In Case You Were Wondering What Could Possibly Be More Awesome Than The Great Outdoor Fight
Consider:
Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monestary in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Columbian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.
— Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
Also:
Every man believes that, given the right provocations, his innate skills will emerge and he will be capable of tremendous feats.
The directive of the Badass Games is to place you in the very situations which test those abilities.
— unknown, presumably Ray and/or Roast Beef, Achewood
Assuming Ray and Beef are behind this, my money’s on Pat — he’s got that primal rage simmering just below the surface. Ordinarily I’d give it to Lyle, but he’s pretty unconscious right now and has been throwing up spaghetti pretty hard of late. Of course, we know not who else has been invited to participate in THE BADASS GAMES, so it could go to anybody; note (as Stephenson did in The Cryptonomicon) that stupendous badassery is the natural inheritance of every living thing (even Philippe and Mr Bear), on the grounds that every day is trying to kill you and everything that isn’t a stupendous badass is dead.
And I’ll further put money on the notion that by this time tomorrow, THE BADASS GAMES will have a well-populated wiki devoted to it. In the meantime, prepare for Chris Onstad to kick your ass … with awesome.
I’m actually slightly worried about this development so soon after the Great Outdoor Fight, which was so wildly popular an increased Onstad’s reader base violently.
I’ve been a rabid fan of Achewood since its inception, and one of its greatest draws has always been the wildly unpredictable storylines and seemingly random tangents. Onstad himself has admitted in several interviews that he usually has no idea where a story is going when he begins to write it.
Hell, when people beging being pantsed by voodoo in the blogs a few years ago, Onstad wrote in one of the blogs (I believe Phillippe’s) that Ray was present at the time of one of the phantom pantsing’s. Then Onstad changed his mind and decided that Ray was the one (unintentionally) perpetrating the vooding pantsing, and editted the blog to reflect that fact.
Anyway, the point is that Onstad’s constant variation and exploration of his world and characters is one of my favorite aspects of Achewood, and The Badass Games sounds a hell of a lot like The Great Outdoor Fight. I have a lot of respect for Onstad’s writing so I have some faith this will go somewhere no and interesting; however, I wouldn’t go declaring it to be new and awesome just yet when it sounds so very, very similar to such a recent storyline.
By Brian Quinlan on 06.08.06 10:58 am
No worries. It looks like everything will be fine.
By Michael Kinyon on 06.09.06 8:55 am
[…] Gary Written on this page, eleven days ago: … stupendous badassery is the natural inheritance of every living thing (even Philippe and Mr Bear) […]
By Fleen: Written by bitter, haggard wordbeasts » Mister Bear Is Too Polite To Mess You Up, But That Doesn’t Mean That He Isn’t Capable Of It on 06.19.06 4:24 pm
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