Extra Punctuation: Manly Vs. Macho in Gears

[ironlordthemad]

OK for what has too be the hundredth time on these forums, I'm going to point at the Gears of War novels by Karen Travis and say that "If you want to realy see whats going on under the hood of some of the best known characters in video gaming, read these books."

It will explain why marcus has the mental capacities of a 12 year old.
It will explain why he is distant, even too those he loves most.

Hats of too Therumancer for sticking up for a good set of video games with logic and reasoning rather than just jumping on the "GRRRR I AM MARCUS FENIX AN ANGRY ROBOT!" bandwagon.

Quick question, did anyone see the final scene in Gears of War 3?
Seriously anyone?
You know that bit where it all hits Marcus and he takes off his armour for the first time (metaphorically and physically) since we knew him as a video game character and we realise just how deeply unwell he is a a person?
Nah just me then.

Or did you miss it in Gears of War 2 where he shows concern for the love of his life, the woman he hasn't made a move on because it would get in the way and just complicate things?

How many of you have realised that the ENTIRE point of Marcus Fenix is just plain and simple: you wont see much of him as a person, he raises his shields around himself so he doesn't get hurt, but when something hits home, when something realy hurts, you see it and you realise how hard he has to work to keep himself protected because he is so weak?

"Read the books" is never an excuse for the game failing to characterise him properly. That excuse would not slide in a movie, a play, or any other form of medium.

The games haven't failed to portray their characters, people have just failed to pick up on what the character are.

Just because your jaded by 17 years of war doesn't mean you aren't a character.

 

[Shamanic Rhythm]

The games haven't failed to portray their characters, people have just failed to pick up on what the character are.

Just because your jaded by 17 years of war doesn't mean you aren't a character.

Yeah, he is a character. A shitty one.

It's slightly ridiculous to claim that Marcus Fenix's hypermasculine attitude is the result of him being 'jaded' by constant war. Jaded people are normally characterised as pessimists or at the very least, cynical realists. Fenix makes absolutely no sense because he is snarky to his superiors and carries out their orders with disdain, but he reacts to everything else with the same psychotic machoism that people drill into elite soldiers to make them unthinking killing machines. The two are completely incongruous.

This is not rocket science: people have been creating very evocative soldier characters for years, especially ones who are 'jaded'. Captain Willard from Apocalypse Now is a better example of 'jaded'. Elias from Platoon is a better example of 'jaded'. Heck, even Arnie's character in Predator is a better example of 'jaded'. Marcus Fenix can only be described as a parody that takes itself seriously; completely and thoroughly oxymoronical.

 

[KilloZapit]

Sometimes it bugs me how often Yahtzee can give biting insights, and other times he can miss a huge amount of the point almost entirely. Sometimes I thing he's just sounding off for the sake of sounding off.

I'm not a huge "Gears Of War" fan, but understand that we're dealing with characters who are career military, and a protaganist who is a hardened veteran before the game even starts, and has also done a fairly notable stint in a military prison.

Military training by it's very nature is supposed to strip away most signs of emotion and individuality, the idea being to replace everything you are with something better... well better in the context of killing people and breaking things in pursuit of a goal someone else decides on. Soldiers who recognize the enemy as having valid points of view, or being regular people with lives and families are kind of useless in reality. All arguements about politics and morality, when your fighting to win soldiers who pause to contemplate the inhumanity of war and what they are doing to their enemy in the midst of a battle can't do the job. The last thing you need is for the guy standing there protecting you to pause and go "OMG, I can't kill this poor unfortunate" while that guy proceeds to kill him and then turns around and massacres you and your entire civilization.

We could sit here and argue about the morality of this entire thing, and the nessecity of it, but I doubt I could do a better job of explaining it and WHY it's needed anymore than say Heinlan's "Starship Troopers".

