The Punisher Kills the American Literary Canon

House of the Seven Gables

Francis Stonham is young daguerrotypist staying at the Pyncheon family’s ancestral mansion. While researching the Pyncheon family history, he is haunted by the ghost of Alice, who was driven mad by young Matthew Maule, who was retaliating for the murder of his grandfather on suspicion of witchcraft. Disgusted with the terror wrought by the two families in their dispute over the land on which the house rests, Stoneham crushes Jaffrey's trachea and leaves him twitching helplessly as he demolishes the house with improvised satchel charges.

Moby-Dick

Captain Castle, on a mad quest for revenge against the white whale that took his leg, hires a crew of whalers under false pretenses. Realizing the danger Castle’s obsession has placed them in, the crew attempts a mutiny. In the ensuing melee, Castle kills Ishmael and Queequeg with a cavalry saber, hurls Starbuck to his death in the unforgiving sea, and drives the remaining crew toward his quarry. The white whale rams the Pequod from beneath, utterly destroying it; ignoring the panicked cries of his crew, Castle hurls himself into the beast’s gullet, where he detonates the suicide vest he invented for the occasion.

House of Mirth

Frannie Bart is a woman of high social standing in New York who rejects several advantageous marriage proposals, holding out for a marriage that is both economically and emotionally fulfilling. When a scandal destroys her reputation, she suffers an escalating series of humiliations, as she’s forced to learn new ways to survive. To that end, she steals a set of love letters from erstwhile suitor Lawrence Selden, and uses them to blackmail the Dorsets and the Trenors, framing Simon Rosedale in the process. Luring them all into Rosedale’s expansive conservatory during a well-attended gala, she opens fire with a Gatling gun, killing the aristocracy of New York at a stroke.

The Great Gatsby

Frank Castle works at a gas station out by the valley of the ashes. When his wife dies in a car wreck caused by some precious New England socialites, he drowns Gatsby in his pool, garrottes Daisy with her own jewelry, crushes Jordan's skull with a golf club, and chases Tom into the valley, where he is caught in a bear trap and left to die under the watchful eyes of T.J.Eckleburg. Nick attempts to flee to his ancestral Midwest, but is killed by an explosive hidden in his valise.

The Sun Also Rises

Depressed and broke, alcoholic veteran Frank Barnes drinks his way through Europe, beside promiscuous divorcee Brett Ashley. Frustrated by a war injury that has left him impotent, and annoyed that Brett keeps sleeping with his friends, Frank drinks himself blind and unleashes a herd of bulls onto the streets of Pamplona. Thousands are killed.

As I Lay Dying

With the death of matriarch Addie Bundren, her children attempt to honor her wishes by burying her in Jefferson. The journey is a long and tumultuous one, and the family is repeatedly waylaid by flooding, injuries, and unintended pregnancies. Meanwhile, Addie’s corpse is rotting in its coffin, and attracting a great deal of attention. Frustrated with his family’s inability to communicate clearly with one another, Addie’s son Frank locks the whole family, coffin and all, in a barn, which he then sets ablaze.

White Noise

Frank Castle kills many, many people in a college town. Everyone is too preoccupied with the inevitability of their own deaths to notice.

Community 1.02: Spanish 101

I am, like most of you, a creature of language, more fundamentally made of words than water. It was the main component of my skillset as a kid, perhaps to my detriment, but it only seemed to extend as far as English. Two years of Latin in elementary school, a brief Spanish sting in middle school, some French during my off-year, an abysmal French follow-up in undergrad, and finally two successful semesters of Japanese to fill out FAU's language requirement have left me with a pleasant awareness of a few other languages, but nothing like actual competence. Bilingualism is thus, with apologies to Ta-Nehisi Coates, something of a superpower, something consistently just a little beyond my ken.

So I've done a lot of terrible, intro-level conversations. They have a kind of thudding rhythm, loudly declaring themselves to be the products of language instruction, as opposed to language. When you're asked to write your own--when writing is what you do with the time you're not spending being popular or well-adjusted--it's easy to overthink them. There's probably a lesson there: do the work and get the fuck out. Or maybe it's the opposite of a lesson. Maybe it's my personal Ezekiel 25:17.

