Oregon Is Bad

Or at least it’s portrayed as such in one of the movies I saw in the past few days. Again, there are three here, and SPOILERS of varying severity for all three.

The Strangers, Chapter 1 – I know I watched the original film before, but I don’t remember that much about it. Beth likes several movies where the villains have absolutely no motive, and they just torment someone because they happen to be around. I guess that’s kind of extra scary to me, as a person who doesn’t really have enemies (as far as I know, anyway) but would also be hopeless at defending myself. We saw this one at the theater, and I think it was definitely by-the-numbers, and rather overdone in some respects. Seeing someone show up in the background in a mask is scary at first, but becomes less so once the audience already knows they’re there. That said, I don’t think it really deserves the bad reviews it’s been getting either; it’s a decent enough movie for what it tries to be. It takes place in rural Oregon, with a couple on their way to Portland spending the night in a tiny rural town at an Airbnb cabin after their car breaks down. I have to wonder what they were going for with the setting, as I generally think of Oregon as being a pretty liberal, tolerant state, while here it wasn’t particularly different from any creepy rural community from a film like this, full of nosy hyper-religious people, who don’t have any vegetarian options on their restaurant menus. Oregon probably does have parts like that, though. Three people in masks, one a burlap sack and the others resembling dolls, show up at the cabin to torture and eventually kill the couple.

One thing that’s left mysterious is whether anyone else in town is complicit in this, or there were just a lot of red herrings. Maybe we’ll find out more about that in the sequels, if they’re ever made. There’s one scene where the guy is dropping a bunch of ketchup, and it suddenly switches to blood dripping from a dead bird on the ceiling, and I have to say I might have found the ketchup more disturbing.

X – We saw a preview for a sequel to this at the movies, so we watched it the next day. If you like movies that constantly cut from one scene to another in a way that makes you think for a second that they’re the same, well, there’s a LOT of that here. The story is about three men and three women who are renting space on a weird old couple’s property in Texas so they can make a porno. The couple living there seem to mostly be motivated by jealousy of young people and their sexual proclivity, but the woman, Pearl, is particularly obsessed with Maxine, who’s played by the same actress. It was definitely creepy, but I don’t think the psychological themes were really as developed as it seems like the creators wanted them to be. I did think it was funny that the director was obsessed with making the porn movie artistic and cinematic when what we saw of it really wasn’t at all. Fortunately, Elon Musk had nothing to do with this film.

Muppets from Space – This one is a lot different from the other two, isn’t it? It was kind of a palate cleanser for me. Beth isn’t a Muppets fan, but she said she liked this one better than Treasure Island. I believe we’ve seen all of the theatrically released Muppet movies now. Although it’s centered around Gonzo feeling lonely because he’s the only one of his kind, it doesn’t really have as much of a story as other Muppet films, instead focusing more on just being weird and goofy. As such, I can see why it wasn’t all that successful, but I still found it entertaining. It has a whole bunch of Muppets living together in the same house, and Gonzo having dreams where he finds out he’s from another planet, and he has to send a message to the aliens.

The villain, played by Jeffrey Tambor (who was also the Wizard in The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz), is the director of an organization that tracks alien activity, but he’s not very good at his job, and is constantly reprimanded by his superior for his lack of evidence. He kidnaps Gonzo to try to interrogate him, and forces Rizzo, who accompanies him, to be a lab rat in experiments run by a sadistic David Arquette. Hulk Hogan, who was playing a heel at the time, also worked at the lab. Kermit, Fozzie, Miss Piggy, Animal, and Pepe the King Prawn go to the research facility to rescue Gonzo, using spy equipment developed by Bunsen and Beaker. Eventually, disco-dancing aliens from Gonzo’s home planet show up and offer to take him back with them, but he decides not to go.

They do, however, take Tambor’s character as an ambassador. I actually remember a Muppet Babies segment where Gonzo imagines himself as the last survivor of an alien civilization in a Superman parody, so I guess that idea had been around well before this movie. This was the only theatrical Muppet film not to have any original songs, instead having a soundtrack made up mostly of stuff from the seventies.

The Rains of Castamere

The Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan – I’ve been meaning to check out the Wheel of Time series for quite a while now, and I finally got around to it. I thought this book was all right, but not all that exciting. Not a whole lot happens, but it establishes a lot of things about its world that I suspect come into play in the many later books. I did think the recurring dreams that the young characters had about the Dark One were genuinely creepy. I do intend to read more of this series, but there’s other stuff I want to get to first. I know there’s now an Amazon TV series based on these books, but I don’t know how far along it’s gotten.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde – We all know Wilde was gay, but I didn’t entirely expect that the story would start out with two men talking about how attractive another man is. I’m sure everyone knows the premise of this story, that a handsome and charismatic but shallow and callous young man has a painting that not only ages in his place, but also reflects his character flaws. It kind of seemed longer than it needed to be, but it did have a good amount of wit.

Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson – Since I recently watched the Muppets’ version of this, and had seen the Disney animated one ten years ago, I thought I should probably read the original book. I already knew a lot of what would happen, but it was a good adventure story, and did a good job at making Long John Silver a very ambiguous character. I did think it was funny in retrospect that, near the beginning, Dr. Livesey scolded Billy Bones for his drinking while he was smoking a pipe.

A Storm of Swords, by George R.R. Martin – The third book in the series has Tyrion Lannister framed for the murder of his cruel, bratty nephew Joffrey who’s become king at the age of thirteen, Jon Snow visit the people on the other side of the Wall on a reconnaissance mission, and Daenerys Targaryen continuing with her conquests and bringing up her dragons. I appreciate how many little details Martin works in, although it’s difficult to keep track of all of them. I’ve seen indications that emphasis on food is something common in children’s books, but there’s definitely a lot of that here as well. Just be careful with the pigeon pie. I find it a little weird that being sent to guard at the Wall is a standard fate for outcasts and criminals. Why would these people have any particular loyalty? I guess it’s a matter of having nowhere else to go. And there are giants and skinchangers on the other side, so I guess it’s more inherently fantastic than Westeros.

The Habitation of the Blessed, by Catherynne M. Valente – I’ve come across the legend of Prester John in several sources, most recently in The Phantom Atlas. I wasn’t aware that Valente, an author who’s written other stuff I’ve quite enjoyed, had written about the topic until someone on Tumblr told me about them, drawing some connections to Oz. This is the first of a trilogy, A Dirge for Prester John, and it’s written as if it’s something that comes from various sources, so it jumps around quite a bit. It takes the idea of John ruling over a fantastic country with magical aspects, but discards the notion that he converted everyone there to Christianity, that instead being a fiction he invented to keep his fellow Europeans from invading. In fact, the inhabitants of Pentexore are confused by John’s religion, as most of its tenets aren’t at all applicable to their lives and ways of thinking. The land in which John finds himself is one where animals talk and no one dies for good, instead having their bodies planted to grow new versions of themselves. It’s also home to a lot of the weird beings that appeared in texts and on maps of foreign countries, like Blemmyae and monopods. And it’s where Jesus’ brother Thomas ended up. Valente does a good job at mixing up various myths and creating a strange utopian culture.

Psaro Gets Pstarted

Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince – One reason I was anxious to play Chapter 6 of Dragon Quest IV is that this game kind of follows up on it, with the same writer being involved. Here, you play as Psaro, the main villain from DQ4, who is revealed to be the son of Randolpho the Tyrant, ruler of the monsters of Nadiria, and a human woman named Miriam. Since part of the plot of both games is that he wants to destroy humanity, it’s an example of the trope of a bad guy hating those who represent what he hates about himself, even though his mother is the parent who actually loves him.

His initial goal is to kill his father, but he fails miserably, and is cursed so that he cannot directly hurt any monsters. He grows up in Rosehill, a town known as a haven for non-humans, mostly dwarves, but also elves and monsters. I thought the consensus was that Psaro WAS an elf, like his paramour Rose, but I haven’t seen any mention of that in this game so far, despite his ears. But maybe Randolpho is part elf himself. Anyway, Psaro becomes a monster wrangler, and recruits monsters to fight other monsters, both enemies and competitors in tournaments. I’ve played the first DQM game, and it’s pretty similar, but has more of a plot.

Psaro, accompanied by Rose and a magic collector named Toilen Trubble, visit the various levels of Nadiria, each one of which has a goal you have to achieve to advance the plot and visit other areas, usually beating a boss.

The levels are associated with various vices, along the lines of Dante’s version of Hell. Each has its own environment, and seasons will change as you proceed.

How many roads must a monster walk down?
The Circle of Indulgence is based on gluttony, and everything there is made of junk food.

It’s interesting that Zenithia and Nadiria are based on Heaven and Hell, respectively, but neither seems to contain any dead people. It’s established that this world has an afterlife, but details are scarce.

There are many connections to 4, including origin stories for some pretty minor characters, like Psaro’s Pawn and the Winky from Ragnar’s chapter, here named Duffer and Eileen.

Rosehill still has the building with four different shop counters, all staffed by Monty, Psaro’s trainer.

The Zenith Dragon is there to try to convince Psaro to live as a human and help the Chosen Ones, Sparkie is his messenger, and Aamon has already started manipulating the future Master of Monsterkind.

After getting through the lower levels of Nadiria, Psaro takes over Diabolic Hall from a guy named Zangiel, who wants him as his successor in trying to overthrow Randolpho. So far, it’s been presented as a prequel to DQ4, and the flashback in Chapter 6 to Psaro and Rose’s first meeting is incorporated and expanded upon. I’ve read that it later intersects with the game’s story, and presumably contradicts it in some ways. I’ll have to see what happens with that. A lot of the music is the same as in DQ4, and monster tournaments are held in the city of Endor.

