Eruditorum Press

A workers state with executive dysfunction

Elizabeth Sandifer

About Elizabeth Sandifer

http://www.eruditorumpress.com

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

Posts by Elizabeth Sandifer:

Me Gun Goes Click, Me Gun Goes Bang (Contra III: The Alien Wars)

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At its heart, Contra III is a game about guns. This does not particularly distinguish it within the world of video games, nor, for that matter, within the world of America. Nevertheless, it is firmly the sort of game Contra III is. Like Super Castlevania IV and Super Ghouls and Ghosts, its central mechanic involves offering players a variety of weapons, each with advantages and disadvantages suitable to particular moments in the game. Contra III’s twist on this mechanic is that Jimbo and Sully are insta-killed by any hit and lose their actively equipped weapon (you can have two weapons, one active at any given moment) upon death, which creates an inherent tension between the desire to have a strong weapon equipped for tricky bits and the desire not to lose a strong weapon to a tricky bit.
One way to put this, then, is that aliens are literally coming to take your guns. This is a crass and largely unhelpful reading, admittedly, although the fact that “losing your gun” means being reduced to a mere machine gun is, in this reading, terribly entertaining.
But equally, it’s impossible to quite separate the iconography of Contra III from the militarized paranoia implicit in it. The first two levels are indicative – bombed out cityscapes through which the player must run, eventually dodging fireballs that burst from the asphalt. This is the iconography of urban decay – the city as a collapsing, rotting space, often described in the fundamentally racially coded terms of the jungle, which was, notably, where the Contra series got its start. This, in turn, was a fundamental image of the Reagan era, where it served as an object of fear that justified the conservative project.
But it also served fundamentally as a fantasy. Like any jungle, the collapsed city is a place upon which fantasies of white militarism are projected. Its untamed wildness requires the puissant white man as a steady hand. Which, of course, Contra III is all too happy to provide via the sumptuously Aryan Jimbo, whose manly poses decorate the interstitial moments between levels.
Being a video game for a Nintendo system, however, some amount of this must be displaced. And so the bombed out city is destroyed by Gigeresque aliens, an all-purpose Other conveniently separate from any material entities, and defined entirely by its inhumanity. Enemies in Contra fall into two general categories – either they are overtly robotic, or they are creatures of grotesque flesh. In either case, the emphasis is on the fundamental antipathy towards the very idea of humanity, which makes the aliens a maximally nightmarish force for the manly heroes to assert themselves against.
This intensely xenophobic setup means that the unreconstructed macho fantasy at the heart of Contra III gets to carry on without undue complication. The resultant ethos is perhaps best captured in the game’s opening, where Jimbo and Sully, following the devastating alien attack, get their sole dialogue in the game, as Jimbo proclaims, “it’s time for revenge,” and Sully concludes, “let’s attack aggressively.”
…

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Saturday Waffling (August 8th, 2015)

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You will recall that the Super Nintendo Project is a magical ritual to destroy Gamergate.

Less than twenty-four hours after the Lemmings post went up, Reaxxion, the neo-reactionary gaming site created by Roosh V (of Return of Kings infamy) created to try to get people to make the leap from Gamergate to literal, actual rapist announced that it would be closing.

You’re welcome.

The Great Leisure continues on Monday with Contra III: The Alien Wars. And then The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past the week after that, which I’ll be writing in the next day or two, and which will go up pretty much as soon as it’s ready for Patreon backers. Who have had the Contra III post since Monday. They live in the future. Or you live in the past. Hopefully the Kinda commentary track I did with Jack Graham will also go up sometime this week, along with an a review of Charlie Jane Anders’s All The Birds in the Sky.

I’m delinquent on last month’s Patreon bonus post, which is going to be about True Detective and Hannibal, I think mainly because I feel the need for at least one, if not both to end before I say anything about them. They’re both intense for me at the moment; True Detective less so, and I think it’s the inferior show at the moment (I’d have said the opposite last year), but I’m still very much enjoying the show. Hannibal borders on just too much for me, especially with the Blakean weirdness kicking up, but in a way I’ve seldom been invested in a show.

