Hi everyone! Thanks for everyone who wrote in response to my last email—it was really nice, and I haven’t responded to all of the comments yet, but I did want to say I read them, and appreciate them very, very much. In any case, this week I am fulfilling the little description thing underneath the title of the letter and writing about something I liked a lot. Bye for now!
“Trope,” like “irony,” is a word that has really taken a beating in the last couple of decades. It tends to reduce: whether by criticizing (x was too reliant on tropes) or by anatomizing (“TVTropes.com”). But if you’ll permit me to put on my “failed classics student” hat: as a word, its lineage is really interesting. Notably, “polytropos” is the first adjective applied to Odysseus in the Odyssey. Here are some translations of the first line:
Muse, tell me of the man of many wiles (Mandelbaum)
Tell me, Muse, about the man of many turns (Cook)
Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways (Lattimore)
Tell me about a complicated man (Wilson)
And here is the “Wiktionary” (still not entirely sure what this is) definition of the root, “tropos”:
τρόπος • (trópos) m (genitive τρόπου); second declension
a turn, way, manner, style
a trope or figure of speech
a mode in music
a mode or mood in logic
the time and space on the battlefield when one side's belief turns from victory to defeat, the turning point of the battle
I like this web of associations because I think it gets closer to the heart of what is actually happening inside a story. Plot developments, tonal shifts, style and reference, shifts in understanding, complexities and obstacles, revelation and opacity, wit and motion: these are the engines of narrative, the sources of a story’s dynamism. The many turns of Odysseus are, of course, what The Odyssey goes on to be about: the poem is a collection, an agglomeration and arrangement, of trópoi.
13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is one of the coolest video games I’ve ever played in my life. It looks stunning—unlike anything else (except for other games made by Vanillaware, none of which, as far as I can tell, are really anything like 13 Sentinels, to a shocking degree). The attention to detail is incredible. The music is really good. I left the voice acting on! People complain about the combat, but as long as you don't go in expecting X-Com or whatever, it's great; besides, it’s mostly there (in my opinion) to serve the overall narrative rhythm—to pace and contextualize the story parts. I played the first third or so of the game on the hardest difficulty and then as soon as I died, like, twice, I turned it to medium, because I really think it's mostly about making you feel badass, and also like everything is fucked. It rules at this, much as the game, in general, rules.
In any case, the game is good because it is good. But it is especially interesting, I think, because for about a dozen reasons it seems like it shouldn’t work.
Contemporary reviews of 13 Sentinels often said something about how referential its story is. I don’t think this is the most important feature of the game, but it is interesting, because it is one of the ways it seems like it shouldn’t work.
It is indeed immediately and comically obvious that the game is the work of people who have internalized vast swaths of popular science fiction media. From the beginning, it is fundamentally a classic popular Japanese story: a conflict between kaiju (Godzilla-style giant monsters) and children in huge robots (every mecha anime ever). The bulk of the game, however, is divided into thirteen intersecting but independent stories, one for each of the major characters, and it’s in these smaller stories that the “tropes” really start to emerge.
[I don’t think they’re really spoilers, but I want y’all to have a great freaking time out there, you know, just a really good and nice time doing your thing; so I moved my big list of examples from this spot in the letter to the footnote linked at the end of this sentence.1]
In short, basically everything that could possibly fit in a story like this is in play, and seemingly-conflicting revelations are thrown at you with blistering, hilarious velocity.
This could be, and perhaps sounds, awful. It is important, then, what 13 Sentinels chooses not to do with its material. It does not take your familiarity with its inspirations as an opportunity to drop names, or to wink knowingly at the camera. It avoids the false solidarity of the “pop culture reference” as it plays out in most knowingly referential popular media—the irritating elbow in the ribs: “You’ve seen that movie too, haven’t you?” (I’m not naming names because I’m nice, but you know what I’m talking about.)
Rather, 13 Sentinels goes as hard as possible in the opposite direction. All of these stories are taken utterly seriously. This is not to say they’re taken at face value: the game knows these stories aren't new, and it knows you know that, too. (It is, for this reason and others, frequently an extremely funny video game.) But they are presented earnestly, as legitimate narrative maneuvers.