As far as monster wrangling goes, I’m not sure I’m doing it the best way. For the most part, I try to recruit monsters that I find interesting. You can keep a whole bunch of them in a paddock, but only eight can journey with you at a time, a main party of four and four others in reserve. They’ll all gain experience, but the ones in the paddock won’t. Monsters can learn new skills by applying talent points, like in several of the later main series games, but it’s kind of frustrating that you don’t get them with every level increase. Any two monsters at Level 10 or above can be synthesized into a new one, which can inherit some, but not necessarily all, of their parent’s skills. So all monsters can reproduce, it’s always asexual, and the parents never survive? I guess Randolpho having children, including one with a human, means synthesis isn’t their only means of reproduction. It’s probably some sort of magic. The game will let you know if a particular pairing will result in a rare monster. It’s pretty fun to experiment with it, although I haven’t done much in the way of careful planning. Most of the battles so far haven’t been that difficult, but the one against General Chayne at Diabolic Hall was brutal. Most of his attacks will hit your entire team, and he hits hard. I finally managed to beat him on my third try, with only one monster alive at the end.

Are Ewoks Too Woke?

This time, we have one movie, one television show, and one made-for-TV movie, all with SPOILERS.

The Mist – Based on a Stephen King story, this has a pretty claustrophobic premise. After a severe storm, many of the residents in a small Maine town go to the grocery store to get stuff they need. A mist comes up outside, and when someone reports that he saw a guy mysteriously killed in it, they’re all pretty much stuck there. This leads to a lot of tension, and one religious extremist basically starts her own cult that wants to sacrifice children to prevent the disaster. There’s also a supernatural aspect, as it turns out that there are tentacled monsters and giant bugs within the mist, although it’s somewhat downplayed to focus on the human interactions. There’s also an indication that the monsters arrived due to a government experiment to communicate with alternate dimensions. Eventually, the main character, a painter who’s gone to the store with his son, escapes with a few others in his car. When he runs out of gas and has been unable to escape the mist and the monsters, he kills the passengers, including his son, out of mercy. He then finds out that the military had been able to drive away the monsters and evacuate people, so he didn’t really need to do the killing after all.

Baby Reindeer – This is a quite disturbing miniseries that Beth really wanted to watch. It stars Scottish comedian Richard Gadd as Donny Dunn, a fictionalized version of himself, and is based on several traumatic events in his past, mostly a woman who stalked him after meeting him at the pub where he worked. He later reveals that he was also repeatedly sexually abused by a guy who promised him a writing job, and he blames himself somewhat because he kept coming back. While he learns that his stalker, Martha, has a past of stalking and can be quite dangerous, he feels bad for her and becomes almost as fascinated with her as she is with him. The fact that he never told anyone about the earlier abuse also makes him reluctant to report Martha either. There are some weird details in the series, like how Martha’s messages to him always include “Sent from my iPhone,” even though she never brings an iPhone into the pub, and it’s sometimes misspelled, suggesting she types that in every time for some reason. She also correctly guesses that he’s an abuse victim, although he’s never admitted it to anyone. It’s also worth noting that the protagonist sometimes acts pretty shady himself, lying and withholding information, but people tend to forgive him. His ex-girlfriend remains a close friend and confidant, and another woman he starts dating stays with him for a while even though he met her under false pretenses. He says at one point that he’s embarrassed to be dating a trans woman, even though he meets her on a dating site specifically for that. It’s hinted that some of his hang-ups are due to his father being somewhat intolerant, hence his being reluctant to come out as bisexual and as a rape victim, although his dad is pretty supportive, if rather prone to outbursts, when we see him on-screen. Donny eventually breaks down during a comedy show and admits to everything. The ending suggests that a lot of trauma remains, however. He tries to confront his abuser and is totally unable to stand up to him, and still remains obsessed with Martha despite not having heard anything from her in a long time. But then, I’m sure trauma like that never goes away just because you come to terms with it, even if that does help to an extent.

Ewoks: The Battle for Endor – I partially chose to watch this on Saturday as it was May the Fourth. Is the whole “May the Fourth be with you” thing older than I think it is, or just something that seems obvious in retrospect? I also watched two Bad Batch episodes earlier in the day, but I would have done that anyway. The follow-up to Caravan of Courage rather disturbingly starts by killing off all of the family that had been stranded on the moon of Endor, except for the girl Cindel, although I didn’t find it entirely clear that this was what happened. Only her father is shown, and he doesn’t die on-screen. I wonder if the other actors not wanting to return was part of why they decided to kill off the characters. Anyway, the killers are a bunch of ape-faced reptilians supported by a sorceress who can turn into a crow and cast illusions. This character seemed pretty typical of eighties children’s fantasy, but not so much of Star Wars. Anyway, Cindel and Wicket escape from the invaders and meet up with Noa Briqualon, a curmudgeonly old hermit who turns out to be much more soft-hearted than he appears. He’s played by Wilford Brimley, but he does not eat any oatmeal.