Whatever. Find your own meaning. The series has landed, which brings us to "Spanish 101," written by Dan Harmon and directed by Joe Russo.

Once again the dean establishes the scene, this time on the PA. A tiny hint of the future Dean Dangerous, but he's still baking. Jeff snags an illicit parking space, while the study group awaits his entry, having already established him as their Charismatic Leader. Abed hints at his Abeditity by engaging in some meta-badinage with himself, and Britta foreshadows herself by complaining to the others. "You are obsessing over someone who doesn't give you a second thought," she says. "Meanwhile, in Guatemala, journalists are being killed by their own government." "Spoilers!" admonishes Abed. Britta does her best to mollify him, diplomatically: "Real stories? They don't have spoilers." She asks with not a small amount of condescension,  "You understand that TV and real life are different, right?" Jeff returns, rolling a Fonz vibe, and deftly brushes Britta's concerns aside. He's brought an empty binder, which Annie happily fills with copies of her notes, showing a somewhat unseemly level of satisfaction.

Jeff hands Britta another card, this time celebrating the 2-week anniversary of his horrible first impression. Britta tells Jeff that she's immune to his bullshit, but he shouldn't be exploiting the innocents in the others in the study group. She leaves in a cloud of indignant condescension; Pierce approaches Jeff and aggressively advises him, "You can't pursue people so desperately, it kind of creeps them out." Meanwhile, Annie and Shirley want to know more about Guatemala, as they're eager to get into the spirit and protest. Britta barely knows what she's talking about, but she does her best. 90% of everything is confidence, and Britta doesn't have it.

The episode and the recap take a queer turn here. The narrative is bifurcating into a standard A-B plot. The Britta-Shirley-Annie plot is introduced first, but the Jeff-Pierce plot gets the payoff. Of course, the real resolution of the episode is progress on the mytharc plot of Jeff trying to nail Britta. At any rate, I'm tempted to take these two separately. Perhaps I will.

Britta, as established earlier, doesn't know much about Guatemala, but cares enough to feel that she ought to know more, and it's this guilt that overflows into condemnation of the group. Annie and Shirley are eager to learn more, less out of concern for the freedom of the Guatemalan press than out of a desire to act out a college-like experience. Annie wants to perform being a college student to feel older, more worldly, and tougher; Shirley wants to perform being a college student to feel younger, less domestic, and more rebellious. They have different ideas--Annie suggests a candlelight vigil "like lesbians do on the news," while Shirley opts for baking brownies. It's a party. We'll get back to them.

The other plot takes us into Spanish 101, and Senor Chang, the chaotic evil dark prince of Greendale. This is the first I ever saw of the show, a free preview of that show some LJ folk were talking about. The clip is available here (sadly, no embed). The Man With the Star-Burns makes his first appearance before Chang dismisses the class: "Hands! 90% of Spanish." Crucially, homework is assigned: students are to pair off and perform conversations using short phrases from unit 1. Pairs are determined randomly via cards under the students' desks; Jeff bribes Abed to pair with Britta, but she foils his effort by swapping with Pierce.

Back in the study room, Pierce's backstory as the heir of a moist towelette empire is introduced. Apparently it's not far off from Chevy Chase's real life backstory. Similarly, both Chevy and Pierce are widely agreed to be insufferable assholes. Jeff and Pierce begin work on the homework. Pierce brings out scotch, demonstrating an desperate intent to make it a long evening of male bonding; Jeff, creeped out, wants to do the damn assignment and leave.

Outside, Annie and Shirley have put on quite a jaunty protest. Starburns appears again, once more aggrieved. As dance begins to spontaneously break out, Britta objects to the frivolity. Losing her temper, she describes the protest as "tacky and lame." Over her stammered apologies, Shirley accuses her of using fringe politics to make herself sound interesting but not wanting to be involved. "I do things," she says in her defense. "I went to...I don't do anything. What can I do?" Annie and Shirley offer to let her help.

