Say, whatever happened to the little girl? - The Uncanny Valley: Dragonbored

So like the title says, I watched Dragonbored, the first skit in Channel Awesome’s 5^th-year anniversary anthology, The Uncanny Valley. This assumes you’ve seen it, so yeah, spoilers. Overall, it was a good look at how we distract ourselves with things like fantasy and video games (and fantasy video games) to escape the tedium of our everyday lives and how it can lead us to forget what the real world can offer. Barbarian (I forget everyone’s names) had a point – “this world has so much to offer and yet you treat it like a burden.” We live in an age where so much of the world is so easily accessible in one form or another, so many different people, places, and ideas are there to be met and seen as never before, yet we so easily become focused on the same-old-same-old routine, turning to artificial worlds to alleviate boredom and using the internet as a means to veg out, rather than explore and encounter new things (yeah, that last part isn’t explicitly in the short, but it fits the general idea). But at the same time, there are limits like international borders and needing money to experience much of it, hence why we need to devote a substantial part of our lives to our jobs. Something that Barbarian’s learned, presumably the hard way, once he’s become acclimatized and just as worn out by an everyday routine as Jerk was.

But that’s more of a ‘bigger picture’ thing than what the short is actually about, which is the same thing on a more personal level. You can infer the stuff from last paragraph in Barbarian’s speech to Jerk, but in practice he was talking more about Jerk’s more immediate circumstances. Even within that narrow sphere there was lots of room for the latter to improve things, but he was squandering it. He felt entitled to more than he had but he blew off his responsibilities, ignored his girlfriend, and was rude to his co-workers. Really, I nicknamed him Jerk because he was kind of unsympathetic – being unhappy with your circumstances is one thing, but taking it out on others is another. To be fair, the party was held without telling him and they ate and drank some stuff that were his to say they can’t, but it still made the point that his colleagues were willing to include him in a more social context, or to be included in something he organized, which he failed to realize. He clearly had issues he needed to work through, and people who expressed a willingness to help him, but he chose to instead ignore it all and then acted slighted when someone else got everything he wanted. Barbarian may have been a fish-out-of-water with medieval-esque attitudes, but he was succeeding because he was confident, outgoing, and, albeit with the aforementioned out-moded attitudes, treated others well. That was the lesson Jerk failed to see – he can’t expect things to come to him, he has to work for them. You know, like he worked to create such a strong, high-level character in Skyguard. He kept trying to make a point that all of Barbarian’s achievements were actually his, which is true, and that makes the lesson doubly true, since his in-game character is a manifestation of everything he needed to succeed. He was doing in the game what he could’ve been doing in real life. Of course, you don’t have to be an extrovert to be successful, but you still need to believe in what you want, and at least make it clear to others.

                                         

The ending also surprised me a little. I’d figured Jerk and Barbarian would both learn their lesson – Barbarian that this world may be exciting, but it has its own limitations, Jerk that Barbarian has something to teach him about success, and they’d switch places. But they seem to be going for a Twilight Zone style, what with the framing device of a narrator, the similar style of title, and the ‘careful what you wish for’ moral of the ending, so it actually makes sense.

That being said, there were a few things that bugged me. One was how Jerk’s girlfriend was so easily enamored with Barbarian, to the point of giving a pass to not just things like a chattel comparison but his assertion that women are somehow special and not people with their own strengths, faults, and personalities like everyone else. Now, I’ve seen enough of Doug Walker’s views on gender elsewhere in his work to be certain this isn’t an expression of his own opinions, just the sort of values you’d expect someone like Barbarian to have. And, given the short length and narrow scope of the story, the important thing is that Jerk is destroying everything around him, including his relationships, and that’s what’s most important about his girlfriend, narrative-wise. But when that’s often the case with female characters, even when there’s no reason for it, it still grates. I’m also a little iffy on the part with the boss and Barbarian, specifically how the boss talks about this being the “post-Obama” age and “we” (as in, black people) have power now. Obviously, yeah, there’s still a long way to go before people of color can be called equal, and I don’t think anyone involved was trying to say otherwise. Presumably the point was that everyone has something to contribute, and they were going for a role-reversal joke with the boss calling Barbarian “my ethnic friend.” I guess I just but I didn’t see the point of doing it that way. Third, there was that joke about the different meanings of ‘gay.’ I don’t know if Jerk calling a bunch of shirtless men hanging out together “gay” was meant to be part of how generally unlikeable he was – now he’s homophobic too! – but the part where Barbarian put his arms around the other guys, said “then gay men are we” and they reacted uncomfortably seemed unnecessary. Again, I didn’t see the point since Barbarian’s values dissonance is already well-established.

So yeah, there were a few things I didn’t like about it, and stories about fictional characters entering the real world, or the consequences of taking escapism too far, have been done before, but it was a fun watch and I’ll definitely check out the next short.