I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on either show.…

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Do you want to feel self-righteous or do you want to win? I like to win. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part Four: The Eternity of Alan Moore)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: Alan Moore cursed the man who would be his successor with the most brutal of curses imaginable for a man of Grant Morrison’s ambition: he gifted him an open throne, and made no effort whatsoever to acknowledge his rival or compete with him.

But this is, in the end, Moore’s nature; the magic trick he’s always been better at than anyone else in the War. He is Eternal. Whatever changes he may bring down upon the world, Moore himself does not change. This may seem a strange claim – he exists in linear time, after all, and there is self-evidently such a thing as a narrative of his career such that one can track an artistic and intellectual evolution between, for instance, V for Vendetta and Providence. But this objection misses the point of the observation. Of course an Eternal entity appears to change when situated in a changing world. But it’s just an illusion; a trick of psychic light. Moore’s entire career has, in practice, been a singular and unwavering action, a masterfully executed con whereby, instead of working a real job, he makes things up. He has never aspired to more. That he, in the process of doing so, became one of the great magi of his age and a primary figure in a history-defining War is something he largely stumbled upon by accident, and it is something he has alternately accepted with grace and good humor and violently and angrily reacted against, depending on the circumstances.
The nature of Moore’s Eternity has precedent, both within his work and without. Indeed, Watchmen itself has such a precedent in the form of Doctor Manhattan, a character who, it is revealed in later chapters, experiences every moment of his life simultaneously. In this regard, Doctor Manhattan approaches his own life through the lens of history, getting to see actions in terms of all their causes and consequences. Such a perspective is obviously denied to Moore, whose vision of his own Eternity eventually coalesced around the less personally ambitious metaphysical view of eternalism, which holds that all moments, past and future, are simultaneously and equally real, with, in Moore’s particular flavor of eternalism, a single human life simply playing on loop. The result is a cosmos that is much like that which Doctor Manhattan experiences, but, crucially, not one that is directly experienced from such an omniscient view.
Figure 845: Doctor Manhattan is often
withdrawn and unconcerned with human
emotion. (Written by Alan Moore, art by
Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, from
Watchmen #1, 1986)
And yet Doctor Manhattan’s defining character flaw is one that Moore can fairly be accused of as well. It is not quite that Moore, like Manhattan, is deficient in empathy and ability to understand people. Quite the contrary, one of Moore’s great strengths as a writer has always been his ability to depict rich psychological nuance for his characters. Rather, it is that Moore and Manhattan both have a strangely fatalist lack of belief in their own agency.
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Comics Reviews (August 5th, 2015)

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From worst to best of what I bought, although I should probably buy fewer comics.

Guardians of Knowhere #2

Bendis’s run on Guardians has been a touch hit and miss for me, and that’s translating poorly to the Secret Warsified Guardians. The crux of the problem here is that this book is about the nature/identity of Yotat, a new character, and his relationship to Knowhere, the Celestial head acting as Battleworld’s moon. The answer appears to be that he’s a Peter Quill alternate, but I couldn’t articulate a reason I’m supposed to care. It’s the sort of sloppy book that includes numerous mentions of a character called Mantis, and even dialogue addressed towards Mantis, but that by the end of I couldn’t tell you who Mantis is. She (I think) appears on a couple of panels but gets no facetime, and is I think killed at the end? Maybe?

Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows #3

I think I’m just kinda bored and done with Slott on Spider-Man.

Ultimate End #4

Apparently the Ultimate Universe has one issue until it’s over. I assume the premise of this book will be clear by then. This issue does not turn out to include a barely surviving Miles Morales atop a pile of dead heroes. Or, in fact, a pile of dead heroes. Or, in fact, Miles, except in one panel. Although he’s apparently important, for reasons that might be explained along with the premise of this book. There’s even a real chance that it will be a satisfying issue when all is said and done. But this series is a hot mess.