Back in the study room, Jeff and Pierce have "something incredibly long and very confusing and a little homophobic and really, really, specifically, surprisingly, and gratuitously critical of Israel." He adds,"The only thing not included in this epic are the five phrases required to get me a passing grade." Troy and Abed pop in to remind them of the other plot, and remind us what doing the damn assignment looks like. Frustrated, Jeff blows up at Pierce, and bails to go hang with Britta.

We follow him out as he grabs a candle, then bribes a kid to give him the sign he's holding. He stands near Britta, who opens her tape and apologizes for being too harsh. "I'm not perfect." A very drunk Pierce stumbles out and screams at Jeff, revealing his professed insincerity. He snags on a passing candle and bursts into flame, running off into the night.

In class the next morning, the group exchanges concerns about Pierce's behavior, but Britta defends him, saying that he's lonely and wants respect in the group: "I think he's spent his whole life looking out for himself, and he would trade it all for a shot at some kind of family."

Chang explains that Pierce has filled him on on their team's dissolution, and offers to give Jeff a C and let Pierce go alone. Jeff refuses: "Pierce, I understand if you don’t want to be my friend. But this thing we’ve created is bigger than the both of us and it deserves to be done right." What follows is something special, and the moment when I began to understand why my friends were so dead-set on getting me to watch this show. Set to the gently cathartic strings of Aimee Mann's "Wise Up," a slow-motion montage shows Jeff and Pierce engaging in an epic, highly offensive, and wildly incomprehensible exploration of the human condition across race, time, and Jewishness. And robots. As the end of the first "real" episode, it sets the tone for what the show is going to be best at: wholly inappropriate, but entirely legitimate emotional response. The presentation is, diegetically, every bit as awful as we'd imagine--it's unclear, from the blocking, who gets the F and who gets the F-minus--but Jeff is giving it everything he has, maybe for Pierce, maybe for Britta, maybe for the group that only Britta and Abed can see right now. Perhaps he doesn't know why he's doing it. Perhaps he doesn't need to.

The moment passes. In the hallway, Britta congratulates Jeff on an authentically selfless act. "How do you know I didn’t do it just to get a shot at you?" he asks. Because after that clusterfuck, "no woman in that class would ever be able to look at you as a viable sexual candidate ever again." Momentarily at a loss for words, Jeff hangs back and watches her leave; Pierce catches up to him, throws an arm over his shoulder, and shares his wisdom.

Finally, another piece in the gentle balance of delights that is Community falls into place with the end tag. The end tags are where Troy and Abed, the adorably co-dependent Bert and Ernie of Greendale, do their best work, and I'll not belabor it by describing it.

First Appearances

• CHANG, MOTHERFUCKER!
• Starburns, the patron saint of Greendale.
• The Spanish Rap in particular, and the end tag in general. As related to this show. They didn't invent it or anything.
• While they've only begun to plumb its depths, the Troy-and-Abed bromance can be seen in its infancy.
• Shirley's inappropriate tendency to respond to any situation with baking.
• Insecure!Britta, a welcome change from trophy goddess of the pilot.
• Pierce's quasi-paternal relationship with the fatherless Jeff, which will be a major focus of seasons two and three.
• Also, sperm.

Highlights

• "Dos Conquistadores," obvi.
• The Spanish Rap, equally obvi.
• "Why do you teach Spanish?

What Have We Learned?

"Things like this will ultimately bring us together as an unlikely family."

Native American History Exhibit

Comfort Food Gaming

Hey, everyone, I'm looking into the feasibility of writing a Thing about comfort food gaming. Before going further, some general thoughts on what seems to categorize the practice:

• Recovering the feeling of play when you're too tired, scattered, or stressed to handle novelty.
• The appeal to nostalgia, either the specific experiences you had with the game in question or what was going on in your life while having said experiences.
• The appeal to achievement, revisiting games you've taught yourself to autopilot.
• Completism, the desire to "once and for all" finish a text you've already "finished" by most reasonable standards. Predominantly associated with open-world games, which constantly provide "excuses" to keep playing.
• Perfectionism, the desire to use hard-won knowledge of the system to moonwalk though things that had previously been difficult.