People often refer to works like these—stories which do something with “tropes” besides straightforwardly indulging them—as “deconstructions,” usually of a given genre. I don’t think this is a useless figure of speech, but I do think that something like 13 Sentinels is perhaps not fully served by the metaphor of dismantling or destruction. The game is a little too kind-hearted for that, a little too wide-eyed. It isn’t pulling these tropes apart because it thinks they’re predicated on lies or obfuscation. (An example of something which “deconstructs” a genre quite well, I think, is Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which I regard as an attempt to craft a genuinely “realistic” Western, one which of necessity foregrounds the unbelievable violence of imperial conquest undergirding the romantic myth of the frontier. And it is difficult to express the extent to which 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is not Blood Meridian.)
Rather, 13 Sentinels is slamming all of these tropes together because it knows they mean something to us. It never loses sight of why these stories are popular: namely, that they are, somehow, satisfying in excess of what any single work can contain. They are emotionally resonant expressions of something that eludes other modes of expression.2 There is something in their contours, familiar as they are, that speaks to us—or at least has spoken to us, or to some of us, at some point. We return to them compulsively, involuntarily, like things we’ve repressed. (This is, not coincidentally, one of the many things 13 Sentinels is about.)
The question underpinning the game is the question of how it all comes together. How can such dramatically different stories—stories whose forms and genres and tropes seem not to overlap—intersect? It is a risk, in our J.J. Abramsified media landscape, for writers to rely too heavily on the suspense created by not knowing what is literally happening. An ending that just reveals the facts usually can’t bear nearly as much emotional or intellectual weight as an ending which genuinely resolves a dramatic situation. The process of discovering what’s happening, then, needs to have stakes for the viewer or reader beyond simply grasping the narrative's mechanics.
This is a bit too pat, maybe, but I think that all these tropes are colliding in 13 Sentinels because so much is colliding inside the characters themselves. Nobody’s motives in this game are entirely pure: everyone is compromised. The inevitable romantic entanglements come across not as perfunctory, but as genuinely desperate. The thirteen individual stories (which you select, for the most part, at will) are, as a rule, stories of people stranded and alone. They know too much, or too little, or the wrong things; they have too much power, or not nearly enough, or power they don’t know what to do with. They don’t know what to make of reality, even though reality has serious plans for them. They don’t know how to tell the stories they are in.
The game’s combat is a series of tactical top-down encounters, usually centered around holding out for a short span of time until a large, mysterious device sticking out of the ground can make a big ka-thunk noise and blow all the nearby bad guys up. These battles serve as a kind of ominous pedal tone underlying the rest of the game—a recurrent reminder that the situation is desperate, that even the most esoteric or puzzling narrative turns are leading towards a terrifyingly serious conclusion. But what is at stake during the battles is what is at stake the whole time: how these characters will survive their situation. Recall the last definition of tropos: “the time and space on the battlefield when one side's belief turns from victory to defeat, the turning point of the battle.” It is ultimately, I think, a marker of how good 13 Sentinels is that even the weariest of tropes feels like a turn the game’s whole world can hinge on.
13 Sentinels is, fundamentally and from the beginning, a time-travel story, so you’ve got your Groundhog Day time loop and your “trying to change the past but just fucking more stuff up” type of stories—but you’ve also got your Spielberg shit: your ET-style cute-lost-alien story; your Jaws monsters; your Close Encounters of the Third Kind “something major is happening and nobody believes me” paranoia—but you’ve also also got your Philip K. Dick identity/reality paranoia: clones, androids who don’t know they’re androids, androids who do know they’re androids but are tormented about it, as well as straight-ahead murder androids. You’ve got UFOs and nanomachines and space stations and portentous dreams and complex double-lives and apocalypses and cyberpunky sequences of jacking into someone’s head using a weird helmet connected to a rack of giant wire-strewn computers hidden in an abandoned warehouse; you’ve got mind-enhancing drugs and suspicious doctors and secret agendas and pop stars and televisions that talk to you and people who watch too many movies becoming convinced that the movies are real…but are they? It’s an ‘80s high-school movie and a soap opera and a mecha anime and a blockbuster alien invasion movie and also a poignant drama about Japanese identity during and immediately after World War II.
There’s a real and defensible line of critique here about the culture industry’s simultaneous fetishes for nostalgia and novelty—two highly marketable qualities—but I am assuming that “consumer” desires are not wholly determined by the vagaries of the invisible hand, or whatever. I might be wrong! But if I am, we here at Corridors of Time HQ are in pretty big trouble.