The Concrete Tomb of Hradzka

On Twitter, and Tumblr, Gail Simone has called for attention to be paid to the Arkh Project. This turns out to be a Twitter account ( http://www.twitter.com/@thearkhproject ) and a Tumblr ( http://thearkhproject.tumblr.com ) and (of course) an IndieGoGo fundraising page that looks a lot like but is not a Kickstarter ( http://www.indiegogo.com/The-Arkh-Project ) for a proposed fantasy video game. As for why Gail Simone was calling attention to it, the reason is in their FAQ:

This game is not the game to watch if you would like to see a lot of cis straight white characters. This game isn’t the one to play if you want to see one or two queer people or one or two brown people to spice up the variety.

Those games exist already. For the latter, many companies are coming out with the resident token brown person, the resident token queer.

The point of this game is to show that we’re tired of being tokens. We want to be the main characters, the supporting characters, the focus. This story is about the marginalized, the fetishized, and the tokenized.

This got my attention. Because I know a lot of people who REALLY VERY MUCH WOULD WANT something like this, or at least would be very happy to know it was out there. I'd be very curious to see what the reception and sales of such a game would be like, and how such a game would affect the marketplace, but being a straight white guy who doesn't play much in the way of video games, I am not the target audience. Still, I know that hunger is there. So my first thought was of all the people I knew who would be happy about this.

My second thought was of DUDEBRO II.

I've posted about DUDEBRO II before. In December 2009, on the NeoGAF forums, one member confessed to having rented Imagine: Babyz Fashion, and finding it a really enjoyable gaming experience. Gaming forums being what they are, his masculinity and sexuality were immediately impugned, to which he replied, "So, I'm a pedophile because I don't want to play Dudebro, My Shit is Fucked Up So I Got to Shoot/Slice You II: It's Straight-Up Dawg Time?" Immediately, of course, everybody on the forum realized that what they wanted more than anything in life was *to actually play just such a game.*

And so it began: they photoshopped box art, wrote cut scenes, designed characters, started programming, and began to make it as a freeware top-down shooter.

I checked on the Dudebro folks intermittently for a while. They had a lot of talented people working on that project. Really talented. Great character design, appallingly sophomoric macho humor, and horrible, horrible puns, straightforward action concept.

And it's been vaporware since 2009.

So I thought, "Wait a minute. Can the Arkh Project people actually do this?"

And then I started Googling, and things began to get squirrelly.

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Originally posted on my DW. | people have commented there. | Do so yourself, if you like.

I asked for a bunch of gen recs because I wanted to see what folks were reading, and liked. I also wanted to see what people thought of as being major categories of gen. I was very curious to see what the categories would wind up being; I'm very much a casefic kind of guy, myself, and fandom has gotten so huge that there are large parts of it I really know almost nothing about. So I wondered if folks would list types of genfic I wouldn't know.

What I didn't expect was to find surprising differences among people about what they see as gen. Betty recommended the NC-17 slashfest "All the Stars Look Down," which I am never going to stop poking gentle fun of her for (and some quite good ones that were gen, but I didn't know the fandoms and the one that I thought best worked was the MENTALIST one), and watersword recommended Life in the Twenty-First Century," which doesn't come off as gen at all to me because it's so much about a character puzzling out his sexual identity. It's interesting to see these differences of opinion. I think it's a reflection of fandom getting slashier and more sexual (and more ideological, as well); a surprising amount of stuff that doesn't focus on details of characters getting laid goes into how characters *feel* about sex.

Some other recs are gen to me, but not the stuff that sets me alight. resolute recommended the Vorkosigan story Domestic Affairs, which is a fine example of a gen story that includes a romantic relationship, but it's not the thing I crave. By contrast, the Chalion story A Clear Glass Window, At a Sea Dawn is pretty borderline; it has a sex scene but the focus is clearly on one person's reaction to it rather than a relationship developing from it. So it's an interesting tightly-focused bit of genslash, or slashy gen. The stuff I tend to go nuts over is stories like Swamp-Adder's rec of The Bloody Revenge of Jefferson Hope, by qikiqtarjuaq, which is basically *exactly* the kind of thing I was looking for. I'll keep going through the recs and reading various things.

Curious note: the I SPY fic that was recced there is quite good. It's only the second in that fandom I've run across, and I liked the other as well. Hmmm.

Going back to the ideological fanfic: it's becoming much more common of late, and it's interesting to see that the flaws are changing. I recall occasional ideological fics in years gone by, and when they fell short it was usually because they were didactic and preachy, like bad STAR TREK episodes. You still get some of those, but what I find more interesting these days are the folks who use their stories to try to unpack the proverbial invisible knapsack, or create a characters-of-color-heavy universe, and err on the side of identifying their characters with the authors' and the presumed audience's own progressive views. "The Third Student," a very well-done classic Holmes story, is a great example of this; it takes up a Holmes adventure from the perspective of a marginalized minority character, an Indian student, but then it goes past this by making the student a keen and sympathetic observer of the tortured English homosexuals around him. I think I would have found the story more convincing if the main character had *not* been so enlightened. (N.K. Jemisin does something similar in her wonderful original story "The Effluent Engine," which is a great caper in which 19th-century Haiti has not only advanced steampunk technology, but widespread gay marriage.)

Another question: from what I've seen, the vast majority of RPF appears to be slash. RPF fans: is there gen? What is it like? What kind of fandoms is it in? Actors, athletes, musicians, what?

The categories I've seen in the discussion so far that I think really are common tropes are casefic, character study, fix-it fic, inverse, curtainfic, AU, and toy-breaking. Do these pop up in RPF gen?

Originally posted on my DW. | people have commented there. | Do so yourself, if you like.