Staying above the Fray

Fortnite is a peculiar, peculiar game.

I've played it for years now, on and off.  I'll drop in at the beginning of a season, play for a while, then drift out.  It's become something different now, as the original Battle Royale gameplay mechanic is now just one of a seemingly infinite and fractally expanding number of variant sub-games.  If you're going to keep players playing forever, buying virtual "skins" and emotes and other in-game "products," that's the way to go, I suppose.  And Lord, are there products, a wild capitalist smorgasbord of every conceivable IP from music and entertainment and gaming culture.  It's actually a great way to know what corporations are pitching.

I've never spent a dime on Fortnite, not a single penny, because I'm cheap.  I still play the Battle Royale version, in which 100 players parachute onto an island, and then spend the next thirty minutes fighting as a lethal "storm" shrinks the battlefield around them.  The goal, of course, is to be the last one standing.

I'm not bad at the game, best I can tell.  Not even close to being a pro, but I do alright.  In a typical season, I win about one out of every ten rounds, getting that "Victory Royale" dopamine bump.  I'm almost always top ten.  I mean, sure, my opponents are all twelve years old, and some have been alive less time than I've been playing the game.  But it's still entertaining.

My rule of thumb, every season, no matter what: you don't need to get into every fight.  

If you want to win, which is kinda sorta the whole point of the game, staying out of firefights during the midgame is just as important as winning them.  Firefights draw the attention of every nearby player, as kids rush to the fray hoping to pick off a weakened player and collect their stuff.  I avoid that.

Early game, I get kitted enough that I can dish out damage, heal myself, and restore my shields.  Then I do everything I can to stay out of conflict.  Play it in stealth mode on foot, moving from cover to cover.  Flee in a car.  Fly above the fray, if there are air vehicles.  Whatever.  Just don't fight unless you have to.

This season, that means I use the "get to the choppa" strategy.  I find a chopper, which I use to soar as high above the melee below as I can.  Folks take potshots at me, which I encourage, because if they're trying to shoot me down, they're drawing attention to themselves.  I repair and refuel often, returning to the skies to watch the carnage as the other players fight it out beneath me, or finding a quiet spot to land and conserve fuel.

That usually gets me to the final five, at which point I'll either drop down and play stealthily, or...if the copter is fine...just stay out of the mess until it's just me and one other player.  Then it's down, down, down, to press aggressively on the last opponent with close quarters weapons.

Of the last five games I've played using that strategy, I've come in second once, and gotten a Victory Royale four times.  Meaning, I did better than four hundred and ninety eight players. 

Again, you don't need to engage in every single fight.

It's not a bad strategy outside of Fortnite, either.

Because there's a different fight, every day.  Our conflict-fueled culture offers us something new to rage about, or to posture over, every danged day.  

It'll destroy your soul, wear you down to a bloody nub of rage and anxiety, consume your every thought.

Better to listen, and to keep one's own counsel, and to act only when it matters.

Reverie, Rage, and Repentance

It was a beautiful afternoon, and I was on my way to pick up my mom for an evening at our house. I'd been ill for most of the week, laid low by a particularly unpleasant bacterial infection. I'd not been out much, other than to crawl whimpering out of bed, shamble whimpering into the bathroom, and shamble whimpering back to bed.

But things finally seemed to be trending towards health. The fevers, finally faded. The discomfort, largely banished. So we invited Mom to our standing Friday British Baking Show watch gathering with my father-in-law, and I was going to get her. It felt good getting into the car, opening the sunroof and rolling down the windows, and putting on some chill music. Motoring along those deeply familiar roads, I bathed in the goodness of some relaxing playlists and the pleasure of feeling the breeze under a perfectly cloud-speckled late afternoon sky. I sang along to them, as I often do.

I came to a stop at the intersection of Graham road and Route 50.  It was a Friday at five thirty, so there was traffic. It's a long long light, so I leaned back, peered up at the blue sky through the sunroof, and sighed.

I was just meditating on how lovely it all felt when the shouting began.

"JESUS CHRIST!"

From behind me and to my right, a man's voice raised and harsh.

"JEEEESUS CHRIST!"

Someone out there on a beautiful day, windows open, yelling his fourth commandment violation at the world.

Was it road rage? Just a crazy person? I couldn't tell. I couldn't see the car or the driver in my mirror, just the Lord's name taken in vain again and again in a harsh and dissonant tone.

My reverie disrupted, I was a little annoyed. Why was this man so angry? The traffic was what it was. No-one was blocking traffic, or failing to turn when they should be turning. I couldn't see any reason anyone would be yelling, but it felt somehow part of the bitter zeitgeist of the day.

Because we barely seem to need reasons to be yelling. We're so reactive, so quick to find fault, quick to anger, quick to violence. Human beings have always been like that, of course, but it feels so amplified now, as provocateurs and professional agitators are supercharged by corporate algorithms designed to keep us addicted to being always upset, all the time.