When looking at a game featuring the military, especially characters who are supposed to be experienced veterans... yes, they are going to be fairly uniform. That's actually good writing since this is what the system produces. Take one of those guys, toss him into a military prison where emotion is a weakness (prison can be very dehumanizing on people who want to survive it, especially military prison), and then toss him back out into an apocolyptic war... and yeah... Marcus Fenix is pretty much what your going to get. If he was any other way it would actually have been bad writing given the backround which ties into the entire thing.... and this is a defense being made by someone who doesn't paticularly like the game in question.

Simply put the whole "Macho" attitude we see here, is kind of realistic for the kinds of characters we tend to deal with. In general people have differant mechanisms for turning out that way. Joking about everything and becoming a sort of macabre clown who takes nothing seriously while doing their job with lethal precisian, or becoming the aloof "Marcus Fenix" type are both very typical ways of dealing with this kind of life.


As far as cutting down bad guys who have legitimate points of view and/or justifications for what they are doing, that's pretty much reality. In general nobody wakes up and decides "we're going to be really evil today just for the heck of it" everything happens for a reason. Of course the Locust/Chimera/Muslims/Whatever have legitimate reasons for doing what they are doing from their own perspective, some of which might even seem fairly reasonable to the other side, if they didn't there wouldn't be a massive scale war. This is incidently exactly WHY you dehumanize your soldiers and strip away a lot of their empathy. In the end pretty much all wars come down to "us or them", "my side, and their side", the bad guy and the good guy are all matters of point of view, and when it's come down to a war only one side is going to be left functioning, and that's the side that gets to record history.

A situation where a bad guy goes off about how legitimate their cause is and then gets cut down by some grunting soldier who might have a personal vendetta is pretty much a summary of war in a nutshell. In the end the point of view of the loser doesn't matter, it's all about who wins.... and in "Gears Of War" it is very much an "us or them" type situation no matter who might have the overall moral high ground when you scrape all the muck away.

Honestly from what I know of the series "Gears Of War" set out to make a sort of commentary on the nature of war, and really from the plot points I've seen it's done a fairly good job of making the points it set out to do. Marcus Fenix might be stereotypical to some extent, but I suspect that's kind of the point, as is the simple point that once a war breaks out
the reasons behind it no longer matter, with it being the job of a soldier to end the war favorably for their side or die trying.

But then again, the realities of war have never really sat well with the left wing regardless of what name it uses in a given country.

All that may be true to a extent. People can break under pressure or become jaded or dysfunctional. War does more or less boil down to us or them, not right or wrong. And soldiers can probably act exactly like Marcus Fenix in that situation. But that still doesn't make him a good character or the story a good story. A character who fails to grow or have any redeeming qualities is a bad character. Having a huge grey on grey morality war staring absolutely no one who can be sympathized with is bad writing. A attempt at commentary on something that offers both nothing we haven't seen before a million times, and no outside viewpoint that we might be expected to sympathize, is a bad commentary (if it even is a commentary at all, which I am doubtful).

Furthermore, this is all a worse case scenario situation engineered from the start to provide as much drama as possible while at the same time failing to actually address any problems. Most wars are not fought by two genocidal enemies who's only goal or choice is the complete annihilation of the other. Most soldiers in command are not put through military prison and years of combat until they turn into macho retards, and those that are often end up too unstable to be trusted. And the story offers no salutation to any of the problems it has brought up. Yeah, yeah, war is hell. Duh. So? What can we do about it? What is the cause of it? Does this, or Starship Troopers, or any other over-glorified story of macho pissing contests with random aliens for vaguely explained reasons, try to offer anything other then an excuse for a story where people commit acts of violence?

And really, I don't say this because I refuse to accept "the realities of war", I say this because "the realities of war" are just not interesting to me. A lot of the strategy and logistics are interesting, a lot of the human drama of those effected by it is interesting, and people struggling for what they believe in is interesting. But emotionally jaded soldiers fighting for no reason then because there is an enemy in front of them isn't. Maybe it's sort of realistic, but it's not any more interesting then watching a bored office worker type up a word document. It's just a guy doing his job, only with more guns.