GFT Retrospective #52: The Devil's Gambit

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

Gambling healthy for once?

Over the last week or so, I have been playing Vampire Survivors on my phone. It is a Castlevania-influenced, Rogue-like, mob-survival game with hundreds of objectives, unlockables, collectibles, upgrades, customization options, and super-affordable DLC that expands gameplay possibilities even more without getting all predatory about it. Unfortunately, it is also super-easy to break with the right build (the level added for the latest update, which has the randomization cranked past human patience, right down to what room you warp to, can be completed if you glitch out of bounds with one of the weapons and use the map and onscreen icons to navigate to each of the collectibles), and with a little guidance (because you have to be a dev to find a lot of these secrets without help), I completed it in a little over a week. There are other end-game challenges you can set for yourself, like "do X with every character," "do Y with only N weapons," "kill at least N of every enemy," "do X with Y turned on/off," etc. But once you find and unlock every character, weapon, option, and item, kill every enemy type, and grind enough gold to buy every upgrade and character (you need a ridiculous amount of the in-game currency, but it's free, there are no microtransactions beyond the total $4 of one-time DLC purchases, and you can idle up billions with the right build), including for the two DLC stages, you're basically done until Poncle decides to release another update or the animated series comes out. It was challenging, frustrating, and fun while it lasted, though.

So, yeah. Randomness, gambling, Castlevania-inspired game with demons in it somewhere. And I'm reviewing The Devil’s Gambit issue of Grimm Fairy Tales, which means the byline tie-in is covered, so please remember to like and comment down below, subscribe to my blog, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, and Facebook for the latest news on my content, like this:

GFT #47: The Devil’s Gambit

Breaking tradition, this issue doesn’t focus on only one fairy tale. In keeping with Grimm Fairy Tales tradition, however, Cindy now wears a slutty, blue, French maid costume. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your view of slutty supervillain costumes, or your view on the use of the word, "slutty" to describe female clothing), she’ll still be wearing it for at least another eight years of publication time. And even though its power and importance have been downplayed significantly in the years since The Devil’s Gambit, her magical, dead unicorn-powered samurai sword (named Carnage, apparently) makes her a badass fighter. Since her Revisited issue, Cindy has been trained to a level that lets her kill a dozen skilled goblin ninjas in a matter of seconds (and makes me have to type ridiculous bullshit like “unicorn-powered samurai sword” and “skilled goblin ninjas”), but I’ve always thought that Cindy would be a significantly less badass fighter without Carnage in her hands. After Cindy kills the Dark One’s personal guard (the aforementioned goblin ninjas) in what was supposed to be a sparring match, he seems more turned on than pissed off, and Zenescope’s most dysfunctional couple is born. The Dark One invites Cindy into his Vegas home--yes, the Devil of the Grimm Universe lives in Sin City, imagine that--for a tour, providing context for The Collection short story and a lead-in to the first of the issue’s two fairy tale adaptations, "The Lord’s Animals and the Devil’s Animals." Included among their fairy tales, animal tales, and fables--as well as a couple of anti-Semitic tales that are just uncomfortable to read--are a few regional creation myths explaining why certain plants or animals look as they do. Apparently, beans have seams because the first bean laughed too hard when his friends almost drowned in a river. I guess that’s 19th century Germany for you: teach children how to behave by telling them stories of murder, dismemberment, bludgeoning, drowning, strangulation, cannibalism, and evil Jews getting torn apart by thorn bushes. Perhaps some of this schooling bled over into certain events of the 20th century??? But it’s okay, kids! Everything is God and magic! I’m being cynical and generalizing to make the point that not all of the Brothers Grimm’s collected tales are the Disneyfied happy ending vehicles that the last forty-plus years of animated cinema have colored them to be. There are some (like the Devil stories mentioned a few posts back) that have profound messages buried deep inside them, and others that are just plain entertaining to read. And then there are stories like “Good Bowling and Card Playing,” the “Simple Hans” variants, and “The Jew in the Thornbush” that exist solely to provide social and historical context from an academic perspective because they are otherwise morally reprehensible and mentally and emotionally damaging to get through in spite of their brevity. Getting back to "The Lord’s Animals and the Devil’s Animals," the original is an explanation myth like “The Straw, the Coal and the Bean” (briefly summarized above) that sees God creating every animal but goats, and choosing wolves to be his “dogs.” So the Devil creates the goats himself, but they keep getting their long tails caught in thorn bushes (yes, those again), so the Devil goes around and bites off all of their tails (which is why goats have stubby tails). Free to roam, they chew on everything, pissing off God, who has his wolves slaughter the goats. A conversation ensues between the Lord and the Devil about how even when the Devil creates, his destructive nature is so prevalent that even his creations have the capacity to destroy. I liked this aspect of the tale because it came across as sort of a cosmic interpretation of old human nature fables like Aesop’s “The Scorpion and the Frog.” Perhaps there were some Greek and Roman influences that affected German culture throughout the years? After this, the Devil asks the Lord for compensation for killing his goats, and the Lord tricks the Devil out of said compensation using cartoon logic (because fairy tales), enraging the Devil so much that he gouges out the eyes of the surviving goats and replaces them with his own. This is supposed to explain why goats are widely associated with the Devil in likeness and nature, but on its own makes no sense. It’s just one of those simple “x happened because why? Because I said so” explanations that these kinds of myths end up having. In the Grimm Fairy Tales version, as told by the Dark One, the animals are switched--God created goats and the Devil created wolves--with the Devil painted as a gracious but vindictive trickster figure. Otherwise, the story progresses much the same while serving as voice-over to Belinda (in her purple cloak from The Gift short story) turning Jacob into Pinocchio (which he had already been doing at the end of the Pinocchio two-parter, but Early Zenescope will be Early Zenescope...), who looks like a nightmarish version of Groot.

