Much Ado About Nihilus - Part One

Beware: Mild spoilers for The Last Jedi

So I should start by saying I don’t know anything about the Old Republic – particularly as may pertain to the popular Knights of the Old Republic video game franchise. While I pray my readers can forgive this lapse I beg their humble forbearance as I explain myself. 

     

As a kid I guess you could say I liked video games as much as any other kid – except, well, maybe just a tiny bit less. I had the video games but my tastes were pedestrian. If it wasn’t available to rent it or wasn’t one of a small handful of titles I saved to buy, I remained ignorant. 

     

The easiest way of understanding my relationship to video games is that video games are the things that you see ads for in comic books. There are really only two categories of items in the universe: comic books and things advertised in comic books. Like Maslow’s Hierarchy. 

     

I was an only child. My parents were a tiny bit older, also, than the parents of the kids I went to school with. I was maybe raised with different expectations regarding what exactly was supposed to happen in terms of the social interests of my peer group. So as I grew up I kept expecting video games to get left behind by my demographic – that is, my precise cohort, people who were born just a couple years to either side of me. And it never really happened. My generation would in fact be the last generation to even play lip service for a sweet second to the idea that video games were something that was supposed to be left behind when you got older. 

     

This was easy to believe at the time – that would be, the mid-90s – because the fact was that I had been disengaging with video games for a while. I still played but what I played was very much in line with what I loved playing when I started: side-scrolling adventure games with a smattering of strategy. My tastes, aside from an Atari when I was very young, were shaped almost completely by Nintendo. 

     

In hindsight small things stand out for larger movements. I went over to a friend’s house, someone I hadn’t seen in a while. He was pretty much the archetypal neighborhood Cool Guy – had always been into sports and girls and movies at just the right time and in just the right proportion. He listened to the kinds of music cool people listened to. And I went over to his house and was surprised to see that he had bought a new video game console – a Playstation. The first Playstation. And I was confused – wait a minute, we’re still doing video games now? And it kicked in a while down the road that, huh, my friend here was probably going to keep playing video games as long as he wanted. And that meant a lot of people were going to do that with him, and weren’t going to think twice about it. 

     

It has proven a prescient insight. No one younger than me would think it unusual that anyone was still playing video games in high school. Honestly, the idea was kind of fusty even when I was a kid, most likely – but like I say, I was an only child. My parents had prepared me for the adolescence and teenage years of the Johnson and Nixon administrations, not Clinton. People weren’t growing up the same way. 

     

And I’ve mostly been OK with that. I remember that first (of only a couple) experiences with the first Playstation, playing some racing simulator that seemed to be nothing but picking out and customizing famous cars. And my friend sat raptly scanning through the different kinds of expensive sports cars – and he wasn’t even particularly a car guy, was the thing. But he liked this really quite stunning driving simulator that let him drive a really nice car, and honestly, more power to him. It’s really not my cup of tea – and I think that tells you a lot about me. My tastes in video games are basically frozen at the point where, mentally, I was ready to say goodbye to them – somewhere late-ish in the life of the Super Nintendo system. 

     

I didn’t have any interest in a realistic car simulator. I didn’t want to play a horror game, or a crime game, or really any of the things that seemed to have taken a sudden and somewhat vertiginous step upwards in terms of presentation. It didn’t seem particularly fun anymore, at least not to me. I hardly lost sleep. 

     

The last Nintendo I had was a Nintendo 64 but I already felt the spirit of the times moving away from me. I could finish neither the Mario nor the Zelda games that came out around the time of the Nintendo 64 – my hands were no longer patient, my mind wandered instead of growing more fascinated by repetition. I did have a lot of fun with friends playing wrestling games. We had the WCW game, which seemed more fun than the dour promotions the WWF (was it the WWE by then?) was putting their heat behind in the late 90s. 