I've written briefly about my comfort food gaming staples: Final Fantasy Tactics, Quest for Glory, the entire DS-mononucleosis library. I'll presumably be writing about them in some more detail. In a desperate bid to avoid that, how about you? What old games can you not seem to stop replaying, even though you probably "should" be playing something new? Has the behavior changed as you've aged? You have aged, right? Are you Fae or what?

This will look really dumb if there aren't any comments, so, y'know, get on that.

Because Fuck Videogames

As has become abundantly clear in the past year, I don't really have the time or inclination to play games that aren't either a) ten years old or b) Bravely Default, so reviews are a rare feature here on Undisciplined. To correct this vital oversight, I've opted to do some brief reviews of games I know absolutely nothing about, beyond what I've heard from knowledgeable journos and game devs on the Twitter.

Kentucky Route Zero: This game is just so literary, you'll shit. It's like reading Moby-Dick in the original American. Presumably it involves Kentucky, and some sort of road. I like road trip narratives, whether they're about young women finding themselves and the true power of friendship, or dudes killing increasingly unimaginative monsters while listening to 70s and 80s metal. Kentucky Route Zero probably isn't like either of those, but regardless, it's literary. So literary. 10/10

Transistor: Some sort of cyberpunk RPG thing. Like Shadowrun, maybe? Sure, why not. Or Netrunner! The kids are playing Netrunner now, right? It looks pretty, and apparently it handles gender better than most games, but it's hard to imagine how much core gameplay you can wring out of electrical engineering. Nonetheless, it gives me hope that new stuff is being done somewhere other than the adventure genre. 10/10

Watch Dogs: Seriously, fuck Watch Dogs. 10/10

Community 1.01: Pilot

Pilots are strange things.

I'm sure analogous processes exist in other media, but none immediately spring to mind. It would be interesting if every novel came with a first chapter that lagged behind the rest of the book by several rewrites, but I doubt anyone would think it to be a sensible idea. However, the exigencies of television mean that often it's prohibitively expensive to do anything else. The pilot sets up the plot and characters, the all-important "why this day" that situates the narrative, but the show has often changed around that narrative by the time the series begins production: characters are added or lost, actors change, personalities soften or harden. The pilot often ends up feeling like an issue #0, an odd prequel of greatest value to completists.

30 Rock's pilot is famously uneven; Parks and Recreation's pilot is practically unrecognizable upon review. Cheers has an iconically strong pilot--Tina Fey cites it as an example of what the 30 Rock pilot wasn't--and it's a fine place to start when examining what a sitcom pilot is called upon to do. The cast is introduced one at a time, and paired with throwaway characters who set up the jokes, letting us in on what we'll need to know in a fairly organic fashion. Cheers gets a lot of mileage from adapting theater traditions to the multi-camera setup; the blocking is crisp and intuitive, the jokes well paced for audience response, and the comedy gets physical very quickly.

Community has its share of commonalities with Cheers: it's initially structured on a confident, likeable womanizer and the pretentious blonde he wants to hate-fuck. Both shows are about homes-away-from-home for various misfits, losers, and temporarily embarrassed geniuses. On Cheers, Diane is dropped into the plot via a specific disappointment; the rest of them are there by virtue of the sheer joy of drinking alcohol and the sublime shittiness of living and working (or not working) in Boston. Cheers is a finely tuned machine that starts off smooth and stays there well into its run. Community is messier. It's a show about messier, or at least it will become one when it begins in earnest with "Spanish 101." For now, Community #0, written by Dan Harmon and directed by Joe Russo.

