I think Zevin made some very salient points. Here is my only point on why this drama over the Dante redesign doesn’t matter.
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Personas are tricky things, aren’t they? You need a high enough social link to unlock more possible fusions, but even then you spend hours re-rolling in order to get the exact combination of skills you want. Know what else is tricky? Talking about Internet celebrity personas.
Okay, I got Repel Light, but I still need Bufudyne since I dropped Chie from my team…
See, the easy way to deflect criticism for anything you say is to have a ‘persona’. The correct way is to admit fault, but why would you want to do that? Let an offensive comment slip? Didn’t do your research? Just pull the ‘persona’ card! Take Man Child Messiah’s favorite whipping boy, Linkara, for example. Lewis (who goes by Linkara, funnily enough) likes to pull the ‘persona’ card whenever somebody notices a mistake in his video. He’s claimed that his supposed fictional version of Linkara is far more arrogant than he is, which makes absolutely no sense if you’ve watched any AT4W video ever.
Any episode of Atop the Fourth Wall contains a bad reading of the comic with the occasional quip from Lewis. Think MST3K but with comics and no humor. Compare this to, say, The Jimqusition on The Escapist. Jim Sterling’s on-screen persona (because the Jim who does the voiceover work is obviously vanilla Jim…which is admittedly pretty weird) is exactly what you’d expect a persona to be. I mean, in one of the episode tags, ‘Jim’ asks to be worshipped akin to a deity.
Just look at this guy. Lectern, sunglasses indoors, giant chainsword, it’s just so obvious that he’s a parody!
The supposed Linkara persona does nothing of the sort. Watch a random AT4W (a name I still don’t understand) and then watch a Linkara Vlog. We can play a game of Spot the Difference! All you need to do is find the parts where Linkara acts differently than Lewis! Spoilers: there aren’t any. Angry Joe is another ‘character’ that I’m suspicious of. Joe Vargas and his irritated counterpart don’t seem to have any noticeable differences in character or beliefs. Joe Vargas is fairly angry himself, and Angry Joe complains about the same things that Vargas hates. These characters are almost completely indiscernible from their real-life counterparts. Sure, Linkara occasionally fights copyright law by dueling Pyramid Head or something, but those are situations, not character elements. I’m sure the Linkara character acts similar to how Lewis imagines he would perform in such a situation.
Blatant lies.
Now, reviewer personas aren’t inherently bad. The Mr. Plinkett character allows for entertaining asides in the midst of insightful commentary. Plinkett and Mike Stolaska (one of the three guys most commonly associated with Red Letter Media and the mastermind behind the Plinkett reviews) certainly share views, yes, but Plinkett is a 100-year old psychopath. Take a piece from his Phantom Menace review, for example. After an excellent bit about how expanded universe stuff doesn’t make plot holes irrelevant, we cut to Plinkett’s creepy basement, complete with bones and a tied-up hooker. I somewhat doubt Stolaska’s basement contains similar horrors.
It’s not really that hard to put together a successful reviewer persona. You can go the Jimqusition route and have an exaggerated self-parody, or you can explore the Plinkett road and create a totally unrelated character that shares the same views. If your persona acts like you and thinks like you, then aforementioned persona is you and falls under the self-insert banner. And god knows Linkara would never make anything with a self-insert character.
But we’ll get to that…
Something you guys should know about me out of the gate is that I’m a big fan of Mike Stolaska and Jay Bauman; better known on the internet as Red Letter Media. The Plinkett Reviews (that 90-minute Phantom Menace review, for those of you who might not know the names involved) are basically film classes mixed in with pitch-black humor, their B-movies are great fun, and Half in the Bag allows them to just talk about movies as themselves. I usually look down on critics putting storylines in their reviews, but the Red Letter Media guys make their stories work. They can be subtle/in the background (like Plinkett’s wives in the Star Trek reviews) or in the foreground (like Nadine). When looking at review stories, you should consider how to factor them into the review first and foremost, but it’s also important to make sure that you’re writing a good story. Here are some of the factors that I think are necessary when a critic gets the filmmaker itch and is too lazy to write some original damn stories.
Fuck movies!
1. The people behind these reviews and the storylines attached are actual filmmakers.
Now, I’m not asking for all critics to be professional filmmakers or game designers. There are many great writers who haven’t taken forays into the medium they criticize. However, I’m not saying that it doesn’t help. Mike and Jay obviously have a better understanding of movies and how they work than, say, the guys from Screened or even myself. And don’t get me wrong; I love pre-BermanBraun Screened. Alex Navarro and Matt Rorie do great work. But they don’t have a filmmaking background. And that’s necessary when making your review plotlines entertaining.