My favorite Star Wars video games – besides the original arcade cabinet of the Death Star approach (quickly evolving geometric patterns made of green lines supposed to approximate the Death Star trench run) – were the Super Star Wars games made (naturally) for the Super Nintendo. They are completely representative of the kind of extraordinarily taxing side-scrollers I loved at that’s age. There was no way to play other than to do each level over and over and again, memorizing every challenge in order and learning as you went. (The few times I’ve ever had the opportunity to play Sonic the Hedgehog it has baffled me that you aren’t supposed to stop and look around. It goes against every instinct I have!) This was the reality: if you were going to risk a Christmas or birthday present from a flush relative on a video game it had to be one that was going to keep your attention for a while. The Super Star Wars games were a safe bet because they took literally hundreds of hours, or seemed like it at the time. 

    

But no matter how tedious and completely tangential to the spirit of Star Wars the proceedings may have been – like the long levels with Luke Skywalker exploring the many kinds of blaster power-ups found hiding in the crevices of the Wampa’s very confusing and well-stocked maze-like cavern – it remained deathlessly fascinating because it had the Star Wars logo. That’s why the Super Star Wars games were the last video games I got excited about before the hobby lost a lot of its luster for me.

     

It was the 90s, and for most of that decade Star Wars was as close to cult as it ever got. It spent just enough time out of the mainstream, an eternity in contemporary terms, that by the time it crept back in the later part of the decade there was a genuine desire. We suffered through things like Shadows of the Empire and Prince Xizor because they seriously didn’t know how people felt about Star Wars and needed to test the waters. In hindsight, yeah, it seems hilarious. But as I’ve discussed elsewhere: things used to go away. Star Wars had gone away. We were lucky to get Super Star Wars and Shadows of the Empire. Star Wars was almost cult, almost kitsch – people still remembered it, but it was starting to fade a bit. Just a bit. Just enough.

     

This experience should tell you my bias when it comes to Star Wars video games: I learned at a young age that even if they might be fun they didn’t matter. They were stuffed with adventures that were explicitly non-canon and could therefore be ignored. (The extended cut of Star Wars with all the side missions detailed in the first Super Star Wars is eight hours long, but Luke kills a lot of weird quicksand monsters in that running time.)

     

I mean, I’m old school. I know the only Star Wars that counts is Star Wars on a screen – be it on film or on one of a handful of TV shows. I could afford to be picky about novels and games because they didn’t count in the same way. (I mean, except for the novelizations, which always oddly have counted [and even continue to count under Disney] in a weird way for such seemingly tangential items [but not actually tangential if you know the franchise’s early history].)

     

If you’re a fan of anything you will relate to the quandary. This is especially important if you’re a fan of something intensely popular like Star Wars: you have to pick and choose what you obsess about because you can’t pick everything. There are only 24 hours in the day still, right? 

     

Let me now tell you about Darth Nihilus. 

     

Darth Nihilus showed up in my game a while ago – maybe half a year, a little more as of this writing. I had no idea who this guy was. He was trailing a few other strange folks like the Sith Assassin and Sith Trooper – gah. Old Republic. 

     

Now, I’m going to crack on Darth Nihilus a bit here, because Darth Nihilus – can I call you Darth? Really, Nihilus seems so formal. Darth. Because I know you’re very chuffed that you actually get to be a Darth . . . 

     

As someone with very little understanding of the Old Republic material, much of it strikes me as stylistically at odds with Star Wars. It seems to stand in relationship to the original Star Wars in much the same way that X-Force stood in relationship to Claremont & Byrne’s X-Men: you can see the familial resemblance but the overall guiding principle behind every aesthetic decision appears to have been that the original model was just not cool enough. 

     

So Darth Nihilus – well, first. Nihilus. Nothing. Was Darth Nietzsche taken? (Or at least Darth High School Understanding of Nietzsche?) I mean, don’t get me wrong – Darth Vader wears all black too. But Darth Vader wears all black like every shred of color got scared shitless and called in sick except for those little buttons on his chestplate. Those guys can stay. Darth Nihilus wears all black like he threw some dye in his laundry and his mom got SUPER PISSED. You know depression really sucks, right? Depression sucks. 

