RE: [Lone Wolves and Cubs]
A Triptych that I Have Been Thinking About
From: Travis
March 18, 2023
"'Everything comes in threes.' Not true. In reality, everything comes in ones. Sometimes, when three 'ones' come in a row, it seems like everything comes in threes. By the way, in medieval times it was widely believed that everything came in twenty-sixes. They were wrong too. It just took them longer to recognize a pattern."
- George Carlin
I debated even going over this, since I think this new format I'm trying out is pretty self-explanatory. But I've never been one to pass up on a digression (nor a chance to say something parenthetically), so here is it anyway:
Have you ever been out somewhere, getting a coffee or whatever, and walked past some people and realized that they individually and accidentally made up a set? For instance:
-A group was all wearing slip on Vans but in different colors.
-Or half of them all got a text and looked down at their phone the same way, at the same time.
-Or there was a mother in line with her daughter, and a woman there with her mother, and a grandmother waiting with her granddaughter.
Every so often, thanks to consuming a lot of different types of entertainment at the same time, I'll run into similar kinds of accidental sets; the book I'm reading has a theme that is also picked up in a TV show my wife and I are watching, which also features an event that reminds me of the video game I've been playing. That kind of thing.
That's what I'm trying to talk about in these 'Triptych' blog posts; things that make up a rough kind of accidental set (and that I don't quite have enough to say about to make up a post of their own).
***
- Wolves and Cubs -
'Lone Wolf and Cub' was a manga from back in the 1970's about a Shogun's executioner and his 3 year old son, traveling around and taking bloody revenge against the clan that disgraced him. I've actually not read it yet, but the title has become a shorthand term for this kind of story where an adult (usually with a violent past) has to take care of a child (usually not their own) on some kind of journey (which usually forces the adult to confront the sins of their past one way or another). The dramatic tension seems to come from the idea of this invincible main character who suddenly has a new and extremely vulnerable weak point that they have to carry along with them. They have to wrestle with being able to do what needs doing to protect their proteges and keeping them from following down the 'road to hell'.
The Professional, the Mandalorian, the newer God of War games come to mind as good examples. Or, these stories that became an accidental set for me recently:
(I) The Last of Us: Remastered
I've talked about this on a podcast episode that hasn't come out yet, but I've been playing through The Last of Us, hoping to get ahead of spoilers for the show.
This is a game where even the remaster is almost a decade old at this point, so there is absolutely nothing new to be said about it now - and while I think the buzz around the HBO show has made most people aware what the general story is - let me offer a couple quick thoughts if you are like me: never played it before, but interested thanks to Pedro Pascal (and I will do my best not to spoil, despite the game's age).
First, even for 10 years old, this game still looks really good (what I've seen of the re-remaster: last of Us Part I looks even better, but this is the version that was free on Playstation+, so this is the one I went with). I really enjoyed sneaking through the post-apocalyptic, crumbling Boston, Pittsburgh, etc., running down the overgrown suburbs and deserted highways. Naughty Dog did a fantastic job of making the environments seem organic, of making you feel like you could explore nooks and crannies of abandoned houses, despite the actual path being pretty linear.
Also, the voice acting is a fucking master class. Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson weren't the right age to play Joel and Ellie in the HBO show, but I can absolutely understand why 'the internet' might've wanted them to try anyway; they bring depth and nuance to their lines that makes them work when they could just as easily have bene your standard, cheesy zombies-gone-wild video game delivery. It helps that the story is more grounded than, say, a Resident Evil or even a Night of the Living Dead. Neil Druckmann still worked some zombie movie cliches in, but seemed intent on keeping this version of the apocalypse more in line with what the real world might be like after 20 years of lock down. Since we all have a bit of real world experience with how a world-wide lock down might play out, the world they put us in maybe doesn't feel as fantastical as it might have back in 2013. The different factions that you meet, the questions of who to trust and how far, the internal and interpersonal conflicts - it didn't take much effort to slip into them.
I should also say, for the record, that the gameplay doesn't quite raise to the level of the story. There is a little bit of an Assassin's Creed dilemma when you approach each interaction with zombies and or bandits where you have to decide if you're going to sneak up on them and take them out silently, or go in guns blazing (or, like me, TRY to go stealth mode and fuck it up halfway through and be forced to burn through your ammo dealing with the aftermath), but for me, that was the part I had to deal with in order to get to more of the story. And, a lot of times I had to deal with them over and over, since some zombies have this fun feature where if they even touch you, you are just dead (and they really enjoyed blind siding me when I was dealing with someone else) -- which I guess is another point for the 'real life feeling' the game was going for, but it wasn't very fun. Scavenging for supplies was kind of cool, but crafting things, upgrading your stats, cycling through the arsenal of guns didn't add very much for me.
So, if you were thinking of diving into this game just in order to experience the story, you have my permission to play it on the easiest setting (or to just watch a Let's Play).
(II) Parable of the Sower
Meanwhile, seeing as we just finished reading Kindred (spoiler for the next season of the podcast I guess). And seeing as I loved it (spoiler again), I went searching for more Octavia Butler books, landed on Parable of the Sower and tore through it in a couple of days.
