Jurassic World is Jurassic World

The qualities and weaknesses of the film Jurassic World are almost exactly the same as the qualities and weaknesses of the park shown inside the fictional universe of Jurassic World.

It’s a Woody Allen film, the funny slightly-creepy dickhole you see on screen is the same as the funny slightly-creepy dickhole creating the story, there is almost a 1-to-1 comparison between the moral nature of the fiction and its creator. It is a self-portrait of a deeply flawed culture. Or it’s like the Hunger Games, a film about how awful it would be to live in a culture of ritualised child murder, in which the most key scenes are of expertly-detailed ritual child murder.

1. ITS A MIRROR

So the first smart thing the Jurassic World film does is make the logic behind the park the same as the logic behind the film.

In the fiction the dinosaur makers are desperate and fearful of losing money because their park is both derivative and highly over-capitalised. It cost a shitload of money to make and though it seems successful they bet so hard on it that they need to make an even-more insane amount of money back. They don't really trust or respect their product. They have Dinosaurs, which are fucking amazing, but the public is used to them and they need more. If they actually get more money, more attention, more everything, they will still be fucked as they will just piss that away on bigger and more risky investments, but that doesn't matter right now, they just need a new thing.

In our reality, the reality of the film-makers, exactly the same thing is happening. Jurassic Park is the go-to franchise for Dinosaurs and everyone has fond memories because after five or ten years, shit films become culturally invisible. No-one remembers them so, for the terms of marketing, they don't exist. Remember those shitty Die-Hard sequels? You do now but in twenty years you won't and the memory of Nakatomi Plaza will still be shining.

The producers are locked in a logic-box. Dinosaurs are not enough, everyone has them now, and, like the park and like every major summer blockbuster, they are massively over-capitalised. They need to make an INSANE amount of money to be considered a success. So they need something new. They need some fucking bullshit.

The conversations in the studio about the creation of the Insomnious Rex and the conversations in fictional In-Gen about the creation of the Insomnious Rex* are the same conversations. Even the memos are the same. And the mixture of childish glee and vague contempt with which the film regards the Indomnius rex is the same as the mixture of childish glee and vague self-loathing with which the executives regard the Indomnius rex. It’s a last-ditch attempt to save (or re-capitalise) the series, it’s also a basic admission on the part of the technicians in the park and the artists of the film that Dinosaurs are shit.

If Dinosaurs are shit and uninteresting then the moral existence of Jurassic World is void and you may as well just use the reconstructed beasts for meat and tools. That's in the fiction. If films with dinosaurs are shit then Jurassic World is like a painting by a painter who doesn't believe in the beauty of their subject. It's like a man looking at a women he doesn't like, trying to make her look beautiful and silently hating her. It’s kind of like the darker side of porn. Desire mingled with contempt. It degrades the painter and the subject.

2. GOOD DINOSAURS, BAD DINOSAURS

The way Jurassic World degrades its subject is just an extension of the way Jurassic Park degraded its subject but more egregious, with less love and more desire. A dark and recessive gene, only present in the first film, but brought to full expression in the 4th generation by relentless imaginative in-breeding.

And as I will state again, for an artist, contempt for the subject becomes contempt for yourself and contempt for the audience.

The Jurassic films have always played the trick of pimping animals as monsters.

It's an old genre trick.

A. T-Rex roar. They probably didn't roar. Why do they roar in the films? Because that’s what Alpha-Monsters do. We have learnt this from fiction. The T-Rex looks like an Alpha-Monster, so it has to sound like an Alpha-Monster. It must play the part we set for it. After all, we created it did we not? And the money that made it came from the entertainment industry. Why shouldn't it be our puppet?

B. Stegosaurus ass-up. As shown here the Jurassic films actually addressed this issue and then went back. Real Stegosaurus don’t feel heavy enough. Their tails would wag too much. They look like they are mincing a little. It’s slightly girlish, change it. Also they are too bright, grey them out.

C. Feathers. Feathers aren't scary. Feathers are feminine. Scales are scary, skin is ok. Boys like smooth objects. If a top predator is very bright and feathered we would have to shoot them differently the colour arrangement of the film would be different. And most importantly - the logic of light and danger would be different from other films. It would tell the story differently to other films, it would be different to other films. Change it. (We can add this to the theme of men in their thirties making films about childish things afraid of being seen as childish so sucking all the colour out of their films.)