     

One of most valuable and underrated aspects of Star Wars is that while powerful people in these stories are destroyed by power, the power itself really only accentuates preexisting character tendencies. Whether a character in Star Wars comes down on the dark or light side depends on personal inclination and circumstance. There’s something tragic in the makeup of every Sith, some quite boring classical flaw, be it pride, wrath, or greed, buckled inward by the immense weight of a great power that practically begs to be used in incriminating ways. Even as fantasy powers go it’s more metaphorical than most. Luke’s great dilemma in Episode XIII arises from a principled decision not to use his power. He knows he’s not a worthy vessel – because, of course, there can be no worthy vessel for power of that kind. Which makes sense . . . except for the fact that few unworthy vessels practice similar restraint. 

     

This is another thing I thought The Last Jedi got exactly right – but also why, after only one viewing, I find my mind not lingering over the movie. Perhaps that’s been because of other problems in my life – it’s been a busy period. But there’s also an element to the movie’s generally well reasoned if slightly scattered delivery that I found satisfying in a way that left me more or less completely – sated. For once, even after all my love for the Prequels – to say nothing of Rogue One, a film that grows immensely in my recollection every time I think about it – I felt as if I understood everything happening onscreen. As if it were completely in line with my own very idiosyncratic feelings on the subject of Star Wars. 

     

This was an odd feeling, to say the least. Somewhat vindicated and somewhat disappointed. The Star Wars on display in The Last Jedi was very much a Star Wars informed, both thematically and visually, as much by the Prequel as by the Original Trilogy. It was not, I believe, a movie Lucas could have made because it’s far too stormy, the character beats in distinctly minor keys. But it’s a movie made in Lucas’ idiom, one where any seemingly superfluous visual detail can be important at any time – and sometimes the little dude getting wasted in the casino isn’t important and sometimes the crystalline foxes in the ice caves are, but ultimately every single detail feels like an independently real and lived part of this universe into which you’ve been given a window. 

     

That’s not something Abrams really “got” except in the same way a kid “gets” wanting to show off his action figures. To be fair he had some really cool action figures. Rey, Finn, & Poe – and everyone else, for that matter, felt right. It felt like a Star Wars movie. But it was visually inert in a way I think mars basically every aspect of Abrams’ career. Lucas can’t fall out of bed without framing a shot – be they stiff or theatrical or a winking F. W. Murnau reference that eight people will ever get – but Abrams couldn’t frame any shot as if his life depended on it. He lets the scenery do the heavy lifting, which isn’t bad as filmmaking philosophies goes if your skills lie more in the realm of production.

     

Where I think The Last Jedi felt most like a departure for the series was visually. The Force Awakens was certainly heavily indebted to the original films (oh gee really? I had no idea!). That’s a big reason those characters really look sharp in every sense, put together in the way that every character in the original series just effortlessly was all the time. But there’s not a lot original about how they look or their world – really, an intentional effect, and the designs and characters hold up a lot better than the film in many ways because of it. 

     

(As much as I love the Prequels, the costuming was – functional. The heroes were people who wore their work uniforms all the time, and those work uniforms were brown robes. The Academy was not kind.) 

     

This movie added things to the Star Wars visual vocabulary. Too many things to list – one of the fun parts of any Star Wars movie is guessing which parts are going to burn in your memory. There are a few scenes I already think rank with anything else in the series and I’ve still only as of this writing seen it the one time.      

     

But in terms of character motivations? I didn’t care much for Kylo Ren the first time around but I realized as The Force Awakens aged a bit that this was intentional. There was something delightful about Kylo Ren wanting so badly to be a badass Sith lord and coming across as a petulant child. The Last Jedi seemed to understand the character better than the first movie, though, because it understood he wasn’t going to actually get anywhere by cosplaying Darth Vader. 