He also crash-landed on the moon, many years ago, along with a friend who was captured and killed. He and his companion Teek, who’s sort of like a monkey and a squirrel, join Cindel and Wicket in journeying to the enemy base to rescue the other Ewoks. Noa and Cindel then leave the moon on his repaired starship, promising to return to visit. It definitely went hard on the cuteness factor, but I thought it was pretty solid. I do wonder how Wicket was able to make a functioning hang glider so quickly out of spare parts.

Madam Lucifer, You Never Looked So Sane

Something About Eve: A Comedy of Fig-Leaves, by James Branch Cabell – The books in this series that I’ve read so far are pretty formulaic, usually about a somewhat sleazy guy who philosophizes a lot without doing much of anything, and has multiple women fall for him. This one largely follows the pattern, with a magician named Gerald Musgrave, who’s a descendant of Dom Manuel, but lives in the United States in the early nineteenth century instead of in Poictesme itself. A demon offers him the chance to separate from his body and go on a journey to the magical land of Antan, where he’ll take over the country from Freydis and the Master Philologist. And he declares himself a god pretty much just because he can, naming his horse after Kalki, the steed of the future avatar of Vishnu. Along the way, he runs into a bunch of women with names that are varieties on Eve, starting with his cousin Evelyn, and resists most of them. He ends up marrying a woman named Maya, who gives the two of them a son with magic, and the child goes on to destroy Antan. So he never gets there, but he finds contentment, and that the demon who had taken over his body had become a noted writer. During the course of his stay with Maya, he chats with Odysseus, King Solomon, Merlin, Ahasuerus the Wandering Jew, Yahweh, and Satan. I read this on Project Gutenberg, and it’s disappointing that it doesn’t include the Frank C. Pape illustrations, but I don’t know about the rights for those.

Mislaid in Parts Half-Known, by Seanan McGuire – Antsy, the protagonist of the previous book in the Wayward Children series, finds out that she has the power to find doors to other worlds. She journeys back to Shop Where Lost Things Go with her new classmates to sort things out there. There’s also a visit to another world inhabited by dinosaurs, where another human child has chosen to stay. There’s a lot of speculation how the doors actually work.

The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales, by Richard Garnett – The author was a librarian at the British Museum, and this is a collection of fantasy stories set in many different times and places, often taking cynical views on different religious traditions. They’re full of gods, demons, priests, and magicians. There’s a good amount of whimsy and satire, and while some of the stories didn’t really stick with me, there were definitely moments throughout that worked quite well. The titular tale has Prometheus being freed from his captivity by a young woman in the fourth century, and the two of them dealing with the new religion that’s become prominent in the area, and the Titan is made a Christian saint. “The Demon Pope” has a Pope trade places with the Devil, to the approval of the treacherous cardinals. In “The Claw,” a magician, Peter of Abano, reveals to a young man that he’s under an obligation to procure souls for the Devil, and these have included many members of the clergy. Peter was an actual thirteenth-century physician who was accused by the Inquisition of practicing magic. Also mentioned in two different stories is Michael Scot, a Scottish mathematician and astrologer who had an interest in the occult, and also eventually garnered a reputation as an evil magician. Whether the character from The Office was named after him, I couldn’t say. “Alexander the Ratcatcher” has Pope Alexander VIII hire a man to exterminate the rats in the Vatican, and he turns out to be his predecessor Alexander VI (otherwise known as Rodrigo Borgia), who has become the ratcatcher in Hell, and gets rid of the rodents in exchange for a better reputation. “The Rewards of Industry” follows the general structure of a tale about three brothers seeking their fortunes. In this case, they’re Chinese, sons of a mandarin, and the ones who spread knowledge of printing and gunpowder to the West are treated with contempt, while the one who’s obsessed with chess grows rich. In “Madam Lucifer,” the Devil falls in love with a widow, but will lose his reign over Hell if he leaves his wife. The description of Lucifer’s wife is amusing: “This lady’s black robe, dripping with blood, contrasted agreeably with her complexion of sulphurous yellow; the absence of hair was compensated by the exceptional length of her nails; she was a thousand million years old, and, but for her remarkable muscular vigour, looked every one of them.” Now that’s what I call a Dis track. “The Talisman” is a pretty funny one, in which a student wizard stops time, arousing the ire of a watchmakers, an almanac writer, and a meteorologist. In order to claim a talisman, the student has to swallow ninety-nine poisons, marry and divorce a salamander, become engaged to a vampire, and sacrifice his mother and sister to the infernal powers. In “The Bell of Saint Euschemon,” three saints bicker over which of their church bells is the most important, only to find out that their powers are actually caused by a demon. There’s a scene in it with the demon teaching the bell-ringer to play cards, and another with a bishop and a sorcerer playing off each other. And “The Poison Maid” is about a magician who raises his daughter to be incredibly toxic, but she meets her match in a prince who was brought up on a regimen of antidotes.

