It is going to sound very silly, but revisiting a bit of "machinima" from 2007 is the reason for reviving this blog, because the last time I did so, I wound up with thoughts, both things that hadn't occurred to me before and the nagging inspiration for adapting it into prose or comics or live action that I absolutely do not have time for.  Hence, the description of this post as an "exorcism", that maybe writing about an idea for a few hours will keep me from spending many more hours producing it.

The Video

So, let's start with the video series.  It's ten episodes plus two alternate endings, less than an hour all told.  Here's episode 1, "The Newly Weds":

(Link to the full playlist)

It's pretty primitive, technically, produced in a PC game called "The Movies" where I gather the point is actually to simulate owning a movie studio but where the in-game creation tools were (at the time) robust enough that you could produce watchable animated shorts that could be uploaded to YouTube.  Speech is nonsense sounds with subtitles, there's a pretty limited repertoire of movements, and if you watch enough, you'll see many of the same "standing sets".  It's kind of a bicycle with training wheels compared to the rocket-powered AI tools a lot of people (some of them the same people!) are experimenting with today.

And yet, I'll take this over 95% of the AI stuff flooding my YouTube recommendations now.  The hard limitations force a creator to look at how movies work, from blocking to editing to story structure.  Shot-to-shot continuity seldom causes a bad stop the way a lot of AI material does.  And once one starts watching, one's brain quickly understands the limitations of the medium and forgives them, while AI is often so photorealistic that weird motions, tone of voice not being quite right, and ham-handed choices in the writing or music hinders suspension of disbelief.

On top of that, this one is actually fairly well-written, as far as material from an amateur using a desktop computer game goes.

The Story

(Spoilers ahoy, because there's no point writing this if I'm not going to look at it end-to-end)

As it opens, two recently-married couples - Chris & Britney and Alex & Diana - are on their honeymoons at a tropical resort.  The male and female halves of each couple are longtime friends, and while Chris & Britney seem to be enjoying their vacation, Alex & Diana are already at odds.  It turns out that Diana & Britney have previously been lovers, and Diana wants to continue, but Britney feels like that would be really inappropriate.  A frustrated Diana is walking alone when she blunders into another story - a body swap between an executive and the assistant he's been sexually harassing - and winds up walking away with the pair of magical amulets that caused it.

She quickly sees a way to solve her problem by swapping bodies with Chris, first telling Alex that they're about to engage in some kinky role-play, not telling Britney who she really is, and then the next morning telling Chris that she won't swap back unless he pleases Alex for the whole honeymoon.  When they return home, she raises the ante, putting Chris in Britney's body (which she's dosed with aphrodisiacs) and forcing Britney and Alex to recognize what's been going on and jump into action.  

There are three endings - one in which they trick Diana into switching with Britney's dog ("Diana" winds up in an asylum and hopefully the real Diana is just put up for adoption rather than put down), one in which Britney winds up in Chris's body to become the man in the relationship (if only for the night), and one in which Chris realizes that he's fallen for Alex and it's best if he stays Diana.

What Works

Bottom line:  Diana is a good villain, and bikast doesn't ever try to convince the viewer that she's anything but that.  Even in the happiest ending, things turn out okay despite her bad intentions, and not because she's giving her friend group some tough love to put everybody where they belong.  On top of that, her desires are clear enough that she doesn't have to monologue, and when she escalates kind of stupidly later, it's for reasons that fit:  She really enjoys having power over people and probably doesn't actually love Britney enough be a good partner, just from refusing to walk the dog.

None of the other characters are terribly fleshed out, but the one driving the action is, even if she's not the hero of the piece or even really an anti-hero.  Everything happens out of motives you can understand even if you don't approve of them.

Also - having the Amulets of Permuta not-quite-fall into Diana's hands (she acquires them by double-crossing a victim) sets useful limits.  This is the only magic she's able to access, not necessarily knowing which curio shop they were purchased at, so the viewer never has to worry about the larger world of magic or particularly worry about some sort of deus ex machina.  It may or may not be deliberate, but it keeps the viewer checked in an invested.

What Maybe Doesn't

First and foremost - there's a lot of rape here for a story that scans as at least partially comedic and isn't exactly reckoned with, even in the ending where Diana is punished!  Even if you don't necessarily feel like ripping someone soul out of their body and placing it in another body of any sex is an intimate crime (which I absolutely do), Chris is violated moments after he's transferred to Diana's body, and you can argue that Diana sleeping with Britney at the same time is a sort of sexual assault because it's happening under false pretenses, as is everything Chris is coerced to do, and then when he's in Britney's body and drugged up....

It's in the "maybe" category because of what I wrote above:  Diana is a clear villain, and this is villainous shit, albeit things that most creators carefully avoid showing their villains doing, whether because they're worried it'll come off sexy as opposed to sadistic or because they're afraid the revulsion will be too personal (no redemption arc possible, folks bailing because this is more visceral than just shooting someone in the head).  The medium works against it as well - the built-in limits on what can be shown because the designers likely did not want the headaches that come from people creating porn and the kind of toyetic designs make it hard to communicate a really nasty vibe.