Blackcross #5

Ellis has really been fond of backloading his series recently, establishing the premise late in the books. Charitably, this means they read better in trade, but in this case the premise just feels like Ellis-by-numbers for this particular period in his career – a horror version of what he did in Supreme: Blue Rose without any of the conceptual grandeur that made that book’s half-revealing tone sing. Here’s the big explanation, next issue is the big fight, and the previous four issues were… the big tease? I dunno. Charitably, a minor work in Ellis’s career.

Darth Vader #8

Fun; Aphra has some great bits, Vader’s in an interesting bind, and I’m still buying a Star Wars comic for no reason other than enjoying watching the way the writer’s mind works, which is a silly reason to buy a comic, but then, at the end of the day spending $3.99 for most comics is silly.

The Wicked & The Divine #13

Man, this is a tough one to review, because it’s a well-executed and very on-point comic about real issues, and any criticism of the book thus feels like a criticism of doing good work about those issues. It’s a skilled done-in-one. But… I dunno. Ultimately, I’ve followed the story of online abuse and particularly harassment of women pretty closely for a few years now, and a well-done but ultimately straightforward story about it doesn’t do a ton for me.…

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The Bloody Pantomime In Which You Have Enslaved Yourselves (Lemmings)

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They move ceaselessly forward. Always forward. They cannot do anything else; their nature is set. At best they may be acted upon by outside influences, but still they are like water. They may be diverted and rerouted, but there is nothing that actually stops the flow. They will walk until they drown.
It is the same with us, really. Time’s riptide pulls us all under, drowning us all beneath the waterline of history. We are perhaps more complex than the green-haired mascots of Psygnosis’s 1991 multiplatform classic, occasionally making what appears very much like a choice. But our choice is just the removal of all the other options; We are set within a system of rules and defined by outside influences. We are not protagonists; not individual avatars of some demiurgic player-souls. We are but part of the flock, buffeted by outside forces.
(And yet the outside forces cannot, strictly speaking, be described as “causal.” The path of history’s flow is defined and knowable, and yet nobody actually follows it with any precision. To use a specific example, we might successfully root the development of the masculine “gamer” identity in the Sega Genesis’s attempt to counter Nintendo’s family marketing with a male-skewing notion of coolness, but it is not as though every Genesis household spawned a Gamergate supporter, or as though there are no misogynistic fuckheads who owned a SNES.)
Perhaps one separates from the crowd. Often this is accomplished by literally elevating him above the rest, designating him with two of the three (or arguably four) permanent traits, namely Climber and Floater, which allow him to scale walls and subsequently parachute down from great heights. This newly minted ubervole will be forever marked as such, appearing under the cursor as “Athlete.” He will strike out and explore the vast landscape, reshaping it to whims that he no doubt imagines are his own. 
But this great reshaping’s only purpose is, in the end, to provide the path that the crowd shall flow through, so that his individuality is subsequently lost in the tide that follows. Indeed, the functions of reshaping –  Builder, Digger, Miner, and Basher – are all temporary roles. When the tasks are completed, whoever performed them simply recedes back to the faceless crowd, reclaiming their identity as “Walker.” The landscape has no author. Nobody made it this way. It simply is. 
More chilling is what is revealed about the the landscape itself when it is altered. Once it has been Dug or Mined or Bashed, or even Blasted, it is simply removed, and the shadows and texture remain fixed around it. For all the intricate play of light and shadows with which it is rendered, it proves flat, an illusion that can be torn through and scraped off. Individual points of landscape may be resistant to destruction or fatal to the touch, but it is all the same substance – a trompe l’oeil painted upon the world. 
This is the state of things: a world designed only so that a mass of people can flow deterministically through it, and a mass of people who exist only to sluice within it.
…

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Saturday Waffling (August 1st, 2015)

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So, you may recall a month or two ago when I ran a big, juicy story on how the website Doctor Who Online was ripping off advertisers. And that got me thinking about my own advertising, and about how I’d much rather be offering advertising to other small businesses within the fan/geek community than selling them via Google and hosting loads of crap ads using phrases like “one weird trick” and “professors hate him” unironically.