     

Sometimes evil really is as one-dimensional as it seems. People try to make it complicated. And that’s not to say that there aren’t complicated situations in this world. But people aren’t situations. People should know the difference between right and wrong. People should be able to see the consequences of their actions. Kylo Ren knows. He takes his mask off and realizes he’s not a villain because he wants to be tortured and emo, he’s a villain because he’s an asshole. He has power and he can use it pretty much without consequence, so why not? What I like about the movie is that it understands that sometimes, for whatever reason, people just make the wrong choice with full knowledge of the difference between good and evil. 

     

This is also a good reason why Snoke’s status as a cipher makes sense. You didn’t know anything about Sheev Palpatine until 1999. He was the Emperor and the only thing you needed to know about the Emperor in the Original Trilogy was that he was a creepy asshole who really like turning vulnerable kids with daddy issues into murderers. That’s what he tried to do to Luke in Jedi, what he succeeded in doing to Anakin in the Prequels, and what Snoke was apparently trying to do with Kylo Ren: gaslight them into becoming emotional fragile (and therefore malleable) attack dogs. The movie ends after Kylo learns a valuable lesson about the difference between Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine. The one who actually ruled the galaxy wasn’t the one who spent a lot of time crying in his bacta tank about his dead wife (who he also killed) spoiler alert send tweet. 

     

So when I see Darth Nihilus – I see someone going all in on the whole “Kylo Ren in Episode VII” vibe. You’re trying too hard, friend. Let’s look at the names of your Attacks & Abilities: Ceaseless Craving, Drain Force, Annihilate, Lord of Hunger, and Wound in the Force. Oh, wait, I’m sorry, those were Evanescence song titles. Or were they??? You know depression really sucks, right? Depression sucks. 

The overall look, the aesthetic – it’s all just a bit much, don’t you think? 

*

Galaxy of Zeroes

1. Introduction

2. Future Farmers of Alderaan

3. Of Mos Espa 

4. Much Ado About Nihilus - Part One 

5. Much Ado About Nihilus - Part Two

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*

Of Mos Espa

So I’ve been quite depressed lately. I’m sorry if I’m a broken record about it. I have to keep reminding myself that it’s actually happening. 

    
That’s the funny thing about depression! Because depression is actually quite funny when you think about it. I mean, I’ve always thought so. Inasmuch as my life and the life of everyone in my close family and everyone of my close relationships has been scarred by depression to a greater or lesser degree, I think depression is a fucking laugh riot. But it’s also because of all the stuff I said in the last sentence that I was completely in denial about the state of my mental health for many decades. 

     

But this is the time for getting real! 

     

I don’t really know what I’m doing with my life but writing. There’s not really a lot I can do – I have a mild talent for teaching but also the aforementioned depression and other assorted bits of mental illness and neuroatypicality have made the parts of teaching that aren’t actually dealing one-on-one with students increasingly difficult. I see postings on Twitter for jobs in the comics field, editorial positions, the kinds of things for which I – with (one quarter of) an Eisner and a Masters degree both – would actually be qualified to apply. But I don’t apply because I don’t think I could hold down a job. I’ve never actually held down a day job – the closest I came was when I worked nights, there I could be left to my own. I really don’t like being told what to do. 

     

So I’m doing the only thing I really know how to do: write. And at this point my only real strategy is to produce as much decent writing as I can and hope that for all the crap I fling out into the world something finally sticks to the wall. I keep going because I don’t have much of a choice but to work on faith. 

     

And it does take a lot of faith to do something like that . . . but it’s not a faith without any context. 

     

There’s a line I want to talk about from an Of Montreal song that I’ve been listening to a lot lately, “A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger” off the album Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? The first thing you have to understand about Of Montreal is that you cannot escape the art student obfuscation that he wraps around every layer of his music and presentation. I spent some time hanging out at an art school a couple years back. In that time I learned that there truly are few things more annoying than one or two awful art school affections – Of Montreal and its ringmaster Kevin Barnes are proof, however, that adopting every art school affectation at once actually makes you go super saiyan. Lesser men have died trying. 