D. Smaller Velociraptors. Obviously a no-goer.

I think in every case where Dinosaurs were presented in a way other than our most current and most accurate estimation of how they look they were :

- Masculinised. Less feathers, less bright, duller colours, made to look more 'heavy', not to tread lightly. Smoother.

- Monsterised. Less human-indifferent animal behaviour which you must work to understand. More human-focused behaviour that makes sense according to popular story logic. This animal is 'good' this one 'bad'. This one 'likes' this character, this other one 'dislikes' this character.

- Capitalised. Make them more like the other films, that’s what people recognise. Make them more like the IP so we can control the IP. Make it like a Trade-mark. Something we can own.

3. BUT ITS ALL SUPER IMAGINATIONS ANYWAY PATRICKS WHY NO BLACK HOBBITSSSS

If this was just a normal genre film full of inventive things it wouldn’t be that bad. So J.J.Abrams and Simon Pegg don't actually like Star Trek that much? They'd rather it was something else? Well fuck it, not much is lost, the good stuff still exists and you get some fragments of beauty out of it.

But Dinosaurs aren't Star Trek, they are a deep thing.

Reasons Dinosaurs matter

- Dinosaurs are from and are symbolic of, Deep Time. The long reaches of time change the perspective of humanity and its relation to the world in ways too total and powerful to cram into even a group of essays. I will simply say that a world in which deep time exists has fundamentally different moral implications than one in which it does not. I will assert that our relationship to fictionally-recreated dinosaurs is like a single very thin strand of our thinking about and relationship with the idea of deep time. They are that time made real, in the minds eye at least. And they are the most exciting, lively and life-imbuing avatar of that concept.

- The power shown in the fiction of the Jurassic World series is a vague shadow of an entirely-real power we will almost certainly have. We might not be able to resurrect Dinosaurs but we will be able to do a LOT with genetics. In talking about the power of our technology over life, Jurassic Park is talking about a really fucking important power that we increasingly have and that we have almost no experience with thinking about. ILM is just the herald of an In-Gen that will one day actually exist.

- In a wider sense, the films, and the Dinosaurs which are the engines of the film are about the relation of technology to nature and this relationship is probably the deepest and most important question of human culture that exists today. What is the validity and beauty and moral meaning of natural world? What should our relationship to it be? Is it a tool, a toy, a work of art, a simple means to live? if it has meaning, where does that meaning come from? What are our responsibilities?

- I will assert here that I think that Dinosaurs are beautiful and have a moral meaning, inherent to themselves, both in their actual previous existence in the real world, but also in the minds-eye are works of art and living beings, though they live only as webs of digital light.

4. IMMORTAN PAT

So I think the essential mediocrity and failure of imagination of the film betrays something more important than just a series of fictional ideas.

Beauty matters and the beauty of a strange form is a good thing to add to the world. A world in which Dinosaurs are feathered and bright and act like fucking dinosaurs and the people watching have to work to understand something outside themselves, is a better world.

And, since the power and energy and life of the Jurassic films derives entirely from the existence and imagined re-construction of fucking Dinosaurs, not doing the fucking Dinosaurs properly, turning them into toys, is an act of fucking startling creative douchebaggery.

The films are based on the advances in our knowledge of Dinosaurs and those advances are actually fascinating and good and meaning-imbuing and they were ignored. This film is like a version of Apollo 13 where they get rescued by aliens.

Its weak and its awful and its morally wrong. They had the power and the capacity and the fucking mandate to make the world more interesting and beautiful and accurate and wondrous all at the same time and they fucking failed and failed wilfully.

MEDIOCRE.

*I know, I know, it was a joke.

Hwæt Mike Mearls

Ok, Mike Mearls here is a way to manage the inevitable crushing system bloat of 5e without it making the whole thing both byzantine yet also somehow bland.

We all know player options sell more than GM options. So any corporation is going to end up overproducing these and jamming out splatbook after splatbook with crap you can add to your character. This will both increase the amount of complexity and powergaming and yet also, somehow, make everything a bit more vague and woolly.

A game where everyone playing is a weird living crystal of some kind might actually be kind of good. But a game where a living crystal teams up with a Minotaur and a Doppelgänger  and a Hill Dwarf probably won’t be. It takes a kind of pressure off the creation of the world. None of these things can be truly strange or 'other'. The charge of their discovery is lost. The fusion-like power you get when you introduce something utterly unpredictable into a coherent world system is lessened.

