The Patreon Letters - May 27, 2017

Hello friends! M here again for your weekly dose of updates and thoughts. Let's hop right into it!

• The new Abnormal Mapping, episode 63, went up yesterday . Our Myst talk has been literal years in the making, as it's one of the original games I wanted to cover when we started the podcast. Not many of those left. I'm indebted to friend of the show Heather Alexandra for coming on to talk about Full Throttle, too. If you don't follow her  or read her work at Kotaku, you're missing out. Heather's great and if she didn't have a day job in games we'd try to have her on all the time.
• The latest Amory Score  went up this week and Jackson has told me they're going to keep going up weekly. I don't really get Coheed & Cambria—it's bad music—but I find it incredibly entertaining to listen to Jackson and Molly act like there's a difference between the 'good' songs and the 'bad' songs. 
• My Full Throttle let's play  will continue for another week, and then after that will be Life is Strange. Please look forward to that. I'm very behind in recording them so hopefully I can get caught up this weekend a bit.
• The first array of pledges this week are processing. Once that happens we'll start asking all you $5+ patrons what games you want us to play and all. We have a couple hard dates for things we want to do still, but it'll be nice to get some fresh ideas into our rotation. We also need to figure out what our monthly stream is going to look like. More to come. But mainly, thank you all for your support. It continues to mean a lot.

For the rest of the letter today, I wanted to talk broadly about DC Comics and also Star Trek. I've been playing a lot of Injustice 2, which got me back into watching the CW DC shows (finally finished season 1 of Supergirl, working on Flash/Arrow now) and reading some comics again. I've been thinking a lot about Star Trek, as the Discovery trailer dropped and we're prepping to record our next Second Officer Slog over the holiday on Monday. And when I think about these two very different things I like a lot and people's reaction to them, I find that a lot of the general cultural opinion of them falls along similar lines. 

Because in 2017, DC comics and Star Trek are both seen as incredibly uncool things compared to their traditional cultural counterparts. By that I mean Marvel and Star Wars, two things I actually like well enough but I'm probably going to throw under the bus a bit here, so ... fair warning, I suppose. I have Thoughts. 

Uncoolness is a hard thing to define in a concrete, encompassing way. It's a certain quality that things have that is imbued in the way people talk about something, of what they point out for ridicule and how that ridicule doesn't stick to things that have coolness. Let me give you a good example. In a lot of the coverage of Injustice 2, many games writers pointed to the two playable characters of Captain Cold and Gorilla Grodd as particularly silly. 

Why not use Mr Freeze, the character they recognize because he was on Batman: TAS and in Batman & Robin? Well the answer is that Captain Cold is actually a very popular villain on the Flash TV show, played with campy aplomb by Wentworth Miller. But games people don't actually watch TV, and certainly not on a channel like the CW, a place that reeks with uncoolness especially in masculine circles because they mostly show melodramas about relationships be they about superheroes or Archie comics characters or just original 20 somethings having misadventures.

Why is Gorilla Grodd in here? A psychic talking gorilla? That's stupid. Never mind that Disney just launched a very successful sequel to Guardians of the Galaxy, a movie series that features a talking gun-toting raccoon named Rocket Raccoon. But he's not a villain. He's a wise cracking rogue, the sort of Dreamworks concoction designed head to toe to not just sell merch on his aesthetic but to deliver one liners to put on shirts or mugs or whatever people buy these days. 

And I say 'Disney released' because I think that's an important thing to remember when discussing why something is cool and why something isn't. Disney is a media empire that delivers all of the content to every quadrant in a way that is so insidious even Disney's critics have Disney stuff they like because much of it is of high enough quality and sold so well that we all have a weakness. Mine is Disney Animation Studio films. But Disney is in the business of selling every thing to every one, which means they're very good at advertising on a level that has infected our culture in a way we'll never untangle. Our very copyright laws exist in their current state because Disney needs them to. It's a power that's unfathomable wrapped in a friendly three-fingered cotton glove.

I remember when Star Wars was very uncool. The prequels had done good business with kids, but the people who originally thought Star Wars was 'for them' had aged out of the movies being made and mostly just shouted about how Star Wars was better in their day when people cared about Boba Fett and not Kitt Fisto. Never mind that the best Star Wars story told to date has been told in the episodes of Clone Wars. That's an uncool show, made during the franchise's greatest lull since the Ewok movies. If you're in your 30s, you're not watching Clone Wars. It's For Kids.

But in comes the Disney machine, to pick up Star Wars and give you what you want. They'll still make the shows for kids, but they'll also go out of their way to make an elaborate stage play of 70s Star Wars to walk you through all your favorites to fill in an unnecessary plot beat of the Star Wars For Olds. I like Rogue One a lot, but its impetus is to create Star Wars for the Gen Xers and the Boomers who need those 70s hair cuts to get on board with ideas like women protagonists and getting rid of Han Solo because he's always sucked, sorry, your beloved Empire spends 20 minutes with him basically being a sexual predator and it's a good thing? I digress.

Disney made Star Wars cool again because it's very good at making things cool. That's the job of advertising. It's why Star Trek has had to chase Star Wars since 2009 in order to get eyeballs and money on it, much to the detriment of Star Trek. It's why people scoff at Gorilla Grodd but load up on Funko Pops of Rocket Raccoon. Familiarity breeds acceptance, and advertising breeds familiarity. And that's fine, but I'm struck constantly by how much people just baldly reflect the messages of marketing without any sort of self examination. Why is an obscure thing dumb when it's barely functionally different than something currently huge? Especially when that thing is a giant psychic gorilla general from a city of hyper-intelligent gorillas. 

Some self-awareness is all that I ask. But it's not good for the bottom line, so it's not cultivated. Gotta work on that brand.

Until next week,

M