From the shadows, Orcus has been watching Pinocchio transform and listening to the Dark One’s tale, and is reminded of this issue’s second Kinder Und Hausmarchen selection, “The Seven Ravens” (three ravens in most versions). The original has many similarities with other tales in the collection, such as “The Twelve Brothers,” “The Six Swans,” “Brother and Sister” (which in turn has some similarities to “Hansel and Gretel”), and “Little Snow White.” Like the “Godfather Death” variants, it involves a poor man with too many children. For some act of ungodliness or another, the male children are cursed by their parents to turn into ravens and fly away, driving their sister to go out into the world to search for them. Her epic journey takes her past the cannibalistic sun and moon to the stars, who give her a chicken bone to unlock the gates of the ravens’ palace atop a glass mountain. She loses the bone on her way to the glass mountain and has to use her dismembered pinky finger to open the lock (all of this ludicrous, bloody nonsense because German fairy tales), after which she goes through a “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” sequence before meeting her brothers and returning home with them for a happy ending. The GFT adaptation begins with a poor farmer who makes a deal with Orcus’ bride to save his crops in exchange for seven flowers that will grow among his crops and be the most precious and beautiful he has ever seen. Of course, the “flowers” turn out to be his children--all daughters in this version--and the evil goddess returns every year for the next seven years to claim and sacrifice one of the farmer’s daughters and trap her soul in the body of a raven for some reason. What follows the seventh year is an epic fight between Shang and Orcus and his bride, an origin story for Allexa (see the Legacy short story and Baba Yaga for details), clues that she and Shang were more than student and mentor, and actual motivation and direction for Orcus’ revenge (see The Gift short story for the first reference to this). This turned out to be my favorite part of the issue, thanks to its original interpretation of the “Seven Ravens” tale and the numerous tied up loose ends from previously inconsequential story threads. The art style in this section of the issue was decent and as close to standard for the series as it could get, delivering a good design for the goddess character into the mix. Overall, the issue fast-tracked a bit too much in an effort to close in on the series’ first big to-do since Sela’s death, and the art was literally sketchy until the "Seven Ravens" segment brought a measure of human interest--and interest, in general--to what otherwise felt rushed and forced as both a narrative and a production. Way to bat cleanup….

I batted much cleanup this week, sending a ton of old tech, clothing, and appliances to a local thrift store. I am exhausted, but I also feel kind of cleansed, and I don't know what to do with myself. Insert Dusty Springfield or White Stripes reference here, and remember once again to like and comment down below, subscribe to my blog, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, and Facebook for the latest news on my content. Next week, I review the return of a beloved (by me, at least) character with a cancelled ongoing series to her name.