But this is a tide in the hearts of men and especially in the hearts of Americans. Because in America everybody must have access to every choice. Taking away or limiting choice can never be considered a good thing. Oh, small groups of individuals might cling together on a temporary basis to play games with highly-focused limited options. But doing this makes them perverts and they know it. They will always be the minority for such a thing works against the spirit of the land. Why can't you be a Ninja in FauxEurope? WHY? THIS IS AMERICA AND YOU CAN BE ANY DAMMN THING YOU WANT.

In the same way, for a variety of reasons, people, and  Americans in particular, will never be entirely comfortable with the 'Other' as a powerful presence in serial fiction. The Borg can be terrifying once, but then you get a sad Borg, and a sexy Borg and a conflicted Borg who feels odd about being a Borg and Borg babies.

Can Orcs be 'evil'? It’s a stupid question in some ways but it will never ever be gone from the communal mind, partly because its the West* and partly because its America and you just said that an entire race/species can be evil. And it doesn’t matter how far the representation gets from reality, it nudges a wound in the nations soul. It will never be an entirely comfortable idea. There will always an exile Drow, there will always be a Noble Savage Orc there will always be a bad guy that it-turns-out-has-a-point-and-who-are-the-real-monsters-anyway-could-it-be-MAN?

And the corruption, or, in this case, blandification, or humanising of the 'other' makes for bland boring stories of adventure because the whole point of adventure, its central charge, is to come face to face with Something Else, something from Outside.

So, to recap.

1. Hasbro will be producing lots of Player-Facing stuff.

2. Everyone must have MAXIMUM CHOICE because FREEDOM.

3. The charge of the Other will always be lessened.

This is a way to ride that wave in the least frustrating way. Instead of turning the wheel of liberalism half-way round to its customary middle-volume position. Spin that motherfucker 360.

Instead of producing books about other worlds or realities where the Player Races are different but the Others are the same array, produce books from other moral worlds and cultural realities. Produce books from the perspective of these cultures where they are the heroes and we (and elves, dwarves and hobbits who are our aspirational shadow selves) are the other.

Lets look at how this might go.

SAVAGES**

Player Races;

Orcs, Goblins, Gnolls, maybe Thri-Kreen

Normal D&D is the points of light pressing out into the surrounding darkness like a spider web.  Instead, this would be a collapsing natural world. A world of tundra, mountains, forests and ancient sacred deeps slowly being strangled by an encroaching and consuming civil order. The races that live here are not reaching out, but being pushed back in irregular patterns. They are martial, vital cultures who, yes, might eat a guy but it’s nothing personal.

Adventures are, instead of going into dungeons: breaking into villages and towns, and even cities in the end game. As well as dealing with monsters and all the usual D&D stuff. Treasure could be food or land. There could be multiple civilised peoples with different attitudes and a patchwork of old/new lands with different challenges.

'Monsters' sneaking through a semi-civilised area is like Heroes sneaking through the wilderness.

(If you want to be extra-sure to not offend the parents, make the evil empire extra evil, fascist, racist and nasty even to its own so when you take it on its all right really dad.)

UNDERDARK

Player Races;

Drow, Duregar, Svirfneblin, Myconid, Olm, Kua-Toa? Quaggoths?

Ok even with a lot of fudging this one is going to be a bit evil. But, all you need to do to make it acceptable is have the players face off against things that are even worse and do it in ultra-dangerous circumstances. World-conquering daemons, Mindflayer Crusades.

Cunning members of ancient hidden cultures battle and destroy immortal evils deep beneath the surface of the earth. Decadent but brilliant badasses pull mad intrigues against even-badder scum. Or just: a mixed group of low status adventurers put aside racial resentments and, to everyone’s surprise, become ultra-competent league of problem solvers. It would be a bit like mid-run Breaking Bad crossed with the A-Team.

THE DEAD

Player Races;

Skeleton, Vampire, Revenant, Ghost? Lich? Mummy?

Skeletons level up into Skelton warriors and Death Knights, or become Liches if they get good enough at magic. Non-corporeal is tricky but could give them increasing abilities to affect the world as they get stronger. Basic spirit can level up through poltergeist, to shadow or ghost.

A city of the dead like Mievilles High Cromlech. Obsessive ritualised timeless society.  Missions based on memories or sorrows or requests to retrieve particular relics and fragments of the dead. Down time periods take place over centuries, not years. Char Gen could be you are all made in the same dungeon by the same necromancer, then heroes attack.

THE BLUE WORLD

Player Races;

Tako, Triton, Merman, Sea-Elf?