So I’m pleased to announce that I’ve switched advertising over to Project Wonderful, an advertising network created by Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics/Squirrel Girl fame, and working mostly among webcomics and other independent websites. Which means that you, yes you, can now easily advertise on my site.

Ads are bid-based, so they cost, basically, as much as people are willing to pay for it. The ads helpfully self-advertise how much outbidding the current ad would cost you, and if you click on the text beneath the ads they’ll give you nice and easy directions on how to advertise. I get more page views per day than Doctor Who Online, and charge a fraction of the price for ads. So please, if you’ve got something you want to advertise, go ahead and do it. My guess is it’ll only cost you a couple bucks a day.

As for things to discuss, I admit that I’m more than slightly bemused and intrigued by Colin Baker’s somewhat indecorous feud with Doctor Who Magazine over the practice of publishing ranked lists of things (his feelings are described in detail towards the top of his site), not least because I’ve settled on the ranked list as the house style for reviews here. And while I admit my view is roughly “I feel like Colin Baker should be more concerned about the fact that his tenure in Doctor Who asked the audience to accept a domestic abuser as a sympathetic protagonist than about the hurt feelings of whoever comes in last in a fan survey,” it seems an interesting enough thing to discuss. So, anyone feel like stepping up and defending Baker’s position that the least popular members of a set should be spared the indignity of coming in last in fan polls? Or, if you want the broader philosophical topic, bad reviews: what’s the point of them?

We’re back on Monday with the start of the next round of The Super Nintendo Project. See you the.…

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Your purity only hurts the reason you’re doing it. (The Last War in Albion Book Two, Part Three: Corporate Comics)

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Previously in The Last War in Albion: The intricate fictional history of Watchmen is based closely on the history of DC Comics, and the characters served as analogues (albeit imprecise ones) for the archetypal heroes of DC.

For all that Moore and Gibbons created an elaborate superhero universe based on the principle of taking a more materially realistic view of the impact superheroes would have on the world, going so far as to think through the comics industry of his fictional world, there is a crucial tangible oversight within Watchmen: it almost completely ignores the way in which superheroes are, historically, generally corporate owned franchises. There are occasional nods towards it – the tragicomic fate of Dollar Bill, Ozymandias’s business empire, and the relationship between the first Silk Spectre and her agent all gesture at the commercial dimensions of costumed heroes. But it is a minor theme within the book, despite ultimately serving as a major one outside of it. Moore might fairly have asked himself, after all, how it was that the Charlton characters, created by Steve Ditko, Joe Gill, Pete Morisi, Charles Nicholas, and Pat Boyette, were initially available for his use at a completely different company from either of the two they had originated at, with none of their creators even remotely involved. Had he done so, the ways in which writing Watchmen would eventually turn sour for him might have come as somewhat less of a surprise than they in practice did. 
The truth, however, is that Moore’s alienation from this aspect of superheroes was always fairly fundamental. For all the money that Watchmen made him (and it was considerable), there were always numerous ways in which Moore left money on the table, and not just from himself. He adamantly refused to write a sequel to the book, and the only prequel he ever seriously considered was a series focusing on the Minutemen which, in any event, he never wrote. And when Barbara Randall (now Kesel), his editor on the series, leaked to him plans that had been cooked up at a DC editorial retreat shortly after the book’s completion for a trio of prequel series (one focusing on the Minutemen, one on the Comedian, and one on Rorschach), he acted swiftly to derail the plans. Indeed, this is a position he has never wavered on in the thirty years since the book’s release, declaring, upon the announcement of the Before Watchmen project in 2012, that “if people do want to go out and buy these Watchmen prequels, they would be doing me an enormous favor if they would just stop buying my other books,” and declaring that he had “complete contempt” for anyone who did buy them. Moore was, simply put, not terribly interested in serving as a productive member of the DC Comics stable of creative personnel.
Figure 842: Even when Moore took jobs on
high-profile titles like Batman, he was more inclined
to write stories focusing on semi-obscure villains
like Clayface than to focus on the iconic characters.
…

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Comics Reviews (July 29th, 2015)

2

From worst to best of what I bought.