Since Mike and Jay know what they’re doing, everything is shot very well, the dialogue flows, and the acting is either intentionally campy or pretty damn great.
2. There’s context for these plotlines that isn’t just “Hey, isn’t it funny that this character is interacting with the reviewer now?”
We’ll get to The Man in a Black Cloak Who isn’t a Registered Trademark of Lucasfilm (“Ahh, I see you know my name.”) later. What the Plinkett and Half in the Bag reviews have in common is their respective overarching plots are original material. Nadine wasn’t in the Star Wars prequels; she’s there because Plinkett is a psychopath who keeps hookers locked up in his basement. And I’m fairly sure The Avengers were never homeless VCR repairmen. Elements related to the movie of the day make occasional appearances, like George Lucas trying to kill the Half in the Bag crew during their The People VS George Lucas review, or a parody of Jack and Jill after the titular Half in the Bag review, but it’s never to the point where you see Mike and Jay becoming Power Rangers and fighting Pyramid Head or something. Because that would be copyright infringement. And we can’t have that.
I hope they serve pizza rolls in Hell.
3. Originality
All I’m going to say about this one is that you don’t see Mr. Plinkett fighting Admiral Bonetopick and his Nefarious Creature or some other generic name like that. When copyrighted characters show up, they’re played for laughs. Other than that, the characters seem to be RedLetterMedia-created.
Did you figure out where this is going after that last comment? Yeah, I’m talking about Linkara and his review “stories”.
Here, we see an example of Linkara’s Spoony envy.
I don’t know much about comics. That’s just not my division. From what I’ve heard, Linkara doesn’t seem to know much about comics. (Not to make my Whiskey Media boner too prominent, but that’s what we have Comic Vine for). No, I’m here to talk about the absolutely terrible storylines Linkara cooks up. We’re going to look at his “work” through the lens of the 3 criteria I listed earlier in this article. Of course, the stories are fairly bad on their own and refuse to die (coincidentally like the bloated continuity of modern comics), but let’s see if we can point down why they failed. I think the criteria I listed earlier could help unravel this mystery. Let’s start with…
1. The people behind these reviews and the storylines attached are actual filmmakers.
NOPE
Linkara is just not a professional actor, director, or literally anything else required to make a good short film or series (since that’s basically what these things are). He’s either doing these things alone or with his girlfriend/family (also not professionals), so the camera angles are usually flat, the acting has the consistency of paper, and the fight scenes lie squarely in the second dimension.
2. There’s context for these plotlines that isn’t just “Hey, isn’t it funny that this character is interacting with the reviewer now?”
NEIN
Let me ask you a simple question: What does Mechakara or Lord Vyce have to do with what the audience knows about Linkara or the world around him? Lord Vyce comes out of nowhere, with a motivation that comes out of nowhere. There’s really no context in the reviews either that doesn’t involve direct copyright infringement, which I’ll get to later. Why is Linkara in Silent Hill and why is he fighting Pyramid Head? Because Linkara is reviewing a Silent Hill comic. That’s it. When The Man in a Black Cloak showed up, it was to parody how the Emperor in Star Wars would manipulate characters with little to no resistance as well as the Vader scene in Revenge of the Sith. The character was played for laughs in a comedic review. Pyramid Head in Linkara’s first Silent Hill review is a serious character for the most part. He exists only for a fight scene.
3. Originality
ABSOLUTELY NOT
I recall doing something similar when I was 9.
You can kiss this one good-bye from the outset, and not just for the Pyramid Head example. During a Power Rangers Zeo comic review, Linkara becomes a Power Ranger. Not a parody of a Power Ranger, as one might hope. A Power Ranger in all but name: morphing sequence, colored suit, even a Megazord.
That’s just on the copyright infringement side. Linkara’s “original” characters might as well have watermarks on them. There Lord Vyce, who is perhaps the most poorly named villain since Darth Maul. Vyce is running from “The Entity”, which is saddled with an equally unfortunate title. (Also, “Judas Liz”? Really?) I stopped watching around that point, but apparently “The Entity” turns out to be infamous Pokemon glitch MissingNo. You gotta be fucking kidding me. We’re back to copyright infringement again?
Why am I even explaining this? Review stories should be either entertaining (Nadine) or seamless (Plinkett’s wives). Linkara’s stories are neither, having the extra problem of being saddled to a guy who abandoned comedic timing a long time ago and who refuses to change up his formula at all. I’m going to go weep over Whiskey Media’s demise. You guys have fun, and watch out for Captain Imabadguy and The Mysterious Big Bad Character.