     T

Because it is so perfectly itself – that is, completely histrionic art school “conceptual piece” pop music – it works. I can’t explain it any better but than to say that it should by all rights be awful bullshit but it is in fact quite far from being awful bullshit. He came of age in Elephant 6 so it all sounds like you just woke up after a long nap in Dave & Buster’s: it’s a godawful racket but it works.

     

I’ve always loved Of Montreal – and this album, Hissing Fauna, in particular – because Barnes seems capable at times of mustering the jilted nervous breakdown energy of the mentally unbalanced in a way that I can’t help but recognize, intimately. I’ve felt that kind of electricity too many times. Manic, one might even say, but perhaps not in the clinical sense. Or not always. 

     

And I respect being able to use that energy so well, to channel that kind of emotional abandon – well, it requires a strength of will and sense of purpose I can only admire. It takes a great deal of discipline to be emotionally vulnerable on a stage. 

     

It’s also a powerful impulse. Sincere emotional honesty disarms people. It’s the next big thing. I’ve seen it on TV in the faces of high school kids keening their dead. 

     

There’s a line in “A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger” that I always note – 

I spent the winter with my nose buried in a book /

While trying to restructure my character /

‘Cause it had become vile to its creator. 

Here’s something very specific to my life and experiences that I’d never really heard anyone mention before, at least in the context of a song: Barnes is describing a sensation of pure disgust at your own personality strong enough to inspire you to reconceive yourself from the ground floor, or at least to want to. To feel the urgent desire to just – be other than you are, because what you are ain’t cutting it. Maybe you’ve felt something similar? I remember all the way back to middle school, that feeling of absolutely loathing myself because of some intangible factor in my personality that made me – 

     

What? Too much? Too . . . something? 

     

I was raised a boy by a world that saw no reason to address me as anything other. You’re conditioned as a boy to know from a very young age that any expression of emotion outside a narrow band of approved masculine activities is strictly forbidden. Violations past single-digits can result in instant social ostracism. Kids learn quick to button up. 

     

It took me longer than most. Part of that can be put down to ignorance. I didn’t know there was anything wrong with my assigned gender so I had no special reason to be wary of expressing excess emotion, other than simply the masculine conditioning I had received my entire life. That’s still a lot, but the lack of specific understanding of any connection between my emotional instability and gender also, oddly, saved me. I never learned to stigmatize gender emotionally because I was raised by a strict feminist who taught me there was nothing shameful or inferior at all about being a woman. 

     

I’m not terribly emotionally repressed because I was raised by frigid or abusive parents who denied me any outlet. On the contrary, there was quite a lot of emotion expressed in my house throughout my growing up. I’m emotionally repressed for a number of reasons, beginning with gender dysphoria that remained undiagnosed until the age of 36 and continuing on through similarly undiagnosed mental illnesses . . . 

     

So when I listen to Of Montreal I respond to the state of emotional panic. I have so much excess emotional energy that I’ve always felt powerless to staunch. Ten pounds of emotion in a five pound sack. Some of it is bad and negative and harmful. And some of it is good and has begun to be developed in a healthy way, such as more sustained and lasting bonds of friendship and love. 

     

Love is another question entirely . . . part of me feels like I should be coy and play out a mystery. But there’s no real mystery to the fact that I’m incredibly, perpetually lonely in a tangible way that has impacted negatively on my life at multiple serious points in my past. I am drawn to people, pulled into other people’s lives with a need that seems almost . . . painfully overpowering at times. 

     

And it’s all just a mass of emotional havoc constantly floating behind my eyes, even after years of therapy and testosterone poisoning and estrogen supplements and bad relationships and good relationships and professional frustration – just simmering. Constantly simmering. 

     

(That’s where my temper comes from, incidentally. There’s a lid on a great big cauldron of emotions, and most of the time I managed to keep that lid on tight, but it’s really rnot a very strong lid at all and sometimes it gets the best of me.) 