Fox Snare, by Yoon Ha Lee – The third book in the Thousand Worlds series alternates chapters between the perspectives of the protagonists of the other two, the fox Min and the tiger Sebin, who are both present on a mission to try to bring peace between the Thousand Worlds and the Sun Clans. They’re accompanied by a government official who’s also a fox spirit, but isn’t aware that any others of her kind still exist, and has her own agenda. The mixture of Korean mythology with a spacefaring society works well. This is billed as the final book, and as such, I feel like the ending wasn’t really as developed as it could have been; it didn’t feel final.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore

Once Upon a Time in Wonderland – I wrote a little bit about Once Upon a Time back when it was still pretty new, but I only recently got back to watching it. I’ve watched the first three seasons, and then this spinoff because I believe it aired after the third. Wonderland has been a part of the main show, but not a particularly major one, as it’s presented as a different world than the one with the Enchanted Forest. It’s mostly set in Wonderland, but with the general penchant for crossovers and characters from different stories being related in complicated ways, it’s no surprise that there’s a fair amount of that as well. One of the main characters, the Knave of Hearts, is also Will Scarlet from Robin Hood’s Merry Men. And in terms of villains…well.

He teams up with the Red Queen, who’s Will’s old girlfriend, and there’s a lot of back story for him as well. He’s revealed to be the illegitimate son of the Sultan of Agrabah, who tries to drown him after he tells this to the ruler, but he survives and learns sorcery to get revenge. There’s actually quite a bit from the Aladdin universe and its rules for genies, one of whom, Cyrus, falls in love with Alice. He’s also the son of Jafar’s former partner. Jafar and the Red Queen distrust each other so much that it’s surprising they started working together in the first place, but there’s a lot of people suddenly switching sides in general. I get the impression that they had to condense some intended character arcs.

The protagonist, now an adult, has been committed to a Victorian asylum, but Will breaks her out and brings her back to Wonderland with help from the White Rabbit, who is voiced by John Lithgow and has the ability to open portals between worlds.

Alice is quite resourceful, and Wonderland is very pretty and colorful, and contains such oddities as marshmallow quicksand, a forest that turns people into trees, a boiling sea, fire-breathing dragonflies, trees with floating bark, and a magical implement called a forget-me-knot. The familiar characters are generally less weird than in the source material: Tweedledum and Tweedledee are obedient servants in David Bowie makeup, Bill has become a human thief nicknamed Lizard, the Jabberwocky takes human form, and the White Knight only shows up to introduce a puzzle.

On the other hand, there’s also a giant Cheshire Cat and a mob boss Caterpillar voiced by Iggy Pop who kind of resembles Jabba the Hutt.

Speaking of Star Wars, the Sarlacc is mentioned in a book of monsters. And Grendel from Beowulf shows up at one point. Really, I think they could have made it weirder, but in terms of introducing political intrigue into a nonsense world, it worked a lot better than the Tim Burton film. By the way, if the Rabbit can tunnel to both Victorian England and Storybrooke, which didn’t exist until 1992, does that count as time travel, or is this a special case?

Psaving Psaro

Dragon Quest IV was pretty amazing when I played it on the NES, so I made sure to pick up a copy of the DS remake in 2008, after which I played through most of the game and then set it aside indefinitely. I have a habit of doing things like that. It might not be a bad idea to do a replay, but I have other things I want to do first. One addition to this version is that there’s a sixth chapter, accessible after you beat Psaro, although it doesn’t exactly follow it narratively. Instead, it reverts you back to your last save, but with some things changed, most notably a big fissure having opened at the altar in the Azimuth. I looked this up, and I’m not really sure how anyone could find it on their own without going back to every single town. It leads to a bonus dungeon that, like the ones in the Game Boy Advance Final Fantasy, has different environments on pretty much every floor, including some houses. At the bottom, you come across two guys called Chow Mein and Foo Young, who apparently spend most of their time arguing about chickens and eggs.

They’re not particularly antagonistic, but that doesn’t mean they hold back; it’s a pretty difficult battle. At least it lets you access your reserve characters in the wagon. During the fight, instead of the normal fight theme, it plays the casino music. Defeating these two allows a flower to grow on the World Tree, which only blooms once every thousand years, and can bring people back from types of death that normal spells or Yggdrasil Leaves cannot. You use it to resurrect Psaro’s girlfriend Rose, and she joins you to confront the villain in Nadiria (although she doesn’t fight in battles), convincing him to team up with you. Yes, this is the guy who murdered everyone in the hero’s home village, but these things can happen. He was already the first main villain in the series to have enough character development to be somewhat sympathetic. He hates humans, but that’s partially because they would try to torment Rose to get her to cry ruby teardops, and he seems to be respected among his monster followers and the animals he gave the power of speech. One of his top officers, Aamon, reveals when you fight him that he was responsible for Rose’s death, having disguised himself as a human to lead a party to kidnap her, so that he can goad Psaro into taking his place as a super-evolved supervillain.