Sandman Overture: Special Edition #5

The quality of the bonus material in this is really, amazingly, egregiously shit. I think my favorite this time is once again the Neil Gaiman interview, which is five questions long and consists of questions like “What’s on The Sandman’s iPod,” a question that manages to find an impressive variety of ways to be stupid, including “why is the editor of this book referring to the main character as The Sandman,” “why are we still using ‘iPod’ as a cultural signifier in 2015,” and my personal favorite, “why did anyone think this was a good question to ask Neil Gaiman?” The only decent bit is the short Dave McKean essay about his process creating the covers. All in all, especially given the considerable number of months they have to pull these special editions together, this is one of the biggest rip-offs in comics at $4.99.

Daredevil #17

Surprised that this one ranks so low for me, but it completely left me cold. Can’t even particularly articulate a reason, although it doesn’t help that I have no real sense of who half the characters are. The Shroud has been appearing for a while, and I get the broad strokes but… nothing sparks for me about him and his plot. Ikari, I vaguely remember, but he seems to just be Daredevil who can see, which, OK, that’s kinda flat. This storyline was working as a operatic and inevitable Daredevil/Kingpin finale, but this puts the emphasis on the wrong parts of the story.

1602: Witch Hunter Angela #2

I found myself a bit lost in this one. Part of it is marketing; I’d expected something a bit more Neil Gaiman pastiche, and instead it’s very much the Gillen/Bennett Angela book filtered through the 1602 aesthetic, with very little of the underlying Gaiman remaining. Was less amused by the 1602 Guardians than I’d hoped from the cover. All in all, this was a bit of a misfire, though the five-page story-within-a-story was cute.

Fables #150

Actually out last week, but I missed it then and grabbed it this week instead. Turns out releasing your final issue as a trade paperback goes poorly for your regular readers. And is, all in all, a more than slightly ludicrous idea. It’s not fair to call it overdone or undeserved; much as it lost gradual steam over its run, Fables was a landmark series, and earned an unapologetically maximalist conclusion. But equally, after an extended final installment and (not kidding) fifteen epilogues, culminating in a gatefold spread to match the gatefold cover, not a single panel of which was even half as good as Legends in Exile, it’s tough to actually praise either. Like a double album a decade after a musician’s best work: you’re glad it exists, but you wish you hadn’t spent money on it.

Sex Criminals #11

Another solid installment long on hilarity and character bits, although a bit ruthless in terms of picking up after a six month absence; this does not feel like the first issue of a new story arc in the least.…

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Time Can Be Rewritten: Night of the Doctor

, 54

“Man, this is the second-worst episode of Doctor Who I’ve been in.”

Because my Patrons are just so gosh-darned nice.

