Outsmrted!

I've had this one discussion about the arts many times over the years which never goes away. I'm not sure how common it is among other groups, but among mine they became more than sick with discussing one of my issues in particular.

I can deal with subpar content. I can abide by bad faith actors or overambitious flops. I can even stomach liars who consistently promise endlessly climbable tall mountains only to deliver a post-apocalyptic crater of pure garbage instead. Artists and entertainers are a varied lot.

But one group of content creators always manages to push the wrong buttons. This would be those artists who cannot avoid cramming in their hamfisted views of the world into every single thing they do. And not just any hamfisted view. This is about those who have found the secret of life, the universe, and everything, and are going to tell the uneducated rubes what billions of people across the world and throughout history haven't yet figured out. This is about the truly smrt people.

And, yes, that spelling is intentional. This is about a very specific group of people.

Mecha and space pirate author Brian Niemeier describes the game in a recent post:

"Here's how the trick works. The Smrt author presents himself as a sort of Gnostic oracle who's got the dirt on some formerly sacred Western tradition. He doesn't break the fourth wall and make these claims overtly. Instead he establishes his credentials by portraying the skeptics attacking the fable as cool, informed characters the reader wants to emulate. At the same time, those who cling to traditional Western beliefs are mocked as credulous--often violent--dupes. The Smrt author carefully frames the window of allowable debate in his world to exclude any compelling arguments for the defense. 

"Skilled Smrt authors will introduce some last-minute ambiguity to allow the rubes some wiggle room. This conceit is just a sugar to coat the poison pill. It's usually presented as an afterthought, and often for a laugh. The story's main impression remains: The reader has joined the cool kids who know the truth behind the fairy tales."

I'm sure you've seen plenty of stories following this very predictable formula. The recent Castlevania Netflix show does exactly this. Dishonest characterization, ahistorical examples to tar certain groups, and hack one dimensional characters, are used to warp the story in the fashion the writer wants. This is done to send a message, and it's wrapped in shiny plastic coating to distract from it.

This is inherently dishonest storytelling.

Why the dishonesty, you might ask. Is it a pathetic cry for attention? Losers in life striking back at what they're too smrt to grasp? It could be any number of things, but it's motivated by ego.

People have an inherent desire to have something over others. Riches, knowledge, virtue. This is Pride. It has ruined many otherwise solid pieces of art. The temptation to use a large platform for yourself instead of for your customers is tempting, but it remains a purely selfish act to weaponize storytelling.

Art is made to connect with the audience. It is an equal exchange between the artist and the customer to exchange product with compensation. But here's the key. No one is going to be paid to be told they are horrible and everything they believe is a lie, because nobody is that stupid. But what if you give it a candy-coating and color the pill so that a casual observer is none the wiser? In this way the smrt artist can slip it in unnoticed.

But it's not just the West that suffers from this.

See Japan and religion in the '90s. So many games and anime were made about an enlightened secular modernist main character that preaches ideas completely out of joint with the setting about their post-modern ideas of God and those following thousands of years of tradition. Stop me if you've played a JRPG in the 90s, because you know the drill.

"Good and evil are both illusions! Now let's destroy both evil ideas so us good people can rule."

This is literally the same muddled, and intellectually bankrupt, theme in so many stories that would otherwise be fantastic. It's all about attacking tradition and wonder which are intrinsic to fantasy. But for near a decade you would get the same tired points.

In some case, like Grandia 2, it makes an already pedestrian plot feel embarrassing. A wandering warrior learns that the "devil" is sympathetic and the "god" is no real god at all. In fact, this means all gods and religions are bad because of this incident. You even get many characters delivering speeches about this as if any of that actually follows. All this in the middle of a bunch of tired anime tropes and plot moves that were already played out by 1999. But it gets sillier.

In Lunar: Silver Star Story, it's not even sensical. The party spends the whole game endowed by magic and relics given by the goddess in order to fight the evil wizard. But, you see, the wizard did all this evil because man is so terrible they need a god to rule over them. Since the goddess power is what stopped the villain before the start of the current story, his point actually does make sense. Without the goddess that villain would not have been stopped.

But the wizard is proclaimed as in the wrong via a very shallow argument. The heroes' respond that they don't need gods at all anymore because they're grown so much and humans are above that old superstition and nonsense. This despite the very common knowledge that the goddess power was needed to save the world in the first place from a different evil before the game began. By the way, the party touches the goddess statue to refill their health, remove poison and ailments, and recover magic throughout the entire game. For free. All magic and artifacts were also created by her. But these heroes don't need gods, even though the quest would have been impossible to complete otherwise! The goddess in question only created a world on a moon with flying magic cities, mystical dragons, and wondrous creatures, but sure take that away to prop up a modern world completely devoid of magic where an overly congested metropolis with high suicide rates and unending media addiction is the ideal universe. The fantasy game actually argues that fantasy is bad for you.

An entire line of magical dragonmasters is wiped out because they're not needed anymore. In a fantasy world where evil can rise up at any time and observably has.

It takes a smrt kind of person to structure a theme like this, but here we are.

And I didn't even get into the last two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion where the plot is forgotten for full blown propaganda for moral relativism and the writer teaching the audience the secrets of the universe. That wasn't otherwise a smrt show, just a solid and entertaining one. But that ending is among the worst.

You might have noticed a theme with smrt stories. They tend to make the writer look arrogant in their attempt to teach a point, and if you dig deep enough they end up contradicting the work in the process. It's always been in fiction to some extent, but entropy is real. What was once chest congestion has morphed into a full blown flu.

Audiences don't really want it anymore. You can see that in how more customers are choosing to spend their money as the years pass. Industries are dying, long-running franchises are being sucked dry and left as husks on the side of the road, and meanwhile the audience only becomes more and more fractured.

Soon there won't be anyone left to look their way. The art gallery, concert hall, and movie theaters: all empty.

So the end result of trying to lecture the audience has ended in them waking away instead of stopping to listen to those peddling poison. You can call it an own-goal. It doesn't get more laughable than that. I guess you could say it is the ultimate smrt move.

And that kind of special smrtness deserves a special song. (Lyrics included below!)

*WARNING: High dosage of Rock inside!*

Outsmarted!

I used to be the kid who always got caught

I used to be the one who never let thought

Interact one bit with intellectual shit, diversity and wit!

You used to be the kid who waited in line

For an opportunity to waste away time

Trying to be so cool, but no suspicion, no clue

You've been...

Outsmarted!

I'm selling you for scrap!

Now I'm the kid who put the shit back in place

And I'm the one who threw it back in your face

It took a bit of intellectual shit, diversity and wit!

Now you're the kid who put the "L" back in Lame

And you're the one who always fitted the frame

Still such a fool! No suspicion, no clue

You've been...

Outsmarted!

I'm selling you for scrap!

You're outsmarted! Yeah!

That's what I said! Yeah!

Only throwing back what you've been putting in my face!

Outsmarted!

I'm selling you for scrap!

And in other news the print version of DimensionBucket Magazine should be available on amazon soon enough. I'll post when the date becomes known. Until then you can try out the digital version of it here. There's also the very exciting action adventure StoryHack magazine which has some of the most fun fiction you'll read today. I'm in issue #3!