The bonus content builds on this by having Aamon take over as ruler of the monsters and use the Secret of Evolution on himself, making him the official final boss.

He takes a similar form to Psaro, as everyone knows the ultimate goal of evolution is to turn into a giant creature with knee spikes and a face on your chest. He has fewer forms than Psaro, and doesn’t seem to be as powerful until the final one, but it’s mitigated by how you can’t access reserve members during this fight. Getting Psaro as a playable character is pretty cool, and he has access to some abilities that didn’t originally exist until later DQ games. The downside is that you really don’t have any dungeons to traverse after getting him, so you’re mostly just going to be using him for grinding. After beating Aamon, you go through the same basic ending as before. Psaro refuses to enter Zenithia, but the Zenith Dragon acknowledges his contribution anyway, and you see Psaro and Rose watching your balloon as you float over Rosehill. By the way, Aamon is named after a being from demonology, probably derived from the Egyptian god Amon, often depicted as a wolf with a snake tail.

The earlier English translation called him Radimvice, and in Japanese he’s just “Evil Priest.” In later appearances, his evolved form is called Ashtaroth, another traditional demon.

The other main addition to the DS version is the immigrant town, which is established in the desert where a bazaar is held in Chapter 2 by Hank Hoffman Jr., an innkeeper’s son who joins your party for a little while as an uncontrollable character. The town that develops over time is pretty common in RPGs, and one of them is part of the plot in DQ3. You can recruit people from various places in the world to live there, and residents include plays on Rocky and Adrian, Elvis, Marie Curie, and political philosopher Leo Strauss.

You find out over time that the site used to be the location of a country called Pioniria, ruled by a sultan who accidentally triggered a genie’s curse. The town eventually develops into a castle, and the sultan is restored.

The guy who came there specifically to be king doesn’t seem to mind this. For that matter, isn’t the desert part of Zamoksva? When the Tsar returns, what does he think of this restored kingdom showing up in his land? I’ve also read that you can get a cross-dressing version of Psaro to live there if you beat Chow Mein and Foo Young a few more times.

Once was enough for me, at least for the time being.

You Got Your Head on Backwards, Baby

Four movie reviews with SPOILERS.

Relic – When an old woman named Edna goes missing, her daughter Kay and granddaughter Sam visit her house to look for clues, and find everything covered in black mold. Edna reappears with no knowledge of ever having gone away, and acts in unpredictable ways, like giving Sam her ring and then accusing her of stealing it. The younger women manage to escape from Edna, but go back to tend to her, and Kay peels off her skin and lets her die. I wondered if that was a reference to some kind of folklore or mythology, but apparently it was supposed to represent her acceptance that Edna’s dementia had essentially made her someone different. It also turns out that Kay has a scar like the one she saw on her mother.

Hotline – This documentary from 2014 runs the gamut in terms of its titular topic, addressing everything from psychics to sex lines to suicide prevention. As such, it tends to jump around quite a bit, but there’s a general theme of how people have used hotlines to gain human connections, despite their usually impersonal nature. From the title, I was kind of more thinking of the hotlines from my childhood where you’d hear a recorded message and get an exorbitant phone bill (not that I ever called any of them), and those were mentioned, but the focus is more on ones where you talk to an actual person, even if they’re an actor.

Hellraiser (2022) – I feel that this remake tried to make the concept of a box that summons demons who torture people into something more complex, but didn’t entirely succeed. It’s a long movie, but it has a pretty small cast and not that much really happens. The plot centers around a recovering drug addict who’s led by a boyfriend she met in rehab to the puzzle box, and the Cenobites take her brother away. It’s eventually revealed that the whole thing is a setup by this one rich guy who had to sacrifice a certain number of people in order to be granted a request, which in his case was the typical pleasure that turned out not to be what he thought, but there are indications that the Cenobites can grant other requests as well. The puzzle doesn’t always remain as a box, but changes shape over time. It also has a knife on it, which seemed to be overkill to me; it doesn’t need to cut people to be sinister. I guess I appreciate that it tried to do something different, but I don’t think it really succeeded. I did find it interesting that the Pinhead character had a feminine voice, which is what Clive Barker said in the original story; but it’s weird that they’d include that one detail when it otherwise had very little to do with the source material. And it was kind of neat to see that the rich guy’s house incorporated some aspects of the box into its architecture.

The Vigil – Like Relic, this also involves an old widow with dementia, but otherwise it’s pretty different. It’s a very Jewish horror movie, about a guy named Yakov Ronen, who left the Hasidic community in Brooklyn after watching his brother die while escaping from some men on the street who were harassing him. He’s having trouble making money, and a guy from his old community offers to pay him for being a Shomer for the night, watching over the body of a Holocaust survivor who’d just died. While in the apartment, he’s haunted by strange visions and cryptic comments from the widow. He tries calling both his girlfriend and his therapist, but both conversations become bizarre. Yakov learns that the deceased was haunted by a Mazzik, a sort of demon that torments people. The idea that a Mazzik could be identified by its head being turned around backwards seems to be an invention of the movie, although it’s certainly the sort of thing that appears in a lot of stories about demons.

