{"id":27527,"date":"2015-06-25T18:15:47","date_gmt":"2015-06-25T23:15:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=27527"},"modified":"2015-06-25T18:39:05","modified_gmt":"2015-06-25T23:39:05","slug":"arkham-asylum-ep8-some-kids-parents-died","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=27527","title":{"rendered":"Arkham Asylum EP8: Some Kid&#8217;s Parents Died!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/UbP67_FZv0s\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=UbP67_FZv0s'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>We have a long-running joke among the cast that we say awful racist things when not recording<span class='snote' title='1'>&#8221;Oh, you&#8217;re recording now? Man, I&#8217;m glad I got all that hateful stuff about Chinese people out of my system earlier!&#8221;<\/span>. And then sometimes we make up fake racism to joke about how we&#8217;re not recording yet, or that we need to get all our racism out before we start recording. So the screwy tirade about Canadians was a reference to the fact that this footage wasn&#8217;t supposed to go in the show. And then Josh left it in. I wouldn&#8217;t mind (Josh trolling us is one of our running gags.) but this racism joke will only make sense to members of the cast<span class='snote' title='2'>And really, it&#8217;s not so much a &#8220;funny&#8221; joke as an idle way of dealing with the paranoia of recording hours and hours of unplanned commentary for a large audience every week, and also a way of making the &#8220;are we recording yet?&#8221; conversations less tedious.<\/span>. <\/p>\n<p>So if that bit didn&#8217;t make sense&#8230; hopefully now it makes slightly less not-sense.<\/p>\n<p>For the record: I&#8217;m okay with Canadians coming to America, <em>as long as they learn English first<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;Batman is sad&#8221; footage Chris was talking about is a reference to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=e-AdTxB2ifI\">this video that Chris made about Arkham Origins<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Batman agonizing over his dead parents&#8221; has now been featured in every Arkham game. <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m going to straight-up recant what I said in this episode about allowing the game to continue if you failed to save Dr. Doctor M.D. from Zsasz. It&#8217;s true that it doesn&#8217;t make any difference to the plot, but it does break Batman&#8217;s trait of hyper-competence and obsession with saving everyone. A failure like, &#8220;I wasn&#8217;t fast enough, and someone died.&#8221; is a HUGE deal for Batman. It does happen once in a while, but it&#8217;s usually part of some sort of character-building moment. It would be the kind of thing he would agonize over for the rest of the game, and would need to be incorporated into some sort of arc. It&#8217;s totally inappropriate to have a failure like that stand without giving it the attention it deserves. <\/p>\n<p>Batman doesn&#8217;t see the death by exploding safe as his fault, because he couldn&#8217;t have saved her from that. He&#8217;s spent his life training to resolve hostage situations, ambush people, and hit stuff with Batarangs, so that failure would sting in a way that the exploding safe doesn&#8217;t. <\/p>\n<p><!--more-->The game makes it a little hard to follow the business with the formula because it doesn&#8217;t establish the moving parts before they come into play. We just know that &#8220;Joker wants the formula.&#8221; We don&#8217;t know how many copies there are, or what form they take. Batman burns that scrap of paper and we assume, &#8220;Oh, I guess that&#8217;s it?&#8221; No wait! He can get it from Dr. Young. But then she dies. So was the formula in that safe? No, that had security codes for where the existing Titan formula is being stored. But if Joker was already here to trap the safe, why was Harley here? Was she going to recover Dr. Young from Zsasz? Or Batman?<\/p>\n<p>And then you think, &#8220;Oh, Joker doesn&#8217;t get the formula. He just gets his hands on the existing stockpile.&#8221; But no, later we get audio of him making more. <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not going to call it a plot hole, but I will say this entire sequence is incredibly <em>muddled<\/em>. It&#8217;s not that the story can&#8217;t make sense, it&#8217;s that we were never given enough information to understand what we&#8217;re being shown. That would be okay if it was part of the ongoing mystery, but Batman seems to know what&#8217;s going on. He just hasn&#8217;t taken the time to explain things to the player.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) We have a long-running joke among the cast that we say awful racist things when not recording&#8221;Oh, you&#8217;re recording now? Man, I&#8217;m glad I got all that hateful stuff about Chinese people out of my system earlier!&#8221;. And then sometimes we make up fake racism to joke about how we&#8217;re not recording yet, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[318],"class_list":["post-27527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning","tag-batman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27527\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}