There's a certain amount of "product of its time" thing going on as well - most folks, or at least most folks who might be into stories about men and women swapping bodies and getting it on - have probably expanded their definition of what they see as a sex crime in the past twenty years, even as many have broadened their opinions on what is no big deal when done consensually.  All of that kind of rams together toward the end, when Alex discovers that it's been Chris in Diana's body, and it's a bit difficult to tell whether he's horrified that he's violated his friend or that he's done something kind of gay (or what Britney is absolving him of when she says he couldn't have known).

It also means the series sort of struggles around the end.  It's not uncommon - a lot of these things were and are produced as serials with no specific end in sight - but making it up as you go along means it can be difficult to craft a satisfying ending because you don't know "what it's about" as opposed to "what happens".  There's also not a lot you can really do to bring the hammer down on Diana, or much for Britney to do in the final confrontation.  The dog ending is probably as good as it gets.

How I Might Tweak It

One thing you immediately notice watching "Common Hearts" today is that a whole lot of trouble maybe could have been resolved if Diana just came out of the closet (and maybe Britney too, depending on how bi you think she is), but it would be the better part of ten years after 2007 before same-sex marriage was legal across the United States, and even Massachusetts only went that way in 2005.  Nobody's got a smartphone, either, which could have influenced the action.  It was kind of early days for that in '07.

Most of the time, I'll just look at that and say it aged quickly, but this time, a bit of possible backstory clicked into place:  What if the marriages were meant to be scams?  Britney & Diana were the love of each other's lives, but they also saw how shaky the ground could be under their feet.  Maybe they've got conservative families, maybe they've seen queer friends suffer in ways straight people don't because the law doesn't accommodate them in the same way, etc.  So Diana hatches a plan:  They'll find a couple of really close friends, woo them, and marry them.  It would allow them to be together most of the time without anyone the wiser, and maybe when they see Chris and Alex, the girls recognize that there's more to their bromance than the boys will admit, and this will let them be together as well.  Diana just doesn't reckon on Britney being bisexual, Chris being a really good guy, and that relationship developing into something real.

Part of what I like about "Common Hearts" is that this sort of character and story-deepening thing fits, whether bikast intended it to be there but didn't have any place where the characters might say it, or if it's just fundamentally solid enough that one can extrapolate back and fill things in, and it not only doesn't break anything, and in fact makes for a richer narrative.  Heck, one could make the argument that it explains Diana's supply of hardcore aphrodisiacs beyond her just being a freak - she's got no interest in men, least of all Alex, so she has to take them to make him believe she's into him and respond in bed.  Not that you really need to justify what Diana does beyond that!

Where I would maybe break it is to not have Diana set Chris up to get immediately raped - instead, she tells Alex that she's about to do this sort of body-swap role play.  On the other side, she maybe intends to tell Britney the truth right away, but Britney is all over her in Chris's body before she can open her mouth, and then, afterwards, she keeps quiet in part because she really wants to see what Britney sees in Chris, while Chris is kind of shaken by how much Alex was into the idea of him being in his wife's body.  It doesn't solve the issue of things happening without consent, but it might give someone writing in another format a chance to give the characters more inside, rather than just have things happen until they spin out of control.  It potentially makes Diana more sympathetic, maybe even enough that she can be forgiven by the end, but then, I don't know that I'd be very good writing a cruel, purely villainous character.

I don't think I'd go for losing the amulets, a gender-bender story cliché, although there's potentially nice symmetry in the idea that they always move on after they've accomplished something; I'd want the characters to actively resolve things, whatever they decide the resolution may be.  Maybe they become a happy polycule with folks switching bodies for convenience and fun; maybe Chris & Britney stay together while Alex & Diana split; maybe they realign into Chris & Alex and Diana & Britney, with or without body swaps, because the theme that develops might be that they're never going to be happy pretending to be something or someone they're not.

Wrapping Up...

Has this exorcised the desire to adapt and update this from my head?  We'll see in a couple days.  I hope so, just because I'd kind of feel weird doing it:  How do you get in touch with someone anonymous who went off to greener pastures sixteen years ago to get blessing/co-operation?  I could probably just say I was inspired by this story in the acknowledgments of anything I wrote, but I feel like I'd have to change a lot more to just be inspired rather than adapting.

Which is to say, this is a very solid little body-swap story, despite its primitive tools and occasional clunkiness, and a lot of folks who make this sort of thing now could probably do well to study how good the fundamentals are and what makes it work, even if the rest of bikast's work doesn't always rise to the same level.

Any thoughts or interest in seeming more like this?  After all I've deleted in the past week, I'm scared to solicit comments, but...

Labels: bikast, exorcism, machinima, review, Youtube