.

Star Trek: Discovery promised us a lot. It promised us that Michael Burnham would be our hero, that the most important character in the show would be a woman of colour, and that she didn’t need to be the captain to be the most important person a) on the ship; b) in Starfleet; or c) in the show. Thanks to a standout, utterly compelling performance by Sonequa Martin-Green, and some very supportive scripts, this promise paid off. Michael was never less than fascinating every time she was on screen, and she got a lot of screen time.
We were promised the first proper gay character in a Star Trek regular cast, and we got that in Stamets (whom I referred to for most of the last year as Grumpy McScienceface), a complex figure whose sexuality and happy relationship were only one aspect of his narrative.
We were also promised some kind of catharsis for Michael Burnham and the unfinished business she had with the Klingon War, with her own mutiny against her beloved captain and her discomfort with her legacy as a traitor.

That’s a lot of promises for one show to make its viewers, and while I’d argue most of them did indeed play out successfully, not all of them did.

 

There was a lot of interesting gender stuff in this show, with plenty of roles for women who were not defined by relationships with men.

The focus on Ensign Tilly with her awkwardness, her ambition and her sense of wonder, pleased me greatly, and I saw a wave of warmth and love for this character every week, mostly from female fans. I also saw a wave of rage and irritation about this character, mostly from male fans, which often felt quite erratic and emotional. I rarely saw anyone able to articulate why Tilly was “annoying” or “unnecessary” or “awful” but I highly recommend the essays of Liz Barr who not only reviewed the episodes with joyous enthusiasm each week, but produced some fantastic analysis around Tilly’s character, especially when she noted the similarities between this Ensign and the characterisation of a young James Kirk.

Star Trek has never been more relatable to me than in the moment that Tilly first asked Stamets for a recommendation to the leadership training program, based on her excellent work performance. We saw on her face how much it cost her to ask; women in the workplace today are often penalised for expressing the same ambition for which men are rewarded. Seeing Tilly attain her goals is perhaps the most utopian thing about this iteration of Star Trek.

Tilly’s loyalty and her epic friendship with Michael contrasts beautifully with Michael’s other new relationship with Ash Tyler, which developed more slowly. Like Michael herself, Ash was part of Lorca’s (in retrospect, super dodgy) HR policy to recruit staff for his warship outside the usual Starfleet channels, and to regularly send them into work situations that were personally traumatic. As a prisoner of war and regular PTSD sufferer, Ash was clearly in need of a long holiday and a therapy Tribble, and was not in the best place to be forming a romantic connection with a convicted mutineer on a suspended sentence.

All these things continued to be true after Ash was revealed to be a surprise Klingon infiltrator.

The most unfortunate aspect of the Ash Tyler reveal was that the show had set him up as a victim of sexual violence, a rare thing for a male fictional character, and having this turn out to be faked felt almost as problematic as a character played by an actor of Arabic descent turning out to be a secret terrorist.

The show got away with it largely because the PTSD Ash experienced was genuine, and because of the complexity of the storyline as it unfolded. Part of him actually will always be a rape victim (as well as a victim of horrific violence) because of his dual memories, even though he managed to balance out much of his brainwashing and his identity issues by the end of the season.

 

Then there was the bigger kick in the teeth that came alongside the Ash Tyler reveal: the shock death of Doctor Culber, Stamets’ beloved husband.

The trouble with science fiction is that you don’t always know if a character death is going to stick, which not only takes the sting out of the intended emotional beat, but also means you don’t know how angry to be.

It’s hard not to be furious about a show that promotes its inclusion of gay characters, receives kudos and cookies for doing so, and then turns around and throws the Bury Your Gays trope at its audience for an emotional gut punch. Star Trek: Discovery lost a lot of fans because of this narrative choice. Many hung in there for another episode or two because, with Stamets embracing his Spore Mage identity, and the constant tease that maybe, just maybe, there was going to be time travel in this show at some point, SURELY, that death was going to be unwritten.

Meanwhile, the show’s actors, writers and PR team fell over themselves to assure us that this wasn’t the end of Stamets and Culber’s epic love story, that it was all going to be fine, that this wasn’t Bury Your Gays at all…

Except, you know, it was. Even worse, Doctor Culber is one of the many people of colour killed unexpectedly in the show, after the deaths of Captain Georgiou and Security Officer Landry. Uncomfortable choices, for a show that made a lot of promises about how diverse and inclusive it would be.

Watching the last few episodes was quite a surreal experience because of that delayed anger, of waiting to find out if this death was going to be undone.

The entire Mirror Universe plot in the second half of the series did at least give us a delightfully vicious new role for Michelle Yeoh as Evil Emperor Phillippa Georgiou, and many opportunities for Michael Burnham to go through harrowing emotional angst while reshaping her own identity as a hero. It let Tilly see her greatest dream twisted into something cruel, and it gave Saru a chance to step properly into the role of Acting Captain.