     

So yeah. I’ve been in love. I’ve been loved. I’ve been lied to. Like anyone. I feel at a loss in some respects because my desire for honesty and my sincere belief in the importance of honesty to – whatever it is I’m doing here, writing about my emotions using Star Wars as smokescreen . . . my desire to be frank with you is at odds with the fact that I don’t feel justified in revealing secrets that aren’t mine to tell. Kevin Barnes doesn’t seem to feel that kind of restraint: he’s been broken into pieces and feels empowered to call down the judgment of the heavens on the object of his disapprobation. 

     

There’s a problem here and it points to an important power differential. The song after “A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger” is called “The Past is a Grotesque Animal,” and it’s a ten-minute-long epic about Barnes’ relationship with his then-ex (later reconciled, at least for a time) wife. It’s savage. If you’ve ever heard Dylan’s “Idiot Wind,” it’s one of the few songs I’ve ever heard that manages to summon the same degree of suffocating bilious rage against the subject of the singer’s disapprobation. It’s hypnotic. It’s freeing. 

     

It also makes me slightly queasy to think about the fact that Barnes by virtue of his platform – by the authority granted by his emotional exhibitionism – has virtually unlimited power to define his relationships. Except on those rare occasions when two artists might actually have platforms of equal or at least commensurate stature, sufficient enough to pummel each other publically without either seeming out of bounds – basically, Jay-Z and Beyoncé – more people are going to care about what Bob says about Sara than what Sara says about Bob, especially since Blood on the Tracks isn’t particularly an obscure record. Not like, say, God Bless the Red Krayola.

     

There’s another line in “The Past is a Grotesque Animal” that I think sums up the impulse: “None of our secrets are physical now.” Blowing open all the doors. But you should also be able to imagine what it must have felt like to hear those words if you were the woman those words were written for. 

     

Sometimes it hits me, suddenly: the fact that I’m a she. So many songs sound different if I stop to think about the fact that I have gone from possibly identifying with the speaker to possibly identifying with the object in so many of them. That’s a profound but very subtle internal shift that I can’t say I fully comprehend. Life is weird now. 

     

And I struggle with my Arena ranking. Part of my frustration comes from the fact that I made a conscious decision to put it off for a long time. I only have so many resources in that game. I judged for a long time that the best uses of my resources was always to build with an eye towards the longest of the long term, and that took a great deal of willpower but I think I more or less succeeded. 

     

After a certain point I realized the time had come for me to pay attention to my Arena ranking. It was garbage and had always been garbage and I didn’t have anyone to blame but myself. 

     

Now, I should explain. The Arena seems when you look at it like it should be the main part of the game: it’s your best team against everyone else’s best team. You go up against a few people every day. As of this writing the number one Arena Squad on my server consists of Emperor Palpatine (Leader), with Vader, Thrawn, Darth Nihilus, and original Han Solo (he of the natty vest and having shot first) rounding out the quintet. They just last week announced new Zeta abilities for Palpatine and Vader. Vader had already had one Zeta, which I had filled, but now he’s got another slot I need to fill meaning I had to veer off what I was doing to catch up. Because boy they have made sure you really have to level your Vader, if nobody else . . . 

     

Palpatine hadn’t had any Zetas before, and now he has two. He has a reputation as a bit of a glass canon, and it’s earned: he can shut down the entire board in one turn but he also dies in three hits. Apparently that’s not quite the case anymore. I don’t have either Thrawn or Nihilus quite ready yet. Perhaps I should take a minute to describe the leveling mechanisms? I mean, every character has so many different leveling mechanisms . . .  

     

But the most important leveling mechanism is the actual character shards. Each character goes to seven stars, and the developers have pretty much promised that they are going to leave it at seven. All the other mechanisms seem designed to be expanded perpetually, however, as the game continues and each successive generation of characters inflates the power slowly but surely. 