That’s stirred the bubbling cauldron of political violence and the din of our endless shouting and finger-pointing, and for the umpteenth time in human history, a people seem drifting closer to a familiar psychosis.

It feels a dark path we've set ourselves down, so hooked on a poisonous cocktail of dopamine, adrenaline, and cortisol that we'd rather blow it all up than find a better path. We seem so lost.

But there is always a better path. As far as we flee into our personalized bespoke darknesses, there is always a way out, if we’re willing to take it.  If we're willing to accept that we're lost, and that we're so often wrong, and that no amount of pride and bile will make things better.  If we're willing to understand, and to act on that understanding, there is always hope.

As I marvelled at the amount of anger in the world, the lane to my right opened up a bit, and the voice grew louder. I thought about rolling up my windows, but I did not. I wanted to hear the voice clearly, and see who it was that just couldn’t seem to stop shouting.

As a battered Nissan Altima pulled alongside, windows down, I saw it was driven a middle aged man. He wore black plastic glasses, and looked to be either Afrocaribbean or Latino or some admixture thereof. He was, given the ruckus he was producing, surprisingly calm. JEEESUS CHRIST, he croaked, but then he gargled, laa laa laaa mmm mmm laaaa laaaa, and I realized that he wasn’t yelling at all.

Because there was music coming from the car, too, an old Christian contemporary song I kinda faintly remembered. He was singing very loudly to a song whose lyrics he didn’t totally remember. 

Was he singing well? No. O Sweet Lord Jesus he was not. But what he lacked in natural talent, tone, and training he was making up for with enthusiasm and volume. Whenever he’d hit the chorus, he’d shout it at the top of his lungs.

That was all I had been hearing. It made me laugh.

 
We can always, all of us, be wrong. We do need to remember that.

The Wings of the Dragon

Left and right are the wings of the dragon

that flail as it falls from highest heaven

My Winter Garden

As the first whispers of autumn crisp the air, I'm beginning to bed down my garden for winter.

The tomato plants went first, much to the disappointment of the squirrels and chipmunks who've been the primary beneficiaries of the crop.  They were followed by the cantaloupes, which I overplanted this year.  Of the dozen-plus 'lopes that grew fat on those vines, we ate four, and gave away one.  The remainder fell prey to rot, sinking slowly into the soil like setting moons.  This being only my second year growing them, I'd neglected to raise the fruit off the ground.  That, and they simply came in too aggressively to harvest them all.  I'll have that in mind next year.

My attention then turned to my sunflower planting.  At the northeastern corner of my front yard, two-dozen-plus sunflowers rise in early summer, creating a towering thicket of greenery topped with a firework display of blossoms.  It gives pleasure to passersby and pollinators alike.  As the helianthus goes to seed, it draws small flocks of goldfinches, which twitter and flirt through the air like flecks of sunlight.  It's just so utterly lovely.  

But that loveliness doesn't last forever.  By early September, those flowers are drooping and dry, the leaves browning and withered.  It starts looking a little grim, a little "gone to seed," as one might say if one were to wrap that metaphor around itself.  

Yesterday, it was time to bring them all down.  Uprooting a flowerbed gets a little more technical when the flowers are nine feet tall, densely packed and interwoven with wild grape vines, grasses, and miscellaneous other flora.

As a suburban gardener, I'm not taking a John Deer DM50 disc mower to the thicket.  That'd make it a one second process, but as I approach it by hand, it takes a couple of hours.

Every part of those sunflowers has a use, so I take them down one by one with care.  

First, I cut away the vines and lower leaves with a hedge trimmer.  Those go into a pile that I mow into compost.  Then I top the flowers, checking each one for seeds that escaped the attention of the birds.  Heavily seeded flower heads I save, hang, and dry.  When they're ready, I'll gently massage the seeds for use either in next year's planting or to give to Mom, so she can feed the birds in winter.  The towering stalks I trim and set against the sunny front wall of the house to dry.  Once they're dried out, they make decent garden stakes, and even better kindling for the hearth.

Taking down those fading flowers is always bittersweet.  Another summer passed, another season gone.  When I step outside the next morning, there's a sense of emptiness in the yard, a notable absence of green and gold.  Like all things mortal, we note a summer garden's passing with an awareness of our own finitude.

But the stalks will burn hot in the hearth on cold nights, the composted leaves will feed the garden when the days grow long again, and the seeds have been gathered in.

When you tend to the needs of the season, and set your intention to seasons yet to come, there's no need for sorrow when the flowers fade.

  

The Strange Theology of K Pop Demon Hunters

You can ruin pretty much anything by overthinking it, and K Pop Demon Hunters is no exception.