Thinking back on it, this isn't exactly a story where knowing the specific plot points would spoil your reading experience, but to keep the overview of the plot light, this is also a story set in the far-flung future of 2024 where the world is suffering. No apocolyse, no zombies, but our main characters have retreated into closed communities to deal with the mounting impacts of climate change and roving bands of thieves and drug users. America's leaders have devolved into self-serving and impotent politics and the towns attached to the company stores have made a resurgence as potential solutions for people hoping for steady work and shelter. Those not willing or able to continue in their enclaves have decided to head north to Canada, or at least to cooler weather and a hopefully a town where they can find a job.
So, yeah... this one also has that 'real life feeling'.
We talk about this a couple of times in the podcast episodes on Kindred (Or, I guess, at this point, we WILL talk about it), but here Octavia Butler once again shows off her understanding of human nature, her ability to give her characters depth and complications and hidden motivations with a few short lines in the narrative, to show-rather-than-tell with prose that is economical and easily switches from insightful to funny to devastating. This book didn't feel like it was going out of its way to set up big, tragic, impactful turns of events, but still managed to quickly and quietly punch me right in the gut when it felt like it.
For me, the book did take a bit to get into as there is a bit of stage setting to introduce the world and it's current issues, the enclave the main character is living in, her family dynamic, and her ideas about sowing the seeds of her new religion and a new life. Not to say that the beginning dragged; it was all needed for the rest of story to have weight, to understand the stakes - just that when Lauren leaves town is where I engaged with the book a bit more.
As we start to follow our characters heading north through California (small spoiler, I guess), I was put back in a mind of Joel and Ellie treking West. Here also were survivors walking down the (almost) abandoned highways, meeting others and having to grapple with how much to trust each other, bartering and scavenging to resupply when they come to a new town. There was even a point where they are debating using their limited funds to buy a riffle, and during the discussion about how they will probably need it to shoot or pin down assailants from a distance that flashed me right back to Joel repairing the sight on the rifle he had picked up as well.
The interesting thing for me was how the story kind of turns the Lone wolf and Cub idea on its head. Instead of the usual "I can't bring a kid along" -> "Remember, I ain't your daddy" -> "I will die for this child who taught me to care about people again" progression, Lauren seems open and caring from the start. She is tough, no non-sense leader and she inspires people to follow along on her journey by being empathetic, by making good decisions and without forcing anyone to do anything they aren't comfortable with. Her hyper-empathy is both her strength and built-in weakness, but she doesn't seem to have to grapple much with taking on more people, of becoming more vulnerable, maybe because she already sees it as her destiny. She is less a Lone Wolf with Cub and more an Alpha Wolf with Many Cubs.
(III) 65
Full disclosure, this movie was not on my list of must-watches - but it has dinosaurs, which my son really loves, and it has Adam Driver, which my wife really loves, and we had a free Saturday, so we all went and saw it.
And, also full disclosure, this movie ain't as ground breaking as the other two stories we just talked about. It's a pretty stripped down, straightforward Sci Fi action flick that you can pretty much figure out by watching the trailer, but, it is also not trying to be anything more than that. It is an almost-antiquated-at-this-point, brisk 90 minutes, and it's got Kylo Ren shooting space guns at dinosaurs, so I wasn't mad at it (although I have seen a lot traffic online from people who were really disappointed, so grain of salt).
Watching the trailer of a guy's spaceship crash landing before being jump scared by a Tyrannosaurus, I got the impression that there was maybe supposed to be a Planet of the Apes twist in here, that the space man from Earth had accidentally time traveled back to a mysterious planet that was -shock- still Earth all along... but then, no; Adam Driver isn't from Earth... and the title screen goes out of its way to tell you that he has crash landed on Earth within, like, the first 10 minutes... so no spoilers there.
And, fairly predictably, he discovers one other survivor of the crash of his space ship, a young girl, who doesn't speak the same language as him, so he can't tell her that her parents didn't make it. And because of his past with his own daughter he can't see any other option than to help her make a journey to the remaining functioning escape pod.
So yeah, the voice acting isn't nearly as important, and we aren't exactly dealing this the collapse of society, but here are Joel and Ellie again, alternately sneaking past and shooting through monsters to deliver her to safety. The setting is way less 'real life' and the character development is no where near as strong (or at all?), but the story is economical, to the point, and doesn't overstay its welcome. This also didn't have the "don't follow me down the dark road, kid" aspect - opting instead for the Lone Wolf grappling with how to protect the Cubs' innocence vis-a-vis finding out that even if she made it home, she was still an orphan now.
For what it's worth, I thought both the actors did a decent job with what they were given. I'm not sure this will stay in theaters long, but once it comes up on streaming, I don't think it would be a bad way to kill an hour and a half on a lazy weekend.
One gripe I did have: the dinosaurs were weird. I imagine they were making a stylistic choice to not use real/recognizable dinosaur species, opting more for movie monsters instead of natural history museum displays ... but they ended up just feeling like generic video-game enemies to me and I can also report that my dino-enthusiast son was a bit let down too.