Zeromus Mission

Since I finally managed to beat Zeromus (and I was kind of surprised when I did), I suppose I should say some more about Final Fantasy IV. This was the second game in the series to be released in North America, and I actually played FF6 before it. Looking back now that we have access to the games in between, it’s interesting to see how it compares. It’s pretty straightforward, certainly more so than 1 or 2. It has a story it wants to tell, which means going through the plot points one at a time. There’s some room for exploration, but most of the time it’s one thing leading to another. Even after you’re able to go anywhere on the surface of the world, you find out there are new places to explore underground and on the Moon, but can’t until you’ve accomplished certain tasks. Who’s in your party is also decided for you, and their abilities are the same throughout. FF1 lets you choose which classes your party members are, and you can upgrade them as well. 2 has a set party, with one rotating member, and how the heroes increase abilities depends on what they do in battle. 3 lets you switch between different jobs. In 4, only Cecil is with you the whole time, and he’s the only one who changes jobs, in a manner similar to that in 1.

This is the first game where you can use a Paladin and an Engineer, but the other classes all appeared in previous games: Dark Knight, Dragoon, Summoner, White Mage, Black Mage, Sage, Bard, Monk, and Ninja. At any point in the game, you usually have a party that’s going to be able to handle the upcoming battles without too much trouble. 4 is also the first game in the series to really distinguish the characters’ personalities, although it does seem to gloss over certain elements that feel pretty significant, in order to move the plot along. You have the Elder of Mysidia basically saying, “You attacked our town, killed some residents, and stole our crystal, but you seem sorry, so go climb a mountain and all will be forgiven!”

And everyone is pretty much okay with Kain rejoining the party after betraying them on two separate occasions.

Maybe it was partially due to the translation, which was pretty sloppy on the Super Nintendo version, but it appears that key character motivations, particularly with Cecil and Kain, were kind of downplayed. There’s a mention of being a Dark Knight affecting Cecil’s well-being, but it doesn’t really come into the gameplay. Nor do I recall learning until somewhat later that Cecil was basically raised by King Baron, explaining why he’s so reluctant to disobey the monarch and why the people think he’s a good choice to be the next king. Kain’s jealousy of Cecil and love for Rosa also wasn’t as developed as it could have been, but maybe that’s partially because of Cecil being the viewpoint character. The game also loves to have characters appear to be dead and then reveal that they really aren’t, lessening the potential impact somewhat.

On the other hand, that’s mostly just with playable characters (only Tellah actually dies, and he’s still able to help you out against Zeromus), while pretty much everyone experiences other losses as well: Rydia’s mother and neighbors, Tellah’s daughter and Edward’s fiancee (the same person), and Edward’s and Edge’s parents; and Cecil and Kain were both orphaned before the events of the game. And a lot of them become kings at the end, although I don’t recall any preparation for Yang taking that position. The former King of Fabul just retires, rather than dying like most of the rest.

The plot of the game fits the general trend in this series to put in weird twists towards the end. That time loop in FF1 kind of comes out of nowhere, after all, and 3 has the whole thing with a separate world where time is frozen, or something like that.

Here, you find out that the hero and the villain are both sons of a magical being from space, that his species is originally from a planet between Mars and Jupiter that blew up, that they now live on the Moon, and that they introduced a lot of the more advanced technology on Earth. It’s several weird conspiracy theories combined into one.

The story behind the story, as you eventually find out, is that a guy living on the Moon wants to destroy all life on Earth and take over the planet, and while he’s imprisoned underground, he can still use mind control on a half-Lunarian guy called Golbez. So he gets the idea to gather the eight crystals together, so he can summon a giant robot to destroy everything. Was that Zemus’ entire plan? Yeah, it’s a powerful robot, and Zemus doesn’t have any way of knowing that someone can fly inside it and destroy its core, but is that one mech actually going to kill everyone on the planet? I can only assume this is because he made the plan when humans were still rare and primitive, and he hadn’t really been keeping up with their development. But that does raise the question as to how much Zemus planned himself and how much he left to Golbez. After all, the plan as it worked out not only involved stealing the crystals, but also infiltrating and control of the main military power in the world. Speaking of which, maybe this was also the original translation or my own mind, but I initially got the impression that, when you confront Cagnazzo, he’d only just started impersonating the King, and wasn’t very good at it.

But now I think the implication is that he’d actually been in that role since before the beginning of the game, and he was able to fool Cecil, who’d known him since childhood, for a while before finally having to reveal his monster turtle form.

Maybe the Fiend deserves more credit than I gave him. On the other hand, the real King was presumably already beefing up the military and employing Dark Knights before the takeover. And after his death, he haunts the basement and is possessed by the Eidolon Odin, and I’m not entirely sure how that works.