In the event you're old and cranky and utterly outside of the zeitgeist, K Pop Demon Hunters is an animated movie produced by a partnership between Sony and Netflix.  It tells the definitively fluffy tale of a three-member K Pop (that's Korean Pop, boomer) girl band called Huntr/x who...in addition to packing stadiums full of adoring fans..are also engaged in a battle to prevent the earth from being overrun by demons.  They do this through the magic of their infectious bops and by killing demons with their prodigious martial arts skills.  Hunter/X has a chance to create a magical shield around the world with their song, one which will wall off the demonic world forever.

The demon world finds this threatening, and the dictator of the demons is convinced by a hunky demon musician that the only way to battle Huntr/x is to form the Saja Boys, a demonic boy band.   Music and actual battles ensue.

It's wonderfully animated by the same team that created the brilliant animated Spiderman movie.  It's an artfully spun cotton-candy confection, one which reflects the pop-ethos of both Korean and Korean-American culture, and it's been a wild success.  Meaning, the songs sung by the two in-movie fictional bands have topped the pop charts, the soundtrack is a number one album, that sort of thing.

Am I the target demographic?  O Lord no.  Those sugary tunes and synchronized dance moves just slide right off my middle-aged neurocalcified brain.

And as a Presbyterian, I'm always both overthinking and looking for a theological angle.  As it happens, theology of a sort is front and center in the movie.

Here, there will be spoilers.  Just saying.  Go forth forewarned.

The movie's obligatory romantic entanglement is between Jinu (the leader of the Saja Boys) and Rumi (one of the three members of Huntr/X, who also happens to be half-demon by birth and is hiding the tell-tale marks of that identity).  Most of the Message in the film is about how shame turns you into a demon, forcing you to hide yourself behind a web of lies and self-loathing.  For example: Like every other demon, the hunky pretty-boy demon Jinu was been enslaved by the demon king Gwi-Ma, trapped by his shame at having betrayed his family in exchange for success.

Why Rumi is ashamed isn't quite clear.  She's ashamed of being half-demon, but if becoming a demon requires you to be ashamed, how that works seems a bit recursive.  Perhaps she's ashamed of her demon father?  Or ashamed of her demonic heritage?  Or ashamed of lying about being half-demon?  I couldn't quite parse that out.

As the movie progresses, the one great goal is creating the ultimate Honmoon barrier between the worlds, trapping the demons forever in the infernal realm ruled by Gwi Ma.   Rumi and Jinu fall in love, of course, and at the end of the film, Jinu overcomes his demonic shame.  He chooses his love for Rumi, and sacrifices his soul so that Rumi and the other members of Huntr/X can defeat Gwi-Ma and...activating the new improved Honmoon shield...forever trap all of the demons in their bitter realm of shame and lies.

As I watched, this was where my overthinking kicked into overdrive.

Here's why.  We know that, if loved, Jinu can change and be released from the power of shame.  We know that Rumi, a half-demon, can be freed from the power of shame.  

But what does that mean?  It means that every other demon...all of whom are souls who have been enslaved by Gwi-Ma...can also change.  It's clear they're all living in fear of the demon king, and when they're not being slaughtered by Huntr/X, most of them are portrayed sympathetically.  They're not really threatening, and are utterly powerless against the OP triple threat of our heroines.  Heck, two of the demons...a three-eyed magpie demon and a Totoro-eque tiger demon who Jinu uses as messengers...are cuddly comic relief.

So what does that say about Rumi's goal, and the conclusion of the movie?   

Again, the great victory of the film was to be this: trapping every single soul that has been enslaved by demonic shame eternally in that oppressive realm.  When this happens, backed/evoked by a triumphant Girlboss pop song, we're supposed to cheer.  All the while, we also know that within the logics of the narrative, every one of those demons has both human backstory and a self-loathing that they could still potentially overcome.   

Yay inflicting eternal torment on the damned?  You..um..go girls?  

As a recovering Calvinist, this seemed...oddly hopeless.  

Particularly for a sugar straw candy concoction like K Pop Demon Hunters.  Being doomed forever because of shame seemed a bit on the grim side, and flew in the face of the whole "coming to terms with the truth of yourself" and "acceptance" schtick.

And here's where my plans for this post went a little awry.

As I dug into it a bit more, I found  a little detail in the freshly minted "lore" for the movie.  Because no IP out there now doesn't have lore, as internet fandom interfaces with world building to create fractally endless ruminations on the "universe" that any popular narrative inhabits.

The shield formed at the end of the film wasn't, evidently, the long planned Golden shield.  It is, or so the eagle-eyed interwebs informed me, very possibly a Rainbow shield, which may be permeable, which may mean the hunky demon Jinu could still be alive, which may point to a sequel, Q.E.D., O.M.G.  

Was that evident at any point in the watching of the film?  Nope. 

Is it evident to a casual viewer?  Not really.  

But pop fandom has an explanation for everything, and can make angels dance on the edge of even the slightest detail.  Films are watched, and rewatched, and watched again, with deep meaning hinging on the tiniest fragment of narrative minutia.

Which is, itself, remarkably theological.

It's nice to know that overthinking isn't just a Presbyterian trait, after all.