(Ok I read through all the 'good' underwater player races and they are rubbish.(Except maybe Tako))

Ixitxachitl, Sayhuagin, Locathah.

No-one ever does the ocean as it is meant to be done and that’s because they treat it as a big dish. Like an alternate map, but underwater. It's a complex, fluid three dimensional flowscape. The real continents and nations are not the shape of the land beneath the sea but the currents and layers of the seas itself. The different trophic zones are like bordering countries, the great oceanic flows that bring warmth and cold around the globe are like continents.

Different races and cultures dominate different vectors and layers. Many of the cities move. Everyone underwater thinks of it as the 'real world' not as an addendum to the land. Because you would if you had access to the majority of the planet.

There are numerous deep-sea caves, so that solves that problem. Missions could be to the ruined palaces carved upside down under the arctic ice, to the lightless trenches, to the undersea volcanic borderlands where fire and water meet. Plus, numerous sunken cities. Floating cities built underwater and lost or abandoned, drifting, full of ghosts and a thousand years of accumulated clumped together history. Like undersea Space Hulks. The cursed city of Repak-Noh appears drifting silently on the borders of the Troposphere, before it inevitably falls back into the midnight zones and is lost for another millennia. Who shall investigate its gleaming portals? You. You shall. Underwater D&D, not as a holiday, but as the main game.

OUTSIDERS

Player Races

Ehhh, Githanki aaannd the other space/psionic ones? Shardminds? Ok this ones a bit of a reach.

I suppose your base is the realm of madness and dreams and reality itself is the dungeon. A nest of freezing time knotted space inhabited by strange beings.

Anyway. To sum up.

The point is that you could have all of these in the same world, but they would remain different and powerful to each other because the each inhabit a different kind of moral and experiential universe. Yes, you can do crossovers, but the dead are always strange to the living. The sea is always strange to the land. The 'savage' is always strange to the civilised.

They are all heroes but they are heroes inside their own worlds like everyone is, and the difference between those worlds lets you have difference and diversity whilst keeping them strange to each other, so when they show up in each others stories they are still reasonable monsters.

Kids are used to this because they know it’s from Warcraft and its ilk where everything is playable, yet separate.

Each would be a different kind of game, but all you would need for each one is a new players handbook. The basic engine underneath would remain the same. Maybe new ideas for missions and xp. And your items and treasures from one book can be the treasures and monsters for every other book.

*Yes I'm sure they have this kind of thing in the 'East' as well and that 'West' and 'East' are troubled concepts, thank you Richard.

** I know Richard, I know.

Who Made This?

Or, perhaps a better question, how was it made?

Ancient Treeman Front

side

Reverse

side

AND THIS GUY HAS SKULLS

This magnificent individual on Warseer has tried to compile a list of the sculptors for GW. I regard this as an excellent thing as I believe every sculpt should come with a list of everyone whose hands touched it. As well as, for my personal use and interest, an exact breakdown of the design process with minutes of all the meetings and an exacting description of the indistrrial processes used in its construction.

From the Warseer list I can see that that Dryads, which seem to prefigure many fo the design elements, were done by Aly Morrison and Brian Nelson.

I have never seen anything quite like it, especially, I have never seen plastics forced to do the things they do here. Have any of my readers?

Also, where do you begin learning about plastic injection technology?

I Made A New Blog

I made this new blog osr underdark to collect all the free resources I could that would help people generate and play in underground worlds.

I have two main reasons for this, the first is selfish. I want to see where 'we' (the royal all-consuming 'we' that effectively means anyone I can track down and who does not actively try to stop me.) are with creating a free Underdark resource.

The other is just so that anyone who wants to run the Underdark can do so without buying an overpriced splatbook (except mine when it comes out obviously.)

Dungeon Dozen guy has already effectively re-written D&D for one dice and he has done a bunch of stuff.  have collected the links. We have an excellent table from Aeon's and Auguries that I remembered from ages ago, there is a huge PDF download on there of old-school module maps that I think were assembled by the Dragonsfoot forum.

I am only providing links, its not really a traffic blog. I am also doing the Labels 'properly' so people can find things.

(I know a blog is a bad format for an archive. I am shit at the Internet.)

So, if YOU know of any good, free Underdark resources on line, like maybe a OPD or something. Then please let me know.

If you want to re-blog this then that would also be good. I don't usually ask for stuff like that but this is for THA PEOPLE (mainly).