I do find it interesting that someone in Troia worries that the country will become a wasteland without the Crystal of Earth, which suggests that these gems have terraforming powers that seem way more impressive than the Giant of Babil, but we don’t really know how they work. It is a theme in these early FF games that the crystals are required to maintain the balance of the world.

Another thing I’ve seen about the story of FF4 is that your party is always one step behind, never able to stop Golbez from taking the crystals even when they are able to figure out his next move ahead of time. I was always a little annoyed at how you have no choice but to give Golbez the Earth Crystal when there’s no reason to trust him, but I suppose it is Cecil’s only chance of getting Rosa back alive.

Then there’s the sequence where you defeat Golbez, but his disembodied arm is still able to grab the crystal. Maybe nobody could have actually prevented that, but it doesn’t seem entirely fair.

I didn’t experiment with any of the extra stuff the Advance version added in, specifically the ability to change party members after defeating the Giant of Babil and the new dungeon that opens on the Moon after beating Zeromus. By that point, I was anxious to move on to something new. I am wondering if I should revisit FF5, which I also stopped playing years ago when I couldn’t beat the final boss, but that might be a little more difficult to pick up again.

Yarthly Matters

The First Kothar the Barbarian Megapack, by Gardner F. Fox – This collects three different volumes, Kothar: Barbarian Swordsman (itself originally published as three short stories), Kothar of the Magic Sword, and Kothar and the Demon Queen. The author is probably best known for his work in comics, and I realized when looking at my tags that I’d read some of his Silver Age Justice League of America stories. These tales of Kothar, barbarian warrior from the northern country of Cumberia, are pretty derivative and formulaic, but still fun. Kothar receives the magic sword Frostfire from the undead wizard Afgorkon, the inspiration for the Lich in Dungeons & Dragons and other fantasy. Owning the sword means he will never be able to have other significant possessions, despite how many fabulous treasures he finds, but he prefers the weapon. He has a recurring enemy in the sorceress Red Lori, with whom he has a weird love-hate relationship, and even teams up with her at one point. The barbarian faces the usual contingent of wizards, monsters, and demons, generally coming out none the worse for wear. One conceit of these stories is that, rather than taking place in an imaginary distant past, Kothar’s planet of Yarth is instead a remnant of an intergalactic civilization that died out, not that this really comes into the plots.

Voyages to the Moon and the Sun, by Cyrano de Bergerac – I’m not sure that, until recently, I realized Cyrano was, like, a real person, and not just a character in a play. But he was, and, among other things, he wrote these two tales that are often published together, although they don’t appear on Project Gutenberg that way. Moon starts out amusingly nonsensical, with the author attempting to reach the satellite by means of evaporating dew, but ending up in Canada instead. He actually gets to the Moon with a machine powered by fireworks, and finds out that the Garden of Eden and Elijah are there, as are four-legged people who communicate through music. Much of the rest of it is a mix of philosophy and satire, and despite the silliness, Cyrano seems to have had a better idea of the layout of the solar system than many of his fellows. The second book begins with some commentary on the first, much like the second part of Don Quixote, with the narrator being accused of heresy (in real life, neither book was published until after Cyrano’s death) and escaping into space in a glass box powered by sunbeams. He finds that the Sun is also inhabited by shapeshifting people and mythical creatures. It’s also the home to a court of birds who put Cyrano on trial because he’s human. He also hangs out with the Italian philosopher Tommaso Camapanella, who’s presumably there because he wrote a utopian dialogue called The City of the Sun.

The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps, by Edward Brooke-Hitching – By the same author as The Madman’s Library, this is also a book of trivia, specifically regarding unreal places that have appeared on maps, many of them included in the volume. Some are purely legendary, while others are the result of hoaxes or wishful thinking. Some were simply misidentifications or phantoms. European attempts to fill in unknown territory in places like the Americas and Africa often come into play, the search for the Northwest Passage showing up pretty often, and the Mountains of Kong being an assumed range that supposedly ran all the way across northern Africa, while the Mountains of the Moon were the imagined source of the Nile. There’s also mention of the proposed southern supercontinent to balance out the land in the Northern Hemisphere, including both what turned out to be Australia and Antarctica. Antillia,Atlantis, El Dorado, Lemuria, Prester John’s Kingdom, St. Brendan’s Island, and Wak-Wak with its human head tree are all here. So is the Garden of Eden, often marked on maps due to the tantalizing mentions in Genesis of actual rivers being nearby. The circular Hy Brasil, not etymologically related to the South American country, which was often said to sink for periods of seven years.

The book notes that later maps actually made the location more specific than older ones, which is pretty uncommon. Another mythical island that made the rounds for a long time was Thule, thought of as the northernmost island in the world, first mentioned by a Greek explorer in the fourth century BCE. There are also some brief diversions to discuss creatures that appear on Olaus Magnus’ Carta Marina and Michael Wolgemut and Wilhelm Pleydenwurff’s Nuremberg Chronicle Map, including Cynocephali and Arimaspoi.