It was, of course, one of the highlights of the Fiftieth Anniversary. A tremendously sentimental and cool moment for fans, a fantastic way of officially revealing what the Hurt Doctor was, and a lovely gift to Paul McGann, who will pretty much never have the TV Movie be someone’s introduction to his Doctor again. And we have a full set of regenerations now, if you care about that sort of thing. Just about the only thing it isn’t, really, is a satisfying ending to the Eighth Doctor Era.
It tries, and that is a real part of its charm. I mean, one is pretty much sure Moffat included the litany of Big Finish companions as an acknowledgment of the Eighth Doctor Era – you know, that messy, historical thing that actually happened. The one with a giant bone thing in the sky, and he’s traveling with a fish, and there’s that girl from Jonathan Creek. Lego. They’re all made out of fucking Lego. Moffat probably even knew what would actually happen, which was that Big Finish fans immediately declared victory over the EDA fans, while the EDA fans sulkily pointed out that technically all this really disproved was the Vampire Science gap theory if those were the companions that first came to mind. 
But the fact that this even happened; that there were still, in 2013, people whose first reaction to this was to make a new move in a fifteen-year-old fandom spat or to somehow make it about Lawrence Miles, speaks volumes. And not even bad volumes. Honestly, the greatest tragedy for anyone who lived through the Eighth Doctor Era would have been if all the blood and pixels spilt had been in the name of a faith so fragile that it could be broke upon a seven minute YouTube video. We listened to Zagreus. We pretended to take Scream of the Shalka seriously. We even read Mad Dogs and Englishmen in public. Heal that, Sisterhood.
Actually, I think my favorite part was when anti-Moffat fans seized on the retcons this made to the Eighth Doctor era as evidence of Moffat’s malfeasance while openly admitting that they hadn’t read the books or listened to the audios. Not out of any sort of “fake geek” sentiment, but simply because I find the idea of blindly entering the Eighth Doctor era factionalizations just to find another front in the Moffat wars to be the most sublimely perfect execution of the Eighth Doctor Era ever. 
All of which is to say that the symbolic fate EIghth Doctor Era is a sublimely ridiculous thing to hang on an eight minute YouTube video. Even one that is, as this one is, intelligently and slyly constructed. The first half works by taking what is by this point a staple scene of the new series – the seduction of the new companion (and both Davies and Moffat always write it as a seduction) – and then twisting it into something altogether different as the usual “bigger on the inside” line becomes a source of utter horror and revulsion for Cass.
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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 2.10: Valar Morghulis

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State of Play
The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:
Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Cersei Lannister, Tywin Lannister
The Lion, Jaime Lannister
The Direwolf, Caetlynn Stark 
Dragons of Qarth: Daenerys Targaryen
Mockingbirds of King’s Landing: Petyr Baelish
Bears of Qarth: Jorah Mormont
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Direwolves of Winterfell: Brandon Stark
The Direwolf, Robb Stark
Direwolves of King’s Landing: Sansa Stark
Direwolves of Harrenhal: Arya Stark
Kraken of Winterfell: Theon Greyjoy
Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly
Stags of King’s Landing: Joffrey Baratheon
Roses of King’s Landing: Margery Tyrell
The Burning Heart, Stannis Baratheon
The Burning Heart, Mellisandre
Spiders of King’s Landing: Varys
Flowers of King’s Landing: Shae
The episode is in parts. The first runs ten minutes and is in sections; it is set in King’s Landing. The first section is two minutes long; the opening image is of Tyrion’s eye. The second section is six minutes long; the transition is by family, from Tyrion to Tywin Lannister. The third section is two minutes long; the transition is by employment, from Littlefinger to Roslyn. 
The second part is five minutes long, and is set in the Riverlands. The transition is by hard cut, from Roslyn to Jaime and Brienne getting out of a boat. It features the death of three unnamed Stark men, two quick, one not. 
The third is two minutes long and is set in the Stark camp in the Riverlands. The transition is by dialogue, from Brienne saying she serves Lady Catelyn to Lady Catelyn. 
The fourth is four minutes long and is set on Dragonstone. The transition is by hard cut, from Robb storming out to the fires in the map room. 
The fifth is seven minutes long and is set in Winterfell. The transition is by image, from the fire that Stannis looks into to Theon’s fire. 
The sixth is four minutes long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from the courtyard of Winterfell to Tyrion. 
The seventh is one minute long and is set in the Stark camp in the Riverlands. The transition is by theme, from Shae’s vow to Tyrion to Robb and Talisa’s vows. 
The eighth is two minutes long and is set in Qarth. The transition is by hard cut, from Robb and Talisa to Daenerys, Jorah, and The Dothraki Who Isn’t Dead walking towards the House of the Undying.
The ninth is three minutes long and is set in the Riverlands outside Harrenhal. The transition is by hard cut, from Daenerys within the House of the Undying to an establishing shot of rocks and cliffs. 
The tenth is four minutes long and is set in Winterfell. The transition is by family, from Arya to Bran and Rickon Stark. It features the death of Maester Luwin, euthanized by Osha. 
The eleventh is one minute long and is set in Qarth. The transition is by image, from Winterfell burning to Daenerys’s torch. 
The twelfth is two minutes long and is set in King’s Landing.
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