It starts with the Dean, the muse who calls our players into being: Troy ("remedial athlete"), Britta ("twenty-something dropouts"), Shirley ("middle-aged divorcees"), and Pierce ("old people keeping their minds active as they circle the drain of eternity"). Jeff, Abed, and Annie fall outside even the domain of "loser-college" for now. Jeff's too awesome, perhaps, and Abed and Annie might be too weird even for Greendale. But we digress. (We'll digress in a minute. First, is that an uncredited Vicki in the crowd? This is the sort of thing that keeps me up at night.)

We see Jeff for the first time, being followed by a fast-talking Abed. Abed is upbeat and energetic, a storm of tics and gestures. Like the rest of them, he's a rough draft. The mostly unchanged Jeff, being too busy enacting the story to examine it, asks Abed about the blonde in their Spanish class, and Abed rattles off a surprisingly detailed biography, closing it with a verbatim performance of something Britta said to him earlier. (I have been known to employ variants of this. In my experience, Jeff's a lot less weirded out by it than most.) Having become acquainted with Britta via Jeff's interest and Abed's creepifying observational skills, along with a brief shot of her responding to the Dean's call, we'll have to wait a bit for more. Jeff has an appointment with one Prof. Ian Duncan, Psychology, to discuss the premise of the show. Jeff, accomplished badass lawyer, was caught with a fake degree and needs a real one, and apparently Greendale counts. That said, he doesn't intend to do any work, and asks Duncan to help him cheat. Mentions are made of when Jeff helped Duncan beat a DUI rap, but overall Duncan seems both competent and wise, a dignified man in an undignified milieu. (This, like so much else, will change.) Duncan, in his British sort of way, admonishes Jeff, and appeals to the value of learning. Jeff finishes what the Dean started, bringing the invocation to a close: "If I wanted to learn, I wouldn't have come to community college."

We're not quite where we need to be, for one location remains to be visited. In the cafeteria, after a brief shot of Pierce trying to scam some food, our third-person-limited consciousness floats over to Britta, cramming for the aforementioned Spanish test. Jeff ambles over and, seemingly off the top of his head, invents a backstory as a Spanish tutor, inviting Britta to join his "study group." Britta's Spanish is too weak to realize that he's full of shit--90% of everything is confidence, after all--so she agrees. The study group has been called into being!

Granted, it's bullshit. It's just something professional liar Jeff thought up to get laid. But an idea, once bidden, cannot be denied its reification, especially when it's taken into the study room. The study room is magical. I'm going to be writing a lot about the study room.

Appropriately, Britta lays out her baseline. All we know about her, at this point, is that she's desirable, so it's going to be Important: honesty. Above all else, honesty. Jeff, continuing the lie, does his best to roll with it. Abed enters, realizing that the story needs him, but we have a couple more stops to make before the show can begin.

Jeff meets Duncan on the athletic field, and they jabber about ethics. Jeff lays out the closest thing to an authentic identity we're going to get: "If I talk long enough, I can make anything right or wrong." Duncan sort of misuses "moral relativism," but he's a psychology professor, and you can't expect too much from those people. He seems to give in, and Jeff returns to find the rest of the cast.

Abed has invited them. Of course he has. Beyond the five we've already met is another, a young, dark-haired woman who seems quite skeptical of Jeff and his study group. Troy makes the first ever Seacrest joke. Oh, and Britta's gone. Attempting to bail, Jeff runs into her outside, and quickly changes his mind a second time.

Returned to the study room, Pierce introduces everyone, getting the names wrong and sexually harassing Shirley in the process. (In a pleasant change of pace for sitcoms, everyone in the room identifies it as such, even the token jock.) Annie's backstory, the Legend of Annie Adderall, is invoked. Jeff, still focused on his goal of a study group consisting only of Britta and himself, attempts to harness the group's internal tensions to destroy them, and they seem to be off to a good start when he gets a call from Duncan.