The Mirror Universe gave us the Lorca Reveal, and the glorious death of his character, two episodes before the end of the series, because he actually wasn’t the point of anything. (Jason Isaacs’ delight in being killed off, at pulling off the long con of convincing the world he was going to be the new Patrick Stewart when in fact he wasn’t even the baddest villain in the show was truly special to watch unfold on social media)

The Mirror Universe did not give us back Doctor Culber, apart from a few metaphysical scenes that felt one opera aria away from that pottery scene in Ghost. Super romantic but, you know. He’s still dead.

 

I enjoyed a lot of things about the final episode of Star Trek: Discovery. I loved how Michael was forced to face the consequences of saving her dead mentor’s evil doppleganger, and that she and Ash got one last away mission as friends, after she broke up with him for being emotionally dishonest (not, as it happens, for being a secret Klingon terrorist, which was less of a deal-breaker).

I loved that the final episode was full of women acting in substantial roles: Kat Cornwell, herself a fascinatingly flawed character, represented the darker side of Starfleet At War Makes Bad Ethical Choices; Evil Georgiou was completely terrible at pretending to be a decent person; Tilly got to be heroic and the comic relief at the same time. I loved that everyone broke into Lorca’s Wardrobe of Leather Cosplay one last time.

I loved that the last episode was ultimately about Michael standing up to Starfleet and giving them a serve for being assholes. She got the kind of epic speech about ideals and honour that women rarely get to speak aloud. She even got her own personal future nemesis, as expressed in that one beautiful moment when Michael begged ‘be good’ as Georgiou slipped away to cause trouble elsewhere.

I really loved that Ash Tyler accepted their breakup and found a new mission instead of moping around waiting for Michael to take him back. Theirs wasn’t even the unhealthiest romantic relationship in the show (hello, Kat/Lorca) but I was glad to see a line drawn under it.

I adored that the long-hinted-at, narratively satisfying Second Mutiny of Michael Burnham was not against Captain Lorca (as often predicted) or even fake Captain Georgiou, but against Admiral Cornwell and her desperate Yes Men. An angry black woman stood up to Starfleet and demanded they do better. To remind us that this is a utopian show, she was rewarded.

I extra super adored that both L’Rell and Georgiou, the baddest villains of the show, both survived to come back and cause problems in the future, almost as much as I adored that Lorca was killed off. (I would watch Jason Isaacs in anything, I totally want them to bring Prime Lorca into the show, but I’m also impressed at them ridding themselves of a male villain like this, and keeping the women for next time)

I even loved that the blatant fan service appearance of the Enterprise at the end was framed specifically as a character moment for Burnham and he-admits-now-he’s-her-dad Sarek, with that lovely ‘uh-oh, Spock’s gonna hate us rescuing him’ facial expression that they shared.

Having said that, discussing this with my Galactic Suburbia co-host Alex recently, she convinced me that this last ten seconds of the episode throws new Discovery fans under the bus, relying on a fannish understanding of the history of Star Trek .

Despite all the things I loved about it, the last episode didn’t bring back Doctor Culber. It barely even showed us Stamets at all, whose epic ‘spores gonna destroy us’ plotline fizzled out instead of building up to a bang. We got a discreet widower medal and a spaceship from some other show, instead of an exciting tease that next season will definitely feature time travel husband-saving shenanigans.

So where do we go from here? Do we get to be angry about the killing off of Doctor Culber yet?

Wilson Cruz and Anthony Rapp have been doing the heavy lifting for the show on social media, teasing that it’s not the end for Culber’s character, that it’s an epic love story, and that it’s only just got started. Rapp tweeted #Patience on the night the finale aired, over and over, in response to fans upset at the death of his fictional husband.

Patience, huh.

And you know, that patience might pay off. If the team are planning a multi season, epic romantic journey about a couple defeating death to find each other again, and they chose to tell that story with a same sex couple, that’s pretty awesome. (Or at least, it will be, potentially, in the future, one day, maybe)

The more diversity a show attempts, and the bolder they are, the more likely it is they might mess up at the next level, tripping over problematic tropes and cultural patterns. But really, it’s not rocket science. If a show sells itself on having a diverse cast and a loving, normalised gay couple, it’s not unreasonable to expect those people to still be alive by the end of Season 1.

It’s bewildering that Discovery didn’t choose to give us that hint of hope, that call for patience, within the narrative of the show, instead of relying so heavily on social media to placate us. Why put a shock death in the story at all if you have to flood the media with articles and interviews and tweets about how no one should be shocked, or grieve, or be unhappy? What exactly was the point?

Personally, I’m still on board for Season 2. I will follow Michael Burnham and Future Captain Tilly anywhere, and I’m invested in the lives and careers of most of the Discovery’s surviving crew. I want more Evil Georgiou, and more Morally Compromised Admiral Kat. I’m on the train. I live here now.

But if Star Trek: Discovery really wants to follow through on their promise of an awesome, progressive science fiction show, it’s going to have to reward our patience with bigger promises, and even bigger payoffs. We already know they can do great, but can they do better?

I guess we’ll find out in 2019.

The post Promises, #Patience & <i>Star Trek: Discovery</i> appeared first on The Book Smugglers.



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