     

So in order to get seven stars you need to get a total of 330 character shards. I only have my Thrawn up to six stars because he’s an exclusive character available only during a special event that requires a fully functional Phoenix Squadron. (Who due to their synergy are incredibly powerful in this game despite their relative low firepower relative to other characters in the saga.) 

     

When I have Thrawn unlocked at seven stars I’ll also be able to unlock his capital ship, the Star Destroyer Chimaera. His ship was the first new capital ship released since they started the ships mini-game with the three basic capital ships – one apiece for Grand Moff Tarkin, Mace Windu, and Admiral Ackbar (RIP). My guess is that the next capital ship they release is going to be for General Grievous, and I stake this guess on the fact that they’ve started selling (the previously quite expensive) Grievous shards periodically and at a much better price in the same slot they also sell shards for, yes, Tarkin, Windu, and Ackbar. Now, I wanted Grievous anyway since he’s honestly one of my very favorite characters in all of Star Wars – ‘tis true, don’t look so shocked! – but the extra incentive that he might be a little bit more important was enough to put me over the edge. I almost have him up to six stars, after which it’s another hundred shards to get to seven stars. 

     

Anyway, the next verse in “A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger” goes – 

And through many dreadful nights 

I lay praying to a saint that nobody has heard of 

And waiting for some high times to come again. 

What you need to keep firmly in your mind if you’re not familiar with what Of Montreal sound like is that this song with the depressing lyrics is really the chirpiest, most sickeningly sweet and positively saccharine tune, also with a weird Europop feel for this album in particular (but certainly not everything he’s ever done). And instead of playing it straight he turns it into the – well, I was reaching for a word and the word that came to mind was “camp.” And I don’t think it’s necessarily camp because there’s nothing at all campy about his approach, even if some of the surface details might be the same. But perhaps that description will suffice. 

     

Even if he might sound a bit demented on the first few listenings (seriously, the voice might take a bit of getting used to . . . if you didn’t grow up listening to They Might Be Giants, in which case you’ll be fine) – once you can actually figure out what he’s saying, you see that he’s being nothing less than absolutely, completely, deathly sincere at all times. And I feel for him. I feel for him because I was never able to pull off a convincing replica of human emotion either, save for rage. For decades friends and lovers told me I was needlessly, repulsively theatrical in my affect. Even back when I believed myself to be a cis dude Barnes’ emotional exhibitionism appealed to me in ways I couldn’t express. 

     

I don’t know a lot about Barnes other than the specific bits of trivia that manage to accrue to the music – I know he was having trouble with his wife because you almost can’t not know that about this album, but I’ve never been one to dig into people’s lives like that. It seems like an invasion of privacy even for a confessional artist like Barnes – perhaps especially for someone like him who gives so much of himself already. I don’t need to know the story because what I need to know is already in the song.         

     

Heavily autobiographical music can be approached in the same manner as a concept album, then. No one except the hardiest of the hardcore ever remembers the details of the plot of the concept album after the first listen. They just don’t. If you ever doubt the principle just ask yourself how big of a Queensryche fan you gotta be to know the plot to Operation: Mindcrime. I don’t want to know all the details of Barnes life – that I know so much about Dylan’s is an artifact of celebrity culture as much as the music itself. 

     

If you think reading an essay about me gives you insight into my character – well, it gives you insight into a character we’re constructing together, a version of me that exists as a collaboration of my very prescriptive elaboration of my feelings and your very descriptive imagination. I don’t control the version of me that lives with you, dear reader.

     

So what can you control in your life? 

     

The emotional exhibitionism in my writing is high calculated, just as I’m sure Barnes’ is as well. What sounds frantic and overheated on record is, certainly, rehearsed and rearranged to within an inch of its life. That it manages to pack that punch after being pressed on the proverbial wax is a miracle of modern recording. 

     

I don’t usually win games. I’m good at playing games, however, a distinction the responsibility for which I place at the fact that I enjoy the social function of games and long for game states of happy equilibrium where no one really has an advantage but everyone gets to play for a while. It’s not a conscious decision but I don’t have any kind of cutthroat instinct at all. 