Duncan has agreed to help Jeff in exchange for his car, and Jeff accepts, faced with the terrifying prospect of studying. It's a short scene, and really, we ought to be getting back to the study room. Jeff meets Britta at the door, alarmed at the chaos inside. Jeff admits that he engineered the chaos in order to get them alone--I'm not sure if he's hoping the honesty will win him points, or hoping she'll be flattered at the scope of the manipulation in her pursuit--but she's only disappointed in him for using them all. Still, she agrees to go out to dinner with him if he fixes it. Thus inspired, Jeff strolls in and delivers the Very First Winger Speech. There's not easily accessible video of the scene, as far as I know, which is a shame, as I'd probably watch it every morning for inspiration. Jeff is lying, of course, in every word. In this scene, in this act to be repeated with every episode, is the basis of Jeff's character, and the frame that balances the show between sappy and cynical: the truth is what people want to hear, but not what they'll believe when they hear it. Jeff can tell the difference between truth and falsity, he's just swapped out the values. He tells the truth with lies, and lies with the truth.

"I hereby pronounce you a community."

At the conclusion of the speech, Annie is smiling so much she looks like she might be holding back tears. Britta breaks the moment by revealing to Jeff that she was lying about dinner, and she'd like him to politely fuck off and leave. He responds by offering to share the envelope full of test answers with the group.

On the steps outside, Jeff opens the envelope to find only blank pages and "Booyah" written, somehow, in John Oliver's accent. A brief confrontation with Duncan later--the moral status quo restored--brings us back to the steps, where the study group seems to instinctively want to comfort Jeff; Jeff instinctively finds himself giving advice. He protests the narrative role he's being boxed into: "I don't have any of the answers." When it's pointed out that he's obviously smart, Jeff's reply is one of uncommon insight, as far as pop culture generally goes: "Funny thing about being smart is that you can get through most of life without ever having to do any work." After a non-verbal conversation incomprehensible to Abed, Britta formally invites him back into the group his lie called into being, and after a beat, he follows them back inside.

There isn't a credits tag on this one, but there's a memorial nod to John Hughes, which I guess is close enough for a pilot. It's not much of an ending, and appropriately, neither is this. None of these characters are where they need to be, yet. Pierce is an unreconstructed hippie, Troy's a token jock who refers to Abed as "slumdog," Britta is pretty and perfect and empty. They'll change, albeit mostly in the next episode. Community is as much about how people don't change as it is about how they do. I'll also be changing, as I write more of these things up, and find the balance I need between vague commentary and tedious recap. I could spend a week reading the respected recappers and cutting this one down to size, but it seemed more prudent, and apropos, to just feel my way through. The best eps are in the second half of season three, anyway. I have semesters and semesters to learn.

First Appearances
Everything. It's the pilot.

Highlights

• Abed bursting into a scene from The Breakfast Club in response to tension.
• The first and only explicit mention of Asperger's.
• Dean Pelton appears but briefly, and the rest of the B-cast is unsurprisingly absent. The one exception, Prof. Duncan, will actually be absent most of the season. What can ya do.
• Seriously, is that Vicki?

What Have We Learned?
"You are all better thank you think you are. You are just designed not to believe it when you hear it from yourself."

Tantrum

Mew!

ETA: An actual appropriate illustration.

While I work on exciting new content--you'll love it, there's going to be synergy and everything--a brief update to inform my vast and varied readership of a valuable crowdfundportunity.

Deborah, who you'd recognize from my links had I ever bothered to update them from when I set this thing up in 2008, is working on a big website thing to archive and annotate the works of Charlotte Mew.

File photo: Deborah J. Brannon.

"Who is Charlotte Mew?" It's a question being asked by the poorly educated with fingers far from the pulse of the community. Mew was an indie Victorian poet; you've probably never heard of her. If you'd like to contribute to a comprehensive archive of her work, like, and the existing scholarship that will no doubt be a tangible contribution to Victorian studies--and who wouldn't?--you can read up on the project and contribute here. Then, when all your dirtbag friends are talking about Victorian poetry, you can tell them that you were into Charlotte Mew when she was underground.

Harry Potter and the Emblem of Fire

I'm not sure why turn-based strategy games so frequently lack a difficulty setting between "Harlem Globetrotters" and "battle of Stalingrad," but it's something I've come to accept from the genre, and Fire Emblem certainly follows suit. My dawning awareness of this fact is the main thing I remember about my first experience with the series: alternating between easy, which felt less like a strategy game than an unusually long and condescending tutorial, and normal, which felt like playing chess when you never learned how to play, and also you're drunk, and someone keeps punching you in the face. I was reading Lord of the Flies at the time, working on an article about Bully and school shooting narratives--thank goodness THOSE aren't topical anymore--at my sister-in-law's place. Life was better, then. It had regular soda, and cigarettes.

The Sacred Stones was the my entry point into the Fire Emblem series, and the last game I remember purchasing for the Game Boy Advance. I'd spent more than fifteen years with the Game Boy and its variants, before the DS came along and perfected game consoles, so I suppose it's fitting that my final purchase was so memorable, but I don't remember what prompted me to buy it. I only know that right as I was starting to "get" it, I lost the damn thing somewhere in transit, and found it astonishingly difficult to replace without going to rather alarming expense. Fortunately, after a year or so of searching, a DS remake was released--Shadow Dragon, a remake of the series' premiere that I had missed--about which I wrote a mediocre and poorly proofed entry here.

I wasn't great at Shadow Dragon, but I feel like I understood it: learning to love the characters who'd be cruelly taken away from you for the simplest of mistakes, and learning to discard the worthless little shits who filled out the roster so the ones you cared about could survive. It wasn't built for long-term play, and even the hidden levels, while technically making the game longer (and exposing your characters to additional risk), were useful primarily because there simply weren't enough enemies in the game to sufficiently level everyone up. You couldn't play Shadow Dragon as an ongoing, infinite process. Everyone would die.

Awakening, of course, offers a choice on that front. Sort of. Sure it offers you the option to have "dead" characters taken away from you, as has traditionally been the series' wont, but they aren't dead. They're "retired." Not in the cool way, like in Blade Runner: their role in the story, if there is one, is unaffected. It kind of takes the piss out of permadeath when you can see the dead milling about at the craft services table between levels.

Nonetheless, losing soldiers to imaginary-death is uniquely galling, since Awakening goes on for-fucking-ever. The number of battles you can get into is literally infinite, and Nintendo will happily sell you additional ones in the e-Shop.

I find I miss the limitations more than anything. The reclass function never made any fucking sense--turn your deadly swordsman into a shitty, awkward knight!--but at least its existence pointed to a fundamental scarcity, that you weren't going to get many chances for a given class of combatant, and you'd goddamn better learn to appreciate them. The weapons followed suit. Sure, you could find an anti-cavalry axe somewhere, but anti-cavalry lances were plentiful, and delineated the superiority of armor over cavalry. (Even cavalry bearing anti-armor swords came at you from a point of statistical weakness.) Cavalry units were particularly limited and valued; in Awakening, nearly every class has a mounted variant, even the nerds, and while reclassing is more limited, it's also a hell of a lot more useful, and allows your characters to be leveled up infinitely.

Where scarcity remains, it's met with surfeit. "Rare" weapons present themselves with surprising consistency, to the point that it becomes hard to keep track. Due to the crucial finitude of nearly all weaponry, inventory management has always been annoyingly complicated in Fire Emblem; there's something perfectly compelling, and eternally frustrating, about a game that would be improved by removing one of the series' oldest and most consistent features. Then again, I guess that's how we got to Casual mode in the first place.

Fire Emblem is dead. Long live Fire Emblem. Just maybe don't make it quite so monogamy-oriented next time. In Shadow Dragon's multiplayer mode, I had an unstoppable squad of low-tier fighters with amazing stats, and do you know why? Because they supported each other emotionally, goddammit. To the tune of 45% hit and evasion bonuses. Awakening restricts relationship bonuses to one at a time, and an S-rank requires all-out hetero banging to achieve, so good luck forging an epic relationship between Virion and Kellam. Sure, you can do it, but you'll always be thinking, "this is cool, but it'd be a lot cooler if I could make these two fuck."

Which I guess is how it feels to be a shipper, huh?