     

As far as my Arena team went I had to learn to overcome my natural (small “c”) conservatism and resentment towards the metagame being so heavily channeled towards the latest big exclusive character. I mean, it makes sense. Obviously. They want you to want the new characters. But what I really enjoy about games with any kind of strategic component is finding weird combinations and strange and eccentric interactions. And any game environment built so heavily towards selling new upgrades will always be defined by the biggest and newest toy on the block. If I want to perform well in the Arena I need to, well, grow up and start playing the game – at least, that part of the game – the way the developers so clearly want me to. 

     

Which means I got my CLS completely buffed. And I’m on track to get my Vader his second Zeta ability within probably two weeks. Maybe a bit less if I hustle. I’m working on my Phoenix Squad so I can get my Thrawn. He’s got two Zeta abilities that will need to be filled, eventually. Always something else. 

     

As of this writing my Arena team is Vader (Leader), with Tarkin, R2-D2, BB-8, and CLS. Vader’s Leader ability only buffs himself and Tarkin but R2 is valuable because he acts as a kind of second leader, buffing up everyone in a few ways but especially CLS and BB-8, who both share multiple factions with one another. It’s ad-hoc based on the best characters I currently have. I have a lot more to build because this isn’t getting me any better than (as of this writing) #128. 

     

It’s nice to have a part of your life, however small and inconsequential, where things do what they’re supposed to, and consistent effort meets consistent reward. 

     

Rebuilding emotionally after – well, take your pick, really. A winter depression? A move? Separation? Transition? Heartbreak? It’s not an easy thing to do. Breakdowns happen. The muck that sticks to your body and sucks you back down to the swamp gets heavier each time. 

     

I dislike the fact that advancing in the game requires dropping everything to collect the newest character – but I’m really complaining about the game itself. That’s what it is. As much as I resented having to stop everything and build my CLS I still felt a great deal of satisfaction having finally finished everything and having a pretty badass Luke Skywalker. Which his not really a phrase you often associate with Luke Skywalker? 

     

When I was in college (the first time) I had a Star Wars Monopoly set and no one ever wanted to be Luke. People don’t really like Luke, or at least the Luke who was the protagonist of the first three movies. People put up with Luke because he was the main guy in Star Wars and Star Wars is great – but we all know Luke was a drip, Han was more fun, and Chewie will buy booze for anyone with fuzz on their face if their money’s green.           

     

The Luke in Episode VIII, though . . . he’s a guy who’s had a breakdown. He failed himself and that meant he failed a lot of other people. And it’s not so much that when it counted he swooped in to save the day – did anyone doubt he would? He’s Luke Fucking Skywalker, of course he was going to save the day. It’s not Cassavetes. It’s that the most important battle he fought in Episode VIII was with himself. And it wasn’t like fighting his dad – where, if you remember the plot of Episode V, he fucks up a lot, but still manages to stand up straight and face towards the future even after getting his hand chopped off. It was more like his dad fighting himself, a battle which you might recall didn’t turn out so well for the good guys. 

     

But Luke succeeded where his dad didn’t because he learned to see past his own overwhelming sense of shame and failure, and to see the genuine need that still existed beyond his own feelings of worthlessness. Anakin of course never saw a world bigger than his own pain. 

     

The need to look beyond ourselves, see past our own limitations – it can’t help but seem that the bars on the prison door were put there by ourselves, built to entrap us by the people who know us and hate us the most. Some were, some weren’t – but speaking for myself, I know I blame myself too much for some things and not enough for others. That’s life. Sometimes we get the privilege of knowing which one. 

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Galaxy of Zeroes

1. Introduction

2. Future Farmers of Alderaan

3. Of Mos Espa 

4. Much Ado About Nihilus - Part One 

Part Three is already available behind the paywall on my Patreon for anyone who subscribes $5 or more! 

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